Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (17 page)

The light had changed, almost an hour had passed, and I became aware of Rosko and Kit standing behind us with mugs of tea. I hadn’t even heard them get up. “What you make of it, Rosko?” Kit asked. I couldn’t tell whether she was trying to help or subtly hinting that I should at least let them help.

“I’ve told Morag before,” he said. “I was there. And I don’t mean there at Ararat, there on the mountain. I mean, up there. With the Architects, while they were taking him. It only lasted a few moments, but—”

The words stopped as I turned back to look at him, but his hands carried on, making loops and shapes in the air as if gestures could succeed where language failed. I waited.

“I can only describe it by analogy. It felt like getting to a gate and being refused admission and watching Daniel step through the gate. Which probably makes it sound like the gates of heaven, but that’s not what I mean. It was like he passed through a barrier and was gone, and I couldn’t follow. By the way, the software just hung up at eighty-nine percent and shut down. I’m going to have to debug it and start again.”

“Shit!” I screamed the word, as loud as I could; if I’d had anything in my hands, I’d have broken it. Something about the intensity of my frustration must have reached through to you, because you actually put the camera down for a moment and turned and hugged me. “Can’t we go get a faster machine from somewhere?” I said over your shoulder.

“I was thinking that too,” Rosko said. “But I just looked at the error file, and I don’t think it’s the machine. It’s the software itself: there’s something about this data set that it’s not set up to handle. Give me time.”

“We don’t have time.”

I suppose that wasn’t very helpful. He threw a
you-deal-with-her
glance at Kit, and went back inside.

We did OK, sort of, for a day or two after that, but it wasn’t easy. We were like settlers, cast ashore in an unforgiving land—no phone service, no Net, and fifteen miles to the nearest grocery store: serious privation—so we tried extra hard to be nice to each other and succeeded some of the time. Rosko worked and worked at the keyboard, Kit gave him neck massages, and I stuck with you and tried not to bug him. Kit and Rosko found my focus on you and the photographs irritating, as if I was encouraging you in an unhealthy obsession, but they were polite about it. Rosko was irritated (but equally polite) when Kit attacked the kitchen like one of hell’s Furies, and, once it was clean, proudly made us a string of bad meals based on overcooked spaghetti, freeze-dried chili, and undercooked rice. Meanwhile Kit and I became irritated with Rosko as he grew more and more uncommunicative. He kept promising to be done “soon,” and during occasional breaks would wander off on his own to stare at the ocean.

“Are you OK?” I asked him when he had just returned. His hair was wild, his eyes distant.

“Me? Fine. Tired, that’s all.”

“Sure. Tired of not telling anyone else what you’re thinking.” The truth was, he’d been way more unsettled by his experience at Ararat than he’d ever let on, and had never really said much about what that experience was. Seraphim-curious now? Secretly half-convinced that “ascending to the Eternal” might be a good thing? I could have believed that.

I was feeling my own growing claustrophobia; after Kit made some not-bad curried-chicken sandwiches and we’d eaten them in a tense, uneasy silence, it was a relief when she got up from the table and said, “I need a walk too. On the beach, but with all of us together. Come on. Let’s check out one more time that place for cell you found.”

Rosko’s moody wandering had had one useful effect: he’d discovered a rocky point where it was possible to hold a phone in the air like a catcher’s mitt and catch maybe one bar. Canada lay across the strait like a gray battleship;
YOU ARE NOW ROAMING INTERNATIONALLY
,
the messages said. Which was funny, almost: I’d spent my whole life roaming internationally, and here I was stuck like dried food to the rim of the United States. Never mind: this time, at last, we each got something. For Kit, several rambling messages from Natazscha about dealing with Carl’s body and the police. For Rosko, updates from his parents about nothing in particular. And for me, a frustrating fragment of the message I’d been waiting for all these weeks:

ACROSS THE BORDER WITH THE OTHERS
. T
RYING TO GET FARTHER SOUTH
,
BUT WE CAN ONLY MOVE AT NIGHT
. W
E HOPE TO REACH

Border? Others? And hope to reach where? No idea—my attempts to reply got me no response beyond Unavailable and System Error.

We came down off the point and did another two or three miles along the beach—me and Rosko separately, you being gently pulled along by Kit’s hand. For an hour, none of us spoke. There were whitecaps on the strait like pills of wool on an old sweater. Lines of waves were coming in toward us at an angle to the beach, and the visibility was down to a mile or so: a bleak scene, with the surrounding world rubbed away. Eventually Rosko stopped to skim stones, and Kit stood a few paces back, her arm linked through yours, watching. There was a chill in the wind that made me want to keep moving, but I stood even farther back and didn’t say anything.

“Daniel,” Kit said, “you keep looking at the photographs from Iona in New Guinea. Why is? What happens in New Guinea?”

“He wasn’t even there,” I said. But she was right. You had the old Nikon in your hands even there on the beach, and at every spare moment you were shuffling through the images, as if the screen on the back was a window into a world you were trying to revisit. You’d linger over a shot, zoom in, and peer at the little screen as if examining every last pixel. Then you’d stare for five minutes at a blurred blowup of a stick, or someone’s knee, or a patch of mud. Thousands of images, stretching across ten years or more—but it was that one trip you kept coming back to, even though you’d been in Crete with Bill at the time.

It wasn’t getting any easier for me to look at pictures involving Jimmy and Lorna, and changing the subject was tempting. But for better or worse, you seemed to be forcing me to turn over my memories, and I knew that might help you to recover your own. I moved down to the water and tried, without success, to skim a stone.

“You need lower angle,” Kit said. Standing next to Rosko, she showed me how it was done. They competed for a couple of minutes. Five skips! Eight! Ten! She pushed him and laughed—which made him smile for the first time in a while—and I felt a pinch of jealousy about even that. Here was something easy, ordinary, and normal, something they were good at and could relax into doing together—and I (trying again) just didn’t have the knack.

Stupid, stupid, stupid emotions. But Kit canceled them, thankfully, by grabbing my wrists and kissing me. “Daniel can’t tell me about the trip, Majka,” she said. “You tell.”

So I did: everything from Lorna’s interest in the emergence of the first tools to trekking into the deep wilderness of the border territory and “discovering” the Tainu.

“They were, what you say, uncontacted? Until then?”

“Not quite. They’d traded with the lowland tribes in the Sepik River valley. And they’d already been ‘discovered’ by one other Westerner, a Baptist missionary named Kurtz. He’d taught them Tok Pisin along with his Bible stories and even baptized some of them. That’s why the kids I played with had names like Abel, Moses, and Natalis.”

“But this Kurtz, he already is gone when you show up—why?”

“Far as I could reconstruct, they kicked him out in disgust after he admitted that the ‘Jisas Kraist’ he kept talking about was someone he’d never met. You have to understand, for them it was like someone says,
My chief is bigger and stronger than your chief
, and they say,
So where is he?
, and you say,
Oh, he’s coming
, and then later you admit that he died two thousand years ago. It must’ve sounded like a bad joke.”

“But why they put up with crazy Chen family?”

“I don’t know. Because they didn’t know what to make of us? Because they were frightened of us too? They were certainly frightened of Lorna.”

“Frightened of your mother?” Rosko asked incredulously. “I know she swears like a trucker, but that’s hard to believe.”

“Aye, but they’d only ever seen one other Caucasian, and white freckled skin with strawberry-blond hair totally gave them the creeps. What broke the ice, what made it possible to win their trust, was my being able to pick up their language.”

“You must have been the first outsider to use it,” Rosko said.

“Kurtz must have tried. But Tain’iwa makes even Navajo look easy. All I know is, they were amazed by the idea that they could teach me their language. The idea that someone could go from not speaking to speaking was new to them, and they got a huge kick out of discovering they could teach me. They kept saying that by giving me Tain’iwa they were
ola-apan gok’iwa geswet ar-apan
—bringing me back from the dead.”

“You’re the only non-native speaker of Tain’iwa in the world, then?”

“Oxip’den di-amou, exip’den ki-amah.”

“Bless you.”

“It means ‘That which we think, so you will think.’
If we teach you our language, we can communicate our ideas to you.
Or maybe
feelings
is the right word.”

I was still holding the stone I’d picked up, so I leaned down and flipped it toward the water. It skipped twice, came to a halt, and seemed to pause for thought before going under. It reminded me of the boat at Antikythera, and I shuddered. Then I turned round and noticed that you were kneeling in the sand with a stick and had drawn a neat, perfect outline map of New Guinea. It even showed the Indonesian border, and the course of the Sepik River. With a decisive thrust, you placed the stick in the sand like a flagpole, right in the Tainu’s territory.

“The volcano,” you said. “Here.” Which was curious: the fact that the Tainu had insisted there was a volcano at the center of their territory—in a place where any geologist could have told you that was impossible—wasn’t a detail I recalled sharing with you.

“It’s a good map,” Rosko said. “By the way, Morag, how did you find out about the I’iwa? The Ghost People?”

“Well—”

Somewhere in the corner on my awareness there was a droning noise, like a low-flying plane. We were all looking down at your map. The drone grew closer. I was in the act of looking around for a plane when Kit grabbed my arm and screamed.

“Majka, look out!”

Too late.

Time did stop, briefly, just long enough for my mother to put her head round the door of my consciousness and say,
Morag, gurrl, I told ye, never stand wi’ your back to the water; sneaker waves, is what it’s called, aye, they come outta nowhere.

Maybe it was the long-delayed wake of a ship. Maybe it was just an unusual wave. But it was big—and as I watched it narrowed and reared higher still, like a cartoon cobra, a glossy gray tongue of muscle. I was aware of Kit at my side, holding my arm in both hands: she barely even got splashed. Rosko was two or three feet away, and barely a drop of water reached him. The cobra narrowed, reared, and lunged forward, hitting me at chest height, but the frothing cap surged right over my head, and I felt the cold invade my clothes—and my sinuses—even before I was slammed back onto the beach.

Afterward I knew I’d never been in any real danger, because Kit never let go. All the undertow did was drag half a kilo of sand into my clothes. I was still in the final backwash of the wave—vaguely thinking to myself,
Feelings, we were talking about feelings
—when, with a show of strength I thought you were no longer capable of, you waded in, scooped me up in your arms, and carried me up the beach to dry ground.

It was a long walk back to the cabin, and the shower was freezing misery. But it was followed by a dry towel, a clean bathrobe, and Rosko being a sweetie: he brought me an oversized mug of cocoa, with marshmallows floating on top, and looked shyly at me as if anxious to see whether the gesture was acceptable. While I sat there sipping it, you sketched me. I looked so pathetically sorry for myself that after I’d seen it—and Rosko reminded me that we’d been talking about the I’iwa—I made a conscious effort to sit up straight and put more light into my voice.