Asgard's Heart (38 page)

"What is a parachute?" asked
Urania, mildly. I looked at her in amazement, having long since accustomed
myself to the fact that the Nine, one way or another, had soaked up absolutely
everything that humans knew. But the scions were only partial personalities,
created in the days before I began the intimate interfacing which had given the
Nine fuller access to my memories. And everything they knew from experience
about habitable worlds was based on their acquaintance with the levels. No one
uses or invents parachutes when the solid sky is only twenty metres away.

"You mean," I said, "that
those bags you packed for the bikes don't contain parachutes?"

"No, Mr. Rousseau." She stopped
there, perhaps offended that I hadn't taken the time to reply to her question.

"So
how are we expected to get down there?" I asked,
satirically. "Do we strap on wings and learn to fly?"

I could tell by the way she looked back at
me that it wasn't as witty as I thought.

Susarma Lear seemed paradoxically pleased
by my discomfort, though she would surely have preferred, had she been thinking
rationally, a method of descent which made some use of her training.

"Don't worry," she said, with a
feeble attempt to imitate Urania's calmly infuriating tone. "Flying can't
be
that
difficult. Insects do it all the time."

I looked her in the cold blue eyes, so that
I could watch her reacting to what she'd said as the implications sank in.

"In the Star Force," I said,
maliciously, "we really have to be ready for anything, don't we?"

28

I was quite ready to believe that I was beaten, but I
felt that I had to give resistance a try. After all, I had no idea how good I
was at swordsmanship. Perhaps I was d'Artagnan as well as Robin Hood.

I moved forward, striking as best I could
at one of the warriors. His own sword came up to meet mine, and when the two
clashed, my blade shattered as if it had been made of delicate glass. I was
left holding the hilt, foolishly looking down at the broken end.

The remaining fighting-men had remained
quite still, their animation still suspended. The one I'd lunged at resumed
the same position. Another man came between two of the warriors, and stood
before me, looking me up and down with what seemed like frank curiosity. He
bore a slight resemblance to John Finn, but the similarity was very
superficial. This was a much taller and more handsome man, and though he had a
Finnish slyness about him, he had also a self-confidence—a kind of authority
implying aristocratic habits—which the sole remaining representative of the
humble house of Finn could never have carried off.

He smiled. It was a nasty, cruel smile that
reminded me of Amara Guur.

"I don't know you," I said,
rather stupidly. I felt dreadful, and I knew that if I were to look down at my
body there would be little to see but rags and tatters of putrefying flesh. I
was quite convinced now that they really had beaten me. The language of my
constitution was no longer arcane

so far as they were concerned.

"No, Mr. Rousseau," he said, in
an oddly mellifluous voice which didn't seem to fit his wicked face.
"You've never seen me before—not even in your dreams. And yet, I am no
less a figment of your imagination than the others. The appearance which I have
is one which you have bestowed upon me."

I didn't know what to say, so I said
nothing. I didn't even know why the game was continuing—there was no obvious
reason why they would want to talk to me before they destroyed me.

"We are at home here," said the
tall man, sounding not unfriendly. "This is our world. You had power here,
but you did not know how to use it efficiently. You never really had a chance
of surviving here, and your friends the Isthomi were over-ambitious in what
they tried to do. Believe it or not, we bear you no animosity. Our war is not
with your kind, but we must do what we must do. Think of it only as a dream,
Mr. Rousseau. The pain which you suffer here is not the pain which flesh is
heir to. It is a mere passing incident."

When a sleeping man is close to wakefulness
while he is still dreaming, there is a moment when he can exert the power of
his returning consciousness within the dream, to shape and control it. I longed
for such a moment now, wishing that I could do something to change the emerging
pattern, but I could not even lift my arm to offer some futile gesture of
defiance. I was frozen into stillness like those unhappy souls held fast by
the trees of the forest, and all I could do was look about me.

I saw that we were in a city—a city built
from grey stone and white marble, almost incandescent beneath the blazing glare
of the huge sun. The buildings were very tall, decorated with tall arches and
mighty colonnades, their facades decorated with sculptured images of battle. My
own position was in the centre of a vast square thronged with people, but the
pavement on which I stood was raised, so that I and the circle of swordsmen who
surrounded me were above the level of the crowd by half a man's height. There
was a great deal of noise as the people in the crowd moved about, chattering
and shouting. I could make no sense of the few words that I caught within the
cacophony, which were in some alien tongue that I could not understand.

Not everyone was looking at me, but I was
the centre of attention here; it was as if I was a prisoner brought out for
ritual humiliation and execution. This was the seat of judgment to which I had
been summoned—dead or alive—in order to hear my condemnation. The elements of
the city's architecture had been dredged from my vague and ill- conceived
notions of what the cities of ancient Earth must have been like, which owed far
more to antique movies than to any real knowledge. It seemed oddly appropriate
that I— the merest pretender to godhood—should go to my destruction on the set
of a low-budget epic. My other self had only been capable of dreaming
second-rate dreams, and I was suffering now from the absurdity of his meagre
pretensions.

Somewhat to my surprise, I felt a desperate
desire to know the answers to a few questions, although I did not doubt that I
would take those answers with me to oblivion in a very short space of time.

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."