Asgard's Heart

24

I passed from my unreal state of consciousness into a dream within the dream. I was still in the grey water, though it seemed calmer now and not so cold.

The armour I wore was hardly heavy at all, but it was slowly dragging me down. I tried to lash out with my limbs, with some idea in mind of bringing myself back to the surface, but all my actions were unnaturally slow and heavy, as though the water had the thickness of honey.

I tried to blow out the water that I had taken in, but I had no strength with which to do it, and in any case my lungs were no longer desperate for air. My feebly thrusting arms became entangled with the waterlogged cloak that had been swept around me in a great arc, so that I could not make any sensible attempt to perform the actions that were demanded by my entirely theoretical notions of how to swim. Gradually, I ceased struggling.

Once I had surrendered entirely to my slow fall into the depths, I became disentangled again, and the cloak streamed out from my body almost as though it were a great black parachute retarding my descent. The water was quite still now, and as the surface receded into the distance above me it took on the aspect of a great white-lit plane of crystal. Below me, by contrast, there was a dark abyss with no hint of illumination.

The coldness had by now gone out of the water—or perhaps my flesh had adapted to it—and the viscosity too was no longer so noticeable, so that the experience of moving through it was more like falling through empty space. I could have imagined myself adrift in the lightless void of interstellar space. There was a silence more profound than any I had ever experienced before.

I found it possible to open my mouth, but could not feel anything moving in or out of it. My chest was quite numb, and I had no sensation of breathing. Nor was I aware of any internal pulse-beat; it was as though time had stopped.

As the last vestiges of light faded away, leaving me in total darkness, I was swept by a feeling of unutterable loneliness, which drowned out all thought and memory for an unmeasurable pause. I felt that I was shrinking into a curious vanishing point—that every last vestige of my soul was evaporating, lost and irrecoverable.

I was certain that this was my experience of the moment of death. I believed that I had drowned, and would be no more as soon as my last moment of sensation was exhausted. I felt a small surge of gratitude that the moment was unmarred by pain or terror, and was calmly ready for extinction.

Whether extinction came, requiring me to be somehow resurrected, or whether my acceptance of death was premature, I do not know. I was next aware of a small presence of mind. I do not know how else to describe it, because I am sure—however paradoxical it may sound—that it was not an awareness of anything save that I was aware. Perhaps it was that irreducible quantum of certainty which Descartes tried to reach, imaginatively, with his dictum: Cogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker.

Strangely, though, I remained in doubt as to whether the thinker was me, or whether I was merely the thought in the head of some enigmatic god or giant. I was not sure whether I was still dreaming, or whether I was nowbeing dreamed. But work of some kind was going on: work of reconstruction, perhaps of re-creation. Something was taking shape, and although I was part and parcel of that shaping, I could not honestly say that I was doing it. If there was any part of me actively involved, it was a subconscious part.

I am not sure how to describe what was being built, because it had that absurd property of entities in software space that what it looked like depended entirely on the eye of the beholder—it was itself pure essence. When I tried to see it, I had to decide what I would see, and I had no basis for making any such decision… no basis, at any rate, within my conscious mind.

It may mean nothing, therefore, to report what images did come into the burgeoning mind that might or might not have been mine. I will have to take the chance, and say what I can.

Perhaps it was a web spun to span the darkness by an invisible spider—across and across, then around and around, in a curving spiral. The anchor-points of the web were not arranged in a circle, but were instead the points of a tetrahedron, so that the web curved in all three dimensions, and then was slightly hollowed like a net, as though the centre were being dragged away at right angles to everything else— into the fourth dimension, I must suppose.

Perhaps I caught brief sensations that might have been echoes of the dancing feet of the spinner as it whirled around its web, but perhaps those tremors of vibration were part of the life of the web itself.

The web caught nothing, and though it might have shuddered in some kind of breeze, it was never stretched taut at any point.

Perhaps the web was spun between the branches of a great tree—though I had the impression that the tree grew up to bear the web, shaped by the necessity of bearing the web. As I began to perceive the tree there must have come into existence some kind of light by which to see it—my experience of the web had been entirely tactile—and the radiance quickly increased as the tree expanded its dimensions. A whole universe seemed to be expanding around me, hyperspherically. The tree was everywhere; it was the whole of creation, the very structure of existence. Its trunk grew in entwined circles, like a knot of infinite complexity, and its branches radiated into all the space which would otherwise have been undefined, bearing foliage and multitudinous blossoms of every colour in the spectrum, which poured out silver pollen in never-ending streams, and reached out their star-shaped styles to bathe in the deluge.

There was a thought, and the thought was: This is the magical universe, in the process of its Creation. This is all that is and ever shall be.

Then there was an awakening.

I do not say that it was I who awoke. I cannot be sure of that. It was, however, my hand that felt the moistness of the sand and the warmth of the sun, my head that felt the sickness and the dizziness of a painful return to consciousness, my limbs which ached with exhaustion.

There was a sitting up—and that is the truth of it, though there is little point in continuing this narration by means of such circumlocutions.

For the sake of convenience, then, I sat up.

I was saved. I had been rescued by something that had caught me at the very moment of destruction and preserved me—or remade me, perhaps more in its own image than I had been before.

I looked around, and found myself on a sandy beach. The ocean, whose waves still lapped the sand about my booted feet, was blue with the reflection of a bright and cloudless sky, in which a golden sun blazed directly ahead.

I got slowly to my feet, and examined my body. I was still clad in the red quilted armour, but my cloak was gone. My sword was still in its scabbard at my waist. I was bareheaded. The feeling of intoxication and unreality that had attended my first incarnation in software space was entirely gone now. I felt, however paradoxically, like the real Michael Rousseau.

I looked inland, to see what kind of shore I had been brought to. There were many trees, so closely grouped that they presented a considerable barrier. The space between their gnarled trunks was filled with their own thorny branches, and with the spiked leaves of flowerless plants that grew between them. The trees were strange in the extreme, because their trunks were moulded in the approximate form of human beings with arms vertically upraised, like wooden people rooted at the ankles. The branches of the trees were extensions of the fingers of these luckless imprisoned souls, growing madly into a tangled leafy crown. The faces etched into the upper part of every bole each had the appearance of a man or woman sleeping, with eyes closed and expressionless. They ranged in colour from ivory white to ebon black; some seemed polished, others very rough.

I was standing on the sand, with the waves lapping at my heels. The wall of vegetation was no more than three metres away. I could see no obvious way into the thicket, but I approached anyway. The spiky leaf-blades of the plants that made up the undergrowth were very supple, and they seemed to writhe away from me as I approached.

When I came closer still, the tree-people appeared to wake from insensibility; the eyes opened, and though the faces were fixed in wood, and should have been incapable of expression, they seemed to look at me with such pain and horror that I flinched. Only the eyeballs moved within the sockets—the mouths etched in the bark apparently could not open to display teeth or tongue, nor could they contrive the slightest of smiles. And yet I was in no doubt at all that here were souls in some perverse state of torment—souls which were alarmed by my approach. The foliage of the trees rattled as if the boughs were being shaken from within, and the sound had the semblance of a childish language, as though the trees were babbling in a hopeless attempt to tell me something.

I stepped back from the edge of the forest, and turned away from the staring eyes to walk along the beach, hurrying to a place where the faces still slept. I did not try to approach too closely again, and when I glanced back I saw that the faces I had left behind had closed their eyes again, and gave every appearance of having returned to their dream-filled slumber.

Many of the trees carried fruit—bright bulbous things coloured yellow or red—but they were high in the crowns, and none had fallen to the sand.

I did not know where I was going, but I strode out purposefully, never pausing. I do not know how long I walked. The sun did not move in the sky; it remained directly overhead.

There were outcrops of black rock about me now, some of which jutted four or five metres above the sand. Etched into the surfaces of these rocks were outlines representing various kinds of animals: horses, deer, some kind of cattle. I half-expected to see these beasts open their eyes as I passed, but they never did.

I had become very thirsty, and was glad to see among these rocks a pool of water, surrounded by wet mud in which I could see the tracks of many animals, though there were none in sight, and I could see no trail by means of which they might have come from the forest. I went to kneel by the pool and dipped the fingers of my left hand into the water, carrying a little of it to my lips—but it was brackish, too salty to be drinkable.

I turned back to the wall of vegetation that prevented my moving inland. It seemed that no good could come of moving along the line of the shore. I did not want to approach again, bringing those awful faces to baleful life, but I did not know what else to do. I was alone, without guidance of any sort. If those who had helped me required something in return, I did not know what it was.

Directly in front of me there was the trunk of a tree which stood straighter and thicker than the rest. I looked at the closed eyes engraven in its thick black bark, and felt a creeping unease rise inside me.

I looked down at the hand which I had unthinkingly used to bring water to my lips, and saw that the fingers were swollen. The skin was beginning to peel from the underlying flesh, which was an unhealthy colour, faintly tinged with gangrenous green. I was astonished by the sight, for I had thought myself whole and healthy.

The water in the pool had become quite still again, and now I knelt down for a second time, and leaned over to look at my reflection. My face had a pallor which seemed to me disgusting. The colour had gone from my eyes, and my hair was a muddy grey. The skin had begun to peel from my forehead, too.

It came to me very suddenly that although my intelligence had somehow been preserved from the oblivion of death, my body had not. My flesh was already showing the stigmata of corruption.

Then, almost immediately, another idea occurred to me. Perhaps this was not the touch of death after all, but the beginning of a metamorphosis. Perhaps I too was fated to become a part of the curious forest, extending roots into the soil. I stood up quickly, and looked again at the tree whose appearance had frightened me.

Did I know the face that was etched into its bark?

Knowing what kind of world I was in, I had not thought it possible for me to feel surprise. It would not have startled me at all to recognise in those carved features a furious face rimmed with poisonous snakes, or the stern glare of some divine countenance more terrible than any human face. But this was not Medusa, or any other character from any other mythology of Earth. It was, instead, something rather more familiar, and uncomfortably so.

It was not a human face at all, though it was humanoid.

As I examined it more closely, I realised that it gave the impression of being part human, but the other part was a confusion of the lupine and the crocodilian.

I took one step forward, and the eyes opened, leaving me with no doubt at all as to the identity of the soul which had been made captive by the hellish tree.

All vormyr look alike to the untutored human eye, but there was one name which always came to my mind whenever I saw a vormyran, or a picture of a vormyran, or heard the word vormyr spoken—and that was the name Amara Guur.

“You’re dead,” I said, very calmly. I did not expect to see the wooden lips move, having formed the impression before that they could not. But the surprises kept coming.

“So are you, Mr. Rousseau,” he replied silkily. “So are you.”