Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (19 page)

I know, because I read about it: this is stuff that some people spend 90 percent of their lives on. But I’d never felt the reality of it before, never understood that love and longing and uncertainty and need could be such an exhausting, all-body workout. Never guessed just how much of me could be taken over by this trivial, everyday agony.

No doubt Kit was complaining to Rosko about how Majka was impossible / was losing it / was, frankly, just between you and me, Rosko, the selfish-centered painfulness in butt, yah? So I tried to distract myself by talking to you and managed to talk only about whether you thought I was selfish or not. You’d have called me on that, once. Not now. So I stared out of the window, stirred some chili, checked the time every thirty seconds, and stared out of the window some more.

When Kit had been gone for forty-nine and a half minutes—during which a thousand years passed, and I burned a pan of corn bread—I filled the kettle. It was white with a floral pattern and rust spots showing through the coating; the stopper in the spout had one of those whistles that responds to the steam pressure with a noise like a mezzo-soprano being strangled.

“You want a cup of something?”

“Yes.”

O-kay. You were looking at your hands, not at me, so I couldn’t tell whether the “yes” was, hallelujah, a direct answer to my question. That would have been a first, but maybe you were thinking of something else.

“A cup of what? Regular tea? Peppermint? Ginger?”

You opened your mouth again, paused, and then flinched, the way you’d done before the raccoons came out of that tree on campus. It set my neck tingling. A threat? Had someone found us? Many things were interfering with my ability to believe I was still rational. One was the memory of being nearly kidnapped by that gorilla of a guy near your parents’ house. It was there all the time, in the background, like having something sticky on my hands that I couldn’t wash off.

You got up slowly and stood at the window. I squeezed your hand. For once, you squeezed in response, but the way you did it was unsatisfying, mechanical—as if you’d had the gesture described to you but not explained. As if Rosko and Kit were right about you.

“What? What did you hear?” There was nothing out there except some wind-whipped grass and the flat gray strait.

Ten or fifteen seconds passed. I was on the point of saying,
No, D, it’s nothing
, when the top of Rosko’s head, then Kit’s, rose into view as they climbed the beach path. Part of me was relieved that it wasn’t scary strangers. Knowing that Kit was coming back to the cabin, a larger part of me was occupied with all the cruel things, or the merely final and irrevocable things, she might say. But most of me was preoccupied with something else. I thought of the raccoons outside the lab; of all the times you’d spoken confidently about things that hadn’t yet happened; of you saying, “There’s no time”; of what Partridge had said about “seers.”

“You can see the future, can’t you?” I said. “You’re turning into what all the religions claim to have. A seer. A prophet. One of the special people who get glimpses through the smoke?”

You just looked at me. Just looked—but it was a look that seemed to brim over with meaning: the very opposite of blank, your eyes had frustration and sympathy in them—as if I was the one suffering an enigmatic mental deficiency, and you were the one trying and trying to help me toward understanding.

“What am I supposed to think, D? I want to laugh at this. I want to say it’s totally unscientific. Mumbo jumbo. Seeing into the future is an absurd idea, impossible. Even more impossible than ancient gods installing software in our heads. What the hell am I supposed to think?”

Rosko, coming back in, had overheard me. “You should give yourself a break,” he said, putting down a big pair of marine binoculars and kicking off his shoes. “Even the physicists don’t know what to think. Half of them say the future can affect the past, and the other half say time’s an illusion. That aside, the whole house of cards is glued together with three big theories—relativity and quantum mechanics, which contradict each other, and string theory, which is mathematically beautiful junk. As for consciousness, it’s reality’s dick: too embarrassing to mention.”

“Thanks for that, Rosko.”

Kit came over and took the kettle from under my hand. “Works better if you turn on the flame,” she said. Her voice was neutral. I tried to hunt for clues in her expression, but I couldn’t focus because I was distracted by her hair, which had been darkened slightly by the damp. It was tucked into the upturned collar of her jacket. I’d never seen it like that before, and it made me ache, fiercely, all over. I looked down at the kettle again.

“She is like you,” she said, turning to Rosko. “Too much the thinking.” Hearing her refer to me in the third person was agony; I knew, in that moment, that it was over. “And now she have something more to think about.”

She was holding out my phone. At arm’s length. I couldn’t even meet her eyes this time. “Forgot I had it still in pocket,” she said. “Pocket goes ping. Then ping. Then also third time ping. Somebody must like you.”

Some
body. That’s how she said it. In a sane mood I could’ve taken it for gentle irony, a joke, a sign that she was looking for a way back to safe ground. But naturally I jumped to the opposite conclusion: she was rubbing salt into my self-inflicted wound. She was mocking me. She was cruelly expressing surprise that anyone could like me—never mind her.

“Thank you,” I said miserably, taking the phone.

I should have said,
I’m sorry.
I should have said,
Please be careful, because right now I’m constructed entirely out of eggshells.
Instead I just looked down at the black rectangle and read the screen.

It said
W
ELCOME TO
C
ANADA
.
Then it changed to
O
UT OF
S
ERVICE
A
REA
. But the three messages were still there.

The first one was from Partridge. I skimmed it, not much interested; it seemed like pleasant chatter that I didn’t need to pay attention to:

I’
M SORRY YOU HAD TO PUSH OFF IN SUCH A HURRY
,
BUT
I
DO UNDERSTAND
. A
NOTHER RIOT HERE
,
IN THE MIDDLE OF DOWNTOWN
: I
GOT A RINGSIDE SEAT FROM MY HOTEL AND IT WASN
’
T A PRETTY SIGHT
. Y
OU
’
LL WELL OUT OF IT
. T
HANKS FOR THE COPIES OF ALL YOUR NOTES
—I’
M WORKING ON THEM
. M
EANWHILE, UP AT THE UNIVERSITY
,
THE
S
ERAPHIM ARE TRYING TO PREVENT THEM FROM EVEN CLEARING UP THE LIBRARY SITE
,
AND
N
ATAZSCHA HAS BEEN QUESTIONED AT LENGTH BY MEN IN DARK SUITS
. A
LL MINOR STUFF COMPARED TO WHAT
’
S HAPPENING IN PLACES LIKE
J
APAN OF COURSE
,
WHICH
,
HAVING DISCOVERED THE JOYS OF SECTARIAN VIOLENCE
,
IS STARTING TO LOOK MORE AND MORE LIKE THE
M
IDDLE
E
AST
. B
UT
I
FEAR WE ARE NOT FAR BEHIND
.

I’
M STILL CONVINCED THAT THE
D
ISKS AND THE
B
RONZE
A
GE
C
OLLAPSE ARE WHERE OUR ANSWER LIES
—
THAT
’
S WHEN THE
A
RCHITECTS GAVE US LANGUAGE
,
OR TOOK AWAY OUR OTHER LANGUAGES
. P
ERHAPS YOU COULD GET SOMEWHERE WITH THE
D
ISKS IF THEY GET THE COMPUTER AT THE
I
NSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS WORKING AGAIN?
B
UT
I
DON
’
T THINK THAT
’
S GOING TO HAPPEN SOON
. I’
VE HAD DINNER WITH
N
ATAZSCHA TWICE
,
INCIDENTALLY
. W
ONDERFUL WOMAN!
B
UT SHE
’
S QUITE DISMISSIVE OF MY IDEA THAT THIS BUSINESS ALL GOT GOING DURING THE
B
RONZE
A
GE
. S
HE THINKS LANGUAGE AND A FULL SENSE OF THE SELF EMERGED MUCH EARLIER
—C
RO
-M
AGNON ART
, N
EANDERTHAL BURIAL PRACTICES, THAT SORT OF THING
. S
O, WHILE
I’
M FIXATED ON THE
T
HERAN CIVILIZATION
,
WHICH GOT GOING SEVEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO
,
SHE THINKS THE BIG STUFF HAPPENED MUCH FURTHER BACK
. I
CAN
’
T BELIEVE SHE
’
S RIGHT
,
BUT THEN
I’
M NOT SURE WHAT TO BELIEVE
.

D
ID YOU HEAR THE STORY FROM
N
EW
Z
EALAND ABOUT SOME OF THE MISSING FROM THE
R
UAPEHU INCIDENT COMING BACK?
F
ASCINATING! SOME SAY IT
’
S ALL HOKUM
,
OTHERS SAY IT
’
S PROOF OF REINCARNATION
,
AND A THIRD SAY IT PROVES THEY WERE ABDUCTED BY ALIENS
. S
O MANY THEORIES!
D
O GET PLENTY OF REST AND FRESH AIR
.

The second message was what I’d been imagining and waiting for all these weeks:

D
EAREST, DEAREST
M
ORAG: LONG STORY
,
BUT WE ARE SAFE
. T
RULY SAFE
,
THIS TIME
,
AND HOME SOON
. M
ADE IT TO
J
ORDAN YESTERDAY
. N
OW ON OUR WAY TO
A
MMAN
. M
ORE IF
/
WHEN
I
CAN
. H
OPE YOU ARE SAFE AND WELL
,
AND
I
JUST WISH
I
KNEW FOR SURE THAT YOU
’
RE GETTING THIS
. L
OVE LOVE LOVE FROM
L
ORNA X
L
ORNA X
L
ORNA X
AND
J
IMMY X
J
IMMY X
J
IMMY X

The third message was the least expected. The one I’d more or less given up on:

M
Y DEAR
M
ORAG
, I
AM SO VERY SORRY THAT
I
DID NOT GET BACK TO YOU
. A
LAS
,
BEING IN A MEDICALLY INDUCED COMA HAS PLAYED HAVOC WITH THE SOCIAL NICETIES
. I
AM STILL UNABLE TO TRAVEL
,
BUT
I
HOPE THAT
I
CAN PREVAIL UPON YOU TO VISIT ME
. C
OME AT ONCE
,
IF YOU CAN
. I
WANT TO TALK TO YOU
ABOUT
M
AYNARD
J
ONES
. A
ND
I
HAVE SOMETHING REMARKABLE TO SHOW YOU
. W
ITH SINCEREST RESPECT
, A
KSHAY
“C
HARLIE
” B
ALAKRISHNAN
.

There was contact information underneath Balakrishnan’s message, but I didn’t read it. Rosko did.

“Hawaii? He wants you to go to Hawaii? I thought he lived in New Delhi.”

“Kona is Hawaii,” Kit said. “I think that guy maybe lives everywhere.”

“I’m not going,” I said. “I can’t leave Daniel now.”

I’d been holding your hand, and you tugged on it. “You will go,” you said. It sounded almost like a recommendation, almost like a command, but it was neither. It was a statement of fact: you knew that I’d go, and you were telling me so.

Kit put her hand on my other arm and squeezed gently, which made me feel like a starving person being offered a grape. I was craving her touch, craving reassurance, craving, honestly, the chance to put my face on her shoulder again and not move for an hour. But was she offering a gesture of reconciliation? Or an attempt to be kind about not offering one?

“Majka,” she said, “You have been trying to find out about Mayo, yes, because you think he knew something about the Architects that you don’t know? His Route Two is about using ISOC to emulate whole brain, upload consciousness to cloud or something, digital immortality, blah blah. But he finds it not working so good, something missing. You still don’t know what. Maybe Rosko is right. Maybe Architects are just beyond us, like we are cat trying to do calculus. But maybe not. Balakrishnan founded ISOC. He hired Mayo, was Mayo’s boss. Also a friend of Iona, yes? So talk to him. And if he is too sick to come here, then of course you go.”

Majka.
That meant something, right? If she was still seriously pissed off, she’d have called me Morag.

Shut up. Shut up. Focus.

I took a deep breath and tried to sound normal. It didn’t work: my voice came out squeaky, needy.

“We can all go.”

“No, Majka. Daniel, he cannot travel now, I think. Too much change already. Look at him—he lose ten kilo. And you need to do this, not us. We stay here, look after him, no problem. You think me and Rosko can’t look after him?”

“No, I don’t think that.”

“Good, so no excuse.”

Rosko was trying to make up to me. “The Big Island’s one of the Seraphim’s so-called Epicenters,” he said. “Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa—huge volcanoes. Maybe you’ll find something out about that. What they’re really planning.”