A Vision of Fire

by Gillian Anderson

  Their call ended and she lay back. Her eyes closed, her mind closed, and she was asleep again.

  Three hours later, when Caitlin was fully awake and caffeinated, the tabby Arfa draped across her lap, she opened her computer and her e-mail. At the top of the list was one from Ben, subject line: 2.5M hits in 4 hrs. Caitlin clicked on the attached video—and she was watching brightly painted trucks full of men and lumber driving into something like a shopping center in India, but a wrecked, distressed shopping center. It looked as if it had been through a hurricane. The men piled out of the trucks and hurried to greet the few people who were edging cautiously toward them from nearby houses. Then the video jumped to show construction—men repairing domed roofs—and people setting up long tables with lunch.

  Caitlin called Ben and he picked up immediately.

  “What am I watching?” she said, smiling as she saw little kids helping to drag planks toward a blasted shop front.

  “The solution to all our problems,” he said. “This video was posted at around noon Jammu time and it went viral faster than any video in history. This shopping center saw a showdown between armed forces with guns, bombs, you name it. That’s what I was watching the night after we—after I stayed over. Apparently, truckloads of Pakistanis and Indians just converged on the city and now they’re rebuilding everything, the temple, the stores, the cinema. When the video went viral there was an international outcry calling for reconciliation. Both delegations showed up this morning to make a deal. It was—actually, it was very strange, like they’d all woken from a fever or something.”

  “That’s amazing,” Caitlin said. “It’s too . . .”

  “Impossible?” Ben asked. “Nevertheless, that was all it took. Supposed enemies treating each other as people, with dignity. Cooperation. Kindness.”

  “And the governments listened,” she mused.

  “Listened? This was just the face-saving grassroots stuff they were praying for.”

  “What does that mean for Kashmir?”

  “We’re not sure,” Ben said. “Both governments agreed to pull their troops from the region. It’ll take some effort before they actually do it, but the ambassador and his counterpart are hard at work on that now. He has a second wind, I’ll tell you that.” Ben chuckled. “Actually, I guess I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “How is Maanik?”

  “The ambassador said she’s herself again.”

  “Specifics?”

  “She has her energy back, her joy, her enthusiasm, and she’s been on the phone with her friends nonstop.”

  “Does she remember anything?”

  “Honestly, Cai, nobody wants to ask her. She was told she had a very bad lung infection and she didn’t question it.”

  “What about the dog?”

  “He’s fine too,” Ben said. “That was the third thing I asked: how’s the world, how’s Maanik, how’s Jack London.”

  “He’s a part of this somehow,” Caitlin said. “Like the snake in Haiti, possibly even those rats that massed downtown.”

  “Odd grouping, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would.”

  “Any idea how they’re connected?”

  “None,” she admitted. But the claw tips of the crescent symbol flashed through her brain.

  “Speaking of which, you and the snake showed up in a YouTube video,” Ben said.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. I’ll send you the link. Don’t worry. Only a couple hundred hits. You haven’t gone viral.”

  “Am I identified?” she asked.

  “Not by name,” he replied. “Now I have one more question before I head back into the conference room. How are you?”

  She chuckled mirthlessly. “Honestly? I have no idea. My brain is present and accounted for but . . . there’s been a shift of some kind.” She extended a hand toward the little sliver of Hudson River she could see outside the window. “There’s something . . . different. I can’t explain it.”

  “You self-hypnotized into quite a state,” Ben said. “I’m not surprised you’re a little disoriented.”

  “Disoriented but connected.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know that either.” She let her hand drop. “To something.”

  There was more to say, a lot more, but Caitlin let it go. Everything she’d experienced would require a great deal more reflection and investigation.

  “Can I assume that whatever it was, whatever they were, they’re gone now?” Ben asked.

  “I’m not sure. I’m not sure they were ever here.”

  “If by ‘here’ you mean ‘on earth,’ the linguistic evidence certainly supports their existence,” Ben said. “You and Maanik didn’t make that up.”

  “No,” Caitlin agreed. “But a civilization that may have existed before we began recording history . . . a civilization that still seems to have active moving parts, probably did make it up.”

  “And—group hug—a civilization you and I seem to have discovered,” he added proudly.

  “That too. It’s a very big idea to process.”

  “One which I’m thrilled to investigate,” he said. “I was looking at the data from yesterday. There are a lot of new words and two of them kept repeating, something about ‘those of spirit’ and ‘those of mechanism.’ ”

  “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.

  “A lot of fish heading north,” a seaman had explained to Mikel.

  So now it’s fish, Mikel had thought as he tracked down the Captain Fallow and financially induced her captain to welcome him aboard. Mikel’s forged geology credentials would not bear intense scrutiny, but they held up under the general disinterest of a captain all too happy to receive a surprise “bonus” this year.

  The ship had sailed east past the ancient submerged volcanoes of the Scotia Sea, curving south when the ice pack allowed, and the trip had been singularly uneventful with few stops. Mikel spent a great deal of time with the geologist he’d robbed weeks ago while the man slept. Together they watched the fathometer, the GPS, the seismometer, and other equipment. He’d had plenty of time to wonder why the stone he’d acquired had killed Arni now when other stones had been in the Group’s possession for over two years. And then, an hour before the penguins began their strange exodus, Mikel had checked his e-mail on one of the ship’s computers. Flora had sent two messages, the first a query about a woman in some handheld video from Haiti.

  Who is this? Flora asked.

  But Mikel had neither the bandwidth nor the patience to inspect the video. He told her he would have to watch it some other time.

  Flora’s second e-mail was much more interesting—and immediate.

  The stones melted the ice in the freezer, she wrote. I transferred them to another freezer; same thing.

  That, too, was new and presently inexplicable.

  What is happening? And why now?

  As the penguins continued their departure, Mikel noticed a change in the wind. But it wasn’t the wind that had shifted. He pushed from the railing and shouldered his way to the bridge. As he entered the warm, cramped room he asked, “Where are we going?”

  “We’re following the penguins,” the captain snapped in his thick Maine accent.

  “Why?”

  “Because we just picked up transmissions from research stations McMurdo and Dumont d’Urville,” he replied. “It sounds like every damned penguin in Antarctica is checking out. No one knows why. I’m putting some space between us and the continent.”

  “What do the brain trusts think?”

  “The same thing us nonbrains think—that something’s scaring them. My guess? Could be some kind of massive ice calving. No one knows.”

  Mikel was about to ask if the satellites showed any preliminary breakage when a massive crack echoed across the ship.

  He grabbed a pair of binoculars from a locker and raced back to the railing. Another crack turned his knees to water but he steadied himself and fixed the binoculars on the iceberg. He felt bodies press around him as the sightseers switched their attention from the penguins to the block of ice—which was splitting in half. But as the awed cries of the veteran sailors suggested, it was like no phenomenon any of them had ever witnessed.

  Seawater surged around an ice tower newly separated from its mother berg, swirling like an inverted whirlpool and in slow motion. Mikel swore and shoved his face harder against the binoculars, struggling to accept what he was seeing. It was there for only a moment before that side of the new iceberg turned away from the ship.

  The sheared face of the massive chunk of ice had not been purely white or blue. It had held something no living person had seen in Antarctica, an object that would make sense only to someone who had seen it before—and Mikel had.

  “What the hell?” he heard someone murmur. “Was something out there?”

  “I don’t know,” said another as the vessel chugged away.

  A third person tried bravely to take a video but Mikel artfully inserted himself between the passenger and the object, pretending to slip on the icy deck. By the time the phone was turned back to the calving iceberg, there was nothing to shoot.

  Mikel didn’t listen to any of the speculations. He had seen the vast brown ovoid marked with black crescents, and below its lowest curve, a smaller, rectangular projection. He had already formed his own hypothesis, rejected it as impossible, then embraced it again—for Mikel had seen this image on a shard of barnacle-crusted pottery.

  It was an airship from the lost world of Galderkhaan.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The authors wish to express their gratitude to agent Doug Grad; to Steve Burkow, Sally Wilcox, and Aaron Anderson; to editor Brit Hvide and the team at Simon & Schuster; and most especially to Clare Kent, who managed the flow of pretty much everything.

  Want to read the next story in The EarthEnd Saga? Pre-order A Dream of Ice today!

  A Dream of Ice

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  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Gillian Anderson is an award-winning film, television, and theatre actress whose credits include the roles of Special Agent Dana Scully in the long-running and critically acclaimed drama series, The X-Files, ill-fated socialite Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, and Lady Dedlock in the BBC production of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House.
She is currently playing the role of Dr. Bedelia Du Maurier in Hannibal and is a costar on the television thriller, Crisis. She currently lives in the UK with her daughter and two sons.

  Jeff Rovin is the author of more than 100 books, fiction and nonfiction, both under his own name, under various pseudonyms, or as a ghostwriter, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. He has written over a dozen Op-Center novels for the late Tom Clancy. Rovin has also written for television and has had numerous celebrity interviews published in magazines under his byline. He is a member of the Author’s Guild, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the Horror Writers of America, among others.

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  authors.simonandschuster.com/Gillian-Anderson

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Jeff-Rovin

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Gillian Anderson and Jeff Rovin

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