Asgard's Heart

12

There seemed to be a sky, which was grey and overcast, heavy with roiling clouds racing before an erratic wind. The clouds seemed so low as to be barely out of reach, as though I might reach up my hand and feel the cool, moist breath of their passage.

The sea was a duller grey, the colour of lead, and although it was no less troubled, its waves trod the paces of a dance that was far more leisurely than the light fantastic of the clouds. There was very little spray, and it seemed as though the ocean were made of some more glutinous compound than mere water, as if it were thickened by dissolved slime.

The ship on whose deck I found myself standing was a curious vessel, more like a sketch of a ship than a real entity of wood and iron. It seemed to me to have been modeled on a poorly-remembered image of a Viking longboat, with a red-and-gold patterned sail billowing upon its single mast, and forty pairs of oars moving in an uncannily-precise rhythm, quite unperturbed by the wayward rise and fall of the waves.

There were no visible oarsmen; the oars projecting from the flank of the vessel seemed to work entirely by themselves, growing organically from the hull. The deck, which extended most of the length of the ship, was lined with silent warriors, huge and blonde, with horned helmets and armour of gleaming bronze. They carried spears and broadswords, but the swords were sheathed. They stood immobile, like carved chessmen waiting for a game to begin. There was no possibility of mistaking them for real people; like the boat, they seemed to me more like entities in an animated cartoon.

The prow of the ship was shaped into a curious figurehead with anchored snakes instead of hair, and the snakes moved sluggishly as the bows dipped and rose with the swell. Beneath this image of Medusa, carried high above the waves, there was a sharp spur, which gleamed as if it were made of steel. Had the gorgon’s head been attached to a body, it might have been riding upon the spur as if on a broomstick, and the implication of that absent form gave the spur a gloss of phallic potency.

The bridge at the hind end of the ship was a paltry affair, consisting of a raised deck protected only by an ornately-carved railing. There was a wheel controlling the rudder (though that seemed to me to be as anachronistic as Medusa or the ramming-spur), but no substantial wheelhouse.

I found myself gripping the rail very tightly, bracing myself against the rolling and yawing of the ship.

I had never been on a ship before—the closest I had ever come to an ocean was driving along the shore of one of the icebound seas on the surface of Asgard. That had certainly been grey, but the way the bergs floated in the shallow water had made it seem utterly serene, while this water, in spite of its apparent viscosity, had an obvious inclination to the tempestuous.

I felt, paradoxically, that I should have been seasick, or at the very least uneasy and uncomfortable. In fact, I did not. The best attempt I can make to describe what I felt like is to say that I felt mildly drunk—at precisely that pitch of intoxication where the befuddled brain seems disconnected from the body, anaesthetised and incipiently dizzy. I felt unreal, and that seemed to me to be an utter absurdity, because I knew full well that from the viewpoint of my parent self I was unreal. I had been copied into a dreamworld, but there was surely a ludicrous impropriety in the fact that I felt like a dream-entity.

Had I, I wondered, any instinct to survive in my present form? Had I sufficient strength of will to continue to exist from one moment to the next?

Oddly enough, that was a frightening thought. I did not feel like myself—and knew, indeed, that in a sense I was not myself, and that there was another, very different self walking away from the interface in the solid world of Asgard’s physical mass. And yet, I was all the self I had, and I knew that this splinter-consciousness, however drunk with its own absurdity it might be, was an entity capable of being destroyed, and that such destruction would be no less a death than would one day overcome my fleshy doppelganger.

I looked around, and found that I was not alone. Mercifully, I was not the only volunteer who had come forward to undertake the high road to the Centre while his solid self attempted the low. Myrlin was watching me. He needed no rail to assist in his support, but seemed quite steady on the deck, riding its movements with casual ease. He seemed no bigger here than he had in the flesh, but that had always been quite big enough—in the flesh he was a two-metre man with a lot to spare, and his ghost-self here retained the same appearance of hugeness. But he did not look real. As I met his gaze, which was as curious and as puzzled as my own, I had to admit that he looked no more authentic than the silly ship on whose deck we stood. He too was more like a cartoon image than a real man.

He was dressed in armour, which was black and shiny, as if lacquered or highly polished. Its sections were moulded so accurately to his body that it looked like an exoskeleton.

He was bare-headed, though, and his colouring was subtly altered. His hair was lighter, although it tended more to auburn than blonde, and his eyes were so bright in their greyness as to seem almost silver.

In his right hand he was carrying a huge sledgehammer, whose head must have weighed at least a hundred kilos, although he seemed to feel not the slightest discomfort in bearing it. He had a large sword in a scabbard at his belt. Despite his seeming inauthenticity, I could not help but feel that this was the role for which fate (as opposed to the cunning Salamandrans) had shaped him. As a barbarian warrior he was somehow convincing, whereas the real android, set against the backcloth of Skychain City and the deeper levels of Asgard, had always seemed awkwardly out of place.

I looked down at my own body, to see what I might be wearing, and found that I was armoured too, though in a slightly different fashion. It was as though I had garments knitted from fine steel thread, which seemed both very strong and very light. Like Myrlin’s, my armour was lacquer-bright, but my colour was a dark red, the colour of burgundy wine.

I hoped that I wouldn’t present too tempting a target, if and when things warmed up.

Looking down, I could see the backs of the hands that gripped the rails. I felt a slight rush of amused relief as I realised that I knew them. I knew them like the backs of my hands… although I was not aware that I had ever paid particularly scrupulous attention to them in my former life. Perhaps it was only in my mind—a reassurance, which I needed, that I was still who I was, really and truly.

I had a sword and a scabbard of my own. The weapon looked big and cumbersome, but it didn’t feel that way. It wasn’t only that it felt light—it felt as if it had a strength of its own, and perhaps an innate skill, which I only had to liberate. This was a magical sword, and that status seemed no more absurd than the fact of my existence here, for this was a world where all was magical, where the laws which regulated other spaces and times could be modified at will, if one only knew how and had the faith that one could do it.

I had another weapon too—a big longbow, leaning upon the rail beside my hand. It didn’t fall or bounce around when the ship lurched, and I guessed that it, too, had a competence of its own. There was a quiver of arrows behind my shoulder, Robin Hood style.

Bring me my bow of burning gold, I quoted silently, with drunken eloquence. Bring me my arrows of desire! And then, in more sombre mood: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned…

I turned again to look at the third person who was standing on the small raised section of deck. She had moved to stand by Myrlin, and was watching me studiously. It wasn’t Susarma Lear, though she had some of Susarma’s features. I had seen her many times before, looking out at me from her crazy looking-glass world, always behind an invisible but solid barrier—not really there at all.

Now, she was really here. Or, to be strictly accurate, I was “really” there.

Her dark hair was still worn long. It hung, straight and sheer, almost to the middle of her back. She was all Amazon now, though, in armour like mine in style, but burnished dark gold. Her eyes were brown, but like Myrlin’s eyes they had an inner glow that made them seem bright, as though they were radiant with heat. She was carrying her own bow, as tall as she was, and her own quiver of arrows. She had a sword, too, but she didn’t seem unduly burdened. She did look real—though that was undoubtedly a consequence of my knowing that she really belonged here. She was the Nine, and she didn’t need to become a caricature to take the appearance of Pallas Athene, warrior goddess—the role was already hers, custom-made.

I took my hands off the rail, and stood upright, slightly surprised to find that I could do it.

“You chose this,” I accused her. “We could experience this according to any scheme of interpretation—any framework of appearances that we cared to import. Why didn’t you give us Star Force uniforms and flame pistols? Why not an armoured car and a road to drive it on? We could have felt at home there. Why this fantasy… this fairyland?”

“Do you remember what happened to Amara Guur when you fought him in the flower garden?” she countered. “Do you remember why he couldn’t fight effectively?”

I remembered. Unlike me, he’d never been in low-gee before. When the fight started, his instincts took over, and all his reflexes were wrong. He was betrayed by his own skills.

She saw that I understood. “This isn’t the world you’ve always known,” she said. “If I were to make it look like that world, you’d be forever trying to act as if it were. Here, you must act on this world’s terms. We have a great deal of latitude in converting our experience into pseudo-sensory interpretations, but we don’t have complete freedom. The constraints this world exercises on the way you can see and manipulate it are weaker than the constraints of the world where your other self lives, but there are constraints. There is an actuality here, which must be accepted in order to be dealt with.”

“Yes,” I said, “but this is silly.”

“On the contrary,” she assured me, gravely. “It may seem to you to be absurd to build a world of experience out of bits of ancient mythologies and literary fantasies with which you had contact in your youth, but it is the perfect strategy for the circumstances. Those fantasies had real meaning for you once, and still do, although you have put them away as childish things. There has always been a private world within your mind—a refuge which offered relief from the oppressive solidity of the world of material objects. That world reproduces the kind of dominion that your personality has within your corporeal body—a power which still has limitations, but lesser ones. The magical world of your ancient myths and folklore fantasies arises out of an attempt to map the properties of the mind onto the properties of the spatial universe. Software space really is that kind of universe, where the personality holds that kind of dominion.

“You are now in a world which can best be understood—which can only be understood—in terms recalling the ideative framework of myths and fantasies. My borrowing may seem unduly confused, but the confusion is inherent in your own memories and your own mind, which can draw with careless abandon on all kinds of source-materials. The point is that these experiences can and do make a kind of sense to you—you are at home here, and when the time comes to act, you will be able to draw on resources other than the reflexes which you learned in order to operate in the material world—resources which are far less likely to let you down.”

“Less likely?” I queried.

“There are no guarantees, Mr. Rousseau. You still have to learn to draw upon those resources, and make the most of them. We are embarked upon a journey into great danger, and we will surely meet enemies. I cannot tell how powerful they may be, or how clever, but they will certainly oppose us with all the strength and cunning they can bring to bear.”

I put my hand on the hilt of my sword, gingerly, not knowing what it would feel like. It felt solid enough, but I knew too much to find that feeling of solidity reassuring. I reminded myself that it wasn’t really solid. Nor was the ship. Nor was I. Nor was the whole vast world in which I was adrift.

“I thought you copied us into an arcane language, so that the hostile software couldn’t get at us,” I remarked. “Come to think of it, I thought there were good reasons why you couldn’t copy yourself, so how come you’re here?” The horrible suspicion began to dawn on me as I spoke that I might have been lured into volunteering for this mission on false pretences.

“What you see before you,” she said, with a disarming smile, “has more in common with one of my scions than with the ninefold being which formerly employed this appearance to speak to you. I am not so much a copy as a redaction. I have no more power here than you or Myrlin, and I strongly suspect that I may have less. I still believe that you have weapons other than the ones with which I have provided you, and that when the time comes you may find a way to import extra power into the appearance of the gorgon’s head which I have added to our arsenal. It is important that you understand this; you may look to me for explanations, but when the battle begins, I am no more powerful than you, and probably less.”

“You’d better give us those explanations,” I said, with a hint of bitterness. “Now I’m here, I have the feeling that we haven’t gone into this deeply enough in our hurried conversations of the past few days.”

“We are encoded in an arcane language,” she said. “It will not be easy for destructive programmes of any kind to attack us—especially if, as I hope, the invaders of Asgard are unintelligent automata. But we must assume that whatever forces are arrayed against us will have some power to react to our presence and adapt to it, with a view to destroying us. I think that we must expect our enemies to break into the frame of meaning that we are imposing upon software space. They will appear as monstrous irruptions of various kinds—I cannot tell what precise forms they will take, but in order to attack us they will have to formulate themselves according to the patterns that we have preset. They will, in effect, have to translate themselves into the symbolic language which we have adopted—a language based in your imagination.”

“I have a depressing feeling,” I said, “that you’re telling me that the things which are trying to kill me are going to do it by turning themselves into the stuff of my worst nightmares.”

“That is a neat way of putting it,” she conceded with irritating equanimity.

“And our friends, if we have any?” Myrlin put in. “They too will have to intrude themselves, in much the same way?”

“If we receive any help,” she agreed, “it will follow a similar pattern of manifestation.”

I looked at the deck where the silent soldiers were arrayed, preternaturally still.

“What about those guys?” I asked.

“Automata,” she said. “Non-sentient programmes, very limited in what they can do. But they will help to defend us when the time comes, and if we are fortunate we may not have to face anything more adept than they are. The enemy may not find it easy to dispose of them.”

I had the suspicion that she was being deliberately optimistic. While we were talking I had grown more accustomed to my bizarre surroundings. I was beginning to acquire a feeling of belonging here. It was as though that peculiar fellow who had elected to make his living as a snapper-up of unconsidered technological trifles in the desolate caves of upper Asgard had all the while been nursing an alter ego compounded out of the fascinations of his infancy: an all-purpose hero equipped to fend off nightmares and confront the gods on their own terms.

It’s sad, in a way, to be forced to acknowledge the desperate lengths to which the human condition forces us to go, within the secret confines of our inmost souls, in search of solace and wish-fulfilment. But I guess our private fantasies are no more unique than our faces, and partake of no more artistry.

In another way, though, our capacity for fantasy is a hopeful thing, because it reassures us that whatever the cold and empty universe does in its mindless attempt to crush our vaulting ambition and make us see how small and stupid we really are, we can mould something better out of our common clay, and rise from our galactic gutter to contemplate the stars.

I stood up straight, staring past the gorgon’s head at the empty sea ahead of us, and wondered what kind of fabulous shore it was that we were trying to reach.