Asgard's Heart (44 page)

"You are undoubtedly curious to know what manner
of enemy it is that we are fighting, but that is not an easy question to answer—we
have only met their instruments, which are weapons rather than persons. I will
tell you what we do know—or what we believe to be the case, but I cannot pretend
that it offers any final enlightenment.

"It seems that the parent entities which made the
invaders of Asgard have nothing in common with the humanoids who were the
architects of its defenders. They may well have existed before life began. The
universe may have been theirs before the first carbon atoms ever came into
being. The orderliness of their original nature may have been built into the
most fundamental structure of matter. The recurring patterns of their
existence are to be found in the dance of subatomic particles and the interplay
of fundamental forces. They were probably born in the explosive chaos of time's
beginning, and as the universe evolved, would have grown to fill it, to bring some
kind of order to the entire cosmos. But the universe was subsequently invaded
by other orderly entities—the molecules of your kind of life.

"At first, we think, the presence of life in the
universe must have seemed an irrelevance to those which became its enemies, but
when life first evolved to humanoid complexity, and humanoids began to design
intelligences of a new and better kind—the silicon gods of the macroworlds— it
must have become clear to the pre-existing intelligences that if it were left
to itself, this other evolutionary process must ultimately come into conflict
with theirs, imposing its own stamp upon the evolution of the universe. The
makers of the invaders began to intervene—they sent out their instruments to
destroy. They made gods of their own, to meet the gods which your kind made—and
they made crude pseudo-living entities, too, with which to attack the organic
fabric of life.

"All this happened in the very distant past, long
before your galaxy was seeded, long before Asgard was built. The war rages
across the entire universe, and may yet continue until the lifetime of the
universe is complete. The battle for Asgard is no more than a single skirmish,
though it may be a vital one. Asgard owes its existence to the war, for if
there was no war, there would be no need of macroworlds to preserve and
protect the produce of worlds, or to help in the seeding of new worlds and new
galaxies.

"The initial invasion of Asgard employed
organisms whose biochemistry was alien to the vast life-system of which your
world is a part—the germs of a plague whose sole function was to destroy and
denature DNA wherever it could be found. But such organisms were a weapon that
the builders could counter with relative ease, because the invaders have never
been adept in the processes of organic creation. The software personalities
that came to fight the real battle were much more powerful. But in that kind of
battle, too, we believe that we will prove stronger in the end. On the infinite
stage of history, life will win. We have to believe that, do we not?"

His words had begun to fade. My vision was already
faded and blurred, though the cloud through which we passed was so featureless
that I could not properly estimate the extent of the deterioration; now I was
beginning to lose my hearing. It seemed that I might have to be content, for
the time being, with such explanations as I had already

received,
incomplete and unsatisfactory though they were.

I wondered what would happen to me when all my senses
had failed—when I could not see, or hear, or feel anything at all. Would my
memory then begin to fade as the lobes of my hypothetical brain became
dysfunctional? Would there be anything left of me at all?

I clung to the knowledge that this strange inhabitant
of software space had, after all, collected me from the place where I had done
my work, and had implied that I could be reconstructed in order to be put to
work yet again, in some unspecified fashion. Despite all that had happened to
me, I was still clinging to what I could only think of as
life
, whatever my enigmatic companion might have
called it.
In extremis
I might be, but it
seemed that I was also among friends, and though the macroworld itself might be
in danger, the game had not yet reached the final play.

I spared a moment to hope, as fervently as I could,
that my other self had fared even better than I, and that if he too had found
unexpected dangers and dreadful threats, he had nevertheless found allies to
preserve him from death.

33

As the
monstrosity hauled its ugly body through the gap I saw that it wasn't a
centipede after all. The abdomen was rounded, a dull orange in colour and very
hairy, and there were only a dozen legs sprouting from the segmented thorax.
The creature had huge wings that gleamed brilliantly in the light of my
headlamp; they were translucent save for the ribs that patterned them, and the
way they refracted and reflected the light gave them a multicolored sheen.
Under other circumstances I might have taken time out to appreciate their
prettiness, which contrasted markedly with the extreme ugliness of the body
that bore them, but things being the way they were my attention was monopolised
by the great gawping eyes and vicious jaws. The jaws were glistening with some
kind of mucus, and the palps on either side of the mouth were writhing like
white worms.

I struggled reflexively, but I was wrapped up so
tightly that all I could do was rock gently back and forth, like some pendulous
fruit stirred by the wind.

I didn't scream, but I think I may have whimpered a
bit.

The last thing I wanted was to attract attention to
myself, so I stopped struggling. I wondered whether I ought to switch off my
headlight—I could still reach the control with the tip of my tongue—but the
idea of being in total darkness with the monster wandering around was
unbearable.

The thing made straight for me. It didn't waste a
single glance on any of the other prisoners. Despite the sense of

imminent
doom which I had, I was paradoxically glad that I wouldn't have to watch it eat
something else, anticipating my own fate while I watched it rip some moth-like
thing apart with those slavering jaws.

The jaws in question reached up toward my face as the
thing scrambled over the giant eggs which littered the floor of the nest. The
horrid head was level with my chest, and as the jaws came apart I formed a
dreadful picture in my mind of my head being squashed between the pincers, the
skull- bones crumpling about my brain.

But the jaws reached on a little further than that,
and snipped like a pair of scissors—with surprising delicacy—at the threads by
which I was suspended. Before I had time to fall the creature reared up on half
a dozen of its back legs, and grabbed me with the four front ones, hugging me
to its chitinous bosom as though I were its long-lost child miraculously
recovered from evil kidnappers. Then, without delay, it turned back on its
tracks and scuttled as fast as it could— which was not very fast, given that I
was such an unwieldy burden—for the doorway.

"Rousseau!" said Susarma Lear, her voice
sounding very loud in my ears. "Rousseau, for Christ's sake,
what's happening?"

"I'm alive," I told her, though I was unable
to muster an appropriate tone of exultation. "I guess I've just become the
prize in a little game of rob-the-larder. I've been scavenged."

The nest-robber hustled through the opening in the
wall of the chamber and hurled itself out into space, still cradling me in its
forelimbs. I tried to turn my head, because the light reflected from the
polished golden plates of its thorax was dazzling me. I wished I hadn't. The
robbery hadn't gone unnoticed, and beyond the thin neck of the creature that
had snatched me was a great tumbling shadow. My headlamp wasn't powerful enough
to illuminate it all, but I got a fleeting impression of enormous size and of a
spiderlike head even uglier than the head of the beast that had me in its grip.

I suppose we flew, after a fashion, but it felt like
falling, as if the nest-robber were diving as steeply as it could to avoid its
vengeful pursuer. As my head twisted I caught brief glimpses of other shapes
hurtling past—the trailing tips of the branches of the gargantuan trees which
grew on the shell that surrounded Asgard's starlet. We came too close to some
of the branches, reeling in mid-air as the wings of my captor touched them. It
swerved to avoid them, but not very successfully, and I treated myself to a
brief moment of macabre humour by wondering if the giant fly which held me had
qualified for its pilot's licence.

For fully fifty seconds the scavenger out-dived its
pursuer, and I had just about decided that perhaps it had got away with its
raid when our barely-controlled fall was rudely interrupted. It wasn't the
pursuer that got us, though—it was something which had been waiting on one of
the tree- branches, ready to catch anything which happened to be passing. When
I recovered from the shock of the collision I saw immediately that something
had wrapped itself around one of the segments of my captor's thorax, less than
ten centimetres away from my helmet, between the fourth and fifth limbs.

The something was thick and wet and very rough, and I
guessed immediately what it was. It was a tongue, and it was hauling my
temporary custodian into a mouth so vast that it seemed to my befuddled brain
that one could easily lose a whole microworld down there. But I only got the
briefest glimpse of the pink wet throat and the dark tunnel that presumably led
to a vastly cavernous stomach and an

acid
ocean of digestive juices.

Mercifully, the thing that had stolen me from the nest
chose that moment to drop me. I didn't for a moment suppose that it had done
so for any altruistic reason, and I credited my release to its instinctive urge
to concentrate all its resources on a hopeless effort to save itself, but I
thanked it anyway—or would have if I could have mustered the breath to speak.
My throat was so tight I couldn't even whimper any more.

Susarma Lear and 673-Nisreen were both trying to
attract my attention, complaining—politely, in the Tetron's case; but with some
asperity on Susanna's side—that I was letting them down by not taking the time
to tell them what was happening. But I really didn't feel capable of offering
them an adequate running commentary.

I fell—and this time there was no doubt that I was
falling as freely as anything could, with no wings at all to bear me up. I
wondered, absurdly, whether the stuff that was wrapped around me was elastic
enough to let me bounce, provided that I didn't fall on my head. I was under no
illusions about what would happen if I
did
fall on my head. Low-gee or no low-gee, the most important bit of me would be a
sticky red smear on the surface of the starshell.

Then I was caught again—grabbed in mid-air with an
abruptness which shook me up badly. It wasn't as bad as hitting the ground, but
it was enough to jar my brain inside my skull and knock me dizzy. For several
seconds I wasn't in a position to see or feel anything at all except the
kinaesthetic display of my own miserable discomfort.

When I could see again, I thought I was right back to
square one, because the thing that had me in its grip now was the monster that
had pursued the nest-robber in that lunatic helter-skelter dive. I could see
all of its hairy spiderlike head, which had black eye-spots here there and
everywhere, and vast hairy mouth-parts. It clutched me tightly between two
foreshortened forelimbs, with four great fingery tentacles wrapped tightly
around my trussed-up torso.