Brian Stableford - Asgard's Heart

673-Nisreen stared at the creature that had once been his kin.

“What are you?” he asked. He seemed to be no longer angry, but simply curious.

“I am 994-Tulyar,” said the other, calmly. “I do not deny that I am more than I once was, but I remain who I have always been, and I demand your obedience to my authority. When the present task is complete, there will be much work still to be done, and the Tetrax are the natural heirs of that mission. The people of the macroworld must be brought into the brotherhood of humanoid species, and the remaining enemies of that brotherhood—the Isthomi and their kin—must be destroyed. There is much for the Tetrax to do, and much for humans, too.”

The last was said with a sidelong glance at John Finn. I could see that Finn looked unhappy and uncertain, but he was listening as intently as Nisreen.

“What kind of war is it that you are fighting?” asked Nisreen, levelly. “Rousseau represented it as a war between two kinds of life, or between life and anti-life. I could not understand.”

“Rousseau could not understand,” Tulyar’s voice replied. “Our allies are minds, like the minds which humanoid beings evolved and then set free within their machines, but they had different makers. Their ultimate origins, like ours, must be sought in the dark dust that drifts between the stars, but for what it is worth, it was their kind and not ours that were the first intelligences of the universe. The substance of life is the stuff of second-generation stars, while theirs had its origin in simpler matter. It is of little significance now, for both kinds of mind have transcended the matter that gave them birth. Material entities created gods, and now the gods dispute for control of the material entities that gave them birth. Asgard is one battleground; when this battle is settled the galaxy will become a battleground. But what you must understand, 673-Nisreen, is that it matters not at all to entities of flesh-and-blood which side they choose; they must have one or the other, but they owe no essential loyalty to either. We are Tetrax, 673-Nisreen, and our only loyalty is to the Tetrax, and to the galactic community whose ideological leaders we are. We must make whatever alliance will serve Tetra and the galaxy best, and that alliance is already forged.”

673-Nisreen seemed less than totally convinced, but he glanced sideways at John Finn. Neither he nor Finn said anything, but the glance spoke volumes. John Finn was turncoat through and through. He didn’t give a damn which side he was on, as long as he was looked after. Nisreen cared, but he didn’t know any longer which side was the side of right. He’d listened to my side of the story, based on what I’d experienced in my dreams—but how much could a human’s dreams count for in the eyes of a sceptical Tetron?

Nisreen looked at Myrlin, then, calmly appraising the state of the android. Myrlin’s eyes were glazed, and he was saying nothing, but he had a needier in his hand and he was all-too-obviously capable of using it.

The question I had asked myself before came back to mind: Where was I? Where was the Rousseau of flesh and blood, from whose brain I had been mysteriously born? As I looked at the thing that had once been my friend, I remembered the other Myrlin, and the strange light that had flared in his eye as he was about to die. In the moment of reaching out to save me, he had changed. Perhaps, if death had not claimed him, he might have destroyed me. I was overcome by the horrible suspicion that the Myrlin of flesh and blood had been used by some alien master to destroy the fleshly Rousseau.

Nisreen was looking at Tulyar again, but the thing that was wearing Tulyar’s body had turned away now. He was sitting down in front of some kind of console. It had a lot of controls—manual keyboards, and mechanical levers.

The intelligence in 994-Tulyar’s body took no further notice of the other Tetron. He seemed quite absorbed in his rapt contemplation of the console. He reached out tentatively to turn a couple of knobs, but then turned back again. He was as inscrutable as any real Tetron now, but I inferred that the final shot in the crazy war which had raged inside Asgard for hundreds of thousands of years was not quite ready for firing. On the other hand, he seemed to expect that the mechanical omens would become auspicious at almost any time. It was a matter of minutes rather than hours—and there didn’t seem to be anything that anyone could do to stop it.

It was nice to know, of course, that Asgard wasn’t going to be blown to bits after all, but if I read pseudo-Tulyar’s meaning right, the blast he was going to unleash would be a holocaust to consume all those inhabitants of software space who had opposed his kin.

Including me.

And there didn’t seem to be a damn thing that anyone could do about it.

But then the disembodied voice chipped in again, and said: No time at all, Michael Rousseau. You know what to do, even though you do not know that you know. There is no hope of establishing any physical interface by means of which we can transcribe you, and we believe that it was once explained to you that the transmission of personalities in any wave-encoded form is difficult in the extreme. There would be no hope of success, save that we are transmitting you into a brain which is already configured to contain you.

We are going to put you back into your body, Michael Rousseau, if we can—we must fire you like a bullet from a magical gun. We do not know if it will work, and we cannot tell how badly your body has been injured, but there is nothing else to be done. You are the very last shot that we can fire. We are sorry for the indecent haste, but there simply is no time to…

I awoke with a horrid, nauseous shock, as if some mysterious beam of malice had jolted my grey matter.

I felt very numb, as though I was floating. I was as high as a kite on some kind of pain-killer. That was due to the life-support system on my back, which was still hooked into my flesh. It had fed me enough anaesthetic to knock me out, and now it was letting me down again, as gently as it could.

I moved the hand that was clutching my abdomen, touching the fingertips very gently to the wound where the needles had gone in. There was a rough edge, but it was only the lacerated plastic of the suit. The entry wound had already scarred over. Whatever the Nine had done to me had given my powers of self-repair a considerable boost. I tried to sit up, and immediately regretted it. It wasn’t exactly pain, but it was a dreadful sensation of nausea. The needles were still inside me, and the damage they’d done was going to take a good deal more than half an hour to make good.

I lay back against the pillar, wondering whether it could possibly do me any good to be alive. I looked from side to side, hoping to see something reassuring. My headlight was still working, but its feeble beam showed me nothing but dust and wreckage—including a skeleton which must have been sprawling in much the same position as myself, against another pillar. When I tried to turn my head, though, I realised that there was another light-source not too far away. At first I thought that it must be Susarma Lear’s helmet-lamp, but it was actually an open doorway in a wall some thirty metres away. I couldn’t see inside from where I was lying, but I could hear 673-Nisreen’s voice over the radio link, and I had to bite my tongue to stop myself exclaiming in surprise.

I tried to sit up, and succeeded. It wasn’t comfortable, but I had a terrible sense of urgency. I couldn’t quite think why, but I had the idea that I was in a hurry. I came to my knees, and then I managed, with some difficulty, to stand up.

I looked around, but the needier I’d been carrying had gone.