He paused, expectantly. I didn’t like to disappoint him, so I took up the threads of the argument. “So you discovered that you weren’t the lords of Creation after all,” I said. “And now you don’t know what to do.”
“We are . . . undecided,” he admitted. He seemed to be waiting for me to respond further, and I decided there was no harm in it.
“At a guess,” I said, “you don’t know much about Asgard, let alone the universe. You have no idea how you got here. When your great-grandfathers first began to find out what kind of world they were in, they naturally assumed that it was all built for them, laid on for the convenience of their expanding population. They credited it to their own ancestors. Your expeditions and conquests might have made some of you sceptical, but there was nothing to overturn your faith in your own position of privilege . . . until you moved into Skychain City. You went in expecting to make mincemeat of a few other barbarians living parasitically on the technology of the ancients, and suddenly realised that it was an entirely different kettle of fish. Must have been a shock.”
“Kettle of fish” didn’t translate too well into parole, but he got the drift.
“You’re a perceptive man, Mr. Rousseau,” he said. He seemed genuinely pleased. Perhaps he’d been starved of intellectual conversation because Alex Sovorov and the Tetrax wouldn’t talk to him.
“Why don’t you negotiate with the Tetrax?” I asked him, bluntly. “They’re not given to grandiose gestures of revenge. They’d forgive an honest mistake. In fact, they’re really rather keen to arrive at a peaceful settlement beneficial to all parties.”
“So our Tetron guests have assured us,” he said. “But you must try to see things our way. What would happen if we were to make peace with the Tetrax? They would want access to the levels we control, in order to pursue their peaceful researches. In return, no doubt, they would offer us their own technology, their own knowledge. They would become involved in our projects, interested in our environments. They already believe that Asgard is theirs, because they have the technology to built cities on its surface, and explore its depths. If we give them leave to go where they wish, do what they will, Asgard will become theirs. They will be the ones who learn to use and control the technology of our ancestors. That would not be right. We are the inheritors—all this is ours. We must do everything in our power to keep control of it.”
Again he paused, expectantly. I played fair, and tried to see things his way. I had to concede that he had a point. “If you let the Tetrax have the run of your levels,” I said, slowly, “they’ll certainly be in a far better position than you are to figure out how Asgard is put together. The technology of the builders—which is incarnate in the very architecture of the macroworld and in the systems that supply energy to the life-sustaining habitats—is very much superior to Tetron technology, but if you and the Tetrax are both trying to figure it out, the Tetrax are bound to get there first. I can see why you want to keep it all to yourselves. You’re sitting on the most high-powered technics in the known universe ... if you could only learn to understand it, you’d be ahead of the Tetrax—ahead of everybody. But the fact is that you don’t understand it—you don’t even understand the technology you’ve captured from the Tetrax in Skychain City, do you?”
“Asgard is ours,” said Sigor Dyan. “We belong here. I think the people of Skychain City refer to us as “invaders,” but that is not correct, is it? It is, in fact, the inhabitants of your city who are invaders of our world. Is that not so?”
“I can see that it must look that way to you,” I conceded carefully.
“I understand that your own race has recently fought a war against another species, which you won,” he said. “Is that not so?”
“It’s true.”
“And why did you fight that war?”
I gave him a wry smile. “Territorial disputes,” I admitted.
“Your opponents were humanoid, I believe—but I am told that they did not resemble you as closely as we do.”
“That’s true too,” I confirmed warily.
“If they had resembled you as closely as we do, do you think your two races might have resolved their differences more amicably?”
“I doubt it,” I said drily. It was an interesting question, though, and I couldn’t pretend to know the answer for sure.
“Your own race is, I believe, technologically inferior to the Tetrax. You are no doubt more advanced than we are, but you have had to find your place in a community of races dominated by the Tetrax. Do you think, given what you know of that community, that humankind will ever catch up with the Tetrax? Do you think that the Tetrax would ever allow any other race to catch up with them, given their present position of superiority?”
I swallowed a gulp of the green stuff. He was sounding altogether too reasonable. His questions were the sort that are best answered with more questions.
“What chance do you think you’d have against the Tetrax if it came to armed conflict?” I asked him. “They take great pride in not being violent, but I’d be willing to bet that they could draw upon some awesome firepower if they had to.”
“I have no doubt of it,” replied Dyan. “If half of what humans have told us about your own Star Force is true, I have no doubt that you could blast Skychain City into dust, and that we could not defend it. But would the Tetrax really want to bomb Skychain City when there are so many of their own people there? What good would it do them, in the long run, if they did? We have twenty billion people in the lower levels. If they tried to retake Skychain City without destroying it, they would find it very difficult—I do not say impossible, but I cannot think of a way that it could be done. And if Skychain City were to fall . . . what then? We still have twenty billion people in the lower levels. How long do you think it would take your invading armies to take the tenth level down ... let alone the fiftieth?”
He had obviously had more time to think this out than I had. His arguments looked suspiciously strong. If the galactics tried to take the invaders’ little empire by force, they would have a real job on their hands. It might be easy to retake Skychain City—but what then? Could the Tetrax really send their explorers down into the levels with a vast population of hostile aliens standing against them? I knew only too well how difficult it had been for the C.R.E. to make headway in the task of learning about the people who had once lived in the outermost layers of Asgard, even when their only enemy was the cold. Maybe, I thought, the neo-Neanderthalers could buy themselves the time they needed to catch up. Maybe they could keep the Tetrax at bay, not just for years but generations, while they fought as hard as they could to master—really master—the technics that were all around them, built into the fabric of their enclosed universe.
“Okay,” I said. “You can keep the Tetrax out of Skychain City . . . and the levels you control. But you don’t have any way of controlling what happens on the other side of the macroworld, do you? Your empire’s straight up and down. If it’s to be a contest, the Tetrax are going to start digging in all the other habitats on level one. And they’ll bring in a great deal more manpower than they ever lent to the C.R.E.—you may still outnumber them by millions to one, but you’ve already conceded that they’re clever. They could still win the race, and if you go all-out to stop them, it will cost you an awful lot of lives. Maybe even twenty billion. Do you really want that kind of war?”