The Gods of Laki

by Chris Angus

  Dagursson tore his eyes away from the deluge long enough to stare up at the path they still had to follow. He saw something moving above, coming at them out of the darkness.

  “What’s that?” he cried.

  Sam and Ryan turned to look just in time to see the body of the strange, frozen, blonde-haired, and very unlucky young woman from long ago hurtle past them, just feet away, disappearing once again into the unknown, as she had seventy years before.

  Dagursson lunged at the figure as it went by and stared after it in stunned disbelief. “I . . . I had a chance,” he said. “I could almost reach her. I could have saved her.”

  Sam put one hand on his shoulder. “You couldn’t save her,” she said. “She’s been dead longer than we’ve been alive. She was a frozen climber from long ago.”

  He stared at Sam incredulously. He’d only had a glimpse of the body as it went by and remembered only the sweep of blonde hair. She had seemed so real. “You’ve seen her before?” He couldn’t get his mind around the incredible idea.

  But they had no time. The water was rising rapidly. They crawled and slid and skidded higher, helping one another when they could, forming a human chain to get past occasional chunks of ice that jutted out of the side of the crevice.

  Finally, they broke through to the surface. As they had before, they sprawled on top of the glacier, reveling in the sense of freedom and release. Far across the landscape, they could see Laki, still encased in boiling, black clouds, though it now seemed also to be covered with rising funnels of steam.

  Then they heard the water beneath them again, like some awful living thing that wouldn’t give them up.

  “We’ve got to go higher on the glacier,” said Ryan. “Or we’ll be swept away once it breaks through to the surface.”

  They scrambled upward, even as the water gushed out of the crevice in a fountain that spurted fifty feet into the sky. When they had climbed a hundred yards higher, they stopped and looked back.

  The water, pulled by gravity, flowed away from them, down the glacier and over the side in a mini-Niagara. Steam poured into the sky as the water bubbled over the frozen landscape.

  “It’s melting the glacier,” said Sam, staring at the incredible sight. The subterranean waters were indeed carving a deep channel into the glacial wall.

  “Come on,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to find another way off this thing and get back to the others. They need to know what’s happened.”

  But Dagursson seemed frozen in place. “Do . . . do you think Laki let us escape, after all?” he asked.

  Ryan shrugged. “Who the hell knows? If this so-called escape was by design, it was about the most convoluted getaway of all time.”

  “Sort of like a test, wasn’t it?” Sam said.

  He stared at her. “I’m getting just a little tired of Laki’s tests. If he’s a god, He’s a damned schizophrenic one. You think that’s possible? A schizoid deity?”

  “Be kind of hard to establish a norm in terms of behavior, wouldn’t it? For God, I mean,” said Sam. “You wouldn’t have a very large sample to judge by.”

  ***

  Carlisle stood next to his communications chief, fretting over his inability to get a clear channel. Finally, the man smiled broadly.

  “Got him,” he said and handed a pair of headphones to Prescott.

  “Prescott?” came the voice. It sounded distant and not very strong, but it was the President. “I can hardly hear you. What’s going on?”

  “Mr. President,” Carlisle spoke loudly, as if the man were stone deaf. “We found your ocean, sir.”

  “What? Say again,” said Thurman.

  “The Southern Ocean, Mr. President. It’s reappeared here, gushing out of the hole in the Earth. There’s no doubt about it. No place else for so much water to come from . . . and it’s salt water.”

  “Well . . . that’s good,” said Thurman. “Isn’t it? Look, we’ve got news, too. Reports have been coming in from around the globe. Volcanic activity is dissipating. I don’t know what you did over there, but it seems to be working. Maybe it was the power of prayer after all.” A distant, bitter laugh came through the headphones. “Listen, His Holiness has been calling me every half hour. Wants to know where his delegation of cardinals is.”

  “Uh . . . no information on that, sir. Some of them are still here, but those who went underground, including Wormer, haven’t been seen, along with our own people. To be honest, Mr. President, we don’t hold out much hope for them. Things are pretty out of control beneath Laki. I don’t think anyone could survive what’s going on down there . . . cardinals and prayer be damned.”

  There was silence on the line. Then the President came back. “Sorry Prescott, I was just getting a report. Our AWACS says that the hole in the Southern Ocean appears to be closing. The waters are still swirling, but they’re not disappearing. Hold on a minute . . .”

  Carlisle waited, staring blankly at the computers above him.

  “That’s confirmed,” the President’s voice came back. “The hole has shut down. Our people report that the overall level of the oceans worldwide has declined nearly six inches. That’s one hell of a lot of water gone down a rabbit hole.”

  “I don’t expect it’s disappeared for long, sir,” said Carlisle, “the huge amounts coming out of Laki will eventually make it back to the sea.”

  “Yes . . . yes, I understand,” said the President. “Listen, I’ve got to go. But it’s good to have some positive news. Let me know if that idiot Wormer surfaces. Until he does, the bloody Pope won’t give me a moment’s rest.”

  Carlisle stared at the phone as the President clicked off.

  Andy Pryne stuck his head in. “Good news, sir. The underground party has just reappeared, coming from the direction of the glacier. Should be here in a few minutes.”

  Carlisle threw the headphones down and pushed past Pryne in his haste to go see for himself.

  Outside, sure enough, Sam, Ryan, and Dagursson were plodding across the flooded landscape. They looked like phantoms emerging from the clouds of steam. Senator Graham was already making his way toward Sam, and the rest of the scientists were close behind.

  Carlisle puffed up beside the trio, shook hands all around, and said, “Whatever you did down there, it appears to be working. I just spoke to President Thurman. He says volcanic activity is subsiding worldwide, and the hole in the Southern Ocean has closed.” He stared at the horizon. “Where are Wormer and the other cardinals?”

  “They . . . didn’t make it,” Dagursson said. “A lot of people didn’t make it out of that hell.”

  “What about Laki?” Carlisle asked. “Did you resolve anything with the volcano? Was it a god after all?”

  “Laki was almost certainly someone’s god,” said Ryan. “The Vikings’, maybe. I’m pretty sure he was never ours. He still seems unwilling to forsake Skari and Amma. The cardinals were turned into chrysalises too, though I don’t think he had any love for them. It’s kind of unclear if what Laki did by turning them into zombies like Amma was give them eternal life or punish them for worshipping him. What happens now is anyone’s guess.”

  “Maybe Laki will go back to his own universe or dimension, or wherever he came from,” said Sam. “I doubt we’ll ever know for certain, but my guess is the dissipation of volcanic energy around the world suggests he’s decided to leave us alone. Perhaps Skari had something to do with that. Who knows? Frankly, I’m tired of trying to figure it all out. Mostly, Laki seemed not to want much to do with us . . . except when he did.”

  “That sounds a lot like God to me,” said Carlisle. “Utterly conflicted. We’re probably a whole lot better off when he doesn’t pay attention to us than when he does, if the past couple of weeks are any indication.”

  President Thurman’s science advisor stared across the landscape. There were no longer any lava streams evident. They’d been replaced by flows of water gushing off the sides of the volcano, tumbling down like glacial streams of meltwater, maki
ng their way eventually to the sea. Through some miracle, they had thus far avoided the parking lot with its two big buses filled with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment.

  “Looks like we’re out of immediate danger,” said Carlisle, “but it will be a while before the water dissipates enough to allow us to get out of here.” He turned to Ryan. “We need to report the loss of Wormer and the cardinals who were with him to the President. His Holiness is concerned.”

  “I doubt His Holiness will want to know precisely what happened to them,” said Ryan. “That their prayer mission was ultimately a failure. If anything, it incited Laki. I think Wormer’s holier-than-thou attitude angered Laki so much he wanted nothing more to do with humans. So he called the greatest offenders into the void. God knows, I can identify with that. Wormer made me want to get rid of him any way I could. If I’d had a hole to throw him into, I might have done the same thing.”

  Carlisle led the way to the bus. “I’m sure His Holiness will find a way to interpret things to his liking,” he said. “It’s one of the things religious leaders are particularly good at.”

  ***

  Dagursson emerged from the bus and went over to sit beside Sam and Ryan. Carlisle, Hauptmann, and Senator Graham were also there.

  “My men finally grounded the helicopter that Rashid commandeered,” he said. “But. . . .”

  “What?” asked Sam.

  “He wasn’t aboard. According to the pilot, he was forced to put down near the coast where Rashid and his comrade were picked up by a fishing vessel. We have no idea where they are now.”

  “Can’t you get the Coast Guard after him?” asked Ryan.

  “They’ve been notified, but they’re short-handed. The strange water phenomena, temperature, and weather changes and so forth have kept them busy rescuing small vessels. Besides, there are probably hundreds of fishing craft off the coast of Iceland. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Face it. Rashid has got away, scot-free.”

  “Maybe not,” said Carlisle. “I’ll tell the President to put out a worldwide Interpol alert for the man. Where can he go?”

  “Back to Iran would be my guess,” said Senator Graham. “International law has little influence there. Something I learned a long time ago.”

  They stared across the surface of Laki. It was slowly returning to something approaching normality. Though the water continued to gush, lava flows had dissipated or been cooled by the huge volumes of ice-cold salt water that could only have come from the Southern Ocean. Those waters had initially been turned to boiling cauldrons by the heat of Laki, but now the mass of icy liquid had overwhelmed the lava. There remained a loud hissing sound over all of Laki, as steam continued to rise in great, billowing clouds.

  Even the skies had returned to normal. The boiling black clouds had reverted to the standard Icelandic overcast. There were no more mini-tornadoes and even the near-constant rumbling of subterranean earthquakes and collapses had subsided.

  “What’s happened to the cosmic ray output?” asked Ryan. “And to your other weird events, your strangelets and Kaluza-Klein particles, the Higgs boson and I don’t know what all?”

  “All our readings show things returning to normal,” said Carlisle. “Which brings up an interesting question. Were they real in the first place? Were they examples of scientific phenomena or simply manifestations of Laki’s anger?”

  “My guess is the latter,” said Sam. “I think Laki made up his own rules, including his own laws of nature. In a strange way, I think he was playing with us, enjoying our struggles, like a cat playing with a mouse.”

  Hauptmann turned a gimlet eye on her. “I know you’re an atheist, my dear, but that’s a pretty cynical view.”

  “I’m not an atheist any more, Ernst,” said Sam. “I’m convinced Laki was real. I’m just not real sure . . . what. I guess you can put me down as agnostic from now on.”

  “I don’t think your cat-and-mouse metaphor is cynical at all,” said Carlisle. “There was a lot going on that we couldn’t explain with all our instruments and computers and simulations. I think Laki pretty much did whatever he felt like, sort of like those ancient Greek or Viking gods, petulant, indifferent, and demanding all at the same time. So we had tentacles that seemed like some kind of fungus, but had no DNA. We had cosmic ray bombardment that had no outside cause or source we could detect. Same with the rents in space/time, black holes, strangelets, and so on.

  “We were looking for scientific cause and effect. What we got instead were completely random events created by an ambivalent deity, acting on impulse. We had no more insight than the ancient Greeks who tried to explain events in their world according to the whims of spiteful gods.”

  “Well, one thing was real enough,” said Graham. “Amma and the other Viking chrysalises were kept alive somehow for a thousand years. I’d still give my eyeteeth to know how Laki did that.”

  Carlisle shook his head. “Like everything else Laki had a hand in, I believe it was all for show, all an illusion. The proof is in how quickly things returned to normal once Laki tired of us. He simply lost interest and has probably turned to some other universe or some other creation for amusement. God help them. We were but a moment’s diversion.”

  “Maybe Amma had it right,” said Sam, “when she said the creation of humans was nothing. Perhaps Laki’s goal all along was to show us how insignificant we really are.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Deep beneath the Vatican, Demetrio Ricci, the papal Secretariat, proceeded on his mission. His focus was not deterred by the many mysteries, some of them gruesome, that abided in the sub-basements of the Vatican.

  The lower levels were dank and smelled of the age of centuries. Ricci carried a rack of large iron keys to locks that were rarely, if ever, used. Any normal mortal might be expected to feel the chill of the past run down his spine as he moved along these dark corridors. But Ricci was unaffected.

  In one secluded room lay ancient Jewish relics, Torah scrolls, manuscripts and most precious of all, the Temple Menorah of pure gold. All had been stolen by the Romans from Jerusalem and taken to Rome in 79 CE. When the Roman Empire became Christian, the items were placed in the Vatican basement. Repeated calls by Israel for return of the sacred holy vessels were never commented upon by the Popes and had been met with denials by Vatican officials that such objects even existed.

  Farther along was another chamber, this one filled with looted Nazi gold. Here were hundreds of millions of confiscated Swiss francs that had been sent to the Vatican for safekeeping by the Nazi puppet Ustasha government of Croatia in 1946. Keeping the gold company were piles of jewelry and other valuables taken from concentration camp victims.

  Ricci paid no attention to any of these relics of the sometimes horrific past of the church. Soon he was striding past the pagan necropolis that had been uncovered beneath Vatican City in 2003 during construction of a parking garage for Vatican workers. Called the Necropoli dell’Autoparco (literally, the Necropolis of the Parking Garage), the tombs gave a glimpse of the ties between Christians and pagans during the Age of Augustus (23 BC – AD 14). Only recently, and against the wishes of the Pope, had part of the necropolis been opened to the public in honor of the Vatican Museum’s 500th anniversary.

  The display held two hundred and fifty excavated tombs, including forty elaborate mausoleums from a time when many pagans were on the verge of conversion to Christianity.

  It was here, in a section of the necropolis still largely unexcavated and hidden from public view, that Ricci reached his goal. The Holy See had been aware of the pagan burials for hundreds of years prior to their unwitting discovery by construction workers. It was only one of many, many secrets of the Catholic Church. Ricci was here to assure His Holiness of the safety and security of another, one that related to issues much in the news of late.

  The papal Secretariat selected one of the large iron keys and inserted it into an ancient, rusting lock. But though the lock was old, it had b
een well oiled and used frequently in recent years. It opened smoothly.

  Inside was a single shelf carved of marble and resting on it a simple wooden box. Ricci took another key, unlocked the box, and grunted as he viewed the contents.

  The box contained a single, oversized book or manuscript. It was the oldest known copy of the original Icelandic sagas. Older by far than the edition of the Heimskringla that Hauptmann had perused with such loving care at the university.

  Ricci placed his hand on the book for the last time. It was an old friend. He’d spent much of his career deciphering the manuscript, comparing his translations with those of earlier papal Secretariats. The book’s secrets had been known to the Holy See for many hundreds of years.

  The aging manuscript was nothing less than proof that there was a living god. Yet it was a proof long denied by the church. For this was the saga of Skari, Viking carver of religious totems in honor of Laki.

  The existence of Skari had long been known to Popes and papal Secretariats. The ancient sagas were clear. They spoke of a being who lived at the center of the Earth and who had bestowed eternal life on the Viking residents of southern Iceland in the tenth century.

  The Pope had told Wormer only part of the truth when he said he knew of the cardinal’s secret council of religions. In fact, the council’s investigations and tenuous conclusions had been reported by the Vatican’s spies to each Pope since the group’s founding immediately after the war. What Wormer was not privy to was that the Vatican had its own copy of the sagas, one kept secret from all but the highest of the Catholic hierarchy.

  According to Skari, Laki was both a pagan and a Catholic god. A bridge between two worlds. Such a confluence could never be openly accepted by the church.

  Yet this was no legend to be dismissed. The sagas proved beyond any doubt that Laki was a power to be reckoned with. A living god who controlled the secret of eternal life. Skari provided authentication of Laki’s power. Hard facts that could not be denied by even the most fervent members of the church.