Asgard's Conquerors (40 page)

I was
already gritting my teeth against the pain that I feared, but what came made
any such feeble reaction quite irrelevant. I felt my head tearing apart, my
thoughts shredded by a searing blast of pure agony, and I screamed.

To make
things worse—there's always some silly little thing which can make even the
most horrible experience still worse—the last thing I heard before I lost
contact with that reality was the sound of a gunshot.

30

I imagined myself
to be Prometheus, chained to a rock, with an eagle's claw raking and tearing my
ribs, the talons lunging at my heart. I became Sir Everard Digby, plunging from
the scaffold, and then to the ground as the rope was cut, still conscious as
the executioner moved to castrate me, and tear the entrails from my belly. I
fused my mind with the sensations of Damiens, stretching on the rack, limbs
ripped with red-hot hooks, wounds tormented with molten lead, with boiling oil,
with burning pitch, with sulphur, the horses straining with all their might at
a body which would not tear. . . .

This was
not mere melodrama, but an act of mental self- defence. I coped with the
dangerously explosive firing of my neurons in the only way I could, by
reconstructing even that most extreme of experiences into some kind of story,
containing it with some kind of imaginative coherency.

I did
not know what I was doing, but I was saving my life and my mind from a shock
that might otherwise have destroyed them.

It is
said, although it must be the product of the corrupt imagination of yellow
journalism, that it took ten horses several hours to pull off Damiens' limbs,
one by one, even after his torturers had weakened his hip and shoulder joints
by cutting partly through the ligaments, and that even then the man still
lived, although unable to speak—and thus unable to repent of his sins and
receive the last possible consolation. In my re-enactment of his drama,
though, all this could be true, and was.

Reporters
also said that Everard Digby was still conscious when they quartered him, but this
is surely an observer's insistence on wringing the last drop of permissible
horror from the tale he has to tell, to make the point that no man at any time
ever did or could have suffered quite as much as the man in question. When I
became Digby, though, it was the Digby of legend that I became, and limits of
plausibility did not concern my fantasizing mind.

There
were, of course, no eyewitnesses to tell us of the sufferings of Prometheus,
and no one therefore with a vested interest in magnifying the importance of the
incident. Perhaps this made it easier to be Prometheus.

I report
now on what happened to me not as an eyewitness but as a victim, and I find my
own vested interests paradoxical. My memory is filtered; I cannot remember the
pain, but have instead to imagine it, and now that I know that it was in some
sense not real pain (nothing, after all, happened to my actual limbs and heart)
I cannot imagine it quite as it was then. My description of it certainly seems
hyperbolic—any description would seem hyperbolic—in view of the fact that I
survived the experience. Nevertheless, I can assure you that I suffered—imagined,
if you wish—extreme pain, and that I did indeed identify myself briefly with
those lurid attempts to describe the worst sufferings ever undergone by human
beings.

Put me
down, if you like, as a hypochondriac.

The
pain, as I withstood it, made me try with all my might to become smaller, to
shrivel myself up and hide myself in insignificance. I tried to wrap myself up
in my own substance, like a worm eating its own tail with furious appe
tite ...
I tried to vanish into a fold of space like a starship into a wormhole or like
some devious subatomic particle strutting its vain appearance across the
infinitesimal stage of the fabric of space for some unimaginable fraction of a
picosecond.

Amazingly,
this cowardly move seemed to work.

The hurt
dwindled as I shrank, and by the time I was no bigger, in my imagination, than
an atom, I was no longer feeling pain. I felt curiously free; I was a world
much tinier than a grain of sand, and there was a comfortable eternity extended
within my hour. For the moment, though, I was paying no attention to anything
outside myself.

Put me
down, if you like, as an egotist.

Then,
like the hero of some antique microcosmic romance, I suffered a kind of
cognitive
bouleversement
,
by which little and big were reversed. With a single elegant flip, like a move
in zero-gee gymnastics, I became the whole universe, made of space and filled
with stars, flowing as I expanded, clothed with a skin of paper-thin galaxies
whose velocity of recession, relative to my stationary heart, was trembling on
the brink of the magical c.

Inside
me, streaming like amoeboid protoplasm, was a seminal fluid of nebular vapours,
lusting for the vortical dance that would spin them into stellar spermatids,
and the beating of my heart was the beating of the Heart Divine— the pulse and
rhythm of Creation. Here too, there could be no pain, but only the crystal
ecstasy of the music of the spheres.

Thus
stabilized, safely, as some kind of persona no longer tied to my humanoid body
and humanoid senses, I was ready to transfigure myself into some hypothetical
corpus in which I might face other entities—in which I might be contacted.

Contact,
after all, was what I was there for.

In the
quaint romances of Old Earth, such intimate contacts as the one which I was set
to make are usually uninhibited by the constraints of language. When the gods
speak inside the heads of the heroes of myth; when the telepathic aliens make
their crucial contact with the scientists of the twenty- first century; when
the sentient computer programmes first get to mental grips with their wetware
progenitors, it is generally assumed that barriers of language are burned
away, and that the protagonist's mind can automatically translate the messages
which are being beamed at him into English— tortured English, sometimes, in the
interests of dramatic effect, but English nevertheless.

In
reality, alas, thought does not transcend language. When two humanoids meet,
although they have not a word of any language in common, they may still hope to
communicate with one another through gesture and mime, but when human and
alien meet across some kind of neuro-artificial interface, brain-cell to silicon
chip instead of eyeball to eyeball, it is not quite so easy. I presume that it
is more difficult still when one of the parties seeking contact has not the
least idea of what he can do in such a hypothetical matrix—so different from
dear old spacetime!—or how to do it.

Take it
from me, the business of contacting an alien intelligence through a direct
neural hook-up is a bit like being required to appear on a TV quiz show
immediately after being born, with horrible penalties to be exacted if the questions
are not answered adequately.

Subjectively,
I began to conceive of myself again as something approximately human-sized.
What I was I cannot tell, and I assume that I was not provided with a shape or
form; I only had to be a point of view. To what extent my own creativity was
involved in the shaping of the environment which coalesced around me I cannot
tell; I suspect that it was all done for me, but that those who formed it for
the edification of my pseudo-sensory awareness drew upon the resources of my
memory and imagination.

It was,
if you like, a kind of dream—and thus, perhaps, amenable to some kind of
psychological analysis, if only I knew how.

Let us
say that I dreamed, then.

I
dreamed that I was in a desert which once had been a sea, and that the
life-forms which had filled the sea had been precipitated out in crystalline
forms, which at night were still and white, like layered ices, but which
sublimated in the heat of the day to become strange vapours and emanations.

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.