Asgard's Conquerors (25 page)

"You're working for the Tetrax?" he queried.

"That's right. They're having difficulty making contact with our
genial hosts, and they sent down three teams of snoopers to find out what's
going on. I was unlucky, and struck out before getting past phase one.
Hopefully, some of the others have been enjoying better luck while I've been in
transit. For my own satisfaction, though, I'd appreciate it if you could fill
me in on what you know—assuming that your determination not to communicate
hasn't extended to seeing and hearing no evil as well as speaking none?"

"Of course not," he said. "Unfortunately, I have not
been able to gather much information here. Much as I would have liked to talk
to the natives of Asgard who are imprisoned here, the lack of a common language
has proved a barrier. Some of them are as keen to learn parole as the invaders,
but their opportunities are more restricted. Some have made progress during the
exercise periods, but the invader linguists are busy round the clock with
collaborators, and have mastered the language much more fully."

"That's okay," I said. "I don't expect miracles. Let's
start with the camp. How many people are here, and who are they?"

"I have not been able to make an accurate count."

I found his pedantry a little hard to cope with. I wondered whether it
might be better to go to sleep now, and try to hold a more sensible
conversation in the morning. My head was beginning to ache. But I persisted.

"Come on, Alex. I just want to know the score. What kind of a
place is this?"

"Well," he said. "I think there are about two thousand
people here. The great majority are members of non- galactic humanoid races—I
estimate that there are at least a dozen different species. Perhaps a tenth of
the prisoners are galactics. Most are Tetrax, but the invaders seem to have
brought down at least one specimen of each of the races represented in Skychain
City. This is as much a centre of learning as a place of imprisonment—it seems
probable that anyone the invaders wish to interrogate for an extended period
of time is brought here. There seems to be no routine mistreatment of
prisoners, but I am not in a position to determine the whole range of the
activities which go on. Until I have more data, it would be premature to draw
too many conclusions."

"Oh
merde,"
I muttered. I should have known what to expect. I
lay down, with my head on the pillow, and looked up at him.

"You're tired," he observed. It was nice to see that he
wasn't entirely incompetent in the business of drawing conclusions.

"You never did tell me what time we eat around here," I
reminded him.

"We operate a day cycle slightly shorter than the Tetron
norm," he told me. "The invaders appear to use a forty-unit division.
I have no idea why. The lights go on at the zero point and off at twenty-five. We
eat during the first, the eleventh, and the twenty-first periods. We exercise
during the fifth and sixth, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth."

"I'll try to remember," I promised.

After a pause, during which time it might have sunk in to his thick skull
that he was not being very helpful, he said, in a softer voice: "What's
going to happen to us, Rousseau? Will the Tetrax succeed in securing our
release?"

"Now why should the Tetrax worry unduly about you?" I asked
him, returning a little of the malicious sarcasm. "In spite of all your
sterling work with the Co-ordinated Research Establishment, they probably don't
give a damn about you, and now that I've failed in my mission, they probably
care almost as little about me. If I were you, Alex, I'd start wondering how I
could help myself. That's what I'm doing."

"Oh," he said flatly. "In that case, I wish you the best
of luck."

I can tell when a man isn't sincere. Unfortunately, I thought I might
need the very best of luck—and a bit more. I shut my eyes, and tried to figure
out how I should play it when the questions began again—as they undoubtedly
would. Unfortunately, I couldn't get my thoughts straight. I was tired and I
was sniffing continually in a hopeless attempt to clear my sinuses.

Of all the stupid places to catch a cold, I thought, furiously, I have
to do it in the one place in the universe where I can't get proper treatment.
Fate still seemed to be dealing me the worst cards it could find, and I
realised that what I'd said to Alex was probably true. In all likelihood we
were out of the game for good, and nobody would bother to make the slightest
effort to bring us back into it. If I didn't play my cards exactly right, I
might be here for a very long time.

18

The second
phase of my interrogation started in a more polite fashion than the first. My
new interlocutor spoke far better parole than my old acquaintance with the
sky-blue eyes, and he obviously wasn't "only a soldier." He even
began by telling me his name, which was Sigor Dyan. He was dressed in black,
like all the uniformed men, but he wore no insignia of rank at all—which
implied, in subtle fashion, that he was important enough to stand outside the
hierarchy. He had the customary white skin, and his white hair was commonplace,
too, but he had curious eyes, which were a purplish colour somewhere between
light-blue and albinic pink. His brow-ridges weren't very prominent and he had
a comparatively steep forehead, which made him look very human indeed.

He received me in a pleasant room, and invited me to sit on a sofa,
although he sat on a more angular chair whose seat was elevated—with the
consequence that he could look at me from a higher vantage, even though I was a
good three centimetres taller than he. There was a low-level glass-topped table
between us, with two cups and a pot of some kind of hot drink. Without asking,
he poured us each a cup, and pushed mine over. I tasted it carefully. It was green
and sweet, like sugared mint tea. It soothed my throat, which had become very
sore. It was obviously velvet glove time—but I knew I'd have to look out for
the iron fist.

"Your name is Michael Rousseau?" he began.

"That's right," I croaked.

"And you are a native of a planet which you call Earth?"

"It's the homeworld of my species. I was born on a microworld in
the asteroid belt. That's a thin scattering of big rocks somewhat further away
from our star than the homeworld. You know about stars and solar systems?"

"We are learning. I believe that Asgard is a very great distance
away from your homeworld—a distance so great that I can hardly imagine it. We
have grown used to figuring distances in rather small units. We have discovered
that our conceptual horizons were narrower than we could possibly have
supposed."

"I hope your soldiers aren't agoraphobic," I commented.

He smiled. "I fear that they are," he told me. "Many
have experienced difficulties in working on the surface. Even the dome of Skychain
City seems to us to contain an unusually large open space. Beyond the dome . . .
perhaps you can imagine what a vertiginous experience it is for our people to
look up into that sky for the first time."

"Perhaps I can," I admitted. I couldn't—when you're born in
the asteroid belt you grow up with a sky that makes all others seem
comfortable.

"What brought you to Asgard, Mr. Rousseau?" He spoke gently,
and I certainly didn't want to discourage him. I felt too poorly to get into an
argument, though I was trying to put on a brave face and keep my symptoms under
control.

"A spirit of adventure," I told him. "You get to a point
in life where you can afford to buy a starship, and suddenly the whole galactic
arm is open to you. The microworld began to seem intolerably parochial, and the
asteroid belt seemed to have very little to offer—just millions of orbiting
boulders. I had a friend who was keen to head for somewhere Romantic. Asgard
is Romantic, with a capital R: the biggest, strangest world in the known universe.
News of its existence had only just reached the system, and it was the great
mystery—the ultimate puzzle. The space-born tend to look outwards . . . they
rarely go back to Earth. To them, Earth is the dead past . . . the galactic
community is the future. What brought you to a place like this?"

"A certain talent for learning languages. Perhaps, though, you do
not mean the question personally—perhaps you are asking what brought my people
to this environment?"

"It would be interesting to know," I answered.

"Initially," he said, "the need to discover more space
than was provided for us in our original habitat came from simple population
pressure. Our habitat was some thirty million square kilometres in extent, but
there were no significant checks on our population growth. We do not know how
many of us there were originally—not very many, perhaps—but by the time we
discovered a way to penetrate other environments there were six billion of us,
and we faced the prospect of doubling our population again in the space of a
man's lifetime. For most of our history—I should say prehistory, as we had no
written records for what must have been the greater part of our time here—we
took our environment for granted. Only in recent lifetimes have we begun the
business of learning to exploit the technologies that lie behind it.

"We thought that we were making very rapid progress as we moved up
and down from our native level. We found no other inhabited level as advanced
as our own, and we found many levels effectively uninhabited. Levels like this
one posed severe problems in downward expansion. There are others like it
beneath us. It seemed easier and more rewarding to go upwards, until we met
the cold levels. It looked as if they would be an insurmountable barrier, until
we found the lower levels of your city. It seemed to us a very welcome loophole—we
could not know until we had already committed our forces what unwelcome
revelations awaited us there."

He paused, expectantly. I didn't like to disappoint him, so I took up
the threads of the argument. "So you discovered that you weren't the
lords of Creation after all," I said. "And now you don't know what to
do."

"We are . . . undecided," he admitted. He seemed to be
waiting for me to respond further, and I decided there was no harm in it.

"At a guess," I said, "you don't know much about Asgard,
let alone the universe. You have no idea how you got here. When your
great-grandfathers first began to find out what kind of world they were in,
they naturally assumed that it was all built for them, laid on for the
convenience of their expanding population. They credited it to their own
ancestors. Your expeditions and conquests might have made some of you
sceptical, but there was nothing to overturn your faith in your own position
of privilege . . . until you moved into Skychain City. You went in expecting to
make mincemeat of a few other barbarians living parasitically on the technology
of the ancients, and suddenly realised that it was an entirely different kettle
of fish. Must have been a shock."

"Kettle of fish" didn't translate too well into parole, but
he got the drift.

"You're a perceptive man, Mr. Rousseau," he said. He seemed
genuinely pleased. Perhaps he'd been starved of intellectual conversation
because Alex Sovorov and the Tetrax wouldn't talk to him.

"Why don't you negotiate with the Tetrax?" I asked him,
bluntly. "They're not given to grandiose gestures of revenge. They'd
forgive an honest mistake. In fact, they're really rather keen to arrive at a
peaceful settlement beneficial to all parties."