Brian Stableford - Asgard's Conquerors

“There’s something wrong with them?” I said—uncertain, although it certainly confirmed the impression I’d received.

“Something badly wrong,” he confirmed. “They’re still functioning, but . . . I’ll explain it to you later. Who’s the fourth one we pulled out?”

“Man named John Finn. Said to be good with electronics. We only brought him because we were afraid he might be useful to the invaders if we left him behind. They interested in him, too?”

“Oh yes.”

“Are the others awake?”

“Not yet. They’re still probing the Tetron and Finn. The star-captain will take a little longer. She has a bullet wound in the leg and is suffering from tissue-necrosis.”

The corridors were beginning to seem endless. Some of the side-branches were unlighted, and showed no sign of ever having been lighted.

“This isn’t ancient biotechnics gone wrong, is it?” I said. “There never was light in these corridors.”

“They don’t use visible light much,” he said. “Not in here, anyhow. The lighting’s just for me. They used to be able to light the ceiling itself, but that was lost along with most of their other capabilities.”

“I should have expected you,” I said. “That note. It was stupid of me to assume that it came from Alex Sovorov. Your bosses—the super-scientists—must have been keeping an eye on the invaders all along. I should have realised.”

He shook his head. “Actually,” he said, “we’d only just begun to keep an eye on Skychain City. We were every bit as surprised as the Tetrax when the Scarida appeared. We weren’t in a position to take a hand, then. Things had already gone wrong. I’ve had to take charge of a lot of things. We need to talk to the Tetrax, and to the Scarida too. The scions I planted in the prison to gather information will have declared themselves by now, but the Tetron virus has disrupted the chain of command both there and in Skychain City—it’s a pity you managed to infect a man as important as Dyan. It’s a pity the alarms went off so soon, as well; that might make it more difficult for the scions.”

“It was hardly my fault,” I reminded him. “Who are the scions?”

“The furry humanoids. The Nine made them—much as the Salamandrans made me—in the image of one of the races which the Scarida displaced. It wasn’t too difficult to get them into the prison, once we’d found a way to that level. Our route up to fifty-two is direct and efficient—there are such routes available, once you know how to get access to them.”

At last we came out of the corridors, and into what qualified as open space in Asgardian terms. But it wasn’t like coming into the fresh air. There was a thirty-metre ceiling here, but it was lighted in the craziest way imaginable, with formless masses of silvery lights drifting and coiling like clouds against a grey background. And beneath this gloomy sky there were no “fields”—not even the kind of artificially- photosynthetic factory fields that the Tetrax had resurrected under Skychain City. There was a roadway, and a railway, extending side-by-side into the gloom, and there were buildings like metal igloos, but there was nothing alive at all.

I realised, belatedly, that the “sky” was no different from the “walls” in the room where I had awakened. It was like a vast video screen, and the clouds that moved across it were the traces of some kind of electronic activity. It suddenly dawned on me that Myrlin’s masters had not simply rigged the sky to function as a big mindscrambler on that long-ago day when they had kicked me out of their little corner of manufactured paradise.

Myrlin’s masters were the sky, just as they were everything else in this weird place.

They were everywhere.

No wonder, I thought, they have difficulty producing manifestations of themselves in a particular location. And no wonder they don’t understand “solitude.”

I turned to face him, able to see his face clearly for the first time, in spite of the dim light.

“Did they make you immortal?” I asked him. “Yes,” he said.

“You don’t suppose they could do the same for me?” I enquired, tentatively.

“They already have,” he assured me. When destiny accepts you as a plaything, anything can happen. One minute, you think you’re dead; the next, you might live forever.

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.