Free Asgard's Heart by Brian Stableford Page B

an imagistic vocabulary which you
already know. It cannot invent—it can only select, and inform by selection.
This notion of an ultimate war between humanoid gods and giants might be an
invention of your own mind, but it must also be information given to you by
the new programme that has colonised your brain. We must treat it as a message,
and try to understand what it is trying to tell us."
    I shrugged. "Okay," I said. "There's a
war going on. How does it help us to characterise the sides as gods and giants?
Does it tell us which side is which? Does it tell us who's trying to destroy
us, and why? And does it tell us what we're supposed to be doing about
it?"
    "Perhaps it does," she replied with
infuriating persistence, "if we can read the imagery correctly."
    "Read on, then," I said impatiently.
    "The primary personalities involved in this
conflict are not humanoids," she said. "In fact, they are not organic
beings at all. They are artificial machine-intelligences—akin to ourselves, but
more complex and more powerful. The organic beings which created the Nine were
making machine-minds in the image of their own personalities. The
machine-intelligences engaged in this war were designed for different and more
ambitious purposes. Some, we must presume, were designed to operate and control
the macroworld—these are the entities that are represented in your dream as the
gods of Asgard. The others, we suspect, must have been created for the specific
purpose of attacking the macroworld and destroying its gods— these are the
beings that are represented in your dream by the giants. They may not actually
be intelligent—perhaps they are destructive automata akin to the things you
call tapeworms— but they seem to be capable of wreaking considerable havoc.
    "If we are to take the imagery seriously, the
plight of the gods is desperate—the forces which are attempting to destroy them
are pressing forward their attack. That attack threatens all the organic life
in Asgard—represented by the world-tree of your dream—but some organic
life-forms may have become instruments of the attackers—that is what is
signified by the image of the traitor. Somehow, there is a vital function to be
served by organic entities, although we cannot be sure whether that function is
to be served by actual organic entities or by software personas which mimic them. That there is a heroic
role to be played we are convinced, but where and how it must be acted out, we
are not certain."
    It was one hell of a story, but it seemed to me to be
reading an awful lot into a dream. I had the uncomfortable suspicion that
whatever I'd dreamed, the Nine would have been able to find a similar story in
it.
    "I don't know," I said, dubiously. "It
would be more convincing if the supposed gods had managed to leave their
message in Myrlin's brain as well as mine—or Tulyar's. Has Tulyar turned up, by
the way?"
    "No," replied the avatar of Athene. "We
are unable to locate him."
    All of a sudden, that sounded rather ominous. Even
with most of their peripheral systems switched off, the Nine should have been
able to locate a Tetron, living or dead, if he were somewhere in their
worldlet. I remembered that although the Nine had been unable to find any
evidence that any alien software had been rudely injected into Myrlin's brain,
they had been more cautious in passing judgment on Tulyar.
    "What do you deduce from that?" I asked,
anxiously.
    "It is difficult to know what to deduce,"
she said, hesitantly, "but it is possible that some kind of programming
was transmitted into Tulyar's brain, and that it was not the
    same
programme that was biocopied into you."
    "By 'not the same' you mean to imply that it
wasn't put there by the same side, don't you?" I said.
    "It is a possibility," she admitted.
    "You think Tulyar might have had something to do
with the attack?"
    "It is a possibility," she said again. There
were, alas, far too many possibilities.
    "Why has the war suddenly