Asgard's Secret (10 page)

It was easy enough
to figure out why. The Tetron criminal justice system is based on the principle
of reparation rather than punishment, although it makes little enough
difference when you're on the receiving end. A criminal's debt to society is
exactly that: a debt. One way or another, it has to be paid off. If you're a
skilled worker lucky enough to find a generous employer, you can pay off a
murder in a matter of ten or twenty years.

If abject slavery
isn't your thing, you have the option of renting out your body as a bioreactor
and your unconscious brain as a relay in some fancy hypercomputer. Some people
actually prefer that, because it allows them to sleep through their entire
sentence—which rarely runs to more than forty or fifty years—but most people
don't, because they fear, very reasonably, that they might not be quite the
same person when they wake up again.

Amara Guur wanted
me to work for him—on his terms. He'd been prepared to ask politely, or at
least to pretend, but either I'd been too slow to respond or something had
happened after Heleb's visit to increase his sense of urgency. I had to admire
his efficiency, though. Had he actually planted Balidar in that bar to wait for
me? Had he given Saul's doorman instructions to send me along there if and when
I turned up?

It seemed so—the
only alternative was that the whole plan had been stitched together in a matter
of minutes as soon as the bartender had spotted me with Balidar.

Either way, it was
a lot of trouble to go to. Whatever Amara Guur had found that had given him a
sudden interest in going out into the cold was obviously a powerful incentive.

If he'd only told
me what it was, maybe . . .

I put that thought
aside. Honest dealing wasn't the sort of thing Amara Guur went in for. If he'd
already committed a murder or two to get hold of whatever it was he had, he'd
probably got stuck in that particular procedural groove.

My lawyer turned up
at forty-one ten, full of apologies for the delay. His name was 238-Zenatta. He
explained, regretfully, that it had proved impossible for 69-Aquila to contact
Saul Lyndrach, who was currently being sought by Immigration Control. They were
apparently anxious to know what had become of a human named Myrlin, who had
been entrusted to Saul's care following his arrival on the surface.

I wasn't surprised
by this news. After all, if Amara Guur's men had given instructions to Saul's
doorman about where to send me, they must have known that he wouldn't be at
home when I came looking for him. I had more urgent matters to consider,
though.

"The evidence
for the prosecution has all been filed," 238-Zenatta told me. "The
witness statements seem to be in order and the forensic evidence is entirely
consonant with it. It seems to me that your only possible chance to minimize
the magnitude of the offence is to plead diminished

responsibility due to alcoholic
poisoning."

I could see why he
might think that. All DNA-based humanoids react in much the same way to
alcohol—except, of course, for the Tetrax, who have apparently modified their
entire species by means of genetic engineering to correct nature's mistake and
save them from the indignities of drunkenness.

"I didn't do
it," I told him. "I was framed."

"You didn't
kill Mr. Atmanu?"

"No."

"Then how do
you account for the fact that your handprints are arrayed on the murder-weapon,
in a configuration suggesting very strongly that you were holding it in such a
way as to strike out with it, aggressively."

"There was
nothing aggressive about it. I was trying to hold him off when he came at me
with a knife. I tried to hit Heleb with it, but the Sleath was perfectly all
right when the Spirellan knocked me out. Heleb killed him."

"You say that
you were knocked unconscious?" 238-Zenatta queried.

I sighed. "No,
I don't have a bruise or a fracture," I admitted. "He squeezed the
arteries at the side of my neck—and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he knew
how to do it without leaving a mark."

"There are
five witnesses," the lawyer pointed out. "Their statements agree in
every detail. Simeon Balidar has admitted that you and he were cheating, and
the cards entered into evidence do appear to be marked. All five witnesses
state that when Mr. Atmanu attempted to take his money back, you attacked him
with the chair, and that you continued to beat him with it after you had
rendered him helpless. Sleaths are, by nature, a relatively fragile species,
and Mr. Atmanu appears to have been a lightly-built individual, so I suppose
you might claim that you did not intend to kill him, but the court is likely to
take the view that it was your responsibility to take your victim's seeming
fragility into account when ..."

"He wasn't
my
victim," I reminded him. "He was Heleb's victim. Heleb killed him—on
Amara Guur's orders. They wanted to frame me. They were all in on it. They all
work for Amara Guur."

238-Zenatta was a
good lawyer. He cut straight to the heart of the matter. "What motive did
they have for arranging such a conspiracy?" he asked.

"They came to
my apartment," I said, fully conscious of how feeble it sounded.
"Heleb and Lema, that is. They offered me a job I didn't want to take.
Guur wanted to make sure that I had no choice."

238-Zenatta
consulted his wristpad. "Heleb and Lema have stated that they did indeed
come to your apartment to offer you a job," he agreed. "They have
made a tape of the conversation available to the court. They have explained
that they subsequently discovered that your reason for hesitating over their
offer was that the alternative plans for raising capital for your expedition,
to which you refer on the tape, involved conspiring with Simeon Balidar to
cheat at cards. Balidar confirms this. Heleb claims that when he discovered
what you were doing, he made a second attempt to persuade you that it would be
far better to swallow your pride and join his expedition than to resort to
criminal means."

"Does he have
a tape of
that
conversation?"

"Alas, no. He
explained that because there were Zabarans present, who have particular
concerns regarding privacy, he switched off his recording device before
entering the room."

"If we can
prove that they were all working for Amara Guur," I said, hopefully,
"that would surely be evidence of a conspiracy."

"Can
we
prove that, Mr. Rousseau?" asked 238-Zenatta, sceptically. I couldn't
blame him. Whether he believed me or not—and I was pretty certain that he
didn't—his chances of finding any evidence of a formal contract of employment
between
any
of the five fatal witnesses and our unfriendly neighbourhood
crime-lord were a bit slim.

"Can we prove
that they dosed me with the alcohol after I was unconscious?" I asked.

"Perhaps, if a
sufficiently thorough medical examination were carried out," he said, even
more sceptically. "But it would be severely detrimental to our best
defence if we did."

"I'm not going
to admit to killing the Sleath," I told him, flatly. "Diminished
responsibility is not an option. I'm not guilty, and that's the way I'm going
to plead. Whether anyone believes me or not, I'm going to tell the court the
truth."

"I fear, Mr.
Rousseau, that the court might not approve of that strategy," the lawyer
said. "It might well seem to the court that you are adding a manifest
slander to the burden of your culpability. You would be asking the court to
believe that someone would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain your
participation in a perfectly ordinary expedition. There are hundreds of people
in Skychain City who have skills similar to yours, Mr. Rousseau, many of whom
are desperate for employment. Why would Amara Guur, or Heleb, or anyone else
commit murder in order to obtain your services, when they could hire a person
of almost equal capability for little more than half the wage that Heleb
offered you in your apartment?"

Put like that, it
did seem impossibly weird. Obviously, I considered myself the best of the best
when it came to pioneering the trackless wilderness, but I could see how other
people might find it difficult to agree with me. After all, I'd never actually
made the big strike for which I felt myself destined. I was so poor, in fact,
that if I really had thought that I could finance my next expedition by running
a crooked card-school, I might very well have tried it.

I looked at
238-Zenatta, and he looked back. There wasn't the slightest hint of challenge
in his stare; none was necessary.

"I didn't do
it," I said. "I don't have any real evidence that Heleb did, or that
anyone was working for Amara Guur, so we'll leave that out of the story—but I'm
sticking to the truth. I wasn't cheating, and I didn't kill the Sleath. He went
for me with a knife, and I defended myself with entirely reasonable force. He
was still alive when Heleb attacked me and knocked me out. That's it."

238-Zenatta shook
his head sadly, but he knew his duty. "Very well," he said.
"That is the case I shall argue."

6

I watched my trial on television, giving
evidence from my cell. 238-Zenatta put in what seemed to me to be a rather
lacklustre performance, but I couldn't blame him for that. My performance
lacked lustre too. We both knew the score.

The Tetron
magistrate, a supersmart AI, found me guilty in thirty-seven seconds. My appeal
took a little longer, but it was dismissed within two minutes.

I was given three
days to find a way of paying off my debt that was acceptable to all interested
parties. The Sleath had had no traceable relatives, so the parties in question
were myself and the Tetron administration. The administration would be reasonable—but
they would insist on my finding a way to pay back the necessary ransom as
quickly as humanly possible. I might be able to persuade them that twenty-five
years of servitude was reasonable, but they would let me work it off at a rate
that would take fifty or a hundred if anyone made a formal offer that looked
better.

I called Aleksandr
Sovorov immediately and told him that I'd take the job at the C.R.E.—but he
informed me, rather coldly, that the offer had been withdrawn. The Co-ordinated
Research Establishment had an image to maintain; they didn't hire convicted
murderers.

Naturally enough,
nobody came forward immediately to offer me a way out. I knew that I'd have at
least two days to contemplate the possibility that I'd be spending the next
forty years in a coma while my metabolism devoted itself to the manufacture of
exotic proteins and my brain processed data for anyone whose calculative
problems required a ready-made neural network rather than something custom-
built from silicon and high-temperature superconductors. Neither process would
leave any manifest scars, but rumour has it that the only kind of mid-life
crisis worse than discovering that you're fifty years out of sync with history
and living in a second-hand body is finding that you're also living in a
second-hand brain whose habitual pathways have been re-geared to processes of
thought that are, to say the least, unhuman.

While I waited, I played
cards with my jailer, 69-Aquila. He seemed quite pleased to have me around; it
was obviously a slow week, and he was winning the game. Fortunately, he
wasn't allowed to play for money.