As Mikel continued to make his way into the tunnel, its walls lit with phosphors, he was forced to live through images and episodes of Pao’s life, the life of his body. It felt as if Pao were trying to meld their lives somehow, draw Mikel’s soul into the past through emotional and physical experiences, shove it aside and insert his own soul in the young man’s body.
The images were disjointed and out of chronological sequence. He saw and felt Pao’s joy at holding a newborn daughter. He felt the anguish and ecstasy of his flaming death clutching Rensat. He sang to Vol in jubilation just after he finished writing the first chant of the cazh. Pao made love with ferocity. There were glimpses of many lovers, many places, many emotions. As a small boy, he pressed his hands against the great hortatur skin of a grounded balloon and marveled at the technology of Galderkhaan.
Then he stood on the side of a mountain, Pao as a much older man, weeping at the loss of Vol when Pao decided to join the Technologists. Then he was with more women, many more, and saw other lives that were too dim to discern clearly. Mikel sensed profound energy slither through his body as the earliest Priests began to decipher the gestures and movements derived from Candescent grymat—blood writing. He saw gory designs on the wall, bloodshed, violence…
Through Pao’s eyes, from a place of concealment, Mikel watched Priests commit suicide as experiments, use their blood as paint. He cried out his feeling of tragedy and betrayal when two huge gangs of Priests and Technologists both ripped to fragments the banner that was supposed to hold the city together. Back on the mountainside, he felt the urge to raise his arms to the banished red-haired woman in her airship, and suppressed it. He felt guilt for half-believing her but never defending her. He had implored her for a name, to tell him who was planning a grievous assault on Galderkhaan, but she had refused to participate in the insanity. She only wished to get away. Pao had spoken to her sister, Enzo. She left too.
Then the dial of his life whipped madly once more. As a much younger man, Pao felt one glorious moment of ascension, just short of transcending, when the Priests first realized it might be possible to become Candescent. He felt the weight of a dead daughter in his arms, fatally burned in an accident with the Technologists’ fire, an event that began the irreparable rift. Over and over and over, he felt Pao’s heart shatter as his friends, his city, died one way and another in the fire and liquid rock. He relived the spirits’ attempting to bond in dying Galderkhaan, their shrieking agony as flame ate them, flame commanded by her, by the woman in the void…
And yet strongest of all, Mikel felt Pao’s yearning for Vol. He felt Vol disappear from Pao’s life and then from the periphery of his life. He felt the loss of that connection after Pao ascended. Though Vol was also dead, the ascended could not communicate without having transcended as Pao and Rensat had done.
There was much more, out of order, out of joint, often moving so fast as to be incomprehensible. As Mikel fought to hold on to who he himself was, other memories fought back, threatened his physical and mental balance. The leopard seal was back in his mind. Mikel was becoming squeezed by images, sensations, emotions, terror… he was a very narrow entity in the middle. He tried with all his might to resist—
Back! he ordered himself. Come back! Stay in the physical!
Slowly, one at a time, Mikel picked up his feet and prayed that when he set each down, it would find the floor. He wasn’t sure how long he had been walking through the cavernous tunnel toward the airstream but he knew he was much nearer to the point of its generation. And his shaking skin, organs, and bones warned him that, the mask notwithstanding, this attempt could surely be fatal.
Through it all, Pao was still present. Pao was reaching in and stretching out, trying to thin and control what little of Mikel remained.
The tiles, activated by Pao, added to his woes. Fresh images flooded in, of elegantly appointed row houses in a Scandinavian city, then a staggering fjord—a chasm of lesser gods.
Then a sudden leap to vast grasslands and people hunting with hawks. They looked Asiatic, perhaps Mongolian. These were things he knew. Mikel’s own knowledge was now part of the ancient database.
Next, Mikel’s personal memories were front and center. He was back in Antarctica, scanning the American bases, the planes landing for the summer season, the large supply ships toiling slowly toward the continent. Pao was now merging with Mikel’s memories, making them one.
Christ, is this what the stones did to Arni? Mikel thought fearfully.
He felt the increasing pressure on his ears, on his skull, vibrating through sinew and blood and bone.
And then a jolt, a shock, a mental kick that Mikel had not anticipated. The Galderkhaani hooked into the thought of Flora, and suddenly Mikel’s vision filled with the Group’s mansion on Fifth Avenue. It gave him a flash of confidence, an anchor. But the location quickly became unpegged in time. Mikel swung from Arni’s first interview there and his synesthetic reaction to Flora’s office, to a lab where Flora was comparing the first two artifacts Mikel had obtained, to Flora’s new assistant opening packages to reveal black soundboards.
Mikel rejected the image, fought back to the fast-narrowing window that was himself in the present. As he proceeded he heard the sound and feel of the air change and hoped that this was the start of the airstream. He could not afford to hesitate, to think. He had to find the way out.
The force of the wind grew stronger and he knew he was close. Then the rippling haze of the heat from the vent began to flow beside him, then behind him. He was closer. Then the howling of the wind returned, faintly at first, and he saw an opening ahead. There was no door and he realized that this room was inside a cave like the one where he’d found the sled. The Technologists had been ambitious but practicaclass="underline" they used existing geology wherever it was feasible. The wind tunnel would provide the added benefit of a primitive form of ventilation, providing a cooling aspect to the room.
Mikel wrapped his arms protectively around his head, and with a guttural cry jumped forward into the stream. The air lifted him as before and smashed him into the wall. Mikel shrieked in pain—his right wrist was surely broken. He took several more hard knocks to his shoulder and arms but not hard enough to break them, or him. And then he was in the sweet spot—rolling over and over helplessly but managing to stay in the center, without a sled. According to what he recalled of the map he was flying away from the city toward the sea. His broken wrist was numb but as long as he remained relaxed he could keep from spinning out of control.
But he was not out of Pao’s reach entirely. The tiles were still all around him. The clarity of the images faded even as the pace of Pao’s search increased, frenetic with determination.
Get out of my head! Mikel screamed inside, but to no avail.
Pao knew he could not count on Mikel but he was probing, desperate. Mikel saw Fifth Avenue, his own apartment. He saw places he had been in Manhattan that he had forgotten.
And then Mikel felt his own mind unsqueeze and return. Countless hours after it had all begun, it all swiftly faded. Every feed from Pao simply dribbled away. Distance must have become a deciding factor.
Mikel’s first complete thought without Pao there to interfere—or help—was an immediate, very practical concern: he had no idea how to locate his entry point to the tunnel—the entry point on which his life depended. If he missed it, was there another route to the surface? Even if there were, he would be too far from the base to survive.