Asgard's Secret (6 page)

2

When I got up again, the lights of Skychain
City had been burning brightly for some time. It was dark outside the dome, but
according to the Tetron timetable it was daytime, and the Tetrax aren't the kind
of folk to let the absence of the sun spoil their calculations.

Asgard's days were
more than six times as long as days on the Tetron homeworld—which are a little
longer than Earth's—and the Tetrax were no more capable of adjusting their
metabolic patterns to that kind of regime than humans, so they kept their own
time. Everyone else kept it too, at least in Skychain City.

The Tetrax had
built the skychain—a remarkable feat, considering that they're a biotech-minded
species and that their own world could no more support such an artefact than
Earth. Anyone else was, of course, at liberty to set up their own docking
satellites and shuttle facilities, but it was so much cheaper to use the Tetron
facility that no one ever had made separate arrangements—which was why the
Tetrax were the effective rulers of Skychain City and the effective directors
of the Co-ordinated Research Establishment, no matter how much cosmetic
democracy they put in place.

It wasn't just
Immigration Control that was staffed by Tetron civil servants; they ran
everything else too. All the citizens got to vote for the mayor and the
council, and the police force was as multiracial as the C.R.E., but at the end
of the day—whose length, you will remember, was determined

by the Tetrax—everything was done the
Tetron way.

Personally, I didn't
mind. The Tetron way seemed to work, and there wasn't any other species I'd
rather have had running things, including my own. Not that I'd ever have let on
to a Tetron, of course—I didn't suck up to them the way Aleksandr Sovorov did.

I went to see Alex
as soon as I'd had my breakfast. I thanked him kindly for recommending me to
Myrlin, and tried not to sound sarcastic while I did it. Then I asked him very
politely whether the relevant committees had looked kindly upon my application
for financial assistance in refitting my truck. "Assistance" was a
euphemism, of course—if they did give me the money to fund my next expedition,
they'd want a percentage of anything I brought back until I died on the job.
Personally, I thought that looked like a much better deal from their point of
view than it did from mine, but I was desperate . . . and I wasn't at all sure
about the quality of their sight.

"I haven't had
the official notification yet," Alex told me, twiddling a ballpoint pen
between his stubby, stained fingers. I could never figure out what the stain
was; sometimes I suspected him of dipping his fingers in some kind of brown dye
because it made him look more like the hands-on scientist he liked to think he
was than the petty bureaucrat he actually seemed to be. Not that he didn't put
in his lab-time, of course—he spent hours every day poring over artefacts of
every shape and dimension—but they all came his way along a metaphorical
conveyor belt, carefully directed towards his supposed expertise by Tetron
scientists who probably kept all the best stuff for themselves. He was, in
essence, a dotter of i's and a crosser of t's; he would never be privileged to
make a real conceptual breakthrough.

He probably knew
that, in his heart of hearts—although he would never have admitted it to
someone like me—but it didn't prevent him from imagining that he was one of the
most important humans in the universe even so, simply because he was on Asgard
rather than Earth, occupying an intermediate station in the hallowed ranks of
the C.R.E.

"Did you put
in a good word for me, Alex?" I asked, humbly. "Did you explain to
them how lucky they'd be to have me on the team?"

"I was asked
for my opinion, naturally," he replied, with suspicious pedantry.

"Which is, of
course, that I'm a good man," I said, mildly. "A trustworthy man—a
man on whom it would be well worth taking a chance. 'Look, lads,' you said, 'I
know Rousseau, and Rousseau knows the levels. There's no one who's been further
afield than he has, no one else with his curiosity and expertise, no one
likelier to come up with something really special and completely new.' That
is
your opinion, isn't it?"

"I know that
it's
your
opinion," Sovorov countered. "I certainly told
them that."

"You told them
that. Would it have hurt you to have thrown your own weight behind it too?
Would it have inconvenienced you to tell them what a good deal they'd be
getting?"

He stabbed
absent-mindedly at the desk with the point of his pen. I wondered what his
unconscious was trying to communicate, in its own inarticulate fashion.

"I don't
believe in letting my personal loyalties override my principles," he said.
"We happen to be members of the same species—we may even reckon one
another as friends— but when I'm acting on behalf of this Research Establishment
I have to put personal feelings aside. The C.R.E. has its own methods and
procedures, and its own system of operation. Its enquiries proceed in a
rational manner, one step at a time. We take great care to examine everything
we find, and to obtain all the data we can from each and every artefact. Our
recovery teams are well trained; they operate in a controlled manner, careful
to do no damage. Safety is their first priority—not merely their own safety,
but the safety of their discoveries. They're scientists, not
treasure-hunters."

"And I'm
not?"

"You're a
scavenger, Michael. Your first priority is to go where no one has gone before,
to find things that no one has ever found before. You move around aimlessly, at
a furious pace, probably destroying far more than you ever bring back, through
sheer carelessness. You may think that you're attempting to further the growth
of knowledge, but you're just a trophy-hunter. Perhaps you're less mercenary
than some of your kind, but that's only because you value the glory that might
be attached to finding something valuable more than the price you can sell it
for. You think that if you cover more ground than other people, you're more
likely to stumble across some fabulous jackpot—but that assumes that you'd be
able to recognise it if you did. You've been here a long time, I know. You've
spent more time in the levels than any other human, perhaps as much time as any
member of any species, but you're strictly an amateur. You don't do any of the
real
work.
You've brought me interesting things in the past, I'll
grant you, and I'm grateful for the fact that you brought them to me rather
than selling them to some junk shop in sector seven, but that doesn't mean that
I have to approve of the way you work. I don't. I don't believe the
Establishment should support people who operate the way you do."

"But you do
support
some
people who do things my way," I pointed out.

"Yes," he
admitted, "we do. If we didn't, we'd have to compete on the open market
for everything that buccaneers of your kind bring in. We make such bargains
reluctantly, and we make them in the hope of maintaining a measure of control
over the activities of freelance explorers—but we can't afford to make deals with
anyone and everyone. We have to be selective, and we can't make our selection
on the basis of species loyalty or personal friendship."

"You
could"
I said—but that was unfair. He was only one man in an
organization full of not-quite-men. The Tetrax called the shots.

"You're a
one-man operation, Michael," Sovorov reminded me, although it was hardly
news. "You may think you're a serious player, but that's because you spend
so much time out in the cold, without the benefit of regular reality checks.
Policy favours teams—teams which can be persuaded to adopt our code of
practice, our fundamental philosophy."

"The Tetrax
found Asgard," I observed. "They could have kept it to themselves, if
they'd really wanted to. Policy, as far as I can see, favours diversity and
compromise. Policy is not to put too many eggs into any one basket, especially
if it's the one you're carrying yourself. Policy is to encourage petty
rivalries, so that everyone is wary of everyone else, and the Tetrax can be
friends with everyone. Divide and conquer is out of date; nowadays it's divide
and exploit."

"That's rather
cynical," Sovorov said. He had a habit of stating the obvious.

"We're all
parasites, Alex, scuttling around the nooks and crannies of Asgard's
rind," I told him. "You might take pride in being the only human
member of a multiracial consortium that pretends to represent the entire
galaxy rather than a handful of colony worlds, but you're no holier than I am.
You're careful and you're methodical—hooray for you. You're also slow and
repetitive. I'm willing to bet that you—or your masters, at any rate—have
learned far more from stuff brought in by so-called scavengers than from the
material your own teams have bagged as they work their way outwards from your home
base at a pace that would disgust a snail. Asgard's big, Alex—really,
really
big. Even the surface is big, let alone level one and level two . . . and when
we find a way down to levels five and six, not to mention fifty and sixty,
we'll find out exactly how big it might be, and how many different things it
might contain. I know your people have been expecting to figure out how to get
down to the lower levels for a long time. Ever since I arrived here it's been
tomorrow, or the next day . . . just a little more data, a tiny stroke of luck
in decoding the signs. Maybe you'll do it—maybe your way
is
the way that will give us the key to the elevator—but I think my way is just as
likely to deliver the big break. While you put a magnifying glass to the map, I'm
covering the territory. If I were you, I'd back me, just to make sure you're
covering all the angles."

He dropped the pen
at last, and sat back in his chair with a theatrical sigh. "We're
gradually putting the jigsaw together," he said. "Little by little,
we're building a coherent picture of the humanoids who lived on Asgard before
what you insist on calling 'the big freeze.' We're putting together a
foundation that will allow us to make sense of
everything—
it's not
just a matter of playing with fancy gadgets in the hope that one of them will
turn out to do something miraculous. If we can understand the language and the
culture of the people who built and maintained Asgard, we can find out what we
need to know about the lower levels
before
we actually go
down into them . . . assuming, as everyone seems to, that there
are
more levels than the ones we've so far penetrated. That would be the sensible
way to proceed, the most productive way to proceed. If someone like you were to
find a way to open up the entire artefact before we've found out why it was
built and what's likely to be down there, it would be a tragedy."

"I don't
agree," I said. I felt, at the time, that my self-restraint was veritably
heroic.

"I know you
don't," he said—and tried to smile.

"They laughed
at Christopher Columbus," I reminded him.

"They also
laughed at a lot of cranks," he pointed out. "Look, Michael, I've
done what I can. Your application is under consideration. It's out of my hands.
Perhaps you'll get your money."

"And perhaps I
won't."