Asgard's Conquerors

26

It wasn’t quite as good as it sounded. I could still be killed, violently. I could be stabbed, strangled, poisoned, burned, or blown up, and unless they could get me into one of their home-repair kits very rapidly, I’d be finished. But I wouldn’t age. They’d repaired that little fault in my design.

Or so Myrlin said. I didn’t feel any different.

“They might do more for you,” he told me, “given time.”

“Well,” I said, “if they want to make deals with the Tetrax and the invaders, they certainly have some attractive bait on offer. But would they really want to offer immortality to twenty billion Neanderthalers?”

By now we were in a more homely environment. The steel igloos were houses, built for Myrlin and his furry friends. They had proper lighting, furniture, and all the usual amenities. Myrlin offered to feed me, but I wasn’t hungry yet. While I’d been in the egg, all my needs had been taken care of—and then some, if reports of my newly- acquired gifts were really to be taken seriously.

“The situation is complicated,” said Myrlin, “but I’ll strip the story down to the bare essentials. I’d better start at the beginning.”

“Please do,” I told him.

“They call themselves the Isthomi,” Myrlin said, settling back into an outsize armchair. “And they are personalities encoded in machines. Artificial intelligences, of a sort—but they were initially created as a result of the attempted duplication of the minds of humanoid individuals. Those humanoid ancestors lived in an enclosed environment not too different from this one, but the Nine do not know whether it was in Asgard, or in another artefact of the same kind.”

“The Nine?” I said, remembering my counting. “You called them that before. Does it really mean that there are only nine of them?”

“Only nine,” he confirmed. “The Nine’s ancestors evolved from preliterate primitivism within their scaled environment. They had legends that told them their own remote ancestors had lived in a different kind of world, but until they discovered the universe the Nine had always considered those legends to have no basis in fact.

“Within their closed world the humanoid Isthomi followed a path of technological sophistication not too different from that which appears to have been followed by the Scarida—the invaders of Skychain City—except that they never found a way out of their closed world. They had no more reason to suppose that the light of the sky and the heat of the ground had been built in order to sustain them than men of Earth have to suppose that the sun was designed to light the Earth and placed there for that purpose, so they took their enclosed cosmos pretty much for granted.

“The humanoid Isthomi fought many wars, and despite relative shortages of certain heavy metals they managed to develop an impressive technology of destruction. The time came when they had the power in their hands to destroy their world. They managed to avoid that eventuality, joined their nations and factions together into a single world community, and became, as your jargon has it, ‘biotech-minded.’ They also developed an elaborate silicon-based information technology, but more slowly than similar technologies have been developed by cultures like the human, whose progress in inorganic technology was aided by a relative abundance of appropriate raw materials.

“The humanoid Isthomi developed technologies of genetic engineering applicable to the transformation of somatic cells in mature bodies, and to the manipulation of egg-cells. They developed a technology similar to the one by means of which I was constructed—accelerated growth coupled with a kind of transcription of personality. Their experiments in the creation, modification, and transcription of personalities eventually led them to try to recreate personalities in different forms, including duplicating the minds of humanoids in silicon-based electronic systems. Thus were born the software Isthomi.

“It’s impossible to guess how accurate, as copies of humanoid minds, the Nine were in the days of their infancy, but the question must have become irrelevant very soon. Minds they certainly were, and from the moment their new incarnations began they were able to undertake a whole new process of growth, maturation, and evolution. They changed very greatly, once they were no longer limited by fleshly bodies. They inhabited a vast complex of linked machines, sharing the new ‘space’ in which they were distributed with countless non-sentient programmes as well as with one another.

“At some stage in history, however, the Nine—or perhaps fractions of the original Nine—were removed from their original environment and placed in another, of which they were the sole intelligent inhabitants—and which appears, in fact, to have been designed specifically to accommodate them. Their memories have no record of what was done to them. They do not know why it was done, or how, or by whom.

“The Nine do not know how long a lapse of time was concealed by the gap in their memories. They are not entirely certain that those memories they have which relate to their existence before they came here are to be trusted. They know how easy it is to create a new individual— robotic or organic—with a wholly synthetic ‘past,’ and they wonder whether they might not have been created likewise, with a synthetic history inbuilt into them. But the essential questions still remain: By whom? And why?

“The Isthomi are by nature patient. They live their lives, normally, at a slow pace. Their sleep, and other trance-like states, may last for time-spans that would be many lifetimes in humanoid terms. They had no urge to be fruitful and multiply, to replenish this new world in which they found themselves. But they did set out to explore it, and eventually, to fill it. Their machine-bodies had the means to produce robotic extensions, and through those extensions they began to increase themselves still further. They undertook a process of colonization parallel to the means by which a handful of humanoids might set out to populate a world and build a civilization there, except that they manufactured no new individuals, but simply extended and complicated their own bodies. Their mobile robots were simply parts of a much greater whole. The analogy of an ant-hive will probably spring to your mind, but it is a misleading one; it would be more appropriate to compare the robots to motile cells within the body of an individual—white blood corpuscles, perhaps.

“For many thousands of years this process of expansion continued. The Nine did not compete with one another, but operated always in concert. Each of the Nine considered the companionship of the other eight to be infinitely precious. The Nine are not egotists—rather, they fear loneliness and excessive individualism, and they value community above all else. They are not Nine so much as Nine-in-One.”

With an attitude like that, I thought, they should certainly get on well with the Tetrax. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the Tetrax might not find them a little too clever to be entirely welcome.

“At some stage,” Myrlin continued, “the Nine made the startling discovery that their enclosed habitat was not the only one in the world—that there were other environments above, below, and beyond it. They also made the discovery that there was a pre-existent technology connecting the levels, supplying them with energy in an ordered and controlled fashion.

“They concluded, of course, that the world in which the humanoid Isthomi had lived must have been a similar artificial environment, and that it might be nearby. By finding it, they supposed, they could find out why they had been removed from that world and placed in another. Naturally, they set out to investigate the technology that had been used in the design and construction of Asgard, and they also set out to explore the neighbouring levels, at their own characteristic pace—which would seem rather leisurely to our species.

“They did not find the world of the humanoid Isthomi— although it may, of course, still exist somewhere in the bowels of Asgard. They did find many other levels with humanoid inhabitants, but in most cases the humanoid races were not thriving. They inferred, after considerable study, that their neighbouring levels were like their own, in that a few individuals of a civilized species had been introduced in the distant past and left to their own devices. But they found no individuals like themselves—only humanoids and other fleshy creatures.

“Many of the humanoid species had made some progress in rebuilding the civilizations from which they had presumably been taken, but for almost all, the process of social evolution had been interrupted. Whatever legacy of memories the original colonists had brought with them had been lost, so that their descendants reverted to savagery, sustained by elementary agriculture or by hunting and gathering. In some, there was a recovery after the initial decline, so that when they had increased to fill up their new world they began again to follow the path of technological progress, but in no case that the Nine found was there any species which had done as they had done, and conserved the heritage which they had brought with them into their new world.

“The uppermost of these inhabited levels was the one to which Saul Lyndrach found a route—a route which was followed first by me and later by you. You know what we found there—a decadent population, living in the ruins of a city built by their remote ancestors, under threat from animal predators which had evolved from less aggressive ancestors under strong competitive pressure. You know, too, that the Nine had begun to supply the inhabitants of that level with materials, fearing that they otherwise might become extinct. They had conceived of that project—as they conceive of all their projects—as a long-term matter, in which they could make plans for thousands of years.

“Our arrival changed their world-view very radically, and what I was able to tell them about the topmost levels of Asgard, and about the universe beyond, was a revelatory shock whose magnitude we cannot possibly imagine. We are young species, the humans and the Tetrax, and we are no strangers to surprise. The Nine are very old, and they had to make considerable adjustments in coming to terms with the knowledge that the universe is very different from what they had imagined.

“Their initial reaction, as you know, was to seal themselves off and give themselves time to think and to discuss. They told you that they would seal off the level that you had penetrated, and they did—but they left extensions of themselves on that level to continue the business of gathering information, and they opened new channels of communication between the levels they knew and the ones above.

“The Nine not only adopted me, as an informant who could tell them a great deal about the universe outside Asgard; they also began to use the technology by means of which I was created, to construct more humanoid bodies. You called me an android, and I suppose you might think of the scions as androids also, but I do not think that designation is correct in either case. I am a true human, developed from a human egg-cell—albeit in unusual fashion. My new companions are true humanoids too. They were brought to adult form in a matter of months, and though the minds inside their heads are abridged versions of the minds of one or another of the Nine, they are entitled to be considered men and not machines. Because of the manner of their origin, they share just nine names, and distinguish themselves otherwise by number, so that they may know one another as different versions of their parent personalities.”

Again I noted how this made the prospect of a deal between the Nine and the Tetrax look healthy, and I wondered in my suspicious mind just how far the Nine had gone in making preparation for such a deal. The Tetrax had a long history of seductively playing the other galactic races for suckers, and I wasn’t distressed by the thought that they might be due for a strong dose of their own medicine.

“The Nine,” Myrlin went on, “were very disturbed by recent events in the upper layers. The Scarida, apparently, are an exceptional species; though they have not completely avoided the pattern which reduced most of the other transplanted races to savagery, they have managed to transcend their primitivism more rapidly than any of their neighbours. They have multiplied more rapidly, and have continued their expansion beyond their own level. They have met very little opposition until now, and know full well that they face a desperate task now that they have set themselves up in opposition to technologically superior opponents. It may not be easy, though, to persuade them that the limits of their expansion have been reached.

“The Nine knew that the task of forming a community of species out of the three very different factions which are now involved—the Scarid empire, the galactic community, and the levels known to the Nine—would not be an easy one, but they had to face the idea that the entire future of Asgard was at stake, and that they must play a role in the deciding of that future.

“That was the point at which the Nine decided to try a very daring experiment.”

“And that,” I put in, “is where things went seriously wrong?”

He nodded, slowly.

“What did they try to do?”

“They tried to connect themselves up to the software of Asgard itself—to extend themselves beyond the machinery of this particular habitat into the fundamental machinery of the macroworld itself. They projected their mind-group into the network of control systems that is built into the structure. The systems which impinge upon the habitats are, of course, simple ones governing the distribution of heat and light. The Nine presumed, though, that those systems must provide a means of access to further, more complicated systems, probably inhabited by machine- personalities like themselves. They believed that they could make contact with those personalities, by extending their own mind-group into the inner regions of Asgard’s ‘software space.’ ”

“They thought they could set up a hot line to the builders,” I said.

“In essence,” Myrlin agreed. “They hoped that at the very least they might find out about the true extent and nature of Asgard’s electronic ‘mind.’ ”

“Why didn’t it work?” I asked.

“Because the systems into which they tried to project themselves are themselves damaged. The Nine weren’t just sending a message out into the hardware in Asgard’s walls. They were transmitting themselves. All nine of them—because, though distinct, they are essentially inseparable.

“If the systems controlling Asgard had been simple and automatic, those systems would just have become part of the Nine’s extended body. If those systems had their own highly-refined artificial intelligences within them, then contact would have been made—albeit a kind of contact for which you and I have no ready-made analogy. It wouldn’t be like two humanoids meeting at a conference table—more like two immiscible liquids flowing together. The Nine didn’t think there was any real danger in what they were doing, even though they couldn’t know what kind of reception they might get from the intelligences they were trying to contact. They were wrong.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not entirely sure, and the Nine can’t explain it to me. I don’t know whether they were the victim of actual hostility or unfortunate circumstance. But whatever it was they made contact with down there, it went through their electronic selves like a bomb blast, injuring them very badly. They’re not dead, and they’re not quite incapable, but they’re seriously hurt. They may well have lost aspects of their own personalities, and—more ominously—they may have unknowingly picked up parts of other personalities. They’re no longer entirely coherent. Again, it’s difficult to find an analogy, but it’s as if you were to wake up feeling very weird, unable to access large chunks of your memory, occasionally acting without knowing what you were doing and why, maybe hearing voices too—as if your mind were no longer fully in control of itself or your body, and as if there were bits of other minds somehow lodged in your brain.”

I thought about it for a few minutes, trying to figure it all out. It didn’t quite come together to make a coherent picture—I thought I could see what he was getting at, but it was as dim and strange as those not-quite-focused faces in which guise which they had appeared to me. Anyhow, it seemed that our software supermen were no longer as super as they once had been. Which could make things complicated, if their grand plan still involved bringing peace and harmony to the whole of Asgard.

“It’s not at all clear what we can conclude from the Nine’s unfortunate experience,” said Myrlin. “But I’m rather afraid that there are two available ways of looking at it, neither of them encouraging.”

“Go on,” I said.

“If,” he said, emphasizing it heavily to let me know what a big if it was, “the builders of Asgard—or the guiding intelligence which the builders left behind to look after it—is an entity like the Isthomi instead of a humanoid species, then what happened to the Isthomi when they tried to contact it can only be interpreted in two ways. Either it’s hostile—or like everything else in and of this macroworld, it’s badly decayed: mad, senile, or incompetent.

“If the first hypothesis is true, we could all be in deep trouble—you, me, the inhabitants of Asgard, and the inhabitants of the galactic arm. There’s no way we can fight something like that. If the second hypothesis is true, the situation is even worse. All the aforementioned are still in trouble—and so is Asgard itself.”

“Not necessarily,” I countered.

“Oh no,” he said, “not necessarily. But think about this: if the Nine experienced the contact they made as a kind of bomb-blast, which has all but reduced them to helplessness, how do you think the other side experienced it? If’—that big if again—“it did the same to the indigenous systems, it might have done untold damage to Asgard. And you know what has to be in the middle of Asgard, to produce the energy that runs all the levels, don’t you?”

I did indeed. At the physical centre of Asgard, whatever was wrapped around it, there had to be a little star. The biggest artificial fusion reactor in the known universe.

“And you think . . . ?” I began.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do think that we’d better make every effort to find out.”