Mythos (8 page)

What I really wanted was to rev Melchior up and have a look at the local cyberscape, to see for myself the locked network Ahllan had mentioned. But if Mel hadn’t woken when I passed, it was because he was deep in electronic dreams. Dreams which I had no right to deprive him of regardless of my own worries and sleeplessness.

“Damn.”

“And hello to you, too,” said Loki from the chair beside the fireplace.

I leaped to my feet, half losing my towel in the process.

“How long have you been here?” I demanded as I clutched at my impromptu sarong. I hadn’t seen him when I came in; but then, I hadn’t been looking.

“Not terribly. I’ve just been sitting here and thinking. I don’t sleep much.” He looked over his glasses at me, and I noted the chaos in his eyes again. “You?”

I growled something inarticulate while I tried to figure out how to reclaim the shreds of my dignity. This was not an interview I’d have chosen to conduct in towel-skirt and floral shawl. Nor unarmed.

“I thought as much.” He smiled and lifted his chin, once more veiling his inner chaos. Then he sighed. “We’re not going to get anywhere with you dressed like that, are we?”

He pointed a finger at the trailing edge of my towel, and chaos shot through with fire and ice poured forth. The towel slid from my hand as it shrink-wrapped itself to my body, becoming a pair of slightly worn blue jeans. A half second later the throw followed suit, turning itself into a long-sleeved black tee. They perfectly matched Loki’s own.

“Better?” he asked.

“Yes . . . Uh, thanks. But I do have to ask about the style choice. Not that I object necessarily; I’m just wondering why you’ve dressed me up like your best friend forever.”

“One less unnecessary decision to make. My entire closet looks like this. Do you have some other preference?”

“Well, I normally wear green and black and—” I stopped and looked down when Loki winked at me. My clothes had changed, becoming black jeans and an emerald shirt. “Thanks again.”

“No problem. Would you like shoes with that?” He pointed at my feet.

“No, thanks, I’m fine.” I shook my head. “Could we get back to the part of the conversation where you tell me why you’re here? In my sitting room. In the middle of the night. Without so much as a knock.”

“Oh, let’s not get all tedious, shall we? It’s not your sitting room; it’s Shakespeare’s and clearly belongs to history. Think of me as another lover of the Bard, and move on from there.”

“Look, Loki, I’ve—” As I spoke his name, his eyes narrowed, and I knew I’d made a mistake, giving away precious information and getting nothing in return. I tried to hide my stumble by continuing. “—had a long day. It’s late and I’m cold and I really don’t much feel like playing games.”

“Well, cold I can fix. I am, after all, the God of Fire.”

He gestured, and chaos spilled from his fingers, making a circle of flame on the floor around me. It was waist high and very hot.

“But if you know who I am, you know that, too.” He winked, and the circle started to shrink. “Now let’s talk about you, shall we?”

I looked at Loki through the tightening flames and shook my head. Why am I always irritating the folks higher up the divine food chain? It’s very frustrating, to say nothing of dangerous. I had no doubt that, as a full god on his home turf, Loki could easily destroy long-lived but definitely mortal me if he wanted to. Not that I was going to let that stop me from arguing with him or anything.

“Could we maybe not play macho power games?” I asked. “I’d much prefer to carry on a civilized conversation.”

“Well, of course you’re going to say something like that. You’re in there, and I’m out here. What’s in it for me?”

“Would you prefer I said the same thing from out there?” I asked, biting the inside of my mouth. Hard.

“If you can manage it, I guess I’d be open to a different dynamic.”

“Fine.” I spat into the flames. Blood.

With a huge “bang” and a flash I was elsewhere—standing in an upside-down bottle cap on the lawn of Forestdown Estates. It had become an itty-bitty faerie ring perfectly scaled to itty-bitty me and the interior of the Shakespeare miniature. It was one of the stranger experiences I’d had since I arrived in this weird Norse DecLocus.

In my pantheoverse, there are more faerie rings than there are stars in the sky, and opening a new one is as easy as drawing a circle and connecting it to chaos. As a child of the Titans, that chaos runs in my blood, and spilling it on the appropriate sort of circle is the simplest way to create a new one.

There’s more than that, though. As a chaos power, I have enormous control over the ring network. Like anyone, I can use it to transport me to any other ring between the blinks of an eye. I can also . . . not exactly
create
new places by using the rings, but define conditions that I would like a ring to fulfill, such as sanctuary. If such a place exists, the rings will take me there. Or, if the potential for a ring exists someplace that I want to go, I can force it open. That was what I’d just done with the bottle-cap ring.

What made it such an odd experience? The fact that as far as I could tell, in this pantheoverse, the circle of fire and the bottle cap were the only faerie rings in existence, and neither one of them had been there before I made them. Nor were they connected back to my home network.

I vaulted over the edge of the bottle cap and dashed across the bit of sidewalk between it and the Shakespeare place. A moment later I walked back into the sitting room. I found Melchior there, glaring at Loki across a heap of broken furniture and the brand-new faerie ring. The latter looked more than a little stunned.

“You were saying?” I raised an eyebrow at Loki from the doorway.

He looked over the top of his glasses at me and made another chaos-touched gesture, restoring most of the room to its former state—the ring being the exception.

“I was saying that we really ought to sit down and discuss this like two civilized beings,” he replied.

“Three,” said Melchior, making a point of going around the ring as he made his way to the sideboard—where he hopped up and crossed his legs goblin fashion.

I made just as much of a point of stepping through the ring as I returned to the chaise. In its activation, the ring had changed, of course, becoming an inch-wide circle of char with letters of gold fire slowly writing themselves around the edge, like the words on one of those LED highway signs. At the moment, they seemed to be quoting out the beginning of the second act of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
:
Over hill, over dale, through bush, through brier, over park, over pale, through flood, through fire, I do wander everywhere, swifter than the moon’s sphere
. . . etc.

I occasionally suspect that the very stuff of reality has an ironic streak. As I settled into my seat, I couldn’t help but notice the mantelpiece behind Loki wink at me. For one brief instant an eye of fire and smoke appeared in the stone. Then it snapped shut and was gone. I smiled inwardly, though I was careful not to let it show on my face. Whatever happened next, Tisiphone, hidden by her magical hunter’s chameleon, would stand ready to back me up. Silence stretched out between Loki and me.

“You’re the one who placed this call,” I finally said to Loki. “Why don’t you start?”

“All right. That”—he indicated the faerie ring with a nod—“is very interesting. Rather elegant, too. One of those bits of design that makes you wonder why
you’d
never thought of it. Between that and your eyes and your friends”—now he nodded at Melchior—“I’m starting to think that you’re not from around here. I’d initially believed you and the girl were both some new sort of fire-giant, and I was rather put out that no one had told me of not one but two such interesting, fresh players joining the ’gard-game.”

“But now you’ve changed your mind?” I asked. I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, but I didn’t want him to know that.

“I have. I know you don’t come from Asgard, not with those eyes. My next thought was that the Vanir had finally gotten tired of letting the Aesir have all the fun and made some kind of mistake in the execution, but no one in Vanaheim seems to have heard of you either—at least no one is talking. But what I really keep coming back to are the eyes. They’re not right for any answer that makes sense. That means they must be right for an answer that doesn’t make sense. I haven’t decided what the question is just yet, but it definitely involves the idea that you’re not from around here. What do you say to that?”

“Would you believe Schenectady?”

He looked over his glasses at me again, glaring, and I held up a hand.

“Sorry. Nervous knee-jerk reflex,” I said.

“Drop the ‘knee,’ and you’re closer to the truth,” said Melchior.

I ignored him and tried to decide what to tell Loki. I didn’t know what he meant by ’gard-game, or any of the other local pantheonic jargon, though Asgard sounded distinctly familiar. I was really wishing I’d paid better attention to whatever my teacher had said on the subject way back when. As far as gods and mythology went, it had ever and always been
Greek to me
. I just wasn’t equipped to deal with the present situation. Maybe if I became an atheist and pretended none of them existed . . . Naw, it’d never work. It’s really hard to disbelieve your family out of existence, however nice it might sound from time to time.

I still didn’t know what to tell Loki—too many variables—so I punted. “What do you know about multiple-world theory and quantum mechanics?”

“The idea that for every decision the world splits and goes both ways? Young’s double slit experiment on a macro scale? All that stuff? It’s very pretty bullshit . . . unfortunately. The only worlds are the nine.” He counted, ticking them off on his fingers. “Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Midgard, Jotunheim, Nidavellir, Svartalfheim, Niflheim, and Muspell; and Odin ultimately controls them all through MimirSoft, damn his monopolist soul to eternal torment.”

Nine named worlds? MimirSoft?
The more I learned, the more alien this place sounded. Perhaps another tack.

“Does the name Zeus ring any bells for you?” I asked.

Loki shook his head, though he got a tip-of-the-tongue look. “Spell that?” he asked after a moment.

“Z-E-U-S. Pretty much like it sounds,” I replied.

“Hmm.”

He pulled a featureless slice of what looked like cobalt blue glass from a slender holster on his belt. It was about four inches by two, and maybe a quarter of an inch thick. With a flick of the wrist like you might use on a cell phone, he opened it into a
/
shape and set it on the end table. A tap on the inner surface of the foot caused the device to light up and project a keyboard made of green light onto the table. A tap on the upper angle produced a shockingly bright rectangle of light on the wall behind the table—a full-color computer desktop.

Melchior whistled. “That’s impressive.”

Loki grinned. “A little nicer than one of MimirSoft’s beige boxes, isn’t it?”

He reached out and touched a tiny spy icon on the bottom right side of the projected screen. A search field opened in response, and he typed
Z E U S
on his keyboard of green light.

The results were immediate:
The king of the mythological gods of ancient Greece. Primarily a sky deity . . .
etc. I barely noticed.

“How do you get it to act like a touch screen?” I moved to get a closer look at the projection on the wall.

Loki grinned, showing a bit of the fox. “Laser motion detector and range finder, same as the keyboard. Want to try it out?” He slid out of his chair.

“Uh-huh.” I was mesmerized. “What’s the battery life like?” I started opening windows and looking for application icons.

“Pretty much infinite. It runs off a chaos tap.”

I stopped dead. “How did you get that into something this small?” Though he hadn’t said anything about being the designer, the proprietary way he talked about the thing told me all I needed to know on that score.

“It wasn’t easy,” he said, “but if you’re willing to let your imagination of what a device
should
be define your specs instead of letting the limitations of current design straitjacket you, it’s amazing what you can accomplish. Never build for the engineers; always build for the end user.”

Melchior had drifted over to stand by my elbow and stare at the device. “It’s gorgeous, but it’s soulless.”

“What do you mean?” asked Loki, obviously stung.

“It’s not a person, just a thing with no AI inside,” replied Melchior.

“And what is artificial intelligence but another pile of gorgeous lies?” sneered Loki.

“You might be surprised,” Melchior replied, his tone mild.

Loki sniffed dismissively, and Melchior went back to looking at the microcomputer, finally saying, “Doesn’t it get distracting, having it light up from inside like that?”