by Richard Farr
But where were these calculations coming from? He kept being puzzled by a nonsensical idea—the calculations are coming from the volcano itself. And he sensed, correctly, that the thought was a kind of echo from whatever it was that the I’iwa were not yet ready to show him.
It took time for him to understand that he was not just being shown around as a kindness to pass the time until Morag either recovered or failed to recover. All the walking, all the showing and trying to explain, was part of the reason he’d been brought here. And it was working—it was healing him. The idea was expressed with beautiful simplicity by one of his guides. She (Daniel thought it was she, but couldn’t say why) took a round, apple-sized rock and broke it. She picked up the neat pieces into which it had split. Laying them in her palm, she indicated first them, then Daniel. Then delicately, as if emphasizing the difficulty and the precision required, she fitted the pieces back together. When she had done so, she held the loose grouping of fragments close to her, as if hugging them, and then took a long inward breath over them, and handed them to him.
This is you, her gestures said. We are here to cure you. When we have cured you, you will help us. It wasn’t just the context that made him guess this meaning: he’d correctly read her meaning from the gestures, as if she had whispered a full sentence to him. Without thinking, he raised one hand and passed it near his temple, fluttering his thumb as he did so: I understand.
How could he understand? Now he saw how: without even suggesting that they were doing so, his guides had been teaching him their language. The old Daniel couldn’t hack French; the new Daniel was picking up the strange silent body language of the I’iwa. He wanted to ask, Who are you? He wanted to ask, What happened to you, in the beginning, and what are you doing here among all these symbols? And how am I capable of this? But he didn’t yet know how to ask those questions.
And so the days passed.
They needed to show him the Place of Origin, Stripe told him. But they needed to wait until both of them were ready.
Day after day, he wandered and learned. Day after day, also, he sat by her side, whispering to her about the caves, about her parents and Kit and Rosko, about anything he knew or could half-remember. One day, without opening her eyes, she began to whisper back.
“How long have we been down here?”
He could hardly speak, because he was so relieved to hear her voice at last, but he controlled himself. “A couple of weeks, maybe. A month?”
“You don’t know.”
“No, I don’t.”
“But you’re back.”
“I’m back,” he said to her. “I’m with you again. I’m not the same as I was. There are pieces that went missing, and pieces that were added, and I don’t understand all of it yet. But I’m back.”
“Am I going to live long enough to get to know you again?”
“Yes.”
“But Kit’s dead. Isn’t she?”
“I don’t know that.”
She fell silent again. He thought she was sleeping.
“What do they mean by ‘the Place of Origin,’ Daniel?”
“They mean the volcano.”
“What do you mean, ‘They mean the volcano’?”
“It’s still coming into focus. I don’t know. I just know it’s true.”
When at last she recovered enough to stand, and even walk a little, there was a strange role reversal. He knew the I’iwa’s body language, and she did not. Also, she was as frail as a person in extreme old age, and spoke very little, in whispers, to save her energy. He had to be at her side constantly. Dog stayed at her side too, looking up, as if planning to catch her if she fell. The I’iwa watched, and nursed her, and waited. Then they told Daniel it was time.
The entrance to the Place of Origin was concealed in plain sight. In a small chamber off an ordinary corridor, there was a pile of large rocks, and behind them a narrow corridor. Stripe entered and signaled for them to follow. Daniel motioned for Dog to go first, then led Morag by the hand. She had little trouble, but it was so narrow that he had to crouch, using his fingertips for balance.
At the end of the tunnel, hundreds of lights flickered against a black background; they might almost have been stars. He had the sense that he was being invited to step out into the blackness, into empty space, and he put out his hands, anxious not to fall. But Stripe was waiting to guide him, and he found himself on a skin-smooth floor of polished stone, with a wall at his back.
The “stars” were lamps. There was also some other source of light from above, because he could make out the surface of the wall. It ran away in a wide arc in both directions, defining a round or oval space the size of a cathedral. It was as if they were nighttime mice, emerging from a hole in the baseboard to step silently into the towering dark emptiness of a room scaled for human beings.
Some of the lamps were in fixtures or niches; others were held by dimly lit moving figures. But immediately in front of them there was a large black nothing—a complete absence of light or detail that didn’t make sense. Looking that way, straight ahead, was like opening your eyes under a blindfold.
One of the I’iwa touched Daniel’s arm and looked up, drawing his attention to a narrow gallery that had been carved out of the rock about twenty feet above them. It seemed to run all the way around the space in both directions—fifty, a hundred yards perhaps—before curving into or disappearing behind the area of blackness. Above, the walls continued upward into the gloom, arching over them and transforming into a high domed roof.
They went up a narrow staircase that had been carved out of the rock, Daniel holding Morag’s arm. At the gallery level, they walked slowly round to the right, stopping frequently for Morag to lean against the rock face and rest. Daniel stayed on the outside in case she stumbled. The gallery was only two or three feet wide and on a subtle incline. By a quarter of the way around, they were fifty feet above the ground.
Now at last he could begin to make sense of what he was seeing. The light was coming from a hole in the top of the cavern, far above them; it was the same circular hole he had mistaken for a lake in the forest, but now he was looking at it from the underside, and sunlight was pouring in through it at an angle. Smoke was pouring upward, from a fire that was burning on the top of the thing that had blocked their view; it rose through the incoming light, graying and veiling it.
The structure was the size of an office building. The sight of it seemed to bring Morag out of her torpor, and she raised her hand, pointing. “Not a volcano. Looks like one, aye, but they always do.”
“They?”
“It’s a ziggurat, D. The weirdest, most amazing one I’ve ever seen, but it’s a ziggurat all the same. Which is to say, it’s a model of a volcano. A memory of a volcano.”
Her brain was blessed—cursed, she’d often said to him—with a million lists. Walking Wikipedia, Rosko had said, in barely disguised admiration. Ella had made fun of her for it: Quite the little fact machine, aren’t we? She could have lectured anyone, for an hour or a day, on Djoser, Chogha Zanbil, the Pyramid of the Magician, and all the rest.
“Ziggurats and pyramids are built to wow, aye? Grand monuments in open spaces. The whole point’s visibility: impress the yokels, intimidate the foreigners. A slogan in stone, and the message is always the same: ‘Look at how powerful we are!’ But this? Ship in a bottle, aye? Buried underground. Kept secret. Doesn’t make sense to keep a ziggurat secret.”
On closer look, though, it did make sense, and the first clue lay in the geometry. There were many stages, each smaller than the one beneath.
No, not “many,” Daniel thought: twelve.
And they were circular.
No, octagonal.
No, not octagonal either. They were dodeca—
No.
It was complicated, intricate, magnificent. The lowest and biggest level was a dodecagon: twelve equal sides, twelve equal angles, and the twelve points reached almost all the way to the walls, so that at those points t
here was only a narrow gap between the ziggurat and the circular cave. The second level was smaller, with eighteen sides. The third was twelve sided again, the next eighteen again, and so on, and each level was turned by a few degrees relative to the one below, so that the whole thing twisted like a corkscrew and the angles never quite overlapped. And each level was taller than the one below, in some ratio he couldn’t determine.
The resulting shape was a tower, but also a spiral; motionless, yet spinning; solid, but light. And every surface was covered in dense markings that duplicated the I’iwa tattoos. Daniel hadn’t seen all of Morag’s ziggurats. But he’d seen the Taj Mahal, and the Sydney Opera House, and Chartres and Wat Arun and the Masjed-e Shah at Isfahan—and this was more beautiful than any of them.
Two I’iwa emerged from the ziggurat itself, on the lowest level. Then three emerged on the second, five on the third, and seven on the fourth. He couldn’t see clearly enough to count the groups farther up, but he didn’t need to: Morag Chen, Walking Wikipedia, knew the first hundred primes, all the way from two to 541. Another list!
“Thirty-seven on the top level,” she said. “That’s the twelfth prime. And the total of all those twelve is 197, which is the forty-fifth prime. They’re trying to do what Shul-hura imagined doing, and what Archimedes tried to do with the Antikythera Mechanism. Reverse-engineering the Architects! Giving back to ordinary people the power to fight them!”
“I wish Rosko could see this,” Daniel said.
“Aye. A computer made out of stone and people. A computer in which the creators of the software become part of the hardware. A computer that’s been running for tens of thousands of years, trying to find out how the Architects work.”
Stripe motioned for them to follow him farther along the gallery, which sloped down again. At the back of the chamber, a narrow rock bridge arced above the chamber floor, connecting the gallery directly to the ziggurat, or volcano, or computer at its second level. Not daring to look down, Daniel guided Morag across.
The inside of the ziggurat was decorated in a way that seemed even more amazing than the miles of corridors. Instead of large symbols in neat rows, almost every inch of every surface here was covered in a web of interconnected images, paintings the size of fingernails, all bleeding into one another. There were plants and animals. Birds and insects. Landscapes of every kind, many of them clearly local but others with deserts, beaches, oceans, and, repeatedly, the same erupting volcano. Minutely detailed silhouettes of trees, with stars picked out behind them. Some of the more abstract images were maps, Daniel thought. There were individual Tainu too, and groups of Tainu, in equal detail. But most frequent by far were the I’iwa themselves, in tens of thousands of unique images, engaged in every imaginable activity: eating and drinking, and pointing at things, and smelling a leaf or a flower, and making spear tips, and laughing and fighting and peeing and gathering wood and spearing a tree kangaroo and lighting a fire and having sex, and there were even, in a curious act of self-reference that could have been evidence either of humor or of a fanatical desire for completeness or both, I’iwa caught in the very act of painting these images.
“Cave art,” he said. But it wasn’t like any cave art he knew. He’d seen the world’s most famous examples, and these walls made Lascaux, Altamira, and Chauvet look like the interrupted scribblings of children. There was something immense about the scale, the ambition, and the sheer number of images; there was also something fantastically skilled, and orderly, and yet manic about the pictures, as if a thousand artists had been told they must keep painting until they’d illustrated everything they’d ever seen, or known, or done; everything they’d ever experienced; and everything they’d ever imagined.
Morag pointed out the image of one particular face. It was an I’iwa sitting on the ground, clutching its jaw in distress. “Toothache?” Daniel said. And he thought, This is a kind of library. Only not a library of books or texts but of experiences. What was that word Rosko had used?
Morag might as well have been reading his mind. “Qualia,” she said. “The individual units of conscious experience. It’s a library of qualia.”
They’d been moving up, level by level, inside the ziggurat. Somewhere near the top, they entered a dome-shaped room that seemed to imitate the great space in which it was contained. It had no images, no decorations; in fact there was nothing in it except a model of the ziggurat, ten feet high, in the center. The model looked exact, except that there was no fire burning on top of it; instead, there was something that looked, Daniel thought, like a stone soccer ball.
Several I’iwa were already in the room. Some of them were holding long, burning tapers. Two of the figures in the shadows stepped forward, hand in hand. The one on the right was clearly very old—wrinkled, stoop-shouldered, with bags under the eyes and blotches of purple staining the skin. The one on the left was shorter, whip-slender, and clearly much younger.
Think of us as representing the past and the future, if you like, the old one signed. Daniel thought it was meant as a joke, partly, but he couldn’t be sure. We’re here to tell you our story.
Lamps ringed the room about ten feet up, and they were spaced much closer together than any of the others Daniel and Morag had seen: there were a couple of dozen, only a foot apart, and they had been positioned to flood the top of the model ziggurat with light. Morag and Daniel could see the dark ball at the top now. It was a globe, and it even had a map carved onto it, though it wasn’t a modern globe. Most of it appeared to be empty.
There was a stone bench halfway between the entrance and the model ziggurat; Stripe sat on it and gestured for them to join him. For a long time, with Dog sitting alert on the floor between them, Morag and Daniel watched the two I’iwa, the old one and the young one—Daniel trying to keep up with the meaning and whispering a translation as best he could, while Morag’s mind, unable for once to connect to the language, rummaged around in its own odd corners, forming and assessing and rejecting hypotheses.
“They’re telling us a Babel story,” Daniel said. “I can’t follow all of it. Many different languages. Many different kinds—I think maybe they mean species. And gods, and some sort of punishment for failing to obey. This is seventy thousand years ago. So Mayo was right. They were enslaved, along with—with—”
“Other species, yes,” Morag said. “Makes sense. Them and the Neanderthals. And the Denisovans and the Flores hobbits. Others too, I bet. And us, of course. Some of these groups had been in southeast Asia for a million years, but the first Homo sapiens would have been there by then.”
“But do we know anything special about seventy thousand years ago?”
“Seventy thousand is the eruption of Mount Toba. A volcano on Sumatra. It was an event thirty, maybe forty times the size of Thera. Screwed the entire planet’s climate for a thousand years, and Homo sapiens nearly went extinct.”
“What about the globe?” he said, pointing.
“It’s a map. Southeast Asia. Indonesia, Malaysia, Borneo on the left, and New Guinea joined up to Australia on the right.”
“I’m not seeing it.”
“That’s because it looked this way seventy thousand years ago, when the oceans were a hundred meters lower.”
“For me,” Daniel said, changing the subject after a pause, “the time since Ararat has been like dreaming. Like being trapped on the other side of a thick glass wall. I could see but not hear, be seen but not make myself heard. I have some catching up to do.”
She put her arm through his, leaned against him, and whispered in his ear. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m going to tell you the whole story. Everything you missed, everything you were robbed of, everything that happened at the edge of your understanding when you were present but absent.”
The old I’iwa took a taper in her hand. She looked at Daniel, and the signs she made, even though they were made in perfect silence, caused an echo of Iona’s voice in the back of his mind: Stop them. Before it’s too late. Then she stretch
ed upward with her other arm, which trembled with the effort, and touched the tiny flame at the taper’s end against the base of the globe.
A thin blue line ran from the flame in both directions around the globe’s base. That reminded him of Iona too, because it looked like one of the burners on their gas stove back home.
The ring of sky-colored fire hovered there, flickering, and grew yellow along the top edge. And then there was a sound like an intake of breath, and the whole surface of the globe burst into flames.
It could have been just a symbol or a warning. But Daniel knew it was more than that. It was an insight into the state of things: it was actual knowledge the I’iwa somehow had. Knowledge that the world out there, to which they were about to return, was already burning.
FROM THE AUTHOR:
SOME NOTES ON FACT AND FICTION
As with the notes for The Fire Seekers, I don’t recommend you read straight through these. Just browse the headings and dip into whatever sounds interesting. You’ll find a more detailed version at my website, www.richardfarr.net.
Fang Lizhi
I’m guessing most readers of this book won’t know of Fang Lizhi, a Chinese scientist and activist of great courage who died in 2012. An astrophysicist by trade, he spoke and wrote eloquently on the connections between openness, equality, democracy, and science. “Science begins with doubt” was the first of his five axioms, which attempt to sum up the kind of intellectual environment—respectful of all evidence, skeptical of all authority—that science needs in order to operate effectively. His message, stated briefly, is this: we don’t yet know everything there is to know about the world, so science is needed; but this is also true of the human (social, economic, and political) world; therefore, science itself shows us why it’s evil for governments to control what their citizens may think and say.
