“Micro and genetics,” she replied. “So you just drafted me onto this Proteus Team?” Just like the Herculean Society and their recruitment codes.
Fallon continued looking at the tablet as he spoke. “As I said, it’s a prescreening measure to save time. There are twenty-three teams, each with at least a hundred candidates. Rather than issuing ident cards and credentials on a case-by-case basis, we streamlined the process by entering the likenesses into the facial recognition database. In the event that your expertise was called for, a proper invitation would have been made, along with suitable compensation for your time.”
He looked up and met her eyes again. “I’m afraid the protocols I put in place to welcome you didn’t anticipate the possibility that you might drop in of your own volition. I’m sorry I can’t give you a proper welcome. Proteus is part of our terraforming initiative, and we’re still in the conceptual phase with that. I would love to talk to you about the possibility of introducing genetically modified extremophiles into the Venutian environment, but as I said, this is kind of a bad time. Again, I apologize for wasting your time. I’ll have some information sent to you, and maybe we can see about reimbursing you for your time and expenses.”
“Actually, Mr. Fallon, I’m here on an unrelated matter. I’m looking for Dr. Ishiro Tanaka.”
Fallon was nonplussed, but Carter saw the other man react. She recognized the Japanese man from the photograph that accompanied his CV. He was clean-shaven with a modest business-like haircut, but ten years older than Fallon. Without waiting for Fallon’s reply, she started toward the table. “Dr. Tanaka, I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
Fallon hastened to intercept her. “Dr. Carter, you can’t just barge in here and start interrogating people.”
She ignored him and continued to focus on Tanaka. “I understand that you’re an expert on microwave heating of plasma in the ionosphere. I was hoping to get your professional opinion on whether these earthquakes could be manmade, specifically the result of something like the HAARP array.”
She expected him to scoff, dismissing the very notion as baseless conspiracy theory, not worth the trouble of a detailed debunking.
But Tanaka did not scoff. Instead, he swallowed nervously.
He wasn’t the only one.
Fallon stepped in front of her. “Dr. Carter, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“You know something,” she persisted. “Dr. Tanaka, were the earthquakes man-made? Did someone use HAARP or something like it to trigger the earthquakes?”
Fallon’s forehead creased in thought. He looked at Tanaka for a moment, then back at Carter. “Perhaps you can be of some help to us.”
“She’s a biologist,” Tanaka said. Despite his obvious ethnicity, there was no hint of an accent in his speech. “What would she know about this?”
Fallon ignored the comment. “Dr. Carter, to answer your question, HAARP had nothing to do with what happened today, but you are correct about one thing. The earthquakes were man-made.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I thought that was obvious. I made them.”
TEN
A silence hung over the group as they made their way out of the ice tunnel into a natural cavern system. Pierce couldn’t tell if his companions had been left speechless by the enormity of what Fiona had accomplished, or if, after everything else they had witnessed, they were taking this latest miracle in stride. He decided it was probably both, a not inappropriate oscillation between two opposing reactions that set up an interference pattern to cancel out everything else.
Miracle.
As a scientist, he was uncomfortable with the word. It felt like a cop-out. Every phenomenon had an explanation consistent with the Laws of Physics. Period. Admittedly, sometimes the explanation was beyond the comprehension of even the best theoretical minds, or as science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke had asserted, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Falling back on words like ‘miracle’ or ‘magic’ was just plain lazy.
Then again, he was an archaeologist, not a physicist or an engineer. He didn’t need to understand how Fiona had — using the Mother Tongue, or that weird ball of memory metal, or some combination of the two — turned the pool in the subterranean chamber into a skating-rink. At the same time, she had opened a tunnel through the ice that spiraled even deeper beneath the surface. It was enough for him to believe that an explanation did exist.
The strangest part was that it wasn’t even that cold. The ice was freezing to the touch, but the surrounding air was tolerable. It was as if the heat energy had been stolen away from the liquid water through some kind of endothermic reaction, rather than a more conventional exchange of heat with the surrounding environment.
Instant freezing by means unknown. Not a miracle, not magic, just a technology none of them could explain. Pierce might have said the same about his smartphone.
Bottom line, they were moving again, hopefully in the right direction.
The ice tunnel brought them to an outflow pipe — like a culvert deep beneath the surface of the pool — where the water drained out of the ancient city and joined an underground river. The passage rose, like the trap assembly in a flush toilet, then dropped in a frozen waterfall that splashed down the limestone wall. That was where the ice ended. Below them, the river was a glistening black void, a good twenty feet across, flowing through a deep canyon-like groove that cut through the uneven floor of the cavern.
Fiona offered no explanation for it, but said, “We should go upriver.”
“That will take us to the surface?” Pierce asked.
Fiona nodded.
“You saw that in your vision?” Gallo asked.
“Sort of. I think the vision was just my brain’s way of making sense of it all.”
“I’d still like to hear more about it,” Gallo said. “You mentioned the Raven?”
Fiona shrugged. “Just Raven…no ‘the.’ He’s a trickster figure in the mythology of the Pacific Northwest tribes, but his tricks usually worked out for good in the end.”
“And you saw Raven in your vision?”
“Sort of. It’s like I was inside the story. How Raven stole the sun and moon. My grandmother taught it to me. Well, a version of it. Every tribe tells it a little differently.”
“Not an uncommon thing in oral traditions,” Pierce observed.
“Tell us,” Gallo pressed.
“We should keep moving,” Lazarus said in a low, grave voice. Despite the fact that his clothes were now bloody tatters hanging from his large frame, he seemed to have made a full recovery from the wounds inflicted by the trilo-pede swarm, but Pierce knew how demanding, physically and mentally, the regeneration process was.
As they made their way into the cavern, following the course of the underground river, Fiona related what she had seen in her dream of Raven.
“And is that the way your grandmother taught it to you?” Gallo asked when she reached the end of the story.
“There were a few differences. In the original version, Raven waits until Girl stops to take a drink of water from the river, and changes himself into a tiny little fish, which she swallows without realizing it. Later on, she gives birth to the baby boy — Raven in a new disguise. I guess the idea of swallowing a fish and getting pregnant always seemed kind of silly to me. Maybe that’s why the dream was different.”
“Interesting variation on immaculate conception,” Gallo remarked. “Were there any other differences?”