Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (35 page)

The inside of the ziggurat was decorated in a way that seemed even more amazing than the miles of corridors. Instead of large symbols in neat rows, almost every inch of every surface here was covered in a web of interconnected images, paintings the size of fingernails, all bleeding into one another. There were plants and animals. Birds and insects. Landscapes of every kind, many of them clearly local but others with deserts, beaches, oceans, and, repeatedly, the same erupting volcano. Minutely detailed silhouettes of trees, with stars picked out behind them. Some of the more abstract images were maps, Daniel thought. There were individual Tainu too, and groups of Tainu, in equal detail. But most frequent by far were the I’iwa themselves, in tens of thousands of unique images, engaged in every imaginable activity: eating and drinking, and pointing at things, and smelling a leaf or a flower, and making spear tips, and laughing and fighting and peeing and gathering wood and spearing a tree kangaroo and lighting a fire and having sex, and there were even, in a curious act of self-reference that could have been evidence either of humor or of a fanatical desire for completeness or both, I’iwa caught in the very act of painting these images.

“Cave art,” he said. But it wasn’t like any cave art he knew. He’d seen the world’s most famous examples, and these walls made Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet look like the interrupted scribblings of children. There was something immense about the scale, the ambition, and the sheer number of images; there was also something fantastically skilled, and orderly, and yet
manic
about the pictures, as if a thousand artists had been told they must keep painting until they’d illustrated everything they’d ever seen, or known, or done; everything they’d ever experienced; and everything they’d ever imagined.

Morag pointed out the image of one particular face. It was an I’iwa sitting on the ground, clutching its jaw in distress. “Toothache?” Daniel said. And he thought,
This is a kind of library. Only not a library of books or texts but of experiences. What was that word Rosko had used?

Morag might as well have been reading his mind. “Qualia,” she said. “The individual units of conscious experience. It’s a library of qualia.”

They’d been moving up, level by level, inside the ziggurat. Somewhere near the top, they entered a dome-shaped room that seemed to imitate the great space in which it was contained. It had no images, no decorations; in fact there was nothing in it except a model of the ziggurat, ten feet high, in the center. The model looked exact, except that there was no fire burning on top of it; instead, there was something that looked, Daniel thought, like a stone soccer ball.

Several I’iwa were already in the room. Some of them were holding long, burning tapers. Two of the figures in the shadows stepped forward, hand in hand. The one on the right was clearly very old—wrinkled, stoop-shouldered, with bags under the eyes and blotches of purple staining the skin. The one on the left was shorter, whip-slender, and clearly much younger.

Think of us as representing the past and the future, if you like,
the old one signed. Daniel thought it was meant as a joke, partly, but he couldn’t be sure.
We’re here to tell you our story.

Lamps ringed the room about ten feet up, and they were spaced much closer together than any of the others Daniel and Morag had seen: there were a couple of dozen, only a foot apart, and they had been positioned to flood the top of the model ziggurat with light. Morag and Daniel could see the dark ball at the top now. It was a globe, and it even had a map carved onto it, though it wasn’t a modern globe. Most of it appeared to be empty.

There was a stone bench halfway between the entrance and the model ziggurat; Stripe sat on it and gestured for them to join him. For a long time, with Dog sitting alert on the floor between them, Morag and Daniel watched the two I’iwa, the old one and the young one—Daniel trying to keep up with the meaning and whispering a translation as best he could, while Morag’s mind, unable for once to connect to the language, rummaged around in its own odd corners, forming and assessing and rejecting hypotheses.

“They’re telling us a Babel story,” Daniel said. “I can’t follow all of it. Many different languages. Many different
kinds
—I think maybe they mean species. And gods, and some sort of punishment for failing to obey. This is seventy thousand years ago. So Mayo was right. They were enslaved, along with—with—”

“Other species, yes,” Morag said. “Makes sense. Them and the Neanderthals. And the Denisovans and the Flores hobbits. Others too, I bet. And us, of course. Some of these groups had been in southeast Asia for a million years, but the first
Homo sapiens
would have been there by then.”

“But do we know anything special about seventy thousand years ago?”

“Seventy thousand is the eruption of Mount Toba. A volcano on Sumatra. It was an event thirty, maybe forty times the size of Thera. Screwed the entire planet’s climate for a thousand years, and
Homo sapiens
nearly went extinct.”

“What about the globe?” he said, pointing.

“It’s a map. Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo on the left, and New Guinea joined up to Australia on the right.”

“I’m not seeing it.”

“That’s because it looked this way seventy thousand years ago, when the oceans were a hundred meters lower.”

“For me,” Daniel said, changing the subject after a pause, “the time since Ararat has been like dreaming. Like being trapped on the other side of a thick glass wall. I could see but not hear, be seen but not make myself heard. I have some catching up to do.”

She put her arm through his, leaned against him, and whispered in his ear. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to tell you the whole story. Everything you missed, everything you were robbed of, everything that happened at the edge of your understanding when you were present but absent.”

The old I’iwa took a taper in her hand. She looked at Daniel, and the signs she made, even though they were made in perfect silence, caused an echo of Iona’s voice in the back of his mind:
Stop them. Before it’s too late.
Then she stretched upward with her other arm, which trembled with the effort, and touched the tiny flame at the taper’s end against the base of the globe.

A thin blue line ran from the flame in both directions around the globe’s base. That reminded him of Iona too, because it looked like one of the burners on their gas stove back home.

The ring of sky-colored fire hovered there, flickering, and grew yellow along the top edge. And then there was a sound like an intake of breath, and the whole surface of the globe burst into flames.

It could have been just a symbol or a warning. But Daniel knew it was more than that. It was an insight into the state of things: it was actual knowledge the I’iwa somehow had. Knowledge that the world out there, to which they were about to return, was already burning.

F
ROM THE
A
UTHOR:

S
OME
N
OTES ON
F
ACT AND
F
ICTION

As with the notes for
The Fire Seekers
, I don’t recommend you read straight through these. Just browse the headings and dip into whatever sounds interesting. You’ll find a more detailed version at my website,
www.richardfarr.net
.

Fang Lizhi

I’m guessing most readers of this book won’t know of Fang Lizhi, a Chinese scientist and activist of great courage who died in 2012. An astrophysicist by trade, he spoke and wrote eloquently on the connections between openness, equality, democracy, and science. “Science begins with doubt” was the first of his five axioms, which attempt to sum up the kind of intellectual environment—respectful of all evidence, skeptical of all authority—that science needs in order to operate effectively. His message, stated briefly, is this: we don’t yet know everything there is to know about the world, so science is needed; but this is also true of the human (social, economic, and political) world; therefore, science itself shows us why it’s evil for governments to control what their citizens may think and say.

The Chinese Communist Party rewarded Fang Lizhi for this insight in a way that would have been instantly familiar to the guardians of absolute truth (and absolute power over what is to be counted as the truth) in the medieval Catholic Church: prison, “reeducation,” and exile.

Of course, the five axioms are about how science
aspires to
work. Fang Lizhi knew very well that it doesn’t always live up to its own ideals. Scientists are almost as prone as authoritarian bureaucrats to thinking they know more than they do; see especially the note below on the very word
unscientific
. The great institutional difference between science on the one hand, and both late-medieval Catholicism and China’s peculiar brand of pseudocommunism on the other, is that science—usually, eventually—rewards skepticism.

“Become what you are”

The German version,
“Werde, der du bist,”
was a favorite saying of nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who learned it from the Greek poet Pindar. Nietzsche and Pindar are both talking about discovering your real, inner nature and setting that nature free from the social and psychological constraints into which it was born. Both men were highly skeptical of an afterlife, so they’d have been surprised and troubled by the spin being given to the idea here by the leader of the Seraphim: his view is that our true nature will be revealed to us only
in
an afterlife.

P
ROLOGUE

Bill Calder, the supernatural, and Zeus having a snit

In response to Bill Calder, you could argue that the Greek idea about Zeus and lightning was a perfectly sensible protoscientific theory, until we came along with a better theory that explains what static electricity does inside clouds. In other words, the Zeus theory, which
we
think of as “supernatural,” was the only intelligible “natural” option at the time and shows that the Greeks didn’t think of Zeus as “supernatural” in our sense—they thought of the gods as a part of the world and interacting with the world. That’s probably right, but it doesn’t undermine Bill’s argument against supernatural explanation.

Let’s suppose there are unexplained bumps in the night, and you tell me it’s a poltergeist, which you say is “an immaterial or supernatural spirit that can’t be explained scientifically.” The right response is surely this: either we can make sense of these bumps by doing more scientific or common-sense investigating, or we can’t. If we can (“Aha, it was the plumbing all along”), then the evidence that there’s a poltergeist vanishes. But if we can’t, to say, “See, told you, it was a poltergeist!” is just to dishonestly admit but not admit that as yet we still
have no idea
(repeat:
no
idea) what the cause really is. Evidence for a “poltergeist” would count as evidence only if we could make sense of that term in a way that links it up with the rest of our understanding of the world. (“Tell me more about these polter-thingys. Are they an electromagnetic phenomenon, or not? Do they have mass, or not? Are they ever visible, or not? How do they
work
? And how do you know any of this?”) Without good answers to these kinds of questions, the concept is empty, since you’ve given me no reason not to be
equally
impressed (or unimpressed) by infinitely many alternative theories, like the Well-Hidden Domestic Dragon theory, the Clumsy Dude from Another Dimension theory, and the creepier Undead Wall Insulation theory—to invent and name just three. So instead of saying, “See, told you, it was a poltergeist,” you might as well say, “See, told you, it was, um, Something We Don’t Know About Yet.” And the only response to that is “Precisely. Let’s keep investigating.”

Notice that some modern believers think God is, as it were, above and beyond the physical—an immaterial creator-spirit who doesn’t interact with the world. Others, on the contrary, think that, like Zeus, He makes decisions and then acts on those decisions (by answering your prayer for an easy chem test, drowning Pharaoh’s army, etc.). That raises interesting questions about what you commit yourself to when you say that God (or anything, for that matter) is “supernatural.” According to Bill’s argument, the former doesn’t even make sense, because it sounds superficially like a claim about what God’s like but really it’s a disguised admission that we
cannot
know
anything
about what He’s like. On the other hand, the latter seems to have the consequence—weird to most people today, but a commonplace in the eighteenth century—that God’s nature is a possible object (even
the
object) of scientific knowledge.

Einstein in delighted free fall

One of the key insights leading Einstein to the general theory of relativity was the equivalence principle, which says that being in a gravitational field is physically indistinguishable from being accelerated at an equivalent rate. A special case of this is that being in
no
gravitational field is indistinguishable from
not
being accelerated. That’s free fall, and it’s why astronauts say that the transition from the high-g launch phase to the zero-g of orbit is like falling off a cliff.

Khor Virap

Worth looking up (or visiting) for the spectacular location, it’s built on the site where Saint Gregory the Illuminator was imprisoned in a pit for thirteen years for trying to convert the Armenians to Christianity.

P
ART
I: A
FTERMATH

“Limbo
 . . .
a traffic jam in the afterlife”

Catholic theologians struggled for centuries with the question of what happened to children who died unbaptized. Heaven or hell? Neither seemed to be the right answer, and Limbo, which literally means “border,” was conceived of as a place between the two, a sort of celestial no-man’s-land where such souls would at least temporarily reside. Vatican theologians more or less abandoned the idea early this century. However, why they
now
think unbaptized souls
don’t
go to Limbo seems to me every bit as puzzling as why they previously thought they did. (See the note on futurists, theology, and unicorns.)

“Freshly dead saints in corny baroque paintings”

The florid baroque style in European painting runs from about 1600 to 1725. Morag might be thinking of Sebastiano Ricci’s
Apotheosis of Saint Sebastian
, or any of dozens more in the genre. An unexpected “saint” gets a similar treatment more than a century later—though the expression is more constipated than amazed—in John James Barralet’s epically unfortunate
The Apotheosis of Washington
.

“Macedonian badass Cleopatra”

Cleopatra VII and her family became perhaps the most famous Egyptians, but they weren’t really Egyptian. Like Alexander the Great, they came from Macedonia, on the northern border of Greece—though by Cleopatra’s time they’d ruled Egypt for almost three hundred years. The dynasty was started by Ptolemy I, who had been a general in Alexander’s army. In a sense, he and his descendants were even more spectacularly successful than the great conqueror: by taking control of Egypt, they were able to become gods.

“The beast with two backs”

Shakespeare uses this euphemism for sex in
Othello
, but it was invented at least a century earlier. I’m not sure about a gold bed, but it’s no fiction that Jules and Cleo were having a very cozy time together; she gave birth to Caesarion—little Caesar—in the summer of the year following his visit.

Caesar and the library

He probably was responsible for a fire at the Library of Alexandria in 48 BCE, but it wasn’t devastating: in reality, the institution survived for centuries after that. Alexandria remained a polytheistic city, with many ethnicities and languages and a rich intellectual life, until the middle of the fourth century. In 313, the emperor Constantine may have converted to Christianity. In any case, over the next two decades, until his baptism and death in 337, he made Christianity more and more the semi-official religion of the Roman Empire, with an atmosphere increasingly hostile to the old pagan religions. There was a brief respite for non-Christians after his death, but in 380 the emperor Theodosius I made Christianity the state religion, began to ban pagan rites throughout the empire, passed laws that made it economically difficult and even dangerous to be a non-Christian, and encouraged the destruction of pagan temples. Alexandria’s newly monotheist rulers drove out Jews and other non-Christian groups, and—in a startling echo of current policies by radical Sunni Muslims—took it upon themselves to destroy everything pre-Christian in the city, including books, monuments, and even the Serapeum, Alexandria’s most magnificent Greek temple. Hatred of the past—and the firm conviction that you’re right about everything, and that only the future of your own faith matters—are not new inventions. (See the note “‘A recovering fundamentalist’—and what Adam could have learned from Socrates.”)

When the great library was finally destroyed or abandoned is unclear, but its contents were probably lost because of piecemeal destruction followed by long neglect, rather than a single great fire. Whatever the exact cause of the loss, during this period most of ancient culture disappeared. You could fill a big lecture hall with the major ancient figures in geography, medicine, history, mathematics, science, drama, poetry, and philosophy from whose writings we have either fragments or nothing. A few examples: Leucippus and Democritus, who invented atomic theory; the mathematician Pythagoras; the philosophers Cleanthes of Assos, Chrysippus, and Zeno of Elea; the great polymath Posidonius of Rhodes, who features in
The Fire Seekers
; the poet Anacreon; and last but not least, the most famous female intellectual of the entire ancient world, the poet Sappho.

The situation in drama sums it up pretty well. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Menander are famous on the basis of fifteen surviving plays, plus some fragments. But we know from other evidence that between them they wrote over
three hundred
plays. All the rest have vanished. It’s like knowing the Harry Potter books from one damaged photocopy of the bits about Hagrid.

Futurists

Morag’s dig about futurists and fortune-tellers is probably well deserved, but I’ve always thought the term has more in common with
theologian
—and
unicorn expert
.

If I claim to know a lot about unicorns, you might reasonably assume this means that I can tell you what shape their horns are supposed to be, which cultures refer to them in their folklore, what magical powers they’re alleged to have, and so on. This is perfectly reasonable—and is consistent with the idea that, in another sense, I can’t possibly know anything about unicorns, because they’re not a possible object of knowledge: they don’t exist.

The very idea that there’s a legitimate subject called
theology
could be said to trade on a related conflation (or confusion) of two different things the term could mean. The etymology (
theos
= god +
logos
= thought/study/reasoning) seems clear enough, but it raises the question: Does doing theology result in knowledge
about God
—for example, “Ah: we find, after careful investigation, that He’s male, bearded, and eternal; wears an old bedsheet; and kicked Lucifer out of heaven”? Or does it result only in historical knowledge about
what other people have thought they knew about God
—for example: “Martin Luther set off the Protestant Reformation in 1517 by disagreeing with the Catholic Church about their alleged power to influence what He does to souls in purgatory.” The second kind of knowledge is unproblematic, or as unproblematic as any kind of historical knowledge can be. But no amount of it shows that the first kind isn’t an illusion. And we do at least have reason to worry that the first kind is an illusion, because it’s unclear (relative to the ordinary standards we insist on in any other kind of inquiry) what the evidence for that sort of knowledge could possibly be. (See the note about Limbo.)

Similarly, we can ask whether a futurist is (a) someone who charges large sums of money to intellectually naive corporate executives for spouting
opinions
about the future of human technology and society (including, of course, opinions about other futurists’ opinions about that future), or (b) someone who actually knows something the rest of us don’t know about that future. As with the other two examples, one might worry that (b) is implausible even in principal. (A good starting point for a discussion of this would be the observation that, as a potential object of knowledge, the future shares an important property with unicorns: it doesn’t exist.)