Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2)

by Richard Farr

  Just as we finished eating, the rain stopped, the wind died, and the mosquitoes showed up in black swarms, impatient for blood. Just as it became fully dark, they went away again—and the rain started again. Dog snuffled around the site—looking for potential dangers or potential leftovers, it was hard to be sure—then came over to lick Spam juice off my fingers. Then it curled up at my feet and immediately started to snore. A long night.

  Cold all over. Damp all over. Numb legs and a shoulder aching from where Kit was resting her head on it. Gray light leaking like a pollutant into the blackness. And, out of the corner of my eye, behind the trees, something moving—or was I just imagining it? I had the sense, probably false, that I’d never slept. But I must have dozed off again after that, because I was woken up by the clank of a spoon against a pot, and a sound I’d never heard before: Oma and Isbet, close by, having an argument. At least Jimmy had the cooker working.

  “Cold?” he said.

  “Freezing.”

  He handed me a mug of cocoa. I sipped it gratefully and considered pouring it over my head. Kit woke up and took it from me; I saw Jimmy smile.

  “How is injuries?” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “Let me look,” I said.

  “Morag, they’re fine. Don’t fuss.”

  “Jimmy,” I imitated, “they’re probably not fine. And I’m not going to put up with you playing hero just so that you can die of blood poisoning. Show me.”

  Scabs were forming, but his skin was already bright pink and hot to the touch. “Infected,” I said. “You’ll have to go back too.”

  Lorna had woken up. “Jimmy, she’s right. Ye got ye’self a right nasty there.”

  “What about you?” I asked her.

  “Just comfy as can be, lyin’ here. But I canna walk much an’ that’s sure. We’ll all have to go back down.”

  Mayo was watching from a log, the gun across his knees. “Morag and I will continue,” he said. “We’re close enough for me to find the way now. The rest of you can return with Oma and Isbet.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “I came here for Daniel, not for you.”

  “And I came here for both of them,” Kit said.

  “Aye,” Lorna said, “an’ while we’re all joinin’ the party, let me jus’ say I’m no way lettin’ you bugger off up there in search of God-knows-what without me, Morag Chen.”

  “You don’t have a choice,” I said. “You can’t go, and we have to. For Daniel’s sake.”

  “I’iwa,” you said. “For everyone.”

  “I can do it, Mumma. I’m not a child anymore.”

  “Morag is safe,” you said to her, with total conviction.

  “What about Isbet and Kit?” I asked you. But you shook your head. You seemed to be saying, I don’t know; my knowledge doesn’t go there.

  Isbet stepped between us. It’s decided, she said in Tain’iwa. My father will lead your parents back. And I will stay.

  Can he do it? I asked. Without you to guide him?

  There was an expression in Tain’iwa for doing something the wrong way, or the most difficult way: walking on your ears. Isbet used it now: Now that we’ve come here, she said, he could retrace our path back to the village if he had to walk on his ears.

  “I stay with you,” Kit said.

  After we’d eaten some rice—with hot sauce squirted on top and the customary sprinkle of bug parts—Jimmy handed me his broken pack. “The usual wilderness stuff. First aid, flashlight, road flares.”

  “Road flares?”

  “I persuaded an angry rhino to get lost with one of those. And there’s an avalanche beacon too.”

  “Oh, that’ll be useful. So much loose snowpack around here.”

  “It might be useful. Make sure you’re in the open, press the big red button for ten seconds, and it uploads your position to a satellite. You don’t have to be in an avalanche to need locating.”

  “We won’t need locating,” I said. “We’ll be fine. Good luck.” You stepped forward and took the pack from me, slipping it on.

  As they left, and we were about to lose sight of them in the trees, Lorna turned and looked at me. There wasn’t a hint of a smile. “When I spoke to ye on the phone, Morag Chen, I felt entitled to assume that our reunion would last a wee bit longer than thuss. And that it wouldn’t end wi’ ye disappearin’ into a stretch o’ unmarked jungle in search o’ somethin’ that makes the locals mess their undies. Forty-eight hours, gurrl. Not back by then, I’m tellin’ ye, we’re sendin’ in the cavalry.”

  I didn’t want to make her worry more than she was already worrying, so I didn’t point out that there would be no cavalry. If anything happened to us in those mountains, and we didn’t return, they’d be stuck trying to persuade the other Tainu to come looking. I knew the Tainu. Even with Isbet missing, they wouldn’t help us. Oma’s dream had changed only his own mind; the rest of them were unsentimental about death and had clear views about their duties to the I’iwa. They’d just look at the ground, mutter about isula, which meant “fate,” and walk away.

  When Jimmy, Lorna, and Oma had gone, Mayo smiled like a mechanic who’s just fixed a broken engine. “We’ll get along much quicker now,” he said. The weather was good again, the terrain easier. And we walked side by side for a while—a fact I managed to use, despite all my anger and instinctive dislike, to get him to answer my most urgent question.

  I fell into a whisper; he’d already made it clear that he had a mad idea of us working together, so I thought some conspiratorial info-swapping would appeal to his vanity. Got him to talk about himself. Asked what he thought of this or that issue in cognitive science, gave him an edited version of my conversations with Balakrishnan. I mentioned Iona’s name a couple of times too, just to soften him up, then brought up her “thesis” again. As I spoke, I focused my mind on the image of you drawing in the soil that curved line connecting “√1” and “√2”. As if I could will him into saying something.

  “I was proud of what Balakrishnan and I were attempting,” he said. “At least initially, back when I still thought uploading a mind was more or less a problem of having a big-enough thumb drive. I thought Julius Quinn was just a new-edition holy roller. A second Moses, as Iona said, bringing the Big Message down from the mountain. Easy to make fun of, and I was mildly amused to see that he was, in his confused, religious-mystical way, right about so much! ‘Our biology isn’t our nature,’ he said. Bingo that! ‘At the highest level,’ he said, ‘our biology is a barrier to our nature, because matter is evolving into mind.’ Bingo again! I congratulated myself on how much further my understanding had evolved that his.”

  “But Iona changed that.”

  “I was making no progress with Route Two. I kept telling Balakrishnan that we only needed a bigger computer, and more money, and a few more years, but privately I’d come to the conclusion that the existing ISOC setup was never going to work. There was something fundamental missing. To capture consciousness in any meaningful way—to liberate consciousness from its prison in the skull, as Quinn might have said—was going to require a technology far more advanced than anything we had. And Iona was the one who made me see two things: how I might find that technology and why it might be curtains for everyone if I failed. You see, her idea was that the Architects weren’t necessarily the crazy invention of a half-crazy charismatic and weren’t impossible, but that on the contrary, they might be—from a strictly scientific view—inevitable.”

  “And that made your work for ISOC irrelevant? How?”

  “She asked a simple question about Route Two. ‘OK, David,’ she said, ‘suppose we buy the whole idea. Suppose some kind of digital immortality really is possible. Maybe it requires better computers than we have, or better mathematics, or something else we’ve not even thought of yet, but it’s almost within reach. Next decade, next century, however long it’s going to take, it’s out there.’ And of course I said, ‘It is out there, Iona, I know it is.’ ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘So
what I don’t understand is this. Why assume that we—twenty-first century Homo sapiens, an ape living on the third rock out from an average star in an average galaxy in the least fashionable suburbs of the Virgo Supercluster—are the first life in the universe to reach that point? Wouldn’t someone out there, or something out there, have learned how to do it first?’ And I said, ‘What if they had?’ ‘David,’ she said, ‘what would the universe look like to us if that were true? How would the universe be if an alien species had already beaten us to the finishing tape and already freed their consciousness from their biology?’”

  He stopped and looked at me, as if to see whether I’d got it. Oh, I’d got it, and I was stunned by the simplicity of it.

  “If Route Two is possible,” I said, “if technological immortality through mind uploading is possible, the best evidence that it’s possible won’t lie in our existing technology. It’ll lie in the existence of the sort of beings who caused us to spend the last five thousand years believing in Route One. So Route One is the best evidence we have that Route Two has already happened. And the Seraphim are worshipping beings who really are immaterial, really are immortal—and were once creatures, just like us.”

  “Iona’s thesis,” he said. “She didn’t know, of course. She just had the imagination to guess, and she was trying to find out whether she was right.”

  “There’s one more thing I don’t understand, though. If the Architects are disembodied intelligences—uploaded minds, whatever—why are they a threat to us? Why are they trying to, uh, re-embody? That’s what happened at Thera. It’s what’s kept happening throughout history, if we’re to believe the mythology, and it’s what we saw at Ararat. Why do they need us?”

  “Good question. That’s why we’re here. You see, these funny little cave people with their unpleasantly sharp spears, they met the Architects at the very beginning, and I think they may have—”

  He was interrupted by a short, sharp howl that sounded almost like a human’s cry of surprise. Around the next corner, Dog was standing with its tail up, staring into the trees.

  “Dota inge?” Isbet said to him. You smell something? She hurried forward and put her hand on his head. Next to where he was standing, there was a patch of broken-down grass and vines. It looked as if a heavy bag has been slid sideways off the trail.

  “This is near where we were ambushed,” Mayo said.

  Without hesitating, you walked off the trail into the trees.

  CHAPTER 21

  TERROR IS THE COLOR OF TEA

  Four of them. They were lying in a neat row. The vegetation was so dense that they were easy to miss, even without the hasty screen of branches that had been thrown over them. It was a scene from a weird dream: four sleeping men, all overweight, one with a sapling growing out of his chest. When my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the “sapling” became the shaft of a spear. I also made out a shimmering movement, and that became a clambering, enthusiastic pile of flies.

  “Beginning to bloat,” Mayo said.

  There was silence, broken only by the hum of the insects and the mournful wauk wauk of a riflebird. Then—casually, nonchalantly, as if taking a spade out of wet ground—you grabbed the shaft of the spear and pulled. The stone tip didn’t want to come out, and you had to use both hands, twisting. There was a sucking sound, and a cup-sized hole appeared, rimmed neatly with a brown-and-white cappuccino froth of maggots.

  “Shits,” Kit said, holding her hand to her mouth and backing away. “They do this to us also. Maybe we, like, get fuck out of here.”

  You nodded, but instead of leading the way back to the path, you walked farther in, the spear still in your hand, and pointed with it. Another spear was sticking out of a tree; a fifth body—nearly a skeleton—was pinned there like an insect in a museum display.

  “Kurtz,” Mayo said. “Must be. You,” he said to Kit. “Go back, and take Daniel and the Tainu girl with you. If you stay here, you’re only going to get in the way, or get killed, or both. Morag and I don’t need guiding now.”

  She looked at Isbet. Some communication beyond language passed between them.

  “How far is cave entrance?” Kit asked.

  “Ten minutes.”

  “We go with you to entrance.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes. Then at least we know where it is.”

  The I’iwa were good hunters, but they hadn’t expected Dog.

  Moving in silence through the undergrowth at the speed of a sprinter, Dog had spent most of the hike circling us, checking ten times the area we could see. “Is like electron in orbit around us,” Kit had said earlier. “Everywhere at once, whoosh!” Sure enough, when we left the bodies behind, the animal vanished again, but minutes later it came up behind us, just in time to howl a warning. I was at the front, with Mayo and his gun right behind me. We turned around to witness a sight that was as strange, in its way, as the Architects themselves.

  Three I’iwa were standing in plain sight at the edge of the path we’d beaten through the undergrowth. There were more, maybe a dozen, in a broad arc farther back. And there was no doubt about it: they were like us, but not like us—human, more or less, but oh, so profoundly narakain.

  The combination of their sameness, and difference, and absolute stillness reminded me of a diorama Bill had dragged us to the American Museum of Natural History Museum in New York. It was the usual evo-junk about how we’re “really” Paleolithic creatures, because the savannah-forest margin of a hundred thousand years ago was the scene of our evolution into modern humans. The kind of thing people read about in a science zine, and then stop cooking their food. Idiots.

  Sorry.

  Anyway, instead of a cave looking out over tundra, with humans wrapped in fur and the inevitable saber-toothed cat, the curators had done a modern street scene: waxwork office types chatting over plastic sandwiches at a fake café table. And the punch line, the big woo-hoo, was that the man in a suit and an open-necked shirt, leaning back with a menu in his hand, and the woman in a skirt and heels, peering at her phone while fiddling with an earring, were Neanderthals. Look how close we are!—that was the message. See how Bob Neander (Marketing) and Betty Thal (Human Resources) need only nice clothes and a haircut to pass for, OK, uglier-than-average H. sap.

  What I’m saying is it was almost the same with the I’iwa. Their broad faces, deep chests, and muscular arms made me think of wrestlers. Their skin was white, but not that much paler than yours. And their features were regular, pleasing, mostly ordinary. No big brow ridges or missing chins, no nose half the size of the face. But replacing their gray leathery-looking skirts with modern clothes wouldn’t have been enough to disguise them. They were totally hairless, for one thing. Androgynous too: you could tell they must be male and female, but you couldn’t be sure which was which. And then there were the eyes: not huge, like cartoon-alien huge, but a strange, fiery yellow orange, and just plain too big.

  The three figures I could clearly see would have looked identical, but each one had a different mark or tattoo in red dye on its chest. One had two parallel lines at an angle, like a tipped equal sign; another had a pizza slice that could have come right off one of the Disks; the third had a vertical line, a horizontal, another vertical, then a small oval at the top, like a stick figure of someone sitting.

  The first two held spears. I’d only just taken in the fact that the third one wasn’t holding a spear when Kit pulled one from a tree next to her and unhesitatingly waved it back at them, yelling in Russian, Stay back, little one. Stay back or I make of you nice fat kebab. Understand?

  Her bravado might have been faked, but it was so convincing that at first I thought they were trembling. Hard to describe, but it was as if their bodies kept blurring slightly. Then they became still, and the figure nearest her bobbed its head and made a fluttering motion with one arm. As if receiving an order, the entire group retreated a couple of steps and then began to spread out on either side.

  My reaction to what happene
d next was delayed, distracted, by the thought that was crossing my mind: Sunil and Vandana. Ildavan. We’ve been told the I’iwa don’t speak—but did I just witness a conversation?

  Kit, on the other hand, saw immediately what was going on: it wasn’t her they were interested in, but you.

  No way that is happening, guys, she said, still in Russian, and she stepped back quickly so that she was directly in front of you. It was a brave, smart move: they couldn’t get to you without attacking her, and they couldn’t attack her without endangering you. But you shook your head and stepped around her.

  “Don’t,” you said, stepping back into the opening. Kit was behaving bravely; you, on the other hand, you seemed to know that if you did the right thing, there was no real danger.

  “Primitive buggers in some ways,” Mayo said under his breath. “But when we get into the caves, you’ll see just how misleading that is.” He brought the gun up to shoulder height.

  “No!” I shouted—and saw one of the I’iwa go down even before I’d registered the noise.

  I was convinced in that moment, despite what you’d said, that he’d signed all our death warrants. They outnumbered us at least three to one: Surely they’d just butcher us now? But they didn’t attack. The two who were nearest us scooped up the victim by the shoulders, dragged him (or her?) backward, and, as if by magic or evaporation, the whole group blended back into the undergrowth. Mayo loosed off three more shots, aimed at nothing.

  “You stupid bastard,” I said.

  “You stupid, sentimental fool,” he replied under his breath. “They have something we absolutely need if any of our species is going to survive. Frightening a few dozen of them, or killing all of them for that matter, is a very minor consideration. And, just as the I’iwa will do anything to protect the secret of what makes the Architects tick, I will do anything to get at that secret.” He waved his gun at me. “You’re going on. And so am I.”