Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  The going got tougher after that. We eased our way into the corridor, past the point where Myrlin had fastened the flame-gun to the ceiling, and started picking our way through the maze following Saul's torchmarks with the aid of my tape. We moved slowly, always scanning the ground ahead of us. Nobody commented on the obvious fact that our chances of catching up with Myrlin before he got to the dropshaft were looking distinctly thin—and nobody suggested that we do anything in response to that awareness but press on as rapidly as we could.

  Before we stopped to sleep, we found two more tripwires, each one connected to a string that disappeared into the darkness. Neither of them was attached to anything at all—they were just mock-ups, set to delay us and to play upon our anxieties. For an android, Myrlin had one hell of a sense of humour—and he succeeded in slowing us up.

  We slung our hammocks from plastic frames that touched the ground at the tips of their four feet. Without our bubbling gear we had no other protection from the cold. The cold floor couldn't hurt us, of course, while we were insulated from it by a metre of near-vacuum, and I'd slept that way a dozen times before, but it wasn't pleasant.

  When we started off again, we followed Saul's directions to a wider corridor, which had two thick rails raised above its floor—tracks that once had guided monorail trains in either direction. I was pleased to see them. Tunnels through which trains once ran tend to be virtually endless, with no closed doors to impede progress. They also tend to take you to interesting places, like stations. Stations are good places to hunt around for elevator shafts.

  "How much further?" asked the star-captain, when we had trudged along in the space between the rails for half a day.

  I consulted my recording of Saul's notes.

  "We should be going down to three within a couple of hours," I told her. "Then we're really in the cold. But we'll only be one more day in the icehouse. Twelve or fourteen hours after we start again, we'll get to the big dropshaft.

  Saul spent a lot of time down there finding it for us, but we can go straight to it. We'll be tired, but we can make it without stopping again."

  "Damn right," she said.

  It wasn't quite as easy as I'd suggested it would be, partly because we found the wreckage of a train blocking the tunnel. It hadn't posed any real obstruction to Saul, but that was before the ever-ingenious Myrlin had put an explosive charge in it, and spread it all over the place. Luckily, he'd blown it into small enough pieces to make a less-than-efficient barricade. The walls, the ceiling and the tracks were made of something far too solid to be broken up by the kind of petard which scavengers carry, so there was no way that Myrlin could engineer a major cave-in to block our path.

  The troopers worked like Trojans to clear the way, and we were on the trail again with all due speed. Our tempers were only slightly frayed by this extra inconvenience, but my comrades-in-arms were already brimful of bile toward their hapless quarry, and I knew that if and when they caught up with him they were really going to make him suffer.

  I resolved not to be there, if there was anywhere else I could possibly be.

  Getting down to three was no picnic, but we still had the ropes and enough equipment to rig up a winch and harness, so the empty shaft posed no real problems. We stopped soon after that to rig up the hammocks again. The troopers seemed tired but otherwise undisturbed. We'd been moving through narrowly-confined spaces all day, and I'd known men who'd never before shown signs of claustrophobia begin to develop the heebie-jeebies under circumstances like these; despite their inbuilt paranoia, though, the troopers were tough and disciplined. Perhaps they were revelling in the luxury of having only one enemy trying to kill them, instead of being surrounded by malevolent aliens and dangerous biotech-bugs. Despite what he'd done to Amara Guur's hatchet men, and despite the little incident of the flame-pistol booby-trap, they weren't really frightened of the android. They were confident that once they caught up with him, they could fry him.

  Serne said to me before we went to sleep that he didn't see how a lone man could wander around the underworld for twenty days at a time without going a little bit crazy. I assured him that, with practice, the burden of solitude was easy enough to bear. The monochrome surroundings, I told him, were quite comforting in their way. I didn't mention that I usually packed my microtapes with hundreds of hours of music to relieve the tedium, and that I was sometimes wont to talk to myself incessantly, making up with loquacious fervour anything which I lacked in narrative skill. That would have sounded too much like a confession of weakness, unbefitting even the most reluctant hero of the Star Force.

  The next day, the conversation flowed more easily, partly because we were all becoming a bit more comfortable with one another's presence, and partly because the visual environment remained so utterly sinister that we were in some need of auditory stimulation. The endless labyrinthine corridors along which we tramped were quite unchanging, and Myrlin had ceased to bother with such trivial practical jokes as laying tripwires that might or might not be connected to something.

  I told the troopers about my adventures working the caves—about the kinds of things I had found, and about the kinds of things that everyone was very keen to find, in order to provide another quantum leap in our understanding of Asgard and its mysterious inhabitants. In exchange, they told me about their adventures fighting the Salamandrans— about all their narrow squeaks, and all their successful missions. Their stories seemed a lot more exciting than mine, and the laconic way they told them was enough to make the blood run cold.

  "This may seem like a stupid question," I said at one point, "but what exactly were we fighting the Salamandrans for?"

  "We were trying to colonize the same region of space," Crucero told me. "Beyond that region, we were virtually surrounded by other cultures longer established in space. There seemed to be only a handful of worlds up for grabs, with humans and Salamandrans equally well placed to grab them. We didn't start out to go to war—in fact, we set out to co-operate, agreeing to share most of the worlds and defend them together, lest anyone else try to move in.

  "Ninety percent of the worlds were dead rocks, which would take thousands of years to render truly habitable, whether we tried to establish a terraformed life-system outside or tried to hollow out an asteroid-type environment. There didn't seem to be anything much worth fighting over, and it must have seemed easy enough to negotiate with the Salamandrans about who got which lump of stone. For a while, we were fetishistic about co-operation, especially when we found out that the Salamandrans had biotech skills somewhat in advance of ours, while their metals technology and plasma physics were less sophisticated—there seemed to be much to be gained by exchanging information.

  "It all went sour, though. The closer the two races became, the worse the friction became. In the end, we found that we were too close. When hostility began to build, it couldn't be contained or diverted. We were locked in a feedback loop which built up a series of individually trivial incidents into a chain of disasters. They started the actual war, but that was probably a matter of chance. Once the bombing started, there was no way to stop. It was genocide or nothing, and it was just a matter of which race ended up extinct or enslaved. We didn't have the communications necessary to talk peace—we were spread out very thinly in a volume of space a hundred light-years across, and once we knew that the killing had started in a dozen different places there was no possible response except to commit the Star Force completely. If we'd hesitated, we might have been wiped out. As it was, we lost more than half our population outside the system, and a considerable fraction inside it— especially in the belt and all points outwards."

  "Are you sure that it couldn't have been settled?" I asked. "Are you certain there was no way to stop?"

  "Hell, no," the lieutenant said. "But not being sure wasn't enough. Don't give me any Tetron crap about having to live together, Rousseau. We know all that. We know it's a big galaxy, full of intelligent humanoid species, and we want to be part of a gr
eat big happy family just like everyone else. But once the killing starts, you can't fall back on that kind of optimism. You have to worry every time you go to sleep that before you wake up the entire human race might be wiped out by some kind of Salamandran plague, or Earth itself turned to slag by some kind of planet- cracker. Once they'd begun to kill us, we had to kill them first. That's all there was to it. You don't have any right to say that we didn't do it right, because you weren't even there. You were here, doing your bit for the Tetron cause instead—helping those monkey-faced hypocrites lengthen their lead in the galactic technology race. Some people

  would reckon that a kind of treason, you know."

  As it happened, I did know. But I wasn't about to concede the point.

  "It isn't just the Tetrax," I told Crucero. "There are several hundred races represented in Skychain City. It's the one place in the galaxy where everyone has to get along with everyone else. The C.R.E. has scientists from dozens of worlds, including Earth, and if there's the seed of a real galactic community anywhere in the universe, this is where it is. Maybe the work we're doing here, and the way we're doing it, is all that will save the entire population of the galaxy from consuming itself in futile wars."

  "And maybe it won't," the star-captain butted in—which is the kind of argument which doesn't readily yield to rational criticism. Then she added her own judgment. "I think this ironclad artificial world of yours is all that was left over from the last round of interstellar wars," she said. "I think that's why its atmosphere caught fire, and why its outermost layers were frozen down. Hell, maybe the war's still going on down there—and maybe the reason the owners never came back out is because every last one of them was a casualty."

  I had to accept that it was a possibility. The thought that it might be true was one of the most depressing I had ever had to face. Whatever was waiting for us at the centre, it surely had to be something better than that. Of all the potential solutions to the riddle of Asgard that I could imagine, the one which implied that the galactic races might be doomed to have their nascent civilization blasted into smithereens by interstellar war was far from being the most appealing. Even the star-captain, for all her wolfish temperament, didn't seem to relish it much.

  "The galactic races are similar enough to be members of the same family," I reminded her. "You and I may have more actual genes in common with chimpanzees and gorillas, but in terms of the way brains work, humans and Salamandrans—hell, even the Tetrax and the vormyr—are virtually mirror images of one another, with only very slight variations. We ought to be able to get along."

  "Sure," she said. "And ninety percent of murders happen within the family. Been that way since Cain and Abel . . . likely to be that way forever more. Interstellar distances just make it a little bit easier to fall out with one another, that's all."

  "I hope you're wrong," I told her. "I hope with all my heart that you're wrong."

  "Oh shit, Rousseau," she said. "How the hell do you think I feel? But hope just isn't enough, is it?"

  I had no answer to that.

  23

  I don't know what kind of weird instinct Saul Lyndrach had used to guide him, but it was nothing I could share. I was continually mystified by the turns he had taken and by the decisions he had made. Maybe he was being deliberately perverse when he found the way to the centre—maybe perversity is what it takes to get to the heart of any matter. One thing is for sure, though: the route we were following guided us into some very peculiar territory.

  Scavengers almost always did their hunting in regions of the underworld that were given over to some kind of intensive technological enterprise. After all, what we were searching for was artefacts, and what every scavenger hoped to discover was some state-of-the-art gadget that no one's ever come across before. The places we tended never to go were the wilderness areas.

  No one really knew how much wilderness there was in the cave-systems on levels one, two and three. There didn't seem to be nearly as much on one or two as there was on three. What that meant was unclear, but in the absence of any evidence that the level three cavies were any less technologically sophisticated than their neighbours, my feeling had always been that they simply liked wilderness areas. Maybe they were concerned to conserve as much as they could of their own evolutionary heritage; maybe when they began to manufacture their food by artificial photosynthesis they set free all the other species which they had exploited in more primitive times, giving them back a place to live, where they could make their own destiny. No one knew, and it was generally considered to be one of the less intriguing problems that Asgard posed.

  Saul Lyndrach had gone into the wilderness not once but several times, as if he were looking for something in particular; and it was in the wilderness, eventually, that he'd found his bonanza. That was where we had to go to follow the android.

  There was nothing left of the wilderness now but trees and a few bones. Everything had died, millions of years ago, and most of it had rotted away before the cold preserved what was left. All the flesh had gone, though the Tetron bioscientists—reputedly the most expert in the galaxy—had managed to recover a good many genome samples, one way and another.

  There were no leaves on the whited trees now, just gnarled trunks and knotted branches. My untrained eye couldn't estimate the number of different species there were, but I could tell which were the oldest trees, with their thick boles and their branches which divided again and again until the ends were no thicker than needles.

  The bones were generally clustered, occasionally to be found in meandering grooves and hollows that had once been streams and pools. The water had somehow been drained from them before the great freeze, so they now had the same thin layer of mixed ices that dressed the entire landscape in a cloak of white. The bones themselves were unremarkable, or so it seemed to me. It was all too easy to find leg-bones and hip-bones and jawbones with teeth which would surely have been similar to ones to be found on any of the humanoid worlds, which all had their quasi-cattle and their quasi-chickens just as they had their quasi-men.

  There were no humanoid skulls, though. Nor were there any dinosaurs, nor giants in the earth, nor hideous aliens to tantalise the imagination.

  Underfoot there had once been grass, but the grass—like everything else—had died before the advent of the cold, and had shriveled into fragility. Our boots crushed it effortlessly, and it seemed rather as if we were walking on frosted cobwebs.

  "This is eerie," said Crucero, who seemed to like this region far less than the honest and simple tunnel through which the monorail trains had run. "Could anything actually be alive down here?"

  It wasn't such a stupid question as it seemed.

  "When it's as cold as this," I told him, "no living system can function. On the other hand, nothing changes. There are some very simple things that were still alive when the cold came, and which can be restored to activity even after millions of years of cryonic oblivion. So far, the biotechs haven't revived anything more complex than a bacterium, but in its way that's not unspectacular. The day they bring back an amoeba will be a really big deal."

  "If the cold had come more quickly," the star-captain mused, "there might be whole plants and animals preserved."

  "It didn't come as quickly as all that," I told her. "Not even on one. We're sixty or seventy metres beneath the surface here, and the artificial rock which they used to make the walls and ceilings is a very good insulator. It might have been thousands of years after whatever disaster overtook the outside that the cold seeped down here, and the decline in temperature was probably very gradual. By the time the cold took control, there was very little left for it to claim for its own—the inhabitants were long gone. Maybe they took all the birds and beasts with them."

  "I can think of another scenario," she said.

  It didn't surprise me. Ever since she'd found out that I wasn't keen on the fortress-Asgard hypothesis she'd taken a certain delight in embroidering it, bringing little bits of evide
nce into line with it one by one.

  "Go ahead," I told her. I figured I was tough enough to take it.

  "Suppose there really is a central power-source down there in the centre," she said. "A starlet, as you call it. And suppose its power-lines really did extend through thousands of levels, including this one, to give power and heat. If that were so, then there's no reason at all why the cold should ever have seeped down this far. Maybe it didn't seep down at all. Maybe this level and the ones above it were deliberately refrigerated, and the atmosphere of the world deliberately destroyed. Maybe it was all part of a strategy of war."

  "You think this was the result of some alien offensive?" I said.

  I couldn't see her face, but I could imagine the grin on

  it.

  "Quite the reverse," she answered. "I think it was a defensive move. I think the reason they had to evacuate these levels was that there was no way they could continue to hold them, and I think the reason they froze them was to try and stop the rot that was taking them over."

  I remembered Seme's descriptions of the kind of fighting the Star Force had been formed to do. The Salamandrans had been biotech-minded, and had used biotech weapons: engineered plagues.

  "You might be right," I conceded reluctantly.

  "And if I am," she pointed out. "Your Tetron friends might get a very nasty shock one day, if they keep on trying to revive the bacteria they find beneath the snowdrifts."

  I knew that she might be right about that, too, but I wasn't about to say so. She didn't need any further encouragement to keep her nasty mind ticking over. Anyhow, I could follow the rest of the train of thought without her help. If Asgard was a fortress, whose outer defences had been penetrated, the reason why the exiled cavies hadn't come out of hiding a million years ago might not be too difficult to figure out. Maybe the surrender of the outer levels hadn't stopped the invasion—maybe there was nothing beneath our boots but layer upon layer of dead worlds.