Starborne

“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.”