Asgard's Heart

36

There was a voice, although there was no image of a speaker. I still had no sense of sight, and I did not think that the voice was really heard. It was more like a spoken thought inside my mind, though it was not my thought.

We have re-established full contact with the starshell, whispered the disembodied voice. Its own systems are virtually inert; the greater part of its software space is devastated; and its defences still prevent our moving any machine with substantial intelligent software into its actual space. But we do have eyes there, thanks to the Isthomi. And there is one move which may yet work. We are preparing.

I had the opportunity, at last, to ask a question.

What am I? I was surprised by the frailty of my own thought-voice.

There is no time, Mr. Rousseau, the voice replied. Believe me, there simply is no time. You know who you are, and there is nothing to be gained from a discussion of the nature of things. It is not that we wish to use you as a mere tool, understanding nothing, but the Tetron is within minutes of destroying us all. The crisis is upon us now, and desperation urges us on. Watch!

Suddenly, there was light, and it was as if I could see, though I still had no sense of possessing a body, and the sight which I had was not the sight of human eyes. It was more like an image transmitted by a camera—transmitted into the depths of my consciousness, upon the screen of my imagination.

I could see a room, where several figures stood. One stood alone, while three others watched him, two before him and one to the side. The viewpoint from which I seemed to be looking was somewhat above them, looking down from the side of the lone man confronted by the two, over the shoulder of the third.

The lone figure was 673-Nisreen. Directly in front of him was a second Tetron—or, to be strictly accurate, a second person inhabiting a Tetron body. That was 994-Tulyar. Beside Tulyar stood Myrlin, and the one whose back was to me was John Finn.

But where am I? I thought. Where are Urania and Susarma Lear?

“I don’t understand,” Nisreen was saying, in parole. Obviously, we had come in on the middle of a conversation.

“You cannot be expected to understand,” Tulyar told him, in that soft, dead voice that had given me the creeps when I first heard it on the Nine’s home level. “All will be explained, in time, but for now, there is urgent work to be done, and it is simply a matter of duty. The starlet is nearly ready; the power build-up in its peripheral systems is becoming critical.”

I saw Nisreen look around, angry with confusion. “What is happening?” he asked. “Do you intend to destroy the macroworld?”

“Certainly not,” said the thing in Tulyar’s body. “Did Rousseau tell you that was what we intended? Is that how he persuaded you to join in this pursuit?”

Nisreen did not reply. The thing that was using Tulyar’s body had much better control of it now than when I had last seen it—in a former incarnation. Now it was no longer tongue-tied, and no longer had that manic stare, it could pass for a Tetron. It was even talking about duty. I could sense Nisreen’s uncertainty—the self-doubt which must be telling him that perhaps, after all, he had been wrong.

I realised, though, that one of those present had that zombie-like manner which I had once seen in Tulyar’s behaviour. I remembered the earlier voice, murmuring away to me while I was carried through a cloud. It had spoken of humanoids infected by enemy programmes—humanoids, in the plural.

“No, 673-Nisreen,” said the pseudo-Tulyar, “we do not intend to destroy the macroworld. It is we who intend to save it, and to save thousands of our brethren with it. The macroworld might have destroyed itself, if the power buildup within the starshell’s peripheral system had been allowed to continue, but we are here to prevent that happening. You should be thankful that your human friends finally met their match—had they succeeded in killing us all, Asgard might well have been doomed.”

“What is your ultimate purpose?” asked Nisreen uncertainly.

“We intend to return power to the macroworld. In fact, we intend to flood Asgard’s systems with power. We will send such a blast of energy into the labyrinth that it will devastate every system through which it passes—a tidal surge of power, which will destroy the godlike beings who have opposed us in this long and bitter war. But you need not fear for our fellow humanoids; they are not the target of the assault. Some will undoubtedly be inconvenienced. A few may die as an indirect result of our action, but they will be innocent bystanders. Our real enemies are entities of a different kind. It is the artificial intelligences created by those who built Asgard—the gods which they made to guide the destinies of their creation—that we must annihilate. From here, you see, we can direct the power-surge exactly as we wish, protecting those systems that we control and destroying those that we do not. We will certainly injure the macroworld slightly, and life in some of its artificial habitats will never be quite the same, but we shall do as little harm to your kind and mine as we can. We aim to preserve life— and to preserve ourselves. If our enemies were in our place, it is by no means certain that they would act as kindly.”

673-Nisreen stared at the creature that had once been his kin.

“What are you?” he asked. He seemed to be no longer angry, but simply curious.

“I am 994-Tulyar,” said the other, calmly. “I do not deny that I am more than I once was, but I remain who I have always been, and I demand your obedience to my authority. When the present task is complete, there will be much work still to be done, and the Tetrax are the natural heirs of that mission. The people of the macroworld must be brought into the brotherhood of humanoid species, and the remaining enemies of that brotherhood—the Isthomi and their kin—must be destroyed. There is much for the Tetrax to do, and much for humans, too.”

The last was said with a sidelong glance at John Finn. I could see that Finn looked unhappy and uncertain, but he was listening as intently as Nisreen.

“What kind of war is it that you are fighting?” asked Nisreen, levelly. “Rousseau represented it as a war between two kinds of life, or between life and anti-life. I could not understand.”

“Rousseau could not understand,” Tulyar’s voice replied. “Our allies are minds, like the minds which humanoid beings evolved and then set free within their machines, but they had different makers. Their ultimate origins, like ours, must be sought in the dark dust that drifts between the stars, but for what it is worth, it was their kind and not ours that were the first intelligences of the universe. The substance of life is the stuff of second-generation stars, while theirs had its origin in simpler matter. It is of little significance now, for both kinds of mind have transcended the matter that gave them birth. Material entities created gods, and now the gods dispute for control of the material entities that gave them birth. Asgard is one battleground; when this battle is settled the galaxy will become a battleground. But what you must understand, 673-Nisreen, is that it matters not at all to entities of flesh-and-blood which side they choose; they must have one or the other, but they owe no essential loyalty to either. We are Tetrax, 673-Nisreen, and our only loyalty is to the Tetrax, and to the galactic community whose ideological leaders we are. We must make whatever alliance will serve Tetra and the galaxy best, and that alliance is already forged.”

673-Nisreen seemed less than totally convinced, but he glanced sideways at John Finn. Neither he nor Finn said anything, but the glance spoke volumes. John Finn was turncoat through and through. He didn’t give a damn which side he was on, as long as he was looked after. Nisreen cared, but he didn’t know any longer which side was the side of right. He’d listened to my side of the story, based on what I’d experienced in my dreams—but how much could a human’s dreams count for in the eyes of a sceptical Tetron?

Nisreen looked at Myrlin, then, calmly appraising the state of the android. Myrlin’s eyes were glazed, and he was saying nothing, but he had a needier in his hand and he was all-too-obviously capable of using it.

The question I had asked myself before came back to mind: Where was I? Where was the Rousseau of flesh and blood, from whose brain I had been mysteriously born? As I looked at the thing that had once been my friend, I remembered the other Myrlin, and the strange light that had flared in his eye as he was about to die. In the moment of reaching out to save me, he had changed. Perhaps, if death had not claimed him, he might have destroyed me. I was overcome by the horrible suspicion that the Myrlin of flesh and blood had been used by some alien master to destroy the fleshly Rousseau.

Nisreen was looking at Tulyar again, but the thing that was wearing Tulyar’s body had turned away now. He was sitting down in front of some kind of console. It had a lot of controls—manual keyboards, and mechanical levers.

The intelligence in 994-Tulyar’s body took no further notice of the other Tetron. He seemed quite absorbed in his rapt contemplation of the console. He reached out tentatively to turn a couple of knobs, but then turned back again. He was as inscrutable as any real Tetron now, but I inferred that the final shot in the crazy war which had raged inside Asgard for hundreds of thousands of years was not quite ready for firing. On the other hand, he seemed to expect that the mechanical omens would become auspicious at almost any time. It was a matter of minutes rather than hours—and there didn’t seem to be anything that anyone could do to stop it.

It was nice to know, of course, that Asgard wasn’t going to be blown to bits after all, but if I read pseudo-Tulyar’s meaning right, the blast he was going to unleash would be a holocaust to consume all those inhabitants of software space who had opposed his kin.

Including me.

And there didn’t seem to be a damn thing that anyone could do about it.

But then the disembodied voice chipped in again, and said: No time at all, Michael Rousseau. You know what to do, even though you do not know that you know. There is no hope of establishing any physical interface by means of which we can transcribe you, and we believe that it was once explained to you that the transmission of personalities in any wave-encoded form is difficult in the extreme. There would be no hope of success, save that we are transmitting you into a brain which is already configured to contain you.

We are going to put you back into your body, Michael Rousseau, if we can—we must fire you like a bullet from a magical gun. We do not know if it will work, and we cannot tell how badly your body has been injured, but there is nothing else to be done. You are the very last shot that we can fire. We are sorry for the indecent haste, but there simply is no time to…