Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2)

by Richard Farr

  He was talking to all three of us at once, and he’d twisted around in his seat, only one hand loosely on the wheel. “Watch out for bicycle!” Kit shouted. He swerved hard, narrowly missing a startled-looking couple on a tandem bike, and carried on as if nothing had happened.

  I wanted him to say more about the Architects. I wanted him to get beyond his hippie-dippie “ancient gods” talk and say what he truly believed about them. Instead he started talking about his hospital stay.

  “They did all those X-rays in Rome because they were worried that I had a skull fracture. The brain is soft tissue, so it doesn’t show, and what you get is a picture of your own empty skull. Rather alarming! But you know how the brain looks, don’t you, the two hemispheres? Like a walnut.”

  “I am thinking, like two pieces of bread dough put in bowl that’s too small,” Kit said. “Like, God made two brains for each person, but put both into same skull. And not enough space, so they kind of squish.”

  “That’s a good image,” Partridge said. “And there might even be something to it. Bill Calder and I were fans of a theory called bicameralism. Two chambers in the brain, like two chambers in Congress. The idea is that the two hemispheres of the brain really did act like two separate brains for most of our history.”

  “I think that work as well as snake with the two heads,” she said.

  “If the two halves were equals, yes. But the bicameral theory says our hemispheres were more like master and slave. Most people think humans became conscious over a long period of time, slowly rising from the mental level of the lower animals, then dogs, then apes, to where we are now. But the bicameral theory says that the big mental differences between animals and humans came much more recently. Back in the early Bronze Age, five or six thousand years ago, nobody had anything like our sense of individuality, personal agency or choice, free will. All anyone had was voices in the head. Inner gods, telling them what to do.”

  “So,” Kit said. “This theory saying we are not conscious before then? That sounds crazy. We were, like, what? Robots? Zombies?”

  “Not quite. The idea is that back in the time before written language, we were not individuals in the way we now understand the idea. Not self-aware.”

  “I don’t see how there could be any evidence for that,” I said.

  “That, Morag, is because you share the modern prejudice that all evidence is scientific evidence. The big source for the bicameral theory isn’t lab data—it’s ancient literature. We think we know what it’s like to be human, so we project what we’re like back onto these people who lived thousands of years ago. But when you read Egyptian theological writings, or Hittite funereal urns, or early Greek poetry—”

  “Yah, sure,” Kit said. “Funeral urns especially. All the time.”

  “—you meet human beings with an inner life that’s profoundly odd. They had only a primitive, half-formed sense of self. They didn’t even think of themselves as individuals, really, as beings with choices. They just listened for commands and obeyed them. Or tried not to and found it didn’t make any difference to the outcome. They called it fate.”

  “They were hearing voices?”

  “Perhaps. But the bicameral theory says the voices were really the dominant left hemisphere talking to the subservient right hemisphere. The gods were inside us.”

  “Is good thing we don’t have to be slaves of voices in the head now.”

  “Oh, but we are, Kit, we are. You think your self, the real you, is like the captain on the bridge of a ship, yes? Someone who sits in a big leather chair, three inches behind your eyes, watching and steering? But think of the internal struggles we all have, all the time. Laziness. Fear. Temptation. Why? Why these internal, deeply painful and emotional struggles? If we’re each only one person, ask yourself a simple question: Who’s doing the struggling? It takes two to wrestle. I say, Kit, could you pass me some more of that tea?”

  He’d made her caretaker of his family-sized thermos, a quart or two of milky Assam stewed to the color of cheap leather. While I tried to digest the possibility that every single human being on the planet was schizophrenic, she poured a couple of inches into the plastic lid and passed it forward. He took both hands off the wheel and reached back to accept it, then blew across the top, holding it up to eye level and peering at the steam. As I was about to shout a warning, he put three fingertips back on the wheel, leaned forward, and slurped noisily. At that exact moment Brunhilde was hip-checked by a big gust of air as Ella’s truck blew past us, doing eighty. Ella gave us a smile and a finger wave as we shot two feet over the white line toward the barrier wall. Completely unperturbed, Partridge steered us back into the lane, raising his cup to return the greeting. A tsunami of tea crested over the lip of the cup and splashed onto his brown corduroy pants.

  “Well, bugger,” he said cheerfully, looking down at the damage. “The only clean pair I’ve got too. I get clumsier and clumsier. Old age shouldn’t be allowed. I suppose that’s part of the Seraphim’s appeal, eh? The traditional faiths don’t like the body because it’s so distractingly beautiful when it’s young. The Seraphim don’t like the body because it gets old and breaks down. They both think the body gets in the way of immortality.”

  He slurped the remains of the tea.

  “But I wonder: Is not having a body such a good idea? The Architects are disembodied, but like the Greek gods, they keep interfering with us. Why? Why do they still need us so badly? Sorry, what were we talking about?”

  “Bicameral two loaves of bread thing,” Kit said. “You are saying the Architects made us that way? So this is like, creationism? My mother is geneticist, you know. I warn you, if you say that she is having like a total cow.”

  “Oh, I don’t think they created us. I find evolutionary science entirely persuasive on that point. My guess is, they showed up at a certain point in our development and saw our species as promising—for their purposes. You know: going in the right direction, but in need of a push.”

  “They redesign us, you mean?”

  “We do it to other species routinely. Ancient Mexicans, for example: they discovered a completely useless plant called teosinte; in next to no time, they used selective breeding to turn it into corn.”

  “So we are like that? We are domesticated species, you are saying?”

  “Well, I don’t think the Architects are farming us—you know, the hungry-alien hypothesis. Though in another sense that is what they’re doing; it’s just that they’re not interested in our bodies. The crop was, and is, consciousness. For reasons that remain unclear, they seem to want our feelings, our memories, our experiences.”

  “But don’t you think the Bronze Age Collapse is evidence that something went wrong with the plan?” I said. “That they couldn’t fully control what they created?”

  “Frankenstein!” Kit said.

  I thought maybe she’d noticed an especially ugly driver in the next lane. It seemed kind of a mean thing to say. But there was no other car nearby.

  “What are you talking about, Kit?”

  “God creates Adam, right? Out of clay or something, and puts in spark of life. Zap.”

  “Close enough,” I said. “According to Genesis, God made us out of dust and breathed our souls into us through our nostrils.”

  “OK, God breathing up the nose is good enough, I guess, if he cleaned teeth recently. Maybe he didn’t—that could explain a lot. Anyway, we do Frankenstein in school, in Russian. You have read of course?”

  “Never,” I admitted.

  “You amaze me, Majka. I am thinking you know everything, have read everything, and then you are total know-nothing about somethings you should know all about. Almost you are sometimes like normal person!”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, is good. Too perfect is pain in the butt. So. Mary Shelley writes this book when she is nineteen or something. Our teacher, big fat Siberian guy, very intense, he says, kids, this is the original science-fiction story, and the plot is so ultrasp
ecial, so completely wow, that it is pretty much only plot anyone ever uses again. Clever scientist makes creature, robot, android. Scientist loves his creature, it is his creation, he is proud like father with baby. But creature is not just a baby. It grows up, is powerful, gets own ideas, wants freedom. Scientist is super-scared now, like crap-in-trouser scared, and thinks maybe he has to kill this thing he created because it is too dangerous. Has big moral thing, what do you say—”

  “Dilemma.”

  “Big moral dilemma, yes, like, do I have to kill my own child? But while he’s sharpening knife maybe, and thinking about this, creature says, no way, José, hasta la vista, baby. Kills scientist, escapes. Crazy terrified stupid mob, big fight. Blam blam, end of creature. Or, creature kills mob, escapes again, end of civilization. In which case, last shot is maybe scientist’s daughter lying in ruins, and we think she is dead, but her hand twitches, big cliché, now we know she will be hero in sequel.”

  “Or else the last shot is the creature crying because everyone is dead, even its own father, and now it’s lonely,” Partridge said. “Which suggests it was more human than the humans who tried to destroy it.”

  “Yah. I think that maybe is Mary Shelley’s point. But now think of Bible again, and Architects again. In Genesis story, who is it makes creatures out of mud—”

  “Dust.”

  “Stop interrupting, Majka. Who makes creatures, and breathes life into them through nostrils? God, yah? So God is original Victor Frankenstein, and we are original monster. God brings us to life, is happy he succeeded. Like, wow, look how cute! But we are too much clever, too much independent, so we start to grow up and want to disobey. Eve and Adam in garden, all woman’s fault of course, blah blah, give me break, and God is now crazy angry. You are saying Architects tried to make us the way they want, and make us obedient, but they failed. Same story also, yes?”

  “What are you saying?” I asked.

  “Architects want obedient slave, but they need also clever, thinking slave. Self-conscious slave, because it is our minds they want. And this is problem, because clever slave does not want to be slave. Clever slave is nothing but trouble, like duh. I think clever slave found out how to invent its own languages, which was like, mental jailbreak. Freedom from their influence. Why the Architects are not predicting this? Maybe they also should have read the book.”

  All that time you’d been sketching furiously, page after page. More jungle scenes. Your parents’ house. Ararat. A waterfall. Rows and rows of symbols that looked sort of like the ones on the Disks but weren’t. A group of what looked like bald cavemen in front of a cave, holding spears. Now that you had our attention, you began to rip the drawings out and deposit one in my lap, one in Kit’s, one in Derek’s even—and then another and another. All the ones you handed to us were variations on the same theme: a building in flames.

  One of them included a mark in the corner that I couldn’t make sense of at first. It was just three lines: two of them almost vertical and leaning against each other, with a third forming a loop near the top.

  The Space Needle.

  “You are trying tell us something, Daniel?” Kit asked.

  “Natazscha,” you said to her. “Natazscha.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s—she’s OK.”

  All three of us turned to look at you, Partridge included. At the same moment Kit’s phone dinged. “Shits,” she said. Sheets. “My mother is text. Library on campus burn this morning.”

  “Which one?” But I was looking at your first sketch again, and I knew. Should have got it right away. The page was nearly all flame, the building nearly all consumed, but the shape behind the flames was clear. “It’s Odegaard, isn’t it?”

  “Odor Guard?” Partridge asked. “That sounds like a brand of deodorant.”

  “O-de-gaard. It’s the main undergraduate library. Right next to the Institute.”

  Kit’s phone rang. After a conversation in Russian so rapid-fire I couldn’t follow it, she said, “She is OK. Working in lab all night of course, like, why would person need to sleep? Says she was taking nap under desk this morning when library goes up, like whoosh. Big big fire.”

  “ISOC is right next door—is she all right?”

  “I think so—”

  “Good,” I said. I ought to have meant Good, I’m glad she’s safe, but the truth was, I meant Good, we don’t have to waste time dealing with that, and we can stick to plan A, which is getting straight back to the Eislers’ house and the Disks.

  “But she says to come straight there, quick as possible.”

  I wanted to scream. Another delay? I looked out into the gathering dark and thought about the Disk images sitting on the computer at the Eislers’ house. I had no interest in rubbernecking at a fire scene.

  “Why?” I said. “What’s the point?” The obvious answer—that making sure she was OK was the nice thing to do, at least if you weren’t an emotionally challenged language nerd fixated on your own issues—seemed to hang in the air between us. For a moment I thought from Kit’s silence that I’d seriously hurt her feelings. But she was texting again.

  “She say, she has been working on something she wants to show us, and now she is worried they will close down the whole campus before she can get us in.”

  “All right,” I said, trying hard to keep the exasperation out of my voice. “You’d better tell Ella to meet us there.” I turned around in my seat to look at her, and squeezed her hand, trying to make up. “Are you OK?”

  “Da. Yes. Maybe.”

  “Seraphim,” you said, to no one in particular.

  At least Kit hadn’t lost her sense of humor. She looked at you and lifted one eyebrow. “Burning down university library, you mean? Girl Scouts, I don’t think.”

  Despite the new urgency, Brunhilde slowed to forty or less as we climbed back among the peaks of the Cascades, and her engine sounded like a sewing machine being drowned in a bucket. Partridge spoke to her in an affectionate mess of English and German. “Come on, old girl. You can do it. Es ist nicht so schlimm. Nur ein paar kleine Berge. Sea to shining sea and all that. Wir sind fast da.” And to me: “Her first time on the West Coast! I don’t think she thought she’d ever live to see it.”

  We staggered to the top of the pass just as it began to rain. Amid the rusting remains of the old ski resort, an abandoned chair lift was swinging in the wind. You turned and looked intently at it.

  “Iona,” you said, and stabbed your finger at the glass, almost as if you’d spotted her on the empty brown slopes.

  “Aye, she taught you to ski here, didn’t she? When you were little. You told me about it.”

  “Iona Maclean.” You looked away and dropped your hand into your lap as if you’d made a mistake. “She’s not here.”

  “No.”

  “She’s here,” you said, picking up one of the sketches. And the tone of your voice was edging toward hers again. “Waterfall. Tall and thin. Beautiful solitude.”

  “This is the waterfall in New Guinea,” I said. “Isn’t it? The one at the edge of the Tainu’s territory, where Iona went looking for the I’iwa?”

  “She’s alone. But—but not alone.”

  “You know what this is about, Majka?” Kit asked.

  “I think Daniel is somehow channeling Iona’s memories from when she visited us in New Guinea.”

  “Maybe Iona just tells him about it,” Kit said.

  It was a reasonable explanation, almost. But the voice and the sketches made it all too perfect for that. I remembered Rosko philosophizing: How could memory even work, if tasting a lemon was an experience so completely different from remembering tasting a lemon? And I thought, no, you weren’t remembering something Iona had said about her experience. You were experiencing her experience.

  “At the waterfall,” you said. “Being watched.”

  As we crossed the floating bridge over Lake Washington, there was just enough light in the west for a pillar of smoke to be visible,
gray on gray, above the University District. It reminded me of Ararat. Natazscha had told Kit to meet us at the north end of the university campus, but we got stuck behind a bus at the freeway ramp, and the streets into the University District were gridlocked. The sidewalks were nearly as bad: serious faces picked out by the headlights under wet hoods and umbrellas. Partridge opened his window to wipe the mirror, and the sour-sweet aroma of charred building flooded in, as if a cook had set fire to a batch of caramels and put out the flames with vinegar.

  We stop-started our way around to the north side of campus and came into quieter side streets full of shuttered fraternities. Natazscha was waiting by her car as promised, and Rosko was already with her. No sign of Ella. After waving and circling the block twice, Partridge gave up looking for a space and simply stopped next to her.

  “Delighted to meet you again, Professor Cerenkov. That’s right, yes. Amsterdam, about five years ago—Bill introduced us. Look, I’ve got Morag and Daniel and your delightful daughter here. But I can’t find anywhere to park, so I’m going to hand them over and find my hotel, if that’s all right? I think I can find my way. Best of luck. I’ll be in touch tomorrow, shall I?”

  Natazscha opened her mouth as if to protest, but then seemed to give up, unable to make the effort. As I climbed out, I was shocked by the way she looked—the word deranged came to mind. She was in her usual high-fashion outfit: an old jacket that didn’t fit and that she hadn’t bothered to zip, despite the rain, over a vaguely peach-colored house dress. No big deal. But her hair was greasy, the dress crumpled and stained, and there was a big smudge of soot on one cheek. With her moon face and cheap, wet, scuff-toed flats, she looked less like an A-list scientist than a Russian peasant, setting out to sell the last half kilo of potatoes on some godforsaken street corner in Chelyabinsk.