The next day, the conversation flowed more easily, partly because we were all becoming a bit more comfortable with one another’s presence, and partly because the visual environment remained so utterly sinister that we were in some need of auditory stimulation. The endless labyrinthine corridors along which we tramped were quite unchanging, and Myrlin had ceased to bother with such trivial practical jokes as laying tripwires that might or might not be connected to something.
I told the troopers about my adventures working the caves—about the kinds of things I had found, and about the kinds of things that everyone was very keen to find, in order to provide another quantum leap in our understanding of Asgard and its mysterious inhabitants. In exchange, they told me about their adventures fighting the Salamandrans— about all their narrow squeaks, and all their successful missions. Their stories seemed a lot more exciting than mine, and the laconic way they told them was enough to make the blood run cold.
“This may seem like a stupid question,” I said at one point, “but what exactly were we fighting the Salamandrans for?”
“We were trying to colonize the same region of space,” Crucero told me. “Beyond that region, we were virtually surrounded by other cultures longer established in space. There seemed to be only a handful of worlds up for grabs, with humans and Salamandrans equally well placed to grab them. We didn’t start out to go to war—in fact, we set out to co-operate, agreeing to share most of the worlds and defend them together, lest anyone else try to move in.
“Ninety percent of the worlds were dead rocks, which would take thousands of years to render truly habitable, whether we tried to establish a terraformed life-system outside or tried to hollow out an asteroid-type environment. There didn’t seem to be anything much worth fighting over, and it must have seemed easy enough to negotiate with the Salamandrans about who got which lump of stone. For a while, we were fetishistic about co-operation, especially when we found out that the Salamandrans had biotech skills somewhat in advance of ours, while their metals technology and plasma physics were less sophisticated—there seemed to be much to be gained by exchanging information.
“It all went sour, though. The closer the two races became, the worse the friction became. In the end, we found that we were too close. When hostility began to build, it couldn’t be contained or diverted. We were locked in a feedback loop which built up a series of individually trivial incidents into a chain of disasters. They started the actual war, but that was probably a matter of chance. Once the bombing started, there was no way to stop. It was genocide or nothing, and it was just a matter of which race ended up extinct or enslaved. We didn’t have the communications necessary to talk peace—we were spread out very thinly in a volume of space a hundred light-years across, and once we knew that the killing had started in a dozen different places there was no possible response except to commit the Star Force completely. If we’d hesitated, we might have been wiped out. As it was, we lost more than half our population outside the system, and a considerable fraction inside it— especially in the belt and all points outwards.”
“Are you sure that it couldn’t have been settled?” I asked. “Are you certain there was no way to stop?”
“Hell, no,” the lieutenant said. “But not being sure wasn’t enough. Don’t give me any Tetron crap about having to live together, Rousseau. We know all that. We know it’s a big galaxy, full of intelligent humanoid species, and we want to be part of a great big happy family just like everyone else. But once the killing starts, you can’t fall back on that kind of optimism. You have to worry every time you go to sleep that before you wake up the entire human race might be wiped out by some kind of Salamandran plague, or Earth itself turned to slag by some kind of planet-cracker. Once they’d begun to kill us, we had to kill them first. That’s all there was to it. You don’t have any right to say that we didn’t do it right, because you weren’t even there. You were here, doing your bit for the Tetron cause instead—helping those monkey-faced hypocrites lengthen their lead in the galactic technology race. Some people would reckon that a kind of treason, you know.”
As it happened, I did know. But I wasn’t about to concede the point.
“It isn’t just the Tetrax,” I told Crucero. “There are several hundred races represented in Skychain City. It’s the one place in the galaxy where everyone has to get along with everyone else. The C.R.E. has scientists from dozens of worlds, including Earth, and if there’s the seed of a real galactic community anywhere in the universe, this is where it is. Maybe the work we’re doing here, and the way we’re doing it, is all that will save the entire population of the galaxy from consuming itself in futile wars.”
“And maybe it won’t,” the star-captain butted in—which is the kind of argument which doesn’t readily yield to rational criticism. Then she added her own judgment. “I think this ironclad artificial world of yours is all that was left over from the last round of interstellar wars,” she said. “I think that’s why its atmosphere caught fire, and why its outermost layers were frozen down. Hell, maybe the war’s still going on down there—and maybe the reason the owners never came back out is because every last one of them was a casualty.”
I had to accept that it was a possibility. The thought that it might be true was one of the most depressing I had ever had to face. Whatever was waiting for us at the centre, it surely had to be something better than that. Of all the potential solutions to the riddle of Asgard that I could imagine, the one which implied that the galactic races might be doomed to have their nascent civilization blasted into smithereens by interstellar war was far from being the most appealing. Even the star-captain, for all her wolfish temperament, didn’t seem to relish it much.
“The galactic races are similar enough to be members of the same family,” I reminded her. “You and I may have more actual genes in common with chimpanzees and gorillas, but in terms of the way brains work, humans and Salamandrans—hell, even the Tetrax and the vormyr—are virtually mirror images of one another, with only very slight variations. We ought to be able to get along.”
“Sure,” she said. “And ninety percent of murders happen within the family. Been that way since Cain and Abel… likely to be that way forever more. Interstellar distances just make it a little bit easier to fall out with one another, that’s all.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” I told her. “I hope with all my heart that you’re wrong.”
“Oh shit, Rousseau,” she said. “How the hell do you think I feel? But hope just isn’t enough, is it?”
I had no answer to that.
23
I don’t know what kind of weird instinct Saul Lyndrach had used to guide him, but it was nothing I could share. I was continually mystified by the turns he had taken and by the decisions he had made. Maybe he was being deliberately perverse when he found the way to the centre—maybe perversity is what it takes to get to the heart of any matter. One thing is for sure, though: the route we were following guided us into some very peculiar territory.
Scavengers almost always did their hunting in regions of the underworld that were given over to some kind of intensive technological enterprise. After all, what we were searching for was artefacts, and what every scavenger hoped to discover was some state-of-the-art gadget that no one’s ever come across before. The places we tended never to go were the wilderness areas.