Tetron faces aren’t expressionless, but they’re very difficult to read, even for a human who has spent a lot of time around them. I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or annoyed, or whether he was telling himself that this was just what you’d expect from a lousy barbarian.
Somehow, Aleksandr Sovorov materialised at my elbow. He seemed to know what I’d just said, although he certainly hadn’t been in earshot when I said it. “It’s important, Rousseau,” he said, sternly, “to figure out exactly where your loyalties lie. Your past recklessness has already cost us one chance to communicate with the advanced race which apparently lives in the lower levels. It would be unfortunate if further recklessness were to damage our standing in the galactic community irreparably.”
I deliberately turned away from both of them to stare directly out of the window. They edged round slightly, lining up on either side of the view like a pair of curtains.
“The thing is, Alex,” I said, with all the condescension I could muster. “You aren’t really in a position to see the big picture. Anyhow, I’m in the Star Force now, and recklessness is my profession.”
Sovorov and the Tetron exchanged glances, and the Tetron bowed slightly before withdrawing.
“Vela and I were chatting yesterday, while you were being questioned,” explained Sovorov. “We tried to establish what would be the best thing for you to do.”
“Very kind of you,” I murmured hoarsely. “The Tetrax must be really proud of you, Alex. Their number one human yes-man. They’re fond of yes-men. They’ll probably give you an honorary number one day. Maybe as high as thirteen.”
“I find it difficult to believe,” he said, frostily, “that the Tetrax chose you to spy for them. They must have been desperate.”
“They were,” I assured him. I was still staring past his shoulder at the twisting dendrites with their coloured lanterns, and the whirligig points of light that danced between their branches.
“Is this life-system DNA-based, Alex?” I asked him. He barely glanced behind him.
“I suppose so,” he said, with the stiffness of one who does not appreciate the subject being changed.
“Come on, Alex, you’re a scientist. You must find it rather intriguing. It’s amazing, and it’s very beautiful. You may have been here long enough to get used to it, but you can’t have lost your curiosity entirely.”
Sovorov shrugged. “It’s pretty,” he said. “But we can only look at it. If you want more data about its biology, you’ll have to ask your new friends. That’s assuming that they’ve bothered to investigate it themselves. I get the impression that whatever doesn’t shoot guns doesn’t interest them much.”
“Sometimes, Alex,” I told him, “you can be less than intelligent as well as less than charming. I believe you’re in danger of losing sight of the reason you came to Asgard in the first place. You came to figure things out, right? You came to learn. I know you get impatient with all the fantasizing about the Centre, but your impatience seems to have closed off your own imagination completely. Don’t you ask yourself, ever, what Asgard is for, and what part it plays in the great scheme of things?”
“There’s no point in posing questions until you have data which permit the formulation of answers,” he said, defensively. Personally, I thought he was dead wrong. You have to formulate the questions first, and the bigger you pose them, the better they are.
“Did you know,” I asked him, “that there’s a microworld orbiting Uranus right now, dredging organic matter out of the atmosphere and the rings? They’ve found tons of stuff— DNA in all kinds of packages. According to a Tetron scientist I talked to, it’s been there since the earliest days of the solar system, when it was briefly warm out there. Life antedates the solar system, Alex—maybe the galaxy. It’s in the dust clouds between the stars. Sometimes it gets frozen, for billions of years, but it doesn’t care. It just hangs about until local conditions become conducive to reproduction, and then it gets going again. It rains down all the gravity wells in the universe, and wherever it finds somewhere that it can get along, it multiplies and multiplies as fast as it can, letting natural selection sort out the most efficient forms for local use. Wherever it can give birth to an ecosphere, it does. It negotiates its energy-economics with the prevailing physical environment, working out some kind of chemical compromise.
“My Tetron pal reckons that the DNA must have evolved spontaneously in the very distant past—and I’m talking about ten billion years here—and has multiplied and multiplied to the point where its creative efforts permeate the entire universe. He reckons that the fundamental humanoid gene-package evolved a long time ago, in some distant corner of the universe, and that it drifted into the galactic arm in some kind of vast cloud a few hundred million years ago to seed all the local stars at much the same time.
“On that basis, Asgard must be the product of a separate Creation, made in some other galaxy at some unimaginably distant point in time. And yet, its inhabitants—maybe even its builders—are first cousins to us and first cousins to the Tetrax. But if that’s so, what can it be doing here? Was it sent to seed the galaxy? Did it bring those initial packages that were scattered all over the galactic arm? Or was it sent here to escape something? Is it saving specimens from the ecospheres of a thousand worlds from some unimaginable menace? And in either case—where are the builders? Why is their whole beautiful macroworld being allowed to run wild, with whole levels dead or deserted, and tinpot emperors appearing with dreams of illimitable conquest? What’s going on here, Alex? You do care, don’t you?”
At least, after all that, he had the grace not to stick out his black-bearded chin and reply with an obstinate: “I don’t know.” Instead, he said: “I didn’t know about Uranus. It does cast new light on the question of whether the galaxy was seeded with life. The convergent evolution theory begins to look rather sick.”
I nodded toward the alien forest with its marvellous fairy lights. “Not much convergent evolution there,” I said. “That is some. ...”
I broke off in mid-sentence, and gulped. Sovorov had been watching my face, not the forest, and he had to turn around to look for what I had seen. By the time he was facing the right way, it was no longer there.
“What is it?” he asked.
“If it was what I think it was,” I said, “it’s probably a case of convergent evolution. I thought I saw a humanoid figure, out there among the trees.”
“No,” he said. “There’s nothing like that out there. It’s a low-energy ecosystem. It couldn’t possibly sustain anything motile that’s bigger than your little finger. Insufficient ecological efficiency—very weak food chains.”
His comments proved that he had done a little bit of thinking about his surroundings, which served to restore some of my faith in human nature, curiosity-wise. But I still was convinced that, just for a moment, I had seen something humanoid. It was difficult to judge distances because of the mist, and that made it difficult to judge size, too, but I had got the distinct impression that what I had seen was big and bulky—more like a giant ape than a man.
I opened my mouth to ask Alex whether the guards were in the habit of wandering around outside in pressurized suits, but I didn’t get the chance. Two Neanderthaler troopers came over and beckoned unceremoniously. Sigor Dyan was obviously expecting me—and this time, I figured, he was going to want some answers.
Unfortunately, I still wasn’t at all sure what answers I could give him, and my head throbbed mercilessly every time I tried to force myself to come up with a sensible strategy.