Asgard's Secret

3

I did have a few other irons in the fire. I spent the rest of the morning trying them out to see if any of them had warmed up, but none of them had. I had a few more conversations like the one I’d had with Aleksandr Sovorov before I accepted the fact that everyone else in Asgard was even less likely than the C.R.E. to give me any money on the terms I was offering, but in the end I went home. Six hours had passed but Sovorov hadn’t called.

When no one is prepared to give you what you need there’s really only one thing you can do, and that’s recalculate your needs. There were two ways I could do that. One was to give up operating independently and join a team. There were at least a dozen outfits who would hire me who kept their fieldworkers supplied with adequate life-support systems and moderately generous pay, but the pay would be all I’d get. If the team I was with made a significant find, its members would get a bonus, but we’d have to hand it over the moment we found it and say goodbye to it forever. The chance of following anything through would be gone.

I hated to give up on the dream of turning up something big—specifically, a way down into one or more unexplored levels. The chance of finding valuable technics was only part of it; what really mattered was the chance to discover a whole new world. I’d been born way too late to get in on the first race into interstellar space, when everyone thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that the galaxy might be full of virgin worlds awaiting discovery and gaiaformation, but that dream had been animating human history for centuries and I’d inherited it in spite of its obsolescence. The discovery that there was a place where the race was still on—not because the Tetrax hadn’t got there first but because they were stuck outside a locked door with no obvious way in—had been an irresistible lure, once it had been explained to me properly by my namesake, Michael Finn.

Even after all my years of Asgard, I thought of my life in terms of Mickey’s sales talk. I still wanted to be the first to find a way down into the heart of the megastructure. I still wanted all the inhabitants of Skychain City to know who I was. I still wanted people on Earth—the homeworld on which I’d never actually set foot—to speak my name in awed tones.

I wanted to be a hero—a living legend. I’m not altogether sure why I wanted it, but I did. It wasn’t easy to surrender the possibility, however remote it might be.

The other way I could reduce my needs was by deciding that the equipment I had in my truck was good for one more trip, and that everything else I owned could be sold to buy food, water and other wasting assets. The returns from my last trip had already paid for the most necessary repairs to the vehicle—that had been my first priority—so I was certain that I could get myself to any pinprick I cared to put on a map of the surface. My cold-suit could still pass the basic safety-checks, so I’d be okay getting down to level one, but the suit was getting old and it was by no means state-of-the-art. It would get me down to level three or four—but would it get me back again?

The dayside temperature on the surface of Asgard is high enough to be almost comfortable, but level one never gets much above the freezing point of water. Level two is a nice, steady 140 Celsius below freezing. Down in four it’s still only twenty or thirty above absolute zero. That wasn’t much higher than it had been when the artefact was in the depths of the dark cloud in which—according to the best brains in the C.R.E.—it had spent the better part of the last few million years, and maybe a lot longer.

I wanted to go down to four, and I only wanted to do that in order to search for a way to go lower down. My suit would probably be fine if I stayed on one and two, and didn’t wander too far from the truck, but if I were only going to do that I might as well stay in the bowels of Skychain City, working inch by inch with a C.R.E. crew. Going down to four without the best available equipment was like playing Russian roulette with only one empty chamber; when you’re leaving footprints in oxy-nitro snow you can’t afford to have a cold-suit develop a fault. It would be a quick way to go; I’d turn into a corpsicle in a matter of seconds—and rumour had it that the Tetrax were on the very threshold of developing technics that would allow them to resurrect me in a hundred or a thousand years—but it still wasn’t the kind of gamble that a serious student of probability would take.

There was also the matter of supplies. Food, water, gaspacks and fuel all had to be bought, and they didn’t come cheap. Nothing came cheap in Skychain City—except, of course, when you were trying to sell instead of buy. When I added up the resale value of my worldly goods, it didn’t come to very much at all. I had tapes and books, and equipment to play them, but what good are tapes and books in English and French, and equipment made to domestic specifications, on a world where only a couple of hundred humans live?

If there’d been any realistic hope of equipping a new expedition without borrowed money, I wouldn’t have been hanging around in Skychain City waiting for a miracle; I’d have been on my way to middle of nowhere. I might have been a scavenger, in the eyes of someone like Alex Sovorov, but I wasn’t an idiot. If nothing turned up, I was finished.

I remembered, yet again, that something had turned up the night before, and I’d been too tired to find out what it might be. The overwhelming probability, I knew, was that it was nothing at all—just one more problem to add to the list—but I couldn’t help wondering whether I might have missed the last bus to Hope yet again.

My friend Aleksandr finally called in the evening, way past the time when the C.R.E. offices would have closed for business.

“Sorry it’s so late,” he said. “You know how committees are.”

“Sure,” I said. “What’s the verdict?”

“They’ve offered you a job,” he said. “It’s quite a generous package, all things considered. They’re keen to employ you, in fact—but it’s a job or nothing. They want to buy your expertise, not fund your recklessness.”

“Thanks,” I said, numbly. “But no thanks.”

“I’m sorry, Michael,” he said, insincerely, “but I don’t think you have any option.”

“You can call me Mr. Rousseau,” I told him, and hung up.

My sleep was uninterrupted by phone calls, but I can’t say that I slept well. As I ate breakfast, I assured myself that at least things couldn’t get any worse—but I was wrong about that.

I’d just thrown the plate into the grinder when the door buzzer sounded. When I opened the door, I found myself looking at two Spirellans.

My immediate instinct was to close the door—not because I have anything against Spirellans in general, but because these two were wearing gaudy clothing to signal the fact that they were unmated males not yet established in the status hierarchy. The ways in which a Spirellan can win a good place in the hierarchy of his clan are said to be many and varied, but not many of them apply in a place like Skychain City, where there are so many aliens. The ways in which Spirellans can win status by dealing with aliens mostly involve doing them down—and to a Spirellan, I was an alien of no particular importance.

There are half a hundred humanoid species regarded by the Tetrax as utter barbarians, and they’d probably reckon Spirellans to be on exactly the same level as humans. I’d have put them a little lower, but I could see how the Spirellans might be biased the other way.

I let them in, politely. In order to get along in a place where hundreds of humanoid races rub shoulders on a day-to-day basis, you have to suppress your instincts.

“My name is Heleb,” said the taller of the two, as his eyes scanned my room with patience and exactitude. “I believe that you are Michael Rousseau.”

I wasn’t offended by the fact that he wasn’t looking at me. He was being polite. When one status-seeking Spirellan male makes eye contact with another, it’s a challenge—not necessarily to a fight, but a contest of some sort. On the other hand, I wasn’t under any illusion about not being in a contest.

“That’s right,” I confirmed.

“It has come to the notice of my employer that you are looking for work,” he said. He spoke well, but he had an unfair advantage. Spirellans don’t look much like Tetrax— they have blue-and-pink marbled skin and two very pronounced skull ridges, which make them look rather like lizards with winged helmets, while the Tetrax look more like moon-faced gorillas with skins like waxed black tree bark—but they have similar mouth-parts, with flattened upper palates and protean tongues.

“Are you from the Co-ordinated Research Establishment?” I asked, warily.

“No,” he said. “Put your mind at rest, Michael Rousseau. We do not operate in the conservative fashion that the Tetrax adopt. I believe that you would find our ways of working much more in tune with your own. We are adventurers.”

“I’m considering several alternative offers at present,” I told him. “If you would care to tell me the name of your employer and details of your offer, I’ll certainly consider it carefully.” While I said it I watched his junior partner moving around my room. He seemed to be going to extraordinary lengths to make certain that there was no danger of our eyes meeting. In fact, he seemed to be paying very close attention to the contents of my shelves, even though he couldn’t possibly have understood either of the languages in which the titles of my books and tapes were inscribed. He was definitely looking for something, although I couldn’t imagine what.

Heleb flashed me the Spirellan equivalent of a smile, although the fact that his eyes were carefully averted gave it an implication of slyness he couldn’t have intended. “I would take charge of one of the trucks myself,” he told me, proudly. “There would be five of us, including my brother Lema.” He paused to nod in the direction of his companion. “We would be very glad to have you with us. We need a man of your experience. In time, we will be experienced too, but we need good guidance, and we know that you are the man to provide it. We would hire you for one expedition only, and would pay you generously. If you wish, you would then have credit enough to outfit an expedition of your own—although we would be glad to offer you the opportunity to accompany us again, if you prefer.”

“Who recommended me to you?” I asked.

“We have friends in the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. We know about the offer they made to you yesterday—an insult, to a man of your quality. We will pay you more generously, and I believe that you will find the work far more to your liking.”

Lema had finished studying my shelves. He hadn’t touched anything, but he seemed satisfied that he had found what he was looking for.

“I have to consider all the offers I’ve received,” I told him. “If you leave your employer’s name and number, I’ll call him when I’ve made a decision.”

There are some races—or, at least, some kinds of persons— who don’t recognise the propriety of a diplomatic refusal. In a place like Skychain City, they’re supposed to put such idiosyncrasies aside, never taking offence at anything short of a kick in the balls—but they’re free to let their displeasure show, if they care to.

Heleb looked me in the eye for less than a second. If I hadn’t known what I knew about Spirellans, I’d have thought nothing of it, but I knew enough to feel a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“Thank you for giving my offer consideration,” he said, insincerely. “I hope to hear from you in due course.”

If he’d been human, or even Tetron, I’d probably have made a smart remark about not holding his breath. Instead, I said: “It’s extremely kind of you to think of me. I’m very grateful. You can be sure that I’ll give your offer sympathetic consideration—but I owe it to everyone who has made me an offer to weigh their proposals very carefully.”

He handed me a card which had a number scrawled on it. Spirellan handwriting isn’t nearly as neat as Spirellan speech, but Tetron numbers are easy to distinguish from one another.

“Your employer’s?” I asked.

“It is my own number,” he told me. It was the third time he’d passed up an open invitation to tell me who his employer was, and he had to know that I had taken due note of the fact.

“Thank you,” I said, again.

When I’d closed the door behind them I realised that my heart was hammering. Without knowing exactly why, I was scared. That had been Heleb’s doing; he had intended to scare me.

I sat down on the bed and wondered what fate had against me. If Heleb really wanted me to join his expedition, he wasn’t going to take my refusal quite as politely as he’d made his offer.