Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

And then the energy of another person was back, the newest bond, the dying woman falling from the clouds, fire all around. But in that fire was something else. Something green appeared in her mind’s eye. Not a bottle green. Paler, more yellow in it, tessellated and glowing with its own light.

The object was oblong, a tile of some kind pulsing with incredible power, like a magnet whose arcs of energy were visible. It blazed through the dying woman, all but obliterated that image, and dominated Caitlin’s mind with other images.

Beckoning. Somehow, the object was pulling her toward it.

Caitlin suddenly felt an enormous pressure on her eardrums followed by rapidly increasing pain. The pain was not in the vision: it was real. The green object, too, seemed to have substance, presence, power .

Break the connection , she told herself.

With a physical jerk that nearly sent her sprawling from the sofa, she found herself back in the living room. She was disoriented, frightened and even more so when she realized she was looking at a woman—a woman with short black hair, the woman who had shoved her backpack in the door of Caitlin’s subway train and then had wiped the air, flooding Caitlin’s mind.

And here she was in Caitlin’s apartment, down the hall from where Jacob lay sleeping. Caitlin pushed herself up from the couch. As she came to standing, the woman wiped the air before her, propelling Caitlin backward as if she’d been punched in the gut.

And then she was gone.

Mikel’s brain was a suddenly empty vessel.

The two souls from Galderkhaan gazed into the eyes of the living man who had invaded the ruins of their city.

Rensat spoke first with some disbelief. “You are alive.”

“Yes,” Mikel said. “So far.” He added, “I think. How—how are we communicating?”

“The stones in the corridor,” she said with pleasure. “You physically activated them. They have connected us.”

Pao circled the intruder as if he were a specimen in a jar. Perhaps he was. “You have a stone of your own?”

Mikel followed where he was pointing. “That—that’s a radio,” he said. “I use it to communicate with fellow men but only on the surface.”

“Why did you enter this room?” the Galderkhaani man asked.

“Something was out there,” Mikel said. “A presence of some kind.” He shook his head. “Forgive me, but—how am I understanding you? I do not speak Galderkhaani.”

“The stones in this library have the wisdom of language,” Pao said.

“But my language did not exist when you did, when they were… made,” Mikel said.

“Then someone who spoke your tongue has ascended near this place,” Pao told him. “What the living knew, the stones now know.”

“How? By what mechanism?” Mikel asked.

Pao started to answer but a touch from Rensat stopped him.

“Your attire, the materials are—unfamiliar to us,” Rensat said. “Where are you from?”

“The north,” he answered. “Far from here, both in time and place.”

“By your reckoning, how old are we?” she asked.

“Judging from the map I saw out there, the contours of your coastline are familiar yet they had not yet been defined by the end of the Ice Age. That would make it about thirty thousand years ago.”

“An ‘ice age,’” Pao said, shaking his head. “The Technologists were right about that, at least.”

“Yes, and they should have stopped where they did,” Rensat said.

“Please explain,” Mikel implored. “There is so much I do not know. These Technologists—what were they trying to do?”

“In the beginning of their rise to power, they sought to tap heat from inside the earth, to melt the ice and protect our city,” Rensat said. “That project was accomplished and it led to the development of a larger idea. To burn their way to Candescence.”

“What you were discussing with the other man, Vol, at the ritual,” Mikel said.

Pao’s eyes showed surprise. “You saw that too?”

Mikel nodded.

“Have you seen Vol elsewhere?” Pao said, pressing him.

Mikel shook his head.

Pao and Rensat exchanged glances. A flicker of hope had risen and quickly perished.

“You’ve mentioned the Candescents several times,” Mikel said. “Who were they?”

“Who are they,” Rensat said, gently correcting him.

“I’m sorry,” Mikel said sincerely. That was clumsy. He had to be careful.

“They are unimaginably ancient beings who inhabit the cosmic plane,” Rensat explained.

“So you believe ,” Pao added. “We do not know.”

“The tiles,” she said confidently.

“That is one explanation for the power of the stones,” Pao said. “Some of us agree with the Technologists that the tiles are simply minerals that vibrate in alignment with the planetary poles, that by some unknown mechanism they store and release everything they encounter along those lines: the energy of human thought, of animal memory, of all that has ever been witnessed or conceived.”

Mikel thought of Flora’s vectors. He was with the Technologists on this one.

“Some of us do not believe in miraculous physical ‘mechanisms’ that have defied understanding,” Rensat said. “The stones could not exist without intelligent creation.”

Mikel had heard this very same argument many times in many contexts; it would not be resolved here and now.

He had the sudden urge to drop it on the conference table before the Group, let them finger through it like an unassembled jigsaw puzzle.

Pao interrupted his thought process. “You said something was out there.”

Mikel nodded. “Fire. The… the ghost of a woman who died recently, on the ice. Burned to death.”

“You saw this—this ‘ghost,’ the ascended one?” Pao asked.

“No, she said her name,” Mikel answered. “I knew of her.”

“Did she say anything else?” Rensat asked.

“Yes,” Mikel told her. “She said, ‘Release me, please.’” He studied the two. “What was holding her?”

The spirits did not answer. But he remembered something they had been discussing earlier.

“Is it your ‘blessed Enzo’?” Mikel asked. “Is Enzo in the flame?”

“It is to be hoped,” Rensat said.

Pao regarded her sternly. “Enough!”

They stood mutely, stubbornly. That line of questioning was closed but Mikel had a great many other things he wanted to ask.

“Tell me about the Source,” he said.

“The Source is everywhere in Galderkhaan,” Pao told him. “Tunnels of magma connecting pool to pool.”

The orange spots on the map , Mikel realized. “The winds I rode to get here,” he said. “Those tunnels were conduits for lava?”

“Yes,” Pao said. “The entrances to the tunnels were placed where the winds were fierce and could be channeled underground, used to drive the sails of the digging apparatus.”

“They were expanded in secret, like so much of what the Technologists did,” Rensat added. “It is why the Source was so much stronger than any of us knew. No one realized the pools were already linked.”

Pao approached Mikel. “It is one of the reasons we have remained here,” he said. “We seek the identity of the one who turned the Source on. Do you know anything of that?”

“No,” Mikel said. “And—why should that matter now?”

The two souls fell silent. Their selective cooperation was starting to frustrate him. They were like Flora, always holding secret cards.

“Pao, Rensat—I don’t know much, but I’ve learned enough to know that there are inordinately dangerous forces here. I need to understand much more in order to protect my people.”