Poul Anderson: The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

In the Middle West, where my mother was now carrying me, we’d have had to be annoyingly circumspect. But most New Yorkers were tolerant, or at least incurious. A beard down to my chest, and shoulder-length hair which I’d pulled into a queue while at the base, didn’t draw many stares, nor more than a few cries of “Beaver!” from little boys. To our landlord, our neighbors, and other contemporaries, we were a retired professor of Germanic philology and his wife, our oddities to be expected. It was no lie, either, as far as it went. Therefore my walk should have eased me somewhat, restored that perspective which Patrol agents must have, lest certain of the things they witness drive them mad. We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included: “The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads, and all is done with forever.”—understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely. Why, those Goths of mine were getting off lightly compared to, say, millions of European Jews and Gypsies, less than ten years futureward, or millions of Russians at this very moment.

It was no good. They were my Goths. Their ghosts crowded around me till street, buildings, flesh and blood became the unreal, the half-remembered dream.

Blindly, I hastened my steps, toward whatever sanctuary Laurie could give.

We occupied a huge flat overlooking Central Park, where we liked to stroll on mild nights. The doorman at the apartment need not double as an armed guard. I hurt him today by the curtness with which I returned his greeting, and realized it when in the elevator, but then my regret was too late. To jump back through time and change the incident would have violated the Prime Directive of the Patrol. Not that something that trivial would have threatened the continuum; it’s flexible within limits, and the effects of alterations usually damp out fast. Indeed, there’s an interesting metaphysical question about the extent to which time travelers discover the past, versus the extent to which they create it. Schrodinger’s cat lurks in history as well as in its box. Yet the Patrol exists in order to assure that temporal traffic does not abort that scheme of events which will at last bring forth the Danellian superhu-mans who founded the Patrol when, in their own remote past, ordinary men learned how to travel temporally.

My thoughts had fled into this familiar territory while I stood caged in the elevator. It made the ghosts more distant, less clamorous. Nevertheless, when I let myself into our home, they followed.

A smell of turpentine drifted amidst the books which lined the living room. Laurie was winning somewhat of a name as a painter, here in the 1930’s when she was no longer the preoccupied faculty wife she had been later in our century. Offered a job in the Patrol, she had declined; she lacked the physical strength that a field agent—male or, especially, female—was bound to need upon occasion, while routine clerical or reference work didn’t interest her. To be sure, we’d shared vacations in mighty exotic milieus.

She heard me enter and ran from her studio to meet me. The sight lifted my spirits a tiny bit. In spattered smock, red hair tucked under a kerchief, she was still slender, supple, and handsome. The lines around her green eyes were too fine to notice until she got near enough to embrace me.

Our local acquaintances tended to envy me a wife who, besides being delightful, was far younger than myself. In fact, the difference in birthdates is a mere six years. I was in my mid-forties, and prematurely gray, when the Patrol recruited me, whereas she had kept most of her youthful looks. The antithanatic treatment that our organization provides will arrest the aging process but not reverse its effects.

Besides, she spent most of her life in ordinary time, sixty seconds to the minute. As a field agent, I’d go through days, weeks, or months between saying goodbye to her in the morning and returning for dinner—an interlude during which she could pursue her career without me underfoot. My cumulative age was approaching a hundred years.

Sometimes it felt like a thousand. That showed.

“Hi, there, Carl, darling!” Her lips pulsed against mine. I drew her close. If a dab of paint got onto my suit, what the hell? Then she stepped back, took both my hands, and sent her gaze across me and into me.

Her voice dropped low: “It’s hurt you, this trip.”

“I knew it would,” I answered out of my weariness.

“But you didn’t know how much… Were you gone long?”

“No. Tell you about it in a while, the details. I was lucky, though. Hit a key point, did what I needed to do, and got out again. A few hours of observation from concealment, a few minutes of action, and fini.”

“I suppose you might call it luck. Must you return soon?”

“In that era, yes, quite soon. But I want a while here to—to rest, get over what I saw was about to happen… Can you stand me around, brooding at you, for a week or two?”

“Sweetheart.” She came back to me.

“I have to work up my notes anyway,” I said into her ear, “but evenings we can go out to dinner, the theater, have fun together.”

“Oh, I hope you’ll be able to have fun. Don’t pretend for my sake.”

“Later, things will be easier,” I assured us. “I’ll simply be carrying out my original mission, recording the stories and songs they’ll make about this. It’s just… I’ve got to get through the reality first.”

“Must you?”

“Yes. Not for scholarly purposes, no, I guess not. But those are my people. They are.”

She hugged me tighter. She knew.

What she did not know, I thought in an uprush of pain—what I hoped to God she did not know—was why I cared so greatly about yonder descendants of mine. Laurie wasn’t jealous. She’d never begrudged the while that Jorith and I had had. Laughing, she’d said it deprived her of nothing, while it gave me a position in the community I was studying which might well be unique in the annals of my profession. Afterward she’d done her best to console me.

What I could not bring myself to tell her was that Jorith was not simply a close friend who happened to be a woman. I could not say to her that I had loved one who lay dust these sixteen hundred years as much as I loved her, and still did, and maybe always would.

The home of Winnithar the Wisentslayer stood on a bluff above the River Vistula. It was a thorp, half a dozen houses clustered around a hall, with barns, sheds, cookhouse, smithy, brewery, and other workplaces nearby: for his family had long dwelt here, and waxed great among the Teurings. Westward reached meadows and croplands. Eastward, across the water, wilderness remained, though settlement was encroaching heavily upon it as the tribe grew in numbers.

They might have logged off the woods altogether, save that more and more of them were moving away. This was a time of unrest. Not only were plundering warbands on the trail; whole folk were pulling up stakes, and clashing when they met. Word drifted from afar that the Romans were often at each other’s throats too, while the mightiness which their forefathers had built crumbled. As yet, few Northerners had done anything bolder than to raid along the Imperial borders. But the southlands just outside those borders, warm, rich, scantily defended by their dwellers, beckoned many a Goth to come carve out a new home for himself.

Winnithar stayed where he was. However, that forced him to pass almost as much of each year in fighting—especially against Vandals, though sometimes against Gothic tribes, Greutungs or Taifals—as he passed in farming. As his sons neared manhood, they began to yearn elsewhere.