Meanwhile, Sky-blue and Sea-blue were having another conference. They didn't seem to be entirely in harmony. From what little I'd seen, the invaders certainly seemed to be a quarrelsome lot.
"This gun is of human manufacture?" asked Sky-blue, when the quiet row was over.
"That's right," I said.
"It does not kill."
"It doesn't kill people with our kind of metabolism. Some of the more peculiar races react badly to the anaesthetic."
"Although you did not kill the officers you shot," said the blond-haired man, carefully, "you are still guilty of a crime which carries the death-penalty. Under our law, I should have you shot."
I was grateful to note the word "should."
"Well," I said, with the air of one determined to be brave at all costs, "it was difficult to see much future anyway. I knew the risk I was taking. Cest la vie" The last, of course, I said in French. He asked me to explain it, and I did. When he reported back to his companion, I thought the white-haired man seemed to be impressed by my fatalism. I began to congratulate myself, unobtrusively, on having laid down some good bait. I daren't get confident, though— there was always a chance that they'd take me at my word and shoot me.
The man with the darker eyes delivered quite a long speech in his native language, while his companion just nodded and made affirmative grunts. Then Sky-blue turned to me, and said: "This is a very strange place to us, with many strange people. We understand that your invasion of our world was carried out in ignorance, and we have been restrained in trying to counter it. The Tetrax and all the other races from the star-worlds must accept, though, that Asgard—as you call it—is ours, and that we are prepared to defend it. We intend to establish friendly relations with the races of the galaxy, if we can. We will need assistance in order to do this. Although you have committed a crime against us, we are prepared to be lenient. If you co-operate with us to the full, you will not be shot. But I warn you that we expect you to help us to the best of your ability, in order to cancel out your evil actions. Do you agree?"
"Why not?" I said lightly. "Certainly I agree."
"Do you know how to repair the damage that you have done?"
"Not entirely," I said. "But I've been using Tetron technics routinely for several years, and I'm not stupid. I can help you get to grips with the city and its systems, and I know the Tetrax well enough to help you deal with them."
"We are already finding ways to make the Tetrax tell us what we need to know," he said, in tight-lipped fashion. I guessed that to mean that they were sick of being gentle and were adopting more violent means of interrogation. The Tetrax feel pain like everyone else, and it could only be a matter of time before the invaders began to get on top of the situation here. I wondered if the Tetrax planned to react to save their people from being maimed or executed, or whether their notion of the individual's duty to his fellows was powerful enough to let them sit back and continue to attempt to make friendly contact through diplomatic channels. I didn't know the answer.
"The first thing we require of you," said the man with blond hair, "is that you should answer many more questions that we have. We are confronting a situation that is new to us. Nothing in our previous experience prepared us for what we have found in this city, and what we now know to exist beyond the dome. We know that we have much to learn, and there is much that you can teach us. But I warn you that our patience is now worn thin. We do not care very much whether you live or die, and if we find that you are not helping us to the very best of your ability, we will shoot you. We have many other people to help us, and the more we learn from them, the less useful you will become. Do you understand that?"
"I understand," I said, flatly. "But I answer questions better when I'm not so hungry."
He wasn't entirely pleased by the tone of my voice, but his displeasure was tempered by understanding, and I thought I had just about won my case.
"You are hungry, and would like to eat?"
"Yes I am," I told him. It was perhaps the first entirely honest thing I had said.
"Then I will take you to a place where we can eat. There you will meet some of the other people who are helping us. Afterwards, you will begin the work of repaying us for our generosity."
The man with sky-blue eyes stood up, and spoke for a couple of minutes to the white-haired man, who remained seated. Then, having apparently obtained approval for his proposals, he gestured to indicate that I should precede him to the door.
When I opened it, I found myself looking down the guns of a couple of guards, and I stood back to let my inquisitor pass. He spoke to them, and they relaxed, but they didn't put the guns away. They fell into step behind us as we went along the corridor.
The electric lighting system the invaders had rigged up here was makeshift, and the light was much yellower than the brilliant white favoured by the Tetrax. I looked up at the bulbs strung on a cable pinned to the ceiling, and the man with sky-blue eyes took it as a criticism.
"It is very poor," he admitted. "But these are the disconnected levels, where we cannot use the power-systems left to us by our ancestors. Very regrettable. You will find things very different closer to the Centre, where the ancestors' power is the motor of our civilization."
I would have liked to continue that conversation, because there were at least as many questions that I wanted to ask him as he wanted to ask me, but we were already arriving at a larger room kitted out as a refectory, with a dozen long tables and hundreds of folding chairs. It was very noisy— the room was full of invader troopers. I guessed that they
must be eating in shifts. Hot food was being dished out from big tureens—flavoured manna with a few trimmings that presumably made it seem a little more like the stuff their mothers used to cook for them.
The odour of the food made my mouth water furiously. Tetron cuisine never had that effect on me, even when I was pretty hungry, and it seemed grounds for concluding that the invaders really did have a great deal in common, both physically and biochemically, with my own kind. I hadn't had a decent meal since leaving Leopard Shark, and although a cold-suit will feed you, it can't satisfy your aesthetic sensibilities. I could feel my stomach muscles churning in anticipation, though I knew I'd have to take it easy until I got back into the habit of eating.
The crowd was so big, and my mind was so preoccupied, that although I saw the group of Kythnans sitting at one of the tables I didn't really pay them much attention until one of them suddenly stood up. She stared at me, and I looked at her dazedly, not really knowing what was happening until the accusing finger was pointed. She took the man with the sky-blue eyes by the elbow, and guided him away from me, talking furiously into his ear in a low voice.
I just stood still, knowing that there was nothing else I could do. The muzzles of the guards' guns swung once again to point at my chest, and I knew that yet again my luck had turned completely arse over tit.
The Kythnan woman was Jacinthe Siani—a ready-made collaborator if ever there was one—and she knew only too well who I really was. She might also know that I'd left Asgard before the invasion, and that my presence here now was a real twenty-four carat surprise.
The sky-blue eyes no longer seemed weak as they fixed me with an astonished gaze when the hurried whispering
was over. They seemed very, very hard.
"Well, Mr. Rousseau," said Jacinthe Siani, vindictively. "This time, it seems, my evidence hasn't acquitted you."
"No need to be so smug about it," I told her, with as much bravado as I could muster. "I don't think I can give you much of a character reference, either."
But I couldn't conceal the fact that I was very frightened indeed. All that trust which I had carefully built up was smashed to smithereens, and it now looked odds-on that I was scheduled to be shot—or worse.
15
This time, there was more urgency about the way I was manhandled. Surprisingly enough, though, they didn't march me back outside again. They took me to a corner of the room,
sat me down, and gave me the food they'd promised. But Sky-blue didn't sit down to eat with me—he went buzzing off like a startled hornet, with Jacinthe Siani in tow. The guards watched me eat; the fact that they didn't relax suggested that they'd had stern orders to look after me very carefully.
Long before I'd finished, Sea-blue was back again, and so was an even older, smaller man with brow-ridges that looked big even on an invader. This one looked to be a real top man. I carried on eating while they discussed the situation, because I figured that if I were going to die, I might as well do it on a full stomach. My appetite had dwindled, though, and I hadn't finished when they indicated that it was time to go.
I was rushed through the corridors and into the open, where there was a passenger car waiting on the nearest section of track. I was shoved in, unkindly. Sky-blue, the old man, and Jacinthe Siani followed, plus a couple of troopers.
As we got under way, I said to the man with pale blue eyes: "Wouldn't it be easier to shoot me right here?"
"We're not going to shoot you, Mr. Rousseau," he said. "You have far too much information that would be valuable to us. But we can only assume that you are a spy, and hostile to our people."
That sounded ominously like a threat of torture.
"I came back because the Tetrax asked me to come," I told him, quickly, "but I'm an ambassador as much as a spy. The Tetrax are very keen to open up a dialogue. They want to make friends, and they don't understand why you won't respond to their signals. When we get up to the surface, I'll be more than happy to act as an intermediary, if you wish."
"We're not going to the surface, Mr. Rousseau," he told me. "We're going in the opposite direction. And we have no desire to hurry in making contact with anyone outside Asgard. There will be all the time in the world to deal with the Tetrax, when we are ready. At the moment, much more pressing matters concern us. What you can tell us will be most interesting—and you will tell us everything that you know."
By this time I was getting used to being interesting. It seemed that everyone in the universe was keen to talk to Michael Rousseau, and were exceedingly reluctant to take no for an answer. I realised that Jacinthe Siani hadn't just fingered me as a Tetron spy. She'd fingered me as the guy who'd penetrated the lower levels—the man who'd talked to the super-scientists.
Everything I had seen of the invaders suggested that they were, by galactic standards, country boys. They must know, by now, just how unsophisticated they were by galactic standards. They knew that the Tetrax were a long way ahead of them, although they seemed to be making what efforts they could to stop the off-world Tetrax finding that out. But Jacinthe Siani had told them that they had neighbours inside Asgard who were even more advanced than the Tetrax. That had to be the main reason why they were playing for time in refusing to talk to the Tetrax. They were hoping to find allies who would help them keep the universe at bay!
And they were convinced that I could help them, once they had persuaded me to talk. Unfortunately, they probably weren't going to believe me when I told them that there wasn't a lot of help I could offer . . . and their unbelief might cost me dearly if they really got tough in the business of persuasion.
I wondered how troubled and confused these would-be conquerors of Asgard were. It must have been quite a shock to them, first to discover the universe, and then to find out that they weren't by any means the most powerful parasites in the guts of the macroworld.
"You don't have any idea who built Asgard, do you?" I said, looking into the pale eyes of the blond-haired man. "How many levels can you operate in? Ten . . . twenty?"
"Don't underestimate us, Mr. Rousseau," he replied, calmly, looking away to watch the factory-fields going by beyond the windows of the carriage. "We control hundreds of habitats in more than fifty levels. It is true that we had not been able to calculate the size of Asgard until we unexpectedly reached the surface, and even now we have no way of knowing how far down the levels go. We know, though, that our ancestors were the builders of Asgard, and that it is only a matter of time before we regain access to the knowledge they had. It may well be that our ancestors were your ancestors, too, and that you too have lost access to what they knew just as we have. If that is true, then your interests and ours are alike, and you must make every effort to help us contact our cousins—those you have already met in the depths of the world."
I glanced at Jacinthe Siani. Like most Kythnans, she had olive-tinted skin and jet-black hair. Her eyes were a very dark brown. She was very much the odd one out in the car, though there were many Earthborn humans who looked less
like Sky-blue and his friends than she did.
"Are your ancestors her ancestors too?" I asked.
"It seems likely," conceded Sky-blue.
"And the Tetrax?"
"That seems unlikely."
"I'm afraid not," I told him. "We have good reason to believe that we're all brothers and sisters under the skin. Any common ancestor that you or I had is just as remote from us as the common ancestor linking either of us to the Tetrax." Or, I thought to myself, the common ancestor I share with a pig, non-flying variety.
"I don't know about such matters," he told me. "I'm only a soldier. You will have the chance to speak to people who do know."
Again, there was a threat in his tone of voice.
"The Tetrax know," I assured him. "If you were only prepared to make proper contact, you could fix up a nice dialogue between your own wise men and theirs. If you and the Tetrax pooled your resources, you might well be able to figure out who did build this thing, when, and why. It's something we'd all like to know."
"It is not for me to decide such matters," he said, terminating the exchange. Then he had to report back to the older man everything that had been said. I turned my attention to Jacinthe Siani.
"Are they treating you well?" I asked.
She smiled in a strangely catlike fashion. "Quite well," she said. "I like them better than many of my old friends."
Knowing what I did about the company she used to keep, I didn't find that at all surprising. "Hell," I said, "you don't have to take such an obvious relish in landing me in it. I never did anything to you, did I? You were the one who was trying to shaft me, remember?"
"I remember everything," she assured me.
I decided that she just didn't like me very much. Some people don't. I can live with it.
From the train-car we transferred to a road vehicle, which whisked us across country with considerably greater alacrity. It was silent, and presumably ran on fuel cells of some kind. I suspected that the invaders hadn't invented the fuel cell themselves; in fact, I had now begun to suspect that they hadn't invented very much at all. It occurred to me that they were real barbarians, and that their home-level technology consisted mainly of ready-made items that they'd discovered—or rediscovered—how to use. Giving their ancestors the credit for ordering the world in which they found themselves was a face-saving exercise. Even inside Asgard, they were little boys lost—no matter how many environments they had "conquered" in the course of their explorations.
Given that they were so primitive themselves, it was easy to work out how mediocre things had to be in those levels of which they had taken control.
Once I had reached this conclusion, I wasn't at all surprised that our trip down into the lower levels was anything but smooth. There was no huge elevator shaft going all the way down to wherever they were taking me. We could drop three, or sometimes four levels at a time, but then we had to transfer to a car or a train again, and hurtle across country to some other point of descent. There was heavy traffic all the way, and I began to realise what an awesome task it must be to move the invader armies around— and, by implication, how vulnerable their troops in Skychain City must be.
By the time we were down to level twelve—assuming that my counting was correct with respect to the levels we skipped past—I didn't see any more groups of galactic prisoners. Wherever we were, there were only invaders—legion upon legion
of them. All but a few were males in uniform. All, without exception, were pale of skin. I couldn't help remembering Myrlin and the biotechnics that had been used to shape him: an accelerated growth programme and some kind of mental force-feeding. The perfect way to grow your own soldiers. I wondered briefly whether these soldiers could have been made that way, and fed with illusions about their own nature and origins. But it didn't make any sense—these neo-Neanderthalers certainly didn't behave as though there might be some mysterious master race behind them.
On the way down, I got to see small areas of about thirty different levels. I think we eventually ended up on level fifty-two, give or take a couple. The top few levels were all dead—no sign of life at all. Five and six were like one and two: very cold, but not as cold as three and four. There was no way to be certain about the temperature outside the tightly-sealed vehicles which we used to cross territory on those levels, but it must have been way below freezing.
Seven and eight I didn't see, but nine was alive, though pretty desolate. It reminded me strongly of the level much further down, to which Saul Lyndrach's dropshaft had initially led us—which is to say that it looked like an ecology that had once been balanced but had run wild. Certainly there was no sign of the machinery of artificial photosynthesis—if there had ever been any, it had long since rotted away, to be replaced by real plants eking out their existence under an enfeebled and ill-lit sky. The terrain looked like tundra, bleak and sub-arctic. There was no sign of native humanoid habitation, or of colonization by the neo- Neanderthalers.
Eleven and twelve were alive, too, but looked much the same. If anything, their bioluminescent skies were even further degraded, so that their light was even weaker.
What I'd eventually concluded about the worldlet Saul had found was that it had initially been set up with very sophisticated biotechnology, which had gradually gone completely to pieces. Its energy supply had initially been electrical and thermal, and the light-producing systems had been organic—although they were not organisms capable of independent life. Over a very long time, possibly running to several millions of years, entropy had done its work and the carefully engineered artificial organics had gradually given way to real organisms, which did retain some of the features of the artificial system, but not so efficiently.
Asgard's Conquerors Page 11
