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

be so elusive, so—
    “Ghostly? I asked them that,” I said.
    “And?”
    “I think the question annoyed them. Oma said to me, ‘Agota ena I’iwa-ben, kopol okt indai. Okt’in, hawa filim waro’p aru.’ Which means, or I thought it meant, ‘They’re ghosts. They’re beyond our understanding. How can you expect us to know what they’re like?’”
    “A reasonable enough response.”
    “He also used a word from Tok Pisin, though—”
    “That’s the national creole, isn’t it? I heard it in Port Moresby. But I thought people like the Tainu were too isolated to know it? Sorry, Morag, I interrupted.”
    “The Tainu know some Tok Pisin for the same reason some of them have vaguely Western-sounding names. There was a missionary here before us.”
    “A German Baptist,” Lorna said. “Josef Kurtz. He taught them enough Tok Pisin to tell them Bible stories an’ stuck around long enough to baptize some o’ them. Sorry, Morag. Go on.”
    “The Tok Pisin word that Oma used to describe the I’iwa was narakain . That’s literally ‘another kind.’ It means different people, another tribe—and it can mean ‘not normal,’ which from a tribal point of view is pretty much the same thing. But it’s not the word I’d use for a ghost. We use ghost stories to scare ourselves, right? But what if the ‘ghost’ story was a way of covering up for an even scarier possibility? That the I’iwa were real.”
    “But in the end you have no evidence one way or the other?”
    Jimmy said, “At first the Tainu said they’d found strange tools on the path. Only in one area, far up the valley near the waterfall. When I asked if they’d kept them, they said, No, no, we must have lost them. I could tell that was rubbish. The tools unnerved them in some way.”
    “Like Robinson Crusoe finding Man Friday’s footprints in the sand?” Iona said.
    “Yes. But instead of investigating, or ‘losing’ them, what they’d done was take the objects far into the forest and throw them into a river.”
    “Out of sight, out of mind?”
    “Maybe. But I get the feeling it’s something they think about all the time—they just don’t like to. They believe these tools belong to the I’iwa. Their ancestors.”
    Ancestors. That’s what I’d said to Jimmy and Lorna. They’re talking about their ancestors. My mistake.
    “I’m beginnin’ to think they’re makin’ the whole thing up,” Lorna said. “Foolin’ outsiders but maybe even foolin’ themselves. Maybe these ‘tools’ are the real ghosts. Thuss idea that they find physical evidence but always destroy it because it’s bad luck; it’s too bloody convenient. In which case we’ve been wastin’ our time here.”
    “We’re not wasting our time,” I said crossly. “While you’ve been chasing ghost tools, I’ve learned Tain’iwa.”
    Aye, I know. A royal pain in the bum, I was. And I never appreciated how patient they were.
     
    Iona was with us for less than a week before the gravitational pull of her other world, data tech, took her away again. “Got to get back to my negotiations,” she said as she crouched on the ground helping me and one of the village girls sort through a pile of candlenuts. “The Harbin city government has built the world’s largest server farm down an abandoned mine, complete with its own fourth-gen nuclear power source. It’s already three-quarters built. I get to tell the local party boss that our DNA-based storage makes it obsolete; no point in ever turning it on. It’s going to be tricky, finding a way to sound as if I’m offering an opportunity and not a career-ending embarrassment.”
    But on her last full day, fearless adventurer that she was, she left our encampment before dawn and went into the forest. “We don’t go beyond the waterfall,” the village chief had said. “The I’iwa will not permit it.”
    “It’s a taboo,” I explained, showing off my fluent command of anthro.
    “I know,” she said mildly. And then,