The Jekyll Legacy by Jaye Michael & Levanah Greene Chapter Thirty-Four Intimate Conspiracy

Victorian alchemy meets modern science and magic.
What could possibly go wrong?

Das Leben gehört den Lebenden an,
und wer lebt, muß auf Wechsel gefaßt sein.

Life belongs to the living,
and whoever lives must be prepared for changes.

 — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre 1821/1829

 

 

“You minx!” Selene chided her, but not unkindly, after the young Captain had done his portion of the task she’d undertaken and left the room, still thanking Sól profusely. “You’ve managed somehow to arrange things so that you’re just as pregnant of the rest of us, and so excused from maintaining the Phil disguise.”

Phyllis smiled. “Nothing so unscrupulous, dearest love, I’ve never been so simple, nor transparent, especially now, although you’re right in that I’m pregnant. What I’m doing is ‘mip’nei tikkun ha-olam,’ for the sake of healing the world.”

“Which means?” She looked mystified.

She tried to explain, although her own thoughts were in a whirl about this, yet she could see what looked like a clear path ahead. “The Nine Worlds were broken long ago by greed and strife; you can see it in the perpetual enmity between the beings there  — I won’t say ‘races,’ because it’s quite clear that all the diverse peoples of those worlds are fully human, as human as ourselves, because they’re all of them cross-fertile — even the Gods and Goddesses, so much alike otherwise, are separated by ancient rivalries and old grievances, yet they have children together, the best and surest reason to work toward a better world for all of us, but they’ve somehow missed the point, much less the mark.”

Selene thought about this, then made a gesture of agreement. “Okay, but how is taking on this Captain’s dead child here going to help the Nine Worlds?”

“Because it’s not just the Nine Worlds, it’s all of them.” She looked over to Eir Menglöð and said, “Captain Hol-Dur’s soul is that of Höðr, is it not?”

She looked startled, then thought through what must be billions of souls that she’d encountered over the long years, then said, “Yes.”

Phyl nodded, pleased to have her inchoate hunch confirmed. “The quarrel between Höðr and his brother Baldr is what shattered the peace of the Nine Worlds originally, because Höðr accidentally killed his half-brother Baldr, Gefjon’s child by Óðinn, which of course led to Höðr being killed by another of their many relatives named Váli, another son of Óðinn by a Giantess named Rindr, as ‘vengeance’ for Höðr’s supposed ‘crime.’ It’s the damnedest crazy system, and it has them positively mired in an endless round of plots and schemes to ‘get even.’ Of course, the fact that the saintly Baldr — who was viewed as one of the Æsir, because of his father, while Höðr, because he’d been reared by his mother, a Vane to whom Óðinn didn’t happen to be married at the time, was counted as a Vane — was porking Höðr’s wife on the sly, didn’t help to soothe anyone’s troubled feelings.”

Eir nodded. “This was indeed the first evil event that started the inevitable progression toward Ragnarök.”

“Inevitable my sweet ass!” Phyllis said sourly. “What it started was a covert blood feud that’s lasted for hundreds of years, with people like Loki — who somehow caused the ‘accident’ that killed Baldr in the first place — egging on one side or another for their own perceived advantage, and to Hel with anyone who got in their way. I strongly suspect that Óðinn was involved in a lot of the worst mischief as well, since he and Loki seem to have been two of a kind, when push came to shove.”

“But what’s that got to do with…? Oh!” Rhea said, quickly putting two and two together.

“Exactly,” Phyl said. “Höðr was ‘blind’ in the original fairytale — which was written down long after the advent of Christianity had muddled the story back on Earth — which is the traditional description of a cuckold, although in the violent and generally misogynist culture of the Nine Worlds it evidently matters not at all whether the woman involved was willing to participate in her ‘seduction’ or not. Nanna, his wife, committed suicide not long after — just like Hol-Dur’s wife, we might note — by which time both Höðr and Baldr were dead. Sound familiar?”

“It does,” Selene said, “but it’s all twisted around….”

“And why wouldn’t it be, after who knows how many distortions of the story through many reïncarnations, perpetually reënacting that primal rivalry?”

Eir said, quite pleased for some reason, “So the prophesies regarding the rebirth of the Nine Worlds after Ragnarök will be fulfilled — as long foretold — and all things made new again, with the beginnings of a new and purified humanity, when Höðr and Baldr are finally reconciled on the Splendid Plain, Iðavöllr.”

Phyllis smiled broadly, then she turned to Eir Menglöð and said, “Which ‘happy ending’ I believe we’ve made possible by our actions here, dear cousin. Of course, I’m still depending on your assistance, since the shuffling of souls is your bailiwick, and in fact the timing of ‘Baal-Dur’s rebirth as Baldr will be critical, because we’ll want him present and aware when young Captain Hol-Dur shows up on the Splendid Plain. I apologize for not bringing everyone into the loop during the planning of all these interlocking schemes, but I was improvising, and didn’t really know exactly what I was doing all the time.’ Then she smiled and added, “Of course, the fact that we’ll all have the services of the young Captain available to us through our pregnancies might be some compensation as well, and Eir and I, I think, can manage sufficient overlapping coverage as ‘Philip’ for these first months before our bellies swell to unmanageable proportions to establish his indisputable ‘reality’ that it won’t seem all that odd when our esteemed ‘husband’ has to take a temporary ‘leave of absence’ to go hobnob with his fellow wizards back in Oz, or wherever.”

Selene and Rhea both laughed, then started singing the first verse from the Wizard of Oz song, but then Phyllis joined in, so they modulated the simple melody into three-part harmony.

The Splendid Plain Iðavöllr was just that, a broad expanse of pastureland  — a hundred leagues or more — with ample woodlots and streams, with one large river for easy commerce, ideal farming country, facing the sea, but not near enough that salt spray could blight the fields, and with high mountains on the leeward side to wring the rain out of the clouds. It was early morning, and larks were on the wing above the small lake that they were passing by.

“It is beautiful here,” Phyllis said to Hol-Dur, her escort for the day. “Your dear wife and parents must be very pleased to find safe harbor after the years of want.”

“They are, my Lady Sól, and Nanna is especially anxious to greet you. I see you’ve brought our son, as promised.”

“Of course I have!” she said. “Did you think I’d let either of you down?”

He shook his head, “No, I trusted you, but none-the-less I feared, as one does, when a great treasure has been given into the keeping of another. Nanna, of course, has been almost beside herself with worry. ‘Might she be waylaid on the strange roads between the worlds?’ she asked, and fretted over countless other imagined problems on your long journey.”

“I’m sorry, then, to have worried her, but there was never any danger. I may not look it, but I’m a fairly dangerous woman to cross, and the roads here are safe, and getting safer, even in Jötunheimr, much less Miðgarðr. The Emperor’s Law holds sway, even in Múspellsheimr, although there are still parts of Niflheimr one wouldn’t want to tarry in.”

“How is the noble Emperor, whose generosity has done so much for all of us?”

“He’s fine, as is his Empress, and they send the customary fostering gifts, as partial payment for the many joys your son has brought us all.”

“He didn’t mind that you carried our child for us? Your first?”

“Not at all,” she assured him. “You know what they say, that a man and his wife are one flesh, so my joys were and always will be his, as his are mine.” She smiled an enigmatic smile. “And of course it was good practice, since I’m pregnant now again, with the Emperor’s child, although I have to confess that it’s only one of very, very many, each and every one the sweet apples of our eyes.”

Hol-Dur shook his head ruefully, “I can hardly imagine, despite having been nearby for most of their births. For several weeks there, it seemed as if there were a dozen or more of the Emperor’s wives going into labor every hour or two. I’m still amazed at his stamina, to have kindled so many children in the space of one or two nights, if one can believe the stories, and it can’t have been many more than that, since their conceptions were obviously nearly simultaneous, if not precisely.”

She laughed and said, “Well, he does have a certain knack for pleasing women, not to belittle your own talents, of course. You have many admirers amongst the wives, if you ever want to take up your former… position… again.” Then she grinned lasciviously.

He laughed with an open heart and said, “I think not, my Lady Sól, although I’ll always treasure the memories I carry of you all, but especially you, of course, since you’re the mother of our first child, and were so generous with your love. I have responsibilities now beyond the bedroom, and I’d never be able to get anything done if I had to cope with even half of the Emperor’s wives again!”

At that they both laughed, and the sound of their laughter preceded them to the Hall, Breiðablik, so Nanna was waiting at the door, smiling and anxious all at once to see again the child she’d thought she’d lost forever. “Husband, and Sól, my dearest sister! Welcome to our home, great Lady.”

“Greetings, dear sister Nanna,” Phyllis said, as she carefully dismounted, a little more awkwardly than usual because she was managing not only a babe in swaddling clothes in one arm, but also a pronounced ‘baby bump’ which threw her balance off a bit, despite her previous experience.

Nanna rushed to help her, saying, “Take care! my Lady, and please let me touch my babe, if you will!” and after cooing and tasting his sweet baby skin for a few moments said, “You must be exhausted after your long journey! Would you like to take a short nap before supper?” Then she said, “We only have the one bed, of course, besides the baby’s cradle, but I was hoping that you wouldn’t mind sharing, since we’d both like to thank you properly… for all you’ve done for us… and I’d like to see how our child began, in love I’m told, and tenderness, which is exactly what I’d wish.” Nanna looked deeply into Sól’s blue eyes, searching for the love she hoped to find there, and she did find it in full measure.

Phyllis smiled and kissed her thoroughly, paying special attention to her lips, and those little nooks behind and beneath her ears. “That sounds delightful,” she whispered as she nuzzled into her neck, inhaling the rich texture and aroma of her freshly-scented hair, “and I am rather in need of a good lie-down, now that I think of it, after so long a journey.”

And so the four of them walked through the open doors of Breiðablik hand-in-hand, with the babe, though weaned, rooting at Nanna’s breast as she carried him.

“So, Phyllis,” Rhea asked, “Are you here to stay?” Phyl was pregnant again, so obviously committed for some time to come.

“Not forever, no. We still have our lives on Earth to get back to, but after giving birth, and then giving up my baby for adoption by his rightful parents, I felt a sense of loss that had to be remedied, so arranged a visit with a future version of Selene, and may want to do the same with you, if you don’t mind. Two babies sounds about right, one each, which was our original bargain, if I recall.” She looked up to the ceiling, as innocent as a lamb, and obviously just as guileless.

Rhea laughed in perfect glee, then said, “You know darned well that you owe us at least two babies each, as I clearly recall, and I think my sister will back me up!”

“Well,” she admitted, “I may remember something like that, and I have been feeling broody. Four wouldn’t be too many, at least for now, eight counting your own twins, but I’d like to space my ‘fair share’ of babies out a bit — just to simplify the logistics of it all, since eight babies all at once might be a tiny bit too much — but we have many lifetimes to worry about ‘keeping score,’ since I’m pretty sure that everything will work out perfectly.”

“Lifetimes? Do we solve the riddle of the Jekyll formula? Is that why there’s a future male Selene?”

“Well, yes and no,” she answered, “we do solve the riddle, but by then we won’t need it, although it will be an enormous advance in medical science, saving many lives that would otherwise be lost.” She smiled, “In fact, it will be your doctoral research that finally makes the effect controllable and reproducible, so the medical tradition of the Lanyon family will continue on Earth into the foreseeable future, so perhaps we have at least one baby name picked out beforehand.” she smiled and gave her a little flirtatious wink.

“Oh, no!” Rhea said, alarmed. “Not another Hastie!”

“Now now, dear,” she murmured, patting her hand soothingly, “You’ve turned out very nicely indeed. I’d hate to deprive our future Earth of the benefit of our son’s exuberance and brilliant enthusiasm.”

“How do you know all this, anyway?” Rhea asked. “Did Eir give you a tour of our future together, as she did the two of us?”

“No, not exactly, I took my own tour, just to check out the ‘lay of the land,’ as you might say.”

“But how?” Selene asked.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Eir said from across the room, where she was seated in a rocking chair and knitting a very small jumper, the very image of happy domesticity. “My Uncle Freyr made Phil, or Phyllis here, monarch of Álfheimr and the Ljósálfar during his extended honeymoon, which might just last forever. He’s always been a little flighty.”

Rhea’s eyebrows furrowed slightly. “Ljósálfar? We never met them, I don’t think. We were supposed to visit Álfheimr, but we never made it before everything crumbled into chaos and improbable victory.”

“The angels, you might say.”

“Oh, crap!” Rhea said, pouting as she realized exactly what that meant. ‘So Phyllis here is the damned Queen of All the Angels, and who knows when we’re going to see Phil again.’

“Well, not for a few years,” Phyl reassured her, “since we have to be realistic about the demands of pregnancy and motherhood for all of us, but we have all the time in the world to make up for my alter ego’s temporary absence, and I love sharing you with my other wives, and perhaps the occasional handsome Captain of the Imperial Guard, just as I am.” Her voice softened and she touched her arm, “It’s you I love, dear Rhea. You must know that by now, not just your luscious body. I’m in our marriage for the long haul, until death us do part, as they say in the traditional Christian ceremony — which has always seemed a very unambitious goal to me, but perhaps that’s just me,” she added parenthetically, “but never mind.” — “In our case, it will be a very long time indeed, all the time there is in all the worlds.”

Rhea smiled — she smiled a lot these days — and said, “Well, I reckon I do know, but it never hurts to remind me.”

“If I’ve been remiss, sweet wife, I humbly beg your pardon. I can only plead the exigencies of pregnancy, of saving the worlds, and then tidying up after. I’ve always been neat, as you may well remember, and dislike loose ends.”

“I do as well,” Eir idly commented, looking over at them for a moment, “in knitting or in life’s byways. In that, my cousin and I are much alike.”

“So how did you two become cousins, Eir? Are you Jewish as well?”

“Not really, since Earth’s obsessions haven’t reached either Myriad or the Nine Worlds. It’s difficult to work up much enthusiasm for this deity or that when one is divine in one’s own right. We’re cousins because we share ancestors, and because our true origins lie very deep in ancient history, long before the Vanir and the Æsir quarrelled, even before Moses ascended Sinai. We take the long view, my cousin and I, which I suppose is one of the reasons I enjoy knitting.” She smiled benignly, and held up her work, visibly more complete than it had been an hour or two before.

Rhea and Selene looked at Phyllis in astonishment. “You’re not Jewish? How did our marriage protect us then, from Na-Noc and the Heart?”

“Well,” she said, “I’m certainly not circumcised now, but Judaism is very flexible, since the very best Jewish scholarship informs us that we know right next to nothing about the true nature of divinity, but we strongly suspect there’s something there, whatever it might be, and however little mere humans can understand whatever it is it is. In all honesty, I have to agree, but I was circumcised, and that’s a sort of promise made on one’s behalf by one’s parents, and you know how I feel about keeping promises. If there’s one thing that realizing that you’re an immortal and all-powerful Goddess does for you, it makes you very humble.” She smiled as benignly as Eir Menglöð had.

“But which came first? Phil? or Sól?”

“Both, of course, or neither. I was born as Philip, grew up, fell in love for the very first time, married, and then took a very odd trip through space and time that led me to discover other ‘true’ selves, all unique, and all exactly the same, all of which are just as real as Phil is, and all of them in love with you. As Sól, I’m much older then the entirety of recorded human history, long before Sinai, before the Pyramids, even before Göbekli Tepe in neolithic Anatolia, but as Phil, I was here long before I was ever Sól, so it all depends on how one looks at it, and how you hold the entirety of my many lives up to the light and peer at them, or it. All I really know is that I’m still me, and that my love is constant and true, which is all I really need to know.”

“But it’s all so confusing!” Rhea pouted very prettily.

“No more confusing than you are, sweet lover. You had a life as Hastie before you were Rhea, but it’s equally true that you were Rhea before you were Hastie, because it’s Rhea who fell in love with me, not Hastie. Who are you, really, Rhea? The ‘Hastie’ who made it possible for you to love me by recreating his ancestor’s serum? The Rhea who grew up loving Selene, so that her love for both of us had fertile ground in which to flourish and grow? We’re left with an essential paradox: without Hastie, and the serum, our relationship would be… difficult, at best, and perhaps impossible, since I suspect that Hastie would never have been inclined to marry me, and would certainly have been extremely unlikely to want to bear my children.”

Rhea smiled. “I suppose not. He never once spent the afternoon snogging on the couch with Jack, so even if you’d managed to seduce him, I doubt that I would have been included in your little ménage.”

“You see the problem then, and the solution. It’s just like François-Marie Arouet had Pangloss say in Candide, ‘Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’”

“No,” she said cynically, “Voltaire was being sarcastic, ‘We must cultivate our gardens,’ was his succinct rebuttal to Pangloss.”

“That too!” She smiled. “That’s exactly what we’re doing now! Cultivating our gardens and growing our own shared future, but in the hope and sure belief that we can make the world better for our children. Neither starry-eyed optimism nor the gloom and doom of Leibnizian determinism make any sense in a purely human context. It’s obvious to most of us that it’s good to be alive and working toward the perfection of the world, even if it isn’t quite good enough for everyone just now. As Julian of Norwich, the English Anchoress and eventual Saint who told the English all about God the Mother, said, ‘All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,’ way back in 1393 or so. She taught that God was the Mother of us all, and that motherhood was ‘the truest of all jobs on earth,’ and who am I to gainsay her? I’ve discovered that I feel almost exactly the same way about it. In fact, if the subject ever comes up, I’m not at all sure that extending suffrage to men was or is an entirely good idea.”

“That’s our Phyllis, a radical feminist to the core,” Selene quipped.

“Is that surprising? Even as Philip, I passionately supported women’s rights in everything. How could anyone possibly love any woman and feel differently?” She grinned and added, “Of course, now that I’m batting for the other team, and in primarily lesbian relationships with many women, my positions may have shifted slightly, but not so much as one might think. I quite like at least some men, in many ways, not just in bed, but I’m by no means overawed by them, and find the tedious arrogance and quarrelsomeness of so many of them extremely irritating.”

Rhea snorted, most unladylike, “Men! Can’t hardly live with’em, can’t really shoot’em neither.”

At this bon mot, they all laughed, but Selene added, “I do miss having Phil nearby, though, with no offence meant at all, Phyllis, but he was a lot of fun to hang around with, and not just in bed.”

“And have him you shall, my dears. I’m still not nearly as skilled in skipping between the various instantiations of my timeline as Eir is, but I’ll get there eventually, whereupon all things will be possible, but I’d also quite like to experience being married to all of you as men, if you’re comfortable with an altered reality, that is. I do know that we three all have masculine incarnations already available in our collective pasts — which are accessible to us as Ljósálfar, therefore no longer limited by strict rules of causuality — so it should be fairly easy, once we have the skills down pat.” She grinned again, very much reminiscent of ‘Philip,’ and said, her voice gone sultry and sexually enticing, “Admit it, ‘boys,’ wouldn’t both of you really like to screw me silly?”

Neither Rhea nor Selene actually answered, but they both looked at her from an entirely new notion of perspective.

Sól and Eir Menglöð were both knitting by a warm fire in the Palace in Myriad. Despite access to the modern world of Earth, or the untrammeled wilderness of the newly refreshed Miðgarðr, the Palace was a nice compromise between peaceful isolation and the comfort of having people bustling all around, the homely scents of countless meals being prepared in kitchens large and small, even the pungent odors and random sounds of the animals who served as transportation and locomotion, the robust indications of human life, and other life, all around them made their cozy rocking chairs somehow more comfortable than they would have been on Earth in an air-conditioned microclimate and R-80 insulation that isolated one from the outside world of sound as much as kept the temperature differentials between inside and out distinct. Their conversation was desultory, because both were working on the local equivalent of Aran sweaters, heavy wool with cabled patterns and twists that required concentration from time to time, managing the spare cable needles in their proper order, linking up the many yarns to their proper loops, the whole still growing and unbound.

Selene and Rhea had no patience for knitting, of course, and were juggling razor-sharp knives back and forth in a dazzling display of martial skills that seemed to become more impossible every day, today augmented by the addition of Japanese-style ‘shuriken’ and “shaken” in various styles and shapes.

“It’s funny,” Phyllis observed to no one in particular, “How the intricate and noisy dance of death being performed in the middle of this room mirrors almost precisely the paths these separate yarns are taking here by the fire, in the process of being joined together, where those other paths are meant to keep apart.”

“Pish tush!” Selene said calmly. “Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud. In the first place, this is a meditative discipline exactly as serene as your own noisy click-clacking, but armed struggle against armed opponents is as much a part of life as combatting the chilly cold and damp of winter gales with knitted sweaters. They’re both of them efforts to prevent something uncomfortable from happening, or to encourage another outcome in an awkward situation.”

Phyllis thought about this for only an instant before she said, “You’re right, of course. I was mistaking my own reluctance to use edged weapons for a general principle, and one which Gefjon neatly sidestepped with her gift of Brenðr, which allows me to be squeamish at no cost. I apologize.”

“La, la,” Rhea said. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Dearest, since we already knew that you were in the wrong, so didn’t take your complaint at all seriously. Both of us have gone through that stage in our own pregnancies, where almost everything just irritates you for no good reason, or makes you feel depressed. It’ll get better in your second trimester, although we’ve been told that it might get rough again towards the end.”

Phyl frowned, considering her words. “Funny, I don’t remember any such symptoms in my other pregnancies, but it’s been quite a while, so maybe I’ve just overlooked it. There was a lot more external stress going on back then as well, most of the time, so it would have been easy to overlook ‘unexplained’ mood swings in the midst of a thousand ready reasons for rage.” She shrugged and raised her hands in a sort of mock surrender. “I was quite a bit more isolated as well, so any remaining gaps in my memory are probably insanity. Please carry on.” She winked at them and went back to her knitting.

Selene and Rhea put away their weapons — vanished as usual into secret locations on their persons — then they walked over and studied Phyllis and Eir as they worked. After several minutes spent in silent study, Selene said, “Teach me how to do that, please.”

Phyl looked at her suspiciously. “Why?”

She raised one eyebrow. “Those knitting needles are almost invisible to the casual glance, since women do knit from time to time. It struck me that it would be a useful thing to know if one had the occasion to lurk quietly by an ingle nook and bide one’s time, ‘defenceless,’ yet fully-armed.” She grinned like a wolf in a paddock, head held a little low.

Both Phyllis and Eir burst into laughter, but Eir said, “I do enjoy seeing such innocent ferocity in a girl. It reminds me of myself when I was younger.”

“Why, thank you, Eir,” they said. “We both admired your own ferocity when we fought the Jötunns near Bilröst as well. It was especially lovely being allowed to ride Sleipnir, so if you ever want him exercised, we’re your goto girls.”

“Too bad Loki’s dead,” Eir said offhandedly, “or we could set him out to stud with Svaðilfari and get another foal or two,”

Selene and Rhea’s eyes lit up with instant cupidity. “Uhm,” they asked in chorus, “is Loki’s body as a mare still accessible? without Loki’s evil spirit in it, of course.”

Eir thought about this for a moment, then said, reluctantly, “It might be, but it would take some fancy footwork.”

“How’s that?” Rhea said, intensely interested.

“Well,” Eir said thoughtfully, “when a mare’s just foaled, she’ll come into heat again roughly nine days later, and we know that Loki remained in mare’s form long enough to nurse her foal, so she must have gone through ‘foal heat’ at the start of that time, and it’s equally obvious that her instincts were intact, since Loki would have had to ensure that Svaðilfari found her ready when he chased and caught her, and that the mare’s own instincts caused her to assume the ‘firm stance’ and other instinctive behaviors required to entice the stallion for breeding. The real trick would be to ensure that Svaðilfari was available, but we do know that Þór killed the Hrímthur who actually owned the stallion, so he’d obviously have no further use for him.”

Rhea was quickly becoming enthused by this idea, since it was exactly the sort of scheme she’d liked to pull off as Hastie. “It sounds like all we have to do is lead Svaðilfari away to safety while Þór and his pals are trying to weasel out of their contract with the Giant by killing him, and as long as we kept Loki pregnant or nursing and we still had her horsey boyfriend available, her own instincts would trap her! Heck! We might be able to rehabilitate the poor sod by appealing to her higher nature as a mother! Surely having three children of her own would be a blessing that she couldn’t ignore, and at very least it would keep Loki out of mischief for three to four years or more, depending on how quickly her foals were weened. Can she nurse and be pregnant at the same time?” This last was addressed to Eir Menglöð. Rhea always did tend to think on the fly.

“Easily,” Eir assured them. “In fact, that’s the normal situation, since gestation lasts eleven months or more, and a good breeder of horses would try to get one foal a year, to maximise his ‘yield’ of valuable foals and eventual yearlings.”

Rhea beamed. “It’s simple, then! In fact….” She went to Eir and whispered in her ear, whereupon Eir left the room.

“This is going to be the best trick ever!” Rhea chortled, ”and it’s a good deeed besides!”

Selene objected, “You make it sound, Dear, as if it were our duty to try and save his life….”

Rhea interrupted, “Well? Isn’t it? We know what course his life takes thereafter, and if we have the chance to rehabilitate him, wouldn’t that be the kindest thing to do? You know what Phil always said, ‘Who saves a single life, it is as if he saves the whole world,’ but we’ve already done that! For our next trick, we should definitely pull a rabbit out of a hat!”

Selene just barely breathed, sotto voce, as she whispered, “Tell me again, Dear, how this is supposed to work.” They were hiding in the woods outside the unfinished walls of Ásgarðr disguised as humble peasant women, with coarse woollen skirts and tucked-in blouses, confined by close-fitting bodices, and with their hair modestly tucked up in white mobcaps — near a huge pile of squarish stones, the building materials, obviously — watching Loki as he looked carefully around, unaware that he had a hidden audience, and began laying out his materials for an act of seiðr.

“It’s simple!” she whispered, “All we have to do is catch Loki off guard, and we know he’ll be distracted and filled with overweening pride, because he’s just concocted a clever plan to cheat the poor Jötunn of his pay, and save his own life in the bargain, since the Æsir have threatened to kill him if he doesn’t manage to prevent the Giant from finishing the walls before….”

Selene interrupted her, still whispering, “Don’t forget, Rhea, that his ‘pay’ is supposed to be the hand of Gefjon in marriage, so I imagine our sister wife will be a little ticked off if this plan of yours doesn’t work, not to mention the fact that the rest of his promised fee is the Sun and the Moon, the disappearance of which might discomfit any number of innocent bystanders.”

“No chance of that, she said confidently, since I have all the bases covered this time. Watch this….” Stepping out of concealment and quickly out of the woods entirely, she walked blithely past Loki, who was busy at his magical preparations and didn’t see her at first.

But then he noticed. “What have you got there, girl?” he said angrily.

“Please, Sir, it’s only mead, for the feast you know.” She indicated the small keg she was carrying in a leather sling across her shoulder. I was told that the noble Æsir required bee’s nectar to celebrate their victory over the Giant.

He scowled, a look of fury crossing his face for a moment before he said, now seeming pleased and angry, both at once, “Their victory!? I see.” His irritation was obvious, though for what reason, or to what purpose, who could say? “You can give your burden to me, then, because I’m about their business, and will carry it to my fellows when I return.”

“But I was told….”

“Silence! ale-Gerðr! I will carry the cask. Unworthy you are to enter the presence of the noble Gods!”

“Yes, Sir. I beg your pardon, Sir,” Rhea cried, her voice quavering in obvious fear, and she dropped the keg and ran back toward the woods.

Loki laughed as he watched her scampering, and then knocked out the bung, took a deep draft from the keg, and then took up a carved wand of ash and began chanting, concentrating on his spell.

Suddenly, Loki’s body seemed to lose cohesiveness, as if it were melting gelatine, beginning to flow into a new and different shape as the whole mass of his body actually enlarged, splitting his breeches into shreds as his expanding thighs strained the limits of the cloth, followed quickly by his multi-colored tunic as the barrel of his chest ballooned and split the fabric. Then he leaned over, groaning in anguish as the actual shape of his skull changed, his jaw impossibly extending, even his teeth changing in his head, enlarging, others loosening in their sockets until they dropped from his jaw and he spit them out upon the ground as he developed a pronounced overbite, then hair flowed over his distorted face and he dropped onto all fours, almost naked now, his former clothes in tatters on the ground, and within minutes he was fully-transformed into a giant bay horse, a mare by all appearances. He… she! shook her head and nickered just as an enormous Jötunn with a powerful black stallion appeared over the crest of a hill about five hundred yards away, coming quickly down the dirt track that led to the walls, ready to begin another day of labor. The stallion was harnessed to a large wooden sledge, which had more of the squarish stones as payload.

The stallion suddenly looked up, neighed out a challenge of dominance and lust, then kicked out of his harness and broke away from his owner, heading directly for the mare, who bowed her head submissively before coyly turning her backside to the oncoming stallion, lifting her tail to one side and ‘winking’ her vulva in what seemed to be an obvious display of sexual heat, and then trotted off into the woods. The stallion quickly followed at a full gallop, completely ignoring the angry shouts of his owner, who was furious by then, screaming at the stallion to return, throwing his hat to the ground and stomping on it, then cursing as he turned to the rocks and began struggling with them, trying to drag one at a time to the gap in the wall, obviously desperate now to plug that gap with stones.

The two women watched in silence as he labored, but neither stallion nor transformed mare returned, and after a few minutes they gave up their observation post and made their careful way back to where Eir was waiting, the stallion Svaðilfari — already captured after his dalliance with the transformed Loki — was now tethered nearby, somewhat ill-at-ease to be near Sleipnir, glancing at him wall-eyed and nervous from time to time, but Loki as mare in œstrus was nowhere to be seen, so they weren’t actually fighting.

“Did it work?” Eir asked.

Rhea almost crowed. “Work!? Of course it did! My plan was perfect! It was the absolute best trick ever!”

“But what did we just do?” Selene asked, frustrated, because Rhea had refused to explain her ‘clever plan,’ as she’d modestly described it.

“Nothing! That’s the beauty of it, except that I chased away the girl who had been carrying that keg and finished her task for her. And then Loki responded to her sudden appearance just as he did the first time, and so he’s good and truly screwed!”

“But I don’t understand,” Selene said, irritated. “If you did nothing, how can there be any change? I don’t see what you’ve done at all!”

“It’s simple,” she said smugly. “I asked Eir here use her ability to flit through time and space to find and recover the vials of serum that I’d already prepared, but were left behind on Earth when we got sucked through Dad’s TSP device.” She hefted a satchel, the contents of which clinked quietly as she wiggled it. “Then I poured a number of them into the keg I’d ‘borrowed’ from the girl who’d been originally sent off with it to the feasting hall.”

Comprehension dawned. “So when Loki-as-new-mother finally tries to use seiðr to change herself back into Loki proper, it won’t work, because his changes were due to the Jekyll formula, and not his seiðr at all!”

“Exactly!” Eir said laughing, “and we’ve got Svaðilfari, and the beginnings of a very small stud farm.” She laughed again. “It really is the best trick ever, and I’m sure that Loki will be very pleased, once she gets used to the idea, which she will, as I understand the effects of this ‘formula’ of yours, because Loki will eventually remember her own life as a mare, and become more and more comfortable in her new rôle in life. The old Loki, of course, would appreciate the irony, but the beauty of it all is that we’ve saved her life and given it renewed purpose and meaning beyond his old resentments, plots, and schemes. Where old Loki did his best to twist the world into horrible shapes and to destroy, new Loki is deeply involved in creating a new life within her even as we speak, and will continue to fill the world with joy and life hereafter, a more fruitful ‘penance’ I can hardly imagine.”

Ambiló and Almilón, Loki’s first foals by Sleipnir, had bred true to type, but were slightly smaller than those crossbreeds sired by Svaðilfari — which was just as well, since Selene and Rhea were a skosh less tall than Eir — and the new purebloods were both mares, and thus slightly more tractable for two heavily-gravid young women who hadn’t grown up on horseback, but none-the-less possessed a level of skill and confidence that many born riders might envy, courtesy of the whole ‘barbarian warrior babe’ package deal.

Since their original coöption of Loki as a broodmare, she’d given birth to well over three hundred foals — both crossbreeds with Svaðilfari and purebloods with Sleipnir — and seemed to have found her true calling as a mom, since she’d evolved into a very gentle horse who seemed to love everyone, but especially human children, upon whom she doted. In fact, the only reason that one might choose not to depend upon her for babysitting was that she couldn’t really change diapers.

All three of them, Selene, Rhea, and Eir Menglöð had spent time with her back in the past, teaching her as best they could the wisdom of mares and — since she was immortal and retained at least something of the Jötunn Loki’s cunning — she had plenty of time to learn, but had rather quickly developed a canny sense of self-preservation and the ability to instantly assess the situations a mother horse encounters in the course of a very long life.

Oddly enough, she didn’t seem to harbor any sort of resentment over her transformation, which puzzled them until Eir pointed out that Loki, while hateful in his former life, was also very intelligent, and may well have resented his position as a Jötunn in a social milieu dominated by the Æsir and the Vanes, one in which Jötunns were generally despised, except by other Jötunns. While some, like Skaði, had achieved high social status, these were generally the best looking, most usually women, and had often gained ‘respectability’ through being married to one of the Æsir or the Vanir. Skaði herself had been married to Njörðr, Eir’s grandfather, but it wasn’t a love match. In fact, she’d been bartered to Njörðr as partial compensation for the killing of her father, Þjazi, in a complex tangle of theft, rape, coerced marriage, and murder mediated by… wait for it… Loki, but prompted by Óðinn and Hœnir, two-thirds of the trinity of the Æsir Gods who’d created humanity, or so they said.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, They were all of them back in upstate New York for their deliveries, even the Empress D’Larona-Cohn and Gefjon, since Phyllis had persuaded them that having access to a modern hospital was a very good idea as one approached one’s time of lying-in, even if one had wizards and sorceresses at one’s beck and call. The women all knew the ‘magic’ word, ‘epidural’ now, although the concept and the science behind it was still a little ‘hazy’ for most of them.

The Empress, especially, had been somewhat reluctant to leave because of her concern for the state of the Empire should something happen whilst she was away, although when real danger to her people had threatened, she’d left without delay.

Phyl had explained that they’d receive regular updates and messengers through her new and permanent portals between their embassy and the Imperial Palace, that she could return for daily visits, if she’d like to, and that Selene and Rhea’s new ‘air force’ of flying cavalry could certainly overawe any possible invasive threat within moments, although their unique mounts were currently pastured on the fields surrounding the Embassy proper since, like Sleipnir, the chimeric horses had formed very close attachments with the women who rode them, and so they’d brought Loki forward as well, to the relative safety of the pastures surrounding the Embassy on Earth, where the mares among them formed a stable herd, with Svaðilfari as their stallion.

Sleipnir, of course, had other duties, so they set the younger stallions out in a pasture well away from the mares, and Phyllis and Akcuanrut set a magic ward, powered by Phil’s monumental stone amplifier, to keep them from flying around and getting up to mischief.

Níðhöggr wriggled his way between the worlds, looking for the source of life and happiness that bombarded his cryptic senses, since he was blind, and after Sinmœra disappeared, he hadn’t felt any living souls in Hel, which had been strangely empty of any but the dead since she’d passed beyond his ken. As he felt his way through the shifting planes of reality, he smelt the distinctive odor of a being he’d felt nearby at the very moment that Sinmœra vanished, but the scent had changed slightly, confusing the giant wyrm, but not enough to put him off the track. He slithered on.

Thundercloud looked off across the open range from the top of a low hill. His herd was ‘grazing’ from fruits and vegetables and grains laid out fresh upon a row of high tables that surrounded an artesian fountain. The fountain itself sprang from an unhewn boulder above a large stone basin, which was carved with intaglio images similar to those in the Palace of Zampulus back in Myriad. It had an inset spillway that let the water plunge down into a rocky pool that fed a stream that coursed down the valley, ran through a wood, and then entered another property on its way to join with other streams running to the sea.

The setting was idyllic, and the vista suitable for postcards. Thundercloud loved this place, not least because he relished the chill in the air, the beginning of winter — the high point of the year as far as he was concerned — although he missed being able to digest the traditional Thanksgiving meal that marked the transition from fall to winter. He used to love the whole ritual of preparation involved in the holiday, planning the guest list, preparing the turkey, serving out the plates and bowls heaped high with food, and then dessert, back when he was Emily.

“Do you miss it?” he asked Wildflower, who stood nearby, delicately holding a plate of apples and raisins in one hand whilst using the other to take items from the plate and pop them into her mouth.

She looked up. “Miss what?” she asked.

“All the things we used to do… watching television in the den, sitting around the dining room table chatting about our daily lives.”

She looked at him curiously. “Not really. Why?”

“Don’t you miss going to work in your laboratory? Inventing things? Writing papers for submission to the scholarly journals?”

“Nope. Not at all.” She sounded definite. “It was how I made a living, and I was good at it, but in the long run it was just a job, and I have a new job now, carrying our foal and preparing myself to be a good mother. My old skills in scientific research and exposition were all well and good, but now I see them as a perfect preparation for the task we have before us, restoring the glory of the centaur peoples and republic, and completing the translation of the ancient documents into modern languages — many lifetime’s labor right there — but perhaps even trying to trace the true history of the centaur peoples of Earth, and discovering what happened to them in ancient times.”

“But how are you doing all that while we rusticate here on Earth?”

“This is the modern age, dear.”

She sounded almost patronizing, although he supposed that they’d have to invent a new word, ‘matronizing,’ to describe this new social dynamic. Their new society was based on parallel dominance and submission hierarchies, and he was a war leader, able to control large groups of stallions, more or less, and to lead the herds as a whole in times of war, but in times of peace the male hierarchy broke down to some extent, supplanted by the parallel domination of the younger and less powerful mares by the older and more powerful mares, who were more concerned with the future welfare of the herd than with mere physical survival.

“We have a team of research assistants digitizing the entire contents of the library, already making selected portions available on the web to qualified scholars, so we can work on the basic task anywhere we have either wired or wireless access using any personal computing device.”

Thundercloud was puzzled. “But… why haven’t I heard anything about this?”

Wildflower looked slightly embarrassed as she said, “Well, we normally don’t bother the stallions with tedious details like that. So few of them have the head for serious research….”

“I see…,” he said gravely.

She understood at once, of course. “Don’t be like that, Emily.” She used his old name for emphasis. “I do try to include you, but it soon degenerates into an endless series of ‘I can’t believe that a mere stallion could…’ and tedious justifications. It’s just easier….”

“I’m sure it is, Herbert,” two could play at that game, “but that doesn’t make it right.”

“You’re right, of course. I’ll try….”

“Never mind.” He cut her off. “You’re right too. It is easier. I get tired of being treated like a talking dog whenever I venture an opinion ‘outside my proper sphere of interest.’ It’s just ironic that I find myself in much the same position that you were in our former life, vaguely present in the lives of your fellow Lanyons, but somehow disassociated as well. I do quite like my sudden elevation in formal status — everyone does pay instant respectful attention when I speak — but then they don’t usually alter their behavior in the slightest. And it’s nice being present in the real world outside the confines of teaching, being a housewife and a mother, but I also miss being the one Hastie turned to when he was in serious trouble, although I suspect every mother goes through a similar experience when a daughter marries, since Rhea now looks to Phil, or ‘Phyllis,’ as they’re calling her now. I never paid much attention to these things before, because it was the rôle that I grew into, because our larger society expected — perhaps demanded would be the better word — that I play with dolls, play at being a mother, a ‘proper’ young lady, and then a wife, so it wasn’t a shock at all when all my playacting became real.”

“I understand, Dear,” she said soothingly. “I had no preparation at all for being a wife, and then a mother, and the latter thought still terrifies me sightly — although I’ve had some time to get used to the idea — but the strangest thing for me was how my sexuality changed — suddenly and completely — from a rather intellectual and detached occasional desire to an instinctive compulsion to submit myself to what I perceived to be the strongest male in my immediate vicinity. It both frightened and humiliated me, to be a slave to what I thought of as my ‘baser instincts’ — where before I’d thought of myself as the master of my body, the quasi-literal ‘ghost in the machine’ — to experience sexual heat to a degree that threw intellectual detachment right out the window and forced me to realize that my new body ruled my mind, and not at all vice versa.”

“It’s not much different for me, Dear,” he said. “Although I tried to resist at first, the tantalizing aroma and appearance of a mare in estrus drives me to a frenzy of lust, and I simply have to act upon it, so I suppose our ‘animal natures’ are rather closer to the surface than they were when we were fully human.”

“We are still married, though, just in a slightly different form,” she said confidently.

“I beg to differ, Dearest — neither taking nor meaning to give offense  — although we’ve had a marriage ceremony, we’re neither of us capable of the sort of commitment and faithfulness that human ceremony contemplates. Just as any mare in heat is irresistible to me, so any stallion who might be able to defeat me would be irresistible to you and all my other so-called “wives’.” He seemed a bit despondent after saying this.

She immediately tried to allay his chagrin. “Sweetheart, when I think about it, it’s not really so different for us now than it has been for most of human history. The victors in every battle either take the women or kill them. There’s even a procedure to be followed when abducting a woman for sexual purposes in the Bible, not that most armies have paid all that much attention to what it says in the Bible.”

Thundercloud blinked in surprise. “I never knew that,” he said. “They certainly didn’t lay any stress upon it when I went to Sunday school.”

“It’s there, Deuteronomy 21:10-14. I obviously went to a more liberal church, because they not only pointed it out, but used it as only one example of the many ways humanity has grown beyond the often savage worldview of the Bible. In any case,” she added, ”and this does rather go against the letter of most of the less liberal religious teachings, we really can’t help being what we truly are.”

Entr’acte

O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

 — William Blake, The Sick Rose, (circa 1794)

Níðhöggr wormed his way past a final barrier only to suddenly feel the burning heat and radiation of a sun and quickly recoiled, shrinking back behind the imperfect veil between himself and the being who’d been present when Sinmœra had vanished. He could still dimly sense the danger, but he was safe for now. Suns moved, he understood instinctively, and so settled back near the edge of the barrier, prepared to wait for as long as it took.

“So, Phyllis,” Rhea said, “ do you really think we have a chance of taking the vote away from fat old men?”

It was very late in the afternoon, getting on toward evening, and the winter Sun was slightly pale and wan, hanging low in the frosty western sky and somewhat obscured by a high overcast. The three of them were walking past Phil’s new and improved version of Stonehenge, just idly chatting.

“I don’t see why not,” she said, laughing. “It’s just a matter to tweaking the Constitution a bit, and there are few things more delightful than ‘kicking against the pricks.’ I am a Goddess, after all, and so relatively unconstrained by the bonds of naïve causality. In fact, we even have an Trinity, of sorts, Mother, Daughter, and the literal Sun, which will help to confuse the issue in primarily English-speaking precincts at least. There doesn’t seem to be much actual competition on the ground these days, as Friedrich Nietzsche once succinctly observed — or perhaps nothing at all beyond vague yearnings — so I can’t really imagine any countervailing miracles coming down the pike.”

Selene riposted, “But what about bigots in general? Who do we really want in our fantasy electorate?”

“Why have an electorate at all? Why not just have Phyl handle everything?”

“I can answer that one,” Phyllis said, “because I don’t want to spend my time deciding whether or not to have a Heroes of Philately National Holiday, or whether Peoria really needs new subterranean mass-transit and high-speed rail systems. I’m not even sure if every fat old white man should be excluded; Santa Claus seems alright, for example, even if he is a reïncarnation of Óðinn.”

“Get out of here!” Rhea said. “Are you telling me that Santa Claus is that old deviate?”

“Of course,” Phyllis said, shrugging her shoulders with almost Italian eloquence. “People can change, even those one might think of as evil incarnate. One of the reasons that Eir Menglöð allows him to use Sleipnir is so that he can visit all the children in a single night, which you’ll agree would be very difficult without Sleipnir’s help.”

Rhea was stunned…. “But what about the reindeer?” she finally managed to ask.

“What about them?” Phyllis said. “They’re a metaphor for Eir’s Sleipnir, of course. That’s why there are traditionally eight reindeer who draw his sleigh, one for each leg, and the stockings that were ‘hung by the chimney with care’ were originally filled by the children with apples and grain, gifts for Sleipnir, in grateful appreciation for his generous effort in hauling that capacious sleigh filled with all those presents around.”

“The really scary thing,” Selene said, “is that this is all starting to make a horrible sort of sense. I thought Óðinn was back in the Nine Worlds!”

“He is, of course,” Phyl said, “but it’s all one world — as you might remember me saying recently — or rather all of our worlds comprise one composite world; all these supposedly ‘separate’ realities are just different ways of looking at the same thing.”

“But how can Óðinn and Santa Claus be the same?” Rhea said. “They’re almost exact opposites!”

Phyllis smiled. “Or you might call them different sides of the same coin, or perhaps different choices that might be made in a single life. The possibility of evil exists in all of us, even me, even you, though I suspect it might lie closer to the surface in me than in either of you two. I asked you, remember, to keep a careful eye on me as I gained more power; with great power comes greater moral hazard, so I was always aware of the danger this posed, and fearful of succumbing to the temptations I was facing. You yourselves have discovered the good heart that beat in even Loki’s breast, so why would either of you be surprised that Óðinn, the Father of us all, could remember his former self when given a chance to reflect on his past, the chance I offered him in his death.”

Whilst they’d been talking, the sun had finally sunk below the hills and it was beginning to get dark. As the air cooled, an evening mist began to coalesce, forming itself into clammy tendrils of fog, growing denser by the moment, almost imperceptible until one glanced away, then obvious when one glanced back, like the minute hand of an old-fashioned analog clock.

It was at this moment, the uncertain time between twilight and night, that Níðhöggr finally chose to strike, quickly burrowing through the barrier between himself and the woman — he felt that it was a woman he’d sensed before, despite some changes — and he reared up to fell her with his mighty claws and consume her with his jaws.

From Rhea’s viewpoint, it was as if a hole had suddenly formed within the fog, the wisps and tendrils swept away, leaving only empty air behind. “Phyl!” she screamed, whipping out her sword, prepared to defend them all, because she was the closest.

Selene’s sword was out as well, equally and almost instantly ready, delayed only by the microseconds wasted in the propagation of the light wave that demonstrated Níðhöggr’s invisible presence. “I’ve got your back, Darling,” she said tersely, as they both waited for the beast’s onslaught.

“Níðhöggr! Stop!” Phyl said urgently.

The beast halted suddenly, confused.

“It’s me, sweetie, Sinmœra! Come take a sniff!” She held out her hand and petted the invisible wyrm’s nose. Oddly, the invisible beast began to purr.

Selene and Rhea both looked at Phyllis in fear. “You’re Sinmœra!? What happened to Phil!?” they said in horrified chorus.

“Don’t worry, Darlings, I’m still here, and mostly Sól and Philip, but Sinmœra fell into the same atomic mælström with me, so a few little parts of me are condensed from her soul as well.” She smiled at them both. “Luckily for us all, my soul was much larger.” She moved to embrace Níðhöggr in her infinitely capacious arms. “My dragon loved her, and I still love my darling dragon in return.”

“But isn’t he a monster?” they said as one.

“Not really. My sweet little Níðhöggr represents the forces of entropy and decay, without which life is impossible. In the ancient texts, he ‘gnaws at the root’ of Yggdrasil, which represents the Universe, and is of course the base of the metaphorical tree of which we are the fruit. Without the transition from high-energy states to low, we’d none of us be here, since metabolism consists of breaking down what other creatures — mostly plants and fungi — have painstakingly built up.”

“You do realize that this is seriously crazy, don’t you?”

“Welcome to the monkey house,” Phyl said, smiling.

“So, Phyl, is this the happy ending?”

Phyllis thought for a few seconds before answering honestly. “I’m not sure,” she said, “It’s also a time of coming to terms with loss and tragedy. I’m alive, and that’s always good, because at least I have a platform from which to recover, but I’m also profoundly wounded, having suffered the utter disintegration of myself. I’m walking around, and apparently ‘healthy,’ but I’m also filled with sorrow.” She gazed at them with love and finally said, “I love you both, and I know that you carry my children, but I can’t remember the actual acts of love that brought those precious lives into being with any more immediacy than I might remember a story told about my grandfather, or after having watched a video online, something a stranger did, or an actor, not me.” She paused again. “That hurts. I want to remember. I’m aching to remember exactly what I felt, how it felt to hold you in my arms, but I can’t.”

“Phyl,” Selene started to say, reaching out to….

Phyllis shook her head in instant irritation. “No! No pity, if you please. I have to work this out myself, because the damage is inside my brain. It’s not the sort of thing you can put a bandage on, or apply a soothing topical analgesic. It’s the loss of my soul, or something like it, even though I’ve been replaced with something ‘nearly’ as good, a complete replacement soul, with a lifetime guarantee!”

Rhea and Selene both looked at her warily.

“Don’t worry, Sweeties, I’m not mad at you at all. I’m just still struggling to recover from that ‘little death’ that destruction of my physical body, and even the memory of my body,” she said with an odd air of detachment. “Sometimes I feel like one of the patients in those books by Oliver Sacks, where he talks about people trying to cope with profound injuries to their brains, and it hurts to realize that I’d be yet another ‘case study’ for him, if he were still alive, but one whose problems can’t possibly be solved by chemicals or surgery.”

“Hi, girls!” Eir Menglöð shouted cheerily from high in the night sky above them. “I felt a ‘disturbance in the force,’ as they said in those videos, and thought you might need a little cheering up.” She landed lightly before them and sprang to the ground as Sleipnir calmly looked around for something to eat.

“How’re you feeling, cousin Sól?”

“Not so hot, actually,” she said. “I’ve been feeling a little down at the mouth, as the man said when he woke up and discovered that his pillow had disappeared overnight.”

Eir smiled. “Still cheery, though. That’s always a good sign.”

Phyl bit the figurative bullet. “Does your memory of your body always vanish when you die?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “It would get pretty crazy after a while, if it didn’t. Mind you, sometimes it happens, but it’s fairly rare, perhaps manifesting as a sense of déjà vu when one encounters a place one has never actually seen, and sometimes in other ways, although some of those are delusions, of course, like the thousands of people who are absolutely certain that they were Cleopatra, or Napoleon, in a past life. Of many millions of shades I’ve guided to their reward, only a handful have remembered anything, much less details of their lives.”

“But I do remember,” Phyllis said plaintively, “but without any sense of immediacy.”

“Which is good, when you really think about it, isn’t it? Would you rather feel like a puppeteer inside your own body? Would you rather be forever disconnected from the body you actually have, remembering a body you’ve left behind in a sort of misplaced nostalgia? Let it go, Sweetie; let it go. You’re you now, not someone else. Make the best of what you have. Wake up!”

“Wake up?” she said, all at sea.

“Remember who you really are,” Eir said, “a woman with a very long life ahead of you. It’s all very nice that you have memories of a former life, but would you want to have memories of all of them?” She kept quiet for a while, waiting….

Phyl thought about that. “I could hardly miss what I didn’t remember, could I?”

“No, you couldn’t. It’s something like those people you resurrected from the stasis the Heart of Virtue left them in. They were all of them stuck like flies in amber, frozen in pain, unmoving, only suffering. You and your wives gave them all new bodies, and most of them chose quite consciously to ‘move on,’ to accept that they actually were whoever it was that they wound up as — no matter who they were before — and made themselves happy about it, all in all.”

“Why does it seem hard for me, though?”

“Perhaps because it was so very sudden. One minute you were alive, and the very next second blown to smithereens. Or perhaps it was because all the victims of the Heart had plenty of time to get sick and tired of being stuck in whatever was left of the bodies, and were anxious to move on, so didn’t let the door catch their fingers in the jamb as they ran through into the next room and flung their arms wide in perfect joy. You might ask one or two, if you dare, since your own history is existentially similar. The timing is different, of course, but you share the core of their experience.”

“Do you know who else I’ve been?”

“Of course, but if you think about it, you know too. It comes with being a Goddess.”

Phyllis concentrated, brows furrowed, until she remembered another life, but only vaguely. “I was Nanna. That’s why I recognized Höðr when I met him, and why I was driven to bear his child. It had all happened to me before, but I’d forgotten.”

Eir smiled, nodding. “But that hint of knowledge gave you the wisdom to make better choices, the second time around, so the Nanna who replaced you will have a better life, blessed by your love and generosity toward her, and to her husband and foster child.”

“Is that all there is?”

“All? That’s what there is for all of us, the possibility of love, of passing that love along to future generations, and of creating an onrushing wave of love than spans generations, sweeping on into the future. You’ve been privileged to see the first fruits of your present life sailing on before you, spreading your particular blessing into another family’s future. If you really think about it, you’re not only a foster mother, but a grandmother now.” She grinned, then laughed. “Do you feel any older?”

Phyllis laughed as well. “I suppose I do.”

“In our world here on Earth,” Selene said, “there are things called ‘catalysts’ which facilitate radical change without being consumed by the change itself. Phyllis here, I think, is a sort of human catalyst who changes everyone she touches into someone better than they were before, and she does it, as far as we can tell, by simply loving them. Rhea and I were beautiful ‘party girls,’ total ‘babes’ before we met her, insanely popular, but who mostly sat around talking about makeup, clothes, and which celebrity was boinking whom in the tabloid news. Then Rhea here got the crazy idea that she knew how to win the big game at school, but she made me go tell her, even though we were just cheerleaders! Phyl listened to me, did exactly what I’d told her to do, and our school won the game. And then she asked me for a date, even though she was supposed to go out with Rhea, who was always more popular than even I was, and I wanted her like I’d never wanted anyone before or since, and I was smarter, much smarter, and much more powerful than I’d ever been before. Phyl had somehow reached back in time and made both of us into better people than we’d ever been before we met her, so now we were suddenly engaged in saving the world, both of us intimate participants in making the future through our pregnancies and our new skills. We’re both warriors now, more powerful than any woman we’ve ever heard of, except maybe in stories, the sort of women you may have seen in videos and games aimed at adolescent boys and young men, ‘hot chicks’ who kick serious ass, and are totally unobtainable, except in boyish fantasy.”

“It’s true,” Rhea said, taking up the narrative. “I wanted her too, and was bitterly disappointed that I’d wound up with a complete jerk on our double date, but I was still thinking then that I had to have all of her or nothing. Selene and I had been lovers for years before we met her, so going all gooey over someone who seemed to be a boy at the time was a big change for both of us, but she’d already worked her magic on us, so all of a sudden I knew physics, chemistry, and fifty ways to kill a troll! I was like Wonder Woman without all the stupid ‘girly’ restrictions on my magic powers! I was in Heaven!”

“We could hardly believe our good luck!” Selene added enthusiastically. “Everything about us that was essential, our love for one another, for example, was just the same, but we ourselves were better, more worthy of each other’s love, and we’d discovered Phyl besides, who was an interesting combination of masculine and feminine qualities that just hit the right note for both of us.” She sighed. “There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of unprotected intercourse with a man like Phyl was, because her… stuff… is a potent brew of mood-altering hormones like testosterone, œstrogen, follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinizing hormone, prolactin, and several different prostaglandins that act as a wonderful tonic and antidepressant — for women, at least — that just leaves one feeling cheery and on top of the world all day long.”

“And of course she had to turn back into Phyllis  — or into Phyllis after having been Philip, I’m not quite sure which version of her came first — before she could have sex with Höðr and give rebirth to his unborn son, an important portion of the eventual reconciliation of the two feuding brothers.” Rhea teared up a little, contemplating a romantic ‘happy ending.’

“So all this… this mishegas,” Selene said, “was just a family spat?”

Rhea looked at her with love. “Of course it was, silly! But not just any sort of craziness. This whole adventure has been all about family, when you think of it, about the first Hastie Lanyon, whose friend Jekyll was yet another warring pair of ‘brothers’ — Remind me to ask Eir if the good Doctor Jekyll was yet another incarnation of the Höðr/Baldr pair — about the Uttersons, Cohns, and all of us, a huge family of mostly girls. Hell, if we weren’t all a little ‘kinky’ we could be the Omnibus version of Little Women.”

“Without that sappy Laurie!”

At which they all laughed, since hardly anyone likes Laurie. “Yeah,” Rhea said, “Fritz Bhaer, was a lot more interesting, and he at least supported Jo in her career ambitions, which was pretty cool, for its day.”

“Yeah,” Selene answered, slightly truculent, “but he was still a putz, in his own peculiarly condescending manner. Our Phyl was ‘supportive,’ but lots more, she actively worked to help us, like figuring how we could carry more and better weapons, and even designing our rings so….” Both women fell instantly into silence, then looked hard at Sól, who after being incinerated into ionized vapor in the very heart of the Sun, and after having painfully reconstituted herself after years of struggle, still bore upon her hand their ring, obviously recreated — since the original would have been vaporized in microseconds — and from the first instant they remembered seeing her, although they hadn’t taken special note at the time, but they would have remembered the change, had it suddenly appeared, since keeping careful track of things was just one of their many special gifts.

“Phil,” Rhea said, her voice gone soft as she stared into Sól’s eyes, “you old softie, you. You really are in there, aren’t you?”

She blushed. “I said I was, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” she whispered, her voice husky with emotion, “but sometimes it’s the little things that really get you.”

“I know,” she said weeping, “I’m so very sorry that I’ve lost my body’s memories of you, and that’s the bitterest loss of all, because I know that they were sweet, precious beyond gems and pearls, but they were lost with my brain and body when I died.” And she then fell deeply into tears.

“Phyllis,” Selene said, caressing her body with the tenderest of emotions suffusing every touch and movement with love and caring, “Rhea’s father told us both something terribly profound and practical, once upon a time, toward the beginning of our incredible adventure, that in a long life, one must be prepared to abandon one’s luggage every once in a while, because what really counts is love. We can make new memories, Sweetie, and new memories on top of those, until that silly ‘hole’ in your head is so full of precious memories that you won’t know your sweet ass from a teakettle, much less which of those sweet memories came first.”

Phyllis looked into her eyes, and then deeply into Rhea’s “Promise?” she asked.

“I do,” they said in chorus.

 

 

Envoi

The Chorus Mysticus

Alles Vergängliche
Ist nur ein Gleichnis;
Das Unzulängliche,
Hier wird’s Ereignis;
Das Unbeschreibliche,
Hier ist’s getan;
Das Ewig-Weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

Everything that perishes
is only a metaphor;
Our shortcomings
are here perfected;
The utterly indescribable
will be revealed;
The Eternal Feminine
draws us beyond ourselves.

 

The End

 

Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002 Jeffrey M. Mahr — All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2012 Levanah Greene — All Rights Reserved