Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

“How are they in jeopardy?” Pao asked, suddenly.

“I found a stone,” Mikel said. “It was drawn from the sea near here. It had the same olivine insets as these many others, and like them, it would vibrate, unpredictably. It gave me… visions. One of my associates was studying it. We think it killed him. It melted his brain.”

“Describe this stone in detail, please,” Rensat said.

“I just told you it melted a man’s brain,” Mikel said with rising irritation. “Does that even matter?”

“I am sorry he died,” Rensat said. “So many have, you know.”

Mikel did not appreciate the mild rebuke.

“The stone,” Pao said. “Tell me about it.”

Mikel did not have the patience to argue. He closed his eyes, visualized the design, and described it in detail.

Pao nodded, nodded again. “You found a stone from the motu-varkas —the tallest and most powerful tower, farthest out at sea. One point of the grand triangle.”

“That ring of tiles was the oldest and strongest in all of Galderkhaan,” Rensat said. “It contained a great concentration of energy.” Her tone grew somber. “That ring was crafted by Aargan, the chief Technologist, the one who made the whole construct come together.”

Pao added, “I have long suspected that she was the one who activated the Source, just to prove she could control it with the ring of motu-varkas .”

Rensat took a moment to consider her next words. “The Technologists used to call us, the Priests, a ‘cult of suicide,’ yet they were the ones who ravaged Galderkhaan. The Priests believed—we proved —that bodies are simply a vehicle to the ultimate goal of soul bonding to reach the higher planes.”

“You proved the existence of these other planes—how?” Mikel asked dubiously.

“In the cazh rituals we performed, stopping short of physical death, we had visions of the transpersonal plane, even the cosmic plane,” she said.

Pao approached Mikel. There was something new in his expression: impatience.

“There is another one we seek,” he said. “We have been searching for her as long as we have been down here.”

“Who is she?” Mikel asked.

In response, Pao plunged his hands at the tiles again. The tiles hummed, formed an image of a woman’s face. It was indistinct, distant, but obviously in pain or stress. Given the flames that glowed below it, it appeared to be a part of the same recording Mikel had seen earlier, of the destruction of Galderkhaan.

“You must tell me,” Pao said. “In your searches, you have encountered no one like this woman?”

Mikel looked at the face. Nothing registered. “Why is she so important?”

“Concentrate,” Pao said with obvious frustration.

Curious himself, and becoming inured to the spirits’ occasionally brusque manner, Mikel ran through the catalog of faces from his decade with the Group. He wished he had a laptop or tablet with the Group’s facial recognition software. He really wanted to help these two, who were truly lost souls.

Suddenly, he recalled that just over a week ago, when he’d been on board the ship on the Scotia Sea, right before seeing the airship burst from the iceberg. Flora had been sending notifications about the stone melting her deep freezers. She’d also mentioned a woman in a video in Haiti. Mikel had been too busy to chase will-o’-the-wisps. He remembered streaming the video at some point, with a lousy Internet connection. Though it had been a pinpoint of thought, now it was bright and clear—and important.

“That’s her,” Pao said, and turned from Mikel.

Oddly, horribly, Mikel felt like a drained glass. Had Pao been inside his mind? Or had the tiles done that? Without realizing it, during this brief interlude, Mikel had leaned against the wall. He could feel the power of the stones vibrating through his shoulder.

Mikel broke the connection by pushing off with his back. He looked at the two spirits, their expressions suddenly triumphant.

“You have seen her! She is of your time!” Pao said. He turned briefly to Rensat. “We cannot leave. We cannot give up now.”

She nodded in firm agreement.

“You must find her,” Pao said to Mikel. “You must bring her to us.”

“Why?” Mikel asked, surprised by the timidity of his own voice. “What good can that possibly do you? You can’t change the past.” Then, with a shudder that started in his knees, he added, “Can you?”

“You saw!” Rensat said with a cruel twist to her mouth, as if he had been complicit in something. “It has already been done.”

“When?”

“At the end,” Pao said. “Someone was present who did not belong.”

“You mean, this woman? From my own time?”

“So it appears,” Pao said. “A few of us managed to bond before she appeared in the sky and prevented the great final cazh .”

Mikel did not share the jubilation of the two Galderkhaani. He felt very, very sick. “You want me to bring her here to change the past,” Mikel said with awful clarity.

“To stop an annihilation!” Pao yelled.

Mikel cried out with shock as his eyesight was ripped away from him and turned toward the previous vision. He was back in the courtyard with the screaming, dying horrors rising above their burning bodies. It was like a Doré etching of hell from Dante’s Inferno come to ghastly life, with shrieks and flames mingled and rising through a canopy of black, cloudy death. He heard the souls of the dead shrieking with agony as they blindly passed other ascended souls in the sky—all of them lost, untranscended, alone, drifting aimlessly above the churning smoke.

Mikel regained his equilibrium somewhat and continued to watch the image. Then he saw the ultimate, final destruction of Galderkhaan. He saw a momentous pulse of fiery energy fueled by pool after pool of magma shooting from the direction of the sea. It rushed into the pavement below their feet and above, immolating the survivors, driving the mass of souls apart.

Above the dying city, he saw the image of the woman hovering and then the image vanished so swiftly that Mikel felt psychological whiplash that left him spinning. Pao was standing very still, his hands hanging at his side, his eyes on the bones on the floor. Mikel didn’t think he’d ever seen anyone look so sad. Rensat took a step closer to him but could only hover, could not touch him.

“The cazh was working, damn her blood!” Rensat said. “We might have taken thousands of souls to the transpersonal plane instead of leaving them stranded, strewn about in horrible isolation, unable ever to rise.”

“Why?” Mikel asked. “Why would someone from my time do that?”

“I don’t know,” Pao admitted.

“And I ask again: finding her now,” Mikel said, “what good will that do?”

It was Rensat who answered. “We seek two,” she reminded him. “This woman… and whoever activated the Source. Finding that genocidal maniac, we will use her to stop him.”

The implications were immediate and deep and they staggered Mikel. He couldn’t even respond. Pao and Rensat intended to rewrite all of history by preventing the destruction of Galderkhaan.

Desperate, impossible questions flooded Mikel’s brain. If they succeeded, if Galderkhaan were saved, would the whole course of history change? Would he suddenly cease to exist, since his own lineage would be altered through tens of thousands of years? Or did his existence prove that they had failed, since history had not been changed?

Mikel stood there shaking his head. “You will save—tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands at the cost of billions?” he asked, stumbling through his own thoughts.