Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (34 page)

But where were these calculations coming from? He kept being puzzled by a nonsensical idea—
the calculations are coming from the volcano itself
. And he sensed, correctly, that the thought was a kind of echo from whatever it was that the I’iwa were not yet ready to show him.

It took time for him to understand that he was not just being shown around as a kindness to pass the time until Morag either recovered or failed to recover. All the walking, all the showing and trying to explain, was part of the reason he’d been brought here. And it was working—it was healing him. The idea was expressed with beautiful simplicity by one of his guides. She (Daniel thought it was
she
, but couldn’t say why) took a round, apple-sized rock and broke it. She picked up the neat pieces into which it had split. Laying them in her palm, she indicated first them, then Daniel. Then delicately, as if emphasizing the difficulty and the precision required, she fitted the pieces back together. When she had done so, she held the loose grouping of fragments close to her, as if hugging them, and then took a long inward breath over them, and handed them to him.

This is you,
her gestures said.
We are here to cure you. When we have cured you, you will help us.
It wasn’t just the context that made him guess this meaning: he’d correctly read her meaning from the gestures, as if she had whispered a full sentence to him. Without thinking, he raised one hand and passed it near his temple, fluttering his thumb as he did so:
I understand
.

How could he understand? Now he saw how: without even suggesting that they were doing so, his guides had been teaching him their language. The old Daniel couldn’t hack French; the new Daniel was picking up the strange silent body language of the I’iwa. He wanted to ask,
Who are you?
He wanted to ask,
What happened to you, in the beginning, and what are you doing here among all these symbols? And how am I capable of this?
But he didn’t yet know how to ask those questions.

And so the days passed.

They needed to show him the Place of Origin, Stripe told him. But they needed to wait until both of them were ready.

Day after day, he wandered and learned. Day after day, also, he sat by her side, whispering to her about the caves, about her parents and Kit and Rosko, about anything he knew or could half-remember. One day, without opening her eyes, she began to whisper back.

“How long have we been down here?”

He could hardly speak, because he was so relieved to hear her voice at last, but he controlled himself. “A couple of weeks, maybe. A month?”

“You don’t know.”

“No, I don’t.”

“But you’re back.”

“I’m back,” he said to her. “I’m with you again. I’m not the same as I was. There are pieces that went missing, and pieces that were added, and I don’t understand all of it yet. But I’m back.”

“Am I going to live long enough to get to know you again?”

“Yes.”

“But Kit’s dead. Isn’t she?”

“I don’t know that.”

She fell silent again. He thought she was sleeping.

“What do they mean by ‘the Place of Origin,’ Daniel?”

“They mean the volcano.”

“What do you mean, ‘They mean the volcano’?”

“It’s still coming into focus. I don’t know. I just know it’s true.”

When at last she recovered enough to stand, and even walk a little, there was a strange role reversal. He knew the I’iwa’s body language, and she did not. Also, she was as frail as a person in extreme old age, and spoke very little, in whispers, to save her energy. He had to be at her side constantly. Dog stayed at her side too, looking up, as if planning to catch her if she fell. The I’iwa watched, and nursed her, and waited. Then they told Daniel it was time.

The entrance to the Place of Origin was concealed in plain sight. In a small chamber off an ordinary corridor, there was a pile of large rocks, and behind them a narrow corridor. Stripe entered and signaled for them to follow. Daniel motioned for Dog to go first, then led Morag by the hand. She had little trouble, but it was so narrow that he had to crouch, using his fingertips for balance.

At the end of the tunnel, hundreds of lights flickered against a black background; they might almost have been stars. He had the sense that he was being invited to step out into the blackness, into empty space, and he put out his hands, anxious not to fall. But Stripe was waiting to guide him, and he found himself on a skin-smooth floor of polished stone, with a wall at his back.

The “stars” were lamps. There was also some other source of light from above, because he could make out the surface of the wall. It ran away in a wide arc in both directions, defining a round or oval space the size of a cathedral. It was as if they were nighttime mice, emerging from a hole in the baseboard to step silently into the towering dark emptiness of a room scaled for human beings.

Some of the lamps were in fixtures or niches; others were held by dimly lit moving figures. But immediately in front of them there was a large black nothing—a complete absence of light or detail that didn’t make sense. Looking that way, straight ahead, was like opening your eyes under a blindfold.

One of the I’iwa touched Daniel’s arm and looked up, drawing his attention to a narrow gallery that had been carved out of the rock about twenty feet above them. It seemed to run all the way around the space in both directions—fifty, a hundred yards perhaps—before curving into or disappearing behind the area of blackness. Above, the walls continued upward into the gloom, arching over them and transforming into a high domed roof.

They went up a narrow staircase that had been carved out of the rock, Daniel holding Morag’s arm. At the gallery level, they walked slowly round to the right, stopping frequently for Morag to lean against the rock face and rest. Daniel stayed on the outside in case she stumbled. The gallery was only two or three feet wide and on a subtle incline. By a quarter of the way around, they were fifty feet above the ground.

Now at last he could begin to make sense of what he was seeing. The light was coming from a hole in the top of the cavern, far above them; it was the same circular hole he had mistaken for a lake in the forest, but now he was looking at it from the underside, and sunlight was pouring in through it at an angle. Smoke was pouring upward, from a fire that was burning on the top of the thing that had blocked their view; it rose through the incoming light, graying and veiling it.

The structure was the size of an office building. The sight of it seemed to bring Morag out of her torpor, and she raised her hand, pointing. “Not a volcano. Looks like one, aye, but they always do.”

“They?”

“It’s a ziggurat, D. The weirdest, most amazing one I’ve ever seen, but it’s a ziggurat all the same. Which is to say, it’s a model of a volcano. A memory of a volcano.”

Her brain was blessed—cursed, she’d often said to him—with a million lists.
Walking Wikipedia,
Rosko had said, in barely disguised admiration. Ella had made fun of her for it:
Quite the little fact machine, aren’t we?
She could have lectured anyone, for an hour or a day, on Djoser, Chogha Zanbil, the Pyramid of the Magician, and all the rest.

“Ziggurats and pyramids are built to wow, aye? Grand monuments in open spaces. The whole point’s visibility: impress the yokels, intimidate the foreigners. A slogan in stone, and the message is always the same: ‘Look at how powerful we are!’ But this? Ship in a bottle, aye? Buried underground. Kept secret. Doesn’t make sense to keep a ziggurat secret.”

On closer look, though, it did make sense, and the first clue lay in the geometry. There were many stages, each smaller than the one beneath.

No, not “many,” Daniel thought: twelve.

And they were circular.

No, octagonal.

No, not octagonal either. They were dodeca—

No.

It was complicated, intricate, magnificent. The lowest and biggest level was a dodecagon: twelve equal sides, twelve equal angles, and the twelve points reached almost all the way to the walls, so that at those points there was only a narrow gap between the ziggurat and the circular cave. The second level was smaller, with eighteen sides. The third was twelve sided again, the next eighteen again, and so on, and each level was turned by a few degrees relative to the one below, so that the whole thing twisted like a corkscrew and the angles never quite overlapped. And each level was taller than the one below, in some ratio he couldn’t determine.

The resulting shape was a tower, but also a spiral; motionless, yet spinning; solid, but light. And every surface was covered in dense markings that duplicated the I’iwa tattoos. Daniel hadn’t seen all of Morag’s ziggurats. But he’d seen the Taj Mahal, and the Sydney Opera House, and Chartres and Wat Arun and the Masjed-e Shah at Isfahan—and this was more beautiful than any of them.

Two I’iwa emerged from the ziggurat itself, on the lowest level. Then three emerged on the second, five on the third, and seven on the fourth. He couldn’t see clearly enough to count the groups farther up, but he didn’t need to: Morag Chen, Walking Wikipedia, knew the first hundred primes, all the way from two to 541. Another list!

“Thirty-seven on the top level,” she said. “That’s the twelfth prime. And the total of all those twelve is 197, which is the forty-fifth prime. They’re trying to do what Shul-hura imagined doing, and what Archimedes tried to do with the Antikythera Mechanism. Reverse-engineering the Architects! Giving back to ordinary people the power to fight them!”

“I wish Rosko could see this,” Daniel said.

“Aye. A computer made out of stone and people. A computer in which the creators of the software become part of the hardware. A computer that’s been running for tens of thousands of years, trying to find out how the Architects work.”

Stripe motioned for them to follow him farther along the gallery, which sloped down again. At the back of the chamber, a narrow rock bridge arced above the chamber floor, connecting the gallery directly to the ziggurat, or volcano, or computer at its second level. Not daring to look down, Daniel guided Morag across.