Mikel shivered, and not from the cold. Perhaps, he thought, right now, he was surrounded by ascended souls he could not see or hear. Regardless, the sadness of their loss was suddenly palpable, their trauma felt immediate as if it had just occurred. It was as real and as current as any he had ever known.
It may be that Pao and Rensat are watching, he thought. Perhaps spirits have always been watching.
Angels and devils. Many survivors of the cataclysm may have lost their roots over generations. The idea of Transcendence may have morphed, via Galderkhaani expatriates, into Valhalla, the Elysian Fields, heaven, and other versions of an afterlife. It could be that Candescents became the earliest gods.
“By coming here, we may be returning to God,” he said.
“Sorry?”
“I was just thinking,” Mikel said. “What if it’s the tinsel that’s fake, but the tree is real. What if all the trappings of religion were created to keep wandering minds engaged.”
“I’m not following,” Dr. Cummins said.
“I’m not sure I am either,” Mikel admitted, smiling and once again falling silent.
Dr. Cummins slowed the truck and raised her goggles slightly. The insides of the lenses were misty and she wiped them with the side of her thumb. It could just be humidity. Or maybe she had felt something emotional here and shed a few tears. She said nothing as she replaced the dark glasses and urged the Toyota across the last, smooth leg of their journey.
As they neared the mouth of the round pit, Mikel saw that it was nearly perfectly round, about one hundred feet in diameter, with a shadow just below the lip that was as flat black as the snow was brilliant white. The edges had been melted unevenly by the flame then refrozen, creating the illusion of a small, circular waterfall stuck in time. The hairline fractures had also been filled in with melted ice and covered with windblown flecks. Dr. Cummins pressed on cautiously, both of them listening for any sound that could suggest the ice had weakened. The external thermometer mounted to the hood showed no discernable rise in temperature as they approached. There were no sudden dips in the ice field.
“I don’t see any steam out there,” Dr. Cummins said. “How deep were your tunnels?”
“The crevasse I descended was maybe a hundred feet,” Mikel said. “I can’t be sure. I fell some of the way.”
“It was artificial?” she asked.
“A lava tube, as I assume this one is, since the fire was able to shoot through rock,” Mikel said.
“We should go the rest of the way on foot,” the glaciologist suggested. “Reconnoiter only. We can break out the gear when we know what we’re looking at.”
Mikel agreed, though at some point very soon he was going to have to tell her his assignment and contact Casey Skett and find out exactly why the man wanted him out here.
Dr. Cummins reported back to the communications center at Halley VI and after suiting up for the cold they hopped from the cab to the surface. The desolation was not as profound as it had been when Mikel first arrived in Antarctica. Dr. Cummins obviously felt it too: when she climbed from the cab she was not just looking at the pit, she was turning around.
Mikel walked over. “Anything wrong?” he asked over his muffler.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
“But you feel something different from before.”
The woman nodded.
Mikel didn’t have to ask what that was. The Old Woman of the Moors was here—at least, her presence and mystery were.
Mikel moved first and Dr. Cummins followed. The crunch of the ice under their boots was muted by the drifted snow. Their toes kicked up little puffs that swirled in unseen eddies of air. The winds were calmer out here and everything else was quiet, save for something they noticed as they neared the pit: occasional, echoing raps.
“What’s that?” Mikel asked, hesitating as he tried to make out the sound.
“Icicles falling,” Dr. Cummins said. “It probably looks like a long white beard down there with the fast-frozen drips and runoff.”
“The Old Woman has a companion,” Mikel quipped.
Dr. Cummins flashed him a thumbs-up that relaxed them both. Mikel hadn’t realized how on edge he was until then.
Walking almost shoulder to shoulder so that one could help the other in case of uncertain footing, they approached the pit with the same gingerly steps they would take approaching a fissure or crevasse. Along the opposite rim of the pit, Mikel saw only the fast-frozen ice, not ground. There wasn’t a single visible crack in the deep cover here; it was like vanilla frosting laid on with a thick spatula.
“I’ve seen geothermal heat generate melting like this on the Amundsen Sea, but not here,” Dr. Cummins said, leaning toward him as they trudged across the ice.
“That’s quite a distance away.”
“About two thousand kilometers,” she said. “To be honest, we don’t know the extent to which subaerial volcanism may be responsible for any of that. Even so, to have reached this far? That wasn’t even part of the most ambitious thinking. Dr. Jasso, is it possible that your ancient civilization covered the entire continent to the western region? It was pretty icy there during the period you indicated.”
“I don’t believe so,” he said. “From the research, I believe there were densely populated pockets across the continent. I would imagine that population, if not controlled, was strictly determined by the food supply.”
“Obviously, they would have had fish, sea mammals, birds—”
“Possibly each other,” he added. “I know nothing about their interment practices.”
“That’s an unpleasant thought, though you’re right. I have heard about isolated pockets that practiced cannibalism along the Amazon.”
“The Galderkhaani were big on jasmine,” Mikel said. “Drank a lot of warm tea, I’d imagine.”
“I like that better,” Dr. Cummins said. “The practice, not that flavor of tea. Dr. Jasso?”
“Yes?”
“Am I whistling past a graveyard?” she asked.
“It’s quite possible,” he said. “I’m uneasy here too. I would be interested in going back through reports from this region, see if other researchers have experienced anything—” he stopped as he sought an appropriate word.
“Off? Ripe? Gray? Oppressive?” Dr. Cummins contributed.
“All of that,” he said.
There was a high, warbling rush of sound. The two of them stopped at the same time. Dr. Cummins pulled her parka from one side and turned her ear toward the pit.
“That’s not the wind,” she said. “Did you hear anything like that below?”
Mikel shook his head. Whatever it was, the sound came from inside the pit, soft and melodious, modulating slightly and echoing on its way up and down.
“It could be an ice flute,” she suggested. “Wind through a hollow icicle—”
“That’s not whistling,” Mikel said. He had heard those in Norway, frozen “panpipes.” Wind passing through a hollow tube of ice has a shriller quality. “That’s humming.”
“Can’t be,” Dr. Cummins said. “Can it?”
“I have learned to dismiss nothing where Galderkhaan is concerned.”
Dr. Cummins shook her head as if to say, I’m just not ready for that.
They started walking again, cautiously, when the frozen water on the lip of the pit nearest them, the northeastern rim, began to darken. It was like watching bread turn moldy in time lapse: something unhealthy was moving toward them.
“Doctor?” Mikel asked.