Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  "But you don't believe that."

  "I try to keep an open mind," I told her. "One day, I'll find out the truth; in the meantime, I'm willing to be patient."

  "How are they supposed to have moved the world out of one galaxy and into another?"

  "Some application of the frame force we haven't figured out yet. Our starships can only make starship-sized whizz-bangs, but the limit's in the hardware, not the physics—or so I'm assured. I can't handle the math myself."

  "I think it's a matter of energy-expense," she said. "To make a teleportal capable of swallowing a planet, you'd need the energy of a small star inside your planet. . . which is presumably why some of your local theorists think there is a small star inside the artefact, not just a boring old planetary core."

  She was beginning to enter into the spirit of the enterprise. Given long enough, I figured that I really might be able to educate her in the Romance of Asgard.

  "You've got it," I said. "Back home, we only have little fusion reactors—but again, the limit's in the hardware, not the physics. Even nature can make stars. Who knows what type two civilizations might be able to do, given that they're defined as the kinds of civilizations that make use of the entire energy-output of a star."

  "Except that we haven't found any yet."

  " Yet being the operative word. All the humanoids in our neighbourhood are babes-in-arms, just like us . . . and none of them could even dream, as yet, of building something like Asgard."

  "Not even the Tetrax," she said thoughtfully.

  "Not even the Tetrax," I agreed. "But they're the ones who own Asgard, or think they do. They get other people to do their spadework for them, because it makes for harmonious relationships with the other local species, and because that's the way their minds work. They think that if they sit back and relax in Skychain City, everything will come back to them in its own time. So far, it always has."

  "Nobody else ever had a warship in orbit around the world," Susarma Lear observed, in a carefully neutral manner.

  "It's not as simple as that," I said. "You might have trashed Salamandra, but we're not nearly ready to take on any of our other neighbours, let alone all of them."

  "I know that," she assured me. "Still—that little black book could be valuable, couldn't it? If your friend Saul really did find what he thinks he found, that is."

  "I've glanced through the relevant pages," I told her. "As soon as your man's had enough sleep to take the driving-seat, I'm going to look at it a little more closely, and as soon as I've caught up with my own sleep I'm going to give it my fullest attention. It's not exactly an autobiography written for publication—it's a set of directions Saul thought he'd be following himself, and didn't particularly want anyone else to be able to follow—but if it means what I think it means, Saul really did find a way down . . . not to five, but much further. To somewhere warm."

  "Well, if there's a little star in the middle of the artefact," the star-captain said brutally, "I should think it would be warm down there. It gets very hot if you burrow down far enough on Earth, and that's only molten iron."

  "Actually," I said, "chaud is only one of the words he used. The other was vif. That means alive. If he meant it literally ..."

  "I'm under orders here, Rousseau," she said, after a moment's hesitation. "Just like you. Our objectives are limited. Once the android is dead . . . well, I have obligations to my men as well as to my superior officers. I'm not going chasing wild geese, Rousseau—let's be clear about that. Neither are you."

  That's what you think, I thought—but what I said was: "Yes, captain. Understood."

  16

  Actually, I did understand. I could see that the star-captain's priorities were bound to be different from mine. She had orders to follow, and she was on some kind of mopping-up mission in the wake of what must have been a very nasty conflict. Even so, she'd shown a glimmer of interest, a hint of vulnerability. I resolved to work on her again—but I knew that the chance wouldn't arise for a while. She went back to her bunk long before Serne woke up, and by the time he came to take over the wheel I was utterly exhausted. I didn't have the energy to give him much of a driving lesson, but he assured me that a truck was a truck, so I left him to it. The star-captain moved in her sleeping bag as I went back into the cabin, but she didn't wake up. Whatever nightmare she was dreaming had her securely in its grip.

  I couldn't keep my eyes open; the notebook would have to wait.

  I slept for eight hours, but the star-captain was still asleep when I woke up again. I checked that Serne was still okay before I began to go through Saul's notes for a second time, much more assiduously than before. I concentrated hard, even though I intended to go through them as many times more as I possibly could before I ditched the book. I didn't start cooking breakfast until the star-captain woke up. She had to be feeling a lot better, but she still didn't seem relaxed.

  When we'd eaten, Susarma Lear insisted on taking her turn in the driving-seat. She assured me that she couldn't possibly make any mistakes driving across a flat plane with not another vehicle in sight from horizon to horizon, but I insisted on sitting beside her to make sure that everything was in order. Not everything was, of course; when she checked with her ship, its watchful observers reported that we were being followed by three trucks, two of which looked conspicuously bigger than ours.

  "Have the Tetrax in Skychain City been able to give us any indication what sort of firepower they're packing?" she asked.

  "Needlers, mostly," the man on the ship reported. "They're petty criminals, not trained soldiers. If you want to take them on, you could probably eliminate them from consideration—but you'd need cover to mount an ambush. We consulted the Tetrax about the possibility of trying to take them out from up here, but they didn't like the idea one little bit."

  "No," said Susarma Lear, grimly. "I have this sneaking suspicion that they'd rather the petty criminals got their hands on the goodies than the Star Force. I don't think we can expect too much help from them."

  "If they'd been in a co-operative mood, they could have prevented the bad guys from exiting the dome," the man on the ship agreed.

  "That's true," I put in, "but if they'd been in an unco-operative mood, they could have stopped us too. We know where they stand—on the sidelines. It may not be the best place, if things get interesting."

  "Keep watching," the star-captain instructed her contact on the ship. "I'm certainly not going to start a pitched battle up here, even if we do find a likely spot for an ambush. I can't afford to risk any losses until I catch up with the android. After that . . . well, anything goes. We'll

  do things the Star Force Way."

  I wondered if Amara Guur would have had the sense to quiver in his boots if he'd heard her say that. Probably not—he wouldn't have understood the niceties of her tone and expression. I did.

  I returned to my careful study of the notebook, with all due patience and determination.

  After a while, the star-captain said: "I suppose the Tetrax must already have learned quite a lot, from the stuff they've already dug out of the upper levels. They must have already stolen quite a march on the rest of us."

  "Not unless they're keeping a lot of secrets from their esteemed colleagues in the C.R.E.," I said. "Which isn't impossible, of course—but I think they're still waiting for the crucial breakthrough. The technics we've excavated so far aren't significantly more advanced than the devices we already have. No matter how clever Asgard's builders were, the people who actually lived in the habitats in the outermost levels seem to have been humanoids not much different from us."

  "Passengers, you mean?"

  "Maybe. Species rescued from endangered worlds who didn't have the wherewithal to save themselves is the most popular guess."

  "So if the lower levels are similar," she said, "it might not matter whether they're dead or alive—they might be just more of the same."

  "It's a possibility," I admitted. "But basing their technics on the
same spectrum of scientific knowledge would necessarily make their technology the same as ours. The humanoid races we know about are similar, but they have quite various technological styles. What I mean ..."

  "I know what you mean," she said. "Heavy metal- minded, like us. Biotech-minded, like the Salamandrans . . . and the Tetrax."

  "Well, yes," I admitted. "Reduced to the crudest possible level, that's about it. Different kinds of sociopolitical systems tend to be associated with different technologies. When 69-Aquila was lecturing me in my cell, he said that you could ignore one direction of the causal flow and regard the technologies as the ultimate determining factor, but that's just as brutal an oversimplification as yours. Different humanoid races produce different kinds of social organization for a variety of reasons—some anatomical, some ecological, some historical—but they all have their idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies are reflected in matters of technological style. Technology is art as well as science, maybe more art than science. That's one of the reasons why the people at the C.R.E. are so interested in the stuff we find in the levels, even though it doesn't actually do anything that we can't already do in our own subtly different fashion. Even if the lower levels are full of passengers, they won't be uninteresting . . . and if some of the passengers can talk to us, they might have some very interesting things to say."

  "And Lyndrach's notebook says that there's people down there, does it?" she asked, nodding towards the black- bound object in my hand. That was why she'd started the conversation—she wanted me to keep her up to date with what I'd found.

  "Not exactly," I admitted. "Actually, vif is pretty much the full extent of what it says, in actual words. But what that implies ..."

  She didn't seem to like the answer, or the way I left it hanging. "Isn't a whole lot, from what you've told me so far. I need details, trooper. Hard data."

  There was plenty of hard data in the book, but not the kind she was fishing for. Even if it had been written in English, she'd still have needed me as an interpreter.

  "Actually," I pointed out, "I've told you a whole lot more than you've told me. I've told you practically everything I know, in fact—but you still haven't told me why you're so hell-bent on catching and killing Myrlin."

  "It's a military secret," she told me. "Strictly need-to- know. You don't need to know. You just have to guide me to him."

  "Right," I said. "The proverbial Star Force Way. Everybody follows orders, and shoots when they hear the word 'Fire!' No ifs and buts, just blood and guts."

  "Sometimes," she said, "it's the way things have to be done. Sometimes, it works."

  "And sometimes it doesn't," I countered. "This is Asgard. Here, we generally do things the Tetron way. That works most of the time."

  "Maybe so," she said. "But even here, it's the Tetrax who do things the Tetron way—not the vormyr or the Spirellans, apparently. Personally, I do things the Star Force Way—and so do you. Your choice was between my way and Amara Guur's way, and you chose mine. It was a wise choice—but now you're stuck with it. So stop asking questions that I can't answer, and tell me exactly what Lyndrach's notebook says. Never mind what it implies— just tell me what it says."

  Sleep had soothed her temper for a while, but the kind of stress she was carrying obviously wasn't the kind you could sleep off in a matter of hours.

  "Saul found some kind of dropshaft," I told her, meekly repeating what I'd deduced from the notebook. "He managed to rig some ropes so that he could get down to the bottom, but he didn't have the equipment he needed to cut his way out. All he could manage was to drill a peephole. On the other side it was warm and it was light. He couldn't see much, because he was looking into a room inside a building—a deserted building, in an advanced state of dilapidation. He could see what looked like fungi, plants, insects . . . but he couldn't see out through the window because it was blocked. Very frustrating. But a building is evidence of builders—and decay of that sort isn't the work of millions of years. It implies ..."

  "I can do the conjectures myself. This is where the android's going?"

  "He's got drilling equipment," I said. "If he takes it with him all the way down to the head of the dropshaft, he can make a way through."

  "But we can catch up with him before that?"

  "Probably."

  "Probably isn't good enough," she said. "We have to stop him before he reaches the dropshaft. If there's light, and life, there's probably a whole world down there for him to get lost in. He'd be very difficult to find—and we couldn't be sure that he'll come back any time soon."

  "Would that be such a bad thing?" I asked, innocently.

  "Yes," she said. "But we can catch him. He doesn't have the detailed instructions that we do. He'll take more time finding his way. We can catch him before he gets there."

  "It's not going to be that much easier for us than it is for him," I warned her. "He's a novice, but so are you and your men. We all have to get down to four, and then trek for miles through the cold. It's going to be difficult for all of us. He might go astray without our knowing it, so we might get to where he's going ahead of him—and once he's behind us, he won't be the only one. This isn't a turkey-shoot, captain."

  "It had better be," she said, ominously. "If he gets away, my superior officers aren't going to forgive us, nor is the human race, if things go bad some time down the line." She seemed to remind herself then that this was exactly what she wasn't supposed to be talking about. She changed the subject, deciding to give me proof that she could do the conjectures herself. "When you say building," she mused, "you mean the kind of building that humanoids make. Even through a peephole, you could see that—technological style being what it is. So if there are people down there, they really will be people."

  "Probably," I agreed. "Close kin, if the evidence of the outer layers can be trusted. Part of the great big humanoid family. In fact, some people think ..."

  "That Asgard is where the humanoid races came from," she finished for me, to demonstrate her conjectural prowess. "The home of our various ancestors—and of our common ancestor too. Now that people will actually be able to get down there, they won't be free to make up any damn story they like any longer. When the news gets out, it'll kill a lot of idle fantasies. But that's life, I guess. All the idle fantasies get gunned down in the end."

  "Quite a Romantic, in your own way, aren't you?" I said.

  She scowled. Perhaps she thought I was insulting her. "No, I'm not," she said. "I have a job to do, but I can't get on with it until I get to where I'm going. The devil makes work for idle minds—but that's why they call it Asgard, right?"

  "It's why we call it Asgard," I confirmed. "The home of the gods. Except that the Tetrax don't really think in terms of gods the way our ancestors used to do—and if they ever did, they certainly wouldn't have thought of hard-drinking warrior gods like the Norse pantheon. The Tetron word some human pioneer translated as Asgard means something more like 'the essence of mystery'—except that the Tetron concept of mystery implies a lot more than our word. Maybe 'metaphysics' would be . . ."

  "Okay," she said. "As a dictionary-maker, you're a pretty good scavenger, Rousseau."

  She was definitely insulting me. I tried not to scowl.

  "Maybe our guy got it right and the Tetrax got it wrong," she said. "Maybe Asgard is the home of the warrior-gods, ever-ready to do battle." She was still thinking about those well-concealed, probably non-existent guns.

  "I don't know about ever-ready," I said. "I dare say you'd like to think that there's some kind of Valhalla down there where all good star-captains go when they die so they can spend eternity committing genocide—but up here it's been a bitterly cold winter for a long, long time, and in Norse myth that kind of winter was the prelude to the final battle: the twilight of the gods, before they all got wiped out."

  "Now you're catching on," she said. "Hold that thought, and you'll begin to see what kind of universe we're living in."

  Her eyes were harder than st
eel—maybe as hard as the stuff of which Asgard's fabric is actually made. It would be a neat tricky I thought, to be able to play the gorgon like that— but it wasn't my personal technical style. It was a Star Force thing.

  They'd had giants in Norse mythology too, I vaguely remembered. The warrior-gods had killed them all. Or had they?

  17

  I was driving again when the sun came up. Susarma Lear was asleep in her bunk, but Serne was sitting beside me, waiting patiently to take another turn at the wheel. He was fidgeting, although he couldn't possibly have been unused to long periods of inactivity. Life in the Star Force had to be ninety-nine percent waiting and one percent action.

  When the rim of the sun suddenly appeared, as a slowly expanding yellow arc away to our right, he drew in his breath sharply. There had been a silvery glow in the sky for some little while, but this was different. The sunlight spilled across the plain like a flood, turning the dead white carpet of snow into a sea of glittering gold. The sky lightened from jet black to a deep, even blue, uninterrupted by the slightest wisp of cloud.

  Serne shielded his eyes and tried to look into the glare, but he couldn't bear it. I took two pairs of sun-goggles from the dashboard compartment and passed one to him.

  "It's big," he observed. "It doesn't seem as bright, but it's . . . very strange."

  "Not much like home?" I queried.

  "Not much," he agreed.

  "It's larger than Earth's star," I told him. "A different spectral type. Its association with Asgard is probably a cosmic accident. I suppose you did most of your fighting in the systems of G-type suns?"

  "That was the territory we were fighting for," he said. "We were always suited up, though. Even the so-called

  Gaia-clones didn't look like home."

  "Wait till you see the sunset," I said. "There's a lot more vapour in the air then, and the sea of gold's more like an ocean of blood. Very symbolic."