Asgard's Secret

7

“As a matter of interest,” I said to 69-Aquila, as I dealt another hand, “has anyone ever escaped from this lock-up?”

“No,” he replied, with brutal honesty—but he liked the sound of his own voice and the pretensions of his own wisdom far too much to content himself with monosyllables. “You should not feel so badly about your inability to understand the logic of humanoid society and galactic civilization, Mr. Rousseau,” he went on. “After all, humans are newcomers to the scene, hurled on to the stage without adequate preparation. You have had no opportunity to study the histories of other worlds and other species, and to induce empirical generalizations therefrom. You are bound to be confused, because you are out of your depth. Your species should not have gone to war against the Salamandrans, and you, Mr. Rousseau, should not have come to Asgard. I understand the temptation, but solving the mystery of Asgard is something that humans, vormyr, Zabarans, Sleaths, and the like are not intellectually equipped to do. The Tetrax will discover the answer, when we have amassed sufficient data.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’m not the only one who doesn’t think so.”

“Clearly not, if you really are innocent of the crime for which you have been convicted,” he observed. “Whoever intends to buy your services obviously believes that they are worth purchasing at a very high price. Fortunately, you are living in a civilized society. Your new employer will be forced to respect the limitations of the law in his use of your… talents.”

“Merde,” I said—although I had to say it in French, so it was just so much empty noise to him. “Your effective jurisdiction ends at the airlock. Once we’re out in the cold, anything goes. You might think you’re living in a civilized society, but the Tetrax only run the administration and the legal system. People like Amara Guur run the underworld: vormyr, Spirellans, and every other kind of barbarian you can put a name to.”

I was too harsh; I should have taken more notice of the fact that he’d conceded the possibility that I really might have been framed. His hesitation before referring to my “talents” hadn’t been intended as a sly insult. He really was wondering what I had that might prompt Amara Guur—or anyone else—to take so much trouble to obtain total control of me.

“You know,” I said, to calm the atmosphere a little, “there’s one thing I’ve never understood about you Tetrax. Why do you have code numbers instead of first names?”

Usually, you have to be wary of asking aliens questions like that, in case they take offence. Fortunately the Tetrax don’t seem to go in for taking mortal offence at personal questions, and 69-Aquila seemed enthusiastic to educate me while I was at his mercy.

“Humankind is not the only race whose members resent being numbered,” he told me. “Such refusals seem to be based in a fear of losing one’s individuality, a reluctance to think of oneself as a more-or-less insignificant unit in a much greater whole. We Tetrax do not require such illusions, and our guiding anxiety is precisely the opposite. We treasure our connectedness, our membership of a nested series of larger wholes. We bear our numbers proudly, because they remind us that we are not mere isolated irrelevancies, divorced from the context that gives our thoughts and actions meaning. As a species, humans are stuck in the last phase of a degenerate capitalism; as individuals, you are stuck in the last phase of a degenerate existential isolation. Wiser species have moved on.”

“So one of us is crazy,” I said, “and you think it’s not you. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

“I would be forced to worry if you began to agree with me,” 69-Aquila said calmly. “I believe that I win again.”

Before he could lay his cards triumphantly down on the tabletop, however, his wristphone chimed. He consulted the display for a full minute.

“Someone is asking to see you,” he said. “It seems that they have a contract of employment to offer you.”

“What a pleasant surprise,” I said, grimly.

Amara Guur didn’t come in person, of course. I was half-expecting Heleb, who’d already made his desire to purchase my services a matter of public record, but discretion seemed to be keeping him out of the game for a while. The person who actually appeared on the other side of my glass partition was a Kythnan woman named Jacinthe Siani.

All the humanoid races making up the galactic community are built according to the same basic blueprint, although no one has figured out, as yet, how the original was determined. We all have two arms, two legs and a head, and we all have two eyes, a mouth and an arsehole. Noses are more various, and so are the embellishments with which various kinds of skin come equipped—horns, hair, scales and so on. Humanoid species come in all colours and many textures; relatively few of them seem utterly loathsome or frightful to one another, but relatively few of them seem markedly attractive either. There are only a couple of dozen alien species that are sufficiently similar to humans that it wouldn’t seem in the least perverted for them to engage in cross-species sexual intercourse. Among those, there are maybe three or four which produce significant numbers of individuals who seem more beautiful to human eyes than actual humans do.

Kythnans are one of them. Among humans, the fact gives rise to frequent jokes about Kythnans and kin. Jacinthe Siani was an exceptional member of her species, as measured by human eyes.

I assumed that Simeon Balidar must have been the one who explained that circumstance to Amara Guur, given that the vormyr are at the other end of the spectrum. To Amara Guur, Jacinthe Siani probably looked just as loathsome as Balidar did; I didn’t dare to conjecture what she must think of him.

Her skin had a faint greenish tinge, but it wasn’t at all unattractive. Her features had a cast that would have been considered Oriental had she been human, but that wasn’t unattractive either—far from it. She didn’t have pointed ears though. I really like pointed ears—but there was no way that Simeon Balidar could know that.

“Perhaps someone ought to explain to Amara Guur that we humans tend to do things the other way around,” I said to her after 69-Aquila had formally introduced us. “We try the seduction first, and the bribery second. Then we bring in the heavy metal. There’s no point in putting on the velvet glove when I’ve already been floored by the iron fist.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about, Mr. Rousseau,” she purred. She had a soft, low voice that would probably have sounded very nice if she’d been talking English—or, even better, French—instead of pangalactic parole.

“No,” I said. “I bet my lawyer could search for days on end without tracing a manifest connection between you and Amara Guur, or any other petty crime-lord. I suppose you’re recruiting for your private stud farm, and you’ve just decided to start breeding humans.”

“I need a man with your expertise,” she said.

“Precisely,” I replied.

“Your expertise in lower-level exploration,” she elaborated.

“You don’t say,” I said. At least, I tried to. Parole isn’t geared to translate that kind of idiomatic expression.

“I do,” she assured me. “I represent a group of people who are mounting an expedition that will penetrate further into the core of Asgard than any previous one. We need to hire men who have extensive experience of moving into virgin territory.”

“And unlike the C.R.E., you don’t mind hiring convicted murderers?”

“You have a debt to pay, Mr. Rousseau,” she observed. “We are civilized folk, who do not harbour petty prejudices. You have the expertise we need.”

“So have a lot of other people,” I told her. “Saul Lyndrach, for example. Have you tried to buy him?”

For a fleeting moment, a shadow crossed her face. No matter how human or superhuman she seemed, I couldn’t be sure that I’d read the expression correctly, but it seemed to me like anxious suspicion. She was worried that I might know more than I seemed to know. She was worried that I might have more with which to negotiate than was apparent, even now.

I wished, fervently, that I had. “Amara Guur doesn’t have the situation under control, does he?” I said. “Framing me was a hasty move, urged on him by panic. There’s a loose cannon rolling around his deck, isn’t there? You don’t have Saul on the payroll, do you? Whatever he found and you’re trying to steal, it’s still out of reach. You want me because I’m a friend of Saul’s, don’t you? That’s what makes me so much more valuable than any other freelance scavenger.”

Every word we exchanged was being recorded, of course. My trial was over, but that didn’t mean the Tetrax weren’t still taking an interest in the case.

“We are prepared to offer you a two-year contract,” she said, doggedly following her script. “It will not pay off more than a fraction of your debt, but the rate of repayment is considerably greater than you would earn by any other means of employment. There are risks involved, of course; we shall be going a long way from Skychain City, and descending further into the levels than anyone has contrived to do before— but I believe that prospect will interest you, and it is clearly in everyone’s interest that you sign the contract.”

“Except,” I said, “that once I’m out in the cold, my life won’t be worth a spoonful of nitrogen.”

“On the contrary,” she said. “It is very much in our interests that you should remain alive, healthy and cooperative. We have no intention of allowing you to come to harm.”

“Do I get a percentage of the profits?” I asked.

“That might be negotiable,” she confirmed. “May I take it that you are agreeable in principle, subject to the outcome of such negotiations?”

“That depends,” I said. “I might get other offers. Now that you’ve put yours on record, the competition might decide to match it, or go one better. It’s Myrlin, isn’t it? The wild card, I mean. The factor that threw off all your calculations. Whether you have Saul or not, you don’t have him—and you don’t know how much he knows.”

“Please try to concentrate on the matter in hand, Mr.

Rousseau,” she said, seemingly unruffled by my stab in the dark. “May I take it that, in the absence of any other offers, you are prepared to negotiate the details of this one? I’m sure the court would be happy to know that you intend to discharge your obligation conscientiously.”

I remembered that Myrlin was supposed to be a giant. Even if he hadn’t been, he’d have had a problem blending into the background of a place like Skychain City. If Myrlin was out of Amara Guur’s reach, he must surely have found some influential friends of his own. Or had I miscalculated the situation? Was it something else that had gone awry, derailing Amara Guur’s original plan? Who had tipped him off that Saul had found something valuable? Balidar? Someone at the C.R.E.? Who would have known, given that Saul hadn’t given me more than the merest hint?

“I’ll be happy to give your offer serious consideration,” I lied. “But you’ll forgive me if I wait the full seventy-two hours before making a decision. I have to consider all the alternatives.”

“You only have one, Mr. Rousseau,” the Kythnan said. “Do you really want to spend half a lifetime asleep, while your body and brain are rented to anyone and everyone who cares to pay the standard fee?”

“I’d have job security,” I pointed out. “And the Tetrax would want me alive and healthy too. Lifetimes are increasing all the while—by the time I got my mind back, we might all have the biotech to live forever. There are a thousand races working on the problem, and we all have the same DNA.”

“That would be a reckless gamble, Mr. Rousseau,” she said. “Accidents happen, even in a gel-tank.”

Her tone was casual, but I knew a threat when I heard one. I hoped that the people listening in were similarly sensitive.

“Maybe I’m beaten,” I conceded, “but I’m not quite ready to lie down yet. You have my permission to talk to my lawyer about that percentage of the profits, and any other safeguards he cares to incorporate. His name’s 238-Zenatta. But I’m not going to sign anything until I’ve had every last hour of my three days’ grace, and I’m not going to give up hoping for a miracle.”

“Thank you,” she said—and she smiled. It was one hell of a smile, but I wasn’t fooled for an instant.