Asgard's Conquerors (42 page)

The grey
walls began to mist over. The ghosts were back. Susarma Lear and Finn looked
uneasy as the silvery shapes began to coalesce, but I was pleased to see them.
The Nine were back in control—in partial control, at least—of their body.
Sailors on strange seas of fate, now safely back in port. I hoped that they
were safe, though it seemed that they hadn't regained their former power and
composure.

"R-r-rouss-ss-sseau,"
said the whispering voice, no clearer than before, "w-w-e kn-n-n-now-w-w
y-o-o-ou n-n-
n-now-w-w.
..."

Safe
they were, it seemed, though by no means entirely recovered from their ordeal.

As
before, the threads of light tried to settle into the forms of faces—nine
faces, overlapping and drifting through one another, filling the room with
their immensity.

They no
longer had the face of Susarma Lear, though.

Now they
had my face.

I heard
the colonel's sharp intake of breath, and saw John Finn silently appealing for
help to some non-existent agent of mercy. I smiled. It was an impressive
effect, and I felt curiously proud. But then I thought about what they'd said.
They knew me, now. They'd been inside me, and in some curious sense they were
still inside me. A shiver ran down my spine, and I almost expected to hear
alien voices inside my
head ...
to
discover my subvocalised thoughts turning into a weird dialogue, or worse—a
Babel of confused conversations. But that wasn't the way it was. It wasn't
that kind of "being in me." I was still myself, and as far as I could
tell, I was still the self I always had been. Whatever extras I had acquired
weren't yet manifesting themselves as other ghosts in my machine. I didn't
doubt, though, that they would manifest themselves, eventually.

Like
Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, I had experienced revelation. I had
been converted. The spirit was in me, and the word was in me. And the word was.
. . .

My
senses reeled, and the colonel had to catch me again, to steady me. She was
looking at me with genuine concern—almost as if she liked me. Not that I was
about to believe that. I'd already taken in my ration of six impossibilities
before breakfast, and now I was the hardest- headed sceptic of them all.

"What
about the other Scarids?" I asked, freeing myself from her grip for a
second time. "Can you disarm them

now?" I was
addressing the Nine, though Susarma Lear had opened her mouth to answer before
they interrupted her.

"Un-n-nder
c-c-control-l-l," they assured me.

I no
longer felt impatient with the stuttering voice. I knew now how difficult a
business communication could be.

"How
about the battle for Skychain City?"

That,
they assured me (I shall not attempt to reproduce the texture of their words,
lest the typographical eccentricities become irritating) would take a little
longer. It was a matter that was out of their hands, alas.

I
stretched my limbs. They all felt as if they were in very good condition, and
there was no reason to doubt that they were, though I couldn't help being
surprised to find them so.

"Okay?"
said Susarma Lear. "Can we get out of here?"

"We'll
have to wait for the scions," I told her. Then I said, almost
absent-mindedly: "Excuse me for a moment."

She
looked surprised, but stood back, as if to let me go to the door. I turned the
other way, and with a smooth efficiency that was surprising, given the weak
gravity, I kicked John Finn in the groin. When he bounced off the wall behind
him I lashed him across the face with the flat of my hand. I felt his nose
break, but I didn't wince. I wasn't in a squeamish mood. When he was down on
the ground I booted him twice more, as hard as I could.

Then I
knelt down beside him.

"That,"
I hissed in a suitably melodramatic whisper, "was just for the purposes of
demonstration. I only want you to know that if you ever try to screw me again,
I'll hurt you so badly you'll be in pain for the rest of your fucking life. And
that could be a very long time."

I stood
up again, and met Susarma Lear's eyes. She was looking at me almost in horror—not
at what I'd done, but at the fact that it was me who had done it. That was odd,
in a way, because I would have thought that she'd be pleased to see me acting
like a hero of the Star Force for once in my life. Sometimes, you just can't
figure out how to please someone.

"Jesus,
Rousseau!" she said.

I didn't
feel anything. I didn't feel anything at all.

"I'm
not quite myself at the moment," I told her. It wasn't true. I was
entirely myself. I just felt that I had a licence to act out of character for
once.

Anyway,
I was a hero. Not just a metaphorical hero, the way she was, but a real one. I
had been summoned by the gods—or by the only kind of something that could pass
for a god, in our thoroughly secularized universe. Destiny had put its mark
upon my forehead, and beckoned to me with its bony finger. I didn't have the
slightest doubt about that—not any more.

"Well,"
I said, "I guess we have time on our hands, now. We've surely had our
ration of unpleasant surprises."

Looking
down at John Finn, bleeding and gasping, I reflected coldly that he had
probably had one too many—but no more, of course, than he deserved. The same
was true of the Scarid officer, who had carried far beyond his ordinary
conceptual horizons the dangerous and preposterous assumption that you can get
what you want by threatening people with guns. There comes a time when it isn't
sufficient to be only a soldier. I hoped fervently that his superiors might
learn that lesson without it having to be rammed home quite so forcefully.

As
things turned out, they did manage to learn it. They discovered the one and
only possible defence against technologically superior armed opposition.

They
surrendered.

And then
they sat down with both the Tetrax and the Nine, in order to try to overcome
all the barriers that stood in the way of sensible communication, and to
discover what there might be that they could discuss in a reasonable manner.

Which is
what passes for a happy ending in situations like the one in which we all found
ourselves.

32

Later, of course,
the doubts began to creep back. Those magic moments of total conviction never
do last. As I've observed before, the true gold of certainty is not to be
found, and you have to settle for what there is.

What
there is, alas, is the knowledge that one is always fallible. You never really
know exactly where you're up to, let alone where it is that you need to go
next.

For the
first time since I'd put the final full stop to the first volume of my memoirs,
things began to run smoothly for a while. The Scarid High Command saw sense;
the Nine pulled 994-Tulyar and Myrlin out of the jaws of death; and a kind of
balance was restored to the universe as I was privileged to experience it.

It
didn't take much effort to persuade my commanding officer that our best
interests lay in staying where we were. There was a great deal to be learned
from the Nine that might prove to be of immense value to Mother Earth and
humankind. She was quick enough to see that it might be a kind of intellectual
treason to leave the task of collaboration with the Isthomi entirely to the
Tetrax. Indeed, she was persuaded that the need to win what advantage we could
from our fortuitous placement easily outweighed such minor considerations as
her annoyance in discovering that her memory was a liar and that Myrlin was
alive and well.

I
figured that in time she might even learn to like him, once she was reconciled
to the idea that she shouldn't try to kill him all over again.

I had my
sacrifices to make, too. Even John Finn had to be put to work, and I knew full
well that once he had absorbed a little of the new knowledge that was here to
be gleaned, he would become utterly insufferable in his arrogance.

Inevitably,
I began to regret having broken his nose. The memory of it still gave me a
certain satisfaction, as well as a sense of having done my bit to preserve the
moral balance of the universe, but I knew that I'd have to watch my back for as
long as he was around, lest a stray knife should somehow become embedded
between my shoulder-blades.

In spite
of such minor difficulties, I soon began to enjoy myself. I was once again in
my element, scavenging in strange places for unfamiliar things. The fact that
there were other people around ceased to matter much—in all essentials I was
alone with my insatiable curiosity, the only beloved mistress of my heart.

Which is
not to say, of course, that I was completely uninterested in the big political
picture that was a-building around us. I was suitably enthused by the fact that
for the first time ever, Asgard and the universe had agreed to communicate with
one another. It filled me with optimism to know that the Scarida and the
galactic community each decided that they had a lot to learn, and that they all
stood to gain from an exchange of opportunities. The Tetrax (speaking on behalf
of the entire galactic community) promised to teach the Scarida the joys of
galactic technology; the Scarida promised to allow the Tetrax access to all
the levels of Asgard which they controlled. The Nine, though facing an uphill
task in the matter of self-repair, agreed not to seal themselves off from
either side, and determined that they would hold the triple detente together.
All very fine, in my view.

All
these developments, as you will notice, solved the general problems within
which context this chapter of my personal history started. Alas, they did not
begin to touch the more personal problems which had arisen along the way. Nor,
for what it is worth, did they provide any answers to the old, old problems
which had been the Great Mysteries even before I got into the game.

Having
emerged intact from my hallucinatory adventure in contact with alien minds, I
had every reason to be pleased with myself, and in a way I was. For a while I
was filled with zestful energy and a huge sense of pride, because I was
convinced that I had achieved a great thing simply by surviving my encounter,
and by virtue of what I thought that the contact implied.

Asgard
itself had called out to me, to be its saviour.

But when
I came down from my adrenalin high, I could hardly help but worry about what
that implied, in terms of what I was now required to do about it.

That was
when the doubts really began to gnaw away at me.

For one
thing, I became increasingly less sure that it implied anything at all. How
did I know, after all, that I had actually and authentically experienced
anything meaningful? How could I be sure that my dream was not simply a dream—and
my sense of importance but a commonplace delusion of grandeur?