I heard a faint hiss coming from the top of the stairs and turned round. The doors of the Hall of Justice had been closed when we arrived, but one stood ajar now, and there was a face peering around it. I thought at first that it was a human face, but then I realised that it was a Kythnan.
Amara Guur had lied. He hadn't come in person—he'd sent Jacinthe Siani instead. I wasn't in the least disappointed.
14
As soon as I looked around, Susarma Lear followed the direction of my gaze—and as soon as she saw the other woman, she went up the steps two at a time. Her men followed, guns leveled. They checked the dark vestibule very carefully, then went to look into the gloomy hall—but it seemed that the Kythnan was alone. Susarma Lear patted her down personally, but she was unarmed too.
"Your friends are drawing attention to us, Mr. Rousseau," Jacinthe Siani said, when I arrived on the top step.
I kept my distance from her as I said: "That's okay. The Tetrax are keeping their distance, for the time being. They always take a tentative approach when they don't understand what's going on—or when they want someone else to take their risks for them. Where does Guur want us to go now?"
"You have a suspicious mind, Mr. Rousseau," she said. "I merely came to make a delivery."
"So where is it?" I asked, glancing at Susarma Lear. The star-captain shook her head, to indicate that the Kythnan didn't have anything substantial concealed in her neatly tailored clothing.
"You will find the notebook in the Hall," the Kythnan said. "Look on the platform where you so nearly signed the contract I offered you. There is a niche in the clerk's podium. You might want to hurry—it would be unfortunate if the night-watchman were to be roused from his peaceful slumber and stumble across it by accident."
Serne made as if to grab the Kythnan as she moved to go, but the star-captain said: "Let her go. If she's lying, there's no point in holding on to her." I watched the femme fatale trip down the steps, as if she hadn't a care in the world.
Khalekhan was already moving through the inner door into the deserted Hall. He moved his gun slowly back and forth. There was only a single light burning, but it was enough to let us see that no one was lurking in the hall. Save for our footfalls, the whole building was silent; one thing that could be said for the Tetron criminal justice system was that it didn't encourage heavy traffic. The jail had been empty when I left, and it was apparently still empty. Serne and Khalekhan covered the star-captain from the doorway as she made her way to the podium. Saul Lyndrach's notebook was exactly where Jacinthe Siani had said it would be; Susarma Lear picked it up and looked at it quizzically before jumping back down to the floor.
"You can look at it later, Rousseau," she said, when I extended my hand to take it from her. "Let's get out of here and find somewhere where the lights are bright enough to read by."
"I'll look at it as we go," I said.
She shrugged her shoulders and let me take it, but she held on to it just long enough before letting go to let me know that, in her opinion, I ought to be grateful for the favour.
I flipped the notebook open and angled the page toward the meagre light, eager to get an impression of what it contained even if I couldn't read every word. In spite of the gloom, one glance was enough to tell me why Simeon Balidar had told Amara Guur that it might be a good idea to send Heleb round to see me—and why, when Saul hadn't cracked under the threat of being slowly torn apart and permanently crippled, Balidar had suggested to Guur that he had better increase the pressure.
Saul's notes weren't written in code. They were written in French.
Out of the two hundred or so humans living in Skychain City, there'd be dozens who spoke Spanish or Chinese, and more than a handful who spoke Russian or Japanese, but French was a different matter.
Myrlin, I remembered, had been able to speak English, Russian, and Chinese, but not French. Myrlin had got Saul out before Saul lapsed into unconsciousness, though— which had been long enough for Saul to tell him the codes he needed to sneak into my apartment and order a ton of equipment. It had probably been long enough for Saul to make other provisions, too. Maybe he had had time to explain to Myrlin how to read the score-marks that he left when he was out in the cold, to make sure that he could always find his way back to his starting-point, and where to look for them . . . and, most important of all, where to start. More probably, he had made a tape of the relevant information, whose instructions Myrlin would have to follow as best he could. It wouldn't be easy for Merlin to retrace Saul's last journey with the aid of that sort of information, and he wouldn't be able to do it quickly. Anyone chasing him, with instructions of their own in hand, would have a chance to catch up with him. The star-captain's near- impossible mission suddenly seemed practicable—with my expert help.
"Come on, damn you," my commanding officer ordered— and like a loyal Star Force man, I obeyed.
"Well," she said, as soon as we were out in the open and hurrying along a static pavement. "What is it?"
I explained what it was, and why I had been the only man on Asgard, so far as Amara Guur knew, who could read it. I didn't bother adding the rider that it was at least possible that there might be another French speaker around by now, on the crew of her trusty warship; it wasn't a train of thought I wanted her to follow, if it could possibly be avoided.
"It will help us to catch him, won't it?" she said.
"Yes," I said. "He's got a long head start, but we'll still be traveling at a good pace when he has to slow down. Now that we can figure out exactly where he's going, we can probably catch him."
"In which case," Serne put in, "he'll go somewhere else."
"I don't think so," I said. "The miracle is that there's anywhere at all to go. I'm going to have to read through this very carefully, but if what Jacinthe Siani told me is true and there really is a way down to the lower levels that no one's found before, that's what he'll aim for. It's his only chance of avoiding the necessity of having to come back—or of finding something so valuable that the Tetrax will protect him against you."
"That's good," the star-captain said, after checking with Crucero. "We'll have the equipment and supplies ready not long after dawn. We'll start immediately—we can catch up on our sleep in relays, once we're on the move."
"What I can't understand," I said, pensively, "is why Guur would just hand it over to us."
"Because the android got a head start," she told me. "And because he knows that we'll chase the android, now we have the means to do it. He intends to chase us."
It was obvious, of course—just as it was obvious, to me if not to her, that while the star-captain had been patting Jacinthe Siani down, the Kythnan had probably sprinkled half a dozen showerproof bugs in her bright blonde hair. I thought about mentioning that, but decided against it. After all, she was the commanding officer, and the one who was determined to track Myrlin down. The moment she caught up with him—if she caught up with him—she intended to gun him down. That was the extent of her interest in him.
At which point, I figured, she would want to bring her men safely back to Skychain City. All her men. But I had Saul Lyndrach's notebook now, and I was probably the only man on Asgard, for the moment, who could read it. I didn't really care one way or the other what happened to Myrlin, even though I had nothing against him personally—but I did care a great deal about what happened to me, and that notebook, after Susarma Lear had collected her bounty.
I hadn't gone within two metres of Jacinthe Siani; she hadn't had a chance to bug my hair. If it should happen that the star-captain and I were separated somehow, down in the levels, she would be the one that Amara Guur would track—which was only fair, considering that she had all the flame-pistols. I was the one with the local knowledge, and I was the one who had always been destined to find a way to the centre of Asgard. That was my business, whether I'd been drafted or not—and I hadn't actually signed the papers, because Susarma Lear was in too much of a hurry to bother with formalities of that sort.
My conscience was clear—or clearish, at any rate. When the time came, I intended to desert my newfound compatriots and go my own way.
Susarma Lear was right to hurry, though, just as Amara Guur had been right to hand over the notebook to me. If it had fallen into Tetron hands, it would only have been a matter of time before they found someone else to read it for them. If it fell into Tetron hands now, the whole game might be over—but the Tetrax didn't know that. They were playing it the clever way, like the civilized folk they were. Slave-owners always get other people to do their dirty work, if they can.
I figured that there had to be a microtransmitter or two in the book as well, and that Amara Guur must be reckoning on tracking me by that means—but I had faith in my memory and my suit's tape-recorder. Even before the time came to dump the star-captain and her merry men, I figured I'd jettison the book. It would be a risk, but a worthwhile one. After all—the prize that was at stake was the ultimate prize, the one I'd been after all my life.
It was mine, by rights. I was Saul's legitimate heir. He and I had had an arrangement. And I was the one who had passed the android on to him, even if the resultant rescue had come a little too late. That was his fault, in a way. If he'd only told me what he had before he went to the C.R.E., so that we could tackle the problem together, everything would probably have been all right.
Not that I blamed him, of course. If I'd been in his shoes, I probably wouldn't have done anything differently— except, of course, break under torture and hand the whole thing over to Amara Guur.
15
Everything took a little longer than Susarma Lear had hoped, but we logged out of lock five thirty units after Life Support and Regulation were scheduled to switch on the city's "daylight." Outside, it was about thirty Earthly hours short of dawn.
We headed north across the vast plain that surrounded the city on all sides.
Serne and the star-captain were riding with me in Saul's truck. Crucero, Khalekhan, and a man named Vasari were following in the second vehicle. We had radio communication with the other truck, and with Susarma Lear's warship, which had left its dock at the top of the skychain in order to mount a discreet and distant search for Myrlin's truck. It wasn't that we didn't trust the Tetrax to pass on any information gleaned from their satellites, of course; we were just taking extra precautions.
The headlights of the truck played upon a near-featureless white carpet. Any tracks left by other trucks had been quickly covered by the ever-swirling snow. On the surface, of course, the snow was real snow: just water, with hardly any pollutants. All the other components of the atmosphere were gaseous; they provided the wind.
"Jesus, Rousseau," Susarma Lear said, after we'd been traveling for a couple of hours. "This is a really weird place." She was sitting beside me, staring through the canopy at the distant horizon. There were two bunks in the rear, so she could have gone to sleep, but she still hadn't managed to wind down enough to get past her insomnia. She had ordered Serne to go to sleep, but she was intent on taking a driving-lesson first.
"Pretty weird," I admitted. "It seems that hardly anyone lived on the outside, back in the good old days. Things grew here, apparently, but it must have been a wholly artificial biosphere. It was as complicated as any Gaian system, even though it didn't have the same habitat-range—in the absence of mountains and seas it was spread as thin as margarine on a workhouse loaf. Its biochemical relics are still detectable, including seeds and spores of various kinds, but it's all dead and mostly in a fairly advanced state of decay."
"How do you find your way around?"
"Satellites and location-finders. If your equipment fails, though, you can navigate by the stars, provided that you can recognise the markers. It isn't quite as flat as it looks hereabouts—there are troughs and hollows as well as gentle contours. You'll see that better when the sun rises and the snow begins to melt."
"There aren't that many stars," she observed. "Are we looking out from the edge of the galaxy, or is it just dust?"
"A bit of both," I said. "That's intergalactic space all right, but if it weren't for the dust you could pick out other galaxies with the naked eye. You can't see the black one, though—not without an X-ray 'scope."
"What black one?" she asked.
I looked sideways at her. "You really have led a sheltered life, haven't you? All war, war, and yet more war, ever since you were a little girl. You know nothing about Asgard, nothing about the black galaxy ..."
"So educate me," she said. I'd shown her all the truck's controls—they weren't complicated—but she was still hungry for learning.
"It's the modest member of our little local cluster," I told her. "It's about a hundred and twenty thousand light- years away, closer than the Magellanic clouds, but much more discreet. It's getting even closer—heading towards us at something like thirty thousand metres per second. It'll take a hundred million years or so to get here, so we don't have to worry about it yet . . . unless, of course, we're prepared to take a very long view of the future. It's mostly just a heterogeneous cloud of dust, like the ones inside the galaxy, but it's big. It has a very low mean temperature, but there are a few stars inside it. Eventually, it will engulf the whole galactic arm, like a cosmic shadow or a subtle fog. Life on Gaia-clone planets will probably go on much as usual for long time after the eclipse starts, but the dust's not entirely placid. There'll be plenty of scope for cosmic catastrophes, both like and unlike the one that probably overcame Asgard."
"Which was?"
"I told you," I reminded her. "Opinions vary. The majority view is that Asgard—or the world that provided the raw materials from which Asgard was constructed—ran into a cold cloud, mostly hydrogen but with a lot of thinly-distributed cosmic debris, cometary ices and the like. Over a period of time, the atmosphere soaked up more and more of it. If proto-Asgard had a primary in those days, as it most probably did, its light must have been severely weakened, and it may have begun behaving strangely. The people must have had a few hundred thousand years notice, at least. Time enough to take elaborate countermeasures.
"The theorists who think that Asgard is just a planet with a few extra crusts built on top of its mantle figure that the task of modifying the world was a relatively simple and straightforward one. Those who think that they used the raw material of a whole planetary family to build shells around the star—or maybe around an artificial star—tell a much longer and more elaborate tale. Anyway, the response doesn't seem to have been entirely successful. In the short term, it was probably a triumph . . . but if you extend your history far enough, something always goes awry in the end. One way or another, the surface biosphere gave up the ghost. The uppermost levels were abandoned to the creeping cold.
"A few million years passed ... or more than a few. Hundreds or thousands of millions, maybe. A long, dark, deep-frozen night. Then, one way or another, Asgard acquired a new primary. The likelier alternative is that it simply drifted into the new sun's gravity-well and was captured, but the more adventurous theorists have wilder explanations. Anyway, the atmosphere warmed up again. The Tetrax are trying hard to get the ecosphere kick-started, but it won't be the same biosphere if and when they do. It'll be a new artefact—but it might allow humanoids to roam around on the surface again, in a few thousand years' time. By then, the upper levels will probably be functional again too. Lots of prime real-estate—enough to accommodate entire species, with all their ecospherical baggage. Unless, of course, the people who owned it before come back to claim it."
She was struggling to get to grips with the catalogue of possibilities. "So the most likely story," she said, "is that this was once a planet just like Earth—until it needed shielding from some kind of. . . cosmic threat. At which point its inhabitants built several layers of armour around it."
Her choice of vocabulary was revealing—but she was fresh from smashing up a planet.
"We haven't found any guns," I told her. "There's no evidence that Asgard was a fortress."
"No?" she said sceptically. "It's a steel ball the size of a giant planet, and when you scratch the surface you find another steel ball inside it, and then another . . . except that scratching the surface is all you've done. A trapdoor here, a trapdoor there, all going down into the living-quarters. What makes you think that the guns aren't all around us, securely locked away?"
Asgard certainly wasn't made of steel, but I didn't want to quibble about trivia. "The Tetrax," I said, "think it was all a matter of cosmic dust clouds and natural catastrophes. The habitats they've explored seem to have been occupied by closely-related but distinct species, living harmoniously together."
"There you are, then," she said. "Good neighbours need common enemies. Stands to reason."
"Not on Asgard, it doesn't," I contradicted her. "There are hundreds of different species here, living together more-or-less peacefully . . . except for the vormyr, and the Spirellans . . . and the humans." I could see why she might think that my argument wasn't very strong, given what we'd all been through in the last couple of days.
"You say the planet drifted into this system," she said. "Where from?"
I shrugged. "Nobody knows," I said, "but there's not that much dust in the immediate vicinity, so it must have come a long way—maybe as far as that" I pointed upwards.
"The black galaxy?"
"It seems unlikely, given the pace it would have to have traveled—but there are some very adventurous theorists on the fringes of the C.R.E. Some suggest that the outer layers might have been abandoned for the duration of the voyage, but now that Asgard's reached its destination they'll be looking to come up from the depths again some time soon.
And by the time the black galaxy looks like it's catching up with them, a hundred million years down the line, they'll doubtless be moving on again, towards the far rim—carefully skirting the black hole in the middle. All type two civilizations are nomads, they reckon. They're really looking forward to the day of re-emergence, because they reckon that what we'll learn will be our ticket to type two status ... or, to be strictly accurate, the Tetrax's ticket to type two status."
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