THE LAST MIDGARDIAN


PANTOMIME


After the historical celebration of Yggdrasil's Day, an abandoned storehouse near the city wall was converted into a kind of Museum of Midgardian Culture and History. Each of the architectural landmarks from the festival was relocated to fill the outer courts of the complex. Within the stone hall, art and artifacts from around Midgard were presented with Asgardian flourish. There were no people housed within, other than the occasional "traditional song and dance festival" that occurred during special diplomatic dinners or during the fieldtrips of Asgardian schoolchildren. To Jane, it was fascinating to see what aspects of Midgard were displayed by the Aesir and which were ignored completely.

It was not long after the festivities of Yggdrasil's day ended and the various representatives from the Nine Realms dispersed that the festival complex needed to be cleaned. Heimdall relocated Jane to work on the clean up team for its duration saying she would "prove more useful" there. She didn't mind so much. She especially enjoyed sorting through the exhibits that had been abandoned. In one such rubbish pile in the Midgardian quadrant, Jane came across a replica of Van Gogh's Starry Night. To the Aesir, the painting was called "not art" and "unevolved" and a "sign of primitive faculties".

Jane dug it out of the rubbish heap, wiped off the grime that it had acquired, and asked if she could keep it. The overseer was appalled that she wished to keep such a "horrid looking thing" and warned her to make sure it couldn't be seen from the Observatory. She didn't care. She clung it to her chest and hung it in her room, across from her window. No Aesir eyes would have to see it there and to her, it was absolutely perfect.

It was years later that a French businessman came to Asgard. He wore a neat grey mustache and he carried an umbrella, though even the rain in Asgard only fell on a controlled schedule. Jane was delivering a parcel to the curate of the museum when she first came across the Frenchman. He was standing in the central courtyard, shielding the sun out of his eyes with a museum brochure so he could gaze at the Eiffel Tower. There he stood for nearly a half hour, as still as a post, except for the streams of tears flowing down his cheeks.

"Excuse me, are you alright?" she asked him, shifting the weight of the heavy parcel to her other hip so she could free her hand to shade her own eyes from the sun.

He withdrew a handkerchief and used it to mop his soggy brow and blow his nose. His gaze fell away from the Eiffel Tower and he looked at her with a wan smile.

"Oui, oui, mademoiselle," he answered. "It is just so beautiful. Paris has never been the same without it. Not a day goes by that I do not stop in the Jardin du Champs de Mars and wish I could see La Tour Eiffel watching over all Paris again."

"What do you mean? Where did the tower go?" Jane asked, more out of dread of what his answer would confirm than out of actual curiosity. She carefully placed her parcel on the cobbled ground of the courtyard and crossed her arms across her chest when the Frenchman took too long to answer her.

He mopped his brow with his handkerchief one more time and pointed. "There she is. They told us she is 'preserved forever as a tribute to the achievements of Midgard,' and that it is a 'mighty honor to be relocated to the Realm Eternal,' but I think the greatest honor was seeing it as part of daily walk through Paris and knowing I was ours."

"I thought this was a replica...," Jane mused and stared up at the iron latticework towering over them both and her heart sank.

"Non. Les artefacts historiques originaux."

"You mean...the art...the basilicas...the pyramids...they were THE ORIGINALS?" Jane nearly screeched.

"Oui. They promised to send us copies. New York has a shiny, new Lady Liberty already, one that will never turn green and whose light will never go out, but how can you replace the Great Pyramid of Giza? No imitation can ever do it justice. Paris may have its own copies...but it is like replacing a diamond with a crystal. It would never be the same."

Jane was dumbstruck. The fury burned in her heart as she remembered the teenage Aesir inscribing their names into the stones of the pyramid and livestock being kept in Westminster Abbey. It was unthinkable.

She realized with a start that the painting she had pulled out of the trash was not a replica.

It was the original.


ooooo

One more inch, Jane thought to herself as she held out a lock of her hair straight before her eyes. She made a tally mark on her notebook and bit the edge of her pen while she counted up the final total. That makes five. Ten inches total. That makes it about ten months.

She put her homemade tape measure down onto her bunk and sighed. She'd been on this strange planet for around ten months now.

Without changing celestial bodies or seasons or clocks or tides, she had nearly gone batty trying to figure out some method of calculating time. At first, she thought she could measure the growth of the grasses in the meadow outside the bunker, but the grass never seemed to grow or change. The leaves of the vines and the array of insects inhabiting them also never shifted in the slightest. They were always there, the same as they were on the first day she arrived. There wasn't even a cloud in the sky or a drop of rain to mar the perpetual sunless light.

So, Jane abandoned this method of time-keeping and tried to rely on her own biology's cycles to direct her. This, also, proved frustrating. For one, her circadian rhythm's predictability was hindered by the unceasing daylight and she had never been very good at remembering to take meals at regular increments. Her menstrual cycle would have been useful, but when the Aesir decided to tamper with her genetic code, they deemed the Midgardian cycle "maladaptive" and "fixed" that "evolutionary error" along with her "Midgardian biological decline into entropy." She would have appreciated more entropy in her physical being now if it meant she could find a way to measure change. But she remained as inalterable as the planet she now lived upon. There would be no wrinkles or grey hairs for another thousand years or more. This yawning expanse of years had, at one point, been an invitation to pursue her passion of study unhindered, but now that she was trapped under a starless sky, it was only another dream to store on a shelf of ironies.

Finally, in a desperate attempt to cling to some form of temporal analysis, she decided to rely on her hair. True, it was an imperfect method, but it was the best one she had at her disposal. It depended not only on her roughly estimated tape measure, drawn onto a broken strap, and her own ability to cut off her hair at exactly eight inches at regular intervals. The ritual gave her some semblance of ritual and time-keeping and that helped settle the frenetic anxiety she had felt building up in her when she felt trapped in a single, unending day.

Ten months.

It had not been an unpleasant ten months. It was simply routine...and quiet...and uneventful. But Jane was an astrophysicist. She liked routines and quiet. She just didn't always like uneventful.

Her companion and she took turns sleeping and keeping watch. They ate when they felt hungry, washed in the brook when they wished to be cleaned, and reorganized the shelves of supplies in their bunker at unnecessarily regular intervals, simply to have something to do to keep themselves busy. Jane, tired of wearing identical jumpsuits each day, picked apart threads from one of the stock of blankets and used these to embroider designs onto her jumpsuits. She had never been much of an artist, and her final product proved it, but it made her feel like she was wearing different clothes from time-to-time.

She also felt more like herself when she wore clothes covered with suns with happy faces or shooting stars around the collar. Sagittarius laughed a throaty, gruff sound when he saw her final result, but then he found her another color of thread from a box of old ropes he had under his bed. This ensured a few of her suns had sunglasses and kept her busy for nearly half an inch of hair growth. She sang while she sewed and despite her off-key melodies and interpretive, scattered memories of lyrics, it cheered her, filled the silence, and improved Sagittarius' mood to the point that he stopped pacing and sat to listen with a set of spoons to keep rhythm along with her.

Sagittarius' moods were difficult to comprehend. Some days, he sat on the threshold to the bunker, his head balanced on his fist, and his eyes fixed onto an indiscernible goal in the distance. He neither moved nor made a sound for what felt like hours. Then he'd suddenly jump to his feet and disappear into the foliage behind the bunker and pace for miles. Other days, he failed to get out of his bed and he sat there, staring at the slats in the metal bunk above him, lost within himself. Other days, he was as jubilant as an otter at play and nothing could make him be serious. He pasted on a wide, infectious grin, and spent the day trying to make her laugh with his antics.

But always, always, on any day and at any time, he was trying to remove the metal bracers from his wrists. And just as predictably, the bracelets confounded all his efforts.

The pair developed their own form of communication after so much time stuck together. They relied on gestures, simple sounds, drawings, and clumsy mimes. It was imperfect, but it worked and they could at least communicate "making dinner" or "going out back" or "you smell. Take a bath" or "I'm fine. Leave me alone."

It was in this manner that he taught her to play a board game. He had come across it in one of the boxes from the ship and it was obviously well-used by its previous owner from all the nicks and dings in the boards and pieces. It consisted of a three-tiered board made of four different colors in concentric circles with corresponding rings of colored glass game pieces. It took her two inches worth of time to even have a ghost of understanding the complicated rules. He was obviously well-adept at the game and she was a novice playing against a master chess player. When she did get the hang of it, his vicious smirk at each of his victories was only ever surpassed by the one time she happened to best him, and then he glowed with all the pride of a tutor whose pupil could finally be granted a new protractor instead of a pencil.

Jane tried not to think about the future, but she couldn't help it. What would become of them in this place? She worried what they would do when their stock of food had all been consumed. She tried to ask her companion about this. He scowled and became broody and then vanished for so long, she began to worry where he had gone. When he returned, it was with a giant carcass slung over his shoulder of a beast that resembled a cross between an overgrown anteater and a mammalian version of a crab. It would have been terrible, if it was alive, but it was now very dead and the smell of it wasn't much better. She worried it would taste just as foul as it smelled, but after Sagittarius had salted, smoked, and dried the meat, it was tolerable. For the time, their barrels of food were replenished, especially when Sagittarius began returning to the bunker with satchels full of vegetation and starchy tubers which, while she couldn't say they were delicious, were a step up from starvation and meant they could survive in the bunker after their preserved foods were gone.

These expeditions into the world "outside" their bunker took a toll on Sagittarius. After his first hunt, he came home so weary he could barely keep his eyes open while he skinned the awful carcass. Then, Jane noticed little streams of clear liquid dripping from each of the designs on his chest and forehead. When she pointed them out, his protruding brows rose and he stopped what he was doing to investigate. He frowned, then shrugged, and kept working. However, by the time his work was done, he was moving so languidly he looked as though he were wading through ankle-deep chewed bubble gum while pulling a wagon of anvils behind him. Finally, he vanished and she found him in the creek, which was completely frozen and wrapped around his sleeping form like a glass sarcophagus.

She felt a little guilty at the thought that she had "sent" Sagittarius to find them food and hoped he hadn't misinterpreted her meaning. His next trip, she tried to go with him to help gather or hunt or whatever it was he did out there, but he growled when he caught her following him. Instead of letting her accompany him, he picked her up by her shoulders in both of his gloved hands and set her down on her bunk, in the same manner as a parent chastising an erring child. He gave her an unmistakable instruction to keep watch over the entryway and she did not try to leave her post.

The entryway that never changed. She almost wished it would change. That something would happen just to punctuate the unending run-on sentence she found herself living in. Then she thought the better of it and realized if something were to happen, she'd rather it happen when Sagittarius was around than not and she settled back into counting her inches grow. They continued in their ceaseless charade, like two parallel lines which moved always together, but a little apart, into an unknown and indefinite unending.

Jane nearly reached eleven and a half inches when something did happen. Or the first of many somethings. In a sudden burst of sanitary inspiration, Jane decided to wash all the linens in the bunker. This took her the better part of three meals and when she was finally finished, her hands were completely raw from the harsh soap and the constant rubbing and her back was so sore from leaning over the brook to wash that she could barely climb the ladder to reach the roof of the bunker. She managed it after a significant amount of groaning and whining and set all her clean blankets on the roof to dry. Quite pleased with herself, she turned to climb down the ladder when her foot slipped on a rung and she fell.

It was a long way to fall and she was not looking forward to discovering just how far. Her cry of surprise was muffled when, instead of falling onto the grass ten feet below her, she was caught Princess-Bride style in a set of cold arms...and a face who looked just as surprised as her own.

Sagittarius grunted and then his eyes grew wide in panic. He fairly threw her from his arms and onto the grass. Then he bent down to appraise her bare arms where his own exposed flesh had broken her fall. No matter which angle he searched, he did not find what he was looking for and his eyes grew even wider than Jane thought was possible. He tentatively extended one finger to prod her bicep with as much hesitancy as if she were an electric current and he a fork. She held still, waiting for a shock of cold or pain or to spontaneously combust into blue alien ice fire, but nothing happened.

It was as mundane as guarding the entryway. And anticlimactic, really. She felt a cold prod on her skin like when her mother used to place a cold compress on her bruises after a fall and nothing more. He poked her arm again, but allowed his long, lean finger remain in contact longer. When there was no apparent harm done, he visibly exhaled. All the swirls of sapphire on his chest sank like a deflated balloon and he burst into a throaty laughter. When he wrapped his entire palm around her arm, his palm felt like the thick shell of a tortoise or the armored back of an armadillo, but he did not make her into an ice sculpture or a Midgardian popsicle.

She gasped in surprise when she found herself lifted from the ground, swung around in an impulsive embrace, and then set upright on the ground with a delighted wink over one red eye. Then Sagittarius sprinted behind the bunker and to the refuge of the brook.

He spent the next half inch playing (if it would not be undignified to call the actions of such a tall, formidable creature "playing") with water. He started by freezing it and then melting it again. This pleased him so much, he froze some into shapes. These shapes grew ever more elaborate until they were towering works of watery art which he then melted and evaporated into a mist. He felt so accomplished with himself that a brilliant, smug grin was glued to his face and chased away all the broody storm clouds for all the time he played. Jane watched his experiments with her own quiet amusement, wishing all the time she had the tools necessary to run tests on just how he made it work.

If she couldn't play science, she might as well join him in his ice art. It took a lot of overly dramatic hand motions and confused eye rolls before he understood she wanted her own block of ice, but he got the idea eventually and kept running his hand over her work to keep it from melting prematurely. After a lot of cold fingers and small cuts with her knife and concentrated lip-biting, she created her own masterpiece. Well, she considered it a masterpiece. Her interpretation of an Emperor Penguin might have resembled more of an oblong watermelon than the Antarctic waterfowl, but she decided it was art and tried not to compare her end product with Sagittarius' life-sized, exquisitely detailed rendition of a winged horse.

She wondered if that meant there were horses...or winged horses...where he came from and just how many similar species of animals and plants their home planets had in common.

She had just determined to keep developing her skills at ice-sculpting when the next "something" occurred and this one made her realize why Sagittarius had insisted someone always guard the entryway to their little haven.

The pair had just finished eating some kind of stew and were washing up when they heard the sound of an explosion. They rushed outside the bunker to find the carefully constructed barrier, forged out of their own ship, a smoldering mess of ash in the meadow grass. Three mismatched figures clothed in the exact same jumpsuits as were stored in the bunker emerged, each with a weapon in hand pointed directly at Jane and Sagittarius. With a series of shouts and a burst of light, they fired.

Jane decided that, when put to the test, she preferred "nothing" more than "something" after all.

oooo