Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (23 page)

“Yes, but the idea is much older than that. It goes all the way back to the distinction between a material world and the immaterial God who creates it. Descartes was just trying to ask the scientific question:
Where
is the soul? There’s a little thing like a pencil eraser in the middle of your brain, the pineal gland. He said that’s where your soul lives. Like a puff of smoke in a bottle!”

“The ghost in the machine.”

“Yes. Most modern scientists think that’s rubbish, of course. How can you and I be
bodies
, located in time and space, but carry around inside us a thing that isn’t located in time and space?”

“But Iona was holding out for the ghost?”

“I was with Iona and Bill when David gave them the VIP tour of the Institute, just after it was built. He showed us the mainframe and said its capacity was comparable to the human brain’s, which, after all, was nothing but a ‘marvelously compact computer.’ Iona wasn’t impressed. She said to him, ‘Your new toy is very fine, David. But when all’s said and done, it’s just the Arnold Schwarzenegger of filing cabinets. Lots and lots of memory—but you’re forgetting that that’s only a metaphor. However good your software is, you will never, ever, be able to give this machine
memories
.’”

I’d put Iona’s note on the table between us. He picked it up and held it the way a priest would hold a holy wafer. “I don’t know what this means,” he admitted, “and my cellular clock has run out, so I probably never will. But I think David changed his mind very quickly. Around the time of Iona’s death, he must have become convinced that the Architects were real, that they were a real threat to our existence, and that in fact he could pull off Route Two only by first understanding them.”

Balakrishnan seemed to weaken even more after that second conversation, and Mrs. Chaudry began to ration access to him even more fiercely. We talked in the chairs next to his fireplace, and over a frugal meal of bread and salad in a tiny dining room below his study, and while I wheeled him around the garden—but I was never with him again for more than twenty minutes.

In the intervals, I was kept sane by Kai’s willingness to play tour guide. He taught me some of Hawaii’s geography, history, culture, and language. He took me to his favorite beachfront shack and introduced me to that high point of Hawaiian cuisine, a roadside “plate lunch.” He even drove me and the kids down a rutted road to Kealakekua Bay so that I could see the spot where the locals had said a brutal good-bye to Captain Cook.

“Cook was haole,” he said. “It means ‘foreigner,’ but also ‘pale skin.’ When he first arrive here, the locals are all celebrating Makahiki, which is the festival of the god Lono. At first, they think he is Lono. Then he tries to go away, and he’s driven back by a storm, and they figure, maybe he’s not Lono. So, right here in this bay, they steal his whaleboat. Big fight, boom boom, and they prove Cook is not Lono by swinging a war club at the back of his head. See guys, definitely dead! Definitely not a god! His crew buried him at sea, right out there in the bay.”

Apparently that was the sanitized version. While Vandana waded and Kai kept an eye on her, Sunil and I walked to the end of a concrete jetty and watched pods of impossibly bright parrot fish pass among the rocks ten feet down. “It didn’t really happen like that,” Sunil said.

“What didn’t?”

“The Hawaiians killing Captain Cook.”

“You mean they didn’t kill him?”

“I mean it was nastier than that,” he said with relish. “They cut him up and ate bits of him. Then they cut all the meat off his bones and kept the bones in a box.”

“So they didn’t bury him at sea?” I said.

“The sailors only managed to collect bits and pieces. I think they buried those.”

I looked down into the water again and almost jumped back when I saw a big, dark shape looming up from below. It was nothing but cloud shadow. But I quickly walked back to join Kai and Vandana.

When I said something about burying Cook in shallow water, Kai laughed. “This island is really three volcanoes, right? Mauna Kea in the north. Mauna Loa, which is most of the island. And Kilauea in the southeast, which is growing the island as it erupts into the sea. Here on this beach, we’re halfway up Mauna Loa. Water just out there, where they bury him? Deep ocean—two, three miles deep.”

The thought that we were standing on the sloping tip of a rock, in the middle of a bathtub three miles deep, was appalling. “Can you take us to see whatever it is the Seraphim are building farther up?” I said to Kai. “An arena or something?”

“I was planning to show you that,” he said. “Quite a sight. We have to drive to the south side of the island to see it, though.”

An hour later, and a couple of thousand feet higher, I learned why Sunil and Vandana took me so seriously.

“We’re your biggest fans,” Sunil piped from the back seat, as the road rose over the south flank of the mountain.

“Fans?” The whole idea was so ridiculous, I had to suppress a laugh. “What do you think I am, a movie star?”

“There are millions and millions of movie stars,” Vandana said contemptuously. “Hundreds, at least. But there are only two famous Babblers. William Calder and Morag Chen. Uncle Akshay’s told us all about you. Babel. Shul-hura. We even started teaching ourselves Akkadian.”

“But then we got bored and decided to make up more of our own languages instead,” Sunil said.

They chattered on for a few more minutes, then fell silent as we passed a heavily guarded gate. There were serious-looking men with guns, and two signboards showing the Seraphim triangle and the famous image of Quinn. Beyond the gate, a dirt road lead north, upslope.

“Summit’s still twenty miles that way,” Kai said, as we crested a rise. “Twenty miles and eleven thousand feet. You can’t get any closer unless you have two spare days and a backpack.”

Again I was struck by how totally different it was from Ararat. When Mack had landed that helicopter, the mountain dominated the skyline from twenty miles away like a barn in a field. But Mauna Loa was so much bigger, so much more gently sloped, that it hardly looked like a mountain. It wasn’t an object in the landscape, because we were already on it; it was the landscape.

“The Seraphim put together a bunch of land deals around here,” Kai explained. “They’re very, very rich, plus, they’re in the police, in the state bureaucracy, everywhere, so they get away with everything. They control this area now. There’s plenty of opposition, you’ll see. But—”

He trailed off as we arrived at a viewpoint, where he parked on the road verge behind a small swarm of cars and tour buses. One of the buses had a banner on the side with a painting representing the mountain as the goddess Pele and the bus-length slogan: “Mauna Loa Is Sacred.” People were milling about with banners:

THIS IS OUR LAND

NO CONSTRUCTION

SERAPHIM GO HOME.

A big pair of military-looking binoculars was set up on a stand near a makeshift fence, neatly blocking the view of a sign that said, “No Entry: Private.” Sunil and Vandana charmed their way to the front of a queue, and Vandana stepped onto a box so that she could see. I joined the back of the line; when she turned around and I asked what she’d seen, all she’d say was “We’ve seen it before. But it’s twice as big now.”

“Totally amazing,” the woman in the airport bathroom had said. She was right. It wasn’t just the scale, but the fact that it looked so different from any other structure I could think of. Alien. A silvery arc of what looked like metal had been extended out horizontally from the middle slopes. When you thought about the scale of the mountain, and the fact that you were looking at something twenty miles away, it had to be huge.

“Bleachers,” Kai explained. “Bleachers in reverse. So that you get a view up the mountain, instead of down. There’s already space for two or three hundred thousand people, and they’re not pau yet.”

Not finished. If Ararat was five thousand people, and—“Are they planning an event here? At a particular date?”

“Not that they sayin’.”

“But aren’t people afraid of what might happen?”

He looked away. “It like climate change. A few people take it serious from beginning. Most people take a long time. When something is too big like this, sure, you get guys with signs, but most people can’t take it in. It still like, nobody believes it happenin’.”

“According to my calculations,” Vandana said, “and math
is
my very best subject after French, Spanish, Hawaiian, and Urdu—”

“Stop boasting,” Sunil said, and he made a big production out of yawning.

“Stop interrupting. According to my calculations, the Big Island will be completely destroyed. Just like Thera. And the tsunamis will drown every city from Yokohama, which is in Japan—”

“We know that.”

“—to Valparaíso, which is in Chile.”

Sunil ran in a tight circle around us with his arms straight out like airplane wings. “I’m a tsunami,” he roared. “A really big one. Rrrrrrrr.”

“So what’s your next step?” Balakrishnan said, when I saw him briefly that evening. I didn’t know the answer, and said good night to him awkwardly, but the answer was handed to me half an hour later by Kit. Two messages, only a few hours apart:

Y
ESTERDAY
,
RAIN IN ROOF
. T
HIS NIGHT
,
RAT IN SHOWER
. R
OSKO IN BAD MOOD
. D
ANIEL IN REALLY BAD MOOD
. I
S ENOUGH
. M
Y MOTHER PICKING US UP
.

And, back in Seattle:

M
AJKA YOU WILL COME HOME NOW
,
PLEASE
? D
ANIEL
FOUND WHAT HE WAS LOOKING FOR
. H
E IS FRANTIC CRAZY
. H
E DRAW GIANT MAP OF
N
EW
G
UINEA AND OTHER STUFF WITH BIG
S
HARPIE ALL OVER KITCHEN WALL
. G
ABI TELLS MY MOTHER
, “
THAT BOY SHOULD BE IN PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL
.” A
LSO
S
ERAPHIM IS EVERYWHERE
. T
HEY COME TO
E
ISLER HOUSE THREE TIMES
,
LIKE THEY SMELL HIM
. I
AM FRIGHTENED FOR HIM
. N
OW
. P
LEASE
.

Found what he was looking for? It was really Kit herself who’d found what you were looking for, though she didn’t have the chance to tell me the details until later. You’d fallen asleep on the couch, and then woken crying and struggling; trying to calm you, she’d talked you through the idea that there was something you couldn’t find. For want of any other ideas, she suggested looking through all Iona’s things, item by item, including every page of that well-scribbled copy of
Anabasis
we’d found in the box at the Institute. A miniature white envelope was acting as a bookmark at page 104, where a single sentence was heavily underlined. I’d read that sentence before; like about half the book, it was famous:

You will come to a point at which the need for language falls away, and only your mind, in tune at last with its origin, can communicate directly with the Architects.

Kit said you grabbed the envelope out of her fingers before she’d had a chance to open it. “This. Here. I’iwa,” you said. The envelope contained one more memory card; the picture that you’d been looking for, hour after hour and day after day, you found in less than a minute.

There were two photographs, one ordinary and one not. She’d attached them to another message:

L
OOK AT FIRST PICTURE
,
THEN LOOK AT SECOND
. U
SE A BIG SCREEN
. D
ANIEL SAYS:
“T
HIS IS IT
. T
HIS IS
I’
IWA
.”

Minutes later she sent a fourth message: ten riveting seconds of video. The first two seconds were Kit herself in close-up, her hand trembling as she said, “Majka, listen. Daniel have something to say. Listen, OK?”