Slowly—or swiftly, she couldn’t be sure of time—the strings tightened into a ball that compressed into a spot of light so brilliant that it almost seemed to balance the crushing darkness around it. That light that never quite surrendered its autonomy before erupting again in a flash of hot light.
A new universe is born, she thought as the strings enlarged and expanded outward and there were once again infinite lights within. And then the lights merged and glowed and burst and caused more small lights as well as dark clouds of early nebulae. The lights—the protostars—writhed around and among the gaseous expanses, burning and dying, exploding and being reborn . . .
Forming worlds. They moved around the stars so swiftly that they seemed to be circles, snakes chasing their own tails. Stars glowed and grew and turned red and exploded, consuming their worlds.
Over and over the process repeated itself, Caitlin’s point of view changing from the large to the small as her spirit journeyed through the organized chaos, to a point and time in space, to a world that was newly formed, a planet where the strands of light rose from one end like a microbe with many tails.
The world phased from hot and flaming to cooler and inviting. Caitlin plunged toward it, toward the region ripe with the cosmic strings, to a point where they penetrated the surface. She was suddenly below the crust, where the golden light took on a green patina as it threaded through minerals and rested from its billion-year journey.
The “microbe” she had seen from space was replicated around the core, copied over and over, heated by magma, driven up to the light, the crust, to the new continent, to—
A new home, Caitlin realized.
The microbes did not have thought but they had a collective sentience, and that mind was revealed to her. An unfathomable number of ancient essences . . . souls . . . had bonded to survive the destruction of their universe, a previous universe. They had formed a collective to survive a big crunch, a snap back from the ultimate extension of matter as gravity reversed their own ancient Big Bang.
Caitlin thought improbably about Jacob playing with a Slinky. One end of the souls had leaped through time to escape the destruction of the cosmos and dragged the other end with it.
Yet was the thought improbable? she wondered. In the spectacle she had just witnessed, even galaxies didn’t carry much weight. The countless lives within them were insignificant, if scale were the only judge. But it couldn’t be, could it? Every part of every string was a piece of something enormous. Without each part, the structure was incomplete. Incomplete, it was not the perfect structure required to make the leap through time and space. Incomplete, every part of the superstring would have failed.
Either everything matters or nothing does, Caitlin thought. Including a boy with his toy.
The microbes moved beneath a world of muted light, of sunlight seen through water and ice. Then they moved on land. Then they moved on legs. Then they moved the arms they possessed and communicated and bonded and reproduced and cleared the ice and built dwellings and spoke.
They found tiles in which the olivine light, the souls of beings—perhaps an assortment of beings—from the previous universe still resided.
The Candescents.
I am Candescent, Caitlin understood with humbling, then terrifying clarity.
The Caitlin on the airship had been powered by the motu-varkas. Through the powerful tiles she had bonded with herself when that other incarnation appeared to control the energies of ascending and transcending souls. She was possessed by the kind of force that countless cultures spoke about, mythologized about when they spoke of gods and demigods, messiahs and prophets, angels and demons.
With that understanding, Caitlin suddenly realized she had control of what she was witnessing. Euphoria filled her soul. In her mind, she raised her arms and pointed her fingers and moved through the world and time. She watched, for a third time, the fall of Galderkhaan. She saw ice cover its remains. She moved her hands and was back in her own life, her own eyes, at NYU, in Phuket, giving birth to her son—
And then she came to a very hard, absolute stop.
CHAPTER 25
The cry had all but died in Caitlin’s throat when she became aware of Ben hovering beside her on one side, Eilifir on the other.
“Jacob,” she said. “Where is he?”
The others looked puzzled. She turned around, past her shadow, at the tile gleaming softly inside the box. Her eyes went to Antoa and then to Casey Skett. They were standing with looks that ranged from puzzlement to concern. She glanced at Madame Langlois, who sat smoking contentedly. Even Enok appeared relaxed.
“You know,” Caitlin said to the woman.
“I know they are satisfied,” the Haitian replied. “I know the snake is pleased.”
Caitlin turned back to Ben. “Call my home now, please! I want to know if my son is there.”
“His—his—”
“His soul, yes. Is Jacob in his body?”
Ben fumbled for his cell phone and made the call. While he did, the Technologist leader approached Caitlin.
“What happened?” Antoa asked.
“I’m still connected to it,” Caitlin answered, pointing at the tile.
“Where is the tile connected?” Antoa asked.
Caitlin regarded him. “Everywhere.”
“Forgive me, but that is a very general term—”
“Everywhere!” she repeated. “With living access to every time that has ever been.” She shook her head. “I am taking it with me.”
“Hello, Mr. O’Hara? It’s Ben,” Caitlin heard her friend say. “Is Jacob awake?”
Caitlin watched Ben carefully as she adjusted to being back in a body after the Candescent limbo, back in her body after being in Galderkhaan. Oddly, she could still feel the kiss of Standor Qala on her lips.
“He is,” Ben said, smiling. “Organizing the drawings into a comic book.”
Caitlin exhaled and stifled a choke of sheer joy. They had both returned. She faced Antoa now. He had moved. He was standing beside Casey Skett, who had retrieved and closed the box. Both men had positioned themselves between Caitlin and the foyer.
“The tile,” Caitlin said.
“It remains with us,” Antoa informed her. “Then, after you tell us what you witnessed, you and the others may go.”
Caitlin walked toward the men. “The tile belongs to another,” she said. “I will hold it for him.”
“Eilifir?” said Antoa.
The man removed a .38 from the pocket of his leather jacket. He leveled it at Caitlin.
“Jesus!” Ben cried. “Eilifir—what are you doing?”
“Stay where you are,” Eilifir warned him without taking his eyes off Caitlin.
“I posed a question and I require an answer,” Antoa said. “What did you see when you screamed?”
“It was not what I saw but what I was unable to hold on to,” she said. “I think I know how Lucifer felt after the fall. I know I feel like Lucifer now. My higher angels—they’re not present at the moment.” She held out her hand. “The box, Antoa.”
He shook his head.
Caitlin extended two fingers of each hand as she approached. The box shook at once, light pushing thinly from beneath the lid and slashing through the room.
“I came back with a message,” Caitlin said. “Listen to me. It is not through a tile that Candescence will be achieved. You Technologists fought the Priests instead of joining them. Together, you could have achieved Candescence. Not just words, not just the tiles, but a combination of both. Instead, you carved out your fiefdoms and because of that Galderkhaan died. There will be no more death. The tile, Antoa.”
“This stone was crafted by my ancestors, not yours,” he said. “It remains with me.”
In her mind, Caitlin saw those ancestors and had to focus to bring her mind back to the present. �
�The tile will go to the owner to be returned to its home. That is what they wish.”
“They? Who?” Antoa asked.
Caitlin replied, “The Candescents.”
“And how do you know their wishes?”
“They revealed their journey to me,” Caitlin said. “They are ready to leave this vessel and return to the cosmos.”
“Why would they share that with you?” Antoa asked.
Caitlin grinned. “I was there. Now I suggest you surrender the box and let us go because the Candescents are going to be leaving.”
Antoa stood his ground and indicated for Skett and Eilifir to do the same. It was the last command he gave. The box opened with a flash that dropped Skett and the Technologist leader to their knees. The box fell, the glow punched through the room, and as Eilifir fell Caitlin threw herself at Ben and pushed him toward the exit.
“Get the Langloises out!” Caitlin cried. “There has to be a back door!”
Even as she spoke, the Technologist and his associates burned and screamed and died, their brains pouring forth, the floor beneath them trembling. Enok was already at his mother’s side, not helping her up but scooping her up and running off with Ben and Caitlin.
“That way!” Ben yelled, pointing toward the kitchen. Enok hesitated before rushing in that direction, taking a moment to pull his cradled mother closer to his chest. Caitlin followed them, her arms in front of her as she tried desperately not to be pulled back into the cataclysm.
The four emerged in a pool area dimly lit by patio lights. They ran wide around the quaking waters as the pool itself cracked along the sides and bottom, dumping water into the earth. They did not look behind them as they ran toward a stone wall that stood between the grounds and the Long Island Sound. Like Lot and his family, they continued forward as the unfettered power of the Candescents burst skyward, illuminating the trees and stony beach as it tore the house from its foundation. A rolling cloud of dust overtook them and they continued to run along the beach until the air was clearer and the ground solid.
Only then did Caitlin and the others look back.
The estate was a pile of debris less than a story high. Nothing recognizable remained: the wood was a mass of splinters among stone that had been crushed to pebbles. The light was gone and so too was the energy that had been pulling at Caitlin.
Breathing heavily, Enok set his mother on a large boulder. Ben assisted him. The Haitian youth thanked him.
Madame Langlois still had her lit cigar.
“They gone,” she said around a puff of smoke. She waved a hand at the wreckage and winked at Caitlin. “Yet not.”
CHAPTER 26
As one, the towers gave up their light.
The glowing columns and the brilliant domes from which they had arisen did not simply snap off; they drifted like mist, leaving only a memory that was difficult to recall, exactly.
The warmth left too. Standing near the pit, Mikel immediately felt the cold. But he didn’t hurry to return to the truck. The surface of the ice was still watery and slick and the vision of the light had changed the way he saw the world around him.
Because there wasn’t just light. There were images, views that were cosmic in scale, unthinkably small, and then—somehow—both. There was age and wisdom and power but also the warmth he had felt on the outside—expanded exponentially. He had felt enfolded, nurtured through a journey that crossed eternity and back.
“Dr. Jasso!” Dr. Cummins yelled to him. She had been standing next to the Toyota and was now skate-walking toward him. “Are you all right?”
“Define ‘all right,’ ” he said, as if surprised by more than his own voice but by his very capacity to speak.
“As all right as the truck?” she said. “It just came back on. We can go.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” he said.
She regarded him closely as she walked him back to the truck. The archaeologist was clearly distracted, not paying attention to where he walked, or how.
“Dr. Jasso, what did you see in there?”
He looked at her and smiled. “Death. Birth. Death again. An apotheosis.”
“Of Galderkhaan?”
He shook his head.
“Who rose from the dead?” Dr. Cummins asked. “You? Did you—do you think you died in there?”
Mikel glanced back at the pit. Clouds of ice were already blowing across the frozen surface as they had for millennia.
“No,” he said. “I did not die. But I was reborn.”
Dr. Cummins stopped by the passenger’s side of the truck and helped him up. The radio and phone were alive with voices and the beeps of text messages.
“You’re not making a lot of sense, Dr. Jasso, but then so little of this has,” she said. “Maybe Bundy and his people can help us figure out what happened.”
Mikel laughed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “But I know someone who can.”
“Who?”
“I was the beneficiary of someone else who came into the light,” he replied. “Someone who was connected to the tile I found from the bottom of the sea.”
The glaciologist went around the truck and got behind the wheel. The heat was on and it felt wonderful.
“Who can explain this?” Dr. Cummins asked as she texted Bundy, letting him know they were fine and headed back.
“My grandmother,” he said.
“Dr. Jasso, for a man who was so loquacious for the last few hours you are annoyingly elusive.”
“Sorry,” he said distractedly. “I’m processing. It’s . . . it’s in a line she used to quote from Second John.”
“Which was?” she asked.
Mikel replied with quiet awe, “This can be explained by ‘the lady chosen by God . . .’ ”
CHAPTER 27
The phone call was not unexpected.
It came three days after Caitlin had returned from Connecticut. Her parents had gone home, the Langloises had boarded a plane to Haiti, Ben and Anita had gone back to work, Jacob had gone back to school, and Caitlin had accepted a leave of absence that was “recommended” to her by her supervisor at Roosevelt Hospital. Police and the FBI from Norwalk had come by to interview her the day after she returned, but she told them she could not shed any light on what caused the explosion—or implosion, as they were calling it, since the mansion seemed to have been pulled in, just like the Group mansion on Fifth Avenue.
“I assure you, I am not the common denominator,” she half lied. “Ben Moss and I went up there to collect our house guests from Haiti.”
“And at Washington Square Park?” Field Agent Arthur Richardson had asked. “You were seen coming from that mansion too.”
“I was in the neighborhood, checking on a patient there,” Caitlin said. “Adrienne Dowman. Has the bureau found her or Flora Davies yet?”
“We have not, nor the people who lived in the house in Norwalk,” Agent Richardson replied crossly.
Caitlin couldn’t tell them anything more. They wouldn’t have believed her. Going forward, she realized she had to be careful what she said, and to whom. This was no longer something she could share with Barbara. Certainly Ben, possibly Anita. Jacob, of course. He was his old self again; content to be back in his body with his hearing aids, but signing with a facility that surpassed what he had been able to do before. He remembered everything that had happened in Galderkhaan, and though the language had been forgotten the superlative use of his hands had not.
And there was one other person she could confide in, draw on, learn from. The man she had walked a few blocks to meet outside the American Museum of Natural History.
“There’s nothing here of that ancient world to interest you,” she said when he approached her at the large front steps beside the statue of Teddy Roosevelt.
“How did you know it was me?” he asked.
Cait
lin smiled as they shook hands under the warming sun. “You walk like you’re still treading on ice.” She looked at his arm. “Plus you have a busted wing in a sling that I could swear was made of thyodularasi skin.”
“It’s a hortatur mask I found in Galderkhaan,” he said. “Remarkable relic. It allowed me to breathe underground . . . and it’s helping me heal. I want to be there if it does anything else.”
Caitlin smiled. “There is no one alive who would understand that better than me.”
“I know that,” he laughed. “Do you want to go inside?”
Caitlin shook her head. “If you don’t mind, I want to stand right here. I want to watch the cars and road, the people, the arteries of a living city. I haven’t really been able to do that for a while.” She looked at him. “That is, if you don’t mind the cold.”
“This, cold?” he laughed. “No, I don’t mind.”
Caitlin grinned when she remembered where he had just been. “I’m sorry about Flora Davies,” she told him. “I didn’t exactly get along with her—”
“No one did.”
“But I would have liked the opportunity to get to know her better,” Caitlin went on.
“Maybe you will,” Mikel said. “She left countless notes, recordings. If you’re interested.”
“One day, I’m sure,” Caitlin replied. “I need time.”
The archaeologist understood that as well.
“Are you going to stay in the city?” Caitlin asked.
“I am,” he said. “Some of the international figures behind the Group are coming. I want to continue the work we were doing. But obviously with a very different endgame. Not something for Priests or Technologists.”
“For everyone,” she said.
“That’s what ‘they’ wanted,” Mikel said.
Caitlin knew whom he meant. The same beings that Madame Langlois had meant each time she used the word.
“When you phoned, you said you saw me with the Candescents,” Caitlin said. “I couldn’t see anything but light.”
The Sound of Seas Page 26