Brian Stableford - Asgard's Secret

238-Zenatta shook his head sadly, but he knew his duty. “Very well,” he said. “That is the case I shall argue.”

I watched my trial on television, giving evidence from my cell. 238-Zenatta put in what seemed to me to be a rather lacklustre performance, but I couldn’t blame him for that. My performance lacked lustre too. We both knew the score.

The Tetron magistrate, a supersmart AI, found me guilty in thirty-seven seconds. My appeal took a little longer, but it was dismissed within two minutes.

I was given three days to find a way of paying off my debt that was acceptable to all interested parties. The Sleath had had no traceable relatives, so the parties in question were myself and the Tetron administration. The administration would be reasonable—but they would insist on my finding a way to pay back the necessary ransom as quickly as humanly possible. I might be able to persuade them that twenty-five years of servitude was reasonable, but they would let me work it off at a rate that would take fifty or a hundred if anyone made a formal offer that looked better.

I called Aleksandr Sovorov immediately and told him that I’d take the job at the C.R.E.—but he informed me, rather coldly, that the offer had been withdrawn. The Co-ordinated Research Establishment had an image to maintain; they didn’t hire convicted murderers.

Naturally enough, nobody came forward immediately to offer me a way out. I knew that I’d have at least two days to contemplate the possibility that I’d be spending the next forty years in a coma while my metabolism devoted itself to the manufacture of exotic proteins and my brain processed data for anyone whose calculative problems required a ready-made neural network rather than something custom-built from silicon and high-temperature superconductors. Neither process would leave any manifest scars, but rumour has it that the only kind of mid-life crisis worse than discovering that you’re fifty years out of sync with history and living in a second-hand body is finding that you’re also living in a second-hand brain whose habitual pathways have been re-geared to processes of thought that are, to say the least, unhuman.

While I waited, I played cards with my jailer, 69-Aquila. He seemed quite pleased to have me around; it was obviously a slow week, and he was winning the game. Fortunately, he wasn’t allowed to play for money.

“Slavery is an abomination,” I informed him, by way of making conversation. “On my homeworld, we gave it up centuries ago, on the grounds that it’s an intolerable affront to civilized values.”

“How do you deal with criminals in your home system?” he asked, politely.

I told him.

He laughed.

“I realise, of course, that everything we lesser species do seems to the Tetrax to be comical as well as barbaric,” I said, “but in this particular instance I really don’t think your way is any better. At least we call a punishment a punishment. We don’t try to pretend that it’s anything else. Your way is hypocritical.”

“You simply don’t realise how backward your culture is,” 69-Aquila assured me. “It is perfectly understandable, even though you have been given the opportunity to observe the folkways of hundreds of other cultures here in Skychain City. You are imprisoned by primitive habits of thought, blinded by parochial prejudices. It is not sufficient merely to live alongside other species; you must learn to make comparisons, to understand the reasons for the differences between them. We Tetrax have had the opportunity to study thousands of humanoid cultures, and to grasp the fundamental principles of their historical development. We understand the inevitability of what you call slavery as well as its practical necessity. There are a great many things your species might have given up whose abandonment would do you credit, but slavery is not one of them. War, for instance. I understand that your species has actually been engaged in a war for almost as long as you have possessed starships.”

“So it’s rumoured,” I conceded. “It’s over now, according to Alex Sovorov, but I’m in no position to defend the fact that it took place at all, given that I left the system before it started. Obviously, I’d rather it hadn’t happened, and I expect that the poor bastards who had to fight it felt the same way.”

Mercifully, there was no word in parole for “bastard,” so I had to use the English one—which saved me from having to explain that I didn’t really mean that Earth’s warships were staffed by people whose parents hadn’t been legally married.

I hurried on. “Anyway, you shouldn’t try to worm out of it by changing the subject. It’s your system that’s in question, not ours. I’m sitting here waiting for someone to buy me, or at least to hire me for a very substantial slice of my future life. The only person who’s likely to offer is the gangster who fitted me up, whose offer will probably look a great deal more attractive on paper than it will turn out to be in real life. In fact, it’ll be an offer I’d have to be insane to take—except that my only alternative is to serve as a laboratory rat in some kind of experimental set-up that’s likely to leave me with a very bad case of not-so-false-but-definitely-inexplicable-memory-syndrome as well as removing me from active participation in the most interesting period of galactic history. I find this a rather invidious position to be in. I don’t think anyone should be subjected to this kind of treatment, and I certainly don’t think they should be insulted, as well as injured, by being told how very civilized it is.”

69-Aquila shrugged his shoulders. The precise meaning of significant gestures varies considerably between species, but a Tetron shrug means much the same as a human shrug. Unlike real gorillas, they only duplicate human genetic make-up to seventy-eight percent, but much of the rest is functionally parallel.

“It is necessary,” he said. “It is also inevitable. We have studied the social evolution of thousands of humanoid species, and found them convergent to almost the same degree as their physical evolution. Whether the reasons for that are somehow contained in the supernoval debris that is our common ancestor, or merely in the abstract logic of the situation, we have not yet been able to ascertain. The fact remains, however, that there is a well-defined pattern which your species cannot perceive, partly because you are stuck at an intermediate stage and partly because you have not had the opportunity to make elaborate comparisons with other species—preferring, it seems, to make war against your nearest neighbour.”

“And I suppose I’m too stupid to understand any explanation you might care to give me,” I said.

“Not at all,” he said. “Our children have no difficulty grasping it. You could do it too, if only you could open your mind.”

“Try me,” I invited.

“The pattern of social relationships within a humanoid culture is largely dependent on the technology it possesses,” he told me. “As technology advances, the economic basis of the culture’s subsistence changes with it. The situation is complicated, of course, by the fact that some kinds of sociopolitical systems are more amenable to technological advance than others, but those which are hostile tend to disappear, whether or not they are formally conquered, so the eventual effect is that technology seems to be the ultimate determinant, and to have a natural growth-pattern of its own.

“In the beginning, when technology is primitive, almost the whole of every person’s labour has to be devoted to the business of survival, and social groups are primitive—mere families, in which power is brute force. When agricultural enterprise permits labourers to feed twice or three times their own number, however, tribes grow much larger and social organization becomes much more complicated. Although armed might remains the ultimate expression of power, ownership of land becomes the primary determinant of economic authority.