Asgard's Conquerors

25

You, of course, will not be in the least surprised to discover that I did not die. I would hardly be telling you the story if I had. I, on the other hand, was in no position to prejudge the issue. It came as something of a surprise to me when I woke up again, and the shock was most definitely not ameliorated by the circumstances in which I found myself.

I was floating.

At first I thought this was a purely subjective impression; I leapt from that idea to the conclusion that I was in zero- gee. Eventually, though, the tactile messages arriving in my brain sorted themselves out into reluctant coherency, and I knew that I was literally floating on some kind of thick liquid that did not wet me. The only kind of non-wetting liquid I knew was mercury, but I was too deeply immersed for it to be mercury.

There was sound in my ears, but it was only the thin hiss of white noise, completely featureless.

I tried to open my eyes, and found it difficult—not because there was any tiredness left to make me want them shut, but because there were two wire-ends stuck to my eyelids. I had to pull my right hand out of the glutinous fluid to snatch them away. There were other wires secured to my forehead, and more on my skull. They were not just glued down—in some peculiar fashion they seemed to be extending roots into my skin. I ripped them all away, not caring what kinds of sensors were on the ends. The “roots” snapped easily, causing no more than mild discomfort, and leaving only a faint itching sensation in my skin.

The white noise ceased when I pulled the wires from my ears, and I was left in silence.

Opening my eyes brought me little immediate profit, because the light was as nebulous and informationless as the sound in my ears. My visual field was filled with grey. I reached forward with my hand, and touched a surface about fifteen centimetres in front of me—above me, that is, given that I was floating on my back. The surface was concave.

I knew where I was, now. Not in Hell, and certainly not in Heaven. I was in a sensory deprivation tank.

I pushed at the concave surface, which was neither warm nor cold to my touch. The force of the push sent me back into the liquid, in accordance to Newton’s third law, and then the liquid buoyed me up again, sloshing around the interior of the tank. The surface above me didn’t yield.

I made a fist of my hand, and rapped on what I assumed to be the lid of my tank. The non-wetting liquid slopped around me, agitated by my movements. I tried to change my attitude, thrusting my leg down, and touched the floor of the tank, also concavely curved.

I’m shut up in a bloody egg! I told myself, with deliberate vehemence. Or in some kind of hi-tech make-believe womb!

I remembered, then, that I ought not to be feeling too good. I moved my jaw from side to side, and touched my fingertips to the place that should have been injured. There was no break, and no sign of a bruise.

I had a pretty good idea where I might be, by now. I was down to my last hypothesis, and as Sherlock Holmes always used to remind us, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—however improbable—must be the truth.

I still wanted to get out of the tank. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but there was something about that perverse liquid that I didn’t relish. In addition to which, I was no longer deprived—I was conscious, and my mind was sharp and clear. A sensory deprivation tank is no place to be when you want to get on with your life.

I banged again on the inside of the lid, and suddenly felt it move beneath my hand. It was moving sideways, in an arc following its curvature. It was as if the upper, transparent half of the egg were being rotated about a central axis, disappearing into the lower, solid half.

I pulled myself free, not wet at all. I was naked, but the air was neither warm nor cold on my skin.

The light outside the tank was just as nebulous, just as grey. I could barely make out the shape of the room. The walls seemed utterly without colour, and were featureless. I looked back at the half-egg behind me, where the liquid had already become calm. Wires attached to the rim of the egg trailed in the liquid. There were more than I’d thought. They weren’t metallic; they looked to me as though they were organic. The egg-thing looked like a giant woodlouse tipped on its back, with spindly legs everywhere.

The only thing I could feel was my own body. That was lighter than it had been for a while. The gravity here was nowhere near Karth-normal, or what passed for Asgard- normal in the upper levels.

I was just wondering where I might start looking for a door when the greyness of the walls was disturbed. White clouds, vague and almost formless, began to appear—not on the walls but within and beyond them, as though the walls were windows looking out into a world of ghosts.

The clouds became humanoid faces, but in a strange unfocussed way. Their clarity was not enhanced by the fact that the faces overlapped, and passed through one another as they moved around the room. It was quite a fancy effect, but I wasn’t unduly upset or surprised by it. The walls were obviously screens, and the cloudy faces were some kind of video-holographic display. The holograms looked very primitive and rough-hewn, but I wasn’t convinced that it was poor technology that was responsible for their incoherency. There was something else . . . something not quite right.

The voice, when it came, was just as fuzzy. In a way, it was even more blurred, and multilayered—as if many people were trying to speak at once, and were not quite managing to synchronize their voices.

“R-r-rouss-ss-ss-eau,” they said.

“The ghost routine’s no good,” I told the walls, trying to inject some heavy contempt into my voice. “I know where I am, and I know who you are, too. What the hell are you trying to prove?”

The faces were huge—two metres tall from chin to crown—and the room seemed quite small as they drifted in and out of one another. They were becoming gradually more focussed. They seemed to me to be a creditable imitation of human faces—female human faces. But I couldn’t imagine what it was all for. Almost without meaning to, I counted the faces. There seemed to be nine. Nine didn’t seem to me to be a very round number, so I recounted, trying to make it ten, but there were nine.

“P-p-pleas-s-se w-w-wait-t-t,” they said. Their voice was slow and drawn-out. They were speaking in English. In spite of what I’d said, it really was rather spooky, not because of the nature of the apparitions, but because it didn’t make any sense.

“How long for?” I asked.

I paused for an answer, but when they spoke again, they were on a different wavelength.

“Ap-p-pologis-s-se,” they said. “S-s-sorr-rr-rry. W-w-will y-you ans-s-swer qu-qu-qu-quest-t-tion?”

Waiting for them to finish a sentence was distinctly tedious, but I decided that I probably had all the time in the world.

“Sure,” I said.

“Ar-r-re y-you l-l-lonel-l-ly?”

I blinked in surprise. It didn’t make any sense. I tried to concentrate on one of the faces, pretending that it was really looking at me, trying to meet its eye. I realised that it reminded me of someone. It wasn’t quite right, but the features were obviously modelled on Susarma Lear. I looked at the others, then, scanning them quickly to confirm the hypothesis. They weren’t all the same. Indeed, it was almost as if they were trying to be different—with difficulty, because they were all based on the same model. The pattern of modification wasn’t random, either. It was as if they were borrowing just a little from someone else’s face. I tried to remember what I looked like in a mirror, looking for bits of my own face, but that didn’t work. I had to think quite hard before I finally realised whose features they were borrowing from to make their Susarma Lear-faces look different.

They were borrowing bits of John Finn.

“Loneliness isn’t one of my vices,” I told them. “But I would appreciate a little company right now. I know you can arrange it. I’ll settle for Myrlin, or even one of your furry friends. I’ve been here before, I know, but you put on much better special effects then. Landscape with lions, bright and sharp—I couldn’t see the walls at all, remember? I guess this is where you live. You don’t have to put on human faces just for me. I don’t care if you look like giant spiders.”

Pause. Then: “M-m-must-t-t t-t-talk t-t-to y-you . . . int-t-teres-s-sted.”

I couldn’t quite work out where the voice was coming from. There was no obvious microphone, and it was diffuse, like everything else, as though they were having difficulty focusing it.

“I’m interested in you too,” I told them, “but I had the impression that you didn’t need to talk to me. I thought you picked my brain fairly thoroughly last time I was here—and all those wires suggest that you’ve been at it again.”

“C-c-can’t-t r-r-read m-m-minds,” they told me. “S-s-so m-m-much of p-p-person-n-n on-nly at c-c-conscious-s-s l- l-level-l-l. C-c-can’t-t und-derst-tand-d s-s-s-solit-t-tude.”

I didn’t get a chance to explain solitude to them. The door finally opened. I couldn’t see whether one section slid behind another, or whether the hole just appeared. One moment there was nothing, the next there was a black rectangle more than two metres high.

Even so, he had to duck as he came through it.

Mercifully, he had brought my clothes. He even had my comfortable boots.

“Small universe, isn’t it?” I said, as I pulled my pants on. The faces hadn’t disappeared; they were still floating around, merging and coming apart. They didn’t have to go around the door—they just disappeared at one edge and reappeared at the other. There was something very odd about their unseeing eyes. They had synthesized human features, but human expression was quite beyond them. They weren’t quite my idea of immortal supermen.

“Hello, Mr. Rousseau,” said Myrlin.

“You can call me Mike,” I told him, not for the first time. “Especially as you just saved my life. I deduce that you saved Susarma, too. Did Serne make it?”

“No. But we got one of the Tetrax.”

“994-Tulyar?”

“Yes. The other was 822-Vela. He was irredeemably dead when we got to him, like Serne.”

Not just dead, I noted, but irredeemably dead.

“I suppose Tulyar was the one you really wanted,” I observed. By this time I had my shirt and pants on, and I was pulling on my boots.

“In a manner of speaking,” he said. He stood aside and indicated that I should precede him through the door. I went out into a gloomy corridor, lit by tiny electric bulbs strung along a wire. It seemed strongly reminiscent of the makeshift lighting the invaders had rigged up, none too cleverly, in the dark corner of Skychain City where they’d captured me. The walls were black and featureless. The corridors meandered left and right, with curves, corners, and intersections, but Myrlin led me through the maze without hesitation.

“Why did you pull me out?” I asked him.

“Two reasons,” he told me. “One—I thought I still owed you a favour. When I found out you were in the prison, I put you on my list. Two—they really are interested. In you, and in your companions. They already had records of you, but the records were damaged; the opportunity to have a second look was both a chance to renew their acquaintance, and a chance to assess how bad the damage was that they had sustained.”

“There’s something wrong with them?” I said—uncertain, although it certainly confirmed the impression I’d received.

“Something badly wrong,” he confirmed. “They’re still functioning, but . . . I’ll explain it to you later. Who’s the fourth one we pulled out?”

“Man named John Finn. Said to be good with electronics. We only brought him because we were afraid he might be useful to the invaders if we left him behind. They interested in him, too?”

“Oh yes.”

“Are the others awake?”

“Not yet. They’re still probing the Tetron and Finn. The star-captain will take a little longer. She has a bullet wound in the leg and is suffering from tissue-necrosis.”

The corridors were beginning to seem endless. Some of the side-branches were unlighted, and showed no sign of ever having been lighted.

“This isn’t ancient biotechnics gone wrong, is it?” I said. “There never was light in these corridors.”

“They don’t use visible light much,” he said. “Not in here, anyhow. The lighting’s just for me. They used to be able to light the ceiling itself, but that was lost along with most of their other capabilities.”

“I should have expected you,” I said. “That note. It was stupid of me to assume that it came from Alex Sovorov. Your bosses—the super-scientists—must have been keeping an eye on the invaders all along. I should have realised.”

He shook his head. “Actually,” he said, “we’d only just begun to keep an eye on Skychain City. We were every bit as surprised as the Tetrax when the Scarida appeared. We weren’t in a position to take a hand, then. Things had already gone wrong. I’ve had to take charge of a lot of things. We need to talk to the Tetrax, and to the Scarida too. The scions I planted in the prison to gather information will have declared themselves by now, but the Tetron virus has disrupted the chain of command both there and in Skychain City—it’s a pity you managed to infect a man as important as Dyan. It’s a pity the alarms went off so soon, as well; that might make it more difficult for the scions.”

“It was hardly my fault,” I reminded him. “Who are the scions?”

“The furry humanoids. The Nine made them—much as the Salamandrans made me—in the image of one of the races which the Scarida displaced. It wasn’t too difficult to get them into the prison, once we’d found a way to that level. Our route up to fifty-two is direct and efficient—there are such routes available, once you know how to get access to them.”

At last we came out of the corridors, and into what qualified as open space in Asgardian terms. But it wasn’t like coming into the fresh air. There was a thirty-metre ceiling here, but it was lighted in the craziest way imaginable, with formless masses of silvery lights drifting and coiling like clouds against a grey background. And beneath this gloomy sky there were no “fields”—not even the kind of artificially- photosynthetic factory fields that the Tetrax had resurrected under Skychain City. There was a roadway, and a railway, extending side-by-side into the gloom, and there were buildings like metal igloos, but there was nothing alive at all.

I realised, belatedly, that the “sky” was no different from the “walls” in the room where I had awakened. It was like a vast video screen, and the clouds that moved across it were the traces of some kind of electronic activity. It suddenly dawned on me that Myrlin’s masters had not simply rigged the sky to function as a big mindscrambler on that long-ago day when they had kicked me out of their little corner of manufactured paradise.

Myrlin’s masters were the sky, just as they were everything else in this weird place.

They were everywhere.

No wonder, I thought, they have difficulty producing manifestations of themselves in a particular location. And no wonder they don’t understand “solitude.”

I turned to face him, able to see his face clearly for the first time, in spite of the dim light.

“Did they make you immortal?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said.

“You don’t suppose they could do the same for me?” I enquired, tentatively.

“They already have,” he assured me. When destiny accepts you as a plaything, anything can happen. One minute, you think you’re dead; the next, you might live forever.