by Richard Farr
While we eat, nobody talks about Quinn, the Babel documents, or the Mysteries. Gabi especially is good at small talk that doesn’t seem small—she even manages to draw Dad into a lighthearted debate about parenting, then slide invisibly from there to the question of what’s going to happen with Morag’s and my schooling now. Rosko takes up the theme: isn’t it time for us to show up to class and be regular kids?
Afterward, when the Eislers have driven home, Dad disappears back to his study without even thinking to make an excuse; Morag and I clean up. I’m scrubbing a pot, soapy water up to my elbows, when I think again of the Range Rover.
“M, do me a favor?”
“Go up and pour dishwater down the back of Bill’s neck? Sure.”
“No. That’ll only make him worse. Just go to the downstairs bathroom. Shut the door behind you, don’t turn the light on, look out into the street. I want to know what you see.”
No questions. She just raises one eyebrow a couple of millimeters and vanishes. Meanwhile I head for the front door, wiping my hands on a dish towel that has all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks on it—another reminder of Mom. I look out through the security viewer again. Nothing.
Morag meets me back at the sink. “One medium-sized gray raccoon. One large black SUV.”
“Still there. Range Rover, yes?”
“I make it a matter of principle not to know those things. And what do you mean, still?”
“Did you see anything else?”
“The raccoon was cute. I love the way their hands—”
“M.”
“OK. The Global Warmer has darkened glass, but I could tell there was at least one person inside.”
“It was there when the Eislers arrived. What do you remember about the journalist?”
“Guy on the front step?” She closes her eyes for a moment, no more than a lazy blink. “Dark-green jacket with an REI logo on the sleeve. Squarish glasses with blue frames, trying too hard to be stylish. Short dark hair with those gray bits at the sides. Would have looked cute if he hadn’t looked terrified. I thought Stefan was a bit harsh.”
“I don’t think he was terrified. And I don’t think he was a journalist. He made out like Stefan frightened him off, but he strolled over to his car, sat on the hood, did some kind of hand signal to those guys in the Range Rover.”
“That’s odd.”
“Local news outlet hires 24/7 surveillance goons who drive an upmarket go-kart with three different antennae? Definitely it’s odd.”
“Who else, though? It’s not exactly the right style for a bunch of Seraphim, either.”
“Guess the people who stole the translation are more sophisticated than we thought.”
Whatever the truth, it makes me angry to be inside my own house hiding and speculating. I put down the last pot and wipe my hands again. “I’m going to talk to them.”
“Are you crazy? You can’t do that!”
But Morag is wrong: I can. It feels good too—especially good, knowing they won’t be expecting it.
I open the front door, hop down the steps as if I’m going for a stroll. The driver is peering out at me through the side window; I go right over, smile, tap on the glass. Three sharp taps, I guess that’s what I’m intending, but I only manage two before the smoked barrier melts silently into the door. As it does so, the driver puts on sunglasses, a gesture so ridiculous I almost laugh.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
He looks like a parody of Secret Service. Dark suit, dark tie, square jaw, neck like a tree stump. Everything except the plastic earpiece.
Then I look over at the guy in the passenger seat.
Plastic earpiece.
“I was thinking maybe I could help you. See, I live here. But maybe you knew that already. Thing is, this is not a legal parking space. I thought you ought to know that the meter maniacs around here are, well, you know. Maniacs. Stalinists. Spawn of Satan. I’m not kidding.”
They’re dressed identically, like Mormons. The one in the passenger seat won’t even turn to look at me—his hands are upturned in his lap, as if he’d been about to rip out the earpiece as I knocked on the window but didn’t have time.
“Thanks,” the driver says. “Appreciate your concern. We were just on our way as a matter of fact.”
“I’m sure you were. Nice earbud, by the way. You have a simply wonderful evening now.”
As I walk back into the house, Dad shouts down from his study.
“Guys. Can you come up here a minute?”
He’s sitting in the fancy executive chair at his desk. Along the wall to his right there’s a big trestle table covered in papers. Above it, a neat row of eight black-and-white photographs: they show each side of the first Phaistos Disk and each side of the three others we found. Looming in the semidarkness behind him are framed prints of Gustav Doré’s The Confusion of Tongues, Bruegel’s The Tower of Babel, and a couple of other images starring wild-eyed biblical types in front of wrecked towers.
He has a wild look in his eye too.
“I feel bad about abandoning you, but I’m going to have to go see Partridge again. In Rome.”
“When?”
Now he just looks embarrassed. “Immediately. I have a flight already—it leaves in a couple of hours.”
I just worked out that a couple of Bond villains are watching our house, and he’s taking off on an academic vacation. I look at him but can’t think of anything to say.
“Look,” he says, “I’m really sorry about this. The timing sucks, I know. But I mean, whatever the Akkadian tablets say, we still don’t have a clue why there was a fragment of a Disk there. If Derek knows where to find a whole collection of them—”
“You’ve heard from him?”
He nods. “I may need to go to Crete as well just for a few days, to see Pandora Kallas and visit the people at the museum. I’ll be back in a week. Ten days, max.”
“That’s—”
Morag finishes the thought for me.
“That’s great, Bill. Exciting. As you say, though, not exactly ideal timing, given the media circus and everything.”
I’m all prepared to be annoyed with her for supporting him; instead, I love the way she manages the balancing act I can’t pull off—direct and critical, without giving offense. Me, I skate closer to the edge:
“What the hell are we supposed to do while you’re gone? Pull down the blinds? Turn off the phones? Live in the dark?”
He starts to say something, twice, but stops. Trying and failing to wrap his mouth around an apology? Finally: “Just refuse to answer questions. You’ll be fine.” He looks at me, as if seeking approval. Then he adds feebly: “I guess you could both stay with the Eislers? That might make things easier.”
I almost pity him. I know he’s got a lot on his mind, but how can anyone be this clumsy? It’s impossible not to imagine Mom, how she would have handled a crisis, how she would have actually taken more than ten seconds to think about our point of view. I open my mouth to answer him without even knowing what I’m going to say, aware both that I’m angry and that paradoxically I don’t care whether he’s going to be here or not: what difference could it make?
Morag, again, beats me to the punch. “We don’t need to be babysat by Gabi and Stefan, Bill. We’ll manage. What does Partridge have to say?”
He swivels his laptop in our direction; Morag and I lean in and peer at the screen. The body of the email contains just a single word. The best-known word in the Greek language: what Archimedes allegedly said, around 260 BCE, when he leapt out of his bath and ran naked and roaring through the streets of Syracuse.
Heureka.
I translate it aloud: “ ‘I have found it.’ That’s it? He didn’t by any chance tell you what he’s found?”
Dad reaches under his desk, pulls out a FedEx envelope. “Derek’s not a stupid man. Paranoid, eccentric, probably wrong about a whole lot of things, but not stupid. I got this a couple of days ago. Apparently he’s convinced that he ca
n’t tell me anything, except in person.”
In the envelope there’s a single piece of paper:
Bill, I’m homing in on the missing piece of the jigsaw. You won’t believe me if I write it down, and anyway I can’t—both of us are being watched. Come to Rome at once. I know you think I’m a fool, but speak of this to no one please. And don’t delay.
P.S. If anything happens to me, look for Casaubon—remember?
“Watched,” Dad says sarcastically, using his fingers to make little scare quotes in the air. “Poor Derek always wants things to be more exciting than they are. He’s one step from believing the CIA has implanted a microphone in his false teeth.”
I’m about to mention the guys in the Range Rover, but Morag steps gently on my foot. When I glance at her, she discreetly shakes her head.
“Casaubon?” she asks.
Dad waves his hand dismissively. “Just something I gave him once.”
I take a deep breath, consciously swallowing my anger. As casually as I can: “Well then. Guess you want me to drive you to the airport?”
A few hours later, while Dad’s sucking down a Scotch on his red-eye to Europe, I’m asleep and my subconscious brings me to Julius Quinn.
At least it’s not a nightmare. I’m a guest at a lakeside estate. Afternoon tea, cakes on the terrace, the full English cliché. He’s friendly, relaxed, plausible. Also, he’s—I mean, I’m kind of a militant heterosexual, but I have to admit it: he’s strangely desirable. And he never raises that famous voice:
It’s all right to have doubts, Daniel. Preachers have been claiming since the beginning of time to have heard the voices of the gods. Ridiculous! But I’m the exception that proves the rule, you see. I really did encounter the Architects.
When I ask him whether I will ever see my mother again, he looks at me with great kindness, great compassion, but a kind of sadness too:
Think about all the priests and all the religions over the centuries, fighting each other so angrily about which of them knows the truth. The atheists say they are all wrong. But what if all the priests and all the atheists are wrong? Has it never occurred to you that the truth might simply be more strange and more magnificent than anyone has dared imagine? The truth is that the reality of the infinite lies beyond all our languages and concepts. In fact, it does not—
The scene thins and shimmers. He’s laughing, throws his head back so that I can see the wet, ribbed vault of his mouth. Looks at me again with a kindly, amused smile.
Oh, Daniel, you cannot—
My picture of him is fading. Nothing is left but fragments of his voice:
It’s not at all what you—
I’m dragged back from the infinite to the real by a single ding on my phone.
CHAPTER 14
THE AKKADIAN VERSION
Message from Rosko, and it’s only just after seven.
Come over now. Sthing important 2 show u.
I sit up in bed, rub my eyes, can’t even see straight yet. My reply reads something like wA2 eerlgy.
Less than ten seconds later I get: Now.
My pulse picks up: What you find?
He won’t say. Only, Parents up + headed out on bikes. Place to selves maybe 2 hrs. Urgent.
A Saturday morning bike ride for Stefan and Gabi Eisler means eighty, a hundred miles. My thumbs are still hovering, my mind still composing an excuse to delay, when I get a third text.
NOW.
He doesn’t say, Bring Morag, but anyway I can’t bring Morag. I pad down the corridor and tap on her bedroom door only to discover, as I could have predicted, that she’s not here: door ajar, bed neatly made as always, the whole room perfectly tidy except for maybe a hundred books in stacks and slews and avalanches on the floor.
Probably left for the ISOC library already. Except that when she goes out she always leaves a note on the kitchen counter, and there’s nothing.
As I send her a message—Morning. OK? Library?—I imagine her walking over there in the gray of dawn. Then I think of the SUV again, curse myself for needing more sleep than she does, wonder why there’s no reply.
What if she’s not safe?
Should be with her.
I try again. This time, though, I hear a distant answering sound from right here in the house. Wandering into the living room, I find the source: her phone, right there on the couch. This is making me nervous—and when the door opens behind me, I nearly jump out of my skin.
“Morning, D.”
“What the—I thought—I was trying to text you, and—”
“I was up in Bill’s study.”
“Oh.”
“Been there all night, actually.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, give my heart rate a couple of seconds to subside. She has a vacant, slightly stunned look, which I put down to lack of sleep. “So, pulling a late one. How’s it going?”
“It’s going brilliantly. In a way. The past two or three days, I’ve reached takeoff speed in Akkadian.”
I give her a puzzled frown.
“A totally new level of understanding. It happens with every language: I get to a point where I’m not translating. I look at the text, and the meaning just bounces right back at me. I can read this stuff, D.”
“That’s good. Listen, I was just heading out to Rosko’s. Said he’s found something important. Want to come with me?”
“Did he say what it’s about?”
“No.”
She grabs a hunk of bread from the counter, slathers butter on it, takes her jacket from the back of a chair. “I’ve made my own breakthrough, D. Tell you as we go down?”
There are already three early arrivals on the street in front of the house. But we have a routine now—sneak through the garage, over a low fence into the neighbor’s yard, then into the alley. Nobody sees us.
“Bill’s methodical to a fault,” Morag says. “I mean, methodical is great, but there’s a limit to what I can stand. It’s like we found a shelf of old books, and he decided we should find out what’s in them by starting on the first page of the first book, and going page by page without even skimming ahead to read the titles. Been driving me crackers.”
Crackers makes me smile: Mom used to say it.
“Dad must be in Rome by now. Not here to hold the whip over you anymore, so you can do your own thing.”
“My own thing is exactly what I’ve been doing. At high speed, all bloody night. I’m a bit fried, tell you the truth.”
It’s a beautiful, warm morning. A couple of minutes after we turn out of the alley, we’re passing Seattle’s oldest cemetery, where the city’s founders are permanently surprised to find themselves rotting right alongside martial arts hero Bruce Lee. We cross the street, heading for a bench that overlooks the lake, and have to jump for the curb to avoid being hit by two muscle-popping bike jocks.
They whip past us at high speed, doing their morning thing on expensive metal. I glance at them only because they come so close to us. They have the generic, aggressive look of the thirtysomething Seattle road warrior: closely buzzed hair, blue spandex, wraparound shades. Other than that, there’s no time to notice anything except that one looks vaguely familiar and one is built like a cross between a stellar track athlete and a Sasquatch.
Probably a sign of paranoia that I notice them at all: I’m mainly interested in hurrying. But Morag wanders to the bench and sits, staring out at nothing. She puts her hands between her knees, hunches forward, rocks back and forth for a minute. Then she says:
“We have Quinn’s story right there in the oldest of the Akkadian tablets. That’s what all the fuss is about, right?”
“Ascent to the realm of the eternal. Our destiny as higher beings achieved at last. Joy unconfined. Sure.”
“But there’s a later set. I sneaked a peek at them when we first dug them up at Babel. Kind of caught my eye—so completely different.”
“You mean a different language?”
“No no. Same language, but a totally differen
t voice. The older tablets read like you’d expect from a religious document. Grand, poetic, repetitive. Impressive in a way, but it could have been written by a committee, you know? This later material, it’s not like that at all. It’s from one person, a priest named Shul-hura. And he’s talking directly to the reader. It’s a message in a bottle. Personal. Me to you. A cry for help.”
She’s fidgeting, nervous, keeps getting up and sitting down again. I can tell she hasn’t finished.
“A cry for help, yes. Or a warning.”
I check my phone. Another message from Rosko: Dude. Speed it up. Drink your coffee here. I put it back in my pocket.
“Go on.”
“Shul-hura describes the arrival of the Architects. He calls them persuasive and charming and beautiful. He says they claim to want to raise humanity to their level, and they want to ‘clarify’ people’s minds, so they have introduced their own language, and forbidden the use of Akkadian.”
“I thought this was all in Akkadian?”
She nods. “Shul-hura is writing a message, in his own language, about his own language being forbidden on pain of death. He also says there are ‘questions that may not be asked’—and then he goes ahead and asks them.”
“Let me guess. One of them is, What do the Architects really want?”
“Close enough. Who are they? Where do they come from? Why must we give up our own languages in order to find the eternal? What is this ‘eternity’?”
“So there’s forbidden knowledge. Eve and the apple.”
“Exactly. Another case of people being told by the gods that there is nothing more evil, nothing more corrupt, than wanting to know what’s really going on.”
“Anything else?”
“Oh, I’ve not even told you the heart of it yet. Remember the Babel story? The Genesis version?”
“God gives us the divine language, so we can communicate with each other and with him. But we offend him by getting arrogant, building skyscrapers. He doesn’t like our attitude, gets his panties all in a wad, ‘confuses our tongues.’ ”
