Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (24 page)

The shot veered away. I got a blurred panorama of her mother’s clutter—a table with dirty dishes, books stacked on a chair, an overstuffed grocery bag next to an open box of cereal on the floor. Then the wall on which you’d scrawled the map. The lens steadied as it found you, sitting cross-legged on the floor near the cereal with your back against a doorjamb. You looked at the camera. Looked at me. You were as thin as a corpse, but there was something familiar in your eyes that I hadn’t seen since before Ararat.

“Morag,” you said. “Go back. Find the I’iwa.”

There was a break in the video stream, and when you came back, you were making a repetitive gesture, a sort of jerky pointing motion toward your own head. “The answer,” you said, and “Eye. Eye. Eye.”

What about your eye?

You trailed off for a moment and looked away, struggling, breathless. Then you looked toward the camera again, and this time you clutched at the front of your shirt as if you were trying to rip it off. There was something close to panic in your eyes, as if you were pleading with me to understand.

“Eye. Eye.”

At last I did understand. Such a flood of hope! Such a small word!

“I.”

What the photographs revealed, I could easily have kept to myself, but some powerful instinct told me to share them with my gracious, ailing host. Maybe it was just knowing that the sheer strangeness of it would thrill him? It was eleven when I got Kai on the house phone. With obvious reluctance, he woke up Mrs. Chaudry, who reacted to my request—that she wake her employer so that I could show him some photographs—with an absolute, flat, unconditional refusal.

I asked politely a second time: useless. Then I argued with her, also politely: equally useless. Plan C was to get angry and rude. Instant success.

He was wearing a long robe of red silk. Mrs. Chaudry wheeled him into the study ahead of me and parked him by the fire, which was already on. Then she provided more tea—ginger, this time, with buttery Scottish shortbread, which Balakrishnan didn’t touch. When she’d retreated, I explained Kit’s message, and told him I needed to leave first thing in the morning. Then I explained about Daniel and the photographs.

He waved his hands over a sensor, and the expensive-looking painting over the fireplace (“Kandinsky. An original. Rather fine, isn’t it?”) slid silently out of the way. A screen was recessed into the wall behind it.

“This is to do with Iona’s trip to New Guinea? She told me all about it once.”

“I don’t think Iona told anyone all about it,” I said.

The first photograph uploaded, and the surface of the screen changed from black to an almost completely even green. “This is New Guinea,” I said. “In the Star Mountains, right on the border, just north of the area where we stayed with the Tainu.”

“Nothing but trees,” Balakrishnan said.

“Almost nothing.” I pointed out the thin brown line of a path, crossing the frame from lower right to upper left, and, like ants on a lawn, five figures standing next to the path near the middle of the shot. I magnified that area.

“This is me with my friends Oma and Isbet. Plus two other Tainu men who came with us.”

Oma, Isbet, and I had our arms around each other’s shoulders, probably at my insistence—there was a faked casualness about it, and they looked uncomfortable in a way I’m sure I hadn’t noticed at the time. The other two Tainu men were standing to one side, in their tanket-leaf skirts, their hands held up as if they didn’t know what to do with them, eyes avoiding the camera. They looked a whole lot more uncomfortable.

“I assume Iona was the photographer?” Balakrishnan said.

“Yes. She took this from quite a distance. I still remember her shouting out, ‘Let me get one more. Smile, everyone!’ Like we were a family at the beach.”

“These Tainu men weren’t in a smiling mood.”

“We’d already come farther than they wanted to. This was the point on the path where they basically refused to go on. See how the path becomes less distinct at the upper left? That’s because you’re higher up the slope there, but you’re also looking fifty, a hundred yards farther back into the forest.”

I panned up the path, then zoomed in tighter and tighter on the trees just above it, at the extreme corner of the frame. The image became pure green, pure mottled green, then a mere quilt of green and greenish-brown pixels.

“We’re looking at a spot that’s maybe a hundredth of the whole image. Now I’m going to switch to the second image, and do the same thing. OK? So we’re looking at the same spot in the far background, above the path, but a few seconds later.”

Click. Click.

Green. Mottled green. And—

Click click click.

The same patch. The same magnification. Only it wasn’t the same. I switched between them, then switched again. “Now you see it. Now you don’t. Now you see it—

“Stop. Are we on the maximum magnification?”

“Yes. And no doubt Rosko’s been messing around to make it as sharp as possible.”

“This is—oh my goodness.”

Oh my goodness
was right. Where the hell does something like that come from, in the middle of an uninhabited tropical forest? How do you explain a shift in the pixels that wasn’t there a few seconds earlier, that you want to say is a trick of the light, a bug on the lens, or a leaf catching the sun, but so very clearly isn’t?

“It’s a hand, isn’t it?” Balakrishnan said. “A hand, curled round the side of a tree trunk, as if someone is hiding. A very broad hand. And above it here—it’s—there’s no doubt, is there?”

No. Three-quarters hidden by the same trunk, but no doubt: the sliver of a ghost-pale face. And, when we looked further, hunting pixel by pixel, in the far background we saw equally undeniable hints of at least two more pale figures, almost hidden in the trees.

“So you were being watched,” he said. “Apparently, you were being watched by a previously unknown tribe of albinos in the middle of the New Guinea Highlands. That seems, well, rather surprising. But why does Daniel care about this?”

“I can only find out by going back there.”

Let me be clear about something with you here, D. What I wanted was to go back to you—and, yes, go back to Kit. But I was afraid of going back too: I was worried that if I did, I’d have to argue about what I was doing with Natazscha. Or Gabi and Stefan. Or Kit.

And—

This is hard to say, but going back to you felt like taking up a burden I needed to be without. You were still hard to communicate with. Maybe you were recovering, as I’d been trying so hard to believe, or maybe you weren’t and never would, as Rosko thought—or maybe you were on the brink of dying. In any case, it was surely me, brilliant me, who was destined to find the solution and save you? Morag Chen: Little Miss Superbrain. I was the one who could always solve every puzzle, and I wanted to come back to you
after
I’d triumphantly solved this one. Besides, I was the expert: I knew New Guinea. The idea that you, or the knowledge you carried, hidden within you, were an essential part of the solution—I’d let the idea float through my mind only to suppress it.

So what I said to Charlie B was
I’m going, and I’m going alone.
And he was the one who shook his head. He was the one who stayed up, late into the night and clearly exhausted, talking me out of myself. He repeated himself a lot, but only because I was being thick.

“Daniel should be there with you.”

“Why?”

“Because”—giving me this look of a father talking patiently to a slow-witted child—“because Daniel needs you, and you need him. And you need real support too, someone to help you through this.”

“It’d be better if I go alone.”

“I don’t think so. I think it would be better still, actually, if Ms. Cerenkov is part of this too.”

“Kit?”

“Yes.”

“No. No—and anyway, then I’d have to go back to Seattle first.”

“Rubbish. You’ve already told me that Ms. Cerenkov—Kit—is very good with Daniel. I think
brilliant
was the word you used. And you clearly trust her judgment in practical things, and—”

“And?”

“And you are obviously”—there was a millisecond pause—“obviously very fond of her.”

“She’s a good friend,” I said, not managing to not sound defensive.

“A good friend. Yes, Morag. I’m sure she is.”

Am I really that bloody transparent? That’s what I want to know. And also, while we’re at it, how did he manage to say it so completely straight, while managing so clearly to mean, with equal sincerity, two things at once?

“Go to New Guinea,” he said. “We can ask Kit to bring Daniel to you. Bring your German friend too, if you like. Rosko, the one who was at ISOC. Kai can arrange everything.”

“Natazscha won’t allow Kit to come. And I nearly got Rosko killed on Ararat, so his parents certainly won’t allow him to come.”

“I’ve known Natazscha Cerenkov for a long time, Morag. She’ll allow it, I think, with a little persuasion. Maybe she’ll even join the party!”

It was pointless to argue—clearly Balakrishnan always got his way. “That’s a lot of flights,” I said. “How are you going to pay for it all?”

There was something good about being able to amuse him. His had the knack of being able to laugh with just his eyes. “I am being rather extravagant, now you mention it,” he said. “My accountants will probably suggest that I raise the cash by selling Gilgamesh. But I don’t think that will be necessary.”

Half an hour later I was back at the guest house, lying in the dark, trying to shut down my brain enough to sleep. Fat chance. When my phone rang, it was after midnight. Since I was already awake, I decided to be cool about it.

“Hello, Kai. Did you get something arranged, then?”

It wasn’t Kai—and, when I processed who it was, I thought I’d die of happiness.

“Morag? Morag? I canna believe I got through at last. Ye gods, it’s been too long. Is that really you, gurrl?”

C
HAPTER
16

T
ELEFOMIN
P
LES
B
ALUS

The line was so bad at first that I was missing every other word, and what I could make out sounded like she was shouting at me from a mile away through a sandstorm. But her unique way of speaking—Bill had called it her “Slightly Scary, Don’t Mess with Me, Inverness Hand-to-Hand-Science-Combat Voice”—was instantly recognizable. I loved it more than any other voice in the world, period. And I’d started to think I might never hear it again.

“I’m callin’ from Amman, Morag. Amman, in Jordan. Jimmy an’ I are OK. Are you OK?”

I knew where Amman was on a map. But I’d never been there, so my imagination had to invent the place she was calling from. Time difference: er, eleven or twelve hours, so it was the middle of the day there. She would be calling from the Scottish consulate, maybe, a shabby, generic office with a window overlooking a shabby, generic Middle Eastern street. Which meant what? Dusty trucks. A man with a big mustache, in baggy white clothes and a white cap, selling figs from a cart. Young women looking stylish in bright embroidered hijabs, and others, age unknown, hidden under the hoods of their black abayas. Clichés. Where she was, it probably didn’t look anything like that. But I couldn’t believe she was really alive without picturing her.

She was telling me they’d had what sounded like “a weeping pig denture” in the desert. I was missing stuff, and I was desperate not to miss stuff; having not heard from her in so long—given what had happened in the interval, it seemed more like years than weeks—I found myself trembling, panicked at the thought of the connection being dropped. It’s amazing how eloquently poor sound quality can say
other side of the world
.

“Say it again. I couldn’t hear you.”

“A wee bit of an adventure.”

I got out of bed and stood at an open window. The ocean was in that direction, but all I could see was a palm tree, rendered ghostly silver by one of the island’s astronomer-friendly streetlights. I tried to make my mind stretch past the palm tree to the beach, and from there out across the thousands of miles of Pacific to China, Tibet, and beyond. The phone line made a new noise, like rain in a drainpipe, and I willed it, begged it not to go dead. The noise stopped. Silence. But then her voice came back loud and clear.

“—an’ we still have a few bureaucratic heads to knock together. But once the paperwork hassles are sorted, we should be back in Seattle in a jiff. A week, love, tops.”

Not knowing how long the clear connection would last, I launched into a machine-gun rapid, hypercondensed explanation of Ararat, and Bill, and the minor fact that I was in Hawaii as a guest of Charlie Balakrishnan. I didn’t say anything about you, not yet: too complicated.

“My,” she said drily when I was pausing for breath. “You must be doin’ a’right if ye can still talk at three hundred words a minute. But when will you be back? I want to see you, right now!”

I took a second, deeper breath. “There’s so much to explain. Too much to explain. But the important thing is, I’m not going back to Seattle. I can’t. I’m leaving tomorrow, I mean later today, for Telefomin.”

“Telefomin? Are ye kiddin’ me, Morag, or has the line gone funny again?”

“Not kidding. Trust me, please. I want to see you too. Both of you. But yes, really, I’m going. Can you—”

It was a ridiculous thing to ask.

“Can you forget Seattle and meet me there instead? Telefomin ples balus?”

Ples balus.
I’d been lazy about keeping up my fluency in New Guinea’s national language, Tok Pisin, but as soon as I tried to get across to Lorna that I was going back there—and as soon as I thought of the amazing idea that soon, once again, she and Jimmy and I might be there together—I reverted instinctively to it. Just picturing the people, the humidity, and the mad-green topography had dropped me straight back into that strange, joyfully bastard language, in which “oldest child” is
nambawan pikinini
and “not working properly” is
bagarap
.

Telefomin is where our work with the Tainu began—a remote mountain station, right in the center of the island, an outpost even by Papuan standards. A short hike from the source of the Sepik River, it’s nothing but a straggle of low houses in a flat valley, ringed by green mountains, connected with the world by
ples balus
.

It means “place for bird.” So it also means “place for plane”—airfield. But in Telefomin, like so many places in New Guinea, the “airfield” was nothing but a strip of roughly level grass. A couple of times a week, people would stand on its fringe and wait patiently for an hour or three; eventually, a de Havilland Twin Otter would thrum down out of the clouds like an angry white duck, waddle to a halt, and disgorge sacks of rice, boxes of soap, and spare parts for
bagarap
Toyota Land Cruisers.

Lorna loved New Guinea, but she clearly thought I was nuts. “Telefomin! No, Morag, that’s silly. It’s thousands o’ miles in the wrong direction. Which isn’t even the point. The point is we’re caught up wi’ all the news about Ararat. And wi’ Bill gone, your father an’ I have a responsibility to Daniel as well. We absolutely must—”

“You don’t understand—”

Snap, crackle.

“You don’t understand. Daniel is—”

I don’t know what it was—the relief of hearing her voice, the fear of being cut off at any second, frustration because we were already lurching into a practical disagreement that she took it for granted she’d win—but my own voice was strangled; I was on the verge of crying.

“Are ye still there?” she asked.

“I’m here. Mumma, please. Listen to me.”

Mumma!
The word just slipped out. I’d last called her
Mumma
just over ten years ago, on the afternoon of my seventh birthday. It was then, standing with our ankles in the North Sea, that we decided “child” was a category I didn’t fit very well, and we’d do better to start treating each other as equals.

Mumma.
I remember everything from that birthday. As if it’s more real than real—as if someone went into my memory files and upped the color-saturation setting. Not just the fact that they’d taken me to Edinburgh for the museums and sights. Not just that Jimmy said it was too hot for town, and we should drive out to the beach at Aberlady and go fossil-hunting instead. No: I remember the smell of the car and the smell of the wind, the cries of each particular gull, the hot dry sand on the path and the cold damp sand below the tide line. I remember the exact feel of the broken silver zipper on the pink anorak Lorna hadn’t wanted to buy for me because it was “a wee bit girlie”—the pink anorak I’d then demanded, because what was supposed to be so wrong with “girlie”? And I remembered both Jimmy’s voice saying,
If you find a dinosaur, I’ll buy you an ice cream
, and the infinitesimally grainy texture of the vanilla soft-serve that he did buy, even though I found only a trilobite.

“Mumma! Look!”

The trilobite was a good clean specimen, almost as long as my thumb.

“Mumma, no one has touched this in millions of years!”

As she came over, her crinkly red hair was all over the place in the wind, her hands gritty from digging and sifting. She nodded appreciatively.

“No human bein’ has ever touched it, Morag. Not once, until now. Thuss poor little bugger got buried in the sand a hundred million years ago. Opposable thumbs weren’t even a twinkle in evolution’s eye back then—our ancestors still looked like rats, probably. So ye’re the first.”

“The first ever? The first ever ever ever, in the whole history of the universe?”

“Feels good, aye?”

It felt better than good: it was the best birthday present I ever had. Not the fossil itself, so much as the thrill of reaching down that far into the well of the past.

I decided I’d become an adult that day, so I started calling them Jimmy and Lorna. They rolled their eyes at first, then got used to it. But I was still a child, in some ways even a normal one. Passionate, but careless: for years afterward, I kept the trilobite in an old jewelry box, in a nest of tissue paper, and got it out to examine under a magnifier from time to time; then, unaccountably, I lost it.

At least now I’d found my mother again.

“Mumma, listen to me. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s what we have to do. Daniel is—Daniel is—”

“Daniel is what, gurrl?”

“They tried to take him on Ararat. Rosko rescued him, but he’s—not well. He’s lost a lot of weight, and—”

“Where is he?”

“In Seattle still, with Rosko Eisler and—look, the point is, I think he learned something on Ararat, about what’s really going on, but now he can’t communicate.”

“Oh, Morag, I’m so sorry. You’re saying he’s a Mystery?”

“No! It’s not that simple.” I tried to describe how you were: the fragments of speech, the drawings, the sense that you were like a man with his arms bound, trying to reach out.

And your voice. I didn’t want to say it, not even to Lorna. Especially not to Lorna. “It’s almost as if Iona is communicating through him. Or, I don’t know, a fragment of her is buried inside him. Like, she told him something. After she was dead. I’m sorry. I know none of this makes any sense.”

It was annoying that the static had gone, because over the clear line, she could hear me sobbing.

Her voice came back much softer. “Morag, Morag. Ye’ve had a really rough time, haven’t ye? We were worried about ye o’ course, but we had no idea. I’m sorry, love. I’m sorry we’ve not been there.”

That made me feel weepier and more emotional than ever. I felt too tired to be interested in persuading her to come to New Guinea or anywhere else—I just wanted her to be with me. And boss me about. And not mind when I did the opposite of whatever she told me to do.

I forced myself to sound calmer: “Tell me something,” I said. “While you were in Iraq, or wherever, did you and Jimmy speak to anyone who’d actually been at Ararat? Or hear any stories about people undergoing Anabasis and disappearing, and then showing up again?”

“Oh aye. Lots of whisperin’ about that around Mosul. An’ we met a Kurdish woman, Seraphim up to the ears, who insisted that she’d converted because her son had returned. He’d been right there in the middle o’ the eruption, she claimed. Ka-boom. An’ then a week later he came back to find her an’ tell her all about partyin’ with the Architects.
Reincarnation
, naturally some of them’s usin’ that word, though it pisses off the Traditionals an’ doesn’t fit in with what Quinn said either.”

“Did you believe her?”

“O’ course not. It’s pretty thin stuff, isn’t it, if ye think about it? I mean, if Jimmy disappeared an’ then came back a week later with a glassy stare an’ a cockamamie story about dying an’ comin’ back to life, I’d ask him what the hell he’d been smokin’. Why do ye ask?”

“Because Daniel predicted it, that’s all.”

“Predicted people would come back? Really?”

But the line fizzed ominously again, and it was all too complicated, so I changed the subject. She’d already evaded a couple of questions about what had happened to them in Iraq. “Are you both OK to travel?”

“Oh aye, we’re absolutely fine.”

If she’d said
We’re fine
, I’d have believed her; I could tell from
absolutely
that she was lying. “OK, so tell me. What really happened to you? Come on, tell me the truth.”

“Och, not so much. We were rounded up near Erbil by a Sunni group. They were goin’ to give us the chop. Thought we were Seraphim, see, an’ the Seraphim are polytheists, an’ if there’s one thing the jihadi boys can’t stand, it’s a polytheist. Jimmy managed to persuade them we were Christians, because that was the next most plausible thing. We spent a while chained up in an abandoned American barracks. Jimmy speakin’ some Arabic came in way handy, aye. Made friends wi’ one o’ the guards, a nice village boy who brought us extra bread an’ then looked the other way while we escaped.”

“Then you just got on bicycles and headed for the border, or what?”

“No, escapin’ was the easy part. We had to hide in the desert. Plenty o’ experience with that, luckily. Jimmy saved us from dyin’ o’ thirst by making a solar still out o’ a rock, an oil can, an’ half a fertilizer bag.”

“And you got to Jordan, and you’re OK now?” I repeated. “Are you sure?”

She didn’t answer my question. “Morag, what about Daniel?”

“I was getting to that. Charlie Balakrishnan’s arranging for Daniel to come directly to Telefomin from Seattle. He’ll be flying with um, a friend. Kit.”

“Kit?”

“Yes.”

“That wouldn’t be Natazscha Cerenkov’s daughter?”

“That’s right.”

“Really? Yekaterina is ‘Kit.’ An’ she’s not a friend, she’s ‘um-a-friend’? Well, well, well, Morag, yer full o’ surprises. I don’t recall ye having um-a-friend before.”

“She’s—she’s—it’s—”

I had no idea what to say. For about ten dozen reasons, I didn’t even know what I wanted to say. What was the important bit here? I tried out various things in my mind.
I’m gay
: no, that got it all wrong, because it sounded like
I’m a socialist
or something, and I didn’t “identify as gay” any more than straight people “identify as straight”—I just happened to be madly in love with one particular person, and that person happened to be Kit.
I’ve never felt like this about anyone in my whole life
: OK, so that was true, but it was too gushy to say to my mother.
It’s all so new
: true, vague, a cliché.
It’s already over
: probably true, hard to say without whining.
It feels like my heart is trying to strangle itself.
I trailed off into silence.

“Fancy a mother not noticin’ a thing like that,” Lorna said. And then she saved my blushes by returning to our earlier conversation. “Telefomin—my goodness. Such a long time. All right, all right. Ye’re mad, is all I can say, an’ Jimmy’ll say I’m mad to have agreed. I know exactly what he’ll say:
Single most crackbrained scheme she’s ever dreamed up
. We’ll get there as soon as we can.”