“I don’t know. But They want it so badly. I’m missing something, I know I am. And I think They know what it is. I have to figure it out.”
“Why can’t you ever be normal? You don’t even have normal enemies,” I said.
“They say you can rate someone’s quality by the quality of their enemies,” she said. “Maybe that’s it, though. They want quantum particles? Well, fuck ’em. That’ll be us too. They’ll have to use every trick up Their slee…whatevers, on us. We just have to keep moving. They might figure out where we are or what we’re doing, but I’m not gonna let Them figure out both.”
“Wave and particle.”
“Wave and particle.”
She chuckled, rested her chin on her shoulder, and closed her eyes: conversation over. As she dozed—catlike, she’d always been able to sleep anywhere, even on this noisy, fume-filled, well-over-body-temperature bus with pantslegs and skirts flapping in her face—I carefully got her notes from my bag to see if I could make heads or tails of it. It was almost impossible to read; the bus was bouncing so hard that the plastic windows were both falling open and, actually, falling out. Ochre dust stormed inside, obscuring the pages.
The destruction of Ur, four thousand years ago. I hadn’t even known people had lived in cities that long. We had done mostly North American and European history in school, so I could answer bunches of questions about the Russian Revolution, but I didn’t, I realized, know much about anything older than a few hundred years ago. The Sumerians wrote everything down on clay tablets, which would of course last longer than paper. It had been a long time since British archaeologists had found the key that let Johnny learn Persian, Akkadian, and Elamite. The little mounds you could find stuff in were called ‘tells’—ha! Like poker. I’d have to surprise her with that one when she woke up.
And all the big men, no matter where, had made exhaustive efforts to repair, decorate, and furnish the temples of their gods, but it hadn’t been enough. What the gods wanted was life force, souls, whatever was inside a person or animal that made them go. Round bowls to hold the bones and ashes as needed, to keep blood off the floor of their beautiful temples.
The old records suggested that the benevolent spirits of old, the Elder Gods, might have been able to help us fight Them—but they had tapped out many battles ago, and were all trapped, dead, or asleep. Marduk had fought Them and put Them to sleep a long time ago, but he had been put under himself, thanks to base treachery: a friend or lover turned against him. Marutukku had kept the gates shut, but he was definitively dead. Johnny had written Apprentices? next to this depressing fact, circled in pink gel pen.
When the Ancient Ones, enemies of the Elder Gods, first came to human civilizations, They had possessed so many people that exorcisms eventually became commonplace, till even the average marketplace soothsayer who sold onions for a living could do one. But precisely because it had become so common, no one had written down the spells.
Speaking of: more of her notes, in turquoise and green gel pen, hard to read. The Spanish Inquisition? No. The Salem witch trials? Yes. The Crusades? Yes. 9/11? No? But check w/ Society.
It had to be here... yes. More notes. Holocaust? No. Jonestown? No.
Carthage, destroyed by Them. Where in the hell was Carthage? It sounded familiar. A Carthaginian shipwreck had been found in Honduras in the 1970s, filled with gold bars and skeletons—they had gotten lost, her notes said, fleeing for West Africa, after They invaded the city. I felt sorry for the refugees. You think you’re escaping, your whole boat sinks. Awful. Jesus.
The Candlestick of the Andes in Peru pointed inland to the geoglyphs of Nazca, itself a great gate of immense power, which was why you could only see the designs from the air. A rope of astonishing, almost inhuman thickness was attached to the central fork of the Candlestick, marked as taboo by local residents, who knew better than to go near it. There was a drawing, in pink again, a series of pulleys and counterweights, maybe Johnny’s idea for what the rope did. Something They would pull on, to do some dark and unknown work that even thousands of humans working together could not do.