had no time to discover whether I could speak my protest aloud, because the huge creature launched itself forthwith into the firmament, and carried us up into the starry night, where we grew in size so vastly that the stars seemed mere snowflakes gently flowing through the wintry air.
I looked down, expecting to be giddy, but there was no particular sense of height—it was as if I were looking through a godly eye, which could capture all Creation at a glance, and I saw what I took to be the whole great world of men—which consisted, not of one meager Earth and a handful of microworlds, nor even all the worlds of the galactic community, but of something immeasurably vaster, growing even as I watched in a futile attempt to fill the limitless expanses of the infinite and the eternal. I was inexplicably unmoved by the incalculable profusion of it all, but while I watched, and the winged horse soared above the very rim of the cosmos, I saw patterns of change that worked in me like pangs of anxiety and knots of fear.
Despite the vastness of everything, there was no detail that I could not comprehend, and I might have seen a single sparrow fall if I had not been so disturbed by other things which tormented my attention.
I saw a land all a-tremble with the paces of a giant hungry wolf, which was leading a pack of dire shadows to a feast of blood.
I saw a world that was a mighty twisted tree, ravaged by a blight that was eating up its vitality from within, desiccating its foliage, and shriveling its multitudinous fruit.
I saw a great ship, the hull of which was made from the growing nails of the coffined dead, whose sails were their silvered hair, riding on massive waves stirred by the roiling of a serpent greater than galaxies, its crew of skeletons armored for war.
I saw a traitor with eyes like red coals, making magic to draw the shadowy wolf-pack to the field of slaughter.
I saw a monstrous army, whose troops were made of fire, which marched like glowing lava from a wound in the fabric of time, its banners of lightning streaming proudly in the radiant breath of countless dying suns.
I saw a bridge like an infinite rainbow, extending from the world below to some other mysterious realm outside the range of my miraculous vision, its colors livid as it cracked and splintered, presaging in its shattering the death of all the gods, and the desolation of that Valhalla in which—after all—I did not really belong.
And I saw a face, which stared at me from the starry firmament, and I knew it for the true possessor of that godlike sight, which I had borrowed for an instant. It was a face full of sorrow and concern, a face where mercy was mingled with wrath, whose sight could penetrate every atom of my being, every secret of my soul, and I knew that this was a god that humans had made, and a god who had made humans in his turn, and a god who now faced destruction, and was desperate enough to seek his heroes wherever he could find them, whether they belonged to him or not.…
And then the god who held me in his guardian hand was forced to let me go, and I fell again, and fell, and fell, all the way back to consciousness.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I opened my eyes, and looked up, into the ungodlike face of my old friend Myrlin. I was flat on my back and he was kneeling over me, peering at me with a measure of concern.
My back was hurting, but not so very badly. It was cushioned by something soft and yielding. I was slightly surprised to find that I was not in one of the Isthomi’s healing eggs being quietly restored to full fitness, but it seemed to be a time for counting my blessings, and a quick survey of the relevant referents assured me that my body was still in one piece and that my mind, so far as I could tell, was still my own.
I looked around, and saw nothing but gray walls. The ceiling was rather ill-lit and there was a distinct lack of furniture and fittings. Susarma Lear was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, watching me, with less apparent concern than Myrlin. The upper half of her was clad only in a light undershirt, and I guessed that her Star Force jacket was what was providing my injured back with a modicum of comfortable support.
“Where are we?” I asked, hoarsely.
“Safe, for the time being,” said Myrlin. “How do you feel?”
“Not so bad,” I said. “Just had a hell of a dream, though.”
“You’ll be okay,” he assured me. “The way the Isthomi have fixed us up, we heal quickly. The cuts and bruises won’t trouble you for long.”
I sat up, and then reached behind me with tentative fingers to see what sort of damage I’d sustained. There was no moist blood, and the wounds didn’t complain too terribly about being touched. I looked down at the colonel’s jacket, and saw that it wasn’t badly stained. I picked it up and threw it to her.
“Thanks,” I said, as she caught it. She put it on, but didn’t fasten it. She looked rather tired.
“Anything to drink?” I asked Myrlin. “Even water would do.”
He shook his head.
I looked at the weapon propped up in a corner of the tiny room. “What is that thing?” I asked—unable to figure out how it had felled the dragon without so much as a bang, let alone a bullet.
“It’s some kind of projector,” said Myrlin. “I don’t understand the physics, but it creates some kind of magnetic seed inside a silicon brain, which grows—or explodes—into something disruptive, wiping out most of the native software in a fifth of a second or so. It’s a kind of mindscrambler, I suppose, except that it’s for artificial minds instead of fleshy ones.”
It was a gun that shot hostile software. The Nine were clever with that sort of thing. It crossed my mind, though, that it was a dangerous weapon to keep around the place. Presumably, it could be turned on the Nine just as easily as their enemies. I knew that they could trust Myrlin, but the thought of a Scarid regiment equipped with such weapons rampaging around the Isthomi worldlet was one that might make a lovely goddess frown.
“I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t impressed by the trick with the bazooka,” I said, “but how the hell did the Isthomi manage to let that thing into their garden?”
“The Isthomi have problems,” he answered. “Your dragon wasn’t the only thing that went on the rampage around these parts. The attack was sudden and surprising, and the Nine’s ability to oppose it was severely restricted by the fact that somebody had just switched the power off.”
I looked at him, blinking to clear my vision and working my tongue over my salivary glands in order to try to spread some moisture around my mouth
“You mean,” I said, slowly, “that someone pulled the plug on the Nine’s hardware?”
“Not exactly,” he said. “I mean that as far as the Nine can tell, someone pulled the plug on the levels. All of them.”
I hadn’t quite recovered complete control of my faculties, so I stared helplessly at him for a minute or so. It was a fairly mind-boggling item of news. We knew that there were at least two thousand levels, each one containing anywhere between two and ten independent habitats—the equivalent of ten thousand habitable worlds. Some of those habitats were dead, others decaying, but most of the inhabited ones depended to a large extent on power drawn from the walls—power that was presumably generated by a starlet: a huge fusion reactor in the core of the macroworld.
Switching off that power wouldn’t mean that all the lights in Asgard had instantly gone out. Most of the habitats had bioluminescent systems which could run for a while without input, and some of the inhabitants had technical know-how adequate to the task of generating their own electricity to feed electric lights. Nor did it mean that every information-system in the macroworld had crashed; a great many of them would have some kind of emergency system to prevent their going down. The Nine would have had support systems to preserve themselves against accidents even of that magnitude—but the vast majority of their subsidiary systems and peripheral elements would have run on power drawn from the central supply. When the central supply went off, the Nine would have had to shut down ninety percent of their capacity—and if they had a