Authors: Brian Stableford
Asgard's Secret (5 page)
1
If I had had more
of a social conscience, events on Asgard might have developed very differently.
In fact—or so I have been assured—the ultimate future of the human race might
have been affected, perhaps for the worse, by my lack of charity. I find this a
very sobering thought, and I'm sure that there's a moral in it for us all. This
isn't my purpose in telling the story, however; I'm not in the business of
writing moral fables.
Perhaps
things would have been different if the call hadn't come through in the middle
of the night. No one is at his best when summoned from sleep at approximately
12.87 standard metric. I only had a wall phone in those days, which couldn't be
reached from the bed; to answer it I had to wriggle out of my sleeping bag and
stagger across the room. I usually tripped over my boots en route. That's why I
habitually answered the phone with a grunt that sounded more like a curse than
a greeting.
The
voice that replied to my grunt didn't seem in the least put out. He didn't have
his eye switched on, but his cultured voice immediately identified him as a
Tetron. Pangalactic parole, being a Tetron invention, uses a range of phonemes
that makes it difficult for anyone except a Tetron to speak it in a cultured
tone, although the Chinese seem to manage much better than other humans. I speak
three languages—English, French and Japanese—but in parole I still sound like
the interstellar equivalent of a country bumpkin.
"Am I speaking
to Michael Rousseau?" asked the Tetron.
"Probably,"
I answered.
"Are you in
doubt as to your identity?" he inquired solicitously.
"This is Mike
Rousseau," I assured him. "There's no doubt about it. What do you
want?"
"My code is
74-Scarion. I am the officer on duty at Immigration Control. There is a person
desirous of entry to the city that identifies himself as a member of your
species. I cannot admit him unless one of his own kind is willing to accept
formal responsibility for his well-being, but he has no previous acquaintance
with anyone on Asgard. As you know, your race has no consulate on this world,
and there seem to be no official channels into which I can direct his
request."
"Why me?"
I asked in a pained tone. "There must be at least two hundred humans on
Asgard. How come your version of alphabetical order puts my name at the top of
your list?"
"Your name was
suggested to me by a Mr. Aleksandr Sovorov, who is a member of the Co-ordinated
Research Establishment. I naturally approached him first, on the grounds that
he is the one member of your species who is in a position of notional
authority. He informed me that he is unable to accept responsibility for what
he terms 'scavengers and fortune-hunters' and suggested that you would be more likely
than he to have something in common with an individual of that sort."
You will doubtless
infer from this incident that I was by no means the only person on Asgard
lacking in charity.
I groaned.
"What, exactly, am I supposed to do for this character?" I asked.
"You
would be required to provide him with accommodation until he can make
arrangements of his own, and to familiarize him with the law and local customs.
It is a temporary arrangement, until he is ready to make his own way—a matter
of friendship and courtesy. Did no one perform the same function for you when
you first arrived on Asgard?"
Actually,
they hadn't. Things had been less formalized in those days. There hadn't been
so many different species intent on getting a slice of the action—and the human
race hadn't been at war.
I cursed
Aleksandr Sovorov for the malicious impulse that had prompted him to throw my
name into the ring, and told myself that I didn't have to knuckle under to that
kind of whim, no matter how badly I needed his help. "I can't do it,"
I said, firmly. "I'm just about broke. I only came back to the city to
stock up on supplies, and then I'll be going out into the cold again. I can't
afford to take in any stray cats."
"I
do not understand," said 74-Scarion, frostily. I'd had to use the English
phrase "stray cats" because it couldn't be translated into parole. If
there were cats on the Tetron homeworld, I didn't know how to describe them in
parole, and it probably wouldn't have done much good if I had. The Tetrax
didn't seem like the kind of folk who'd tolerate their pets going astray. They
weren't the kind of folk who approved of people casually dropping vernacular
terms into their carefully crafted artificial languages either—they tended to
view such actions as a kind of pollution, if not as flagrant insults.
"I
can't do it," I repeated. "I probably don't even speak his language.
Unlike you, we have quite a lot."
74-Scarion
was unperturbed by this suggestion. A new
voice chipped in,
saying—in English—"My name is Myrlin, Mr. Rousseau—with a 'y,' not an 'e.'
I also speak Russian and Chinese, if that would help to find me a sponsor. I wouldn't
want to force myself upon you, as you're so clearly reluctant, but I wonder if
you could suggest someone who might be willing to accept temporary
responsibility for me. I really would like to get down to the surface tonight,
if possible."
He sounded so
polite that I felt profoundly guilty—so guilty, in fact, that instead of
following Aleksandr Sovorov's example and trying to think of someone I disliked
enough to book them an untimely wake-up call, I tried to think of someone who
might be willing and able to take the poor guy in, if only to get him admitted
to the city.
"I know
someone who might be able to help," I said, eventually—in parole, for the
Tetron's benefit. "I met Saul Lyndrach yesterday—he's just back from a
trip into the levels and he seemed quite pleased with the way things had gone.
It's bound to take him a while to trade his cargo, but his credit must be good,
and he probably won't be in any hurry to get back out again. He's your man. He
lives over in sector six. Give me a minute and I'll look up his number."
"That will not
be necessary, Mr. Rousseau," 74-Scarion assured me. "I shall obtain
it from the central database. I am sorry to have troubled you. Thank you for
your assistance."
The minute he'd
hung up, of course, I began to get curious. I'd been so eager to avoid getting
the newcomer dumped on me that I hadn't bothered to ask where he'd come from,
or why, or any of a dozen other things I might routinely have asked of a fellow
human being. Even if he hadn't come from Earth, he was bound to have news, and
I really should have been interested in news, given that there was a war on.
Even if there hadn't been, it would have been pleasant to see a new human face.
When there are only a couple of hundred members of one's own species in a city
whose population runs into the tens of thousands, on a world thousands of
light-years from Earth, it's worth making an effort to be friendly. Aleksandr
Sovorov might be the kind of person who took pride in looking down on his own
species, but I wasn't, and I regretted having given the mysterious Myrlin the
impression that I might be.
I assured myself,
though, that Saul Lyndrach would put him right. As I flopped back down on the
bed and struggled into the sleeping bag, I resolved that I would definitely
make the effort to visit Saul some time in the next couple of days, to
apologise to him and to his guest. I also resolved to keep a close guard on my
tongue when I went to see Aleksandr Sovorov at the C.R.E., sternly resisting
any temptation to tell him what I thought of his little joke. If I wanted his
help, I had to be very careful indeed . . . and I certainly needed his help.
It occurred to me
to wonder, then, whether the mysterious Myrlin might have been in a position
to help me out, if only I'd taken him in. My mind was suddenly flooded by
images of a rich eccentric fleeing war-torn Earth in a starship full of
precious metal or negotiable biotech, full of Romantic dreams about penetrating
the secrets of Asgard, whose only desire on arriving in Skychain City would be
to find a reliable guide to be his partner. . . .
I gave it up. I hadn't
come to Asgard to be a guide. I'd had a partner once, but it hadn't worked out.
I was a loner now; when I made my big strike, it was going to be all mine. The
one good thing about Alex Sovorov's contempt was that if he did condescend to
shove some C.R.E. cash in my direction, he certainly wouldn't want to tag along
to make sure I spent it wisely. I told myself that I'd done the right thing,
and that even if I hadn't, it was only because I'd been woken up in the middle
of the night.
And what if I had
taken Myrlin in? What difference would it have made? Well, I probably wouldn't
have been framed for murder, for a start, and he might still have been around
when the Star Force arrived to inform me that he wasn't really human at all—and
was, in fact, the deadliest enemy that our species had to face in a universe where
enemies didn't seem to be in short supply. And maybe . . . just maybe ... I wouldn't
ever have got to penetrate the inmost secrets of Asgard.
All things
considered, I think I did the right thing, even if I did it for the wrong
reasons.