Asgard's Heart (19 page)

"You are now in a world which can best be
understood—which can only be understood—in terms recalling the ideative
framework of myths and fantasies. My borrowing may seem unduly confused, but
the confusion is inherent in your own memories and your own mind, which can
draw with careless abandon on all kinds of source-materials. The point is that
these experiences can and do make a kind of sense to you—you are
at home
here, and when the time comes to act, you
will be able to draw on resources other than the reflexes which you learned in
order to operate in the material world—resources which are far less likely to
let you down."

"Less likely?" I queried.

"There are no guarantees, Mr. Rousseau. You still
have to learn to draw upon those resources, and make the most of them. We are
embarked upon a journey into great danger, and we will surely meet enemies. I
cannot tell how powerful they may be, or how clever, but they will certainly
oppose us with all the strength and cunning they can bring to bear."

I put my hand on the hilt of my sword, gingerly, not
knowing what it would feel like. It felt solid enough, but I knew too much to find
that feeling of solidity reassuring. I reminded myself that it wasn't really
solid. Nor was the ship. Nor was I. Nor was the whole vast world in which I was
adrift.

"I thought you copied us into an arcane language,
so that the hostile software couldn't get at us," I remarked. "Come
to think of it, I thought there were good reasons why you couldn't copy
yourself, so how come you're here?" The horrible suspicion began to dawn
on me as I spoke that I might have been lured into volunteering for this
mission on false pretences.

"What you see before you," she said, with a
disarming smile, "has more in common with one of my scions than with the
ninefold being which formerly employed this appearance to speak to you. I am
not so much a copy as a redaction. I have no more power here than you or
Myrlin, and I strongly suspect that I may have less. I still believe that you
have weapons other than the ones with which I have provided you, and that when
the time comes you may find a way to import extra power into the appearance of
the gorgon's head which I have added to our arsenal. It is important that you
understand this; you may look to me for explanations, but when the battle
begins, I am no more powerful than you, and probably less."

"You'd better give us those explanations," I
said, with a hint of bitterness. "Now I'm here, I have the feeling that we
haven't gone into this deeply enough in our hurried conversations of the past
few days."

"We are encoded in an arcane language," she
said. "It will not be easy for destructive programmes of any kind to
attack us—especially if, as I hope, the invaders of Asgard are unintelligent
automata. But we must assume that whatever forces are arrayed against us will
have some power to react to our presence and adapt to it, with a view to destroying
us. I think that we must expect our enemies to break into the frame of meaning
that we are imposing upon software space. They will appear as monstrous
irruptions of various kinds—I cannot tell what precise forms they will take,
but in order to attack us they will have to formulate themselves according to
the patterns that we have preset. They will, in effect, have to translate
themselves into the symbolic language which we have adopted—a language based in
your imagination."

"I have a depressing feeling," I said,
"that you're telling me that the things which are trying to kill me are
going to do it by turning themselves into the stuff of my worst
nightmares."

"That is a neat way of putting it," she
conceded with irritating equanimity.

"And our friends, if we have any?" Myrlin
put in. "They too will have to intrude themselves, in much the same
way?"

"If we receive any help," she agreed,
"it will follow a similar pattern of manifestation."

I looked at the deck where the silent soldiers were
arrayed, preternaturally still.

"What about those guys?" I asked.

"Automata," she said. "Non-sentient
programmes, very limited in what they can do. But they will help to defend us
when the time comes, and if we are fortunate we may not have to face anything
more adept than they are. The enemy may not find it easy to dispose of
them."

I had the suspicion that she was being deliberately
optimistic. While we were talking I had grown more accustomed to my bizarre
surroundings. I was beginning to acquire a feeling of belonging here. It was as
though that peculiar fellow who had elected to make his living as a snapper-up
of unconsidered technological trifles in the desolate caves of upper Asgard had
all the while been nursing an
alter ego
compounded
out of the fascinations of his infancy: an all- purpose hero equipped to fend
off nightmares and confront the gods on their own terms.

It's sad, in a way, to be forced to acknowledge the
desperate lengths to which the human condition forces us to go, within the
secret confines of our inmost souls, in search of solace and wish-fulfilment.
But I guess our private fantasies are no more unique than our faces, and
partake of no more artistry.

In another way, though, our capacity for fantasy is a
hopeful thing, because it reassures us that whatever the cold and empty
universe does in its mindless attempt to crush our vaulting ambition and make
us see how small and stupid we really are, we can mould something better out of
our common clay, and rise from our galactic gutter to contemplate the stars.

I stood up straight, staring past the gorgon's head at
the empty sea ahead of us, and wondered what kind of fabulous shore it was that
we were trying to reach.

13

I came
out of the interface with the sensation of waking from a dreamless sleep. The
filaments had already withdrawn from my flesh, and I was slumped in the chair.

Susarma Lear bent over me as soon as I opened my eyes,
and for once her own eyes were warmed with faint concern. It seemed that she
was getting to like me just a little, despite the fact that I was not cast in
the Star Force's best heroic mould.

"You okay, Rousseau?" she asked.

I breathed out, and felt the inside of my mouth with
my tongue. It was a bit fuzzy, with the merest hint of an unpleasant taste.

"Sure I'm okay," I told her. "You ever
hear a document complain about being put through a photocopier?"

Her eyes hardened again. "You're a real wit,
Rousseau," she said. "You know that?" I knew it, but it didn't
seem polite to agree, given that she sounded so unenthusiastic about it.

"How's Myrlin?" I asked, peering round the
edge of my hood at the other occupied chair. He was coming round too, and he
put up a hand to signal that he was adequate to the task of getting up and
getting ready for the next step in our campaign.

There was no rush; now that the Nine's robot arms were
programmed, they could put a new truck together more quickly than would have
been humanly possible, but that still wasn't quite the same as waving a magic
wand and saying the word of power. In the real world, these things take time.

I got out of the chair and left the room, heading back
home. I intended to use up a precious hour or so doing absolutely nothing—not
even thinking, if I could possibly avoid it. I thought I could. I wasn't keen
on having company, but the colonel came with me. There were obviously things
on her mind.

"I still don't understand," she said,
"why the bastards didn't call on me. They must have known what was happening,
even if they couldn't stop it themselves. I could have plugged Finn."

I hadn't had the time or the inclination to fill her
in on the whole thing. Clearly, the Nine hadn't taken pains to explain it to
her either.

"It was a set-up," I told her, tersely.
"The Nine wanted them to take the truck. We think they might be able to
lead us to the Centre. Whatever got into Tulyar's brain during the software
skirmishing seems to have sole tenancy now, and I guess it has a mission of its
own to complete. It may not be entirely
compos
mentis
, and there's a chance that it isn't very intelligent, but it does
want to go somewhere. We're going to follow it."

"We?"

"You said you wanted to come. Changed your
mind?"

"Hell, no. Anywhere out of here will look pretty
good to me. But are you sure that you know what you're doing?"

"No," I said, succinctly. "But there's
nothing much to be gained by staying put, is there? I'd catch some sleep if I
were you—in fact, if I were you, I'd consider myself very lucky to be able to
catch some sleep without wondering if some clever nightmare might gobble me up
and wake up in my place."

She looked at me suspiciously. "You think you
might end up like Tulyar? You're afraid that something got into your head, too,
and might be planning to take over?"

"So far," I told her, "I feel as though
I'm in sole charge. The Isthomi figure that I got some kind of donation—a weapon
for my software self to use—but they think that its only function as far as I'm
concerned is to feed information into my dreams. We're hoping that the software
which got to me was sent by the good guys, and that they're gentlemanly enough
not to do me any permanent damage—but there's no way to be sure just yet."

"If you turn into somebody else," she said,
with a less-than-wholehearted attempt at levity, "what would you like me
to do about it? Should I shoot him?"

"Well," I said, "I guess it all depends
whether you like him better than me. But if you can stand him, I'd like you to
look after him for me. Someday he might want to give my body back, and I'd
rather it wasn't all shot up."

It says something for my state of mind that this
faintly surreal conversation sounded perfectly normal. I wondered if I might
already be losing my grip, and suppressed a small shudder as I remembered the
bleak stare in 994-Tulyar's eyes. If I ever looked like that, I'd try to avoid
mirrors.

"Why do you think Tulyar—the thing that's in
Tulyar's body—is heading for the Centre?" she asked. "If the easiest
way to get there is the way your
alter ego
is going, through software space, why are the enemy trying to do things the
other way about, sending their copy through real space?"

That was a good question, and I'd already asked it of
the Nine. "We probably won't know until we get there," I said.
"But the way the Isthomi have it figured, the builders were humanoid—pretty
much like you and me, now that the Isthomi have massaged our quiet DNA into
toughening up our bodies. They created artificial intelligences to control
Asgard: man-made gods, much more powerful than themselves. Maybe they didn't
entirely trust the gods they made, or maybe they were fearful of exactly the
kind of invasion they seem to have suffered, but for one reason or the other
they may have reserved some key controls for purely mechanical operation. The
Isthomi believe that there are some switches down there which can only be
thrown by hand. Their guess is that when the invaders got the upper hand, the
builders sealed off the Centre to protect those switches, and that it wasn't
until the moment of contact, when they made a biocopy of one of themselves in
Tulyar's brain, that the invaders finally got themselves a pair of hands—or,
given Tulyar's authority and the gullibility of the Scarida, several pairs of
hands."