The grey walls began to mist over. The ghosts were back. Susarma Lear and Finn looked uneasy as the silvery shapes began to coalesce, but I was pleased to see them. The Nine were back in control—in partial control, at least—of their body. Sailors on strange seas of fate, now safely back in port. I hoped that they were safe, though it seemed that they hadn't regained their former power and composure.
"R-r-rouss-ss-sseau," said the whispering voice, no clearer than before, "w-w-e kn-n-n-now-w-w y-o-o-ou n-n- n-now-w-w. ..."
Safe they were, it seemed, though by no means entirely recovered from their ordeal.
As before, the threads of light tried to settle into the forms of faces—nine faces, overlapping and drifting through one another, filling the room with their immensity.
They no longer had the face of Susarma Lear, though.
Now they had my face.
I heard the colonel's sharp intake of breath, and saw John Finn silently appealing for help to some non-existent agent of mercy. I smiled. It was an impressive effect, and I felt curiously proud. But then I thought about what they'd said. They knew me, now. They'd been inside me, and in some curious sense they were still inside me. A shiver ran down my spine, and I almost expected to hear alien voices inside my head ... to discover my subvocalised thoughts turning into a weird dialogue, or worse—a Babel of confused conversations. But that wasn't the way it was. It wasn't that kind of "being in me." I was still myself, and as far as I could tell, I was still the self I always had been. Whatever extras I had acquired weren't yet manifesting themselves as other ghosts in my machine. I didn't doubt, though, that they would manifest themselves, eventually.
Like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, I had experienced revelation. I had been converted. The spirit was in me, and the word was in me. And the word was. . . .
My senses reeled, and the colonel had to catch me again, to steady me. She was looking at me with genuine concern—almost as if she liked me. Not that I was about to believe that. I'd already taken in my ration of six impossibilities before breakfast, and now I was the hardest- headed sceptic of them all.
"What about the other Scarids?" I asked, freeing myself from her grip for a second time. "Can you disarm them
now?" I was addressing the Nine, though Susarma Lear had opened her mouth to answer before they interrupted her.
"Un-n-nder c-c-control-l-l," they assured me.
I no longer felt impatient with the stuttering voice. I knew now how difficult a business communication could be.
"How about the battle for Skychain City?"
That, they assured me (I shall not attempt to reproduce the texture of their words, lest the typographical eccentricities become irritating) would take a little longer. It was a matter that was out of their hands, alas.
I stretched my limbs. They all felt as if they were in very good condition, and there was no reason to doubt that they were, though I couldn't help being surprised to find them so.
"Okay?" said Susarma Lear. "Can we get out of here?"
"We'll have to wait for the scions," I told her. Then I said, almost absent-mindedly: "Excuse me for a moment."
She looked surprised, but stood back, as if to let me go to the door. I turned the other way, and with a smooth efficiency that was surprising, given the weak gravity, I kicked John Finn in the groin. When he bounced off the wall behind him I lashed him across the face with the flat of my hand. I felt his nose break, but I didn't wince. I wasn't in a squeamish mood. When he was down on the ground I booted him twice more, as hard as I could.
Then I knelt down beside him.
"That," I hissed in a suitably melodramatic whisper, "was just for the purposes of demonstration. I only want you to know that if you ever try to screw me again, I'll hurt you so badly you'll be in pain for the rest of your fucking life. And that could be a very long time."
I stood up again, and met Susarma Lear's eyes. She was looking at me almost in horror—not at what I'd done, but at the fact that it was me who had done it. That was odd, in a way, because I would have thought that she'd be pleased to see me acting like a hero of the Star Force for once in my life. Sometimes, you just can't figure out how to please someone.
"Jesus, Rousseau!" she said.
I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel anything at all.
"I'm not quite myself at the moment," I told her. It wasn't true. I was entirely myself. I just felt that I had a licence to act out of character for once.
Anyway, I was a hero. Not just a metaphorical hero, the way she was, but a real one. I had been summoned by the gods—or by the only kind of something that could pass for a god, in our thoroughly secularized universe. Destiny had put its mark upon my forehead, and beckoned to me with its bony finger. I didn't have the slightest doubt about that—not any more.
"Well," I said, "I guess we have time on our hands, now. We've surely had our ration of unpleasant surprises."
Looking down at John Finn, bleeding and gasping, I reflected coldly that he had probably had one too many—but no more, of course, than he deserved. The same was true of the Scarid officer, who had carried far beyond his ordinary conceptual horizons the dangerous and preposterous assumption that you can get what you want by threatening people with guns. There comes a time when it isn't sufficient to be only a soldier. I hoped fervently that his superiors might learn that lesson without it having to be rammed home quite so forcefully.
As things turned out, they did manage to learn it. They discovered the one and only possible defence against technologically superior armed opposition.
They surrendered.
And then they sat down with both the Tetrax and the Nine, in order to try to overcome all the barriers that stood in the way of sensible communication, and to discover what there might be that they could discuss in a reasonable manner.
Which is what passes for a happy ending in situations like the one in which we all found ourselves.
32
Later, of course, the doubts began to creep back. Those magic moments of total conviction never do last. As I've observed before, the true gold of certainty is not to be found, and you have to settle for what there is.
What there is, alas, is the knowledge that one is always fallible. You never really know exactly where you're up to, let alone where it is that you need to go next.
For the first time since I'd put the final full stop to the first volume of my memoirs, things began to run smoothly for a while. The Scarid High Command saw sense; the Nine pulled 994-Tulyar and Myrlin out of the jaws of death; and a kind of balance was restored to the universe as I was privileged to experience it.
It didn't take much effort to persuade my commanding officer that our best interests lay in staying where we were. There was a great deal to be learned from the Nine that might prove to be of immense value to Mother Earth and humankind. She was quick enough to see that it might be a kind of intellectual treason to leave the task of collaboration with the Isthomi entirely to the Tetrax. Indeed, she was persuaded that the need to win what advantage we could from our fortuitous placement easily outweighed such minor considerations as her annoyance in discovering that her memory was a liar and that Myrlin was alive and well.
I figured that in time she might even learn to like him, once she was reconciled to the idea that she shouldn't try to kill him all over again.
I had my sacrifices to make, too. Even John Finn had to be put to work, and I knew full well that once he had absorbed a little of the new knowledge that was here to be gleaned, he would become utterly insufferable in his arrogance.
Inevitably, I began to regret having broken his nose. The memory of it still gave me a certain satisfaction, as well as a sense of having done my bit to preserve the moral balance of the universe, but I knew that I'd have to watch my back for as long as he was around, lest a stray knife should somehow become embedded between my shoulder-blades.
In spite of such minor difficulties, I soon began to enjoy myself. I was once again in my eleme
nt, scavenging in strange places for unfamiliar things. The fact that there were other people around ceased to matter much—in all essentials I was alone with my insatiable curiosity, the only beloved mistress of my heart.
Which is not to say, of course, that I was completely uninterested in the big political picture that was a-building around us. I was suitably enthused by the fact that for the first time ever, Asgard and the universe had agreed to communicate with one another. It filled me with optimism to know that the Scarida and the galactic community each decided that they had a lot to learn, and that they all stood to gain from an exchange of opportunities. The Tetrax (speaking on behalf of the entire galactic community) promised to teach the Scarida the joys of galactic technology; the Scarida promised to allow the Tetrax access to all the levels of Asgard which they controlled. The Nine, though facing an uphill task in the matter of self-repair, agreed not to seal themselves off from either side, and determined that they would hold the triple detente together. All very fine, in my view.
All these developments, as you will notice, solved the general problems within which context this chapter of my personal history started. Alas, they did not begin to touch the more personal problems which had arisen along the way. Nor, for what it is worth, did they provide any answers to the old, old problems which had been the Great Mysteries even before I got into the game.
Having emerged intact from my hallucinatory adventure in contact with alien minds, I had every reason to be pleased with myself, and in a way I was. For a while I was filled with zestful energy and a huge sense of pride, because I was convinced that I had achieved a great thing simply by surviving my encounter, and by virtue of what I thought that the contact implied.
Asgard itself had called out to me, to be its saviour.
But when I came down from my adrenalin high, I could hardly help but worry about what that implied, in terms of what I was now required to do about it.
That was when the doubts really began to gnaw away at me.
For one thing, I became increasingly less sure that it implied anything at all. How did I know, after all, that I had actually and authentically experienced anything meaningful? How could I be sure that my dream was not simply a dream—and my sense of importance but a commonplace delusion of grandeur?
Then again, even if something had happened, how could I know for sure just what it was? Even if I was correct in believing that a message had been sent which I had received, on what grounds could I assure myself that I had read it right?
And yet again, if it all was true, and something in the depths of the macroworld—something great and fine and utterly mysterious—had cried out to me for aid . . . then what the hell could a mere human being be expected to achieve in rendering aid to beings who were apparently very different in kind, and far superior in their abilities?
What, indeed, could possibly be done?
I had begun this chapter of my life with a terribly sense of not knowing what I ought to do, but the progenitors of that feeling had been mere boredom and a superfluity of trivial opportunity. Now, I was faced with another uncertainty about what I could and should do next—an uncertainty infinitely more terrible in aspect.
It was at least possible that I had been singled out for great things. But I had not the slightest idea how to go about them.
I and I alone had stood four-square with the Nine when that anguished cry for help had surged from the depths of Asgard to blow through us like a hot wind. Myrlin and 994- Tulyar had been so badly shocked by the first instant of their contact that they had been thrust into the valley of the shadow of death—I was soon able to ascertain, once they were well again, that they had no memory of anything that might have happened to them while they were at the interface. If their being had been polluted with vestiges of an alien soul, they knew nothing of it, and manifested no stigmata of any such infection.
The fact that I had fared differently reflected no credit upon me. I was inclined to presume that by the time I entered the game the "creatures" who were manifest in my dream as eyes of fire had learned to be more gentle, and had moderated their approach, so that their touch became something which a frail and tiny humanoid mind could cope with.
It was, of course, to the Nine that I turned in the hope of enlightenment, but they too were unable to offer much insight. The contact had affected them as severely as it had affected Myrlin and Tulyar, and in their fashion they had been much more severely wounded by it. They could not confirm or deny what I told them about my interpretation of the contact as a cry for help. Even when I interfaced with the Nine again, to give them more intimate access to my memories and interpretations of the experience, they could not judge what it was that I set before them. Their knowledge was no more secure than mine, their scepticism no less corrosive.
Perhaps, if they had been well, they would have had more powerful resources on which to draw, but in their injured state, they had to devote all but the tiniest fraction of their attention and endeavour to the business of self-repair.
Of course, I now had a relationship with the Nine more special than their relationship with Myrlin, or any other being of my kind. They and I had secrets in common; circumstance had forged a bond between us, and that bond was far from being merely metaphorical. In some sense, the Nine were in me . . . just as the eyes of fire and whatever consciousness lay behind them was in me.
It mattered very little that I could hardly begin to understand the Nine: what kind of beings they were, what view of the world they had. The Nine had taken the natural course in choosing my face as the medium of their new visual manifestations. They accepted that in some subtle but crucial fashion, they and I had exchanged parts of our personalities, and that I now lived in them and they in me. Their acceptance was a foundation stone on which we could build trust, and perhaps a common cause.
But they, like me, had no idea what could and should be done to answer the call that I might have received.
In our ignorance, we hesitated—waiting, I suppose, for something more to happen. It was not that we were hoping for a third contact—the Nine felt that they could well do without another such traumatic experience. It was more that we were expecting some process of change to complete itself in me. We hoped and feared that my experience might have consequences that were yet to unfold.
After all, I did have a strong sense of being different from what I had been before, though it is not easy to describe exactly what that sense was like.
In my waking moments, I was myself, and once my elation had evaporated I seemed very much the self I had always been—stubborn, self-contained, frequently facetious, sometimes churlish, but always with my heart in what I thought to be the right place.
In my dreams, though, I sometimes found strange sensations lurking within a deeper self than the one I knew and was in my everyday intercourse with the phenomenal world. I never went back to that dreaming desert, nor saw those eroded monoliths, nor faced those eyes of fire, but there were feelings, and more than feelings. Sometimes, there were faint and fragile voices, which spoke in querulous whispers, which seemed to be hunting for something to say, as if they were trying to remember—or simply trying to become.
I began to fear that those dreams would eventually intrude upon reality, but I waited, and they did not.
I often went back to the room with the hooded chairs, to interface again and again with the wounded Nine, to dream more exotic dreams awake than those I dreamed in sleep. But it was not easy, as I have explained, to begin the serious work of communication.
Although the Nine already knew parole, and English too, there were still many barriers to the kind of speech which was necessary in that curious spaceless "world" of electronic information. But the Nine did want to talk—they wanted, in fact, to bring me to the edge of their own community. There was no sense in which they could welcome me into that community, and become the Ten, but they did want to know me in a fashion very different from the way they had known Myrlin.
I think the waiting, and the work that we did while we waited, was valuable. I think even the uncertainty was valuable, in its way, in making us question what it was that we must do.
This time, though, there was no possibility of turning my back and deciding to go home. Although the Nine and I did not know what it was that we had to do—or what it was that I had to do—we did know that the way forward was the way downward, and that whatever was in the heart of Asgard had to be found.
As the wise man said: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait Vinventer. He might have added that there comes a time when it is no longer enough merely to invent. It is necessary, also, to confront. Even if our gods are invented, we still need to know what it is that they require of us.
And so, when I have finished recording this second volume of my adventures—which I have been doing, I candidly admit, as much to straighten out my thoughts as in the hope of entertaining readers—I intend to set out yet again on my journey to the centre of Asgard, to discover whether, in truth, there is a place for me in the halls of Valhalla—and a task for me to do, in order to earn it.
I will be, as ever, a reluctant hero—and I leave it to you to decide whether that is the best kind, or the worst.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
BRIAN STABLEFORD was born in 1948 in Shipley, Yorkshire. He was educated at Manchester Grammar School and the University of York (B.A. in Biology; Doctorate. Phil, in Sociology). From 1976 to 1988 he was a Lecturer in the Sociology Department of the University of Reading, teaching courses in the philosophy of social science and the sociology of literature and the mass media. He has also taught at the University of the West of England, on a B.A. in "Science, Society and the Media." He has been active as a professional writer since 1965, publishing more than 50 novels and 200 short stories as well as several non-fiction books; he is a prolific writer of articles for reference books, mainly in the area of literary history.
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