The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  Only a Mayan deity could do you that much damage. No thanks, mighty Zampo. I feel a need to be alert right now, to be my full self, to avoid anything that will, you know, dull the blade.

  I wash my face in cold water, take a long look in the mirror—yes, my reflection is still there—and make a promise to myself.

  I will know what happened on the Torre Sur.

  I will know why she died.

  I will know why the women of Uyuni mattered.

  For a long minute I just stand there, listening. A shiver runs through me, bringing out my arms in fine goose bumps. The house feels like a living thing, something that already has me in its mouth and at any provocation might swallow.

  Ninety Mayan gods, yellow in their brown bottle: I pour them into the toilet bowl. Most of them sit on the surface of the water for a few seconds, then one by one they tumble and sink. I push the lever, find a crumb of cruel satisfaction in watching them drown.

  CHAPTER 12

  ARCHITECTS

  I sleep late, and when I come downstairs I assume the house is going to be empty. But both Dad and Morag are in the kitchen. Morag’s sitting with her elbows on the table and a glum look on her face. Dad’s pacing up and down like a caged tiger, waving his arms, saying, How the hell?

  There’s a humming noise outside. And a Seattle Times on the table, with a blaring headline about Goat Rocks.

  “Morning,” I say, attempting to be cheerful. “Talking about this?”

  He doesn’t even say no, never mind good morning. Twitches a blind to one side and looks out onto the street.

  “No,” Morag says. “Bill’s campus account was hacked.”

  He turns around, distracted, runs a hand through his hair. “Someone found everything we’ve translated so far. They tweaked it a bit, to suit their own purposes, faked a couple of emails from me to Morag about keeping it all quiet, and put it up on the web. Along with a froth-at-the-mouth screed about how the evil atheist Calder has been hiding the truth from the world.”

  “You’re pretty close to frothing at the mouth yourself, Dad. Any idea who?”

  “The Seraphim—who else?”

  “You have a bit of a reputation. Could be a regular hacker. Student prank. Something like that.”

  He shakes his head. “No. The way this was done, it just suits the Seraphim’s purposes too neatly.”

  I stare into the fridge, decide to eat leftover mashed potato for breakfast, toss a bowl in the microwave. Dad finally stops pacing and parks his butt on the edge of the sink.

  “Everything so far is from the earliest sets of Babel tablets,” Morag says. “Like I told you, it’s Quinn’s story, totally. Not just the multiple gods, but the need to forget or destroy their own languages and learn the language of the gods, so that their minds can be—whatever.”

  “ ‘Attuned to the eternal,’ ” Dad throws in.

  “Aye. So that the Akkadians who are good enough at spiritual acrobatics can escape the merely physical world and be, you know, vacuumed up into heaven. Hundreds of other details too—they match perfectly with what Quinn wrote.”

  “Which,” I point out again through a mouthful of potato, “is impossible. Unless Quinn saw the Babel tablets before you did.”

  “Slow down, D. There are three options. Number one: the similarity between what Quinn says in Anabasis and what we found at Babel is total coincidence.”

  “That’s about as believable as the starship Enterprise discovering yet another planet where the aliens speak English and look exactly like us except for weird plastic foreheads.”

  “Agree, totally. Option two, then. Option two, like you say, is that he saw the Akkadian tablets before we did. Which is even more impossible, because we were the first people into that library in about three thousand years.”

  “He could have found something similar at a different site?”

  “Congratulations—that’s number three. The least crazy option.”

  “So there you go.”

  Dad gets up, looks outside again; the buzzing is still there. He turns back to me. “I want to believe that, Daniel. I keep repeating to myself the line from Sherlock Holmes about how you eliminate the impossible and what’s left is the truth.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “Sometimes you eliminate the impossible and what’s left is impossible too. Quinn’s not an archaeologist. And suppose he was. Suppose he found another manuscript with the same story—why not advertise the fact? His critics have already scoffed at Anabasis enough, they’ve already demanded evidence, and all he could say so far was ‘Wait, have faith, you will see.’ ”

  The strangeness of it is beginning to sink in. Quinn comes up with a wacky “revelation” about what he was told personally in an encounter with the gods, then someone else comes along and finds ancient texts in which the gods say exactly the same thing.

  “But,” I offer, “you still don’t know exactly what the Akkadian documents say. You’re having trouble with them?”

  He and Morag look at each other oddly, and I feel, or think I feel, a strong spark of tension between them—it’s like being in the room with a married couple who don’t get along.

  “Morag and I agree completely on the broad outline. There are just some details to clean up.” And then I’m distracted by him motioning for me to look out of the window.

  The buzzing: in fact it’s a combination of chanting and singing. Two separate groups of people have collected right across the street from our house. One set, the singers, are swaying from side to side, waving banners; one reads, Psalm 14:1. The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. The other set, twenty feet farther down the sidewalk, are still as statues, like they’re meditating or something. Their banners carry the Know It Is True slogan, or a sort of icon of a burning book, or the familiar, endlessly reproduced image of Quinn’s face. Some are wearing the white scarf with its broken golden triangle.

  “Shit. How long have they been there?”

  “Since dawn.”

  As I look out, someone in the crowd sees me—sees a face anyway—and a rock hits the side of the house. A police officer, who must have been out of my line of sight, strides across the street wagging his finger.

  “There’s a fourth option,” I say quietly, putting my empty bowl in the sink.

  “What?” Morag asks.

  “You don’t want to hear it. Neither of you do. The fourth option is the one that’s obvious to those people outside, and ten million Seraphim around the world.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Quinn says Anabasis was a direct personal revelation. From the gods, Architects, whatever. Maybe he’s simply telling the truth.”

  “Daniel,” Dad says, as if I’ve just admitted to being a meth addict. “Give me a break. You don’t believe that.”

  “I don’t know what to believe. And Sherlock Holmes would say it’s no more impossible than your other options.”

  Dad shakes his head, looks at his watch, heads upstairs: I’m a lost cause, as usual. Then he pauses and calls back over his shoulder:

  “Morag, ten minutes OK? We’ll drive out the alley and avoid these jokers.” And, as an afterthought: “Do you want to come with us, Daniel?”

  “I’ll be fine here.”

  Morag is quiet for a minute, examining her nails. Then she looks through the doorway, as if checking that he’s out of earshot. Softly she says, “Bill and I spend a lot of time on little debates about how to translate certain words. I’ll say, ‘This word is stone.’ He’ll say, ‘No, it just means heavy.’ That’s normal stuff. But I feel as if he’s trying to minimize the similarities to Quinn and Anabasis. Like he can’t face it. There’s this one word in Akkadian that keeps on coming up. Right where you expect them to say gods. Bill keeps saying, ‘Yeah, gods, close enough.’ Right from the start I thought the word they were using was more like builders, or originators. It took me awhile to make the connection, but it’s Quinn’s word. Architects.”

 
; “You’re sure?”

  “The more I learn, the less I’m sure of anything. But whoever hacked the files is sure. They not only changed every sentence with gods to architects—they put the word in capital letters all the way through.”

  Nobody in the wider world cares about these details. All they care about is that it’s a great story—especially since Dad’s supposed to despise religion in general and Quinn in particular:

  DOES ANCIENT EVIDENCE PROVE SERAPHIM ARE RIGHT?

  ATHEIST PROF TRIED TO HIDE EVIDENCE

  ANCIENT MANUSCRIPT SHOWS GODS WERE REAL

  Then the traditional faiths weigh in. One of the louder California megachurches stages a big demonstration in which people burn images of Quinn and Dad together, as if they were secret collaborators. A pastor with a shiny blue suit and the IQ of a light switch generates unintentional laughs by saying that God’s purpose cannot be known by “atheists and apostates”—it can be understood only by people like him, who “study God’s Word in the original English.” Separately, the bishop of Johannesburg joins forces with a Chicago rabbi and a London imam to denounce both as part of a “conspiracy against faith.”

  In other parts of the world, life is even simpler. Neither the Saudis nor the Iranians even mention Dad, or Quinn—and besides, they can afford to dismiss atheism as ridiculous. But they recognize the Seraphim for the threat they are, and, as Dad puts it to Morag and me, “They understand, even more than our so-called democracies, the political value of terror.” So dozens of people in Riyadh, Jeddah, Tehran, and Isfahan, who might or might not have anything to do with the Seraphim, are rounded up and beheaded in front of their own families on live television.

  The Vatican takes longer to respond than some, but then it flexes its intellectual muscle by wheeling the formidable Cardinal Gerhard Kirkmünde onto the talk shows. Kirkmünde, who has PhDs by the handful, is rumored to speak almost as many languages as Dad. He denounces “Dr. Culver”—you can tell he’s getting it wrong on purpose—for “insulting all genuine faith.” By genuine faith he means monotheism, a group of faiths that includes Judaism, Islam, and the Protestant denominations, all of which he has in other circumstances dismissed haughtily as erroneous.

  “This Canadian scholar,” Kirkmünde concludes—Canadian, he actually says that, trying (badly) to make Dad sound as irrelevant as possible—“is meddling in matters he does not understand.” And he speaks like he expects an apology.

  NPR wants to interview Dad, maybe wants to hear that apology. He must be tempted: loudly failing to apologize for anything, in fact laying into Kirkmünde with both fists flying, would be a nice recreational break. But he resists, goes back to work. All he says—privately, to us: “You know, sometimes evidence is puzzling. But being puzzled is a bad reason to run around shrieking with your hands in the air, like frightened children. It’s also a bad reason for surrendering your judgment to someone whose main claim to expertise is that he wears funny clothes and stares out of the window a lot.”

  The protesters are there all day now, dawn to dusk, in their two groups: on the north corner of the block, the traditionals, as someone has recently dubbed them; a house-width further down, their opponents the Seraphim. They leave each other alone, mostly, but not everyone leaves us alone. After the third or fourth creepy call on our landline, we change the number. Then a visibly deranged guy shows up at the back door, tries to set light to it with the bottle of grain alcohol he’s drinking, only manages to set light to himself. (“I’b doin it fuh Jesus,” he shouts, through a column of greasy smoke, waving the bottle as small blue flames dance up his arm, across his shoulder, into his hair. I put him out with the first thing that comes to hand, a gallon of two-percent milk that’s sitting in a grocery bag in the hallway. When a fire truck shows up, he actually complains to the paramedic about how the milk has ruined his shirt.) After that I persuade Dad to call a security company. I spend an entire afternoon supervising them as they change all the locks and upgrade the alarm system.

  Everyone’s expecting a statement from Quinn by now, but several days go by: he seems to be waiting for the airwaves to clear. When he does react, it’s with a kind of icy, Olympian disdain. Doesn’t mention Dad, the translations, the demonstrations. He just issues a media release to every news outlet on the planet.

  No doubt it’s inspiring, if you’re either Seraphim or Seraphim-curious. If not, it’s just terrifying:

  The time for doubt is over. At the exact hour of the rising of the next full moon, the Seraphim will be ready for a transformation greater than any before seen in our time. At the third home of the Architects, we confidently expect many thousands will follow in the footsteps of the Maya, the Anasazi, the Babylonians, and so many others, ascending to their immortal reward. Know it is true: as they ascend, as the power of their minds is released from the prison of their bodies, the roar will be heard around the world.

  Quinn loves drama, you can tell that. Everyone goes on about what he can possibly mean, what the “third home” could possibly be. Nobody knows; he’s not saying. But a lot of people, me included, mark the next full moon on their calendars.

  CHAPTER 13

  I HAVE FOUND IT

  On the day of Quinn’s enigmatic announcement, there are at least ten more reports of disappearances, three more stories about Mysteries being recovered, and three news stories about arsons at major libraries. Also, I invite the Eislers and the Cerenkovs over to dinner.

  I don’t even bother to ask Dad and Morag if it’s OK, which turns out to be the right call: when I do mention it—by email, because that’s the only reliable way to get Dad’s attention—they both say, Yeah, sure; sounds good; whatever. Gabi Eisler gets back to me right away and says they’ll all be there. Nothing from Kit’s mom, Natazscha, and it’s only when Dad and Morag get home late in the afternoon that I receive a thirdhand reply.

  “I bumped into Kit with her mom on campus,” Morag says. “Natazscha was hurrying off, so Kit and I ended up hanging out. She said they can’t make it tonight.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Reading between the lines, Kit really wanted to come, but Natazscha’s freaked out by the idea of her hanging around with either of us here. Pity. I really like her.”

  I’ve not discussed my feelings about Kit with Morag because, well, because my feelings are too animal. It’s embarrassing. So I change the subject to shopping for fish.

  Hours later, we’re both watching from the kitchen window when the Eislers arrive. No protesters now, all gone home for the evening. But, as the Eislers get out of their car, a guy with a breezy grin approaches Stefan with his hand held out.

  Journalist, I’d guess—he even has a notebook and pen in his other hand, as if to identify himself. I open the front door to greet Gabi and Rosko. Stefan is stuck at the bottom of the steps, answering the notebook guy:

  “Make a statement? Ja, sure I’ll make a statement. Ready? OK, here it is: You, yes you, should leave this family alone. Professor Calder has already done interviews. If you want to arrange another one, call his department at the university. This, however”—he gestures to the house—“is private.”

  “Sir, after these extraordinary revelations, don’t you think the public has a right—”

  “I think Professor Calder and his family have a right not to be harassed at their own front door.”

  “Excuse me, sir.” He’s trying for the Mr. Offended tone now. “This is my job.”

  “I am sorry to hear that. Couldn’t get a real one? A personal tragedy in a tough economy.”

  “But—”

  “See the lake down there?”

  “Lake Washington? Yes.”

  “It’s big, and cold, and two hundred feet deep. But you should go jump in it, because otherwise I swear to God I’ll pick you up, carry you down the hill, and throw you in.”

  Not a plausible threat—the guy has thirty, forty pounds on Stefan. But he looks suitably alarmed, throws a wan smile in our direction, and beats a retreat t
o the safety of his battered white Civic, which is parked across the street.

  Morag has already gone in with Gabi and Rosko. Ten seconds later, as I hold the door for Stefan, I’ve almost forgotten the guy. And yet—

  Something in the body language?

  His face, his posture. It’s like, all the anxiety about being sent for a swim has just switched off. Or was never there. He’s standing by the car with a phone to his ear, looking around as if scoping the area. Something not right about it.

  I shut the door but glue my eye to the little brass security viewer. It’s old, has a scratched lens, but I can see well enough. He saunters to the front end of his car. Peers at something out of my sight line. Slouches against the hood. And makes a series of low, quick hand gestures, like a baseball catcher.

  Mumbling an excuse, I run down the corridor past the kitchen, duck into the downstairs bathroom. Without turning the light on, I close the door behind me and move slowly, inch by inch, until the view of an ornamental Japanese maple becomes a view of the street. I’m just in time to see the Civic’s brake lights brighten and then disappear as the car pauses and turns at the end of the street.

  So he was leaving after all. But there’s only one place anyone could park, in the direction of those odd, quick gestures. It’s occupied by a black Range Rover with three antennae.

  Morag chats with Rosko. Stefan stands around awkwardly with a glass of wine in his hand until Dad shows up from his study and condescends to be social. Gabi actually helps. I’ve had nothing to do all day but think about this meal, so I’ve gone a bit overboard: tiny salads of butter lettuce and red onion; a platter of big, pepper-crusted wild salmon fillets served with black kale and roasted sweet potato; slivers of Manchego cheese topped with fig butter; a real heart attack of a cardamom-scented crème brûlée.