I would have looked around, hoping to find a weapon of some sort, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from that thick-maned head and the black tongue which lolled out between the huge teeth. It took another step forward, languidly, and then tensed, ready for a quick sprint and a mighty leap.
I claim no credit for what I did then, because it was not the result of conscious decision. Rather, it was a deep- seated reflex which had been locked up in my subconscious, unused and unsuspected, ever since some arcane process of preparation had put it there.
I stood bolt upright, threw my arms wide, and screamed in rage and defiance at the beast.
Unfortunately, whatever had planted that instinct in my brain had not reckoned with this particular lion. It didn't turn tail and run. Instead, it did what it had always intended to do.
It took three bounding strides and leapt at my head, the claws standing out from its raking forepaws and the great jaws gaping wide, ready to seize me with those awful teeth.
Then my conscious mind wrenched control of my body back from my stupid subconscious, and told it to run like hell.
But the lion vanished in mid-air, even as I brought my arms across in a futile effort to make a defensive screen, before I could pivot on my heel and flee. The creature jumped clean out of existence, into whatever limbo of oblivion illusions must go when they die.
Helplessly, I staggered backwards, carried by the impetus of my intention to run, though there was no longer any need. I cannoned into an invisible wall a couple of metres away from the spot where I'd woken up. I hit it with my shoulder, and gave my arm a painful wrench.
My eyes told me that there was no wall there—not even a wall of glass. My eyes said that there was a grassy plain stretching away to the horizon. The only concession they would make to my aching shoulder was to suggest that there was some invisible wall of force preventing me from walking across the grassland.
I knew that my eyes were liars. I was inside Asgard, probably in some kind of chamber, and there was no plain, no sky, no sun and no lion. It was all a picture projected on the walls.
It took five minutes for me to ascertain that the room was rectangular, about four metres by three, and that there was not the slightest sign of any seam or doorway.
"Bastards!" I shouted, fairly certain that I could be seen and overheard by someone, or something—why else the illusion; and why else the lion?
I was being tested, or taunted. Someone, or something, was interested in me.
There didn't seem to be any point in further vulgar abuse, and I was damned if I was going to start up a one-sided inquisition. There were things I wanted to find out, and there were a few sensible investigations that I could make no matter what kind of cage I was in.
I checked the places where my life-support system had been hooked into my body. The places where the drip- feeders had gone into my veins were just perceptible to the touch, but had healed completely. That implied that I had been out of my suit for some time—several days, if the evidence could be taken at face value. But I didn't feel hungry or weak. In fact, I felt fighting fit.
I ran my fingers over all the parts of my body I could reach. I found a couple of old scars, a couple of big moles which had always been there—and a few new anomalies. The skin at the back of my neck felt as if it was pockmarked, and I had an unusually itchy scalp. But I was clean-shaven and my hair was no longer than it had been when I put the cold-suit on. I hadn't taken anything to inhibit hair-growth, because a cold-suit is loose-fitting, so I must have had more than three days' growth of beard when the mindscrambler hit me.
It was obvious that the interval between scrambling and unscrambling had been a long one. The peace-officers in Skychain City carry mindscramblers of a kind, but much cruder ones than the one I'd been hit with—not much more advanced than a common-or-garden stun gun. The Tetrax had illusion-booths, too, but none as sophisticated as the room that I was now trapped in. With a Tetron illusion, you could always see the joins. Willing suspension of disbelief was required. This illusion was a whole order of magnitude more plausible.
Perhaps I was, after all, in the hands of miracle- workers—men who were, if not actually like gods, at least prepared to play godlike games with those poor humanoids unlucky enough to fall into their clutches.
Whom the gods destroy, I reminded myself, they first make mad.
Well, I was mad all right; in fact, I was downright furious.
I looked around, sceptically, and the grassy plain just disappeared. I couldn't help starting in shock, but I wasn't entirely surprised. It was only the suddenness which had made me react. I knew by now that they could show me anything they wanted to.
What they showed me now was a room, four metres by three, with an open door to my left. The room was lit from above, the whole ceiling glowing pearly white. The walls were grey and featureless.
I wasn't entirely convinced that this was reality; I gamble as well as the next man, and I know enough to look out for a double bluff. There were no prizes for guessing that they wanted me to go through the door. I contemplated being perverse, but decided that the room wasn't any place that I wanted to stay. I did what I was supposed to do, and exited stage left.
I found myself in a dimly lit corridor. The door was at the end of it, so there was only one way to go, and I went. It curved, so I couldn't see more than three metres in front of me. The light emanated from the whole surface of the ceiling; the walls remained grey and featureless. The grassy plain had been a lot less boring, but I wasn't about to complain. Boredom I could stand; hungry predators were a distinct strain on the nerves.
Then, in front of me, I saw a T-junction. As I moved toward it, a figure emerged from the left-hand path, saw me and quickly brought up a gun which it had been holding loosely in its right hand. It was a humanoid, but it wasn't human. It was a vormyran, or a very good imitation of one. It was a dead ringer for Amara Guur—but all vormyr are.
32
It was wearing a shirt and tight pants, but it was barefoot, like me, and might easily have been untimely ripped from a cold-suit. The gun which it leveled at me was a small needier, which could blast out tiny fragments of metal at the rate of six a second.
I stopped.
"Rousseau?" said the vormyran, uncertainly. His voice was deep and gravelly, but it sounded oddly gentle.
"It won't work twice," I said, with a certain subdued asperity. "I think you're an illusion." But I betrayed my doubts by speaking in parole, not in English. I remembered the one about the little boy who cried wolf, and then got gobbled up by the real one.
I stood very still, determined not to surrender to any wild instincts, and equally determined not to run.
He came forward, and reached up to rest the muzzle of the needier against the soft skin beneath my jaw.
"Okay," I said, finding my mouth suddenly dry. "You're not an illusion."
He did have bad breath. I could feel its warmth. His eyes were big, the slit-pupils widened because of the dim light. His thin black lips were drawn back to expose his pointed teeth. His mottled skin seemed paler than when I had seen him last, on the screen in Saul Lyndrach's apartment.
"Where are we, Mr. Rousseau?" he asked, hissing as he sounded the sibilant in my name.
"I wish I knew," I replied, sourly. "How did they get
you, Mr. Guur? You are Amara Guur, I suppose?"
"I'll ask the questions," he said, softly. "After all, I have the gun."
It struck me, suddenly, that it was monumentally unfair that he should have the gun. I had woken up with nothing but my underclothes. Whoever it was that had captured us, and now was studying us with clinical detachment, had taken the trouble to give a gun to Amara Guur, and not to me. It seemed to suggest that a very peculiar set of moral priorities were at work. I was certain they were watching, but I wasn't at all certain what they were watching for. Could it be that they wouldn't actually allow Guur to shoot me—that they'd intervene to stop him? After all, it would surely be a terr
ible waste to let one of their experimental rats go down the toilet so quickly, and for no good reason.
Maybe I was still as safe as I had been when the lion leapt.
On the other hand, maybe I wasn't. I decided that I didn't want to take the chance.
"You know as much as I do," I told Amara Guur, levelly. "Maybe more. I woke up a few minutes ago, in some kind of illusion-booth—a big one, not like the glorified coffins they use to serve up the shows in Skychain City. It was a scene from my homeworld, or a world very much like it. I was attacked by a predator, but it disappeared when it jumped me." He looked surprised, so I added: "Same with you?"
He shook his head, and said: "I just woke up." Then he asked: "Where and when did they take you?"
"I don't know how long ago. I'd been in the level at the bottom of the dropshaft for thirty hours or so—maybe a little more. I was with the android, Myrlin. They hit us with a mindscrambler when Myrlin shut down some kind
of a power-plant in the city."
His eyes remained fixed on mine. They put me very strongly in mind of the lion's eyes. Maybe that was why our hosts had shown me the lion first—to get me in the right frame of mind for the real thing.
"There was a city?" he asked. He drew the needier back toward himself, in what might have been construed as a conciliatory gesture. When its pressure was withdrawn from my neck I swallowed, thankfully.
"You didn't get that far?" I countered.
He hesitated, so I went on. "We don't have any reason to like one another, Mr. Guur," I said, "but I strongly suspect that we're both in the same boat. I'm not sure that we have any sensible option but to tell each other what we know, and try to figure it out together. As you must know, we're deep inside Asgard, and whoever brought us down here is playing silly games with us. They must have us under observation now."
He didn't lower his eyes, but he did nod his head, almost imperceptibly, and he closed his lips about his pointed teeth. Then he lowered the gun, though he continued to hold it in his hand.
"We were taken by surprise," he said. "In the corridors close to the dropshaft. We ran into some kind of trap, and several of my men were gunned down by flame-pistols. Immediately afterwards, they came at us."
"They?" I queried, wondering whether he'd mistaken Crucero for a whole platoon. It must have been Crucero who set the trap.
"Robots of some kind," he replied. "Like gigantic insects—but artificial."
Not just Crucero then, I thought. The ambush season must have started early. I realised that Myrlin must have roused a whole hornet's nest when he thrust his cutter into that control system. They must have come out to get us all—even the people at the top of the dropshaft.
"Did anyone from your party get away?" I asked Amara Guur.
"I do not know. I think perhaps not. What about the human soldiers?"
"I don't know either. But if they came all the way back up to three to grab your people, I dare say that they grabbed the star-captain and the others on the way. It seems that they don't want anyone reporting back—and it seems that they now have custody of everyone who knows the way down here."
That particular lie was intended as much for the eavesdroppers as for him. Saul Lyndrach's slightly-modified log was still in the truck up on the surface. It might take the Tetrax quite a while to find another French-speaker to decode it for them, and to figure out which bits I'd altered, but they'd do it, given time. They could be very thorough when they wanted to be.
When Guur didn't say anything, I asked him a question. "How did you track us through the levels?" It was almost a hint to the effect that I'd told a lie, and that the lie was really intended to deceive the mysterious observers. He probably knew that the bug he'd planted in the book was still on the surface.
"It was inside your boot heel," he replied. "When the giant took your truck, we knew you would need a replacement suit and we knew your specifications. Wherever that boot goes, it leaves an organic trace. We could have followed it anywhere, but we only needed to find the location of the shaft. Our intention was to wait for you there— hoping, of course, that you did not return. It would have been suitably ironic, would it not, if the android had killed your companions just as he killed my men?"
I didn't tell him that we'd left Crucero behind to take care of the possibility that he'd wait at the top of the shaft. It didn't seem necessary or diplomatic. I decided to let him believe that it was our present hosts who had organised the flame-pistol party.
"Well," I said, "it's all water under the bridge now. The question is: what do we do next?"
"There is nothing behind me but a closed room," said Guur.
"Same here," I told him. "That leaves us only one direction to go—and who knows who we might meet? Would you like to lead the way?"
"I have the gun," he reminded me. "You lead the way."
Amara Guur was exactly the kind of person on whom one should never turn one's back, but sometimes you don't get the choice.
I turned into the corridor where neither of us had been, and led the way toward our next encounter.
The corridor twisted and turned, but there was never more than one way to go. It could have been a veritable maze had the observers wanted it to be—I was morally certain that they could have opened up doorways and alternative pathways wherever they desired—but it seemed that they only wanted to take us from point A to point B.
Point B, as it transpired, was a big open space. We came out of a narrow portal to be faced with an alien forest. By alien, I don't just mean that it was like no place I'd ever been—having never been to Earth I had no real experience of the kind of plain which they'd shown to me when I first awoke, but it had been an environment where I had some slight sense of belonging. Here, the sensations awakened in my mind when I looked upon the strange bushes and trees was exactly the opposite; this was a place where I emphatically did not belong.
It wasn't the shapes which made it seem so odd—foliage, I guess, can come in a range of shapes so vast that nothing seems particularly extraordinary—but the scale of things. The leaves, which were dark of hue, were all very large. They were mostly green, though some were streaked with crimsons and violets. The flowers, which were very gaudy— though their colours too seemed dark, with no whites or pastel shades—were enormous, every blossom the size of a man's torso. The yellows were all ochreous, the blues tended toward indigo, the reds were blood-dark; all the stamens and styles which clustered at the heart of each bloom were black. Most of the flowers were bell-shaped things, though some were like hollow hemispheres; almost without exception they pointed upwards, at the ceiling, which was blazing with golden electric light a mere twelve metres above the forest floor.
There were very few things that I could think of as trees, though there was not a single plant which seemed small. Rather, they were bushes writ large, or lily-pads on a gargantuan scale. They grew tightly clustered together, leaving not even the narrowest of paths where a humanoid might comfortably walk between them. They towered above me, and although their topmost tendrils could only have reached three-quarters of the way to their artificial sky, they seemed to have command even of that empty space which they left.
The scent was overpowering, sickly sweet. There was a sound like the whirring of a bull-roarer, which at first I could not trace to its point of origin. Then I saw something clambering over the lip of one of the blossoms, and realised that it was a huge flightless insect, the size of a man's head, coloured as darkly as the plant on which it wandered, in shades sufficiently similar to make it difficult to see until it moved. I realised then that the sounds must be made by similar creatures, chafing their body-parts like grasshoppers.
"Do you recognise this place?" I asked the vormyran, my voice not much above a whisper.
"No," he replied. "I have traveled in most of the tropical lands of my homeworld, but I have seen nothing remotely like this."
I wondered if this was the native territory of the people who lived on this level. If so
, it would be easy to believe them giants. But I did not leap to that conclusion. For one thing, the ceiling was only twelve metres above our heads— no higher than the ceilings in levels one, two and three, which had been inhabited by humanoids of normal size. For another, the grey wall to either side of the doorway curved quite noticeably as it extended away. If that curve were to be extrapolated, its implication was that we were in an enclave no more than a kilometre in diameter. This was nothing but a big garden, or a vivarium; it was not an entire world by any means.
I was about to ask what we should do next, but the question died unasked when there came a new sound, much louder than the chirring of the pollinators which scrambled around the giant blooms.
There was no mistaking the sound; it was gunfire.
33
The gun that was being fired wasn't a flame-pistol, nor even a needier. It was an old-fashioned crash-gun blasting away on automatic, sending out a veritable hail of bullets.
The moment the gunfire stopped, the insects started. When we had first heard them, they had obviously been in their restful mood—now, they were panicked. The bull-roarer sound was amplified a thousand times, into an appalling screech, which went on and on and on.
I clasped my hands to my eardrums, trying to keep out the dreadful noise, and Amara Guur did the same, although the needier was still tightly clutched in the fingers of his right hand. I tried to move back into the corridor from which we had come, but I hit the solid wall, and when I half-turned in surprise, I found that the portal was no longer there. The grey wall was solid and seamless, enclosing us.
We huddled against the smooth surface until the sound died away, the crescendo easing down until the former level of sound was restored. Only then was it possible to speak.
"That way," said Guur, gutturally. He pointed away to the right, in the direction from which the noise of gunfire had come.
Asgard's Secret Page 20