Diverse Energies

by Joe Monti Tobias S. Buckell

  I step around her desk and go through the doorway.

  The frosty receptionist’s frosty twin takes six ampoules of my blood and instructs me to wait in another sitting room. My only company is a giant with muscles like granite and a laugh like cannon fire. He tells me his name is Gunther, and he’s a merchant sailor who came to San Diego from Norway, but then the shipping company he worked for went bust, and he’s been stranded here ever since. He’s hoping to make enough money to buy his way on a ship back home.

  “But isn’t it even colder in Norway? People say the ice is locking up shipping lanes, and the blizzards are so bad the planes can’t land.”

  He gets a faraway look. “I have family there,” he says simply. “They need me.”

  I get it. I totally do.

  We pass the time chatting. I tell him what San Diego used to be like, with blue oceans and surfers and broad beaches of sand, and how the stores used to be open and how I used to go to school and how I wanted to be a doctor of some kind. And he tells me about things he has seen — dolphins dancing off the prow of his ship, and blue whales breaching, like giant towers of life rocketing from the sea. And something he saw recently, a ridge on the horizon that didn’t show up on sonar, but that through binoculars looked like some kind of impossibly large serpent.

  “I don’t believe in sea monsters or UFOs,” he says with his powerful, cheery laugh. “It must have been an optical illusion. Also, I drink too much.”

  I think of what the woman at the bus shelter said: The Midgard Serpent awakens and its thrashing cracks the world.

  I can only return his laugh with a weak smile.

  A door opens, and I gasp at the sight of the woman standing there. If Miss Frost the receptionist and her twin who drew my blood were lovely and awful, this woman is some kind of terrible, beautiful goddess. She stands as tall as Gunther in a cream business suit three shades darker than her flawless skin. Red curls frame her face like flame on snow. Her blue eyes are like jewels worthy of a queen.

  “Edward Darmadi?”

  I make myself stand. “That’s me.”

  She doesn’t smile, but her eyes warm, and the room gets warmer with them.

  “Congratulations. You’ve been chosen to continue with the study.”

  “I get the thousand dollars?”

  “Within another hour, you will receive a great reward. Please come with me.”

  She holds open the door for me.

  Gunther tries to look confident. “And me, too, right?”

  The goddess barely glances at him when she speaks. “You may return to the receptionist. She will give you twenty dollars for your time. Thank you.”

  Gunther, this big, powerful, cheery man, seems to deflate before my eyes. He slinks off back to the main waiting room, defeated.

  I have nothing to offer him but a small good-bye wave, and I go with the goddess.

  She takes me down a corridor with large windows on either side. Behind the windows, technicians in lab coats labor behind workbenches arrayed with computers and biomedical equipment. I recognize some of it from my biology studies: autoclaves, centrifuges, incubators, sequencers. I suppose this place isn’t too different from most medical research labs, but I wonder how many of them are staffed the way NorseCODE is. Every person I’ve seen who works here — from the receptionist, to the woman who took my blood, to the goddess escorting me, to each and every one of the technicians — is a woman. They are all white. They are all tall. They are all beautiful and powerful.

  “It is good to meet you, Edward. My name is Radgrid.” She notices my interest in what’s going on behind the windows. “Do you know anything about genomics, Edward?”

  “It involves mapping genes. Figuring out the code of DNA molecules and understanding how DNA determines inherited traits. Like, why some people are blond or why they get certain diseases.”

  “Very good. Here at NorseCODE, we are looking specifically at Y-chromosome DNA.”

  “Y-chromosome . . . that’s the DNA that we inherit from our fathers.”

  “Exactly. Every man’s genes contain a Y-chromosome, which you received from your father. And looking at those Y-chromosomes — how they have remained the same from generation to generation, or how they have changed through mutation — has enabled us to find ancient, common ancestors of people living today. Scientists have discovered that our Y-chromosomal Adam — the most recent, common ancestor from whom all living people are descended — lived as recently as sixty thousand years ago. Research has found that sixteen million men living today are the progeny of Genghis Khan, the great warrior who ruled the vast Mongolian empire eight hundred years ago.”

  Radgrid’s voice rises with excitement as she walks, and her pace quickens. I struggle to keep up with her long stride.

  “Is that what you’re doing here? Looking for descendants of Genghis Khan?

  “No,” she says. “We’re looking for the descendants of Odin, the All-Father, chieftain god of the mighty Aesir, whose valor defends us from Ragnarok, the death of all worlds.”

  We step through a final door, and there, waiting for me, is a man with a sword.

  He shows me a hideous, brown-toothed grin and says, “Doom.”

  The room is the size of a basketball court. It’s all sterile white walls and a cold cement floor with a drain in the middle. The floor is wet, as if recently hosed, and the air smells of blood.

  Of course, I do the only sensible thing. I turn right around and try to run. But the door we just came through locks, and when I bang on it, I only hurt my hand. It’s solid steel. I’m not going anywhere.

  Radgrid has been talking.

  “You only remember the Aesir in lore and in your corrupted names for the days of the week. Thursday for Thor, who must die slaying the Midgard Serpent. Tuesday, for Tew, the war god who lost his arm. Wednesday for Woden, or Odin, whom I have already mentioned. They were gods of yesterday, in times of war and strife, when men and women needed help against their enemies, needed help in childbirth, needed help bringing forth crops against the starvation of the dark winters. The truth of the gods has always been bigger than stories and names.”

  I dig out my phone and thumb 911. But the phones haven’t worked more than a few days out of every month, and right now my mine is just a useless plastic prop. Radgrid knows this. She keeps talking.

  “The gods have always known how they’ll die,” she says. She pulls down a plastic case from a shelf. It takes me a few seconds to remember where I’ve seen a case of this size and shape. It was in a sporting goods store. It’s a rifle case.

  I slap the walls and scream for help. Radgrid talks.

  “The gods know how everything will die. It begins with three winters, and no summer between. The Fimbulwinter, it’s called. You know what it is, and now you know its name. Then follow war and cruelty. Men forget the bonds of kinship. And then disaster. The Midgard Serpent stirs, raising seas and drowning the lands. Do you remember the Asian tsunami last year? Do you keep up with the news, Edward?”

  I don’t answer, because I’m still too busy looking for a way out, but I remember the tsunami. It killed more than a hundred thousand people.

  “Then there is Fenrir, the great wolf, and one of his kin grows large enough to eat the Moon. It’s an age of swords, an age of spears, an age of axes.”

  I turn to face her. “And an age of wolves,” I say, “until the world sinks down.”

  “Yes,” she says, nodding. “Yes, Edward. And in the end, the gods battle the giants and the other monsters, and they die, laying waste to all worlds. So it was uttered, in the beginning of days. It is fact. Nothing can change it.”

  The big, ugly man with the sword rolls his neck and shoulders, stretching before exercise. The way he’s looking at me tells me the kind of exercise he has in mind involves butchery.

  I find myself getting angry. All I wanted was some money to feed my family. “So why are you bothering me with this? I’m not from one of the places where they believ
e in your gods. I was born here, in San Diego. My parents are from Indonesia. I’m an atheist. And if I had a religion, it’d be my dad’s, and he’s Muslim.”

  “All gods spring from the same well,” she says with a shrug, as if she’s not that interested in my objection. “They change shape and color, and different peoples at different times express them differently. But now, today, in this time and place, when things are ending, they are expressed as Odin’s tribe.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. Why bother me with this?”

  “You have met my sisters. They, like myself, are Valkyries. We are Odin’s shield maidens. His corpse pickers. We are tasked with building his last army. Throughout history we have plucked fallen warriors from the killing fields and brought them to Odin’s hall. They are called the Einherjar. There, they fight and train by day until they are cut down. Then, at sunset, they rise to spend the night in revel and feast until sunrise, when they go out to the fields to train and die once more. It is heaven.”

  Hope surges through me. Since I am so obviously not a great warrior, Radgrid has clearly made a mistake. This is all basically just a paperwork mix-up, and once I make her realize that, she and her sword-swinging thug will let me go.

  I open my mouth, but she speaks sharply to cut me off: “The greatest of Odin’s warriors share two things in common. One, they are his sons, and the sons of his sons, from the days when he walked among men and lived in their houses.”

  Dread dawns on me like another dark winter day. “The Y-chromosome. NorseCODE has been looking for Odin’s descendants. And I’m a genome match.”

  Radgrid thumbs the latches on the rifle case. I flinch at the sound. “The second requirement is that the warriors of the Einherjar have died gloriously in battle. Not of sickness, not of old age. They cannot have died in bed. They must have died in blood.”

  I cling desperately to reason. “Why build an army when you said yourself you’re going to lose the war? You said nothing can change it.”

  “We must act as though we have hope, Edward, even when there is none. We must pretend. To act as though we have hope is to keep hope alive.”

  She lifts the lid of the case, and I see what’s lying there in a neatly cut foam indentation. The ugly man with the sword coughs a laugh, and I panic. I turn and throw myself against the door, and I smash my fists against steel and scream. Somehow, through all my commotion, I still hear Radgrid’s chilling voice.

  “Edward Darmadi,” she says. “Prepare to die gloriously.”

  She lifts the sword out of the case and holds it out to me.

  His name is Egil Thorvaldsson. He is a Viking warrior who died raiding in England in 865 A.D., and he’s been one of the Einherjar ever since. He’s serving as Radgrid’s champion here at NorseCODE in San Diego, California, and he is offering me an opportunity to be glorious.

  He is going to kill me.

  There’s no more time to insist that this is all a mistake, or that it’s too crazy to be true. It doesn’t matter that I’m not a Nordic Viking warrior. It doesn’t matter that I’m the Indonesian American son of Muslims. All that matters right now are the swords.

  I feel like I’ve been fighting him for hours, but it’s probably only been minutes. Mostly, I’ve been running around the room, dodging the sweep of his blade. My chest heaves for breath, and my muscles ache and burn, and blood streams down my arm and makes the sword slippery in my hand.

  But he’s bleeding, too. I don’t really remember when or how, but I cut him over his left eyebrow. The blood drips into his left eye faster than he can blink it away, blinding him. He swipes at it with a forearm the size of a hog, but the blood keeps pouring out.

  It won’t be enough to save me, but if I can’t find hope or courage, I can at least pretend like I have them.

  Egil rises to his full height, towering over me, and raises his sword high. I backpedal away, but it’s like trying to escape a falling redwood when you’re standing right beneath it. The blade comes down, and I rush closer to him. I move my sword in a desperate spasm, and luck or fate or doom decides that my blade will slice into his forehead above his right eye. He curses and falters as blood springs from his new wound, and I stumble away to get distance.

  Now we’re both sweating and breathing hard. We’re both bleeding. But there’s one difference between us.

  I can still see.

  When I was taking driver’s ed, I hit a dog.

  The instructor said it wasn’t my fault. The dog just ran out from between two parked cars, right into my path. There was a small impact and a squeal of pain that I will never forget. I remember calmly turning off the car, putting it in PARK, and applying the parking brake, and I opened my door and went around to the front of the car. The dog lay there, still, its eyes open, but it was so clearly vacant of life, and I was too horrified to cry. I knew that a life had been subtracted from the world, and the sense of its absence never left me.

  I feel the same thing when I dart around Egil Thorvaldsson and run my sword through his back.

  Standing over his lifeless body, I turn to Radgrid.

  “You made me kill a man.”

  She waves this off. “He’s Einherjar. He’s died before. He will rise and die again. There are ways,” she says. “Ways to bring the living to the afterworld. You still draw breath, and though you have not achieved a glorious death, you have fought gloriously. With your leave, I will take you to Valhalla. There you will train with the greatest warriors the world has ever seen for a fight whose day draws ever closer. There you will drink the ale of gods and be counted among the greatest of men, ever. You will eventually die, as all things do. Every animal, every human, every god, must one day end. But such grand meaning will your death have.”

  I think about the waiting room outside, filled with coughs and moans. I think about the cold world outside, getting darker and darker every day until the sun refuses to rise. Things will end not with a bang but with a sniffle.

  I release my sword and let it clang against the cement floor.

  “I want my thousand bucks.”

  Radgrid said the long, dark winter won’t lift. I hear the blowing wind outside, and a hard rain patters the window. I sit with my mother and father and sister in our little living room, eating roast chicken by the light of a low-energy bulb. Maybe this is cowardice. Monsters are coming. I can’t see them yet, or hear them, but I know they’re out there, lurking beyond a stranger horizon than I ever dreamed possible. Maybe it’s cowardice to stay here at home.

  But maybe, sometimes, heroism is doing whatever you have to do to stand guard over your family. Sometimes heroism is just paying the electricity bill to keep the lights burning one more night.

  Next Door

  by Rahul Kanakia

  At 3 A.M., the itching got so bad that Aakash rolled off his mattress and crawled across the garage floor to the bug-free patch of concrete where Chandresh and Rishi were sleeping. But after a shivering hour next to his restless brothers, he got up and trudged to the bed. He was just crawling in when he spotted a black speck on his pillow. Shuddering, he flung the bedding away and huddled atop the bare plastic with which he’d shrink-wrapped the mattress.

  At first he kept the light on, but then Chandresh started rustling around on the floor, so he switched it off. In the dark, he felt the featherlight touches all over his skin, running up his legs and across his chest, pausing on the tip of his nose and then jumping into his hair. He knew that most of the sensations were probably just imaginary bugs, conjured up by his anxiety. He needed to relax. They’d only had the bugs for a few weeks. His boyfriend, Victor, had lived in a bug-ridden squat for two years, but he’d gotten used to them after a few months. “They’re no worse than mosquito bites,” Victor had said.

  But Aakash couldn’t stop feeling them. Finally, he gave in and raked his nails over his neck, arms, legs, chest, stomach, armpits, and groin. But the scratching brought no relief. The points of itchiness multiplied until he didn’t have enough finge
rs to deal with them. He screamed silently and beat on the mattress, but then his mother, Deepa, sleepily murmured, “What? Who?” so Aakash clenched his hands together. There was no sense in waking her up too.

  Fighting tears of frustration, he got off the mattress and went to the far corner of the garage. He crossed his legs and sat down next to the spigot that provided their water. He was surrounded by junk: skis, a lawnmower, three bicycles, boxes of Christmas ornaments, books, and old clothes. It all belonged to the family of strangers who owned this garage. Whenever Aakash tried to move any of it, little bots would sizzle out of the junk and sound a warning beep until Aakash moved away.

  Chemicals couldn’t get rid of the bedbugs — modern bugs were immune to most all pesticides — but those tiny little bots could run through the garage and zap them all in an instant. Aakash looked upward and mouthed a silent prayer to the owners of the garage. He was right on the verge of cranking open that garage door and walking up to the big house and knocking on the door and begging the owners to make that tiny adjustment to the bots and set Aakash’s family free from this menace. But Aakash stepped back from the edge. He was a squatter. He didn’t have any rights.