“Unfortunately for Guur, Saul wasn’t alone when the kidnappers turned up, so they had to snatch Myrlin too. Whether they threatened him with fancy blasters like yours or shot him with anaesthetic darts I don’t know, but they made the mistake of keeping him alive, in case he knew anything useful.
“One way or another, Myrlin got his chance to fight back—too late to save Saul, alas. By the time he’d slaughtered the bad guys and got Saul out, Saul must have figured that he wasn’t going to make it, even with the aid of Tetron medicare. He had no idea that I was in jail, so he told the android to come to me for help. Saul and I had reciprocal agreements about making use of one another’s stuff if things went bad. He knew that Guur would have a heavy guard on his truck, but not on mine. I don’t know whether he made the calls himself or gave Myrlin his codes, but that doesn’t matter. Myrlin should have called an ambulance as soon as he got Saul out of Guur’s clutches, even if Saul told him not to—but he’s a stranger here, and Saul was probably insistent about the necessity of his making a clean getaway. Saul’s one remaining ambition must have been to make absolutely sure that Amara Guur didn’t get the big prize.”
The star-captain shook her head wearily. “Jesus, Russell,” she said. “What kind of madhouse is this?”
“Actually, it’s Rousseau,” I said. “As in Jean-Jacques.”
She looked at me uncomprehendingly.
“Du contrat social,” I said, helpfully. “Discours sur les sciences et les arts. That Rousseau. Not Russell.” I could tell that it meant nothing to her; the French was just so much gibberish to her uneducated ears, and eighteenth-century philosophy obviously wasn’t numbered among her personal interests. But she did catch on to the fact that she’d got my name wrong.
“Jesus, Rousseau” she said scrupulously, “we’ve got more important things to worry about than how you spell your name. So where do you fit in?”
It was a good question. Why, given that he must already have had Saul Lyndrach safe in his evil clutches—or so he must have assumed—had Amara Guur bothered to send Heleb and Lema to my apartment to make me a polite offer? And why, after a few more hours had elapsed but long before Myrlin had run amok, had he decided that the polite offer had been too tentative and that more extreme measures were required?
“Saul wasn’t giving in,” I said. “Maybe Guur figured that the only way to put pressure on a man like him was by threatening his friends.”
“That doesn’t sound very convincing,” she observed accurately.
“You haven’t actually told me yet what your interest in Myrlin is,” I countered.
Her tone frosted over. “In the Star Force, Trooper Rousseau, it’s the officers who ask the questions.”
I decided to be generous and forgive her; it was, after all, only a few hours since she’d saved my life. “No problem,” I said, stoutly. “But we all need something to eat. I’m not sure my kitchen can cater for this many—might I suggest that you send your loyal lieutenant out for a takeaway?”
She didn’t like my tone, but she saw the merit in the suggestion, and she was still leaning over backwards to be diplomatic—by her meagre standards—because I was the one with all the local knowledge she needed so badly.
She sent the sergeant out to buy some food, with a couple of men to help him carry it. I didn’t have enough chairs for the rest of us to sit down, but the troopers were obviously used to roughing it. They made no objection when the star-captain and I sat down on the bed.
“Fire away,” I said.
She frowned at my choice of words, but she had more important things on her mind than criticising my sense of humour.
12
“What are these levels you keep talking about?” was the star-captain’s first question.
I was mildly astonished. I knew that she’d only arrived on Asgard that day, but I’d assumed that she must know something about it. I’d assumed, in fact, that everyone in the universe must know something about Asgard, even if they had been busy for most of their adult lives fighting an interstellar war.
“This is an artefact, not a planet,” I said. “It might have a planet inside it, but all the bits we have access to are artificial. The outer surface is a shell—one of a series of shells nested one inside another like the layers of an onion. Nobody knows how many shells there are. The levels are the spaces between them, which are fitted out as sets of habitats—four or five to a level—with seemingly independent ecospheres. The differences between them are subtle, but they seem to fill a similar spectrum to that of so-called Gaia-clone ecospheres… the worlds in which humanoids live. We know of hundreds of negotiable portals down to level one; they’re easy enough to find. We know of a dozen that give access to level two, and a handful that let us down to three and four—but the further down you go, the more difficult it is to explore further. They’re very, very cold. People lived there once, but they all went away.”
“Where to?” she wanted to know.
“Opinions differ. Some think they went lower down, sealing themselves in against whatever catastrophe devastated the upper layers. Some think they went outwards, maybe to colonize all the gaiaformable worlds in the galactic arm— which would make them the ancestors of the present galactic so-called civilization.”
“How long ago did all this happen?”
“Again, opinions differ. The evidence seems to be ambiguous, although you’d have to ask a C.R.E. scientist for details. Millions of years ago, at least—maybe hundreds of millions, or billions.”
“And you say it’s got a planet inside it?”
“No, I said that it might have a planet inside it. It’s possible that there are only half a dozen shells, built as a succession of platforms on a natural surface. On the other hand, it might be shells all the way down to the centre… well, not all the way down, because that would be impossible. Maybe there’s a core of molten iron, as there would be at the centre of a planet. Maybe there’s some kind of giant fusion reactor—a starlet. That would make the megastructure into a kind of multiple Dyson sphere. Nobody knows, although everyone is trying to find out. In the meantime, we search the habitats on the accessible levels for clues, and for new technologies. The Tetrax are very interested in the spectrum of humanoid technologies. Even when they already have gadgets of their own for doing the same jobs, they like to study all the different ways there are of doing things. They’re very big on matters of technological style. That’s why they’re interested in your cargo, I presume.”
“I see,” she said. She didn’t. My explanation had been the barest thumbnail sketch; I’d hardly scratched the surface of the fabulous enigma that was Asgard.
The food arrived then, so we took a break. It didn’t last long. She was still avid to get on, even though she seemed to have accepted the fact that it was now too late to do anything before morning. I was tired, and so were her men, but she had far too much agitation churning in her skull to allow her to think of sleep just yet. Her men made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor, where there was just enough space for them all to lie down, given a certain amount of geometrical ingenuity, but she and I kept going.
“So you’ve been out into these levels before—dozens of times, or hundreds?” she asked me, still trying to grasp the situation into which she’d rushed.
“Must be nearly a hundred by now,” I confirmed. “I’ve been here a long time. Mickey Finn and I were among the first humans to get here. It seemed like a big adventure. It was a big adventure. Those were the glory days of star travel—I guess things must have changed a great deal since the war broke out.”