Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

I wondered what would happen to me when all my senses had failed—when I could not see, or hear, or feel anything at all. Would my memory then begin to fade as the lobes of my hypothetical brain became dysfunctional? Would there be anything left of me at all?

I clung to the knowledge that this strange inhabitant of software space had, after all, collected me from the place where I had done my work, and had implied that I could be reconstructed in order to be put to work yet again, in some unspecified fashion. Despite all that had happened to me, I was still clinging to what I could only think of as life , whatever my enigmatic companion might have called it. In extremis I might be, but it seemed that I was also among friends, and though the macroworld itself might be in danger, the game had not yet reached the final play.

I spared a moment to hope, as fervently as I could, that my other self had fared even better than I, and that if he too had found unexpected dangers and dreadful threats, he had nevertheless found allies to preserve him from death.

As the monstrosity hauled its ugly body through the gap I saw that it wasn’t a centipede after all. The abdomen was rounded, a dull orange in colour and very hairy, and there were only a dozen legs sprouting from the segmented thorax. The creature had huge wings that gleamed brilliantly in the light of my headlamp; they were translucent save for the ribs that patterned them, and the way they refracted and reflected the light gave them a multicolored sheen. Under other circumstances I might have taken time out to appreciate their prettiness, which contrasted markedly with the extreme ugliness of the body that bore them, but things being the way they were my attention was monopolised by the great gawping eyes and vicious jaws. The jaws were glistening with some kind of mucus, and the palps on either side of the mouth were writhing like white worms.

I struggled reflexively, but I was wrapped up so tightly that all I could do was rock gently back and forth, like some pendulous fruit stirred by the wind.

I didn’t scream, but I think I may have whimpered a bit.

The last thing I wanted was to attract attention to myself, so I stopped struggling. I wondered whether I ought to switch off my headlight—I could still reach the control with the tip of my tongue—but the idea of being in total darkness with the monster wandering around was unbearable.

The thing made straight for me. It didn’t waste a single glance on any of the other prisoners. Despite the sense of imminent doom which I had, I was paradoxically glad that I wouldn’t have to watch it eat something else, anticipating my own fate while I watched it rip some moth-like thing apart with those slavering jaws.

The jaws in question reached up toward my face as the thing scrambled over the giant eggs which littered the floor of the nest. The horrid head was level with my chest, and as the jaws came apart I formed a dreadful picture in my mind of my head being squashed between the pincers, the skull-bones crumpling about my brain.

But the jaws reached on a little further than that, and snipped like a pair of scissors—with surprising delicacy—at the threads by which I was suspended. Before I had time to fall the creature reared up on half a dozen of its back legs, and grabbed me with the four front ones, hugging me to its chitinous bosom as though I were its long-lost child miraculously recovered from evil kidnappers. Then, without delay, it turned back on its tracks and scuttled as fast as it could— which was not very fast, given that I was such an unwieldy burden—for the doorway.

“Rousseau!” said Susarma Lear, her voice sounding very loud in my ears. “Rousseau, for Christ’s sake, what’s happening?”

“I’m alive,” I told her, though I was unable to muster an appropriate tone of exultation. “I guess I’ve just become the prize in a little game of rob-the-larder. I’ve been scavenged.”

The nest-robber hustled through the opening in the wall of the chamber and hurled itself out into space, still cradling me in its forelimbs. I tried to turn my head, because the light reflected from the polished golden plates of its thorax was dazzling me. I wished I hadn’t. The robbery hadn’t gone unnoticed, and beyond the thin neck of the creature that had snatched me was a great tumbling shadow. My headlamp wasn’t powerful enough to illuminate it all, but I got a fleeting impression of enormous size and of a spiderlike head even uglier than the head of the beast that had me in its grip.

I suppose we flew, after a fashion, but it felt like falling, as if the nest-robber were diving as steeply as it could to avoid its vengeful pursuer. As my head twisted I caught brief glimpses of other shapes hurtling past—the trailing tips of the branches of the gargantuan trees which grew on the shell that surrounded Asgard’s starlet. We came too close to some of the branches, reeling in mid-air as the wings of my captor touched them. It swerved to avoid them, but not very successfully, and I treated myself to a brief moment of macabre humour by wondering if the giant fly which held me had qualified for its pilot’s licence.

For fully fifty seconds the scavenger out-dived its pursuer, and I had just about decided that perhaps it had got away with its raid when our barely-controlled fall was rudely interrupted. It wasn’t the pursuer that got us, though—it was something which had been waiting on one of the tree-branches, ready to catch anything which happened to be passing. When I recovered from the shock of the collision I saw immediately that something had wrapped itself around one of the segments of my captor’s thorax, less than ten centimetres away from my helmet, between the fourth and fifth limbs.

The something was thick and wet and very rough, and I guessed immediately what it was. It was a tongue, and it was hauling my temporary custodian into a mouth so vast that it seemed to my befuddled brain that one could easily lose a whole microworld down there. But I only got the briefest glimpse of the pink wet throat and the dark tunnel that presumably led to a vastly cavernous stomach and an acid ocean of digestive juices.

Mercifully, the thing that had stolen me from the nest chose that moment to drop me. I didn’t for a moment suppose that it had done so for any altruistic reason, and I credited my release to its instinctive urge to concentrate all its resources on a hopeless effort to save itself, but I thanked it anyway—or would have if I could have mustered the breath to speak. My throat was so tight I couldn’t even whimper any more.

Susarma Lear and 673-Nisreen were both trying to attract my attention, complaining—politely, in the Tetron’s case; but with some asperity on Susanna’s side—that I was letting them down by not taking the time to tell them what was happening. But I really didn’t feel capable of offering them an adequate running commentary.

I fell—and this time there was no doubt that I was falling as freely as anything could, with no wings at all to bear me up. I wondered, absurdly, whether the stuff that was wrapped around me was elastic enough to let me bounce, provided that I didn’t fall on my head. I was under no illusions about what would happen if I did fall on my head. Low-gee or no low-gee, the most important bit of me would be a sticky red smear on the surface of the starshell.

Then I was caught again—grabbed in mid-air with an abruptness which shook me up badly. It wasn’t as bad as hitting the ground, but it was enough to jar my brain inside my skull and knock me dizzy. For several seconds I wasn’t in a position to see or feel anything at all except the kinaesthetic display of my own miserable discomfort.