“The humanoid Isthomi fought many wars, and despite relative shortages of certain heavy metals they managed to develop an impressive technology of destruction. The time came when they had the power in their hands to destroy their world. They managed to avoid that eventuality, joined their nations and factions together into a single world community, and became, as your jargon has it, ‘biotech-minded.’ They also developed an elaborate silicon-based information technology, but more slowly than similar technologies have been developed by cultures like the human, whose progress in inorganic technology was aided by a relative abundance of appropriate raw materials.
“The humanoid Isthomi developed technologies of genetic engineering applicable to the transformation of somatic cells in mature bodies, and to the manipulation of egg-cells. They developed a technology similar to the one by means of which I was constructed—accelerated growth coupled with a kind of transcription of personality. Their experiments in the creation, modification, and transcription of personalities eventually led them to try to recreate personalities in different forms, including duplicating the minds of humanoids in silicon-based electronic systems. Thus were born the software Isthomi.
“It’s impossible to guess how accurate, as copies of humanoid minds, the Nine were in the days of their infancy, but the question must have become irrelevant very soon. Minds they certainly were, and from the moment their new incarnations began they were able to undertake a whole new process of growth, maturation, and evolution. They changed very greatly, once they were no longer limited by fleshly bodies. They inhabited a vast complex of linked machines, sharing the new ‘space’ in which they were distributed with countless non-sentient programmes as well as with one another.
“At some stage in history, however, the Nine—or perhaps fractions of the original Nine—were removed from their original environment and placed in another, of which they were the sole intelligent inhabitants—and which appears, in fact, to have been designed specifically to accommodate them. Their memories have no record of what was done to them. They do not know why it was done, or how, or by whom.
“The Nine do not know how long a lapse of time was concealed by the gap in their memories. They are not entirely certain that those memories they have which relate to their existence before they came here are to be trusted. They know how easy it is to create a new individual— robotic or organic—with a wholly synthetic ‘past,’ and they wonder whether they might not have been created likewise, with a synthetic history inbuilt into them. But the essential questions still remain: By whom? And why?
“The Isthomi are by nature patient. They live their lives, normally, at a slow pace. Their sleep, and other trance-like states, may last for time-spans that would be many lifetimes in humanoid terms. They had no urge to be fruitful and multiply, to replenish this new world in which they found themselves. But they did set out to explore it, and eventually, to fill it. Their machine-bodies had the means to produce robotic extensions, and through those extensions they began to increase themselves still further. They undertook a process of colonization parallel to the means by which a handful of humanoids might set out to populate a world and build a civilization there, except that they manufactured no new individuals, but simply extended and complicated their own bodies. Their mobile robots were simply parts of a much greater whole. The analogy of an ant-hive will probably spring to your mind, but it is a misleading one; it would be more appropriate to compare the robots to motile cells within the body of an individual—white blood corpuscles, perhaps.
“For many thousands of years this process of expansion continued. The Nine did not compete with one another, but operated always in concert. Each of the Nine considered the companionship of the other eight to be infinitely precious. The Nine are not egotists—rather, they fear loneliness and excessive individualism, and they value community above all else. They are not Nine so much as Nine-in-One.”
With an attitude like that, I thought, they should certainly get on well with the Tetrax. But I couldn’t help wondering whether the Tetrax might not find them a little too clever to be entirely welcome.
“At some stage,” Myrlin continued, “the Nine made the startling discovery that their enclosed habitat was not the only one in the world—that there were other environments above, below, and beyond it. They also made the discovery that there was a pre-existent technology connecting the levels, supplying them with energy in an ordered and controlled fashion.
“They concluded, of course, that the world in which the humanoid Isthomi had lived must have been a similar artificial environment, and that it might be nearby. By finding it, they supposed, they could find out why they had been removed from that world and placed in another. Naturally, they set out to investigate the technology that had been used in the design and construction of Asgard, and they also set out to explore the neighbouring levels, at their own characteristic pace—which would seem rather leisurely to our species.
“They did not find the world of the humanoid Isthomi— although it may, of course, still exist somewhere in the bowels of Asgard. They did find many other levels with humanoid inhabitants, but in most cases the humanoid races were not thriving. They inferred, after considerable study, that their neighbouring levels were like their own, in that a few individuals of a civilized species had been introduced in the distant past and left to their own devices. But they found no individuals like themselves—only humanoids and other fleshy creatures.
“Many of the humanoid species had made some progress in rebuilding the civilizations from which they had presumably been taken, but for almost all, the process of social evolution had been interrupted. Whatever legacy of memories the original colonists had brought with them had been lost, so that their descendants reverted to savagery, sustained by elementary agriculture or by hunting and gathering. In some, there was a recovery after the initial decline, so that when they had increased to fill up their new world they began again to follow the path of technological progress, but in no case that the Nine found was there any species which had done as they had done, and conserved the heritage which they had brought with them into their new world.
“The uppermost of these inhabited levels was the one to which Saul Lyndrach found a route—a route which was followed first by me and later by you. You know what we found there—a decadent population, living in the ruins of a city built by their remote ancestors, under threat from animal predators which had evolved from less aggressive ancestors under strong competitive pressure. You know, too, that the Nine had begun to supply the inhabitants of that level with materials, fearing that they otherwise might become extinct. They had conceived of that project—as they conceive of all their projects—as a long-term matter, in which they could make plans for thousands of years.
“Our arrival changed their world-view very radically, and what I was able to tell them about the topmost levels of Asgard, and about the universe beyond, was a revelatory shock whose magnitude we cannot possibly imagine. We are young species, the humans and the Tetrax, and we are no strangers to surprise. The Nine are very old, and they had to make considerable adjustments in coming to terms with the knowledge that the universe is very different from what they had imagined.
“Their initial reaction, as you know, was to seal themselves off and give themselves time to think and to discuss. They told you that they would seal off the level that you had penetrated, and they did—but they left extensions of themselves on that level to continue the business of gathering information, and they opened new channels of communication between the levels they knew and the ones above.