Eric Flint: Pyramid Power

"You can't die," said Lamont, as if his sheer fierce will could hold her back.

"Hold me, love."

And then Sigyn ran up, took one look and shouted up at the Valkyrie circling above: "Find Idun and bring her here!"

The Valkyrie blinked in surprise. "Idun? I came to ask what you want us to do with the rest of Einherjar."

"Idun. Now! Or I will curse you with a cold hearth for always and always."

The Valkyrie clapped her heels to her horse, as Jerry and Liz tried to staunch the blood from Marie's wound. They were successful in that, but it didn't look as if it was going to make any difference. She was slipping away.

And then, much sooner that they would have thought possible, the Valkyrie returned and dropped an angry Idun next to them.

"Sister, I will not help you," said the Lady of Spring, the rejuvenator, the custodian of the apples of youth. She sounded very cross. "Loki can die, for all I care. He got me kidnapped. And then he turned me into a nut."

Thrud looked up from her seat on Odin before Sigyn had a chance to reply. "Idun, see who I am sitting on. And understand what this means. Thor is now Lord of the?sir. If you don't help this woman he's not going to be just angry. We owe her more than we can repay."

"It's not for Loki?" asked Idun, startled.

"Loki has won on the plain," said Sigyn. "Ragnarok will not come. Look-already Fimbulwinter is past and the sun is shining. Your spring comes. Anyway, the flame does not ever need your apples. This woman does."

"She helped Thor to beat his drinking problem," said Thrud. "And we need her to keep him that way."

Idun nodded. "That we do." She opened her golden casket and took out an apple.

Jerry used the first blade to hand-that was Gram-to cut a sliver off the apple, and insert it between Marie's lips. "Chew if you can. Even the juice helps."

She did, weakly.

Jerry, Liz and the rest of them watched. And then Idun shook her head. "It is not the wound. She must eat the entire apple now. There is much within that needs it. The wound is a slight thing. The other, well…"

She looked at Lamont, tears still wet on his cheeks, a look of incredulous hope on his face. "You are her husband?"

He nodded.

Smiling, she took out another apple. "Then you'd better eat this one. A young woman, as she will need to become to take her body back to before it was affected by this disease, would be too much for you otherwise. You'll need your stamina."

Eric Flint Dave Freer

Pyramid Power

Miggy Tremelo was amused by Melvin Steinmetz's sangfroid. The head of one of the nation's premier think tanks-an academic on steroids, so to speak-was handling the discussion with a Greek sphinx and an Egyptian dwarf-god as if he were sitting around a conference table in the Future Enterprise Institute or participating in a university seminar-instead of being perched on a mechanic's stool in the maintenance garage attached to Miggy's headquarters. They were having the meeting in the cavernous garage, of course, because Throttler wouldn't fit anywhere else.

"If I understand this correctly, what this lady,"-Steinmetz nodded at the sphinx-"has just proved is that it is possible to travel though the Ur-Mythworlds without going through the pyramid."

"Some of them, it would be better to say," cautioned Miggy.

"But if I also have this correctly, the pyramid showed no growth as a result."

Tremelo nodded. "That's right, Melvin. That could be because the Krim is no longer active in those Mythworlds as a result of Dr. Lukacs and the rest of his group's efforts."

"But-" Steinmetz looked almost cross-eyed, for a moment. The thinktank president shook his head. "Miggy… have you considered the implications?"

Tremelo chuckled. "I'd make a wisecrack here about people teaching their grandmothers to suck eggs, except I'm way too polite."

Melvin winced, but half-smiled also, acknowledging the hit. "All right, point taken. You don't need to rub salt into my wounds. Obviously you have considered them"-he cocked his head a little-"and may I presume you came to the same conclusions I'm coming to?"

"That the Mythworlds have an independent existence? That they are-in some sense, at least-real and not simply virtual constructs of the Krim?"

"Or Krim constructs that have taken on a life of their own," Steinmetz said. "That strikes me as the most likely possibility."

Miggy nodded. "Me, too." He jabbed a thumb at one of the university maintenance vans parked alongside a wall of the garage. "The fact that that vehicle was made by human beings doesn't mean that it's simply a figment of our imagination. It was before it was made, sure enough. Just a gleam in an automobile designer's eye, so to speak. But now it's as real as-"

Grinning, Bes slapped his chest. "Me! I can prove it, too. You want me to crumple up the van?"

A bit hastily, Tremelo said, "That won't be necessary, I think."

Steinmetz was studying Bes a lot more intently than Miggy was comfortable with. As often as he and Melvin had clashed over policy issues in times past, Miggy was well aware that the man had a very keen mind. Until he was sure that Steinmetz was actually switching sides in the current dispute with the PSA, Tremelo really didn't want him probing too deeply into some of the other mysteries and conundrums that surrounded the pyramid and the Mythworlds.

Right at the top of that list was the problem that Miggy himself had been wrestling with since the day after Jerry Lukacs and the others returned from the Greek Mythworld, bringing with them Bes and Athena.

Why had Bes retained his powers-and Athena hadn't? The Greek goddess was still in police custody in Las Vegas, since no one had been able to figure out what else to do with her. Former goddess, rather, it would seem. If she had any divine powers they were not evident at all. She just seemed to be a spiteful, nasty middle-aged woman.

There were a number of possible answers to that question. All of them were uncomfortable, and some were downright scary.

Steinmetz now turned that sharp, considering gaze on Throttler. "So… she can operate from any sphinx image where there is even a modicum of belief in that universe. What that would seem to imply is that the sphinx, yes, and Bes, have acquired at least demi-god status in our universe. We're still in the realm of guesswork here but belief seems to be very powerful stuff, not constrained by the terms of ordinary logic."

Miggy hesitated. Melvin had seized upon the most obvious of the possible explanations, and one that was unsettling but not nearly as disturbing as some others. Tremelo was tempted to leave it at that. But his innate honesty rebelled a little. Clash as they might, from time to time, he and Steinmetz were basically colleagues. You didn't leave colleagues needlessly groping in the dark.

"I don't think that theory holds up, Melvin. Yes, you might be able to explain Bes' continued powers as being due to the fervor of wrestling fans. Just as you could explain Athena's lack of such being due to the fact that she has no equivalent… let's call it 'fan base.' The problem is Lamont Jackson."

Steinmetz narrowed his eyes. "Explain, please. I'm not following you."

"It's simple. Why did Lamont Jackson keep his Tyche-bestowed luck for a time-but only for a time? That he still had it when he came out of the pyramid was blindingly obvious by the wealth he piled up so rapidly. Within two days, he'd been banned from every casino in Las Vegas; within a week, any in the world; within two weeks, every state lottery in the U.S. had done the same. By then, of course, Lamont was a multimillionaire several times over. But then that same luck vanished overnight, when his wife Marie turned out to be dying from a particularly virulent form of cancer. And if that didn't prove the luck had gone, having himself and most of his family snatched back into the pyramid surely did."