Authors: Brian Stableford
I
dreamed that my body was wrapped around by snakes, whose warm polished scales
slid over my skin as they writhed and coiled around me. I was not squeezed by
the coils, for these were not constrictors bent on crushing me to death, but I
was held tight, unable to move. I could see their eyes glowing in the darkness,
and where their heads touched me I could feel the slick forked tongues
caressing me . . .
tasting
me. . . .
That dream dissolved, and took me back to one which
had visited me before:
My dream of Creation, in which the life born in the
great gas-clouds which drifted in interstellar space still poured into those
tiny lighted wells which were solar systems, enfolding those tiny fragments of
supernova debris which were planets, finding niches in the dense atmospheres
of gas-giants and the oceans of water-worlds.
The cosmos was so vast that all the matter which was
in it was no more than a storm of dust blown about by uncaring energy-winds,
and the molecules of life such a tiny fraction of matter that all life—all that
great universal ecocloud—was no more than a haunting phantom or shadow,
tenuous and precarious. And then there came again that other: the thing which
was not life yet threatened life, which I could not quite bring into my
framework of understanding.
This time, my perspective continued to alter, so that
I lost sight of the ocean of stars which was the visible universe, and saw
instead the molecules of life engaged in the game of evolution, building
themselves into more complex cells, and then into multi-cellular beings, adding
new orders of magnitude to their complexity. Now I saw the pattern of life, as
it extended through the vast expanding universe of space, as if it were a prodigious
tree spreading its roots and branches wherever there was room for them to go,
producing gorgeous flowers and fruits wherever they touched a world which
provided the vital elementary seeds around which such flowers and fruits might
flourish. I saw Earth as one such fruit, Tetra as another, and all the galaxies
as branches bearing flowers and fruit in abundance: fruit glowing with internal
light, while the flowers sang and filled infinity with their scent.
As well as its flowers and its fruits, the tree was
swarming with commensal creatures of every kind—with insects and birds, frogs,
and tunneling worms. Though many of these were parasites which took their
sustenance from the tree and left damage in their wake, they were no real
threat to the continued existence and health of the tree, and I knew that what
damage they did was only part of a continuing process of death and
transfiguration, wherein a kind of balance was sustained.
But then I saw that there was another kind of blight
in the tree—a canker which reached out its desiccating grip wherever it could
to turn the flowers leprously white and shrivel the fruit into dry husks. Many
of the canker's instruments mimicked the population of the tree, appearing as
tiny parasites—whatever kind of force this was, it could produce pseudo-life of
its own, but in so doing it
denied
the possibility of balance and of permanence, for this blight was something
which could only destroy or be destroyed. It permitted only two ends—either the
blight would be obliterated, or the tree would die. This was true of the whole,
and of each and every part that the blight had reached. There were many
branches yet untouched—their flowers beautiful and fresh, their fruits luscious
and sweet—but there were many that had already withered, and others where
resistance held the canker's instruments in check. Ultimately, the fate of the
entire tree was at stake, and any one of these tiny battles might prove crucial
to the destiny of the whole. . . .
Then I woke up again, with the desperately tired
feeling that it had all happened before, and would all happen again. I was no
longer master inside my own skull, and every time the fragile hold of
consciousness was shaken loose, my imagination was up for grabs, ready to be
shot full of whatever psychic propaganda was coded into the rogue software
that was gradually increasing its authority within my brain.
And yet, I was still
me.
My essential self hadn't been blighted or damaged at all.
At least, not yet. There was no way of knowing how
long a thing like the one which had taken over Tulyar might lie dormant, if it
was prepared to bide its time.
Under other circumstances, I might have devoted a
little time to a more detailed consideration of the pollution of my dreams, but
as soon as I opened my eyes such minor anxieties were displaced by more urgent
concerns.
I realised that the nightmare about the snakes had considerable
foundation in reality. I was trussed up tight by some kind of thick, sticky
thread, wound so thoroughly about me that I was encased in a virtual cocoon,
with only my head sticking out at the top. I struggled to free myself, but my
arms were pinned against my side, unable to move. As I kicked against the
confining bonds I found that my thighs were just as firmly held, but that I
could wiggle my feet. My whole body swung as I tried unsuccessfully to bend at
the waist, and I deduced that I must be suspended from above by a number of
threads. I had the small consolation of being right way up, but that was the
only blessing I could count in a dire situation, apart from the fact that I was
still alive.
I tried desperately to shift my fingers, and contrived
some small movement, but they were spread out and bound to my thighs. I must
have dropped the needier, and could not tell whether I had ever managed to fire
it.
My headlight was still working, and I could turn my
head enough to play its beam around my gloomy surroundings. I found that I was
inside some kind of chamber whose walls were dense thickets of grey, leafless
branches. It seemed to be roughly spherical, but there were a number of thick
threads running across the cavity, apparently rigid. These were coated in what
looked like dried glue, which was occasionally gathered into globules shaped
like drips that had solidified just before they began to fall.
The bottom part of the spherical enclosure was heaped
with big white things like elongated footballs a metre long and as thick as a
man's thigh. The heap was partly covered by great gobs of slimy stuff. They
looked to me like eggs, and I shuddered to think what manner of hungry
offspring might be destined to hatch out of them.
Suspended from the roof of the chamber by strands of
the dried gluey stuff were a number of neatly-wrapped packages which—I realised—must
look pretty much like me. Like me they all had heads poking out at the top, but
none of the heads was remotely humanoid. Every one of them was probably some
kind of giant insect, but like the moths on the bottommost level of outer
Asgard they didn't have compound eyes, and that gave them something of the appearance
of nocturnal mammals. Though their jaws and palps and antennae were
arthropodan, their eyes were big and wide and innocent. Like me, these other
prisoners were still alive—their antennae and their mouth-parts moved as though
they were engaged in a sign-language conversation. Some, at least, stared at me
while I stared at them, and they seemed—though it was surely an illusion—to
pity me in my awful plight.
We were all installed in some kind of larder. We were
fresh meat laid in to feed the babies that would soon emerge from the enormous
eggs.
Whatever had come after us as we tried to fly down to
the shell surrounding Asgard's starlet had obviously caught me. It had brought
me back to its nest. I wondered whether I ought to be grateful that it hadn't
simply torn me apart. Then I wondered how long it was likely to be before its
eggs started hatching, and how long it was likely to take the larvae to devour
me if they started with my feet and worked upwards. Then I remembered the
difficulty the tentacled slugs up above had had when they had tried to unwrap
their prey, and I wondered how long it would take these things to chew through
the super-tough plastic in which I was encased.
I realised, with a small frisson of fear, that the
life-support system hooked into the flesh of my neck could keep me alive for a
long time, even if something was slowly eating me.
Then, belatedly, I wondered what had happened to the
rest of our little party.
"Hey," I said, tentatively, into the
microphone. "Is anybody there?"
"Rousseau!" came the explosive reply. There
was only one voice, and it was Susarma Lear's.
"Susarma?" I echoed. "What happened to
the others?"
"Jesus!" she said, "I thought you were
all dead. What the hell are you playing at, Rousseau? Where are you?"
"I only just woke up," I told her, in an
aggrieved tone. "As to where I am, I wish I knew. But I'm in terrible
trouble. Whatever grabbed me trussed me up like a mummy, and I'm hanging here
in what looks horribly like a larder."
"Can you see any of the others?" she
demanded.
I took another careful look at my companions, but all
the ones I could see were definitely non-humanoid.
"Not unless there's someone directly behind
me," I said. "I can't crane my neck that far. Where are
you?"
Before she could reply, there was the sound of a long,
sleepy groan. I knew it wasn't her, and it didn't sound like Myrlin or Urania.
"Nisreen?" I said. "Nisreen, is that
you?"
There was a slight pause. Then he answered. "Mr.
Rousseau?"
"Where are you, Nisreen?" I asked.
There was another pause before he said: "I am
immobilised. I think I am hanging in mid-air. I can see several creatures whose
heads resemble moths or beetles, wrapped up as I am in. . . ."
"Shit," said the colonel, interrupting him.
"That means I have two of you to look for, and I don't even know where to
start. Talk about hunting needles in haystacks. I need that damned brainbox,
but I haven't heard a peep from Urania or Myrlin."
"You're free, then?" I said. It was hopeful
news, though it was no guarantee of my salvation.
"Yeah," she said. "Thing grabbed me. I
would have blasted it but it had hold of me and I didn't fancy joining it in
free fall. I played dead until it landed—then I filled the bastard full of
needles. I'm in the crown of some incredibly massive tree—must be a couple of
miles high, as near as I can tell. My wings got damaged and I don't dare to try
to fly. There's more light here than I could have guessed when we were looking
down before the jump—glow-worms of some kind are here, there, and everywhere, and
the trees seem to produce light themselves. I can see hundreds of the damn
things in every direction, but the forest isn't so densely packed that I can
walk from the branches of one tree into the branches of another. It's going to
take me half a day to get down to the floor, unless I take a risk and jump, and
I don't know which way to go to look for either of you."
It didn't sound promising.
"Myrlin?" I said, hopefully. "Urania?
Is anyone there?" If they'd been able to speak, they would have spoken already,
and I knew it. Suddenly I felt horribly alone.
"A couple of other things have come after me, but
they're very slow," said Susarma. "I figure I can make it down to the
ground. But I can't see anything that looks like a helmet-light, and I'm not
sure I'd be able to tell it from the glow-worms if you
were
within sight."
"Unfortunately," I said, drily, "I'm
pretty sure that we aren't. I'm inside something that probably looks like a
giant pumpkin from the outside. Nisreen is presumably in another one of the
same kind. But we could be twenty or thirty kilometres away as easily as right
next door."
"Well what the hell am I supposed to
do,
Rousseau?" She sounded very annoyed, but
I knew that it was just a cover-up. Really, she was feeling utterly and
completely helpless.
"I don't know," I said, feebly. "I just
don't know."
"It would seem," said 673-Nisreen,
"that I have little chance of extricating myself from the bonds which
confine me."
"In that case," said Susarma, with a sigh,
"we're in trouble."
That seemed to me like an understatement. I looked
down again at the eggs. It didn't really matter what loathsome kind of thing
would emerge therefrom—a monster is only an egg's way of making an egg, just
like a chicken or a man. All life, if my vivid dreams could be credited with
putting things in their proper perspective, was part of the same unfolding
pattern, the same infinite thread darting from the spool of Creation to be
caught by the loom of fate.
In being eaten by some infant creature I would merely
be casting the molecules that had briefly been me back into the cauldron of
life, where they would be redistributed again and again and again in the aeons
to come. Even if the local food chain were blown to kingdom come when the
starlet went nova, the atoms would still exist, hurrying through the infinite
void until they were gobbled up by greedy microorganisms a billion years from
now, to start the story over in some other region.
Looked at in that way, it didn't seem to matter so
much. From
that
perspective, hardly anything
mattered.
But none of that affected the fact that poor Mike
Rousseau—the one and only; the most important entity in the universe from the
viewpoint of his own tiny, narrow mind—was facing an imminent, agonising, and
utterly horrible death without having completed the last leg of his journey to
the centre of Asgard.