Stormbringer

by Alis Franklin

  As a local, Travis has a permanent reservation. Tonight, he’s bequeathed it to his special guests.

  Inside, Umami is all black lacquer screens and red lanterns and tasteful art pieces. A neat young man greets us with gracious obsequiousness at the door, before showing us to a table in a quiet corner. He goes through the ritual of laying our napkins on our laps, then hurries off to fetch water and amuse-bouche.

  When he’s gone, Sig leans toward me, eyes very wide. “Lain,” he says, “this place is really posh.”

  I laugh. “Yeah. It’s not bad. I like Jaques Raymond better, I think, but Melbourne’s a long way to go right now.” I could charter a plane, I guess. Maybe next time.

  “You could’ve told me,” Sigmund hisses. “I would’ve dressed up a bit.”

  “You look fine, man.”

  “How do you know? I thought you were supposed to be blind.”

  I rock my hand back and forth, indicating ambivalence. The Wyrdsight doesn’t “see,” exactly. But I’m not blind blind, either.

  “I still feel . . . underdressed,” Sigmund says, his words tasting of shame and inadequacy. He slumps back in his seat, pushes his glasses up his nose, and tries to hide behind the table, away from the stares of the other diners.

  They are all pretty dressed up, now that I think about it. So I say, “Sig, look. The reality is, when you’re coming in to pay a thousand dollars for a meal—”

  “A thousand whats? Lain!”

  “—then nobody gives a shit what you’re wearing. This is Panda. Rich geeks in T-shirts and ripped jeans crop up here like single-use functions in bad code. Their money’s just as plastic as everyone else’s.”

  Sigmund slouches in his chair. “A thousand dollars?” he says. “Really? Man, I can’t afford that.”

  “You’re not,” I point out. “Travis is. This is his table.” I point, and Sigmund follows the gesture up the wall, to where a painting hangs above us. Abstract, but still obviously of the LB building, three-column statue-slash-logo-slash-prison and all. “We’ll be fine.”

  Sigmund picks at the tablecloth, then picks up a fork and stares at it. It’s a fancy fork, about $50 per piece to buy: the high price of “design,” of the lifestyle, of the same principles LB is built on.

  “Rich people,” Sig says.

  “Mortal gods,” I agree, just as the waiter returns with all the discrete timing of the impeccably trained.

  He pours the water and introduces the food; sesame-crusted salmon sashimi with ginger and wasabi, served in little handmade ceramic spoons. Then he explains the menu, all eight courses of it. With matching wines. I know the exact moment Sigmund realizes he doesn’t get a choice—realizes that everything is dinner—by the taste of shock and panic in the air.

  The waiter finishes with, “Are there any food allergies or requirements tonight I should tell the chef about?”

  “We’ll skip the oysters,” I say.

  “We can substitute the vegetarian option, if you’d prefer,” says the waiter, unperturbed. “It’s Burmese melon salad.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “Anything else?”

  “You right with the shellfish?” I ask Sigmund.

  “Um,” he says, and bites his lip.

  He’s not allergic, he just doesn’t eat things from the ocean that don’t come with scales, the last remaining vestiges of his paternal religiosity. Sig’s father, David, might be distanced from the dogma, but he never ate shellfish growing up, so never thought to introduce it to his son, either. Funny how these things turn out.

  “No,” Sig says after a moment. “It’s fine. I’ll try it.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  When the waiter vanishes back behind the screen, Sigmund adds, “I figure if I don’t like something here, I don’t like it anywhere, right?”

  “I can call the guy back, if you’re feeling adventurous,” I say, grinning. “Get him to re-add the oysters.”

  “You could,” Sig says, mischief glinting through his fatigue, “but you got rid of them pretty quick. So I’m kinda betting you’re the one who doesn’t like them.”

  “Hah!” I say. “Do you know who I am? Legendary eating contest participant, hello?”

  “One, you lost that—”

  “Eating the dishes was cheating and didn’t count!” (Because I didn’t think of it. Also, the guy I lost to? Literal personification of fire. Like I said, massive cheating.)

  “—and two, I still reckon you hate oysters.”

  “They’re like drinking snot,” I say. “Someone else’s cold, lumpy snot.”

  “Oh. Dude. Gross.”

  “See?”

  “I’m not sure I can even eat my spoonfish now.” Sigmund eyes the item in question, trying to decide how to eat it without embarrassing himself.

  I help him out by taking my own spoon and gulping the contents down, all at once. Two chews and it’s gone. Sigmund copies the gesture, frowns for a moment, then says, “That’s pretty good. I don’t usually like salmon.”

  “That’s the trick,” I say. “People pay a shitload to come here and get no choice over the menu. The chef has to make it good—all of it—else it’s Kitchen Nightmares time.”

  “Guess I never thought about it that way before.” Sigmund stares into the bowl of his now-empty spoon. “I always kinda figured, fancy food . . . it was something you had to develop a taste for, y’know?”

  “Sig, ‘developing a taste’ is for things that are disgusting, like cigarettes and oysters,” I say. “The truth is, the idea that rich people have some kind of special refined palette that sets them apart from the un-rich is a myth. One spread by rich people. Good food is good food, no matter who you are. That’s the whole point of it.”

  Sigmund nods, and I feel him turning this new information over in his head. Processing. Then he grins, and says, “Except for oysters.”

  I grin, too, all sharp teeth and scarred lips. “Right,” I say. “Except for oysters.”

  Course number two is a roulade of smoked ocean trout, with paired chardonnay. Unsurprisingly, we’re talking about computers when it arrives. Specifically, my computers.

  “It was the seventies,” I say. “Back then, all the hippie peace-and-love bullshit was dying faster than an alcoholic in the desert, and LB did coal. Only coal. We dug it up, we processed it, we sold it, we made a mint.”

  “Sounds lucrative.” Sigmund sips his chardonnay with the trepidation of someone unused to wine.

  “It was,” I say. “Still would be. But that’s the thing about coal, y’know. It’s a finite resource. It wasn’t going to be around forever. Not like yours truly.” Sig gives half a laugh around his drink. “We had computers back in those days, right. But they were—” I gesture.

  “Enormous,” Sigmund translates. “So I’ve heard. Like. Rooms, or whatever.”

  “Right. Very uninspiring things. They did payroll. Stuff like that. We had them, but . . . eh. We had them because we had them, that was all. But in the seventies, you started to get all these stories. Out of the States, mostly. People soldering together these things in their garages, these bastard hybrids of calculators and typewriters and the punchcard reel-churners we had.

  “It was the microchip,” I continue. “Before that, back in the fifties, it was all vacuum tubes and whatever. Big shit. But you get the microchip, and—Well, it’s called the fucking microchip for a reason, isn’t it? ’71, that was the first microprocessor, care of Intel. But those guys, they didn’t get it. They still thought they were making this shit for niche markets. Universities, whatever. Except the kids in those places, they were looking at this stuff, and they were thinking, Well . . . how do I get one?”

  “They made their own,” Sigmund says.

  “Right. They made their fucking own. We had these guys, in head office. They used to hang around until fuck o’clock, get in at the same. One night, I wandered down to see what the shit they were up to. They had this . . . this fucking thing. All circuits and wood, spre
ad out over a desk. They’d mail-ordered it from the fucking States, were putting it together.”

  “One of the first personal computers,” Sigmund says. Then, dropping his eyes and pushing his glasses up his nose, “We, uh. We got taught this story at uni.”

  “Right,” I say. “Well, it’s true”—more or less—“and I was all, ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ So they showed me.”

  Sigmund nods. “That must’ve been pretty cool.”

  I have to laugh. “Sig, the thing was a fucking glorified calculator. It was nothing. Homemade wooden case . . . a piece of junk. But it reeked of Wyrd. That shit doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Like the echo of a scream: ‘Pay attention, this is gonna be on the fucking exam.’ And that wooden pile of shit? That’s what it felt like. It wasn’t anything. But it was going to be.”

  “And you wanted in?”

  I shake my head. “No. I didn’t want ‘in.’ I wanted it. All of it. That night, I was on a fucking flight out to America. I tracked down those fucking hippies who’d sold the kit, wanted to buy everything out from under them, their fucking souls included. And those fucks, man. They looked at me, and you know what they said?”

  Sigmund grins. He knows what they said. “They said they had something better.”

  I nod. “A motherfucking monitor. Green and fucking black, cathode-ray piece of shit. But it fit on a desk, and that was it. That was history. I said I’d give them everything. Within a month, we’d rebranded, had the first Pyre fucking computer going for manufacture. By the end of that year, I was selling off the old shit, the coal. BHP and Oceanid were fucking lapping it up, the suckers. I cut whatever I had to to finance these two smartass kids and their fucking dream.”

  “Everyone thought you were crazy,” Sigmund says. He’s heard this part of the story, too. Seen the made-for-TV movie, even.

  “The board kept trying no confidence,” I say. “Shit like that. It was a ruthless fucking time.”

  “But you won.”

  I nod, swirling the wine inside my glass, smelling the peaches and the oak. “I won,” I say. “Eventually.”

  “‘The Purges,’ right?” Not my choice of name, and I still wince to hear it.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, it was—anyone who wasn’t with the new program? They were gone. Their shit tossed out onto the street overnight, some of them. It was brutal, but we did what we did.”

  Coal is a finite resource, there’s only so much of it buried in the ground. But the future? The future is forever, always.

  “And now we have these.” Sigmund’s holding up his phone—his Pyre Flame—and giving something like a grin. “This is what you felt? The day when everyone walked around with their own computer, stuffed into their pocket.”

  I close my eyes, breathe, and feel.

  “No,” I say eventually. “Not this. This is still the journey. We’re not at the destination. Not yet.”

  The future is not now.

  But it will be. One day.

  By the time the duck arrives, Sigmund discovers a furious need to piss, care of the wine. He manages to make it to the bathroom and back with only a minimum of staggering.

  When he returns, he leans forward across the table and says, voice not quite a whisper, “Man, I’m pretty drunk.”

  “It’s a lot of wine,” I say. About a bottle each, and that’s assuming the waiters weren’t being generous with the pouring, which they were. “It’s normal. Drink some water.” Sigmund isn’t much of a drinker, is the guy who’ll spend an entire evening nursing a single Corona until it goes flat and warm.

  “This food is really nice.”

  “I know,” I say, grinning around my duck. Then, the dangerous confession: “It’s a weakness, mortal food. One of the many things I don’t miss about home.”

  Sigmund blinks at the comment, then takes a guess: “You mean in Asgard?” His pronunciation is still terrible.

  I nod. “An eternity of charred goat and apples and skyr.”

  “‘Skyr’?”

  “Viking yogurt.”

  “Oh.” Sigmund peers at his plate, trying to identify what he can of the ingredients. After a moment, he gives up, and instead says: “You don’t talk about Asgard very much.”

  It’s not posing a question so much as it is seeking an invitation to ask one. I make a noncommittal noise in reply. “There’s not very much to talk about,” I lie. “I wasn’t there, then I was, and now I’m not again.” Sigmund winces at the aggressive not-truthiness of these statements.

  “You don’t miss it?”

  “No,” I say, maybe too quickly. If this one’s a lie, Sigmund is the only one of us who can tell. I don’t ask him for clarification.

  “Then why are you going back?” Sigmund does not look at me when he asks it, eyes focused on his own plate with ferocious intensity.

  Ah. Yes. That.

  There’s a long, horrible moment where I don’t know what to say. I fill it with a sip of wine. Sigmund scarfs a potato. As he’s chewing, I say, “Because.” Then can’t think of anything else.

  “‘Because’?” he quotes back.

  “Because.”

  This earns me a scowl, thick clotted waves of red-brown concern oozing from Sigmund’s Wyrd. “Lain . . .” he starts.

  Here’s the thing. I both haven’t been to Ásgarðr for a millennium and was just there two months ago. That’s the downside of being two people at once. As Lain-Loki, I’m exiled from the place, presumed dead. As Loki-Baldr, I’m the goddamn king of it. This is what is commonly known as a “loose end.” In this case, said loose end has a physical embodiment in the form of one very ugly magic spear, Gungnir, which functions as a sort of de facto symbol of office. Baldr inherited the thing from his father, Odin. Now I have it. The chances that some áss brat is going to come looking for it sooner rather than later is fairly high, and I’ve had enough assholes from my past gatecrashing my city as of late. I think it’s time to return the favor.

  I try explaining this to Sigmund, complete with hand gestures and a lot of blather about fate and destiny and Wyrd that sounds unconvincing even to me. Maybe the truth of it is I just want to go home. Miðgarðr is nice and all, but . . .

  But.

  But this one I don’t say to Sigmund. Because Sigmund is Sigmund and Sigmund is mortal and he’s a Miðgarðr boy, through and through. I don’t want him to start thinking that’s not enough. Because Ásgarðr was home and Sigmund is home, and getting this one wrong is a mistake I’ve made before. It’s not one I plan on making again.

  So. I’ll go to Ásgarðr, look around, say hi to the old gang, wave Gungnir around a bit. That’ll take a day, maybe two, tops. Then I’m back. To Panda and to LB and, most of all, to Sig. Easy done.

  Sigmund is still looking at me from across the table, all big brown eyes and seeping uncertainty. I give him my best, most rakish grin, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand with my own.

  “It’ll be fine, Sig,” I say. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

  His cool fingers intertwine with my own, and he looks down, before quickly bringing our joined hands up to his lips to brush a kiss across the knuckles.

  “Yeah,” he says. “Okay. I’m sure it’ll be fine.” Then he smiles, and I try not to melt.

  Eight courses, matched wines, and by the time we stumble out of the restaurant it’s approaching midnight and Sigmund is as pissed as Thor in Útgarðr. He leans on my arm as I take him back to the car, his eyes heavy and feet dragging.

  “Is this where you take me back to your lair and have your wicked way with me?” he asks.

  “This is where I take you back to my lair and roll you into bed, you drunkard. Just what kind of monster do you think I am?”

  “A cute one,” he says. Or possibly the wine does. “A nice one.”

  “Mm, don’t say that too loudly,” I say, folding him into the seat. “You’ll ruin my reputation.” Whatever’s left of it.

  I get into the driver’s side myself, the car’s
engine coming to life as I do. Sigmund looks over at the sound. “Hey. You can’t drive. You had all that wine, too.”

  “Mortal wine,” I say, pulling the car out of its parking space. “It doesn’t count.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe you should let the car drive.”

  I laugh, lifting my hands off the wheel. It continues to turn, taking us out into the street.

  Sigmund smiles and closes his eyes. “I had a really nice time tonight,” he says.

  “Me too.”

  Then: “You take all your dates there, huh?”

  “Uh . . .” Jesus, Sig.

  But all he says is, “Next time, I pick the restaurant. And pay. Somewhere special, just for us.”

  I’m silent for a moment, then: “Yeah, that sounds . . . I’d like that, man. A lot.”

  By the time we get home, Sigmund’s starting to sober up enough for the hangover to creep in. I follow him into the bathroom, making sure he doesn’t slip and die while he brushes his teeth. Then he changes, takes another piss, and grumbles when I make him drink a glass of water and down two Advil.

  “You’ll thank me in the morning,” I say, sitting on top of the bed while he settles himself beneath the covers.

  “’ll be gone inna mornin’,” he points out, mostly to the pillow.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I will. So text me.”

  He makes a nondescript noise, curling his head against my thigh.

  I watch him until he falls asleep. It doesn’t take long.

  He drools when he sleeps, and snores. Sigmund is all awkwardness and acne, hunched shoulders and double chins. His skin and hair and eyes are dark, he isn’t tall or fast or strong, and no one would ever look at him and think that, once upon a time, he used to be a Viking goddess.

  Sigyn, the Victorious. A shipbuilder’s daughter. One who grew up chopping wood and dreaming of distant lands. Who didn’t ever want to marry, lest she never get to see them.

  One who, in the end, caught the eye of the most capricious of the gods. My eye. Well, Loki’s eye. Adopted brother of Odin, the monster slithering through the gilded halls of heaven. Certainly not an easy man to stay married to, but Sigyn did.