Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

Nevertheless, I managed to sit up, and after a while I opened my eyes, blinking in order to clear my vision.

I was still in the same place. The sky had stopped flickering, and was now presenting a reasonable simulation of twilight. Some of the lights were on, but most were off. The forest was still, and very quiet. I could still smell smoke, but the odour was faint and distant.

Susarma Lear was stretched out on a gigantic leaf, her head cradled by a purple flower. She was quite unconscious, and made no response at all when I shook her sleeve.

I looked at the patch of open ground where Myrlin’s body should have been lying.

The body wasn’t there.

Nor was the patch of ground.

I wasn’t altogether surprised. Dazed as I was, I remembered seeing the body flicker before I went out for the count, and the suspicion must have been born in my mind at that moment that all was definitely not as it seemed.

I checked Jacinthe Siani, who responded no better to my half-hearted attempt to rouse her than the star-captain had. I could also see Seme, similarly dead to the world, though not actually deceased.

I coughed a few times, trying to get the awful taste out of my mouth, and then leaned against the wall, trying to draw strength from its cool solidity.

Myrlin came out of the bushes. He was dressed exactly as he had been when I had seen him shot down, but his big hairy torso was quite intact, and though the dim light made him seem a little greyer than I remembered him, he looked a good deal healthier than I did.

It was the first time I’d been able to get a good look at his face, without an obscuring visor. His features weren’t rugged at all. He was round-faced with skin that looked very soft. He was like a vastly overgrown baby, except for the big nose.

“Hello, Mr. Rousseau,” he said softly.

“That damned lion,” I said, with a certain amount of irritation. “You weren’t testing me. You were testing the illusion.”

“They weren’t entirely sure that it would work,” he said. “It’s a new trick they worked out specially for the occasion. You had me worried when you seemed to have it figured out, but I thought it went well enough. I think it worked on the star-captain. She’ll be quite convinced that she killed me. A cathartic experience, I’m sure. She’s been under a lot of stress.”

“The others are really dead, though.”

“Oh yes,” he said, mildly. “Amara Guur and his men are really dead. She knows they’re dead—and that will help to convince her that I’m dead too, should she begin to doubt it. I didn’t have any qualms about letting them die—they tortured Saul Lyndrach, and caused his death. They’d have killed me too, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the tranquillisers they pumped into me weren’t as effective as they expected. There are advantages in being a giant.”

“You orchestrated the whole thing?”

“Mostly. I didn’t have a completely free hand. They went along with most of what I suggested.”

“They?”

“The people who live here. They seem to be a little shy—I haven’t actually met them in the flesh yet. But they have very sophisticated machines.”

I shook my head, still trying to get back the good feeling I’d had when I woke up only a couple of hours before. An awful lot had happened during those brief hours.

“Is the fire out?” I asked, deliberately choosing a question of marginal relevance. I didn’t feel up to asking the big ones yet.

“Yes. It didn’t do too much damage. It can all be repaired.”

“That’s a relief.” The sarcasm wasn’t really called for, but I figured that I might be excused.

There was a pause, while Myrlin looked down at the prostrate star-captain, who had a more peaceful expression on her face now than I’d ever seen there before.

“I don’t think they actually believed me,” said Myrlin.

“What didn’t they believe?” I countered.

“They didn’t believe that everyone would start trying to kill one another. They didn’t believe that you could all wake up in this bizarre situation, and promptly start figuring out how to stage a massacre.”

“Some people have no imagination,” I observed drily.

“They don’t do any killing themselves,” he said. “I suspect they don’t do much dying either. They seem to have their world and their lives pretty much under control.”

“Bully for them,” I said. “How is it, exactly, that you seem to be the one calling the shots around here?”

“I made a deal with them.”

“So I gather. But what made them strike a deal with you?

Why not the star-captain? Why not Amara Guur? Why not me?”

“My interests and theirs appear to coincide,” he said. “I need a home… a life… a place to belong. I was more than ready to volunteer to stay here, and help them out.”

“Help them out with what? Their world and their lives are under control, remember?”

“They need time to think, Mr. Rousseau. Time to decide what to do—about the universe.”

“About the universe?” I had the feeling that I was getting out of my philosophical depth. It was all becoming a little too surreal.

“They didn’t know the universe existed,” he told me. “They thought Asgard was all that there was… layer upon layer, ad infinitum. Now, they have to come to terms with the idea of the surface… of infinite space… they have to figure out what it all means, in terms of who they might be, and where they might be, and why.”

“They’re not the builders, then? They didn’t make Asgard and they don’t know what it’s for?”

“No. They’re not the builders. They know a little bit about a few hundreds of levels, but they’re no wiser about what’s in the centre than you are. They don’t seem to do a lot of exploring themselves, but they do have robots. They’d never been up Saul’s dropshaft before, though. They had no idea what was up on three. Now they know about the cold levels… about the galactic community… about Tetrax and vormyr and the human/Salamandran war. I get the impression that they’re a little anxious about it all. I suspect that they’re not very aggressive, and that they think what just happened here is rather horrible.”

I thought it was rather horrible myself, but I didn’t bother to say so.

“So you’re going to stay and teach them about the universe,” I said, instead. I smiled sardonically, because it was, in its way, a wonderful irony. He was newborn, and all that he knew about the universe, and about humanoidkind, had been pumped into him by some kind of machine. He wasn’t real. Maybe that was why these mysterious underworld-dwellers liked him so much.

“Why’d you stage the bloodbath?” I asked him. “Why not simply have your friends put Guur and his bully boys in cold storage? They must have given us a pretty thorough going-over while they had us in their clutches for twelve whole days. They didn’t have to wake anyone up at all. They could have used us as founts of information about the universe, then thrown us out with the garbage, if they wanted to.”

“I thought you’d like to go back, Mr Rousseau. I wanted to do you a good turn. The star-captain too, perverse as it may seem. I don’t really have anything against her, you understand. She couldn’t help but see things the way she did.”

“You steered me straight into Amara Guur,” I pointed out. “He could have killed me any time.”

Myrlin picked something up from the ground. It was the needier that Seme had given to me so that I could wave it at Jacinthe Siani. I assumed that it must have been the one which Guur had carried. He pointed it at the sky, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.