Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Page 3

  You stopped, as if to catch your breath. “Come on,” I said, taking your arm. “We need to keep going.” But you resisted, turned, and that was when you looked me in the eye for the first time. It was like you were trying to remember something, or put a difficult idea into words.

  “Tell me what happened up there,” I said. “Describe it. Talk to me, Daniel Calder.”

  You said nothing—but it wasn’t that you looked like a sleepwalker; you didn’t have that creepily empty, classic Mystery stare. You looked intensely preoccupied, like someone trying to solve a difficult puzzle under time pressure—or like someone who just received news too bad to take in. You turned back to the mountain again and raised one arm, as if you were about to point to it. But the gesture was odder than that. You held your palm up flat, as if pressed against an invisible pane, and spread your fingers wide, grasping at something you couldn’t reach.

  When you spoke, that first time after the eruption, the accent was your own, but not the pattern of intonation. Not the pitch either, which was higher than usual, more feminine. And every word seemed to cost you struggle, effort:

  “Kor-QET-si—”

  “Kor-QET-si, dol-ETH-mor, uk—”

  “Kor-QET-si, dol-ETH-mor, uk-WAI-jen, voh-DJE-mun.”

  There were tears in your eyes. Tears in mine too, because you’d taken me in one minute from thinking you were a Mystery to thinking that perhaps, if possible, it was worse than that.

  Who were you? What mind, what consciousness, was in there, behind those familiar eyes?

  At least you switched back to English briefly after that. “They’ll come back,” you said quietly, in almost your own voice. But the next thing you said, at least it wasn’t in the language of the Architects, but it came out with a great anguished struggle, each word a burden. It was like you were possessed by someone, speaking in tongues. The “other” voice, coming through yours, was clearer now, not American, and oh, I knew it so well. It could almost have been mine.

  Your mother. “It’s everything, Daniel. Everything and nothing. If only they’d known.”

  You bent over, choking and gasping, and her voice came again.

  “Everything and nothing. If only they had known. They’ll come back. Stop them, Daniel. Before it’s too late.”

  PART I:

  AFTERMATH

  CHAPTER 1

  THE UNIVERSE VANISHES

  Don’t worry, I’m going to tell you the whole story. Everything you missed, everything you were robbed of, everything that happened at the edge of your understanding when you were present but absent. Yes, the whole story of what I tried to make sense of, and what I tried to do to help you, and what happened instead. But I can’t do that, can’t give you a true picture of what happened out there in the world, without you knowing what I was dealing with privately, inside me, in here. (The public and the private. Facts versus feelings. Is and seems. “A theme to which we’ll return,” as your dad liked to say in his lectures. Oh aye.) And I want especially to make one wee detail of my inner emotional geography totally clear.

  OK by you if we do that?

  Cards on the table, before we move on?

  So. The short version is that when we got back from Ararat, your famously brilliant, logical, levelheaded sister was a sniveling, useless mess. A mental and emotional farm-fry. Exhausted, rattled, a bag of nerves without a clue. I wanted answers, and I wanted them yesterday, and I had to face the fact that I didn’t even know what questions to ask. Oh, and I was desperately, desperately thirsty for you to recognize me and say my name; failing that, to answer a question, or ask one; failing that, to at least say something I could understand. But you weren’t there. Your will, your motivation, your self wasn’t there—or else it was there, but it was buried under layers of rubble, like an earthquake victim, trying and failing to claw its way back to the surface.

  “It’s everything, and it’s nothing,” you’d say. “It’s everywhere and nowhere. Now.”

  “What is, D? Are you talking about the Architects? Are you talking about something you saw, something you experienced when they were there?”

  “It’s light, everywhere. It’s a—, it’s a—”

  “A what?”

  “A kind of perfection.”

  “What is?”

  “A hunger.”

  “Daniel, please—”

  “No bodies. No emotions. No time.”

  “Daniel—”

  Then there’d be five minutes of silence, or a day of silence, and you’d suddenly say: “They will return for us.”

  That was the kind of thing that came out, when you spoke, and even the half-lucid moments were erratic and fleeting. You had a foot in two worlds, and you were fully present in neither of them. Limbo: isn’t that what Catholics call it—like, a traffic jam in the afterlife, when you’ve departed but you can’t arrive? Ninety-nine percent of the time you were silent, enigmatic, and unreachable. And on top of that you scared the crap out of me by shifting without warning between a manner that was relaxed, as if you were just an amused observer of the human comedy, and a burning anguish that only your eyes could articulate. Above all else, I wanted to find a way to bring you back, to rescue you from whatever had happened up there, but both your anxiousness and your long silences reminded me of the worst rumor from the outside world. One by one the Mysteries were “coming to a stop,” as someone had said, “like battery-powered toys when the juice runs out.” For all their superficial physical health, the people the Architects had left behind as blanks, as empty husks, were dying.

  What was I to believe? What was I to do? Why could I no longer even concentrate on what to believe or do? One thing I did, even though I’d kind of guessed it’d be useless, was persuade Gabi Eisler to be the designated grown-up and take you to a doctor, then a neurologist, then a shrink. Three pale balding men in their fifties: they could have been brothers.

  Or parrots on a perch: “We can do nothing for these people.”

  I was really just going through the motions—no stone unturned and all. But “these people”—how dare they? Violent impulses aren’t usually my thing, but I imagined them saying what they were so clearly thinking—The Mysteries are a lost cause; let it go; we shouldn’t waste resources on them—and then I imagined punching their oversized noses.

  It wasn’t their fault. I just wanted them to have answers because I didn’t. So much for the cool, intellectually hyperconfident, somewhere-on-the-spectrum savant. So much for the miniature know-it-all, blinking cutely in the glare of the Shanghai TV lights. That’s who I was supposed to be, D. That’s how I’d been constructed. An adult genius in a child’s body. A thinking machine. A once-in-a-lifetime phenom. Daughter of archaeologists can speak twelve languages, has “unmeasurable” IQ, et cetera, et cetera, et bloody cetera. I’d spent seventeen years surrounded by those bright, tinny trumpet notes of amazement and ignorant praise. And now, when I needed it most, my confidence in my own understanding, even my own mental stability, was no longer just lower than people had come to expect. It was zero.

  Nobody suggested we move back into your parents’ house, or use it, or even visit, and at the beginning I was way too fried to argue with Gabi Eisler’s brittle hausfrau efficiency. She welcomed us, fussed over us, and laughed too loud in short bursts, like a person with depression in a smiley-face T-shirt. She also shoveled enormous quantities of heavy, wintery food at us—chili with corn bread, sausages with shredded red cabbage and mashies, great steaming bricks of beef-and-mushroom lasagna. You ate it all, mechanically and without interest, like an engine that needs fuel—and you still lost weight. Me, I pushed it around on my plate, tried to make the right noises of gratitude, and gave most of it to you or Rosko when she wasn’t looking. When she thought I wasn’t looking, she’d reach out and touch his damaged face, her eyes bright with tears. She was trying to pretend—to me and to herself—that she’d forgiven me for nearly getting him killed. She was trying to pretend, also, that you weren’t giving her
the creeps.

  She made up a temporary bedroom, two camp cots divided by a curtain in their half-finished basement. It smelled of old paint and dryer lint. And maybe it was the physical claustrophobia, or the guilt and helplessness I felt every time I looked at you, or my fears for the future, but down there I felt myself turning into a person I just didn’t much like.

  I was pissed off with Gabi and Stefan for their frosty hospitality—as if they owed me any other kind! I was pissed off with all the people whose brains I’d have picked, if only they hadn’t all been so inconsiderately dead. (Julius Quinn. Mayo. Both your parents. Derek Partridge.) I even got pissed off with Rosko, because he’d totally clammed up about Ararat; oh aye, and because one afternoon he actually said, “Morag, what are you so pissed off about?” Boy, did that do the trick!

  Giving me a constant stream of advice was one of his techniques for not talking about himself.

  “You have to sleep more, Morag. And eat more. And drink less coffee. Maybe get away from Seattle to somewhere you feel safer and can relax. Some friends of my parents have a poky little cabin out on the Olympic Peninsula that we could use. At least put some drops in your eyes—they look terrible.”

  I wanted to say to him, Thanks, yes, excellent advice, Rosko, and I appreciate the concern, and now please, please would you bugger off, because yes, OK, the drops, I’ll do the drops if you insist, but right now I need to concentrate on, uh, whatever it was I was thinking about a minute ago, and could you at least not stand in the light like that, because this cuneiform of Shul-hura’s that I’m rereading, which by the way seems to suggest that the Architects said they’d come back when we were ready, is a swine to read in the best of circs, the individual wedges small as a rat’s teeth, and—

  My eyes were red because I was getting even less sleep than normal. Also because every third time I looked at you, I had to take a deep breath, steal five minutes of privacy in the loo, and cry. And the sadness, the sense that I’d failed you, was combining with a rising tide of anxiety that threatened to breach my seawall and drown me in pure salt panic. Deer in the headlights? Ha. It was more like deer just galloped off a cliff. When I did get two straight hours of blissful unconsciousness—or, more likely, two straight hours of vile dreams—I’d wake up with my heart hammering, exhausted and desperate.

  By way of unpleasant static in the background, the ’rents were still totally off-radar, and I found that I couldn’t stop worrying about them. Jimmy, Lorna: Why why why no message, no contact? After crossing into Armenia, we spent two weeks stuck in Yerevan, while Rosko got one and a half fingers amputated and we jousted with four different national bureaucracies—German, Scottish, American, Armenian—over the delicate matter of being in the wrong country with no paperwork. I got one message from my parents there, just one, saying they were safely out of Iraq. Then nothing. Captured on the border by lethal jihadi wannabes and dragged back to a filthy bunker in Mosul or Raqqa? Captured by the Seraphim themselves in what was left of Turkey? Already killed for ticking the wrong box on the Supernatural Commitments form by some brand-new group with an acronym the West hadn’t even heard of yet? I needed to know. The pinnacle of human achievement, the cherry on western civilization’s five-thousand-layer cake, is that you can post a cat video from any yurt in Kazakhstan. But week after week Jimmy and Lorna sent nothing. We’re still alive—that would have been nice. We’re safe. Even: We’ve been detained, but we’re safe. I could have settled for any of those. Nothing.

  I couldn’t contact Charlie Balakrishnan either. Sure, I’m a seventeen-year-old nobody and he’s a busy international tycoon—a mover and shaker in the financial and industrial ionosphere whose daily worries no doubt range from the well-being and efficiency of thirty thousand employees on five continents to the new custom paint job on his backup Gulfstream. But when the director of his own fancy institute has disappeared, and his old friend Bill Calder ditto, and then he gets messages from me on his corporate email account saying, Daniel and I were at Ararat, and I heard Julius Quinn’s last words, and I tried to intervene in the Anabasis, and failed, and survived, and Bill and Mayo were there too, and Mayo spoke to me, but they died too, and I need to talk to you, please? Like, yesterday, was it too much to expect that he would take a moment away from the company spreadsheets to snap his fingers and instruct the nearest PA/minion/lackey/aide to press “Call Back” on his gold-plated speakerphone?

  Apparently it was too much to expect.

  It was so irritating to be so irritated—with myself and everyone else. It was like having the worst PMS of my life, for weeks and weeks.

  Can you imagine?

  No, obviously not. Fair enough. So let me cut to the chase. With all that swirling around in my head, I have to get this one thing clear. Out in the open. Out of the way.

  Are you truly ready? Good. So here it is: I decided to make things easier for myself by refusing even then, just as I refuse now, to feel even a tiny bit guilty about, you know.

  That.

  Kit was over at the Eislers’ constantly, right from the start. She wanted to hear the stories and help look after you—which she was annoyingly good at—and she said she needed to get out of the apartment because her mother was acting “wa-wa.”

  “What do I mean, ‘wa-wa’? I mean that she is like totally freaked, ever since you tell her about Mayo being on Ararat. Eyes is jumping around like two mice on hot plate. OK, so he was her boss, and instead of Mr. Smooth Science Guy, he is some kind of crazy. So I expect, you know, she is upset. But not like this. Fourteen-hour days is normal for my mother. Twenty hour, not so much. Probably thinks she can figure everything out single-handed. Understand what happened to Daniel. Explain Ararat. Explain what her boss was doing. Save whole world from creepy Architects if only she never sleeps.”

  “Sounds like someone else I know,” Rosko said pointedly.

  “Yah,” she said, giving me a long stare. “Like Morag, who also is putting herself under too much stress, also getting, how is it, snapple?”

  “Snappish,” I snapped.

  “My mother is all freaked because she is in middle of big something at her lab, and Institute’s fancy mainframe computer is acting all screw-loose since a week at least, and her favorite student, who does all her coding and babysits the computer has, ka-pow, what you say, puff of smoke.”

  “Disappeared? That’s the code geek she shared with Mayo, isn’t it? Carl Bates?”

  She nodded. “Is no big deal, I think, but my mother is like, total hysteria. Invites him to dinner, because she thinks he is lonely over the summer and needs a mother. He says, ‘Yes, thank you for invitation, Professor, I’d love to come.’ And I say to Natazscha, ‘What you think we feed him, given you are worst cook in history of world?’ This is true, actually. She makes Ukrainian stew with lentils, and smell is maximum bad, maximum, like you microwave old running socks. Whole apartment you can’t breathe. And, lucky for that, he never shows up. I say to her, ‘Good, relax, he probably forgot. Or he went on vacation or something.’”

  Not wanting to deal with her mother’s problems, Kit had plenty of incentive to hang with us at the Eislers—even though Rosko liked yanking her chain. “One thing I don’t understand,” he said. “Why is your mother’s English so much better than yours? It’s not like she’s a Babbler.”

  “No, Rosko, she is not freak like you and Morag. But she studies English in school ten, fifteen years, and I study two years. Also, she is obsessive-competitive—”

  “Compulsive.”

  “Whatever. Work maniac.”

  For me, having Kit around was wonderful. And also—how shall I put this?—really difficult. Because it meant that, on top of everything else, I was forced to put up with another, if possible even more painful layer of confusion and inner struggle.

  Over and over, from the first time I saw her again, I said to myself:

  No, Morag.

  No.

  Be calm. Be sensible.

  Bad bad bad even to think ab
out this now.

  You don’t feel this way really. You only think you do.

  I’d say things like that to myself while my back was turned to her, while maybe she fixed you a sandwich or played cards with you. (She was the one who discovered that you could still play, and enjoy, a game like Hearts.) I’d shuffle blindly through something on my screen, resisting and resisting the temptation to glance back at her.

  Work, Morag. Work on Bill’s notes about the Disks. Or the few bits of Shul-hura’s Babylon tablets that you still haven’t translated. Or why not email some random people who might have known Mayo?

  Everyone goes on about your brain, so use it.

  Then I’d glance back at her. And maybe her face would be at a new angle, or lit differently, or I’d be just in time to catch some characteristic gesture, like the way she always tilted her head slightly as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. And my heart would stop beating for a dangerously long interval.

  Don’t make a fool of yourself, Morag.

  It’s irrational. It’s pathetic. It’s ridiculous.

  You have more important things to think about. The job is to understand what Mayo was doing on Ararat. In the hope of that helping you make sense of the Architects. In the hope of that making it easier to bring Daniel back.

  A mission! A lifesaving mission! So put this silly, trivial, personal stuff aside. Emotions! Nothing but a bloody nuisance.

  Who needs them?

  It was right after one of these pathetic little autotherapy sessions that you gave me the picture of her.

  Magnificent, it was. Uncanny.