Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) by Richard Farr Page B

frequently—friendly with Ella, but clueless about the attention he was getting. You were wary, twitchy, clutching Iona’s camera and shivering under a blanket even though it was a warm day; you stared out of the window, your eyes wide, like you were suffering from a combination of the flu and acute agoraphobia. From time to time you’d mutter fragments of sentences, and you began to calm down only when I handed you sunglasses and your sketch pad. You spent a long time drawing an odd series of pictures. They were shaky because of the truck’s movement, and each one was framed by a sketch of the back of a camera, as if you were drawing her viewpoint—magically recreating her missing shots. And sure enough: one of them, more elaborate and detailed than the others, showed a small clearing in a forest. It wasn’t a generic scene, but a real place: when I looked closer, I could identify the species of nearly every tree and shrub. A memory. Only, not your memory, because it was a place you’d never been.
    “What is you think of this new planet thing?” Kit was asking Ella.
    “We’re not going to see it—that’s for sure. Wrong side of the sky.”
    “I mean, do you believe these stories about this is home to Architects or something?”
    “Not a chance. If you look at the actual data, instead of the dip-wad journalism, for all we know S-8A could have sulfuric acid oceans. Or an atmosphere thinner than the Death Zone on Everest. Or enough gamma radiation to barbecue steel. Plus, it’s thirty-five light years away. With anything like our technology, that’s a round trip of three million years.”
    “Maybe the Architects have better rockets,” Rosko said.
    She shook her head. “If someone out there thinks thirty-five light years is no big deal, they’re not using rockets. Warp drives, wormholes, teleportation, who knows? The point is, if you’re commuting between stars, then you’ve invented something that makes the speed of light irrelevant. And if the speed of light’s irrelevant, distance is irrelevant. Thirty-five light years or thirty-five million light years, what’s the diff? They could have come here to show off their ‘Einstein Was Wrong’ tattoos from anywhere in the universe.”
    “Anywhere,” you said, looking up from another sketch. “Or everywhere and nowhere.”
    “What does that mean, Daniel?” Ella asked. She sounded irritated, as if she was convinced that you were incapable of anything except the occasional eruption of nonsense. “What does ‘everywhere and nowhere’ even mean? They’ve got to come from somewhere, right?”
    But you might as well have been speaking to yourself. “Everywhere and nowhere,” you muttered to yourself; you were already busy drawing again.
     
    We were all quiet as we came down out of the mountains into the gorge of the Columbia. Even for me, it was a comfortable quiet, for about half a minute. But I hadn’t thought through the trip. I mean, I knew Kit would probably be there, but I’d never planned to spend two hours sitting inches away from her in the back seat of a truck, parted from her by nothing but a thin, invisible, increasingly potent, and maybe lethal wall of electrical current. She used a Swiss Army knife to take slices out of an apple and offered me one on the tip of the blade. “Thanks,” I said, and discovered that my throat was so dry I could barely swallow. When she said a couple of ordinary, sensible things like “You want another slice?” or “Wow, look at wind farm over there” or “Tell me more about the Professor Partridge” I could only blush, stammer, and feel appalled that she looked and sounded so relaxed. I even got a curling paperback out of my bag—one she’d picked out for me, from one of those free libraries in the neighborhood (What did that mean, her giving me the book? Was it just a thoughtful, friendly gesture?)—and spent three minutes trying to read.
    And another three at least pretending to try to