Asgard's Heart (13 page)

"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.

8

When
we got back to the place which the Nine had fixed up to provide living quarters
for their guests and their scions, we were able to see the real extent of the
carnage.

The village that they'd fitted out for us consisted of
forty dome-shaped constructions, which were arranged in neat rows in one of the
few open areas that this worldlet had, under a twenty-metre sky lit by
electricity. The sky was still lit, but dimly, and there was a suggestion of
twilight about it. At least half of the forty domes had been damaged by
explosive blasts, and the streets were littered with debris. It wasn't easy to
tell how many robot invaders had run riot in the village, but I counted eight
carcasses made of assorted plastics and metals. Five seemed physically
undamaged, and I could only assume that the Isthomi's scions had wiped out
their internal programming with weapons like the one they had given Myrlin.