Asgard's Heart (30 page)

I remembered that what seemed to be
happening in my dream was a failure of the
imagination ...
an inability to get
a grip on things. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe any story that Nisreen and I
could think up must be false, for the simple reason that we had to make it make
sense, and the reality didn't. Maybe the answer was so peculiar that we
couldn't even formulate it—but maybe not so peculiar that it was beyond the
imagination of an advanced software
persona.
Maybe the things
that were fighting this grotesque war had reasons for doing so that we could
never comprehend. Maybe even the Nine were too primitive and too stupid: mere
godling cannon-fodder in a conflict which concerned them hardly more than it
concerned us.

I remembered the end of the dream, and the
other dreams, and the way in which a mythical framework of understanding kept
imposing itself, incomprehensibly, upon what might well be attempts by the
biocopy in my brain to help me figure out the what and why of things.

I tried to explain that to Nisreen—to tell
him something about the ideas underlying Greek and Norse mythology—in order to
ask him what dreams poor Tulyar might have had, and what vocabulary of symbols
the Tetron mind might draw upon in parallel with my experiences.

"With us it is not the same," he
said. "Your present culture is a patchwork, made by the drawing together
of many ancestral tribes which had different languages and different ways of
thought, having dispersed geographically long before inventing agriculture and
settling down. Your entire history is dominated by the idea of a small local
tribe

surrounded by
aliens ...
by enemies.

"On Tetra, our ancestors discovered
agriculture and settled down before dispersing geographically, so that our
gradual colonization of the various regions of our world was more like the
growth of a single culture. In time, we developed different languages and
other cultural differences, but our history has always been dominated by the
idea of one tribe, changing and diversifying. You see the influence of this
idea in our resistance to exaggerated individualism, and in our habit of
numbering ourselves within our name- groups. Not until we began to travel among
the stars did we find ourselves to be one tribe among many, and we have always
been concerned to bind the galactic community together as a great whole,
uneasily aware that it might be impossible or inappropriate to do so. That is
why we take such an interest in theories of history and researches in biology
that credit all the galactic humanoids with a common ancestry of some kind.

"In terms of our mythology, we were
always monotheists. A single tribe very quickly produced the notion of a single
god. That idea, in its turn, gave way fairly readily to the notion of a
universe that, although godless, is law-governed and ordered as a great
machine. Our historical scientists believe that is why the Tetrax are the most
scientifically- advanced race in the galactic arm, although we are no older, in
evolutionary terms, than any other.

"We have nothing in our cultural and
mythological heritage which resembles the complicated notions of your ancient
Greeks or Norsemen—the idea of
Gotterdammerung
would be entirely
alien to us. We have not even the kind of covert dualism that is built into
your supposedly monotheistic religions, which oppose a law-making god with an
adversary or a subversive chaos. It may be, I think—for reasons which are
purely accidental—that you have far better resources in the imagination for
representing what seems to be going on around us than 994-Tulyar had. It may be
that coincidence has helped to model your mythical thinking on a pattern which
really is reproduced in the universe, in a conflict of godlike beings with
which we have somehow become entangled."

My head was beginning to ache again, but
not with the effort of thought. What Nisreen had said was fascinating in more
ways than one. One of the ways in which it was fascinating was that it might
help to explain why I was being fitted up by fate to take a part in whatever
was going on around us. It suggested that there might be something about the
human mind—as moulded by its historical and cultural heritage—which enabled it
to adapt to the context in which the war inside Asgard could be seen to have
meaning. It suggested, in fact, that my other self, copied and encrypted by the
Isthomi and then sent forth upon his heroic quest through Asgard's other
dimensions, might indeed be enabled to achieve something which no other humanoid
could do as well.

For the first time, I paused to wonder how
he was getting on, and what he might be up to in those realms of Asgard which
were the true habitation of the gods. Was he yet in sight of Valhalla? Or had
he suffered instead the dire penalty of
hubris?

I didn't suppose that I would ever find
out,
but my insatiable desire to speculate made me think
about it anyhow, until I was interrupted by Susarma Lear, who stuck her head
into the back of the transporter and said: "We got lucky."

"You mean we picked up the trail of
the other truck?" I said.

"Not exactly," she replied.
"There's no sign of the trace it was supposed to be laying down for us,
and we might easily have lost it for good—if it hadn't started transmitting a
Mayday. The opposition are still on this level . . . and they're in
trouble."

She was right, of course. We'd got lucky.
But I wasn't about to start cheering yet. Until we found out just what kind of
trouble the opposition was in, we had no way of knowing whether we could avoid
the same fate.

22

The last traces of the weed had vanished. Once again
the mists had withdrawn and the sea was calm, but I knew that it was only
another calm before a storm. As I watched the oars dipping into the water I
regretted that the goddess who was the architect of this Creation had chosen to
define our environment in terms of an ocean; I thought that I might have felt
more secure on solid land. She had assured me that soil and rock would have
been no less eager to seize and choke us than the waters of this hallucinatory
ocean, and that we would still have had to isolate ourselves in some kind of
vessel, but the sea still seemed uncomfortably alien to me.

I had asked why, if unfamiliarity to our
enemies was the chief criterion determining her decision, she had not elected
to provide us with a void to cross and a ship like
Leopard Shark
in which to
navigate it. She had replied that an analogue of stressed space would in her
estimation be far easier for our enemies to come to terms with, and the shell
of a starship too easy for them to crack. It was, she told me, far safer to be
in a realm of uncertain magic, where the enemy could not readily estimate what
deceptive power they might assume, or what power we in our turn might have to
use against them.

"But we do not know that
ourselves!" I had protested.

"That," she had replied with
finality, "may be our greatest advantage."

I did not think that I had settled well
into the identity of a man of magic. Some men might have taken comfort from the
suspicion that unknown forces lay latent within them, holding the potential for
a miraculous rescue even in the direst of circumstances, but it was not a
possibility in which I could invest much trust. I would have preferred to know
just what I was, and what I could do, and to be confident that my resources
would be adequate to the task in hand. Alas, even men of flesh and blood rarely
know such things, and it is a lucky man indeed who has the pleasure of certainty
in regard to the last of those matters.

The next encounter began with a disturbance
in the water, which was not so evident on the surface of the sea but which
began to exert a marked influence upon the course of the vessel, dragging us
off our bearing and away to starboard. I watched the oars as they began to
fight against the drag, those to port relaxing while those to starboard tried
to work increasingly hard.

"Look!" said Myrlin, pointing
away to starboard.

There, far away from the boat, we could see
a swirling motion in the water beginning, and rapidly increasing. What had
caught us was the outer edge of a great whirlpool that was endeavouring to suck
us into a clockwise spiral. It was immediately clear that whatever force was
working in the water was more powerful than the oars, because our course was
indeed curving away along the arc of a great circle.

Myrlin grappled with the helm, holding it
hard over in an attempt to steer us to port, and the prow of the ship began to
come about. Instead of taking us away from the current, though, he simply
succeeded in exposing a greater target to the rushing water, which began to
sweep us sideways.

Myrlin spun the wheel, trying to turn the
ship back again in order that the oars could gain some purchase, but the

force of the surge was now so great that he could not
bring the vessel around. The oars were flailing now, as impotent as they had
been when the weed prevented their dipping beneath the surface.

Once again, I felt quite impotent. The
weapons with which I had been provided were quite useless in dealing with this
kind of attack. I looked back at the female form in which the Nine had remade
themselves, and saw that she was chanting, trying to raise some kind of magical
force to oppose the one sent to suck us down.

In response to her invocation a great wind
blew up, which tried with all its might to carry us in the opposite direction
to the drag of the maelstrom. The automata on the lower deck were busy with our
great square sail, changing its attitude to catch the full force of the wind
while Myrlin threw the wheel the other way, trying to pull our stern round to
face the direction of the drag.

The opposition of wind and water churned up
the surface of the sea in mighty waves, and turbid spray was everywhere,
lashing fiercely at our faces.

I clung to the rail desperately, with my
bow and arrows held tight beneath my foot, lest they should be lost. The ship
had been tossed about by the wind and the waves before, but that was nothing
by comparison with the effects of the present contest of the elements. The sky
had grown dark, and the clouds which obscured it were almost black. As though
with an outburst of sudden rage those clouds began to pour black rain upon us,
cold and stinging. The raindrops mixed with hailstones the size of bullets.

The shape of the whirlpool, which had
presented itself quite clearly a few minutes before, was now lost in the tumult,
and we seemed to be in the grip of chaos itself, lurching and listing without
any apparent pattern.

My stomach felt as if it was turning over,
and I had to go down on one knee to crouch beneath the level of the rail,
trying to hide my face from the scourging of the storm. I could not tell what
Myrlin was trying to do, nor what advantage was being gained in the fight
between our wizardry and theirs—all that I could do was wait, and hope that if
the ship capsized, I would have the strength to swim in a sea made mad by the
vortex in the water and the assaults of the air.