I looked up into that huge unfathomable face, wondering which of those many eyes were focused on me. I didn't know whether or not dinnertime had finally arrived, or whether the monster was just taking a breather before flying back up to return me to the larder, but I was just about past caring. It didn't really seem to matter much any more.
The tentacles placed me very carefully on the ground, feet downwards, but didn't let go. If they had, I'd have fallen over. Then something very weird snaked round the side of the monstrous head, and poked at me. It was long and thin and silvery, and for a moment I couldn't for the life of me imagine what it might be. Then it began to slice through the threads that bound me, neatly and with awesome efficiency.
"Zut!" I whispered, in sheer amazement. "I think the bastard's friendly!"
"What?" said Susarma Lear. She wasn't shouting any more, and neither was Nisreen.
"I think I made it," I told them, realising as I was cleverly released from my uncomfortable confinement that I really had made it. The pursuer that had pounced on the nest-robber hadn't been an outraged victim of theft—it had been a would-be rescuer. No doubt it had been a predator among predators when first it got involved in the little melodrama, but it must have been the one predator that was taken completely by surprise by its prey. This beastie had managed to snatch the agile box which was carrying the Nine's most versatile daughter, and instead of a square meal it had bought itself an artificial parasite which had run half a hundred synthetic nerve-lines through its chitinous hide to hijack its entire nervous system. The stupid monster had never had much of a mind of its own, but now it was under the dominion of a brain far superior to any other in this entire ecosystem.
Within a couple of minutes I was free, though the circulation to my feet had been inhibited and I found myself temporarily unable to stand up. I sat down on a woody ridge of some kind, and rubbed my ankles enthusiastically.
I explained to Susarma Lear and Myrlin what had happened, and told them to find a safe place to wait. "She's got some way of homing in on us," I said. "She can hear us even though she can't talk back. She's still in control of the situation. The monster's taking off again now, Nisreen—I think it'll come after you, this time. Don't panic when you see it. Just let it bring you down. In no time at all, we'll all be together again. We made it. It was a close one, but I think we made it! Hell and damnation, I think we've made it!"
My exultation died as quickly as it had come when I remembered, suddenly, that some of us hadn't made it. Urania, who had been carrying Clio when she jumped, hadn't been as lucky as me. Whatever had grabbed her had been looking for an instant meal instead of something to save for the little ones. Even Myrlin, whose giant size had presumably made him the tastiest morsel of us all, had found his fighting prowess inadequate to the slaying of such dragons as inhabited this vile region of Asgard's inner space.
I looked around then, more soberly. I could still savour the triumphant sensation of having reached the legendary Centre, but there was a bitter undertaste that spoiled the experience. I also looked around for a place to hide. The flying spider which had Clio's brain-box perched on its back couldn't stick around to look after me, because it had more urgent work to do. It had saved me from two nasty fates, but there might be any number of greedy things lurking in the woods at ground zero, and I hadn't so much as a dagger with which to defend myself.
There wasn't much in the way of undergrowth down on the forest floor, and there didn't seem to be anything too big or too terrible wandering around between the radiating root-ridges of the trees, which extended in every direction, fusing together wherever they met. The impression I got when I shone my light around was that the actual surface of the starshell was covered in a deep carpet of woody tissue, interrupted by very many pits and crevices of unknown depth.
I found a flat place that was as far from holes and cracks as I could manage, and crouched down, trying to keep a lookout in every direction. What I would do if anything hungry and vicious emerged from one of the pits I wasn't entirely sure, but I was certainly ready to fight. Having come this far, I wasn't about to be intimidated by any humble vermin from the local Underworld.
I waited patiently for the party to be reassembled. Although we had lost Myrlin and Urania, Clio was still in the game, fighting with all her electronic might. Even if 994-Tulyar and John Finn had made it past the flying nightmares, we were still four-to-two superior, and we had the cleverest player on the field. We still had to find a doorway into the starshell, but in the space of half an hour I'd come all the way back to the land of the living, having earlier been written off as so much sandwich meat stored in readiness for a birthday party. I felt as though I was on a miraculous winning-streak.
The Centre of Asgard, where the answers to all the puzzles in the universe were waiting to be discovered, seemed to be mine to possess, and I was irrationally convinced that nothing could stop me now.
34
I fell into a kind of trance while we moved through the mist. I could no longer see or hear, and the thoughts with which I laboured to maintain my stream of consciousness were fragile and sluggish. I could readily believe that I was dead, as something wearing the appearance of Amara Guur had told me I was. I could accept that this was only a kind of afterlife: a slow shriveling of consciousness, an evaporation of the human spirit.
Whatever power I had possessed to force that which was outside of me to conform to my expectations of space and matter was gone now. I was no longer conscious of my own medusal form, and could not feel the slithering of the snakes upon my head. I struggled against the apparent erosion of my being. Although I could no longer see, I tried to picture things in my mind's eye. I was sure that my companion was still there, still engaged in the business of transporting me through Asgard's software space, and I tried to reconstruct his image in the inner space of my soul. I reconstructed him as Saul Lyndrach, but then I realised that Saul was only an appearance that he had worn, based in a whim of my expectations. I tried to picture the entity differently, then, as a valkyrie carrying my packaged soul to the Valhalla in which it was destined to rest, awaiting the possibility of some enigmatic rebirth into the grey matter of a living brain. I did not doubt that I had earned my place in the paradise of warriors; although I had been an instrument rather than a mover in all that had passed since I had been so strangely born from the grey matter of my prototype, I had surely shown an abundance of courage.
For some reason, I could not quite hold the image steady. The valkyrie I imagined was borrowed from an earlier dream, but that dream-image had itself been compounded from faces which I knew. She was not Susarma Lear, but her piercing blue eyes were certainly Susarma's, and the rest of her features seemed somehow to be struggling to acquire her whole appearance. All the female apparitions of the Nine had borrowed in much the same way— had been variations on that one basic theme—and there seemed no getting away from her sheer insistence on stamping her authority upon me. I wondered, briefly, whether I had committed the awful folly of allowing myself to become infatuated with her. It would, after all, be understandable—she was the only human female with whom I had come into any kind of intimate contact for many years.
I put that train of thought aside. There was no point at all in sexual fantasy, given that I had lost even that virtual image of a real body that I had brought into this dreamworld. I had surely transcended the desires of the flesh.
I allowed the blurred face of the valkyrie to dissolve, and let the picture in my head drift on the idle breeze of whimsy. It decayed into a sequence of surreal shapes—some of them faces or insectile creatures, but mostly abstract forms. I became hyperconscious of the fact that it was all mere illusion. The stirrings of my subconscious were somehow refracting ghostly images into my mind, but everything was feeble and unfocussed. There were echoes of memories that I no longer had the ability to recall, but there was nothing to cling to . . . nothing to help me maintain the conviction that I still existed as a whole, coherent per
son.
I had lost all contact with the passage of time; there was no reference point that would have enabled me to measure its progress. I had no heartbeat, no inner rhythm of any kind. Nor did the journey seem capable of an end, in the sense that we might reach something that could present the appearance of a new place. What change there was had now to operate within me rather than in my apparent surroundings. The images my mind had conjured up faded into darkness. There was nothing outside of me at all, and little enough of me.
I remembered that I had felt once before that I was making in fact the journey that Descartes undertook in his imagination. When I had drowned in the ocean that the Isthomi had created to carry us into software space I had come close to total extinction before recovering my sense of self.
Then, it had all been happening to me. Now, although it was all happening again, I was more self-destructively involved. I seemed actually to be casting aside all sensation of the world, and all sensation of belonging to my own body. Like a snake shedding its skin, I was sloughing off the burden of my psyche. I was not losing so much as surrendering my grip on time and memory, becalming myself in the instant of the present. But as before, I could think nothing, save cogito, ergo sum: there is a thought, therefore something exists. Perhaps it was not I who was existing, though ... or perhaps I was acquiring a liquidity of personality which made me more than myself as well as less.
I felt, anyhow, as though I—or whatever now existed in my place—had reached the very limit of existence, beyond which there was nothing at all.
From that brink of oblivion, something gradually returned. I felt that a new "I" was constituted, and did not doubt that it could qualify not merely as a self, but as my self. That self, I felt, was once again gathering substance— or, to be precise, the virtual image of substance which entities in software space possessed. I was once again acquiring a body. I could see and feel nothing outside of it—my sensorium was not yet restored—but I nevertheless had some awareness of extension and solidity. More important, I was able to bring new thoughts out of the abyss of lethargy into which the old ones had sunk, savouring their strength and agility.
Was that, I wondered, what it feels like for man of flesh and blood to die? Was it possible that once the heart has stopped pumping, and all the nerves have stopped relaying information from the sense-organs to the brain, consciousness fades slowly and peacefully away in such a manner? Perhaps there was no curtain of darkness that abruptly descended—no shock of death to bring down a guillotine on experience. Perhaps there was always that fading disconnection—an odyssey beyond sensation, beyond pain, beyond memory, beyond self.
Previously, I had always imagined that it must be horrible to die, and all the more horrible if the moment of death were extended, savagely torturing consciousness upon the rack of pain. Now, I wondered whether existence might be kinder than that, and death a more peculiar ecstasy than any which life could offer.
But I wondered too whether my sense of self was absurdly anachronistic, still trying idiotically to conceive of itself as a being of flesh and sinew, blood and brain, when it was really no such thing. Perhaps, I thought, I should have used this opportunity to cut myself off from such residual notions, and accepted fully what was surely the truth: that I was no more like the entity of flesh which produced me than a dragonfly is like a nymph, or an anonymous egg like the organism it must become.
Perhaps, I thought, I should no longer be contemplating the idea of death. For was I not now a god among gods? Had I not been brought, like many a hero before me, to share the realm that was Asgard and Olympus, to be omniscient and undying, not human at all?
I tried to train myself in that way of thinking. I instructed my new self that it had become a kind of insect, redeemed from temporary entombment in a chrysalis. Out of the wreck and dissolution of one form another had now arisen, I said, and the new must put away all thought of the old, and learn to fly.
I told myself, urgently, that there was encrypted in my soul an inner nature beyond any which I had previously suspected, which had survived not only my "duplication" as an item of arcane software but also my annihilation in that form, providing some kind of template for my reincarnation as a second software self. I had been human, and quasi- human, but now I was divine.
Was I not?
Was I not?
I imagined myself grown again from that inconsiderable atom of thought to which I had been reduced, and tried to picture what I now might be. I felt that seed of being burst forth with a renewed vitality.
But I felt also that something was wrong, and that a promise was in the process of betrayal. I felt, however paradoxical it might seem, too familiar to myself.
I was Michael Rousseau, and I felt—I knew—that I ought to be more than that.
For a time (which seemed long) I could not quite imagine what form it was that I was acquiring. I deliberately played with the possibility that I might no longer be humanoid, or even animal, and imagined myself growing as a tree, like the great world-tree Yggdrasil which I had woven into the pattern of those dreams by means of which I had tried to envision the war which had been fought—was still being fought—in Asgard's various spaces.
I imagined myself also as a spore floating in the reaches of interstellar space, drifting for millions of years, awaiting the moment of coincidence which would deliver me into a place where life could thrive—into the vaporous maw of a gas giant, or the great hoop of warm cloud surrounding a condensing sun. I imagined myself as a tight-wound thread of nucleic acid, unraveling into a world pregnant with possibility, doubling and doubling and doubling to spin raw organic matter into the stuff of life, bound into organisms which could not only reproduce themselves, but which also carried wrapped in their quiet DNA the apparatus of future evolution: the templates of a million different forms, a million different creatures whose interactions would be the seed of that intricate building process which led inexorably to the complexity of mind, the humanity of man, and the creativity of whatever being it was who was quiet in man himself—in all the millions or billions of humanoid species which the spinning thread of universal life had woven on its planetary looms.
I imagined myself as both the whole and a tiny part of the thread manipulated by the three grey Fates, daughters of Night and sisters of the Seasons. I could catch no glimpse of the Fates themselves, but remembered dimly that in one representation they were one and the same with the Keres, who carried the souls of the dead to Hades, and wore therefore the selfsame faces as the valkyries who had taken possession of my soul. I was sensible of the fashion in which that thread spilled eternally into the darkness which was the universe, woven not into a single pattern but an infinite series of patterns, each one different in detail and yet serving the same aesthetic end.
Finally, I imagined myself as an embryo, floating in an amniotic sac, shaped and formed while I grew by an unfolding plan, sustained by a placenta which I would soon no longer need, waiting for the renewal of sense and sensation, of life of my own . . . waiting for birth, or rebirth, or a place in the vast unfolding chain of being in which birth and rebirth, duplication and metamorphosis, death and putrefaction, were all mere marks of punctuation in the sentence of existence.
All of that, I knew, belonged to the realm of the possible, the realm of the real. . . .
But I knew, somehow, that it would be denied to me.
I had been shaped for a different purpose. I had not been made ready for immortality, for life in the world of the gods. I might have become divine, but instead I had been prepared for another destiny, another mission. I was still an instrument, a weapon of war. I was helpless in the hands of those who sought to use me.
Knowing that, I realised how easy it must be for men to hate their gods, and how wise it might be not to trust them.
35
The flying spider, with Clio hooked into its nervous system like a possessive demon, returned with 673-Nisreen within half an hour. He was badly shaken, and still sufferi
ng from his broken arm, but once he was free of his swaddling- clothes I helped rub his ankles to restore the circulation. He had no weapon, so we remained defenceless until Clio and her assistant brought Susarma Lear down, but nothing emerged to threaten us. The forest floor seemed to offer adequate sanctuary from the horrors that haunted the treetops.
Clio put the flying spider to sleep before disengaging herself, leaving the monstrous thing laid out across the root-ridges, legs and wings sprawled in all directions. I had never seen such an ungainly creature, nor an uglier one, and I was glad when we hurried off, leaving it to the mercy of any scavengers or predators which cared to risk approaching it while it was too dazed to resume the normal course of its life. I rather hoped that it would survive—it had played a vital role in saving us from a particularly nasty predicament, even if it hadn't been quite itself while doing so. Who was I to minimise the efforts of a helpless instrument, drafted into a conflict far beyond the scope of its own understanding?
From her temporary vantage point high up in the trees Susarma Lear had seen many small lights produced by living creatures, but down on the surface of the starshell it was much gloomier, and we had only our helmet-lights to show us the way. I had not the slightest idea which way we ought to go, but the magic box still had matters well in hand. She climbed up on my shoulders, but refrained from running her neuronal feelers through my suit and into the back of my skull. Instead she began to send electronic signals over the radio link that we used for voice contact. She couldn't manage a voice of her own but she could understand our speech, and she could answer questions on a buzz-once-for-yes-twice-for-no basis. It didn't take long to work out a rudimentary system of communication, and to figure out which way she wanted us to go.
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