by Richard Farr
“Do you think we’ll survive this?” Julia asks him. “I mean, the sheer numbers, all over the world—”
“Oh yes, we’ll survive it. Humanity has survived the Architects before. Someone in the distant past has always been persistent enough, and confident enough, and clever enough, to master their game and then beat them at it. We can do it again. But not unless we get enough sleep. Good night, and thank you for showing me M13—hadn’t seen it since I was a boy.”
Partridge is using a walking stick, and picks his way cautiously across the broken ground in the direction of a camper van. A door opens and slams. A light comes on inside. After a minute of silence, I hear heavy shuffling footsteps behind me, and two voices.
“Morag?”
“Morag.”
The first voice wants to know where I am. The second—flat, distant—is just repeating the word, as if comforted but puzzled by it.
“Over here, Rosko. What’s up?”
They come up the ridge slowly. “Time to say good-night,” he says.
“Let me take his hand. Hey, D, it’s me. Morag.”
“M—. M—. Morag. Dark.”
I’ve noticed before that he seems to find the dark comforting. He moves close, so that his arm presses against mine. It’s as if he can read my moods better that way. He’s like an animal—intelligent still, instinctively sharp, but with a mind that’s both limited and unreachable. And yet sometimes he’ll snap entirely out of it and look at me with his old eyes, even say a sentence or two that sounds completely normal. It’s like witnessing fragments from a dream of his former life. Every time it happens, I experience this vast surge of hope—and then his eyes go dull again.
It’s easy to see now that every Mystery is a partial case—a person whose mind was taken, but not so completely as to destroy their basic functioning and cause death. Alzheimer’s, that’s the comparison people keep on making, though it’s not the same. Most, especially the adults, are left with nothing but a functioning brain stem: a heartbeat, breath, nothing else. Some recognize a few words, more rarely still a few faces, but even they can’t speak or understand or decide. Then there are the few like Daniel, normally younger people, who are deeply absent yet not wholly gone. Partridge has a theory about it. He always does.
“I’d better take him down again,” Rosko says. “I think the Star Mafia is about to pack up for the night.”
I give Daniel a hug, which he returns like a swimmer clinging to wreckage. Rosko pulls him away gently, speaking softly to him; he uses a matter-of-fact tone, without that condescending, lilting child-speak so many other people are falling into. “Hey, Daniel, long day, huh? Let’s head down, do our teeth. Don’t know about you, but I need some sleep.”
Ella and Julia—the Star Mafia—are already breaking down the telescopes, with some help from Kit. I’m not wanted for this delicate ritual, and neither are the Y-chromosomers, who are already busy spitting toothpaste into the bushes. So I stay up on the ridge and enjoy the solitude.
There’s a circle of flashlights where the boys are grouped. I can see the pool of bluish light from Rosko’s headlamp as it crosses to that corner of the field, see how he wipes Daniel’s face with a towel, talks to him, then takes his hand to steady him over the rough, dark ground toward their tent.
Rosko Eisler, who used to be handsome. Now he has a mauled ear, bad scarring all down one side of his face, and two missing fingers that he fed to the crevasse on Ararat—and poor Ella, who doesn’t have a chance, thinks he’s more handsome than ever.
I look north toward the Pole Star. Putting to one side the commonsense illusion that I’m standing on a flat surface, I tilt my head and make an effort to visualize the whole earth beneath me and the imaginary axle around which it turns. The plane of our orbit appears in my mind’s eye too, a translucent silvery circle that arcs out westward into space. For a minute or two, in my solitude and silence, I can feel the planet balanced there: a fat dancer, pivoting on its solitary polar heel as it spins backward, away from the sun, into darkness.
My parents got safely out of Iraq, just hours before it erupted into a full-scale religious war. Thank goodness for that. And Pandora survived. But I miss Iona. I miss Bill too, partly because nobody else seems to miss him. A high standard for me to aspire to. So much knowledge. So much passion to know, even if he was wrong about Phaistos and the Architects.
Above all, I miss Daniel—even though I can see him fifty yards away, his slumped shoulders and bowed head silhouetted for a moment against the side of an orange tent.
“Morag? Morag?”
Kit. She has left Ella and Julia to finish up, and I can just make out where she’s standing, near the tents. I can hear the fear in her voice. She doesn’t want to be out in the dark alone. Not many people do, after everything that has happened. We live now, as our ancestors did for five thousand years, in a world haunted by demons. The sound of her fear produces a rush of tenderness in me. Daniel always tried to protect me, and that was good, I guess, but it allowed me to be selfish, narrowed me, gave me the luxury to be the cold prodigy everyone expected. I feel I have been released from that now. I have never before, not even with him, felt this intense desire that someone else not hurt.
Interesting emotion. Must be a name for it.
I shout down to her, trying to inject into my voice all of the warmth, and strength, that I feel. “With you in a minute!”
One last look at the Pole Star. One last look at the patch of cat-black sky where Julia’s telescope revealed M13 to us—a fuzzy little star cluster that looks like a small piece of lint. But it contains a quarter of a million suns, she said. So much out there, she said. Oh yes, Julia. You have no idea.
Time to go. So I tip my head back, look straight up, and speak out loud, enunciating every word slowly and carefully as if addressing the Milky Way itself. Wouldn’t want a syllable to be wasted:
“I’m onto you now, you greedy miserable bastards. And I will defeat you.”
THANKS
Novels are a pack of lies. The best part of assembling this pack was discovering how many smart nonfiction writers—people actually investigating what’s true—committed the foolish error of leaving all their best ideas just lying around in books, from where I could easily steal them. Much of what I did steal, I only partially understood; whether I understood it or not, I bent it shamelessly to my own purposes. To all of those writers: my gratitude, my admiration, my apologies.
On a more personal note, thanks to Nick Harris at the Story Foundation in Los Angeles, who is solely responsible for this whole thing ever happening in the first place; Stephen Barbara at Foundry Literary + Media in New York, who is to the common literary agent as champagne is to beer; the whole team at Amazon for their patience, warmth, hard work, high standards, and enthusiasm, but especially editor Courtney Miller and copyeditor Kyra Freestar, who each made many excellent suggestions while saving me from more of my own errors than I care to count; and Kate Egan, my wonderful editor, who among many other skills had a knack for expressing her confidence in this project at just the moments when I had none.
For various other kinds of help, knowledge, or support, I’m also grateful to Tim Ditlow, Olivier Fabris, Aidan Farr, Clarissa Farr, Declan Farr, Paula Gottlieb, Chaouky Kaboul, Fiona Kenshole, Dirk Obbink, Rosalie Wells, several anonymous translators at AOLTI, Andrea Soroko’s entire fourth-period tenth-grade Language Arts class, several anonymous Teen Center Advisors at the Seattle Public Library, and the staffs of several different Seattle Public Library branches and of the Suzzallo and Allen Libraries at the University of Washington.
As usual, my greatest debt is to my wife, Kerry Fitz-Gerald. Despite holding down a real job, she spent countless hours on this book, improving it in many ways. She also put up stoically with months (OK: years) of authorial stercore tauri, including but not limited to moaning, whining, rationalizing, complaining, procrastinating, not earning any money even when not procrastinating, and the occasional episode of blind roarin
g panic. I know, love, I really do: no amount of Thanks is ever going to be enough.
FROM THE AUTHOR:
SOME NOTES ON FACT AND FICTION
You probably don’t want to read straight through these notes. Just browse the headers and dip into anything that looks interesting. The true nerds among you can find a much fuller version, plus additional notes and a partial list of sources, at my website. For a cautionary note on the sources, or rather, my use of them, see Thanks.
PROLOGUE
Rongorongo and Rapa Nui
Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovered Paasch-Eyland (Easter Island) on Easter Sunday 1722—hence the name. The supposedly original Polynesian name, Rapa Nui, was probably made up more than a century after this; we don’t know what the island was called before European discovery.
The strange and beautiful script found there, Rongorongo, never has been deciphered, or not convincingly, and perhaps never will be.
Old Elamite
Old Elamite is one of several languages associated with the kingdom of Elam, which existed around the northeast end of the Persian Gulf from about 2700 to 540 BCE.
The Bronze Age Collapse
The Bronze Age Collapse was a real event that saw the partial or total destruction of Ugarit, Troy, Tarsus, Knossos, Aleppo, Byblos, Ashkelon, Paphos, Carchemish, Hattusa, and Mycenae, among other cities. Theories include a massive drought (some evidence there); a storm of earthquakes (surprisingly, ditto); a mysterious invasion by so-called Sea Peoples (much-quoted but both vague and doubtful). Also climate change, defeat of charioteers by guerrilla foot soldiers, and “general systems collapse” (which sounds to me a lot like “if we give it a name, it’ll sound like a theory”). Different experts are so keen to push the evidence for their favorite hunch that in reading the literature, it’s hard to hang onto the essential point: nobody knows what happened.
Types of writing
A quick and dirty way to divide up writing systems is this: in logographic systems like Chinese, symbols stand for words; in syllabic systems, like Egyptian, symbols stand for syllables; in alphabetic systems, like English, symbols stand for phonemes or sounds. In reality it’s a lot more complicated. Still, it’s broadly true that a highly logographic system like Chinese will have thousands of distinct characters, a mainly syllabic system like Egyptian will have a hundred or more, and an alphabet will have anywhere from just over a dozen main symbols (Hawaiian) to fifty or sixty (Khmer, Sanskrit).
Making sense of the Phaistos Disk
Daniel expresses a simplified version of my own puzzlement. It is said, as if it’s just obvious, that the Phaistos Disk has thirty-one groups of symbols in a spiral on one side, and thirty groups in a spiral on the other. But it seems to me this is just obviously wrong, in two ways. First: as Daniel says, the shape is really an outer horseshoe with a separate inner spiral. Second: there are two lines that look like a short string of beads (one on each side), and on one side only there’s an extra “unbeaded” line next to the beaded line. If this third line is a mistake—a slip of the stylus—then you have a pattern that makes much more sense: thirty groups on both sides; each side divided into the twelve-group outer horseshoe and the eighteen-group inner spiral; and each spiral beginning with a single unique L-shaped group. Check it out and see what you think.
Storing data in DNA
Can we store data in DNA? Shortly after writing a draft of this book, I learned that a team at Harvard Medical School is working on how to do just that. It’s in the early stages, but DNA could provide astonishing information density—and, unlike that flash drive you just put through the laundry, remain stable for ten thousand years.
Some Yahoo
Bill Calder isn’t referring to Jerry Yang’s Internet company, but to the disgusting apelike creatures (or disturbingly humanlike apes) in the fourth part of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Apparently the company’s name really is a direct reference to Gulliver, but you have to wonder whether any of the Sunnyvale geeks had actually read the book. A cursed race of unteachable, stinking, irrational, odious brutes? Really?
Uranium, thorium, and a low-budget ray gun
I’ve given Bill Calder a fancied-up form of optically stimulated luminescence (or thermoluminescence) dating. Can you really do it through a glass museum case, with a handheld laser and a phone app? No—not yet.
Darwin, germs, and hand-washing
The Swiss medical pioneer Ignaz Semmelweis first suggested in 1847 that doctors’ own lack of hygiene might be causing the puerperal fever that was killing so many of their patients; the idea deeply offended the medical profession and was ridiculed. Darwin published On the Origin of Species, cracking the deep problem of how things in nature can look “perfectly designed” without having a designer, in 1859. The germ theory of disease was not widely accepted until the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 1870s.
PART I: PATAGONIA
The Torre Sur and “a big fat mile of nothing”
OK, a bit of an exaggeration. The Torre Sur is over a mile and a half tall, but only from sea level, and the longest vertical face on it is maybe half that. The nearest you can get to a mile-long vertical fall, anywhere in the world, is probably on Great Trango Tower in Pakistan. Look it up; if you suffer from vertigo, keep a plastic bag handy.
“Not really an atheist atheist”
Most people think they know what an atheist is, but it’s not as simple as it looks.
Socrates (see the later section “Some Dates”) was accused of being an atheist in 399 BCE, but what the outraged conservatives of Athens meant was that he was teaching false or nontraditional beliefs about the gods, not that he didn’t believe the gods existed. Early Christians were described as atheists by the Romans, for the same reason.
Modern atheists like Richard Dawkins usually talk as if they think that we can prove God doesn’t exist, as if “I know God doesn’t exist” is the meaning of the term. But you can’t prove that something doesn’t exist unless you can first say what it is, and one frustrating thing about religious belief is that even within the same religion, different believers give widely varying and incompatible descriptions of what sort of entity God is. So it’s not clear what the atheist has to disprove, or how to do it.
In my view, it’s more useful to think of atheism as the claim that theologies are fake systems of knowledge. You shouldn’t believe what any particular theology says about the nature of God, for exactly the same reason that you shouldn’t believe what I say about the committee of eighty-nine invisible pink hippopotami that run the universe from a couch in my attic: there’s no evidence—or nothing that in any other field of inquiry would count as evidence—either for or against them. And, since there are infinitely many things that might exist, though we have no evidence about them (to mention just ninety-one: any particular conception of God, the Blueberry Muffin at the Beginning of Time, and those hippos in my attic), it’s hard to see how it makes sense to believe in any of them.
The island of Iona
You can find it off the west coast of Scotland, near Oban. It was an important monastic and scholarly center in the early Middle Ages—and it is beautiful. I visited it when I was fourteen, and remember the occasion all too clearly. The ferry from Mull was tiny. An exceptionally heavy swell was coming south down the sound. When my parents and I finally set foot on Iona, soaked to the skin, we were quite surprised to be alive.
Muon scanner?
Muon scanning is a cool idea dreamed up to check cargo containers for contraband and bombs. Also known as cosmic ray tomography, it doesn’t quite exist yet in any practical sense, but we’ll get there—and soon after we do, it will be adapted for medical scanning. Then, instead of making pictures by shooting X-rays through you, or using huge MRI magnets to pat down your atomic nuclei, a muon scanner will create images of your insides using naturally occurring muons—particles a bit like electrons that originate in deep space and are passing through your body all the time anyway.
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br /> Freddy Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche lived in an age that was even more deeply impressed by the excellence of “man” (i.e., the human species) than we are today. He wasn’t impressed at all—and, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885), he argued that humans as we currently understand them will be “surpassed” by Übermenschen (overmen, or supermen). These are not flying guys in capes; nor are they Nazi-style tyrants. Nietzsche thinks of them as exceptional people whose self-confidence, creativity, and courage will help humanity break free from what he sees as the suffocating constraints of guilt and self-loathing imposed on us by Christian morality.
Uncontacted indigenous groups
Around the world there are probably about a hundred groups of uncontacted people—those who have either totally avoided contact with the outside world or have actively resisted it. To find out more, visit www.uncontactedtribes.org and www.survivalinternational.org/tribes.
“Ni v pizdu”
I’m not going to translate this. Imagine starting with the expression “a load of crap,” and then turning the crudeness dial all the way up to “Unprintable.”
Pronouncing “Babel,” translating babilani, and building ziggurats
I’m British, so I grew up saying BAY-bl (rhymes with fable). Most Americans are used to BABB-l (rhymes with rabble). British dictionaries go for the first pronunciation; most American dictionaries give both. Maybe we could all agree on a “correct” pronunciation if we knew how the Akkadians or Babylonians pronounced babilani. We don’t, so pronounce it however you like.
The word babilani actually comes from Akkadian, the earlier language (and civilization) out of which Babylonian developed. The even earlier (Sumerian) name for the place was Etemenanki, which has a similar meaning. The usual translation of Etemenanki is “the house of the foundation of heaven and earth,” which has the distinct disadvantage of not making sense. A better stab at the meaning might be something like “the place between heaven and earth.”