Asgard's Secret

35

When I woke up again I felt anything but good. My stomach was queasy, my head was spinning and I had a dreadful metallic taste in my mouth. My eyelids felt as if they were glued down and the muscles in my legs were aching.

Nevertheless, I managed to sit up, and after a while I opened my eyes, blinking in order to clear my vision.

I was still in the same place. The sky had stopped flickering, and was now presenting a reasonable simulation of twilight. Some of the lights were on, but most were off. The forest was still, and very quiet. I could still smell smoke, but the odour was faint and distant.

Susarma Lear was stretched out on a gigantic leaf, her head cradled by a purple flower. She was quite unconscious, and made no response at all when I shook her sleeve.

I looked at the patch of open ground where Myrlin’s body should have been lying.

The body wasn’t there.

Nor was the patch of ground.

I wasn’t altogether surprised. Dazed as I was, I remembered seeing the body flicker before I went out for the count, and the suspicion must have been born in my mind at that moment that all was definitely not as it seemed.

I checked Jacinthe Siani, who responded no better to my half-hearted attempt to rouse her than the star-captain had. I could also see Seme, similarly dead to the world, though not actually deceased.

I coughed a few times, trying to get the awful taste out of my mouth, and then leaned against the wall, trying to draw strength from its cool solidity.

Myrlin came out of the bushes. He was dressed exactly as he had been when I had seen him shot down, but his big hairy torso was quite intact, and though the dim light made him seem a little greyer than I remembered him, he looked a good deal healthier than I did.

It was the first time I’d been able to get a good look at his face, without an obscuring visor. His features weren’t rugged at all. He was round-faced with skin that looked very soft. He was like a vastly overgrown baby, except for the big nose.

“Hello, Mr. Rousseau,” he said softly.

“That damned lion,” I said, with a certain amount of irritation. “You weren’t testing me. You were testing the illusion.”

“They weren’t entirely sure that it would work,” he said. “It’s a new trick they worked out specially for the occasion. You had me worried when you seemed to have it figured out, but I thought it went well enough. I think it worked on the star-captain. She’ll be quite convinced that she killed me. A cathartic experience, I’m sure. She’s been under a lot of stress.”

“The others are really dead, though.”

“Oh yes,” he said, mildly. “Amara Guur and his men are really dead. She knows they’re dead—and that will help to convince her that I’m dead too, should she begin to doubt it. I didn’t have any qualms about letting them die—they tortured Saul Lyndrach, and caused his death. They’d have killed me too, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the tranquillisers they pumped into me weren’t as effective as they expected. There are advantages in being a giant.”

“You orchestrated the whole thing?”

“Mostly. I didn’t have a completely free hand. They went along with most of what I suggested.”

“They?”

“The people who live here. They seem to be a little shy—I haven’t actually met them in the flesh yet. But they have very sophisticated machines.”

I shook my head, still trying to get back the good feeling I’d had when I woke up only a couple of hours before. An awful lot had happened during those brief hours.

“Is the fire out?” I asked, deliberately choosing a question of marginal relevance. I didn’t feel up to asking the big ones yet.

“Yes. It didn’t do too much damage. It can all be repaired.”

“That’s a relief.” The sarcasm wasn’t really called for, but I figured that I might be excused.

There was a pause, while Myrlin looked down at the prostrate star-captain, who had a more peaceful expression on her face now than I’d ever seen there before.

“I don’t think they actually believed me,” said Myrlin.

“What didn’t they believe?” I countered.

“They didn’t believe that everyone would start trying to kill one another. They didn’t believe that you could all wake up in this bizarre situation, and promptly start figuring out how to stage a massacre.”

“Some people have no imagination,” I observed drily.

“They don’t do any killing themselves,” he said. “I suspect they don’t do much dying either. They seem to have their world and their lives pretty much under control.”

“Bully for them,” I said. “How is it, exactly, that you seem to be the one calling the shots around here?”

“I made a deal with them.”

“So I gather. But what made them strike a deal with you?

Why not the star-captain? Why not Amara Guur? Why not me?”

“My interests and theirs appear to coincide,” he said. “I need a home… a life… a place to belong. I was more than ready to volunteer to stay here, and help them out.”

“Help them out with what? Their world and their lives are under control, remember?”

“They need time to think, Mr. Rousseau. Time to decide what to do—about the universe.”

“About the universe?” I had the feeling that I was getting out of my philosophical depth. It was all becoming a little too surreal.

“They didn’t know the universe existed,” he told me. “They thought Asgard was all that there was… layer upon layer, ad infinitum. Now, they have to come to terms with the idea of the surface… of infinite space… they have to figure out what it all means, in terms of who they might be, and where they might be, and why.”

“They’re not the builders, then? They didn’t make Asgard and they don’t know what it’s for?”

“No. They’re not the builders. They know a little bit about a few hundreds of levels, but they’re no wiser about what’s in the centre than you are. They don’t seem to do a lot of exploring themselves, but they do have robots. They’d never been up Saul’s dropshaft before, though. They had no idea what was up on three. Now they know about the cold levels… about the galactic community… about Tetrax and vormyr and the human/Salamandran war. I get the impression that they’re a little anxious about it all. I suspect that they’re not very aggressive, and that they think what just happened here is rather horrible.”

I thought it was rather horrible myself, but I didn’t bother to say so.

“So you’re going to stay and teach them about the universe,” I said, instead. I smiled sardonically, because it was, in its way, a wonderful irony. He was newborn, and all that he knew about the universe, and about humanoidkind, had been pumped into him by some kind of machine. He wasn’t real. Maybe that was why these mysterious underworld-dwellers liked him so much.

“Why’d you stage the bloodbath?” I asked him. “Why not simply have your friends put Guur and his bully boys in cold storage? They must have given us a pretty thorough going-over while they had us in their clutches for twelve whole days. They didn’t have to wake anyone up at all. They could have used us as founts of information about the universe, then thrown us out with the garbage, if they wanted to.”

“I thought you’d like to go back, Mr Rousseau. I wanted to do you a good turn. The star-captain too, perverse as it may seem. I don’t really have anything against her, you understand. She couldn’t help but see things the way she did.”

“You steered me straight into Amara Guur,” I pointed out. “He could have killed me any time.”

Myrlin picked something up from the ground. It was the needier that Seme had given to me so that I could wave it at Jacinthe Siani. I assumed that it must have been the one which Guur had carried. He pointed it at the sky, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.

“It’s not loaded,” I said.

“It’s loaded,” he said. “It just isn’t capable of firing.”

Strangely, I felt bitterly disappointed. A little while ago, I’d done the only heroic thing which I’d ever done in my entire life. I’d pulled off a real coup, turning the tables on one of the most evil bastards in the known universe—but his gun had already been fixed. The poor fool hadn’t had a chance. All the heroics suddenly seemed very silly.

“The gun that killed Khalekhan wasn’t useless,” I pointed out coldly.

“Khalekhan was a casualty,” he said. “As Guur pointed out, it was a stupid misjudgement on Heleb’s part. He was a combat soldier. I didn’t have anything against him, but I’m not about to cry over his passing. It was part of the price that had to be paid, if any of you were to go back to the surface. You’re the only one I’d care to trust, Mr. Rousseau, and I’d be careful even then. The bloodbath wasn’t entirely my idea; as I said, the people I’m with now weren’t entirely convinced, despite what they distilled from your software while you were asleep, what kind of beings we really are. Now they know. But I did help them plan it all, and I was ready and willing for people to be killed. I was also quite prepared to be unsporting, and give Amara Guur a disabled gun. I guess I’m no better than the rest of you—a pretty good imitation of humankind, wouldn’t you say?”

Too goody I’d have said.

“Why did they agree to let me go, if they’re as anxious as you say?” I inquired. “Why are they letting you tell me all this?”

“They don’t particularly want to keep you. They know that the secret of the dropshaft can’t be contained indefinitely, given that you left the notebook on the surface. They don’t see any harm in letting you out. Of course, you’ll never find the way down here again. They’ll block the way permanently. The Tetrax can have the levels all the way down to the bottom of Saul’s shaft, but that’s the floor so far as they’re concerned—until they learn a great deal more about how the native technics work.

“As for this little conversation—I suppose it might be seen as self-indulgence on my part. But there is a utilitarian aspect to it. You’d have realised that I wasn’t dead. You were the only one who could figure it out, but after the lion, I was sure that you would guess what had happened. I don’t think you’d ever have managed to convince the star-captain, even if you’d tried, because she wants me to be dead so very badly. But I’d rather you didn’t even try to convince her. I’d rather you let her go on believing what she believes, quite unchallenged. I’d rather you were a coconspirator, Mr. Rousseau. I want you to be on my side. You are on my side, aren’t you, Mr Rousseau?”

I looked at him tiredly. “You can call me Mike,” I said, with a slight croak in my voice.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “And you do want to return to the surface, don’t you? To claim your big reward? To be the man who found the way to more than a hundred new levels?”

I hesitated for a moment. But then I nodded. “Yes I do,” I said.

“That’s what I thought. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Sorry you can’t stay. I think I might get the bigger rewards.”

“Like what?”

“Immortality… that sort of thing. As I said, I haven’t even met my hosts in the flesh yet, but I get the idea that they’re very clever people. Very clever indeed.”

There wasn’t much to say in reply to that.

Another thought struck me, though I didn’t voice it. These people didn’t know what was in the centre—they had no more idea about who built Asgard than I did—but if anyone could find out, they could. They were threatening to make sure that the Tetrax never would, but now they knew about the universe, their own curiosity was sure to have been stimulated. I was being turned back from my journey to the centre, but Myrlin was only just starting his. He had every chance of getting there, whether he became immortal or not.

I wondered whether I could revoke my hasty decision to return. I wondered whether I, too, might strike a bargain with these desperately shy, fabulously clever folk. But they hadn’t taken the trouble to ask me. They hadn’t even bothered to open up a conversation with me. Whatever their probes had extracted from my numbed brain during those twelve days that I had lain on their dissecting slabs, it hadn’t made them want to talk to me. They obviously chose their friends with the utmost care. They were quite possibly the worst snobs in the whole of Creation.

“Why are things so bad in the upper levels?” I asked him, suddenly anxious that the interview was coming to its end before I had asked any of the important questions. “Why were the top levels evacuated? Why has the one we came down been allowed to run wild? Why have its people degenerated?”

“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.