Valhalla, p.6
Valhalla, page 6
‘You got it,’ Carol replied.
Odin clicked his tongue. ‘I don’t blame you for being sceptical, ’ he said, ‘but it’s true. Look at it this way; the bar you used to work in.’
‘Yeah? What about it?’
Odin scratched his ear. ‘Naturally, you know who owns it.’
Carol frowned a little. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘It’s part of a nationwide chain.’
‘Exactly. And that chain’s part of a holding company that’s part of the leisure and catering division of a corporation that’s a wholly owned subsidiary of a group of companies whose shares are quoted on Wall Street; thirty per cent of those shares are owned by another multinational group, another thirty per cent belongs to various insurance companies—’
‘All right,’ Carol interrupted. ‘But that’s different. That’s humans. Mortals. This has got to be different, right?’
‘Oh yes,’ Odin answered. ‘Very different. For one thing, all those companies and corporations are efficiently managed and properly run by people who know what they’re doing. That’s a big difference. The Valhalla Group isn’t like that at all.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Carol held up her hand. ‘Valhalla Group? You mean there’s more than one of these places?’
Odin nodded. ‘In roughly the same way as there’s more than one star in the sky, yes. Would you mind awfully not leaning on my suitcase, by the way? It’s rather old and fragile, and I simply can’t afford a new one.’
One of the ravens hopped off his shoulder and started pecking at a derelict sausage it had spotted under the table. Carol ignored it. ‘What do you mean, can’t afford? Aren’t you some kind of god?’
Odin seemed a little offended by that, and it showed in his tone as he replied, ‘Yes, of course. And you’re some kind of human. But you were working in - pardon me - a grubby little bar.’ He indicated the hall with a slight nod of his head. ‘And I work here.’
‘Oh,’ Carol replied, a little ashamed of herself. ‘I didn’t—’
‘Here,’ Odin went on, ‘and other places. As you so rightly guessed, there’s more than one. But, sadly,’ he went on, ‘only one of me. And only one salary, too. Divided equally between all my various personae, it doesn’t run to expensive luxury items like new suitcases.’
Carol straightened up quickly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Really I am. It sounds lousy. But,’ she continued with an effort, ‘I can’t help that, it’s between you and your bosses. Come on, you must report to somebody. And I want to talk to him, whoever he is.’
Odin nodded gravely. ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘Hugin, sit up straight. Young lady would like to talk to you.’
The large, rather scruffy raven on Odin’s shoulder stopped pecking his collar and turned his beak towards Carol. ‘Ark,’ it said.
‘Excuse me?’ Carol murmured. ‘You report to a goddamn bird?’
‘That’s right. I make my report to Hugin here, he flies off with it and comes back with my orders. When,’ he added sourly, ‘he doesn’t go wandering off nibbling roadkills, that is. The administration of ten thousand afterlives ground to a halt once, just because he got himself shut in somebody’s garage.’
Carol sat down on the table. ‘You know,’ she said, after a long silence, ‘I believe you. I mean, that’s just the sort of lousy, feckless way things would be run.’
‘Explains a lot about life in general,’ Odin replied sadly. ‘I’ll tell you another thing; I’ve been doing this job for, what, two thousand years? Something like that. And you know what I trained as? Assistant librarian. But,’ he continued mournfully, ‘as luck would have it, I got assigned to Personnel as an archivist, and Valhalla comes under Personnel; so, when they were roaming round with handcuffs and a big sack looking for someone for this job, guess who didn’t get out of the way quick enough.’ He smiled heartbreakingly. ‘Out the back, just past the lost-property office and the slops bins, I converted one of the outbuildings into a really rather good little library. Dewey-decimal system, paid for all the books myself. Spent hours glueing on the little pockets you put the tickets in. Apart from me, the only time anyone’s ever been in there was when Eirik Bloodaxe was hiding out from Hrolf Kraki and Sigurd Fafnisbana. He figured it was the last place anybody would ever think of looking.’
Carol bit her lip. ‘That’s awful,’ she said. ‘Seriously, I think it sucks, the whole thing. But even so, there has to be some way I can lodge an appeal. I mean, the way you describe it, there must be mistakes happening practically every day.’
Odin laughed. ‘Don’t get me wrong, please,’ he said. ‘Just because it’s a bad system doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t mostly work most of the time. And in your case, it worked just fine. This is the Valhalla for female ancillary workers in the catering sector whose aspirations don’t conform to the generally prevailing norm.’
‘Uppity cocktail waitresses?’
‘That’s what I just said,’ Odin replied, ‘but without the derogatory language. You’re here because you used to work in a bar, and you died.’
Carol frowned. ‘I wanted to talk to someone about that. I didn’t die.’
Odin sighed. ‘Oh dear, this is very awkward. I know it’s bound to be terribly traumatic for you, and believe me, I do sympathise; someone your age, young and attractive, with her whole life before her, it’s little short of tragic. But you died, and that’s all there is to it. Sorry, but as we say in the trade, if you’re afraid of the dark, stay out of the coffin.’
‘So I died,’ Carol said angrily. ‘What of?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I said, what of? You’re not trying to tell me I suddenly just stopped, like a gas station watch.’
‘Well, of course you died of something,’ Odin said. ‘You really want to know?’
‘Yes. Is that unreasonable?’
‘No, I suppose not. Munin, here please.’ The other raven hopped back up on to Odin’s shoulder; the bird was the size of a small turkey and almost completely featherbare in places. ‘Munin is old Norse for Memory,’ Odin explained. ‘Other people have a database, or at the very least a filing cabinet. I have a large black scavenger.’
The raven stuck its beak into Odin’s ear - he didn’t so much as wince - and said something like ‘Ark ark’. Odin nodded, and the bird went back to what it had been doing, which was nobody’s business but its own. ‘According to Munin,’ Odin said, ‘the cause of death was a catastrophic brain haemorrhage resulting from a freak blood-clot - an extremely rare condition for someone your age, statistically you’d be more likely to die of a septic panda-bite, but invariably and immediately fatal. If it’s any consolation you just went to sleep and didn’t wake up: you never felt a thing.’
Carol growled. ‘I know I didn’t,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s pissing me off. Sorry, but I just don’t believe you. I want to see some evidence.’
Odin scratched his head. ‘You do? How depressingly morbid. Still, if that’s what it takes to make you happy.’
He snapped his fingers; and on the table next to her was a long, narrow shape under a blanket, something more or less her size and shape. Before she could stop him, Odin leaned across and lifted the blanket.
‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘they did a very thorough autopsy. I don’t know if you can see it with the naked eye, but that little varmint there - just there, look . . .’
Dead people can’t vomit. Fact. Ask Carol. They can try - vigorously - but nothing actually comes out. ‘Please,’ she said, when she could speak again, ‘put it away. I believe you.’
‘Sure?’ Odin asked solicitously. ‘Take all the time you need, please. I want you to be absolutely happy about this.’
‘Mmmmggh.’
Odin flicked the cloth back and snapped his fingers again. The corpse stayed where it was, to his obvious disappointment. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Loose connection somewhere, I expect. I’ll try again later. Anyway, here’s a unique opportunity for you to make some sort of witty remark along the lines of “over my dead body”. Right, try again. You know, if this was an overdue book rather than a dead body, I’d have no trouble at all knowing how to deal with it.’
He snapped again, and the body vanished, leaving nothing behind except a slight smear on the tabletop and a strong smell of preservatives. ‘That was gross,’ Carol said.
‘Really? But it was your body. You used to live in it. Whatever its shortcomings you must have loved it once, or else you wouldn’t have spent all that money buying it food, or wrapping it up in expensive clothes. I suppose it’s a bit like leftover scraps; however nice the food was, it’s all unappetising and yucky once it’s gone cold and been scraped into the bin. What you might call the Doctor Jekyll and Mr Formaldehyde syndrome.’
‘But I didn’t do anything.’ Carol looked up at him pitifully. ‘I didn’t kill anybody or go around stealing or setting fire to buildings. What am I being punished for?’
Odin shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘No such things as punishments and rewards up here. It was just your time, and this is where you were meant to go. It’s been painstakingly handcrafted to suit your own personal needs and requirements, you know. Oh, that reminds me; you’re not a vegetarian, are you? No nut allergies or religious food taboos? If you do have anything like that, please make sure I know about it early, so I can tell the kitchen staff. In a ideal world, of course, all that stuff’d be on the file. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I think it’s terribly important to make new arrivals feel at home and give a really personal service, but I do have other things I should be seeing to. I can’t be in two places at once, you know. Well, that’s not strictly true, I am in a damn sight more than two places all the time, but that just makes it all worse. Cheer up,’ he added, as he picked up his helmet and his various other bits and pieces. ‘You’ll fit in eventually, as the coalface said to the flower.’
He walked away, leaving Carol staring after him. He went about five yards, then turned back.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘strictly off the record, if after you’ve given it a fair trial and all and you still don’t like it here—’
‘Like now, for instance.’
‘—Say in a hundred years or so, or let’s not be too hasty, let’s say a thousand, there is something you might be able to do that’d make the powers-that-be a little bit more inclined to listen to what you’ve got to say. Not that I’m promising anything, you understand, and whatever you do, you mustn’t say I told you this. I’m trusting you, so please don’t let me down.’
‘Yes, yes, all right. What is it?’
‘Ask them for a job.’
Carol blinked. ‘A job? You must be crazy. I got a job. It’s a life I need to get.’
Odin grinned uncharacteristically, the broad grin of someone springing an elaborate verbal trap. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’re here.’
For a moment, Carol had a strong urge to hit him, but she decided against it. ‘That’s cheap,’ she said. ‘If I’ve been brought here - killed, dammit, and brought here - just so you can make your goddamn jokes, then I promise you there’s going to be trouble.’
Odin shook his head. ‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘It’s not a joke. Well, obviously not, because an essential ingredient in jokes is being funny, and it wasn’t, much. But really, that’s why you ended up here. Think about your life; go on.’
‘Okay.’ Carol closed her eyes and contorted her face into a pantomime of concentration. ‘I’m thinking. All right, I’ve thought. Now what?’
‘Didn’t take long, did it?’
‘So what?’ Carol replied with a shrug. ‘It was a simple life—’
‘More than just simple. It was nothing. Get up, go to work, come home, go to bed.’
‘So I worked hard.’
‘All right, you worked hard. Diligently. You were an employer’s dream of a cocktail waitress. You devoted your entire life to picking up empty glasses and putting down full ones for the benefit of a lot of basically sad people, with occasional time out to daydream about lost Mayan cities, strange visitors from distant galaxies, genies in bottles and, finally, Valhalla. Remind me, what was your degree from MIT in?’
‘Electronics.’ Carol scowled. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I admit it. In fairness to myself, I should have carved myself out a significant career, rather than dropping out. Then I could have got up in the morning, gone to work, come home, gone to bed, slept and earned lots of money. Big deal.’
‘I don’t make the rules,’ Odin said. ‘You didn’t get a life, so you got an afterlife. Now I’m giving you some good advice. If you ever want to get out of here, get a job. Do something useful. People who make themselves useful don’t fit in around here. If you really try hard, you might just get thrown out. And that’s all the help I can give you. I shouldn’t even have told you that, but what the hell. The thought of sharing Eternity with you in this mood isn’t a cheerful one.’
‘Okay.’ Carol looked down at the floor. ‘Can you do just one more thing for me? Please?’
‘I’m going to regret this,’ Odin said. ‘What is it?’
‘Get a message through to my mom and dad. Please,’ she added urgently, as Odin opened his lips to refuse. ‘I know, it’s against regulations and you’ll get in all kinds of trouble and probably it breaks the Prime Directive and undermines the fabric of space/time. But - well, it’s not so much my mother: we weren’t close but we were kind of friends. But Dad and I had this big fight when I said I wasn’t going to take the really cool job with MacroSoft he pulled all those strings to get for me - like, he’s a control freak. I guess it goes with what he does; he’s an agent, you know, finding people work in films and TV and commercials and such. Anyway, I want him to know I love him, and I miss him, even if he is an asshole.’
‘That’s so touching,’ Odin replied sourly. ‘Look, this isn’t like mortality, you don’t have a right to a lawyer and a phone call. Millions and millions of people die; if we did requests, we’d never get any work done.’
‘Please?’
Odin nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Though it’s completely against my better judgement. Not to mention the fact that I’ve got a brontosaurus tibia to pick with your father.’
Carol frowned. ‘You have?’
‘Sure,’ Odin replied grimly. ‘Who do you think got me this crummy job in the first place?’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘On your feet,’ said the sergeant. ‘Come on, jump to it. You’re making the battlefield look untidy.’
Howard groaned. ‘Leave me alone,’ he muttered. ‘Please.’
The sergeant grunted and kicked him in the ribs. ‘I said on your feet,’ he said. ‘You deaf or something?’
‘Last time I looked I hadn’t got any feet,’ Howard moaned. ‘There was this mortar bomb, you see, and—’
‘Really?’ The sergeant jumped in the air and landed on Howard’s ankle. The pain was—
But he’d proved his point. ‘They’re back,’ Howard said, once he was through screaming. ‘My feet, they’re there again. How did that happen?’
‘This is Valhalla, stupid,’ the sergeant said. ‘Now get up and get fell in, or I’ll kick your arse from here to Brierley Hill.’
Howard stood up, wobbled as he tried to put his weight on his bruised ankle, and grabbed hold of something to steady himself. The ‘something’ proved to be the wall of the house that, late yesterday afternoon, had been blown to pieces, one of which had landed on him and caved in his skull.
‘Getting the hang of it now, are we?’ said the sergeant unpleasantly. ‘Penny finally dropped? Little light bulb finally lit and hovering above your head?’
Howard nodded. ‘We die, but then we come back to life again. And the scenery, too.’
‘We call it the Reset Button,’ the sergeant said. ‘All the pain without the nasty long-term effects. Decaff warfare.’
Howard rubbed his aching ribs. ‘That ought to make me feel better, I suppose,’ he said. ‘Presumably, then, after a while you sort of tune out the pain and stop noticing it.’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘Don’t make me laugh,’ he said. ‘And if you think you know something about pain, you just wait till you’re pinned down in a burning building. The pain carries on till the last bit of you turns to ash. In fact, it hurts so much there’s weeks we have trouble getting volunteers for burning-building duty.’
Howard stared at him. ‘People volunteer?’ he stuttered.
‘Sure they do.’ The sergeant patted him on the shoulder. ‘You see, son, once you’ve been here a while you’ll get the point. The worst pain of all is the boredom.’
Before Howard could reply to that, a missile screamed overhead and the whole street disappeared in a cloud of smoke, dust and cinders. Something, probably displaced masonry of some description, hit Howard between the shoulders and catapulted him into the middle of the road, just as a machine-gun started tearing up the tarmac like an invisible pneumatic drill. Without hanging around to see if he’d been hit, he scrambled and crawled for cover and snuggled hedgehog-fashion behind a shattered residue of brickwork. The machine-gun stopped firing, but some instinct made him stay where he was; five seconds later, the instinct earned the gratitude of the rest of Howard and the right to wear a smug grin as a sniper’s bullet ricocheted off a jagged corner of brick about a sixteenth of an inch above his head.
‘Well?’ said a voice from under the fallen masonry. ‘You just going to crouch there all day, or are you going to fight back?’
‘That depends,’ Howard replied. ‘Will it do any good?’
‘What do you mean?’ the sergeant queried, puzzled.
‘Will I be able to escape? Will it be safer?’
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’ The machine-gun opened up on the masonry heap, sending flattened bullets and knife-edged breeze-block chips spitting out in all directions. ‘Haven’t you got it yet? You aren’t here to be safe. You’re here to be dangerous .’
