Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

I swallowed a lump which had somehow appeared in my throat. “I may be an Achillean by birth,” I said, “but I’m not exactly cut from the same cloth as Perseus. His father, as I recall, was Zeus.”

“I cannot pretend to have a complete understanding of fleshly beings,” she told me, “despite what I have learned from my scions. But I do not think that the paternity of your flesh is of any significance here. It is the author of the software within your brain that concerns us now. The mind which you brought here carries a legacy of knowledge and craft which must be deemed the property of your entire race… and what has now been added to it we can only guess.”

I wasn’t ready for that. I shook my head, and turned away with a dismissive gesture.

“Much more of that,” I remarked, and not in jest, “and you’ll be scaring me more than the gorgon’s head did. Hostile software that wants to drive me mad is something I could maybe be cured of—you’re talking about something a hell of a lot more ominous than a tapeworm.”

“It is conjecture only,” she reassured me. “We must know more before we plan to act, though time is of the essence. We must find out whether anyone else has had such an experience.”

Although I was the only one who’d consciously made contact during that dark hour when the Isthomi had come close to destruction, I wasn’t the only one who’s interfaced. Myrlin had been hooked up too—and so had 994-Tulyar. I wondered what kind of imagery could be mined from the mythological symbol-system of a Tetron mind.

“Do you want me to ask?” I said unenthusiastically.

“The inquiry would come better from myself,” she assured me. “It may be necessary to be diplomatic, in the case of the Tetron.”

I readily forgave her the impolite implication that diplomacy was not my strong suit. “In that case,” I said, “perhaps I should try to get a bit more sleep.”

“If you dream,” she said, before she faded out, “be sure to pay attention as carefully as you can.”

It wasn’t the most soothing instruction I’d ever taken to bed with me, but as things turned out, I couldn’t obey it anyhow. Whatever dreams disturbed my mind failed, for once, to penetrate the blissful wall of my unconsciousness.

I was awakened from my peaceful slumbers by the delicate trilling of the telephone apparatus that the Isthomi had installed in my quarters. I always hung the mouthpiece above the bed before retiring, so that I could respond to interruptions with the minimum of effort. I didn’t even bother to open my eyes—I just fished the thing from its perch, thumbed the ACCEPT CALL button, and mumbled an incoherent semblance of a greeting into the mike.

“Jesus, Rousseau,” said the voice at the other end. “You’re supposed to be an officer in the Star Force. Why the hell are you asleep at this hour?”

“Time,” I said, “is purely relative. “What you call ‘this hour’ can be any damn hour we care to call it. What do you want, Susarma?”

“For a start,” she replied, “I want you to call me ‘Colonel.’ Also, I would like to invite you to accompany me on a little walk in the garden.”

I opened my eyes then and held the phone away from my face, staring at it as one tends to stare at an object that has unexpectedly started behaving in a perverse manner.

“You want me to come for a walk in the garden?” I asked guardedly.

“That’s what I said,” she confirmed. She sounded slightly bad-tempered, but there was nothing unusual about that. What was unusual was that she was talking about gardens as if I was supposed to know what she meant. I thought about it for a moment, and had little difficulty figuring out which garden she meant, but couldn’t for the life of me fathom out her reasons for wanting me to go there. One thing was certain though, and that was the fact that she must have a reason. She was not normally given to circumlocution or to guessing games.

Something was obviously wrong. I wondered whether it was the same kind of something wrong that I had already encountered, or an entirely unconnected kind of something wrong. Troubles seem never to come singly.

“Okay,” I said, in an off-hand manner. “The garden. Give me twenty minutes to wake up, and I’ll be there.”

I was proud of myself for giving no more than the slightest indication that I’d had difficulty working out what she meant, and I further demonstrated my initiative by waiting until I had showered and breakfasted, and was well away from my room, before asking the Isthomi if they could get me to the enclosed region which they’d used as an arena on my first visit to this level, to stage the big fight between the Star Force and Amara Guur’s mobsters, and to fake Myrlin’s death by fire at the less-than-tender hands of Susarma Lear.

The Isthomi opened up one of their convenient doorways into the hidden recesses of their world, and laid on a robot car which whizzed me away through curving tunnels at breathtaking pace. It was a longer journey than I expected—although it had never before occurred to me to wonder whether the maze in which my last adventure had taken place was geographically close to the essentially-similar one in which I’d found myself on the earlier occasion. I had nothing to do during the journey but worry about the speed at which I was traveling, and wish that it didn’t seem quite so much like a kind of repeating nightmare I’d suffered from in my youth—a stereotyped dream from which most microworlders are said to suffer.

Eventually, the car stopped and another doorway opened up beside me, through which I stepped into a hothouse world of gigantic flowers, vivid in hue and sharply scented. They presented a riot of colour—mostly purples and golds in this particular spot, which was dominated by a single vast bush, whose branches were tangled into an inextricable mess, and whose convolvuline blossoms looked like a scene from a surreal bell-factory. Given the host of mythological references that every waking moment now evoked, I could hardly help thinking of the bush as a Gordian knot, though it would have taken a much mightier hand than mine to slash it with a massive sword.

“Colonel Lear!” I called, mindful of her instruction that military protocol was still to be observed between us. I looked in either direction along the grey wall that curved away to my left and right, with a thin green verge which could serve as a path, if only I knew which way to go.

The door by which I had been admitted had closed silently and seamlessly behind me, but now another opened, a dozen metres away, and Susarma Lear stepped through. She was, as always, wearing her Star Force uniform, the black cloth contrasting in a remarkably pleasing fashion with the dazzling shock of blonde hair surrounding her face. She was also wearing a sidearm—one of the guns she’d taken from the Scarida when she’d come to my rescue while I was making my painful contact with the gods of Asgard.

The way she was holding her stern jaw made me wince. It wasn’t hard to believe that the icy stare in her bright blue eyes could turn men into stone.

“Hello, Rousseau,” she said, soberly. “Thanks for being so quick on the uptake.”

“I deduce,” I said—having had time to think about it— “that some unkind person has taken advantage of the fact that the Isthomi granted our request for personal privacy, and has surreptitiously bugged our rooms.”

“That’s right,” she confirmed.

“Finn again?”

“I assume that he’s involved. 994-Tulyar is behind it, of course.”

“Why?”

“If you mean, why are they doing it, it’s probably because they’re a bunch of scheming bastards to whom low cunning comes naturally. But I don’t like it. I don’t know what kind of game Tulyar’s playing, but I think it’s something I ought to find out about.”