Asgard's Heart (33 page)

I went back to the cab, more to get out of
the way than because there was anything that I could usefully do there.
Susarma, still suited up, came to join me. I could see that there was a feverish
light of action in her eye, and knew that she was going into existential
overdrive. I'd seen her that way before, and was convinced that it would one
day be the death of her.

"This is it, Rousseau," she said,
tautly. "Better get your arse suited up and your adrenaline in gear."

"Sure," I said, lightly.
"This is it. Marked down in my diary:
appointment
with sudden death, survive if feasible.
Do you think you could possibly call me
Mike?"

"It's not the Star Force way,"
she told me. "And I suspect that now is the time when we have to start
doing things the Star Force way—don't you?"

The Star Force way consisted, in essence,
of trying to reach the target by torching everything in the way. Bearing in
mind what might be waiting for us, though, I had an unwelcome suspicion that
she could be right. From now on, things would probably have to be done the Star
Force way, all the way to the Centre.

24

I passed from my unreal state of consciousness into a
dream within the dream. I was still in the grey water, though it seemed calmer
now and not so cold.

The armour I wore was hardly heavy at all,
but it was slowly dragging me down. I tried to lash out with my limbs, with
some idea in mind of bringing myself back to the surface, but all my actions
were unnaturally slow and heavy, as though the water had the thickness of
honey.

I tried to blow out the water that I had
taken in, but I had no strength with which to do it, and in any case my lungs
were no longer desperate for air. My feebly thrusting arms became entangled
with the waterlogged cloak that had been swept around me in a great arc, so
that I could not make any sensible attempt to perform the actions that were
demanded by my entirely theoretical notions of how to swim. Gradually, I ceased
struggling.

Once I had surrendered entirely to my slow
fall into the depths, I became disentangled again, and the cloak streamed out
from my body almost as though it were a great black parachute retarding my
descent. The water was quite still now, and as the surface receded into the
distance above me it took on the aspect of a great white-lit plane of crystal.
Below me, by contrast, there was a dark abyss with no hint of illumination.

The coldness had by now gone out of the
water—or perhaps my flesh had adapted to it—and the viscosity too was no
longer so noticeable, so that the experience of moving

through it was more like falling through empty space.
I could have imagined myself adrift in the lightless void of interstellar
space. There was a silence more profound than any I had ever experienced
before.

I found it possible to open my mouth, but
could not feel anything moving in or out of it. My chest was quite numb, and I
had no sensation of breathing. Nor was I aware of any internal pulse-beat; it
was as though time had stopped.

As the last vestiges of light faded away,
leaving me in total darkness, I was swept by a feeling of unutterable loneliness,
which drowned out all thought and memory for an unmeasurable pause. I felt that
I was shrinking into a curious vanishing point—that every last vestige of my
soul was evaporating, lost and irrecoverable.

I was certain that this was my experience
of the moment of death. I believed that I had drowned, and would be no more as
soon as my last moment of sensation was exhausted. I felt a small surge of
gratitude that the moment was unmarred by pain or terror, and was calmly ready
for extinction.

Whether extinction came, requiring me to be
somehow resurrected, or whether my acceptance of death was premature, I do not
know. I was next aware of a small
presence of mind.
I do not know how
else to describe it, because I am sure—however paradoxical it may sound—that it
was not an awareness of anything save that I was aware. Perhaps it was that
irreducible quantum of certainty which Descartes tried to reach, imaginatively,
with his dictum:
Cogito, ergo sum.
There is a thought,
therefore there is a thinker.

Strangely, though, I remained in doubt as
to whether the thinker was me, or whether I was merely the thought in the head
of some enigmatic god or giant. I was not sure whether I was still dreaming, or
whether I was now
being

dreamed.
But work of some kind was going on: work
of reconstruction, perhaps of re-creation. Something was taking shape, and
although I was part and parcel of that shaping, I could not honestly say that I
was doing it. If there was any part of me actively involved, it was a
subconscious part.

I am not sure how to describe what was
being built, because it had that absurd property of entities in software space
that what it looked like depended entirely on the eye of the beholder—it was
itself pure essence. When I tried to see it, I had to decide what I would see,
and I had no basis for making any such
decision ...
no basis, at any rate, within my conscious mind.

It may mean nothing, therefore, to report
what images did come into the burgeoning mind that might or might not have been
mine. I will have to take the chance, and say what I can.

Perhaps it was a web spun to span the
darkness by an invisible spider—across and across, then around and around, in
a curving spiral. The anchor-points of the web were not arranged in a circle,
but were instead the points of a tetrahedron, so that the web curved in all
three dimensions, and then was slightly hollowed like a net, as though the
centre were being dragged away at right angles to everything else— into the
fourth dimension, I must suppose.

Perhaps I caught brief sensations that
might have been echoes of the dancing feet of the spinner as it whirled around
its web, but perhaps those tremors of vibration were part of the life of the
web itself.

The web caught nothing, and though it might
have shuddered in some kind of breeze, it was never stretched taut at any
point.

Perhaps the web was spun between the
branches of a great tree—though I had the impression that the tree grew up to
bear the web, shaped by the necessity of bearing the web. As I began to
perceive the tree there must have come into existence some kind of light by
which to see it—my experience of the web had been entirely tactile—and the
radiance quickly increased as the tree expanded its dimensions. A whole
universe seemed to be expanding around me, hyperspherically. The tree was
everywhere; it was the whole of creation, the very structure of existence. Its
trunk grew in entwined circles, like a knot of infinite complexity, and its
branches radiated into all the space which would otherwise have been undefined,
bearing foliage and multitudinous blossoms of every colour in the spectrum,
which poured out silver pollen in never-ending streams, and reached out their
star-shaped styles to bathe in the deluge.

There was a thought, and the thought was:
This is the magical
universe, in the process of its Creation. This is all that is and ever shall
be.

Then there was an awakening.

I do not say that it was I who awoke. I
cannot be sure of that. It was, however, my hand that felt the moistness of the
sand and the warmth of the sun, my head that felt the sickness and the
dizziness of a painful return to consciousness, my limbs which ached with
exhaustion.

There was a sitting up—and that is the
truth of it, though there is little point in continuing this narration by means
of such circumlocutions.

For the sake of convenience, then,
I sat up.

I was saved. I had been rescued by
something that had caught me at the very moment of destruction and preserved me—or
remade me, perhaps more in its own image than I had been before.

I looked around, and found myself on a
sandy beach. The ocean, whose waves still lapped the sand about my booted feet,
was blue with the reflection of a bright and cloudless sky, in which a golden
sun blazed directly ahead.

I got slowly to my feet, and examined my
body. I was still clad in the red quilted armour, but my cloak was gone. My
sword was still in its scabbard at my waist. I was bareheaded. The feeling of
intoxication and unreality that had attended my first incarnation in software
space was entirely gone now. I felt, however paradoxically, like the
real
Michael Rousseau.

I looked inland, to see what kind of shore
I had been brought to. There were many trees, so closely grouped that they
presented a considerable barrier. The space between their gnarled trunks was
filled with their own thorny branches, and with the spiked leaves of flowerless
plants that grew between them. The trees were strange in the extreme, because
their trunks were moulded in the approximate form of human beings with arms
vertically upraised, like wooden people rooted at the ankles. The branches of
the trees were extensions of the fingers of these luckless imprisoned souls,
growing madly into a tangled leafy crown. The faces etched into the upper part
of every bole each had the appearance of a man or woman sleeping, with eyes
closed and expressionless. They ranged in colour from ivory white to ebon
black; some seemed polished, others very rough.

I was standing on the sand, with the waves
lapping at my heels. The wall of vegetation was no more than three metres away.
I could see no obvious way into the thicket, but I approached anyway. The
spiky leaf-blades of the plants that made up the undergrowth were very supple,
and they seemed to writhe away from me as I approached.

When I came closer still, the tree-people
appeared to wake from insensibility; the eyes opened, and though the faces were
fixed in wood, and should have been incapable of expression, they seemed to
look at me with such pain and horror that I flinched. Only the eyeballs moved
within the sockets—the mouths etched in the bark apparently could not open to
display teeth or tongue, nor could they contrive the slightest of smiles. And
yet I was in no doubt at all that here were souls in some perverse state of
torment—souls which were alarmed by my approach. The foliage of the trees
rattled as if the boughs were being shaken from within, and the sound had the
semblance of a childish language, as though the trees were babbling in a
hopeless attempt to tell me something.

I stepped back from the edge of the forest,
and turned away from the staring eyes to walk along the beach, hurrying to a
place where the faces still slept. I did not try to approach too closely again,
and when I glanced back I saw that the faces I had left behind had closed their
eyes again, and gave every appearance of having returned to their dream-filled
slumber.