Infinity's Illusion

by Richard Farr

  “If you shoot the dog, you bastards, you’ll have to shoot me first.”

  “Get out of the way.”

  “So get me out of the way by shooting me. Hmm? Oh, but you don’t want to do that, do you? Because, like your friend said, I’m your only hope of making sense of what’s in the backpack.”

  The mustache twitched, and a look almost of boredom passed across the man’s face. “I can shoot your friend first, if you like, just to show that we’re running out of patience. Then your mother. Then maybe you’ll start doin’ what you’re told.”

  She started to get up again. “The dog will be useful. It helped us find our way—”

  “We don’t need help. We know exactly where we’re going. Five, four—”

  How intelligent could an animal be? How much could it get, just by hints and implications? Morag didn’t know, but she held Dog by its ears and looked into its eyes, all the while shielding it. She hadn’t thought the thing through, but she found herself whispering one phrase in Tainu, over and over: “Dolon ka’unaret. Dolon ka’unaret. Dolon ka’unaret.” She looked back at the gunman and pretended to give in, slowly getting back to her feet. Then she grabbed the backpack from where it lay against Daniel’s leg and thrust Isbet’s braid right under Dog’s nose. “Dolon ka’unaret. Run!”

  Dolon ka’unaret was Tain’iwa for “husband-mother.” Morag’s plan—her idea, anyway—was that Dog would save itself by running for the shack in the forest where Isbet’s “husband-mother” had lived. That might be safe. Anyway, it was beyond the far edge of the clearing, a quarter mile into the forest.

  Of course, the animal might get there only to turn around and come back. But she couldn’t worry about that now.

  Dog didn’t understand Morag’s intentions at all. Its brain just didn’t really do language, and though it had heard the phrase dolon ka’unaret a hundred times, or a thousand, the words still meant exactly nothing. Dog’s entire vocabulary was isbet and oma and the Tain’iwa words for hunt and meat.

  By wild coincidence, though, and by a chain of chemical causations and associations too complex for the human mind to untangle, the urgency of Morag’s voice, combined with the smell of Isbet’s hair and the fact that it had just seen Isbet’s body, gave it an idea about ka’unaret after all.

  It dipped its head, almost as if nodding to her, and opened its jaws in what looked like an enormous yawn. Then, in one fluid movement, it bit sideways into the pack and picked it up. In one bound, it was gone, hurrying its burden through the undergrowth.

  “Shit shit shit kill it!” Hitler screamed, and all three of them switched their focus of attention, firing low into the trees.

  Dog knew it was being hunted, so it zigzagged for half a mile. Then it doubled back, came out into the clearing at a different point, and found Isbet’s body again. It dragged the pack across her body, so as to pick up more of her scent, and took off again, in a completely different direction.

  Over an hour later, many miles away and a thousand feet higher up, it dragged the pack onto a narrow rock ledge. The ledge was hard even to get near, and impossible for a human being to access without ropes. Once there, Dog proudly deposited the backpack against the thin, leathery shin of ka’unaret himself—Isbet’s long-dead and carefully smoked husband, who sat in a line, next to other Tainu dead, guarding the valley. And Dog sat there, and sang to ka’unaret until nightfall, and curled itself around the pack and slept. The following morning, a group of people in khaki were mystified that they couldn’t find it, though they’d done such a careful job triangulating the beacon’s position and it was clearly close by. That afternoon, the battery ran out.

  Daniel had been distracted by Hitler’s shout, for about half a second. He looked at the source of the scream, and had time to think that the black mustache was a bad style decision—an attempt at macho that only made the wearer look ridiculous. Then he turned back again, and it took only another hundredth of a second to take on board the fact that he was no longer looking at the gleaming, clean-shaven muzzle of Pinkie’s gun. Pinkie was firing in the direction Dog had taken; Daniel was looking at the back of Pinkie’s trigger hand. The hand was pink too, like the face, but scratched and bug-chewed, with a fat blue vein standing out near the base of the thumb.

  At first, looking at the hand and the vein was like looking at a landscape: it was just a picture, and it didn’t mean anything. But then he sensed part of his former, half-forgotten life, his old self, coming back to him. A buried way of thinking; a set of skills that had long ago migrated out of his brain and into his muscles. The situation was still hopeless, but Pinkie’s momentary distraction represented a chance, and there wouldn’t be a second one.

  He began to rotate from the waist. As he did so, he shaped the middle knuckle of his middle right finger into a tent of bone. He was too close for a straight punch, and that was the wrong move anyway; instead, he hooked his fist upward in an arc, so that it went through the space between the man’s gun arm and his chest. Tensing his body all the way down to his feet, to maximize leverage, Daniel powered the knuckle into that exquisitely sensitive spot just under the earlobe. Just behind the curve at the end of the jawbone. Someone had done it to Daniel, once, not even all that hard, so he knew all about it. The pain was astonishing. And he could tell, just from the way it felt, that he’d scored a bull’s-eye.

  Pinkie made a sound like a small dying bird, and his third or fourth shot went high into the tree canopy. Stepping in closer, as if for a friendly hug, Daniel continued his movement to the left, pulling the trapped gun arm in toward his body while using his other palm to smash forward against the damaged jaw. Pinkie wasn’t unconscious—in fact he was grasping at Daniel’s face with his free hand—but his combat boots had left the ground as his body began to arc backward over Daniel’s hip. Twenty degrees more rotation, thirty, and then there was a soft thok as the geometry of his body ceased to add up and his shoulder dislocated.

  Daniel kept turning, got one hand on the falling gun, and gave up a prayer as he somehow slotted a finger through the trigger guard. Bringing the weapon down until it was more or less level, and using Pinkie’s body as both a shield and a convenient barrel rest, he squeezed off a shot in the general direction of Blondie.

  He missed, of course, and when she fired back, the impact was like being kicked in the ribs by a Clydesdale.

  Daniel had time to imagine all the damage that had just been done to him—fatal, surely?—but it was Pinkie who roared out, Pinkie who was transformed in an instant from a groaning, staggering fighter into a slack weight. Daniel was forced backward, and he overbalanced. As he hit the ground, with Pinkie coming down on top of him, he squeezed the trigger again.

  Even less chance than the first time.

  It was ironic, really, he thought, as he admitted defeat. Morag had always been the brain: after years of living with Jimmy and Lorna in archaeological camps, she still couldn’t cook, still didn’t know a bowline from a granny knot, and had barely mastered the art of setting up a tent. He, Daniel, was the one with outdoorsy, practical skills. Create an emergency shelter? Hang a bear bag? Catch and clean a steelhead? No problem. But guns were different. Jimmy and Lorna’s friends in the Iraqi desert had taught her how to do lethal things to a line of old cans with an AK-47; Daniel still remembered, with guilty pleasure, how she’d frightened Édouard Colbert out of his wits—and the contents of his bladder—on Little Ararat. He’d never been around guns. Definitely the wrong person to be waving the hardware, and he’d fired a second time only because he was out of options; only because, as he went down, he was holding on to the faint hope of winging Blondie, or giving her a fright, or something.

  He was on his back now, and for a second she just stood there, her own gun still raised, as if contemptuously assessing the exact degree of his incompetence. Would she give him a straight F before killing him? Or a sympathy C-minus perhaps? Maybe she wasn’t a great shot either—but it wouldn’t much matter, because she was standing fifte
en feet away and he was starfished on the ground with a wounded guy lying half across him. There was something in her look that suggested she’d be quite happy to make sure of things by emptying her magazine into both bodies at once.

  He stared at her in a way that he hoped looked defiant, and found that his mind was racing, uselessly. So this is it. Crap. I must have been wrong—all those strange vague scenes from the future were just wishful thinking. And then: But no, that can’t be right. I know that can’t be right. Because there’s Murakami in his garden, and Rosko again, and I can see a strangely deserted Seattle and a girl with long dark hair and—

  It was confusing. He was lying there on the forest floor, knowing he was about to die. On the other hand, he “knew” all this other stuff that seemed to mean he wasn’t about to die. The conflict was so strange that he wanted to sit up and say to the woman with the gun: No, you can’t shoot me. Not yet, anyway. We need to check the script, because you might have it wrong. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen.

  As the words and thoughts tumbled, Blondie’s expression changed from skeptical, even dismissive—as if she knew what he was thinking, and why he was mistaken—to a look that was more still and abstracted. It crossed Daniel’s mind that he’d been right: she wasn’t a great shot after all, and was concentrating on her aim. She raised the gun an inch or so, stopped, then raised it another inch. He tensed, waiting for the sound. He wondered why she was hesitating, and wondered what death—real death, not the thing he’d experienced on Ararat—would feel like.

  She really was hesitating. She tilted her nose upward, as if sniffing a scent, or hearing a sound she wanted to identify, or looking for something that had distracted her in the trees.

  When she raised her head a fraction more, Daniel saw a mark that looked like a mole under her chin. It was an odd mole, though. It was leaking.

  Her head came forward again, and she looked at him again. Her eyes were as serene and blank as dark-brown glass. And her knees gave way, and the gun fell from her hands, and she went straight to the ground sideways, like a dropped sack.

  Pinkie was still alive, but his roar of pain had subsided into a desperate, rattling wheeze. Bright-red blood was flooding from a wound in his gut. Daniel rolled out from underneath him and got to a crouching position before he saw that Morag was still rooted to the same spot, looking at Lorna, and Hitler was standing just behind Lorna with one hand around her throat and his pistol to her head. Daniel thought of his sensei again, a small, lethal woman with a gray ponytail, and how the top-floor dojo in Seattle was always too hot in the summer, the next move shouted over the noise of box fans.

  Name your kata!

  Hai! Matsumura bassai!

  He waited for tactical inspiration. It still wasn’t coming.

  “The dog,” Pinkie hissed frantically, pawing at his chest.

  “We understand that you need the pack,” Daniel said, trying to sound calm, “and we can get it for you. The dog will come back, if we call it. But—”

  “Route Two is our only chance.” It was clear that he was dying, and that Hitler didn’t know what to do next. Neither did Daniel.

  There was a moment of eerie silence, as if time itself had become sluggish in the heat. Daniel sensed that Hitler was about to give an order of some kind, even saw his mouth open a little. Then a surreal figure stepped into the silence from behind a tree.

  Hitler saw the motion out of the corner of his eye. He kept the gun on Lorna, but turned fractionally to look. Whatever it was, it hadn’t been there a second before; now, it gave the impression that it had always been there. It blended so well with the forest that it was hard to pick out. They all found themselves craning forward a little, staring, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. Thin-boned, almost childlike; dressed in feathers and moss and rags. Not I’iwa, for sure. Not Tainu either, though it was carrying a raised Tainu hunting bow.

  “Don’t anyone move,” Hitler said. He was thinking, playing for time. And no one did move, much, except that one finger, on the strange forest creature’s trailing hand, shifted fractionally.

  A tiny motion. Like the twitching of a leaf.

  The sound that came next was as light and innocent as a child blowing out a single birthday candle. Huuuu-h. And in the time it took for that sound to reach their ears, one of the Tainu’s bone-tipped arrows had erupted from the bow, erased the intervening space, missed Lorna’s ear by the width of a medium-sized fly, and, with a precision that was perversely beautiful, buried itself in Hitler’s brain at the exact midpoint between his eyes.

  Strange clothing aside, the feral creature with the bow was almost completely covered in mud, and its face was lopsided. It looked fictional, to Daniel: an elf, or a goblin, the features pulled sideways by a magical curse or an invisible hand. But he had no idea who or what it could be. Neither did Lorna.

  Morag, on the other hand, saw through the injury, the mud, and the camouflage: “Oh God. It’s really you. You’re alive! Yekaterina Pavelevna Cerenkov!”

  The bow came down. “Hello, Majka. Still call me Kit, yah? Is easier.”

  Her right eye drooped: the lower lid seemed to melt into the deep scar where her cheekbone had had its argument with the butt of Mayo’s gun. Morag ran to her, meaning to hug her, but then stopped short to look more closely at her. She looked into Kit’s eyes, first, because that was the way to be certain that this apparition was real. Then she reached up to touch the scar. Kit—filthy and bizarre, and with the symmetry of her face permanently ruined—was by some alchemy the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.

  “Where—How did you—What—?”

  Kit put her hand on top of Morag’s and moved it away from the wound. “Mayo’s gun break bone,” she said. “Painful? Like nearly drives me insane. Also then become infected, so half my face swells up like balloon. Not so nice the look now, huh? I know. I see reflection in water. Sorry for clothes, also. Survive alone in New Guinea forest is not good. I am bitten all time. Lonely, frightened, almost starve. Is like, actually, total crapshit.”

  Lorna had trained as a nurse, and a life was a life, so after one slack-jawed stare she ignored Kit and rushed over to the bleeding man. But Pinkie had only a short time left, they needed to make use of it, and Daniel had learned from the I’iwa that this was no time for sentiment. Deliberately placing himself in Lorna’s way, he knelt in the gore-soaked mud and put his face down low.

  “You needed to capture Morag. If she’s so important, don’t you think she should know what’s going on?”

  Pinkie was breathing like an uphill runner. Bloodless and glossed with sweat, his cheeks looked like shrink-wrapped mozzarella.

  “Poor bogger’s goin’ intae shock,” Lorna said, but Daniel put up a hand to cut her off. Pinkie’s eyes closed, then popped open again. There was fear in them. He looked at Daniel, and beyond Lorna to where Morag was hugging the forest creature, and back to Daniel.

  “The Architects ’ave come back,” he said. “They’re ’ere. Every fuckin’ where.”

  Daniel experienced a shudder of recognition. It was like paying attention, for the first time, to something that had been there, at the edge of his visual field, ever since Ararat. Iona had been the first to notice: at every “event,” there had been the dead, and the zombie-like Mysteries who hadn’t gone all the way, and then again and again it had turned out that there was one person missing. Uyuni in Bolivia. Ruapehu in New Zealand. Goat Rocks, near Seattle.

  As the evidence accumulated, more and more of these pied pipers, leading their little flocks to high places, had turned out to be Babblers—or that was the simple idea. But they were something stranger than that. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it; Iona had not made that clear. That word, zombie, hovered in his mind, but it wasn’t quite right. Ghosts? Not exactly. Fake people, the way robots could be fake people? Not that either. Copies of people, he wanted to say, but—

  Pinkie wheezed, as if trying to get enough of their attention for his faint w
hisper. “Architects. Takin’ on the form of some poor bastard they already got. Been among us since Thera, and before. Angkor. Nineveh. Cahokia.”

  Daniel remembered the folders that Rosko had found, after Patagonia, hidden in the background of Édouard and Sophie Colbert’s website. The city of Babylon. Hattusa. Troy. Mycenae. Akkad. Rapa Nui. Yes, and Angkor and Nineveh and Mohenjo-daro and Cahokia too. He remembered his dad saying that Angkor had been the biggest city in the world, until suddenly it wasn’t.

  “Who ordered you to attack the caves? Who knew about them? About Morag?”

  “Route Two. We’ve been running surveillance on both your parents for years. Then on you and the girl. When she came here—” There was a suggestion of a shrug, as if he didn’t know how to articulate what he was thinking.

  “So Balakrishnan sent you after us?”

  Pinkie managed a flicker of a smile. “Uma Chaudry.”

  The name meant nothing, for a moment. Then Daniel remembered what Morag had told him about Hawaii, and the annoying Indian housekeeper. “She was working for Maynard Jones?”

  “She got Balakrishnan to hire ’im in the first place. Tryin’ to nudge the boss away from wasting his time with all that cryogenic bullshit. Toward the real goal.”

  “Disembodiment. Digital upload.”

  “Yeah. Balakrishnan dismissed it, so she an’ Maynard Jones began collaboratin’ behind his back.”

  Pinkie’s eyes began to roll back into his head. Then he clenched his jaw, making a visible effort, and snapped into focus again: “We lost you in the forest. Thing is—”

  “Yes?”

  A gurgling noise came from his throat, like the sound of a bathtub on the point of emptying. Fresh blood, thinned pink by spittle, coated his teeth. “Chaudry’s right,” he said. “Route Two’s our only hope. Humans, we’re too dangerous for the Architects now. Know too much. Built the tower too ’igh!”

  “Mrs. Chaudry was a piece of work,” Morag said. “But it doesn’t make sense. She wasn’t a Babbler herself.”