Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

There seemed to be nothing…

But there was something.

It was something whose nature I could not quite grasp. I had to struggle for a way of understanding it. I did not even know whether it was something that came into being long after the story of life had begun, or whether it had remained hidden and dormant all the while. Was it, I wondered, another kind of life, which had its own incompatible game to play with matter, space, and time? Could it be conceptualised as a force which was the very antithesis of life—some elemental principle of destruction, or at least of deconstruction? Was it something opposed in essence not merely to life but even to matter, like the antimatter built of positrons and antiprotons?

I could not tell, and as I struggled to understand what message the dream was trying to deliver to my own intelligence, I felt the perspective shifting from what had seemed (only seemed?) to be a literal representation into a mythical one, where life became a generative god, father and mother of all things, while whatever adversary it was that threatened life became demonic: Satan, Beelzebub, Ahriman, Iblis, Tiamat.

But this mythical framework of understanding would no more come to a stable and graspable point of resolution than the cosmological vision had, for simple dualism was quickly hedged with alternative images and doubts. I caught glimpses of giants which my memory was quick to name Ymir and Purusha, but they were mere shadows on the cave-wall of my skull, cast by some inner light that was flickering already under the threat of being extinguished. They overlapped and all but drowned out a host of other shadows, some with humanoid form, some with animal form, and some built from eccentric combinations of the two.

I tried to give names to all the dancing silhouettes, but it was a hopeless task, because they were already fading away. I felt like an avatar of Tantalus, condemned to stand beneath the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but never able to take a bite. I struggled desperately to find something sensible and meaningful in the chaotic whirl of impressions, but it was too late.

The communicative bond was shattered. I woke up. I had one hell of a headache, which was not so much my previous headache doubled, but my previous headache raised to a new order of magnitude.

I opened my eyes anyway, and found myself back in the bunk from which I’d fallen. Opposite me, suddenly attentive, was the scion Urania.

“Please lie still for a few minutes, Mr. Rousseau,” she said, before I could open my mouth to speak. “Your skull is not fractured, but you were badly concussed. The powers of self-repair which my sisters awakened in your flesh will preserve you, but you must rest.”

It was one of those occasions when only cliches will do: “What happened?” I asked, quickly following up with: “Where are we?”

“A trap was set for us in the shaft,” she said. “I fear that we were careless—we did not think to investigate the space above the access-point. A heavy mass was dropped shortly after we began our descent. Fortunately, we were able to release our grip on one side of the shaft before impact. When the missile hit us, we were already swinging, and the blow was a glancing one. The extensors which had let go were able to seize the same side of the shaft as the remainder, so that we were able to withstand the ripping away of three of the others. Then we resumed our descent. No one was seriously injured, although 673-Nisreen sustained a broken arm. He does not have your augmented powers of healing, and the injury will prove troublesome.”

She glanced down as she said it, and I realised that the Tetron bioscientist must be in the bunk below me. I would have craned my neck over the edge to catch his eye and say hello, but my head wasn’t quite up to it.

“You are sure that this is me, I suppose?” I said. “Not something else borrowing my body?”

It was a feeble attempt at humour, but it was far too near the knuckle. She gave me an anxious, speculative look, obviously giving the hypothesis serious consideration.

“It’s okay,” I said, swiftly. “It really is me. I think the other guy had sole control for a while, there, but I’m definitely back now. It didn’t try to take over. It was trying to tell me something—to explain what this is all about.”

“If you had a further dream-experience,” she said, taking on the interested tone of voice that her mirror-land parent had adopted in similar circumstances, “I would be most interested to hear a description of it.”

“It was nothing much,” I muttered, sourly. “Just a history lesson. We never got to the end of it, and I think I was too stupid to get the point anyway. All I’m sure of is that it was trying to explain to me that there’s a war going on—not just in Asgard but throughout the universe. We already suspected that.”

But while I said it, I was wondering. Was the thing in my brain an independent intelligence, trying to tell me what this whole affair was all about? Or had the experience been some kind of programme playing on automatic, on which I’d just happened to eavesdrop? If the latter was the case, did it mean that the thing inside me wasn’t anything like a person, but more like a bundle of non-sentient programmes… game-playing programmes? Maybe Tulyar wasn’t so much a victim of demonic possession as an ambulatory automatic pilot: a zombie lodestone or a golem direction-finder. The possibilities, alas, were still endless. There were too many names, too many metaphors queued up like idols in some bizarre marketplace, none of them quite able to grasp the essence of the problem.

“Oh, merde” I said with feeling. “I think I’d rather not have woken up at all. Do you happen to know if I finished my supper?”

She handed me a tube and a bladder, both half-full—or half-empty, if you happen to be of the pessimistic turn of mind. I took a long pull from the bladder-pack, and felt a little better. The headache was clearing fast, and I guessed that I’d already been supplied with medication.

“How long was I out?” I asked.

“According to your measurement,” she said blandly, “about fifty-two hours.”

This was not as much of a shock as it might have been. Lately, I’d been losing vast chunks of my life right, left, and centre. If I’d still been condemned to the traditional threescore years and ten I’d have begun to feel aggrieved, but Myrlin and the Nine had assured me that their tinkering with my personal biotechnology had increased that potential many times over. If I were careful, I’d outlive Methuselah. I could afford to spend a few days in suspended animation every now and again.

The truck rocked slightly, and I became aware that we were traveling horizontally. During the two days and a bit I’d missed, we’d obviously had plenty of time to get to the bottom of the shaft, and for all I knew we might have climbed down another just as long.

I eased myself out of the narrow bunk, ignoring Urania’s painstaking mime of anxious disapproval. Her big brown monkey-like eyes had no difficulty at all in signifying sadness, but I wasn’t about to be blackmailed into feeling guilty by an accident of anatomy.

I worked my way forward into the cab. Myrlin was in the driving seat but he wasn’t actually driving. The truck was making its own way, with a little help from the intelligent suitcase resting on his lap. Susarma Lear was on the other side of the front seat, her left elbow wedged into a convenient cranny so that she could prop up her face on the heel of her hand. She was staring moodily out at the way ahead. She looked round when I moved into the space behind the seats.

“In the Star Force,” she said, “we like to think that we’re always ready for action. We do not take fifty-two-hour naps.” But she said it lightly, to let me know that she didn’t really mean it. She had about as much chance of learning to be witty as I had of absorbing the true Star Force spirit, but at least she was trying.