Asgard's Conquerors (22 page)

I wondered how troubled and confused these would-be conquerors of
Asgard were. It must have been quite a shock to them, first to discover the
universe, and then to find out that they weren't by any means the most powerful
parasites in the guts of the macroworld.

"You don't have any idea who built Asgard, do you?" I said,
looking into the pale eyes of the blond-haired man. "How many levels can
you operate in? Ten . . . twenty?"

"Don't underestimate us, Mr. Rousseau," he replied, calmly,
looking away to watch the factory-fields going by beyond the windows of the
carriage. "We control hundreds of habitats in more than fifty levels. It
is true that we had not been able to calculate the size of Asgard until we unexpectedly
reached the surface, and even now we have no way of knowing how far down the
levels go. We know, though, that our ancestors were the builders of Asgard, and
that it is only a matter of time before we regain access to the knowledge they
had. It may well be that our ancestors were your ancestors, too, and that you
too have lost access to what they knew just as we have. If that is true, then
your interests and ours are alike, and you must make every effort to help us
contact our cousins—those you have already met in the depths of the world."

I glanced at Jacinthe Siani. Like most Kythnans, she had olive-tinted
skin and jet-black hair. Her eyes were a very dark brown. She was very much the
odd one out in the car, though there were many Earthborn humans who looked less

like Sky-blue
and his friends than she did.

"Are your ancestors her ancestors too?" I asked.

"It seems likely," conceded Sky-blue.

"And the Tetrax?"

"That seems unlikely."

"I'm afraid not," I told him. "We have good reason to
believe that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin. Any common ancestor
that you or I had is just as remote from us as the common ancestor linking
either of us to the Tetrax." Or, I thought to myself, the common ancestor
I share with a pig, non-flying variety.

"I don't know about such matters," he told me. "I'm only
a soldier. You will have the chance to speak to people who do know."

Again, there was a threat in his tone of voice.

"The Tetrax know," I assured him. "If you were only
prepared to make proper contact, you could fix up a nice dialogue between your
own wise men and theirs. If you and the Tetrax pooled your resources, you might
well be able to figure out who did build this thing, when, and why. It's
something we'd all like to know."

"It is not for me to decide such matters," he said, terminating
the exchange. Then he had to report back to the older man everything that had
been said. I turned my attention to Jacinthe Siani.

"Are they treating you well?" I asked.

She smiled in a strangely catlike fashion. "Quite well," she
said. "I like them better than many of my old friends."

Knowing what I did about the company she used to keep, I didn't find
that at all surprising. "Hell," I said, "you don't have to take
such an obvious relish in landing me in it. I never did anything to you, did I?
You were the one who was trying to shaft me, remember?"

"I remember everything," she assured me.

I decided that she just didn't like me very much. Some people don't. I
can live with it.

From the train-car we transferred to a road vehicle, which whisked us
across country with considerably greater alacrity. It was silent, and
presumably ran on fuel cells of some kind. I suspected that the invaders hadn't
invented the fuel cell themselves; in fact, I had now begun to suspect that
they hadn't invented very much at all. It occurred to me that they were real
barbarians, and that their home-level technology consisted mainly of ready-made
items that they'd discovered—or rediscovered—how to use. Giving their ancestors
the credit for ordering the world in which they found themselves was a
face-saving exercise. Even inside Asgard, they were little boys lost—no matter
how many environments they had "conquered" in the course of their
explorations.

Given that they were so primitive themselves, it was easy to work out
how mediocre things had to be in those levels of which they had taken control.

Once I had reached this conclusion, I wasn't at all surprised that our
trip down into the lower levels was anything but smooth. There was no huge
elevator shaft going all the way down to wherever they were taking me. We could
drop three, or sometimes four levels at a time, but then we had to transfer to
a car or a train again, and hurtle across country to some other point of
descent. There was heavy traffic all the way, and I began to realise what an
awesome task it must be to move the invader armies around— and, by
implication, how vulnerable their troops in Skychain City must be.

By the time we were down to level twelve—assuming that my counting was
correct with respect to the levels we skipped past—I didn't see any more groups
of galactic prisoners. Wherever we were, there were only invaders—legion upon
legion of them. All but a few were males in uniform. All, without exception,
were pale of skin. I couldn't help remembering Myrlin and the biotechnics that
had been used to shape him: an accelerated growth programme and some kind of
mental force-feeding. The perfect way to grow your own soldiers. I wondered
briefly whether these soldiers could have been made that way, and fed with
illusions about their own nature and origins. But it didn't make any sense—these
neo-Neanderthalers certainly didn't behave as though there might be some
mysterious master race behind them.

On the way down, I got to see small areas of about thirty different
levels. I think we eventually ended up on level fifty-two, give or take a
couple. The top few levels were all dead—no sign of life at all. Five and six
were like one and two: very cold, but not as cold as three and four. There was
no way to be certain about the temperature outside the tightly-sealed vehicles
which we used to cross territory on those levels, but it must have been way
below freezing.

Seven and eight I didn't see, but nine was alive, though pretty
desolate. It reminded me strongly of the level much further down, to which Saul
Lyndrach's dropshaft had initially led us—which is to say that it looked like
an ecology that had once been balanced but had run wild. Certainly there was no
sign of the machinery of artificial photosynthesis—if there had ever been any,
it had long since rotted away, to be replaced by real plants eking out their
existence under an enfeebled and ill-lit sky. The terrain looked like tundra,
bleak and sub-arctic. There was no sign of native humanoid habitation, or of
colonization by the neo- Neanderthalers.

Eleven and twelve were alive, too, but looked much the same. If
anything, their bioluminescent skies were even further degraded, so that their
light was even weaker.

What I'd eventually concluded about the worldlet Saul had found was
that it had initially been set up with very sophisticated biotechnology, which
had gradually gone completely to pieces. Its energy supply had initially been
electrical and thermal, and the light-producing systems had been organic—although
they were not organisms capable of independent life. Over a very long time,
possibly running to several millions of years, entropy had done its work and
the carefully engineered artificial organics had gradually given way to real
organisms, which did retain some of the features of the artificial system, but
not so efficiently.

What had happened, therefore, was effectively a devolution or
degeneration from artificial systems to living ones. I know that seems almost
crazy, given that we generally think of living systems being far more ordered
than non-living ones, but the builders' biotechnics had been more sophisticated
than living systems. Even something as primitive (in these terms) as the Tetrax
artificial photosynthesis systems up on level one would, if left to its own
devices, eventually give way to "natural" grass. Think of it not so
much as non- life degenerating into life, but as the delicately-bred plants in
a garden, adapted not simply to reproduce themselves but also to serve the
purposes of the gardeners, gradually evolving into coarser—but inherently
hardier—weeds.

A mixture of guesswork and inference suggested to me that some of the
old inhabitants of Skychain City were being relocated to lower levels, where
they were being herded into the ruins of ancient and long derelict cities to
begin the work of refurbishing them for their new would-be masters. For the
Tetrax, especially, it must have been like being sent back to the Stone Age. As
we crossed a particularly bleak plain on twelve I wondered whether there was
some kind of testing going on. Maybe the invaders wanted to see whether the
Tetrax were clever enough to find out how the systems built into Asgard's
structure could be made to function again, even after a vastly long period of
disuse and decay.

Further down, the rot that had claimed the higher habitats seemed not
to have set in—or not to have progressed so far. But there were other
complications.

Until we reached fifteen I had assumed that all the levels would have
much the same atmosphere. The atmospheres of almost all humanoid homeworlds are
very similar indeed, the relative percentages of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon
dioxide being a cleverly-maintained optimum. Planetary atmospheres, of
course, are the creation of life, and because all the humanoid homeworlds share
the same chemistry of life, they share the same ideal conditions. Their
ecospheres adapt to produce and conserve those conditions, in much the same way
that homeostatic mechanisms within endothermic organisms produce a constant
internal temperature.

There are one or two galactic humanoid species who breathe air that the
rest of us would find uncomfortable, but for precisely that reason they aren't
fully integrated into the galactic community. There are life-systems that have
alternative chemistries, but they shape up very differently from the kind of
life-system that produces humanoids. You do get life, of a sort, in the
atmospheres of gas giant planets—even gas giants as cold as Uranus—but it
doesn't produce anything like the range of organisms that DNA can produce, and
as far as I knew no one had ever found evidence of anything in such a system
as intelligent as an insect, let alone a man.

Thus, I was very surprised to find that in a big airlock on level
fifteen, our little party boarded a vehicle which looked more like a gigantic
bullet or a wheeled starship than a car, and that when we went out into the
open, we found ourselves in a real pea-souper of an atmosphere.

For a few minutes, I simply watched in astonishment as the coloured fog
roiled around the thick windows, stirred into activity by the velocity of our
passage. It was a dingy green colour, lit from above by a sky no more than
fifteen metres above us. The green wasn't uniform, though: there were coiling
wraiths of purple and indigo, like gaseous worms, and bigger, paler shapes that
reminded me of old- fashioned images of immaterial spooks and spectres.

I could tell that Jacinthe Siani had seen it before, but not often
enough to get entirely blase about it. Sky-blue and the troopers were as bored
as they could be, though.

"What is it?" I asked Sky-blue.

"Mostly methane, hydrogen, and carbon oxides," said Sky-blue,
morosely. "Some helium, many longer-chain carbon molecules. Very high
pressure. We have to be careful with the locks. If the atmospheres get mixed,
they react. Sometimes explosively. We don't know any other way through. Our
maps are incomplete. We were fortunate to be able to locate a way up as quickly
as we did; an environment like this might have been a barrier for many generations.
The first one our forefathers discovered was the boundary of their empire for a
long time, but we can now move about freely in such habitats, and we find
certain uses for them."

"Is there life here?"

"Of a sort. Nothing that troubles us."

"I don't suppose you have a theory as to why your ancestors should
fill some of their cave-systems with alien atmospheres?"

Before he could answer, the older man cut in with a few sharp remarks
in his own tongue. Sky-blue favoured me with a dirty look, and I figured that he'd
just been reminded that I was a spy and an enemy. I decided that it would be
diplomatic to ask fewer questions.

By the time we left fifteen, I was ready for more surprises. Indeed, I
was eager for them, if only to take my mind off what might be awaiting me
below. For that reason, all the levels I numbered in the twenties were
disappointments. They certainly weren't dead, and I didn't get the impression
that they were markedly decayed, but the territory we crossed was empty. The
skies were bright, and the vegetation seemed reasonably lush, but there was no
evidence of sophisticated machinery except for the vehicles on the road, and
the only sentients I saw were the pale-skinned invaders.

I could see plenty of pillars holding up the ceilings, but I couldn't
see any blocks filled out with doors and windows. I knew, though, that we were
seeing only the tiniest slice of each habitat, and that every one of them would
surely be as big, and might well be as various, as an Earthly continent. It was
as though I was trying to judge the nature and complexity of the Earth from a
twenty-kilometre drive across a randomly chosen part of Canada. The best sights
these levels had to offer might be awesome indeed, but it was entirely possible
that the invaders had never yet caught a glimpse of them, having only skated
quickly across the surface, more eager to find doorways to other levels than to
explore fully those which appeared harmless and useless to them.