I consoled myself with the thought that Susarma Lear must feel ten times worse about the absence of a meaningful target at which she could blast away.
The ground on which we found ourselves was dead white and very flat, which seemed to me unnatural until I realised that it was actually the chitinous epidermis of some vast thermosynthetic organism—a living carpet which probably extended throughout the entire worldlet, having sustained itself until the switch-off by drawing off energy from the real “floor.” No doubt the chitinous tegument was to protect it from herbivores, which—equally undoubtedly— would have evolved ways of drilling through it in order to sustain themselves, enabling them in their turn to supply the tentacled predators with their natural sustenance. It was the classic ecological pyramid that defines the structure of life-systems everywhere. It would have been pleasant to chat to 673-Nisreen about the aesthetics of it all, but we were too busy.
Now that we could search more carefully, we found four bodies. Two were Scarid soldiers; two were Tetrax. 994-Tulyar wasn’t among them, and neither was John Finn, but those two were all that was left of the eight who had set out, and we now outnumbered them five to two—six to two if we counted the brain-in-a-box called Clio, which was strapped to Urania’s shoulders like a knapsack. I wondered if Finn had yet figured out that Tulyar wasn’t Tulyar and that he was being played for a sucker. I thought not. Despite his cleverness with electronic gadgets, John Finn was essentially a cretin.
The ground was far too hard to show obvious tracks, but the heels of the suits Finn and Tulyar were wearing had been rigged to leave a trace for us, and it didn’t take long to confirm that there was indeed a trail to be followed.
It took us about a quarter of an hour to organise the bits that we’d crammed into the elevator with us, but eventually we had them assembled into five two-wheeled vehicles with power-cells in the space between our knees and luggage compartments behind the saddle. I’d ridden similar vehicles in the suburban streets of Skychain City, where there were no moving pavements, but the fact that the gravity was so much less down here—and for the first time it seemed noticeably less than it had been in the Nine’s home level— made me a little anxious about keeping my balance.
Just as we were about to set off, our lights picked out three more of the slug-things, gliding with surprising swiftness over the great white carpet, but while Susarma Lear was eagerly pulling her crash-gun out of its holster our little flying friends were zooming in for the sting, and they still had poison to spare. The slugs were thrown into desperate paroxysms, and were rendered helpless within a matter of seconds.
“You’ll get your chance yet,” I consoled her, hoping that she wouldn’t. Then I looked at Urania, who had charge— via Clio—of the olfactory sensor that could pick up the trail we had to follow. She led the way once again into the desolate darkness. Susarma Lear and I followed in single file, with 673-Nisreen behind me, and Myrlin bringing up the rear.
It didn’t take me long to get saddle-sore, and to begin hoping that the next drop we would face would be the last.
26
When I told him he was dead, and he said that I was too, I half-expected a needier to materialise somewhere in the branches of the monstrous tree. I winced in anticipation of little slivers of metal tearing me apart. The branches that were his fingers rustled ominously, but nothing happened. The relief was momentary—it dawned on me that if he didn’t mean that he intended to kill me, then he must mean something else.
“I don’t feel very dead,” I told him defiantly. It wasn’t true—I did remember the sensation of drowning, which had seemed horribly like dying at the time, and I was uncomfortably aware of the evil condition of my flesh.
“Nevertheless,” he told me, in his barbarous parole, “your attempt to reach the core of Asgard’s software space is over. You have been immobilised. Your body is already beginning to disintegrate. Do not be misled by the fact that you retain consciousness—this is Hell, Mr. Rousseau, and you are with the condemned.”
I looked again at my hands, to examine my peeling skin more closely. There was little feeling in the fingers, and the strips of skin which were coming away were melting into liquid at the edges. The discolouration suggested that gangrene was beginning to spread in the deeper tissues. It was getting worse as I watched, and I became suddenly anxious about the power of suggestion. Might this be no more than one more attack, more subtle in kind? I didn’t have to believe him, and I made up my mind that I wouldn’t.
I thought about what he’d said, and wondered why it appeared to be Amara Guur who was speaking. The fact that he was appearing in that form was something to do with his being my idea of the archetypal enemy, but had the entity that confronted me chosen that form, or had I imposed the identity upon it?
“You’re just a figment of my imagination,” I told him.
“My outward form is a figment of your imagination,” he agreed. “It is the way you have translated my presence into a visual image. Your consciousness is too limited to apprehend me in any other way. All of this is a figment of your imagination, Mr. Rousseau. It is a dream, which you now must dream alone. Everything you see is transfigured by your mind into a set of visual symbols, but it is happening. Dream or reality, you are doomed.”
I heard a keening sound, and looked up to see a company of predatory birds wheeling in the sky. I looked up at the tangled foliage, at the poisonous fruits lurking amid the branches. I thought about being on an island in the middle of an infinite sea: marooned. But if I was already doomed— trapped and condemned to Hell—why would he be bothering to tell me?
I knew then that this was just a new phase of the contest. The gods had preserved me from the cruel sea, and the giants had found a way to talk to me, but the battle of which I was a part was still raging all around me, as yet unsettled.
“It’s all just a posthumous fantasy,” said Amara Guur. He was trying too hard to make the point, and I was determined to resist the power of the lie. “You’re on your way to Hell,” he went on, “but don’t worry about the route. You don’t have to go anywhere. It will all come to you.”
Deciding not to believe him didn’t help me to figure out what to do next. Should I run? Or should I try to cut my way through the barrier, to penetrate the interior of this alien shore? Or was there an opportunity to learn something here, which might yet be turned to my advantage?
It was possible, I thought, that the enemy knew as little about me as I knew about them. Perhaps they were trying to find out more about me, and perhaps they would reveal something of themselves by so doing.
“What are you?” I asked, with an edge in my voice. I deliberately didn’t say “who.”
“I’m the thing you’re most afraid of,” he replied. “I’m Nemesis. I’m the one who brought you to the edge of death before, and would have destroyed you, save for the fact that the Nine gave me a gun that didn’t work. This time, I’ve been shaped by a very different armourer, and there can be no escape. No android; no star-captain; no magic-workers. I’m Amara Guur.”
“You’re a part of whatever invaded the macroworld. You’re the infection that blighted its systems—a software virus set to injure and destroy its programmes. You’re part of the thing which is trying to destroy Asgard.”
The mouth, shaped in the bark of the tree, had teeth within it—the white, sharp teeth of a predator. The tree smiled.
“I’m that too,” he said, still looking more like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile than a human being. “This is the twilight of the gods, and the halls of Valhalla are cold. The clarion has sounded at Bifrost bridge and the gods ride to their destruction. Thor has met the Midgard serpent and has gone to his fated death. Fenrir has broken his bonds and shakes the world-ash Yggdrasil with his howling. The fire-giants are free, and their flames will consume the vault of heaven. Odin is dead. Heimdall and Loki will destroy one another. All the great gods are dead, and the many mankinds which live in Asgard are given to the darkness, waiting for the end.”