Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (10 page)

“This is brilliant,” I whispered. “A breakthrough at last. I know this is going to clarify everything.”

“Don’t go all bipolar on me, Morag,” he said. “One minute we’re all doomed. The next minute we’re all saved. It gets confusing. This is a hard drive from a laptop, and it’s had a rough time. See the dent in this end? Pried out in a hurry, maybe with a knife. Broke the power connector.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Power connector’s a piece of cake. The memory itself, who knows? Laptop hard drives are crap to start with. This one’s been in a Turkish crevasse, an Armenian washing machine, and the international mail system.”

He picked up the soldering iron and a pair of tweezers. “Daniel, hold this end steady for me with your fingertips. That’s right.”

Complete silence. It was like observing heart surgery. When he was satisfied with the new contact, he used a magnifier to examine the whole drive.

“Daniel, do you know what this drive is? Whose it is? Where it’s from?”

It was probably seventy degrees in the Eislers’ kitchen, but you’d zipped the jacket all the way to your chin, as if not having the hard drive in the pocket made you even colder. “Numbers,” you said, shaking your head.

“What numbers, Daniel?”

“Numbers.”

“Why didn’t you tell us about it before?”

You raised your eyebrows as if to say,
You didn’t ask
.

“This must have been Bill’s. Yes?”

But you shook your head. “Mayo.”

“Scheisse. Bill must have gotten it from him, and it’s been in that jacket pocket the whole time. Which means—”

Rosko sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling.

“What?”

“Do you write ‘√2’ on your own laptop’s hard drive? No, because the drive’s inside the laptop. So if this is from Mayo’s machine, and Bill took it out, then Bill wrote this.”

You were nodding. I couldn’t tell whether you were saying
Yes, that’s reasonable
or
Congrats, finally you got there
.

“And so this is a message to us from Bill,” I said. “See any other damage?”

“See, no. Which doesn’t mean a thing. But since I’m an optimist I’ll give it a ten percent chance.”

You reached out and stroked the top cover of the drive, the way you might stroke a small animal, letting one finger rest on the black symbols. It was as if you were saying,
Yes, this is my father’s writing.

“Mayo knew,” you said. “Eighteen twelve. Eighteen twelve.”

Rosko looked at you with a tolerant exasperation. “Daniel, my friend, this would be an excellent time to make sense. 1812 is a famous date, isn’t it? The Battle of Waterloo or something?”

“Eighteen twelve,” you repeated, more insistent this time, as if our hearing wasn’t good.

“Not Waterloo,” I said. “That was 1815. Wellington gets all the glory, but he’d have lost except that at the last minute von Blücher and the Prussians showed up—”

“Morag.”

“What?”

“Stick to the point, Morag.”

“Sorry. 1812. OK, yes, 1812 is—is—oh.”

“What?”

“Eighteen twelve isn’t a date. It’s two numbers, eighteen and twelve. We’re not talking battles. We’re talking a horseshoe of twelve symbols containing a spiral of eighteen more. It’s the structure of the Phaistos Disks. Daniel pointed it out to Bill. You were proud that you’d noticed what Bill missed, remember?”

There was a faint smile at the corner of your mouth.

“You do remember! Eighteen twelve.” I turned to Rosko again. “It will work, won’t it?”

He positioned the cover over the drive and started reinserting the tiny screws. “What’s that idiom in English about betting the farm? Don’t.”

“It will work,” you said. We both stopped and looked at you.

“It will work,” you said again. “But—”

Rosko raised one eyebrow. “Thanks for that, Daniel.” Then he held up the cover to me before starting to reattach it. “Root. Auf Deutsch heisst
root
‘Wurzel,’ oder? Vielleicht ist das ein Wortspiel?”

“A pun?”

“Ja. Yes. Like: the
root
in ‘√2’ is referring to the root of a plant, maybe. Or the root cause of something? The origin?”

We both thought about that. But
second root of a plant
and
second origin
didn’t make sense.

“
Root
has only two meanings I can think of,” I said. “It’s a noun, like in
The tree has shallow roots
and
Money is the root of all evil
. And it’s a verb, like in
The pig is rooting for food
and
He’s rooting for his team
. There’s nothing else, is there?”

“Root two,” you said in a harsh whisper. “Root two.” You’d turned pale, with small beads of sweat on your upper lip, and you were trembling with annoyance or frustration, as if this at least was vitally important. You took a sheet of printer paper, picked a stub of pencil from where you’d parked it behind your ear, and drew a simple thin line, like a degraded sine wave, that was clearly meant to be Ararat. Above that, a dark scribble that looked like nothing—except that I could tell right away it was meant to be the cloud from which the Architects had emerged. Then you mashed the pencil point down so hard that the point crumbled, and wrote a thick black “√2” inside the shape of the cone.

“Why Mayo was there,” you said again, looking at us as if you simply couldn’t understand how slow we were being. “Root two. Root. Two.”

Or, language being a tricky thing, that’s what I thought you said.

Rosko searched around in his box full of cables, found what he wanted, and hooked the drive up to my machine. Nothing happened. He raised his eyebrows in a resigned, told-you-so look, but unplugged it, poked at the connectors, and tried again. There was a faint, almost inaudible hum that stopped, started again, and made all our hearts skip a beat with a single high squeal,
eeeeeeeeeeee
. It sounded like a pig falling off a cliff.

“Great. So much for that,” I said.

“Patience, patience, patience.” He took the entire housing off again and cleaned the inside with compressed air. Moving so slowly that I wanted to scream, he clipped two wires and resoldered them. Finally he was ready to try again. And, impossibly, it worked. The names of sixty-eight files—I could have guessed that number—unpacked themselves across the screen:

Phaistos_original_a.tiff

Phaistos_original_b.tiff

Phaistos_calder_01a.tiff

Phaistos_calder_01b.tiff

Phaistos_calder_02a.tiff . . .

I couldn’t speak, so I pointed to the first one. When Rosko opened it, what swam up onto the screen like a pizza was one side of the first Phaistos Disk—the one Bill took you to see at the museum in Heraklion.

“Now open this one,” I said, picking another file at random near the end of the list. It was a Disk we’d never seen.

“Must be one of Cicero’s souvenirs,” Rosko said. “From the wreck.”

“Then we have all thirty-four known Disks here.”

He nodded. “Sixty-eight sides. Mayo must have had them, like he told you, and Bill managed to steal these images.”

“I can unpick the puzzle now,” I said. “I’m sure I can.” I was trying for total confidence, which was way more than I felt; it didn’t help that Rosko said nothing. I wanted to say,
What? What? Don’t you believe me?
I settled instead for “The first thing is to not lose any of this.”

“I can upload it all to—”

“No. Not the web. But make sure we have it safe. Save the files to something portable too. I should get down to work right away and—”

A door slammed, and I heard the beep of a car being locked. You were already standing at the window, as if you’d anticipated the noise. Rosko stood up and looked out over your shoulder. “It’s Ella. Driving a huge new truck. Toyota Testosterone, Chevy MegaHeavy, something like that.”

I looked out too. She had just climbed out and was adjusting a stretchy, horizontally striped black-and-white microskirt.

“She’s got a thing for you, Rosko. You do know that, don’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m serious. The hots, totally.”

He turned to the screen again. “This is a big job. Full manual count of the symbols, key in all the data, reconfigure the statistical app.”

“I should stay here, then. Get started.”

“Don’t do that. You need the break. We both need the break. And it’s a one-night thing—we’ll be back here tomorrow. Soon enough.”

“Bill looked for this material for ten years. Now I have it in my hands, and you want me to leave it?”

“For a few hours, yes. Come back to this rested.”

There was a bang on the screen door. “You guys ready to roll?”

I went to let her in. “Hi, Ella. Killer skirt.”

She used both hands to smooth it against her thighs, then adjusted her earrings, which were wooden
X
and
Y
Scrabble tiles. “I already picked up Kit for you.” She was speaking to me, but looking past me at Rosko. “Are you coming or not?”

Picked up Kit for you.
Was that merely an odd way to put it? A slip of the tongue? Or a carefully calibrated tease? Whatever: sure enough, Kit was stepping out of the truck on the far side of the street. She hadn’t seen me. She was standing under a cherry tree, right hand on left shoulder, stretching. Above her, a solitary scrap of cloud was glowing pink in a clear sky.

We had a full set of Disk images. A real breakthrough at last? Now maybe I could get somewhere? The right thing to do, obviously, was blow off the trip and get down to work without delay. And part of me wanted nothing more than that.

Part of me. But we all live with little hints of schizophrenia, don’t we? It was like two people squabbling inside my head. Left brain, right brain. Or sensible brain, insane brain.

The Disks!

The chance to get out of the Eislers’ house and be around Kit!

The Disks!

The chance—

“We’ve not even thought about food, or what clothes to bring, or camping gear,” Rosko said to Ella.

“Julia’s bringing food for an army. I have spare camping gear. How long will it take you to find a sleeping bag, warm clothes, and a toothbrush?”

I took a long look at the image on the screen. When I looked at Ella again, she was using an antique silver compact to adjust her jet-black lipstick. I felt weak and stupid for doing the wrong thing.

“Five minutes,” I said.

C
HAPTER
6

F
OOL FOR
L
OVE

It was an ordinary drive. A strange journey. A turning point.

For an hour, up into the mountains, we talked about everything and nothing. Ella seemed relaxed, even if she kept glancing sideways at Rosko. Rosko seemed no more troubled than usual and yawned frequently—friendly with Ella, but clueless about the attention he was getting. You were wary, twitchy, clutching Iona’s camera and shivering under a blanket even though it was a warm day; you stared out of the window, your eyes wide, like you were suffering from a combination of the flu and acute agoraphobia. From time to time you’d mutter fragments of sentences, and you began to calm down only when I handed you sunglasses and your sketch pad. You spent a long time drawing an odd series of pictures. They were shaky because of the truck’s movement, and each one was framed by a sketch of the back of a camera, as if you were drawing her viewpoint—magically recreating her missing shots. And sure enough: one of them, more elaborate and detailed than the others, showed a small clearing in a forest. It wasn’t a generic scene, but a real place: when I looked closer, I could identify the species of nearly every tree and shrub. A memory. Only, not your memory, because it was a place you’d never been.

“What is you think of this new planet thing?” Kit was asking Ella.

“We’re not going to see it—that’s for sure. Wrong side of the sky.”

“I mean, do you believe these stories about this is home to Architects or something?”

“Not a chance. If you look at the actual data, instead of the dip-wad journalism, for all we know S-8A could have sulfuric acid oceans. Or an atmosphere thinner than the Death Zone on Everest. Or enough gamma radiation to barbecue steel. Plus, it’s thirty-five light years away. With anything like our technology, that’s a round trip of three million years.”

“Maybe the Architects have better rockets,” Rosko said.

She shook her head. “If someone out there thinks thirty-five light years is no big deal, they’re not using rockets. Warp drives, wormholes, teleportation, who knows? The point is, if you’re commuting between stars, then you’ve invented something that makes the speed of light irrelevant. And if the speed of light’s irrelevant, distance is irrelevant. Thirty-five light years or thirty-five million light years, what’s the diff? They could have come here to show off their ‘Einstein Was Wrong’ tattoos from anywhere in the universe.”

“Anywhere,” you said, looking up from another sketch. “Or everywhere and nowhere.”

“What does that mean, Daniel?” Ella asked. She sounded irritated, as if she was convinced that you were incapable of anything except the occasional eruption of nonsense. “What does ‘everywhere and nowhere’ even mean? They’ve got to come from somewhere, right?”

But you might as well have been speaking to yourself. “Everywhere and nowhere,” you muttered to yourself; you were already busy drawing again.

We were all quiet as we came down out of the mountains into the gorge of the Columbia. Even for me, it was a comfortable quiet, for about half a minute. But I hadn’t thought through the trip. I mean, I knew Kit would probably be there, but I’d never planned to spend two hours sitting inches away from her in the back seat of a truck, parted from her by nothing but a thin, invisible, increasingly potent, and maybe lethal wall of electrical current. She used a Swiss Army knife to take slices out of an apple and offered me one on the tip of the blade. “Thanks,” I said, and discovered that my throat was so dry I could barely swallow. When she said a couple of ordinary, sensible things like “You want another slice?” or “Wow, look at wind farm over there” or “Tell me more about the Professor Partridge” I could only blush, stammer, and feel appalled that she looked and sounded so relaxed. I even got a curling paperback out of my bag—one she’d picked out for me, from one of those free libraries in the neighborhood (What did that mean, her giving me the book? Was it just a thoughtful, friendly gesture?)—and spent three minutes trying to read.

And another three at least pretending to try to read.

Fool for Love.
That was the title. Go on, laugh if you want. Ha bloody ha.

Train of thought—train of inner argument—with eyes pointed in the general direction of the page:

Kit’s relaxed because she knows how I feel. And she’s OK with it, so it’s not a big deal.

Oh, get a grip, Morag. If she’s guessed how you feel, then it’s a big deal either way. She’s relaxed because the thought of you being attracted to her has never, never entered her head, not even for a split second.

OK, you’re probably right; I’ve been misreading the signals.

No! That’s not the problem! The problem is there never have been any signals. None. You’re . . . what do they call it? Confabulating. Making stuff up. Constructing the emotional reality you need to believe in because the real emotional reality—that she’s not only not interested in you now, but never, ever could or will be—is too painful to think about. Am I right?

There’s no need to rub it in.

There’s plenty of need to rub it in. If you give away how you feel by some half-intended slip or look or gesture—which, let’s face it, is becoming more probable by the second right now as you sit there having your smiling panic attack—she’ll be horrified. Or maybe not horrified. Maybe she’ll think it’s funny. Interesting question there, Morag: Would you prefer to be an object of horror and loathing to the person you’re obsessed with? Or are you going for ridicule instead? Monster or clown? You decide! Well, no, that’s all part of the fun of being desperately, helplessly infatuated with someone, isn’t it—you don’t decide. You are powerless here, because she gets to decide in which of two different ways to make your life not worth living.

Should have stayed at the house, shouldn’t I?

Yes, you should have.

Should have stayed hunched over the computer, doing the necessary, important, boring stuff on which lives may depend, and which I’m good at, instead of trying to have an emotional life, which I suck at?

You got it.

But now I’m stuck here in this truck with her. Right next to her. And I can’t stand it, because all I want to do in the whole world is what I don’t have and never, ever in my whole pathetic life will have the courage to do. Which is tell her. Be open, and clear, and look at her and tell her. Just say the words.

Cowardice will serve you well here, Morag. Don’t do it.

Oh, shut up and sod off, will you? Just saying the words is all I want to do: “Kit, Kit. Listen to me. Listen, will you, for a minute? Because I know it sounds absurd, but I can’t help it. I have to tell you. See, the thing is, well how can I put this, whenever I look at you, or hear you speak, or smell your hair, I have this overwhelming, um, this wonderful, oh, words are so useless! This exhilarating, but at the same time unbearable—”

I threw the book back into my bag as we crossed the Columbia. When we crested the long rise on the other side, with the great river gorge behind us and farmland opening up to the east, I turned to my left to check on you, then looked back over my shoulder at the view.

Anything to break the spell.

Anything to take my mind off my own mind.

I put my left arm up along the back of the seat, where there was plenty of room for it, because you were scrunched into the corner, leaning on the door. I pivoted around in the seat, making a conscious effort to focus on what I was seeing and not on what I was feeling, and it was only natural after a minute or so for my right hand to offer me a little balance by dropping into the space on my right side, onto the seat.

The boring tan-colored seat.

Only, Kit had kicked off her shoes, as she always does. And tucked her legs underneath her, as she always does. And so my open palm came to rest—

Not on the tan-colored seat, but—

Not on the tan-colored cloth seat, a dead, dumb material object made in a factory in Taiwan or Tennessee, which had neither feelings of its own nor any emotional significance for me, but—

—instead—

—oh holy crap you’re an idiot, Morag, an idiot—

—across the smooth cream-colored arch of her naked foot.

Some absolute, hundred-proof madness surged up my arm and through my body and into my brain at that moment. There was an instinct in there, a strong one, to draw my hand away, to make things normal again, to take the world back a pace by offering a meaningless, polite apology, the way you do when you bang elbows with a stranger in a corridor.
Sorry! Invaded your personal space! Clumsy old me!
But the madness crushed that instinct; it was still there, a small terrified voice begging me to be sensible, to salvage things and get back to
before.
But I couldn’t act on its instruction.

I stopped breathing, I swear, the moment our skin made contact.

The inside of my palm fit so neatly over the curve of her foot. It liked being there. It wanted to stay there. So it did—rebelling against the shrill cry of reason.

I could feel the warmth radiating from her skin.

There was a violent roaring in my ears, like static. There was also, at the same time, a silence as absolute as the spaces between the stars.

I was running out of air. My vision was blurring. And despite all that, a strange calm descended on me, because it was too late now. I’d made my terrible, awful, shame-inducing mistake. She
knew
now. There was no way to take back my hand’s confession. I’d just have to wait for the world to fly apart and explode. Perhaps she would sit up, quietly remove her foot, and look out of the window with a blush of extreme discomfort on her cheek. Or perhaps instead she’d look at me in horror and say,
Fuck it is you are doing?

And let’s look on the dark side. (I was already looking on the dark side.) Perhaps she’d never speak to me again.

Hours passed. Whole monstrous endless seconds.

At the end of them, Kit’s foot was still mysteriously there, under my hand. And then, in a development that I could see with my own eyes but not in the least make sense of, she took her own left hand, which was resting on her knee, and picked it up and opened the palm as if to look at it, and turned it over again, splaying the fingers wide. And shifted it in my direction. And put it down again, very slowly and delicately and deliberately, so that it covered mine.

And Ella was leaning over to whisper something to Rosko. And a horse looked up at us from a sunlit field. And Rosko was saying something to Ella in reply; I knew he was, because he’d turned in his seat up front and maybe glanced back at us—I wasn’t sure of that, but I could see his lips moving, and oddly enough I couldn’t hear a thing.

I closed my eyes. I was shaking. I took two long, deep breaths, and turned to look at Kit’s hand, because it being there, on top of mine, was like a difficult theoretical proposition that I’d been told about by someone else and needed to confirm by collecting further evidence. Yes, no doubt about it: there it was. Kit’s hand on mine. I’d never taken in how slim her fingers were, or how neatly she kept her nails, or the fact that the thin silver ring she wore on her little finger was pitted and worn.

When I summoned up enough courage to look at her, it was as if I’d never once before seen those beautiful, hypnotic green irises, chocolate-colored at the rim and flecked radially from the center with bright ocher and jade and chestnut. I could see nothing else: it was like they were planets, filling my whole visual field. I had to look down at our hands again, look up again, force myself to mentally back away from her eyes so that I could take in her whole expression.

She was looking at me steadily and seriously, but with a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. She continued to hold my gaze, rock solid, and as she did so she ran her thumb in a slow diagonal line across the back of my hand.

“I think I’m going to faint,” I said.

“Is OK,” she whispered. “Is OK.”

All I could do was nod, and keep looking at her, and smile, and then stop smiling, and look down at our hands yet again. Then I touched the back of her hand with my other hand and maybe nodded some more and looked up at her and nodded again. I tried to smile again, too, I remember that, but the muscles in my face weren’t working right. So instead I touched my fingertips to my own cheek, and then to hers.

From somewhere in the far distance someone was saying my name.

It was Ella. “Morag,” she said again. “Oy, Morag.”

I glanced to the front and saw her looking back at me in the mirror. She was grinning from ear to ear, smug as a squirrel.

“What?”

“I don’t want to give you relationship advice or anything, honeybuns. But if you sit like that much longer, you’re going to get a wicked crick in the neck.”

It was meant to be funny. It was funny—I could see that. So could Kit, who squeezed my hand, glanced at Ella too, and turned back to me with a huge, gorgeous, blinding megawatt smile.