Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
When I came back, I was on my side in the great bed, facing Mary.
The furs were tangled around our legs. The chamber swam for a moment before settling. I felt Henrik’s solid heat at my back at once, the broad shape of him half propped behind me, one arm heavy over my waist in absentminded possession. Across from us Sven lay behind Mary in much the same way, his chest to her shoulders, one big hand spread over her belly as if he had placed it there without thinking and then left it because it belonged there.
Mary’s green eyes met mine.
We looked wrecked. Flushed, damp, hair in disarray, lips swollen, bodies slack with overuse. And still, under that, there was something bright and conspiratorial in her expression, a tiny secret flame I felt mirrored in my own face before I had formed any conscious thought.
We smiled at each other.
It wasn’t the smile of girls getting away with something. It felt stranger and deeper than that. The smile of women who had seen a pattern and recognized themselves inside it.
My voice came out a bit hoarse, but, I thought, with unmistakable girlish glee. “We know something.”
Mary gave a helpless little laugh that turned into a giggle. “Yes, we do.”
Henrik’s chest moved with a quiet chuckle behind me. “Do you, little volva?” His beard brushed my temple when he shifted. “And what is it you know?”
For one second I only felt it, the way I had felt the tree; not as deduction but as a whole condition arriving in me. It sat in the refreshment I had drunk. In the rootedness. In the hand Sven had left on Mary’s lower belly. In the certainty that had widened in that highest place and then dropped like a seed through all the levels of meaning until it landed in flesh. In the pendant’s warmth against my chest.
It seemed insane, given what I knew about mammalian biology, but perhaps it meant that a vǫlva’s senses did indeed do their work at some quantum level. I spoke before my rational mind could assemble an argument against saying it aloud.
“I’m… well, I mean… I’m going to be… pregnant.”
CHAPTER 37
Ilsa
A week later, I got to see Project Athena for the first time.
Nothing in Sicily or Rouen had prepared me for the scale of it. The journey itself felt like moving off the map: private flights, secure transfers, sealed corridors, men with holstered weapons and a kind of blank, dominant competence that seemed designed to demonstrate the importance of complete secrecy.
Then, at last, the Arctic, seen through the windows of a caterpillar-treaded vehicle that lumbered across frozen tundra. White above, white below, and in between a facility so large and so blended into the snowscape that at first my mind refused to read it as an identifiable place at all.
Inside, though, the whiteness gave way to steel, climate-controlled warmth and humidity, massive doors, polished concrete, machine noise, and a sense of buried immensity. Everything about Project Athena seemed designed to make any imaginable apocalypse manageable. It was a sanctuary, a fortress, a laboratory, and something else besides: a place from which a remnant of humanity meant to launch itself literally away from earth if it had to.
Henrik held my hand as we walked, just behind Sven and Mary, through an observation corridor whose glass looked down into one of the principal construction hangars. I stopped, my jaw slackening, hardly aware of my body despite the embarrassing nudity to which our masters had enforced our return in the vestibule just inside the entrance to the complex.
The thing below us rose in sections under cranes and lattices of scaffolding, made of sleek curves and black-white skin and open compartments where teams in bright work rigs moved like insects. Floodlights made the metal gleam. Gantries crossed the void around it. The entire hangar swallowed noise and gave it back as a vast industrial murmur.
“Athena Station,” Henrik said.
I had no answer. The archaeologist in me, absurdly enough, found the nearest available analogy not in modern aerospace but in the old cavern under Capo Zafferano. A vessel under stone. A people preparing for catastrophe by means of quasi-mystical transport. Only here the timbers had become alloys and carbon composites, the rowing benches engines and life support and radiation shielding, and the cave a climate-controlled cathedral of engineering under the Arctic ice.
“It’s overwhelming,” I said at last.
Henrik’s mouth twitched. “In scale?”
“In ambition.”
“Yes,” he said. “That too.”
I stood there staring until he touched the small of my back and guided me on, to catch up with Sven and Mary. I looked over my shoulder several times like a child leaving a fair. The impression remained: humanity, terrified and grandiose and entirely sincere, building itself a modern ark in the polar night.
The domestic side of the project lay in another section, separated from the men’s rooms, workshops, conference areas, and the more private spaces where I felt sure masters and mistresses enjoyed their submissive sexual servants. Project Athena, for all its technological sophistication, still obeyed an old logic. Men planned, built, guarded, and used. Women nurtured, gestated, submitted, and, if they were of the right sort, saw visions and dreamed dreams. In the family wing, women even had the privilege of wearing clothes.