Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (2 page)

P
ROLOGUE

A T
HOUSAND
G
ODS

You were standing motionless on the snow, like all the others, with your face tilted up toward the sky and your hands raised in greeting.

“There!” I shouted.

Mack didn’t hear me, which wasn’t surprising—I was competing with 130 decibels. I leaned across the instrument panel, pointed, and shouted again. “There! Daniel and Rosko. Do you see?”

Wrestling with the controls, struggling to make the big machine do his bidding, he glanced to his left and nodded. Even in that moment of life-threatening crisis there was an aura of relaxed control about him.

“Go,” he mouthed, even before the helicopter’s wheels had made contact with the pad. “Help them. You’ll have to be quick.”

Snow and ice, stained pink by the evening light, were cascading onto the pad. Smoke and steam were so totally everywhere that you couldn’t tell which was which. As if by magic, Rosko had emerged from the crevasse, covered in blood, and was struggling up the slope toward you from fifty paces away. The Seraphim were standing silently, or chanting, or on the steeper sections they were beginning to stumble and fall as the ground shook. It was still a couple of hours to sunset, but the full moon had risen into view over the shoulder of the mountain, indecently big and close, like an airbrushed fantasy planet from the cover of an old comic book. Not far to our right, Mount Ararat’s first lava flow in centuries was hissing and sliding—a lazy, venomous, red-eyed snake, mooching for new victims.

And—

And—

It was hard not to stand there in the doorway and just stare. The sky, which should have been blue, was turning before our eyes into an upside-down oil-black lake. And a thousand gods—spirits, disembodied souls, angels, demons, Architects, what the hell did I know?—were swirling and foaming and materializing out of it, taking on human and yet not-human shapes as they dripped down toward the shiny, bright faces of the entranced, eager-for-immortality Believers. That counts as a Don’t-Miss, Five Stars, Bucket-List roadside attraction, don’t you think? But it grabs your attention even more, when it contradicts everything you’ve ever believed, because your whole life you’ve been a science-minded, unapologetically rationalist, don’t-give-me-that-crap atheist.

This is not happening.
That’s what I said to myself.
Morag, this is so so so not bloody happening. It’s just an illusion. A hallucination. An extra-deluxe, high-octane, ultra-high-pixel-density nightmare.

I hate it, D; I totally hate it when I don’t believe a single word I’m telling myself.

Your dad’s voice came floating back to me. He may have been an arrogant pain in the neck, but he was also my mentor, my hero. William Hayden Calder, famous linguist: hunched over our Akkadian translations at the big table in his Seattle office, unearthing buried civilizations for a living. “Don’t misunderstand me, Morag,” he’d said to me once. “My position isn’t simply that ghosts don’t exist and souls don’t exist and gods don’t exist. I’m not saying that we have bad-to-zero evidence for those
particular
things—though, sure, bad-to-zero evidence is what we have. What I’m saying is the whole category of what people call ‘the supernatural’ is a crock, a confusion.”

“Why?”

“Simple. If you can’t make sense of something—if it seems to lie beyond your understanding—then you’ve nothing but bad reasons for claiming that you ‘know’ it’s supernatural. On the other hand, if eventually you do make sense of it, bingo: the temptation to call it supernatural evaporates. History of science in a nutshell.”

Thunder and lightning explained as Zeus having a snit: that was his favorite example. I’d always agreed with him, and I’d always thought that Julius Quinn, his former student turned Alternative Messiah, was merely a super-charismatic BS artist, like all the other people in history who’ve claimed they’re just back from a personal interview in the Big Office Upstairs. Even when Iona became obsessed with the disappearances in Bolivia, even when the “disappeared” turned out to be Mysteries—and even when she died, and we saw a hint of this same craziness in those blurred frames of video, I wasn’t ready to believe so much as a syllable from our Mr. Quinn. But Ararat forced me to give him and his Seraphim this much: I might not have, and they might not have, the slightest effing clue what the Architects were, but they were
real
.

They came down like fast-acting stalactites from the roof of a cave. At first each one was just a viscous column, and they hesitated, as if picking out one of the individuals below: only then did they begin to take on the outline of a human form. The supplicants (Applicants? Angels? Victims? You tell me!) stood rigid, with their arms held out in greeting, poised on the cliff edge of infinity with joy on their luminous upturned faces.

Amazing
—and when you’ve been raised by a couple of archaeologists, so you know the world’s mythologies like the back of your hand—well, all things considered, it would have been nice to get a spare five minutes, sit down with a notepad, and concentrate on the details.

“You’ll have to be quick.”

Oh. Right. Sorry, Mack, yes, have to be quick. Because—

Because
shit shit shit
one of them is above you.

You
, Daniel Calder.

Right now.

Don’t look at it, D! Please! Don’t look at it!

But it was there especially for you, so you looked at it.

Daniel, run!

But you didn’t run. You were already beyond running. You just stood there looking up, like all the others, mesmerized. In that pose, you might have been one of those Greek statues of an athlete that they found standing, javelin arm forever raised, on the seabed at Antikythera. A track-and-field snapshot in solid bronze. The hero of the games, anticipating forever the laurel wreath of victory.

I hauled the door open and jumped down onto a pile of snow and ice. My foot hit a jagged block at an angle and I spun sideways, turning my ankle and cutting both hands. Rosko had started running up the slope toward you; when I picked myself up and looked again, he was already halfway there. Yelling was pointless—neither of you could have heard a thing from that distance, not over the deafening triple protest of the blades, the engine, and the mountain itself—but I yelled into the thin air until my throat hurt.

“Daniel! Daniel, it’s me. Morag. We’re over here; can you see us? This way! Rosko, you have to move faster. Now, Rosko. Now!”

Cheerleading the impossible. You must both weigh eighty kilos—sorry: 180 pounds—so how he even picked you up, I’ll never know. Somehow he got you over his shoulder and started half-carrying, half-dragging you toward me. I ran, or stumbled, to meet him halfway. It was only then that I saw how bad his injuries looked. No words between us. We made it to the open door, where I pulled more muscles than I can name getting you both on board. Before I’d even had time to get your bums into seats, the helicopter lurched sideways, smashed in the tail by a block of ice. Our bearded, grinning, rifle-toting Armenian friend shouted, “Hang on to something!” before managing to give us a foot or two of lift and steer us crabwise off the steel deck.

I buckled you both into the second row and half-jumped, half-fell into the copilot’s seat on Mack’s right as he veered away and down. We passed right over a tongue of the lava flow. The heat radiating off it was so intense, I wondered if we’d light up. A shred of lint, sucked in too close to a bonfire.

Once it was behind us we dropped like a stone. It took only a few sickening, theme-park minutes to leave that horrible scene and most of Mount Ararat’s five thousand meters behind. The pale-brown moonscape beneath us—rock, dust, gullies—looked like a beach raked by a bear’s claw. The whole machine was canted over to one side, the nose was tilted too far down, and we were seconds away from violent death.

“So far, so good!” Mack said, as if everything was going way better than expected. As if he was Dad, we were the kids, and this was a Sunday drive to the beach. When he looked at me with a mad gleam in his eye, as if to check that I was having fun too, I didn’t know whether to feel better or worse.

Funny how many regrets a mind can dwell on, in the almost infinitely expandable space of a single moment. We were about to say our last good-byes to the world from inside a fireball of shredding metal, and I had all the emotions you’d expect, including the purest and most cowardly physical terror, anger that this was a situation over which I had no control, and “a kind of philosophical panic” (I here quote the great German thinker sitting beside you, Rosko G. Eisler) at the thought of my own extinction. But that was just the start. I managed also to regret that I’d never see my parents again. Regret that I’d never become the world-famous anthropologist, linguist, and discoverer of lost civilizations I’d planned to be. Regret that I’d never know how to adjust my personal belief-space to fit the fact of oily, strangely attractive beings materializing into semihuman form out of a clear sky, precisely as Julius Quinn had predicted they would.

It even entered my mind, like the scent of honeysuckle captured in passing, that I’d never see a Certain Other Person again. Or find out what feelings that person might have about me. Or—let’s face it, Morag, shall we?—almost certainly not have about me.

The mountain was behind and above us. I couldn’t see most of it, but the eruption seemed to have stopped. A small fist of smoke was rising from the summit. It blurred into the rolling bank of unnatural darkness that kept parting, re-forming, and concentrating in the sky above. Several darker points within that darkness dripped down, a viscous goo extending down like molasses toward the crowds of people still grouped in rings around the summit.

The Architects, still at work.

And the Seraphim faithful—but it wasn’t a
faith
, Julius Quinn had insisted, hadn’t he? It wasn’t a
faith
because it wasn’t a
religion
, even if everyone, including me, kept calling it that. No: it was
the truth
—and those who called themselves the Seraphim because they had accepted the truth were still there, still waiting to accept their infinite reward.

We were following the line of a deep gully. Its edges reminded me of saw blades, and there were more gullies on either side. I was supposed to be saying something helpful, like
What about landing over there? I see a place over there!
Only, there wasn’t enough
there
to set down a phone.

There was a sickening drop, a half second of zero-g during which my brain decided to brighten up its last moment with a picture of Einstein, clothes rumpled and hair wild, in delighted free fall: the lightbulb moment when he gets it that acceleration and gravity are the same thing.

Mack slapped at the dashboard and said something in Armenian that was probably unprintable; it must have worked, because our descent rate corrected itself so abruptly that my stomach tried to escape through my sinuses. We leveled out after that, which was good. Not so good was the fact that we were flying almost sideways.

“The tail must be damaged,” he said. “I can’t keep us in the air much longer.”

A band of green appeared. A smear on the windshield? A trick of the light. But Mack pointed at it. “Crops. That’s the Aras River valley. Ten kilometers.”

Small farms came into view. Fields. Even a few trees. Behind us, Ararat still loomed; the curve of the slope made it look like we were trying to outrun a tsunami. We flew almost straight for a minute, but as the helicopter slowed down, it slewed hard to the left again, like a supermarket trolley with a jammed wheel. We sunk to ten or fifteen feet off the ground but kept moving. There was a sound I mistook for the squeal of a pig—our tail section dragging through the branches of a tree—and, after hanging motionless for a second, we went to the ground like a dropped brick.

By pure chance, the wheels were level. By pure chance, we landed in plowed soil, or the impact would have snapped our necks.

“Help Daniel,” I shouted. From behind one of the seats I grabbed a bag with a big red medical “
+
” on the front. I unbuckled Rosko, took his good arm, and threw us both out the side door.

There was barely time to get him away from the slowing rotors and collapse on a low mound of earth before the true eruption came.