Asgard's Conquerors (23 page)

When we stopped to sleep, at a way station on what I took to be level
twenty-nine, I was beginning to fear that Asgard might not have much more to
show me. Wouldn't it be ghastly, I thought, if the Centre turned out to be no
more exotic than Skychain City—or the microworld Goodfellow? There is no more
horrible way that any mystery can be resolved than by dissolution into ironic
anti-climax.

I consoled myself with the thought that we were a long, long way from
the Centre yet—and with the knowledge that the reason I was being taken on this
little trip to the heartland of Invaderdom was that I had already been shown
proof that there were more things in Asgard, as in Heaven, than had hitherto
been dreamt of in the invaders' poverty- stricken philosophy.

But could I, I wondered, interest them enough to persuade them to let
me live?

16

The levels I
numbered in the thirties were much brighter and more crowded than those in the
twenties. Every time we emerged from one of the buildings that housed the connecting
shafts, we came out into thriving city streets—wide roads with floor-to-ceiling
facings, pavements, shops. This, I inferred, was the heartland of the invader
empire; these were levels they had colonized in the distant past. I couldn't
tell which was their home level, and my companions were not answering
questions. Sky-blue and the senior officer had been arguing again, and Sky-blue
was rather tight- lipped. Jacinthe Siani was keeping her distance from me,
probably because she wanted to impress upon her new friends that she was
solidly on their side.

I saw very few people on the streets who belonged to any other race
than that of the invaders themselves, although there were far more females
visible now, and far more civilians. The range of physical variation within
the neo-Neanderthaler species was unusually small. I guessed that they were all
descended from a relatively limited gene-pool; that would fit in with the
popular theory that Asgard was some kind of Ark, whose many habitats had been
set aside to be populated by the descendants of a favoured few individuals.
Maybe all the invaders were descended from a single Adam-and-Eve pair, though
they had now such a vast population that they had filled up several other
habitats in addition to their allotted Eden.

Obviously, such colonization had not been a mere matter of moving into
empty space—they would hardly possess armoured vehicles by the millions and an
army which seemed to involve ninety-nine out of a hundred of the adult male population
if they had only discovered virgin territory. What I could see in the streets
didn't give any indication of what had happened to the conquered races. The few
exotic individuals I saw might conceivably have been slaves—or the enfranchised
relics of populations—that had been all but wiped out.

As we cruised the city streets I amused myself with a little
speculative mathematics.

Suppose, I thought, that the pale-skinned pseudo-Neanderthalers
currently filled twenty cave-systems, each with a land area not much less than
the land area of Mother Earth. With abundant food production they could be
doubling their population every forty or fifty years. That implied that they
would have to take over another sixty cave systems in the next century, and
another four hundred and eighty by the end of the following century. How long
would it take them to fill Asgard? How long would it take them to bump into
someone who would put a stop to their game? And if Asgard were really millions
of years old, why hadn't one of its races already expanded to fill the whole
macroworld?

I tried raising such issues with my captors, but the man with blond
hair was sulking, and refused to talk. He had been forcibly reminded that his
job was to transport me, not to enlighten me.

Below forty, things began to change again. The invaders seemed to have
had every bit as much difficulty going downwards from their local area as they
had going upwards. Once again, their cities were replaced by much more limited
roadside developments in less promising territory. But these lower levels
weren't all dark and they weren't all bleak. On the contrary, many were
brighter, hotter, and full of life. If the topmost levels could be reckoned tundra
or steppe, these were jungle, swamp, and savannah.

On one particularly long trip—at least sixty kilometres— from one
downshaft to the next I sweated so much that I longed for my lost cold-suit,
with its careful temperature control. We were using an armoured car here, as we
did on most of the levels that were not fully civilized, and the way the hot
light beat down on the metal from the thirty-metre ceiling made it feel like an
oven.

The area on either side of the road had been sprayed with some kind of
herbicide, and new growth was only just beginning to creep back into an area
whose earlier plants were all browned and desiccated. In the distance, though,
we could see trees which reached up almost to the ceiling, spreading vast
palmate leaves in a horizontal array to soak up the intense radiation almost at
source, so that what got through to the lower layers was a crazy zigzag of thin
shafts. I couldn't believe that the lush, strange undergrowth beneath the
trees was wholly sustained by the interrupted light, although it was certainly
well illuminated by it, and I concluded that much of the ground-hugging
vegetation was thermosynthetic, leeching energy from the ground itself.

I'd never seen natural thermosynthetic organic systems before, and was
surprised to see that they were not fungus- white, as I would have expected,
but patterned and multicoloured in all kinds of bizarre ways. Like the
flowering plants of Mother Earth these thermosynths had evolved in
collaboration with insects, and they signalled to their pollinators in every
possible way, appealing both to the visual and olfactory senses.

This was a very noisy forest, full of fluting sounds that I

initially
assumed to be the calling of birds, but in a rare few minutes of conversation
Jacinthe Siani remarked that in this ecosystem even the plants had voices, so
intense had the competition to attract insects become. Here, she said, there
were also fat flightless birds that mimicked flowers both physically and
musically, in order to entice their prey into their hungry beaks.

I wondered whether the invaders had located the machinery that
controlled temperature in these habitats, and why they hadn't simply turned
down the thermostat to make them more hospitable. I couldn't believe that the
neo-Neanderthalers had simply decided, like good conservationists, to leave
this system the way it was in order to avoid precipitating an ecocatastrophe.
It seemed much more likely that they had left it the way it was because they
didn't know how to change it. They really were like a bunch of Neanderthalers
on the streets of twenty-first century New York; they could pass for locals by
putting on clothes, and could make a living as muggers with their own rough-
hewn weapons, but they didn't know how anything worked.

But where were the zookeepers who should have made sure that these
savages couldn't break out of their own allotted cage? Where, oh where, were
the Lords of Valhalla?

As we traversed another of these tropical demi-paradises, I wondered
what kind of sentients lived here. I was reluctant to conclude from the fact
that I hadn't seen a single humanoid flitting among the bushes that these
systems were just gargantuan vivaria. Clearly the invaders hadn't colonized
these levels to any significant extent, but they could easily have built themselves
a reputation for violence sufficient to make the locals very discreet. I
fantasized about peaceful pygmies, tribes of lotus eaters, and about clever
fellows who had invented musical instruments in order to charm the butterflies
and the bees.

Further down, things got stranger still. I was glad to find that there
wasn't a simple temperature cline determining the distribution of levels. Had
it been the case that the levels started at absolute zero and had got so hot by
fifty that they could no longer sustain life, I would have become pessimistic
about the prospect of finding much more of interest. But the gravity had
barely begun to weaken here, and I knew that the balmy arena in which I'd
fought my duel with Amara Guur was much lower down.

Below the tropical regions there were cooler ones whose life-systems
seemed much less fervent. Some looked ripe for colonization, but showed even
less evidence of invader penetration than the tropical hothouses—and the
invaders we did see were mostly wearing masks and protective clothing. We
weren't—but we were in a vehicle that I judged to be very tightly sealed.

My companions wouldn't tell me what it was about levels forty-three and
forty-five which made them so hostile to invasion even though they looked so
innocent, but the masks and suits brought to mind rumours of galactic explorers
who'd found lush worlds which turned out to be biochemically booby-trapped in
some way. Where many humanoid species are gathered together, travelers' tales
are a penny a hundred, and only one in a hundred has a grain of truth in it,
but I'd listened to a lot of them, partly because they were fun and partly
because they did at least convey some sense of the strangeness of the universe.

You might think that because all "Earthlike" planets have the
same biochemistry, and a very similar range of major-groups of life-forms, one
would be pretty much like another. That's true—up to a point. I've been told
that even a seasoned galactic traveler might never see anything to convince him
otherwise. (Though few humanoids ever visit one another's homeworlds; they
visit one another's home systems, but in a civilized solar system there often
isn't any real need or incentive to go down into a deep gravity well. A
well-travelled galactic might have visited twelve or fifteen systems, but it's
a very rare tourist who has actually set foot on more than three actual
planets.)

The really exotic worlds are, of course, those on which humanoid life
failed to evolve, or on which it evolved in a very different ecological context—and
those worlds are often hostile to visiting humanoid life at a very basic level.
It's not just that the locals will throw spears at you—it's that the local
organics are poison through and through. The habitats through which we passed
on what I took to be levels forty-three and forty-five might have belonged to
this type, though I couldn't for the life of me see any obvious clues as to why
they were so dangerous. The vegetation was still green, and most of it still
looked like trees, bushes, grasses, and flowers.

Forty-seven and forty-nine had been extensively colonized, and there
were thriving invader communities beside the roads on which we drove, though
the temperatures were still on the high side. Fifty, although we saw only a
brief stretch of it, was a real wonder. It was very dimly lit, although the
light was uniform—resembling a very cloudy twilight rather than a starlit night—but
it was very warm, and it was home to a rich life-system that was presumably
almost entirely thermosynthetic.

It wasn't easy to imagine a kind of planet—or a locale on a planet—where
these kinds of conditions could occur. Maybe on a planet with perpetual fog and
a steep axial tilt, in a region of considerable volcanic activity, there could
be something like this, but it was difficult to imagine any such region being
stable long enough to develop a rich flora and fauna.

One would expect there to be no colour in this kind of ecosystem, with
the dim light encouraging only shades of grey. But that wasn't the case. Many
of the plants here produced coloured fruit and flowers that they lit
themselves; it was a world of Christmas trees with inbuilt bioluminescent
fairy-lights. Many of the insects, too, carried around their own lights—wherever
I looked there seemed to be clouds of fireflies, and the ground was ribboned by
the lights of glowing worms.