The Mask of Loki

by Roger Zelazny

  "My earthly reputation precedes me," he murmured. Then the man took a step backward, bowed his head, and moved his palm in a cascading motion: from eyebrows to lips to heart.

  Gurden stood rigid before him.

  "What was that all about?"

  "A greeting, Thomas, in the old fashion."

  "I don't know you—except by reputation."

  "And that is exactly the point I would probe with you: what, exactly, is it that you do know?"

  Gurden thought this was an invitation for him to speak.

  "You are, by your own definition, a 'freedom fighter'. But others would call you a terrorist. You have raised the endless dispute in Palestine to be a bloody standard that draws half the Arab world to you. Yet you delight in inflaming old wounds—cleric against moderate, Arab against Jew, Turk against Arab, Shiite against Sufi—until no man can know his own business. All you have is hate for the established order—even when it is one that you yourself helped create. And now you carry your revolution here, to the United States. Why?"

  Hasan shook his graceful head. "You don't remember, do you?"

  "You signed a treaty in Ankara—and broke it the next year. You gave the Jew and Christian residents in the Old City safe passage—and then slaughtered them as their trucks approached the checkpoint at Bet Shemesh. They call you the Wind of God, because you obey the rules of no country. Yet the people love you. They name their weapons after you and throw themselves into battles they cannot win. Why are you here?"

  The smile never left Hasan's face but grew broader as Gurden spoke. The restlessness of the other soldiers stilled as if Hasan had laid a reassuring hand on each man's shoulder.

  "Because you are here, Thomas."

  "So, what have you done here? Taken over a sector power plant. And do you think they will pay you to leave it running? Do you think they will give you safe passage out of here—and keep their word—because you can destroy it?"

  "They offered it to me," Hasan smiled. "As a challenge. It was such a large fruit—and so ineptly guarded—how could I resist?"

  "All this to kick the Americans in the balls?"

  "Not just America—the entire western tradition."

  "What did the West do to you?"

  "You really don't remember that, Thomas?"

  "This country is filled with people who hate your kind of absolutism, Hasan. The refugee Palestinians, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and Afghanis—they all came to this country because they were fleeing your brand of terror. They were tired of the old blood feuds that bound a man to his tribe and pitted his tribe against the whole world. You have no followers here."

  "The West speaks!" Hasan raised his hands, palms outward, in mock adoration. "International and cosmopolitan, because you had conquered and trampled all nations but your own. Praising reason and science over faith and submission, because in your pride you thought to calculate the Mind of God. Holding to human treaties, laws, and promises because you had no faith anymore... Do you not remember?"

  Gurden would say something more, but the pleading note in Hasan's voice gave him pause. He looked at Sandy, but she would not meet his eyes.

  "Remember what?"

  "You touched the stones?"

  "What stones?"

  "The old man's stones, which you took from Alexandra."

  "Yes, I touched them."

  "And—?"

  "And they ... made sounds, notes. Like a glass harmonica—but maybe it was inside my head."

  "That's all? Just sounds?" Hasan seemed disappointed.

  "Was there supposed to be more?"

  Hasan looked at Sandy, then at Ithnain. "You are sure this is the man?"

  "He could not be other, My Lord!" Sandy almost shrieked.

  Ithnain was nodding, and sweat rolled down his face.

  Hasan's lower lip curved around in a great, downward-pointing bow. His eyes crinkled in disgust.

  "Go with Hamad," he said at last, to Ithnain. "Find the master control for all this mechanism. Begin ramping down the power levels. We will negotiate for what we may salvage here."

  "Yes, My Lord!" Ithnain bowed, gathered his men with his eyes, and retreated on the run.

  "My Lord Hasan—" Sandy began.

  The leader turned a hard glare on her.

  "Perhaps we have failed," she said. "Yes, we have failed to bring this man to the state of readiness you required. That is my fault, and I—"

  "What is it?" Hasan barked.

  "Perhaps if you introduce him, once more, to the pieces of the stone ..."

  "What do the stones have to do with this?" Gurden asked.

  Hasan's great frown was unwavering upon Sandy. Without his eyes ever leaving her downturned face, he put out his hand, palm up. She fumbled quickly in her breeches' pocket and produced the old man's—the Knight Templar's—pencil box. Hasan placed his other hand upon it and opened the lid. The six stones, fragments of the musical scale, still nestled in their gray foam cutouts.

  "Hold him!" Hasan barked to his men.

  Hands clamped Gurden's arms. Arms wrapped his waist and knees from behind.

  Hasan brought the pencil box forward as if it contained poison, held it below Gurden's chin, raised it until two, then three of the fragments were pressed into the skin there.

  Pain, as before, but less than he had felt before. And a broken chord: F, A-flat, B-flat, something else. And colors whirling behind his closed eyelids: fragments of purple, blue, and yellow-green, other colors broken off a rainbow. And something more whirled there: a blending of memory, the dimensions of time, a diagonally slanted knife blade suspended against the sky, a hand holding a horse pistol with a barrel eight inches long, a wall of green cloth with glinting brass buttons, other images too fast for his tight-squeezed eyes to catch.

  Tom Gurden wanted to go unconscious with the pain, but he could not.

  Hasan withdrew the stones.

  Gurden opened his eyes. He was looking directly into the black and depthless eyes of the Arab leader.

  "This is not the man," Hasan said, almost sadly.

  "My Lord!" Sandy exclaimed. "Let us try—"

  "No!" Hasan cut her off. "We have tried long enough. He is nothing." To his men: "Take him away and bind him."

  * * *

  "They should not do that," the AI at the far node remarked. It was speaking to itself—except that it was still ported to Eliza's fiber line.

  "Do what?" she asked. The Other had retreated into listening mode. Was it gone?

  "They are changing the limits of the envelope," the AI said. "They do not give the correct code sequence. Correct codes must always accompany such an order. There, I have stopped them."

  "Is that ... good?"

  "It is necessary."

  Eliza waited, listening hard.

  "They must not do that!" the AI suddenly complained again, a thousand milliseconds later. "They will disrupt the entire field."

  The Other promptly awoke from its dormant mode. "Scan the humans!" it commanded.

  "No time, I must—"

  "Scan them!"

  "No badges. Not staff. Not authorized."

  "One should be radiating an energy pattern," the Other began, softly, "that will approximate this—" and it reeled off a sequence of alternating positive and negative numbers. The negatives contained the shape of Eliza's Other.

  "Scanning ... Such a one is there."

  "Tag it and track it."

  "But the unauthorized commands—! The magnetic field is becoming unstable."

  "Let them proceed."

  * * *

  Gurden lay where the Arabs had left him: on his side, his hands bound behind him at the elbow with cords, his knees and ankles bound also, the long loops of cord taken up to his wrists, then around his forehead, forcing his head back. He was in a darkened cell, a storage closet, off the main floor of the reaction hall.

  The door opened, admitting a wedge of light and a shado
w. Then it closed.

  He tried to roll his head around to see, but the movement pulled his arms higher and hurt him. He relaxed and let his head slump on the concrete floor.

  A caged domelight came on in the ceiling.

  "Tom?"

  "Sandy."

  "I'm sorry you have to be hurt."

  "What does he want? Why me?"

  "You still don't know that?"

  "No, and may God damn it, whatever it is!"

  She knelt before him, putting her face close to his. Her eyes were wide and full of amusement.

  "You are lying, Tom Gurden. You have always felt a power in yourself. A dimension beyond your own years, beyond your skin. You feel it still, when you touch the stones. You don't have to lie to me anymore."

  "I feel pain when I touch them. Pain and music and colors and that's all."

  "What more do you expect?"

  "Hunh?"

  "Power has always been pain. Music and colors, too, of course. But mostly pain. The question is: do you know how to use it? Or not? Or are you merely concealing your knowledge from us?"

  She took up a small case which she had set on the floor. Gurden studied it out of the corner of his eye: a leather folder, lined with green velvet, like a jeweler's portfolio. Inside it, he could see when she opened the flaps, were square waxpaper envelopes, of the sort used to catalog gems. She pulled out two at random, opened them—being careful to keep her fingers away from the contents—and dumped out fragments of the same red-brown stone. They danced on the dirty, gray-painted floor before his eyes.

  Two more envelopes, and she set their chips to dancing also. One bounced and caught him in the cheek with a stab of pain.

  Two more, and he could see that these pieces of stone were not settling down. They danced in front of his face with their own kinetic energy, danced and spun and formed a rough shape, like a globe, as Sandy dumped out more and more pieces, always careful not to touch them herself. Each one that touched him was like the nicking of a hot knife into his cheeks, chin, closed eyelids, forehead. None of the pieces danced away from him. None would ever be lost again.

  "What is it, Tom?"

  "A stone."

  "Whose stone?"

  "I—I don't know."

  "Whose?"

  "The old man's? Something from the Order of the Temple?"

  "You're guessing! Whose stone?"

  "Then—mine!"

  "Why yours?"

  "Because it dances for me!"

  The paper envelopes, empty now, lay about her bent knees like last autumn's leaves. Suddenly they, too, began to stir. The stone fragments picked up the pulse, as did the sore corners of the elbow, hip, and knee on which he lay. The floor was shuddering with energy. The globular pattern of the stones seemed to rise into the air before his eyes.

  "Stop them!" he called.

  Sandy sank back on her heels, her face open with wonder.

  "It's not them," she said in a normal voice, which was almost drowned out in the subvocal rumbling. "It's the floor!"

  The door of the cell banged open behind him. Gurden expected an intrusion of angry Arabs. Instead he felt a wave of heat.

  * * *

  "The magnetic envelope is expanding too rapidly," the AI said coolly.

  "Double the rate of deu-trit injection," the Other ordered. "Match the shape of the field."

  "That procedure is contraindicated," the AI protested.

  "Compensate," the Other insisted. "Increase the laser pulse and fuel injection rates."

  "I require the correct code sequence."

  "Lambda-four-two-seven," the Other supplied.

  "Increasing detonations. Please input desired shape of the envelope."

  "Radius two kilometers."

  "Objection—"

  "Lambda-four-two-seven. Override."

  "Compensating."

  * * *

  Sandy's golden-blonde hair turned red and puffed into a white, powdery ash. Her skin glazed and cracked into red runnels that glazed over and cracked again. She closed her eyes, and the lids flashed into steam.

  "No!" The sound came from Gurden's throat and was lost in the roaring heat from the door.

  Whatever Alexandra Vaele had been—captor, traitor, lead hound in the pack that had chased him here—she first had been his mistress and old love. If someone had told him, in some far-off and unimaginable moment, that she had grown old and withered, had gotten sick with a cancer or other final illness, had died mangled in a crash ... then he might have accepted her death with little more than a sigh. But to see her blasted into ruin like this was more of a shock than his system could bear.

  "No!"

  Thomas Gurden absorbed the blazing heat into his own back, focused his eyes on the frantic dance of the stones, and willed that this pain not be.

  * * *

  Loki was pleased with the results of his contact with the new golem—or "artificial intelligence," as it called itself. It had been a most obedient servant. When the energies it controlled finally reached out, flared, and killed it, Loki was ready.

  He streaked down the path of light and launched his battle-hardened awareness into the maelstrom of fire he found at its end.

  Swept up in the boiling heat there, Loki found fragments, bits, and pieces of other human awarenesses. They were stunned with confusion and dim horror. (Serve them right, he thought, for playing with energies they could not begin to understand.) With no feeling of mercy or salvation, for he had none, Loki collected these tiny mites one by one. He held each one to his wolflike nose and drew deeply of its scent.

  The wrong ones he discarded immediately, to fade in the cloud of cooling plasma.

  When he found the right one, he cherished it and strengthened it.

  "Come with me, My Son!" he commanded.

  The weak presence of Hasan as-Sabah turned and followed him, as a soul in submission to God might waft itself toward Paradise.

  Something mewed among the condensing particles of vapor, catching Loki's attention one last time. Yes, there would be a place for this one, too.

  "Come along!"

  * * *

  Coda

  Who made thee a prince and judge over us?

  —Exodus, 2:14

  * * *

  Four dimensions established the continuum which Thomas Gurden accepted as conventional and which coordinated his awareness. Three of these dimensions were the axes of space—x, y, and z. And one was the axis of time—t.

  All his life, Gurden had navigated among the three spatial dimensions at will. He had pushed with the strength of muscles or machines against surfaces and fluids shaped by gravity. Depending on the amount of energy available in glucose, gasoline, JP-4, Uranium-235, or deuterium-tritium at fusible temperatures, he had been able to cover as much distance as quickly as he thought necessary.

  But in the fourth dimension, time, he had always been as helpless as a fly in amber. No speed that he could achieve—at least with the machines and energies available in the twenty-first century—would alter the flow of time through his amber bubble.

  And even at relativistic speeds, such as he might attain on a journey between stars, the flow of local time—that is, time within his bubble—would not change perceptibly. Light from outside the starship's hull might red-shift and fade to black. Out there, the dance of atoms might slow to a stately waltz and, the music finished, come to stand on a single, lingering note. Yet, within the hull, time still would creep past Tom Gurden at a dozen breaths and seventy-two heartbeats per minute, with an occasional, comforting gurgle in his glands and the slow, glacier-creep of wrinkles in his face.

  His personal time-sense would remain immutable, no matter how fast he might try to run from it.

  So Tom Gurden's first coherent thought was that dead humans did stand outside the four axial coordinates of space and time. Death is another place—and not precisely a place. Death is the ultimate abstraction.

&
nbsp; And never, not ever, did time reverse itself. Gurden or any human being could no more move backwards, to a time that has been and gone, than he could sit behind himself.

  So, even in death, Tom Gurden must still have been moving forward in time... Wasn't that right? He must have arrived in this place by traveling from the near side of back there, as he approached the near side of up ahead. Like always. Right?

  Gurden's second coherent thought was a realization: that all those people who populated his dreams had been ... him. Every one of them had died, yet his persona had moved on.

  He had, in his lives, fought with swords and pistols and his bare hands. He had bought and sold horseflesh and diamonds, paper and land, antique cars and suspect paintings, opiates and strong liquors, music. He had made love and babies, wine, cabinets and sonnets, acts of contrition. He had spun woolen yarn and webs of deceit, delicate visions and deliberate dreams. He had raised wheat and corn, yearling colts and gladiolus, barn roofs and Saturday night hell. He had spent money and time, wasted the energies of youth and the substance of inheritances, and counted the hours in courtrooms and doctor's waiting rooms, on train platforms and at air terminal gates. He had gone to business meetings and funerals, trysts and masked balls, mountaintops and the depths of despair. And once he had gone to the Holy Land, there to die.

  Tom Gurden's third coherent thought was that he knew this place. And, though he understood that time could never—not ever—reverse itself, he recognized immediately that this pretty green valley, with the morning mists drifting through it and the bubbling stream that emptied out from the shore of a landlocked sea, had not existed for almost nine centuries.

  Once again he was lying on his side, denting the turf with his shoulder and knee, elbow and hip. His arms were pulled stiffly behind him. His eyes were open, taking in a vista of green blades from the viewpoint of robins and worms.

  "Now do you remember?"

  The voice was Hasan's—Harry Sunday's. His English was precise, lilting, still mocking as it fell on the ear. But, considering this voice on sober reflection, Gurden found it also saddened, as if Hasan spoke around a weary sigh that lingered on the edge of consciousness.