Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  I hadn't asked Urania exactly what Tulyar's party had taken from their own truck, and much of it was already packed up in satchels. It was all too obvious, though, what kind of transport we would now be expected to employ. No doubt they were sophisticated robots in their own right, but they looked to me like glorified bicycles. Susarma was used to going into battle with whatever came to hand, and didn't seem too worried about the prospect of riding one, but Myrlin was anxious about their small size and apparent frailty, and 673-Nisreen—who still had his right forearm immobilised by a plastic sheath—seemed on the brink of asking to be left behind. I made the suggestion that perhaps he should stay with the truck, in case it was only pride that was preventing him, but he said no. The Tetrax had something of a reputation for exaggerated discretion, but if the entire race could be judged by Nisreen, they were certainly no cowards.

  The long descent was a severe trial of my peace of mind. By the time we reached the bottom I was so eager to move, so eager to act, that it was almost a disappointment to find that our advance guard of mechanical wasps really had stung to very good effect, and that there was not a monster in the vicinity still capable of raising a tentacle.

  I consoled myself with the thought that Susarma Lear must feel ten times worse about the absence of a meaningful target at which she could blast away.

  The ground on which we found ourselves was dead white and very flat, which seemed to me unnatural until I realised that it was actually the chitinous epidermis of some vast thermosynthetic organism—a living carpet which probably extended throughout the entire worldlet, having sustained itself until the switch-off by drawing off energy from the real "floor." No doubt the chitinous tegument was to protect it from herbivores, which—equally undoubtedly— would have evolved ways of drilling through it in order to sustain themselves, enabling them in their turn to supply the tentacled predators with their natural sustenance. It was the classic ecological pyramid that defines the structure of life-systems everywhere. It would have been pleasant to chat to 673-Nisreen about the aesthetics of it all, but we were too busy.

  Now that we could search more carefully, we found four bodies. Two were Scarid soldiers; two were Tetrax. 994- Tulyar wasn't among them, and neither was John Finn, but those two were all that was left of the eight who had set out, and we now outnumbered them five to two—six to two if we counted the brain-in-a-box called Clio, which was strapped to Urania's shoulders like a knapsack. I wondered if Finn had yet figured out that Tulyar wasn't Tulyar and that he was being played for a sucker. I thought not. Despite his cleverness with electronic gadgets, John Finn was essentially a cretin.

  The ground was far too hard to show obvious tracks, but the heels of the suits Finn and Tulyar were wearing had been rigged to leave a trace for us, and it didn't take long to confirm that there was indeed a trail to be followed.

  It took us about a quarter of an hour to organise the bits that we'd crammed into the elevator with us, but eventually we had them assembled into five two-wheeled vehicles with power-cells in the space between our knees and luggage compartments behind the saddle. I'd ridden similar vehicles in the suburban streets of Skychain City, where there were no moving pavements, but the fact that the gravity was so much less down here—and for the first time it seemed noticeably less than it had been in the Nine's home level— made me a little anxious about keeping my balance.

  Just as we were about to set off, our lights picked out three more of the slug-things, gliding with surprising swiftness over the great white carpet, but while Susarma Lear was eagerly pulling her crash-gun out of its holster our little flying friends were zooming in for the sting, and they still had poison to spare. The slugs were thrown into desperate paroxysms, and were rendered helpless within a matter of seconds.

  "You'll get your chance yet," I consoled her, hoping that she wouldn't. Then I looked at Urania, who had charge— via Clio—of the olfactory sensor that could pick up the trail we had to follow. She led the way once again into the desolate darkness. Susarma Lear and I followed in single file, with 673-Nisreen behind me, and Myrlin bringing up the rear.

  It didn't take me long to get saddle-sore, and to begin hoping that the next drop we would face would be the last.

  26

  When I told him he was dead, and he said that I was too, I half-expected a needier to materialise somewhere in the branches of the monstrous tree. I winced in anticipation of little slivers of metal tearing me apart. The branches that were his fingers rustled ominously, but nothing happened. The relief was momentary—it dawned on me that if he didn't mean that he intended to kill me, then he must mean something else.

  "I don't feel very dead," I told him defiantly. It wasn't true—I did remember the sensation of drowning, which had seemed horribly like dying at the time, and I was uncomfortably aware of the evil condition of my flesh.

  "Nevertheless," he told me, in his barbarous parole, "your attempt to reach the core of Asgard's software space is over. You have been immobilised. Your body is already beginning to disintegrate. Do not be misled by the fact that you retain consciousness—this is Hell, Mr. Rousseau, and you are with the condemned."

  I looked again at my hands, to examine my peeling skin more closely. There was little feeling in the fingers, and the strips of skin which were coming away were melting into liquid at the edges. The discolouration suggested that gangrene was beginning to spread in the deeper tissues. It was getting worse as I watched, and I became suddenly anxious about the power of suggestion. Might this be no more than one more attack, more subtle in kind? I didn't have to believe him, and I made up my mind that I wouldn't.

  I thought about what he'd said, and wondered why it appeared to be Amara Guur who was speaking. The fact that he was appearing in that form was something to do with his being my idea of the archetypal enemy, but had the entity that confronted me chosen that form, or had I imposed the identity upon it?

  "You're just a figment of my imagination," I told him.

  "My outward form is a figment of your imagination," he agreed. "It is the way you have translated my presence into a visual image. Your consciousness is too limited to apprehend me in any other way. All of this is a figment of your imagination, Mr. Rousseau. It is a dream, which you now must dream alone. Everything you see is transfigured by your mind into a set of visual symbols, but it is happening. Dream or reality, you are doomed."

  I heard a keening sound, and looked up to see a company of predatory birds wheeling in the sky. I looked up at the tangled foliage, at the poisonous fruits lurking amid the branches. I thought about being on an island in the middle of an infinite sea: marooned. But if I was already doomed— trapped and condemned to Hell—why would he be bothering to tell me?

  I knew then that this was just a new phase of the contest. The gods had preserved me from the cruel sea, and the giants had found a way to talk to me, but the battle of which I was a part was still raging all around me, as yet unsettled.

  "It's all just a posthumous fantasy," said Amara Guur. He was trying too hard to make the point, and I was determined to resist the power of the lie. "You're on your way to Hell," he went on, "but don't worry about the route. You don't have to go anywhere. It will all come to you."

  Deciding not to believe him didn't help me to figure out what to do next. Should I run? Or should I try to cut my way through the barrier, to penetrate the interior of this alien shore? Or was there an opportunity to learn something here, which might yet be turned to my advantage?

  It was possible, I thought, that the enemy knew as little about me as I knew about them. Perhaps they were trying to find out more about me, and perhaps they would reveal something of themselves by so doing.

  "What are you?" I asked, with an edge in my voice. I deliberately didn't say "who."

  "I'm the thing you're most afraid of," he replied. "I'm Nemesis. I'm the one who brought you to the edge of death before, and would have destroyed you, save for the fact that the Nine gave me a gun that didn't work. This time
, I've been shaped by a very different armourer, and there can be no escape. No android; no star-captain; no magic-workers. I'm Amara Guur."

  "You're a part of whatever invaded the macroworld. You're the infection that blighted its systems—a software virus set to injure and destroy its programmes. You're part of the thing which is trying to destroy Asgard."

  The mouth, shaped in the bark of the tree, had teeth within it—the white, sharp teeth of a predator. The tree smiled.

  "I'm that too," he said, still looking more like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile than a human being. "This is the twilight of the gods, and the halls of Valhalla are cold. The clarion has sounded at Bifrost bridge and the gods ride to their destruction. Thor has met the Midgard serpent and has gone to his fated death. Fenrir has broken his bonds and shakes the world-ash Yggdrasil with his howling. The fire-giants are free, and their flames will consume the vault of heaven. Odin is dead. Heimdall and Loki will destroy one another. All the great gods are dead, and the many mankinds which live in Asgard are given to the darkness, waiting for the end."

  It was all straight out of my mind. He was still speaking in parole but all the names were in the original Earthly language. Did it mean that the invaders of Asgard had picked my mind clean, the way the Isthomi had tried to do when I first fell into their inquiring hands? Or was this creature some kind of magic mirror, reflecting my own ideas back at me?

  "But it begins again," I said. "In the story, it begins again! There is no final end."

  "Oh yes," he said, "it begins again. In other galaxies, other macroworlds, in every little Earth-clone planet which wheels in its track around a yellow star, it begins again and again and again. But for every beginning there is an end, and this is the end of Asgard. Surt will consume it all."

  That was one symbol I had no difficulty in decoding. Surt was the king of the fire-giants, whose fire turned the battlefield of Gotterdammerung to ashes when all the killing was done. Surt could only be the starlet at the heart of the macroworld, which would blow Asgard apart if it went nova. The products of a thousand Creations—and what did it matter whether those Creations took place on planetary surfaces or inside macroworlds?—would be destroyed and wasted in such an explosion. Ashes to ashes; dust to dust. Was that what the invaders of Asgard were trying to achieve? Were they a software suicide squad?

  "But you'd die too," I said. "The plague which kills the sheep leaves the wolves to starve. The destroyers go to their destruction with their victims. Why?"

  He laughed. "You have made me a humanoid in order to see me," he said. "But you know that is not what I am."

  "It's not what I am, either," I retorted. "I'm just a bundle of information, like you. I'm just a shadow on the wall of the cave, lit by Platonic fire."

  "Precisely," he said. "We are all shadow-selves, sent into combat by our archetypes. Perhaps that is what you are really fighting, Mr. Rousseau—the archetypal predators. Your Amara Guur is a very pale imitation of the real thing. You have no idea how limited your imagination is."

  "Predators kill for food," I told him. "Amara Guur was a fake. He used his predatory ancestry to justify behaviour that would never have been tolerated in a wolf pack."

  "You mistake me, and you mistake your own kind," replied the thing which looked like Amara Guur. "The predator kills for many reasons: for food, to defend his territory, and for pleasure, too. For pleasure, Mr. Rousseau. It is a sentimental view that says the predator takes no pleasure in his killing. The predator is prudent, the predator deceives, but the predator loves to kill. Only a fool believes that it could be otherwise."

  "Territory," I echoed. "Is that what this is all about: territory?"

  "Or pleasure," he riposted. "You are trying once again to omit the pleasure."

  "Despite our petty squabbles," I said, trying hard not to think about destruction and decay, "all the humanoid races have their DNA in common. The Tetrax are right, aren't they, to be ambitious for galactic brotherhood? They're right to try to bind us into a community. Whatever you're a copy of, it isn't made of DNA, is it? This cuts deeper than meat-eaters versus leaf-eaters. This is competition between alternative biochemistries."

  He laughed again. "Mr. Rousseau," he said, "do you really imagine that biochemistries care? Your thinking is anchored to your imbecilic point of view. Do you really think that you have the intelligence to understand, when the power of your dreams can do no more than this? How can you believe that you ever had a chance to understand?"

  He was shifting the ground of the argument, leading me first one way and then another, and I suddenly wondered why. If I were dead and on my way to Hell, immobilised and facing inevitable disintegration, Amara Guur would not be here, teasing me and taunting me. Suddenly, I began to believe that I was doing the wrong thing in letting him delay me. I had to get past him—I had to go on.

  I looked again at my arms, which were mottled with grey, the flesh rutted and scratched. There were several ulcerous sores, slowly turning fire-red, beginning to suppurate. The sores reminded me, strangely, of the fruit on the branches of the humanoid trees. But I knew that it didn't matter whether I was "dead" or not—what mattered was that I was still active, still thinking, and still some kind of threat to whatever strange army it was that sought to keep me from the heart of the macroworld's systems.

  I drew my sword, and raised it high above my head, ready to slash at the branches blocking my way. No expression of terror came into those crazy staring eyes—it was rather as if they mocked me, challenging me to do my worst. I hacked at the tangled branches and the thorny undergrowth, scything through it with my bright, sharp blade, going against him as fiercely and as recklessly as I had gone against him once before, when he tried to use me as a shield to save himself from the Star Force.

  As I moved forward to pass him, the spined leaves thrust at me, and I felt the thorns plucking at my armour, but they could not penetrate it to rip my flesh. It was as though the wall of thorns dissolved beneath my attack, evaporating on contact with my wrath and my warmth.

  I forced my way through, leaving Amara Guur to return to his wooden slumber, and went on into the dense thicket, which became dark as the branches above my head obscured the sun. There was a foul, dank smell all around me, and all of a sudden there was no green at all but only shades of grey, and the signs of decay and corruption were everywhere. It was as though I were hacking my way into the body of a gigantic corpse. There was no sign of another side to the wall, and I felt that I was tunneling into the heart of something horrible.

  Too late I was seized by doubt, wondering if I had been tricked. Perhaps this was not the path that the enemy had tried to prevent my taking—perhaps this was instead the way they had wanted me to go, so that I might deliver myself into their hands.

  I turned, and looked back.

  There was no sign of the path by which I had come—no tunnel back to the sandy beach and the sunlight. On every side of me there was nothing but a tangle of white, soft, rootlike things, dimly lit as though by furtive bioluminescence.

  I looked wildly around, and while I stood still the tangled knots drew more tightly about me, until I was confined in a circular cage with no more than a metre of space around my spoiling flesh. There was still a frail, faint light to see by, and I watched the knotted things in front of my face writhe like maggots as they wove themselves into a tight, confining wall.

  I raised my sword, and slashed wildly at the confining threads, trying to cut my way through. For a moment, I thought they might not yield, but the sharpness of the blade prevailed and the cage in which they had tried to confine me was breached. I shoved my body into the gap, pushing through to the other side. I was still in the forest and the branches still writhed in a determined attempt to block my way, but I broke into a run, hacking madly at whatever was in my path.

  My arms ached and my head hurt. I felt dizzy, but I dared not pause for an instant lest I give the malevolent vegetation a second chance to imprison me. Branches grabbed at
my arms and rootlets tried to seize my feet, but while I was moving they were impotent to establish a hold. I did not know how long I could go on, or how long I would need to, but I was determined not to be beaten while there was strength in my body, and despite the gathering discomfort I had no sensation of nearing exhaustion.

  How much time passed while that strange contest went on I have no idea, but the forest began to thin again, and I saw brighter light ahead of me. Encouraged by the prospect of an end I dashed forward, and the assailing branches fell away. There were no more groping tendrils, no more stabbing thorns.

  I came out of the forest into an open space, and threw up a protective arm as I was momentarily dazzled by the glare of an unnaturally bloated yellow sun. But there was a pavement beneath my feet, and the air was filled with sound emitted by countless clamorous voices, and I knew that this was no desert isle, but a busy place.

  When I dropped my arm again, and looked to see where I was, I found myself confronting a ring of men, each one as tall and as muscular as Myrlin, and each one armed with a gleaming sword. They were like enough to one another to be clones, and I realised that they were probably automata like the ones that had manned the deck of the magical ship on which I had approached this shore.

  I took half a step forward, and they brought up their weapons, pointing the blades at my torso. I glanced sideways, and could see no end to their array, so I turned on my heel. There was no sign of the forest through which I had come—the pavement was all around me, and so were the warriors. There were sixteen of them in all, and they had me completely hemmed in.

  "You have done well, Michael Rousseau," said a voice, which spoke in English rather than parole, "but we know you now, and you are at our mercy."