Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Actually I wasn’t so sure about the alpha-specimen part. As far as I could tell, the Extenders were almost exclusively rich older men with a personal terror of death. Reading their stuff, spittle-flecked with enthusiasm, gave me this vivid image of humanity’s future: a couple of dozen palsied egomaniacs, cloned into thousands, forming a new superrace. They’d get smarter and smarter, and they’d be so pickled in Botox that each would live to be 130! Then 160! Or even worse! I have to say, it made the extinction of the species sound like a wise plan.

  Perhaps Mayo was on Charlie Balakrishnan’s radar even back then. Impossible to tell: there were big gaps in the résumé. I was expecting “Institute for the Study of the Origin of Consciousness” to leap out at me. Nope. And still nothing that would tell me why he’d ended up saying such very strange things to me just before Ararat turned him into a bacon snack.

  A dead end. Literally. Though one more sentence he wrote at that stage grabbed me by the eyeballs and should have grabbed me more: Once we have gone beyond individual diseases and solved the problem of the ageing process itself, the gateway to immortality will open in front of us.

  “Maybe you need to focus not so much on Mayo,” Kit said to me one day, “and more on just spend good time with Daniel.”

  Was she implying that I didn’t care enough about you? That was annoying! Was she implying that she could show me how to look after you better than I was doing already? That was probably true, and really annoying! Was the fact that I was annoyed evidence that I was feeling useless, and cornered, and defensive, and that in dealing with it I was showing all the cool maturity of a hypoglycemic toddler? That was seriously, seriously—

  “You need to work more on helping him rebuild his memories,” she said. “This is what I think.”

  I need to work more systematically on hugging you, I thought, and I was so annoyed by the complete impossibility of that ever happening that what I said, without thinking about it, was “You have any bright suggestions?”

  I regretted “bright” as it fell out of my mouth. Just how much does life suck when you’re half-mad with longing for someone, and they have no idea and never will, and you deal with that by insulting them?

  “No, Morag,” she said levelly. “I only have dim suggestion.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t—I’m tired. I didn’t—”

  “You said Iona liked photography, yes? So maybe find family photographs? Share them with Daniel. Maybe that helps?”

  I swallowed my pride. “I’m really sorry. That’s actually kind of brilliant. Maybe I should go back to the Calders’ house and see what I find.”

  “Take him with you.”

  CHAPTER 4

  NARAKAIN

  Early that same evening I was alone in the house with you. You were absorbed in the atlas again, riffling through the pages as if hunting for something new. You seemed anxious, but at least you were doing your own thing. Maybe your abnormality was becoming normal to me; anyway I left you alone for half an hour and drifted onto the front porch. Feeling trapped, needing fresh air. I took my phone, which was a mistake, because it gave me time to catch up with the fact that they’d found an entire large village almost deserted in the High Atlas of central Morocco, with only children left behind. And that violent street battles had erupted in the favelas of Buenos Aires between Seraphim supporters trying to build a pyramid-like structure and other residents trying to stop them. And, from Japan, the big one: the Seraphim had taken over the Horyu-ji temple near Osaka, an explosion had destroyed the whole thing, and there were reports of darkness, “like an eclipse,” and deafening voices, and “spirits of great beauty reaching down from the sky.”

  Honestly, I’d almost forgotten about you—staring into a peaches-and-cream sunset, with my mind as blank as I could make it—when I heard the Eislers’ car pull up at the back of the house. Gabi and Rosko, back from the grocery store.

  Footsteps on the steps up to the kitchen. A banging door. Then Gabi’s voice: “Guten Abend! Anyone home? Hello, Daniel.”

  Then Rosko’s voice: “Hi, Daniel. Where’s—shit, what have you done?”

  Then Gabi’s again: “Oh no! Are you all right? Ach, look at the wall. Morag? Rosko, get a bandage and paper towels. In the kitchen. Morag, where are you?”

  You were cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, with a pair of scissors in your right hand and blood all over the other. It was cool in the house, but there was a sheen of sweat on your face. Gabi had dropped her shoulder bag and was on the floor beside you, kneeling in a litter of cut pages and irregular strips of white page border—the ruins of the atlas. She produced a wad of tissue and started inspecting the damage. “Iona,” you were saying. “Iona.”

  “Oh, there you are,” Gabi said when she saw me, as if I’d been absent without leave from a sentry box. “He must have cut himself doing this.”

  She pointed to the wall next to the TV, where you’d taped dozens and dozens of cut-out pieces of map, liberally smearing the wall wherever your wounded left hand went. Some of the pieces were easy to identify; others I had to kneel and squint at. New Zealand and Turkey (surprise, surprise). Ecuador. Alaska. Chile. Part of Antarctica. The Kamchatka Peninsula—you’d shown me a video about sea kayakers exploring that coast, with huge bears on the beaches and huge volcanoes behind. A chunk of East Africa. Iceland. There would have been something insane about it even without the blood. The maps were cut savagely, jaggedly, and attached to the wall at crazy angles. At least four long strips of tape held each piece of paper in place, and some of the strips were a couple of feet long.

  You’d used a fat black marker to circle six of the map fragments, and you’d joined those six with lines, right across the wall: central Italy, central Mexico, Japan, Hawaii’s Big Island, the island of Java, and Washington State, all connected up like bugs in a spider’s web. And, just in case anyone didn’t get the point, you’d used your very own red ink, fresh from your hand, to daub a list in three-inch caps right next to them:

  VESUVIUS

  POPOCATÉPETL

  FUJI

  MERAPI

  MAUNA LOA

  RAINIER

  We’d already heard stories about Rainier by then—there were “unconfirmed reports,” as the anchors liked to say, that groups of Seraphim were going up there to “sense” whether the mountain was suitable. Two groups had gone up from opposite sides at night, wearing nothing but street clothes. One person had died in a fall only just beyond the visitor center, three more died of hypothermia higher up, and a dozen who’d stayed with them had to be search-and-rescued. Were the Seraphim planning to stage an “event” there? (Since Ararat, “event” had come to mean something both enigmatic and specific.)

  I was thinking about that, and still taking in what you’d done, when you surprised me with a word Gabi couldn’t possibly have made sense of—a word I hadn’t heard pronounced in seven years. “I’iwa.” You even got the intonation just right, I noticed: the little pop of pressure on the first syllable, and the long, stressed middle sound liquefying into two: Ih-iii-yi-wa.

  “I don’t care about the atlas,” Gabi said faintly, to no one in particular, touching her finger to the map of Washington State. She was talking for the sake of talking, completely spooked. “I gave it to Stefan years ago, for an anniversary. But nobody uses such things any more.”

  Rosko came back and started to clean you up. I put my hand on your arm, and you were trembling. “What is it, D? What do you know about the I’iwa?”

  “I’i-who?” Rosko asked.

  As if in answer, you reached forward and pulled down the six marked maps. Big flakes of paint came away with the tape like dead skin. Then from your lap you took a seventh fragment of map. It was different from the others—cut more carefully, emphasizing its bird shape, which I recognized instantly, even without the prompting of that half-forgotten, jungle-scented word.

  “New Guinea,” Rosko said. “But what’s that?” He pointed to a neat questio
n mark you’d drawn with a marker at the center of the island.

  “What that is, Rosko, is weird. Daniel’s marked an area called the Star Mountains. They’re very remote. Almost uninhabited. It’s where Jimmy and Lorna and I lived for a few months with the Tainu.”

  “That tribe you told me about?”

  “Yes. A people whose entire culture revolved around protecting the ghosts of their ancestors so that the ghosts could go on protecting them from the gods. Their language is Tain’iwa—but the word tain’iwa can mean either ‘the language we speak’ or something more like ‘the people who use words.’ I’iwa is the opposite: it means ‘the speechless people.’ Or ‘not-people.’ Or ‘ghost people.’”

  Rosko looked again at the map. That’s when we noticed that it was attached with a paper clip to a second piece of paper. I recognized that instantly too: it was a drawing of your parents’ house.

  Gabi had just finished cleaning up your hand and putting on a large Band-Aid. “Maybe we should have a doctor look at this,” she said.

  But I’d had enough of doctors’ opinions about you. “No,” I said. “He’s fine. Come on, D. I’m taking you over to your parents’ house. We can look through Iona’s stuff. Like Kit said—see if there’s anything that’ll help you.”

  “I really think it would be better if—” Gabi started, but I was running out of patience. I pulled you to your feet.

  “Daniel has worse injuries that need fixing.”

  No drama, no one about. I let us in at the side entrance, tripped over a pair of your running shoes, and felt mildly surprised that the light switches did something as ordinary and predictable as turn the lights on. But it was dusty, and somehow unnaturally silent, and Iona and Bill haunted every inch of it.

  I took you into the kitchen first, because it was always your favorite room and I hoped it would stir those memories Kit had talked about. Instead I found that my own memories were choking me. You, cooking mushroom risotto at that stove. You, kneading bread on that counter. Bill, opening a bottle of wine and pouring a glass for Iona at that table.

  “Those cinnamon rolls you used to make, D. Do you remember? Insanely rich, with brown sugar and cinnamon and pecans, and about three pounds of butter. I loved those things, D! Do you think you could still—?”

  But you held your hand up to cut me off, as if you needed to think or listen for something. You ran your fingertips over the cabinets, the magnetic knife rack, and the knobs on the stove.

  “Here. They were. Here. But—it’s—”

  You stopped, with your head cocked. Then, as if coming to a decision, you walked out of the room and headed for the basement stairs.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, which was a way of making conversation or not listening to the horrible silence, I suppose, because the answer was obvious. Iona’s study. At the bottom step, you flipped the lights on. The house had looked normal, undisturbed, but when we stepped into her work area, I knew something was wrong. Every book and file had been stacked neatly on the floor. Derek Partridge’s office in Rome all over again.

  You stepped in gingerly among the piles and turned slowly, scanning the room. Two paces, and you were at the closet on the far side, pulling out typical basement-closet stuff: a coat; two plastic tubs, one for hats and one for gloves; an umbrella with a broken strut; old gallon paint cans, one with “Downstairs Bath” in black marker on the lid. Up top, at head height, there was a shelf with two brown cardboard boxes—“Spare Bulbs” and “Batteries.” You looked at everything carefully, and then stood at the other end and reached up to touch, with your fingertips, a foot-wide space next to “Batteries.”

  “It’s gone,” you said.

  After that you went into a controlled frenzy, talking loudly to yourself as you systematically ransacked the house. Drawers pulled out. Chairs overturned. Every cupboard and cabinet flung open. Bedrooms, attic, garage. Back to the kitchen. The words were an unintelligible mix of fragments, in both English and the “language” of the Architects:

  “They will know it.”

  “Ol-CHI-ma, dem-UK-tel—”

  “The river into the cave—”

  “Calculating, calculating—”

  “So long ago—”

  “The volcano is a computer, a trap.”

  You frightened me: you seemed to be approaching some psychological cliff edge. But I didn’t interfere, perhaps because I’d not seen you so purposeful, so motivated, and there was a sliver of hope in motivated. But eventually you’d looked everywhere, it seemed, and you had such a wild look that I tried to urge you to give it up and leave. You shook me off and went back to the basement.

  It was on the floor, what you were looking for. It was leaning up against the baseboard at an odd angle as if thrown there, only three feet from the bottom of the basement stairs. An expensive old camera, big and clunky, the black metal casing scuffed from use. Iona’s old Nikon. “She had this one when she came to us in New Guinea,” I said. “It used to have a wide bright-orange strap. That flash of color through the trees was the first thing I saw when she arrived in our encampment.”

  “Iona,” you said, nodding furiously. You held up the camera. “The I’iwa. The I’iwa were there. At the beginning.”

  The I’iwa were there. At the beginning. I knew what you were talking about. Or did I?

  It was that summer of your first trip to Crete. You and Bill were in Heraklion, discovering that the Phaistos Disks were several thousand years older than they were supposed to be. Meanwhile Iona was globetrotting, because she was still building her company and hadn’t yet made out like a bandit. But even then—so typical!—en route between important meetings in Oz and important meetings in China, she decided to take a week off and drop in on us. Because Lorna had a bee in her bonnet about the evolution of tool use, the family Chen were living in a bug-infested hut with a roof made of pandanus leaves, deep in the mountains, on the border between Indonesian West Papua and Papua New Guinea.

  “Iona, pet,” my mother said by shortwave radio, from a dripping front porch the size of a closet. “Ye’re entirely welcome here, an’ entirely mad. We’re on a river that has nae even a name. It’s a tributary o’ the August, which is a tributary o’ the Sepik. We’re at least a twenty-mile hike from the nearest airstrip. An’ the trails? Frankly, gurrl, even wi’out the leeches, an’ the snakes, an’ the certifiably insane wild pigs, the trails round here are an unmitigated feck’n bastard.”

  She must have known that news of danger, difficulty, or discomfort would only be an incentive. Sure enough: a few days later I was playing in a mud hole with some Tainu kids when I heard voices and saw a flash of orange through the trees, and the president and CEO of IONA Bioencryption Systems—Mom, to you—walked into camp with a big smile on her face. Two exhausted local boys, Willem and Yosep, were bobbing erratically in her wake, looking glassy-eyed, bewildered, shocked. No doubt they’d taken her for a typical wait meri—one of the feeble creatures who came in hordes, looking for the Garden of Eden, and discovered instead a kind of vertical tropical hell through which they needed to be carried after the first hundred yards. They probably took bets on how quickly Iona would pass out, then found themselves struggling to keep up. No one warned them they were guiding a world-class fitness nut who’d recently pioneered a new route on the south face of Aconcagua.

  “That wasn’t bad,” she said in greeting, like someone returning to the house after a jog in the park. A camera—that camera, on the orange strap—was around her neck. She swung down her pack and handed me a mildly crushed packet of McVitie’s dark chocolate digestive biscuits.

  “Thank you thank you thank you, Auntie Iona! My favorite!”

  “I know.”

  “And I haven’t tasted chocolate in weeks!”

  “Eat them all, Morag. They’re good for your brain. And don’t call me Auntie. It makes me feel old.”

  Iona also brought real sliced white bread. For dinner, we toasted it over a fire and ate it with canned baked beans.
I introduced her to my new Tainu friends while babbling at her about their language and culture. And beliefs too—though I left their beliefs about the I’iwa for later, when we were alone, because I’d already worked out that merely saying the word bothered them.

  “You’re learning so much, Morag,” she said. “But none of this sounds like archaeology.”

  “Morag has turned into our resident anthro,” Jimmy said proudly. “What brought me and Lorna here was something else. Stories from downriver about the Tainu still using exceptionally primitive tools. We were already interested in comparing modern New Guinea tools—the sort of thing the locals were using before steel was introduced—with pre-metal tools in Europe. So we decided to trek up here and see what we could find.”

  “And?”

  “Total wild goose chase,” Lorna said. “Nothin’ new here. Nothin’ particularly interestin’. But there is a wee bit o’ a puzzle. When we describe what we’re lookin’ for, instead o’ sayin’ that they’ve never heard o’ anythin’ like that, they get all sheepish an’ want to change the subject. An’ then they say, Oh, um, we sometimes find odd things like that in the forest, but they’re nothing to do with us. It’s like they’re sayin’, sure, tools like that exist here, but some other tribe is responsible, an’ we don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Did they show you any examples?”

  “Morag,” Jimmy said, turning to me. “This is your story.”

  So I told her about the Ghost People. Or I told her what I thought I understood about them.

  “The Tainu believe that the spirits of their ancestors live in caves at the head of a valley west of here,” I said. “I’iwa. The I’iwa almost never show themselves and never speak. They sometimes come out at night and hunt, but their purpose in life—or death—is to protect the living Tainu.”