She considered telling Eoin about setting up a meeting with Cillian, more as a courtesy to her boss than anything, when the images began to shift and the darker outcomes began to grow. It was the whirling dizzy sensation she got when the probabilities shifted, and she froze.
So for some reason, including Eoin on this decision was a poor choice. What about Nell? That seemed to be a neutral option. Then she thought about asking Brendan if he had any get-togethers scheduled with Cillian anytime soon. Maybe she could piggyback onto his meeting?
Dizzy twirling took over again. Well, it seemed that things were even better now with Brendan involved.
Decision making 101, Ariel laughed to herself, wishing this gift had been useful like this more times in the past. She picked up the phone. “Brendan? You got a moment? Can I come by and see you?”
Cillian was happy to make time for her, but hoped that she was willing to drive out to his place. With the sun not setting until almost ten at night now, she was more than willing to travel an hour for a late meal and even happier when Brendan offered to drive.
Cillian greeted them warmly, his thinning brown hair still wet from the shower, his body full of freckles made more apparent by the shorts and t-shirt he wore. Conversation was kept light while drinks and appetizers appeared.
“Let’s walk through the gardens,” Cillian suggested, and Ariel considered the possibility that the man didn’t necessarily trust the household help that cared for him. Perhaps one or more was known to have reported back to Mr. McGrane on one of his “good days”?
Once the three of them were far from the house, Cillian’s tone moved away from that of friendly host. “Nell says you either accepted what she said or played along like you did. She told you I don’t like to talk to about this, certainly not here, but I understand that she told you to come forth if you had more questions. So something is bothering you.”
The breeze and the mist in the air had worked together to churn Brendan’s bright hair into a froth of butterscotch, but underneath it his serious face nodded slightly, like this all made perfect sense to him. Ariel could only guess that he was in the loop as well. Of course he was.
Ariel opened her mouth and then decided there might be a more effective way to communicate. Hadn’t Siarnaq told her that he and Baldur could feel each other’s psychic abilities even though they were so disparate that they didn’t meld?
She reached out her arm and firmly placed the inside of her right wrist against Cillian’s bare arm. He jumped back and yelled like someone had burned him.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Ariel said holding her own arm in pain as the dull slow throbbing began to subside. “I had no idea it would be so strong.”
“What are you?” he asked in horror.
“I’m like you,” she replied steadily. “Like you, but different. You need to know. Let me explain.”
An hour later their drinks and appetizers were long gone and Ariel was sure the wait staff was beside themselves trying to serve dinner. The conversation for the last hour had centered on what Ariel could do as she covered learning about her gift as a child, her odd reaction at being offered the job in Dublin, and the amazing experiences she had lying with Siarnaq.
Cillian and Brendan encouraged her to speak, offering few opinions and asking few questions. It was clear that Brendan was far more than a programmer for Cillian’s software. He spoke like he was Cillian’s confidant and his friend.
“We frankly thought that someone like you couldn’t exist,” Cillian told her. “We’ve known about Baldur for a while. His high frequency foresight isn’t all that uncommon really—people who have it often don’t even fully notice it. A second before the phone rings you know who it is, a second before the song comes on the radio you know what is coming. That kind of thing. For some reason Baldur seems to have discovered his ability and developed it well as a child, and early detection and practice of course strengthen anything.”
“Why aren’t more people using it like he is?” Ariel asked.
“Well, most of the small percentage of people who even acknowledge that their gift is real have neither the resources nor the training to use it on the stock market. Baldur is rather a confluence of unfortunate events, to be honest, and now he has sought out a small group like him and trained them too. They’ve all gotten particularly good at using their skills online. In a world without electronic stock exchanges, he’s just someone who can avoid a punch in the nose better than most. In this world, he is a problem.”
“And he wants to use me to become more of one,” Ariel said. “Now he’s being helped by the one man who knows way too much about what I can do. Why did I sleep with Siarnaq?”
Cillian smiled in a gentle way. “I don’t throw stones. I do know that foresight of any kind removes you a little bit from the rest of humanity. It’s harder to connect, and it is understandable for us to take the opportunities that we can to reestablish connection. We do already know of Siarnaq, too, if I wasn’t clear about it.”
“No, I didn’t get that from you. How would you know of him?”
Brendan answered. “Cillian has seen the effects of Siarnaq and of what he is trying to do. It might matter, and Cillian’s premories, as you so cutely call them, include some knowledge of the man behind the consequences.”
“So he might succeed?” Ariel was suddenly curious now that she was in the presence of someone who could see more of the story.
“He might. There are a lot more variables than he knows, but what he does could make a very large difference and in some scenarios even his name is remembered.”
“You’ve seen Siarnaq becoming a famous person in history?” Ariel asked, happier at this news than she would have expected.
“Yes I have. Ariel, before the entire kitchen empties out in the gardens to find us, I need to quickly tell you two things. Three actually, but I think you’ve guessed the third, which is that we don’t speak of this once we are back in the house.”
“Of course,” Ariel said.
“Good. Another is that while people with Baldur’s skill are not that uncommon, history has also produced a fair number of prophets like Siarnaq and myself who see far ahead. And of course it has also produced a lot of charlatans who claimed to do so. But we all thought that you couldn’t happen. What with the myriad of possibilities after even a few minutes, and the emotional burden of seeing those probabilities evolving in one’s own life, well, it seemed natural that nature sort of blocked out those frequencies, sort of like a notch filter if you will.“
“I’ve never known life without my premories,” Ariel said. “It’s not like I had a choice about them.”
“Well,” Cillian said, “you’re an extremely rare case, and possibly unique. We need to look out for you, for a whole lot of reasons.”
“There you are,” a flustered woman’s voice came from the other side of the hedge. “The roast is nearly ruined, Mr. McGrane. Please do come inside and let us serve you dinner.”
“We’re on our way, Maeve,” Cillian yelled back cordially. As the threesome made their way around the shrubbery, he whispered softly to Ariel, “The last thing I was trying to say was that we’ve all got your back at this Blue Lagoon spa thing coming up in in Iceland.”
“You’re going?” she asked in surprise.
“Are you kidding? Given the guest list, Nell and Brendan and I could not imagine missing it.”
******
Mikkel did not want to waste two days in Iceland playing around at a spa. He was overwhelmed with the amount of work that he had to do, and the people that he had to organize to do it.
Not that he couldn’t use a little playtime, he thought. There had been a day when he had loved hiking and skiing and climbing and kayaking and relaxing with a few cold beers afterwards, and he wondered sometimes what had happened to the young man who enjoyed the outdoors. He hardly left his computer screen now.
There had also been a day when he had enjoyed his work. He had sped through a P
h.D. program, powered by his own considerable brainpower and his love of the subject matter. How could anyone not be fascinated by learning to fly through the air, by figuring out how to hurl things into space? The young boy who had stared at the never-ending night sky of winter and wanted nothing more than to fly up to the stars had grown into a man who knew just what it took to do so.
Only now that man was tired. The hours were long, and managing people was clearly not his forte. They wore him out with their petty squabbles and issues—not that he didn’t like people in theory. He did. He wished everyone well. He just wasn’t particularly suited to all the hand-holding and encouraging it seemed to take to get them all to work together.
He decided that in spite of his workload, he clearly needed to be at this shindig in Iceland. He, Baldur and Cillian were linked together in so many ways—three men dragging each other along in a bizarre sack race that had the very fate of the human race at stake. And the innocent software company Ullow basically served as the sack that bound them together. Mikkel shook his head. How in the hell had he gotten himself into this mess?
He thought of the guest list. That young American woman, Ariel, would certainly be there. Eager and curious, she’d been the last thing that this situation needed. Eoin should show some sense and send her back to the London office before she managed to really muck things up.
And yet, the mental image of spending two days in a spa with Ariel, with her bikini clad body possibly sitting right next to him, brought him a certain amount of unexpected pleasure. Oh good grief, he scolded himself. It had been far too long since he’d had any of that sort of relaxation either, hadn’t it? He’d better get a grip. Lusting after business contacts was a bad idea in general, and an awful idea under the circumstances.
Which brought to mind the obvious question. What sort of game was Baldur playing anyway? Socializing had never been a tool in the man’s arsenal. So why the sudden change? The idea of Baldur sitting next to Ariel in a hot tub, telling her stories while she listened in fascination, was oddly disturbing to Mikkel, and he scolded himself for a second time.
Don’t let this competition thing with the man take over your brain, he told himself sternly. That young lady is not a prize to fight over—she is person who needs to go home before she gets hurt.
Mikkel puzzled over that last thought. All this time he figured he resented Ariel because he was concerned that she would dig too deeply into his affairs and cause him problems. Could it be that he also was worried for her safety? He supposed so. It was possible to be bothered by both possibilities.
He went back to the latest order of materials that he had been reviewing. Numbers and more numbers flashed on his screen as he scrolled, and yet all he could focus on was the mental image he had concocted of a certain redheaded support engineer wearing a swimsuit that was far skimpier than anything a real woman would ever wear on a business outing.
What did they call those things? Thongs? He gave himself a mental head slap and went back to his numbers.
******
Toby had led an interesting life, and he didn’t surprise very easily. He’d come across his share of oddities, not the least of which had been meeting Zane Zeitman. Zane had been gifted with a degree of fine muscle control well beyond that of most people, and as a bored adolescent he’d spent his time in class learning how to do things like change the appearance of his chin and his cheekbones. The end result was that if you gave Zane the right wig and clothing, he could pretty much resemble any other human being.
Toby had to wonder if Ariel’s odd story about remembering events from the future was the result of genetics or upbringing. A shape-shifting brother with a clairvoyant sister was not a coincidence. Had these kids grown up next to a radioactive waste dump or something? He supposed that Ariel could be making the whole thing up, driven by some childhood sense of competition with her brother that would not loosen its hold on her adult brain. From what he knew of the young woman, though, he doubted it.
She’d written him from her heart, telling him stories he suspected that she might never have shared with anyone. He’d read of little Ariel sorting knowledge in her brain into memories and premories, relying on an innate sense of which was which much the way children in a bilingual household quickly developed a sense of what words went with what language.
She’d told him bluntly of her encounter with the Inuit man and how his prophetic abilities had merged so beautifully with hers. Toby read of the man’s odd quest to save the human race by isolating the people of Northern Greenland.
Toby had been particularly interested in the story of Mikkel, a former aeronautics professor now doing something secretive for reasons of his own, and now the object of the Inuit man’s hatred. That hatred had allied the Inuit with an Icelandic investor named Baldur, which brought the whole mess squarely into Toby’s world.
Baldur’s possible threats to Ariel, or at the very least his determination to find a way to use her skills to aid in his own amassing of wealth, had bad implications not only for the young woman herself, but for the world economy too. Casinos in Vegas regularly threw out gamblers who could count cards well enough to consistently defy the odds. They had no qualms about doing so. Were the equity exchanges of Earth’s leading nations capable of accepting that a small group of investors could gain a similar advantage by using a psychic ability that most people would scoff at? Toby was guessing that Baldur could do considerable damage before the possibility was well enough believed for regulations to be put in place to stop him.
If Baldur was smart, and Toby had every reason to believe that he was, then Baldur would move slowly enough not to set off alarms anywhere and yet quickly enough to become a force of his own before anyone could clearly prove anything.
It looked like that was exactly what the man was doing. Ariel would potentially make him quicker and more effective, and therefore even more difficult to stop.
Toby didn’t know what to make of the distant prophet Cillian and his dire predictions that also worried Ariel. Frankly that part of her narrative had struck him as far-fetched, conjuring up images in his brain of bearded men in rags standing on street corners holding up signs saying “The end is near”. Toby admitted that thinking a thousand years ahead probably wasn’t his strong suit. He tended to be the kind of man who was more focused on the here and now.
Plus, the present held plenty of its own problems. y1 had watched Baldur long enough to be sure that he was a crisis in the making, and Ariel had confirmed their suspicions and added a new urgency. They needed a plan for stopping d4 now.
Part 2. d4, Jerk and Snap
15. Summer at the Blue Lagoon
Ariel was surprised at how hard her heart pounded when she saw that the incoming call was from Siarnaq.
“Hello pretty sunset hair,” he greeted her, like they had never quarreled. “We should not be such strangers to each other.”
“No, we shouldn’t,” she agreed, searching for a neutral follow up. “How are things going for you?”
“They are well. I know that you do not want to hear more, unless you have changed your mind about the means I am using to pursue my purpose. I called only to see if you are doing well, and to tell you that I remain your friend, no matter what.”
“Thanks Siarnaq. I appreciate that. I’m happy to be your friend too. I still don’t think much of your new partner, though, and I still worry that you’ve made an alliance with a snake.”
“A snake. That’s some sort of tropical reptile, right?”
At first Ariel thought he was joking. Then it dawned on her that Greenland might not have snakes. “It’s an animal with a reputation for biting others, even those that have given it aid. It means someone that you can’t trust.”
“I see.”
A few seconds of silence followed. Ariel finally said, “I’ll be at a company event next week, in Iceland, and will be spending a day or two in Baldur’s company. Because of my job, I have to be nice. I’ll try, I’ll really try, Siar
naq, to think better of the man and give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“This I would appreciate. At least use your open mind, not your closed one. Already he is doing me and my cause so much good, Ariel. I can’t begin to tell you how grateful he makes me.”
That’s another whole problem, Ariel thought. “You know, if he bankrupts one of my other clients that’s not good for me either,” Ariel said.
“Perhaps this other client of yours, the real snake in this story, will wise up and put his money into something else, given all the many little problems he is now running into,” Siarnaq countered.
“Lot’s of little problems, huh?” Ariel muttered.
“Baldur is quite good at creating them,” Siarnaq said with satisfaction. “It will only get worse. Are you in a position to advise Mikkel to move on to other interests?”
“I’m never in a position to tell my clients what to do with their own money, Siarnaq. My job is just to help them make the stuff, and preferably lots of it.”
“I see. Well then, I will simply hope that you and Baldur have a very nice time next week.” Something about the way he said very made Ariel’s skin crawl.
“Surely you’re not hoping I jump into bed with him?” she asked with an outrage that she knew probably wasn’t warranted.
“He has mentioned to me that if you and he worked together, he could be even more effective than he is now. Ariel, I wish him to be very effective.”
“And you don’t care at all what our working together entails?” She knew that it was an unreasonable question, or at least one being asked in an unreasonable tone of voice. She and Siarnaq had made no promises to each other. Hell, they hadn’t even spoken to each other in more than a month.
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