Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (31 page)

“Iona’s thesis,” he said. “She didn’t know, of course. She just had the imagination to guess, and she was trying to find out whether she was right.”

“There’s one more thing I don’t understand, though. If the Architects are disembodied intelligences—uploaded minds, whatever—why are they a threat to us? Why are they trying to, uh, re-embody? That’s what happened at Thera. It’s what’s kept happening throughout history, if we’re to believe the mythology, and it’s what we saw at Ararat. Why do they need us?”

“Good question. That’s why we’re here. You see, these funny little cave people with their unpleasantly sharp spears, they met the Architects at the very beginning, and I think they may have—”

He was interrupted by a short, sharp howl that sounded almost like a human’s cry of surprise. Around the next corner, Dog was standing with its tail up, staring into the trees.

“Dota inge?” Isbet said to him.
You smell something?
She hurried forward and put her hand on his head. Next to where he was standing, there was a patch of broken-down grass and vines. It looked as if a heavy bag has been slid sideways off the trail.

“This is near where we were ambushed,” Mayo said.

Without hesitating, you walked off the trail into the trees.

C
HAPTER
21

T
ERROR IS
T
HE
C
OLOR OF
T
EA

Four of them. They were lying in a neat row. The vegetation was so dense that they were easy to miss, even without the hasty screen of branches that had been thrown over them. It was a scene from a weird dream: four sleeping men, all overweight, one with a sapling growing out of his chest. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the “sapling” became the shaft of a spear. I also made out a shimmering movement, and that became a clambering, enthusiastic pile of flies.

“Beginning to bloat,” Mayo said.

There was silence, broken only by the hum of the insects and the mournful
wauk wauk
of a riflebird. Then—casually, nonchalantly, as if taking a spade out of wet ground—you grabbed the shaft of the spear and pulled. The stone tip didn’t want to come out, and you had to use both hands, twisting. There was a sucking sound, and a cup-sized hole appeared, rimmed neatly with a brown-and-white cappuccino froth of maggots.

“Shits,” Kit said, holding her hand to her mouth and backing away. “They do this to us also. Maybe we, like, get fuck out of here.”

You nodded, but instead of leading the way back to the path, you walked farther in, the spear still in your hand, and pointed with it. Another spear was sticking out of a tree; a fifth body—nearly a skeleton—was pinned there like an insect in a museum display.

“Kurtz,” Mayo said. “Must be. You,” he said to Kit. “Go back, and take Daniel and the Tainu girl with you. If you stay here, you’re only going to get in the way, or get killed, or both. Morag and I don’t need guiding now.”

She looked at Isbet. Some communication beyond language passed between them.

“How far is cave entrance?” Kit asked.

“Ten minutes.”

“We go with you to entrance.”

“No,” I said.

“Yes. Then at least we know where it is.”

The I’iwa were good hunters, but they hadn’t expected Dog.

Moving in silence through the undergrowth at the speed of a sprinter, Dog had spent most of the hike circling us, checking ten times the area we could see. “Is like electron in orbit around us,” Kit had said earlier. “Everywhere at once, whoosh!” Sure enough, when we left the bodies behind, the animal vanished again, but minutes later it came up behind us, just in time to howl a warning. I was at the front, with Mayo and his gun right behind me. We turned around to witness a sight that was as strange, in its way, as the Architects themselves.

Three I’iwa were standing in plain sight at the edge of the path we’d beaten through the undergrowth. There were more, maybe a dozen, in a broad arc farther back. And there was no doubt about it: they were like us, but not like us—human, more or less, but oh, so profoundly
narakain
.

The combination of their sameness, and difference, and absolute stillness reminded me of a diorama Bill had dragged us to the American Museum of Natural History Museum in New York. It was the usual evo-junk about how we’re “really” Paleolithic creatures, because the savannah-forest margin of a hundred thousand years ago was the scene of our evolution into modern humans. The kind of thing people read about in a science zine, and then stop cooking their food. Idiots.

Sorry.

Anyway, instead of a cave looking out over tundra, with humans wrapped in fur and the inevitable saber-toothed cat, the curators had done a modern street scene: waxwork office types chatting over plastic sandwiches at a fake café table. And the punch line, the big woo-hoo, was that the man in a suit and an open-necked shirt, leaning back with a menu in his hand, and the woman in a skirt and heels, peering at her phone while fiddling with an earring, were Neanderthals. Look how close we are!—that was the message. See how Bob Neander (Marketing) and Betty Thal (Human Resources) need only nice clothes and a haircut to pass for, OK, uglier-than-average
H. sap
.

What I’m saying is it was almost the same with the I’iwa. Their broad faces, deep chests, and muscular arms made me think of wrestlers. Their skin was white, but not that much paler than yours. And their features were regular, pleasing, mostly ordinary. No big brow ridges or missing chins, no nose half the size of the face. But replacing their gray leathery-looking skirts with modern clothes wouldn’t have been enough to disguise them. They were totally hairless, for one thing. Androgynous too: you could tell they must be male and female, but you couldn’t be sure which was which. And then there were the eyes: not huge, like cartoon-alien huge, but a strange, fiery yellow orange, and just plain
too big
.

The three figures I could clearly see would have looked identical, but each one had a different mark or tattoo in red dye on its chest. One had two parallel lines at an angle, like a tipped equal sign; another had a pizza slice that could have come right off one of the Disks; the third had a vertical line, a horizontal, another vertical, then a small oval at the top, like a stick figure of someone sitting.

The first two held spears. I’d only just taken in the fact that the third one wasn’t holding a spear when Kit pulled one from a tree next to her and unhesitatingly waved it back at them, yelling in Russian,
Stay back, little one. Stay back or I make of you nice fat kebab. Understand?

Her bravado might have been faked, but it was so convincing that at first I thought they were trembling. Hard to describe, but it was as if their bodies kept blurring slightly. Then they became still, and the figure nearest her bobbed its head and made a fluttering motion with one arm. As if receiving an order, the entire group retreated a couple of steps and then began to spread out on either side.

My reaction to what happened next was delayed, distracted, by the thought that was crossing my mind:
Sunil and Vandana. Ildavan. We’ve been told the I’iwa don’t speak—but did I just witness a conversation?

Kit, on the other hand, saw immediately what was going on: it wasn’t her they were interested in, but you.

No way that is happening, guys,
she said, still in Russian, and she stepped back quickly so that she was directly in front of you. It was a brave, smart move: they couldn’t get to you without attacking her, and they couldn’t attack her without endangering you. But you shook your head and stepped around her.

“Don’t,” you said, stepping back into the opening. Kit was behaving bravely; you, on the other hand, you seemed to know that if you did the right thing, there was no real danger.

“Primitive buggers in some ways,” Mayo said under his breath. “But when we get into the caves, you’ll see just how misleading that is.” He brought the gun up to shoulder height.

“No!” I shouted—and saw one of the I’iwa go down even before I’d registered the noise.

I was convinced in that moment, despite what you’d said, that he’d signed all our death warrants. They outnumbered us at least three to one: Surely they’d just butcher us now? But they didn’t attack. The two who were nearest us scooped up the victim by the shoulders, dragged him (or her?) backward, and, as if by magic or evaporation, the whole group blended back into the undergrowth. Mayo loosed off three more shots, aimed at nothing.

“You stupid bastard,” I said.

“You stupid, sentimental fool,” he replied under his breath. “They have something we absolutely need if any of
our
species is going to survive. Frightening a few dozen of them, or killing all of them for that matter, is a very minor consideration. And, just as the I’iwa will do anything to protect the secret of what makes the Architects tick, I will do anything to get at that secret.” He waved his gun at me. “You’re going on. And so am I.”

Kit looked at the head of the spear, and then at Mayo’s head; I could tell she was thinking how well the two of them would fit together. I turned to Isbet, and spoke rapidly with her in Tain’iwa, knowing Mayo couldn’t follow it. I was trying to persuade her to take Kit and get out, but she kept looking at Mayo, looking at Kit, and shaking her head.

“Ib delem i’iwa’em,” she said. “Keluk andur. Ji’tep awanat, ix’ix em’t edaran.”
We stay with you until we reach the caves. That way we’ll know where the entrance is. And we’ll try to stop him somehow.

She looked at Kit, who nodded as if she’d understood everything. “We come with you,” Kit said to me.

“If you get hurt, Yekaterina Cerenkov, I will never forgive myself for getting you involved in this. Do you understand that?”

“I understand perfect, Majka. But what can I do? This guilty-if-I-not-having-protected-you thing, problem with it is it work both ways, yah? You care about another person more than you care about yourself, sure, sometimes this is total pain in the butt. Maybe one day we have chance to get used to it.”

I wanted to say something, but not something stolen from a greeting card, so I shut up and just stared at her, as if staring hard enough might make it possible to capture and hold on to the look in her eyes forever.

She touched her hand to my face. “Come on. I smell very strange smell. I think is fake volcano.”

She was right that it didn’t smell like Ararat. The air around Ararat had smelled of minerals—sulfur and rock: the center of the earth, burning. This was all wood, soil, and animal fat. We picked our way slowly and carefully, scanning every inch of the green leaf-sea that surrounded us. At the top of a rise there was a faint noise in the distance, like a stadium crowd heard from miles away. More rain?

“River,” you said.

Oh, just great.

“He’s right,” Mayo said. “Down here. It’s not much more than a stream, though, and there’s one of these big beech trees across it. Makes a decent bridge.”

Wrong about that.

The river wasn’t much—barely a dozen feet across—but it was swollen to maximum capacity, a roaring, powerful, animal thing barely contained within its smooth rock channel. The water was doing twenty knots, and it was the color of builder’s tea in a Glasgow café. And the beech tree “bridge” was gone.

“It was right here, I’m certain.”

Kit, Isbet, and I stood with our backs to the water, watching. No I’iwa, or none we could see. Mayo hunted for another place to cross. You crouched by the water, looking puzzled, almost as if you could will a bridge into being. But once again I had the sense that you were looking inward, trying to see something that was just outside your mind’s grasp.

“Here,” Mayo shouted. He’d found another trunk—a small one, slick with moss and moisture. He slung the gun around his neck, grabbed a branch above him, and managed to get a couple of steps out over the water. Dog sat and watched with great interest. I glanced down at the water and tried not to throw up.

“Cross that?” I said. I was talking aloud, to myself. “You have to be absolutely fu—”

“I help you,” Kit said, grabbing my hand. “Don’t think. Or think only about sky. Nice blue sky, yes, pretty isn’t it? I hold your hand, just listen my voice and do what I say. Yes?”

Isbet wasn’t focused on helping me: she was focused on getting rid of Mayo, and had sidled to within a few paces of the log’s end. She was clearly planning to give it a kick. But when Mayo was about three feet out he slipped anyway. His own weight pushed the trunk sideways. Somehow his flailing arms caught in a vine and he managed to land on our side again as the trunk slumped into the water. One of his legs went in, and it too was tossed sideways by the force of the water, but he flung both arms around a rock and managed to crawl to safety. As he got up, he was looking straight at Isbet. It was obvious what she’d been intending to do.

“The feeling’s mutual,” he said, getting to his feet and raising the gun. “I should have got rid of you earlier.”

Kit and I were standing too far away to do anything, and you were crouched by the water, watching impassively—either not caring what happened, or already knowing the outcome.

I was waiting for the familiar sound of the gun when there was a yellow blur on the ground. The sound I heard next might equally have been the gun going off high over Isbet’s head or Mayo’s ankle bones snapping like wet sticks as Dog’s jaws closed around them.

The I’iwa chose that moment to appear again.

I was running past you—hoping, without much hope, that I’d get the gun before Mayo could use it again. Isbet lunged at him from the opposite direction. Our turn for luck. Just a mite faster, a pace closer, and one of us would have run right through the invisible dotted line, the low parabola, along which the spear was traveling. Instead it thrummed like a hummingbird as it passed through the gap between our heads.

Mayo had bent over double and had his hands around Dog’s throat. If he’d been standing, the head of the spear would have caught him in the chest; instead, it entered the top of his left shoulder, in the soft hollow between his collarbone and his shoulder blade. He rose to his full height, bellowing, “Everything! It’s everything!”

The shaft of the spear was sticking vertically out of his shoulder, next to his ear, and a dark stain was flooding his shirt lower down. The picture didn’t quite make sense at first. Then I saw the spear’s tip, poking out in the middle of the stain. It had sliced clear through his shoulder and come out again under his armpit.