Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  And thus the fighting began.

  The attackers were a mixed crew: some dedicated and some mercenary, some highly experienced and some less so. But they’d all been trained in modern combat. According to the manuals they’d studied, and the tactical exercises they’d taken part in, they should have found their element of surprise decisive, even with Dog’s slight warning. It was a powerful advantage, after all, and much amplified (they thought) by the cover of a moonless night. “Frighten them,” their small, fierce, elderly leader had said. “Force them to act quickly, without preparation. Drive them out into the open like rabbits. Then find the girl, who may be our only hope of coming up with a way to—”

  But the attackers underestimated the Ghost People, just as Daniel had done at first, and the cover of darkness was a mistake that almost destroyed their plans. The I’iwa had been hunting in those forests, and learning the principles of ambush and counterambush, since long before Homo sapiens reinvented the business of killing. Their eons of experience tracking prey in darkness—and their huge eyes, which worked poorly in bright sun but were attuned to a million fine gradations of twilight—left them with all their natural advantages.

  Many of the attackers never did get inside the caves, and instead experienced only a last sharp surprise as their necks were broken by powerful hands, or their hearts sliced open from behind by the I’iwa’s razor-vaned spears. Others experienced a more prolonged terror, finding themselves in an unexpected, fast-moving game of cat and mouse among the trees, singled out, spooked, and separated from the group, their flashlights and helmet radios and night-vision goggles no match for a species of expert nocturnal predators.

  It went on like that for two hours, one silent death after another, not a single attacker getting within reach of a cave entrance. The I’iwa had no illusions about what was at stake, and would have picked them off to the last one. But the gray fingers of dawn tipped the scales at last, making one great fact of technology and culture outweigh all others. Sharp spears, wielded by superb hunters, yes. But they were spears wielded against guns. It was history repeating itself, as Derek Partridge would have said: once the light of dawn began to soak in through the trees, it was Pizarro and the Inca all over again. Pizarro and his little band of sweaty, exhausted horsemen, with their rotten teeth and malnutrition and syphilis, utterly destroying the magnificent massed armies of Atahuallpa. In daylight, technology was everything. An unfair fight in the darkness turned into a different kind of unfair fight after dawn: a massacre.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  Crack.

  They used their bullets wisely, one by one for a certain kill, and each shot sounded like a tree being felled. Then the forest grew silent, and you might have thought it was littered with paper, rather than downed trees. Hundreds of pieces of pale, crumpled trash, each one an I’iwa corpse.

  The attackers had lost almost half their people, but their plan had become easier too, because the I’iwa, in retreating, had revealed many of the hidden entrances. And once the attackers moved inside the caves, flooding the tunnels with artificial light, the elaborate defensive precautions were able to slow the inevitable only a little.

  In the lowest levels, the first shots that were close enough to hear sounded hollow and muffled, like someone beating a stick against the flank of a mule. Each was followed by a faint hiss, then a high, wheezing howl that spoke of pain, but also of bewilderment and panic. It was the sound of the voiceless I’iwa experiencing something they had never imagined.

  Dog sneezed, and sneezed again, and the first visible billows of tear gas reached them. Stripe, the I’iwa who had befriended Daniel and Morag and become their chief minder and teacher, pulled at Daniel’s shoulder and indicated that he and Morag should follow.

  Morag found herself fighting panic, almost like when she fell in the river. But that was fear of water—a phobia, a bit of irrationality, bad mental architecture. Her fear now was a perfectly rational fear of the unknown. “Guns and gas,” she said to Daniel as they followed Stripe’s retreating figure. “Not the Seraphim’s style, is it? Like Julius Quinn said, if you believe all that stuff, all you have to do is chant the right chants, give up your existing language, and wait. No need for violence. Even the library burnings were just a gesture.”

  “Yeah. This is more like Route Two. People working for Mayo. Remember the divers who attacked us in Crete? The Seraphim think they already know all about the Architects. This is about trying to find the Architects’ real secret.”

  “But how did anyone know about the caves? Or know we were here?”

  “They followed us.”

  “How do you know?”

  He shrugged. It was a feeling, an intuition. He thought about all the “feelings” and “intuitions” sloshing around in his mind. Their future involved a lot of water. And blood. And thirst and insects. He could see Lorna, which made him hopeful, but also a filthy, mud-daubed figure he couldn’t bring into focus, possibly a threat and possibly one of the Tainu. “I know a lot of things without knowing how I know them,” he said.

  “OK. But the only way someone followed us to New Guinea, and then followed us here, is if Charlie Balakrishnan told them—”

  She was interrupted by more gunshots, closer this time. Five other I’iwa had collected around Stripe, and with Dog close by, they hurried down the narrow, hidden tunnel to the Place of Origin.

  It was almost empty now. The only I’iwa left in the area were a dozen or so busily constructing a strange wooden exoskeleton around the ziggurat that was the repository of their most prized memories, and also a monument representing a volcano, and also a working computer. “Looks like they’re making a packing case.” Morag said. “As if they’re planning to ship the whole thing to a museum.”

  Daniel pointed up to the roof of the cavern. The peak of the structure was silhouetted against the great circular hole, the doline that Daniel had mistaken for a forest lake when he’d seen it, so long ago, from the other side. On the twelfth level of the ziggurat, a small fire was kept permanently lit, just as ceremonial fires had been kept lit by the priests atop the ziggurats of Babylon, and from where they stood it was visible as a faint pink glow.

  Dark figures were coming into the cavern, or trying to, using ropes to rappel over the lip of the hole. As they watched, one of the figures cried out and fell—hit by a spear, perhaps, though it was impossible to tell because of the thickening smoke. Another came much farther down a rope and tried to swing toward a handhold on the cavern wall, only to arc back the other way, directly over the flames. They heard a scream, then nothing. More figures appeared, and there was a burst of automatic gunfire that echoed around the cavern; then nothing, for a moment; then the limp body of an I’iwa fell from the upper darkness like a falling star, cartwheeling as it fell, and crashed to stillness on the third level of the ziggurat.

  There wasn’t much distance between the archway in which they were concealed, at the edge of the great cavern, and the ziggurat itself. Directly across the gap there was a square opening into the structure. Five feet wide and five tall, it was the only entrance to the first level. Stripe held up a hand, hesitated, then hurried forward, bringing his hand down with a forward-sweeping gesture that said Now, quickly in any language.

  Their movement was answered immediately by more gunfire, but they all made it across. “They’re not firing at us anyway,” Daniel said to Morag. “They want you. And what’s in the backpack. All they’ve managed to do is give away the fact that they saw us.”

  “Aye, but they still saw us.”

  “It won’t matter.”

  It was their first time in this, the lowest level. The interior space was what they expected, in one way: an empty, twelve-sided, geometrically perfect space fifty or sixty feet across. The impression you got on entering this chamber wasn’t one of enclosure, though—it was of unending, open space. There was a lamp at each corner, where the angles between each pair of walls met the sloping, tentlike roof, and th
e light revealed something different from the I’iwa’s usual dense riot of mathematical symbols and miniature images. The walls had been decorated with a life-size twilight forest scene. It was an optical illusion, a trompe l’oeil: peering forward into the gloom, you couldn’t shake the sense that you were standing amid the trees in the forest above. There were even birds visible, sleeping in the trees, and stars in a late evening sky. A wild pig was silhouetted there, against the remaining hints of blue, but with just enough light that you could see one eye peering back at you from over its fat, wiry rear end.

  On the far side, opposite the entrance, there was—or seemed to be—a dense thicket of birch trees. The perspective had been handled so well that the trunks really looked like a three-dimensional group, not a line of images on a wall. As you came closer, you felt as if you were beginning to walk in among them; as if you too were about to be swallowed by the approaching night.

  One of the I’iwa did just that. The short, pale figure, lamp in hand, walked straight toward the middle of the thicket, appeared to round one of the trees, and vanished. Then two more followed. Stripe got to the same point, then looked back and made a motion with one arm that meant This way. Stay close.

  His disappearance, only three steps ahead of them, could have been a magic trick. Daniel and Morag were an arm’s length from the wall before they could see how it had been done. At just this one corner, the two sections of wall didn’t kiss at their thirty-degree angle as they were supposed to. Instead, they’d been built so that their ends overlapped slightly, like poorly fitted double doors. The vertical birch trunks fooled the eye: the gap was essentially invisible.

  Just before they squeezed through, Morag looked back across the chamber. A single I’iwa, with a burning three-foot torch in its right hand, was watching them from the entrance. When she made eye contact, its eyes seemed to express an intense emotion she couldn’t read. Then it tilted its head a quarter inch to the right, rolled its shoulders, and slightly splayed and tilted the thumb of its other hand.

  It meant Go, and be successful. Or perhaps, she thought, a better translation was Go, and don’t waste what we have done by dying.

  On the other side of the illusory birches, they found themselves in an area of narrow tunnels, endlessly forking. Even Morag could only just stand up in them. She kept a tally in her head for the first few minutes. Right fork, left fork, straight on, sharp left. Doing that down here made her think of the original labyrinthos, under the palace of King Minos, where they’d taken the Athenian sacrificial youth to be devoured by the Minotaur, and only Theseus, with his ball of twine, had found a way out. When she’d been a child, and Jimmy had told her the story, she’d thought that Theseus was a dummy, needing the twine. “Why didn’t he just remember the turns?” It was hard to grasp that most people couldn’t remember everything. But now that she found herself in Theseus’s situation, she was also tired, and frightened—and recently she’d had special reasons for taxing her memory to an unusual degree. So she soon gave up trying to keep track of where they were. She’d have to trust that the I’iwa, whose home this was, knew where they were going.

  At least the terrain sloped down, to begin with. That, and a surge of adrenaline, allowed her to keep up pretty easily for the first half mile or so, though she could taste the bitter gas in the back of her throat. She did have to stop briefly, more than once, gasping and stifling a cough with one forearm of her grime-encrusted denim jacket pressed to her nose. When she did that, the I’iwa stopped immediately, waiting with their lamps held up as high as the tunnel would allow, and some part of her mind noticed that she couldn’t tell how exactly it was that their faces could be so still, and patient, and yet somehow convey the message that it was important to hurry.

  She was a bit out of breath, that was all. A bit dizzy, that was all. She’d be fine, given a moment to recover. God, it was hot, and why had they gone so much deeper when they were supposed to be getting out? But really, she’d be fine. Really.

  The first staircase was straight and steep. It rose inside a perfectly cylindrical tunnel, like a broken escalator in a madman’s dream of an airport terminal. No advertisements for booze and luxury watches, though. Only steps, and more steps, sharp and black and awkwardly steep. She told herself it was no big deal. She told herself that the searing pain in her thighs would go away, and that her lungs, which weren’t cooperating again, would be working normally soon.

  Twenty steps. Thirty. Forty—

  “It’s not bloody fair,” she said, pausing and gasping. “Before I get in here, I’m perfectly healthy and you’re half starved. We spend weeks living off the same diet of dried moss and smoked bat. At the end of it, what? You’re Superman’s half brother, and I might as well be fifty kilos of rice.”

  “Short-grain,” Daniel said.

  “Thanks.”

  “And I’m guessing you weigh less than that. A big chunk of the time, you’ve only taken in that fermented shit.”

  “It probably was fermented shit. Their idea of a protein shake or something. I think I hurled most of it.”

  “You did—which is why you’ve been losing weight down here as fast as I’ve been putting it back on.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t waste your energy apologizing. You had a bad fall. Broken bones. A head injury. Just be glad your brain’s still intact.”

  Aye, she thought: not much problem with the brain. She replayed in her mind two radically contrasting but equally detailed memories: the purely physical terror of falling into the river and being dragged into the caves; and, after she recovered, the purely intellectual delight of puzzling out both the I’iwa’s language—languages, really: the whole system was sensationally complicated, as you might expect from an entire society of Babblers—and their equally complex counting system.

  She’d been pulled under repeatedly and bashed against the walls of the river’s narrow channel like a doll in a Stone Age washing machine. She should have died right there, her lungs filled with milky-brown water. Instead she’d gasped in just enough air to stay alive and had been sucked into a tunnel, hurled over an underground waterfall, and left floating, badly injured, in a shallow, lightless lake. She would have died there, certainly, if not from bad cuts and broken ribs then simply from being trapped underground. But the strange glabrous figures of the I’iwa had arrived, holding lamps they’d hollowed out from the hip bones of wild New Guinea pigs. Their mythos had not told them she would arrive unconscious and badly injured. But they knew her significance, and they rescued her, watched over her, and patiently nursed her back from the edge. All so that they could tell her their story.

  She took a long, deep breath. It didn’t feel good, because the air was too hot and damp, but it was a good excuse for a couple of seconds more rest.

  “Take it easy,” Daniel repeated, wanting to calm her and at the same time wishing she could speed up.

  She was irritated. “Take it easy? How the eff can I take it easy, D, when we’re trying to get away from those bastards back there and I’m slowing us down? I’m a bloody liability.”

  “You’re not a liability. You’re the goods—you’re why they’re here.”

  “Always the same. My body’s a nuisance or an irrelevance. My brain’s the only thing anyone cares about.”

  “Maybe you should stop being quite so good with languages. And give up the whole photographic memory thing.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  She started moving again. “Did I mention that I made a resolution about my future? If we get out of this place alive, and I live to be a hundred—”

  “Save your breath, M.”

  “If I live to be a hundred—”

  “Eighty-three years to go. Yes?”

  “—I am never, never, never again going to eat smoked bat.”

  He waited until she’d climbed ten more steps. “Tell you the truth, I think bat tastes OK.”

  “It’s the principle,” she said. What she wanted to say, only
she didn’t have the energy, was: You only think it tastes OK because you’ve lost your sense of taste. That’s one of the things that went missing, isn’t it? You’re the guy who used to go on about why Chinook salmon’s overhyped and sockeye is better, or how you have to keep your coffee beans frozen or the grind will be wrong. You were the one with the little lecture about store-bought chocolate sauce being the work of Satan. That stuff mattered to you once. To the old Daniel.

  When she finally sank to her knees, still less than halfway to the top of the stairs, he scooped her up and carried her without hesitation. She’d always been small and light, but she was shocked by how easily he did it. Instead of gratitude, she felt a wave of annoyance.

  “Put me down.”

  “You almost passed out.”

  “Put me—oh, never mind. Carry me, if it makes you feel better.”

  This was unfair. She knew it was unfair, so to hide from her own embarrassment she went on:

  “Look at you, Mr. Macho. Ripped shirt, long hair, abs gleaming in the lamplight. You’re a walking bloody cliché. Like something off the cover of the latest Regency Supernatural. ‘Dashing adventurer Sir Daniel Calder descends into the caverns of the I’iwa to save the fainting Lady Chen!’”

  It was supposed to be funny, but a chill ran through him. He had to struggle to come up with the image she was trying to convey. He could fill in the cliché part—the square-jawed beefcake—but he’d forgotten what his own face looked like.

  “Don’t talk,” he said. “Rest.”

  But she wanted to talk. The joke was taking her mind off the present. “What would the title be? Anabasis?”

  “What about Ghosts in the Machine?” he said.

  “Oh, that’s dead brilliant, that is. We’ll go with that. But the thing is, D, for a romance, the concept’s not right.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we both stink, you’re my twin brother, and I’m in love with a Russian girl who’s probably dead.”

  He realized that he couldn’t recall Kit’s face either.