Asgard's Secret (8 page)

"Who
recommended me to you?" I asked.

"We have
friends in the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. We know about the offer
they made to you yesterday—an insult, to a man of your quality. We will pay you
more generously, and I believe that you will find the work far more to your
liking."

Lema had finished
studying my shelves. He hadn't touched anything, but he seemed satisfied that
he had found what he was looking for.

"I have to
consider all the offers I've received," I told him. "If you leave
your employer's name and number, I'll call him when I've made a decision."

There are some
races—or, at least, some kinds of persons— who don't recognise the propriety of
a diplomatic refusal. In a place like Skychain City, they're supposed to put
such idiosyncrasies aside, never taking offence at anything short of a kick in
the balls—but they're free to let their displeasure show, if they care to.

Heleb looked me in
the eye for less than a second. If I hadn't known what I knew about Spirellans,
I'd have thought nothing of it, but I knew enough to feel a sinking sensation
in the pit of my stomach.

"Thank you for
giving my offer consideration," he said, insincerely. "I hope to hear
from you in due course."

If he'd been human,
or even Tetron, I'd probably have made a smart remark about not holding his
breath. Instead, I said: "It's extremely kind of you to think of me. I'm
very grateful. You can be sure that I'll give your offer sympathetic
consideration—but I owe it to everyone who has made me

an offer to weigh their proposals very
carefully."

He handed me a card
which had a number scrawled on it. Spirellan handwriting isn't nearly as neat
as Spirellan speech, but Tetron numbers are easy to distinguish from one
another.

"Your
employer's?" I asked.

"It is my own
number," he told me. It was the third time he'd passed up an open
invitation to tell me who his employer was, and he had to know that I had taken
due note of the fact.

"Thank
you," I said, again.

When I'd closed the
door behind them I realised that my heart was hammering. Without knowing
exactly why, I was scared. That had been Heleb's doing; he had
intended
to scare me.

I sat down on the
bed and wondered what fate had against me. If Heleb really wanted me to join
his expedition, he wasn't going to take my refusal quite as politely as he'd
made his offer.

4

I felt in desperate need of a sympathetic
ear and a little moral support, so I decided to go see Saul Lyndrach and take a
look at the mysterious Myrlin.

Unfortunately, Saul
wasn't home. Like me, he rented a cell in a honeycomb singlestack—one of a
couple of hundred hastily erected by the Tetrax when they'd first built the
base that had grown into Skychain City. The Mercatan building supervisor hadn't
seen him go out and hadn't the slightest idea when he'd be back, but that was
only to be expected. The doorman did go out of his way to mention the giant
he'd seen Saul with the previous day, though.

"What
giant?" I queried. Most starfaring humanoids are much the same size as
humans—it's a matter of the pressures of convergent evolution in DNA-based
Gaia-clone ecospheres—but there were a couple of species with representatives
on Asgard which routinely grew to two metres ten, so a singlestack supervisor
wasn't likely to use the word "giant" lightly.

"A
guest," the Mercatan told me, in stilted parole. "The foolish fellow
at Immigration Control must have classified him as human by mistake, perhaps
because of his nose. Mr. Lyndrach is probably trying to sort out the error, but
you know how officious these Tetrax are. They never admit that they might have
made a mistake."

Saul wasn't far
short of two metres tall himself. By Mercatan standards,
he
was a giant. If Myrlin seemed like a giant compared with Saul, he had to be
really
big—but he'd told me over the phone that he was human. He spoke English, and
had claimed to be able to speak Russian and Chinese as well. If he hadn't been
human, he wouldn't even have known the names of the languages.

"You might
look in the bar on the corner." The supervisor added, in a confidential
manner, apparently having warmed to my presence, "Mr. Lyndrach often
drinks in there, and it has a high ceiling."

"Thanks,"
I said. "I will."

I did, too—I just
kept right on making one mistake after another.

Saul wasn't
anywhere to be seen in the bar, but there was a human called Simeon Balidar
sitting in a booth, looking expectantly about him as if he were waiting for
someone. He caught sight of me as soon as I walked through the door and waved
to me.

I didn't like
Balidar much. He was a scavenger, like me, but he didn't have a truck of his
own. He hired himself out to anyone and everyone—except the C.R.E., who seemed
to him to be way too safe. He'd always thought that he and I were kindred
spirits, and had never understood why I didn't agree with him—but he did know a
lot of people, including Saul, so I went over to the booth.

I only wanted
answers to a couple of questions, but Balidar was the kind of guy who couldn't
possibly answer a question without making a big thing of it, so I had to let
him buy me a drink.

"No," he
said, when he finally got around to answering my questions. "Saul hasn't
been in today—I haven't seen him since the day before yesterday. I don't know
anything about a giant called Myrlin."

I sipped my drink,
wondering how to carry the conversation forward now that my reason for getting
involved in it had evaporated. "You don't, by any chance, know a Spirellan
called Heleb?" I said. "Has a little brother named Lema?"

His eyes narrowed.
"Why?" he asked.

It was, in its way,
a very revealing answer, but I figured I ought to tread carefully if I were
going to persuade him to expand on it. "Oh, I heard that he's putting
together a team," I said. "Sounded like your kind of thing—good pay,
adventurous . . . the antithesis of everything the dear old C.R.E. stands
for."

"Are you going
to get involved?" he asked, in a way that suggested to me that he already
knew about the expedition
and
Heleb's offer. I began to wonder, in
fact, whether it might have been Balidar who'd put them on to me in the first
place.

"Maybe,"
I said. "I've had several offers. Heleb's might be the best, but I don't
know who he's working for. He was careful not to tell me."

"Does it
matter?" he asked stupidly.

"Maybe, maybe
not," I said, "but I'm certainly not going to sign on until I know,
am I? It shouldn't be too difficult to find out."

"No," he
said. "I suppose not. Look—there's the people I'm waiting for. Would you
care to join us?"

I looked over my
shoulder. Two Zabarans had just come into the bar and they were making straight
for the booth. They seemed harmless enough, and probably were. Zabarans had the
reputation of being easy to get along with. They also had the reputation of
being very enthusiastic gamblers—which was, I figured, why Simeon Balidar was
waiting for them. He had always fancied himself as a card player, although I'd
played with him and Saul a dozen times without ever detecting any conspicuous
talent.

"What are you
playing?" I asked.

He named a Zabaran
game. I knew the rules, but I didn't want to take any risks.

"It's
okay," he said, in English. "I know these guys. They're a soft touch.
If it were just me, they'd probably gang up on me, but with two of us in the
game . . . we'll start off with low stakes, just to get the feel of
things."

I thought about it
for half a minute, and then said: "Okay, I'll play for a while—on one
condition."

"What's
that?" he asked.

"Tell me who
Heleb works for."

He shrugged his
shoulders. "Like you say," he said, still speaking English, after a
fashion, "you could find out easily enough. He works for Amara Guur."

He got up then to
follow the Zabarans into a back room. I followed him, wondering what Amara Guur
could possibly want with someone like me.

I'd never met Guur,
but I knew him by reputation. He was a vormyran. He was also a parasite—a black
marketeer. Tetron government involves a great many rules and regulations, and
wherever there are rules and regulations there are people intent on breaking
them for fun and profit. From what I'd heard, Amara Guur didn't bother much
with the fun end of the spectrum, but he was extremely keen on the profit end.
If he thought there was a profit in mounting an expedition into the wilderness,
he'd do it—but it wasn't his style to speculate. If he was taking two big
trucks into the back of beyond, he must have a strong reason for thinking that
there was something there to be found. That was interesting, in a scary sort
of way.

I sat down at the
table in the back room and began to play, almost absent-mindedly. The fact that
my attention was elsewhere didn't seem to do me any harm. Almost from the first
hand I began to win—not much, because we weren't playing for high stakes, but
steadily. I figured that the time to leave would be when the Zabarans suggested
raising the stakes—at which point, they'd probably figure that it was time to
stop laying down bait for the human suckers and get serious.

Unfortunately, that
didn't happen.

What happened
instead was that a latecomer arrived, full of apologies, to join the game. He'd
sat down and grabbed the cards before I had time to register the fact that he
wasn't a Zabaran but a Sleath.

"You play
cards with a Sleath?" I whispered to Balidar in English.

"He's
okay," Balidar assured me. "Anyway, he's a terrible card player—and
there's only one of him and four of us. The Zabarans will calm him down if he
gets excited."

The reason I was
surprised is that Sleaths had a reputation for being hot-tempered—not
dangerous,
just hot-tempered. The ones I'd met were small and
slender by human standards, but the fact that every other starfaring race in
the galaxy was bigger and tougher than they were only seemed to make the
Sleaths I'd met try harder to assert themselves. They always lost the fights
they started—but in a place like Skychain City, where the Tetrax set the
standards of civilized behaviour, winners tended to come out of fights looking
even more brutal and barbaric than the losers.

I decided to give
it a few more hands.

I continued
winning, even more profitably now that there were five players in the game
instead of four. Balidar seemed to be absolutely right about the Sleath—he was
a
terrible
card player.

Nobody suggested
raising the stakes. I couldn't blame them; little by little, all the money on
the table was making its way over to me. I was glad that almost all of my wins
were coming when someone else was dealing; if I hadn't known that I was playing
an honest game, I'd have begun to suspect myself of cheating.

Some people play
more carefully when they're losing. Others play more aggressively. The Zabarans
were playing very carefully by now. The Sleath was playing very aggressively.
That only increased the probability that he would keep on losing, and he did.