Asgard's Heart (17 page)

We remained in the cab while Finn carefully taped a cylindrical
object to the part of my back that was most difficult for my hands to reach. It
was no bigger than Myrlin's thumb, but if it really was an explosive device—and
I was quite prepared to believe that it was—it could do a lot of damage.

Finally, Finn ordered me to step out on to the
platform. It wasn't until I got down that I saw the other waiting figures,
away to the rear. They came slowly forward, and I got two shocks, the bigger
one hard on the heels of the smaller.

The first shock was that they weren't the Scarid
soldiers I had been expecting—they were Tetrax. The second shock was that the
one who led them out was 994-Tulyar. I knew him well enough to be sure that I
could recognise his features, even though he had an expression on his face
that I had never seen before. He looked at me with glittering eyes that somehow
caught the light shining from the walls. With the empty, unlit shaft above me,
I felt as though I were standing in a pool of darkness.

"They told me you were missing," I said to
him. When he made no reply, I realised that something was very wrong. I
wondered briefly whether I could possibly have made a mistake in identification,
but I knew in my heart that I hadn't. This was Tulyar—or, perhaps,
had been
Tulyar. I wondered whether the folklore
of the Tetrax featured such beings as zombies.

He still didn't say anything. He just stared at me,
with what seemed to be an animosity beyond my understanding. But then he
glanced sideways, quickly and furtively, and I felt a sudden flood of relief. I
was sure that he wanted to kill me, but he knew that if he did, the Nine would
strike back at him.

I realised that there was more to this crazy affair
than the feeble-minded desire of a handful of Scarid bully-boys to get back
home. Finn wasn't just trying to escape. He was playing the mercenary again,
figuring that he might get a greater reward from a grateful Tetron high-number
man than he could expect from Star Force justice or the hospitality of the
Isthomi.

I looked sideways at one of the Scarid officers.
"You think this guy is going to take you to meet your ancestors, don't
you?" I said, with faint disgust. "You don't intend to go up—you're
going down."

"Shut up, Rousseau," said Finn,
unceremoniously. He took the gun-barrel away from my neck for the first time. "Get
over there, out of the way."

"John," I said, feeling at least a quantum
of genuine concern for him. "It's not Tulyar. I know it looks like
Tulyar, but he wouldn't pull a stunt like this. Something else has colonised
his brain—it got into him when he tried to interface with the Nine and got
caught up in their close encounter with something dangerous. He's been taken
over— possessed by some software demon."

It was no good. Finn and the Scarids wouldn't believe
me, and I couldn't really blame them. They didn't know about Medusa's head, and
they couldn't begin to understand what kind of war was being waged inside
Asgard. 994-Tulyar didn't move or speak. He just waited. I wondered if I could
appeal to his better nature, thinking that perhaps the real Tulyar was still in
there somewhere, still potentially able to speak or think or act if only he
could figure out the way.

"Tulyar?" I said. "Do you know what's
happening to you?"

It was a stupid question. This wasn't just a misguided
Tetron following some suggestion that had come to him in a dream; it was
another kind of person entirely. Whatever had intruded upon the Tetron's mind
had done a far more comprehensive wrecking job than the thing that had got into
mine. Assuming that what was in me wasn't just a delayed-action seed of
destruction, I was a lucky man. Looking at Tulyar, or what had once been
Tulyar, gave me a little more confidence in the supposition that I had been
drafted to the side of the angels.

"Do as you're told, Rousseau," said Finn
coldly, his voice grating with evident strain. "Just get out of the way,
and everybody will be safe and sound."

Uncomfortably aware of the thing taped to my back, I
moved away from the circular platform and into the mouth of the tunnel through
which I'd brought the truck. My gaze flicked over the three Scarids and the two
other Tetrax— neither of whom, I was oddly glad to see, was 673-Nisreen. They
were all showing signs of anxiety, but they all seemed committed. I knew how
sensitive the Scarida were about the question of their hypothetical ancestors,
who had supposedly laid on the power that had recently been switched off, for
the benefits and greater glory of the Scarid empire. I knew, too, how strong
the Tetrax were on matters of obligation, and how nearly impossible it would
be for men placed under Tulyar's orders to defy him, even though they could
plainly see that there was something very weird about him.

"Let them go, John," I said to my fellow
human, figuring that the brotherhood of man ought to count for
something.
"Stay here."

His reply was brief and obscene. He'd never liked me,
and that dislike had got in the way of his common sense on more than one
occasion.

"You don't know what you're doing," I said,
looking now at Jacinthe Siani.

"Do you?" she countered. "Does any of
us?"

There wasn't time to have a debate about it. The
Scarids were already loading themselves into the rear part of the cab, and
whatever it was that was wearing Tulyar's body followed them. The remaining
Tetrax got into the front seat, while Finn went last of all. The door shut
behind them.

As the platform began to sink into the depths,
carrying the truck away into abyssal darkness, I put out a hand to steady
myself against the wall, feeling suddenly very weak.

Eventually, the wall lit up, and there she was,
looking as sprightly as ever.

"You can remove the explosive charge now, Mr.
Rousseau," she said. "It's quite safe."

"Considering that your power is supposed to be
not far short of godlike," I told her, "you're pretty damn useless
every time it comes to the crunch." I figured I was entitled to feel a
little resentful.

"I must apologise for not warning you that it was
about to happen," she said, "but as you know, they were able to
listen in on our conversation."

"You knew what they intended to do?" I said.

"Certainly."

"And you deliberately let them get away?" I
was annoyed, having jumped to the conclusion that the Nine were really quite
glad to wave goodbye to my transporter, on the grounds that it would narrow my
options to the point where I'd have no choice but to go along with their plans.
But I'd misjudged them, as usual.

"When we realised that something had been
implanted in the Tetron's brain—and that it was not akin to the programme sent
to colonise your own brain," she said, equably, "we could only
conclude that it had been intruded by the enemy. We had then to consider what
the best thing was to do with a possible enemy in our midst. Had it shown any
hostile intention, we would of course have destroyed it, but in fact it seemed
to want only to escape. It seemed to us to be an opportunity not to be missed,
though of course we were concerned to conceal that judgment."

"Opportunity?" I echoed. "Opportunity
to do what?"

"As you guessed yourself," she said,
"the biocopy which has apparently taken over Tulyar's body knows how to
get into the deeper levels, despite the apparent difficulties of so doing. We
must assume that it knows how to reach its destination."

"How the hell does that help us? He's got the
only transport!"

I have to admit that she was very patient with me.
"The reason that it took time to construct the vehicle," she pointed
out, "was that it was very difficult to programme the machines which built
it. Now that they know how to do it, they can construct a duplicate in a matter
of hours. We had quite sufficient time to equip the vehicle which they have stolen
with a device whose model I'm sure you remember."

Enlightenment dawned.

When the Tetrax had sent us into the levels to carry
plague into the Scarid empire, they had thoughtfully equipped our boots with a
device which leaked an organic trace, easily followed by an artificial
olfactory sensor. That device, detected by John Finn, had led the Scarida down
to the world of the Isthomi just in time to throw me in at the deep end of the
crucial moment of contact. I had always assumed that it was 994- Tulyar who
had been responsible for the trace.

Now, it seemed, the tables had been turned. Finn,
Tulyar, and their allies were laying a trail which might lead the corporeal me—and
a few friends—all the way to the Centre.

The boot, for once, was on the other foot.

11

At
this point in my story, I fear, the narrative flow becomes slightly confusing,
for reasons which the reader may already have figured out.

I must admit that I did not anticipate any
considerable confusion myself, even when I realised that I had tacitly given
way to the Nine's demand that I be copied. I had interfaced with the Nine on
several previous occasions, and I supposed that this special interfacing would
not feel significantly different. At the end of it, I knew, that creature of
flesh and blood which I thought of as the real me would simply get out of the
chair and continue with my real life. The fact that there would be a ghostly
entity drifting through the vast labyrinth of silicon neurons and optical fibre
sinews that was Asgard's diffuse "brain" which would also think of
itself as Mike Rousseau, sharing all my knowledge, all my memories, and all my
hang-ups, did not strike me as an item of any great relevance to the flesh-and-blood
Rousseau's future experience of self.

It turned out that I was wrong.

Exactly how and why I was wrong will become clear in
due time, when my story—perhaps it would now be more appropriate to say
stories
—approaches its—or
their
—climax. For the moment, I need only say
that the person who is recording this story has two sets of memories to draw
upon, and must—if the story is to make sense—describe two independent series
of events.

It might perhaps be easier for the reader if I were
simply to shift one of the continuing narrative threads into the third person,
possibly referring to the software copy as "the other Rousseau" while
retaining "I" for the flesh-and-blood appellant which held the sole
entitlement to it until the crisis in my affairs made division essential. But
that would misrepresent to you the nature of the entity that is now telling the
tale, and I cannot help but feel that such a move would be misleading, if not
tantamount to self-betrayal.

I must, therefore, ask my readers to forgive me for exposing
them to the possibility of mild disorientation. From this moment on, the
perpendicular pronoun will be applied without discrimination to two very
different entities—but given the fact that those two persons embarked upon very
different adventures in what appeared to them to be very different worlds, I do
not think it likely that the reader will ever be in doubt as to which of the
two is the referent of any specific passage of prose. In the interests of
simplicity, I shall present the two narratives in two series of alternating
chapters, although there is a certain arbitrariness about the parallels thus
produced. Software time is no more like clockwork time than software space is
like the kind of space that is to be found in a cupboard or a cosmos.