Asgard's Secret

2

When I got up again, the lights of Skychain City had been burning brightly for some time. It was dark outside the dome, but according to the Tetron timetable it was daytime, and the Tetrax aren’t the kind of folk to let the absence of the sun spoil their calculations.

Asgard’s days were more than six times as long as days on the Tetron homeworld—which are a little longer than Earth’s—and the Tetrax were no more capable of adjusting their metabolic patterns to that kind of regime than humans, so they kept their own time. Everyone else kept it too, at least in Skychain City.

The Tetrax had built the skychain—a remarkable feat, considering that they’re a biotech-minded species and that their own world could no more support such an artefact than Earth. Anyone else was, of course, at liberty to set up their own docking satellites and shuttle facilities, but it was so much cheaper to use the Tetron facility that no one ever had made separate arrangements—which was why the Tetrax were the effective rulers of Skychain City and the effective directors of the Co-ordinated Research Establishment, no matter how much cosmetic democracy they put in place.

It wasn’t just Immigration Control that was staffed by Tetron civil servants; they ran everything else too. All the citizens got to vote for the mayor and the council, and the police force was as multiracial as the C.R.E., but at the end of the day—whose length, you will remember, was determined by the Tetrax—everything was done the Tetron way.

Personally, I didn’t mind. The Tetron way seemed to work, and there wasn’t any other species I’d rather have had running things, including my own. Not that I’d ever have let on to a Tetron, of course—I didn’t suck up to them the way Aleksandr Sovorov did.

I went to see Alex as soon as I’d had my breakfast. I thanked him kindly for recommending me to Myrlin, and tried not to sound sarcastic while I did it. Then I asked him very politely whether the relevant committees had looked kindly upon my application for financial assistance in refitting my truck. “Assistance” was a euphemism, of course—if they did give me the money to fund my next expedition, they’d want a percentage of anything I brought back until I died on the job. Personally, I thought that looked like a much better deal from their point of view than it did from mine, but I was desperate… and I wasn’t at all sure about the quality of their sight.

“I haven’t had the official notification yet,” Alex told me, twiddling a ballpoint pen between his stubby, stained fingers. I could never figure out what the stain was; sometimes I suspected him of dipping his fingers in some kind of brown dye because it made him look more like the hands-on scientist he liked to think he was than the petty bureaucrat he actually seemed to be. Not that he didn’t put in his lab-time, of course—he spent hours every day poring over artefacts of every shape and dimension—but they all came his way along a metaphorical conveyor belt, carefully directed towards his supposed expertise by Tetron scientists who probably kept all the best stuff for themselves. He was, in essence, a dotter of i’s and a crosser of t’s; he would never be privileged to make a real conceptual breakthrough.

He probably knew that, in his heart of hearts—although he would never have admitted it to someone like me—but it didn’t prevent him from imagining that he was one of the most important humans in the universe even so, simply because he was on Asgard rather than Earth, occupying an intermediate station in the hallowed ranks of the C.R.E.

“Did you put in a good word for me, Alex?” I asked, humbly. “Did you explain to them how lucky they’d be to have me on the team?”

“I was asked for my opinion, naturally,” he replied, with suspicious pedantry.

“Which is, of course, that I’m a good man,” I said, mildly. “A trustworthy man—a man on whom it would be well worth taking a chance. ‘Look, lads,’ you said, ‘I know Rousseau, and Rousseau knows the levels. There’s no one who’s been further afield than he has, no one else with his curiosity and expertise, no one likelier to come up with something really special and completely new.’ That is your opinion, isn’t it?”

“I know that it’s your opinion,” Sovorov countered. “I certainly told them that.”

“You told them that. Would it have hurt you to have thrown your own weight behind it too? Would it have inconvenienced you to tell them what a good deal they’d be getting?”

He stabbed absent-mindedly at the desk with the point of his pen. I wondered what his unconscious was trying to communicate, in its own inarticulate fashion.

“I don’t believe in letting my personal loyalties override my principles,” he said. “We happen to be members of the same species—we may even reckon one another as friends— but when I’m acting on behalf of this Research Establishment I have to put personal feelings aside. The C.R.E. has its own methods and procedures, and its own system of operation. Its enquiries proceed in a rational manner, one step at a time. We take great care to examine everything we find, and to obtain all the data we can from each and every artefact. Our recovery teams are well trained; they operate in a controlled manner, careful to do no damage. Safety is their first priority—not merely their own safety, but the safety of their discoveries. They’re scientists, not treasure-hunters.”

“And I’m not?”

“You’re a scavenger, Michael. Your first priority is to go where no one has gone before, to find things that no one has ever found before. You move around aimlessly, at a furious pace, probably destroying far more than you ever bring back, through sheer carelessness. You may think that you’re attempting to further the growth of knowledge, but you’re just a trophy-hunter. Perhaps you’re less mercenary than some of your kind, but that’s only because you value the glory that might be attached to finding something valuable more than the price you can sell it for. You think that if you cover more ground than other people, you’re more likely to stumble across some fabulous jackpot—but that assumes that you’d be able to recognise it if you did. You’ve been here a long time, I know. You’ve spent more time in the levels than any other human, perhaps as much time as any member of any species, but you’re strictly an amateur. You don’t do any of the real work. You’ve brought me interesting things in the past, I’ll grant you, and I’m grateful for the fact that you brought them to me rather than selling them to some junk shop in sector seven, but that doesn’t mean that I have to approve of the way you work. I don’t. I don’t believe the Establishment should support people who operate the way you do.”

“But you do support some people who do things my way,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” he admitted, “we do. If we didn’t, we’d have to compete on the open market for everything that buccaneers of your kind bring in. We make such bargains reluctantly, and we make them in the hope of maintaining a measure of control over the activities of freelance explorers—but we can’t afford to make deals with anyone and everyone. We have to be selective, and we can’t make our selection on the basis of species loyalty or personal friendship.”

“You could” I said—but that was unfair. He was only one man in an organization full of not-quite-men. The Tetrax called the shots.

“You’re a one-man operation, Michael,” Sovorov reminded me, although it was hardly news. “You may think you’re a serious player, but that’s because you spend so much time out in the cold, without the benefit of regular reality checks. Policy favours teams—teams which can be persuaded to adopt our code of practice, our fundamental philosophy.”

“The Tetrax found Asgard,” I observed. “They could have kept it to themselves, if they’d really wanted to. Policy, as far as I can see, favours diversity and compromise. Policy is not to put too many eggs into any one basket, especially if it’s the one you’re carrying yourself. Policy is to encourage petty rivalries, so that everyone is wary of everyone else, and the Tetrax can be friends with everyone. Divide and conquer is out of date; nowadays it’s divide and exploit.”

“That’s rather cynical,” Sovorov said. He had a habit of stating the obvious.

“We’re all parasites, Alex, scuttling around the nooks and crannies of Asgard’s rind,” I told him. “You might take pride in being the only human member of a multiracial consortium that pretends to represent the entire galaxy rather than a handful of colony worlds, but you’re no holier than I am. You’re careful and you’re methodical—hooray for you. You’re also slow and repetitive. I’m willing to bet that you—or your masters, at any rate—have learned far more from stuff brought in by so-called scavengers than from the material your own teams have bagged as they work their way outwards from your home base at a pace that would disgust a snail. Asgard’s big, Alex—really, really big. Even the surface is big, let alone level one and level two… and when we find a way down to levels five and six, not to mention fifty and sixty, we’ll find out exactly how big it might be, and how many different things it might contain. I know your people have been expecting to figure out how to get down to the lower levels for a long time. Ever since I arrived here it’s been tomorrow, or the next day… just a little more data, a tiny stroke of luck in decoding the signs. Maybe you’ll do it—maybe your way is the way that will give us the key to the elevator—but I think my way is just as likely to deliver the big break. While you put a magnifying glass to the map, I’m covering the territory. If I were you, I’d back me, just to make sure you’re covering all the angles.”

He dropped the pen at last, and sat back in his chair with a theatrical sigh. “We’re gradually putting the jigsaw together,” he said. “Little by little, we’re building a coherent picture of the humanoids who lived on Asgard before what you insist on calling ‘the big freeze.’ We’re putting together a foundation that will allow us to make sense of everything— it’s not just a matter of playing with fancy gadgets in the hope that one of them will turn out to do something miraculous. If we can understand the language and the culture of the people who built and maintained Asgard, we can find out what we need to know about the lower levels before we actually go down into them… assuming, as everyone seems to, that there are more levels than the ones we’ve so far penetrated. That would be the sensible way to proceed, the most productive way to proceed. If someone like you were to find a way to open up the entire artefact before we’ve found out why it was built and what’s likely to be down there, it would be a tragedy.”

“I don’t agree,” I said. I felt, at the time, that my self-restraint was veritably heroic.

“I know you don’t,” he said—and tried to smile.

“They laughed at Christopher Columbus,” I reminded him.

“They also laughed at a lot of cranks,” he pointed out. “Look, Michael, I’ve done what I can. Your application is under consideration. It’s out of my hands. Perhaps you’ll get your money.”

“And perhaps I won’t.”

“It wouldn’t be the end of the world,” he said. “You have skills and plenty of experience. Lots of people would be glad to hire you.”

“I’m not a team player,” I told him. “If I were employee material, I’d never have left Earth. Do you have any news of the war, by the way?—I didn’t really get a chance to chat to the new arrival last night. Too tired by half.”

“So was I,” he admitted, “but the word around the Establishment is that it’s over.”

“Really? Who won?”

He was the wrong person to ask. He furrowed his bushy eyebrows and said, “In a war, Michael, nobody wins. It’s just destruction and devastation all round. If we can’t learn to understand that, there’s no future for us in this galaxy.”

I sighed. “How long before I get a decision on my proposal?” I asked.

“Fifteen or twenty units,” he told me. He meant Tetron metric units, which are something in the region of a quarter of an Earthly hour. “I’ll call you as soon as I know. Will you be at home?”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I assured him. “I have other irons in the fire.”