Asgard's Heart (7 page)

The darkness of the eyes was surprising. In my painful
and enigmatic moment of contact with whatever it was that lurked in the depths
of Asgard's software space, the Other had become manifest as a group of four
eyes, which burned as though with some consuming fire. Ever since the contact I
had occasionally had a curious sensation of being watched, as though I were
still somehow open to the scrutiny of those eyes. So why, I wondered, should
this new apparition— which surely must be reckoned a legacy of my contact— have
only empty holes for eyes.
These
eyes were
the very antithesis of those others, which I had called "eyes of fire."
These were eyes of vacuum, eyes of awesome emptiness, eyes which promised those
whom they beheld a fate so dire and bleak as to be ultimately fearful.

There was no doubt in my mind that this was a threatening
ghost, and that its projection betrayed the presence in my brain—in my inmost
self—of something hostile, menacing, and dangerous. Something lurked inside of
me that seemed to wish me harm, and here it was, struggling to get outside of
me in order to look back at me, not merely to see what I looked like, but by
the act of observation to transform that which was observed.

The conviction grew in me that this dreadful messenger
had come to me with a summons—not the plea for help that I had heard in the
moment of my first contact with the gods and devils of Asgard, but a more
urgent command. Medusa could not possibly come as a supplicant; she was
altogether too stern of countenance for that.

I had no other name to give it but Medusa, and I felt
that its gorgon stare was beginning the engagement of a battle of wills whose
intended resolution might easily be my petrifaction.

I sweated with the effort of fighting those eyes,
gritting my teeth together to express the determination I had to defeat this
influence. I did not want to be possessed; I was not about to tolerate the
presence of squatters in my inmost soul.

"Damn you," I whispered, thinking to hurt it
with sound. "Leave me alone!"

But the sound didn't hurt it, and I realised that it
was becoming clearer, achieving better focus. I could see the eyes forming on
the snakes that grew from the scalp instead of hair, and I could see the
flickering of forked tongues issuing from seams that had not been there a
moment before. I could see the line of the cheekbone quite clearly, and knew
that its bone-structure at least was modeled on Susarma Lear's—but it did not
have her hair and it did not have her eyes.

In fact, it didn't have
any
eyes. Yet.

I felt a shock of panic as I wondered what would
happen if those empty eyes should become full, and suddenly the awfulness of
their emptiness was nothing to the awfulness of their potential fullness, for
if this was indeed Medusa, the addition of those eyes might achieve the
threatened end, and harden my own soft features into grey, unyielding stone.

"Get out of here!" I whispered.
"Begone!"

But the mere command was ineffective.

Now the snakes were beginning to writhe, and to hiss
angrily at one another as if they resented their perverse anchorage and did not
love their neighbours. Several of the mouths were gaping now, to expose the
needle-sharp fangs, and the snakes' eyes were glowing like red coals. The
womanly lips were parting too, very slowly, to expose the teeth within—teeth
that were not at all womanly, but pointed like the teeth of a shark. The jet
black tongue which lapped over the shark-like teeth, as if savouring the memory
of some previous meal, was forked like the snakes' tongues, but much thicker,
and there was something curiously obscene about its writhing.

And the eyes . . . the eye-sockets were not as dark
now, and there was something in those gloomy apertures that looked like the
sparkle of distant stars.

I could not doubt that something terrible was about to
happen.

The face moved then, coming nearer to my own. It was
no longer hovering close to the ceiling but descending, with that tongue still
spreading poisonous saliva upon the jagged teeth, and those snakes seething
with frustrated wrath, and the stars in the eyes were beginning to shine. . . .

"Light!" I shouted, breaking the deadlock
with a rush of panic. "Light the room, for Christ's sake!"

It is said that the story of the universe began with a
cry of
"Fiat lux!"
although the
story in question has nothing to say on the question of whether there were
artificial intelligences already incorporated into the walls which bounded
existence, pre-programmed to answer such a call. I had the advantage of knowing
that the autonomic subsystems of the Isthomi were always at my disposal, and I
knew that my call would be instantly answered.

It was the right move.

As bright light flooded the room in response to a
bioelectric jolt, the gorgon's face—which was composed of a much frailer
radiance—was swamped and obliterated.

The monster never reached me. Its eyes were never
wholly formed. And I was made of anything but stone— there was no mistaking the
frailty of my flesh, which
crawled
as only
frail flesh can, when it has had a close encounter with something dreadful.

"Merde!"
I said, with feeling, as I sat up and
wiped sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. I groped for my wristwatch,
though the time that it showed me would be completely meaningless. There was no
cycle of day or night here, and for the moment I couldn't quite remember whether
the digital display was set to refer to a human twenty-four-hour cycle, a
Tetron metric cycle, or the forty- period cycle devised by the Scarid armies
that had brought chaos to the corridors of Asgard. By the time I had worked out
how long I had been asleep, the datum no longer seemed relevant. I did
not
want to go back to sleep.

I got up and dressed myself, then instructed the
kitchen- unit to make me a cup of coffee.

In accordance with the general improvement of the
situation, the kitchen-unit that the Isthomi had put together was now quite
clever in serving the needs of my stomach

and my
palate alike. We were well past the stage of supporting life on manna and
water, and I hoped that we might soon make progress in synthesizing a
reasonable imitation of good red wine. In the meantime, the coffee was a welcome
reassurance that the universe was not completely out of joint.

As I sipped it, I contemplated my next move. As was my
habit, the first option I considered was forgetting the whole thing, or at
least keeping it a dark secret. There were reasons why that might be a good
idea. I was hoping that circumstances would soon permit me to gather about
myself a few bold companions in order to begin my odyssey through the inner
regions of Asgard in search of the final solution to its mysteries. I could
hardly expect to attract such disciples—let alone reconcile them to the
acceptance of my leadership—if they suspected that I was insane, possessed, or
otherwise not to be trusted. No one but me had felt the urgency of that cry for
help that had come from Asgard's depths, and no one but me had the strength of
my conviction that I had understood it. It was going to be difficult enough to
talk Susarma Lear into following my lead—especially in view of the fact that I
needed her old adversary Myrlin every bit as much as I needed her—without
letting her know that I had been visited by an apparition of a gorgon's head.

On the other hand, I had to concede that I had been
way out of my intellectual depth for some time. I am no fool, by human standards—and,
despite the opinions of the Tetrax, I believe those to be reasonably good
standards—but nothing I had ever encountered in my education or my experience
equipped me to come to grips with what had happened to me in my moment of
contact with whatever it was that was loose in Asgard's software space. If I
wanted to fight this thing properly, I needed the insight and advice of

someone
much cleverer than I was, and that meant that I had no option but to confide in
the Nine. Sick and shattered they might be, but they were the only ones who
stood a real chance of figuring out what the hell it all meant.

So when I drained my cup, I turned to the nearest
blank wall, and said: "I think we ought to have a little chat."

3

The
grey wall faded away, to be replaced by what looked like another room. Although
it was just a surface image, it looked as if it had depth; I had come to think
of it as a mirror-world, like the world beyond the looking-glass into which
Carroll's Alice stepped. This was partly because it had the colour and
sharpness of a reflection, but partly because I knew only too well that the
world it represented was not at all like ours, but was instead a mad world
where the limits of possibility were very different indeed.

The figure facing me was seated on an illusory chair
which looked rather like an ornate wooden piano-stool; it was backless, but had
low side-rails. The Nine presented the image of a single person—a female, clad
in a somewhat diaphanous garment recalling (and not by any coincidence) my
vague memories of ancient Greek statuary. She seemed to be about twenty years
of age, and was very beautiful, although the contours of her face, which were
partly borrowed from Susarma Lear, now put me disturbingly in mind of the
apparition that had recently confronted me.

I coughed, in an ineffectual attempt to hide the
embarrassment that her appearance caused me. "I don't want to appear
rude," I said, "but could you possibly put some less provocative
clothes on?"

The image changed, without a ripple or a flicker, and
she was now clad in a severely-cut Star Force uniform; but her hair was black,
not blonde, and she seemed less like

Susarma
Lear than she had before.

"Thanks," I said.

"Something is wrong?" she observed.

"Maybe," I said, unenthusiastically
wondering whether this was, after all, the best thing to do. Now the room was
bright and I was face to face with what looked like another human being, my
experience began to seem much more like a bad dream, and an alarmist reaction
seemed absurdly out of place. "I don't suppose you were monitoring this
room a moment ago?" I asked.

"Of course not. Since you expressed to us your
anxieties about privacy, we reserve our attention, and take our place only in
response to your summons."

I knew that. "I saw something," I said.
"I don't think it was real, though. Not
solid.
Perhaps it was just a dream."

Her face reflected her interest and concern. It was
odd that her mimicry of human mannerisms went so far, but it was something the
Isthomi had very carefully crafted into the programme that produced her. The
Nine had taken great care in the rebuilding of their appearances, and took
quite a pride in their simulation of expression and nonverbal patterns of
signification.

"Please describe it as fully and accurately as
you can," she said.

I did my best, stumbling over a couple of details, to
give her a complete account of the hallucination. When I had finished, she was
radiating puzzlement like an over-enthusiastic method actor.

"Can the silent movie bit," I told her with
slight asperity. "We both know it was some kind of residue from that
interface when I made contact with whatever it was that nearly took you apart.
What I want to know is, was it an attack of some kind? Am I playing host to
some sort of