Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (18 page)

“I found out about the I’iwa because Kurtz and my mother were both pale-skinned freaks who didn’t speak Tain’iwa.”

“The Tainu thought the missionary and your mother were ghosts?”

“Not literally. But they didn’t have any other category in which to make sense of them, and white people already fit into their world view in a way they weren’t jumping up and down to share. Maybe it was a taboo about mentioning their ancestors: that’s common. They’d gesture up-valley with a shudder, and refuse to look in that direction, as if they were saying,
That’s where the ghosts live, not a place you ever want to go; let’s change the subject.
I only found out more when one of the women died.”

“She become ghost?” Kit said.

“Not that I saw. But the Tainu do a strange thing with their dead. OK, so every culture does strange things with the dead. We don’t like dead bodies, and we want to get rid of them—we want to get rid of the very idea of death—so we dress our corpses in fancy clothes and stick them six feet under. Or burn them. The Tainu do the opposite. They place the dead person in a sitting position, on a sort of wooden deck chair, and smoke it whole over a fire—”

“Then they eat corpse, are you going to tell me? Excuse me, I throw up. Sorry. Is becoming a habit.”

I have to admit, I was getting a small kick out of teasing Kit by grossing her out. “No, no. They do end up looking like extra-large beef jerky with teeth, but the point of smoking them is to preserve them—to keep them around.”

“And then what?”

“They’re placed on cliffs overlooking the valleys. And they just sit there, for months or even years, scaring away the tribe’s enemies.”

“Would be scaring the shitless of me,” Kit said.

“The thing is, the Tainu made it clear that this dead woman, who had to be smoked for over a week, was still a real person.
Embok dilu Tain’iwa
is what they said—still part of the language community of the Tainu. At least until the flesh has rotted away.”

“And the I’iwa?” Rosko asked. “Is that the next stage, after the body’s gone?”

“That was my guess too, at first, because the Tainu said they were pale, and didn’t speak, and were hard to see. In a culture full of witchcraft and sorcery, being worried about something like that didn’t seem strange, so ‘ghosts’ was the natural way to think of it. Though the I’iwa coming out at night to hunt pigs and steal sweet potatoes, that was odd.”

“So you began to think they might not be ancestors but a really, genuinely uncontacted tribe? Who paint their bodies with clay or something?”

“Crossed my mind. A tribe near Goroka does that.”

Speaking of ghosts, you’d been so silent that I’d almost forgotten you were there. But your reaction to what I’d said about the I’iwa reminded me to refocus. Your breath had quickened, and your eyes were flaring as if you were having a panic attack. You had the camera in your hands, of course, and in seconds you found a shot we’d looked at before: me with Jimmy and Lorna and our guides, standing on a chalky path in front of the tentacle roots of a pandanus tree.

“Who are these two?” Rosko asked. “Guides? But she’s a child.”

The sight of those two faces made me ache, almost as much as I was aching for Jimmy and Lorna. I’d missed them and thought about them and wondered about them ever since we left New Guinea. “Friends,” I said. “Good friends. This is Oma, the old headman, and his daughter, Isbet.
Homer
and
Elizabeth
, Josef Kurtz would have said. She was the same age as me.”

“You say he give Christian names,” Kit said. “But Homer is Greek poet, yah?”

“Homer was a blind storyteller. Oma was a good storyteller too, and he was going blind. He had cataracts.”

“He can’t have been much of a guide, then.”

“They were a team. Oma had a staggering mental map of the Tainu’s territory, like he could remember every path and gully for miles around. But he was learning to rely on Isbet’s eyes. Between the two of them, they could safely take you anywhere.”

You produced the New Guinea map you’d torn from the Eislers’ atlas.

“That’s right, Daniel,” Kit said. “New Guinea.” And to me: “He is trying to tell us something about this.”

“No shit,” I said—and immediately hated myself for sounding so dismissive.

What
were
you trying to tell us? That you remembered me talking about New Guinea and the I’iwa? That seeing the pictures from there reminded you of Iona, and made you miss her? That you now knew something about what she believed, and were trying to tell me what it was? I had no idea. Your dad used to say,
For any finite body of evidence, there are always infinitely many consistent theories.
Great.

“Talk to me, Daniel,” I said. “Talk to me, somehow. What is it you’re thinking?” But you only looked at me with what seemed, more than ever, to be a combination of frustration and pity. So I turned angrily to Rosko, who’d just walked out of the room and come back in again. “What about you? Why don’t you talk to me, Eisler? You, who’s been busy not saying what you really think ever since Ararat?”

Boy, I was becoming unpleasant. I was so angry that I managed the whole diatribe before I realized that he was holding his damned silly laptop with its screwed-up software in his hands.

He had every right to be angry right back at me. But his expression was one I couldn’t read. Exhaustion? Puzzlement? Affection, even? Pity?

“It’s finished,” he said, holding up the machine. “One hundred percent. And I’m prepared to talk now.”

C
HAPTER
12

W
HAT
R
AVEN
D
ID

“Morag,” he said, “I did try to tell you what I thought, right at the beginning, but you didn’t want to listen. I’ve been trying to accept that. I’ve even been trying to persuade myself that maybe I was wrong and you were right. But Ararat—”

“Yes?”

“Ararat was so strange, so far outside of anything else in my experience, that it’s almost impossible to put into words. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a clear picture in my mind. They took Daniel. Whatever happens to people afterward—‘up there,’ I mean, in the realm of the Whatever—the Architects take the conscious experiences stored in our minds as their raw material. Do they install our memories in their own minds? Do they just consume them like cookies? I don’t know. But they take them, and they took Daniel’s. Sure, he’s not a complete Mystery—in other words, the process was interrupted, and they didn’t take everything. That’s why he has some language left, plus these random obsessions like Iona, and the fires, and New Guinea. Those things make it look to you like he’s got some important clue to communicate. But there’s no reason to think that. They’re fragments, like pieces of a dream. Or the things shamans say when they’re five miles high on peyote.”

Kit could probably see that I was about to boil over. I was—I felt completely betrayed. To change the subject, she jerked her head toward the computer. “What about this? Famous Disks you and Majka are wanting to understand. Anything?”

“That’s the other piece of bad news. The other part I’ve been suspecting, but not quite admitting to myself. Morag, you said a long time ago that you doubted Bill’s analysis.”

“What about it?”

“You said he’d never looked beyond the assumption that it was an ancient language, something
spoken
by the ancient Minoans or the Therans. And maybe he was wrong; maybe it wasn’t a language, but something else.”

All that was true, but I was feeling too resentful, too angry about his pessimism, to even nod.

“Well,” he said, “the statistical analysis shows—it shows—” He stopped again, blew out a long breath, and looked at you. Then he closed the laptop. “Let me tell you a story.”

“They brought me to ISOC because I was a Babbler,” he said. “Just like you are, Morag. When I first got there, the linguists were interested in assessing my learning speed. So they gave me the toughest language they could think of, then checked me out under the scanner twice a week.”

“What they throw at you?” Kit asked. “Something Asian, I am betting. Vietnamese?”

“Good guess. They started with Korean, and that resulted in at least one published research paper on the growth of my neural kudzu under learning stress. But even Korean was too easy for the ISOC sadists. They found an old Canadian First Nations guy from way up the coast. Albert. I never did get a last name. He spoke Nuxalk—
Nu-haug-wlk
. It’s a language on the verge of extinction from a valley in British Columbia. A totally alien set of phonemes, and some of the words have no vowels, which makes it impossible even to say how many syllables they have. It might as well be a language from another planet.”

I was determined not to participate in the conversation, and I’d snuck over to your chair and was hugging you, my face pressed against your chest, unsure which of us was comforting which. But I was listening to every word.

“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—