Mythos (36 page)

Once again, I faced rank after rank of giant bronze abacuses, every one ten feet tall and strung with hundreds of thick bronze wires. Everywhere I looked I saw motion, bright points zipping from left to right and back again as millions of copper beads slid back and forth under their own power. I crossed to the nearest abacus and walked around it. Odin had said this room held Mimir’s soul, the computer system that kept the Norse MythOS distinct and separate from my own.

I circled the abacus again, and yet again. As far as I could tell it was not connected to the others in any way. I was reminded of the problem that had struck me when I first saw Necessity’s version of this place, and I repeated what I’d said then. “How do you program a computer with no interface, no visible inputs or outputs, and an unknown programming language?”

“I don’t know, Boss. I really don’t.”

I started around the abacus a fourth time but stopped when Laginn poked at my ankle.

“What is it?” I asked.

The hand pointed back into the depths of the room, then started off in that direction. After going a dozen feet, it stopped and beckoned for us.

“How very Lassie,” said Melchior.

“Have you got a better idea?”

Melchior shook his head, and once again we followed the hand. It led us all the way to the back of the room, where a deep, water-filled crack split the floor. The opening was perhaps two feet by eight and the water within clearer than the purest crystal. I could easily see the walls of the crack as it slanted down and out, becoming a tunnel with light at the far end. I squatted to get a better angle and . . . just about screamed. Looking back at me from the far end was a disembodied eye—a familiar disembodied eye.

The tunnel connected the room of the abacuses to the deeps of Mimir’s Well, and it was Odin’s eye that met my own. I discovered that its empty depths were every bit as hard to look into as the darkness that filled the socket it had once occupied. No, not empty; knowing, filled with a dark and terrible understanding. I throttled a desire to run screaming from the room in the face of that shadowed gaze. I could sense there was something there, something I needed to understand, though I didn’t yet know what it might be.

A sharp, modulated buzz sounded from somewhere behind us, back toward the door.

“Alarm?” I asked as I spun to face in that direction.

“No,” said Melchior. “Can’t you hear it? That’s home pantheoverse binary. Ahllan!” He ran back between the abacuses.

I wanted to join him, but instead found myself looking once again into the pool and Odin’s eye. I could almost taste the thing I must learn there, knew that it wanted only a few more minutes of concentration to discern. I reached inward, searching for the shadow of the Raven. Found it, reached further, trying to touch the echoes of Odin’s naming me Intuition. I had to find the way. Had to understand. Time passed.

Then, all in an instant, I had it. The eye
was
the answer, and a grim answer indeed.

“Boss!” Melchior cried from somewhere behind me, and I could hear his feet slapping on the wood as he hurried closer. “Boss!”

“What is it, Melchior?” I asked, when he skidded to a halt beside me.

“What are you planning?” he demanded. “Because I guarantee I’m not going to like it.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because you never call me Melchior unless it’s serious.”

“You go first,” I said. “What did Ahllan have to tell us?”

“She’s dying . . . fast,” he said, with deep pain hiding just beneath the surface of his voice. “She won’t be able to hold on as long as she thought. Not more than another hour. Probably less. She said we had to crack this thing now and come home, or get out on our own. Your turn. What are you planning?”

“I’m not planning,” I said. “I’m acting.”

“Acting?” he asked, clearly alarmed. “On what?”

“Impulse,” I said; then, as the shadow of the Raven enveloped me, I matched word with deed.

Reaching up, I plucked the eye from my left socket and dropped it into the Well of Mimir.

Pain rushed into my empty socket. Pain that brought a terrible empty darkness with it. I was drowning in the Void.

Bad mistakes, I’ve made a ton. Tearing my left eye from its socket and throwing it into Mimir’s Well would have to rank among my worst, and my best. The terrible, howling pain of it was only the least part of the blunder I’d just committed.

Had I known what Clotho was giving me when she named me Raven, I might have run screaming rather than accept the name. Or then again, I might not. I’m funny that way. At Necessity’s behest, Clotho had wrapped me in the mantle of the Trickster. Now my own special divinity lived in the instant where good ideas became bad ones and vice versa.

See also,
Ow! Ow, ow, ow. Ooh!

Long ago, Odin had sacrificed his eye to Mimir in exchange for all the knowledge in the universe. Now I’d made the same offering with the same stakes. But where Odin was a god, the greatest of his pantheon, I was only the most minor of powers. My mind could no more contain the torrent of information Mimir bestowed upon me than my open arms could encompass the sky. I knew everything, the position of every grain of sand on every beach on Earth, the smell of every flower, the taste of all the food that had ever been eaten, everything. It was too much. It should have broken my mind.

But I had once before merged my soul with that of a great power, the greatest in my pantheon, the goddess Necessity. Together we had destroyed the body occupied by her daughter Nemesis and returned the houseless Soul of Enmity to her eternal imprisonment in Tartarus. The contact between Necessity and me had lasted only a few brief seconds, but it had given me a taste of omniscience. It was that taste that saved me from madness now. The knowledge that it was possible to withstand such an onslaught and come out the other side gave me the strength to hang on through the first minutes of information overdose.

My salvation came not from what I remembered of that earlier event; it came from what I had forgotten. Almost everything. I knew that I had done those things, knew that I had briefly held an entire pantheoverse in my mind. I even knew how I had done those things, but the actual knowledge of the pantheoverse? Gone, and good riddance.

When we think of memory, we tend to focus on the power of remembering, of how we learn from our past and how that affects our future. But forgetting is just as powerful as remembering. It allows us to move beyond the pains of the past to live in the present. Mnemosyne, the Goddess of Memory, is the object of countless prayers and offerings, but in that moment I gave thanks to her sister, Lesmosyne, Goddess of Forgetting, for I knew that this, too, would pass.

That didn’t give me control over the process, nor any hope of controlling it. It just allowed me to believe in my own survival long enough to stave off madness and thereby ensure that same survival. It also started me on the business of selectively forgetting.

I had been forgetting all along; my finite mind simply couldn’t hold all of the infinite knowledge Mimir fed me. A huge amount of data went in one synapse and straight out another. Unfortunately, it started pouring right back in again because my connection with Mimir was an ongoing thing.

As long as my eye remained in the well, we would be linked and the information glut would continue. How did I know that? See above, that bit about knowing everything. The trick was getting the right bits of knowing into the tiny focus point of my finite brain.

My earlier experience using the minds of the crows and the ravens in my search for Loki helped me now. It provided a model for the necessary winnowing process.
Not the only model, nor the most effective one,
informed the part of me that knew everything, but a model nonetheless. I used it to help forget that which I didn’t need to remember and remember that which I dared not forget.

All that stuff about sand and flowers and food? Not important just then. I shoved it completely out of my mind.

How to force splits in the structure of the pantheoverse?
Ding! Ding! Bump that baby to the front of the line.

I can’t begin to describe the millions of fine details of the splitting process. I can say only that there and then I knew what I needed to do. The primary element was finding an important event that could go more than one way. The more important the event, the easier it was to create a fracture between the possible courses of the future.

In that moment, the most important event of all had to do with whether I
would
split the pantheoverse. I could sense that it might easily go either way. I reached out, homing in on the point of decision so that I could insert the crowbar provided by the power of Mimir and arrange for it to do both.

I found it in Ahllan, who hovered on the cusp between life and death. In that instant, she was Schroedinger’s troll, both alive and dead, the ultimate example of quantum uncertainty. If she . . . No! Unfair! Unjust! Such a split point couldn’t be, could it? But I could feel that it was, and I wept.

Because I
could
save her. But if I did, the Norse pantheoverse would remain whole and Ragnarok inevitable. By using the power of the abacuses, I could bring Ahllan back to our own pantheoverse. The return to home and hearth and the chaos she had been designed for would preserve her long enough for me to prepare a new troll body as I had once built a new goblin body for Melchior. The transfer would be successful, and she would live on as herself. That was one future.

In the other, I could use Mimir’s control over MimirNet to send a great pulse of information through the network, the complete source code for the MimirNet OS. It would hit the loop we had installed like a data tsunami, swamping and tumbling the old troll I loved. Drowning her in information. She would reach for the chaos tap, try to draw enough power to manage the flood. She would fail. The raw chaos would ravage her soul, burning away much of what made her Ahllan. The MimirNet OS would rush in to fill the hole, merging with what remained of her soul and finishing the job her earlier seizure had begun, the fusing of her soul and the RuneNet supercluster. They would become one entity.

The hybrid would hold most of Ahllan’s memories, but they would no longer make her Ahllan, not in the ways that truly mattered. At its core would be the soul that had once belonged to her, the part of her that made her a person and not a thing. But again, it would not be her. It couldn’t be, because with the addition of Mimir’s source code, it would have become the soul of a god. Ahllan/RuneNet would become a divine AI sharing dominion over the Norse universe/multiverse interface with Mimir and Odin.

She would become Mimir’s Mirror.

Wars would be fought back and forth between her and Mimir. Gods would die in them. But every battle and every death would go both ways. In some places, Ragnarok would come exactly as had been foretold. In others it would be averted. In a few it would be infinitely worse—with no rebirth following the great destruction.

And the responsibility for every one of those futures would be mine. I could give this universe the gift of uncertainty, of paths that avoided the ruin foretold, but only at the cost of the end of everything on other roads. Only at the cost of Ahllan’s life.

It was a terrible decision to have to make for another. The most terrible decision. I knew what Ahllan would want me to do, knew that she had already offered her life if that was what it took to thwart a future of foregone conclusions, its people robbed of any real choice by the ultimate in cosmic determinism. Knowing what she would have told me to do didn’t help. Knowing
everything
didn’t help. I still had to make the choice.

Kill someone I loved to give freedom to an entire pantheoverse? Or save her and leave the place no worse off than it had been when I entered the scene? I had to decide in the instant, and I did.

The pain of my lost eye was nothing to the pain I felt when I killed Ahllan.

Oh, I could lie to myself and say that I merely chose to let her life end as it would have without my intervention. I could tell myself it was exactly what she would have wanted me to do. I could comfort myself with the truth that it was her or an entire pantheoverse’s future, a myriad of them even. In fact, I told myself all those things and more.

None of it changed the fact that I had held Ahllan’s life in my hands and had ended it. Nothing ever would. Her death was a stain on my soul, and I would carry it unto the end of my days. It was my decision and my burden.

I had saved the universe and killed a friend.

I am the Raven. I am Impulse. I am the Trickster.

My worst mistakes and my greatest triumphs are all too often one and the same.

 

 

When you know everything, sometimes it takes a while for you to whittle it down to knowing something. After I made my choice, I let myself get lost in the general to the exclusion of the specific for what felt like a very long time, though it wasn’t—I knew that, too.