Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  ASGARD'S

  SECRET

  THE ASGARD TRILOGY

  BOOK ONE

  BRIAN

  STABLEFORD

  Five Star • Waterville, Maine

  Copyright © 2004 by Brian Stableford.

  Previously published by DAW Books, Inc., under the title "Journey to the Center" copyright © 1982 by Brian Stableford.

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  First Edition

  First Printing: October 2004

  Published in 2004 in conjunction with Tekno Books and Ed Gorman.

  Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

  Printed in the United States on permanent paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Stableford, Brian M.

  Asgard's secret / by Brian Stableford.— 1st ed. p. cm.

  Completely rev. ed. of: Journey to the center. ISBN 1-59414-211-4 (hC : alk. paper) I. Stableford, Brian M. Journey to the center. II. Title. PR6069.T17A94 2004

  823'.914—dc22 2004053347

  an ebookman scan

  For

  the Most Reverend LIONEL FANTHORPE, Primate Archbishop of the Interdenominational Templar Church of the Holy Lands and Good Friend

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  An earlier version of this story entitled Journey to the Center was published by DAW Books in 1982. A partly-revised edition was published in the UK by NEL in 1989. In the present version all the chapters that were unrevised in the NEL edition have been thoroughly rewritten, so none of the text of the original version has survived into this (much better) one, although the basic plot remains much the same.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  If I had had more of a social conscience, events on Asgard might have developed very differently. In fact—or so I have been assured—the ultimate future of the human race might have been affected, perhaps for the worse, by my lack of charity. I find this a very sobering thought, and I'm sure that there's a moral in it for us all. This isn't my purpose in telling the story, however; I'm not in the business of writing moral fables.

  Perhaps things would have been different if the call hadn't come through in the middle of the night. No one is at his best when summoned from sleep at approximately 12.87 standard metric. I only had a wall phone in those days, which couldn't be reached from the bed; to answer it I had to wriggle out of my sleeping bag and stagger across the room. I usually tripped over my boots en route. That's why I habitually answered the phone with a grunt that sounded more like a curse than a greeting.

  The voice that replied to my grunt didn't seem in the least put out. He didn't have his eye switched on, but his cultured voice immediately identified him as a Tetron. Pangalactic parole, being a Tetron invention, uses a range of phonemes that makes it difficult for anyone except a Tetron to speak it in a cultured tone, although the Chinese seem to manage much better than other humans. I speak three languages—English, French and Japanese—but in parole I still sound like the interstellar equivalent of a country bumpkin.

  "Am I speaking to Michael Rousseau?" asked the Tetron.

  "Probably," I answered.

  "Are you in doubt as to your identity?" he inquired solicitously.

  "This is Mike Rousseau," I assured him. "There's no doubt about it. What do you want?"

  "My code is 74-Scarion. I am the officer on duty at Immigration Control. There is a person desirous of entry to the city that identifies himself as a member of your species. I cannot admit him unless one of his own kind is willing to accept formal responsibility for his well-being, but he has no previous acquaintance with anyone on Asgard. As you know, your race has no consulate on this world, and there seem to be no official channels into which I can direct his request."

  "Why me?" I asked in a pained tone. "There must be at least two hundred humans on Asgard. How come your version of alphabetical order puts my name at the top of your list?"

  "Your name was suggested to me by a Mr. Aleksandr Sovorov, who is a member of the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. I naturally approached him first, on the grounds that he is the one member of your species who is in a position of notional authority. He informed me that he is unable to accept responsibility for what he terms 'scavengers and fortune-hunters' and suggested that you would be more likely than he to have something in common with an individual of that sort."

  You will doubtless infer from this incident that I was by no means the only person on Asgard lacking in charity.

  I groaned. "What, exactly, am I supposed to do for this character?" I asked.

  "You would be required to provide him with accommodation until he can make arrangements of his own, and to familiarize him with the law and local customs. It is a temporary arrangement, until he is ready to make his own way—a matter of friendship and courtesy. Did no one perform the same function for you when you first arrived on Asgard?"

  Actually, they hadn't. Things had been less formalized in those days. There hadn't been so many different species intent on getting a slice of the action—and the human race hadn't been at war.

  I cursed Aleksandr Sovorov for the malicious impulse that had prompted him to throw my name into the ring, and told myself that I didn't have to knuckle under to that kind of whim, no matter how badly I needed his help. "I can't do it," I said, firmly. "I'm just about broke. I only came back to the city to stock up on supplies, and then I'll be going out into the cold again. I can't afford to take in any stray cats."

  "I do not understand," said 74-Scarion, frostily. I'd had to use the English phrase "stray cats" because it couldn't be translated into parole. If there were cats on the Tetron homeworld, I didn't know how to describe them in parole, and it probably wouldn't have done much good if I had. The Tetrax didn't seem like the kind of folk who'd tolerate their pets going astray. They weren't the kind of folk who approved of people casually dropping vernacular terms into their carefully crafted artificial languages either—they tended to view such actions as a kind of pollution, if not as flagrant insults.

  "I can't do it," I repeated. "I probably don't even speak his language. Unlike you, we have quite a lot."

  74-Scarion was unperturbed by this suggestion. A new voice chipped in, saying—in English—"My name is Myrlin, Mr. Rousseau—with a 'y,' not an 'e.' I also speak Russian and Chinese, if that would help to find me a sponsor. I wouldn't want to force myself upon you, as you're so clearly reluctant, but I wonder if you could suggest someone who might be willing to accept temporary responsibility for me. I really would like to get down to the surface tonight, if possible."

  He sound
ed so polite that I felt profoundly guilty—so guilty, in fact, that instead of following Aleksandr Sovorov's example and trying to think of someone I disliked enough to book them an untimely wake-up call, I tried to think of someone who might be willing and able to take the poor guy in, if only to get him admitted to the city.

  "I know someone who might be able to help," I said, eventually—in parole, for the Tetron's benefit. "I met Saul Lyndrach yesterday—he's just back from a trip into the levels and he seemed quite pleased with the way things had gone. It's bound to take him a while to trade his cargo, but his credit must be good, and he probably won't be in any hurry to get back out again. He's your man. He lives over in sector six. Give me a minute and I'll look up his number."

  "That will not be necessary, Mr. Rousseau," 74-Scarion assured me. "I shall obtain it from the central database. I am sorry to have troubled you. Thank you for your assistance."

  The minute he'd hung up, of course, I began to get curious. I'd been so eager to avoid getting the newcomer dumped on me that I hadn't bothered to ask where he'd come from, or why, or any of a dozen other things I might routinely have asked of a fellow human being. Even if he hadn't come from Earth, he was bound to have news, and I really should have been interested in news, given that there was a war on. Even if there hadn't been, it would have been pleasant to see a new human face. When there are only a couple of hundred members of one's own species in a city whose population runs into the tens of thousands, on a world thousands of light-years from Earth, it's worth making an effort to be friendly. Aleksandr Sovorov might be the kind of person who took pride in looking down on his own species, but I wasn't, and I regretted having given the mysterious Myrlin the impression that I might be.

  I assured myself, though, that Saul Lyndrach would put him right. As I flopped back down on the bed and struggled into the sleeping bag, I resolved that I would definitely make the effort to visit Saul some time in the next couple of days, to apologise to him and to his guest. I also resolved to keep a close guard on my tongue when I went to see Aleksandr Sovorov at the C.R.E., sternly resisting any temptation to tell him what I thought of his little joke. If I wanted his help, I had to be very careful indeed . . . and I certainly needed his help.

  It occurred to me to wonder, then, whether the mysterious Myrlin might have been in a position to help me out, if only I'd taken him in. My mind was suddenly flooded by images of a rich eccentric fleeing war-torn Earth in a starship full of precious metal or negotiable biotech, full of Romantic dreams about penetrating the secrets of Asgard, whose only desire on arriving in Skychain City would be to find a reliable guide to be his partner. . . .

  I gave it up. I hadn't come to Asgard to be a guide. I'd had a partner once, but it hadn't worked out. I was a loner now; when I made my big strike, it was going to be all mine. The one good thing about Alex Sovorov's contempt was that if he did condescend to shove some C.R.E. cash in my direction, he certainly wouldn't want to tag along to make sure I spent it wisely. I told myself that I'd done the right thing, and that even if I hadn't, it was only because I'd been woken up in the middle of the night.

  And what if I had taken Myrlin in? What difference would it have made? Well, I probably wouldn't have been framed for murder, for a start, and he might still have been around when the Star Force arrived to inform me that he wasn't really human at all—and was, in fact, the deadliest enemy that our species had to face in a universe where enemies didn't seem to be in short supply. And maybe . . . just maybe ... I wouldn't ever have got to penetrate the inmost secrets of Asgard.

  All things considered, I think I did the right thing, even if I did it for the wrong reasons.

  2

  When I got up again, the lights of Skychain City had been burning brightly for some time. It was dark outside the dome, but according to the Tetron timetable it was daytime, and the Tetrax aren't the kind of folk to let the absence of the sun spoil their calculations.

  Asgard's days were more than six times as long as days on the Tetron homeworld—which are a little longer than Earth's—and the Tetrax were no more capable of adjusting their metabolic patterns to that kind of regime than humans, so they kept their own time. Everyone else kept it too, at least in Skychain City.

  The Tetrax had built the skychain—a remarkable feat, considering that they're a biotech-minded species and that their own world could no more support such an artefact than Earth. Anyone else was, of course, at liberty to set up their own docking satellites and shuttle facilities, but it was so much cheaper to use the Tetron facility that no one ever had made separate arrangements—which was why the Tetrax were the effective rulers of Skychain City and the effective directors of the Co-ordinated Research Establishment, no matter how much cosmetic democracy they put in place.

  It wasn't just Immigration Control that was staffed by Tetron civil servants; they ran everything else too. All the citizens got to vote for the mayor and the council, and the police force was as multiracial as the C.R.E., but at the end of the day—whose length, you will remember, was determined

  by the Tetrax—everything was done the Tetron way.

  Personally, I didn't mind. The Tetron way seemed to work, and there wasn't any other species I'd rather have had running things, including my own. Not that I'd ever have let on to a Tetron, of course—I didn't suck up to them the way Aleksandr Sovorov did.

  I went to see Alex as soon as I'd had my breakfast. I thanked him kindly for recommending me to Myrlin, and tried not to sound sarcastic while I did it. Then I asked him very politely whether the relevant committees had looked kindly upon my application for financial assistance in refitting my truck. "Assistance" was a euphemism, of course—if they did give me the money to fund my next expedition, they'd want a percentage of anything I brought back until I died on the job. Personally, I thought that looked like a much better deal from their point of view than it did from mine, but I was desperate . . . and I wasn't at all sure about the quality of their sight.

  "I haven't had the official notification yet," Alex told me, twiddling a ballpoint pen between his stubby, stained fingers. I could never figure out what the stain was; sometimes I suspected him of dipping his fingers in some kind of brown dye because it made him look more like the hands-on scientist he liked to think he was than the petty bureaucrat he actually seemed to be. Not that he didn't put in his lab-time, of course—he spent hours every day poring over artefacts of every shape and dimension—but they all came his way along a metaphorical conveyor belt, carefully directed towards his supposed expertise by Tetron scientists who probably kept all the best stuff for themselves. He was, in essence, a dotter of i's and a crosser of t's; he would never be privileged to make a real conceptual breakthrough.

  He probably knew that, in his heart of hearts—although he would never have admitted it to someone like me—but it didn't prevent him from imagining that he was one of the most important humans in the universe even so, simply because he was on Asgard rather than Earth, occupying an intermediate station in the hallowed ranks of the C.R.E.

  "Did you put in a good word for me, Alex?" I asked, humbly. "Did you explain to them how lucky they'd be to have me on the team?"

  "I was asked for my opinion, naturally," he replied, with suspicious pedantry.

  "Which is, of course, that I'm a good man," I said, mildly. "A trustworthy man—a man on whom it would be well worth taking a chance. 'Look, lads,' you said, 'I know Rousseau, and Rousseau knows the levels. There's no one who's been further afield than he has, no one else with his curiosity and expertise, no one likelier to come up with something really special and completely new.' That is your opinion, isn't it?"

  "I know that it's your opinion," Sovorov countered. "I certainly told them that."

  "You told them that. Would it have hurt you to have thrown your own weight behind it too? Would it have inconvenienced you to tell them what a good deal they'd be getting?"

  He stabbed absent-mindedly at the desk with the point of his pen. I wondered
what his unconscious was trying to communicate, in its own inarticulate fashion.

  "I don't believe in letting my personal loyalties override my principles," he said. "We happen to be members of the same species—we may even reckon one another as friends— but when I'm acting on behalf of this Research Establishment I have to put personal feelings aside. The C.R.E. has its own methods and procedures, and its own system of operation. Its enquiries proceed in a rational manner, one step at a time. We take great care to examine everything we find, and to obtain all the data we can from each and every artefact. Our recovery teams are well trained; they operate in a controlled manner, careful to do no damage. Safety is their first priority—not merely their own safety, but the safety of their discoveries. They're scientists, not treasure-hunters."

  "And I'm not?"

  "You're a scavenger, Michael. Your first priority is to go where no one has gone before, to find things that no one has ever found before. You move around aimlessly, at a furious pace, probably destroying far more than you ever bring back, through sheer carelessness. You may think that you're attempting to further the growth of knowledge, but you're just a trophy-hunter. Perhaps you're less mercenary than some of your kind, but that's only because you value the glory that might be attached to finding something valuable more than the price you can sell it for. You think that if you cover more ground than other people, you're more likely to stumble across some fabulous jackpot—but that assumes that you'd be able to recognise it if you did. You've been here a long time, I know. You've spent more time in the levels than any other human, perhaps as much time as any member of any species, but you're strictly an amateur. You don't do any of the real work. You've brought me interesting things in the past, I'll grant you, and I'm grateful for the fact that you brought them to me rather than selling them to some junk shop in sector seven, but that doesn't mean that I have to approve of the way you work. I don't. I don't believe the Establishment should support people who operate the way you do."