Asgard's Heart (50 page)

I thought I knew how difficult it had been for him to
do what he had just done. In a way, he'd done exactly what Finn had, and taken
the side of an alien against his own species-cousin, but I knew he hadn't done
it for the same reason. Whatever Tulyar had been telling him when I woke up, he
hadn't believed. Reason had told him which side to be on, and even though what
he'd done was making him sick to the core of his being, he'd done it. It only
looked like the Star-Force way; the motive behind it had been something very
different.

I hadn't time to do or say anything. I took my place
in the chair where pseudo-Tulyar had been sitting, and looked at the keyboards
and the dials. There must have been two hundred different switches, and
although every one had been shaped with humanoid fingers in mind, I couldn't
make any sense at all of the symbols.

I raised my hands, feeling a frightful sense of utter
frustration rising inside me.

And then some kind of bomb went off in my head.

I began to punch the keyboard furiously. There were no
flashing lights or ringing bells to give evident warning of the fact that the
power build-up in the starlet was about to discharge itself, and I had in fact
lost all consciousness of the fear that Asgard might very shortly be turned
into nova debris. I had not the slightest notion what I was doing, or how, and
my self-consciousness seemed to be locked into some absurd psychostasis,
whereby I could watch my hands but could feel no connection with them
whatsoever.

I had not even sufficient presence of mind to wonder
whether this was how Myrlin had felt when the creature lurking in his brain had
sprung its sudden ambush, and made him into what he had so tragically become—the
traitor who had very nearly turned the war around.

When my hands finally finished their work, they just
stopped. I must have been struck rigid in the chair, frozen into stillness. How
much time there was to spare when I completed the sequence, I have no idea. The
conventions of melodrama demand that it be a mere handful of seconds, and I
can't say for certain that it wasn't, but the simple

truth
is that I did not know then and do not know now.

I wondered, as I sat there, perfectly still, whether
it was now safe for me to die. I was feeling no authentic pain, but in myself I
felt absolutely awful. If someone had told me then that I was dead, I could not
have denied it with any conviction.

When I felt a touch on my shoulder, I looked up to see
673-Nisreen staring down at me. The poor guy still hadn't much idea of what had
happened, or how, or why, and he was desperate for some reassurance that he'd
done the right thing.

"What have you done?" he asked, starting
with one of the easier ones.

That was the moment when I discovered that I did, in
fact, know what I had done. I didn't know
how,
but I knew
what.

"I shunted the power which had built up in the
starshell into a stresser, to wormhole the macroworld," I told him.
"Which is exactly what they did a million and a half years ago, when the
battle first reached its critical phase. The builders were still around then,
in humanoid form. They didn't survive the consequent skirmishes, but at least
they got the starshell sealed off, and left the war to the software gods who
were equipped to fight it."

"Where are we?" he asked. I could see from
his eyes that he was quick enough on the uptake to know that a thing the size
of Asgard would make a hell of a wormhole. I knew he wouldn't be overly shocked
by the answer.

"I don't know," I said. "I moved us,
but there's no way to know where. At a guess, we've come a couple of million
light-years. I hope you don't feel homesick, because we aren't ever going to
see the Milky Way again, let alone Tetra. Asgard's all we have now—we might
even have to practice being nice to the Scarida. There are still billions of
them up there. I doubt that there are more than a couple of thousand Tetrax, or
a couple of dozen humans."

The needles were churning in my guts, but somehow I
had them sealed off. I was bleeding inside, but I had enough blood left in the
arteries to keep my brain going. I felt light-headed again—anaesthetised.

He began to work his way up to the difficult
questions.

"It
wasn't
Tulyar, was it?"

"No," I confirmed. "It wasn't Tulyar,
and it wasn't Myrlin. Whatever their short-term plans may have been, they meant
no good to your species or mine, or anything else that's truly alive. I don't
know what it was that made them, but when it comes to the choice between our
gods and theirs, it has to be ours that we go out to fight for. I'm certain of
that, if nothing else."

"How did you do it?" he asked. "How did
you know what to do?"

"Physically," I said, "I feel like half
the man I used to be. Mentally, I fear that I may be a little bit more. The
copy of my consciousness that the Nine launched into software space was somehow
retranscribed into my own brain. It's been through a lot, and it's come every
bit as close to extinction as my poor fleshly body, but it was strong enough,
at the end, to carry another injection of programming into biocopy form—a set
of instructions for moving the macroworld.

"The gods found themselves a hero, Nisreen. A
demigod—whatever you care to call it. Believe me Nisreen, there's a part of me
that has seen things and been things
nobody
should be asked to see and be. The penalty of living in interesting times, I
guess."

I had a question of my own, though I didn't really
expect

him to
be able to answer it. "Is the colonel still alive?"

"Yes," he said. More time must have passed
than I thought. I must have been sitting still for several minutes— time for
him to take a look.

"I don't know how," he went on, "but
she's still alive. I'm not sure she can survive for long, though, unless we can
get help."

"Help," I said, "is not a problem. This
is the real Centre of Asgard, and from this seat you can do
anything,
if you know how. The gods that the
builders made to look after themselves and their creations can be summoned from
the vasty deep and made to do our bidding. It's all at our fingertips, now. If
Susarma can be saved, she will be. You too. Even me—although it may take a
long, long session in one of the Nine's magic eggs. We're going to live,
Nisreen, thanks to you. If you hadn't stopped
Tulyar. . . ."

"It
wasn't
994-Tulyar," he said, with a sudden flare of wrathful indignation of which
I would never have believed a Tetron capable. "It was something obscene.
Something. . . ."

He couldn't even find words for it, and I realised
belatedly how desperate had been the decision which he'd made. Reason had only
been a part of it—and maybe, in the final analysis, not the most important
part. The Tetrax identify with one another rather more closely than humans do.
The brotherhood of man may be nine-tenths pretence, but the brotherhood of the
Tetrax is something else. The thing that had stolen Tulyar's body hadn't killed
Nisreen because it thought that it could recruit and use him the way it had
recruited and used John Finn, but it had been wrong. As I looked at
673-Nisreen, I realised that even if I hadn't managed to hit back—even if
pseudo-Tulyar had managed to use the starlet's power to destroy Asgard's gods—the
war wouldn't have been over. Far from it. The Tetrax might still be primitive
by comparison with the builders of Asgard, but they were on the side of life,
and they would have entered the lists with every last atom of force at their
disposal.

I knew that the war was still going on, throughout the
universe, but I was hopeful.

It wasn't just that we'd won our tiny little skirmish—
there was more than that to help me to hope.

Whatever imagination it was had created the demons of
Asgard had a hard fight on its hands if it intended to annihilate life itself,
because life had men as well as gods, and hearts as well as minds, and its
enemies had not.

38

I
touched Susarma's shoulder, very gently. She opened her eyes, and stared up at
me stupidly. She didn't know where she was; maybe she didn't even know who she
was.

"Sorry," I whispered.

I let her look at me for a few seconds. Her brain had
to start working in its own good time.

"Rousseau?" she said, very faintly. She
smiled. Her mind was a million light-years away, and she was floating, high as
a kite.

"I thought ..."
she began, and then stopped, probably thinking that she was about to
say something silly.

"You thought right," I told her, calmly.
"We should both be dead. But the Nine fixed us up. We're supermen,
remember?"

She tried to sit up, but I put out my arm to restrain
her. Her eyes widened as she felt the damage inside her. She was carved up more
thoroughly than I was.

She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
I had to guess what questions she probably had in mind.

"Help," I said, "is on its way. The
gods of Asgard are back in Valhalla. The power is back on in the levels. You
and I are hurt pretty badly, but thanks to the Isthomi we can come through it.
I'm not sure that we can stay conscious, but I know we aren't going to die.
The war within Asgard is over, save for a little mopping-up. 673-Nisreen is
okay, and in better shape than either of us, except that he broke his arm again
while saving my life.

"That's the good news. The bad news is that we're
a million light years from home and we aren't ever going to be able to go
back. Maybe even that has its brighter side. If the Star Force still exists,
you're the grand commander—She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. I can't think of anyone who
could play the part better. It's not inconceivable that you're the only human
female of child-bearing age on Asgard, but with Isthomi biotech to help us
there's no need for you to worry unduly about becoming the mother of the species—I
dare say we could have a thousand kids without troubling ourselves with any
greater intimacy than passing the test tube and arguing about what to call the
brats."

She wasn't in any condition to laugh at the joke, and
she looked more annoyed than amused. She wasn't the maternal type.

"Did you get that bastard android?" she
whispered.

"It wasn't him," I told her, dully. "It
was some other bastard, just using him. He never really had a chance, did he?
First the Salamandrans, then the evil masterminds of Anti-Life. Given the
opportunity, he'd have been a better man than you or I, but he got all the
rough deals that fate could find for him."

"Did you get him?" She had a one-track mind.

"Yes," I said. "No clever illusions
this time. No mistakes. I blasted all hell out of him. You'd have been proud
of me. I got Finn too. And the thing that was pretending to be Tulyar. I got
them all, the Star Force way. No ifs and buts . . . just blood and guts."

She looked up at me. There wasn't a trace of
hero-worship in her pale blue stare.

"As of now," I told her, "I've
resigned. You can keep the medal."

She smiled faintly.

"You got to the Centre," she said,
"didn't you?"

I looked around. The lights were back on in the
levels, but not here. We were surrounded by darkness, dust, and the dead.