The All Father Paradox

by Ian Stuart Sharpe

  “Not Mr. Chandler, then?” he drawled, sarcastically, struggling to stand.

  The bright morning sun was excruciating, and he blinked several times just to try and focus. The dawn chorus, at least, provided some beauty to balance the near universal uprooting of everything he loved and held dear.

  “The Christians positively exuded candles, lighting them to guide lost souls to Heaven. Great cathedrals glowering in a mass of silent flames, all those visible signs of gladness. The White Christ was the light of the world. Crowned with crowds, bearing an eternal lamp, confusing the powers of darkness. How could I resist the poetry? My own Big Sleep and Long Goodbye were just the cherry on the cake. You forgot Time to Kill, by the way.”

  “How can this be?” Michaels wailed.

  He scanned his surroundings. The old cork tree was still there—the most northerly specimen in Europe, he’d been told. He could see movement on the road, a horse and cart by the sound of it. Beyond Seascale village, he could see something like zeppelins skirting the horizon.

  “I’ll let you in on a little secret. I deal in shapes. Hamr, my people called it. Shape-changing. A little shimmy here and little shift there, and the guise is complete. I started with the Northumbrians, helped turn the tide of the Saxon Wars. Dealt with that old rascal Willehad. Each time I went back, I had my cover story. Hiding in plain sight, right under His nose. It’s damn near the oldest trick in the book. Hang on tightly to Great Uncle Odin, and you might just avoid being thrown to those wolves,” he said, pointing to the pillar and the hellhounds carved onto it.

  Michaels had always been reluctant to bother the Almighty, even on Sundays. His problems had seemed trite: his world had been Parish Councils and PASE, Scouts Halls and pies. Now it seemed impossibly shrunken and alien. He didn’t have much family, but still, he couldn’t imagine a world where they had simply been replaced with bearded doppelgängers with bad manners. He figured he had nothing to lose.

  “Isaiah 65:25,” said Michaels almost mechanically. “‘The wolf and the lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain…’”

  “So says the lord.” The All Father shook his head, then laughed. “Your Holy Bible is a footnote in history, read in secret on the tattered fringes of my new design, my Vikingverse.”

  “You think He won’t stop you?” said the churchwarden. “The Lord God sees all and knows all.”

  “Your god only exists in the minds of men, barely at all since I have changed their thoughts and memories. The Norns thought they could control the cosmos too, but I’ve broken their wheel before they even began to spin. Drowned their father in blood. And now, the wolf is no longer at my door. The doom that was Ragnarok is forestalled.”

  The old man looked more youthful, more vigorous with each passing moment. He was clearly delighted.

  Michaels couldn’t believe the universe worked like that. Whatever Christianity might have concocted, surely it represented a fundamental goodness? There had to be principles, rules around that kind of thing. If murder was a crime punishable by life imprisonment, what was the sentence for deicide? Heaven was tea at the rectory. It was the White-haven Maritime festival and hikes on the Wasdale Screes. It was the one true cross and its twice-told tale. The churchwarden screwed up his courage and shouted with all his might.

  “You think you’ve changed time? Escaped your fate? Well, what goes around, comes around. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

  Odin stopped, and snarled. “You think I can be stopped with truisms and platitudes, when I have outwitted the eternal?”

  “You said it yourself, the Norns control the fates of gods as well as men. The tomb of the Saint was open. Someone set him free. I’m assuming it wasn’t you.”

  HUGINN AND MUNINN

  MÍMISBRUNNR ORBITAL RING, TETHERED ABOVE NIFLHEIM / MUS-PELHEIM TERMINATOR ZONE

  1968

  BOHR, I AM BORED.” BOHRED, she thought, quite pleased with herself.

  This was no way to end a war. Battles had rhythm, movement; they had blood and iron. Like the centuries-long Maharaja Wars, there had to be a last desperate stand, a fatal blow. You couldn’t finish a conflict locked in a stinking, dingy chamber deciphering ancient star charts.

  She had gone to a lot of wasted effort for this audience. She wore her hair in five tight crimson cornrow braids that tumbled down the high collar of her gown. Beads jangled against the brass pauldron on her right shoulder. The fabric was textured, uniform honeycombed hexagons, although that was the only orderly part of the ensemble. The asymmetrical drape of the cloth left her right arm and leg exposed, and the armour merged into ornate, almost mechanical, studded brass rings bound tightly to her milk-white flesh. The whole ensemble was capped by the gleaming imperial visor; the overall impression was equal parts martial fylkir and harlot. Stunning, she had thought. Impractical for the field, but as dress uniform, unparalleled. If she was back in Uppsala, she’d inspire the jarls to an orgiastic frenzy. The catwalks would clamour for more, and the Sunnesdag supplements would drape her over their centrefold.

  Here, none of the Skuld insects had even noticed.

  She stopped the pretence of poring over the star chart and lifted the visor. She was Dómhild Trumba, Queen of the Heavens, ruler of the United Kingdoms. The stars would do what she told them to do, and it was high time she had some fun. She had some of those enchanting raven-bread mushrooms in her luggage; she couldn’t stagger without them. That might help everyone loosen up.

  For as long as she could remember, she’d had this awful sense of being born into the world either too early or too late. She understood the empire’s past, and she knew just how to shape its future, but the present just infuriated her. Bohr wasn’t helping matters by summoning her here.

  The Skuld busied around her as if she weren’t there. Or worse, they deferentially avoided her, scurrying away in the opposite direction when she approached, like ants escaping the probing finger of a child.

  Ants, that’s what they all were. Seen through her own eyes, they even looked a little like bugs, hooded with chitinous cowls, aprons spun from Kevlar or tiled with chalky abalone mantle, moving in mysterious mathematical patterns at the behest of the High Lector, Niði Bohr. If it looks like an ant, scurries like an ant, and—what noise do ants make? The Skuld all communicated by way of pheromones, or else through their own visors. They rarely spoke at all. Well, that was that. She’d just call them ants from now on. The Great Mathematician was a plump old rassragr. Seiðmenn. It just wasn’t right, men buggering each other. This was the Sanitary Sixties, for Odin’s sake, almost everyone got correctional treatments.

  “Bohr. Seriously, I don’t understand any of it. Do you have any idea of where the Jötnar fled to?”

  The lector’s mournful face remained focused on the sheets splayed across the table. It was hard to tell if he was gloomy because of the war reports or because he had a permanently petulant face. Perhaps one of his bugs had crawled up his backside. He remained silent and stroked his long, unkempt beard.

  “Bohr,” she said. “You asked me here on a matter of grave importance. I assumed you had found a nest; if not, then I have better things to do with my time.”

  “Please. Patience. I will be with you shortly.”

  The lector returned to mumbling his nonsensical incantations over the books, his beard twitching with each word, an intense look of concentration on his moon face. He blinked often, annotating and compiling on his visor.

  Trumba slid languidly to the hollows at the crown of the ship and peered out. She wasn’t a teenager any more; she’d matured almost overnight she thought. She carried herself regally. She wondered whether her father would have bothered with all this paraphernalia. He’d spent most of his life at war with the Jötnar—although the siege of Utgard had demonstrated the limits of what he had learned from the
experience.

  She stood to her full height and spoke with the authority of the fulltrui of Odin. It felt reassuring to tower over minions.

  “Why here, Bohr? Why, of all the worlds, are we circling this god-forsaken rock?”

  It was more complaint than question. She knew the answer, part of it at least. The Skuld were always looking for the potential, rather than for the practical. That was why their order had set their great ring fortress, Mímisbrunnr, above such a schizophrenic world. The planet even had two names, plucked from the ancient tales. The sun-scorched side was Muspelheim, the land of fire; the dark side was named Niflheim, the abode of mist. Her people loved messing around with words. Why simply call something one name, when an obscure and roundabout metaphor will do? It had always irritated Trumba, ambiguity was annoying in her book. Clarity, vigorously reinforced and spliced in repeatedly—that was the basis of a healthy empire.

  The facilities here represented half of the sovereign debt. Conversely, the rock below was the least lustrous of the jewels in her crown. Surtalogi, the star it orbited, was a red dvergar; despite the close orbit, the planet received only a tiny fraction of the light Sol beamed at Midgard. Heat yes—Muspelheim was like an abandoned stone cooking by the still-seething embers of a dwindling fire, it bathed in a perpetual sweltering gloom.

  It felt like a punctured dream. Once, in the days before staggering, the stars must have seemed to burn bright in the heavens, beckoning new waves of explorers. Who would have thought that all of infinitude would remain tantalisingly out of reach?

  She’d only been here once before, as a child. Bohr had explained the heavens to her if memory served. It had been a state visit; her father brought her to inspect the latest ships and the new solar sails. The war had been old even then. The latest advances were on display, although Bohr quickly confessed those ships would take 80,000 years to get back to Midgard. The long way around, he called it.

  In an instant, the Nine Worlds had shrunk. Her future became a great glass globe, a miniaturized scene of model landscapes, forever closed off from the rest of the galaxy. You simply couldn’t get anywhere without the greenways, at least not quickly. Her father accepted the reality and laughed about back-up plans, hiding the fact that he was running out of strategic options. Trumba remembered feeling very cheated, although for a very different reason. There were no more worlds for her to conquer.

  Bohr still hadn’t answered her. Trumba was becoming incandescent with rage. The Vǫlur had always treated her condescendingly while her father had been alive.

  “Yes, Princess,” they’d intone solemnly, then continue as if no words had been exchanged. Well, she’d soon show them. The fylkirs had financed the Skuld even before the Jötnar rose, but she could always cut that funding off.

  Bohr put down his notes and followed her to the hollow. When he looked down at the world below, it was with something resembling pride or even happiness. He’d been here his whole life no doubt, born and bred in the hinterworlds.

  “Why here, you asked? There is nowhere else.”

  He gestured flamboyantly at the sun, then glanced at her and shook his head.

  “The blinkers of an Urdling education, all past glory and not enough forward thinking. How I wish you might have visited us sooner. You see how this beast is much smaller and dimmer than Sol? Don’t let that deceive you! He is much more active. He flares very frequently, hence the name Surt’s Sword. The giant was supposed to destroy the world during the end times with his cleansing sword of fire. Thankfully, this planet has a shield to match his thrusts, a planetary magnetic field supported by convection at the core.”

  Trumba resisted the temptation to roll her eyes. “Bohr. You have a point, do you?”

  “Have you ever stepped onto the surface, my Queen?”

  Bohr knew full well that, as queen, she hadn’t left the safety of Midgard before last week. To step away in the first year of her rule would be a dereliction of duty—her followers would be lost without her. Her broadcasts were essential for morale, for rebuilding. They helped stimulate the nation, keeping women on their backs, the farmers sowing seed, and giving the Einherjar a vital spring in their step.

  Bohr carried on, without taking his eyes from the waltzing below.

  “See how the planet doesn’t turn. She keeps her face to his, twirling in an endless embrace. Muspelheim is consistently sun-baked, receiving scorching, direct sunlight without ever getting a break from it. The sun appears ten times larger than it does on Midgard, searing the sky, like a looming kiss. And look, because of the tight orbit, the planet completes a revolution around Surtalogi in just eleven days. A dizzying, celestial waltz.

  “Niflheim, the side facing away from the star, is a beauty too. I think of her as a widow, wandering bereft into the eternal night, cold with tears. She gazes up at the sky for signs of her lost lover, and it stares straight back! Thiazi’s Eyes, so much brighter than the Hundastjarna—the brightest star in your Majesty’s night sky. Here, the atmosphere glows like a sapphire. The winds constantly whirl from the hot to the cold side, reminding the widow of the passion that has passed her by. But it is the marriage between the two worlds that is most fascinating. The border between each side forms a ring around the planet, a ring of perpetual dawn. A ring that constantly promises hope. And here the trees have flourished, drenched in dew. They are unlike any tree you have ever seen, the oldest of forests, grown over aeons, yet tall, spindly and black, like a belt of spiders.”

  “They don’t sound like trees at all.”

  “The Mímameiðr wood hungers for light. In scientific terms, Surtalogi lacks blue light for photosynthesis; the trees here must absorb the full spectrum, and there is an abundance of red wavelengths, which makes the trees as black as coal. Most of the energy is in the infrared, so if you closed your eyes and basked in the warmth, it would feel almost as warm as Sol, plus you wouldn’t be in danger of a sunburn without UV light to contend with.”

  “This all sounds like a nightmarish beach resort. Is that why we are here? My father, his father, generations of fylkirs, have funded all this and respected your privacy. I hope we have something better to show for it than skaldic fancies.”

  Bohr smiled. “We have plenty to show for it. The trees themselves, when harvested, become an engineering marvel, a material beyond compare, with tensile strength superior to anything in the empire. Unable to manufacture better, we Skuld had simply decided to enhance what the gods have given us. The result of treatment and compression was a living battery, rough-hewn but impregnable. All the exteriors here are made from it. I personally explained the work here to Dietbald, and your grandfather, Hrólfur, too, right here, in the map room. They never questioned the funding, not once, and here is the why—what do the sagas tell us of the worlds below?”

  Trumba had no idea of what he was talking about. That was the biggest problem with being in charge. People felt they could bring you their problems to solve. She stared at him expectantly.

  “Before there was soil or sky or any green thing, there was only the gaping abyss of Ginnungagap. Frost from Niflheim and billowing flames from Muspelheim crept toward each other until they met in the void, and amid the hissing and sputtering, the fire melted the ice, and the drops formed themselves into Ymir, the first of all beings.”

  Trumba paused, reflecting on the words. “Are you trying to tell me that this is the birthplace of the universe? What drit. That’s clearly a self-fulfilling prophecy. A circular argument. We named the damned place.”

  “But we didn’t name the planet. Yggdrasil did, and whispered the names to us. Her trees are the most penetrating of preachers and Mímameiðr is chief among them”

  Trumba now laughed outright at the seer.

  “The years floating in the Gap have broken your mind.”

  “The obvious is always least understood. All aspects of the Nine Worlds seem preordained, do they not? For as long as man has had fire, we have hunted and gathered and told stories about a Great Tree s
panning Nine Worlds, linking all of creation. And then, one day, it isn’t a story anymore. It is a reality. We have the formula to prove it.”

  Bohr paused for a moment, inhaling slowly and cracking sizable knuckles. Perhaps he was aiming to be intimidating; she couldn’t tell with mares.

  “Let me tell you something of seiðr, your Majesty. Your Urdur have always tried to dress up symbols and formula in ritual dances and arcane songs, but at root, all knowledge is just a way to manipulate the world around you. We can raise storms, make distant ships sink, make swords blunt, soften armour, and bring victory from defeat because we can bind the forces of the Worlds or blind others to them. Here we call our mystic dancers by their true names: trajectories and velocities, temperatures and wavelengths. Predictions are simply probability equations.”

  “So which are you, a great magician or a great mathematician?”

  Trumba thought the man was incredibly pompous. She stared out of the hollow, wondering whether this thundering windbag would take the bait. In her experience, old men needed reminding they weren’t in control.

  “Your Majesty, do you know why the Skuld came to this distant, brutal world? It was to escape the idle bigotry of our kings and the billion ignoramuses they rule. Mathematician? Magician? Are these insults now? I am afraid I am called much worse than that to my face. Nidhogg, by the naval men, when I present them with the limits of the physical world. Did you know the ancient Greeks used that word, mathematics, to describe a teacher? The word magician comes from the Greek too—the magus was a priest. There is nothing unmanly about seeking knowledge. Only the Norse would think to castrate genius.”

  Trumba sneered. “Only the Norse opinion counts. Last time I checked, none of the small races have a vote.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the breakthroughs we mathematicians have made. No one comes here, except for the admiralty and then only rarely. We are a military secret on an impossible world, yet the seiðmenn who have joined us are some of the greatest minds in history. Einnsteinen, Oppenheimr, Heisenborg, von Schröding—names to conjure with.