for her, but I had no difficulty in resisting the urge to put my arm around her shoulder. She’d done me too many bad turns, and no favors at all.
“The sooner I can get back to the surface, the better,” she said. “I don’t like it down here.”
“It’s a long, long way to the surface,” said Susarma Lear, who had even less sympathy for the Kythnan woman than I did. “And the elevators are out. I don’t think any of us will be going home for quite a while.”
Jacinthe clearly hadn’t thought of that. She looked at me forlornly with her big dark eyes, genuinely pathetic.
“It’s a disappointing universe, isn’t it?” I said. The words didn’t come out quite as cruelly as I intended them. When it came to it, I just hadn’t got the heart to turn the knife in the wound.
Jacinthe turned disconsolately away, and wandered off in the direction of the battered dome that was all the home she had left.
I went to look more carefully at one of the disabled robots. It didn’t much resemble the giant mantis which had come after me—it was more like a bipedal armadillo, with guns instead of arms. It seemed to me to be rather crudely-designed, as killing-machines went. This hadn’t been a subtle attack, or a particularly well-prepared one. I inferred that the sudden hotting up of the war had taken the opposing forces somewhat by surprise. No doubt they were improvising as best they could, but they didn’t seem to have had much time to prepare for the battle which they’d just fought.
I asked one of the scions about the casualty figures. She didn’t have an exact count, but she told me that more than three-quarters of the Scarid contingent had been killed or seriously injured, and that half of the Tetrax were dead. I asked about 994-Tulyar, but all she could say was that he wasn’t among the casualties they’d collected.
“Did they get Finn?” asked Susarma Lear, and when the scion told her that Finn was still unhurt, she said: “Pity.” I knew how she felt.
Someone else had seen us, and came over to talk; the scion went on her way. I didn’t recognize the newcomer immediately—it’s not that all Tetrax look alike, but it does take an effort of mind to pay attention to their distinguishing characteristics instead of the mere fact of their obvious alienness.
“Mr. Rousseau?” he said, uncertainly. He obviously had the same difficulty with human faces.
I realized belatedly who he was. “673-Nisreen?” I countered. For the first time, I felt a small thrill of relief. Here was one survivor I could be glad to greet.
He gave me a slight bow. “I arrived here only a few hours ago,” he said. “I know almost nothing of the situation. But I am unable to locate 994-Tulyar, and if he is not found—or if he is found to be dead—I shall be in effective authority over the remaining Tetrax here. I have spoken to the entities you call the Nine, and they have told me that it might be some time before they can restore communication with the upper levels. I am, as you know, a biologist, and although I have been an ambassador of sorts to your own species, I am not at all sure where my responsibility now lies. I cannot tell what ends we might work toward, or what means we might employ in the hope of their attainment. It is said that you have a special intimacy with the curious intelligences that are native to this level, and you have been here longer than anyone else that I might consult. Will you advise me, Mr. Rousseau, as to what you think will happen now, and what we should do?”
I’d never been asked for advice by a Tetron, and had never expected to be. 994-Tulyar would never have condescended to ask me the time of day. In the one substantial conversation I’d previously had with Nisreen, he’d seemed as patronizing as any of his race, but I’d obviously made a favorable impression on him. The only problem was that I didn’t know what advice I could give him. I thought fast, trying to come up with something that might justify his trust.
“The first thing the Isthomi will need to do,” I improvised, “is to organize some kind of defensive strategy, in case this happens again. I don’t know who it was that sent those murder-machines against us, but we’d be foolish to assume that they’ve shot their bolt. The Nine know relatively little about weaponry. Scarid weapons are fairly crude, and your scientists might have more useful expertise—you’d better find out what help you can offer to the Isthomi in that regard.”
Nisreen nodded. “I see,” he said. Then he waited—obviously I’d only whetted his appetite for more.
“The Nine already have a lot of problems on their plate,” I said. “As you probably know, they’ve suffered a couple of disasters of a less crude nature. Now the attackers have switched off the power supply to the entire macroworld, the Nine will want to find out very quickly who they are and how they can be stopped. The people who stand to suffer most in the short term are the Scarida—you’ll have to talk to whoever’s left in charge of their team, to impress upon him that their interests and ours are identical. We don’t want them deciding to do something silly, and we’ll certainly need their fighting men if there’s another attack.”
He nodded again, but didn’t even bother to provide a verbal prompt. He just waited for more. He was certainly expecting a lot from a mere barbarian. I decided, albeit a little reluctantly, to tell him about my plans.
“The Nine have been building a robot vehicle for me,” I told him. “It’s designed to cross more or less any terrain, even through a reducing atmosphere. I intend to take it down through the levels, relying on the Nine to find me a route. We need to find out what’s happening down there—and whether we can do anything about it. If turning the power off was as simple as throwing a switch, then it can probably be turned on again with equal ease, and if one side in this war had a pressing reason for wanting it switched off, the other side will presumably want to switch it back on again. If the people fighting this war thought that the Isthomi were impotent to intervene, they probably wouldn’t have tried to destroy them—which implies that there’s something we can do, even if we can’t quite figure out what it is.”
I could tell from his expression that this wasn’t quite the kind of advice which he had in mind, so I stopped. There really didn’t seem to be anything else I could say. I decided that there was no point in bringing up the Nine’s other bright idea about sending a task-force of personality-copies through software space. I still didn’t like the idea very much, and I wasn’t at all sure that I was prepared to volunteer.
“I’m sorry, Nisreen,” I finished, “but I can’t tell you what you ought to do. If there’s a role for you to play in all this, you’ll have to work it out for yourself.”
Nisreen studied me carefully, his face quite inscrutable. “I am indebted to you, Mr. Rousseau,” he said. “We all face a difficult time now, and I must undertake to make what contribution I can, as my duty demands. I will talk with you again, if I may. But may I ask one more question?”
“Go ahead,” I said, generously.
“We once discussed, very briefly, various hypotheses regarding the possible nature of Asgard and its relation to the many star-worlds which support humanoid life. Can you tell me which hypothesis you now consider to be the most likely?”
It was a very good question.
“When I talked to you last,” I said, hesitantly, “I suggested that Asgard, or something like it, might have been the common point of origin of the gene-systems that are scattered around the galactic arm—that the builders of Asgard had been behind the seeding of the star-worlds that produced the galactic community. The other hypothesis I had in mind was that its task might be to gather genes from star-worlds, using the habitats in
