Asgard's Secret

32

It was wearing a shirt and tight pants, but it was barefoot, like me, and might easily have been untimely ripped from a cold-suit. The gun which it leveled at me was a small needier, which could blast out tiny fragments of metal at the rate of six a second.

I stopped.

“Rousseau?” said the vormyran, uncertainly. His voice was deep and gravelly, but it sounded oddly gentle.

“It won’t work twice,” I said, with a certain subdued asperity. “I think you’re an illusion.” But I betrayed my doubts by speaking in parole, not in English. I remembered the one about the little boy who cried wolf, and then got gobbled up by the real one.

I stood very still, determined not to surrender to any wild instincts, and equally determined not to run.

He came forward, and reached up to rest the muzzle of the needier against the soft skin beneath my jaw.

“Okay,” I said, finding my mouth suddenly dry. “You’re not an illusion.”

He did have bad breath. I could feel its warmth. His eyes were big, the slit-pupils widened because of the dim light. His thin black lips were drawn back to expose his pointed teeth. His mottled skin seemed paler than when I had seen him last, on the screen in Saul Lyndrach’s apartment.

“Where are we, Mr. Rousseau?” he asked, hissing as he sounded the sibilant in my name.

“I wish I knew,” I replied, sourly. “How did they get you, Mr. Guur? You are Amara Guur, I suppose?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” he said, softly. “After all, I have the gun.”

It struck me, suddenly, that it was monumentally unfair that he should have the gun. I had woken up with nothing but my underclothes. Whoever it was that had captured us, and now was studying us with clinical detachment, had taken the trouble to give a gun to Amara Guur, and not to me. It seemed to suggest that a very peculiar set of moral priorities were at work. I was certain they were watching, but I wasn’t at all certain what they were watching for. Could it be that they wouldn’t actually allow Guur to shoot me—that they’d intervene to stop him? After all, it would surely be a terrible waste to let one of their experimental rats go down the toilet so quickly, and for no good reason.

Maybe I was still as safe as I had been when the lion leapt.

On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t. I decided that I didn’t want to take the chance.

“You know as much as I do,” I told Amara Guur, levelly. “Maybe more. I woke up a few minutes ago, in some kind of illusion-booth—a big one, not like the glorified coffins they use to serve up the shows in Skychain City. It was a scene from my homeworld, or a world very much like it. I was attacked by a predator, but it disappeared when it jumped me.” He looked surprised, so I added: “Same with you?”

He shook his head, and said: “I just woke up.” Then he asked: “Where and when did they take you?”

“I don’t know how long ago. I’d been in the level at the bottom of the dropshaft for thirty hours or so—maybe a little more. I was with the android, Myrlin. They hit us with a mindscrambler when Myrlin shut down some kind of a power-plant in the city.”

His eyes remained fixed on mine. They put me very strongly in mind of the lion’s eyes. Maybe that was why our hosts had shown me the lion first—to get me in the right frame of mind for the real thing.

“There was a city?” he asked. He drew the needier back toward himself, in what might have been construed as a conciliatory gesture. When its pressure was withdrawn from my neck I swallowed, thankfully.

“You didn’t get that far?” I countered.

He hesitated, so I went on. “We don’t have any reason to like one another, Mr. Guur,” I said, “but I strongly suspect that we’re both in the same boat. I’m not sure that we have any sensible option but to tell each other what we know, and try to figure it out together. As you must know, we’re deep inside Asgard, and whoever brought us down here is playing silly games with us. They must have us under observation now.”

He didn’t lower his eyes, but he did nod his head, almost imperceptibly, and he closed his lips about his pointed teeth. Then he lowered the gun, though he continued to hold it in his hand.

“We were taken by surprise,” he said. “In the corridors close to the dropshaft. We ran into some kind of trap, and several of my men were gunned down by flame-pistols. Immediately afterwards, they came at us.”

“They?” I queried, wondering whether he’d mistaken Crucero for a whole platoon. It must have been Crucero who set the trap.

“Robots of some kind,” he replied. “Like gigantic insects—but artificial.”

Not just Crucero then, I thought. The ambush season must have started early. I realised that Myrlin must have roused a whole hornet’s nest when he thrust his cutter into that control system. They must have come out to get us all—even the people at the top of the dropshaft.

“Did anyone from your party get away?” I asked Amara Guur.

“I do not know. I think perhaps not. What about the human soldiers?”

“I don’t know either. But if they came all the way back up to three to grab your people, I dare say that they grabbed the star-captain and the others on the way. It seems that they don’t want anyone reporting back—and it seems that they now have custody of everyone who knows the way down here.”

That particular lie was intended as much for the eavesdroppers as for him. Saul Lyndrach’s slightly-modified log was still in the truck up on the surface. It might take the Tetrax quite a while to find another French-speaker to decode it for them, and to figure out which bits I’d altered, but they’d do it, given time. They could be very thorough when they wanted to be.

When Guur didn’t say anything, I asked him a question. “How did you track us through the levels?” It was almost a hint to the effect that I’d told a lie, and that the lie was really intended to deceive the mysterious observers. He probably knew that the bug he’d planted in the book was still on the surface.

“It was inside your boot heel,” he replied. “When the giant took your truck, we knew you would need a replacement suit and we knew your specifications. Wherever that boot goes, it leaves an organic trace. We could have followed it anywhere, but we only needed to find the location of the shaft. Our intention was to wait for you there— hoping, of course, that you did not return. It would have been suitably ironic, would it not, if the android had killed your companions just as he killed my men?”

I didn’t tell him that we’d left Crucero behind to take care of the possibility that he’d wait at the top of the shaft. It didn’t seem necessary or diplomatic. I decided to let him believe that it was our present hosts who had organised the flame-pistol party.

“Well,” I said, “it’s all water under the bridge now. The question is: what do we do next?”

“There is nothing behind me but a closed room,” said Guur.

“Same here,” I told him. “That leaves us only one direction to go—and who knows who we might meet? Would you like to lead the way?”

“I have the gun,” he reminded me. “You lead the way.”

Amara Guur was exactly the kind of person on whom one should never turn one’s back, but sometimes you don’t get the choice.

I turned into the corridor where neither of us had been, and led the way toward our next encounter.

The corridor twisted and turned, but there was never more than one way to go. It could have been a veritable maze had the observers wanted it to be—I was morally certain that they could have opened up doorways and alternative pathways wherever they desired—but it seemed that they only wanted to take us from point A to point B.

Point B, as it transpired, was a big open space. We came out of a narrow portal to be faced with an alien forest. By alien, I don’t just mean that it was like no place I’d ever been—having never been to Earth I had no real experience of the kind of plain which they’d shown to me when I first awoke, but it had been an environment where I had some slight sense of belonging. Here, the sensations awakened in my mind when I looked upon the strange bushes and trees was exactly the opposite; this was a place where I emphatically did not belong.

It wasn’t the shapes which made it seem so odd—foliage, I guess, can come in a range of shapes so vast that nothing seems particularly extraordinary—but the scale of things. The leaves, which were dark of hue, were all very large. They were mostly green, though some were streaked with crimsons and violets. The flowers, which were very gaudy— though their colours too seemed dark, with no whites or pastel shades—were enormous, every blossom the size of a man’s torso. The yellows were all ochreous, the blues tended toward indigo, the reds were blood-dark; all the stamens and styles which clustered at the heart of each bloom were black. Most of the flowers were bell-shaped things, though some were like hollow hemispheres; almost without exception they pointed upwards, at the ceiling, which was blazing with golden electric light a mere twelve metres above the forest floor.

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.