Poul Anderson - The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

The forbidden door swung back. Carl came out, and another. He forgot to close it. Men glimpsed a thing of metal. Some remembered what he had ridden who flew above the battlefields. They huddled close, gripped amulets or drew signs in the air.

Carl’s companion was a woman, though clad in rainbow-shimmery breeks and tunic. Her countenance was of a kind never seen before—broad and high in the cheekbones like a Hun’s, but short of nose, coppery-golden of hue, beneath straight blue-black hair. She held a box by its handle.

The two dashed to the bedroom. “Out, out!” Carl roared, and chased the Gothic women before him like leaves before a storm.

He followed them, and now remembered to shut the door on his steed. Turning around, he saw how everybody stared at him, while they shrank away. “Be not afraid,” he said thickly. “No harm is here. I have but fetched a wise-woman to help Jorith.”

For a while they all stood in stillness and gathering murk.

The stranger trod forth and beckoned to Carl. There was that about her which drew a groan from him. He stumbled to her, and she led him by the elbow into the bedroom. Silence welled out of it.

After another while folk heard voices, his full of fury and anguish, hers calm and ruthless. Nobody understood that tongue.

They returned. Carl’s face looked aged. “She is sped,” he told the others. “I have closed her eyes. Make ready her burial and feast, Winnithar. I will be back for that.”

He and the wise-woman entered the secret room. From the midwife’s arms, Dagobert howled.

I’d flitted uptime to 1930’s New York, because I knew that base and its personnel. The young fellow on duty tried to make a fuss about regulations, but him I could browbeat. He put through an emergency call for a top-flight medic. It happened to be Kwei-fei Mendoza who had the opportunity to respond, though we’d never met. She asked no more questions than were needful before she joined me on my hopper and we were off to Gothland. Later, however, she wanted us both at her hospital, on the moon in the twenty-fourth century. I was in no shape to protest.

She had me take a kettle-hot bath and sent me to bed. An electronic skullcap gave me many hours of sleep.

Eventually I received clean clothes, something to eat (I didn’t notice what), and guidance to her office. Seated behind an enormous desk, she waved me to take a chair. Neither of us spoke for a minute or three.

Evading hers, my gaze shifted around. The artificial gravity that kept my weight as usual did nothing to make the place homelike for me. Not that it wasn’t quite beautiful, in its fashion. The air bore a tinge of roses and new-mown hay. The carpet was a deep violet in which star-points twinkled. Subtle colors swirled over the walls. A big window, if window it was, showed the grandeur of mountains, a craterscape in the distance, heaven black but reigned over by an Earth nearly full. I lost myself in the sight of that glorious white-swirled blueness. Jorith had lost herself there, two thousand years ago.

“Well, Agent Farness,” Mendoza said at length in Temporal, the Patrol language, “how do you feel?”

“Dazed but clear-headed,” I muttered. “No. Like a murderer.”

“You should certainly have left that child alone.” I forced my attention toward her and replied, “She wasn’t a child. Not in her society, or in most throughout history. The relationship helped me a lot in getting the trust of the community, therefore in furthering my mission. Not that I was cold-blooded about it, please believe me. We were in love.”

“What has your wife to say on that subject? Or did you never tell her?”

My defense had left me too exhausted to resent what might else have seemed nosiness. “Yes, I did. I… asked her if she’d mind. She thought it over and decided not. We’d spent our younger days in the 1960’s and ’70’s, remember… No, you’d scarcely have heard, but that was a period of revolution in sexual mores.”

Mendoza smiled rather grimly. “Fashions come and go.”

“We’d stayed monogamous, my wife and I, but more out of preference than principle. And look, I always kept visiting her. I love her, I really do.”

“And she doubtless reckoned it best to let you have your middle-aged fling,” Mendoza snapped.

That stung. “It wasn’t! I tell you, I loved Jorith, the Gothic girl, I loved her too.” Grief took me by the throat. “Was there absolutely nothing you could do?”

Mendoza shook her head. Her hands rested quietly on the desk. Her tone softened. “I told you already. I’ll tell you in detail if you wish. The instruments—no matter how they work, but they showed an aneurysm of the anterior cerebral artery. It hadn’t been bad enough to produce symptoms, but the stress of a long and difficult primiparous labor caused it to rupture. No kindness to revive her, after such extensive brain damage.”

“You couldn’t repair that?”

“Well, we could have brought the body uptime, restarted the heart and lungs, and used neuron cloning techniques to produce a person that resembled her, but who would have had to learn almost everything over from the beginning. My corps does not do that sort of operation, Agent Farness. It isn’t that we lack compassion, it’s simply that we have too many calls on us already, to help Patrol personnel and their… proper families. If ever we started making exceptions, we’d be swamped. Nor would you have gotten your sweetheart back, you realize. She would not have gotten herself back.”

I rallied what force of will was left me. “Suppose we went downtime of her pregnancy,” I said. “We could bring her here, fix that artery, blank her memories of the whole trip, and return her to—live out a healthy life.”

“That’s your wishfulness speaking. The Patrol does not change what has been. It preserves it.” I sank deeper into my chair. Variable contours sought in vain to comfort me.

Mendoza relented. “But don’t feel too much guilt, you,” she said. “You couldn’t have known. If the girl had married somebody else, as she surely would have, the end would have been the same. I get the impression you made her happier than most females of her era.”

Her tone gathered strength: “You, though, you’ve given yourself a wound that will take long to scar over. It never will, unless you resist the supreme temptation—to keep going back to her lifetime, seeing her, being with her. That is forbidden, under severe penalties, and not only because of the risks it might pose to the time-stream. You’d wreck your spirit, even your mind. And we need you. Your wife needs you.”

“Yes,” I achieved saying.

“Hard enough will be watching your descendants and hers endure what they must. I wonder if you should not transfer entirely from your project.”

“No. Please.”

“Why not?” she flung at me. “Because I—I can’t just abandon them—as if Jorith had lived and died for nothing.”

“That will be for your superiors to decide. You’ll get a stiff reprimand at the very least, as close to the black hole as you’ve orbited. Never again may you interfere to the degree you did.” Mendoza paused, glanced from me, stroked her chin, and murmured, “Unless certain actions prove necessary to restore equilibrium… But that is not my province.”

Her look returned to my misery. Abruptly she leaned forward over the desk, made a reaching gesture, and said:

“Listen, Carl Farness. I’m going to be asked for my opinion of your case. That’s why I brought you here, and why I want to keep you a week or two—to get a better idea. But already—you’re not unique, my friend, in a million years of Patrol operations!—already I’ve begun to see you as a decent sort, who may have blundered but largely through inexperience.