A Vision of Fire: A Novel

by Gillian Anderson

  “I don’t know that I was ever there,” she admitted. “I just don’t know what else to think.”

  Ben shook his head. “Show me a Mongolian connection and I’ll try harder to buy into it. The language definitely shows traces of Mongolian ancestry. But even so, Antarctic Vikings sailing north to Central Asia? That’s a reach, Cai. About eight thousand miles of a reach.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Yeah. Fine, I’ve got nothing else.”

  “It was a good try, though.”

  “Sure, sure. A unified theory that explains everything . . . and nothing.”

  “Let’s put it away for tonight,” Ben suggested.

  Caitlin gathered up the drawings and put the file folder away, trying to stop her mind from chewing on the problem. When she turned back to Ben, his focus had changed. He was sitting there looking at her, not at her analytical avatar, and he was sitting very still. She reached out with her right hand and picked up his left hand. Instantly she felt a waterfall surge through her body, vaguely channeled through her right hand. It brought a feeling of such immense relief, she laughed. Ben smiled and inhaled deeply, as if he had just downed a liter of water and was catching his breath.

  “Jacob said he wasn’t big enough to help hold it,” Caitlin said.

  “Huh?”

  “The ocean.”

  “What made you think of that?”

  “Nothing,” she lied.

  Ben was silent, choosing his words carefully. Then he said, “I have a lot of empty space. To hold things.”

  Caitlin stared at him, seeing all the countless moments he had been alone in his life. “You’ve got room for my slosh-over, you mean?”

  He didn’t have to answer.

  She shook her head. “That worries me. Relying on someone, emotionally.”

  “Why? People help each other, Cai. It’s what we do.”

  “Well, people do a lot of other things too, and some of them are pretty rotten.”

  Ben chuckled. “And you think I’ve got a problem with commitment.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Not with words,” he said, smiling.

  “Maybe we have complementary problems,” Caitlin said slowly as she stepped to him, gently pushing his shoulders back and draping a leg over his lap to straddle him. Her back was to the table edge, her body molded into his.

  “Even a crazy fit is a fit,” Ben whispered.

  She held her lips to his and they breathed together, deeply, as he laid his hands on her lower back and pulled her in tight. Ben was right: it was a crazy fit. But at the moment, it was a fit.

  CHAPTER 24

  The nocturnal world outside the Global Explorers’ Club mansion was uncommonly still.

  Earlier that day, pigeons had avoided the area just north of Washington Square Park. Dogs had not seemed eager to walk on lower Fifth Avenue; they hit the broad street and stopped, refusing to go farther. Cats that normally sat in the windows of buildings across the street avoided their perches altogether.

  Arni Haugan had not noticed any of that. He had been working in the basement of his chaotic chemistry lab for fourteen hours straight, since just before dawn, when Mikel had arrived with the artifact. The Group’s leading field agent had been delayed in Montevideo due to something about an albatross rookery and problems with the electronics of the private jet.

  “You’re getting as sensitive as people,” the Caltech wunderkind muttered at his tablet as he waited for the results of a capillary electrophoresis test. Arni loved his tools; he just didn’t always appreciate their temperament.

  Like now. The computer insisted there was a problem with the current being carried by the borate ions, and the homogeneous electric field was unstable. Which meant there was a problem with the electrophoresis setup, the software, or both.

  He grunted. It was time to stop. He would start fresh in the morning.

  Arni shut the tablet and pushed back from the table with his usual cocktail of relief and frustration. Work was never done but it felt good to lay it aside for a while. He needed to plug back into the real world. The air in the Group’s basement was rigorously filtered and purified as part of Flora Davies’s war on dust—the “silent, corrosive killer of relics,” as she described it—leaving the atmosphere with an almost electric perfume.

  Arni was a synesthete, having always experienced one sense accompanied by another, especially colors with odors and sounds. The kids in elementary school used to call him “Nutso” because he used his Crayolas to illustrate what he smelled, heard, and tasted. This produced rhapsodic little works of art that no one understood but everyone responded to. His mother had always said that he should become an artist. She was one of the few parents, he suspected, who had ever regretted that her son elected, instead, to become a PhD.

  Flora had found his synesthesia fascinating and potentially useful. He was convinced that this, not his strong but less-than-brilliant postgrad record, had scored him this job.

  That, plus the fact that she needed someone willing to work in the opposite of an ivory tower, he thought. A scientific wine cellar.

  The smell down here registered in his peripheral vision as straight, metallic, bright yellow lines. They didn’t impede his work and didn’t bother him until he’d put in over eight hours. Then they became constricting, like neon prison bars.

  Arni had turned on a jazz playlist from his iPod to add a thin purple nebula to the yellow lines haunting his vision. Now he unplugged it, sending the basement into sepulchral silence. There had once been a pendulum clock rescued from a decommissioned train terminal, but when that died, Flora replaced it with a silent red display on the wall, like the countdown clock at Cape Canaveral.

  Arni stretched, reviewing what his day’s work had produced: little more than confirmation of what they already knew. He had shaved a slice of rock from one unmarked corner of the card-sized stone and hunkered over it with the light microscope to affirm that, yes, as the weight and location had suggested, it was a pallasite meteorite with a nickel-iron matrix and olivine crystals, and a bit of chromite as well. He had dug out a minuscule sample of the substance inside the carvings and run chemical tests, affirming that no, they still had no idea what kind of tool had made them. There was no trace of non-indigenous stone or metal, no hint of thread from a cloth or fur from a pelt that may have been used to smooth it. Arni admitted to himself that a dull familiarity had set in when he compared this object with the others in the Group’s collection. Whether in stone or metal or clay or eroded alabaster or even rotted wood, the carvings were all alike in terms of relative size and depth. The only thing that altered between them was the arrangement of carvings.

  Still wearing his latex gloves, he stowed the object in a large safe with the other eight objects.

  “Cras dies novus est,” he said, quoting one of Flora’s favorite Latin expressions. “Tomorrow is a new day.” It always put an unapologetic, unbeaten cap on the day.

  Arni flicked off the light. Just one stop in the locker room and he would be out of this sharp air and onto a nice, pungent uptown bus.

  He e-mailed his friend Bewan to tell him he was on the way. Hanging up his lab coat, he pulled a new white button-down shirt from his locker. He was tired, but tired was the best way to enjoy Uranium, a throwback to the 1980s with disco music and black lights to make its cocktails glow. The sounds and tastes would become colors, unimpeded, and he’d finally relax.

  Arni started to close his locker door and then stopped, going still.

  The electronics. In the plane. In the lab.

  A bloody meteorite!

  Of all the tests they’d tried on the carved objects, they’d never checked to see if the objects were radioactive. There was no reason to. Everyone knew that pallasite meteorites weren’t radioactive—not enough to speak of. But “everyone knew” were words of death in scientific research. It wouldn’t take more than a minute to grab a Geiger counter and wave the wand over the object.

  Arni opted not to
change clothes again. He returned to the lab, flicked on the lights, and found one of the Group’s Geiger counters. He retrieved the meteorite and placed it on the worktable, then waved the Geiger wand in front of it. The count of ionizing events—evidence of radioactivity—was almost nonexistent. The Geiger produced a couple dull clicks at a limping, almost dead pace, generating one or two light brown spots in the corners of Arni’s vision. Nothing to get excited about.

  Arni heard a ring. Damn. His phone back in the locker room. No matter. It was probably Bewan saying he would meet him at the club, was already in line. Arni had to hurry. He gave the wand one last sweep. Suddenly, brown drops began pattering in Arni’s vision like rain. He heard dull clicks at a rapid pace. The Geiger counter’s needle was beginning to twitch toward the right of the gauge—even though that was impossible. An object couldn’t suddenly develop radioactivity.

  Then his synesthesia created a thin gray fog with black edges in his peripheral vision.

  “Okay—that’s just crazy,” he said.

  The gray fog was his unvarying response to recorded spoken voices, not the clicks that emanated from the Geiger counter.

  “No,” he said out loud. These aren’t clicks coming from the machine.

  They were dull, soft voices . . . coming from the stone? He moved closer, bent lower. There was no doubt about it. They were like voices on the wind—the chanting of angels came to mind. Arni practiced no religion nor believed in supernatural beings, but there the voices were.

  He drew a sharp breath as the carvings began to pulse, not with his synesthetic lights but with an internal luminescence, ivory-white. The symbols were lighting up in a nonlinear order, each carving showing a soft visual pulse with every corresponding sound. The tones themselves were fractionally louder now. They reminded Arni of language tapes, native pronunciation slowed for the novice, but he immediately squashed that thought. The human propensity for personification meant that any unidentified sound resembling vocalization would automatically be interpreted as words and language. That was wishful, not scientific. He felt in his pocket for his phone. He had to record this—

  His phone was in his locker. He reached over and rebooted his tablet. There was an audio recorder built in.

  While it turned back on, Arni picked up the meteorite and turned it over, trying to see if there was a point of origin for the hum. He discovered that the stone was vibrating, but not in a way that could be producing the tone. The buzz was more like a mild electric current than a cell phone. It was not unpleasant to the touch; it was soothing, in fact. It made him want to hold it. The current seemed to magnify inside his body, as though triggering his own energy centers—the top of his skull, his forehead, his throat, his heart—

  His thoughts suddenly felt muddy and something began throbbing behind his eyes, forcing itself forward. Something moving, something wholly other. Rust-red and swirling in a cyclonic cone, as if seen from the top, it was becoming thinner as he descended. Now, a landscape. A manufactured landscape of domes and spires incorporated among what seemed to be natural elements, long curves and slopes. The natural parts were enormous, making the artificial components seem like part of a train set or Christmas nativity—small. Very small. And nearly everything was white, as if the entire image was backlit or bottom-lit, somehow, as if light rays were extending up to create the image, yet no rays were visible.

  Is this you or me? he asked the artifact.

  Again Arni heard the voices. His orientation with the image changed. It tilted suddenly, in an uncanny lockstep with the sounds, so that Arni was looking up: specifically at a stone pillar about three stories high. It was tipped with something glinting green that made him think of the olivine crystals inside the meteorite. He looked around and saw that similar stone pillars circled the city . . .

  And then the sky seemed to burst red again across its huge expanse. The landscape shifted, revealing a street, a route, at the end of which was white and blue in a riot of motion. This was not him, not his synesthetic response. The colors, the images, the sounds—they were all coming from the rock.

  What are you? Arni demanded.

  But he never got the answer, never saw what was at the end of the route. Suddenly his right brain and left brain ceased functioning together. His right brain continued to view the image. His left brain died, and he could no longer think to himself about what he was seeing. The right side of his body crumpled so quickly that he fell to the floor. Colors from all over the spectrum flooded his vision but he could not summon the ability to scream. Then just as suddenly, all the colors stopped, every sensation stopped, and he no longer felt his body touching the floor, no longer felt his body at all.

  Arni experienced an overpowering urge to sleep. His eyes were shut but he still saw—for another moment. Then his medulla melted, and his corpus callosum, his thalamus, and his pons, and he stopped breathing even as his heart rate exploded.

  Moments later he was dead, a trickle of blood and liquid brain dripping from his nose onto the collar of his new white shirt.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 25

  Ben heard the soft buzz of his phone, reached for it, and grabbed air.

  That potted plant wasn’t his night table and the smell in his nose wasn’t—

  This wasn’t his bed. In the dark, he saw the contour of a woman’s bare shoulders and strands of hair.

  He remembered . . . Caitlin . . . last night . . . as his phone buzzed again. Where the hell did I leave it . . . ?

  He sat up carefully to avoid waking her and looked around, then down. The back pocket of his trousers on the floor was pulsing blue-white. He leaned over for it, snuck his phone from the pocket with two fingers, and sat in the bed so as to shield Caitlin from the glow as he read two texts. The first was sent at 3:02 a.m.: Hangout asap.

  The second came a minute later: Under fire now.

  The sender was Ignacio de Viana, a friend of Ben’s from Uruguay—

  a civilian who, for the last year, had been one of the hundred UN personnel in Jammu, India. “Hangout” did not mean “let’s hang out” and “under fire” was literal, no joke.

  Ben texted back: 60 secs.

  He pulled on his trousers and eased out of Caitlin’s room. Her apartment was chilly and dim, with the kind of hopeless illumination from streetlights through sheer curtains that made it seem like the night itself was drained, tired. Ben stumbled through the unfamiliar terrain, located his bag, and placed his tablet on the now-familiar dining table. Luckily he had only put the computer to sleep instead of shutting it down, so it was a quick jump to Google Hangouts. While signaling Ignacio for a video chat, Ben used the brief delay to turn on a program that would record the face-to-face call. He quickly pulled his earphones from his bag as well, to prevent sounds from traveling down the hall. Shivering, he threw a nearby afghan over his bare shoulders.

  As the call connected, Ben jacked in. Machine-gun fire exploded in his ears and he jerked backward, his stomach in his throat. It took him a moment to realize that it was from the earphones, not the room.

  Ignacio appeared on-screen but the camera angle was skewed, only showing part of his face and someone’s living room. Gray smoke was spreading across afternoon sunlight. Ignacio was shouting in Urdu over his shoulder, “Get away from the window!” Someone shouted something back that Ben didn’t quite catch. He would play it back later, enhance the sound.

  When Ignacio finally brought the camera to his face, Ben saw that one lens of his glasses was gone and the other fractured. The young man’s typically well-groomed hair was wild and matted on one side with blood. There was a red sheen on his scalp that indicated the wound was fresh and still flowing.

  “Jesus Christ,” Ben exclaimed. “Where—”

  “Raghunath Bazaar,” Ignacio yelled over the pounding of intermittent gunfire. “I don’t know who showed up first, Indian soldiers or Pakistani, but they’re all freaking insane, Ben. They’re shooting civilians at random.”

  Th
ere was a loud pop outside the room and Ignacio dropped from the bottom of the screen. Ben heard shouts from the left and right sides, different voices, angry voices. There were more pops, then silence. Were they hit? Or had they just taken cover?

  Ben watched anxiously as pictures fell from the wall across the room. Then the shock of a grenade blew into his ears. He recoiled and his hands flew up to yank the headphones from his ears. After a second, catching his breath, he replaced them.

  “Ignacio, are you safe?” he shouted.

  After a troubling delay, Ignacio called, “Yes.” He repositioned himself on the screen. “I’m across the street from the fighting, up the stairs. It’s all across the street. Ben, you have to tell the assembly this is happening! It’s like we’re in bloody Afghanistan. No rule of law here. None.”

  “Where are the rest of the peacekeepers?”

  “The main body is about ten miles away. Ten of us were making a routine tour when a bomb went off.”

  “Hold on,” Ben said.

  “I’m not going anywhere, trust me.”

  Ben texted Ambassador Pawar. Within a minute he had added the diplomat to the video chat. Ignacio’s camera angled steeply as he stood up, keeping it in his hand. There was a glimpse of the silks of a sari, a woman pulling at his arm.

  “Ignacio, I’ve got Ambassador Ganak Pawar, can you see him?”

  “Yes.” Ignacio coughed. “I’m told we have to go, the smoke in the room is getting thicker.”

  “Mr. de Viana, can you get to a safe place?” said the ambassador.

  “The woman who lives here says they are going out the back, to the main road, where people are forming caravans.”

  Ignacio’s camera swerved again and Ben heard a woman shout in Urdu, “The floor, the floor!” The camera dipped; Ignacio must have kneeled for cover again. A window came into view, showing the pockmarked onion domes of temples and shattered rooftops. Then the lens dropped to the retail shacks in front of the temples and the wide street. They looked as though they’d been toppled by an earthquake—splintered, crushed by stone from an adjacent structure. Ben counted five bodies, wide, dark stains of their blood on the street, and others who were still crouched, wounded and screaming, in the doorway of a cinema. Six soldiers ran through the area, guns at their hips, ready to fire in an instant. One of them jerked to a stop, spun around, and shot his gun at second-floor windows above a shop.