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  ASGARD'S

  HEART

  THE ASGARD TRILOGY

  BOOK THREE

  BRIAN

  STABLEFORD

  Five Star • Waterville, Maine

  Copyright © 2005 by Brian Stableford. An earlier version of this text was published in the United Kingdom, 1990, by NEL, under the title The Centre Cannot Hold.

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  First Edition

  First Printing: February 2005

  Published in 2005 in conjunction with Tekno Books and Ed Gorman.

  Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

  Printed in the United States on permanent paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stableford, Brian M.

  Asgard's heart / Brian Stableford. p. cm.

  ISBN 1-59414-210-6 (he : alk. paper) Note: "An earlier version of this text, copyrighted © 1982 by Brian Stableford, was published by DAW Books, Inc., under the title Journey to the center"—T.p. verso. 1. Life on other planets—Fiction. 2. Science Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6069.T17A935 2005

  823'.914—dc22 2004063674

  an ebookman scan

  ASGARD'S

  HEART

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

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  8

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  11

  12

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  38

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  I did not set out on life's great journey with the intention of becoming a demigod. Indeed, when I was a boy growing up on Microworld Achilles in the asteroid belt, it had never occurred to me that such a career choice was possible.

  Had I known then what destiny had in mind for me, I might have stayed home and spared myself a great many hazards—an exciting life was not something that I particularly craved. On the other hand, now I know how incomprehensively vast the Great Scheme of Things really is, and how very difficult it is for a single individual to amount to anything within that Scheme, I cannot help but feel a certain sense of privilege in having become what I am.

  I claim no great credit for the fact that out of all the billions of people who happened to be within Asgard at the critical moment of its history, fate selected me for the crucial role; I was desperately unlucky to be saddled with the responsibility, and fantastically fortunate not to make a mess of things. But the impossible had to be done, and circumstance determined that I was the one who had to do it.

  On two occasions in the past I have found it convenient to commit parts of my story to tape, and those earlier slices of autobiography must still exist somewhere in the universe, though I am not sure that it will ever be possible to assemble them in one place to form an eccentric trilogy. I will be brief in summarising the events described therein.

  In the first of those accounts I described how my attempts to scrape a living as a scavenger, recovering technological artefacts from the topmost levels of Asgard, were suddenly complicated when my fellow human Saul Lyndrach discovered a shaft which gave access to more than a hundred levels which had never been breached by any member of the galactic community. Saul was prevented from enjoying the fruits of his discovery because he was murdered by some of the more barbaric members of the community, headed by the loathsome Amara Guur, but they in turn were frustrated by their inability to read French, the language in which Saul had kept his notes.

  It so happens that I am of French-Canadian descent, and it transpired that I was the one man on Asgard who could read Saul's notes, so the gangsters who had stolen them set out to entrap me. As things turned out, however, I was not delivered into the hands of my enemies, but into the hands of Earth's glorious Star Force, who had a very different reason for wanting to locate Saul's dropshaft. What they wanted was to hunt down and kill an android who called himself Myrlin, who had been manufactured for nefarious reasons by the Salamandrans, lately defeated by humankind in a minor interstellar war.

  Suffice it to say that our expedition into the lower depths of Asgard culminated in an orgy of murder and mayhem, carefully observed by the technologically-sophisticated inhabitants of a level deep inside the centre of the macroworld. Confused by the discovery that the universe was much vaster than they had previously imagined, and rather different in kind, these super-scientific machine- intelligences then elected to seal themselves off from further contact with the galactic community.

  In the second chronicle of my adventures I described how turmoil erupted in and around Asgard when the galactic community's base there was overrun by barbarian invaders from the lower levels, and how the leading citizens of the galactic community, the Tetrax, who were led by the fact that these invaders closely resembled human beings, recruited humans to help them in trying to find a solution to their diplomatic difficulties. Naturally, the double-dealing for which the Tetrax are justly notorious precipitated the helpful humans in question—including me—into very deep trouble. This, however, was only a prelude to the development of much greater problems deeper inside Asgard.

  My eventual return to the level inhabited by the machine- intelligences—who called themselves the Isthomi (or, not being very numerous, the Nine)—discovered matters in extreme disorder. Awakened to a new awareness of the mysteries of the universe, the Isthomi had set out to explore the structure of Asgard, trying to make contact with the similar intelligences that they assumed to be running the show. Alas, they suffered considerable injury as a result of the attempt, discovering only the sad truth that if Asgard had ever had great and godlike machine-minds presiding over its vast inner spaces, those minds were either dangerously mad, or embroiled in some kind of conflict whose nature mere humanoids could hardly begin to comprehend.

  The war that was raging through the upper levels unfortunately extended its baleful influence to the world of the incapacitated Isthomi, and the reckless stupidity of the warriors in question resulted in my being forced to interface with the machine-mind while a second contact with intelligences closer to the centre was taking place.

  After sharing in that moment of contact—and hearing, I thought, an enigmatic cry for help—I was not quite the man I had been before. My mind had not merely been disturbed, but altered in some as-yet-unfathomable way. To say that I was resentful about this invasion of my innermost privacy would have been understating the case, but there was no going back. I knew that I would have to play my part in the interesting times that had suddenly returned to the lower depths of Asgard, no matter what that part might be.

  It turned out to be a more vital and more peculiar part than I could ever have imagined.

  2

  It began, I suppose, with the haunting.

  I had become used to "ghosts" of a certain kind. Following their near-destruction, the Isthomi had found grea
t difficulty in arranging any kind of manifestation of themselves that would present to their humanoid guests a reassuring appearance. Their attempts to produce the appearance of a human face with which to address me had resulted only in blurred images etched in white light upon the night-black walls of their realm: images I could not help but think of as ghosts. But those ghosts differed from the one that later came to haunt me in two very vital respects. Firstly, they were in and of the walls of the worldlet; they inhabited the "body" of the Isthomi. Secondly, their appearance, however confusing or disturbing it may have been at first, was not in any way threatening.

  The new ghost seemed very different—and it frightened me very badly.

  I had been having a nightmare—one of many which had troubled me since my forced contact with the denizens of Asgard's software space. I can remember certain fleeting details of it: a falcon fluttering helplessly because its leg was caught in the jaws of a trap; a sphinx padding softly across the sands of a great desert, following a guiding star; dark gods and fearsome titans taking formation for some awesome, awful battle. All of these things seemed to my dreaming consciousness to be direly prophetic of chaos to come, of a destruction and devastation which would consume both the universe in which I existed and the private universe which was within my mind.

  The memory of a dozen other dreams of like kind was still in my mind as I awoke. I remember being quite certain in my mind that I was awake, and that was why I was so very surprised and frightened when I opened my eyes and saw the ghostly entity that was hovering over my bed.

  The room in which I was lodged had no windows, but its internal lighting did not fade to pitch-darkness. The artificial bioluminescence of the ceiling retained a glimmer, reminiscent of starlight, even while I slept. Because of that faint radiance, it was not easy at first to see the apparition, whose own glow was very little brighter. It became obvious neither because of its brightness nor its shape—which was not very well focused—but because it was shimmering slightly, like a shifting haze.

  I realised immediately that what it was trying to be was a face. I do not speak metaphorically when I say that it was trying, for I was in no doubt that there was some kind of intention involved. The face seemed to be about two metres away from me, directly above my head as I lay on my back looking upwards, but I quickly concluded that this was an illusion. It was not a thing hovering in mid-air; it was some kind of virtual image, projected there in appearance only.

  Only for the briefest of moments did I toy with the supposition that the Nine were at work. Their image- control had increased so wonderfully in recent days that they were most unlikely to present such a weak appearance, and in any case, their phantasmal appearances always remained confined by the walls. This one was obviously different. I quickly came to the conclusion that its source was in my own brain.

  In short, I was seeing things.

  I did what everyone does when first confronted with such an awareness: I tried to stop seeing it. I blinked, and shook my head, but neither of those feeble gestures accomplished anything, save that they made the image shimmer and waver a little more. Having exhausted that line of approach to the problem I tried the next obvious course, which was to try to see it more clearly, squinting in the attempt to bring it into better focus.

  Concentrating hard, I realised that it was a female face, but that something was wrong with the upper part of it. The hair was not right. For a moment, its appearance reminded me of the startling halo of blonde hair which was Susarma Lear's crowning glory, but then I realised that the strands were much too thick—that they looked more like the tendrils of a sea-anemone than actual hairs. Then I looked at the eyes, which were like dark pits, and I felt a distinct thrill of fear.

  The darkness of the eyes was surprising. In my painful and enigmatic moment of contact with whatever it was that lurked in the depths of Asgard's software space, the Other had become manifest as a group of four eyes, which burned as though with some consuming fire. Ever since the contact I had occasionally had a curious sensation of being watched, as though I were still somehow open to the scrutiny of those eyes. So why, I wondered, should this new apparition— which surely must be reckoned a legacy of my contact— have only empty holes for eyes. These eyes were the very antithesis of those others, which I had called "eyes of fire." These were eyes of vacuum, eyes of awesome emptiness, eyes which promised those whom they beheld a fate so dire and bleak as to be ultimately fearful.

  There was no doubt in my mind that this was a threatening ghost, and that its projection betrayed the presence in my brain—in my inmost self—of something hostile, menacing, and dangerous. Something lurked inside of me that seemed to wish me harm, and here it was, struggling to get outside of me in order to look back at me, not merely to see what I looked like, but by the act of observation to transform that which was observed.

  The conviction grew in me that this dreadful messenger had come to me with a summons—not the plea for help that I had heard in the moment of my first contact with the gods and devils of Asgard, but a more urgent command. Medusa could not possibly come as a supplicant; she was altogether too stern of countenance for that.

  I had no other name to give it but Medusa, and I felt that its gorgon stare was beginning the engagement of a battle of wills whose intended resolution might easily be my petrifaction.

  I sweated with the effort of fighting those eyes, gritting my teeth together to express the determination I had to defeat this influence. I did not want to be possessed; I was not about to tolerate the presence of squatters in my inmost soul.

  "Damn you," I whispered, thinking to hurt it with sound. "Leave me alone!"

  But the sound didn't hurt it, and I realised that it was becoming clearer, achieving better focus. I could see the eyes forming on the snakes that grew from the scalp instead of hair, and I could see the flickering of forked tongues issuing from seams that had not been there a moment before. I could see the line of the cheekbone quite clearly, and knew that its bone-structure at least was modeled on Susarma Lear's—but it did not have her hair and it did not have her eyes.

  In fact, it didn't have any eyes. Yet.

  I felt a shock of panic as I wondered what would happen if those empty eyes should become full, and suddenly the awfulness of their emptiness was nothing to the awfulness of their potential fullness, for if this was indeed Medusa, the addition of those eyes might achieve the threatened end, and harden my own soft features into grey, unyielding stone.

  "Get out of here!" I whispered. "Begone!"

  But the mere command was ineffective.

  Now the snakes were beginning to writhe, and to hiss angrily at one another as if they resented their perverse anchorage and did not love their neighbours. Several of the mouths were gaping now, to expose the needle-sharp fangs, and the snakes' eyes were glowing like red coals. The womanly lips were parting too, very slowly, to expose the teeth within—teeth that were not at all womanly, but pointed like the teeth of a shark. The jet black tongue which lapped over the shark-like teeth, as if savouring the memory of some previous meal, was forked like the snakes' tongues, but much thicker, and there was something curiously obscene about its writhing.

  And the eyes . . . the eye-sockets were not as dark now, and there was something in those gloomy apertures that looked like the sparkle of distant stars.

  I could not doubt that something terrible was about to happen.

  The face moved then, coming nearer to my own. It was no longer hovering close to the ceiling but descending, with that tongue still spreading poisonous saliva upon the jagged teeth, and those snakes seething with frustrated wrath, and the stars in the eyes were beginning to shine. . . .

  "Light!" I shouted, breaking the deadlock with a rush of panic. "Light the room, for Christ's sake!"

  It is said that the story of the universe began with a cry of "Fiat lux!" although the story in question has nothing to say on the question of whether there were artificial intelligences already incorporated
into the walls which bounded existence, pre-programmed to answer such a call. I had the advantage of knowing that the autonomic subsystems of the Isthomi were always at my disposal, and I knew that my call would be instantly answered.

  It was the right move.

  As bright light flooded the room in response to a bioelectric jolt, the gorgon's face—which was composed of a much frailer radiance—was swamped and obliterated.

  The monster never reached me. Its eyes were never wholly formed. And I was made of anything but stone— there was no mistaking the frailty of my flesh, which crawled as only frail flesh can, when it has had a close encounter with something dreadful.

  "Merde!" I said, with feeling, as I sat up and wiped sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. I groped for my wristwatch, though the time that it showed me would be completely meaningless. There was no cycle of day or night here, and for the moment I couldn't quite remember whether the digital display was set to refer to a human twenty-four-hour cycle, a Tetron metric cycle, or the forty- period cycle devised by the Scarid armies that had brought chaos to the corridors of Asgard. By the time I had worked out how long I had been asleep, the datum no longer seemed relevant. I did not want to go back to sleep.

  I got up and dressed myself, then instructed the kitchen- unit to make me a cup of coffee.

  In accordance with the general improvement of the situation, the kitchen-unit that the Isthomi had put together was now quite clever in serving the needs of my stomach

  and my palate alike. We were well past the stage of supporting life on manna and water, and I hoped that we might soon make progress in synthesizing a reasonable imitation of good red wine. In the meantime, the coffee was a welcome reassurance that the universe was not completely out of joint.

  As I sipped it, I contemplated my next move. As was my habit, the first option I considered was forgetting the whole thing, or at least keeping it a dark secret. There were reasons why that might be a good idea. I was hoping that circumstances would soon permit me to gather about myself a few bold companions in order to begin my odyssey through the inner regions of Asgard in search of the final solution to its mysteries. I could hardly expect to attract such disciples—let alone reconcile them to the acceptance of my leadership—if they suspected that I was insane, possessed, or otherwise not to be trusted. No one but me had felt the urgency of that cry for help that had come from Asgard's depths, and no one but me had the strength of my conviction that I had understood it. It was going to be difficult enough to talk Susarma Lear into following my lead—especially in view of the fact that I needed her old adversary Myrlin every bit as much as I needed her—without letting her know that I had been visited by an apparition of a gorgon's head.