Well, I thought, when he told me that, you would say that, wouldn’t you?
What I said aloud was: “It’s personal, isn’t it? You and the star-captain. She was the one who liberated you. She was the one who mistook you for a Salamandran prisoner of war. It was a natural mistake, but she thinks she screwed up. She’s trying to make amends—to finish the mopping up. She thinks you might have infected her—her and all her men.”
“No!” he said. “They never took off their battle-suits. They didn’t dare. No one who came down to the surface of Salamandra and into the bunkers was licensed to breathe the air or touch the surfaces. I haven’t infected anyone. But you’re right—it is personal, for her. She was the one who liberated me.”
“Saul wasn’t wearing a battle-suit,” I pointed out. “Saul, whose dead body you left in my bed. I wasn’t wearing a battle-suit when I found him. Nor was Susarma Lear.”
“I haven’t infected anyone,” he insisted. “I hadn’t been primed. Even if I had, the infection would be harmless. There isn’t a trigger. Even if there was, it wouldn’t be timed to go off for a long time. I’m not dangerous, Mr. Rousseau.”
I didn’t doubt that he believed it, or that his belief was absolutely unshakable. But that didn’t mean that it was true. On the other hand, it did make sense. Even the worst situation imaginable wasn’t that bad. There was plenty of time to take precautions, if any turned out to be necessary. There was no reason for the Star Force to be so intent on hunting him down and killing him—except that that was the Star Force Way, and that Star-Captain Susarma Lear had made a mistake she was extremely keen to repair.
“Some day,” I said, “I might want to go back to the home system. If the people there think I’ve been infected with some alien bioweapon…”
“You haven’t.”
“Even so, they’ll want to be certain that I haven’t. Okay, so I’m not a secret army of hundreds or thousands—I’m no real danger, in practical terms. Even so, they will want to be certain. They’ll want to be certain about all of us—Susarma Lear, Serne, Vasari… everyone who’s ever been on Asgard.”
“They can be. They will be. They know about the programme now. It’s just a matter of investigation and analysis. They can remove that last nagging doubt, if they’re prepared to try. Even without Tetron help, it’s just a matter of making an effort. They’d check you over anyway, coming in from a place like Skychain City… even if you hadn’t been down here.”
He was right, of course. They would. There really wasn’t any more danger from whatever he might be carrying than there might be from any alien bug I might have picked up purely by chance, playing cards with a Zabaran, or making an everyday journey on a road-strip. You’d have to be paranoid to think otherwise—as paranoid as Star-Captain Lear and her commanding officers.
“The surviving details of the programme are in that warship’s cargo,” Myrlin told me. “If our own scientists can’t work it out, the Tetrax surely can.”
Our own scientists. He believed that he was human. Was the belief enough to make him human? Some would think so, others wouldn’t. I had to decide which side I was on.
“It can’t have been easy to hijack a starship, and escaping from what was left of the Salamandran surface,” I observed, thoughtfully.
“No, it wasn’t,” he admitted.
“You must be an exceptional human being.”
“I think I am,” he said. “In fact, I know I am.”
29
We saw another predator when we stopped to rest, but this one didn’t attack. It looked at us from a distance, and went away. Maybe it was because we were between the rails, outside its territory—or maybe it just had a slightly smarter way of operating than the first one I’d met. We saw other animals, too, but mostly just their rear ends as they disappeared from view.
“I hope we reach the terminus soon,” I said. “All this walking is just using up time. It wasn’t supposed to be like this—the big discovery was supposed to have a lot more immediacy than this.”
“We’ll get there,” he assured me.
“Is that just self-reassurance, or do you know something I don’t?” I asked.
“How could I possibly know anything you don’t?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how much the Salamandrans knew about Asgard, or what they might have piped into your brain while you were growing in that tank. Susarma Lear wondered whether you might have an objective in mind—a specific reason for coming here.”
“I told you what the reason was,” he reminded me. “I knew there weren’t many humans—and that the Tetrax are biotech-minded.”
“The galaxy is full of places with no humans at all,” I pointed out. “And there are a lot more Tetrax on the Tetron homeworld than there are here. If you want your story to ring true, you might want to modify that particular part of it.”
I couldn’t see much of his face behind the plate in his helmet, except for his outsized nose, but I knew that he was looking at me long and hard.
“Okay,” he said, eventually. “I told you the truth, but not the whole truth. I didn’t know anything about the programme of which I was a part when I was liberated. I thought I really was a prisoner of war. When my liberators first became suspicious that something odd had been going on, they didn’t figure out immediately that I was part of it. They asked for my help trying to figure it out, because I’d been on the spot. Local knowledge, you see. I tried to help them, as best I could. Why shouldn’t I? I began to realise what I was before they did—not long before, but long enough to give me an advantage. I think I found out quite a bit more than they did—which is how I know that I’m no threat, although they’re not so sure. I also found out that the Salamandrans had to buy in technics to help them get the programme started.”
“Tetron technics?”
“I don’t know. Not from the Tetron homeworld, that’s for sure.”
“From Asgard? You’re saying that the Salamandrans bought bootleg military biotech from Asgard?”
“I can’t be certain,” he admitted, “but I saw documents and equipment marked with a symbol shaped like this”—he drew a picture in the empty air with the forefinger of his right gauntlet—“and Asgard was named as a port of departure. It might have been a cover story of some kind, but I didn’t have any other leads. Once I’d found out all I could about Asgard, it seemed at least plausible that it might have been something excavated from the levels.”
“I could see how you might jump to that conclusion,” I said, thoughtfully. “If so, I bet the scavenger who found it was paid a pittance for the discovery. If someone’s bootlegging local technics, it needn’t necessarily be the Tetrax… and if Tetrax are involved, they might not be operating with the blessing of their own people. Black marketeering of every kind is rife in Skychain City, and it isn’t all run by the vormyr.”
“It doesn’t really matter any more,” he said, “but it seemed to be a potentially-sensitive item of information. I didn’t want to mention it, until…”
“Until you realised that I needed more convincing of your absolute honesty. I’m flattered. After all, while you have the guns and I don’t, my opinion of your honesty doesn’t matter much, does it?”