Asgard's Heart

by Brian Stableford

  As aeons passed, true life—the life of DNA—was born, a by-product of the creation and destruction of the stars which was the rhythmic history of the universe itself, the fundamental alchemy of all things.

  Life was not everywhere in the universe; it had come too late for that. It emerged here and there, and there again. Similar processes of chemical unfolding produced nearly identical chemistries again and again in different regions of space. Every time life emerged, it would begin to spread, its own molecules—organised now into the first primitive cells—discovering abundant food in the vast clouds ripe for their predation, and discovering in the light of suns the powerhouses which would drive the motor of their future growth and evolution.

  Eventually, life discovered worlds: planets bathing in the light of suns, whose gravity-wells offered the opportunity for molecule-systems to congregate very densely, and play their games with an intimacy and an intensity of competition hitherto unthinkable. Worlds were not conquered easily, for their surfaces were very violent places, but in the clouds of gas-giants life often found a refuge, and in the oceans of water which sometimes surrounded rock-worlds life discovered the most zestful of all its games, where competition was fiercest of all and the ladder of evolution reached out to new heights of complexity and cleverness.

  It seemed to be only a matter of time—albeit time measured in billions of years—before life did fill the universe, extending its seeds into every last corner where they might one day grow, so that it was potentially present in every region where a new sun might be born, ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities were opened up by the material system which formed around each coalescing star. There seemed to be nothing that could inhibit the infinite and eternal extension of the great game, whose play would become the universal project, the strategy of existence itself.

  There seemed to be nothing. . . .

  But there was something.

  It was something whose nature I could not quite grasp. I had to struggle for a way of understanding it. I did not even know whether it was something that came into being long after the story of life had begun, or whether it had remained hidden and dormant all the while. Was it, I wondered, another kind of life, which had its own incompatible game to play with matter, space, and time? Could it be conceptualised as a force which was the very antithesis of life—some elemental principle of destruction, or at least of deconstruction? Was it something opposed in essence not merely to life but even to matter, like the antimatter built of positrons and antiprotons?

  I could not tell, and as I struggled to understand what message the dream was trying to deliver to my own intelligence, I felt the perspective shifting from what had seemed (only seemed?) to be a literal representation into a mythical one, where life became a generative god, father and mother of all things, while whatever adversary it was that threatened life became demonic: Satan, Beelzebub, Ahriman, Iblis, Tiamat.

  But this mythical framework of understanding would no more come to a stable and graspable point of resolution than the cosmological vision had, for simple dualism was quickly hedged with alternative images and doubts. I caught glimpses of giants which my memory was quick to name Ymir and Purusha, but they were mere shadows on the cave-wall of my skull, cast by some inner light that was flickering already under the threat of being extinguished. They overlapped and all but drowned out a host of other shadows, some with humanoid form, some with animal form, and some built

  from eccentric combinations of the two.

  I tried to give names to all the dancing silhouettes, but it was a hopeless task, because they were already fading away. I felt like an avatar of Tantalus, condemned to stand beneath the fruit of the tree of knowledge, but never able to take a bite. I struggled desperately to find something sensible and meaningful in the chaotic whirl of impressions, but it was too late.

  The communicative bond was shattered. I woke up. I had one hell of a headache, which was not so much my previous headache doubled, but my previous headache raised to a new order of magnitude.

  I opened my eyes anyway, and found myself back in the bunk from which I'd fallen. Opposite me, suddenly attentive, was the scion Urania.

  "Please lie still for a few minutes, Mr. Rousseau," she said, before I could open my mouth to speak. "Your skull is not fractured, but you were badly concussed. The powers of self-repair which my sisters awakened in your flesh will preserve you, but you must rest."

  It was one of those occasions when only cliches will do: "What happened?" I asked, quickly following up with: "Where are we?"

  "A trap was set for us in the shaft," she said. "I fear that we were careless—we did not think to investigate the space above the access-point. A heavy mass was dropped shortly after we began our descent. Fortunately, we were able to release our grip on one side of the shaft before impact. When the missile hit us, we were already swinging, and the blow was a glancing one. The extensors which had let go were able to seize the same side of the shaft as the remainder, so that we were able to withstand the ripping away of three of the others. Then we resumed our descent. No one was seriously injured, although 673-Nisreen sustained a broken arm. He does not have your augmented powers of healing, and the injury will prove troublesome."

  She glanced down as she said it, and I realised that the Tetron bioscientist must be in the bunk below me. I would have craned my neck over the edge to catch his eye and say hello, but my head wasn't quite up to it.

  "You are sure that this is me, I suppose?" I said. "Not something else borrowing my body?"

  It was a feeble attempt at humour, but it was far too near the knuckle. She gave me an anxious, speculative look, obviously giving the hypothesis serious consideration.

  "It's okay," I said, swiftly. "It really is me. I think the other guy had sole control for a while, there, but I'm definitely back now. It didn't try to take over. It was trying to tell me something—to explain what this is all about."

  "If you had a further dream-experience," she said, taking on the interested tone of voice that her mirror-land parent had adopted in similar circumstances, "I would be most interested to hear a description of it."

  "It was nothing much," I muttered, sourly. "Just a history lesson. We never got to the end of it, and I think I was too stupid to get the point anyway. All I'm sure of is that it was trying to explain to me that there's a war going on—not just in Asgard but throughout the universe. We already suspected that."

  But while I said it, I was wondering. Was the thing in my brain an independent intelligence, trying to tell me what this whole affair was all about? Or had the experience been some kind of programme playing on automatic, on which I'd just happened to eavesdrop? If the latter was the case, did it mean that the thing inside me wasn't anything like a person, but more like a bundle of non-sentient programmes . . . game-playing programmes? Maybe Tulyar wasn't so much a victim of demonic possession as an ambulatory automatic pilot: a zombie lodestone or a golem direction-finder. The possibilities, alas, were still endless. There were too many names, too many metaphors queued up like idols in some bizarre marketplace, none of them quite able to grasp the essence of the problem.

  "Oh, merde" I said with feeling. "I think I'd rather not have woken up at all. Do you happen to know if I finished my supper?"

  She handed me a tube and a bladder, both half-full—or half-empty, if you happen to be of the pessimistic turn of mind. I took a long pull from the bladder-pack, and felt a little better. The headache was clearing fast, and I guessed that I'd already been supplied with medication.

  "How long was I out?" I asked.

  "According to your measurement," she said blandly, "about fifty-two hours."

  This was not as much of a shock as it might have been. Lately, I'd been losing vast chunks of my life right, left, and centre. If I'd still been condemned to the traditional threescore years and ten I'd have begun to feel aggrieved, but Myrlin and the Nine had assured me that their tinkering with my personal biotechnology had increased that pote
ntial many times over. If I were careful, I'd outlive Methuselah. I could afford to spend a few days in suspended animation every now and again.

  The truck rocked slightly, and I became aware that we were traveling horizontally. During the two days and a bit I'd missed, we'd obviously had plenty of time to get to the bottom of the shaft, and for all I knew we might have climbed down another just as long.

  I eased myself out of the narrow bunk, ignoring Urania's painstaking mime of anxious disapproval. Her big brown monkey-like eyes had no difficulty at all in signifying sadness, but I wasn't about to be blackmailed into feeling guilty by an accident of anatomy.

  I worked my way forward into the cab. Myrlin was in the driving seat but he wasn't actually driving. The truck was making its own way, with a little help from the intelligent suitcase resting on his lap. Susarma Lear was on the other side of the front seat, her left elbow wedged into a convenient cranny so that she could prop up her face on the heel of her hand. She was staring moodily out at the way ahead. She looked round when I moved into the space behind the seats.

  "In the Star Force," she said, "we like to think that we're always ready for action. We do not take fifty-two-hour naps." But she said it lightly, to let me know that she didn't really mean it. She had about as much chance of learning to be witty as I had of absorbing the true Star Force spirit, but at least she was trying.

  I looked past her at the landscape that was dimly illuminated by the headlights. There was nothing much to see— just a sea of fine sand or dust, silvery grey in colour. It wasn't flat, though its undulations were shallow. The air seemed to be full of tiny particles shimmering in the beams of light that preceded us. The truck wasn't making anything like the speed it should have been, and I guessed that the wheels were sinking into the dust. We must have been kicking up one hell of a cloud behind us.

  "Dead?" I asked, as I eased myself into a position between Myrlin and Susarma Lear.

  "Apparently not," said Myrlin.

  "But well on the way," added the colonel.

  They both sounded glum.

  "Something wrong?" I asked.

  "We're having difficulty following the trace," Myrlin explained. "The small quantities of organic material leaked by the other truck seem to be disappearing very quickly. It's possible that they're simply adhering to particles that are then scattered by the disturbance of its passage, but I think it more probable that the molecules are actually being metabolised. We have a bearing, of course, but it is not certain that the other vehicle will hold a straight course. If it deviates, we might have difficulty picking up the trail."

  "Metabolised?" I queried. "You mean the dust is full of bacteria?"

  "Ninety percent organic," said Myrlin. "Millions of species in every handful."

  "The usual story," said Susarma. "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It's just that this level has no middlemen." It was a cleverer joke than I'd ever heard her make before, and the first sign that a bit of me was rubbing off on her.

  "Is this the same sort of stuff that the rings of Uranus are made out of?" I asked. "Has anyone told Nisreen?"

  "He's asleep," said the colonel, laconically. "Sedated. Got a broken arm."

  The truck lurched slightly as it came over the top of a bigger-than-usual undulation. One of the wheels spun free for a second or two, but then it got a grip again. The air seemed so thick with the dust that it was difficult to see where the ground ended and the space above it began. To say that visibility was poor was an understatement—we might have been driving through a dense fog. I wondered whether this really was a level full of the kind of dust that could be found in the gas-clouds where second-generation stars were found—a sample of the primeval life-system which seeded the seas of every world where water could exist as a liquid. Who could tell? Maybe it was a different kind of system altogether—a very old one. Perhaps metazoan life was only a passing phase which biospheres went through, and in the end it all came full circle. As Susarma said: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

  My funny dream had left its imprint on my waking self. I had the history of the universe and the destiny of all flesh very much in mind. The pain in my head was ebbing away, but it didn't leave me feeling normal. I had that medicated feel you sometimes get when your pain-bearing nerves have been switched off—as if it was low gee outside my skull and zero gee inside it.

  "Well," I said, "as it's all so utterly boring, I might as well go lie down."

  I should have known better than to tempt fate like that. We crested another rise and were suddenly heading downhill. All four wheels had lost their purchase—which wasn't surprising, because we were riding a landslide and the dust was traveling faster than we were. It was coming up in front of us in great billows that cut visibility to absolute zero, and for all we could tell the ground might have swallowed us up entirely.

  For all of five seconds I wasn't in the least worried. After all, I was used to levels that had twenty-metre ceilings, where even the deepest lake would barely cover your head if you walked across its bed. I assumed that the slope couldn't go on for long, and that we'd be bound to hit bottom any second.

  Then the five seconds became ten, and I knew we were in trouble. For all I knew, this was the laundry-chute that would take us all the way down to the bottom of the world.

  In a way, it wasn't so bad—after all, the bottom of the world was exactly where we wanted to go. But how many tons of dust would we be buried under, if and when we got there? And how in hell were we ever going to pick up the trail that we'd very nearly lost even before we fell into the hole?

  20

  The mist was slowly clearing, as though to let us witness the extent of our predicament, and we stood by the rail, morosely inspecting the expanse of weed which was thus revealed to us.

  We were stuck fast. Though the oars still struggled to find some purchase amid the choking fronds of the weed, we could see that they were fighting a hopeless battle. It seemed that there was weed of every kind and texture—kelps and wracks, filamentous green weeds and rubbery brown weeds, were all tangled together into a straitjacket overlaying the surface upon which we traveled. There was not a hectare of clear water to be seen, and there were many places where the bulk of the weed was so great that it formed hillocks and mounds in the water. It looked as if we might descend from the ship and walk upon it, so thickly was it clustered, but I would not have dared to trust that appearance.

  "What now?" asked Myrlin, sourly. "Will they send an army of giant crabs marching across this desert sea to attack us? Will other monsters gather beneath its shield, invisible until they thrust themselves up all about us?"

  "A better question," I said, "is whether they need to do anything at all? Why should they trouble to find a means of destroying us, if they can hold us immobile? Wherever our goal might lie, it seems to me that we can come no nearer to it unless we can find a way to break out of this trap they've set to catch us."

  We both looked to our guardian goddess for an answer,

  but it was plain that she was temporarily perplexed.

  "I confess that I had not anticipated this," she admitted. "Whatever it is which acts against us, it has found a way to confine us. I do not know how this has been done, and without knowing how, I cannot see a way to escape."

  I had laid down my bow and sheathed my sword. I was not entirely ungrateful for an opportunity to pause, because I felt that I had hardly begun to come to terms with this hallucinatory realm, but I knew that any delay could only work to the advantage of our enemies. Their hostility had so far been relatively impotent; they had not yet learned the ontological rules by which our natures converted the raw material of software space into experience—the magic of our being still held good. But they were the natives of this space, and it could only be a matter of time before they gained full measure of the demonic powers they were anxious to possess in order to turn our little fantasy into a full-blown nightmare. Myrlin and I did not belong here at all, and even the lovely goddess in whom the Nine
were embodied, however much better adapted to this milieu she might intrinsically be, was a novice in this business of warfare by witchery.

  "Could you burn the weed the way you burned their weird ship?" I asked.

  She stared at me blankly, the light seeming dim in her eyes. The pale perfection of her features seemed too inhuman to be truly beautiful. I did not even know whether my present form was capable of any analogue of sexual desire, but I did not think her capable of inspiring it, despite her careful mimicry of human beauty.

  "Perhaps. . . ." she said, dubiously.

  "If it is only a matter of finding the right magic . . ." began Myrlin, but then he shook his head in confusion.

  "Only," I echoed, with a mirthless laugh.

  "But you have shaped this dream of ours," complained the black-clad giant, addressing himself to Pallas Athene. "We did not find this place; it came into being with our coming. Why can you not define by the force of your will the ways by which we may control it?"

  "We are far from being omnipotent," she told him. "We have laid down the rules which determine how things will appear to us, and now must abide by them. If our enemies find strategies which our rules permit, though we had not thought of them ourselves, we cannot arbitrarily cancel their legitimacy."

  "Is it nothing but a game, then?" he asked her, bitterly. "When I agreed to do this, I thought it something more."

  "Games are merely fantasies," she said, "which reproduce the structure of experience. Yes, this is a game, if you care to call it one, but what is at stake is the life that you have here, and countless other lives, here and elsewhere. There is no more for it to be."

  "Then we have only to find the right countermove," I said, "the capture en passant which will let us out of the trap . . . the formula of power which will burn the weed or wither it with blight, or cause a herd of friendly sea-cows to rise from the depths and consume it with avid appetite."