by Richard Farr
As he struggled to keep up with Dog, gray parrots cried out as if encouraging him, and giant iridescent butterflies, so blue that they looked like pages torn from the sky, fluttered down through the tree canopy and swam forward through the warm watery air, leading the way. He was bruised, his head ached, and he was thirsty. Small flies kept biting him on the face and neck, and the bites were sharp, with an electrical suddenness like wasp stings. But all his body’s discomforts had the feel of something being reported to him. They were like rumors of bad news in a distant country.
Daniel came to a small precipice, and the trees thinned. Stepping forward, he saw that he was on the rim of a large, bowl-shaped depression perhaps half a mile wide and two hundred feet deep. The sides of the bowl were unbroken green forest, and briefly his eyes tricked him into thinking there was a steaming lake in the middle. But the steam on the water was not steam, and the perfect circular blackness at the center of the depression was not water.
He knew at once that he’d been there before, or that some part of his mind (or some part of some mind?) had been there before—and for the first time, right there on the lip of the depression, he was able to grapple briefly with the implications of that thought.
At Ararat he had seen the bright white thing Traditionals liked to call “heaven.” The thing Quinn had called “the infinite.” He didn’t understand it, but he understood enough to know both that it was real—that those who dismissed it were wrong—and that those who believed in it were completely wrong too about what kind of thing it was. Not a place, unless that word was just a metaphor to help the mind grasp something ungraspable. And nothing to do with God, or even strictly speaking an afterlife. It was, simply, everything. A landscape of unimaginable size built from every thought ever thought, every feeling ever felt, in the present, the past, and the future.
He had seen the future, he thought. Fires. War. Panic. A wide stretch of ocean, covered as far as the eye could see with floating bodies. A tiny Japanese man with a rumpled sweater and round steel glasses, pruning roses in a sunlit garden, who smiled up at him and said, “No, no, Daniel. When I say ‘zombie,’ I don’t mean that kind of thing at all! I’m afraid it’s more disturbing than that.” A memory of the future, was that really possible? And shouldn’t he have known, in that case, about Morag falling into the river?
Iona had said something about this once. “Kurt Gödel,” she’d said, showing him an old black-and-white picture that looked like a homeless man. “Mathematician. Crazy as a loon. He and Einstein were big buddies, in their last years. While they were doddering around Princeton one day, discussing time travel, Gödel said, ‘If we can travel to other times, then other times aren’t times. They’re places. In which case time itself, as we understand it, doesn’t exist.’”
Dog growled, and Daniel shook his mother’s voice from his head, forcing himself to focus on the bizarre scene in front of him.
Volcano.
Something had prompted him to expect it, here in these mountains, but the image he’d attached to the idea was cobbled together from cartoons of volcanoes and old paintings of Vesuvius roaring to life above doomed Pompeiians, and real memories that he hadn’t even known were his memories from Ararat. The reality in front of him was nothing like any of these things, and he’d done enough caving to know that this wasn’t a real volcano at all. The strange dark O in the floor of the little valley was a doline—a hole in the ground that was the vertical entrance to a cave system. Yet there was the thick, pungent gray-white smoke drifting up from it—and something in him kept saying volcano.
It was impossible to see down into it. Even with the sun high in the sky, the combination of shadow and smoke obscured whatever was below. And Dog merely sniffed and then ignored it, hurrying around one side of the rim before melting like butter into the forest again. But Daniel knew this meant something, knew this place was the very center of what everything meant, and he was so magnetically drawn to it that he experienced an odd tremor of fear: Might he, if he came too close, throw himself over the edge into the darkness?
Luckily Dog was calling to him, and he knew he must follow, and soon afterward it found another entrance. It had gone far ahead, at least a mile, and hadn’t returned. Daniel was anxious again. Then he found it, sitting by a small dark archway, quiet and alert like a fur-coated doorman.
As he stepped toward the archway, he heard his mother again. Yes. Yes. You’re going to be all right now. Just don’t give up.
The sunlight cut through the trees all around him: gold knives on a green velvet cloth. Another of the huge blue butterflies flexed its wings on a branch nearby. Dog looked at him expectantly, its black eyes catching two bright stars of light.
All these things that I see around me are also in me, Daniel thought, feasting his own eyes on the scene. But he was being drawn toward, and needed, whatever was on the other side of the dark cleft in the rock. And he sensed that he would not see any of what was around him—none of the bright colors, and not even the sunlight itself—for a long time.
The I’iwa knew he was there. A group of them had tracked him all the way, and they let him enter the cave system, the place that was the center of their universe. They weren’t worried—on the contrary, they were overjoyed that they’d fended off the threats and that at last he had come to them. But they watched him and didn’t help. Even after he had gone into the darkness and had to rely more than ever on the animal’s senses, they waited and watched, trying to make his way easier but unwilling to show themselves further until his mind was ready.
They had learned patience the hard way: by waiting. For fifty-seven thousand, one hundred and thirty-three suns, they had waited in these caves. It was a span they had recorded meticulously—and, though the details were less clear before that, their history went back even longer, to the time when their remotest ancestors had lived in the open, always on the move and always about to die, surviving the seemingly boundless time of the Migration.
Seven hundred centuries.
Three thousand generations.
But those were terms from another species, another civilization, and another set of priorities. After the Origin was how they thought of it. In any vocabulary, it was a long time, and all these unimaginable eons, they had kept their own survival secret, kept this place of their survival secret, and kept their skills and their calculations secret—all so that they would be here when the legends said that the tall pale boy and the short dark girl would come.
For sure, there was urgency now, and no time to waste—they knew that the special urgency of now was what had carried him here. But they steeled themselves not to interfere. Perhaps he could sense their presence and wondered why they didn’t help him—or wondered why they didn’t harm him? The legends were silent on that. But they were clear on one thing. Because he had encountered the Architects and been damaged—and because the damage itself had rendered him special—it was necessary for him to find the place for himself. Only then could they discover whether he had brought them what they needed. Only then could they begin to offer the help for which they had spent all the long centuries preparing.
Daniel did sense their presence, dimly, did connect them with the lamps he found burning and the piles of food that were left out for him, but at first he ignored them. The caves and tunnels were what they were: he accepted them as normal. Even after he entered an area of larger galleries and caverns, shaped and smoothed and with all kinds of niches, walls, and stairways, he didn’t think it strange at first. He was like a child still: everything was what it was, and his mind offered him nothing to compare it with. But something was shifting, deep inside him. He was beginning to see his own internal picture at last.
It was like watching dawn break over the dark jumbled landscape that, all this time, had been his own mind. Instead of merely noticing that certain experiences clung to the tastes, smells, and sights of the I’iwa’s subterranean home, he understood that they all clustered around one center. A subject, a self.
And that this self was a ragged, restitched, but recognizable version of the person he had once been.
A more powerful version too, with more knowledge and more will.
“Daniel,” he said quietly in one of these spaces.
And then much louder: “Daniel. That is my name, the name I was given by my parents, seventeen years ago when I was born. My name is Daniel Calder.”
Finally, with a great struggle, as if heaving a stone up from a deep place of burial, he almost shouted it: “I am Daniel Calder.”
The strangeness of the place became clear to him then. He wasn’t in a cave system; he was in a cave system that had been turned into an underground city. The phrase itself triggered another memory of his father, who had taken him to Derinkuyu, the underground city in Turkey—a more astounding structure than anything he’d ever seen above ground. It had been carved out of volcanic rock just like this, thirty or thirty-five centuries ago, by people with stone and wood and maybe bronze in their hands, and it was capable of housing thousands. This, the home of the I’iwa, was the same idea, only bigger, older, and more elaborate.
In one of the pools of lamplight, he put down Jimmy’s backpack and examined its contents. Space blanket, multi-tool, compass, three energy bars, the ridiculous avalanche beacon, a small flashlight. He wanted to save the flashlight for emergencies, but he turned it on briefly so that he could examine more closely the food they’d left. There were pale roots, like carrots only thinner and longer, that didn’t taste of much. There was a spongy green moss, with an intense peppery taste that brought back another memory: making a sandwich at a familiar kitchen counter and completing it by adding chopped arugula. A favorite flavor—but what did favorite mean? He had to chase the word around for a moment, like a small animal that wouldn’t stay still until cornered, before he could see that it meant he had liked the flavor.
He. I. He. Me. My.
In that kitchen, a woman at the table was holding a big mug of tea and a book. Iona Maclean. My mother. The idea was still slippery, but it was there.
He couldn’t identify the third type of food the I’iwa left. It had a strong smell, somewhere between salami and strong blue cheese, and at first he refused to eat it. Dog ate it with relish. It was the only thing Dog would eat. Daniel discovered soon enough that it tasted good, like beef jerky mixed with fruit.
He never did find out what the roots were, or the moss. But the mystery of the beef jerky was solved in a long, downward-sloping hallway in which the floor, which until now had been increasingly smooth and neat, was carpeted with tiny bones. Each bone had been cleaned meticulously. Not a scrap of flesh remained. Another memory: the smallest bones were like a Victorian toothpick, made from walrus ivory, that his father had once shown him in a museum in England.
A carved oval fissure divided the tunnel from a cave beyond—a genuine cave, this, not shaped and honed like the spaces around it. The upper half was blocked by a net that had been woven from fine strands of vine, and long black thorns from another plant had been incorporated cleverly into the weave, so that the needle-sharp tips stuck out at all angles. He detached a papery scrap of material from one of the thorns. It felt as fragile as it looked, like charred paper. It was the material out of which the I’iwa had made their skirts.
He took one of the bone lamps and ducked under the net. There was a sound like whispering. The chamber was low, only ten or fifteen feet for the most part, so the rock roof over his head was easily visible. It didn’t look like rock, though. It rippled, as if it was coated in a layer of oil or melting rubber.
For a moment he was reminded of the sky above Ararat. But there were no Architects here. He was looking at the I’iwa’s source of protein. For who knew how long, they’d been farming here. Farming and eating millions and millions of bats.
The I’iwa had heard Daniel calling his own name, but they attached no special significance to it, having given up spoken language near the very beginning. It had been their way, one way, of protecting themselves from the Architects. Hiding themselves. Camouflaging their very minds from the predatory beings who had come down from the sky and made them what they were, so long ago.
They waited and watched, and, still for a little longer, they waited. Dog began to move faster, whiffling and snorting and looking back to make Daniel hurry, which was hard to do because hurrying made the lamp in his hand flicker. But he tried to hurry because he could tell that Dog had picked something up—that its sensitive nose had discovered, and identified, a one-part-per-billion trace of some organic molecule that didn’t belong to the caves, or the bats, or the I’iwa. A molecule that stood out like a sunlit snake in the darkness.
At last, when they had reached the lowest level, Dog began to pant uncontrollably, and at the same time Daniel became fully conscious of being in the I’iwa’s presence.
Or: he became fully conscious of his own being, in their presence.
When they judged that he was ready, they stepped forward to greet him.
No spears—their hands were empty. The one nearest him had a tattoo that was simply a thick diagonal slash from shoulder to hip. Stripe, Daniel thought, and Stripe became that I’iwa’s name.
Stripe went down on one knee and in a very natural gesture held out the back of his hand. Dog sniffed warily, licked at the pale hand experimentally, and then tossed its muzzle to the left, making a muh-uuh noise. Daniel had a hallucinatory sense that it had spoken to him in English: Here. In here. Come on. And Dog wasn’t mistaken—they had come to the right place. Just a few paces beyond where they had stopped was the octagonal room where Morag lay on her bed of moss like an Elizabethan effigy.
“Morag,” he said, kneeling beside her.
One of the I’iwa held a lamp close to her face. In a small current of air, its light flickered over her like the wings of a yellow moth.
“Morag. Can you hear me? Morag? It’s Daniel. I’m Daniel. I came to find you.”
Or it’s not Daniel, he thought. Because the old Daniel Calder, at a moment like this, would have been racked with anguish, seeing her there and not knowing the future. But this Daniel Calder knew, with complete confidence, one more thing he couldn’t possibly know.
“Morag. You’re going to be OK. Wake up. It’s me. You’re going to be OK.”
She was absolutely still. Even when he stared at her hands, which were folded over her stomach, it was impossible to see any movement. And yet he knew she was alive. He knew she would come back to him.
He sensed that the I’iwa in the room had been looking at her too, almost willing her to wake up, but that their attention had shifted back to him, as if they expected him to perform some specific act. He looked at them, and then back at Morag, puzzled. But then he got it. He leaned back from her makeshift bed, reached into the scuffed and muddied backpack, and brought out the blue binder he’d taken from Rosko.
“Here,” he said out loud, because he didn’t know how to speak to them yet. “This is for you.”
One of the I’iwa took it, closed its eyes as if it was about to faint, and then looked at the others and hurried away.
It was hard for him to know how long she lay there. The I’iwa were meticulous record-keepers, but they were used to thinking either in moments or in eons. They paid a kind of reverend attention to individual experiences, as if whole lifetimes were contained within them, but they also treated years and decades as if they were nothing. In between, the markers of time that humans were so concerned about—hours, days, weeks, and months—seemed to have no meaning for them.
He tried to keep track of the days at first. But, either because it was impossible anyway, or because of the I’iwa’s subtle, powerful influence on his mind, he quickly gave up. He thought of those experiments where people volunteer to live in an “apartment” down a mineshaft, with no radio, no light, and no temperature change. It was like that: he knew that his body’s natural clock had stopped working. Perhaps he too was sleeping eighteen hours at a time, and then staying awake for fort
y.
Certainly he and Dog spent whole days by Morag’s side, and he slept with Dog curled next to him, on a second heap of moss in the same room—the I’iwa seemed to have guessed that he would want that. But, once he had seen the care and attention with which they nursed her, there were long periods when he and Dog wandered.
He could almost have believed that the two of them were exploring at will, except that they always had a guide. There were things the I’iwa took him to and showed him; there were, he sensed, other things they were not yet prepared to show him. For miles, the galleries went on, and many were decorated with complex groupings of the tattoo symbols. Decorated: no, that was the wrong word. They were written, carefully, in precise and dizzyingly long lines. They looked like miles of binary code, or DNA, except that instead of two digits, or four letters, there were dozens of distinct signs, some of them vaguely familiar and some not, in groups of varying length.
Mathematicians, Mayo had said to Morag. The term had made something click in his mind, like a puzzle piece fitting into its place beside something his mother had said to him: David and his tribe think everything’s contained in science. That ultimately everything’s contained in physics. Your father’s another one. Oh, Daniel, they’re so nearly right! But they’re also wrong. The quantum world is a world of numbers, not things, and it’s numbers that count.
The little pun—it’s numbers that count—reminded him painfully of her, of the richness and depth of her personality and her love for him. It was terrible: a panoramic glimpse, as from a mountaintop, of the huge geography of his loss. But he could see that the capacity to experience this emotional pain was a good thing too: the capacity to feel that grief was all a part of his return to himself. And, perhaps only because he was thinking of her, he took it for granted that he was seeing on those walls the record of an unimaginably intricate calculation. The record of an attempt to fight back: of an attempt to break into the minds of the Architects themselves.