Asgard's Secret

19

Two days out we had to bear eastwards in order to skirt the southeastern arm of one of the northern hemisphere’s larger seas. It had hardly begun to melt, and the bergs still stood up like rows of jagged teeth against the horizon, gleaming where they caught the sunlight that flickered over them. For a while, the glittering play of the light made a pleasant contrast with the featureless plain, but in its own way it was just as constant.

“Is the whole damn world all as boring as this?” growled Serne in one of his rare communicative moments when the two of us were sharing the cab.

“Pretty much,” I told him. “The seas are shallow, and there are no mountains to speak of. It’s not like Earth, with all those tectonic plates grinding against one another, heaving up mountain ranges, and all those volcanoes blasting away. This surface was designed. There are no cities either. The Tetrax found a few clusters of what used to be buildings scattered here and there, but no ghost towns, no ancient temples, no pyramids. People certainly worked up here, but they probably went home to the levels when their shifts finished. When they abandoned the surface they took virtually everything that they could carry—they left far less machinery here than in the subsurface levels.

“Most people figure that the cavies retired to live underground long before they deserted the upper levels. They may have used the surface purely for growing crops—but the C.R.E. palaeobiologists who work with the seeds and microfossils haven’t found that much evidence of disciplined agricultural activity. Maybe this level was just the roof of the world, and they left it more-or-less to its own devices. It may not have been anything more than some kind of roof-garden. The sea over there might conceivably be a reservoir or a lake, but some C.R.E. people think it was just a glorified puddle in the guttering. We’ll pass a C.R.E. dome soon—that should break up the tedium of your day.”

“Is that where we’re going—to some kind of dome?” he asked.

“Hardly,” I replied. “C.R.E. people are essentially mean-spirited. They don’t allow the likes of you and me to use their routes into the underworld. They wouldn’t even invite us in for a cup of tea if we knocked on their door. They’re so proud of the fact that they have members of a hundred different species working together that they’ve become rather paranoid in their insularity. People like me find our own ways down into level one; we’ll be using one of Saul’s holes.”

Serne peered out of the windows, looking first at the sullen grey waves lapping gently at the barren shore, then inland at the desolate, foggy wasteland, which was dressed as far as the eye could see in blurred shades of pale grey, with not a patch of green to be seen. Even by the low standards commonly set by the surface of Asgard this was not a particularly appealing spot.

“How in hell do you know where to dig?” said Serne sourly.

“We don’t dig,” I told him. “There are sections of the surface where all the soil blew away millions of years ago— great plastic-surfaced deserts, pitted by meteoric dust. There, we can find the trapdoors the cavies used. It’s not easy, because there’s rarely anything to see except a hairline crack and markings which have virtually worn away—no handles or hinges—but it can be done. It helps if you have some idea where to look.”

“And you have?”

“Damn right. Each cave-system on level one seems to be arrayed rather like the petals of a flower, with arms radiating out from a relatively small central hub. Of course, all the systems may be connected by smaller tunnels, but the big open spaces—the farmlands, as it were—form that kind of pattern. The hub of this system is a long way north. The C.R.E. has a dome there, but the one we’ll pass is on the arm which points down toward the equator. The Tetrax have been here long enough to begin to fathom out the kind of scheme the cavies’ architects used, and a lot of trapdoors are arranged in a fairly orderly manner. Now that Myrlin’s reached his destination, we know that Saul’s hole is in much the same position on the next arm over as the one beneath the dome we pass. It must have taken him a while to find it—searching for a circle a few metres across in an area of a hundred square miles isn’t easy—but he knew where to start searching before he set out.”

“Think we’ll have any problem finding our way once we get there?”

“Not that much. Given that Myrlin’s still so far ahead of us, we ought to hope that it isn’t too easy. If he’s able to see Saul’s sled-tracks, he might make better time than we suppose.”

Secretly, of course, I was hoping that Myrlin might find it easier than we had supposed. I was also praying for a bit of really foul weather, not so much to slow our own trucks down as to cause a few problems to Amara Guur’s pirate crew, which was still toiling in our wake. If one of his trucks were to get stuck, it might make a big difference to any eventual confrontation. We couldn’t stop him following us, at least as far as the gateway to the underworld, but a helpful adjustment to the odds we’d face when we got down there might make the difference between life and death for some of us. I still reckoned that I could come out of this mess alive—with luck. Bad weather was only one potential gift that fortune might throw my way.

“What kind of power-units do the sleds have?” Serne asked.

I laughed.

“Muscle-power,” I told him.

“Jesus!” he complained. “Are you telling me that we couldn’t do better than that?”

“Where we’re going,” I told him, “it can get very cold. Machines don’t work too well down in three or four, where it’s only a few degrees Kelvin on a good day. Atmospheric pressure is pretty weak—most of the familiar gases have crystallized out as snow. But it’s not like being in space. The soles of your feet, and your gauntlets every time you touch something, are in contact with solids colder than anything you find in the inner reaches of a solar system—very much colder than any spaceship hull. Wheeled vehicles are hopeless. The C.R.E. sometimes uses hovercraft, but they’re no use in the narrower corridors, and even hovercraft settle when they stop, which means that they have to lay down some kind of cushion every time they put the brakes on. It’s no way to make progress, and it helps them to maintain their customary snail’s pace.

“If you want to move in the levels, my friend, you have to rely on nature’s way. Two feet and polished skids. Even so, you can run into difficulties if the people who made your boots and gloves were telling lies about their tolerance.”

Serne didn’t seem pleased by this news, nor by the relish I took in telling him how rough it was going to be.

“How long are we going to be down there?” he asked.

I shrugged. “We won’t linger in there a minute longer than necessary,” I assured him. “I want to get through it as fast as I possibly can.” I didn’t mention that my goal wasn’t to catch Myrlin, but to get to the interesting places in good time. “If nothing goes wrong,” I added, “we should be able to get through the cold in a couple of days. You’ll just have to hope that the android won’t. We’ll have plenty of margin for error. The gaspacks will renew our air for at least thirty days, more in an emergency. The suits recycle all our wastes, and input carbohydrates—they’ll easily keep us going until the air begins to go bad, although we’ll lose weight and our digestive systems will get thrown out. I guess you’re used to those kinds of side effects.”

“And then some,” he said. I could just make out his bleak stare behind the goggles. I didn’t want to ask him what his personal best was for getting by in a life-preserving suit—it probably wasn’t anywhere near as long as mine, but when I’d set my record, there was no army of aliens trying to blast, fry or evaporate me.

There never had been—until now.

“I guess you’ve already had your fill of suits and gaspacks,” I said, meekly.

“We only used heavy suits where there wasn’t any atmosphere,” he said colourlessly. “Most of the real fighting was done on surface. The temperature was usually fine and the air would have been breathable—except that the Salamandrans were heavily into biotech weaponry. Viroids, neurotoxin-carrying bacteria, that sort of thing… all human-specific, of course. Mostly, we wore thin sterile suits like glorified plastic bags, which wouldn’t slow us down too much. Skin-huggers, with little networks of capillaries to carry your sweat away. Before we put them on we had to shave all over… they gave us some inhibitor to stop the hair growing back, but it didn’t stop the itching. Five or six days into a mission I could feel my flesh crawling. Couldn’t scratch… not properly, anyway.

“We used to spend most of our time creeping around under a blue sky like you’d find on any friendly world—or under the stars, anyhow—and there’d be growing things all around us, nice and green, and sometimes cities that might be anybody’s cities… but the air was usually filled with things that would turn us into great lumps of gangrene if we took a single lungful. Even when the air was clean… we had to wear the suits anyway, just in case. We relied on the machines on our backs to keep us alive. The suits were virtually indestructible… couldn’t tear no matter what you did to them… but somehow I never felt entirely safe touching things, just in case I pricked my finger and died screaming.

“I never liked the machine on my back. I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t touch it… but there it was, masterminding my chemistry like some little god. Somehow it always seemed more remote than the ship, or the stars in the sky.”

If he’d stopped halfway I’d have told him that I understood—that I knew how he felt. He went on long enough, though, to convince me that I didn’t. His was a special paranoia.

“This won’t be so very different,” I said. “Amara Guur’s bully boys will only have good old-fashioned needle-guns, and I don’t know what your friend the android will be packing, but it really doesn’t matter. While we’re down in the cold levels we only have to be hit once and we’ll be dead. If we have to go deeper, where Saul found warmth and life, we might be able to survive a superficial wound or two… but we’d be trapped down there forever. You can’t send a radio message asking for help when you’re way down in the levels.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “When it comes to gunplay, we’re the best, and you’ve said nothing to make me think there’ll be anything where we’re going that will put us out of our stride.”

I was tempted to ask whether he suffered at all from claustrophobia. There were a lot of wide open spaces down below, sure enough, but we’d have to work our way through some pretty narrow corridors—wormholes of a kind very different from the ones our starships are supposed to make as they whizz-bang their way through the undervoid. The more I got to see of the star-captain and her merry men, though, the more confident I became that they could handle themselves perfectly well in what would be to them terra incognita. Crazy they might be, but there was no doubting that they were tough.

“If the war was as bad as you say,” I commented, “I’d have thought you’d head straight for home now that it’s over. Why come all the way out here?”

His lips seemed hardly to move as he said: “It isn’t over.”

“No?” I answered, sceptically. “You’re telling me that the whole damn human race is at war with one lousy android?”

A special paranoia indeed! I thought, when he looked away.

All he said was: “It’s got to be finished. It’s necessary.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe so. That’s your business, and you seem intent on keeping me out of it. But there is another side to what we’re doing now, and I’d really appreciate a little help in alerting the star-captain to some of the other implications of all this. What’s happening here on Asgard might be every bit as important to the future of the human race as the war you just won—and to the rest of the galactic community, Asgard’s immeasurably more important.”

His pale eyes just stared into mine.

“Look,” I said, “the star-captain already worked it out that if there are only fifty layers, there could easily be a hundred times the surface area of Earth down there. If, as seems possible, the whole bloody thing is an artefact, there could be ten thousand levels—the equivalent of fifteen or twenty thousand whole worlds… maybe hundreds of thousands of independent habitats. There might be more humanoid races living inside Asgard than in the entire galaxy of natural worlds. Who knows? The Tetrax have been trying to lift the lid off this great big can of worms for a hell of a long time—and now we have a golden opportunity to do it. You and me and the blonde bombshell! Oh, merde—you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Don’t insult me, Rousseau,” he said, mildly. “I’m just a belter, like you. I don’t know the first thing about this place, that’s true. But I’m not a fool, and the star-captain is anything but. If what we find down there is something useful to the human race, we’ll do what’s necessary. After we get the android, we’ll decide what to do next, in the line of duty. To be honest, though, I have to say that what I’ve seen of this world, and what you’ve told me about the cold down below, doesn’t fill me with wild enthusiasm.”

He’d asked me—ordered me—not to insult him, so I didn’t. I shut up. But what I was thinking was that this was a man whose imagination had shriveled up inside him, and all but faded away. For him, it had always been the human race against the Salamandrans for control of local space. All the great wide cosmos, with its thousands of humanoid cultures, meant next to nothing to him. He had some vague idea that Asgard might be important in a political context, but he really didn’t see what a puzzle it was. He didn’t seem to realise that cracking the puzzle might tell us exactly where we—not just Homo sapiens but all the humanoid races—fitted into the vastest possible scheme of things.

He had no real awareness of the mystery of our origins, or the possibilities of our ultimate future. I did.

I’m not a passionate man, by any means. I’m a cold fish, content with my own company, satisfied with day-to-day survival in a fairly unfriendly universe. Personal relationships aren’t my cup of tea. But I do care about things— about the big things, the deep questions.

It mattered to me what was in the heart of Asgard, although I had no way of explaining to a man like Serne exactly why it mattered. I wanted to know who built Asgard, and why; where it had come from and where it was intended to go. I wanted to know whether all the humanoid races in the galaxy came from common stock; and if so, whose, and why. I wanted to know who I was, because despite what Serne said, I wasn’t just a belter, or even a human being, but a citizen of infinity and eternity, with a birth certificate written in the DNA of my chromosomes.

That was why, with all due respect to my new commanding officer and my fellow starship troopers, I couldn’t actually find it in my heart to care about their lousy android and their stupid paranoia.

I was on my way to the centre of the universe, and to my personal confrontation with its deepest secrets.

It turned out to be a more tortuous journey than I anticipated, but isn’t it always?