A Dream of Ice Read online

  Flora let the thought sit a moment. “Look, I think it best that you keep track of what you experience with and without supporting evidence. Both are valuable but keep them separate in your reporting. Clear?”

  “Very,” Mikel said, and he meant it. He felt as though the grunge had suddenly been cleared from his brain and a universe of possibilities had opened.

  CHAPTER 5

  As Caitlin hurried from the subway to her office, she left a message for Barbara asking for an appointment as soon as possible. So much had blown in on her in the last few hours that she felt unable to prioritize which questions and feelings she should heed first . . . which were real, which were intuited, and which might be wholly imagined.

  She was certain the exchange with Odilon was real. The rising power she felt in her hands, the look of amazement on his face, and the sudden well of emotion; those were all completely honest.

  That’s the place to start, she decided, the part you know is true.

  The question she couldn’t answer was how far to take it, how much to tell Barbara.

  Maybe the choice wouldn’t be hers. The feeling of openness and expansion had not returned since she’d seen the dark-haired woman on the subway.

  What happened?

  Had Caitlin shut the power down? Maybe there was a mental off switch in her brain that she’d stumbled onto blindly. Maybe it wasn’t off but simply sleeping.

  And then there was that woman herself. Was she just a convenient, innocent figure? Or did she open the power? Had Caitlin’s mind, overloaded, grabbed at a meaningless gesture and ascribed power to it? Was she developing paranoia? Imagining that someone was watching her was certainly a first step.

  She was unclear about everything, except for the surprising but unmistakable welter of sadness that had risen since that moment on the train when Caitlin had shut the cascade of faces down. It was a form of mourning, of suddenly losing this new and frightening but vital window on the world . . . perhaps on several worlds. She imagined her mother chastising her, but there was no way she could let this be.

  Caitlin felt suddenly, strangely defensive when she received a text from Barbara confirming an availability the next morning. What if Barbara wouldn’t understand and judged her?

  Caitlin was relieved to have scheduled patients that afternoon. More than once in her individual therapy sessions with the high school and college students, she longed to try a repeat of the conduit she had manifested with Odilon.

  But these students didn’t need a drastic assist. They were doing the long, slow slog through their psyches, identifying old patterns, accepting their entrenchment, learning and trying and failing and trying again to deprogram from the distortions, succeeding by increments. It was steady, honorable work, made possible by the relatively stable lives they were living. Odilon was different. He’d been on the edge of a cliff and unable to ask for help. These kids faced challenges but no immediate danger. To interrupt their process would have impugned their responsibility for themselves.

  After Caitlin’s last session, though, the grief washed back into her so powerfully she put her head in her hands. Thinking was a burden she no longer wished to bear. She needed to talk to someone who wouldn’t need a preamble. It was four thirty here; in Cornwall, Ben would probably still be up.

  She checked Skype first and there he was. She hesitated, wondering if he might be talking to someone. Ow, she thought. And her heart floundered when the call resulted in silence. But it was only a delay, and he blipped on-screen with the biggest smile and a warm “Hi.”

  “I only have half an hour before I have to pick up Jacob, I’m sorry,” she began.

  “I’ll take it,” he said, continuing to smile.

  “But if you want to get a late dinner tomorrow, if you’re not too blown out from the flight back—”

  “I won’t be,” Ben replied. “I want to take you out for your birthday.” She smiled, but he must have seen the hesitancy she felt because he quickly switched subjects. “Okay, half an hour, counting down. What’s happening?”

  “A lot,” she said, looking away from him. “I can’t even begin. Can you do me a favor, Ben, would you mind going over what you’ve learned about Galderkhaan from your translations?”

  Ben laughed, and she knew it was a “things never change” laugh.

  “Caitlin, it’s in the e-mails I sent—”

  “Yes, I know, I read them, but I’d like to hear them from you. It’s just—it’s how I’m thinking these days. Human to human, not soliloquy to soliloquy.”

  He grinned and said, “Firstly, that’s commendable. And secondly, can I begin with some new bits first?”

  “Wherever you like,” she said.

  “Until last night,” Ben said, “I was focusing on the three videos we have of Maanik and the one I took with my phone at the UN when you—when you saw Galderkhaan.”

  Caitlin noted his careful choice of words. Not “visited,” not “witnessed” or “experienced,” but “saw,” which could mean “imagined.” Clearly, he still didn’t completely believe her about that night.

  “So what’ve you got?” she asked, trying not to lay on the affected cheerfulness too thick.

  “Okay. First, I dove into something basic: volcanoes in Antarctica,” he replied. “Galderkhaan must have been located on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Or possibly north in the Scotia Sea. Those volcanoes are submerged now and there’s been quite a bit of earthquake activity there. That wouldn’t be unusual but they really are very distant from the continent. So the west coast is far more likely.”

  “Isn’t the west coast the part that’s melting the fastest?”

  “Yes, several studies have confirmed that all the western glaciers are going to melt and the whole ice sheet could follow.”

  “I wonder—”

  “And that’s a yes as well. A couple years ago they found an active volcano under the western ice sheet. If it blows a fissure, the whole area could come out looking like Iceland, all hot springs and thermal vents. Only more melty and less therapeutic. Geologists are pretty sure earthquakes around the volcano line are contributing to the big meltdown, although they’re not the only causes.”

  “There’s also idiocy and arrogance.”

  “Whether it’s global warming or deep and latent magmatic activity or just a big nasty climatic cycle, the west side is our place. There are no known volcanoes around the other coast. Now, Antarctica being covered with snow and ice, that means that our Galderkhaani friends had to have some impressive tricks for making their city habitable. I’ve started assuming geothermal engineering to an unprecedented degree. Actually, to an unantecedented—” he stumbled over the word a few times until they were both laughing. “To a degree unmatched to the present day. They were oasis builders, Caitlin.”

  “Huh, okay . . . could they have built more than one oasis?”

  Ben hmmed noncommittally. “That jibes with a particular word I found: ‘ida-ida.’ Caitlin, I can’t tell you how unusual this word is—half hour, you said?”

  “Yes, sorry, Ben.”

  “All right, then, to the chase. The word means ‘building,’ but not in the sense of a single structure. It’s more like building something that’s ever expanding, sort of like ‘fulfilling’—dare I say, a manifest destiny.”

  “Is it related to the Technologists or the Priests or both?”

  “Just the Technologists.”

  “Ben, is there anything about expansion in an—internal sense?”

  “I don’t follow. You mean like a soul?”

  “More like an expanded consciousness.” She stopped there, unwilling to say anything that might lead to a discussion of why she was asking. Ben was a friend, but not an uncritical one. The kind, in fact, her mother wished for her.

  Ben studied her for a moment. “A psychiatrist walks into a bar,” he said, grinning, “and sees herself sitting on a stool.”

  She smiled back. “Cute.” It was an old joke of theirs, dating ba
ck to their college days. Ben used it whenever he had to pull her from what he called her “Hamlet reflections.”

  “To answer the question—seriously—there’s no talk of their inner lives, except for the cazh, which is really about an outer afterlife. Maybe this wasn’t a very inward-minded people?”

  “I doubt that,” said Caitlin.

  “Why? We don’t know if they had art, songs, poetry—”

  “They loved,” she replied. “It wasn’t just physical love. I felt it when I eavesdropped on their lives and relationships.”

  “Quite possibly,” Ben agreed. “Then again, we did keep encountering them in crisis mode, which would explain an outward focus.”

  Caitlin fell into a sudden depression. Earlier, she had thought something might have come back with her from the past; she wondered now if it weren’t just the opposite: that something of herself had stayed behind, connected to these people, hurting with them.

  And then, just as suddenly, she came out of it, as cold poured down her spine again as it had at the apartment. She forced herself to focus on the screen. That’s where reality was, she told herself.

  “Cai,” Ben said, “I see my time is running down and I have a more important question.”

  She looked at him expectantly but when he didn’t respond to her cue, she raised her eyebrows, further encouraging him to speak.

  “When we have dinner tomorrow night,” Ben said with a direct gaze and a light tone, “how romantic should I make it?”

  Caitlin glanced away but had to look back at him. She adored his sweet face, she truly did. But he had the most inelegant way of transitioning between topics she had ever experienced.

  “I don’t know, Ben. Can we wait till we’re together to see?”

  “Human to human,” he said, nodding.

  “Yes, human to human,” said Caitlin.

  Ben only broke their gaze for a second and then he was back to his buoyancy. “All right,” he said. “I’ve got another few minutes and I’m gonna use them. Gaelle—over the past day I’ve been studying the recording of her when she was having her crisis in the marketplace. In Maanik’s episodes, she seems to be talking about the Priests and Technologists equally, as if she’s caught between them. But Gaelle—the camera didn’t capture much of her, only a few sentences, unfortunately, and she spoke exclusively of the Technologists.”

  “That fits,” Caitlin said. “I mean that Gaelle would be talking about them, since in her vision she died trying to leave Galderkhaan with them. Physically, I mean. Not spiritually.”

  “Which brings me to this,” Ben said. “When you were—back there, while we were at the UN, did you see anything in the air? In the sky, I mean.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t want to feed it to you.”

  “Okay.” She shut her eyes and carefully, tentatively drifted back to that night. It was all instantly real again and she snapped herself back.

  “Cai?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I saw clouds, the moon, volcanic ash spreading, and of course the rising souls, though I wouldn’t quite describe that as seeing them, more like sensing them.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, yeah. No birds. Also the columns of the Technologists, which were tall, very tall, and wide. They reminded me of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. That kind of stone, I mean.”

  “Hm. Well, there’s a word in Gaelle’s video that—trust me, I have doubted this and struggled to prove I’m wrong, but it’s unmistakable. ‘Aikai.’ ‘Ship of the air.’ ”

  Caitlin sat up straight.

  “What?” Ben asked.

  “Like zeppelins!” she said. The thought had occurred to her before, when she’d considered how the Galderkhaani might have mapped the region. “Ben, the Technologists’ columns were absolutely tall enough for that.”

  “For what?”

  “To be docking stations. Remember, like they tried do with the Empire State Building right after it was built?”

  “They did?”

  “Yeah. Just like the columns, it was low enough to use stairs to disembark, yet not high enough to get clocked by upper-level winds.”

  “But you didn’t actually see any airships?”

  She shook her head. “Not one. Besides, if they did have airships, why wouldn’t they have tried to escape on them?”

  “Maybe they could only fly at certain times?” Ben suggested. “Or they were being prepared, perhaps enlarged, for the coming catastrophe? Remember, the eruption seemed to come earlier than anyone expected.”

  “Maybe,” Caitlin replied. “Then again, I wouldn’t necessarily want to fly through air filled with rocks spewing from a volcano.”

  “Good point,” Ben said. “Better to die trying to outrace a pyroclastic outpouring.”

  “People’s instinct is to outrun something. That’s animal, human nature. Like with the tsunami. I heard it in Thailand over and over, ‘I thought I could run faster than the waves.’ Some of the Galderkhaani might have been running to the sea to try to escape.”

  “That does make some sense,” Ben agreed. “Anyway, before you go, here’s what set me off on this, Caitlin. Gaelle says the word ‘tawazh.’ The Norse had a god named Tiwaz. A sky god.”

  “The Norse again?” The prow of a Viking ship had been one of their first clues about the existence and potential reach of Galderkhaan.

  Ben nodded. “It doesn’t mean that someone escaped on an airship, but maybe part of the language made it out somehow.”

  “Meaning people did,” Caitlin said. “By sea.”

  Ben nodded again.

  Caitlin considered the repercussions of what he was saying. “That’s a big thought. Living descendants.”

  “It’s a possibility,” he said, correcting her.

  “Yes, but there’s something else. Remember, the earliest I saw of Galderkhaan was just an hour before it was destroyed. They could have been sending airships anywhere, any time before that. Maybe some of them never came back.”

  He grinned.

  “What?”

  He laughed devilishly. “Are you conceding that I might be onto something?” Before she could answer he continued, “Remember the Varangian Rus? The Norsemen who traveled east as far as Mongolia?”

  “A little,” she said.

  “Well, listen to this: those Norsemen also traveled south, and they became some of the most trusted guards and soldiers of the Byzantine emperor. Most of them started their careers in the navy before they moved into the palace. And on their ships, they used what was called ‘Greek fire’—a substance that burned on water as well as land. It would burn just about anything anywhere, and we still can’t figure out what it was made of.”

  “I don’t follow,” she said . . . and then she did. All the people she had seen erupt into spontaneous flame—she forced herself to push away images of melting flesh. “But, Ben, didn’t the Greeks—”

  “Invent it? Who says history’s always right?”

  She answered without thinking, “Those of us who actually witnessed it.”

  “Cai . . .”

  The certainty of her answer, the conviction, stopped Ben hard.

  “Hey, I have to pick up Jacob,” Caitlin said. “Safe trip—I’ll see you tomorrow, okay.”

  Ben managed a wary smile before she shut her laptop.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Caitlin and Jacob arrived home, she suggested they cook something that neither of them had made before. Jacob was always game for new things and right now Caitlin needed a distraction that had start-to-finish directions.

  The result was a frittata that nearly made it out of the skillet intact. They laughed as they poured the runnier parts into their mouths and for a moment, Caitlin forgot everything that wasn’t egg, cheese, ketchup, and her son. After dinner she shooed Jacob off to do his homework. He went gleefully, eager to return to Captain Nemo and find out what had happened to the troubled submariner.

  Just as he was about to shut the b
edroom door, Caitlin knocked on the table and called out to him. Jacob emerged again into the hallway to catch her question.

  “What do you think will happen to him?”

  Jacob shrugged, obviously content to let Jules Verne do the heavy lifting.

  “Isn’t he out there sinking ships with his submarine?” Caitlin asked.

  “Yes, but people hurt his family,” he signed. “He’s mad.”

  “Angry or mad?” she asked, making the loopy sign beside her head.

  Jacob scowled. “He’s pissed, Mom. Very, very pissed.” With that, he shut the door.

  The initial question hadn’t been answered, but Jacob seemed to be in Nemo’s corner. She supposed he could have worse father figures in his life than a brilliant scientist who was sick of war.

  Jacob finished reading and then asked her permission to watch a movie in his room. Caitlin considered joining him despite her work overload. Alone, she felt overwhelmed. She didn’t want to think, didn’t want to answer e-mails, didn’t want to communicate with anyone. She wanted temporary oblivion. She walked into Jacob’s room, gave him a kiss good-night, and walked straight to the bathroom to pop half of a sleeping pill, regardless of the early hour. She pulled the shades in her room. Then, lying in bed with headphones on and the sheet pulled over her head, she listened to Pachelbel—less familiar than Bach, more focus required to stay with each note—until she slipped into unconsciousness.

  As she slept, there was a drumming on the wall. It was slow and low at first, then grew louder. The cat jumped on the bed and slunk low across Caitlin’s legs, its tail dragging like a chain. Arfa mewed, stopped just beside her knee, then pawed at the air.

  A cool wind rustled the tissues in a box on the night table, blew across the cat’s low back, swept under the door and into the hallway. It moved like a low mist, rolling out, surging unevenly toward Jacob’s room.

  It entered.

  The drumming grew louder, more insistent.

  “Ma. Ma. Ma.”

  Jacob’s voice was a dreamy monotone, like exhaled breath that somehow formed the same word with each cycle.