Asgard's Secret (42 page)

"I don't
know," he said. "I honestly don't."

"Did Asgard
come from the black galaxy? Is it a fortress, or an Ark, or what the
hell?"

"I
don't know,"
he insisted. "I can't answer those
questions, Mike. I don't think the people here have ever asked them—until now."

But you can find the answers,
I thought,
and I never
will.

I felt like Adam,
about to be expelled from Eden. But what the hell had I done wrong? What sin
had I committed here? I hadn't even been given a chance to display my worthiness.
The only one of the people delivered here by cruel fate who had been tried and
not found wanting was the android. He alone, it seemed, was untainted by
innate sin . . . unborn and unfallen.

It had a weird kind
of aesthetic propriety, but it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all—but we have
long since grown used to the cruel truth that we do not live in the best of all
possible worlds, have we not? No one has any right to expect fairness.

"Is that
it?" I asked him, still fighting the nausea, still using the invisible
wall for support. "Is that all there is to it?"

"Yes," he
said, sorrowfully. "It's over now. You'll all wake up with your cold-suits
on, up on level three. You'll have enough reserves to get back to the surface,
with a little to spare. The star-captain will have the comfort of knowing that
she completed her impossible mission; you'll be able to trade what you know for
a lot of money. Good luck, Mike."

"Same to
you," I said, with all the grace I could muster. "And . . ."

He had already
begun to turn away, but he looked back at me, staring down from his improbable
height, looking every inch a demigod.

"Yes?" he
prompted.

"I really did
appreciate this little chat."

"So did
I," he assured me. "So did I."

The way he said it,
I knew it wasn't intended to be an
au revoir.
It was a
goodbye. He expected that he would never see me again.

It seemed, as the
sky flickered again and I plunged back into the deep well of unconsciousness,
that it was goodbye forever to some of my most precious dreams.

But not all of
them.

I could still be
famous. I could still be a living legend— and when I'd been asked whether that
was what I wanted, my first impulse had been to say yes. I still had a secret
to sell, and a desperate desire to haggle over its true price.

36

There isn't much point in my giving a
detailed description of the journey back to the surface. It was mercifully uneventful.

The star-captain
and her surviving sidekicks were, I thought, surprisingly incurious about what
had actually happened to them down below. They understood that we'd been
captured by some kind of alien intelligence, set free in order to play games
and then captured again before being released somewhere else, but they were
astonishingly unresentful of this cavalier treatment.

The fact that they
remembered so clearly and so satisfy- ingly how they had gunned down poor
Myrlin probably accounted in large measure for their lack of resentment; it
was obvious that the star-captain, at least, had been liberated from a
frightful burden, and that she was abundantly grateful for her freedom. She
even began to treat me with a measure of good fellowship, and nothing more was
said about such embarrassing matters as charges of cowardice and desertion. She
seemed perfectly happy to tear up my conscription papers after Jacinthe Siani's
testimony to a Tetron court exonerated me from all blame in the matter of the
murder of Atmin Atmanu, restoring my record to cleanliness.

Needless to say, I came
back to Skychain City a much more popular man than I had left. I was the man
with the notebook, the man with the tape that could guide the C.R.E. to the
vital dropshaft.

The others who
returned with me would all have been popular too, save for the fact that not
one of them had made any notes of their own which might guide a third party to
the spot marked X. The star-captain wasn't interested, of course, but I think
I observed Serne grinding his teeth a couple of times when he realised that he
had carelessly neglected his chance to get a cut of the loot. Jacinthe Siani was
definitely peeved, because she didn't even know enough to bribe her way out of
the service-obligations that were heaped upon her as a result of her complicity
in various crimes. I contemplated buying her out at one point, but very
briefly. Even after searching my merciful heart, I couldn't find an atom of
sympathy for her. I believe that her services were purchased by some other
Kythnans, but what she was going to have to do to pay them back I didn't want
to ask.

While the starship
troopers were on their way back up the skychain, ready to take their
interstellar destroyer back to the home system, where they would doubtless
enjoy their own heroes' welcome and collect their campaign medals— once they'd
been
very
carefully checked for alien infection— I went to see my old
friend Aleksandr Sovorov, to negotiate a deal with the C.R.E.

I told him most of
the story. I drew a veil over certain parts of it, but I did give him a few
juicy details about the civilization with which I'd come into brief contact
deep in the bowels of the planet. I took a certain vindictive glee in watching
him squirm with anguish.

By the time I was
finished, he was staring at me as if I were some kind of hairy arthropod with a
disgusting odour.

"You made
contact with an advanced civilization thousands of levels down?" he
repeated, to make sure that he'd got it right.

"That's
right," I told him. "Must have been about halfway to the
centre."

"And when they
released you all, your Star Force friends and Amara Guur's gangsters set off on
such an orgy of killing that they exported you all the way back to level three,
and decided to seal themselves off forever?"

"That seems to
be the gist of it," I confirmed, though it wasn't
entirely
accurate. "They seemed to think that we're barbarians. So does everyone
else, now I come to think about it. Perhaps they're right."

He groaned. He
always did tend to overact. "Do you have any idea of what you've
done?"
he asked. The expression of pain in his eyes was a
sight to behold.

"If the C.R.E.
hadn't turned down my application for aid," I pointed out, "none of
this would have happened. In a way, it's all
your
fault."

"If the C.R.E.
had done what I suggested," he retorted, "they'd have kept people
like you out of the levels altogether."

"If they'd
done that," I retorted, "Saul Lyndrach would never have found the
shaft in the first place. The super-scientists down in the depths would still
be blissfully ignorant of the existence of the universe, content to sit on
whatever they have in place of arses for the next few million years. And you
wouldn't be sitting here buying a way into a hundred new levels—
warm
levels, where there's life, and enough recoverable technology to keep you busy
for the next few centuries."

"You stupid,
selfish bastard," he said, hissing through his teeth. "You have
ruined everything the C.R.E. was set up to do. You have set back the cause of
humankind irreparably. How do you think we are ever going to hold our heads up
in the galactic community
now?
There is nothing worse that the
universe could have shown to these people than a bunch of brawling savages. You
couldn't be content with taking the Star Force down there, could you? You had
to take the vormyr and the Spirellans too, just to show them how ugly humanoids
can be when they're absolutely at their worst."

"I didn't
exactly take Amara Guur with me," I pointed out. "He came along of
his own accord. If I'd known that I had a bug in my bootheel, I would have worn
overshoes. Anyway, you're forgetting the guy who led us all on the chase. The
Salamandran android. Who do you think was responsible for
his
being there?"

"Saul
Lyndrach," he replied, undaunted.

I shook my head.

I picked up a piece
of paper from his desk, and pointed to the letterhead. There was a symbol
beside the letters which spelled out
Co-ordinated Research Establishment
in parole.

"What's that,
Alex?" I said.

For a moment or two
he simply looked annoyed and impatient, but he finally figured out that I was
serious.

"It's a
pictograph in one of the Tetron languages," he said. "It's the symbol
of our organization, as well you know. What of it?"

"It appears on
all your documents, like a trademark."

"Yes. So
what?"

"That's the
symbol Myrlin drew in the air when he told me about the Salamandrans buying
technics from Asgard— the technics they used to make
him.
The Tetrax and
the upper-level cavies are both biotech-minded, remember? The Tetrax seem to
have made a little bit more out of what they've found here than they've let
underlings like you know about. And they've been selling some of it to like-
minded barbarians, to use in those horrid wars that they disapprove of so
strongly. If everything had gone as planned, the Co-ordinated bloody Research
Establishment might just have been responsible for the extinction of the human
species. Your species and mine, Alex. Who did you say was stupid and selfish?
Who are the barbarians now, Alex?"

"You're
lying," he said, hopefully. But he knew me better than that.

I shook my head.

"I didn't know
. . ."he said, tentatively.

"I know you
didn't," I said. "Well, you know now."

He thought about it
for a minute, and then said: "It doesn't affect my condemnation of what
you did. I stand by everything that I believe. What happened in the lower
levels is a disaster . . . for the human community and for mankind. And I don't
believe that the Tetron administration knew about this trade in technics, or if
they did, I don't believe that they intended them to be used in war. There are
a lot of factions in the C.R.E., and it could have been any of them."

"That's my
point," I told him. "It could have been any of them. The whole
universe is full of barbarians, Alex, and I didn't see anything down in the
bowels of Asgard to convince me that the people we tangled with were angels.
The Star Force carved up Guur's hatchet men, but it was the cavies who set it
up, and the cavies who sat back with their popcorn and watched it happen. They
were clever . . . but I didn't see anything to make me believe that they were
nice.
Maybe
we should be glad that they sealed themselves off. What if they do decide what
to do about the universe . . . and decide that what they ought to do is
sterilise the whole damn cosmos?"

"That's
ludicrous," he told me with much more feeling than conviction.

"Maybe,"
I agreed. "But it's all a bit hypothetical, isn't it? At the end of the
day, we just don't know, do we? Now, why don't we start talking about more
interesting things, like money. How much does the C.R.E. propose to pay me for
my little treasure-map?"