Asgard's Heart

20

The mist was slowly clearing, as though to let us witness the extent of our predicament, and we stood by the rail, morosely inspecting the expanse of weed which was thus revealed to us.

We were stuck fast. Though the oars still struggled to find some purchase amid the choking fronds of the weed, we could see that they were fighting a hopeless battle. It seemed that there was weed of every kind and texture—kelps and wracks, filamentous green weeds and rubbery brown weeds, were all tangled together into a straitjacket overlaying the surface upon which we traveled. There was not a hectare of clear water to be seen, and there were many places where the bulk of the weed was so great that it formed hillocks and mounds in the water. It looked as if we might descend from the ship and walk upon it, so thickly was it clustered, but I would not have dared to trust that appearance.

“What now?” asked Myrlin, sourly. “Will they send an army of giant crabs marching across this desert sea to attack us? Will other monsters gather beneath its shield, invisible until they thrust themselves up all about us?”

“A better question,” I said, “is whether they need to do anything at all? Why should they trouble to find a means of destroying us, if they can hold us immobile? Wherever our goal might lie, it seems to me that we can come no nearer to it unless we can find a way to break out of this trap they’ve set to catch us.”

We both looked to our guardian goddess for an answer, but it was plain that she was temporarily perplexed.

“I confess that I had not anticipated this,” she admitted. “Whatever it is which acts against us, it has found a way to confine us. I do not know how this has been done, and without knowing how, I cannot see a way to escape.”

I had laid down my bow and sheathed my sword. I was not entirely ungrateful for an opportunity to pause, because I felt that I had hardly begun to come to terms with this hallucinatory realm, but I knew that any delay could only work to the advantage of our enemies. Their hostility had so far been relatively impotent; they had not yet learned the ontological rules by which our natures converted the raw material of software space into experience—the magic of our being still held good. But they were the natives of this space, and it could only be a matter of time before they gained full measure of the demonic powers they were anxious to possess in order to turn our little fantasy into a full-blown nightmare. Myrlin and I did not belong here at all, and even the lovely goddess in whom the Nine were embodied, however much better adapted to this milieu she might intrinsically be, was a novice in this business of warfare by witchery.

“Could you burn the weed the way you burned their weird ship?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly, the light seeming dim in her eyes. The pale perfection of her features seemed too inhuman to be truly beautiful. I did not even know whether my present form was capable of any analogue of sexual desire, but I did not think her capable of inspiring it, despite her careful mimicry of human beauty.

“Perhaps…” she said, dubiously.

“If it is only a matter of finding the right magic…” began Myrlin, but then he shook his head in confusion.

“Only,” I echoed, with a mirthless laugh.

“But you have shaped this dream of ours,” complained the black-clad giant, addressing himself to Pallas Athene. “We did not find this place; it came into being with our coming. Why can you not define by the force of your will the ways by which we may control it?”

“We are far from being omnipotent,” she told him. “We have laid down the rules which determine how things will appear to us, and now must abide by them. If our enemies find strategies which our rules permit, though we had not thought of them ourselves, we cannot arbitrarily cancel their legitimacy.”

“Is it nothing but a game, then?” he asked her, bitterly. “When I agreed to do this, I thought it something more.”

“Games are merely fantasies,” she said, “which reproduce the structure of experience. Yes, this is a game, if you care to call it one, but what is at stake is the life that you have here, and countless other lives, here and elsewhere. There is no more for it to be.”

“Then we have only to find the right countermove,” I said, “the capture en passant which will let us out of the trap… the formula of power which will burn the weed or wither it with blight, or cause a herd of friendly sea-cows to rise from the depths and consume it with avid appetite.”

She was still looking at me, steadily and without resentment. “Yes,” she said. “That is what we must do.”

“I can’t help,” I told her. “You’re the one with all the magical artistry at her disposal.”

She shook her head. “Not so,” she said. Her gaze moved at last, wandering to the hammer that Myrlin held, weightlessly, in his hand. But what use was a hammer against a Sargasso of clinging weed? I turned to look at the carved figure-head—the symbol of whatever power might be contained within my being, waiting to erupt. Would it do us any good to be able to turn the weed to stone? Perhaps—if the stone were as brittle as glass. But I didn’t know how. I didn’t even know to release whatever power I might be harbouring: I knew no open sesame! which might unlock the doppelganger of my soul.

“It is possible,” she said thoughtfully, “that this was the state which the war within Asgard’s software space had reached. Perhaps the opposing forces, unable to destroy one another, had succeeded only in bringing about some kind of crystallization, whereby each held the other immobile and impotent. Perhaps that state of crystallization was shattered by our initial intervention—suddenly destroyed, liberating the armies on either side. Perhaps that is the state to which things must soon return, unless…”

She was thinking that while the situation was fluid, there was an opportunity for a conclusive advantage to be gained, here or in the physical centre to which my alter ego might now be drawing close. But there was something else in what she said that had caught my attention. She had spoken of the possible immobilisation of the contending forces as a crystallization, but the analogy which came to my mind was petrifaction—a conversion of the living, active flesh to rigid, impotent stone. Was that the nature of the weapon with which I had been entrusted? Was that why it appeared to me as Medusa’s head? Was I the crystal-seed whose mission, in the thinking of those who had summoned me here with their cry for help, was to restore stillness and impotence to the heart of Asgard’s software space?

It was not easy to work out how I ought to feel about that. I had seen enough of the levels to know what effects the long stagnation of Asgard’s systems had had upon many of the habitats and their humanoid prisoners.

But what alternatives are there? I asked myself. And have I really any choice at all in what I do?

I wondered how much choice Perseus had had, pushed hither and yon by the whims of the Olympians. But the Olympians themselves, I remembered, had been subject to the workings of an implacable destiny—beyond the machinations of the gods there was the instrumentality of fate, symbolised by three dark sisters spinning the thread of time and life.

I watched the oars, still scraping the surface of the knotted weed, albeit in half-hearted fashion now. They were still working autonomically, trying to repeat the action of rowing, but they seemed pathetic in their inadequacy, like the legs of a beetle turned over on its back, unable to right itself.

The image brought an idea into my mind, and I turned back to the goddess. “How extensive is the command which you have over the ship?” I asked. “Could you alter its locomotive action?”

“We are the ship,” she replied, plainly. “It is our body, as much as this is.” She pointed her finger at her breastbone as she spoke. By “we” she meant, of course, the Nine, not the three adventurers whose descent into Asgard’s inner depths had been interrupted.

“Then you must stop trying to swim,” I told her, “and begin to crawl. Make the blades of your oars into hands, and brace the shafts like the legs of a walking insect. If the weed is strong enough to hold us, it may be strong enough to support us, provided that our weight is sufficiently spread out.”

She turned swiftly to look at the oars, and I could see by the returning light in her eye that I had offered her a possible solution.

I watched with her as the oars stopped their futile pawing. The blades grew into shapes which more resembled the feet of a wading bird, and the shafts became jointed. As soon as the feet were all in position, the legs began to lift, and though it seemed for a moment that the sucking surface tension of the sea would hold us down, our hull broke free, and we were suddenly on top of the weed. One or two of the feet broke through the matted surface, but there were too many points of support to make our position precarious, and the legs began to move, a wave passing along the rank like the kind of wave which passes along the many legs of a millipede as it makes its painstaking way along. At first we walked slowly, as though fearful to fall, but we quickly picked up speed, and soon were running at least as rapidly as we had earlier been able to row.

I saw Myrlin smile, not simply because we were moving again, but because he had accepted the lesson that we could discover how to act here… that we were not utterly impotent by virtue of the strangeness of it all.

“Well done!” he said. “Perhaps they will not stop us after all.”

But I was not so ready to surrender to delight. I had not failed to notice that the moment we began to move, the mists that had withdrawn themselves began to steal inwards again. The cloudy sky above us, which had become quite white and high, now seemed to descend again, and to shift and swirl with fierce uncertain winds. I expected at any moment that the weed would sink beneath the surface of the eldritch sea, and let us down to float again, as we had before—but that was not what concerned me. I knew that we had now had our pause, and having escaped the attempt to confine us, must force our enemies to redouble their efforts to destroy us. In proving that we were not impotent, we had proved that we might be dangerous, and I knew that every adversary that came against us would be stronger than the last—until, in the end, we would meet our match.

The game, if game it was to be reckoned, had hardly begun.