No one really knew how much wilderness there was in the cave-systems on levels one, two and three. There didn’t seem to be nearly as much on one or two as there was on three. What that meant was unclear, but in the absence of any evidence that the level three cavies were any less technologically sophisticated than their neighbours, my feeling had always been that they simply liked wilderness areas. Maybe they were concerned to conserve as much as they could of their own evolutionary heritage; maybe when they began to manufacture their food by artificial photosynthesis they set free all the other species which they had exploited in more primitive times, giving them back a place to live, where they could make their own destiny. No one knew, and it was generally considered to be one of the less intriguing problems that Asgard posed.
Saul Lyndrach had gone into the wilderness not once but several times, as if he were looking for something in particular; and it was in the wilderness, eventually, that he’d found his bonanza. That was where we had to go to follow the android.
There was nothing left of the wilderness now but trees and a few bones. Everything had died, millions of years ago, and most of it had rotted away before the cold preserved what was left. All the flesh had gone, though the Tetron bioscientists—reputedly the most expert in the galaxy—had managed to recover a good many genome samples, one way and another.
There were no leaves on the whited trees now, just gnarled trunks and knotted branches. My untrained eye couldn’t estimate the number of different species there were, but I could tell which were the oldest trees, with their thick boles and their branches which divided again and again until the ends were no thicker than needles.
The bones were generally clustered, occasionally to be found in meandering grooves and hollows that had once been streams and pools. The water had somehow been drained from them before the great freeze, so they now had the same thin layer of mixed ices that dressed the entire landscape in a cloak of white. The bones themselves were unremarkable, or so it seemed to me. It was all too easy to find leg-bones and hip-bones and jawbones with teeth which would surely have been similar to ones to be found on any of the humanoid worlds, which all had their quasi-cattle and their quasi-chickens just as they had their quasi-men.
There were no humanoid skulls, though. Nor were there any dinosaurs, nor giants in the earth, nor hideous aliens to tantalise the imagination.
Underfoot there had once been grass, but the grass—like everything else—had died before the advent of the cold, and had shriveled into fragility. Our boots crushed it effortlessly, and it seemed rather as if we were walking on frosted cobwebs.
“This is eerie,” said Crucero, who seemed to like this region far less than the honest and simple tunnel through which the monorail trains had run. “Could anything actually be alive down here?”
It wasn’t such a stupid question as it seemed.
“When it’s as cold as this,” I told him, “no living system can function. On the other hand, nothing changes. There are some very simple things that were still alive when the cold came, and which can be restored to activity even after millions of years of cryonic oblivion. So far, the biotechs haven’t revived anything more complex than a bacterium, but in its way that’s not unspectacular. The day they bring back an amoeba will be a really big deal.”
“If the cold had come more quickly,” the star-captain mused, “there might be whole plants and animals preserved.”
“It didn’t come as quickly as all that,” I told her. “Not even on one. We’re sixty or seventy metres beneath the surface here, and the artificial rock which they used to make the walls and ceilings is a very good insulator. It might have been thousands of years after whatever disaster overtook the outside that the cold seeped down here, and the decline in temperature was probably very gradual. By the time the cold took control, there was very little left for it to claim for its own—the inhabitants were long gone. Maybe they took all the birds and beasts with them.”
“I can think of another scenario,” she said.
It didn’t surprise me. Ever since she’d found out that I wasn’t keen on the fortress-Asgard hypothesis she’d taken a certain delight in embroidering it, bringing little bits of evidence into line with it one by one.
“Go ahead,” I told her. I figured I was tough enough to take it.
“Suppose there really is a central power-source down there in the centre,” she said. “A starlet, as you call it. And suppose its power-lines really did extend through thousands of levels, including this one, to give power and heat. If that were so, then there’s no reason at all why the cold should ever have seeped down this far. Maybe it didn’t seep down at all. Maybe this level and the ones above it were deliberately refrigerated, and the atmosphere of the world deliberately destroyed. Maybe it was all part of a strategy of war.”
“You think this was the result of some alien offensive?” I said.
I couldn’t see her face, but I could imagine the grin on it.
“Quite the reverse,” she answered. “I think it was a defensive move. I think the reason they had to evacuate these levels was that there was no way they could continue to hold them, and I think the reason they froze them was to try and stop the rot that was taking them over.”
I remembered Seme’s descriptions of the kind of fighting the Star Force had been formed to do. The Salamandrans had been biotech-minded, and had used biotech weapons: engineered plagues.
“You might be right,” I conceded reluctantly.
“And if I am,” she pointed out. “Your Tetron friends might get a very nasty shock one day, if they keep on trying to revive the bacteria they find beneath the snowdrifts.”
I knew that she might be right about that, too, but I wasn’t about to say so. She didn’t need any further encouragement to keep her nasty mind ticking over. Anyhow, I could follow the rest of the train of thought without her help. If Asgard was a fortress, whose outer defences had been penetrated, the reason why the exiled cavies hadn’t come out of hiding a million years ago might not be too difficult to figure out. Maybe the surrender of the outer levels hadn’t stopped the invasion—maybe there was nothing beneath our boots but layer upon layer of dead worlds.
I knew it couldn’t be quite that bad. I knew because of the few tantalizing jottings which Saul had left in his notebook. The level he had reached at the bottom of his dropshaft wasn’t cold, and there were living creatures there. There was light, and there was plant life, and there were animals. He’d seen enough, before he was forced to return because he was at the very limit of his exploratory range, to make that plain. But what Saul had seen wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate that there was still intelligent life inside Asgard. It wasn’t sufficient to prove that if a war had been fought, it hadn’t been lost.
The star-captain’s scenario was still a lively contender— and if she was right, then the warm, living part of Asgard into which we were headed might be far more dangerous than I had previously supposed.
Eventually, we came to the next big wall.
It looked like most of the other walls in the levels: frosted, curving, windowless. There was a doorway in front of us, which Saul had opened with the aid of levers and a torch, so that it presented itself to us as a narrow and jagged slash of shadow. We approached it very carefully, knowing it to be the ideal spot for another of Myrlin’s little traps. Perhaps for that very reason there was nothing untoward to be found. The android probably figured that if he had got this far without being caught then he was virtually home and dry. Once he moved away from the bottom of the dropshaft he was making his own way, and all he had to do was cover his tracks.