Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  On the other hand, I could hardly stay awake forever.

  "That explains why the Isthomi are prepared to entertain us," she admitted, after a pause for thought. "But what are we doing here, Rousseau . . . Mike?"

  I looked at her in mild surprise. She was, after all, a volunteer. Her orders had been to return to the surface, and though circumstances had conspired to prevent her obeying them, she'd already decided that she wasn't going back. I realised now, though, that her motives for making that decision had been almost entirely negative. Her orders had seemed to her to be bad ones, inspired by forces that did not have human interests at heart, and her instinct had told her to disobey them. She hadn't thought it through much further than that.

  "We're trying to save the macroworld," I reminded her. "If we needed a reason, we got it when the power was switched off. Before that, we had the fact that I seemed to have received a cry for help . . . and before that we had simple curiosity: the desire to solve the biggest puzzle that fate had ever thrown our way—excepting, of course, such commonplace mysteries as the origin of life, which may not be unrelated to it. Isn't that enough?"

  "I guess so," she said. "But I can't help feeling that we may be biting off more than we can chew. Whatever the scheme of things is really like, creatures like us are very, very tiny, aren't we?"

  I'd always known that. I realised that somehow, she'd never quite got hold of the idea before. I remembered the way she'd conducted herself when she first arrived on Asgard, blithely suggesting that she could always bomb Skychain City into slag if she didn't get her own way. I supposed that active participation in the virtual genocide of the Salamandrans had given her inflated ideas about the importance of homo sapiens which were only now being deflated to a true sense of proportion.

  "Well," I said, "it was a virus whose individual particles can be measured in Angstrom units which destroyed the Scarid empire of twenty billion humanoid beings. Nothing's insignificant, if it's in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing."

  I felt embarrassed about sermonising, but as I repeated my own words back to myself for reinspection, I couldn't help feeling that, as sermons went, my little homily had its merits. Unfortunately, Susarma Lear was in the mood to export a little of her newfound sense of deflation.

  "The problem is," she said, pensively, "that as you kindly pointed out to me up above, we really don't know what we're doing, do we?"

  I'm sure that I could have thought up a convincing reply to preserve a few of my delusions of grandeur, but I was saved from the responsibility by the fact that at that precise moment in time something very big and very heavy landed on top of the truck with an almighty crash, and broke our hold on the walls of the shaft.

  What had been sideways suddenly became down, and I was catapulted out of the bunk. The only thought which my brain could then accommodate was the terrified realization that twenty-five kilometres was a hell of a long way to fall, and that even the low-gee wasn't going to save us from being comprehensively pulped when we hit the bottom.

  18

  It was time for our blond Vikings to come to life and do their stuff, but there was one awful moment when they simply stood, inanimate, while the walking dead streamed all over them.

  "The bow!" cried Myrlin as I reached reflexively for the sword at my belt. I knew that it would be useless to protest that I had never fired an arrow in my life, from a longbow or any other contraption; not knowing what magic had gone into my present making, I might easily discover myself a match for Robin Hood.

  I snatched up the quiver from its resting place and slung it over my shoulder; then I snatched up the bow and notched the first arrow in the string. It was a stoutly- timbered weapon, and I could well imagine that it was first cousin to the one which Penelope's suitors had toiled in vain to bend, but it offered little resistance to me as I drew the string back and took aim at one of the skeletons which had a little more flesh on it than most, and which had established a coign of vantage on the figurehead. I loosed the arrow, and saw it fly with a speed that belied the apparent slackness of the string. It hit the bone-man square in the sternum and exploded his entire rib cage, sending slivers of bone in every direction.

  The Vikings were moving now, lashing out with their swords and spears. A couple were whirling battle-axes around their heads, and wherever the blades met the brittle skeletons the bones came apart with satisfying ease. Automata our fighting men might be, but they were none the less fearsome for that—they never hit one another, and they commanded nearly every square metre of space on the deck with their flashing blades. The skeleton men poured from their macabre craft in such profusion that they seemed sure to overwhelm our forces by sheer weight of numbers, but they were mostly smashed to bits as soon as they came within range.

  One bony warrior leapt to the mast, and climbed like a gibbon to a place of relative safety, then grabbed a spear right out of the hand of one of our burly supporters. It made as if to hurl the weapon at the deck where we stood, but Myrlin knocked it from its perch with an arrow that went into its eye-socket, plucking its steel-helmed skull from the vertebral column and carrying it over the side into the sullen water.

  The scraping impact of the two ships had brought us to a virtual standstill, and the entire length of our small vessel, save only for the afterdeck, was alongside the hull of the other. The platform where Myrlin, the goddess, and I were standing was not quite as open to attack as the main deck below, but it was no longer beyond the reach of the corpselike warriors as they swung on their silvery ropes. The bow was no longer any use and I cast it down again, drawing my sword from its scabbard. I had to swing it with unseemly haste as two of the vile things came swinging through the air at me, reaching with their own rusted blades. I caught them both between the pelvic girdle and the bottom rib, and cut them in half.

  I couldn't help feeling that it was all too easy, and that these creatures, for all their revolting ugliness, were far too feeble to be used as serious instruments of intimidation. But then I saw a blond swordsman stagger, and watched him pulled down by groping hands which had no right to be active at all, and I realised that it was not enough to break the skeletons, because the scattered bones were somehow able to reconnect themselves, reassembling new bodies from the shattered parts of the old.

  The automata had cut down so many opponents in such a brief space of time that the deck was already littered with bones of every kind, and from that debris a new generation of enemies had already begun to form. Rising unheeded from the timbers they had struck more than one deadly blow at our defenders, and even those which no longer had swords to wield were ready and able to grapple and hinder their opponents.

  Upon our raised afterdeck things were not yet set to become so troublesome. The bones which I had scattered had mostly fallen to the lower deck or gone over the side. Better still, Myrlin was wielding his great hammer now, whirling it about him one-handed, striking with such force that the creatures he assaulted were not merely broken but pulverized. But there was danger nevertheless in the detritus which threatened to accumulate about our feet as skeleton after skeleton dropped from above, eager enough to be broken, and equally avid to rise again.

  One cannot truly kill the dead.

  There was no point at all in trying to cry a warning to the Vikings below, who surely could not heed it, but I looked wildly about for the goddess who was our guide, wondering if she knew an answer to the kind of menace we were facing. Only she had the wit and skill to produce some magical effect that might turn the tables yet again, as she had when the fiery arch had tried to swallow us up.

  She stood alone at the furthest corner of our tiny fortress, wrestling with the bow I had discarded. She was struggling to fire an ungainly arrow whose tip was wrapped in lacerated cloth. The trailing tatters made the task unduly difficult.

  I did not know what she was doing, but I saw immediately that she needed a defender, because a skeleton bearing a dagger clenched between its rows of rotted tee
th was scuttling like a monkey along the rampart, ready to pounce and drag her to the ground.

  I lashed out with the flat of my sword, not trying to cut the thing in two but endeavouring instead to thrust it whole over the edge and into the sea. I caught it as I had intended and swept it away, but even as I did so I felt a bony arm wrapped around my neck as one of the creatures closed on me from behind.

  I could not strike backwards with my sword, but as the fingers, slimy with decayed flesh, closed upon my windpipe I reached back with my free hand to hook my fingers into the vacant eye-sockets of the thing, and heaved upwards with all my might. The creature had hardly any weight, and I pulled it up with ease, twisting to hurl it over the parapet in my determination not to strew the deck with deadly litter.

  When I turned again to strike at another monster that was groping for the goddess, I saw that she had managed to draw the bow, and I watched her loose the arrow. As it passed within a metre of my head the fibres loosely wrapped about its head burst brightly into flame, and I spun around to watch it bury its point in the weird carcass of the giant ship.

  The flames leapt from the arrowhead along the knotted lengths of keratin, and within an instant had caught the edge of one of those great grey sails. The sail caught alight as though it were tinder-dry and hungry to burn, and the entire rigging of that remarkable vessel immediately became sheeted in blue fire, the ropes falling about the decks in eerie cataracts of flame. Those skeletons which were still crowding the decks of the huger vessel, ready to swarm down upon us, were wreathed and cloaked by the burning fabric'of the tumbling sails, and thrown into dreadful disarray. Although their brown bones would not easily burn, the fire seemed to attack whatever spirit it was which held the bones together and gathered them again if they were parted. The skeletons aboard the ship of the dead seemed almost to melt as they fell in disarray.

  There were others which had already attained the platform on which we fought, but Myrlin was striking out now with tremendous force. The hammer, far more effective in his hands than any mere sword, wrought a destruction as complete as the woman's witchfire, and the giant paused only a moment more before leaping over the parapet to the deck below—one giant coming to the aid of an entire company. He danced a complex path between the stabbing blades of the harassed automata, striking downwards and across to splinter skulls, crush fingers, and shatter leg-bones, so that wherever a new warrior tried to rise from the relics of those struck down, there was insufficient substance to give it effective shape.

  One last skeleton heaved itself over the rail, sword high in hand, and struck at the goddess, but I shot out my own sword to intercept the blow, then lashed out with my boot to bundle the thing over the side and into the water.

  The whole of the attacking ship was now sheathed in flame, and the heat was intense, but our oars were working furiously to draw us away. Those which had been trapped between the hulls had somehow lost their rigidity, and were thrusting like the legs of a desperate insect to push us away from the fire.

  The expanse of water which appeared between the two hulls seemed to have an anger of its own, roiling and swirling as the oars whipped its surface, and the ships did come apart, slowly at first and then more quickly as the oars, free to operate with all their power, skated our smaller vessel away from the burning wreck.

  The warriors in the horned helmets, despite the fact that they were not sentient, did not lack the intelligence required to begin sweeping the remains of their erstwhile attackers into the water, to prevent any chance of their forming again to renew the assault. Half a dozen of the blond defenders had been struck down and had taken fatal wounds, but no more, and what was left of the mock-men of bone and sinew could pose no further threat.

  I dared not pause to relax, but made sure that our own enclosed platform was quite free of cadaverous parts. When this ugly task was finished, my first instinct was to look again to the sea before us, lest another enemy should already be rearing its ugly head from the waters. But there was nothing to be seen save for another bank of cold grey mist, and that some distance off.

  "Is it over, for a while?" I asked our patroness, as she put down the bow and scanned the scene with her radiant eyes.

  She shook her head. "They need not give us time to rest or confer," she said. "We are unlimited by the heaviness of matter and the emptiness of real space, and so are they. I have no doubt now that they are clever, and that they have established a bridge of common meanings across which they may launch their assaults. Whatever is hidden within that bank of fog will be just as anxious to destroy us as the things which we have so far faced, and it will be upon us very soon."

  I managed a small but humourless laugh, and asked: "Are we near to our destination? Can we hope that help will come?"

  "I cannot tell," she replied. "I do not know what strength we have, let alone what the enemy will use to draw it from us. We have spun the fabric of this world from the thread of your wayward dreams, Michael Rousseau, and none of us can be sure just what our present state will permit, or how it might be conclusively disrupted. They are exploring the imagery of assault, and we the imagery of defence. There is no way to know what ingenuity they have to bring to bear, or what we have within us to defy it. Do what you can, and time will tell us whether we have done enough. Remember that you may be the most powerful of us all, with assistance already given to you."

  As I turned to face the mist that waited to swallow us up, I could not help reflecting that this was poor encouragement. This might be a world concocted out of my dreams, but it was nevertheless a world where I felt myself to be a stranger. If I had ever been here before, in my waking fantasies or my deepest slumbers, I was not aware of it, and I had so far seen little evidence that my subconscious resources were uniquely fitted to the magical metaphysics of this realm. My sword might be a featherweight in my hand, my aim with the bow as unerring as my heart's desire would have it, and my voice the forceful instrument of my will, but I was still a man in a world where forceful spirits moved which had more power than I could ever muster. Behind the appearances which we must fight to maintain were entities which had brought Asgard itself to the brink of destruction, and they did not need to understand us wholly in order to crush us as comprehensively as Myrlin's magical hammer had crushed the rotting bone-men.

  The mist closed about me, then, forcing a shiver from my body. I felt by no means tireless as the damp greyness chilled the sweat of exertion that stood upon my forehead.

  For a moment, I felt our movement through the fog as though it were a wind, but then that movement slowed abruptly as the ship seemed to be gripped by a giant vise, which closed upon its hull and held it tight—and though I could not see the oars straining to pull us on, I knew that they strained in vain, and that we were caught fast. However close we might be to the mysterious shore ahead of us, we had ceased to make progress toward it.

  19

  I had an uneasy feeling that I had been dead to the world for a long time—and by "the world" I do not simply mean the world of material objects, but also the private world inside my head. Ordinarily, of course, the fact of my unconsciousness would have rendered meaningless any reference to that private world, which could not be said to exist independently of my perception of it, but my existential situation was no longer ordinary. Like 994-Tulyar, I was harbouring a mysterious stranger, which could take advantage of any loosening of the grip of my own personality to increase the measure of its own dominion within my brain and body.

  Because of this curious state of affairs, I awoke from oblivion not once but twice—first into a dream which seemed not to be my own. I experienced it only as a spectator, from a perspective more remote than any I had ever experienced before, in normal dreaming or under the influence of a psychotropic drug.

  The dream that I interrupted was a dream of Creation, but I cannot say when it had begun, or how long it had been going on. I was too late to witness the birth of the universe, if that had indeed been its starting-point
; nor was I in time to study the intricate dance of the atoms which must have long preceded the origin of the complex organic molecules from which the first living systems were built. I do not know whether dozens or hundreds of self-replicating molecular systems had already been born

  and superseded, or how those systems had been propelled up the ladder of evolution by whatever chain of cause- and-consequence overruled the logic of random chance. When I invaded this dream the youngest stars of the nascent universe were long dead, and in their explosive dying had given birth to scores of heavier elements which decisively altered the context of opportunity in which the adventure of life was due to unfold. There was already a molecule in existence which was a rude ancestor of DNA, and others which joined with it in an intricate game of transferred energies.

  The habitat of these molecular game-players was not to be found on the surfaces of worlds, but in vast heterogeneous clouds of gas and dust extending over distances of such magnitude that light took years to traverse them. These clouds were the wombs of new stars, and it was in the energetic haloes created by such births that the molecules of proto-life pursued their game with the greatest avidity. Elsewhere, their more ingenious transactions failed, and darkness stilled their enterprise; but the players and their game were rarely obliterated, even in the least promising regions of space; they merely waited patiently for the light of new stars to renew their efforts. With each new sun-birth, the molecules came closer to producing the phenomena of authentic life, and each sun-death would blast the spores of proto-life into distant regions of every cloud, destroying all but a few, but leaving those few to resume their unfolding story at some future time.