The Fire Seekers Page 3

  “Too old to be a fake?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me neither.”

  He looks up, peers into the middle distance, looks at the phone again as if unsure of what he’s seen. Then he turns the screen toward me and points at a small graph. There are two bell-shaped curves, one red and one green, cut by a thin, vertical blue line. “These numbers are the uranium and thorium concentrations in the clay. We’ve been assuming that this thing is either a hoax by Pernier, from a hundred years ago, or else it’s Minoan, from maybe 1600 BCE. These readings say, None of the above. It’s too old to be Bronze Age at all.”

  “But it was found in a Minoan ruin, and you know the age of the, the uh—”

  “Strata. Yes, but being able to date the different strata at the site only means we know when it was left there. These numbers say the Disk was manufactured over two thousand years before it was buried.” He points to the graphs, puts his thumbnail against the blue line. “Absolute minimum age, six thousand years. And the average of these data sets is closer to seven thousand. That’s not older than Tutankhamun. That’s older than—”

  “Stonehenge?”

  “Yes.” He looks at me with an expression I can’t read and swipes to a screen filled with bunches of dots—a scatter graph. “More to the point, it’s older than Sumerian, which is supposed to be the oldest written language. And there’s another thing too. It’s not Minoan. Can’t be—the minerals in the clay are all wrong. It’s not even from Crete.”

  A thrill passes through me. Or a chill. There’s something new and strange about the Man Who Knows Everything being so obviously out of his comfort zone.

  “What does it mean?”

  A long pause before he replies. When he does, his voice is low, papery. “It means that when I woke up this morning I was an expert on the origins of language. On the origins of civilization itself. And now—” He looks at the graph on the phone again. “And now I don’t know anything about anything.”

  He gets up and starts walking toward the park entrance, as if I’m not even there. I have to jump up and scurry to catch him.

  “Where are we going now?”

  Doesn’t even look at me. Replies as if he’s talking to himself—a habit I’ll be getting used to.

  “I need a beer.”

  We come back to Crete every year after that, for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. In the second year, we actually dig up three more Disks at a peak sanctuary (a kind of temple in a cave) in central Crete, but they only deepen the mystery, proving their age beyond doubt while making the language itself even more of an enigma.

  Dad studies the hell out of the new Disks, spends a lot of late nights muttering Why oh why oh bugger and damn won’t you make sense? then hands them over to the Greek authorities, who put them in the museum right next to the original. The following season, he hires a young, distractingly gorgeous marine archaeologist, Pandora Kallas. He wants her to search sites off the north coast, because significant chunks of Minoan civilization were swept underwater by a giant tsunami when the island of Thera, just seventy miles away, erupted in 1628 BCE. Pandora finds nothing. But she’s nice to be around—except that being around her can interfere with normal breathing—and I get free diving lessons.

  Increasingly, Dad shifts back to establishing a reputation in his other work, on the Mesopotamian languages of ancient Iraq. He publishes as much as ten ordinary scholars—partly with the help of his brilliant new grad student, the African American Julius Quinn. (Tall. Handsome. An actor’s deep, resonant voice. Shockingly improbable blue eyes.) But there’s a perception that in some deeper way, Dad’s become a failure.

  Doesn’t exactly help that he gets ten messages a day from beady-eyed basement-dwellers who’ve dedicated their lives to the connection between the Phaistos Disks, the Nazca Lines, and the CIA’s attempts to cover up the truth about Bigfoot. Helps even less when a snarky journalist describes him as a once-promising scholar, whose obsession with the Phaistos Disks has left him increasingly isolated.

  Quinn’s an enigma. Shows up out of nowhere, talks his way in by knowing a lot about a lot. It takes months for him to reveal even the most basic things: that he’s from Chicago, that he once wanted to be a priest but gave it up, that he’s a Babbler like Dad—a dozen languages or more, picked up as casually as pieces of litter.

  Quinn encourages Dad to take Phaistos seriously, to keep up the fight to unlock its secrets, floats the odd and politically incorrect idea that the accelerating extinction of human languages, one of Dad’s pet themes, is a good thing—and then goes AWOL. Dad has mixed feelings. Disturbing guy, Julius. Clever, driven, obsessive. I liked him a lot, at first. But he’s one of those people who always seems to be standing too close.

  When Quinn does show up again, it’s not back at the UW but in the news. He has been hiking in Mexico. His companions have disappeared in circumstances he can’t quite explain. Shortly afterward, he publishes Anabasis (pronounced, in his slow, beautiful drawl, Ana-BAY-AY-siss), which he describes as a record of my encounter with the Architects; announces his foundation of the Seraphim; mentions breezily that all of human culture, and human history itself, will soon, thank goodness, come to an end.

  When Quinn has ten, maybe twenty thousand followers, people start calling the Seraphim “a spiritual movement.” Then the numbers double. And double. And double again. Soon it’s “a major new cult,” and Quinn is compared to the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. At maybe the half-million mark, the existing faiths wake up to how bad it really is: years of declining enthusiasm among the faithful seem like a small problem in the face of what has become, let’s be clear, a wildly successful new religion. As if rubbing salt into the wound, the new casually dismisses the old: Quinn speaks of the traditional faiths in all their muddle and weakness—above all, their sheer wrongness about our history and our destiny. In the churches of Africa, the mosques of Indonesia, the smoky gilded temples of Myanmar and Laos—all across the globe, an exodus from the established religions turns from a trickle into a flood. And there is violence, inevitably, especially when the Seraphim exhibit a taste, a passion even, for burning other people’s books. Whole libraries of books, on the grounds that all human language is a distraction from the language that is rightfully our own, the language of the Architects.

  Quinn’s followers adopt a simple uniform: the thin white scarf, like a priest’s stole, with an enigmatic golden shape at one end—a sort of hollow triangle with the tip cut off. Critics try calling Quinn a huckster, a liar, a charlatan, but it’s too late for that: when the Seraphim number a couple of million, worldwide, the mainstream media starts to adopt some striking phrases from his most goggle-eyed followers. He is the Savior, the Way, the Guide on the Stairway. The New Messiah.

  And he says:

  The Architects have returned.

  We must prepare our minds for ascent.

  We must not repeat the errors of the past.

  The time of our greatness, the time of our freedom, the time of our immortality is at hand.

  “Amazing how ignorant we were.”

  One of Dad’s favorite lines. In his History of Science course, in front of five hundred new students, he’d intone it beneath a grainy black-and-white image of his great-great-great-grandfather, Dr. Hayden C. Calder. Greasy, badly cut nineteenth-century hair; sensible dark suit; severe expression. Graduated top of his class at the University of Pennsylvania’s renowned med school in 1837. Already had a successful medical practice in 1842, when he sat motionless for fifteen minutes at a photographer’s studio in Philly so that this image could be recorded on a silvered copper plate. Best education of his day—and yet, Dad would take great pleasure in pointing out: This man was too early for Darwin. Too early for the idea that disease is caused by germs. Too early, even, for the idea that doctors should wash their hands. And what was ancient culture, for him? What was our deep history? The Greeks and the Romans. Before that, a vague
era of cave men. Before that, Adam and Eve in the Garden. Look at him, ladies and gentlemen, look at him. A modern American! But from our point of view, he knows almost nothing!

  It was supposed to be a warning. Don’t be arrogant. Don’t assume the big surprises are all behind us.

  Wise advice—such a pity the giver failed to take it. But I guess the innocence of childhood must come to an end, sooner or later.

  For each of us.

  Even for the species.

  PART I:

  PATAGONIA

  CHAPTER 1

  GIFTS

  I kill the alarm, turn the bezel two clicks, shift onto my back. Above me, where my wrist should be, bright-green bioluminescent sea creatures blur and dance on the ink-black surface of the darkness. As I swim up toward them, toward full consciousness, they shimmer, sharpen, and clothe themselves in meaning.

  ALT 6,900 FT / 2,103 M

  Ah. Right.

  A shudder runs through me as my mind breaks surface into the day. I’m not in bed. I’m not safe in bed, at home. On this, my seventeenth birthday, I’m waking up an hour before sunrise in a thousand-dollar sleeping bag that’s rated to minus forty—and still isn’t warm enough. The bag is strapped into an orange nylon portaledge, which is basically a tiny A-shaped tent with a metal ring at the top. And the metal ring is attached, by way of some wires and chocks, to a small crack in a giant rock face.

  Beneath my bag, there’s a thin sleeping mat.

  Beneath that, a millimeter of ripstop nylon.

  Beneath that, a big fat mile of nothing.

  We’re near the top of the South Tower, the jewel in the crown of Patagonia’s Torres del Paine National Park. It’s only 8,204 feet, so on the side of Everest it would look like a hangnail; even Mount Rainier, the fat white tent that dominates the skyline at home, is nearly twice this height. So no big deal! Except that the Torres del Paine are not mountains. They’re mad, impossible-looking, finger-straight vertical screams of rock. Plus, they get blasted by hundred-mile-per-hour winds all year long. Plus, right now, they’re wearing frozen armor.

  Madness, some people would say. We’re climbing the Torre Sur, by a new route, at the end of April—the beginning of the southern winter. It’s one of the most beautiful, most thrilling, most crap-your-pants frightening challenges a climber can find, anywhere on the planet. Quite a gift!

  “Daniel. Oh Daniel. Happy birthday, darling. And move it move it move it. No cake unless we make it to the top.”

  “Uh-huh. Wake me up again in an hour, Mom.” I fluff up the bag, squirm deeper.

  “No can do, sunshine. Up, now. You too, Rosko.”

  Giving the orders, from the next portaledge over, Iona Maclean. My mother. Your average middle-aged suburban mom, except for being glamorous, smart, and a superb Alpine climber who can now indulge her passion full time because she’s done with all those business meetings, having retired (at the grand old age of thirty-six) insanely rich.

  The name of her genetic encryption company is IONA. Dad insisted, because the Scottish island for which she was named was also beautiful, and also a preserver of knowledge in dark times. Within a couple of years of our first trip to Crete, IONA was backing up half the world’s secure databases—zettabytes of the stuff, yottabytes, whatever. After that it became one of the hottest properties in the history of tech. Mom played coy with the big boys just long enough to give the stock price a major boner, then cashed in on a headline-making offer from Intel and gave up the eighteen-hour office days to start spending like a true professional.

  But what does an interesting person do, with half a billion green? Bling was never Mom’s style. Not sure she even owned a pair of earrings, and “glamorous” means she made the cover of some magazine (as Businesswoman of the Year) looking tousled and chic while free soloing her way up a giant redwood. She and Dad never collected other rich people. They also never bought fancy stuff just to impress the neighbors, and they never moved out of the Capitol Hill fixer that was a major budget stretch back when the main breadwinner was a specialist in stone-dead languages.

  No. Indulgence for Mom meant two things. First, deciding to pull the plug at the end of my eighth grade, clear her schedule, and homeschool me. (Good idea, says one of my teachers. You’ll have the chance to get a real grip on those learning disabilities. As if I drool or something.) Dad supported the idea from the start, even contributed here and there, and enjoyed taking the opportunity to say loudly and often that the American homeschool movement was religious fundamentalism’s great gift to the open-minded.

  Mom’s second indulgence was adventure. For her own sake, sure, but it became an excellent excuse to make strange projects in exotic locations part of my curriculum. When she wasn’t teaching me the chemistry of egg proteins in the kitchen, celestial navigation from a kayak on Puget Sound, or the physics of glaciation down a crevasse on Mount Rainier, she was dragging me around the world. She competed in the world’s toughest off-road race, the Dakar rally (apprentice mechanic and chuck-wagon crew, aged thirteen: Daniel Calder). Designed and built a carbon fiber trimaran—Maiandros, “The Wanderer”—then used it to shred the world speed record for a sail-powered transatlantic crossing (CAD-monkey, logistics grunt, and then deckhand, aged fourteen: Daniel Calder). Bought a plane, a helicopter, and a couple of microlights to study dune formation in the Sahel (airsick student pilot, aged fifteen: Daniel Calder). In between, she created three different charitable foundations (coffee maker, web designer, spreadsheet jockey, and freelance ideas guy, right up to the present: Daniel Calder).

  This Patagonia thing, in contrast, is supposed to be a combo Family Vacation and Birthday Gift. But a special email, from Jimmy Chen in Iraq, comes perfectly timed to rescue Dad from the obligation to join us:

  Need you out here ASAP, Bill. It’s a bloody goldmine.

  The gold mine isn’t literally gold, but it’s a discovery so momentous that Mom knows Patagonia can’t compete. She compensates for Dad’s absence by turning our vacation into its own mini-expedition. Two French videographers, Édouard and Sophie Colbert, have been working for her company on another project since they moved to Seattle. When they get wind of the plan, they insist on coming too, and filming the whole thing. Fabulous idea, said Mom, fabulous—after which they seemed to be at the house every day. At first they chatter enthusiastically about climbing and adventure travel. Then they start chattering enthusiastically about Julius Quinn and the Seraphim. Sophie admits to Mom that they are “trying out” some of his “spiritual routines”—fasting, meditation, that kind of thing. And they’ve “unburdened” themselves by throwing away all their books. Except Anabasis of course.

  This stuff annoys me almost as much as it would annoy Dad. I’m not like him—not an atheist atheist. Fact, I don’t really know what I believe; kind of like it that way. So I don’t have much patience for his endless arguing, but I don’t have any more patience for smiley types selling New Age spiritual chewing gum. (We’re all going to be saved, saved! I want to ask: From what?) Not sure why the Colberts are quite so stoked about Patagonia, either: it’s not like they’re being paid. Free travel, I guess. Anyway, they and their cameras and their irritating inner shine are here with us. Later today, there’s supposed to be great footage of me grinning in hi-def color as I clamber heroically onto the top.

  “I said rise and shine, boys. Now.”

  “Keep your hair on. We’re moving.”

  “You’ve not moved an inch, Daniel Calder. Neither have you, Rosko.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Intuition. Common sense. Long experience.”

  I loosen the top cord and stick my head out. The down-shrouded pupa next to me shifts and groans.

  “Scheisse! I mean shit! Ich bin so ein Idiot. Alles gut zum Geburtstag, Daniel! And why are you persuading me to come on this trip with this insane woman who says she is your mother? Good thing she is beautiful, heh? Or I would do nothing she tells me.”

  An impressive performance. My new b
est friend is even less awake than I am, but he’s swearing in a mixture of German and English, wishing me a happy birthday in German, and somehow managing, in English, to be rude to my mother while simultaneously flirting with her.

  Rosko Eisler: nice guy, blond Teutonic athlete-god, code geek. Also, like Dad and Quinn, a Babbler, drawn to Seattle by a program at the UW that’s designed to solve what its founder modestly describes as the deepest puzzle in the universe.

  ISOC, it’s called: the Institute for the Study of the Origins of Consciousness. On the polished concrete wall in the main entrance, in expensive brushed-steel letters, there’s a quotation from its founder, a reclusive Indian billionaire named Charlie Balakrishnan:

  Bacteria are not conscious. But we are, and we evolved from them. So when did consciousness show up? Where did it come from? What is it? And how is it possible?

  Charlie B is the founder and CEO of BalakInd, one of the biggest industrial conglomerates in the world. He has three private planes and houses by the dozen from Seattle to the Maldives. But at heart he’s a thinker, a man with deep questions to answer, and instead of answering them by buying an armchair and a pile of books, his way of getting things done is to take the president of the UW to dinner, offer a vision in which the university puts all the world’s best intellectual muscle into one building, and then write a check that ends in eight zeros.

  Charlie, a Babbler himself, is especially interested in language. Why do we have it at all? Why so many, when most of us can speak only one? And why are some of us so good at picking up many? The pitch that goes out to others of his kind is roughly this:

  Hi, linguistic overachievers! We have world-class people in computational linguistics, brain imaging, genetics, behavioral and cognitive psych, you name it. We’re especially curious to know how three pounds of jellied oatmeal pulls off the trick of language, and how some people’s oatmeal is so much better at it than others’. So could we pay you a lot, and give your whole family lavish relocation expenses, and put your very unusual oatmeal through our fancy new muon scanner? Give us a call.