Asgard's Conquerors (35 page)

It wasn't quite as
good as it sounded. I could still be killed, violently. I could be stabbed,
strangled, poisoned, burned, or blown up, and unless they could get me into one
of their home-repair kits very rapidly, I'd be finished. But I wouldn't age.
They'd repaired that little fault in my design.

Or so
Myrlin said. I didn't feel any different.

"They
might do more for you," he told me, "given time."

"Well,"
I said, "if they want to make deals with the Tetrax and the invaders, they
certainly have some attractive bait on offer. But would they really want to
offer immortality to twenty billion Neanderthalers?"

By now
we were in a more homely environment. The steel igloos were houses, built for
Myrlin and his furry friends. They had proper lighting, furniture, and all the
usual amenities. Myrlin offered to feed me, but I wasn't hungry yet. While I'd
been in the egg, all my needs had been taken care of—and then some, if reports
of my newly- acquired gifts were really to be taken seriously.

"The
situation is complicated," said Myrlin, "but I'll strip the story
down to the bare essentials. I'd better start at the beginning."

"Please
do," I told him.

"They
call themselves the Isthomi," Myrlin said, settling back into an outsize
armchair. "And they are personalities encoded in machines. Artificial
intelligences, of a sort—but they were initially created as a result of the
attempted duplication of the minds of humanoid individuals. Those humanoid
ancestors lived in an enclosed environment not too different from this one, but
the Nine do not know whether it was in Asgard, or in another artefact of the
same kind."

"The
Nine?" I said, remembering my counting. "You called them that before.
Does it really mean that there are only nine of them?"

"Only
nine," he confirmed. "The Nine's ancestors evolved from preliterate
primitivism within their scaled environment. They had legends that told them
their own remote ancestors had lived in a different kind of world, but until
they discovered the universe the Nine had always considered those legends to
have no basis in fact.

"Within
their closed world the humanoid Isthomi followed a path of technological
sophistication not too different from that which appears to have been followed
by the Scarida—the invaders of Skychain City—except that they never found a way
out of their closed world. They had no more reason to suppose that the light of
the sky and the heat of the ground had been built in order to sustain them than
men of Earth have to suppose that the sun was designed to light the Earth and
placed there for that purpose, so they took their enclosed cosmos pretty much
for granted.

"The
humanoid Isthomi fought many wars, and despite relative shortages of certain
heavy metals they managed to develop an impressive technology of destruction.
The time came when they had the power in their hands to destroy their world.
They managed to avoid that eventuality, joined their nations and factions
together into a single world community, and became, as your jargon has it, 'biotech-minded.'
They also developed an elaborate silicon-based information technology, but more
slowly than similar technologies have been developed by cultures like the
human, whose progress in inorganic technology was aided by a relative
abundance of appropriate raw materials.

"The
humanoid Isthomi developed technologies of genetic engineering applicable to
the transformation of somatic cells in mature bodies, and to the manipulation
of egg-cells. They developed a technology similar to the one by means of which
I was constructed—accelerated growth coupled with a kind of transcription of
personality. Their experiments in the creation, modification, and transcription
of personalities eventually led them to try to recreate personalities in
different forms, including duplicating the minds of humanoids in silicon-based
electronic systems. Thus were born the software Isthomi.

"It's
impossible to guess how accurate, as copies of humanoid minds, the Nine were in
the days of their infancy, but the question must have become irrelevant very
soon. Minds they certainly were, and from the moment their new incarnations
began they were able to undertake a whole new process of growth, maturation,
and evolution. They changed very greatly, once they were no longer limited by
fleshly bodies. They inhabited a vast complex of linked machines, sharing the
new 'space' in which they were distributed with countless non-sentient
programmes as well as with one another.

"At
some stage in history, however, the Nine—or perhaps fractions of the original
Nine—were removed from their original environment and placed in another, of
which they were the sole intelligent inhabitants—and which appears, in fact, to
have been designed specifically to accommodate them. Their memories have no
record of what was done to them. They do not know why it was done, or how, or
by whom.

"The
Nine do not know how long a lapse of time was concealed by the gap in their
memories. They are not entirely certain that those memories they have which
relate to their existence before they came here are to be trusted. They know
how easy it is to create a new individual— robotic or organic—with a wholly
synthetic 'past,' and they wonder whether they might not have been created
likewise, with a synthetic history inbuilt into them. But the essential
questions still remain: By whom? And why?

"The
Isthomi are by nature patient. They live their lives, normally, at a slow pace.
Their sleep, and other trance-like states, may last for time-spans that would
be many lifetimes in humanoid terms. They had no urge to be fruitful and
multiply, to replenish this new world in which they found themselves. But they
did set out to explore it, and eventually, to fill it. Their machine-bodies had
the means to produce robotic extensions, and through those extensions they
began to increase themselves still further. They undertook a process of
colonization parallel to the means by which a handful of humanoids might set
out to populate a world and build a civilization there, except that they
manufactured no new individuals, but simply extended and complicated their
own bodies. Their mobile robots were simply parts of a much greater whole. The
analogy of an ant-hive will probably spring to your mind, but it is a
misleading one; it would be more appropriate to compare the robots to motile
cells within the body of an individual—white blood corpuscles, perhaps.

"For
many thousands of years this process of expansion continued. The Nine did not
compete with one another, but operated always in concert. Each of the Nine
considered the companionship of the other eight to be infinitely precious. The
Nine are not egotists—rather, they fear loneliness and excessive
individualism, and they value community above all else. They are not Nine so
much as Nine-in-One."

With an
attitude like that, I thought, they should certainly get on well with the
Tetrax. But I couldn't help wondering whether the Tetrax might not find them a
little too clever to be entirely welcome.

"At
some stage," Myrlin continued, "the Nine made the startling discovery
that their enclosed habitat was not the only one in the world—that there were
other environments above, below, and beyond it. They also made the discovery
that there was a pre-existent technology connecting the levels, supplying them
with energy in an ordered and controlled fashion.

"They
concluded, of course, that the world in which the humanoid Isthomi had lived
must have been a similar artificial environment, and that it might be nearby.
By finding it, they supposed, they could find out why they had been removed
from that world and placed in another. Naturally, they set out to investigate
the technology that had been used in the design and construction of Asgard, and
they also set out to explore the neighbouring levels, at their own
characteristic pace—which would seem rather leisurely to our species.

"They
did not find the world of the humanoid Isthomi— although it may, of course,
still exist somewhere in the bowels of Asgard. They did find many other levels
with humanoid inhabitants, but in most cases the humanoid races were not
thriving. They inferred, after considerable study, that their neighbouring
levels were like their own, in that a few individuals of a civilized species
had been introduced in the distant past and left to their own devices. But they
found no individuals like themselves—only humanoids and other fleshy creatures.

"Many
of the humanoid species had made some progress in rebuilding the civilizations
from which they had presumably been taken, but for almost all, the process of
social evolution had been interrupted. Whatever legacy of memories the
original colonists had brought with them had been lost, so that their
descendants reverted to savagery, sustained by elementary agriculture or by
hunting and gathering. In some, there was a recovery after the initial decline,
so that when they had increased to fill up their new world they began again to
follow the path of technological progress, but in no case that the Nine found
was there any species which had done as they had done, and conserved the
heritage which they had brought with them into their new world.

"The
uppermost of these inhabited levels was the one to which Saul Lyndrach found a
route—a route which was followed first by me and later by you. You know what
we found there—a decadent population, living in the ruins of a city built by
their remote ancestors, under threat from animal predators which had evolved
from less aggressive ancestors under strong competitive pressure. You know,
too, that the Nine had begun to supply the inhabitants of that level with
materials, fearing that they otherwise might become extinct. They had
conceived of that project—as they conceive of all their projects—as a long-term
matter, in which they could make plans for thousands of years.

"Our
arrival changed their world-view very radically, and what I was able to tell
them about the topmost levels of Asgard, and about the universe beyond, was a
revelatory shock whose magnitude we cannot possibly imagine. We are young
species, the humans and the Tetrax, and we are no strangers to surprise. The
Nine are very old, and they had to make considerable adjustments in coming to
terms with the knowledge that the universe is very different from what they had
imagined.

"Their
initial reaction, as you know, was to seal themselves off and give themselves
time to think and to discuss. They told you that they would seal off the level
that you had penetrated, and they did—but they left extensions of themselves
on that level to continue the business of gathering information, and they
opened new channels of communication between the levels they knew and the ones
above.

"The
Nine not only adopted me, as an informant who could tell them a great deal
about the universe outside Asgard; they also began to use the technology by
means of which I was created, to construct more humanoid bodies. You called me
an android, and I suppose you might think of the scions as androids also, but I
do not think that designation is correct in either case. I am a true human,
developed from a human egg-cell—albeit in unusual fashion. My new companions
are true humanoids too. They were brought to adult form in a matter of months,
and though the minds inside their heads are abridged versions of the minds of
one or another of the Nine, they are entitled to be considered men and not
machines. Because of the manner of their origin, they share just nine names,
and distinguish themselves otherwise by number, so that they may know one
another as different versions of their parent personalities."

Again I
noted how this made the prospect of a deal between the Nine and the Tetrax
look healthy, and I wondered in my suspicious mind just how far the Nine had
gone in making preparation for such a deal. The Tetrax had a long history of
seductively playing the other galactic races for suckers, and I wasn't
distressed by the thought that they might be due for a strong dose of their own
medicine.

"The
Nine," Myrlin went on, "were very disturbed by recent events in the
upper layers. The Scarida, apparently, are an exceptional species; though they
have not completely avoided the pattern which reduced most of the other transplanted
races to savagery, they have managed to transcend their primitivism more
rapidly than any of their neighbours. They have multiplied more rapidly, and
have continued their expansion beyond their own level. They have met very
little opposition until now, and know full well that they face a desperate task
now that they have set themselves up in opposition to technologically superior
opponents. It may not be easy, though, to persuade them that the limits of
their expansion have been reached.

"The
Nine knew that the task of forming a community of species out of the three very
different factions which are now involved—the Scarid empire, the galactic
community, and the levels known to the Nine—would not be an easy one, but they
had to face the idea that the entire future of Asgard was at stake, and that
they must play a role in the deciding of that future.