The Fire Seekers

by Richard Farr

Dad shrugs meekly. The three of them turn in the direction of the landing pad. A small gust of wind reminds me that I have Dad’s parka on, but it’s not zipped, so I cross my arms over the chest to keep it around me. My right palm lands over the breast pocket, where there’s something hard and rectangular, like a pack of cigarettes. That’s when Morag makes a dash for the microphones and starts speaking.

  “Damn,” Mayo says, and he and Sophie turn around as if to stop her. But Rosko and I are barring the way. Mayo’s about to speak when Dad, standing directly behind him, says, “Game’s over, Mayo.” The Aussie turns again, surprise written all over his face, and Dad clouts him in the mouth. Not an expert punch, not even a good one, but Mayo’s wearing ridiculous dress shoes and loses his balance on the steep snow. Dad jumps, hands around his neck as they go down.

  Dad has Mayo pinned under him, motionless and gagging, just long enough to turn and catch my eye:

  “Get yourselves out of here. And save that jacket. It was hard to get.”

  Mayo grunts, shifts, manages to slither halfway to freedom and hack sideways with one elbow across the bridge of Dad’s nose. Dad gasps in pain and loses hold.

  “You stupid man, Calder,” Mayo says as he gets to his feet. “I trusted that you understood what’s at stake here. What’s at stake here is infinite.”

  He aims a kick, but it misses completely.

  “I know what’s at stake,” Dad says calmly, and launches himself headfirst at the buckle on Mayo’s expensive, probably crocodile-skin belt.

  They go down again, rolling.

  The roll turns into an uncontrolled slide.

  Below them, maybe fifty or a hundred feet away, there’s a curious shadow line across the snow. Not as obvious as it sometimes is—you’d need a lot of mountain experience to recognize it.

  When they get there, still accelerating, there’s a little puff as the snowbridge explodes under their combined weight.

  And the crevasse opens wide like a leering, blue-lipped mouth.

  Morag’s alone now at the amplifier panel. Her voice comes streaming around us like the wind, carried everywhere on a thousand watts of high-end amplification. And I think, irrelevantly: That voice, that exact accent, is one of the things I love most in the whole world.

  “Listen to the sound of your native language,” she says. “That sound is what freed your ancestors from the Architects. Their language is not a gift. It’s a curse. A lie. The road to enslavement. Listen to your own language. Listen, listen.”

  And she repeats herself in language after language:

  Ecoutez la musique de votre langue maternelle—

  Sentita la musica della vostra lingua madre—

  Hören Sie den Klang Ihrer Muttersprache—

  Prislushaytes’ k zvuku vashego rodnogo yazyka—

  “It’s not going to work,” Rosko yells to me. “Most of these people probably speak Turkish, Kurdish, Azerbaijani. I don’t think she has a word of those languages. Neither do I.”

  “It’s also not going to work because you are out of time,” Sophie says, backing toward the helicopter as her eyes drift from us to the sky above our heads, as if searching for something.

  The clouds are darkening, as if a storm is brewing in the clear blue sky. Then there’s a rustling, fizzing sound, like wind coming through a forest. For a moment I think it’s something wrong with the amplification, but Morag’s voice continues, clear and strong—except that it’s being drowned in the rising volume of the new sound:

  Ol-CHI-ma

  Va-MA-je

  Bin-AR-bin

  Qa-ROX-ret

  The Seraphim on the other side of the peak must have just seen what they were anticipating all these weeks.

  The moment Quinn chose for maximum effect:

  Moonrise.

  Sophie glances at the sky again and a look of panic passes across her face as she turns and runs for the helicopter, with Rosko close behind her. When she reaches it, Mack is standing in the doorway. He looks at the sky too. It’s shimmering now, sulfurous and blotchy like an oil slick. Sophie looks up at Mack, glances over her shoulder at Rosko, stumbles away across the slope.

  By the time I get back to Morag, the whole mountain has begun to shake. Above us, little pools of darkness in the air are beginning to thicken, come into focus. But she’s still talking steadily into the microphone:

  Istamti biranini lughatil thad—

  “Not even Arabic, Morag,” Rosko says.

  I grab her arm. “The Architects. They’ve come.”

  She looks up. “That’s just a word, Daniel. Architects is just a word, like God. It’s just a net we throw out in the hope of catching what we don’t understand. Like once we didn’t understand lightning, or stars, or dreams.”

  Never won an argument with Morag; no time to lose one now. I rip out the microphone cable. Then I grab her, kicking and screaming, and start carrying her back to safety.

  “Damn you damn you damn you, Daniel Calder. I have to do this, and I can resist them. Put me the fock doon.”

  I ignore her. Maybe she looks up again and sees how close to the end of things we are, because she stops resisting. When I’m halfway there, Rosko comes scrambling toward us. Behind him, the Sikorsky’s rotor begins to turn. I drop Morag in the snow and look down the mountain at the point where Dad and Mayo disappeared.

  “Get on board, M.”

  “What about Bill?”

  “Going for him now.”

  I run, slither, fall. I scrabble back to my feet using my still-damaged fingers like hooks in the snow, then run and slither and run some more. It’s much farther than it looks. My lungs are screaming, but as if in a dream, Kit is floating miraculously by my side in her running gear, smiling.

  Go Daniel yes you can do this.

  The chanting has spread across the whole mountain, louder and louder and unnaturally louder, as if the faithful themselves have been amplified. It’s a high, keening, ecstatic sound. As I get to the lip of the crevasse, I remember the scene outside the museum in Crete. I imagine scooping Dad up, the way I couldn’t scoop up that woman on the burning sidewalk. So much stronger now! I’m looking around, unsure whether I’ve come down to the right point, when a massive jolt makes me lose my footing, get up, lose my footing again.

  And I’m falling.

  The crevasse is thirty, forty feet deep—I’ve seen worse on a dozen glaciers, but I’m not roped this time. The only reason I don’t die is that I land with a thud on a narrow ledge ten feet down. No injuries, but the ledge slopes away into the abyss, there are no handholds, and the entire mass of ice is shaking.

  “Dad!”

  No sign of him. Nothing. I lean my whole weight into the blue wall, claw at it. Inexorably, I begin to slide.

  “Dad!”

  “Daniel!”

  For a moment in my confusion I think it’s him, but when I look for the source of the voice, it’s Rosko, above me. “Hang on.”

  “No, Rosko, no!” But it’s too late. Spidermensch is climbing into the lip of the crevasse, digging in as he goes. He has an ice ax in each hand.

  “These were in the other helicopter. Hoping I could put one through the back of that Australian bastard’s head.”

  “Rosko, get out. You could kill yourself in here.”

  He’s just above me now. “Look who’s talking, Mr. Clumsy. Shut up and hold on to me.”

  Maybe I ought to argue some more. Maybe I ought to say, You’re insane. But there’s that special look in his eye: It’s OK; trust me; I’m totally comfortable with this. And there’s a natural pecking order here: he’s the better climber, the natural, so I obey. I grab his hand, haul up next to him, use his leg as a step to climb out. I’m flat on the surface again, scooting round to give him my hand in turn, when the ground itself makes a noise like an injured animal. The ice beneath me ripples and bucks, just the way it did on the Torre Sur. I steady myself, then fling my right arm down for Rosko. But he’s gone.

  “Rosko! Rosko! Rosko!”


  Nothing.

  Just a blue silent rift in the mountain, fading to black.

  I’m on all fours, out of breath, out of hope. But now there’s a different roar, and the ice begins to split and steam all around me, and I stand and raise my face to the amazing, amazing sky.

  My breathing slows, my heart rate slows, all the panic and horror washes away. I feel a wave of joy washing over me too. I reach down and find at my feet a great splinter of ice-crusted rock. It’s volcanic, and surprisingly light. I raise it up in offering.

  For my Architect has arrived.

  He is surely the most beautiful, terrible, and seductive of all. Seductive, because I am honored and happy and thrilled to surrender myself to him. Terrible, because I know that I must obey, that there is no choice but to submit utterly. And beautiful—oh! He is tall, and slender, but he has the casual power of a giant. I can’t tell whether he is wearing clothes, because the body looks as if it is still an immature form, in the process of emerging from a chrysalis of light. But the arms, shoulders, and head are there, recognizably human and yet so different, so other, because they are the perfection of the human. Not some beautiful thing, this, but the ideal of beauty itself. Not a human being, but a designer. A maker. A god.

  His eyes envelop me. I feel his delicate, cold, powerful fingers reaching right through the meaningless barrier of my physical body and down, down, down. Into my self.

  Life passing before your eyes? How poorly our imaginations do justice to that idea! I feel each digital constituent, each atom, each moment of my conscious existence flooding up through me now, like a stream of iridescent butterflies, each one as unique, distinct, unrepeatable as the next. I feel as if I am examining each one of them in the minutest detail, and nothing from my whole life has been lost, but time itself must have bloated and slowed, time must have changed its nature, because though it happens quickly, there are thousands upon thousands of these moments. The trivial. The painful. The sublime.

  I’m a small child, being carried by my mother in a winter landscape by a river, and a great V of geese is flying overhead, their wings creaking in the still air.

  I taste a pomegranate for the first time; the sweetness of the pulp lingering under the surprise bitterness of a single bitten seed.

  We’re at the Nigambodh Ghat on the banks of the Yamuna, in New Delhi, and a woman is hunched down near the small burning pyre of a child, and she looks my way, looks into my eyes, her face a picture of inconsolable grief.

  In a sunlit classroom on a Wednesday, Mrs. Rosales is at the board in a blue dress, writing out for us in her loopy old-fashioned writing the word people; I feel proud that I can spell such a big, grown-up word.

  A red barn is caught in a shaft of sunlight in the middle distance, on a lonely road between wheat fields; in the blue sky above it, flat-bottomed lozenges of cumulus fall into ranks, like fat white tanks moving into battle.

  In dense jungle near the Ucayali River, in the western Amazon, Jimmy and I are breaking trail in a storm of biting flies while Morag, also swinging a machete, talks about Darwin’s theory of NUT-urull sul-AKE-shunn.

  At home in Seattle, Kit gives me her lopsided smile in the street outside our house, then turns without saying anything and walks away down the block under the cherry trees.

  These are not memories: no one ever confused the taste of a lemon with the memory of it. What I’m having is the experiences themselves, for a second time. I am present again—in no order, and every order, and simultaneously it seems—at every single moment of consciousness that has made up my inner life and world.

  It’s as if the Architect is saying to me: This is what you have been, Daniel Calder. What you have been is what I need. All that you have been, I now consume.

  The light intensifies until it cannot brighten more.

  Then it brightens more, and still more.

  But it’s OK. I feel calm, and safe. And the heat is immense but all I feel is enveloping, protective warmth.

  Ok-DI-ke

  Qom-FU-nu

  Bes-YEH-min

  Gor-CHAM-xi

  Tel-DZU-juk

  Mul-SHU-lah

  Ol-QO-hut

  Kai-FI-mun

  The white scar on my forearm is healing, vanishing. As if from far away, I hear-see-feel Morag, screaming for me from the door of the great metal insect whose name I no longer know or need.

  She thinks something terrible is happening to me. I can see it in her face. But she’s wrong. I want to tell her not to worry.

  Because after all, a body is a body, Morag.

  After the body, there is no more to smell or taste or touch.

  No more to tell.

  All language falls away, all concepts, thoughts, emotions, and there is no more to see, even, at the last. Except that everything, everywhere, is light.

  And more light.

  And more beautiful light.

  And amazement and free fall and wonder, and then I, Daniel Calder, am taken up at last from the prison of my body into understanding. Into knowledge.

  Immortality is mine.

  And I welcome it, at first, because it is what I have been promised and it is perhaps where I will hear my mother’s voice again.

  But I do not hear her.

  Instead, the sound I hear is the distant wasp swarm of a billion billion voices pleading into silence.

  For I am ascending now,

  disintegrating now,

  evaporating

  now

  now

  now

  now

  now

  into the bright bright trickery of heaven

  EPILOGUE

  SEEING IN THE DARK

  Minutes to midnight.

  I’m standing alone at the top of a low gravel ridge, on the beautiful high rangeland of eastern Washington. An hour’s drive farther east, the Grand Coulee Dam lies hidden like a dog’s bone in an inky ditchful of night. North of us, according to the map, the vastness of the Colville Indian Reservation stretches halfway to Canada. A few miles south, the lights of a small wheat-farming town are just visible—a smear of glitter across a thumb’s width of the horizon.

  On the lower side of the twenty-acre field below me, near the dirt road, a dozen cars and tents are clustered. There’s a slight rise at the other side, where a couple of big Dobsonian telescopes stand like wrecked filing cabinets on their simple, blocky stands. They make me think of my mother, who bought one in Scotland once, on a whim. Useless, of course. But there’s no cloud here, and no light pollution either. This is one of the best places in the whole northwest for seeing in the dark.

  An hour ago, I stood at this same spot with my arms around Kit, and we watched the new moon, thin as a blade, ride a blue velvet cushion down the west. As the blue faded to indigo, the sky began to swarm with its dozens, hundreds, thousands of tiny thermonuclear fireflies. And she turned around, hugged me urgently, and said yes, and I kissed her on the lips for the first time.

  Maybe she just needed warmth and reassurance. But I don’t want to believe that. I don’t believe that: when our breath mingled and our lips touched, I felt as if I’d been hurled from a cliff only to discover I could fly.

  “Morag Morag Morag,” she said.

  It’s six weeks since Ararat. A thousand people died there, and five thousand more became Mysteries. Some say that all those people would have lived, if only I’d kept out of it. Others—the Seraphim, naturally—say that they would all have ascended to the Architects. Lots of confident opinion. Me, I only have the guilt, combined with the knowledge that, as usual, the loudest voices have the least bloody clue what they’re talking about.

  At least we had more warning than we expected. The Architects took their time doing whatever it is they do. But the main “explosion,” when it came, was so powerful that nobody will ever know for sure how many were taken up and how many were simply swallowed whole, like krill in the maw of a whale, when the southern flank of the summit collapsed. Or how many more were in
cinerated in the lava flows when the shock waves set off Ararat’s first eruption in centuries. Latest estimates of the initial “energy transfer” are in the megaton range. But that number is just a fig leaf—something behind which the physicists and seismologists can hide the embarrassing truth: an explosion with no source and no plausible cause, which can destroy everything around it without touching those within it, is not something anyone understands.

  “Amazing how ignorant we were.” That’s what Bill used to say to his students. Even more amazing how ignorant we are now. But I’ll be better prepared, next time. Among other things, Bill’s hard drive—Mayo’s hard drive, which Bill must have somehow gotten a hold of, and stashed in the parka he gave to Daniel—has thirty perfect images of thirty different Disks: a record of the real Babel, if I can unpick it.

  Sophie Colbert chose exactly the wrong direction in which to run. I saw her scrambling down a rocky gully below the snowline, and wish I had not seen her as she was engulfed by the first lava flow. Up on the glacier, I saw Daniel standing there, saw the Architect shimmer and re-form above him, like it was having trouble coming into focus. I had assumed Rosko was gone, along with Bill and Mayo.Mack already had the helicopter in the air, veering away fast, when I spotted a figure emerging like a cartoon devil from the surface of the ice itself.

  Rosko Eisler. Covered in sheets of his own blood.

  I saw what he did then. Saw how he threw Daniel’s limp body over one shoulder even as that thing was swirling around them, saw his stumbling uphill run, back to the landing pad. Huge chunks of shattered ice were already pouring down onto the pad as the glacier began to disintegrate.

  I thought I would have to threaten Mack, but when I pointed to Rosko, he landed again without hesitation. My heroes, both of them.

  A meteor rakes across the sky to the southwest just as a thin, high, elderly voice carries across to me from near the telescopes.

  “Frankly, Julia, my dear, I’ve seen about as many stars as I can take, after those Roman goons shot me through the shoulder and tried to open up my head with the other end of the gun. Trussed me up like a turkey, drove me to some woods north of Rome, and dumped me in a ditch, d’you know—not at all dignified. They must have thought I was already a goner, but apparently I’m indestructible. Didn’t survive an English boarding school for nothing, eh?”