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

digestive biscuits.
    “Thank you thank you thank you, Auntie Iona! My favorite!”
    “I know.”
    “And I haven’t tasted chocolate in weeks!”
    “Eat them all, Morag. They’re good for your brain. And don’t call me Auntie. It makes me feel old.”
    Iona also brought real sliced white bread. For dinner, we toasted it over a fire and ate it with canned baked beans. I introduced her to my new Tainu friends while babbling at her about their language and culture. And beliefs too—though I left their beliefs about the I’iwa for later, when we were alone, because I’d already worked out that merely saying the word bothered them.
    “You’re learning so much, Morag,” she said. “But none of this sounds like archaeology.”
    “Morag has turned into our resident anthro,” Jimmy said proudly. “What brought me and Lorna here was something else. Stories from downriver about the Tainu still using exceptionally primitive tools. We were already interested in comparing modern New Guinea tools—the sort of thing the locals were using before steel was introduced—with pre-metal tools in Europe. So we decided to trek up here and see what we could find.”
    “And?”
    “Total wild goose chase,” Lorna said. “Nothin’ new here. Nothin’ particularly interestin’. But there is a wee bit o’ a puzzle. When we describe what we’re lookin’ for, instead o’ sayin’ that they’ve never heard o’ anythin’ like that, they get all sheepish an’ want to change the subject. An’ then they say, Oh, um, we sometimes find odd things like that in the forest, but they’re nothing to do with us. It’s like they’re sayin’, sure, tools like that exist here, but some other tribe is responsible, an’ we don’t want to talk about it.”
    “Did they show you any examples?”
    “Morag,” Jimmy said, turning to me. “This is your story.”
    So I told her about the Ghost People. Or I told her what I thought I understood about them.
    “The Tainu believe that the spirits of their ancestors live in caves at the head of a valley west of here,” I said. “I’iwa. The I’iwa almost never show themselves and never speak. They sometimes come out at night and hunt, but their purpose in life—or death—is to protect the living Tainu.”
    “From what?”
    “The Tainu say that the I’iwa protect them from the anger of the ‘volcano’—which stole the I’iwa’s own language.”
    I used my fingers to put scare quotes around volcano .
    “Hang on a minute,” she said, turning to Jimmy. “You told me once that all the volcanoes here were at the western end of New Guinea.”
    “That’s right,” he said. “But according to Morag these guys keep insisting there’s one right up the valley there where the I’iwa supposedly live. They say they’ve seen the smoke. It’s nonsense, of course. Sorry, go on, Morag.”
    “The thing about the I’iwa,” I said, “is that they don’t like to be seen, and they’re very good at not being seen.”
    “So how do the Tainu know they exist?”
    “Some people claim to have spotted them. Not in the open, not standing there on the path. But glimpsed through the trees, maybe at dawn or twilight. And sometimes the I’iwa want to remind the Tainu that they’re watching. So they leave signs. Broken plants or scratches on a tree.”
    “Or one o’ these primitive stone tools,” Lorna said. “An’ the Tainu claim that sometimes sweet potatoes are stolen in the night, or that, even when no one from the tribe is out huntin’, they’ll hear a chicken or a pig bein’ killed in the forest.”
    Iona asked a thousand questions. Did the Tainu think of the I’iwa as ghosts or spirits in the Western sense? Did they believe they lived forever—the immortal souls of the departed? Or, if they were dangerous, and stole things, and occasionally left stone tools behind, were they more like real creatures, with bodies? But then surely there would be more evidence of them? How could they