Asgard's Secret (20 page)

And by the time the black galaxy looks like
it's catching up with them, a hundred million years down the line, they'll
doubtless be moving on again, towards the far rim—carefully skirting the black
hole in the middle. All type two civilizations are nomads, they reckon. They're
really looking forward to the day of re-emergence, because they reckon that
what we'll learn will be our ticket to type two status ... or, to be strictly
accurate, the Tetrax's ticket to type two status."

"But you don't
believe that."

"I try to keep
an open mind," I told her. "One day, I'll find out the truth; in the
meantime, I'm willing to be patient."

"How are they
supposed to have moved the world out of one galaxy and into another?"

"Some
application of the frame force we haven't figured out yet. Our starships can
only make starship-sized whizz-bangs, but the limit's in the hardware, not the
physics—or so I'm assured. I can't handle the math myself."

"I think it's
a matter of energy-expense," she said. "To make a teleportal capable
of swallowing a planet, you'd need the energy of a small star inside your
planet. . . which is presumably why some of your local theorists think there
is
a
small star inside the artefact, not just a boring old planetary core."

She was beginning
to enter into the spirit of the enterprise. Given long enough, I figured that I
really might be able to educate her in the Romance of Asgard.

"You've got
it," I said. "Back home, we only have little fusion reactors—but
again, the limit's in the hardware, not the physics. Even nature can make
stars. Who knows what type two civilizations might be able to do, given that
they're defined as the kinds of civilizations that make use of the entire
energy-output of a star."

"Except that
we haven't found any yet."

"
Yet
being the operative word. All the humanoids in our neighbourhood are
babes-in-arms, just like us . . . and none of them could even dream, as yet, of
building something like Asgard."

"Not even the
Tetrax," she said thoughtfully.

"Not even the
Tetrax," I agreed. "But they're the ones who own Asgard, or think
they do. They get other people to do their spadework for them, because it makes
for harmonious relationships with the other local species, and because that's
the way their minds work. They think that if they sit back and relax in
Skychain City, everything will come back to them in its own time. So far, it
always has."

"Nobody else
ever had a warship in orbit around the world," Susarma Lear observed, in a
carefully neutral manner.

"It's not as
simple as that," I said. "You might have trashed Salamandra, but
we're not nearly ready to take on any of our other neighbours, let alone all of
them."

"I know
that," she assured me. "Still—that little black book could be
valuable, couldn't it? If your friend Saul really did find what he thinks he
found, that is."

"I've glanced
through the relevant pages," I told her. "As soon as your man's had
enough sleep to take the driving-seat, I'm going to look at it a little more
closely, and as soon as I've caught up with my own sleep I'm going to give it
my fullest attention. It's not exactly an autobiography written for
publication—it's a set of directions Saul thought he'd be following himself,
and didn't particularly want anyone else to be able to follow—but if it means
what I think it means, Saul really did find a way down . . . not to five, but
much further. To somewhere warm."

"Well, if
there's a little star in the middle of the artefact," the star-captain
said brutally, "I should think it
would
be warm down
there. It gets very hot if you burrow down far enough on Earth, and that's only
molten iron."

"Actually,"
I said, "
chaud
is only one of the words he used. The other was
vif.
That means
alive.
If he meant it literally ..."

"I'm under
orders here, Rousseau," she said, after a moment's hesitation. "Just
like you. Our objectives are limited. Once the android is dead . . . well, I have
obligations to my men as well as to my superior officers. I'm not going chasing
wild geese, Rousseau—let's be clear about that. Neither are you."

That's
what you think
, I thought—but what I said was: "Yes,
captain. Understood."

16

Actually, I did understand. I could see
that the star-captain's priorities were bound to be different from mine. She
had orders to follow, and she was on some kind of mopping-up mission in the
wake of what must have been a very nasty conflict. Even so, she'd shown a
glimmer of interest, a hint of vulnerability. I resolved to work on her
again—but I knew that the chance wouldn't arise for a while. She went back to
her bunk long before Serne woke up, and by the time he came to take over the
wheel I was utterly exhausted. I didn't have the energy to give him much of a
driving lesson, but he assured me that a truck was a truck, so I left him to
it. The star-captain moved in her sleeping bag as I went back into the cabin,
but she didn't wake up. Whatever nightmare she was dreaming had her securely in
its grip.

I couldn't keep my
eyes open; the notebook would have to wait.

I slept for eight
hours, but the star-captain was still asleep when I woke up again. I checked
that Serne was still okay before I began to go through Saul's notes for a
second time, much more assiduously than before. I concentrated hard, even
though I intended to go through them as many times more as I possibly could
before I ditched the book. I didn't start cooking breakfast until the
star-captain woke up. She had to be feeling a lot better, but she still didn't
seem relaxed.

When we'd eaten,
Susarma Lear insisted on taking her turn in the driving-seat. She assured me
that she couldn't possibly make any mistakes driving across a flat plane with
not another vehicle in sight from horizon to horizon, but I insisted on sitting
beside her to make sure that everything was in order. Not everything was, of
course; when she checked with her ship, its watchful observers reported that we
were being followed by three trucks, two of which looked conspicuously bigger
than ours.

"Have the
Tetrax in Skychain City been able to give us any indication what sort of
firepower they're packing?" she asked.

"Needlers, mostly,"
the man on the ship reported. "They're petty criminals, not trained
soldiers. If you want to take them on, you could probably eliminate them from
consideration—but you'd need cover to mount an ambush. We consulted the Tetrax
about the possibility of trying to take them out from up here, but they didn't
like the idea one little bit."

"No,"
said Susarma Lear, grimly. "I have this sneaking suspicion that they'd
rather the petty criminals got their hands on the goodies than the Star Force.
I don't think we can expect too much help from them."

"If they'd
been in a co-operative mood, they could have prevented the bad guys from
exiting the dome," the man on the ship agreed.

"That's
true," I put in, "but if they'd been in an unco-operative mood, they
could have stopped us too. We know where they stand—on the sidelines. It may
not be the best place, if things get interesting."

"Keep
watching," the star-captain instructed her contact on the ship. "I'm
certainly not going to start a pitched battle up here, even if we do find a
likely spot for an ambush. I can't afford to risk any losses until I catch up
with the android. After that . . . well, anything goes. We'll

do things the Star Force Way."

I wondered if Amara
Guur would have had the sense to quiver in his boots if he'd heard her say
that. Probably not—he wouldn't have understood the niceties of her tone and
expression. I did.

I returned to my
careful study of the notebook, with all due patience and determination.

After a while, the
star-captain said: "I suppose the Tetrax must already have learned quite a
lot, from the stuff they've already dug out of the upper levels. They must have
already stolen quite a march on the rest of us."

"Not unless
they're keeping a lot of secrets from their esteemed colleagues in the
C.R.E.," I said. "Which isn't impossible, of course—but I think
they're still waiting for the crucial breakthrough. The technics we've
excavated so far aren't significantly more advanced than the devices we already
have. No matter how clever Asgard's builders were, the people who actually
lived in the habitats in the outermost levels seem to have been humanoids not
much different from us."

"Passengers,
you mean?"

"Maybe.
Species rescued from endangered worlds who didn't have the wherewithal to save
themselves is the most popular guess."

"So if the
lower levels are similar," she said, "it might not matter whether
they're dead or alive—they might be just more of the same."

"It's a possibility,"
I admitted. "But basing their technics on the same spectrum of scientific
knowledge would necessarily make their technology
the same
as ours. The
humanoid races we know about are similar, but they have quite various
technological styles. What I mean ..."

"I know what
you mean," she said. "Heavy metal- minded, like us. Biotech-minded,
like the Salamandrans . . . and the Tetrax."

"Well,
yes," I admitted. "Reduced to the crudest possible level, that's
about it. Different kinds of sociopolitical systems tend to be associated with
different technologies. When 69-Aquila was lecturing me in my cell, he said
that you could ignore one direction of the causal flow and regard the
technologies as the ultimate determining factor, but that's just as brutal an oversimplification
as yours. Different humanoid races produce different kinds of social
organization for a variety of reasons—some anatomical, some ecological, some
historical—but they all have their idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies are
reflected in matters of technological style. Technology is art as well as
science, maybe
more
art than science. That's one of the reasons why the people
at the
C
.R.E. are so
interested in the stuff we find in the levels, even though it doesn't actually
do anything that we can't already do in our own subtly different fashion. Even
if the lower levels are full of passengers, they won't be uninteresting . . .
and if some of the passengers can
talk
to us, they
might have some very interesting things to say."

"And
Lyndrach's notebook says that there's people down there, does it?" she
asked, nodding towards the black- bound object in my hand. That was why she'd
started the conversation—she wanted me to keep her up to date with what I'd
found.

"Not
exactly," I admitted. "Actually,
vif
is pretty much
the full extent of what it
says
, in actual words. But what that
implies ..."

She didn't seem to
like the answer, or the way I left it hanging. "Isn't a whole lot, from
what you've told me so far. I need details, trooper. Hard data."

There was plenty of
hard data in the book, but not the kind she was fishing for. Even if it had
been written in English, she'd still have needed me as an interpreter.