Asgard's Conquerors

30

I imagined myself to be Prometheus, chained to a rock, with an eagle’s claw raking and tearing my ribs, the talons lunging at my heart. I became Sir Everard Digby, plunging from the scaffold, and then to the ground as the rope was cut, still conscious as the executioner moved to castrate me, and tear the entrails from my belly. I fused my mind with the sensations of Damiens, stretching on the rack, limbs ripped with red-hot hooks, wounds tormented with molten lead, with boiling oil, with burning pitch, with sulphur, the horses straining with all their might at a body which would not tear. . . .

This was not mere melodrama, but an act of mental self- defence. I coped with the dangerously explosive firing of my neurons in the only way I could, by reconstructing even that most extreme of experiences into some kind of story, containing it with some kind of imaginative coherency.

I did not know what I was doing, but I was saving my life and my mind from a shock that might otherwise have destroyed them.

It is said, although it must be the product of the corrupt imagination of yellow journalism, that it took ten horses several hours to pull off Damiens’ limbs, one by one, even after his torturers had weakened his hip and shoulder joints by cutting partly through the ligaments, and that even then the man still lived, although unable to speak—and thus unable to repent of his sins and receive the last possible consolation. In my re-enactment of his drama, though, all this could be true, and was.

Reporters also said that Everard Digby was still conscious when they quartered him, but this is surely an observer’s insistence on wringing the last drop of permissible horror from the tale he has to tell, to make the point that no man at any time ever did or could have suffered quite as much as the man in question. When I became Digby, though, it was the Digby of legend that I became, and limits of plausibility did not concern my fantasizing mind.

There were, of course, no eyewitnesses to tell us of the sufferings of Prometheus, and no one therefore with a vested interest in magnifying the importance of the incident. Perhaps this made it easier to be Prometheus.

I report now on what happened to me not as an eyewitness but as a victim, and I find my own vested interests paradoxical. My memory is filtered; I cannot remember the pain, but have instead to imagine it, and now that I know that it was in some sense not real pain (nothing, after all, happened to my actual limbs and heart) I cannot imagine it quite as it was then. My description of it certainly seems hyperbolic—any description would seem hyperbolic—in view of the fact that I survived the experience. Nevertheless, I can assure you that I suffered—imagined, if you wish—extreme pain, and that I did indeed identify myself briefly with those lurid attempts to describe the worst sufferings ever undergone by human beings.

Put me down, if you like, as a hypochondriac.

The pain, as I withstood it, made me try with all my might to become smaller, to shrivel myself up and hide myself in insignificance. I tried to wrap myself up in my own substance, like a worm eating its own tail with furious appetite ... I tried to vanish into a fold of space like a starship into a wormhole or like some devious subatomic particle strutting its vain appearance across the infinitesimal stage of the fabric of space for some unimaginable fraction of a picosecond.

Amazingly, this cowardly move seemed to work.

The hurt dwindled as I shrank, and by the time I was no bigger, in my imagination, than an atom, I was no longer feeling pain. I felt curiously free; I was a world much tinier than a grain of sand, and there was a comfortable eternity extended within my hour. For the moment, though, I was paying no attention to anything outside myself.

Put me down, if you like, as an egotist.

Then, like the hero of some antique microcosmic romance, I suffered a kind of cognitive bouleversement, by which little and big were reversed. With a single elegant flip, like a move in zero-gee gymnastics, I became the whole universe, made of space and filled with stars, flowing as I expanded, clothed with a skin of paper-thin galaxies whose velocity of recession, relative to my stationary heart, was trembling on the brink of the magical c.

Inside me, streaming like amoeboid protoplasm, was a seminal fluid of nebular vapours, lusting for the vortical dance that would spin them into stellar spermatids, and the beating of my heart was the beating of the Heart Divine— the pulse and rhythm of Creation. Here too, there could be no pain, but only the crystal ecstasy of the music of the spheres.

Thus stabilized, safely, as some kind of persona no longer tied to my humanoid body and humanoid senses, I was ready to transfigure myself into some hypothetical corpus in which I might face other entities—in which I might be contacted.

Contact, after all, was what I was there for.

In the quaint romances of Old Earth, such intimate contacts as the one which I was set to make are usually uninhibited by the constraints of language. When the gods speak inside the heads of the heroes of myth; when the telepathic aliens make their crucial contact with the scientists of the twenty- first century; when the sentient computer programmes first get to mental grips with their wetware progenitors, it is generally assumed that barriers of language are burned away, and that the protagonist’s mind can automatically translate the messages which are being beamed at him into English— tortured English, sometimes, in the interests of dramatic effect, but English nevertheless.

In reality, alas, thought does not transcend language. When two humanoids meet, although they have not a word of any language in common, they may still hope to communicate with one another through gesture and mime, but when human and alien meet across some kind of neuro-artificial interface, brain-cell to silicon chip instead of eyeball to eyeball, it is not quite so easy. I presume that it is more difficult still when one of the parties seeking contact has not the least idea of what he can do in such a hypothetical matrix—so different from dear old spacetime!—or how to do it.

Take it from me, the business of contacting an alien intelligence through a direct neural hook-up is a bit like being required to appear on a TV quiz show immediately after being born, with horrible penalties to be exacted if the questions are not answered adequately.

Subjectively, I began to conceive of myself again as something approximately human-sized. What I was I cannot tell, and I assume that I was not provided with a shape or form; I only had to be a point of view. To what extent my own creativity was involved in the shaping of the environment which coalesced around me I cannot tell; I suspect that it was all done for me, but that those who formed it for the edification of my pseudo-sensory awareness drew upon the resources of my memory and imagination.

It was, if you like, a kind of dream—and thus, perhaps, amenable to some kind of psychological analysis, if only I knew how.

Let us say that I dreamed, then.

I dreamed that I was in a desert which once had been a sea, and that the life-forms which had filled the sea had been precipitated out in crystalline forms, which at night were still and white, like layered ices, but which sublimated in the heat of the day to become strange vapours and emanations.

I dreamed that I was in a forest of stalagmitic rocks, which had been eroded into edgeless smoothness, contoured with many curves as if they were molten statues. In the silver dawn the vaporous entities were stirring from their nightly sleep, floating upwards and writhing in a ceaseless but futile effort to attain fixed shape.

They began a slow, sinister dance around and around the coralline maypoles, beneath a purple sky slowly lightening to mauve. These shimmering shadows yearned for shape, for solidity, but their ambitions were hopeless. They did not seem to react in any way to my presence, but were utterly self-involved, in pursuit of their own private purposes.

The rocks were coloured grey and green, but as they were caressed by the miasmic vapour-creatures their colours were smeared, and a fugitive redness began to ooze as if escaping from the core of each column through a porous epidermis. The more distant rocks began to recede, drawn backwards into gathering shadows of coloured mist, but this took place furtively, as if at the very edge of attention.

The forest, having likened its warming air to water, began to repopulate itself with tiny sparks—transient flickers of light that attempted the semblance of sunlight scintillating by reflection from tiny scales. The desert’s memories of having been a sea were only impressionistic; it could not recall the mass of the water or the bodies of its former inhabitants, but it had their echoes imprinted in it. It had the spirit of a sea, and it knew how a sea felt in being a sea.

I did not feel involved in any of this. Nothing seemed to be addressed to me. I felt, instead, like an invader, a trespasser in an autogenetic realm where I could not belong. I felt that the desert’s dream was essentially a lonely one.

And then I saw the four eyes of fire, burning like red-hot coals, peering at me from the shadows, their inner light eclipsing sunlight and remembered sea alike.

As they moved from the limits of perception, closer and closer, it seemed that the desert stirred and muttered, complaining at the disturbance. The eyes glared, their fire a bloody radiance that assaulted the forest like a hot wind, challenging and dispelling its dream.

The desert, angered, fought back. Whirlpools of vapour arose in an attempt to consume the eyes, but impotently. Writhing serpents tried first to swallow the eyes, and then to wrap themselves around the invaders, constrictor- fashion. Torrents of black rain fell from the sky, and lightning struck at the four eyes, again and again—hopelessly. The eyes stared at me. This was not the gaze of Medusa, turning me to stone, but rather the reverse. It was a stare in which I might dissolve or evaporate, becoming insubstantial.

Because I was nowhere and nothing, but simply a dislocated presence, the stare was inside me as well as outside. I was not staring, nor were the eyes of fire my eyes, but their searching was within me, through and through me, and I felt that I could never be apart from it again. I believed that I would always be under the scrutiny of those eyes, that there would always be something of that blazing stare in the way I observed myself.

The desert sighed, and I was not consumed. The womb- dream of a long-gone ocean began to reassert itself again, at the fringes of attention. The bulbous columns of rock still bled, and their blood became vaporous, taking flight as misty monsters—dragons and winged things. That dragonsblood flowed in me, and I felt that if ever I had veins again, and blood of my own, then the pulse of the Heart Divine would send those dragons coursing through my being, forever and ever.

I counted the columns, and numbered them nine, and for the first time my mind became thoughtfully active, striving for meaning, hoping for a key to the symbology.

I was suddenly overcome by a floodtide of emotion, as though my metaphorical heart was bursting, but I did not know what it was that I was supposed to be feeling. I could not tell rage from pity, grief from affection. I was moved, but I could not tell what it was that moved me, or what I was supposed to understand.

I clung to one conclusion.

The Nine are not dead!

I told myself that they had lost control of themselves, and of their systems, as though they had become unconscious, perhaps catatonic, but that they were not dead. That conclusion, that thought, was vital. It made me remember who I was, and what I was, and what the situation was. Where I was, or what form I had, remained questions unasked and unanswerable, but I knew that there were Nine and there were Four, and that the Nine were not dead, and that the Four were still present, still trying to achieve some mysterious end, not knowing how.

I realised, then, that it was not just me who was all at sea in this business of contact and communication. The Nine and the Four had their barriers to contend with, their walls of incomprehension. They, too, had no way to perceive one another save for the semblance of pain and the strangeness of symbol. They had exploded into one another with the devastating shock of first encounter, and their second encounter had been no less disruptive, but now perhaps their damaged selves were grasping at one another for mutual support—perhaps even for mutual inclusion. They were trying to touch one another so intimately as almost to be one another. But that was dangerous, as they had both discovered.

The eyes seemed now to be very close to me, in two pairs staring from either side, though I had no eyes of my own with which to meet their stare. They were still calling forth waves of feeling with their hypnotic insistence, but I still did not know what to feel. Somehow, the feeling began to assume the nature of fear, but even as it did so, I felt a counterbalancing insistence that this was wrong. There had been a partial withdrawal, as though the eyes were struggling to become more remote, to distance themselves.

Terror grew inside me, and pain, and I felt again the urge to absent myself, to become small, to seek safety in the perverse world of the atom. But I also felt not-fear and not-pain, and I wondered whether those strange feelings might better have been translated into words, if only I had had the means.

Do not hurt! Do not fear!

Was that what the Four were saying to me? Or was it the Nine? Were the Nine and Four in conflict still—the Muses and the Seasons, competing to inform this private universe with frames of meaning? I could not tell.

The pain did not reassert itself. No more legends of torture came to trouble and to save my soul. But the fear would not be gone. It ebbed and flowed, as though it were trying to undergo some metamorphosis of significance, but it could not quite make of itself what it wanted to become.

I tried to help.

Whose fear? I wondered. Perhaps not mine. Perhaps. . . .

The thought did seem to inject something into the pattern of potentiality. The feeling seemed more confident, more nearly that which it was trying to be.

And then I guessed.

What you’re trying to be, I said—to myself, because my thoughts were as difficult for them to understand as theirs were for me—is a need! You’re sending out a Mayday!

Once this was perceived, the feeling in which I had perceived the odour of fear now became sharper, as if it were no longer struggling to find form. The touching-point was there. I had made contact with a kind of mind which, as far as I could guess, might be the mind of Asgard entire, or might only be some tiny imprisoned thing, like the mind of a worldlet confined in one of its many levels. That mind and mine had not the encoded equipment to say anything at all one another—unlike the minds of the Nine, which remembered a humanoid incarnation and which were already equipped for interface with entities such as myself. This mind (or group of minds) was alien indeed; alien to the Nine and to me. It had learned to “speak” but a single word to me.

But I thought I understood the word. I prayed that I did, because if I did not, this might all be for nothing.

I became the universe again, embodying all Creation. I took on the semblance of bodily form, albeit macrocosmically. I was four-eyed and nine-boned, and my eyes were eyes of fire and my bones the rocks of ages, and my heart was the Heart Divine, my blood seething with the venom of dragons and my semen with the ghosts of all men who had ever been and all who were to come.

As above, so below . . . and I felt this universe reflected in a mode of being much tinier, in a cage of absurd flesh. This was more than Creation. This was Encounter, and its beginning was a word.

And the word, I believed, was help!

Or, to put it more aptly: HELP!

HELP!

H-E-L-P!

It was not I who was screaming, but something much more terrible, and much more helpless.

It was Prometheus, and murdered Pan. In that scream was the waking of Brahma from his ageless dream. In that scream was the pain that Odin felt when he tore out his eye and sold it: the price of his godly wisdom. In that unbearable scream was the breath of Gotterdammerung, come to end the deep cold of the fimbulwinter, come to disturb Valhalla and bring the gods themselves to their meeting with destiny.

But when the gods cry for help, what strength can mere mortals bring to their aid?