Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

He stood upright and was about to step forward to search for the origin of the breeze when an inner voice stopped him. Over the years, he had learned to listen to that voice. This time, though, it insisted. He stayed by the wall and looked around for whatever was causing the internal alarm.

Just over an arm’s length away was a mass of olivine tiles placed in the wall roughly at eye level, and a small bubble of rock like those he’d seen in the chamber. The olivine was glowing. With half of his body still edged to the wall, he stepped to the mosaic. To the right he saw an arched entrance, clearly a designed opening and not a lava crack. However, the opening was sealed shut with a mass of basaltic stone—hardened magma.

That didn’t make sense, though.

If lava flowed over the tunnel, it should have kept flowing, poured down, and filled much more of this space. Instead, it simply stopped with a curious edge as if heaped against something—but there was nothing to heap against.

Maybe there was a barrier that has since collapsed? he thought. But what kind of structure could have withstood volcanic heat, other than volcanic rock itself?

The olivine mosaic was just as mysterious—not just its chemistry but its design. Given the position of the tiles on the wall, Mikel thought they bore a distinct resemblance to an exit sign in a theater—a cautionary or emergency notice of some kind. Could it have been put there by the mysterious Source-tapping Technologists just in case something went wrong? He was habitually on guard against the unscientific impulse to assume one’s own culture could automatically explicate another. But upon closer examination the drawings etched into the olivine clearly showed gestures . If he was interpreting the drawings correctly, it looked as though the viewer or reader should retrieve something from the bubble of rock and put it on their face.

Mikel touched a small quartz panel on the bubble of rock. The arched entrance immediately opened like the door of a cabinet. Inside, he found a row of hooks holding four sagging, beige bits of what appeared to be remarkably well-preserved cloth masks. He set his teeth against the cold and pulled off a glove to touch one. It didn’t feel like fabric. The swatch had an unrecognizable smoothness, definitely not plastic. He would have compared it to skin but it didn’t move like skin when he lifted it. Somehow it felt flexible and then oddly structured, but the structure disappeared as soon as he moved it again.

Technologist gear? he wondered.

As Mikel pulled down his balaclava and cautiously placed the mask to his face, its edges cinched themselves to his skin. With some effort he could pry it loose again, but it was designed to be airtight, and suddenly Mikel felt why. His lungs felt full and remained that way, holding a flex like a bodybuilder ballooning a muscle. The mask hadn’t appeared to do anything—yet what else could have caused this?

He tried to stay calm, rational, as he contemplated the truly foreign technology… something so alien it was beyond his ability to analyze or understand. He reminded himself that he was here to catalog and move on. Perhaps the larger picture would help to explain these magnificent parts.

The olivine mosaic provided no other clues. Their pulse seemed slightly faster than before, but he had no way of quantifying that. Mikel carefully turned to face the tunnel again. He could see that several feet ahead, there was a larger, closet-size panel with the same olivine design, yet this mosaic was dark and could not be read. Inching himself along the wall, he reached out to open it and discovered within upright stacks of what looked like bobsleds made of Persian rugs, ribbed with some kind of wicker.

Flying carpets , he thought jokingly, reaching for one of them. But who could say whether or not this was where the legend began—carried away by surviving Galderkhaani?

He tugged on it several times, putting real muscle into it, but the contraptions were stuck fast. He shined his light all around them and fumbled between them and around to the back. Although his fingertips sensed protrusions from the wall, there were no vises or hooks. Apparently these could not be obtained as easily as the masks. Perhaps they’d been considered more valuable or, considering that the mosaic wasn’t lit, less crucial.

Mikel spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out the attachment mechanism, wiggling the contraptions in every direction but coming up with nothing. Finally, with a grunt of frustration, he gave up. The ancient locks, whatever they were, had worked. He was starting to feel like a bit of an idiot, like an alien discovering New York City, and spending all its time fooling with a broom closet. He closed the panel and turned back to the tunnel.

So , he thought as he shone his headlamp down the corridor in one direction, then the other. Which way?

He looked up at the place where he’d entered and calculated that to head toward the continent he wanted to turn to his left.

He took two steps forward and was blown off his feet.

Snapped into survival mode, Mikel hunched into a fetal form as a rush of air rocketed him down the tunnel. The airstream was steady only in velocity, not in dynamics. With no warning it would suddenly twist viciously, then again and again. Several times it slammed him into the wall. He’d fall and then with no respite the wind would pick him up again and hurtle him onward. He wished he hadn’t taken off his helmet but so far his arms were enough protection. Then he was slammed especially hard. His headlamp smashed and broke and the tunnel went instantly utterly dark.

A second later the airstream flipped him over and blasted him toward the ceiling, face first. He kicked out to let his feet take the brunt of the impact and felt the jolt all the way up his spine.

Jesus Christ—

He needed a way out of this. He looked around for anything he could cling to.

Another flip, and then he noticed that he was primarily slamming into the wall on the left. To get back to center, he tried pulling his arms tightly to his sides, straightening his legs. The airstream responded with a push. He must have overshot slightly because he was whipped right out of the airstream directly into another one that slammed him into the opposite wall. Quickly he ducked his head back in the original direction, crossed what he sensed was the centerline, and slammed into the left wall again at an angle that would leave a bruise on his arm from elbow to shoulder.

He tried again directing himself toward the middle with a hell of a lot more caution. He was right, in the exact center of the tunnel the airstream smoothed out and lost some of its turbulence. He caught the sweet spot and stayed there, keeping his head bowed to shield his face. He was moving in the direction he wanted to go and there were no more collisions. For the first time he was able to draw a real breath, as opposed to panicked gasps.

The pneumatic airstream was propelling him at what felt like the speed of a car. Obviously this tunnel had been designed for humans inside contraptions of some kind. The magic carpets? But just in case there was some kind of accident, just in case air pressure became a threat, the designers had provided protection for the body. The mask! he thought suddenly, and almost laughed with the marvel of it. Mikel had felt his lungs firm up but now he realized that his eardrums must have been protected against increased air pressure too; an eardrum would rupture long before a lung collapsed. Perhaps even his bones and muscles had received a boost, which might explain why he hadn’t fractured anything yet. The effects of the mask could have been giving his whole body extra resilience.