Part 95 (1/2)

G.o.d or not, he had a nice smile, full lips behind the fringe of beard curving crookedly. ”It did make a meal of the rest.”

She felt her own frown. Felt the hand clutching the phone drop to her side. ”You're left-handed.”

”Where I'm from,” he said, ”no one is left-handed. But I learned.”

”So why didn't you give the wolf your left hand?”

He shrugged, eyebrows drawing together over the bridge of a slightly crooked nose.

In the face of his silence, she fidgeted. ”It would have been the sensible choice.”

”But not the grand one. It doesn't pay to be stingy with wolves, Sorensdotter.”

Her hands clenched. One around the phone, one pressing fresh blood from a wound. ”You said helskor, before. What are helskor?”

”h.e.l.l shoes.” He jerked his stump back at the steep and slick descent. ”The road to the underworld is strewn with thorns; the river the dead must wade is thick with knives. Even well-shod, I see you have your injuries.”

”I'm not dead,” Dagmar said.

”Dead enough to shed your blood on the path to Hel's domain. Dead enough to have been seeking Niflheim these past months, whether or not you knew it.”

With his taken breath and the lift of his chin, Tr gave himself away. He gestured to her dripping hand and said what he meant to say anyway. ”When you put your hand in a wolf's mouth, you must understand that you have already made the decision to sacrifice it.”

”I didn't know it was a wolf,” she said. ”I thought it was a marriage.”

”They are not,” Tr says, ”dissimilar. Are you going to stand there forever?”

Dagmar raises her left hand. Blood smears it already, the slit in her palm deeper than it had seemed. Still welling.

It palls the diamond in crimson, so no fire reflects. It clots in the s.p.a.ces in the band's filigree.

She says, ”I didn't want to waste it. I wanted to save it for something else.”

”A sacrifice,” the G.o.d says, ”is not a waste.”

He does not say: What you try to salvage will drag you down instead.

He does not say: You cannot cut your losses until you are willing to admit that you have lost.

He does not need to.

How bad can it be? Dagmar wonders.

She puts her b.l.o.o.d.y finger in her mouth and hooks her teeth behind the ring.

d.a.m.n you, she thinks. I want to live. Even with failure.

Bit by bit, sc.r.a.ping skin with her teeth, she drags the ring along her finger. The pain brings sharp water to her eyes. The taste of blood-fresh and clotted-gags her. The diamond sc.r.a.pes her gums. Flesh bunches against her knuckle.

I don't think I can do this.

”This has already happened,” the G.o.d says in her ear. ”This is always happening.”

I don't think I can not.

When she pulls once more, harder, her knuckle rips, skins off, burns raw. With a fresh well of blood that tastes like seaweed, the ring slides free, loose in her mouth, nearly choking her.

Dagmar spits it on the sand and screams.

The G.o.d has left her.

Dagmar stands on the strand under the bright sun, her left hand cradled against her chest, and watches the long indigo breakers combing the hammered sea. Red runs down her arm, drips from her elbow, falls and spatters into the shallow play of the ocean's edge. Overhead wheel crows, murders and covenants of them, driving even the boldest seagulls away.

She holds the ring in her right hand. Her fingers clutch; she raises her fist. One sharp jerk, and the ocean can have it. One- She turns back and draws her arm down, and instead tosses the bright b.l.o.o.d.y thing flas.h.i.+ng into the sky. Round and round, spinning, tumbling, pretty in the sun until the dark wings of carrion birds sweep toward it.

She does not see which claims it-banded or bare-just the chase as all the others follow, proclaiming their greed and outrage, sweeping away from her along the endless empty river of the sky.

”Thank you,” she whispers after them.

In a moment, they are gone.

-for SL The Death of Terrestrial Radio The first word was meant to be spoken quietly, if it should ever be spoken at all. A dribble of signal. An echo. A ghost. A coded trickle, something some PC running SETI-at-home would pick out of the background noise, flag, and return silently to the great database in the sky, the machine's owner innocent of her role in making history.

I am one of the few who is old enough to remember what we got. Something as subtle as a solid whack across the nose with a cricket bat. We couldn't believe it at first, but there it was, interfering with transmissions on all frequencies, cluttering our signals with static ghosts.

Television had largely abandoned the airwaves by then, so the transmissions that came to houses and offices over fiber optic cable were unperturbed. Dueling experts opined with telegenic confidence that the suggestive sequence of blips was some natural, cosmological phenomenon-and not somebody broadcasting to the whole world, simultaneously, intentionally.

That lasted all of about three hours before the first cable news channel produced an elderly man, liver-spotted scalp clearly visible between the thinning strands of his hair. He was a ham radio operator, a lifetime wireless hobbyist who folded his hands before his chest and closed his eyes to listen to those noises straight out of an old movie-exactly like the chatter of a wireless telegraph.

He let his lids crack open again, ”It's Morse code; of course I recognize it. It might be the most famous Marconi transmission in history.”

He quoted, as if reciting a familiar poem, ”CQD CQD SOS t.i.tanic Position 41.44 N 50.24 W. Require immediate a.s.sistance. Come at once. We struck an iceberg. Sinking.”

I was in my office at the ALMA site, surrounded by coworkers, and you could have heard a pin drop. We hadn't exactly gotten the jump on this one-not when the signal was interfering with people's baby monitors. But we had been engaged in trying to track it.

A simple task, given the strength of the signal. It originated in Taurus, and exhibited measurable parallax over the course of a couple of days. Not only was it loud, in other words-but it was close, and moving fast.

A few weeks later, we found the second one. Suddenly, radio signals were blossoming all over the sky. Our own dead signals, our own dead voices-ham radio, The Shadow, coded signals from World War I-spoken back to us.

And then they stopped.

When I was fifteen years old, other girls wanted to be doctors and actors and politicians. They played soccer and softball, went to Girls State, marched in band.

I ran SETI and stayed late at school for Math League and Physics Club. Almost n.o.body really believed in aliens, but I wanted to talk to them so badly I didn't even have words for the feeling, the cravings that welled up inside me.

Other girls and boys-even other geeks-dated. And I guess I tried, sort of. But the people around me never seemed as entrancing as the numbers in my head. I wanted to like them-loneliness was certainly an issue-but the gap between wanting and being able seemed unbridgeable.

In retrospect, what I sought refuge in was not too dissimilar from the age-old fantasy that one is adopted, that one's real family will come along someday and rescue one from these weirdos one's been left with. Except I felt so weird I turned to aliens. Maybe someone out there would be like me. Certainly, it seemed like I had nothing in common with anybody else on this planet.

Sooner or later, you put aside childish things-or risk being labeled a crackpot. By the time I turned twenty-seven, I had two grad degrees and a tenure-track job at a major research university. I'd gotten time on the VLA and was mining the research for my dis towards further publications.