Asgard's Conquerors (27 page)

I couldn't tell whether he was implying that I was in no position to
offer effective help to the enemy either, but I didn't care. For a few moments
I just looked out at the swirling mists, wondering whether this habitat, too,
contained tens of millions of square kilometres of territory, and wondering
what awesome variations the life-system might exhibit over the full range of
its terrain.

When I did answer him, it was to say: "There may be gains to be
derived from collaboration. As you say, my fellow humans are not in a position
to explain Tetron

technics to
the invaders, so they can do little harm. They might, though, succeed in
winning the trust of these people. We must remember that the discoveries they
made in capturing Skychain City have upset their entire world-view. By the
time my race ventured outside our solar system we already knew a great deal
about the universe, and were forewarned of the fact that it was inhabited.
Contact with the galactic community was not entirely surprising. These people
have suffered a shock of far greater magnitude. It may be that they are
reassured by their close resemblance to us, and that through contact with
humans they can gradually become accustomed to contact with galactics in general.
My species-brethren may be building vital bridges."

I was proud of myself; I thought it a speech worthy of a Tetron in its
delicacy and guile. No doubt 822-Vela wouldn't agree, but a Tetron never will
agree that anyone can play his own game half as well as he does.

"That would be a dangerous policy," observed 822-Vela.
"And we must remember, Mr. Rousseau, that you humans are not practised in
the ways of diplomacy. Better, perhaps, to say nothing at all than to attempt a
policy of friendliness which might easily do more harm than good."

Or to put it another way: Don't try to be too clever, human—you're not
up to it.

"I'm not sure that they'll be prepared to be polite indefinitely,"
I told him, not without a certain vindictiveness. "I think members of your
own race might be in grave danger of harm. I think that it may be necessary to
give these people some answers—and the answers we humans can give them may help
to discourage them from attempting to extract information from you by violent
means."

Tetron faces aren't expressionless, but they're very difficult to read,
even for a human who has spent a lot of

time around
them. I couldn't tell whether he was disappointed or annoyed, or whether he
was telling himself that this was just what you'd expect from a lousy
barbarian.

Somehow, Aleksandr Sovorov materialised at my elbow. He seemed to know
what I'd just said, although he certainly hadn't been in earshot when I said
it. "It's important, Rousseau," he said, sternly, "to figure
out exactly where your loyalties lie. Your past recklessness has already cost
us one chance to communicate with the advanced race which apparently lives in
the lower levels. It would be unfortunate if further recklessness were to
damage our standing in the galactic community irreparably."

I deliberately turned away from both of them to stare directly out of
the window. They edged round slightly, lining up on either side of the view
like a pair of curtains.

"The thing is, Alex," I said, with all the condescension I
could muster. "You aren't really in a position to see the big picture.
Anyhow, I'm in the Star Force now, and recklessness is my profession."

Sovorov and the Tetron exchanged glances, and the Tetron bowed slightly
before withdrawing.

"Vela and I were chatting yesterday, while you were being
questioned," explained Sovorov. "We tried to establish what would be
the best thing for you to do."

"Very kind of you," I murmured hoarsely. "The Tetrax
must be really proud of you, Alex. Their number one human yes-man. They're fond
of yes-men. They'll probably give you an honorary number one day. Maybe as high
as thirteen."

"I find it difficult to believe," he said, frostily,
"that the Tetrax chose you to spy for them. They must have been desperate."

"They were," I assured him. I was still staring past his

shoulder at
the twisting dendrites with their coloured lanterns, and the whirligig points
of light that danced between their branches.

"Is this life-system DNA-based, Alex?" I asked him. He barely
glanced behind him.

"I suppose so," he said, with the stiffness of one who does
not appreciate the subject being changed.

"Come on, Alex, you're a scientist. You must find it rather
intriguing. It's amazing, and it's very beautiful. You may have been here long
enough to get used to it, but you can't have lost your curiosity
entirely."

Sovorov shrugged. "It's pretty," he said. "But we can
only look at it. If you want more data about its biology, you'll have to ask
your new friends. That's assuming that they've bothered to investigate it
themselves. I get the impression that whatever doesn't shoot guns doesn't
interest them much."

"Sometimes, Alex," I told him, "you can be less than intelligent
as well as less than charming. I believe you're in danger of losing sight of
the reason you came to Asgard in the first place. You came to figure things
out, right? You came to learn. I know you get impatient with all the fantasizing
about the Centre, but your impatience seems to have closed off your own
imagination completely. Don't you ask yourself, ever, what Asgard is for, and
what part it plays in the great scheme of things?"

"There's no point in posing questions until you have data which
permit the formulation of answers," he said, defensively. Personally, I
thought he was dead wrong. You have to formulate the questions first, and the
bigger you pose them, the better they are.

"Did you know," I asked him, "that there's a microworld
orbiting Uranus right now, dredging organic matter out of

the
atmosphere and the rings? They've found tons of stuff— DNA in all kinds of
packages. According to a Tetron scientist I talked to, it's been there since
the earliest days of the solar system, when it was briefly warm out there. Life
antedates the solar system, Alex—maybe the galaxy. It's in the dust clouds
between the stars. Sometimes it gets frozen, for billions of years, but it
doesn't care. It just hangs about until local conditions become conducive to
reproduction, and then it gets going again. It rains down all the gravity wells
in the universe, and wherever it finds somewhere that it can get along, it
multiplies and multiplies as fast as it can, letting natural selection sort out
the most efficient forms for local use. Wherever it can give birth to an
ecosphere, it does. It negotiates its energy-economics with the prevailing
physical environment, working out some kind of chemical compromise.

"My Tetron pal reckons that the DNA must have evolved
spontaneously in the very distant past—and I'm talking about ten billion years
here—and has multiplied and multiplied to the point where its creative efforts
permeate the entire universe. He reckons that the fundamental humanoid
gene-package evolved a long time ago, in some distant corner of the universe,
and that it drifted into the galactic arm in some kind of vast cloud a few
hundred million years ago to seed all the local stars at much the same time.

"On that basis, Asgard must be the product of a separate Creation,
made in some other galaxy at some unimaginably distant point in time. And yet,
its inhabitants—maybe even its builders—are first cousins to us and first
cousins to the Tetrax. But if that's so, what can it be doing here? Was it sent
to seed the galaxy? Did it bring those initial packages that were scattered all
over the galactic arm? Or was it sent here to escape something? Is it saving
specimens from the ecospheres of a thousand worlds from some unimaginable
menace? And in either case—where are the builders? Why is their whole beautiful
macroworld being allowed to run wild, with whole levels dead or deserted, and
tinpot emperors appearing with dreams of illimitable conquest? What's going on
here, Alex? You do care, don't you?"

At least, after all that, he had the grace not to stick out his
black-bearded chin and reply with an obstinate: "I don't know."
Instead, he said: "I didn't know about Uranus. It does cast new light on
the question of whether the galaxy was seeded with life. The convergent
evolution theory begins to look rather sick."

I nodded toward the alien forest with its marvellous fairy lights.
"Not much convergent evolution there," I said. "That is
some. ..."

I broke off in mid-sentence, and gulped. Sovorov had been watching my
face, not the forest, and he had to turn around to look for what I had seen. By
the time he was facing the right way, it was no longer there.

"What is it?" he asked.

"If it was what I think it was," I said, "it's probably
a case of convergent evolution. I thought I saw a humanoid figure, out there
among the trees."

"No," he said. "There's nothing like that out there.
It's a low-energy ecosystem. It couldn't possibly sustain anything motile
that's bigger than your little finger. Insufficient ecological efficiency—very
weak food chains."

His comments proved that he had done a little bit of thinking about his
surroundings, which served to restore some of my faith in human nature,
curiosity-wise. But I still was convinced that, just for a moment, I had seen
something humanoid. It was difficult to judge distances because of the mist,
and that made it difficult to judge size, too, but I had got the distinct
impression that what I had seen was big and bulky—more like a giant ape than a
man.

I opened my mouth to ask Alex whether the guards were in the habit of
wandering around outside in pressurized suits, but I didn't get the chance. Two
Neanderthaler troopers came over and beckoned unceremoniously. Sigor Dyan was
obviously expecting me—and this time, I figured, he was going to want some
answers.

Unfortunately, I still wasn't at all sure what answers I could give
him, and my head throbbed mercilessly every time I tried to force myself to
come up with a sensible strategy.

I was just about ready to fall unconscious, and leave the whole sorry
mess behind. Instead, I walked with my escorts back along the corridors to my
appointment with the inquisition.

20

When they
brought me back to Sigor Dyan everything was the same, except for the stuff he
gave me to drink. The new liquor was brown and turbid, and reminded me a little
bit of mussel soup. I had drunk quite a lot of mussel soup in my youth, because
the closed ecospheres on asteroid microworlds—unenlivened in those days by
imported Tetron biotech—frequently used engineered shellfish as a key element
in their recycling processes. Mollusks, it seems, are clever in ways that other
kinds of organisms aren't. They don't taste very good, though. I had never
learned to love mussel soup.

I took a couple of sips from the cup, then laid it down for good. I was
still feeling queasy, and my temperature was way above normal. I had hoped
earlier that I might be on the road to recovery, but the fever didn't seem to
be clearing up and my nose was still runny. The headache seemed to be getting
steadily worse.

"Personally," I told him, "I don't have any strong feelings
about who I work for. I'm not altogether keen on the way the Tetrax do
business, but I can work with them. I guess I can work with you, too. I'll tell
you where to find the dropshaft into the lower levels that Jacinthe Siani has
told you about. Say the word, and I'll even lead you to it."