The All Father Paradox

by Ian Stuart Sharpe

  She’d hoped it would seem a macabre and brutal punishment, something worthy of a Norse Queen, like a modern-day blood-eagle. Mannerheim didn’t register shock or make any other visible reaction. He was now stone cold.

  “Is that so? Is that so?” he muttered. He turned to Bohr and exchanged invisible commentary, before returning to Trumba.

  “The Jötunn is gone. Nowhere to be found. He left the Ring forty-eight hours ago as far as we can determine, but we might be able to follow his movements now we have studied his thrall here.”

  The admiral nodded toward Gest, who was lolling backwards and forwards in his chair, succumbing to the sedatives. He peered closely at Trumba, as if scrutinising an ailing machine for a worn-out part. She was finding it difficult to stand and took an involuntary step back.

  “I’m afraid we don’t know when he got into your mind, your Majesty, but he has clearly penetrated deeply. You have been contaminated in ways we can only pray don’t compromise us further. Thank Thor for the Oblivion Link or he might have had the fleet. The Hveðrungr had no wife, never had biological children, true children. We won’t be able to determine what other draugr you were seeing until we autopsy.”

  Trumba sat down, stunned and reeling. Her breathing was ragged, stifled. She looked around the room, wild-eyed, starting to panic.

  “What have you given me?” she croaked, clawing at her throat.

  Without her visor, she felt feeble. Was this what a palace coup looked like, plump old rassragrs pretending to be gods? Where was MIM? None of this could be believed, let alone corroborated. Why had she been forsaken?

  “This wolfhead is laced with poison. We’ll probably find the same in your bloodstream. I’m sure it will be painless. Let the record show that, as of 10:38 on this, the 23rd day of Skerpla, that I, Grand Admiral Karl Götstaf Andríður Mannerheim, in accordance with Commonwealth Order Nine, assume the Regency of the United Kingdoms due to the incapacity of our beloved Trumba, fifth of that name.”

  MIM twinkled in acknowledgement. With that, Mannerheim saluted, with masterful irony, and ushered his men out of the room. Trumba watched them retreat, in and out of focus. She was imprisoned in her own failing body. She heard her father’s voice, an echo from her childhood. She could see him when she closed her eyes, and she realized she missed him terribly. He’d taught her everything she knew, all the old tales, the ones worth telling.

  Bohr was sitting sideways, engrossed in a conversation. His black dwarfs were humming at his side, relaying his thoughts to the Skuld outside and throughout Mímisbrunnr.

  “Admiral, what would you like us to do with the bodies?” he asked, upside-down, his breath sweet and close.

  “Autopsy both, for the record. But seal this room until you are ready; we need to contain this until we are ready.”

  “Impressive, that wolfcoat. I’d like to examine the body myself, if that can be arranged. And we must get a sample of brain tissue. I want to know what he has seen. He had direct exposure we might be able to follow. As Brother Audgudson always says, the empires of our future are empires of the mind!”

  Trumba only barely heard Mannerheim’s rasping reply, as the naval men barricaded the broken door. They had left her for dead. They didn’t even wait to take her pulse.

  The pain was excruciating, worse than the polio. But she’d beaten that. In battle, a Viking fought with fury, making each solitary breath count. Her father had taught her to struggle. Inhale, as she grabbed a spear and thrust; exhale, she jerked her shield to the side to deflect the counterblow. In battle, you will either fall or come away alive, he said. A Viking fought knowing she was invincible, part of a tale stretching back to the dawn of days. Be bold, therefore, for everything is preordained. Nothing can bring a woman to her death if her time has not come, and nothing can save one doomed to die.

  Her father was there, now, with her, helping her fight on. She was a scion of the Norse, she was the uppermost branch, touching the heavens. Trumba had imagined her own story wouldn’t end. She had tasted immortality, she’d been so close.

  She inhaled. Her shield splintered under the blow, her tendons flared in agony. Exhale.

  She fell to one knee and then further still, hoping her father would catch her.

  EXEGESIS VIII

  GÆSLINGFJORD, ENGLAND

  2017

  THE GOD LOOKED STUNNED. HE stood silently mouthing the words the churchwarden had hurled at him.

  “Someone set him free.” Doubt was clearly not just the preserve of an Anglican flock, Michaels thought. It was a devious weapon and had been deftly deployed. The Reverend would be proud, God rest his soul.

  Michaels watched his adversary’s face contort, flushing all manner of crimson. The storybooks were full of tales of Odin’s rage. The recollection made Michaels flinch, but it was too late to regret the provocation. He looked over his shoulder for a line of retreat. Fat chance, fat man, he thought with an almost palpable misery. Eerily, the world seemed more enclosed. He could feel the walls closing in even if he couldn’t see them.

  The laughter was almost a wheeze at first, thin, like a cough. Michaels had a moment’s hope the old man might be choking, but quickly saw the truth: the spluttering had been a counter—a mocking deception. Two ravens swooped down and perched, one on each cross, and fixed their eyes on him. Caw, kraa, they jibed, as if they were in on the joke. At that, Odin burst into unbridled laughter, thumping around his half-formed stage, pounding the air with his fists. The evening rang with the sound of cheering warriors and clinking goblets. It was a curtain call, nothing more, nothing less. In another time and place, Michaels might have admired the theatrics.

  “You think I fear anyone here, in this Hall of the Slain? Where the heroes of the ages lend me their swords? Oh, my dear warden. Those are not tombs. No-one is buried underneath. They are markers, tags, anchors across time.”

  “Doesn’t matter. This is consecrated ground. You are a trespasser. You need to leave.”

  If he screwed his eyes shut, he could ignore the timbers, the thatch of golden shields.

  “And you are a grave fellow. The wound is already struck. It’s not as deep as a well, or as wide as a church door, but it’s enough. What do you imagine happens when you die?”

  The god had stopped laughing. He took up a spear and hefted it from hand to hand, as if assessing the weight. His one eye flashed with fury, fixed on Michaels.

  Michaels felt strangely calm. He was breathing deeply, rhythmically. There was a freedom in inevitability.

  “I have faith in the hereafter. We are all God’s children.”

  Annoyingly, his tongue was less cooperative. His mouth was ash-dry and fixed in a bitter pout. His words clicked as they crept from him, but he trusted them all the same.

  “I am the Lord, I have no peer, there is no God but me. I arm you for battle, even though you do not recognize me.”

  All Michaels could hear was the rasping of endless horns.

  NORNA-GESTS ÞÁTTR

  KUNTA! FUKJA! DRIT!”

  Gest woke up, swearing. Those fuckers had tried to kill him. It always hurt much more than he remembered. His chest felt like he had been kicked by a mule, and his whole left side was writhing with invisible electricity. Added to that, the klaxons were damn loud, and just in case you slept through them, someone was firing the sonic cannons too. It wasn’t the first time he’d woken up feeling this sore, but from all the commotion around him, he suspected it might be the last.

  That was something, at least.

  He had tried to warn them, but there was no use in being bitter. He always knew it was a fool’s errand. Who was going to believe a story like his? The thousand-year-old farmer, come to warn of a fairy-tale foe. Gest had no genetics on file that would even give them pause for thought. For one thing, he hated change—he left off popular music when the piano replaced the harpsicord. For another, he was just too damned old; he counted rheumatism as his bosom friend. No, he’d lived long enough without being spliced and di
ced to start moving things around now. The military had thought him a spy and repaid treachery with cyanide. Marshall Thunder always acted first, asked questions later. You couldn’t blame him after what they’d seen in the war.

  Gest instinctively reached for his harp, with the secret compartment keeping his candle safe. It was as tough as he was, carved long ago from a red-bark tree. Indestructible, the Skræling Dreamer had said, and it had survived five hundred more years, surpassing the warranty. Not a bad trade for a handful of beads. Strange; he’d been captured or killed a dozen times over the years, but no one ever took it from him, or when they did, it was always easy to find, thrown in a junk pile or discarded on a table. He’d long since decided it had a glamour on it.

  The warnings continued, three oscillating and shrill tones, an Alert Ready system broadcast to all householders, everywhere, all at once. The fylkir’s personal calculator was responsible for all the din. MIM was delivering a steady flow of information, digesting and regurgitating data from across the Nine Worlds on banks of monitors that made up the far wall. They were all showing loops of eerily silent destruction, with no sound but for the alarm.

  The world ends not with a bang, but with a mute button, he thought.

  He was still sitting in the imperial chambers, on a jet-black wooden chair. Mímameiðr wood, like a finely upholstered tarantula. The room was empty otherwise, except for a few bits of detritus on the floor and a discarded negligee on the unmade bed. He didn’t know where the empress was, although he suspected she’d been consigned to the laboratory furnace of history. The Mayfly Queen, Empress for a Day. Gest had always thought politics was a dirty business, but the cardinal rule was surely never trust the Varangians. Who guards the guards? Oh well, he thought, so much for his plan of going straight to the top.

  There was a goblet half-hidden under the sheet and wine spilled underneath. Dry to the touch. He’d been gone for a while then. Normally, if there was such a thing, he came back within hours, but sometimes days had passed. They hadn’t bothered to tie him, and they certainly hadn’t bothered to come and collect him. Given the images he saw on the screens that covered the far wall, the navy had their hands full. He’d missed the events real time—as far as he could tell, most of the broadcast were replays.

  He watched the carnage with resignation. Here it was, then—the thread was cut. It was little consolation that all other threads in existence were being severed at the same time. Well, that shows how far mankind had come, he thought. Ragnarok was being broadcast live.

  ON MIDGARD, THE EARTH SHOOK violently with a series of deep-sea detonations. MIM showed graphs, predictive analyses, measuring atmospheric composition as the waters bubbled up methane. Close to Miklagard, the North Anatolian fault ruptured. The European side thrashed into the Black Sea, which replied with a satisfied belch of hydrogen sulfide, poisoning the remaining denizens of the Great City in an instant. Fireballs followed, the gas reacting with the fabric of the city, storms of acid and flame savaging her proud beauty. The tidal waves were a mercy, wiping her ruined visage clean. The broken Dome of the Church of Holy Wisdom turned black as whatever souls were left departed. The screens flashed an advisory:

  Hydrogen sulfide can cause inhibition of the cytochrome oxidase enzyme system resulting in lack of oxygen use in the cells.

  That was funny, he thought. The central nervous system of the empire had been paralyzed, her people suffocated, and MIM offered a science lesson. No wonder the rank and file despised the machine.

  He watched as the land wracked and writhed, cities tottered then crashed headlong from their foundations. The Gulrstein Caldera spewed magma and ash across the west, the Brenna Ring turning the Peaceful Ocean into a steaming cauldron. Seawalls cracked and buckled, filthy water surged through townships across the Rim as if Hafgufa had risen again. Ash eclipsed the sun, just like it had on Jötunheim.

  Gest was relieved that he didn’t have any loved ones. He stopped making attachments centuries ago. The cities, though, he’d been to most of them. He mourned their passing: New Jorvik, Sveinsey, Reykjarvík, Austrióss—all funeral pyres.

  The door was sealed, wedged shut on the outside, a temporary repair after the Varangians had smashed through, but a solid one. He couldn’t see any way out of the chamber. He sat on the bed, pouring himself wine and smoking clove kretek cigarettes he’d bummed in Jayakarta. You couldn’t take your eyes off it. It was like the election all over again, although if he’d have known the empress had such a great taste in Gothic reds, he might have voted for her.

  As the hours wore on, the broadcasts showed that Mannerheim had sailed with the fleet, hoping to coordinate a rescue. The Drakkar arrived in the sky like Valkyries to rescue the fallen, to deliver hope, to bring salvation. But that too ended in disaster. The Odin was swallowed in a sea of desperate refugees; the Thor’s systems were clogged by ash and pumice, and the great ark was wrecked. The crew of the Tyr mutinied and had to be executed by their fellow Úlfhéðnar to restore order to the fleet. The admiral was broadcasting directly now, giving orders mechanically. The Naglfar, the great Audgudson bio-ship, broke her moorings, and the decrepit old tinkerers went wailing into the night. The empire was dimming; the broadcasts swamped by people sharing the sheer scale of the catastrophe, before being snuffed out themselves in countless, horrifying ways.

  The advisories continued throughout the night, but mercifully, the klaxons stopped. The sonic cannon too. Silence reigned now, the stillness broken only by the occasional frenzied knocking on the door. He ignored them; it wasn’t as if he could open it or provide enlightenment. Gest had never been fitted for a visor and couldn’t engage with anybody outside the room. He numbed the disquiet he felt with another gulp of wine and sat back to watch text crawl across MIM’s screens.

  HE MUST HAVE DOZED OFF for another few hours, although all the broadcasts showed different times and it was hard to be sure. His mother always said wine, women, and song would be his downfall. She’d been almost right. He was so drunk on the imperial cellar, it was only when the door started melting that Gest released that Mímisbrunnr itself was now under assault.

  It was a prison break. In one corner of the wall of broadcasts was a screen showing the interior of the Ring. Spiky rime-jewelled supermen, night terrors from the dark side of the planet below, marched through the sections, slaying the Skuld with abandon. MIM had recorded it all. He had simply missed it in between the mayhem. The Roarer had worked with phenomenal speed, shaping the outlaws of Náströnd to his liking, moulding them to fit the fabric of the world on either side of the terminator line in the burrows of old Mímisbrunnr. The Sons of Muspell had shattered Bifrost in their ascent, some falling back to the burning shores they came from, but still more came searing into the naval yards.

  The door was almost burned through now. Gest hadn’t come this far to surrender to a Jötunn. The draugr could rot in whatever he used as a tomb. Even at the end of all things, a Viking should find time for one last fight, he thought. Wasn’t that the whole point of Ragnarok?

  He rolled away from the monitors to the far side of the bed and used his leg to snag the black chair that had been so good to him of late. He’d find a better use for it than interrogation.

  He heard the axe whistling before he saw it. The hilt bounced awkwardly off the ceiling and the axe clattered to the floor, blade flat to the ground. Gest noted that, if there was a throwing gene, it wasn’t enhanced in this latest design. He made a grab for the weapon then stood up, holding the Mímameiðr chair as a shield.

  There were two Jötnar. He’d handled a pair before, but with a whole squad of Úlfhéðnar in support, and of course, the wine wasn’t helping matters. The genius of the draugr was to use test tubes and petri-dishes to bring nightmares out of memory and into the slaughter. The Father of Monsters had surpassed himself with this new batch, making just about the ugliest things Gest had ever seen. These two were lurid pink, a fusion of spiny armour crammed over blubber and oily fur. They had four sets of stu
bby appendages, eight arms and legs, each brandishing claws, which explained the terrible throw at least.

  Gest recognised them as vastly overgrown specimens from the Utgard laboratories; the screens had been full of anatomical drawings and gene-maps. Microscopic bugs, but the Verðandi had called them wonder weapons: the Roarer’s latest find, able to survive the boiling volcanic springs at Hvergelmir or the icy wastes of the Himalayas with equal ease. The stallari had laughed in their faces. The war was virtually over, and the threat never materialized.

  Now, Gest was about to eat their words. He had to hand it to the draugr: graft them into human cells, and the bugs turned out formidably.

  The Jötnar had tubular mouths, rather than a jawline brimming with teeth. They drawled rather than spoke, not that he could understand a word—and not that you ever tried to reason with a Jötunn, unless you wanted them to rip your tongue out before they gouged out your heart. He held up the chair to ward them off. The first Jötunn funnelled out what passed for laughter in nightmare land.

  “Hrimthurssar, hrimthurssar,” they hooted.

  Gest briefly regretted leaving P.T. Barnheim in the Panic of ’37. Still, he knew a thing or two about big game hunting. He prowled around his adversaries looking for a gap to exploit.

  “You know the secret to lion taming, you pig-fucking maggots? The chair does the important work. You hold it up like so, and the lion tries to focus on all four legs of the chair at the same time.”

  Gest edged closer, the Jötnar watching the blackwood waving hypnotically in front of them.

  “With its focus divided—”

  He drove two chair legs straight through the head of one of the creatures, simultaneously pinning the other’s shoulder with a third. He slid underneath their flailing bodies, trying to shut out the shrill screams. He struck at what he thought were leg tendons with the axe, but the blackwood proved much more penetrating. Gest reached up and turned the chair like a corkscrew. The surviving Jötunn lost its footing, allowing him enough purchase to grind it back into a corner.