Chapter Twelve: The Nature Of A Doomed Cosmos
Chapter Twelve: The Nature Of A Doomed Cosmos
The gods of our ancestors made the world. They also broke it. See Chapter Five
Timur grasped the Web of Norns, and in a flash found himself once again in Mimr’s Pub. To his relief, all five of his friends were already there.
They sat together at a wooden table, plates of food and goblets of drink filling every available space. The goddess Freyja was there too, clad in an elegant white and gold gown, accompanied by her cats Weiss and Schwartz, the felines sleeping on the couch while she entertained her guests.
Timur’s friends greeted him with smiles and cheers as he walked through the doorway, and he swiftly took the empty spot set aside for him. After a single gulp of Idunn’s mead the smell of food became positively overwhelming, and realizing just how hungry he was Timur set to work on his meal, not bothering to ask where it came from or how anyone knew he craved a good cheeseburger.
Between wolfing down bites that somehow only became more delicious with each chew, Timur listened as his friends described all they had experienced in the hours since they had last been together. Freyja listened intently, kindly and patiently asking innocuous but oddly probing questions whenever there was a gap in the running narrative. Last of all her attention settled on him.
“Kim and Patrick pretty much covered everything,” Timur shrugged. “I can’t add much, other than that Jackson guy is a right twat. Our position was only a few dozen meters away from theirs during the battle, so saw pretty much everything like they did, felt those awful shells rain down… then there was the nukes.”
Timur was about to continue, but stopped himself. Suddenly he felt a wave anger sweep over him. It was like a switch in his brain had flipped, and feeling his face flush Timur stood up abruptly, walked over to the couch where the cats lay dozing, then threw himself down onto the cushion between them. Weiss looked up and glared, but Schwartz just snored, feet twitching as the creature ran through some feline dream. He interlaced his fingers behind his head, leaned back into the cushions, and stretched his feet to rest them on the seat of the nearest bench.
“What is happening to us, guys?” Timur asked no on in particular, bitterness in his voice, staring up at the rafters. “How did we all end up caught in the middle of three wars at completely different points in time?”
“Well,” Freyja said gently, looking over to him, “to put it bluntly, you’ve essentially been drafted, don’t you know? That’s what becoming Einherjar is. You get taken away from the world you knew and sent to fight in an eternal conflict until the end of time. Simple enough, isn’t it?”
“Drafted into what army?” Timur glared at the goddess. “You keep saying we’re Einherjar. Which is a word I only know from Norse mythology, and means almost nothing to me. Not next to all the other insanity we’ve been through in the past couple days.”
“It means exactly what I said,” Freyja smiled. “You have been made soldiers, though this was not your choice. Loke removed you from your Thread of reality and placed you in another, one almost identical to your own. In doing so he has created a paradox that cannot be resolved without violating the very laws that hold Midgard as you know it together. In the end, as Voluspa foresaw so many ages ago, the universe will tear itself apart, bringing about Ragnarok, the annihilation of quite literally everything.”
“I still don’t entirely buy this whole Norse gods bit,” Timur growled, shaking his head. “What are you people, really, that you can have such godlike powers over us? Are you seriously telling me that the old Norse were the ones who got it all right about the true nature of the universe?”
“Ah,” Freyja winked at him, “but here you are forgetting that just because you perceive us as you would if the Norse mythological tradition was in fact reporting truths long forgotten does not mean that we are exactly who you might logically think from the visual evidence alone. A curious fact about the human mind, really any mind that originates in Midgard, is that it only directly perceives a small fraction of what it thinks it does.”
“Your strange brains are exceptionally adept at minimizing cognitive load. By that, I mean you tend to automatically conserve attention for higher-order cognitive functions, like abstract thought and verbal communication. In your moment-to-moment life you tend to see whatever you have been conditioned to, not necessarily what is truly real. This is why children of many species spend years essentially testing the environment around them to determine what is consistent and what is not.”
“As they grow, most of them reach a point where they no longer need to investigate the nature of very regular things like, say, the effect of gravity, or the sun rising over the horizon at the break of each new day. They learn to presume the existence of those types of things and their habits. And so they see, without truly seeing, rarely stopping to consider just how much their mind is filling in the gaps.”
“Riiight,” Eryn cut in, sounding weary. “I remember this week of my philosophy of science seminar during first year of grad school. You’re about to tell us that we perceive you like gods from the Norse pantheon because our brains are already primed because of prior associations, a Sapir-Whorf sort of thing. Problem with that line of reasoning, goddess, is that I’ve never paid any attention to mythology of any variety. So why do I, or we I should say, all see you as Freyja and the bearded vagrant looking dude as Odin? Why not, say, Amaterasu or Shiva or Ishtar or a member of some other pantheon?”
“Good, good!” Freyja nodded enthusiastically. “You reason well! So: your Norse mythology, in those Threads where it develops more or less as you know it, is merely one branch, a local realization, of a far deeper mythological system. To understand me better, tell me where in your home Thread each of you were born.”
“Me and Loucas are from Puerto Rico,” Yari said, scarcely looking up from her mofongo. “Kim grew up in Indonesia, Patrick is Estonian-Canadian, Eryn is Vancouver Canadian, and Timur is Punjabi.”
“Halfish.” Timur corrected her, shrugging sheepishly, feeling embarrassed he hadn’t told them more about his family past before. “Dad and mom were both from the Punjab. The Tarkhans claim to have lived there for over a thousand years, though who knows if it’s actually true. Dad was always pretty eclectic, and liked to say he was a half-Mongol Islamic Hindu just to rile up the neighbors. Mom’s family was Sikh through and through, though she wasn’t really into names and labels. Punjab is an interesting place. I haven’t been back in years, not since I got out of Kashmir and came to Vancouver. So me, I suppose I’m kind of, well… ”
“You’re just Canadian, now!” said Yari, beaming broadly.
“Sure, Yar,” Timur shrugged, smiling back at her. “I’m fine with that. Most Canadians seem pretty nice.”
“Fascinating,” Freyja shook her head, golden locks gleaming in the light. “It is difficult for we gods to be certain with fresh Einherjar, so I prefer to ask about regional origins rather than assume. One way we are very different than you, perhaps truly godlike in our own way, is that we tend to see you mortals as a sort of amalgam of all the possible yous that can exist across the infinity of Midgard. Makes it difficult to pin down the particulars of the unique you I’m actually talking to at a given moment.”
Freyja laughed and rubbed her eyed with a slender hand. “I am making all of this more complicated than is strictly necessary, aren’t I? To communicate with beings who have spent all their lives trapped in a narrow single realization of what could be is sometimes most difficult. Maybe it will work better if I offer you the tour guide's version of the deep history of the gods, which the Norse happened to remember better than any other people by some strange twist of fate I personally attribute to Loke’s proximity to Iceland, something you six sadly became aware of.”
Freyja paused, looking lost in thought for several long minutes. When she began to speak again, her voice had changed. It was both quieter and clearer, tinged with the sadness of memory.
“The mortal universe of Midgard was born,” Freyja held up her hands, and between them Timur saw a brief vision like the unfolding of Creation, “through a kind of overlap between Jotunheim, Muspelheim, and Niflheim. In an instant, gravity from Niflheim and energy from Muspelheim were bound together, forced to interact according to the strange rules of quantum mechanics emanating from Jotunheim.”
“Many worlds existed under Yggdrasil, separate and distinct, until Ymir brought Midgard to be in the void of Ginnungagap. It is a blend of them all and a crossroads linking each, and Vanir and Aesir, Jotnar and Muspelli, Aelfar and Svartaelfar, indeed soon all beings known to the gods were drawn to it. And so all became bound to its fate, as Midgard also blended with our own worlds at their farthest margins.”
“We Vanir were drawn to the sheer variety of life that emerged, and when your species was in its infancy we walked among you, learning and teaching. The Aesir under Odin also came, seeking mastery and wisdom, and likewise encountered humanity in your earliest days. This was not all for the good, as we Aesir and Vanir are like long-separated twins, yet in our first meetings in Midgard we met one another with absolute hostility. We originated from different Worlds after all, and we did not know how to communicate at first, each seeing the worst in the other.”
“To the Vanir, Midgard is a delicate place, a garden to be cherished and cultivated. To the Aesir, this world is for adventure, a puzzle to be solved and developed. The two ways are not incompatible, yet at first misunderstandings and arrogance on both sides brought about a terrible conflict. And because Earth is the first world we encountered, it became the site of our long, bitter, mutually destructive struggle, one that tragically dragged in ancient Humans as well, for we gods then walked among you more openly than in later times.”
“It was Odin, in his wisdom, who first realized that the war would someday destroy us both and Midgard too. Even before we knew our own homes were under threat from the greater danger that unites us now, we realized the necessity of an honorable peace. And so Odin forged the truce that has held ever since, save a few scattered incidents usually triggered by misunderstanding. We each have our own homes and realms, but we mix and marry freely. Never will we war among ourselves again.”
“It’s always good when mom and dad get along,” Patrick muttered, and Timur noticed that he seemed to be paying the closest attention to Freyja’s tale. “And from what little I know of ancient mythologies, I’m pretty sure that story of warring factions of gods is common to a lot of cultures. Is that how you’re going to connect this history back up with Eryn’s original question of why you all look so Norse to our eyes?”
“You are wise, quiet one,” Freyja chuckled. “And on the right trail. For humans of your time, the days when we gods dared walk openly are so far in the past that you have no material history to account for them. Writing came late in your species’ development, and because language is a living thing, always shifting and evolving, your oral histories evolved as well. The original truths were scattered across tribes and cultures, events compressed in time and overlaid by new ideas, new interpretations of the old core. In the end, the stories became in many places purely functional, a convenient way to transmit ideas about good behavior and other important lessons across the generations.”
“The simple answer to your question,” Freyja nodded gravely to Patrick and Eryn in turn, “is that you see us this way because your primary language is English. Your minds naturally seek a reference point for comprehending what you are experiencing. These are heavily influenced by the culture you have integrated into. And in your time on your home Thread and many others, the language you speak and cultural idiom you employ is heavily inflected by mythology, which was once the carrier of the old traditions, held sacred in its own way.”
“Your original time is more than a thousand years after a period when a small set of expansionist ideologies conquered most of Earth. When their centuries-long push for conquest began, your kind entered an epoch of dying languages and fading peoples, the constriction of ideas and possibilities down to an incredibly narrow false choice between greater or lesser misery in life and mere hope for salvation after death. But even in your time, as your species approaches a moment where the very definitions of what constitutes a language or a people will greatly change, the old wisdom still shines through and the ancient truths continue to bind.”
“And I will admit,” Freyja grinned coyly, “that we gods do nothing to keep you from perceiving us this way. We could, you know. Though we prefer to treat with you as equals insofar as we can, we do possess powers you lack. And we have been among the many peoples of Earth in numerous guises. In truth I am not merely Freyja, but also in many respects also Aphrodite, Ishtar, Hathor, and Venus, among so many more. I have had many aspects in my travels, and the same is true for most others of godly kind, as mortals are adept at muddling memories over time. I choose to allow you to perceive me in this aspect because it is appropriate for our present situation. The Norse simply remembered better than any other humans the ultimate fate of all gods and worlds, how we must some day die.”
“I think I hate this reality,” Timur sighed, shaking his head and reaching out to pet Schwartz the cat. “I really do. So Loke broke everything, using us, and now we’re stuck living the consequences… until the end? I repeat myself: I hate this reality.”
“I didn’t make most of the rules,” Freyja shrugged. “Like all the gods, whatever I have touched in Midgard has tended to become truly real, an event all Threads of cause and effect evolve to incorporate into themselves. We ourselves are bound by the rules of this life, even if we are limited by different ones than such as yourselves.
Kim sighed, her brow furrowing. “So I’m going to hazard a guess here,” she squinted at Freyja. “You people aren’t gods in the all-knowing, all-powerful sense, but you have a huge amount of power relative to us. You are like deities to us in the same way we are to ants?”
“I love having smart students!” Freyja cheered aloud, punching a hand towards the ceiling. “That metaphor will do for the time being. And just as we could squish you, but choose not to, you are able to bite us back, though we generally find this more amusing than dangerous, so I do not advise you to try.”
“I’m with Timur. I hate this reality.” Kim grumbled, and Timur was somewhat gratified to all his friends nod as one, though Yari with perhaps slightly less vigor than the rest.
“Tell me about it!” Freyja grimaced. “In their own realms the Jotnar and Muspelli are to us like we are to you, so for the most part their domains are completely off limits to us. The Aelfar live in a strange place only Freyr can transport visitors to as part of an old treaty, and the Svartaelfar will only treat with a select few outsiders. And even when we embody in Midgard, we experience life just as you mortals do, though we can rather conveniently leave at any time, provided we actually remember who we are. Odin in particular likes to go play human. Male, female, other genders, it doesn’t matter. Dude wanders around time and space, just living and learning, being and doing everything Allfather can imagine.”
“In fact, that’s how you humans first got caught up in our wars. Some of us liked to play warlord in Midgard and wound up being some of your greatest heroes, even ancestors. Though not everything attributed to us is accurate, of course, because naturally later generations of would-be leaders did their best to associate themselves with memory of our past deeds, even to the point of becoming us in the eyes of some of their more rabid followers.”
“Freyja, you are the goddess of digression, aren’t you?” Eryn interrupted, sighing. “Here we are trying to understand what we’ve gotten ourselves into and what we have to do to survive, maybe even get home, and you’re busy telling us all the grand secrets of the universe.”
“I like that!” Freyja squealed happily. “Goddess of digression, yes! I’m sorry, I know I do go on. Every now and again I rediscover that I enjoy educating the new Einherjar.”
“In any case, what I meant to get across to the six of you is that I am no great fan of this reality myself. You do realize, don’t you, that what you see of me or any of the others at a given moment is actually only a sort of… after-image, of our deeper true selves? I’m carrying on this conversation with you somewhere in the far back of my mind, with the rest of me barely even aware that it is happening because I’m sitting on my throne staring at the Web of Norns and desperately hoping that I can come up with a way to avert Ragnarok. And no matter what simulation I run, everything I try fails!”
Timur blinked several times, seeing the clear dismay in her eyes and feeling sudden sympathy for her. His anger was slowly fading, replaced by an overwhelming sense of helpless frustration.
“Why can’t you just send us home, then?” Timur said, staring into her eyes and silently willing her to perform a divine intervention. “If there is no hope, and there’s nothing we can do anyway? It sounds like it’s the end, no matter what happens, so why do we have to be stuck here? Why can’t we go to our families?”
“Because there is yet a tiny shred of hope,” she shook her head. “As well as the fact that once Einherjar, always Einherjar, until Ragnarok. Even were you to die and have a chance to be born again before the end, you would remain Einherjar. If Loke had not selected you we would be free to dispatch you wherever in time and space we chose to carry out missions in the name of the gods. But do you not recall? Loke unleashed a catastrophe on your world. Going home is not an option, for soon no home will be secure from the ravages of Fimbulwinter and Ragnarok.”
“No, sadly,” Freyja looked at them all with deep sympathy clear in her eyes, “like so many young humans before, you have been drafted to go fight in a war. All you can hope to do now is survive. Survive, and see what if any difference you can make before the end. In this, you are now no different than the gods.”
“But always remember that dark as things may seem, there is always cause for hope, even if irrational, desperate, and fleeting. Because what is the alternative to having hope? To lay down, and die. But death is coming regardless sooner or later, so what is the point of staying idle? Every living thing in all the Nine Worlds is facing the exact same future now: absolute annihilation. The end of everything, forever, because in the wake of Surtur’s fire time itself will cease to be.”
“But the end can be put off, and this has been the long work of gods and Einherjar, invisible to mortals such as yourself. We have fought to give us all as much time as possible, a worthy war if ever there was one. You are now part of that long, sacred tradition, responsible for more good than you can possibly know. All you can do is join the fight, clinging to at least one tiny shred of hope.”
“Hope, huh?” Loucas said, finishing a long pull of mead as Freyja fell silent. “That’s really all we’ve got? I’m the kind of guy who prefers science. You’re gods, and if I heard you correctly, you actually had a hand in shaping the world as we know it. And yet there’s absolutely nothing you can possibly do?”
“You speak as if we haven’t examined this problem from every angle, innumerable times,” Freyja chided. “For us Ragnarok has been prophecy aeons in the making, a threat we have done all we possibly could to avert since before your solar system formed, from your frame of reference. We know now with a surety that Ragnarok is as inevitable as the birth of Midgard, everything that could have been tried to avert it in fact was long ago. The Fate of Norns is fixed, yet we keep on hoping that something may yet change, or that there is some detail we missed.”
“There is in fact an interpretation of Voluspa’s prophecy,” Freyja lowered her voice, “that holds something will emerge after Ragnarok. But only Loke seems to truly believe in it. Which is why he now actively seeks to bring the end of days down upon us all. He hopes that he will be the one to effect the tiny change that makes all the difference then rule whatever comes after the Last Battle.”
“Maybe I could even get behind that, if he wasn’t committed to making sure that he is the only one who survives, taking his final vengeance upon us all. An impossible dream, one he himself knows cannot be, and yet sustained by wild hope he will keep fighting to the bitter end of everything.”
“It is admirable, in a way,” Freyja mused, taking a long sip of pale mead, “if you can get past the fact that he is willing to destroy anything and anyone that stands in his way. Myself, I would rather die and be forgotten, if all my friends and everything I loved were doomed to oblivion. But he is willing to sacrifice even his own family in order to survive. So it goes with too many Jotnar, I suppose. Perhaps that is why Thor spends so much time fighting them whenever they encroach on Midgard. Too many remain incomprehensible to us, and though Loke was raised in Asgard he has never forsaken the blood of his kin. Not all Jotnar are bad, far from it, but his line… they’re special.”
The room fell quiet, save for the sound of both cats now snoring so loud Freyja was having to raise her voice. Whatever they knew or felt about the looming end of the universe, they didn’t share with anyone else.
“So,” Eryn asked, after a long pause, “this trap we’re stuck in, it isn’t going to let us out anytime soon, is it? I have to go back to Germany and do… I don’t know what. Keep pretending I’m some kind of helpful spy, I guess, and kill more Nazis.”
“There are worse ways to spend your life,” Freyja smiled fiercely, raising her mead in salute. “Hitler down, Goebbels down, you’re on quite a roll!”
“Yeah… ” Eryn said uncertainly. “And in another century, Kim, Patrick, and Timur have to try not to get shot or bombed or nuked in Idaho until… they get to meet someone with some real power?”
“Yup,” Timur nodded glumly, glancing at the clock over their doorway and annoyed they had less than an hour left before Jackson and Chavez had ordered them to report for intensive basic training. “The tech is better where we’re at, but the whole thing feels too familiar to me. Like the old nightmare I’ve always had, where I woke up to find myself in Kashmir again.”
“I’m so sorry,” Freyja said softly, gazing into his eyes. “I can see much pain in you. Continue drinking your mead. The fruits of Idunn’s labor can heal many afflictions, or else Einherjar could not wage war for eternity without losing their humanity completely.”
“And lastly,” Eryn said, as if determined to keep their predicament organized in her mind, “Yari and Loucas have to go on space battleship to help out a bunch of robots whose end objective is… they don’t know what. And they’re supposed to keep doing this until… they also wind up in the right position to influence someone important.”
“So basically,” Eryn continued, summing up. “We just keep treading water, hoping for an opportunity to show up that could let us change what you’re telling us can’t possibly change?”
“That is correct,” Freyja nodded gravely. “Welcome to the war, Einherjar. Now hurry up and finish your meals. You have a lot of work to do.”