“You’re Loki?” I asked, allowing just a hint of mockery into the question.
The professor shot me a look that had some steel in it, and, blowing on his tea, drank deeply. “I guess we should get to it. I can’t spend too long outside slo-time or the rats will get me.”
“Rats?” I glanced around.
“Yes. Can’t stand the things.” He put down his cup. “It’s what the part of my mind that wants to kill me summons up to do the job.”
“But we’re shielded down here? We can’t work magic like we could on the surface . . .” I looked back up at the tunnel mouth high in the wall, expecting to see Cutter John standing there with his pincers at the ready.
“There’s a dampening field, yes, but the, ah, the unfortunate sideeffects of the experiment can still manifest, they just take a little longer. Inside the slo-time bubble I’m completely safe, but too long out in the chamber and the rats start creeping in.”
“Larry was out here,” I pointed out.
“Yes.” The professor looked at Larry. The family resemblance was quite remarkable now the young man stood beside the professor’s chair. “Well, Larry . . . Larry is—”
“A marvellous mechanical man,” Larry said, and executed a sharp bow.
The professor shrugged. “I built Larry to carry my data-echo—he is, as he says, an automaton, housing . . . well, me, or at least the copy of me that the machines hold. We have our little joke: I’m the father—”
“I’m the son,” said Larry.
“And Loki is the Holy Ghost,” the professor finished.
“I don’t understand,” Kara said. None of us did of course, but the v?lva valued knowledge above pride.
“You’ve met Aslaug of course?” The professor struggled out of his chair, falling back once and waving off Larry’s help on his second attempt. The automaton—some sort of clockwork soldier, I assumed—gave us an embarrassed look. “A number of my contemporaries escaped their bodies when the nuclear strikes went in, both starting and ending the war over the course of a few hours. They were able, with the help of the changes that our work here had wrought on the fabric of things, to project their intellects into various different forms. Aslaug was Asha Lauglin, a brilliant physicist. She projected onto negative energy states in the dark-matter field. The projections all think they survived. They didn’t of course, Asha Lauglin was carbonized in a nuclear explosion. She died eleven hundred years ago. Aslaug is a copy, just like Larry here, only one that became corrupted over the years, caught up in the folklore of the people who repopulated. Reshaped by their beliefs and the joint will of the believers—”
“And Loki?” Kara interrupted. I was pleased of it. I thought that the professor must be a teacher in addition to his other duties—few other people are so in love with the sound of their own voices.
“Loki is the copy of me that I projected. Only I didn’t die. That’s not a necessary part of the equation—although the effort involved, and the pain of it, are such that without the threat of imminent death to spur you few people are ever likely to undergo the process.”
“Loki is you?” I asked unnecessarily—my lips just wanted something to say.
“Not me, a copy of me. I don’t control him and we have . . . grown apart. But we share the same core and many of the same goals. His power to influence events is both enhanced and constrained by the trap into which he has fallen though.”
“Trap?” Becoming a god was a trap I would happily step into.
“The myth of Loki. It pre-dates me by a very long way, however old I may appear to you, young man. I fear my . . . let’s call it my ‘spirit-echo’ may have fallen into that particular trap owing to something as puerile as word-play.”
“I don’t follow.”
“My contemporaries at school used to call me Loki. I suppose I might have been somewhat of a joker back in those days, but really it was just how my name appeared on the register. Lawrence O’Kee. You see? L. O’kee. Simple as that.”
“So your spirit copy thinks he’s Loki . . .” Kara said.
“Yes.”
“And he isn’t.”
“No. But because he’s trapped in stories that a great many people believe, he has access to the power of their belief, which in turn is backed by what you call the Wheel. The changes our machines here have made to reality allow the belief of all those people to give Loki real power. Just as immediately above us those changes allow each of you to summon fire or fly or accomplish whatever it is you wish to accomplish. Before your imagination creates monsters to kill you of course.”
“What about the key?” I asked, holding it up.
The professor tapped it with a finger. For an instant it became a small silvery key of peculiar design and no more than an inch long. I nearly dropped it. By the time I stopped fumbling it the key was back to its usual black glassy appearance, reaching from the base of my palm to the tip of my index finger.
“It’s the authorization key for the manual control panel on the central processor complex. I gave it to my projection—to Loki—as a kind of back-up plan if my efforts to terminate the IKOL project didn’t succeed in the time available. To be honest it started off as more of a joke than a serious attempt to solve the problem. At that point I thought it might take me six months to close down the accelerator ring. I hadn’t imagined that I would spend the next ten years of my life working at it . . . and run out of time before the damn thing went critical.” The old man ran a hand through his thinning white hair. Exhaustion lurked in the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Now the key looks as if it’s our only hope. I sent the key out with Loki to gather belief. The idea was to weave it into stories, to make it part of mythology. The more deeply it became embedded in the consciousness of the people the more strength it could draw from their collective will, from their sleeping imaginations. So, you see, the key has become a symbol that indirectly draws on the Wheel’s own power. If it works, the Wheel will effectively turn itself off.”
“Give him the key, Jal.” Snorri stepped up close, looking down on both of us. “The professor will know what to do with it to turn the machine off.”
My hand closed of its own accord, fingers clenched about the coldness of the key. Giving up the key at this point felt like having my options taken from me. Turning the Wheel’s engines off now would supposedly give Snorri’s family a chance to slip into the unknown that awaited dead people in Builder times. Snorri wanted that . . . but an afterlife on this Holy Mountain didn’t sound so bad. And turning off the engine wouldn’t stop the Wheel turning, only slow it. Without the engines at Osheim the only thing to turn the Wheel and keep changing the way reality works would be us—every time a mage used magic it tore at the fabric of the world. The cracks would spread, the Wheel would turn, more slowly than before, but turn none the less, carrying us all toward the end. The world would still shatter—just in a few years’ time rather than a few weeks. Turn the key the other way and those last few weeks would compress into a last few seconds and, according to the Lady Blue, I’d face the end of the all things standing in the single most secure place, guaranteed safe passage into a new world, poised to rule not as a king or emperor but as a new god. The Blue Lady might have lied: I didn’t trust the bitch further than I could spit her, but she had made this her last hidey-hole for a reason.
“Jal?” Snorri smacked my shoulder.
“Sorry—drifted off there.” I uncurled my fingers, eyes on the key. “Well—”
“Access to the central processor complex is rather awkward.” The professor pressed both palms against his chest as if to preclude the possibility of anyone placing the key in his hand. Perhaps when he poked it the thing bit him back. “The real work was always done remotely in the control room.” He nodded toward somewhere high above us. “But for the super-fine control we need it’s best to be right there where the main processors are.”