Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (9 page)

“The I’iwa. They have the answer.”

Rosko took the memory card and turned it over in his fingers again. “If there were more of these, with more photographs, Iona would have backed them up. They have to be online somewhere.”

“Forget it,” I said. “You know Iona—her company
owned
the encrypted storage business. And the big sell was that other people wouldn’t even be able to find your files in the first place, much less decrypt them.”

“Not the sort of woman whose password is
password
. You’re right. So, if there are other photographs, we have to find the cards they were originally saved on.”

You reached for the little blue square of plastic again.

“Yes,” I said. “Or Daniel has to.”

C
HAPTER
5

W
ORTSPIEL?

The morning after we’d been to the house, there was a tap-tap on the screen door: your old semi-Goth pal, Ella Hardy. Standing on the porch with a brown paper package under one arm, she was looking good, in an Ella kind of way: ripped pink jeans over glitter-red Doc Martens; a “
Black Sabbath World Tour”
T-shirt; a studded gunmetal-gray fake leather biker jacket draped over her shoulders; Midnight Corpse eye shadow (guessing about the color there); and a radical new retro-seventies David Bowie ’do: short, spiky, and the dye color was, guessing again, Vomit at Sunrise.

I assumed the package was for the Eislers, so I went to put it on the counter behind me. You took it out of my hands.

“You need a break, Morag,” Ella said.

“How can you tell?”

“Hon, I’m
looking
at you—that’s how I can tell.”

“Thanks.”

“Like I said, you need a break. Looking after a—looking after Daniel must be tough.”

“Daniel is fine,” I said. Which was a lie. What I’d meant to say was
Looking after Daniel is fine
. That would have been a lie too. But I wasn’t going to admit my fears to Ella, because I suspected her of thinking you were—as one of the doctors had been pleased with his own frankness for saying—
another of these hopeless cases
.

“The forecast says ultraclear skies at the end of the week. Astronomy club’s going to haul out the telescopes and head east over the mountains. It’ll mean a four-hour drive, staying up half the night, and camping. It’s what you need, Morag. A total change of scene.”

I thought of the pile of papers on the table in the basement, and the need to bug everyone I could think of about Jimmy and Lorna, the need to pick Natazscha’s brain about Mayo, and half a dozen other things. Above all, I thought about my general, overwhelming sense that I must
work work work
at understanding what had happened to you. Solve the puzzle. Not a moment to lose.

“Like I said, I’m a wee bit busy.”

“Have you ever even seen Messier 33? A supercute spiral galaxy. It’s three million light years away, Morag! If you come with us, and let me show it to you, photons will fall into your eyes that set out before human beings came down from the trees. Speaking of supercute, is Rosko here? It was him I wanted to ask, honestly.”

I bet it was.

“He’s out. I’ll tell him.”

“Be sure to do that. Oh, and I was going to ask Kit Cerenkov. Would that be OK with you, Morag? You two seem to, I don’t know, totally get along.”

Had she seen right through me? I tried to sound as if she’d mentioned someone I was only hazily aware of, out at the periphery of my life, instead of the girl whose image and voice and scent had taken over my mind. “Kit Cerenkov. Sure, ask her. Why not?”

“Fun fun fun,” she twinkled. Her boots twinkled too, catching the sunlight as she danced down the front steps.

You’d gone into the living room, ripped open the package, and were already wearing what we’d left behind in Yerevan: your dad’s old jacket. You were perched on the arm of a chair, sketching furiously. This time the face emerged quickly and clearly: Bill, wearing that same jacket, as we’d seen him on Ararat. It was the best, clearest evidence yet that you
had memories
. That there might be a way back.

On the left arm of the jacket, where all the blood had been, the edge of the stain was still visible like an afterimage. A note, handwritten in blunt pencil, was lying on the floor by your feet. It was from Mack’s cousin, Anahit Boghossian, whose tiny concrete apartment in Yerevan had been home while we got our paperwork sorted out.

Dear Morag, Rossko, Daniel, please excuse my English. You forget coat. Blood stain was still there, so I wash again through machine. Difficult times, but we are strong. With best wishes of you in America.—Anahit

“That was nice of her,” Rosko said when he got back, swinging a bike helmet.

“Yes,” I said, and told him about Ella’s invitation. “She likes you,” I added.

He didn’t bite. He kept looking straight at you, as if admiring the jacket. “Ella?” he said neutrally. “She seems nice. It’ll be fun to get out of here for a night.”

For the hundredth time I wondered about him. He wasn’t gay. But you’d expressed the puzzle to me before: he was kind, smart, and gentle. A charmer. Good-looking despite the scars. A nice guy who made girls—some girls—visibly woozy. But he didn’t notice, or want to notice. I didn’t get it. And I didn’t have time to think much about it, because Stefan Eisler came in with a phone to his ear.

“Yes. This is his father, yes. That’s right. Mein Gott—wirklich? I was led to understand that you—they told me—I see. Danke. Ja, sicher, Professor.
Zufällig ist sie gerade hier
. Yes. Right here.”

His eyes were wide. Which wasn’t surprising, since I’d told him the whole story by then, Rome included.

“
Sein Deutsch ist gar nicht schlecht
,” he said, and handed me the phone. “
Ziemlich gut sogar
. Besonders für einen toten Engländer.”

Stefan was right. Good German, especially for a dead Englishman. And, once he’d switched to his native language, it was hard to get the dead Englishman to stop talking.

“Me? Oh no, not even slightly dead! They put a bullet in the ceiling, and another through my right arm. A third ricocheted off something and ended up in my upper right scapula. I was lucky with that one. But they must have decided that they hadn’t been paid enough to risk a murder charge, because after that they resorted to the blunt end of the gun. Gagged me, trussed me up like a turkey, and tossed me into a ditch at the edge of a golf course. I never did like golf. When I’d managed to loosen the ropes, I crawled a hundred yards and collapsed in the middle of the eleventh green. Quite dramatic, utterly ballsed up someone’s long putt, and an ambulance was there in minutes. At the hospital in Rome, they x-rayed me until I was medium rare.
Bleeding into the brain cavity,
they said,
concussion with intracranial swelling.
Oh, and
near death
: they kept saying that to each other in loud whispers. Exercising their national right to become overexcited while stating the obvious. So much more entertaining than the English—our preferred modus operandi is to be boring while understating the obvious. Naturally I was near death. Anyone my age lives every day with one foot in the long wooden box.”

“So great to hear your voice, Professor Partridge. Are you still at the hospital?”

“Goodness no. I overheard one of them mentioning exploratory brain surgery. I expect they thought I was so far past my sell-by date that they might as well use me for practice. I worked out where they’d put my clothes, waited until the coast was clear, and scarpered like a thief in the night. Thanks for the help,
amici
! Sorry to rush, but so much to do, world to save!
Stammi bene!
In two shakes of a lamb’s tail, I was on a plane back to Boston.”

“Are you OK, Professor? Honestly?”

“Never better. The only lasting pain is that those louts in Rome got to my copy of the
Geographika
. Probably the last copy on Earth, might be one of the keys to what’s happening now with the Architects, and it’d taken me years to track it down. I never even read the whole thing before they stole it.”

That was when I grasped that Partridge knew
nothing
. Not that Bill was dead. Not that we had rescued his precious papyrus of the
Geographika
and then been responsible for its destruction. Not even that we’d been at Ararat.

We were on the phone for over an hour. Toward the end he went so quiet that I kept thinking the connection had dropped.

“Poor Bill. And poor Daniel. Oh dear, I am so sorry, Morag. I’ve seen the pictures of Ararat, just as everyone has. But I had no idea how well all this fits—which means it’s every bit as bad as I feared.”

I should have asked him what he meant by that. Instead I tried to lighten his mood, and mine, by telling him how glad I was to be getting out of town.

“Ooh, astronomy!” he exclaimed, bubbly and as easily distracted as a child. “Tell me more. Where is it you’re going?”

Ella was supposed to pick us up early on Friday morning. Late into Thursday night, I read aloud to you from Shul-hura’s Akkadian manuscripts. “He’s a recovering fundamentalist without a support group,” I said. “His problem is he believes in the Architects, but he’s stopped believing what he’s supposed to believe about them. Listen to this.” And I read you one of the passages that intrigued me most, retranslating the cuneiform as I went:

Those who obey will ascend and become perfect. Freed from the body and freed from death—eternal. Or so we are told.

It is wrong to ask questions. Questions only obscure our path to infinity. Or so we are told, and so we tell the people.

The Architects have taken away our languages, and these old languages may not be used, on pain of death. Only a few of us retain the memory of them. So I write these questions, on pain of death: Do they want companions, or cattle? And how can we know?

It was warm in the basement, airless, but as I read and talked, you lay on the camp cot fully clothed, jacket and all; you couldn’t retain body heat, were always cold. Your eyes flicked from me to the book, then to the ceiling, then back again. Again I had the sense that you, like me, were trying to work something out, under stress, under time pressure. At some level, I knew you were taking in what I was saying and understanding it. You were hyperalert and even less able or willing to sleep than me.

I must have fallen asleep. That’s how I came to be alone and drowning, in a rough sea at night, ten miles from Antikythera. A wave reared out of the dark and crashed over me. The water was warm and salty in the back of my throat. I spat, gulped air, and screamed your name. But I knew it was too late: you were already gone, already drowned. I tried to scream one more time, but the water rushed into my mouth as the weight of my clothes pulled me under.

I woke with my heart doing 180 and my clothes drenched in the saltwater of my own sweat. You were lying down, still fully clothed but apparently asleep at last. I crept out to the bathroom, threw up, got some water, and changed into dry things. It was five in the morning.

I peeped in through our curtain divide again, and I was about to drop the curtain back in place when your right hand strayed up to your heart, as if you’d just risen to your feet for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But your fingertips shifted, as if you were checking the breast pocket of the jacket.

“Daniel?”

Ten minutes later I’d woken Rosko, and the three of us were sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over an object the size of a phone, while Rosko used a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers to loosen eight black screws that looked like mustard seeds.

He lifted off the top of the housing and held it up to the light. Someone had written the mathematical sign for “square root of two” on it in black permanent marker: “√2.”