Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  "No, I live in a Tetron-built apartment—it's not as luxurious as this, of course, but I think I can figure out which virtual buttons to press. Thanks. What's your name, by the way?"

  "69-Aquila," he told me, with a slight inclination of the head.

  When he'd gone, I went to the bed head control panel and found the button that would open the bathroom. Once I'd managed to display the virtual keyboard underneath the bathroom wallscreen, it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to activate the water-fountain, open the laundry chute and switch on the shower. I didn't bother with the medicare facility; I figured that it would be simpler to live with the headache than work my way through an interrogation in parole, complete with blood samples, just to get a Tetron aspirin. By the time my clothes and I had both been thoroughly cleaned I felt better anyway—or would have done, if I hadn't been so acutely conscious of the fact that I'd been fitted up for murder.

  It was easy enough to figure out why. The Tetron criminal justice system is based on the principle of reparation rather than punishment, although it makes little enough difference when you're on the receiving end. A criminal's debt to society is exactly that: a debt. One way or another, it has to be paid off. If you're a skilled worker lucky enough to find a generous employer, you can pay off a murder in a matter of ten or twenty years.

  If abject slavery isn't your thing, you have the option of renting out your body as a bioreactor and your unconscious brain as a relay in some fancy hypercomputer. Some people actually prefer that, because it allows them to sleep through their entire sentence—which rarely runs to more than forty or fifty years—but most people don't, because they fear, very reasonably, that they might not be quite the same person when they wake up again.

  Amara Guur wanted me to work for him—on his terms. He'd been prepared to ask politely, or at least to pretend, but either I'd been too slow to respond or something had happened after Heleb's visit to increase his sense of urgency. I had to admire his efficiency, though. Had he actually planted Balidar in that bar to wait for me? Had he given Saul's doorman instructions to send me along there if and when I turned up?

  It seemed so—the only alternative was that the whole plan had been stitched together in a matter of minutes as soon as the bartender had spotted me with Balidar.

  Either way, it was a lot of trouble to go to. Whatever Amara Guur had found that had given him a sudden interest in going out into the cold was obviously a powerful incentive.

  If he'd only told me what it was, maybe . . .

  I put that thought aside. Honest dealing wasn't the sort of thing Amara Guur went in for. If he'd already committed a murder or two to get hold of whatever it was he had, he'd probably got stuck in that particular procedural groove.

  My lawyer turned up at forty-one ten, full of apologies for the delay. His name was 238-Zenatta. He explained, regretfully, that it had proved impossible for 69-Aquila to contact Saul Lyndrach, who was currently being sought by Immigration Control. They were apparently anxious to know what had become of a human named Myrlin, who had been entrusted to Saul's care following his arrival on the surface.

  I wasn't surprised by this news. After all, if Amara Guur's men had given instructions to Saul's doorman about where to send me, they must have known that he wouldn't be at home when I came looking for him. I had more urgent matters to consider, though.

  "The evidence for the prosecution has all been filed," 238-Zenatta told me. "The witness statements seem to be in order and the forensic evidence is entirely consonant with it. It seems to me that your only possible chance to minimize the magnitude of the offence is to plead diminished

  responsibility due to alcoholic poisoning."

  I could see why he might think that. All DNA-based humanoids react in much the same way to alcohol—except, of course, for the Tetrax, who have apparently modified their entire species by means of genetic engineering to correct nature's mistake and save them from the indignities of drunkenness.

  "I didn't do it," I told him. "I was framed."

  "You didn't kill Mr. Atmanu?"

  "No."

  "Then how do you account for the fact that your handprints are arrayed on the murder-weapon, in a configuration suggesting very strongly that you were holding it in such a way as to strike out with it, aggressively."

  "There was nothing aggressive about it. I was trying to hold him off when he came at me with a knife. I tried to hit Heleb with it, but the Sleath was perfectly all right when the Spirellan knocked me out. Heleb killed him."

  "You say that you were knocked unconscious?" 238-Zenatta queried.

  I sighed. "No, I don't have a bruise or a fracture," I admitted. "He squeezed the arteries at the side of my neck—and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he knew how to do it without leaving a mark."

  "There are five witnesses," the lawyer pointed out. "Their statements agree in every detail. Simeon Balidar has admitted that you and he were cheating, and the cards entered into evidence do appear to be marked. All five witnesses state that when Mr. Atmanu attempted to take his money back, you attacked him with the chair, and that you continued to beat him with it after you had rendered him helpless. Sleaths are, by nature, a relatively fragile species, and Mr. Atmanu appears to have been a lightly-built individual, so I suppose you might claim that you did not intend to kill him, but the court is likely to take the view that it was your responsibility to take your victim's seeming fragility into account when ..."

  "He wasn't my victim," I reminded him. "He was Heleb's victim. Heleb killed him—on Amara Guur's orders. They wanted to frame me. They were all in on it. They all work for Amara Guur."

  238-Zenatta was a good lawyer. He cut straight to the heart of the matter. "What motive did they have for arranging such a conspiracy?" he asked.

  "They came to my apartment," I said, fully conscious of how feeble it sounded. "Heleb and Lema, that is. They offered me a job I didn't want to take. Guur wanted to make sure that I had no choice."

  238-Zenatta consulted his wristpad. "Heleb and Lema have stated that they did indeed come to your apartment to offer you a job," he agreed. "They have made a tape of the conversation available to the court. They have explained that they subsequently discovered that your reason for hesitating over their offer was that the alternative plans for raising capital for your expedition, to which you refer on the tape, involved conspiring with Simeon Balidar to cheat at cards. Balidar confirms this. Heleb claims that when he discovered what you were doing, he made a second attempt to persuade you that it would be far better to swallow your pride and join his expedition than to resort to criminal means."

  "Does he have a tape of that conversation?"

  "Alas, no. He explained that because there were Zabarans present, who have particular concerns regarding privacy, he switched off his recording device before entering the room."

  "If we can prove that they were all working for Amara Guur," I said, hopefully, "that would surely be evidence of a conspiracy."

  "Can we prove that, Mr. Rousseau?" asked 238-Zenatta, sceptically. I couldn't blame him. Whether he believed me or not—and I was pretty certain that he didn't—his chances of finding any evidence of a formal contract of employment between any of the five fatal witnesses and our unfriendly neighbourhood crime-lord were a bit slim.

  "Can we prove that they dosed me with the alcohol after I was unconscious?" I asked.

  "Perhaps, if a sufficiently thorough medical examination were carried out," he said, even more sceptically. "But it would be severely detrimental to our best defence if we did."

  "I'm not going to admit to killing the Sleath," I told him, flatly. "Diminished responsibility is not an option. I'm not guilty, and that's the way I'm going to plead. Whether anyone believes me or not, I'm going to tell the court the truth."

  "I fear, Mr. Rousseau, that the court might not approve of that strategy," the lawyer said. "It might well seem to the court that you are adding a manifest slander to the burden of your culpability. You would be a
sking the court to believe that someone would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain your participation in a perfectly ordinary expedition. There are hundreds of people in Skychain City who have skills similar to yours, Mr. Rousseau, many of whom are desperate for employment. Why would Amara Guur, or Heleb, or anyone else commit murder in order to obtain your services, when they could hire a person of almost equal capability for little more than half the wage that Heleb offered you in your apartment?"

  Put like that, it did seem impossibly weird. Obviously, I considered myself the best of the best when it came to pioneering the trackless wilderness, but I could see how other people might find it difficult to agree with me. After all, I'd never actually made the big strike for which I felt myself destined. I was so poor, in fact, that if I really had thought that I could finance my next expedition by running a crooked card-school, I might very well have tried it.

  I looked at 238-Zenatta, and he looked back. There wasn't the slightest hint of challenge in his stare; none was necessary.

  "I didn't do it," I said. "I don't have any real evidence that Heleb did, or that anyone was working for Amara Guur, so we'll leave that out of the story—but I'm sticking to the truth. I wasn't cheating, and I didn't kill the Sleath. He went for me with a knife, and I defended myself with entirely reasonable force. He was still alive when Heleb attacked me and knocked me out. That's it."

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

  6

  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 adv
ances, 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.

  "As knowledge advances further, more complex technology emerges and machines begin to take over the business of production. Cities expand as agriculture becomes more efficient. As factories become more sophisticated, ownership of machines becomes increasingly important, gradually displacing the authority invested in ownership of land. Your culture has not yet escaped this phase, which therefore seems to you to be a culmination of history, but if you were not distracted by petty squabbles over the ownership of the gaiaformable planets in the vicinity of your home star you would understand that you have not yet refined your social relations to their logical end-point. Are you following me?"

  He's already told me that Tetron children had no difficulty grasping it all, so I certainly wasn't going to admit that I couldn't. "Yes," I said.

  "If you only had the imagination to see it," he went on, relentlessly, "you would see that your present system of social relationships is already being transformed. Just as the land-based economy gave way to the machine-based economy, so the machine-based economy will give way to a service-based economy. As feudal servitude was replaced by capitalistic servitude, so the latter will be replaced by the purest form of servitude: a network of obligations independent of the models of agricultural or factory production, generalized throughout society. Had humans not acquired frame force technology so abruptly, your economy of mechanical production would not have received the sudden boost associated with starship production. Had humans not made contact with other humanoid species, your mastery of nuclear annihilation technology would have developed more gradually, and you would have been forced to apply its energy to the reclamation of your own ecosphere, obliterating the traditional authority invested in the control of land and machinery in the interests of ecocatastrophic avoidance. You would have had no alternative but to reconstitute your economy as a pattern of service obligations. The transformation is still inevitable, although you might delay it for a century or two if you insist on fighting more wars in order to preserve your barbaric and antiquated socioeconomic system. Do you see what I mean?"