Asgard's Conquerors

15

This time, there was more urgency about the way I was manhandled. Surprisingly enough, though, they didn’t march me back outside again. They took me to a corner of the room, sat me down, and gave me the food they’d promised. But Sky-blue didn’t sit down to eat with me—he went buzzing off like a startled hornet, with Jacinthe Siani in tow. The guards watched me eat; the fact that they didn’t relax suggested that they’d had stern orders to look after me very carefully.

Long before I’d finished, Sea-blue was back again, and so was an even older, smaller man with brow-ridges that looked big even on an invader. This one looked to be a real top man. I carried on eating while they discussed the situation, because I figured that if I were going to die, I might as well do it on a full stomach. My appetite had dwindled, though, and I hadn’t finished when they indicated that it was time to go.

I was rushed through the corridors and into the open, where there was a passenger car waiting on the nearest section of track. I was shoved in, unkindly. Sky-blue, the old man, and Jacinthe Siani followed, plus a couple of troopers.

As we got under way, I said to the man with pale blue eyes: “Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot me right here?”

“We’re not going to shoot you, Mr. Rousseau,” he said. “You have far too much information that would be valuable to us. But we can only assume that you are a spy, and hostile to our people.”

That sounded ominously like a threat of torture.

“I came back because the Tetrax asked me to come,” I told him, quickly, “but I’m an ambassador as much as a spy. The Tetrax are very keen to open up a dialogue. They want to make friends, and they don’t understand why you won’t respond to their signals. When we get up to the surface, I’ll be more than happy to act as an intermediary, if you wish.”

“We’re not going to the surface, Mr. Rousseau,” he told me. “We’re going in the opposite direction. And we have no desire to hurry in making contact with anyone outside Asgard. There will be all the time in the world to deal with the Tetrax, when we are ready. At the moment, much more pressing matters concern us. What you can tell us will be most interesting—and you will tell us everything that you know.”

By this time I was getting used to being interesting. It seemed that everyone in the universe was keen to talk to Michael Rousseau, and were exceedingly reluctant to take no for an answer. I realised that Jacinthe Siani hadn’t just fingered me as a Tetron spy. She’d fingered me as the guy who’d penetrated the lower levels—the man who’d talked to the super-scientists.

Everything I had seen of the invaders suggested that they were, by galactic standards, country boys. They must know, by now, just how unsophisticated they were by galactic standards. They knew that the Tetrax were a long way ahead of them, although they seemed to be making what efforts they could to stop the off-world Tetrax finding that out. But Jacinthe Siani had told them that they had neighbours inside Asgard who were even more advanced than the Tetrax. That had to be the main reason why they were playing for time in refusing to talk to the Tetrax. They were hoping to find allies who would help them keep the universe at bay!

And they were convinced that I could help them, once they had persuaded me to talk. Unfortunately, they probably weren’t going to believe me when I told them that there wasn’t a lot of help I could offer . . . and their unbelief might cost me dearly if they really got tough in the business of persuasion.

I wondered how troubled and confused these would-be conquerors of Asgard were. It must have been quite a shock to them, first to discover the universe, and then to find out that they weren’t by any means the most powerful parasites in the guts of the macroworld.

“You don’t have any idea who built Asgard, do you?” I said, looking into the pale eyes of the blond-haired man. “How many levels can you operate in? Ten . . . twenty?”

“Don’t underestimate us, Mr. Rousseau,” he replied, calmly, looking away to watch the factory-fields going by beyond the windows of the carriage. “We control hundreds of habitats in more than fifty levels. It is true that we had not been able to calculate the size of Asgard until we unexpectedly reached the surface, and even now we have no way of knowing how far down the levels go. We know, though, that our ancestors were the builders of Asgard, and that it is only a matter of time before we regain access to the knowledge they had. It may well be that our ancestors were your ancestors, too, and that you too have lost access to what they knew just as we have. If that is true, then your interests and ours are alike, and you must make every effort to help us contact our cousins—those you have already met in the depths of the world.”

I glanced at Jacinthe Siani. Like most Kythnans, she had olive-tinted skin and jet-black hair. Her eyes were a very dark brown. She was very much the odd one out in the car, though there were many Earthborn humans who looked less like Sky-blue and his friends than she did.

“Are your ancestors her ancestors too?” I asked.

“It seems likely,” conceded Sky-blue.

“And the Tetrax?”

“That seems unlikely.”

“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “We have good reason to believe that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. Any common ancestor that you or I had is just as remote from us as the common ancestor linking either of us to the Tetrax.” Or, I thought to myself, the common ancestor I share with a pig, non-flying variety.

“I don’t know about such matters,” he told me. “I’m only a soldier. You will have the chance to speak to people who do know.”

Again, there was a threat in his tone of voice.

“The Tetrax know,” I assured him. “If you were only prepared to make proper contact, you could fix up a nice dialogue between your own wise men and theirs. If you and the Tetrax pooled your resources, you might well be able to figure out who did build this thing, when, and why. It’s something we’d all like to know.”

“It is not for me to decide such matters,” he said, terminating the exchange. Then he had to report back to the older man everything that had been said. I turned my attention to Jacinthe Siani.

“Are they treating you well?” I asked.

She smiled in a strangely catlike fashion. “Quite well,” she said. “I like them better than many of my old friends.”

Knowing what I did about the company she used to keep, I didn’t find that at all surprising. “Hell,” I said, “you don’t have to take such an obvious relish in landing me in it. I never did anything to you, did I? You were the one who was trying to shaft me, remember?”

“I remember everything,” she assured me.

I decided that she just didn’t like me very much. Some people don’t. I can live with it.

From the train-car we transferred to a road vehicle, which whisked us across country with considerably greater alacrity. It was silent, and presumably ran on fuel cells of some kind. I suspected that the invaders hadn’t invented the fuel cell themselves; in fact, I had now begun to suspect that they hadn’t invented very much at all. It occurred to me that they were real barbarians, and that their home-level technology consisted mainly of ready-made items that they’d discovered—or rediscovered—how to use. Giving their ancestors the credit for ordering the world in which they found themselves was a face-saving exercise. Even inside Asgard, they were little boys lost—no matter how many environments they had “conquered” in the course of their explorations.

Given that they were so primitive themselves, it was easy to work out how mediocre things had to be in those levels of which they had taken control.

Once I had reached this conclusion, I wasn’t at all surprised that our trip down into the lower levels was anything but smooth. There was no huge elevator shaft going all the way down to wherever they were taking me. We could drop three, or sometimes four levels at a time, but then we had to transfer to a car or a train again, and hurtle across country to some other point of descent. There was heavy traffic all the way, and I began to realise what an awesome task it must be to move the invader armies around— and, by implication, how vulnerable their troops in Skychain City must be.

By the time we were down to level twelve—assuming that my counting was correct with respect to the levels we skipped past—I didn’t see any more groups of galactic prisoners. Wherever we were, there were only invaders—legion upon legion of them. All but a few were males in uniform. All, without exception, were pale of skin. I couldn’t help remembering Myrlin and the biotechnics that had been used to shape him: an accelerated growth programme and some kind of mental force-feeding. The perfect way to grow your own soldiers. I wondered briefly whether these soldiers could have been made that way, and fed with illusions about their own nature and origins. But it didn’t make any sense—these neo-Neanderthalers certainly didn’t behave as though there might be some mysterious master race behind them.

On the way down, I got to see small areas of about thirty different levels. I think we eventually ended up on level fifty-two, give or take a couple. The top few levels were all dead—no sign of life at all. Five and six were like one and two: very cold, but not as cold as three and four. There was no way to be certain about the temperature outside the tightly-sealed vehicles which we used to cross territory on those levels, but it must have been way below freezing.

Seven and eight I didn’t see, but nine was alive, though pretty desolate. It reminded me strongly of the level much further down, to which Saul Lyndrach’s dropshaft had initially led us—which is to say that it looked like an ecology that had once been balanced but had run wild. Certainly there was no sign of the machinery of artificial photosynthesis—if there had ever been any, it had long since rotted away, to be replaced by real plants eking out their existence under an enfeebled and ill-lit sky. The terrain looked like tundra, bleak and sub-arctic. There was no sign of native humanoid habitation, or of colonization by the neo- Neanderthalers.

Eleven and twelve were alive, too, but looked much the same. If anything, their bioluminescent skies were even further degraded, so that their light was even weaker.

What I’d eventually concluded about the worldlet Saul had found was that it had initially been set up with very sophisticated biotechnology, which had gradually gone completely to pieces. Its energy supply had initially been electrical and thermal, and the light-producing systems had been organic—although they were not organisms capable of independent life. Over a very long time, possibly running to several millions of years, entropy had done its work and the carefully engineered artificial organics had gradually given way to real organisms, which did retain some of the features of the artificial system, but not so efficiently.

What had happened, therefore, was effectively a devolution or degeneration from artificial systems to living ones. I know that seems almost crazy, given that we generally think of living systems being far more ordered than non-living ones, but the builders’ biotechnics had been more sophisticated than living systems. Even something as primitive (in these terms) as the Tetrax artificial photosynthesis systems up on level one would, if left to its own devices, eventually give way to “natural” grass. Think of it not so much as non- life degenerating into life, but as the delicately-bred plants in a garden, adapted not simply to reproduce themselves but also to serve the purposes of the gardeners, gradually evolving into coarser—but inherently hardier—weeds.

A mixture of guesswork and inference suggested to me that some of the old inhabitants of Skychain City were being relocated to lower levels, where they were being herded into the ruins of ancient and long derelict cities to begin the work of refurbishing them for their new would-be masters. For the Tetrax, especially, it must have been like being sent back to the Stone Age. As we crossed a particularly bleak plain on twelve I wondered whether there was some kind of testing going on. Maybe the invaders wanted to see whether the Tetrax were clever enough to find out how the systems built into Asgard’s structure could be made to function again, even after a vastly long period of disuse and decay.

Further down, the rot that had claimed the higher habitats seemed not to have set in—or not to have progressed so far. But there were other complications.

Until we reached fifteen I had assumed that all the levels would have much the same atmosphere. The atmospheres of almost all humanoid homeworlds are very similar indeed, the relative percentages of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide being a cleverly-maintained optimum. Planetary atmospheres, of course, are the creation of life, and because all the humanoid homeworlds share the same chemistry of life, they share the same ideal conditions. Their ecospheres adapt to produce and conserve those conditions, in much the same way that homeostatic mechanisms within endothermic organisms produce a constant internal temperature.

There are one or two galactic humanoid species who breathe air that the rest of us would find uncomfortable, but for precisely that reason they aren’t fully integrated into the galactic community. There are life-systems that have alternative chemistries, but they shape up very differently from the kind of life-system that produces humanoids. You do get life, of a sort, in the atmospheres of gas giant planets—even gas giants as cold as Uranus—but it doesn’t produce anything like the range of organisms that DNA can produce, and as far as I knew no one had ever found evidence of anything in such a system as intelligent as an insect, let alone a man.

Thus, I was very surprised to find that in a big airlock on level fifteen, our little party boarded a vehicle which looked more like a gigantic bullet or a wheeled starship than a car, and that when we went out into the open, we found ourselves in a real pea-souper of an atmosphere.

For a few minutes, I simply watched in astonishment as the coloured fog roiled around the thick windows, stirred into activity by the velocity of our passage. It was a dingy green colour, lit from above by a sky no more than fifteen metres above us. The green wasn’t uniform, though: there were coiling wraiths of purple and indigo, like gaseous worms, and bigger, paler shapes that reminded me of old- fashioned images of immaterial spooks and spectres.

I could tell that Jacinthe Siani had seen it before, but not often enough to get entirely blase about it. Sky-blue and the troopers were as bored as they could be, though.

“What is it?” I asked Sky-blue.

“Mostly methane, hydrogen, and carbon oxides,” said Sky-blue, morosely. “Some helium, many longer-chain carbon molecules. Very high pressure. We have to be careful with the locks. If the atmospheres get mixed, they react. Sometimes explosively. We don’t know any other way through. Our maps are incomplete. We were fortunate to be able to locate a way up as quickly as we did; an environment like this might have been a barrier for many generations. The first one our forefathers discovered was the boundary of their empire for a long time, but we can now move about freely in such habitats, and we find certain uses for them.”

“Is there life here?”

“Of a sort. Nothing that troubles us.”

“I don’t suppose you have a theory as to why your ancestors should fill some of their cave-systems with alien atmospheres?”

Before he could answer, the older man cut in with a few sharp remarks in his own tongue. Sky-blue favoured me with a dirty look, and I figured that he’d just been reminded that I was a spy and an enemy. I decided that it would be diplomatic to ask fewer questions.

By the time we left fifteen, I was ready for more surprises. Indeed, I was eager for them, if only to take my mind off what might be awaiting me below. For that reason, all the levels I numbered in the twenties were disappointments. They certainly weren’t dead, and I didn’t get the impression that they were markedly decayed, but the territory we crossed was empty. The skies were bright, and the vegetation seemed reasonably lush, but there was no evidence of sophisticated machinery except for the vehicles on the road, and the only sentients I saw were the pale-skinned invaders.

I could see plenty of pillars holding up the ceilings, but I couldn’t see any blocks filled out with doors and windows. I knew, though, that we were seeing only the tiniest slice of each habitat, and that every one of them would surely be as big, and might well be as various, as an Earthly continent. It was as though I was trying to judge the nature and complexity of the Earth from a twenty-kilometre drive across a randomly chosen part of Canada. The best sights these levels had to offer might be awesome indeed, but it was entirely possible that the invaders had never yet caught a glimpse of them, having only skated quickly across the surface, more eager to find doorways to other levels than to explore fully those which appeared harmless and useless to them.

When we stopped to sleep, at a way station on what I took to be level twenty-nine, I was beginning to fear that Asgard might not have much more to show me. Wouldn’t it be ghastly, I thought, if the Centre turned out to be no more exotic than Skychain City—or the microworld Goodfellow? There is no more horrible way that any mystery can be resolved than by dissolution into ironic anti-climax.

I consoled myself with the thought that we were a long, long way from the Centre yet—and with the knowledge that the reason I was being taken on this little trip to the heartland of Invaderdom was that I had already been shown proof that there were more things in Asgard, as in Heaven, than had hitherto been dreamt of in the invaders’ poverty- stricken philosophy.

But could I, I wondered, interest them enough to persuade them to let me live?