The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  Not many do. There aren’t many out there. But ISOC has made Seattle the Babbler capital of the world. Dad. David Maynard Jones, the star Aussie philosopher/neurologist/cognitive scientist they hired to run the place. Charlie Balakrishnan himself, though almost no one’s ever seen him. And a handful of imports like Rosko.

  I zip off the rain fly and look around. To the west, over the Pacific, nothing but darkness. To the east, over the South Atlantic, a sky the color of dirty concrete. Still no telling if it’s going to be a clear day or not. Somewhere off to my right, though I can’t see it, there’s another portaledge, surrounded by extra heavy gear bags: Édouard and Sophie with their cameras.

  The only other evidence that we’re not alone on the planet is a smudge of red in a narrow cleft between steep scree slopes. Two Hilleberg tents. Rosko’s parents, Stefan and Gabi Eisler, will be down there now, squinting up through binoculars to see that we get the day started on schedule.

  They’re climbers too. Semiretired because of injuries and crumbly joints, but they jumped at the chance to come with us. “We’ll be base camp,” Gabi said. “Anything, to be in Patagonia, even if it does mean hanging around for days with a radio and a pot of freeze-dried chili while you have all the fun.”

  Stefan has a way of being so deadpan that you can’t tell when he’s joking: “Let me see if I understand. Two weeks in South America, after flying there first class at your mother’s expense?” Long pause, furrowed brow, doesn’t even crack a smile. “I can get some time off.”

  There’s a small light hanging from a lanyard above me. I reach up, switch it on, rummage in a bag for my favorite climbing food, a cold hunk of greasy buffalo mozzarella. Fat, fat, fat: burning seven thousand calories a day in subzero air makes you crave it like a drug. As I sink my teeth in, the VHF crackles into life.

  “Good morning, Daniel, can you hear me?”

  Gabi Eisler’s voice comes out of the handset tinny, bright, like she’s imprisoned right next to the batteries inside the orange plastic casing.

  “Mmm. Uh-huh. Loud and clear, Gabi.”

  “Happy birthday!”

  “Thank you.”

  “I have messages. You ready?”

  This is the morning ritual. For the duration of the climb, our only contact with the outside world is through Gabi, the radio, and Gabi’s access to an email account run through a satellite link.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Here is the latest from your father: ‘Greetings from London, monkeys. On my way home from Iraq and glad to be breathing damp air again. Stopping off for an interview in Boston. Daniel, I’m bringing home a special surprise for you. Be safe.’ ”

  Been with him in Iraq. Given Islam’s attitude to representing the human form, I can guess at least that the “special surprise” isn’t going to be a plastic figurine of some Babylonian god sitting cross-legged on top of a ziggurat. More likely, Dad has quietly pocketed an actual ancient artifact. A shard of pottery maybe. Something that he’ll think is cool, and won’t understand my total lack of interest in. Not clear if the surprise is supposed to be a birthday gift, either—his message, natch, omits that detail. Which I’m probably supposed to feel all neglected and upset about; it’s so typical, it scarcely registers.

  My friends do better. From pale, twitchy Aaron Wolff:

  “ ‘You’re insane. Mostly in a good way, but right now I get vertigo and an urge to puke every time I think of you. I don’t want to offer technical advice, but maybe, I dunno, use a rope? Hi to Spidermensch.’ ”

  Spidermensch—that’s a nod to Rosko’s climbing skill by way of a reference to the Übermensch, or “superman,” who shows up in the writings of Rosko’s current Famous Philosopher I’d Most Like to Share a Bong With, nineteenth-century German bad boy Freddy Nietzsche.

  There’s a simple happy birthday from loud, sarcastic semi-Goth Ella Hardy. Another from shy, elegant cello whiz Julia Shubin. From Kit Cerenkov, who I just had an extremely hot dream about, and feel guilty for wanting to hear from most—nothing.

  “One from Alex Bolyai,” Gabi says. “I’m not sure I can pronounce it. ‘Sok szerencset kivanok es boldog szulinapot’?”

  Figures. Sandor “Alex” Bolyai is a redheaded Hungarian whose clothes never quite fit. Like Julia and Ella, he’s not a Babbler, but he seems to like dropping into his native language so that no one has a clue what he’s talking about.

  “I’m guessing that’s either ‘Happy birthday’ or ‘Bring back illegal drugs,’ ” Rosko mutters.

  “There’s also a message from David Maynard Jones,” Gabi says.

  “Really?”

  “ ‘Happy birthday, Daniel. Best of luck, and say hi to your mom.’ ”

  “ ‘Say hi to your mom’?” I say over my shoulder, by way of conveying both the message and a question.

  “We’ve known each other for years, darling.”

  Mental note: it’s kind of odd that I didn’t know this. David Maynard Jones, known to all as Mayo, came to the UW a year or two ago to run ISOC. Nice guy, far as I can tell from a couple of three-minute conversations. But known each other for years, darling? Odd.

  “I have one more, Daniel.”

  Of course you do. “From Morag.”

  It’s not even a question. My “twin sister” would never forget the birthday we share.

  Morag and I are so not related. She looks Chinese, because of her dad; sounds Scottish, because she learned her beautiful, musical English in Inverness; and has a brain like a supernova. But our moms were best friends, and we were born on the same day. Twin sister: that’s how I think of her. I shift into a more comfortable position, reach into the food bag for a bagel, and settle down to find out what M has to say.

  Gabi’s voice comes over the radio again, teasing. “Sure you’re ready?”

  “Oh yes.”

  But I’m not ready for her message. Not at all.

  CHAPTER 2

  ROCKFALL

  I have such a strong connection to Morag, such a sense of her presence and her voice, my mind translates Gabi’s German accent directly into Morag’s soft northeast-Scotland burr.

  “ ‘Safe safe safe D, and happy birthday.’ ”

  (What I hear: BURRUTH-deh.)

  “ ‘The dig is fantastic.’ ”

  (What I hear: f’n-TUHH-stek.)

  “ ‘Amazing what you can find, thirty feet under a desert. But get this: I persuaded the ’rental units that I should do my senior year with you and Iona. So they’re sending me back to moss country with Bill, and I’m going to live with you guys! Aye, that’s right: plane to Boston later today, and I’ll be back in Seattle before you are. A conspiracy to make me normal before it’s too late, but don’t worry, little brother: it’s already too late. Is this brilliant, or is it brilliant? See you soon. I miss you miss you miss you, xoxoxo.’ ”

  Oh wow. Miss you miss you miss you too.

  “Little brother?” Rosko says.

  “Joke.” (I’m six foot four. Morag’s five two.) “Gabi, this is for real?”

  “For real, Daniel. Lorna worked it out with your mother weeks ago, but I was sworn to silence until today. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Mind? A slide show is already playing in my head of all the places Morag and I will go, all the things we’ll do together, all the people I’ll proudly introduce her to. Rosko looks at me, raises his voice so that Gabi can hear him over the radio, and speaks in English for my benefit: “Does he mind? Mutti, I’m telling you, if he grins any more his ears will fall off.”

  Mom has taken down her rain fly, so I can see her now in the glow of our light. She’s looking pleased with herself. “Your father and I have been working on Lorna for a long time,” she says. “I told her, it’s getting too scary in Iraq now, with the Shia authorities taking the threat from the Seraphim so seriously. Being Jimmy and Lorna, they refused to leave, because their dig is going to put them in the history books and all that, but they did agree that Morag deserves to spend a yea
r in a normal city, around kids her own age. And there’s the Babbler program too—your father’s been dropping hints about that. You are OK with it, yes? Maybe I should have discussed it with you?”

  I shake my head, smile at her. Truth is, there’s a mustard seed of doubt in my mind, but I keep it to myself. All my life, a week with Morag here and a month there; so rarely anything like ordinary life to share. After wanting that for so long, it’s amazing to face the fact that my picture of how this will work is vague as a dream. My mind’s racing. My heart’s racing. What will you want to do, when you get to Seattle? Who will you like best? What will you think of Rosko? Kit? The rain? Will my life be good enough for you?

  “So,” Rosko says, “I get to meet the famous sister.”

  “We’re not related,” I remind him. “Not really.”

  Mom breaks in. “Lorna and I thought of ourselves as sisters. Then, you know, when we both managed to produce a sprog on the same day, it always seemed Daniel and Morag were bound to each other in some way. And now she’ll get to experience a bit of normal life for once.”

  Normal life. Ha! That’s what I want, yeah. But being home-schooled by Mom isn’t exactly normal to start with, and with Morag, normal is just not on the radar anyway. Nobody could be normal after seventeen years with Jimmy and Lorna in Scotland, Shanghai, the Amazon, Papua, some mountains no one has heard of in the middle of the Sahara, and the Iraqi desert.

  And then there’s the additional fact, the big dash of hot sauce in the recipe. Morag’s not just smart. Not even “just” a Babbler. She’s an all-out twelve-cylinder prodigy.

  “How good is she?” Rosko asks, unable to keep the competitive edge out of his voice. “At languages, I mean?”

  “Grew up fluent in English, Shanghai Wu, Mandarin, and Cantonese. But that’s kind of what you’d expect, in the circumstances. I don’t think Jimmy and Lorna even twigged she was a Babbler until they moved to Papua.”

  “I don’t even know what they speak there.”

  “About three hundred different languages. But officially, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Jawa. Lorna says it took her just a couple of months to master them both. Then they discovered a previously uncontacted indigenous group in the western highlands. Extremely strange language structure. Jimmy told me he never got beyond a few phrases, but Morag was chatting away with them almost immediately. Since then she’s learned—I don’t know, honestly. I lose track. Half a dozen major European languages, couple of African ones, Arabic. Naturally I make a big deal out of the fact I know some Greek, because that’s one she’s embarrassed not to have picked up yet. If you dig, though, she’ll admit she can get by in Basque.”

  “Basque?”

  “It’s a language isolate. Completely unrelated to any other—”

  “I know what a language isolate is, Daniel.”

  “Yeah, well. She’s interested in that. Just like Dad. Hey, if it makes you feel better, she said her Russian is crap. How did she put it? Never do peas or something?”

  “Ni v pizdu?”

  “Right.”

  Rosko puts back his head and laughs. “Ni v pizdu! That does not make me feel any better at all.”

  “Why?”

  “Because only someone with excellent Russian would think of claiming their Russian is bad that way. It’s an obscene slang-dialect called mat.”

  “Yo, boys!” Mom interrupts. “You have to yak and pack at the same time, or we’ll get behind schedule.”

  “Roger that, Mom.” I start lacing on my boots. Rosko puts some more effort into squeezing air out of a sleeping mat.

  “What about school? I mean her academic ability?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I do.”

  “OK. Two years old: arithmetic. Seven years old: college-level reading comprehension. Fifteen years old, published a research paper in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology about tribal greeting rituals. Oh yeah, and she reads a hundred and fifty pages an hour, and never forgets anything. Jimmy and Lorna got out of China partly because she was becoming a celebrity. Just before they left, a shrink on Hong Kong TV went all drooly about her, said her brain ought to be mapped for the sake of science, and described her IQ as not measurable.”

  “Competition for your father.”

  “Oh yeah, and she knows it. She admires him like crazy, but he brings out her most ambitious side. She’s already itching to make the next big discovery.”

  “So how does a regular dimwit like you manage to get on with her so well?”

  Anyone else calls me a dimwit, I get angry—maybe because being around my family has taught me to think it’s true. But Rosko can say it and I don’t mind. Because he’s a charmer? Because we’re interested in the same stuff? Not sure. Before I have a chance to answer—before I have a chance to say, ‘We both like tree climbing,’ or ‘I like to cook and she likes to eat what I cook,’ or ‘She likes bad romance novels and I like teasing her about them’—Mom hands me a loop of carabiners and interrupts.

  “Morag has total intellectual self-confidence, Rosko. And not much confidence about anything else. A bit—jumpy. Daniel makes her feel safe. Apart from her parents, he’s the one person she completely trusts.”

  Trees, food, and romance novels would have sounded better. But the light’s growing stronger every minute, so I shrug and focus on closing up some Ziplocs. I’m so preoccupied with the thought of Morag being in Seattle that it shocks me to turn again, just a minute later, and see Mom staring into space. It’s not the first or even the third time, this climb, that she’s been distracted, not quite on form. She’s hunched over a gear bag in her yellow all-in-one climbing suit, supposedly checking rope. On the surface, her bright, cheerful self, but something’s off-kilter.

  “Mom? You all right?”

  She forces a smile. “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “It sounds silly, but I can’t get those Bolivian women out of my head. Just a news story, nothing to do with me. But I feel this terrible, personal sense of loss. As if I knew them all.” She frowns, shakes herself, passes a hand over her face like someone trying to get rid of a cobweb.

  “You make it sound like they’re dead. We don’t know that.”

  “That’s part of what I find so hard. I know they’re dead. I’m certain of it. But how can I be?”

  “You can’t.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” she says, in a way that means, You’re wrong.

  “They were Seraphim, that’s the rumor, isn’t it? You and the Colberts seem drawn to that.”

  “Not drawn to it, Daniel. Maybe Édouard and Sophie are. I’m just curious about why it’s so powerful. I spent some time talking to Julius Quinn when he was working with your father. He’s a truly special individual, you know. Hypnotic. Talks a lot of nonsense, I suppose, but it doesn’t surprise me in the least that—”

  She stops. “As for the Bolivian thing, I truly don’t know. These disappearances have bugged me in the strangest way, that’s all.”

  Disappearances: something she’s been mentioning off and on for months now, as if shyly trying to get me or Dad or anyone else interested. One day, looking for the car keys, I went into her home office and found she had devoted a small corkboard to it. A collection of notes and clippings about barely noticed stories from Japan, India, Tasmania, Iceland.

  Reading the clippings was like intruding on her private space. Like snooping in a diary. But when I did ask her about it, all she would say was, Nobody except me is connecting the dots.

  Then in March, just before we left for Patagonia, there were those Bolivian women. A story that left Mom visibly rattled and actually caught the rest of the world’s attention for about half a minute.

  Uyuni. A small, remote town on the wind-scoured Bolivian altiplano. One Sunday evening, a big group of friends meet as usual before walking to church together. But they don’t arrive at the church, they’re not at home when their neighbors go looking, and they don’t come home
.

  Never mind, everyone says. They’ll show up!

  Alive and well?

  Dead, in some grisly way?

  No. They don’t show up. Twenty-five women have just disappeared.

  And there are the rumors now. About refusing confession, chanting among themselves, copies of a certain book.

  Mom finishes cinching down a strap, looks around to see if she has forgotten anything, shakes herself. “It just feels so personal,” she says. Then she glances at her watch. “Enough of that. Let’s focus on the climb.”

  “Where are the Colberts?” I ask. “Can’t see them.”

  She leans out on one of the ropes, craning her neck, and points. “They should be a little higher up, hidden behind that spine.” She picks up the radio. “Édouard. Sophie. This is Iona. You still asleep?”

  A gravelly French accent comes over the radio. “No, Iona, all packed and ready to go. We were just waiting for you to fire the starting gun. Everything good with you?”

  “On our way in one minute, Édouard.”

  “Right behind you, then. Take it easy, give us some nice photo ops, and we’ll see you at the top. May the Architects be with us.”

  “Yes, Édouard. May the Architects be with us. I’ll take any help we can get.” She says it in a way perfectly balanced between polite gratitude and skepticism.

  “Oh, and I nearly forgot. Bon anniversaire to Daniel.”

  I try to empty my mind of everything except the climb now. Briefly we lapse into silence, taking one last look around. These giant pinnacles in their white robes are so beautiful they don’t seem real—they look more like a digitized mock-up of an alien planet. To the south, the sky is wrapped in long ribbons of what might be more ice, but in fact it’s high cirrus. As we watch, pale pink light soaks into it, like watery blood—and then a great orange blister erupts out of the world’s east cheek and the pink-white world is turned to gold.

  “OK,” Mom says. “Enough sightseeing. Let’s go.”