Brian Stableford - Asgard's Conquerors

I dreamed that I was in a forest of stalagmitic rocks, which had been eroded into edgeless smoothness, contoured with many curves as if they were molten statues. In the silver dawn the vaporous entities were stirring from their nightly sleep, floating upwards and writhing in a ceaseless but futile effort to attain fixed shape.

They began a slow, sinister dance around and around the coralline maypoles, beneath a purple sky slowly lightening to mauve. These shimmering shadows yearned for shape, for solidity, but their ambitions were hopeless. They did not seem to react in any way to my presence, but were utterly self-involved, in pursuit of their own private purposes.

The rocks were coloured grey and green, but as they were caressed by the miasmic vapour-creatures their colours were smeared, and a fugitive redness began to ooze as if escaping from the core of each column through a porous epidermis. The more distant rocks began to recede, drawn backwards into gathering shadows of coloured mist, but this took place furtively, as if at the very edge of attention.

The forest, having likened its warming air to water, began to repopulate itself with tiny sparks—transient flickers of light that attempted the semblance of sunlight scintillating by reflection from tiny scales. The desert’s memories of having been a sea were only impressionistic; it could not recall the mass of the water or the bodies of its former inhabitants, but it had their echoes imprinted in it. It had the spirit of a sea, and it knew how a sea felt in being a sea.

I did not feel involved in any of this. Nothing seemed to be addressed to me. I felt, instead, like an invader, a trespasser in an autogenetic realm where I could not belong. I felt that the desert’s dream was essentially a lonely one.

And then I saw the four eyes of fire, burning like red-hot coals, peering at me from the shadows, their inner light eclipsing sunlight and remembered sea alike.

As they moved from the limits of perception, closer and closer, it seemed that the desert stirred and muttered, complaining at the disturbance. The eyes glared, their fire a bloody radiance that assaulted the forest like a hot wind, challenging and dispelling its dream.

The desert, angered, fought back. Whirlpools of vapour arose in an attempt to consume the eyes, but impotently. Writhing serpents tried first to swallow the eyes, and then to wrap themselves around the invaders, constrictor- fashion. Torrents of black rain fell from the sky, and lightning struck at the four eyes, again and again—hopelessly. The eyes stared at me. This was not the gaze of Medusa, turning me to stone, but rather the reverse. It was a stare in which I might dissolve or evaporate, becoming insubstantial.

Because I was nowhere and nothing, but simply a dislocated presence, the stare was inside me as well as outside. I was not staring, nor were the eyes of fire my eyes, but their searching was within me, through and through me, and I felt that I could never be apart from it again. I believed that I would always be under the scrutiny of those eyes, that there would always be something of that blazing stare in the way I observed myself.

The desert sighed, and I was not consumed. The womb- dream of a long-gone ocean began to reassert itself again, at the fringes of attention. The bulbous columns of rock still bled, and their blood became vaporous, taking flight as misty monsters—dragons and winged things. That dragonsblood flowed in me, and I felt that if ever I had veins again, and blood of my own, then the pulse of the Heart Divine would send those dragons coursing through my being, forever and ever.

I counted the columns, and numbered them nine, and for the first time my mind became thoughtfully active, striving for meaning, hoping for a key to the symbology.

I was suddenly overcome by a floodtide of emotion, as though my metaphorical heart was bursting, but I did not know what it was that I was supposed to be feeling. I could not tell rage from pity, grief from affection. I was moved, but I could not tell what it was that moved me, or what I was supposed to understand.

I clung to one conclusion.

The Nine are not dead!

I told myself that they had lost control of themselves, and of their systems, as though they had become unconscious, perhaps catatonic, but that they were not dead. That conclusion, that thought, was vital. It made me remember who I was, and what I was, and what the situation was. Where I was, or what form I had, remained questions unasked and unanswerable, but I knew that there were Nine and there were Four, and that the Nine were not dead, and that the Four were still present, still trying to achieve some mysterious end, not knowing how.

I realised, then, that it was not just me who was all at sea in this business of contact and communication. The Nine and the Four had their barriers to contend with, their walls of incomprehension. They, too, had no way to perceive one another save for the semblance of pain and the strangeness of symbol. They had exploded into one another with the devastating shock of first encounter, and their second encounter had been no less disruptive, but now perhaps their damaged selves were grasping at one another for mutual support—perhaps even for mutual inclusion. They were trying to touch one another so intimately as almost to be one another. But that was dangerous, as they had both discovered.

The eyes seemed now to be very close to me, in two pairs staring from either side, though I had no eyes of my own with which to meet their stare. They were still calling forth waves of feeling with their hypnotic insistence, but I still did not know what to feel. Somehow, the feeling began to assume the nature of fear, but even as it did so, I felt a counterbalancing insistence that this was wrong. There had been a partial withdrawal, as though the eyes were struggling to become more remote, to distance themselves.

Terror grew inside me, and pain, and I felt again the urge to absent myself, to become small, to seek safety in the perverse world of the atom. But I also felt not-fear and not-pain, and I wondered whether those strange feelings might better have been translated into words, if only I had had the means.

Do not hurt! Do not fear!

Was that what the Four were saying to me? Or was it the Nine? Were the Nine and Four in conflict still—the Muses and the Seasons, competing to inform this private universe with frames of meaning? I could not tell.

The pain did not reassert itself. No more legends of torture came to trouble and to save my soul. But the fear would not be gone. It ebbed and flowed, as though it were trying to undergo some metamorphosis of significance, but it could not quite make of itself what it wanted to become.

I tried to help.

Whose fear? I wondered. Perhaps not mine. Perhaps. . . .

The thought did seem to inject something into the pattern of potentiality. The feeling seemed more confident, more nearly that which it was trying to be.

And then I guessed.

What you’re trying to be, I said—to myself, because my thoughts were as difficult for them to understand as theirs were for me—is a need! You’re sending out a Mayday!

Once this was perceived, the feeling in which I had perceived the odour of fear now became sharper, as if it were no longer struggling to find form. The touching-point was there. I had made contact with a kind of mind which, as far as I could guess, might be the mind of Asgard entire, or might only be some tiny imprisoned thing, like the mind of a worldlet confined in one of its many levels. That mind and mine had not the encoded equipment to say anything at all one another—unlike the minds of the Nine, which remembered a humanoid incarnation and which were already equipped for interface with entities such as myself. This mind (or group of minds) was alien indeed; alien to the Nine and to me. It had learned to “speak” but a single word to me.