Lear was nodding, though, as if she understood. “It’s what the Star Force—and everyone else—uses to protect its systems from hostile software,” she said, airily. “You can never be absolutely certain that you can keep tapeworms out of your machinery, so you have to make sure that the damage they do to your software once they’re there is strictly limited. What you do is to keep your own information in a special code—an arcane language—which is immune to the spoiling which the tapeworm tries to do. If you’re clever enough, the invader program is unable to crash your system or bugger up your data. Right?”
She had turned to look at me, but now she turned back to face the avatar of Athene who looked, in some ways, uncannily like her. I had never thought of Susarma Lear as a dead ringer for Athene; personally, I thought that she was infinitely more convincing as a valkyrie.
“That is substantially correct,” admitted the woman in the wall.
“Why can’t you just make copies of yourselves in your arcane languages?” I asked. “You know how to operate in software space, and I don’t. I’d be no use to you at all.”
“There are two reasons why that might not be so,” she answered, calmly. “First of all, we are very much creatures of Asgard. Even though we have spent an unspecifiable span of time in a state that we now recognize as virtual imprisonment, cut off from the other native systems of the macroworld, we are nevertheless adapted by our nature and evolution for interaction with those systems. That gives us a certain amount of power, but it also makes us vulnerable. It would be very difficult for us to translate ourselves into a form in which we could protect ourselves from attempts by other native systems to attack and injure us.
“Your persona, on the other hand, has evolved in very different circumstances, and is quite alien to the native systems. If the analogy will help you, you might think of yourself as a virus to which Asgard has no inbuilt immunity, whereas we—even in mutated form—are viruses to which there is already a great deal of inbuilt resistance.”
It wasn’t particularly flattering to be compared to a virus, but I could live with it.
“And the second reason?” I queried.
“Medusa’s head,” she replied, succinctly. I was glad to see that Susarma Lear now looked completely at a loss.
“You think I’ve got a weapon,” I said, uneasily. “You think that whoever called for help gave me something I could use to answer the call: the biocopy.”
“If it is a weapon,” she told me, “it is probably a weapon that can only be used in software space. The biocopy itself is probably useless, save perhaps as a source of information. But if we can re-copy it along with the rest of your persona, encrypted to the best of our ability, then it may become a powerful instrument—perhaps as potent as Medusa’s head.”
As a source of information, whatever the entity had put into my head was certainly lacking in clarity. As messages from the world beyond go, my remarkable dreams were themselves pretty heavily encrypted—but I wasn’t about to accept too readily the theory that I could be a hot-shot superhero, if only I were rid of my body.
“What about you?” I aid to Myrlin. “What have you been dreaming about lately.”
He looked at me in a way that told me that he had already been interrogated on that point. He also looked slightly sad. “Nothing,” he told me. “If whatever was out there tried to transcribe a biocopy into my brain, it seems that it didn’t take. We’re not certain about 994-Tulyar, but you were the only one who made any kind of conscious contact, and it looks as though you were the only one able to take what they tried to give us.
“Oh merde,” I said, with a kind of sigh I didn’t even know I could produce.
I had the distinct impression that I had once again been drafted into a war that I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic to fight. As usual, though, it seemed that I might find it very difficult indeed to say no.
CHAPTER EIGHT
When we got back to the place that the Nine had fixed up to provide living quarters for their guests and their scions, we were able to see the real extent of the carnage.
The village they’d fitted out for us consisted of forty dome-shaped constructions, which were arranged in neat rows in one of the few open areas that this worldlet had, under a twenty-meter sky lit by electricity. The sky was still lit, but dimly, and there was a suggestion of twilight about it. At least half of the forty domes had been damaged by explosive blasts, and the streets were littered with debris. It wasn’t easy to tell how many robot invaders had run riot in the village, but I counted eight carcasses made of assorted plastics and metals. Five seemed physically undamaged, and I could only assume that the Isthomi’s scions had wiped out their internal programming with weapons like the one they had given Myrlin.
Nobody paid any immediate attention to our arrival. A few scions were still busy picking up dead and wounded humanoids on stretchers, ferrying them to doorways in the gray walls. Inside the labyrinth of tunnels, the Nine would have set out a whole series of egg-shaped flotation tanks, where the wounded could be placed until they could do whatever was possible to mend the broken bodies. I knew they were clever, and could sometimes resuscitate people who would have been deemed dead by human or Tetron doctors, but the miracles they could work were limited, and most of the injured were in a very bad way. I looked at a couple of Tetron scientists—only recently arrived on this level—who were being hustled away by the scions. I was morally certain that nothing could be done for them. They were dead, and far beyond recall to the land of the living.
There were several Scarid soldiers making a show of patrolling the streets, carrying the weapons they’d brought down with them when they came to negotiate a treaty with 994-Tulyar. They looked a little glazed, as one might expect of men who’d just come through an unexpected battle, but they also looked a little bit pleased with themselves. It wasn’t hard to guess why. They were fighting men who’d recently been humiliated by the cunning of the Tetrax, forced to accept that their glorious empire was impotent to deal with the real universe. They’d come down here to learn their lesson from the all-wise and non-violent conquerors, but when the attack had come, it had been they and not the Tetrax who’d known how to react. They’d been able to put up something of a fight, and were proud of that.
As I looked around at the shards of the robots which had served as the assault force, I quickly realized that the Scarid soldiers couldn’t have contributed much to their actual defeat—the ones that had been stopped by firepower had been hit by missiles much bigger than the ones the Scarida had in their popguns. Some looked as if they had blown themselves to smithereens, probably because something had been done to their internal software, which had fatally disrupted their power-plants. It was the Nine who’d done all the hard work, despite their peaceful inclinations.
We tried to find some task with which we could usefully occupy ourselves, but the urgent work was virtually complete, and the less vital clearing up could safely be left to the Nine’s robot servitors. I looked around for someone I knew, but the only person I recognized was an ashen-faced Jacinthe Siani. I didn’t particularly want to talk to her, but she obviously thought that it was a time for old grudges to be set aside. She came over.
“What happened?” she said. “I thought the war was over.”
“That was the war between the Scarida and the inhabitants of Skychain City,” I told her, drily. “This seems to be a war of much greater magnitude, fought by armies more peculiar than the ones we galactic innocents are used to. I doubt that there’ll be any further call for your services as a traitress.”
She
