If I was going to be used yet again, as a go-between who didn't even understand my own make-up, I wanted to be sure that I wasn't going to be the Judas Goat who would lead my other self and all his allies to the slaughter.
But I couldn't be sure.
I couldn't be sure of anything.
In the meantime, the thing that was wearing the face of my late, lamented friend tucked my gorgon's head beneath his phantom arm, and strolled off into a gathering mist of pure confusion.
31
I dreamed that my body was wrapped around by snakes, whose warm polished scales slid over my skin as they writhed and coiled around me. I was not squeezed by the coils, for these were not constrictors bent on crushing me to death, but I was held tight, unable to move. I could see their eyes glowing in the darkness, and where their heads touched me I could feel the slick forked tongues caressing me . . . tasting me. . . .
That dream dissolved, and took me back to one which had visited me before:
My dream of Creation, in which the life born in the great gas-clouds which drifted in interstellar space still poured into those tiny lighted wells which were solar systems, enfolding those tiny fragments of supernova debris which were planets, finding niches in the dense atmospheres of gas-giants and the oceans of water-worlds.
The cosmos was so vast that all the matter which was in it was no more than a storm of dust blown about by uncaring energy-winds, and the molecules of life such a tiny fraction of matter that all life—all that great universal ecocloud—was no more than a haunting phantom or shadow, tenuous and precarious. And then there came again that other: the thing which was not life yet threatened life, which I could not quite bring into my framework of understanding.
This time, my perspective continued to alter, so that I lost sight of the ocean of stars which was the visible universe, and saw instead the molecules of life engaged in the game of evolution, building themselves into more complex cells, and then into multi-cellular beings, adding new orders of magnitude to their complexity. Now I saw the pattern of life, as it extended through the vast expanding universe of space, as if it were a prodigious tree spreading its roots and branches wherever there was room for them to go, producing gorgeous flowers and fruits wherever they touched a world which provided the vital elementary seeds around which such flowers and fruits might flourish. I saw Earth as one such fruit, Tetra as another, and all the galaxies as branches bearing flowers and fruit in abundance: fruit glowing with internal light, while the flowers sang and filled infinity with their scent.
As well as its flowers and its fruits, the tree was swarming with commensal creatures of every kind—with insects and birds, frogs, and tunneling worms. Though many of these were parasites which took their sustenance from the tree and left damage in their wake, they were no real threat to the continued existence and health of the tree, and I knew that what damage they did was only part of a continuing process of death and transfiguration, wherein a kind of balance was sustained.
But then I saw that there was another kind of blight in the tree—a canker which reached out its desiccating grip wherever it could to turn the flowers leprously white and shrivel the fruit into dry husks. Many of the canker's instruments mimicked the population of the tree, appearing as tiny parasites—whatever kind of force this was, it could produce pseudo-life of its own, but in so doing it
denied the possibility of balance and of permanence, for this blight was something which could only destroy or be destroyed. It permitted only two ends—either the blight would be obliterated, or the tree would die. This was true of the whole, and of each and every part that the blight had reached. There were many branches yet untouched—their flowers beautiful and fresh, their fruits luscious and sweet—but there were many that had already withered, and others where resistance held the canker's instruments in check. Ultimately, the fate of the entire tree was at stake, and any one of these tiny battles might prove crucial to the destiny of the whole. . . .
Then I woke up again, with the desperately tired feeling that it had all happened before, and would all happen again. I was no longer master inside my own skull, and every time the fragile hold of consciousness was shaken loose, my imagination was up for grabs, ready to be shot full of whatever psychic propaganda was coded into the rogue software that was gradually increasing its authority within my brain.
And yet, I was still me. My essential self hadn't been blighted or damaged at all.
At least, not yet. There was no way of knowing how long a thing like the one which had taken over Tulyar might lie dormant, if it was prepared to bide its time.
Under other circumstances, I might have devoted a little time to a more detailed consideration of the pollution of my dreams, but as soon as I opened my eyes such minor anxieties were displaced by more urgent concerns.
I realised that the nightmare about the snakes had considerable foundation in reality. I was trussed up tight by some kind of thick, sticky thread, wound so thoroughly about me that I was encased in a virtual cocoon, with only my head sticking out at the top. I struggled to free myself, but my arms were pinned against my side, unable to move. As I kicked against the confining bonds I found that my thighs were just as firmly held, but that I could wiggle my feet. My whole body swung as I tried unsuccessfully to bend at the waist, and I deduced that I must be suspended from above by a number of threads. I had the small consolation of being right way up, but that was the only blessing I could count in a dire situation, apart from the fact that I was still alive.
I tried desperately to shift my fingers, and contrived some small movement, but they were spread out and bound to my thighs. I must have dropped the needier, and could not tell whether I had ever managed to fire it.
My headlight was still working, and I could turn my head enough to play its beam around my gloomy surroundings. I found that I was inside some kind of chamber whose walls were dense thickets of grey, leafless branches. It seemed to be roughly spherical, but there were a number of thick threads running across the cavity, apparently rigid. These were coated in what looked like dried glue, which was occasionally gathered into globules shaped like drips that had solidified just before they began to fall.
The bottom part of the spherical enclosure was heaped with big white things like elongated footballs a metre long and as thick as a man's thigh. The heap was partly covered by great gobs of slimy stuff. They looked to me like eggs, and I shuddered to think what manner of hungry offspring might be destined to hatch out of them.
Suspended from the roof of the chamber by strands of the dried gluey stuff were a number of neatly-wrapped packages which—I realised—must look pretty much like me. Like me they all had heads poking out at the top, but none of the heads was remotely humanoid. Every one of them was probably some kind of giant insect, but like the moths on the bottommost level of outer Asgard they didn't have compound eyes, and that gave them something of the appearance of nocturnal mammals. Though their jaws and palps and antennae were arthropodan, their eyes were big and wide and innocent. Like me, these other prisoners were still alive—their antennae and their mouth-parts moved as though they were engaged in a sign-language conversation. Some, at least, stared at me while I stared at them, and they seemed—though it was surely an illusion—to pity me in my awful plight.
We were all installed in some kind of larder. We were fresh meat laid in to feed the babies that would soon emerge from the enormous eggs.
Whatever had come after us as we tried to fly down to the shell surrounding Asgard's starlet had obviously caught me. It had brought me back to its nest. I wondered whether I ought to be grateful that it hadn't simply torn me apart. Then I wondered how long it was likely to be before its eggs started hatching, and how long it was likely to take the larvae to devour me if they started with my feet and worked upwards. Then I remembered the difficulty the tentacled slugs up above had had when they had tried to unwrap their prey, and I wondered how long it would take these things to chew through the super-tou
gh plastic in which I was encased.
I realised, with a small frisson of fear, that the life-support system hooked into the flesh of my neck could keep me alive for a long time, even if something was slowly eating me.
Then, belatedly, I wondered what had happened to the rest of our little party.
"Hey," I said, tentatively, into the microphone. "Is anybody there?"
"Rousseau!" came the explosive reply. There was only one voice, and it was Susarma Lear's.
"Susarma?" I echoed. "What happened to the others?"
"Jesus!" she said, "I thought you were all dead. What the hell are you playing at, Rousseau? Where are you?"
"I only just woke up," I told her, in an aggrieved tone. "As to where I am, I wish I knew. But I'm in terrible trouble. Whatever grabbed me trussed me up like a mummy, and I'm hanging here in what looks horribly like a larder."
"Can you see any of the others?" she demanded.
I took another careful look at my companions, but all the ones I could see were definitely non-humanoid.
"Not unless there's someone directly behind me," I said. "I can't crane my neck that far. Where are you?"
Before she could reply, there was the sound of a long, sleepy groan. I knew it wasn't her, and it didn't sound like Myrlin or Urania.
"Nisreen?" I said. "Nisreen, is that you?"
There was a slight pause. Then he answered. "Mr. Rousseau?"
"Where are you, Nisreen?" I asked.
There was another pause before he said: "I am immobilised. I think I am hanging in mid-air. I can see several creatures whose heads resemble moths or beetles, wrapped up as I am in. . . ."
"Shit," said the colonel, interrupting him. "That means I have two of you to look for, and I don't even know where to start. Talk about hunting needles in haystacks. I need that damned brainbox, but I haven't heard a peep from Urania or Myrlin."
"You're free, then?" I said. It was hopeful news, though it was no guarantee of my salvation.
"Yeah," she said. "Thing grabbed me. I would have blasted it but it had hold of me and I didn't fancy joining it in free fall. I played dead until it landed—then I filled the bastard full of needles. I'm in the crown of some incredibly massive tree—must be a couple of miles high, as near as I can tell. My wings got damaged and I don't dare to try to fly. There's more light here than I could have guessed when we were looking down before the jump—glow-worms of some kind are here, there, and everywhere, and the trees seem to produce light themselves. I can see hundreds of the damn things in every direction, but the forest isn't so densely packed that I can walk from the branches of one tree into the branches of another. It's going to take me half a day to get down to the floor, unless I take a risk and jump, and I don't know which way to go to look for either of you."
It didn't sound promising.
"Myrlin?" I said, hopefully. "Urania? Is anyone there?" If they'd been able to speak, they would have spoken already, and I knew it. Suddenly I felt horribly alone.
"A couple of other things have come after me, but they're very slow," said Susarma. "I figure I can make it down to the ground. But I can't see anything that looks like a helmet-light, and I'm not sure I'd be able to tell it from the glow-worms if you were within sight."
"Unfortunately," I said, drily, "I'm pretty sure that we aren't. I'm inside something that probably looks like a giant pumpkin from the outside. Nisreen is presumably in another one of the same kind. But we could be twenty or thirty kilometres away as easily as right next door."
"Well what the hell am I supposed to do, Rousseau?" She sounded very annoyed, but I knew that it was just a cover-up. Really, she was feeling utterly and completely helpless.
"I don't know," I said, feebly. "I just don't know."
"It would seem," said 673-Nisreen, "that I have little chance of extricating myself from the bonds which confine me."
"In that case," said Susarma, with a sigh, "we're in trouble."
That seemed to me like an understatement. I looked down again at the eggs. It didn't really matter what loathsome kind of thing would emerge therefrom—a monster is only an egg's way of making an egg, just like a chicken or a man. All life, if my vivid dreams could be credited with putting things in their proper perspective, was part of the same unfolding pattern, the same infinite thread darting from the spool of Creation to be caught by the loom of fate.
In being eaten by some infant creature I would merely be casting the molecules that had briefly been me back into the cauldron of life, where they would be redistributed again and again and again in the aeons to come. Even if the local food chain were blown to kingdom come when the starlet went nova, the atoms would still exist, hurrying through the infinite void until they were gobbled up by greedy microorganisms a billion years from now, to start the story over in some other region.
Looked at in that way, it didn't seem to matter so much. From that perspective, hardly anything mattered.
But none of that affected the fact that poor Mike Rousseau—the one and only; the most important entity in the universe from the viewpoint of his own tiny, narrow mind—was facing an imminent, agonising, and utterly horrible death without having completed the last leg of his journey to the centre of Asgard.
For myself, I could not imagine any more grotesque failure of the moral order of the universe. It simply wasn't fair.
At that moment, my eye was caught by a movement. Part of the wall of the spherical nest was being eased aside to allow the ingress of something large and living. For a fraction of a second I nursed the faint hope that it was a friendly humanoid come to set me free, but it just wasn't a sustainable illusion. The head coming through the gap was far too big and far too ugly to be anyone I knew.
It looked, in fact, like the head of a monstrous centipede, all golden yellow in the beam of my helmet-light, with great antler-like antennae, yellow-irised eyes, and four moving jaws like outsized hedge-trimmers.
"I hate to make a depressing situation seem even worse," I said, hoarsely, "but I may have just been put on the menu."
32
"This macroworld, which you call Asgard, was not always in this location," said the voice of Saul Lyndrach, who still seemed to be speaking in English. "It came here from another galaxy, in the very distant past. In your terms, it was approximately a million and a half years ago."
We were moving through a cloud of silvery mist. I could no longer see him, nor could I feel the grip of his hand on my snaky hair. In fact, I could no longer feel my snaky hair. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that what was left of my flesh was still rotting, and I expected that at any moment I might lose my sight entirely as the processes of decay worked their way through my eyeballs. After that, presumably, my hearing would go and leave me isolated in the prison of my dying brain.
I still had enough cells left in that hypothetical brain to marvel at the figure of a million and a half years. When Asgard had arrived in the galactic arm—from the Black Galaxy or somewhere else—Homo sapiens was just a glimmer in the genes of its parent species.
"Asgard came to this region through what you call a wormhole," the voice went on. "Under certain special circumstances, the starlet can produce enough power to warp the macroworld through stressed space."
I had no reason to doubt him, but again I had to marvel at the thought. It would take a lot of energy to warp something like Asgard. A hell of a lot of energy—more than a star routinely pipes out. I already knew that there was a small star at the centre of Asgard, but its regular output couldn't be enough to shift Asgard from here to my home sun; an intergalactic trip would be out of the question.
It was as though he could read the thoughts in my head. "The power for the displacement was supplied by a controlled nova," he said. "An artificial starlet is more versatile than you might imagine, but it was nevertheless a difficult journey to contrive. Even though there was no question of planning a specific destination, the trick of displacing the whole of the extra energy of the explosion into the creation of
a wormhole required considerable cleverness. There was the danger of too large an explosion, which would have converted all Asgard into a tiny supernova and scattered its mass across the desert of intergalactic space. There was also the danger that the starlet's fusion reaction would be damped down too far once the required energy had been bled into the stresser.
"The intergalactic shift was not totally successful. Asgard did what it was supposed to do, but the fusion reaction was damped down, and though the damage was reparable, given time, it put a severe strain on power-supplies to the levels. More importantly, the invasion had already occurred, and the invaders had come with the macroworld to its new location. That was when the war within Asgard began in earnest, and the reduction in the starlet's output left its defenders at a disadvantage. The upper levels had already been evacuated—now they were refrigerated. They could never have cooled so extremely by natural processes. The intention was to seal off the lower levels.
"This barrier was not to protect the lower levels, which had already been invaded, but to protect the space outside the macroworld. The builders, riding the starlet explosion, intended to remove themselves into the dark remoteness of intergalactic space. Alas, wormholes do not form randomly, and they are always attracted to gravity-wells—something which makes interstellar travel much more convenient for species like yours. In trying to remove a centre of infection from their own galaxy, the masters of Asgard simply brought it into yours. They knew that this galaxy had been seeded, and when, and they were therefore able to make a rough calculation to tell them how long it would be before interstellar travelers were likely to arrive here. They knew that they would not survive, in their own humanoid form, but they hoped that the army which fought for them in software space might win the war before that time elapsed. That hope proved false. We could not win the war—in the short term, the damage to the starlet gave the invaders the upper hand; in the longer term it proved that we could only contrive a stalemate.
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