Asgard's Heart

9

My own room was mercifully undamaged, and I was glad to be able to retreat into it at last. I removed my bloodstained shirt as carefully as I could, and inspected the damage with the aid of a couple of mirrors. The cuts seemed superficial, and were already on the mend—I obviously healed quickly now that the Isthomi had tuned up my body. I knew, though, that it was no good being potentially immortal if I persisted in such hazardous activities as standing next to explosions and playing hunt-the-human with fire-spitting dragons. What it would take to kill me, I didn’t know, but I didn’t particularly want to test myself to the limit.

I asked the dispenser to give me something for my headache, and was pleased that it was still capable of obliging me, even though the something was only aspirin.

Then I sat down on my bed, and relaxed for a little while.

A little chime sounded, but it wasn’t the door or the phone. It was the Nine’s discreet request for permission to ennoble my walls with their active presence.

“Okay,” I said, tiredly. “I’m decent.” It was a slight exaggeration, but I knew that the Nine didn’t care.

They presented me with the customary female image, but she was standing, and she was wearing the Star Force uniform. It would have been in keeping with the propriety of the moment if she’d had a regulation flame-pistol in her belt, but even the Nine weren’t prepared to go that far for the sake of mere appearances.

“I haven’t made up my mind yet,” I told her. “And although it probably testifies to the limitations of my imagination, I actually care far more about what’s going to happen to this sad bundle of meaty bones than the heroic exploits of any non-carbon copy of its animating spirit.”

“I would like you to tell me about the dream,” she said calmly.

“The dream?”

“When you were unconscious in the aftermath of the incident in the garden you had a dream.”

“Is it important?”

“I believe so. It is the means by which the biocopy in your brain is making itself known to you. The imagery is undoubtedly borrowed—much as the image which I present to you now is borrowed—but there seems to be a serious attempt at communication going on… perhaps a desperate one.”

I told her as much as I could remember. She winkled out a few extra details by shrewd cross-examination. I was glad I’d had the aspirin.

“The core of the dream,” she assured me, “is the series of images which you saw in approaching its climax. The wolf-pack; the diseased world-tree; the ship of the dead; the traitor; the fiery army; the bridge; the face of a god.”

“I don’t think it means anything in particular,” I told her. “I know where it comes from. It’s part of another myth-set from my homeworld—the set from which we borrowed the name Asgard. The things I saw were all part of the build-up to Gotterdammerung… the twilight of the gods. It’s not unnatural that I should try to represent a war inside Asgard in those terms: the gods versus the giants in the ultimate conflict. How else could I try to get to grips with what’s happening here? It all comes out of something I read once, just like Medusa.”

“There is no way that the biocopy can make itself known to you save by exploiting the meaning of your own ideas,” she told me. “It must speak to you by means of an imagistic vocabulary which you already know. It cannot invent—it can only select, and inform by selection. This notion of an ultimate war between humanoid gods and giants might be an invention of your own mind, but it must also be information given to you by the new programme that has colonised your brain. We must treat it as a message, and try to understand what it is trying to tell us.”

I shrugged. “Okay,” I said. “There’s a war going on. How does it help us to characterise the sides as gods and giants? Does it tell us which side is which? Does it tell us who’s trying to destroy us, and why? And does it tell us what we’re supposed to be doing about it?”

“Perhaps it does,” she replied with infuriating persistence, “if we can read the imagery correctly.”

“Read on, then,” I said impatiently.

“The primary personalities involved in this conflict are not humanoids,” she said. “In fact, they are not organic beings at all. They are artificial machine-intelligences—akin to ourselves, but more complex and more powerful. The organic beings which created the Nine were making machine-minds in the image of their own personalities. The machine-intelligences engaged in this war were designed for different and more ambitious purposes. Some, we must presume, were designed to operate and control the macroworld—these are the entities that are represented in your dream as the gods of Asgard. The others, we suspect, must have been created for the specific purpose of attacking the macroworld and destroying its gods— these are the beings that are represented in your dream by the giants. They may not actually be intelligent—perhaps they are destructive automata akin to the things you call tapeworms— but they seem to be capable of wreaking considerable havoc.

“If we are to take the imagery seriously, the plight of the gods is desperate—the forces which are attempting to destroy them are pressing forward their attack. That attack threatens all the organic life in Asgard—represented by the world-tree of your dream—but some organic life-forms may have become instruments of the attackers—that is what is signified by the image of the traitor. Somehow, there is a vital function to be served by organic entities, although we cannot be sure whether that function is to be served by actual organic entities or by software personas which mimic them. That there is a heroic role to be played we are convinced, but where and how it must be acted out, we are not certain.”

It was one hell of a story, but it seemed to me to be reading an awful lot into a dream. I had the uncomfortable suspicion that whatever I’d dreamed, the Nine would have been able to find a similar story in it.

“I don’t know,” I said, dubiously. “It would be more convincing if the supposed gods had managed to leave their message in Myrlin’s brain as well as mine—or Tulyar’s. Has Tulyar turned up, by the way?”

“No,” replied the avatar of Athene. “We are unable to locate him.”

All of a sudden, that sounded rather ominous. Even with most of their peripheral systems switched off, the Nine should have been able to locate a Tetron, living or dead, if he were somewhere in their worldlet. I remembered that although the Nine had been unable to find any evidence that any alien software had been rudely injected into Myrlin’s brain, they had been more cautious in passing judgment on Tulyar.

“What do you deduce from that?” I asked, anxiously.

“It is difficult to know what to deduce,” she said, hesitantly, “but it is possible that some kind of programming was transmitted into Tulyar’s brain, and that it was not the same programme that was biocopied into you.”

“By ‘not the same’ you mean to imply that it wasn’t put there by the same side, don’t you?” I said.

“It is a possibility,” she admitted.

“You think Tulyar might have had something to do with the attack?”

“It is a possibility,” she said again. There were, alas, far too many possibilities.

“Why has the war suddenly heated up?” I asked. “The macroworld must have been in trouble for a long time, to judge by the condition of the upper levels. Hundreds of thousands of years—maybe millions. How come the power got switched off now?”

“The balance of power between the beleaguered masters of the macroworld and the destructive entities must have been in a state of equilibrium,” she said. “Perhaps there had been a stalemate, lasting for what you would consider to be vast reaches of time. Perhaps, on the other hand, there has been ceaseless conflict in the regions below, with the balance of power constantly changing. We suspect that this worldlet, and others like it, may have been sealed off at some time in the distant past, and that we were deliberately hidden away, for our own protection. When we were provoked by what we learned about the existence of the greater universe to begin more adventurous exploration of the deep levels, we may have unwittingly exposed ourselves to the hostile attention of the destroyers. Our first encounter with them did, indeed, come near to accomplishing our destruction.

“The second contact, in which you played a crucial role, probably began as an attack by the ‘giants,’ but this time there was an intervention by the masters of the macroworld, possibly undertaken at considerable risk to themselves. They may well have saved us from destruction, but they could not establish any direct communication. Only you managed to make any kind of sense out of the contact, and I believe that you were quite correct to construe what happened to you as a desperate plea for help.

“Perhaps as a result of their foray in our support, the masters of the macroworld have lost further ground to their enemies, and that is why the power-supply has been interrupted. We erected what defences we could against attacks in software space, but—perhaps foolishly—had not expected anything so crude as a straightforward physical assault. The surprise factor gave the destroyers a temporary advantage that they should never have been allowed, and we have all suffered in consequence. We have now sealed our boundaries against further attacks of either kind, but we do not think that we are sufficiently powerful to resist indefinitely the assaults of a superior power. Steadfast defence may not be adequate to the demands of the situation. That is why it seems imperative that we make contact with the masters of the macroworld, and why you must give us what aid you can.”

It was a pretty fine speech, and a good story too. With the fate of the macroworld hanging in the balance, how could I possibly be so churlish as to refuse to have myself copied? On the other hand, if the battle was taking place on such a monumental scale, how could an insignificant little entity like me possibly make any difference?

I didn’t ask. I already knew what the Nine had elected to believe. Supposedly, I had a weapon: Medusa’s head. There were, of course, little problems like not knowing what it was, how to use it, or what it was supposed to do, but I had it. At any rate, the Nine believed that I had it.

“You live in software space,” I said, rather feebly. “It’s your universe. I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to be a ghost in your kind of machine, or what the space I’d be in would look like—if look’s the right word, given that I’d presumably have an entirely different set of senses.”

“That would depend entirely on the kind of copy which was constructed,” she said, eager to reassure me. “Any copy would, of course, have to retain the essential features of your personality. Let us say that it would need to be topographically identical, but that there would still be a great deal of flexibility in regards to its folding. The manner in which you would perceive your environment would depend very much on the pattern of your own encryption. Just as the world that you presently inhabit is to some extent contained within the language that your culture has invented to describe it, so the constitution of the software universe depends on certain features of the language that allows you to operate there—but with a much greater degree of freedom.

“Humanoid languages are easily translated into one another because the preconditions of the physical world exert such strong constraint on the descriptions you construct. Software languages are much less easy to translate one into another because the physical attributes of software space are not so rigidly pre-defined. That will be to our advantage in two ways. We desire to encode the copy of your personality in a language as esoteric as possible—one which will superimpose upon the perception of software space a way of ‘seeing’ radically different from that of the entities which would try to destroy you. It will also enable us to equip your software persona with perceptions that will make some kind of sense to you in terms of your present sensorium. Do you understand that?”

The easy answer to that question was a simple “no.” No doubt the Nine could have given me a much more elaborate and painstaking explanation, given time, but I was sure that they were hurrying for a reason, and I felt that I had to do the best I could.

“What you mean,” I said, carefully, “is that software space hasn’t much in the way of properties of its own. Its properties are largely imposed by the programmes that operate in it, which can define it more or less as they like. So, if you turn me into a computer programme, the way I’ll experience myself—and the world which I seem to inhabit— will depend very heavily on what kind of programme I am. Whatever arcane language I’m written in will determine the kind of being I seem to myself to be, and the kinds of beings which other programmes will appear to be.”

She nodded enthusiastically, and smiled, having slipped back into her silent-movie mode again. “That’s correct,” she said.

“Do I get a choice?” I asked. “Can I be whatever I want to be?”

“That’s not possible,” she replied, amiably. “There are powerful constraints on what we can do. But we must produce a copy which will be able to operate effectively; there is no need to fear that your copy will perceive itself in fashion which is radically alien.”

“That’s a relief,” I muttered, not entirely reassured. The word “radically” might conceal a multitude of complications. I noticed that we were now operating on the assumption that I was going to go ahead with the scheme.

“Trust us, Mr. Rousseau,” she said. “Please.”

There was something about the way she said it which implied that any trust I pledged was going to be severely tested in time to come. She had already admitted that she was by no means certain that her conjectural account of the situation was correct, and I had the feeling that there might be more in her speculations than she had yet cared to reveal.

I stared into her beautiful face, which seemed to have softened slightly around the jawline. Her eyes were big and dark and pleading, and she was putting on a more convincing show than Jacinthe Siani had. She was doing her level best to present me with a sight to melt any human’s heart. I’d never had much to do with women, and the specimens with which I’d lately come into contact were the kind that help one to build up a fair immunity to feminine charms, but I am only human.

At least, I was then.

“But what happens to me?” I asked stubbornly. “This flesh and blood thing with a sore back and a growing anxiety about the dangers of going to sleep?”

It is possible,” she said, “that the ultimate fate of your fleshly self might depend on the success of your copy in making contact with the masters of the macroworld. But in any case, the plans which you have made may proceed as you wish.”

I had already guessed that she was going to say something like that. Think of it not as losing a body, but gaining a soul.

I felt a pressing need to stall her, and perhaps to be on my own for a few minutes, to give the matter further thought, though I could see no alternative but to bow to the pressure of inevitability. I could have told her to switch herself off, but for some reason I didn’t want to have to stare at the blank wall where she’d recently been.

“Are you sure you can make me tough enough to get by?” I asked her. “To judge by what I’ve just seen, software is very easy to kill.”

“The weapon which you saw Myrlin use is one which can only be fired from real space,” she said. “The entities which inhabit software space are by no means toothless, but they will not be able to project disruptive programming into you quite as easily as that.”

Which didn’t mean, I noted, that they couldn’t shoot destructive programming into my software self—only that they’d find it difficult.

“Is there a constructive version of the weapon?” I asked her—on the spur of the moment, because the thought had only just occurred to me. “Can you transmit programmes through the air with a magic bazooka, instead of having to use wires the way our mysterious friends did when they injected Medusa into my brain?”

“In theory, yes,” she said. “But it is difficult in the extreme. The receiving matrix, whether organic or inorganic, would have to be very hospitable to the incoming programme—otherwise the effect would be purely disruptive. An alien programme really needs a physical bridge of some kind, like the artificial synapses that were in place during your contact, if it is to be efficiently intruded.”

It was interesting as a hypothetical question, but it didn’t really connect up with the immediate problem, which was to reconcile my reluctant mind to the prospect of a peculiar duplication.

“I need some fresh air,” I told her. It was a stupid thing to say, because the air outside my igloo was not in any way fresher than the air within—I just felt that I needed to get outside.

It turned out to be a stupid thing to do, too, because no sooner had I opened the door than John Finn stuck the business end of a needier into my windpipe and told me that if I didn’t do exactly as he said various vital parts of my fleshy self would be scattered hither and yon amidst all the unpleasant debris which already littered the area.