The Beasts Of Valhalla m-4

by George C. Chesbro

  Seeing our reaction, Loge stepped closer to the shield. Tears actually glistened in his sea-blue eyes. "I really am sorry," he said. "I know they were your friends, and I understand your grief. But remember that I've lost a son and a grandson. Believe me, it doesn't make a difference. All of the death and suffering for which you hold me responsible is insignificant compared to… what would have been, and can now be prevented."

  "What's it about, Loge?" I asked through clenched teeth. "Which of the dozen different versions of Project Valhalla we've heard is the right one?"

  "None."

  Garth and I looked at each other, then at Loge. The old man had both his hands placed on the shield, almost as if he wanted to reach through and touch us. For a brief moment, grief and loneliness swam in his eyes. Then it was gone. He stepped back, seemed to be making an effort to compose himself as he refilled his pipe from a pouch in his pocket, lit it.

  I asked, "Besides yourself, who else knows what the Valhalla Project is really supposed to do?"

  "Nobody," Loge answered in a voice that trembled slightly.

  Garth punched the shield with his fist. "Damn it, don't you think we have the right to know?!"

  "Yes," Loge murmured in a voice that was almost inaudible. "And I want you to know."

  "So tell us, already!" I said, thoroughly exasperated.

  "Soon."

  "Why not now?"

  "First, there's something you must see. I believe it will explain many things-my need for the isolation in which you find me, the things I think about in that isolation. Then you will understand Project Valhalla."

  Again, Garth punched the shield. His face was flushed a deep, brick red. "Let's get one thing straight between us, you fucking screwball. You don't need us any longer, do you?"

  "For experimentation and knowledge, no," Loge replied evenly.

  "Then for what?" I asked quickly.

  "Soon, Dr. Frederickson."

  Garth stepped back from the shield, took a deep breath, and slowly relaxed his fists. "If you don't need us, why are we still alive? Why bother bringing us here in the first place?"

  "All your questions will be answered soon, Garth. I promise you."

  "Go to hell, you fucking Nazi," Garth said, and spat at the glass. "Shit, even the rest of the Nazis couldn't have thought this one up-it took the biggest Nazi of all."

  Loge's face, distorted by Garth's spittle on the Plexiglas, contorted in pain; Garth's words had cut him deeply. He wiped tears from his eyes, looked down at me. "You like people, don't you?"

  "Yes," I answered softly. "But I like them the way they are."

  Loge nodded absently, then turned and slowly walked away down the long corridor.

  We didn't see Loge for the rest of the day, and he didn't come in the morning. We tried shouting into the intercom in the living room, but it seemed to be dead. We tried shouting at the walls, where we assumed microphones must be hidden, but got no response and no Loge. We even tried shouting up at the recessed television cameras in all the rooms, but there was still no response.

  We were just sitting down to a lunch Garth had prepared when the lights in the apartment went out. A few moments later we heard the haunting, E-flat opening chords of Das Rheingold; the sound filled the apartment and seemed to be coming from everywhere at once, vibrating in our bones as well as our ears.

  Suddenly there was a glow, then a flicker at the entrance to the living room. We rose, walked into the other room-and came to a dead stop.

  Standing, we didn't move for close to three hours.

  Like the shield in the Treasure Room, the Plexiglas sealing off the living room could reflect images, which in this case were being rear-projected from the media room beyond. What we were watching was a series of slides and short film clips, a visual presentation precisely edited in rhythms that matched the music in the introductory opera in Wagner's Ring cycle.

  One brief series of slides showed a soldier snatching an infant from its mother's arms, then bashing the baby's head against a brick wall.

  Another series showed a soldier disemboweling a pregnant woman.

  These images passed before our eyes even before the thirty-six E-flat opening bars of Das Rheingold were over, and were followed by other, similar images throughout the length of the opera. As horrible as were these opening sequences, the ones that followed were just as horrible, and had the same emotional impact. Although each sequence was brief, some images consisting only of the flash of a single slide, not a single image or sequence of images was ever repeated in the three hours.

  None had to be. The record of human cruelty, even when presented in snippets, was easily long enough to stretch through Das Rheingold.

  And beyond.

  Each day for the next three days, beginning at precisely one o'clock in the afternoon, another opera in the cycle was presented, each with its own accompanying slide and film show. During this time I-and Garth, too, I believed-came to understand what heretofore had been only a vaguely bemusing puzzlement when practiced or described by other people: religion and religious experience.

  Siegmund Loge was our high priest, and he was baptizing us in an ocean of feeling inside ourselves deeper than we had ever imagined.

  After Die Walkiire we began to fast. And we continued our fast.

  Also, we were silent for these four days… not only during each opera and its accompanying visual presentation, but afterwards, like monks in retreat.

  Tens, hundreds of thousands of slides and film clips flashed through the seventeen-and-a-half-hour length of the Ring cycle. Loge, the Nobel laureate, was also revealed to us now as a consummate artist as well as an ultrabrilliant scientist. By precisely matching these images of unspeakable and indescribable horror to Wagner's masterpiece, the vast opus of a Nazi sympathizer, Loge had found a way to speak of the unspeakable and describe the indescribable; what he had done was to construct a kind of spiritual submersible, comprised of music and light, that took us to the very bottom of the ocean of evil that stains the shores of the human heart.

  The onslaught of horror was so terrible that finally, with music as a catalyst, it transcended horror; it created in us a feeling of profound sadness that I realized, with a suddenness that literally took my breath away, was a reflection, the tender and merciful grace, of my own goodness, the air supply that kept me from drowning in what I was seeing.

  So our decency, too, Loge showed us, though the horror of the images never stopped. Whatever feelings Garth and I had ever felt stir in us were nothing, mere breezes on the skin of the soul, compared to what we were feeling now; Siegmund Loge was working on our souls' skin with a tattooer's needle of notes and colors.

  How Siegmund Loge had lived for more than eighty years with this pain weighing on his soul without being crushed by it, I couldn't imagine, and I realized, with shame, what a very shallow human being I was compared to this very great and very sad and very compassionate old man. I believed that Garth felt the same.

  Mr. Lippitt had told me I'd be impressed by Siegmund Loge. I was impressed. And I knew that whatever happened next, a sea change had taken place in my soul by the time the last sweet and haunting notes of Gotterdammerung had faded away.

  Garth and I would never forget what we had experienced in this room, and we would never be the same.

  39

  At precisely one o'clock in the afternoon on the day after Gotterdammerung, Siegmund Loge came to us. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying recently, but his voice was steady, if soft, when he spoke.

  "I've spent almost my entire lifetime compiling that-since I was seventeen. It was completed, the last pictures matched to the last bars of the music, only recently-in the morning of the day you were found. This is the first time I've experienced it as a whole, and so it's an experience we've shared together." He took a deep breath, and his voice trembled slightly when he continued. "Please tell me what you think."

  "I couldn't find any fucking popcorn in the kitchen, Loge," Garth sa
id evenly. "What good are movies without popcorn?"

  Loge's face was stony as he stared intently at Garth. The muscles in his jaw began to twitch, and emotions-clear as the images in the vast montage he had assembled-passed across his eyes: bewilderment, shock, hurt, grief-rage. "How dare you make such a remark?!" he shouted at Garth, pounding the shield with his fist. "You have no right to do what you're doing! I've been watching you for the past four days, and I've seen your reactions! I know how my work affected you! I've seen you both sobbing, and I've seen you sitting in silence, lost in grief! I've watched the two of you tossing in your sleep! The three of us have felt the same! Don't you dare deny your pain to me! It's our common bond!"

  Garth reached inside his overalls as if to scratch, pulled out a tuft of fur and casually tossed it into the air. The glossy black hair drifted to the floor.

  "That's my brother's way of telling you we'll share nothing with you that we don't have to," I said, scratching at the residual scales on the back of my forearm. "You've taken everything else from us from shit to toenail clippings, but you can't have our emotions. In addition to everything else, it turns out you're a nasty old voyeur. Why did you show that to us, anyway? Do we look like art critics?"

  Loge swallowed hard, then stepped back from the shield. He seemed stunned, as if he had made some simple miscalculation and couldn't find his mistake. "It's my explanation," he said hoarsely.

  "Your explanation?!" I snapped. "Do you really think you can justify or explain the murder of our nephew and his friend by giving Garth and me an emotional root canal job?! Do you think art can justify all the death and suffering you've caused?! You're part of the problem! Man, right now you are the problem! You're killing the world!"

  Loge screwed his eyes shut, tilted his head back and clenched his fists. When he spoke, his voice was like a long moan. "I had hoped that you and your brother would understand, Dr. Frederickson, but you still don't. It's not a question of emotion or justification, not a matter of good or evil. It is mathematics. Our world, the world humans dominate and rule, is dying. But I'm not killing it; I'm trying to save it."

  Then, suddenly, I understood-and wished I hadn't. "My God," I said in a voice I didn't recognize as my own. "It's the Triage Parabola."

  Loge emitted a sigh, lowered his head, opened his eyes, unclenched his fists. "Yes, Dr. Frederickson. I do think you now understand."

  "Mongo," Garth said, gripping my arm, "what the hell are you two talking-?"

  I quickly put my fingers to his lips, then pointed to Loge, who had begun to pace back and forth in front of the shield, nervously running his long fingers through his long silver hair.

  "As you know," Loge said in the tone of voice some professors use when lecturing students, "the Triage Parabola has proved useful in helping to predict which of several endangered species will most benefit from human intervention, thus enabling us to focus our attention and resources where they will do the most good. To apply the formulas of the Triage Parabola to human beings is almost impossibly complex, because the number of variables in human behavior-economic, political, social, psychological-approaches infinity. However, almost a decade ago I was able to apply the formulas, using a Cray computer and a mathematics system of my own invention. I kept my findings secret; I saw nothing to be gained in revealing them, since there was absolutely nothing that could be done to alter what seemed to be inevitable-or so I thought, until I was approached at the Institute for the Study of Human Potential by certain representatives of the Pentagon."

  "Mongo," Garth murmured, "tell me what this banana is talking about."

  "He's saying humanity is an endangered species, that we're on the verge of extinction."

  "From what? Nuclear war?"

  "Maybe, maybe not," I said, recalling that in the entire visual montage accompanying the Ring, only two sequences, each lasting less than twenty seconds, had been devoted to the melting flesh of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "I think what Loge is saying is even worse than that."

  The scientist, who had heard me, nodded in affirmation, then resumed his pacing. "Correct, Dr. Frederickson. Thermonuclear war may destroy human life-indeed, all life-over the planet, but not necessarily so. In fact, the solutions to the equations indicate that the outside parameters for our existence may be as much as three or four hundred years. But no more. The means by which we destroy ourselves cannot be predicted mathematically-and are, in any case, irrelevant. It is of no value to look around for the catastrophe that will come; in an evolutionary sense, we are the catastrophe, a unique species of self-aware, intelligent creatures that are, as an entire species, quite insane. We are, as the Triage Parabola makes quite clear, simply an evolutionary dead end. Nature, as is well-known from even the most casual observation, is unforgiving and implacable in erasing her mistakes. On an evolutionary scale, we rose with lightning speed; we shall disappear with lightning speed. In four hundred years, or maybe only four hundred months or weeks or days or hours or seconds, there will not be a single human being left on the face of the earth. In four thousand years-a snap of the fingers in evolutionary time-there will probably not even be a trace left of our existence."

  "What's going to replace us?" I asked.

  "If nothing is done to alter our course?" Loge shrugged. "Who knows? The Triage Parabola is an extremely powerful mathematical tool, but it's not a crystal ball. Data to predict the end of our existence is available; that necessary to predict what sort of sentient creature, if any, will replace us is not. The only thing that's certain is that we will be gone."

  "No, it's not certain," I said, knowing I sounded slightly foolish and petulant, and not caring; I couldn't think of anything else to say. "There is also love in the world."

  "It is certain, Dr. Frederickson. You have not learned the lessons of your odyssey, as I had hoped you would. First, love is ephemeral; it vanishes at the torturer's first pass. Yes, there is love, and it is responsible for much that we have accomplished that is beautiful, good, and true. But love cannot triumph over evil because, for most people, only their evil transcends tribal boundaries, not their love. The young men and women in the commune you visited loved- each other. They were looking forward, with ecstasy, to the death of virtually everyone else. Stryder London loved-his country, which is to say his tribe, and was perfectly willing to countenance a weapon of terrible evil as long as it would subjugate the wills of all tribes to which he did not belong. Tribes, Dr. Frederickson. Tribes. National tribes; religious tribes; ethnic tribes; family tribes; sexual tribes; cultural tribes. By swinging down from the trees, by emerging from the caves, we only ensured our own eventual destruction. We are an evolutionary dead end precisely because we were able to replace sticks and stones with nerve gas and thermonuclear weapons without ever evolving, intellectually and morally, beyond the ridiculous, childish superstitions and primitive, tribal mind-sets that necessitated the use of the comparatively harmless sticks and stones in the first place. Once we poisoned the wells of neighboring tribes; now we poison oceans. The Triage Parabola provided me with a mathematical demonstration of our species' demise; I have given the world a practical demonstration. Of all people on earth, the Frederickson brothers have experienced the greatest overall view of that demonstration. By accident, my work touched your bodies; by design, I touched your souls. Yet you react to me as if I were some kind of mad scientist."

  Garth and I looked at each other. "Perish the thought," I said quickly. "You're planning to send us all back in evolutionary time to see if we can't get it right the second time, aren't you? That's what the Valhalla Project is about, right?"

  Loge slowly nodded. "Yes. Once I have tested the formulation in an initial trial run in my communes, any necessary corrections will be made, and then a second batch of 'Father's Treasure' will be delivered. This formulation will be highly infectious. Then the commune members will all be sent out into the world to await what the members of the commune you visited think of as the 'Good Time.' That time will come quickly. We will be rende
red comparatively harmless to each other, at least on a global scale, and can only hope that we will evolve in a more appropriate manner if given this second chance. It is the ultimate, most humane, use of the Triage Parabola, gentlemen, and it is humankind's only hope for long-term survival."

  "Uh, Loge…" I swallowed, found my mouth was just a bit dry. "Dr. Loge, before you go ahead and do anything we all may regret in the morning, why don't you recheck your figures?"

  Loge shook his head sadly, looked at me with profound sadness in his eyes. "I have rechecked them, Dr. Frederickson; I've rechecked them hundreds of times. I know you're not a scientist or a mathematician, so it may be difficult for you to understand. Without the intervention represented by the Valhalla Project, our extinction is a certainty."

  "You mentioned that no one else had tried to apply the Triage Parabola to humans because it was almost impossible. Maybe it is impossible. Now, you're a fairly bright man, but you're not a god, despite what a lot of folks think. Even you could be wrong."

  "No, I'm not a god," Loge said simply. "There are no gods, of course. I'm just a man, one representative of a species that, quite possibly, may be the only one in the entire universe which has such a high degree of self-awareness and intelligence. No other species anywhere may have the potential to travel to the stars to find out. Unless someone intervenes to save us from ourselves, it is doubtful we will even have time to accomplish the relatively simple task of traveling to another planet and colonizing it. I am not a god; I can be wrong, and often have been in the past. This is not such a time. I am not wrong. The figures are correct. Someone had to take the responsibility for altering our course, and I have done it; the Valhalla Project is the only solution I could think of. I feel I've come to know the two of you quite well, through the reports that came to me of the havoc you've been wreaking. Once, I thought perhaps the two of you could appreciate my burden and understand my terrible loneliness. Now I believe I was mistaken. The Triage Parabola is correct about the imminent extinction of humankind; I was wrong about you."