by Ari Bach
Chapter V: Vadsø
AMID THE duties of her new life as a walrus tamer, Violet started her real training. She awoke when Alopex came to her team’s dreamscape, fully rested after her first lucid dream in ages. Veikko rushed out the barracks door first to see Skadi and hear the latest news on the malfunctioning detectors. Vibeke headed to one of the arsenals, where she was learning new weapons with names like the “Talley Buffalo Cannon” and the “Cerebral Bore,” which made Violet eager to dig quickly into her education. Alopex led her from the barracks to the caves and left her in the company of Snorri, a small and ancient man of 141 with an accent thicker than Valfar’s. With her link back on, the meaning of every word loaded into her head as it was spoken, to Violet’s great pleasure.
“Call me Snorri,” he began. “I forgot my last name sometime in the nineties, but I know more about the history of this hole than we ever programmed into Alopex, who I programmed, by the way. Her voice came from my seventh wife. Her looks came from a fox my fourth wife ran over on our way here. We traveled in a vehicle with treads and wheels. I won’t be boring you with any epic tales you don’t want to hear. They just wanted me to meet you so you knew who to ask. You can’t find me online—I don’t have antennae. Find me in my hut if you want me. It’s the hut made of bricks, little square things, over that way. You can always recognize me because I’m the only man here with glasses. Glasses are these things on my head. They help me see without resorting to Niide’s eye surgery. Niide graduated 133rd in his class. Come anytime, ask anything. I know everything. Today I’m just taking you to Balder’s office. He’s given the last fifty-three recruits their first lessons. This way, ask what you will.”
He turned and walked into the caves. Violet followed and a couple of questions came naturally.
“How many were in Dr. Niide’s class?”
“About 14,440 men, women, and various other genders. He’s improved since then, but these glasses have served me well for just under a hundred years, and I have no need for him to stick things in my eyes or anywhere else. I like to see, hear, and copulate manually, thank you very much. You can trust him, of course. He’ll save your life twice before the month is out.”
She didn’t want to ask how he knew that.
“Thanks,” she said. “So tell me about Balder. The short version, please.”
“Balder is so named because he’s nearly invincible. You might have noticed that most members his age bear the scars of reassembly, having been killed at least once or lost various parts. Balder has never been killed, resuscitated, or even bionically repaired. Before he came here, his name was Justin Robertson. He was from the Rocky Mountains in America, where as a child he survived the third Catholic uprising, in which his family was burned alive. He survived the following gang wars and the paroxysmal holocaust of 2199 and survived the crossing of the Atlantic on nothing but a cargo skiff with four pirates he met in Tortuga.” Snorri kept speaking without seeming to stop for a breath. “Only to arrive,” he continued, “in Iceland during the fires of 2204, where he stayed through 2205, whence came the genetic abominations of Høtherus, whom he fought off to earn his entry to our cadre. Valhalla was quite different then, only just reformed by Alföðr. Since then he has done his name honor by accomplishing over two hundred and seventy-five top-level missions, including our intervention with the Phobosian separatists—yes, that was us—and halting the rampage of the Greenwich Antipacifists through the London Underground.”
Violet called up a few specifics from Alopex as she listened. Every battle and disaster Snorri listed was described as the most terrible event of its time. The Rocky Mountains were as wild as the west got, the third Catholic Uprising was the most violent of the four, and the paroxysmal holocaust was the worst chemical war ever fought on Earth. The Greenwich Antipacifist rampage was closer to home and recent enough to have been taught to Violet in school. They rarely killed people anymore but the GAP punks were still active in parts of London, and every traveler of the underground was warned to be mindful of them.
“What’s Alf been through?” She had to know.
“Quite a contrast. Old ‘Alf’ has been killed at least seven times and retains only his original heart, head, and a few other assorted parts. Though nobody here will agree, he calls it a careless streak from his youth. The fact is, he has only been injured at all in less than half a percent of his missions, the sheer volume of which have made him the experienced cyborg he is today. Bit by bit he’s become laden with diverse machinery in his chassis, a body which he can fundamentally rearrange for any situation, even to the point that last year he managed to disguise himself as an industrial food blender to avoid detection during a recent raid.”
Violet eyed him in disbelief, but he showed no sign of having a sense of humor. She tried to imagine just what modifications could make a human being so malleable and mechanical. Snorri went on. “Despite all that, Alföðr did not lose his eye in battle. Rather, he had it modified with an MMR five-lens system that can record and play back imagery from any point of view. It can also extrapolate impending motion. His Tikari, his fifth, is a tarantulesque little fellow with six eyes to correspond. Though he was never officially named the head of Valhalla, his word is respected above all and rarely disputed. When he arrived he was already a poet warrior, of sorts,” Snorri laughed, “with training in more arts of war than most people could even name.”
“Where did he come from?”
“From the far east. Nobody knows his given name, but his original surname was Gyatso.”
“What happened to his team?”
“A tale you would have to ask him. Suffice it to say, they were all killed not two days after he arrived, and in their absence he set to work changing many a thing here. Valhalla was not always so peaceful a valley nor so noble or heterogeneous an organization. He’s to blame for this place, for the good and the bad, and for the library on your left, in which he keeps hundreds of ancient paper volumes, some of which have never been scanned up.”
Violet looked as they passed a clear vault door. The room was full of clothbound or leathery blocks like the one she’d seen on Vibeke’s bed. As the books she knew had all been loaded into her mind within a few seconds, the notion of trying to learn a whole room’s worth by text struck her as impossible, if not a waste of time and a cause of terrible eyestrain.
“Alföðr has also, since the first year of his arrival, written a monthly log called Håvamål, which is known for a dry sense of humor and words so sesquipedalian that they make ‘obfuscate’ look downright paucisyllabic.”
Even the link didn’t have a definition for the last word. Before she could ask, they came to Balder’s office, with Balder waiting outside the door.
“Violet! Welcome and welcome again! Come in, come in. Thank you, Snorri!”
“Gogs, Balder,” said the old man, and he turned and left. Violet followed Balder into his office, a cluttered room with bare rock walls. Most of the clutter appeared to be weapons and polishing instruments. Some of the blades and wooden contraptions were highly ornate, decorative beyond what she imagined a weapon would have use for. One of the walls held a Bowie knife not unlike Sergeant Cameron’s, but this one had a handle of bone and a blade of uneven metal with small ridges. Unconsciously, her Tikari peeked out of her chest to take a look. It caught Violet off guard that it had such a mind of its own, but she could hardly blame it for peeking at its ancestor.
“Well, Violet, my first duty is to destroy your concept of reality, your ideas of how the world works, and give you at least some idea of what this place is all about. First: who do you think runs the world?”
“The CEOs,” she replied without hesitation.
“Good! Yes, there are kings and queens and presidents and all manner of titles. They all mean the same thing: poster boys, poster girls. Chief Executive Management is the only title that means a thing, and it means the richest 0.00000333 percent of the world’s living humans, all twenty billion on earth and off. What t
hey do not control: they do not control us, and they do not control everything under the seas.”
“What about space?”
“Everything in space. Even the PRA is owned by an earthbound company under UNEGA. All the Oort planetoids, Centauris, and everything on them are owned by Zaibatsu, UNEGA’s cruelest subsidiary. But space is a near dead zone for our interests. There have been twelve manned expeditions and uncountable probes, and little of interest has been found outside the solar system. The most advanced extraterrestrial life-form that human exploration has found is the Centaurian ‘Gremlin.’ I’ve seen them myself. They look like two-centimeter tall albino penguins and taste like vulcanized rubber. Aside from a dull and decaying tourist industry, space is empty. But the seas—what do you know about Cetaceans?”
She knew a good deal, she thought, but didn’t venture a word. She wanted to hear it all as he had to tell it. She shook her head.
“That’s what most of us know. The fact is, aside from gills, cartilaginous skeletons, and some damn big eyes, they’re human at heart. A good bunch. There has never been an attack on a human from their governments. More than they can say about us. Companies have assaulted them from time to time in a manner that should have provoked terrible retribution, but nothing came. One Suomi president massacred a sizable gathering of them, an act that cost the title of president its last powers. The Valkohai, if you have heard of them, are a myth to justify action. Rumors of their takeovers online are also false. There is nothing to suggest any Cetacean has ever even had a link. Veikko can tell you a good deal about their customs and culture, but I want to make clear exactly how their politics work.
“They are monastic, and not company based. Should a Cetacean wish to control a sea city or sea in general, they have to forfeit their life as a citizen. They give up family, money, and most contact with the world in order to become a sequestered monk. The sea state keeps them alive and more or less comfortable and gives them the power to fulfill the wishes of their subjects and no chance for anything more. Such people are not seen by the school, lest their appearance sway voters. They’re known as beings of pure policy and title, made scrupulously detailed to anyone concerned, and answerable, along with the enforcers of those laws, by death for any hint of stepping out of line. As the only appeal in their politics is wholly altruistic, only the most noble of fish folk apply, and it seems to me they can be trusted. All eighteen of them. Similarly, citizens only pay tax if they want to vote. As only those willing to pay for the greater good may participate, greed has no place in their democracy.
“That logic pervades the great majority of the benthic world. But there are pirates. We deal with pirates from time to time, and they range from petty thieves to villains of absurd proportions. Some even have a Robin Hood mentality and have done more for charity than Charity Co., which is, in truth, a division of the Vagrant Eradication Militia, GAUNE’s bullies. The pirate varieties will get their own day of briefing in your training. All that is important now is that you not mistake them for the general ocean body.”
“Got it,” she answered. There was something else she wanted to know knocking at the back of her mind, but Balder moved on.
“Religious sects. You know, I am sure, from your army history class, that the last great cold war was a religious one. But they don’t tell you just what that means. As I have fought them myself, I can tell you. Religion is a disease, a social cancer. It is the afterbirth of intelligence, of thought itself. Superstition has overgrown into belief, and some of those beliefs mean genocide, or war, or the severe delay of progress. It’s hard to imagine now, but the planet was once so consumed that people would kill each other over these idiocies. Now, it is true that they have been tamed to some extent. When the great rebellions broke out over the nations, religions were banned. Even before then there were petty attempts to separate the religions from government, but they were doomed, of course, to—”
“Why, why were they doomed?”
“Pass a law that says a virus may not infect you. Will the virus respect your law? As long as religion exists, it will eat away at all that’s good in the world. Even now it lives on, it tries, waits for an opportunity. There are still believers. With it banned, all that’s different is the virus cannot exist in the open air, and that does quite a bit of good, actually.”
It seemed a bit vicious to Violet. Religion was as dead as the dodo. It was almost funny to beat the dead animal so cruelly. “Not a fan of the old superstitions, are you?”
Balder understood her amusement. “I saw it up close. What to you is a line from Snorri was to me the death of my family. I saw Catholicism make its penultimate stand in the Americas. They burned my parents alive, for no reason beyond their lack of faith in a pile of lies that deserved no faith. I saw my friends and their families tortured into belief, pushed so far beyond their wits that they gave in and became as zombies to a name that was truly no more than a name and a system of cruelty.” His serious candor gave way to a grin. “Yes, I am biased. Few have such a bias. Even here you will find some believers in some old myths. Even Alf suspects there is more to death than is apparent. He believes in metempsychosis. It seems a harmless belief, and in him it is indeed harmless. You might say rightly that some religious beliefs are more virulent than others. Religions like Nazism and Christianity have proven more aggressive than Thelema or Buddhism. But even those mild absurdities could lead to atrocities. Imagine if one in power believed an old nemesis was reincarnated in some random man, because of star charts or hepatomancy? Would they then attack a person, or perhaps a country that had done nothing at all?
“What I say, I say only so you know what to do when you come across it in its violent form. You will see men and women beg to be martyred. You will see people kill over no more than a line in an old book, and some of those lines would have us put to death for dressing as another gender or drinking the wrong wine. Do not expect logic from them. Do not ever try to reason with them. I find it best just to kill them.”
“Got it,” she answered. She thought to tell him his last comment sounded like the same kind of irrationality he was condemning, but there was something more important than religious squabbles. She had to hear now, without delay. “What’s the Orange Gang?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” He grinned. “You know most of it already, rather dull material from rather dull police. I know what they’ve told you about the birth of the color-coded sponsored crime organizations in 2222, and the resulting ultrafunded, ultracorrupt police crews of 2223 that captured most of them and stuffed them in the superjails built for them in 2224 by the companies that had suggested the color-coded crime organizations in the first place. It’s all true, to be sure. Here is what they never told you.
“Wulfgar isn’t just a criminal genius. He is Napoleon, Hitler, Genghis Khan, and Alexander of Macedon. Or he would be, if not for us. He is one of those men—perhaps one is born in each generation—who, if given the chance, will take the world entirely. To date he has been kept in check by our calculated destruction of his avenues of progress, and by his idiot brother. The cops dared not tell you, or perhaps they merely don’t understand, that when you killed Hrothgar Kray, you broke one of his restraints. But you built a new one. Wulfgar is no longer susceptible to nepotism, but he is human, and a twin, and he is surely vulnerable to the anger and madness that his brother’s death might inspire. Left to his own devices, he will work logically through them. He is strong enough, smart enough to do that. But you are now in the best of all positions to see that he does not.
“A genius is only a genius by the grace of fate. He has been made by the things that have happened to him and can be unmade by others. The most brilliant men alive, and he is one of them, are still men, and men are flawed, men are faulty! Our minds evolved to survive, not to govern or think. Wulfgar is an unstoppable train of cruelty, greed, and lust for power. He can’t be stopped, but he can be derailed—”
“Why can’t he? You could kill him!” Viole
t’s anger at the cops was coming out at Balder. She knew it, but she didn’t stop it. She had to know. “Why the hell haven’t you killed him yet?”
Balder wasn’t angry. He was glad to see her a sentence ahead of what he told her. “Chaos! We could have killed him when he was young but had no reason then. Now when we have reason, it is because he has power, so much power he is dangerous, so much power that if he died today, his gang would be plunged into chaos.”
“Let it!”
“How big do you think the Orange Gang is, Violet? How many lives does it affect?”
“Couple hundred people, and fuck it, we can kill them too.”
“Seventy million men, women, and children.”
Violet was floored.
“Only a couple hundred know they are in the gang. That’s the rock in the pond, but the ripples of what Wulfgar controls can wash over the banks! Seventy million people work for his interests, in companies related, dependent, or in opposition to him. If he died today, and we have calculated this precisely, the police in Danmark would become a genocidal force in weeks. Most of Italia would be seized by GAUNE and its population enslaved. Wulfgar is the only reason they haven’t begun a hostile takeover. The goods are too damaged by his gang to justify seizure. Wulfgar has so deeply wedged himself into the world, that if we pulled out that splinter, it would bleed to death.”
Violet took it all in.
“The world is complex, you see, and what is complex is fragile. This cold war, this tangled web beneath the skin of the globe, is a slim thread away from going hot, hot as a global thermonuclear war. We are one such thread, but Wulfgar is another. These threads are invisible, lest they be cut, so there’s no shame in not having recognized them until you yourself became tangled against your will. Nonetheless, that gossamer web is real. To break it would wreck all of society, and as I’m sure you’ve been told, we don’t fuck shit up.