Asgard's Conquerors (34 page)

The only
thing I could feel was my own body. That was lighter than it had been for a
while. The gravity here was nowhere near Karth-normal, or what passed for
Asgard- normal in the upper levels.

I was
just wondering where I might start looking for a door when the greyness of the
walls was disturbed. White clouds, vague and almost formless, began to appear—not
on the walls but within and beyond them, as though the walls were windows
looking out into a world of ghosts.

The
clouds became humanoid faces, but in a strange unfocussed way. Their clarity
was not enhanced by the fact that the faces overlapped, and passed through one
another as they moved around the room. It was quite a fancy effect, but I
wasn't unduly upset or surprised by it. The walls were obviously screens, and
the cloudy faces were some kind of video-holographic display. The holograms
looked very primitive and rough-hewn, but I wasn't convinced that it was poor
technology that was responsible for their incoherency. There was something else
. . . something not quite right.

The
voice, when it came, was just as fuzzy. In a way, it was even more blurred, and
multilayered—as if many people were trying to speak at once, and were not quite
managing to synchronize their voices.

"R-r-rouss-ss-ss-eau,"
they said.

"The
ghost routine's no good," I told the walls, trying to inject some heavy
contempt into my voice. "I know where I am, and I know who you are, too.
What the hell are you trying to prove?"

The
faces were huge—two metres tall from chin to crown—and the room seemed quite
small as they drifted in and out of one another. They were becoming gradually
more focussed. They seemed to me to be a creditable imitation of human faces—female
human faces. But I couldn't imagine what it was all for. Almost without meaning
to, I counted the faces. There seemed to be nine. Nine didn't seem to me to be
a very round number, so I recounted, trying to make it ten, but there were
nine.

"P-p-pleas-s-se
w-w-wait-t-t," they said. Their voice was slow and drawn-out. They were
speaking in English. In spite of what I'd said, it really was rather spooky,
not because of the nature of the apparitions, but because it didn't make any
sense.

"How
long for?" I asked.

I paused
for an answer, but when they spoke again, they

were on a different
wavelength.

"Ap-p-pologis-s-se,"
they said. "S-s-sorr-rr-rry. W-w-will y-you ans-s-swer qu-qu-qu-quest-t-tion?"

Waiting
for them to finish a sentence was distinctly tedious, but I decided that I
probably had all the time in the world.

"Sure,"
I said.

"Ar-r-re
y-you l-l-lonel-l-ly?"

I
blinked in surprise. It didn't make any sense. I tried to concentrate on one of
the faces, pretending that it was really looking at me, trying to meet its
eye. I realised that it reminded me of someone. It wasn't quite right, but the
features were obviously modelled on Susarma Lear. I looked at the others,
then, scanning them quickly to confirm the hypothesis. They weren't all the
same. Indeed, it was almost as if they were trying to be different—with
difficulty, because they were all based on the same model. The pattern of
modification wasn't random, either. It was as if they were borrowing just a
little from someone else's face. I tried to remember what I looked like in a
mirror, looking for bits of my own face, but that didn't work. I had to think
quite hard before I finally realised whose features they were borrowing from to
make their Susarma Lear-faces look different.

They
were borrowing bits of John Finn.

"Loneliness
isn't one of my vices," I told them. "But I would appreciate a little
company right now. I know you can arrange it. I'll settle for Myrlin, or even
one of your furry friends. I've been here before, I know, but you put on much
better special effects then. Landscape with lions, bright and sharp—I couldn't
see the walls at all, remember? I guess this is where you live. You don't have
to put on human faces just for me. I don't care if you look like giant spiders."

Pause.
Then: "M-m-must-t-t t-t-talk t-t-to y-you . . . int-t-teres-s-sted."

I
couldn't quite work out where the voice was coming from. There was no obvious
microphone, and it was diffuse, like everything else, as though they were
having difficulty focusing it.

"I'm
interested in you too," I told them, "but I had the impression that
you didn't need to talk to me. I thought you picked my brain fairly thoroughly
last time I was here—and all those wires suggest that you've been at it
again."

"C-c-can't-t
r-r-read m-m-minds," they told me. "S-s-so m-m-much of p-p-person-n-n
on-nly at c-c-conscious-s-s l- l-level-l-l. C-c-can't-t und-derst-tand-d
s-s-s-solit-t-tude."

I didn't
get a chance to explain solitude to them. The door finally opened. I couldn't
see whether one section slid behind another, or whether the hole just appeared.
One moment there was nothing, the next there was a black rectangle more than
two metres high.

Even so,
he had to duck as he came through it.

Mercifully,
he had brought my clothes. He even had my comfortable boots.

"Small
universe, isn't it?" I said, as I pulled my pants on. The faces hadn't
disappeared; they were still floating around, merging and coming apart. They
didn't have to go around the door—they just disappeared at one edge and reappeared
at the other. There was something very odd about their unseeing eyes. They had
synthesized human features, but human expression was quite beyond them. They
weren't quite my idea of immortal supermen.

"Hello,
Mr. Rousseau," said Myrlin.

"You
can call me Mike," I told him, not for the first time. "Especially as
you just saved my life. I deduce that you saved Susarma, too. Did Serne make
it?"

"No.
But we got one of the Tetrax."

"994-Tulyar?"

"Yes.
The other was 822-Vela. He was irredeemably dead when we got to him, like
Serne."

Not just
dead, I noted, but irredeemably dead.

"I
suppose Tulyar was the one you really wanted," I observed. By this time I
had my shirt and pants on, and I was pulling on my boots.

"In
a manner of speaking," he said. He stood aside and indicated that I should
precede him through the door. I went out into a gloomy corridor, lit by tiny
electric bulbs strung along a wire. It seemed strongly reminiscent of the
makeshift lighting the invaders had rigged up, none too cleverly, in the dark
corner of Skychain City where they'd captured me. The walls were black and
featureless. The corridors meandered left and right, with curves, corners, and
intersections, but Myrlin led me through the maze without hesitation.

"Why
did you pull me out?" I asked him.

"Two
reasons," he told me. "One—I thought I still owed you a favour. When
I found out you were in the prison, I put you on my list. Two—they really are
interested. In you, and in your companions. They already had records of you,
but the records were damaged; the opportunity to have a second look was both a
chance to renew their acquaintance, and a chance to assess how bad the damage
was that they had sustained."

"There's
something wrong with them?" I said—uncertain, although it certainly
confirmed the impression I'd received.

"Something
badly wrong," he confirmed. "They're still functioning, but . . .
I'll explain it to you later. Who's the fourth one we pulled out?"

"Man
named John Finn. Said to be good with electronics. We only brought him because
we were afraid he might be useful to the invaders if we left him behind. They
interested in him, too?"

"Oh
yes."

"Are
the others awake?"

"Not
yet. They're still probing the Tetron and Finn. The star-captain will take a
little longer. She has a bullet wound in the leg and is suffering from
tissue-necrosis."

The
corridors were beginning to seem endless. Some of the side-branches were
unlighted, and showed no sign of ever having been lighted.

"This
isn't ancient biotechnics gone wrong, is it?" I said. "There never
was light in these corridors."

"They
don't use visible light much," he said. "Not in here, anyhow. The
lighting's just for me. They used to be able to light the ceiling itself, but
that was lost along with most of their other capabilities."

"I
should have expected you," I said. "That note. It was stupid of me to
assume that it came from Alex Sovorov. Your bosses—the super-scientists—must
have been keeping an eye on the invaders all along. I should have
realised."

He shook
his head. "Actually," he said, "we'd only just begun to keep an
eye on Skychain City. We were every bit as surprised as the Tetrax when the
Scarida appeared. We weren't in a position to take a hand, then. Things had
already gone wrong. I've had to take charge of a lot of things. We need to talk
to the Tetrax, and to the Scarida too. The scions I planted in the prison to
gather information will have declared themselves by now, but the Tetron virus
has disrupted the chain of command both there and in Skychain City—it's a pity
you managed to infect a man as important as Dyan. It's a pity the alarms went
off so soon, as well; that might make it more difficult for the scions."

"It
was hardly my fault," I reminded him. "Who are the scions?"

"The
furry humanoids. The Nine made them—much as the Salamandrans made me—in the
image of one of the races which the Scarida displaced. It wasn't too difficult
to get them into the prison, once we'd found a way to that level. Our route up
to fifty-two is direct and efficient—there are such routes available, once you
know how to get access to them."

At last
we came out of the corridors, and into what qualified as open space in
Asgardian terms. But it wasn't like coming into the fresh air. There was a
thirty-metre ceiling here, but it was lighted in the craziest way imaginable,
with formless masses of silvery lights drifting and coiling like clouds against
a grey background. And beneath this gloomy sky there were no "fields"—not
even the kind of artificially- photosynthetic factory fields that the Tetrax
had resurrected under Skychain City. There was a roadway, and a railway, extending
side-by-side into the gloom, and there were buildings like metal igloos, but
there was nothing alive at all.

I
realised, belatedly, that the "sky" was no different from the
"walls" in the room where I had awakened. It was like a vast video
screen, and the clouds that moved across it were the traces of some kind of
electronic activity. It suddenly dawned on me that Myrlin's masters had not
simply rigged the sky to function as a big mindscrambler on that long-ago day
when they had kicked me out of their little corner of manufactured paradise.

Myrlin's
masters were the sky, just as they were everything else in this weird place.

They
were everywhere.

No
wonder, I thought, they have difficulty producing manifestations of themselves
in a particular location. And no wonder they don't understand "solitude."

I turned
to face him, able to see his face clearly for the first time, in spite of the
dim light.

"Did they make
you immortal?" I asked him. "Yes," he said.

"You
don't suppose they could do the same for me?" I enquired, tentatively.

"They
already have," he assured me. When destiny accepts you as a plaything,
anything can happen. One minute, you think you're dead; the next, you might
live forever.

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