Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

“When will that be?”

“Next Friday, four-oh-one p.m.”

Flora ignored Adrienne’s unwelcome quip. “Worst case—what happens if I go in?”

“All right, here’s the truth,” Adrienne said. “Let’s ignore the question of stability. It’s ultrasound on steroids in there. What that means is, if you don’t stay inside too long and if you’re protecting your eardrums, any other effects on you should be minimal. Your body heat will probably rise.”

“How long is too long?”

“When you start feeling like you have a fever, that’s too long.”

“Seconds? Minutes?”

“Maybe two minutes,” Adrienne said. “I just don’t know. And I repeat, I do not want to find out.”

Flora had faith in the iron constitution that came with her Welsh heritage. She wanted to test that envelope. “Anything else?”

“There’s a minimal risk of cavitation, bubbles forming in your blood, tissues, or organs.”

“The practical effects of which are?”

“Your blood vessels could rupture.”

Flora gazed at the stone. “How minimal is minimal?”

Adrienne rubbed her eyebrows. “Almost nonexistent if you don’t linger once the other symptoms set in.”

“Good.” Flora swung away from the window and strode down the hall.

“Get me out of here,” Adrienne said under her breath, her eyes betraying fear as she watched the relic hovering, quiet and still and ominous.

Flora came back gloved and holding a tray with eight objects, all about the same size and shape as the artifact. Adrienne could see at a glance that none were made of the same type of stone. She guessed ancient clay, wood, and copper right off the bat. One looked like it might be alabaster, and another looked sheathed in a beige leather with an odd sheen. Flora balanced the tray carefully in one hand, thrust a pair of surgical gloves at Adrienne, and tweaked her headphones more securely over her ears. Then she opened the door to the chamber.

“Come on,” she ordered.

“Thank you, no,” Adrienne snapped.

“You’re not going to be inside,” Flora returned. “You’re going to stand in the doorway and hand me these.”

Adrienne stood still for a moment, then pulled on the gloves with an insolent look. She received the tray dubiously. “Do any of these have a history of acting up?”

“No, they’ve never misbehaved,” Flora said as she eyed the room, the boundaries of which were set by the black panels on the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Adrienne reached into the pocket of her lab coat and thumbed on a recorder. She announced the time. Flora stood still and shook out her hands. After taking a long breath, she slowly stepped into the frame of inaudible sound waves—

And felt nothing. Flora did a head-to-toe check. Heart rate: unchanged. Breathing: normal. Vision and hearing: neither deprived nor hallucinating. She grinned and approached the artifact.

“Dr. Davies, can you hear me all right?”

“I can.”

“If you start to feel that the world is going swimmy in any way, or if you suddenly feel like you’re sort of distanced from everything, like it takes extra effort for your hand to reach an object, that’s a warning sign.”

“I’m always distanced from everything. It’s called objectivity.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Yes. Hand me one of the artifacts.”

Adrienne surveyed the objects. She selected the alabaster one and leaned forward into the room to convey it to Flora’s outstretched hand. Once Flora had received it, Adrienne quickly backed out into the doorway.

Flora regarded the carvings on this stone and compared them to the triangle on the relic. She had memorized the patterns long ago, knew that there was no obvious sequence among them.

“At the risk of stating the obvious,” Adrienne said, “do not move the main stone in any way.”

“Okay. It stays on its back. So. What’s the pattern? The creators of these were not children playing with dominoes.”

“Unlike you.”

Flora did not bother responding to that. She continued where she’d left off. “I’m going to align the faces first.” And with that, Flora carefully slid the alabaster artifact into the space above the main stone, as close as possible without their touching.

“What does it feel like?” Adrienne asked.

Flora was glad her companion’s first priority was still science. “I feel a slight repulsion between the objects.” Quickly, she flipped the alabaster so that its carvings faced the ceiling instead of the main stone. A very gentle feeling of suction resulted and she let go of the alabaster. She heard Adrienne gasp. Immediately the stone settled in, floating in the air a bare millimeter above the other.

“The node’s not big enough to hold all of these up,” Adrienne said.

“Next,” Flora ordered.

Adrienne regarded the tray. Carefully, she picked up the wooden artifact. Its center had begun to petrify but its edges had the fragility of very, very old organic matter. Adrienne held up the object carefully, then leaned in to hand it to Flora.

“This is about an ounce, roughly one-third the weight of the first stone passed into the chamber,” Adrienne said into the recorder. “We should have taken accurate measurements.”

“It’s twenty-six point four grams,” Flora said.

Adrienne’s mouth clapped shut as Flora slid the wooden artifact above the alabaster one. Again, with a slight suction the object began to levitate, not touching the one below it.

Both women remained silent as, one by one, Adrienne passed the items from the tray. She didn’t speak again until there was only one artifact remaining.

“This is impossible,” Adrienne said.

“Isn’t it, though?” Flora asked with an edge of delight. Her ears were pounding slightly and she felt warm but not enough to be concerned.

“Dr. Davies, I don’t think you realize—they don’t all fit in the node. The artifacts are helping each other. You’re sure they’re not magnetic?”

“Wood? Fabric?” Flora said.

“They could still be affected by any magnetic fields in the stones.”

“No.” Flora slid the last artifact onto the top of the stack. “They are not magnetic. The other objects are not being impacted by paramagnetism or diamagnetism. We did those tests.” Then she just stood there and looked at them.

“I just want to remind you that you’ve been in there for well over two minutes. How do you feel?” Adrienne asked.

“Wonderful, actually,” Flora replied. “It’s… clean here. Pure. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

Adrienne’s eyes shifted from the objects to the Group’s director. It was the first time she’d seen her smile like this. “Dr. Davies, why are you obsessed with these?”

“A scholar’s interest in the inexplicable.”

“No,” Adrienne said. “A scholar would be publishing articles about these in journals, and asking every scientist and researcher she could contact for help with studying them.”

Flora ignored her.

“You’re keeping secrets,” Adrienne said.

Again, she made no reply.

“Who or what are you protecting?” Adrienne asked. “What did you cover up a death for?”

Flora turned ever so slightly and glanced back. “What death?”

“My predecessor,” Adrienne said. “I asked around, I heard about Arni Haugan.”

Flora smiled mirthlessly. “You appear to be a better detective than you are a scientist.”

“Not fair and not true,” Adrienne said.

Flora turned her back on the younger woman.

“Any idea what really happened to Haugan?” Adrienne asked.

“The artifact,” Flora said grudgingly. “But we don’t know how. We have no idea what he was doing with it at the time.”