The Sorrow of Odin the Goth

1935

Laurie and I went walking in Central Park. March gusted boisterous around us. A few patches of snow lingered, otherwise grass had started to green. Shrubs and trees were in bud. Beyond those boughs, the city towers gleamed newly washed by weather, on into a blueness where some clouds held a regatta. The chill was just enough to make blood tingle.

Lost in my private winter, I scarcely noticed. She gripped my hand. “You shouldn’t have, Carl.” I felt how she shared the pain, as far as she was able.

“What else could I do?” I replied out of the dark. “Tharasmund asked me to come along, I told you. How could I refuse, and ever sleep easy again?”

“Do you now?” She dropped that question fast. “Okay, maybe it was all right, allowable, to lend whatever consolation there might be in your presence. But you spoke up. You tried to head off the conflict.”

“Blessed are the peacemakers, they taught me in Sunday school.”

“That clash is inescapable. Isn’t it? In the selfsame tales and poems you went back to study.”

I shrugged. “Tales. Poems. How much fact is in them? Oh, yes, history knows what became of Ermanaric at the end. But did Swanhild, Hatha-wulf, Solbern die as the saga says? If anything of the kind ever happened—if it isn’t just a romantic imaginihg, centuries later, that a chronicler chanced to take seriously—did it necessarily happen to them?” I cleared my stiffened throat. “My job in the Patrol is to help discover what the events really were that it exists to preserve.”

“Dearest, dearest,” she sighed, “you’re hurting so much. It’s twisting your judgment. Think. I’ve thought—oh, but I’ve thought—and of course I haven’t been there myself, but maybe that’s given me a perspective you… you’ve chosen not to have. Everything you’ve reported, throughout this whole affair, everything shows events driving toward a single goal. If you, as a god, could have bluffed the king into reconciliation, you would have, surely. But no, that isn’t the shape of the continuum.”

“It flexes, though! What difference can a few barbarians’ lives make?”

“You’re raving, Carl, and you know it. I… lie awake a lot myself, afraid of what you might blunder into. You’re too close again to what is forbidden. Maybe you’ve already crossed the threshold.”

“The time lines would adjust. They always do.”

“If that were true, we wouldn’t need a Patrol. You must understand the risk you’ve been running.”

I did. I made myself confront it. Nexus points do occur, where it matters how the dice fell. They aren’t oftenest the obvious ones, either.

An example bobbed into my memory, like a drowned corpse rising to the surface. An instructor at the Academy had given it as being suitable for cadets out of my milieu.

Enormous consequences flowed from the Second World War. Foremost was that it left the Soviets in control of half Europe. (Nuclear weapons were indirect; they would have come into being at approximately that time regardless, since the principles were known.) Ultimately, that military-political situation led to happenings which affected the destiny of humankind for hundreds of years afterward—therefore forever, because those centuries had their own nexuses.

And yet Winston Churchill was right when he called the struggle of 1939-1945 “the Unnecessary War.” The weakness of the democracies was important in bringing it on, true. Nonetheless, there would not have been a threat to make them quail, had Nazism not taken control of Germany. And that movement, originally small and scoffed at, later chastised (though far too mildly) by the Weimar authorities—that movement would not, could not have come to power in the country of Bach and Goethe, except through the unique genius of Adolf Hitler. And Hitler’s father had been born as Alois Schicklgruber, illegitimate, result of a chance affair between an Austrian bourgeois and a housemaid of his…

But if you headed off that liaison, which you could easily have done without harming anybody, then you aborted all history that followed. By 1935, say, the world would already be different. Maybe it would become better than the original (in some respects; for a while) or maybe it would become worse. I could imagine, for example, that humans never got into space. Surely they would not have done it anywhere near as soon; it might well have occurred too late to rescue a gutted Earth. I could not imagine that any peaceful Utopia would have resulted.

No matter. If things back in Roman times changed significantly because of me, I’d still be there; but when I returned to this year, my whole civilization would never have existed. Laurie would never have.

“I… don’t agree I was taking risks,” I argued. “My superiors read my reports, honest reports they are. They’ll let me know if I’m going off the track.”

Honest? I wondered. Well, yes, they related what I observed and did, without any lies or concealment, though in spare style. But the Patrol didn’t want emotional breastbeating, did it? And I wasn’t expected to render every last trivial detail, was I? Impossible to do, anyway.

I drew breath. “Look,” I said, “I know my place. I’m simply a literary and linguistic scholar. But wherever I can help—wherever I safely can—I’ve got to. Don’t I?”

“You’re you, Carl.”

We walked on. Presently she exclaimed, “Hey, man, you’re on furlough, vacation, remember? We’re supposed to relax and enjoy life. I’ve been making plans for us. Just listen.”

I saw tears in her eyes, and did my best to return the cheerfulness she laid over them.