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

  And another three at least pretending to try to read.

  Fool for Love. That was the title. Go on, laugh if you want. Ha bloody ha.

  Train of thought—train of inner argument—with eyes pointed in the general direction of the page:

  Kit’s relaxed because she knows how I feel. And she’s OK with it, so it’s not a big deal.

  Oh, get a grip, Morag. If she’s guessed how you feel, then it’s a big deal either way. She’s relaxed because the thought of you being attracted to her has never, never entered her head, not even for a split second.

  OK, you’re probably right; I’ve been misreading the signals.

  No! That’s not the problem! The problem is there never have been any signals. None. You’re . . . what do they call it? Confabulating. Making stuff up. Constructing the emotional reality you need to believe in because the real emotional reality—that she’s not only not interested in you now, but never, ever could or will be—is too painful to think about. Am I right?

  There’s no need to rub it in.

  There’s plenty of need to rub it in. If you give away how you feel by some half-intended slip or look or gesture—which, let’s face it, is becoming more probable by the second right now as you sit there having your smiling panic attack—she’ll be horrified. Or maybe not horrified. Maybe she’ll think it’s funny. Interesting question there, Morag: Would you prefer to be an object of horror and loathing to the person you’re obsessed with? Or are you going for ridicule instead? Monster or clown? You decide! Well, no, that’s all part of the fun of being desperately, helplessly infatuated with someone, isn’t it—you don’t decide. You are powerless here, because she gets to decide in which of two different ways to make your life not worth living.

  Should have stayed at the house, shouldn’t I?

  Yes, you should have.

  Should have stayed hunched over the computer, doing the necessary, important, boring stuff on which lives may depend, and which I’m good at, instead of trying to have an emotional life, which I suck at?

  You got it.

  But now I’m stuck here in this truck with her. Right next to her. And I can’t stand it, because all I want to do in the whole world is what I don’t have and never, ever in my whole pathetic life will have the courage to do. Which is tell her. Be open, and clear, and look at her and tell her. Just say the words.

  Cowardice will serve you well here, Morag. Don’t do it.

  Oh, shut up and sod off, will you? Just saying the words is all I want to do: “Kit, Kit. Listen to me. Listen, will you, for a minute? Because I know it sounds absurd, but I can’t help it. I have to tell you. See, the thing is, well how can I put this, whenever I look at you, or hear you speak, or smell your hair, I have this overwhelming, um, this wonderful, oh, words are so useless! This exhilarating, but at the same time unbearable—”

  I threw the book back into my bag as we crossed the Columbia. When we crested the long rise on the other side, with the great river gorge behind us and farmland opening up to the east, I turned to my left to check on you, then looked back over my shoulder at the view.

  Anything to break the spell.

  Anything to take my mind off my own mind.

  I put my left arm up along the back of the seat, where there was plenty of room for it, because you were scrunched into the corner, leaning on the door. I pivoted around in the seat, making a conscious effort to focus on what I was seeing and not on what I was feeling, and it was only natural after a minute or so for my right hand to offer me a little balance by dropping into the space on my right side, onto the seat.

  The boring tan-colored seat.

  Only, Kit had kicked off her shoes, as she always does. And tucked her legs underneath her, as she always does. And so my open palm came to rest—

  Not on the tan-colored seat, but—

  Not on the tan-colored cloth seat, a dead, dumb material object made in a factory in Taiwan or Tennessee, which had neither feelings of its own nor any emotional significance for me, but—

  —instead—

  —oh holy crap you’re an idiot, Morag, an idiot—

  —across the smooth cream-colored arch of her naked foot.

  Some absolute, hundred-proof madness surged up my arm and through my body and into my brain at that moment. There was an instinct in there, a strong one, to draw my hand away, to make things normal again, to take the world back a pace by offering a meaningless, polite apology, the way you do when you bang elbows with a stranger in a corridor. Sorry! Invaded your personal space! Clumsy old me! But the madness crushed that instinct; it was still there, a small terrified voice begging me to be sensible, to salvage things and get back to before. But I couldn’t act on its instruction.

  I stopped breathing, I swear, the moment our skin made contact.

  The inside of my palm fit so neatly over the curve of her foot. It liked being there. It wanted to stay there. So it did—rebelling against the shrill cry of reason.

  I could feel the warmth radiating from her skin.

  There was a violent roaring in my ears, like static. There was also, at the same time, a silence as absolute as the spaces between the stars.

  I was running out of air. My vision was blurring. And despite all that, a strange calm descended on me, because it was too late now. I’d made my terrible, awful, shame-inducing mistake. She knew now. There was no way to take back my hand’s confession. I’d just have to wait for the world to fly apart and explode. Perhaps she would sit up, quietly remove her foot, and look out of the window with a blush of extreme discomfort on her cheek. Or perhaps instead she’d look at me in horror and say, Fuck it is you are doing?

  And let’s look on the dark side. (I was already looking on the dark side.) Perhaps she’d never speak to me again.

  Hours passed. Whole monstrous endless seconds.

  At the end of them, Kit’s foot was still mysteriously there, under my hand. And then, in a development that I could see with my own eyes but not in the least make sense of, she took her own left hand, which was resting on her knee, and picked it up and opened the palm as if to look at it, and turned it over again, splaying the fingers wide. And shifted it in my direction. And put it down again, very slowly and delicately and deliberately, so that it covered mine.

  And Ella was leaning over to whisper something to Rosko. And a horse looked up at us from a sunlit field. And Rosko was saying something to Ella in reply; I knew he was, because he’d turned in his seat up front and maybe glanced back at us—I wasn’t sure of that, but I could see his lips moving, and oddly enough I couldn’t hear a thing.

  I closed my eyes. I was shaking. I took two long, deep breaths, and turned to look at Kit’s hand, because it being there, on top of mine, was like a difficult theoretical proposition that I’d been told about by someone else and needed to confirm by collecting further evidence. Yes, no doubt about it: there it was. Kit’s hand on mine. I’d never taken in how slim her fingers were, or how neatly she kept her nails, or the fact that the thin silver ring she wore on her little finger was pitted and worn.

  When I summoned up enough courage to look at her, it was as if I’d never once before seen those beautiful, hypnotic green irises, chocolate-colored at the rim and flecked radially from the center with bright ocher and jade and chestnut. I could see nothing else: it was like they were planets, filling my whole visual field. I had to look down at our hands again, look up again, force myself to mentally back away from her eyes so that I could take in her whole expression.

  She was looking at me steadily and seriously, but with a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. She continued to hold my gaze, rock solid, and as she did so she ran her thumb in a slow diagonal line across the back of my hand.

  “I think I’m going to faint,” I said.

  “Is OK,” she whispered. “Is OK.”

  All I could do was nod, and keep looking at her, and smile, and then stop smiling, and look down at our hands yet again. Then I touched the back of her hand
with my other hand and maybe nodded some more and looked up at her and nodded again. I tried to smile again, too, I remember that, but the muscles in my face weren’t working right. So instead I touched my fingertips to my own cheek, and then to hers.

  From somewhere in the far distance someone was saying my name.

  It was Ella. “Morag,” she said again. “Oy, Morag.”

  I glanced to the front and saw her looking back at me in the mirror. She was grinning from ear to ear, smug as a squirrel.

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to give you relationship advice or anything, honeybuns. But if you sit like that much longer, you’re going to get a wicked crick in the neck.”

  It was meant to be funny. It was funny—I could see that. So could Kit, who squeezed my hand, glanced at Ella too, and turned back to me with a huge, gorgeous, blinding megawatt smile.

  I tried to smile back, but my face still wasn’t cooperating. I got about halfway there. Then I burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 7

  HISTORY AND HOPE

  That dry eastern rangeland was one of the places you’d always promised to show me, and you’d described it well, but its strangeness still came as a surprise, so breathtakingly different from the misty, tree-conquered coast. The land was open, undulating, and almost barren, with nothing but small angular rocks littered among the sagebrush. We could see snowy peaks, low and distant on the horizon. Occasionally the sagebrush gave way to plowed fields, cleared fields, fields furred emerald with new grass. Miles of this—and then, down a dirt farm road, we came over a small rise and saw a silhouette so unexpected that it might have been an alien spaceship. It was a lone boulder, tapered and rounded at the bottom so that it seemed to float a few inches above the ground. A lone boulder the size of a house.

  “That’s it,” Ella said. “The Bretz Erratic. Five thousand tons of greenstone, brought here from hundreds of miles away by the Missoula Floods.”

  “I know,” I said. I knew because you’d told me the story. The ice dam giving way at ancient Lake Missoula, fifteen thousand years ago. Walls of water two hundred feet tall roaring across the land, an unstoppable inland tsunami that carried giant icebergs with these monster rocks embedded in them. By then, the first Native Americans would have been scratching out a life here. I tried not to imagine, and couldn’t stop imagining, how small doomed groups of them might have heard thunder one clear morning, and looked up in puzzlement, and watched as the eastern horizon glinted, flexed, and rushed forward to engulf them.

  Ella pulled off the road next to the boulder. We parked so close to it that we missed the ageing dark-brown VW minibus that was lurking on the other side. But the figure I saw on the ridge—baggy clothes, lopsided stance, wild tufts of hair—was instantly recognizable.

  “Oh my God, I don’t believe it.”

  Kit followed my gaze. “Who is?”

  “It’s—I don’t believe it. Wait here, OK?”

  We locked eyes again for about half a second as I scrambled across her to the door.

  “You are run away already?” she said, pouting theatrically. “Before even have kissed me?”

  “Rain check?” I said. Then I ran across the field, stumbling on the uneven ground.

  “Professor! How on earth—?”

  It was Derek Partridge, beaming at me. “Ah. Good afternoon, Morag. A relief to know that I’m in the right place. Wonderful to see you.”

  “But you were in Boston when you called! You must have driven nonstop.”

  “I did pull over and nap once or twice. As for the driving, a scholar’s job is to sit in a chair all day, and I’ve been doing that for decades. The same thing at fifty miles an hour is not much of a hardship. And, after our conversation at the beginning of the week, I had to see you. So”—he pointed to the Volkswagen—“I got Brunhilde an oil change and pointed her west.”

  “But—”

  “Morag, please, I know. I’m a seventy-six-year-old wine-lover who’s survived a brutal mugging and a week being prodded and condescended to by perky Italian medical experts who could have been my grandchildren. At the end of it all, I had to deal with the awful news you gave me when we spoke. And it follows that my decision to jump into my faithful old Kombinationskraftwagen and drive 2,904 miles just so that I can talk to you in person is incontrovertible proof of my senility. I humbly accept your judgment.”

  I stared at him.

  “Wasn’t that what to were going to say?”

  “I wasn’t going to say any of it.”

  “You are a true diplomat.”

  “No, I’m not. I say what I think. But I’m also big on subtle distinctions, and I don’t think you’re senile. I think you’re a nutter.”

  He smiled indulgently, as if accepting that that was an improvement. There was something paradoxically strong in him, for a frail old man. That, or his connection to Bill Calder, or maybe his connection to you, made me lose it at that point. I flung my arms around him and nearly knocked him onto the grass. When he didn’t fall over, I kissed him on both cheeks. He smelled of cheap shaving foam, and his skin was thinner than loo paper.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “The first thing I should have said is I’m so glad that you’re—that you’re not dead. But I still don’t understand why you came all this way.”

  “I came all this way because we’re in trouble, Morag. Big trouble.”

  “We?” I looked around at the empty field with its handful of human figures.

  “We, meaning all of us. Homo sapiens. History is repeating itself. I know a lot of history, and I’d rather it didn’t.”

  “Are you talking about the Seraphim? Or the Architects?”

  “Both, but the Seraphim are just enablers. The important point is that what’s happening now is like a mirror of what happened at Thera and after, in the Bronze Age. The Architects were there then, and they did a huge amount of damage. But something scared them off. Now they’ve come back to finish their work.”

  “You believe the Architects are literally gods, don’t you? The Mesopotamian gods, returning?”

  His eyes twinkled mischievously. “Would that bother you very much?”

  “Bill Calder taught me that calling something supernatural was the essence of unscientific thinking.”

  “Oh, Morag, my dear, you learned all Bill Calder’s lessons well, and I’m going to miss him as much as you do,” he said. “But unscientific is a bully word. People swing it around like a fat stick to intimidate people. To stop them thinking.”

  “Shouldn’t we try to be clear about what’s scientific and what isn’t?”

  “Indeed yes—and one of the dirty secrets of science is that scientists themselves often fail that test. Learn some of science’s history, my dear! When I was growing up, well-known psychologists were telling parents that it was ‘unscientific’ to hug and comfort their children. That wasn’t science! That was baseless, evidence-free drivel! But a white lab coat has such prestige in our culture that if you wear one and talk loudly enough, you can persuade people to believe any nonsense you dream up.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but one example of bad science isn’t a reason for believing the theology of ancient Mesopotamia.”

  “So let’s just say that the ancient gods have returned is my working shorthand for a pattern that I see but don’t understand. What they ‘really’ are, leave that aside for now.” He picked a piece of lint from his sleeve, held it up to the light, and gently puffed it away. “The thing to focus on is that they visited us before and went away again—which is why half the world’s religions are about begging the absent gods to come back. But leave that aside. Now the Architects are back. And they want what happened at Ararat to repeat, all over the world.”

  “So we have to prevent that,” I said.

  “It may already be too late to prevent it. The Seraphim have just declared six semiofficial ‘areas of interest’—Epicenters, as they call them. Places where they’re concentrating their resources for the next attem
pts at Anabasis.”

  “They’re planning multiple Ararats?”

  “Ararat had all sorts of historical significance for them, but it’s in a remote area. Amazing that they got as many people to it as they did. These new Epicenters are all volcanoes in populated areas. Vesuvius in Italy. Popocatépetl in Mexico—”

  “Holy shit. Sorry. Vesuvius. Popocatépetl. Fuji. Merapi. Mauna Loa. And Mount Rainier.”

  “You’ve heard about it too, then?”

  “Daniel had, apparently.” I told him about the atlas and your list on the wall; I left out the blood. “So this is like Shul-hura said about all the ancient worship at volcanoes—and all the pyramids and ziggurats, which were just models of the volcanoes, in effect. Places for the Architects to tune in?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “And then what?”