As she broke the connection, I repeated what I’d said, silently. Goodbye. I hoped that it would be forever.
Then I got on with the serious business of finding out what it felt like to be modestly rich.
It might have felt better, but for the nagging worries. They were private worries, probably not worth entertaining, but I couldn’t quite shake them off. The experiences I’d been through had left me more-or-less unscathed, but they had planted some seeds of doubt in my mind—doubts about appearance and reality, about truth and deception. I kept thinking about Myrlin, dead and yet not dead, and what difference it might make.
I couldn’t help setting up a couple of hypothetical scenarios in my mind, just trying them out for size.
In the first scenario, I invited myself to suppose the Salamandrans had been able to bring their genetic time-bomb project to a successful conclusion, but were worried about the secret being discovered. I supposed that they knew full well that there was no chance of hiding the thing completely—especially given that the C.R.E. were involved. And I supposed, therefore, that they’d decided to cover up their success by planting an ingenious false trail… by setting up a monstrous red herring. It wouldn’t even be necessary to assume that Myrlin was consciously lying. After all, he knew only what they had fed into him.
I couldn’t help but wonder whether the sole reason for Myrlin’s existence might have been to convince the Star Force that in killing him they’d destroyed the threat to humankind.
Maybe it had all been a farce—a sideshow, to distract attention from the main event. Maybe the human race was still in dire trouble, with the vengeance of the Salamandrans still to be unleashed in the indeterminate future.
The second scenario, partly inspired by the first, was more immediate in its implications. I invited myself to suppose that the underworlders had had even more control over appearances than they’d seemed. Given that the star-captain’s memories of what had happened were false, why shouldn’t mine be equally fake? Maybe they had been pumped into me in much the same way that Myrlin’s memories of a human lifetime had been pumped into him. There was no way I could really be sure of anything that had happened after I was hit by the first mindscrambler. All else might easily have been illusion. Was Amara Guur really dead? Was Myrlin really alive? There was simply no way to be absolutely sure. I might never have been into the lower depths of Asgard at all. I might never have been any lower down than the level at the bottom of Saul’s dropshaft.
How could I know?
There’s no way to solve puzzles like those. My instinct was to trust the judgments I had made—to believe that the Salamandran project had failed, and to believe that what Myrlin had told me about the world which he had made his own was true—but I’d seen people killed when their instinctive responses betrayed them utterly because they were in the wrong environment. How can a man trust his instincts after that?
There was nothing to be gained by working over those puzzles in my mind, but knowing that wasn’t enough to let me stop.
The last words of one of my favourite books urge men not to waste too much time in pondering insoluble questions. Il faut cultiver notre jardin, says Voltaire, who was one of the wisest men who ever lived. We must look after our own garden. We must take charge of that which we can actually control.
It may be that we never can reach the centre of things, where all the real truths are hidden away. It may be that the pure, unadulterated kernel of Absolute Certainty is not under any circumstances to be grasped, no matter how long and arduous an odyssey you undertake in the attempt to reach it.
My own journey hadn’t ended; I wasn’t even certain that it had properly begun.
But I was beginning to accept that at the end of the day, you just have to settle for what you can get.
About the author
BRIAN STABLEFORD has published more than 50 novels and 200 short stories, as well as several non-fiction books and thousands of articles for periodicals and reference books. He is a part-time Lecturer in Creative Writing at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He lives in Reading with his wife Jane, a holistic therapist. His novels include The Empire of Fear (1988), Young Blood (1992) and a future history series comprising Inherit the Earth (1998), Architects of Emortality (1999), The Fountains of Youth (2000), The Cassandra Complex (2001), Dark Ararat (2002) and The Omega Expedition (2002). His previous Five Star books are Year Zero (2003) and Designer Genes: Tales of the Biotech Revolution (2004). Other recent publications include Kiss the Goat: A Twenty-first Century Ghost Story (Prime Press) and a Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature (Scarecrow Press). He is currently compiling a companion Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature for publication in 2005.
ASGARD’S SECRET
THE ASGARD TRILOGY
BOOK ONE
BRIAN
STABLEFORD
Five Star • Waterville, Maine
Copyright © 2004 by Brian Stableford.
Previously published by DAW Books, Inc., under the title “Journey to the Center” copyright © 1982 by Brian Stableford.
All rights reserved.
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
First Edition
First Printing: October 2004
Published in 2004 in conjunction with Tekno Books and Ed Gorman.
Set in 11 pt. Plantin.
Printed in the United States on permanent paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stableford, Brian M.
Asgard’s secret / by Brian Stableford.— 1st ed. p. cm.
Completely rev. ed. of: Journey to the center. ISBN 1-59414-211-4 (hC : alk. paper) I. Stableford, Brian M. Journey to the center. II. Title. PR6069.T17A94 2004
823’.914—dc22 2004053347
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