Asgard's Secret (36 page)

The lights in the
dome came on again then, and they too had changed. The beams shining through
the portholes were no longer yellow but pink. Higher up on the dome, some shone
vivid red, but only intermittently.

"Do they use
red flashing lights as warning signals on Salamandra?" I asked the
android. "They do in the home system, and in Skychain City. It's an
inbuilt humanoid bias."

"I don't
know," he replied, absent-mindedly. He touched my arm and pointed, to draw
my attention to the fact that the door was opening.

The hinge was at
the top, and it swung outwards. The light within was dazzling, and I blinked
furiously, desperate to adjust my eyes. I wanted to see whoever—or whatever—
might come out.

I heard Myrlin cry
out in pained surprise, and then felt the most horrid sensation imaginable—as
if corrosive acid were being poured into my brain.

I screamed, exactly
as the star-captain and her troopers had screamed when the amoeba flowed over
them.

Perhaps Myrlin
screamed too, but I couldn't hear him. My inner being was being wrenched apart
and shredded. I was trying with all my might to fall unconscious—and I suppose
that I must have managed to do that, eventually.

31

Crazy as it may seem, I woke up feeling
good.

I had long regarded
it as an inevitable aspect of the human condition that no one, whatever the
circumstances,
ever
wakes up feeling good, but this was an exceptional awakening in more ways than
one. I felt fresh, light-headed, and euphoric.

The good feeling
lasted as long as it took me to realise that I had no idea where I was. That
was followed by the realisation that wherever I was, I had to be in dire
trouble. I was no longer wearing a cold-suit; all I had on were the T-shirt and
underpants that I usually wear under a cold- suit. I opened my eyes, blinking
against the bright light, and had to shade them carefully until they adjusted.

When I tried to get
to my feet, I realised that I had been lying on my side on hard ground. I wasn't
stiff or uncomfortable, so I concluded that I hadn't been lying there long.
The movement that brought me upright was attended by a peculiar feeling of
nostalgia
, which I didn't understand at all for a few seconds,
until it dawned on me that I felt very light. I had the kind of weight I'd
carried around in my long- lost youth, when I lived on a microworld in the
asteroid belt. All the years in which I'd been dragged down by the surface-
gravity of Asgard seemed to have melted away, restoring an earlier state of
being.

It was an illusion,
of course; there was no way I could be back in the asteroid belt. But if I was
still on—or rather
in—
Asgard, then I had to be a
long
way down. Maybe
not in the centre, whose pull seemed still to be exerting itself upon my bare
feet, but a lot nearer to the centre than that derelict ecosystem from which
I'd been snatched.

I took my hand away
from my eyes, then, ready to see whatever there was to be seen. And what there
was to be seen threw all my calculations out of order again, because there was
something very, very strange. It made me gasp in amazement.

The major surprise
wasn't the grassy plain, which seemed to stretch away from me in all
directions, lush and green; or the tall palm-like trees, which grew in clumps;
or the bright birds, which fluttered in their foliage, although I had never
seen their like in all my life.

What shocked me
most was the brilliant blue sky. In that sky was a bright, golden sun which
filled the infinite blue vault with vivid light.

I had never seen a
pale blue sky or a golden sun. I had never been on Earth, or any other world
like Earth. The sky on Asgard was very different in hue, thanks to the thinness
of its atmosphere, and it was a sky I had only seen through some kind of
window-glass. I had never stood naked beneath a limitless sky, and the
illusion that I was there now was something that filled me with inexpressible
panic.

Illusion?

Even as I crouched
down again, as if trying to hide from that sky, I was telling myself that it
had to be an illusion. After all, where could I really be which had a sky like
that? I was inside Asgard, where the "sky" could be no more than
twenty or thirty metres over my head, and made of solid substance . . . where
there could be no glaring yellow sun, but only rank upon rank of electric
lights, or a pale varnish of bioluminescent lichen. I could not possibly be
outside, because I was inside.

Or was I?

In the centre, I had
always believed, must live the miracle-workers, the men like gods, the
super-scientists. Was it possible that Asgard was neither a home, nor an Ark,
nor a fortress, but a kind of terminal in some extraordinary kind of
transportation system? Had I somehow been teleported out of Asgard, to some
unimaginably distant world?

At that moment, it
came home to me that literally
anything
might be
possible—that I must not prejudge anything at all. I was as innocent as Adam in
Eden, from whom all the secrets of Creation had been hidden, and who stupidly
ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, instead of that
other
tree, which might have given him a wisdom infinitely to be preferred.

Tentatively, I moved
my naked foot over the ground on which I was crouching, and knew at once that
visual appearance and tactile reality were at odds. My eyes told me that I was
in a dusty clearing mottled with tufts of grass but my toes told me that was a
lie. There was no dust and no grass, just a hard, neutral surface. It was
neither warm nor cold to the touch, but it was slick and smooth—exactly like
that mysterious ultra-hard superplastic from which Asgard's walls were made.

"Illusion, then,"
I murmured to myself.
Illusion, after all.

I looked up then as
I heard a rustle in the grass—the grass which probably wasn't there.

Not ten metres away
from me, watching me with a baleful eye, was a great tawny-maned predator with
teeth like daggers. I had no difficulty in recognising it, though I had only
ever seen its like in photographs and videos. It was a big male lion.

It came forward a
little further, and I saw that it was lazily swishing its tail. It was staring
me straight in the eye, and it took very little imagination to figure out what
kind of calculations its predatory brain was making.

I quickly told
myself that it was only an illusion, but that was impossible to believe while
the beast was so obviously looking at me, its gaze so careful and so
malevolent. There was no doubt in my mind that it could see me, and that its
intention was to feast on my flesh. My mind, trapped by the horror of it, could
not spare the time for arguments about whether the lion was really there; I was
utterly hung up on the question of whether I should remain frozen in immobility,
or run like hell.

I would have looked
around, hoping to find a weapon of some sort, but I couldn't tear my eyes away
from that thick-maned head and the black tongue which lolled out between the
huge teeth. It took another step forward, languidly, and then tensed, ready for
a quick sprint and a mighty leap.

I claim no credit
for what I did then, because it was not the result of conscious decision.
Rather, it was a deep- seated reflex which had been locked up in my
subconscious, unused and unsuspected, ever since some arcane process of preparation
had put it there.

I stood bolt
upright, threw my arms wide, and screamed in rage and defiance at the beast.

Unfortunately,
whatever had planted that instinct in my brain had not reckoned with this
particular lion. It didn't turn tail and run. Instead, it did what it had
always intended to do.

It took three
bounding strides and leapt at my head, the claws standing out from its raking
forepaws and the great jaws gaping wide, ready to seize me with those awful
teeth.

Then my conscious
mind wrenched control of my body back from my stupid subconscious, and told it
to run like hell.

But the lion
vanished in mid-air, even as I brought my arms across in a futile effort to
make a defensive screen, before I could pivot on my heel and flee. The creature
jumped clean out of existence, into whatever limbo of oblivion illusions must
go when they die.

Helplessly, I staggered
backwards, carried by the impetus of my intention to run, though there was no
longer any need. I cannoned into an invisible wall a couple of metres away from
the spot where I'd woken up. I hit it with my shoulder, and gave my arm a
painful wrench.

My eyes told me
that there was no wall there—not even a wall of glass. My eyes said that there
was a grassy plain stretching away to the horizon. The only concession they
would make to my aching shoulder was to suggest that there was some invisible
wall of force preventing me from walking across the grassland.

I knew that my eyes
were liars. I was inside Asgard, probably in some kind of chamber, and there
was no plain, no sky, no sun and no lion. It was all a picture projected on the
walls.

It took five
minutes for me to ascertain that the room was rectangular, about four metres by
three, and that there was not the slightest sign of any seam or doorway.

"Bastards!"
I shouted, fairly certain that I could be seen and overheard by someone, or
something—why else the illusion; and why else the lion?

I was being tested,
or taunted. Someone, or something, was interested in me.

There didn't seem
to be any point in further vulgar abuse, and I was damned if I was going to
start up a one-sided inquisition. There were things I wanted to find out, and
there were a few sensible investigations that I could make no matter what kind
of cage I was in.

I checked the
places where my life-support system had been hooked into my body. The places
where the drip- feeders had gone into my veins were just perceptible to the
touch, but had healed completely. That implied that I had been out of my suit
for some time—several days, if the evidence could be taken at face value. But
I didn't feel hungry or weak. In fact, I felt fighting fit.

I ran my fingers
over all the parts of my body I could reach. I found a couple of old scars, a
couple of big moles which had always been there—and a few new anomalies. The
skin at the back of my neck felt as if it was pockmarked, and I had an
unusually itchy scalp. But I was clean-shaven and my hair was no longer than it
had been when I put the cold-suit on. I hadn't taken anything to inhibit
hair-growth, because a cold-suit is loose-fitting, so I must have had more than
three days' growth of beard when the mindscrambler hit me.

It was obvious that
the interval between scrambling and unscrambling had been a long one. The
peace-officers in Skychain City carry mindscramblers of a kind, but much cruder
ones than the one I'd been hit with—not much more advanced than a
common-or-garden stun gun. The Tetrax had illusion-booths, too, but none as
sophisticated as the room that I was now trapped in. With a Tetron illusion,
you could always see the joins. Willing suspension of disbelief was required.
This illusion was a whole order of magnitude more plausible.