There was no need for us to mount an assiduous search for the inhabitants of the city; they came to us, like night- flying insects drawn to a flame. The metaphor is more appropriate than it may seem, because there was nothing in their eyes to suggest that they were moved by an active curiosity. Their vacant expressions suggested that they were indeed being drawn by some inner impulse that they neither understood nor cared to suppress.
They were humanoid, but on a scale that I hadn't seen among all the starfaring races represented on Asgard. Those who seemed to be fully-grown were no taller than the average human child of ten or eleven, and much more lightly built. They weren't just thin; they were bony, as if they ought to have been carrying far more flesh than they actually were. Their silvery-grey skin was wrinkled, so that even the faces of the smallest ones—children, I assumed— seemed irredeemably ancient. They were clothed, but the majority wore little more than filthy loincloths. Even the most extravagantly dressed had only knee-length trousers and threadbare waistcoats without buttons or hooks.
They were drawn to us, but not all the way. They came to stand and stare, but they kept their distance. Because we were walking along the street, they formed up to either side of us in two long ranks. Not one of them was carrying anything—neither a weapon, nor a tool, nor a toy. There was no evidence that any of them had been doing anything when the news of our arrival began to spread. There had been no work going on, and no play either, so far as I could tell.
They jostled for position in their discreet fashion, but not violently. None spoke to us, and none made any gesture of greeting. They just watched us—and those we had passed by fell into step behind us, following us at a distance of eight or ten metres.
Myrlin said nothing, so I figured that it was up to me. I caught up with him easily enough now that he'd slowed down, and raised my arms. I gestured theatrically. "Can anybody talk?" I asked—in parole, although I knew perfectly well that none of them would have been able to understand it even if they could hear me; it just seemed more appropriate than English.
They didn't react to the pantomime, let alone reply. I was at a loss.
30
It didn't make sense. There might be energy to spare down here, but that didn't mean that there was no competition, no struggle to survive. If these people were as passive as they seemed, and as helpless as they seemed, then somebody had to be looking after them—somebody, given their response to our presence, who looked more like us than they did.
"I think they're all children," Myrlin said. "Don't be fooled by the wrinkles."
"I'm not so sure," I said. "But whoever—or whatever— supplies their food and clothing doesn't seem to have been doing a very good job lately. Maybe not for a long time."
"They don't seem to be making much headway in learning to fend for themselves," Myrlin observed. "They should have begun showing a little enterprise some time ago. Natural selection favours the adventurous in circumstances like these—unless these are an unrepresentative sample. Maybe the adventurous are out adventuring."
We were still moving, but our walk had slowed to a mere stroll. We didn't have anywhere in particular to go, but we were still headed towards the city centre.
"They're not afraid of me," he observed. "They must see big people sometimes—if not adults of their own kind, people of another kind. Maybe people in suits—not cold- suits, I suppose, but maybe sterile suits."
"If they come from elsewhere," I said, "they certainly don't use the dropshaft we came down. If there's another,
the sensible place to put it is in the city."
"Wishful thinking," Myrlin observed. He was right—but so was I.
I glanced behind. The crowd behind us had grown considerably. There must have been a hundred or more ahead of us, discreetly placed to either side, but there were three or four times as many in the rear.
"They expect something," I said, "but no matter how badly they need it, they know how to behave."
"Dumb animals," the android suggested. "Maybe it's the clothes that are misleading. They're built like humanoids, but they might not be humanoids at all in our sense."
"Maybe," I conceded. "Maybe they're androids—obsolete androids, put out to grass."
"Built for what purpose?" he countered.
"Built small to alleviate the possibility of rebellion," I suggested. "If I were thinking in terms of manufacturing people to do my bidding, I wouldn't make them your size."
"That was a mistake," he conceded. He came to a halt then, and just stood there, scanning the sea of wrinkled faces—waiting.
I wasn't sure that it would work, but it was worth a try. I stopped too.
"Okay," I said, as if to the crowd, in parole. "You can take us to your leader, or bring your leader out to us, or whatever you want. Just give us a sign." In the meantime, I raised both arms in an expansive gesture of helplessness— although it would have been a lot more expressive if I hadn't been wearing a cold-suit.
They weren't in any hurry, but they looked at one another, and jostled one another a bit. They seemed to have got the idea that the onus was on them to find somebody willing to show a bit of initiative.
In the end, the tension was too much for them. The crowd behind was densely packed now, and it was difficult to see what was happening beyond the first few rows, but someone was pushing through—or being pushed through by his companions ... if it were, in fact, a "he."
"He" came forward very tentatively, one step at a time. We turned to face him—and to look down at him.
He stopped a couple of metres short, and looked up at Myrlin's faceplate. He was presumably making the assumption that the android was the senior authority-figure because he was taller.
He began talking. I could hear him, even through the faceplate—but not very distinctly. It didn't matter. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't pangalactic parole that he was spouting, or any other language I knew.
I waved my arms, hoping to signify that I wasn't getting it, tapped my helmet to signify that I couldn't hear very well, then tapped the palm of my left hand with the forefinger of my right, in the hope of suggesting to him that he might do better to try sign language.
He wasn't very quick on the uptake, but at last he stopped looking at Myrlin. I continued signalling madly. I pointed in four different directions, to indicate that we didn't know which way to go. I mimed walking and tried to impress upon him the urgent need I had for guidance. I was glad that I didn't have to try to get across any notion of where I wanted to go.
For a while, it seemed that I was making no headway at all. He looked at me with a stare so blank that I might as well have been dancing a jig or performing a mating ritual.
Somewhere out in the crowd, though, the penny finally dropped. Some local genius figured out that we were all standing around because the big guys didn't know where to go, and figured that it was up to him—or maybe her—to think of an appropriate destination. "He" thrust himself forward, babbled at the spokesman for a few moments, got into an argument and eventually won it. He moved around us and looked back at us, expectantly.
I gave him a Star Force salute. "Lead on," I said.
He set off in the direction we'd been heading in before we stopped, and we followed. Everybody else followed us.
We didn't turn right or left for such a long time that I began to wonder whether the little person was merely going ahead of us in the direction he thought we wanted to go rather than actually guiding us.
I estimated that there must be at least six hundred "people" following us by now—maybe as many as a thousand. The city was big; it must have been built to house at least a hundred times as many—but it still seemed reasonably populous to me, given that everyone seemed to be on the brink of starvation.
At last, we turned aside, and found ourselves in a new region where the buildings were larger—not just because they had been very obviously built to accommodate people my size rather than the little people, but because they were municipal buildings rather than
dwellings. They had suffered even more from the ravages of time than the simpler edifices; more than half had been reduced to rubble or to gaunt skeletons of jagged pillars and broken arches. Spears of shadow crisscrossed the cracked and thickly begrimed pavements on which we walked, although the open plazas we crossed on occasion showed much whiter in the relentless glare.
My heart rate increased when I saw the place to which our guide was leading us. It was a hemispherical dome, brilliantly lit from within so that beams of yellow light radiated like spines from its many rounded windows. Alone among the buildings it seemed untouched by decay. It did not belong here.
Our guide took us right up to a great circular portal that looked like the airlock of a starfreighter. He didn't touch it. Once he was ten metres away, he turned sideways and beckoned us on. He obviously felt that he had done his bit. I hoped that he wasn't expecting a tip.
Unfortunately, the door was tightly sealed and we hadn't the slightest idea how it might be opened. There was some kind of panel beside the door, set at the height of my shoulder in the curved surface of the dome, but it was shielded by a plate of transparent plastic that didn't yield to gentle pressure or prising by our gauntleted fingers.
I had to stand on tiptoe to look through the nearest of the brightly-lit "windows," but I couldn't see anything inside; the light was so bright that I wondered whether it was an incandescent bulb rather than a window.
The crowd was waiting.
"We must look like a couple of idiots," I said to Myrlin, after several minutes of experimental probing and prodding.
"It seems to be locked," he agreed—but he still had a cutter suspended from his belt, beside my flame-pistol, and he was already unshipping it.
I wasn't sure that it was the wise thing to do, but I didn't have any alternative to suggest.
I had a knife, and I opened it. I made one last attempt to lever off the plastic cover, but I couldn't shift or scratch it.
"Let me," said Myrlin.
I stepped aside, and he activated the cutter's beam. I looked around to see how the crowd reacted to the sight of the flame, but they didn't fall back in awe or display any alarm. They just watched, and waited.
Myrlin cut the centre out of the plate in a matter of seconds; the plastic shrivelled and melted away. He switched it off and waited for the edges to cool; then he inserted his vast fingers into the gap and started pressing the panel beneath.
Nothing happened.
I drew his attention to a vertical slit to the left of the panel. "A keyhole, do you think?" I said.
"Probably," he admitted. I looked back at the crowd, still thinking that we must seem like total incompetents. Myrlin activated the cutter again, increased the power, and thrust the head of the device into the panel-box. The surface began to sizzle, and the metal of the console flared magnesium-white as its components began to burn.
"Be careful," I said.
It was too late for that. The lights in the dome suddenly went out. Then the lights above the city went out too— every last one of them.
The crowd reacted to that. Its members scattered like frightened rabbits. At least, that was the impression I got. It seemed very dark, although Myrlin's torch continued to give off a fervent glow until it sputtered out.
"What now?" the android asked.
I switched on my headlamp, and slowly played its beam over the deserted pavement where the crowd had been assembled a few moments earlier.
"I don't know," I said—and the city lights came back on just as I pronounced the final syllable.
"Well, we know that the repair systems are efficient," he observed—but there was something different about the quality of the light now. It was no longer pure white, and it was no longer perfectly steady.
The lights in the dome came on again then, and they too had changed. The beams shining through the portholes were no longer yellow but pink. Higher up on the dome, some shone vivid red, but only intermittently.
"Do they use red flashing lights as warning signals on Salamandra?" I asked the android. "They do in the home system, and in Skychain City. It's an inbuilt humanoid bias."
"I don't know," he replied, absent-mindedly. He touched my arm and pointed, to draw my attention to the fact that the door was opening.
The hinge was at the top, and it swung outwards. The light within was dazzling, and I blinked furiously, desperate to adjust my eyes. I wanted to see whoever—or whatever— might come out.
I heard Myrlin cry out in pained surprise, and then felt the most horrid sensation imaginable—as if corrosive acid were being poured into my brain.
I screamed, exactly as the star-captain and her troopers had screamed when the amoeba flowed over them.
Perhaps Myrlin screamed too, but I couldn't hear him. My inner being was being wrenched apart and shredded. I was trying with all my might to fall unconscious—and I suppose that I must have managed to do that, eventually.
31
Crazy as it may seem, I woke up feeling good.
I had long regarded it as an inevitable aspect of the human condition that no one, whatever the circumstances, ever wakes up feeling good, but this was an exceptional awakening in more ways than one. I felt fresh, light-headed, and euphoric.
The good feeling lasted as long as it took me to realise that I had no idea where I was. That was followed by the realisation that wherever I was, I had to be in dire trouble. I was no longer wearing a cold-suit; all I had on were the T-shirt and underpants that I usually wear under a cold- suit. I opened my eyes, blinking against the bright light, and had to shade them carefully until they adjusted.
When I tried to get to my feet, I realised that I had been lying on my side on hard ground. I wasn't stiff or uncomfortable, so I concluded that I hadn't been lying there long. The movement that brought me upright was attended by a peculiar feeling of nostalgia, which I didn't understand at all for a few seconds, until it dawned on me that I felt very light. I had the kind of weight I'd carried around in my long- lost youth, when I lived on a microworld in the asteroid belt. All the years in which I'd been dragged down by the surface- gravity of Asgard seemed to have melted away, restoring an earlier state of being.
It was an illusion, of course; there was no way I could be back in the asteroid belt. But if I was still on—or rather in— Asgard, then I had to be a long way down. Maybe not in the centre, whose pull seemed still to be exerting itself upon my bare feet, but a lot nearer to the centre than that derelict ecosystem from which I'd been snatched.
I took my hand away from my eyes, then, ready to see whatever there was to be seen. And what there was to be seen threw all my calculations out of order again, because there was something very, very strange. It made me gasp in amazement.
The major surprise wasn't the grassy plain, which seemed to stretch away from me in all directions, lush and green; or the tall palm-like trees, which grew in clumps; or the bright birds, which fluttered in their foliage, although I had never seen their like in all my life.
What shocked me most was the brilliant blue sky. In that sky was a bright, golden sun which filled the infinite blue vault with vivid light.
I had never seen a pale blue sky or a golden sun. I had never been on Earth, or any other world like Earth. The sky on Asgard was very different in hue, thanks to the thinness of its atmosphere, and it was a sky I had only seen through some kind of window-glass. I had never stood naked beneath a limitless sky, and the illusion that I was there now was something that filled me with inexpressible panic.
Illusion?
Even as I crouched down again, as if trying to hide from that sky, I was telling myself that it had to be an illusion. After all, where could I really be which had a sky like that? I was inside Asgard, where the "sky" could be no more than twenty or thirty metres over my head, and made of solid substance . . . where there could be no glaring yellow sun, but only rank upon rank of electric lights, or a pale varnish of bioluminescent lichen. I could not possibly be outside, because I was
inside.
Or was I?
In the centre, I had always believed, must live the miracle-workers, the men like gods, the super-scientists. Was it possible that Asgard was neither a home, nor an Ark, nor a fortress, but a kind of terminal in some extraordinary kind of transportation system? Had I somehow been teleported out of Asgard, to some unimaginably distant world?
At that moment, it came home to me that literally anything might be possible—that I must not prejudge anything at all. I was as innocent as Adam in Eden, from whom all the secrets of Creation had been hidden, and who stupidly ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, instead of that other tree, which might have given him a wisdom infinitely to be preferred.
Tentatively, I moved my naked foot over the ground on which I was crouching, and knew at once that visual appearance and tactile reality were at odds. My eyes told me that I was in a dusty clearing mottled with tufts of grass but my toes told me that was a lie. There was no dust and no grass, just a hard, neutral surface. It was neither warm nor cold to the touch, but it was slick and smooth—exactly like that mysterious ultra-hard superplastic from which Asgard's walls were made.
"Illusion, then," I murmured to myself. Illusion, after all.
I looked up then as I heard a rustle in the grass—the grass which probably wasn't there.
Not ten metres away from me, watching me with a baleful eye, was a great tawny-maned predator with teeth like daggers. I had no difficulty in recognising it, though I had only ever seen its like in photographs and videos. It was a big male lion.
It came forward a little further, and I saw that it was lazily swishing its tail. It was staring me straight in the eye, and it took very little imagination to figure out what kind of calculations its predatory brain was making.
I quickly told myself that it was only an illusion, but that was impossible to believe while the beast was so obviously looking at me, its gaze so careful and so malevolent. There was no doubt in my mind that it could see me, and that its intention was to feast on my flesh. My mind, trapped by the horror of it, could not spare the time for arguments about whether the lion was really there; I was utterly hung up on the question of whether I should remain frozen in immobility, or run like hell.
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