Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2)

by Richard Farr

  “Albert spent a lot of time just explaining their culture,” he said. “Teaching me their myths and stories. Which are really interesting. Tl’alhi-na. Tsut-kw’its’ik t’ax. Qwaxw, way. Ays-kwtutuu tx, Tl’upana, stl’aps uulh-tx. Tsqm-na. Tsut-kw’its-ik t’ax. Tcaliitsim-kw tx.”

  The sound of the words was harsh but fluid, like rocks in fast, shallow water.

  “What’s the translation?”

  “That’s from a story about Raven and Cormorant. They go halibut-fishing together in a canoe. Cormorant is good at fishing, so he catches plenty, but he’s also trusting, naive, not too bright. When Raven catches nothing, he decides to steal all Cormorant’s fish. The way Albert told it, you’re set up to hope Raven will be forced to apologize, or else he’ll be found out and suffer some kind of punishment when they return to their village, and poor Cormorant will get his fish back. But apparently the Nuxalk aren’t big on Disney endings.”

  He slowly repeated the Nuxalk phrases again, reveling in the strangeness of the sound. “That line is what happens right after Raven steals the fish. ‘Come here, Raven said to Cormorant, and open your mouth. So Cormorant went to him and opened his mouth. And Raven cut out his tongue.’”

  “Yuck,” Kit said.

  “Yeah. Raven commits a crime—and then gets away with it by making it impossible for Cormorant to tell people what really happened. A simple moral. If you don’t want people to know what you’re really up to, silence your victims.”

  “What does this have to do with the code?” I asked.

  “Like I was saying, Bill was all about the Phaistos Disks being an undiscovered language—the next Sumerian or Linear A. But you started to have doubts.”

  “So?”

  “I’m convinced now that you were right. All these ancient sources talk about how humans were given language by the gods, right? And then had it taken away? But I always wondered: What if that’s just a bad analogy? Being a geek, I thought, maybe what the gods did wasn’t so much give us a language as install an operating system.”

  “This idea is surely the total geek, Rosko,” Kit said. “Architects installing software in our minds?”

  “Bill’s software can identify over a thousand languages, and if you feed in something else, it can say, OK, this is more like Croatian than Bosnian, or it’s more like Mixtec than Zapotec. But it had a coughing fit because the data from the Disks doesn’t have a structure like any language, and that’s because it isn’t a language. It’s math. Something to do with a complex function based on huge prime numbers, I think—which is kind of like the encryption that runs the Internet, actually.”

  “Kind of like the encryption that runs the Internet,” I echoed, trying to keep my voice level. “But it was written down on clay tablets by a bunch of Babbler priests living in a small isolated civilization on the flanks of a volcano, a thousand years before the Sumerians worked out enough cuneiform to keep track of their fucking goats?”

  “That’s what I’m saying. And, if it’s really based on prime factorization, it’s beyond the reach of any computing power we have. This little laptop, it had some trouble there, but after I straightened out the code, it managed to identify, you know, the shape of the building. But now that we know what that building is, we also know there’s no possibility of breaking in, not even with the ISOC machine. Not with all the computers in the world.”

  “Hard for believe,” Kit said, “that we were programmed.”

  “People found it hard to believe that the earth goes round the sun. Or that the continents float on lakes of liquid rock. Or that we’re descended from fish. But it’s still true.”

  “So you’re saying what?” I asked. “That it’s hopeless? That this just confirms what you’ve secretly suspected ever since Ararat? Which is that we should just give up?”

  He turned away to look out of the window, which seemed like answer enough. But you jumped up and kicked the table. “No,” you said. “No!” You were shaking, and sweating, and crushing the New Guinea map in your hands.

  I should have tried to comfort you. But I was so angry and frightened and so in need of air that I grabbed Kit by the hand, pulled her outside, and spent twenty minutes sobbing into her shoulder.

  Part of falling in love was being amazed by how well Kit could understand me, could intuitively just get it, could know who I was and put up even with the annoying parts without the need for endless backfilling, explaining, and apologizing. (Litmus test for a healthy relationship, D, try it out sometime: if you keep having to say “What did you mean by that?” you’re screwed.) But another part of falling in love was greedily expecting her to understand me perfectly, and side with me in everything, and being crushed when she failed the test. The sense that Rosko had betrayed me—that he’d known we couldn’t help you, or learn any more about the Architects that would make any difference—was bad enough in itself. But it was almost worse to grasp that she pretty much agreed with him, that all her care for me was just kind of pity for the deluded, and that all her care for you, her obvious affection for you, was like the attitude of a nurse while hanging around waiting for her terminal dementia patient to die.

  I didn’t just think all that: I said it too. Which was a mistake. And I said it angrily, which was a bigger mistake. At that point she ran out of calm and bit my head off, and the word bitch got used, by one or the other of us.

  OK, OK: probably, realistically, she didn’t bite my head off, but she was annoyed with me (I wonder why!) and she didn’t hide it. Or did hide it, but not well enough. The end result was I felt like she’d bitten my head off, but suspected I might be overreacting. At which exact point, natch, she said dismissively, “You’re overreacting.” She also said, “Don’t be a whiner, Morag.” She even managed to make me feel guilty by saying it was immature of me not to put aside my own obsessions and focus on “just taking more proper care of Daniel.” More proper: as if what I was doing didn’t come up to her standards and therefore didn’t quite count.

  Arguments are like flash fires—they spread so quickly that afterward, you can’t describe the order in which things took flame. But somehow I managed to use a particularly self-pitying tone to bring up Jimmy and Lorna.

  I know, I know, Kit lost her father to booze. And she had that offhand, irritable-practical, slightly distant relationship with Natazscha, which I couldn’t decide whether to admire or feel sorry for. But her reaction made me conscious of how deeply she didn’t see that aspect of me, didn’t have the capacity to imagine what it was like for me, to grow up traveling the world with my parents, for their life to have been my life, for them to have been my closest friends, for them to be missing.

  Being in love makes you so, so stupid!

  Did I say that already? Sorry.

  You don’t understand me. You’re not even listening. You can’t imagine what it was like to be blah blah blah. Or how it’s been for me, not knowing blah blah blah. It’s easy for you because et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

  High-drama relationship clichés, tumbling out of my mouth one after another. Embarrassed by myself? You have no idea. I thought, This is not even me, the way Daniel is not Daniel. The end of it wasn’t even me feeling annoyed, wasn’t even me feeling alienated from her, or having the satisfaction of feeling wronged because she threw a pot of boiling tea at me. No. A pot of boiling tea would have been easy. Instead, she just said, “I’m going for a walk.” Rosko came out and joined her, and the only thing she threw at me as the two of them headed toward the beach was a look. A coolly offended, fuck-you-too look that burned and burned and burned.

  A short unpleasant visit inside my head:

  I’m crazier about her than she is about me. In which case, it’s only a matter of time before she gets tired of me. Maybe she’s already tired of me. Maybe I should wear clothes that are less boring. Or do an Ella and go for a radically different hairstyle. Or just become, overnight, a completely different person. A more interesting, more empathetic, more attractive person. A better
person. Because what have I done? What I’ve done is announce that I’m too self-absorbed to have even noticed or cared about any of the things that in fact I’ve been noticing half to death, the things I care about more than I know how to say, like how kind she is, and good with you, and funny, and how every time I look at her I feel like a helpless minor asteroid being caught in the gravitational field of a star—and—and—and if she leaves me now, if just as this has got started she changes her mind because I’m such an emotional idiot, I can’t survive that. It’ll crush me. Maybe it’s already too late. Maybe I’m so bad at this that I’ve already done the damage. Maybe—

  I know, because I read about it: this is stuff that some people spend 90 percent of their lives on. But I’d never felt the reality of it before, never understood that love and longing and uncertainty and need could be such an exhausting, all-body workout. Never guessed just how much of me could be taken over by this trivial, everyday agony.

  No doubt Kit was complaining to Rosko about how Majka was impossible / was losing it / was, frankly, just between you and me, Rosko, the selfish-centered painfulness in butt, yah? So I tried to distract myself by talking to you and managed to talk only about whether you thought I was selfish or not. You’d have called me on that, once. Not now. So I stared out of the window, stirred some chili, checked the time every thirty seconds, and stared out of the window some more.

  When Kit had been gone for forty-nine and a half minutes—during which a thousand years passed, and I burned a pan of corn bread—I filled the kettle. It was white with a floral pattern and rust spots showing through the coating; the stopper in the spout had one of those whistles that responds to the steam pressure with a noise like a mezzo-soprano being strangled.

  “You want a cup of something?”

  “Yes.”

  O-kay. You were looking at your hands, not at me, so I couldn’t tell whether the “yes” was, hallelujah, a direct answer to my question. That would have been a first, but maybe you were thinking of something else.

  “A cup of what? Regular tea? Peppermint? Ginger?”

  You opened your mouth again, paused, and then flinched, the way you’d done before the raccoons came out of that tree on campus. It set my neck tingling. A threat? Had someone found us? Many things were interfering with my ability to believe I was still rational. One was the memory of being nearly kidnapped by that gorilla of a guy near your parents’ house. It was there all the time, in the background, like having something sticky on my hands that I couldn’t wash off.

  You got up slowly and stood at the window. I squeezed your hand. For once, you squeezed in response, but the way you did it was unsatisfying, mechanical—as if you’d had the gesture described to you but not explained. As if Rosko and Kit were right about you.

  “What? What did you hear?” There was nothing out there except some wind-whipped grass and the flat gray strait.

  Ten or fifteen seconds passed. I was on the point of saying, No, D, it’s nothing, when the top of Rosko’s head, then Kit’s, rose into view as they climbed the beach path. Part of me was relieved that it wasn’t scary strangers. Knowing that Kit was coming back to the cabin, a larger part of me was occupied with all the cruel things, or the merely final and irrevocable things, she might say. But most of me was preoccupied with something else. I thought of the raccoons outside the lab; of all the times you’d spoken confidently about things that hadn’t yet happened; of you saying, “There’s no time”; of what Partridge had said about “seers.”

  “You can see the future, can’t you?” I said. “You’re turning into what all the religions claim to have. A seer. A prophet. One of the special people who get glimpses through the smoke?”

  You just looked at me. Just looked—but it was a look that seemed to brim over with meaning: the very opposite of blank, your eyes had frustration and sympathy in them—as if I was the one suffering an enigmatic mental deficiency, and you were the one trying and trying to help me toward understanding.

  “What am I supposed to think, D? I want to laugh at this. I want to say it’s totally unscientific. Mumbo jumbo. Seeing into the future is an absurd idea, impossible. Even more impossible than ancient gods installing software in our heads. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

  Rosko, coming back in, had overheard me. “You should give yourself a break,” he said, putting down a big pair of marine binoculars and kicking off his shoes. “Even the physicists don’t know what to think. Half of them say the future can affect the past, and the other half say time’s an illusion. That aside, the whole house of cards is glued together with three big theories—relativity and quantum mechanics, which contradict each other, and string theory, which is mathematically beautiful junk. As for consciousness, it’s reality’s dick: too embarrassing to mention.”

  “Thanks for that, Rosko.”

  Kit came over and took the kettle from under my hand. “Works better if you turn on the flame,” she said. Her voice was neutral. I tried to hunt for clues in her expression, but I couldn’t focus because I was distracted by her hair, which had been darkened slightly by the damp. It was tucked into the upturned collar of her jacket. I’d never seen it like that before, and it made me ache, fiercely, all over. I looked down at the kettle again.

  “She is like you,” she said, turning to Rosko. “Too much the thinking.” Hearing her refer to me in the third person was agony; I knew, in that moment, that it was over. “And now she have something more to think about.”

  She was holding out my phone. At arm’s length. I couldn’t even meet her eyes this time. “Forgot I had it still in pocket,” she said. “Pocket goes ping. Then ping. Then also third time ping. Somebody must like you.”

  Some body. That’s how she said it. In a sane mood I could’ve taken it for gentle irony, a joke, a sign that she was looking for a way back to safe ground. But naturally I jumped to the opposite conclusion: she was rubbing salt into my self-inflicted wound. She was mocking me. She was cruelly expressing surprise that anyone could like me—never mind her.

  “Thank you,” I said miserably, taking the phone.

  I should have said, I’m sorry. I should have said, Please be careful, because right now I’m constructed entirely out of eggshells. Instead I just looked down at the black rectangle and read the screen.

  It said WELCOME TO CANADA. Then it changed to OUT OF SERVICE AREA. But the three messages were still there.

  The first one was from Partridge. I skimmed it, not much interested; it seemed like pleasant chatter that I didn’t need to pay attention to:

  I’M SORRY YOU HAD TO PUSH OFF IN SUCH A HURRY, BUT I DO UNDERSTAND. ANOTHER RIOT HERE, IN THE MIDDLE OF DOWNTOWN: I GOT A RINGSIDE SEAT FROM MY HOTEL AND IT WASN’T A PRETTY SIGHT. YOU’LL WELL OUT OF IT. THANKS FOR THE COPIES OF ALL YOUR NOTES—I’M WORKING ON THEM. MEANWHILE, UP AT THE UNIVERSITY, THE SERAPHIM ARE TRYING TO PREVENT THEM FROM EVEN CLEARING UP THE LIBRARY SITE, AND NATAZSCHA HAS BEEN QUESTIONED AT LENGTH BY MEN IN DARK SUITS. ALL MINOR STUFF COMPARED TO WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PLACES LIKE JAPAN OF COURSE, WHICH, HAVING DISCOVERED THE JOYS OF SECTARIAN VIOLENCE, IS STARTING TO LOOK MORE AND MORE LIKE THE MIDDLE EAST. BUT I FEAR WE ARE NOT FAR BEHIND.

  I’M STILL CONVINCED THAT THE DISKS AND THE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE ARE WHERE OUR ANSWER LIES—THAT’S WHEN THE ARCHITECTS GAVE US LANGUAGE, OR TOOK AWAY OUR OTHER LANGUAGES. PERHAPS YOU COULD GET SOMEWHERE WITH THE DISKS IF THEY GET THE COMPUTER AT THE INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS WORKING AGAIN? BUT I DON’T THINK THAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN SOON. I’VE HAD DINNER WITH NATAZSCHA TWICE, INCIDENTALLY. WONDERFUL WOMAN! BUT SHE’S QUITE DISMISSIVE OF MY IDEA THAT THIS BUSINESS ALL GOT GOING DURING THE BRONZE AGE. SHE THINKS LANGUAGE AND A FULL SENSE OF THE SELF EMERGED MUCH EARLIER—CRO-MAGNON ART, NEANDERTHAL BURIAL PRACTICES, THAT SORT OF THING. SO, WHILE I’M FIXATED ON THE THERAN CIVILIZATION, WHICH GOT GOING SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, SHE THINKS THE BIG STUFF HAPPENED MUCH FURTHER BACK. I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE’S RIGHT, BUT THEN I’M NOT SURE WHAT TO BELIEVE.
>
  DID YOU HEAR THE STORY FROM NEW ZEALAND ABOUT SOME OF THE MISSING FROM THE RUAPEHU INCIDENT COMING BACK? FASCINATING! SOME SAY IT’S ALL HOKUM, OTHERS SAY IT’S PROOF OF REINCARNATION, AND A THIRD SAY IT PROVES THEY WERE ABDUCTED BY ALIENS. SO MANY THEORIES! DO GET PLENTY OF REST AND FRESH AIR.

  The second message was what I’d been imagining and waiting for all these weeks:

  DEAREST, DEAREST MORAG: LONG STORY, BUT WE ARE SAFE. TRULY SAFE, THIS TIME, AND HOME SOON. MADE IT TO JORDAN YESTERDAY. NOW ON OUR WAY TO AMMAN. MORE IF/WHEN I CAN. HOPE YOU ARE SAFE AND WELL, AND I JUST WISH I KNEW FOR SURE THAT YOU’RE GETTING THIS. LOVE LOVE LOVE FROM LORNA X LORNA X LORNA X AND JIMMY X JIMMY X JIMMY X

  The third message was the least expected. The one I’d more or less given up on:

  MY DEAR MORAG, I AM SO VERY SORRY THAT I DID NOT GET BACK TO YOU. ALAS, BEING IN A MEDICALLY INDUCED COMA HAS PLAYED HAVOC WITH THE SOCIAL NICETIES. I AM STILL UNABLE TO TRAVEL, BUT I HOPE THAT I CAN PREVAIL UPON YOU TO VISIT ME. COME AT ONCE, IF YOU CAN. I WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT MAYNARD JONES. AND I HAVE SOMETHING REMARKABLE TO SHOW YOU. WITH SINCEREST RESPECT, AKSHAY “CHARLIE” BALAKRISHNAN.

  There was contact information underneath Balakrishnan’s message, but I didn’t read it. Rosko did.

  “Hawaii? He wants you to go to Hawaii? I thought he lived in New Delhi.”

  “Kona is Hawaii,” Kit said. “I think that guy maybe lives everywhere.”

  “I’m not going,” I said. “I can’t leave Daniel now.”

  I’d been holding your hand, and you tugged on it. “You will go,” you said. It sounded almost like a recommendation, almost like a command, but it was neither. It was a statement of fact: you knew that I’d go, and you were telling me so.

  Kit put her hand on my other arm and squeezed gently, which made me feel like a starving person being offered a grape. I was craving her touch, craving reassurance, craving, honestly, the chance to put my face on her shoulder again and not move for an hour. But was she offering a gesture of reconciliation? Or an attempt to be kind about not offering one?