Asgard's Secret (27 page)

The troopers worked
like Trojans to clear the way, and we were on the trail again with all due
speed. Our tempers were only slightly frayed by this extra inconvenience, but
my comrades-in-arms were already brimful of bile toward their hapless quarry,
and I knew that if and when they caught up with him they were really going to
make him suffer.

I resolved not to
be there, if there was anywhere else I could possibly be.

Getting down to
three was no picnic, but we still had the ropes and enough equipment to rig up
a winch and harness, so the empty shaft posed no real problems. We stopped soon
after that to rig up the hammocks again. The troopers seemed tired but
otherwise undisturbed. We'd been moving through narrowly-confined spaces all
day, and I'd known men who'd never before shown signs of claustrophobia begin
to develop the heebie-jeebies under circumstances like these; despite their
inbuilt paranoia, though, the troopers were tough and disciplined. Perhaps they
were revelling in the luxury of having only one enemy trying to kill them,
instead of being surrounded by malevolent aliens and dangerous biotech-bugs.
Despite what he'd done to Amara Guur's hatchet men, and despite the little
incident of the flame-pistol booby-trap, they weren't really frightened of the
android. They were confident that once they caught up with him, they could fry
him.

Serne said to me
before we went to sleep that he didn't see how a lone man could wander around
the underworld for twenty days at a time without going a little bit crazy. I assured
him that, with practice, the burden of solitude was easy enough to bear. The
monochrome surroundings, I told him, were quite comforting in their way. I didn't
mention that I usually packed my microtapes with hundreds of hours of music to
relieve the tedium, and that I was sometimes wont to talk to myself
incessantly, making up with loquacious fervour anything which I lacked in
narrative skill. That would have sounded too much like a confession of
weakness, unbefitting even the most reluctant hero of the Star Force.

The next day, the
conversation flowed more easily, partly because we were all becoming a bit more
comfortable with one another's presence, and partly because the visual
environment remained so utterly sinister that we were in some need of auditory
stimulation. The endless labyrinthine corridors along which we tramped were
quite unchanging, and Myrlin had ceased to bother with such trivial practical
jokes as laying tripwires that might or might not be connected to something.

I told the troopers
about my adventures working the caves—about the kinds of things I had found,
and about the kinds of things that everyone was very keen to find, in order to
provide another quantum leap in our understanding of Asgard and its mysterious
inhabitants. In exchange, they told me about their adventures fighting the
Salamandrans— about all their narrow squeaks, and all their successful missions.
Their stories seemed a lot more exciting than mine, and the laconic way they
told them was enough to make the blood run cold.

"This may seem
like a stupid question," I said at one point, "but what exactly were
we fighting the Salamandrans
for?"

"We were
trying to colonize the same region of space," Crucero told me.
"Beyond that region, we were virtually surrounded by other cultures longer
established in space. There seemed to be only a handful of worlds up for grabs,
with humans and Salamandrans equally well placed to grab them. We didn't start
out to go to war—in fact, we set out to co-operate, agreeing to share most of
the worlds and defend them together, lest anyone else try to move in.

"Ninety
percent of the worlds were dead rocks, which would take thousands of years to
render truly habitable, whether we tried to establish a terraformed life-system
outside or tried to hollow out an asteroid-type environment. There didn't seem
to be anything much worth fighting over, and it must have seemed easy enough to
negotiate with the Salamandrans about who got which lump of stone. For a while,
we were fetishistic about co-operation, especially when we found out that the
Salamandrans had biotech skills somewhat in advance of ours, while their metals
technology and plasma physics were less sophisticated—there seemed to be much
to be gained by exchanging information.

"It all went
sour, though. The closer the two races became, the worse the friction became.
In the end, we found that we were
too
close. When
hostility began to build, it couldn't be contained or diverted. We were locked
in a feedback loop which built up a series of individually trivial incidents
into a chain of disasters. They started the actual war, but that was probably a
matter of chance. Once the bombing started, there was no way to stop. It was
genocide or nothing, and it was just a matter of which race ended up extinct or
enslaved. We didn't have the communications necessary to talk peace—we were
spread out very thinly in a volume of space a hundred light-years across, and
once we knew that the killing had started in a dozen different places there was
no possible response except to commit the Star Force completely. If we'd
hesitated, we might have been wiped out. As it was, we lost more than half our
population outside the system, and a considerable fraction inside it—
especially in the belt and all points outwards."

"Are you
sure
that it couldn't have been settled?" I asked. "Are you certain there
was no way to stop?"

"Hell,
no," the lieutenant said. "But not being sure wasn't enough. Don't
give me any Tetron crap about having to live together, Rousseau. We know all
that. We know it's a big galaxy, full of intelligent humanoid species, and we
want to be part of a great big happy family just like everyone else. But once
the killing starts, you can't fall back on that kind of optimism. You have to
worry every time you go to sleep that before you wake up the entire human race
might be wiped out by some kind of Salamandran plague, or Earth itself turned to
slag by some kind of planet- cracker. Once they'd begun to kill us, we had to
kill them first. That's all there was to it. You don't have any right to say
that we didn't do it right, because you weren't even
there.
You were here, doing your bit for the Tetron cause instead—helping those
monkey-faced hypocrites lengthen their lead in the galactic technology race.
Some people

would reckon that a kind of treason, you
know."

As it happened, I did
know. But I wasn't about to concede the point.

"It isn't just
the Tetrax," I told Crucero. "There are several hundred races
represented in Skychain City. It's the one place in the galaxy where everyone
has
to get along with everyone else. The C.R.E. has scientists from dozens of
worlds, including Earth, and if there's the seed of a real galactic community
anywhere in the universe, this is where it is. Maybe the work we're doing here,
and the way we're doing it, is all that will save the entire population of the
galaxy from consuming itself in futile wars."

"And maybe it
won't," the star-captain butted in—which is the kind of argument which
doesn't readily yield to rational criticism. Then she added her own judgment.
"I think this ironclad artificial world of yours is all that was left over
from the
last
round of interstellar wars," she said. "I think
that's why its atmosphere caught fire, and why its outermost layers were
frozen down. Hell, maybe the war's still going on down there—and maybe the
reason the owners never came back out is because every last one of them was a
casualty."

I had to accept
that it was a possibility. The thought that it might be
true
was one of the most depressing I had ever had to face. Whatever was waiting for
us at the centre, it surely had to be something better than
that.
Of all the potential solutions to the riddle of Asgard that I could imagine,
the one which implied that the galactic races might be doomed to have their
nascent civilization blasted into smithereens by interstellar war was far from
being the most appealing. Even the star-captain, for all her wolfish temperament,
didn't seem to relish it much.

"The galactic
races are similar enough to be members of the same family," I reminded
her. "You and I may have more actual genes in common with chimpanzees and
gorillas, but in terms of the way brains work, humans and Salamandrans—hell,
even the Tetrax and the vormyr—are virtually mirror images of one another, with
only very slight variations. We ought to be able to get along."

"Sure,"
she said. "And ninety percent of murders happen within the family. Been
that way since Cain and Abel . . . likely to be that way forever more.
Interstellar distances just make it a little bit easier to fall out with one
another, that's all."

"I hope you're
wrong," I told her. "I hope with all my heart that you're
wrong."

"Oh shit,
Rousseau," she said. "How the hell do you think I feel? But hope just
isn't enough, is it?"

I had no answer to
that.

23

I don't know what kind of weird instinct
Saul Lyndrach had used to guide him, but it was nothing I could share. I was
continually mystified by the turns he had taken and by the decisions he had
made. Maybe he was being deliberately perverse when he found the way to the
centre—maybe perversity is what it takes to get to the heart of any matter.
One thing is for sure, though: the route we were following guided us into some
very peculiar territory.

Scavengers almost
always did their hunting in regions of the underworld that were given over to
some kind of intensive technological enterprise. After all, what we were
searching for was artefacts, and what every scavenger hoped to discover was
some state-of-the-art gadget that no one's ever come across before. The places
we tended never to go were the wilderness areas.

No one really knew
how much wilderness there was in the cave-systems on levels one, two and three.
There didn't seem to be nearly as much on one or two as there was on three.
What that meant was unclear, but in the absence of any evidence that the level
three cavies were any less technologically sophisticated than their
neighbours, my feeling had always been that they simply
liked
wilderness areas. Maybe they were concerned to conserve as much as they could
of their own evolutionary heritage; maybe when they began to manufacture their
food by artificial photosynthesis they set free all the other species which
they had exploited in more primitive times, giving them back a place to live,
where they could make their own destiny. No one knew, and it was generally
considered to be one of the less intriguing problems that Asgard posed.

Saul Lyndrach had
gone into the wilderness not once but several times, as if he were looking for
something in particular; and it was in the wilderness, eventually, that he'd
found his bonanza. That was where we had to go to follow the android.

There was nothing
left of the wilderness now but trees and a few bones. Everything had died,
millions of years ago, and most of it had rotted away before the cold preserved
what was left. All the flesh had gone, though the Tetron
bioscientists—reputedly the most expert in the galaxy—had managed to recover a good
many genome samples, one way and another.

There were no
leaves on the whited trees now, just gnarled trunks and knotted branches. My
untrained eye couldn't estimate the number of different species there were, but
I could tell which were the oldest trees, with their thick boles and their
branches which divided again and again until the ends were no thicker than
needles.