Valhalla, p.23
Valhalla, page 23
The small-English guy stared at him and started shaking his head, like he was about to have a seizure or something. ‘It’s okay,’ Vinnie said, trying to sound soothing and friendly; but the more soothing and friendly he tried to be, the more it seemed to freak the small-English guy out, until he made a horrified gurgling noise and jumped up, keeping the instrument console thing between Vinnie and himself.
‘Look, this is crazy,’ Vinnie said, still trying to appear relaxed and laid-back while circling predator-fashion round the console. ‘Really, I’m not gonna hurt you; all I want to do is sabotage the goddamn ship. Now hold still, will you?’
He reached out. In retrospect, it was a mistake; he mistimed the grab and the small-English guy had plenty of time to avoid him and jump sideways, which he did. Unfortunately, he landed awkwardly, lost his footing and sat down on the console, causing red lights to flash and an alarm to go off. A computer voice started counting backwards in Russian, and the ship’s PA system began making loud HOOP-HOOP noises. The small-English guy froze and stared at him in abject terror.
‘Jeez,’ Vinnie said, ‘what’s that goddamn racket? Can’t you turn it off?’
The guy shook his head. ‘Self-destruct,’ he hissed. ‘In two minute.’
‘Huh? But—’ Yes. Well. Why fight it? ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘So long, it was great meeting you guys. Thanks for the soup.’ He turned and walked away, strolling, not running, towards the stairs that led to the bridge and the conning tower.
Ten minutes or so later, when his head burst out of the water like the first crocus of spring, he was still trying to work it out in his mind. No, he hadn’t scuttled the ship, they’d done that themselves; but if he’d stayed where they’d put him and kept still and quiet, chances were the sub wouldn’t have self-destructed. He opened his eyes and looked round, but he needn’t have bothered. No survivors in little rubber boats, not even any wreckage or debris floating on the water. It had, of course, been a miracle that he’d got out alive, a freak concatenation of incredibly unlikely coincidences that he hadn’t even bothered to take note of as they happened around him; he’d just assumed they’d be there, the way a surgeon expects the nurse to put the scalpel into his hand when he asks for it, and he hadn’t been disappointed.
What next? Plane, ship, helicopter, submarine; it didn’t leave much, unless it was a cycle that repeated itself endlessly, in which case the next rescue would presumably be another plane.
He looked up. No plane. No ship, for that matter, no helicopter, no submarine, not even a drifting log for him to cling to. Come on, guys, whatever happened to continuity? Let’s keep this gig slick. Bring on the next . . .
Next to him, the sea suddenly and unexpectedly boiled. Startled, he trod water and tried to keep his eyes above the surface. Then something bobbed up out of the sea a few feet away.
‘Ah, shit,’ he complained, his voice heavy with disgust. ‘No. No way. I am not getting in one of those buggers, and that’s that, man, that’s final. Hey, you just listen to me a goddamn minute here—’
If he said anything else, the noise of the wind and the sea blotted it out completely as the giant sperm whale that had just put its head above water opened its enormous jaws, swallowed Vinnie as if he were a dry roasted peanut, and dived again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The strike was over, and the whole of the Valhalla campus echoed with the ring of steel on steel and bone, the gurgle of free-flowing mead, disjointed attempts at singing while profoundly drunk and the raucous melodies of Viking regurgitation—
(Maybe, Carol wondered, this is also the Valhalla for mashed swede and macaroni; they get cooked, they get eaten, and by night-fall they’re back again, ready to repeat the cycle—)
—as if nothing had happened; which was fair enough, because very little had. The strike hadn’t been broken as such, nor had there been any formal negotiated settlement. Instead, a day came when the Vikings had drifted back to their accustomed places and carried on.
‘A horse once dead to be flogging . . .’ one of them explained to Carol, who, for reasons of her own, no longer cared particularly much about the strike or anything to do with her surroundings. Nevertheless, enough of her residual personality remained to prompt her to argue the toss.
‘But Odin’s won,’ she objected. ‘You gave up, and he won. He screwed you.’
The Viking nodded in grudging acknowledgement. ‘Of rats a bag is Odin, not to be being disputed. But nowhere at great velocity to be approaching is of futility the very essence.’
Carol shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ she said. ‘It’s up to you guys, basically. And if you can live - sorry, stay dead - with the fact that that jerk beat you—’
‘With the smooth, occasionally a rough,’ the Viking replied philosophically. ‘And out of each other the shit to be beating to any extent, the injustices regardless, than nothing is better. Lo! To fighting I go. A time long it has been.’
Carol didn’t reply and the Viking walked away, whistling out of tune and practising thrusts and parries with his sword. He looked happy enough, and that was ironic, since he was presumably just some kind of hallucination or hologram supplied with the scenario to make it seem more authentic. Maybe the unreal people were happy, but surely that wasn’t the point. After all, you don’t build a factory to give a secure, loving home to a bunch of machines.
‘Feeling better now?’
‘Where did you appear from?’ Carol replied wearily. ‘You’ve got this habit of suddenly being there which is really beginning to bug me.’
‘Sorry,’ Odin replied, without the slightest trace of remorse. ‘Actually I’m everywhere at all times, it’s all part of being a god. I’d have thought you’d have known that.’
Carol sighed. ‘Don’t start. And I don’t believe you, either. I’ll bet you there’s all sorts of places you aren’t.’
Odin shook his head. ‘How I wish that was true,’ he replied. ‘But it isn’t. Just think about that for a moment, will you? Have you any idea how big the universe is?’
‘Oh please, spare me the Carl Sagan stuff.’
‘No, really,’ Odin said, with a degree of feeling that rather startled Carol. ‘Think about it, just for a moment, before you walk away. Consider that it takes a particle of light two million years to go from the outer edge of this galaxy to the nearest point of the galaxy next door, and everything in between is empty. Nothing. Like Iowa, only worse. I’m out there. Dammit, I’m every bit as much out there as I am here. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-to-the-power-of-nine-nine-infinitely-recurring per cent of me hangs brooding in the interstellar void, nothing whatsoever to do, utterly cheesed off, while the remaining picopercent of me is here, rushed off my feet, hasn’t even got time to stop for breakfast. That’s what it’s really like, being a god. No fun at all.’
Carol frowned. ‘My heart bleeds,’ she said. ‘The rest of you should get a hobby or read a book or something, instead of taking it out on people like me who never did you any harm.’
‘No sympathy, huh?’
‘No sympathy. You need to get a grip of yourself, deal with it, the way we mortals have to deal with the thought of dying. Though,’ she added venomously, ‘if the rest of us knew you were here waiting for us, it’d certainly add a new dimension of terror to mortality.’
‘Oh well,’ Odin said, ‘if you’re just going to stand there being all hostile, then the hell with you.’ He vanished, leaving nothing behind except a chocolate-bar wrapper and a very faint electromagnetic field. Carol sniffed disdainfully and walked away.
A few yards up the track, she came across two Vikings fighting. Neither of them was in good shape; blood was leaking out of both of them like oil from the crankcase of a Harley Davidson, and one of them looked like he’d been wagering his arms and legs in a Viking variant of strip poker and had just seen his opponent’s full house while holding a pair of fours.
‘Excuse me,’ she said.
The somewhat dismembered Viking looked round at her, giving his opponent a chance to swing hard with his battleaxe and sever the poor fool’s head from his neck. The head toppled forwards, bounced twice like a flabby beach ball and rolled up against Carol’s foot.
‘Sorry,’ Carol said.
‘Over spilt blood in crying no merit,’ replied the head stoically. ‘To be of assistance?’
‘Nothing, really,’ Carol said. ‘I’m bored, is all.’
The head raised an eyebrow. ‘To be bored?’ it queried. ‘In Valholl?’
‘Yeah. Bored stiff. I mean, for God’s sake, what is there to do around here?’
The Viking who still had his head on clicked his tongue. ‘To be fighting, naturally,’ he said.
‘But I don’t want to fight,’ Carol objected. ‘Sorry, but I don’t go for all that macho-aggressive stuff. If I wanted to get hacked to death where I stand in the middle of a barren and inhospitable landscape, I’d go to LA.’
The Viking sniffed. ‘Trying it you have been, to assume?’ he asked.
‘Well, no,’ Carol replied. ‘But what the hell, I haven’t tried wasting away with diphtheria either, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t enjoy it much.’
‘To be trying,’ the Viking said. ‘Come! In haste! His weapons to be retrieving, whereupon at you to be having.’
‘You mean, I fight you?’ Carol shook her hair vigorously. ‘Get real, will you? You’re about ten times bigger than me and I’ll bet you’ve been practising beating the shit out of people with swords and axes and stuff since you were in psychotics’ pre-school.’
‘Irrelevant,’ the Viking said. ‘In Valholl to be equal all warriors are.’
Carol scowled. ‘Yeah, I heard that already. I thought that just meant we all get to vote at Residents’ Association meetings. ’
‘In ability to be equal,’ the Viking explained. ‘This you are not knowing? For shame.’
Before Carol could reply, she heard a discreet cough at ankle level.
‘To excuse,’ said the head. ‘To do and to see, things and people, with special reference to a dog hypothetical.’
‘What? Oh, sorry.’ Carol moved her feet to allow the head to roll past. ‘Hey, mister. You forget something?’
‘I believe not,’ the head replied.
‘Really? How about the rest of you?’
The head spun on the spot like a bowling ball at the end of its run. ‘That you reminded me is good. Gratitude.’
Carol smiled. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘you’re so absent-minded you’d forget your own body if it wasn’t usually sewn on.’
Once the head-and-body ensemble had cleared out of the way, Carol stooped down and looked at the magnificent garnet-encrusted hilt of the sword it had left lying on the ground. ‘Just looking,’ she pointed out, as the Viking reacted to her movement. ‘So that’s a sword, is it?’
‘Verily.’
‘Hmm.’ Carol leaned a little closer. The hilt was surprisingly small. ‘Mind if I just pick it up?’ she asked. ‘Without prejudice and all that crap?’
‘My guest to be,’ said the Viking politely.
It turned out to be even heavier than she’d expected, but the balance made up for most of it. There was an undoubted appeal about the thing, probably directly related to some sub-Freudian character defect ultimately caused by her lousy relationship with her schmuck of a father . . .
Yeah, it felt great. You could really damage something with one of these.
‘Say,’ she murmured to the Viking, her eyes still on the sword, ‘how do you work these things? Is there a special knack to it, or do you just kind of lash out?’
‘Of taste a matter.’
‘Okay,’ she said, and swung the sword in a gleaming arc, until she felt an agonising judder running up her arm as far as her shoulder.
‘Oops,’ she said, looking down. ‘Butterfingers.’
The Viking’s head looked back at her. ‘Of apology no need,’ it said reassuringly. ‘Of beginners, however, the luck.’
‘What d’you mean? I thought that was a pretty good swing.’
‘Respect,’ said the head, ‘but awful the style, and the footwork . . .’
‘Here.’ She bent down, picked up the head and popped it back on the Viking’s shoulders. There was no click or fizz; but once the two had reunited there wasn’t any trace of a join.
‘Wow,’ she said, ‘nice trick. How do you guys do that? Velcro?’
‘In Valholl, no problem.’ The newly restored Viking stood up. ‘Each day of lives nine to each of us vouchsafed is, hereinbefore I but times three having been slain, six to me remaining. To be fighting, and this time,’ he added sternly, ‘from cheating to desist.’
Well, why not? Last time around she’d died in her sleep, she hadn’t even been there to feel what it was like. She’d felt cheated about that; it was like going to Europe and not being allowed out of the tour bus. Death in battle, mano a mano with a fierce and ruthless opponent, swordfighting - she’d always been a sucker for a good black-and-white-movie swordfight, the sort of affair where you know without having to look that before they’re done someone’ll have swung down from the top of the stairs on the chandelier, and the bad guy will have ruined a perfectly good lamp-stand by missing the hero’s head with a haymaker and burying his blade in it. And if the Viking really was telling the truth and genuine blade skill counted for nothing here, she might even win.
‘Okay,’ she said, holding the sword at arm’s length and trying to remember the way Errol Flynn stuck his backside out while taking guard in The Prisoner of Zenda. ‘Let’s do it.’
The Viking nodded and slashed at her. She thought, Oh shit, parry! and at once her arm moved, so that her sword blocked the blow. She felt the shock in her elbow, but the Viking’s obviously superior strength hadn’t counted for anything. Cool, she thought, and took a swing at him.
‘Ack!’ the Viking yelped involuntarily, as a red line appeared on his tricep. Carol blinked twice.
‘Hey,’ she said, ‘did I just get you?’
‘Ja,’ the Viking grunted. ‘To fight thus, where were you learning?’
‘Wasn’t me,’ Carol replied. ‘I mean, I don’t know spit about swordfighting, ’cept for what I’ve seen in the movies. Does it hurt?’
‘Not in Valholl. Urgh!’
He slashed at her again and, without even a conscious thought, she got out of the way (one step back, one left) and counter-attacked with a navel-level thrust. The Viking avoided it, but only by an inch or so after a standing jump. Before he could regain his balance, she feinted high and swept the blade down low. He stooped awkwardly to parry; she let her sword glide off his angled blade and recovered with another thrust. It scraped the inside edge of his elbow, and while he was yowling about that, she quickly stepped right and forward and swung hard at his unprotected head.
It reminded her a lot of the year when she’d won a coconut at the fair and her father had struggled to break it open for her. In particular it was the hollow, woody sound the coconut had made just before it finally gave up and shattered; exactly the same sound as the Viking’s skull made when she hacked at it with the sword. The Viking looked at her without a word and dropped to the ground, motionless, as blood seeped through the crushed part of his skull in precisely the same way as the juice in the middle of the coconut had done. Uncanny similarity (unless this was all in her mind and she was using that memory to base this delusion on; that was a nice, comfortable theory and worked just fine except for one thing - it wasn’t true).
‘Of novices the good fortune,’ the Viking said, sitting up. ‘Down four, still to go five. This time, I the first blow to be striking, ja?’
‘What? Oh, sure, ja, ja.’ Carol relaxed, then took guard. She made a mess of it, because the Viking stepped neatly round her defence and sliced into her skull as if it were an apple.
Didn’t feel a thing. Hey, don’t say I missed it again, that’d really suck—
‘Jesus,’ the man was saying, and the scowl on his face showed that he really wasn’t happy. ‘What does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?’
Carol looked down at the tray in her hands, and below that the black and white tiled floor. ‘Drink?’
‘Yeah, before I grow a beard and die of old age. Shit, all I want’s another bottle of Michelob.’
‘Michelob?’
‘You got it. What was so difficult, huh?’
She looked at him. He was about sixty-two, fat and white-bearded, wearing a baseball cap. He wasn’t the Viking. He didn’t appear to be Odin. The point was worth checking, though.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but are you Odin?’
‘Am I odeing what? And what’s that mean anyhow, to ode? You got a cold or something?’
‘That’s fine,’ Carol said. ‘One Michelob, coming right up, soon as I’ve called my Dad.’
The man objected, but Carol was already standing at the bar, shovelling coins into the payphone. To her surprise, she found that she could remember her father’s mobile number. Line engaged; but that was quite usual. She got the man his beer (Michelob; third shelf down, on the left, where it’d always been) then tried again.
‘Dad?’
‘No, it’s me. Sorry. Would you like me to give him a message? ’
Carol shuddered. ‘Odin?’
‘Large as death and twice as handsome. Do you want me to give your dad a message or not? Something cheesy, I’ll bet: “Dad, I love you”, or something of the sort.’
‘Screw you.’
‘That’s not a very nice thing to say to your father.’
‘That’s not for him, that’s for you.’
‘Oh. Well in that case, same to you with Béarnaise sauce and a cocktail cherry. So long.’
The line went dead and she hung up. It was the bar, no doubt about it. Everything was as it should be, from the smell of the spilt beer to the inaudible drone of the TV in the corner showing reruns of the third season of Cheers. She looked round and saw Juanita, and Phil the owner, reading the National Enquirer behind the bar, and one or two customers she knew by sight; old barflies who were probably listed in the inventory along with the tables and glasses. She took half an inch of the skin of her forearm between thumb and index finger and tweaked hard: Yes, ouch, check. She walked to the door, up the stairs and out on to the street. The air was cold and smelt of New York, and when she had tried to go through the outside door and on to the sidewalk, no invisible barrier or force field had blocked her way. She was—it was incredible.
