Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  I looked the godlike man in the eye as I had looked Amara Guur in the eye, and said: "Will you tell me what it is that I have been a part of? Will you tell me what I was supposed to achieve, and why you fought so hard to stop me?"

  He smiled, wryly. "You could not begin to understand," he said. He must have known what an infuriating answer

  that would be. And he added: "It was not such a hard fight. The Isthomi are very feeble, as godlings go."

  "They thought I might find friends here," I said weakly, "who would come to my aid."

  "Poor fool," he said, not ungently. "You have tried to intervene in a battle whose nature you could never comprehend. You have no friends here, but only those who would use you. Your flesh-and-blood counterpart is no better off—he too is just a pawn, and he cannot even be certain which side he is on. He does not know whether the passenger in his body intends him to save the macroworld or to destroy it."

  "Do you know?" I asked, with as much insolence as I could muster.

  He spread his hands wide, as if to say that it could not matter. I could not tell whether it was simply an act of casual cruelty, or whether there was some point in this dialogue. I wondered why he was delaying, if he intended to destroy me, and I noted that although he stood less than two metres away he had made no attempt to touch me. Was I still dangerous, in some way that I could not quite fathom?

  I stared hard into his face, wishing fervently that looks could kill, but I could not move my arms or my legs. My limbs had so far submitted to the forces of decay that they had no way of responding to the signals sent by my brain, and I had the sensation that the brain itself had little left of its own order and power. Yet the end was not yet come, and I felt sure that there must be some reason for the delay. If they had been able to blot me out, utterly and entirely, they would have done it. They had not yet attained that final dominance which would permit them to administer the coup de grace. Perhaps there was still hope—still something I

  could do if only I knew how.

  But the only thing I could do, it seemed, was talk.

  "Who are you?" I asked, trying with all my might to be contemptuous.

  He laughed. "What answer can I possibly give?" he countered. "The appearance which you see is in your eye, the identity which I have is in your mind. I have no way to answer you save by reference to your ideas, your characterizations. There are no gods, and yet I am a god, because you have no way of thinking about the kind of being I am, and the powers at my disposal, save by linking them to your myths of gods and giants. The builders of the macroworld were humanoid in form, and their nature is already pregnant in the parent being from which you were copied, in the quiet DNA which is unexpressed within your every cell, but you have not the power of their imagination, and you cannot conceive of the nature and power of the beings they created within their machines—or the nature and power of the invaders which have come to displace them. We are not gods but you must dress us as gods in order to have any image of us at all. You named the macroworld Asgard, because it seemed to you the creation of godlike beings, and you have translated the danger that threatens it into the vocabulary of Gotterdammerung, because there is no other way in which your petty minds might encompass it.

  "You ask me who I am. I can only say that in your mind's eye I am the one who guided the hand of the blind slayer of Balder; I am the one who freed the great wolf Fenrir and rode with him at the head of an army drawn from the Underworld where the dead denied Valhalla groaned beneath the burden of their misery; I am the one whose call roused the fire giants and plotted the course of the ship of ghosts—you must call me Loki. Are you any wiser now, small creator of gods? Do you understand now what your little thread signifies within the infinite tapestry woven by the Norns? No, my human friend, you do not. You understand nothing—nothing at all."

  "Forget Loki, then," I said. "Strip away the mythic mask. You're one of the invaders of the macroworld: a tapeworm, programmed to disrupt and destroy. Why are you trying to destroy Asgard?"

  He smiled. "The macroworld is in danger," he said, coolly, "but we do not intend that it should be destroyed. We have other plans for it. We have sent our ambassadors to save it, and they will do so, unless your fleshly self intervenes. If anyone intends to let the starlet go nova, it is the ones who oppose us—the guardian gods of Asgard. What passenger they have placed in your counterpart's brain we cannot tell, but we know only too well that those who fight against us would rather blow the macroworld to atoms than let us possess it. You do not know what kind of beings they are who have summoned you to this fight. You do not understand the game in which you are a pawn, and you owe no loyalty to those who have used you."

  He seemed to be working hard to make that point, and I wondered whether my acceptance of ignorance and confusion, or some fatal weakening of my resolve, was yet necessary to the final victory of the forces which were labouring so hard in the work of my destruction.

  "You switched off the power," I accused him. "It was the invaders, not the gods made by the builders, which sought to condemn thousands of worldlets to death."

  "Yes," he said, without hesitation. "We switched off the power. The Isthomi's probing disrupted the stalemate that had long held us impotent, and we took advantage of it. But the robots which penetrated the starshell were of necessity very crude, and that was the only thing which they could achieve—the real space inside the starshell is too hazardous for our kind of being. We have no flesh-and-blood legions at our disposal, as the guardian gods once had, but the balance of power is more equal now. When we struck again at the Isthomi, we seized our chance to conscript a little flesh to our own cause. When we have won our victory, you may be sure that the power will be returned to the levels; we have need of Asgard, if we can only dispossess its jealous gods. But you, I fear, must be destroyed. We cannot tell what the clever Aesir may have made of you, and we must protect ourselves."

  There was an obvious hypocrisy in his regretfulness. He still wasn't absolutely certain that I was harmless. He was still trying to delay while the forces of corruption worked their careful way with my rotting body. I knew that I couldn't move, but I also knew that I could work magic. I had helped to calm a storm with the power of my voice, and though I knew no spells or words of power, I knew that there must be some key to unlock the forces in my mind.

  "Loki died too," I whispered—and my voice, though weak, sounded oddly loud over the clamour of the crowd who were waiting to see me killed. "On the field of Ragnarok, they all died! When it all began again, there was a new race of gods, unknown save for Balder, whose murder was undone. You're all going to die. Do you hear me— you're all going to die!"

  My voice rose as I spoke to what I intended to be a stentorian shout, but it came out more like a cracked shriek. The effect was entirely ruined, and the person who called himself Loki, far from being intimidated by my defiant curse, laughed again, with every sign of genuine amusement. The crowd joined in with him, and suddenly the random noise generated by the throng coalesced into a single continuing sound: the sound of joyous laughter.

  I burned with humiliation, and I tried with all my might to focus every last vestige of my waning spirit into a hot surge of pure hatred. I was certain that I had the power to raise my arm, to fight back. In that moment, the sheer magnitude of my rage made me feel like a god—like one whose power simply could not be denied.

  But passion wasn't enough. My arm wouldn't come up, and when I looked down to command my flesh with the power of my gaze, I saw why. The maggots were already busy in my flesh. They had devoured me almost to the bone. Where once there had been white skin there was now a grey tegument like ragged cloth, pallid and writhing, foul to behold.

  Helplessly, I looked up again into the vicious grey eyes of my accuser and executioner.

  He had a sword in his hand now, whose mirror-bright blade shone like liquid fire in the angry sunlight. As he raised it to sweep it around in a deadly arc his lips drew back from his teeth in a way th
at linked him incontrovertibly with the predator whose appearance he had worn in his previous manifestation, when I had engaged him in debate before. Perhaps it was then that I had unwisely given him the opportunity to learn to understand me.

  He was Loki the traitor; he was Amara Guur; he was the devil incarnate—and I had nothing left with which to resist his evil.

  He reached out with his left hand to grab a handful of my scaly hair, and held me tight while he brought the sword across to cut cleanly through my neck.

  My rotting body fell to the ground, seared by the heat of the sun-warmed stone, while he held my severed head aloft, displaying it to the assembled crowd. He let loose a great wordless howl of triumph, which said as clearly as I might have wished that he had still feared me, and that there had been something I could have done, if only I had known the way, but that I had failed to discover it.

  29

  At first glance, they didn't look like wings.

  In fact, the things which Urania pulled out of the bags she'd thoughtfully packed for us looked so much like screwed-up balloons that I thought I'd got hold of the wrong end of the stick and we were going down Montgolfier-fashion. No such luck—they were wings all right, but they were made out of artificial organics, and they spent their inactive time huddled into tight little balls.

  "What exactly are we supposed to do with these things?" I asked Urania, as I took up one of these unpromising objects and weighed it in my hand. It felt distressingly light and fragile.

  "Think of them as another kind of robot," she suggested. "They are not so very different from the tiny things which we used to carry cameras and poison darts down to this level. But these are adapted for the purpose of carrying humanoid beings. It will not be necessary for you to do anything—they will hold you securely, and have an expertise of their own which will enable you to glide down safely. They can cope with any movements which you make, but it would be as well if you tried to remain still, spreading out your limbs horizontally until you touch down on the shell which surrounds the starlet."

  Susarma Lear was no more enthused than I by the sight of these creations, which certainly seemed less elegant in design than anyone could have anticipated. As inventors went, the Isthomi were easily a match for the legendary

  Daedalus—their home level had a labyrinth to put his to shame, and minotaurs would have been a mere finger- exercise for their biotech skills—but I remembered only too well what had happened to poor Icarus.

  "Do not be afraid," said Urania to Susarma Lear. "There is nothing to fear. At least, there is nothing to fear from the fall itself."

  Until she appended the last remark I had almost managed to reassure myself.

  "What is there to fear?" I asked.

  "There is breathable air in this space," she reminded me. "Perhaps it is there only to facilitate the kind of descent which we are about to make. On the other hand, it may well support a complex life-system, which would presumably have its predators."

  I looked down at the void, and contemplated the faint, uncertain lights that marked out the disc of the starshell. With the central power-supply cut off, those lights were most probably the product of natural bioluminescence. The outside of the starshell was a planetoid in its own right— though it was like no other planetoid in the known galaxy. An asteroid that size couldn't hold on to any atmosphere to speak of because it would be too light, but this one had air by virtue of being in an enclosed space. The combination of very low gravity and relatively high atmospheric pressure must be unique, and the life-system native to such an environment would probably be highly idiosyncratic. But everywhere there was life, there were predators and prey—and the hunters, presumably, would be well used to the darkness.

  Myrlin handed me something else which Urania had taken from our luggage. It was a handgun—a needier. He gave one to Susarma, too, although she still had the Scarid crash-gun holstered at her waist.

  "Carry it," Myrlin suggested. "But if you have to shoot, try not to point it in my direction."

  She favoured him with a nasty scowl. She had chased him half way across the galactic arm with every intention of murdering him, and had thought for a long time that she had succeeded. She had probably never felt so good in all her life as when she thought she was gunning him down, and though she was a trifle saner now than she had been then, she hadn't exactly learned to love him.

  673-Nisreen refused the offer of a weapon, excusing himself on the grounds that the injury to his arm would prevent his using it effectively. The long ride on the motorcycle hadn't done the broken limb any favours, and he was obviously feeling more than a little discomfort. But he wasn't about to turn back; he was determined to be in this to the bitter end.

  I watched Urania place a mass of folded flesh on Myrlin's back, and I saw the thing beginning to unwind, sending tentacles around his neck and torso in a complicated web. It looked strong, but it also looked rather sinister, and I couldn't help remembering those tentacled monsters that had come so close to stopping Tulyar's party. No wings spread out as yet from the pulpy lump that was left. It just rearranged itself on either side of the life-support pack that was hugging the android's spine between his shoulder- blades.

  Myrlin inspected the bits of it he could see apprehensively. He knew the Isthomi better than any of us, and was usually inclined to trust their word without the slightest hesitation, but it takes a lot of faith to accept unquestioningly the assurance that when you jump into an enormous hole, a rubbery pink mess will promptly convert itself into a set of wings which is already trained to keep you safe.

  673-Nisreen looked even more unhappy, despite the reputation the Tetrax have for inscrutability. Myrlin told him that he would try to stay close to him, and I ventured the opinion that we had all better try to stay together, although we would perforce have to be very careful if we had to start shooting.

  The thought of having something to shoot at usually lifted Susarma Lear's spirits, but she looked very grim now. She had a special frame of mind that she reserved for combat situations, but she hadn't yet been able to define this as a combat situation.

  "Go carefully," I told her. "The guys with the headlamps are on your side. Chances are that if there's anything big down there it'll be no more lethal than those moths that mobbed us up above. It may be wiser to save our ammunition for 994-Tulyar and his friend."

  When we were all kitted out, Urania simply vaulted the barrier and launched herself into empty space, hugging Clio to her chest. She didn't have a gun, but she had shown not the slightest sign of apprehension or anxiety. When she had put on frail flesh she clearly hadn't acquired all the hangups that fleshy creatures usually have. She was of the Nine, and she had their perfect faith that what was properly planned would always work.

  It would have made me feel a lot better if I could have watched her wings sprout and seen her dive flatten out into a graceful soaring glide, but she was leaping into darkness, and she was out of the reach of our feeble beams of light before the thing on her back had a chance to get its act together. I was prepared to wait, figuring that once her equipment had got itself into gear she might fly back up and favour us with a brief glimpse of her new accomplishments, but she didn't.

  673-Nisreen looked around with an expression that said: "Who's next?"

  I didn't rush to volunteer. I looked at Myrlin. He was a little preoccupied, perhaps mulling over the fact that he was more than two metres tall and weighed something over a hundred and fifty kilos—at least twice as much as the scion.

  "Okay Rousseau," said Susarma Lear, in her most frigid She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed tone. "We go together on the count of three, and if either of us chickens out he gets busted to corporal. One. . . . Two. . . ."

  She was already scrambling up on to the top of the protective fence, balancing herself on the guard-rail. She wasn't even looking at me to make sure that I was doing as I was told. In the Star Force, officers take that kind of thing for granted.

  "... Three!" she said, and jum
ped.

  Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I had jumped with her. Maybe it was the influence of Star Force discipline coming out at last. Maybe it was my latent superhumanity taking over in the moment of crisis. Either way, I found myself tumbling in the air, watching the circle of light that was the airlock slowly dwindling in size. There was one horrid thrill of pure terror, like a fire alarm going off in my nervous system, and then a flood of intoxicated relief as I realised that nothing was happening to me. I was floating free, and remembered that while in free fall I was, of course, quite weightless.

  It was not completely dark, but all the light I could see was emitted by distant pinpricks that were very remote, so I had no real sensation of movement or speed. No doubt I was accelerating with whatever alacrity the weak gravity could muster, but I could not feel it. Instead, I felt utterly isolated, out of touch with the entire universe . . . almost alone.

  Almost.

  For a couple of seconds I was on the brink of lapsing into a kind of trance—a dream-state. I was very nearly there when I realised what was happening, and snatched myself back. It was a sensation like many I'd had before, when snatching myself back from a doze induced by warmth and relaxation, but I knew that this time was different. Something was in my head— something which had nearly taken advantage of a moment of shock and confusion. Maybe its intention was innocent; maybe it only wanted to show me a bit more of its psychic movie about the history of the universe. But I'd seen it wearing the face of Medusa, and I was frightened of it. I wanted to hold on to my presence of mind at all costs.

  I made a deliberate effort to assume the position that had been recommended to me, adjusting the attitude of my body so that I was face-down, with my arms and legs spread out. It was easier than I thought, but when I then tried to look back over my shoulder to see how much I resembled an angel I found myself rolling over slowly, spinning about two different axes. A moment's dizziness confused me further, and then I righted myself again.