American.”
“Frost,” Elizabeth says. “Robert Frost.”
“Is that a kind of ice?” someone asks.
“It’s a name,” says someone else.
“’From what I’ve tasted of desire,’” Elizabeth says, and her tone makes it clear that she is reciting again, “’I hold with those who favor fire.’”
The year-captain enters the room just then, and Paco glances toward him and says in his booming unfettered way, “And what about you, year-captain? How do you think the world’s going to end? We’ve done the sun going nova, we’ve done the entropic heat-death, we’ve done the rising of the seas until everything has drowned. We’ve done plague and drought and volcanoes. Give us your take, now.”
“Fimbulwinter,” the year-captain says. “Ragnarok.” The barbaric half-forgotten words leap instantly to his tongue almost of their own accord. The northern winds of his childhood sweep through his memory. He sees the frost-locked boreal landscape gleaming as though ablaze, even in the parsimonious winter light.
“The Twilight of the Gods, yes,” Elizabeth says, and gives him a melting smile of unconcealed love, which the year-captain, lost in polar memories, does not see.
Faces turn toward him. They want to hear more. The year-captain says, reaching deep for the ancestral lore, “A time comes when the sun turns black. It gives no light, it gives no warmth, winter comes three times in succession with no summer between. This is the Fimbulwinter, the great winter that heralds the world’s end. There is battle everywhere in the darkness, and brother slays brother for the sake of greed, and father lies with daughter, sister with brother, many a whoredom.”
Elizabeth is nodding. She knows these ancient skaldic poems too. Half to herself she murmurs, rocking back and forth rhythmically, “’An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shall be cloven. A wind-age, a wolf-age, ere the world totters.’”
“Yes,” says the year-captain, shivering now, his mind swirling with the powerful ancient images. “A great wolf will swallow the sun, and another wolf the moon. The stars vanish from the heavens. Trees are torn up, and mountains fall, and all fetters and bonds are broken and rent. The sea bursts its bounds, and the Midgard Serpent stirs and comes up on the land and sprinkles all the air and water with his venom, and the Fenris-Wolf breaks free and advances with his mouth agape, his lower jaw against the Earth and the upper against heaven. Nothing is without fear anywhere in the world. For this is the day on which the gods will meet their doom.”
He falls silent, playing out the final titanic battle in his mind, Thor putting the Serpent to death but dying himself of its venom, and the Wolf devouring Father Odin, only to have his gullet torn asunder by Vidar, and the demonic Surtr riding out of Muspelheim and casting fire over the Earth that burns all the world. But of these things the year-captain says nothing aloud. He feels he has had the center of the stage long enough just now. And an Arctic gloom has begun to seize his spirit. The ice, the darkness, the ravening wolves rising above the blazing world. And the Earth of his Viking forefathers is so far away, floating through the emptiness of the night, spinning eternally on its axis somewhere back behind him — a dot, a grain of sand. Nothing. Everything.
After a moment Elizabeth’s voice continues the tale:
“’Smoke-reek rages, and reddening fire. The high heat licks against heaven itself.’” Her mind is a crowded storehouse of poetry. But even she is unable to remember the next line.
“And then?” Paco asks. He throws his hands upward and outward, palms raised. Paco is a small, compact- bodied man of great strength and personal force, and any gesture he makes is always more emphatic than it needs to be, just as his shoulders seem twice as wide as those of a man his height should be. “That’s it? The End? Everybody’s dead and there’s nothing more? The curtain comes down and there’s not going to be any next act, and we look around and see that the theater is empty?”
“Redemption, then,” says the year-captain distantly. “Rebirth. The new world rising on the ashes of the old.”
He isn’t sure. Some details of his grandmother’s stories have faded in his mind, after all these many years. But it must be so, the rebirth. It is that way in every myth, no matter what land it may come from: the world is destroyed so that it may be brought forth new and fresh. There would be no point to these tales, otherwise. Not if the Twilight of the Gods is followed simply by unending empty night. That way all of life would be reduced to the experience of any one mortal individual: we are each of us born into flesh and we live, well or not well as the case may be, and then we die, goodbye, and that’s that for us, everything over. But that is only the individual case. New lives are being engendered even as ours is passing from us: an eternal cycle of rebirth and return. We end, yes, but the world of mortals goes on, death succeeded always by more life. So it must be with whole planets too. Sooner or later they may die, but new worlds are born from the dead husk of the old, and thus it all continues, world without end, always a new dawn beyond the darkness in which yesterday perished. There must never be a total and final end: never. Never.
“You know,” Heinz says cheerfully — Heinz is always cheerful — “for us the world has already come to an end, really. Because we will never see it again. It is already becoming mythical for us. It was a dying world even before we left it, wasn’t it? And now, so far as we’re concerned, it’s dead, and we are its rebirth. We, and all the ova and sperm sitting in cold storage down there in our tanks.”
“If,” says Paco. “Don’t forget the Big If.”
Heinz laughs. “There is no If. The sky is full of worlds, and we will find some. One good one is all we need.”
In fact Heinz is right, they all agree: the world they had left behind them was essentially already dead — the human world, that is — even though some hundreds of millions of people were still moving about upon the face of it. It had passed successfully through all the convulsions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the myriad acute crises of demography and nationalistic fervor and environmental decay, and had moved on into an era so stable and happy that its condition seemed indistinguishable from death, for what has ceased to grow and change has ceased to carry out the most important functions of life. Earth now was the home of a steadily dwindling population of healthy, wealthy, cautious, utterly civilized people, living the easy life in an easy society supported by automated devices of every sort. All their problems had been solved except the biggest one of all, which was that the solutions had become the problems and the trend-lines of everything were curving downward toward inevitable extinction. No one had expected that, really: that the end of striving and strife would in effect mean the end of life. But that was how it was working out. The last sputtering spark of Earth’s vitality was here, carried aboard the
An enormous irony, yes. A cosmic giggle. The world, free now of war and lesser conflicts, of inequalities, of disease, of shortages, was drifting downward on an apparently irreversible spiraling course. There was a lot of bland unexcited cocktail-party talk of the end of the human race within five or six hundred years, a notion with which hardly anybody seemed to care to disagree, and such talk was enough to make most people pause and contemplate matters of ultimate destiny for — oh, a good ten or fifteen minutes at a time.
The explosive population growth of the early industrial era had been curbed so successfully that virtually no children were being born at all. Even though the human life span now routinely exceeded a century, there was no region of the world where population was not steadily declining, because childbirth had become so uncommon that the replacement level was not being maintained. The world had become one vast pleasant suburb of well-to-do elderly childless folks.
Everyone was aware of the problem, of course; but everyone was eager for someone else to do something about it. The calm, mature, comfortable, emotionally stable people of the era had, as a general rule, very little interest in bearing or rearing children themselves, and such experiments in having children artificially generated and communally raised as had been carried out had not met with manifest success.
What the human race appeared to be doing, though no one said anything about it out loud, was to be politely allowing itself to die out. Most people thought that that was very sad. But what, if anything, was anybody supposed to do about it?
The
