Asgard's Secret

4

I felt in desperate need of a sympathetic ear and a little moral support, so I decided to go see Saul Lyndrach and take a look at the mysterious Myrlin.

Unfortunately, Saul wasn’t home. Like me, he rented a cell in a honeycomb singlestack—one of a couple of hundred hastily erected by the Tetrax when they’d first built the base that had grown into Skychain City. The Mercatan building supervisor hadn’t seen him go out and hadn’t the slightest idea when he’d be back, but that was only to be expected. The doorman did go out of his way to mention the giant he’d seen Saul with the previous day, though.

“What giant?” I queried. Most starfaring humanoids are much the same size as humans—it’s a matter of the pressures of convergent evolution in DNA-based Gaia-clone ecospheres—but there were a couple of species with representatives on Asgard which routinely grew to two metres ten, so a singlestack supervisor wasn’t likely to use the word “giant” lightly.

“A guest,” the Mercatan told me, in stilted parole. “The foolish fellow at Immigration Control must have classified him as human by mistake, perhaps because of his nose. Mr. Lyndrach is probably trying to sort out the error, but you know how officious these Tetrax are. They never admit that they might have made a mistake.”

Saul wasn’t far short of two metres tall himself. By Mercatan standards, he was a giant. If Myrlin seemed like a giant compared with Saul, he had to be really big—but he’d told me over the phone that he was human. He spoke English, and had claimed to be able to speak Russian and Chinese as well. If he hadn’t been human, he wouldn’t even have known the names of the languages.

“You might look in the bar on the corner.” The supervisor added, in a confidential manner, apparently having warmed to my presence, “Mr. Lyndrach often drinks in there, and it has a high ceiling.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

I did, too—I just kept right on making one mistake after another.

Saul wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the bar, but there was a human called Simeon Balidar sitting in a booth, looking expectantly about him as if he were waiting for someone. He caught sight of me as soon as I walked through the door and waved to me.

I didn’t like Balidar much. He was a scavenger, like me, but he didn’t have a truck of his own. He hired himself out to anyone and everyone—except the C.R.E., who seemed to him to be way too safe. He’d always thought that he and I were kindred spirits, and had never understood why I didn’t agree with him—but he did know a lot of people, including Saul, so I went over to the booth.

I only wanted answers to a couple of questions, but Balidar was the kind of guy who couldn’t possibly answer a question without making a big thing of it, so I had to let him buy me a drink.

“No,” he said, when he finally got around to answering my questions. “Saul hasn’t been in today—I haven’t seen him since the day before yesterday. I don’t know anything about a giant called Myrlin.”

I sipped my drink, wondering how to carry the conversation forward now that my reason for getting involved in it had evaporated. “You don’t, by any chance, know a Spirellan called Heleb?” I said. “Has a little brother named Lema?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?” he asked.

It was, in its way, a very revealing answer, but I figured I ought to tread carefully if I were going to persuade him to expand on it. “Oh, I heard that he’s putting together a team,” I said. “Sounded like your kind of thing—good pay, adventurous… the antithesis of everything the dear old C.R.E. stands for.”

“Are you going to get involved?” he asked, in a way that suggested to me that he already knew about the expedition and Heleb’s offer. I began to wonder, in fact, whether it might have been Balidar who’d put them on to me in the first place.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve had several offers. Heleb’s might be the best, but I don’t know who he’s working for. He was careful not to tell me.”

“Does it matter?” he asked stupidly.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said, “but I’m certainly not going to sign on until I know, am I? It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out.”

“No,” he said. “I suppose not. Look—there’s the people I’m waiting for. Would you care to join us?”

I looked over my shoulder. Two Zabarans had just come into the bar and they were making straight for the booth. They seemed harmless enough, and probably were. Zabarans had the reputation of being easy to get along with. They also had the reputation of being very enthusiastic gamblers—which was, I figured, why Simeon Balidar was waiting for them. He had always fancied himself as a card player, although I’d played with him and Saul a dozen times without ever detecting any conspicuous talent.

“What are you playing?” I asked.

He named a Zabaran game. I knew the rules, but I didn’t want to take any risks.

“It’s okay,” he said, in English. “I know these guys. They’re a soft touch. If it were just me, they’d probably gang up on me, but with two of us in the game… we’ll start off with low stakes, just to get the feel of things.”

I thought about it for half a minute, and then said: “Okay, I’ll play for a while—on one condition.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Tell me who Heleb works for.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Like you say,” he said, still speaking English, after a fashion, “you could find out easily enough. He works for Amara Guur.”

He got up then to follow the Zabarans into a back room. I followed him, wondering what Amara Guur could possibly want with someone like me.

I’d never met Guur, but I knew him by reputation. He was a vormyran. He was also a parasite—a black marketeer. Tetron government involves a great many rules and regulations, and wherever there are rules and regulations there are people intent on breaking them for fun and profit. From what I’d heard, Amara Guur didn’t bother much with the fun end of the spectrum, but he was extremely keen on the profit end. If he thought there was a profit in mounting an expedition into the wilderness, he’d do it—but it wasn’t his style to speculate. If he was taking two big trucks into the back of beyond, he must have a strong reason for thinking that there was something there to be found. That was interesting, in a scary sort of way.

I sat down at the table in the back room and began to play, almost absent-mindedly. The fact that my attention was elsewhere didn’t seem to do me any harm. Almost from the first hand I began to win—not much, because we weren’t playing for high stakes, but steadily. I figured that the time to leave would be when the Zabarans suggested raising the stakes—at which point, they’d probably figure that it was time to stop laying down bait for the human suckers and get serious.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

What happened instead was that a latecomer arrived, full of apologies, to join the game. He’d sat down and grabbed the cards before I had time to register the fact that he wasn’t a Zabaran but a Sleath.

“You play cards with a Sleath?” I whispered to Balidar in English.

“He’s okay,” Balidar assured me. “Anyway, he’s a terrible card player—and there’s only one of him and four of us. The Zabarans will calm him down if he gets excited.”

The reason I was surprised is that Sleaths had a reputation for being hot-tempered—not dangerous, just hot-tempered. The ones I’d met were small and slender by human standards, but the fact that every other starfaring race in the galaxy was bigger and tougher than they were only seemed to make the Sleaths I’d met try harder to assert themselves. They always lost the fights they started—but in a place like Skychain City, where the Tetrax set the standards of civilized behaviour, winners tended to come out of fights looking even more brutal and barbaric than the losers.

I decided to give it a few more hands.

I continued winning, even more profitably now that there were five players in the game instead of four. Balidar seemed to be absolutely right about the Sleath—he was a terrible card player.

Nobody suggested raising the stakes. I couldn’t blame them; little by little, all the money on the table was making its way over to me. I was glad that almost all of my wins were coming when someone else was dealing; if I hadn’t known that I was playing an honest game, I’d have begun to suspect myself of cheating.

Some people play more carefully when they’re losing. Others play more aggressively. The Zabarans were playing very carefully by now. The Sleath was playing very aggressively. That only increased the probability that he would keep on losing, and he did.

There’s an addictive aspect to card playing, which keeps losers in the game when the voice of reason tells them they should quit. It also keeps winners in the game, even when the voice of reason is whispering that something suspicious is going on. I don’t think the Sleath would have let me go even if I’d tried, but the fact is that I didn’t try. I just kept on playing, until he threw the last of his bankroll into the pot.

It was a bad bet, and he duly lost it—to me.

That was when he accused me of cheating.

I wasn’t scared. He was adapted for fast movement in an environment where the gravity was only four-fifths of Asgard’s surface gravity, and he was such a puny specimen of his kind that he had to wear supportive clothing just to get around. Anyway, I thought I could calm him down, with a little help from the Zabarans.

“It’s just a run of bad luck,” I lied, as soothingly as I could. “Your day will come—and it’s just loose change. Hardly enough to buy a meal and a couple of rounds of drinks.”

The Sleath turned to the Zabarans. “They are in it together,” he said, pointing at Balidar, who’d dealt the fatal hand. “He has been throwing his friend perfect cards ever since I sat down.”

The Zabarans looked down at their own depleted stocks of cash, but they shook their heads. They had no intention of backing him up. That annoyed him even more.

“You are in it too!” the Sleath said. “This whole game is fixed.”

“You obviously know these people better than I do,” I pointed out. “I just bumped into Simeon by chance. I’ve never seen either of these two before. You didn’t get good cards, I’ll grant you—but you didn’t exactly play them well, did you?”

That was a mistake. The Sleath let out a torrent of verbiage in his own language, which was presumably a concatenation of curses, and then he pulled a knife.

I got up and moved away, grabbing my chair as I did so and making sure it was between us. He hesitated for a moment, and I hoped he’d thought better of it, but then he lunged. I plucked the chair off the ground and used the legs to fence him off. I clipped his wrist with the tip of one leg, but my only concern was to make sure that he couldn’t get at me with the knife—it was his own fault that he ran his face into another leg and poked himself in the eye.

The howl he let out had far more rage in it than pain, so I figured that it wasn’t going to stop him. I jabbed at him, catching him in the chest and the forehead. He fell over, but he hadn’t actually been knocked down, and certainly wasn’t unconscious.

For the moment, though, he’d lost interest in trying to impale me. He wasn’t in any hurry to get up. He dropped the knife, quite deliberately, to signal that he’d given up.

The door to the bar was behind me. I heard it open, but I didn’t turn round until I was certain that the Sleath wasn’t going to change his mind again. When I did, I was all set to tell the bartender that everything was okay and that there was no need to call a peace-officer.

The bartender was there, but he wasn’t alone. There were two Spirellans with him: Heleb and his little brother.

I was confused, but the feeling I’d had that things weren’t right suddenly increased by an order of magnitude. I was still holding the chair, and I abandoned any thought of putting it down. I looked at Simeon Balidar, expecting a little moral support. He was studiously looking at the ceiling, absent-mindedly shuffling the cards.

I looked back at Heleb. He met my eye. I looked away immediately, but I knew that it was too late.

“Hello again,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I’m still thinking about your offer.”

The bartender closed the door behind him, leaving Heleb and Lema on the inside. It was the only door there was, and the room had no window. I looked at the two Zabarans, but they were backing off. The Sleath had been right. They were all in it together—but he wasn’t the sucker the trap had been set to catch.

“I get the message,” I said to Heleb. “You really want me to join your expedition. This wasn’t necessary, you know—it was probably the best offer I was going to get.”

“Everyone knows that humans are barbarians,” Heleb observed, in his scrupulously-pronounced parole, “but cheating at cards is not the kind of conduct that can be tolerated in a civilized society.”

The Sleath was getting to his feet now, with a new gleam in his eye. He didn’t seem to be in on the conspiracy—he thought his irrational convictions had just been proved right. He didn’t pick up the knife, though—he just leaned over the table to pick up the money I’d had in front of me.

“It’s not all yours,” I pointed out, mildly.

“It would have been,” the Sleath said, “if the game had been honest.”

“No it wouldn’t,” I said, speaking softly even though it was pure indignation that made me do it. “You’re a truly terrible player, and the sooner you face up to that, the better.”

He probably sneered, but I couldn’t tell. He picked up the money—all of it.

I didn’t try to stop him. I knew that it wasn’t worth it. I didn’t look directly at Heleb again, either—but I saw him coming out of the corner of my eye. I still had the chair in my hand, so I lashed out with all the force I could muster.

Unfortunately, I was cramped for room. He was expecting it, of course, and he was trained in unarmed combat. He grabbed the chair legs and twisted, adding his own strength to the force of my awkward thrust. If I hadn’t let go, I’d have gone crashing into the wall.

I dived for the door, but even if I’d got past Heleb, Lema would still have been in the way. One of them hit me on the back of the neck with a rigid hand.

I was on my knees, dazed but not unconscious. I put both my hands on top of my head and tried to curl up into a ball, but it was no good. Stiff fingers closed on my neck, groping for the carotid arteries.

The trouble with convergent evolution, I thought, as I passed out, is that it makes us all anatomically similar without making us all equal. It just gives the bad guys transferable skills.