“What about the other Scarids?” I asked, freeing myself from her grip for a second time. “Can you disarm them now?” I was addressing the Nine, though Susarma Lear had opened her mouth to answer before they interrupted her.
“Un-n-nder c-c-control-l-l,” they assured me.
I no longer felt impatient with the stuttering voice. I knew now how difficult a business communication could be.
“How about the battle for Skychain City?”
That, they assured me (I shall not attempt to reproduce the texture of their words, lest the typographical eccentricities become irritating) would take a little longer. It was a matter that was out of their hands, alas.
I stretched my limbs. They all felt as if they were in very good condition, and there was no reason to doubt that they were, though I couldn’t help being surprised to find them so.
“Okay?” said Susarma Lear. “Can we get out of here?”
“We’ll have to wait for the scions,” I told her. Then I said, almost absent-mindedly: “Excuse me for a moment.”
She looked surprised, but stood back, as if to let me go to the door. I turned the other way, and with a smooth efficiency that was surprising, given the weak gravity, I kicked John Finn in the groin. When he bounced off the wall behind him I lashed him across the face with the flat of my hand. I felt his nose break, but I didn’t wince. I wasn’t in a squeamish mood. When he was down on the ground I booted him twice more, as hard as I could.
Then I knelt down beside him.
“That,” I hissed in a suitably melodramatic whisper, “was just for the purposes of demonstration. I only want you to know that if you ever try to screw me again, I’ll hurt you so badly you’ll be in pain for the rest of your fucking life. And that could be a very long time.”
I stood up again, and met Susarma Lear’s eyes. She was looking at me almost in horror—not at what I’d done, but at the fact that it was me who had done it. That was odd, in a way, because I would have thought that she’d be pleased to see me acting like a hero of the Star Force for once in my life. Sometimes, you just can’t figure out how to please someone.
“Jesus, Rousseau!” she said.
I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel anything at all.
“I’m not quite myself at the moment,” I told her. It wasn’t true. I was entirely myself. I just felt that I had a licence to act out of character for once.
Anyway, I was a hero. Not just a metaphorical hero, the way she was, but a real one. I had been summoned by the gods—or by the only kind of something that could pass for a god, in our thoroughly secularized universe. Destiny had put its mark upon my forehead, and beckoned to me with its bony finger. I didn’t have the slightest doubt about that—not any more.
“Well,” I said, “I guess we have time on our hands, now. We’ve surely had our ration of unpleasant surprises.”
Looking down at John Finn, bleeding and gasping, I reflected coldly that he had probably had one too many—but no more, of course, than he deserved. The same was true of the Scarid officer, who had carried far beyond his ordinary conceptual horizons the dangerous and preposterous assumption that you can get what you want by threatening people with guns. There comes a time when it isn’t sufficient to be only a soldier. I hoped fervently that his superiors might learn that lesson without it having to be rammed home quite so forcefully.
As things turned out, they did manage to learn it. They discovered the one and only possible defence against technologically superior armed opposition.
They surrendered.
And then they sat down with both the Tetrax and the Nine, in order to try to overcome all the barriers that stood in the way of sensible communication, and to discover what there might be that they could discuss in a reasonable manner.
Which is what passes for a happy ending in situations like the one in which we all found ourselves.
32
Later, of course, the doubts began to creep back. Those magic moments of total conviction never do last. As I’ve observed before, the true gold of certainty is not to be found, and you have to settle for what there is.
What there is, alas, is the knowledge that one is always fallible. You never really know exactly where you’re up to, let alone where it is that you need to go next.
For the first time since I’d put the final full stop to the first volume of my memoirs, things began to run smoothly for a while. The Scarid High Command saw sense; the Nine pulled 994-Tulyar and Myrlin out of the jaws of death; and a kind of balance was restored to the universe as I was privileged to experience it.
It didn’t take much effort to persuade my commanding officer that our best interests lay in staying where we were. There was a great deal to be learned from the Nine that might prove to be of immense value to Mother Earth and humankind. She was quick enough to see that it might be a kind of intellectual treason to leave the task of collaboration with the Isthomi entirely to the Tetrax. Indeed, she was persuaded that the need to win what advantage we could from our fortuitous placement easily outweighed such minor considerations as her annoyance in discovering that her memory was a liar and that Myrlin was alive and well.
I figured that in time she might even learn to like him, once she was reconciled to the idea that she shouldn’t try to kill him all over again.
I had my sacrifices to make, too. Even John Finn had to be put to work, and I knew full well that once he had absorbed a little of the new knowledge that was here to be gleaned, he would become utterly insufferable in his arrogance.
Inevitably, I began to regret having broken his nose. The memory of it still gave me a certain satisfaction, as well as a sense of having done my bit to preserve the moral balance of the universe, but I knew that I’d have to watch my back for as long as he was around, lest a stray knife should somehow become embedded between my shoulder-blades.
In spite of such minor difficulties, I soon began to enjoy myself. I was once again in my element, scavenging in strange places for unfamiliar things. The fact that there were other people around ceased to matter much—in all essentials I was alone with my insatiable curiosity, the only beloved mistress of my heart.
Which is not to say, of course, that I was completely uninterested in the big political picture that was a-building around us. I was suitably enthused by the fact that for the first time ever, Asgard and the universe had agreed to communicate with one another. It filled me with optimism to know that the Scarida and the galactic community each decided that they had a lot to learn, and that they all stood to gain from an exchange of opportunities. The Tetrax (speaking on behalf of the entire galactic community) promised to teach the Scarida the joys of galactic technology; the Scarida promised to allow the Tetrax access to all the levels of Asgard which they controlled. The Nine, though facing an uphill task in the matter of self-repair, agreed not to seal themselves off from either side, and determined that they would hold the triple detente together. All very fine, in my view.
All these developments, as you will notice, solved the general problems within which context this chapter of my personal history started. Alas, they did not begin to touch the more personal problems which had arisen along the way. Nor, for what it is worth, did they provide any answers to the old, old problems which had been the Great Mysteries even before I got into the game.
Having emerged intact from my hallucinatory adventure in contact with alien minds, I had every reason to be pleased with myself, and in a way I was. For a while I was filled with zestful energy and a huge sense of pride, because I was convinced that I had achieved a great thing simply by surviving my encounter, and by virtue of what I thought that the contact implied.