Asgard's Heart (15 page)

My own
room was mercifully undamaged, and I was glad to be able to retreat into it at
last. I removed my bloodstained shirt as carefully as I could, and inspected
the damage with the aid of a couple of mirrors. The cuts seemed superficial,
and were already on the mend—I obviously healed quickly now that the Isthomi
had tuned up my body. I knew, though, that it was no good being potentially
immortal if I persisted in such hazardous activities as standing next to explosions
and playing hunt-the-human with fire-spitting dragons. What it would take to
kill me, I didn't know, but I didn't particularly want to test myself to the
limit.

I asked the dispenser to give me something for my headache,
and was pleased that it was still capable of obliging me, even though the
something was only aspirin.

Then I sat down on my bed, and relaxed for a little
while.

A little chime sounded, but it wasn't the door or the
phone. It was the Nine's discreet request for permission to ennoble my walls
with their active presence.

"Okay," I said, tiredly. "I'm
decent." It was a slight exaggeration, but I knew that the Nine didn't
care.

They presented me with the customary female image, but
she was standing, and she was wearing the Star Force uniform. It would have
been in keeping with the propriety of the moment if she'd had a regulation
flame-pistol in her belt, but even the Nine weren't prepared to go that far for
the sake of mere appearances.

"I haven't made up my mind yet," I told her.
"And although it probably testifies to the limitations of my imagination,
I actually care far more about what's going to happen to this sad bundle of
meaty bones than the heroic exploits of any non-carbon copy of its animating
spirit."

"I would like you to tell me about the
dream," she said calmly.

"The dream?"

"When you were unconscious in the aftermath of
the incident in the garden you had a dream."

"Is it important?"

"I believe so. It is the means by which the
biocopy in your brain is making itself known to you. The imagery is undoubtedly
borrowed—much as the image which I present to you now is borrowed—but there
seems to be a serious attempt at communication going on . . . perhaps a
desperate one."

I told her as much as I could remember. She winkled
out a few extra details by shrewd cross-examination. I was glad I'd had the
aspirin.

"The core of the dream," she assured me,
"is the series of images which you saw in approaching its climax. The
wolf-pack; the diseased world-tree; the ship of the dead; the traitor; the
fiery army; the bridge; the face of a god."

"I don't think it means anything in
particular," I told her. "I know where it comes from. It's part of
another myth-set from my homeworld—the set from which we borrowed the name
Asgard. The things I saw were all part of the build-up to
Gotterdammerung
. . . the twilight of the gods.
It's not unnatural that I should try to represent a war inside Asgard in those
terms: the gods versus the giants in the ultimate conflict. How else could I
try to get to grips with what's happening here? It all comes out of something I
read once, just like Medusa."

"There is no way that the biocopy can make itself
known to you save by exploiting the meaning of your own ideas," she told
me. "It must speak to you by means of an imagistic vocabulary which you
already know. It cannot invent—it can only select, and inform by selection.
This notion of an ultimate war between humanoid gods and giants might be an
invention of your own mind, but it must also be information given to you by
the new programme that has colonised your brain. We must treat it as a message,
and try to understand what it is trying to tell us."

I shrugged. "Okay," I said. "There's a
war going on. How does it help us to characterise the sides as gods and giants?
Does it tell us which side is which? Does it tell us who's trying to destroy
us, and why? And does it tell us what we're supposed to be doing about
it?"

"Perhaps it does," she replied with
infuriating persistence, "if we can read the imagery correctly."

"Read on, then," I said impatiently.

"The primary personalities involved in this
conflict are not humanoids," she said. "In fact, they are not organic
beings at all. They are artificial machine-intelligences—akin to ourselves, but
more complex and more powerful. The organic beings which created the Nine were
making machine-minds in the image of their own personalities. The
machine-intelligences engaged in this war were designed for different and more
ambitious purposes. Some, we must presume, were designed to operate and control
the macroworld—these are the entities that are represented in your dream as the
gods of Asgard. The others, we suspect, must have been created for the specific
purpose of attacking the macroworld and destroying its gods— these are the
beings that are represented in your dream by the giants. They may not actually
be intelligent—perhaps they are destructive automata akin to the things you
call tapeworms— but they seem to be capable of wreaking considerable havoc.

"If we are to take the imagery seriously, the
plight of the gods is desperate—the forces which are attempting to destroy them
are pressing forward their attack. That attack threatens all the organic life
in Asgard—represented by the world-tree of your dream—but some organic
life-forms may have become instruments of the attackers—that is what is
signified by the image of the traitor. Somehow, there is a vital function to be
served by organic entities, although we cannot be sure whether that function is
to be served by actual organic entities or by software
personas
which mimic them. That there is a heroic
role to be played we are convinced, but where and how it must be acted out, we
are not certain."

It was one hell of a story, but it seemed to me to be
reading an awful lot into a dream. I had the uncomfortable suspicion that
whatever I'd dreamed, the Nine would have been able to find a similar story in
it.

"I don't know," I said, dubiously. "It
would be more convincing if the supposed gods had managed to leave their
message in Myrlin's brain as well as mine—or Tulyar's. Has Tulyar turned up, by
the way?"

"No," replied the avatar of Athene. "We
are unable to locate him."

All of a sudden, that sounded rather ominous. Even
with most of their peripheral systems switched off, the Nine should have been
able to locate a Tetron, living or dead, if he were somewhere in their
worldlet. I remembered that although the Nine had been unable to find any
evidence that any alien software had been rudely injected into Myrlin's brain,
they had been more cautious in passing judgment on Tulyar.

"What do you deduce from that?" I asked,
anxiously.

"It is difficult to know what to deduce,"
she said, hesitantly, "but it is possible that some kind of programming
was transmitted into Tulyar's brain, and that it was not the

same
programme that was biocopied into you."

"By 'not the same' you mean to imply that it
wasn't put there by the same side, don't you?" I said.

"It is a possibility," she admitted.

"You think Tulyar might have had something to do
with the attack?"

"It is a possibility," she said again. There
were, alas, far too many possibilities.

"Why has the war suddenly heated up?" I
asked. "The macroworld must have been in trouble for a long time, to judge
by the condition of the upper levels. Hundreds of thousands of years—maybe millions.
How come the power got switched off
now?"

"The balance of power between the beleaguered
masters of the macroworld and the destructive entities must have been in a
state of equilibrium," she said. "Perhaps there had been a stalemate,
lasting for what you would consider to be vast reaches of time. Perhaps, on the
other hand, there has been ceaseless conflict in the regions below, with the
balance of power constantly changing. We suspect that this worldlet, and others
like it, may have been sealed off at some time in the distant past, and that we
were deliberately hidden away, for our own protection. When we were provoked by
what we learned about the existence of the greater universe to begin more
adventurous exploration of the deep levels, we may have unwittingly exposed
ourselves to the hostile attention of the destroyers. Our first encounter with
them did, indeed, come near to accomplishing our destruction.

"The second contact, in which you played a
crucial role, probably began as an attack by the 'giants,' but this time there
was an intervention by the masters of the macroworld, possibly undertaken at
considerable risk to themselves. They may well have saved us from destruction,
but they

could
not establish any direct communication. Only you managed to make any kind of
sense out of the contact, and I believe that you were quite correct to construe
what happened to you as a desperate plea for help.

"Perhaps as a result of their foray in our
support, the masters of the macroworld have lost further ground to their
enemies, and that is why the power-supply has been interrupted. We erected what
defences we could against attacks in software space, but—perhaps foolishly—had
not expected anything so crude as a straightforward physical assault. The
surprise factor gave the destroyers a temporary advantage that they should
never have been allowed, and we have all suffered in consequence. We have now
sealed our boundaries against further attacks of either kind, but we do not
think that we are sufficiently powerful to resist indefinitely the assaults of
a superior power. Steadfast defence may not be adequate to the demands of the
situation. That is why it seems imperative that we make contact with the
masters of the macroworld, and why you must give us what aid you can."

It was a pretty fine speech, and a good story too.
With the fate of the macroworld hanging in the balance, how could I possibly be
so churlish as to refuse to have myself copied? On the other hand, if the
battle was taking place on such a monumental scale, how could an insignificant
little entity like me possibly make any difference?

I didn't ask. I already knew what the Nine had elected
to believe. Supposedly, I had a weapon: Medusa's head. There were, of course,
little problems like not knowing what it was, how to use it, or what it was
supposed to do, but I had it. At any rate, the Nine
believed
that I had it.

"You live in software space," I said, rather
feebly. "It's your universe. I can't even imagine what it would feel like
to be a ghost in your kind of machine, or what the space I'd

be in
would look like—if look's the right word, given that I'd presumably have an
entirely different set of senses."

"That would depend entirely on the kind of copy
which was constructed," she said, eager to reassure me. "Any copy
would, of course, have to retain the essential features of your personality.
Let us say that it would need to be topographically identical, but that there
would still be a great deal of flexibility in regards to its folding. The manner
in which you would perceive your environment would depend very much on the
pattern of your own encryption. Just as the world that you presently inhabit is
to some extent contained within the language that your culture has invented to
describe it, so the constitution of the software universe depends on certain
features of the language that allows you to operate there—but with a much
greater degree of freedom.

"Humanoid languages are easily translated into
one another because the preconditions of the physical world exert such strong
constraint on the descriptions you construct. Software languages are much less
easy to translate one into another because the physical attributes of software
space are not so rigidly pre-defined. That will be to our advantage in two
ways. We desire to encode the copy of your personality in a language as
esoteric as possible—one which will superimpose upon the perception of software
space a way of 'seeing' radically different from that of the entities which
would try to destroy you. It will also enable us to equip your software
persona
with perceptions that will make some kind
of sense to you in terms of your present sensorium. Do you understand
that?"

The easy answer to that question was a simple
"no." No doubt the Nine could have given me a much more elaborate and
painstaking explanation, given time, but I was sure that they were hurrying for
a reason, and I felt that I had to do the best I could.

"What you mean," I said, carefully, "is
that software space hasn't much in the way of properties of its own. Its
properties are largely imposed by the programmes that operate in it, which can
define it more or less as they like. So, if you turn me into a computer
programme, the way I'll experience myself—and the world which I seem to inhabit—
will depend very heavily on what kind of programme I am. Whatever arcane
language I'm written in will determine the kind of being I seem to myself to
be, and the kinds of beings which other programmes will appear to be."

She nodded enthusiastically, and smiled, having
slipped back into her silent-movie mode again. "That's correct," she
said.

"Do I get a choice?" I asked. "Can I be
whatever I want to be?"