Asgard's Heart (45 page)

"Rousseau!" complained my two-man audience,
avid for news.
"What's happening?"

"I fell out of the frying pan," I yelled—not
knowing quite why I was yelling—"and now I'm in the fire!"

And then, abruptly, my stomach turned over again. It
wasn't because we had changed direction again, but because we had actually
stopped. We were quite still, not because we were hovering, but because we had
landed. Beyond the ugly head I could see the edges of the vast wings, which
were vibrating gently. I tried to crane my neck around, to see if we were on
the ground, or merely perched on a branch, but I couldn't turn far enough.

I looked up into that huge unfathomable face,
wondering which of those many eyes were focused on me. I didn't know whether or
not dinnertime had finally arrived, or whether the monster was just taking a
breather before flying back up to return me to the larder, but I was just about
past caring. It didn't really seem to matter much any more.

The tentacles placed me very carefully on the ground,
feet downwards, but didn't let go. If they had, I'd have fallen over. Then
something very weird snaked round the side of the monstrous head, and poked at
me. It was long and thin and silvery, and for a moment I couldn't for the life
of me imagine what it might be. Then it began to slice through the threads that
bound me, neatly and with awesome efficiency.

"Zut!"
I whispered, in sheer amazement. "I
think the bastard's friendly!"

"What?" said Susarma Lear. She wasn't
shouting any more, and neither was Nisreen.

"I think I made it," I told them, realising
as I was cleverly released from my uncomfortable confinement that I really had
made it. The pursuer that had pounced on the nest-robber hadn't been an
outraged victim of theft—it had been a would-be rescuer. No doubt it had been a
predator among predators when first it got involved in the little melodrama,
but it must have been the one predator that was taken completely by surprise by
its prey.
This
beastie had managed to snatch
the agile box which was carrying the Nine's most versatile daughter, and
instead of a square meal it had bought itself an artificial parasite which had
run half a hundred synthetic nerve-lines through its chitinous hide to hijack
its entire nervous system. The stupid monster had never had much of a mind of
its own, but now it was under the dominion of a brain far superior to any other
in this entire ecosystem.

Within a couple of minutes I was free, though the
circulation to my feet had been inhibited and I found myself temporarily unable
to stand up. I sat down on a woody ridge of some kind, and rubbed my ankles
enthusiastically.

I explained to Susarma Lear and Myrlin what had
happened, and told them to find a safe place to wait. "She's got some way
of homing in on us," I said. "She can hear us even though she can't
talk back. She's still in control of the situation. The monster's taking off
again now, Nisreen—I think it'll come after you, this time. Don't panic when
you see it. Just let it bring you down. In no time at all, we'll all be
together again. We made it. It was a close one, but I think we made it! Hell
and damnation, I think we've made it!"

My exultation died as quickly as it had come when I
remembered, suddenly, that some of us hadn't made it. Urania, who had been
carrying Clio when she jumped, hadn't been as lucky as me. Whatever had grabbed
her had been looking for an instant meal instead of something to save for the
little ones. Even Myrlin, whose giant size had presumably made him the tastiest
morsel of us all, had found his fighting prowess inadequate to the slaying of
such dragons as inhabited this vile region of Asgard's inner space.

I looked around then, more soberly. I could still
savour the triumphant sensation of having reached the legendary Centre, but
there was a bitter undertaste that spoiled the experience. I also looked around
for a place to hide. The flying spider which had Clio's brain-box perched on
its back couldn't stick around to look after me, because it had more urgent
work to do. It had saved me from two nasty fates, but there might be any number
of greedy things lurking in the woods at ground zero, and I hadn't so much as a
dagger with which to defend myself.

There wasn't much in the way of undergrowth down on
the forest floor, and there didn't seem to be anything too big or too terrible
wandering around between the radiating root-ridges of the trees, which extended
in every direction, fusing together wherever they met. The impression I got
when I shone my light around was that the actual surface of the starshell was
covered in a deep carpet of woody tissue, interrupted by very many pits and
crevices of unknown depth.

I found a flat place that was as far from holes and
cracks as I could manage, and crouched down, trying to keep a lookout in every
direction. What I would do if anything hungry and vicious emerged from one of
the pits I wasn't entirely sure, but I was certainly ready to fight. Having
come this far, I wasn't about to be intimidated by any humble vermin from the
local Underworld.

I waited patiently for the party to be reassembled. Although
we had lost Myrlin and Urania, Clio was still in the game, fighting with all
her electronic might. Even if 994-Tulyar and John Finn had made it past the
flying nightmares, we were still four-to-two superior, and we had the
cleverest player on the field. We still had to find a doorway into the starshell,
but in the space of half an hour I'd come all the way back to the land of the
living, having earlier been written off as so much sandwich meat stored in
readiness for a birthday party. I felt as though I was on a miraculous
winning-streak.

The Centre of Asgard, where the answers to all the
puzzles in the universe were waiting to be discovered, seemed to be mine to
possess, and I was irrationally convinced that nothing could stop me now.

34

I fell
into a kind of trance while we moved through the mist. I could no longer see or
hear, and the thoughts with which I laboured to maintain my stream of
consciousness were fragile and sluggish. I could readily believe that I was
dead, as something wearing the appearance of Amara Guur had told me I was. I
could accept that this was only a kind of afterlife: a slow shriveling of
consciousness, an evaporation of the human spirit.

Whatever power I had possessed to force that which was
outside of me to conform to my expectations of space and matter was gone now. I
was no longer conscious of my own medusal form, and could not feel the
slithering of the snakes upon my head. I struggled against the apparent erosion
of my being. Although I could no longer see, I tried to picture things in my
mind's eye. I was sure that my companion was still there, still engaged in the
business of transporting me through Asgard's software space, and I tried to
reconstruct his image in the inner space of my soul. I reconstructed him as
Saul Lyndrach, but then I realised that Saul was only an appearance that he had
worn, based in a whim of my expectations. I tried to picture the entity
differently, then, as a valkyrie carrying my packaged soul to the Valhalla in
which it was destined to rest, awaiting the possibility of some enigmatic
rebirth into the grey matter of a living brain. I did not doubt that I had
earned my place in the paradise of warriors; although I had been an instrument
rather than a mover in all that had passed since I had been so strangely born
from the grey matter of my prototype, I had surely shown an abundance of
courage.

For some reason, I could not quite hold the image
steady. The valkyrie I imagined was borrowed from an earlier dream, but that
dream-image had itself been compounded from faces which I knew. She was not
Susarma Lear, but her piercing blue eyes were certainly Susarma's, and the rest
of her features seemed somehow to be struggling to acquire her whole
appearance. All the female apparitions of the Nine had borrowed in much the
same way— had been variations on that one basic theme—and there seemed no
getting away from her sheer insistence on stamping her authority upon me. I
wondered, briefly, whether I had committed the awful folly of allowing myself
to become infatuated with her. It would, after all, be understandable—she was
the only human female with whom I had come into any kind of intimate contact
for many years.

I put that train of thought aside. There was no point
at all in sexual fantasy, given that I had lost even that virtual image of a
real body that I had brought into this dreamworld. I had surely transcended the
desires of the flesh.

I allowed the blurred face of the valkyrie to
dissolve, and let the picture in my head drift on the idle breeze of whimsy. It
decayed into a sequence of surreal shapes—some of them faces or insectile
creatures, but mostly abstract forms. I became hyperconscious of the fact that
it was all mere illusion. The stirrings of my subconscious were somehow
refracting ghostly images into my mind, but everything was feeble and
unfocussed. There were echoes of memories that I no longer had the ability to
recall, but there was nothing to cling to . . . nothing to help me maintain the
conviction that I still existed as a whole, coherent person.

I had lost all contact with the passage of time; there
was no reference point that would have enabled me to measure its progress. I
had no heartbeat, no inner rhythm of any kind. Nor did the journey seem capable
of an end, in the sense that we might reach something that could present the
appearance of a new
place.
What change there
was had now to operate within me rather than in my apparent surroundings. The
images my mind had conjured up faded into darkness. There was nothing outside
of me at all, and little enough
of
me.

I remembered that I had felt once before that I was
making in fact the journey that Descartes undertook in his imagination. When I
had drowned in the ocean that the Isthomi had created to carry us into software
space I had come close to total extinction before recovering my sense of self.

Then, it had all been happening
to
me. Now, although it was all happening again,
I was more self-destructively involved. I seemed actually to be casting aside
all sensation of the world, and all sensation of belonging to my own body. Like
a snake shedding its skin, I was sloughing off the burden of my psyche. I was
not
losing
so much as
surrendering
my grip on time and memory,
becalming myself in the instant of the present. But as before, I could think
nothing, save
cogito, ergo sum:
there is a
thought, therefore
something
exists. Perhaps
it was not I who was existing, though ... or perhaps I was acquiring a
liquidity of personality which made me more than myself as well as less.

I felt, anyhow, as though I—or whatever now existed in
my place—had reached the very limit of existence, beyond which there was
nothing at all.

From that brink of oblivion, something gradually
returned. I felt that a new "I" was constituted, and did not doubt
that it could qualify not merely as a self, but as
my
self. That self, I felt, was once again gathering substance— or, to
be precise, the virtual image of substance which entities in software space
possessed. I was once again acquiring a body. I could see and feel nothing
outside of it—my sensorium was not yet restored—but I nevertheless had some
awareness of extension and solidity. More important, I was able to bring new
thoughts out of the abyss of lethargy into which the old ones had sunk,
savouring their strength and agility.