Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

“In fact, if Asgard is a fortress, it looks very much as if the fortress has been breached, and that the entire macroworld is in danger—and not just from the slow death that will follow the power failure. We must at least consider the possibility that if this war is being waged by invaders of Asgard against its defenders, their objective might be its total destruction.”

I could tell that I’d impressed him. He looked very serious indeed—as well he might, considering that I’d just suggested to him that if the mysterious battle raging around us were to be won by the wrong side, ten thousand life-systems might be blown to atoms.

The Tetrax had always posed as great believers in the brotherhood of humanoid races, and were never slow to preach to others the doctrine that truly civilized people outgrew the folly of war. I had always had my doubts as to whether the likes of 994-Tulyar really believed that, but 673-Nisreen seemed less of a hypocrite. For him, the thought that the godlike beings who had built Asgard were involved in the kind of war where multiple genocide might qualify as a minor incident must be a very shocking one.

As I had said to Jacinthe Siani, it was beginning to look as if we were inhabitants of a rather disappointing universe.

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.