Minister Faust (9 page)

She pursed her lips, maintained her stare at me. “You vud haff to ask zem.”

“You’ve obviously had time to form your own analysis of the F*L*A*C and their decision.”

She was silent. Behind her, the temporal lobe shimmered, but there was no lightning.

“So according to your analysis, what is the F*L*A*C’s rationale for ordering you here? Where have they miscomprehended you and your work?”

“Ze F*L*A*C…unt ze FOOCH itself, fails to unterstandt…ze significance uff self-discipline unt reevaluation…durink difficult times…or uzzervise.”

“And that refers to you how?”

“I haff providedt guidance, Doktor. Guidance zey apparently belief is no lonker reqviredt. Alzough, perhaps
now,
sadly, in light of Hawk—”

“You’re an icon, Professor,” I said, changing directions again to prevent her clambering into her psychemotional bunker to escape the falling shells of my inquiry. “Not only as a Norse deity and as a twentieth-century superhuman, but in the academy—author of
Women Who Fly with the Valkyries, The Frigga Mystique,
and
The Buri Myth,
among others—”

“Ja?”

“You broke down doors, sometimes literally, to gain entrance to traditionally male domains. Dozens of female heroes entered the F*O*O*J because they were inspired by you, and they’ve sung your praises in interviews, books, and the motivational speaker circuit. And, of course, the fact that you’ve been worshiped for centuries—”

“Ja?”

In the northern sky of her brain’s emotional center, blue lightning flashed; the thunder lagged by seconds. I motioned for her to stand and walk with me, which she did, and we headed off toward the nexus of her divine motor function.

“That’s quite a burden,” I said above the thunder finally rolling in, “having to live up to all that. Never being allowed to falter. To be vulnerable.”

“Burtens are a part of life in ziss vurlt. Hawk Kink…taught us all zat.”

“A
part
of life, yes. You think they’re the entirety?”

“I didt not say zat.”

“A burden you’ve borne for twenty centuries. And now, even with the Götterdämmerung over, you’re still having to hold yourself up as an example of what people can achieve if they have the will and honor, if they’re devoted to what they consider right. It must be…

“Well, I won’t tell
you
how it feels, but beholding a generation of younger heroes, younger
women
heroes, who comport themselves as if all the privileges and access they have weren’t fought for and struggled for by the women who preceded them, most of whom never got such opportunities…opportunities that they’re—some would say—squandering? You must find that absolutely galling.”

She drew in a huge breath through her nostrils, but even with her mouth closed I could hear her teeth grinding against one another as if she were chewing the metallic sweetbreads of the mythic iron goat Scyldscrotgnashhunt.

We were close.

Iconsternation: Iron Lips

I
aimed my neuron probe up into the cerebral “sky” of memory, the zone to which my Id-Smasher
^®
had mapped and routed the segments of Hnossi’s actual flesh-and-ichor brain.

Inside her virtual cerebrum, the sky warbled at my neuron probe’s beam. I then tapped a sequence on my belt controls, stimulating the sensory-memory lobe, and around us IMAXed the remembered sights, smells, sounds, and wind-rushing tactile impression of flying over snow-clutched Scandinavian mountain peaks. Neurally connected to her as I was, I felt the strain at my shoulders of wings surging through the stratosphere, felt the cold rush across my body.

“Your other powers,” I said, aiming my probe elsewhere, “include the ability to summon this, correct?”

Instantly we were standing in a bald, gray valley; a gleaming iron chariot appeared, connected to a train of tiger-sized iron cats. I clicked again: across the sky, we looked down at two massive projections of Hnossi’s hands, into which materialized her two magic iron swords, one short, one long.

“Iron chariot; iron cats; iron swords. You can turn your wings into iron, you can occasionally turn your body into iron, you have gold-and silver-plated iron armor, your
name
is—”

“Your point, Doktor?”

“That’s a lot of iron, Hnossi. You tell me. What’s the point?”

“Mm,
ja,
” she sneered. “Don’t you sink zat’s just a
bit
too…mm…pre
cise,
Frau Doktor? Too purfectly pat unt pristine? Zat my carryink uff iron implements unt various transformations viss iron connote a hardness or hard-heartedtness uff my character, Freudianly suggestink furzer some sort uff pursonal or family dysfunction?”

“I didn’t say a word about your family, Professor Icegaard.”

She stiffened, blinking at me, looking like a sleeping cockatoo whose perch had suddenly collapsed beneath her.

“But the way you reacted to my question, Hnossi, is interesting. Have you found in your career or your mothering that shame is an effective means of silencing people when they question you or your decisions?”

Her lips flattened like spatulas, her eyes nailed onto me like eviction notices. The giant projection of hands and swords flared and then turned to black smoke, while the entire sky erupted in flame.

The two of us stood crisping in the violent orange light of the inferno. But because I refused to look away from her face, Hnossi finally spoke.

“Vell, first uff all, you’re mistaken ven you say—it’s inaccurate to, totally incorrect to suggest zat I—zat I
shame
people, Doktor, vezzer professionally or pursonally. Unt even if, unt I punctuate
if,
vut I said to you vuss ‘shaming,’ zen zat’s only becoss zat’s vut you’d just been doingk to me!”

“Why are you choosing to think I was trying to shame you?”

“You, you just—you vere just tryink to somehow make me feel ashamedt uff my ferric powers! Vich I’ve been using for centuries in your vurlt, savink people like you, people who caun’t take care of zemselfs!”

“So you admit that you did try to shame me as retaliation for what you perceived as me shaming you, and you just attempted to shame me
again
by saying people like me can’t take care of themselves.”

The firestorm emitted what can only described as a confused light, diminishing into vast, belching fields of smoke which I waved away with my hands. Hnossi removed her mandarin-collared powder blue cardigan, and from her back her wings emerged in a burst of snow and black ash. Standing, she flapped her vast black falcon wings to clear our air.

“So in which ways, do you think,” I said, coughing, “has this belief of yours that two wrongs make a right led to professional or personal problems for you?”

She sat agape, finally squeaking out, “I caun’t belief your shoddy, scattershot, disjointed—you’re not even listeningk to me! I don’t
haff
any professional or pursonal proplems!”

“Not even denial?”

“So if I defendt myself against untrue accusations, I’m in denial?”

“You’re divorced—”

An image of her ex-husband, the Mexican superhero Strong Man, in his cape, mask, and wrestling tunic, glimmered behind her. He smiled broadly. “Yes I am, as are about a hundred million uzzer vimmen viss soughtless husbands in ziss country—”

“You’ve been sent to therapy with me—”

An array of caricatures—dwarfish versions of the F*L*A*C officers—sprouted from the “floor” like toadstools. “Because an assembly of scaredt, jealous, foolish, myopic
untermenschen
on ze F*L*A*C is afraid of vut I represent unt how tiny zey feel ven zey’re forced to evaluate zeir own lifes in comparison to—”

“You’re estranged from your children, Hnossi.”

Her mouth stopped. Shut.

A wall of hewn stone appeared behind her, soaring back left, right, and upward, and with a thunder-smack concluded its construction as an impenetrable fortress.

From behind narrowed eyes, she said, “You don’t know ennysing about my children.”

“Tell me.”

“I come from a culture, a generation, zat said private matters are
private.
Unt ve do not discuss our problems viss just vutever professional gossip-junkie happens to troll ze back alleys looking to…to score.”

“But you just said you didn’t have any personal problems.”

Her eyes snapped open, her lips opening for a breath. But if she had a sentence waiting to fly, she never surrendered its passport. By then, Hnossi Icegaard was beginning to see that neither my office nor the Id-Smasher
^®
permitted the use of denial as an avoidance technique.

“Prove me wrong,” I said. “If you don’t have any personal problems, then tell me about your children, why your emotional-memory center has metaphored a psychic fortress around any image of them, and why your not seeing them doesn’t indicate or constitute a problem.”

“Ve’re not estrangedt! Ve see each uzzer all ze time!”

“When was the last time you had a meal together? Actual family time, sitting around the table for roasted wild boar, tankards of Jotun ale, recitations from the
Poetic Edda
?”

“Please spare me your painfully passetic attempts at cultural sensitivity, Doktor.”

“So. When was it? The last time?”

She looked to her left, looking “east,” and the glittering Bifrost rainbow bridge raced up toward the mountain rising from the black plains of memory. At its peak glittered into existence the silver and golden meadhalls of Aesgard.

I ignored her attempt to hide in her “happy place.”

“Married to, let’s see,” I said, clicking a projection of my
IRON LASS
file after Hnossi’s prolonged refusal to speak, “married May 1962 to Hector ‘Qetzalcoatl’ El Santo, HKA Strong Man.” The life-size smiling image of the caped-and-tunicked hero and Mexican screen idol reappeared beside Hnossi. She moved closer to it as if automatically, then forced herself to step back and look away.

“Two children: Inga-Ilsabetta, born October 1962, and Baldur, nicknamed Lil Boulder, born June 1964.”

A tall girl and a shorter boy, both dark-haired, appeared at Strong Man’s hips. Both looked up toward their father with the power of the sun in their smiles.

“Separated from El Santo, 1974; children chose to live with their father. El Santo eventually filed for divorce in 1981.”

The family triad diminished into blackness and disappeared. I paused, looking at the woman staring at the fading footprints of shadows.

“Later that year, you drafted a paper entitled
Toward a Practical Götterdämmerung: A Logistical Analysis,
ghost-rewritten and repackaged to the public as the paperback bestseller
Time to Ragnarok!
It became the clarion call that initiated the War.”

I glanced away from my file projection to see Iron Lass’s eyes attempting to carve me into individual slices of luncheon meat.

“The same year your husband tells you that your marriage is truly finished, you, essentially single-handedly, declare a global war that changes the planet. A war whose logistics you chart. A war you lead to victory.”

“Ziss is absurdt,” she said, her left hand glowing white, her right hand shadowing into black. “Vut ridiculous, patronizing, reductionist nonsense, to claim an entire geopolitical hyperhominid conflict can be explainedt avay as merely
a vuman scornt
?”

“To go from leading your fellow Valkyries into battle for centuries, being literally worshiped as a deity of iron—to opening yourself up to simple, mortal love, meaning you’d’ve had to’ve made yourself soft and pliant and vulnerable to humans, bearing children for a mortal man, even…and then after all of that, to be rejected? That’s iconoclasm, Hnossi! The shattering of an icon…you!

“So rather than being ‘patronizing’ or ‘reductionist,’ I’m trying to get you to integrate everything you’ve gone through into a postwar logistical analysis of your
self.
”

Her eyes, aflame, dimmed; her body, rigid, melted by a degree. Her hands resumed their normal state, no swords having appeared in them.

“My muzzer,” she finally muttered, “alvays saidt to me, she saidt, ‘Brünhilde, you’re too smart by half.’ ” She lowered her voice further. “She never remembert my name.”

What will it mean for your life, and for your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Iron Lass:
“I never sought glory. Basic respect would suffice.”

B
lobs of Day-Glo color oozed and swirled around me as if I were standing inside a giant lava lamp, and the air smelled like a mixture of bubble gum and the cosmetics department at a Target store.

“So, Syndi,” I asked the only other person with me inside the Id-Smasher
^®
’s neuroscape, “how do you feel about the F*L*A*C ordering you into counseling?”

“Like, as far as I’m concerned,” said the young pop star, once again and in quick succession yawning, stretching, snapping her virtual gum, and rolling her eyes, “
ev
erybody should be in counseling.”

Power Grrrl had manifested from her memories the leather sofa from my Verbalarium and had draped herself across it, her back wedged into one of its corners, one thigh hiked up over the sofa’s arm, her hair dazzled along the sofa’s back as if she were awaiting her paparazzi. Mentally clad in black-and-silver leather dominatrix garb and swaying her torso to the dance beat seeping from her bustier-speakers, she was, that day, unusually low-key.