The crowd reacted to that. Its members scattered like frightened rabbits. At least, that was the impression I got. It seemed very dark, although Myrlin’s torch continued to give off a fervent glow until it sputtered out.
“What now?” the android asked.
I switched on my headlamp, and slowly played its beam over the deserted pavement where the crowd had been assembled a few moments earlier.
“I don’t know,” I said—and the city lights came back on just as I pronounced the final syllable.
“Well, we know that the repair systems are efficient,” he observed—but there was something different about the quality of the light now. It was no longer pure white, and it was no longer perfectly steady.
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.