The game, if game it was to be reckoned, had hardly begun.
21
When we came to rest, the truck’s front end was pointed downwards at an angle of forty-five degrees. We had not been brought to an abrupt stop, nor had we been bounced about very much on the way down. All in all, it had been a pretty smooth ride. I calculated that we’d been traveling with the dustslide for the best part of half a minute, but I couldn’t translate that into distance. The acceleration due to gravity was pretty tame down here, and we’d had the dust to slow us up as well. We certainly hadn’t got to the bottom of the world, but in Asgardian terms we could be at the bottom of a fairly deep well, buried in dirt.
I could see through the window that it wasn’t just dirt that we were buried under. It was a thick, glutinous liquid. We were at the bottom of a sea of mud.
I already knew that the truck could climb down an empty shaft, but I wasn’t at all sure that it could swim.
“Anybody hurt?” I asked.
Nobody answered. I assumed that could be taken as an all-round no.
“What do we do now?” asked Susarma Lear. Like the rest of us she had both hands on the ledge of the dashboard in front of her, bracing herself so that she didn’t slide off the seat. The window looked like a dull mirror, silvered by the dust in which we were buried, and I could see her shadowy reflection looking at me.
Nobody answered her question either.
Then there came a strange sound, as if something was being scraped along the side of the vehicle. Wherever we were, we weren’t alone.
“Is the side of the truck clear?” I asked Urania, wondering whether it was only the cab that was under the drift.
“No,” she said, shortly. She was fluttering her fingers over the body of her mechanical sister, her brow furrowed with intense concentration.
The sound continued, moving closer now, until it was at the side of the cab. It was no longer a single scrape but a combination, and the sounds were now coming from three different directions. As I looked at the dim reflection of Susarma’s face I saw it suddenly dissolve as though exploded, and actually winced before I realised that it was the mud which had been disturbed, not the person whose image it had caught. There was something moving in the ooze, pressing against the truck as if trying to grip it.
It was like a section of segmented tubing, pale and slimy. It extended itself across the windscreen, as though it were a piece of rope that was being wound carefully around the truck.
“Oh shit,” said Susarma. “It’s a bloody worm. A giant worm.”
I knew there was no need to be frightened—at least, not of the worm. It could be the biggest and nastiest worm in the universe, but it wasn’t going to be able to break in. To judge by the scraping sounds it was either coiling itself tightly about us, or it had three or four friends with it, but it was still quite impotent. On the other hand, its presence wasn’t exactly comforting.
“What do we do?” Susarma asked again, obviously hoping that someone had thought of a brilliant plan in the interval which had passed since she last enquired. I hadn’t, so I looked at Urania, who was still busy communing with the magic box.
“We are extending pseudopods,” she said. “There is a rigid surface beneath us, on which the pseudopods can find purchase. Then we must drag ourselves through the mud.”
“It sounds,” I observed, “as if that might take a long time.”
We waited. Then she said: “We are close to the bottom of a cleft. There is an upward slope about thirty metres away, inclined about twenty degrees to the horizontal. With luck, it should not take too long to free us from the mud.”
She didn’t sound over-optimistic. That wasn’t entirely surprising. We still had to pick up the trail of the other truck. With the ground turning liquid and the local bugs busy gobbling up the organic trace we were supposed to be following, that might not be easy. If we were unlucky, we’d be lost—and of all the places I could think of to be lost in, this was far from being my favourite.
“Is there anything we can do to help?” I asked.
“It will not be necessary,” she assured me. “Perhaps you should take the opportunity to rest.” She seemed perennially keen to make sure that I got my beauty sleep.
I didn’t think the wait would be very restful no matter what I did, but I didn’t like the thought of remaining braced against the windscreen, watching the worms go by. I climbed out of the cab into the hind part of the truck.
673-Nisreen had woken up when we stopped. He had turned himself around in his bunk so that it was his feet that were pointed downward at a forty-five degree angle, but he didn’t look very comfortable. He asked me what had happened and I told him, as succinctly as I could. Instead of getting into my bunk I sat down on the sloping floor, in the narrow space between the two sets of shelves. It was as comfortable a position as I could find.
“How’s the arm?” I asked.
“The scion set it well,” he told me. “The slide jarred it, but I do not think it did any further damage.” Like all Tetrax, he was committed to making light of his suffering. They consider themselves to be a very dignified race.
“I think I have another piece of the jigsaw,” I said.
He didn’t understand me. Obviously, the parole word into which I’d translated “jigsaw” didn’t have the right connotations.
I told him about my dream. Urania was busy, but I figured that Clio would be listening in somehow.
“Whatever they copied into my brain,” I told him, when I’d finished, “seems to be intended to tell us what the situation is, as well as helping us to deal with it. Comparing its tactics with what the thing that got into Tulyar seems to have done, I’m inclined to believe that we’re on the side of the humanitarians—which makes it the right side, in my book. I only wish I could get a proper grip on whatever it’s trying to teach me. What is this anti-life? You’re a bioscientist—what could it be?”
He was a Tetron bioscientist, which meant that he had an inbuilt evasiveness when it came to guesswork and speculation, but I could tell that what I’d told him intrigued him a little.
“The simplest hypothesis,” he said, carefully, “might suppose it to be something which has the same characteristics as DNA-based living systems—the tendencies of growth, self-replication, evolution of complexity, and so on—but with a different chemical basis. If its fundamental molecular system was a different carbon chain, this other system might be locked into a universe-wide competition with DNA for the elements of life: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen.”
“So an Asgard-type macroworld would then become both an Ark and a fortress in the context of an ongoing war between DNA-life and X-life for sole possession of the universe? It would be designed to collect and preserve DNA-forms, and also to seed worlds where the elements of life are available. But there are X-life macroworlds too, manned by X-life humanoids and X-life software entities, trying to do much the same thing. And each side is trying to shoot down the other side’s macroworld.”
“Perhaps,” said Nisreen, though I could tell that it wasn’t a scenario he cared for.