Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

The fact that they remembered so clearly and so satisfyingly how they had gunned down poor Myrlin probably accounted in large measure for their lack of resentment; it was obvious that the star-captain, at least, had been liberated from a frightful burden, and that she was abundantly grateful for her freedom. She even began to treat me with a measure of good fellowship, and nothing more was said about such embarrassing matters as charges of cowardice and desertion. She seemed perfectly happy to tear up my conscription papers after Jacinthe Siani’s testimony to a Tetron court exonerated me from all blame in the matter of the murder of Atmin Atmanu, restoring my record to cleanliness.

Needless to say, I came back to Skychain City a much more popular man than I had left. I was the man with the notebook, the man with the tape that could guide the C.R.E. to the vital dropshaft.

The others who returned with me would all have been popular too, save for the fact that not one of them had made any notes of their own which might guide a third party to the spot marked X. The star-captain wasn’t interested, of course, but I think I observed Serne grinding his teeth a couple of times when he realised that he had carelessly neglected his chance to get a cut of the loot. Jacinthe Siani was definitely peeved, because she didn’t even know enough to bribe her way out of the service-obligations that were heaped upon her as a result of her complicity in various crimes. I contemplated buying her out at one point, but very briefly. Even after searching my merciful heart, I couldn’t find an atom of sympathy for her. I believe that her services were purchased by some other Kythnans, but what she was going to have to do to pay them back I didn’t want to ask.

While the starship troopers were on their way back up the skychain, ready to take their interstellar destroyer back to the home system, where they would doubtless enjoy their own heroes’ welcome and collect their campaign medals— once they’d been very carefully checked for alien infection— I went to see my old friend Aleksandr Sovorov, to negotiate a deal with the C.R.E.

I told him most of the story. I drew a veil over certain parts of it, but I did give him a few juicy details about the civilization with which I’d come into brief contact deep in the bowels of the planet. I took a certain vindictive glee in watching him squirm with anguish.

By the time I was finished, he was staring at me as if I were some kind of hairy arthropod with a disgusting odour.

“You made contact with an advanced civilization thousands of levels down?” he repeated, to make sure that he’d got it right.

“That’s right,” I told him. “Must have been about halfway to the centre.”

“And when they released you all, your Star Force friends and Amara Guur’s gangsters set off on such an orgy of killing that they exported you all the way back to level three, and decided to seal themselves off forever?”

“That seems to be the gist of it,” I confirmed, though it wasn’t entirely accurate. “They seemed to think that we’re barbarians. So does everyone else, now I come to think about it. Perhaps they’re right.”

He groaned. He always did tend to overact. “Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?” he asked. The expression of pain in his eyes was a sight to behold.

“If the C.R.E. hadn’t turned down my application for aid,” I pointed out, “none of this would have happened. In a way, it’s all your fault.”

“If the C.R.E. had done what I suggested,” he retorted, “they’d have kept people like you out of the levels altogether.”

“If they’d done that,” I retorted, “Saul Lyndrach would never have found the shaft in the first place. The super-scientists down in the depths would still be blissfully ignorant of the existence of the universe, content to sit on whatever they have in place of arses for the next few million years. And you wouldn’t be sitting here buying a way into a hundred new levels— warm levels, where there’s life, and enough recoverable technology to keep you busy for the next few centuries.”

“You stupid, selfish bastard,” he said, hissing through his teeth. “You have ruined everything the C.R.E. was set up to do. You have set back the cause of humankind irreparably. How do you think we are ever going to hold our heads up in the galactic community now? There is nothing worse that the universe could have shown to these people than a bunch of brawling savages. You couldn’t be content with taking the Star Force down there, could you? You had to take the vormyr and the Spirellans too, just to show them how ugly humanoids can be when they’re absolutely at their worst.”

“I didn’t exactly take Amara Guur with me,” I pointed out. “He came along of his own accord. If I’d known that I had a bug in my bootheel, I would have worn overshoes. Anyway, you’re forgetting the guy who led us all on the chase. The Salamandran android. Who do you think was responsible for his being there?”

“Saul Lyndrach,” he replied, undaunted.

I shook my head.

I picked up a piece of paper from his desk, and pointed to the letterhead. There was a symbol beside the letters which spelled out Co-ordinated Research Establishment in parole.

“What’s that, Alex?” I said.

For a moment or two he simply looked annoyed and impatient, but he finally figured out that I was serious.

“It’s a pictograph in one of the Tetron languages,” he said. “It’s the symbol of our organization, as well you know. What of it?”

“It appears on all your documents, like a trademark.”

“Yes. So what?”

“That’s the symbol Myrlin drew in the air when he told me about the Salamandrans buying technics from Asgard— the technics they used to make him. The Tetrax and the upper-level cavies are both biotech-minded, remember? The Tetrax seem to have made a little bit more out of what they’ve found here than they’ve let underlings like you know about. And they’ve been selling some of it to like-minded barbarians, to use in those horrid wars that they disapprove of so strongly. If everything had gone as planned, the Co-ordinated bloody Research Establishment might just have been responsible for the extinction of the human species. Your species and mine, Alex. Who did you say was stupid and selfish? Who are the barbarians now, Alex?”

“You’re lying,” he said, hopefully. But he knew me better than that.

I shook my head.

“I didn’t know…” he said, tentatively.

“I know you didn’t,” I said. “Well, you know now.”

He thought about it for a minute, and then said: “It doesn’t affect my condemnation of what you did. I stand by everything that I believe. What happened in the lower levels is a disaster… for the human community and for mankind. And I don’t believe that the Tetron administration knew about this trade in technics, or if they did, I don’t believe that they intended them to be used in war. There are a lot of factions in the C.R.E., and it could have been any of them.”

“That’s my point,” I told him. “It could have been any of them. The whole universe is full of barbarians, Alex, and I didn’t see anything down in the bowels of Asgard to convince me that the people we tangled with were angels. The Star Force carved up Guur’s hatchet men, but it was the cavies who set it up, and the cavies who sat back with their popcorn and watched it happen. They were clever… but I didn’t see anything to make me believe that they were nice. Maybe we should be glad that they sealed themselves off. What if they do decide what to do about the universe… and decide that what they ought to do is sterilise the whole damn cosmos?”