Asgard's Conquerors (37 page)

And in
the end, of course, they asked me about Asgard— about who might have built it,
and why, and what I thought about it, and what my reasoning was.

So we
were back to the heart of the matter again, back to the thing that could hardly
help but fascinate us all. Except that the matter was more complicated now,
because the Nine had their own unfortunate experience to add to the register of
perplexing evidence.

We
talked for a long time, and much of what we said even about Asgard simply went
over old ground. I told them about the galactic races, and about all the things
I'd discussed with 673-Nisreen aboard
Leopard
Shark
—all of which was news to them. We
had a sense of getting nearer to the whole picture, but we still didn't have
enough to put it all together.

"The
Ark scenario still looks most likely," I told them. "The way I had it
figured, on the basis of what I saw in the levels while the Scarida were taking
me to prison, was that the builders of Asgard were making an object to contain
thousands of environments, reproducing the conditions of a whole galaxy full of
inhabited worlds. From each world they then took a series of ecosystems, and a
handful of indigenes. But what Myrlin told me about the Isthomi doesn't quite
square with that. There, it seems, the parent culture was living in a macroworld
like Asgard, with no memory of any worldly existence. So maybe Asgard is a
daughter macroworld, reproducing the structure and cultural diversity of an
earlier model. In which case—was the earlier model an Ark, or do we face an
infinite regress?"

"We
are more anxious about the disaster which appears to have overtaken the
world," said Thalia-7. "What we have discovered about the outermost
levels of Asgard is puzzling. For one thing, the outermost levels seem once to
have had a level of technological sophistication that few of the levels below
have reproduced, even though they were evacuated long ago. Wherever the
inhabitants of those outer levels went, it was not to the levels immediately
below. But the mystery of where they went is perhaps a lesser matter, compared
with the mystery of why?"

"The
standard theory is that Asgard lost most of its atmosphere passing through a
dense, cold cloud, and that the levels had to be evacuated because of that. We
always supposed that the outermost levels, unlike the levels below, relied
upon an external source of energy—an outer sun rather than an inner one."

"That
is a possibility," conceded Calliope-4—the two scions tended to take it in
turns to speak—"but given that levels just below the outermost ones are
equipped to draw energy from the distribution-system which exists in the walls
of the macrostructure, we find it difficult to believe that the outermost
levels could not have been sustained through any such disaster. We also cannot
understand how the temperature in those outer levels fell so very far. We think
it could not have done so by virtue of any natural process. We tend to favour
the hypothesis that the outermost levels were deliberately cooled, and that the
regions whose temperature was reduced almost to absolute zero were set

up as a kind of
defensive barrier."

"A
barrier against what?"

"Some
kind of invasion." Thalia took up the thread again. "Not by entities
such as you or we, but by something microscopic, on the same size-scale as
bacteria or viruses."

I
remembered all those bacteria, frozen in the rings of Uranus for four billion
years, and still viable. But the temperature in the vicinity of Uranus was
still tens of degrees Kelvin. Cold preserves, but not absolute cold. Maybe it
was easier to freeze the outer layers of the macroworld than heat them up or
irradiate them to the level needed to destroy a microscopic invader. But it was
difficult to believe. Bacteria are no threat to an advanced biotechnology, and
viruses can be combated too. Myrlin had assured me that neither he nor I now
had anything to fear from that kind of attack.

I
explained to them that there was yet another aspect of the problem which
interested me, and that the existence of entities like Asgard might help to
explain why all the galactic starfaring races were about the same age. I
pointed out that one could easily invert the story about Asgards—it seemed that
we were now entitled to speak in the plural— being populated in the first
instance by borrowing from the ecospheres of worlds. Perhaps, instead, the
ecospheres of worlds were populated by borrowing from Asgards. I explained my
gardening analogies: Asgard as a seed-nursery, its builders as planters,
engaged in a project of colonization whose time-scale ran to millions of years.
They thought the story more plausible and more palatable than Nisreen had—but
they were used to the idea of personalities inhabiting inorganic hardware,
whose sense of time was very different from that of planet-born humanoids.

The
galactics had always imagined the builders of Asgard in their own image—encouraged,
of course, by the fact that the one-time inhabitants of the outer layers had
been humanoid. The Nine, obviously, had always thought of the builders as
beings more like themselves—beings whose personalities might be distributed
through the systems of the entire macroworld. That would have looked like the
more likely hypothesis, now I knew that it was on the map of possibilities,
except for two things. How could we explain what had happened to the Nine when
they tried to contact these hypothetical master-builders? And why would beings
like the Nine, only more so, be interested in seeding whole galaxies with the
kind of DNA that eventually produced humanoid beings?

"If
the chronology of the Nine is anywhere near accurate," I said, "then
it can't have been this Asgard which seeded the galactic arm with the genes of
my remote proto-mammalian ancestors. Perhaps the one that did has gone away
again. On the other hand, there's every chance that there are other Asgards
lurking about in the galaxy—even in the local region of space, which has been
very imperfectly explored. If the others aren't in solar systems, we wouldn't
have a snowball in hell's chance of locating them. We travel between
star-systems in wormholes—for all we know, the depths of interstellar space
might be lousy with macroworlds. Maybe we only found this one because something
did go wrong with it."

I think
we could have gone on for several more hours, but we were interrupted by a
knock at the door. It was a curiously homely sound to be hearing in that
bizarre place.

"That'll
be Finn," I said, as I went to answer it.

I was
due full marks for deduction. When I opened the door of Myrlin's little igloo,
I found that it was indeed John Finn who was standing on the doorstep. But he
wasn't quite as I had expected to see him.

For one
thing, he had a gun, which he was pointing at my chest. I could tell by his
expression that he wouldn't be at all averse to using it. It wasn't a mud gun
either—it was the kind of gun the invaders used. Given that, the second
surprise dovetailed perfectly with the first. As well as the scion who'd
presumably been appointed by Myrlin to guide him here, he had three Scarida
with him, one of whom was my old adversary with the sky-blue eyes.

They
were all carrying guns.

Only a
soldier,
I reminded myself, as a sinking
feeling took possession of my stomach.
He's only a soldier.

It
seemed that this particular enemy weren't quite ready to negotiate on our
terms. In fact, it looked as if they weren't in a negotiating mood at all.

28

When we were all
safely inside, with the door closed, I relaxed a bit. Not that it was a very
relaxing situation—the gleam in John Finn's eye suggested that he would like
nothing better than to blow my head off. He still blamed me for everything. The
three invaders with him were as nervous as cats, though I guessed that they
hadn't the slightest suspicion of what the real situation was.

Thalia-7
and Calliope-4 stood up, anxiously. "What has happened?" asked one of
them.

The
invader officer looked at them, but didn't answer. He seemed very uneasy
indeed, as if none of this was making much sense to him. That was hardly
surprising.

"What's
happening at the prison camp?" I asked him. "The negotiations between
the scions and your superiors must be under way by now."

I got no
response save for a blank stare. He didn't know anything about any
negotiations. He didn't know that Thalia, Calliope and all their siblings were
scions of the Nine. To him, they looked like members of a conquered race, and
he couldn't figure out what they were doing here. He was out of his
intellectual depth.

"Who
brought you here?" I asked, trying to take the initiative in what was
sure to be a difficult conversation, and hoping that I could explain it all to
him.

"As
a matter of fact," said John Finn, "you did."

I looked
at him in puzzlement, thrown out of my conversational stride. He was grinning
with smug satisfaction. I

could only wait for
him to explain.

"You
were right about me," he said. "I know what you told the blonde while
we were sick in that hospital. You told her I couldn't be trusted. Dead right—I
don't owe one damn thing to the Star Force, or Mother Earth, or the whole human
race, let alone the Tetrax. When the invaders picked me up, I told them
everything they wanted to know—and then some. I told them about all the little
gadgets the Tetrax gave me, about which I knew a little bit more than the Tetrax
thought I did. Told the Scarids how to start searching for all the bugs that
were already in place. Found lots of them in the city—and we found some in
places we never expected to. Took me a while to realise that I was carrying a
bug myself, but I figured it out. My boot heels were leaking some kind of
organic muck, leaving a trail for an olfactory sensor. Guess who else has a
couple just like them."

I
remembered what had happened last time I had been followed into the deeper
levels.

"Oh
merde!"
I said.
"Not again!"

He
nodded.

"But
why?" I asked. "It doesn't make sense for the Tetrax to bug their own
agents."

"Maybe
they didn't trust you," said Finn. "Want to know what I think? I
think they expected us to defect to the opposition—if not immediately, as soon
as we found out what we were really carrying. They knew we'd be in trouble when
the invaders found out that we were carrying that damned virus. They expected
us to take the obvious way out. And they wanted to be able to find us again
when the war was over."

I
suppose it was just about plausible, but I didn't believe it. The Tetrax had no
interest in persecuting us. My theory was that they had tagged us for our own
good—so that they could save us from the wrath of the invaders, if they got the
chance. The Tetrax fight dirty, but they do have that curious sense of
obligation, and in their own weird fashion they do go in for orderly moral
bookkeeping. A man like John Finn wouldn't begin to understand things like
that, though, so I didn't try to argue with him. Anyway, he hadn't finished
bragging yet about how clever he had been.