The Beasts Of Valhalla

reflection, the tender and merciful grace, of my own goodness, the air supply that kept me from drowning in what I was seeing.

So our decency, too, Loge showed us, though the horror of the images never stopped. Whatever feelings Garth and I had ever felt stir in us were nothing, mere breezes on the skin of the soul, compared to what we were feeling now; Siegmund Loge was working on our souls' skin with a tattooer's needle of notes and colors.

How Siegmund Loge had lived for more than eighty years with this pain weighing on his soul without being crushed by it, I couldn't imagine, and I realized, with shame, what a very shallow human being I was compared to this very great and very sad and very compassionate old man. I believed that Garth felt the same.

Mr. Lippitt had told me I'd be impressed by Siegmund Loge. I was impressed. And I knew that whatever happened next, a sea change had taken place in my soul by the time the last sweet and haunting notes of Gotterdammerung had faded away.

Garth and I would never forget what we had experienced in this room, and we would never be the same.

39

At precisely one o'clock in the afternoon on the day after Gotterdammerung, Siegmund Loge came to us. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying recently, but his voice was steady, if soft, when he spoke.

'I've spent almost my entire lifetime compiling that-since I was seventeen. It was completed, the last pictures matched to the last bars of the music, only recently-in the morning of the day you were found. This is the first time I've experienced it as a whole, and so it's an experience we've shared together.' He took a deep breath, and his voice trembled slightly when he continued. 'Please tell me what you think.'

'I couldn't find any fucking popcorn in the kitchen, Loge,' Garth said evenly. 'What good are movies without popcorn?'

Loge's face was stony as he stared intently at Garth. The muscles in his jaw began to twitch, and emotions- clear as the images in the vast montage he had assembled-passed across his eyes: bewilderment, shock, hurt, grief-rage. 'How dare you make such a remark?!' he shouted at Garth, pounding the shield with his fist. 'You have no right to do what you're doing! I've been watching you for the past four days, and I've seen your reactions! I know how my work affected you! I've seen you both sobbing, and I've seen you sitting in silence, lost in grief! I've watched the two of you tossing in your sleep! The three of us have felt the same! Don't you dare deny your pain to me! It's our common bond!'

Garth reached inside his overalls as if to scratch, pulled out a tuft of fur and casually tossed it into the air. The glossy black hair drifted to the floor.

'That's my brother's way of telling you we'll share nothing with you that we don't have to,' I said, scratching at the residual scales on the back of my forearm. 'You've taken everything else from us from shit to toenail clippings, but you can't have our emotions. In addition to everything else, it turns out you're a nasty old voyeur. Why did you show that to us, anyway? Do we look like art critics?'

Loge swallowed hard, then stepped back from the shield. He seemed stunned, as if he had made some simple miscalculation and couldn't find his mistake. 'It's my explanation,' he said hoarsely.

'Your explanation?!' I snapped. 'Do you really think you can justify or explain the murder of our nephew and his friend by giving Garth and me an emotional root canal job?! Do you think art can justify all the death and suffering you've caused?! You're part of the problem! Man, right now you are the problem! You're killing the world!'

Loge screwed his eyes shut, tilted his head back and clenched his fists. When he spoke, his voice was like a long moan. 'I had hoped that you and your brother would understand, Dr. Frederickson, but you still don't. It's not a question of emotion or justification, not a matter of good or evil. It is mathematics. Our world, the world humans dominate and rule, is dying. But I'm not killing it; I'm trying to save it.'

Then, suddenly, I understood-and wished I hadn't. 'My God,' I said in a voice I didn't recognize as my own. 'It's the Triage Parabola.'

Loge emitted a sigh, lowered his head, opened his eyes, unclenched his fists. 'Yes, Dr. Frederickson. I do think you now understand.'

'Mongo,' Garth said, gripping my arm, 'what the hell are you two talking-?'

I quickly put my fingers to his lips, then pointed to Loge, who had begun to pace back and forth in front of the shield, nervously running his long fingers through his long silver hair.

'As you know,' Loge said in the tone of voice some professors use when lecturing students, 'the Triage Parabola has proved useful in helping to predict which of several endangered species will most benefit from human intervention, thus enabling us to focus our attention and resources where they will do the most good. To apply the formulas of the Triage Parabola to human beings is almost impossibly complex, because the number of variables in human behavior-economic, political, social, psychological-approaches infinity. However, almost a decade ago I was able to apply the formulas, using a Cray computer and a mathematics system of my own invention. I kept my findings secret; I saw nothing to be gained in revealing them, since there was absolutely nothing that could be done to alter what seemed to be inevitable-or so I thought, until I was approached at the Institute for the Study of Human Potential by certain representatives of the Pentagon.'

'Mongo,' Garth murmured, 'tell me what this banana is talking about.'

'He's saying humanity is an endangered species, that we're on the verge of extinction.'

'From what? Nuclear war?'

'Maybe, maybe not,' I said, recalling that in the entire visual montage accompanying the Ring, only two sequences, each lasting less than twenty seconds, had been devoted to the melting flesh of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 'I think what Loge is saying is even worse than that.'

The scientist, who had heard me, nodded in affirmation, then resumed his pacing. 'Correct, Dr. Frederickson. Thermonuclear war may destroy human life-indeed, all life-over the planet, but not necessarily so. In fact, the solutions to the equations indicate that the outside parameters for our existence may be as much as three or four hundred years. But no more. The means by which we destroy ourselves cannot be predicted mathematically-and are, in any case, irrelevant. It is of no value to look around for the catastrophe that will come; in an evolutionary sense, we are the catastrophe, a unique species of self- aware, intelligent creatures that are, as an entire species, quite insane. We are, as the Triage Parabola makes quite clear, simply an evolutionary dead end. Nature, as is well-known from even the most casual observation, is unforgiving and implacable in erasing her mistakes. On an evolutionary scale, we rose with lightning speed; we shall disappear with lightning speed. In four hundred years, or maybe only four hundred months or weeks or days or hours or seconds, there will not be a single human being left on the face of the earth. In four thousand years-a snap of the fingers in evolutionary time-there will probably not even be a trace left of our existence.'

'What's going to replace us?' I asked.

'If nothing is done to alter our course?' Loge shrugged. 'Who knows? The Triage Parabola is an extremely powerful mathematical tool, but it's not a crystal ball. Data to predict the end of our existence is available; that necessary to predict what sort of sentient creature, if any, will replace us is not. The only thing that's certain is that we will be gone.'

'No, it's not certain,' I said, knowing I sounded slightly foolish and petulant, and not caring; I couldn't think of anything else to say. 'There is also love in the world.'

'It is certain, Dr. Frederickson. You have not learned the lessons of your odyssey, as I had hoped you would. First, love is ephemeral; it vanishes at the torturer's first pass. Yes, there is love, and it is responsible for much that we have accomplished that is beautiful, good, and true. But love cannot triumph over evil because, for most people, only their evil transcends tribal boundaries, not their love. The young men and women in the commune you visited loved- each other. They were looking forward, with ecstasy, to the death of virtually everyone else. Stryder London loved-his country, which is to say his tribe, and was perfectly willing to countenance a weapon of terrible evil as long as it would subjugate the wills of all tribes to which he did not belong. Tribes, Dr.