Asgard's Heart (43 page)

For myself, I could not imagine any more grotesque
failure of the moral order of the universe. It simply wasn't fair.

At that moment, my eye was caught by a movement. Part
of the wall of the spherical nest was being eased aside to allow the ingress of
something large and living. For a fraction of a second I nursed the faint hope
that it was a friendly humanoid come to set me free, but it just wasn't a
sustainable illusion. The head coming through the gap was far too big and far
too ugly to be anyone I knew.

It looked, in fact, like the head of a monstrous
centipede, all golden yellow in the beam of my helmet-light, with great
antler-like antennae, yellow-irised eyes, and four moving jaws like outsized
hedge-trimmers.

"I hate to make a depressing situation seem even
worse," I said, hoarsely, "but I may have just been put on the
menu."

 
32

"This
macroworld, which you call Asgard, was not always in this location," said
the voice of Saul Lyndrach, who still seemed to be speaking in English.
"It came here from another galaxy, in the very distant past. In your
terms, it was approximately a million and a half years ago."

We were moving through a cloud of silvery mist. I
could no longer see him, nor could I feel the grip of his hand on my snaky
hair. In fact, I could no longer feel my snaky hair. I had an uncomfortable
suspicion that what was left of my flesh was still rotting, and I expected that
at any moment I might lose my sight entirely as the processes of decay worked
their way through my eyeballs. After that, presumably, my hearing would go and
leave me isolated in the prison of my dying brain.

I still had enough cells left in that hypothetical
brain to marvel at the figure of a million and a half years. When Asgard had
arrived in the galactic arm—from the Black Galaxy or somewhere else—
Homo sapiens
was just a glimmer in the genes of
its parent species.

"Asgard came to this region through what you call
a wormhole," the voice went on. "Under certain special circumstances,
the starlet can produce enough power to warp the macroworld through stressed
space."

I had no reason to doubt him, but again I had to
marvel at the thought. It would take a lot of energy to warp something like
Asgard. A hell of a lot of energy—more than a star routinely pipes out. I
already knew that there was a small star at the centre of Asgard, but its
regular output couldn't be enough to shift Asgard from here to my home sun; an
intergalactic trip would be out of the question.

It was as though he could read the thoughts in my
head. "The power for the displacement was supplied by a controlled
nova," he said. "An artificial starlet is more versatile than you
might imagine, but it was nevertheless a difficult journey to contrive. Even
though there was no question of planning a specific destination, the trick of
displacing the whole of the extra energy of the explosion into the creation of
a wormhole required considerable cleverness. There was the danger of too large
an explosion, which would have converted all Asgard into a tiny supernova and
scattered its mass across the desert of intergalactic space. There was also the
danger that the starlet's fusion reaction would be damped down too far once the
required energy had been bled into the stresser.

"The intergalactic shift was not totally
successful. Asgard did what it was supposed to do, but the fusion reaction was
damped down, and though the damage was reparable, given time, it put a severe
strain on power-supplies to the levels. More importantly, the invasion had
already occurred, and the invaders had come with the macroworld to its new location.
That was when the war within Asgard began in earnest, and the reduction in the
starlet's output left its defenders at a disadvantage. The upper levels had
already been evacuated—now they were refrigerated. They could never have cooled
so extremely by natural processes. The intention was to seal off the lower
levels.

"This barrier was not to protect the lower
levels, which had already been invaded, but to protect the space outside the
macroworld. The builders, riding the starlet explosion, intended to remove
themselves into the dark remoteness of intergalactic space. Alas, wormholes do
not form randomly, and they are always attracted to gravity-wells—something
which makes interstellar travel much more convenient for species like yours. In
trying to remove a centre of infection from their own galaxy, the masters of
Asgard simply brought it into yours. They knew that this galaxy had been
seeded, and when, and they were therefore able to make a rough calculation to
tell them how long it would be before interstellar travelers were likely to
arrive here. They knew that they would not survive, in their own humanoid form,
but they hoped that the army which fought for them in software space might win
the war before that time elapsed. That hope proved false. We could not win the
war—in the short term, the damage to the starlet gave the invaders the upper
hand; in the longer term it proved that we could only contrive a stalemate.

"The builders considered the possibility of
trying to move Asgard again, but time was against them. They could not do so
immediately because of the damping down of the starlet's fusion reactor, and
once the starlet's normal functions had been restored they could not make
proper preparations because the war was in its most desperate phase. They
judged it necessary, instead, to isolate the real space within the starshell in
order to protect it from the invaders.

"The war went badly for the builders in those
early years. It took such toll of their resources that they could not survive,
in their organic forms. No humanoid has set foot on the starshell for hundreds
of thousands of years, and those inorganic intelligences which reached the
shell itself could not breach the defences protecting the control room—until
the Isthomi upset the balance of things.

"The builders had built artificial intelligences
to inhabit their machinery which were much more powerful than themselves—gods,
if you wish to call them that, but gods manufactured by men who were not so
very different from your own kind. But the builders did not trust their servant
gods as completely as they might have done. The systems that control the starlet—the
systems that control Asgard itself—were not entirely under the control of the
programmes inhabiting Asgard's software space. The most crucial decisions
required humanoid hands in order to be implemented—clever hands with nimble
fingers. Control of the starlet is by no means a trivial matter of closing
certain switches, though there are some effects that can be obtained by crude
destructive work—including the interruption of the power supply. In a sense, we
were fortunate—the power might have failed hundreds of thousands of years ago,
even without the interference of the invaders' mobiles, just as the starlet may
eventually blow up without the intervention of their humanoid instruments. But
as things were, the balance of things was maintained, and the contending forces
were locked into a potentially endless struggle.

"Asgard is full of humanoids, and in principle
any one of them might have been co-opted into the war, given the information
necessary to control the starlet. But with the builders gone, the starshell
isolated, and such intelligences as the Isthomi carefully sealed off, organic
beings were beyond the reach of software intelligences. They lived, as it were,
in a parallel world. The power of software entities to intervene in their
environments was very limited, even when the builders were in control and their
machine-dwelling gods enjoyed all the power potentially at their disposal.
Alas, the war had weakened us, and our opportunities to make contact with
humanoids were much reduced.

"I have said that the war went badly for the
builders—it went scarcely better for our enemies. The battles that we fought
were of a nature you can hardly comprehend, but they were mutually destructive
to the point where neither side had more than a tiny fraction of its initial
resources. For a long time now it has been fought in a purely defensive mode,
with either side blocking the other's moves.

"I cannot describe to you the way that the war
was being fought, or why it reached the kind of impasse which it reached. But
you have seen many of the levels, and you know that the majority had begun to
stagnate. We could not influence them in any way at all, because the invaders
denied us access as far as they were able. There are only a handful of
habitats that contain races sufficiently advanced technologically to have
produced their own machine intelligences; the Isthomi are very exceptional.
Part of Asgard's purpose is to preserve and protect the variety of humanoid and
other species, and so the Isthomi were isolated within their habitat. When
they discovered that there were other habitats, and began exploring them, they
initially did so by means of mobile units—robots—which moved unhindered through
actual space, much as the Scarid armies did.

"Although they attracted the attention of both
the invaders and ourselves, we made no attempt to interfere with them, although
it became gradually more obvious that their explorations would eventually bring
them close to the starshell, making them a significant factor in the war. When
they attempted to reach the central systems through software space, activating
the defences, inaction was no longer possible. The war came briefly to life
again, with a rapid series of moves and countermoves. When the invaders struck
out at the Isthomi they would have destroyed them had we not managed to weaken
the blow. They took advantage of the interface which was established between
the Isthomi's systems and a small group of humanoid brains, and we made our own
move in parallel—both moves were hasty and perhaps ill-judged; they were
certainly decided on the spur of the moment. The move that
we
made—the move that created
you
—has succeeded better than we had any right to
hope. Alas, it may yet prove to be the case that the same is true of the
enemy's move.

"Your
alter ego
is attempting to restore power to the levels. He believes that with the aid of
the Nine he might succeed, but neither he nor the Nine know what kind of
defences the starshell has. The Nine cannot survive there, and without the
Nine, your
alter ego
has no idea what must
be done. The problem does not end there, because the humanoids infected by the
enemy's programmes surely know how to achieve the end that
they
are intended to achieve. What that end is we
cannot be entirely certain, but it will certainly involve our destruction, and
the achievement of their dominion within the walls of Asgard. Asgard's software
space, and all of its systems, would soon be ours again if it were not for the
enemy's humanoid agents, but as things stand, the invaders may yet achieve
their object.

"You may have difficulty understanding what
difference it would make if the invaders were to win. They certainly would not
immediately wipe out all organic life within the macroworld, or within the
galactic community. Nevertheless, we do believe that their ultimate aim is the
annihilation of life, and we believe that possession of Asgard would offer them
a so-far unparalleled opportunity to study the multitudinous forms of life,
and make more efficient preparations for its destruction. So far, the enemy's
experiments in the manufacture of organic weapons have been poor ones—they have
produced nothing more complicated than a bacterium, and the diseases which they
have manufactured have been relatively impotent. We are anxious to deny them
the opportunity to improve their skills, and if it were to seem absolutely
necessary, we would destroy Asgard to prevent it falling into their hands.