Asgard's Heart (8 page)

poisoned
programming or what?"

"Please tell us everything that you know about
this person called Medusa," she said calmly.

"I can't remember very much about her at
all," I replied. "She was a character in Greek mythology who turned
everyone who looked at her to stone. A hero called Perseus cut off her head
while watching her reflection in a highly polished shield. That's it."

"Are you sure?" she countered.

The inquiry left me feeling rather helpless. I knew
that she was prompting me—trying to make me remember something else. She was an
alien group-mind who lived halfway to the core of an artificial macroworld
orbiting a star a thousand light-years from Earth, and yet she knew more about
the mythology of the ancient Greeks than I did. What made it even more bizarre
was that her primary source of information about matters human was an android
on Salamandra, whose own second-hand information had been pumped into him by
hostile aliens while he was growing at an unnatural pace from embryo to giant
in some kind of nutrient bath.

"As sure as I can be," I replied,
defensively stubborn. "No doubt there's more locked up in the vaults of my
subconscious, but I only have the primitive lever of memory to get me in
there. I haven't got your kind of access to stored data."

"Please don't be disturbed," she said
softly. "There is a mystery here, but I believe that we can solve
it."

She had some of Susarma Lear's features, but she
didn't have Susarma Lear's voice—which, as even the colonel's many admirers
would have admitted, did tend to the strident. This voice was much more like
Jacinthe Siani's. There was no point in complaining—Susarma Lear and Jacinthe

Siani
were the only two humanoid females the Nine could use as models. Jacinthe, who
still had the trust of the Scarida on account of being their most loyal galactic
collaborator, had been brought down by a team of their negotiators shortly
after the end of the war.

"It's all very well to tell me not to be
disturbed," I told her, "but I'm not sure that I have much control
over that any more. This stupid hallucination was a disturbance, and though I'm
pretty confident that I'm not going mad of my own accord, I can't help worrying
about the possibility of having picked up a little hostile software."

"Exactly what do you mean by 'hostile software'?"
she asked, in a painstaking fashion.

I sighed. "As with everything else," I said,
testily, "I'm sure you know far more about it than I do. I'm no
electronics expert. Ever since the earliest days of infotech on our world we've
had things called 'information viruses' or 'tapeworms.' They're programmes
that can be hidden on a disc or a bubble, which load into your system along
with other software. Once they're established in your equipment they begin
intruding bits of random noise into other programmes, and if left to themselves
they can turn all your inbuilt software to junk. All our semi-intelligent
systems have protective devices—immunizers—which are supposed to keep them out,
but the tapeworms just get cleverer and cleverer. They're used mainly by
saboteurs. No doubt you and any other machine-intelligences lurking in the
depths of Asgard are far too clever to be infected by the kind of tapeworms we
produce—but I dare say you have troubles of your own. What I'm asking you is:
did I pick up some kind of tapeworm when I was contacted? Is there something in
my brain that's intended to destroy my mind?"

She seemed thoughtful, though she'd now corrected the
tendency to overact. "What you're afraid of," she said, "is that
when you were forced into the interface with my own software space, where you
encountered the alien presence which injured me, your own brain was somehow
forced to make a biocopy of an alien programme. You now suspect that the
biocopy has become fully established, and is beginning to be active. You think
that it might be analogous to one of these 'tapeworms,' and that its purpose
may be to disrupt your own intrinsic programming—including that part which
constitutes your identity."

"That's about the size of it," I admitted.
"I can't shake the feeling that something got into me during that contact,
and though I don't know what the hell it is, I don't like it being there. And I
certainly don't like the idea of it becoming active. You may be used to the
idea of having nine identities in one, but I'm not. I'm a solitary kind of
person, and I like to have vacant possession of my own brain. So tell me— have
I picked up some hostile software?"

"I cannot be sure," she said, as I'd been
fairly certain that she would. "To tell you the truth, despite the success
of my efforts at self-repair, I am not altogether certain whether or not I
might have acquired some new hidden programming of my own. I still have no
very clear idea of what kind of entity it was that I contacted in the deeper
part of Asgard, nor what kind of entity it was which subsequently made the
second contact within my own systems. Since I began experimenting with the
production of the scions— whose minds are, of course, biocopies of parts of my
own collective being—I have pushed back my own conceptual horizons quite
considerably. I can easily believe that the entity we contacted was capable of
making a biocopy of part of itself within your brain, even though it was
operating across a primitive neuronal bridge. That does appear to be the most
likely hypothesis, which could explain your recent experience. But it is by no
means easy to decide whether the entity really had any hostile intent, despite
the considerable damage that I sustained as a result of the contact. You have
cast considerable doubt on that by your interpretation of the second contact as
a cry for help."

"I don't want to be haunted," I said,
flatly. "Not by monsters whose
raison d'etre
is turning people to stone. Nothing would please me more than to decide that
any software I've picked up is friendly, and that it won't drive me mad—but
Medusa is hardly a friendly image, is it?"

"It is not plausible that the entity had any
independent knowledge of human mythology," she pointed out. "What you
saw just now was mainly your own creation. You were responding to a stimulus,
in much the same way that you supplied your own imagery to cope with the
contact that you made at the interface. That is why you must ask yourself very
carefully what the image of Medusa might mean; it is a symbol which we must
decode."

"What Medusa means," I insisted, "is
turning people to stone."

"Did you take any special interest in Greek
mythology in your youth?" she asked patiently.

I hesitated, then shrugged. "More than some, I
guess. Local connections encouraged it. I was born in the asteroid belt, on a
microworld. The microworld moved about a bit, but it stayed within a mass-rich
region of space at one of the Lagrangian points forming an equilateral triangle
with the sun and the solar system's biggest gas giant, Jupiter. For reasons of
historical eccentricity, the asteroids near the Lagrangian points are known as
Trojan asteroids, and they're named after the heroes who fought in the Trojan
War. One group is called the Trojan group, even though it has one asteroid
named after the Greek hero Patroclus; the other is called the Greek group, even
though it contains one named after the Trojan Hector. Hector was one of two
asteroids in our group that had been hollowed to create a microworld; the other—the
one where I was born—was Achilles. It was inevitable that a certain friendly
rivalry should grow up between the two; at the utilitarian level we were
competing for the same resources, but the subtler business of trying to forge
some kind of cultural identity for our worlds attached us psychologically and
emotionally to the names of our worlds. Achilles and Hector fought a great duel
at the end of the
Iliad
, you see—and
Achilles won. The Homeric epics were elementary reading for every child on the
microworld, and the rest of Greek mythology was a logical extension. The first
humans who came out here obviously had a different cultural background, or
they'd have translated the name which the Tetrax gave this macroworld as
Olympus, not as Asgard."

"In that case," she said, with a hint of
irritating smugness, "you did read more about Medusa than you have recalled."

"I know that she never showed up at Troy, and
that Odysseus never bumped into her on his travels. Perseus was in a different
story. So tell me—what did I forget?"

She didn't want to tell me. She wanted me to remember
for myself. After all, understanding my strange experience was a matter of
coming to terms with my subconscious.

"Why did Perseus want the gorgon's head?"
she asked.

I struggled hard to remember. Microworld Achilles was
a long way away, and my years there now seemed to be a very remote region of
the foreign country that was my past.

"He'd placed himself under some obligation to a
king, and was forced to go after it," I said, eventually. "Athene

helped
him to trick a couple of weird sisters who had only one eye between them, so
that they'd tell him where to get what he needed—winged shoes and a cap to make
himself invisible. When he got back with the head he found that the king had
done the dirty on him somehow . . . tried to rape his mother, I think . . .
and. ..."

Enlightenment struck as I managed to follow the frail
thread of long-buried memories to the punch line. Perseus had used the head to
turn the bad guy and all his court to stone.

"You don't think it was aimed
at
me, do you?" I said, softly. "It's
hostile software, all right—but you think it may be some kind of weapon!"

"There is no way to be sure," she replied.
"But it is a possibility, is it not?"

I looked at her, pensively. Though her hair was dark,
her eyes were grey and pale. They weren't Susarma Lear's eyes and they weren't
Jacinthe Siani's either. In fact, they were more like mine. It was impossible
to think of her, sitting there, as a conglomerate of nine individuals, and it
didn't seem appropriate to think of her as bearing the name of only one of the
nine Muses after whom Myrlin had impishly named her scions. As she stared back
at me, with all the deep concern of a master psychoanalyst, I remembered
something else from my reading of long ago.

The mother of the nine Muses had been Mnemosyne.
Mnemosyne meant "memory."

Another thought which flitted quickly across my mind
was that although the Muses were the inspiration behind the various arts, the
supreme goddess of the arts was Athene, who had aided Perseus.

I wondered how I should name the phantasm which faced
me now. Should I call her Mnemosyne, or Athene?

But
Mnemosyne, I supposed, was a mere abstraction rather than a person, and for all
the arbitrariness of her appearance, what I was facing now was a real and
powerful being—one who could readily aspire to be reckoned one of the
"gods" to which Asgard was supposedly home.

"I have an uncomfortable feeling," I said,
"that you might be inclined to find rather more meaning in my little
adventure than I want to look for."

"On the contrary," she replied sweetly.
"You have already declared your intention of penetrating to the very
lowest levels of the macroworld. You are already determined to undertake a
journey to the mysterious Centre, and have asked me to try to discover a route
that would take you there. It may be that this is a search which will take both
of us into unexpected
realms ...
let us not
discount the possibility that the way to the Centre is already engraved in the
hidden recesses of your own mind. Whatever cried to you for help may also have
given you the means to supply that help."

I swallowed a lump which had somehow appeared in my
throat. "I may be an Achillean by birth," I said, "but I'm not
exactly cut from the same cloth as Perseus. His father, as I recall, was
Zeus."

"I cannot pretend to have a complete
understanding of fleshly beings," she told me, "despite what I have
learned from my scions. But I do not think that the paternity of your flesh is
of any significance here. It is the author of the software within your brain
that concerns us now. The mind which you brought here carries a legacy of
knowledge and craft which must be deemed the property of your entire race . . .
and what has now been added to it we can only guess."

I wasn't ready for that. I shook my head, and turned
away with a dismissive gesture.

"Much more of that," I remarked, and not in
jest, "and you'll be scaring me more than the gorgon's head did. Hostile
software that wants to drive me mad is something I could maybe be cured of—you're
talking about something a hell of a lot more ominous than a tapeworm."

"It is conjecture only," she reassured me.
"We must know more before we plan to act, though time is of the essence.
We must find out whether anyone else has had such an experience."

Although I was the only one who'd consciously made
contact during that dark hour when the Isthomi had come close to destruction, I
wasn't the only one who's interfaced. Myrlin had been hooked up too—and so had
994-Tulyar. I wondered what kind of imagery could be mined from the
mythological symbol-system of a Tetron mind.

"Do you want me to ask?" I said
unenthusiastically.