The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel

by Brian Stableford

  “What’s in Juhasz’s mind,” I said, “is a lot of empty space where the marbles once were. All we need now is for Earth Spirit and Ariadne to start exchanging shots. They could flame down together, leaving us all to play Robinson Crusoe. Then Vesenkov and Captain d’Orsay could shoot it out to decide who gets to be emperor. And the mute HSB that could have been the big stepping stone can wheel around the world forever, waiting until the natives achieve space travel in eighty thousand years or so. Won’t they be surprised?”

  “I take it you aren’t going to compete?” she said.

  “For what?”

  “The job of emperor.”

  “Hell, no,” I said. “I’m not old enough, remember?”

  “I don’t think w have too much to worry about,” she said, after weighing it up. “We don’t figure in his grand plans, whatever they finally amount to. I think he’ll pass all undesirables back to the Earth Spirit. There’s no harm in letting us all go home. It’ll take three hundred years for anyone to get back here without the kindly guiding light.”

  “First,” I said, “we have to get back to the Ariadne.”

  “I’ll lay even money,” she offered, “that by the time we reach the dome, the first shuttlecraft will be down. Now that the plague warning is off, Juhasz wants to go right ahead with plan A. That’s probably why he fell out with Harmall and precipitated the small war. We’ll arrive to find our deportation papers all signed and ready. We’ll be missing a great scientific opportunity, of course, and we won’t be very popular at home. Bearers of bad news never are. On the other hand, Harmall is the officially designated can-carrier. We played our part, so far as we’ve been allowed to.”

  She was a monumental fountainhead of common sense when she was on form. At moments like that she almost reminded me of my mother.

  “It would be nice not to have to leave so many loose ends,” I observed.

  “There are always loose ends,” she observed. “We could work here half our lives, and there’d be loose ends all over the place. We could tie up some of the ones we have now, but loose ends are like the Hydra’s heads.”

  “Hercules coped,” I pointed out.

  “Hercules was a hero. But then,” she added with a grin, “Leander was some kind of hero too, wasn’t he?”

  I grinned back. “Not exactly,” I said. “Hero was the other one.”

  She didn’t know what I was talking about. All she knew was that Leander was a Greek name with vaguely classical connection.

  “Hero and Leander were lovers,” I told her. “She used to put a light in her window at night so he could swim across the Hellespont to meet her. She was a priestess, and the meetings were illicit. He drowned one stormy night, and she cast herself from her window in despair. There are poems about it, but I never looked them up.”

  “Sweet,” she said. “Do you go swimming a lot?”

  “About as often as little angels fly.”

  “I quite like flying,” she remarked, subverting the joke. I let it go.

  “Speaking of stormy nights,” I said, “we’d better finish getting the shelter secured. The rain’s getting heavier and the wind is blowing.”

  We had nothing much in the way of tent-pegs, so we finally decided to secure the canopy by weighting the flaps that once had secured it to the hull of the boat with big, rounded stones. We found half a dozen such stones lurking in the undergrowth; they were hard but not as heavy as they looked. They had the bulk of basketballs, but they weighed less than twenty kilos.

  It had rained more or less solidly all day, and the weather showed no sign of improvement. The cycle of evaporation and precipitation seemed to be fairly constant on Naxos. The complex factors which result in such an unfair redistribution of the Earth’s watery wealth were mostly inapplicable on Naxos, which looked like the ideal posting for a lazy meteorologist.

  As usual, Angelina took the first watch. Once we had established the custom, we didn’t like to vary it. Irregular habits, my uncle said (fearlessly facing up to the possibility of self-contradiction), are the bane of a well-ordered life.

  It was even more cramped in the “tent” than it had been on the boat, despite the fact that we’d been able to discard several powerpacks before arranging the loads we’d have to carry overland to the dome. There was barely enough room to lie down. Exhaustion, though, is a great sedative, and I soon drifted off to sleep. The dream I was having when I woke up wasn’t particularly pleasant, but it was by no means one of my five-star nightmares. It mostly concerned getting wet and trying to attract the attention of passing spaceships with fires that wouldn’t produce enough smoke.

  The reason I woke up was that Angelina was kicking me, and shouting something about the tent blowing away. I had to get to my feet and help her shift power-packs outside into the rainstorm in order to anchor the canopy more securely.

  We’d just about completed this task when it occurred to me that it shouldn’t have been necessary.

  “What happened to the goddam stones?” I asked, once we were back inside, dripping liberally all over the groundsheet.

  “They went for a walk,” she said humorlessly.

  “What did they use for legs?” I asked sarcastically.

  “It’s not a joke,” she said, showing the first hint of intolerance I’d seen in her. “They weren’t stones—they were animals. They grew heads and legs and they stalked away about their business. They can change shape, and also—it seems—the structure and properties of their tissues. Tortoise-strategy, taken to its logical conclusion.”

  I began to wish I’d seen it.

  “It must have been a shock when you switched on the light,” I said.

  “Revelation, dear boy. Remember the pink stuff? Liquid protoplasm. The thing which lived in the pool, and the things which came out of the water to feed both had some limited power to modify their form. It’s a good trick to be able to turn, if you’re an amphibian. As you move from one environment to another, you adapt. It makes so much sense, I wonder the amphibians back on Earth didn’t go in for it. Why stick to one metamorphosis when the talent is so useful to retain?”

  “They didn’t have a chance,” I muttered. “Life was too tough for them. They got booted into touch in the evolutionary game. The wrong mutational heritage, and no time to catch up before the violence of the environment shoved them aside. I wonder how they do it?”

  “No miracle,” she said. “Embryos can do it. It’s just a matter of maintaining infantile talents into adulthood, and learning to apply them more widely. Facultative metamorphosis. Must be easy when your soma knows how.”

  “Axolotls could metamorphose more than once,” I recalled. “And they could hold off metamorphosis, too, if they wanted—they could breed as juveniles or adults. I said it was a pity we drove them to extinction. Hell!”

  “What’s up?”

  “The indigenes. They might be a race of bloody werewolves.”

  “Werefrogs,” she corrected.

  “No,” I said, sitting down and trying to think. “It’s serious. If this faculty is widespread in the life-system—your fundamental peculiarity of the animal kingdom—then the most advanced members are likely to be the ones which use it best.”

  “Not necessarily,” she said. “Intelligence is a different kind of adaptability altogether. You may find that it’s the ones who couldn’t master shape changing that had to invest in cleverness instead. Cows have three stomachs and bats have sonar, but people don’t even have claws—their tricks are a different kind.”

  “But it’s different!” I said. “This whole system is different—not a carbon copy of Earth’s, the way Calicos is. It is possible for evolution to transcend biochemical destiny. We always knew that it was, but until now there was no instance. We can’t lose this to Juhasz’s paranoia. We can’t.”

  “You might convince your young friend Norton of that,” she said, “but you might still find yourself outvoted—unless you want to stay here under Juhasz’s authority.”
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  I shook my head, and then rested it briefly on the palm of my hand.

  “Better get back to sleep,” she said. “You still have two hours. Tomorrow will be a hard day. Save your speculations for the hours when we’ll need the distraction.”

  It was good advice, if only it could be followed. I wasn’t up to it. Tired though I was, I couldn’t get back to the real state of inertia. I dozed, no doubt, but the slightest sound penetrated to my dream-led thoughts, and when it was my turn to stand guard I was anything but refreshed. Nevertheless, I stood my turn, and though we were not threatened, I would have been ready if we had been. Nothing of any considerable size came near the tent all night, and the only things I shone the light upon were the crazy toad-like creatures I’d taken for stones. Active, they didn’t look very different from the creatures on the islet, to which they were no doubt related.

  A neat trick, I thought, to be able to grow legs like that. But can you grow hands that grip? Can you grow eyes in the back of your head? Could you make claws or poisonous fangs? And what do you get up to when it’s time for sex?

  In my mind, the possibilities were endless. In the flesh, no doubt, they’d be very much more restricted. In all likelihood, they couldn’t do anything more than turn themselves into rocks and back again. What the local masters of the technique might be capable of was something else.

  All through the night I was half expecting the trees to take up their roots and march away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Early the next morning, Juhasz called Catherine d’Orsay to inform her that a shuttlecraft was being prepared, and that it would make the drop before nightfall. Looked at objectively, it was hardly an irrevocable move, but in the context of the attitudes prevalent aboard the Ariadne it was an unmistakable statement of commitment.

  Even Captain d’Orsay asked whether it was wise, and for a few moments, listening in, I wondered whether there was going to be a breakdown in the tripartite accord.

  “Captain Juhasz,” said Zeno, who took over the position of spokesman from Catherine d’Orsay, “we should point out that the original ground crew never completed their survey. Their untimely deaths may have had nothing to do with the possible inhospitability of the local life-system, but there are no adequate grounds for assuming that Naxos is safe. We really don’t know very much about the biology of the world.”

  “Our original fears regarding the environment of Naxos,” replied the captain, “were based on the supposition that alien life might be very different from our own and utterly incompatible with it. Your very existence provides a reassurance that alien biologies are likely to be similar enough to permit humans to thrive on other Earthlike worlds.”

  “In science,” Zeno reminded him, “we do not generalize from such limited data.”

  I took advantage of the momentary lull which followed that remark to interrupt. “Captain,” I said, “this is Lee Caretta. Dr. Hesse and I have evidence that the dissimilarities between the life-system of Naxos and that of Earth are far greater than the differences between Earth and Calicos. I urge you to wait until we have joined Zeno and Dr. Vesenkov at the dome, and until we have carried out a thorough investigation of the biology of this world. As yet, we are almost totally ignorant.”

  “Your objections are noted, Dr. Caretta,” said Juhasz, “and they are overruled. I have men of my own perfectly capable of carrying out the investigation, and I regret that I can no longer trust your party. When you reach the dome, you may assist my people only until such a time as it becomes convenient to bring you back up to the Ariadne. Then, you and your companions will be permitted to leave for Earth.”

  I felt like yelling at him and telling him what a pigheaded fool he was. In order to help resist the temptation I gave the mike to Angelina and went outside to start packing up the stuff.

  “You have all the time in the world, Captain Juhasz,” I heard her say. “Your journey has taken more than three hundred years. Five full lifetimes. It would be a pity if it were all to go wrong now because you couldn’t contain your impatience.”

  “Madam,” replied the captain, “it is because it has taken us five lifetimes to reach our goal that our patience has worn thin so easily. Had you genuinely come to help us, perhaps things would be different, but you came instead to prevent us from bringing to fulfillment the plan to which we have all devoted our lives. We have no alternative but to exclude you at the earliest possible time from further involvement in our destiny.”

  She begged him to reconsider. It didn’t sound as if it was going to do any good. She didn’t bring up the subject of intelligent indigenes. It wouldn’t have helped.

  She helped me pack up the luggage, and I began to secure her part of the load on her back.

  “I’m beginning to ache already,” she said.

  “The situation is out of hand,” I observed. “Juhasz is running on sheer inertia. His discretionary brakes have failed. I only hope that Zeno is busy persuading Catherine d’Orsay that the Holy Trinity would be better off without its godhead.”

  “Maybe we should work on Harmall,” she said. “Persuade him to let Juhasz have things his own way, if only the HSB can be restored. Let Juhasz get his program under way—what will it matter in twenty or thirty years? Which is worth more—the world or the stepping stone?”

  “If we knew what Harmall really stood for,” I pointed out, “we’d find it a lot easier to deal with that question.”

  “It might make it easier, too, if we were sure how we would deal with the world,” she said. “It’s all very well to be good ecologists in favor of a policy to let well enough alone—but what kind of politically viable solution would we settle for?”

  I had no ready answer to that. I didn’t think it was possible to prepare one until we knew all the things that we had to find out about the nature of the life-system and the identity of the creatures who were clever enough to fashion hunting spears out of cane.

  We set off on the long walk. Angelina was right; the aching began even as we started out, and things didn’t get any easier.

  “Think of all those early explorers,” I said, when we rested at midday. “They did this sort of thing for fun. Months on end, through trackless jungle far nastier than this, without the benefit of plastic suits to keep malaria out.”

  “They did have bearers, though,” she said, shedding her bundle gratefully.

  “One more night,” I reminded her. “Definitely the last. Then we can take it easy. Eat, drink and be merry.”

  “But be careful of the water. Murderers always return to the scene of the crime.”

  “If they’re alive,” I added. The thought was too sobering to be amusing.

  “Can I have the radio?” she asked.

  I unshipped it and handed it over. She started calling the dome, asking for Zeno.

  When he answered, she asked: “Have you and Vesenkov completed an analysis of the poison?”

  “Certainly,” replied Zeno. “Do you want the formula?”

  “Not as such. I was wondering about the provenance of the poison. Is it a compound known and used on Earth that might have been brought from the Ariadne or easily synthesized? Or does it originate locally?”

  “We have considered the point,” said Zeno cautiously. “The reason we have not reported is that we are unsure of the answer. The compound is of a kind that was at one time manufactured on Earth—so Vesenkov assures me—for purposes of chemical warfare. Its synthesis would be difficult and hazardous, but we cannot be certain that it has not been derived from some chemically related but innocuous substance within the environment of the dome. With so many plastics around, the amount of organic material available is considerable. On the other hand, the substance is fairly similar to the venom manufactured by some particularly poisonous snakes, both on Earth and on Calicos. It may therefore be of local biological origin.”

  “If you had to guess,” said Angelina, “which way would you go?”

  “The second seems to me the more l
ikely,” admitted Zeno. “but the possibility that these people had been poisoned once seemed highly unlikely, and this example continually reminds me to be on guard. It is too easy to reach wrong conclusions from hasty theorizing.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll remember that.”

  When she signed off, I said: “So what?”

  “Have you seen anything equipped with poisonous fangs?”

  “That doesn’t mean much.”

  “The animals they examined before being wiped out were mostly little froglike things and insects. I suppose any one of them might have been carrying the stuff around in their bodies; and having found it, the missing woman might have set it aside without mentioning it, because she intended to use it. But it’s all so bizarre!”

  “We already know that,” I said.

  She shook her head. After a pause, I said: “You think the aliens did it, don’t you? Not merely were-frogs, but also werepeople. That’s a hell of a jump from seeing a few stones grow legs and walk away.”

  “The missing person had opportunity but no motive,” she said quietly. “The natives had motive, but no obvious opportunity. It’s all a matter of finding the missing piece.”

  “Can this really be the fountainhead of common sense I’ve grown to know?” I asked. “We have a hunting spear and walking stones, plus a little pink ooze and a glimpse of something running. From that, you could reach a million wrong conclusions with the aid of the most mediocre imagination.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “Motives for murder aren’t all that difficult to find,” I said, “if you really believe that murders have to have motives.”

  “You have to fall back on the logic of insanity,” she said. And added: “If that’s not a contradiction in terms.”

  “We’re talking about a human being,” I reminded her. “What’s so out of the ordinary about madness?”

  By mutual consent, we let the matter drop. Hasty theorizing—if you could dignify such wild imaginings with the noble title of theory—wasn’t going to get us anywhere from our present position. Our big problem was finding the strength to keep walking, not solving the riddle of the universe. The trouble with riddles is that they may remain unsolved forever—you have no guarantees. The problem of staying on one’s feet and continuing to place one foot in front of the other until one reaches a particular destination is quite a different matter. One way or other, it’s bound to be resolved. You do or you don’t. My spirits were at a sufficiently low ebb to make me cling to the simpler problem, and even to become quite single-minded about it. There’s something comforting about a straightforward matter of either/or. As it turned out, though, the problem of reaching the dome had angles that I wasn’t considering.