Asgard's Conquerors (41 page)

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.

But I
thought I understood the word. I prayed that I did, because if I did not, this
might all be for nothing.

I became
the universe again, embodying all Creation. I took on the semblance of bodily
form, albeit macrocosmically. I was four-eyed and nine-boned, and my eyes were
eyes of fire and my bones the rocks of ages, and my heart was the Heart Divine,
my blood seething with the venom of dragons and my semen with the ghosts of all
men who had ever been and all who were to come.

As
above, so below . . . and I felt this universe reflected in a mode of being
much tinier, in a cage of absurd flesh. This was more than Creation. This was
Encounter, and its beginning was a word.

And the
word, I believed, was help!

Or, to
put it more aptly: HELP!

HELP!

H-E-L-P!

It was
not I who was screaming, but something much more terrible, and much more
helpless.

It was
Prometheus, and murdered Pan. In that scream was the waking of Brahma from his
ageless dream. In that scream was the pain that Odin felt when he tore out his
eye and sold it: the price of his godly wisdom. In that unbearable scream was
the breath of
Gotterdammerung
,
come to end the deep cold of the fimbulwinter, come to disturb Valhalla and
bring the gods themselves to their meeting with destiny.

But when
the gods cry for help, what strength can mere mortals bring to their aid?

31

I came round, and
jerked forward convulsively, pulling my head away from the hood and its
grasping spiderweb of intrusive connections. They slid from my skin with a
dull, tearing sensation.

My head
was buzzing with confusion. I felt somebody grab me, but I wouldn't let myself
fall back. Instead, I lurched further forward, thrusting myself out of the
chair altogether. I would certainly have fallen if the other person had not
been holding me, but the arms which had gripped me were strong, and helped me
to stand.

I
remembered the gunshot then, and gritted my teeth against the possibility of
authentic pain, but none came. It was not I, then, who had been shot.

I opened
my eyes, and looked around.

My eyes
met other eyes—pale blue eyes, perhaps sky blue eyes. But these were bright and
warm, not pale and cold. There was yellow hair too, but in such abundance!

I
blinked. I was not prepared to see those eyes, or that remarkable halo of
blonde hair. I looked her up and down, to make sure that it really was her. All
the curves were in the right place. The only thing which didn't make sense was
that she was wearing the uniform of a Scarid trooper, a couple of sizes too
baggy.

I looked
around the room.

The Scarid
officer was lying flat on his back, arms akimbo, with a bullet-wound in the
middle of his forehead. The other trooper who'd come into the room with us was
also quite dead, in a vast pool of blood which had leaked out of the chasm in
his chest, apparently some little time ago.

John
Finn stood looking on, a couple of metres away, leaning on the chair—now empty—which
had earlier contained the body of 994-Tulyar. He was no longer holding a gun,
and he no longer looked smug. He was watching me, seemingly less than delighted
by the fact of my recovery.

It was
sheer joy to be able to say, in real English words: "What the hell
happened?"

"I
disposed of the two outside," said Susarma Lear, "then borrowed one
uniform and both their guns. These two weren't even watching the door. I'd have
blasted him, too, but I wasn't quite sure which side he was on, so he had time
to drop his gun and surrender. Wise move."

"How
did you get out of the egg? Myrlin said you wouldn't be ready for another
twenty-four hours or so."

"Search
me. There was some kind of power failure, I think. Woke me up. For a minute or
two, I thought I was trapped, but then I got the lid to roll back. I got out
into the corridor, and started exploring. I just happened upon the two
soldier-boys by sheer good luck."

"But
you weren't armed!" I protested. "You didn't even have any clothes
on!"

"That
was the advantage I had," she said. "If you'd have been there, you'd
have seen a colonel in the Star Force. But all they saw was a helpless naked
woman. They didn't have a chance."

I shook
my head in wonderment. Poor, stupid barbarians. I looked around again.
"What happened to Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Not to mention the Tetron,
and ..." I
didn't
complete the sentence.

"Myrlin?"
she said.

"That's
the one," I confirmed.

"I
thought he was dead," she said, in an ominously amiable tone.

"Isn't
he?" I was able to counter.

"Apparently,"
she said, "that was touch and go. Your two furry friends rushed him away
to one of those magic eggs. Tulyar too. They reckon that there's a very good
chance of restoring them to health, despite their condition."

"They're
good with things like that," I confirmed, disentangling myself from her
steely grip now that I felt able to stand by myself. "Have they told you
yet that you're immortal?"

She
cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. "Am I?" she said.

When I
nodded in reply she turned to look at Finn.

"Him
too, I guess," I said. "Depressing thought, isn't it?"

Finn
looked at us both as if we were making fun of him. The news should have cheered
him up, but he just wasn't in the mood. I supposed that later, when it sank in—and
when he began to believe it—it would make him feel quite elated, especially
when he remembered how close the colonel had come to blowing his brains out.