Asgard's Heart

21

When we came to rest, the truck’s front end was pointed downwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. We had not been brought to an abrupt stop, nor had we been bounced about very much on the way down. All in all, it had been a pretty smooth ride. I calculated that we’d been traveling with the dustslide for the best part of half a minute, but I couldn’t translate that into distance. The acceleration due to gravity was pretty tame down here, and we’d had the dust to slow us up as well. We certainly hadn’t got to the bottom of the world, but in Asgardian terms we could be at the bottom of a fairly deep well, buried in dirt.

I could see through the window that it wasn’t just dirt that we were buried under. It was a thick, glutinous liquid. We were at the bottom of a sea of mud.

I already knew that the truck could climb down an empty shaft, but I wasn’t at all sure that it could swim.

“Anybody hurt?” I asked.

Nobody answered. I assumed that could be taken as an all-round no.

“What do we do now?” asked Susarma Lear. Like the rest of us she had both hands on the ledge of the dashboard in front of her, bracing herself so that she didn’t slide off the seat. The window looked like a dull mirror, silvered by the dust in which we were buried, and I could see her shadowy reflection looking at me.

Nobody answered her question either.

Then there came a strange sound, as if something was being scraped along the side of the vehicle. Wherever we were, we weren’t alone.

“Is the side of the truck clear?” I asked Urania, wondering whether it was only the cab that was under the drift.

“No,” she said, shortly. She was fluttering her fingers over the body of her mechanical sister, her brow furrowed with intense concentration.

The sound continued, moving closer now, until it was at the side of the cab. It was no longer a single scrape but a combination, and the sounds were now coming from three different directions. As I looked at the dim reflection of Susarma’s face I saw it suddenly dissolve as though exploded, and actually winced before I realised that it was the mud which had been disturbed, not the person whose image it had caught. There was something moving in the ooze, pressing against the truck as if trying to grip it.

It was like a section of segmented tubing, pale and slimy. It extended itself across the windscreen, as though it were a piece of rope that was being wound carefully around the truck.

“Oh shit,” said Susarma. “It’s a bloody worm. A giant worm.”

I knew there was no need to be frightened—at least, not of the worm. It could be the biggest and nastiest worm in the universe, but it wasn’t going to be able to break in. To judge by the scraping sounds it was either coiling itself tightly about us, or it had three or four friends with it, but it was still quite impotent. On the other hand, its presence wasn’t exactly comforting.

“What do we do?” Susarma asked again, obviously hoping that someone had thought of a brilliant plan in the interval which had passed since she last enquired. I hadn’t, so I looked at Urania, who was still busy communing with the magic box.

“We are extending pseudopods,” she said. “There is a rigid surface beneath us, on which the pseudopods can find purchase. Then we must drag ourselves through the mud.”

“It sounds,” I observed, “as if that might take a long time.”

We waited. Then she said: “We are close to the bottom of a cleft. There is an upward slope about thirty metres away, inclined about twenty degrees to the horizontal. With luck, it should not take too long to free us from the mud.”

She didn’t sound over-optimistic. That wasn’t entirely surprising. We still had to pick up the trail of the other truck. With the ground turning liquid and the local bugs busy gobbling up the organic trace we were supposed to be following, that might not be easy. If we were unlucky, we’d be lost—and of all the places I could think of to be lost in, this was far from being my favourite.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” I asked.

“It will not be necessary,” she assured me. “Perhaps you should take the opportunity to rest.” She seemed perennially keen to make sure that I got my beauty sleep.

I didn’t think the wait would be very restful no matter what I did, but I didn’t like the thought of remaining braced against the windscreen, watching the worms go by. I climbed out of the cab into the hind part of the truck.

673-Nisreen had woken up when we stopped. He had turned himself around in his bunk so that it was his feet that were pointed downward at a forty-five degree angle, but he didn’t look very comfortable. He asked me what had happened and I told him, as succinctly as I could. Instead of getting into my bunk I sat down on the sloping floor, in the narrow space between the two sets of shelves. It was as comfortable a position as I could find.

“How’s the arm?” I asked.

“The scion set it well,” he told me. “The slide jarred it, but I do not think it did any further damage.” Like all Tetrax, he was committed to making light of his suffering. They consider themselves to be a very dignified race.

“I think I have another piece of the jigsaw,” I said.

He didn’t understand me. Obviously, the parole word into which I’d translated “jigsaw” didn’t have the right connotations.

I told him about my dream. Urania was busy, but I figured that Clio would be listening in somehow.

“Whatever they copied into my brain,” I told him, when I’d finished, “seems to be intended to tell us what the situation is, as well as helping us to deal with it. Comparing its tactics with what the thing that got into Tulyar seems to have done, I’m inclined to believe that we’re on the side of the humanitarians—which makes it the right side, in my book. I only wish I could get a proper grip on whatever it’s trying to teach me. What is this anti-life? You’re a bioscientist—what could it be?”

He was a Tetron bioscientist, which meant that he had an inbuilt evasiveness when it came to guesswork and speculation, but I could tell that what I’d told him intrigued him a little.

“The simplest hypothesis,” he said, carefully, “might suppose it to be something which has the same characteristics as DNA-based living systems—the tendencies of growth, self-replication, evolution of complexity, and so on—but with a different chemical basis. If its fundamental molecular system was a different carbon chain, this other system might be locked into a universe-wide competition with DNA for the elements of life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen.”

“So an Asgard-type macroworld would then become both an Ark and a fortress in the context of an ongoing war between DNA-life and X-life for sole possession of the universe? It would be designed to collect and preserve DNA-forms, and also to seed worlds where the elements of life are available. But there are X-life macroworlds too, manned by X-life humanoids and X-life software entities, trying to do much the same thing. And each side is trying to shoot down the other side’s macroworld.”

“Perhaps,” said Nisreen, though I could tell that it wasn’t a scenario he cared for.

“What are the alternatives?”

“These anti-life entities might not be able to produce mirror-images of the life-systems which DNA has built. Perhaps only DNA produces trees, insects, humanoids… perhaps a system based in different molecules would produce very different forms. Perhaps it could not produce metazoan entities at all—perhaps nothing more complicated than a bacterium. But that would not explain the apparent presence of hostile software entities within Asgard. Perhaps the anti-life sequence of evolution does not involve carbon at all—perhaps it involves different elements, and begins to touch the world of life only at the point when its intelligent, manipulative entities begin to build intelligent machines whose brains are silicon-based.”

“But what, in that case, would the war be about? What would be the purpose of the worldlets?”

“To collect and to seed, as you have already suggested. But it might help to explain the curious situation we find here if we suppose that the invaders of Asgard really have nothing against the organic inhabitants of the worldlets, and would be quite content to let them alone. They might envisage themselves as being in competition—and hence in conflict—only with the software intelligences. That would explain why life of our kind has never been wiped out or seriously threatened, although the attempt made by the Isthomi to explore the software space of inner Asgard invoked such a powerful reaction.”

I considered the two alternatives. They both had certain attractions. I couldn’t immediately see a way of deciding between them. Nor could I see any reason to suppose that they were the only two hypotheses that might be entertained.

“Can you think of any others?” I asked Nisreen.

“The game of speculation,” he parried, “can be played indefinitely. There are always more.”

“Tell me,” I said.

“It is outside the scope of my expertise,” he said.

“I don’t think this is an appropriate time to get coy,” I told him. “The guys back on Tetra will probably never know. You can be as wild as you like.”

“In that case,” he said, “we can multiply hypotheses simply by pushing the level of competition further and further back. We have imagined life based in an alternative organic chemistry. We have imagined pseudo-life based in the chemistry of other elements than carbon. If we are to exercise our imaginations more fully, we might attach the phenomena which are associated with life—replication, evolution, control of the environment—to things other than those transactions of atoms and molecules which we categorise as ‘chemistry.’ If there are to be no limits upon what we suppose, then we may babble about quasi-living systems and intelligences at the subatomic level, or at the level of the structuring of space itself. You have no doubt been told that if the fundamental constants of physics had other values than the ones they have now, life of our kind would be impossible. It is possible to speculate that those characteristics themselves are in some way open to manipulation— but at this point the imagination of beings like us is tested to its limit. I, at least, can no longer construct a coherent account of what might be going on.”

I remembered that what seemed to be happening in my dream was a failure of the imagination… an inability to get a grip on things. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe any story that Nisreen and I could think up must be false, for the simple reason that we had to make it make sense, and the reality didn’t. Maybe the answer was so peculiar that we couldn’t even formulate it—but maybe not so peculiar that it was beyond the imagination of an advanced software persona. Maybe the things that were fighting this grotesque war had reasons for doing so that we could never comprehend. Maybe even the Nine were too primitive and too stupid: mere godling cannon-fodder in a conflict which concerned them hardly more than it concerned us.

I remembered the end of the dream, and the other dreams, and the way in which a mythical framework of understanding kept imposing itself, incomprehensibly, upon what might well be attempts by the biocopy in my brain to help me figure out the what and why of things.

I tried to explain that to Nisreen—to tell him something about the ideas underlying Greek and Norse mythology—in order to ask him what dreams poor Tulyar might have had, and what vocabulary of symbols the Tetron mind might draw upon in parallel with my experiences.

“With us it is not the same,” he said. “Your present culture is a patchwork, made by the drawing together of many ancestral tribes which had different languages and different ways of thought, having dispersed geographically long before inventing agriculture and settling down. Your entire history is dominated by the idea of a small local tribe surrounded by aliens… by enemies.

“On Tetra, our ancestors discovered agriculture and settled down before dispersing geographically, so that our gradual colonization of the various regions of our world was more like the growth of a single culture. In time, we developed different languages and other cultural differences, but our history has always been dominated by the idea of one tribe, changing and diversifying. You see the influence of this idea in our resistance to exaggerated individualism, and in our habit of numbering ourselves within our name-groups. Not until we began to travel among the stars did we find ourselves to be one tribe among many, and we have always been concerned to bind the galactic community together as a great whole, uneasily aware that it might be impossible or inappropriate to do so. That is why we take such an interest in theories of history and researches in biology that credit all the galactic humanoids with a common ancestry of some kind.

“In terms of our mythology, we were always monotheists. A single tribe very quickly produced the notion of a single god. That idea, in its turn, gave way fairly readily to the notion of a universe that, although godless, is law-governed and ordered as a great machine. Our historical scientists believe that is why the Tetrax are the most scientifically-advanced race in the galactic arm, although we are no older, in evolutionary terms, than any other.

“We have nothing in our cultural and mythological heritage which resembles the complicated notions of your ancient Greeks or Norsemen—the idea of Gotterdammerung would be entirely alien to us. We have not even the kind of covert dualism that is built into your supposedly monotheistic religions, which oppose a law-making god with an adversary or a subversive chaos. It may be, I think—for reasons which are purely accidental—that you have far better resources in the imagination for representing what seems to be going on around us than 994-Tulyar had. It may be that coincidence has helped to model your mythical thinking on a pattern which really is reproduced in the universe, in a conflict of godlike beings with which we have somehow become entangled.”

My head was beginning to ache again, but not with the effort of thought. What Nisreen had said was fascinating in more ways than one. One of the ways in which it was fascinating was that it might help to explain why I was being fitted up by fate to take a part in whatever was going on around us. It suggested that there might be something about the human mind—as moulded by its historical and cultural heritage—which enabled it to adapt to the context in which the war inside Asgard could be seen to have meaning. It suggested, in fact, that my other self, copied and encrypted by the Isthomi and then sent forth upon his heroic quest through Asgard’s other dimensions, might indeed be enabled to achieve something which no other humanoid could do as well.

For the first time, I paused to wonder how he was getting on, and what he might be up to in those realms of Asgard which were the true habitation of the gods. Was he yet in sight of Valhalla? Or had he suffered instead the dire penalty of hubris?

I didn’t suppose that I would ever find out, but my insatiable desire to speculate made me think about it anyhow, until I was interrupted by Susarma Lear, who stuck her head into the back of the transporter and said: “We got lucky.”

“You mean we picked up the trail of the other truck?” I said.

“Not exactly,” she replied. “There’s no sign of the trace it was supposed to be laying down for us, and we might easily have lost it for good—if it hadn’t started transmitting a Mayday. The opposition are still on this level… and they’re in trouble.”

She was right, of course. We’d got lucky. But I wasn’t about to start cheering yet. Until we found out just what kind of trouble the opposition was in, we had no way of knowing whether we could avoid the same fate.