Asgard's Secret (24 page)

"We used to
spend most of our time creeping around under a blue sky like you'd find on any
friendly world—or under the stars, anyhow—and there'd be growing things all
around us, nice and green, and sometimes cities that might be
anybody's
cities . . . but the air was usually filled with things
that would turn us into great lumps of gangrene if we took a single lungful.
Even when the air was
clean ... we
had to
wear the suits anyway, just in case. We relied on the machines on our backs to
keep us alive. The suits were virtually indestructible . . . couldn't tear no
matter what you did to them . . . but somehow I never felt entirely safe
touching things, just in case I pricked my finger and died screaming.

"I never liked
the machine on my back. I couldn't see it and I couldn't touch it . . . but
there it was, masterminding my chemistry like some little god. Somehow it
always seemed more remote than the ship, or the stars in the sky."

If he'd stopped
halfway I'd have told him that I understood—that I knew how he felt. He went
on long enough, though, to convince me that I didn't. His was a special
paranoia.

"This won't be
so very different," I said. "Amara Guur's bully boys will only have
good old-fashioned needle-guns, and I don't know what your friend the android
will be packing, but it really doesn't matter. While we're down in the cold
levels we only have to be hit once and we'll be dead. If we have to go deeper,
where Saul found warmth and life, we might be able to survive a superficial
wound or two . . . but we'd be trapped down there forever. You can't send a
radio message asking for help when you're way down in the levels."

"Don't worry
about it," he said. "When it comes to gunplay, we're the best, and
you've said nothing to make me think there'll be anything where we're going
that will put us out of our stride."

I was tempted to
ask whether he suffered at all from claustrophobia. There were a lot of wide
open spaces down below, sure enough, but we'd have to work our way through some
pretty narrow corridors—wormholes of a kind very different from the ones our
starships are supposed to make as they whizz-bang their way through the
undervoid. The more I got to see of the star-captain and her merry men, though,
the more confident I became that they could handle themselves perfectly well in
what would be to them
terra
incognita.
Crazy they might be, but there was no doubting that
they were tough.

"If the war
was as bad as you say," I commented, "I'd have thought you'd head
straight for home now that it's over. Why come all the way out here?"

His lips seemed
hardly to move as he said: "It isn't over."

"No?" I answered,
sceptically. "You're telling me that the whole damn human race is at war
with one lousy android?"

A
special paranoia indeed!
I thought, when he looked away.

All he said was:
"It's got to be finished. It's necessary."

"Well," I
said, "maybe so. That's your business, and you seem intent on keeping me
out of it. But there is another side to what we're doing now, and I'd really
appreciate a little help in alerting the star-captain to some of the other
implications of all this. What's happening here on Asgard might be every bit as
important to the future of the human race as the war you just won—and to the
rest of the galactic community, Asgard's immeasurably more important."

His pale eyes just
stared into mine.

"Look," I
said, "the star-captain already worked it out that if there are only fifty
layers, there could easily be a hundred times the surface area of Earth down
there. If, as seems possible, the whole bloody thing is an artefact, there
could be
ten thousand
levels—the equivalent of fifteen or twenty thousand
whole worlds . . . maybe hundreds of thousands of independent habitats. There
might be more humanoid races living
inside
Asgard than in
the entire galaxy of natural worlds. Who knows? The Tetrax have been trying to
lift the lid off this great big can of worms for a hell of a long time—and now
we
have a golden opportunity to do it. You and me and the blonde bombshell! Oh,
merde
—you
don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Don't insult
me, Rousseau," he said, mildly. "I'm just a belter, like you. I don't
know the first thing about this place, that's true. But I'm not a fool, and the
star-captain is anything but. If what we find down there is something useful to
the human race, we'll do what's necessary. After we get the android, we'll
decide what to do next, in the line of duty. To be honest, though, I have to
say that what I've seen of this world, and what you've told me about the cold
down below, doesn't fill me with wild enthusiasm."

He'd asked
me—ordered me—not to insult him, so I didn't. I shut up. But what I was
thinking was that this was a man whose imagination had shriveled up inside him,
and all but faded away. For him, it had always been the human race against the
Salamandrans for control of local space. All the great wide cosmos, with its
thousands of humanoid cultures, meant next to nothing to him. He had some
vague idea that Asgard might be important in a political context, but he really
didn't see what a puzzle it was. He didn't seem to realise that cracking the
puzzle might tell us exactly where we—not just
Homo sapiens
but all
the humanoid races—fitted into the vastest possible scheme of things.

He had no real
awareness of the mystery of our origins, or the possibilities of our ultimate
future. I did.

I'm not a
passionate man, by any means. I'm a cold fish, content with my own company,
satisfied with day-to-day survival in a fairly unfriendly universe. Personal
relationships aren't my cup of tea. But I do
care
about things—
about the big things, the
deep
questions.

It mattered to me
what was in the heart of Asgard, although I had no way of explaining to a man
like Serne exactly
why
it mattered. I wanted to know who built Asgard, and why;
where it had come from and where it was intended to go. I wanted to know
whether all the humanoid races in the galaxy came from common stock; and if so,
whose, and why. I wanted to know who I was, because despite what Serne said, I
wasn't just a belter, or even a human being, but a citizen of infinity and
eternity, with a birth certificate written in the DNA of my chromosomes.

That was why, with
all due respect to my new commanding officer and my fellow starship troopers,
I couldn't actually find it in my heart to care about their lousy android and
their stupid paranoia.

I was on my way to
the centre of the universe, and to my personal confrontation with its deepest
secrets.

It turned out to be
a more tortuous journey than I anticipated, but isn't it always?

20

The most tedious phase of the journey came
eventually to its close.

That filled me with
relief, though I wasn't sure exactly what I had to be pleased about. I was
still being hustled along by a gang of lunatics, chasing a giant who was in the
habit of making a real mess of people who annoyed him, with a dozen or more of
the nastiest characters in galactic society trailing along in my wake.

It was enough to
make anyone feel insecure.

Anyhow, there were
the trucks, standing in lonely splendour on an empty plain. The snow had begun
to drift around their wheels, carried by the keen wind which was blowing out of
the nightside toward the hotspot where the sun stood at its temporary zenith.

We were only
leaving one man—Vasari—to guard the trucks, which numbered three now that we
had caught up with the one which Myrlin had "borrowed" from me. The
star-captain gave Vasari orders to say clear of Amara Guur if he could, and not
to fire unless he was fired on.

"He probably
won't take the risk of trying to kill you," she told him, "and if
you're here, he'll have to leave some of his own men here too. Don't start
anything—but be careful."

"You could ask
the navy one more time to take the bastards out," Vasari suggested.
"Laser, bomb, or particle- beam—I don't mind at all."

"Sorry,"
she said. "Politics." Her tone was neutral, but she really was sorry.

"With
luck," I told him, "you won't be alone with the bad guys for long.
Now that news has leaked out . . . well, by the time we get back, there could
be a real circus up here. Even if that doesn't happen, they won't want to make
a move against you, because it would give the Tetrax the excuse they needed to
come down on the whole expedition. Guur has to stay on the right side of the
Tetrax now."

"I'll be
okay," Vasari assured me.

What I'd said was
true; other people would be headed this way—but none of them had a tape of the
juicy bits in Saul Lyndrach's notebook, and none of them would be able to read
the original now that I'd made a few careful alterations. They might be able
to track us, but the Tetrax wouldn't even try; they'd wait to see who emerged,
and what news they brought with them.

I hoped Vasari
would be able to follow his orders. It wouldn't be so bad to come back from our
little expedition to find the peace-officers waiting for me instead of the
gangsters, but whatever we found down below, the location of Saul's dropshaft
to the warm levels was a secret that the Tetrax and the C.R.E. would pay very
dearly to know. If and when I decided to sell it, I didn't want them to have a
reason to get it out of me by some less pleasant method than paying through the
nose for it.

I didn't point out
to Vasari or to the star-captain that if it should chance that Myrlin returned
to the surface before we did, the Tetrax wouldn't take any more kindly to
Vasari killing him than they would to Amara Guur's rearguard killing Vasari.
That was another little bit of business which could only be safely conducted in
the privacy of the lower levels, beyond the reach of the long arm of the law.

Our five-man
expedition hauled our sleds across the melting snow to Saul's portal. Saul's
tracks had long gone but Myrlin's fresh ones were obvious. Myrlin hadn't bothered
to replace the plug Saul had put in to conceal his drillhole, so we were able
to start putting equipment through it without delay.

The trapdoors the
cavies had set in the roof of their world were designed to react to some kind
of transmitted signal, in response to which the barrier would retreat downwards
and then slide sideways into a slot. Needless to say, no such mechanism had
ever been found in working order. Drilling through the traps was extremely
laborious—they weren't metal but some kind of artificial bioproduct, like
super-hard dental enamel—but galactic technology was easily good enough to
supply appropriate tools. The principal structural material of which Asgard
seemed to be made was a very different matter, as it had to be if it was going
to permit hundreds of hollow levels to be excavated in it without collapsing.
Drilling or blasting through the actual walls of Asgard wasn't
quite
impossible, but it was near enough to impossible to make the trapdoors seem
inviting. Down below, it was the same: where there were no open doorways, we
had to look for closed ones, which wouldn't be too difficult to break through.
There were probably millions of doorways that we couldn't even see—doorways
that might open up all the lower levels, if only we knew where they were.