Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

“It’s not loaded,” I said.

“It’s loaded,” he said. “It just isn’t capable of firing.”

Strangely, I felt bitterly disappointed. A little while ago, I’d done the only heroic thing which I’d ever done in my entire life. I’d pulled off a real coup, turning the tables on one of the most evil bastards in the known universe—but his gun had already been fixed. The poor fool hadn’t had a chance. All the heroics suddenly seemed very silly.

“The gun that killed Khalekhan wasn’t useless,” I pointed out coldly.

“Khalekhan was a casualty,” he said. “As Guur pointed out, it was a stupid misjudgement on Heleb’s part. He was a combat soldier. I didn’t have anything against him, but I’m not about to cry over his passing. It was part of the price that had to be paid, if any of you were to go back to the surface. You’re the only one I’d care to trust, Mr. Rousseau, and I’d be careful even then. The bloodbath wasn’t entirely my idea; as I said, the people I’m with now weren’t entirely convinced, despite what they distilled from your software while you were asleep, what kind of beings we really are. Now they know. But I did help them plan it all, and I was ready and willing for people to be killed. I was also quite prepared to be unsporting, and give Amara Guur a disabled gun. I guess I’m no better than the rest of you—a pretty good imitation of humankind, wouldn’t you say?”

Too goody I’d have said.

“Why did they agree to let me go, if they’re as anxious as you say?” I inquired. “Why are they letting you tell me all this?”

“They don’t particularly want to keep you. They know that the secret of the dropshaft can’t be contained indefinitely, given that you left the notebook on the surface. They don’t see any harm in letting you out. Of course, you’ll never find the way down here again. They’ll block the way permanently. The Tetrax can have the levels all the way down to the bottom of Saul’s shaft, but that’s the floor so far as they’re concerned—until they learn a great deal more about how the native technics work.

“As for this little conversation—I suppose it might be seen as self-indulgence on my part. But there is a utilitarian aspect to it. You’d have realised that I wasn’t dead. You were the only one who could figure it out, but after the lion, I was sure that you would guess what had happened. I don’t think you’d ever have managed to convince the star-captain, even if you’d tried, because she wants me to be dead so very badly. But I’d rather you didn’t even try to convince her. I’d rather you let her go on believing what she believes, quite unchallenged. I’d rather you were a coconspirator, Mr. Rousseau. I want you to be on my side. You are on my side, aren’t you, Mr Rousseau?”

I looked at him tiredly. “You can call me Mike,” I said, with a slight croak in my voice.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “And you do want to return to the surface, don’t you? To claim your big reward? To be the man who found the way to more than a hundred new levels?”

I hesitated for a moment. But then I nodded. “Yes I do,” I said.

“That’s what I thought. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“Sorry you can’t stay. I think I might get the bigger rewards.”

“Like what?”

“Immortality… that sort of thing. As I said, I haven’t even met my hosts in the flesh yet, but I get the idea that they’re very clever people. Very clever indeed.”

There wasn’t much to say in reply to that.

Another thought struck me, though I didn’t voice it. These people didn’t know what was in the centre—they had no more idea about who built Asgard than I did—but if anyone could find out, they could. They were threatening to make sure that the Tetrax never would, but now they knew about the universe, their own curiosity was sure to have been stimulated. I was being turned back from my journey to the centre, but Myrlin was only just starting his. He had every chance of getting there, whether he became immortal or not.

I wondered whether I could revoke my hasty decision to return. I wondered whether I, too, might strike a bargain with these desperately shy, fabulously clever folk. But they hadn’t taken the trouble to ask me. They hadn’t even bothered to open up a conversation with me. Whatever their probes had extracted from my numbed brain during those twelve days that I had lain on their dissecting slabs, it hadn’t made them want to talk to me. They obviously chose their friends with the utmost care. They were quite possibly the worst snobs in the whole of Creation.

“Why are things so bad in the upper levels?” I asked him, suddenly anxious that the interview was coming to its end before I had asked any of the important questions. “Why were the top levels evacuated? Why has the one we came down been allowed to run wild? Why have its people degenerated?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly don’t.”

“Did Asgard come from the black galaxy? Is it a fortress, or an Ark, or what the hell?”

“I don’t know,” he insisted. “I can’t answer those questions, Mike. I don’t think the people here have ever asked them—until now.”

But you can find the answers, I thought, and I never will.

I felt like Adam, about to be expelled from Eden. But what the hell had I done wrong? What sin had I committed here? I hadn’t even been given a chance to display my worthiness. The only one of the people delivered here by cruel fate who had been tried and not found wanting was the android. He alone, it seemed, was untainted by innate sin… unborn and unfallen.

It had a weird kind of aesthetic propriety, but it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all—but we have long since grown used to the cruel truth that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, have we not? No one has any right to expect fairness.

“Is that it?” I asked him, still fighting the nausea, still using the invisible wall for support. “Is that all there is to it?”

“Yes,” he said, sorrowfully. “It’s over now. You’ll all wake up with your cold-suits on, up on level three. You’ll have enough reserves to get back to the surface, with a little to spare. The star-captain will have the comfort of knowing that she completed her impossible mission; you’ll be able to trade what you know for a lot of money. Good luck, Mike.”

“Same to you,” I said, with all the grace I could muster. “And…”

He had already begun to turn away, but he looked back at me, staring down from his improbable height, looking every inch a demigod.

“Yes?” he prompted.

“I really did appreciate this little chat.”

“So did I,” he assured me. “So did I.”

The way he said it, I knew it wasn’t intended to be an au revoir. It was a goodbye. He expected that he would never see me again.

It seemed, as the sky flickered again and I plunged back into the deep well of unconsciousness, that it was goodbye forever to some of my most precious dreams.

But not all of them.

I could still be famous. I could still be a living legend— and when I’d been asked whether that was what I wanted, my first impulse had been to say yes. I still had a secret to sell, and a desperate desire to haggle over its true price.

There isn’t much point in my giving a detailed description of the journey back to the surface. It was mercifully uneventful.

The star-captain and her surviving sidekicks were, I thought, surprisingly incurious about what had actually happened to them down below. They understood that we’d been captured by some kind of alien intelligence, set free in order to play games and then captured again before being released somewhere else, but they were astonishingly unresentful of this cavalier treatment.