He still didn't say anything. He just stared at me, with what seemed to be an animosity beyond my understanding. But then he glanced sideways, quickly and furtively, and I felt a sudden flood of relief. I was sure that he wanted to kill me, but he knew that if he did, the Nine would strike back at him.
I realised that there was more to this crazy affair than the feeble-minded desire of a handful of Scarid bully-boys to get back home. Finn wasn't just trying to escape. He was playing the mercenary again, figuring that he might get a greater reward from a grateful Tetron high-number man than he could expect from Star Force justice or the hospitality of the Isthomi.
I looked sideways at one of the Scarid officers. "You think this guy is going to take you to meet your ancestors, don't you?" I said, with faint disgust. "You don't intend to go up—you're going down."
"Shut up, Rousseau," said Finn, unceremoniously. He took the gun-barrel away from my neck for the first time. "Get over there, out of the way."
"John," I said, feeling at least a quantum of genuine concern for him. "It's not Tulyar. I know it looks like Tulyar, but he wouldn't pull a stunt like this. Something else has colonised his brain—it got into him when he tried to interface with the Nine and got caught up in their close encounter with something dangerous. He's been taken over— possessed by some software demon."
It was no good. Finn and the Scarids wouldn't believe me, and I couldn't really blame them. They didn't know about Medusa's head, and they couldn't begin to understand what kind of war was being waged inside Asgard. 994-Tulyar didn't move or speak. He just waited. I wondered if I could appeal to his better nature, thinking that perhaps the real Tulyar was still in there somewhere, still potentially able to speak or think or act if only he could figure out the way.
"Tulyar?" I said. "Do you know what's happening to you?"
It was a stupid question. This wasn't just a misguided Tetron following some suggestion that had come to him in a dream; it was another kind of person entirely. Whatever had intruded upon the Tetron's mind had done a far more comprehensive wrecking job than the thing that had got into mine. Assuming that what was in me wasn't just a delayed-action seed of destruction, I was a lucky man. Looking at Tulyar, or what had once been Tulyar, gave me a little more confidence in the supposition that I had been drafted to the side of the angels.
"Do as you're told, Rousseau," said Finn coldly, his voice grating with evident strain. "Just get out of the way, and everybody will be safe and sound."
Uncomfortably aware of the thing taped to my back, I moved away from the circular platform and into the mouth of the tunnel through which I'd brought the truck. My gaze flicked over the three Scarids and the two other Tetrax— neither of whom, I was oddly glad to see, was 673-Nisreen. They were all showing signs of anxiety, but they all seemed committed. I knew how sensitive the Scarida were about the question of their hypothetical ancestors, who had supposedly laid on the power that had recently been switched off, for the benefits and greater glory of the Scarid empire. I knew, too, how strong the Tetrax were on matters of obligation, and how nearly impossible it would be for men placed under Tulyar's orders to defy him, even though they could plainly see that there was something very weird about him.
"Let them go, John," I said to my fellow human, figuring that the brotherhood of man ought to count for something. "Stay here."
His reply was brief and obscene. He'd never liked me, and that dislike had got in the way of his common sense on more than one occasion.
"You don't know what you're doing," I said, looking now at Jacinthe Siani.
"Do you?" she countered. "Does any of us?"
There wasn't time to have a debate about it. The Scarids were already loading themselves into the rear part of the cab, and whatever it was that was wearing Tulyar's body followed them. The remaining Tetrax got into the front seat, while Finn went last of all. The door shut behind them.
As the platform began to sink into the depths, carrying the truck away into abyssal darkness, I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall, feeling suddenly very weak.
Eventually, the wall lit up, and there she was, looking as sprightly as ever.
"You can remove the explosive charge now, Mr. Rousseau," she said. "It's quite safe."
"Considering that your power is supposed to be not far short of godlike," I told her, "you're pretty damn useless every time it comes to the crunch." I figured I was entitled to feel a little resentful.
"I must apologise for not warning you that it was about to happen," she said, "but as you know, they were able to listen in on our conversation."
"You knew what they intended to do?" I said.
"Certainly."
"And you deliberately let them get away?" I was annoyed, having jumped to the conclusion that the Nine were really quite glad to wave goodbye to my transporter, on the grounds that it would narrow my options to the point where I'd have no choice but to go along with their plans. But I'd misjudged them, as usual.
"When we realised that something had been implanted in the Tetron's brain—and that it was not akin to the programme sent to colonise your own brain," she said, equably, "we could only conclude that it had been intruded by the enemy. We had then to consider what the best thing was to do with a possible enemy in our midst. Had it shown any hostile intention, we would of course have destroyed it, but in fact it seemed to want only to escape. It seemed to us to be an opportunity not to be missed, though of course we were concerned to conceal that judgment."
"Opportunity?" I echoed. "Opportunity to do what?"
"As you guessed yourself," she said, "the biocopy which has apparently taken over Tulyar's body knows how to get into the deeper levels, despite the apparent difficulties of so doing. We must assume that it knows how to reach its destination."
"How the hell does that help us? He's got the only transport!"
I have to admit that she was very patient with me. "The reason that it took time to construct the vehicle," she pointed out, "was that it was very difficult to programme the machines which built it. Now that they know how to do it, they can construct a duplicate in a matter of hours. We had quite sufficient time to equip the vehicle which they have stolen with a device whose model I'm sure you remember."
Enlightenment dawned.
When the Tetrax had sent us into the levels to carry plague into the Scarid empire, they had thoughtfully equipped our boots with a device which leaked an organic trace, easily followed by an artificial olfactory sensor. That device, detected by John Finn, had led the Scarida down to the world of the Isthomi just in time to throw me in at the deep end of the crucial moment of contact. I had always assumed that it was 994- Tulyar who had been responsible for the trace.
Now, it seemed, the tables had been turned. Finn, Tulyar, and their allies were laying a trail which might lead the corporeal me—and a few friends—all the way to the Centre.
The boot, for once, was on the other foot.
11
At this point in my story, I fear, the narrative flow becomes slightly confusing, for reasons which the reader may already have figured out.
I must admit that I did not anticipate any considerable confusion myself, even when I realised that I had tacitly given way to the Nine's demand that I be copied. I had interfaced with the Nine on several previous occasions, and I supposed that this special interfacing would not feel significantly different. At the end of it, I knew, that creature of flesh and blood which I thought of as the real me would simply get out of the chair and continue with my real life. The fact that there would be a ghostly entity drifting through the vast labyrinth of silicon neurons and optical fibre sinews that was Asgard's diffuse "brain" which would also think of itself as Mike Rousseau, sharing all my knowledge, all my memories, and all my hang-ups, did not strike me as an item of any great relevance to the flesh-and-blood Rousseau's future experience of self.
It turned out that I was wrong.
Exactly how and why I was wrong will become clear
in due time, when my story—perhaps it would now be more appropriate to say stories—approaches its—or their—climax. For the moment, I need only say that the person who is recording this story has two sets of memories to draw upon, and must—if the story is to make sense—describe two independent series of events.
It might perhaps be easier for the reader if I were simply to shift one of the continuing narrative threads into the third person, possibly referring to the software copy as "the other Rousseau" while retaining "I" for the flesh-and-blood appellant which held the sole entitlement to it until the crisis in my affairs made division essential. But that would misrepresent to you the nature of the entity that is now telling the tale, and I cannot help but feel that such a move would be misleading, if not tantamount to self-betrayal.
I must, therefore, ask my readers to forgive me for exposing them to the possibility of mild disorientation. From this moment on, the perpendicular pronoun will be applied without discrimination to two very different entities—but given the fact that those two persons embarked upon very different adventures in what appeared to them to be very different worlds, I do not think it likely that the reader will ever be in doubt as to which of the two is the referent of any specific passage of prose. In the interests of simplicity, I shall present the two narratives in two series of alternating chapters, although there is a certain arbitrariness about the parallels thus produced. Software time is no more like clockwork time than software space is like the kind of space that is to be found in a cupboard or a cosmos.
12
There seemed to be a sky, which was grey and overcast, heavy with roiling clouds racing before an erratic wind. The clouds seemed so low as to be barely out of reach, as though I might reach up my hand and feel the cool, moist breath of their passage.
The sea was a duller grey, the colour of lead, and although it was no less troubled, its waves trod the paces of a dance that was far more leisurely than the light fantastic of the clouds. There was very little spray, and it seemed as though the ocean were made of some more glutinous compound than mere water, as if it were thickened by dissolved slime.
The ship on whose deck I found myself standing was a curious vessel, more like a sketch of a ship than a real entity of wood and iron. It seemed to me to have been modeled on a poorly-remembered image of a Viking longboat, with a red-and-gold patterned sail billowing upon its single mast, and forty pairs of oars moving in an uncannily-precise rhythm, quite unperturbed by the wayward rise and fall of the waves.
There were no visible oarsmen; the oars projecting from the flank of the vessel seemed to work entirely by themselves, growing organically from the hull. The deck, which extended most of the length of the ship, was lined with silent warriors, huge and blonde, with horned helmets and armour of gleaming bronze. They carried spears and broadswords, but the swords were sheathed. They stood immobile, like carved chessmen waiting for a game to begin. There was no possibility of mistaking them for real people; like the boat, they seemed to me more like entities in an animated cartoon.
The prow of the ship was shaped into a curious figurehead with anchored snakes instead of hair, and the snakes moved sluggishly as the bows dipped and rose with the swell. Beneath this image of Medusa, carried high above the waves, there was a sharp spur, which gleamed as if it were made of steel. Had the gorgon's head been attached to a body, it might have been riding upon the spur as if on a broomstick, and the implication of that absent form gave the spur a gloss of phallic potency.
The bridge at the hind end of the ship was a paltry affair, consisting of a raised deck protected only by an ornately- carved railing. There was a wheel controlling the rudder (though that seemed to me to be as anachronistic as Medusa or the ramming-spur), but no substantial wheelhouse.
I found myself gripping the rail very tightly, bracing myself against the rolling and yawing of the ship.
I had never been on a ship before—the closest I had ever come to an ocean was driving along the shore of one of the icebound seas on the surface of Asgard. That had certainly been grey, but the way the bergs floated in the shallow water had made it seem utterly serene, while this water, in spite of its apparent viscosity, had an obvious inclination to the tempestuous.
I felt, paradoxically, that I should have been seasick, or at the very least uneasy and uncomfortable. In fact, I did not. The best attempt I can make to describe what I felt like is to say that I felt mildly drunk—at precisely that pitch of intoxication where the befuddled brain seems disconnected from the body, anaesthetised and incipiently dizzy. I felt unreal, and that seemed to me to be an utter absurdity, because I knew full well that from the viewpoint of my parent self I was unreal. I had been copied into a dreamworld, but there was surely a ludicrous impropriety in the fact that I felt like a dream-entity.
Had I, I wondered, any instinct to survive in my present form? Had I sufficient strength of will to continue to exist from one moment to the next?
Oddly enough, that was a frightening thought. I did not feel like myself—and knew, indeed, that in a sense I was not myself, and that there was another, very different self walking away from the interface in the solid world of Asgard's physical mass. And yet, I was all the self I had, and I knew that this splinter-consciousness, however drunk with its own absurdity it might be, was an entity capable of being destroyed, and that such destruction would be no less a death than would one day overcome my fleshy doppelganger.
I looked around, and found that I was not alone. Mercifully, I was not the only volunteer who had come forward to undertake the high road to the Centre while his solid self attempted the low. Myrlin was watching me. He needed no rail to assist in his support, but seemed quite steady on the deck, riding its movements with casual ease. He seemed no bigger here than he had in the flesh, but that had always been quite big enough—in the flesh he was a two-metre man with a lot to spare, and his ghost-self here retained the same appearance of hugeness. But he did not look real. As I met his gaze, which was as curious and as puzzled as my own, I had to admit that he looked no more authentic than the silly ship on whose deck we stood. He too was more like a cartoon image than a real man.
He was dressed in armour, which was black and shiny, as if lacquered or highly polished. Its sections were moulded so accurately to his body that it looked like an exoskeleton.
He was bare-headed, though, and his colouring was subtly altered. His hair was lighter, although it tended more to auburn than blonde, and his eyes were so bright in their greyness as to seem almost silver.
In his right hand he was carrying a huge sledgehammer, whose head must have weighed at least a hundred kilos, although he seemed to feel not the slightest discomfort in bearing it. He had a large sword in a scabbard at his belt. Despite his seeming inauthenticity, I could not help but feel that this was the role for which fate (as opposed to the cunning Salamandrans) had shaped him. As a barbarian warrior he was somehow convincing, whereas the real android, set against the backcloth of Skychain City and the deeper levels of Asgard, had always seemed awkwardly out of place.
I looked down at my own body, to see what I might be wearing, and found that I was armoured too, though in a slightly different fashion. It was as though I had garments knitted from fine steel thread, which seemed both very strong and very light. Like Myrlin's, my armour was lacquer-bright, but my colour was a dark red, the colour of burgundy wine.
I hoped that I wouldn't present too tempting a target, if and when things warmed up.
Looking down, I could see the backs of the hands that gripped the rails. I felt a slight rush of amused relief as I realised that I knew them. I knew them like the backs of my hands . . . although I was not aware that I had ever paid particularly scrupulous attention to them in my former life. Perhaps it was only in my mind—a reassurance, which I needed, that I was still who I was, really and truly.
I had a sword and a scabbard of my own. The weapon looked big and cumbersome, but it didn't feel that way. It wasn't only that it felt ligh
t—it felt as if it had a strength of its own, and perhaps an innate skill, which I only had to liberate. This was a magical sword, and that status seemed no more absurd than the fact of my existence here, for this was a world where all was magical, where the laws which regulated other spaces and times could be modified at will, if one only knew how and had the faith that one could do it.
I had another weapon too—a big longbow, leaning upon the rail beside my hand. It didn't fall or bounce around when the ship lurched, and I guessed that it, too, had a competence of its own. There was a quiver of arrows behind my shoulder, Robin Hood style.
Bring me my bow of burning gold, I quoted silently, with drunken eloquence. Bring me my arrows of desire! And then, in more sombre mood: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . . The blood- dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . .
I turned again to look at the third person who was standing on the small raised section of deck. She had moved to stand by Myrlin, and was watching me studiously. It wasn't Susarma Lear, though she had some of Susarma's features. I had seen her many times before, looking out at me from her crazy looking-glass world, always behind an invisible but solid barrier—not really there at all.
Now, she was really here. Or, to be strictly accurate, I was "really" there.
Her dark hair was still worn long. It hung, straight and sheer, almost to the middle of her back. She was all Amazon now, though, in armour like mine in style, but burnished dark gold. Her eyes were brown, but like Myrlin's eyes they had an inner glow that made them seem bright, as though they were radiant with heat. She was carrying her own bow, as tall as she was, and her own quiver of arrows. She had a sword, too, but she didn't seem unduly burdened. She did look real—though that was undoubtedly a consequence of my knowing that she really belonged here. She was the Nine, and she didn't need to become a caricature to take the appearance of Pallas Athene, warrior goddess—the role was already hers, custom-made.
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