Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

I was quite ready to believe that I was beaten, but I felt that I had to give resistance a try. After all, I had no idea how good I was at swordsmanship. Perhaps I was d’Artagnan as well as Robin Hood.

I moved forward, striking as best I could at one of the warriors. His own sword came up to meet mine, and when the two clashed, my blade shattered as if it had been made of delicate glass. I was left holding the hilt, foolishly looking down at the broken end.

The remaining fighting-men had remained quite still, their animation still suspended. The one I’d lunged at resumed the same position. Another man came between two of the warriors, and stood before me, looking me up and down with what seemed like frank curiosity. He bore a slight resemblance to John Finn, but the similarity was very superficial. This was a much taller and more handsome man, and though he had a Finnish slyness about him, he had also a self-confidence—a kind of authority implying aristocratic habits—which the sole remaining representative of the humble house of Finn could never have carried off.

He smiled. It was a nasty, cruel smile that reminded me of Amara Guur.

“I don’t know you,” I said, rather stupidly. I felt dreadful, and I knew that if I were to look down at my body there would be little to see but rags and tatters of putrefying flesh. I was quite convinced now that they really had beaten me. The language of my constitution was no longer arcane so far as they were concerned.

“No, Mr. Rousseau,” he said, in an oddly mellifluous voice which didn’t seem to fit his wicked face. “You’ve never seen me before—not even in your dreams. And yet, I am no less a figment of your imagination than the others. The appearance which I have is one which you have bestowed upon me.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I didn’t even know why the game was continuing—there was no obvious reason why they would want to talk to me before they destroyed me.

“We are at home here,” said the tall man, sounding not unfriendly. “This is our world. You had power here, but you did not know how to use it efficiently. You never really had a chance of surviving here, and your friends the Isthomi were over-ambitious in what they tried to do. Believe it or not, we bear you no animosity. Our war is not with your kind, but we must do what we must do. Think of it only as a dream, Mr. Rousseau. The pain which you suffer here is not the pain which flesh is heir to. It is a mere passing incident.”

When a sleeping man is close to wakefulness while he is still dreaming, there is a moment when he can exert the power of his returning consciousness within the dream, to shape and control it. I longed for such a moment now, wishing that I could do something to change the emerging pattern, but I could not even lift my arm to offer some futile gesture of defiance. I was frozen into stillness like those unhappy souls held fast by the trees of the forest, and all I could do was look about me.

I saw that we were in a city—a city built from grey stone and white marble, almost incandescent beneath the blazing glare of the huge sun. The buildings were very tall, decorated with tall arches and mighty colonnades, their facades decorated with sculptured images of battle. My own position was in the centre of a vast square thronged with people, but the pavement on which I stood was raised, so that I and the circle of swordsmen who surrounded me were above the level of the crowd by half a man’s height. There was a great deal of noise as the people in the crowd moved about, chattering and shouting. I could make no sense of the few words that I caught within the cacophony, which were in some alien tongue that I could not understand.

Not everyone was looking at me, but I was the centre of attention here; it was as if I was a prisoner brought out for ritual humiliation and execution. This was the seat of judgment to which I had been summoned—dead or alive—in order to hear my condemnation. The elements of the city’s architecture had been dredged from my vague and ill-conceived notions of what the cities of ancient Earth must have been like, which owed far more to antique movies than to any real knowledge. It seemed oddly appropriate that I— the merest pretender to godhood—should go to my destruction on the set of a low-budget epic. My other self had only been capable of dreaming second-rate dreams, and I was suffering now from the absurdity of his meagre pretensions.

Somewhat to my surprise, I felt a desperate desire to know the answers to a few questions, although I did not doubt that I would take those answers with me to oblivion in a very short space of time.

I looked the godlike man in the eye as I had looked Amara Guur in the eye, and said: “Will you tell me what it is that I have been a part of? Will you tell me what I was supposed to achieve, and why you fought so hard to stop me?”

He smiled, wryly. “You could not begin to understand,” he said. He must have known what an infuriating answer that would be. And he added: “It was not such a hard fight. The Isthomi are very feeble, as godlings go.”

“They thought I might find friends here,” I said weakly, “who would come to my aid.”

“Poor fool,” he said, not ungently. “You have tried to intervene in a battle whose nature you could never comprehend. You have no friends here, but only those who would use you. Your flesh-and-blood counterpart is no better off—he too is just a pawn, and he cannot even be certain which side he is on. He does not know whether the passenger in his body intends him to save the macroworld or to destroy it.”

“Do you know?” I asked, with as much insolence as I could muster.

He spread his hands wide, as if to say that it could not matter. I could not tell whether it was simply an act of casual cruelty, or whether there was some point in this dialogue. I wondered why he was delaying, if he intended to destroy me, and I noted that although he stood less than two metres away he had made no attempt to touch me. Was I still dangerous, in some way that I could not quite fathom?

I stared hard into his face, wishing fervently that looks could kill, but I could not move my arms or my legs. My limbs had so far submitted to the forces of decay that they had no way of responding to the signals sent by my brain, and I had the sensation that the brain itself had little left of its own order and power. Yet the end was not yet come, and I felt sure that there must be some reason for the delay. If they had been able to blot me out, utterly and entirely, they would have done it. They had not yet attained that final dominance which would permit them to administer the coup de grace. Perhaps there was still hope—still something I could do if only I knew how.

But the only thing I could do, it seemed, was talk.

“Who are you?” I asked, trying with all my might to be contemptuous.

He laughed. “What answer can I possibly give?” he countered. “The appearance which you see is in your eye, the identity which I have is in your mind. I have no way to answer you save by reference to your ideas, your characterizations. There are no gods, and yet I am a god, because you have no way of thinking about the kind of being I am, and the powers at my disposal, save by linking them to your myths of gods and giants. The builders of the macroworld were humanoid in form, and their nature is already pregnant in the parent being from which you were copied, in the quiet DNA which is unexpressed within your every cell, but you have not the power of their imagination, and you cannot conceive of the nature and power of the beings they created within their machines—or the nature and power of the invaders which have come to displace them. We are not gods but you must dress us as gods in order to have any image of us at all. You named the macroworld Asgard, because it seemed to you the creation of godlike beings, and you have translated the danger that threatens it into the vocabulary of Gotterdammerung , because there is no other way in which your petty minds might encompass it.