Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (29 page)

“Just tell us,” Jimmy said. “Who are they?”

“Well, the first thing is, the I’iwa are cave dwellers. And, as that derogatory Victorian term
caveman
might suggest, their material culture is so poor, so primitive, that it makes the Tainu here look like a bunch of upper-class Sydney wine-sniffers. But what you’re going to have to get your pretty little heads around is that these ‘cave’ people were studying mathematics when we were still hitting each other over the head with clubs. And they’ve built something in stone that can only be described as a computer. And with it, they—”

He stood up, as if changing his mind about something, and shouldered the backpack again. “Come on. There’s no time to waste. And since I found the entrance partly by accident and don’t know how I got back here, we’ll need the chief and his daughter to guide us. I know, I know, they won’t want to. So just tell them to get over it, because they’re going to die otherwise.”

He turned and smiled at me conspiratorially, as if sharing a secret. “Actually they’re going to die in any case. Everyone is. Apart from us.”

“Us?”

“The Babblers, Morag. You see, I think the I’iwa have provided what you might call a digital life raft. A means of resistance and escape. Just for the carriers of FOXQ3. With their help, our fragment of humanity will be able to survive what’s coming.”

“You’re mad,” I said. “And you don’t need to threaten Oma and Isbet. They already agreed to go.”

“They did? How interesting.”

“Oma wants to help Daniel.”

You’d got up and stood next to him. Strange—you’d come to seem so fragile, but it was as if you were visibly growing in strength and purpose now; of course you were several inches taller than him anyway, and you leaned in close, dominating him. “There’s no time.”

I thought of what Balakrishnan had said:
A place beyond time. The annihilation of time.
But Mayo wasn’t thinking of that. “If what that so-called district commissioner told me is true,” Mayo said, “you’re dead straight about that, Danny-boy. When those Epicenters are ready, it’s going to be Thera all over again, except it’ll be our civilization getting toasted. If you want to beat the Architects—and gain what they’ve gained, which is
everything
—you’ll have to trust me and work with me.”

He was replying to you, but looking at me, so he didn’t see you watching him as he spoke. You gave an infinitesimal shake of your head, just a sideways twitch, and mouthed again, as if speaking to yourself: “No time.”

Kit stood up next to you and almost spat at Mayo. “Pah! You are saying there is big Architect language secret that even Archimedes cannot work out, Bill Calder cannot work out, and Morag cannot work out. But now you are saying, some hairy guys in cave with spears did it? They have big stone abacus? Or maybe they are like, guardians of giant alien supercomputer? This is I think good idea for comic book story. But also totally crapshit.”

I admired her for instinctively not believing a word Mayo said and for having the guts to say so. But I thought,
Isn’t this basically what Rosko said?

Lorna hadn’t moved. She was staring into what remained of the fire, coaxing smoke out of it with a stick. “Frankly, David Maynard Jones,” she said, “I have to agree wi’ Kit.
Crapshit
is the very word I was lookin’ for.”

I had to smile. No idea how she did it, but with that one repeated word—overlaid with a passable imitation of Kit’s accent—she’d managed to tell me that our relationship was OK, that she was completely fine with it. I guess if I’d been a normal teen, it wouldn’t have mattered what my mother thought; it mattered. Hugely.

Mayo was scrabbling in his back pocket. He pulled out a filthy sheet of paper. “You don’t trust me, Dr. Chen. Which is only reasonable. Besides, all the good evidence is a long, tough hike from here. But you might want to take a look at this.”

The piece of paper was mainly stains and mud, but a rough pencil sketch was still visible. He passed it to Lorna.

“I have seen wonders,” he said. “Wonders! This is a drawing I did of what we can call, if you like, the Calendar Wall. Actually this is a very rough sketch of one corner of the wall—the whole thing is as long as a football field, and each symbol, well, there are tens of thousands of them.”

“Why ‘Calendar Wall’?” she asked, squinting at the page. “Moon phases or somethin’?”

“Suns, actually. Every winter solstice the I’iwa have ever seen.”

“How many?”

“The Theran civilization on Crete first encountered the Architects seven thousand years ago, am I right, Morag?”

“That’s when the earliest Disks date from.”

“And the Architects made the best of a bad job by destroying them—or taking them all up to heaven, if you like—in the Thera eruption, which was thirty-six centuries ago—”

“Right.”

“And then, as Professor Partridge says, they cleaned up the resulting mess in the Bronze Age Collapse over the following few centuries?”

“Assuming we buy the supernatural stuff,” Jimmy said, “what could any of that have to do with some uncontacted tribal people in New Guinea?”

“History. Is. Repeating. Itself,” you said. You were quoting Partridge—there was even a hint of his accent.

“Yes, Daniel. History is repeating itself. And you think that’s true because what happened at Thera is happening again now. But Thera was already history repeating itself. The I’iwa encountered the Architects too, you see, and had their own period of belief followed by their own period of rebellion. But not seven thousand years ago. Oh no.”

“How many?” Lorna repeated. “How many suns?”

“Our history books are missing a zero, Dr. Chen. Not seven thousand. Seventy thousand. And the I’iwa have been in these mountains, carefully hiding themselves and some other remarkable things, for most of that time.”

“That’s rubbish,” Jimmy said. “Humans first migrated to Australia forty or fifty thousand years ago. At the most. And they didn’t get to New Guinea until well after that. If you’re trying to tell us a small albino tribe has been living up there in a cave for sixty thousand years, you’re hallucinating.”

Mayo pulled open his shirt again. “I wasn’t hallucinating the spear, was I? No more than Iona Maclean was. As for the dates for human migration, you’re right. But I can give you a better date: fifty-three thousand, to be exact. And I know that because the I’iwa themselves appear to have recorded the event. You see, the I’iwa were already here by then.”

“What
are
you talking about?”

“Call it the Stone Age Collapse, if you like. Maybe Partridge could write a book about it. As many as a dozen different human species were wiped out, as the Architects intended. The Neanderthals were almost wiped out, and they went extinct not much later. The Denisovans likewise. Then there’s
Homo floresiensis
—the hobbits.”

“The so-called hobbits survived on the island of Flores until ten or twelve thousand years ago,” Jimmy said. “Or a lot more recently than that, if you take local legends seriously. The villagers on Flores were talking about the little hairy people who lived in the forest, the
ebu gogo
, until only a century ago.”

“I know,” Mayo said. “A remnant population of
Homo floresiensis
. They would have been the very last surviving part of a huge, multispecies experiment—the true, original Babel, at which the Architects were trying to cook up just the recipe they needed—”

“So my mother was right,” Kit whispered.

“—except that the
ebu gogo
have been upstaged. You see, the I’iwa are very much alive today. Right up there in these mountains. And they’re not
Homo sapiens
either.”

C
HAPTER
20

O
FF THE
M
AP

As we made for the edge of the clearing, Isbet was still carrying her baby in the
bilum
bag. He was a boy, but he didn’t seem to have a name yet. I couldn’t believe she was planning to bring him with us on so dangerous an adventure—but what other option did she have? At the edge of the village, I found out: as if by invisible signal, a woman near Oma’s age came out of a hut. She was wearing a shapeless, stained cotton dress. Not Isbet’s mother—she had died years ago, before we even came to the Tainu. This woman had a lined, tragic face, and barely looked at us. She exchanged a few words with Oma, then unshouldered a bag almost identical to Isbet’s. They swapped. The new bag was full of food.

“Dolon ka’unaret,” Isbet said as we moved on. It meant
husband-mother
.

The path Oma chose was almost flat, to begin with. Oma and Isbet were at the front, with you an eager pace behind, almost stepping on their heels. Kit and I followed you, a few yards back. Dog didn’t have a place in the line; it moved so much faster than the humans that it kept disappearing ahead of Oma, only to show up mysteriously behind you, or by my side, before vanishing into the trees again.

Jimmy and Lorna were behind us—and falling farther behind, with Mayo prodding them along from the back, so Kit and I had a small bubble of privacy. One of the many things on my mind was what she’d said, or not said, about Rosko; about half a dozen times, I opened my mouth to ask her about it then didn’t. Instead I made small talk about New Guinea—history, tribes, languages, oh, Kit, look at this cool flower. She put up with it for a while and then flashed me a look that said,
What are you really thinking about?

“You said you had an argument with Rosko. But not an argument.”

“Yes.”

I counted our paces while she failed to say anything else: ten, fifteen, twenty.

“And you keep putting off telling me anything else.”

“Sorry.”

Ten, fifteen, twenty.

“Difficult to know how to say,” she said. “But I try. When we are all together, Rosko is easy, yah? Relaxed kind of guy, nice guy, no drama, maybe a little, what do you say, difficult for read?”

“Hard to read. Go on.”

“I feel awkward from him before, but is much worse after you leave for Hawaii. I was kind of glad I had to take Daniel back to Seattle. I couldn’t make him out. I thought he—”

Ten. Fifteen. Twenty.

“I knew it is something about attraction. Romance. Sex. I think, maybe he is confused. Or maybe even he is attracted to Daniel—but I know that’s not right. So, what? He is into me? Like Daniel was—kind of hanging around me like puppy and stupid straight boy so not getting it? But I don’t think this either. Then we get back to Seattle, and guess what but Ella is there waiting with too much the cosmetics and tongue hanging out, and poor Rosko not maybe making best choices. He has thing with her.”

“That sounds like a terrible idea for both of them.”

“Only lasts maybe twenty-four hours, but yah, sure—she is crying in my lap, and angry, and he won’t talk. You know I don’t maybe like Ella so much, but I say to him, hey, Rosko, you have totally hurt her feelings, what the hell is this?”

“Typical boy,” I said. “He doesn’t know what he wants, so he gives up trying to work it out and goes for the first available distraction.”

“No. Is not that, Majka. He knows exactly what he wants. He gets involved with Ella to try to distract himself from person he wants, because thinking about the person he does want, and can’t have, is driving him crazy.”

“Who, Kit? I can’t think of anyone else he’s ever seemed remotely—”

“You know what? Rosko is good-looking I guess, but he says to me, ‘I feel that I know what it’s like to be a very ugly person. There’s only one person I ever felt mentally and emotionally in tune with, only one person I ever really wanted to, you know,
be
with. And that person looks right through me. That person has never even imagined seeing me the way I want to be seen, and never will.’ So of course I say, Rosko, you can’t know that. And he says, yes, Kit, I can. It’s just something I have to accept and put up with.”

“Who, Kit? Spit it out.”

She stopped in the middle of the path and looked at me with a strange kind of compassion, as if she pitied me for not understanding. Jimmy and Lorna were just a few paces behind us.

“You, Majka. You. He said, ‘I dream about her all the time.’ Then he started crying. I never saw him cry before. And he can’t stop apologizing to me, because he thinks I will be angry.”

Lorna stopped because we were standing in the way. “Ye best close yer mouth, or you’ll be gettin’ mozzie bites on yer tongue,” she said. “What’s the big surprise?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“Aye, nothin’, Morag, sure. Yer jawbone is trailin’ in the mud, an’ if it’s nothin’, I’m Joan of Arc. Never mind. None o’ my beeswax, aye?”

“Keep moving,” Mayo said.

The first climb came after that. Only a couple of hundred feet, but then we lost fifty, gained another two hundred, lost another hundred. It shouldn’t have seemed difficult, but it was midmorning and the humidity was already extraordinary.

“My blood’s thinned,” Jimmy said at a water stop. “I’d forgotten how exhausting this is.”

“After what you go through in Iraq?” Kit said. “Should be resting in hotel, not hiking in wild place.”

“We’ll be fine, Kit.”

Fine? I wasn’t confident that they’d survive even the next uphill slope. They’d gone back to Iraq looking fit for forty-five, but their ordeal in the desert had aged them both by decades. Just getting to the Tainu village had left them looking drained, and I felt stupid and guilty for involving them in this. Pure selfishness—I’d wanted to see them and hadn’t been prepared to wait any longer. So here they were, sweating their way up a forest trail, and if that wasn’t enough guilt for one morning, I was also wasting a lot of energy trying to suppress the idea that I was pissed off with them for slowing us down.

We entered denser vegetation, and the muffled green gloom became suffocating. All of us, except Oma and Isbet, had clothes soaked through with sweat. You, at least, were tireless: skin and bone, maybe, but I could see all that old mountain-man-rugged-dude energy surging back into you, as if you were too intent on the task to be aware of physical discomfort. Meanwhile Oma and Isbet, barefoot and scarcely clothed, didn’t have a drop of sweat on their bodies, and they kept walking placidly, never varying their pace, as if no effort was involved. When Oma did stop, it was as if he’d turned to stone: he stood slightly knock-kneed, his toes splayed in the mud, his empty, big-knuckled hands held out at his sides as if weighing something invisible, and the only motion was an almost imperceptible waving of his fingertips, like kelp in a current. Sometimes he’d raise one hand, vaguely indicating a direction. Then Isbet would say a few words to him, words that often didn’t make sense to me even though I could translate them:
shallow now; it’s darker on the left side; long scratches high up.
Or she’d give a rapid-fire list of five, eight, ten plant names. She was painting word-pictures for him. Most of his replies were a single word, or a grunt, or he’d simply touch her arm. Then he’d pick a direction, grab Isbet by the hand or elbow, and launch himself uphill in some new direction.

Toward the end of the morning, in the worst of the heat, the path narrowed and turned even more steeply uphill. We climbed almost continually for two hours until we were working our way along a scree line at the bottom of a cliff. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw people looking down at us from above; I made the connection just as I heard Kit’s sharp intake of breath.

“Dolon te akim, biu!” Isbet said, smiling cheerfully.
Here is my husband, the third one along.
She raised her hand toward the row of seated figures, greeting him. I wondered whether he could offer us any protection.

We dropped a thousand feet to a soup-green river, forded the river, and gained more elevation than we’d lost in an especially brutal path on the other side. In some places we had to pull ourselves up using whatever loose roots or other handholds we could find.

“Uket minai’a bek?” Isbet said at last.
This is where we were before. Remember?

I recognized the place too. “She’s right,” I said to Kit. “They had a temporary camp we stayed at, just over there. We’re only an hour from the waterfall now.”

“Yes,” Lorna said. And threw up.

“You all right?”

“Fine, fine. Feelin’ dizzy is all.”

I wanted to believe her. But the afternoon was worse than the morning by far. More climbing. Clouds of sweat bees. Not a breath of wind. And heat that just kept building and building. She threw up again.

“Emdem. Jaa amt eyam, ipol enatak,” Isbet said to me. Which meant, roughly:
Don’t worry. Soon the world will rain, and then its coolness will enter us.

“Kam apa ipol, otala re em,” I said.
We will welcome the rain into us.

Welcome
turned out to be optimistic.

The waterfall was spectacular. Part of an underground river system, it unraveled like a bolt of white silk and plunged one hundred feet from a tall slab of limestone to where we stood. The area directly beneath it boiled and growled through a series of pools, but there were shallow areas even I didn’t mind standing in, and the falling water was a natural air conditioner. Jimmy, Lorna, and Kit stood near me, knee deep, splashing their faces and enjoying the relief from the heat.

I tried to enjoy the moment. But Mayo was standing dangerously close to the place where the water came down, muttering fiercely to himself, and Oma and Isbet had huddled together by a tree about as far from the water as they could get, looking tense and deep in conversation. I watched them, wondering what they were saying.

Kit plucked my sleeve. “Daniel,” she said, and pointed toward the cliff path. You’d already started up it, and were almost halfway to the top. You looked back, hanging on to a small tree, clearly impatient for us to follow.

“Come on,” she said. I waved to the others and hurried after her.

By the time we got to the top, you were standing—like a statue on its plinth—in the middle of the rounded rock that Iona had described to us when she returned, pale and frightened, from her solo hike. Even though she’d told us it was strange, there was still something shocking about it. Not just round, but perfectly round; not just smooth, but with a surface as flawless as paper. Maybe three feet across and a foot thick with a subtly tapered edge, it looked like a piece of abstract modern art turned out on a lathe.

“She said the ax was here,” Jimmy shouted over the roar of the water, pointing at your feet. But there was no strange gift waiting for us this time. Only a wall of green, with a small opening at the point farthest from the water. Mayo pointed to it.

“This is the way we went,” he said. We crawled through what amounted to a tunnel in the vegetation, then left the trees below as we climbed a ridge. It turned into a rill of exposed rock, arcing above the surrounding tree canopy like the back of a dragon. Near the top we passed through a thin cloud layer. Distant ridges came into view.

A whole new level of stillness and awareness seemed to come over Oma then. I’d assumed he was simply finding his way, aiming for a particular place, but there was more to it than that. He was closing in on something. Bending low, he felt for the rocks, and every time he came to a significant outcropping he stopped, crouched, and sniffed.

Isbet could see I was puzzled.
Caves,
she said in Tain’iwa.
Air currents move through them. But the caves near the volcano smell different. Those caves are where the I’iwa live.

Kit rolled her eyes at me. “This not looking so much the volcano country to me,” she said, after I’d translated. I was about to agree with her when you put your hand on my arm.

“There,” you said. You were pointing to a spot on the horizon between two peaks. It was maybe five miles away, and another thousand feet above us. “Smoke.”