Asgard's Heart. Brian Stableford
in one, but I’m not. I’m a solitary kind of person, and I like to have vacant 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 that 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 that 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 which 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’être 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 that 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 that formed 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—which was 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 that 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 which 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 might 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 gray 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 that 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 that 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 Center, and have asked me to try to discover a route which 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 Center 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 you brought here carries a legacy of knowledge and craft that 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