“A barrier against what?”
“Some kind of invasion.” Thalia took up the thread again. “Not by entities such as you or we, but by something microscopic, on the same size-scale as bacteria or viruses.”
I remembered all those bacteria, frozen in the rings of Uranus for four billion years, and still viable. But the temperature in the vicinity of Uranus was still tens of degrees Kelvin. Cold preserves, but not absolute cold. Maybe it was easier to freeze the outer layers of the macroworld than heat them up or irradiate them to the level needed to destroy a microscopic invader. But it was difficult to believe. Bacteria are no threat to an advanced biotechnology, and viruses can be combated too. Myrlin had assured me that neither he nor I now had anything to fear from that kind of attack.
I explained to them that there was yet another aspect of the problem which interested me, and that the existence of entities like Asgard might help to explain why all the galactic starfaring races were about the same age. I pointed out that one could easily invert the story about Asgards—it seemed that we were now entitled to speak in the plural— being populated in the first instance by borrowing from the ecospheres of worlds. Perhaps, instead, the ecospheres of worlds were populated by borrowing from Asgards. I explained my gardening analogies: Asgard as a seed-nursery, its builders as planters, engaged in a project of colonization whose time-scale ran to millions of years. They thought the story more plausible and more palatable than Nisreen had—but they were used to the idea of personalities inhabiting inorganic hardware, whose sense of time was very different from that of planet-born humanoids.
The galactics had always imagined the builders of Asgard in their own image—encouraged, of course, by the fact that the one-time inhabitants of the outer layers had been humanoid. The Nine, obviously, had always thought of the builders as beings more like themselves—beings whose personalities might be distributed through the systems of the entire macroworld. That would have looked like the more likely hypothesis, now I knew that it was on the map of possibilities, except for two things. How could we explain what had happened to the Nine when they tried to contact these hypothetical master-builders? And why would beings like the Nine, only more so, be interested in seeding whole galaxies with the kind of DNA that eventually produced humanoid beings?
“If the chronology of the Nine is anywhere near accurate,” I said, “then it can’t have been this Asgard which seeded the galactic arm with the genes of my remote proto-mammalian ancestors. Perhaps the one that did has gone away again. On the other hand, there’s every chance that there are other Asgards lurking about in the galaxy—even in the local region of space, which has been very imperfectly explored. If the others aren’t in solar systems, we wouldn’t have a snowball in hell’s chance of locating them. We travel between star-systems in wormholes—for all we know, the depths of interstellar space might be lousy with macroworlds. Maybe we only found this one because something did go wrong with it.”
I think we could have gone on for several more hours, but we were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was a curiously homely sound to be hearing in that bizarre place.
“That’ll be Finn,” I said, as I went to answer it.
I was due full marks for deduction. When I opened the door of Myrlin’s little igloo, I found that it was indeed John Finn who was standing on the doorstep. But he wasn’t quite as I had expected to see him.
For one thing, he had a gun, which he was pointing at my chest. I could tell by his expression that he wouldn’t be at all averse to using it. It wasn’t a mud gun either—it was the kind of gun the invaders used. Given that, the second surprise dovetailed perfectly with the first. As well as the scion who’d presumably been appointed by Myrlin to guide him here, he had three Scarida with him, one of whom was my old adversary with the sky-blue eyes.
They were all carrying guns.
Only a soldier, I reminded myself, as a sinking feeling took possession of my stomach. He’s only a soldier.
It seemed that this particular enemy weren’t quite ready to negotiate on our terms. In fact, it looked as if they weren’t in a negotiating mood at all.
28
When we were all safely inside, with the door closed, I relaxed a bit. Not that it was a very relaxing situation—the gleam in John Finn’s eye suggested that he would like nothing better than to blow my head off. He still blamed me for everything. The three invaders with him were as nervous as cats, though I guessed that they hadn’t the slightest suspicion of what the real situation was.
Thalia-7 and Calliope-4 stood up, anxiously. “What has happened?” asked one of them.
The invader officer looked at them, but didn’t answer. He seemed very uneasy indeed, as if none of this was making much sense to him. That was hardly surprising.
“What’s happening at the prison camp?” I asked him. “The negotiations between the scions and your superiors must be under way by now.”
I got no response save for a blank stare. He didn’t know anything about any negotiations. He didn’t know that Thalia, Calliope and all their siblings were scions of the Nine. To him, they looked like members of a conquered race, and he couldn’t figure out what they were doing here. He was out of his intellectual depth.
“Who brought you here?” I asked, trying to take the initiative in what was sure to be a difficult conversation, and hoping that I could explain it all to him.
“As a matter of fact,” said John Finn, “you did.”
I looked at him in puzzlement, thrown out of my conversational stride. He was grinning with smug satisfaction. I could only wait for him to explain.
“You were right about me,” he said. “I know what you told the blonde while we were sick in that hospital. You told her I couldn’t be trusted. Dead right—I don’t owe one damn thing to the Star Force, or Mother Earth, or the whole human race, let alone the Tetrax. When the invaders picked me up, I told them everything they wanted to know—and then some. I told them about all the little gadgets the Tetrax gave me, about which I knew a little bit more than the Tetrax thought I did. Told the Scarids how to start searching for all the bugs that were already in place. Found lots of them in the city—and we found some in places we never expected to. Took me a while to realise that I was carrying a bug myself, but I figured it out. My boot heels were leaking some kind of organic muck, leaving a trail for an olfactory sensor. Guess who else has a couple just like them.”
I remembered what had happened last time I had been followed into the deeper levels.
“Oh merde!” I said. “Not again!”
He nodded.
“But why?” I asked. “It doesn’t make sense for the Tetrax to bug their own agents.”
“Maybe they didn’t trust you,” said Finn. “Want to know what I think? I think they expected us to defect to the opposition—if not immediately, as soon as we found out what we were really carrying. They knew we’d be in trouble when the invaders found out that we were carrying that damned virus. They expected us to take the obvious way out. And they wanted to be able to find us again when the war was over.”