The All Father Paradox

by Ian Stuart Sharpe

  Trumba wondered whether she ought to summon Lind to the station. Shake things up. As it was, her erstwhile partner-in-genocide was making very little sense.

  “I have only one friend,” said Hveðrungr from his cell, “and that is echo. Why is it my friend? Because I love my sorrow, and echo does not take it away from me. I have only one confidant, and that is the silence of night. Why is it my confidant? Because it remains silent. My sorrow is my castle.”

  “Gentlemen, our guest thinks he is a skald! Tell me, what epics have you penned?”

  “I shall be your skald! I do not want to be a skald for others; make your appearance, and I shall be your skald. I shall eat my own poem, and that will be my food. Or do you find me unworthy? Just as a temple dancer dances to the honour of the gods, so I have consecrated myself to your service; light, thinly clad, limber, unarmed, I renounce everything. I own nothing; I desire to own nothing; I love nothing;

  I have nothing to lose. But have I not, thereby, become all the more worthy of you, you who long ago must have been tired of depriving people of what they love, tired of their craven snivelling and craven pleading. Surprise me. I am ready!”

  It was quite a performance. The two Varangians looked as perplexed as Trumba felt. The bandy-legged scarecrow with flailing arms and the vacant stare was clearly unhinged. Which reminded her, how had the ties come undone? She ought to be concerned, the guards even more so, but it was… a struggle to remember.

  Was there a problem? Nonplussed, she turned back to the prisoner.

  “Not a skald then, but a clown?” she asked.

  “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre,” said the ragged prisoner. “The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

  “A joke,” said Trumba. “I don’t think any of this is a joke. You butchered thousands of people, caused the deaths of millions more. In a way, I am an admirer. Who knows how long my father might have sat his fat arse on my throne if you and your freak show hadn’t come to town. And your experiments with Iðunn Lind have been very fruitful. What I want to know is why?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Then he shook his head. “How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it, and why was I not informed of the rules and regulations before being thrust into the ranks as if I had been bought by a peddling Rus of human beings? How did I get involved in this big enterprise called actuality? Why should I be involved? Isn’t it a matter of choice? And if I am compelled to be involved, where is the manager—I have something to say about this. Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?”

  She wasn’t understanding any of this. Was it possible that the beatings had already addled him?

  “I have already heard your complaint. Your incessant broadcasts, your rebellion, the treacherous Declarations of Jötunheim, the Ninety-Nine Disputes—why?”

  “Out of love for mankind,” said the Roarer. “And out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.”

  “You are to be commended then,” said the empress. “My father would literally shit himself every time he heard one of your bombs explode.”

  “A revolutionary age is an age of action,” said the Roarer. “Ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens, but there is immediate publicity everywhere. In the present age, a rebellion is, of all things, the most unthinkable. Such an expression of strength would seem ridiculous to the calculating intelligence of our times. On the other hand, a political virtuoso might bring off a feat almost as remarkable. He might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself, he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home, having spent a very pleasant evening.”

  Trumba decided she wasn’t enjoying this after all. The Roarer seemed intoxicated by his own voice. She needed to squeeze some sense out of him before she let others in on the secret.

  “So, the Disputes were, what? An attempt to set the Althing against the Urdur? You are making no sense. These two gentlemen are here to stop your prating. If need be, they will strike your head from your neck.”

  If the Roarer heard the threat, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  “Every movement and change takes place with the help of 100,000 or 10,000 or 1,000 noisy, grumbling, rumbling, and yodeling people,” he said. “A mediocre ruler is a much better constitution than this abstraction, 100,000 rumbling nonhumans. Is it tyranny when one person wants to rule, leaving the rest of us others out? No, but it is tyranny when all want to rule. Let others complain that the age is wicked. My complaint is that it is paltry, for it lacks passion. Men’s thoughts are thin and flimsy as lace. A people’s government is the true image of Hel. On Jötunheim, at least we are human beings. We hate, we love, we murder our enemies, and curse their descendants throughout all generations.”

  “Well, we want the same thing. I couldn’t agree more. Dissolving the Althing is a wonderful idea,” she said, snatching at whatever straws she could.

  Trumba had dreamed of being rid of the people’s assembly ever since she was a little girl. The upper chamber could stay—so long as it was packed with stooges—to make a suitable show of representation. If only this Roarer wasn’t barking mad, she could have dealt with him, turned necessity into a virtue. Perhaps he had an able lieutenant she could stand up, someone to keep the jarls quaking in their jackboots. MIM certainly thought so. She looked at him, sprawled on the floor, barely able to manage contempt. He was monologuing more than Bohr.

  “I dreamt last night,” he said, “that I’d been rapt into the Niðafjöll, in the halls of red gold. There sat all the gods assembled. As a special dispensation, I was granted the favour to have one wish. ‘Do you wish for youth,’ said Iðunn, ‘or for beauty, or power, or a long life; or do you wish for the most beautiful woman, or any other of the many fine things we have in our treasure trove? Choose, but only one thing!’ For a moment, I was at a loss. Then I addressed the gods: ‘Most honourable contemporaries, I choose one thing—that I may always have the laughs on my side.’ Not one god made answer, but all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my wish had been granted and thought that the gods knew how to express themselves with good taste: for it would surely have been inappropriate to answer such a request with gravity.”

  She shook her head.

  “Wonderful. Well, I’ll grant you that very same last wish. You may laugh until your heart bursts and we have broken every bone in your body. And then, I will leave you to rot on the planet below.”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t leave the world. I’ll enter a lunatic asylum and see if the profundity of insanity reveals to me the riddles of life. Idiot, why didn’t I do that long ago, why has it taken me so long to understand what it means when the Skræling honour the insane, step aside for them? Yes, a lunatic asylum. Don’t you think I may end up there?”

  There was something very disconcerting about the prisoner. He wasn’t just disjointed, or mad; it was stranger than that. He wasn’t conversing, he was practising statements, like an understudy mouthing snippet of dialogue from the wings. He was reciting lines into a mirror, he was rehearsing—or remembering—or feeding lines like a prompt in his corner stage. Or all those things.

  The Roarer looked directly at her again, piercing the Varangian visage, and it was only then she realised that he hadn’t looked up at all since the beating. He’d wittered away all this time with his eyes downcast. Perhaps they had given him a concussion? He seemed much more connected now. Even half-nak
ed in an empty room, he looked controlled. His eyes were redolent of ancient enmities, coal-black embers burning in the coal-black room.

  “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that, twisting in dark passions, produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? At Hvergelmir, I had barely started. Nothing is as heady as the wine of possibility. Believe me, the most painful hangover is remembering the future, particularly the ones you’ll never have.”

  THE PRISON BROADCAST WAS WELL-INDEXED, even without mentioning the Roarer. On reflection, her special prisoner would have to come later. Trumba had learnt to toy with viewers, holding back the big reveal until she need the boost. For now, it seemed perfectly reasonable to keep him as her little secret. She was the one in charge here, after all.

  There was another message from Berg:

  HEL HAS OFFICIALLY FROZEN OVER.

  HOW IS THE CONSTRUCTION? she fired back, concerned that Berg had a genuine issue.

  ON SCHEDULE. LIND OVERSEEING PERSONALLY. APPLES IN DEEP FREEZE.

  In a beat, another message arrived.

  CAN WE TALK?

  That was the last thing she wanted to do. The man wouldn’t stop talking, even after sex, when most of her lovers had the good grace to shut up and fall asleep. That was half the reason she’d sent him to oversee the project in the first place.

  WHEN CAN I COME HOME? I MISS YOU.

  He sent a short clip of the construction, but it was so shrouded in icy fog she couldn’t make out the progress. Pointedly, Berg had appended the note with “Wish I Wasn’t Here.”

  LAUNCH FIRST, she replied, and then put her visor out of reach, away from temptation. Technology had made it almost impossible for irritations like Berg to be out of sight and out of mind.

  Trumba flicked through a smattering of other broadcasts, every one an intimate insight into her subjects’ lives. There was a candid argument, laid out for the world to share. A horse fight, with commentary from a dejected gambler. A man lost at sea, searching the last known coordinates of the Hafgufa and wishing he hadn’t. The usual drunken sex with people in horned helmets.

  She cursed; there really was a dearth of talent in the world. No one held her attention, but then very few people could hold a candle to the imperial presence.

  None of them had truly suffered for their art. None of them had suffered the indignity of an election.

  She had a bank of monitors in her room, and she left some of the screens on, watching a world of followers stare back at her. She was a wolf among the sheep.

  The Norse had elected their kings since before Ragnar. Little had changed over the centuries; the hustings were still just a great din of people and weapons, a clash of shouting and arms—although Trumba had been assured it was mainly for show. The fylkir had essentially been a hereditary title for centuries. Her family always won; the Urdur made sure of that. The Oak Kings and Queens of Munsö, born from a line of rulers stretching back to Ragnar and Rurik, the Lords of Always Summer, who rested the heavens in their noble hands. This was a dynastic decision, they had said, not a political one. A hot-blooded thoroughbred like Princess Trumba was a shoo-in. The Centre for Public Integrity showed she would not only win the sympathy vote after the funeral debacle, but that she indexed well on the war effort too, thanks to MIM. In those naïve days, there was no need for personal broadcasts.

  That overconfidence had nearly been their ruin. The High Urdur had wrung her hands and made her whole “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns” speech; Trumba wondered if the old crone saw the execution squad coming or whether the black hood got in the way.

  It was beyond ridiculous. The Urdur were meant to know everything before it happened. You weren’t just born into the sisterhood, you were preordained. Now, if an empress couldn’t trust her own secret police, who should she have at her back? Trumba sat in the Winter Palace watching the tide turn against her, the broadcasts getting increasingly cruel, until they were verging on the democratic.

  Begrudgingly, Trumba had to admit the largest part of the problem had been the opposition. Frigga was telegenic, a model candidate. She must have literally been born for the broadcasts, because you didn’t get that kind of symmetry once outside of the womb. She probably had some orchid in her somewhere, although that was hard to verify. She polled so well, she might have been married to Odin himself.

  She wasn’t, of course. Her real name was Lucina Hagman, the daughter of a peacenik Finnar and minor functionary for the Urdur. Trumba had been beside herself when she read the surveillance reports. She didn’t know what was worse, that these loving parents had cooked up a treacherous little sex kitten for a daughter or that they’d done so using imperial property. Right under Uppsala’s nose! In hindsight, Trumba had killed the High Urdur far too quickly.

  The reports made depressing reading. Frigga’s long legs and smouldering eyes weren’t even the half of it; the most voluptuous part was something called phenotypic plasticity. Like a butterfly changing colour with the seasons, Frigga could present to people in whatever guise she chose. She appeared how her audience wanted her to appear, whether Norse, Chitai, or Skræling. She was a predilection in heels, a sashaying peccadillo.

  Trumba had taken the report literally for a few days—she was horrified that she found Frigga attractive, inconsolable at the thought that some lesbian tendencies had slipped through her childhood screening. If that came to light, she’d lose the election and face years of correction. Thankfully, one of her godsmen told her pheromones only worked in close proximity, and that the full effect could only be felt in person.

  No wonder Frigga performed well at her love-ins. They weren’t rallies, they were orgies. Sex sold. Who wouldn’t want their future queen submissively splayed over a couch? The Psychographics Institute told her it was the natural expression of Viking culture. Martial men wanted a pin-up princess to drool over while on campaign. Frigga was a good farmer’s daughter, a shield-maiden and a bed-slave, all rolled into one malleable hide.

  At that stage, the election looked like a foregone conclusion. No one was interested in Trumba’s efforts to maintain law and order: the polls didn’t budge an ell when the Thane of Thane put down the Kakamuchee uprising. The Skræling Enclosures were seen as a gimmick. Parading the odd captured Jötunn gave Trumba something of a bump, but her analysts didn’t expect it to last.

  Why should it? Reality didn’t matter. Voters didn’t want to deal with problems. Real people wanted the puerile distractions of nubile thralls speed-running through an AR maze. They wanted their Knattleiker heroes to share meatball recipes. They wanted to follow babies crawling for the first time or to recreate sexual escapades with old lovers. There were the people who thought ruling was child’s play, and then scorned Trumba for being little girl. Soft lands breed soft men. The only way to rule them was to come down to their level.

  The romp with the Knattleiker team backfired completely. It had been mistakenly edited to look like she had poured celebratory champagne on herself before fucking all five of them. The cut made Trumba look so presumptuous and entitled that, ultimately, she had to pretend it was a fake. Broadcasters openly called her the Transitionary Princess, Champagne Trumba, the Five Star Vulva. It was a long six months.

  All the more reason that snatching victory from the oesophagus of defeat had been so sweet.

  TANGRIST AND TANNGIOST AUDGUDSON, KNOWN universally as the Wizards of Midvaten, were two old-school Skuld, brothers who’d left the Order and gone into business. They weren’t just wrinkly old, they were as old as the hills; they were withered and fetid. MIM said they were as old as Iðunn Lind herself: the very rich had been able to sample Iðunn’s Apples since before the war, so if you made it as far as the Dirty Thirties and had enough cash, you could go on until the money ran out.

  The Audgudsons had made their fortune with all kinds
of inventions; most of the broadcast technology used that century—sound recordings, motion pictures, and augmented reality—was under their patent. It really was a miracle what they had been able to achieve, a rollercoaster of discovery, each twin driving his sibling to greater and greater success, until they ended up wafting around the world on lavish skyships and looking down from the clouds on the mere mortals below. Her father famously joked once that these massive bloated gasbags were held aloft by nothing more than ego.

  The Wizards owned all the networks, not to mention the Daily Thunderer, which had a wider circulation than all the other Runics put together. If they had been friends of the fylkir, then there wouldn’t have been the need for any unpleasantness, but the Audgudsons had snarled and snapped at the House of Munsö for years, turning their broadsheets and broadcasts against the Imperial Family. Spite and Spittle her father had called them, on days when even he had had enough. Hellulanders were like that, he said, unfeeling, made of stone. They took the official dispatches from the frontlines on Jötunheim and turned them into pure vitriol, burying the brave and noble sacrifice of war under mountains of fatality reports. It went beyond policy to the personal. They called Trumba’s appointment as heir presumptive as “the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality.” Her father had hidden that from her at the time, but it all came up again after the funeral.

  When the election date was announced, rumours began to circulate around the Althing: the Audgudsons planned to stand for high office themselves. They began to hobnob with the idols of Mistilton and Hulvidland, men and women of the Silver Screen who put themselves about as the New Gods: Holly Kings and Mistletoe Queens, twisting folklore and pedigree back on the House of Munsö. Summer had long faded, they screeched. The Great Oak has lost its leaves, they screamed. Some bright spark suggested the twins should bankroll Frigga’s campaign rather than split the vote. Soon enough, you couldn’t move for New Gods, prattling on with their entirely predictable ideas and jejune opinions. Their celebrity magnified them, made them living legends, and a billion Audgudson screens gave them a platform to opine on whatever their tiny minds thought of next.