For some reason, I could not quite hold the image steady. The valkyrie I imagined was borrowed from an earlier dream, but that dream-image had itself been compounded from faces which I knew. She was not Susarma Lear, but her piercing blue eyes were certainly Susarma’s, and the rest of her features seemed somehow to be struggling to acquire her whole appearance. All the female apparitions of the Nine had borrowed in much the same way— had been variations on that one basic theme—and there seemed no getting away from her sheer insistence on stamping her authority upon me. I wondered, briefly, whether I had committed the awful folly of allowing myself to become infatuated with her. It would, after all, be understandable—she was the only human female with whom I had come into any kind of intimate contact for many years.
I put that train of thought aside. There was no point at all in sexual fantasy, given that I had lost even that virtual image of a real body that I had brought into this dreamworld. I had surely transcended the desires of the flesh.
I allowed the blurred face of the valkyrie to dissolve, and let the picture in my head drift on the idle breeze of whimsy. It decayed into a sequence of surreal shapes—some of them faces or insectile creatures, but mostly abstract forms. I became hyperconscious of the fact that it was all mere illusion. The stirrings of my subconscious were somehow refracting ghostly images into my mind, but everything was feeble and unfocussed. There were echoes of memories that I no longer had the ability to recall, but there was nothing to cling to… nothing to help me maintain the conviction that I still existed as a whole, coherent person.
I had lost all contact with the passage of time; there was no reference point that would have enabled me to measure its progress. I had no heartbeat, no inner rhythm of any kind. Nor did the journey seem capable of an end, in the sense that we might reach something that could present the appearance of a new place. What change there was had now to operate within me rather than in my apparent surroundings. The images my mind had conjured up faded into darkness. There was nothing outside of me at all, and little enough of me.
I remembered that I had felt once before that I was making in fact the journey that Descartes undertook in his imagination. When I had drowned in the ocean that the Isthomi had created to carry us into software space I had come close to total extinction before recovering my sense of self.
Then, it had all been happening to me. Now, although it was all happening again, I was more self-destructively involved. I seemed actually to be casting aside all sensation of the world, and all sensation of belonging to my own body. Like a snake shedding its skin, I was sloughing off the burden of my psyche. I was not losing so much as surrendering my grip on time and memory, becalming myself in the instant of the present. But as before, I could think nothing, save cogito, ergo sum: there is a thought, therefore something exists. Perhaps it was not I who was existing, though… or perhaps I was acquiring a liquidity of personality which made me more than myself as well as less.
I felt, anyhow, as though I—or whatever now existed in my place—had reached the very limit of existence, beyond which there was nothing at all.
From that brink of oblivion, something gradually returned. I felt that a new “I” was constituted, and did not doubt that it could qualify not merely as a self, but as my self. That self, I felt, was once again gathering substance— or, to be precise, the virtual image of substance which entities in software space possessed. I was once again acquiring a body. I could see and feel nothing outside of it—my sensorium was not yet restored—but I nevertheless had some awareness of extension and solidity. More important, I was able to bring new thoughts out of the abyss of lethargy into which the old ones had sunk, savouring their strength and agility.
Was that, I wondered, what it feels like for man of flesh and blood to die? Was it possible that once the heart has stopped pumping, and all the nerves have stopped relaying information from the sense-organs to the brain, consciousness fades slowly and peacefully away in such a manner? Perhaps there was no curtain of darkness that abruptly descended—no shock of death to bring down a guillotine on experience. Perhaps there was always that fading disconnection—an odyssey beyond sensation, beyond pain, beyond memory, beyond self.
Previously, I had always imagined that it must be horrible to die, and all the more horrible if the moment of death were extended, savagely torturing consciousness upon the rack of pain. Now, I wondered whether existence might be kinder than that, and death a more peculiar ecstasy than any which life could offer.
But I wondered too whether my sense of self was absurdly anachronistic, still trying idiotically to conceive of itself as a being of flesh and sinew, blood and brain, when it was really no such thing. Perhaps, I thought, I should have used this opportunity to cut myself off from such residual notions, and accepted fully what was surely the truth: that I was no more like the entity of flesh which produced me than a dragonfly is like a nymph, or an anonymous egg like the organism it must become.
Perhaps, I thought, I should no longer be contemplating the idea of death. For was I not now a god among gods? Had I not been brought, like many a hero before me, to share the realm that was Asgard and Olympus, to be omniscient and undying, not human at all?
I tried to train myself in that way of thinking. I instructed my new self that it had become a kind of insect, redeemed from temporary entombment in a chrysalis. Out of the wreck and dissolution of one form another had now arisen, I said, and the new must put away all thought of the old, and learn to fly.
I told myself, urgently, that there was encrypted in my soul an inner nature beyond any which I had previously suspected, which had survived not only my “duplication” as an item of arcane software but also my annihilation in that form, providing some kind of template for my reincarnation as a second software self. I had been human, and quasi-human, but now I was divine.
Was I not?
Was I not?
I imagined myself grown again from that inconsiderable atom of thought to which I had been reduced, and tried to picture what I now might be. I felt that seed of being burst forth with a renewed vitality.
But I felt also that something was wrong, and that a promise was in the process of betrayal. I felt, however paradoxical it might seem, too familiar to myself.
I was Michael Rousseau, and I felt—I knew—that I ought to be more than that.
For a time (which seemed long) I could not quite imagine what form it was that I was acquiring. I deliberately played with the possibility that I might no longer be humanoid, or even animal, and imagined myself growing as a tree, like the great world-tree Yggdrasil which I had woven into the pattern of those dreams by means of which I had tried to envision the war which had been fought—was still being fought—in Asgard’s various spaces.