The Russians roared in laughter. I expected more to the story, but Rasputin kept laughing, his entourage kept laughing, everyone was laughing but me. I turned to the translator.
“What’s so funny?”
The translator was wiping tears from his eyes. It took him a moment to gain enough composure to speak.
“It’s funny, because Mongols fuck their horses!”
My face went red.
“Oy, are you taking a piss!?”
The translator said something and the table’s laughter renewed. I was not amused. Not in the slightest. I was reaching for one of the ashtrays, heavy fuck-all bludgeoning types, when a man tapped my shoulder.
“Don’t listen to these frauds. That’s the third time I’ve heard that Mongol story today.”
I turned to find a bearded and disheveled Irishman.
“You mind if I have a look?”
“Go to it, man.”
The Irishman snatched the rubbings out of Rasputin’s grasp and gave them a good look. The Russian rumbled but made no move to retrieve the documents.
“Come on with me, mate. Leave these buffoons to their carousing.” I got up and left the Russian drinking party. The Irishman wasn’t done with them.
“Mark my words, Grigori. You keep on with your stories you’re going to come to a horrible, bloody end!”
The Russian answered with a finger gesture. I’m not sure what it meant, but I could guess.
“Where did you get these?” The Irishman asked.
“Long story. The short version is… cogs.”
“Someone wrote these on machine cogs?”
“Yeah.”
“That makes no sense.”
“Tell me what you know, mate. Maybe I can make sense of it.”
The Irishman shook his head.
“I don’t think you can. This is Sumerian cuneiform.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I’m a writer. I research this sort of thing.” He presented a hand. “Abraham Stoker. My friends call me Bram.” I shook his hand.
“Jacob Fellows.”
“Good to know. This isn’t just regular cuneiform, mate. This is some pretty common stuff.”
“Common Sumerian?”
“Sure, pal. Look, this one says, ‘If a man put out the eye of another man, his eye shall be put out.’”
“Eye for an eye?”
“Right. And this one says, ‘If a slave denies ownership of his master, the master shall gain the right to cut off the slave’s ear.’ These are laws. Specifically, these are the laws of King Hammurabi of Babylonia.”
“I’m not familiar.”
“You should be. King Hammurabi was the sixth king of Babylon and one of the first true rulers of man. He presented the first written laws of man, two-hundred and eighty two statutes covering crime, marriage, contracts, ownership. You could say he was the father of civilization. You mind stepping out with me?”
“Pardon?”
“I don’t like the prospect of curious ears.”
I followed Stoker out of the Hellfax, and thankfully so. The stench of dishonest Russian was too much to bear and I was tempted to get my five pounds back by force.
We absconded to a café across the street and sat for a kettle of Royal Blend.
“You mind handing those back.”
I slid Stoker the etchings. He gave them a bit more scrutiny.
“You’ve got two laws of two-hundred eighty two. At least, two-eighty-two are assumed. The original carvings are numbered, but sixty-six through ninety-nine are missing.”
“What does it mean? Why etch it into metal work?”
“Why not? Cuneiform was an etched writing used primarily in stone, clay, and wood. If the Babylonians had a better mastery of metalwork, I’m sure they would have etched their words on disks.”
I sipped my tea. Stoker sipped his. Something wasn’t right about the situation, about my chance meeting with an informative stranger.
“Why would a modern engineer take the time to etch these in his cogs?” I asked.
“I can think of two reasons. One, he was a mad man and the etchings bore some irrational meaning, personal to him but unfathomable to the sane world. Such is the nature of insanity in that it is deeply personal, and intensely lonesome.”
“You sound like a man who speaks from experience.”
“I’ve made a study of the insane for one of my books. I once met a man who eats spiders. He would bait them by catching flies and leaving them on thewindow sill. When I asked him why he ate spiders, he told me that he had yet to figure out how to catch rats, but when he did, he would drink their blood. There was a logic that made sense to him: flies, spiders, rats. But it was a personal, subjective logic, not meant for the world outside his mind.”
Stoker took another sip of his tea.
“But I’m moving away from the topic at hand. The second explanation is that the maker of these cogs attached some kind of greater meaning to his machinery and was leaving a note to the world. Do you believe in God, Mr. Fellows?”
I leaned forward in my chair. The Irishman regarded me with intense unblinking eyes.
“Yes,” I said.
“And you know the relationship between the Christian God and the Babylonians? You know about the Tower of Babel?”
“Just Sunday school stuff. Big tower, big crash, something of that sort.”
“The ancient precursors to the Babylonians, the Shinar, spoke a language understood by all mankind. Their words were the language of the universe. They were not burdened with mis-communications and the chaos of misunderstanding. It was impossible for them to misunderstand, such was the clarity of their words. The Shinar were ordered, industrious, mechanical. They learned fast, built fast, and they gathered the secrets of the earth and disseminated the knowledge among their people like bees in a hive. It was the Shinar who decided to build a tower. A tower to speak with God, with their creator.”
“How’d a people so knowledgeable get it in their heads that God lived in the clouds?” I asked.
“That very question baffled biblical scholars for centuries. Of course, we live in an advanced society. A society of Boschon cards and difference computation machines. We’re devising a new universal language based in numbers. But I digress. Not all towers are meant to reach God by proximity. Have you ever heard of radio waves?”
“No.”
“A Serbian in America, Nicola Tesla, has built a tower of metal in the hills of Colorado. His tower fires invisible energy that can transmit words to other towers of similar make, like a telegraph with no wires. Words can cover kilometers in fractions of a second. Tesla claims that with enough power he can talk to men on the other side of the Earth. For hundreds of years, we thought of towers as just objects of physical stature, but now we know better. Maybe it is Tesla who is shortsighted. Maybe with enough energy he can speak to other worlds, other universes, to God himself. Maybe this was the nature of the Shinar’s tower.”
I sipped my tea. “So you suppose the Shinar figured out these radios waves?”
“I don’t know. We’ll never know. God smote them. He deemed them too advanced, to arrogant in their attempt to connect with him. He took away their words, their language, the very strength of their society. They became the Babblers, the men who could not talk.
“Unable to understand each other, their fine-tuned order turned to chaos, to fighting, to destruction and violence. They destroyed their beautiful tower, their cosmopolitan city, all their riches and advances and wondrous things. They became again like the animals that hoot and point and scream and gnash their teeth. Every man was foreign to every man. And following the tradition of foreign nations they fought and fought and fought. For years the Shinar waged war upon themselves. The survivors eventually left and became wanderers of the earth. Tribes of families. The Babbling tribes of man. Humanity entered their third Dark Age.