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?
Then again, even if something had happened, how could I know for sure just what it was? Even if I was correct in believing that a message had been sent which I had received, on what grounds could I assure myself that I had read it right?
And yet again, if it all was true, and something in the depths of the macroworld—something great and fine and utterly mysterious—had cried out to me for aid . . . then what the hell could a mere human being be expected to achieve in rendering aid to beings who were apparently very different in kind, and far superior in their abilities?
What, indeed, could possibly be done?
I had begun this chapter of my life with a terribly sense of not knowing what I ought to do, but the progenitors of that feeling had been mere boredom and a superfluity of trivial opportunity. Now, I was faced with another uncertainty about what I could and should do next—an uncertainty infinitely more terrible in aspect.
It was at least possible that I had been singled out for great things. But I had not the slightest idea how to go about them.
I and I alone had stood four-square with the Nine when that anguished cry for help had surged from the depths of Asgard to blow through us like a hot wind. Myrlin and 994- Tulyar had been so badly shocked by the first instant of their contact that they had been thrust into the valley of the shadow of death—I was soon able to ascertain, once they were well again, that they had no memory of anything that might have happened to them while they were at the interface. If their being had been polluted with vestiges of an alien soul, they knew nothing of it, and manifested no stigmata of any such infection.
The fact that I had fared differently reflected no credit upon me. I was inclined to presume that by the time I entered the game the “creatures” who were manifest in my dream as eyes of fire had learned to be more gentle, and had moderated their approach, so that their touch became something which a frail and tiny humanoid mind could cope with.
It was, of course, to the Nine that I turned in the hope of enlightenment, but they too were unable to offer much insight. The contact had affected them as severely as it had affected Myrlin and Tulyar, and in their fashion they had been much more severely wounded by it. They could not confirm or deny what I told them about my interpretation of the contact as a cry for help. Even when I interfaced with the Nine again, to give them more intimate access to my memories and interpretations of the experience, they could not judge what it was that I set before them. Their knowledge was no more secure than mine, their scepticism no less corrosive.
Perhaps, if they had been well, they would have had more powerful resources on which to draw, but in their injured state, they had to devote all but the tiniest fraction of their attention and endeavour to the business of self-repair.
Of course, I now had a relationship with the Nine more special than their relationship with Myrlin, or any other being of my kind. They and I had secrets in common; circumstance had forged a bond between us, and that bond was far from being merely metaphorical. In some sense, the Nine were in me . . . just as the eyes of fire and whatever consciousness lay behind them was in me.
It mattered very little that I could hardly begin to understand the Nine: what kind of beings they were, what view of the world they had. The Nine had taken the natural course in choosing my face as the medium of their new visual manifestations. They accepted that in some subtle but crucial fashion, they and I had exchanged parts of our personalities, and that I now lived in them and they in me. Their acceptance was a foundation stone on which we could build trust, and perhaps a common cause.
But they, like me, had no idea what could and should be done to answer the call that I might have received.
In our ignorance, we hesitated—waiting, I suppose, for something more to happen. It was not that we were hoping for a third contact—the Nine felt that they could well do without another such traumatic experience. It was more that we were expecting some process of change to complete itself in me. We hoped and feared that my experience might have consequences that were yet to unfold.
After all, I did have a strong sense of being different from what I had been before, though it is not easy to describe exactly what that sense was like.
In my waking moments, I was myself, and once my elation had evaporated I seemed very much the self I had always been—stubborn, self-contained, frequently facetious, sometimes churlish, but always with my heart in what I thought to be the right place.
In my dreams, though, I sometimes found strange sensations lurking within a deeper self than the one I knew and was in my everyday intercourse with the phenomenal world. I never went back to that dreaming desert, nor saw those eroded monoliths, nor faced those eyes of fire, but there were feelings, and more than feelings. Sometimes, there were faint and fragile voices, which spoke in querulous whispers, which seemed to be hunting for something to say, as if they were trying to remember—or simply trying to become.
I began to fear that those dreams would eventually intrude upon reality, but I waited, and they did not.
I often went back to the room with the hooded chairs, to interface again and again with the wounded Nine, to dream more exotic dreams awake than those I dreamed in sleep. But it was not easy, as I have explained, to begin the serious work of communication.
Although the Nine already knew parole, and English too, there were still many barriers to the kind of speech which was necessary in that curious spaceless “world” of electronic information. But the Nine did want to talk—they wanted, in fact, to bring me to the edge of their own community. There was no sense in which they could welcome me into that community, and become the Ten, but they did want to know me in a fashion very different from the way they had known Myrlin.
I think the waiting, and the work that we did while we waited, was valuable. I think even the uncertainty was valuable, in its way, in making us question what it was that we must do.
This time, though, there was no possibility of turning my back and deciding to go home. Although the Nine and I did not know what it was that we had to do—or what it was that I had to do—we did know that the way forward was the way downward, and that whatever was in the heart of Asgard had to be found.
As the wise man said: Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait Vinventer. He might have added that there comes a time when it is no longer enough merely to invent. It is necessary, also, to confront. Even if our gods are invented, we still need to know what it is that they require of us.
And so, when I have finished recording this second volume of my adventures—which I have been doing, I candidly admit, as much to straighten out my thoughts as in the hope of entertaining readers—I intend to set out yet again on my journey to the centre of Asgard, to discover whether, in truth, there is a place for me in the halls of Valhalla—and a task for me to do, in order to earn it.
I will be, as ever, a reluctant hero—and I leave it to you to decide whether that is the best kind, or the worst.