Asgard's Secret

by Brian Stableford

  Amara Guur was too clever to let go of his needier, but for the moment he was all tied up trying to collect himself. His reflexes were quick, but they were the wrong reflexes for this kind of gravity—when he thrust against the ground, trying to bring himself back to his feet, he thrust far too hard, and completely lost his balance again, tumbling in mid-air in a long somersault.

  The vormyran Guur had called Kaat hadn't been at all inconvenienced by his master's acrobatics, but when he'd jerked his own needier up to the firing position he'd also trusted his old reflexes, which were geared to functioning in Asgard-normal gravity. The shots he fired went high and wide.

  The star-captain had obviously been trained for low-gee combat. I couldn't see where she'd stashed her own gun, but it was suddenly in her hand, and the entire upper part of Kaat's body was suddenly aflame as the flesh boiled away from the bones.

  I dived for the flower where the crash-gun had fallen. Although I'd lost sight of it, my groping hand caught it up without a fumble. I let the dive carry through, rolling with it. The enormous flower, crushed beneath my weight, felt like a sheet of sticky rubber but it didn't stop my forward roll. When my feet touched the ground again I let myself come upright, stretching with just the right touch of delicacy, bringing the gun up to fire.

  I felt as if everything were happening in slow motion— as, after a fashion, it was. While I was up on my feet again I could see that Amara Guur had just about regained control of his own body. He'd fetched up against the curving wall and with its aid he was bracing himself, bringing the needier round to aim at my midriff.

  I fired, holding the trigger down to discharge the last three bullets as fast as they would go. The first one hit him in the navel, the second in the sternum. The third exploded his head.

  The recoil kicked me backwards and sent me sprawling under a bush, where a congregation of giant cockroaches was wailing away like a choir of demented sirens. When I landed in their midst they wriggled away as fast as their scrawny legs could carry them.

  When I was able to stand up again, the star-captain was holding her gun before her, covering Jacinthe Siani, who was pressed back against the wall with hands thrown wide, looking terrified. Serne was emerging from the bushes to one side, Crucero from the other. There was no sign of Heleb or the last vormyran.

  I didn't expect ever to see either of them again.

  The noise of the insects was beginning to die down, and by the time we were all together it was possible for us to speak and be heard.

  "Nice move, Rousseau," said the star-captain. "Maybe you'll make a starship trooper after all."

  "I grew up in low-gee," I said, by way of explanation. "Never did any real fighting, but I played a lot of games. Guur lived all his life on planets, and he was careless enough to let me know it. I knew he'd be a sitting duck once he was off-balance."

  I looked down at Guur's shattered body. There was blood everywhere. It looked no different from human blood—even the stink was the same.

  "I could have taken all three of them," said the star-captain, matter-of-factly. "But it was nice of you to help, considering. I suppose you didn't believe me, though, when I said that he was welcome to you."

  "I figured you were marginally less likely to gun me down than he was. You always intended to blast him, though, didn't you? All the stuff about co-operating was just to gain time while these two tidied up Heleb and the last vormyran, wasn't it?"

  "Right," she said, already turning away to face Crucero.

  "The predator is clever," I murmured. "The predator deceives."

  "What's that?" she asked.

  "Just a little motto I picked up," I told her. "You were bluffing too, I hope, when you mentioned charging me with cowardice and desertion?"

  "It had crossed my mind," she said. "But when poor Kally started screaming, I guess we all thought we were dead. I'll trade off that one against the fact that you backed me up here—okay?"

  She didn't seem exactly over-generous, but I figured that the result was acceptable.

  "What do we do with her?" asked Crucero, waving his flame-pistol at Jacinthe Siani.

  "Kill her," advised Serne casually. For a moment, he reminded me very strongly of Heleb.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "She might be useful to me. She's probably the only one left who can tell the Tetrax the

  whole truth about my being framed. I need her."

  "That's okay," said the star-captain. "She's harmless now, and she isn't going to give us any trouble—are you?"

  Jacinthe Siani shook her head enthusiastically.

  "If you want her," said Serne, "you can look after her." He slapped a gun into my hand—a needier, which he'd recovered from one of the dead bodies.

  I took it, and glanced at the part of the forest from which he'd emerged. The noise of the insects hadn't died away, and seemed to be increasing again. I suddenly realised why. The moment I saw what was happening, the stink of it cut through the riot of odours like a knife, and my heart skipped a beat.

  "Merde!" I said, too softly to be clearly heard.

  They saw from my expression that something was wrong, and the star-captain turned quickly to look at whatever it was that had alarmed me.

  The billowing smoke was gushing furiously now, filling the margin between the topmost leaves and the twelve- metre sky, already beginning to blot out the vivid electric lights, bringing night to the jungle for what might have been the first time in thousands of years.

  "Oh shit," she said. "I told you to be careful."

  "I couldn't get close enough to use the wire," Serne complained. "I had to take the bastard out with the flame."

  "Let's hope they have a fire brigade," I said.

  The star-captain didn't want to wait. "This way," she said, pointing along the curving path which ran its narrow course round the edge of the burning garden. She began to run. Crucero didn't hesitate, and neither did Serne. Jacinthe Siani was still backed up against the wall, and though her eyes were fixed upon the smoke rising from the bushes she didn't seem inclined to move.

  "Come on!" I said, grabbing her arm. I pulled her away from the wall and pushed her in the direction which the others had taken. "Run!" I commanded.

  At last, she ran. I ran behind her, taking great bounding strides. Unused to the gravity, she fell over three times, but I kept picking her up and urging her on, thrusting her forward along the curve of the featureless wall. We both bumped into the wall more than once, because the path was so narrow, and the reaction of our bouncing confused even me. We must have fallen thirty or forty metres behind the others within three minutes.

  The fire hadn't seemed to be spreading very quickly, and we soon outran the smoke, but I couldn't help remembering the way that the door had closed behind me. As far as we knew, we were in a sealed cylinder, and we had no real reason to believe that the people who'd put us there would be inclined to let us out. They hadn't lifted a finger to interfere when we'd started slaughtering one another—why should they intervene now to save the killers from the consequences of their shooting party? I hoped that they might at least care about their hothouse plants, and would put out the fire if only to save the forest.

  I was so preoccupied with hustling Jacinthe Siani along the narrow track, and with worrying about the fire, that I didn't realise when the star-captain and her merry men stopped. I had to bring myself up short when I saw Seme's broad back in front of me, and even my long experience in low gee wasn't sufficient to cope with the problem. I missed him, but I ended up sprawled full-length under yet another bush, away to one side of him.

  When I crawled out, feeling as if there were bruises all over my body, I saw that he'd gone into a defensive crouch, and that his gun was once again in his hand. Crucero had already faded into the undergrowth. When I tried to stand up my shoulder was grabbed by the star-captain, who forced me down again, pulling me sideways into the cover of a broad-leaved plant.

  "What is it?" I asked, trying to make myself heard over the ra
cket of the insects without actually shouting. "More vormyr?" I realised that no one had ever specified exactly how many men Amara Guur had had with him when he was ambushed, or how many had survived to be captured by robots.

  But it wasn't more vormyr. She didn't reply to my question, but I was close enough to her to see the avid glint in her eye. I knew then that she'd seen Myrlin.

  She let go of my shoulder, but I promptly grabbed her arm, causing her to look round at me with a furious countenance. As she tried to shake me off, her lips drew back from her teeth in a kind of snarl that I'd never before seen on a human face.

  "Don't do it," I said. "He isn't any danger to you. I swear it!"

  She tried to shake me off, but the angry oath that was on her lips suddenly died as the implications of what I'd said sunk in.

  "What the hell do you know about it?" she demanded. Her face was close to mine; otherwise I would never have been able to hear the words, which came out in a forceful hiss.

  "I was with him," I told her. "After we got split up. He told me everything. He isn't any danger!"

  "He told you that, I suppose!" she retorted.

  He had told me, and I had believed him. But as I looked at Susarma Lear's sweat-stained face, at the blonde hair now matted and tangled, and the blue eyes colder than any eyes I had ever seen before, I knew that there was no way on Earth, or on Asgard, or anywhere in the universe you could name, that she was ever going to take my word for it.

  "Don't kill him," I begged. "Please, don't kill him."

  I wouldn't let go of her arm. I don't know exactly why I cared so much. After all, it was his word against hers ... or his word against her instincts. What had he done for me in the few hours we'd been together? What sense was there in my trying to defend him?

  But I did care. Maybe I had simply reached the end of my tolerance for death and destruction. Maybe I was suffering from a nasty bout of that old omnivore confusion.

  She brought her pistol round and pointed it at my face.

  "If you don't let go," she said, "I'll blow your fucking head off."

  She'd already set the world on fire—what had she to lose?

  There was no doubting that she meant it. Her special paranoia was well and truly unconfined, and there was not a thing I could do to contain it.

  I let go of her arm.

  Jacinthe Siani was still out in the open, crouching on the path. Nobody had bothered to pull her out of the way. She looked very miserable, brought into as much disarray by her falls and collisions as anyone else. Her hair was a mess and the expression on her nearly-human face was sheer blind panic. She was staring out along the curving path, and though I couldn't see him from where I crouched, I knew who she was staring at.

  Susarma Lear had turned away from me, and I was utterly forgotten.

  I guess there comes a time in every man's life when he does something totally stupid, for no good reason at all.

  I leapt to my feet, and shouted with all my might: "Run, you bastard, run!"

  Once I was standing, I could see him. He was seven or eight metres away, in the middle of an unusually large patch

  of bare ground. He had been looking at Jacinthe Siani, his eyes wide in apparent puzzlement. As I rose, he turned to me, but he gave not the slightest sign that he had heard what I said, and the noise of the fire-startled insects was so clamorous that he probably could not make out the words. It was only the sight of me that had attracted his attention, and he stared at me as though I was a madman. He did not appear to be armed, and all he was wearing was a pair of underpants. For all his gargantuan bulk, he looked supremely vulnerable—the easiest target in the world.

  Susarma Lear rose in front of me, emitting incomprehensible obscenities. Without the slightest pause or hesitation she thrust her gun out before her and fired. The flame-bolts sizzled like fireworks as they shot through the air, striking him full in the chest: one, two, three.

  He went over backwards, collapsing into himself as the hot gases opened up his pleural cavity, frying his heart and his lungs.

  The star-captain let out a mighty scream of triumph, and then the sky went crazy too.

  All the blazing lights began flickering and flashing, and I felt for the second time that nightmarish sensation of having acid poured into my skull. I reached up with my hands to cover my face, trying to shut my eyes against the assault of the mindscrambler, but I had no chance.

  The last thing I saw before I was rudely thrust into insensibility was Myrlin's shattered body, lying with arms outstretched on that patch of bare ground.

  It was shimmering, like a distorted video-picture about to flicker out and disappear.

  But it was me who flickered out.

  35

  When I woke up again I felt anything but good. My stomach was queasy, my head was spinning and I had a dreadful metallic taste in my mouth. My eyelids felt as if they were glued down and the muscles in my legs were aching.

  Nevertheless, I managed to sit up, and after a while I opened my eyes, blinking in order to clear my vision.

  I was still in the same place. The sky had stopped flickering, and was now presenting a reasonable simulation of twilight. Some of the lights were on, but most were off. The forest was still, and very quiet. I could still smell smoke, but the odour was faint and distant.

  Susarma Lear was stretched out on a gigantic leaf, her head cradled by a purple flower. She was quite unconscious, and made no response at all when I shook her sleeve.

  I looked at the patch of open ground where Myrlin's body should have been lying.

  The body wasn't there.

  Nor was the patch of ground.

  I wasn't altogether surprised. Dazed as I was, I remembered seeing the body flicker before I went out for the count, and the suspicion must have been born in my mind at that moment that all was definitely not as it seemed.

  I checked Jacinthe Siani, who responded no better to my half-hearted attempt to rouse her than the star-captain had. I could also see Seme, similarly dead to the world, though not actually deceased.

  I coughed a few times, trying to get the awful taste out of my mouth, and then leaned against the wall, trying to draw strength from its cool solidity.

  Myrlin came out of the bushes. He was dressed exactly as he had been when I had seen him shot down, but his big hairy torso was quite intact, and though the dim light made him seem a little greyer than I remembered him, he looked a good deal healthier than I did.

  It was the first time I'd been able to get a good look at his face, without an obscuring visor. His features weren't rugged at all. He was round-faced with skin that looked very soft. He was like a vastly overgrown baby, except for the big nose.

  "Hello, Mr. Rousseau," he said softly.

  "That damned lion," I said, with a certain amount of irritation. "You weren't testing me. You were testing the illusion."

  "They weren't entirely sure that it would work," he said. "It's a new trick they worked out specially for the occasion. You had me worried when you seemed to have it figured out, but I thought it went well enough. I think it worked on the star-captain. She'll be quite convinced that she killed me. A cathartic experience, I'm sure. She's been under a lot of stress."

  "The others are really dead, though."

  "Oh yes," he said, mildly. "Amara Guur and his men are really dead. She knows they're dead—and that will help to convince her that I'm dead too, should she begin to doubt it. I didn't have any qualms about letting them die—they tortured Saul Lyndrach, and caused his death. They'd have killed me too, if it hadn't been for the fact that the tranquillisers they pumped into me weren't as effective as they expected. There are advantages in being a giant."

  "You orchestrated the whole thing?"

  "Mostly. I didn't have a completely free hand. They went along with most of what I suggested."

  "They?"

  "The people who live here. They seem to be a little shy—I haven't actually met them in the flesh yet. But they have very sophisticate
d machines."

  I shook my head, still trying to get back the good feeling I'd had when I woke up only a couple of hours before. An awful lot had happened during those brief hours.

  "Is the fire out?" I asked, deliberately choosing a question of marginal relevance. I didn't feel up to asking the big ones yet.

  "Yes. It didn't do too much damage. It can all be repaired."

  "That's a relief." The sarcasm wasn't really called for, but I figured that I might be excused.

  There was a pause, while Myrlin looked down at the prostrate star-captain, who had a more peaceful expression on her face now than I'd ever seen there before.

  "I don't think they actually believed me," said Myrlin.

  "What didn't they believe?" I countered.

  "They didn't believe that everyone would start trying to kill one another. They didn't believe that you could all wake up in this bizarre situation, and promptly start figuring out how to stage a massacre."

  "Some people have no imagination," I observed drily.

  "They don't do any killing themselves," he said. "I suspect they don't do much dying either. They seem to have their world and their lives pretty much under control."

  "Bully for them," I said. "How is it, exactly, that you seem to be the one calling the shots around here?"

  "I made a deal with them."

  "So I gather. But what made them strike a deal with you?

  Why not the star-captain? Why not Amara Guur? Why not me?"

  "My interests and theirs appear to coincide," he said. "I need a home ... a life ... a place to belong. I was more than ready to volunteer to stay here, and help them out."

  "Help them out with what? Their world and their lives are under control, remember?"

  "They need time to think, Mr. Rousseau. Time to decide what to do—about the universe."

  "About the universe?" I had the feeling that I was getting out of my philosophical depth. It was all becoming a little too surreal.

  "They didn't know the universe existed," he told me. "They thought Asgard was all that there was . . . layer upon layer, ad infinitum. Now, they have to come to terms with the idea of the surface ... of infinite space . . . they have to figure out what it all means, in terms of who they might be, and where they might be, and why."