Asgard's Heart (16 page)

"That's not possible," she replied, amiably.
"There are powerful constraints on what we can do. But we must produce a
copy which will be able to operate effectively; there is no need to fear that
your copy will perceive itself in fashion which is radically alien."

"That's a relief," I muttered, not entirely
reassured. The word "radically" might conceal a multitude of complications.
I noticed that we were now operating on the assumption that I was going to go
ahead with the scheme.

"Trust us, Mr. Rousseau," she said.
"Please."

There was something about the way she said it which implied
that any trust I pledged was going to be severely tested in time to come. She
had already admitted that she was by no means certain that her conjectural
account of the situation was correct, and I had the feeling that there might
be more in her speculations than she had yet cared to reveal.

I stared into her beautiful face, which seemed to have
softened slightly around the jawline. Her eyes were big and dark and pleading,
and she was putting on a more convincing show than Jacinthe Siani had. She was
doing her level best to present me with a sight to melt any human's heart. I'd
never had much to do with women, and the specimens with which I'd lately come
into contact were the kind that help one to build up a fair immunity to
feminine charms, but I am only human.

At least, I was
then.

"But what happens to me?" I asked
stubbornly. "This flesh and blood thing with a sore back and a growing anxiety
about the dangers of going to sleep?"

It is possible," she said, "that the
ultimate fate of your fleshly self might depend on the success of your copy in
making contact with the masters of the macroworld. But in any case, the plans
which you have made may proceed as you wish."

I had already guessed that she was going to say something
like that.
Think of it not as losing a body, but
gaining a soul.

I felt a pressing need to stall her, and perhaps to be
on my own for a few minutes, to give the matter further thought, though I could
see no alternative but to bow to the pressure of inevitability. I could have
told her to switch herself off, but for some reason I didn't want to have to
stare at the blank wall where she'd recently been.

"Are you sure you can make me tough enough to get
by?" I asked her. "To judge by what I've just seen, software is very
easy to kill."

"The weapon which you saw Myrlin use is one which
can only be fired from real space," she said. "The entities which
inhabit software space are by no means toothless, but they will not be able to
project disruptive programming into you quite as easily as that."

Which didn't mean, I noted, that they couldn't shoot
destructive programming into my software self—only that they'd find it
difficult.

"Is there a constructive version of the
weapon?" I asked her—on the spur of the moment, because the thought had
only just occurred to me. "Can you transmit programmes through the air
with a magic bazooka, instead of having to use wires the way our mysterious
friends did when they injected Medusa into my brain?"

"In theory, yes," she said. "But it is
difficult in the extreme. The receiving matrix, whether organic or inorganic,
would have to be
very
hospitable to the
incoming programme—otherwise the effect would be purely disruptive. An alien
programme really needs a physical bridge of some kind, like the artificial synapses
that were in place during your contact, if it is to be efficiently
intruded."

It was interesting as a hypothetical question, but it
didn't really connect up with the immediate problem, which was to reconcile my
reluctant mind to the prospect of a peculiar duplication.

"I need some fresh air," I told her. It was
a stupid thing to say, because the air outside my igloo was not in any way
fresher than the air within—I just felt that I needed to get outside.

It turned out to be a stupid thing to do, too, because
no sooner had I opened the door than John Finn stuck the business end of a
needier into my windpipe and told me that if I didn't do exactly as he said
various vital parts of my fleshy self would be scattered hither and yon amidst
all the unpleasant debris which already littered the area.

10

"Look,
John," I said, patiently. "I'm aware of the fact that you have a
little learning difficulty, but even you must remember that we've been through
all this before. If you wanted to exercise your death-wish, you could have
done it this morning."

"Personally," he said, "I'd just as
soon kill you, but I'm assured that for some stupid reason you're considered to
be quite valuable. No other hostage will do as well. Just behave yourself, and
your freaky friends in the walls will make sure that no harm will come to you.
No mindscramblers, no clever tricks at all—they'll just give us what we want,
rather than risk any harm coming to you. See?"

"What do you want?" I asked, flatly.

"We want to get the hell out of here before those
killing machines come back. We want that armoured truck the magic Muses have
been building for you."

While he talked he urged me into action. He came round
behind me but he kept the needier jammed into my neck, so that if anything
unexpected happened he could blow my brains out without any delay at all. I
allowed him to shove me where he wanted me to go.

"Whose bright idea was this?" I asked.

"Just keep walking," he told me. The light
was still gloomy, and there appeared to be nobody else about, but once we were
away from the domes a couple of other armed men fell into step with us. I
wasn't in the least surprised to see that they were Scarid soldiers. They were
the only people around who were stupid enough not to realise that they were
safer behind the Isthomi's defences, and that once outside them there'd be no
way of getting all the way back up to level fifty-two.

"You were bloody lucky to get away last
time," I told him in a low voice. "The colonel's been regretting that
she didn't shoot you ever since. She'll be ever so grateful for a second
chance."

"She isn't going to get it," he said
optimistically.

There was a car waiting for us in one of the Nine's
labyrinthine tunnel-systems, and I gathered that one of Finn's friends had
already made it clear to the Nine exactly what they wanted done. The Nine had
apparently decided to play ball. I could only assume that they really did
consider me a uniquely valuable asset, and were prepared to hand over the robot
transporter rather than risk my being damaged. It also occurred to me, though,
that the Nine seemed to have lost interest in the transporter and in the
possibility of getting my fleshly self to the Centre by conventional means. So
much for my plans going forward as I had intended.

"I suppose I should have asked the Nine to take
care of that bug you planted," I remarked, as I took my place in the front
seat of the car. "You'd never have figured out that I was so important to
the Nine if you hadn't listened in."

He sat directly behind me, never relaxing the pressure
of the gun on my skin. It reminded me very strongly of the first time I had
visited this level, when Amara Guur had treated me in exactly the same fashion.
The Nine had supplied Guur with a weapon that wouldn't fire, looking after me
even though I wasn't nearly as valuable then as I seemed to be now. It would be
too much to hope, though, that the weapon which Finn had now was useless.
Someone had probably tried it out during the morning's skirmish.

Another Scarid came out of the shadows to join us in
the car, making three in all; they seemed desperately morose. They were all
officers, but none of them seemed to be assuming command. I was puzzled,
because I couldn't see why they'd consent to taking orders from a jerk like
Finn. I could understand how they might feel very much out of their depth, and
how eager they must be to get home. I also knew how this kind of strong-arm
tactic was very much their way of doing things—but it still didn't add up that
they would turn in their hour of need to a no-hoper like Finn.

My puzzlement increased when a fourth figure came
towards us from the direction of the village. It was Jacinthe Siani. She, of
all people, should have known better than to get involved in this, but she was
under Scarid orders now, and they probably hadn't given her a choice. She took
her place behind me.

"If you try to take the transporter out," I
said, speaking in parole rather than English so that the Scarids could understand,
"you'll very likely run into more of those things that attacked us. The
Nine have defences now—here you're safe. You could be going to your deaths if
you try to go up through the levels, even if you can figure out a route."

"Shut up, Rousseau," said Finn, also in
parole. "We know what we're doing."

I shut up. After all, I told myself, why the hell
should I care if John Finn and a bunch of Scarids wanted to get themselves
killed? There was no reason at all—except that I didn't want them to take my
transporter. If I was ever going to get to the Centre, I'd need it.

It didn't take long to get to the manufactory where
the Nine had been putting the robot together. It was even less well-lit than
the residential area, and it seemed unnaturally still and silent. All the
mechanical arms projecting from the walls were idle, mostly drawn back and
folded. The transporter stood in lonely isolation in the middle of an open
space. It seemed to be finished, and it had the special gleam of something
brand new and never used. It was much bigger than the truck I'd used for work
on the surface, but it didn't look so very different. Most of its elaborations
were internal—although it did have a turret on top with three different guns
mounted on it.

"We're going to drive to a certain place,"
Finn told me, "where we have a couple of friends waiting. Then we're going
to give you something to hold—it'll be a bomb, but don't worry about it going
off, because I'll have the detonator safe about my person. Once we're out of
the habitat, with Asgard's nice thick walls separating us, we'll be safe, and
so will the bomb. We'll never see one another again."

I reflected that it wasn't all bad news.

Finn and I climbed into the front seat of the
transporter, while the Scarids got into the cab behind us. There was a set of
manual controls, although the robot was really intended to drive itself, or to
interface with another silicon- based intelligence. The manual controls had
been designed with a human driver in mind, though, and followed a common stereotype.
I had no difficulty in starting up and driving off into the tunnel ahead. It
was only just wide enough to accommodate us, but there was no problem in
following it. I didn't have to make any turnings—the Nine had obviously been
apprised already of the destination that Finn had in mind, and they were happy
to open up a route that would take us directly there.

There didn't seem to be any point in further
exercising my limited powers of persuasion, so I did exactly what Finn wanted
me to do, taking comfort from the fact that I was probably driving him to the
doorstep of his appointment with death.

When we stopped, I couldn't see anything much outside
except for a circular space with an empty shaft above it. I assumed that it was
a platform that could lift the truck up to the next level—maybe several levels.