Brian Stableford - Asgard's Conquerors

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Stay out of it for the time being. The Nine do want to talk to you, though. They’ll probably send a couple of the scions over to do the talking, but they’ll hear everything themselves. Don’t be alarmed by the scions—they’re partial personalities of members of the Nine, modified for life as humanoid individuals, and they’re somewhat weird, but they’ve made a lot of progress during the last months. We can’t make any more for the time being—we just wouldn’t be able to fill their heads effectively now that the Nine have been injured. We daren’t run the risk of producing madmen. A great pity—we should have made hundreds more, in a dozen different forms, while we had the chance. We may need them. By the way: Finn should be waking up too—or would you rather we kept him in the tank?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Send him out. I’ll look after him. What about Susarma Lear?”

He shook his head. “Another twenty-four hours, I should think,” he said.

After he had gone, the furry humanoids came to visit. There were two, and they were certainly somewhat weird.

“We are Thalia-7 and Calliope-4,” said one of them, peering at me with big brown eyes. They looked more like Tetrax than humans, but their hair was shaggier and much lighter in colour, and their faces weren’t as compact. They had wide mouths and rubbery lips, and put me in mind of steep-faced orangutans.

“Thalia and Calliope?” I queried.

“The Nine have no names; they have no need of them. When they created our partial personalities, we adopted names suggested by your species-cousin Myrlin, and numbered different versions of each parent personality in a fashion similar to your more distant species-cousins, the Tetrax.”

They sat down together on a sofa, moving almost in unison. They could easily have been twins, and I would have inferred from the way they stuck so close that they were aspects of the same personality rather than different ones, but I guessed that it might take two to make a crowd, and remembered that they didn’t like “solitude.” I couldn’t tell what sex they were, but in view of the fact that they’d chosen to name themselves after the Muses, I decided to think of them as being on the female side of neuter.

“Why are you so interested in me?” I asked them. “Paradoxical as it may seem, Myrlin probably has more of the heritage of human knowledge locked up in his mind than I do, even though he’s never been to the solar system.”

“But you have seen so much more of the universe—and you know much more than he about Asgard. In any case, it is good to talk as well as to know. To express knowledge . . .” She groped momentarily for words, then concluded: “... is to create being.”

I looked at them both, uneasily aware of the fact that these were beings more alien than any humanoids I had ever before encountered.

“I thought the Nine’s machines had picked my mind clean,” I said. “I thought you knew more about me than I do.”

Calliope shook her head, obviously intending the gesture to be read as a negation. “We know much,” she assured me, “but there is a sense in which we also know little—so very little. We can only know about you by hearing your own account. In one sense, that is the only real account that can be given. Do you follow?”

I thought I did. The real person is the active, thinking, talking person. I was the only one who could tell them about me. And it was something that had to be told, not extracted by neuronal taproots plugging into my brain. They might have copied my brain’s software in some arcane fashion, but that wasn’t the same thing as knowing the person who belonged to that brain.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

They wanted to know a great deal. About myself; about the history of mankind; about the evolution of life on earth; about cosmology and cosmogony and atomic physics and things that go bump in the night. In some sense, they knew it all already, but they wanted to hear it. There was a great deal that I couldn’t tell them, and much that was very difficult for me to put into the proper words, given my own ignorance and lack of expertise, but I tried.

All the while, they watched me. It was as if they were studying me, learning how to be human . . . how to be humanoid. They were unfailingly courteous in asking questions—like great grave children anxious for the low- down on the business of adult living.

And in the end, of course, they asked me about Asgard— about who might have built it, and why, and what I thought about it, and what my reasoning was.

So we were back to the heart of the matter again, back to the thing that could hardly help but fascinate us all. Except that the matter was more complicated now, because the Nine had their own unfortunate experience to add to the register of perplexing evidence.

We talked for a long time, and much of what we said even about Asgard simply went over old ground. I told them about the galactic races, and about all the things I’d discussed with 673-Nisreen aboard Leopard Shark —all of which was news to them. We had a sense of getting nearer to the whole picture, but we still didn’t have enough to put it all together.

“The Ark scenario still looks most likely,” I told them. “The way I had it figured, on the basis of what I saw in the levels while the Scarida were taking me to prison, was that the builders of Asgard were making an object to contain thousands of environments, reproducing the conditions of a whole galaxy full of inhabited worlds. From each world they then took a series of ecosystems, and a handful of indigenes. But what Myrlin told me about the Isthomi doesn’t quite square with that. There, it seems, the parent culture was living in a macroworld like Asgard, with no memory of any worldly existence. So maybe Asgard is a daughter macroworld, reproducing the structure and cultural diversity of an earlier model. In which case—was the earlier model an Ark, or do we face an infinite regress?”

“We are more anxious about the disaster which appears to have overtaken the world,” said Thalia-7. “What we have discovered about the outermost levels of Asgard is puzzling. For one thing, the outermost levels seem once to have had a level of technological sophistication that few of the levels below have reproduced, even though they were evacuated long ago. Wherever the inhabitants of those outer levels went, it was not to the levels immediately below. But the mystery of where they went is perhaps a lesser matter, compared with the mystery of why?”

“The standard theory is that Asgard lost most of its atmosphere passing through a dense, cold cloud, and that the levels had to be evacuated because of that. We always supposed that the outermost levels, unlike the levels below, relied upon an external source of energy—an outer sun rather than an inner one.”

“That is a possibility,” conceded Calliope-4—the two scions tended to take it in turns to speak—“but given that levels just below the outermost ones are equipped to draw energy from the distribution-system which exists in the walls of the macrostructure, we find it difficult to believe that the outermost levels could not have been sustained through any such disaster. We also cannot understand how the temperature in those outer levels fell so very far. We think it could not have done so by virtue of any natural process. We tend to favour the hypothesis that the outermost levels were deliberately cooled, and that the regions whose temperature was reduced almost to absolute zero were set up as a kind of defensive barrier.”

“A barrier against what?”

“Some kind of invasion.” Thalia took up the thread again. “Not by entities such as you or we, but by something microscopic, on the same size-scale as bacteria or viruses.”