Asgard's Heart Read Online Free

of space at one of the Lagrangian points forming 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—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 which 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 that 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 may 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 grey 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 which 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 which 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