by John Brunner
Sword-age, axe-age, shields are cloven,
Wind-age, wolf-age, ere the world perish!
All the cunning amassed by Father Odin, wisest of the Aesir, was of no avail. The black crows Huginn and Munin, thought and memory, brought him news of all that passed in all the worlds: Niflheim, Muspelheim, Jotunheim, Utgard, Midgard, Asgard … At the price of an eye he bought the secrets of Mimir, sitting by his well under the middle root of Yggdrasil, and at Mimir’s death he conjured the giant’s head to make it speak to him still, and answer all his questions.
It was to no avail.
Austr byr in aldnar i Iarnvidhi
Ok foedhir thar Fenris kindir.
Verdhr af theim aollom einar nokkar
Tungls tiugari, i trollz hamil
By subtlety he stole the blood of Kvasir from the giant Suttung, which the dwarfs had mingled with honey and placed in the cauldron Odrerir. Whoever drank of it should be a bard and a skald, should understand and speak of all things to the delight and wonder of the worlds. So fierce was the chase as he fled in the guise of an eagle that Suttung’s heart burst asunder, following him.
No more, however, did that theft avail.
East-by Ironwood watches the old witch
And feeds there the Fenris brood.
One of them shall be born
Formed as a fiend who shall fling down the moon!
Nine days, nine nights, wounded with his own spear, Odin hung on the trunk of Yggdrasil and none came in to answer to his calls. Starving and clemmed with thirst, on the ninth day he saw runes on the ground, and read them aloud, and was made whole and young.
But no more did that free him from the destiny of death.
As much fascinated as terrified, Ulla walked across the island, heedless of where her feet were carrying her, her eyes fixed on the moon as it slipped into the maw of the wolf.
Likewise …
Head spinning like a centrifuge, Kitty Minakis drew in her small arms and legs tightly against her body, eyes wide and staring into nowhere. A form of knowledge was upon her; she needed to rise and share it, it being far too huge for a single mind to encompass. Trembling, she set out and found no one. Alone, in dark, on this small knob of ground enclosed by the illimitable waters.
Girdled by rivers—Acheron, Cocytus, Phlegethon, Lethe, Styx—it was a dark country, full of ill boding. There no flowers grew, but gloomy black poplars, and willows which never bore fruit. There the ground was carpeted with asphodel, the plant of ruined cemeteries, long forgotten by the children of those who had been interred. There only the wan light of the moon was to be seen, and no birds sang.
There in the Grove of Persephone the many-headed dog Cerberus came fawning, to lick the feet of the new arrivals, wagging his horrid tail. But let him once get the scent of death from a passer-by, and from then on for ever that person should not pass again. Seeing the fearful hound who blocked the way back to the sweets and delights of Earth, the dead drank gladly of the waters of Lethe, and forgot.
There was a charge to enter the other world. It must under all circumstances be paid. Had you no obolus to pay the ferry-fee, old ferryman Charon would spit on and revile you, and take his boat off from the shore, poling with heaves and grunts, to cross the river Acheron. Abandoned, hopeless, you must mourn and roam continually on the river bank, halfway between somewhere and nowhere, until the end of time.
He who reigns over that dark country Tartarus is called Ploutos, “the rich”, for of the increase in his wealth there is no end. Speak not of the forgotten treasure hidden in the earth, which he comes invisibly to steal away; speak rather of the number of his subjects, to which day by day and without ceasing there are added scores, thousands, millions!
Such is his power that every night he sends forth his agent Hypnos, whom men know as sleep, and he shows them a foretaste of the fate in store. This my Lord is the king from whom you shall not escape; sooner or later it will not be gentle Hypnos, reluctant to lay fetters on the human mind and yielding with a sigh to the advent of the pleasant nymph Aurora when she brings the dawn, but Thanatos who comes, Death who lays hard hands on the unwilling and drags them screaming and howling to the Underworld.
Where will the ferry bear us? To the dreary groves of Tartarus, there where the asphodel glimmers like the phosphorescence of rotting fish, the sweetest light that we shall ever see again, or the fields of Elysium, from whose white graceful poplars Heracles made his crown of triumph when he vanquished Cerberus? Not knowing, let us gladly drink of Lethe, that we shall forget all reason to complain of the fate we must endure. Let no one say: I pine here in Tartarus, and should be there, for I was not evil in my life on Earth. Let all forget.
Let all forget…
Passive, on sighting the ferry of Charon, Kitty Minakis sat down on a rock to await the arrival of the boatman who would claim her fare. She had drunk dutifully of the Lethe water. All past vain hope was gone from her.
Likewise …
Abdul Hassan was thankful for the quirk of heredity which made him able to survive on far less than the average amount of sleep. Five hours, sometimes six, had sufficed him on Earth. Here where the days were thirty hours long he took six more often than at home, but midnight usually found him, as tonight, sitting alone and contemplating the problems he must solve, while everyone else except the two on watch in the Santa Maria slept and dreamed.
But he was tired in ways which sleep could not relieve. Somewhere adrift on the face of Asgard, there was their unfortunate explorer Dennis Malone, who should have been looking forward to returning home next spring, and instead was trapped here. As though he had accepted the bread and water of Ament, The Westerner, and become the friend of the gods.
Abdul tensed. The chair he was sitting on had suddenly begun to sway, as though it were being rocked on a gentle swell. The walls enclosing him appeared to open out. Turning to face the door, which he had left ajar for the sake of the cool breeze, he saw a kind of hallway beyond. In the same instant the midnight curfew overtook him, and his light went out.
From the last course of his thoughts before this curious event set in, he retained a self-directed question: How shall I be judged? For it was by him, the pivot of their venture, that the success or failure of the Asgard colony hung.
Great weariness overcame him, a sense that it was now too late to make any further amends for whatever errors he had committed. Calmly he rose and went forth to face the verdict.
They waited for him in the Hall of Double Justice, and he saw them when he rose from kissing the threshold of that most sacred place. He had crossed the land between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Arrived, he had no hope of going back. What must be, must be. Let it therefore be.
At the edge of hearing he seemed to sense the mocking laughter of the lady of the West, whose bread he had eaten and whose water he had drunk. He remembered her high plume of feathers, symbol of the land of sunset. But her task was done. Invited—lured—however one should phrase it, the fact stood: he was in the Hall.
There stood a monstrous scale under the painted roof: the scale of justice, in one pan of which hung down the heart befouled with all the supplicant’s sins. It tilted steeply, for the load was heavy, and that pan scraped the gaudy floor.
Beside it stood Maat the goddess of truth and justice, terrible in aspect, with eyes that could pierce any veil of dissembling the new-dead tried to screen his failings with. There too was Amemait, the devourer, the greedy beast formed of crocodile and hippopotamus and lion, eager to snatch men’s souls and gobble them. Whining a little, drooling on the tiles, he fixed the supplicant with his horrid gaze.
Under a naos, the Lord Osiris himself, the righteous judge. On his head the atef flanked by ostrich feathers, arms crossed soberly upon his breast; in one hand the whip, in the other the crook, emblems of supreme power. Wound about his body, below the face tinged with the suggestive green of putrefaction—for he too died, was cut apart, was scattered to the corners of the kingdo
m—the winding-sheets of the dead. But his arms are free. There is hope and yet there is no hope. Oblivion is not inevitable, but what is done is done.
On either side, two and forty judges, each with a sharp-edged sword. Call each by name, and they will give a bow, but do not think to bribe them. These have gone past corruption, into incorruptibility.
There is ceremonial music: chanted prayers, the jangling of sistra. There is the scent of precious wood, burned on sacred fires to sweeten the air for the nostrils of the judges. But there is one thing more than this show and pomp. There is a man brought to the tribunal to be judged.
The pans of the scales must be balanced by the feather of truth.
Beyond hope or anxiety, beyond alarm or disquiet, Abdul Hassan waited quietly for Anubis the jackal-headed god to place the feather in the scale and see which way it tipped with its monstrous burden on the other side.
SIX THE WOUNDED WELKIN
I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I behold the stars at mortal wars
And the wounded welkin weeping;
The moon embraces her shepherd
And the queen of love her warrior,
While the first doth horn the star of morn
And the next the heavenly farrier
Whiles that I sing, “Any food, any feeding,
Money, drink or clothing?
Come dame or maid, be not afraid—
Poor Tom will injure nothing.”
—Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song
XVI
AT FIRST the incredible news which Saul Carpender broke to him stunned Dennis completely. He could not react to it—could only mechanically complete the motions he was going through, to dock his boat on the slipway Dan Sakky had carved from the rock. The drone of the engine peaked, to lift the craft on its hoverducts, then died as he shut off the power altogether. By that time, attracted by the noise, two others had joined Saul on the wharf, both looking weary, dirty, and dispirited.
And both, like Saul, carrying their guns.
The first was Yoko, her suit grimy in a way he had never expected to see. He had always known her to be fastidious about her appearance, smart as one of the ancient Japanese dolls she so much resembled. A bandage was wrapped around her left wrist.
A moment later Tibor Gyorgy emerged into view. The burly Magyar electronics expert was in the same state—hair tousled, beard growing out, his clothes unwashed for days, and armed. He was limping slightly, as though from a rheumaticky knee. Dull-faced, the three of them watched as Dennis got out of the boat and approached them.
“What in the world has been going on while I was away?” he demanded.
“Told you,” Saul sighed. “Went off their heads, all six of them.”
“Yes, but—”
So did I.
Dennis altered what he had been about to say. Time enough later to start on the mystery of how he had been able to stay alive, and return in good health, after ten days of apparently behaving like a mindless animal. He said, “But what did they actually do? Why are you in such a mess? Why are you carrying your guns all the time? How can six people out of a hundred and eighty make you look so—well, so downright scared?’
The three exchanged glances, as though embarrassed. At length Tibor said, “I guess it isn’t them. Though I am scared, that’s true. I’m worried half out of my skull. It’s what this disgusting planet is doing to us. Look!”
He skinned up the leg of his suit to reveal the swollen state of his right knee. As the dawn light grew stronger, Dennis could see the tell-tale scurvy marks, and realised that it must be from the same cause that they all wore the same expression of hopeless frustration.
“You’re all right,” Yoko said. “Tai gave you a supply of vitamin pills to take while you were away.”
“But I didn’t use them up,” Dennis said.
“Don’t give us that!” Saul’s voice was thick with contempt. “You can tell just by looking—you don’t have any deficiency diseases!”
“I still have practically the whole jarful,” Dennis insisted. “Here!” He turned to reach over the side of the boat and produced the jar as proof. “In any case, before I went away, Tai was saying he did have some of the ready-made stuff in store—he just didn’t want to use it up before he absolutely had to, during the winter.”
“Oh, sure, there’s a bit of stock left. But not much. Not after Tai got to it and started throwing it away.”
“What?”
“Fact. Here, give us some of them pills!” Saul extended his hand greedily.
“Well—well, sure!” Dennis uncapped the jar and handed it over. They each gulped one of the capsules and would have taken more, but that they looked accusingly at one another like shipwrecked sailors sharing out the last drops of fresh water on a raft.
Before he could speak again, someone else appeared from the direction of the village: a lean young coloured man with an aggressive expression, one of Ulla’s junior mineralogists whose name he could not for a moment recall.
“Ah, Steve!” Yoko said with relief, and he remembered: Steven Highwood, that was it.
“The prodigal returned, hm?” The Negro said, picking his way over the rocks. He too held his gun at the ready. “Well, I guess that’s kind of good news. So we got one of the boats back.”
“One of the boats back?” Dennis echoed, still confused.
“Sure. Why do you think we’re mounting this guard rota?” Tibor sounded faintly surprised. “Or did you think we were spending the night out here by the harbour for fun, maybe? Kitty made off with one of the surviving cushionfoils, the one we’d stocked up to go and look for you in.”
“That’s right,” Yoko chimed in. “I was due to go, and Steve, and Hal Bengtsson from Dan Sakky’s section. And when I came down here with Saul first thing in the morning, to make a final check of it, she’d made off in it.”
“Kitty did that?”
“Ah, hell! I never thought being out of touch for a few days would addle a bright guy’s brains like this.” Saul turned towards the village. “Let’s go get some breakfast and we’ll tell you the rest of it. There’s too bloody much of it to get through right now. What’s the grub like this morning, by the way, Steve?”
Settling on a convenient shelf of rock to survey the harbour, the young Negro shrugged. “Filthy slop, same as usual. But it plugs the gap. Go on—hurry. Or there may not be any left. The swine were practically eating the trough when I came away.”
Breasting the rise and sighting the village closely for the first time since his return, Dennis stopped in his tracks. At one end of the barracks-like mess building, there was a jagged gap in the wall, and from it black smears, the traces of soot, licked up crazily.
He said, “What the—? Was there a fire?”
“What does it look like?” Tibor muttered. “Which of them did we have to thank for that, Saul? Dan, was it?”
“No, Ulla. It was Dan who smashed the dam and let the reservoir drain dry.”
“What?” Dennis exclaimed.
“I keep telling you—they went crazy! Don’t you understand?” Saul turned furious red-rimmed eyes on him.
“Saul, it must be a terrible shock for Dennis meeting all this at once,” Yoko soothed. “We had it in separate stages, and that was bad enough. It happened this way, Dennis. About the second morning after you failed to call in, when we were all set to go looking for you, we got up to find that all the six test subjects were wandering around the village—delirious, I suppose. They were literally raving, talking about gods and devils, and goodness knows what. So we tried to calm them, of course, and eventually they seemed to become rational again, after several hours, except that they’d acquired an obsession. They kept trying to make everyone else go straight to the experimental plots and eat the fruit and vegetables. Which of course was a crazy idea. They were out of their minds. We caught one of them—I think it was Dan, wasn’t it?” she interpolated with a glance at Tibor—”
drinking unpurified water, and he tried to tell us that we must. Not ought to: must. In the end we decided we’d have to restrain them for their own good, but I suppose we tipped our hand. We thought we’d surprise them in their own rooms, which they went to normally at nightfall—apart from this insistence on making us eat native-grown food, they were behaving sanely in most respects—but before we caught them …”
She shrugged. “Well, I suppose it was our own fault for not warning everybody. Only the people who had spoken to them during the day realised they were crazy. We were afraid what might happen if the word got around. So, pretending to be in their right minds, they managed to commit acts of sabotage. Tai got into the biolab, smashed everything he could lay hands on, poured medicines and vitamins down the drain. Dan went out and wrecked all the purification filters on the water-pipes, and wound up by driving a tractor into the middle of the dam. It burst, and we don’t expect to be able to fix it before the stormy season begins. Kitty made off with that boat, too, and we don’t know what’s become of her or it.”
Dennis listened in icy misery, as though his heart had been replaced by a frozen stone.
“What about Parvati?” he demanded. “Did she—?”
“They all did. I don’t know if they planned it together. But she wasn’t the next one we caught. That was Ulla. She was mixing in native-grown food with the supplies that had been set out for breakfast. When they tried to stop her, she tipped one of the heaters over and started the fire you can still see the traces of. Then Abdul went to the Niña and shorted a high-tension power-lead through the girders so they lit up like the filament of one of those old light-bulbs—look!”
She threw up her arm, and Dennis saw that the shape of the Niña was deformed, its original smooth ovoid silhouette twisted as though the weight of a giant’s foot had come down on it, crushingly.