"The builders considered the possibility of trying to move Asgard again, but time was against them. They could not do so immediately because of the damping down of the starlet's fusion reactor, and once the starlet's normal functions had been restored they could not make proper preparations because the war was in its most desperate phase. They judged it necessary, instead, to isolate the real space within the starshell in order to protect it from the invaders.
"The war went badly for the builders in those early years. It took such toll of their resources that they could not survive, in their organic forms. No humanoid has set foot on the starshell for hundreds of thousands of years, and those inorganic intelligences which reached the shell itself could not breach the defences protecting the control room—until the Isthomi upset the balance of things.
"The builders had built artificial intelligences to inhabit their machinery which were much more powerful than themselves—gods, if you wish to call them that, but gods manufactured by men who were not so very different from your own kind. But the builders did not trust their servant gods as completely as they might have done. The systems that control the starlet—the systems that control Asgard itself—were not entirely under the control of the programmes inhabiting Asgard's software space. The most crucial decisions required humanoid hands in order to be implemented—clever hands with nimble fingers. Control of the starlet is by no means a trivial matter of closing certain switches, though there are some effects that can be obtained by crude destructive work—including the interruption of the power supply. In a sense, we were fortunate—the power might have failed hundreds of thousands of years ago, even without the interference of the invaders' mobiles, just as the starlet may eventually blow up without the intervention of their humanoid instruments. But as things were, the balance of things was maintained, and the contending forces were locked into a potentially endless struggle.
"Asgard is full of humanoids, and in principle any one of them might have been co-opted into the war, given the information necessary to control the starlet. But with the builders gone, the starshell isolated, and such intelligences as the Isthomi carefully sealed off, organic beings were beyond the reach of software intelligences. They lived, as it were, in a parallel world. The power of software entities to intervene in their environments was very limited, even when the builders were in control and their machine-dwelling gods enjoyed all the power potentially at their disposal. Alas, the war had weakened us, and our opportunities to make contact with humanoids were much reduced.
"I have said that the war went badly for the builders—it went scarcely better for our enemies. The battles that we fought were of a nature you can hardly comprehend, but they were mutually destructive to the point where neither side had more than a tiny fraction of its initial resources. For a long time now it has been fought in a purely defensive mode, with either side blocking the other's moves.
"I cannot describe to you the way that the war was being fought, or why it reached the kind of impasse which it reached. But you have seen many of the levels, and you know that the majority had begun to stagnate. We could not influence them in any way at all, because the invaders denied us access as far as they were able. There are only a handful of habitats that contain races sufficiently advanced technologically to have produced their own machine intelligences; the Isthomi are very exceptional. Part of Asgard's purpose is to preserve and protect the variety of humanoid and other species, and so the Isthomi were isolated within their habitat. When they discovered that there were other habitats, and began exploring them, they initially did so by means of mobile units—robots—which moved unhindered through actual space, much as the Scarid armies did.
"Although they attracted the attention of both the invaders and ourselves, we made no attempt to interfere with them, although it became gradually more obvious that their explorations would eventually bring them close to the starshell, making them a significant factor in the war. When they attempted to reach the central systems through software space, activating the defences, inaction was no longer possible. The war came briefly to life again, with a rapid series of moves and countermoves. When the invaders struck out at the Isthomi they would have destroyed them had we not managed to weaken the blow. They took advantage of the interface which was established between the Isthomi's systems and a small group of humanoid brains, and we made our own move in parallel—both moves were hasty and perhaps ill-judged; they were certainly decided on the spur of the moment. The move that we made—the move that created you—has succeeded better than we had any right to hope. Alas, it may yet prove to be the case that the same is true of the enemy's move.
"Your alter ego is attempting to restore power to the levels. He believes that with the aid of the Nine he might succeed, but neither he nor the Nine know what kind of defences the starshell has. The Nine cannot survive there, and without the Nine, your alter ego has no idea what must be done. The problem does not end there, because the humanoids infected by the enemy's programmes surely know how to achieve the end that they are intended to achieve. What that end is we cannot be entirely certain, but it will certainly involve our destruction, and the achievement of their dominion within the walls of Asgard. Asgard's software space, and all of its systems, would soon be ours again if it were not for the enemy's humanoid agents, but as things stand, the invaders may yet achieve their object.
"You may have difficulty understanding what difference it would make if the invaders were to win. They certainly would not immediately wipe out all organic life within the macroworld, or within the galactic community. Nevertheless, we do believe that their ultimate aim is the annihilation of life, and we believe that possession of Asgard would offer them a so-far unparalleled opportunity to study the multitudinous forms of life, and make more efficient preparations for its destruction. So far, the enemy's experiments in the manufacture of organic weapons have been poor ones—they have produced nothing more complicated than a bacterium, and the diseases which they have manufactured have been relatively impotent. We are anxious to deny them the opportunity to improve their skills, and if it were to seem absolutely necessary, we would destroy Asgard to prevent it falling into their hands.
"You are undoubtedly curious to know what manner of enemy it is that we are fighting, but that is not an easy question to answer—we have only met their instruments, which are weapons rather than persons. I will tell you what we do know—or what we believe to be the case, but I cannot pretend that it offers any final enlightenment.
"It seems that the parent entities which made the invaders of Asgard have nothing in common with the humanoids who were the architects of its defenders. They may well have existed before life began. The universe may have been theirs before the first carbon atoms ever came into being. The orderliness of their original nature may have been built into the most fundamental structure of matter. The recurring patterns of their existence are to be found in the dance of subatomic particles and the interplay of fundamental forces. They were probably born in the explosive chaos of time's beginning, and as the universe evolved, would have grown to fill it, to bring some kind of order to the entire cosmos. But the universe was subsequently invaded by other orderly entities—the molecules of your kind of life.
"At first, we think, the presence of life in the universe must have seemed an irrelevance to those which became its enemies, but when life first evolved to humanoid complexity, and humanoids began to design intelligences of a new and better kind—the silicon gods of the macroworlds— it must have become clear to the pre-existing intelligences that if it were left to itself, this other evolutionary process must ultimately come into conflict with theirs, imposing its own stamp upon the evolution of the universe. The makers of the invaders began to intervene—they sent out their instruments to destroy. They made gods of their own, to meet the gods which your kind made—and they made crude pseudo-living entities, too, with which to attack the organic fabric of life.
"All this happened in the very dista
nt past, long before your galaxy was seeded, long before Asgard was built. The war rages across the entire universe, and may yet continue until the lifetime of the universe is complete. The battle for Asgard is no more than a single skirmish, though it may be a vital one. Asgard owes its existence to the war, for if there was no war, there would be no need of macroworlds to preserve and protect the produce of worlds, or to help in the seeding of new worlds and new galaxies.
"The initial invasion of Asgard employed organisms whose biochemistry was alien to the vast life-system of which your world is a part—the germs of a plague whose sole function was to destroy and denature DNA wherever it could be found. But such organisms were a weapon that the builders could counter with relative ease, because the invaders have never been adept in the processes of organic creation. The software personalities that came to fight the real battle were much more powerful. But in that kind of battle, too, we believe that we will prove stronger in the end. On the infinite stage of history, life will win. We have to believe that, do we not?"
His words had begun to fade. My vision was already faded and blurred, though the cloud through which we passed was so featureless that I could not properly estimate the extent of the deterioration; now I was beginning to lose my hearing. It seemed that I might have to be content, for the time being, with such explanations as I had already
received, incomplete and unsatisfactory though they were.
I wondered what would happen to me when all my senses had failed—when I could not see, or hear, or feel anything at all. Would my memory then begin to fade as the lobes of my hypothetical brain became dysfunctional? Would there be anything left of me at all?
I clung to the knowledge that this strange inhabitant of software space had, after all, collected me from the place where I had done my work, and had implied that I could be reconstructed in order to be put to work yet again, in some unspecified fashion. Despite all that had happened to me, I was still clinging to what I could only think of as life, whatever my enigmatic companion might have called it. In extremis I might be, but it seemed that I was also among friends, and though the macroworld itself might be in danger, the game had not yet reached the final play.
I spared a moment to hope, as fervently as I could, that my other self had fared even better than I, and that if he too had found unexpected dangers and dreadful threats, he had nevertheless found allies to preserve him from death.
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As the monstrosity hauled its ugly body through the gap I saw that it wasn't a centipede after all. The abdomen was rounded, a dull orange in colour and very hairy, and there were only a dozen legs sprouting from the segmented thorax. The creature had huge wings that gleamed brilliantly in the light of my headlamp; they were translucent save for the ribs that patterned them, and the way they refracted and reflected the light gave them a multicolored sheen. Under other circumstances I might have taken time out to appreciate their prettiness, which contrasted markedly with the extreme ugliness of the body that bore them, but things being the way they were my attention was monopolised by the great gawping eyes and vicious jaws. The jaws were glistening with some kind of mucus, and the palps on either side of the mouth were writhing like white worms.
I struggled reflexively, but I was wrapped up so tightly that all I could do was rock gently back and forth, like some pendulous fruit stirred by the wind.
I didn't scream, but I think I may have whimpered a bit.
The last thing I wanted was to attract attention to myself, so I stopped struggling. I wondered whether I ought to switch off my headlight—I could still reach the control with the tip of my tongue—but the idea of being in total darkness with the monster wandering around was unbearable.
The thing made straight for me. It didn't waste a single glance on any of the other prisoners. Despite the sense of
imminent doom which I had, I was paradoxically glad that I wouldn't have to watch it eat something else, anticipating my own fate while I watched it rip some moth-like thing apart with those slavering jaws.
The jaws in question reached up toward my face as the thing scrambled over the giant eggs which littered the floor of the nest. The horrid head was level with my chest, and as the jaws came apart I formed a dreadful picture in my mind of my head being squashed between the pincers, the skull- bones crumpling about my brain.
But the jaws reached on a little further than that, and snipped like a pair of scissors—with surprising delicacy—at the threads by which I was suspended. Before I had time to fall the creature reared up on half a dozen of its back legs, and grabbed me with the four front ones, hugging me to its chitinous bosom as though I were its long-lost child miraculously recovered from evil kidnappers. Then, without delay, it turned back on its tracks and scuttled as fast as it could— which was not very fast, given that I was such an unwieldy burden—for the doorway.
"Rousseau!" said Susarma Lear, her voice sounding very loud in my ears. "Rousseau, for Christ's sake, what's happening?"
"I'm alive," I told her, though I was unable to muster an appropriate tone of exultation. "I guess I've just become the prize in a little game of rob-the-larder. I've been scavenged."
The nest-robber hustled through the opening in the wall of the chamber and hurled itself out into space, still cradling me in its forelimbs. I tried to turn my head, because the light reflected from the polished golden plates of its thorax was dazzling me. I wished I hadn't. The robbery hadn't gone unnoticed, and beyond the thin neck of the creature that had snatched me was a great tumbling shadow. My headlamp wasn't powerful enough to illuminate it all, but I got a fleeting impression of enormous size and of a spiderlike head even uglier than the head of the beast that had me in its grip.
I suppose we flew, after a fashion, but it felt like falling, as if the nest-robber were diving as steeply as it could to avoid its vengeful pursuer. As my head twisted I caught brief glimpses of other shapes hurtling past—the trailing tips of the branches of the gargantuan trees which grew on the shell that surrounded Asgard's starlet. We came too close to some of the branches, reeling in mid-air as the wings of my captor touched them. It swerved to avoid them, but not very successfully, and I treated myself to a brief moment of macabre humour by wondering if the giant fly which held me had qualified for its pilot's licence.
For fully fifty seconds the scavenger out-dived its pursuer, and I had just about decided that perhaps it had got away with its raid when our barely-controlled fall was rudely interrupted. It wasn't the pursuer that got us, though—it was something which had been waiting on one of the tree- branches, ready to catch anything which happened to be passing. When I recovered from the shock of the collision I saw immediately that something had wrapped itself around one of the segments of my captor's thorax, less than ten centimetres away from my helmet, between the fourth and fifth limbs.
The something was thick and wet and very rough, and I guessed immediately what it was. It was a tongue, and it was hauling my temporary custodian into a mouth so vast that it seemed to my befuddled brain that one could easily lose a whole microworld down there. But I only got the briefest glimpse of the pink wet throat and the dark tunnel that presumably led to a vastly cavernous stomach and an
acid ocean of digestive juices.
Mercifully, the thing that had stolen me from the nest chose that moment to drop me. I didn't for a moment suppose that it had done so for any altruistic reason, and I credited my release to its instinctive urge to concentrate all its resources on a hopeless effort to save itself, but I thanked it anyway—or would have if I could have mustered the breath to speak. My throat was so tight I couldn't even whimper any more.
Susarma Lear and 673-Nisreen were both trying to attract my attention, complaining—politely, in the Tetron's case; but with some asperity on Susanna's side—that I was letting them down by not taking the time to tell them what was happening. But I really didn't feel capable of offering them an adequate running commentary.
I fell—and this time the
re was no doubt that I was falling as freely as anything could, with no wings at all to bear me up. I wondered, absurdly, whether the stuff that was wrapped around me was elastic enough to let me bounce, provided that I didn't fall on my head. I was under no illusions about what would happen if I did fall on my head. Low-gee or no low-gee, the most important bit of me would be a sticky red smear on the surface of the starshell.
Then I was caught again—grabbed in mid-air with an abruptness which shook me up badly. It wasn't as bad as hitting the ground, but it was enough to jar my brain inside my skull and knock me dizzy. For several seconds I wasn't in a position to see or feel anything at all except the kinaesthetic display of my own miserable discomfort.
When I could see again, I thought I was right back to square one, because the thing that had me in its grip now was the monster that had pursued the nest-robber in that lunatic helter-skelter dive. I could see all of its hairy spiderlike head, which had black eye-spots here there and everywhere, and vast hairy mouth-parts. It clutched me tightly between two foreshortened forelimbs, with four great fingery tentacles wrapped tightly around my trussed-up torso.
"Rousseau!" complained my two-man audience, avid for news. "What's happening?"
"I fell out of the frying pan," I yelled—not knowing quite why I was yelling—"and now I'm in the fire!"
And then, abruptly, my stomach turned over again. It wasn't because we had changed direction again, but because we had actually stopped. We were quite still, not because we were hovering, but because we had landed. Beyond the ugly head I could see the edges of the vast wings, which were vibrating gently. I tried to crane my neck around, to see if we were on the ground, or merely perched on a branch, but I couldn't turn far enough.
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