Asgard's Heart (34 page)

Many of the trees carried fruit—bright
bulbous things coloured yellow or red—but they were high in the crowns, and
none had fallen to the sand.

I did not know where I was going, but I
strode out purposefully, never pausing. I do not know how long I walked. The
sun did not move in the sky; it remained directly overhead.

There were outcrops of black rock about me
now, some of which jutted four or five metres above the sand. Etched into the
surfaces of these rocks were outlines representing various kinds of animals:
horses, deer, some kind of cattle. I half-expected to see these beasts open
their eyes as I passed, but they never did.

I had become very thirsty, and was glad to
see among these rocks a pool of water, surrounded by wet mud in which I could
see the tracks of many animals, though there were none in sight, and I could
see no trail by means of which they might have come from the forest. I went to
kneel by the pool and dipped the fingers of my left hand into the water,
carrying a little of it to my lips—but it was brackish, too salty to be
drinkable.

I turned back to the wall of vegetation
that prevented my moving inland. It seemed that no good could come of moving
along the line of the shore. I did not want to approach again, bringing those
awful faces to baleful life, but I did not know what else to do. I was alone,
without guidance of any sort. If those who had helped me required something in
return, I did not know what it was.

Directly in front of me there was the trunk
of a tree which stood straighter and thicker than the rest. I looked at the
closed eyes engraven in its thick black bark, and felt a creeping unease rise
inside me.

I looked down at the hand which I had
unthinkingly used to bring water to my lips, and saw that the fingers were
swollen. The skin was beginning to peel from the underlying flesh, which was
an unhealthy colour, faintly tinged with gangrenous green. I was astonished by
the sight, for I had thought myself whole and healthy.

The water in the pool had become quite
still again, and now I knelt down for a second time, and leaned over to look at
my reflection. My face had a pallor which seemed to me disgusting. The colour
had gone from my eyes, and my hair was a muddy grey. The skin had begun to peel
from my forehead, too.

It came to me very suddenly that although
my intelligence had somehow been preserved from the oblivion of death, my body
had not. My flesh was already showing the stigmata of corruption.

Then, almost immediately, another idea
occurred to me. Perhaps this was not the touch of death after all, but the beginning
of a metamorphosis. Perhaps I too was fated to become a part of the curious
forest, extending roots into the soil. I stood up quickly, and looked again at
the tree whose appearance had frightened me.

Did I know the face that was etched into
its bark?

Knowing what kind of world I was in, I had
not thought it possible for me to feel surprise. It would not have startled me
at all to recognise in those carved features a furious face rimmed with
poisonous snakes, or the stern glare of some divine countenance more terrible
than any human face. But this was not Medusa, or any other character from any
other mythology of Earth. It was, instead, something rather more familiar, and
uncomfortably so.

It was not a human face at all, though it
was humanoid.

As I examined it more closely, I realised
that it gave the impression of being
part
human, but the other part was a confusion
of the lupine and the crocodilian.

I took one step forward, and the eyes
opened, leaving me with no doubt at all as to the identity of the soul which
had been made captive by the hellish tree.

All vormyr look alike to the untutored
human eye, but there was one name which always came to my mind whenever I saw
a vormyran, or a picture of a vormyran, or heard the word
vormyr
spoken—and that was
the name Amara Guur.

"You're dead," I said, very
calmly. I did not expect to see the wooden lips move, having formed the
impression before that they could not. But the surprises kept coming.

"So are you, Mr. Rousseau," he
replied silkily. "So are you."

25

There was a long time to wait while Urania and Clio
cooked up a surprise package for the monsters that were lurking down below.
They quickly came to the conclusion that a bomb wasn't the answer—it was likely
to be very messy and wasn't guaranteed to be one hundred percent effective.
After examining the bits of alien flesh which had come up the shaft attached to
the battered Scarid, the Isthomi decided that a biotechnological attack would
be infinitely preferable-

While they were figuring out the details of
its manufacture they programmed and dispatched a small swarm of flying cameras
to reconnoitre for us. These electronic eyes were no bigger than the largest
flying insects, but they didn't have wings. Because they had to do the greater
part of their flying in an evacuated shaft—we saw no point in sending them down
in the car—they were powered by tiny rockets.

In the meantime, we opened up the other
truck and carried our two invalids over there. We stripped it of weapons
before depositing them, but I lingered for a while before leaving them alone.
Urania had asked me to stay because she wanted to make sure that the Scarid was
still on the mend, but I wanted to have a word with Jacinthe Siani anyhow.

She was more-or-less okay, physically, but
she was still badly frightened. She didn't want to be left alone, and was
grateful that I didn't just dump her. She hadn't expected any favours, given
the way she'd dealt with me in the past, but it would have been too cruel to
abandon her without some kind of reassurance.

"You're as safe here as anywhere in
Asgard," I pointed out to her. "If we get through, there's still a
slight chance that we may be able to get the power back on. If we don't,
there's a slight chance it might come back on anyway. If it doesn't, you should
soon be fit enough to try to get back to the Nine's worldlet. You have all the
time you need to find the way. The Nine are the best friends you could ask for
in this situation. You'll be okay. I wish I could be as confident about my own
future."

"Why go, then?" she asked, in a
whisper. She was a pragmatist, who didn't believe in heroism for its own sake.

I shrugged my shoulders. "I always
wanted to go to the Centre," I told her. "And now something else
wants me to go there too."

That reminded me why I wanted to talk to
her.

"Tell me about 994-Tulyar," I
said. "You do understand, don't you, that he isn't really Tulyar at
all?"

"I don't know what you're talking
about," she said. "He was hurt, when the machines attacked us. He
wasn't badly injured, but he had difficulty talking. He got better. He says
that he knows how to switch the power on."

There was no point in disputing the fact.
She had no idea what had happened to me as a result of the interface with the
alien. She had no idea that such a thing was possible. Even the two Tetrax,
who must have been in as good a position as anyone to see differences between
Tulyar present and Tulyar past, must simply have assumed that if Tulyar's body
was walking and talking, it was Tulyar inside it. If it had behaved peculiarly,
they'd simply assumed, like Jacinthe, that it was the result of his injuries.
They might think him mad if he behaved crazily enough, but the idea that his
body was being operated by a biocopy of alien software sneaked into his brain
while he was fast asleep lay beyond their conceptual horizons.

"He was guiding you, wasn't he?"
I asked, determined to stick to less controversial ground. "He knows the
way to the Centre."

"He said that he'd seen a map,"
she replied. Her voice was steady now, and she had no difficulty talking.

"Did he give you a reason for
hijacking the transporter?"

"He said that we couldn't trust the
Isthomi—that they were really responsible for the power being shut off. He said
that they were fighting a war of their own, and that we would be killed if we
stayed on that level. Down below, he said, we'd find people to help us—the
ancestors of the Scarida. He said that they'd find a way to restore power to
the Scarid levels, once they knew the Scarida were in trouble. He said that the
Nine were no friends of the Scarida or of the Tetrax . . . that they were
frightened by the discovery of the Scarid empire, and the galactic community,
and would like to see them both destroyed."

She paused for breath. Then she went on:
"He said that the Scarida and the Tetrax must make contact with the
builders of Asgard, whether the Nine liked it or not, if the humanoid
population of the macroworld was to be saved. If we didn't, he said, all the
humanoid races would be wiped out, and things like the Isthomi would be the
sole survivors. He said they'd fooled you completely, and made you their
slave."

I remembered what I'd told her about the
Nine being the best friends she could possibly have if the power wasn't restored.
For a moment, I wondered whether it might be true. Might the Nine be worried
about the power of humanoid cultures inside and outside Asgard? Might they be
acting entirely in the interests of their own kind? Might they have me
completely fooled?

I didn't think so . . . but how could I be
sure?

The horrible thought struck me that it
might all be a put-up job. Maybe there never was any attack on the Nine. Maybe
it was the Nine and the Nine alone who had injected mysterious software into my
brain. Maybe Tulyar hadn't been taken over . . . maybe he had only guessed the
truth. Maybe he had seen a map. Maybe I was being played for a sucker all along
the line.

When I thought about it carefully, though,
it didn't make any sense. If the Nine had wanted to bring down the Scarid
empire and cut themselves off from the galactic community, they could have
done it all by themselves. They didn't need to pretend to be injured, and they
certainly didn't need me. It had to be the Nine who were telling the truth, and
the thing using Tulyar's body that was lying.

Hadn't it?

"I don't suppose Tulyar mentioned
dreaming at all?" I asked, weakly.

She thought it was a crazy question, and
didn't dignify it with an answer. There was only one question left to ask.

"I know you didn't see much when the
trouble started down below," I said, "but did you see anything at all
to indicate whether any of your people got through?"

"I don't know," she replied,
faintly. "It all happened so quickly. Our lights were smothered . . . then
put out. I'm only certain that some of them were killed. If I were you,
Rousseau, I wouldn't go down there."