I coughed, feeling a gout of blood rising from my belly into my mouth, but I knew that I had to remain standing. Whatever else I did before I died—and there was something I had to do—I had to destroy the alien that had made use of 994-Tulyar's body to breach the defences of the starshell. Whatever mischief he was trying to work, he had been mere moments from completing it, and it wouldn't be enough to hurt him. He had to be finished.
I watched, impatiently, while he got his arms inside the futile grip which 673-Nisreen was trying to secure, and thrust outwards both ways. The bioscientist's grip was broken, and Tulyar threw him off. While Nisreen tumbled through the air in grotesque slow motion pseudo-Tulyar groped in desperation for the needier that he had dropped.
But in throwing Nisreen aside he'd signed his own death-warrant. I had a clear shot now, and I fired.
For the first time, I missed.
I was supposed to be the low-gee expert, the man from Achilles, but I fired the last bullet before I had quite brought my hand to a standstill, and I wasn't properly braced against the kick of the gun.
I felt a surge of nausea, but I couldn't even pause to swallow the blood that was in my mouth. I coughed again, spraying tiny flecks of red all over the hood, but hurled myself forward anyhow, knowing that I had to hit him before he could fire the needler.
I had my arms out ahead of me, and it was the gun I was holding which slammed into his helmet, but now he was the one who was braced and I was the featherweight. When he thrust out at me with his arms I began to do the same slow somersault as Nisreen. I went all the way over, and by the time I was facing him again I was staring straight down the barrel of his gun, looking failure and death in the face.
But when the needles came, they missed me again. The zombie had fired just a fraction too late, and the convulsion which sent the shots wide was caused by the impact of a stream of needles which passed through his right eye and cheek, ploughing into the brain and destroying whatever strange entity it was that had taken possession when 994-Tulyar's own real self had given up the ghost.
673-Nisreen was holding John Finn's gun. It was he who had fired. Finn was lying dead at his feet, and when Nisreen dropped his eyes to avoid looking at 994-Tulyar's corpse he looked straight at the bloody mess inside Finn's helmet. Tetrax can't turn pale, but Nisreen did the best he could, and I saw him shudder convulsively.
I thought I knew how difficult it had been for him to do what he had just done. In a way, he'd done exactly what Finn had, and taken the side of an alien against his own species-cousin, but I knew he hadn't done it for the same reason. Whatever Tulyar had been telling him when I woke up, he hadn't believed. Reason had told him which side to be on, and even though what he'd done was making him sick to the core of his being, he'd done it. It only looked like the Star-Force way; the motive behind it had been something very different.
I hadn't time to do or say anything. I took my place in the chair where pseudo-Tulyar had been sitting, and looked at the keyboards and the dials. There must have been two hundred different switches, and although every one had been shaped with humanoid fingers in mind, I couldn't make any sense at all of the symbols.
I raised my hands, feeling a frightful sense of utter frustration rising inside me.
And then some kind of bomb went off in my head.
I began to punch the keyboard furiously. There were no flashing lights or ringing bells to give evident warning of the fact that the power build-up in the starlet was about to discharge itself, and I had in fact lost all consciousness of the fear that Asgard might very shortly be turned into nova debris. I had not the slightest notion what I was doing, or how, and my self-consciousness seemed to be locked into some absurd psychostasis, whereby I could watch my hands but could feel no connection with them whatsoever.
I had not even sufficient presence of mind to wonder whether this was how Myrlin had felt when the creature lurking in his brain had sprung its sudden ambush, and made him into what he had so tragically become—the traitor who had very nearly turned the war around.
When my hands finally finished their work, they just stopped. I must have been struck rigid in the chair, frozen into stillness. How much time there was to spare when I completed the sequence, I have no idea. The conventions of melodrama demand that it be a mere handful of seconds, and I can't say for certain that it wasn't, but the simple
truth is that I did not know then and do not know now.
I wondered, as I sat there, perfectly still, whether it was now safe for me to die. I was feeling no authentic pain, but in myself I felt absolutely awful. If someone had told me then that I was dead, I could not have denied it with any conviction.
When I felt a touch on my shoulder, I looked up to see 673-Nisreen staring down at me. The poor guy still hadn't much idea of what had happened, or how, or why, and he was desperate for some reassurance that he'd done the right thing.
"What have you done?" he asked, starting with one of the easier ones.
That was the moment when I discovered that I did, in fact, know what I had done. I didn't know how, but I knew what.
"I shunted the power which had built up in the starshell into a stresser, to wormhole the macroworld," I told him. "Which is exactly what they did a million and a half years ago, when the battle first reached its critical phase. The builders were still around then, in humanoid form. They didn't survive the consequent skirmishes, but at least they got the starshell sealed off, and left the war to the software gods who were equipped to fight it."
"Where are we?" he asked. I could see from his eyes that he was quick enough on the uptake to know that a thing the size of Asgard would make a hell of a wormhole. I knew he wouldn't be overly shocked by the answer.
"I don't know," I said. "I moved us, but there's no way to know where. At a guess, we've come a couple of million light-years. I hope you don't feel homesick, because we aren't ever going to see the Milky Way again, let alone Tetra. Asgard's all we have now—we might even have to practice being nice to the Scarida. There are still billions of them up there. I doubt that there are more than a couple of thousand Tetrax, or a couple of dozen humans."
The needles were churning in my guts, but somehow I had them sealed off. I was bleeding inside, but I had enough blood left in the arteries to keep my brain going. I felt light-headed again—anaesthetised.
He began to work his way up to the difficult questions.
"It wasn't Tulyar, was it?"
"No," I confirmed. "It wasn't Tulyar, and it wasn't Myrlin. Whatever their short-term plans may have been, they meant no good to your species or mine, or anything else that's truly alive. I don't know what it was that made them, but when it comes to the choice between our gods and theirs, it has to be ours that we go out to fight for. I'm certain of that, if nothing else."
"How did you do it?" he asked. "How did you know what to do?"
"Physically," I said, "I feel like half the man I used to be. Mentally, I fear that I may be a little bit more. The copy of my consciousness that the Nine launched into software space was somehow retranscribed into my own brain. It's been through a lot, and it's come every bit as close to extinction as my poor fleshly body, but it was strong enough, at the end, to carry another injection of programming into biocopy form—a set of instructions for moving the macroworld.
"The gods found themselves a hero, Nisreen. A demigod—whatever you care to call it. Believe me Nisreen, there's a part of me that has seen things and been things nobody should be asked to see and be. The penalty of living in interesting times, I guess."
I had a question of my own, though I didn't really expect
him to be able to answer it. "Is the colonel still alive?"
"Yes," he said. More time must have passed than I thought. I must have been sitting still for several minutes— time for him to take a look.
"I don't know how," he went on, "but she's still alive. I'm not sure she can survive for long, though, unless we can get help."
"Help," I sa
id, "is not a problem. This is the real Centre of Asgard, and from this seat you can do anything, if you know how. The gods that the builders made to look after themselves and their creations can be summoned from the vasty deep and made to do our bidding. It's all at our fingertips, now. If Susarma can be saved, she will be. You too. Even me—although it may take a long, long session in one of the Nine's magic eggs. We're going to live, Nisreen, thanks to you. If you hadn't stopped Tulyar. . . ."
"It wasn't 994-Tulyar," he said, with a sudden flare of wrathful indignation of which I would never have believed a Tetron capable. "It was something obscene. Something. . . ."
He couldn't even find words for it, and I realised belatedly how desperate had been the decision which he'd made. Reason had only been a part of it—and maybe, in the final analysis, not the most important part. The Tetrax identify with one another rather more closely than humans do. The brotherhood of man may be nine-tenths pretence, but the brotherhood of the Tetrax is something else. The thing that had stolen Tulyar's body hadn't killed Nisreen because it thought that it could recruit and use him the way it had recruited and used John Finn, but it had been wrong. As I looked at 673-Nisreen, I realised that even if I hadn't managed to hit back—even if pseudo-Tulyar had managed to use the starlet's power to destroy Asgard's gods—the war wouldn't have been over. Far from it. The Tetrax might still be primitive by comparison with the builders of Asgard, but they were on the side of life, and they would have entered the lists with every last atom of force at their disposal.
I knew that the war was still going on, throughout the universe, but I was hopeful.
It wasn't just that we'd won our tiny little skirmish— there was more than that to help me to hope.
Whatever imagination it was had created the demons of Asgard had a hard fight on its hands if it intended to annihilate life itself, because life had men as well as gods, and hearts as well as minds, and its enemies had not.
38
I touched Susarma's shoulder, very gently. She opened her eyes, and stared up at me stupidly. She didn't know where she was; maybe she didn't even know who she was.
"Sorry," I whispered.
I let her look at me for a few seconds. Her brain had to start working in its own good time.
"Rousseau?" she said, very faintly. She smiled. Her mind was a million light-years away, and she was floating, high as a kite.
"I thought ..." she began, and then stopped, probably thinking that she was about to say something silly.
"You thought right," I told her, calmly. "We should both be dead. But the Nine fixed us up. We're supermen, remember?"
She tried to sit up, but I put out my arm to restrain her. Her eyes widened as she felt the damage inside her. She was carved up more thoroughly than I was.
She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. I had to guess what questions she probably had in mind.
"Help," I said, "is on its way. The gods of Asgard are back in Valhalla. The power is back on in the levels. You and I are hurt pretty badly, but thanks to the Isthomi we can come through it. I'm not sure that we can stay conscious, but I know we aren't going to die. The war within Asgard is over, save for a little mopping-up. 673-Nisreen is okay, and in better shape than either of us, except that he broke his arm again while saving my life.
"That's the good news. The bad news is that we're a million light years from home and we aren't ever going to be able to go back. Maybe even that has its brighter side. If the Star Force still exists, you're the grand commander—She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. I can't think of anyone who could play the part better. It's not inconceivable that you're the only human female of child-bearing age on Asgard, but with Isthomi biotech to help us there's no need for you to worry unduly about becoming the mother of the species—I dare say we could have a thousand kids without troubling ourselves with any greater intimacy than passing the test tube and arguing about what to call the brats."
She wasn't in any condition to laugh at the joke, and she looked more annoyed than amused. She wasn't the maternal type.
"Did you get that bastard android?" she whispered.
"It wasn't him," I told her, dully. "It was some other bastard, just using him. He never really had a chance, did he? First the Salamandrans, then the evil masterminds of Anti-Life. Given the opportunity, he'd have been a better man than you or I, but he got all the rough deals that fate could find for him."
"Did you get him?" She had a one-track mind.
"Yes," I said. "No clever illusions this time. No mistakes. I blasted all hell out of him. You'd have been proud of me. I got Finn too. And the thing that was pretending to be Tulyar. I got them all, the Star Force way. No ifs and buts . . . just blood and guts."
She looked up at me. There wasn't a trace of hero-worship in her pale blue stare.
"As of now," I told her, "I've resigned. You can keep the medal."
She smiled faintly.
"You got to the Centre," she said, "didn't you?"
I looked around. The lights were back on in the levels, but not here. We were surrounded by darkness, dust, and the dead.
"I got to the Centre," I agreed. "All the answers are here . . . and I have all the time in the world to find out what they are."
It was true, in a way. Our friendly neighbourhood gods would be only too pleased to give me a more leisurely explanation of anything and everything, as soon as someone had put my intestines back together and I was fit to be told. I could have the unedited version of the history of the universe, and all the lessons in life-science I could possibly desire. All the secrets of Asgard the Ark, Asgard the Fortress, and Asgard the Universal Landscape Gardener would be mine for the asking.
I could have long conversations with any god I cared to name, and share classes with Athene of the Isthomi.
Magnifique.
Something deep inside me echoed my ironic cheer. I was not the man I used to be, and I knew that what was lurking now in the darker recesses of my brain might yet trouble my dreams far more than any scary vision of Medusa, even though it was really only me.
Only me!
I had a lot of finding out still to do, and I knew only too well that although my perilous journey to the Centre of Asgard was over, my journey into the depths of my own being had hardly even begun.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRIAN STABLEFORD was born in 1948 in Shipley, Yorkshire. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and the University of York (B.A. in Biology; Doctorate Phil. in Sociology). From 1976 to 1988 he was a Lecturer in the Sociology Department of the University of Reading, teaching courses in the philosophy of social science and the sociology of literature and the mass media. He has also taught at the University of the West of England, on a B.A. in "Science, Society and the Media." He has been active as a professional writer since 1965, publishing more than 50 novels and 200 short stories as well as several non-fiction books; he is a prolific writer of articles for reference books, mainly in the area of literary history.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Asgard's Heart Page 28