“Monitoring Cillian’s behavior,” she went on, “is now Doyle’s full time job. Doyle has the old man’s power of attorney and basically controls the family fortune, but his instructions are to let Cillian behave as if the money is his own. That is, as long as Cillian behaves.”
“Is investing in the stock market considered ‘behaving’?” Ariel asked.
“Barely,” Nell laughed. “As long as it keeps Cillian from turning to worse things. Racing horses is considered behaving, too, as long as Cillian doesn’t do too much of it.”
“So Doyle is his babysitter,” Ariel said.
“That’s right. And Cillian McGrane is his dad’s biggest disappointment. He was created to grow the McGrane empire even larger, and instead all he has ever wanted to do was to enjoy the empire he’s got.”
“I think Cillian McGrane’s got more sense than I thought,” Ariel said. She picked up the check that the waiter had just dropped off and her eyes widened.
“What was that wine?”
“A 2010 Château La Nerthe Chateauneuf-du-Pape,” Nell said. “Worth every penny, too, don’t you think?”
Ariel considered how much she’d learned over lunch, and she had to agree.
The work portion of the trip would all be at the end, so Ariel tried to enjoy the beginning of her little vacation. She packed a few good books and her warmest clothes, and delighted in a window seat as she watched the late afternoon sun set on her way into Iceland. She found a favorite song on her mp3 player and listened to the pretty shimmer of Ellie Goulding’s voice singing “Lights” as the giant Vatnajökull glacier gleamed beneath her when the plane dipped below the clouds. Ariel thought that perhaps she had never seen anything so beautiful as the various shades of blues that glistened off of the ice in the light of a sun moving low in the winter sky while the song played softly in her mind.
She joined her group at the Reykjavik airport for the evening flight on to Nuuk. The small band of mostly Icelandic travelers was quiet, but friendly, and she felt thankful to live in both a time and place where a woman could easily travel alone. Nuuk was just a quick stopover, and the next morning they boarded the pint-sized plane for Ilulissat, the main tourist destination in Greenland.
Ariel stepped off the plane to her first view of the barren rocks mottled with bright colored lichens that make up the tundra. She had never set foot inside of the Arctic Circle before. Tiny flickers and flashes erupted as her boot touched the ground.
My premonitions are stronger here, she noticed with surprise. The cold dry air? The earth’s magnetic field? There had to be a reason. She added it to her list of things to try to figure out later.
While they were waiting for the luggage to be brought into the waiting area of the airport, Ariel wandered off, looking for a bathroom. She turned into an office and noticed a man’s legs sticking out from under a desk.
“Are you okay?” She felt like she should say something.
She heard him chuckle. “No, I’m in serious need of somebody to grab the other end of this wire. One man doing a two man job.” Ariel saw that he was trying to get some sort of computer cable to go up through a small hole in the desk.
“Let me help.” She came over, pulled the cord through and by acquired instinct plugged it into the monitor where it was clearly intended to go.
“Thanks,” he said with appreciation, as he wriggled out from under the desk. Then he noticed that she’d connected the cable. “A helpful tourist and one that knows how to connect hardware.”
“I can manage considerably more than plugging in a monitor,” she laughed. “IT training here, though I don’t use it enough these days. I’m Ariel. Passing through trying to hunt down the ladies room.”
“You came all the way to the arctic to find a place to pee?” he teased.
She rolled her eyes and when he held out his hand she took it without thinking.
“Siarnaq,” he said and Ariel saw a small spark in the air before their hands touched.
Then for a few seconds, neither of them could have said a word if they had wanted to.
For Siarnaq, the images he saw were so much larger than those he was used to—close-up and huge, like looking at something right in front of your face with a pair of binoculars. Amidst the blur of something too big to take in, he knew that he was finally seeing the future from his own lifetime. The prospect filled him with joy, but the images were just so close that he had no way to make any sense of them, The accompanying knowledge in his brain seemed to be coming at him like hundreds of birds chirping. We must not be designed to see what comes in our own lifetime, he reasoned.
To Ariel, the flickers of the distant future went wild in the corners of her brain, like far off flashing lights too remote for her to see the images that they were illuminating. This man matters in a future too far off for me to see, she thought. I wish I could enlarge these images somehow. We must not be able to see past the next several months. I guess that makes sense.
He let go of her hand slowly.
“You’re a seer.” He said it like he knew it for a fact. He studied her red hair, fair skin and blue eyes. She wasn’t of the People, or at least if she had Inuit ancestors they were few indeed. Had he ever met a seer who wasn’t mostly Inuit? He didn’t think so.
“You get visions of the future?” Ariel’s heart was starting to beat louder. She had never expected to be asking this question, much less to be in this situation for a second time in her life.
The Inuit man laughed. “The world is full of seers,” he said.
I had no idea that would be so good to know, she thought.
Siarnaq added gently. “You have a lot to learn. You’re with the tour group?” he asked. She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. “Today, they give you time to shop and sightsee. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.”
Siarnaq was younger than she had first guessed, only in his mid- to late-twenties, a young man wearing older men’s clothes. A look around showed him to be taller than most Inuit, and he spoke English fairly well. Seated across from him at a booth in a little coffee shop, Ariel was waking up to the fact that he was cute, in spite of a bad haircut, and pants and a shirt that would have looked out of style in a thrift store twenty years ago.
They had established in soft voices that each of them saw movies in their own heads, like memories but of the future. Siarnaq came from a culture seeped in magic, and viewed his gift with no particular awe. He told her how he was sometimes bothered that other seers all used methods of divination, and foretold events that would happen soon. His knowledge came without beckoning, and was always of events too far ahead to be of much use. He added that he had studied and traveled some, enough to understood why Ariel’s gifts would make her so much more uncomfortable in her society.
“So it is hard for you too, knowing how it’s all going to end? Is that why you came to Greenland? To see where mankind makes its final stand?”
Ariel shook her head in confusion. “What are you talking about? I don’t know how anything is going to end, Siarnaq. Do you? I almost never see anything past the next several months. Once in a while, a little further.”
She thought back to the odd premonitions when she had been asked to transfer to Ireland. “There was one kind of exception—it was about my own future but it actually did give me a hint of something awful for the whole human race. I’ve been trying to learn about it ever since. But it didn’t necessarily mean the end to everything, at least I don’t think it did.”
“We’re not so alike after all.” He was the one who understood it first. “I only see after my lifetime, well after it, to places that are decades, maybe centuries from now. I can’t be sure. I see a lot of one particular thing, and it is the slow end of humanity. It follows me everywhere. But not you? You get to see your own future! What I would give…”
“It’s not as useful or as much fun as you would think,” Ariel said. “Although it definitely beats what you’ve got. Talk about depressing.”
“W
hen I touched you today, I got visions that were close up and blurry, like I’d never seen before... Those visions were from my own life.”
She started to tell Siarnaq about her experience with Baldur, but had gotten no further than opening her mouth when she decided to pass. She was only guessing about Baldur and this exchange was complicated enough. Besides, the very idea of another seer would certainly derail what was turning into a very pleasant conversation.
“So we must be tuned to different frequencies!” Siarnaq continued on, pleased with his discovery. “You understand science. You understand radios.”
“I studied them in school, don’t remember much.”
“Well, I work a lot with radios. They are an important part of communication here in my world. Do you know how long a radio wave is?”
“Long. Like maybe feet long.” Ariel was pretty sure of that.
“You people still know what AM radio is?”
Ariel rolled here eyes. “Yeah. It’s the stations you turn to for sports.”
“Okay,” Siarnaq agreed. He pointed out the window. “The waves for AM radio are like from here to that building down the road.”
“Really? That big?”
“Your FM radio waves?” he went on. “More like just from me to you.”
Ariel got the analogy. “So I’m an FM radio seeing things more closely and you’re an AM radio seeing things further away. How cool is this? What are other waves? Microwaves? Longwave radio? Are there other kinds like us, but in other frequencies?”
“I don’t know,” Siarnaq shrugged. “Lots of other Inuit tell the future, but they all use tools for their fortune-telling, and no one seems as sure about their predictions as I am.” His eyes showed his sorrow. “It’s a horrible burden, this knowing that the human race will end so soon. We Inuit will be ready to do our part,” he assured her solemnly. “I am going to see to it.”
“I think we ought to work towards humanity bouncing back.” Ariel was a bit disturbed by the extent to which her new friend seemed to have latched on to the gloomiest outcome possible.
“What do you mean? You think my vision is wrong?”
“Of course not.” Ariel didn’t understand the problem. “But surely you’ve seen several futures? Even I, with my short-term information, know that there are always a variety of outcomes. One may be overwhelmingly likely but still…”
“What do you mean? The future is the future. You see what will be. There is no maybe this or maybe that. There is what is. You can’t change that.”
“Okay.” Ariel saw the problem. “You think the future is fixed?”
“Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?” Siarnaq was deciding that this girl wasn’t quite as smart as she had first seemed. “The present and past are fixed. The future is no different. Besides, how could people like us see the future if there wasn’t one to see?”
Ariel took a breath. And took another sip of her coffee.
“I promise you that close up at my frequency, I see several possible futures all the time. Some are more likely, but I always see lots of them. It’s how the near future works. You might ask me to coffee or not. I might say yes, I might say no. I pick. You pick. And with each pick the possibilities shift a little.” Ariel stopped talking and gave the matter some thought. “Maybe, I don’t know, maybe the far future really is fixed. Maybe you’re right and all the little things we choose don’t make a bit of difference in the end. That would be kind of sad when you think about it, but I’m willing to consider that possibility. If you only see one final outcome, then we are just screwed.”
Siarnaq was listening intently, and now there was hint of a smile on his face.
“You think I’m funny?” Ariel said, a little offended.
“No, I think I’m funny. I’m wondering why I never considered that tomorrow could be different than yesterday. Perhaps you’re the one who is right, and you, an outsider, have taught me something of use about the world and how it works.”
Ariel suspected that this was a high compliment.
“Maybe I have been seeing different outcomes,” Siarnaq said. “But because I did not understand I forced them all into being parts of one story, with the most extreme ending, of course, the most final one, thinking that all the other visions were just of what came before, when in fact some of them may have been of what came instead.”
Over the next hour he listened as Ariel described the more or less mundane visions that intruded on her days with probabilities of what the next few weeks or months might bring. Siarnaq shared what he could back. His visions were far more compelling.
“I don’t know what specifically happens, and I think it is because my people don’t know. I always see through them. Contact and supplies from outside of Greenland stop. Not instantly, but rapidly over a few weeks. Then our contact with Nuuk and the other southern towns stops. I see curious Inuit leaving the far north in the deep of winter, to go to those towns to the south and report back on what has happened. I see them never returning. All that comes back is a few messages by radio, telling the people that they must stay put in the far north. They must not send any more people south. I see us do this, and we survive. For a while. We think that we may be all that is left of humanity, but that may not be true. There are not many of us left and we do okay for a while, but in the end we have lost too much of our ability to get by. I see us growing less, over generations, and finally, that is that.” The sorrow in Siarnaq’s expression settled deep into the lines on his face, comfortable in the grooves that had been etched by reliving these thoughts many times before.
“So you work to bring radio communication to all of Greenland, so it will be there when it is needed?” Ariel asked.
“That too,” Siarnaq agreed. “More than that, I see myself as a man who brings the modern and yet warns my people not to depend too much on it. I guess that I want my people’s children to survive for as long as they can.”
Ariel hesitated. She didn’t want to argue with this newfound friend and yet she couldn’t resist pointing out an inconsistency when she saw one.
“Then at some level you do believe that you can change the future?” she smiled. “Otherwise, why try to bring radios? Why try to keep your people self-sufficient?”
Siarnaq had to laugh at her logic. “You are right. I think that I can cheat the future just a little, because I can’t face what lies ahead without a tiny bit of hope. So I try to nudge the inevitable. I think that the big things are fixed by forces much larger than me, and I accept that, but even a mere man can be forgiven for trying to make a few little changes.”
Ariel nodded. This made sense. “Seeing as far ahead as you do, I understand how it would feel that way. Big events, etched in stone. Seeing the way I do, I feel like everyone makes such a difference all the time that it makes me dizzy. So many outcomes, and some of them are so different than anything I’d expect.”
“So you feel too powerful,” Siarnaq guessed. “And that bothers you?”
She nodded. “Just like feeling so powerless bothers you.”
They were ready to part as friends, kindred spirits who had against all odds found each other and experienced a brief moment of understanding. Maybe they’d even try to meet again.
Ariel stood, intending to rejoin her group after paying for the coffee. She would have made it out of the door, too, if Siarnaq hadn’t reached out to take her hand as they both stood to leave.
Even his brief touch reignited the splatter of visions she had felt earlier, and she worked to steady the dizziness that came with them. While the giddy feeling was largely uncomfortable to Ariel, it seemed to intrigue Siarnaq, and he held on to her hand tightly for several seconds.
“May I?” he asked as he ran his other hand gently up her arm. “Please?”
It wasn’t like being touched by anyone else. The contact between new skin, and more skin, set off more images, as Ariel felt her own natural frequency start to piggyback onto the wavelength of Siarnaq’s visions. Her day-to-day c
larity began to form around his far future events and the more skin contact she made with the man the clearer the melding of their two visions was becoming. He let go of her and took a step away. It stopped.
She took a step forward and placed the whole inside of her lower arm against his. The combined visions came back stronger. He gave her a curious smile. People in the small diner were starting to stare at them. This was not the ideal place for a science experiment. Ariel hesitated for only a second.
“Let’s go outside,” she muttered. Then, as they gathered coats and walked out into the below zero dusk, she realized that outdoors was not going to be any better. “Would you like to come back to my room?” He nodded. They both knew. At that point, they couldn’t walk away without finding out more.
Ariel didn’t consider herself promiscuous, and she certainly had never invited a man she had just met back to her hotel room. As they walked, she reminded herself that this did not have to end with sex, even though she was pretty sure that it would. If it didn’t, wouldn’t the two of them always wonder what would have been possible if it had?
They lay together on the bed, huddled under covers in an otherwise cold room, without a stich of clothing between them. Ariel let her senses go completely as she touched him with all the skin she could manage. She realized that she had been always holding back from men, not wanting to learn too much as their bodies touched. Now, she opened up all her senses and let the input come in waves as she felt his body shudder as he did the same. Later she would realize that there had been very little actual foreplay. The quiet touch of their skin from head to toe had been all the enticement that either of them had needed.
Ariel held her breath as she felt the day-to-day lives of dozens of hardy souls as they struggled with their pain and enjoyed their pleasures, making life work in their cold harsh world. Little decisions made big differences, like they did in Ariel’s own life. Marriages, births, travel, and deaths ran through her head, and she guessed that Siarnaq was enjoying a similar show as her day-to-day awareness superimposed itself on his world.
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