Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

Magnificent technology , he thought, humbled, and it would fit in his pocket if he ever headed home. He suddenly felt overwhelmed with the realization that he was plugged into both history and legend. This airstream was Aeolus, the Greek keeper of the wind. Here it was—real, not myth. Undetected by the outside world, perhaps only just revived, and Mikel was in it.

Suddenly, he was weeping.

The tears came fast and puddled inside his goggles, steaming the insides—not that he could see anything anyway. It had finally hit him, after so many close calls. He probably would not make it home. He was underground, in the dark, in one of the most remote spots on Earth. Worse, he was the only person to know one of the secret wonders of the world and he was going to die in it .

Eventually his tears stopped and the profound sense of loneliness froze within him. He was plunging through a pneumatic system that was not designed for human bodies and he didn’t see how he was going to come to a stop except catastrophically. Whatever resilience the mask had given him, it would not help him survive a full stop at a dead end.

Mikel had always thought that if he saw his life flashing before his eyes, it would be the result of an involuntary spasm, but now he felt that he was choosing to do it, seeing his crazy Basque grandmother, then school, university, grad school, Flora and the Group, the scientists—more than one—whom Mikel had stolen artifacts from. With most of his family either deceased or self-absorbed, he didn’t think there was one person on Earth who would mourn him—except maybe Siem, but that would be more a function of feeling overwhelmed by tragedies. Even Flora. She had seemed distraught over the way Arni died and also by his absence—but mourning? No. Mikel couldn’t imagine her grieving for him.

Suddenly, Mikel realized that there might be a way through this. The quartz-and-olivine panels he’d left behind: perhaps they were set in terminals. There might be a way to pinpoint the next one, if there was one.

He listened carefully to see if there was any change in the sound of the wind. His senses on high alert, he wondered how long he’d been suffering the now-painful howling. But then he heard it: a slightly hollow sound, deeper than the shrieking in the rest of the tunnel, nearly a full octave lower.

It came and went and then a minute later it came again, passing him faster than he could make a move. But now he knew what to listen for and when the next one came, he was ready.

Damn it , he missed. But he had the rhythm. Timing it out from memory, he anticipated when he would feel the next sound beside him and jackknifed toward it.

Whipping across the airstream into an opening on the side of the tunnel, his body dropped heavily to the ground as the air support disappeared, but it was not nearly as bad as a crash.

Collecting his wits and his breath, Mikel could not believe he was still alive and in one piece. He waited for the tingling and fear to stop shaking him, then he finally got to his knees and then to his feet. The new space welcomed him like Prospero’s beach in a tempest, sheltering him from the hell of sound and wind.

Still in total darkness, he felt all around the space and realized it was quite small, with no entrance for lava to have spewed through, but it did have what he recognized as another quartz panel. Once again it popped open under his fingertips and just as he’d predicted, it was one of the “bobsleds.” Almost praying, he fumbled around the back of the contraption, trying to free it. Nothing. It was as mysteriously secure as the others.

Many attempts and long minutes later, Mikel cursed and drove his fist into the rock. Feeling claustrophobic and trapped, he began to pry the mask off his face so he could get one damned breath of fresh air. Then, as soon as the mask was in his hands, the area flashed with an extraordinarily bright light. A millisecond later the light was gone. Purple and green afterimages flooded across his eyes. Mikel reached out to feel the niche again to see if he could locate the source of the flash. He was interrupted by a sharp knock on his knee. With a crisp sound like wicker snapping, one of the contraptions had dropped out of the niche and hit his leg, then toppled onto the floor. Mikel had the sudden impression that he’d just been photographed—and approved.

He picked up the sled, praying it hadn’t cracked when it was released.

“Let’s hope you know what to do.”

With one hand on the stone wall to guide him, he stepped back into the tunnel but stopped short of the airstream. He restored the mask to his face, then carefully climbed into the surprisingly firm contraption placing his head in what he saw as a cobra-like hood. He suspected it would fill with wind when he stepped back into the airstream, to carry him along like a sail.

“God I hope I’ve got this right.”

His heart slamming hard, he shuffled to where the sound told him the winds began. Then, like a sledder on a mountainside, he turned ninety degrees and dropped flat into the wind flow.

Incredibly, the slightly concave shape of the struts caused the wind to raise the little vehicle from the floor. There was some initial wobbling, which he corrected by positioning his body in the center. As disconcerting as it was to be moving at this speed in the dark, it wasn’t half as bad as going without. The hood protected his ears, fed on the wind, and he was not uncomfortable. And because he was finally using the mechanism that must have been designed for the tunnel, he felt safe.

There was nothing for him to do except stay still, and because his last dose of REM was incomprehensibly long ago and far away, Mikel actually drifted to sleep. He dreamed of a hand stretched toward his bowed head, the fingers pointing at the nape of his neck…

He woke to a strange sensation. Still floating in the air, he was moving much more slowly. The sound of the air changed again as well, lower than before. It was as if he was being invited to stop.

“ Yes ,” he answered. “ Yes! ”

Mikel angled his body toward the wall and the nose of the sled went with him, effectively pinwheeling a quarter turn so it was facing into what he presumed was another niche. His weight, held forward, caused it to lurch in a little farther and stop.

Smiling at the simple beauty of the system, Mikel gratefully stood and moved in the direction where he imagined the wall should be, but he doubled over something thigh-high and very hard. He landed on rippled and rocky stone. Crawling forward, his hands found an arched doorway in the wall that was, like the other, sealed shut by a long-solidified lava flow. Mikel pushed against the wall to stand and feeling his way along it, discovered another set of mosaic tiles under his hands, but these weren’t glowing either. Exhausted by the thought of having to make one more intense decision, he impulsively pressed hard against the tiles.

With no warning, Mikel was suddenly looking into a pair of hazel eyes. White eyebrows sat close above them and a white beard displayed dozens of carefully made ringlets, swoops, and curls.

Mikel Jasso was looking at Pao, the hesitant, recalcitrant man from the stone and fire chamber. Only now the man was very, very different.

He was somewhat translucent, the images of the real world blurring slightly when he passed. The man was pale and gaunt and moved with strange, ethereal sweeps of his arms. He seemed to control objects around him without touching them.

This man was dead.

Questions flooded Mikel’s mind as he watched the spectral figure.

Years before, he had attended a séance at the Group’s headquarters. It was an exercise to contact any surviving spirit of the ancients. Artifacts had been positioned around the table and Arni, the synesthete, had served as a very effective medium. Though the effort had failed in terms of opening a useful pathway, everyone felt a shift in the character of the room. There was a weight, a slight pressure of energy like shallow water. It was as if someone—or several someones—had been present who wasn’t present before. Flora, ever the one for empirical proof, declared it a form of group hypnosis and that was that.