Asgard's Heart (46 page)

Was that, I wondered, what it feels like for man of
flesh and blood to die? Was it possible that once the heart has stopped
pumping, and all the nerves have stopped relaying information from the
sense-organs to the brain, consciousness fades slowly and peacefully away in
such a manner? Perhaps there was no curtain of darkness that abruptly descended—no
shock
of death to bring down a guillotine on
experience. Perhaps there was always that fading disconnection—an odyssey
beyond sensation, beyond pain, beyond memory, beyond self.

Previously, I had always imagined that it must be
horrible to die, and all the more horrible if the moment of death were
extended, savagely torturing consciousness upon the rack of pain. Now, I
wondered whether existence might be kinder than that, and death a more peculiar
ecstasy than any which life could offer.

But I wondered too whether my sense of self was
absurdly anachronistic, still trying idiotically to conceive of itself as a
being of flesh and sinew, blood and brain, when it was really no such thing.
Perhaps, I thought, I should have used this opportunity to cut myself off from
such residual notions, and accepted fully what was surely the truth: that I was
no more like the entity of flesh which produced me than a dragonfly is like a
nymph, or an anonymous egg like the organism it must become.

Perhaps, I thought, I should no longer be
contemplating the idea of death. For was I not now a god among gods? Had I not
been brought, like many a hero before me, to share the realm that was Asgard
and Olympus, to be omniscient and undying, not human at all?

I tried to train myself in that way of thinking. I
instructed my new self that it had become a kind of insect, redeemed from
temporary entombment in a chrysalis. Out of the wreck and dissolution of one
form another had now arisen, I said, and the new must put away all thought of
the old, and learn to fly.

I told myself, urgently, that there was encrypted in
my soul an inner nature beyond any which I had previously suspected, which had
survived not only my "duplication" as an item of arcane software but
also my annihilation in that form, providing some kind of template for my
reincarnation as a second software self. I had been human, and quasi- human,
but now I was divine.

Was I not?

Was I not?

I imagined myself grown again from that inconsiderable
atom of thought to which I had been reduced, and tried to picture what I now
might be. I
felt
that seed of being burst
forth with a renewed vitality.

But I felt also that something was wrong, and that a
promise was in the process of betrayal. I felt, however paradoxical it might
seem, too familiar to myself.

I was Michael Rousseau, and I felt—I knew—that I ought
to be more than that.

For a time (which seemed long) I could not quite
imagine what form it was that I was acquiring. I deliberately played with the
possibility that I might no longer be humanoid, or even animal, and imagined
myself growing as a tree, like the great world-tree Yggdrasil which I had woven
into the pattern of those dreams by means of which I had tried to envision the
war which had been fought—was still being fought—in Asgard's various spaces.

I imagined myself also as a spore floating in the
reaches of interstellar space, drifting for millions of years, awaiting the
moment of coincidence which would deliver me into a place where life could
thrive—into the vaporous maw of a gas giant, or the great hoop of warm cloud
surrounding a condensing sun. I imagined myself as a tight-wound thread of
nucleic acid, unraveling into a world pregnant with possibility, doubling and
doubling and doubling to spin raw organic matter into the stuff of life, bound
into organisms which could not only reproduce themselves, but which also
carried wrapped in their quiet DNA the apparatus of future evolution: the
templates of a million different forms, a million different creatures whose
interactions would be the seed of that intricate building process which led
inexorably to the complexity of mind, the humanity of man, and the creativity
of whatever being it was who was quiet in man himself—in all the millions or
billions of humanoid species which the spinning thread of universal life had
woven on its planetary looms.

I imagined myself as both the whole and a tiny part of
the thread manipulated by the three grey Fates, daughters of Night and sisters
of the Seasons. I could catch no glimpse of the Fates themselves, but
remembered dimly that in one representation they were one and the same with the
Keres, who carried the souls of the dead to Hades, and wore therefore the
selfsame faces as the valkyries who had taken possession of
my
soul. I was sensible of the fashion in which
that thread spilled eternally into the darkness which was the universe, woven
not into a single pattern but an infinite series of patterns, each one
different in detail and yet serving the same aesthetic end.

Finally, I imagined myself as an embryo, floating in
an amniotic sac, shaped and formed while I grew by an unfolding plan, sustained
by a placenta which I would soon no longer need, waiting for the renewal of
sense and sensation, of life of my own . . . waiting for birth, or rebirth, or
a place in the vast unfolding chain of being in which birth and rebirth,
duplication and metamorphosis, death and putrefaction, were all mere marks of
punctuation in the sentence of existence.

All of that, I knew, belonged to the realm of the
possible, the realm of the real. . . .

But I knew, somehow, that it would be denied to me.

I had been shaped for a different purpose. I had not
been made ready for immortality, for life in the world of the gods. I might
have become divine, but instead I had been prepared for another destiny,
another mission. I was still an instrument, a weapon of war. I was helpless in
the hands of those who sought to use me.

Knowing that, I realised how easy it must be for men
to hate their gods, and how wise it might be not to trust them.

35

The
flying spider, with Clio hooked into its nervous system like a possessive
demon, returned with 673-Nisreen within half an hour. He was badly shaken, and
still suffering from his broken arm, but once he was free of his swaddling-
clothes I helped rub his ankles to restore the circulation. He had no weapon,
so we remained defenceless until Clio and her assistant brought Susarma Lear
down, but nothing emerged to threaten us. The forest floor seemed to offer adequate
sanctuary from the horrors that haunted the treetops.

Clio put the flying spider to sleep before disengaging
herself, leaving the monstrous thing laid out across the root-ridges, legs and
wings sprawled in all directions. I had never seen such an ungainly creature,
nor an uglier one, and I was glad when we hurried off, leaving it to the mercy
of any scavengers or predators which cared to risk approaching it while it was
too dazed to resume the normal course of its life. I rather hoped that it would
survive—it had played a vital role in saving us from a particularly nasty
predicament, even if it hadn't been quite itself while doing so. Who was I to
minimise the efforts of a helpless instrument, drafted into a conflict far
beyond the scope of its own understanding?

From her temporary vantage point high up in the trees
Susarma Lear had seen many small lights produced by living creatures, but down
on the surface of the starshell it was much gloomier, and we had only our
helmet-lights to show us the way. I had not the slightest idea which way we
ought to go, but the magic box still had matters well in hand. She climbed up
on my shoulders, but refrained from running her neuronal feelers through my
suit and into the back of my skull. Instead she began to send electronic signals
over the radio link that we used for voice contact. She couldn't manage a voice
of her own but she could understand our speech, and she could answer questions
on a buzz-once-for-yes-twice-for-no basis. It didn't take long to work out a
rudimentary system of communication, and to figure out which way she wanted us
to go.

"How far is it?" I asked. "An
hour?"

No.

"Two hours?"

Yes.

It wasn't much of a conversation, but the essentials
were there.

In anything like Earth-normal gravity the journey
would have been very difficult, because the ground was far from flat—the cracks
in the carpet made by the root-ridges were anything up to five metres deep and
ten across. As things were, we couldn't have weighed much more than a tenth of
our Earth weight, and we found that we could hurdle the cracks with consummate
ease, and could have turned somersaults if we'd wanted to. But we had to keep a
wary eye on the trees. Their lowest branches were high above our heads, but
there were things moving on the trunks, and on three occasions great winged
shadows fluttered down towards us, presumably intent on investigating our
nutritious potential. Susarma was always ready with her needier in case the
situation became desperate, but we obviously didn't seem appetising enough and
the shadows passed us by. There were creepy-crawlies in the cracks between the
root-ridges, too, but they kept their heads well down and didn't bother us at
all.

"These roots don't just overlap," I said to
Nisreen. "They're all one system. There's only one organism here, and
all
the trees are just branches. The starshell is
bedrock to a single mammoth plant."

I didn't mention Yggdrasil, the mythical world-ash of
which I'd dreamed. The name wouldn't have meant anything to a Tetron—or to
Susarma, who'd had a more practical education.

673-Nisreen agreed that the plant was remarkable. From
a Tetron, that was a genuine concession. I think he might have entered into the
spirit of the thing if his arm hadn't been troubling him so much. I felt fine
again, but he hadn't gone through the Isthomi's bodily tuning-up process, and
he was conspicuously less than superhuman. Bioscientist or not, a discussion of
the wonders of the local ecology simply didn't warrant a place on his immediate
personal agenda. I was left to marvel privately at the multitudinous scions of
the single starshell-hugging tree. No doubt there would have been far more to
marvel at had the light been better, but the gloom put me in mind of my
expeditions into the cold levels in the quiet days before Saul Lyndrach,
Myrlin, and Susarma Lear had so rudely interrupted the pattern of my life.

The journey took less than two hours—Clio had underestimated
the ground that we could cover in the low-gee conditions. Our destination, it
transpired, was a kind of tower built beside one of the spokes which connected
the starshell to the outer part of the macroworld. The tower was built in the
form of a tall four-sided pyramid with a few square-sectioned extrusions and a
hemispherical dome on top. The spoke that vanished into the canopy above it was
oval in section, about four metres thick on the long diameter. The dome on top
of the building looked as though it ought to be transparent, but there was no
light inside it now; the entire edifice was silent and dark.

There was a moatlike ditch around the building,
created because the carpet of root-ridges was held back by a fence not unlike
the one that protected the airlock on the level above. The ditch was about
twelve metres across and five deep. We could see that there was a doorway
directly across from the point where we stood looking down, and we could see
that it had been opened in a rather crude manner. A way had been blasted
through it by a sophisticated petard of some kind. The gap was adequate to let
through a man—or a man-sized robot.