Shoggoths in Bloom (47 page)

“Sorry,” she said helplessly.

But he answered, “Don’t worry, plenty of room,” and whisked past without letting his shoulder brush. He bounced from foothold to foothold until he vanished into a twisting passage between sandstone outcrops.

“There’s my sense of inadequacy,” Dagmar sighed, trudging on.

Things she does not say in response: “Look at you.” She bites he lip. She nods.

She is trying to save her marriage.

And he’s right. She should take up running again.

Someone had run a hand-line—just a length of plastic clothesline, nothing that would prevent a serious fall—down the steepest, muddiest bit of the trail-bottom. Dagmar used it to steady herself as she descended, careful not to trust it with too much of her weight. By now, she could hear the wearing of the sea—and something else. Water, also—but not the water trickling in the rocky stream bed, and not the water hissing amongst the grains of sand. Falling water.

She rounded the corner of the gully—now towering a hundred feet or more overhead, to a cliff edge bearded with straggling bushes—and found herself in a grotto.

A narrow waterfall trembled from the cliff-top across wet, packed sand, shimmering like a beaded curtain in the slanted morning light. Its spray scattered lush draperies of ferns with jeweled snoods, hung trembling on the air in rainbow veils. Alongside grew dusty green reeds.

She drew up at the foot of the trail, her throat tightening upon the words of delight that she had no one to call out too. Broad sand stretched before her now, a wide path that led between two final shoulders of stone to the sea. Wetsuited surfers frolicked in the curling waves, silhouetted against the mirror-bright facets of the water. The sun was bright out there, though she stood in mist and shadow.

At the cliff-top, two crows sat shoulder to shoulder, peering down at Dagmar with curious bright eyes, heads cocked.

“Caw,” said the one on the right. She could not see if they were banded.

She craned her head until her neck ached stiffly and tried not to think of how she was going to get back up to the top. Loneliness ached against her breast like the pressure of accusing fingers.

“Hey,” she said. “This is so beautiful.”

The crows did not answer.

Her hands had swollen on the descent, taut and prickling, the left one burning around her ring. Her feet ached still—mashed toes, and she suspected from a sharper, localized pain that one of those shards of glass might have punched through the sole of her shoe.

The ripples beneath the waterfall looked cool. She hopped the rocky little stream—now that it ran across the surface rather than down in a gully, it was easy—and limped toward the pool, wincing.

The crows come at dawn, bright-eyed—how can black eyes seem bright?— and intelligent. The feeding station is designed so that only one bird at a time can eat, and see her. They squabble and peck, but not seriously—and, after a fashion, they take turns: one, having eaten, withdraws from the uncomfortably close presence of the researcher, and the next, hungry, shoulders in.

When they come up to the trough, to pick at the cracked corn she dribbles through the transparent plastic shield that separates her from the birds, they eye her face carefully. They make eye contact. They tip their heads.

She knows it’s not good science, but she begins to think they know her.

It would be stupid to pull off her shoe—if she did have a cut, she’d get sand in it, and then she’d just have to put the shoe back on sandy and get blisters—so instead she dropped a knee in the wet sand beside the pool and let her hands fall into the water. It was cold and sharp and eased the taut sensation that her skin was a too-full balloon. She touched her ring, felt the heat in the skin beside it. It was too tight even to turn.

Dagmar pushed sandy, sweat-damp hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.

From behind her, as before, a voice—this one also male, but midrange, calm, with an indeterminate northern European accent—said, “Have a care with that.”

Dagmar almost toppled forward into the puddly little pool. She caught herself on a hand plunged into the water—the left one, it happened—and drew it back with a gasp. There must have been a bit of broken glass in the pool, too, and now dilute blood ran freely from the heel of her thumb down her elbow, to drip in threads upon the sand.

She turned over her shoulder, heart already racing with the threat of a strange man in an isolated place—and instead found herself charmed. He was tall but not a tower, broad but not a barn-door. Strong-shouldered like a man who used it—the surfers on the water, the soldiers who ran along the beach. Long light hair—sand-brown—bounced over one of those shoulders in a tail as the water bounced down the cliff above. A trim brown beard hid the line of his jaw; the flush of a slight sunburn vanished behind it.

And his right arm ended in shiny scraps of scar tissue four inches above where the wrist should have been.

Iraq, she thought. He might have been thirty; he wasn’t thirty-five. Afghanistan?

His gaze went to the trickle of bloody water along her arm. She expected him to start forward, to offer help.

Instead he said, “Your coming is foretold, Dagmar Sörensdotter. I am here to tell you: you must make a sacrifice to a grief to end it.”

Her name. Her father’s name. The cold in her fingers—the way the pain in her hand, in her foot receded. The way she suddenly noticed details she had not seen before: that the cliff behind the one-handed man was gray and tawny granite, and not the buff sand she’d been eyeing throughout her descent; that the surfers scudding like elongated seals through the curving ocean had all drifted out of line of sight: that the ocean itself was being lost again behind chilly veils of mist.

She pulled her bloody right hand away from the wound in her left and groped in the pocket of her shorts for her phone.

“It avails you not, Dagmar Sörensdotter,” he said. “You are in no danger. When grief burns in your heart, and your blood enters the water, and you run down into the earth at the edge of the sea with your helskor on, accompanied by crows—on this my day of all days! Who shall come to you then but a god of your ancestors, before you run all the way to Niflheim?”

He gestured to her feet. She looked down at her trail shoes, and noticed a reddish patch spreading along the side of the right one. She looked up again.

He didn’t look like a god. He looked like a man—a man her own age, her own ethnicity, more or less her own phenotype. A man in a gray T-shirt and faded jeans rolled up to show the sand-dusted bones of his ankles. A crazy man, apparently, no matter how pleasant his gaze.

“I have a phone,” she said, raising her right hand to show it. Aware of the water and the cliff at her back. Aware of the length of his legs, and the fact that she’d have to dart right past him to reach the beach trail. “I’ll scream.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “If you must,” he said, tiredly. “I am Týr, Sörensdotter. My name means God. This hand”—he held up that ragged, scarshiny stump—“fed the Fenris wolf, that he would stand to be shackled. This hand”—he raised the intact one—“won me glory nonetheless. Men speak of the brave as Týr-valiant, of the wise as Týr-prudent. I am called ‘kin-ofgiants;’ I am named ‘god-of-battle;’ I am hight ‘the-leavings-of-the-wolf.’ ” He paused; the level brows rose. “And will that name be yours as well?”

“I’ve met someone else,” he says.

Dagmar lowers her eyes. She slices celery lengthwise, carefully, dices it into cubes as small as the shattered bits of safety glass.

It feels like a car wreck, all right.

She scrapes the vegetables into hot oil and hears them sizzle.

“Do you hear me?” he asks. “I’ve met someone else.”

“I heard you.” She sets the knife down on the cutting board before she turns around. “Were you looking for the gratification of a dramatic response? Because you could have timed it better. I have a pan full of boiling oil right here.”

“The leavings of the wolf,” she said. “Leavings. Like . . . leftovers?” Dial 911, she told herself, before the nice crazy stalker pulls out a knife. But her fingers didn’t move over the screen.

God or not, he had a nice smile, full lips behind the fringe of beard curving crookedly. “It did make a meal of the rest.”

She felt her own frown. Felt the hand clutching the phone drop to her side. “You’re left-handed.”

“Where I’m from,” he said, “no one is left-handed. But I learned.”

“So why didn’t you give the wolf your left hand?”

He shrugged, eyebrows drawing together over the bridge of a slightly crooked nose.

In the face of his silence, she fidgeted. “It would have been the sensible choice.”

“But not the grand one. It doesn’t pay to be stingy with wolves, Sörensdotter.”

Her hands clenched. One around the phone, one pressing fresh blood from a wound. “You said helskor, before. What are helskor?”

“Hell shoes.” He jerked his stump back at the steep and slick descent. “The road to the underworld is strewn with thorns; the river the dead must wade is thick with knives. Even well-shod, I see you have your injuries.”

“I’m not dead,” Dagmar said.

“Dead enough to shed your blood on the path to Hel’s domain. Dead enough to have been seeking Niflheim these past months, whether or not you knew it.”

With his taken breath and the lift of his chin, Týr gave himself away. He gestured to her dripping hand and said what he meant to say anyway. “When you put your hand in a wolf’s mouth, you must understand that you have already made the decision to sacrifice it.”

“I didn’t know it was a wolf,” she said. “I thought it was a marriage.”

“They are not,” Týr says, “dissimilar. Are you going to stand there forever?”

Dagmar raises her left hand. Blood smears it already, the slit in her palm deeper than it had seemed. Still welling.

It palls the diamond in crimson, so no fire reflects. It clots in the spaces in the band’s filigree.

She says, “I didn’t want to waste it. I wanted to save it for something else.”

“A sacrifice,” the god says, “is not a waste.”

He does not say: What you try to salvage will drag you down instead.

He does not say: You cannot cut your losses until you are willing to admit that you have lost.

He does not need to.

How bad can it be? Dagmar wonders.

She puts her bloody finger in her mouth and hooks her teeth behind the ring.

Damn you, she thinks. I want to live. Even with failure.

Bit by bit, scraping skin with her teeth, she drags the ring along her finger. The pain brings sharp water to her eyes. The taste of blood—fresh and clotted—gags her. The diamond scrapes her gums. Flesh bunches against her knuckle.

I don’t think I can do this.

“This has already happened,” the god says in her ear. “This is always happening.”

I don’t think I can not.

When she pulls once more, harder, her knuckle rips, skins off, burns raw. With a fresh well of blood that tastes like seaweed, the ring slides free, loose in her mouth, nearly choking her.

Dagmar spits it on the sand and screams.

The god has left her.

Dagmar stands on the strand under the bright sun, her left hand cradled against her chest, and watches the long indigo breakers combing the hammered sea. Red runs down her arm, drips from her elbow, falls and spatters into the shallow play of the ocean’s edge. Overhead wheel crows, murders and covenants of them, driving even the boldest seagulls away.

She holds the ring in her right hand. Her fingers clutch; she raises her fist. One sharp jerk, and the ocean can have it. One—

She turns back and draws her arm down, and instead tosses the bright bloody thing flashing into the sky. Round and round, spinning, tumbling, pretty in the sun until the dark wings of carrion birds sweep toward it.

She does not see which claims it—banded or bare—just the chase as all the others follow, proclaiming their greed and outrage, sweeping away from her along the endless empty river of the sky.

“Thank you,” she whispers after them.

In a moment, they are gone. —for SL

The first word was meant to be spoken quietly, if it should ever be spoken at all. A dribble of signal. An echo. A ghost. A coded trickle, something some PC running SETI-at-home would pick out of the background noise, flag, and return silently to the great database in the sky, the machine’s owner innocent of her role in making history.

I am one of the few who is old enough to remember what we got. Something as subtle as a solid whack across the nose with a cricket bat. We couldn’t believe it at first, but there it was, interfering with transmissions on all frequencies, cluttering our signals with static ghosts.

Television had largely abandoned the airwaves by then, so the transmissions that came to houses and offices over fiber optic cable were unperturbed. Dueling experts opined with telegenic confidence that the suggestive sequence of blips was some natural, cosmological phenomenon—and not somebody broadcasting to the whole world, simultaneously, intentionally.

That lasted all of about three hours before the first cable news channel produced an elderly man, liver-spotted scalp clearly visible between the thinning strands of his hair. He was a ham radio operator, a lifetime wireless hobbyist who folded his hands before his chest and closed his eyes to listen to those noises straight out of an old movie—exactly like the chatter of a wireless telegraph.

He let his lids crack open again, “It’s Morse code; of course I recognize it. It might be the most famous Marconi transmission in history.”

He quoted, as if reciting a familiar poem, “CQD CQD SOS Titanic Position 41.44 N 50.24 W. Require immediate assistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking.”

I was in my office at the ALMA site, surrounded by coworkers, and you could have heard a pin drop. We hadn’t exactly gotten the jump on this one—not when the signal was interfering with people’s baby monitors. But we had been engaged in trying to track it.

A simple task, given the strength of the signal. It originated in Taurus, and exhibited measurable parallax over the course of a couple of days. Not only was it loud, in other words—but it was close, and moving fast.