Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (28 page)

“So you won’t take us?” I said it in English, without thinking, but I didn’t get a chance to translate, because he still wasn’t finished.

I had dreams, Morrrg. Dreams about you returning with a tall thin man who was your brother but did not look like you.

He put his hand out and grabbed you hard around the arm.

This man. In my dreams, he went to the I’iwa also, and found the volcano. And in the dream it was right for him to go, and to take you with him to the I’iwa, because the I’iwa wanted him, and needed him, and helped him.

He broke off and spoke to Isbet in a low whisper.

“Esumek ku, tem timal ka,” she said to me. “I’iwa-nok.”
My father says we will go with you.

I could tell Oma didn’t want to go; his dream had simply persuaded him that it was the right thing to take a risk in order to help Daniel.

“Will you be frightened?” I asked.

We will go with you,
she repeated, managing to sound brave and decisive without answering the question. As it happened, though, going to the I’iwa wasn’t quite Oma’s or Isbet’s decision to make.

C
HAPTER
19

A D
EAD
M
AN WITH A
R
UINED
F
ACE

A damp night in the abandoned church. Jimmy and Lorna were snoring in minutes, and Kit soon after, but you sat in a corner, fidgeting and not even pretending to sleep. I lay half-awake until a snake fell from the rafters onto my sleeping bag; after that, I lay fully awake. By dawn we were huddled outside around a fire I’d made—lots of smoke, no detectable heat. Then Jimmy came out and put together a delicious breakfast of cold purple snot, otherwise known as taro. Lorna and Kit emerged, both rubbing their arms and looking as if they needed to try the whole sleep thing again in a real bed. “I love New Guinea,” Lorna said. “But either I’m gettin’ old or I’d forgotten how amazingly uncomfortable it is.”

You ate a few bites, once again looking faintly puzzled by the idea of eating, or the idea of flavor, then got up and started pacing the perimeter of the village, wringing your hands and peering into the forest. As the sun came up over the trees, light began to leak across the clearing like pale floodwater. It was a peaceful scene, but not one I had the heart to enjoy much; I felt as anxious as you looked, and I was losing an argument.

“We should leave this morning,” I said, brandishing one of your drawings. “Daniel needs to find the I’iwa, that’s clear. What are we waiting for?”

“Is too dangerous,” Kit said, ganging up with Jimmy and Lorna. “Kurtz is disappeared, and this group of Seraphim not returned? We need more information.”

You’d drifted back to us, and you were standing behind her. “He’s back,” you said. “He will take us.” Not a contribution to the discussion; again, a bare statement of fact.

“Who’s back?” Lorna asked.

You turned away and looked toward the trees, raising one arm and pointing west at trees that were already bright yellow in the first direct sunlight. Dog sniffed at you, made a querying
wuuh
sound as if to say
Are you sure?
and loped away to stand there with its tail in the air. After staring into the undergrowth for a few seconds it began a high, quavering howl that contained three or four cracked notes at once,
aaa-rrrr-ooo-uuu-rrrr
, like a malfunctioning ambulance siren. The effect on the Tainu was certainly like a siren. Several of the younger men appeared from nowhere and ran over to a spot just behind where Dog was standing. When they raised their bows, there was a flash of white at the points of the arrows.

“Bone tips,” I said. I’d hardly ever seen them, but Oma had once explained them to me, in a disturbingly offhand way: you could hunt wild pigs and cuscus and tree kangaroos using hardened bamboo, but a bone arrowhead was more difficult to make and was reserved for the special task of killing people. Groups of women and children had been gathering around other fires, but the women knew what the bone arrow tips meant too, and they were backing the children away to the far margin of the clearing on the other side of the village, readying themselves to melt into the forest. Everything became still, like a painting. Even Dog managed to continue its eerie tune without visibly moving.

There was a crackling tension in the air, but it went on for a minute, then two, then three, and I began to think it was a false alarm. You knelt down beside Dog as if to whisper something; it gave an affronted
ooo-uuh
and fell silent. You stood again and turned to face the trees.

There was a crash-crash-crash in the undergrowth.

More silence.

Crash-crash-crash.

More silence.

And then a figure staggered into the clearing, swinging a black stick from side to side, low down, like a crude machete. A figure straight out of a horror movie.

Kurtz?
That was what I thought.

The camo gear was caked with mud. Most of him was caked with mud. A fist-sized crust of dried blood was visible on his abdomen, under the open front of his shirt. Then he turned toward us.

Ruined face
was right. His left eye was gone. His left ear looked like a fried mushroom, thick and shriveled and black. And the whole left side of his head was a crusted plain of red scar tissue. It looked like the throat of a lizard. Like a handbag shredded by a knife. Like a nineteenth-century astronomer’s map of Mars.

The deformities, or injuries, were ghoulish and frightening. But the scariest thing of all was his surviving eye. It fixed on me, fiercely. Then it jumped around all over the landscape before fixing on me again. It looked like a small enraged animal in a trap. It was full of an energy and a desperation bordering on madness.

“Dru,” I shouted to the men. “Ena i’bek’em.”
No. Don’t fire your arrows.

The Tainu men weren’t inclined to take my advice about how to protect their village. You were directly in front of them, but the arrows stayed notched, the strings taut. You shook your head, apparently fearless, and walked over to him. The bone tips of the arrows tracked you both as you came toward us.

The “stick” he’d been using to bushwhack through the undergrowth wasn’t a stick. It was a fancy, modern, high-end military carbine. It seemed like an odd piece of gear for a missionary. And it wasn’t until he spoke that I realized my mistake.

He looked so strange, so radically different, that I expected him to sound different—an insane cackle maybe, or a gravelly drawl suitable for someone back from the dead. The damage to his face had given him a lisp, but the accent was unchanged: educated Oz, rubbed smooth like a stone by large American universities. And, despite the derelict look and the mad eye, there was something instantly recognizable about his tone.

“Hello, Morag,” he said. “What an excellent surprise. I wondered if you’d catch up with me eventually, and I have to say it’s most fortunate that you have. Daniel too, eh, and Yekaterina Cerenkov? You must be Jimmy and Lorna Chen, the archaeologists? Mother not here, Yekaterina? A pity. Knowing her research, she’d especially enjoy hearing of my adventures.”

David Maynard Jones. A dead man with a ruined face.

“So, ye really are alive,” Lorna said. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

He turned around to slough off a small backpack; it had what looked like a hiking pole sticking up out of it. The carbine, now held correctly, remained in his hand. “Yes, as a matter of fact, you will be damned,” he said. “No one but the Babblers have any chance of surviving what the Architects have in store for us. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First things first. I’ve been lost in the mountains with not much but this fancy fire-stick and the clothes on my back, and I’ve had nothing to eat in the last two days except some river snails, a giant rat that I more or less blew to pieces, and one impressively large tarantula. Could I trouble you for some real food?”

Jimmy handed him sago bread, a water bottle, and half a roasted breadfruit. He put the gun on the ground, squatting just outside our circle, and chewed hungrily for a while. Three mosquitoes landed on his forehead in a line and began to swell pinkly, like fat men at a bar, but either he didn’t notice or he was beyond caring. I wanted to say something profound, but all I could manage was “How the
hell
did you do it?”

“
Hell
is right, Morag, I assure you. How did I survive the eruption? I’ll tell you: in the space of an hour, I used up several lifetimes of the purest, highest-quality luck. Bill Calder didn’t have so much of it. A pity, that. I thought I’d make him my partner, that he’d be intelligent enough to understand what I was offering him and what failure would mean. ‘Bill,’ I said, ‘we’re not talking about a better life, or some trivial advances in knowledge. We’re talking about zero versus infinity. Eternity in the dark versus eternity in the light.’ But he didn’t get it. Or didn’t believe it.”

“Or he did get it,” Lorna said, “but he didn’t want ye to be in control of that knowledge.”

Mayo didn’t even turn her way; he continued talking to me as if no one else was there.

“Bill died when we fell into the crevasse. I was stuck on a ledge just below the lip. His body was twenty feet below me, like a broken doll. Head smashed open. All those high-quality brains spilled out like—well, never mind the details. I managed to wedge myself into a crack in the ice and get out. But the bloody helicopter was just taking off.”

You nodded, as if agreeing with his description. “Angry. Certain death. Immortality taken away.”

He put his head to one side and looked at you, puzzled and fascinated by what you’d said. Me too. But he continued with the story:

“It was hidden in the smoke, and I ran toward the sound. But the lava flow was barring my way. Actually, the lava was hidden in the smoke too, and I came within a split second of running directly into it. Instead I ran into a wall of thousand-degree air. It didn’t feel like heat. It felt as if someone had come along with a sharp knife and sliced off one side of my body. Another two seconds, and I’d’ve lit up like a lamp wick, burned alive without the lava even touching me. But I managed to turn and throw myself in the opposite direction. I was blinded by the heat, stumbling across the snow, and miraculously I fell down what must have been a thousand-foot snow chute. Also miraculously, I avoided breaking my legs or colliding headfirst with anything. And then there was a delay before the big energy transfer and the main eruption, and even with bad burns and one eye gone I managed to get far enough away. Which wouldn’t have helped, except that I was on the north side, and the eruption was focused in the opposite direction. Even so I ended up wading for miles through thigh-deep ash and nearly choked to death.”

“Several lifetimes of luck,” Jimmy echoed. “But your mission to discover the truth about the Seraphim was a failure.”

“The Seraphim are lemmings, following their leaders over a cliff. Just like so many people down the ages before them. Seems obvious to me—if someone says, ‘God has your best interests at heart, so do what he says,’ isn’t just a little skepticism warranted? Sure, anyone who can successfully pretend to be a god must have some tricks up their sleeve. But then the next question is, what are those tricks, how do they work, and how do I steal them? My goal wasn’t to understand what happens to the Seraphim. It was to understand how the Architects became Architects.”

“But why did you even believe they existed?” I asked. “Before Ararat, I mean. Why, if the Seraphim were just another religion, did you think their ‘gods’ were worth investigating?”

He looked at me, smirking, as if he was enjoying not telling me. As if waiting for me to beg, or say something more. Out of frustration, I did.

“I already know it was something Iona said. I’ve seen your notes.
Iona’s thesis
, you called it?”

He popped a hunk of breadfruit into his mouth and sat looking at us each in turn, but again it was me his eye settled on. I had the sense that Jimmy, Lorna, and Kit were mere specimens to him, irrelevances. You puzzled and interested him, as you had never done before: with the sole exception of Iona, he’d looked down on people who weren’t Babblers. But I was the one whose attention he wanted now; I could tell he was sizing up whether I ought to know, or whether he was ready to tell me. I wanted to urge him to go on, but you distracted us both, digging with your fingernails in the soil and breathing like you’d just finished a marathon. You cleared an area the size of a dinner plate, and your eyes were darting back and forth between me and the ground.

You smoothed the broken soil, then took a stick and scratched a semicircular arc like a bowl, and wrote “√1” at one end of the arc and “√2” at the other. Mayo looked at you with renewed curiosity. “Not as slow as I thought, your brother. Either that, or he is slow but he learned something awfully special up on Ararat. Meaning of life, right there. Meaning of life and meaning of death.”

Lorna pointed to his chest. “Ye’d do well to get that cleaned up, I’d say. Yer not goin’ to discover the secret of life an’ death if ye die o’ gangrene poisonin’.”

He pulled open one side of his shirt to show us the wound. “That, Dr. Chen, is something far more remarkable than it looks. But don’t worry. Antibiotics were one thing I did have with me. I’m not going to die.”

“How did it happen, then?”

He pulled the “hiking pole” from the backpack and passed it to me. The Tainu men behind us gasped and started whispering to each other.

It was a short wooden spear. The shaft was thick and uneven, made from a roughly cleaned branch. But the tip, lashed to the branch with a piece of vine, was a sliver of knapped stone so elegant and symmetrical that it looked like something produced on a machine. Each of the three sides was a long, slightly concave triangle. Each long side was razor sharp. The point was like a needle.

“This was thrown at me from thirty feet away, aimed at my heart. I twisted sideways at the last moment, so it only took a chunk out of me.”

“That’s completely unlike anything local,” Jimmy said.

Mayo grinned and got to his feet again. “Oh, but it is local. Way more local than these people.” He indicated the men behind us.

“I’iwa,” you said.

“I’iwa. They ambushed us as we were making our way out of what I absolutely guarantee is the strangest cave system in the world.”

He paused, scratching himself, and grinned at us. The grin was lopsided because of the scar tissue. It made him look even more demonic.

“Bill Calder was a bright bloke,” he said, “but he had an underdeveloped imagination. He’d grown up on stories about ancient languages, so naturally he thought he’d found another one, and his big ambition was to unlock it. A footnote in the history books! I suppose that’s a cheap sort of immortality, isn’t it? Not so bad, if it’s all you can afford.”

I wanted to throw a rock at him for talking about Bill’s ambitions, and mine, in that way. To keep myself quiet, I dug my fingernails into my arm—and then realized it was Kit’s arm. She detached my fingers, then held on to them.

“And you lot, you’re bright too, but you also lack imagination, because your wildest idea about the I’iwa is that if they’re not ghosts, they must be another ‘lost tribe.’ How exciting that would be—thought we’d found the last of those a long time back. The Hagahai, the Fayu, the Liawep, then the Tainu. But no, here’s one more ‘primitive’ group left for us to prod, and document, and open up to the tender mercies of the religious fundamentalists and the mining companies. What fun! But, oh dear, oh dear, reality is so very far ahead of you.”