Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

There wasn’t much point in following up that line of conversation. It wouldn’t matter much whether a habitat was humanoid-inhabited or not, whether its atmosphere was oxygen-rich or reducing, or whether its organisms were photosynthetic or thermosynthetic: the big switch-off had left them all to live on their energy-capital. Some of them would be able to support sophisticated organisms for hundreds of years, simpler ones for hundreds of thousands, and bacteria for hundreds of millions; but in the end, if the power never came back on, entropy would turn them all into so much sterile sewage.

“Anyhow,” I said, “we could always cross our fingers and hope that some of the levels further down have intelligent inhabitants who do know their way around, far better than we do. For all we know, a hundred worldlets could have sent out teams of repair-men, every one of them so clever that bringing the power back will be just like mending a fuse.”

“We can hope,” said Susarma Lear, who had just climbed down from the turret, having concluded that there was nothing else out there to shoot. “But I’ve told you before, Rousseau—hope just isn’t enough.”

As mottos went it had its good points, but in a morale-boosting contest it could only be a hot contender for the booby prize.

“Well, if it’s all down to us,” I said, “we’d better look after that bloody suitcase, because everything I’ve seen of humanoid intercourse with machinery tells me that we’re a hell of a lot better at smashing things than we are at fixing them.”

“We may find scope for the exercise of both talents before we’re through,” said Myrlin, with the air of one who does not fear contradiction.

“We will do what we can,” said Urania simply. “We can do no more.”

The mist had faded into a light, silvery haze, and visibility on all sides of the ship had improved dramatically. A dead calm had fallen upon the sea. Where our oars disturbed the surface there was turbulence, and the ripples spread out slowly from each point of contact, but the viscous water damped them down and swallowed them. The wake which we left behind us was similarly impotent to disturb the waters for long; it too was calmed and soothed so that it stretched behind us for little more than a boat length, like gently-trailing tresses of weed.

I watched dark-haired Athene as she stared over the rail at the still and silent sea, clearly perturbed by what was happening, because it was so unexpected. I think she would have preferred a more recognisable menace, which could be opposed in straightforward fashion.

“What is happening?” asked Myrlin—not of her, though it was she who was surely best placed to answer—but of me.

“They appear to have made a temporary withdrawal,” I said. “I suspect they’re taking time out to think things over. A council of war, maybe. When they have another go at us, they’ll have a better idea of what to do. I have a suspicion that they may have done this sort of thing before, and know one or two tricks that our side hasn’t even thought of.”

She turned to look at me while I spoke, and the bleak look in her eye suggested that she had reached similar conclusions.

“It is too soon to despair,” she said, sharply. “While they withdraw, we make progress. Our weapons are still potent, and whatever monsters they may produce can only become solid enough to do us harm by rendering themselves vulnerable to our power of retaliation. You are more difficult to destroy now than ever you were as creatures of flesh and bone—remember that!”

While she instructed us to be brave, our surroundings began again to change. The mist began to thicken again, and draw about us, so that we could not see such great expanses of mirror-bright water to either side. The mist changed colour, too, so that it was no longer silvery-white but a roseate pink. At first I thought of this as if it were an infusion of something the colour of blood, which paled only because of its dilution in the mist, but there was too much yellow in the pink for that, and it was a colour I had only ever seen in the fragile petals of sweet-smelling flowers.

I had the strangest impression that this must be the most perfect of the colours which mist might have: a colour for sugar-sweet clouds in a child’s vision of paradise. I looked upwards, to the top of the mast, where the stirring of the wind had not completely ceased, and I saw wreaths of the mist thickening like radiant tongues of pink flame. The sea, beneath this glowing coloured vapour, could not help but lose its greyness, but the light that it reflected was by no means so pale. It was a red deeper by far, but still not like the colour of blood, tending more to the orange part of the spectrum. It put me in mind of films I had seen—the films by which I had learned the landscapes and appearances of the homeworld which I had never visited—where the camera’s eye had looked boldly into the face of the setting sun. It had stuck in my memory that the sun in such circumstances seemed hugely bloated by virtue of its proximity to the horizon, its image rippled by the hazy movement of the heated air.

I could easily imagine that the ocean upon which we floated was the surface of a dying sun, an infinite lake of quiet fire. Despite the redness, though, there was no heat at all. I no longer felt the need to draw my cloak tightly about me, but neither did I feel a need to discard it. There was still a hint of chill creeping in my bones.

“Look!” said Myrlin, pointing dead ahead. We could see very little beyond the figurehead which was carved to represent Medusa, whose serpentine tresses were themselves half-obscured by numinous tongues of rosy vapour, but we could see that the fog in direct line with the vessel’s course was beginning to thicken and to move in a much more agitated fashion. Its colour was darkening too, though not consistently, and as I struggled to make sense of what was happening I formed the notion that some kind of great arch was forming in the mist, through which the ship must sail, and that this arch was made of a blazing redness.

The sea was disturbed now, but not in the chaotic fashion of a surface stirred by eddying winds. It was as though there were some kind of force flowing from the points where the fiery arch met the water, which was causing great ripples and surges. As the ship began to meet these ripples, the bow began to dip and rise.

There was a sound, then, like the moan of some desolate creature slowly dying—a faint, hollow, hopeless sound which echoed eerily across the face of the water.

I concentrated on the arms of the arch into which we were sailing, which were thickening all the time from the gathering cloud, and now seemed like huge rotating pillars, far thinner at the bottom than the top—great vortices which slipped sinuously from side to side as ripples of expansion passed up from the water, loosening their hold on verticality.

“They’re sucking up the water!” I shouted as I realised what was happening. “Like a brace of tornadoes!”

The movement of the ship was increasing in its violence with every second that passed, and I moved in from the side, gripping the rail close to the position of the wheel, with which Myrlin was now trying to grapple.

They had sent no monster to fly at us or rise from the depths, but were raising against us the very elements of this world which we had made—they were attacking us with a storm, trying to upset the very fabric which we had imposed upon software space.

“Be calm!” commanded the gilt-clad goddess. “Hold hard, and we will ride it out. We are unsinkable!”

It was a promise which I longed to believe, but the sea boiled up beneath us as if it were a cauldron brought hurriedly to the boil, and there came into our faces a howling tempestuous wind like the voice of a wrathful god, while the mist fell all about us cloyingly, as though precipitated from solution in the air. There seemed little doubt that our ridiculous vessel would be smashed into matchwood, and our own bodies torn apart by the fury of the storm.