Ragnarok

by Michael Smorenburg

  “And the other reason?”

  “Just, errr…. Well that, uhhmm… That I know you… well.”

  “And that you’re engaged to me? My fiancé?”

  He laughed and looked at his feet, abashed. “News travels fast.”

  She smiled and let it ride. “My folks? Can I talk to them? When can I see them?”

  “Shortly, I’m sure. When this lot get done with the debrief,” he indicated toward the milling officials with his head.

  He was still holding her in his arms, speaking in an intimate hush, using the intimacy to keep those who still wanted to interview her at bay.

  “But we can’t delay them much longer.”

  “What’s it gonna entail?”

  “A lot of questions. Some serious commitments from you for secrecy… Signatures to documents you won’t have time to read.”

  “Fine,” she said offhandedly.

  “Y’a do understand the gravity of this?”

  “I was an investigative journalist. I get it.”

  “No temptation with the journalist stuff. Not soon an’ not ever. These guys are serious!”

  “Okay… I get it.”

  They held each other a moment longer and the officials meandered another step closer.

  “Can you believe this… this, well, shit?” Pete posed a loss for a better word.

  “Daxton sort of hinted at it.... Well… not at wild men exactly, but at a time twist. What now?”

  Pete laughed, but it was humorless.

  “Doubt anyone’s got a clue.”

  “Would you mind, sir?” a man with an officer’s bearing but not wearing uniform or rank asked directly.

  “Sure… Can we organize the lady something warm and dry?”

  “Of course, just a few questions and the shower facility will be ready for you, ma’am.”

  Pete retreated from the area.

  He was still suffering disbelief at what was going on under this canopy.

  The field hospital had hastily erected partitions, two dozen beds mostly filled, dozens of medical staff swarming in every direction, beeps and blips on the air, the hiss and sigh of more than one life-support breather and heavily armed guards at the door.

  And then he caught sight of a familiar face at the canteen, helping himself to coffee.

  It was Daxton Cronner.

  Pete had managed to squeeze a meeting in with Daxton when he was last in New York, just after Tegan had met with him.

  It had been their first meeting in person. Pete had called it to thank him for giving of his time, to assure Daxton that Tegan would maintain informant privilege and mostly to understand what had gone down and why he was skittish and reportedly nervous.

  He’d decide that it was simply Daxton’s character to be antisocial, idiosyncratic and neurotic.

  It was a genius thing, particularly when the genius in question is pinned with the blame and thrown out into the cold.

  He milled close by, waiting for Daxton to finish talking to a woman.

  “Mr. Cronner?” He was at last able to make an approach.

  “Do I know you?” Daxton asked, looking puzzled over cut-off prescription glasses.

  “Very briefly… Pete, the Ozzie—we had lunch?”

  “Ahh—” Daxton seemed more confident with his hypothesis now vindicated and his opinion suddenly in demand. “They said the girl got caught up in this? Your fiancé now?”

  “Tegan, yeah. Fortunately she’s safe.”

  “Quite how, I don’t know, by the look of them.”

  “Y’a think they’re for real? Is this possible?”

  “I could hypothesize it and I’d call myself nuts for the conclusions. But I’m looking at it and I don’t have another explanation.”

  “Can we talk? Off the record… y’a can imagine, I’m trying to come to terms with it.”

  Daxton nodded, clearly weighing what he could speculate on without sanction.

  “Have you any idea of where they’re from?”

  “When…. When they’re from.”

  “Well, sure. That just keeps sounding too strange.”

  Daxton shrugged as if it was a matter of fact, because in the formulas he’d been working on, it was.

  “Any guess what you think happened? How it happened? Specifically?”

  “Time crystals,” Daxton said simply, as if it should mean something.

  “Crystals? Magic? Y’a kidding, right?”

  “No,” Daxton looked almost peeved at the suggestion. “Not at all. No magic at all. It’s physics, pure physics. A newly discovered state that matter can be in… Unfortunately named, that I’ll grant you.”

  “I’m guessing your energy burst?” Pete prompted.

  “Indeed. Quite right,” Daxton suggested. “I propose that the energies that blew back turned everything in the path of the time-rip into a form of time crystals. Every atom in the path got physically shifted into that state.”

  “Yeah, well… I don’t mean t’a sound facetious, but that wasn’t in my high-school syllabus, I don’t think,” Pete went for understatement.

  “No doubt,” Daxton agreed. “It’s not in any syllabus… not yet.”

  He swallowed the last of his coffee.

  “A time crystal, or, should I say more properly, a space-time crystal is rather new to physics. It’s an open system in non-equilibrium with its environment that exhibits time translation symmetry breaking. Particles that have been forced into a time crystal characteristic will violate the conservation of energy. The non-conservation is in reality a transfer to the vacuum field… you may know it as the zero-point field. It’s really quasi-energy at work, you understand?”

  Pete didn’t, but he sensed it was best to just let the Professor go on and hope he’d say something that sounded remotely coherent.

  “So, contrary to what’s indicated by the laws of thermodynamics, it is impossible for these crystals to be in equilibrium with their environment over time.”

  Pete nodded his most convincing pretense at agreement.

  “Time crystals exhibit topological order, an emergent phenomenon in which nonlocal correlations encoded in the whole wave-function of a system allow for fault tolerance against perturbations, you understand? So, once energized to have time crystal properties, the atoms in the path—these men, their boat, and, I understand, a reef full of fish—exhibit quantum states that stabilize against de-coherence effects that usually limit their lifetime.”

  “I’ve gotta be honest,” Pete admitted. “It’s a more than a little over my head. But, if I understand the situation…. I have Nordic blood in me. What if one’a these guys over there’s an ancestor?”

  “Ahhh… the grandfather paradox? What if they die here and never give birth to your greatest-great-grandparent back then that leads on to you?”

  “Yeah,” bewilderment rang through Pete’s intonation as he said it.

  “May not be a problem,” Daxton was nodding to thoughts in his own mind. “Firstly… different atoms. Different atoms that make these guys up that were involved in making the genes you inherited up. But mostly, if they are time crystals… if the atoms that make them are briefly time crystals, there is nothing we can do to hold them. They will spontaneously revert back to when they came from… when, of course, the energy that caused their conversion to this state dissipates out of the system as it surely will.”

  “Y’a mean, they’ll… what? Like teleport… like a Star Trek episode?”

  “Well,” Daxton surprisingly chortled at the image. His chuckle seemed rather human for such a stick-dry character.

  “I can’t say if they’ll shimmer and disappear into fairy dust, and I have no idea when or how it will happen. But thermodynamics suggests it should happen simultaneously to all of them. They’ll simply be gone.”

  “And the missin’ planes? The missin’ ships?”

  Daxton gritted his teeth and massaged the tendons that stood out in his turkey neck, thinking it through.

  “G
ood point. They may come cruising back into their old flight plan. I’ll have to do the equations the other way.”

  “This seem normal t’a ya’?” Pete asked on impulse.

  “Normal’s whatever nature chooses to do. I’m only an observer with no jurisdiction to judge it, no matter how outrageous or beyond experience it is. If the science says it can happen… and it seems to have happened, then it can happen,” he shrugged with resignation.

  Pete nodded in agreement at the obvious answer. “I bet every anthropologist on Earth would wanna be in that room over there,” he mused.

  “Almost no point," Daxton suggested. “All this never happened.”

  “They don’t strike me as the giant men… ya’ know… like their legend,” Pete observed, still charged up from hours of worry and adrenaline, and feeling the need to make small talk.

  “In their time, they were giants. Now we’re the giants.”

  It was literally and figuratively true.

  They stood a while, shoulder to shoulder, watching the masked giants behind the quarantine screen administering medicine to their own ancestors.

  “Seems at least the injuries were kept to a minimum.” The urge to make small talk overtook Pete again.

  “One was killed by a sniper.” Daxton confirmed what Pete had witnessed on the monitor a few hours ago. “And it’s touch and go with the youngster. Septicemia from a gangrenous arm… probably brain damage, say the surgeons.”

  “Consequences for him?”

  “Probably be a simpleton. Not good in his world, I’d imagine.”

  “And us? What happens to us in their bloodline if they die here, now? I’m trying to get my head around this causality thing.”

  “Well, we’re here, you and me—that much is certain. If one of these men hadn’t given you his genes to be here, you wouldn’t be.”

  They were silent again, watching the activity.

  “I presume you’ve seen the news about the plane into the Hudson?” Pete asked.

  “Indeed.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  “Can’t say much, I’m afraid. But it never happened, that’s the official line.”

  Pete frowned.

  “How they gonna cover it?”

  Daxton bit his lower lip and danced his head from side to side. “Persuasion.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “Officially, it was a bird strike.”

  “And the missing weeks they were gone. The media noise… archives of it?”

  “They’re in for observation.”

  “Ahhh,” Pete knew better than to ask how they’d obliterate the memories. “But their families—you can’t take the families in for observation?”

  “Therapy,” Daxton suggested plainly.

  “What, all of them?”

  “Sure—everyone close enough to need counseling.” Daxton shrugged in a most telling way. “There are medications, therapies. There is… well… LifeGames Corporation, you’ve heard of it?”

  “The A.I. company? Virtual Reality training?”

  “Sure. Their operation’s underpinned by very sophisticated hypnosis technology. A few sessions, you see, and you know…”

  Daxton left it unsaid.

  “And the public at large?” Pete persisted.

  “Documentaries. False memories; I understand they’re relatively easy to plant. Time fixes much, confounds claims. Today’s news is tomorrow’s conspiracy.”

  “But news archives?”

  “Databases fail…”

  Just then, Daxton got a tap on the shoulder and was led away to further meetings.

  Pete stood alone, staring through the quarantine curtain, contemplating.

  Of all the perils the captors on the other side had faced from their distant descendants—the military force and doctors who swarmed over them now—none was more lethal than the vicious microbes that their ancient world had not prepared them to face in this one.

  The expressed fear was that the onset of flu symptoms in Tegan may already be incubating and spread an epidemic if these men contracted it and took it back with them to their time.

  But Daxton’s opinion on this seemed sound; if no modern virus was recorded in our history, then it didn’t… or wouldn’t, happen.

  It was all so complicated—yet simple.

  Chapter 24

  Grundarfjörður, Iceland

  Júrgson Estate, 1041CE

  Latitude: 64°55'13"N

  Longitude: 23°15'8"W

  “Gánsí Júrgson was of the dream world,” the saga explained.

  “From the day he awoke from the nightmare where a fire-stick had took his sword arm, he retreated into the wilderness of a madman’s ranting. Insane stories of skræling sending floating cities fast against the wind and Odin drawing lines on the roof of the sky.”

  It is told that, without his left arm and the withered right hand where a wolf had attacked his sword arm, Gansi had physically withered and become an imbecile.

  Indeed, the notion that he had become more female than male was carefully cultivated. Because, as a female, he could be considered a vǫlva, a spákona or spækona… a female shaman and seer.

  Gansi had seen Ragnarök—he told. The very end of the world inhabited by magic. And no amount of reasoning with him would stop his talking about it.

  After his delirium, something had died in the boy. Everyone knew that Gansi had become a simpleton when his mind had been eaten by a sickness from far away and in another time.

  When Ráðúlfr Júrgson, the father of Gansi had returned with his boy from far across the sea, it was only the son who, no longer a warrior, beguiled children with the most vivid prophesies of a world to come.

  Raol had been in the banishment path of his great uncle on his mother’s side, Leif Ericson, who was son of Erik the Red.

  Raol’s wife, Rágna, who had waited six long years for her man and boy to re-appear on the horizon, was a woman of distinction. She had grown the family wealth during that banishment time.

  Since the withered boy could no longer be a warrior, and because he would not heed warnings and close his mouth about the dream, it was Raol who had first promoted the idea that his son should adopt a female guise.

  He promoted this idea as it was an offense for a man to perform the role of seer, it was considered an ergi; unmanly and sexually perverse.

  It was there in the sagas, as Tegan scanned the ancient documents, determined to find what she knew must be here.

  Raol had some personal experience of such a deadly circumstance.

  The Saga of his kin, Eric the Red, related that Ragnvaldr Rettilbein, one of Harald Fairhair's sons by the Sami woman Snæfrid, was a seiðmaðr; one who claimed to have glimpsed the future.

  For that offence, the king had him and other fellow male practitioners burned to death within a house.

  This was the law.

  King Edgar had decreed that, “any wicca or witch, wiglaer or wizard, false swearer, morthwyrtha who worship the dead, or any foul contaminated, manifest horcwenan or whore, be anywhere in the land, man shall drive them out. Every priest shall forbid hwata or omens, galdra or magic, and with many phantoms.”

  These were canon laws not to be trifled with.

  Raol would rather that the nightmare world had turned his son into a babbling woman than see Gansi meet his legal fate for telling their tale.

  And then Tegan found what she was looking for. The Saga of Gansi.

  As Gansi told the tale, Freyrík, Gansi’s cousin and Raol’s nephew had been returned to the world of men from that nightmarish place without his head.

  In truth, his body had been put over the side of the Longboat when it had bloated in death, but he lived on in proud memory. For, the skræling had plucked his head from his body that day of the capture, when he had stood on the longboat to cast his axe at the blackened tormentors in the night that had become day.

  Ótta, Raol’s brother, had mourned the loss of his son that day when Ragnarö
k was foreseen.

  And so it was that the story of Ragnarök could be told by only one, a seer afforded special immunity to reveal the saga, a tale of men drawn into the trap of the hated skræling and their gods.

  The Saga of Gansi, a saga that should never have been allowed, relayed how the great swirling phantom of a mighty aurora had burst upon the men in their retreat from Vinland after the exile was well over. In that confusion, the finger of Odin had seemed to order them back toward the coast, and Raol had obeyed to lead his men valiantly into hiding there.

  But the skræling had brought foul magic against them.

  In obeisance to Odin, Raol and his men had plundered and pillaged the small villages when the skræling men had cleverly taken on the likeness of Norsemen to dupe Raol into fellowship.

  And then the day had come when the first of the skræling came into Raol’s hide in a strange tuk—tuk—tuking craft, and were rightly slaughtered.

  Presently, a she-devil had approached from the landward river-course at the back of Raol’s encampment, and she was spared because she had assumed the appearance of mother, of Ragna, and so confused and perplexed Raol from his proper course to slaughter her without mercy.

  Tegan’s hands were clammy with fear and excitement as she read on, knowing that she was reading about herself in this parchment; laboriously translating the text from ancient Norse, one paragraph at a time.

  And the she-devil had brought calamity.

  Vast clattering dragons had blasted hot air down onto the men and then more flying creatures kept coming until the men abandoned the encampment, at last to flee back to civilization.

  But, Gansi would tell, his own condition already perilous with fever, he recalled the night of their flight becoming an instant daytime filled with thunder and a mighty sea battle.

  Freyrík had disobeyed Raol’s instruction to feign surrender and draw the howling craft with blackened devils clinging to it aboard, where they could be cut down.

  When he had stood to throw his axe, the magic of the skræling had exploded his head.