Asgard's Conquerors

19

During the next exercise period, while I was temporarily let loose—presumably to think over all that had been said to me—I got my chance to talk to 822-Vela for a while.

We met by one of the observation windows, and as we spoke I was able to alternate my glance between his wizened face and the alien wilderness outside. There was a kind of swirling oily mist which made it difficult to see further than ten or fifteen metres, but there was a cluster of the dendritic structures close to the wall, and it was possible to make out, albeit vaguely, the small creatures fluttering amid the branches. The coloured lights which dressed the branches of the dendrites insinuated their soft radiance into the mist, creating rainbow hazes through which the fireflies danced and darted.

Why is it here? I wondered. Is it something so very unusual in the great universal scheme that it became precious?

822-Vela was explaining to me the policy that the Tetrax of Skychain City had decided to follow. “Essentially,” he said, “our strategy is one of calm reason, with a measure of stubbornness and a certain seductive appeal. We are trying to make clear the benefits that both the galactic races and the races of Asgard would obtain from a meeting of minds and a joining of resources. We stress the standards of behaviour which are required if a complex galactic community is to exist in peace and harmony. We have refused to tell the invaders anything about our technology, or about our discoveries on Asgard, or about the position of our other subsurface bases, unless and until they make some kind of treaty with us and allow us to restore effective communication with the starships in space.”

“Well,” I said, deciding that I could make a bid for prestige by name-dropping furiously, “1125-Camina and 994-Tulyar deduced that you would follow that policy, and are planning their own overtures to fit in with it. The problem is that the invaders won’t respond in any way to their calls, and without more information it was difficult to decide how to continue. With luck, one of our groups will have managed to renew communications, so that the people in orbit will be fully informed, but it’s not easy to see what will happen next. You can probably judge better than I whether 1125-Camina would think it appropriate to order some kind of military action.”

It’s no good fishing for information with the Tetrax. They’re too good at it to fall for any bait mere humans can deploy. All he said in reply was: “No doubt 1125-Camina will make the best decision. Can we assume that you, like Dr. Sovorov, will follow our directions in this matter? Many of your species-brethren are actively collaborating with the invaders—mercifully, few humans or Kythnans are in a position to offer effective assistance to them.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was implying that I was in no position to offer effective help to the enemy either, but I didn’t care. For a few moments I just looked out at the swirling mists, wondering whether this habitat, too, contained tens of millions of square kilometres of territory, and wondering what awesome variations the life-system might exhibit over the full range of its terrain.

When I did answer him, it was to say: “There may be gains to be derived from collaboration. As you say, my fellow humans are not in a position to explain Tetron technics to the invaders, so they can do little harm. They might, though, succeed in winning the trust of these people. We must remember that the discoveries they made in capturing Skychain City have upset their entire world-view. By the time my race ventured outside our solar system we already knew a great deal about the universe, and were forewarned of the fact that it was inhabited. Contact with the galactic community was not entirely surprising. These people have suffered a shock of far greater magnitude. It may be that they are reassured by their close resemblance to us, and that through contact with humans they can gradually become accustomed to contact with galactics in general. My species-brethren may be building vital bridges.”

I was proud of myself; I thought it a speech worthy of a Tetron in its delicacy and guile. No doubt 822-Vela wouldn’t agree, but a Tetron never will agree that anyone can play his own game half as well as he does.

“That would be a dangerous policy,” observed 822-Vela. “And we must remember, Mr. Rousseau, that you humans are not practised in the ways of diplomacy. Better, perhaps, to say nothing at all than to attempt a policy of friendliness which might easily do more harm than good.”

Or to put it another way: Don’t try to be too clever, human—you’re not up to it.

“I’m not sure that they’ll be prepared to be polite indefinitely,” I told him, not without a certain vindictiveness. “I think members of your own race might be in grave danger of harm. I think that it may be necessary to give these people some answers—and the answers we humans can give them may help to discourage them from attempting to extract information from you by violent means.”

Tetron faces aren’t expressionless, but they’re very difficult to read, even for a human who has spent a lot of time around them. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or annoyed, or whether he was telling himself that this was just what you’d expect from a lousy barbarian.

Somehow, Aleksandr Sovorov materialised at my elbow. He seemed to know what I’d just said, although he certainly hadn’t been in earshot when I said it. “It’s important, Rousseau,” he said, sternly, “to figure out exactly where your loyalties lie. Your past recklessness has already cost us one chance to communicate with the advanced race which apparently lives in the lower levels. It would be unfortunate if further recklessness were to damage our standing in the galactic community irreparably.”

I deliberately turned away from both of them to stare directly out of the window. They edged round slightly, lining up on either side of the view like a pair of curtains.

“The thing is, Alex,” I said, with all the condescension I could muster. “You aren’t really in a position to see the big picture. Anyhow, I’m in the Star Force now, and recklessness is my profession.”

Sovorov and the Tetron exchanged glances, and the Tetron bowed slightly before withdrawing.

“Vela and I were chatting yesterday, while you were being questioned,” explained Sovorov. “We tried to establish what would be the best thing for you to do.”

“Very kind of you,” I murmured hoarsely. “The Tetrax must be really proud of you, Alex. Their number one human yes-man. They’re fond of yes-men. They’ll probably give you an honorary number one day. Maybe as high as thirteen.”

“I find it difficult to believe,” he said, frostily, “that the Tetrax chose you to spy for them. They must have been desperate.”

“They were,” I assured him. I was still staring past his shoulder at the twisting dendrites with their coloured lanterns, and the whirligig points of light that danced between their branches.

“Is this life-system DNA-based, Alex?” I asked him. He barely glanced behind him.

“I suppose so,” he said, with the stiffness of one who does not appreciate the subject being changed.

“Come on, Alex, you’re a scientist. You must find it rather intriguing. It’s amazing, and it’s very beautiful. You may have been here long enough to get used to it, but you can’t have lost your curiosity entirely.”

Sovorov shrugged. “It’s pretty,” he said. “But we can only look at it. If you want more data about its biology, you’ll have to ask your new friends. That’s assuming that they’ve bothered to investigate it themselves. I get the impression that whatever doesn’t shoot guns doesn’t interest them much.”

“Sometimes, Alex,” I told him, “you can be less than intelligent as well as less than charming. I believe you’re in danger of losing sight of the reason you came to Asgard in the first place. You came to figure things out, right? You came to learn. I know you get impatient with all the fantasizing about the Centre, but your impatience seems to have closed off your own imagination completely. Don’t you ask yourself, ever, what Asgard is for, and what part it plays in the great scheme of things?”

“There’s no point in posing questions until you have data which permit the formulation of answers,” he said, defensively. Personally, I thought he was dead wrong. You have to formulate the questions first, and the bigger you pose them, the better they are.

“Did you know,” I asked him, “that there’s a microworld orbiting Uranus right now, dredging organic matter out of the atmosphere and the rings? They’ve found tons of stuff— DNA in all kinds of packages. According to a Tetron scientist I talked to, it’s been there since the earliest days of the solar system, when it was briefly warm out there. Life antedates the solar system, Alex—maybe the galaxy. It’s in the dust clouds between the stars. Sometimes it gets frozen, for billions of years, but it doesn’t care. It just hangs about until local conditions become conducive to reproduction, and then it gets going again. It rains down all the gravity wells in the universe, and wherever it finds somewhere that it can get along, it multiplies and multiplies as fast as it can, letting natural selection sort out the most efficient forms for local use. Wherever it can give birth to an ecosphere, it does. It negotiates its energy-economics with the prevailing physical environment, working out some kind of chemical compromise.

“My Tetron pal reckons that the DNA must have evolved spontaneously in the very distant past—and I’m talking about ten billion years here—and has multiplied and multiplied to the point where its creative efforts permeate the entire universe. He reckons that the fundamental humanoid gene-package evolved a long time ago, in some distant corner of the universe, and that it drifted into the galactic arm in some kind of vast cloud a few hundred million years ago to seed all the local stars at much the same time.

“On that basis, Asgard must be the product of a separate Creation, made in some other galaxy at some unimaginably distant point in time. And yet, its inhabitants—maybe even its builders—are first cousins to us and first cousins to the Tetrax. But if that’s so, what can it be doing here? Was it sent to seed the galaxy? Did it bring those initial packages that were scattered all over the galactic arm? Or was it sent here to escape something? Is it saving specimens from the ecospheres of a thousand worlds from some unimaginable menace? And in either case—where are the builders? Why is their whole beautiful macroworld being allowed to run wild, with whole levels dead or deserted, and tinpot emperors appearing with dreams of illimitable conquest? What’s going on here, Alex? You do care, don’t you?”

At least, after all that, he had the grace not to stick out his black-bearded chin and reply with an obstinate: “I don’t know.” Instead, he said: “I didn’t know about Uranus. It does cast new light on the question of whether the galaxy was seeded with life. The convergent evolution theory begins to look rather sick.”

I nodded toward the alien forest with its marvellous fairy lights. “Not much convergent evolution there,” I said. “That is some. ...”

I broke off in mid-sentence, and gulped. Sovorov had been watching my face, not the forest, and he had to turn around to look for what I had seen. By the time he was facing the right way, it was no longer there.

“What is it?” he asked.

“If it was what I think it was,” I said, “it’s probably a case of convergent evolution. I thought I saw a humanoid figure, out there among the trees.”

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing like that out there. It’s a low-energy ecosystem. It couldn’t possibly sustain anything motile that’s bigger than your little finger. Insufficient ecological efficiency—very weak food chains.”

His comments proved that he had done a little bit of thinking about his surroundings, which served to restore some of my faith in human nature, curiosity-wise. But I still was convinced that, just for a moment, I had seen something humanoid. It was difficult to judge distances because of the mist, and that made it difficult to judge size, too, but I had got the distinct impression that what I had seen was big and bulky—more like a giant ape than a man.

I opened my mouth to ask Alex whether the guards were in the habit of wandering around outside in pressurized suits, but I didn’t get the chance. Two Neanderthaler troopers came over and beckoned unceremoniously. Sigor Dyan was obviously expecting me—and this time, I figured, he was going to want some answers.

Unfortunately, I still wasn’t at all sure what answers I could give him, and my head throbbed mercilessly every time I tried to force myself to come up with a sensible strategy.

I was just about ready to fall unconscious, and leave the whole sorry mess behind. Instead, I walked with my escorts back along the corridors to my appointment with the inquisition.