“If you want to move in the levels, my friend, you have to rely on nature’s way. Two feet and polished skids. Even so, you can run into difficulties if the people who made your boots and gloves were telling lies about their tolerance.”
Serne didn’t seem pleased by this news, nor by the relish I took in telling him how rough it was going to be.
“How long are we going to be down there?” he asked.
I shrugged. “We won’t linger in there a minute longer than necessary,” I assured him. “I want to get through it as fast as I possibly can.” I didn’t mention that my goal wasn’t to catch Myrlin, but to get to the interesting places in good time. “If nothing goes wrong,” I added, “we should be able to get through the cold in a couple of days. You’ll just have to hope that the android won’t. We’ll have plenty of margin for error. The gaspacks will renew our air for at least thirty days, more in an emergency. The suits recycle all our wastes, and input carbohydrates—they’ll easily keep us going until the air begins to go bad, although we’ll lose weight and our digestive systems will get thrown out. I guess you’re used to those kinds of side effects.”
“And then some,” he said. I could just make out his bleak stare behind the goggles. I didn’t want to ask him what his personal best was for getting by in a life-preserving suit—it probably wasn’t anywhere near as long as mine, but when I’d set my record, there was no army of aliens trying to blast, fry or evaporate me.
There never had been—until now.
“I guess you’ve already had your fill of suits and gaspacks,” I said, meekly.
“We only used heavy suits where there wasn’t any atmosphere,” he said colourlessly. “Most of the real fighting was done on surface. The temperature was usually fine and the air would have been breathable—except that the Salamandrans were heavily into biotech weaponry. Viroids, neurotoxin-carrying bacteria, that sort of thing… all human-specific, of course. Mostly, we wore thin sterile suits like glorified plastic bags, which wouldn’t slow us down too much. Skin-huggers, with little networks of capillaries to carry your sweat away. Before we put them on we had to shave all over… they gave us some inhibitor to stop the hair growing back, but it didn’t stop the itching. Five or six days into a mission I could feel my flesh crawling. Couldn’t scratch… not properly, anyway.
“We used to spend most of our time creeping around under a blue sky like you’d find on any friendly world—or under the stars, anyhow—and there’d be growing things all around us, nice and green, and sometimes cities that might be anybody’s cities… but the air was usually filled with things that would turn us into great lumps of gangrene if we took a single lungful. Even when the air was clean… we had to wear the suits anyway, just in case. We relied on the machines on our backs to keep us alive. The suits were virtually indestructible… couldn’t tear no matter what you did to them… but somehow I never felt entirely safe touching things, just in case I pricked my finger and died screaming.
“I never liked the machine on my back. I couldn’t see it and I couldn’t touch it… but there it was, masterminding my chemistry like some little god. Somehow it always seemed more remote than the ship, or the stars in the sky.”
If he’d stopped halfway I’d have told him that I understood—that I knew how he felt. He went on long enough, though, to convince me that I didn’t. His was a special paranoia.
“This won’t be so very different,” I said. “Amara Guur’s bully boys will only have good old-fashioned needle-guns, and I don’t know what your friend the android will be packing, but it really doesn’t matter. While we’re down in the cold levels we only have to be hit once and we’ll be dead. If we have to go deeper, where Saul found warmth and life, we might be able to survive a superficial wound or two… but we’d be trapped down there forever. You can’t send a radio message asking for help when you’re way down in the levels.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “When it comes to gunplay, we’re the best, and you’ve said nothing to make me think there’ll be anything where we’re going that will put us out of our stride.”
I was tempted to ask whether he suffered at all from claustrophobia. There were a lot of wide open spaces down below, sure enough, but we’d have to work our way through some pretty narrow corridors—wormholes of a kind very different from the ones our starships are supposed to make as they whizz-bang their way through the undervoid. The more I got to see of the star-captain and her merry men, though, the more confident I became that they could handle themselves perfectly well in what would be to them terra incognita. Crazy they might be, but there was no doubting that they were tough.
“If the war was as bad as you say,” I commented, “I’d have thought you’d head straight for home now that it’s over. Why come all the way out here?”
His lips seemed hardly to move as he said: “It isn’t over.”
“No?” I answered, sceptically. “You’re telling me that the whole damn human race is at war with one lousy android?”
A special paranoia indeed! I thought, when he looked away.
All he said was: “It’s got to be finished. It’s necessary.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe so. That’s your business, and you seem intent on keeping me out of it. But there is another side to what we’re doing now, and I’d really appreciate a little help in alerting the star-captain to some of the other implications of all this. What’s happening here on Asgard might be every bit as important to the future of the human race as the war you just won—and to the rest of the galactic community, Asgard’s immeasurably more important.”
His pale eyes just stared into mine.
“Look,” I said, “the star-captain already worked it out that if there are only fifty layers, there could easily be a hundred times the surface area of Earth down there. If, as seems possible, the whole bloody thing is an artefact, there could be ten thousand levels—the equivalent of fifteen or twenty thousand whole worlds… maybe hundreds of thousands of independent habitats. There might be more humanoid races living inside Asgard than in the entire galaxy of natural worlds. Who knows? The Tetrax have been trying to lift the lid off this great big can of worms for a hell of a long time—and now we have a golden opportunity to do it. You and me and the blonde bombshell! Oh, merde—you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
“Don’t insult me, Rousseau,” he said, mildly. “I’m just a belter, like you. I don’t know the first thing about this place, that’s true. But I’m not a fool, and the star-captain is anything but. If what we find down there is something useful to the human race, we’ll do what’s necessary. After we get the android, we’ll decide what to do next, in the line of duty. To be honest, though, I have to say that what I’ve seen of this world, and what you’ve told me about the cold down below, doesn’t fill me with wild enthusiasm.”
He’d asked me—ordered me—not to insult him, so I didn’t. I shut up. But what I was thinking was that this was a man whose imagination had shriveled up inside him, and all but faded away. For him, it had always been the human race against the Salamandrans for control of local space. All the great wide cosmos, with its thousands of humanoid cultures, meant next to nothing to him. He had some vague idea that Asgard might be important in a political context, but he really didn’t see what a puzzle it was. He didn’t seem to realise that cracking the puzzle might tell us exactly where we—not just Homo sapiens but all the humanoid races—fitted into the vastest possible scheme of things.