Asgard's Heart (6 page)
Authors: Brian Stableford
1
I did
not set out on life's great journey with the intention of becoming a demigod.
Indeed, when I was a boy growing up on Microworld Achilles in the asteroid
belt, it had never occurred to me that such a career choice was possible.
Had I known then what destiny had in mind for me, I
might have stayed home and spared myself a great many hazards—an exciting life
was not something that I particularly craved. On the other hand, now I know how
incomprehensively vast the Great Scheme of Things really is, and how very
difficult it is for a single individual to amount to anything within that
Scheme, I cannot help but feel a certain sense of privilege in having become
what I am.
I claim no great credit for the fact that out of all
the billions of people who happened to be within Asgard at the critical moment
of its history, fate selected me for the crucial role; I was desperately
unlucky to be saddled with the responsibility, and fantastically fortunate not
to make a mess of things. But the impossible had to be done, and circumstance
determined that I was the one who had to do it.
On two occasions in the past I have found it
convenient to commit parts of my story to tape, and those earlier slices of
autobiography must still exist somewhere in the universe, though I am not sure
that it will ever be possible to assemble them in one place to form an
eccentric trilogy. I will be brief in summarising the events described therein.
In the first of those accounts I described how my
attempts to scrape a living as a scavenger, recovering technological artefacts
from the topmost levels of Asgard, were suddenly complicated when my fellow
human Saul Lyndrach discovered a shaft which gave access to more than a hundred
levels which had never been breached by any member of the galactic community.
Saul was prevented from enjoying the fruits of his discovery because he was
murdered by some of the more barbaric members of the community, headed by the
loathsome Amara Guur, but they in turn were frustrated by their inability to
read French, the language in which Saul had kept his notes.
It so happens that I am of French-Canadian descent,
and it transpired that I was the one man on Asgard who could read Saul's notes,
so the gangsters who had stolen them set out to entrap me. As things turned
out, however, I was not delivered into the hands of my enemies, but into the
hands of Earth's glorious Star Force, who had a very different reason for
wanting to locate Saul's dropshaft. What
they
wanted was to hunt down and kill an android who called himself Myrlin, who had
been manufactured for nefarious reasons by the Salamandrans, lately defeated by
humankind in a minor interstellar war.
Suffice it to say that our expedition into the lower
depths of Asgard culminated in an orgy of murder and mayhem, carefully observed
by the technologically-sophisticated inhabitants of a level deep inside the
centre of the macroworld. Confused by the discovery that the universe was much
vaster than they had previously imagined, and rather different in kind, these
super-scientific machine- intelligences then elected to seal themselves off
from further contact with the galactic community.
In the second chronicle of my adventures I described
how turmoil erupted in and around Asgard when the galactic community's base
there was overrun by barbarian invaders from the lower levels, and how the
leading citizens of the galactic community, the Tetrax, who were led by the
fact that these invaders closely resembled human beings, recruited humans to
help them in trying to find a solution to their diplomatic difficulties.
Naturally, the double-dealing for which the Tetrax are justly notorious
precipitated the helpful humans in question—including me—into very deep
trouble. This, however, was only a prelude to the development of much greater
problems deeper inside Asgard.
My eventual return to the level inhabited by the
machine- intelligences—who called themselves the Isthomi (or, not being very
numerous, the Nine)—discovered matters in extreme disorder. Awakened to a new
awareness of the mysteries of the universe, the Isthomi had set out to explore
the structure of Asgard, trying to make contact with the similar intelligences
that they assumed to be running the show. Alas, they suffered considerable
injury as a result of the attempt, discovering only the sad truth that if
Asgard had ever had great and godlike machine-minds presiding over its vast
inner spaces, those minds were either dangerously mad, or embroiled in some
kind of conflict whose nature mere humanoids could hardly begin to comprehend.
The war that was raging through the upper levels unfortunately
extended its baleful influence to the world of the incapacitated Isthomi, and
the reckless stupidity of the warriors in question resulted in my being forced
to interface with the machine-mind while a second contact with intelligences
closer to the centre was taking place.
After sharing in that moment of contact—and hearing, I
thought, an enigmatic cry for help—I was not quite the man I had been before.
My mind had not merely been disturbed, but altered in some as-yet-unfathomable
way. To say that I was resentful about this invasion of my innermost privacy
would have been understating the case, but there was no going back. I knew that
I would have to play my part in the interesting times that had suddenly
returned to the lower depths of Asgard, no matter what that part might be.
It turned out to be a more vital and more peculiar
part than I could ever have imagined.
2It
began, I suppose, with the haunting.
I had become used to "ghosts" of a certain
kind. Following their near-destruction, the Isthomi had found great difficulty
in arranging any kind of manifestation of themselves that would present to
their humanoid guests a reassuring appearance. Their attempts to produce the
appearance of a human face with which to address me had resulted only in
blurred images etched in white light upon the night-black walls of their realm:
images I could not help but think of as ghosts. But those ghosts differed from
the one that later came to haunt me in two very vital respects. Firstly, they
were in and of the walls of the worldlet; they inhabited the "body"
of the Isthomi. Secondly, their appearance, however confusing or disturbing it
may have been at first, was not in any way threatening.
The new ghost seemed very different—and it frightened
me very badly.
I had been having a nightmare—one of many which had
troubled me since my forced contact with the denizens of Asgard's software
space. I can remember certain fleeting details of it: a falcon fluttering
helplessly because its leg was caught in the jaws of a trap; a sphinx padding
softly across the sands of a great desert, following a guiding star; dark gods
and fearsome titans taking formation for some awesome, awful battle. All of
these things seemed to my dreaming consciousness to be direly prophetic of
chaos to come, of a destruction and devastation which would consume both the
universe in which I existed and the private universe which was within my mind.
The memory of a dozen other dreams of like kind was
still in my mind as I awoke. I remember being quite certain in my mind that I
was
awake, and that was why I was so very
surprised and frightened when I opened my eyes and saw the ghostly entity that
was hovering over my bed.
The room in which I was lodged had no windows, but its
internal lighting did not fade to pitch-darkness. The artificial bioluminescence
of the ceiling retained a glimmer, reminiscent of starlight, even while I
slept. Because of that faint radiance, it was not easy at first to see the
apparition, whose own glow was very little brighter. It became obvious neither
because of its brightness nor its shape—which was not very well focused—but
because it was shimmering slightly, like a shifting haze.
I realised immediately that what it was trying to be
was a face. I do not speak metaphorically when I say that it was
trying,
for I was in no doubt that there was some
kind of intention involved. The face seemed to be about two metres away from
me, directly above my head as I lay on my back looking upwards, but I quickly
concluded that this was an illusion. It was not a
thing
hovering in mid-air; it was some kind of virtual image, projected
there in appearance only.
Only for the briefest of moments did I toy with the
supposition that the Nine were at work. Their image- control had increased so
wonderfully in recent days that they were most unlikely to present such a weak
appearance, and in any case, their phantasmal appearances always remained
confined by the walls. This one was obviously different. I quickly came to the
conclusion that its source was in my own brain.
In short, I was seeing things.
I did what everyone does when first confronted with
such an awareness: I tried to stop seeing it. I blinked, and shook my head, but
neither of those feeble gestures accomplished anything, save that they made
the image shimmer and waver a little more. Having exhausted that line of
approach to the problem I tried the next obvious course, which was to try to
see it more clearly, squinting in the attempt to bring it into better focus.
Concentrating hard, I realised that it was a female
face, but that something was wrong with the upper part of it. The hair was not
right. For a moment, its appearance reminded me of the startling halo of blonde
hair which was Susarma Lear's crowning glory, but then I realised that the
strands were much too thick—that they looked more like the tendrils of a
sea-anemone than actual hairs. Then I looked at the eyes, which were like dark
pits, and I felt a distinct thrill of fear.