Asgard's Heart

7

I opened my eyes, and looked up into the ungodlike face of my old friend Myrlin. I was flat on my back and he was kneeling over me, peering at me with a measure of concern.

My back was hurting, but not so very badly. It was cushioned by something soft and yielding. I was slightly surprised to find that I was not in one of the Isthomi’s healing eggs being quietly restored to full fitness, but it seemed to be a time for counting my blessings and a quick survey of the relevant referents assured me that my body was still in one piece and that my mind, so far as I could tell, was still my own.

I looked around, and saw nothing but grey walls. The ceiling was rather ill-lit and there was a distinct lack of furniture and fittings. Susarma Lear was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall, watching me, with less apparent concern than Myrlin. The upper half of her was clad only in a light undershirt, and I guessed that her Star Force jacket was what was providing my injured back with a modicum of comfortable support.

“Where are we?” I asked, hoarsely.

“Safe, for the time being,” said Myrlin. “How do you feel?”

“Not so bad,” I said. “Just had a hell of a dream, though.”

“You’ll be okay,” he assured me. “The way the Isthomi have fixed us up, we heal quickly. The cuts and bruises won’t trouble you for long.”

I sat up, then reached behind me with tentative fingers to see what sort of damage I’d sustained. There was no moist blood, and the wounds didn’t complain too terribly about being touched. I looked down at the colonel’s jacket, and saw that it wasn’t badly stained. I picked it up and threw it to her.

“Thanks,” I said, as she caught it. She put it on, but didn’t fasten it. She looked rather tired.

“Anything to drink?” I asked Myrlin. “Even water would do.”

He shook his head.

I looked at the weapon which was propped up in a corner of the tiny room. “What is that thing?” I asked—unable to figure out how it had felled the dragon without so much as a bang, let alone a bullet.

“It’s some kind of projector,” said Myrlin. “I don’t understand the physics, but it creates some kind of magnetic seed inside a silicon brain, which grows—or explodes—into something disruptive, wiping out most of the native software in a fifth of a second or so. It’s a kind of mindscrambler, I suppose, except that it’s for artificial minds instead of fleshy ones.”

It was a gun that shot hostile software. The Nine were clever with that sort of thing. It crossed my mind, though, that it was a dangerous weapon to keep around the place. Presumably, it could be turned on the Nine just as easily as their enemies. I knew that they could trust Myrlin, but the thought of a Scarid regiment equipped with such weapons rampaging around the Isthomi worldlet was one that might make a lovely goddess frown.

“I don’t want you to think that I wasn’t impressed by the trick with the bazooka,” I said, “but how the hell did the Isthomi manage to let that thing into their garden?”

“The Isthomi have problems,” he answered. “Your dragon wasn’t the only thing that went on the rampage around these parts. The attack was sudden and surprising, and the Nine’s ability to oppose it was severely restricted by the fact that somebody had just switched the power off.”

I looked at him, blinking to clear my vision and working my tongue over my salivary glands to try to spread some moisture around my mouth.

“You mean,” I said, slowly, “that someone pulled the plug on the Nine’s hardware?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “I mean that as far as the Nine can tell, someone pulled the plug on the levels. All of them.”

I hadn’t quite recovered complete control of my faculties, so I stared helplessly at him for a minute or so. It was a fairly mind-boggling item of news. We knew that there were at least two thousand levels, each one containing anywhere between two and ten independent habitats—the equivalent of ten thousand habitable worlds. Some of those habitats were dead, others decaying, but most of the inhabited ones depended to a large extent on power drawn from the walls—power that was presumably generated by a starlet: a huge fusion reactor in the core of the macroworld.

Switching off that power wouldn’t mean that all the lights in Asgard had instantly gone out. Most of the habitats had bioluminescent systems that could run for a while without input, and some of the inhabitants had technical know-how adequate to the task of generating their own electricity to feed electric lights. Nor did it mean that every information-system in the macroworld had crashed; a great many of them would have some kind of emergency system to prevent their going down. The Nine would have had support systems to preserve themselves against accidents even of that magnitude—but the vast majority of their subsidiary systems and peripheral elements would have run on power drawn from the central supply. When the central supply went off, the Nine would have had to shut down ninety percent of their capacity—and if they had a physical invasion to fight off at the same time, they must have been stretched to the limit. They’d already been weakened twice by serious injury to their software; now, it seemed, someone or something was bent on smashing up their hardware. The software saboteurs of inner Asgard had turned Luddite.

“You’re saying,” I said, to make sure I had it right, “that in order to attack the Isthomi, someone has cut off power supplies to the entire macroworld.”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I think we can rule out coincidence, but it’s possible that the enemy simply had advance notice of the power being cut off, and decided to plan his assault on the Nine accordingly. The power-cut might be part of a grander campaign. If there really is a war going on in Asgard’s software space—and the Nine are convinced that there is—that war seems to be getting hotter by the hour.”

I looked around again, at the blank walls. Susanna Lear was still watching us, her eyes attentive despite her tiredness.

“We’re sealed off in a hidey-hole,” Myrlin told me. “The Nine have put solid walls around us; hopefully no more robot dragons will be able to find us, let alone break through to us. The real fight is going on back at the living-quarters. We three were lucky to be away from there for various reasons—we may yet turn out to be the sole survivors. The Nine don’t have many robots with fighting capability, nor any substantial store of weapons. The Scarida will fight, and the scions with them, but they may be up against overwhelming odds.

“It will take time to get power back to all the peripheral systems, and to get vehicles like the ones which brought you here on the move again. They’ll send something to pick us up when they can, and will activate the wall to talk to us once they’re certain that it won’t attract hostile attention. They didn’t know what they were up against when they last got a message to me, and they didn’t dare take too many chances.”

“Well,” I said, “so much for our fond hopes that the software damage they sustained in their contacts was just an unhappy accident. We really are caught up in a shooting war, and it doesn’t look as if the guys doing the shooting are prepared to consider us innocent bystanders. If the power doesn’t come back on…”

I remembered that Sigor Dyan had casually mentioned the total size of the Scarid population. There were tens of billions of them, without counting the members of races they’d displaced or conquered. Their tinpot empire had already been laid low by the plague that the Tetrax had loosed on them; now the power supplies which they believed to have been left to them by their kindly ancestors were suddenly gone. People were going to die. Lots of people. If the power didn’t come back on soon, every single habitat in the macroworld would be under threat, not merely of major disruption, but of total destruction.

“All in all,” I murmured, “I’d rather be in Skychain City.” All the systems in Skychain City had been installed by the Tetrax. The power-supply from the starlet had been switched off in levels one to four for a very long time.

“Why are they so determined to get us?” asked Susarma Lear harshly. “What makes us so interesting that someone would send something like that electric stick insect after us?”

Myrlin looked over his shoulder at her. “I don’t know,” he said soberly. “I’m not sure it’s anything personal. It looks to me like a chain reaction. Something down below was aroused from inaction by the attempt the Nine made to explore the information-systems in the Centre. At first it probably acted reflexively, but now it seems to be organising a strategy of destruction. The entity that contacted Mike while he was interfaced with the Isthomi is probably something different—if it really was appealing for help, it may have brought us to the attention of its enemies.”

“If your computerized buddies hadn’t gone prying,” she said, “we wouldn’t be in this mess.” She was still nursing aggressive feelings towards poor Myrlin.

“They wouldn’t have embarked upon that kind of exploration if it hadn’t been for what they learned from us,” he answered mildly. “And I wouldn’t have attracted their attention by buggering up one of their systems if you hadn’t been chasing me with murderous intent.”

“So it’s all my fault?” she said. Her voice was still cutting, but I thought that she had some appreciation of the irony of the situation.

“No,” I said. “You explained it to me before, remember? It’s all my fault, for not taking Myrlin in and keeping him safe until your assassination squad arrived. I suffered a momentary lapse of generosity, and the consequences of my churlishness have imperiled the whole bloody universe. Lack of charity is a terrible thing, don’t you think?”

“Well,” she said, “I’ll say one thing for you, Rousseau. Things are never dull when you’re around.”

“Not my fault,” I assured her. “Just lucky enough to be living in interesting times.”

The wall behind her suddenly lit up, presenting the appearance of another room, with that same silly chair and that same impeccable goddess. She was back in her thin dress, but I didn’t ask her to change it. One Star Force colonel at a time was quite enough for me.

Her face was not shaped to show anxiety or stress. Indeed, it radiated imperturbability. I wasn’t sure whether that meant that everything was under control, or whether things were so awful that the Nine didn’t dare to let on.

“I will try to get a vehicle to you in a short time,” she said. “I am sorry that it has taken so long.”

“Have you zapped all the mantises?” I asked.

“The robot invaders have all been disabled or sealed in,” she said. “Many systems are still non-functional, and the damage is severe, but the situation is now stable.”

“We can’t rely on it remaining stable,” I said. “We’ve got to get ready to make our bid for the Centre as soon as possible. We can’t just hang around, getting battered by one attack after another.”

“I agree, Mr. Rousseau,” she said, with a little smile that I didn’t entirely like. “We must waste no more time before making a serious attempt to find out precisely what is going on in the deeper levels, and how we can rectify the situation. The power-supply must be restored, and the hostile force which is attempting to destroy us must be neutralised.”

“Is the robot transporter safe?” asked Myrlin. He meant the one that the Nine had been building for our journey to the Centre. If we’d lost that, we might not have any alternative but to sit tight and wait for the next attack.

“It is safe,” replied the Nine, “but it may be irrelevant. There is another way to make the attempt to reach the Centre, and this attack leads us to believe that we must attempt both, as soon as we possibly can.”

My first thought was that they meant the deep elevator shaft which had brought us down from level fifty-two. It wasn’t much use for our purposes, partly because it didn’t go down much further, and partly because it wasn’t big enough to carry a heavy armoured vehicle. But then I realised that without the central power-supply, the elevator wouldn’t work. I also realised that without the central power-supply to open doors and activate other elevators, it was going to be a very tough job getting a truck down into the bowels of the macroworld—even if we could discover a route.

“What better way?” Myrlin had asked, while I was realising all that.

“Through software space,” she replied.

“You already tried that,” I pointed out, “and were nearly destroyed. Besides, we can’t go through software space, can we?” It occurred to me even as I was saying it that it might be an unwise remark.

“Yes you can, Mr. Rousseau,” she told me. “And if our present understanding of the situation is correct, we think that the entity which has made contact with you intends that you should.”

Ever since humans first began building so-called artificial intelligences, people had looked forward to the day when it would be possible to duplicate a human mind in machine-based software. In the home system, our software scientists had not yet come close to the skill and sophistication that would be necessary to carry out such a task, but other races in the galactic community had got closer—the manufacture of Myrlin’s personality by the relatively unsophisticated Salamandrans was a pointer to the possibility that such play with artificial minds was only just over the conceptual horizon. The Nine had begun their own existence as simulations of the personalities of another kind of Isthomi, incarnate in flesh very little different from mine. The entity which had contacted me while I was interfaced with the Isthomi had, it seemed, made some kind of biocopy of its own programming to colonise the software space inside my brain. The Isthomi had made similar biocopies of themselves in order to equip the fleshly scions which they had made. If that could be done, so could the reverse process: the Isthomi could make a machine-code copy of my personality within their own systems, including the extra software that the contact had foisted on me.

It was only natural, I realised, that the Nine had jumped to a conclusion which hadn’t even occurred to me—that when my mysterious contactees had cried for help, they had expected that help to come through software space, not through the cracks and crevices of Asgard’s massive macroarchitecture.

I was by no means convinced that it was a good idea.

“You want to make a copy of me,” I said. “And send that copy out into software space to run the gauntlet of whatever it was that blasted you when you tried to reach the Centre.”

“We have reasons for thinking that you might be able to succeed,” she assured me.

“Maybe so,” I said. “But I’m not so sure that I want to send a software copy of myself to the Centre. In fact, I’m not so sure that I want any software copies of me hanging about anywhere. You might have got used to being nine persons in one, but I’m accustomed to there being just one of me. I think I told you that I’m an essentially solitary person. I really wouldn’t like to have to use numbers to distinguish each of my particular selves from all the other ones. It just isn’t my style.”

“Why do you think that Rousseau might succeed where you failed?” asked Susarma Lear, cutting through my objections as though they didn’t much matter. I had a nasty suspicion that they didn’t.

“We are now forewarned of the dangers and difficulties,” replied the image in the wall. “We believe that we can now make software personas far less vulnerable to destruction than the exploratory probes which we have previously sent out. Such personas can be encrypted, written in an arcane language.”

“What’s an arcane language?” I asked, feeling slightly foolish.

But Susarma Lear was nodding, as though she understood. “It’s what the Star Force—and everyone else—uses to protect its systems from hostile software,” she said, airily. You can never be absolutely certain that you can keep tapeworms out of your machinery, so you have to make sure that the damage they do to your software once they’re there is strictly limited. What you do is to keep your own information in a special code—an arcane language— which is immune to the spoiling that the tapeworm tries to do. If you’re clever enough, the invader programme is unable to crash your system or bugger up your data. Right?”

She had turned to look at me, but now she turned back to face the avatar of Athene who looked, in some ways, uncannily like her. I had never thought of Susarma Lear as a dead ringer for Athene; personally, I thought that she was infinitely more convincing as a valkyrie.

“That is substantially correct,” admitted the woman in the wall.

“Why can’t you just make copies of yourselves in your arcane languages?” I asked. “You know how to operate in software space, and I don’t. I’d be no use to you at all.”

“There are two reasons why that may not be so,” she answered calmly. “First of all, we are very much creatures of Asgard. Even though we have spent an unspecifiable span of time in a state that we now recognise as virtual imprisonment, cut off from the other native systems of the macroworld, we are nevertheless adapted by our nature and evolution for interaction with those systems. That gives us a certain amount of power, but it also makes us vulnerable. It would be very difficult for us to translate ourselves into a form in which we could protect ourselves from attempts by other native systems to attack and injure us.

“Your persona, on the other hand, has evolved in very different circumstances, and is quite alien to the native systems. If the analogy will help you, you might think of yourself as a virus to which Asgard has no inbuilt immunity, whereas we—even in mutated form—are viruses to which there is already a great deal of inbuilt resistance.”

It wasn’t particularly flattering to be compared to a virus, but I could live with it.

“And the second reason?” I queried.

“Medusa’s head,” she replied succinctly. I was glad to see that Susarma Lear now looked completely at a loss.

“You think I’ve got a weapon,” I said, uneasily. “You think that whoever called for help gave me something I could use to answer the call: the biocopy.”

“If it is a weapon,” she told me, “it is probably a weapon which can only be used in software space. The biocopy itself is probably useless, save perhaps as a source of information. But if we can re-copy it along with the rest of your persona, encrypted to the best of our ability, then it may become a powerful instrument—perhaps as potent as Medusa’s head.”

As a source of information, whatever the entity had put into my head was certainly lacking in clarity. As messages from the world beyond go, my remarkable dreams were themselves pretty heavily encrypted. But I wasn’t about to accept too readily the theory that I could be a hotshot superhero, if only I were rid of my body.

“What about you?” I said to Myrlin. “What have you been dreaming about lately?”

He looked at me in a way that told me he had already been interrogated on that point. He also looked slightly sad. “Nothing,” he told me. “If whatever was out there tried to transcribe a biocopy into my brain, it seems that it didn’t take. We’re not certain about 994-Tulyar, but you were the only one who made any kind of conscious contact, and it looks as though you were the only one able to take what they tried to give us.”

“Oh merde” I said, with a kind of sigh I didn’t even know I could produce.

I had the distinct impression that I had once again been drafted into a war which I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic to fight. As usual, though, it seemed that I might find it very difficult to say no.