as simulations of the personalities of another kind of Isthomi, incarnate in flesh very little different from mine. The entity that had contacted me while I was interfaced with the Isthomi had, it seemed, made some kind of biocopy of its own programming to colonize the software space inside my brain. The Isthomi had made similar biocopies of themselves in order to equip the fleshy scions they had made. If that could be done, so could the reverse process: the Isthomi could make a machine-code copy of my personality within their own systems, including the extra software that the contact had foisted on me.
It was only natural, I realized, that the Nine had jumped to a conclusion that hadn’t even occurred to me—that when my mysterious contactees had cried for help, they had expected that help to come through software space, not through the cracks and crevices of Asgard’s massive macroarchitecture.
I was by no means convinced that it was a good idea.
“You want to make a copy of me,” I said, “and send that copy out into software space to run the gauntlet of whatever it was that blasted you when you tried to reach the Center.”
“We have reasons for thinking that you might be able to succeed,” she assured me.
“Maybe so,” I said. “But I’m not so sure that I want to send a software copy of myself to the Center. In fact, I’m not so sure that I want any software copies of me hanging about anywhere. You might have got used to being nine persons in one, but I’m accustomed to there being just one of me. I think I told you that I’m an essentially solitary person. I really wouldn’t like to have to use numbers to distinguish each of my particular selves from all the other ones. It just isn’t my style.”
“Why do you think that Rousseau might succeed where you failed?” asked Susarma Lear, cutting through my objections as though they didn’t much matter. I had a nasty suspicion that they didn’t.
“We are now forewarned of the dangers and difficulties,” replied the image in the wall. “We believe that we can now make software personas that would be far less vulnerable to destruction than the exploratory probes we have previously sent out. Such personas can be encrypted, written in an arcane language.”
“What’s an arcane language?” I asked, feeling slightly foolish.
Susarma 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