He looked first at Vesenkov, and then at me. How much does he know? I wondered. How much has he guessed?
“The problem,” said Angelina calmly, “is to know what those best interests are—or even if it makes sense to talk about the interests of the race as a whole.”
“The Ariadne and her sister ships were not launched to perpetuate the conflicts that were the sickness of her age,” he said, as though it was some kind of explanation. “She was an attempt to transcend that sickness. Captain d’Orsay and I—and Captain Ifere also—were commissioned not just to be masters of a ship, but to be midwives to a new world. Ariadne was designed to carry the seed of a Utopia, her landfall was intended to herald the rebirth of mankind—a new and better mankind.”
“And when the Earth Spirit arrived,” I said, “it was as if the past had caught up with you.” I said it dryly, trying not to sound contemptuous.
He turned his pale eyes on me, and I had difficulty in meeting his stare. From his point of view, I suppose, I must have seemed the ghost of a distant era, symbolizing many of the sins that Morten Juhasz had tried to leave behind on Earth.
“I want you to understand what you are doing here,” be said. “It is important that you do. I do not intend to make Naxos into a second Earth. I will not allow anyone else to make it so.”
“Captain Juhasz,” said Angelina calmly. “I think everyone here would like to share the kind of dream that you’ve carried with you across three hundred and fifty years and a hundred and fifty light-years. I don’t think anyone wants to make Naxos into some kind of suburb of the solar system, where all the faults of Earth’s history can be repeated. To some extent, you’re preaching to the converted. The thing is, though, that Ariadne isn’t alone in the universe. Naxos isn’t some kind of a test-tube where your worthy triumvirate can conduct its experiment in social engineering. As you’ve said, this is something in which all men have a stake. I’m assuming, of course, that by ‘mankind’ you do mean ‘all men,’ and not some imaginary transcendental collective entity.”
Again, he chose not to debate the issue on ground of her choosing, but simply started again.
“I am in command here,” he said. “Captain d’Orsay and Captain Ifere, naturally, share in the decision-making process, but we are all of one mind. There is no authority here but mine, and while you are involved in this enterprise you must accept that authority and no other. Is that quite clear?”
“As a disinterested observer,” interposed Zeno, with well-concealed irony, “may I say that you are being slightly insulting in assuming that any of my companions has interests and ambitions at odds with your own. Their ambition, like yours, is to further the ambitions of humankind. For myself, I have no hesitation in pledging myself to the same end. Men have always respected the rights and ambitions of the Calicoi, and it is the aim of the Calicoi to work in harmonious association with men. Or do you imagine that I am here solely to look after the interests of my own kind, with a view to stealing this new world away from you?”
Juhasz hesitated. I could appreciate his quandary. Maybe he did think that Zeno’s presence was intended to give the Calicoi some kind of stake in Naxos. Maybe there was even some truth in that opinion. But saying so out loud was something else. As Zeno had pointed out, it was difficult for him to clarify his suspicions at all without sounding “slightly insulting.”
“There is no one disputing your authority, captain,” said Angelina. It might have rested there, with all bad feeling smoothed over, if it hadn’t been for Vesenkov.
“Bloody not so,” he said, brusquely. “My authority is Soviet. No other. You want help, I help. Everybody’s friend. Nobody’s servant.”
While Juhasz weighed that up, I did too. In a sudden fit of madness, I decided that diplomacy could go to hell.
“You can count me in there, too,” I said. “I don’t think you own this world, and if you think you do I think you’re harboring a dangerous fantasy. It’s not for you—not even your little Holy Trinity—to specify the greater good of mankind. Finding out what killed your people down there is one thing—putting myself under your command is another.”
I looked across at Angelina, who favored me with the merest shake of her head and a wry smile. Juhasz looked at her too, inviting her to dissent. She didn’t. He didn’t bother checking with Zeno. Neither Vesenkov nor I had said anything that wasn’t obvious, but the delicate issue was whether we could or should have left it unsaid, content to string the captain along. In the end, it was to me that he spoke.
“And your authority, too, is the Soviet?” he asked, with deadly irony.
“Not exactly,” I said.
“No,” he said, in the voice of one confirming by emphasis an uncomfortable truth. “Your authority is this Space Agency that your Mr. Harmall represents, which seems—if I understand him correctly—to be connected with some numinous alliance of western nations, but also autonomous to some degree.”
“What they mean by freedom,” put in Vesenkov, with an unusual lack of brevity, “is not knowing who bloody orders come from.” It might have passed for a tolerably witty comment—on another occasion.
“I work for the Agency,” I said. “So does Zeno. Technically, I think, you do too.”
That, too, wasn’t a particularly clever thing to say. It was a way of interpreting his position vis-à-vis Harmall that he was guaranteed to resist in the strongest possible terms.
“The world from which the Ariadne came,” he said, “is not your world. To your world, we owe nothing.”
All in all, it wasn’t a particularly satisfactory meal, from anybody’s point of view.
As we left, I said to Vesenkov: “You certainly fouled that one up, didn’t you?”
He looked at me in surprise, possibly with resentment, for a moment or two. Then he grinned, deciding to take it as a joke. He patted me on the shoulder, and said: “Must find answer. Bloody quick time. Before shooting starts.” Then he laughed again and zoomed off down the corridor, pulling himself hand-over-hand along the guide rail.
CHAPTER NINE
When I got back to my cabin there was someone waiting outside the door. Obviously, it wasn’t enough that they kept interrupting me. Now they were beginning to form queues.
He looked as if he was even younger than me—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. He was small and wiry, with a kind of hunted expression that fit in very well with the intellectual climate aboard the ship.
“Dr. Caretta?” he queried. “I’m Simon Norton.”
I took his extended hand. He wobbled as we shook—he clearly wasn’t used to zero g.
“I’ve heard that you’re from England,” he said. He didn’t sound very sure.
“I was born there,” I told him. “Sorry about the name—I come from a long line of Italian ice-cream makers. I haven’t seen the dark satanic mills for a while, though.”
He laughed at that. “I was born in Nottingham,” he said. “I haven’t been there for a while, either. Seems like only yesterday, though.”
I opened the door, and swayed aside to let him pass. He moved awkwardly over to the bedrail, which he caught onto in order to steady himself.
“I’d offer you a drink,” I said,, “but as you can see, I’m living in somewhat Spartan conditions.”
“Aren’t we all?” he countered, weakly.
It dawned on me that when he said that it seemed like only yesterday that he’d said good-bye to dear old England he was being rather more literal than I’d realized. Unlike Catherine d’Orsay, who was on the transit duty roster, this fresh-faced youth must have slept through all three hundred and fifty years. His last memory must be the shuttle journey up from Earth. That was some blackout.
“How was England?” I asked conversationally. I eased myself onto the top end of the bed, looping a safety strap around my ankle to steady myself.
“In a bad way, mostly,” he said. “Except Oxford—and presumably Cambridge too. They run the clocks two hundred years slow there.”
“Wha
t did you study?” I asked.
“Genetics.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That’s one thing I was wondering,” I admitted. “Where are the legions of deep-frozen scientists, eager to catch up on the centuries of material progress? Are you the whole delegation?”
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he admitted.
“Oh,” I said. “Why not?”
“Orders.”
“Why?”
“I guess they thought that you’d be too busy. They wouldn’t want us to waste your time. But....”
“But?” I prompted.
He ducked his head to cover a rueful smile. “I wanted to know the answer to the central enigma. I guess I should have been a mathematician—then I’d only have had to ask whether Fermat’s last theorem had been solved.”
I’d no idea whether Fermat’s last theorem had been solved—or, for that matter, what the hell it was. What was slightly more worrying was that I hadn’t a clue what the central enigma was either. I told him this, and he looked quite shocked for a moment. Then his face cleared.
“Oh,” he said, “of course. Once you cracked the problem, it wouldn’t be an enigma anymore. You’ll have forgotten it was ever called that.”
“Well?” I said, when he hesitated again.
“To us,” he said, “it seemed like the problem. It had been around for a long, long time—more than a century. I think we should have had the answer, but virtually all funding for two or three generations had been diverted into biotechnics. Commercialization had squeezed out pure research, and theory was in low repute anyway—there was this fashionable argument about the end of theory...because we were supposed already to have induced most of what could be induced with the aid of human senses....”
“I know the one,” I told him dryly.
“The thing is,” he went on, “that we had no real connection between biochemical genetics and anatomy. As far as we knew—and had known for more than a hundred years—the genes in the nucleus were just blueprints for proteins: a chemical factory. We knew that changes in the gene deployment affected gross structures, but we had no idea how. In the nineteen sixties it must have seemed that making the connection between micro- and macro-genetics was just around the corner, but we never got round that corner. The gap in evolutionary theory left by that omission was very serious...but as I say, everyone seemed to have other fish to fry.”
“That’s the central enigma?”
He nodded.
“We’re even worse off than you were,” I told him. “We not only don’t know the answer, we’ve demoted the question. There’ve been a lot of distractions while you’ve been away. The collapse of civilization—that kind of thing. Après vous—le déluge, in fact. Genetics only began to boom again in my lifetime. Now we have a new context for the whole science, though—it’s not just biology anymore, it’s paratellurian biology. Instead of one life-system, we have dozens. It gives us the chance to do a lot of data-chasing and cataloguing—with abundant practical justification, of course. No great theorist has yet emerged who’ll tie it all in together. Mind you, there are only half a dozen properly equipped laboratories in the system, so it’s not entirely surprising. We four knights errant who have come riding to your rescue are members of a very special elite—though I don’t think your three captains truly appreciate that fact.”
He was looking at me as if I were insane. I don’t know why. After all, it was hardly my fault.
“In your own day as in mine,” I reminded him, nations of Earth were grappling with problems far more basic than your central enigma. It may not be nice to think about, but there are as many people on the brink of starvation in 2444 as there were in 2044, and probably as many or more than there were in 1644. In between times—in between 2044 and 2444, that is—things were always worse and never better. We’ve been in trouble since you left home...for God’s sake, that’s why you left! Technology—especially biotechnology—is and has been a necessity; science is and always has been a luxury. You must understand that.”
“But I don’t,” he complained. “How can you have technology without science? If technology is a necessity, science must be too.”
“In a way,” I conceded. “But it’s a mistake to think that advances in technology are dependent on advances in science. The technologies that transformed the economy of the Middle Ages—water mills, windmills, heavy ploughs and the horse-collar—were none of them dependent upon any advance in scientific theory. The same is true of the machines that made the industrial revolution. Indeed, it was the proliferation of theory that followed technological innovation, not vice versa. Biotechnics is basically fancy cookery. Its theoretical base was laid down in the nineteen thirties, but we haven’t exhausted it yet and maybe never will. New knowledge might open up new technological horizons, but it isn’t necessary when you can find adequate practical measures in what you already know.”
He shook his head slowly. “So you still have no firm knowledge relating to the inheritance of structure? You still know a great deal about biochemical blueprints and very little about embryological ones?”
I nodded. “Maybe that old argument about the end of theory isn’t so stupid,” I said.
I wondered how I’d feel if I time-machined into the future and was told by the local cognoscenti that they hadn’t made an inch of progress on all the problems that seemed so immediate and so desperate to me. Not terribly surprised, in all likelihood. It’s easy to become cynical about progress once you’re aware of the extent to which the machine has seized up.
“Then we don’t need you,” said Simon Norton. “You’re no better than us. When we sent for help from Earth...we assumed....”
“The thing is,” I said, “that you don’t know a damn thing about any biology except Earth’s. I do. I know the biochemistry and the diversity of a dozen different systems. I work hand-in-glove with a product of one of them. What’s down on the surface is as new to me as it is to you, but it’s a different kind of newness. For me, it’s part of a pattern. For you, it would be the first encounter with the alien. You do see the difference?”
He thought about it for a moment, and then conceded that he did.
“After all,” I pointed out, “you didn’t actually dedicate your own life to the noble pursuit of a solution to the central enigma, did you? You threw it over for the chance to be midwife to a new world. A mere biotechnician.”
He grinned.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said.
It wasn’t a sour or sarcastic comment, and was probably more a comment on his own personal ambitions than a reflection on the existential role of the Ariadne itself, but it suddenly struck me nevertheless that here was an attitude markedly different from that of Captains Juhasz and d’Orsay.
“Why?” I asked quietly.
“It was the big thing going,” he said. “A journey to the stars. The romance was the most important thing. The gene bank seemed like a good idea, in view of the way things kept threatening to go completely to hell. And the prospect of finding a new world was....”
“Like finally getting a return ticket to paradise,” I finished for him.
“Stupid, really,” he said.
“Not so stupid,” I told him. “After all, you came home, didn’t you. Dead center.”
“Except for all those men and women, down there...dead.”
“Even if it were to be the case that humans can never live down there,” I said, “Ariadne would still have done a good job. The HSB you’ve established there is the most important bridgehead we’ve so far extended toward galactic center. Even if we can’t use Naxos, we need her orbit. A string of satellite stations at sixty-degree intervals is something we need almost is much as we need the world itself. It could change the tempo and direction of our so-called conquest of space. Mere biotechnicians would probably be in demand. However lethal Naxos’ life-system might be, it will still warrant study.”
He didn’t seem to think that was a bad id
ea. There was no paranoid gleam in his eye, no glint of an obsessive desire to be a demigod supervising the advent of humankind in a new Garden of Eden.
I thought of coming right out with it, and telling him to spread the word that at least one of his captains was off his rocker, but thought better of it.
“I don’t think I could go home,” he said pensively. The statement seemed like something of a non sequitur, but his expression was eloquent.
“No,” I agreed. “You seem to have cut yourself off from home, rather. Your future’s here.”
After a pause, he asked, “Do you think you can solve the problem—down there?”
“That depends on what kind of a problem it is,” I answered. I didn’t want to go through the whole rigmarole again, so I left it at that.
“Well,” he said, “I wish you the best of luck.”
“Luck,” I said, “has nothing to do with it.” I didn’t say it ungraciously: it was just a throwaway line, intended to put the seal on the conversation. I didn’t realize, of course, what a damn lie it would turn out to be.
CHAPTER TEN
There were four capsules in all. One was entirely filled with equipment, while Captain d’Orsay was scheduled to ride down solo, sharing accommodation with more of our precious luggage. Zeno and Vesenkov were appointed traveling companions, and so were Angelina and myself. It never occurred to me at the time to ask who had made these traveling arrangements.
As spaceships go, the capsule which was to carry us down was signally unimpressive. It was basically spherical, but bulged at the waist into a kind of skirt. The base was shielded to protect the interior from the heat of friction, and the rim of the skirt was equipped with small jets for modifying the attitude of the craft. It had no propulsion unit, of course—it was intended only for descending into a gravity-well, which is a kind of flight that offers few problems except those concerned with slowing down.
It was, as is only to be expected, very cramped. Its two seats were very well-padded and the safety harnesses were awesome in their complexity; these two facts taken together suggested that no one was entirely confident about the inevitability of a soft landing.
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