Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“We used to spend most of our time creeping around under a blue sky like you’d find on any friendly world—or under the stars, anyhow—and there’d be growing things all around us, nice and green, and sometimes cities that might be anybody’s cities… but the air was usually filled with things that would turn us into great lumps of gangrene if we took a single lungful. Even when the air was clean… we had to wear the suits anyway, just in case. We relied on the machines on our backs to keep us alive. The suits were virtually indestructible… couldn’t tear no matter what you did to them… but somehow I never felt entirely safe touching things, just in case I pricked my finger and died screaming.

“I never liked the machine on my back. I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t touch it… but there it was, masterminding my chemistry like some little god. Somehow it always seemed more remote than the ship, or the stars in the sky.”

If he’d stopped halfway I’d have told him that I understood—that I knew how he felt. He went on long enough, though, to convince me that I didn’t. His was a special paranoia.

“This won’t be so very different,” I said. “Amara Guur’s bully boys will only have good old-fashioned needle-guns, and I don’t know what your friend the android will be packing, but it really doesn’t matter. While we’re down in the cold levels we only have to be hit once and we’ll be dead. If we have to go deeper, where Saul found warmth and life, we might be able to survive a superficial wound or two… but we’d be trapped down there forever. You can’t send a radio message asking for help when you’re way down in the levels.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “When it comes to gunplay, we’re the best, and you’ve said nothing to make me think there’ll be anything where we’re going that will put us out of our stride.”

I was tempted to ask whether he suffered at all from claustrophobia. There were a lot of wide open spaces down below, sure enough, but we’d have to work our way through some pretty narrow corridors—wormholes of a kind very different from the ones our starships are supposed to make as they whizz-bang their way through the undervoid. The more I got to see of the star-captain and her merry men, though, the more confident I became that they could handle themselves perfectly well in what would be to them terra incognita. Crazy they might be, but there was no doubting that they were tough.

“If the war was as bad as you say,” I commented, “I’d have thought you’d head straight for home now that it’s over. Why come all the way out here?”

His lips seemed hardly to move as he said: “It isn’t over.”

“No?” I answered, sceptically. “You’re telling me that the whole damn human race is at war with one lousy android?”

A special paranoia indeed! I thought, when he looked away.

All he said was: “It’s got to be finished. It’s necessary.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe so. That’s your business, and you seem intent on keeping me out of it. But there is another side to what we’re doing now, and I’d really appreciate a little help in alerting the star-captain to some of the other implications of all this. What’s happening here on Asgard might be every bit as important to the future of the human race as the war you just won—and to the rest of the galactic community, Asgard’s immeasurably more important.”

His pale eyes just stared into mine.

“Look,” I said, “the star-captain already worked it out that if there are only fifty layers, there could easily be a hundred times the surface area of Earth down there. If, as seems possible, the whole bloody thing is an artefact, there could be ten thousand levels—the equivalent of fifteen or twenty thousand whole worlds… maybe hundreds of thousands of independent habitats. There might be more humanoid races living inside Asgard than in the entire galaxy of natural worlds. Who knows? The Tetrax have been trying to lift the lid off this great big can of worms for a hell of a long time—and now we have a golden opportunity to do it. You and me and the blonde bombshell! Oh, merde —you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Don’t insult me, Rousseau,” he said, mildly. “I’m just a belter, like you. I don’t know the first thing about this place, that’s true. But I’m not a fool, and the star-captain is anything but. If what we find down there is something useful to the human race, we’ll do what’s necessary. After we get the android, we’ll decide what to do next, in the line of duty. To be honest, though, I have to say that what I’ve seen of this world, and what you’ve told me about the cold down below, doesn’t fill me with wild enthusiasm.”

He’d asked me—ordered me—not to insult him, so I didn’t. I shut up. But what I was thinking was that this was a man whose imagination had shriveled up inside him, and all but faded away. For him, it had always been the human race against the Salamandrans for control of local space. All the great wide cosmos, with its thousands of humanoid cultures, meant next to nothing to him. He had some vague idea that Asgard might be important in a political context, but he really didn’t see what a puzzle it was. He didn’t seem to realise that cracking the puzzle might tell us exactly where we—not just Homo sapiens but all the humanoid races—fitted into the vastest possible scheme of things.

He had no real awareness of the mystery of our origins, or the possibilities of our ultimate future. I did.

I’m not a passionate man, by any means. I’m a cold fish, content with my own company, satisfied with day-to-day survival in a fairly unfriendly universe. Personal relationships aren’t my cup of tea. But I do care about things— about the big things, the deep questions.

It mattered to me what was in the heart of Asgard, although I had no way of explaining to a man like Serne exactly why it mattered. I wanted to know who built Asgard, and why; where it had come from and where it was intended to go. I wanted to know whether all the humanoid races in the galaxy came from common stock; and if so, whose, and why. I wanted to know who I was, because despite what Serne said, I wasn’t just a belter, or even a human being, but a citizen of infinity and eternity, with a birth certificate written in the DNA of my chromosomes.

That was why, with all due respect to my new commanding officer and my fellow starship troopers, I couldn’t actually find it in my heart to care about their lousy android and their stupid paranoia.

I was on my way to the centre of the universe, and to my personal confrontation with its deepest secrets.

It turned out to be a more tortuous journey than I anticipated, but isn’t it always?

The most tedious phase of the journey came eventually to its close.

That filled me with relief, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I had to be pleased about. I was still being hustled along by a gang of lunatics, chasing a giant who was in the habit of making a real mess of people who annoyed him, with a dozen or more of the nastiest characters in galactic society trailing along in my wake.

It was enough to make anyone feel insecure.

Anyhow, there were the trucks, standing in lonely splendour on an empty plain. The snow had begun to drift around their wheels, carried by the keen wind which was blowing out of the nightside toward the hotspot where the sun stood at its temporary zenith.

We were only leaving one man—Vasari—to guard the trucks, which numbered three now that we had caught up with the one which Myrlin had “borrowed” from me. The star-captain gave Vasari orders to say clear of Amara Guur if he could, and not to fire unless he was fired on.