Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

Whom the gods destroy , I reminded myself, they first make mad.

Well, I was mad all right; in fact, I was downright furious.

I looked around, sceptically, and the grassy plain just disappeared. I couldn’t help starting in shock, but I wasn’t entirely surprised. It was only the suddenness which had made me react. I knew by now that they could show me anything they wanted to.

What they showed me now was a room, four metres by three, with an open door to my left. The room was lit from above, the whole ceiling glowing pearly white. The walls were grey and featureless.

I wasn’t entirely convinced that this was reality; I gamble as well as the next man, and I know enough to look out for a double bluff. There were no prizes for guessing that they wanted me to go through the door. I contemplated being perverse, but decided that the room wasn’t any place that I wanted to stay. I did what I was supposed to do, and exited stage left.

I found myself in a dimly lit corridor. The door was at the end of it, so there was only one way to go, and I went. It curved, so I couldn’t see more than three metres in front of me. The light emanated from the whole surface of the ceiling; the walls remained grey and featureless. The grassy plain had been a lot less boring, but I wasn’t about to complain. Boredom I could stand; hungry predators were a distinct strain on the nerves.

Then, in front of me, I saw a T-junction. As I moved toward it, a figure emerged from the left-hand path, saw me and quickly brought up a gun which it had been holding loosely in its right hand. It was a humanoid, but it wasn’t human. It was a vormyran, or a very good imitation of one. It was a dead ringer for Amara Guur—but all vormyr are.

It was wearing a shirt and tight pants, but it was barefoot, like me, and might easily have been untimely ripped from a cold-suit. The gun which it leveled at me was a small needier, which could blast out tiny fragments of metal at the rate of six a second.

I stopped.

“Rousseau?” said the vormyran, uncertainly. His voice was deep and gravelly, but it sounded oddly gentle.

“It won’t work twice,” I said, with a certain subdued asperity. “I think you’re an illusion.” But I betrayed my doubts by speaking in parole, not in English. I remembered the one about the little boy who cried wolf, and then got gobbled up by the real one.

I stood very still, determined not to surrender to any wild instincts, and equally determined not to run.

He came forward, and reached up to rest the muzzle of the needier against the soft skin beneath my jaw.

“Okay,” I said, finding my mouth suddenly dry. “You’re not an illusion.”

He did have bad breath. I could feel its warmth. His eyes were big, the slit-pupils widened because of the dim light. His thin black lips were drawn back to expose his pointed teeth. His mottled skin seemed paler than when I had seen him last, on the screen in Saul Lyndrach’s apartment.

“Where are we, Mr. Rousseau?” he asked, hissing as he sounded the sibilant in my name.

“I wish I knew,” I replied, sourly. “How did they get you, Mr. Guur? You are Amara Guur, I suppose?”

“I’ll ask the questions,” he said, softly. “After all, I have the gun.”

It struck me, suddenly, that it was monumentally unfair that he should have the gun. I had woken up with nothing but my underclothes. Whoever it was that had captured us, and now was studying us with clinical detachment, had taken the trouble to give a gun to Amara Guur, and not to me. It seemed to suggest that a very peculiar set of moral priorities were at work. I was certain they were watching, but I wasn’t at all certain what they were watching for. Could it be that they wouldn’t actually allow Guur to shoot me—that they’d intervene to stop him? After all, it would surely be a terrible waste to let one of their experimental rats go down the toilet so quickly, and for no good reason.

Maybe I was still as safe as I had been when the lion leapt.

On the other hand, maybe I wasn’t. I decided that I didn’t want to take the chance.

“You know as much as I do,” I told Amara Guur, levelly. “Maybe more. I woke up a few minutes ago, in some kind of illusion-booth—a big one, not like the glorified coffins they use to serve up the shows in Skychain City. It was a scene from my homeworld, or a world very much like it. I was attacked by a predator, but it disappeared when it jumped me.” He looked surprised, so I added: “Same with you?”

He shook his head, and said: “I just woke up.” Then he asked: “Where and when did they take you?”

“I don’t know how long ago. I’d been in the level at the bottom of the dropshaft for thirty hours or so—maybe a little more. I was with the android, Myrlin. They hit us with a mindscrambler when Myrlin shut down some kind of a power-plant in the city.”

His eyes remained fixed on mine. They put me very strongly in mind of the lion’s eyes. Maybe that was why our hosts had shown me the lion first—to get me in the right frame of mind for the real thing.

“There was a city?” he asked. He drew the needier back toward himself, in what might have been construed as a conciliatory gesture. When its pressure was withdrawn from my neck I swallowed, thankfully.

“You didn’t get that far?” I countered.

He hesitated, so I went on. “We don’t have any reason to like one another, Mr. Guur,” I said, “but I strongly suspect that we’re both in the same boat. I’m not sure that we have any sensible option but to tell each other what we know, and try to figure it out together. As you must know, we’re deep inside Asgard, and whoever brought us down here is playing silly games with us. They must have us under observation now.”

He didn’t lower his eyes, but he did nod his head, almost imperceptibly, and he closed his lips about his pointed teeth. Then he lowered the gun, though he continued to hold it in his hand.

“We were taken by surprise,” he said. “In the corridors close to the dropshaft. We ran into some kind of trap, and several of my men were gunned down by flame-pistols. Immediately afterwards, they came at us.”

“They?” I queried, wondering whether he’d mistaken Crucero for a whole platoon. It must have been Crucero who set the trap.

“Robots of some kind,” he replied. “Like gigantic insects—but artificial.”

Not just Crucero then, I thought. The ambush season must have started early. I realised that Myrlin must have roused a whole hornet’s nest when he thrust his cutter into that control system. They must have come out to get us all—even the people at the top of the dropshaft.

“Did anyone from your party get away?” I asked Amara Guur.

“I do not know. I think perhaps not. What about the human soldiers?”

“I don’t know either. But if they came all the way back up to three to grab your people, I dare say that they grabbed the star-captain and the others on the way. It seems that they don’t want anyone reporting back—and it seems that they now have custody of everyone who knows the way down here.”

That particular lie was intended as much for the eavesdroppers as for him. Saul Lyndrach’s slightly-modified log was still in the truck up on the surface. It might take the Tetrax quite a while to find another French-speaker to decode it for them, and to figure out which bits I’d altered, but they’d do it, given time. They could be very thorough when they wanted to be.

When Guur didn’t say anything, I asked him a question. “How did you track us through the levels?” It was almost a hint to the effect that I’d told a lie, and that the lie was really intended to deceive the mysterious observers. He probably knew that the bug he’d planted in the book was still on the surface.