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

an ebookman scan

For

the Most Reverend LIONEL FANTHORPE, Primate Archbishop of the Interdenominational Templar Church of the Holy Lands and Good Friend

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

An earlier version of this story entitled Journey to the Center was published by DAW Books in 1982. A partly-revised edition was published in the UK by NEL in 1989. In the present version all the chapters that were unrevised in the NEL edition have been thoroughly rewritten, so none of the text of the original version has survived into this (much better) one, although the basic plot remains much the same.

Contents

Acknowledgements

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

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10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

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25

26

27

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34

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36

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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.

2

When I got up again, the lights of Skychain City had been burning brightly for some time. It was dark outside the dome, but according to the Tetron timetable it was daytime, and the Tetrax aren't the kind of folk to let the absence of the sun spoil their calculations.

Asgard's days were more than six times as long as days on the Tetron homeworld—which are a little longer than Earth's—and the Tetrax were no more capable of adjusting their metabolic patterns to that kind of regime than humans, so they kept their own time. Everyone else kept it too, at least in Skychain City.

The Tetrax had built the skychain—a remarkable feat, considering that they're a biotech-minded species and that their own world could no more support such an artefact than Earth. Anyone else was, of course, at liberty to set up their own docking satellites and shuttle facilities, but it was so much cheaper to use the Tetron facility that no one ever had made separate arrangements—which was why the Tetrax were the effective rulers of Skychain City and the effective directors of the Co-ordinated Research Establishment, no matter how much cosmetic democracy they put in place.

It wasn't just Immigration Control that was staffed by Tetron civil servants; they ran everything else too. All the citizens got to vote for the mayor and the council, and the police force was as multiracial as the C.R.E., but at the end of the day—whose length, you will remember, was determined

by the Tetrax—everything was done the Tetron way.

Personally, I didn't mind. The Tetron way seemed to work, and there wasn't any other species I'd rather have had running things, including my own. Not that I'd ever have let on to a Tetron, of course—I didn't suck up to them the way Aleksandr Sovorov did.

I went to see Alex as soon as I'd had my breakfast. I thanked him kindly for recommending me to Myrlin, and tried not to sound sarcastic while I did it. Then I asked him very politely whether the relevant committees had looked kindly upon my application for financial assistance in refitting my truck. "Assistance" was a euphemism, of course—if they did give me the money to fund my next expedition, they'd want a percentage of anything I brought back until I died on the job. Personally, I thought that looked like a much better deal from their point of view than it did from mine, but I was desperate . . . and I wasn't at all sure about the quality of their sight.

"I haven't had the official notification yet," Alex told me, twiddling a ballpoint pen between his stubby, stained fingers. I could never figure out what the stain was; sometimes I suspected him of dipping his fingers in some kind of brown dye because it made him look more like the hands-on scientist he liked to think he was than the petty bureaucrat he actually seemed to be. Not that he didn't put in his lab-time, of course—he spent hours every day poring over artefacts of every shape and dimension—but they all came his way along a metaphorical conveyor belt, carefully directed towards his supposed expertise by Tetron scientists who probably kept all the best stuff for themselves. He was, in essence, a dotter of i's and a crosser of t's; he would never be privileged to make a real conceptual breakthrough.

He probably knew that, in his heart of hearts—although he would never have admitted it to someone like me—but it didn't prevent him from imagining that he was one of the most important humans in the universe even so, simply because he was on Asgard rather than Earth, occupying an intermediate station in the hallowed ranks of the C.R.E.

"Did you put in a good word for me, Alex?" I asked, humbly. "Did you explain to them how lucky they'd be to have me on the team?"

"I was asked for my opinion, naturally," he replied, with suspicious pedantry.

"Which is, of course, that I'm a good man," I said, mildly. "A trustworthy man—a man on whom it would be well worth taking a chance. 'Look, lads,' you said, 'I know Rousseau, and Rousseau knows the levels. There's no one who's been further afield than he has, no one else with his curiosity and expertise, no one likelier to come up with something really special and completely new.' That is your opinion, isn't it?"

"I know that it's your opinion," Sovorov countered. "I certainly told them that."

"You told them that. Would it have hurt you to have thrown your own weight behind it too? Would it have inconvenienced you to tell them what a good deal they'd be getting?"

He stabbed absent-mindedly at the desk with the point of his pen. I wondered what his unconscious was trying to communicate, in its own inarticulate fashion.

"I don't believe in letting my personal loyalties override my principles," he said. "We happen to be members of the same species—we may even reckon one another as friends— but when I'm acting on behalf of this Research Establishment I have to put personal feelings aside. The C.R.E. has its own methods and procedures, and its own system of operation. Its enquiries proceed in a rational manner, one step at a time. We take great care to examine everything we find, and to obtain all the data we can from each and every artefact. Our recovery teams are well trained; they operate in a controlled manner, careful to do no damage. Safety is their first priority—not merely their own safety, but the safety of their discoveries. They're scientists, not treasure-hunters."

"And I'm not?"

"You're a scavenger, Michael. Your first priority is to go where no one has gone before, to find things that no one has ever found before. You move around aimlessly, at a furious pace, probably destroying far more than you ever bring back, through sheer carelessness. You may think that you're attempting to further the growth of knowledge, but you're just a trophy-hunter. Perhaps you're less mercenary than some of your kind, but that's only because you value the glory that might be attached to finding something valuable more than the price you can sell it for. You think that if you cover more ground than other people, you're more likely to stumble across some fabulous jackpot—but that assumes that you'd be able to recognise it if you did. You've been here a long time, I know. You've spent more time in the levels than any other human, perhaps as much time as any member of any species, but you're strictly an amateur. You don't do any of the real work. You've brought me interesting things in the past, I'll grant you, and I'm grateful for the fact that you brought them to me rather than selling them to some junk shop in sector seven, but that doesn't mean that I have to approve of the way you work. I don't. I don't believe the Establishment should support people who operate the way you do."

"But you do support some people who do things my way," I pointed out.

"Yes," he admitted, "we do. If we didn't, we'd have to compete on the open market for everything that buccaneers of your kind bring in. We make such bargains reluctantly, and we make them in the hope of maintaining a measure of control over the activities of freelance explorers—but we can't afford to make deals with anyone and everyone. We have to be selective, and we can't make our selection on the basis of species loyalty or personal friendship."

"You could" I said—but that was unfair. He was only one man in an organization full of not-quite-men. The Tetrax called the shots.

"You're a one-man operation, Michael," Sovorov reminded me, although it was hardly news. "You may think you're a serious player, but that's because you spend so much time out in the cold, without the benefit of regular reality checks. Policy favours teams—teams which can be persuaded to adopt our code of practice, our fundamental philosophy."

"The Tetrax found Asgard," I observed. "They could have kept it to themselves, if they'd really wanted to. Policy, as far as I can see, favours diversity and compromise. Policy is not to put too many eggs into any one basket, especially if it's the one you're carrying yourself. Policy is to encourage petty rivalries, so that everyone is wary of everyone else, and the Tetrax can be friends with everyone. Divide and conquer is out of date; nowadays it's divide and exploit."

"That's rather cynical," Sovorov said. He had a habit of stating the obvious.

"We're all parasites, Alex, scuttling around the nooks and crannies of Asgard's rind," I told him. "You might take pride in being the only human member of a multiracial consortium that pretends to represent the entire galaxy rather than a handful of colony worlds, but you're no holier than I am. You're careful and you're methodical—hooray for you. You're also slow and repetitive. I'm willing to bet that you—or your masters, at any rate—have learned far more from stuff brought in by so-called scavengers than from the material your own teams have bagged as they work their way outwards from your home base at a pace that would disgust a snail. Asgard's big, Alex—really, really big. Even the surface is big, let alone level one and level two . . . and when we find a way down to levels five and six, not to mention fifty and sixty, we'll find out exactly how big it might be, and how many different things it might contain. I know your people have been expecting to figure out how to get down to the lower levels for a long time. Ever since I arrived here it's been tomorrow, or the next day . . . just a little more data, a tiny stroke of luck in decoding the signs. Maybe you'll do it—maybe your way is the way that will give us the key to the elevator—but I think my way is just as likely to deliver the big break. While you put a magnifying glass to the map, I'm covering the territory. If I were you, I'd back me, just to make sure you're covering all the angles."

He dropped the pen at last, and sat back in his chair with a theatrical sigh. "We're gradually putting the jigsaw together," he said. "Little by little, we're building a coherent picture of the humanoids who lived on Asgard before what you insist on calling 'the big freeze.' We're putting together a foundation that will allow us to make sense of everything— it's not just a matter of playing with fancy gadgets in the hope that one of them will turn out to do something miraculous. If we can understand the language and the culture of the people who built and maintained Asgard, we can find out what we need to know about the lower levels before we actually go down into them . . . assuming, as everyone seems to, that there are more levels than the ones we've so far penetrated. That would be the sensible way to proceed, the most productive way to proceed. If someone like you were to find a way to open up the entire artefact before we've found out why it was built and what's likely to be down there, it would be a tragedy."

"I don't agree," I said. I felt, at the time, that my self-restraint was veritably heroic.

"I know you don't," he said—and tried to smile.

"They laughed at Christopher Columbus," I reminded him.

"They also laughed at a lot of cranks," he pointed out. "Look, Michael, I've done what I can. Your application is under consideration. It's out of my hands. Perhaps you'll get your money."

"And perhaps I won't."

"It wouldn't be the end of the world," he said. "You have skills and plenty of experience. Lots of people would be glad to hire you."

"I'm not a team player," I told him. "If I were employee material, I'd never have left Earth. Do you have any news of the war, by the way?—I didn't really get a chance to chat to the new arrival last night. Too tired by half."

"So was I," he admitted, "but the word around the Establishment is that it's over."

"Really? Who won?"

He was the wrong person to ask. He furrowed his bushy eyebrows and said, "In a war, Michael, nobody wins. It's just destruction and devastation all round. If we can't learn to understand that, there's no future for us in this galaxy."

I sighed. "How long before I get a decision on my proposal?" I asked.

"Fifteen or twenty units," he told me. He meant Tetron metric units, which are something in the region of a quarter of an Earthly hour. "I'll call you as soon as I know. Will you be at home?"

"I'll be back as soon as I can," I assured him. "I have other irons in the fire."

3

I did have a few other irons in the fire. I spent the rest of the morning trying them out to see if any of them had warmed up, but none of them had. I had a few more conversations like the one I'd had with Aleksandr Sovorov before I accepted the fact that everyone else in Asgard was even less likely than the C.R.E. to give me any money on the terms I was offering, but in the end I went home. Six hours had passed but Sovorov hadn't called.

When no one is prepared to give you what you need there's really only one thing you can do, and that's recalculate your needs. There were two ways I could do that. One was to give up operating independently and join a team. There were at least a dozen outfits who would hire me who kept their fieldworkers supplied with adequate life-support systems and moderately generous pay, but the pay would be all I'd get. If the team I was with made a significant find, its members would get a bonus, but we'd have to hand it over the moment we found it and say goodbye to it forever. The chance of following anything through would be gone.

I hated to give up on the dream of turning up something big—specifically, a way down into one or more unexplored levels. The chance of finding valuable technics was only part of it; what really mattered was the chance to discover a whole new world. I'd been born way too late to get in on the first race into interstellar space, when everyone thought—wrongly, as it turned out—that the galaxy might be full of virgin worlds awaiting discovery and gaiaformation, but that dream had been animating human history for centuries and I'd inherited it in spite of its obsolescence. The discovery that there was a place where the race was still on—not because the Tetrax hadn't got there first but because they were stuck outside a locked door with no obvious way in—had been an irresistible lure, once it had been explained to me properly by my namesake, Michael Finn.

Even after all my years of Asgard, I thought of my life in terms of Mickey's sales talk. I still wanted to be the first to find a way down into the heart of the megastructure. I still wanted all the inhabitants of Skychain City to know who I was. I still wanted people on Earth—the homeworld on which I'd never actually set foot—to speak my name in awed tones.

I wanted to be a hero—a living legend. I'm not altogether sure why I wanted it, but I did. It wasn't easy to surrender the possibility, however remote it might be.

The other way I could reduce my needs was by deciding that the equipment I had in my truck was good for one more trip, and that everything else I owned could be sold to buy food, water and other wasting assets. The returns from my last trip had already paid for the most necessary repairs to the vehicle—that had been my first priority—so I was certain that I could get myself to any pinprick I cared to put on a map of the surface. My cold-suit could still pass the basic safety-checks, so I'd be okay getting down to level one, but the suit was getting old and it was by no means state-of-the-art. It would get me down to level three or four—but would it get me back again?

The dayside temperature on the surface of Asgard is high enough to be almost comfortable, but level one never gets much above the freezing point of water. Level two is a nice, steady 140 Celsius below freezing. Down in four it's still only twenty or thirty above absolute zero. That wasn't much higher than it had been when the artefact was in the depths of the dark cloud in which—according to the best brains in the C.R.E.—it had spent the better part of the last few million years, and maybe a lot longer.

I wanted to go down to four, and I only wanted to do that in order to search for a way to go lower down. My suit would probably be fine if I stayed on one and two, and didn't wander too far from the truck, but if I were only going to do that I might as well stay in the bowels of Skychain City, working inch by inch with a C.R.E. crew. Going down to four without the best available equipment was like playing Russian roulette with only one empty chamber; when you're leaving footprints in oxy-nitro snow you can't afford to have a cold-suit develop a fault. It would be a quick way to go; I'd turn into a corpsicle in a matter of seconds—and rumour had it that the Tetrax were on the very threshold of developing technics that would allow them to resurrect me in a hundred or a thousand years—but it still wasn't the kind of gamble that a serious student of probability would take.

There was also the matter of supplies. Food, water, gaspacks and fuel all had to be bought, and they didn't come cheap. Nothing came cheap in Skychain City—except, of course, when you were trying to sell instead of buy. When I added up the resale value of my worldly goods, it didn't come to very much at all. I had tapes and books, and equipment to play them, but what good are tapes and books in English and French, and equipment made to domestic specifications, on a world where only a couple of hundred humans live?

If there'd been any realistic hope of equipping a new expedition without borrowed money, I wouldn't have been hanging around in Skychain City waiting for a miracle; I'd have been on my way to middle of nowhere. I might have been a scavenger, in the eyes of someone like Alex Sovorov, but I wasn't an idiot. If nothing turned up, I was finished.

I remembered, yet again, that something had turned up the night before, and I'd been too tired to find out what it might be. The overwhelming probability, I knew, was that it was nothing at all—just one more problem to add to the list—but I couldn't help wondering whether I might have missed the last bus to Hope yet again.

My friend Aleksandr finally called in the evening, way past the time when the C.R.E. offices would have closed for business.

"Sorry it's so late," he said. "You know how committees are."

"Sure," I said. "What's the verdict?"

"They've offered you a job," he said. "It's quite a generous package, all things considered. They're keen to employ you, in fact—but it's a job or nothing. They want to buy your expertise, not fund your recklessness."

"Thanks," I said, numbly. "But no thanks."

"I'm sorry, Michael," he said, insincerely, "but I don't think you have any option."

"You can call me Mr. Rousseau," I told him, and hung

up.

My sleep was uninterrupted by phone calls, but I can't say that I slept well. As I ate breakfast, I assured myself that at least things couldn't get any worse—but I was wrong about that.

I'd just thrown the plate into the grinder when the door buzzer sounded. When I opened the door, I found myself looking at two Spirellans.

My immediate instinct was to close the door—not because I have anything against Spirellans in general, but because these two were wearing gaudy clothing to signal the fact that they were unmated males not yet established in the status hierarchy. The ways in which a Spirellan can win a good place in the hierarchy of his clan are said to be many and varied, but not many of them apply in a place like Skychain City, where there are so many aliens. The ways in which Spirellans can win status by dealing with aliens mostly involve doing them down—and to a Spirellan, I was an alien of no particular importance.

There are half a hundred humanoid species regarded by the Tetrax as utter barbarians, and they'd probably reckon Spirellans to be on exactly the same level as humans. I'd have put them a little lower, but I could see how the Spirellans might be biased the other way.

I let them in, politely. In order to get along in a place where hundreds of humanoid races rub shoulders on a day- to-day basis, you have to suppress your instincts.

"My name is Heleb," said the taller of the two, as his eyes scanned my room with patience and exactitude. "I believe that you are Michael Rousseau."

I wasn't offended by the fact that he wasn't looking at me. He was being polite. When one status-seeking Spirellan male makes eye contact with another, it's a challenge—not necessarily to a fight, but a contest of some sort. On the other hand, I wasn't under any illusion about not being in a contest.

"That's right," I confirmed.

"It has come to the notice of my employer that you are looking for work," he said. He spoke well, but he had an unfair advantage. Spirellans don't look much like Tetrax— they have blue-and-pink marbled skin and two very pronounced skull ridges, which make them look rather like lizards with winged helmets, while the Tetrax look more like moon-faced gorillas with skins like waxed black tree bark—but they have similar mouth-parts, with flattened upper palates and protean tongues.

"Are you from the Co-ordinated Research Establishment?" I asked, warily.

"No," he said. "Put your mind at rest, Michael Rousseau. We do not operate in the conservative fashion that the Tetrax adopt. I believe that you would find our ways of working much more in tune with your own. We are adventurers."

"I'm considering several alternative offers at present," I told him. "If you would care to tell me the name of your employer and details of your offer, I'll certainly consider it carefully." While I said it I watched his junior partner moving around my room. He seemed to be going to extraordinary lengths to make certain that there was no danger of our eyes meeting. In fact, he seemed to be paying very close attention to the contents of my shelves, even though he couldn't possibly have understood either of the languages in which the titles of my books and tapes were inscribed. He was definitely looking for something, although I couldn't imagine what.

Heleb flashed me the Spirellan equivalent of a smile, although the fact that his eyes were carefully averted gave it an implication of slyness he couldn't have intended. "I would take charge of one of the trucks myself," he told me, proudly. "There would be five of us, including my brother Lema." He paused to nod in the direction of his companion. "We would be very glad to have you with us. We need a man of your experience. In time, we will be experienced too, but we need good guidance, and we know that you are the man to provide it. We would hire you for one expedition only, and would pay you generously. If you wish, you would then have credit enough to outfit an expedition of your own—although we would be glad to offer you the opportunity to accompany us again, if you prefer."

"Who recommended me to you?" I asked.

"We have friends in the Co-ordinated Research Establishment. We know about the offer they made to you yesterday—an insult, to a man of your quality. We will pay you more generously, and I believe that you will find the work far more to your liking."

Lema had finished studying my shelves. He hadn't touched anything, but he seemed satisfied that he had found what he was looking for.

"I have to consider all the offers I've received," I told him. "If you leave your employer's name and number, I'll call him when I've made a decision."

There are some races—or, at least, some kinds of persons— who don't recognise the propriety of a diplomatic refusal. In a place like Skychain City, they're supposed to put such idiosyncrasies aside, never taking offence at anything short of a kick in the balls—but they're free to let their displeasure show, if they care to.

Heleb looked me in the eye for less than a second. If I hadn't known what I knew about Spirellans, I'd have thought nothing of it, but I knew enough to feel a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

"Thank you for giving my offer consideration," he said, insincerely. "I hope to hear from you in due course."

If he'd been human, or even Tetron, I'd probably have made a smart remark about not holding his breath. Instead, I said: "It's extremely kind of you to think of me. I'm very grateful. You can be sure that I'll give your offer sympathetic consideration—but I owe it to everyone who has made me

an offer to weigh their proposals very carefully."

He handed me a card which had a number scrawled on it. Spirellan handwriting isn't nearly as neat as Spirellan speech, but Tetron numbers are easy to distinguish from one another.

"Your employer's?" I asked.

"It is my own number," he told me. It was the third time he'd passed up an open invitation to tell me who his employer was, and he had to know that I had taken due note of the fact.

"Thank you," I said, again.

When I'd closed the door behind them I realised that my heart was hammering. Without knowing exactly why, I was scared. That had been Heleb's doing; he had intended to scare me.

I sat down on the bed and wondered what fate had against me. If Heleb really wanted me to join his expedition, he wasn't going to take my refusal quite as politely as he'd made his offer.

4

I felt in desperate need of a sympathetic ear and a little moral support, so I decided to go see Saul Lyndrach and take a look at the mysterious Myrlin.

Unfortunately, Saul wasn't home. Like me, he rented a cell in a honeycomb singlestack—one of a couple of hundred hastily erected by the Tetrax when they'd first built the base that had grown into Skychain City. The Mercatan building supervisor hadn't seen him go out and hadn't the slightest idea when he'd be back, but that was only to be expected. The doorman did go out of his way to mention the giant he'd seen Saul with the previous day, though.

"What giant?" I queried. Most starfaring humanoids are much the same size as humans—it's a matter of the pressures of convergent evolution in DNA-based Gaia-clone ecospheres—but there were a couple of species with representatives on Asgard which routinely grew to two metres ten, so a singlestack supervisor wasn't likely to use the word "giant" lightly.

"A guest," the Mercatan told me, in stilted parole. "The foolish fellow at Immigration Control must have classified him as human by mistake, perhaps because of his nose. Mr. Lyndrach is probably trying to sort out the error, but you know how officious these Tetrax are. They never admit that they might have made a mistake."

Saul wasn't far short of two metres tall himself. By Mercatan standards, he was a giant. If Myrlin seemed like a giant compared with Saul, he had to be really big—but he'd told me over the phone that he was human. He spoke English, and had claimed to be able to speak Russian and Chinese as well. If he hadn't been human, he wouldn't even have known the names of the languages.

"You might look in the bar on the corner." The supervisor added, in a confidential manner, apparently having warmed to my presence, "Mr. Lyndrach often drinks in there, and it has a high ceiling."

"Thanks," I said. "I will."

I did, too—I just kept right on making one mistake after another.

Saul wasn't anywhere to be seen in the bar, but there was a human called Simeon Balidar sitting in a booth, looking expectantly about him as if he were waiting for someone. He caught sight of me as soon as I walked through the door and waved to me.

I didn't like Balidar much. He was a scavenger, like me, but he didn't have a truck of his own. He hired himself out to anyone and everyone—except the C.R.E., who seemed to him to be way too safe. He'd always thought that he and I were kindred spirits, and had never understood why I didn't agree with him—but he did know a lot of people, including Saul, so I went over to the booth.

I only wanted answers to a couple of questions, but Balidar was the kind of guy who couldn't possibly answer a question without making a big thing of it, so I had to let him buy me a drink.

"No," he said, when he finally got around to answering my questions. "Saul hasn't been in today—I haven't seen him since the day before yesterday. I don't know anything about a giant called Myrlin."

I sipped my drink, wondering how to carry the conversation forward now that my reason for getting involved in it had evaporated. "You don't, by any chance, know a Spirellan called Heleb?" I said. "Has a little brother named Lema?"

His eyes narrowed. "Why?" he asked.

It was, in its way, a very revealing answer, but I figured I ought to tread carefully if I were going to persuade him to expand on it. "Oh, I heard that he's putting together a team," I said. "Sounded like your kind of thing—good pay, adventurous . . . the antithesis of everything the dear old C.R.E. stands for."

"Are you going to get involved?" he asked, in a way that suggested to me that he already knew about the expedition and Heleb's offer. I began to wonder, in fact, whether it might have been Balidar who'd put them on to me in the first place.

"Maybe," I said. "I've had several offers. Heleb's might be the best, but I don't know who he's working for. He was careful not to tell me."

"Does it matter?" he asked stupidly.

"Maybe, maybe not," I said, "but I'm certainly not going to sign on until I know, am I? It shouldn't be too difficult to find out."

"No," he said. "I suppose not. Look—there's the people I'm waiting for. Would you care to join us?"

I looked over my shoulder. Two Zabarans had just come into the bar and they were making straight for the booth. They seemed harmless enough, and probably were. Zabarans had the reputation of being easy to get along with. They also had the reputation of being very enthusiastic gamblers—which was, I figured, why Simeon Balidar was waiting for them. He had always fancied himself as a card player, although I'd played with him and Saul a dozen times without ever detecting any conspicuous talent.

"What are you playing?" I asked.

He named a Zabaran game. I knew the rules, but I didn't want to take any risks.

"It's okay," he said, in English. "I know these guys. They're a soft touch. If it were just me, they'd probably gang up on me, but with two of us in the game . . . we'll start off with low stakes, just to get the feel of things."

I thought about it for half a minute, and then said: "Okay, I'll play for a while—on one condition."

"What's that?" he asked.

"Tell me who Heleb works for."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Like you say," he said, still speaking English, after a fashion, "you could find out easily enough. He works for Amara Guur."

He got up then to follow the Zabarans into a back room. I followed him, wondering what Amara Guur could possibly want with someone like me.

I'd never met Guur, but I knew him by reputation. He was a vormyran. He was also a parasite—a black marketeer. Tetron government involves a great many rules and regulations, and wherever there are rules and regulations there are people intent on breaking them for fun and profit. From what I'd heard, Amara Guur didn't bother much with the fun end of the spectrum, but he was extremely keen on the profit end. If he thought there was a profit in mounting an expedition into the wilderness, he'd do it—but it wasn't his style to speculate. If he was taking two big trucks into the back of beyond, he must have a strong reason for thinking that there was something there to be found. That was interesting, in a scary sort of way.

I sat down at the table in the back room and began to play, almost absent-mindedly. The fact that my attention was elsewhere didn't seem to do me any harm. Almost from the first hand I began to win—not much, because we weren't playing for high stakes, but steadily. I figured that the time to leave would be when the Zabarans suggested raising the stakes—at which point, they'd probably figure that it was time to stop laying down bait for the human suckers and get serious.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen.

What happened instead was that a latecomer arrived, full of apologies, to join the game. He'd sat down and grabbed the cards before I had time to register the fact that he wasn't a Zabaran but a Sleath.

"You play cards with a Sleath?" I whispered to Balidar in English.

"He's okay," Balidar assured me. "Anyway, he's a terrible card player—and there's only one of him and four of us. The Zabarans will calm him down if he gets excited."

The reason I was surprised is that Sleaths had a reputation for being hot-tempered—not dangerous, just hot-tempered. The ones I'd met were small and slender by human standards, but the fact that every other starfaring race in the galaxy was bigger and tougher than they were only seemed to make the Sleaths I'd met try harder to assert themselves. They always lost the fights they started—but in a place like Skychain City, where the Tetrax set the standards of civilized behaviour, winners tended to come out of fights looking even more brutal and barbaric than the losers.

I decided to give it a few more hands.

I continued winning, even more profitably now that there were five players in the game instead of four. Balidar seemed to be absolutely right about the Sleath—he was a terrible card player.

Nobody suggested raising the stakes. I couldn't blame them; little by little, all the money on the table was making its way over to me. I was glad that almost all of my wins were coming when someone else was dealing; if I hadn't known that I was playing an honest game, I'd have begun to suspect myself of cheating.

Some people play more carefully when they're losing. Others play more aggressively. The Zabarans were playing very carefully by now. The Sleath was playing very aggressively. That only increased the probability that he would keep on losing, and he did.

There's an addictive aspect to card playing, which keeps losers in the game when the voice of reason tells them they should quit. It also keeps winners in the game, even when the voice of reason is whispering that something suspicious is going on. I don't think the Sleath would have let me go even if I'd tried, but the fact is that I didn't try. I just kept on playing, until he threw the last of his bankroll into the pot.

It was a bad bet, and he duly lost it—to me.

That was when he accused me of cheating.

I wasn't scared. He was adapted for fast movement in an environment where the gravity was only four-fifths of Asgard's surface gravity, and he was such a puny specimen of his kind that he had to wear supportive clothing just to get around. Anyway, I thought I could calm him down, with a little help from the Zabarans.

"It's just a run of bad luck," I lied, as soothingly as I could. "Your day will come—and it's just loose change. Hardly enough to buy a meal and a couple of rounds of drinks."

The Sleath turned to the Zabarans. "They are in it together," he said, pointing at Balidar, who'd dealt the fatal hand. "He has been throwing his friend perfect cards ever since I sat down."

The Zabarans looked down at their own depleted stocks of cash, but they shook their heads. They had no intention of backing him up. That annoyed him even more.

"You are in it too!" the Sleath said. "This whole game is fixed."

"You obviously know these people better than I do," I pointed out. "I just bumped into Simeon by chance. I've never seen either of these two before. You didn't get good cards, I'll grant you—but you didn't exactly play them well, did you?"

That was a mistake. The Sleath let out a torrent of verbiage in his own language, which was presumably a concatenation of curses, and then he pulled a knife.

I got up and moved away, grabbing my chair as I did so and making sure it was between us. He hesitated for a moment, and I hoped he'd thought better of it, but then he lunged. I plucked the chair off the ground and used the legs to fence him off. I clipped his wrist with the tip of one leg, but my only concern was to make sure that he couldn't get at me with the knife—it was his own fault that he ran his face into another leg and poked himself in the eye.

The howl he let out had far more rage in it than pain, so I figured that it wasn't going to stop him. I jabbed at him, catching him in the chest and the forehead. He fell over, but he hadn't actually been knocked down, and certainly wasn't unconscious.

For the moment, though, he'd lost interest in trying to impale me. He wasn't in any hurry to get up. He dropped the knife, quite deliberately, to signal that he'd given up.

The door to the bar was behind me. I heard it open, but I didn't turn round until I was certain that the Sleath wasn't going to change his mind again. When I did, I was all set to tell the bartender that everything was okay and that there was no need to call a peace-officer.

The bartender was there, but he wasn't alone. There were two Spirellans with him: Heleb and his little brother.

I was confused, but the feeling I'd had that things weren't right suddenly increased by an order of magnitude. I was still holding the chair, and I abandoned any thought of putting it down. I looked at Simeon Balidar, expecting a little moral support. He was studiously looking at the ceiling, absent-mindedly shuffling the cards.

I looked back at Heleb. He met my eye. I looked away immediately, but I knew that it was too late.

"Hello again," I said, trying to keep my voice steady. "I'm still thinking about your offer."

The bartender closed the door behind him, leaving Heleb and Lema on the inside. It was the only door there was, and the room had no window. I looked at the two Zabarans, but they were backing off. The Sleath had been right. They were all in it together—but he wasn't the sucker the trap had been set to catch.

"I get the message," I said to Heleb. "You really want me to join your expedition. This wasn't necessary, you know—it was probably the best offer I was going to get."

"Everyone knows that humans are barbarians," Heleb observed, in his scrupulously-pronounced parole, "but cheating at cards is not the kind of conduct that can be tolerated in a civilized society."

The Sleath was getting to his feet now, with a new gleam in his eye. He didn't seem to be in on the conspiracy—he thought his irrational convictions had just been proved right. He didn't pick up the knife, though—he just leaned over the table to pick up the money I'd had in front of me.

"It's not all yours," I pointed out, mildly.

"It would have been," the Sleath said, "if the game had been honest."

"No it wouldn't," I said, speaking softly even though it was pure indignation that made me do it. "You're a truly terrible player, and the sooner you face up to that, the better."

He probably sneered, but I couldn't tell. He picked up the money—all of it.

I didn't try to stop him. I knew that it wasn't worth it. I didn't look directly at Heleb again, either—but I saw him coming out of the corner of my eye. I still had the chair in my hand, so I lashed out with all the force I could muster.

Unfortunately, I was cramped for room. He was expecting it, of course, and he was trained in unarmed combat. He grabbed the chair legs and twisted, adding his own strength to the force of my awkward thrust. If I hadn't let go, I'd have gone crashing into the wall.

I dived for the door, but even if I'd got past Heleb, Lema would still have been in the way. One of them hit me on the back of the neck with a rigid hand.

I was on my knees, dazed but not unconscious. I put both my hands on top of my head and tried to curl up into a ball, but it was no good. Stiff fingers closed on my neck, groping for the carotid arteries.

The trouble with convergent evolution, I thought, as I passed out, is that it makes us all anatomically similar without making us all equal. It just gives the bad guys transferable skills.

5

I woke up with a terrible hangover, reeking of some kind of aromatic liquor. It took me several seconds to remember that I'd only had a couple of drinks, and that neither of them had contained anything that human taste-buds would deem exotic.

The insides of my eyelids were red, and I spent another few seconds wondering whether that might be a symptom of something dreadful. Then I realised that, wherever I was, the lights were on—and very bright. I struggled to unglue the eyelids, squinting until the dazzle faded. Unfortunately, the headache didn't. When I managed to sit up and look around, I discovered that I was in a cell. The floor and walls—one of which was made of clear glass—were spotlessly clean. There was no mistaking the Tetron workmanship.

I was on a low-slung bunk. There was no mattress, but the surface was smart enough to soften up when someone lay down on it; the dent my recumbent body had left was slowly evening out. At the third attempt I managed to stand up. The glass wall was solid, although there was a marbled section just above head height that was emitting a stream of fresh, cool air. I stood on tiptoe to let the current stir my hair. I contrived a couple of deep breaths that didn't fill my lungs with the sickly stench. Then I banged on the glass with my fist.

During the two minutes that it took for the guard to respond to my summons I reconstituted the memory of the fight in the bar. It didn't seem so terrible—but I knew that

I'd been set up by Amara Guur, and I knew that things had to be a lot worse than mere memory could tell me.

The guard was a Tetron, dressed in the sort of informal uniform that almost all Tetrax wear, whether they're street- sweepers, public administrators or schoolteachers—except, of course, for the ones that are wearing formal kinds of uniforms, like policemen.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Thirty-two ninety," he replied. I'd slept through most of yesterday and a fair slice of today.

"How did I get here?"

"The police brought you."

The answer was a trifle over-literal, but my head was hurting too much to allow me to frame one that might elicit the information I needed. All I could manage was: "Where from?"—which was pretty stupid, because I knew that too.

He didn't. "I'm afraid that I haven't read the arresting officer's report, Mr. Rousseau. Would you like me to display a copy on the wallscreen?"

"Later," I said. "Do you happen to know what I'm charged with?"

"Murder," he told me.

It should have been a lot more surprising than it was. Even though it wasn't particularly surprising, the sound of the word made me want to vomit.

"Who am I supposed to have murdered?" I asked, hoarsely.

"A person named Atmin Atmanu."

"The Sleath?" I hadn't even known his name; somehow, slimy Simeon Balidar had forgotten to introduce us.

"I believe Mr. Atmanu was a Sleath."

I groaned, but I didn't bother to tell him that I had been framed. He was a Tetron, and he would simply have reminded me that I would be presumed innocent until I'd actually been proven guilty in a court of law, just like any other item of filthy scum the peace-officers swept up from the gutter. Not that he'd actually have said the last part, but he'd have reminded me anyway.

"I need to get cleaned up," I told him. "Then I need something to soothe my aching head. Then I need a lawyer—can you find me one?"

"The control-panel operating the bathroom facilities is located at the head of the bed," he told me, patiently. "The cubicle has a medicare facility, although you will have to volunteer a second blood sample if you require controlled drugs. Did you have any particular lawyer in mind?"

"No. Can you call Aleksandr Sovorov at the Co-ordinated Research Establishment and tell him that I'm here? He probably knows half a dozen lawyers who'll take humans as clients, if there are that many in Skychain City."

"I will do that," the guard said. "Is there anyone else you would like me to notify regarding your arrest and incarceration?"

"Saul Lyndrach," I said. "He lives in sector six. I can't remember his number, but he's on the database. I can get a drink of water in the bathroom, I suppose?"

"Of course," he said, seeming mildly offended at the implied slur on the quality of Tetron prisons. "There is also a laundry facility. Do you need instruction in the operation of these fitments?"

"No, I live in a Tetron-built apartment—it's not as luxurious as this, of course, but I think I can figure out which virtual buttons to press. Thanks. What's your name, by the way?"

"69-Aquila," he told me, with a slight inclination of the head.

When he'd gone, I went to the bed head control panel and found the button that would open the bathroom. Once I'd managed to display the virtual keyboard underneath the bathroom wallscreen, it wasn't too difficult to figure out how to activate the water-fountain, open the laundry chute and switch on the shower. I didn't bother with the medicare facility; I figured that it would be simpler to live with the headache than work my way through an interrogation in parole, complete with blood samples, just to get a Tetron aspirin. By the time my clothes and I had both been thoroughly cleaned I felt better anyway—or would have done, if I hadn't been so acutely conscious of the fact that I'd been fitted up for murder.

It was easy enough to figure out why. The Tetron criminal justice system is based on the principle of reparation rather than punishment, although it makes little enough difference when you're on the receiving end. A criminal's debt to society is exactly that: a debt. One way or another, it has to be paid off. If you're a skilled worker lucky enough to find a generous employer, you can pay off a murder in a matter of ten or twenty years.

If abject slavery isn't your thing, you have the option of renting out your body as a bioreactor and your unconscious brain as a relay in some fancy hypercomputer. Some people actually prefer that, because it allows them to sleep through their entire sentence—which rarely runs to more than forty or fifty years—but most people don't, because they fear, very reasonably, that they might not be quite the same person when they wake up again.

Amara Guur wanted me to work for him—on his terms. He'd been prepared to ask politely, or at least to pretend, but either I'd been too slow to respond or something had happened after Heleb's visit to increase his sense of urgency. I had to admire his efficiency, though. Had he actually planted Balidar in that bar to wait for me? Had he given Saul's doorman instructions to send me along there if and when I turned up?

It seemed so—the only alternative was that the whole plan had been stitched together in a matter of minutes as soon as the bartender had spotted me with Balidar.

Either way, it was a lot of trouble to go to. Whatever Amara Guur had found that had given him a sudden interest in going out into the cold was obviously a powerful incentive.

If he'd only told me what it was, maybe . . .

I put that thought aside. Honest dealing wasn't the sort of thing Amara Guur went in for. If he'd already committed a murder or two to get hold of whatever it was he had, he'd probably got stuck in that particular procedural groove.

My lawyer turned up at forty-one ten, full of apologies for the delay. His name was 238-Zenatta. He explained, regretfully, that it had proved impossible for 69-Aquila to contact Saul Lyndrach, who was currently being sought by Immigration Control. They were apparently anxious to know what had become of a human named Myrlin, who had been entrusted to Saul's care following his arrival on the surface.

I wasn't surprised by this news. After all, if Amara Guur's men had given instructions to Saul's doorman about where to send me, they must have known that he wouldn't be at home when I came looking for him. I had more urgent matters to consider, though.

"The evidence for the prosecution has all been filed," 238-Zenatta told me. "The witness statements seem to be in order and the forensic evidence is entirely consonant with it. It seems to me that your only possible chance to minimize the magnitude of the offence is to plead diminished

responsibility due to alcoholic poisoning."

I could see why he might think that. All DNA-based humanoids react in much the same way to alcohol—except, of course, for the Tetrax, who have apparently modified their entire species by means of genetic engineering to correct nature's mistake and save them from the indignities of drunkenness.

"I didn't do it," I told him. "I was framed."

"You didn't kill Mr. Atmanu?"

"No."

"Then how do you account for the fact that your handprints are arrayed on the murder-weapon, in a configuration suggesting very strongly that you were holding it in such a way as to strike out with it, aggressively."

"There was nothing aggressive about it. I was trying to hold him off when he came at me with a knife. I tried to hit Heleb with it, but the Sleath was perfectly all right when the Spirellan knocked me out. Heleb killed him."

"You say that you were knocked unconscious?" 238-Zenatta queried.

I sighed. "No, I don't have a bruise or a fracture," I admitted. "He squeezed the arteries at the side of my neck—and I wouldn't be at all surprised if he knew how to do it without leaving a mark."

"There are five witnesses," the lawyer pointed out. "Their statements agree in every detail. Simeon Balidar has admitted that you and he were cheating, and the cards entered into evidence do appear to be marked. All five witnesses state that when Mr. Atmanu attempted to take his money back, you attacked him with the chair, and that you continued to beat him with it after you had rendered him helpless. Sleaths are, by nature, a relatively fragile species, and Mr. Atmanu appears to have been a lightly-built individual, so I suppose you might claim that you did not intend to kill him, but the court is likely to take the view that it was your responsibility to take your victim's seeming fragility into account when ..."

"He wasn't my victim," I reminded him. "He was Heleb's victim. Heleb killed him—on Amara Guur's orders. They wanted to frame me. They were all in on it. They all work for Amara Guur."

238-Zenatta was a good lawyer. He cut straight to the heart of the matter. "What motive did they have for arranging such a conspiracy?" he asked.

"They came to my apartment," I said, fully conscious of how feeble it sounded. "Heleb and Lema, that is. They offered me a job I didn't want to take. Guur wanted to make sure that I had no choice."

238-Zenatta consulted his wristpad. "Heleb and Lema have stated that they did indeed come to your apartment to offer you a job," he agreed. "They have made a tape of the conversation available to the court. They have explained that they subsequently discovered that your reason for hesitating over their offer was that the alternative plans for raising capital for your expedition, to which you refer on the tape, involved conspiring with Simeon Balidar to cheat at cards. Balidar confirms this. Heleb claims that when he discovered what you were doing, he made a second attempt to persuade you that it would be far better to swallow your pride and join his expedition than to resort to criminal means."

"Does he have a tape of that conversation?"

"Alas, no. He explained that because there were Zabarans present, who have particular concerns regarding privacy, he switched off his recording device before entering the room."

"If we can prove that they were all working for Amara Guur," I said, hopefully, "that would surely be evidence of a conspiracy."

"Can we prove that, Mr. Rousseau?" asked 238-Zenatta, sceptically. I couldn't blame him. Whether he believed me or not—and I was pretty certain that he didn't—his chances of finding any evidence of a formal contract of employment between any of the five fatal witnesses and our unfriendly neighbourhood crime-lord were a bit slim.

"Can we prove that they dosed me with the alcohol after I was unconscious?" I asked.

"Perhaps, if a sufficiently thorough medical examination were carried out," he said, even more sceptically. "But it would be severely detrimental to our best defence if we did."

"I'm not going to admit to killing the Sleath," I told him, flatly. "Diminished responsibility is not an option. I'm not guilty, and that's the way I'm going to plead. Whether anyone believes me or not, I'm going to tell the court the truth."

"I fear, Mr. Rousseau, that the court might not approve of that strategy," the lawyer said. "It might well seem to the court that you are adding a manifest slander to the burden of your culpability. You would be asking the court to believe that someone would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain your participation in a perfectly ordinary expedition. There are hundreds of people in Skychain City who have skills similar to yours, Mr. Rousseau, many of whom are desperate for employment. Why would Amara Guur, or Heleb, or anyone else commit murder in order to obtain your services, when they could hire a person of almost equal capability for little more than half the wage that Heleb offered you in your apartment?"

Put like that, it did seem impossibly weird. Obviously, I considered myself the best of the best when it came to pioneering the trackless wilderness, but I could see how other people might find it difficult to agree with me. After all, I'd never actually made the big strike for which I felt myself destined. I was so poor, in fact, that if I really had thought that I could finance my next expedition by running a crooked card-school, I might very well have tried it.

I looked at 238-Zenatta, and he looked back. There wasn't the slightest hint of challenge in his stare; none was necessary.

"I didn't do it," I said. "I don't have any real evidence that Heleb did, or that anyone was working for Amara Guur, so we'll leave that out of the story—but I'm sticking to the truth. I wasn't cheating, and I didn't kill the Sleath. He went for me with a knife, and I defended myself with entirely reasonable force. He was still alive when Heleb attacked me and knocked me out. That's it."

238-Zenatta shook his head sadly, but he knew his duty. "Very well," he said. "That is the case I shall argue."

6

I watched my trial on television, giving evidence from my cell. 238-Zenatta put in what seemed to me to be a rather lacklustre performance, but I couldn't blame him for that. My performance lacked lustre too. We both knew the score.

The Tetron magistrate, a supersmart AI, found me guilty in thirty-seven seconds. My appeal took a little longer, but it was dismissed within two minutes.

I was given three days to find a way of paying off my debt that was acceptable to all interested parties. The Sleath had had no traceable relatives, so the parties in question were myself and the Tetron administration. The administration would be reasonable—but they would insist on my finding a way to pay back the necessary ransom as quickly as humanly possible. I might be able to persuade them that twenty-five years of servitude was reasonable, but they would let me work it off at a rate that would take fifty or a hundred if anyone made a formal offer that looked better.

I called Aleksandr Sovorov immediately and told him that I'd take the job at the C.R.E.—but he informed me, rather coldly, that the offer had been withdrawn. The Co-ordinated Research Establishment had an image to maintain; they didn't hire convicted murderers.

Naturally enough, nobody came forward immediately to offer me a way out. I knew that I'd have at least two days to contemplate the possibility that I'd be spending the next forty years in a coma while my metabolism devoted itself to the manufacture of exotic proteins and my brain processed data for anyone whose calculative problems required a ready-made neural network rather than something custom- built from silicon and high-temperature superconductors. Neither process would leave any manifest scars, but rumour has it that the only kind of mid-life crisis worse than discovering that you're fifty years out of sync with history and living in a second-hand body is finding that you're also living in a second-hand brain whose habitual pathways have been re-geared to processes of thought that are, to say the least, unhuman.

While I waited, I played cards with my jailer, 69-Aquila. He seemed quite pleased to have me around; it was obviously a slow week, and he was winning the game. Fortunately, he wasn't allowed to play for money.

"Slavery is an abomination," I informed him, by way of making conversation. "On my homeworld, we gave it up centuries ago, on the grounds that it's an intolerable affront to civilized values."

"How do you deal with criminals in your home system?" he asked, politely.

I told him.

He laughed.

"I realise, of course, that everything we lesser species do seems to the Tetrax to be comical as well as barbaric," I said, "but in this particular instance I really don't think your way is any better. At least we call a punishment a punishment. We don't try to pretend that it's anything else. Your way is hypocritical."

"You simply don't realise how backward your culture is," 69-Aquila assured me. "It is perfectly understandable, even though you have been given the opportunity to observe the folkways of hundreds of other cultures here in

Skychain City. You are imprisoned by primitive habits of thought, blinded by parochial prejudices. It is not sufficient merely to live alongside other species; you must learn to make comparisons, to understand the reasons for the differences between them. We Tetrax have had the opportunity to study thousands of humanoid cultures, and to grasp the fundamental principles of their historical development. We understand the inevitability of what you call slavery as well as its practical necessity. There are a great many things your species might have given up whose abandonment would do you credit, but slavery is not one of them. War, for instance. I understand that your species has actually been engaged in a war for almost as long as you have possessed starships."

"So it's rumoured," I conceded. "It's over now, according to Alex Sovorov, but I'm in no position to defend the fact that it took place at all, given that I left the system before it started. Obviously, I'd rather it hadn't happened, and I expect that the poor bastards who had to fight it felt the same way."

Mercifully, there was no word in parole for "bastard," so I had to use the English one—which saved me from having to explain that I didn't really mean that Earth's warships were staffed by people whose parents hadn't been legally married.

I hurried on. "Anyway, you shouldn't try to worm out of it by changing the subject. It's your system that's in question, not ours. I'm sitting here waiting for someone to buy me, or at least to hire me for a very substantial slice of my future life. The only person who's likely to offer is the gangster who fitted me up, whose offer will probably look a great deal more attractive on paper than it will turn out to be in real life. In fact, it'll be an offer I'd have to be insane to take—except that my only alternative is to serve as a laboratory rat in some kind of experimental set-up that's likely to leave me with a very bad case of not-so-false-but-definitely-inexplicable-memory-syndrome as well as removing me from active participation in the most interesting period of galactic history. I find this a rather invidious position to be in. I don't think anyone should be subjected to this kind of treatment, and I certainly don't think they should be insulted, as well as injured, by being told how very civilized it is."

69-Aquila shrugged his shoulders. The precise meaning of significant gestures varies considerably between species, but a Tetron shrug means much the same as a human shrug. Unlike real gorillas, they only duplicate human genetic make-up to seventy-eight percent, but much of the rest is functionally parallel.

"It is necessary," he said. "It is also inevitable. We have studied the social evolution of thousands of humanoid species, and found them convergent to almost the same degree as their physical evolution. Whether the reasons for that are somehow contained in the supernoval debris that is our common ancestor, or merely in the abstract logic of the situation, we have not yet been able to ascertain. The fact remains, however, that there is a well-defined pattern which your species cannot perceive, partly because you are stuck at an intermediate stage and partly because you have not had the opportunity to make elaborate comparisons with other species—preferring, it seems, to make war against your nearest neighbour."

"And I suppose I'm too stupid to understand any explanation you might care to give me," I said.

"Not at all," he said. "Our children have no difficulty grasping it. You could do it too, if only you could open your mind."

"Try me," I invited.

"The pattern of social relationships within a humanoid culture is largely dependent on the technology it possesses," he told me. "As technology advances, the economic basis of the culture's subsistence changes with it. The situation is complicated, of course, by the fact that some kinds of sociopolitical systems are more amenable to technological advance than others, but those which are hostile tend to disappear, whether or not they are formally conquered, so the eventual effect is that technology seems to be the ultimate determinant, and to have a natural growth-pattern of its own.

"In the beginning, when technology is primitive, almost the whole of every person's labour has to be devoted to the business of survival, and social groups are primitive—mere families, in which power is brute force. When agricultural enterprise permits labourers to feed twice or three times their own number, however, tribes grow much larger and social organization becomes much more complicated. Although armed might remains the ultimate expression of power, ownership of land becomes the primary determinant of economic authority.

"As knowledge advances further, more complex technology emerges and machines begin to take over the business of production. Cities expand as agriculture becomes more efficient. As factories become more sophisticated, ownership of machines becomes increasingly important, gradually displacing the authority invested in ownership of land. Your culture has not yet escaped this phase, which therefore seems to you to be a culmination of history, but if you were not distracted by petty squabbles over the ownership of the gaiaformable planets in the vicinity of your home star you would understand that you have not yet refined your social relations to their logical end-point. Are you following me?"

He's already told me that Tetron children had no difficulty grasping it all, so I certainly wasn't going to admit that I couldn't. "Yes," I said.

"If you only had the imagination to see it," he went on, relentlessly, "you would see that your present system of social relationships is already being transformed. Just as the land-based economy gave way to the machine-based economy, so the machine-based economy will give way to a service-based economy. As feudal servitude was replaced by capitalistic servitude, so the latter will be replaced by the purest form of servitude: a network of obligations independent of the models of agricultural or factory production, generalized throughout society. Had humans not acquired frame force technology so abruptly, your economy of mechanical production would not have received the sudden boost associated with starship production. Had humans not made contact with other humanoid species, your mastery of nuclear annihilation technology would have developed more gradually, and you would have been forced to apply its energy to the reclamation of your own ecosphere, obliterating the traditional authority invested in the control of land and machinery in the interests of ecocatastrophic avoidance. You would have had no alternative but to reconstitute your economy as a pattern of service obligations. The transformation is still inevitable, although you might delay it for a century or two if you insist on fighting more wars in order to preserve your barbaric and antiquated socioeconomic system. Do you see what I mean?"

"Sure," I said, valiantly. "You mean that power is, in essence, the ability to get other people to do things for you. Like brute force, property and money are just different ways of implementing that power, and only seem to be symbolizing things like land and manufactured goods. What property and money really symbolize is labour, and the only thing a man really has to sell is himself. But there's an important difference between entering into contracts for the exchange of services as free individuals, and people actually— or effectively—owning one another."

"It is a false distinction," 69-Aquila assured me. "No one is a free individual, able to exist outside his society. Our needs are complex, our desires illimitable save by social constraint. In order to have the means of existence, we must sell ourselves entirely—and if we incur debts beyond the value we have put on ourselves, we must find ways to pay them. If we cannot compensate our fellows for the violence we do to them, what recourse do they have but to retaliate in kind? You, apparently, see no fault in that—but you live alongside thousands of other humanoid species, many of whom are wiser than you."

"Not that much wiser," I told him. "We had similar theories to yours back in the home system—it's just that we didn't drum them into our children quite so ruthlessly."

He laughed again. "You are the warmakers," he pointed out. "You are the ones with the punitive criminal justice system. I agree that everything I have said is obvious, even to you—but you are too blind to understand the significance of what you see. And I win again."

He laid down his cards. He was right, of course. He had won again.

7

"As a matter of interest," I said to 69-Aquila, as I dealt another hand, "has anyone ever escaped from this lock-up?"

"No," he replied, with brutal honesty—but he liked the sound of his own voice and the pretensions of his own wisdom far too much to content himself with monosyllables. "You should not feel so badly about your inability to understand the logic of humanoid society and galactic civilization, Mr. Rousseau," he went on. "After all, humans are newcomers to the scene, hurled on to the stage without adequate preparation. You have had no opportunity to study the histories of other worlds and other species, and to induce empirical generalizations therefrom. You are bound to be confused, because you are out of your depth. Your species should not have gone to war against the Salamandrans, and you, Mr. Rousseau, should not have come to Asgard. I understand the temptation, but solving the mystery of Asgard is something that humans, vormyr, Zabarans, Sleaths, and the like are not intellectually equipped to do. The Tetrax will discover the answer, when we have amassed sufficient data."

"Maybe," I said. "But I'm not the only one who doesn't think so."

"Clearly not, if you really are innocent of the crime for which you have been convicted," he observed. "Whoever intends to buy your services obviously believes that they are worth purchasing at a very high price. Fortunately, you are living in a civilized society. Your new employer will be

forced to respect the limitations of the law in his use of your . . . talents."

"Merde," I said—although I had to say it in French, so it was just so much empty noise to him. "Your effective jurisdiction ends at the airlock. Once we're out in the cold, anything goes. You might think you're living in a civilized society, but the Tetrax only run the administration and the legal system. People like Amara Guur run the underworld: vormyr, Spirellans, and every other kind of barbarian you can put a name to."

I was too harsh; I should have taken more notice of the fact that he'd conceded the possibility that I really might have been framed. His hesitation before referring to my "talents" hadn't been intended as a sly insult. He really was wondering what I had that might prompt Amara Guur—or anyone else—to take so much trouble to obtain total control of me.

"You know," I said, to calm the atmosphere a little, "there's one thing I've never understood about you Tetrax. Why do you have code numbers instead of first names?"

Usually, you have to be wary of asking aliens questions like that, in case they take offence. Fortunately the Tetrax don't seem to go in for taking mortal offence at personal questions, and 69-Aquila seemed enthusiastic to educate me while I was at his mercy.

"Humankind is not the only race whose members resent being numbered," he told me. "Such refusals seem to be based in a fear of losing one's individuality, a reluctance to think of oneself as a more-or-less insignificant unit in a much greater whole. We Tetrax do not require such illusions, and our guiding anxiety is precisely the opposite. We treasure our connectedness, our membership of a nested series of larger wholes. We bear our numbers proudly, because they

remind us that we are not mere isolated irrelevancies, divorced from the context that gives our thoughts and actions meaning. As a species, humans are stuck in the last phase of a degenerate capitalism; as individuals, you are stuck in the last phase of a degenerate existential isolation. Wiser species have moved on."

"So one of us is crazy," I said, "and you think it's not you. Well, you would, wouldn't you?"

"I would be forced to worry if you began to agree with me," 69-Aquila said calmly. "I believe that I win again."

Before he could lay his cards triumphantly down on the tabletop, however, his wristphone chimed. He consulted the display for a full minute.

"Someone is asking to see you," he said. "It seems that they have a contract of employment to offer you."

"What a pleasant surprise," I said, grimly.

Amara Guur didn't come in person, of course. I was half-expecting Heleb, who'd already made his desire to purchase my services a matter of public record, but discretion seemed to be keeping him out of the game for a while. The person who actually appeared on the other side of my glass partition was a Kythnan woman named Jacinthe Siani.

All the humanoid races making up the galactic community are built according to the same basic blueprint, although no one has figured out, as yet, how the original was determined. We all have two arms, two legs and a head, and we all have two eyes, a mouth and an arsehole. Noses are more various, and so are the embellishments with which various kinds of skin come equipped—horns, hair, scales and so on. Humanoid species come in all colours and many textures; relatively few of them seem utterly loathsome or frightful to one another, but relatively few of them seem markedly attractive either. There are only a couple of dozen alien species that are sufficiently similar to humans that it wouldn't seem in the least perverted for them to engage in cross-species sexual intercourse. Among those, there are maybe three or four which produce significant numbers of individuals who seem more beautiful to human eyes than actual humans do.

Kythnans are one of them. Among humans, the fact gives rise to frequent jokes about Kythnans and kin. Jacinthe Siani was an exceptional member of her species, as measured by human eyes.

I assumed that Simeon Balidar must have been the one who explained that circumstance to Amara Guur, given that the vormyr are at the other end of the spectrum. To Amara Guur, Jacinthe Siani probably looked just as loathsome as Balidar did; I didn't dare to conjecture what she must think of him.

Her skin had a faint greenish tinge, but it wasn't at all unattractive. Her features had a cast that would have been considered Oriental had she been human, but that wasn't unattractive either—far from it. She didn't have pointed ears though. I really like pointed ears—but there was no way that Simeon Balidar could know that.

"Perhaps someone ought to explain to Amara Guur that we humans tend to do things the other way around," I said to her after 69-Aquila had formally introduced us. "We try the seduction first, and the bribery second. Then we bring in the heavy metal. There's no point in putting on the velvet glove when I've already been floored by the iron fist."

"I have no idea what you are talking about, Mr. Rousseau," she purred. She had a soft, low voice that would probably have sounded very nice if she'd been talking English—or, even better, French—instead of pangalactic parole.

"No," I said. "I bet my lawyer could search for days on end without tracing a manifest connection between you and Amara Guur, or any other petty crime-lord. I suppose you're recruiting for your private stud farm, and you've just decided to start breeding humans."

"I need a man with your expertise," she said.

"Precisely," I replied.

"Your expertise in lower-level exploration," she elaborated.

"You don't say," I said. At least, I tried to. Parole isn't geared to translate that kind of idiomatic expression.

"I do," she assured me. "I represent a group of people who are mounting an expedition that will penetrate further into the core of Asgard than any previous one. We need to hire men who have extensive experience of moving into virgin territory."

"And unlike the C.R.E., you don't mind hiring convicted murderers?"

"You have a debt to pay, Mr. Rousseau," she observed. "We are civilized folk, who do not harbour petty prejudices. You have the expertise we need."

"So have a lot of other people," I told her. "Saul Lyndrach, for example. Have you tried to buy him?"

For a fleeting moment, a shadow crossed her face. No matter how human or superhuman she seemed, I couldn't be sure that I'd read the expression correctly, but it seemed to me like anxious suspicion. She was worried that I might know more than I seemed to know. She was worried that I might have more with which to negotiate than was apparent, even now.

I wished, fervently, that I had. "Amara Guur doesn't have the situation under control, does he?" I said. "Framing me was a hasty move, urged on him by panic. There's a loose cannon rolling around his deck, isn't there? You don't have Saul on the payroll, do you? Whatever he found and you're trying to steal, it's still out of reach. You want me because I'm a friend of Saul's, don't you? That's what makes me so much more valuable than any other freelance scavenger."

Every word we exchanged was being recorded, of course. My trial was over, but that didn't mean the Tetrax weren't still taking an interest in the case.

"We are prepared to offer you a two-year contract," she said, doggedly following her script. "It will not pay off more than a fraction of your debt, but the rate of repayment is considerably greater than you would earn by any other means of employment. There are risks involved, of course; we shall be going a long way from Skychain City, and descending further into the levels than anyone has contrived to do before— but I believe that prospect will interest you, and it is clearly in everyone's interest that you sign the contract."

"Except," I said, "that once I'm out in the cold, my life won't be worth a spoonful of nitrogen."

"On the contrary," she said. "It is very much in our interests that you should remain alive, healthy and cooperative. We have no intention of allowing you to come to harm."

"Do I get a percentage of the profits?" I asked.

"That might be negotiable," she confirmed. "May I take it that you are agreeable in principle, subject to the outcome of such negotiations?"

"That depends," I said. "I might get other offers. Now that you've put yours on record, the competition might decide to match it, or go one better. It's Myrlin, isn't it? The wild card, I mean. The factor that threw off all your calculations. Whether you have Saul or not, you don't have him—and you don't know how much he knows."

"Please try to concentrate on the matter in hand, Mr.

Rousseau," she said, seemingly unruffled by my stab in the dark. "May I take it that, in the absence of any other offers, you are prepared to negotiate the details of this one? I'm sure the court would be happy to know that you intend to discharge your obligation conscientiously."

I remembered that Myrlin was supposed to be a giant. Even if he hadn't been, he'd have had a problem blending into the background of a place like Skychain City. If Myrlin was out of Amara Guur's reach, he must surely have found some influential friends of his own. Or had I miscalculated the situation? Was it something else that had gone awry, derailing Amara Guur's original plan? Who had tipped him off that Saul had found something valuable? Balidar? Someone at the C.R.E.? Who would have known, given that Saul hadn't given me more than the merest hint?

"I'll be happy to give your offer serious consideration," I lied. "But you'll forgive me if I wait the full seventy-two hours before making a decision. I have to consider all the alternatives."

"You only have one, Mr. Rousseau," the Kythnan said. "Do you really want to spend half a lifetime asleep, while your body and brain are rented to anyone and everyone who cares to pay the standard fee?"

"I'd have job security," I pointed out. "And the Tetrax would want me alive and healthy too. Lifetimes are increasing all the while—by the time I got my mind back, we might all have the biotech to live forever. There are a thousand races working on the problem, and we all have the same DNA."

"That would be a reckless gamble, Mr. Rousseau," she said. "Accidents happen, even in a gel-tank."

Her tone was casual, but I knew a threat when I heard one. I hoped that the people listening in were similarly sensitive.

"Maybe I'm beaten," I conceded, "but I'm not quite ready to lie down yet. You have my permission to talk to my lawyer about that percentage of the profits, and any other safeguards he cares to incorporate. His name's 238-Zenatta. But I'm not going to sign anything until I've had every last hour of my three days' grace, and I'm not going to give up hoping for a miracle."

"Thank you," she said—and she smiled. It was one hell of a smile, but I wasn't fooled for an instant.

8

When the Kythnan had gone, I kicked the glass wall in frustration, but all that achieved was to make my big toe ache.

"I hope you got all that," I said to the empty air. "If she's telling the truth, your expectation of getting down into the lower levels in your own time and on your own terms is under threat. I only hope you care enough to try to figure out what the hell is going on—and to do something about it before my time runs out."

I was confident of the first part of that hope. The Tetrax had to care enough about what Saul Lyndrach might have found to worry about Amara Guur getting his hands on it— but I was all too well aware that it wasn't at all the same thing as caring what might happen to me. If the Tetrax concluded that the sensible thing to do was to let Amara Guur do their spadework for them, they probably wouldn't be in the least interested in subverting his plans—which meant that from my point of view, they might as easily be reckoned deadly enemies as potential allies.

I really did need a miracle.

I tried to call Saul Lyndrach, and wasn't overly surprised when I failed.

Then I phoned 74-Scarion at Immigration Control and asked whether he had any information on Myrlin's whereabouts. 74-Scarion admitted some slight concern, but assured me that the newcomer's disappearance was a minor matter—a mere technicality, unworthy of serious investigation. I didn't

know whether to believe him or not.

Then I rang Aleksandr Sovorov, and said: "You've got to get me out of this, Alex. There's no one else I can turn to."

"I'm sorry, Rousseau," he said, "but I don't see the necessity."

He didn't know that he was quoting Voltaire, but that didn't make me feel any less ignominious a beggar.

"I didn't do it, Alex," I told him.

"Actually," he admitted, "I never thought you had. But if you couldn't prove it to the court, I don't see what I can do."

"Come on, Alex. The C.R.E. must be interested in the fact that Amara Guur's planning a looting expedition. He thinks he knows a way into the lower levels."

"Rousseau," he said, obviously forgetting the fact that I'd instructed him to call me mister as well as the fact that he'd earlier felt free to call me Michael, "everybody thinks he knows a way into the lower levels. Do you know how many people come to us with tales like Lyndrach's?"

"No," I said, feeling some slight relief at having made progress enough with the mystery to be certain that Saul had gone to the C.R.E. with whatever he'd found, "but I do know what happens when their applications get booted into touch by your stupid committees. Somebody believed him, Alex—or thought his claim was worth taking seriously enough to rat him out to the vormyran mafia."

"We can't investigate every silly rumour that comes our way," he said. "The sillier they sound, the less inclined we are to take them seriously."

"Exactly how silly did this one sound?" I asked.

"I can't talk to you about C.R.E. business," he told me. "You're a convicted murderer calling from a prison cell, for heaven's sake."

"Just get me out, Alex. I'll take any reasonable offer, to stay out of Amara Guur's clutches."

"I'd really like to help," he assured me, "but my hands are tied."

"And your fat arse is bolted to your well-upholstered chair," I retorted. "There are two hundred humans on Asgard, Alex—some of them have got to be capable of caring about Saul, if not about me. If you can find him before my time's up—or Myrlin the jolly giant—you might be able to get something going. If the Tetrax can't find them, somebody must be hiding them, and that somebody is far more likely to be human than alien. You have to find them, and persuade them to tell the Tetrax what's going on."

"Do you think I'm some kind of miracle-worker?" he complained.

"Nothing less will do," I assured him. "A miracle-worker is what I need."

"Well, I'm not," he informed me, unnecessarily. "I'll ask around, but I'm warning you, Rousseau—if this business ends up harming my position in the C.R.E., I'm going to be extremely annoyed."

"Well, if I don't end up dead, I'll just have to carry that on my conscience."

"You're not much of a diplomat, are you?" he came back, radiating wounded vanity. "Murderer or not, it's people like you that get the human species a bad name. No wonder we get embroiled in stupid wars. We did win, by the way, insofar as either side can be said to have won. The Salamandrans came off far worse than we did, at any rate. It'll take us centuries to live it down, of course, even though they started it—but at least it wasn't our homeworld that was devastated. They're going to need our help now, just to avoid extinction. Compared with the amount of blood the whole race has on its hands, your innocence of the death of a single Sleath is a minor matter."

"Not to me," I told him, through gritted teeth. I was being as diplomatic as I possibly could.

"We're all complicit in near-genocide, Michael," he told me, morosely. "None of us can avoid that stain. It's a whole-species crime. You and I and our two hundred compatriots might be a very long way from Earth—farther, I suppose, than anyone else—and you and I, at least, might have set off from home before the war even began, but we're still guilty. There's no way around that."

I hung up on him, figuring that either he would do what I'd asked him to do or he wouldn't, and that either way, he was the least likely miracle-worker I'd ever met in my entire not-quite-guilt-free life.

There was no mad rush to buy me out that day. Nor was there any news of Saul Lyndrach or mysterious Myrlin. The hours of grace remaining to me ticked inexorably by, and the only manifest improvement in my situation was the slight amendment to Jacinthe Siani's contract that 238-Zenatta negotiated on my behalf.

The changes were cosmetic, of course; I knew as well as the Kythnan did that my chances of collecting a share of Amara Guur's profits were a good deal slimmer than a snowball's in hell.

I seriously considered the alternative, but I couldn't persuade myself of its merits. Amara Guur might be a murderous crook, but he wanted me conscious as well as alive and healthy, at least in the short term. While he still needed me, I had a chance to outwit him, and maybe even get my own back.

I knew I'd have to sign Jacinthe Siani's contract in the end, but I was determined to drag it out as long as I could.

9

When the appointed hour came, I was let out of my cell and taken to the Hall of Justice by 69-Aquila. 238-Zenatta was waiting for me there, with Jacinthe Siani and the fatal document. There was also a Tetron clerk to whom I wasn't formally introduced, because she was female—the Tetrax have strict but labyrinthine rules to regulate communication between the sexes. She and Aquila were there to witness that I was signing the contract of my own free will.

I insisted on having it read aloud, as was my right. The clerk didn't seem at all put out; I got the impression that she welcomed the opportunity to show off her perfect parole.

I didn't bother to listen—I just watched the miniunits ticking away on the wallclock's digital display.

A Tetron day is about twenty-eight Earth-standard hours. It's divided up into a hundred units, each of which is subdivided by a further hundred, so each miniunit is about ten times as long as an Earthly second. It makes Tetron clocks seem to run very slowly; waiting for the next tick can be an agonising business if you're in the wrong frame of mind.

The clerk handed the ballpoint pen to me, and pushed a fingerprint pad across the tabletop. I slowly inked my thumb, and then I looked at it very carefully. I'd given up expecting miracles; it was just that I had let the treacly quality of Tetron time get a grip on my actions.

I was just about to make my thumbprint and add my signature when the door to the Hall burst open. There was an appalling clatter of booted feet on the vitreous floor. The floor was immune to all damage, of course, but such was the racket that it was easy to imagine chips and shards flying in every direction.

Seven humans in neat black uniforms raced across the room as if they'd been entered for a sixty-metre dash with a really unpleasant booby prize for the last one to finish. I'd never actually seen one before, but I guessed immediately that the uniforms belonged to the now-legendary Star Force. Six of the starship soldiers were male, but the one in the lead was a blonde woman who gave the definite impression that her wrathful stare ought to be turning all of us to stone.

"Russell!" she howled, at the top of her strident voice. "Don't sign that paper!"

I wasn't about to quibble about the pronunciation of my name. I dropped the pen and wiped the ink from my thumb, uncaring of the fact that my trousers were fresh out of the wash.

The officer and her cohort immediately slowed to a fast walk—or, to be strictly accurate, a military march. An eighth figure stumbled through the door behind them, purple in the face with the effort of trying to keep up. It was Aleksandr Sovorov.

Jacinthe Siani looked around, as if searching for moral support, but none was available to her. She'd come alone to do a simple job—but it wouldn't have mattered if she'd had half a dozen of Amara Guur's hatchet-men with her. They could hardly have started a fight in the Hall of Justice—and if they had, they'd have lost. The blonde and her six bravos were wearing sidearms of a kind I'd never seen before, and they certainly looked as if they knew how to use them. They were warriors—and near-genocidal warriors at that.

"The deadline has expired!" Jacinthe Siani said, appealing to the clerk. "He agreed to sign. He cannot back out now!"

The blonde arrived at the foot of the platform as the Kythnan completed the plea, and vaulted up to join us. She looked hard at Jacinthe Siani, curling her lip in a manner calculated to radiate contempt; then she turned to the clerk. "I'm Star-Captain Susarma Lear, representing the United Governments and Military Forces of Earth," she said. "I demand that you release this man into my custody immediately. I hereby accept responsibility for any debts he may have incurred."

"You cannot!" Jacinthe Siani complained—but she didn't sound confident.

I looked at Aleksandr Sovorov, with a heart full of sincere affection. He'd brought the cavalry!

He had actually brought the cavalry to my rescue—or the Star Force, who were surely an order of magnitude better, considering what they had instead of horses and six-guns.

It didn't seem to be an appropriate time for legal niceties, so I grabbed the contract from the table, ripped it in half and threw it at the Kythnan's feet. "I changed my mind before the deadline expired," I said. "I accept the star-captain's offer, gladly. I can do that, can't I, Zenatta?"

238-Zenatta frowned at the omission of his number, but he was still my lawyer. "Most certainly," he said. "In view of the fact that Ms. Siani's contract only covers a fraction of my client's debt, while the star-captain is willing to accept responsibility for the whole, I submit that the administration-in-residence of Skychain City must prefer her offer, provided that the period of discharge is not excessive."

"This is not right!" Jacinthe Siani complained—but no one was listening.

"What period did you have in mind for the repayment of

Mr. Rousseau's debt, Star-Captain Lear?" the clerk inquired.

"I'll have to talk to the ship's quartermaster," the star- captain told her, "but how does a couple of hours sound? We have negotiable cargo. Your people on the satellite have already expressed a strong interest in it."

A couple of hours obviously sounded good to the clerk, but I noticed 69-Aquila frowning. When the Tetrax frown, they don't do it by halves. I thought for one crazy second that Amara Guur might have bought him too, but then I realised that it was the thought of Star-Captain Lear's "negotiable cargo" that was troubling him.

Only three or four days had passed since news of humanity's victory over the Salamandrans had reached Asgard. Hers must be a warship, fresh from a climactic battle. When she said "negotiable cargo," what she probably meant was "loot."

I resolved not to ask. It didn't seem polite, in the circumstances.

"That will be perfectly satisfactory, Star-Captain," the clerk said. "I can see no legal or moral grounds for any objection."

Jacinthe Siani opened her mouth to complain again, but she could see that it was futile. No sound came out.

"It really breaks my heart to let you down," I told her, "but I love women in uniform."

"You'll regret this," the Kythnan hissed, her composure cracking under the strain.

"I seriously doubt that," I said. "At present, I feel better than I've felt for a long time. I wish you the best of luck explaining your failure to Amara Guur."

When Jacinthe Siani had stomped off, the star-captain went into a huddle with 238-Zenatta and the clerk. In the meantime, Aleksandr Sovorov had come lumbering up the steps to join me. The six troopers stayed on the floor, in perfect military formation.

"Alex," I said, "I forgive you everything. How the hell did you manage to find her?"

"Find her?" he repeated, struggling to draw breath. "I didn't. . . find her. That . . . officious idiot. . . from Immigration Control . . . demanded that I take responsibility for her."

My feelings of gratitude shriveled a little. "So you figured that you'd palm her off on to me, as usual," I said. "Well, why not? I'm always glad to help."

He'd got his breath back by now. "Not exactly," he said. "When I found out what she wanted, I naturally told her about your situation. I thought she'd be too late to do anything about it, but she seems to be a very decisive person— and as the Hall of Justice is directly across the plaza from Immigration Control, she didn't have far to come. Mercifully."

"What do you mean, when you found out what she wanted?" I asked.

"She'd already talked to 74-Scarion, so she knew that Myrlin had been lodged with Saul Lyndrach, and that Immigration Control had been looking for both of them. He'd just told her that the outworlder had been logged out of lock five in the early hours of this morning in your truck, so . . ."

"He was what!" I screeched. My heart was still pounding from the shock of my unexpected rescue, and it wasn't ready to cope with the shock of discovering that my truck had been hijacked.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the C.R.E. man said. "Didn't anyone tell you?"

"You're the one who's supposed to be keeping me informed," I pointed out.

"Am I?" he said. "Well, I didn't know myself until the star-captain told me what 74-Scarion had told her. But as soon as I explained to her that you were here, caught up in some bizarre conspiracy, she decided to get you out."

"She decided," I echoed. "On her own?"

"Well, naturally I encouraged her to do exactly that— especially when she said that even if you'd already signed the contract to help some local gangster find whatever it is Myrlin's presumably set off to look for, she had seven flame-pistols to make sure that you didn't lift a finger on anyone's behalf but hers."

"How did he get hold of my truck?" I demanded. "It was securely locked up—and the keys were locked up too, in my room. Nobody knew the codes but me . . . well, except for ..."

"How should I know?" Sovorov interrupted, a trifle impatiently. I still felt so good about the miracle that I forgave his rudeness instantly.

"Was Saul with him when they logged out of the lock?" I asked.

"I don't know, I tell you," the scientist told me, petulantly. "He's not on the record, but if he was hiding in the back of the truck ..."

I would have pursued the matter further, but I didn't get the chance. The star-captain tapped me on the shoulder. "It's okay, Russell," she said. "You're all mine. The Tetrax will collect their pound of flesh from the spoils of Salamandra. Thank your lucky stars I got here in time. Sign these."

She presented me with a sheaf of papers. The forms were in English and Chinese; three copies of each. I looked at them uncomprehendingly. "What are they?" I asked, stupidly.

"Your conscription papers," she informed me, drily. "The Star Force is about to make a man of you, you worthless piece of low-life shit." She smiled as if she were joking.

I had a nasty suspicion that she might not be.

"I don't want. . ."I began. I gave up as the smile vanished and her bright blue eyes took on the Gorgon stare she'd used on Jacinthe Siani. I stared at the papers, wondering whether I was entitled to feel insulted. I decided that I wasn't; what she'd just done for me gave her a very healthy balance of moral credit in my memory-bank.

"No rush," said Susarma Lear. "You're drafted anyway, whether you sign them or not. No rush about signing on, that is—everything else is extremely urgent, so we'd better get going. Now"

"Didn't you tell me that your race had abandoned slavery several centuries ago?" 69-Aquila enquired interestedly.

"My mistake, apparently," I told him, by way of farewell. "I guess we're not such barbarians, after all."

10

I didn't get a commission. I didn't even get a uniform. Star-Captain Susarma Lear tucked my as-yet-unsigned conscription papers away in her trousers and led the way out of the Hall of Justice into the plaza. Basic training lasted about half a minute, and consisted of her pointing to one of her merry men and saying: "That's Lieutenant Crucero. He's second-in-command. Anything he orders you to do, you do. If you've got any questions, he or Seme will be happy to answer them, but not now. For now, I'll ask the questions. Number one: how much do you know about the android?"

"What android?"

"The big one. Goes under the name Myrlin. Currently in possession of your vehicle."

"He's not human?" I queried weakly.

"He's an android," she said. "Now cut the crap and tell me what you know about him."

I deducted a few points from her moral credit, but it still seemed very healthy.

"I've never even seen him," I told her. "I talked to him on the phone, briefly, when he first came down the chain. Immigration wanted me to take him in. I suggested they ask Saul Lyndrach. I was grumpy because I'd just been woken up. When I went to see Saul to apologise, his doorman directed me into a trap. A Spirellan named Heleb, who works for a vormyran named Amara Guur, stitched me up for killing a Sleath. Heleb murdered the Sleath himself, because his boss wants my help—my expert help. Saul had contacted the C.R.E. asking for funding, because he'd found a way down into the lower levels. My guess is that Guur went after him to find out what he'd got, but something went wrong, and now Myrlin has it. He also has my truck, which some stupid Tetron AI passed out of lock five without a murmur of protest, presumably on the feeble grounds that the truck hadn't been reported stolen and Myrlin wasn't officially registered as a wanted man. Slight concern, I think 74-Scarion said, but no formal investigation. Merde! He'll never get into my cold-suit if he's as big as they say he is. That's it. Where are we going?"

We'd paused outside the entrance to the Hall of Justice while I filled her in on the basics. We were attracting attention from the passers-by, not so much because of the black uniforms as the sidearms Alex Sovorov had called flame-pistols.

"I don't know," she replied. "You tell me."

"Up the Skychain to your ship?" I suggested. "I'm not sure how safe we are down here, after the way Jacinthe Siani looked at me before she left."

"We're not leaving the surface until we catch up with the android," she said. "You're the local expert—it's your job to lead me to him. As quickly as humanly possible. Starting now."

"I can't," I said. "He's out in the cold—and my truck's out there with him."

"In that case," she said, "we'll have to acquire another truck. Or two. Can't doesn't cut it in the Star Force, Russell. From now on, you're a can do kind of guy."

The euphoria of having been let off Amara Guur's hook was still canceling out any bad feelings such rude treatment would normally have evoked.

"We could just wait till he comes back," I suggested reasonably.

"And suppose he doesn't?"

"In that case, you could stop worrying about him, couldn't you?" I said, lightly.

Her blue eyes went steely again. Obviously, I hadn't quite mastered the niceties of military discipline and protocol.

"We need to get off the street," I told her. "You might not be a walking target, but I probably am. If Amara Guur couldn't get me, he won't want you to have me."

Her bleak eyes bored into the nooks and crannies of my soul. It was more than just an act. I realised that she was strung out as taut as a piano wire. The war might be officially over, but she hadn't stopped fighting. She obviously hadn't even paused in her fighting for a long time. "Trooper Russell," she said, "you're in the Star Force now—don't make me remind you again. Anyone who takes a shot at you takes a shot at all of us, and will be answered in kind. You seem to have enemies, but that's nothing unusual to us. We've been on our present tour of duty for nineteen months, Earth time, and we have spent that entire time fighting enemies who had the resources of whole worlds to draw upon. We have nothing to fear from the petty criminals of this ridiculous backwater."

"I understand that, Star-Captain Lear," I said soothingly, "but Amara Guur might not." I looked around for Aleksandr Sovorov, but he was nowhere to be seen. He obviously figured that he'd done his bit for the genocidal maniacs of his homeworld, and was free to resume his quiet and orderly life.

"Where can I get in touch with the local law-enforcement agency, Russell?" the star-captain said—which was a curious coincidence, because as she spoke the words my eye was caught by three Tetron peace-officers, who were making their way along the road-strip towards us with an ominously purposeful stride. Ordinarily, that would not have been a sight that caused me any anxiety, but these were not ordinary times—and they were looking right at me. I smiled at them; I still felt full of benevolence towards fate and fortune.

When I didn't answer her question, Susarma Lear looked over her shoulder, following my gaze. She smiled too, but the peace-officers ignored her as they leapt from the slow-moving strip on to solid ground.

"Are you Michael Rousseau, sir?" the spokesman said to me.

"Whatever it is," I said, "I didn't do it. I just this minute got out of jail."

"You are not under suspicion of having committed any crime, sir," the Tetron informed me, dutifully. "However, we are investigating a multiple murder, and your name has been recently linked with several of the deceased persons. This necessitates my asking you some questions. It will not be necessary for you to accompany us to our offices, provided that you have no objection to our recording your answers here."

The star-captain was giving me a rather peculiar look, as if she were wondering whether she'd accidentally conscripted Jack the Ripper.

"Who's dead this time?" I asked.

"Seven people have been killed," the policeman told me. "Three are vormyr, one is a Spirellan, one a human and two are Zabarans. Three of the persons gave evidence at your recent trial, testifying that you murdered Mr. Atmanu in their presence."

It didn't take a mathematical genius to work out who one of the victims must be. "Balidar's been murdered?" I said, weakly. "Heleb too?" I added, optimistically.

"Simeon Balidar is the dead human," the peace-officer confirmed. "The Spirellan named Lema also testified at your trial, as did the Zabaran Shian Mor."

I was disappointed to hear that Heleb wasn't numbered among the dead, but I felt free to hope that he might be grief-stricken about his little brother. "I was in jail," I repeated. "My every word has been monitored for the last five days. You know that I couldn't have had anything to do with it."

"I have already confirmed that you are not under suspicion," the Tetron reminded me, frowning as only a Tetron can frown. "All I need to know is whether you know anything that would cast light on the motive for the crime. Since you had nothing to do with it, you might perhaps be able to tell us whether anyone else had a motive."

"Right," I said. "As it happens, I do. The dead men were participants in a conspiracy to frame me for the murder of the Sleath, Atmanu. The conspiracy has just gone awry, so the person who hired them is probably trying to clear up the evidence of his crime. His name is Amara Guur. He's not one of the dead vormyr, I presume?"

The peace-officer didn't seem too happy about the content of my statement, but he recorded it meekly. "Amara Guur is not among the deceased," he confirmed.

"Pity," I said. "He's your man, then. He's already been responsible for one murder that I know of. I have no doubt at all that he's also responsible for these. I suggest that you arrest him immediately."

"Do you have any evidence to support what you say, sir?" the peace-officer asked, dutifully.

"Absolutely," I said. "The best evidence there is. I know that I didn't murder the Sleath, and that all the witnesses at my trial committed perjury in order to force me to sign a contract drawn up by Amara Guur. You should arrest a woman named Jacinthe Siani as well as Guur—she's a Kythnan. If you put your minds to it, you'll have the entire puzzle unraveled by nightfall."

The star-captain obviously wanted to get a move on. "Have you finished with this man?" she asked. "If not, you'll have to deal with me. He's a trooper in the Earth Star Force, and I'm his commanding officer. As it happens, I was hoping to talk to your commanding officer. I need your help to ascertain the whereabouts of a stolen vehicle and apprehend the thief. It's a matter of some urgency."

"I fear that I am presently engaged in a murder enquiry," the Tetron replied. "If you care to call at our headquarters, one of our officers will record your complaint and will doubtless do his best to assist you. The central police station on the far side of the plaza." He turned and pointed.

"Crucero," the star-captain said to her lieutenant. "Get over there and see what you can do to get some action out of these jumped-up monkeys."

I winced. All three peace-officers were Tetrax—perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not—and they were standing close enough to hear what she'd said. Even though she'd said it in English, they had it on tape. When they played it back, they'd be sure to have it translated—and they wouldn't like it one little bit.

I waited until they'd jumped back on the strip and had been carried away before saying, "You might want to be careful about remarks like that, Captain. The Tetrax can be touchy. They never show it, but rumour has it that they hold grudges for a long time."

"They'll help us," she assured me. "Their friends on the satellite are very interested in my cargo."

"The spoils of Salamandra?" I said. "Why would they be interested in loot picked up from the devastated homeworld

of some barbarian species from way along the rim?"

Her eyes were pure Medusa. "I'm asking the questions, Russell," she reminded me. "You're wasting time. How do we get started chasing that android?"

"If you really want to make a move," I said, "we should probably start at my place. That's where he got the keys to my lock-up, and the truck. Perhaps he left a note to apologise—maybe even to explain. At any rate, I'd like to find out what else he stole. Also, I'm hungry—and I think your men might be hungry too."

"I'll worry about my men," she said. "They're soldiers. But you're right. If that's where the trail starts, we should check it out. By the way, you were lying to the peace-officers, weren't you? You don't have the least idea who killed all those people."

"Actually, I've got a pretty good idea who killed them," I said. "But yes, I was lying—I can't believe that Amara Guur slaughtered seven of his own people. What I can believe is that he'll be even madder when Jacinthe Siani tells him the bad news about me than he was when he found out that someone else had started gunning down his henchmen. It would be nice to think that the peace-officers might take him in for questioning, although they're probably a bit too scrupulous about matters of evidence to do it on my say-so. Shall we go?"

Her Medusa stare was mingled with curiosity. She didn't know quite what to make of me. She didn't seem to approve of me, but wasn't quite ready to say so—yet.

Crucero had taken three men with him to the police station. It took twenty minutes for the remaining four of us to get back to my place, but the interval passed without any discernible assassination attempts. My room was locked, and showed no signs of having been broken into, but I

opened the door very cautiously, just in case there was anyone inside who shouldn't have been there. There was.

He was lying on my bed, but he didn't get up to greet me. He couldn't, because he was very obviously dead. It was Saul Lyndrach.

11

The peace-officers arrived in a matter of minutes to conduct their investigation. The team was headed by the same Tetron who'd spoken to us in the plaza, who obviously felt that Saul's murder was linked to the others, although he didn't explain why. He was right, of course, but he didn't seem to attach any particular significance to my confident assurance that Amara Guur was definitely responsible.

At least my own alibi was still cast iron.

It was a long afternoon, but I was eventually allowed back into my apartment. The body had been removed once the forensic team had completed their examination, and someone had tidied up. The officer who'd interrogated us was kind enough to sum up his preliminary findings.

Saul had died at approximately eleven twenty that morning, while I was still secure in my cell. Myrlin had logged out of lock five in my truck at eleven ninety-four. According to the Tetron medical examiner, Saul must have been unconscious for several Tetron units before he died. He'd lost a lot of blood. He had, apparently, been tortured for some considerable time over a period of days. He had several broken fingers and numerous electrical burns. Although he would have been able to control the pain to some degree by virtue of his internal technology, it would still have been an extremely unpleasant experience.

In the opinion of the medical examiner, the person or persons who had inflicted Saul's injuries had not been trying to kill him—in fact, he or they had been trying to keep him alive. The process must have begun, he deduced, on the same day that Saul had accepted responsibility for Myrlin the Homeless Android, probably within sixty Tetron units.

Before lapsing into unconsciousness for the last time, however, Saul—or someone with a very similar voice, in possession of all the necessary identification codes—had used my phone to make a series of purchases, including an outsized cold-suit and enough supplies to stock my truck for a couple of hundred days. In so doing, he had used up every last vestige of his—by which I mean Saul's—remaining credit. The goods had been delivered to the lockup where my truck was kept.

In the course of making these calls, Saul—or the person pretending to be him—had not requested medical assistance, but he—or the person pretending to be him—had taken the trouble to leave a message for me inscribed, in English, on the answerphone's display screen.

Dear Mike, it read,

We have no idea where you are and can't ask your permission, but we need a truck badly and we can't get to mine. After we're gone, though, mine is yours and you should have no difficulty getting to it. It's a fair trade, I think—maybe a little more than fair, to compensate for the inconvenience. All the best, Saul.

"Does that count as a will?" I asked the peace-officer. "No," he told me. "It would not matter, in any case. I shall be forced to impound the vehicle in question, on the grounds that it may contain relevant evidence. Do you know where it is?"

"No," I said. "Don't you?"

"Mr. Lyndrach's personal records have been erased. We will doubtless locate it in due course."

"As a matter of interest," I said, "what kind of gun was used to shoot the other seven victims?"

The Tetron hesitated, but he must have known that it would be on the evening news. "They were not shot to death," he admitted. "The immediate causes of death were various, but they all had numerous broken bones, caused by their being struck very powerfully with blunt instruments— or, in some instances, hurled with considerable force into solid walls."

"Right," I said. "A very violent person, Amara Guur. Very violent indeed."

My room still seemed very crowded after the Tetrax had gone, although Susarma Lear's men had waited patiently outside until the coast was clear. Crucero and his companions had returned to the fold some time ago. I hadn't heard the lieutenant make his report, but I had no difficulty imagining its contents. The Tetrax did not anticipate apprehending Myrlin any time soon. They could probably track his progress by means of one of their communication satellites, if they could identify his truck—although there were certain to be others making their way over the surface that would make identification difficult—but they had no intention of chasing him. They would wait until he returned to Skychain City and arrest him then.

Susarma Lear wasn't convinced, but she checked with me before taking any further action. "Surely they'll change their minds now that he's wanted for murder?" she said.

"He isn't wanted for murder," I told her. "He's just a potential witness. Even if he were, they wouldn't try to pursue him. It would be pointless. While he's on the surface he's visible—don't be fooled by that bullshit about not being able to identify him—but as soon as he goes down to level one he's out of reach. They'll wait for him to come back, confident in the assumption that he'll have to, sooner or later. There's nowhere else for him to go. If he doesn't come back . . . then they'll stop worrying about it."

She didn't like it, but she could see the logic of it. "Well," she said, "at least you must be keen to catch him now."

"Why?" I asked.

"Because he killed your friend," she said. "Surely you didn't believe what you told the gorilla about this Guur character having done it?"

"Amara Guur did kill Saul," I told her. "Even the Tetrax must have figured that out by now. Myrlin killed the seven guys who were busy torturing him—not, alas, before they'd gone over the top and left him beyond help. I don't know about you, but that doesn't actually fill me with indignation. You might call it murder, but I call it heroism."

Her stare wasn't quite as wrathful as before, but I figured that was because she was getting tired. She must have had a very long and trying day. "How do you know?" she said, eventually.

"Elementary logic," I said. "Saul went to the C.R.E. to ask for a loan, just as I did—but he had better bait. He knew the location of a doorway down into level five, maybe further down than that. Unfortunately, rumours of doorways down to five are a dime a dozen in these parts. Saul's neither a fool nor a con man, but when a proposition like that goes before a committee there's bound to be some idiot who'll throw a spanner in the works. Somebody there knew Saul well enough to know that he was absolutely reliable, but getting the right decision through the committee would have needed someone much tougher than Myrlin the

Superandroid. Guur knew a good thing when he heard the rumour, though, and he went after Saul.

"Unfortunately for Guur, Saul wasn't alone when the kidnappers turned up, so they had to snatch Myrlin too. Whether they threatened him with fancy blasters like yours or shot him with anaesthetic darts I don't know, but they made the mistake of keeping him alive, in case he knew anything useful.

"One way or another, Myrlin got his chance to fight back—too late to save Saul, alas. By the time he'd slaughtered the bad guys and got Saul out, Saul must have figured that he wasn't going to make it, even with the aid of Tetron medicare. He had no idea that I was in jail, so he told the android to come to me for help. Saul and I had reciprocal agreements about making use of one another's stuff if things went bad. He knew that Guur would have a heavy guard on his truck, but not on mine. I don't know whether he made the calls himself or gave Myrlin his codes, but that doesn't matter. Myrlin should have called an ambulance as soon as he got Saul out of Guur's clutches, even if Saul told him not to—but he's a stranger here, and Saul was probably insistent about the necessity of his making a clean getaway. Saul's one remaining ambition must have been to make absolutely sure that Amara Guur didn't get the big prize."

The star-captain shook her head wearily. "Jesus, Russell," she said. "What kind of madhouse is this?"

"Actually, it's Rousseau," I said. "As in Jean-Jacques."

She looked at me uncomprehendingly.

"Du contrat social," I said, helpfully. "Discours sur les sciences et les arts. That Rousseau. Not Russell." I could tell that it meant nothing to her; the French was just so much gibberish to her uneducated ears, and eighteenth-century philosophy obviously wasn't numbered among her personal interests. But she did catch on to the fact that she'd got my name wrong.

"Jesus, Rousseau" she said scrupulously, "we've got more important things to worry about than how you spell your name. So where do you fit in?"

It was a good question. Why, given that he must already have had Saul Lyndrach safe in his evil clutches—or so he must have assumed—had Amara Guur bothered to send Heleb and Lema to my apartment to make me a polite offer? And why, after a few more hours had elapsed but long before Myrlin had run amok, had he decided that the polite offer had been too tentative and that more extreme measures were required?

"Saul wasn't giving in," I said. "Maybe Guur figured that the only way to put pressure on a man like him was by threatening his friends."

"That doesn't sound very convincing," she observed accurately.

"You haven't actually told me yet what your interest in Myrlin is," I countered.

Her tone frosted over. "In the Star Force, Trooper Rousseau, it's the officers who ask the questions."

I decided to be generous and forgive her; it was, after all, only a few hours since she'd saved my life. "No problem," I said, stoutly. "But we all need something to eat. I'm not sure my kitchen can cater for this many—might I suggest that you send your loyal lieutenant out for a takeaway?"

She didn't like my tone, but she saw the merit in the suggestion, and she was still leaning over backwards to be diplomatic—by her meagre standards—because I was the one with all the local knowledge she needed so badly.

She sent the sergeant out to buy some food, with a couple of men to help him carry it. I didn't have enough

chairs for the rest of us to sit down, but the troopers were obviously used to roughing it. They made no objection when the star-captain and I sat down on the bed.

"Fire away," I said.

She frowned at my choice of words, but she had more important things on her mind than criticising my sense of humour.

12

"What are these levels you keep talking about?" was the star-captain's first question.

I was mildly astonished. I knew that she'd only arrived on Asgard that day, but I'd assumed that she must know something about it. I'd assumed, in fact, that everyone in the universe must know something about Asgard, even if they had been busy for most of their adult lives fighting an interstellar war.

"This is an artefact, not a planet," I said. "It might have a planet inside it, but all the bits we have access to are artificial. The outer surface is a shell—one of a series of shells nested one inside another like the layers of an onion. Nobody knows how many shells there are. The levels are the spaces between them, which are fitted out as sets of habitats—four or five to a level—with seemingly independent ecospheres. The differences between them are subtle, but they seem to fill a similar spectrum to that of so-called Gaia-clone ecospheres . . . the worlds in which humanoids live. We know of hundreds of negotiable portals down to level one; they're easy enough to find. We know of a dozen that give access to level two, and a handful that let us down to three and four—but the further down you go, the more difficult it is to explore further. They're very, very cold. People lived there once, but they all went away."

"Where to?" she wanted to know.

"Opinions differ. Some think they went lower down, sealing themselves in against whatever catastrophe devastated the upper layers. Some think they went outwards, maybe to colonize all the gaiaformable worlds in the galactic arm— which would make them the ancestors of the present galactic so-called civilization."

"How long ago did all this happen?"

"Again, opinions differ. The evidence seems to be ambiguous, although you'd have to ask a C.R.E. scientist for details. Millions of years ago, at least—maybe hundreds of millions, or billions."

"And you say it's got a planet inside it?"

"No, I said that it might have a planet inside it. It's possible that there are only half a dozen shells, built as a succession of platforms on a natural surface. On the other hand, it might be shells all the way down to the centre . . . well, not all the way down, because that would be impossible. Maybe there's a core of molten iron, as there would be at the centre of a planet. Maybe there's some kind of giant fusion reactor—a starlet. That would make the megastructure into a kind of multiple Dyson sphere. Nobody knows, although everyone is trying to find out. In the meantime, we search the habitats on the accessible levels for clues, and for new technologies. The Tetrax are very interested in the spectrum of humanoid technologies. Even when they already have gadgets of their own for doing the same jobs, they like to study all the different ways there are of doing things. They're very big on matters of technological style. That's why they're interested in your cargo, I presume."

"I see," she said. She didn't. My explanation had been the barest thumbnail sketch; I'd hardly scratched the surface of the fabulous enigma that was Asgard.

The food arrived then, so we took a break. It didn't last long. She was still avid to get on, even though she seemed to have accepted the fact that it was now too late to do anything before morning. I was tired, and so were her men, but she had far too much agitation churning in her skull to allow her to think of sleep just yet. Her men made themselves as comfortable as they could on the floor, where there was just enough space for them all to lie down, given a certain amount of geometrical ingenuity, but she and I kept going.

"So you've been out into these levels before—dozens of times, or hundreds?" she asked me, still trying to grasp the situation into which she'd rushed.

"Must be nearly a hundred by now," I confirmed. "I've been here a long time. Mickey Finn and I were among the first humans to get here. It seemed like a big adventure. It was a big adventure. Those were the glory days of star travel—I guess things must have changed a great deal since the war broke out."

"That's good," she said. "We're going to need an experienced man. We'll be depending on you, Rousseau. The Star Force will be depending on you. The human race will be depending on you. So how soon can we get started? And when I say how soon} I want to take your first estimate, cut it in half, and then shave a bit more off."

"I don't have a truck any more," I pointed out, a trifle disingenuously. "Even if I did, I couldn't track Myrlin over the surface. The Tetrax might be willing—and they're certainly able—to tell you where he is until he goes down to level one, but after that, it'd be hopeless."

"We'll have to take him out from space, then," she said. "We can do that."

"No you can't," I told her. "The Tetrax won't permit that. They might help you to chase him, but shooting at the surface from orbit is absolutely out of the question."

"Nothing is absolutely out of the question," she assured me, "but we need to stay on the right side of the Tetrax if we can. So we get them to help us track him. We chase him. We follow him down into the levels. What next? And I don't want to hear the word can't."

"What do you expect me to do—follow his footprints in the snow?"

"If that's what's necessary," she said. "And don't ever lie to me again, Trooper Rousseau. I don't like it. Believe me, now you're in the Star Force, you don't want to get on the wrong side of your commanding officer. How soon can we get the truck ready to depart?"

She was crazy, but she wasn't a fool. I saw my mistake immediately. I'd told the Tetron peace-officer that I didn't know where Saul's truck was, but I'd told her en passant that he and I had had a reciprocal arrangement. He'd had the codes necessary to get into my apartment and secure my keys. I had the codes necessary to get into his and secure his.

It occurred to me then that the peace-officer must also have known that I was lying. He hadn't taken the trouble to ask me where the truck was in the hope that I'd tell him, but in order to let me know that he didn't have it.

The Tetrax had no intention of chasing Myrlin—but they had no objection to letting me do it, if I were crazy enough. Their hands might be tied by their own law, but they must have figured out by now that Saul Lyndrach had really been on to something, and they didn't want some mysterious outworlder monopolizing the discovery any more than they wanted Amara Guur to get his dirty hands on it. The game was bigger than I'd imagined—and the bigger it got, the smaller its hapless pawns came to seem.

"Merde," I murmured.

"Never mind that," the star-captain said, mistaking the reason for my distress. "How soon can we start?"

"What are you going to do with the android if you catch him?" I wanted to know.

"Kill him," she replied. It didn't surprise me.

"Why?"

"How many times do I have to tell you, Trooper? I give orders; you follow them. How soon?"

"I still say that it's impossible. If he knows we're following—and he's bound to suspect that someone will, even if he doesn't know you're here—he'll cover his tracks."

"In that case," she said, "we'll have to make sure we use a big enough bomb to get him while we still can." She was smiling, but I knew that she was threatening me. If I wasn't going to help her, she was implying, then she would have to take extreme measures, no matter what the cost.

I'd already concluded that she was crazy, but I hadn't quite realised how crazy she was. She still had a big moral credit balance, though. I had to try to help.

"The Tetrax really aren't going to let you bomb Asgard," I told her, as gently as I could. "Even if you can pinpoint Myrlin's position without their help, they'll put political pressure on your commander that he'd be insane to resist. Having just brought one humanoid species to the brink of extinction, you're probably prepared to take on anyone and anything by the same means, but the United Governments and Military Forces really wouldn't like it if you upset the Tetrax. They have a lot of friends. We're effectively outnumbered by . . . oh, let's say five hundred million to one, although that may be a conservative estimate, given that we don't really know how far around the rim galactic civilization extends. You have big responsibilities, Star-Captain Lear, and I know you want to discharge them sensibly. You've come to me for local knowledge. So trust me when I tell you you'll need to think long and hard before you so much as take the safety-catch off your flame-pistol while you're on Asgard. If you're lucky, the peace-officers won't have left any recording devices behind to spy on this conversation—and if you're really lucky, they won't take it seriously even if they did—but if I were you, I'd stop talking about the possibility of your starship opening fire. It isn't going to happen."

The silence that descended then seemed very heavy indeed. It was as if the sleeping troopers had stopped breathing—as if they were spellbound, waiting for the star-captain to explode.

She didn't. "Trooper Rousseau," she said. "This is a private conversation, protected by military confidentiality. I'm just trying to impress upon you the seriousness of our mission. We need that android dead—and when I say we, I mean the human race. I have to kill him—and you're right. I need you to tell me how to do it, so I'm being extra nice to you. But if you don't start being a lot more helpful, you have no idea of the depth of the trouble you'll be in. So tell me—when do we start?"

There are some people you just can't argue with. Not all of them are Tetrax. I had already started formulating a timetable in my head when I was interrupted by the trill of the wallphone.

I leapt to my feet, extremely grateful for the opportunity to get away from Susarma Lear, if only for a moment. I tripped over three recumbent troopers on my way to the phone, but I got there in the end.

My gratitude drained away as soon as the caller's image appeared on the viewscreen. It was a vormyran.

All vormyr look alike to the inexpert human eye, but I didn't need three guesses to figure out who this one was.

"Michael Rousseau?" he inquired, in awkwardly broken parole. "My name is Amara Guur. We need to talk."

13

Politeness required that I should switch on the eye above my own phone so that Amara Guur could see me too, but I didn't bother. I felt that I could happily live out my life without ever letting him see my face.

"What do you want?" I asked harshly.

He smiled. Unusual for humanoids, the vormyr are a predatory species, irredeemably carnivorous. I'd been told that they had very bad breath, and it was easy enough to imagine that, even though I was only looking at a picture. Guur looked like a cross between a wolf and a crocodile, slightly favouring the reptilian side of the family. It wasn't a harmonious combination. His smile was unattractive in the extreme.

"I'd like to discuss some matters of mutual interest, if you're willing."

"I'm not," I told him.

He didn't seem put out.

"I can understand that," he said. "It has come to my attention that you feel that I am in some way responsible for your recent troubles. I can assure you that I am not, but I should like to make a gesture of good will in any case—a small gift, to assure you of my friendship. It cannot make up for your unfortunate experience, of course, but I think you might be very glad to receive it." His accent wasn't incomprehensible once I'd got used to it.

"I don't want it," I said.

"I think that you do," he retorted. "In any case, it belongs to you by reason of both legal and moral entitlement—if, as I understand, you are the sole beneficiary of Saul Lyndrach's will. Not that I had anything to do with his unfortunate demise, of course—I have offered the peace- officers my full co-operation in the matter of apprehending the homicidal giant."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded. I had to use the English word for "hell," but he got my drift. He smiled again.

"It is a small item that . . . happened to come into my possession." So saying, he lifted something up to his phone's eye so that I could see it. It was a black-bound notebook. It had to be Saul's log, containing his personal record of his last trip. It had to contain the location of the doorway down to level five—encrypted, I presumed. Obviously, Simeon Balidar hadn't been able to decipher it, and Saul hadn't been willing to divulge the key even under extreme pressure. Amara Guur obviously thought that I had a better chance of cracking the code—which explained why he thought we should talk, but not why he was apparently ready to make me a gift of the book, and to risk displaying it on a phone-channel that was almost certainly being monitored by the police. I presumed that he was lying, laying down bait for the next phase of the game.

"Put it in the post," I said.

"We don't have time," he replied. "I can send it by courier, or you can come and collect it, as you please. To be perfectly honest, I would rather not run the risk of a courier being intercepted by . . . other interested parties. If you would care to name a public meeting-place, where two innocent citizens could meet without fear of interference, I shall be happy to bring it there myself. You are welcome to bring your military escort with their flame-pistols at the ready. If it will help you to reach a decision, your companions might care to know that it will assist them greatly in their pursuit of the multiple murderer Myrlin."

Susarma Lear had overheard every word. She shouldered me out of the way, and said: "I'll be in that square near the foot of the skychain in whatever the local equivalent of twenty Earth minutes is," she said. "On the steps of the building where we found Rousseau this morning. Don't keep me waiting too long."

"I am delighted to know that Mr. Rousseau has such decisive friends," the vormyran said. "I look forward to meeting you in person."

He broke the contact.

"Thanks a lot," I said. "He might still have time to set up a trap, even on the steps of the Hall of Justice. It's nighttime out there, you know."

"Don't be paranoid," she said. "Anyway, you don't have to go. I'll even leave Serne to look after you, if you want." While she was speaking, she started kicking her men, although most of them had been woken up when I tripped over them on the way to the phone, and they'd all started paying attention when she'd walked over them to shoo me out of the way.

"It can't be as straightforward as it seems," I said. "If that book has directions to where Myrlin's going, why would Guur hand it over to us?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "But I know the easiest way to find out. Are you ready to go?"

"You just said I didn't have to!"

"Yes, I did—but that's like accusing you of being a coward. You're a trooper in the Star Force now, Rousseau— when someone suggests that you might be a coward, you're supposed to show them that they're wrong. That's a little local knowledge for your edification. Now move." Her men didn't seem in the least perturbed by the fact that they'd only had the briefest of cat-naps. They were already moving.

"Do I get a flame-pistol?" I asked, bitterly.

"Not yet," she said. "But if you come through this little expedition like a good Star Force man, I'll think about it."

We attracted a certain amount of attention as we made our way through the streets, even though it was the dead of night. The Tetrax set the clocks, but other species' circadian rhythms weren't always able to comply. There were enough people about to be seriously inconvenienced as we hurried along, considerably faster than the moderate pace at which the road-strips ran. Usually, people who ran on the moving strips, barging past other pedestrians, attracted a continual barrage of loud complaints, but there's something about bulky sidearms that reduces all complaints to mute resentful stares. We attracted a good many of those.

As we went, the star-captain made further plans.

"Okay, Rousseau," she said. "How many people can we get into this truck of Lyndrach's?"

"It's a small one—built to carry two, although it can take three," I told her.

"Shit," she said. "We're going to need another."

I was amazed. "Do you know how much a truck costs?" I asked.

"No," she said, "but I'll pay it. I'm not chasing the android with only you and Crucero as back-up. If you've read this situation right, he killed seven men with his bare hands and whatever blunt instruments he was able to pick up. It's okay—my quartermaster's already dickering with the Tetrax. We'll all need suits, too. You'd better start making up a list of equipment."

"You've never been out in the cold," I said. "You have no idea what it's like. It's dangerous out there, especially for novices."

"Do you think it isn't dangerous wearing all the kinds of suits we've had to wear these last ten years?" she said, contemptuously. "Do you think it wasn't dangerous going down to the surface of Salamandra after the bombardment? Believe me, Rousseau—you don't know what real scavenging is. Make the list, and get it right. Let me worry about the cost and the hazards."

I made the list. I started while we were still on the strip, and I managed to complete it within five minutes of arriving at the plaza. The star-captain gave it to Crucero and told him to take care of it, as soon as possible. She sent all but two of her troopers to help him. The two that remained were Serne and an Oriental named Khalekhan. I thought she might be going out of her way to prove that she wasn't afraid of any trap that the likes of Amara Guur could spring, but I had to admit that they both looked as if they meant business once they had their flame-pistols drawn. In theory, that was illegal, but there wasn't a peace-officer in sight, even though we were in full view of the central police station and the night shift was on duty. The Tetrax seemed perfectly content to let us do whatever it was the star- captain felt she had to do. I didn't doubt that they were looking on, from a discreet distance, and that Amara Guur would know that too, but I was still anxious.

There were no vormyr in the plaza either. There was nothing to do but wait. The plaza was the largest open space in the city, directly under the pole of the dome. The Skychain shot up like an infinite glittering arrow from the base-station a couple of hundred metres away; it was an impressive sight, even in the muted light, but the star-captain didn't bother gawking at it. She was looking from side to side, scanning the passers-by on the roadstrip.

When we'd been there about ten minutes, a Campanulan lost his balance transferring from the faster strip to the slower one and fell with his legs on one and his torso on the other. He brought down half a dozen people of assorted races who were standing on the slower strip while the faster one dragged him along—if it had been mid-morning, he'd have skittled a hundred or more. Somebody must have dropped something into the crack between the strips, because the roller gears suddenly started making an awful noise. The safety-relays immediately stopped both strips.

"Does that happen often?" the star-captain asked.

"Not at night," I told her. "Twice or three times a day, when the lights are on. It's okay. The repair crew will come out even at this hour. If they don't fix it in time, we'll only have to walk to the next intersection to get a ride home."

She had tensed up when the accident happened; her eyes were darting back and forth, as if she expected soldiers with blazing guns to emerge from the shadows at any moment, although the pedestrians had meekly accepted the necessity of using their own muscle-power and were proceeding about their business in good order. I hoped that she hadn't actually released the safety-catch on her weapon.

"That's the repair crew coming now," I told her, pointing to the approaching team. "Those aren't weapons they're carrying. Take it easy, will you? It doesn't look as if anyone's trapped an arm or a leg, so it'll just be a matter of minutes."

I could see that she was trying to relax, but she wasn't finding it easy.

I heard a faint hiss coming from the top of the stairs and turned round. The doors of the Hall of Justice had been closed when we arrived, but one stood ajar now, and there was a face peering around it. I thought at first that it was a human face, but then I realised that it was a Kythnan.

Amara Guur had lied. He hadn't come in person—he'd sent Jacinthe Siani instead. I wasn't in the least disappointed.

14

As soon as I looked around, Susarma Lear followed the direction of my gaze—and as soon as she saw the other woman, she went up the steps two at a time. Her men followed, guns leveled. They checked the dark vestibule very carefully, then went to look into the gloomy hall—but it seemed that the Kythnan was alone. Susarma Lear patted her down personally, but she was unarmed too.

"Your friends are drawing attention to us, Mr. Rousseau," Jacinthe Siani said, when I arrived on the top step.

I kept my distance from her as I said: "That's okay. The Tetrax are keeping their distance, for the time being. They always take a tentative approach when they don't understand what's going on—or when they want someone else to take their risks for them. Where does Guur want us to go now?"

"You have a suspicious mind, Mr. Rousseau," she said. "I merely came to make a delivery."

"So where is it?" I asked, glancing at Susarma Lear. The star-captain shook her head, to indicate that the Kythnan didn't have anything substantial concealed in her neatly tailored clothing.

"You will find the notebook in the Hall," the Kythnan said. "Look on the platform where you so nearly signed the contract I offered you. There is a niche in the clerk's podium. You might want to hurry—it would be unfortunate if the night-watchman were to be roused from his peaceful slumber and stumble across it by accident."

Serne made as if to grab the Kythnan as she moved to go, but the star-captain said: "Let her go. If she's lying, there's no point in holding on to her." I watched the femme fatale trip down the steps, as if she hadn't a care in the world.

Khalekhan was already moving through the inner door into the deserted Hall. He moved his gun slowly back and forth. There was only a single light burning, but it was enough to let us see that no one was lurking in the hall. Save for our footfalls, the whole building was silent; one thing that could be said for the Tetron criminal justice system was that it didn't encourage heavy traffic. The jail had been empty when I left, and it was apparently still empty. Serne and Khalekhan covered the star-captain from the doorway as she made her way to the podium. Saul Lyndrach's notebook was exactly where Jacinthe Siani had said it would be; Susarma Lear picked it up and looked at it quizzically before jumping back down to the floor.

"You can look at it later, Rousseau," she said, when I extended my hand to take it from her. "Let's get out of here and find somewhere where the lights are bright enough to read by."

"I'll look at it as we go," I said.

She shrugged her shoulders and let me take it, but she held on to it just long enough before letting go to let me know that, in her opinion, I ought to be grateful for the favour.

I flipped the notebook open and angled the page toward the meagre light, eager to get an impression of what it contained even if I couldn't read every word. In spite of the gloom, one glance was enough to tell me why Simeon Balidar had told Amara Guur that it might be a good idea to send Heleb round to see me—and why, when Saul hadn't cracked under the threat of being slowly torn apart and permanently crippled, Balidar had suggested to Guur that he had better increase the pressure.

Saul's notes weren't written in code. They were written in French.

Out of the two hundred or so humans living in Skychain City, there'd be dozens who spoke Spanish or Chinese, and more than a handful who spoke Russian or Japanese, but French was a different matter.

Myrlin, I remembered, had been able to speak English, Russian, and Chinese, but not French. Myrlin had got Saul out before Saul lapsed into unconsciousness, though— which had been long enough for Saul to tell him the codes he needed to sneak into my apartment and order a ton of equipment. It had probably been long enough for Saul to make other provisions, too. Maybe he had had time to explain to Myrlin how to read the score-marks that he left when he was out in the cold, to make sure that he could always find his way back to his starting-point, and where to look for them . . . and, most important of all, where to start. More probably, he had made a tape of the relevant information, whose instructions Myrlin would have to follow as best he could. It wouldn't be easy for Merlin to retrace Saul's last journey with the aid of that sort of information, and he wouldn't be able to do it quickly. Anyone chasing him, with instructions of their own in hand, would have a chance to catch up with him. The star-captain's near- impossible mission suddenly seemed practicable—with my expert help.

"Come on, damn you," my commanding officer ordered— and like a loyal Star Force man, I obeyed.

"Well," she said, as soon as we were out in the open and hurrying along a static pavement. "What is it?"

I explained what it was, and why I had been the only man on Asgard, so far as Amara Guur knew, who could read it. I didn't bother adding the rider that it was at least possible that there might be another French speaker around by now, on the crew of her trusty warship; it wasn't a train of thought I wanted her to follow, if it could possibly be avoided.

"It will help us to catch him, won't it?" she said.

"Yes," I said. "He's got a long head start, but we'll still be traveling at a good pace when he has to slow down. Now that we can figure out exactly where he's going, we can probably catch him."

"In which case," Serne put in, "he'll go somewhere else."

"I don't think so," I said. "The miracle is that there's anywhere at all to go. I'm going to have to read through this very carefully, but if what Jacinthe Siani told me is true and there really is a way down to the lower levels that no one's found before, that's what he'll aim for. It's his only chance of avoiding the necessity of having to come back—or of finding something so valuable that the Tetrax will protect him against you."

"That's good," the star-captain said, after checking with Crucero. "We'll have the equipment and supplies ready not long after dawn. We'll start immediately—we can catch up on our sleep in relays, once we're on the move."

"What I can't understand," I said, pensively, "is why Guur would just hand it over to us."

"Because the android got a head start," she told me. "And because he knows that we'll chase the android, now we have the means to do it. He intends to chase us."

It was obvious, of course—just as it was obvious, to me if not to her, that while the star-captain had been patting Jacinthe Siani down, the Kythnan had probably sprinkled half a dozen showerproof bugs in her bright blonde hair. I thought about mentioning that, but decided against it. After all, she was the commanding officer, and the one who was determined to track Myrlin down. The moment she caught up with him—if she caught up with him—she intended to gun him down. That was the extent of her interest in him.

At which point, I figured, she would want to bring her men safely back to Skychain City. All her men. But I had Saul Lyndrach's notebook now, and I was probably the only man on Asgard, for the moment, who could read it. I didn't really care one way or the other what happened to Myrlin, even though I had nothing against him personally—but I did care a great deal about what happened to me, and that notebook, after Susarma Lear had collected her bounty.

I hadn't gone within two metres of Jacinthe Siani; she hadn't had a chance to bug my hair. If it should happen that the star-captain and I were separated somehow, down in the levels, she would be the one that Amara Guur would track—which was only fair, considering that she had all the flame-pistols. I was the one with the local knowledge, and I was the one who had always been destined to find a way to the centre of Asgard. That was my business, whether I'd been drafted or not—and I hadn't actually signed the papers, because Susarma Lear was in too much of a hurry to bother with formalities of that sort.

My conscience was clear—or clearish, at any rate. When the time came, I intended to desert my newfound compatriots and go my own way.

Susarma Lear was right to hurry, though, just as Amara Guur had been right to hand over the notebook to me. If it had fallen into Tetron hands, it would only have been a matter of time before they found someone else to read it for them. If it fell into Tetron hands now, the whole game might be over—but the Tetrax didn't know that. They were playing it the clever way, like the civilized folk they were. Slave-owners always get other people to do their dirty work, if they can.

I figured that there had to be a microtransmitter or two in the book as well, and that Amara Guur must be reckoning on tracking me by that means—but I had faith in my memory and my suit's tape-recorder. Even before the time came to dump the star-captain and her merry men, I figured I'd jettison the book. It would be a risk, but a worthwhile one. After all—the prize that was at stake was the ultimate prize, the one I'd been after all my life.

It was mine, by rights. I was Saul's legitimate heir. He and I had had an arrangement. And I was the one who had passed the android on to him, even if the resultant rescue had come a little too late. That was his fault, in a way. If he'd only told me what he had before he went to the C.R.E., so that we could tackle the problem together, everything would probably have been all right.

Not that I blamed him, of course. If I'd been in his shoes, I probably wouldn't have done anything differently— except, of course, break under torture and hand the whole thing over to Amara Guur.

15

Everything took a little longer than Susarma Lear had hoped, but we logged out of lock five thirty units after Life Support and Regulation were scheduled to switch on the city's "daylight." Outside, it was about thirty Earthly hours short of dawn.

We headed north across the vast plain that surrounded the city on all sides.

Serne and the star-captain were riding with me in Saul's truck. Crucero, Khalekhan, and a man named Vasari were following in the second vehicle. We had radio communication with the other truck, and with Susarma Lear's warship, which had left its dock at the top of the skychain in order to mount a discreet and distant search for Myrlin's truck. It wasn't that we didn't trust the Tetrax to pass on any information gleaned from their satellites, of course; we were just taking extra precautions.

The headlights of the truck played upon a near-featureless white carpet. Any tracks left by other trucks had been quickly covered by the ever-swirling snow. On the surface, of course, the snow was real snow: just water, with hardly any pollutants. All the other components of the atmosphere were gaseous; they provided the wind.

"Jesus, Rousseau," Susarma Lear said, after we'd been traveling for a couple of hours. "This is a really weird place." She was sitting beside me, staring through the canopy at the distant horizon. There were two bunks in the rear, so she could have gone to sleep, but she still hadn't managed to wind down enough to get past her insomnia. She had ordered Serne to go to sleep, but she was intent on taking a driving-lesson first.

"Pretty weird," I admitted. "It seems that hardly anyone lived on the outside, back in the good old days. Things grew here, apparently, but it must have been a wholly artificial biosphere. It was as complicated as any Gaian system, even though it didn't have the same habitat-range—in the absence of mountains and seas it was spread as thin as margarine on a workhouse loaf. Its biochemical relics are still detectable, including seeds and spores of various kinds, but it's all dead and mostly in a fairly advanced state of decay."

"How do you find your way around?"

"Satellites and location-finders. If your equipment fails, though, you can navigate by the stars, provided that you can recognise the markers. It isn't quite as flat as it looks hereabouts—there are troughs and hollows as well as gentle contours. You'll see that better when the sun rises and the snow begins to melt."

"There aren't that many stars," she observed. "Are we looking out from the edge of the galaxy, or is it just dust?"

"A bit of both," I said. "That's intergalactic space all right, but if it weren't for the dust you could pick out other galaxies with the naked eye. You can't see the black one, though—not without an X-ray 'scope."

"What black one?" she asked.

I looked sideways at her. "You really have led a sheltered life, haven't you? All war, war, and yet more war, ever since you were a little girl. You know nothing about Asgard, nothing about the black galaxy ..."

"So educate me," she said. I'd shown her all the truck's controls—they weren't complicated—but she was still hungry for learning.

"It's the modest member of our little local cluster," I told her. "It's about a hundred and twenty thousand light- years away, closer than the Magellanic clouds, but much more discreet. It's getting even closer—heading towards us at something like thirty thousand metres per second. It'll take a hundred million years or so to get here, so we don't have to worry about it yet . . . unless, of course, we're prepared to take a very long view of the future. It's mostly just a heterogeneous cloud of dust, like the ones inside the galaxy, but it's big. It has a very low mean temperature, but there are a few stars inside it. Eventually, it will engulf the whole galactic arm, like a cosmic shadow or a subtle fog. Life on Gaia-clone planets will probably go on much as usual for long time after the eclipse starts, but the dust's not entirely placid. There'll be plenty of scope for cosmic catastrophes, both like and unlike the one that probably overcame Asgard."

"Which was?"

"I told you," I reminded her. "Opinions vary. The majority view is that Asgard—or the world that provided the raw materials from which Asgard was constructed—ran into a cold cloud, mostly hydrogen but with a lot of thinly-distributed cosmic debris, cometary ices and the like. Over a period of time, the atmosphere soaked up more and more of it. If proto-Asgard had a primary in those days, as it most probably did, its light must have been severely weakened, and it may have begun behaving strangely. The people must have had a few hundred thousand years notice, at least. Time enough to take elaborate countermeasures.

"The theorists who think that Asgard is just a planet with a few extra crusts built on top of its mantle figure that the task of modifying the world was a relatively simple and straightforward one. Those who think that they used the raw material of a whole planetary family to build shells around the star—or maybe around an artificial star—tell a much longer and more elaborate tale. Anyway, the response doesn't seem to have been entirely successful. In the short term, it was probably a triumph . . . but if you extend your history far enough, something always goes awry in the end. One way or another, the surface biosphere gave up the ghost. The uppermost levels were abandoned to the creeping cold.

"A few million years passed ... or more than a few. Hundreds or thousands of millions, maybe. A long, dark, deep-frozen night. Then, one way or another, Asgard acquired a new primary. The likelier alternative is that it simply drifted into the new sun's gravity-well and was captured, but the more adventurous theorists have wilder explanations. Anyway, the atmosphere warmed up again. The Tetrax are trying hard to get the ecosphere kick-started, but it won't be the same biosphere if and when they do. It'll be a new artefact—but it might allow humanoids to roam around on the surface again, in a few thousand years' time. By then, the upper levels will probably be functional again too. Lots of prime real-estate—enough to accommodate entire species, with all their ecospherical baggage. Unless, of course, the people who owned it before come back to claim it."

She was struggling to get to grips with the catalogue of possibilities. "So the most likely story," she said, "is that this was once a planet just like Earth—until it needed shielding from some kind of. . . cosmic threat. At which point its inhabitants built several layers of armour around it."

Her choice of vocabulary was revealing—but she was fresh from smashing up a planet.

"We haven't found any guns," I told her. "There's no evidence that Asgard was a fortress."

"No?" she said sceptically. "It's a steel ball the size of a giant planet, and when you scratch the surface you find another steel ball inside it, and then another . . . except that scratching the surface is all you've done. A trapdoor here, a trapdoor there, all going down into the living-quarters. What makes you think that the guns aren't all around us, securely locked away?"

Asgard certainly wasn't made of steel, but I didn't want to quibble about trivia. "The Tetrax," I said, "think it was all a matter of cosmic dust clouds and natural catastrophes. The habitats they've explored seem to have been occupied by closely-related but distinct species, living harmoniously together."

"There you are, then," she said. "Good neighbours need common enemies. Stands to reason."

"Not on Asgard, it doesn't," I contradicted her. "There are hundreds of different species here, living together more-or-less peacefully . . . except for the vormyr, and the Spirellans . . . and the humans." I could see why she might think that my argument wasn't very strong, given what we'd all been through in the last couple of days.

"You say the planet drifted into this system," she said. "Where from?"

I shrugged. "Nobody knows," I said, "but there's not that much dust in the immediate vicinity, so it must have come a long way—maybe as far as that" I pointed upwards.

"The black galaxy?"

"It seems unlikely, given the pace it would have to have traveled—but there are some very adventurous theorists on the fringes of the C.R.E. Some suggest that the outer layers might have been abandoned for the duration of the voyage, but now that Asgard's reached its destination they'll be looking to come up from the depths again some time soon.

And by the time the black galaxy looks like it's catching up with them, a hundred million years down the line, they'll doubtless be moving on again, towards the far rim—carefully skirting the black hole in the middle. All type two civilizations are nomads, they reckon. They're really looking forward to the day of re-emergence, because they reckon that what we'll learn will be our ticket to type two status ... or, to be strictly accurate, the Tetrax's ticket to type two status."

"But you don't believe that."

"I try to keep an open mind," I told her. "One day, I'll find out the truth; in the meantime, I'm willing to be patient."

"How are they supposed to have moved the world out of one galaxy and into another?"

"Some application of the frame force we haven't figured out yet. Our starships can only make starship-sized whizz-bangs, but the limit's in the hardware, not the physics—or so I'm assured. I can't handle the math myself."

"I think it's a matter of energy-expense," she said. "To make a teleportal capable of swallowing a planet, you'd need the energy of a small star inside your planet. . . which is presumably why some of your local theorists think there is a small star inside the artefact, not just a boring old planetary core."

She was beginning to enter into the spirit of the enterprise. Given long enough, I figured that I really might be able to educate her in the Romance of Asgard.

"You've got it," I said. "Back home, we only have little fusion reactors—but again, the limit's in the hardware, not the physics. Even nature can make stars. Who knows what type two civilizations might be able to do, given that they're defined as the kinds of civilizations that make use of the entire energy-output of a star."

"Except that we haven't found any yet."

" Yet being the operative word. All the humanoids in our neighbourhood are babes-in-arms, just like us . . . and none of them could even dream, as yet, of building something like Asgard."

"Not even the Tetrax," she said thoughtfully.

"Not even the Tetrax," I agreed. "But they're the ones who own Asgard, or think they do. They get other people to do their spadework for them, because it makes for harmonious relationships with the other local species, and because that's the way their minds work. They think that if they sit back and relax in Skychain City, everything will come back to them in its own time. So far, it always has."

"Nobody else ever had a warship in orbit around the world," Susarma Lear observed, in a carefully neutral manner.

"It's not as simple as that," I said. "You might have trashed Salamandra, but we're not nearly ready to take on any of our other neighbours, let alone all of them."

"I know that," she assured me. "Still—that little black book could be valuable, couldn't it? If your friend Saul really did find what he thinks he found, that is."

"I've glanced through the relevant pages," I told her. "As soon as your man's had enough sleep to take the driving-seat, I'm going to look at it a little more closely, and as soon as I've caught up with my own sleep I'm going to give it my fullest attention. It's not exactly an autobiography written for publication—it's a set of directions Saul thought he'd be following himself, and didn't particularly want anyone else to be able to follow—but if it means what I think it means, Saul really did find a way down . . . not to five, but much further. To somewhere warm."

"Well, if there's a little star in the middle of the artefact," the star-captain said brutally, "I should think it would be warm down there. It gets very hot if you burrow down far enough on Earth, and that's only molten iron."

"Actually," I said, "chaud is only one of the words he used. The other was vif. That means alive. If he meant it literally ..."

"I'm under orders here, Rousseau," she said, after a moment's hesitation. "Just like you. Our objectives are limited. Once the android is dead . . . well, I have obligations to my men as well as to my superior officers. I'm not going chasing wild geese, Rousseau—let's be clear about that. Neither are you."

That's what you think, I thought—but what I said was: "Yes, captain. Understood."

16

Actually, I did understand. I could see that the star-captain's priorities were bound to be different from mine. She had orders to follow, and she was on some kind of mopping-up mission in the wake of what must have been a very nasty conflict. Even so, she'd shown a glimmer of interest, a hint of vulnerability. I resolved to work on her again—but I knew that the chance wouldn't arise for a while. She went back to her bunk long before Serne woke up, and by the time he came to take over the wheel I was utterly exhausted. I didn't have the energy to give him much of a driving lesson, but he assured me that a truck was a truck, so I left him to it. The star-captain moved in her sleeping bag as I went back into the cabin, but she didn't wake up. Whatever nightmare she was dreaming had her securely in its grip.

I couldn't keep my eyes open; the notebook would have to wait.

I slept for eight hours, but the star-captain was still asleep when I woke up again. I checked that Serne was still okay before I began to go through Saul's notes for a second time, much more assiduously than before. I concentrated hard, even though I intended to go through them as many times more as I possibly could before I ditched the book. I didn't start cooking breakfast until the star-captain woke up. She had to be feeling a lot better, but she still didn't seem relaxed.

When we'd eaten, Susarma Lear insisted on taking her turn in the driving-seat. She assured me that she couldn't possibly make any mistakes driving across a flat plane with not another vehicle in sight from horizon to horizon, but I insisted on sitting beside her to make sure that everything was in order. Not everything was, of course; when she checked with her ship, its watchful observers reported that we were being followed by three trucks, two of which looked conspicuously bigger than ours.

"Have the Tetrax in Skychain City been able to give us any indication what sort of firepower they're packing?" she asked.

"Needlers, mostly," the man on the ship reported. "They're petty criminals, not trained soldiers. If you want to take them on, you could probably eliminate them from consideration—but you'd need cover to mount an ambush. We consulted the Tetrax about the possibility of trying to take them out from up here, but they didn't like the idea one little bit."

"No," said Susarma Lear, grimly. "I have this sneaking suspicion that they'd rather the petty criminals got their hands on the goodies than the Star Force. I don't think we can expect too much help from them."

"If they'd been in a co-operative mood, they could have prevented the bad guys from exiting the dome," the man on the ship agreed.

"That's true," I put in, "but if they'd been in an unco-operative mood, they could have stopped us too. We know where they stand—on the sidelines. It may not be the best place, if things get interesting."

"Keep watching," the star-captain instructed her contact on the ship. "I'm certainly not going to start a pitched battle up here, even if we do find a likely spot for an ambush. I can't afford to risk any losses until I catch up with the android. After that . . . well, anything goes. We'll

do things the Star Force Way."

I wondered if Amara Guur would have had the sense to quiver in his boots if he'd heard her say that. Probably not—he wouldn't have understood the niceties of her tone and expression. I did.

I returned to my careful study of the notebook, with all due patience and determination.

After a while, the star-captain said: "I suppose the Tetrax must already have learned quite a lot, from the stuff they've already dug out of the upper levels. They must have already stolen quite a march on the rest of us."

"Not unless they're keeping a lot of secrets from their esteemed colleagues in the C.R.E.," I said. "Which isn't impossible, of course—but I think they're still waiting for the crucial breakthrough. The technics we've excavated so far aren't significantly more advanced than the devices we already have. No matter how clever Asgard's builders were, the people who actually lived in the habitats in the outermost levels seem to have been humanoids not much different from us."

"Passengers, you mean?"

"Maybe. Species rescued from endangered worlds who didn't have the wherewithal to save themselves is the most popular guess."

"So if the lower levels are similar," she said, "it might not matter whether they're dead or alive—they might be just more of the same."

"It's a possibility," I admitted. "But basing their technics on the same spectrum of scientific knowledge would necessarily make their technology the same as ours. The humanoid races we know about are similar, but they have quite various technological styles. What I mean ..."

"I know what you mean," she said. "Heavy metal- minded, like us. Biotech-minded, like the Salamandrans . . . and the Tetrax."

"Well, yes," I admitted. "Reduced to the crudest possible level, that's about it. Different kinds of sociopolitical systems tend to be associated with different technologies. When 69-Aquila was lecturing me in my cell, he said that you could ignore one direction of the causal flow and regard the technologies as the ultimate determining factor, but that's just as brutal an oversimplification as yours. Different humanoid races produce different kinds of social organization for a variety of reasons—some anatomical, some ecological, some historical—but they all have their idiosyncrasies, and those idiosyncrasies are reflected in matters of technological style. Technology is art as well as science, maybe more art than science. That's one of the reasons why the people at the C.R.E. are so interested in the stuff we find in the levels, even though it doesn't actually do anything that we can't already do in our own subtly different fashion. Even if the lower levels are full of passengers, they won't be uninteresting . . . and if some of the passengers can talk to us, they might have some very interesting things to say."

"And Lyndrach's notebook says that there's people down there, does it?" she asked, nodding towards the black- bound object in my hand. That was why she'd started the conversation—she wanted me to keep her up to date with what I'd found.

"Not exactly," I admitted. "Actually, vif is pretty much the full extent of what it says, in actual words. But what that implies ..."

She didn't seem to like the answer, or the way I left it hanging. "Isn't a whole lot, from what you've told me so far. I need details, trooper. Hard data."

There was plenty of hard data in the book, but not the kind she was fishing for. Even if it had been written in English, she'd still have needed me as an interpreter.

"Actually," I pointed out, "I've told you a whole lot more than you've told me. I've told you practically everything I know, in fact—but you still haven't told me why you're so hell-bent on catching and killing Myrlin."

"It's a military secret," she told me. "Strictly need-to- know. You don't need to know. You just have to guide me to him."

"Right," I said. "The proverbial Star Force Way. Everybody follows orders, and shoots when they hear the word 'Fire!' No ifs and buts, just blood and guts."

"Sometimes," she said, "it's the way things have to be done. Sometimes, it works."

"And sometimes it doesn't," I countered. "This is Asgard. Here, we generally do things the Tetron way. That works most of the time."

"Maybe so," she said. "But even here, it's the Tetrax who do things the Tetron way—not the vormyr or the Spirellans, apparently. Personally, I do things the Star Force Way—and so do you. Your choice was between my way and Amara Guur's way, and you chose mine. It was a wise choice—but now you're stuck with it. So stop asking questions that I can't answer, and tell me exactly what Lyndrach's notebook says. Never mind what it implies— just tell me what it says."

Sleep had soothed her temper for a while, but the kind of stress she was carrying obviously wasn't the kind you could sleep off in a matter of hours.

"Saul found some kind of dropshaft," I told her, meekly repeating what I'd deduced from the notebook. "He managed to rig some ropes so that he could get down to the bottom, but he didn't have the equipment he needed to cut his way out. All he could manage was to drill a peephole. On the other side it was warm and it was light. He couldn't see much, because he was looking into a room inside a building—a deserted building, in an advanced state of dilapidation. He could see what looked like fungi, plants, insects . . . but he couldn't see out through the window because it was blocked. Very frustrating. But a building is evidence of builders—and decay of that sort isn't the work of millions of years. It implies ..."

"I can do the conjectures myself. This is where the android's going?"

"He's got drilling equipment," I said. "If he takes it with him all the way down to the head of the dropshaft, he can make a way through."

"But we can catch up with him before that?"

"Probably."

"Probably isn't good enough," she said. "We have to stop him before he reaches the dropshaft. If there's light, and life, there's probably a whole world down there for him to get lost in. He'd be very difficult to find—and we couldn't be sure that he'll come back any time soon."

"Would that be such a bad thing?" I asked, innocently.

"Yes," she said. "But we can catch him. He doesn't have the detailed instructions that we do. He'll take more time finding his way. We can catch him before he gets there."

"It's not going to be that much easier for us than it is for him," I warned her. "He's a novice, but so are you and your men. We all have to get down to four, and then trek for miles through the cold. It's going to be difficult for all of us. He might go astray without our knowing it, so we might get to where he's going ahead of him—and once he's behind us, he won't be the only one. This isn't a turkey-shoot, captain."

"It had better be," she said, ominously. "If he gets away, my superior officers aren't going to forgive us, nor is the human race, if things go bad some time down the line." She seemed to remind herself then that this was exactly what she wasn't supposed to be talking about. She changed the subject, deciding to give me proof that she could do the conjectures herself. "When you say building," she mused, "you mean the kind of building that humanoids make. Even through a peephole, you could see that—technological style being what it is. So if there are people down there, they really will be people."

"Probably," I agreed. "Close kin, if the evidence of the outer layers can be trusted. Part of the great big humanoid family. In fact, some people think ..."

"That Asgard is where the humanoid races came from," she finished for me, to demonstrate her conjectural prowess. "The home of our various ancestors—and of our common ancestor too. Now that people will actually be able to get down there, they won't be free to make up any damn story they like any longer. When the news gets out, it'll kill a lot of idle fantasies. But that's life, I guess. All the idle fantasies get gunned down in the end."

"Quite a Romantic, in your own way, aren't you?" I said.

She scowled. Perhaps she thought I was insulting her. "No, I'm not," she said. "I have a job to do, but I can't get on with it until I get to where I'm going. The devil makes work for idle minds—but that's why they call it Asgard, right?"

"It's why we call it Asgard," I confirmed. "The home of the gods. Except that the Tetrax don't really think in terms of gods the way our ancestors used to do—and if they ever did, they certainly wouldn't have thought of hard-drinking warrior gods like the Norse pantheon. The Tetron word some human pioneer translated as Asgard means something more like 'the essence of mystery'—except that the Tetron concept of mystery implies a lot more than our word. Maybe 'metaphysics' would be . . ."

"Okay," she said. "As a dictionary-maker, you're a pretty good scavenger, Rousseau."

She was definitely insulting me. I tried not to scowl.

"Maybe our guy got it right and the Tetrax got it wrong," she said. "Maybe Asgard is the home of the warrior-gods, ever-ready to do battle." She was still thinking about those well-concealed, probably non-existent guns.

"I don't know about ever-ready," I said. "I dare say you'd like to think that there's some kind of Valhalla down there where all good star-captains go when they die so they can spend eternity committing genocide—but up here it's been a bitterly cold winter for a long, long time, and in Norse myth that kind of winter was the prelude to the final battle: the twilight of the gods, before they all got wiped out."

"Now you're catching on," she said. "Hold that thought, and you'll begin to see what kind of universe we're living in."

Her eyes were harder than steel—maybe as hard as the stuff of which Asgard's fabric is actually made. It would be a neat tricky I thought, to be able to play the gorgon like that— but it wasn't my personal technical style. It was a Star Force thing.

They'd had giants in Norse mythology too, I vaguely remembered. The warrior-gods had killed them all. Or had they?

17

I was driving again when the sun came up. Susarma Lear was asleep in her bunk, but Serne was sitting beside me, waiting patiently to take another turn at the wheel. He was fidgeting, although he couldn't possibly have been unused to long periods of inactivity. Life in the Star Force had to be ninety-nine percent waiting and one percent action.

When the rim of the sun suddenly appeared, as a slowly expanding yellow arc away to our right, he drew in his breath sharply. There had been a silvery glow in the sky for some little while, but this was different. The sunlight spilled across the plain like a flood, turning the dead white carpet of snow into a sea of glittering gold. The sky lightened from jet black to a deep, even blue, uninterrupted by the slightest wisp of cloud.

Serne shielded his eyes and tried to look into the glare, but he couldn't bear it. I took two pairs of sun-goggles from the dashboard compartment and passed one to him.

"It's big," he observed. "It doesn't seem as bright, but it's . . . very strange."

"Not much like home?" I queried.

"Not much," he agreed.

"It's larger than Earth's star," I told him. "A different spectral type. Its association with Asgard is probably a cosmic accident. I suppose you did most of your fighting in the systems of G-type suns?"

"That was the territory we were fighting for," he said. "We were always suited up, though. Even the so-called

Gaia-clones didn't look like home."

"Wait till you see the sunset," I said. "There's a lot more vapour in the air then, and the sea of gold's more like an ocean of blood. Very symbolic."

He looked out over the illuminated plain, drinking in the sight as if he were avid for sensory stimulation—but there wasn't a lot to see once he'd savoured the changing colours to the full. The undulations were still so shallow that it looked quite flat.

"Crazy landscape," he said. "No benchmarks—trees, hills, whatever. Makes the distances seem unreal. Driving through limbo."

I called the other truck to make sure that Crucero had found the eyeshades. He had. He reported that everything was satisfactory, and made no comment on the quality of the sunrise or the landscape.

"How long have you served with the star-captain?" I asked Serne, for the sake of introducing a human note into the conversation.

He looked at me suspiciously, as if he thought I might be trying to worm some kind of military secret out of him.

"Three tours," he said, finally. "She was only a lieutenant first time around."

"A long time," I observed, although the only clue I had as to how long a tour might be was the casual remark that the latest one had been uncommonly long at nineteen months. "All the way to the actual invasion, I presume."

"It wasn't much of an invasion," he told me. "The fleet pounded all hell out of Salamandra from orbit. The battle in the system lasted a full month, but it wasn't our show. We only went down to mop up. There wasn't a lot to mop."

"But there were survivors—on the ground, I mean."

"Quite a few, mostly dug in very deep. What was left of the high command had surrendered, of course, but not everyone knew that. Messy job, at first—then it got tedious. Picking up litter."

"More relaxing, though?"

"Too relaxing," he said, tersely. He didn't add anything, although I gave him the opportunity of a long pause.

"And then you came to Asgard, directly from the battleground," I said, taking up the burden of keeping things going. "A long haul."

He looked at me suspiciously again. He was right, of course—I was trying to worm a military secret out of him.

"Yeah," he said. "Long, but fast. I've been on slower trips that lasted a lot longer."

"Still mopping up," I went on, inexorably. "Chasing a lone android who managed to get off the surface of Salamandra in spite of the odds stacked against him. A human android, made by alien biotech."

"I wouldn't know about that," he lied. "I just follow orders. So should you. You shouldn't give the captain any grief— she's already had more than her fair share."

"No more than you," I pointed out.

"You shouldn't give me any grief, either," he told me. "I can't beat the shit out of you, because you're in my unit— but that doesn't mean that accidents can't happen."

"Thanks for the warning," I said, sardonically. "It's bad enough that Amara Guur and his Spirellan sidekick are after me, without wondering whether my Star Force buddies are itching to put a bullet in my back."

"We don't use bullets," he observed. "But no matter how cold it gets, flame-pistols work just fine."

"I can tell that you've been under a lot of strain lately," I said, "so I'll try to tread as softly as I can. I'm not the enemy, though. You wiped out the enemy, almost to the last not-quite-man. I'm not sure that it's necessary to be so obsessive about the mopping up. One lousy android can't be much of a threat to the whole human race, no matter what he did to Saul's kidnappers."

"I just follow orders," he repeated. "So should you. I mean that."

I didn't doubt it. He was crazy, of course, but that wasn't entirely surprising, in the circumstances. There was obviously more to his devotion to his senior officer than mere military discipline, but that was understandable too, in the circumstances. There were probably as many women as men on the ship that had brought Susarma Lear to Asgard, but her little troop was all male, and she had one hell of a glare when she cared to use it—no bigger than a run-of-the-mill G-type glare, perhaps, but a lot more powerful.

"I'm very grateful to the star-captain," I assured him. "She got me out of a nasty jam back there at the Hall of Justice. I'd never actually thought about joining the Star Force, but it was definitely the better alternative. I know my place. You from Earth?"

He shook his head. "Space-born," he said. "The belt."

"Me too," I said.

"Really? Ceres? I'm from the Trojans." It was the first sign of real humanity I'd seen in him.

"Vesta, mostly," I told him. "My father came out from Canada to help build microworlds, so we moved around the ring a lot. We shipped out of the system when things became complicated after the contacts, but we were just crew—we didn't see a lot of the Tetrax or any of the other humanoids. That was when I heard about Asgard. When the time came to fly the nest . . . well, it was a long time ago. I'm older than I look."

"I guessed," he said. "Tetron biotech. Still mortal, though."

"Yes. And no more durable, at a guess, than you."

"You came here alone?"

"No. I was with a party. At first I worked with a guy named Michael Finn—he was Mickey so I was Mike—but he got himself killed. I thought about going home, but I never took the plunge. I still have Mickey's ship in dock, but can't afford to fit it out for the haul."

"You missed the war," he observed. His voice was level, but somewhere behind the words there was an accusation. In his carefully-shielded eyes, I was a deserter, or a draft-dodger.

"Yes," I said, tiredly. "I missed the war."

This time, the pause was enough to prompt him. "They never got to Earth," he said. "The belt wasn't so easy to defend. Must have been more than a million people there by then. Scattered, of course—but the Trojans were a target. Everyone I ever knew outside the force was killed."

"I'm sorry."

"They paid for it," he assured me.

"I guess so," I agreed, keeping my tone carefully neutral.

He wasn't fooled. "You think we shouldn't have done what we did to Salamandra?"

"I wasn't there," I reminded him—and myself. "I was here, where everybody works overtime to get along, even with the vormyr. Even the vormyr make the effort, most of the time. You had your experience, I have mine. If we see things differently, it's understandable. We can try to get along anyway, can't we? Isn't that what we're doing?"

"What we're doing," he said, stonily, "is mopping up." He looked away, out across the glittering plain, as if he were trying to lose himself in the eerie, alien radiance. He seemed to me to be already lost. I think he felt that way too.

18

When I woke up again after my next turn in the bunk I found the star-captain and her lackey in a bad mood. There didn't seem to be any particular reason for it—they were just jittery. Nothing was happening, and they wanted action.

"Have your people still got a fix on my truck?" I asked, subtly making the point that if we weren't getting anywhere, neither was Myrlin.

"He's stopped," Serne reported tersely.

"You mean he's reached his destination—Saul's portal to one?" I asked. The one thing the notebook hadn't told me about the journey I had to make was the exact location of the effective starting-point: the entry-point to level one. That he had retained in his memory—until he confided it to his belated saviour.

"We don't know for sure," the star-captain said. "He may be resting—we don't know whether he needs sleep as much as we do, but he was designed to pass for human, so he must need some."

"If so, it gives us a chance to make up some ground," I said. "Amara Guur can't be gaining on us."

"We could take him out so easily," Serne said, wistfully. "Just one missile. It wouldn't even dent the surface, let alone take out any innocent bystanders—but your friends in Skychain City won't hear of it, and the warship's captain is playing it their way. He's a frame jockey, of course—not Star Force."

"The commander agrees with him," Susarma Lear told him, with a slight sympathetic sigh. "He trusts us to get the job done. It is our job." Hers seemed an odd combination of resentment and fatalism, less straightforward than Seme's grim frustration.

"Doesn't this snow ever melt?" Serne wanted to know.

"Eventually," I said. "Nothing happens in a hurry out here. Besides which, it's even less convenient when it's running water. We'll have to be more careful from now on. So will Guur's drivers—I don't suppose, by any chance, that they've suffered any mishaps?"

"No," said Serne, as he got up, rather ungraciously, to let me take his seat beside the star-captain. "They haven't gained an inch—but they haven't lost one either. I can't see why we don't just shoot and have done with it—take them out as well as the android. Ten seconds and it's all sorted— we could argue with the Tetrax afterwards."

"And communication between humankind and the galactic community would be fouled up for a couple of hundred years," I pointed out. "The war with the Salamandrans ruined our image, but at least they started it. Now it's over; we have a lot of repair work to do."

"They don't need to track him to find out where he's going once he's reached the doorway to level one," Susarma Lear said. "Now that you've got the book, they don't need him at all."

"You just don't get it, do you?" I said, exasperatedly. "They let him through Immigration Control. He's a citizen. To them, he's entitled to exactly the same consideration as you or me. The Tetrax take these things seriously. Even if they thought he was guilty of mass murder on account of what happened to Balidar and his vormyr friends, they'd consider him innocent until he'd been proven guilty, and they'd want to put him on trial. This shoot-first-and-answer-questions-later mentality is doing us enough harm as a mere display. Gunning down the android in the levels might be getting your dirty work done out of sight, but don't imagine that the Tetrax will simply put it out of mind. The whole future of the human species might be at stake here."

"Indeed it might," she said, bleakly. "That's exactly what I've been trying to tell you. You have no conscientious objection to our gunning down the guys who are following us, I hope? Will that blight our image too?"

"It won't do us any good," I said, "but the Tetrax might be quietly pleased to see the last of Amara Guur. They might look on that as doing their dirty work for them—but they don't have anything against Myrlin. In fact, he probably interests them for much the same reasons that your warship's cargo interests them, now that they know he's not human."

"I'd figured that one out," she said, sourly. "Salamandrans and the Tetrax are both biotech-minded. The Salamandrans weren't as advanced, but they doubtless had their own style. I listen, you know, and I'm not dumb. Thousands of humanoid worlds and a whole damn humanoid zoo right here on Asgard—maybe passengers, maybe slaves, maybe androids. I can see why they might think that he's a piece of the puzzle. I can understand why they don't want us firing missiles every which way. But I've got a job to do, and I'm going to do it, even if I do have to chase the bastard all the way to the planet's core and annoy the hell out of the Tetrax. Okay?"

"We won't be going down that far, even if we don't get to him first," I told her. "We don't have a long enough rope. Saul's shaft probably isn't much more than ten levels deep—maybe only a couple."

"Good," she said. "Let's hope that we don't have to find out." But she hardly paused before adding: "How many do you reckon there are, altogether?"

"The radius of the planet is about ten thousand kilometres," I told her. "If it were hollow shells all the way to the centre there might be a hundred thousand. Nobody makes a serious guess as high as that, but some are prepared to talk about tens of thousands. I'm with them—but it's hope, not knowledge."

"What's the mean density of the megastructure?" she wanted to know.

"About three and a half grams per cubic centimetre. You'll have noticed that the surface gravity is approximately Earth-normal, even though Asgard is so much bigger than Earth. We don't know how to interpret that, of course—the density is highly unlikely to be uniform, and it could vary any way you can imagine."

She was no mathematician, but she could do simple mental arithmetic. "If the radius of this world is half as much again as Earth's," she said, "it must have twice the surface area, or thereabouts. Even if there were only fifty levels, each one with not much more than half the area of the surface, there'd still be as much living-space inside as in fifty Gaia-clone worlds. More, given that they probably don't go in much for oceans."

"Right," I agreed. "And if there are a thousand, or ten thousand ..."

"That's one hell of a construction job," she observed.

"It would need a lot of labour," I agreed, "and a lot of time. A biotech-minded species might well think about androids . . . except for the fact that even the limited production-lines that humanoid species have ready-built-in tend to be cheaper to run than any artifice we can imagine."

"Any artifice we can imagine," she repeated, adding the emphasis.

"If the levels are warm and light only half a dozen floors down," I observed, in case her own mental arithmetic had stalled, "there might be more humanoids inside Asgard than there are in the entire galactic arm—and more species too."

"That would put our diplomatic problems with the Tetrax into a different context," she observed. "Do you know whether there are any Salamandrans in Skychain City?"

"I don't think so," I said. "I never heard of any—but I don't even know what they look like. You're wondering why the android came here, aren't you?"

"Don't push it, Rousseau," she warned.

"Your secrets are safe," I assured her. "But I had wondered that myself. I guess the Salamandrans would know about Asgard, even if none of them had ever made their way here. They seem to have educated your android pretty thoroughly. Maybe he thought that a cosmopolitan arena like Skychain City would be an easier place to hide than a world where ninety-nine percent of the inhabitants looked the same. A giant stands out anywhere, but in a circus like this . . . you could imagine the train of thought. There are a hundred worlds where he might have sought sanctuary, including the Tetron homeworld, but he might not have been confident of his welcome on any of them. He'd be entitled to be a trifle paranoid, wouldn't he?"

"The Salamandrans couldn't possibly know anything about Asgard that the Tetrax don't know," she said.

"No," I said.

"He's just following up an opportunity that arose by chance when he arrived here."

"I think so," I agreed. "It was a freaky stroke of luck, but it couldn't have been anything else, could it?"

"No," she said. "It couldn't. But Tetrax biotech is good enough to clone the android, isn't it? They could do that, if they wanted to. They clone themselves all the time, don't they? That's why they all have numbers instead of names."

"That's not the explanation they give when asked," I said, "but they're biotech-minded, so cloning technology must be child's play to them. Even we can do cloning, and we're not biotech-minded at all. I don't think they'd be interested in turning out an army of supermen to wreak vengeance on the human race on behalf of Salamandra, though. It's not their style."

She looked at me. Even through the shades I could see the hardness of her eyes. "We have to kill him," she told me. "Whatever it costs us, in terms of image or human lives. I want you to understand that."

She didn't. If she'd wanted me to understand, she'd have told me exactly what it was that she and her military masters feared. In the absence of a good explanation, I was inclined to think that she and they were merely paranoid— understandably paranoid, but merely paranoid.

I reminded myself that she'd just taken part in the murder of a planetary biosphere. She was still in a state of shock. The guilt was probably getting to her, in peculiar ways.

"Don't mind me," I said, insincerely. "I'm just a starship trooper. My job is to follow orders."

19

Two days out we had to bear eastwards in order to skirt the southeastern arm of one of the northern hemisphere's larger seas. It had hardly begun to melt, and the bergs still stood up like rows of jagged teeth against the horizon, gleaming where they caught the sunlight that flickered over them. For a while, the glittering play of the light made a pleasant contrast with the featureless plain, but in its own way it was just as constant.

"Is the whole damn world all as boring as this?" growled Serne in one of his rare communicative moments when the two of us were sharing the cab.

"Pretty much," I told him. "The seas are shallow, and there are no mountains to speak of. It's not like Earth, with all those tectonic plates grinding against one another, heaving up mountain ranges, and all those volcanoes blasting away. This surface was designed. There are no cities either. The Tetrax found a few clusters of what used to be buildings scattered here and there, but no ghost towns, no ancient temples, no pyramids. People certainly worked up here, but they probably went home to the levels when their shifts finished. When they abandoned the surface they took virtually everything that they could carry—they left far less machinery here than in the subsurface levels.

"Most people figure that the cavies retired to live underground long before they deserted the upper levels. They may have used the surface purely for growing crops—but the C.R.E. palaeobiologists who work with the seeds and microfossils haven't found that much evidence of disciplined agricultural activity. Maybe this level was just the roof of the world, and they left it more-or-less to its own devices. It may not have been anything more than some kind of roof-garden. The sea over there might conceivably be a reservoir or a lake, but some C.R.E. people think it was just a glorified puddle in the guttering. We'll pass a C.R.E. dome soon—that should break up the tedium of your day."

"Is that where we're going—to some kind of dome?" he asked.

"Hardly," I replied. "C.R.E. people are essentially mean-spirited. They don't allow the likes of you and me to use their routes into the underworld. They wouldn't even invite us in for a cup of tea if we knocked on their door. They're so proud of the fact that they have members of a hundred different species working together that they've become rather paranoid in their insularity. People like me find our own ways down into level one; we'll be using one of Saul's holes."

Serne peered out of the windows, looking first at the sullen grey waves lapping gently at the barren shore, then inland at the desolate, foggy wasteland, which was dressed as far as the eye could see in blurred shades of pale grey, with not a patch of green to be seen. Even by the low standards commonly set by the surface of Asgard this was not a particularly appealing spot.

"How in hell do you know where to dig?" said Serne sourly.

"We don't dig," I told him. "There are sections of the surface where all the soil blew away millions of years ago— great plastic-surfaced deserts, pitted by meteoric dust. There, we can find the trapdoors the cavies used. It's not easy, because there's rarely anything to see except a hairline crack and markings which have virtually worn away—no handles or hinges—but it can be done. It helps if you have some idea where to look."

"And you have?"

"Damn right. Each cave-system on level one seems to be arrayed rather like the petals of a flower, with arms radiating out from a relatively small central hub. Of course, all the systems may be connected by smaller tunnels, but the big open spaces—the farmlands, as it were—form that kind of pattern. The hub of this system is a long way north. The C.R.E. has a dome there, but the one we'll pass is on the arm which points down toward the equator. The Tetrax have been here long enough to begin to fathom out the kind of scheme the cavies' architects used, and a lot of trapdoors are arranged in a fairly orderly manner. Now that Myrlin's reached his destination, we know that Saul's hole is in much the same position on the next arm over as the one beneath the dome we pass. It must have taken him a while to find it—searching for a circle a few metres across in an area of a hundred square miles isn't easy—but he knew where to start searching before he set out."

"Think we'll have any problem finding our way once we get there?"

"Not that much. Given that Myrlin's still so far ahead of us, we ought to hope that it isn't too easy. If he's able to see Saul's sled-tracks, he might make better time than we suppose."

Secretly, of course, I was hoping that Myrlin might find it easier than we had supposed. I was also praying for a bit of really foul weather, not so much to slow our own trucks down as to cause a few problems to Amara Guur's pirate crew, which was still toiling in our wake. If one of his trucks were to get stuck, it might make a big difference to any eventual confrontation. We couldn't stop him following us, at least as far as the gateway to the underworld, but a helpful adjustment to the odds we'd face when we got down there might make the difference between life and death for some of us. I still reckoned that I could come out of this mess alive—with luck. Bad weather was only one potential gift that fortune might throw my way.

"What kind of power-units do the sleds have?" Serne asked.

I laughed.

"Muscle-power," I told him.

"Jesus!" he complained. "Are you telling me that we couldn't do better than that?"

"Where we're going," I told him, "it can get very cold. Machines don't work too well down in three or four, where it's only a few degrees Kelvin on a good day. Atmospheric pressure is pretty weak—most of the familiar gases have crystallized out as snow. But it's not like being in space. The soles of your feet, and your gauntlets every time you touch something, are in contact with solids colder than anything you find in the inner reaches of a solar system—very much colder than any spaceship hull. Wheeled vehicles are hopeless. The C.R.E. sometimes uses hovercraft, but they're no use in the narrower corridors, and even hovercraft settle when they stop, which means that they have to lay down some kind of cushion every time they put the brakes on. It's no way to make progress, and it helps them to maintain their customary snail's pace.

"If you want to move in the levels, my friend, you have to rely on nature's way. Two feet and polished skids. Even so, you can run into difficulties if the people who made your boots and gloves were telling lies about their tolerance."

Serne didn't seem pleased by this news, nor by the relish

I took in telling him how rough it was going to be.

"How long are we going to be down there?" he asked.

I shrugged. "We won't linger in there a minute longer than necessary," I assured him. "I want to get through it as fast as I possibly can." I didn't mention that my goal wasn't to catch Myrlin, but to get to the interesting places in good time. "If nothing goes wrong," I added, "we should be able to get through the cold in a couple of days. You'll just have to hope that the android won't. We'll have plenty of margin for error. The gaspacks will renew our air for at least thirty days, more in an emergency. The suits recycle all our wastes, and input carbohydrates—they'll easily keep us going until the air begins to go bad, although we'll lose weight and our digestive systems will get thrown out. I guess you're used to those kinds of side effects."

"And then some," he said. I could just make out his bleak stare behind the goggles. I didn't want to ask him what his personal best was for getting by in a life-preserving suit—it probably wasn't anywhere near as long as mine, but when I'd set my record, there was no army of aliens trying to blast, fry or evaporate me.

There never had been—until now.

"I guess you've already had your fill of suits and gaspacks," I said, meekly.

"We only used heavy suits where there wasn't any atmosphere," he said colourlessly. "Most of the real fighting was done on surface. The temperature was usually fine and the air would have been breathable—except that the Salamandrans were heavily into biotech weaponry. Viroids, neurotoxin-carrying bacteria, that sort of thing ... all human-specific, of course. Mostly, we wore thin sterile suits like glorified plastic bags, which wouldn't slow us down too much. Skin-huggers, with little networks of capillaries to carry your sweat away. Before we put them on we had to shave all over . . . they gave us some inhibitor to stop the hair growing back, but it didn't stop the itching. Five or six days into a mission I could feel my flesh crawling. Couldn't scratch . . . not properly, anyway.

"We used to spend most of our time creeping around under a blue sky like you'd find on any friendly world—or under the stars, anyhow—and there'd be growing things all around us, nice and green, and sometimes cities that might be anybody's cities . . . but the air was usually filled with things that would turn us into great lumps of gangrene if we took a single lungful. Even when the air was clean ... we had to wear the suits anyway, just in case. We relied on the machines on our backs to keep us alive. The suits were virtually indestructible . . . couldn't tear no matter what you did to them . . . but somehow I never felt entirely safe touching things, just in case I pricked my finger and died screaming.

"I never liked the machine on my back. I couldn't see it and I couldn't touch it . . . but there it was, masterminding my chemistry like some little god. Somehow it always seemed more remote than the ship, or the stars in the sky."

If he'd stopped halfway I'd have told him that I understood—that I knew how he felt. He went on long enough, though, to convince me that I didn't. His was a special paranoia.

"This won't be so very different," I said. "Amara Guur's bully boys will only have good old-fashioned needle-guns, and I don't know what your friend the android will be packing, but it really doesn't matter. While we're down in the cold levels we only have to be hit once and we'll be dead. If we have to go deeper, where Saul found warmth and life, we might be able to survive a superficial wound or two . . . but we'd be trapped down there forever. You can't send a radio message asking for help when you're way down in the levels."

"Don't worry about it," he said. "When it comes to gunplay, we're the best, and you've said nothing to make me think there'll be anything where we're going that will put us out of our stride."

I was tempted to ask whether he suffered at all from claustrophobia. There were a lot of wide open spaces down below, sure enough, but we'd have to work our way through some pretty narrow corridors—wormholes of a kind very different from the ones our starships are supposed to make as they whizz-bang their way through the undervoid. The more I got to see of the star-captain and her merry men, though, the more confident I became that they could handle themselves perfectly well in what would be to them terra incognita. Crazy they might be, but there was no doubting that they were tough.

"If the war was as bad as you say," I commented, "I'd have thought you'd head straight for home now that it's over. Why come all the way out here?"

His lips seemed hardly to move as he said: "It isn't over."

"No?" I answered, sceptically. "You're telling me that the whole damn human race is at war with one lousy android?"

A special paranoia indeed! I thought, when he looked away.

All he said was: "It's got to be finished. It's necessary."

"Well," I said, "maybe so. That's your business, and you seem intent on keeping me out of it. But there is another side to what we're doing now, and I'd really appreciate a little help in alerting the star-captain to some of the other implications of all this. What's happening here on Asgard might be every bit as important to the future of the human race as the war you just won—and to the rest of the galactic community, Asgard's immeasurably more important."

His pale eyes just stared into mine.

"Look," I said, "the star-captain already worked it out that if there are only fifty layers, there could easily be a hundred times the surface area of Earth down there. If, as seems possible, the whole bloody thing is an artefact, there could be ten thousand levels—the equivalent of fifteen or twenty thousand whole worlds . . . maybe hundreds of thousands of independent habitats. There might be more humanoid races living inside Asgard than in the entire galaxy of natural worlds. Who knows? The Tetrax have been trying to lift the lid off this great big can of worms for a hell of a long time—and now we have a golden opportunity to do it. You and me and the blonde bombshell! Oh, merde—you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, do you?"

"Don't insult me, Rousseau," he said, mildly. "I'm just a belter, like you. I don't know the first thing about this place, that's true. But I'm not a fool, and the star-captain is anything but. If what we find down there is something useful to the human race, we'll do what's necessary. After we get the android, we'll decide what to do next, in the line of duty. To be honest, though, I have to say that what I've seen of this world, and what you've told me about the cold down below, doesn't fill me with wild enthusiasm."

He'd asked me—ordered me—not to insult him, so I didn't. I shut up. But what I was thinking was that this was a man whose imagination had shriveled up inside him, and all but faded away. For him, it had always been the human race against the Salamandrans for control of local space. All the great wide cosmos, with its thousands of humanoid cultures, meant next to nothing to him. He had some vague idea that Asgard might be important in a political context, but he really didn't see what a puzzle it was. He didn't seem to realise that cracking the puzzle might tell us exactly where we—not just Homo sapiens but all the humanoid races—fitted into the vastest possible scheme of things.

He had no real awareness of the mystery of our origins, or the possibilities of our ultimate future. I did.

I'm not a passionate man, by any means. I'm a cold fish, content with my own company, satisfied with day-to-day survival in a fairly unfriendly universe. Personal relationships aren't my cup of tea. But I do care about things— about the big things, the deep questions.

It mattered to me what was in the heart of Asgard, although I had no way of explaining to a man like Serne exactly why it mattered. I wanted to know who built Asgard, and why; where it had come from and where it was intended to go. I wanted to know whether all the humanoid races in the galaxy came from common stock; and if so, whose, and why. I wanted to know who I was, because despite what Serne said, I wasn't just a belter, or even a human being, but a citizen of infinity and eternity, with a birth certificate written in the DNA of my chromosomes.

That was why, with all due respect to my new commanding officer and my fellow starship troopers, I couldn't actually find it in my heart to care about their lousy android and their stupid paranoia.

I was on my way to the centre of the universe, and to my personal confrontation with its deepest secrets.

It turned out to be a more tortuous journey than I anticipated, but isn't it always?

20

The most tedious phase of the journey came eventually to its close.

That filled me with relief, though I wasn't sure exactly what I had to be pleased about. I was still being hustled along by a gang of lunatics, chasing a giant who was in the habit of making a real mess of people who annoyed him, with a dozen or more of the nastiest characters in galactic society trailing along in my wake.

It was enough to make anyone feel insecure.

Anyhow, there were the trucks, standing in lonely splendour on an empty plain. The snow had begun to drift around their wheels, carried by the keen wind which was blowing out of the nightside toward the hotspot where the sun stood at its temporary zenith.

We were only leaving one man—Vasari—to guard the trucks, which numbered three now that we had caught up with the one which Myrlin had "borrowed" from me. The star-captain gave Vasari orders to say clear of Amara Guur if he could, and not to fire unless he was fired on.

"He probably won't take the risk of trying to kill you," she told him, "and if you're here, he'll have to leave some of his own men here too. Don't start anything—but be careful."

"You could ask the navy one more time to take the bastards out," Vasari suggested. "Laser, bomb, or particle- beam—I don't mind at all."

"Sorry," she said. "Politics." Her tone was neutral, but she really was sorry.

"With luck," I told him, "you won't be alone with the bad guys for long. Now that news has leaked out . . . well, by the time we get back, there could be a real circus up here. Even if that doesn't happen, they won't want to make a move against you, because it would give the Tetrax the excuse they needed to come down on the whole expedition. Guur has to stay on the right side of the Tetrax now."

"I'll be okay," Vasari assured me.

What I'd said was true; other people would be headed this way—but none of them had a tape of the juicy bits in Saul Lyndrach's notebook, and none of them would be able to read the original now that I'd made a few careful alterations. They might be able to track us, but the Tetrax wouldn't even try; they'd wait to see who emerged, and what news they brought with them.

I hoped Vasari would be able to follow his orders. It wouldn't be so bad to come back from our little expedition to find the peace-officers waiting for me instead of the gangsters, but whatever we found down below, the location of Saul's dropshaft to the warm levels was a secret that the Tetrax and the C.R.E. would pay very dearly to know. If and when I decided to sell it, I didn't want them to have a reason to get it out of me by some less pleasant method than paying through the nose for it.

I didn't point out to Vasari or to the star-captain that if it should chance that Myrlin returned to the surface before we did, the Tetrax wouldn't take any more kindly to Vasari killing him than they would to Amara Guur's rearguard killing Vasari. That was another little bit of business which could only be safely conducted in the privacy of the lower levels, beyond the reach of the long arm of the law.

Our five-man expedition hauled our sleds across the melting snow to Saul's portal. Saul's tracks had long gone but Myrlin's fresh ones were obvious. Myrlin hadn't bothered to replace the plug Saul had put in to conceal his drillhole, so we were able to start putting equipment through it without delay.

The trapdoors the cavies had set in the roof of their world were designed to react to some kind of transmitted signal, in response to which the barrier would retreat downwards and then slide sideways into a slot. Needless to say, no such mechanism had ever been found in working order. Drilling through the traps was extremely laborious—they weren't metal but some kind of artificial bioproduct, like super-hard dental enamel—but galactic technology was easily good enough to supply appropriate tools. The principal structural material of which Asgard seemed to be made was a very different matter, as it had to be if it was going to permit hundreds of hollow levels to be excavated in it without collapsing. Drilling or blasting through the actual walls of Asgard wasn't quite impossible, but it was near enough to impossible to make the trapdoors seem inviting. Down below, it was the same: where there were no open doorways, we had to look for closed ones, which wouldn't be too difficult to break through. There were probably millions of doorways that we couldn't even see—doorways that might open up all the lower levels, if only we knew where they were.

No one, alas, had ever found a map to show us how the levels were connected.

Getting the sleds down to level one took us more than an hour. Myrlin had left one of his own ropes dangling from a piton at the rim, but I had to rig another one to let the equipment down. It was biotech cord, made out of tangled monomolecular strands, and phenomenally tough. It didn't mind the cold in the least and could be reeled up so tightly that one man could carry the best part of a million metres of it if he wanted to. We didn't need that much; we didn't intend to play Theseus while we were searching down there in the Labyrinth for Myrlin the Minotaur.

There had once been a ladder of sorts in the vertical shaft, but corrosion had got at it since the days when the cold had put paid to all kinds of rot. On level one chemical processes had been operating again for a long time.

Eventually, we got down into a semicircular covert, and were then able to move along a short and narrow tunnel to a much bigger one, which must have been one of the cavies' main arterial highways. The torch mounted on my helmet was just powerful enough to pick out the far wall.

"Where are we?" asked Lieutenant Crucero. We were keeping a single open channel for collective communication, so that everyone could hear and speak to everyone else. Crucero turned to me when he asked the question, and his searchlight dazzled me. That can be a real headache when you're working with a team in the levels—people need to get used to looking anywhere but at the face of the person they're addressing.

I'd recorded the vital data from the notebook on one of the sound-tapes woven into my shoulderpads; I could use my tongue to call up the tape, and to wind it forward or back at my convenience. Saul's trail would be blazed, with his private symbols scored on the wall at every junction, but I still needed the tape to help me decipher the symbols. As for the rest of the commentary Saul had thought it desirable to append to his notes—most of that was snugly stored in my memory, or so I hoped.

"Saul says it's a main road," I told Crucero. "Probably runs the entire length of this arm of the system. Other roads branch off at regular intervals, and they have their own sub- branches, et cetera. A lucky find, that trapdoor—they don't all bring you down to such a handy spot."

I had deduced from the notebook that Saul had used this door a dozen times, and there were plenty of tracks around to confirm the deduction. Allowing twenty-five days per trip that meant he'd been coming here on a regular basis for something over an Earthly year. He'd come back from most of those trips with nothing more than commonplace stuff, picked up by the wayside down in three or four. Then, out of the blue, he'd hit the big one: the biggest bonanza in the history of galactic prospecting.

And he'd lined himself up to be tortured and slaughtered by the likes of Amara Guur.

It doesn't seem adequate, sometimes, simply to shrug your shoulders and say, c'est la vie.

"Let's get going," said Susarma Lear.

We set off along the highway, travelling northwest. We didn't talk much, though my companions were inclined to ask the occasional question. Mostly, it was Crucero who did the asking—perhaps curiosity was part of the second-in- command's duties. His requests for practical advice were easily answered; the big questions remained undebated, save for one medium-sized one.

"If he never read the book," the lieutenant asked, having observed the abundance of signs of previous passage, "how does the android know which set of tracks to follow?"

"Saul told him," I said. "Maybe he's got an eidetic memory. After all, once you can design your own androids, you can start improving on nature's equipment, in more ways than one. If I had to guess, though, I'd say that he's probably working from a tape that Saul made for him while they were at my place, to explain the meaning of the symbols in his private code. Either way, the android won't find it as easy to find the way as we will—that's why we stand a reasonable chance of catching up with him."

"Only if he makes for the dropshaft," said Serne darkly.

"There's nowhere else for him to go," I pointed out. "If he doesn't intend to come up again, he's got to get down into the warm. If he does intend to come up, he'll need to bring something worthwhile out of the depths in order to make himself so useful to the Tetrax that they'll protect him against all his enemies."

"Let's concentrate on making good time," the star-captain said. "Drop the chatter and pay attention to what you're doing."

The troopers obeyed the order without demur.

The highway was empty. The layer of ice that dressed it was very thin; little water had found its way in here, and level one was warm enough for frozen water to be the only kind of ice there was. The surface was smooth enough for the sleds to glide over it as easily as anyone could wish—I didn't even mind taking my turn to haul one.

Once or twice we passed lumps of slag, which were all that remained of the vehicles the indigenes had driven along the road in the unimaginably distant past. They were parked in alcoves, so as not to block the way—the cavies had been tidy-minded people.

"How do you ever recover anything useful from those?" asked Crucero, after the star-captain had given him tacit permission by pausing to inspect a lump of debris.

"We don't," I told him. "It's not even honest rust—the cavies were biotech-minded, like the Tetrax and your late enemies the Salamandrans. That was an organic car. Most of its materials were probably made by some kind of artificial photosynthetic process, though its electronics will have used silicon and all the normal stuff. It's pure garbage now.

Scavengers find nothing worth a damn on level one . . . the best loot comes from three and four, where time stood still once the cold worked its way down in the days of the big blackout. Hardly a molecule stirred until the C.R.E. operatives began opening doors again. The heat of the sun hasn't percolated down there yet, and we scavengers tend to be reasonably careful with our plugs and our little bubble- domes."

"Move!" said the star-captain tersely.

We moved.

21

We must have marched past thousands of wide-open side- roads. Some had flash-marks where Saul had engraved the record of his past explorations with a cutting-torch, but most of them he'd simply ignored. How he'd decided which ones to explore, I don't know: he'd just followed his instincts, or his whims.

We took a rest after three hours on the road. It had been a very long haul and I was dog-tired, but the troopers seemed to be taking it in their stride. It was a picnic, I supposed, by comparison with mopping up on the surface of a firestormed planet. They didn't say.

Where my suit's systems were plugged into my body at the torso and the groin I was beginning to feel sore. I also felt a little sick, because it always took a while for my body to get used to the chemical tyrant on my back. My stomach was still expecting food, and was complaining because it wasn't going to get any. It's not easy turning yourself into a cyborg.

I wondered if the android was having similar problems, or whether he had been built to be adaptable.

We had already lost contact with the outside world; the roof over our heads was opaque to radio waves. I wasn't quite sure what kind of bugs Amara Guur had planted on us, but I couldn't see how he intended to track us. The piddling little things that Jacinthe Siani had put in the star-captain's hair and the device they'd put in the binding of the book couldn't transmit much of a signal. If he was using electronics, any obscuring of our trail we could do once we were off the highway would probably throw him— he surely didn't have any idea what Saul's flashmarks meant.

I felt that I had no cause to feel complacent, though. Amara Guur might be an evil-minded reptile, but he was clever, and although I knew next to nothing about them, I'd heard of Tetron-built pseudo-olfactory tracking devices that would allow people carrying certain special organics to be trailed halfway across a world after a five-year lapse of time. We'd had to buy a lot of equipment, and any item of that might have been set up to leak something that might be quite imperceptible to us but stink like a skunk to some kind of artificial bloodhound.

By the time we set forth again, the silence and the sameness were beginning to get on the nerves of the troopers. Serne and Khalekhan began swapping irrelevances, while the rest of us listened in. They were aware that they were putting on a kind of performance, but it was obviously something they'd done before. They must have been on other long missions communicating on an open channel, and they'd built up strategies to cope with the fact that there were others—including officers—listening to their every irreverence. But the chatter soon palled, and it fell to me to take over the role of talker-in-chief. After all, I was the one who was on home ground, and had some relevant things to say.

What I didn't say, even after I'd made enough observations to know that it was true, was that Myrlin was making better time than I had thought possible. His tracks showed no sign of hesitation, and he had an enormous stride. I was glad about that, but I knew that it would only make the star-captain's tight-lipped mood even worse.

The going became even easier once we had turned off the highway on to a side road, which quickly brought us to a different kind of territory.

I could see that the troopers were impressed by the wider open spaces, where the ceiling was twenty metres up instead of ten, the roof being held up by great pillars spaced at wide but regular intervals.

"This is farmland, cavie-style," I told them. "As far as the experts can judge, much of the farming would have used artificial photosynthetic processes, some of them liquid- based and some solid. There's some debate as to whether they ever used actual organisms at all. Where the Tetrax have built their own primary-production facilities under Skychain City, they've put in vast carpets of green stuff driven by light, heat, or direct electrics—they produce various kinds of single-product foodstuffs adapted to the needs of the various races, which we generally call 'manna.' The carpets also churn out other useful materials, extruding and dumping them underneath. There has to be a complicated irrigation-system, and a transportation-system for packaging and distribution of the products. The cavies' original system was probably similar—down on two you'll see the channels which carried water and the tracks that carried the trains."

"Were there lights up there?" asked Crucero, pointing his searchlight up at the ceiling.

"Sure," I said. "But it's the devil's own job trying to track the power cables. There seem to have been a lot of authentic electric light bulbs, but not everywhere. Other places there are what we think was some kind of artificial bioluminescence—the Tetrax can do that, too, after a fashion. There are probably cables of some kind connecting all the levels, maybe running deep down to the starlet itself . . . the central fusion reactor, if there is one. But the walls are so thick and so hard it's almost impossible to get into any conduits or expose any integral systems."

"Are we heading for some kind of city?" asked Khalekhan.

"Probably," I told him. "Difficult to tell, sometimes, what's a city and what isn't. We'll come to a big wall with lots of entrances which give way to a maze of corridors. Doors by the million—all shut. No way to know how many rooms there are, or how much is solid through and through. To explore a complex like that takes a C.R.E. team years— they'll probably be centuries working their patient way through the big ones at the hub of each system. They've always figured that there must be dropshafts in the hubs which could take them all the way down, and that they'll find them in the end, if they're patient enough and methodical enough. They're probably right . . . but in the meantime, Saul's hare tactics seem to have prevailed over their tortoise strategy."

We trudged on across the desolate landscape. Everything showed white in the light of our torches. The territory was sectioned with geometrical precision, broken up into diamonds and rectangles, with the pillars holding up the roof sprouting at each corner. We were walking along the walls that had once separated the sections, where there had once been carpets or lakes of artificial photosynthetic, electrosynthetic and thermosynthetic substances. Now there were only empty holes. The cavies had wrapped up their fields and drained their reservoirs, and taken it all with them when they had set forth on their exodus into the interior.

This entire system had once been a self-sustaining ecological unit: a complete, functioning ecosphere. Now it was dead, like the surface of a world that had passed through a cosmic catastrophe or a nuclear holocaust. It was a ghost- world, utterly abandoned. But had its people simply removed themselves to some other closed ecosphere, a hundred metres, or a hundred thousand metres, beneath our feet? I tried to imagine the queue that might have formed at the elevator, and remembered old jokes about standing on one spot while the entire population of China passed by in a line ... a line which could never end, because new Chinamen were being born faster than the old ones could pass by.

The cavies, I presumed, didn't have that kind of problem—a race that lived in a closed and sealed ecology must surely have been able to maintain population stability. But I couldn't be sure. Maybe I had it the wrong way around. Maybe it was because the cavies didn't have a stable population that they had to keep adding layer after layer to the surface of their world, to supply ever more living space. If that had been the case, once upon a time, then it was possible that the disaster that pulled them back from the outer levels was something that happened deep inside Asgard, and not the destruction of the outer atmosphere after all.

I tried to stop thinking about it by telling myself that when we got to the end of our expedition, we'd have much more evidence to go on, and that it was futile to speculate in the meantime. But I couldn't stop. The closer I got to the answer, the more eagerly the question preyed upon my thoughts. I guess I became preoccupied.

Too preoccupied, as it turned out.

We came, as I had anticipated, to a floor-to-ceiling wall—a vast, long face that curved away in either direction as far as we could see. There was an open doorway in front of us, scored on either side by Saul Lyndrach and Myrlin: three mysterious hieroglyphs, two to the left and one to the right. The hole was just wide enough to steer a sled through.

I was in the lead, and my attention was split two ways. I looked back at my companions, then squinted at Saul's marks, all the while teasing the tape with my tongue to bring it to the precise point at which any relevant comment would have been recorded.

All the while I was doing these things I was walking forward without pause, and I never saw the tripwire that was waiting for me in the darkness just beyond the doorway. I felt the impedance to my foot the moment I made contact, but by then it was too late.

I barely had time to look about in wild panic before something that seemed to my untutored eye to be the size of a small sun came hurtling out of the darkness toward my head.

22

Fools rush in, they say, where angels fear to tread.

I can elaborate on that, by observing that fools trip up where angels would still be on their feet. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because if there's a flame-pistol pointed at the place where your face should be, you might be a damn sight safer tripping up.

A flame-pistol doesn't actually fire a jet of flame. What it fires is some kind of semi-liquid artificial plastic which is desperately unstable, and which bursts spontaneously into flame without requiring an external supply of oxygen. Once ignited, it burns very quickly and exceedingly hot, so the person at whom the pistol has been fired is faced with a rapidly expanding cloud of gas. It pays, sometimes, to be close to such a weapon, because if you duck, it can still miss you. If you're a bit further away, you have to dive much further to avoid it.

When I tripped over the piece of rope that Myrlin had left inside the doorway, I was just close enough. That miniature sun couldn't have missed me by more than ten centimetres, but it hadn't expanded enough to burn me. The electromagnetic radiation it gave off wasn't enough to blast a hole in the heavy-duty suit I was wearing. By the time the second bolt was fired, I was flat on the floor and I was determined to stay there until it was all over.

The flame-pistol had obviously been set on automatic, because the second bolt was by no means the last. I lost count after five, but I think the damn thing spat out eight or ten bolts before it finally gave up. Even at that, the trigger must have slipped—a fully-loaded flame-pistol carries a lot of ammunition. I waited for well over a minute, not daring to move, before I finally lifted my head, and then I came tremulously to my feet.

I turned around, and looked back at the carnage behind me, half-expecting to be confronted with the scene of a massacre.

There were great gouting clouds of gas, smoke and vapour, and great glowing patches where the ledge along which we had come had suddenly been raised in temperature from a few degrees Kelvin to a few thousand. One of the sleds had been completely devastated—it had been turned into a pile of slag every bit as useless as those million-year-old cars we had passed on the highway. The other one had been too close to me—the bolts had gone clean over the top of it, without the radiation doing too much damage.

If the star-captain and her men had been close enough to me to have entered the tunnel-mouth, they would have been cooked, but natural caution had held them back. When the firing started they'd done exactly the right thing, making full use of their hair-trigger reflexes. They'd moved into the shadow of the solid wall, hurling themselves forward and sideways so that the bolts had passed harmlessly by, crouching well away from the explosive impacts which the expanding bolts had made on the body of the second sled, and hiding their eyes. They were lucky that they were wearing heavy-duty suits, not the light sterile suits Serne had described to me as their normal combat gear. Even so, I ordered an immediate set of tests, to make sure that the radiation hadn't done any fatal damage.

"Rousseau," said the star-captain icily, "you're a moron."

"Maybe so," I said. I actually felt like a moron, for not expecting the tripwire, and not being properly alert to its presence. "But you ought to thank whatever god you have that he put the wire so close to the doorway. If we'd been thirty metres into a narrow corridor, you wouldn't have had a cat in hell's chance of avoiding those fireballs. You think he's a moron too, or was that just a warning shot?"

"Can it, Rousseau," she said, with all her customary charm. "Just tell us how much we lost, and how much it's going to hurt our chances."

I sighed.

"Well," I said, "it's certainly not going to help. It's cost us most of our cutting equipment, and all of our bubbling gear. That means we're going to have difficulties when we sleep. We'll have to pitch hammocks in the open, and make damn sure that we don't take a fall. The suits are sound, as far as the tests can tell, but the material's not really intended to cope with a deluge of infrared and microwaves. It saved us from being cooked, but its future tolerance might be affected. We can go on, but all risks are doubled now. Next time . . . well, next time, whoever goes first had better not trigger the trap. That's all there is to it."

There wasn't much more to add to that, and she didn't bother. There was no point in threatening to do all kinds of horrible things to me if I was so stupid as to get myself killed. She just had to trust me to be careful. No one else could take over—it was my territory, and her boys were way out of their depth.

The going got tougher after that. We eased our way into the corridor, past the point where Myrlin had fastened the flame-gun to the ceiling, and started picking our way through the maze following Saul's torchmarks with the aid of my tape. We moved slowly, always scanning the ground ahead of us. Nobody commented on the obvious fact that our chances of catching up with Myrlin before he got to the dropshaft were looking distinctly thin—and nobody suggested that we do anything in response to that awareness but press on as rapidly as we could.

Before we stopped to sleep, we found two more tripwires, each one connected to a string that disappeared into the darkness. Neither of them was attached to anything at all—they were just mock-ups, set to delay us and to play upon our anxieties. For an android, Myrlin had one hell of a sense of humour—and he succeeded in slowing us up.

We slung our hammocks from plastic frames that touched the ground at the tips of their four feet. Without our bubbling gear we had no other protection from the cold. The cold floor couldn't hurt us, of course, while we were insulated from it by a metre of near-vacuum, and I'd slept that way a dozen times before, but it wasn't pleasant.

When we started off again, we followed Saul's directions to a wider corridor, which had two thick rails raised above its floor—tracks that once had guided monorail trains in either direction. I was pleased to see them. Tunnels through which trains once ran tend to be virtually endless, with no closed doors to impede progress. They also tend to take you to interesting places, like stations. Stations are good places to hunt around for elevator shafts.

"How much further?" asked the star-captain, when we had trudged along in the space between the rails for half a day.

I consulted my recording of Saul's notes.

"We should be going down to three within a couple of hours," I told her. "Then we're really in the cold. But we'll only be one more day in the icehouse. Twelve or fourteen hours after we start again, we'll get to the big dropshaft.

Saul spent a lot of time down there finding it for us, but we can go straight to it. We'll be tired, but we can make it without stopping again."

"Damn right," she said.

It wasn't quite as easy as I'd suggested it would be, partly because we found the wreckage of a train blocking the tunnel. It hadn't posed any real obstruction to Saul, but that was before the ever-ingenious Myrlin had put an explosive charge in it, and spread it all over the place. Luckily, he'd blown it into small enough pieces to make a less-than-efficient barricade. The walls, the ceiling and the tracks were made of something far too solid to be broken up by the kind of petard which scavengers carry, so there was no way that Myrlin could engineer a major cave-in to block our path.

The troopers worked like Trojans to clear the way, and we were on the trail again with all due speed. Our tempers were only slightly frayed by this extra inconvenience, but my comrades-in-arms were already brimful of bile toward their hapless quarry, and I knew that if and when they caught up with him they were really going to make him suffer.

I resolved not to be there, if there was anywhere else I could possibly be.

Getting down to three was no picnic, but we still had the ropes and enough equipment to rig up a winch and harness, so the empty shaft posed no real problems. We stopped soon after that to rig up the hammocks again. The troopers seemed tired but otherwise undisturbed. We'd been moving through narrowly-confined spaces all day, and I'd known men who'd never before shown signs of claustrophobia begin to develop the heebie-jeebies under circumstances like these; despite their inbuilt paranoia, though, the troopers were tough and disciplined. Perhaps they were revelling in the luxury of having only one enemy trying to kill them, instead of being surrounded by malevolent aliens and dangerous biotech-bugs. Despite what he'd done to Amara Guur's hatchet men, and despite the little incident of the flame-pistol booby-trap, they weren't really frightened of the android. They were confident that once they caught up with him, they could fry him.

Serne said to me before we went to sleep that he didn't see how a lone man could wander around the underworld for twenty days at a time without going a little bit crazy. I assured him that, with practice, the burden of solitude was easy enough to bear. The monochrome surroundings, I told him, were quite comforting in their way. I didn't mention that I usually packed my microtapes with hundreds of hours of music to relieve the tedium, and that I was sometimes wont to talk to myself incessantly, making up with loquacious fervour anything which I lacked in narrative skill. That would have sounded too much like a confession of weakness, unbefitting even the most reluctant hero of the Star Force.

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.

No one really knew how much wilderness there was in the cave-systems on levels one, two and three. There didn't seem to be nearly as much on one or two as there was on three. What that meant was unclear, but in the absence of any evidence that the level three cavies were any less technologically sophisticated than their neighbours, my feeling had always been that they simply liked wilderness areas. Maybe they were concerned to conserve as much as they could of their own evolutionary heritage; maybe when they began to manufacture their food by artificial photosynthesis they set free all the other species which they had exploited in more primitive times, giving them back a place to live, where they could make their own destiny. No one knew, and it was generally considered to be one of the less intriguing problems that Asgard posed.

Saul Lyndrach had gone into the wilderness not once but several times, as if he were looking for something in particular; and it was in the wilderness, eventually, that he'd found his bonanza. That was where we had to go to follow the android.

There was nothing left of the wilderness now but trees and a few bones. Everything had died, millions of years ago, and most of it had rotted away before the cold preserved what was left. All the flesh had gone, though the Tetron bioscientists—reputedly the most expert in the galaxy—had managed to recover a good many genome samples, one way and another.

There were no leaves on the whited trees now, just gnarled trunks and knotted branches. My untrained eye couldn't estimate the number of different species there were, but I could tell which were the oldest trees, with their thick boles and their branches which divided again and again until the ends were no thicker than needles.

The bones were generally clustered, occasionally to be found in meandering grooves and hollows that had once been streams and pools. The water had somehow been drained from them before the great freeze, so they now had the same thin layer of mixed ices that dressed the entire landscape in a cloak of white. The bones themselves were unremarkable, or so it seemed to me. It was all too easy to find leg-bones and hip-bones and jawbones with teeth which would surely have been similar to ones to be found on any of the humanoid worlds, which all had their quasi-cattle and their quasi-chickens just as they had their quasi-men.

There were no humanoid skulls, though. Nor were there any dinosaurs, nor giants in the earth, nor hideous aliens to tantalise the imagination.

Underfoot there had once been grass, but the grass—like everything else—had died before the advent of the cold, and had shriveled into fragility. Our boots crushed it effortlessly, and it seemed rather as if we were walking on frosted cobwebs.

"This is eerie," said Crucero, who seemed to like this region far less than the honest and simple tunnel through which the monorail trains had run. "Could anything actually be alive down here?"

It wasn't such a stupid question as it seemed.

"When it's as cold as this," I told him, "no living system can function. On the other hand, nothing changes. There are some very simple things that were still alive when the cold came, and which can be restored to activity even after millions of years of cryonic oblivion. So far, the biotechs haven't revived anything more complex than a bacterium, but in its way that's not unspectacular. The day they bring back an amoeba will be a really big deal."

"If the cold had come more quickly," the star-captain mused, "there might be whole plants and animals preserved."

"It didn't come as quickly as all that," I told her. "Not even on one. We're sixty or seventy metres beneath the surface here, and the artificial rock which they used to make the walls and ceilings is a very good insulator. It might have been thousands of years after whatever disaster overtook the outside that the cold seeped down here, and the decline in temperature was probably very gradual. By the time the cold took control, there was very little left for it to claim for its own—the inhabitants were long gone. Maybe they took all the birds and beasts with them."

"I can think of another scenario," she said.

It didn't surprise me. Ever since she'd found out that I wasn't keen on the fortress-Asgard hypothesis she'd taken a certain delight in embroidering it, bringing little bits of evidence into line with it one by one.

"Go ahead," I told her. I figured I was tough enough to take it.

"Suppose there really is a central power-source down there in the centre," she said. "A starlet, as you call it. And suppose its power-lines really did extend through thousands of levels, including this one, to give power and heat. If that were so, then there's no reason at all why the cold should ever have seeped down this far. Maybe it didn't seep down at all. Maybe this level and the ones above it were deliberately refrigerated, and the atmosphere of the world deliberately destroyed. Maybe it was all part of a strategy of war."

"You think this was the result of some alien offensive?" I said.

I couldn't see her face, but I could imagine the grin on

it.

"Quite the reverse," she answered. "I think it was a defensive move. I think the reason they had to evacuate these levels was that there was no way they could continue to hold them, and I think the reason they froze them was to try and stop the rot that was taking them over."

I remembered Seme's descriptions of the kind of fighting the Star Force had been formed to do. The Salamandrans had been biotech-minded, and had used biotech weapons: engineered plagues.

"You might be right," I conceded reluctantly.

"And if I am," she pointed out. "Your Tetron friends might get a very nasty shock one day, if they keep on trying to revive the bacteria they find beneath the snowdrifts."

I knew that she might be right about that, too, but I wasn't about to say so. She didn't need any further encouragement to keep her nasty mind ticking over. Anyhow, I could follow the rest of the train of thought without her help. If Asgard was a fortress, whose outer defences had been penetrated, the reason why the exiled cavies hadn't come out of hiding a million years ago might not be too difficult to figure out. Maybe the surrender of the outer levels hadn't stopped the invasion—maybe there was nothing beneath our boots but layer upon layer of dead worlds.

I knew it couldn't be quite that bad. I knew because of the few tantalizing jottings which Saul had left in his notebook. The level he had reached at the bottom of his dropshaft wasn't cold, and there were living creatures there. There was light, and there was plant life, and there were animals. He'd seen enough, before he was forced to return because he was at the very limit of his exploratory range, to make that plain. But what Saul had seen wasn't sufficient to demonstrate that there was still intelligent life inside Asgard. It wasn't sufficient to prove that if a war had been fought, it hadn't been lost.

The star-captain's scenario was still a lively contender— and if she was right, then the warm, living part of Asgard into which we were headed might be far more dangerous than I had previously supposed.

Eventually, we came to the next big wall.

It looked like most of the other walls in the levels: frosted, curving, windowless. There was a doorway in front of us, which Saul had opened with the aid of levers and a torch, so that it presented itself to us as a narrow and jagged slash of shadow. We approached it very carefully, knowing it to be the ideal spot for another of Myrlin's little traps. Perhaps for that very reason there was nothing untoward to be found. The android probably figured that if he had got this far without being caught then he was virtually home and dry. Once he moved away from the bottom of the dropshaft he was making his own way, and all he had to do was cover his tracks.

The corridors inside the wall were like those in any other complex, but the doors that Saul had opened showed us rooms that were different from any I had seen before. For one thing, they hadn't been entirely emptied. There was payload here—enough to have made Saul rich even without the shaft to the interior.

There were no bare walls inside the rooms; there was storage space of one kind or another, all of it packed tight. There were shelves for objects, and big pieces of equipment with display screens, keyboards and instrument panels. Even the chairs were still in place. There were sinks and benches, and sealed chambers fitted with artificial manipulators. There was a great deal of glassware.

Obviously, this was one place the cavies had intended to come back to. Equally obviously, they hadn't actually been back for a very long time.

"It's a laboratory," said Crucero, looking around one of the bigger rooms.

"Damn right," I replied, abstractedly. I was examining some big steel boxes, which might have been refrigerators, ovens, radiation chambers or autoclaves, and wondering whether there was any way to get inside them.

"It's a biotech lab," said Susarma Lear, by way of amplification. I could tell that her imagination was showing her ranks of technicians trying to solve the problem of defending a closed world against a plague-attack . . . and failing.

"The C.R.E. would pay plenty for a place like this," I told her. "If it's been stripped at all, it doesn't show. They may have closed it down, but they left it ready to be started up again. Everywhere else, we've found nothing but the litter they left behind because they considered it useless. This is the real thing."

Even so, there was a kind of desolation about the place. It was too tidy. It hadn't been deserted in a panic; whatever work had gone on here had been brought to a conclusion. It looked as if you could simply find the main power-switch, and turn everything right back on, but that was misleading.

Khalekhan brushed his suited forefinger over one of the keyboards, as though he expected the keys to click and the screen above it to light up. But the keys were stuck solid, immovable, and whatever data had been enshrined in the silicon chips inside the machine must have long since decayed into chaos. Even at twenty degrees Kelvin—and it was no colder than that here—entropy takes its slow toll. Electronic systems can last for millions of years, because silicon is tough stuff, but they need use and maintenance. The unnatural stillness of the deep-freeze isn't such a wonderful preservative as some people make out.

"Let's not waste time," said the star-captain, gruffly. "You can play games to your heart's content when we come back. We have a job to do, remember?" The reason she sounded gruff was that her last hopes of catching Myrlin in the upper levels had now evaporated. If she was going to catch and kill him, she was going to have to do it much closer to the centre of the world.

I didn't protest against her haste. I was as keen to find the dropshaft as she was, albeit for very different reasons. These laboratories were exciting, but they paled into insignificance by comparison with what might be waiting for us down below.

So we moved on, passing doors which Saul had never got round to forcing, barely glancing into the rooms which he had opened up. There was only one where I lingered a little while, letting my curiosity off the bit; that was when I found myself beside one of the sealed transparent chambers where artificial hands were poised above a small assortment of equipment: pipettes, reagent jars, beakers. It was a touch of untidiness that seemed fascinating, and somehow very promising. Whatever was inside that sealed chamber might have been the very last thing that the cavies were working on before they left—before they made their exit down the deep elevator shaft which might have taken them all the way to the mysterious centre.

While I paused momentarily, Serne went ahead, scanning the path for tripwires. He didn't find any booby-traps, but he found the shaft.

He called out for us to come quickly, but he was out of sight; we all went through the standard pantomime of asking "Where?" so that he could reply, unhelpfully, "Here." Eventually, though, we managed to find him.

If we had been in any doubt as to whether Myrlin was still ahead of us, what we found in the shaft settled the question. There were two doubled-up cords secured at the top, and there were half a dozen pieces of equipment abandoned there. It was my equipment, taken from my truck. There was no sled—Myrlin had been strong enough to carry all that he needed, at a pace we couldn't match.

There was an air current drifting up the shaft. We couldn't feel it inside our suits, but we could see its effects in the corridor, where some of the ices had begun to melt or sublimate. This was one little corner of level three that had begun to warm up, though our instruments confirmed that the effect was as yet slight. It was one hell of a chimney that the warm air had to climb, and the top of it was still pretty cold. Saul had only drilled a small hole in the door at the bottom of the shaft—just enough to let him look around— but the flow we monitored implied that there was a much bigger breach now. Myrlin had obviously made a gap big enough to let him through.

We had made very good progress, despite the pauses caused by Myrlin's one real trap and several fake ones, and I was pretty sure that our advantages would have allowed us to catch up with any normal fugitive. The android, though, was still a step and a half in front of us. I hoped that we never would catch up.

"It's going to be a long ride down to the bottom," I said. "It's obviously possible to abseil down, but we should rig some kind of cradle using the winch. We'll have to come up again soon enough, and I don't relish the thought of having to climb. The temperature's high enough for us to leave a block-and-tackle for some time without the pulley freezing solid, but we ought to leave a man here anyhow."

"Why?" asked Crucero.

"Because if we don't," the star-captain put in, "those goons who are following us might simply squat here and wait for us. Someone has to make this place seriously defensible, and lay a much better series of traps than the one the android left for us. If those fail, he has to take the bastards from behind. I don't mind if they follow us down, so that we can meet them on equal terms, but I'm not going to let them take us one by one as we come up. Okay?"

"You want a volunteer?" asked Serne.

"No," she said. "I want Crucero."

She didn't explain why. That was one of the prerogatives of being a star-captain. I think Crucero had mixed feelings about the job, but he followed the logic of the case well enough. He didn't have the same curiosity about what was down below as I had, and he wasn't about to howl with anguish at the lost opportunity. He was probably more worried about the number of men Amara Guur might have sent after us, and whether one lousy lieutenant and a dozen cunning booby-traps could hold the fort against them all.

"They also serve who only stand and wait," I assured him.

He didn't laugh.

"Let's get to work," said Susarma Lear.

We began preparing for our descent into the abyss—our passage from the seventh circle of hell to what I hoped would be the hinterlands of paradise.

I am not by nature an optimist, but as we worked to rig the makeshift cradle I felt almost rigid with excitement. I really did hope that I was on my way to some kind of paradise run by men like gods; the allure of the centre had a very powerful hold on me.

But as the star-captain had remarked, sometimes hope just isn't enough.

24

There was, of course, another dispute once we'd rigged up our scaffold and were ready to start lowering Earth's first ambassador to the heartland of Asgard. I wanted to be the first one down, but I was overruled. After some argument, Serne was given the job. Apparently, the star-captain was worried in case Myrlin was lying in wait at the foot of the shaft, waiting to pick us off one by one. She graciously agreed that I could go third, after her and before Khalekhan.

I was not entirely out of sympathy with her logic, but I found the waiting well-nigh unbearable. It took a long time to lower Serne into the depths, and even longer to haul the cradle back up again once he was down. I wasn't able to calculate the exact depth of the shaft, but it seemed to be several thousand metres—just a pinprick with respect to the actual radius of the planet, but pretty deep; deep enough to be a dozen or a hundred levels down, if there were caveworlds all the way.

"Why isn't there an elevator in the shaft?" asked Crucero, when we had wound the cradle all the way back up to the top again.

"Good question," I said. "Maybe what's left of it is a tangled heap of scrap at the bottom." We couldn't ask Serne, because the shaft was no good for radio communication—all we could get from him was fuzzy static. But there was no cable already in the shaft, and no sign of any fitment in the ceiling from which a cable might once have been suspended. There were ridged grooves on each side-wall, though, into which a car could have slotted. It wasn't immediately obvious how it might have been secured or powered.

"Even if there's no way past the floor where Serne is," I said, more to myself than to my companions, "this shaft could give us access to two hundred levels, each one containing a cave-system as big as a world. It would take centuries to explore. You could lose the entire human race down there, let alone one android."

And when the Tetrax get here, I added, silently, we'll have skychain number two, built inside the world instead of outside. And all the galactics on Asgard will be setting forth on voyages of exploration. Things will never be the same again. Never.

I was getting a bit ahead of myself. There was a murderous android up ahead of me, who posed some mysterious threat to my entire species. There was a gang of bad- tempered humanoid crocodiles behind me, eager to claim this momentous discovery for their own loathsome kind. And there were the heroes of the Star Force all about me, lusty with genocidal fervour and their own brand of paranoia. These were not circumstances which were conducive to a sense of security, and if I had paused to reflect on my predicament I could hardly have faced the future with joyous confidence; nevertheless, I felt that I was entitled to a certain frisson of triumph and exultation, and I indulged myself as far as I was able.

When the star-captain was halfway down, we discovered that it was possible for her to hear Serne while still being able to hear us, so that communication of a sort became possible.

"He says that there's mould, or something like it, growing all over the walls," she reported. "No sign of the android—he cut his way through the door without much difficulty . . . zzz . . . There's dim light outside—not electric bulbs . . . maybe the artificial bioluminescence you talked about. Some kind of corridor ... no sign of present use . . . zzz . . . zzz . . . beyond the shaft... no wreckage of any elevator-car . . . zzz . . . zzzzz ..."

The exchange didn't last long, and was more frustrating than informative. The star-captain's voice faded into a mist of static, and the trial of my patience began again.

"Doesn't make much sense, does it?" said Crucero cheerfully.

"If I had to face Amara Guur's hatchet-men on my own," I informed him unkindly, "I'd be a very worried man."

"I'm trained in guerrilla tactics," he assured me. "I don't have to kill them all—I just have to stop them setting an ambush. If I can blow them to hell and gone, that's fine. If I can't, I'll let them come down the shaft, so that the star- captain can take care of them. All I have to do is make sure that they can't set a trap here . . . and stay alive. Don't worry about me, Trooper. I'll hold my ground—just see that you hold yours."

I didn't say anything more. I figured I'd asked for what I got.

"Do you want to take a gun?" asked the lieutenant, after a pause. He was offering me a flame-pistol.

"I don't have room in my belt," I replied drily. It wasn't a joke. I was carrying a varied assortment of tools.

Eventually, the cradle came back and it was my turn to take the drop. I was glad to climb into it, figuring that this was the real business at hand. Military manoeuvres, I decided, were inherently uninteresting. All the years of my life had been aimed at this moment, even though I hadn't realised it

for the first twenty or twenty-five of them.

It hadn't even been my idea to come to Asgard—my friend Mickey Finn had worked hard to convince me, just as he'd worked hard to convince the others who'd come with us. But I knew now that Mickey Finn had been doing destiny's work. Everything that Mike Rousseau had ever done or thought had been nothing more than preparation for this descent . . . this penetration . . . and I was determined to savour it to the full.

While I dropped through the darkness, turning back and forth through sixty degrees as the cradle swung, I pictured myself as the very archetype of Faustian man, claiming the knowledge and the wealth for which I had laid my very soul on the line.

The sweet taste of the illusion was not in the least soured by my awareness that in most of the old versions of the story, Faust had ended up in hell.

The room—if you can call it a room—into which the elevator-shaft opened at the bottom was a sad disappointment. It was quite bare, and as Seme had said, the walls were covered with something very much like ordinary mould. He wasn't just being uncommunicative when he'd talked about the mould—when he'd mentioned that he'd run through the entire inventory of what there was to be seen. But there was light—a faint radiance, perhaps bioluminescent, emanating from the ceiling and the walls.

There was another door. It had been cut away to open up a space where a man could get through—a very big man—but the edges of the cut had been folded back again, to leave a gap that wasn't much more than a thin crack. Susarma Lear and Serne hadn't tried to open it out fully. They were waiting inside it, peering out.

I wanted to go through, but the star-captain held me back. She wanted to wait until Khalekhan was with us, so that we could all go on together. I had been waiting so long that a little more time didn't matter that much, but I was still annoyed.

I played the beam of my head-light over the mouldy walls, and then looked more closely at the bottom of the elevator-shaft. The floor seemed solid enough; the grooves disappeared straight into it.

"That's where the elevator went," I said, softly. I was only talking to myself, but Serne overheard.

"Where?" he asked.

I pointed downwards, and said: "There."

"It's solid," he said. "This is the bottom."

"It's solid now," I agreed. "But you can see that it's a seal of some kind—look at the meniscus where the plug meets the wall. It must have been a hard-setting liquid which they just pumped in. Naturally they took the elevator car down below the seal, so they could still use it."

"So?" he said.

"So," I said, tiredly, "there are other levels further down. Lots of other levels. We're nowhere near the real centre—yet."

As usual, my mind was working faster than my speech. Here, they'd sealed the shaft. Why? Because this was the last of the abandoned levels? Was the civilization of Asgard still flourishing, just beneath our feet? It had to be. I felt it in my bones. Valhalla was there—the home of the gods, to which heroes went when they had proved themselves worthy. I was tempted to get down on my hands and knees, to put my ear to the ground, in case I could catch the distant thrum of mighty engines, or the murmur of happy crowds.

"It's not very bright out there," said the star-captain, her cool voice cutting through my reverie like a knife. "The temperature is above the freezing-point of water, but it's only a tunnel. Looks pretty bleak. Not much wildlife about."

I wanted to join her, but I didn't. I didn't want to have to stand there, peeping through a crack, when I ought to be forcing my way through. They had already assured me that there was nothing much to be seen.

Even when Khalekhan had arrived there was a further pause for military ritual, as the starship troopers checked their guns and confirmed with empty gestures their readiness for whatever was to come. My participation was, to say the least, half-hearted. But in the end, we were ready.

"I'll go first," I said, hopefully.

Susarma Lear probably figured that if there was going to be an ambush, I might as well be the one to walk into it. I was expendable now.

For whatever reason, she waved me on.

And I went.

25

I stepped across the threshold between the worlds without much difficulty. The door yielded easily enough to the pressure of my hand. I wasn't surprised to find myself in a corridor; it seemed only logical that there'd be some kind of establishment here similar to the one at the top of the shaft. This corridor, however, was very much warmer than the one up above, and like the room from which we'd come it was dimly lit by some kind of bioluminescence. The beam of my headlight picked out scuttling white insects as they hurriedly disappeared into various cracks and coverts. The largest of them was no bigger than my thumbnail.

I checked the temperature; it was 276 degrees Kelvin— three degrees above the freezing point of water, assuming that the pressure was close to Skychain City's norm. It couldn't be comfortable for the insects, if they were exothermic, but it was obviously tolerable. Since the shaft had been open the local air temperature must have dropped very noticeably; outside, it would surely be warmer.

I led the way along the passage, following the glaring traces left by the giant android as his feet had scuffed the organic slick that covered the floor. We passed through two more doorways, each one opened by means of brute force and left agape. It wasn't until we reached the main door that we found more evidence of cutting, and the gap had been closed again. I had to lever the flap open again, but I set to it with a will. I'd seen virtually nothing of the establishment itself—I hadn't the slightest idea whether it was a laboratory or a Laundromat—but I didn't want to waste a minute. My only ambition was to get outside, into the cavies' version of open territory.

I held my breath as I forced a way through, not letting it out again until I was out. I might have said something to the people behind me, but I really can't remember.

The light was brighter on the outside. It was diffuse light, pure white in colour; it seemed to emanate from everywhere overhead, but not quite uniformly. The "sky" was faintly mottled, with occasional black spots. It was almost like a negative image of a planetary sky, with dark stars and shadowy clouds set against a radiant background the absolute opposite of night-black.

The ground glistened like the skin of a patterned snake or frog, mostly in shades of grey. There were dendritic forms like trees and bushes clustered about the door, gathered densely enough to qualify as a forest, but they were festooned with glistening strands of some gossamer-like substance, as if each and every one had been turned into a massive trap by a giant funnel-web spider. The tallest of the "trees" grew to twice my height; the "sky" was only twice as far from the floor.

In spite of the brighter light, the suggestion was of a misty dusk rather than full daylight. We'd have been able to see easily enough without our headlamps, but I wasn't in any hurry to switch mine off. Its light reflected eerily from the spider-silk, but the material would have seemed even more sinister by what passed hereabouts for natural light.

"What is that stuff?" the star-captain asked—but I had no answer.

"It's just as colourless as the surface," Serne complained.

"I guess the trees don't need chlorophyll," I told him. "Whatever fuels this ecosystem, it's not simulated sunlight.

The trees are probably thermosynthetic, drawing heat from Asgard's superstructure. It's not like the surface-simulation on level one."

I only had to take a single step to bring myself within easy reach of a cobweb-strewn branch. The impression of gossamer wasn't misleading; the stuff really was as fragile as spider-silk, and as clingy. The branch itself was brittle; it snapped the moment I put pressure on it. I crumbled the fragment in my gauntleted hand; it disintegrated into tiny shards.

Tiny flying creatures were flocking about our heads, presumably attracted by the light. They resembled tiny moths with wings patterned in black and white. As they accumulated, it became obvious that the lamps weren't going to be helpful for much longer.

Susarma Lear cursed.

"Might as well switch off," I said.

When they'd complied with the suggestion, I moved away from the doorway. The living cloud evaporated. It was easy enough to walk between the trees, even though they filled most of the available space; they were too fragile to impede our progress.

The "boles" of the trees were thick and bulbous, and the junctions from which the branches sprouted were decked with a much thicker overgrowth than the external spider-silk veils. There were creepy-crawlies a-plenty, but I still couldn't see anything bigger than my thumbnail.

Myrlin's boots had left huge footprints in the ground, which was thickly carpeted—to a depth of two or three centimetres—by some kind of fungal mass. If he wanted to conceal his tracks, he was going to have to get out of the forest first.

"Look there," said the star-captain, pointing up at an angle of forty-five degrees. The flyers she was pointing at were obviously bigger than insects, although it was difficult to judge their distance accurately enough to estimate their size. Some were gliding, others flapping wings in a laborious fashion that suggested considerable size, but I didn't want to infer too much. A few shone very faintly, either with bioluminescence of their own or because they were infected with some kind of parasitic growth.

"It's not a garden," Serne observed, drily.

"Nor a vegetable field," I agreed. "Wilderness, pure and—"

I broke off very abruptly. I hadn't heard the slightest warning sound, because my cold-suit wasn't equipped with pick-up mikes. I wouldn't have had any warning at all, if I hadn't caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye, hurtling towards me with astonishing speed.

It was coming from my right, and it was much bigger than it had any right to be, considering the speed with which it was moving through a very cluttered environment— but it wasn't smashing a way through the elaborately- festooned branches the way I was; it was moving discreetly, with remarkable agility.

I had no way of knowing how much it weighed, although I knew that it had to be lightly-framed, but I caught a glimpse of the spikes on its head and the claws on its feet. I certainly didn't want to get in its way. If my cold-suit had been built for sprinting I'd have run, even though I knew that I wouldn't have had a chance of getting away—but I had to stand and face it, because I had no alternative. I raised my hands, ready to grapple.

I didn't need to. When it was no more than a metre away, a thin beam of liquid light leapt out of Seme's flame- pistol and drilled a hole right through its head. The creature was light enough to be hurled sideways by the impact, and its ability to flow through the gaps in the forest abruptly deserted it. It crashed into a bush, sending splinters flying in every direction.

"Hey!" I said. "That was a little too close for comfort."

"No trouble," he said, just as if I'd thanked him kindly.

For a moment, I thought the dead thing was vaguely humanoid, but it was just that it had reared up on its hind legs to attack me and had been jerked rigid by the shock of having its brain instantaneously spit-roasted. It was more like a cat—except for the spikes.

Susarma Lear and Khalekhan had their guns out too. They had formed a triangle, each covering a hundred and twenty degrees of arc, as if they expected a horde of naked savages to leap out of ambush brandishing spears. They seemed so purposeful that I'd gladly have laid a thousand to one against the horde.

The animal's skin was smooth and hairless. Its feet were large, with splayed toes as long as the claws that projected from them. Its shoulders seemed ridiculously large until I realised that it had some kind of extendable frill draped like a cloak about its upper torso. The spikes on its head didn't look like horns, until I'd figured out how it held its head when it was charging, and then they did. I doubted that they'd have been able to penetrate my cold-suit, even if I hadn't been ready to fend off the attack with my brawny arms, but I was glad that I hadn't had to wrestle with the beast.

"Well," I said, "it's not quite as big as a man, but if there are things like that around, there could be humanoids too."

"Let's get moving," Susarma Lear said. "The android's getting further away. He's a lot faster than we anticipated, and he just keeps on going."

She had had enough of letting me lead. She set off in front herself, striding out purposefully.

"We could get Crucero to send more equipment down," I suggested—but she wouldn't hear of it.

"No time," she said.

I fell into step at the rear of the group. I couldn't see her, but I could talk to her easily enough over the radio link. "Keep a sharp lookout," I said. "Logic says that there must be worse things than that around these parts."

"I didn't think the spikes on its head were for decoration," she retorted. "And I saw how fast it moved. Natural selection doesn't favour agility like that unless it's a matter of life or death. When it saw you, it charged—no time wasted in hesitation. I can read the signs too, Rousseau. Trust me."

"You're in command," I said a trifle resentfully.

"That's right," she said. "There must have been a path here once, Rousseau, if not a road. That place we just came from was built to last, and it's lasted, but the infrastructure supporting it has been obliterated. Maybe if we stripped this glutinous carpet we'd find the roadway with all its markings intact, but it wouldn't tell us much more than we already know. Nobody like us has been this way for a very long time—except for the android."

"You're right," I conceded. "But there's built to last and built to last. The station up on four has been deep-frozen, but this one hasn't. I doubt that we're talking about an ecosystem that ran wild a million years ago, let alone hundreds of millions. This is degeneracy of a more recent vintage."

"I'll let you worry about the implications of that," she said.

"Thanks. What did you make of the frill?"

"What frill?" she said, before she realised what I meant.

"Sorry, Rousseau—I don't read frills. Arms and armour, speed and skill are my things. What did you make of the frill?"

"It could have been an arbitrary embellishment, used in sexual display," I said. "On the other hand, it could have been a mechanism for radiating excess heat. If so, keeping warm is no problem hereabouts—quite the reverse, in fact."

"So the power's still on, and the provision it makes for life-support is generous. Big deal. Try to keep up, will you?"

"I am keeping up," I assured her. What she meant was: Don't even think about deserting. I wasn't intimidated. If I were to set off in the opposite direction to the one Myrlin had gone, she'd keep chasing Myrlin—but I had to pick my moment. If they weren't sufficiently distracted, they might just decide to shoot me.

When we finally paused to rest, though, the star-captain made a gesture of trust that I hardly deserved—she offered me a gun. I hadn't accepted the one Serne had offered me, but this one seemed far more significant. I took it, and thanked her for the kind thought.

Now that I had my very own flame-pistol, I felt that I had finally been awarded full membership in her gang. That, I supposed, was how she'd intended me to feel.

"Try to use it wisely," she said. "And whatever else you do, make sure that none of us is in the line of fire before you set it off."

"I'll do my best," I promised.

26

I had expected to find water, and it didn't take long for the expectation to materialise. There was a lot more of it than I had anticipated, in fact. It didn't look deep, but it looked distinctly noisome—stagnant was too weak a word to do it justice.

Myrlin's trail led us straight to it, no more than six hours' march from the bottom of the dropshaft. Perhaps, once upon a time, it had been a system of reservoirs or a vast hydroponic farm. Now it was a swamp whose waters were as thick as soup, choked with drifting mats of vegetation and pockmarked with small islets crowded with skeletal dendrites decked out with the usual anaemic tinsel. The air was thick with flying insects. Every now and again marsh gas would bubble to the surface, sending slow ripples across it.

"Pity we didn't pack a boat," I murmured, as we stood contemplating the dimly lit vastness of the swamp. Our eyes were well-accustomed to the twilight, but the visibility was a lot poorer over the still water.

"Shut up, Rousseau," said the star-captain. What she meant was: don't bother to tell us that we've lost any chance we ever had of finding him.

I didn't have to. "We couldn't track a bulldozer across that," Serne observed.

"Shut up, Serne," said the star-captain. "We're not giving up. We are not going back to report that we simply stopped trying. When our life-support systems reach the

limit of their range, we can turn back. Not before."

It was obvious, though, that she no longer expected to catch up with Myrlin. He must be extremely weary by now, but he'd done it. He'd beaten her.

"Follow me," the star-captain said, in her most determined tone.

She was out of her mind, but I hadn't the courage to tell her so. She walked slowly into the water, testing its depth as she went, heading directly away from the shore. I assumed that she would try to guess as best she could which way Myrlin would turn, given that he'd have to avoid the islets and the floating mats.

She was no more than thigh-deep when the bottom leveled out.

"Look!" she said, triumphantly, pointing at the fringe of one of the fibrous masses; it had certainly been disturbed, probably by Myrlin. I had to grant that we might not be entirely lost, until we got far enough out to find larger expanses of open water.

I sighed, and walked into the water after the others, still content to bring up the rear but not yet ready to turn tail and run. It was laborious ploughing through the murky water, but I wasn't afraid of getting out of my depth. If necessary, I could have walked along the bottom in my cold-suit with a metre of water over my head. I did pause to wonder whether there might be creatures lurking below with teeth like sharks or crocodiles, or drilling worms, but I figured they'd just get toothache if they tried to get through the fabric.

Susarma Lear shouted "Look!" three times more—and I could hear the hope creeping back into her voice—while we covered another kilometre or so. We were moving more slowly now, no longer in a straight line, and I was getting very tired—but I knew that Myrlin had been going without sleep a lot longer than I had, and I could hardly blame the star-captain for conserving the hope that we might find him fast asleep on an islet at any moment.

Eventually, though, we came to a much greater expanse of open water, and the signs of Myrlin's passage vanished entirely.

The wild goose had flown.

"We'd better rest a while," the star-captain said. Her voice had the texture of ground glass, but she still wasn't prepared to say out loud that she admitted defeat.

"If you were to report that you'd caught and killed him," I pointed out, delicately, as we sprawled on the last of a chain of islets, looking out over the placid lake, "no one would ever know the difference."

"That's not the Star Force Way," she said, severely.

"This isn't Star Force territory," I told her.

"The Star Force doesn't have territory," she informed me, frostily. "But wherever the Star Force goes, it does things the Star Force Way."

"Sure," I said. "If you don't win the Star Force Way, you lose the Star Force Way. No ifs or buts, just—"

"I heard the joke the first time, Rousseau," she said. "I don't want to hear it again. Here's the plan. We make our way back to the edge of the swamp as quickly as we can, and then we make our way around it. He's got to come out somewhere. It's just a matter of picking up his trail there."

I suppressed a groan. I suspect that I wasn't the only one. I began to shake my head instead, and then I stopped, because my eye had caught a movement in the dark surface of the lake. It was a ripple, rolling in towards the shore.

It was a very big ripple, and it wasn't alone.

"Captain," Serne whispered. He'd seen it too, and he

was drawing his gun even as he spoke.

I didn't reach for mine. They were only ripples, even if it did look as if whatever was causing them might be vast.

We all waited for something substantial to break the surface, but it seemed just as vitreous as ever, even though it had a curiously marbled effect, and no longer seemed quite as flat as it had been.

Whatever was there had to be moving under its own power, because there was no current for it to drift on, but it was hard to figure out exactly where it might be or exactly how fast it might be moving.

Khalekhan had drawn and raised his gun, but he lowered it again. "There's nothing—" he began—but Serne had leveled his own weapon; he was taking aim.

All I could see was murky water. Nasty water, but only water—except that it wasn't.

It was obvious now that the surface was no longer flat, but it really did seem as if the lake itself had come to life, and that it was the water itself that was flowing towards us. It wasn't the water, although it was just as transparent, and seemingly just as fluid. It was something very big and very strange, oozing along the bottom of the lake, but now that it was close it was rearing up like some kind of giant domelike wave.

There were thin pinpricks of light inside it.

It was a gargantuan blob of protoplasm: an amoeboid leviathan. It must have been more than sixty metres across, although it probably wasn't round; it probably wasn't any easily definable shape.

The pseudopods were already out of the water, flowing at us like giant hands with too many fingers. "Flowing at us" doesn't sound all that threatening, but I felt well and truly threatened.

So did Serne. He had already opened fire, and he had altered the setting of his flame-pistol, so that it was letting out great gouts, like the gun in Myrlin's trap, rather than the delicate beam he'd used to kill the spiky predator.

Khalekhan raised his gun again. So did Susarma Lear.

My own instinct was to flee. I danced backwards, away from the groping jelly. It was like trying to jump out of a stream of treacle, but I managed to haul myself away, and once I was free I could move faster than the protoplasm could flow, at least while I was still on the islet.

I'd like to be able to say that I knew that my moment had finally arrived, and that I was boldly and gladly seizing my opportunity, but it wouldn't be true. The Star Force code compels me to admit that I simply panicked. While three tongues of lethal fire turned substantial—but relatively tiny—parts of the amazing creature to murky steam, I ran like hell.

If the creature had had a brain, Serne would doubtless have picked it out and made his fire-power tell—but it didn't. It kept on flowing, the coenocytic mass splitting here, there and anywhere in response to the flame-flood, but not dying. The creature didn't mind being boiled and sliced, and it was very, very big indeed.

I only glanced back the once, to see the glutinous grey gel flowing up and up and up the legs and torsos of the intrepid soldiers of Old Earth; then I concentrated on making my own escape. I plunged into the water on the far side of the islet and kept on going, heading for the next in the chain. I crossed that one, and the next, and the next.

A scream was ringing in my ears. There were probably three voices, but there was only one interminable scream. It wasn't a scream of agony or anguish, but of pure unadulterated horror. I tolerated it for what seemed like twenty or thirty

seconds, and then I switched off the radio. It was easier, then, to keep on going. I was safe, but I kept going anyway. I was alone, and I was free. Their game was over, and the only one left to play was my own.

27

In the urgency of my flight from the lake monster I had come well away from the trail the four of us had blazed as we followed the fugitive indications of Myrlin's passage. I wasn't even sure of the direction I had taken, or which direction we had been facing after all our zigs and zags in the swamp.

I was lost—but after cursing myself briefly, I calmed down. I figured that I had to be heading back in the direction of the edge of the swamp, and that wherever I came out, I'd be able to follow the star-captain's last plan and make my way around it—partially, at least—before retracing my steps and trying the other direction, until I found the place where we'd gone in. I had plenty of time; there was no problem, provided that I didn't encounter any more nasty denizens of the swamp.

To keep myself company I tongued in the music tape that I always had set up in my helmet. It helped to steady me, because it restored the familiarity of the situation, to the extent that it could be restored. I was alone, in semi- darkness, beneath the surface of Asgard—and that had become, in the course of the years, the existential situation of the real me.

I began to feel confident, and even slightly cheerful. I had made the great discovery at last. I had found the way to Asgard's heart.

I put the star-captain and her troopers out of my mind. I blotted them out of my consciousness and memory. They had interrupted the course of my destiny, and now they were gone. I was back on track. I couldn't afford to dwell on the tragedy that had overtaken them; I had other things to think about, and new plans to make.

Eventually, plan one paid its first dividend. I reached the edge of the swamp. It was only then that I realised how utterly exhausted I was. I put a good ten metres between myself and the water's edge, and I sank down on to the ground, lying there quite still, listening to the music.

I didn't really intend to sleep, but I couldn't help drifting off into a doze.

I didn't sleep for long—not long enough, in fact. I was still very tired when I forced my eyes open and sat up again. The music was still playing. The pipes in my suit had kept right on pumping nourishment into my bloodstream and carrying my various wastes away. The oxygen/nitrogen mix had continued to flow into my headspace, always carefully refreshed, purged of carbon dioxide. The music had soothed my auditory canals like a drug.

I forced myself to my feet and took stock of my situation. I could see further here than I'd been able to while trekking through the forest earlier. There was a slope, and a ridge that seemed to be skirting the marshland. I went up it, confident that I'd be able to get a much better view from the top.

I found more than I had bargained for. The ridge proved to be an embankment, and there were rails running along it. They hadn't been used for a very long time—it was difficult to guess exactly how long, given that they weren't metallic and that the encrustation on them wasn't rust, but the important thing was that they really were rails. Rails have termini, one at each end. Sometimes, they have stations along the way.

I forgot about skirting the marsh in search of my old trail, and set out to follow the rails.

I was half-entranced, and the rails made it easy to slip into a quasi-mechanical mode. I continued to put one foot in front of the other without giving the matter any conscious thought, and didn't even bother to look around myself to any considerable extent. The landscape had become tedious in its seeming familiarity: trees and more trees, all thickly clad in cobwebs. Had another predator appeared, I hope I would have been able to react with appropriate alacrity, but none did.

I was between the buildings almost before I realised that they were there. I refocused my eyes abruptly, wondering whether I'd accidentally wandered into a city, but there were only two of them, one to either side of the track. There was no platform, and the buildings were in a very bad state of repair, their roofs collapsed and their walls crumbling. There didn't seem to be any furniture inside what remained of the rooms that had been exposed by fallen walls—but even so, they were buildings, of an appropriate size and design to have been erected by humanoid hands. They warranted farther investigation.

I picked out the one that seemed to be in a slightly better state of repair, and stepped through the door into a shadowed hallway.

Then one of the shadows moved, extended an impossibly long arm, and pressed the muzzle of a gun to my faceplate.

Unlike the rails, the gun was made of metal, and it wasn't old. I hadn't the slightest doubt that if it went off, the faceplate would shatter—and so would my skull.

"Merde," I said, with feeling. No one could hear me, of course. My suit radio was still switched off.

Having just stepped into the darkness, I couldn't see the person holding the gun, but I formed the impression of a mass of shadow larger than any man—or larger than any man should have been.

He switched on his headlamp, dazzling me. I felt the pressure of his hand as he removed my flame-pistol from my belt. When my eyes had recovered sufficiently to begin to discern the muzzle of his gun again, it was moving over my faceplate in a very strange manner. I watched it go through the routine twice before I realised that it was writing out a series of numbers. It took me a while longer to work out that he was indicating a channel code. I deduced that he was instructing me to turn on my radio and retune it so that I could talk to him.

I did as I was told.

"I'm on," I said, to let him know I'd done it.

"Mr. Rousseau, I presume," he said, with the easy confidence of a man who'd just mounted a successful ambush. He must have seen me coming from a long way off. I hadn't even seen the buildings.

"You can call me Mike," I said. "Welcome to Asgard. I did come to see you the day after you landed, to apologise for my churlishness—but events had moved on. I seem to have caused us both a certain amount of trouble."

I could see him now, after a fashion—or his suit, at least. He was enormous, but not beyond the bounds of everyday possibility. The suit-manufacturer had been able to supply him out of stock, albeit with a unit that might have sat in the storeroom for a long time if he hadn't come along when he did.

"That's all right," he said. "I'm used to trouble. I'm sorry about your truck—and the body in your bed. I should have called for medical help as soon as I got Saul out, but I had no idea who my enemies were—and nor had Saul. He thought the Tetrax had tipped off Amara Guur."

"Somebody did," I agreed. "I can't believe that it was a Tetron—but the inner workings of the C.R.E. are a mystery to me."

"Do you know what happened back in Skychain City?" he asked.

"Not for certain. The story, as I see it, is that Guur's men came to snatch Saul and found you there too—asleep, I presume. They took you both along, and put you on ice while they chatted to Saul. They had the notebook but couldn't read it. Balidar told them that I might be able to. They checked, just in case—and when they couldn't break Saul, they launched plan B. It had almost paid off when the Star Force arrived. By that time, you'd broken loose and indulged in a little payback—but Saul was past saving so you went on your way. Guur gave us the notebook. We followed you. He followed us. Did I miss anything? Can I sit down, by the way? I had a cat-nap, but I'm exhausted."

"Go ahead," he said. "How did you find me?"

"I didn't," I said, surprised. "When the star-captain and her men picked a fight with a giant amoeba I took the opportunity to run. When I got out of the swamp I found the tracks. I followed them. I guess you did the same."

"How many Star Force men are guarding the dropshaft?"

"Only one, at present," I said. "There's another on the surface. Amara Guur could have passed the first without any trouble, if he wanted to, but getting past the second will be a different matter. The warship must be able to shuttle more men down if the need arises, though, and if Guur did pick a fight with the man they left on the surface to watch the hole, they'd interpret that as need—and the Tetrax would probably agree. Why? Were you thinking of going back?"

"I'm not thinking of taking off my helmet just yet," he said. "As you've doubtless ascertained, the air here has enough oxygen in it to be breathable, but the biotoxin assay doesn't look promising."

"I hadn't quite got around to that kind of routine labour," I confessed. "The star-captain was in a hurry."

"So I heard. I was able to listen in on you as soon as you reached the bottom of the dropshaft."

"Really? You should have said something."

"I didn't know whether you'd be able to get a fix on me if I started transmitting. The risk didn't seem worthwhile."

"It was probably a wise decision," I confirmed. "The star-captain wasn't in a negotiating mood."

"How much did she tell you?" he wanted to know.

"That you're an android manufactured by the Salamandrans, for reasons shrouded in the deepest military secrecy. She seems to feel that you're a threat to the human race, but she wasn't at liberty to tell me why. My orders were to shoot first and not to expect any answers to any questions that I might care to ask, before or after. I never intended to carry them out—it's not my style. Still—you're safe now. There's only the two of us left down here, and you have both guns."

"If only that were true," he said.

It took me a moment or two to figure out what he meant. I ought to have realised when he told me to change channels when I switched the radio on. I was very tired.

"One of them's still alive?" I guessed.

"They're all still alive."

"Well, praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. The damn thing must have flowed right over them. Its juices couldn't pick a hole in their cold-suits. I should have known that. It was all the screaming ... I bet they're as embarrassed as all hell about that."

"They've put it behind them," Myrlin said, drily. "I shouldn't have told you that, I suppose. Now you can let them listen in on us, if you care to—but you'd have worked it out anyway, wouldn't you?"

"I'd prefer to keep things simple," I told him. "Anyway, I'm a deserter now. I suppose the star-captain is more than a little annoyed about that."

"She certainly is."

"So we're in the same boat now, aren't we?" He was way too paranoid to believe it, but I felt that I had to try.

"I prefer to keep things simple myself," he told me. "If I shot you, I'd have one thing less to worry about."

"True," I admitted. "Why didn't you?"

"Because the time will come, sooner or later, when the air will have to be tested. No biospectral analysis is ever as good as a clinical trial."

"You want me to take my helmet off?"

"Not yet," he said. "First, I want to find out where the tracks go. There might be other alternatives. Humanoids lived here once. They still might, even though the trains stopped running. If they're in contact with other levels . . . with the builders themselves . . . That's enough rest for now. Get up."

I didn't argue. I got up, and we moved out of the shadows into the permanent twilight. He looked just as big out in the open, but he wasn't really a giant. He was just a very big humanoid—the kind of humanoid a genetic engineer might design if he'd been asked to provide a blueprint for a warrior, and hadn't quite caught on to the fact that the last few hundred years of progress had rendered that kind of physical power redundant. Nowadays, war is all about the kind of hardware you can carry; weaklings can be supermen too.

Unfortunately, he had two guns and I had none.

I walked ahead of him, following the tracks as I had before, fighting to stay alert.

"If Guur's men were able to get past the Star Force rearguard," he said, "would they be able to find us?"

"I doubt it," I said. "They might be able to find the star- captain—Guur's Kythnan femme fatale almost certainly bugged her hair. They bugged the book too, but I left that behind. I think I'm clean, but it's not impossible that I picked up some traceable contamination from it."

"Is that why they gave it to you?"

"Maybe. On the other hand, they'd run out of time. Plan B had gone up in smoke, and they were desperate. They had to get things moving somehow. For a Salamandran android, you speak very good English."

"I was well-educated," he said. "It was an unorthodox process, but highly effective. They'd never tried it before, of course, so whoever designed the technics deserves congratulation. Can we stick to more pressing matters, for the time being? How many men does Guur have? How dangerous are they?"

"Not many," I told him. "A dozen, maybe—but that's the number he'll have started out with when he arrived at the hole on the surface. If he tries to fight his way past Crucero, he'll take casualties. Then again, they're petty gangsters, not down-level men. He probably has a couple of scavengers with him, acting as guides, but you killed at least one of those when you broke Saul out. He might have lost some men just following the trail down to four. Why didn't you put that flamer further along the corridor, where it

would have roasted at least one of us when it went off?"

"Did it go off?" he said. "When you arrived safely, I assumed that you'd seen the tripwire." It wasn't exactly an answer to my question, but it was all I got.

"Anyway," I said, "even if Guur does get down here with eight or ten men, he's still got the star-captain, Serne and Khalekhan to reckon with. She may not know that he's tracking her, but she won't be an easy target."

"You didn't warn her that he'd planted bugs on her?"

"No," I admitted. "I always intended to give her the slip sooner or later, and I figured that if Guur went after her instead of me . . . okay, so I should have warned her. We all make tactical misjudgments—we're only humanoid. Silence seemed like a good idea at the time, but things were moving so fast. It won't make any difference. She can handle Guur—and the chances are that he won't even try to pick a fight with Crucero, or risk the booby traps once he knows approximately where the dropshaft is. Why bother?"

"He wouldn't, if all he wanted to know was the location of the prize," Myrlin admitted. "But he does have a score to settle. It's not the Star Force personnel that Guur wants dead—or you, come to that. It's me. Everybody wants me dead—except, perhaps, for you."

I realised that he was probably right. Not that Guur would care overmuch about the loss of seven lives—what he'd care about was the loss of face. If a crime-lord loses seven of his henchmen, not to mention a kidnap-victim, he has to do something about it, or look like a fool. People like Guur and Heleb took that sort of thing seriously.

I looked from side to side as I led the way, but the tracks were no longer raised on an embankment. We were no longer skirting the swamp but moving through the gossamer- embalmed forest. The taller trees loomed large on either side, and the undergrowth had crept to the very edges of the parallel rails, although the space between them was still clear. It was an easy road to follow—so easy that anyone else who stumbled across it would undoubtedly start following it, unless they had a very pressing reason for going in another direction.

"You're right," I told him. "I don't have anything against you. In fact, I feel guilty about not having taken responsibility for you when 74-Scarion asked me to. It was my fault that you became a target for Guur—and you tried to help my friend, killing that slimeball Balidar in the process. I don't have anything against you at all. I might have, if Susarma Lear wasn't so careful of her military secrets, but I'm not prepared simply to take her word for it that you have to be killed. I'm an Asgarder, not a starship trooper."

It all sounded rather hollow, even to me, even though every word of it was true.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you the truth," he said.

"That makes us even," I told him. "I just told you the truth, but you don't believe me. But I'm not as paranoid as you—and I'm certainly not as paranoid as the star-captain. If anyone's ever going to believe you, it's me. So why don't you try me—unless, of course, it's a military secret that you can't divulge."

"All right," he said, seemingly grateful for the opportunity. "I'll tell you the story."

And he did.

28

Earth, it seemed, had always had the upper hand in the war. The Salamandrans had started it, but it had been a desperation move. The Salamandrans were never a match for Earth's firepower—although they underestimated the extent of their deficit, and tried hard to conceal it from the humans when they discovered the awful truth.

Earth's heavy metal technology was only a little more advanced than Salamandra's, just as Salamandra's biotech was only a little more advanced than Earth's, but technology is art as well as science, perhaps more art than science. When it came to the art of war, Earth had the Star Force Way, and the Salamandrans didn't. Human had more guns, more powerful guns, and much sexier guns.

The Salamandrans had a much wider range of biotech weapons, but biotech weapons always have delivery problems. Tailoring biotech weapons to attack human flesh while leaving Salamandran flesh untouched was easy enough, but introducing those weapons to human flesh was a different matter. Biological warfare is essentially intimate, in a way that heavy metal warfare isn't. In a clash of styles, heavy metal always wins—but the Salamandrans, having only the history of their own species to draw on, hadn't quite realised that when they started the war.

They realised it soon enough thereafter. The Salamandrans had killed a lot of humans in the early phases of the war, before Earth's high command had figured out exactly what kind of defences they needed, but they never got to Earth itself. Once the human defences were properly mobilised, the backlash began—and the Salamandrans understood soon enough that they were in deep shit.

They tried to fight a holding action, while they tried to formulate a Plan B. Biotech-minded species like the Tetrax always tend to take the long view, so they began making contingency plans for the way they'd have to fight in a second war, a couple of hundred years down the line, to recover everything they'd lost in the first—even if that "everything" turned out to include their homeworld and everything else they held . . . and even if that "everything" brought them to the brink of extinction.

As I said, the big problem with biotech weaponry is delivery. Insulation against airborne agents is too easy. Delivery of a biotech weapon requires personal contact. The Salamandrans had the lessons of their own troubled history to draw on, and what those lessons had taught them was that the success of biological warfare depended on the efficiency of its carriers. So they set out to design carriers who could take their weapons to the human race: androids, designed not merely to look like humans but to be humans, in every sense that mattered except one; androids who would believe, as sincerely as any other human, that they were human, and wouldn't even know about that one subtle difference.

Unfortunately, androids suffer from the same problems as any other kind of biological weaponry: their own delivery takes a long time. All the biotech-minded humanoid races have the technics to make androids, but few of them bother, because growing and educating an android requires just as much trouble as growing and educating a person by natural means. If you need slaves, the economical way to provide them is the Tetron way—but the Salamandrans had other priorities. The Salamandrans had—or thought they had—a strong incentive for grappling with the problems of accelerated growth and accelerated education, so that they could bring their human-seeming androids to full maturity in less than half the time it took a natural human.

They'd experimented before, of course, but only in the manufacture of pseudo-Salamandrans. For humans they needed moderately different technics and a whole new DNA-recipe. It's not surprising that the trial runs threw up some unexpected glitches. They would probably have sorted them out if they'd had time.

They didn't have time. Their holding-action wasn't good enough. The war ended before they'd got any kind of production-line set up. All they had was the final set of prototypes.

They were pretty good prototypes, except for one small detail: the accelerated growth had built up a little too much momentum. They were too big—not beyond the natural range of human variation, but close to its upper limit. They would be too easily identifiable, maybe not in the first instance, but soon enough. One near-giant might not seem suspicious, but a whole set would be certain to attract attention and invite careful investigation.

The problems of delivering biological weapons don't stop with finding carriers, of course. As soon as a tailored plague manifests itself, defences can be mobilised against it. Cases can be quarantined; vaccines can be sought. Those plagues spread furthest that have the longest incubation period—but incubation periods sufficient to allow an agent to be carried undetected to every corner of a Gaia-clone world, let alone a fledgling interstellar empire, require the users of the weaponry to take a very long view indeed.

Even humans had worked out, while fighting their own petty plague wars, that the most effective biological weapons—in the long term—were those which debilitated without killing, so that every sufferer would be a burden as well as an infective agent. They'd figured out, too, that it mustn't show itself too soon, and mustn't be too easily identifiable as an enemy agent when it did. The basic theory required a two-step process: infect first, trigger later.

The Salamandrans knew all that too. They had built an infective agent into Myrlin and his kin, but it was a subtle one; it wouldn't run riot for a long time, and when it did, it would cause a long, slow social meltdown rather than a modern Black Death.

It was a good plan, in its way, but it had one all-important proviso attached to it. It was a good plan, so long as nobody knew about it. Once someone did, it could be short- circuited. The defenders didn't even have to devise a defence against the primary agent, if that proved too difficult; they only had to devise a defence against the trigger.

As things turned out, the Salamandran homeworld fell too soon, too abruptly, and far too messily. They lost, or sacrificed, most of their prototype androids, but they didn't manage to obliterate every last trace of the program. They provided Myrlin with a believable cover-story—representing him, of course, as a prisoner of war—but it wasn't quite good enough. It passed the first inspection, but it fell apart on closer examination.

When Myrlin was initially picked up, he was treated as a liberated captive, in spite of his unusual size, but he never got off the surface of Salamandra—not, at least, until he had to make his escape, because he'd been spotted for what he was.

Nobody knew the details of the plan, but the invaders had eventually figured out that there had been a plan, and that he was part of it. Nobody knew exactly what it was that he was carrying, or how it was ultimately to be triggered, or when—but nobody was overly interested in niceties like that. They just wanted him dead. After all, from the Star Force viewpoint, he was only an alien android: a bioweapon.

From his own point of view, of course, things seemed very different. He had been grown in a tank and his developing brain had been fed by unorthodox methods, discreetly filled with synthetic memories and stocks of knowledge, but he thought of himself as fully and authentically human. He didn't want to be a weapon of war. He didn't intend to be a weapon of war. His only ambition was to be disarmed, if any disarmament were necessary.

He didn't think it was. He didn't think that the first phase of the operation had been completed, let alone the second stage of the programme. He thought that he had never even been primed to be infectious, and that even if he had, he was a weapon without a trigger, a bomb without a detonator—but it was in his interests not merely to think all those things but to believe them with all the passion and certainty of which a synthetic human mind was able.

Even if he had been primed, he explained, he wasn't a problem that needed to be solved the Star Force Way. He could be disarmed. He could be quarantined. In fact, he had only escaped from custody in order to get himself disarmed, and quarantined. He had come to Asgard because the Tetrax were the cleverest biotechnicians in the humanoid community—and because there were so few humans here.

"You were never in any danger, Mr. Rousseau," he assured me. "Even if you'd taken me in, you'd have been in no danger. Saul Lyndrach was in no danger from me— although he was, alas, from others."

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?"

He didn't give the flame-pistol back. I hadn't supposed that he would.

"We'd better move on," he said. "We won't get to the terminus by sitting still."

It was fine by me; I was feeling a little better. We set off along the track yet again.

"There's energy to spare here," I observed, after we'd gone a little way further. "The ecosystem may seem degenerate, and the artefacts we've seen so far are definitely long past their period of use, but there's no obvious reason why evolution shouldn't be progressive. Given that this is an artificial habitat—a big cage, in essence—the fact that the power's still switched on means that things really ought to be working according to plan. I can't believe that this is anybody's plan, but it's certainly not a plan that went awry millions of years ago. The humanoids who lived here must have suffered a fairly recent catastrophe. It's possible, I suppose, that the heat fuelling the ecosystem is leaking in from other levels, rather than actually being laid on, but that's not the kind of situation that could have endured for millions of years either. Are you following all this?"

"I understand what you're saying," he confirmed, "but it's not the most urgent matter on my mind."

"No, it's not," I admitted. "Okay, what do you want to talk about, Mr. Myrlin? Is it Mr. Myrlin, or is Myrlin your first name?"

"It's my surname," he said. "At least, it's the surname the Salamandrans made up for me. My forenames are supposed to be Alexander James. I don't really feel comfortable with them, now that I know the memories associated with them are fake."

"But you're content with Myrlin?"

"With a 'y,' " he reminded me. "Or maybe a 'why not'? Everybody needs a name, Mr. Rousseau."

"You can call me Mike," I said, generously.

"I'm not a magician," he told me. "I'm not a monster either. It's just a name, and I'm just a human being, like you."

He was protesting too much, but who could blame him?

"It's okay," I assured him. "I'm not the one you need to convince."

"The horizon's getting brighter," he said. "I can't see any buildings yet, but I think we're getting close."

He was right. The "sky" was definitely brighter in the direction we were headed. Given the closeness of the horizon, the brightly-lit region couldn't be far away. I increased my stride, although I couldn't match his. He moved ahead of me effortlessly enough.

I wondered if I ought to change the radio channel while he was distracted, to make contact with the star-captain and reassure her that I was still okay—but I'd have had to explain why I'd been out of contact for so long, and where I was, and what I was doing . . .

All in all, it seemed simpler just to keep going. After all, in spite of what Myrlin had said a few minutes ago, the only thing that really mattered was the mystery of Asgard. It might not be the most urgent matter on his mind, but it was still the most urgent on mine.

As he drew further ahead, I tried to break into a run, but the cold-suit wasn't built for it. He had the longer legs, so he was the one who came in sight of the city first—but I got there as soon as I could.

I was hoping for something that would really bend my mind, but I knew that I would be over-optimistic to expect it. I'd seen enough of the habitat to be pretty certain that we weren't about to meet the humanoids who had built Asgard, or any equally exciting alternative.

The city was decaying. Like everything else in the ecosystem, it seemed to have been deteriorating for a long time, though not for millions of years. Walls were crumbling; doorways yawned; the streets were overgrown and littered. The one thing untouched by the effects of long neglect was the system of lights; no frail bioluminescence had ever held domain over this place; it was illuminated by countless incandescent bulbs, each one the size of a humanoid head. Whatever repair system had been entrusted with the job of keeping the network in good order was obviously fully functional.

What the light displayed to us, though, was quite the opposite.

There was no need for us to mount an assiduous search for the inhabitants of the city; they came to us, like night- flying insects drawn to a flame. The metaphor is more appropriate than it may seem, because there was nothing in their eyes to suggest that they were moved by an active curiosity. Their vacant expressions suggested that they were indeed being drawn by some inner impulse that they neither understood nor cared to suppress.

They were humanoid, but on a scale that I hadn't seen among all the starfaring races represented on Asgard. Those who seemed to be fully-grown were no taller than the average human child of ten or eleven, and much more lightly built. They weren't just thin; they were bony, as if they ought to have been carrying far more flesh than they actually were. Their silvery-grey skin was wrinkled, so that even the faces of the smallest ones—children, I assumed— seemed irredeemably ancient. They were clothed, but the majority wore little more than filthy loincloths. Even the most extravagantly dressed had only knee-length trousers and threadbare waistcoats without buttons or hooks.

They were drawn to us, but not all the way. They came to stand and stare, but they kept their distance. Because we were walking along the street, they formed up to either side of us in two long ranks. Not one of them was carrying anything—neither a weapon, nor a tool, nor a toy. There was no evidence that any of them had been doing anything when the news of our arrival began to spread. There had been no work going on, and no play either, so far as I could tell.

They jostled for position in their discreet fashion, but not violently. None spoke to us, and none made any gesture of greeting. They just watched us—and those we had passed by fell into step behind us, following us at a distance of eight or ten metres.

Myrlin said nothing, so I figured that it was up to me. I caught up with him easily enough now that he'd slowed down, and raised my arms. I gestured theatrically. "Can anybody talk?" I asked—in parole, although I knew perfectly well that none of them would have been able to understand it even if they could hear me; it just seemed more appropriate than English.

They didn't react to the pantomime, let alone reply. I was at a loss.

30

It didn't make sense. There might be energy to spare down here, but that didn't mean that there was no competition, no struggle to survive. If these people were as passive as they seemed, and as helpless as they seemed, then somebody had to be looking after them—somebody, given their response to our presence, who looked more like us than they did.

"I think they're all children," Myrlin said. "Don't be fooled by the wrinkles."

"I'm not so sure," I said. "But whoever—or whatever— supplies their food and clothing doesn't seem to have been doing a very good job lately. Maybe not for a long time."

"They don't seem to be making much headway in learning to fend for themselves," Myrlin observed. "They should have begun showing a little enterprise some time ago. Natural selection favours the adventurous in circumstances like these—unless these are an unrepresentative sample. Maybe the adventurous are out adventuring."

We were still moving, but our walk had slowed to a mere stroll. We didn't have anywhere in particular to go, but we were still headed towards the city centre.

"They're not afraid of me," he observed. "They must see big people sometimes—if not adults of their own kind, people of another kind. Maybe people in suits—not cold- suits, I suppose, but maybe sterile suits."

"If they come from elsewhere," I said, "they certainly don't use the dropshaft we came down. If there's another,

the sensible place to put it is in the city."

"Wishful thinking," Myrlin observed. He was right—but so was I.

I glanced behind. The crowd behind us had grown considerably. There must have been a hundred or more ahead of us, discreetly placed to either side, but there were three or four times as many in the rear.

"They expect something," I said, "but no matter how badly they need it, they know how to behave."

"Dumb animals," the android suggested. "Maybe it's the clothes that are misleading. They're built like humanoids, but they might not be humanoids at all in our sense."

"Maybe," I conceded. "Maybe they're androids—obsolete androids, put out to grass."

"Built for what purpose?" he countered.

"Built small to alleviate the possibility of rebellion," I suggested. "If I were thinking in terms of manufacturing people to do my bidding, I wouldn't make them your size."

"That was a mistake," he conceded. He came to a halt then, and just stood there, scanning the sea of wrinkled faces—waiting.

I wasn't sure that it would work, but it was worth a try. I stopped too.

"Okay," I said, as if to the crowd, in parole. "You can take us to your leader, or bring your leader out to us, or whatever you want. Just give us a sign." In the meantime, I raised both arms in an expansive gesture of helplessness— although it would have been a lot more expressive if I hadn't been wearing a cold-suit.

They weren't in any hurry, but they looked at one another, and jostled one another a bit. They seemed to have got the idea that the onus was on them to find somebody willing to show a bit of initiative.

In the end, the tension was too much for them. The crowd behind was densely packed now, and it was difficult to see what was happening beyond the first few rows, but someone was pushing through—or being pushed through by his companions ... if it were, in fact, a "he."

"He" came forward very tentatively, one step at a time. We turned to face him—and to look down at him.

He stopped a couple of metres short, and looked up at Myrlin's faceplate. He was presumably making the assumption that the android was the senior authority-figure because he was taller.

He began talking. I could hear him, even through the faceplate—but not very distinctly. It didn't matter. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't pangalactic parole that he was spouting, or any other language I knew.

I waved my arms, hoping to signify that I wasn't getting it, tapped my helmet to signify that I couldn't hear very well, then tapped the palm of my left hand with the forefinger of my right, in the hope of suggesting to him that he might do better to try sign language.

He wasn't very quick on the uptake, but at last he stopped looking at Myrlin. I continued signalling madly. I pointed in four different directions, to indicate that we didn't know which way to go. I mimed walking and tried to impress upon him the urgent need I had for guidance. I was glad that I didn't have to try to get across any notion of where I wanted to go.

For a while, it seemed that I was making no headway at all. He looked at me with a stare so blank that I might as well have been dancing a jig or performing a mating ritual.

Somewhere out in the crowd, though, the penny finally dropped. Some local genius figured out that we were all standing around because the big guys didn't know where to go, and figured that it was up to him—or maybe her—to think of an appropriate destination. "He" thrust himself forward, babbled at the spokesman for a few moments, got into an argument and eventually won it. He moved around us and looked back at us, expectantly.

I gave him a Star Force salute. "Lead on," I said.

He set off in the direction we'd been heading in before we stopped, and we followed. Everybody else followed us.

We didn't turn right or left for such a long time that I began to wonder whether the little person was merely going ahead of us in the direction he thought we wanted to go rather than actually guiding us.

I estimated that there must be at least six hundred "people" following us by now—maybe as many as a thousand. The city was big; it must have been built to house at least a hundred times as many—but it still seemed reasonably populous to me, given that everyone seemed to be on the brink of starvation.

At last, we turned aside, and found ourselves in a new region where the buildings were larger—not just because they had been very obviously built to accommodate people my size rather than the little people, but because they were municipal buildings rather than dwellings. They had suffered even more from the ravages of time than the simpler edifices; more than half had been reduced to rubble or to gaunt skeletons of jagged pillars and broken arches. Spears of shadow crisscrossed the cracked and thickly begrimed pavements on which we walked, although the open plazas we crossed on occasion showed much whiter in the relentless glare.

My heart rate increased when I saw the place to which our guide was leading us. It was a hemispherical dome, brilliantly lit from within so that beams of yellow light radiated like spines from its many rounded windows. Alone among the buildings it seemed untouched by decay. It did not belong here.

Our guide took us right up to a great circular portal that looked like the airlock of a starfreighter. He didn't touch it. Once he was ten metres away, he turned sideways and beckoned us on. He obviously felt that he had done his bit. I hoped that he wasn't expecting a tip.

Unfortunately, the door was tightly sealed and we hadn't the slightest idea how it might be opened. There was some kind of panel beside the door, set at the height of my shoulder in the curved surface of the dome, but it was shielded by a plate of transparent plastic that didn't yield to gentle pressure or prising by our gauntleted fingers.

I had to stand on tiptoe to look through the nearest of the brightly-lit "windows," but I couldn't see anything inside; the light was so bright that I wondered whether it was an incandescent bulb rather than a window.

The crowd was waiting.

"We must look like a couple of idiots," I said to Myrlin, after several minutes of experimental probing and prodding.

"It seems to be locked," he agreed—but he still had a cutter suspended from his belt, beside my flame-pistol, and he was already unshipping it.

I wasn't sure that it was the wise thing to do, but I didn't have any alternative to suggest.

I had a knife, and I opened it. I made one last attempt to lever off the plastic cover, but I couldn't shift or scratch it.

"Let me," said Myrlin.

I stepped aside, and he activated the cutter's beam. I looked around to see how the crowd reacted to the sight of the flame, but they didn't fall back in awe or display any alarm. They just watched, and waited.

Myrlin cut the centre out of the plate in a matter of seconds; the plastic shrivelled and melted away. He switched it off and waited for the edges to cool; then he inserted his vast fingers into the gap and started pressing the panel beneath.

Nothing happened.

I drew his attention to a vertical slit to the left of the panel. "A keyhole, do you think?" I said.

"Probably," he admitted. I looked back at the crowd, still thinking that we must seem like total incompetents. Myrlin activated the cutter again, increased the power, and thrust the head of the device into the panel-box. The surface began to sizzle, and the metal of the console flared magnesium-white as its components began to burn.

"Be careful," I said.

It was too late for that. The lights in the dome suddenly went out. Then the lights above the city went out too— every last one of them.

The crowd reacted to that. Its members scattered like frightened rabbits. At least, that was the impression I got. It seemed very dark, although Myrlin's torch continued to give off a fervent glow until it sputtered out.

"What now?" the android asked.

I switched on my headlamp, and slowly played its beam over the deserted pavement where the crowd had been assembled a few moments earlier.

"I don't know," I said—and the city lights came back on just as I pronounced the final syllable.

"Well, we know that the repair systems are efficient," he observed—but there was something different about the quality of the light now. It was no longer pure white, and it was no longer perfectly steady.

The lights in the dome came on again then, and they too had changed. The beams shining through the portholes were no longer yellow but pink. Higher up on the dome, some shone vivid red, but only intermittently.

"Do they use red flashing lights as warning signals on Salamandra?" I asked the android. "They do in the home system, and in Skychain City. It's an inbuilt humanoid bias."

"I don't know," he replied, absent-mindedly. He touched my arm and pointed, to draw my attention to the fact that the door was opening.

The hinge was at the top, and it swung outwards. The light within was dazzling, and I blinked furiously, desperate to adjust my eyes. I wanted to see whoever—or whatever— might come out.

I heard Myrlin cry out in pained surprise, and then felt the most horrid sensation imaginable—as if corrosive acid were being poured into my brain.

I screamed, exactly as the star-captain and her troopers had screamed when the amoeba flowed over them.

Perhaps Myrlin screamed too, but I couldn't hear him. My inner being was being wrenched apart and shredded. I was trying with all my might to fall unconscious—and I suppose that I must have managed to do that, eventually.

31

Crazy as it may seem, I woke up feeling good.

I had long regarded it as an inevitable aspect of the human condition that no one, whatever the circumstances, ever wakes up feeling good, but this was an exceptional awakening in more ways than one. I felt fresh, light-headed, and euphoric.

The good feeling lasted as long as it took me to realise that I had no idea where I was. That was followed by the realisation that wherever I was, I had to be in dire trouble. I was no longer wearing a cold-suit; all I had on were the T-shirt and underpants that I usually wear under a cold- suit. I opened my eyes, blinking against the bright light, and had to shade them carefully until they adjusted.

When I tried to get to my feet, I realised that I had been lying on my side on hard ground. I wasn't stiff or uncomfortable, so I concluded that I hadn't been lying there long. The movement that brought me upright was attended by a peculiar feeling of nostalgia, which I didn't understand at all for a few seconds, until it dawned on me that I felt very light. I had the kind of weight I'd carried around in my long- lost youth, when I lived on a microworld in the asteroid belt. All the years in which I'd been dragged down by the surface- gravity of Asgard seemed to have melted away, restoring an earlier state of being.

It was an illusion, of course; there was no way I could be back in the asteroid belt. But if I was still on—or rather in— Asgard, then I had to be a long way down. Maybe not in the centre, whose pull seemed still to be exerting itself upon my bare feet, but a lot nearer to the centre than that derelict ecosystem from which I'd been snatched.

I took my hand away from my eyes, then, ready to see whatever there was to be seen. And what there was to be seen threw all my calculations out of order again, because there was something very, very strange. It made me gasp in amazement.

The major surprise wasn't the grassy plain, which seemed to stretch away from me in all directions, lush and green; or the tall palm-like trees, which grew in clumps; or the bright birds, which fluttered in their foliage, although I had never seen their like in all my life.

What shocked me most was the brilliant blue sky. In that sky was a bright, golden sun which filled the infinite blue vault with vivid light.

I had never seen a pale blue sky or a golden sun. I had never been on Earth, or any other world like Earth. The sky on Asgard was very different in hue, thanks to the thinness of its atmosphere, and it was a sky I had only seen through some kind of window-glass. I had never stood naked beneath a limitless sky, and the illusion that I was there now was something that filled me with inexpressible panic.

Illusion?

Even as I crouched down again, as if trying to hide from that sky, I was telling myself that it had to be an illusion. After all, where could I really be which had a sky like that? I was inside Asgard, where the "sky" could be no more than twenty or thirty metres over my head, and made of solid substance . . . where there could be no glaring yellow sun, but only rank upon rank of electric lights, or a pale varnish of bioluminescent lichen. I could not possibly be outside, because I was inside.

Or was I?

In the centre, I had always believed, must live the miracle-workers, the men like gods, the super-scientists. Was it possible that Asgard was neither a home, nor an Ark, nor a fortress, but a kind of terminal in some extraordinary kind of transportation system? Had I somehow been teleported out of Asgard, to some unimaginably distant world?

At that moment, it came home to me that literally anything might be possible—that I must not prejudge anything at all. I was as innocent as Adam in Eden, from whom all the secrets of Creation had been hidden, and who stupidly ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, instead of that other tree, which might have given him a wisdom infinitely to be preferred.

Tentatively, I moved my naked foot over the ground on which I was crouching, and knew at once that visual appearance and tactile reality were at odds. My eyes told me that I was in a dusty clearing mottled with tufts of grass but my toes told me that was a lie. There was no dust and no grass, just a hard, neutral surface. It was neither warm nor cold to the touch, but it was slick and smooth—exactly like that mysterious ultra-hard superplastic from which Asgard's walls were made.

"Illusion, then," I murmured to myself. Illusion, after all.

I looked up then as I heard a rustle in the grass—the grass which probably wasn't there.

Not ten metres away from me, watching me with a baleful eye, was a great tawny-maned predator with teeth like daggers. I had no difficulty in recognising it, though I had only ever seen its like in photographs and videos. It was a big male lion.

It came forward a little further, and I saw that it was lazily swishing its tail. It was staring me straight in the eye, and it took very little imagination to figure out what kind of calculations its predatory brain was making.

I quickly told myself that it was only an illusion, but that was impossible to believe while the beast was so obviously looking at me, its gaze so careful and so malevolent. There was no doubt in my mind that it could see me, and that its intention was to feast on my flesh. My mind, trapped by the horror of it, could not spare the time for arguments about whether the lion was really there; I was utterly hung up on the question of whether I should remain frozen in immobility, or run like hell.

I would have looked around, hoping to find a weapon of some sort, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from that thick-maned head and the black tongue which lolled out between the huge teeth. It took another step forward, languidly, and then tensed, ready for a quick sprint and a mighty leap.

I claim no credit for what I did then, because it was not the result of conscious decision. Rather, it was a deep- seated reflex which had been locked up in my subconscious, unused and unsuspected, ever since some arcane process of preparation had put it there.

I stood bolt upright, threw my arms wide, and screamed in rage and defiance at the beast.

Unfortunately, whatever had planted that instinct in my brain had not reckoned with this particular lion. It didn't turn tail and run. Instead, it did what it had always intended to do.

It took three bounding strides and leapt at my head, the claws standing out from its raking forepaws and the great jaws gaping wide, ready to seize me with those awful teeth.

Then my conscious mind wrenched control of my body back from my stupid subconscious, and told it to run like hell.

But the lion vanished in mid-air, even as I brought my arms across in a futile effort to make a defensive screen, before I could pivot on my heel and flee. The creature jumped clean out of existence, into whatever limbo of oblivion illusions must go when they die.

Helplessly, I staggered backwards, carried by the impetus of my intention to run, though there was no longer any need. I cannoned into an invisible wall a couple of metres away from the spot where I'd woken up. I hit it with my shoulder, and gave my arm a painful wrench.

My eyes told me that there was no wall there—not even a wall of glass. My eyes said that there was a grassy plain stretching away to the horizon. The only concession they would make to my aching shoulder was to suggest that there was some invisible wall of force preventing me from walking across the grassland.

I knew that my eyes were liars. I was inside Asgard, probably in some kind of chamber, and there was no plain, no sky, no sun and no lion. It was all a picture projected on the walls.

It took five minutes for me to ascertain that the room was rectangular, about four metres by three, and that there was not the slightest sign of any seam or doorway.

"Bastards!" I shouted, fairly certain that I could be seen and overheard by someone, or something—why else the illusion; and why else the lion?

I was being tested, or taunted. Someone, or something, was interested in me.

There didn't seem to be any point in further vulgar abuse, and I was damned if I was going to start up a one-sided inquisition. There were things I wanted to find out, and there were a few sensible investigations that I could make no matter what kind of cage I was in.

I checked the places where my life-support system had been hooked into my body. The places where the drip- feeders had gone into my veins were just perceptible to the touch, but had healed completely. That implied that I had been out of my suit for some time—several days, if the evidence could be taken at face value. But I didn't feel hungry or weak. In fact, I felt fighting fit.

I ran my fingers over all the parts of my body I could reach. I found a couple of old scars, a couple of big moles which had always been there—and a few new anomalies. The skin at the back of my neck felt as if it was pockmarked, and I had an unusually itchy scalp. But I was clean-shaven and my hair was no longer than it had been when I put the cold-suit on. I hadn't taken anything to inhibit hair-growth, because a cold-suit is loose-fitting, so I must have had more than three days' growth of beard when the mindscrambler hit me.

It was obvious that the interval between scrambling and unscrambling had been a long one. The peace-officers in Skychain City carry mindscramblers of a kind, but much cruder ones than the one I'd been hit with—not much more advanced than a common-or-garden stun gun. The Tetrax had illusion-booths, too, but none as sophisticated as the room that I was now trapped in. With a Tetron illusion, you could always see the joins. Willing suspension of disbelief was required. This illusion was a whole order of magnitude more plausible.

Perhaps I was, after all, in the hands of miracle- workers—men who were, if not actually like gods, at least prepared to play godlike games with those poor humanoids unlucky enough to fall into their clutches.

Whom the gods destroy, I reminded myself, they first make mad.

Well, I was mad all right; in fact, I was downright furious.

I looked around, sceptically, and the grassy plain just disappeared. I couldn't help starting in shock, but I wasn't entirely surprised. It was only the suddenness which had made me react. I knew by now that they could show me anything they wanted to.

What they showed me now was a room, four metres by three, with an open door to my left. The room was lit from above, the whole ceiling glowing pearly white. The walls were grey and featureless.

I wasn't entirely convinced that this was reality; I gamble as well as the next man, and I know enough to look out for a double bluff. There were no prizes for guessing that they wanted me to go through the door. I contemplated being perverse, but decided that the room wasn't any place that I wanted to stay. I did what I was supposed to do, and exited stage left.

I found myself in a dimly lit corridor. The door was at the end of it, so there was only one way to go, and I went. It curved, so I couldn't see more than three metres in front of me. The light emanated from the whole surface of the ceiling; the walls remained grey and featureless. The grassy plain had been a lot less boring, but I wasn't about to complain. Boredom I could stand; hungry predators were a distinct strain on the nerves.

Then, in front of me, I saw a T-junction. As I moved toward it, a figure emerged from the left-hand path, saw me and quickly brought up a gun which it had been holding loosely in its right hand. It was a humanoid, but it wasn't human. It was a vormyran, or a very good imitation of one. It was a dead ringer for Amara Guur—but all vormyr are.

32

It was wearing a shirt and tight pants, but it was barefoot, like me, and might easily have been untimely ripped from a cold-suit. The gun which it leveled at me was a small needier, which could blast out tiny fragments of metal at the rate of six a second.

I stopped.

"Rousseau?" said the vormyran, uncertainly. His voice was deep and gravelly, but it sounded oddly gentle.

"It won't work twice," I said, with a certain subdued asperity. "I think you're an illusion." But I betrayed my doubts by speaking in parole, not in English. I remembered the one about the little boy who cried wolf, and then got gobbled up by the real one.

I stood very still, determined not to surrender to any wild instincts, and equally determined not to run.

He came forward, and reached up to rest the muzzle of the needier against the soft skin beneath my jaw.

"Okay," I said, finding my mouth suddenly dry. "You're not an illusion."

He did have bad breath. I could feel its warmth. His eyes were big, the slit-pupils widened because of the dim light. His thin black lips were drawn back to expose his pointed teeth. His mottled skin seemed paler than when I had seen him last, on the screen in Saul Lyndrach's apartment.

"Where are we, Mr. Rousseau?" he asked, hissing as he sounded the sibilant in my name.

"I wish I knew," I replied, sourly. "How did they get

you, Mr. Guur? You are Amara Guur, I suppose?"

"I'll ask the questions," he said, softly. "After all, I have the gun."

It struck me, suddenly, that it was monumentally unfair that he should have the gun. I had woken up with nothing but my underclothes. Whoever it was that had captured us, and now was studying us with clinical detachment, had taken the trouble to give a gun to Amara Guur, and not to me. It seemed to suggest that a very peculiar set of moral priorities were at work. I was certain they were watching, but I wasn't at all certain what they were watching for. Could it be that they wouldn't actually allow Guur to shoot me—that they'd intervene to stop him? After all, it would surely be a terrible waste to let one of their experimental rats go down the toilet so quickly, and for no good reason.

Maybe I was still as safe as I had been when the lion leapt.

On the other hand, maybe I wasn't. I decided that I didn't want to take the chance.

"You know as much as I do," I told Amara Guur, levelly. "Maybe more. I woke up a few minutes ago, in some kind of illusion-booth—a big one, not like the glorified coffins they use to serve up the shows in Skychain City. It was a scene from my homeworld, or a world very much like it. I was attacked by a predator, but it disappeared when it jumped me." He looked surprised, so I added: "Same with you?"

He shook his head, and said: "I just woke up." Then he asked: "Where and when did they take you?"

"I don't know how long ago. I'd been in the level at the bottom of the dropshaft for thirty hours or so—maybe a little more. I was with the android, Myrlin. They hit us with a mindscrambler when Myrlin shut down some kind

of a power-plant in the city."

His eyes remained fixed on mine. They put me very strongly in mind of the lion's eyes. Maybe that was why our hosts had shown me the lion first—to get me in the right frame of mind for the real thing.

"There was a city?" he asked. He drew the needier back toward himself, in what might have been construed as a conciliatory gesture. When its pressure was withdrawn from my neck I swallowed, thankfully.

"You didn't get that far?" I countered.

He hesitated, so I went on. "We don't have any reason to like one another, Mr. Guur," I said, "but I strongly suspect that we're both in the same boat. I'm not sure that we have any sensible option but to tell each other what we know, and try to figure it out together. As you must know, we're deep inside Asgard, and whoever brought us down here is playing silly games with us. They must have us under observation now."

He didn't lower his eyes, but he did nod his head, almost imperceptibly, and he closed his lips about his pointed teeth. Then he lowered the gun, though he continued to hold it in his hand.

"We were taken by surprise," he said. "In the corridors close to the dropshaft. We ran into some kind of trap, and several of my men were gunned down by flame-pistols. Immediately afterwards, they came at us."

"They?" I queried, wondering whether he'd mistaken Crucero for a whole platoon. It must have been Crucero who set the trap.

"Robots of some kind," he replied. "Like gigantic insects—but artificial."

Not just Crucero then, I thought. The ambush season must have started early. I realised that Myrlin must have roused a whole hornet's nest when he thrust his cutter into that control system. They must have come out to get us all—even the people at the top of the dropshaft.

"Did anyone from your party get away?" I asked Amara Guur.

"I do not know. I think perhaps not. What about the human soldiers?"

"I don't know either. But if they came all the way back up to three to grab your people, I dare say that they grabbed the star-captain and the others on the way. It seems that they don't want anyone reporting back—and it seems that they now have custody of everyone who knows the way down here."

That particular lie was intended as much for the eavesdroppers as for him. Saul Lyndrach's slightly-modified log was still in the truck up on the surface. It might take the Tetrax quite a while to find another French-speaker to decode it for them, and to figure out which bits I'd altered, but they'd do it, given time. They could be very thorough when they wanted to be.

When Guur didn't say anything, I asked him a question. "How did you track us through the levels?" It was almost a hint to the effect that I'd told a lie, and that the lie was really intended to deceive the mysterious observers. He probably knew that the bug he'd planted in the book was still on the surface.

"It was inside your boot heel," he replied. "When the giant took your truck, we knew you would need a replacement suit and we knew your specifications. Wherever that boot goes, it leaves an organic trace. We could have followed it anywhere, but we only needed to find the location of the shaft. Our intention was to wait for you there— hoping, of course, that you did not return. It would have been suitably ironic, would it not, if the android had killed your companions just as he killed my men?"

I didn't tell him that we'd left Crucero behind to take care of the possibility that he'd wait at the top of the shaft. It didn't seem necessary or diplomatic. I decided to let him believe that it was our present hosts who had organised the flame-pistol party.

"Well," I said, "it's all water under the bridge now. The question is: what do we do next?"

"There is nothing behind me but a closed room," said Guur.

"Same here," I told him. "That leaves us only one direction to go—and who knows who we might meet? Would you like to lead the way?"

"I have the gun," he reminded me. "You lead the way."

Amara Guur was exactly the kind of person on whom one should never turn one's back, but sometimes you don't get the choice.

I turned into the corridor where neither of us had been, and led the way toward our next encounter.

The corridor twisted and turned, but there was never more than one way to go. It could have been a veritable maze had the observers wanted it to be—I was morally certain that they could have opened up doorways and alternative pathways wherever they desired—but it seemed that they only wanted to take us from point A to point B.

Point B, as it transpired, was a big open space. We came out of a narrow portal to be faced with an alien forest. By alien, I don't just mean that it was like no place I'd ever been—having never been to Earth I had no real experience of the kind of plain which they'd shown to me when I first awoke, but it had been an environment where I had some slight sense of belonging. Here, the sensations awakened in my mind when I looked upon the strange bushes and trees was exactly the opposite; this was a place where I emphatically did not belong.

It wasn't the shapes which made it seem so odd—foliage, I guess, can come in a range of shapes so vast that nothing seems particularly extraordinary—but the scale of things. The leaves, which were dark of hue, were all very large. They were mostly green, though some were streaked with crimsons and violets. The flowers, which were very gaudy— though their colours too seemed dark, with no whites or pastel shades—were enormous, every blossom the size of a man's torso. The yellows were all ochreous, the blues tended toward indigo, the reds were blood-dark; all the stamens and styles which clustered at the heart of each bloom were black. Most of the flowers were bell-shaped things, though some were like hollow hemispheres; almost without exception they pointed upwards, at the ceiling, which was blazing with golden electric light a mere twelve metres above the forest floor.

There were very few things that I could think of as trees, though there was not a single plant which seemed small. Rather, they were bushes writ large, or lily-pads on a gargantuan scale. They grew tightly clustered together, leaving not even the narrowest of paths where a humanoid might comfortably walk between them. They towered above me, and although their topmost tendrils could only have reached three-quarters of the way to their artificial sky, they seemed to have command even of that empty space which they left.

The scent was overpowering, sickly sweet. There was a sound like the whirring of a bull-roarer, which at first I could not trace to its point of origin. Then I saw something clambering over the lip of one of the blossoms, and realised that it was a huge flightless insect, the size of a man's head, coloured as darkly as the plant on which it wandered, in shades sufficiently similar to make it difficult to see until it moved. I realised then that the sounds must be made by similar creatures, chafing their body-parts like grasshoppers.

"Do you recognise this place?" I asked the vormyran, my voice not much above a whisper.

"No," he replied. "I have traveled in most of the tropical lands of my homeworld, but I have seen nothing remotely like this."

I wondered if this was the native territory of the people who lived on this level. If so, it would be easy to believe them giants. But I did not leap to that conclusion. For one thing, the ceiling was only twelve metres above our heads— no higher than the ceilings in levels one, two and three, which had been inhabited by humanoids of normal size. For another, the grey wall to either side of the doorway curved quite noticeably as it extended away. If that curve were to be extrapolated, its implication was that we were in an enclave no more than a kilometre in diameter. This was nothing but a big garden, or a vivarium; it was not an entire world by any means.

I was about to ask what we should do next, but the question died unasked when there came a new sound, much louder than the chirring of the pollinators which scrambled around the giant blooms.

There was no mistaking the sound; it was gunfire.

33

The gun that was being fired wasn't a flame-pistol, nor even a needier. It was an old-fashioned crash-gun blasting away on automatic, sending out a veritable hail of bullets.

The moment the gunfire stopped, the insects started. When we had first heard them, they had obviously been in their restful mood—now, they were panicked. The bull-roarer sound was amplified a thousand times, into an appalling screech, which went on and on and on.

I clasped my hands to my eardrums, trying to keep out the dreadful noise, and Amara Guur did the same, although the needier was still tightly clutched in the fingers of his right hand. I tried to move back into the corridor from which we had come, but I hit the solid wall, and when I half-turned in surprise, I found that the portal was no longer there. The grey wall was solid and seamless, enclosing us.

We huddled against the smooth surface until the sound died away, the crescendo easing down until the former level of sound was restored. Only then was it possible to speak.

"That way," said Guur, gutturally. He pointed away to the right, in the direction from which the noise of gunfire had come.

There was a narrow curved pathway running along the edge of the wall, where the plants did not quite extend themselves to the boundary of their allotted space. It was easy enough to follow, and we followed it at a run.

A hundred metres or so round the curve we found a nearly-naked Spirellan and a scantily-clad Kythnan female crouching over a bloodstained body. The body was wearing dark underclothes of a kind I had seen before—under a Star Force uniform. The Kythnan was Jacinthe Siani; I jumped immediately to the conclusion that the Spirellan, who was still holding a handgun pointed at the dead man, was my old acquaintance Heleb.

While Guur and I approached from one direction, two more vormyr were approaching from the other. I suspected that the trouble I was in had just become five times worse.

I went quickly to the dead man. It was Khalekhan—he had taken three shots in the chest and had almost been cut in half. He was holding a flame-pistol, which hadn't been fired. I didn't even reach for it, but Heleb grabbed me round the neck with a hairy arm, and held me tight until one of the newcomers had appropriated it. When he let me go, I remained kneeling, but I turned away from the body to look up at my captors.

"That is one of the persons who ambushed us," said Heleb. "I saw him—just before those robots swarmed all over us." I knew it was a case of mistaken identity, but I wasn't about to say so.

"Was he alone?" growled Amara Guur. He sounded uncertain, perhaps because he hadn't seen anyone at the ambush, but I knew that he could put two and two together once he realised the flame-pistols were Star Force weapons, not at all in the style of our present captors.

Heleb hesitated before he said: "I think so."

"You think so!"

Heleb cringed before Guur's obvious wrath. It takes a lot to make a Spirellan cringe. No human could ever achieve such an effect.

"I didn't see anyone else," the Kythnan put in.

Guur looked at the gun in Heleb's hand. "How many shots do you have left?" he demanded.

Heleb released the clip from the butt of the gun and checked it. "Three," he said. He didn't sound very happy about it, and I could understand why. Nobody had anything on but the underclothes they'd been wearing beneath their cold-suits. The bastards who were keeping tabs on us had left several of us with guns, but they hadn't provided any extra ammunition. Heleb had sprayed a dozen shots around when he'd let fly at Khalekhan, probably because he was habitually over-generous in the violence department. Now, he had only three bullets left.

He could do arithmetic too, if forced, and his counting must have told him that there might be three more starship troopers lurking in the bushes, plus one extra-large android.

I looked around at the shattered and wounded blossoms that had been blasted apart by the shots that had missed their target. Several of them were leaking viscous brown sap, and looked for all the world as if they were bleeding. One of the insect-like things had copped it too; its insides had been spread all over a net of green-and-purple leaves, grey and brown and sticky. The creature's exoskeleton was more leathery than chitinous; only its six legs were rigid. The legs were still moving, jerkily, in the grip of some autonomic reflex, but while I watched they gradually slowed down.

It was fairly clear that the chances of our all getting together and declaring a truce until our present predicament could be sorted out were pretty damn slim. The star-captain wasn't a forgiving sort, and one of her boys had just been killed. I could imagine how angry that would make her, even though Heleb was only getting his own back for what had happened up on three.

I realised, uncomfortably, that I was in a very unenviable situation. I was in the hands of the wrong party: a captive, or a hostage. I didn't know why the mysterious observers had cast me in that role—because they had sure as hell given me to Amara Guur by arranging things the way they had—but I had no illusions about how difficult it was going to be to play the part.

"It doesn't matter whether he was alone or not," said Guur, pensively. "If the other humans are here, they must have heard the shots, and that racket which the shots provoked. But there are only three soldiers, and they seem as anxious to destroy the android as we are. Even if they have guns, we are stronger. We are five, and now that we have the flame-pistol, we are all armed."

I checked his arithmetic, and was unsurprised to find it sound. Both of the vormyr who had come from the other direction had been holding needlers. One of them now passed the flame-gun to Heleb, who gave his own pistol to Jacinthe Siani. Clearly, she was counted among the combat troops, though it was equally clear that she was considered to be expendable. She didn't protest the allocation, even though it was hot-headed Heleb who had left the gun dangerously undersupplied with firepower.

I came slowly to my feet. Guur guided me up against the grey wall, and stared into my eyes once again.

"Kill him!" said Heleb.

"Be quiet!" retorted Guur, in no mood to be told what to do. "Heleb, you will move along the wall a little way, in the direction from which we came. Have your gun ready. Seviir—guard the other approach. Kaat—watch the jungle."

He paused while they moved to obey. Then he relaxed a little.

"Why are we here, Mr. Rousseau?" he asked quietly.

I didn't imagine that he wanted a discussion on matters of metaphysical philosophy. His concerns were more immediate.

"They're watching us," I told him. "We can't see them, but I'll lay odds that they can see everything we do. Maybe they can eavesdrop on our thoughts—I don't know. They want to see how we react, and I think your Spirellan friend may already have disappointed them."

Guur drew his lips back from his teeth. He really did look half-wolf, half-crocodile, and his breath was worse now than it had been before.

"I don't think we have many secrets," he said. "You have small bruises on your neck, Mr. Rousseau, and so have I. My kind has a better sense of time than yours, and I know that twelve days have passed since I was captured. They have had time to examine us very thoroughly, and may have methods of examination better than any we know. Do you not agree?"

"It seems that way," I conceded. He was ugly and evil-minded, but he was no fool.

"When you assume that they will be disappointed to see us fight," he went on, "do you take it for granted that they are leaf-eaters, like the Tetrax?"

I gathered that he didn't think too much of leaf-eaters. I resolved to remember that if ever I wanted to drive a vormyran wild with fury, that was probably the insult that would do it.

"I don't know what they eat," I replied. "But think of it this way: the inhabitants of Asgard probably didn't know that their world had been discovered by people from elsewhere; they might not even have realised that the universe outside Asgard was inhabited. If you suddenly discovered that the outer layers of the big onion where you'd been hiding for millions of years had been invaded by inquisitive

outsiders, what kind of people would you like them to be?"

He replied with a phrase in what I could only presume was his native tongue.

When I looked at him blankly, he translated. "It means," he said, " 'things edible.' Prey."

"People aren't prey," I told him.

"vormyr have no word for 'people,' " he told me. "We have a word for predators and a word for prey. Humanoids fit into one category or the other, as do all animal species."

"You can't operate that way in a civilized community," I informed him, piously.

"So the Tetrax say," he sneered. "Like all leaf-eaters, they practice the ethics of the herd: the ethics of cowardice, the denial of life and strength. There are two kinds of being, human. There are those whose way it is to eat, and those whose way it is to be eaten. The true law demands loyalty to the tribe, respect for fellow predators and the careful control of those to be eaten. We are prudent predators, human, but we never forget what we are. We move quietly and stealthily among the herds of the Tetrax and their kind, because herds of leaf-eaters can be very dangerous—but we know who we are. We never forget the true way of being, the true civilization."

I had always assumed that gangsters were naturally stupid, and that those galactic races which preserved the morals of crocodiles were essentially simple-minded. Amara Guur clearly didn't see things the same way. I'd always resented the fact that the Tetrax considered humans as barbaric as the vormyr, because I'd always considered it obvious that, whereas the vormyr really were barbaric, humans weren't so bad; the vormyr obviously had a very different view of the matter—they presumably felt insulted to be put in the same category as us.

"That's stupid," I told him. "You can't decide whether you owe someone moral consideration on the basis of what he eats; you have to do it on the basis of intelligence."

I knew as soon as I'd said it that he wouldn't be at all impressed. I could even think of several arguments he might use in response. After all, you could argue that what we are and how we think is very largely determined by what we eat. Maybe I could see both sides of the argument, because I was an unrepentant omnivore. But he didn't want to continue the discussion at that level. To him, it was perfectly obvious that the opinions of any lousy bunch of leaf-eaters didn't matter a damn, and his kind had retained that conviction even while they coexisted with dozens of herbivorous species in the galactic community.

No wonder, I thought, they get on so well with the Spirellans. No wonder everyone else hates their guts. No wonder they've established their own delinquent subculture in Skychain City.

I recalled that Sleaths were vegetarian. It no longer seemed surprising that they'd murder a man just to put me in the frame. To Guur, it wasn't really murder, because a Sleath wasn't worth an atom of moral consideration. I wondered what he thought of me.

"I suppose you think the ones who are watching us are good predators," I said. "That they put us in this cage to see how good we are."

Guur turned away, looking first at Khalekhan's dead body, then at the luscious flowers of the forest.

"No," he said, sadly. "They are leaf-eaters. I would like to think otherwise, but everything tells me it is so."

"Everything?"

"Armour," he said. "Armour is the investment of leaf- eaters. The predator is quick and sleek—his weapons are offensive. None but they who feed on seed and branch would armour a world as this one is armoured, and hide themselves as these ones hide. These are not hunters; they are those who would grow fat. Like the Tetrax, they would make their food in machines, dead and bland, vile and unclean. The universe is full of herds, who do not like the ones who truly live. But the law bids predators be prudent. The predator is clever, the predator deceives. The ethics of the herd preserve the herd, but only until the day when the hunter comes. This herd already knows what we are, and what we can do—it does not fear us, but it fears what we are. It fears the hunters who are still to come."

"You could lay down your arms," I suggested, "and try to soothe those fears a little."

I knew it was useless. A real leaf-eater suggestion. He didn't care what the watchers would think of him. He was a predator.

"The predator is clever," I repeated subvocally. "The predator deceives. Like hell."

"The star-captain's a predator too," I told him. "She just got back from wiping out an entire world. I couldn't say for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Salamandrans were meat-eaters too. I may look like a leaf-eater, but the Star Force are right at the top of the food chain—take my word for it."

He was still staring into my eyes, though his pupils had shrunk now to thin vertical slits, so that his eyes were a dark orange from rim to rim, like angry flames.

"Your kind is confused," he told me. "You feel the strength of the true law, and yet you capitulate with the ethics of the herd. You seek a balance that cannot exist, and it weakens you. Your kind does not know whether it is a tribe or a herd, and I can use that. When the star-captain sees that I have you, she will hesitate. She will try to bargain for your life, and she will lose her own life in consequence of that hesitation."

I thought he was probably wrong, but I didn't know whether that was anything to be glad about. In fact, I didn't know how to react at all, and in that uncertainty I suppose his point was proved. I was confused all right.

I salved my conscience by wondering whether that confusion was really such a bad thing. I remembered the Tetron theory of history that 69-Aquila had described to me, and wondered how it accommodated the kind of interspecific psychological differences that meant so much to Amara Guur. For all that they were leaf-eaters by nature, the Tetrax seemed predatory enough in their sanctioning of slavery and their notions of obligation. Behind their herdlike ethics there was real power and real strength.

Omnivores of the universe unite! I thought. Let's show the hunters just how double-faced we can be!

"Someone moving," hissed Jacinthe Siani, close to Amara Guur's pointed ear.

The vormyran turned, quickly. He grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me away from the wall. He pushed me into a position between himself and the flowery forest.

"You will be my shield," he murmured. "Keep perfectly still, and be silent. While you are useful, I will let you live. The prudent predator never kills without purpose."

This ambiguous promise did not seem to me to be at all encouraging.

"Guur!" called a female voice from the jungle. "I want to talk!"

"I agree entirely," Amara Guur called back. "We are very sorry about the unfortunate accident, which occurred when my foolish friend was overtaken by panic. We must all

work together now. Please come forward."

I glanced from side to side. The vormyran called Kaat was to one side of me, Jacinthe Siani to the other. Neither Heleb nor the other vormyran was visible now—they had each moved surreptitiously into the thick undergrowth.

If I had been a braver man, I dare say that I would have shouted out to tell the star-captain that she was being invited into the jaws of a trap. As it was, I simply could not find a voice.

I watched Susarma Lear—apparently unarmed—step into a small open space between two of the great coloured flowers, and my heart sank as I wondered whether this curious garden might rather be a kind of arena, where the emperors of Asgard staged their circuses. It was pretty obvious now just who the lions were—and I couldn't help fearing that the poor benighted Christians might be unable to put up any kind of resistance at all.

34

"We deeply regret the death of your soldier," said Amara Guur smoothly. "It was an unfortunate error, caused by the shock of discovering ourselves in this astonishing situation."

"I can understand that," replied Susarma Lear coolly. "We don't want to fight your people. We came to kill the android, and that's what we want to do. I gather that you don't have any reason to like him either—that you'd be just as happy to see him dead as we would."

I felt Guur relax slightly, though he kept the needier pressed into my spine, just below the neck.

"That is correct," he said. "The giant . . . the android . . . killed a number of valued men. We certainly would not wish to interfere with your mission."

"Once the android is dead," the star-captain went on, "our next priority is getting out of here. There's no point in wasting our energies trying to kill one another. We need to work together."

"I agree," said Guur.

"Then I suggest that you put down your guns, so that we can talk in a civilized manner."

Guur relaxed a little more, and I felt the pressure on my vertebra relent. But he didn't drop the gun. Jacinthe Siani let the barrel of the crash-gun droop, but the vormyr to the other side of me didn't move a muscle.

"Nothing would give me greater pleasure," lied Amara Guur. "But you will appreciate my desire to be careful. We can see you, empty-handed, but we cannot see your companions."

I found my voice at last. "He's lying," I said to the star- captain. "If I were you, I'd get the hell out of here."

I felt the gun boring into my back again, and Guur's hard-nailed fingers bit into my arm where he was still holding me.

"Mr. Rousseau does not understand," he said flatly.

The star-captain's face never changed expression. I couldn't tell whether she was looking at me or at the creature behind me.

"Trooper Rousseau is in deep trouble," she said, laconically. "He faces charges of cowardice and desertion. He ran out on us when he thought we were in trouble. If you want him, you can keep him. Frankly, I don't care."

They say that when the chips are down, you find out who your real friends are. I didn't seem to have any. The only person with whom I'd recently exchanged an amicable word was Myrlin, who seemed even more unpopular than I was. I had been worried before, but now I began to feel downright terrified. I didn't know the star-captain well enough to fathom her real motives and true beliefs. I knew that Amara Guur was a verminous bastard who would kill everyone in sight given half a chance, but what the star- captain's game was I really couldn't be certain. Maybe she did think she could make a deal. Maybe she did figure that zapping the android was so important that it was worth taking sides with Amara Guur.

"If your men will come out of hiding," said Guur, "mine will do the same. When we are all clearly visible, we will all lay down our arms. Is that agreeable?"

"Certainly," said Susarma Lear, with apparent equanimity.

Then, somewhere away to the left, there was the unmistakable sound of a flame-pistol erupting. There was a great gout of smoke, and the jungle went mad as every oversized

insect in the place started chattering in blind panic.

I had already planned my move. I ducked out of the way of Guur's needier, stuck my arm between his legs, and heaved upwards. In the low gravity Guur weighed less than half what he normally did, and although I couldn't lift him vertically I got him off the ground, pitching him sideways so that he cannoned into Jacinthe Siani and knocked her flying. The crash-gun she'd been holding flew from her grasp and landed in the bell of a huge flower whose petals were amber streaked with dark red.

Amara Guur was too clever to let go of his needier, but for the moment he was all tied up trying to collect himself. His reflexes were quick, but they were the wrong reflexes for this kind of gravity—when he thrust against the ground, trying to bring himself back to his feet, he thrust far too hard, and completely lost his balance again, tumbling in mid-air in a long somersault.

The vormyran Guur had called Kaat hadn't been at all inconvenienced by his master's acrobatics, but when he'd jerked his own needier up to the firing position he'd also trusted his old reflexes, which were geared to functioning in Asgard-normal gravity. The shots he fired went high and wide.

The star-captain had obviously been trained for low-gee combat. I couldn't see where she'd stashed her own gun, but it was suddenly in her hand, and the entire upper part of Kaat's body was suddenly aflame as the flesh boiled away from the bones.

I dived for the flower where the crash-gun had fallen. Although I'd lost sight of it, my groping hand caught it up without a fumble. I let the dive carry through, rolling with it. The enormous flower, crushed beneath my weight, felt like a sheet of sticky rubber but it didn't stop my forward roll. When my feet touched the ground again I let myself come upright, stretching with just the right touch of delicacy, bringing the gun up to fire.

I felt as if everything were happening in slow motion— as, after a fashion, it was. While I was up on my feet again I could see that Amara Guur had just about regained control of his own body. He'd fetched up against the curving wall and with its aid he was bracing himself, bringing the needier round to aim at my midriff.

I fired, holding the trigger down to discharge the last three bullets as fast as they would go. The first one hit him in the navel, the second in the sternum. The third exploded his head.

The recoil kicked me backwards and sent me sprawling under a bush, where a congregation of giant cockroaches was wailing away like a choir of demented sirens. When I landed in their midst they wriggled away as fast as their scrawny legs could carry them.

When I was able to stand up again, the star-captain was holding her gun before her, covering Jacinthe Siani, who was pressed back against the wall with hands thrown wide, looking terrified. Serne was emerging from the bushes to one side, Crucero from the other. There was no sign of Heleb or the last vormyran.

I didn't expect ever to see either of them again.

The noise of the insects was beginning to die down, and by the time we were all together it was possible for us to speak and be heard.

"Nice move, Rousseau," said the star-captain. "Maybe you'll make a starship trooper after all."

"I grew up in low-gee," I said, by way of explanation. "Never did any real fighting, but I played a lot of games. Guur lived all his life on planets, and he was careless enough to let me know it. I knew he'd be a sitting duck once he was off-balance."

I looked down at Guur's shattered body. There was blood everywhere. It looked no different from human blood—even the stink was the same.

"I could have taken all three of them," said the star-captain, matter-of-factly. "But it was nice of you to help, considering. I suppose you didn't believe me, though, when I said that he was welcome to you."

"I figured you were marginally less likely to gun me down than he was. You always intended to blast him, though, didn't you? All the stuff about co-operating was just to gain time while these two tidied up Heleb and the last vormyran, wasn't it?"

"Right," she said, already turning away to face Crucero.

"The predator is clever," I murmured. "The predator deceives."

"What's that?" she asked.

"Just a little motto I picked up," I told her. "You were bluffing too, I hope, when you mentioned charging me with cowardice and desertion?"

"It had crossed my mind," she said. "But when poor Kally started screaming, I guess we all thought we were dead. I'll trade off that one against the fact that you backed me up here—okay?"

She didn't seem exactly over-generous, but I figured that the result was acceptable.

"What do we do with her?" asked Crucero, waving his flame-pistol at Jacinthe Siani.

"Kill her," advised Serne casually. For a moment, he reminded me very strongly of Heleb.

"Wait a minute," I said. "She might be useful to me. She's probably the only one left who can tell the Tetrax the

whole truth about my being framed. I need her."

"That's okay," said the star-captain. "She's harmless now, and she isn't going to give us any trouble—are you?"

Jacinthe Siani shook her head enthusiastically.

"If you want her," said Serne, "you can look after her." He slapped a gun into my hand—a needier, which he'd recovered from one of the dead bodies.

I took it, and glanced at the part of the forest from which he'd emerged. The noise of the insects hadn't died away, and seemed to be increasing again. I suddenly realised why. The moment I saw what was happening, the stink of it cut through the riot of odours like a knife, and my heart skipped a beat.

"Merde!" I said, too softly to be clearly heard.

They saw from my expression that something was wrong, and the star-captain turned quickly to look at whatever it was that had alarmed me.

The billowing smoke was gushing furiously now, filling the margin between the topmost leaves and the twelve- metre sky, already beginning to blot out the vivid electric lights, bringing night to the jungle for what might have been the first time in thousands of years.

"Oh shit," she said. "I told you to be careful."

"I couldn't get close enough to use the wire," Serne complained. "I had to take the bastard out with the flame."

"Let's hope they have a fire brigade," I said.

The star-captain didn't want to wait. "This way," she said, pointing along the curving path which ran its narrow course round the edge of the burning garden. She began to run. Crucero didn't hesitate, and neither did Serne. Jacinthe Siani was still backed up against the wall, and though her eyes were fixed upon the smoke rising from the bushes she didn't seem inclined to move.

"Come on!" I said, grabbing her arm. I pulled her away from the wall and pushed her in the direction which the others had taken. "Run!" I commanded.

At last, she ran. I ran behind her, taking great bounding strides. Unused to the gravity, she fell over three times, but I kept picking her up and urging her on, thrusting her forward along the curve of the featureless wall. We both bumped into the wall more than once, because the path was so narrow, and the reaction of our bouncing confused even me. We must have fallen thirty or forty metres behind the others within three minutes.

The fire hadn't seemed to be spreading very quickly, and we soon outran the smoke, but I couldn't help remembering the way that the door had closed behind me. As far as we knew, we were in a sealed cylinder, and we had no real reason to believe that the people who'd put us there would be inclined to let us out. They hadn't lifted a finger to interfere when we'd started slaughtering one another—why should they intervene now to save the killers from the consequences of their shooting party? I hoped that they might at least care about their hothouse plants, and would put out the fire if only to save the forest.

I was so preoccupied with hustling Jacinthe Siani along the narrow track, and with worrying about the fire, that I didn't realise when the star-captain and her merry men stopped. I had to bring myself up short when I saw Seme's broad back in front of me, and even my long experience in low gee wasn't sufficient to cope with the problem. I missed him, but I ended up sprawled full-length under yet another bush, away to one side of him.

When I crawled out, feeling as if there were bruises all over my body, I saw that he'd gone into a defensive crouch, and that his gun was once again in his hand. Crucero had already faded into the undergrowth. When I tried to stand up my shoulder was grabbed by the star-captain, who forced me down again, pulling me sideways into the cover of a broad-leaved plant.

"What is it?" I asked, trying to make myself heard over the racket of the insects without actually shouting. "More vormyr?" I realised that no one had ever specified exactly how many men Amara Guur had had with him when he was ambushed, or how many had survived to be captured by robots.

But it wasn't more vormyr. She didn't reply to my question, but I was close enough to her to see the avid glint in her eye. I knew then that she'd seen Myrlin.

She let go of my shoulder, but I promptly grabbed her arm, causing her to look round at me with a furious countenance. As she tried to shake me off, her lips drew back from her teeth in a kind of snarl that I'd never before seen on a human face.

"Don't do it," I said. "He isn't any danger to you. I swear it!"

She tried to shake me off, but the angry oath that was on her lips suddenly died as the implications of what I'd said sunk in.

"What the hell do you know about it?" she demanded. Her face was close to mine; otherwise I would never have been able to hear the words, which came out in a forceful hiss.

"I was with him," I told her. "After we got split up. He told me everything. He isn't any danger!"

"He told you that, I suppose!" she retorted.

He had told me, and I had believed him. But as I looked at Susarma Lear's sweat-stained face, at the blonde hair now matted and tangled, and the blue eyes colder than any eyes I had ever seen before, I knew that there was no way on Earth, or on Asgard, or anywhere in the universe you could name, that she was ever going to take my word for it.

"Don't kill him," I begged. "Please, don't kill him."

I wouldn't let go of her arm. I don't know exactly why I cared so much. After all, it was his word against hers ... or his word against her instincts. What had he done for me in the few hours we'd been together? What sense was there in my trying to defend him?

But I did care. Maybe I had simply reached the end of my tolerance for death and destruction. Maybe I was suffering from a nasty bout of that old omnivore confusion.

She brought her pistol round and pointed it at my face.

"If you don't let go," she said, "I'll blow your fucking head off."

She'd already set the world on fire—what had she to lose?

There was no doubting that she meant it. Her special paranoia was well and truly unconfined, and there was not a thing I could do to contain it.

I let go of her arm.

Jacinthe Siani was still out in the open, crouching on the path. Nobody had bothered to pull her out of the way. She looked very miserable, brought into as much disarray by her falls and collisions as anyone else. Her hair was a mess and the expression on her nearly-human face was sheer blind panic. She was staring out along the curving path, and though I couldn't see him from where I crouched, I knew who she was staring at.

Susarma Lear had turned away from me, and I was utterly forgotten.

I guess there comes a time in every man's life when he does something totally stupid, for no good reason at all.

I leapt to my feet, and shouted with all my might: "Run, you bastard, run!"

Once I was standing, I could see him. He was seven or eight metres away, in the middle of an unusually large patch

of bare ground. He had been looking at Jacinthe Siani, his eyes wide in apparent puzzlement. As I rose, he turned to me, but he gave not the slightest sign that he had heard what I said, and the noise of the fire-startled insects was so clamorous that he probably could not make out the words. It was only the sight of me that had attracted his attention, and he stared at me as though I was a madman. He did not appear to be armed, and all he was wearing was a pair of underpants. For all his gargantuan bulk, he looked supremely vulnerable—the easiest target in the world.

Susarma Lear rose in front of me, emitting incomprehensible obscenities. Without the slightest pause or hesitation she thrust her gun out before her and fired. The flame-bolts sizzled like fireworks as they shot through the air, striking him full in the chest: one, two, three.

He went over backwards, collapsing into himself as the hot gases opened up his pleural cavity, frying his heart and his lungs.

The star-captain let out a mighty scream of triumph, and then the sky went crazy too.

All the blazing lights began flickering and flashing, and I felt for the second time that nightmarish sensation of having acid poured into my skull. I reached up with my hands to cover my face, trying to shut my eyes against the assault of the mindscrambler, but I had no chance.

The last thing I saw before I was rudely thrust into insensibility was Myrlin's shattered body, lying with arms outstretched on that patch of bare ground.

It was shimmering, like a distorted video-picture about to flicker out and disappear.

But it was me who flickered out.

35

When I woke up again I felt anything but good. My stomach was queasy, my head was spinning and I had a dreadful metallic taste in my mouth. My eyelids felt as if they were glued down and the muscles in my legs were aching.

Nevertheless, I managed to sit up, and after a while I opened my eyes, blinking in order to clear my vision.

I was still in the same place. The sky had stopped flickering, and was now presenting a reasonable simulation of twilight. Some of the lights were on, but most were off. The forest was still, and very quiet. I could still smell smoke, but the odour was faint and distant.

Susarma Lear was stretched out on a gigantic leaf, her head cradled by a purple flower. She was quite unconscious, and made no response at all when I shook her sleeve.

I looked at the patch of open ground where Myrlin's body should have been lying.

The body wasn't there.

Nor was the patch of ground.

I wasn't altogether surprised. Dazed as I was, I remembered seeing the body flicker before I went out for the count, and the suspicion must have been born in my mind at that moment that all was definitely not as it seemed.

I checked Jacinthe Siani, who responded no better to my half-hearted attempt to rouse her than the star-captain had. I could also see Seme, similarly dead to the world, though not actually deceased.

I coughed a few times, trying to get the awful taste out of my mouth, and then leaned against the wall, trying to draw strength from its cool solidity.

Myrlin came out of the bushes. He was dressed exactly as he had been when I had seen him shot down, but his big hairy torso was quite intact, and though the dim light made him seem a little greyer than I remembered him, he looked a good deal healthier than I did.

It was the first time I'd been able to get a good look at his face, without an obscuring visor. His features weren't rugged at all. He was round-faced with skin that looked very soft. He was like a vastly overgrown baby, except for the big nose.

"Hello, Mr. Rousseau," he said softly.

"That damned lion," I said, with a certain amount of irritation. "You weren't testing me. You were testing the illusion."

"They weren't entirely sure that it would work," he said. "It's a new trick they worked out specially for the occasion. You had me worried when you seemed to have it figured out, but I thought it went well enough. I think it worked on the star-captain. She'll be quite convinced that she killed me. A cathartic experience, I'm sure. She's been under a lot of stress."

"The others are really dead, though."

"Oh yes," he said, mildly. "Amara Guur and his men are really dead. She knows they're dead—and that will help to convince her that I'm dead too, should she begin to doubt it. I didn't have any qualms about letting them die—they tortured Saul Lyndrach, and caused his death. They'd have killed me too, if it hadn't been for the fact that the tranquillisers they pumped into me weren't as effective as they expected. There are advantages in being a giant."

"You orchestrated the whole thing?"

"Mostly. I didn't have a completely free hand. They went along with most of what I suggested."

"They?"

"The people who live here. They seem to be a little shy—I haven't actually met them in the flesh yet. But they have very sophisticated machines."

I shook my head, still trying to get back the good feeling I'd had when I woke up only a couple of hours before. An awful lot had happened during those brief hours.

"Is the fire out?" I asked, deliberately choosing a question of marginal relevance. I didn't feel up to asking the big ones yet.

"Yes. It didn't do too much damage. It can all be repaired."

"That's a relief." The sarcasm wasn't really called for, but I figured that I might be excused.

There was a pause, while Myrlin looked down at the prostrate star-captain, who had a more peaceful expression on her face now than I'd ever seen there before.

"I don't think they actually believed me," said Myrlin.

"What didn't they believe?" I countered.

"They didn't believe that everyone would start trying to kill one another. They didn't believe that you could all wake up in this bizarre situation, and promptly start figuring out how to stage a massacre."

"Some people have no imagination," I observed drily.

"They don't do any killing themselves," he said. "I suspect they don't do much dying either. They seem to have their world and their lives pretty much under control."

"Bully for them," I said. "How is it, exactly, that you seem to be the one calling the shots around here?"

"I made a deal with them."

"So I gather. But what made them strike a deal with you?

Why not the star-captain? Why not Amara Guur? Why not me?"

"My interests and theirs appear to coincide," he said. "I need a home ... a life ... a place to belong. I was more than ready to volunteer to stay here, and help them out."

"Help them out with what? Their world and their lives are under control, remember?"

"They need time to think, Mr. Rousseau. Time to decide what to do—about the universe."

"About the universe?" I had the feeling that I was getting out of my philosophical depth. It was all becoming a little too surreal.

"They didn't know the universe existed," he told me. "They thought Asgard was all that there was . . . layer upon layer, ad infinitum. Now, they have to come to terms with the idea of the surface ... of infinite space . . . they have to figure out what it all means, in terms of who they might be, and where they might be, and why."

"They're not the builders, then? They didn't make Asgard and they don't know what it's for?"

"No. They're not the builders. They know a little bit about a few hundreds of levels, but they're no wiser about what's in the centre than you are. They don't seem to do a lot of exploring themselves, but they do have robots. They'd never been up Saul's dropshaft before, though. They had no idea what was up on three. Now they know about the cold levels . . . about the galactic community . . . about Tetrax and vormyr and the human/Salamandran war. I get the impression that they're a little anxious about it all. I suspect that they're not very aggressive, and that they think what just happened here is rather horrible."

I thought it was rather horrible myself, but I didn't bother to say so.

"So you're going to stay and teach them about the universe," I said, instead. I smiled sardonically, because it was, in its way, a wonderful irony. He was newborn, and all that he knew about the universe, and about humanoidkind, had been pumped into him by some kind of machine. He wasn't real. Maybe that was why these mysterious underworld- dwellers liked him so much.

"Why'd you stage the bloodbath?" I asked him. "Why not simply have your friends put Guur and his bully boys in cold storage? They must have given us a pretty thorough going- over while they had us in their clutches for twelve whole days. They didn't have to wake anyone up at all. They could have used us as founts of information about the universe, then thrown us out with the garbage, if they wanted to."

"I thought you'd like to go back, Mr Rousseau. I wanted to do you a good turn. The star-captain too, perverse as it may seem. I don't really have anything against her, you understand. She couldn't help but see things the way she did."

"You steered me straight into Amara Guur," I pointed out. "He could have killed me any time."

Myrlin picked something up from the ground. It was the needier that Seme had given to me so that I could wave it at Jacinthe Siani. I assumed that it must have been the one which Guur had carried. He pointed it at the sky, and pressed the trigger. Nothing happened.

"It's not loaded," I said.

"It's loaded," he said. "It just isn't capable of firing."

Strangely, I felt bitterly disappointed. A little while ago, I'd done the only heroic thing which I'd ever done in my entire life. I'd pulled off a real coup, turning the tables on one of the most evil bastards in the known universe—but his gun had already been fixed. The poor fool hadn't had a chance. All the heroics suddenly seemed very silly.

"The gun that killed Khalekhan wasn't useless," I pointed out coldly.

"Khalekhan was a casualty," he said. "As Guur pointed out, it was a stupid misjudgement on Heleb's part. He was a combat soldier. I didn't have anything against him, but I'm not about to cry over his passing. It was part of the price that had to be paid, if any of you were to go back to the surface. You're the only one I'd care to trust, Mr. Rousseau, and I'd be careful even then. The bloodbath wasn't entirely my idea; as I said, the people I'm with now weren't entirely convinced, despite what they distilled from your software while you were asleep, what kind of beings we really are. Now they know. But I did help them plan it all, and I was ready and willing for people to be killed. I was also quite prepared to be unsporting, and give Amara Guur a disabled gun. I guess I'm no better than the rest of you—a pretty good imitation of humankind, wouldn't you say?"

Too goody I'd have said.

"Why did they agree to let me go, if they're as anxious as you say?" I inquired. "Why are they letting you tell me all this?"

"They don't particularly want to keep you. They know that the secret of the dropshaft can't be contained indefinitely, given that you left the notebook on the surface. They don't see any harm in letting you out. Of course, you'll never find the way down here again. They'll block the way permanently. The Tetrax can have the levels all the way down to the bottom of Saul's shaft, but that's the floor so far as they're concerned—until they learn a great deal more about how the native technics work.

"As for this little conversation—I suppose it might be seen as self-indulgence on my part. But there is a utilitarian aspect to it. You'd have realised that I wasn't dead. You were the only one who could figure it out, but after the lion, I was sure that you would guess what had happened. I don't think you'd ever have managed to convince the star- captain, even if you'd tried, because she wants me to be dead so very badly. But I'd rather you didn't even try to convince her. I'd rather you let her go on believing what she believes, quite unchallenged. I'd rather you were a coconspirator, Mr. Rousseau. I want you to be on my side. You are on my side, aren't you, Mr Rousseau?"

I looked at him tiredly. "You can call me Mike," I said, with a slight croak in my voice.

"That's what I thought," he said. "And you do want to return to the surface, don't you? To claim your big reward? To be the man who found the way to more than a hundred new levels?"

I hesitated for a moment. But then I nodded. "Yes I do," I said.

"That's what I thought. I'm sorry."

"Sorry?"

"Sorry you can't stay. I think I might get the bigger rewards."

"Like what?"

"Immortality . . . that sort of thing. As I said, I haven't even met my hosts in the flesh yet, but I get the idea that they're very clever people. Very clever indeed."

There wasn't much to say in reply to that.

Another thought struck me, though I didn't voice it. These people didn't know what was in the centre—they had no more idea about who built Asgard than I did—but if anyone could find out, they could. They were threatening to make sure that the Tetrax never would, but now they knew about the universe, their own curiosity was sure to have been stimulated. I was being turned back from my journey to the centre, but Myrlin was only just starting his. He had every chance of getting there, whether he became immortal or not.

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 satisfy- ingly 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."

"You stupid, selfish bastard," he said, hissing through his teeth. "You have ruined everything the C.R.E. was set up to do. You have set back the cause of humankind irreparably. How do you think we are ever going to hold our heads up in the galactic community now? There is nothing worse that the universe could have shown to these people than a bunch of brawling savages. You couldn't be content with taking the Star Force down there, could you? You had to take the vormyr and the Spirellans too, just to show them how ugly humanoids can be when they're absolutely at their worst."

"I didn't exactly take Amara Guur with me," I pointed out. "He came along of his own accord. If I'd known that I had a bug in my bootheel, I would have worn overshoes. Anyway, you're forgetting the guy who led us all on the chase. The Salamandran android. Who do you think was responsible for his being there?"

"Saul Lyndrach," he replied, undaunted.

I shook my head.

I picked up a piece of paper from his desk, and pointed to the letterhead. There was a symbol beside the letters which spelled out Co-ordinated Research Establishment in parole.

"What's that, Alex?" I said.

For a moment or two he simply looked annoyed and impatient, but he finally figured out that I was serious.

"It's a pictograph in one of the Tetron languages," he said. "It's the symbol of our organization, as well you know. What of it?"

"It appears on all your documents, like a trademark."

"Yes. So what?"

"That's the symbol Myrlin drew in the air when he told me about the Salamandrans buying technics from Asgard— the technics they used to make him. The Tetrax and the upper-level cavies are both biotech-minded, remember? The Tetrax seem to have made a little bit more out of what they've found here than they've let underlings like you know about. And they've been selling some of it to like- minded barbarians, to use in those horrid wars that they disapprove of so strongly. If everything had gone as planned, the Co-ordinated bloody Research Establishment might just have been responsible for the extinction of the human species. Your species and mine, Alex. Who did you say was stupid and selfish? Who are the barbarians now, Alex?"

"You're lying," he said, hopefully. But he knew me better than that.

I shook my head.

"I didn't know . . ."he said, tentatively.

"I know you didn't," I said. "Well, you know now."

He thought about it for a minute, and then said: "It doesn't affect my condemnation of what you did. I stand by everything that I believe. What happened in the lower levels is a disaster . . . for the human community and for mankind. And I don't believe that the Tetron administration knew about this trade in technics, or if they did, I don't believe that they intended them to be used in war. There are a lot of factions in the C.R.E., and it could have been any of them."

"That's my point," I told him. "It could have been any of them. The whole universe is full of barbarians, Alex, and I didn't see anything down in the bowels of Asgard to convince me that the people we tangled with were angels. The Star Force carved up Guur's hatchet men, but it was the cavies who set it up, and the cavies who sat back with their popcorn and watched it happen. They were clever . . . but I didn't see anything to make me believe that they were nice. Maybe we should be glad that they sealed themselves off. What if they do decide what to do about the universe . . . and decide that what they ought to do is sterilise the whole damn cosmos?"

"That's ludicrous," he told me with much more feeling than conviction.

"Maybe," I agreed. "But it's all a bit hypothetical, isn't it? At the end of the day, we just don't know, do we? Now, why don't we start talking about more interesting things, like money. How much does the C.R.E. propose to pay me for my little treasure-map?"

He looked mildly surprised. "After what you've said about the C.R.E. selling technics to the Salamandrans, you still want to sell us the location of Lyndrach's dropshaft?"

"It's a crooked game," I told him, "but it's the only game in town."

"You don't think I should resign?"

"Hell, no. We need at least one human on the inside, to try to make certain it doesn't happen again. I'd come in with you, but I don't like organizations. I'm a loner."

He didn't need any further encouragement. We started talking about money. My revelations obviously hadn't shaken him too much, because he made every possible effort to strike the meanest bargain he could. It took a long time to get the offer up to within spitting distance of my dreams of avarice.

But in the end, we closed the deal, to the mutual satisfaction of all parties.

Before the Star Force ship pulled out of orbit to start burrowing through its self-made wormhole, I got a call from my ex-commanding officer. Her image was a bit blurred on the screen, but she was looking good now that she was happy.

"I really could have made a trooper out of you," she said. "You took care of Amara Guur pretty well."

"I found out later that his gun was jammed," I told her.

"When?" she asked.

"I tried it," I said, evasively.

"You didn't know it when you took him out," she said, "did you?"

I admitted that I hadn't. She smiled a wolfish smile, as if she thought she knew me better than I know myself. She didn't.

"I am not a hero," I told her. "I run away from giant amoebas. I only went for Amara Guur because I thought you'd shoot straight through me if I didn't."

"You might be right," she told me. "I'm a real hero, and I shoot when I have to, no matter who's in the way. You'd have saved us a lot of trouble, you know, if you'd only taken that android in when Immigration Control asked you to. Just an atom of social conscience, and you could have kept him nice and warm for us in Skychain City."

Something about the way she said it made me very conscious of the fact that Susarma Lear was not, after all, a very nice person. Real heroes never are, I guess.

"There are thousands of people here who would have given all that they own to see what you and I saw ... to go where you and I went," I told her. "And you don't care at all, do you? The mystery never got to you, and you really don't give a damn what's at the centre of it all. You have a narrow mind, Star-Captain Lear."

"It was broad enough to let you off the hook," she told me. "You owe me a favour. I might be back to claim it some day."

I didn't think I owed her any favours at all, even though I was keeping secrets from her that would make her very angry indeed if she ever found out about them.

"I hope you'll forgive me," I said, "if I don't look forward to it. It's not that I can't stand to see women in uniform, you understand. It's just that I prefer a quiet life."

"There's something not quite right about a man who wants to spend his time rooting around the frigid remains of a world that went to hell a million years ago," she said. "It testifies to a certain aridity of the passions, and a dereliction of the soul. Try to be a hero, Rousseau, in spite of yourself. Just try."

Motherly advice wasn't her strong point. It didn't move me at all.

"Goodbye," I said.

"Au revoir," she replied.

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.

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