Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (32 page)

That should have been the end for David Maynard Jones. But, like Gilgamesh, he hadn’t planned to die, not ever, and he made it very clear that he didn’t plan to die now. With his good arm he grabbed me to him. Kit was swinging a punch at him, but he managed to swing the butt of the gun around. It caught her with an audible crack in the side of her head.

I turned and saw her go down. You seemed to know something was wrong, at last, and launched yourself toward us. I heard Isbet cry out—“Oda’xin ga’iwa jam’eyep!”
Kill him, Dog!
—but he lashed out at her; she went down too, and he managed to land a savage kick in Dog’s ribs.

He’d had to reach away from me to do that, which gave me some space. I leaned back, allowed my mind to linger for a moment on the thought of him hitting Kit, and, with all the fury I could muster, smashed my head into his chin.

It almost worked.

I was able to wriggle free, sort of, and I moved toward you. But he grabbed me by the hair and pulled me back with such force that I thought my neck would break, turning me round and forcing my face against his.

The scar tissue was like sandpaper against my cheek. “You just don’t get it, do you?” he hissed. “Like Bill Calder, you don’t get it. This isn’t about improving human life. It’s about the choice between certain death and eternal life. Eternal life, Morag. Infinite life. What the Seraphim are doing is precisely what the Architects want: it will feed them and make them stronger and stronger. There’s no stopping that now, and it means the rest of humanity’s toast, defunct.
Homo sapiens
might as well already be extinct. And what does it matter? Every single memory from every single person now living: it’s half a trillion years of conscious experience that the Architects will be vacuuming up. What a pity! But it’s a drop in the infinite bucket. If Babblers like us can escape—if just one human consciousness can escape and become truly immortal, like them? You do the math.”

“I want to fight them, not become one of them.”

“Ordinary human beings are finished. The Architects made us what we are so that they could consume us. The end has already begun, and there’s nothing you can do for the others. You can only work with me and claim what’s yours.”

He let go of me long enough to grab the handle of the spear. “Looks bad, this, doesn’t it? Superficial tissue damage, though. Muscle and ligaments—easy to repair. If I can just survive the blood loss, and stay alive long enough, we’re not going to need tissue anyway.”

It might have been halfway believable with a hospital close by. But not here—and anyway, he was wrong about the superficial damage. As I watched him, Lorna’s voice came to me, giving a running diagnosis.

Aye, it’s true there’s a space there, in the shoulder. Spear goes through that gap, an’ comes out in the armpit, it’s right ugly, an’ ye’ve buggered a couple o’ major muscles, but ye’d survive that, wi’ a bit o’ luck. T’other hand, suppose yer out o’ luck? Suppose the spear nicks a lung?

Mayo had said himself that he’d used up several lifetimes of luck on Ararat. Apparently he was all out. The bright red bubble at one corner of his mouth became a trickle, then a river, then a flood. In the space of a moment, the look in that one mad eye went from surprise, to rage, to nothing. A dead man stared at me.

I assumed he’d simply crumple to the ground, but he had one last act to perform. He went over backward, like a felled tree, but his fingers didn’t let go of me, and the weight of his body kept me moving, turning, overbalancing.

As I fell, I saw in a blur that the I’iwa were standing all around us. Dozens of them, spears raised, motionless. Each of them had a different tattoo. I wondered what the tattoos meant.

Mayo crashed backward onto a hummock of rock at the very edge of the river. I cried out—“No!”—and their expressions changed as they rushed forward, astonishingly fast, because they had seen what was about to happen.

His dead hand released me at last. I continued to fall. And it was already too late.

The water—did I mention this already?—the water in the river, hurling itself past at an impossible speed, was the color of tea.

With the glaciers in the New Guinea Highlands long gone, you might expect a river to be warm. Maybe it was warm. But the sensation I experienced was like lethal cold, or lethal heat—or being electrocuted by a fire hose. I was in severe, whole-body pain. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move a muscle. I was like a silently screaming statue—a helpless Gilgamesh—punched sideways, instantly sucked under, and there was no way I was ever coming up again.

My back hit the wall of the channel. I was flipped upside down. I was spun sideways, and my head scraped the other wall. I rolled over sideways several times, like a log down a hill. When the currents did spin my face just barely to the surface, it was only for a split second, but I saw sky. I was near the bank, there were overhanging branches, and I tried to reach one, only to find that my arms at my sides were as responsive as wooden oars. I went down again without breathing, and knew my lungs would burst, and knew I was going to die.

I wish I could tell you that at the very end I was thinking of you, of our life together and our life apart, of all the things I’d shared with you and wanted to share with you. But the pure quintessence of terror isn’t like that. I was drowning. It was the way of dying I’d always feared the most. I was reduced to wanting only one thing in the world, which was to drown quicker.

I might have got my wish, but the next churn brought me to the surface just in time to be thrust against the opposite bank again. A fallen branch stabbed me in the side of the head and it was like a hot wire being jabbed into my brain: a pain so local and intense that I screamed and took in air.

My hands flung themselves out as if working now entirely on their own, trying to grasp the branch. Way too late: it was already ten yards behind me. But one of my hands closed around a handful of roots instead. The roots stretched and tore, but some of them held against the fierce backward drag of the current and I got the other hand into them too. Because of those roots I was able to look back, and I saw you one last time.

One snapshot. One fragment of consciousness. In that fragment, like a diamond, such a world of detail!

Mayo was lying motionless, with his chest raised up and his arms out, splayed as if crucified. The spear shaft was still poking out of his neck, and an artery must have burst, because the stain spreading into the sunlight around him, already bigger than his body, was bright vermillion, the signature color of a billion oxygen-saturated cells that his muscles and his brain would never get to feed on. Behind him, seen only as vertical flashes of white, were the I’iwa, doing what they seemed to do best—transitioning from visible to invisible as they retreated from the scene. A patch of yellow also disappeared as I saw it, but then it appeared again—Dog, ranging fast along the bank toward me. With its nose an inch from the ground, it was hunting for me, I knew, but it hadn’t seen me yet and of course the water would defeat even its brilliant nose. You were a few steps behind, and with the advantage of height you spotted me.

Behind you there was only the endless forest. Isbet had vanished. Kit had vanished too, and I had time, as I hung there in the octopus-grip of the water, to think that I had loved every last thing about her, and that therefore it was a stupid, deep, obvious, and undeniable flaw in the very structure of the universe itself that this was it, that we’d had almost no time together, that she was probably dead, and I was about to die, and we’d never see each other again.

Just as Dog reached me, the roots in my hand gave way and I was swept on, farther and farther downstream. And a bend in the river revealed a wall of rock. And it was the opposite of what we’d seen at the waterfall, because there was a hole in the rock—a toothy, wet, twenty-foot hole like the mouth of a wailing rock star—and the river, instead of flowing out of it, was plunging directly into the mountain.

When the sun went out, there was a noise like insects feeding or a slice of potato frying in oil. I saw one last half-moon of daylight from the mouth of the tunnel. And then, without warning, the all-enclosing water wasn’t there anymore. I was falling. And the very last thing I thought was that I would never, never know. And the very last thing I did was scream your name.

“Daniel!”

E
PILOGUE

I
N THE
M
ACHINE

They had placed her with her hands folded on her chest, on a thick bed of leaves and moss, at the center of an octagonal room. Eight small lamps—bone bowls with long wicks, filled with pools of clear animal fat—glowed from the corners; their yellow light turned her skin the color of honey.

At the sight of her, another memory came back to him, almost undamaged, and clung to him. He was with Iona. No longer quite a child—fourteen, maybe?—and they’d been hiking in green hills somewhere. There were sheep in a field. A steep lane led down into a village. They’d had to climb a low sandstone wall, and when they rounded some old oaks, they found that they were in the far corner of a churchyard. Plain eighteenth-century gravestones and elaborate Victorian ones stood at crazy angles in the grass, the carved angels still there but the words and dates already going down to their inevitable defeat in the battle with time and moss.

The church itself was obviously in regular use, but it was empty just then except for a trapped sparrow panicking among the rafters. They stood together in the aisle, looking up at the choir and cross, and then Iona sat in one of the pews and knelt briefly on a blue embroidered hassock, her chin propped on her hands. It made him uncomfortable, because he didn’t know whether she was praying or only trying out the idea of praying. (Later she would say to him, “I’m listening for something, Daniel. I don’t know what—I don’t even know what kind of what! I’m just listening for something that’s out there that we’re not noticing. Mathematics and prayer are pretty much the same activities in that respect, as far as I’m concerned.”)

He remembered all this now because, in the chancel at the back, they’d found the marble tomb-effigy of an Elizabethan noblewoman, with a brass plaque:

“Anna Hazard, of This Parish. Obiit 1599.”

She wore a long dress, a cap, and an elaborately ruffed lace collar. Centuries of dirt and candle soot had darkened the stone until it was the same shade as Morag’s skin.

“She looks peaceful, doesn’t she?” Iona had said. “As if she’s decided death isn’t so bad.”

At the point where the river had swept her away, allowing the mountain to swallow her, there was no scent for Dog to follow. It was enraged and bewildered by this, for a moment—the loss was like being blinded. But its mind was also not constructed to waste energy on regret; after hesitating for the space of two breaths, it plunged into the trees at right angles to the water, calling with a soft yip-yip for the boy to follow. It wondered if he would understand. Would he persist in some quest of his own, or would he understand that it, with its deep knowledge of the landscape, knew best what to do? Would he have the sense to just follow?

It yipped again, and its heart swelled as it saw him follow. He was slow, but not as slow as some of the others. Dog sensed that this was not a matter of strength but of focus—of the boy knowing what he wanted, and having now an almost-canine capacity to think of nothing but the task ahead.

Once more Dog’s nose fell to within an inch of the ground, scanning. Not for her scent, not yet: that wouldn’t be here. Her scent was a picture in its mind, a picture as clear and unmistakable as a sunlit snake. But now Dog sought for what the old man had been seeking: the smell of the underworld.

Daniel followed the animal, trusted the animal, but not blindly. He saw, through the mist that hung between the peaks, a glimpse of something thicker and darker that wasn’t mist. The smoke again? Dog moved too quickly for him, of course, and often in those first hours, the thought crossed his mind that it might have abandoned him. But every few minutes it came back.

He thought about the scene at the river, and about Isbet and Kit. He also thought about whether he would ever get into the caves and find Morag. That seemed relatively clear. Then he thought about whether they would ever get out again, and what would happen then—that was not clear. But mostly he was able to push these thoughts away, because he knew that what he was doing had to be done; why he knew, or how he knew, didn’t matter. He had seen things—
had been given pieces of other people’s seeing
: he thought of it that way—and he had to trust the things he’d been given to see, focus on them, and not lose them. Especially now that he could feel his
self
beginning to cohere again.

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.