Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (25 page)

Balakrishnan insisted on being wheeled down to the garden to see me off. Sunil and Vandana were supposed to be there too, but they hadn’t shown up and Kai was standing by the SUV, looking at his fat black diver’s watch.

“Mrs. Chaudry,” Balakrishnan said, “are those little rascals coming or not?”

Before she had a chance to answer, I heard a gate bang shut and flip-flops slapping on the path at the side of the house. Sunil came around the corner at full speed with his sister just behind him.

“Morag-ákulan!”

“Morag-ínjaia!”

“Hi, guys,” I said. I didn’t even ask what their greeting meant, because they were too full of questions. Had Uncle Akshay and worked out what the Seraphim were doing in Hawaii? Had we worked out how to make him live forever? They wanted to teach me Ildavan—which was a big special privilege, because it was really their secret language, but they thought I’d understand, and not go teaching it to just anyone—so when was I coming back? And where was I going?

Kai opened the passenger door and coughed. I was flying commercial—first class, in compensation for none of BalakInd’s planes being immediately available, but I still had to make the plane.

“I’m going to New Guinea,” I said. “A big island north of Australia.”

“I know,” Sunil trilled importantly. “They have more languages there than anywhere else in world.”

“Yes. And I’m going there to look for a tribe of people who supposedly don’t speak any language and who guard a volcano that doesn’t exist.”

When I was seated in the back of the SUV again, and the garden wall was magically sliding out of the way, I looked back. Sunil bounced a soccer ball on one knee, oblivious. Balakrishnan watched me steadily, as if willing me to succeed. Vandana gave her shoulders an almost imperceptible shake. I slid the window down and leaned out.

“What did that mean?”

Her eyes creased in an impish smile. “Let’s see. A good translation might be, um—” She counted ostentatiously on her fingers, as if to remind me of all the possibilities they’d invented. “
Jékamekt?
Or
kq’ud’zuq
? Or
obia oniatat o’oa
? Or maybe
thutheg cham phe amphai
?”

“I get it,” I said. “But what did all
those
mean, Vandana? In English.”

It was Balakrishnan who answered the question. “They mean ‘good luck,’ Morag.”

It was the last thing he said to me. A few weeks later he was dead. And it wasn’t even his faulty genes that killed him.

P
ART
IV:

G
HOSTS

C
HAPTER
17

F
ISCHER
’
S
K
INGDOM

Dragged halfway around the world in the wrong direction, normal parents would have demanded a detailed justification, footnotes and all. But then normal parents take for granted all that stuff about adolescent brains being only half-baked and therefore crap at everything, especially risk assessment, so they also take for granted that their kids are screwups, and probably engaged right now in some idiotic, life-threatening mistake, of a kind the parents themselves would never have made, not ever, no way, not in a million years. (And, you know, let’s not mention that story about the stash, the party, and the motorbike.)

Luckily for me, Jimmy and Lorna had never been within a light year of normal, and their default parenting position was always that I must be doing what I’m doing for a reason, and that they’d find out the reason eventually. So when they showed up in New Guinea only half a day after I did—“Lorna put the fear of God into the visa people,” Jimmy explained proudly—they demanded nothing from me. We used up hours and hours just hugging, crying, laughing, and exchanging details. Over hot tea and a really bad meal at what passes in Telefol country for a restaurant, all Jimmy said by way of probing was “This is wonderful. Wonderful. But I still don’t really get why we’re here. Tell me about Daniel again, and why you think this has something to do with the Tainu.”

If I’d played coy, if I’d said, “Wait and see,” they’d have done just that. (Freaks. Call the parent police.) But it seemed unfair to make them wait.

“I don’t know why,” I said, “but Daniel clearly thinks the I’iwa hold the key to what I’ve been looking for. And they’re not a legend. They exist.”

When I described the two photographs, Lorna’s response was not what I expected.

“Sod it,” she said, turning to Jimmy. “We should’ve listened, aye?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “Iona told you she’d seen them, and you didn’t tell me?”

Jimmy put his hand on my arm. “There was nothing much to tell, not at the time. Not much to tell later, if it comes to that. But that last evening she was with us—”

“When she came back from the waterfall?”

“Yes. You were just a child. She didn’t want to frighten you. So she kept two details to herself until after you’d turned in for the night. Those two details were, well, they were an interesting story. But frankly we thought she was imagining things. You remember the hand ax she found?”

Of course I did. “Just like the rumors you’d heard. Tools that were very primitive, like something from the Paleolithic.”

“She told us that just as she picked it up, she heard a noise, and she turned in time to see a figure in the trees behind her.”

“She
saw
the I’iwa?”

“A figure in the trees, that’s all. Holding a spear, she thought. The thing she kept repeating was ‘Lorna, Jimmy, listen: it was dark there, under the trees. I could only see it because it was white. And there are no short, naked white people in this part of the world.’ Talk about seeing a ghost! Of course we said, ‘Must have been a trick of the light, Iona; you’re very tired, Iona,’ all that sort of thing. But she wouldn’t buy it.”

“You didn’t investigate?”

“Oma an’ Isbet took us as far as they’d go,” Lorna said.

“What about the ax?”

“Disappeared. An’ we probably couldn’t have dated it anyway. A wooden arrow or ax handle, bingo—but wi’ no organic material, ye have no decaying isotopes.” She shrugged. “The ax was a puzzler. But we never saw another one, an’ it was just very hard to believe Iona’s story.”

“Time to put on the hiking boots,” Jimmy said.

But not so fast.

As we wandered around that afternoon, reminiscing about our work there and taking in the familiar smell of the place, we bumped into an old friend, a Telefol woman named Fula.

“The town’s changed,” she said. “Do you remember how it was? More missinari than local people. Seventh-Day Adventist. Pentecostal. Catholic—”

“Evangelical Lutheran,” Lorna continued. “Australian Church o’ Christ the Savior. Tasmanian Church o’ Jesus the Nazarene. Aye. I always wondered if gettin’ saved by two different missions meant the first one wasn’t valid.”

Fula smiled thinly. “Everything different now. A few of the old missions still here. But Seraphim is big thing now. Danish man, Johannes Fischer, is chief. Some people he make believe in these Architects. Most of us, we are like the old missinari. Frightened of him.”

“We should talk to him,” Jimmy said. “But what do you mean,
chief
?”

“He get the government in Port Moresby to make him district commissioner for whole area.” She trailed her hand through the air, taking in everything around us and ending with our objective in the northwest. “You want to go up there again? Into Star Mountains? You have to get his permission.”

You and Kit arrived the next morning, while we were waiting to see Fischer. Natazscha and Rosko weren’t with you. Kit ran across the grass from the little plane, dragging you by the hand, kissed me all over my face right in front of Jimmy and Lorna, and then pulled you toward us for a three-way hug.

“Hi, Jimmy and Lorna,” she said breathlessly, breaking free to hug them both too. “Is so good to see you, and I am really great to be here! One of Mr. Balakrishnan’s company planes took me and Daniel whole way to the capital. Port—”

“Moresby,” Lorna said.

“Yah, Port Moresby. My mother, she refuse to come. She also does not want me to come, actually, but then I overhear long conversation she has with Charlie Balakrishnan, and I think he uses, like, ten-liter bottle of charm. She goes all blushes and eyelids batting—yes, Mr. Balakrishnan, no, Mr. Balakrishnan—and she say to me, OK, OK, you can take Daniel out there, you can visit with Morag. Excuse me, did I mention I am crazy about your daughter? But I guess you guess that? Anyway, Natazscha says me, yah, you can take Daniel, and make sure everyone is fine, and then immediately, Yekaterina, you must—”

She raised one finger, and swept it in an arc back toward Seattle.

I was horrified. And confused—still trying to take in the kisses, still trying to backtrack to that phrase
crazy about your daughter
. I actually grabbed her by the arm to slow her down. “You’re going to leave again? You’re going to fly straight back?”

“Majka, let me finish. There was Seraphim marches all over, last couple days. Seattle also, and many of them turning into riot. Is like, religious war not in Syria or something but middle of downtown, outside the Nordstrom. Natazscha is frightened things are falling apart, and she thinks I will be safer with her. Or thinks she will be safer with me. Both of which is like, total crapshit—”

“But you’re not—you’re not—?”

She held my face in both hands. “Majka, take fifteen deep breaths, OK? Of course not. You are very dumb sometimes for smart person. I stay here with you, and Daniel, until this thing is finished. My mother will be fine. If she is angry, I’m sorry, but she can frankly stuff everything.”

“What about Rosko?”

“Rosko is complicated.”

“He’s angry with me for being angry with him? Or he’s just given up?”

But she shook her head. “He’s fine,” she said quickly, as if dismissing the subject. “Gabi basically forbid him to come.” She obviously wasn’t telling me everything, but at that moment you managed to change the subject for her by handing me a drawing. The gesture reminded me of when you’d given me the one of Kit—which I was carrying, carefully folded, in my pocket. But this was one of the bald cavemen you’d drawn before—a single figure, face not visible, crouched over a fire. I more or less ignored it, I’m afraid.

“Thanks, D. How are you? You’re skinnier than a measuring tape.”

“He not eating, not sleeping, just pacing and muttering all the time,” Kit said. “I say to him, Daniel, you eat, because if you die of starvation, Majka is killing me. But he doesn’t listen.”

You actually smiled at that: just a hint, but it was there. You pointed to the drawing in my hand. “This is the place,” you said.

We picked up the bags and walked the half mile back to the little “house” Jimmy and Lorna had rented. We’d all gone inside, except you, and I could tell that Kit was marveling silently at the sheer unlikeliness of calling this two-room, tin-roofed shack a “house.” Maybe because she’d noticed the almost total lack of furniture, she suggested we sit outside—and you’d already perched in the middle of the rough-cut front steps, with your sketch pad spread across your knees. The four of us gathered around you.

As with the photographs, there were two images in the double-page spread you showed us. The left side was an expanded, minutely precise copy of that corner detail from Iona’s photograph, complete with the tantalizing, almost-hidden hand and face. On the other side, you’d done another copy, but edited. Around the edge of the drawing, every leaf was identical, but the section of tree trunk in the middle had gone, as if digitally removed, revealing the figure behind. I recognized it immediately as a more detailed version of the “caveman” you’d just presented to me. It was almost naked, but wearing a sort of gray skirt that looked as if it might be leather. And it was deeply strange. Not just bald but hairless, it had a squat body; a square, oddly proportioned face; and unnaturally large eyes. A big tattoo on its chest was immediately familiar: a shape like a stretched animal skin, almost identical to one of the Phaistos symbols.

“Daniel’s good at drawin’,” Lorna said. She was stating a fact—I’d shown her the picture of Kit. “Good at drawin’ accurately—so what does it mean, that thuss is in such a strange style? These are like cartoons. The proportions are all wrong.”

“I’iwa,” you said. A thick blue binder filled with paper was next to you on the step. I thought it was sketch paper at first. It was two or three hundred pages of printed numbers.

“These are from Rosko’s work with Bill’s software,” I said. “What he was doing in the cabin. Did he give them to you?”

You just looked at me, without saying a word, but the answer was so clear that I felt as if you’d spoken:
He didn’t give them to me. I took them.

“Why do you need these, D? What are they for?”

Again you didn’t say anything, but again I felt I knew what you were thinking—maybe I was picking up on the way you were holding them, like a priest with an offering. Anyway, if I was right, it was the weirdest thought:
A gift. For the I’iwa.

Lorna was still looking at the picture. “Daniel,” she said, “when did ye see this?”

“Iona. Iona saw.”

“Tell me somethin’,” she said slowly. “Can ye
see
yer mother? In yer head? Can ye hear her voice?”

No response. I interrupted. “Daniel thinks about Iona all the time. But he doesn’t know she was his mother, because he doesn’t know who he is himself. He literally doesn’t know that he’s Daniel Calder.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Kit said. “Not now. Daniel? He—”

“Quiet, both o’ ye,” Lorna said. She’d crouched down next to you and put a hand on your arm. You lowered the binder onto your knees. “Do ye remember bein’ here, Daniel? Before?”

You hesitated, as if you knew what you wanted to say but couldn’t come up with the words. Then you gave a sharp nod.

“But he
wasn’t
here, ever,” I protested. As if Lorna didn’t know that.

“Hush, gurrl. What did ye see, Daniel? At the waterfall?”

“This,” you said. “This.”

“All right, Daniel,” Jimmy said. “The I’iwa are real. Let’s accept that. Why does it matter? I’m all for an expedition. But why do we need so badly to find them?”

You looked at him, and down at the paper, and with the tip of a finger you traced a triangle on the top sheet. “They know.”

The story we’d decided to tell Johannes Fischer to keep him off our backs was that Jimmy and Lorna were just innocent academic fact-grubbers, eager to continue their earlier work on tool evolution. “Part o’ a larger anthropological study o’ how they’re manufactured,” Lorna mouthed to us, practicing. It wasn’t super-plausible, given that they hadn’t been in New Guinea for seven years, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was Fischer being Seraphim; the Seraphim thought, as fundamentalists do, that only the future can possibly matter.