The Sound of Seas Read Online Free PDF Page B

When? By what chain of evolution? The answers would change human understanding of the world. Those answers, those profound truths were also out there, and Mikel couldn’t get to them. He couldn’t convince a group of scientiststo help him investigate further. In fairness, Mikel was not being as cooperative, and thus as persuasive, as he might have been. His unauthorized descent into the ancient underground ice tunnels, and his insistence that he could not reveal much of what he had found there—not without the authorization of his employer, Flora Davies and the Group back in New York—had alienated the science team and most of the other occupants. The sole exception was Siem der Graaf. The young maintenance worker appreciated the fact that the archaeologist treated him like a colleague and not a high-priced repairman. Siem also appreciated Mikel’s willingness to charge into the unknown in pursuit of knowledge. If not for the extreme climatic conditions, Mikel wouldn’t be sitting here because of the Halley VI staff. But he wouldn’t get more than a quarter mile without gear and assistance.
    Making matters worse at the moment, he had been unable to reach Flora Davies, his superior at Group headquarters, her assistant Adrienne, or anyone else in the NYU-area mansion. The Internet was down, and phone service was poor though he still got into voice mail; for some reason, Flora wasn’t calling back. He had seen on the news that the West Village in Manhattan was still reeling from unexplained fires in the area; no doubt that, and the water pumped at the inferno, had compromised the wires in old conduits beneath the mansion.
    His forced isolation wasn’t entirely contrary, however. Mikel used the time to create a written record of everything he could remember about his trip through the ruins of ancient Galderkhaan and his encounter with the spirits of the Priests Pao and Rensat. With one hand, he had arduously pecked out the log on his tablet.
    The dead , he had written, are not dead—merely without bodies . The lowest of these appear to be “unascended souls.” Like poltergeists in modern lore, they appear to be trapped in the place where they lived or died. I encountered two of these: Galderkhaani Enzo, who had a modern soul; and scientist Jina Park, who was held here, in her thrall. I do not understand by what mechanism either of them remained in the caverns below the ice. P erhaps by choice? Perhaps by the means through which they died—intense fire? Or perhaps this is the Galderkhaani version of hell, a place where souls are punished for suicide or murder or other mortal crimes.
    In the happier order of things, the Galderkhaani believed that at death they ascended—single souls reaching a level of celestial epiphany I still don’t understand. From my studies I learned that Pao and his contemporary Vol created a ritual they called cazh , words and a ceremony that bonded souls, allowed them to shuck the body en masse and, together, rise to an even higher state of spiritual enlightenment—Transcendence, which I would equate with traditional angels or djinn in more familiar ancient lore. Their ultimate goal was to bring together enough souls to— well, transcend Transcendence and achieve Candescence, a state of bliss they believed would make them somehow “one” with the cosmos.
    Strangely, it did not sound lunatic as he wrote it. Mikel’s livelihood was to conduct research for the Group, research that sought every fragment of knowledge they could glean about Galderkhaan. During that quest he had encountered many ancient and current faiths that, despite their subtle differences, all had an archetypical similarity: without fail, each of them believed that humans die and a spiritual part of them goes to an afterlife.
    Who am I to dispute any of it , he thought as he added material to his tablet. Either I spent hours speaking with a pair of transcended