Asgard's Secret (43 page)

He looked mildly
surprised. "After what you've said about the C.R.E. selling technics to
the Salamandrans, you still want to sell us the location of Lyndrach's
dropshaft?"

"It's a crooked
game," I told him, "but it's the only game in town."

"You don't
think I should resign?"

"Hell, no. We
need at least one human on the inside, to try to make certain it doesn't happen
again. I'd come in with you, but I don't like organizations. I'm a loner."

He didn't need any
further encouragement. We started talking about money. My revelations obviously
hadn't shaken him too much, because he made every possible effort to strike
the meanest bargain he could. It took a long time to get the offer up to within
spitting distance of
my
dreams of avarice.

But in the end, we
closed the deal, to the mutual satisfaction of all parties.

Before the Star
Force ship pulled out of orbit to start burrowing through its self-made
wormhole, I got a call from my ex-commanding officer. Her image was a bit
blurred on the screen, but she was looking good now that she was happy.

"I really
could have made a trooper out of you," she said. "You took care of
Amara Guur pretty well."

"I found out
later that his gun was jammed," I told her.

"When?"
she asked.

"I tried
it," I said, evasively.

"You didn't
know it when you took him out," she said, "did you?"

I admitted that I hadn't.
She smiled a wolfish smile, as if she thought she knew me better than I know
myself. She didn't.

"I am
not
a hero," I told her. "I run away from giant amoebas. I only went for
Amara Guur because I thought you'd shoot straight through me if I didn't."

"You might be
right," she told me. "I'm a
real
hero, and I shoot
when I have to, no matter who's in the way. You'd have saved us a lot of
trouble, you know, if you'd only taken that android in when Immigration Control
asked you to. Just an atom of social conscience, and you could have kept him
nice and warm for us in Skychain City."

Something about the
way she said it made me very conscious of the fact that Susarma Lear was not,
after all, a very nice person. Real heroes never are, I guess.

"There are
thousands of people here who would have given all that they own to see what you
and I
saw ... to go
where you and I went," I told
her. "And you don't care at all, do you? The mystery never got to you, and
you really don't give a damn what's at the centre of it all. You have a narrow
mind, Star-Captain Lear."

"It was broad
enough to let you off the hook," she told me. "You owe me a favour. I
might be back to claim it some day."

I didn't think I owed
her any favours at all, even though I was keeping secrets from her that would
make her very angry indeed if she ever found out about them.

"I hope you'll
forgive me," I said, "if I don't look forward to it. It's not that I can't
stand to see women in uniform, you understand. It's just that I prefer a quiet
life."

"There's
something not quite right about a man who wants to spend his time rooting around
the frigid remains of a world that went to hell a million years ago," she
said. "It testifies to a certain aridity of the passions, and a
dereliction of the soul. Try to be a hero, Rousseau, in spite of yourself. Just
try."

Motherly advice
wasn't her strong point. It didn't move me at all.

"Goodbye,"
I said.

"Au
revoir,"
she replied.

As she broke the
connection, I repeated what I'd said, silently.
Goodbye.
I hoped that
it would be forever.

Then I got on with
the serious business of finding out what it felt like to be modestly rich.

It might have felt
better, but for the nagging worries. They were private worries, probably not
worth entertaining, but I couldn't quite shake them off. The experiences I'd
been through had left me more-or-less unscathed, but they had planted some
seeds of doubt in my mind—doubts about appearance and reality, about truth and
deception. I kept thinking about Myrlin, dead and yet not dead, and what
difference it might make.

I couldn't help
setting up a couple of hypothetical scenarios in my mind, just trying them out
for size.

In the first
scenario, I invited myself to suppose the Salamandrans
had
been able to bring their genetic time- bomb project to a successful conclusion,
but were worried about the secret being discovered. I supposed that they knew
full well that there was no chance of hiding the thing completely—especially
given that the C.R.E. were involved. And I supposed, therefore, that they'd
decided to cover up their success by planting an ingenious false
trail ... by
setting up a monstrous red
herring. It wouldn't even be necessary to assume that Myrlin was consciously
lying. After all, he knew only what they had fed into him.

I couldn't help but
wonder whether the sole reason for Myrlin's existence might have been to
convince the Star Force that in killing him they'd destroyed the threat to
humankind.

Maybe it had all
been a farce—a sideshow, to distract attention from the main event. Maybe the
human race was still in dire trouble, with the vengeance of the Salamandrans
still to be unleashed in the indeterminate future.

The second
scenario, partly inspired by the first, was more immediate in its implications.
I invited myself to suppose that the underworlders had had even more control
over appearances than they'd seemed. Given that the star- captain's memories of
what had happened were false, why shouldn't mine be equally fake? Maybe they had
been pumped into me in much the same way that Myrlin's memories of a human
lifetime had been pumped into him. There
was
no way I could really be sure of
anything
that had
happened after I was hit by the first mindscrambler. All else might easily have
been illusion. Was Amara Guur really dead? Was Myrlin really alive? There was
simply no way to be absolutely sure. I might never have been into the lower
depths of Asgard at all. I might never have been any lower down than the level
at the bottom of Saul's dropshaft.

How could I know?

There's no way to
solve puzzles like those. My instinct was to trust the judgments I had made—to
believe that the Salamandran project
had
failed, and to
believe that what Myrlin had told me about the world which he had made his own
was
true—but I'd seen people killed when their instinctive responses betrayed them
utterly because they were in the wrong environment. How can a man trust his
instincts after that?

There was nothing
to be gained by working over those puzzles in my mind, but knowing that wasn't
enough to let me stop.

The last words of
one of my favourite books urge men not to waste too much time in pondering
insoluble questions.
Il faut
cultiver notre jardin,
says Voltaire, who was one of the wisest
men who ever lived. We must look after our own garden. We must take charge of
that which we can actually control.

It may be that we
never can reach the centre of things, where all the real truths are hidden
away. It may be that the pure, unadulterated kernel of Absolute Certainty is
not under any circumstances to be grasped, no matter how long and arduous an
odyssey you undertake in the attempt to reach it.

My own journey
hadn't ended; I wasn't even certain that it had properly begun.

But I was beginning
to accept that at the end of the day, you just have to settle for what you can
get.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR

BRIAN
STABLEFORD
has published more than 50 novels and 200 short stories,
as well as several non-fiction books and thousands of articles for periodicals
and reference books. He is a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at King
Alfred's College, Winchester. He lives in Reading with his wife Jane, a
holistic therapist. His novels include
The Empire of Fear
(1988),
Young Blood
(1992) and a future history series comprising
Inherit
the Earth
(1998),
Architects of Emortality
(1999),
The Fountains of Youth
(2000),
The Cassandra Complex
(2001),
Dark Ararat
(2002) and
The Omega Expedition
(2002). His previous Five Star books are
Year Zero
(2003) and
Designer
Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution
(2004). Other recent
publications include
Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-first Century Ghost Story
(Prime Press)
and a
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature
(Scarecrow
Press). He is currently compiling a companion
Historical Dictionary of Fantasy
Literature
for publication in 2005.