Asgard's Conquerors

27

Later, Myrlin had to leave. It was time for 994-Tulyar to awake, and he wanted to be there, in order to begin the lengthy business of explanation all over again. He wanted to put Tulyar into direct contact with the Nine as soon as possible, so that Tulyar could begin the work of bringing peace and harmony to the upper levels.

“I’m hoping that the scions will be able to bring some of the Scarid leaders down here soon,” Myrlin told me. “The Scarida will have to put themselves in the hands of the scions, of course, and leave their hardware at home—but if they have any notion at all of the realities of the situation they’ll come. We can bring them swiftly and directly here— one thing the Nine did get from their excursion into the structural systems was a much more elaborate picture of the connections between the levels. As I told you, we now have access to a shaft which goes directly from this level to fifty- two, with a working elevator still in it.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Stay out of it for the time being. The Nine do want to talk to you, though. They’ll probably send a couple of the scions over to do the talking, but they’ll hear everything themselves. Don’t be alarmed by the scions—they’re partial personalities of members of the Nine, modified for life as humanoid individuals, and they’re somewhat weird, but they’ve made a lot of progress during the last months. We can’t make any more for the time being—we just wouldn’t be able to fill their heads effectively now that the Nine have been injured. We daren’t run the risk of producing madmen. A great pity—we should have made hundreds more, in a dozen different forms, while we had the chance. We may need them. By the way: Finn should be waking up too—or would you rather we kept him in the tank?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Send him out. I’ll look after him. What about Susarma Lear?”

He shook his head. “Another twenty-four hours, I should think,” he said.

After he had gone, the furry humanoids came to visit. There were two, and they were certainly somewhat weird.

“We are Thalia-7 and Calliope-4,” said one of them, peering at me with big brown eyes. They looked more like Tetrax than humans, but their hair was shaggier and much lighter in colour, and their faces weren’t as compact. They had wide mouths and rubbery lips, and put me in mind of steep-faced orangutans.

“Thalia and Calliope?” I queried.

“The Nine have no names; they have no need of them. When they created our partial personalities, we adopted names suggested by your species-cousin Myrlin, and numbered different versions of each parent personality in a fashion similar to your more distant species-cousins, the Tetrax.”

They sat down together on a sofa, moving almost in unison. They could easily have been twins, and I would have inferred from the way they stuck so close that they were aspects of the same personality rather than different ones, but I guessed that it might take two to make a crowd, and remembered that they didn’t like “solitude.” I couldn’t tell what sex they were, but in view of the fact that they’d chosen to name themselves after the Muses, I decided to think of them as being on the female side of neuter.

“Why are you so interested in me?” I asked them. “Paradoxical as it may seem, Myrlin probably has more of the heritage of human knowledge locked up in his mind than I do, even though he’s never been to the solar system.”

“But you have seen so much more of the universe—and you know much more than he about Asgard. In any case, it is good to talk as well as to know. To express knowledge . . .” She groped momentarily for words, then concluded: “... is to create being.”

I looked at them both, uneasily aware of the fact that these were beings more alien than any humanoids I had ever before encountered.

“I thought the Nine’s machines had picked my mind clean,” I said. “I thought you knew more about me than I do.”

Calliope shook her head, obviously intending the gesture to be read as a negation. “We know much,” she assured me, “but there is a sense in which we also know little—so very little. We can only know about you by hearing your own account. In one sense, that is the only real account that can be given. Do you follow?”

I thought I did. The real person is the active, thinking, talking person. I was the only one who could tell them about me. And it was something that had to be told, not extracted by neuronal taproots plugging into my brain. They might have copied my brain’s software in some arcane fashion, but that wasn’t the same thing as knowing the person who belonged to that brain.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

They wanted to know a great deal. About myself; about the history of mankind; about the evolution of life on earth; about cosmology and cosmogony and atomic physics and things that go bump in the night. In some sense, they knew it all already, but they wanted to hear it. There was a great deal that I couldn’t tell them, and much that was very difficult for me to put into the proper words, given my own ignorance and lack of expertise, but I tried.

All the while, they watched me. It was as if they were studying me, learning how to be human . . . how to be humanoid. They were unfailingly courteous in asking questions—like great grave children anxious for the low- down on the business of adult living.

And in the end, of course, they asked me about Asgard— about who might have built it, and why, and what I thought about it, and what my reasoning was.

So we were back to the heart of the matter again, back to the thing that could hardly help but fascinate us all. Except that the matter was more complicated now, because the Nine had their own unfortunate experience to add to the register of perplexing evidence.

We talked for a long time, and much of what we said even about Asgard simply went over old ground. I told them about the galactic races, and about all the things I’d discussed with 673-Nisreen aboard Leopard Shark—all of which was news to them. We had a sense of getting nearer to the whole picture, but we still didn’t have enough to put it all together.

“The Ark scenario still looks most likely,” I told them. “The way I had it figured, on the basis of what I saw in the levels while the Scarida were taking me to prison, was that the builders of Asgard were making an object to contain thousands of environments, reproducing the conditions of a whole galaxy full of inhabited worlds. From each world they then took a series of ecosystems, and a handful of indigenes. But what Myrlin told me about the Isthomi doesn’t quite square with that. There, it seems, the parent culture was living in a macroworld like Asgard, with no memory of any worldly existence. So maybe Asgard is a daughter macroworld, reproducing the structure and cultural diversity of an earlier model. In which case—was the earlier model an Ark, or do we face an infinite regress?”

“We are more anxious about the disaster which appears to have overtaken the world,” said Thalia-7. “What we have discovered about the outermost levels of Asgard is puzzling. For one thing, the outermost levels seem once to have had a level of technological sophistication that few of the levels below have reproduced, even though they were evacuated long ago. Wherever the inhabitants of those outer levels went, it was not to the levels immediately below. But the mystery of where they went is perhaps a lesser matter, compared with the mystery of why?”

“The standard theory is that Asgard lost most of its atmosphere passing through a dense, cold cloud, and that the levels had to be evacuated because of that. We always supposed that the outermost levels, unlike the levels below, relied upon an external source of energy—an outer sun rather than an inner one.”

“That is a possibility,” conceded Calliope-4—the two scions tended to take it in turns to speak—“but given that levels just below the outermost ones are equipped to draw energy from the distribution-system which exists in the walls of the macrostructure, we find it difficult to believe that the outermost levels could not have been sustained through any such disaster. We also cannot understand how the temperature in those outer levels fell so very far. We think it could not have done so by virtue of any natural process. We tend to favour the hypothesis that the outermost levels were deliberately cooled, and that the regions whose temperature was reduced almost to absolute zero were set up as a kind of defensive barrier.”

“A barrier against what?”

“Some kind of invasion.” Thalia took up the thread again. “Not by entities such as you or we, but by something microscopic, on the same size-scale as bacteria or viruses.”

I remembered all those bacteria, frozen in the rings of Uranus for four billion years, and still viable. But the temperature in the vicinity of Uranus was still tens of degrees Kelvin. Cold preserves, but not absolute cold. Maybe it was easier to freeze the outer layers of the macroworld than heat them up or irradiate them to the level needed to destroy a microscopic invader. But it was difficult to believe. Bacteria are no threat to an advanced biotechnology, and viruses can be combated too. Myrlin had assured me that neither he nor I now had anything to fear from that kind of attack.

I explained to them that there was yet another aspect of the problem which interested me, and that the existence of entities like Asgard might help to explain why all the galactic starfaring races were about the same age. I pointed out that one could easily invert the story about Asgards—it seemed that we were now entitled to speak in the plural— being populated in the first instance by borrowing from the ecospheres of worlds. Perhaps, instead, the ecospheres of worlds were populated by borrowing from Asgards. I explained my gardening analogies: Asgard as a seed-nursery, its builders as planters, engaged in a project of colonization whose time-scale ran to millions of years. They thought the story more plausible and more palatable than Nisreen had—but they were used to the idea of personalities inhabiting inorganic hardware, whose sense of time was very different from that of planet-born humanoids.

The galactics had always imagined the builders of Asgard in their own image—encouraged, of course, by the fact that the one-time inhabitants of the outer layers had been humanoid. The Nine, obviously, had always thought of the builders as beings more like themselves—beings whose personalities might be distributed through the systems of the entire macroworld. That would have looked like the more likely hypothesis, now I knew that it was on the map of possibilities, except for two things. How could we explain what had happened to the Nine when they tried to contact these hypothetical master-builders? And why would beings like the Nine, only more so, be interested in seeding whole galaxies with the kind of DNA that eventually produced humanoid beings?

“If the chronology of the Nine is anywhere near accurate,” I said, “then it can’t have been this Asgard which seeded the galactic arm with the genes of my remote proto-mammalian ancestors. Perhaps the one that did has gone away again. On the other hand, there’s every chance that there are other Asgards lurking about in the galaxy—even in the local region of space, which has been very imperfectly explored. If the others aren’t in solar systems, we wouldn’t have a snowball in hell’s chance of locating them. We travel between star-systems in wormholes—for all we know, the depths of interstellar space might be lousy with macroworlds. Maybe we only found this one because something did go wrong with it.”

I think we could have gone on for several more hours, but we were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was a curiously homely sound to be hearing in that bizarre place.

“That’ll be Finn,” I said, as I went to answer it.

I was due full marks for deduction. When I opened the door of Myrlin’s little igloo, I found that it was indeed John Finn who was standing on the doorstep. But he wasn’t quite as I had expected to see him.

For one thing, he had a gun, which he was pointing at my chest. I could tell by his expression that he wouldn’t be at all averse to using it. It wasn’t a mud gun either—it was the kind of gun the invaders used. Given that, the second surprise dovetailed perfectly with the first. As well as the scion who’d presumably been appointed by Myrlin to guide him here, he had three Scarida with him, one of whom was my old adversary with the sky-blue eyes.

They were all carrying guns.

Only a soldier, I reminded myself, as a sinking feeling took possession of my stomach. He’s only a soldier.

It seemed that this particular enemy weren’t quite ready to negotiate on our terms. In fact, it looked as if they weren’t in a negotiating mood at all.