A Vision of Fire

“Priests and Technologists,” Caitlin said.

“Yes, that’s about right.” He hesitated. “You want to talk about it?”

“I’m still unclear about what the Technologists were doing. The Priests were attempting to escape their physical bodies and ascend, but they were also trying to unite.”

“You mean join hands, like that kid’s game, Ring Around the Rosie?”

“No, more like what I said before, a séance. A ritual where the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts. A joining that was very powerful and getting stronger, that was fishing for souls here, now. That’s why I did what I did. I felt that if I could interfere with their ceremony, they would be unable to rise as a group.”

“What was the point of their joining?”

“I don’t know.”

Ben was silent.

“Go ahead,” Caitlin said. “Say it.”

“Cai, do you actually believe any of that? Especially the part about going into the past? Not physically, obviously, but out-of-body?”

“I must have,” she said. “I mean, reverse-engineer it, Ben. Maanik is okay.”

“Yes…”

“The things I just described fit with the words you translated.”

“Also true,” Ben agreed.

“So how else do you explain it?”

Ben was quiet again.

Caitlin fell silent too, sifted through scraps of memory. “Ben, did anything happen with my hair?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s acting… unruly today.”

“Yes,” he said, and she heard reluctance. “It was standing on end.”

“Moving as if in a wind or water?”

“No, standing as if it got zapped with static electricity,” Ben answered thoughtfully. “A charge built up by the storm, I figured.”

“A charge I felt through those blast-proof windows? That you didn’t feel?”

Again, Ben was silent.

“Well, one puzzle at a time,” she said. “Something changed Maanik after the assassination attempt, and something yesterday changed her back. The world is a little saner today. Maybe that’s enough for now.”

“Not for me,” Ben admitted. “I’m still stuck on the simple, non-metaphysical question of how Galderkhaan could have existed at all.”

She started at that. “You know its name?”

“Yeah, you said it last night.”

“Galderkhaan,” she repeated.

Ben continued. “And it fits the rest of the language, vaguely Mongolian. How could modern humans — they were modern, weren’t they?”

“They appeared to be,” she answered. “Shorter, maybe? A golden tinge, though that may have been the play of light and smoke.”

“Okay, but not Neanderthal or an early hominid,” Ben said. “How could they have thrived when our species was supposedly still lemurs in the trees?”

“I don’t know.” She was silent for a moment. “There is one thing I do know, though.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve got to get going. A psychiatrist walks into her office—”

“Okay, go,” Ben said.

They ended the call and Caitlin gazed at the bright world outside, petted the purring cat. She noticed she was petting with her right hand. She switched to petting with her left hand and felt a flow of something roll up through her fingers to her heart, settling her, calming her. Arfa purred louder.

“What do you have to do with this?” she asked the cat. She gazed at pigeons on the ledge. “All of you?”

But even as Caitlin felt herself calm, a part of her stood back, apart, wondering what life was going to be like now.

She sighed and set the cat aside, returned to common ground between the old self and the new — her e-mail. She noticed near the top a message from Gaelle Anglade. There was something in the subject line that never would have been there just a few days before.

A smiley face.

EPILOGUE

Mikel Jasso peered over the starboard-side railing of the Captain Fallow. The soft fringe of his hood blew against his cheek, protecting it from the sharp wind. The ship was running along the eastern stretch of the Weddell Sea, prevented by the ice pack from approaching the north coast of Antarctica. Presently they were skirting a blocky iceberg that towered hundreds of feet above their heads, gleaming the purest white except where it blushed turquoise blue at its base — but no one was admiring the pale giant. Like the other crew members and scientists crowded along the rail, Jasso was watching the mass of emperor penguins swimming north across the sea.

The number in the migration was unprecedented, as far as veterans of these seas could remember, and it was a month before the penguins’ breeding season was supposed to finish. And there was something else, several crew members noted. There was no playfulness in the movements of the penguins, no cautious reconnaissance along their flanks; they did not even bother to swim around the ship, simply propelling themselves beneath it to the other side. Mikel observed them with a careful eye, remembering the flight of the albatrosses. There was the same kind of urgency here, not the haste to get somewhere but a kind of single-minded need to get away from something.

Why now? Jasso wondered.

The question of the albatrosses and the rats had not been far from his mind when he arrived back in the Falklands and saw an unusual number of vessels heading out to sea.