Father Of The Gods

by Abhishek Roy

  I swam up and the serenity underwater vanished instantly and the cold wind hit my face. After the unnatural warmth of the water, it felt even colder. The spout had started to dissolve rapidly and the wide funnel had started to thin. The dark silhouette of a man stood near the base of the opposite cliff. Though I could not see through the blizzard, I knew it was Vivek.

  I searched the lake for Ram and was relieved to find him 10 metres away from me, closer to the shore.

  “Ram!” I shouted at the top of my voice albeit it was futile. Yet, we had eye contact. It was clear that Ram was scared because of the worried expression on his face. His face was slick with water and he had started to shiver. I went towards him and held him close to me. He was the only family I had left.

  Kapittel 20

  Mathias’s story

  NANDA DEVI BIOSPHERE RESERVE, UTTARAKHAND, INDIA

  March 10, 2017, Friday, 1430 hours IST

  I broke the silence, “When I was under water, I noticed a rather ominous dark hole bored into the cliff face about 15 feet under the surface of the water. It was probably 8 to 10 feet in diameter and was perfectly circular.”

  “It could be the lair of some animal,” suggested Ram.

  “I do not know of any marine animal that can bore a perfectly circular hole into solid rock,” I contradicted him.

  “So what do you suppose it is?” asked Ram.

  “I don’t know. It might be a way to get to the structure up on the ridge.”

  “We can go and explore it anyway. We would also be more comfortable in the water than here. Don’t you think so, Mathias?”

  “Yes. The water was surprisingly warm!” I exclaimed.

  “What if the hole itself is filled with water? The hole might be man-made but there might be some animal living in there.”

  “No animal can live in such a habitat and we won’t go too deep inside. If we do, then god save us.” I grinned.

  “This is serious Mathias,” said Ram. “You are sure about this, right?“

  “Absolutely,” I replied.

  We swam a little closer to the ridge. Then Ram took out his flashlight wrapped in tape. We were stationary in the water for some time, trying to let the oxygen flood our lungs. About fifteen minutes had passed since we saw the hole.

  I looked at Vivek who was standing at the shore. Even from afar, I could see that he was pretty worried about us. This felt very warm albeit it was odd. I had got acquainted with him just recently and so had he.

  As soon as we were ready, I plunged into the water and the mighty mountains of the Himalayas, the beautiful cloudy sky with the sunlight tearing through the clouds were all replaced with the aquamarine haze of the water.

  The last thing I heard before jumping into the water amidst the magnificent mountains of the Nanda Devi Biosphere reserve 20,000 ft above sea level in the Himalayas, was Ram calling my name. “Mathias! Be careful!” and a loud splash almost simultaneously as he also hit the water.

  ***

  This brings us back to where this story started.

  Kapittel 21

  Mathias’s story

  NANDA DEVI BIOSPHERE RESERVE, UTTARAKHAND, INDIA

  March 10, 2017, Friday, 1515 hours IST

  We were in front of the hologram of the magnificently yet oddly dressed being who claimed to be an ancient Norse God.

  “What do you want with us?” I asked him again, trying to analyse this image of a man who called himself a Norwegian god. He seemed to be debonair and talked in impeccable English, marked by a tinge of an unrecognisable accent. However, at the same time, there was something malicious about him. His dress was unconventional, made of strange material, very flamboyant, and the buttons on his coat were of different sizes, the one at the top being the largest and it was glowing a dull red colour.

  “I understand that you have lots of questions in mind. So I would rather answer your question one by one. The first. What do I want with you? I brought you to this place for a reason Thorson. This was all but a test, an analysis of your abilities and by reaching the Shrine, you proved your mettle. Therefore, I ask you to come to Asr-Gawa with me.”

  “Wait.” Ram interjected again and the holographic man frowned. “You said some Asr-Gawa. What is it?“

  “Asr-Gawa is the name of our realm in our native tongue. We are a realm in another dimension in the same space. Your Indian sects call it Swarg in short and Norwegians used to call it Asgard. Our Asurian tribes have been called Aesirs in the past — in your world, your Iranians and Hindus call us Asura though both of them follow different notions of good and bad. Zoroastrians call us Ahura. In fact, we were the ones who started the Assyrian dynasty. We helped write your celebrated Hammurabi Code of Law. Actually we call ourselves Asurians. Do you get it?” he explained. “Likewise, we call your planet Mandagaar. The Nordics call it Midgard whereas your Spanish people call it Mundo, meaning the world. We Asurians refer to the people of Mandagaar as Mandaas.“

  “Interesting. But still...” Ram was about to start again, angry as he was reminded of his father again.

  “KEEP QUIET! I will talk to him first and then you!” The man rebuked him. A pause ensued.

  “So the men chasing us in Meerut were sent by you?” I asked, breaking the silence.

  “Yes, of course. As I said, this was a test.” He replied. This just confirmed my doubts about this whole thing being staged for me.

  “Where is my dad?” Ram butted in, clearly annoyed. “We received a distress call from my father that led us here.“

  “As I said, I led you here and not your father. During his research he had found a disturbance in a scale he had made. A scale that showed the river of time. Your father studied that disturbance using a new device, which he had invented. He found the location where the disturbance had taken place and had followed it to the Himalayas. Unfortunately, he stumbled upon our secret base. According to our protocol, no one should know about our presence here on Earth. So, we had to take him down.”

  “Was the scale called... choronoscale?” Ram asked him, a little scared.

  “Yes! It was! Did he tell you that?” Baldr replied but Ram was too shocked to say anything. He had always known that his father was studying a chronoscale but never knew what it was. Now that his cloudy past before coming to the orphanage started to get clear, his eyes welled up to finally understand how his father had died.

  I remember, few days ago, when Ram was exhilarated by the news. Hell, he even came to India in search of his father, aided by my unconventional methods.

  “So all this was a mere ruse. You lured us here to recruit Mathias into some of your mumbo jumbo? And what did you say? You killed my father because he was innocently searching for answers and had stumbled upon your base?” he shouted.

  “LET ME SPEAK! YOU WILL UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING IF YOU JUST LET ME SPEAK!” he too was getting angry now.

  Ram grunted but agreed, suppressing his anger. If he could have got his hands on the person behind the hologram, he would have surely throttled him.

  “So Thorson, let me give you some knowledge of your past. You are originally not from here. Actually, you are from here but in another dimension. You are originally from Asr-Gawa.”

  “What?” I was totally bewildered by what he was talking about.

  “Then let me give you some more knowledge. I think you are familiar with the Norwegian mythology made by you earthlings, am I correct?”

  “Come on Ram. This is just a sham. We should get going.” Just before we turned to go back, the holographic man who claimed to be Baldr cried out,

  “I know a lot of things about your parents Thorson. I also know why they abandoned you.” With that, he hit the nail. “What do you know about my parents?“

  “Everything,” he replied.

  “Shut up! You are just a hoax. There must a projector or something over here and you must have... must have hacked into my accounts and found it out.”

  Again, I was about to leave when he said. “I can’
t hack into your head, can I? Yet I am aware that you must be having dreams of your parents.”

  Now he seemed to be a little more genuine. “How do you know that?”

  “Ah! Impressed you at last! Well you possess an exceptionally good brain,” he started. “Scientists in my realm did a lot of studies of our brains and unlocked some of its most intriguing mysteries. According to them, many dreams are nothing but latent memories of our past. When we sleep, these memories come rushing back in. In your subconscious mind, you can see yourself in place of your older self and start reliving that period. Because of your superb brain, you have these dreams about your past more frequently and vividly than we do; probably because of your memory skills,” he explained.

  Apparently, most of what he had said was true. I have a good eidetic memory and it comes in handy.

  “Seems alright but why should I trust you. What you just told me, can be just another scientific discovery. Show me something that only I will know. Something about my parents,” I challenged him.

  “Very well. So you must be thinking where you come into the big picture. Tell me Thorson, how your parents appear in your dreams?” he asked me in a way as if he already knew the answer.

  “Well, my mother appears to be affectionate,” I said as I reminisced my dreams. “She has sharp.., .probably blue eyes. She had ebony black hair. My father on the other hand is big and muscular, has red hair and bright eyes. He wears a formal outfit and carries a briefcase with him.“

  “Something like this, I suppose,” he waved his hand and a picture of a middle-aged couple materialised to his right. The two were smiling in the picture and a certain warmth passed throughout my body. As I recognised their vaguely familiar faces, Baldr spoke up.

  “Yes. These are your parents, aren’t they? Remember them from your dreams? Well, they are not from your dimension. Your parents are Asurians.” He gave me a sly grin.

  My tear ducts became active and I felt a lump in my throat. After all these years, I had seen a proper image of my parents and met a man who claimed to know about them. The sudden shock overwhelmed me. I tried my best to remain calm and stern but I felt my eyes go red.

  “Where did you find this?” I asked him slowly, through gritted teeth.

  “You need not worry about th...”

  “WHERE?” I yelled, my voice booming through the entire cavern. He had hit a personal nerve and I had a hard time trying to control myself.

  “Well, your father’s my brother. So, I will obviously carry a picture of him and your mother, right?”

  “Who-are-you-for-real?” I asked him, running out of patience.

  “I already told you. I am Baldr Nu. I am a nobleman in Asr-Gawa and have a seat in the council of Elders. I am here to help you Thorson. Do not think of me as a foe,” he finished. He seemed convincing but at that time, it seemed extremely cheap to play such a joke on someone. My anger swelled up from my gut and I let out a loud cry as I moved towards the projector, wanting to pulverise it and end this.

  “Mathias! Don’t! You need to get a hold on yourself,” Ram caught my arm, tears already flowing on his cheek like me.

  I had direct eye contact with the holographic man. While my eyes were bloodshot, his were completely expressionless, and yet piercing. They gave him a look of superiority and invincibility. His eyes silently commanded me to back off and I decided it was futile to show anger.

  “Come on Ram. Let’s get going.” I adamantly walked away with powerful strides. This had been too emotional for Ram and me.

  “Don’t you wish to know why you are here and the injustice your homeland subjected you to?” He asked loudly as Ram and I walked towards the hole we had come from.

  “Don’t you want to know why they left you here?” He asked again. I stopped in my tracks at that question. He just seemed to know quite a lot and able to answer quite as much. My mind suddenly changed and fell for his manipulative skills. I walked back, past a bewildered Ram and stopped at the projector.

  “Speak!” I cried.

  “Good. Now, bear with me...” He smiled but I cut him off.

  “SPEAK!” I shouted louder.

  “Alright, alright,” he acquiesced. “But I need you to believe in every word I tell you. You might think I am joking but everything I tell you now will be the truth. You see Thorson, I really sympathise with you. I will tell you the truth, so listen to me carefully,” his voice was serious now. I looked at the teary-eyed Ram who was totally confused about what was happening now. He had come here to find his father and got to know how he had died. Poor Ram was still recovering from shock but I decided to hear him.

  “You see, we... along with you Mandaas... we stay in a group of multiple dimensions intertwined in the same place at the same time in the same universe. There might be more dimensions but we are aware of Asr-Gawa, Jargantaam, Mandagaar and Muspelheim. We have reason to believe that two more dimensions exist, called Hel and Nidavellir, but full communications are not established yet. Each of these dimensions has one star system that can support life. You must have read about parallel universes, no?” Baldr asked me.

  “I have, yes. Universes which are similar but contain minute differences.” I replied.

  “It is something of that sort. Mandagaar, or Earth as you know it, is the 3rd planet in the planetary subsystem we call E-106. The dimension that you exist is called Dimension XN. It is the closest dimension to Asr-Gawa and our connection has existed for a long time, many hundreds of years by your chrono scale. The star systems are there in each dimension, only they differ from one another. You must also know that there is one zone around the central sun. This zone is neither too far nor too near to the sun, thereby supporting the factors necessary for life. Our planet and your planet are more or less in the same location in the habitable zone. However, the planet in Jargantaam is farther away from the sun, making the climate very cold while in Muspelheim, the planet is nearer to the sun. For instance...if I remember correctly, then some subatomic particles in our dimension have different angular momentums than the particles in your dimension. The planet you live in, you call Earth. We call our planet, Asr-Gawa.”

  “Are you serious? I mean, the part where you said about the spin or angular momentum. That is supersymmetry in physics! It states the exact same thing - particles have a partner in another family of particles that possess a different spin!” I said, mesmerised.

  “Asurians are more evolved...intelligent and I wouldn’t say stronger but resilient, than Mandaas...earthlings. Our cities are way beyond ‘advanced’ can define.” His voice reflected an exaggeration. “We can travel from one dimension to the other. In fact, we had long back found out ways to pin point any location in time and space to... “

  “How do you travel from one dimension to the other?” I interrupted, the inner physicist in me curious to know.

  “We have tele porters to do so. They are fashioned like a torus shaped ring and need a special key to be activated. Well, I do not know the science behind it but I suppose it opens a tunnel. We call it ‘tunnel av tunneller’ or the ‘tunnel of tunnels’ in our language. And as I had said earlier, it depends on your definition of ‘God’. Do you think God is a person with all the golden ratios on his body perfect? Well, it is a known fact that under-developed civilisations refer to the population of a more advanced civilisation as gods. Just think about it, if you were to show a caveman, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the present, wouldn’t he feel as if he had glimpsed heaven? What if you were to show the same caveman, one of your ‘touch screen’ devices, wouldn’t he tell his family that he had seen a magic mirror? We are as human as you are, as mortal as you are.”

  “You just said that your people have been communicating with us for hundreds of our years,” Ram had found his voice at last. “But how is that possible? If you have been coming here merely for a few hundreds of years, then how come there is Norwegian mythology dating back to ancient Vikings more than two thousand years back?“

  “Good qu
estion. Using the laws of quantum mechanics, we can travel through time but not in our own dimension. We can do that in the other dimensions like yours. Asurians have influenced the Mandaas of old and the Mandaas thousands of years later, which makes you people feel that we are thousands of years old. So we can travel to your dimension at any point in the past and appear, and we have done that often so that when we came to earth in ancient times, the Norwegian people referred to us as gods. Actually, I am 44 years old and Odin is in his eighties. It’s just that...our entire civilisation is much older.” He paused for some time, allowing it to settle in. All of a sudden, I saw movement in the shadows through my peripheral vision. I felt as if someone was here. Being totally engaged in this conversation, I decided to keep quiet.

  “We have also influenced you in literature. Do you remember François Rabelais?” He asked me.

  “Umm...” my brows furled. “He was a...famous French writer, no?“

  “Yeah! He wrote Gargantua and Pantagruel!” Ram jumped in.

  “Exactly.” the holographic man continued. “You see, in our place, the realm which you know as Jotunheim is called Jargantaam. The citizens are known as... Jargantaans.” The hologram was so efficient that the minutest expression of humour on his face was also visible. “Do you see a connection?”

  “Well, the people from Jotunheim are called Jotnars but... “ Ram thought aloud. “Jargantaans... sounds more or less like gargantuan! Is that where the word ‘gargantuan’ has come from?“

  “You are pretty smart, you know? Yes he is one of us. His actual name is Farben Ru and is one of the literary giants in our dimension. When he was young, he had visited your dimension during the Renaissance period in order to learn art and bring it to our dimension. We are technologically advanced but we don’t have a lot of opportunity for arts. A proof supporting this fact is that none of your historians are sure about his place or date of birth. That is because he was never born on Earth. Farben Ru is Asurian. During his stay here he decided to write a novel and named it after Jargantaam. He is a very celebrated author in Asr-Gawa now, though he is near Odin’s age.”