Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  Perhaps the web was spun between the branches of a great tree—though I had the impression that the tree grew up to bear the web, shaped by the necessity of bearing the web. As I began to perceive the tree there must have come into existence some kind of light by which to see it—my experience of the web had been entirely tactile—and the radiance quickly increased as the tree expanded its dimensions. A whole universe seemed to be expanding around me, hyperspherically. The tree was everywhere; it was the whole of creation, the very structure of existence. Its trunk grew in entwined circles, like a knot of infinite complexity, and its branches radiated into all the space which would otherwise have been undefined, bearing foliage and multitudinous blossoms of every colour in the spectrum, which poured out silver pollen in never-ending streams, and reached out their star-shaped styles to bathe in the deluge.

  There was a thought, and the thought was: This is the magical universe, in the process of its Creation. This is all that is and ever shall be.

  Then there was an awakening.

  I do not say that it was I who awoke. I cannot be sure of that. It was, however, my hand that felt the moistness of the sand and the warmth of the sun, my head that felt the sickness and the dizziness of a painful return to consciousness, my limbs which ached with exhaustion.

  There was a sitting up—and that is the truth of it, though there is little point in continuing this narration by means of such circumlocutions.

  For the sake of convenience, then, I sat up.

  I was saved. I had been rescued by something that had caught me at the very moment of destruction and preserved me—or remade me, perhaps more in its own image than I had been before.

  I looked around, and found myself on a sandy beach. The ocean, whose waves still lapped the sand about my booted feet, was blue with the reflection of a bright and cloudless sky, in which a golden sun blazed directly ahead.

  I got slowly to my feet, and examined my body. I was still clad in the red quilted armour, but my cloak was gone. My sword was still in its scabbard at my waist. I was bareheaded. The feeling of intoxication and unreality that had attended my first incarnation in software space was entirely gone now. I felt, however paradoxically, like the real Michael Rousseau.

  I looked inland, to see what kind of shore I had been brought to. There were many trees, so closely grouped that they presented a considerable barrier. The space between their gnarled trunks was filled with their own thorny branches, and with the spiked leaves of flowerless plants that grew between them. The trees were strange in the extreme, because their trunks were moulded in the approximate form of human beings with arms vertically upraised, like wooden people rooted at the ankles. The branches of the trees were extensions of the fingers of these luckless imprisoned souls, growing madly into a tangled leafy crown. The faces etched into the upper part of every bole each had the appearance of a man or woman sleeping, with eyes closed and expressionless. They ranged in colour from ivory white to ebon black; some seemed polished, others very rough.

  I was standing on the sand, with the waves lapping at my heels. The wall of vegetation was no more than three metres away. I could see no obvious way into the thicket, but I approached anyway. The spiky leaf-blades of the plants that made up the undergrowth were very supple, and they seemed to writhe away from me as I approached.

  When I came closer still, the tree-people appeared to wake from insensibility; the eyes opened, and though the faces were fixed in wood, and should have been incapable of expression, they seemed to look at me with such pain and horror that I flinched. Only the eyeballs moved within the sockets—the mouths etched in the bark apparently could not open to display teeth or tongue, nor could they contrive the slightest of smiles. And yet I was in no doubt at all that here were souls in some perverse state of torment—souls which were alarmed by my approach. The foliage of the trees rattled as if the boughs were being shaken from within, and the sound had the semblance of a childish language, as though the trees were babbling in a hopeless attempt to tell me something.

  I stepped back from the edge of the forest, and turned away from the staring eyes to walk along the beach, hurrying to a place where the faces still slept. I did not try to approach too closely again, and when I glanced back I saw that the faces I had left behind had closed their eyes again, and gave every appearance of having returned to their dream-filled slumber.

  Many of the trees carried fruit—bright bulbous things coloured yellow or red—but they were high in the crowns, and none had fallen to the sand.

  I did not know where I was going, but I strode out purposefully, never pausing. I do not know how long I walked. The sun did not move in the sky; it remained directly overhead.

  There were outcrops of black rock about me now, some of which jutted four or five metres above the sand. Etched into the surfaces of these rocks were outlines representing various kinds of animals: horses, deer, some kind of cattle. I half-expected to see these beasts open their eyes as I passed, but they never did.

  I had become very thirsty, and was glad to see among these rocks a pool of water, surrounded by wet mud in which I could see the tracks of many animals, though there were none in sight, and I could see no trail by means of which they might have come from the forest. I went to kneel by the pool and dipped the fingers of my left hand into the water, carrying a little of it to my lips—but it was brackish, too salty to be drinkable.

  I turned back to the wall of vegetation that prevented my moving inland. It seemed that no good could come of moving along the line of the shore. I did not want to approach again, bringing those awful faces to baleful life, but I did not know what else to do. I was alone, without guidance of any sort. If those who had helped me required something in return, I did not know what it was.

  Directly in front of me there was the trunk of a tree which stood straighter and thicker than the rest. I looked at the closed eyes engraven in its thick black bark, and felt a creeping unease rise inside me.

  I looked down at the hand which I had unthinkingly used to bring water to my lips, and saw that the fingers were swollen. The skin was beginning to peel from the underlying flesh, which was an unhealthy colour, faintly tinged with gangrenous green. I was astonished by the sight, for I had thought myself whole and healthy.

  The water in the pool had become quite still again, and now I knelt down for a second time, and leaned over to look at my reflection. My face had a pallor which seemed to me disgusting. The colour had gone from my eyes, and my hair was a muddy grey. The skin had begun to peel from my forehead, too.

  It came to me very suddenly that although my intelligence had somehow been preserved from the oblivion of death, my body had not. My flesh was already showing the stigmata of corruption.

  Then, almost immediately, another idea occurred to me. Perhaps this was not the touch of death after all, but the beginning of a metamorphosis. Perhaps I too was fated to become a part of the curious forest, extending roots into the soil. I stood up quickly, and looked again at the tree whose appearance had frightened me.

  Did I know the face that was etched into its bark?

  Knowing what kind of world I was in, I had not thought it possible for me to feel surprise. It would not have startled me at all to recognise in those carved features a furious face rimmed with poisonous snakes, or the stern glare of some divine countenance more terrible than any human face. But this was not Medusa, or any other character from any other mythology of Earth. It was, instead, something rather more familiar, and uncomfortably so.

  It was not a human face at all, though it was humanoid.

  As I examined it more closely, I realised that it gave the impression of being part human, but the other part was a confusion of the lupine and the crocodilian.

  I took one step forward, and the eyes opened, leaving me with no doubt at all as to the identity of the soul which had been made captive by the hellish tree.

  All vormyr look alike to the untutored human eye, but there was one name which always came
to my mind whenever I saw a vormyran, or a picture of a vormyran, or heard the word vormyr spoken—and that was the name Amara Guur.

  "You're dead," I said, very calmly. I did not expect to see the wooden lips move, having formed the impression before that they could not. But the surprises kept coming.

  "So are you, Mr. Rousseau," he replied silkily. "So are you."

  25

  There was a long time to wait while Urania and Clio cooked up a surprise package for the monsters that were lurking down below. They quickly came to the conclusion that a bomb wasn't the answer—it was likely to be very messy and wasn't guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective. After examining the bits of alien flesh which had come up the shaft attached to the battered Scarid, the Isthomi decided that a biotechnological attack would be infinitely preferable-

  While they were figuring out the details of its manufacture they programmed and dispatched a small swarm of flying cameras to reconnoitre for us. These electronic eyes were no bigger than the largest flying insects, but they didn't have wings. Because they had to do the greater part of their flying in an evacuated shaft—we saw no point in sending them down in the car—they were powered by tiny rockets.

  In the meantime, we opened up the other truck and carried our two invalids over there. We stripped it of weapons before depositing them, but I lingered for a while before leaving them alone. Urania had asked me to stay because she wanted to make sure that the Scarid was still on the mend, but I wanted to have a word with Jacinthe Siani anyhow.

  She was more-or-less okay, physically, but she was still badly frightened. She didn't want to be left alone, and was grateful that I didn't just dump her. She hadn't expected any favours, given the way she'd dealt with me in the past, but it would have been too cruel to abandon her without some kind of reassurance.

  "You're as safe here as anywhere in Asgard," I pointed out to her. "If we get through, there's still a slight chance that we may be able to get the power back on. If we don't, there's a slight chance it might come back on anyway. If it doesn't, you should soon be fit enough to try to get back to the Nine's worldlet. You have all the time you need to find the way. The Nine are the best friends you could ask for in this situation. You'll be okay. I wish I could be as confident about my own future."

  "Why go, then?" she asked, in a whisper. She was a pragmatist, who didn't believe in heroism for its own sake.

  I shrugged my shoulders. "I always wanted to go to the Centre," I told her. "And now something else wants me to go there too."

  That reminded me why I wanted to talk to her.

  "Tell me about 994-Tulyar," I said. "You do understand, don't you, that he isn't really Tulyar at all?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," she said. "He was hurt, when the machines attacked us. He wasn't badly injured, but he had difficulty talking. He got better. He says that he knows how to switch the power on."

  There was no point in disputing the fact. She had no idea what had happened to me as a result of the interface with the alien. She had no idea that such a thing was possible. Even the two Tetrax, who must have been in as good a position as anyone to see differences between Tulyar present and Tulyar past, must simply have assumed that if Tulyar's body was walking and talking, it was Tulyar inside it. If it had behaved peculiarly, they'd simply assumed, like Jacinthe, that it was the result of his injuries. They might think him mad if he behaved crazily enough, but the idea that his body was being operated by a biocopy of alien software sneaked into his brain while he was fast asleep lay beyond their conceptual horizons.

  "He was guiding you, wasn't he?" I asked, determined to stick to less controversial ground. "He knows the way to the Centre."

  "He said that he'd seen a map," she replied. Her voice was steady now, and she had no difficulty talking.

  "Did he give you a reason for hijacking the transporter?"

  "He said that we couldn't trust the Isthomi—that they were really responsible for the power being shut off. He said that they were fighting a war of their own, and that we would be killed if we stayed on that level. Down below, he said, we'd find people to help us—the ancestors of the Scarida. He said that they'd find a way to restore power to the Scarid levels, once they knew the Scarida were in trouble. He said that the Nine were no friends of the Scarida or of the Tetrax . . . that they were frightened by the discovery of the Scarid empire, and the galactic community, and would like to see them both destroyed."

  She paused for breath. Then she went on: "He said that the Scarida and the Tetrax must make contact with the builders of Asgard, whether the Nine liked it or not, if the humanoid population of the macroworld was to be saved. If we didn't, he said, all the humanoid races would be wiped out, and things like the Isthomi would be the sole survivors. He said they'd fooled you completely, and made you their slave."

  I remembered what I'd told her about the Nine being the best friends she could possibly have if the power wasn't restored. For a moment, I wondered whether it might be true. Might the Nine be worried about the power of humanoid cultures inside and outside Asgard? Might they be acting entirely in the interests of their own kind? Might they have me completely fooled?

  I didn't think so . . . but how could I be sure?

  The horrible thought struck me that it might all be a put-up job. Maybe there never was any attack on the Nine. Maybe it was the Nine and the Nine alone who had injected mysterious software into my brain. Maybe Tulyar hadn't been taken over . . . maybe he had only guessed the truth. Maybe he had seen a map. Maybe I was being played for a sucker all along the line.

  When I thought about it carefully, though, it didn't make any sense. If the Nine had wanted to bring down the Scarid empire and cut themselves off from the galactic community, they could have done it all by themselves. They didn't need to pretend to be injured, and they certainly didn't need me. It had to be the Nine who were telling the truth, and the thing using Tulyar's body that was lying.

  Hadn't it?

  "I don't suppose Tulyar mentioned dreaming at all?" I asked, weakly.

  She thought it was a crazy question, and didn't dignify it with an answer. There was only one question left to ask.

  "I know you didn't see much when the trouble started down below," I said, "but did you see anything at all to indicate whether any of your people got through?"

  "I don't know," she replied, faintly. "It all happened so quickly. Our lights were smothered . . . then put out. I'm only certain that some of them were killed. If I were you, Rousseau, I wouldn't go down there."

  "If I'd always followed your advice," I said uncharitably, "Amara Guur would have made mincemeat out of me a long time ago."

  She didn't say anything in reply, but her big dark eyes were radiating injured innocence. If she had really pulled the Scarid officer out of the frying pan down there, she couldn't be quite as nasty as I'd always supposed, but I wasn't about to forgive her for the bad turns she'd done me.

  "Don't worry," I told her, again. "You'll be okay, if anyone is. Maybe we'll meet again, when the lights are back on."

  I left her to mull over her past life, and to wonder whether she had a future.

  When the flying cameras brought back their pictures we found that her story, such as it was, seemed to be honest and accurate. The picture quality was awful—not unexpectedly, given that there was no light and our spy-eyes had to use infra-red vision—but our brain-in-a-box managed to integrate all the information and enhance it a little. There was a good deal of debris, but it didn't show up very clearly. We could make out a couple of bodies, still sheathed in transparent plastic, and we guessed that the killers hadn't been able to breach the suits. That was comforting, in a way— but it hadn't saved the poor guys inside them, who'd been broken and crushed regardless.

  The predators themselves looked like a cross between gargantuan slugs and sea anemones. They were sitting still while the spy-eyes flew around, so we had no way to judge how fast they could move when the need arose, but they didn't
look very quick. There were about twenty of them gathered about the doorway by now, but several had been damaged by bullets and a few were almost certainly dead. They were heaped up untidily, and though it was difficult to be sure, I got the impression that the ones on top might be patiently devouring the ones below. The fact that their prey had proved unexpectedly difficult to digest hadn't cost them their meal. No wonder they were still lurking, hoping for dessert.

  "They're nothing," opined Susarma Lear scornfully. "If the Scarids had been carrying Star Force flame-pistols instead of needlers and crash-guns, they'd have mopped that lot up in a matter of minutes."

  I diplomatically refrained from pointing out that we'd lost our Star Force flamers long ago, and that she too was reduced to carrying a relatively primitive handgun.

  "It will not be necessary to expose ourselves to any risk," said Urania. "We have programmed the truck's organic production unit to supply ample quantities of a powerful poison which will paralyse the nerve-nets controlling the smooth muscle of the tentacles. It is sufficiently powerful that the tiny robots which carried the infra-red cameras can easily be adapted to carry a lethal dose. We should not need our guns immediately, although it will of course be necessary to carry such arms as we can when we resume our journey."

  I saw Nisreen nodding with approval. The Tetrax had always believed that heavy metal was no substitute for clever biotechnics.

  When our fly-sized shock troops had completed their mission, we set out ourselves. We had a certain difficulty crowding five of us and all the relevant equipment into the car, but it was possible. The pseudo-Tulyar's party had divided themselves into two fours only because it was a split down the middle, not because four was the car's maximum capacity. I guess we were crammed in pretty tightly, but we'd been crowded in the truck, and it wasn't particularly claustrophobic.

  The ride down was very long. The flow of time felt different now that we were out of the truck—the vehicle had been a comforting cocoon, where the minutes that passed were naturally dead and empty. Now I was in a light suit, with a small cargo of weapons and equipment to carry, every second was pregnant with hazard.