"They're not the builders, then? They didn't make Asgard and they don't know what it's for?"
"No. They're not the builders. They know a little bit about a few hundreds of levels, but they're no wiser about what's in the centre than you are. They don't seem to do a lot of exploring themselves, but they do have robots. They'd never been up Saul's dropshaft before, though. They had no idea what was up on three. Now they know about the cold levels . . . about the galactic community . . . about Tetrax and vormyr and the human/Salamandran war. I get the impression that they're a little anxious about it all. I suspect that they're not very aggressive, and that they think what just happened here is rather horrible."
I thought it was rather horrible myself, but I didn't bother to say so.
"So you're going to stay and teach them about the universe," I said, instead. I smiled sardonically, because it was, in its way, a wonderful irony. He was newborn, and all that he knew about the universe, and about humanoidkind, had been pumped into him by some kind of machine. He wasn't real. Maybe that was why these mysterious underworld- dwellers liked him so much.
"Why'd you stage the bloodbath?" I asked him. "Why not simply have your friends put Guur and his bully boys in cold storage? They must have given us a pretty thorough going- over while they had us in their clutches for twelve whole days. They didn't have to wake anyone up at all. They could have used us as founts of information about the universe, then thrown us out with the garbage, if they wanted to."
"I thought you'd like to go back, Mr Rousseau. I wanted to do you a good turn. The star-captain too, perverse as it may seem. I don't really have anything against her, you understand. She couldn't help but see things the way she did."
"You steered me straight into Amara Guur," I pointed out. "He could have killed me any time."
Myrlin picked something up from the ground. It was the needier that Seme had given to me so that I could wave it at Jacinthe Siani. I assumed that it must have been the one which Guur had carried. He pointed it at the sky, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.
"It's not loaded," I said.
"It's loaded," he said. "It just isn't capable of firing."
Strangely, I felt bitterly disappointed. A little while ago, I'd done the only heroic thing which I'd ever done in my entire life. I'd pulled off a real coup, turning the tables on one of the most evil bastards in the known universe—but his gun had already been fixed. The poor fool hadn't had a chance. All the heroics suddenly seemed very silly.
"The gun that killed Khalekhan wasn't useless," I pointed out coldly.
"Khalekhan was a casualty," he said. "As Guur pointed out, it was a stupid misjudgement on Heleb's part. He was a combat soldier. I didn't have anything against him, but I'm not about to cry over his passing. It was part of the price that had to be paid, if any of you were to go back to the surface. You're the only one I'd care to trust, Mr. Rousseau, and I'd be careful even then. The bloodbath wasn't entirely my idea; as I said, the people I'm with now weren't entirely convinced, despite what they distilled from your software while you were asleep, what kind of beings we really are. Now they know. But I did help them plan it all, and I was ready and willing for people to be killed. I was also quite prepared to be unsporting, and give Amara Guur a disabled gun. I guess I'm no better than the rest of you—a pretty good imitation of humankind, wouldn't you say?"
Too goody I'd have said.
"Why did they agree to let me go, if they're as anxious as you say?" I inquired. "Why are they letting you tell me all this?"
"They don't particularly want to keep you. They know that the secret of the dropshaft can't be contained indefinitely, given that you left the notebook on the surface. They don't see any harm in letting you out. Of course, you'll never find the way down here again. They'll block the way permanently. The Tetrax can have the levels all the way down to the bottom of Saul's shaft, but that's the floor so far as they're concerned—until they learn a great deal more about how the native technics work.
"As for this little conversation—I suppose it might be seen as self-indulgence on my part. But there is a utilitarian aspect to it. You'd have realised that I wasn't dead. You were the only one who could figure it out, but after the lion, I was sure that you would guess what had happened. I don't think you'd ever have managed to convince the star- captain, even if you'd tried, because she wants me to be dead so very badly. But I'd rather you didn't even try to convince her. I'd rather you let her go on believing what she believes, quite unchallenged. I'd rather you were a coconspirator, Mr. Rousseau. I want you to be on my side. You are on my side, aren't you, Mr Rousseau?"
I looked at him tiredly. "You can call me Mike," I said, with a slight croak in my voice.
"That's what I thought," he said. "And you do want to return to the surface, don't you? To claim your big reward? To be the man who found the way to more than a hundred new levels?"
I hesitated for a moment. But then I nodded. "Yes I do," I said.
"That's what I thought. I'm sorry."
"Sorry?"
"Sorry you can't stay. I think I might get the bigger rewards."
"Like what?"
"Immortality . . . that sort of thing. As I said, I haven't even met my hosts in the flesh yet, but I get the idea that they're very clever people. Very clever indeed."
There wasn't much to say in reply to that.
Another thought struck me, though I didn't voice it. These people didn't know what was in the centre—they had no more idea about who built Asgard than I did—but if anyone could find out, they could. They were threatening to make sure that the Tetrax never would, but now they knew about the universe, their own curiosity was sure to have been stimulated. I was being turned back from my journey to the centre, but Myrlin was only just starting his. He had every chance of getting there, whether he became immortal or not.
I wondered whether I could revoke my hasty decision to return. I wondered whether I, too, might strike a bargain with these desperately shy, fabulously clever folk. But they hadn't taken the trouble to ask me. They hadn't even bothered to open up a conversation with me. Whatever their probes had extracted from my numbed brain during those twelve days that I had lain on their dissecting slabs, it hadn't made them want to talk to me. They obviously chose their friends with the utmost care. They were quite possibly the worst snobs in the whole of Creation.
"Why are things so bad in the upper levels?" I asked him, suddenly anxious that the interview was coming to its end before I had asked any of the important questions. "Why were the top levels evacuated? Why has the one we came down been allowed to run wild? Why have its people degenerated?"
"I don't know," he said. "I honestly don't."
"Did Asgard come from the black galaxy? Is it a fortress, or an Ark, or what the hell?"
"I don't know," he insisted. "I can't answer those questions, Mike. I don't think the people here have ever asked them—until now."
But you can find the answers, I thought, and I never will.
I felt like Adam, about to be expelled from Eden. But what the hell had I done wrong? What sin had I committed here? I hadn't even been given a chance to display my worthiness. The only one of the people delivered here by cruel fate who had been tried and not found wanting was the android. He alone, it seemed, was untainted by innate sin . . . unborn and unfallen.
It had a weird kind of aesthetic propriety, but it wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all—but we have long since grown used to the cruel truth that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, have we not? No one has any right to expect fairness.
"Is that it?" I asked him, still fighting the nausea, still using the invisible wall for support. "Is that all there is to it?"
"Yes," he said, sorrowfully. "It's over now. You'll all wake up with your cold-suits on, up on level three. You'll have enough reserves to get back to the surface, with a little to spare. The star-captain will have the comfort of knowing that she completed her impossible mission; you'll be able
to trade what you know for a lot of money. Good luck, Mike."
"Same to you," I said, with all the grace I could muster. "And . . ."
He had already begun to turn away, but he looked back at me, staring down from his improbable height, looking every inch a demigod.
"Yes?" he prompted.
"I really did appreciate this little chat."
"So did I," he assured me. "So did I."
The way he said it, I knew it wasn't intended to be an au revoir. It was a goodbye. He expected that he would never see me again.
It seemed, as the sky flickered again and I plunged back into the deep well of unconsciousness, that it was goodbye forever to some of my most precious dreams.
But not all of them.
I could still be famous. I could still be a living legend— and when I'd been asked whether that was what I wanted, my first impulse had been to say yes. I still had a secret to sell, and a desperate desire to haggle over its true price.
36
There isn't much point in my giving a detailed description of the journey back to the surface. It was mercifully uneventful.
The star-captain and her surviving sidekicks were, I thought, surprisingly incurious about what had actually happened to them down below. They understood that we'd been captured by some kind of alien intelligence, set free in order to play games and then captured again before being released somewhere else, but they were astonishingly unresentful of this cavalier treatment.
The fact that they remembered so clearly and so satisfy- ingly how they had gunned down poor Myrlin probably accounted in large measure for their lack of resentment; it was obvious that the star-captain, at least, had been liberated from a frightful burden, and that she was abundantly grateful for her freedom. She even began to treat me with a measure of good fellowship, and nothing more was said about such embarrassing matters as charges of cowardice and desertion. She seemed perfectly happy to tear up my conscription papers after Jacinthe Siani's testimony to a Tetron court exonerated me from all blame in the matter of the murder of Atmin Atmanu, restoring my record to cleanliness.
Needless to say, I came back to Skychain City a much more popular man than I had left. I was the man with the notebook, the man with the tape that could guide the C.R.E. to the vital dropshaft.
The others who returned with me would all have been popular too, save for the fact that not one of them had made any notes of their own which might guide a third party to the spot marked X. The star-captain wasn't interested, of course, but I think I observed Serne grinding his teeth a couple of times when he realised that he had carelessly neglected his chance to get a cut of the loot. Jacinthe Siani was definitely peeved, because she didn't even know enough to bribe her way out of the service-obligations that were heaped upon her as a result of her complicity in various crimes. I contemplated buying her out at one point, but very briefly. Even after searching my merciful heart, I couldn't find an atom of sympathy for her. I believe that her services were purchased by some other Kythnans, but what she was going to have to do to pay them back I didn't want to ask.
While the starship troopers were on their way back up the skychain, ready to take their interstellar destroyer back to the home system, where they would doubtless enjoy their own heroes' welcome and collect their campaign medals— once they'd been very carefully checked for alien infection— I went to see my old friend Aleksandr Sovorov, to negotiate a deal with the C.R.E.
I told him most of the story. I drew a veil over certain parts of it, but I did give him a few juicy details about the civilization with which I'd come into brief contact deep in the bowels of the planet. I took a certain vindictive glee in watching him squirm with anguish.
By the time I was finished, he was staring at me as if I were some kind of hairy arthropod with a disgusting odour.
"You made contact with an advanced civilization thousands of levels down?" he repeated, to make sure that he'd got it right.
"That's right," I told him. "Must have been about halfway to the centre."
"And when they released you all, your Star Force friends and Amara Guur's gangsters set off on such an orgy of killing that they exported you all the way back to level three, and decided to seal themselves off forever?"
"That seems to be the gist of it," I confirmed, though it wasn't entirely accurate. "They seemed to think that we're barbarians. So does everyone else, now I come to think about it. Perhaps they're right."
He groaned. He always did tend to overact. "Do you have any idea of what you've done?" he asked. The expression of pain in his eyes was a sight to behold.
"If the C.R.E. hadn't turned down my application for aid," I pointed out, "none of this would have happened. In a way, it's all your fault."
"If the C.R.E. had done what I suggested," he retorted, "they'd have kept people like you out of the levels altogether."
"If they'd done that," I retorted, "Saul Lyndrach would never have found the shaft in the first place. The super-scientists down in the depths would still be blissfully ignorant of the existence of the universe, content to sit on whatever they have in place of arses for the next few million years. And you wouldn't be sitting here buying a way into a hundred new levels—warm levels, where there's life, and enough recoverable technology to keep you busy for the next few centuries."
"You stupid, selfish bastard," he said, hissing through his teeth. "You have ruined everything the C.R.E. was set up to do. You have set back the cause of humankind irreparably. How do you think we are ever going to hold our heads up in the galactic community now? There is nothing worse that the universe could have shown to these people than a bunch of brawling savages. You couldn't be content with taking the Star Force down there, could you? You had to take the vormyr and the Spirellans too, just to show them how ugly humanoids can be when they're absolutely at their worst."
"I didn't exactly take Amara Guur with me," I pointed out. "He came along of his own accord. If I'd known that I had a bug in my bootheel, I would have worn overshoes. Anyway, you're forgetting the guy who led us all on the chase. The Salamandran android. Who do you think was responsible for his being there?"
"Saul Lyndrach," he replied, undaunted.
I shook my head.
I picked up a piece of paper from his desk, and pointed to the letterhead. There was a symbol beside the letters which spelled out Co-ordinated Research Establishment in parole.
"What's that, Alex?" I said.
For a moment or two he simply looked annoyed and impatient, but he finally figured out that I was serious.
"It's a pictograph in one of the Tetron languages," he said. "It's the symbol of our organization, as well you know. What of it?"
"It appears on all your documents, like a trademark."
"Yes. So what?"
"That's the symbol Myrlin drew in the air when he told me about the Salamandrans buying technics from Asgard— the technics they used to make him. The Tetrax and the upper-level cavies are both biotech-minded, remember? The Tetrax seem to have made a little bit more out of what they've found here than they've let underlings like you know about. And they've been selling some of it to like- minded barbarians, to use in those horrid wars that they disapprove of so strongly. If everything had gone as planned, the Co-ordinated bloody Research Establishment might just have been responsible for the extinction of the human species. Your species and mine, Alex. Who did you say was stupid and selfish? Who are the barbarians now, Alex?"
"You're lying," he said, hopefully. But he knew me better than that.
I shook my head.
"I didn't know . . ."he said, tentatively.
"I know you didn't," I said. "Well, you know now."
He thought about it for a minute, and then said: "It doesn't affect my condemnation of what you did. I stand by everything that I believe. What happened in the lower levels is a disaster . . . for the human community and for mankind. And I don't believe that the Tetron administration knew about this trade in technics, or if they did, I
don't believe that they intended them to be used in war. There are a lot of factions in the C.R.E., and it could have been any of them."
"That's my point," I told him. "It could have been any of them. The whole universe is full of barbarians, Alex, and I didn't see anything down in the bowels of Asgard to convince me that the people we tangled with were angels. The Star Force carved up Guur's hatchet men, but it was the cavies who set it up, and the cavies who sat back with their popcorn and watched it happen. They were clever . . . but I didn't see anything to make me believe that they were nice. Maybe we should be glad that they sealed themselves off. What if they do decide what to do about the universe . . . and decide that what they ought to do is sterilise the whole damn cosmos?"
"That's ludicrous," he told me with much more feeling than conviction.
"Maybe," I agreed. "But it's all a bit hypothetical, isn't it? At the end of the day, we just don't know, do we? Now, why don't we start talking about more interesting things, like money. How much does the C.R.E. propose to pay me for my little treasure-map?"
He looked mildly surprised. "After what you've said about the C.R.E. selling technics to the Salamandrans, you still want to sell us the location of Lyndrach's dropshaft?"
"It's a crooked game," I told him, "but it's the only game in town."
"You don't think I should resign?"
"Hell, no. We need at least one human on the inside, to try to make certain it doesn't happen again. I'd come in with you, but I don't like organizations. I'm a loner."
He didn't need any further encouragement. We started talking about money. My revelations obviously hadn't shaken him too much, because he made every possible effort to strike the meanest bargain he could. It took a long time to get the offer up to within spitting distance of my dreams of avarice.
But in the end, we closed the deal, to the mutual satisfaction of all parties.
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