Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (8 page)

“That wasn’t bad,” she said in greeting, like someone returning to the house after a jog in the park. A camera—
that
camera, on the orange strap—was around her neck. She swung down her pack and handed me a mildly crushed packet of McVitie’s dark chocolate digestive biscuits.

“Thank you thank you thank you, Auntie Iona! My favorite!”

“I know.”

“And I haven’t tasted chocolate in weeks!”

“Eat them all, Morag. They’re good for your brain. And don’t call me Auntie. It makes me feel old.”

Iona also brought real sliced white bread. For dinner, we toasted it over a fire and ate it with canned baked beans. I introduced her to my new Tainu friends while babbling at her about their language and culture. And beliefs too—though I left their beliefs about the I’iwa for later, when we were alone, because I’d already worked out that merely saying the word bothered them.

“You’re learning so much, Morag,” she said. “But none of this sounds like archaeology.”

“Morag has turned into our resident anthro,” Jimmy said proudly. “What brought me and Lorna here was something else. Stories from downriver about the Tainu still using exceptionally primitive tools. We were already interested in comparing modern New Guinea tools—the sort of thing the locals were using before steel was introduced—with pre-metal tools in Europe. So we decided to trek up here and see what we could find.”

“And?”

“Total wild goose chase,” Lorna said. “Nothin’ new here. Nothin’ particularly interestin’. But there is a wee bit o’ a puzzle. When we describe what we’re lookin’ for, instead o’ sayin’ that they’ve never heard o’ anythin’ like that, they get all sheepish an’ want to change the subject. An’ then they say,
Oh, um, we sometimes find odd things like that in the forest, but they’re nothing to do with us.
It’s like they’re sayin’, sure, tools like that exist here, but some other tribe is responsible, an’ we don’t want to talk about it.”

“Did they show you any examples?”

“Morag,” Jimmy said, turning to me. “This is your story.”

So I told her about the Ghost People. Or I told her what I thought I understood about them.

“The Tainu believe that the spirits of their ancestors live in caves at the head of a valley west of here,” I said. “I’iwa. The I’iwa almost never show themselves and never speak. They sometimes come out at night and hunt, but their purpose in life—or death—is to protect the living Tainu.”

“From what?”

“The Tainu say that the I’iwa protect them from the anger of the ‘volcano’—which stole the I’iwa’s own language.”

I used my fingers to put scare quotes around
volcano
.

“Hang on a minute,” she said, turning to Jimmy. “You told me once that all the volcanoes here were at the western end of New Guinea.”

“That’s right,” he said. “But according to Morag these guys keep insisting there’s one right up the valley there where the I’iwa supposedly live. They say they’ve seen the smoke. It’s nonsense, of course. Sorry, go on, Morag.”

“The thing about the I’iwa,” I said, “is that they don’t like to be seen, and they’re very good at not being seen.”

“So how do the Tainu know they exist?”

“Some people claim to have spotted them. Not in the open, not standing there on the path. But glimpsed through the trees, maybe at dawn or twilight. And sometimes the I’iwa want to remind the Tainu that they’re watching. So they leave signs. Broken plants or scratches on a tree.”

“Or one o’ these primitive stone tools,” Lorna said. “An’ the Tainu claim that sometimes sweet potatoes are stolen in the night, or that, even when no one from the tribe is out huntin’, they’ll hear a chicken or a pig bein’ killed in the forest.”

Iona asked a thousand questions. Did the Tainu think of the I’iwa as ghosts or spirits in the Western sense? Did they believe they lived forever—the immortal souls of the departed? Or, if they were dangerous, and stole things, and occasionally left stone tools behind, were they more like real creatures, with bodies? But then surely there would be more evidence of them? How could they be so elusive, so—

“Ghostly? I asked them that,” I said.

“And?”

“I think the question annoyed them. Oma said to me, ‘Agota ena I’iwa-ben, kopol okt indai. Okt’in, hawa filim waro’p aru.’ Which means, or I thought it meant, ‘They’re ghosts. They’re beyond our understanding. How can you expect us to know what they’re like?’”

“A reasonable enough response.”

“He also used a word from Tok Pisin, though—”

“That’s the national creole, isn’t it? I heard it in Port Moresby. But I thought people like the Tainu were too isolated to know it? Sorry, Morag, I interrupted.”

“The Tainu know some Tok Pisin for the same reason some of them have vaguely Western-sounding names. There was a missionary here before us.”

“A German Baptist,” Lorna said. “Josef Kurtz. He taught them enough Tok Pisin to tell them Bible stories an’ stuck around long enough to baptize some o’ them. Sorry, Morag. Go on.”

“The Tok Pisin word that Oma used to describe the I’iwa was
narakain
. That’s literally ‘another kind.’ It means different people, another tribe—and it can mean ‘not normal,’ which from a tribal point of view is pretty much the same thing. But it’s not the word I’d use for a ghost. We use ghost stories to scare ourselves, right? But what if the ‘ghost’ story was a way of covering up for an even scarier possibility? That the I’iwa were real.”

“But in the end you have no evidence one way or the other?”

Jimmy said, “At first the Tainu said they’d found strange tools on the path. Only in one area, far up the valley near the waterfall. When I asked if they’d kept them, they said,
No, no, we must have lost them.
I could tell that was rubbish. The tools unnerved them in some way.”

“Like Robinson Crusoe finding Man Friday’s footprints in the sand?” Iona said.

“Yes. But instead of investigating, or ‘losing’ them, what they’d done was take the objects far into the forest and throw them into a river.”

“Out of sight, out of mind?”

“Maybe. But I get the feeling it’s something they think about all the time—they just don’t like to. They believe these tools belong to the I’iwa. Their ancestors.”

Ancestors.
That’s what I’d said to Jimmy and Lorna.
They’re talking about their ancestors.
My mistake.

“I’m beginnin’ to think they’re makin’ the whole thing up,” Lorna said. “Foolin’ outsiders but maybe even foolin’ themselves. Maybe these ‘tools’ are the real ghosts. Thuss idea that they find physical evidence but always destroy it because it’s bad luck; it’s too bloody convenient. In which case we’ve been wastin’ our time here.”

“We’re not wasting our time,” I said crossly. “While you’ve been chasing ghost tools,
I’ve
learned Tain’iwa.”

Aye, I know. A royal pain in the bum, I was. And I never appreciated how patient they were.

Iona was with us for less than a week before the gravitational pull of her other world, data tech, took her away again. “Got to get back to my negotiations,” she said as she crouched on the ground helping me and one of the village girls sort through a pile of candlenuts. “The Harbin city government has built the world’s largest server farm down an abandoned mine, complete with its own fourth-gen nuclear power source. It’s already three-quarters built. I get to tell the local party boss that our DNA-based storage makes it obsolete; no point in ever turning it on. It’s going to be tricky, finding a way to sound as if I’m offering an opportunity and not a career-ending embarrassment.”

But on her last full day, fearless adventurer that she was, she left our encampment before dawn and went into the forest. “We don’t go beyond the waterfall,” the village chief had said. “The I’iwa will not permit it.”

“It’s a taboo,” I explained, showing off my fluent command of anthro.

“I know,” she said mildly. And then, when Jimmy and Lorna were out of earshot: “But the I’iwa aren’t my ancestors. So perhaps the taboo doesn’t apply to me? Don’t worry, I’ll be back by the afternoon!”

She wasn’t. It was only long after dark, when we’d put in two hours of worrying and were trying to organize a search party among deeply unwilling Tainu, that she walked back into the encampment.

“Sorry.”

“Is that so?” Lorna said, meaning
No, you aren’t
. Iona looked pale, though: either exhausted or scared. But privacy’s nonexistent among the Tainu, and we had to wait until later, when the four of us were briefly alone, to get the full story. She sounded like a kid admitting she’s had a scary adventure in the wrong part of town.

“I went beyond the waterfall.”

“Iona, lass,” Lorna said. “We told you it wasn’t wise, and we kinda dropped a few wee hints it might be dangerous too, so you goin’ ahead an’ doin’ it anyway was totally a given. Please, tell us somethin’ we couldn’t have guessed.”

“All right,” she said. “I will. I was hot, so I waded into the pool beneath the falls to wash my face. I stood there for a while and sensed I was being watched. I kept seeing movement out of the corner of my eye.”

“It could have been an animal,” I said. “A wild pig.”

“It could have been an animal, but it wasn’t. Someone was trying to get me to notice them and follow them.”

“And you did?” Jimmy asked.

“There’s no way up except a steep path right next to the falls. I climbed about a hundred feet. At the top, right where the river pours out of a hole in the mountainside, there’s a rock platform.”

She used the end of a stick to scratch a diagram of what she was describing in the mud.

“In the center of the platform there’s a round, flat rock, like a tabletop. I don’t just mean roundish: it’s unmistakably a worked object, not something natural. This was sitting in the middle of it.”

She handed Jimmy an object the size of a fist. It was a flattish stone, shaped like a teardrop, with a round edge on one side; the other side had been knapped to a razor sharpness. He looked at it carefully, turning it over, and handed it to Lorna. She held it up, rotating it in her fingers, the way you might examine a monster diamond, and blew out a long breath before passing it to me. It was smooth and heavy. It seemed to fit into my hand as if it belonged there.

“That’s a hand ax,” Jimmy said. “It reminds me of things they’ve found in France, dating to forty, fifty thousand years ago. It isn’t remotely like anything else from New Guinea. When Europeans arrived here in the 1930s they said, ‘Stone Age people, Stone Age tools.’ That was right, in so far as the locals didn’t have metal. But local tools are ‘like’ that thing the way a bird’s like a bat.”

I must have yawned, because Lorna announced that it was time for me to go to bed. We were right in front of the hut the Tainu had allowed us to take over. Reluctantly I said good night. Before I went in, I turned back to look at the group of three adults.

“Doesn’t make sense,” Lorna was saying.

Iona stirred the fire. She was looking pale, drawn, and intensely serious. “Makes even less sense if it was made by ghosts,” she said.

I went into the hut and lay down under the mosquito net. I don’t know how long I stayed awake, but I must have drifted off while they were still talking.

You clutched the camera to your chest all the way back to the Eislers’, where Rosko quickly confirmed that its battery was long dead. But there was a memory card inside. You plucked it from his hand and looked at it as if it was a holy relic.

“An old one,” Rosko said. “Wrong size for my machine.” But after rooting around in a boxful of cables, he came up with a charger for the camera battery and an adapter for the card. “Let’s see what she left for us.”

What she’d left was not much: the card was almost empty, and it gave us a frustratingly narrow window into your past—a dozen photos, all taken on a single not-bad spring day a couple of weeks before you, Rosko, and Iona left for Patagonia. Three weeks to the day—I did the math—before she died. The house. You in front of the house. Daffodils in almost bloom. A chestnut tree against the sky. You at the park, with a blurred jogger in the background. I wanted to linger over every frame, but you thumbed through them impatiently, your breathing short, and when you got to the end, you kept scrolling, as if you could magic more images into existence. At first I assumed you were looking for a picture of her, and of course there never are pictures of the photographer. But eventually you stopped. There were tears in your eyes—whether from grief, fear, or frustration, I couldn’t tell.

“New Guinea,” you said. “Photographs.”

“Not on this card,” Rosko said.

“There are photographs,” you insisted.

“So where are they? And why do you want to see them?”

“Mayo.”

“Mayo what?”

You looked down at the camera as if it was a wounded bird and hugged it to your chest again, as if either you could save it or it could save you. Then you said, in your own voice, something simple but perfectly clear.

“Mayo wants the answer. The I’iwa—”

That intonation again: it was amazing. As if you spoke the language.