Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

He’d set up office in one of the recently abandoned mission buildings, a green-painted one-story house that had a veranda running around three sides. He made us wait around for a long time for our appointment, clearly a tactic designed to make us feel as unimportant as possible. Eventually we were granted an interview. Or Jimmy was. Kit looked after you and your sketch pad under a tree while the other three of us hung around his door, making ourselves as conspicuous as possible.

The man who emerged was fortyish, with short gray hair and irises made from little round pucks of glacier ice. In his khakis and neatly pressed white shirt, he could have been a manager for an international aid organization—Doctors Without Borders, maybe—or for one of the giant mines at Ok Tedi or Grasberg or Porgera.

He ignored Lorna and me, ushering Jimmy into his office. He had the door almost closed when Lorna got her foot in it.

“Seein’ as how we’ve all been waitin’ out here for such a long, long time,” she said with a steely, dangerous brightness, “it only seems fair that we should all get to chat for a nice long time. D’ye not think?”

I admired the attitude. It didn’t help much. He ignored both of us.

“And what are you doing here, Mr. Chen?”

“We’re archaeologists.”

“Is that so? I didn’t think there was an abundance of temple ruins to be uncovered around here. It’s not the Upper Nile or the Yucatán. And I have to inform you that sadly, the kind of work you are doing is wasted time now. The past is past. We stand on the verge of a profound transformation, and our need for this very planet—never mind our need for artifacts left behind in the ground by people who are long since dead—is coming to an end. Sorry to be so harsh. But better for you to recognize the truth sooner rather than later, don’t you think?”

He was teasing, in both senses of the word. Making fun—and trying to extract more information.

“We’ve spent a long time studying the development of tools,” Jimmy said, ignoring what he’d said and making the work sound as scholarly, boring, and harmless as possible. “Mesolithic versus Neolithic, Europe versus Asia, stuff like that.”

“Ah. Tools, really?” And after a brief pause: “You don’t know anything about the Tainu, by any chance?”

Lorna gave Fischer a well-crafted blank look. “Tay-what?”

He continued to address Jimmy. “Many years ago, one of the missionaries, a German Baptist named Kurtz, made first contact with a remote seminomadic group called the Tainu. They kicked him out after a while, and he went on to do other work. But I was told that recently he caught up with the Tainu again, got them to settle in a permanent village, and built them a church. Such a pity that dedicated, devoted people can be so wrong about everything! But I digress. The Baptist mission here hadn’t heard from him in months at the point when I arrived. And here’s the exciting part from our point of view. The mission looked through his belongings. Which wasn’t hard, because everything he owned was in one string bag on a nail over his bed. But the bag contained hundreds of pages of note about the Tainu’s beliefs. Two things caught our attention. They speak of a secret volcano, in a location where no volcano can possibly exist. And the site of this ‘volcano’ is protected by ghost-ancestors in the forest who have either lost the capacity for speech or choose not to speak. In view of what Julius Quinn tells us in
Anabasis
, we found that combination of myths fascinating. Perhaps you’ve heard of that linguist—Caldwell or something—whose big thing is that all myths have to come from somewhere?”

“Calder, I think that was his name,” Lorna said cautiously. “So would ye—would the Seraphim, I mean—be lookin’ for this tribe now?”

Fischer condescended to address her at last. “I was sent here to pursue a general strategy of poking around, you might say: finding out what areas are going to be the most fertile recruiting grounds for us. There are Seraphim spreading out in all directions through this country, as they are indeed all over the world. And just a week ago I was lucky enough to meet with a group of Seraphim volunteers who traveled here specially because they have a lot of expertise in languages and a specific interest in exerting our benign influence in the Tainu area.”

I should have asked him more about that and then shut up and listened. But I was angry. “Benign? You think the Seraphim’s influence is benign? How’s it benign if every person who ‘ascends’ and every Mystery who fails to fully ‘ascend’ is simply being dragged to an early death? What if your Julius Quinn is wrong? What if Shul-hura in Babylon is right, and the ‘dimension of the eternal’ is just a lunch counter at which the Architects are the customers and human minds are the dish of the day?”

He smiled broadly. “Julius Quinn is not wrong. Of course there are risks involved in Anabasis, and some people go before they are ready. But the reward for success is real. Think of what that means! Think of what the word
infinity
really means!”

“I’m thinking of the Mysteries,” I said. I glanced outside, and then pretended I hadn’t. Mentioning the Mysteries brought back to me the fear that still hadn’t gone away: that, despite the hints that your condition was improving, you were still in danger. “They’re dying. Everywhere they’re dying.”

He shifted in his chair—there might have been a small shrug of indifference; it was hard to tell—and stared out the window as if he wasn’t willing to talk about it further. I could see you and Kit under the tree and hoped he couldn’t.

“The Seraphim are experiencing unprecedented success all over the world,” he said. “But we’ve concentrated most of our resources on a few places where interaction with the Architects seems easiest.”

“The Epicenters,” I said. “Fuji. Mauna Loa. Rainier.”

“We don’t know why volcanoes are important. Julius Quinn believed it was a cultural memory of our first encounters with the Architects. The matter of language is clearer, though. People who have only one language are more susceptible to the language of the Architects themselves; their minds are already tuned closer to the right frequency, so to speak. The Epicenters are just our top picks, as you might say, because our biggest successes since Ararat have been in places with a single dominant language and population centers close to volcanoes.”

“You expect to, what, entice the Architects back at those places?”

“Not entice. They are coming. Our purpose is simply to pave the way. Make the transition as effective as possible.”

“So the Epicenters will be like Ararat.”

He smiled. “A month at most to the next great Anabasis. And after that things will progress, oh, very quickly. Ararat was a village of the saved. The Epicenters will be cities of the saved.”

“The explosions, though. If you gather hundreds of thousands of people—”

“The planning is for over half a million at Mauna Loa.”

“Then—”

I was trying to imagine—trying not to imagine—a Thera-sized eruption in the middle of the Pacific, when Jimmy interrupted. “New Guinea doesn’t fit, though, does it?”

“It’s a special case. Highly volcanic, but also the biggest hot spots for linguistic diversity on the planet. In Papua New Guinea alone, there are 839 languages by our latest count, and a thousand or more before European contact. That’s my specialty—I’m a Babbler, if you know that term.”

Jimmy nodded. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Something isn’t working well here. We’ve been meeting with a powerful resistance, as if something is actively interfering with our work. And, as I said, there’s the curious myth about the volcano. So our people wanted me to investigate. Then a volunteer group showed up. Funny that they should be Australian, by the way. Poor things: down there, they don’t have a single active volcano in an area twenty times the size of Japan! But we’re been having some little success even there.”

“Ye have?” Lorna said.

“Tut tut, not keeping up with the news.”

“We’ve been a tad busy.”

“Well then, an uplifting story I have for you.” He emphasized
uplifting
. A preacher’s pun:
Anabasis was uplifting people into the Eternal. He picked up a tablet and found a news clip from an Australian TV station.

“A couple of days ago, this was.”

Standing in bright sun, in a parking area, an earnest local TV reporter with too-obvious blue contacts was doing everything he could to ramp up the drama. He talked loud, held his shiny face close to the lens, and bounced on the balls of his feet like a boxer, as if maybe he was about to left hook the camera.

“For those of you who aren’t familiar with it,” he said, “and frankly, almost no one is familiar with Great Basalt Wall National Park, the word
park
is a bit of a misnomer.”

Pa-AH-k,
he said.
Miz-NOE-mah.
The accent was thicker and rougher than Mayo’s.

“The Toomba lava flow is a unique geological feature.”
FAI-cha.
“Four hundred square kilometers of exposed basalt from an eruption thirteen thousand years ago. It’s probably the most isolated and inhospitable piece of public land anywhere in Australia. Or even the world. There’s no public access, no roads, no nothing. Police are still collecting evidence, but there seems to be no doubt that this extraordinary event is related to Seraphim activity. Here in Townsville, we spoke to Kenny Kenner, who owns the Waverider Board Shop. Kenny, I understand you heard the explosion? Even though we’re, what, a hundred and fifty k from there?”

The camera panned out to reveal a shop with a giant surfboard over the door. Kenny, standing proudly underneath it, was a middle-aged surfer, the hair around his bald spot a tiara of blonded spikes. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and his tan was so overdone that the belly hanging out over his peach-colored shorts looked like a well-oiled kangaroo-skin handbag. He scratched it affectionately.

“Yeah, mate, like I said. Massive crash of thunder out of a clear blue sky. I thought, crikey, it’s the end of the world.”

The reporter finished the picture with a couple of human-interest details I could have done without. All seventy-two of the people they’d found were from the same little mining town, Charters Towers. There was a separate list of missing, all of them children, and there was evidence that they had been there, but had wandered off. Any chance that they could have survived out there alone was being dismissed out of hand. As for the adult victims, the forensics people had said that at least a dozen of them were still alive when the dingoes arrived.

He didn’t offer more detail on that, but the implication was clear. Most of the seventy-two had died outright, but some had not gone all the way. They had turned into Mysteries. Robbed of the will to move, they had just stood there, helpless and passive and waiting. Were Mysteries just mental blanks, empty husks? Or were they still capable of suffering? Nobody knew. Nobody wanted to know, because it didn’t bear thinking about.

Fischer positively beamed at us: the whole incident was “very encouraging,” he said, “because it just goes to show that the word of Julius Quinn is spreading more rapidly than we could have imagined!”

“Oh aye, a great success,” Lorna said grimly. “Seventy-two down, seven an’ a half billion to go, is it?”

But he didn’t catch her tone, or pretended not to. “What a time to be alive, don’t you think? To witness the very end of mere humanity, and the very beginning of something so much greater!”

Twenty minutes later we were back outside, fuming. “Smooth bastard,” Lorna said. Fischer was indeed now the sole administrative authority for the area—he’d even showed us his certificates from the national government in Port Moresby—and he didn’t want us out in the field, “not under any circumstances, because it might interfere with our people’s more important work.”

But we discovered soon enough that he had less control over the local situation than he thought. One “Seraphim,” at least, had done an excellent job of misleading him.

You and Kit were still under the tree where we’d left you. A loud giggle erupted from a couple of local kids you seemed to be entertaining. You’d presented them with a picture of themselves: a caricature, funny but sweet, with big heads and exaggerated features. They smiled, thanked you, and were turning to go, but you held up your hand in a
stop
gesture and began riffling through your sketch pad. You held up a picture to them, and their expressions became serious.

“Lukluk save?” you said.

I was amazed. Not just that you’d asked a coherent question, but that you’d done it in Tok Pisin, which you’d had no opportunity to learn. Where had it come from? The phrases I’d taught to Iona? You were struggling with them, but they were there:

“Lukluk—lukluk save dispela man?”
Do you recognize this man?

The kids nodded furiously. “Yes,” one of them said, pointing to the office. “Tokim dispela man.”

“L—L—Longtaim bifo?”
A long time ago?

“One week, maybe. He missinari, ask for Tainu.”

We still hadn’t seen the drawing, and you didn’t seem to recognize its significance, judging from how casually you handed it to Kit. Lorna looked at the sketch over Kit’s shoulder, and her jaw fell open.

“Jes’ wait a minute, Daniel. Isn’t that—isn’t that—? Och no. Ye’ve got to be feck’n kiddin’ me. Morag, I thought ye said—”

“Let me see.”

Such a subtle business, drawing a face! Capturing not just the shape but the
look
. And this was one of your best, maybe even better than the one of Kit. Not just no mistaking who it was, but a sense that he was there, looking back at me.

“That’s impossible, D,” I said. “I’m telling you right now. It can’t be. It can’t be. That’s just impossible.”

You’d leaned back against the tree, as if exhausted, and the kids were moving away. I quickly called them back.

“Dispela man missinari? Tru? Bringim Jisas Kraist stori?”

They shook their heads. “Missinari bringim haus wokim stori.”

I didn’t understand until one of them made a roof shape with her arms. It still took me a moment to process, because every word and phrase in Tok Pisin means about ten different things.
Haus wokim
meant “builder.” But it also meant “architect.” Now it meant “Architect” as well.