Asgard's Secret (37 page)

Perhaps I was,
after all, in the hands of miracle- workers—men who were, if not
actually
like gods, at least prepared to play godlike games with those poor humanoids
unlucky enough to fall into their clutches.

Whom the gods destroy
, I reminded myself,
they
first make mad.

Well, I was mad all
right; in fact, I was downright furious.

I looked around,
sceptically, and the grassy plain just disappeared. I couldn't help starting in
shock, but I wasn't entirely surprised. It was only the suddenness which had
made me react. I knew by now that they could show me anything they wanted to.

What they showed me
now was a room, four metres by three, with an open door to my left. The room
was lit from above, the whole ceiling glowing pearly white. The walls were grey
and featureless.

I wasn't entirely
convinced that this was reality; I gamble as well as the next man, and I know
enough to look out for a double bluff. There were no prizes for guessing that
they wanted me to go through the door. I contemplated being perverse, but
decided that the room wasn't any place that I wanted to stay. I did what I was
supposed to do, and exited stage left.

I found myself in a
dimly lit corridor. The door was at the end of it, so there was only one way to
go, and I went. It curved, so I couldn't see more than three metres in front of
me. The light emanated from the whole surface of the ceiling; the walls
remained grey and featureless. The grassy plain had been a lot less boring, but
I wasn't about to complain. Boredom I could stand; hungry predators were a
distinct strain on the nerves.

Then, in front of
me, I saw a T-junction. As I moved toward it, a figure emerged from the
left-hand path, saw me and quickly brought up a gun which it had been holding
loosely in its right hand. It was a humanoid, but it wasn't human. It was a
vormyran, or a very good imitation of one. It was a dead ringer for Amara
Guur—but all vormyr are.

32

It was wearing a shirt and tight pants, but
it was barefoot, like me, and might easily have been untimely ripped from a
cold-suit. The gun which it leveled at me was a small needier, which could
blast out tiny fragments of metal at the rate of six a second.

I stopped.

"Rousseau?"
said the vormyran, uncertainly. His voice was deep and gravelly, but it sounded
oddly gentle.

"It won't work
twice," I said, with a certain subdued asperity. "I think you're an
illusion." But I betrayed my doubts by speaking in
parole,
not in English. I remembered the one about the little boy who cried wolf, and
then got gobbled up by the real one.

I stood very still,
determined not to surrender to any wild instincts, and equally determined not
to run.

He came forward,
and reached up to rest the muzzle of the needier against the soft skin beneath
my jaw.

"Okay," I
said, finding my mouth suddenly dry. "You're not an illusion."

He did have bad
breath. I could feel its warmth. His eyes were big, the slit-pupils widened
because of the dim light. His thin black lips were drawn back to expose his
pointed teeth. His mottled skin seemed paler than when I had seen him last, on
the screen in Saul Lyndrach's apartment.

"Where are we,
Mr. Rousseau?" he asked, hissing as he sounded the sibilant in my name.

"I wish I knew,"
I replied, sourly. "How did they get

you,
Mr.
Guur? You
are
Amara Guur, I suppose?"

"I'll ask the
questions," he said, softly. "After all, I have the gun."

It struck me,
suddenly, that it was monumentally unfair that
he
should have the
gun. I had woken up with nothing but my underclothes. Whoever it was that had
captured us, and now was studying us with clinical detachment, had taken the
trouble to give a gun to Amara Guur, and not to me. It seemed to suggest that a
very peculiar set of moral priorities were at work. I was certain they were
watching, but I wasn't at all certain what they were watching
for.
Could
it be that they wouldn't actually allow Guur to shoot me—that they'd intervene
to stop him? After all, it would surely be a terrible waste to let one of their
experimental rats go down the toilet so quickly, and for no good reason.

Maybe I was still
as safe as I had been when the lion leapt.

On the other hand,
maybe I wasn't. I decided that I didn't want to take the chance.

"You know as
much as I do," I told Amara Guur, levelly. "Maybe more. I woke up a
few minutes ago, in some kind of illusion-booth—a big one, not like the glorified
coffins they use to serve up the shows in Skychain City. It was a scene from my
homeworld, or a world very much like it. I was attacked by a predator, but it
disappeared when it jumped me." He looked surprised, so I added:
"Same with you?"

He shook his head,
and said: "I just woke up." Then he asked: "Where and when did
they take you?"

"I don't know
how long ago. I'd been in the level at the bottom of the dropshaft for thirty
hours or so—maybe a little more. I was with the android, Myrlin. They hit us
with a mindscrambler when Myrlin shut down some kind

of a power-plant in the city."

His eyes remained
fixed on mine. They put me very strongly in mind of the lion's eyes. Maybe that
was why our hosts had shown me the lion first—to get me in the right frame of
mind for the real thing.

"There was a
city?" he asked. He drew the needier back toward himself, in what might
have been construed as a conciliatory gesture. When its pressure was withdrawn
from my neck I swallowed, thankfully.

"You didn't
get that far?" I countered.

He hesitated, so I went
on. "We don't have any reason to like one another, Mr. Guur," I said,
"but I strongly suspect that we're both in the same boat. I'm not sure
that we have any sensible option but to tell each other what we know, and try
to figure it out together. As you must know, we're deep inside Asgard, and
whoever brought us down here is playing silly games with us. They must have us
under observation now."

He didn't lower his
eyes, but he did nod his head, almost imperceptibly, and he closed his lips
about his pointed teeth. Then he lowered the gun, though he continued to hold
it in his hand.

"We were taken
by surprise," he said. "In the corridors close to the dropshaft. We
ran into some kind of trap, and several of my men were gunned down by
flame-pistols. Immediately afterwards, they came at us."

"They?" I
queried, wondering whether he'd mistaken Crucero for a whole platoon. It must
have been Crucero who set the trap.

"Robots of
some kind," he replied. "Like gigantic insects—but artificial."

Not just Crucero then,
I thought.
The
ambush season must have started early.
I realised that Myrlin must have roused a whole hornet's
nest when he thrust his cutter into that control system. They must have come
out to get us al
l—even
the people at the top of the dropshaft.

"Did anyone
from your party get away?" I asked Amara Guur.

"I do not
know. I think perhaps not. What about the human soldiers?"

"I don't know
either. But if they came all the way back up to three to grab your people, I dare
say that they grabbed the star-captain and the others on the way. It seems that
they don't want anyone reporting back—and it seems that they now have custody
of everyone who knows the way down here."

That particular lie
was intended as much for the eavesdroppers as for him. Saul Lyndrach's
slightly-modified log was still in the truck up on the surface. It might take
the Tetrax quite a while to find another French-speaker to decode it for them,
and to figure out which bits I'd altered, but they'd do it, given time. They could
be very thorough when they wanted to be.

When Guur didn't
say anything, I asked him a question. "How did you track us through the
levels?" It was almost a hint to the effect that I'd told a lie, and that
the lie was really intended to deceive the mysterious observers. He probably
knew that the bug he'd planted in the book was still on the surface.

"It was inside
your boot heel," he replied. "When the giant took your truck, we knew
you would need a replacement suit and we knew your specifications. Wherever
that boot goes, it leaves an organic trace. We could have followed it anywhere,
but we only needed to find the location of the shaft. Our intention was to wait
for you there— hoping, of course, that you did not return. It would have been
suitably ironic, would it not, if the android had killed your companions just
as he killed my men?"

I didn't tell him
that we'd left Crucero behind to take care of the possibility that he'd wait at
the top of the shaft. It didn't seem necessary or diplomatic. I decided to let
him believe that it was our present hosts who had organised the flame-pistol
party.

"Well," I
said, "it's all water under the bridge now. The question is: what do we do
next?"

"There is
nothing behind me but a closed room," said Guur.

"Same
here," I told him. "That leaves us only one direction to go—and who
knows who we might meet? Would you like to lead the way?"

"I have the
gun," he reminded me. "
You
lead the
way."

Amara Guur was
exactly the kind of person on whom one should never turn one's back, but
sometimes you don't get the choice.

I turned into the
corridor where neither of us had been, and led the way toward our next
encounter.

The corridor twisted
and turned, but there was never more than one way to go. It could have been a
veritable maze had the observers wanted it to be—I was morally certain that
they could have opened up doorways and alternative pathways wherever they
desired—but it seemed that they only wanted to take us from point A to point B.

Point B, as it
transpired, was a big open space. We came out of a narrow portal to be faced
with an alien forest. By alien, I don't just mean that it was like no place I'd
ever been—having never been to Earth I had no real experience of the kind of
plain which they'd shown to me when I first awoke, but it had been an
environment where I had some slight sense of belonging. Here, the sensations
awakened in my mind when I looked upon the strange bushes and trees was exactly
the opposite; this was a place where I emphatically did not belong.

It wasn't the
shapes which made it seem so odd—foliage, I guess, can come in a range of
shapes so vast that nothing seems particularly extraordinary—but the
scale
of things. The leaves, which were dark of hue, were all very large. They were
mostly green, though some were streaked with crimsons and violets. The flowers,
which were very gaudy— though their colours too seemed dark, with no whites or
pastel shades—were enormous, every blossom the size of a man's torso. The
yellows were all ochreous, the blues tended toward indigo, the reds were
blood-dark; all the stamens and styles which clustered at the heart of each
bloom were black. Most of the flowers were bell-shaped things, though some were
like hollow hemispheres; almost without exception they pointed upwards, at the
ceiling, which was blazing with golden electric light a mere twelve metres
above the forest floor.