“Niði Bohr, have you taken a knock to the head?”
“It might surprise you to know that my family have always been intimately involved with immortals. My grandfather taught Iðunn Lind, you know. Oh, you can wipe that worried look off your face. I’m not saying I am literally Odin’s father. But I don’t think that matters. Not everyone has a memory like yours, you see? For example, in a few minutes, I’ll deploy HEIMDAL. We named the system after Heimdallr, the warden of the gods. Seemed a suitable acronym, all things considered. But what if future generations name the god after the weapons system? What if we have created a loop? A self-fulfilling prophecy, a self-entangled world. That’s why MIM can’t explain it to me. She’s been cut off.”
Gest wasn’t convinced. “Bohr, you have more in common with Fasting Coyote than you might imagine. He also spoke to an Unknown, Unknowable Lord of Everywhere, to whom he built an entirely empty temple. They still carried him out on a cart.”
The Skuld studiously ignored him and continued to make preparations. His computations looked feverish, his brow sweating.
“Well my friend, if I am right, you are the only one who can fix this.”
“How many chances do I get?” Gest hauled a lifer to the back of the shuttle and strapped them in.
“This isn’t a joke, I’m afraid,” Bohr called back.
“Why me?” Gest yelled over the cycling engines. He wrestled the second lifer into a redundant seat, straining to hear the lector’s explanation.
“We could never find the gods, no matter how much we searched the Nine Worlds. You were always there, hiding in plain sight, dressed up in the guise of a Christian legend. An impossible hidey-hole, kept safe by all the minds beyond our ken. All these strangely intelligent minds that silently surround and interpenetrate us. Call them álfar as beautiful as the sun or call them entangled electrons waltzing on solar rays. Call them Norns controlling our destiny or call them Dark Energy, binding the Gap. They’ve been talking to us, but we don’t know how to listen. Let’s face it, this current history veered off somewhere distasteful. Perhaps the further the wave travels, the weaker it becomes.”
“What are you talking about?” Gest crept back to the front, crawling with horror at what he thought he’d heard.
Bohr turned to face him again, pivoting in the seat. “I think you are Odin. Or you will be. You are going to carry the seeds of creation with you back into the past. All those stories, all that history. The Mímameiðr, too. You will plant the World Tree.”
“Bikkju-sonr. Assuming for one second that any of that were true, how will I do that?”
“Because I am going to send you.”
“No!” Gest bellowed.
But it was too late.
The whole shuttle hummed as the Oblivion Link completed. He felt the Skuld rummaging in his mind, unlocking secrets, sifting through his past. There was no stopping him; he was far too skilled at that kind of thing. Fully armed, Bohr staggered away as far as he could, as quickly as he could, hauling the vessel with all the heartfelt force of a millennium of memories. The shuttle tumbled through the void like a leaf in a gale.
Gest could feel the lector’s mind too. He stood witness as HEIMDAL erupted, eviscerating the remaining sons of Muspell. There was delight, exhilaration, triumph…
Then nothing.
In that split second, Surt reached out his sword. The light was excruciatingly, catastrophically bright. Even at their impossible distance, the shuttle groaned.
Behind them, doors were dismantled, crushed in the deepest well of all: gravity. The sword swung further still, cleaving the heavens with two brilliant beams of destruction. Gest screamed in pain, his skin blistering, his eye sockets burning in the afterglow and the heavens screamed with him.
The planet of ice and fire shattered, the crust and hot iron innards spilling into the cool Gap, a stream of rocks and particles sucked into the coruscating clouds of light at the edge of an ominous black disc. Mímisbrunnr boiled away into the witch’s brew.
The sun turns black, | earth sinks in the sea,
The hot stars down | from heaven are whirled;
Fierce grows the steam | and the life-feeding flame,
Till fire leaps high | about heaven itself
THE STARS HAD ALL VANISHED now. All that remained was Ginnungagap, nothing without end. There were still winds, though, great gusts blowing in from the sea. He could smell the salt, feel the air.
But Gest’s eyes were gone. Supernovas were son-of-a-bitch painful.
He might shake off the injuries. He had in the past. But there wasn’t much likelihood of his eye-sight returning to empty sockets. He didn’t heal that well.
Somehow, he felt lighter. He was certain that Olaf had roared his last, just as he was certain the draugr had triggered the insatiable black hole, the Ultimate Devourer. Nothing survived that, not light, not even the ravings of a madman. Whatever the creature was, it had been swallowed in the maelstrom.
Bohr was gone too. He felt for the pulse on the old Skuld’s neck, but he’d already felt his mind snap out of existence. In sharing consciousness, he’d found no meaning, no revelation, no enlightenment. Just oblivion. At the moment he jumped, the Skuld became what he beheld. Shame, Gest thought. He hadn’t known him long, but he felt a certain kinship.
All the magnificence of the Empire of the Heavens had been obliterated too. The shuttle’s link to MIM had collapsed. There was no voice recognition. That wasn’t surprising given the scale of the destruction. He had no way of telling where they had landed—or when. He heard cows though, mooing contently. If there were cows, placid, docile, milk-giving cows, they could survive.
He couldn’t see if the on-board data was intact. Without a link, the systems would decay anyway, leaving fragments of information. There were four of the short, squat boxes on board, the ones the Skuld had used to run errands and make repairs. He didn’t have any skill with technology, but he asked them to form a perimeter and patrol the four quadrants, and they seemed obliging enough. It was a military staple. Who knew what was lurking out there in the dark? The Bots would help the lifers when, if, they awoke—but he wasn’t too worried about that. There were wearing Gap-suits after all, and naval types were a hardy bunch. They’d likely been spliced with some Jötunn DNA.
Gest didn’t have the energy to start over, to stitch everything back together, despite Bohr’s urging. He was tired beyond belief. There wasn’t much use waiting around to exchange pleasantries. He felt around for the distress beacon, set it, and walked off into the night. He assumed it was night, anyway. He was cold and shivering, despite the burns.
He still had his harp. And his candle. The Norns were still watching.
Over the centuries, he’d travelled the length and breadth of the Nine Worlds looking for answers, looking for the gods to make sense of it all. At times, he’d considered the possibility he was divine. Was he Christ reborn, come to judge the world at its end? Was he to be adored as the visible expression of Ahura Mazda, the eternal light of righteousness? Was he, as the Brahman would have it, a divine and an omniscient flame? The living symbol of the triumph of light over darkness, knowledge over ignorance, good over evil, hope over despair? Perhaps he was Odin, just as Bohr said, detached from his wagon and searching for his sense of self. If he was a god, he’d find out soon enough.
Either that or he was a mistake. An ember escaped from the celestial fire, cascading through the ages, a mote of stardust. He hadn’t achieved any victories, after all. He hadn’t changed the world or saved his people from the twilight, when the worlds of man and gods had needed him most. He’d saved his own hide and left the rest as pestilential dust.
He’d sailed with the sons of Ragnar, though. That was something. He’d been candleman to the greatest warriors, their faithful squire, holding true and watching. Perhaps that was who he was: a witness, fated to record the full length of the twine, the ravelling and unravelling of existence. He had the nagging thought that Olaf had tricked him,
over and over again. When the wolf gets old, he becomes a clown for the dogs.
The cows mooed in agreement, making him hungry and miserable. He traced the lines of countless scars, a tapestry of tales. He thought of the skalds. Empires dissolve and peoples disappear, but song passes not away. No music now, no audience for his songs, no warming fires in the Rus wilds.
But he could soon fix that. He felt all the duels and deaths, and found his body groaning for release. He reached for the battered old harp, and played one last time, two old senescent friends, reminiscing.
Then he took the hoary candle and rolled it in his palm. With a sigh, he touched it to his tinderbox.
“Let there be light.”
SOS SOS SOS AF YMIR YMIR YMIR TRUMBA V PSN 54.24.0 N, 3.26.0 W CODE SILVER ABANDONING SHIP AR K MESSAGE REPEATS
EXEGESIS IX
GOSFORTH, ENGLAND
2017
MRS. JONES PULLED ALONGSIDE THE grass verge. She’d parked too close to his car, as usual, but he wasn’t about to complain. He was expecting a whole bevy of scholars up from Cambridge that afternoon, and she’d agreed to run down to Oxenholme and pick them up in the minivan.
She waved at the churchwarden and walked up the path to Sunday Service.
“Hello, Olaf luv, how is old Granddad Michaels this morning?” she trilled.
Michaels waved back, gritting his teeth. Reverend Riley clapped a hand on his shoulder and peered at him over the top of his glasses.
“Why does she do that?” Riley asked sympathetically.
“What? Persist in calling me Olaf, luv? She is a bit right-of-centre you know.”
“Not much fun being named after the Eternal King of Norway?”
“If your predecessor had dedicated the old church to a normal saint the same year I was born, I wouldn’t have this problem. The Scouts think it is a hoot too.”
“I see your point. But no, I mean, why does she call you Granddad? You’re not even forty.”
“That’s what Olaf means: grandfather. She looked it up on Wikipedia. You should see what she came up with for my surname.”
The two men laughed, then looked back at the trio of crosses in their charge. The silence was amiable, each man content in the warm morning sun.
“I hope you haven’t been staring at the blessed things all morning,” Riley said.
Michaels shook his head. “You know the village stocks used to be here. The last rascal to be put in them was punished because he climbed that cross.”
Riley exhaled slowly. “It really is a miracle. The Bishop of Carlisle will be joining us, by the way.”
“Wonderful,” said Michaels. Then…
“God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.”
The vicar laughed. “I prefer Wordsworth. Talking of storms, more trouble in the papers, I see. Protests, marches.”
“Well, if life is a brief moment in the light between the eternal void before birth and after death, I can understand why people get angry when theirs goes to shit,” said the churchwarden.
Michaels was glad to see PASE was working again, but until the experts looked at the new columns, it wasn’t much use in deciphering the legends entwined across the sandstone.
“Are you reading anything? I just finished Chandler’s last novel, Playback, if you want to borrow it for the drive to Oxenholme.”
“No thanks. I have a whole new chapter here to work through. I think there are two stories on the new arrivals, one Christian, one Norse.”
He looked at the new interlaced carvings on the nearest cross. Yggdrasil was there, her branches spiralling up the column, with the Allfather caged in her roots, ordering the universe once more at the Well of the Urd. At various points, the tree was inscribed with candles, giving the impression of a Victorian Christmas tree. On the east side, the candles stopped abruptly before a man with a large round shield. On the north side, draped in shade, the candles continued higher, all the way to the crown, great wolves chasing them for all fourteen feet. The last image was Heimdallr facing Loki at the end of all things—or perhaps it was an archangel dueling Satan. From this angle, they even looked like they were dancing. It was impossible to tell. The only certainty was the sun circle at the top had toppled off, as if predestined to be used as the rectory sundial.
“Ah, I’ll admit, I was never comfortable with the duality. How can two histories sit side by side?” the vicar said, rubbing his beard thoughtfully.
“It’s called entanglement, I think,” Michael replied.
“Sounds complicated.”
“You know the solution to the Gordian knot? I think if I had a problem that complicated, I’d just cut the rope too. You know the greatest irony?”
“What’s that?”
“Ragnarok was all about renewal. It wasn’t ever meant to be the end of all things, not like the Christian End Times. It was about passing the torch. Giving the younger soldiers a go. I mean, the sun sets each night but still rises the next day, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what the sun circle seems to say,” the vicar said, breezily. “What goes around comes around. I’m still irked at the new classification. I’ve basically had to admit to Mrs. Jones that we have three swastikas on church property.”
“I wonder if we haven’t got this interpretation wrong. History isn’t a straight line. Christianity spread change quickly. You know what happens when you drop a pebble in the lake? Ripples go in all directions. It’s not a Mexican wave, with every working in sequence. That reminds me, did I mention the Vikings had a wall too, just like Trump? They called it the Danevirke, the Bulwark of the Danes.”
“Did it work?”
“Did it, hell. The Christians, when they came, just sailed round it. Before poor Thor knew it, his people were wearing bishop’s mitres and cutting down his sacred trees. Wouldn’t you be pissed off?”
“I know he still fills the skies with rage; he has hit the church steeple a few times over the years,” Riley chuckled.
The vicar clasped the churchwarden on the back and led him inside for the service.
The All Father Paradox Page 30