Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

What the light displayed to us, though, was quite the opposite.

There was no need for us to mount an assiduous search for the inhabitants of the city; they came to us, like night-flying insects drawn to a flame. The metaphor is more appropriate than it may seem, because there was nothing in their eyes to suggest that they were moved by an active curiosity. Their vacant expressions suggested that they were indeed being drawn by some inner impulse that they neither understood nor cared to suppress.

They were humanoid, but on a scale that I hadn’t seen among all the starfaring races represented on Asgard. Those who seemed to be fully-grown were no taller than the average human child of ten or eleven, and much more lightly built. They weren’t just thin; they were bony, as if they ought to have been carrying far more flesh than they actually were. Their silvery-grey skin was wrinkled, so that even the faces of the smallest ones—children, I assumed— seemed irredeemably ancient. They were clothed, but the majority wore little more than filthy loincloths. Even the most extravagantly dressed had only knee-length trousers and threadbare waistcoats without buttons or hooks.

They were drawn to us, but not all the way. They came to stand and stare, but they kept their distance. Because we were walking along the street, they formed up to either side of us in two long ranks. Not one of them was carrying anything—neither a weapon, nor a tool, nor a toy. There was no evidence that any of them had been doing anything when the news of our arrival began to spread. There had been no work going on, and no play either, so far as I could tell.

They jostled for position in their discreet fashion, but not violently. None spoke to us, and none made any gesture of greeting. They just watched us—and those we had passed by fell into step behind us, following us at a distance of eight or ten metres.

Myrlin said nothing, so I figured that it was up to me. I caught up with him easily enough now that he’d slowed down, and raised my arms. I gestured theatrically. “Can anybody talk?” I asked—in parole, although I knew perfectly well that none of them would have been able to understand it even if they could hear me; it just seemed more appropriate than English.

They didn’t react to the pantomime, let alone reply. I was at a loss.

It didn’t make sense. There might be energy to spare down here, but that didn’t mean that there was no competition, no struggle to survive. If these people were as passive as they seemed, and as helpless as they seemed, then somebody had to be looking after them—somebody, given their response to our presence, who looked more like us than they did.

“I think they’re all children,” Myrlin said. “Don’t be fooled by the wrinkles.”

“I’m not so sure,” I said. “But whoever—or whatever— supplies their food and clothing doesn’t seem to have been doing a very good job lately. Maybe not for a long time.”

“They don’t seem to be making much headway in learning to fend for themselves,” Myrlin observed. “They should have begun showing a little enterprise some time ago. Natural selection favours the adventurous in circumstances like these—unless these are an unrepresentative sample. Maybe the adventurous are out adventuring.”

We were still moving, but our walk had slowed to a mere stroll. We didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, but we were still headed towards the city centre.

“They’re not afraid of me,” he observed. “They must see big people sometimes—if not adults of their own kind, people of another kind. Maybe people in suits—not cold-suits, I suppose, but maybe sterile suits.”

“If they come from elsewhere,” I said, “they certainly don’t use the dropshaft we came down. If there’s another, the sensible place to put it is in the city.”

“Wishful thinking,” Myrlin observed. He was right—but so was I.

I glanced behind. The crowd behind us had grown considerably. There must have been a hundred or more ahead of us, discreetly placed to either side, but there were three or four times as many in the rear.

“They expect something,” I said, “but no matter how badly they need it, they know how to behave.”

“Dumb animals,” the android suggested. “Maybe it’s the clothes that are misleading. They’re built like humanoids, but they might not be humanoids at all in our sense.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “Maybe they’re androids—obsolete androids, put out to grass.”

“Built for what purpose?” he countered.

“Built small to alleviate the possibility of rebellion,” I suggested. “If I were thinking in terms of manufacturing people to do my bidding, I wouldn’t make them your size.”

“That was a mistake,” he conceded. He came to a halt then, and just stood there, scanning the sea of wrinkled faces—waiting.

I wasn’t sure that it would work, but it was worth a try. I stopped too.

“Okay,” I said, as if to the crowd, in parole. “You can take us to your leader, or bring your leader out to us, or whatever you want. Just give us a sign.” In the meantime, I raised both arms in an expansive gesture of helplessness— although it would have been a lot more expressive if I hadn’t been wearing a cold-suit.

They weren’t in any hurry, but they looked at one another, and jostled one another a bit. They seemed to have got the idea that the onus was on them to find somebody willing to show a bit of initiative.

In the end, the tension was too much for them. The crowd behind was densely packed now, and it was difficult to see what was happening beyond the first few rows, but someone was pushing through—or being pushed through by his companions… if it were, in fact, a “he.”

“He” came forward very tentatively, one step at a time. We turned to face him—and to look down at him.

He stopped a couple of metres short, and looked up at Myrlin’s faceplate. He was presumably making the assumption that the android was the senior authority-figure because he was taller.

He began talking. I could hear him, even through the faceplate—but not very distinctly. It didn’t matter. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t pangalactic parole that he was spouting, or any other language I knew.

I waved my arms, hoping to signify that I wasn’t getting it, tapped my helmet to signify that I couldn’t hear very well, then tapped the palm of my left hand with the forefinger of my right, in the hope of suggesting to him that he might do better to try sign language.

He wasn’t very quick on the uptake, but at last he stopped looking at Myrlin. I continued signalling madly. I pointed in four different directions, to indicate that we didn’t know which way to go. I mimed walking and tried to impress upon him the urgent need I had for guidance. I was glad that I didn’t have to try to get across any notion of where I wanted to go.

For a while, it seemed that I was making no headway at all. He looked at me with a stare so blank that I might as well have been dancing a jig or performing a mating ritual.

Somewhere out in the crowd, though, the penny finally dropped. Some local genius figured out that we were all standing around because the big guys didn’t know where to go, and figured that it was up to him—or maybe her—to think of an appropriate destination. “He” thrust himself forward, babbled at the spokesman for a few moments, got into an argument and eventually won it. He moved around us and looked back at us, expectantly.

I gave him a Star Force salute. “Lead on,” I said.

He set off in the direction we’d been heading in before we stopped, and we followed. Everybody else followed us.

We didn’t turn right or left for such a long time that I began to wonder whether the little person was merely going ahead of us in the direction he thought we wanted to go rather than actually guiding us.