Asgard's Conquerors (5 page)

1

I sometimes
have the disturbing impression that the universe is determined to force my life
into the mould of an exemplary tale. I have done my best to resist, but I am
beginning to believe that resistance is useless. I fear that fate has it in for
me, and that destiny has me marked down for something big.

I will explain to you, if I may, how I arrived at this awful
conclusion.

There is supposed to be an ancient Chinese curse which implies that the
worst fate which could possibly befall a man is to live in interesting times. I
had always been aware of this saying, but had never considered its logical
corollaries, the first of which must surely be that one is similarly cursed if
one is drawn, moth-to-flame fashion, to interesting places. So I, as a young
man, was lured by my good friend Mickey Finn to cross half the known universe
to the artificial macroworld which Earthmen had learned to call Asgard: the
home of the technocratic "gods."

Various members of the galactic community, representing as many as
three hundred different humanoid species, had been digging around for
technological artefacts in the topmost levels of Asgard for many years. The
Co-ordinated Research Establishment organised the efforts of most of these good
people—guided and supervised by the Tetrax, who are very much the top dogs in
the galactic community— but I never joined it, preferring to be my own master
and go wherever the mood took me into those cold and desolate spaces.

It was not I who made the breakthrough discovery that opened up the
warmer and more interesting levels beneath those which had caught a dreadful
chill in some unlucky cosmic accident. It was my fellow human Saul Lyndrach,
who was quickly murdered by evil persons desirous of prising the secret out of
him. It was then that I fell afoul of the second corollary of that ancient
Chinese curse, which is that one can get into very deep trouble if one happens
to become an interesting person. Through no fault of my own, I was suddenly
very interesting indeed.

I was interesting to the gangsters who had murdered Saul because I
happened to be the only person on Asgard who could read French, the language in
which Saul had recorded his notes. I was also interesting to several members
of Earth's Star Force, who had come to Asgard fresh from concluding a genocidal
war against the planet Salamandra. Their commanding officer, Star-Captain
Susarma Lear, was convinced that a large man to whom Saul had generously given
shelter, was actually a Salamandran android mysteriously equipped to take revenge
on humankind; she also became convinced that I was the one man who could help
her catch and kill this person.

To cut a long story short (you can read about it, if you wish, in the
first volume of my memoirs) the android disappeared into the bowels of Asgard,
with myself and the starship troopers in hot pursuit. We were tracked in our
turn by an assorted rabble of vormyr and Spirellans, bent on mayhem.

And mayhem was what ensued.

When everything was finally sorted out, the star-captain and her merry
men set off back to Earth, feeling smug about having completed their nasty
mission, and I was left to sell the secret of the gateway into inner Asgard to
the highest bidder.

I wasn't used to being rich. All my life I'd lived on the margin, never
having to worry about long-term ambitions because it was quite hard enough
figuring out where next week's food was going to come from. My lucky strike
changed that, and suddenly I was precipitated into a premature mid-life crisis,
faced with the awful prospect of making plans.

Asgard began to seem like a pricked balloon. Its mysteries were far
from being solved, but the process had begun, and with hundreds of levels now
open for exploration the contribution which might be made by any one man seemed
pretty small. Even though I hadn't really got near the enigmatic centre of the
world, I felt that my hour of glory had come and gone. I began to wonder what
there was in the rest of the galaxy to attract the attentions of a nouveau
riche recluse like myself. Inevitably, I began to think of home: the solar
system; the asteroid belt; the microworlds; Mother Earth.

I'd never actually been to Earth. Asgard, which was more than a
thousand light years away from my birthplace in the belt, was the only
planet-sized mass I'd ever been on. It began to seem a little odd that I'd come
so far from home without ever bothering to visit the homeworld of my species,
which was only a lousy couple of hundred million miles away from where I'd
started from. The more I thought about it, the more peculiar it seemed.

So I decided to make a pilgrimage to Earth.

Mistral,
the ship in which I'd come to Asgard, in
the company of Mickey Finn, Helmut Belinski, and Jean Averaud, was still strung
up to an umbilical, quietly trailing the Tetron satellite at the top of the
skychain. She was evacuated and sealed. No dust, no decay, no wear and tear.
She'd been Finn's ship, really, though it had taken our combined fortunes to
get her fitted out for the long trip to

Asgard. Finn,
Belinski, and Averaud had all been killed in an accident downstairs, on one of
the trips when it was my turn to stay at home. Under our agreement, I inherited
the ship. It was all I did inherit, along with a bill for Mickey's back taxes,
which the Tetrax kindly forwarded to me.

That had been a bad time for me—to be one of a group of four on a world
mostly populated by aliens is one thing, to be a man alone is another. I'd
gotten used to it; in a way, I'd gotten to like it. In the course of adjusting,
I'd pushed
Mistral
into some quiet corner of my consciousness, where she didn't intrude upon my
thoughts. But she'd always been there, waiting.

I used part of my small fortune to have her fitted out all over again.
I had the fusion reactor overhauled and the space-stresser checked. I don't
know the first thing about the tortuous physics of the frame force, which lets
us play origami with raw space in order to wormhole ourselves around the
universe, and I wanted to make quite sure that the ship would end up back in
Sol-space when I pressed the right buttons. I bought new navigational software,
and the best troubleshooting programmes I could find, just to make sure. Then,
relishing the thought that I could splash out without pauperizing myself, I
installed some brand new Tetron organics—an integrated thermosynthetic system
that would do food, waste-disposal, atmosphere regulation, bioluminescence, and
minor electrics with pure organic technology; not an adapted organism in it.
When we'd flown out, we'd had to make do with bacterial soup and adapted fungi.
The food had been unbearable, the stink disgusting.

When it was all done, and my ship was rigged up for first- class
service, I trundled up the skychain, and I said
au revoir
to dear old
Asgard. I wasn't sure that I'd ever be back.

I wasn't sure of anything, much.

Starships are very fast. They make light seem like viscous treacle
oozing across a flat tabletop. But galactic distances are not small; in fact,
they are unimaginably huge. So the ship's flight back to Earth was no mere
ferry-crossing. It took months, and it became very boring.

I had text-discs and I had sound-discs. I had a centrifuge to put
weight on me, and various gadgets for keeping various bits of me fighting fit.
They kept me occupied for a while, but in the end I was forced to seek some new
distraction, some pleasure whose delights I had never tasted before.

That was when I conceived the plan of writing the memoirs to which I
referred, and immediately reached for my tape recorder. I won't say that it was
an entirely joyful experience inscribing it all, because I am not a literary
man, and sometimes found composition hard work. On the other hand, I am sure
that my reconstructed dialogue sounds a good deal slicker than what was
actually said at the time; poetic license can be fun! I had no intention of
publishing what I had recorded—not immediately, anyhow—because there was some
very sensitive information in there regarding the real fate of the android
which Susarma Lear thought she had destroyed, but I took a certain satisfaction
in setting the record straight.

I finished the job a couple of days before I had to de-stress in order
to enter solar space.

When I came out of my wormhole, I was nowhere near where I actually
wanted to be. That was only to be expected. I guess it takes a near-miracle for
navigational software to get a ship into such a tiny target as a solar system—you
really can't expect to be neatly delivered to a particular planetary doorstep.
I wasn't within spitting distance of

Earth, or
even the asteroid belt. In fact, the only object of any conceivable interest
within easy travelling distance was Uranus.

I'd never been to Uranus. To the best of my knowledge, very few people
had, though some intrepid individuals had begun poking around the moons and the
rings before I left the system. A routine scan by my equipment told me that
there was now a microworld in the vicinity of the planet, which rejoiced in the
name of Goodfellow. My ship was automatically logged in by the microworld's
scanners, and my software transmitted all the usual data, receiving the
customary cartload of rubbish in return: the size, specifications, population,
etc. of Goodfellow. I didn't bother getting my screens to display it, but I got
a digest of the essentials. There were eight hundred people aboard, all but a
dozen of them civilians. They were supposedly engaged in scientific
data-collection and mapping. All very cosy, but not particularly interesting.