Everything I had seen of the invaders suggested that they were, by galactic standards, country boys. They must know, by now, just how unsophisticated they were by galactic standards. They knew that the Tetrax were a long way ahead of them, although they seemed to be making what efforts they could to stop the off-world Tetrax finding that out. But Jacinthe Siani had told them that they had neighbours inside Asgard who were even more advanced than the Tetrax. That had to be the main reason why they were playing for time in refusing to talk to the Tetrax. They were hoping to find allies who would help them keep the universe at bay!
And they were convinced that I could help them, once they had persuaded me to talk. Unfortunately, they probably weren’t going to believe me when I told them that there wasn’t a lot of help I could offer . . . and their unbelief might cost me dearly if they really got tough in the business of persuasion.
I wondered how troubled and confused these would-be conquerors of Asgard were. It must have been quite a shock to them, first to discover the universe, and then to find out that they weren’t by any means the most powerful parasites in the guts of the macroworld.
“You don’t have any idea who built Asgard, do you?” I said, looking into the pale eyes of the blond-haired man. “How many levels can you operate in? Ten . . . twenty?”
“Don’t underestimate us, Mr. Rousseau,” he replied, calmly, looking away to watch the factory-fields going by beyond the windows of the carriage. “We control hundreds of habitats in more than fifty levels. It is true that we had not been able to calculate the size of Asgard until we unexpectedly reached the surface, and even now we have no way of knowing how far down the levels go. We know, though, that our ancestors were the builders of Asgard, and that it is only a matter of time before we regain access to the knowledge they had. It may well be that our ancestors were your ancestors, too, and that you too have lost access to what they knew just as we have. If that is true, then your interests and ours are alike, and you must make every effort to help us contact our cousins—those you have already met in the depths of the world.”
I glanced at Jacinthe Siani. Like most Kythnans, she had olive-tinted skin and jet-black hair. Her eyes were a very dark brown. She was very much the odd one out in the car, though there were many Earthborn humans who looked less like Sky-blue and his friends than she did.
“Are your ancestors her ancestors too?” I asked.
“It seems likely,” conceded Sky-blue.
“And the Tetrax?”
“That seems unlikely.”
“I’m afraid not,” I told him. “We have good reason to believe that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin. Any common ancestor that you or I had is just as remote from us as the common ancestor linking either of us to the Tetrax.” Or, I thought to myself, the common ancestor I share with a pig, non-flying variety.
“I don’t know about such matters,” he told me. “I’m only a soldier. You will have the chance to speak to people who do know.”
Again, there was a threat in his tone of voice.
“The Tetrax know,” I assured him. “If you were only prepared to make proper contact, you could fix up a nice dialogue between your own wise men and theirs. If you and the Tetrax pooled your resources, you might well be able to figure out who did build this thing, when, and why. It’s something we’d all like to know.”
“It is not for me to decide such matters,” he said, terminating the exchange. Then he had to report back to the older man everything that had been said. I turned my attention to Jacinthe Siani.
“Are they treating you well?” I asked.
She smiled in a strangely catlike fashion. “Quite well,” she said. “I like them better than many of my old friends.”
Knowing what I did about the company she used to keep, I didn’t find that at all surprising. “Hell,” I said, “you don’t have to take such an obvious relish in landing me in it. I never did anything to you, did I? You were the one who was trying to shaft me, remember?”
“I remember everything,” she assured me.
I decided that she just didn’t like me very much. Some people don’t. I can live with it.
From the train-car we transferred to a road vehicle, which whisked us across country with considerably greater alacrity. It was silent, and presumably ran on fuel cells of some kind. I suspected that the invaders hadn’t invented the fuel cell themselves; in fact, I had now begun to suspect that they hadn’t invented very much at all. It occurred to me that they were real barbarians, and that their home-level technology consisted mainly of ready-made items that they’d discovered—or rediscovered—how to use. Giving their ancestors the credit for ordering the world in which they found themselves was a face-saving exercise. Even inside Asgard, they were little boys lost—no matter how many environments they had “conquered” in the course of their explorations.
Given that they were so primitive themselves, it was easy to work out how mediocre things had to be in those levels of which they had taken control.
Once I had reached this conclusion, I wasn’t at all surprised that our trip down into the lower levels was anything but smooth. There was no huge elevator shaft going all the way down to wherever they were taking me. We could drop three, or sometimes four levels at a time, but then we had to transfer to a car or a train again, and hurtle across country to some other point of descent. There was heavy traffic all the way, and I began to realise what an awesome task it must be to move the invader armies around— and, by implication, how vulnerable their troops in Skychain City must be.
By the time we were down to level twelve—assuming that my counting was correct with respect to the levels we skipped past—I didn’t see any more groups of galactic prisoners. Wherever we were, there were only invaders—legion upon legion of them. All but a few were males in uniform. All, without exception, were pale of skin. I couldn’t help remembering Myrlin and the biotechnics that had been used to shape him: an accelerated growth programme and some kind of mental force-feeding. The perfect way to grow your own soldiers. I wondered briefly whether these soldiers could have been made that way, and fed with illusions about their own nature and origins. But it didn’t make any sense—these neo-Neanderthalers certainly didn’t behave as though there might be some mysterious master race behind them.
On the way down, I got to see small areas of about thirty different levels. I think we eventually ended up on level fifty-two, give or take a couple. The top few levels were all dead—no sign of life at all. Five and six were like one and two: very cold, but not as cold as three and four. There was no way to be certain about the temperature outside the tightly-sealed vehicles which we used to cross territory on those levels, but it must have been way below freezing.
Seven and eight I didn’t see, but nine was alive, though pretty desolate. It reminded me strongly of the level much further down, to which Saul Lyndrach’s dropshaft had initially led us—which is to say that it looked like an ecology that had once been balanced but had run wild. Certainly there was no sign of the machinery of artificial photosynthesis—if there had ever been any, it had long since rotted away, to be replaced by real plants eking out their existence under an enfeebled and ill-lit sky. The terrain looked like tundra, bleak and sub-arctic. There was no sign of native humanoid habitation, or of colonization by the neo- Neanderthalers.