Asgard's Heart (18 page)

12

There
seemed to be a sky, which was grey and overcast, heavy with roiling clouds
racing before an erratic wind. The clouds seemed so low as to be barely out of
reach, as though I might reach up my hand and feel the cool, moist breath of
their passage.

The sea was a duller grey, the colour of lead, and
although it was no less troubled, its waves trod the paces of a dance that was
far more leisurely than the light fantastic of the clouds. There was very
little spray, and it seemed as though the ocean were made of some more
glutinous compound than mere water, as if it were thickened by dissolved slime.

The ship on whose deck I found myself standing was a
curious vessel, more like a sketch of a ship than a real entity of wood and
iron. It seemed to me to have been modeled on a poorly-remembered image of a
Viking longboat, with a red-and-gold patterned sail billowing upon its single
mast, and forty pairs of oars moving in an uncannily-precise rhythm, quite
unperturbed by the wayward rise and fall of the waves.

There were no visible oarsmen; the oars projecting
from the flank of the vessel seemed to work entirely by themselves, growing
organically from the hull. The deck, which extended most of the length of the
ship, was lined with silent warriors, huge and blonde, with horned helmets and
armour of gleaming bronze. They carried spears and broadswords, but the swords
were sheathed. They stood immobile, like carved chessmen waiting for a game to
begin. There was no possibility of mistaking them for real people; like the
boat, they seemed to me more like entities in an animated cartoon.

The prow of the ship was shaped into a curious figurehead
with anchored snakes instead of hair, and the snakes moved sluggishly as the
bows dipped and rose with the swell. Beneath this image of Medusa, carried high
above the waves, there was a sharp spur, which gleamed as if it were made of
steel. Had the gorgon's head been attached to a body, it might have been riding
upon the spur as if on a broomstick, and the implication of that absent form
gave the spur a gloss of phallic potency.

The bridge at the hind end of the ship was a paltry
affair, consisting of a raised deck protected only by an ornately- carved
railing. There was a wheel controlling the rudder (though that seemed to me to
be as anachronistic as Medusa or the ramming-spur), but no substantial
wheelhouse.

I found myself gripping the rail very tightly, bracing
myself against the rolling and yawing of the ship.

I had never been on a ship before—the closest I had
ever come to an ocean was driving along the shore of one of the icebound seas
on the surface of Asgard. That had certainly been grey, but the way the bergs
floated in the shallow water had made it seem utterly serene, while this water,
in spite of its apparent viscosity, had an obvious inclination to the
tempestuous.

I felt, paradoxically, that I should have been
seasick, or at the very least uneasy and uncomfortable. In fact, I did not. The
best attempt I can make to describe what I felt like is to say that I felt mildly
drunk—at precisely that pitch of intoxication where the befuddled brain seems
disconnected from the body, anaesthetised and incipiently dizzy. I felt unreal,
and that seemed to me to be an utter absurdity, because I knew full well that
from the viewpoint of my parent self I was unreal. I had been copied into a
dreamworld, but there was surely a ludicrous impropriety in the fact that I
felt like a dream-entity.

Had I, I wondered, any instinct to survive in my
present form? Had I sufficient strength of will to continue to exist from one
moment to the next?

Oddly enough, that was a frightening thought. I did
not feel like myself—and knew, indeed, that in a sense I
was not
myself, and that there was another, very
different self walking away from the interface in the solid world of Asgard's
physical mass. And yet, I was all the self I had, and I knew that this
splinter-consciousness, however drunk with its own absurdity it might be, was
an entity capable of being destroyed, and that such destruction would be no
less a death than would one day overcome my fleshy
doppelganger.

I looked around, and found that I was not alone. Mercifully,
I was not the only volunteer who had come forward to undertake the high road to
the Centre while his solid self attempted the low. Myrlin was watching me. He
needed no rail to assist in his support, but seemed quite steady on the deck,
riding its movements with casual ease. He seemed no bigger here than he had in
the flesh, but that had always been quite big enough—in the flesh he was a
two-metre man with a lot to spare, and his ghost-self here retained the same
appearance of hugeness. But he did not look real. As I met his gaze, which was
as curious and as puzzled as my own, I had to admit that he looked no more authentic
than the silly ship on whose deck we stood. He too was more like a cartoon
image than a real man.

He was dressed in armour, which was black and shiny,
as if lacquered or highly polished. Its sections were moulded so accurately to
his body that it looked like an exoskeleton.

He was
bare-headed, though, and his colouring was subtly altered. His hair was
lighter, although it tended more to auburn than blonde, and his eyes were so
bright in their greyness as to seem almost silver.

In his right hand he was carrying a huge sledgehammer,
whose head must have weighed at least a hundred kilos, although he seemed to
feel not the slightest discomfort in bearing it. He had a large sword in a
scabbard at his belt. Despite his seeming inauthenticity, I could not help but
feel that this was the role for which fate (as opposed to the cunning
Salamandrans) had shaped him. As a barbarian warrior he was somehow convincing,
whereas the real android, set against the backcloth of Skychain City and the
deeper levels of Asgard, had always seemed awkwardly out of place.

I looked down at my own body, to see what I might be
wearing, and found that I was armoured too, though in a slightly different
fashion. It was as though I had garments knitted from fine steel thread, which
seemed both very strong and very light. Like Myrlin's, my armour was lacquer-bright,
but my colour was a dark red, the colour of burgundy wine.

I hoped that I wouldn't present too tempting a target,
if and when things warmed up.

Looking down, I could see the backs of the hands that
gripped the rails. I felt a slight rush of amused relief as I realised that I
knew them. I knew them like the backs of my hands . . . although I was not
aware that I had ever paid particularly scrupulous attention to them in my former
life. Perhaps it was only in my mind—a reassurance, which I needed, that I was
still who I was, really and truly.

I had a sword and a scabbard of my own. The weapon
looked big and cumbersome, but it didn't feel that way. It wasn't only that it
felt light—it felt as if it had a strength of its own, and perhaps an innate
skill, which I only had to liberate. This was a magical sword, and that status
seemed no more absurd than the fact of my existence here, for this was a world
where all was magical, where the laws which regulated other spaces and times
could be modified at will, if one only knew how and had the faith that one
could do it.

I had another weapon too—a big longbow, leaning upon
the rail beside my hand. It didn't fall or bounce around when the ship lurched,
and I guessed that it, too, had a competence of its own. There was a quiver of
arrows behind my shoulder, Robin Hood style.

Bring me my bow of burning gold
, I quoted
silently, with drunken eloquence.
Bring me my arrows of desire!
And then,
in more sombre mood:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world. . . . The blood- dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned. . . .

I turned again to look at the third person who was
standing on the small raised section of deck. She had moved to stand by Myrlin,
and was watching me studiously. It wasn't Susarma Lear, though she had some of
Susarma's features. I had seen her many times before, looking out at me from
her crazy looking-glass world, always behind an invisible but solid barrier—not
really there at all.

Now, she was really here. Or, to be strictly accurate,
I was "really" there.

Her dark hair was still worn long. It hung, straight
and sheer, almost to the middle of her back. She was all Amazon now, though, in
armour like mine in style, but burnished dark gold. Her eyes were brown, but
like Myrlin's eyes they had an inner glow that made them seem bright, as though
they were radiant with heat. She was carrying her own bow, as tall as she was,
and her own quiver of arrows. She had a sword, too, but she didn't seem unduly
burdened. She did look real—though that was undoubtedly a consequence of my
knowing that she really belonged here. She was the Nine, and she didn't need to
become a caricature to take the appearance of Pallas Athene, warrior goddess—the
role was already hers, custom-made.

I took my hands off the rail, and stood upright,
slightly surprised to find that I could do it.

"You chose this," I accused her. "We
could experience this according to any scheme of interpretation—any framework
of appearances that we cared to import. Why didn't you give us Star Force
uniforms and flame pistols? Why not an armoured car and a road to drive it on?
We could have felt at home there. Why this fantasy . . . this fairyland?"

"Do you remember what happened to Amara Guur when
you fought him in the flower garden?" she countered. "Do you remember
why he couldn't fight effectively?"

I remembered. Unlike me, he'd never been in low-gee
before. When the fight started, his instincts took over, and all his reflexes
were wrong. He was betrayed by his own skills.

She saw that I understood. "This isn't the world
you've always known," she said. "If I were to make it look like that
world, you'd be forever trying to act as if it were. Here, you must act on this
world's terms. We have a great deal of latitude in converting our experience
into pseudo-sensory interpretations, but we don't have complete freedom. The
constraints this world exercises on the way you can see and manipulate it are
weaker than the constraints of the world where your other self lives, but there
are constraints. There is an actuality here, which must be accepted in order to
be dealt with."

"Yes," I said, "but this is
silly."

"On the contrary," she assured me, gravely.
"It may seem to you to be absurd to build a world of experience out of
bits of ancient mythologies and literary fantasies with which you had contact
in your youth, but it is the perfect strategy for the circumstances. Those
fantasies had real meaning for you once, and still do, although you have put
them away as childish things. There has always been a private world within your
mind—a refuge which offered relief from the oppressive solidity of the world of
material objects. That world reproduces the kind of dominion that your
personality has within your corporeal body—a power which still has limitations,
but lesser ones. The magical world of your ancient myths and folklore fantasies
arises out of an attempt to map the properties of the mind onto the properties
of the spatial universe. Software space really is that kind of universe, where
the personality holds that kind of dominion.