Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“Was he alone?” growled Amara Guur. He sounded uncertain, perhaps because he hadn’t seen anyone at the ambush, but I knew that he could put two and two together once he realised the flame-pistols were Star Force weapons, not at all in the style of our present captors.

Heleb hesitated before he said: “I think so.”

“You think so!”

Heleb cringed before Guur’s obvious wrath. It takes a lot to make a Spirellan cringe. No human could ever achieve such an effect.

“I didn’t see anyone else,” the Kythnan put in.

Guur looked at the gun in Heleb’s hand. “How many shots do you have left?” he demanded.

Heleb released the clip from the butt of the gun and checked it. “Three,” he said. He didn’t sound very happy about it, and I could understand why. Nobody had anything on but the underclothes they’d been wearing beneath their cold-suits. The bastards who were keeping tabs on us had left several of us with guns, but they hadn’t provided any extra ammunition. Heleb had sprayed a dozen shots around when he’d let fly at Khalekhan, probably because he was habitually over-generous in the violence department. Now, he had only three bullets left.

He could do arithmetic too, if forced, and his counting must have told him that there might be three more starship troopers lurking in the bushes, plus one extra-large android.

I looked around at the shattered and wounded blossoms that had been blasted apart by the shots that had missed their target. Several of them were leaking viscous brown sap, and looked for all the world as if they were bleeding. One of the insect-like things had copped it too; its insides had been spread all over a net of green-and-purple leaves, grey and brown and sticky. The creature’s exoskeleton was more leathery than chitinous; only its six legs were rigid. The legs were still moving, jerkily, in the grip of some autonomic reflex, but while I watched they gradually slowed down.

It was fairly clear that the chances of our all getting together and declaring a truce until our present predicament could be sorted out were pretty damn slim. The star-captain wasn’t a forgiving sort, and one of her boys had just been killed. I could imagine how angry that would make her, even though Heleb was only getting his own back for what had happened up on three.

I realised, uncomfortably, that I was in a very unenviable situation. I was in the hands of the wrong party: a captive, or a hostage. I didn’t know why the mysterious observers had cast me in that role—because they had sure as hell given me to Amara Guur by arranging things the way they had—but I had no illusions about how difficult it was going to be to play the part.

“It doesn’t matter whether he was alone or not,” said Guur, pensively. “If the other humans are here, they must have heard the shots, and that racket which the shots provoked. But there are only three soldiers, and they seem as anxious to destroy the android as we are. Even if they have guns, we are stronger. We are five, and now that we have the flame-pistol, we are all armed.”

I checked his arithmetic, and was unsurprised to find it sound. Both of the vormyr who had come from the other direction had been holding needlers. One of them now passed the flame-gun to Heleb, who gave his own pistol to Jacinthe Siani. Clearly, she was counted among the combat troops, though it was equally clear that she was considered to be expendable. She didn’t protest the allocation, even though it was hot-headed Heleb who had left the gun dangerously undersupplied with firepower.

I came slowly to my feet. Guur guided me up against the grey wall, and stared into my eyes once again.

“Kill him!” said Heleb.

“Be quiet!” retorted Guur, in no mood to be told what to do. “Heleb, you will move along the wall a little way, in the direction from which we came. Have your gun ready. Seviir—guard the other approach. Kaat—watch the jungle.”

He paused while they moved to obey. Then he relaxed a little.

“Why are we here, Mr. Rousseau?” he asked quietly.

I didn’t imagine that he wanted a discussion on matters of metaphysical philosophy. His concerns were more immediate.

“They’re watching us,” I told him. “We can’t see them, but I’ll lay odds that they can see everything we do. Maybe they can eavesdrop on our thoughts—I don’t know. They want to see how we react, and I think your Spirellan friend may already have disappointed them.”

Guur drew his lips back from his teeth. He really did look half-wolf, half-crocodile, and his breath was worse now than it had been before.

“I don’t think we have many secrets,” he said. “You have small bruises on your neck, Mr. Rousseau, and so have I. My kind has a better sense of time than yours, and I know that twelve days have passed since I was captured. They have had time to examine us very thoroughly, and may have methods of examination better than any we know. Do you not agree?”

“It seems that way,” I conceded. He was ugly and evil-minded, but he was no fool.

“When you assume that they will be disappointed to see us fight,” he went on, “do you take it for granted that they are leaf-eaters, like the Tetrax?”

I gathered that he didn’t think too much of leaf-eaters. I resolved to remember that if ever I wanted to drive a vormyran wild with fury, that was probably the insult that would do it.

“I don’t know what they eat,” I replied. “But think of it this way: the inhabitants of Asgard probably didn’t know that their world had been discovered by people from elsewhere; they might not even have realised that the universe outside Asgard was inhabited. If you suddenly discovered that the outer layers of the big onion where you’d been hiding for millions of years had been invaded by inquisitive outsiders, what kind of people would you like them to be?”

He replied with a phrase in what I could only presume was his native tongue.

When I looked at him blankly, he translated. “It means,” he said, “ ‘things edible.’ Prey.”

“People aren’t prey,” I told him.

“vormyr have no word for ‘people,’ ” he told me. “We have a word for predators and a word for prey. Humanoids fit into one category or the other, as do all animal species.”

“You can’t operate that way in a civilized community,” I informed him, piously.

“So the Tetrax say,” he sneered. “Like all leaf-eaters, they practice the ethics of the herd: the ethics of cowardice, the denial of life and strength. There are two kinds of being, human. There are those whose way it is to eat, and those whose way it is to be eaten. The true law demands loyalty to the tribe, respect for fellow predators and the careful control of those to be eaten. We are prudent predators, human, but we never forget what we are. We move quietly and stealthily among the herds of the Tetrax and their kind, because herds of leaf-eaters can be very dangerous—but we know who we are. We never forget the true way of being, the true civilization.”

I had always assumed that gangsters were naturally stupid, and that those galactic races which preserved the morals of crocodiles were essentially simple-minded. Amara Guur clearly didn’t see things the same way. I’d always resented the fact that the Tetrax considered humans as barbaric as the vormyr, because I’d always considered it obvious that, whereas the vormyr really were barbaric, humans weren’t so bad; the vormyr obviously had a very different view of the matter—they presumably felt insulted to be put in the same category as us.

“That’s stupid,” I told him. “You can’t decide whether you owe someone moral consideration on the basis of what he eats; you have to do it on the basis of intelligence.”