She seemed thoughtful, though she’d now corrected the tendency to overact. “What you’re afraid of,” she said, “is that when you were forced into the interface with my own software space, where you encountered the alien presence which injured me, your own brain was somehow forced to make a biocopy of an alien programme. You now suspect that the biocopy has become fully established, and is beginning to be active. You think that it might be analogous to one of these ‘tapeworms,’ and that its purpose may be to disrupt your own intrinsic programming—including that part which constitutes your identity.”
“That’s about the size of it,” I admitted. “I can’t shake the feeling that something got into me during that contact, and though I don’t know what the hell it is, I don’t like it being there. And I certainly don’t like the idea of it becoming active. You may be used to the idea of having nine identities in one, but I’m not. I’m a solitary kind of person, and I like to have vacant possession of my own brain. So tell me— have I picked up some hostile software?”
“I cannot be sure,” she said, as I’d been fairly certain that she would. “To tell you the truth, despite the success of my efforts at self-repair, I am not altogether certain whether or not I might have acquired some new hidden programming of my own. I still have no very clear idea of what kind of entity it was that I contacted in the deeper part of Asgard, nor what kind of entity it was which subsequently made the second contact within my own systems. Since I began experimenting with the production of the scions— whose minds are, of course, biocopies of parts of my own collective being—I have pushed back my own conceptual horizons quite considerably. I can easily believe that the entity we contacted was capable of making a biocopy of part of itself within your brain, even though it was operating across a primitive neuronal bridge. That does appear to be the most likely hypothesis, which could explain your recent experience. But it is by no means easy to decide whether the entity really had any hostile intent, despite the considerable damage that I sustained as a result of the contact. You have cast considerable doubt on that by your interpretation of the second contact as a cry for help.”
“I don’t want to be haunted,” I said, flatly. “Not by monsters whose raison d’etre is turning people to stone. Nothing would please me more than to decide that any software I’ve picked up is friendly, and that it won’t drive me mad—but Medusa is hardly a friendly image, is it?”
“It is not plausible that the entity had any independent knowledge of human mythology,” she pointed out. “What you saw just now was mainly your own creation. You were responding to a stimulus, in much the same way that you supplied your own imagery to cope with the contact that you made at the interface. That is why you must ask yourself very carefully what the image of Medusa might mean; it is a symbol which we must decode.”
“What Medusa means,” I insisted, “is turning people to stone.”
“Did you take any special interest in Greek mythology in your youth?” she asked patiently.
I hesitated, then shrugged. “More than some, I guess. Local connections encouraged it. I was born in the asteroid belt, on a microworld. The microworld moved about a bit, but it stayed within a mass-rich region of space at one of the Lagrangian points forming an equilateral triangle with the sun and the solar system’s biggest gas giant, Jupiter. For reasons of historical eccentricity, the asteroids near the Lagrangian points are known as Trojan asteroids, and they’re named after the heroes who fought in the Trojan War. One group is called the Trojan group, even though it has one asteroid named after the Greek hero Patroclus; the other is called the Greek group, even though it contains one named after the Trojan Hector. Hector was one of two asteroids in our group that had been hollowed to create a microworld; the other—the one where I was born—was Achilles. It was inevitable that a certain friendly rivalry should grow up between the two; at the utilitarian level we were competing for the same resources, but the subtler business of trying to forge some kind of cultural identity for our worlds attached us psychologically and emotionally to the names of our worlds. Achilles and Hector fought a great duel at the end of the Iliad, you see—and Achilles won. The Homeric epics were elementary reading for every child on the microworld, and the rest of Greek mythology was a logical extension. The first humans who came out here obviously had a different cultural background, or they’d have translated the name which the Tetrax gave this macroworld as Olympus, not as Asgard.”
“In that case,” she said, with a hint of irritating smugness, “you did read more about Medusa than you have recalled.”
“I know that she never showed up at Troy, and that Odysseus never bumped into her on his travels. Perseus was in a different story. So tell me—what did I forget?”
She didn’t want to tell me. She wanted me to remember for myself. After all, understanding my strange experience was a matter of coming to terms with my subconscious.
“Why did Perseus want the gorgon’s head?” she asked.
I struggled hard to remember. Microworld Achilles was a long way away, and my years there now seemed to be a very remote region of the foreign country that was my past.
“He’d placed himself under some obligation to a king, and was forced to go after it,” I said, eventually. “Athene helped him to trick a couple of weird sisters who had only one eye between them, so that they’d tell him where to get what he needed—winged shoes and a cap to make himself invisible. When he got back with the head he found that the king had done the dirty on him somehow… tried to rape his mother, I think… and…”
Enlightenment struck as I managed to follow the frail thread of long-buried memories to the punch line. Perseus had used the head to turn the bad guy and all his court to stone.
“You don’t think it was aimed at me, do you?” I said, softly. “It’s hostile software, all right—but you think it may be some kind of weapon!”
“There is no way to be sure,” she replied. “But it is a possibility, is it not?”
I looked at her, pensively. Though her hair was dark, her eyes were grey and pale. They weren’t Susarma Lear’s eyes and they weren’t Jacinthe Siani’s either. In fact, they were more like mine. It was impossible to think of her, sitting there, as a conglomerate of nine individuals, and it didn’t seem appropriate to think of her as bearing the name of only one of the nine Muses after whom Myrlin had impishly named her scions. As she stared back at me, with all the deep concern of a master psychoanalyst, I remembered something else from my reading of long ago.
The mother of the nine Muses had been Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne meant “memory.”
Another thought which flitted quickly across my mind was that although the Muses were the inspiration behind the various arts, the supreme goddess of the arts was Athene, who had aided Perseus.