The Sound of Seas (3 page)

“There is no one else with us,” the man said. “You will not be accosted.”

“All right,” Ben said. “You have my attention. Who are you and how do you know who I am?”

“My name is Eilifir,” the man said softly, “and I followed you from the Group mansion, saw you speaking briefly with Dr. O'Hara.”

“Followed?”

“I have a car. Actually, the driver followed you. I was busy watching.”

“But you just said—”

“That there is no one with us, and there isn't,” the man said. “We are alone. From the mansion I came here, replaced one of my people. I've been waiting to speak with Caitlin—or you.”

“I see. You mentioned the Group. How do you know those people?” Ben asked.

“We—their sponsors and my people—once lived together.”

“On Fifth Avenue?”

“No, Mr. Moss,” the man replied with a little chuckle. His unshaved cheeks parted as he smiled for the first time. “Our ancestors lived together. In Galderkhaan.”

Ben was a little rocked by that—not just the fact that someone else knew about the place, but obviously knew more than he did. Then his mind returned to what he had just been thinking about, what he knew of the postapocalyptic trek of the Galderkhaani up through Asia to points north, including Scandinavia.

“You say you ‘once' lived together,” Ben remarked. “That, plus the fact that you didn't go up to the mansion and knock on the door tells me that you are no longer very sociable.”

“Their ideas are different from mine.”

“Are you some kind of rogue scholar?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” the man replied.

“ ‘Not exactly?' That's all I get?”

“For now.”

“Uh huh,” Ben said, and moved to go around the man. “Sorry, Eilifir. I have a lot to—”

“Not yet,” the man said with a hint of menace now. He moved closer.

Ben hesitated. He had been around enough diplomats to know when polite insistence was about to shade into a threat.

“Do the doctors know what is wrong with Dr. O'Hara?” Eilifir asked.

“How do you know anything's wrong with her?”

“I have a man outside the hospital,” the man replied. “You departed. She did not. Must we do this dance, Mr. Moss?”

“Caitlin is unconscious but it isn't a coma,” Ben answered. “They don't know what it is. You probably know that, if you've been watching her.”

“No, I only suspected,” the man said. “We make it a policy not to
crowd people. The others—they do that. Empathetic souls like Dr. O'Hara pick up on it.” He turned his face toward the brownstone. “The man and woman who are upstairs, why are they here?”

“I don't know that either,” Ben said. “How do you know about
them
?”

“Someone was here, watching, until I could relieve her.”

“That's at least three people,” Ben said. “You have a curious definition of ‘alone.' ”

“As you know, words have nuance.”

“Right, but I don't have time for subtleties. So that there are no more surprises—how many helpers do you have here?”

“Too few,” Eilifir replied. “Do you know Casey Skett?”

Hell, couldn't the man answer a question directly?
“No,” Ben said to move this along. “Who is
he
? Or is it a waste of breath to ask?”

“I guess you would call him our general,” the man said. “He and I are the leaders of a handful of other field personnel who want to help you save Dr. O'Hara.”

“From?”

“Becoming lost in the past,” the man said.

“How do you know . . .
what
do you know?” Ben asked.

“That any form of
cazh
or the lesser mergings is tricky, dangerous, as I'm sure you well know.”

“Is that what happened here?” Ben asked with alarm.

“I'm honestly not sure,” Eilifir replied. “That's what we're trying to determine. If it has, then she is in great danger.”

Ben did not tell the man that it was the second time that morning he'd heard that sentiment.

Eilifir drew his hand from his pocket, handed Ben a card. “Call me when you learn anything, when you need something.”

“You seem certain that I will.”

“No one can face these forces alone,” he said, “the more so when he or she doesn't know what they are.”

“Do you?”

The man was quiet for a moment—contemplative. “Not entirely, no. But we have tools you lack, tools you may need. And before you ask what they are, I can only say this: Caitlin O'Hara has forged an energetic relationship with just two Galderkhaani tiles. That was enough to send her soul through time and wreak havoc across several acres of New York.” He moved closer to Ben until they were inches apart. There was a new, more ominous quality in his voice. “There are thousands of tiles buried beneath the South Polar ice. If Dr. O'Hara taps into them, wakens them in an effort to get home, the forces she will release would be exponentially more destructive than what we saw last night. And not in the past, Mr. Moss. She would pull that fury with her, into the present. It would travel
through
her. You can imagine, I think, what would be left of her after that.”

It was as fantastic and sobering a monologue as any Ben had ever heard—and, in the United Nations, he had translated many of those.

“Where will you be?” Ben asked.

“Right here,” Eilifir said, backing away.

Though the air was warming slightly, Ben felt cold inside. Without another word, he turned and went into the apartment.

CHAPTER 2

M
ikel Jasso was very tired and extremely frustrated.

The Basque native lay in the cot that had been assigned to him until such time as he could be evacuated from the Halley VI research station. That would take weeks, but he had been ordered to stay out of the way of the thirty-nine scientists, medics, maintenance workers, and other personnel at the base. He was to remain inside the eight modules—which were connected caterpillar-style, like a train—not venturing outside, not observing experiments or research, simply doing nothing.

Doing nothing had kept him awake since his adventure under the Antarctic ice. He desperately needed sleep. But there was something he needed more desperately. He had been among the long-frozen ruins. He had interacted with tiles of staggering power.

He had communicated with the dead.

Mikel Jasso needed answers, not imprisonment.

And I need someone above ground to talk to about it all, someone to listen to me
, he thought. There was a vast amount of knowledge out there. The technology alone could occupy him for years. Not just the olivine tiles but treated skins that were still fresh, the breathing apparatus that
seemed to employ the mechanism of sea creatures to filter air from a maelstrom; all of that was extremely sophisticated. And he couldn't get to it, having made himself a pariah by causing the crash of a truck, the denting of a module it was pulling, and endangering the life of an expedition member who had elected to rescue him from an underground cavern.

Mikel also had a broken wrist, which made it difficult to do anything.

And so he lay there, his tablet at the ready, staring at the white ceiling, replaying the last two days for anything he may have missed.

The archaeologist had to laugh, at least inside. He was in a human habitation brought south, and to this spot, with enormous effort. Administered by the British Antarctic Survey, the Halley VI modules had just been successfully towed from a fragile section of terrain on the Brunt Ice Shelf to a more stable region twelve kilometers inland from the Weddell Sea. The accommodation building and garage had come with greater difficulty: not having been erected on skis, they had to be dragged across the ice by trucks and bulldozers struggling against unfavorable winds and cold. Yet nearby, an entire civilization had flourished in this miserable, hostile environment. Even allowing for climatic change, Antarctica was still quite harsh at the dawn of the Ice Age, at the height of Galderkhaani civilization. From what he had gleaned in the caverns, lava had been used to melt and control ice via a network of tunnels. Towers of basalt and other materials had been built. The air had been conquered by ships that spanned the vast continent, and perhaps beyond. Science and religion had struggled with an ambitious, deeply conflicted cultural project, the conquest of the afterlife . . . incredibly, with some success.

The anthropologist in him was puzzled by something even deeper: How did the Galderkhaani come to be here? When? By what chain of evolution? The answers would change human understanding of the world. Those answers, those profound truths were also out there, and Mikel couldn't get to them. He couldn't convince a group of scientists
to help him investigate further. In fairness, Mikel was not being as cooperative, and thus as persuasive, as he might have been. His unauthorized descent into the ancient underground ice tunnels, and his insistence that he could not reveal much of what he had found there—not without the authorization of his employer, Flora Davies and the Group back in New York—had alienated the science team and most of the other occupants. The sole exception was Siem der Graaf. The young maintenance worker appreciated the fact that the archaeologist treated him like a colleague and not a high-priced repairman. Siem also appreciated Mikel's willingness to charge into the unknown in pursuit of knowledge. If not for the extreme climatic conditions, Mikel wouldn't be sitting here because of the Halley VI staff. But he wouldn't get more than a quarter mile without gear and assistance.

Making matters worse at the moment, he had been unable to reach Flora Davies, his superior at Group headquarters, her assistant Adrienne, or anyone else in the NYU-area mansion. The Internet was down, and phone service was poor though he still got into voice mail; for some reason, Flora wasn't calling back. He had seen on the news that the West Village in Manhattan was still reeling from unexplained fires in the area; no doubt that, and the water pumped at the inferno, had compromised the wires in old conduits beneath the mansion.

His forced isolation wasn't entirely contrary, however. Mikel used the time to create a written record of everything he could remember about his trip through the ruins of ancient Galderkhaan and his encounter with the spirits of the Priests Pao and Rensat. With one hand, he had arduously pecked out the log on his tablet.

The dead
, he had written,
are not dead—merely without bodies
.
The lowest of these appear to be “unascended souls.” Like poltergeists in modern lore, they appear to be trapped in the place where they lived or died. I encountered two of these: Galderkhaani Enzo, who had a modern soul; and scientist Jina Park, who was held here, in her thrall. I do not understand by what mechanism either of them remained in the caverns below the ice. P
erhaps by
choice? Perhaps by the means through which they died—intense fire? Or perhaps this is the Galderkhaani version of hell, a place where souls are punished for suicide or murder or other mortal crimes.

In the happier order of things, the Galderkhaani believed that at death they ascended—single souls reaching a level of celestial epiphany I still don't understand. From my studies I learned that Pao and his contemporary Vol created a ritual they called
cazh
, words and a ceremony that bonded souls, allowed them to shuck the body en masse and, together, rise to an even higher state of spiritual enlightenment—Transcendence, which I would equate with traditional angels or djinn in more familiar ancient lore. Their ultimate goal was to bring together enough souls to—
well, transcend Transcendence and achieve Candescence, a state of bliss they believed would make them somehow “one” with the cosmos.

Strangely, it did not sound lunatic as he wrote it. Mikel's livelihood was to conduct research for the Group, research that sought every fragment of knowledge they could glean about Galderkhaan. During that quest he had encountered many ancient and current faiths that, despite their subtle differences, all had an archetypical similarity: without fail, each of them believed that humans die and a spiritual part of them goes to an afterlife.

Who am I to dispute any of it
, he thought as he added material to his tablet.
Either I spent hours speaking with a pair of transcended ghosts or I was delirious.

That was possible too.

Mikel ached in every part of his body, having climbed through lava tubes and flown vast distances through a wind tunnel, which was where he broke his wrist, not to mention being thrown from a truck that was hauling a module. He had struck his head numerous times, so many times, in fact, that anything was possible.

But there is no disputing this
, he thought as he typed.
Since touching those luminous olivine stones that lined sections of the tunnel and its towers,
I have felt different. Not alert, because I'm still tired as hell . . . but more intuitive, I guess you'd call it.
He went back and erased that; it wasn't true.
He didn't know when someone was coming or what was being served for a meal. He wrote: . . .
but more aware of the lives that were lived here.

Whether they were ghosts or angels in any real sense did not matter. Mikel felt as though, through the tiles, he had touched the past . . . that the past was still out there, somewhere, not dead but alive, not gone but eternal.

He didn't write any of that. The data wasn't there to support a living past, and the answers were elusive. He hoped, while he was still down here, he could learn more. However, he did add this:

I'm still at a loss to explain exactly what precipitated the pillar of fire that erupted perhaps fifty kilometers from where I found the Galderkhaan power center, the Source—whose early activation apparently precipitated the destruction of that civilization.

That
wasn't entirely true. It
could
be explained.

Pao and Rensat had sought an American woman, Caitlin O'Hara, someone with experience in spiritual matters and Galderkhaani artifacts. They wanted her to help them save Galderkhaan from destruction by shutting down the Source in the past. Perhaps they had found Caitlin and she had done just the opposite—activated it here and now, or at least part of it, to obliterate the possibility of rewriting history. Or perhaps she made it burn hotter in the past somehow, and there was blowback in the present. Those details are the ones he lacked.

But he had no explanation to fit the geology and the narrative that had been unfolding. The deep, deep magma would have required a reason to suddenly “burp” at that location.

In any case, Pao and Rensat clearly had not succeeded. Otherwise, he would not be here. If Galderkhaan had survived, it would still be here. The concept of multiple timelines, of alternative histories, of parallel worlds was not something he was willing to consider . . . yet.

But then, a few days ago, the spirit world was not something in which you put much credence either
, he thought.

He flexed his index finger, which he had been typing with. Below him, the module was not quiet. There was the ever-present hum of
generators, the occasional hammering shriek of wind, and the creak of the structure as it endured those winds. Yet that was all background noise and Mikel started when his phone chimed.

“Finally!” he said as he saw Flora's personal number. He pressed the device to his ear and plugged a finger in the other to drown out the noise. “Hello—Flora?”

“No,” the male voice said from the other end. “It's Casey Skett.”

Mikel was instantly alert. For the last ten years Skett had worked with the Group disposing of biological “accidents” that occasionally resulted from their research. He worked for the New York City Department of Sanitation's “DAR” division—dead animal removal. That was the only reason he ever came to the mansion. Skett should not be using Flora's phone.

“Casey, what's going on over there?” Mikel asked with an unprecedented sense of foreboding.

“I want you to talk to Flora,” he said, his voice crackling through the bad connection. “And then I want you to do me a favor.”

“Put Flora on,” Mikel said. There was something about Casey's tone that did not sound like Casey, the skinny and slack-eyed figure who rarely strung more than three or four words together.

A moment later Flora was on the line.

“Hello, Mikel. I'm afraid you're going to have to do whatever Casey asks,” she said in a thick, slow voice.

“ ‘Afraid'?”

“He—he has shared information that I cannot, at present, divulge,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because he—he does not wish me to,” she replied. “But you will cooperate with him, yes?”

This too was not the Flora he knew. But Mikel knew better than to question her. Not because she was always right, but because there was no changing her mind once it was set.

“Of course,” Mikel told her. “I'll do whatever you need, Flora.”

“Thank you, Mikel.”

He was immediately aware of—and concerned by—a couple of slight catches he had noticed in her voice, brief hesitations. She was one of the most certain people he had ever known. Were those catches natural, or was she trying to signal him that all was not well?

“Before you go,” Mikel asked casually, “how is my find behaving?”

But Flora was not available to answer. Casey Skett was back on the call.

“Your find is fine,” Casey informed him. “It's under control.”

“You've evidently been promoted,” Mikel said.

“I could not resist the compensation package,” Skett said. “And you, Dr. Jasso—you are a valued reallocated asset.”

“Meaning?”

“That my promotion means you are no longer working for Flora but for me. And the favor I need is for you to go to the site where fire erupted from the ice.”

Mikel didn't ask how he knew. The Group has access to satellites monitoring every area of the Galderkhaani continent. “Do you know what caused it?”

“Something in the past, I believe,” he answered. “Or rather, something that began in the past and rippled through to the present. That process is one of the things I wish to understand.”

At least he wasn't cagey about answering. “I have a broken wrist,” Mikel said.

“You still have one hand that works? That's all you should need.”

“True, if I could get out there,” Mikel said. “But I've created problems down here—lots of them. No one is going to do me any favors.”

“Find a way to compel them,” Skett replied bluntly. “They're already trying to understand it—but from a distance, like the safe and incurious academics they are.”

“How do you—”

“I saw it in a report filed by Dr. Bundy,” Skett said. “I have resources too, Dr. Jasso. Aren't
you
curious about it as well?”

“Of course I am,” Mikel said. “But I'm grounded, and frankly, I don't like being under the whip hand of someone who was until today a custodian, in effect.”

“Who pretended to be a custodian, in effect,” Skett said. “And spare me the hauteur. You took orders from Flora easily enough.”

“She earned my respect. You haven't even begun.”

“Dr. Jasso, pride has no place in my work. You will do as I ask and that is that. However, I assure you, my reasons are not hostile even if my methods seem to have been. Inform these scientists of yours that you can show them what happened out there. Assure them they will never figure it out just using instruments, but that
you
can explain it.”