Asgard's Secret

15

Everything took a little longer than Susarma Lear had hoped, but we logged out of lock five thirty units after Life Support and Regulation were scheduled to switch on the city’s “daylight.” Outside, it was about thirty Earthly hours short of dawn.

We headed north across the vast plain that surrounded the city on all sides.

Serne and the star-captain were riding with me in Saul’s truck. Crucero, Khalekhan, and a man named Vasari were following in the second vehicle. We had radio communication with the other truck, and with Susarma Lear’s warship, which had left its dock at the top of the skychain in order to mount a discreet and distant search for Myrlin’s truck. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust the Tetrax to pass on any information gleaned from their satellites, of course; we were just taking extra precautions.

The headlights of the truck played upon a near-featureless white carpet. Any tracks left by other trucks had been quickly covered by the ever-swirling snow. On the surface, of course, the snow was real snow: just water, with hardly any pollutants. All the other components of the atmosphere were gaseous; they provided the wind.

“Jesus, Rousseau,” Susarma Lear said, after we’d been traveling for a couple of hours. “This is a really weird place.” She was sitting beside me, staring through the canopy at the distant horizon. There were two bunks in the rear, so she could have gone to sleep, but she still hadn’t managed to wind down enough to get past her insomnia. She had ordered Serne to go to sleep, but she was intent on taking a driving-lesson first.

“Pretty weird,” I admitted. “It seems that hardly anyone lived on the outside, back in the good old days. Things grew here, apparently, but it must have been a wholly artificial biosphere. It was as complicated as any Gaian system, even though it didn’t have the same habitat-range—in the absence of mountains and seas it was spread as thin as margarine on a workhouse loaf. Its biochemical relics are still detectable, including seeds and spores of various kinds, but it’s all dead and mostly in a fairly advanced state of decay.”

“How do you find your way around?”

“Satellites and location-finders. If your equipment fails, though, you can navigate by the stars, provided that you can recognise the markers. It isn’t quite as flat as it looks hereabouts—there are troughs and hollows as well as gentle contours. You’ll see that better when the sun rises and the snow begins to melt.”

“There aren’t that many stars,” she observed. “Are we looking out from the edge of the galaxy, or is it just dust?”

“A bit of both,” I said. “That’s intergalactic space all right, but if it weren’t for the dust you could pick out other galaxies with the naked eye. You can’t see the black one, though—not without an X-ray ‘scope.”

“What black one?” she asked.

I looked sideways at her. “You really have led a sheltered life, haven’t you? All war, war, and yet more war, ever since you were a little girl. You know nothing about Asgard, nothing about the black galaxy…”

“So educate me,” she said. I’d shown her all the truck’s controls—they weren’t complicated—but she was still hungry for learning.

“It’s the modest member of our little local cluster,” I told her. “It’s about a hundred and twenty thousand light-years away, closer than the Magellanic clouds, but much more discreet. It’s getting even closer—heading towards us at something like thirty thousand metres per second. It’ll take a hundred million years or so to get here, so we don’t have to worry about it yet… unless, of course, we’re prepared to take a very long view of the future. It’s mostly just a heterogeneous cloud of dust, like the ones inside the galaxy, but it’s big. It has a very low mean temperature, but there are a few stars inside it. Eventually, it will engulf the whole galactic arm, like a cosmic shadow or a subtle fog. Life on Gaia-clone planets will probably go on much as usual for long time after the eclipse starts, but the dust’s not entirely placid. There’ll be plenty of scope for cosmic catastrophes, both like and unlike the one that probably overcame Asgard.”

“Which was?”

“I told you,” I reminded her. “Opinions vary. The majority view is that Asgard—or the world that provided the raw materials from which Asgard was constructed—ran into a cold cloud, mostly hydrogen but with a lot of thinly-distributed cosmic debris, cometary ices and the like. Over a period of time, the atmosphere soaked up more and more of it. If proto-Asgard had a primary in those days, as it most probably did, its light must have been severely weakened, and it may have begun behaving strangely. The people must have had a few hundred thousand years notice, at least. Time enough to take elaborate countermeasures.

“The theorists who think that Asgard is just a planet with a few extra crusts built on top of its mantle figure that the task of modifying the world was a relatively simple and straightforward one. Those who think that they used the raw material of a whole planetary family to build shells around the star—or maybe around an artificial star—tell a much longer and more elaborate tale. Anyway, the response doesn’t seem to have been entirely successful. In the short term, it was probably a triumph… but if you extend your history far enough, something always goes awry in the end. One way or another, the surface biosphere gave up the ghost. The uppermost levels were abandoned to the creeping cold.

“A few million years passed… or more than a few. Hundreds or thousands of millions, maybe. A long, dark, deep-frozen night. Then, one way or another, Asgard acquired a new primary. The likelier alternative is that it simply drifted into the new sun’s gravity-well and was captured, but the more adventurous theorists have wilder explanations. Anyway, the atmosphere warmed up again. The Tetrax are trying hard to get the ecosphere kick-started, but it won’t be the same biosphere if and when they do. It’ll be a new artefact—but it might allow humanoids to roam around on the surface again, in a few thousand years’ time. By then, the upper levels will probably be functional again too. Lots of prime real-estate—enough to accommodate entire species, with all their ecospherical baggage. Unless, of course, the people who owned it before come back to claim it.”

She was struggling to get to grips with the catalogue of possibilities. “So the most likely story,” she said, “is that this was once a planet just like Earth—until it needed shielding from some kind of… cosmic threat. At which point its inhabitants built several layers of armour around it.”

Her choice of vocabulary was revealing—but she was fresh from smashing up a planet.

“We haven’t found any guns,” I told her. “There’s no evidence that Asgard was a fortress.”

“No?” she said sceptically. “It’s a steel ball the size of a giant planet, and when you scratch the surface you find another steel ball inside it, and then another… except that scratching the surface is all you’ve done. A trapdoor here, a trapdoor there, all going down into the living-quarters. What makes you think that the guns aren’t all around us, securely locked away?”

Asgard certainly wasn’t made of steel, but I didn’t want to quibble about trivia. “The Tetrax,” I said, “think it was all a matter of cosmic dust clouds and natural catastrophes. The habitats they’ve explored seem to have been occupied by closely-related but distinct species, living harmoniously together.”

“There you are, then,” she said. “Good neighbours need common enemies. Stands to reason.”

“Not on Asgard, it doesn’t,” I contradicted her. “There are hundreds of different species here, living together more-or-less peacefully… except for the vormyr, and the Spirellans… and the humans.” I could see why she might think that my argument wasn’t very strong, given what we’d all been through in the last couple of days.

“You say the planet drifted into this system,” she said. “Where from?”

I shrugged. “Nobody knows,” I said, “but there’s not that much dust in the immediate vicinity, so it must have come a long way—maybe as far as that” I pointed upwards.

“The black galaxy?”

“It seems unlikely, given the pace it would have to have traveled—but there are some very adventurous theorists on the fringes of the C.R.E. Some suggest that the outer layers might have been abandoned for the duration of the voyage, but now that Asgard’s reached its destination they’ll be looking to come up from the depths again some time soon.

And by the time the black galaxy looks like it’s catching up with them, a hundred million years down the line, they’ll doubtless be moving on again, towards the far rim—carefully skirting the black hole in the middle. All type two civilizations are nomads, they reckon. They’re really looking forward to the day of re-emergence, because they reckon that what we’ll learn will be our ticket to type two status… or, to be strictly accurate, the Tetrax’s ticket to type two status.”

“But you don’t believe that.”

“I try to keep an open mind,” I told her. “One day, I’ll find out the truth; in the meantime, I’m willing to be patient.”

“How are they supposed to have moved the world out of one galaxy and into another?”

“Some application of the frame force we haven’t figured out yet. Our starships can only make starship-sized whizz-bangs, but the limit’s in the hardware, not the physics—or so I’m assured. I can’t handle the math myself.”

“I think it’s a matter of energy-expense,” she said. “To make a teleportal capable of swallowing a planet, you’d need the energy of a small star inside your planet… which is presumably why some of your local theorists think there is a small star inside the artefact, not just a boring old planetary core.”

She was beginning to enter into the spirit of the enterprise. Given long enough, I figured that I really might be able to educate her in the Romance of Asgard.

“You’ve got it,” I said. “Back home, we only have little fusion reactors—but again, the limit’s in the hardware, not the physics. Even nature can make stars. Who knows what type two civilizations might be able to do, given that they’re defined as the kinds of civilizations that make use of the entire energy-output of a star.”

“Except that we haven’t found any yet.”

“ Yet being the operative word. All the humanoids in our neighbourhood are babes-in-arms, just like us… and none of them could even dream, as yet, of building something like Asgard.”

“Not even the Tetrax,” she said thoughtfully.

“Not even the Tetrax,” I agreed. “But they’re the ones who own Asgard, or think they do. They get other people to do their spadework for them, because it makes for harmonious relationships with the other local species, and because that’s the way their minds work. They think that if they sit back and relax in Skychain City, everything will come back to them in its own time. So far, it always has.”

“Nobody else ever had a warship in orbit around the world,” Susarma Lear observed, in a carefully neutral manner.

“It’s not as simple as that,” I said. “You might have trashed Salamandra, but we’re not nearly ready to take on any of our other neighbours, let alone all of them.”

“I know that,” she assured me. “Still—that little black book could be valuable, couldn’t it? If your friend Saul really did find what he thinks he found, that is.”

“I’ve glanced through the relevant pages,” I told her. “As soon as your man’s had enough sleep to take the driving-seat, I’m going to look at it a little more closely, and as soon as I’ve caught up with my own sleep I’m going to give it my fullest attention. It’s not exactly an autobiography written for publication—it’s a set of directions Saul thought he’d be following himself, and didn’t particularly want anyone else to be able to follow—but if it means what I think it means, Saul really did find a way down… not to five, but much further. To somewhere warm.”

“Well, if there’s a little star in the middle of the artefact,” the star-captain said brutally, “I should think it would be warm down there. It gets very hot if you burrow down far enough on Earth, and that’s only molten iron.”

“Actually,” I said, “chaud is only one of the words he used. The other was vif. That means alive. If he meant it literally…”

“I’m under orders here, Rousseau,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Just like you. Our objectives are limited. Once the android is dead… well, I have obligations to my men as well as to my superior officers. I’m not going chasing wild geese, Rousseau—let’s be clear about that. Neither are you.”

That’s what you think, I thought—but what I said was: “Yes, captain. Understood.”