Asgard's Secret
Page 24
Before the Star Force ship pulled out of orbit to start burrowing through its self-made wormhole, I got a call from my ex-commanding officer. Her image was a bit blurred on the screen, but she was looking good now that she was happy.
"I really could have made a trooper out of you," she said. "You took care of Amara Guur pretty well."
"I found out later that his gun was jammed," I told her.
"When?" she asked.
"I tried it," I said, evasively.
"You didn't know it when you took him out," she said, "did you?"
I admitted that I hadn't. She smiled a wolfish smile, as if she thought she knew me better than I know myself. She didn't.
"I am not a hero," I told her. "I run away from giant amoebas. I only went for Amara Guur because I thought you'd shoot straight through me if I didn't."
"You might be right," she told me. "I'm a real hero, and I shoot when I have to, no matter who's in the way. You'd have saved us a lot of trouble, you know, if you'd only taken that android in when Immigration Control asked you to. Just an atom of social conscience, and you could have kept him nice and warm for us in Skychain City."
Something about the way she said it made me very conscious of the fact that Susarma Lear was not, after all, a very nice person. Real heroes never are, I guess.
"There are thousands of people here who would have given all that they own to see what you and I saw ... to go where you and I went," I told her. "And you don't care at all, do you? The mystery never got to you, and you really don't give a damn what's at the centre of it all. You have a narrow mind, Star-Captain Lear."
"It was broad enough to let you off the hook," she told me. "You owe me a favour. I might be back to claim it some day."
I didn't think I owed her any favours at all, even though I was keeping secrets from her that would make her very angry indeed if she ever found out about them.
"I hope you'll forgive me," I said, "if I don't look forward to it. It's not that I can't stand to see women in uniform, you understand. It's just that I prefer a quiet life."
"There's something not quite right about a man who wants to spend his time rooting around the frigid remains of a world that went to hell a million years ago," she said. "It testifies to a certain aridity of the passions, and a dereliction of the soul. Try to be a hero, Rousseau, in spite of yourself. Just try."
Motherly advice wasn't her strong point. It didn't move me at all.
"Goodbye," I said.
"Au revoir," she replied.
As she broke the connection, I repeated what I'd said, silently. Goodbye. I hoped that it would be forever.
Then I got on with the serious business of finding out what it felt like to be modestly rich.
It might have felt better, but for the nagging worries. They were private worries, probably not worth entertaining, but I couldn't quite shake them off. The experiences I'd been through had left me more-or-less unscathed, but they had planted some seeds of doubt in my mind—doubts about appearance and reality, about truth and deception. I kept thinking about Myrlin, dead and yet not dead, and what difference it might make.
I couldn't help setting up a couple of hypothetical scenarios in my mind, just trying them out for size.
In the first scenario, I invited myself to suppose the Salamandrans had been able to bring their genetic time- bomb project to a successful conclusion, but were worried about the secret being discovered. I supposed that they knew full well that there was no chance of hiding the thing completely—especially given that the C.R.E. were involved. And I supposed, therefore, that they'd decided to cover up their success by planting an ingenious false trail ... by setting up a monstrous red herring. It wouldn't even be necessary to assume that Myrlin was consciously lying. After all, he knew only what they had fed into him.
I couldn't help but wonder whether the sole reason for Myrlin's existence might have been to convince the Star Force that in killing him they'd destroyed the threat to humankind.
Maybe it had all been a farce—a sideshow, to distract attention from the main event. Maybe the human race was still in dire trouble, with the vengeance of the Salamandrans still to be unleashed in the indeterminate future.
The second scenario, partly inspired by the first, was more immediate in its implications. I invited myself to suppose that the underworlders had had even more control over appearances than they'd seemed. Given that the star- captain's memories of what had happened were false, why shouldn't mine be equally fake? Maybe they had been pumped into me in much the same way that Myrlin's memories of a human lifetime had been pumped into him. There was no way I could really be sure of anything that had happened after I was hit by the first mindscrambler. All else might easily have been illusion. Was Amara Guur really dead? Was Myrlin really alive? There was simply no way to be absolutely sure. I might never have been into the lower depths of Asgard at all. I might never have been any lower down than the level at the bottom of Saul's dropshaft.
How could I know?
There's no way to solve puzzles like those. My instinct was to trust the judgments I had made—to believe that the Salamandran project had failed, and to believe that what Myrlin had told me about the world which he had made his own was true—but I'd seen people killed when their instinctive responses betrayed them utterly because they were in the wrong environment. How can a man trust his instincts after that?
There was nothing to be gained by working over those puzzles in my mind, but knowing that wasn't enough to let me stop.
The last words of one of my favourite books urge men not to waste too much time in pondering insoluble questions. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, says Voltaire, who was one of the wisest men who ever lived. We must look after our own garden. We must take charge of that which we can actually control.
It may be that we never can reach the centre of things, where all the real truths are hidden away. It may be that the pure, unadulterated kernel of Absolute Certainty is not under any circumstances to be grasped, no matter how long and arduous an odyssey you undertake in the attempt to reach it.
My own journey hadn't ended; I wasn't even certain that it had properly begun.
But I was beginning to accept that at the end of the day, you just have to settle for what you can get.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRIAN STABLEFORD has published more than 50 novels and 200 short stories, as well as several non-fiction books and thousands of articles for periodicals and reference books. He is a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at King Alfred's College, Winchester. He lives in Reading with his wife Jane, a holistic therapist. His novels include The Empire of Fear (1988), Young Blood (1992) and a future history series comprising Inherit the Earth (1998), Architects of Emortality (1999), The Fountains of Youth (2000), The Cassandra Complex (2001), Dark Ararat (2002) and The Omega Expedition (2002). His previous Five Star books are Year Zero (2003) and Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution (2004). Other recent publications include Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-first Century Ghost Story (Prime Press) and a Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature (Scarecrow Press). He is currently compiling a companion Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature for publication in 2005.
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Brian Stableford, Asgard's Secret