I wondered whether I could revoke my hasty decision to return. I wondered whether I, too, might strike a bargain with these desperately shy, fabulously clever folk. But they hadn’t taken the trouble to ask me. They hadn’t even bothered to open up a conversation with me. Whatever their probes had extracted from my numbed brain during those twelve days that I had lain on their dissecting slabs, it hadn’t made them want to talk to me. They obviously chose their friends with the utmost care. They were quite possibly the worst snobs in the whole of Creation.
“Why are things so bad in the upper levels?” I asked him, suddenly anxious that the interview was coming to its end before I had asked any of the important questions. “Why were the top levels evacuated? Why has the one we came down been allowed to run wild? Why have its people degenerated?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly don’t.”
“Did Asgard come from the black galaxy? Is it a fortress, or an Ark, or what the hell?”
“I don’t know,” he insisted. “I can’t answer those questions, Mike. I don’t think the people here have ever asked them—until now.”
But you can find the answers, I thought, and I never will.
I felt like Adam, about to be expelled from Eden. But what the hell had I done wrong? What sin had I committed here? I hadn’t even been given a chance to display my worthiness. The only one of the people delivered here by cruel fate who had been tried and not found wanting was the android. He alone, it seemed, was untainted by innate sin… unborn and unfallen.
It had a weird kind of aesthetic propriety, but it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all—but we have long since grown used to the cruel truth that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, have we not? No one has any right to expect fairness.
“Is that it?” I asked him, still fighting the nausea, still using the invisible wall for support. “Is that all there is to it?”
“Yes,” he said, sorrowfully. “It’s over now. You’ll all wake up with your cold-suits on, up on level three. You’ll have enough reserves to get back to the surface, with a little to spare. The star-captain will have the comfort of knowing that she completed her impossible mission; you’ll be able to trade what you know for a lot of money. Good luck, Mike.”
“Same to you,” I said, with all the grace I could muster. “And…”
He had already begun to turn away, but he looked back at me, staring down from his improbable height, looking every inch a demigod.
“Yes?” he prompted.
“I really did appreciate this little chat.”
“So did I,” he assured me. “So did I.”
The way he said it, I knew it wasn’t intended to be an au revoir. It was a goodbye. He expected that he would never see me again.
It seemed, as the sky flickered again and I plunged back into the deep well of unconsciousness, that it was goodbye forever to some of my most precious dreams.
But not all of them.
I could still be famous. I could still be a living legend— and when I’d been asked whether that was what I wanted, my first impulse had been to say yes. I still had a secret to sell, and a desperate desire to haggle over its true price.
36
There isn’t much point in my giving a detailed description of the journey back to the surface. It was mercifully uneventful.
The star-captain and her surviving sidekicks were, I thought, surprisingly incurious about what had actually happened to them down below. They understood that we’d been captured by some kind of alien intelligence, set free in order to play games and then captured again before being released somewhere else, but they were astonishingly unresentful of this cavalier treatment.
The fact that they remembered so clearly and so satisfyingly how they had gunned down poor Myrlin probably accounted in large measure for their lack of resentment; it was obvious that the star-captain, at least, had been liberated from a frightful burden, and that she was abundantly grateful for her freedom. She even began to treat me with a measure of good fellowship, and nothing more was said about such embarrassing matters as charges of cowardice and desertion. She seemed perfectly happy to tear up my conscription papers after Jacinthe Siani’s testimony to a Tetron court exonerated me from all blame in the matter of the murder of Atmin Atmanu, restoring my record to cleanliness.
Needless to say, I came back to Skychain City a much more popular man than I had left. I was the man with the notebook, the man with the tape that could guide the C.R.E. to the vital dropshaft.
The others who returned with me would all have been popular too, save for the fact that not one of them had made any notes of their own which might guide a third party to the spot marked X. The star-captain wasn’t interested, of course, but I think I observed Serne grinding his teeth a couple of times when he realised that he had carelessly neglected his chance to get a cut of the loot. Jacinthe Siani was definitely peeved, because she didn’t even know enough to bribe her way out of the service-obligations that were heaped upon her as a result of her complicity in various crimes. I contemplated buying her out at one point, but very briefly. Even after searching my merciful heart, I couldn’t find an atom of sympathy for her. I believe that her services were purchased by some other Kythnans, but what she was going to have to do to pay them back I didn’t want to ask.
While the starship troopers were on their way back up the skychain, ready to take their interstellar destroyer back to the home system, where they would doubtless enjoy their own heroes’ welcome and collect their campaign medals— once they’d been very carefully checked for alien infection— I went to see my old friend Aleksandr Sovorov, to negotiate a deal with the C.R.E.
I told him most of the story. I drew a veil over certain parts of it, but I did give him a few juicy details about the civilization with which I’d come into brief contact deep in the bowels of the planet. I took a certain vindictive glee in watching him squirm with anguish.
By the time I was finished, he was staring at me as if I were some kind of hairy arthropod with a disgusting odour.
“You made contact with an advanced civilization thousands of levels down?” he repeated, to make sure that he’d got it right.
“That’s right,” I told him. “Must have been about halfway to the centre.”
“And when they released you all, your Star Force friends and Amara Guur’s gangsters set off on such an orgy of killing that they exported you all the way back to level three, and decided to seal themselves off forever?”
“That seems to be the gist of it,” I confirmed, though it wasn’t entirely accurate. “They seemed to think that we’re barbarians. So does everyone else, now I come to think about it. Perhaps they’re right.”
He groaned. He always did tend to overact. “Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?” he asked. The expression of pain in his eyes was a sight to behold.
“If the C.R.E. hadn’t turned down my application for aid,” I pointed out, “none of this would have happened. In a way, it’s all your fault.”
“If the C.R.E. had done what I suggested,” he retorted, “they’d have kept people like you out of the levels altogether.”
“If they’d done that,” I retorted, “Saul Lyndrach would never have found the shaft in the first place. The super-scientists down in the depths would still be blissfully ignorant of the existence of the universe, content to sit on whatever they have in place of arses for the next few million years. And you wouldn’t be sitting here buying a way into a hundred new levels—warm levels, where there’s life, and enough recoverable technology to keep you busy for the next few centuries.”