“That seems to be the idea. It’s fairly common in our world, isn’t it? ‘United’ this or ‘Confederation’ of that. Unfortunately, there was a signing aspect to the spoken language to give it nuance, so the words alone don’t tell the entire story.”
“Fascinating,” she said. “Like the click consonants in many African tongues.”
“Exactly. But there is still a big piece of the puzzle I am missing,” Mikel said.
“And that is?” she asked.
He was silent again.
“Are you thinking, Dr. Jasso, or am I going to have to pull each answer from you?” Dr. Cummins asked.
“Sorry,” he said sincerely. “I was thinking. I’m trying to clarify ideas in my mind, which isn’t easy. I’m not accustomed to discussing this away from the Group in New York, where everyone throws ideas into the ring. My confusion has to do with the Galderkhaani beliefs about the afterlife.”
“Religion.”
“Broadly,” he agreed, “though I’m not sure they made a distinction between religion and everyday life. What I mean is, it wasn’t so compartmentalized. Even the scientific class entertained a very strong belief in what we’d call the mystical.”
“Like alchemists or druids,” she said.
“I suppose that would be a good comparison,” Mikel concurred. “Yes, quite apt.”
“I grew up in Scotland, and it is steeped in those old beliefs, as you are probably aware,” Dr. Cummins said. “As a child I first went to the mountains known as the Old Woman of the Moors, as their shape reminds some of a sleeping goddess. Every eighteen years, the full moon moves in such a way that a person standing with arms outstretched like Mr. Da Vinci’s drawing would be perfectly framed by the moon. To those watching from one of the stone avenues constructed for that purpose, time and space vanishes and human and celestial body are one.”
“An illusion of geometry,” Mikel suggested.
“Now who is the doubter?” Dr. Cummins asked. “What you just said is quite true, but there’s more. From that same vantage point, the course of the moon is such that it strokes the sides of the goddess Earth, rousing great energies. Everyone there feels it.” She chuckled. “One reason I am out here with you, Dr. Jasso? Not because you are especially persuasive. The earth is, however. I went back home a year ago. Even with all my mental safeguards working on behalf of scientific explanations, I couldn’t quantify the feeling I got inside. It was a kind of tickling in my belly that rose and fell from my skull to my toes. It made me smile long after the moon was gone. And I’ll tell you this: I do not approach any peaks here, ice or stone, without feeling some of that sensation return. The geology, the cosmos, they waken something. Even in scientists.” She gave him a quick look. “You too? Or are you more hard-nosed than that?”
“I was,” he admitted as they thumped across a patch of snow that was rippled like speed bumps. “My grandmother’s belief in spirits was absolute, but she was very old world.”
“You say that as if ‘new’ is automatically better than ‘old.’”
“The eyes are fresher, less steeped in accepted tradition than in proof.” He looked in the direction of the pit. “I want, I need proof of what I experienced out there. I didn’t become a scientist to disprove old ideas. Nothing would please me more than to know that what my grandmother felt was right.”
“I understand that and I respect it,” Dr. Cummins said. “Like you, I was set on this path by someone else.”
“Who?”
“My uncle Timothy, who had a ranch in Kirkcudbright, Scotland. The first time I saw a horse shyte, unicorns lost their magic for me. I need things that keep more than my curiosity alive. I am constantly searching for places that rekindle my sense of wonder.”
Mikel replied thoughtfully, “This enterprise with Galderkhaan—it started that way. But the more relics my colleagues and I found, the more we learned of their language, it seemed as if they were shaping up to be a sad microcosm of all humanity: roughly one hundred thousand people who could not get along without dividing into factions. And I have since learned, from my excursion underground, that it wasn’t just something that caused the Source to turn on its creators. There was a Dr. Frankenstein, someone who unleashed it.”
“Mass homicide?”
“Unintentional, perhaps, but yes… the destruction of this entire civilization was spurred by sociopolitical, possibly romantic, fractures that would be all too familiar to any modern human.”
Dr. Cummins considered this new information. “Entire,” she said.
“I’m sorry?”
“You said it destroyed the entire civilization,” Dr. Cummins said. “Are you sure?”
“What do you mean?”
“Ancient peoples were remarkably mobile across vast stretches of ocean,” she said. “The Vikings, Kon-Tiki, even Columbus and Magellan…”
“That’s true,” Mikel said.
“Surely you and your colleagues have considered this.”
“We have,” he admitted.
Dr. Cummins regarded him. “Radio silence again,” she said. “So you do have evidence of some diaspora.”
“We have words and claims, not evidence,” he told her. Once again, he didn’t want to say any more. It was one thing to ruminate about a dead culture. It was another to confide in her that hostile agents were trying to finish a struggle they started millennia ago. That might be far, far more than she had bargained for.
The two fell silent as the truck purred across the ice. Mikel thought back to the conversation he had just had with Casey Skett, about the Group having an origin other than the one Flora had told him. This shift from seeking knowledge to seeking power was disturbing. It was fascinating, even compelling, certainly logical to think the Group had been founded by refugee Galderkhaani. It was frightening, however, to imagine these people, and Skett’s people, still seeking to control the tiles. The stones were an incredible source of information. Yet they were also a source of great destructive power. Bringing just one back to New York had caused Arni’s brain to liquefy. It had caused Mikel to hallucinate severely or, briefly, to time travel—he still didn’t know which. In the lava tube to which they were returning, a wall of tiles enabled him to communicate with Galderkhaani dead—and for them to enter his mind from miles away. It had driven animals mad along lines of force that extended halfway around the globe.
Though he was headed back to the site as Casey Skett had commanded, Mikel wondered what kind of experiment the man had in mind… and whether he could actually go through with it. He did not know enough to bounce that off Dr. Cummins.
They crossed the partially drifted-over tracks of their previous transit, when they had been relocating the Halley VI modules from the compromised ice shelf. The rest of the ride continued to pass in silent reflection. For his part, Mikel was imagining a thriving civilization on the wastes across which they traveled. On ice? On clear plains? He didn’t know. He pictured airships in the sky, vessels on the sea, animals long-since extinct like the one he’d seen below, the “guardian” of the chamber. It was not just an exponential Pompeii. In AD 79 when Vesuvius buried that port city, the vast bulk of the Roman Empire and its citizens, its diverse culture, survived. Galderkhaan and its people were obliterated. He did not know the degree to which any refugees may have maintained a pure form of the language, the arts, the faith, the technology.
But there is that magnificent library, he thought covetously. And there were ascended and transcended souls. To be able to talk to them, debrief them—it would be like being able to talk to the monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, who some archaeologists believe was one and the same with Moses, or Alexander the Great, or even just a vegetable vendor from Nero’s Rome.