Asgard's Heart (36 page)

"It's all just a posthumous
fantasy," said Amara Guur. He was trying too hard to make the point, and I
was determined to resist the power of the lie. "You're on your way to
Hell," he went on, "but don't worry about the route. You don't have
to go anywhere. It will all come to you."

Deciding not to believe him didn't help me
to figure out what to do next. Should I run? Or should I try to cut my way
through the barrier, to penetrate the interior of this alien shore? Or was
there an opportunity to learn something here, which might yet be turned to my
advantage?

It was possible, I thought, that the enemy
knew as little about me as I knew about them. Perhaps they were trying to find
out more about me, and perhaps they would reveal something of themselves by so
doing.

"What are you?" I asked, with an
edge in my voice. I deliberately didn't say "who."

"I'm the thing you're most afraid
of," he replied. "I'm Nemesis. I'm the one who brought you to the
edge of death before, and would have destroyed you, save for the fact that the
Nine gave me a gun that didn't work. This time, I've been shaped by a very
different armourer, and there can be no escape. No android; no star-captain; no
magic-workers. I'm Amara Guur."

"You're a part of whatever invaded the
macroworld. You're the infection that blighted its systems—a software virus set
to injure and destroy its programmes. You're part of the thing which is trying
to destroy Asgard."

The mouth, shaped in the bark of the tree,
had teeth within it—the white, sharp teeth of a predator. The tree smiled.

"I'm that too," he said, still
looking more like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile than a human being.
"This is the twilight of the gods, and the halls of Valhalla are cold. The
clarion has sounded at Bifrost bridge and the gods ride to their destruction.
Thor has met the Midgard serpent and has gone to his fated death. Fenrir has
broken his bonds and shakes the world-ash Yggdrasil with his howling. The fire-giants
are free, and their flames will consume the vault of heaven. Odin is dead.
Heimdall and Loki will destroy one another. All the great gods are dead, and
the many mankinds which live in Asgard are given to the darkness, waiting for
the end."

It was all straight out of my mind. He was
still speaking in parole but all the names were in the original Earthly language.
Did it mean that the invaders of Asgard had picked my mind clean, the way the
Isthomi had tried to do when I first fell into their inquiring hands? Or was
this creature some kind of magic mirror, reflecting my own ideas back at me?

"But it begins again," I said.
"In the story, it begins again! There is no final end."

"Oh yes," he said, "it
begins again. In other galaxies, other macroworlds, in every little Earth-clone
planet which wheels in its track around a yellow star, it begins again and
again and again. But for every beginning there is an end, and this is the end
of Asgard. Surt will consume it all."

That was one symbol I had no difficulty in
decoding. Surt was the king of the fire-giants, whose fire turned the
battlefield of
Gotterdammerung
to ashes when all the killing was done.
Surt could only be the starlet at the heart of the macroworld, which would blow
Asgard apart if it went nova. The products of a thousand Creations—and what did
it matter whether those Creations took place on planetary surfaces or inside
macroworlds?—would be destroyed and wasted in such an explosion. Ashes to
ashes; dust to dust. Was that what the invaders of Asgard were trying to
achieve? Were they a software suicide squad?

"But you'd die too," I said.
"The plague which kills the sheep leaves the wolves to starve. The
destroyers go to their destruction with their victims. Why?"

He laughed. "You have made me a humanoid
in order to see me," he said. "But you know that is not what I
am."

"It's not what I am, either," I
retorted. "I'm just a bundle of information, like you. I'm just a shadow
on the wall of the cave, lit by Platonic fire."

"Precisely," he said. "We are
all shadow-selves, sent into combat by our archetypes. Perhaps that is what you
are
really
fighting, Mr. Rousseau—the archetypal
predators. Your Amara Guur is a very pale imitation of the real thing. You have
no idea how limited your imagination is."

"Predators kill for food," I told
him. "Amara Guur was a fake. He used his predatory ancestry to justify
behaviour that would never have been tolerated in a wolf pack."

"You
mistake me, and you mistake your own kind,"
replied the thing which looked like Amara Guur. "The predator kills for
many reasons: for food, to defend his territory, and for pleasure, too. For
pleasure, Mr. Rousseau. It is a sentimental view that says the predator takes
no pleasure in his killing. The predator is prudent, the predator deceives,
but the predator loves to kill. Only a fool believes that it could be
otherwise."

"Territory," I echoed. "Is
that what this is all about: territory?"

"Or pleasure," he riposted.
"You are trying once again to omit the pleasure."

"Despite our petty squabbles," I
said, trying hard not to think about destruction and decay, "all the
humanoid races have their DNA in common. The Tetrax are right, aren't they, to
be ambitious for galactic brotherhood? They're right to try to bind us into a
community. Whatever you're a copy of, it isn't made of DNA, is it? This cuts
deeper than meat-eaters versus leaf-eaters. This is competition between
alternative biochemistries."

He laughed again. "Mr. Rousseau,"
he said, "do you really imagine that biochemistries care? Your thinking is
anchored to your imbecilic point of view. Do you really think that you have
the intelligence to understand, when the power of your dreams can do no more
than this? How can you believe that you ever had a chance to understand?"

He was shifting the ground of the argument,
leading me first one way and then another, and I suddenly wondered why. If I
were dead and on my way to Hell, immobilised and facing inevitable
disintegration, Amara Guur would not be here, teasing me and taunting me.
Suddenly, I began to believe that I was doing the wrong thing in letting him
delay me. I had to get past him—I had to go on.

I looked again at my arms, which were
mottled with grey, the flesh rutted and scratched. There were several ulcerous
sores, slowly turning fire-red, beginning to suppurate. The sores reminded me,
strangely, of the fruit on the branches of the humanoid trees. But I knew that
it didn't matter whether I was "dead" or not—what mattered was that I
was still active, still thinking, and still some kind of threat to whatever
strange army it was that sought to keep me from the heart of the macroworld's
systems.

I drew my sword, and raised it high above
my head, ready to slash at the branches blocking my way. No expression of
terror came into those crazy staring eyes—it was rather as if they mocked me,
challenging me to do my worst. I hacked at the tangled branches and the thorny
undergrowth, scything through it with my bright, sharp blade, going against
him as fiercely and as recklessly as I had gone against him once before, when
he tried to use me as a shield to save himself from the Star Force.

As I moved forward to pass him, the spined
leaves thrust at me, and I felt the thorns plucking at my armour, but they
could not penetrate it to rip my flesh. It was as though the wall of thorns
dissolved beneath my attack, evaporating on contact with my wrath and my
warmth.

I forced my way through, leaving Amara Guur
to return to his wooden slumber, and went on into the dense thicket, which
became dark as the branches above my head obscured the sun. There was a foul,
dank smell all around me, and all of a sudden there was no green at all but
only shades of grey, and the signs of decay and corruption were everywhere. It
was as though I were hacking my way into the body of a gigantic corpse. There
was no sign of another side to the wall, and I felt that I was tunneling into
the heart of something horrible.

Too late I was seized by doubt, wondering
if I had been tricked. Perhaps this was not the path that the enemy had tried
to prevent my taking—perhaps this was instead the way they had wanted me to go,
so that I might deliver myself into their hands.

I turned, and looked back.

There was no sign of the path by which I
had come—no tunnel back to the sandy beach and the sunlight. On every side of
me there was nothing but a tangle of white, soft, rootlike things, dimly lit as
though by furtive bioluminescence.

I looked wildly around, and while I stood
still the tangled knots drew more tightly about me, until I was confined in a
circular cage with no more than a metre of space around my spoiling flesh.
There was still a frail, faint light to see by, and I watched the knotted
things in front of my face writhe like maggots as they wove themselves into a
tight, confining wall.

I raised my sword, and slashed wildly at
the confining threads, trying to cut my way through. For a moment, I thought
they might not yield, but the sharpness of the blade prevailed and the cage in
which they had tried to confine me was breached. I shoved my body into the gap,
pushing through to the other side. I was still in the forest and the branches
still writhed in a determined attempt to block my way, but I broke into a run,
hacking madly at whatever was in my path.

My arms ached and my head hurt. I felt
dizzy, but I dared not pause for an instant lest I give the malevolent
vegetation a second chance to imprison me. Branches grabbed at my arms and
rootlets tried to seize my feet, but while I was moving they were impotent to
establish a hold. I did not know how long I could go on, or how long I would
need
to,
but I was
determined not to be beaten while there was strength in my body, and despite
the gathering discomfort I had no sensation of nearing exhaustion.

How much time passed while that strange
contest went on I have no idea, but the forest began to thin again, and I saw
brighter light ahead of me. Encouraged by the prospect of an end I dashed
forward, and the assailing branches fell away. There were no more groping
tendrils, no more stabbing thorns.

I came out of the forest into an open
space, and threw up a protective arm as I was momentarily dazzled by the glare
of an unnaturally bloated yellow sun. But there was a pavement beneath my
feet, and the air was filled with sound emitted by countless clamorous voices,
and I knew that this was no desert isle, but a busy place.

When I dropped my arm again, and looked to
see where I was, I found myself confronting a ring of men, each one as tall and
as muscular as Myrlin, and each one armed with a gleaming sword. They were like
enough to one another to be clones, and I realised that they were probably
automata like the ones that had manned the deck of the magical ship on which I
had approached this shore.

I took half a step forward, and they
brought up their weapons, pointing the blades at my torso. I glanced sideways,
and could see no end to their array, so I turned on my heel. There was no sign
of the forest through which I had come—the pavement was all around me, and so
were the warriors. There were sixteen of them in all, and they had me
completely hemmed in.

"You have done well, Michael
Rousseau," said a voice, which spoke in English rather than parole,
"but we know you now, and you are at our mercy."

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