A Vision of Fire

“I’ll try but Mrs. Pawar is pretty desperate. Cai, there’s one more thing.” He hesitated again.

“Just blurt it out.”

“Okay. Maanik seems to be emitting… something.”

“Something?”

“It’s thermal, I guess, but it seems to have substance too. A constant, steady flow from her right hand. Cold, like mist. Please don’t tell me it’s her soul or something.”

“I don’t think it’s her soul,” Caitlin said. She did not add, But I don’t know what it might be. She looked out the window. “We’re on the expressway now, traffic’s not so bad. I’ll be there in about forty-five minutes.” She hesitated. “Are you okay? What’s happening in Kashmir?”

She noticed the cab driver’s face tweak, turn slightly toward her. She looked at the name on his license, Shri Kapoor. Their eyes met for a moment in the rearview mirror.

“The UN sent a small force over there but not in the way we hoped,” Ben said. “We wanted a protectorate but this is playing out like martial law. The allied countries are starting to grandstand big-time, like the Allies after World War II. Everyone is jockeying for post-crisis influence even though we’re not past the crisis yet. Russia was first, on behalf of India. China guaranteed loans for Pakistan. That’s all I can say but it feels like we’re flinging farther away from any kind of sane, predictable political process.” He paused. “Like us,” he said tiredly. “I mean, flinging farther away from each other. Not the politics.”

She smiled, then promised, “We’re going to fix that.”

“There’s the old college Cai with the old college try,” he said.

“Rah,” she said. “But first crisis first. Tell me about the Vikings.”

“A story in runes,” he joked. There was a flash of the old Ben as he dove in, the enthusiastic kid scholar. It made her laugh, and she could imagine his answering grin. “In the ninth century, the trade route between the Baltic Sea and the Caspian Sea was essentially conquered and controlled for two hundred years by people called the Rus.”

“Rus as in Russian?”

“Exactly, but that came later, after they intermingled with the Slavs to the point of absorption.” He was racing, as if he was trying to get it all on the table before she reached him in the cab. “In the early days they were specifically the Varangian Rus—‘Varangian’ is from an Old Norse word—and they came down from Scandinavia. They mostly stuck to the trade-and-raid routes, shopping in Baghdad, periodically attacking Constantinople, as pretty much everyone did for thousands of years—”

“Three Vikings walk into a bar in Constantinople… ,” she said slowly.

Ben chuckled and sucked down a breath. He realized he was rushing.

“Okay,” he continued, more slowly. “The Varangian Rus also traveled east beyond Constantinople, to the city of Bolghar on the Volga. The Silk Road was fully active—”

“But that trade route connecting the West to the East was much more recent than an ice-free Antarctica. What’s this got to do with us?”

“The fact that it happened,” he said. “This all occurred between the ninth and eleventh centuries. It was written about, mapped, charted. But it could have happened before, any number of times, and if no one wrote about it, or we haven’t found the writings—”

“Or we haven’t deciphered the writings—”

“Exactly. And how do we know that in your ‘other time’ things were even written? We’ve witnessed these words and gestures. Maybe there were people who just memorized things, like human computers.”

And communicated those thoughts en masse, at death, to another brain? Caitlin wondered. Was that also part of the transpersonal plane? She was getting ahead of herself.

“Ben, we’re coming to the Triborough Bridge and I need a minute to just absorb—”

“Of course. I’ll see you in a few.”

“Wait. Do you have your equipment?”

“After all these years, do you really have to ask?”

“Thank you, Ben, so much.”

“You’re welcome.”

She ended the call, sat back, and took a deep breath.

Under the portentous skies, her mind returned to the task at hand, to Maanik. She had to figure out how to approach her; this could well be her last chance. Without really thinking about it, she reached out with her left hand and touched the frame of the taxi just above her window. At first she felt only the rumble of the road through the steel, but after a second she felt something deeper. She could feel a path extending far beyond the shape of the cab, the traffic outside, even beyond the towers of the city and the angry sky.