Asgard's Secret (19 page)

At which point, I figured,
she would want to bring her men safely back to Skychain City.
All
her men. But I had Saul Lyndrach's notebook now, and I was probably the only
man on Asgard, for the moment, who could read it. I didn't really care one way
or the other what happened to Myrlin, even though I had nothing against him
personally—but I did care a great deal about what happened to me, and that
notebook, after Susarma Lear had collected her bounty.

I hadn't gone
within two metres of Jacinthe Siani; she hadn't had a chance to bug
my
hair. If it should happen that the star-captain and I were separated somehow,
down in the levels, she would be the one that Amara Guur would track—which was
only fair, considering that she had all the flame-pistols. I was the one with
the local knowledge, and I was the one who had always been destined to find a
way to the centre of Asgard. That was my business, whether I'd been drafted or
not—and I hadn't actually signed the papers, because Susarma Lear was in too
much of a hurry to bother with formalities of that sort.

My conscience was
clear—or clearish, at any rate. When the time came, I intended to desert my
newfound compatriots and go my own way.

Susarma Lear was
right to hurry, though, just as Amara Guur had been right to hand over the
notebook to me. If it had fallen into Tetron hands, it would only have been a
matter of time before they found someone else to read it for them. If it fell
into Tetron hands now, the whole game might be over—but the Tetrax didn't know
that. They were playing it the clever way, like the civilized folk they were.
Slave-owners always get other people to do their dirty work, if they can.

I figured that
there had to be a microtransmitter or two in the book as well, and that Amara
Guur must be reckoning on tracking me by that means—but I had faith in my
memory and my suit's tape-recorder. Even before the time came to dump the
star-captain and her merry men, I figured I'd jettison the book. It would be a
risk, but a worthwhile one. After all—the prize that was at stake was the
ultimate
prize, the one I'd been after all my life.

It
was
mine, by rights. I was Saul's legitimate heir. He and I had had an arrangement.
And I was the one who had passed the android on to him, even if the resultant
rescue had come a little too late. That was his fault, in a way. If he'd only
told me what he had before he went to the C.R.E., so that we could tackle the
problem together, everything would probably have been all right.

Not that I blamed
him, of course. If I'd been in his shoes, I probably wouldn't have done
anything differently— except, of course, break under torture and hand the whole
thing over to Amara Guur.

15

Everything took a little longer than
Susarma Lear had hoped, but we logged out of lock five thirty units after Life
Support and Regulation were scheduled to switch on the city's
"daylight." Outside, it was about thirty Earthly hours short of dawn.

We headed north
across the vast plain that surrounded the city on all sides.

Serne and the
star-captain were riding with me in Saul's truck. Crucero, Khalekhan, and a man
named Vasari were following in the second vehicle. We had radio communication
with the other truck, and with Susarma Lear's warship, which had left its dock
at the top of the skychain in order to mount a discreet and distant search for
Myrlin's truck. It wasn't that we didn't trust the Tetrax to pass on any
information gleaned from their satellites, of course; we were just taking extra
precautions.

The headlights of
the truck played upon a near-featureless white carpet. Any tracks left by other
trucks had been quickly covered by the ever-swirling snow. On the surface, of
course, the snow was
real
snow: just water, with hardly any pollutants. All the other
components of the atmosphere were gaseous; they provided the wind.

"Jesus,
Rousseau," Susarma Lear said, after we'd been traveling for a couple of
hours. "This is a really weird place." She was sitting beside me,
staring through the canopy at the distant horizon. There were two bunks in the
rear, so she could have gone to sleep, but she still hadn't managed to wind
down enough to get past her insomnia. She had ordered Serne to go to sleep, but
she was intent on taking a driving-lesson first.

"Pretty
weird," I admitted. "It seems that hardly anyone lived on the
outside, back in the good old days. Things grew here, apparently, but it must
have been a wholly artificial biosphere. It was as complicated as any Gaian
system, even though it didn't have the same habitat-range—in the absence of
mountains and seas it was spread as thin as margarine on a workhouse loaf. Its
biochemical relics are still detectable, including seeds and spores of various
kinds, but it's all dead and mostly in a fairly advanced state of decay."

"How do you
find your way around?"

"Satellites
and location-finders. If your equipment fails, though, you can navigate by the
stars, provided that you can recognise the markers. It isn't quite as flat as
it looks hereabouts—there are troughs and hollows as well as gentle contours.
You'll see that better when the sun rises and the snow begins to melt."

"There aren't
that many stars," she observed. "Are we looking out from the edge of
the galaxy, or is it just dust?"

"A bit of
both," I said. "That's intergalactic space all right, but if it
weren't for the dust you could pick out other galaxies with the naked eye. You
can't see the black one, though—not without an X-ray 'scope."

"What black
one?" she asked.

I looked sideways
at her. "You really have led a sheltered life, haven't you? All war, war,
and yet more war, ever since you were a little girl. You know nothing about
Asgard, nothing about the black galaxy ..."

"So educate
me," she said. I'd shown her all the truck's controls—they weren't
complicated—but she was still hungry for learning.

"It's the
modest member of our little local cluster," I told her. "It's about a
hundred and twenty thousand light- years away, closer than the Magellanic clouds,
but much more discreet. It's getting even closer—heading towards us at
something like thirty thousand metres per second. It'll take a hundred million
years or so to get here, so we don't have to worry about it yet . . . unless,
of course, we're prepared to take a very long view of the future. It's mostly
just a heterogeneous cloud of dust, like the ones inside the galaxy, but it's
big. It has a very low mean temperature, but there are a few stars inside it.
Eventually, it will engulf the whole galactic arm, like a cosmic shadow or a
subtle fog. Life on Gaia-clone planets will probably go on much as usual for
long time after the eclipse starts, but the dust's not entirely placid.
There'll be plenty of scope for cosmic catastrophes, both like and unlike the
one that probably overcame Asgard."

"Which
was?"

"I told
you," I reminded her. "Opinions vary. The majority view is that
Asgard—or the world that provided the raw materials from which Asgard was
constructed—ran into a cold cloud, mostly hydrogen but with a lot of
thinly-distributed cosmic debris, cometary ices and the like. Over a period of
time, the atmosphere soaked up more and more of it. If proto-Asgard had a
primary in those days, as it most probably did, its light must have been
severely weakened, and it may have begun behaving strangely. The people must
have had a few hundred thousand years notice, at least. Time enough to take
elaborate countermeasures.

"The theorists
who think that Asgard is just a planet with a few extra crusts built on top of
its mantle figure that the task of modifying the world was a relatively simple
and straightforward one. Those who think that they used the raw material of a
whole planetary family to build shells around the star—or maybe around an
artificial star—tell a much longer and more elaborate tale. Anyway, the
response doesn't seem to have been entirely successful. In the short term, it
was probably a triumph . . . but if you extend your history far enough,
something always goes awry in the end. One way or another, the surface
biosphere gave up the ghost. The uppermost levels were abandoned to the
creeping cold.

"A few million
years passed ... or more than a few. Hundreds or thousands of millions, maybe.
A long, dark, deep-frozen night. Then, one way or another, Asgard acquired a
new primary. The likelier alternative is that it simply drifted into the new
sun's gravity-well and was captured, but the more adventurous theorists have
wilder explanations. Anyway, the atmosphere warmed up again. The Tetrax are
trying hard to get the ecosphere kick-started, but it won't be the same
biosphere if and when they do. It'll be a new artefact—but it might allow
humanoids to roam around on the surface again, in a few thousand years' time.
By then, the upper levels will probably be functional again too. Lots of prime
real-estate—enough to accommodate entire species, with all their ecospherical
baggage. Unless, of course, the people who owned it before come back to claim
it."

She was struggling
to get to grips with the catalogue of possibilities. "So the most likely
story," she said, "is that this was once a planet just like
Earth—until it needed shielding from some kind of. . . cosmic threat. At which
point its inhabitants built several layers of armour around it."

Her choice of
vocabulary was revealing—but she was fresh from smashing up a planet.

"We haven't
found any guns," I told her. "There's no evidence that Asgard was a
fortress."

"No?" she
said sceptically. "It's a steel ball the size of a giant planet, and when
you scratch the surface you find another steel ball inside it, and then another
. . . except that scratching the surface is all you've done. A trapdoor here, a
trapdoor there, all going down into the living-quarters. What makes you think
that the guns aren't all around us, securely locked away?"

Asgard certainly
wasn't made of steel, but I didn't want to quibble about trivia. "The
Tetrax," I said, "think it was all a matter of cosmic dust clouds and
natural catastrophes. The habitats they've explored seem to have been occupied
by closely-related but distinct species, living harmoniously together."

"There you
are, then," she said. "Good neighbours need common enemies. Stands to
reason."

"Not on
Asgard, it doesn't," I contradicted her. "There are hundreds of
different species here, living together more-or-less peacefully . . . except
for the vormyr, and the Spirellans . . . and the humans." I could see why
she might think that my argument wasn't very strong, given what we'd all been
through in the last couple of days.

"You say the
planet drifted into this system," she said. "Where from?"

I shrugged.
"Nobody knows," I said, "but there's not that much dust in the
immediate vicinity, so it must have come a long way—maybe as far as
that"
I pointed upwards.

"The black
galaxy?"

"It seems
unlikely, given the pace it would have to have traveled—but there are some very
adventurous theorists on the fringes of the C.R.E. Some suggest that the outer
layers might have been abandoned for the duration of the voyage, but now that
Asgard's reached its destination they'll be looking to come up from the depths
again some time soon.