Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

By this time, Clio had managed to pick the lock that protected the gateway to the underworld. The outer wall of the airlock had already been persuaded to slide away into its bed. As soon as I got close enough to look down, I knew that it was something very different from the portals we had previously used.

The chamber within the lock was huge and deep. It was about twenty metres in diameter and fifteen metres deep. Around the lower perimeter was a horizontal ledge about eighty centimetres wide, with a protective fence and guardrail. Within that outer circle there was just a plain floor. There were elaborate control-panels set into the walls of the chamber, and four ladders leading down to the ledge.

There were several pieces of equipment scattered about the ledge between the fence and the wall—994-Tulyar and his sole remaining companion had apparently decided to travel light. But they hadn’t left their guns behind.

We let ourselves down to the circular ledge, and Urania plugged Clio’s brainbox into the nearest control panel. By now, she was a master in the art of interfacing, and Urania was immediately able to tell us that there was an atmosphere beyond the lower door, and that it had oxygen enough to be breathable—though we kept our suits on as a matter of course, to defend ourselves against dangerous organics.

As the circular floor began to slide away I already had some sort of notion of what I was going to see. I knew this was no elevator shaft, and my hands had a tight grip on the guard rail as I tensed myself in anticipation of vertiginous dizziness.

It wasn’t utterly dark down there, but there wasn’t a great deal of light either. There was something there, directly below us, but it was impossible to tell how far away it was or what it was like. The tiny, glimmering lights were very faint—it was like looking at a distant cloud-nebula through a powerful telescope, or looking down at a city from a high-flying plane on a night whose clarity was marred by a certain amount of hazy cloud. The light, such as it was, was concentrated in a fairly small area directly below us.

There was no shaft going down from the airlock. Our descent through Asgard’s levels was over, and we had reached the bottom of that part of the macroworld’s structure. From where we stood now, there seemed to be nothing but empty space separating us from another object—a world within a world, very distant and very small.

I quickly realised that it might only be the lack of light which made it appear that way, and that the tiny sphere which was Asgard’s core must in fact be connected to the outer part of the macroworld by dozens of threads or girders. We could see nothing of those connecting spokes, but there was no doubt at all that they must be out there in the darkness: the ribs of the macroworld, carrying the power cables and the neuronal chains which were the corridors of Asgard’s software space.

I peered hard into the Stygian gloom, thinking that at least one such rib must be close at hand, to serve us as a bridge. But then I realised, belatedly, that if we were to try to cross that vast empty space by means of such a thread we would need something like the teardrop elevators which had connected Skychain City to the orbital satellite—and that there was now no power to drive them. It was difficult to imagine that the motorbikes which had brought us here could be adapted to such a purpose, even if we could reach the upper anchorage of one of the connecting threads—and Tulyar and Finn had abandoned their machines here.

“Jesus Christ!” whispered Susarma Lear, who was standing beside me on what was now a narrow balcony, looking down into the heart of the world. “What is that?”

“At a guess,” I said, “it’s a baby star in high-tech swaddling-clothes. There must be bases down there where the builders live—or where they once lived—but there are no more levels.”

“It is the starshell,” Urania confirmed. “Inside it is the fusion reactor which supplied Asgard’s power. We are looking down into the last of the levels, and the largest one of all. Remember that there is air here; there may well be life too. None of the levels above is more than fifty or sixty metres deep, but the fact that this one is many thousands of metres deep does not necessarily mean that we should regard it any differently—this too may be a habitat.”

“Well,” said Susarma, “there’s one way in which it’s different. I can’t tell how far down it is, but it’s one hell of a drop, and we certainly don’t have an aeroplane in our luggage. So what are we supposed to do now?”

I stared down into the awesome pit, realising that I could now see the Centre—that mysterious Valhalla which was the home of whatever godlike beings had built the macroworld. It hung there suspended, like some kind of magic ball, gleaming oh-so-faintly with tiny lights that sparkled and twinkled uncertainly. I wondered whether they were continually being eclipsed and revealed by the passage of whatever shadowy monsters we still had to face.

“Tulyar’s still en route,” I said, quietly. “He’s still out there, ahead of us. And whatever he took from the first truck, we took from the replica. We can still follow him.”

Susarma Lear turned to look at Urania, who was on her other side. “What did you pack in those bags?” she asked. Her voice was still little more than a whisper, and I could hear the strain in it.

“There is no need to be afraid,” replied the scion, with the air of one quoting the obvious. “The gravity is very low now, and with the exception of 673-Nisreen we have bodies better equipped to resist injury than those we are following.”

But Susarma Lear didn’t find these reassurances entirely convincing. “Are you trying to tell me,” she said, icily, “that we’re going to jump?”

“We appear to have little alternative,” put in Myrlin, who didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea himself. I couldn’t blame him.

“Hell, Colonel,” I said, my own mouth more than a little dry. “You can hardly complain. You’re the only one of us who’s ever used a bloody parachute.”

“What is a parachute?” asked Urania, mildly. I looked at her in amazement, having long since accustomed myself to the fact that the Nine, one way or another, had soaked up absolutely everything that humans knew. But the scions were only partial personalities, created in the days before I began the intimate interfacing which had given the Nine fuller access to my memories. And everything they knew from experience about habitable worlds was based on their acquaintance with the levels. No one uses or invents parachutes when the solid sky is only twenty metres away.

“You mean,” I said, “that those bags you packed for the bikes don’t contain parachutes?”

“No, Mr. Rousseau.” She stopped there, perhaps offended that I hadn’t taken the time to reply to her question.

“So how are we expected to get down there?” I asked, satirically. “Do we strap on wings and learn to fly?”

I could tell by the way she looked back at me that it wasn’t as witty as I thought.

Susarma Lear seemed paradoxically pleased by my discomfort, though she would surely have preferred, had she been thinking rationally, a method of descent which made some use of her training.

“Don’t worry,” she said, with a feeble attempt to imitate Urania’s calmly infuriating tone. “Flying can’t be that difficult. Insects do it all the time.”

I looked her in the cold blue eyes, so that I could watch her reacting to what she’d said as the implications sank in.

“In the Star Force,” I said, maliciously, “we really have to be ready for anything, don’t we?”