Asgard's Heart (28 page)

My funny dream had left its imprint on my
waking self. I had the history of the universe and the destiny of all flesh
very much in mind. The pain in my head was ebbing away, but it didn't leave me
feeling normal. I had that medicated feel you sometimes get when your
pain-bearing nerves have been switched off—as if it was low gee outside my
skull and zero gee inside it.

"Well," I said, "as it's all
so utterly boring, I might as well go lie down."

I should have known better than to tempt
fate like that. We crested another rise and were suddenly heading downhill. All
four wheels had lost their purchase—which wasn't surprising, because we were
riding a landslide and the dust was traveling faster than we were. It was
coming up in front of us in great billows that cut visibility to absolute zero,
and for all we could tell the ground might have swallowed us up entirely.

For all of five seconds I wasn't in the
least worried. After all, I was used to levels that had twenty-metre ceilings,
where even the deepest lake would barely cover your head if you walked across
its bed. I assumed that the slope couldn't go on for long, and that we'd be
bound to hit bottom any second.

Then the five seconds became ten, and I
knew we were in trouble. For all I knew, this was the laundry-chute that would
take us all the way down to the bottom of the world.

In a way, it wasn't so bad—after all, the
bottom of the world was exactly where we wanted to go. But how many tons of
dust would we be buried under, if and when we got there? And how in hell were
we ever going to pick up the trail that we'd very nearly lost even before we
fell into the hole?

20

The mist was slowly clearing, as though to let us
witness the extent of our predicament, and we stood by the rail, morosely
inspecting the expanse of weed which was thus revealed to us.

We were stuck fast. Though the oars still
struggled to find some purchase amid the choking fronds of the weed, we could
see that they were fighting a hopeless battle. It seemed that there was weed of
every kind and texture—kelps and wracks, filamentous green weeds and rubbery
brown weeds, were all tangled together into a straitjacket overlaying the
surface upon which we traveled. There was not a hectare of clear water to be
seen, and there were many places where the bulk of the weed was so great that
it formed hillocks and mounds in the water. It looked as if we might descend
from the ship and walk upon it, so thickly was it clustered, but I would not
have dared to trust that appearance.

"What now?" asked Myrlin, sourly.
"Will they send an army of giant crabs marching across this desert sea to
attack us? Will other monsters gather beneath its shield, invisible until they
thrust themselves up all about us?"

"A better question," I said,
"is whether they need to do anything at all? Why should they trouble to
find a means of destroying us, if they can hold us immobile? Wherever our goal
might lie, it seems to me that we can come no nearer to it unless we can find a
way to break out of this trap they've set to catch us."

We both looked to our guardian goddess for
an answer,

but it was plain that she was temporarily perplexed.

"I confess that I had not anticipated
this," she admitted. "Whatever it is which acts against us, it has
found a way to confine us. I do not know how this has been done, and without
knowing how, I cannot see a way to escape."

I had laid down my bow and sheathed my
sword. I was not entirely ungrateful for an opportunity to pause, because I
felt that I had hardly begun to come to terms with this hallucinatory realm,
but I knew that any delay could only work to the advantage of our enemies.
Their hostility had so far been relatively impotent; they had not yet learned
the ontological rules by which our natures converted the raw material of
software space into experience—the magic of our being still held good. But they
were the natives of this space, and it could only be a matter of time before
they gained full measure of the demonic powers they were anxious to possess in
order to turn our little fantasy into a full-blown nightmare. Myrlin and I did
not belong here at all, and even the lovely goddess in whom the Nine were
embodied, however much better adapted to this milieu she might intrinsically
be, was a novice in this business of warfare by witchery.

"Could you burn the weed the way you
burned their weird ship?" I asked.

She stared at me blankly, the light seeming
dim in her eyes. The pale perfection of her features seemed too inhuman to be
truly beautiful. I did not even know whether my present form was capable of any
analogue of sexual desire, but I did not think her capable of inspiring it,
despite her careful mimicry of human beauty.

"Perhaps. . . ." she said,
dubiously.

"If it is only a matter of finding the
right magic . . ." began Myrlin, but then he shook his head in confusion.

"Only," I echoed, with a
mirthless laugh.

"But you have shaped this dream of
ours," complained the black-clad giant, addressing himself to Pallas
Athene. "We did not find this place; it came into being with our coming.
Why can you not define by the force of your will the ways by which we may
control it?"

"We are far from being
omnipotent," she told him. "We have laid down the rules which
determine how things will appear to us, and now must abide by them. If our
enemies find strategies which our rules permit, though we had not thought of
them ourselves, we cannot arbitrarily cancel their legitimacy."

"Is it nothing but a game, then?"
he asked her, bitterly. "When I agreed to do this, I thought it something
more."

"Games are merely fantasies," she
said, "which reproduce the structure of experience. Yes, this is a game,
if you care to call it one, but what is at stake is the life that you have
here, and countless other lives, here and elsewhere. There is no more for it to
be."

"Then we have only to find the right
countermove," I said, "the capture
en passant
which will let us
out of the trap . . . the formula of power which will burn the weed or wither
it with blight, or cause a herd of friendly sea-cows to rise from the depths
and consume it with avid appetite."

She was still looking at me, steadily and
without resentment. "Yes," she said. "That is what we must
do."

"I can't help," I told her.
"You're the one with all the magical artistry at her disposal."

She shook her head. "Not so," she
said. Her gaze moved at last, wandering to the hammer that Myrlin held,
weightlessly, in his hand. But what use was a hammer against a Sargasso of
clinging weed? I turned to look at the carved figure-head—the symbol of
whatever power might be contained within
my
being, waiting to
erupt. Would it do us any good to be able to turn the weed to stone? Perhaps—if
the stone were as brittle as glass. But I didn't know how. I didn't even know
to release whatever power I might be harbouring: I knew no
open sesame!
which might unlock
the
doppelganger
of my soul.

"It is possible," she said
thoughtfully, "that this was the state which the war within Asgard's
software space had reached. Perhaps the opposing forces, unable to destroy one
another, had succeeded only in bringing about some kind of crystallization,
whereby each held the other immobile and impotent. Perhaps that state of
crystallization was shattered by our initial intervention—suddenly destroyed,
liberating the armies on either side. Perhaps that is the state to which things
must soon return,
unless. ..."

She was thinking that while the situation
was fluid, there was an opportunity for a conclusive advantage to be gained,
here or in the physical centre to which my
alter ego
might now be
drawing close. But there was something else in what she said that had caught my
attention. She had spoken of the possible immobilisation of the contending
forces as a crystallization, but the analogy which came to my mind was
petrifaction
—a conversion of the
living, active flesh to rigid, impotent stone. Was that the nature of the
weapon with which I had been entrusted? Was that why it appeared to me as
Medusa's head? Was I the crystal-seed whose mission, in the thinking of those
who had summoned me here with their cry for help, was to restore stillness and
impotence to the heart of Asgard's software space?

It was not easy to work out how I ought to
feel about that. I had seen enough of the levels to know what effects the long
stagnation of Asgard's systems had had upon many of the habitats and their
humanoid prisoners.

But what alternatives are there?
I asked
myself.
And have I really any choice at all in what I do?

I wondered how much choice Perseus had had,
pushed hither and yon by the whims of the Olympians. But the Olympians
themselves, I remembered, had been subject to the workings of an implacable
destiny—beyond the machinations of the gods there was the instrumentality of
fate, symbolised by three dark sisters spinning the thread of time and life.

I watched the oars, still scraping the
surface of the knotted weed, albeit in half-hearted fashion now. They were
still working autonomically, trying to repeat the action of rowing, but they
seemed pathetic in their inadequacy, like the legs of a beetle turned over on
its back, unable to right itself.

The image brought an idea into my mind, and
I turned back to the goddess. "How extensive is the command which you have
over the ship?" I asked. "Could you alter its locomotive action?"

"We are the ship," she replied,
plainly. "It is our body, as much as this is." She pointed her finger
at her breastbone as she spoke. By "we" she meant, of course, the
Nine, not the three adventurers whose descent into Asgard's inner depths had
been interrupted.

"Then you must stop trying to
swim," I told her, "and begin to crawl. Make the blades of your oars
into hands, and brace the shafts like the legs of a walking insect. If the weed
is strong enough to hold us, it may be strong enough to support us, provided
that our weight is sufficiently spread out."

She turned swiftly to look at the oars, and
I could see by the returning light in her eye that I had offered her a possible
solution.

I watched with her as the oars stopped
their futile pawing. The blades grew into shapes which more resembled the feet
of a wading bird, and the shafts became jointed. As soon as the feet were all
in position, the legs began to lift, and though it seemed for a moment that the
sucking surface tension of the sea would hold us down, our hull broke free, and
we were suddenly on top of the weed. One or two of the feet broke through the
matted surface, but there were too many points of support to make our position
precarious, and the legs began to move, a wave passing along the rank like the
kind of wave which passes along the many legs of a millipede as it makes its
painstaking way along. At first we walked slowly, as though fearful to fall,
but we quickly picked up speed, and soon were running at least as rapidly as we
had earlier been able to row.