Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) Page 8

  “So great to hear your voice, Professor Partridge. Are you still at the hospital?”

  “Goodness no. I overheard one of them mentioning exploratory brain surgery. I expect they thought I was so far past my sell-by date that they might as well use me for practice. I worked out where they’d put my clothes, waited until the coast was clear, and scarpered like a thief in the night. Thanks for the help, amici! Sorry to rush, but so much to do, world to save! Stammi bene! In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I was on a plane back to Boston.”

  “Are you OK, Professor? Honestly?”

  “Never better. The only lasting pain is that those louts in Rome got to my copy of the Geographika. Probably the last copy on Earth, might be one of the keys to what’s happening now with the Architects, and it’d taken me years to track it down. I never even read the whole thing before they stole it.”

  That was when I grasped that Partridge knew nothing. Not that Bill was dead. Not that we had rescued his precious papyrus of the Geographika and then been responsible for its destruction. Not even that we’d been at Ararat.

  We were on the phone for over an hour. Toward the end he went so quiet that I kept thinking the connection had dropped.

  “Poor Bill. And poor Daniel. Oh dear, I am so sorry, Morag. I’ve seen the pictures of Ararat, just as everyone has. But I had no idea how well all this fits—which means it’s every bit as bad as I feared.”

  I should have asked him what he meant by that. Instead I tried to lighten his mood, and mine, by telling him how glad I was to be getting out of town.

  “Ooh, astronomy!” he exclaimed, bubbly and as easily distracted as a child. “Tell me more. Where is it you’re going?”

  Ella was supposed to pick us up early on Friday morning. Late into Thursday night, I read aloud to you from Shul-hura’s Akkadian manuscripts. “He’s a recovering fundamentalist without a support group,” I said. “His problem is he believes in the Architects, but he’s stopped believing what he’s supposed to believe about them. Listen to this.” And I read you one of the passages that intrigued me most, retranslating the cuneiform as I went:

  Those who obey will ascend and become perfect. Freed from the body and freed from death—eternal. Or so we are told.

  It is wrong to ask questions. Questions only obscure our path to infinity. Or so we are told, and so we tell the people.

  The Architects have taken away our languages, and these old languages may not be used, on pain of death. Only a few of us retain the memory of them. So I write these questions, on pain of death: Do they want companions, or cattle? And how can we know?

  It was warm in the basement, airless, but as I read and talked, you lay on the camp cot fully clothed, jacket and all; you couldn’t retain body heat, were always cold. Your eyes flicked from me to the book, then to the ceiling, then back again. Again I had the sense that you, like me, were trying to work something out, under stress, under time pressure. At some level, I knew you were taking in what I was saying and understanding it. You were hyperalert and even less able or willing to sleep than me.

  I must have fallen asleep. That’s how I came to be alone and drowning, in a rough sea at night, ten miles from Antikythera. A wave reared out of the dark and crashed over me. The water was warm and salty in the back of my throat. I spat, gulped air, and screamed your name. But I knew it was too late: you were already gone, already drowned. I tried to scream one more time, but the water rushed into my mouth as the weight of my clothes pulled me under.

  I woke with my heart doing 180 and my clothes drenched in the saltwater of my own sweat. You were lying down, still fully clothed but apparently asleep at last. I crept out to the bathroom, threw up, got some water, and changed into dry things. It was five in the morning.

  I peeped in through our curtain divide again, and I was about to drop the curtain back in place when your right hand strayed up to your heart, as if you’d just risen to your feet for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But your fingertips shifted, as if you were checking the breast pocket of the jacket.

  “Daniel?”

  Ten minutes later I’d woken Rosko, and the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over an object the size of a phone, while Rosko used a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers to loosen eight black screws that looked like mustard seeds.

  He lifted off the top of the housing and held it up to the light. Someone had written the mathematical sign for “square root of two” on it in black permanent marker: “√2.”

  “This is brilliant,” I whispered. “A breakthrough at last. I know this is going to clarify everything.”

  “Don’t go all bipolar on me, Morag,” he said. “One minute we’re all doomed. The next minute we’re all saved. It gets confusing. This is a hard drive from a laptop, and it’s had a rough time. See the dent in this end? Pried out in a hurry, maybe with a knife. Broke the power connector.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Power connector’s a piece of cake. The memory itself, who knows? Laptop hard drives are crap to start with. This one’s been in a Turkish crevasse, an Armenian washing machine, and the international mail system.”

  He picked up the soldering iron and a pair of tweezers. “Daniel, hold this end steady for me with your fingertips. That’s right.”

  Complete silence. It was like observing heart surgery. When he was satisfied with the new contact, he used a magnifier to examine the whole drive.

  “Daniel, do you know what this drive is? Whose it is? Where it’s from?”

  It was probably seventy degrees in the Eislers’ kitchen, but you’d zipped the jacket all the way to your chin, as if not having the hard drive in the pocket made you even colder. “Numbers,” you said, shaking your head.

  “What numbers, Daniel?”

  “Numbers.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us about it before?”

  You raised your eyebrows as if to say, You didn’t ask.

  “This must have been Bill’s. Yes?”

  But you shook your head. “Mayo.”

  “Scheisse. Bill must have gotten it from him, and it’s been in that jacket pocket the whole time. Which means—”

  Rosko sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

  “What?”

  “Do you write ‘√2’ on your own laptop’s hard drive? No, because the drive’s inside the laptop. So if this is from Mayo’s machine, and Bill took it out, then Bill wrote this.”

  You were nodding. I couldn’t tell whether you were saying Yes, that’s reasonable or Congrats, finally you got there.

  “And so this is a message to us from Bill,” I said. “See any other damage?”

  “See, no. Which doesn’t mean a thing. But since I’m an optimist I’ll give it a ten percent chance.”

  You reached out and stroked the top cover of the drive, the way you might stroke a small animal, letting one finger rest on the black symbols. It was as if you were saying, Yes, this is my father’s writing.

  “Mayo knew,” you said. “Eighteen twelve. Eighteen twelve.”

  Rosko looked at you with a tolerant exasperation. “Daniel, my friend, this would be an excellent time to make sense. 1812 is a famous date, isn’t it? The Battle of Waterloo or something?”

  “Eighteen twelve,” you repeated, more insistent this time, as if our hearing wasn’t good.

  “Not Waterloo,” I said. “That was 1815. Wellington gets all the glory, but he’d have lost except that at the last minute von Blücher and the Prussians showed up—”

  “Morag.”

  “What?”

  “Stick to the point, Morag.”

  “Sorry. 1812. OK, yes, 1812 is—is—oh.”

  “What?”

  “Eighteen twelve isn’t a date. It’s two numbers, eighteen and twelve. We’re not talking battles. We’re talking a horseshoe of twelve symbols containing a spiral of eighteen more. It’s the structure of the Phaistos Disks. Daniel pointed it out to Bill. You were proud that you’d noticed what Bill missed, reme
mber?”

  There was a faint smile at the corner of your mouth.

  “You do remember! Eighteen twelve.” I turned to Rosko again. “It will work, won’t it?”

  He positioned the cover over the drive and started reinserting the tiny screws. “What’s that idiom in English about betting the farm? Don’t.”

  “It will work,” you said. We both stopped and looked at you.

  “It will work,” you said again. “But—”

  Rosko raised one eyebrow. “Thanks for that, Daniel.” Then he held up the cover to me before starting to reattach it. “Root. Auf Deutsch heisst root ‘Wurzel,’ oder? Vielleicht ist das ein Wortspiel?”

  “A pun?”

  “Ja. Yes. Like: the root in ‘√2’ is referring to the root of a plant, maybe. Or the root cause of something? The origin?”

  We both thought about that. But second root of a plant and second origin didn’t make sense.

  “Root has only two meanings I can think of,” I said. “It’s a noun, like in The tree has shallow roots and Money is the root of all evil. And it’s a verb, like in The pig is rooting for food and He’s rooting for his team. There’s nothing else, is there?”

  “Root two,” you said in a harsh whisper. “Root two.” You’d turned pale, with small beads of sweat on your upper lip, and you were trembling with annoyance or frustration, as if this at least was vitally important. You took a sheet of printer paper, picked a stub of pencil from where you’d parked it behind your ear, and drew a simple thin line, like a degraded sine wave, that was clearly meant to be Ararat. Above that, a dark scribble that looked like nothing—except that I could tell right away it was meant to be the cloud from which the Architects had emerged. Then you mashed the pencil point down so hard that the point crumbled, and wrote a thick black “√2” inside the shape of the cone.

  “Why Mayo was there,” you said again, looking at us as if you simply couldn’t understand how slow we were being. “Root two. Root. Two.”

  Or, language being a tricky thing, that’s what I thought you said.

  Rosko searched around in his box full of cables, found what he wanted, and hooked the drive up to my machine. Nothing happened. He raised his eyebrows in a resigned, told-you-so look, but unplugged it, poked at the connectors, and tried again. There was a faint, almost inaudible hum that stopped, started again, and made all our hearts skip a beat with a single high squeal, eeeeeeeeeeee. It sounded like a pig falling off a cliff.

  “Great. So much for that,” I said.

  “Patience, patience, patience.” He took the entire housing off again and cleaned the inside with compressed air. Moving so slowly that I wanted to scream, he clipped two wires and resoldered them. Finally he was ready to try again. And, impossibly, it worked. The names of sixty-eight files—I could have guessed that number—unpacked themselves across the screen:

  Phaistos_original_a.tiff

  Phaistos_original_b.tiff

  Phaistos_calder_01a.tiff

  Phaistos_calder_01b.tiff

  Phaistos_calder_02a.tiff . . .

  I couldn’t speak, so I pointed to the first one. When Rosko opened it, what swam up onto the screen like a pizza was one side of the first Phaistos Disk—the one Bill took you to see at the museum in Heraklion.

  “Now open this one,” I said, picking another file at random near the end of the list. It was a Disk we’d never seen.

  “Must be one of Cicero’s souvenirs,” Rosko said. “From the wreck.”

  “Then we have all thirty-four known Disks here.”

  He nodded. “Sixty-eight sides. Mayo must have had them, like he told you, and Bill managed to steal these images.”

  “I can unpick the puzzle now,” I said. “I’m sure I can.” I was trying for total confidence, which was way more than I felt; it didn’t help that Rosko said nothing. I wanted to say, What? What? Don’t you believe me? I settled instead for “The first thing is to not lose any of this.”

  “I can upload it all to—”

  “No. Not the web. But make sure we have it safe. Save the files to something portable too. I should get down to work right away and—”

  A door slammed, and I heard the beep of a car being locked. You were already standing at the window, as if you’d anticipated the noise. Rosko stood up and looked out over your shoulder. “It’s Ella. Driving a huge new truck. Toyota Testosterone, Chevy MegaHeavy, something like that.”

  I looked out too. She had just climbed out and was adjusting a stretchy, horizontally striped black-and-white microskirt.

  “She’s got a thing for you, Rosko. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m serious. The hots, totally.”

  He turned to the screen again. “This is a big job. Full manual count of the symbols, key in all the data, reconfigure the statistical app.”

  “I should stay here, then. Get started.”

  “Don’t do that. You need the break. We both need the break. And it’s a one-night thing—we’ll be back here tomorrow. Soon enough.”

  “Bill looked for this material for ten years. Now I have it in my hands, and you want me to leave it?”

  “For a few hours, yes. Come back to this rested.”

  There was a bang on the screen door. “You guys ready to roll?”

  I went to let her in. “Hi, Ella. Killer skirt.”

  She used both hands to smooth it against her thighs, then adjusted her earrings, which were wooden X and Y Scrabble tiles. “I already picked up Kit for you.” She was speaking to me, but looking past me at Rosko. “Are you coming or not?”

  Picked up Kit for you. Was that merely an odd way to put it? A slip of the tongue? Or a carefully calibrated tease? Whatever: sure enough, Kit was stepping out of the truck on the far side of the street. She hadn’t seen me. She was standing under a cherry tree, right hand on left shoulder, stretching. Above her, a solitary scrap of cloud was glowing pink in a clear sky.

  We had a full set of Disk images. A real breakthrough at last? Now maybe I could get somewhere? The right thing to do, obviously, was blow off the trip and get down to work without delay. And part of me wanted nothing more than that.

  Part of me. But we all live with little hints of schizophrenia, don’t we? It was like two people squabbling inside my head. Left brain, right brain. Or sensible brain, insane brain.

  The Disks!

  The chance to get out of the Eislers’ house and be around Kit!

  The Disks!

  The chance—

  “We’ve not even thought about food, or what clothes to bring, or camping gear,” Rosko said to Ella.

  “Julia’s bringing food for an army. I have spare camping gear. How long will it take you to find a sleeping bag, warm clothes, and a toothbrush?”

  I took a long look at the image on the screen. When I looked at Ella again, she was using an antique silver compact to adjust her jet-black lipstick. I felt weak and stupid for doing the wrong thing.

  “Five minutes,” I said.

  CHAPTER 6

  FOOL FOR LOVE

  It was an ordinary drive. A strange journey. A turning point.

  For an hour, up into the mountains, we talked about everything and nothing. Ella seemed relaxed, even if she kept glancing sideways at Rosko. Rosko seemed no more troubled than usual and yawned frequently—friendly with Ella, but clueless about the attention he was getting. You were wary, twitchy, clutching Iona’s camera and shivering under a blanket even though it was a warm day; you stared out of the window, your eyes wide, like you were suffering from a combination of the flu and acute agoraphobia. From time to time you’d mutter fragments of sentences, and you began to calm down only when I handed you sunglasses and your sketch pad. You spent a long time drawing an odd series of pictures. They were shaky because of the truck’s movement, and each one was framed by a sketch of the back of a camera, as if you were drawing her viewpoint—magically recreating her missing shots. And sure enough: one of them, more
elaborate and detailed than the others, showed a small clearing in a forest. It wasn’t a generic scene, but a real place: when I looked closer, I could identify the species of nearly every tree and shrub. A memory. Only, not your memory, because it was a place you’d never been.

  “What is you think of this new planet thing?” Kit was asking Ella.

  “We’re not going to see it—that’s for sure. Wrong side of the sky.”

  “I mean, do you believe these stories about this is home to Architects or something?”

  “Not a chance. If you look at the actual data, instead of the dip-wad journalism, for all we know S-8A could have sulfuric acid oceans. Or an atmosphere thinner than the Death Zone on Everest. Or enough gamma radiation to barbecue steel. Plus, it’s thirty-five light years away. With anything like our technology, that’s a round trip of three million years.”

  “Maybe the Architects have better rockets,” Rosko said.

  She shook her head. “If someone out there thinks thirty-five light years is no big deal, they’re not using rockets. Warp drives, wormholes, teleportation, who knows? The point is, if you’re commuting between stars, then you’ve invented something that makes the speed of light irrelevant. And if the speed of light’s irrelevant, distance is irrelevant. Thirty-five light years or thirty-five million light years, what’s the diff? They could have come here to show off their ‘Einstein Was Wrong’ tattoos from anywhere in the universe.”

  “Anywhere,” you said, looking up from another sketch. “Or everywhere and nowhere.”

  “What does that mean, Daniel?” Ella asked. She sounded irritated, as if she was convinced that you were incapable of anything except the occasional eruption of nonsense. “What does ‘everywhere and nowhere’ even mean? They’ve got to come from somewhere, right?”

  But you might as well have been speaking to yourself. “Everywhere and nowhere,” you muttered to yourself; you were already busy drawing again.

  We were all quiet as we came down out of the mountains into the gorge of the Columbia. Even for me, it was a comfortable quiet, for about half a minute. But I hadn’t thought through the trip. I mean, I knew Kit would probably be there, but I’d never planned to spend two hours sitting inches away from her in the back seat of a truck, parted from her by nothing but a thin, invisible, increasingly potent, and maybe lethal wall of electrical current. She used a Swiss Army knife to take slices out of an apple and offered me one on the tip of the blade. “Thanks,” I said, and discovered that my throat was so dry I could barely swallow. When she said a couple of ordinary, sensible things like “You want another slice?” or “Wow, look at wind farm over there” or “Tell me more about the Professor Partridge” I could only blush, stammer, and feel appalled that she looked and sounded so relaxed. I even got a curling paperback out of my bag—one she’d picked out for me, from one of those free libraries in the neighborhood (What did that mean, her giving me the book? Was it just a thoughtful, friendly gesture?)—and spent three minutes trying to read.