The others backed a few steps away when North spoke. Hansen looked at them, then toward their leader again. “Where is this place?” he asked. “Where are we?”
“North found the path through the Matrix,” said a decisively plain woman. Eisner, Hansen thought; one of the exploration unit. “We travel all eight planes of the Matrix, now; and the Matrix itself is the ninth.”
“We’re gods,” said Rolls. “You can think of us that way, Hansen.”
There was more in his tone than satisfaction, but Hansen didn’t have enough information to guess what the other emotions were.
But the real question—
“What’s going to happen to me, then?” Hansen asked.
North began to laugh. Others of the self-proclaimed gods smiled or blinked in surprise.
“You don’t understand, do you?” said Fortin with the air of detached amusement that was the attitude Hansen knew to expect of the android.
“Then tell me,” Hansen said. He didn’t need a gun in his hand to make the words a threat.
Fortin’s face chilled. “It’s very simple,” he said. “Only one of us could enter Ruby from the—inside of the Matrix. So we had to make you one of us before we sent you in.”
“Welcome to godhead, Kommissar,” North said.
His terrible, thunderous laughter echoed through the hall.
Author’s Note
The poems of the Poetic Edda (sometimes called the Elder Edda) cover various aspects of Norse myth, mythic history, and folklore. They aren’t in any sense a structured belief system, though their odds and ends comprise almost everything known about ancient Norse beliefs. They were written over a period of centuries and across the sweep of the Norse world (including Greenland). Though the subjects are pagan, most of the verses were put in their final form by Christians.
The disparate pieces were then hammered to fit by an anonymous Icelandic redactor who was not only Christian but also remarkably limited both as an editor and as a poet. In addition, the redactor was missing pieces of some of his poems, and there is also a large gap in the sole text of his compilation.
Put in short terms, the Poetic Edda is a confusing hodgepodge which hadn’t particularly interested me when I read it twenty years ago. Anyway, my training was in classical languages and history, not those of the Norse/Germanic world.
Then in 1986 I took my family to Iceland for a three-week vacation. While I was there, I picked up a copy of Hollander’s excellent translation of the Poetic Edda and read the verses among the geography in which they had been compiled and (in part) written. I found them stunningly evocative.
Iceland’s contrasts would probably have had a considerable effect on me anyway. For example, one day I stood on the largest glacier in Europe; the next day I was on an active volcano. Similar stark dichotomies pervade all the physical features of the country.
Iceland was the right place—the right places—to appreciate the Edda.
I returned with the certainty that I was going to use the Edda as the basis for my own fiction, though I was damned if I knew just how I was going to do that. I read some secondary materials (particularly Dumezil and H. R. Ellis Davidson) regarding the structure and themes of the Norse myths, but that course wasn’t productive; not because the authors were wrong, but because their truth wasn’t my truth.
So I did what I’d been taught to do by the best teacher I’ve ever had, Professor Jonathan Goldstein, when I was an undergraduate at Iowa: I went back to the primary sources. I paraphrased the complete Poetic Edda, and took notes on the Prose Edda (or Snorri Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson, Iceland’s greatest literary figure, in the thirteenth century) and the Volsung Saga (which covers the material in the missing portion of the Poetic Edda).
Finally I went over the resulting 15,000 words of notes and chose elements which I thought would work in a science fiction novel. Initially I tried to include too much for a single volume, but I kept whittling away at the material until the length seemed satisfactory.
The myths which became major facets of Northworld are: