Asgard's Heart (29 page)

I saw Myrlin smile, not simply because we
were moving again, but because he had accepted the lesson that we
could
discover how to act
here . . . that we were not utterly impotent by virtue of the strangeness of
it all.

"Well done!" he said.
"Perhaps they will not stop us after all."

But I was not so ready to surrender to
delight. I had not failed to notice that the moment we began to move, the mists
that had withdrawn themselves began to steal inwards again. The cloudy sky
above us, which had become quite white and high, now seemed to descend again,
and to shift and swirl with fierce uncertain winds. I expected at any moment
that the weed would sink beneath the surface of the eldritch sea, and let us
down to float again, as we had before—but that was not what concerned me. I
knew that we had now had our pause, and having escaped the attempt to confine
us, must force our enemies to redouble their efforts to destroy us. In proving
that we were not impotent, we had proved that we might be dangerous, and I knew
that every adversary that came against us would be stronger than the last—until,
in the end, we would meet our match.

The game, if game it was to be reckoned,
had hardly begun.

21

When we came to rest, the truck's front end was
pointed downwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. We had not been brought to
an abrupt stop, nor had we been bounced about very much on the way down. All in
all, it had been a pretty smooth ride. I calculated that we'd been traveling
with the dustslide for the best part of half a minute, but I couldn't translate
that into distance. The acceleration due to gravity was pretty tame down here,
and we'd had the dust to slow us up as well. We certainly hadn't got to the
bottom of the world, but in Asgardian terms we could be at the bottom of a
fairly deep well, buried in dirt.

I could see through the window that it
wasn't just dirt that we were buried under. It was a thick, glutinous liquid.
We were at the bottom of a sea of mud.

I already knew that the truck could climb
down an empty shaft, but I wasn't at all sure that it could swim.

"Anybody hurt?" I asked.

Nobody answered. I assumed that could be
taken as an all-round no.

"What do we do now?" asked
Susarma Lear. Like the rest of us she had both hands on the ledge of the
dashboard in front of her, bracing herself so that she didn't slide off the
seat. The window looked like a dull mirror, silvered by the dust in which we
were buried, and I could see her shadowy reflection looking at me.

Nobody answered her question either.

Then there came a strange sound, as if
something was being scraped along the side of the vehicle. Wherever we were, we
weren't alone.

"Is the side of the truck clear?"
I asked Urania, wondering whether it was only the cab that was under the
drift.

"No," she said, shortly. She was
fluttering her fingers over the body of her mechanical sister, her brow
furrowed with intense concentration.

The sound continued, moving closer now,
until it was at the side of the cab. It was no longer a single scrape but a
combination, and the sounds were now coming from three different directions. As
I looked at the dim reflection of Susarma's face I saw it suddenly dissolve as
though exploded, and actually winced before I realised that it was the mud which
had been disturbed, not the person whose image it had caught. There was
something moving in the ooze, pressing against the truck as if trying to grip
it.

It was like a section of segmented tubing,
pale and slimy. It extended itself across the windscreen, as though it were a
piece of rope that was being wound carefully around the truck.

"Oh shit," said Susarma.
"It's a bloody worm. A giant worm."

I knew there was no need to be frightened—at
least, not of the worm. It could be the biggest and nastiest worm in the
universe, but it wasn't going to be able to break in. To judge by the scraping
sounds it was either coiling itself tightly about us, or it had three or four
friends with it, but it was still quite impotent. On the other hand, its
presence wasn't exactly comforting.

"What do we do?" Susarma asked
again, obviously hoping that someone had thought of a brilliant plan in the
interval which had passed since she last enquired. I hadn't, so I looked at
Urania, who was still busy communing with the magic box.

"We are extending pseudopods,"
she said. "There is a rigid surface beneath us, on which the pseudopods
can find purchase. Then we must drag ourselves through the mud."

"It sounds," I observed, "as
if that might take a long time."

We waited. Then she said: "We are
close to the bottom of a cleft. There is an upward slope about thirty metres
away, inclined about twenty degrees to the horizontal. With luck, it should not
take too long to free us from the mud."

She didn't sound over-optimistic. That
wasn't entirely surprising. We still had to pick up the trail of the other
truck. With the ground turning liquid and the local bugs busy gobbling up the
organic trace we were supposed to be following, that might not be easy. If we
were unlucky, we'd be lost—and of all the places I could think of to be lost
in, this was far from being my favourite.

"Is there anything we can do to
help?" I asked.

"It will not be necessary," she
assured me. "Perhaps you should take the opportunity to rest." She
seemed perennially keen to make sure that I got my beauty sleep.

I didn't think the wait would be very
restful no matter what I did, but I didn't like the thought of remaining braced
against the windscreen, watching the worms go by. I climbed out of the cab into
the hind part of the truck.

673-Nisreen had woken up when we stopped.
He had turned himself around in his bunk so that it was his feet that were
pointed downward at a forty-five degree angle, but he didn't look very
comfortable. He asked me what had happened and I told him, as succinctly as I
could. Instead of getting into my bunk I sat down on the sloping floor, in the
narrow space between the two sets of shelves. It was as comfortable a position
as I could find.

"How's the arm?" I asked.

"The scion set it well," he told
me. "The slide jarred it, but I do not think it did any further
damage." Like all Tetrax, he was committed to making light of his
suffering. They consider themselves to be a very dignified race.

"I think I have another piece of the
jigsaw," I said.

He didn't understand me. Obviously, the
parole word into which I'd translated "jigsaw" didn't have the right
connotations.

I told him about my dream. Urania was busy,
but I figured that Clio would be listening in somehow.

"Whatever they copied into my brain,"
I told him, when I'd finished, "seems to be intended to tell us what the
situation is, as well as helping us to deal with it. Comparing its tactics
with what the thing that got into Tulyar seems to have done, I'm inclined to
believe that we're on the side of the humanitarians—which makes it the right
side, in my book. I only wish I could get a proper grip on whatever it's trying
to teach me. What is this
anti-life?
You're a
bioscientist—what could it be?"

He was a Tetron bioscientist, which meant
that he had an inbuilt evasiveness when it came to guesswork and speculation,
but I could tell that what I'd told him intrigued him a little.

"The simplest hypothesis," he
said, carefully, "might suppose it to be something which has the same
characteristics as DNA-based living systems—the tendencies of growth,
self-replication, evolution of complexity, and so on—but with a different
chemical basis. If its fundamental molecular system was a different carbon
chain, this other system might be locked into a universe-wide competition with
DNA for the elements of life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen."

"So an Asgard-type macroworld would
then become both an Ark and a fortress in the context of an ongoing war between
DNA-life and X-life for sole possession of the universe? It would be designed
to collect and preserve DNA-forms, and also to seed worlds where the elements
of life are available. But there are X-life macroworlds too, manned by X-life
humanoids and X-life software entities, trying to do much the same thing. And
each side is trying to shoot down the other side's macroworld."

"Perhaps," said Nisreen, though I
could tell that it wasn't a scenario he cared for.

"What are the alternatives?"

"These anti-life entities might not be
able to produce mirror-images of the life-systems which DNA has built. Perhaps
only DNA produces trees, insects, humanoids . . . perhaps a system based in
different molecules would produce very different forms. Perhaps it could not
produce metazoan entities at all—perhaps nothing more complicated than a
bacterium. But that would not explain the apparent presence of hostile software
entities within Asgard. Perhaps the anti-life sequence of evolution does not
involve carbon at all—perhaps it involves different elements, and begins to
touch the world of life only at the point when its intelligent, manipulative
entities begin to build intelligent machines whose brains are
silicon-based."

"But what, in that case, would the war
be about? What would be the purpose of the worldlets?"

"To collect and to seed, as you have
already suggested. But it might help to explain the curious situation we find
here if we suppose that the invaders of Asgard really have nothing against the
organic inhabitants of the worldlets, and would be quite content to let them
alone. They might envisage themselves as being in competition—and hence in
conflict—only with the software intelligences. That would explain why life of
our kind has never been wiped out or seriously threatened, although the attempt
made by the Isthomi to explore the software space of inner Asgard invoked such
a powerful reaction."

I considered the two alternatives. They
both had certain attractions. I couldn't immediately see a way of deciding
between them. Nor could I see any reason to suppose that they were the only two
hypotheses that might be entertained.

"Can you think of any others?" I
asked Nisreen.

"The game of speculation," he
parried, "can be played indefinitely. There are always more."

"Tell me," I said.

"It is outside the scope of my
expertise," he said.

"I don't think this is an appropriate
time to get coy," I told him. "The guys back on Tetra will probably
never know. You can be as wild as you like."

"In that case," he said, "we
can multiply hypotheses simply by pushing the level of competition further and
further back. We have imagined life based in an alternative organic chemistry.
We have imagined pseudo-life based in the chemistry of other elements than
carbon. If we are to exercise our imaginations more fully, we might attach the
phenomena which are associated with life—replication, evolution, control of the
environment—to things other than those transactions of atoms and molecules
which we categorise as 'chemistry.' If there are to be no limits upon what we
suppose, then we may babble about quasi-living systems and intelligences at the
subatomic level, or at the level of the structuring of space itself. You have
no doubt been told that if the fundamental constants of physics had other values
than the ones they have now, life of our kind would be impossible. It is
possible to speculate that those characteristics themselves are in some way
open to manipulation— but at this point the imagination of beings like us is
tested to its limit. I, at least, can no longer construct a coherent account of
what might be going on."