Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

It didn’t seem to be worth pursuing the matter of my name, or even following up her point about how well we could claim to know one another.

“We’re here,” I said, “because the Isthomi find this whole situation just as puzzling as we do. They don’t know what the hell to expect in the lower depths, but there is one fact about Asgard—and, for that matter, about the universe—which leads them to harbour the suspicion that we poor creatures of flesh and blood must, in the final analysis, be good for something.”

“I’ll make a deal,” she said. “I’ll try to remember to call you Mike if you promise not to conduct conversations as though they were guessing games. Never mind the buildup—just skip to the punch line.”

“The Isthomi,” I said, in a faintly injured tone, “are very clever. They’re also very handy. They seem to be superior to us in every way—which is why we occasionally get this feeling of redundancy. But what Asgard is mostly full of… and what the galaxy beyond Asgard’s walls seems to be mostly full of… is beings like us. What the Isthomi can’t understand is why, if beings like themselves are so bloody clever, the universe isn’t full of them. They keep looking over their shoulders in the hope of catching a glimpse of their Achilles heel. Maybe they already got shot there a couple of times, during their contacts with whatever is loose in Asgard’s software space.

“The Isthomi are so powerful that they seem to us to be godlike, but they aren’t really gods. They’re vulnerable in all kinds of ways. We blasted our way through the hostile hardware that came after us, but that wasn’t the real war. It was just a throwaway move. We may yet have to withstand an attack much more insidious than the fireworks which were left to entertain us at the bottom of the first shaft—an attack by hostile software. Every time Clio puts out feelers to pick a lock for us she could open herself up to the kind of devastation the Nine suffered when they went exploring in the heart of Asgard’s software space. When it comes to the crunch, there might be no one left to carry this fight forward except the likes of you and me. So look after that Scarid crash-gun you’ve taken to wearing—one day soon…”

I was forced to pause in my melodramatic discourse because the truck lurched, and I had to brace myself against the ceiling of my bunk space as we wobbled drunkenly. It seemed that we were under way, and that the mechanical precision of the bendy legs which were walking us down the shaft was by no means perfect. I sighed, unable to fancy my chances of getting a good night’s sleep. I wasn’t sure that I wanted one, anyhow—I was still apprehensive about dreaming, and the fact that the biocopy foisted on my brain had now been recopied into something more like its natural form in harness with my alter ego didn’t affect the fact that it was still lurking in the shadows of my soul.

On the other hand, I could hardly stay awake forever.

“That explains why the Isthomi are prepared to entertain us,” she admitted, after a pause for thought. “But what are we doing here, Rousseau… Mike?”

I looked at her in mild surprise. She was, after all, a volunteer. Her orders had been to return to the surface, and though circumstances had conspired to prevent her obeying them, she’d already decided that she wasn’t going back. I realised now, though, that her motives for making that decision had been almost entirely negative. Her orders had seemed to her to be bad ones, inspired by forces that did not have human interests at heart, and her instinct had told her to disobey them. She hadn’t thought it through much further than that.

“We’re trying to save the macroworld,” I reminded her. “If we needed a reason, we got it when the power was switched off. Before that, we had the fact that I seemed to have received a cry for help… and before that we had simple curiosity: the desire to solve the biggest puzzle that fate had ever thrown our way—excepting, of course, such commonplace mysteries as the origin of life, which may not be unrelated to it. Isn’t that enough?”

“I guess so,” she said. “But I can’t help feeling that we may be biting off more than we can chew. Whatever the scheme of things is really like, creatures like us are very, very tiny, aren’t we?”

I’d always known that. I realised that somehow, she’d never quite got hold of the idea before. I remembered the way she’d conducted herself when she first arrived on Asgard, blithely suggesting that she could always bomb Skychain City into slag if she didn’t get her own way. I supposed that active participation in the virtual genocide of the Salamandrans had given her inflated ideas about the importance of homo sapiens which were only now being deflated to a true sense of proportion.

“Well,” I said, “it was a virus whose individual particles can be measured in Angstrom units which destroyed the Scarid empire of twenty billion humanoid beings. Nothing’s insignificant, if it’s in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.”

I felt embarrassed about sermonising, but as I repeated my own words back to myself for reinspection, I couldn’t help feeling that, as sermons went, my little homily had its merits. Unfortunately, Susarma Lear was in the mood to export a little of her newfound sense of deflation.

“The problem is,” she said, pensively, “that as you kindly pointed out to me up above, we really don’t know what we’re doing, do we?”

I’m sure that I could have thought up a convincing reply to preserve a few of my delusions of grandeur, but I was saved from the responsibility by the fact that at that precise moment in time something very big and very heavy landed on top of the truck with an almighty crash, and broke our hold on the walls of the shaft.

What had been sideways suddenly became down, and I was catapulted out of the bunk. The only thought which my brain could then accommodate was the terrified realization that twenty-five kilometres was a hell of a long way to fall, and that even the low-gee wasn’t going to save us from being comprehensively pulped when we hit the bottom.

It was time for our blond Vikings to come to life and do their stuff, but there was one awful moment when they simply stood, inanimate, while the walking dead streamed all over them.

“The bow!” cried Myrlin as I reached reflexively for the sword at my belt. I knew that it would be useless to protest that I had never fired an arrow in my life, from a longbow or any other contraption; not knowing what magic had gone into my present making, I might easily discover myself a match for Robin Hood.

I snatched up the quiver from its resting place and slung it over my shoulder; then I snatched up the bow and notched the first arrow in the string. It was a stoutly-timbered weapon, and I could well imagine that it was first cousin to the one which Penelope’s suitors had toiled in vain to bend, but it offered little resistance to me as I drew the string back and took aim at one of the skeletons which had a little more flesh on it than most, and which had established a coign of vantage on the figurehead. I loosed the arrow, and saw it fly with a speed that belied the apparent slackness of the string. It hit the bone-man square in the sternum and exploded his entire rib cage, sending slivers of bone in every direction.

The Vikings were moving now, lashing out with their swords and spears. A couple were whirling battle-axes around their heads, and wherever the blades met the brittle skeletons the bones came apart with satisfying ease. Automata our fighting men might be, but they were none the less fearsome for that—they never hit one another, and they commanded nearly every square metre of space on the deck with their flashing blades. The skeleton men poured from their macabre craft in such profusion that they seemed sure to overwhelm our forces by sheer weight of numbers, but they were mostly smashed to bits as soon as they came within range.