Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

I looked past her at the landscape that was dimly illuminated by the headlights. There was nothing much to see— just a sea of fine sand or dust, silvery grey in colour. It wasn’t flat, though its undulations were shallow. The air seemed to be full of tiny particles shimmering in the beams of light that preceded us. The truck wasn’t making anything like the speed it should have been, and I guessed that the wheels were sinking into the dust. We must have been kicking up one hell of a cloud behind us.

“Dead?” I asked, as I eased myself into a position between Myrlin and Susarma Lear.

“Apparently not,” said Myrlin.

“But well on the way,” added the colonel.

They both sounded glum.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“We’re having difficulty following the trace,” Myrlin explained. “The small quantities of organic material leaked by the other truck seem to be disappearing very quickly. It’s possible that they’re simply adhering to particles that are then scattered by the disturbance of its passage, but I think it more probable that the molecules are actually being metabolised. We have a bearing, of course, but it is not certain that the other vehicle will hold a straight course. If it deviates, we might have difficulty picking up the trail.”

“Metabolised?” I queried. “You mean the dust is full of bacteria?”

“Ninety percent organic,” said Myrlin. “Millions of species in every handful.”

“The usual story,” said Susarma. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It’s just that this level has no middlemen.” It was a cleverer joke than I’d ever heard her make before, and the first sign that a bit of me was rubbing off on her.

“Is this the same sort of stuff that the rings of Uranus are made out of?” I asked. “Has anyone told Nisreen?”

“He’s asleep,” said the colonel, laconically. “Sedated. Got a broken arm.”

The truck lurched slightly as it came over the top of a bigger-than-usual undulation. One of the wheels spun free for a second or two, but then it got a grip again. The air seemed so thick with the dust that it was difficult to see where the ground ended and the space above it began. To say that visibility was poor was an understatement—we might have been driving through a dense fog. I wondered whether this really was a level full of the kind of dust that could be found in the gas-clouds where second-generation stars were found—a sample of the primeval life-system which seeded the seas of every world where water could exist as a liquid. Who could tell? Maybe it was a different kind of system altogether—a very old one. Perhaps metazoan life was only a passing phase which biospheres went through, and in the end it all came full circle. As Susarma said: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

My funny dream had left its imprint on my waking self. I had the history of the universe and the destiny of all flesh very much in mind. The pain in my head was ebbing away, but it didn’t leave me feeling normal. I had that medicated feel you sometimes get when your pain-bearing nerves have been switched off—as if it was low gee outside my skull and zero gee inside it.

“Well,” I said, “as it’s all so utterly boring, I might as well go lie down.”

I should have known better than to tempt fate like that. We crested another rise and were suddenly heading downhill. All four wheels had lost their purchase—which wasn’t surprising, because we were riding a landslide and the dust was traveling faster than we were. It was coming up in front of us in great billows that cut visibility to absolute zero, and for all we could tell the ground might have swallowed us up entirely.

For all of five seconds I wasn’t in the least worried. After all, I was used to levels that had twenty-metre ceilings, where even the deepest lake would barely cover your head if you walked across its bed. I assumed that the slope couldn’t go on for long, and that we’d be bound to hit bottom any second.

Then the five seconds became ten, and I knew we were in trouble. For all I knew, this was the laundry-chute that would take us all the way down to the bottom of the world.

In a way, it wasn’t so bad—after all, the bottom of the world was exactly where we wanted to go. But how many tons of dust would we be buried under, if and when we got there? And how in hell were we ever going to pick up the trail that we’d very nearly lost even before we fell into the hole?

The mist was slowly clearing, as though to let us witness the extent of our predicament, and we stood by the rail, morosely inspecting the expanse of weed which was thus revealed to us.

We were stuck fast. Though the oars still struggled to find some purchase amid the choking fronds of the weed, we could see that they were fighting a hopeless battle. It seemed that there was weed of every kind and texture—kelps and wracks, filamentous green weeds and rubbery brown weeds, were all tangled together into a straitjacket overlaying the surface upon which we traveled. There was not a hectare of clear water to be seen, and there were many places where the bulk of the weed was so great that it formed hillocks and mounds in the water. It looked as if we might descend from the ship and walk upon it, so thickly was it clustered, but I would not have dared to trust that appearance.

“What now?” asked Myrlin, sourly. “Will they send an army of giant crabs marching across this desert sea to attack us? Will other monsters gather beneath its shield, invisible until they thrust themselves up all about us?”

“A better question,” I said, “is whether they need to do anything at all? Why should they trouble to find a means of destroying us, if they can hold us immobile? Wherever our goal might lie, it seems to me that we can come no nearer to it unless we can find a way to break out of this trap they’ve set to catch us.”

We both looked to our guardian goddess for an answer, but it was plain that she was temporarily perplexed.

“I confess that I had not anticipated this,” she admitted. “Whatever it is which acts against us, it has found a way to confine us. I do not know how this has been done, and without knowing how, I cannot see a way to escape.”

I had laid down my bow and sheathed my sword. I was not entirely ungrateful for an opportunity to pause, because I felt that I had hardly begun to come to terms with this hallucinatory realm, but I knew that any delay could only work to the advantage of our enemies. Their hostility had so far been relatively impotent; they had not yet learned the ontological rules by which our natures converted the raw material of software space into experience—the magic of our being still held good. But they were the natives of this space, and it could only be a matter of time before they gained full measure of the demonic powers they were anxious to possess in order to turn our little fantasy into a full-blown nightmare. Myrlin and I did not belong here at all, and even the lovely goddess in whom the Nine were embodied, however much better adapted to this milieu she might intrinsically be, was a novice in this business of warfare by witchery.

“Could you burn the weed the way you burned their weird ship?” I asked.

She stared at me blankly, the light seeming dim in her eyes. The pale perfection of her features seemed too inhuman to be truly beautiful. I did not even know whether my present form was capable of any analogue of sexual desire, but I did not think her capable of inspiring it, despite her careful mimicry of human beauty.

“Perhaps…” she said, dubiously.

“If it is only a matter of finding the right magic…” began Myrlin, but then he shook his head in confusion.

“Only,” I echoed, with a mirthless laugh.