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.”