The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

  “How do they know what to spell out?” Rosko says. “They can’t know what the right combination is supposed to be.”

  “They don’t,” Morag says. “What they’re doing is guesswork.”

  Quinn speaks up, his voice so much richer and more persuasive, so much more arresting than anyone else’s: “What they are doing is not guesswork,” he says. “It is faith.”

  I’m not sure whether his tone is meant to be intimidating, or just authoritative, but it works for me—I feel physically drawn to him as he says it, can feel why people follow him, as if his confidence has the power to make things true. But Morag’s not intimidated, not impressed. I see in my little pilot’s mirror the withering look she throws at him.

  “Faith is just the problem, isn’t it? You’ve been taken in by the Architects, Quinn. Lied to. Just like the Babbler-priests at Strongyle were. And then the Babbler-priests in Mesopotamia, and the Yucatán, the Indus Valley, ancient Elam, Rapa Nui. They had buckets of faith, and what did it give them? Just a heightened capacity not to ask questions until it was too late. Rosko, did you tell him about the Akkadian Version?”

  “Wasn’t exactly top of the priority list the last couple of days, Morag.”

  “None of this matters now,” Quinn says decisively. “For today, whatever you believe and I believe, we are on the same side. This has to stop. If we can disconnect all the amplification in time, then perhaps—”

  A sudden turbulence has me wrestling frantically with the cyclic—the helicopter’s equivalent of a steering wheel. We slew sideways and fall more than two thousand feet. The lower altitude is probably good, but what saves us from zero altitude is Mack’s swift, unexpected reaction in adjusting the antitorque pedals. I shoot a questioning look at him and he grins again, obviously both fearless and pleased with himself:

  “I flew shotgun in these when I was in the Army. Kept my eyes open, that’s all. But I could get the hang of this.”

  More than five thousand feet of mountain towers above us now, and nearly all the Seraphim are there. Rosko shades his eyes, squinting out at the vast crowd. “We’re never going to pick out Bill in all this.”

  But dyslexia comes to my aid again. Can’t do letters, can do patterns. I knew, as soon as I saw the mass of people, that all I had to do was get within range and then not try too hard: like looking at an acre of grass, and just seeing the four-leaf clovers pop out at you. Can’t even say what exactly catches my eye, but—

  “There they are. Just upslope to the right from the helicopter pad.”

  “Aye,” Morag says. “And someone’s already taken your parking space.”

  She’s right. There’s a big shiny new Sikorsky on the pad, glinting expensively.

  “Do you have room to put down behind it?”

  I’m about to need a thousand percent of my available skill, so I don’t reply. I come in from above, slow us to a crawl, hover, rotate left a little. Double-check the altitude. Triple-check the angles. Yes, there is room for both machines. Just.

  And I get so close to the right spot, I really do.

  So close.

  We’re sinking gently from twenty feet above the pad when a gust drifts us backward, off target. I correct it, kind of: the machine moves back across the pad in the right direction, but at the same time yaws left. Partially correcting that makes the nose pitch down. Worrying that I’ll clip the Sikorsky, I fix the pitch, only at the expense of making the yaw worse.

  Then we’re forced backward again, we’re sinking again, and there seems to be nothing I can do this time. When the tip of a rotor hits the edge of the pad itself, the whole airframe twitches, like an animal that’s touched a live fence.

  There’s a pause. Just long enough for me to think maybe everything’s OK. Then the cyclic comes alive and kicks my hand away.

  No control.

  When you dump a large helicopter on a steep mountainside, there’s a standard, simple procedure: everyone dies. In our case, the engine stalls and one rotor blade sheers off with a sound like a cat being strangled. Then the landing gear catches in the steel underside of the platform. Mack and I are wearing three-point seat belts, but when we go over sideways, everyone in the back is hurled against the left side of the cabin.

  We hang motionless over the long, icy drop. For a few heartbeats we all hold our breaths, waiting for the fall. When it doesn’t happen, Mack is amazing:

  “One at a time,” he says, already out of his belt and scrambling for the right-side (now the upper) door. “Morag first. Move, now.” He levers the door open, calls each name in turn, takes each person by the arm, hauls them out. One by one we climb up over the lip and clamber out to safety. But he calls Quinn’s name last, and Quinn hasn’t moved. He’s lying oddly twisted against the left-side door, a pool of blood on the glass next to his head.

  “Hang on,” Mack says. He’s already moving to climb back in when Quinn’s voice comes up from below, ragged and weak now but still commanding: “No. You can’t get me out—my neck is broken. I must speak to Morag.”

  He means he wants her to listen, but she bends down, grabs the sill, and before I can stop her she’s swung herself down beside him. She kneels, puts a hand on his forehead, talks to him. I can see by the way his eyes strain to look at her that he can’t move even an inch, but his lips are moving rapidly. Then there’s a noise exactly like someone popping the tab on a giant soda can—a loud crunch followed by a kind of scraping note that goes up in pitch at the end—and the helicopter settles a foot lower.

  “The undercarriage is separating,” Rosko yells. “Morag, get out now!”

  Quinn’s blue eyes go perfectly still. In one movement, she brushes her fingers across his face to close them, leaps up onto the sideways backrest of the pilot’s seat, and jumps, a bloody arm outstretched. In the hole formed by the right-side doorway, I get a one-handed grip on her, then Rosko manages to grab her other hand just as a single loud pop announces that the metal strut holding the undercarriage in place has failed.

  The helicopter falls away from her body like a discarded prom dress—except that there’s no floor for it to fall to. It plunges, hits the snow, begins to roll over and over. As I haul her to safety, we watch it reach a band of rock, where it spins hard, shreds itself prettily like something made from tissue paper, and drops out of sight.

  The shock of the moment has immobilized us—it’s a few seconds before we become fully aware again of where we are. I’m still gripping Morag in a bear hug when Mack looks up, leans his head to one side like a swimmer with water in his ear. Then I notice it too: a noise that reminds me at once of the Seraphim rally in the park.

  “Listen,” he says. “They’re broadcasting his voice.”

  Yes, that’s what it is: Quinn. A recording of one of his speeches, sermons, whatever you want to call them. I can hear fragments only, but it’s as if he’s speaking in the language out of which the chants are made:

  Ok-DE-chol-chol. Chol-BAN-qi-jat. Ul-fet, ul-fet. Ul-ROX-vo, ix-ep, ep-WO-dze.

  “M, what did Quinn say to you just now?”

  She struggles out of my arms and looks up the slope toward the crowds. “I didn’t even understand most of it. His last words were, ‘You will have to give them back their own voices.’ ”

  I grab her by the shoulders, try to give her back her own hardest, most penetrating stare. “I don’t know what he meant, but we’re out of time for giving them anything. We need to find out why the hell Dad is here, and get him out—and then get you out. If Quinn is right—if your Shul-hura is right—we need to know what happened to the Disks and have you working on them. Otherwise we’re finished.”

  She shakes her head. “There are ten thousand people on this mountain. I have to try to save them.”

  “You can’t. Quinn’s talking about the Phaistos language—you’ve not cracked it, and there are seven billion other people who need you to stay alive until you do.”

  “I have an idea. And fortune favors the brave, doesn’t it?” />
  “No,” Mack says. “In my experience, fortune only favors the fortunate.”

  Morag looks at me and Rosko. “Ten thousand people, who have probably spent months training to speak only the chants from Anabasis.”

  “Returning to the language of the gods,” Rosko says. “Returning to the time before Babel.”

  “Aye. That’s what Quinn taught them to believe.”

  “Quinn’s gone,” I insist. “And you don’t have the Phaistos language.”

  “There’s another possibility, though. I’ll need you to help me get to the PA system. Come on.”

  And she starts sprinting upslope across the snow.

  I’m fast, but her athleticism always takes me by surprise: by the time I catch up with her, she’s already reached a point just below a kind of speaker’s platform, with a podium, an electrical generator, microphones. Sophie is there, barring the way, and with her is Dad. They’re both dressed in down parkas like scientists on a field trip—which is, I guess, what they are. Off to one side, as if spaced evenly along the edge of the crowd, I can see other figures who are clearly not Seraphim, clearly observing, not participating. And there’s a third figure near us, on the platform, a man who gives off an aura of being in charge even though his back is turned to us as he surveys the great sea of the Seraphim faithful.

  “Morag! Daniel!” Dad says. “You should not have come here.”

  “Where is Édouard?” Sophie says.

  I’m looking forward to saying, Your husband got tied up, but I don’t get the chance, because the man behind them calmly looks at his wristwatch, puts his hands together behind his back, turns around.

  Unbelievable.

  I’m lost for words.

  Morag, on the other hand, is never lost for words. “You?” she says. “You? Cognitive science. Computational models of the mind. Consciousness. So interested in both Bill’s and Iona’s research; so interested in me and all the other Babblers. But I jus’ dinna put two and two together. Well fock.”

  He smiles and gives her a formal little bow, polite as always. Even here, on a snowfield on the summit of a volcano, David Maynard Jones is wearing an expensive wool coat and a silk tie.

  CHAPTER 23

  IN THE ARMY OF THE TEN THOUSAND

  “Morag. An honor, as always. And delighted that your idiot brother didn’t kill you just now. I’ve been trying to catch up with you for some time.”

  I take a step forward. “I think the word you’re looking for is kidnap.”

  He raises one eyebrow about a millimeter—like he has no idea what I’m talking about, or anyway the distinction’s not important—then gestures to the crowd farther up the slope and continues to address Morag, as if I’ve not spoken. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? Julius Quinn has managed to create a global wave of religious hysteria. Quite aside from all the people who have died, and will die, in the resulting sectarian conflicts, he has helped turn hundreds of people around the world into Mysteries, and those numbers are accelerating rapidly. Because sometimes Anabasis works, and sometimes it does not. For a while, a lot of us in the science community buried our heads in the sand, pretty much pretended it wasn’t happening. Didn’t we, Bill? All that blather about the Architects—ha! It played so well to the gullible that we became gullible in our own way: we just dismissed the whole thing.”

  “Until Patagonia,” Sophie breathes, in her silky Paris accent.

  “Yes. I’d been keeping tabs on Iona Maclean for years. A dangerously intelligent woman, for a non-Babbler. She and I had what you might call a philosophical disagreement, a long way back, after I told her a little too much about my own research. I wanted to be sure she didn’t dig too deep. That’s why the Colberts were in Patagonia—just part of a procedure to find out what she knew, what she suspected. Her dying that way was—well, I don’t want to appear heartless, but from the point of view of getting at the truth, it was a piece of luck.”

  He flashes a look of insincere apology at me, then can’t prevent himself from smiling. I can’t really take in what he’s said—I’m just reduced to a raw sense that I once mistakenly liked him and now I want to kill him.

  Rosko puts a hand on my arm, as if sensing that he might need to restrain me.

  “What happened in Patagonia persuaded us to take Quinn’s religious mumbo jumbo more seriously. Persuaded us that it might have some direct connection to the work on the nature of the mind that we were already doing. As your father likes to say, myths don’t come from nowhere.”

  He checks his watch again. “And now we are simply gathering more evidence, in this picturesque laboratory the Seraphim have provided.”

  “It doesn’t add up though, does it?” Rosko says. “You’re supposed to be a professor. Just a professor—someone who works in a Seattle lab studying how the brain works. But somehow you’re up a mountain in eastern Turkey with a million-dollar helicopter.”

  Mayo laughs heartily. “It all adds up perfectly, according to Charlie Balakrishnan’s accountants. He pays for everything, and for the same reason that he set up the Institute for the Study of the Origin of Consciousness. He wants answers to a deep question, perhaps the deepest question of all. Why do we humans have this inner world of concepts, of feelings, of hopes and fears that we can express and manipulate through language? Ten million species on the planet, but only we are like this—why? What is this thing? Then the Mysteries came along, and turned the question on its head: where is their consciousness going? The Seraphim have an answer to that—a new version of the old, old answer: the faithful are taken up into heaven! When the old religions talked about immortality, you could dismiss it, of course—no evidence. But in the case of the Mysteries, obviously something was going on. But what? Charlie B is not young, he’s afraid of dying, and he will pay any amount to find out.”

  “He’s not going to find out anything,” I tell him. “By taking Quinn out of the picture, you’ve interfered with the Anabasis. All you’re going to get is—”

  But I don’t know the ending to my own sentence. Sophie turns to address me—which is good, because she’s turning her back on Morag, who is inching closer to the amplifiers.

  “Quinn’s fairground performance is not essential in any way,” Sophie says. “What’s essential is that this is a measurable physical process, and measuring is exactly what we intend to do. We’ve already made progress. At first, we thought the dead at places like Uyuni and Goat Rocks were the failures, and the Mysteries were the successes. Now we know it’s the opposite—whatever’s happening, the Mysteries are the ones who are not quite ready. We want to understand the difference, and we have everything covered. Video, audio, infrared, electromagnetism, ultrasonic shock, radiation. We’re going to get some serious data today.”

  “Aye,” Morag says, “but you underestimated Quinn’s role, and without him here, you won’t get what you want. If the Architects show up at all, everyone up here will either be turned into a Mystery or be killed. Doesn’t that bother you at all? Didn’t think so.” Turning to Dad, she says: “Have you actually swallowed this crap? How naive are you, Bill Calder?”

  Dad has been watching Mayo. Now he turns slowly to face us again, but he doesn’t answer Morag’s question. I sense that he’s betrayed me in some way—betrayed Mom in some way—and I’m so angry that I can barely meet his eye. But something in him forces my attention.

  “Remember those first trips to Crete, Daniel? The museum? How badly I wanted to know about the Disks? Plan A was to talk to all the important people, let them know what I wanted. Didn’t work. Plan B, with Jimmy’s imager, that required a bit of subterfuge, didn’t it? A bit of not playing by the rules? And it was successful.”

  I push up my sleeve to reveal the white scar. “I remember.”

  “Well, this is Plan C.”

  I’m tossing this around in my head, wondering what the hell he’s on about—Plan C? Subterfuge?—when he winks. Briefly, once, with one eyelid, just the way he taught me on the beach all those y
ears ago. And then he turns back to the Aussie, but he’s still addressing me.

  “Mayo and I have been working together for a long time. Now that he has all the Disks safely housed at Charlie Balakrishnan’s compound in Delhi, we can really begin to get a grip on them. Master the Phaistos code at last. With Morag’s help: I have no doubt it will take Morag’s help.”

  “Want my help, do you, Bill? After what this lot’s done to me, and Partridge, and Rosko? Well ye can jus’ go screw ye’self.”

  He turns again, winks again. Morag sees it this time, and a shadow of confusion passes over her face like a racing cloud. Then Sophie interrupts.

  “Too much talk. We’re set up now—anyone who’s not ready for heaven, it’s time to get out of here.”

  “Yes indeed,” Dad says, but then he takes three paces toward me, sloughs off his down jacket, holds it out.

  “I’ve been a crappy father, Daniel. Wasn’t a great husband either, and I’m sorry I ever teased your mother about her spiritual shopping. One thing I never teased her about was her judgment of other people. That’s the reason I listened carefully when she talked to me about my old, ha, rival, and said ‘Watch him. Don’t trust him.’ It’s the reason I’m here.”

  He thrusts the coat at me. “You look cold, take this.”

  “No, I’m fine. But I thought she—”

  “Take the damn coat,” he hisses, strangely insistent. “And get Morag safely off the mountain. I’ll deal with those two.”

  “But—”

  He touches a fingertip to his lips, then turns back toward Sophie, his voice changing back to Pompous Scientist on a Mission. “Have you double-checked the audio? That’s the most important thing for me. I must have all sixteen channels on line to get a full—”

  “Everything’s fine,” she snaps. “We have three different backup circuits. We’re also behind schedule now. Come on.”