The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

1935

I had fled home to Laurie. But next day, when I let myself into our place after a long walk, she was not waiting. Instead, Manse Everard rose from my armchair. His pipe had made the air hazed and acrid.

“Huh?” I could only exclaim.

He stalked close. I felt his footfalls. As tall as I and heavier-boned, he seemed to loom. His face was expressionless. The window at his back framed him in sky.

“Laurie’s okay,” he said like a machine. “I asked her to absent herself. This’ll be plenty rough on you without watching her get shocked and hurt.”

He took my elbow. “Sit down, Carl. You’ve been through the wringer, plain to see. Figured you’d take a vacation, did you?”

I slumped into my seat and stared down at the rug. “Got to,” I mumbled. “Oh, I’ll make sure of any loose ends, but first—God, it’s been ghastly—”

“No.”

“What?” I lifted my gaze. He stood above me, feet apart, fists on hips, overshadowing. “I tell you, I can’t.”

“Can and will,” he growled. “You’ll come back with me to base. Right away. You’ve had a night’s sleep. Well, that’s all you’ll get till this is over. No tranquilizers, either. You’ll have to feel everything to the hilt as it happens. You’ll need full alertness. Besides, there’s nothing like pain for driving a lesson in permanently. Most important, maybe—if you don’t let that pain go through you, the way nature intended, you’ll never really be rid of it. You’ll be a haunted man. The Patrol deserves better. So does Laurie. And even you yourself.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked while the horror rose in a tide around me.

“You’ve got to finish the business you started. The sooner the better, for you above all. What kind of vacation could you have if you knew that duty lay ahead? It’d destroy you. No, do the job at once, get it behind you on your world line; then you can rest and start recovering.”

I shook my head, not in negation but in bewilderment. “Did I go wrong? How? I filed my reports regularly. If I was straying off the reservation again, why didn’t some officer call me in and explain?”

“That’s what I’m doing, Carl.” A ghost of gentleness passed into Everard’s voice. He sat down opposite me and busied his hands with his pipe.

“Causal loops are often very subtle things,” he said. Despite the soft tone, that phrase shocked me to full awareness. He nodded. “Yeah. We’ve got one here. The time traveler becomes a cause of the selfsame events he set out to study or otherwise deal with.”

“But—no, Manse, how?” I protested. “I’ve not forgotten the principles. I never did forget them, in the field or anywhere, anywhen else. Sure, I became part of the past, but a part that fitted into what was already there. We went through this at the inquiry and—and I corrected what mistakes I had been making.”

Everard’s lighter cast a startling snap through the room. “I said they can be very subtle,” he repeated. “I looked deeper into your case mainly because of a hunch, an uneasy feeling that something wasn’t right. It involved a lot more than reading your reports—which, by the way, are satisfactory. They’re simply insufficient. No blame to you for that. Even with a long experience under your belt, you’d probably have missed the implications, as closely involved in the events as you’ve been. Me, I had to steep myself in knowledge of that milieu, and rove it from end to end, over and over, before the situation was clear to me.”

He drew hard on his pipe. “Never mind technical details,” he went on. “Basically, your Wanderer became stronger than you realized. It turns out that poems, stories, traditions which flowed on for centuries, transmuting, cross-breeding, influential on people—a number of those had their sources in him. Not the mythical Wodan, but the physically present person, you yourself.”

I had seen this coming and mustered my defense. “A calculated risk from the outset,” I said. “Not uncommon. If feedback like that occurs, it’s no disaster. What my team is tracing are simply the words, oral and literary. Their original inspirations are beside the point. Nor does it make any difference to subsequent history… whether or not, for a while, a man was there whom certain individuals took for one of their gods… as long as the man didn’t abuse his position.” I hesitated. “True?”

He dashed my wan hope. “Not necessarily. Not in this instance, for sure. An incipient causal loop is always dangerous, you know. It can set up a resonance, and the changes of history that that produces can multiply catastrophically. The single way to make it safe is to close it. When the Worm Ouroboros is biting his own tail, he can’t devour anything else.”

“But… Manse, I left Hathawulf and Solbern bound off to their deaths… Okay, I confess attempting to prevent it, not supposing it was of any importance to mankind as a whole. I failed. Even in something that minor, the continuum was too rigid.”

“How do you know you failed? Your presence through the generations, the veritable Wodan, did more than put genes of yours into the family. It heartened the members, inspired them to become great. Now at the end—the battle against Ermanaric looks like touch and go. Given the conviction that Wodan is on their side, the rebels may very well carry the day.”

“What? Do you mean—-Oh, Manse!”

“They mustn’t,” he said.

Agony surged higher still. “Why not? Who’ll care after a few decades, let alone a millennium and a half?”

“Why, you will, you and your colleagues,” the pitying, implacable voice declared. “You set out to investigate the roots of a specific story about Hamther and Sorli, remember? Not to mention the Eddie poets and saga writers before you, and God knows how many tellers before them, affected in small ways that could add up to a big final sum. Mainly, though, Ermanaric is a historical figure, prominent in his era. The date and manner of his death are a matter of record. What came immediately afterward shook the world.

“No, this is no slight ripple in the time-stream. This is a maelstrom abuilding. We’ve got to damp it out, and the only way to do that is to complete the causal loop, close the ring.”

My lips formed the useless, needless “How?” which throat and tongue could not.

Everard pronounced sentence on me: “I’m sorrier than you imagine, Carl. But the Volsungasaga relates that Hamther and Sorli were almost victorious, when for unknown reasons Odin appeared and betrayed them. And he was you. He could be nobody else but you.”