Asgard's Secret (38 page)

There were very few
things that I could think of as trees, though there was not a single plant
which seemed small. Rather, they were bushes writ large, or lily-pads on a gargantuan
scale. They grew tightly clustered together, leaving not even the narrowest of
paths where a humanoid might comfortably walk between them. They towered above
me, and although their topmost tendrils could only have reached three-quarters
of the way to their artificial sky, they seemed to have command even of that
empty space which they left.

The scent was
overpowering, sickly sweet. There was a sound like the whirring of a
bull-roarer, which at first I could not trace to its point of origin. Then I saw
something clambering over the lip of one of the blossoms, and realised that it
was a huge flightless insect, the size of a man's head, coloured as darkly as
the plant on which it wandered, in shades sufficiently similar to make it
difficult to see until it moved. I realised then that the sounds must be made
by similar creatures, chafing their body-parts like grasshoppers.

"Do you recognise
this place?" I asked the vormyran, my voice not much above a whisper.

"No," he
replied. "I have traveled in most of the tropical lands of my homeworld,
but I have seen nothing remotely like this."

I wondered if this
was the native territory of the people who lived on this level. If so, it would
be easy to believe them giants. But I did not leap to that conclusion. For one
thing, the ceiling was only twelve metres above our heads— no higher than the
ceilings in levels one, two and three, which had been inhabited by humanoids of
normal size. For another, the grey wall to either side of the doorway curved
quite noticeably as it extended away. If that curve were to be extrapolated,
its implication was that we were in an enclave no more than a kilometre in
diameter. This was nothing but a big garden, or a vivarium; it was not an
entire world by any means.

I was about to ask
what we should do next, but the question died unasked when there came a new
sound, much louder than the chirring of the pollinators which scrambled around
the giant blooms.

There was no
mistaking the sound; it was gunfire.

33

The gun that was being fired wasn't a
flame-pistol, nor even a needier. It was an old-fashioned crash-gun blasting
away on automatic, sending out a veritable hail of bullets.

The moment the
gunfire stopped, the insects started. When we had first heard them, they had
obviously been in their restful mood—now, they were panicked. The bull-roarer
sound was amplified a thousand times, into an appalling screech, which went on
and on and on.

I clasped my hands
to my eardrums, trying to keep out the dreadful noise, and Amara Guur did the
same, although the needier was still tightly clutched in the fingers of his
right hand. I tried to move back into the corridor from which we had come, but
I hit the solid wall, and when I half-turned in surprise, I found that the
portal was no longer there. The grey wall was solid and seamless, enclosing
us.

We huddled against
the smooth surface until the sound died away, the crescendo easing down until
the former level of sound was restored. Only then was it possible to speak.

"That
way," said Guur, gutturally. He pointed away to the right, in the
direction from which the noise of gunfire had come.

There was a narrow
curved pathway running along the edge of the wall, where the plants did not
quite extend themselves to the boundary of their allotted space. It was easy
enough to follow, and we followed it at a run.

A hundred metres or
so round the curve we found a nearly-naked Spirellan and a scantily-clad
Kythnan female crouching over a bloodstained body. The body was wearing dark
underclothes of a kind I had seen before—under a Star Force uniform. The
Kythnan was Jacinthe Siani; I jumped immediately to the conclusion that the
Spirellan, who was still holding a handgun pointed at the dead man, was my old
acquaintance Heleb.

While Guur and I approached
from one direction, two more vormyr were approaching from the other. I suspected
that the trouble I was in had just become five times worse.

I went quickly to
the dead man. It was Khalekhan—he had taken three shots in the chest and had
almost been cut in half. He was holding a flame-pistol, which hadn't been
fired. I didn't even reach for it, but Heleb grabbed me round the neck with a
hairy arm, and held me tight until one of the newcomers had appropriated it.
When he let me go, I remained kneeling, but I turned away from the body to look
up at my captors.

"That is one
of the persons who ambushed us," said Heleb. "I saw him—just before
those robots swarmed all over us." I knew it was a case of mistaken
identity, but I wasn't about to say so.

"Was he
alone?" growled Amara Guur. He sounded uncertain, perhaps because he
hadn't seen anyone at the ambush, but I knew that he could put two and two
together once he realised the flame-pistols were Star Force weapons, not at all
in the style of our present captors.

Heleb hesitated
before he said: "I think so."

"You
think
so!"

Heleb cringed
before Guur's obvious wrath. It takes a lot to make a Spirellan cringe. No
human could ever achieve such an effect.

"I didn't see
anyone else," the Kythnan put in.

Guur looked at the
gun in Heleb's hand. "How many shots do you have left?" he demanded.

Heleb released the
clip from the butt of the gun and checked it. "Three," he said. He
didn't sound very happy about it, and I could understand why. Nobody had anything
on but the underclothes they'd been wearing beneath their cold-suits. The
bastards who were keeping tabs on us had left several of us with guns, but they
hadn't provided any extra ammunition. Heleb had sprayed a dozen shots around
when he'd let fly at Khalekhan, probably because he was habitually over-generous
in the violence department. Now, he had only three bullets left.

He could do
arithmetic too, if forced, and his counting must have told him that there might
be three more starship troopers lurking in the bushes, plus one extra-large
android.

I looked around at
the shattered and wounded blossoms that had been blasted apart by the shots
that had missed their target. Several of them were leaking viscous brown sap,
and looked for all the world as if they were bleeding. One of the insect-like
things had copped it too; its insides had been spread all over a net of
green-and-purple leaves, grey and brown and sticky. The creature's exoskeleton
was more leathery than chitinous; only its six legs were rigid. The legs were
still moving, jerkily, in the grip of some autonomic reflex, but while I watched
they gradually slowed down.

It was fairly clear
that the chances of our all getting together and declaring a truce until our
present predicament could be sorted out were pretty damn slim. The star-captain
wasn't a forgiving sort, and one of her boys had just been killed. I could
imagine how angry that would make her, even though Heleb was only getting his
own back for what had happened up on three.

I realised,
uncomfortably, that I was in a very unenviable situation. I was in the hands of
the wrong party: a captive, or a hostage. I didn't know why the mysterious
observers had cast me in that role—because they had sure as hell given me to
Amara Guur by arranging things the way they had—but I had no illusions about
how difficult it was going to be to play the part.

"It doesn't
matter whether he was alone or not," said Guur, pensively. "If the
other humans are here, they must have heard the shots, and that racket which
the shots provoked. But there are only three soldiers, and they seem as
anxious to destroy the android as we are. Even if they have guns, we are
stronger. We are five, and now that we have the flame-pistol, we are all
armed."

I checked his
arithmetic, and was unsurprised to find it sound. Both of the vormyr who had
come from the other direction had been holding needlers. One of them now passed
the flame-gun to Heleb, who gave his own pistol to Jacinthe Siani. Clearly, she
was counted among the combat troops, though it was equally clear that she was
considered to be expendable. She didn't protest the allocation, even though it
was hot-headed Heleb who had left the gun dangerously undersupplied with
firepower.

I came slowly to my
feet. Guur guided me up against the grey wall, and stared into my eyes once
again.

"Kill
him!" said Heleb.

"Be
quiet!" retorted Guur, in no mood to be told what to do. "Heleb, you
will move along the wall a little way, in the direction from which we came.
Have your gun ready. Seviir—guard the other approach. Kaat—watch the
jungle."

He paused while
they moved to obey. Then he relaxed a little.

"Why are we
here, Mr. Rousseau?" he asked quietly.

I didn't imagine
that he wanted a discussion on matters of metaphysical philosophy. His concerns
were more immediate.

"They're
watching us," I told him. "We can't see them, but I'll lay odds that
they can see everything we do. Maybe they can eavesdrop on our thoughts—I don't
know. They want to see how we react, and I think your Spirellan friend may already
have disappointed them."

Guur drew his lips
back from his teeth. He really did look half-wolf, half-crocodile, and his
breath was worse now than it had been before.

"I don't think
we have many secrets," he said. "You have small bruises on your neck,
Mr. Rousseau, and so have I. My kind has a better sense of time than yours, and
I know that twelve days have passed since I was captured. They have had time to
examine us very thoroughly, and may have methods of examination better than any
we know. Do you not agree?"

"It seems that
way," I conceded. He was ugly and evil-minded, but he was no fool.

"When you
assume that they will be disappointed to see us fight," he went on,
"do you take it for granted that they are leaf-eaters, like the
Tetrax?"

I gathered that he
didn't think too much of leaf-eaters. I resolved to remember that if ever I wanted
to drive a vormyran wild with fury, that was probably the insult that would do
it.

"I don't know
what they eat," I replied. "But think of it this way: the inhabitants
of Asgard probably didn't know that their world had been discovered by people
from elsewhere; they might not even have realised that the universe outside
Asgard was inhabited. If
you
suddenly discovered that the outer
layers of the big onion where you'd been hiding for millions of years had been
invaded by inquisitive

outsiders, what kind of people would
you
like them to be?"

He replied with a
phrase in what I could only presume was his native tongue.

When I looked at
him blankly, he translated. "It means," he said, " 'things
edible.' Prey."

"People aren't
prey," I told him.

"vormyr have
no word for 'people,' " he told me. "We have a word for predators and
a word for prey. Humanoids fit into one category or the other, as do all animal
species."

"You can't
operate that way in a civilized community," I informed him, piously.

"So the Tetrax
say," he sneered. "Like all leaf-eaters, they practice the ethics of
the herd: the ethics of cowardice, the denial of life and strength. There are
two kinds of being, human. There are those whose way it is to eat, and those
whose way it is to be eaten. The true law demands loyalty to the tribe, respect
for fellow predators and the careful control of those to be eaten. We are
prudent predators, human, but we never forget what we are. We move quietly and
stealthily among the herds of the Tetrax and their kind, because herds of
leaf-eaters can be very dangerous—but we know who we are. We never forget the
true way of being, the true civilization."