Asgard's Heart

27

For the first few hours the ride was a veritable nightmare. It wasn’t so much the slug-things, which were too slow to bother us once we were alert to their existence. Nor, for that matter, was it anything that was genuinely dangerous. In the light suit, which seemed so much more fragile than the cold-suits I was used to, I felt virtually naked. The last time I’d worn a suit like that to cross an alien wilderness, Scarid stormtroopers had been on my tail, and they’d come within an inch of killing me. That kind of experience is enough to make anyone feel paranoid, and though I’d been assured that I was now a superman, I hadn’t yet seen much hard evidence of my superhumanity.

The headlights of our motorbikes attracted flying things: mothlike creatures bigger than any I had ever seen before. They came at us in great swarms, clumsily bumping into one another as they tried to get into the light. Some of them would stall in the confusion and fall into my path, and I couldn’t help running over them, feeling their soft bodies busting beneath the bike’s tyres. They continually spun out of the beam that lit my way, colliding helplessly with my helmet like balloons filled with flock.

The low gravity here made gliding easy and powered flight was to be had on the cheap, in energy-economic terms; these things didn’t need wings a metre across to bear them aloft, even when they had bodies the size of my arm. Their wings were coloured in exotic patterns, although I couldn’t see them to their best advantage as they jostled one another to flit through the beam. Their eyes weren’t compound, and reflected the light like cats’ eyes, but their mouth parts were insectile, with jaws and palps like cockroaches. The combination seemed bizarre, and though I’d recently seen enough of alien life by now to know how very ingenious DNA can be, the creatures still appeared to me to be monstrous and unnatural.

The trees were no better, if “trees” was the right word for the elements of the forest through which we rode. They were rooted top and bottom, to the ceiling as well as to the floor, and their foliage formed a curious double canopy. The thermosynthetic tegument covered the roof of the world as well as its floor, and weight was such a minor problem that most of the organisms made little distinction between up and down. I saw that the slug-things were just as happy wandering across the sky as the ground, held tight by their big suckers, and there were a couple of occasions when I had to ride directly beneath one, with tentacles snaking down at me from above. They couldn’t quite reach me, because they were used to catching taller prey in that fashion; the indigenous herbivores on which they fed had taken equal advantage, in their range of forms, of the low gravity.

The local fauna leaned conspicuously toward molluscan and arthropodan forms; the branches of the double-rooted trees were swarming with things that looked like a cross between a beetle and a crab. Anchored to the tougher boughs were creatures the size of a man’s head, which had tough shells shaped like barnacles. They opened their tops periodically to shoot out “limbs” like the tentacles of the slug-things. They didn’t look big enough to be a threat to anything but the moths that were their prime targets, but I did my best to keep clear of them anyway.

The larger herbivores looked like giant lobsters, harvest spiders, and walking radio masts, but they were easily spooked and ran away from our lights when we came close to their herds.

We rode for hour after hour without a pause. We weren’t going very fast, though it wasn’t too difficult to find a clear, flat path between the trees. We probably averaged about fifty kilometres per hour, though our route had twists and turns enough to ensure that we covered less than two-thirds of that distance in a hypothetical straight line.

My mind gradually settled into an acceptance of the surroundings, and I stopped caring about the moth-like things bouncing off my helmet. I concentrated on keeping my eyes fixed on the tail-light of the bike ahead, following the route which it mapped out for me. I must have settled eventually into a kind of trance-like state, because I lost all track of time. I really have no idea how long we had been riding by the time we arrived at our destination.

I had been expecting another wall and another airlock. I had paused to wonder whether the bikes could clamber down an evacuated shaft as easily as the larger vehicle had, but had simply shelved the question, knowing that there was no point in worrying about it ahead of time. The Nine had so far been equal to everything, and there would be time to worry about the limits of their competence when we found them out.

It was another airlock, but it wasn’t set in a wall. It was set in the floor, and it was big, like a vast drain-cover. It was in the middle of a patch of bare ground, which had a protective fence around it, presumably to keep the local wildlife away; we approached with care lest it should still be electrified, but it was harmless now, and presumably had been since the power went off. There was still the possibility of another booby-trap, though, and we didn’t throw caution to the winds. We checked all around the fence—a perimeter of nearly a hundred metres. We located the point at which Tulyar and Finn had gained access, and found their vehicles abandoned outside the fence.

Urania took the magic suitcase into the compound and got to work. I arranged the bicycles in a semicircle, with their headlight beams pointing out into the darkness. They didn’t show us much because they were still attracting swarms of the flying creatures, and I went to turn them off, but as I did so I noticed something odd about the trees that were faintly illuminated by the beams. They grew more thickly there than on the side from which we’d approached, and there were evident slash-marks where someone—or something—had widened a pathway through them.

I showed the evidence to Myrlin. “You think Tulyar met some friends here?” I asked him.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “Someone switched the power off, and if your logic is correct, that someone needed hands to do it—it wasn’t just a trick of the tapeworms. Perhaps Tulyar’s friends were already down there, waiting for him.”

It made sense enough, and it wasn’t very comforting. I had been taking comfort from the fact that we outnumbered Tulyar’s party, but for all we knew there might be a robot army down below as strong and as nasty-minded as the one which had tried to blast the Isthomi’s worldlet.

“If they already have hands down there,” I asked, “why do they need Tulyar at all?”

It wasn’t a rhetorical question, and I would have been very grateful had Myrlin been able to provide me with an answer, but he couldn’t. Only Tulyar—the thing that once had been Tulyar—knew what he was doing, and why.

By this time, Clio had managed to pick the lock that protected the gateway to the underworld. The outer wall of the airlock had already been persuaded to slide away into its bed. As soon as I got close enough to look down, I knew that it was something very different from the portals we had previously used.

The chamber within the lock was huge and deep. It was about twenty metres in diameter and fifteen metres deep. Around the lower perimeter was a horizontal ledge about eighty centimetres wide, with a protective fence and guardrail. Within that outer circle there was just a plain floor. There were elaborate control-panels set into the walls of the chamber, and four ladders leading down to the ledge.

There were several pieces of equipment scattered about the ledge between the fence and the wall—994-Tulyar and his sole remaining companion had apparently decided to travel light. But they hadn’t left their guns behind.

We let ourselves down to the circular ledge, and Urania plugged Clio’s brainbox into the nearest control panel. By now, she was a master in the art of interfacing, and Urania was immediately able to tell us that there was an atmosphere beyond the lower door, and that it had oxygen enough to be breathable—though we kept our suits on as a matter of course, to defend ourselves against dangerous organics.

As the circular floor began to slide away I already had some sort of notion of what I was going to see. I knew this was no elevator shaft, and my hands had a tight grip on the guard rail as I tensed myself in anticipation of vertiginous dizziness.

It wasn’t utterly dark down there, but there wasn’t a great deal of light either. There was something there, directly below us, but it was impossible to tell how far away it was or what it was like. The tiny, glimmering lights were very faint—it was like looking at a distant cloud-nebula through a powerful telescope, or looking down at a city from a high-flying plane on a night whose clarity was marred by a certain amount of hazy cloud. The light, such as it was, was concentrated in a fairly small area directly below us.

There was no shaft going down from the airlock. Our descent through Asgard’s levels was over, and we had reached the bottom of that part of the macroworld’s structure. From where we stood now, there seemed to be nothing but empty space separating us from another object—a world within a world, very distant and very small.

I quickly realised that it might only be the lack of light which made it appear that way, and that the tiny sphere which was Asgard’s core must in fact be connected to the outer part of the macroworld by dozens of threads or girders. We could see nothing of those connecting spokes, but there was no doubt at all that they must be out there in the darkness: the ribs of the macroworld, carrying the power cables and the neuronal chains which were the corridors of Asgard’s software space.

I peered hard into the Stygian gloom, thinking that at least one such rib must be close at hand, to serve us as a bridge. But then I realised, belatedly, that if we were to try to cross that vast empty space by means of such a thread we would need something like the teardrop elevators which had connected Skychain City to the orbital satellite—and that there was now no power to drive them. It was difficult to imagine that the motorbikes which had brought us here could be adapted to such a purpose, even if we could reach the upper anchorage of one of the connecting threads—and Tulyar and Finn had abandoned their machines here.

“Jesus Christ!” whispered Susarma Lear, who was standing beside me on what was now a narrow balcony, looking down into the heart of the world. “What is that?”

“At a guess,” I said, “it’s a baby star in high-tech swaddling-clothes. There must be bases down there where the builders live—or where they once lived—but there are no more levels.”

“It is the starshell,” Urania confirmed. “Inside it is the fusion reactor which supplied Asgard’s power. We are looking down into the last of the levels, and the largest one of all. Remember that there is air here; there may well be life too. None of the levels above is more than fifty or sixty metres deep, but the fact that this one is many thousands of metres deep does not necessarily mean that we should regard it any differently—this too may be a habitat.”

“Well,” said Susarma, “there’s one way in which it’s different. I can’t tell how far down it is, but it’s one hell of a drop, and we certainly don’t have an aeroplane in our luggage. So what are we supposed to do now?”

I stared down into the awesome pit, realising that I could now see the Centre—that mysterious Valhalla which was the home of whatever godlike beings had built the macroworld. It hung there suspended, like some kind of magic ball, gleaming oh-so-faintly with tiny lights that sparkled and twinkled uncertainly. I wondered whether they were continually being eclipsed and revealed by the passage of whatever shadowy monsters we still had to face.

“Tulyar’s still en route,” I said, quietly. “He’s still out there, ahead of us. And whatever he took from the first truck, we took from the replica. We can still follow him.”

Susarma Lear turned to look at Urania, who was on her other side. “What did you pack in those bags?” she asked. Her voice was still little more than a whisper, and I could hear the strain in it.

“There is no need to be afraid,” replied the scion, with the air of one quoting the obvious. “The gravity is very low now, and with the exception of 673-Nisreen we have bodies better equipped to resist injury than those we are following.”

But Susarma Lear didn’t find these reassurances entirely convincing. “Are you trying to tell me,” she said, icily, “that we’re going to jump?”

“We appear to have little alternative,” put in Myrlin, who didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea himself. I couldn’t blame him.

“Hell, Colonel,” I said, my own mouth more than a little dry. “You can hardly complain. You’re the only one of us who’s ever used a bloody parachute.”

“What is a parachute?” asked Urania, mildly. I looked at her in amazement, having long since accustomed myself to the fact that the Nine, one way or another, had soaked up absolutely everything that humans knew. But the scions were only partial personalities, created in the days before I began the intimate interfacing which had given the Nine fuller access to my memories. And everything they knew from experience about habitable worlds was based on their acquaintance with the levels. No one uses or invents parachutes when the solid sky is only twenty metres away.

“You mean,” I said, “that those bags you packed for the bikes don’t contain parachutes?”

“No, Mr. Rousseau.” She stopped there, perhaps offended that I hadn’t taken the time to reply to her question.

“So how are we expected to get down there?” I asked, satirically. “Do we strap on wings and learn to fly?”

I could tell by the way she looked back at me that it wasn’t as witty as I thought.

Susarma Lear seemed paradoxically pleased by my discomfort, though she would surely have preferred, had she been thinking rationally, a method of descent which made some use of her training.

“Don’t worry,” she said, with a feeble attempt to imitate Urania’s calmly infuriating tone. “Flying can’t be that difficult. Insects do it all the time.”

I looked her in the cold blue eyes, so that I could watch her reacting to what she’d said as the implications sank in.

“In the Star Force,” I said, maliciously, “we really have to be ready for anything, don’t we?”