“What I can’t understand,” I said, pensively, “is why Guur would just hand it over to us.”
“Because the android got a head start,” she told me. “And because he knows that we’ll chase the android, now we have the means to do it. He intends to chase us.”
It was obvious, of course—just as it was obvious, to me if not to her, that while the star-captain had been patting Jacinthe Siani down, the Kythnan had probably sprinkled half a dozen showerproof bugs in her bright blonde hair. I thought about mentioning that, but decided against it. After all, she was the commanding officer, and the one who was determined to track Myrlin down. The moment she caught up with him—if she caught up with him—she intended to gun him down. That was the extent of her interest in him.
At which point, I figured, she would want to bring her men safely back to Skychain City. All her men. But I had Saul Lyndrach’s notebook now, and I was probably the only man on Asgard, for the moment, who could read it. I didn’t really care one way or the other what happened to Myrlin, even though I had nothing against him personally—but I did care a great deal about what happened to me, and that notebook, after Susarma Lear had collected her bounty.
I hadn’t gone within two metres of Jacinthe Siani; she hadn’t had a chance to bug my hair. If it should happen that the star-captain and I were separated somehow, down in the levels, she would be the one that Amara Guur would track—which was only fair, considering that she had all the flame-pistols. I was the one with the local knowledge, and I was the one who had always been destined to find a way to the centre of Asgard. That was my business, whether I’d been drafted or not—and I hadn’t actually signed the papers, because Susarma Lear was in too much of a hurry to bother with formalities of that sort.
My conscience was clear—or clearish, at any rate. When the time came, I intended to desert my newfound compatriots and go my own way.
Susarma Lear was right to hurry, though, just as Amara Guur had been right to hand over the notebook to me. If it had fallen into Tetron hands, it would only have been a matter of time before they found someone else to read it for them. If it fell into Tetron hands now, the whole game might be over—but the Tetrax didn’t know that. They were playing it the clever way, like the civilized folk they were. Slave-owners always get other people to do their dirty work, if they can.
I figured that there had to be a microtransmitter or two in the book as well, and that Amara Guur must be reckoning on tracking me by that means—but I had faith in my memory and my suit’s tape-recorder. Even before the time came to dump the star-captain and her merry men, I figured I’d jettison the book. It would be a risk, but a worthwhile one. After all—the prize that was at stake was the ultimate prize, the one I’d been after all my life.
It was mine, by rights. I was Saul’s legitimate heir. He and I had had an arrangement. And I was the one who had passed the android on to him, even if the resultant rescue had come a little too late. That was his fault, in a way. If he’d only told me what he had before he went to the C.R.E., so that we could tackle the problem together, everything would probably have been all right.
Not that I blamed him, of course. If I’d been in his shoes, I probably wouldn’t have done anything differently— except, of course, break under torture and hand the whole thing over to Amara Guur.
15
Everything took a little longer than Susarma Lear had hoped, but we logged out of lock five thirty units after Life Support and Regulation were scheduled to switch on the city’s “daylight.” Outside, it was about thirty Earthly hours short of dawn.
We headed north across the vast plain that surrounded the city on all sides.
Serne and the star-captain were riding with me in Saul’s truck. Crucero, Khalekhan, and a man named Vasari were following in the second vehicle. We had radio communication with the other truck, and with Susarma Lear’s warship, which had left its dock at the top of the skychain in order to mount a discreet and distant search for Myrlin’s truck. It wasn’t that we didn’t trust the Tetrax to pass on any information gleaned from their satellites, of course; we were just taking extra precautions.
The headlights of the truck played upon a near-featureless white carpet. Any tracks left by other trucks had been quickly covered by the ever-swirling snow. On the surface, of course, the snow was real snow: just water, with hardly any pollutants. All the other components of the atmosphere were gaseous; they provided the wind.
“Jesus, Rousseau,” Susarma Lear said, after we’d been traveling for a couple of hours. “This is a really weird place.” She was sitting beside me, staring through the canopy at the distant horizon. There were two bunks in the rear, so she could have gone to sleep, but she still hadn’t managed to wind down enough to get past her insomnia. She had ordered Serne to go to sleep, but she was intent on taking a driving-lesson first.
“Pretty weird,” I admitted. “It seems that hardly anyone lived on the outside, back in the good old days. Things grew here, apparently, but it must have been a wholly artificial biosphere. It was as complicated as any Gaian system, even though it didn’t have the same habitat-range—in the absence of mountains and seas it was spread as thin as margarine on a workhouse loaf. Its biochemical relics are still detectable, including seeds and spores of various kinds, but it’s all dead and mostly in a fairly advanced state of decay.”
“How do you find your way around?”
“Satellites and location-finders. If your equipment fails, though, you can navigate by the stars, provided that you can recognise the markers. It isn’t quite as flat as it looks hereabouts—there are troughs and hollows as well as gentle contours. You’ll see that better when the sun rises and the snow begins to melt.”
“There aren’t that many stars,” she observed. “Are we looking out from the edge of the galaxy, or is it just dust?”
“A bit of both,” I said. “That’s intergalactic space all right, but if it weren’t for the dust you could pick out other galaxies with the naked eye. You can’t see the black one, though—not without an X-ray ‘scope.”
“What black one?” she asked.
I looked sideways at her. “You really have led a sheltered life, haven’t you? All war, war, and yet more war, ever since you were a little girl. You know nothing about Asgard, nothing about the black galaxy…”
“So educate me,” she said. I’d shown her all the truck’s controls—they weren’t complicated—but she was still hungry for learning.
“It’s the modest member of our little local cluster,” I told her. “It’s about a hundred and twenty thousand light-years away, closer than the Magellanic clouds, but much more discreet. It’s getting even closer—heading towards us at something like thirty thousand metres per second. It’ll take a hundred million years or so to get here, so we don’t have to worry about it yet… unless, of course, we’re prepared to take a very long view of the future. It’s mostly just a heterogeneous cloud of dust, like the ones inside the galaxy, but it’s big. It has a very low mean temperature, but there are a few stars inside it. Eventually, it will engulf the whole galactic arm, like a cosmic shadow or a subtle fog. Life on Gaia-clone planets will probably go on much as usual for long time after the eclipse starts, but the dust’s not entirely placid. There’ll be plenty of scope for cosmic catastrophes, both like and unlike the one that probably overcame Asgard.”
“Which was?”
“I told you,” I reminded her. “Opinions vary. The majority view is that Asgard—or the world that provided the raw materials from which Asgard was constructed—ran into a cold cloud, mostly hydrogen but with a lot of thinly-distributed cosmic debris, cometary ices and the like. Over a period of time, the atmosphere soaked up more and more of it. If proto-Asgard had a primary in those days, as it most probably did, its light must have been severely weakened, and it may have begun behaving strangely. The people must have had a few hundred thousand years notice, at least. Time enough to take elaborate countermeasures.