Mythos (32 page)

“Any regrets on choosing sides?” Melchior’s voice came from the tinny speakers of his laptop form.

I glanced into his webcam and shook my head. He sat on the exact same workbench I’d found him on when we’d come to rescue him from Loki, and the same two-headed giant now acted as my assistant. Life is terminally ironic sometimes. With a careful drag of my fingernail I swapped a pair of connections in the circuit diagram on his screen.

“How does that look?” I asked.

He plugged this new network card adapter configuration in to the MimirNet simulation we’d put together for the Rune supercluster and let it run. RuneNet might not be able to cast its own spells, but it did have a huge amount of computing power that we could put to use to help prepare things that Melchior could implement.

“Better,” he said a moment later. “At least it is if our assumptions about the way the system works are correct, and if RuneNet is a valid test environment.”

“That’s a pretty big pair of ifs,” said Ahllan. She’d insisted on helping and had done a damn fine job, coming up with design twists that never would have occurred to me—too old for this stuff indeed. “I wish I could run the sims myself.” She shifted around in her seat—a wheeled chair that looked like the overstuffed offspring of a hospital bed and a La-Z-Boy.

“That’d be nice,” I said. “I understand how you work at the chip level, and I know you aren’t going to suddenly start making rounding errors on number strings longer than twelve digits. This thing”—I pointed at the Rune server cluster—“is completely opaque.”

“Stupid, too,” added Melchior. “It can’t do anything you don’t tell it to, or even tell you if you’ve done something wrong. Phenomenal computing power, but no soul.”

Loki harrumphed from the chair he’d taken behind us but didn’t say a word. Not saying anything was one of the conditions I’d imposed for letting him watch us work up close and personal—the result of his fifth attempt at backseat chip design. I glanced at the diagram again and tapped in the command that integrated it with the rest of the adapter. It was a kludge, but that was
my
post-logo-design signature.

“I think we’re going to have to call it done,” I said.

“Agreed,” said Melchior. “It’ll work, and we’re short on time.”

Ahllan nodded as well, and I sent the schematic to my two-headed assistant’s machine for blueprinting and transmission to the manufacturing team. The giant looked it over and discussed it between itself for a few minutes before giving a double nod.

“It’ll take ten to twelve hours to get this put together. I’ll take it down to Fabrication now.”

“Good,” I said, though the length of the delay didn’t make me happy. “I could use the sack time.”

I got up from my chair and rubbed my back. I’d come straight up to the lab after breakfast and stayed there for something like twenty hours getting the design nailed down. That was after spending the entire previous night talking with Jormungand. I picked up my jacket and headed for the quarters we’d been assigned. On the way, I checked the tiny spinnerette in my pocket. It still wasn’t moving.

I felt well and truly beat, but when I got to the room I was sharing with Tisiphone, I found her slept out but interested in remaining in bed for a while longer . . . if I knew what she meant. I decided maybe I wasn’t that tired after all.

When we’d finished with not-sleeping together, she and I lay facing each other on our stomachs with pillows under our chins—it was a giant-scale bed, which had some definite advantages. Tisiphone had relaxed her wings, and they covered her like a blanket of fire.

“I could get to liking this,” said Tisiphone.

I smiled. “Which part? The afterglow? The really big bed? Hanging out with chaos powers?” I took a deep breath because the next bit was getting close to dangerous territory, but I really wanted to know how she was feeling about our exile here. “The Norse gods howling for our blood?”

She wrinkled her nose. “That last I could do without. The rest is nice though.” She looked away from my eyes and stopped speaking for so long I thought she was finished and it was my turn to say something again. But just as I drew breath to do so, she continued. “So is not being on call twenty-four/seven.”

I blinked and thought very carefully about what I should say next. Before I thought of anything clever, she shook her head, though she still didn’t meet my eyes.

“I don’t think that came out right. I miss home. I miss my sisters. It’s just kind of nice to have a little vacation from responsibility.”

“I can see that. I’m rather enjoying not having to watch my back for Hades or Atropos. Of course, that’s balanced out by having to watch it for Odin and Tyr, but at least it’s different.”

I didn’t say anything about the individual she hadn’t mentioned missing. If she wanted to stay mad at Necessity, she had good cause. She also had good cause to want a vacation. Rather like a small-town doctor, a Fury was never off duty. Which meant she’d gone nearly four thousand years without a break. That had to wear. I’d have cracked long ago, but Tisiphone is made of tougher stuff than I am.

“Do you ever dream about staying here?” I asked. “Because I could see hanging around for a while if we can get this whole Ragnarok thing sorted out. A world without Hades has a lot to recommend it.”

“Ravirn?” she said, sliding forward on her pillow so that her face was inches from my own.

“Uh-huh.”

“Shut up.”

“I—” But she stopped my lips with kisses three, and I forgot all about talking.

Making love with a woman who has wings of any kind, much less fiery ones, is an interesting proposition. When you add in the fires at the juncture of her legs and the tips of her breasts, it becomes a challenge that walks a thin line between the sizzling and the silly. I will leave the rest as an exercise for the active imagination.

 

 

“You sure about this?” I asked Melchior, as we slid the networking card into one end of the adapter.

He flickered into goblin shape, gave me a grin and a thumbs-up, then returned to laptop. I plugged the athame cable in to one of his ports and wished I felt half as confident as Melchior acted.

“I suppose we’d better get this over with.”

I connected the adapter to Melchior and waited for a crash or some other disaster. A couple of minutes passed while he ran the hardware through its paces, and I just paced. Finally, he gave a little “bing” to attract my attention and flashed
Ready
on his screen.

Blood and pain and my athame took me out of my body and into the net. As I entered the interior Melchior’s virtual room with its spiral staircase, I was met once again by the tiny, flying feathered serpent wearing my familiar’s face.

He pointed me toward our window on the electronic world. “You
have
to see this.”

Beyond lay the MimirNet network. This time, with the proper hardware in place, it looked very different. Instead of the armored spiderweb or giant hamster tubes of earlier visits, what I saw now reminded me of nothing so much as Bifrost on steroids. The bridge that linked Asgard and Midgard was replicated here a hundred times over, an entire rainbow network.

A billion sparkling bits of data followed the rainbows, each a bright point of white light. Like a superswarm of very well-trained fireflies, they plied the paths described by the lines of the rainbow beneath them.

“Invisible walls?” I asked.

“That’s what I thought,” agreed Melchior. “Ceiling, too, they never go above a certain height.”

I requested a rock, and Melchior supplied it. I threw the chunk of code at the nearest rainbow segment. When it reached the space above the edge, it bounced away with a hollow thunk and fell into darkness. About what I’d expected.

“I want to take a closer look.”

Melchior nodded, and a series of bright red stairs unfolded themselves from the window shaped like Melchior’s mouth to the edge of the rainbow. I followed them down and put a hand out to the invisible wall. It felt smooth and warm, and it gave a little, like a thin sheet of Plexiglas. I pushed hard, and it gave even more. I felt certain I could break it if I applied enough force, but I had serious doubts about the advisability of that. I wanted to crack the system more subtly if I could manage it.

“Melchior, would you ask Ahllan to hook us up to RuneNet? We’re going to need the processing muscle.”

“Done,” he said, and I knew he’d flashed the message on his screen back in meatspace. “She says it’ll take about five minutes. I’m not sure why, but Loki agreed with her.”

The time slid past slowly and uneventfully until Ahllan appeared unexpectedly on the stairs above us. She looked young and strong and dangerous, every inch a troll. Melchior, on the other hand, looked apoplectic.

“What do you need?” she asked. Then, when she saw Melchior’s expression, she said, “Relax. I ran the connection through me because I still don’t trust Loki. This way anything he tries to slip into the process via RuneNet has to get through me before it hits the two of you. I’m much more expendable. Besides, RuneNet needs very careful minding. I can do that while you take care of Ravirn.”

I could see that Melchior wanted to argue, but I caught his eye and shook my head. I didn’t like her risking herself either, but it was her decision. She was also right. Loki couldn’t be fully trusted, and RuneNet did need minding. The supercluster wasn’t an AI. I couldn’t just ask it for what I wanted and expect it to interpret my request correctly. It required careful programming, and Ahllan could supply that on the fly.

I indicated the network beside me. “I need to get in there without making a big fuss. I’d also like to see if we can’t tap the flow in an ongoing way and suck up information. What I’m picturing is an extra little loop of rainbow. Thoughts?”

Ahllan grinned. “Nice. I think we can manage that. But we’ll want to rearrange the connections so that you can pull Melchior out of the interface without losing the whole thing once you actually head for MimirNet proper. Hang on a tick.”

“Wait a second—” began Melchior.

Ahllan vanished. A few seconds later, the network below us blipped out, going from rainbow back to armored spiderweb.

Melchior swore.

“What?” I asked.

“
That’s
why she was so keen to help with the design. I should have seen it.”

“What?” I asked again.

“She just cut me out of the direct connection to the network card. She adjusted that design so it would be more compatible with her older network hardware and protocols. Hell, I should have realized that was why she wanted the channels set that way. In a moment, she’ll have it plugged through her so that she’s filtering both it and RuneNet, shielding us with her own soul. Damn it, Ahllan, you shouldn’t be—” He stopped as the spiderweb flickered and became a rainbow once again.

“There,” said Ahllan as she reappeared. “That’s much better.”

She still wore the young avatar, but as she walked down to join us, strain and age showed in her posture like some half-seen ghost of her real body. Melchior gave me a dark look but didn’t say anything to Ahllan.

“Can you swing us underneath?” I asked Melchior.

The stairs lowered us into the darkness below the rainbow, and I had Melchior conjure me up the code equivalent of a really powerful magnifying glass so I could get a finer read on the architecture of the rainbow.

“Well, I will be dipped in shit,” I whispered after a few minutes.

“Something wrong, Boss?”

“Nope. For the first time in quite a while something is completely right.”

“Care to share?” asked Ahllan.

“Sure, I was starting to feel like I’d never get the hang of this Norse pseudobinary stuff. That even if I did learn to parse it with my forebrain, it would always be like a foreign language badly learned. I would have to think everything through in my native tongue, then carefully translate it into the new one, making every single operation a two-step process.”

“I take it something changed,” said Ahllan.

“Yes, it has! When I looked at the code here, it was like reading mweb-native binary. I’m actually thinking in the local version now, though I’m not sure why I’ve had the sudden breakthrough.”

“Snakebite,” said Melchior.

“What do you . . . ? Oh, Jormungand.” I’d told him about the way the chaos the Midgard Serpent had injected into me had met and merged with the stuff of my being. “I bet you’re right, Mel.”

“When have I ever been wrong?”

Ahllan waved a finger in the air. “I’ve got a list if you want it.”

“Actually, could you e-mail that to me?” I said. “It might come in handy later. In the meantime, let me tell you what I’d like to do with the bridge.”

My binary, pseudo or otherwise, is nowhere near as good as an AI’s, so it took me a good twenty minutes to whistle out the underlying spell structure for Ahllan to critique. It then took her all of thirty seconds to convert that into a fully realized program for RuneNet to run, and some tiny fraction of a second for the supercluster actually to perform the job.

When it finished running the code, we had a free-floating chunk of rainbow that mimicked the shape of an oval racetrack hanging in the space below us. Ahllan gave a whistled command, and the whole thing rose underneath a straight section of MimirNet so that viewed from above, the long sides of the oval seemed to overlap and merge with the equivalent section of the network. Another command fused our racetrack section to the main network.

“Now for the tricky part,” said Ahllan, licking her lips.

The next whistle was long and complex, with all sorts of harmonies and counterpoints built in on top of the basic melodic line. Even though I’d composed the base spell myself, I found it hard to follow. On top of that, the pseudobinary lent the code an eerie, otherworldly quality I’d never encountered in one of my own programs.