Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“Who recommended me to you?” I asked.

“We have friends in the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. We know about the offer they made to you yesterday—an insult, to a man of your quality. We will pay you more generously, and I believe that you will find the work far more to your liking.”

Lema had finished studying my shelves. He hadn’t touched anything, but he seemed satisfied that he had found what he was looking for.

“I have to consider all the offers I’ve received,” I told him. “If you leave your employer’s name and number, I’ll call him when I’ve made a decision.”

There are some races—or, at least, some kinds of persons— who don’t recognise the propriety of a diplomatic refusal. In a place like Skychain City, they’re supposed to put such idiosyncrasies aside, never taking offence at anything short of a kick in the balls—but they’re free to let their displeasure show, if they care to.

Heleb looked me in the eye for less than a second. If I hadn’t known what I knew about Spirellans, I’d have thought nothing of it, but I knew enough to feel a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

“Thank you for giving my offer consideration,” he said, insincerely. “I hope to hear from you in due course.”

If he’d been human, or even Tetron, I’d probably have made a smart remark about not holding his breath. Instead, I said: “It’s extremely kind of you to think of me. I’m very grateful. You can be sure that I’ll give your offer sympathetic consideration—but I owe it to everyone who has made me an offer to weigh their proposals very carefully.”

He handed me a card which had a number scrawled on it. Spirellan handwriting isn’t nearly as neat as Spirellan speech, but Tetron numbers are easy to distinguish from one another.

“Your employer’s?” I asked.

“It is my own number,” he told me. It was the third time he’d passed up an open invitation to tell me who his employer was, and he had to know that I had taken due note of the fact.

“Thank you,” I said, again.

When I’d closed the door behind them I realised that my heart was hammering. Without knowing exactly why, I was scared. That had been Heleb’s doing; he had intended to scare me.

I sat down on the bed and wondered what fate had against me. If Heleb really wanted me to join his expedition, he wasn’t going to take my refusal quite as politely as he’d made his offer.

I felt in desperate need of a sympathetic ear and a little moral support, so I decided to go see Saul Lyndrach and take a look at the mysterious Myrlin.

Unfortunately, Saul wasn’t home. Like me, he rented a cell in a honeycomb singlestack—one of a couple of hundred hastily erected by the Tetrax when they’d first built the base that had grown into Skychain City. The Mercatan building supervisor hadn’t seen him go out and hadn’t the slightest idea when he’d be back, but that was only to be expected. The doorman did go out of his way to mention the giant he’d seen Saul with the previous day, though.

“What giant?” I queried. Most starfaring humanoids are much the same size as humans—it’s a matter of the pressures of convergent evolution in DNA-based Gaia-clone ecospheres—but there were a couple of species with representatives on Asgard which routinely grew to two metres ten, so a singlestack supervisor wasn’t likely to use the word “giant” lightly.

“A guest,” the Mercatan told me, in stilted parole. “The foolish fellow at Immigration Control must have classified him as human by mistake, perhaps because of his nose. Mr. Lyndrach is probably trying to sort out the error, but you know how officious these Tetrax are. They never admit that they might have made a mistake.”

Saul wasn’t far short of two metres tall himself. By Mercatan standards, he was a giant. If Myrlin seemed like a giant compared with Saul, he had to be really big—but he’d told me over the phone that he was human. He spoke English, and had claimed to be able to speak Russian and Chinese as well. If he hadn’t been human, he wouldn’t even have known the names of the languages.

“You might look in the bar on the corner.” The supervisor added, in a confidential manner, apparently having warmed to my presence, “Mr. Lyndrach often drinks in there, and it has a high ceiling.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I will.”

I did, too—I just kept right on making one mistake after another.

Saul wasn’t anywhere to be seen in the bar, but there was a human called Simeon Balidar sitting in a booth, looking expectantly about him as if he were waiting for someone. He caught sight of me as soon as I walked through the door and waved to me.

I didn’t like Balidar much. He was a scavenger, like me, but he didn’t have a truck of his own. He hired himself out to anyone and everyone—except the C.R.E., who seemed to him to be way too safe. He’d always thought that he and I were kindred spirits, and had never understood why I didn’t agree with him—but he did know a lot of people, including Saul, so I went over to the booth.

I only wanted answers to a couple of questions, but Balidar was the kind of guy who couldn’t possibly answer a question without making a big thing of it, so I had to let him buy me a drink.

“No,” he said, when he finally got around to answering my questions. “Saul hasn’t been in today—I haven’t seen him since the day before yesterday. I don’t know anything about a giant called Myrlin.”

I sipped my drink, wondering how to carry the conversation forward now that my reason for getting involved in it had evaporated. “You don’t, by any chance, know a Spirellan called Heleb?” I said. “Has a little brother named Lema?”

His eyes narrowed. “Why?” he asked.

It was, in its way, a very revealing answer, but I figured I ought to tread carefully if I were going to persuade him to expand on it. “Oh, I heard that he’s putting together a team,” I said. “Sounded like your kind of thing—good pay, adventurous… the antithesis of everything the dear old C.R.E. stands for.”

“Are you going to get involved?” he asked, in a way that suggested to me that he already knew about the expedition and Heleb’s offer. I began to wonder, in fact, whether it might have been Balidar who’d put them on to me in the first place.

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ve had several offers. Heleb’s might be the best, but I don’t know who he’s working for. He was careful not to tell me.”

“Does it matter?” he asked stupidly.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I said, “but I’m certainly not going to sign on until I know, am I? It shouldn’t be too difficult to find out.”

“No,” he said. “I suppose not. Look—there’s the people I’m waiting for. Would you care to join us?”

I looked over my shoulder. Two Zabarans had just come into the bar and they were making straight for the booth. They seemed harmless enough, and probably were. Zabarans had the reputation of being easy to get along with. They also had the reputation of being very enthusiastic gamblers—which was, I figured, why Simeon Balidar was waiting for them. He had always fancied himself as a card player, although I’d played with him and Saul a dozen times without ever detecting any conspicuous talent.

“What are you playing?” I asked.

He named a Zabaran game. I knew the rules, but I didn’t want to take any risks.

“It’s okay,” he said, in English. “I know these guys. They’re a soft touch. If it were just me, they’d probably gang up on me, but with two of us in the game… we’ll start off with low stakes, just to get the feel of things.”

I thought about it for half a minute, and then said: “Okay, I’ll play for a while—on one condition.”