Asgard's Secret

31

Crazy as it may seem, I woke up feeling good.

I had long regarded it as an inevitable aspect of the human condition that no one, whatever the circumstances, ever wakes up feeling good, but this was an exceptional awakening in more ways than one. I felt fresh, light-headed, and euphoric.

The good feeling lasted as long as it took me to realise that I had no idea where I was. That was followed by the realisation that wherever I was, I had to be in dire trouble. I was no longer wearing a cold-suit; all I had on were the T-shirt and underpants that I usually wear under a cold-suit. I opened my eyes, blinking against the bright light, and had to shade them carefully until they adjusted.

When I tried to get to my feet, I realised that I had been lying on my side on hard ground. I wasn’t stiff or uncomfortable, so I concluded that I hadn’t been lying there long. The movement that brought me upright was attended by a peculiar feeling of nostalgia, which I didn’t understand at all for a few seconds, until it dawned on me that I felt very light. I had the kind of weight I’d carried around in my long-lost youth, when I lived on a microworld in the asteroid belt. All the years in which I’d been dragged down by the surface-gravity of Asgard seemed to have melted away, restoring an earlier state of being.

It was an illusion, of course; there was no way I could be back in the asteroid belt. But if I was still on—or rather in— Asgard, then I had to be a long way down. Maybe not in the centre, whose pull seemed still to be exerting itself upon my bare feet, but a lot nearer to the centre than that derelict ecosystem from which I’d been snatched.

I took my hand away from my eyes, then, ready to see whatever there was to be seen. And what there was to be seen threw all my calculations out of order again, because there was something very, very strange. It made me gasp in amazement.

The major surprise wasn’t the grassy plain, which seemed to stretch away from me in all directions, lush and green; or the tall palm-like trees, which grew in clumps; or the bright birds, which fluttered in their foliage, although I had never seen their like in all my life.

What shocked me most was the brilliant blue sky. In that sky was a bright, golden sun which filled the infinite blue vault with vivid light.

I had never seen a pale blue sky or a golden sun. I had never been on Earth, or any other world like Earth. The sky on Asgard was very different in hue, thanks to the thinness of its atmosphere, and it was a sky I had only seen through some kind of window-glass. I had never stood naked beneath a limitless sky, and the illusion that I was there now was something that filled me with inexpressible panic.

Illusion?

Even as I crouched down again, as if trying to hide from that sky, I was telling myself that it had to be an illusion. After all, where could I really be which had a sky like that? I was inside Asgard, where the “sky” could be no more than twenty or thirty metres over my head, and made of solid substance… where there could be no glaring yellow sun, but only rank upon rank of electric lights, or a pale varnish of bioluminescent lichen. I could not possibly be outside, because I was inside.

Or was I?

In the centre, I had always believed, must live the miracle-workers, the men like gods, the super-scientists. Was it possible that Asgard was neither a home, nor an Ark, nor a fortress, but a kind of terminal in some extraordinary kind of transportation system? Had I somehow been teleported out of Asgard, to some unimaginably distant world?

At that moment, it came home to me that literally anything might be possible—that I must not prejudge anything at all. I was as innocent as Adam in Eden, from whom all the secrets of Creation had been hidden, and who stupidly ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, instead of that other tree, which might have given him a wisdom infinitely to be preferred.

Tentatively, I moved my naked foot over the ground on which I was crouching, and knew at once that visual appearance and tactile reality were at odds. My eyes told me that I was in a dusty clearing mottled with tufts of grass but my toes told me that was a lie. There was no dust and no grass, just a hard, neutral surface. It was neither warm nor cold to the touch, but it was slick and smooth—exactly like that mysterious ultra-hard superplastic from which Asgard’s walls were made.

“Illusion, then,” I murmured to myself. Illusion, after all.

I looked up then as I heard a rustle in the grass—the grass which probably wasn’t there.

Not ten metres away from me, watching me with a baleful eye, was a great tawny-maned predator with teeth like daggers. I had no difficulty in recognising it, though I had only ever seen its like in photographs and videos. It was a big male lion.

It came forward a little further, and I saw that it was lazily swishing its tail. It was staring me straight in the eye, and it took very little imagination to figure out what kind of calculations its predatory brain was making.

I quickly told myself that it was only an illusion, but that was impossible to believe while the beast was so obviously looking at me, its gaze so careful and so malevolent. There was no doubt in my mind that it could see me, and that its intention was to feast on my flesh. My mind, trapped by the horror of it, could not spare the time for arguments about whether the lion was really there; I was utterly hung up on the question of whether I should remain frozen in immobility, or run like hell.

I would have looked around, hoping to find a weapon of some sort, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from that thick-maned head and the black tongue which lolled out between the huge teeth. It took another step forward, languidly, and then tensed, ready for a quick sprint and a mighty leap.

I claim no credit for what I did then, because it was not the result of conscious decision. Rather, it was a deep-seated reflex which had been locked up in my subconscious, unused and unsuspected, ever since some arcane process of preparation had put it there.

I stood bolt upright, threw my arms wide, and screamed in rage and defiance at the beast.

Unfortunately, whatever had planted that instinct in my brain had not reckoned with this particular lion. It didn’t turn tail and run. Instead, it did what it had always intended to do.

It took three bounding strides and leapt at my head, the claws standing out from its raking forepaws and the great jaws gaping wide, ready to seize me with those awful teeth.

Then my conscious mind wrenched control of my body back from my stupid subconscious, and told it to run like hell.

But the lion vanished in mid-air, even as I brought my arms across in a futile effort to make a defensive screen, before I could pivot on my heel and flee. The creature jumped clean out of existence, into whatever limbo of oblivion illusions must go when they die.

Helplessly, I staggered backwards, carried by the impetus of my intention to run, though there was no longer any need. I cannoned into an invisible wall a couple of metres away from the spot where I’d woken up. I hit it with my shoulder, and gave my arm a painful wrench.

My eyes told me that there was no wall there—not even a wall of glass. My eyes said that there was a grassy plain stretching away to the horizon. The only concession they would make to my aching shoulder was to suggest that there was some invisible wall of force preventing me from walking across the grassland.

I knew that my eyes were liars. I was inside Asgard, probably in some kind of chamber, and there was no plain, no sky, no sun and no lion. It was all a picture projected on the walls.

It took five minutes for me to ascertain that the room was rectangular, about four metres by three, and that there was not the slightest sign of any seam or doorway.

“Bastards!” I shouted, fairly certain that I could be seen and overheard by someone, or something—why else the illusion; and why else the lion?

I was being tested, or taunted. Someone, or something, was interested in me.

There didn’t seem to be any point in further vulgar abuse, and I was damned if I was going to start up a one-sided inquisition. There were things I wanted to find out, and there were a few sensible investigations that I could make no matter what kind of cage I was in.

I checked the places where my life-support system had been hooked into my body. The places where the drip-feeders had gone into my veins were just perceptible to the touch, but had healed completely. That implied that I had been out of my suit for some time—several days, if the evidence could be taken at face value. But I didn’t feel hungry or weak. In fact, I felt fighting fit.

I ran my fingers over all the parts of my body I could reach. I found a couple of old scars, a couple of big moles which had always been there—and a few new anomalies. The skin at the back of my neck felt as if it was pockmarked, and I had an unusually itchy scalp. But I was clean-shaven and my hair was no longer than it had been when I put the cold-suit on. I hadn’t taken anything to inhibit hair-growth, because a cold-suit is loose-fitting, so I must have had more than three days’ growth of beard when the mindscrambler hit me.

It was obvious that the interval between scrambling and unscrambling had been a long one. The peace-officers in Skychain City carry mindscramblers of a kind, but much cruder ones than the one I’d been hit with—not much more advanced than a common-or-garden stun gun. The Tetrax had illusion-booths, too, but none as sophisticated as the room that I was now trapped in. With a Tetron illusion, you could always see the joins. Willing suspension of disbelief was required. This illusion was a whole order of magnitude more plausible.

Perhaps I was, after all, in the hands of miracle-workers—men who were, if not actually like gods, at least prepared to play godlike games with those poor humanoids unlucky enough to fall into their clutches.

Whom the gods destroy, I reminded myself, they first make mad.

Well, I was mad all right; in fact, I was downright furious.

I looked around, sceptically, and the grassy plain just disappeared. I couldn’t help starting in shock, but I wasn’t entirely surprised. It was only the suddenness which had made me react. I knew by now that they could show me anything they wanted to.

What they showed me now was a room, four metres by three, with an open door to my left. The room was lit from above, the whole ceiling glowing pearly white. The walls were grey and featureless.

I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was reality; I gamble as well as the next man, and I know enough to look out for a double bluff. There were no prizes for guessing that they wanted me to go through the door. I contemplated being perverse, but decided that the room wasn’t any place that I wanted to stay. I did what I was supposed to do, and exited stage left.

I found myself in a dimly lit corridor. The door was at the end of it, so there was only one way to go, and I went. It curved, so I couldn’t see more than three metres in front of me. The light emanated from the whole surface of the ceiling; the walls remained grey and featureless. The grassy plain had been a lot less boring, but I wasn’t about to complain. Boredom I could stand; hungry predators were a distinct strain on the nerves.

Then, in front of me, I saw a T-junction. As I moved toward it, a figure emerged from the left-hand path, saw me and quickly brought up a gun which it had been holding loosely in its right hand. It was a humanoid, but it wasn’t human. It was a vormyran, or a very good imitation of one. It was a dead ringer for Amara Guur—but all vormyr are.