Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

“Until last night,” Ben said, “I was focusing on the three videos we have of Maanik and the one I took with my phone at the UN when you—when you saw Galderkhaan.”

Caitlin noted his careful choice of words. Not “visited,” not “witnessed” or “experienced,” but “saw,” which could mean “imagined.” Clearly, he still didn’t completely believe her about that night.

“So what’ve you got?” she asked, trying not to lay on the affected cheerfulness too thick.

“Okay. First, I dove into something basic: volcanoes in Antarctica,” he replied. “Galderkhaan must have been located on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Or possibly north in the Scotia Sea. Those volcanoes are submerged now and there’s been quite a bit of earthquake activity there. That wouldn’t be unusual but they really are very distant from the continent. So the west coast is far more likely.”

“Isn’t the west coast the part that’s melting the fastest?”

“Yes, several studies have confirmed that all the western glaciers are going to melt and the whole ice sheet could follow.”

“I wonder—”

“And that’s a yes as well. A couple years ago they found an active volcano under the western ice sheet. If it blows a fissure, the whole area could come out looking like Iceland, all hot springs and thermal vents. Only more melty and less therapeutic. Geologists are pretty sure earthquakes around the volcano line are contributing to the big meltdown, although they’re not the only causes.”

“There’s also idiocy and arrogance.”

“Whether it’s global warming or deep and latent magmatic activity or just a big nasty climatic cycle, the west side is our place. There are no known volcanoes around the other coast. Now, Antarctica being covered with snow and ice, that means that our Galderkhaani friends had to have some impressive tricks for making their city habitable. I’ve started assuming geothermal engineering to an unprecedented degree. Actually, to an unantecedented—” he stumbled over the word a few times until they were both laughing. “To a degree unmatched to the present day. They were oasis builders, Caitlin.”

“Huh, okay… could they have built more than one oasis?”

Ben hmm ed noncommittally. “That jibes with a particular word I found: ‘ ida-ida .’ Caitlin, I can’t tell you how unusual this word is—half hour, you said?”

“Yes, sorry, Ben.”

“All right, then, to the chase. The word means ‘building,’ but not in the sense of a single structure. It’s more like building something that’s ever expanding, sort of like ‘fulfilling’—dare I say, a manifest destiny.”

“Is it related to the Technologists or the Priests or both?”

“Just the Technologists.”

“Ben, is there anything about expansion in an— internal sense?”

“I don’t follow. You mean like a soul?”

“More like an expanded consciousness.” She stopped there, unwilling to say anything that might lead to a discussion of why she was asking. Ben was a friend, but not an uncritical one. The kind, in fact, her mother wished for her.

Ben studied her for a moment. “A psychiatrist walks into a bar,” he said, grinning, “and sees herself sitting on a stool.”

She smiled back. “Cute.” It was an old joke of theirs, dating back to their college days. Ben used it whenever he had to pull her from what he called her “Hamlet reflections.”

“To answer the question—seriously—there’s no talk of their inner lives, except for the cazh , which is really about an outer afterlife. Maybe this wasn’t a very inward-minded people?”

“I doubt that,” said Caitlin.

“Why? We don’t know if they had art, songs, poetry—”

“They loved,” she replied. “It wasn’t just physical love. I felt it when I eavesdropped on their lives and relationships.”

“Quite possibly,” Ben agreed. “Then again, we did keep encountering them in crisis mode, which would explain an outward focus.”

Caitlin fell into a sudden depression. Earlier, she had thought something might have come back with her from the past; she wondered now if it weren’t just the opposite: that something of herself had stayed behind, connected to these people, hurting with them.

And then, just as suddenly, she came out of it, as cold poured down her spine again as it had at the apartment. She forced herself to focus on the screen. That’s where reality was she told herself.

“Cai,” Ben said, “I see my time is running down and I have a more important question.”

She looked at him expectantly but when he didn’t respond to her cue, she raised her eyebrows, further encouraging him to speak.

“When we have dinner tomorrow night,” Ben said with a direct gaze and a light tone, “how romantic should I make it?”

Caitlin glanced away but had to look back at him. She adored his sweet face, she truly did. But he had the most inelegant way of transitioning between topics she had ever experienced.

“I don’t know, Ben. Can we wait till we’re together to see?”

“Human to human,” he said, nodding.

“Yes, human to human,” said Caitlin.

Ben only broke their gaze for a second and then he was back to his buoyancy. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got another few minutes and I’m gonna use them. Gaelle—over the past day I’ve been studying the recording of her when she was having her crisis in the marketplace. In Maanik’s episodes, she seems to be talking about the Priests and Technologists equally, as if she’s caught between them. But Gaelle—the camera didn’t capture much of her, only a few sentences, unfortunately, and she spoke exclusively of the Technologists.”

“That fits,” Caitlin said. “I mean that Gaelle would be talking about them, since in her vision she died trying to leave Galderkhaan with them. Physically, I mean. Not spiritually.”

“Which brings me to this,” Ben said. “When you were—back there, while we were at the UN, did you see anything in the air? In the sky, I mean.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t want to feed it to you.”

“Okay.” She shut her eyes and carefully, tentatively drifted back to that night. It was all instantly real again and she snapped herself back.

“Cai?”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw clouds, the moon, volcanic ash spreading, and of course the rising souls, though I wouldn’t quite describe that as seeing them, more like sensing them.”

“That’s it?”

“Well, yeah. No birds. Also the columns of the Technologists, which were tall, very tall, and wide. They reminded me of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. That kind of stone, I mean.”

“Hm. Well, there’s a word in Gaelle’s video that—trust me, I have doubted this and struggled to prove I’m wrong, but it’s unmistakable. ‘ Aikai. ’ ‘Ship of the air.’”

Caitlin sat up straight.

“What?” Ben asked.

“Like zeppelins!” she said. The thought had occurred to her before, when she’d considered how the Galderkhaani might have mapped the region. “Ben, the Technologists’ columns were absolutely tall enough for that.”

“For what?”

“To be docking stations. Remember, like they tried do with the Empire State Building right after it was built?”

“They did?”

“Yeah. Just like the columns, it was low enough to use stairs to disembark, yet not high enough to get clocked by upper-level winds.”

“But you didn’t actually see any airships?”

She shook her head. “Not one. Besides, if they did have airships, why wouldn’t they have tried to escape on them?”

“Maybe they could only fly at certain times?” Ben suggested. “Or they were being prepared, perhaps enlarged, for the coming catastrophe? Remember, the eruption seemed to come earlier than anyone expected.”