Asgard's Heart (25 page)

"Does it strike you, Rousseau, that
we're a trifle redundant here?" she said.

"I don't think it would constitute a
fatal breakdown of Star Force discipline if you were to call me Mike," I
told her. "I tell everyone to do it, but no one takes a blind bit of
notice. You have to expect formality from Tetrax, I guess, but
you
could surely make
an exception."

"Why break a habit just to pretend we
know one another?" she countered. "Hell, Rousseau, I don't know the
first thing about you, for all the time I've been forced to spend in your
company. Anyway, what I mean is, it seems to me that this fancy robot truck
could do the job all on its own. It doesn't need us to drive it, or to shoot
its guns—that goddamn suitcase could do it all, couldn't it? Even if the
levers we finally have to pull are mechanical, the suitcase and the furry

hermaphrodite could do the job. Why are
we
here,
Rousseau?"

It didn't seem to be worth pursuing the
matter of my name, or even following up her point about how well we could claim
to know one another.

"We're here," I said,
"because the Isthomi find this whole situation just as puzzling as we do.
They don't know what the hell to expect in the lower depths, but there is one
fact about Asgard—and, for that matter, about the universe—which leads them to
harbour the suspicion that we poor creatures of flesh and blood must, in the
final analysis, be good for something."

"I'll make a deal," she said.
"I'll try to remember to call you Mike if you promise not to conduct
conversations as though they were guessing games. Never mind the buildup—just
skip to the punch line."

"The Isthomi," I said, in a
faintly injured tone, "are very clever. They're also very handy. They seem
to be superior to us in every way—which is why we occasionally get this feeling
of redundancy. But what Asgard is mostly full
of. . .
and what the galaxy
beyond Asgard's walls seems to be mostly full
of ...
is beings like us. What the Isthomi can't understand
is why, if beings like themselves are so bloody clever, the universe isn't full
of them. They keep looking over their shoulders in the hope of catching a
glimpse of their Achilles heel. Maybe they already got shot there a couple of
times, during their contacts with whatever is loose in Asgard's software space.

"The Isthomi are so powerful that they
seem to us to be godlike, but they aren't really gods. They're vulnerable in
all kinds of ways. We blasted our way through the hostile hardware that came
after us, but that wasn't the real war. It was just a throwaway move. We may
yet have to withstand an attack much more insidious than the fireworks which
were left to entertain us at the bottom of the first shaft—an attack by hostile
software. Every time Clio puts out feelers to pick a lock for us she could open
herself up to the kind of devastation the Nine suffered when they went
exploring in the heart of Asgard's software space. When it comes to the crunch,
there might be no one left to carry this fight forward except the likes of you
and me. So look after that Scarid crash-gun you've taken to wearing—one day
soon. . . ."

I was forced to pause in my melodramatic
discourse because the truck lurched, and I had to brace myself against the
ceiling of my bunk space as we wobbled drunkenly. It seemed that we were under
way, and that the mechanical precision of the bendy legs which were walking us
down the shaft was by no means perfect. I sighed, unable to fancy my chances of
getting a good night's sleep. I wasn't sure that I wanted one, anyhow—I was still
apprehensive about dreaming, and the fact that the biocopy foisted on my brain
had now been recopied into something more like its natural form in harness with
my
alter ego
didn't affect the fact that it was still lurking in
the shadows of my soul.

On the other hand, I could hardly stay
awake forever.

"That explains why the Isthomi are
prepared to entertain us," she admitted, after a pause for thought.
"But what are
we
doing here, Rousseau . . . Mike?"

I looked at her in mild surprise. She was,
after all, a volunteer. Her orders had been to return to the surface, and
though circumstances had conspired to prevent her obeying them, she'd already
decided that she wasn't going back. I realised now, though, that her motives
for making that decision had been almost entirely negative. Her orders had
seemed to her to be bad ones, inspired by forces that did not have human
interests at heart, and her instinct had told her to disobey them. She hadn't
thought it through much further than that.

"We're trying to save the
macroworld," I reminded her. "If we needed a reason, we got it when
the power was switched off. Before that, we had the fact that I seemed to have
received a cry for help . . . and before that we had simple curiosity: the
desire to solve the biggest puzzle that fate had ever thrown our way—excepting,
of course, such commonplace mysteries as the origin of life, which may not be
unrelated to it. Isn't that enough?"

"I guess so," she said. "But
I can't help feeling that we may be biting off more than we can chew. Whatever
the scheme of things is really like, creatures like us are very, very tiny,
aren't we?"

I'd always known that. I realised that
somehow, she'd never quite got hold of the idea before. I remembered the way
she'd conducted herself when she first arrived on Asgard, blithely suggesting
that she could always bomb Skychain City into slag if she didn't get her own
way. I supposed that active participation in the virtual genocide of the
Salamandrans had given her inflated ideas about the importance of
homo sapiens
which were only now
being deflated to a true sense of proportion.

"Well," I said, "it was a
virus whose individual particles can be measured in Angstrom units which
destroyed the Scarid empire of twenty billion humanoid beings. Nothing's
insignificant, if it's in the right place at the right time, doing the right
thing."

I felt embarrassed about sermonising, but
as I repeated my own words back to myself for reinspection, I couldn't help feeling
that, as sermons went, my little homily had its merits. Unfortunately, Susarma
Lear was in the mood to export a little of her newfound sense of deflation.

"The problem is," she said,
pensively, "that as you kindly pointed out to me up above, we really don't
know what we're doing, do we?"

I'm sure that I could have thought up a
convincing reply to preserve a few of my delusions of grandeur, but I was saved
from the responsibility by the fact that at that precise moment in time
something very big and very heavy landed on top of the truck with an almighty
crash, and broke our hold on the walls of the shaft.

What had been sideways suddenly became
down, and I was catapulted out of the bunk. The only thought which my brain
could then accommodate was the terrified realization that twenty-five
kilometres was a hell of a long way to fall, and that even the low-gee wasn't
going to save us from being comprehensively pulped when we hit the bottom.

18

It was time for our blond Vikings to come to life and
do their stuff, but there was one awful moment when they simply stood,
inanimate, while the walking dead streamed all over them.

"The bow!" cried Myrlin as I
reached reflexively for the sword at my belt. I knew that it would be useless
to protest that I had never fired an arrow in my life, from a longbow or any
other contraption; not knowing what magic had gone into my present making, I
might easily discover myself a match for Robin Hood.

I snatched up the quiver from its resting
place and slung it over my shoulder; then I snatched up the bow and notched the
first arrow in the string. It was a stoutly- timbered weapon, and I could well
imagine that it was first cousin to the one which Penelope's suitors had toiled
in vain to bend, but it offered little resistance to me as I drew the string
back and took aim at one of the skeletons which had a little more flesh on it
than most, and which had established a coign of vantage on the figurehead. I
loosed the arrow, and saw it fly with a speed that belied the apparent
slackness of the string. It hit the bone-man square in the sternum and exploded
his entire rib cage, sending slivers of bone in every direction.

The Vikings were moving now, lashing out
with their swords and spears. A couple were whirling battle-axes around their
heads, and wherever the blades met the brittle skeletons the bones came apart
with satisfying ease. Automata our fighting men might be, but they were none
the less fearsome for that—they never hit one another, and they commanded
nearly every square metre of space on the deck with their flashing blades. The
skeleton men poured from their macabre craft in such profusion that they seemed
sure to overwhelm our forces by sheer weight of numbers, but they were mostly
smashed to bits as soon as they came within range.

One bony warrior leapt to the mast, and
climbed like a gibbon to a place of relative safety, then grabbed a spear right
out of the hand of one of our burly supporters. It made as if to hurl the weapon
at the deck where we stood, but Myrlin knocked it from its perch with an arrow
that went into its eye-socket, plucking its steel-helmed skull from the
vertebral column and carrying it over the side into the sullen water.

The scraping impact of the two ships had
brought us to a virtual standstill, and the entire length of our small vessel,
save only for the afterdeck, was alongside the hull of the other. The platform
where Myrlin, the goddess, and I were standing was not quite as open to attack
as the main deck below, but it was no longer beyond the reach of the corpselike
warriors as they swung on their silvery ropes. The bow was no longer any use
and I cast it down again, drawing my sword from its scabbard. I had to swing it
with unseemly haste as two of the vile things came swinging through the air at
me, reaching with their own rusted blades. I caught them both between the
pelvic girdle and the bottom rib, and cut them in half.

I couldn't help feeling that it was all too
easy, and that these creatures, for all their revolting ugliness, were far too
feeble to be used as serious instruments of intimidation. But then I saw a
blond swordsman stagger, and watched him pulled down by groping hands which had
no right to be active at all, and I realised that it was not enough to break
the skeletons, because the scattered bones were somehow able to reconnect
themselves, reassembling new bodies from the shattered parts of the old.

The automata had cut down so many opponents
in such a brief space of time that the deck was already littered with bones of
every kind, and from that debris a new generation of enemies had already begun
to form. Rising unheeded from the timbers they had struck more than one deadly
blow at our defenders, and even those which no longer had swords to wield were
ready and able to grapple and hinder their opponents.