Asgard's Secret

36

There isn’t much point in my giving a detailed description of the journey back to the surface. It was mercifully uneventful.

The star-captain and her surviving sidekicks were, I thought, surprisingly incurious about what had actually happened to them down below. They understood that we’d been captured by some kind of alien intelligence, set free in order to play games and then captured again before being released somewhere else, but they were astonishingly unresentful of this cavalier treatment.

The fact that they remembered so clearly and so satisfyingly how they had gunned down poor Myrlin probably accounted in large measure for their lack of resentment; it was obvious that the star-captain, at least, had been liberated from a frightful burden, and that she was abundantly grateful for her freedom. She even began to treat me with a measure of good fellowship, and nothing more was said about such embarrassing matters as charges of cowardice and desertion. She seemed perfectly happy to tear up my conscription papers after Jacinthe Siani’s testimony to a Tetron court exonerated me from all blame in the matter of the murder of Atmin Atmanu, restoring my record to cleanliness.

Needless to say, I came back to Skychain City a much more popular man than I had left. I was the man with the notebook, the man with the tape that could guide the C.R.E. to the vital dropshaft.

The others who returned with me would all have been popular too, save for the fact that not one of them had made any notes of their own which might guide a third party to the spot marked X. The star-captain wasn’t interested, of course, but I think I observed Serne grinding his teeth a couple of times when he realised that he had carelessly neglected his chance to get a cut of the loot. Jacinthe Siani was definitely peeved, because she didn’t even know enough to bribe her way out of the service-obligations that were heaped upon her as a result of her complicity in various crimes. I contemplated buying her out at one point, but very briefly. Even after searching my merciful heart, I couldn’t find an atom of sympathy for her. I believe that her services were purchased by some other Kythnans, but what she was going to have to do to pay them back I didn’t want to ask.

While the starship troopers were on their way back up the skychain, ready to take their interstellar destroyer back to the home system, where they would doubtless enjoy their own heroes’ welcome and collect their campaign medals— once they’d been very carefully checked for alien infection— I went to see my old friend Aleksandr Sovorov, to negotiate a deal with the C.R.E.

I told him most of the story. I drew a veil over certain parts of it, but I did give him a few juicy details about the civilization with which I’d come into brief contact deep in the bowels of the planet. I took a certain vindictive glee in watching him squirm with anguish.

By the time I was finished, he was staring at me as if I were some kind of hairy arthropod with a disgusting odour.

“You made contact with an advanced civilization thousands of levels down?” he repeated, to make sure that he’d got it right.

“That’s right,” I told him. “Must have been about halfway to the centre.”

“And when they released you all, your Star Force friends and Amara Guur’s gangsters set off on such an orgy of killing that they exported you all the way back to level three, and decided to seal themselves off forever?”

“That seems to be the gist of it,” I confirmed, though it wasn’t entirely accurate. “They seemed to think that we’re barbarians. So does everyone else, now I come to think about it. Perhaps they’re right.”

He groaned. He always did tend to overact. “Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?” he asked. The expression of pain in his eyes was a sight to behold.

“If the C.R.E. hadn’t turned down my application for aid,” I pointed out, “none of this would have happened. In a way, it’s all your fault.”

“If the C.R.E. had done what I suggested,” he retorted, “they’d have kept people like you out of the levels altogether.”

“If they’d done that,” I retorted, “Saul Lyndrach would never have found the shaft in the first place. The super-scientists down in the depths would still be blissfully ignorant of the existence of the universe, content to sit on whatever they have in place of arses for the next few million years. And you wouldn’t be sitting here buying a way into a hundred new levels—warm levels, where there’s life, and enough recoverable technology to keep you busy for the next few centuries.”

“You stupid, selfish bastard,” he said, hissing through his teeth. “You have ruined everything the C.R.E. was set up to do. You have set back the cause of humankind irreparably. How do you think we are ever going to hold our heads up in the galactic community now? There is nothing worse that the universe could have shown to these people than a bunch of brawling savages. You couldn’t be content with taking the Star Force down there, could you? You had to take the vormyr and the Spirellans too, just to show them how ugly humanoids can be when they’re absolutely at their worst.”

“I didn’t exactly take Amara Guur with me,” I pointed out. “He came along of his own accord. If I’d known that I had a bug in my bootheel, I would have worn overshoes. Anyway, you’re forgetting the guy who led us all on the chase. The Salamandran android. Who do you think was responsible for his being there?”

“Saul Lyndrach,” he replied, undaunted.

I shook my head.

I picked up a piece of paper from his desk, and pointed to the letterhead. There was a symbol beside the letters which spelled out Co-ordinated Research Establishment in parole.

“What’s that, Alex?” I said.

For a moment or two he simply looked annoyed and impatient, but he finally figured out that I was serious.

“It’s a pictograph in one of the Tetron languages,” he said. “It’s the symbol of our organization, as well you know. What of it?”

“It appears on all your documents, like a trademark.”

“Yes. So what?”

“That’s the symbol Myrlin drew in the air when he told me about the Salamandrans buying technics from Asgard— the technics they used to make him. The Tetrax and the upper-level cavies are both biotech-minded, remember? The Tetrax seem to have made a little bit more out of what they’ve found here than they’ve let underlings like you know about. And they’ve been selling some of it to like-minded barbarians, to use in those horrid wars that they disapprove of so strongly. If everything had gone as planned, the Co-ordinated bloody Research Establishment might just have been responsible for the extinction of the human species. Your species and mine, Alex. Who did you say was stupid and selfish? Who are the barbarians now, Alex?”

“You’re lying,” he said, hopefully. But he knew me better than that.

I shook my head.

“I didn’t know…” he said, tentatively.

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “Well, you know now.”

He thought about it for a minute, and then said: “It doesn’t affect my condemnation of what you did. I stand by everything that I believe. What happened in the lower levels is a disaster… for the human community and for mankind. And I don’t believe that the Tetron administration knew about this trade in technics, or if they did, I don’t believe that they intended them to be used in war. There are a lot of factions in the C.R.E., and it could have been any of them.”

“That’s my point,” I told him. “It could have been any of them. The whole universe is full of barbarians, Alex, and I didn’t see anything down in the bowels of Asgard to convince me that the people we tangled with were angels. The Star Force carved up Guur’s hatchet men, but it was the cavies who set it up, and the cavies who sat back with their popcorn and watched it happen. They were clever… but I didn’t see anything to make me believe that they were nice. Maybe we should be glad that they sealed themselves off. What if they do decide what to do about the universe… and decide that what they ought to do is sterilise the whole damn cosmos?”

“That’s ludicrous,” he told me with much more feeling than conviction.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But it’s all a bit hypothetical, isn’t it? At the end of the day, we just don’t know, do we? Now, why don’t we start talking about more interesting things, like money. How much does the C.R.E. propose to pay me for my little treasure-map?”

He looked mildly surprised. “After what you’ve said about the C.R.E. selling technics to the Salamandrans, you still want to sell us the location of Lyndrach’s dropshaft?”

“It’s a crooked game,” I told him, “but it’s the only game in town.”

“You don’t think I should resign?”

“Hell, no. We need at least one human on the inside, to try to make certain it doesn’t happen again. I’d come in with you, but I don’t like organizations. I’m a loner.”

He didn’t need any further encouragement. We started talking about money. My revelations obviously hadn’t shaken him too much, because he made every possible effort to strike the meanest bargain he could. It took a long time to get the offer up to within spitting distance of my dreams of avarice.

But in the end, we closed the deal, to the mutual satisfaction of all parties.

Before the Star Force ship pulled out of orbit to start burrowing through its self-made wormhole, I got a call from my ex-commanding officer. Her image was a bit blurred on the screen, but she was looking good now that she was happy.

“I really could have made a trooper out of you,” she said. “You took care of Amara Guur pretty well.”

“I found out later that his gun was jammed,” I told her.

“When?” she asked.

“I tried it,” I said, evasively.

“You didn’t know it when you took him out,” she said, “did you?”

I admitted that I hadn’t. She smiled a wolfish smile, as if she thought she knew me better than I know myself. She didn’t.

“I am not a hero,” I told her. “I run away from giant amoebas. I only went for Amara Guur because I thought you’d shoot straight through me if I didn’t.”

“You might be right,” she told me. “I’m a real hero, and I shoot when I have to, no matter who’s in the way. You’d have saved us a lot of trouble, you know, if you’d only taken that android in when Immigration Control asked you to. Just an atom of social conscience, and you could have kept him nice and warm for us in Skychain City.”

Something about the way she said it made me very conscious of the fact that Susarma Lear was not, after all, a very nice person. Real heroes never are, I guess.

“There are thousands of people here who would have given all that they own to see what you and I saw… to go where you and I went,” I told her. “And you don’t care at all, do you? The mystery never got to you, and you really don’t give a damn what’s at the centre of it all. You have a narrow mind, Star-Captain Lear.”

“It was broad enough to let you off the hook,” she told me. “You owe me a favour. I might be back to claim it some day.”

I didn’t think I owed her any favours at all, even though I was keeping secrets from her that would make her very angry indeed if she ever found out about them.

“I hope you’ll forgive me,” I said, “if I don’t look forward to it. It’s not that I can’t stand to see women in uniform, you understand. It’s just that I prefer a quiet life.”

“There’s something not quite right about a man who wants to spend his time rooting around the frigid remains of a world that went to hell a million years ago,” she said. “It testifies to a certain aridity of the passions, and a dereliction of the soul. Try to be a hero, Rousseau, in spite of yourself. Just try.”

Motherly advice wasn’t her strong point. It didn’t move me at all.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Au revoir,” she replied.

As she broke the connection, I repeated what I’d said, silently. Goodbye. I hoped that it would be forever.

Then I got on with the serious business of finding out what it felt like to be modestly rich.

It might have felt better, but for the nagging worries. They were private worries, probably not worth entertaining, but I couldn’t quite shake them off. The experiences I’d been through had left me more-or-less unscathed, but they had planted some seeds of doubt in my mind—doubts about appearance and reality, about truth and deception. I kept thinking about Myrlin, dead and yet not dead, and what difference it might make.

I couldn’t help setting up a couple of hypothetical scenarios in my mind, just trying them out for size.

In the first scenario, I invited myself to suppose the Salamandrans had been able to bring their genetic time-bomb project to a successful conclusion, but were worried about the secret being discovered. I supposed that they knew full well that there was no chance of hiding the thing completely—especially given that the C.R.E. were involved. And I supposed, therefore, that they’d decided to cover up their success by planting an ingenious false trail… by setting up a monstrous red herring. It wouldn’t even be necessary to assume that Myrlin was consciously lying. After all, he knew only what they had fed into him.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether the sole reason for Myrlin’s existence might have been to convince the Star Force that in killing him they’d destroyed the threat to humankind.

Maybe it had all been a farce—a sideshow, to distract attention from the main event. Maybe the human race was still in dire trouble, with the vengeance of the Salamandrans still to be unleashed in the indeterminate future.

The second scenario, partly inspired by the first, was more immediate in its implications. I invited myself to suppose that the underworlders had had even more control over appearances than they’d seemed. Given that the star-captain’s memories of what had happened were false, why shouldn’t mine be equally fake? Maybe they had been pumped into me in much the same way that Myrlin’s memories of a human lifetime had been pumped into him. There was no way I could really be sure of anything that had happened after I was hit by the first mindscrambler. All else might easily have been illusion. Was Amara Guur really dead? Was Myrlin really alive? There was simply no way to be absolutely sure. I might never have been into the lower depths of Asgard at all. I might never have been any lower down than the level at the bottom of Saul’s dropshaft.

How could I know?

There’s no way to solve puzzles like those. My instinct was to trust the judgments I had made—to believe that the Salamandran project had failed, and to believe that what Myrlin had told me about the world which he had made his own was true—but I’d seen people killed when their instinctive responses betrayed them utterly because they were in the wrong environment. How can a man trust his instincts after that?

There was nothing to be gained by working over those puzzles in my mind, but knowing that wasn’t enough to let me stop.

The last words of one of my favourite books urge men not to waste too much time in pondering insoluble questions. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, says Voltaire, who was one of the wisest men who ever lived. We must look after our own garden. We must take charge of that which we can actually control.

It may be that we never can reach the centre of things, where all the real truths are hidden away. It may be that the pure, unadulterated kernel of Absolute Certainty is not under any circumstances to be grasped, no matter how long and arduous an odyssey you undertake in the attempt to reach it.

My own journey hadn’t ended; I wasn’t even certain that it had properly begun.

But I was beginning to accept that at the end of the day, you just have to settle for what you can get.