The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel

by Brian Stableford

  This is not, of course, to say that meaningful conversations did not take place, or that our transit time to the edge of beyond was fruitless in terms of learning things we needed to know. By playing back databeads supplied by Captain d’Orsay on handheld bookplates we increased our acquaintance with the information her ill-fated groundcrew had actually managed to transmit—food for thought that we desperately needed to nourish our starveling minds.

  “Everything,” I confided to Zeno and Angelina Hesse, at one of our frequent discussion seminars, “points to one single conclusion. They should not have died. The fact of their dying sticks out like a sore thumb as the one incoherent circumstance in a compelling and familiar pattern.”

  (I do not talk like that all the time—only when the mood takes me.)

  “It’s odd,” confessed Angelina.

  “It’s not possible, I suppose,” ventured Zeno, “that they died as a result of equipment failure of some kind. Asphyxiation, perhaps. A purely physical cause seems more likely to me than a biological agent which struck so suddenly and so swiftly.”

  I would have liked to believe that too, but the last messages transmitted made it absolutely plain that the victims themselves thought that they were under biological attack from within. They spoke of symptoms and signs, and though it was not possible for them to testify as to their actual cause of death—for obvious reasons—the brief commentaries which they gave on the manner of their dying seemed to rule out asphyxiation or conventional poisoning caused by a malfunction in their life-support systems (which, in any case, offered no such testimony of their own).

  “Allergy,” said Vesenkov, who had not actually been included in the discussion, but who had been listening in. He was a solidly built man, about my height, with steel-rimmed spectacles. His English wasn’t as good as it might have been—nowhere near as good as Zeno’s—but he exaggerated his lack of capability by choosing to speak mostly in clipped phrases and one-word sentences.

  “Could be,” conceded Angelina. “But it’s not easy to account for the fact that they all developed extreme reactions to the same allergen, let alone the sudden presence of that allergen in their environment. Obviously someone inadvertently carried something from the lab area into the sleeping quarters, but given the sterilization procedures, it’s more likely they carried it inside than out. Looks to me like a virus.”

  “Do you know how difficult it is to get a hookup between an alien virus and human DNA?” I countered. “It’s been done, but Scarlatti had to work damned hard to produce the evidence he has, and in no case has the alien virus, even where it’s managed to reproduce virions, actually done substantial damage to a host. Viruses don’t have much built-in adaptability, and they’re just not geared to operating in cells from another life-system.”

  “The biochemical environment of a human cell isn’t too alien from the viewpoint of a virus—even a virus taken out of the ooze of some world where life never got beyond the primeval soup stage,” she pointed out.

  “Sure,” I said. “Biochemical destiny ensures that the replicator molecules which arise in so-called Earthlike environments are always very similar, and the metabolic pathways that build up around them are similar too. Maybe it’s wrong to talk of alien environments...but for a Naxos-built virus to make itself at home in human cells is like a Chinese peasant trying to make himself at home on Sule.”

  “A virus doesn’t have to be ‘at home’ to kill,” she argued. “Quite the reverse, in fact. Most viruses treat their hosts fairly gently. Good tactics. Instant death for hosts is easy extinction for viruses that need to commute endlessly from one host to another. Obviously, what happened to the groundcrew is aberrant, whether you compare it with Earthly viruses infecting Earthly hosts, or Naxos viruses attacking Naxos hosts.”

  “No virus,” put in Vesenkov laconically. “Frog don’t catch cold.”

  What he meant was that viruses tend to be species-specific, or at least limited to a range of similar species. We don’t catch diseases from frogs, even within our own life-system.

  “I said it was aberrant,” answered Angelina.

  “Aberrant is just a fudge-word,” I pointed out. “You’re just using it to protect the hypothesis against criticism.”

  “Food poisoning,” said Zeno suddenly. “That would make sense. Not if they were eating out of tubes, the way we do—but they were on the surface, maybe eating from a common pot. Sterile, for sure—but there might have been toxins left over from some previous infection, as in botulism.”

  “That’s easy enough to check,” Angelina pointed out. “Did the food come from the same source, and, if so, what was its history?”

  “Canaries,” put in Vesenkov. “Mice too.”

  “That’s a point,” I admitted. “What happened to the animals? Did they die too? And if so, when?”

  We thought about that for a minute. Nobody knew. No data. We checked with Catherine d’Orsay, but she didn’t know either. She did, however, express the opinion that the food would have come out of individual tubes rather than from some common source, which made twenty simultaneous attacks of food poisoning seem unlikely.

  This left us, as you will realize, dramatically short of hypotheses. Aberrant viruses, for all their secondary elaboration, seemed to be left in the lead. Privately, no doubt, we all considered such unlikely outsiders as the possibility that malevolent indigenes had zapped them all with telepathic mind-crunchers, but nobody was going to say a thing like that out loud.

  “The more I think about it,” I observed, “the more likely it seems that this mysterious killer might sneak up on us, too.”

  That one buried the conversation. I could have gone on to solicit opinions as to why we’d volunteered to get ourselves into this position, but it seemed pointless. We all knew well enough. It was the age-old dream of the gates of Eden slowly opening wide, with St. Peter standing there to tell us that we’d served out our sentence and cleansed our souls of original sin, and could now come back in. Catherine d’Orsay maybe had it worse than the rest of us, but we all had it—even Vesenkov and Jason Harmall.

  We weren’t put off by the danger because we knew, after all, that the serpent would still be lurking under the tree of knowledge, and that this time we had to put paid to his little tricks. You can’t expect to live in paradise unless you pay the price, now can you?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Earth Spirit was a kind of mobile sardine can. Ariadne, by contrast, was an ancient castle where no one lived except a handful of tourist guides and a king without a kingdom.

  It was old; it was labyrinthine in its complexity; it was a weird place to be. “It,” of course, was more properly “she,” but I couldn’t think of Ariadne as a ship. It was a little world.

  Castles, of course, are inhabited mostly by the ghosts of the distant past. Their walls and staircases recall the sound of marching men-at-arms, of torchlight and torture, of knighthood and martyrdom. There is a coldness about them. Ariadne was inhabited mostly by the ghosts of the future. Its belly was pregnant with a million unborn children; eggs ready to begin division but callously interrupted; empty plastic wombs waiting patiently to be full. And as for coldness...there were row upon row of crystal sarcophagi, where you could sleep the dreamless sleep, if you wished, in the certainty of reincarnation; left-handed time machines.

  The king without a kingdom?

  That was Morten Juhasz, the captain among captains, to whom Catherine d’Orsay had surrendered her short-lived and ill-fated command. He was hawk-faced and firm of countenance, a machine for issuing commands. He was long and lean, and it would have been easy to believe that he had given up taking his shots if it were not for the fact that one could not imagine his bones being brittle.

  His attitude to us was ambivalent. He recognized the inescapable logic that led to our being called in, but he resented the necessity. I think he would have liked it better if he could reasonably have given the job to one of his own back-up ground crews. He didn’t want outs
iders to solve his problems for him. He would have liked it even more if the first crew had succeeded—if Naxos had been as hospitable as, at first glance, it seemed. He knew well enough, though, that if there were authentic experts in alien biology to be used, who could bring to bear years of personal experience and the legacy of centuries of inquiry, then his own people had to step aside.

  I was pleased to be assigned a cabin again, if only for a couple of days before we set off on the next stage of the journey (straight down). I felt tired after the long trip on the Earth Spirit, where I’d spent a lot of time in my bunk but had slept very badly, almost afraid to dream. To have four walls around me, separating my space from the rest of the universe, was a needful luxury. I didn’t particularly want to retreat into it, to spend hours glorying in my own company—I just wanted to know that I had it, and that it was there if I needed it.

  There was no conducted tour of the Ariadne; we were called instead to a conference with the shipboard’s ecosystemic analysts, to make sure that every idea and item of data had its full exposure. It didn’t solve much: the hypotheses that came out were the ones we’d already looked at; the new information relating to the nature of Naxos’ life-system merely served to emphasize still further how closely related it was to Earth or Calicos. There are remarkably few biochemical options open to an evolving water-based life-system, and Naxos had found all the easy answers to all the difficult problems. The non-conclusion which the conference reached was that we didn’t know, and weren’t likely to find out except by continuing our investigations on the surface.

  By the time I retired to my lonely cell, the exhaustion was really eating into my spirit and I was beginning to feel depressed. I knew that I was probably building up to a nightmare, but the knowledge didn’t help. If anything, it only increased the probability. I wanted to get to bed, but circumstances conspired to find delays in the shape of visitors. I wasn’t the only one, it seemed, who was looking for new opportunities in the luxury of temporary privacy.

  The first person to come knocking at my door was Jason Harmall.

  He closed the door behind him, carefully, and waited for me to invite him to sit down. There was nowhere to sit except the bed. I took the top end and let him have the other.

  He produced from his pocket a small device that looked rather like the seed-case of a poppy, broken off with three inches of stem—except, of course, that it was made of metal.

  “What’s that?” I asked, meekly, as he handed it to me.

  “A transmitter,” he said. “It won’t work directly. You record a message into it, and then switch functions. It scrambles the message and fires it out as a kind of beep.”

  “You, I take it, have the receiver to match?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m not a secret agent,” I pointed out.

  “I am,” he replied evenly.

  I looked down at the thing I was holding for a few moments, then said, “Why me?”

  “Don’t feel privileged,” he said. “Dr. Hesse has one too.”

  “The idea is that anything I may find out is privileged information, I suppose? If we figure it out first, we forget to inform Vesenkov.”

  “I’m not particularly worried about Vesenkov,” he said. “I’m not a fool. I know that you’ll have to work together, and that you’ll be pooling your resources. Vesenkov can be told everything he needs to know—and Zeno too, of course. But Juhasz insists on sending one of his own people down with you—he argued for half a dozen, but I persuaded him that one is enough. It will be Captain d’Orsay, not a scientist. You shouldn’t have any trouble keeping her on the outside of your investigation. And when you know the answer, you tell me, not her—and not Juhasz.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I don’t have to cooperate.”

  His blue eyes didn’t waver. “Dr. Caretta,” he said gently, “I presume that you do intend to return to the solar system when this is over. You weren’t considering staying here forever?”

  I thought it over. “All right,” I said. “I do have to cooperate. But I cooperate better when I understand what I’m doing.”

  “It’s simple enough,” he said. “The Ariadne mission is...out of date. It no longer fits in with our ambitions. Captain d’Orsay, I fear, doesn’t quite see things that way. Captain Juhasz even less so. I don’t think there’s any chance of persuading them to see things our way. Ergo...it may be necessary to take independent action. Quietly, of course. Very quietly. There’s no need for you to feel any sense of moral dilemma. Your interests lie with ours—indeed, I’d go so far as to say that you are one of us.”

  I was too tired to want to start an argument about us-es and thems, but there was one point that occurred to me as well worth raising.

  “They’re going to float us down to the surface, aren’t they? We’re going to ride down in shielded tin cans with chutes.”

  “That’s correct,” he said.

  “That means we have to get picked up again. I see your point about our being dependent on the Earth Spirit to take us home, but we’re just as dependent on the Ariadne to provide a shuttlecraft that will pick us up. But you want me to hold out against Juhasz if we find out what went wrong with the first crew.”

  “You have nothing to worry about,” he assured me.

  “Reassure me,” I told him.

  “Dr. Caretta,” he said, in his nice, soft voice, “if you find out what killed those men—and give us a chance to beat it—you won’t have to worry about the possibility of being marooned. We’ll be beating a path to your door.”

  I looked again at the metal toy that was undoubtedly a part of the armory of every well-equipped spy in known space.

  I shrugged, and said, “I don’t see what I can lose.”

  He nodded his approval. He was clearly a man who understood the pragmatic point of view. Then he left.

  When the second knock sounded I felt a slight surge of desperation. I jumped to the conclusion that it was Catherine d’Orsay, come to keep me from my sleep and to feed my eventual bad dreams with the anxious prospect of being asked to serve as a double agent. Mercifully, I was wrong. It was, instead, Angelina Hesse, who only wanted to discuss the awkwardness of being a spy for one side.

  She showed me her little toy, and I said: “Snap.”

  “I feel uncomfortably like a cat’s paw,” she said. Obviously, she’d no more been prepared for this than I had. She’d been plucked from her laboratory in exactly the same way; she’d done far too much good work in biology to have been wasting time spying on the side.

  “If we were cat’s paws,” I pointed out, “we’d have claws.”

  “Stupidly,” she said, “I hadn’t quite realized how valuable this planet might be. When the news was broken, I thought of it as a tremendous break—in the context of the study of paratellurian biology. The other implications....”

  She let the sentence dangle.

  “They wouldn’t let d’Orsay communicate with Earth,” I said glumly. “She confided in me. She hadn’t realized what a hot potato it was, either—but I bet she knows now. She went back to the system expecting to find a humanitarian Utopia, cemented together out of three centuries and more of technical and moral progress. I think she was disappointed with what she found.”

  “How do you think they’ll react when they find out that Space Agency wants to abort their program—after three hundred and fifty years?”

  “Not pleased. Especially when they’re parked on the very doorstep of success.”

  “They’ll go mad,” she said. It was possible that she wasn’t speaking figuratively.

  “What can they do?” I asked. It was meant to be a hypothetical question, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders, indicating that Juhasz, Catherine d’Orsay et al. were—like ourselves—merely helpless pawns of a fate they could not control.

  “They could switch off the HSB,” she replied quietly.

  She’d had mor
e time to think since Harmall had had his little confidential chat with her. Now I did some hard thinking of my own—trying to remember just how disillusioned Catherine d’Orsay had been at our little farewell party, and trying to imagine just how Morten Juhasz might have taken the news she’d brought back.

  “Do you suppose,” I said eventually, “that Harmall might have had the Earth Spirit followed?” It had occurred to me that a shipload of soldiers just might come popping out of hyperspace at any moment.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “This,” I opined, “might turn into a real hornet’s nest.”

  She shook her head pensively. “More likely Harmall will want to play it softly. String them along. Let them think our plan and theirs are compatible. He won’t spring any traps until he holds all the cards. Our job has to be settled first, before anyone can act.”

  “By our plan, you mean Harmall’s...Space Agency’s.”

  “Isn’t it ours?”

  I wasn’t so sure. “If Harmall had come to me back on Sule,” I said, “and told me that I’d have to be party to a complicated double-cross, I just might have spit in his eye.”

  “Why do you think he didn’t?” she asked, sensibly. I had to concede the point.

  “Anyhow,” she went on, “do you think that the best way to exploit Naxos—given that we’re living in 2444 and not 2094—is to let the Ariadne zygotes come to term? If this world is habitable—and empty of intelligent life—it’s one of a kind.”