Asgard's Heart Read online

  On the other hand, I had to concede that I had been way out of my intellectual depth for some time. I am no fool, by human standards—and, despite the opinions of the Tetrax, I believe those to be reasonably good standards—but nothing I had ever encountered in my education or my experience equipped me to come to grips with what had happened to me in my moment of contact with whatever it was that was loose in Asgard's software space. If I wanted to fight this thing properly, I needed the insight and advice of

  someone much cleverer than I was, and that meant that I had no option but to confide in the Nine. Sick and shattered they might be, but they were the only ones who stood a real chance of figuring out what the hell it all meant.

  So when I drained my cup, I turned to the nearest blank wall, and said: "I think we ought to have a little chat."

  3

  The grey wall faded away, to be replaced by what looked like another room. Although it was just a surface image, it looked as if it had depth; I had come to think of it as a mirror-world, like the world beyond the looking-glass into which Carroll's Alice stepped. This was partly because it had the colour and sharpness of a reflection, but partly because I knew only too well that the world it represented was not at all like ours, but was instead a mad world where the limits of possibility were very different indeed.

  The figure facing me was seated on an illusory chair which looked rather like an ornate wooden piano-stool; it was backless, but had low side-rails. The Nine presented the image of a single person—a female, clad in a somewhat diaphanous garment recalling (and not by any coincidence) my vague memories of ancient Greek statuary. She seemed to be about twenty years of age, and was very beautiful, although the contours of her face, which were partly borrowed from Susarma Lear, now put me disturbingly in mind of the apparition that had recently confronted me.

  I coughed, in an ineffectual attempt to hide the embarrassment that her appearance caused me. "I don't want to appear rude," I said, "but could you possibly put some less provocative clothes on?"

  The image changed, without a ripple or a flicker, and she was now clad in a severely-cut Star Force uniform; but her hair was black, not blonde, and she seemed less like

  Susarma Lear than she had before.

  "Thanks," I said.

  "Something is wrong?" she observed.

  "Maybe," I said, unenthusiastically wondering whether this was, after all, the best thing to do. Now the room was bright and I was face to face with what looked like another human being, my experience began to seem much more like a bad dream, and an alarmist reaction seemed absurdly out of place. "I don't suppose you were monitoring this room a moment ago?" I asked.

  "Of course not. Since you expressed to us your anxieties about privacy, we reserve our attention, and take our place only in response to your summons."

  I knew that. "I saw something," I said. "I don't think it was real, though. Not solid. Perhaps it was just a dream."

  Her face reflected her interest and concern. It was odd that her mimicry of human mannerisms went so far, but it was something the Isthomi had very carefully crafted into the programme that produced her. The Nine had taken great care in the rebuilding of their appearances, and took quite a pride in their simulation of expression and nonverbal patterns of signification.

  "Please describe it as fully and accurately as you can," she said.

  I did my best, stumbling over a couple of details, to give her a complete account of the hallucination. When I had finished, she was radiating puzzlement like an over-enthusiastic method actor.

  "Can the silent movie bit," I told her with slight asperity. "We both know it was some kind of residue from that interface when I made contact with whatever it was that nearly took you apart. What I want to know is, was it an attack of some kind? Am I playing host to some sort of

  poisoned programming or what?"

  "Please tell us everything that you know about this person called Medusa," she said calmly.

  "I can't remember very much about her at all," I replied. "She was a character in Greek mythology who turned everyone who looked at her to stone. A hero called Perseus cut off her head while watching her reflection in a highly polished shield. That's it."

  "Are you sure?" she countered.

  The inquiry left me feeling rather helpless. I knew that she was prompting me—trying to make me remember something else. She was an alien group-mind who lived halfway to the core of an artificial macroworld orbiting a star a thousand light-years from Earth, and yet she knew more about the mythology of the ancient Greeks than I did. What made it even more bizarre was that her primary source of information about matters human was an android on Salamandra, whose own second-hand information had been pumped into him by hostile aliens while he was growing at an unnatural pace from embryo to giant in some kind of nutrient bath.

  "As sure as I can be," I replied, defensively stubborn. "No doubt there's more locked up in the vaults of my subconscious, but I only have the primitive lever of memory to get me in there. I haven't got your kind of access to stored data."

  "Please don't be disturbed," she said softly. "There is a mystery here, but I believe that we can solve it."

  She had some of Susarma Lear's features, but she didn't have Susarma Lear's voice—which, as even the colonel's many admirers would have admitted, did tend to the strident. This voice was much more like Jacinthe Siani's. There was no point in complaining—Susarma Lear and Jacinthe

  Siani were the only two humanoid females the Nine could use as models. Jacinthe, who still had the trust of the Scarida on account of being their most loyal galactic collaborator, had been brought down by a team of their negotiators shortly after the end of the war.

  "It's all very well to tell me not to be disturbed," I told her, "but I'm not sure that I have much control over that any more. This stupid hallucination was a disturbance, and though I'm pretty confident that I'm not going mad of my own accord, I can't help worrying about the possibility of having picked up a little hostile software."

  "Exactly what do you mean by 'hostile software'?" she asked, in a painstaking fashion.

  I sighed. "As with everything else," I said, testily, "I'm sure you know far more about it than I do. I'm no electronics expert. Ever since the earliest days of infotech on our world we've had things called 'information viruses' or 'tapeworms.' They're programmes that can be hidden on a disc or a bubble, which load into your system along with other software. Once they're established in your equipment they begin intruding bits of random noise into other programmes, and if left to themselves they can turn all your inbuilt software to junk. All our semi-intelligent systems have protective devices—immunizers—which are supposed to keep them out, but the tapeworms just get cleverer and cleverer. They're used mainly by saboteurs. No doubt you and any other machine-intelligences lurking in the depths of Asgard are far too clever to be infected by the kind of tapeworms we produce—but I dare say you have troubles of your own. What I'm asking you is: did I pick up some kind of tapeworm when I was contacted? Is there something in my brain that's intended to destroy my mind?"

  She seemed thoughtful, though she'd now corrected the tendency to overact. "What you're afraid of," she said, "is that when you were forced into the interface with my own software space, where you encountered the alien presence which injured me, your own brain was somehow forced to make a biocopy of an alien programme. You now suspect that the biocopy has become fully established, and is beginning to be active. You think that it might be analogous to one of these 'tapeworms,' and that its purpose may be to disrupt your own intrinsic programming—including that part which constitutes your identity."

  "That's about the size of it," I admitted. "I can't shake the feeling that something got into me during that contact, and though I don't know what the hell it is, I don't like it being there. And I certainly don't like the idea of it becoming active. You may be used to the idea of having nine identities in one, but I'm not. I'm a solitary kind of person, and I like to have vacan
t possession of my own brain. So tell me— have I picked up some hostile software?"

  "I cannot be sure," she said, as I'd been fairly certain that she would. "To tell you the truth, despite the success of my efforts at self-repair, I am not altogether certain whether or not I might have acquired some new hidden programming of my own. I still have no very clear idea of what kind of entity it was that I contacted in the deeper part of Asgard, nor what kind of entity it was which subsequently made the second contact within my own systems. Since I began experimenting with the production of the scions— whose minds are, of course, biocopies of parts of my own collective being—I have pushed back my own conceptual horizons quite considerably. I can easily believe that the entity we contacted was capable of making a biocopy of part of itself within your brain, even though it was operating across a primitive neuronal bridge. That does appear to be the most likely hypothesis, which could explain your recent experience. But it is by no means easy to decide whether the entity really had any hostile intent, despite the considerable damage that I sustained as a result of the contact. You have cast considerable doubt on that by your interpretation of the second contact as a cry for help."

  "I don't want to be haunted," I said, flatly. "Not by monsters whose raison d'etre is turning people to stone. Nothing would please me more than to decide that any software I've picked up is friendly, and that it won't drive me mad—but Medusa is hardly a friendly image, is it?"

  "It is not plausible that the entity had any independent knowledge of human mythology," she pointed out. "What you saw just now was mainly your own creation. You were responding to a stimulus, in much the same way that you supplied your own imagery to cope with the contact that you made at the interface. That is why you must ask yourself very carefully what the image of Medusa might mean; it is a symbol which we must decode."

  "What Medusa means," I insisted, "is turning people to stone."

  "Did you take any special interest in Greek mythology in your youth?" she asked patiently.

  I hesitated, then shrugged. "More than some, I guess. Local connections encouraged it. I was born in the asteroid belt, on a microworld. The microworld moved about a bit, but it stayed within a mass-rich region of space at one of the Lagrangian points forming an equilateral triangle with the sun and the solar system's biggest gas giant, Jupiter. For reasons of historical eccentricity, the asteroids near the Lagrangian points are known as Trojan asteroids, and they're named after the heroes who fought in the Trojan War. One group is called the Trojan group, even though it has one asteroid named after the Greek hero Patroclus; the other is called the Greek group, even though it contains one named after the Trojan Hector. Hector was one of two asteroids in our group that had been hollowed to create a microworld; the other—the one where I was born—was Achilles. It was inevitable that a certain friendly rivalry should grow up between the two; at the utilitarian level we were competing for the same resources, but the subtler business of trying to forge some kind of cultural identity for our worlds attached us psychologically and emotionally to the names of our worlds. Achilles and Hector fought a great duel at the end of the Iliad, you see—and Achilles won. The Homeric epics were elementary reading for every child on the microworld, and the rest of Greek mythology was a logical extension. The first humans who came out here obviously had a different cultural background, or they'd have translated the name which the Tetrax gave this macroworld as Olympus, not as Asgard."

  "In that case," she said, with a hint of irritating smugness, "you did read more about Medusa than you have recalled."

  "I know that she never showed up at Troy, and that Odysseus never bumped into her on his travels. Perseus was in a different story. So tell me—what did I forget?"

  She didn't want to tell me. She wanted me to remember for myself. After all, understanding my strange experience was a matter of coming to terms with my subconscious.

  "Why did Perseus want the gorgon's head?" she asked.

  I struggled hard to remember. Microworld Achilles was a long way away, and my years there now seemed to be a very remote region of the foreign country that was my past.

  "He'd placed himself under some obligation to a king, and was forced to go after it," I said, eventually. "Athene

  helped him to trick a couple of weird sisters who had only one eye between them, so that they'd tell him where to get what he needed—winged shoes and a cap to make himself invisible. When he got back with the head he found that the king had done the dirty on him somehow . . . tried to rape his mother, I think . . . and. ..."

  Enlightenment struck as I managed to follow the frail thread of long-buried memories to the punch line. Perseus had used the head to turn the bad guy and all his court to stone.

  "You don't think it was aimed at me, do you?" I said, softly. "It's hostile software, all right—but you think it may be some kind of weapon!"

  "There is no way to be sure," she replied. "But it is a possibility, is it not?"

  I looked at her, pensively. Though her hair was dark, her eyes were grey and pale. They weren't Susarma Lear's eyes and they weren't Jacinthe Siani's either. In fact, they were more like mine. It was impossible to think of her, sitting there, as a conglomerate of nine individuals, and it didn't seem appropriate to think of her as bearing the name of only one of the nine Muses after whom Myrlin had impishly named her scions. As she stared back at me, with all the deep concern of a master psychoanalyst, I remembered something else from my reading of long ago.

  The mother of the nine Muses had been Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne meant "memory."

  Another thought which flitted quickly across my mind was that although the Muses were the inspiration behind the various arts, the supreme goddess of the arts was Athene, who had aided Perseus.

  I wondered how I should name the phantasm which faced me now. Should I call her Mnemosyne, or Athene?

  But Mnemosyne, I supposed, was a mere abstraction rather than a person, and for all the arbitrariness of her appearance, what I was facing now was a real and powerful being—one who could readily aspire to be reckoned one of the "gods" to which Asgard was supposedly home.

  "I have an uncomfortable feeling," I said, "that you might be inclined to find rather more meaning in my little adventure than I want to look for."

  "On the contrary," she replied sweetly. "You have already declared your intention of penetrating to the very lowest levels of the macroworld. You are already determined to undertake a journey to the mysterious Centre, and have asked me to try to discover a route that would take you there. It may be that this is a search which will take both of us into unexpected realms ... let us not discount the possibility that the way to the Centre is already engraved in the hidden recesses of your own mind. Whatever cried to you for help may also have given you the means to supply that help."

  I swallowed a lump which had somehow appeared in my throat. "I may be an Achillean by birth," I said, "but I'm not exactly cut from the same cloth as Perseus. His father, as I recall, was Zeus."

  "I cannot pretend to have a complete understanding of fleshly beings," she told me, "despite what I have learned from my scions. But I do not think that the paternity of your flesh is of any significance here. It is the author of the software within your brain that concerns us now. The mind which you brought here carries a legacy of knowledge and craft which must be deemed the property of your entire race . . . and what has now been added to it we can only guess."

  I wasn't ready for that. I shook my head, and turned away with a dismissive gesture.

  "Much more of that," I remarked, and not in jest, "and you'll be scaring me more than the gorgon's head did. Hostile software that wants to drive me mad is something I could maybe be cured of—you're talking about something a hell of a lot more ominous than a tapeworm."

  "It is conjecture only," she reassured me. "We must know more before we plan to act, though time is of the essence. We must find out whether anyone else has had such an experience."

  Although I was the only o
ne who'd consciously made contact during that dark hour when the Isthomi had come close to destruction, I wasn't the only one who's interfaced. Myrlin had been hooked up too—and so had 994-Tulyar. I wondered what kind of imagery could be mined from the mythological symbol-system of a Tetron mind.

  "Do you want me to ask?" I said unenthusiastically.

  "The inquiry would come better from myself," she assured me. "It may be necessary to be diplomatic, in the case of the Tetron."

  I readily forgave her the impolite implication that diplomacy was not my strong suit. "In that case," I said, "perhaps I should try to get a bit more sleep."

  "If you dream," she said, before she faded out, "be sure to pay attention as carefully as you can."

  It wasn't the most soothing instruction I'd ever taken to bed with me, but as things turned out, I couldn't obey it anyhow. Whatever dreams disturbed my mind failed, for once, to penetrate the blissful wall of my unconsciousness.

  4

  I was awakened from my peaceful slumbers by the delicate trilling of the telephone apparatus that the Isthomi had installed in my quarters. I always hung the mouthpiece above the bed before retiring, so that I could respond to interruptions with the minimum of effort. I didn't even bother to open my eyes—I just fished the thing from its perch, thumbed the ACCEPT CALL button, and mumbled an incoherent semblance of a greeting into the mike.