by Tom Holt
“Yes you are. You got shot, remember? In an act of selfless if rather ostentatious heroism.”
Maurice actually smiled. “Ah,” he said, “let me just explain about that. You see, there’s this thing called YouSpace – it’s horribly complicated and I don’t really understand about it myself, but—”
“I know all about YouSpace.”
“You do? Gosh. Anyway, when I got shot, I looked down at the bullet-hole, and it must’ve acted like a YouSpace doughnut, because instead of dying, I found myself…”
He tailed off. The man was shaking his head.
“Yes,” Maurice protested, “but here I am. I’m quite obviously alive, so—”
“Sorry.” No he wasn’t, or he wouldn’t be smirking like that. “The good news is, the universe in which you got yourself killed is one of a tiny handful in the multiverse that has a fully functional, operational afterlife.” He paused and widened the grin. “That’s the good news.”
“Um.”
“The bad news,” the man continued with quite uncalledfor relish, “is that you died as a consequence of a voluntary positive act of conflict in a combat situation, with,” he added spitefully, “unmistakable heroic intent. All of which, I’m truly sorry to say, makes you one of mine. I know, neither of us would’ve chosen it like this, but that’s what you get for being a goddamn show-off.”
“One of—”
“Indeed. My name is Odin. Welcome to Valhalla.”
It was the classic walking-through-a-plate-glass-door moment: the shock, the surprise, the feeling of utter foolishness. His mouth fell open and his mind went completely blank.
“I’ll just give you a quick overview of what we do here,” Odin went on, in the bored-automatic tone of someone who’s given the speech a million times before. “Valhalla is the eternal home of heroes who die in battle. That’s you. Breakfast is at six sharp; be there or miss out. Six twelve to twenty fifty-eight hours, should you survive that long, mortal combat. Twenty-one hundred hours, the dead come back to life and there’s boisterous feasting and macho drinking games in the Great Hall. Lights out at zero four hundred until breakfast at six. Your personal valkyrie or wish-maiden is Stefhilda, whom I think you’ve already met – best of luck with that one, or better still, just don’t bother. I think that’s everything, unless you’ve got any questions.”
“Mortal combat?”
Odin nodded. “You fight. People fight you. The loser dies. Quite simple, once you’ve got the hang of it.”
“Yes, but—”
“Talking of which,” Odin said, looking over the top of Maurice’s head at someone he couldn’t see, “I’d like you to meet one of your fellow guests, Eric Bloodaxe. Eric, Maurice, Maurice, Eric. See you this evening for dinner.”
“But—”
Directly behind him, someone or something was growling. He looked round and saw a huge man casually dressed in bearskins. He held a long, wide-bladed axe.
“Excuse me,” Maurice said.
“Defend yourself!” the axeman yelled, but only for form’s sake. If he’d really meant it, he’d have given Maurice a split second more time—
He opened his eyes.
He was sitting on a hard bench, drawn up to a long wooden table. The noise in the room was deafening: off-key singing, mostly, though there was also the clatter of metal crockery and the distinctive chunky noise of competitive head-butting. A plump arm appeared on the right side of his head and slammed down a wide wooden dish on the table in front of him. He looked at it.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“Boiled pork,” said a harsh female voice overhead. “What does it look like?”
“I’m Jewish.”
“Tough.”
He scowled at the plate. Not even any greens or mashed potatoes. He nudged the man sitting next to him. “What else is there?”
“Boiled pork,” the man replied. “It’s always boiled pork. It’s what there is.”
“I can’t eat this.”
“Don’t, then.”
“But—”
The man hit him in the face with a fist the size of a large melon, and he went straight to sleep.
He opened his eyes.
He was lying on the floor of the room he’d been in last night, except that there were no tables or benches. Someone dressed head to foot in camouflage gear was standing over him, pointing a rifle at his head. He blinked. “When’s breakfast?” he asked.
“You missed it,” the man replied, and shot him.
That night, at dinner, he attracted the waitress’s attention by grabbing her hand and twisting the index finger back as far as it would go. “Excuse me,” he said.
“What?”
“No pork for me, thanks. Instead—”
“There’s pork. That’s it.”
“Instead,” Maurice said firmly, “I’d like a nice bagel and a plate of doughnuts. Now, please.”
The waitress grinned at him, pulled her hand away and smacked him across the top of his head. It hurt like hell. “No doughnuts,” she said. “No bagels. House rule. Forbidden. Just pork. Eat.”
“Yes, but—”
The waitress hit him over the head with a wooden tray, and he went straight to—
“Don’t tell me,” Maurice said, as the Napoleonic grenadier levelled his bayonet and prepared to lunge. “I missed breakfast again.”
“Oui.”
“Sod. Look, is there anywhere you can buy sandwiches or something, because I’m absolutely aaargh!”
He looked at the slab of boiled pork and winced. If I had a knife, he thought, I could cut a hole in it and maybe—
“Excuse me.”
“What?”
“Could I have a knife, please?”
The waitress gave him a mocking grin. “Forbidden at table,” she said. “House rule.”
“Yes, but—”
Whack.
He woke up.
Dining hall. That meant he’d come back to life again, for the, what was it now, seventeenth time? Eighteenth? No idea. The disjointed nature of his existence, the fact that he only spent a few minutes alive and conscious each day, and the frequent savage blows to his head had left him with an unreliable memory and recurring bouts of double vision. He was so hungry he even considered eating the boiled pork, for a moment or so.
Eighteen days? Nineteen? Forty-six? A thousand? He simply couldn’t be sure anymore; and besides, what possible difference could it make? It was slowly starting to sink in: this sort of thing, every day, for ever and ever and ever. Eternal life – or, as his fellow inmates called it, Paradise.
Um.
As the plate of boiled pork swooped down from overhead he felt like a rabbit in the shadow of an eagle. He cowered; the waitress accidentally-on-purpose clonked the side of his head with her elbow, making his teeth rattle. She had the knack of catching him on exactly the same spot every single time. He thought: for ever. Even after the last star’s gone nova and entropy’s devoured every last erg of energy in the universe, we’ll still be here, killing each other and noshing boiled pork. And, apart from me, everyone seems to be enjoying it.
The bloodstain on his shirtfront was a sort of milk-chocolate brown now, and the left armpit seam of his tux had split; apparently, the daily resurrection didn’t apply to property, only flesh and blood. The pork, he’d gathered, was actually the same pig, over and over again. One admirable thing about Valhalla – it was carbon neutral, 100 per cent recycled and infinitely, infinitely sustainable.
Any minute now, he’d do something to offend one of his neighbours at table and get his face smashed in, so if he wanted to do any thinking, it had to be now. He thought, hard. For a while, nothing came. Then, just as Big Olaf to his left swung his fist back for his trademark right cross, he remembered—
He woke up. He’d missed breakfast. Ah shucks.
Today, the enemy du jour was a colourfully dressed hussar from the era of the Franco-Prussian war. As the bastard charged him, sabre uplifted rea
dy for the killing downstroke, he reached in his jacket pocket, pulled out the plastic ray-gun and hoped very much that he’d figured this out right.
The hussar was within arm’s length. He pointed the raygun and pressed the trigger. There was a blinding flash of white light, and no hussar.
Maurice smiled. One down, untold millions to go. Still, it wasn’t as if he had anything else to do.
A couple of hours later, he found out that the ray-gun had a wide-beam maximum-dispersal setting. It was way cool. Get the angle just right and you could take out a whole battalion of American Civil War zouaves or the entire Zulu contingent at Rorke’s Drift. He pressed on. That evening at dinner, he knew, he wasn’t going to be popular with his fellow residents, but he couldn’t help that. If this was going to work, he was going to have to zap them all.
Round about tea-time, by his best estimate, he stood alone in the Great Hall. The battery was showing signs of being on its last legs, but he hoped he wasn’t going to need more than one more shot, if that. He twiddled the dial on the top of the ray-gun across to minimum beam, maximum output, and waited.
Not for very long. Boot-heels on the stone stairs, and then Odin appeared in the doorway. He looked at Maurice and smiled.
“Evening,” Odin said. “Nice to see you’re entering into the spirit of things.”
Maurice raised the ray-gun and took careful aim. “This is a constant object,” he said, trying to be Dirty Harry but coming out a quarter to Christopher Robin. “Do you know what that means?”
Odin just grinned.
“There comes a time,” Maurice went on, “when a man, even if he’s English, gets so pissed off he demands to see the manager. That’s you, right?”
Nod.
“When I was a kid,” he went on, “my aunt Jane bought me a load of ‘Myths and legends of the…’ books. I seem to remember, Norse gods aren’t actually immortal. They chuff along pretty well indefinitely under optimum conditions, but if you kill them, they die.”
“Hypothetically,” Odin replied, a trifle too casually. “Can’t say it’s actually true, because it’s never been tried.”
“I have a scientific turn of mind,” Maurice said. “Let’s give it a go.”
Odin shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “I’ve always wondered what it’d be like. Of course, the Valhalla Effect would bring me back to life in, let’s see…” (a glance at the Rolex Oyster on his wrist) “three hours and seventeen minutes, at which point I’d come back to life seriously annoyed with you. But by all means, go ahead.”
“Seriously annoyed,” Maurice repeated. His arms were hurting from holding up the ray-gun for so long. “You might even do me physical harm, or kill me.” He smiled. “Yawn.”
Odin walked up to him, gently took the ray-gun out of his hand and tucked it back in his pocket. “You’re pathetic,” he said kindly. “You wouldn’t shoot me, for the same reason I wasn’t all that keen on getting shot; neither of us know if the Valhalla Effect works on gods. You know what? You really shouldn’t be here.”
Always nice to know you agree with the Supreme Being on something. “Fine,” Maurice said. “Send me home.”
“Sorry, can’t.” Odin looked at him; half annoyance, half compassion, one vivid blue eye. “Follow me,” he said. “I have a private dining room.”
“Private—?”
“Mphm. Oh come on,” he added. “You don’t think I make do with boiled bloody pork, do you?”
It was through another of those tiresome invisible doors. Inside—
Maurice stared. The colour scheme was daffodil yellow and Delft blue. The cooker was magnificent – straight off the set of the most fashionable TV chef. Burnished copper pans hung from hooks; a complete set of Le Creuset crowded the hobs. The spice rack had more shelves than the British Library. The most ravishingly amazing smell—
“Filet de chevreuil roti avec sauce aigre-douce dauphinoise,” Odin said proudly, “my signature dish. Grab a plate and park your bum. Just give me a couple of minutes while I sauté the artichoke hearts.”
For a moment… just for a split second. But, “Not for me, thanks,” Maurice said (and his heart broke as he said it, but what the hell).
Odin opened the oven door. The perfume of roasting juices filled the universe. “Sure?”
Maurice nodded. “In my myths-and-legends book,” he said, “if you eat anything in the Underworld, you’ve got to stay there forever.”
Odin laughed. “You’re a smart boy, Maurice Katz,” he said. “Maybe I misjudged you. That’s genuine hero thinking, that is.” He put the casserole dish back in the oven and slammed the door. “How about a frothy coffee instead? That’s allowed,” he added. “Promise. Gods’ honour.”
“Thanks.”
For two minutes or so, Odin fooled about with a machine of unbelievable complexity and sophistication, which eventually granted him a triple espresso and a gingerbread latte. He sat down on the opposite side of the red-and-white chequerboard tablecloth and lifted his cup in genuine respect. “Right,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
Maurice licked the crests off the petrified froth-breakers. Cinnamon sprinkles. Maybe he’d been wrong all along, and this was Paradise after all. “Simple,” he said. “Thanks ever so much for having me to stay, but I want to go home now, please.”
“Can’t. Sorry.”
“All I need,” Maurice said, “is a simple doughnut. I bet you’ve got a recipe.”
“Loads,” Odin replied. “There’s plain and simple, or with jam, Dutch style, New Orleans style, yeast batter doughnuts Polish style, doughnut babas with rum, Greek honey doughnuts, creme fraiche doughnut balls—”
“Any of them got a hole in the middle?”
“No.”
“In that case, I’ll settle for a nice bagel. You can do bagels, can’t you?”
Odin shook his head. “Can’t seem to get the right flour. And before you ask, onion rings in batter are also a big double negative. House rules. Look,” he went on, smiling gently, “I wish it wasn’t this way. We both know you don’t exactly fit in here, and that’s sad. I respect where you’re coming from. I believe you’ve got character, integrity and a whole lot of guts—”
“You ought to, you’ve seen them often enough.”
“But unfortunately there’s nothing I can do – my hands are tied. Death is death; there’s no going back.”
Maurice glowered at him. “Multiverse theory.”
“Ah, well.” Odin spread his hands in a vague, ambiguous gesture. “Exactly so. All across the multiverse, in countless billions of alternative realities, there are versions of you walking around alive and well, in some cases even happy, and I’m sure that’s a tremendous comfort to you. Here, though—” He shook his head. “No dice. Sorry. Look, here’s what I’ll do, given that you’re probably one of the most heroic heroes we’ve ever had the privilege of hosting. You give me the constant object, and I’ll see to it you get chicken noodle soup every third Friday. Just for crying out loud don’t tell anyone or I’ll have riots on my hands.”
Maurice shook his head. “In my myths-and-legends book,” he said, “there was this man who wrestled with Death and won.”
“Hercules. He beat you for Best Hero.”
“Quite,” Maurice said. “Thank you, Mister Tactful. The point is, it can be done. Right?”
Odin gave him a cautious look. “Are you suggesting that you and I wrestle? Only, forgive me, there’s definite overtones there, and I have to say, no offence, but—”
“What I mean is,” Maurice said firmly, “there are ways and means round the rules. Yes?”
Odin looked at him.
“And you don’t want me here, and I really don’t want to be here. Well?”
Odin smiled. “It’s really got to you, hasn’t it?” he said. “Missing out to Hercules, I mean, for the Best Hero gong. Listen, just being nominated is pretty hot stuff; you should be satisfied with that.”
“I couldn’t give a damn,” Maurice said, l
ike he really meant it. “I want to get out of here now. You can fix it, if you really try. Otherwise, I guess I’ll just have to go on blowing everybody away, forever and ever. And I really don’t think you want that. All those bruised heroic egos—”
Odin scowled at him; then, quite abruptly, his face went blank. “Did I tell you,” he said, “about the Equal Opportunities program?”
“Don’t change the—”
“You may have noticed,” Odin went on, “that the guests we have here are exclusively male.”
“Yes. So what?”
Odin shook his head. “Such an outdated attitude,” he said. “Particularly now that so many of the major warmongering nations are putting women into front-line combat as well as men. I ask you, is that right? Of course not. I’m fully committed to a chauvinism-free Valhalla. Naturally, to start with there’ll have to be a quota system—”
“What’s this got to do with anything?”
“Think,” Odin said, beaming at him. “Naturally, we can’t rush things, I mean, there’s accommodation issues, changing-room facilities, the whole nightmare realm of redoing all the plumbing, but—”
Maurice took out the ray-gun. “Stop drivelling,” he said. “What are you up to?”
“Quite simple,” Odin replied. “To begin with, naturally, we’ll be looking to recruit the brightest and the best from the female military community. We want the first intake of women in Valhalla to be of the highest possible calibre, no pun intended. To which end, I’ve drawn up a shortlist of Fighting Women of Today whom I want to see coming here in, say, the next six months. Now, would you possibly care to hazard a guess as to which name is right at the top of that list?”
Maurice stared at him. “You wouldn’t.”
“Bet?”
“But she’s—”
Odin grinned. “Your one true love. Just think. You’d be together, for ever and always, the ultimate romantic resolution. The first thing you’d see every morning for all eternity would be her smiling face, just before,” he added with a pleasant twinkle in his eye, “she blew your head off. Now, isn’t that your actual honest-to-goodness Liebestod? I ask you. What more could a heroic lover possibly want?”