A Dream of Ice

by Gillian Anderson

  Flora stared at Adrienne for a moment longer, not quite believing what she was hearing, then looked back at the stone. “And you will find that I’m capable of very selective hearing.”

  “We’ll see,” Adrienne said. “Let’s start with this. You’ve solved a problem with that stone. I suggest—I urge you not to turn off the system and start messing with it again or you may have to solve others before you’re ready.”

  “We have no choice,” Flora said. “You’ve been taking readings since it’s been in stasis and learned very little—”

  “Oh, I haven’t learned very little,” Adrienne replied. “So far, I’ve learned nothing. This object is like an electron. Stop it and it’s just another particle. You only learn when it’s active, in motion.”

  “Then what choice do I have but to shut off the—what did you call it?”

  “The node,” Adrienne replied. “That’s the location in the array of sound waves capable of sustaining the levitation.”

  “Yes. All right, Adrienne. Give me an option.”

  “Patience,” Adrienne replied. She cocked her head toward the stone. “I’ve had to tiptoe around this relic, literally. Every garbage truck, every bus that passed by on the street had me on edge. Vibrations of any kind affect sound.”

  “I understand that,” Flora said. “But I don’t think you understand what we have.”

  Adrienne opened her mouth to speak but thought better of it.

  “The stability of a singularity that suddenly, inexplicably reaches out and expands, that creates massive inflation,” Flora said. “What does that describe?”

  Adrienne replied immediately. “The Big Bang.”

  “Quite so,” Flora said. She gazed at the artifact. “This is the beginning of the universe in a bottle. And it is artificial, though constructed of naturally occurring minerals, and possibly made by intelligent hands. That’s significant.”

  “Dr. Davies, it’s an ancient stone in a node,” Adrienne said, correcting her.

  Flora chose that moment to selectively not hear.

  “And you said ‘intelligent,’ not ‘human,’ ” Adrienne pointed out as she replayed the statement in her head. “What did you mean by that?”

  Again, Flora ignored her. Instead, she asked, “What would happen to me if I walked in there? It’s just ultrasound, right? The same that’s used on pregnant women?”

  “And that we use to break up kidney stones. Or, perhaps, Group directors.”

  “So it could be destructive.”

  “Yes,” Adrienne sighed. “I’ll just say I hope you won’t do that. It would be a seriously flawed decision.”

  Flora smiled.

  Adrienne was not warmed by the smile. “You’re not going to listen.”

  “All those vehicles that passed by, the trucks and buses—they did not cause an imbalance, did they?” Flora asked.

  Adrienne’s mouth tightened. “Dr. Davies, you were smart enough to hire me and now I’m asking you to be smart enough to stay out of the lab until I figure out a safe, sane next step.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Next Friday, four-oh-one p.m.”

  Flora ignored Adrienne’s unwelcome quip. “Worst case—what happens if I go in?”

  “All right, here’s the truth,” Adrienne said. “Let’s ignore the question of stability. It’s ultrasound on steroids in there. What that means is, if you don’t stay inside too long and if you’re protecting your eardrums, any other effects on you should be minimal. Your body heat will probably rise.”

  “How long is too long?”

  “When you start feeling like you have a fever, that’s too long.”

  “Seconds? Minutes?”

  “Maybe two minutes,” Adrienne said. “I just don’t know. And I repeat, I do not want to find out.”

  Flora had faith in the iron constitution that came with her Welsh heritage. She wanted to test that envelope. “Anything else?”

  “There’s a minimal risk of cavitation, bubbles forming in your blood, tissues, or organs.”

  “The practical effects of which are?”

  “Your blood vessels could rupture.”

  Flora gazed at the stone. “How minimal is minimal?”

  Adrienne rubbed her eyebrows. “Almost nonexistent if you don’t linger once the other symptoms set in.”

  “Good.” Flora swung away from the window and strode down the hall.

  “Get me out of here,” Adrienne said under her breath, her eyes betraying fear as she watched the relic hovering, quiet and still and ominous.

  Flora came back gloved and holding a tray with eight objects, all about the same size and shape as the artifact. Adrienne could see at a glance that none were made of the same type of stone. She guessed ancient clay, wood, and copper right off the bat. One looked like it might be alabaster, and another looked sheathed in a beige leather with an odd sheen. Flora balanced the tray carefully in one hand, thrust a pair of surgical gloves at Adrienne, and tweaked her headphones more securely over her ears. Then she opened the door to the chamber.

  “Come on,” she ordered.

  “Thank you, no,” Adrienne snapped.

  “You’re not going to be inside,” Flora returned. “You’re going to stand in the doorway and hand me these.”

  Adrienne stood still for a moment, then pulled on the gloves with an insolent look. She received the tray dubiously. “Do any of these have a history of acting up?”

  “No, they’ve never misbehaved,” Flora said as she eyed the room, the boundaries of which were set by the black panels on the walls, floor, and ceiling.

  Adrienne reached into the pocket of her lab coat and thumbed on a recorder. She announced the time. Flora stood still and shook out her hands. After taking a long breath, she slowly stepped into the frame of inaudible sound waves—

  And felt nothing. Flora did a head-to-toe check. Heart rate: unchanged. Breathing: normal. Vision and hearing: neither deprived nor hallucinating. She grinned and approached the artifact.

  “Dr. Davies, can you hear me all right?”

  “I can.”

  “If you start to feel that the world is going swimmy in any way, or if you suddenly feel like you’re sort of distanced from everything, like it takes extra effort for your hand to reach an object, that’s a warning sign.”

  “I’m always distanced from everything. It’s called objectivity.”

  “Is that a joke?”

  “Yes. Hand me one of the artifacts.”

  Adrienne surveyed the objects. She selected the alabaster one and leaned forward into the room to convey it to Flora’s outstretched hand. Once Flora had received it, Adrienne quickly backed out into the doorway.

  Flora regarded the carvings on this stone and compared them to the triangle on the relic. She had memorized the patterns long ago, knew that there was no obvious sequence among them.

  “At the risk of stating the obvious,” Adrienne said, “do not move the main stone in any way.”

  “Okay. It stays on its back. So. What’s the pattern? The creators of these were not children playing with dominoes.”

  “Unlike you.”

  Flora did not bother responding to that. She continued where she’d left off. “I’m going to align the faces first.” And with that, Flora carefully slid the alabaster artifact into the space above the main stone, as close as possible without their touching.

  “What does it feel like?” Adrienne asked.

  Flora was glad her companion’s first priority was still science. “I feel a slight repulsion between the objects.” Quickly, she flipped the alabaster so that its carvings faced the ceiling instead of the main stone. A very gentle feeling of suction resulted and she let go of the alabaster. She heard Adrienne gasp. Immediately the stone settled in, floating in the air a bare millimeter above the other.

  “The node’s not big enough to hold all of these up,” Adrienne said.

  “Next,” Flora ordered.

  Adrienne regarded the tra
y. Carefully, she picked up the wooden artifact. Its center had begun to petrify but its edges had the fragility of very, very old organic matter. Adrienne held up the object carefully, then leaned in to hand it to Flora.

  “This is about an ounce, roughly one-third the weight of the first stone passed into the chamber,” Adrienne said into the recorder. “We should have taken accurate measurements.”

  “It’s twenty-six point four grams,” Flora said.

  Adrienne’s mouth clapped shut as Flora slid the wooden artifact above the alabaster one. Again, with a slight suction the object began to levitate, not touching the one below it.

  Both women remained silent as, one by one, Adrienne passed the items from the tray. She didn’t speak again until there was only one artifact remaining.

  “This is impossible,” Adrienne said.

  “Isn’t it, though?” Flora asked with an edge of delight. Her ears were pounding slightly and she felt warm but not enough to be concerned.

  “Dr. Davies, I don’t think you realize—they don’t all fit in the node. The artifacts are helping each other. You’re sure they’re not magnetic?”

  “Wood? Fabric?” Flora said.

  “They could still be affected by any magnetic fields in the stones.”

  “No.” Flora slid the last artifact onto the top of the stack. “They are not magnetic. The other objects are not being impacted by paramagnetism or diamagnetism. We did those tests.” Then she just stood there and looked at them.

  “I just want to remind you that you’ve been in there for well over two minutes. How do you feel?” Adrienne asked.

  “Wonderful, actually,” Flora replied. “It’s . . . clean here. Pure. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  Adrienne’s eyes shifted from the objects to the Group’s director. It was the first time she’d seen her smile like this. “Dr. Davies, why are you obsessed with these?”

  “A scholar’s interest in the inexplicable.”

  “No,” Adrienne said. “A scholar would be publishing articles about these in journals, and asking every scientist and researcher she could contact for help with studying them.”

  Flora ignored her.

  “You’re keeping secrets,” Adrienne said.

  Again, she made no reply.

  “Who or what are you protecting?” Adrienne asked. “What did you cover up a death for?”

  Flora turned ever so slightly and glanced back. “What death?”

  “My predecessor,” Adrienne said. “I asked around, I heard about Arni Haugan.”

  Flora smiled mirthlessly. “You appear to be a better detective than you are a scientist.”

  “Not fair and not true,” Adrienne said.

  Flora turned her back on the younger woman.

  “Any idea what really happened to Haugan?” Adrienne asked.

  “The artifact,” Flora said grudgingly. “But we don’t know how. We have no idea what he was doing with it at the time.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “Not enough,” Flora admitted. “This is a lab and it was a workplace accident. They happen.”

  Adrienne frowned but she decided not to pursue the issue now. She didn’t like Flora but she couldn’t afford to conflate that with the truth of what Flora had just said.

  Flora surprised her then. “Besides, Haugan is not gone. Not really. Not if some theories are correct.”

  Adrienne took a step forward. “Doctor, I think the ultrasound may be affecting you—”

  “Be quiet. Here’s something you don’t know,” the woman went on. “The civilization that created these artifacts proved that there is life after death. More than proved it, in fact. We think they systematized their access to it.”

  Adrienne stared at her. “Myth.”

  “Fact.”

  “What are you going off of?”

  “Partial translations. Very partial. Drawings. A gut feeling and dreams.”

  “Dreams?” Adrienne’s voice was soaked in doubt and frustration.

  “Shared dreams,” Flora stressed. “As we gathered these artifacts together, my associate Mikel and I began to have the same dreams.”

  “Elaborate, if you don’t mind,” Adrienne said.

  Flora did not respond. She felt fine, still, but she was puzzled and transfixed by the miracle of what she was seeing in the chamber. Cautiously, she reached into the node and removed the top artifact. When nothing changed, she slid it, carvings faceup, beneath the main stone.

  Instantly they felt the room heat up. Within three seconds sweat was beading on their foreheads.

  “Whatever you just did, undo it!” Adrienne pleaded.

  Flora didn’t hear her. She was suddenly having difficulty breathing. The heat was as powerful as a sauna set on high. Her head felt heavy and she put a hand on the back of her neck.

  “Dr. Davies!” Adrienne shouted. “Grab the artifacts and get out!”

  Flora heard a hum and saw that the main stone was vibrating. She reached a weakened hand forward and carefully removed the top artifact from the stack.

  “Doctor!” Adrienne screamed. “Don’t be gentle about it!”

  Flora took two at once but she was trembling at the knees now. She placed the objects in the crook of her arm. Then she realized she was not the only thing shaking, so was the floor. Suddenly, all the stones began to wobble madly. The bottom one dropped from the stack and hit the floor. Flora reached down as fast as she could manage and saw that the black floor panel was bubbling. She pulled the artifact from the chaos.

  Adrienne yelled something incoherent and started to move into the chamber, but she found that her feet wouldn’t lift properly. The concrete floor was liquefying and creeping toward the doorway, as if trying to escape the room. With effort she could lift her boots free from the slow sludge but it took a lot of muscle.

  She looked up to scream at Flora again and saw the entire stack of artifacts collapse and fall to the floor. The main stone almost leaped from the pile and Flora was able to snatch it midflight as the other artifacts hit the bubbling, oozing black panel. She grabbed at the scattered stones and managed to retrieve them all, albeit dripping black liquid. Then she tried to turn and run but the floor gripped the edges of her shoes as it flowed.

  Adrienne took a giant, heaving backward step from the doorway. She almost fell over but shoved the edge of the tray at the wall to gain equilibrium. She was horrified to feel the wall soften beneath its edge and jerked the tray away as soon as she felt balanced. Then she yanked her other leg out of the doorway too.

  “Throw them to me!” she told Flora.

  Flora, still lunging slowly forward, threw the first artifact, then the next, and the next. It was so hot she wanted to vomit. She felt tears in her eyes as she saw fragments fly from the wooden artifact as Adrienne caught it. Only the petrified center was left now as the rest of it melted into the custard concrete floor.

  Flora held the last artifact, the main stone, the Serpent, which was vibrating so hard she could feel the waves through her arms down to her feet. Her vision clouded, suffused with red, and she thought she smelled sulfur. Vaguely she could hear Adrienne screaming at her. She took another weak step forward and with all her willpower, she let go of the Serpent in Adrienne’s direction.

  The stone tumbled through the air and Adrienne dove forward and snatched it from the liquid concrete. Then the girl disappeared from the doorway. Flora heard the sound of running and suddenly realized she was hearing again. Her mind was clearing. The heat was lifting. She was gaining more control of her limbs. She lurched from the room and the floor seemed steady beneath her so she stopped, resting against a wall. She looked back at the chamber. The black panels had melted halfway down the walls. Long drips trailed from the panels on the ceiling. But the melting had stopped. The floor was still. The panels were no longer bubbling.

  “Damn it!” she heard from down the hall. “We need another room!”

  Adrienne was heading back down the hall in Flo
ra’s direction, yelling. “I’ll get the rest of the panels. That deep freezer will give us fifteen minutes, max!”

  CHAPTER 17

  But he’ll die!” Siem der Graaf shouted.

  The taller man blocked Eric Trout’s path to the spiral stairway. They were standing nearly nose to nose in the “jam tart,” the large red module that served as Halley VI’s social hub. Eric’s mustache hung in two tendrils past his chin, and days of sharp frustration had burned his typically jovial expression to a frazzle.

  “Der Graaf,” Trout huffed, “this is essentially the only situation where the title ‘base commander’ actually means something. Step aside.”

  The younger man opened his mouth to speak but just shook his head.

  Trout’s chin sank into the collar of his heavy turtleneck. “Der Graaf, we’re following orders strictly on this. We start the move off the ice shelf in thirty minutes.”

  Trout raised a thick-fingered hand and gently pushed Siem to the side, then hurried down the stairs.

  “But surely you don’t need everyone for the move,” Siem argued, following on his heels. “You will have excess personnel, in fact. Or do you plan to have them sitting around inside the modules as you tow them?”

  “Anyone without a specific job will be in the trucks and bulldozers, heading to the new location.”

  “Fine. Then give me two men for just that amount of time, before you need them to start hanging pictures back on the walls.”

  Trout fired back a severely disapproving look.

  “Two men and Ski-Doos to save a life!” Siem said, pressing the commander.

  Trout turned to face him in the empty dining area.

  “You cannot have them,” Trout said finally. “We have to turn off everything for the move except the hydraulics. No electronics. Communications will be off. It’s unconscionable to send out one man, let alone three, on a dangerous rescue mission with zero radio contact. I simply cannot, der Graaf. I will not.”

  “Then you’re killing him.”

  “He did this to himself, without orders,” Trout replied. His expression softened. “Has it not occurred to you he might want that?”