You might think that because all “Earthlike” planets have the same biochemistry, and a very similar range of major-groups of life-forms, one would be pretty much like another. That’s true—up to a point. I’ve been told that even a seasoned galactic traveler might never see anything to convince him otherwise. (Though few humanoids ever visit one another’s homeworlds; they visit one another’s home systems, but in a civilized solar system there often isn’t any real need or incentive to go down into a deep gravity well. A well-travelled galactic might have visited twelve or fifteen systems, but it’s a very rare tourist who has actually set foot on more than three actual planets.)
The really exotic worlds are, of course, those on which humanoid life failed to evolve, or on which it evolved in a very different ecological context—and those worlds are often hostile to visiting humanoid life at a very basic level. It’s not just that the locals will throw spears at you—it’s that the local organics are poison through and through. The habitats through which we passed on what I took to be levels forty-three and forty-five might have belonged to this type, though I couldn’t for the life of me see any obvious clues as to why they were so dangerous. The vegetation was still green, and most of it still looked like trees, bushes, grasses, and flowers.
Forty-seven and forty-nine had been extensively colonized, and there were thriving invader communities beside the roads on which we drove, though the temperatures were still on the high side. Fifty, although we saw only a brief stretch of it, was a real wonder. It was very dimly lit, although the light was uniform—resembling a very cloudy twilight rather than a starlit night—but it was very warm, and it was home to a rich life-system that was presumably almost entirely thermosynthetic.
It wasn’t easy to imagine a kind of planet—or a locale on a planet—where these kinds of conditions could occur. Maybe on a planet with perpetual fog and a steep axial tilt, in a region of considerable volcanic activity, there could be something like this, but it was difficult to imagine any such region being stable long enough to develop a rich flora and fauna.
One would expect there to be no colour in this kind of ecosystem, with the dim light encouraging only shades of grey. But that wasn’t the case. Many of the plants here produced coloured fruit and flowers that they lit themselves; it was a world of Christmas trees with inbuilt bioluminescent fairy-lights. Many of the insects, too, carried around their own lights—wherever I looked there seemed to be clouds of fireflies, and the ground was ribboned by the lights of glowing worms.
In a way, I realised, what was happening here was a curious inversion of the characteristic pattern of life on Earth. There, light provided the fuel for the ecosphere, and sophisticated organisms made their own heat. Here, heat was the basic fuel, and the cleverest organisms made light for communication— perhaps as casually as Earthly creatures made odours. I had never heard rumour of anything like it, and I found it entrancing, but my bored fellow travellers hardly gave it a glance through the sealed windows of the car. There were a few buildings along the road we traveled, but no pedestrians. I guessed that it was probably another of the habitats where the invaders needed filter-masks to breathe safely.
Neither the man with pale blue eyes nor Jacinthe Siani volunteered any information about this place, and I realised that the Kythnan’s single comment about the musical plants was a true gauge of what it took to awaken her curiosity. As for the invader, although he was “only a soldier,” he seemed nevertheless to be remarkably insensitive to the beauty and the inherent fascination of what Asgard held. He took all this for granted—it meant nothing, in terms of inspiring theories about what Asgard was, and the godlike beings who had designed it.
The savage mind, I thought, fixated on the wisdom of imaginary ancestors, uncaring about the progress of its own wisdom. And yet these people might succeed in driving the Tetrax from Asgard, and in bringing desolation to vast reaches of the macroworld.
If ever I had thought seriously about throwing in my lot with the invaders and betraying the Tetrax, I was sure by now that I could not do it. I needed to pin my colours to the mast of some cause that was actually interested in penetrating Asgard’s mysteries.
After catching only the merest glimpses of the ecosystem on level fifty, I was enthusiastic to see more. Our next drop took us to what I judged to be level fifty-two. This was another weird one, and I knew when we changed vehicles before we went through the complicated locks that it would be another with a reducing atmosphere. The car we got into was like a miniature spaceship, sealed very tight.
There was more life here, though, than there had been in the earlier hydrogenous environment. There, everything had been vaporous save for a kind of swampy sludge at ground level. Here, there were many dendritic forms—I hesitate to call them “trees” because they looked more like corals, and certainly didn’t have any leafy foliage—coiling and branching tortuously. They didn’t form much of a forest because they mostly kept their distance from one another, but some of them—after the fashion of the cloudy habitat on level fifty— bore what looked like luminescent fruit.
There were flying creatures, too—or, to be strictly accurate, gliding creatures, because I couldn’t see any evidence of fluttering wings as they floated from one dendrite to another. There was a sort of undergrowth, consisting mostly of globular entities of assorted sizes, many of which were associated in clusters. I couldn’t imagine what kinds of metabolism these things must have; I knew there were bacteria in conventional ecosystems that could only grow in the absence of free oxygen, but I knew of no metazoan entities with anaerobic habits. Here, I assumed, some fairly radical revision of the basic DNA support-system must be necessary, if this life were akin to our own.
Our drive across this territory was another short one—barely a couple of kilometres. We came then to a big windowed wall curving away in either direction into the murk. We crawled through a second system of airlocks, but instead of coming to another big elevator that could lower our vehicle down to the next level, we parked in a bay. As we disembarked, and were met by more armed troopers, I realised that we were not going any further. We had arrived at our destination.
The wrist-timer I was wearing was showing Asgard metric time, but in human terms our journey had taken the best part of two days. While there had been plenty to look at, I hadn’t been entirely aware of how tired I was, but now it came home to me that I’d only slept for about six of those forty-eight hours.
I was initially surprised that our destination had proved to be located in such a hostile habitat, but I soon perceived the logic of it. What better place is there to put a maximum-security prison than a building surrounded by an alien atmosphere? It would certainly help to discourage would-be escapers.
Now that we’d arrived, I could no longer distract myself from the extremity of my plight. Fifty levels down, there could be not the slightest hope that the Tetrax could do anything to free me. Susarma Lear would have not the slightest chance of ever finding me, even if she were disposed to bring the Star Force to my rescue.
And as if that were not trouble enough, I was morally certain that my captors were going to demand far more information from me than I actually had to give, and were not going to take at all kindly to the inadequacy of my answers.
17
I later discovered that it was a pretty crowded prison camp, but that was by no means obvious when I arrived. The corridors were all empty—everyone was locked up in the cells. There weren’t even many guards about; I suppose they didn’t need very many, given that there was little future in dreams of rebellion or escape.