Asgard's Secret (11 page)

"Slavery is an
abomination," I informed him, by way of making conversation. "On my
homeworld, we gave it up centuries ago, on the grounds that it's an intolerable
affront to civilized values."

"How do you
deal with criminals in your home system?" he asked, politely.

I told him.

He laughed.

"I realise, of
course, that everything we lesser species do seems to the Tetrax to be comical
as well as barbaric," I said, "but in this particular instance I really
don't think your way is any better. At least we call a punishment a punishment.
We don't try to pretend that it's anything else. Your way is
hypocritical."

"You simply
don't realise how backward your culture is," 69-Aquila assured me.
"It is perfectly understandable, even though you have been given the
opportunity to observe the folkways of hundreds of other cultures here in

Skychain City. You are imprisoned by
primitive habits of thought, blinded by parochial prejudices. It is not
sufficient merely to live alongside other species; you must learn to make
comparisons, to understand the reasons for the differences between them. We
Tetrax have had the opportunity to study thousands of humanoid cultures, and to
grasp the fundamental principles of their historical development. We understand
the inevitability of what you call slavery as well as its practical necessity.
There are a great many things your species might have given up whose
abandonment would do you credit, but slavery is not one of them. War, for
instance. I understand that your species has actually been engaged in a war for
almost as long as you have possessed starships."

"So it's
rumoured," I conceded. "It's over now, according to Alex Sovorov, but
I'm in no position to defend the fact that it took place at all, given that I left
the system before it started. Obviously, I'd rather it hadn't happened, and I expect
that the poor bastards who had to fight it felt the same way."

Mercifully, there
was no word in parole for "bastard," so I had to use the English
one—which saved me from having to explain that I didn't really mean that
Earth's warships were staffed by people whose parents hadn't been legally
married.

I hurried on.
"Anyway, you shouldn't try to worm out of it by changing the subject. It's
your system that's in question, not ours. I'm sitting here waiting for someone
to buy me, or at least to hire me for a very substantial slice of my future
life. The only person who's likely to offer is the gangster who fitted me up,
whose offer will probably look a great deal more attractive on paper than it
will turn out to be in real life. In fact, it'll be an offer I'd have to be
insane to take—except that my only alternative is to serve as a laboratory rat
in some kind of experimental set-up that's likely to leave me with a very bad
case of not-so-false-but-definitely-inexplicable-memory-syndrome as well as
removing me from active participation in the most interesting period of galactic
history. I find this a rather invidious position to be in. I don't think anyone
should be subjected to this kind of treatment, and I certainly don't think they
should be insulted, as well as injured, by being told how very civilized it
is."

69-Aquila shrugged
his shoulders. The precise meaning of significant gestures varies considerably
between species, but a Tetron shrug means much the same as a human shrug.
Unlike real gorillas, they only duplicate human genetic make-up to
seventy-eight percent, but much of the rest is functionally parallel.

"It is
necessary," he said. "It is also inevitable. We have studied the
social evolution of thousands of humanoid species, and found them convergent to
almost the same degree as their physical evolution. Whether the reasons for
that are somehow contained in the supernoval debris that is our common
ancestor, or merely in the abstract logic of the situation, we have not yet
been able to ascertain. The fact remains, however, that there is a well-defined
pattern which your species cannot perceive, partly because you are stuck at an
intermediate stage and partly because you have not had the opportunity to make
elaborate comparisons with other species—preferring, it seems, to make war
against your nearest neighbour."

"And I suppose
I'm too stupid to understand any explanation you might care to give me,"
I said.

"Not at
all," he said. "Our children have no difficulty grasping it. You
could do it too, if only you could open your mind."

"Try me,"
I invited.

"The pattern
of social relationships within a humanoid culture is largely dependent on the
technology it possesses," he told me. "As technology advances, the
economic basis of the culture's subsistence changes with it. The situation is
complicated, of course, by the fact that some kinds of sociopolitical systems
are more amenable to technological advance than others, but those which are
hostile tend to disappear, whether or not they are formally conquered, so the
eventual effect is that technology seems to be the ultimate determinant, and
to have a natural growth-pattern of its own.

"In the
beginning, when technology is primitive, almost the whole of every person's
labour has to be devoted to the business of survival, and social groups are
primitive—mere families, in which power is brute force. When agricultural
enterprise permits labourers to feed twice or three times their own number,
however, tribes grow much larger and social organization becomes much more
complicated. Although armed might remains the ultimate expression of power,
ownership of land becomes the primary determinant of economic authority.

"As knowledge
advances further, more complex technology emerges and machines begin to take
over the business of production. Cities expand as agriculture becomes more
efficient. As factories become more sophisticated, ownership of machines
becomes increasingly important, gradually displacing the authority invested in
ownership of land. Your culture has not yet escaped this phase, which therefore
seems to you to be a culmination of history, but if you were not distracted by
petty squabbles over the ownership of the gaiaformable planets in the vicinity
of your home star you would understand that you have not yet refined your
social relations to their logical end-point. Are you following me?"

He's already told
me that Tetron children had no difficulty grasping it all, so I certainly
wasn't going to admit that I couldn't. "Yes," I said.

"If you only
had the imagination to see it," he went on, relentlessly, "you would
see that your present system of social relationships is already being
transformed. Just as the land-based economy gave way to the machine-based
economy, so the machine-based economy will give way to a service-based economy.
As feudal servitude was replaced by capitalistic servitude, so the latter will
be replaced by the purest form of servitude: a network of obligations independent
of the models of agricultural or factory production, generalized throughout
society. Had humans not acquired frame force technology so abruptly, your
economy of mechanical production would not have received the sudden boost
associated with starship production. Had humans not made contact with other
humanoid species, your mastery of nuclear annihilation technology would have
developed more gradually, and you would have been forced to apply its energy to
the reclamation of your own ecosphere, obliterating the traditional authority
invested in the control of land and machinery in the interests of
ecocatastrophic avoidance. You would have had no alternative but to reconstitute
your economy as a pattern of service obligations. The transformation is still
inevitable, although you might delay it for a century or two if you insist on
fighting more wars in order to preserve your barbaric and antiquated
socioeconomic system. Do you see what I mean?"

"Sure," I
said, valiantly. "You mean that power is, in essence, the ability to get
other people to do things for you. Like brute force, property and money are
just different ways of implementing that power, and only seem to be symbolizing
things
like land and manufactured goods. What property and money really symbolize is
labour, and the only thing a man really has to sell is himself. But there's an
important difference between entering into contracts for the exchange of
services as free individuals, and people actually— or effectively—
owning
one another."

"It is a false
distinction," 69-Aquila assured me. "No one is a free individual,
able to exist outside his society. Our needs are complex, our desires illimitable
save by social constraint. In order to have the means of existence, we must
sell ourselves entirely—and if we incur debts beyond the value we have put on
ourselves, we must find ways to pay them. If we cannot compensate our fellows
for the violence we do to them, what recourse do they have but to retaliate in
kind? You, apparently, see no fault in that—but you live alongside thousands of
other humanoid species, many of whom are wiser than you."

"Not that much
wiser," I told him. "We had similar theories to yours back in the
home system—it's just that we didn't drum them into our children quite so
ruthlessly."

He laughed again.
"You are the warmakers," he pointed out. "You are the ones with
the punitive criminal justice system. I agree that everything I have said is
obvious, even to you—but you are too blind to understand the significance of
what you see. And I win again."

He laid down his
cards. He was right, of course. He had won again.

7

"As a matter of interest," I said
to 69-Aquila, as I dealt another hand, "has anyone ever escaped from this
lock-up?"

"No," he
replied, with brutal honesty—but he liked the sound of his own voice and the
pretensions of his own wisdom far too much to content himself with monosyllables.
"You should not feel so badly about your inability to understand the logic
of humanoid society and galactic civilization, Mr. Rousseau," he went on.
"After all, humans are newcomers to the scene, hurled on to the stage
without adequate preparation. You have had no opportunity to study the
histories of other worlds and other species, and to induce empirical
generalizations therefrom. You are bound to be confused, because you are out of
your depth. Your species should not have gone to war against the Salamandrans,
and you, Mr. Rousseau, should not have come to Asgard. I understand the
temptation, but solving the mystery of Asgard is something that humans, vormyr,
Zabarans, Sleaths, and the like are not intellectually equipped to do. The
Tetrax will discover the answer, when we have amassed sufficient data."

"Maybe,"
I said. "But I'm not the only one who doesn't think so."

"Clearly not,
if you really are innocent of the crime for which you have been
convicted," he observed. "Whoever intends to buy your services
obviously believes that they are worth purchasing at a very high price.
Fortunately, you are living in a civilized society. Your new employer will be

forced to respect the limitations of the
law in his use of your . . . talents."

"Merde,
" I
said—although I had to say it in French, so it was just so much empty noise to
him. "Your effective jurisdiction ends at the airlock. Once we're out in
the cold, anything goes. You might think you're living in a civilized society,
but the Tetrax only run the administration and the legal system. People like
Amara Guur run the underworld: vormyr, Spirellans, and every other kind of
barbarian you can put a name to."