The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel

by Brian Stableford

  You’re up to your knees in the water, but the water is black and as thick as oil. It fastens itself around you, gripping and holding you back. The sky is black and the leafless trees are white and brittle, powdery when you touch them. The moon is dead white, too, as it hangs in the sky like a predatory thing, still and silent but always able to change.

  There’s no sound at all, because your feet won’t splash in the water. It parts like treacle as you drag your legs forward. You touch the surface with your fingers and it sticks to them like tar. Black tar and white powder transmute themselves in combination into grey slime.

  You have to get to the edge, but you don’t know where you are. The moon can’t guide you and the only way you have of knowing which way to go is something inside you that drives you on. It’s sitting in your head, among the canyons and crevices of your brain, but it carries a cattle-prod that reaches into your guts to sting your heart.

  You think your heart may burst and you beg the thing to stop, but it just keeps driving you on, without rhyme or reason or care or compassion or hatred or mother-love.

  It will drive you until you drop, or until—what’s worse—you burst and spill your blue-black substance into the gloomy waters, where fish will feed until there’s nothing left but a brittle husk, powdering in the wind, so the thing in your head can break out of the prison of your skull and grow....

  and grow....

  and grow.

  But it’s a dream.

  Only a dream.

  You know that you can’t escape, because even if you wake, you have to return. You can sleep forever, but you can only wake for a bare handful of hours. Wakefulness is sleep’s concession to the ambitions of the human spirit, and dreaming is proof of their vanity.

  You reach your hands out to the moon, and you beg for forgiveness, though you never committed a crime. You’ll confess to anything, if only she’ll lift you away and let you fly on Angel’s wings, high into the sky in search of the stars. You begin to accuse yourself of all the monstrous infamies that you can think of, to show yourself needful of forgiveness...to show that you are so bad that only a saint’s love could possibly redeem you...but she will not hear. She hangs in heaven like a spider on a thread, turned to stone and wrinkled silver.

  You’re sinking, and you know it. You’re so far away, and getting farther. In the end...you’ll stop struggling. You’ll accept the world of your dreams, which is, after all, the only real world. The other isn’t yours...it’s an alien place, inhabited by demons, but in your dreams, if only you can be forgiven, you can enjoy the darkness and the love...all the love...more love than the other world contains.

  To float is to yield, to sink into the blackness, which no longer seems so viscous, but the heaviness and the cloud of suffocation are growing out of your delirium, spiraling behind your eyes, phosphenes popping like seed pods all around you, and the thing inside your head shaking with silent laughter.

  So you beg for mercy and cry for help, and say now that it isn’t your fault and that someone else was guilty and that the whole world deserves to suffer if only you can go free because the whole world’s to blame and deserves to sicken and die and perish in clouds of flame if one innocent man might be saved to go on all alone, and alone, and alone.

  Only the world of dreams is a moral world, and only here can justice be part of your being, a chemical in your blood. Only here can it make sense for all crimes to be rewarded, all suffering redeemed, all guilt cleansed. There’s something inside you that doesn’t want to run away, that won’t let you run away, that always wants to return, that saves you from yourself, that makes you what you are and sucks your blood and caresses your skin and thrusts its stinger into the space behind your eyes.

  The trees begin to move and march away, forming ranks and shouldering arms, with flowers falling from the sky and rain like tears that vanishes into mist. All the whiteness in the world is going away, to leave you beneath the moon, in an infinite sea of blackness, burning in a sea of tears.

  Then the moon goes out, an eye obscured by the lid of darkness, the lid of the world that seals you in.

  forever.

  And somehow you’re glad that this time it’s never to end....

  ...when it does.

  So I wake up, cold and wet, and try to wipe away the sweat with moist fingers, and curse the tangled blankets that feel for all the world like clinging undergrowth against my skin.

  My head is aching, and it’s so difficult to feel safe and reassured, but the light of the sun is already beaming down on me, and I suddenly have the feeling that it’s later than I think.

  There’s something I’ve forgotten, and there seems to be something urgent about the big black gap in my memory that wasn’t there before. I can’t remember where I am or why, and the effort of collecting my scattered thoughts is making my head split open.

  I take myself in hand, and tell myself not to be stupid, that everything will be all right, as long as I take things calmly, and try not to hurt myself, and make sure that nobody knows. It’s all a matter of bluff and discretion. It really doesn’t matter that I’ve brought this thing with me, not merely across the solar system but out into the realm of cold white stars. It really doesn’t matter, because it’s still in me, utterly private, nobody’s business but my own, and as long as nobody knows, it doesn’t really exist. It’s just me. Nobody else.

  And then I remember where I am, and I realize that something is strange. I put my hand in front of my face, so I can look at the dew-spattered fingers, and I make myself feel the cold and the damp all over my body.

  I sit up, and see that I am alone. The wilderness is all around me. My sterile suit is gone, and with it everything I was carrying, except for one small thing that is clutched tightly in my left hand. It looks, absurdly, like a seed pod of a poppy when the flowers have fallen away, but it is made of metal.

  I cannot help myself.

  I curse.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Harmall,” I said, “this is Lee Caretta. I’m in trouble I don’t know if you can receive this—or, even if you can, whether you’ll be able to do anything about it—but I hope you can. You’re the only hope I have. I don’t know how this thing you’ve given me works, but I’m hoping that you’ll be able to get a fix on it. I’m not going to move because I don’t know which direction the dome is. I may do some shouting, to try to attract attention. Angelina may still be close by. But I won’t move. I’ll transmit this now, and I’ll call again in an hour or so. I’ll keep calling, until I’m sure that it’s not working. Then I’ll think of something else.

  “I need help, Harmall. Badly. Get it to me if you can.”

  I switched off the recorder, and pressed the button that would transmit the message as a scrambled bleep, all the way to the Ariadne, if only she was above the horizon. I didn’t even know that much. As I’d said, though, I’d keep trying. Getting a signal through was probably my best hope. I didn’t want to start walking until I had to. I didn’t know how far I might have come from the spot where Angelina and I had set up camp, nor in which direction. The last thing I remembered was anchoring the canopy to protect us from the rain. I had all the hours of darkness and a couple of hours of daylight to account for. Maybe most of the time I had been asleep, but even in my sleep I might have walked.

  I’d already tried shouting for Angelina. So far, it hadn’t worked. I didn’t think it was going to.

  I only hoped that I hadn’t choked her to death before leaving. I didn’t think I had—in none of my previous episodes had anything so gruesome surfaced in retrospective connection with the memory blackout. I had no evidence that I’d ever done anything at all while blacked out—though that, of course, could hardly be taken as conclusive. If I’d been murdering people, though, they’d have caught up with me.

  On the other hand, Naxos apparently had a bad track record as far as people’s behavior during crazy interludes was concerned.

  Previously, I’d always woken up i
n bed, and that had reassured me. I’d always fallen back into the normal pattern of life, and hence had been able to take it for granted that I’d never left it. This may seem absurd, but I’d never expended any effort trying to discover what had happened during my blackouts. I’d never asked myself why they happened. The only interest in them I had was in trying to avoid anyone else finding out about them. I’d listened for clues to where I might have been or what I might have done, but not to answer my own curiosity—more to provide myself with a plausible answer if anyone actually asked. My only interest in the truth, in fact, had been the necessity of finding a convincing alibi.

  Now, though, things were different. I hadn’t woken up in bed—I’d woken up in an alien forest, without my sterile suit, barefooted and clad only in a thin one-piece more suited to use as underwear than entire clothing. This blackout had taken me from safety and abandoned me in a situation of desperate danger. It was the first time that I had ever thought of the blackouts as being dangerous. Always, before, I’d tacitly assumed that they were in some unspecifiable sense benevolent. Problematic, but not hostile. Now they were very clearly the enemy.

  I took a momentous decision. I didn’t want to have any more blackouts. I didn’t want to have any more nightmares, either.

  Deciding is one thing, though—achieving is another.

  I was sitting with my back against the bole of a tree. The ground was covered with soft leaf humus, and was relatively bare. There was a little clearing in front of me, where the spreading branches of three trees interwove to screen out the sunlight. Only in the center, where there was a dappled disc of illuminated ground, was there a small clump of ground-hugging flowering plants with crinkly leaves and purple flowers. Their scent was distinct and sweet, eclipsing the other odors of the forest at the point where I had stationed myself.

  It was cold in the shadow, but the air temperature was increasing slowly as the sun climbed into the sky. It promised to be a bright day, for once—at least I had not run near-naked into a rainstorm.

  I didn’t mind sitting still—I was both exhausted and dispirited, and felt no urge to be on my feet and moving. The dome, I knew, was likely to be no more than ten kilometers away, probably in a northeasterly direction, but then ten kilometers might as well be light-years. The ground would cut my feet to ribbons. What would have been, on city streets in stout shoes, a mere stroll taking a couple of hours at the outside, was here a very different prospect. I might do it, given time and the determination to cope with pain and laceration, but an error in my bearing of a mere five or ten degrees would send me to either side of the dome, out of eyeshot.

  So, at least, the situation seemed. It was a defeatist attitude, no doubt, but there might be time for rallying my shattered courage when I was sure that the message to Harmall wasn’t getting through, or was finding no response.

  I contemplated the possibility of a cruder signal, and wondered if it really was possible to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. If the sticks I could find nearby ever dried out, I could try it, but in the meantime the possibility did not look strong.

  I wasn’t hungry—my stomach, used to the thin but nutritious gruel eked out by the tubes, had long since shrunk, and would not trouble me with alarmist signals. I was, however, a little thirsty—and that sensation would not be held at bay by habit. There was moistness everywhere, but I hesitated to gather vegetation in order to wring out a few polluted droplets that might injure me far more than they comforted me. I had an ambivalent attitude to the possibility of alien infection, generated by the custom of taking extreme precautions which never, in actuality, failed. Striking a bargain between thirst and caution was going to be no easy task, and might be a matter of long and careful negotiation.

  The feeling that I was being watched crept up on me quite slowly. At first, it was at the very threshold of consciousness—I found myself scanning the hanging curtains of greenery that decked the bushes away to my right with anxious apprehension, and was almost surprised. I put it down to nerves and deliberately looked away in another direction, where there were bare tree trunks and no obvious places to hide; but my eyes were drawn back gradually, until I found myself staring again.

  Time went by, though, and nothing happened. When I judged that an hour or so had passed, I lifted Harmall’s device again, and spoke into the mouthpiece for a second time.

  “Harmall, this is Lee Caretta. This is a mayday call. I’m in bad trouble. Get a fix on my position if you can, and send someone to help. The quicker they can get here, the better.”

  I thumbed the transmit control, and then froze rigid as something crawled out of the bushes.

  It was one of those times when you can hate yourself for being right.

  Its gait was froglike, but it hadn’t a froglike head. Its forearms were long, and this allowed it to carry its head held high, with its forward-looking staring eyes fixed on my face. Its mouth was lined with shark-like teeth, but it had lips that quivered and puckered as if the mouth were getting ready to spit. I remember the beast in the swamp with the long neck and the startled expression, and the little frogs which could bring down dragonflies with a well-aimed jet of water.

  It paused about four meters in front of me, as if waiting to see what I’d do. It was poised to pounce, but somehow I knew that it wasn’t about to. I met the stare of its big eyes, and I couldn’t doubt that there was a mind behind them.

  Two more of the things crawled out of the undergrowth, to take up positions flanking the first.

  I slipped Harmall’s gadget into my one and only pocket and placed my elbows on my knees, thrusting my hands wide, palm-open. I was trying to look helpless, and I suppose that I succeeded.

  Their features began to flow. The line of the mouth and the jaw began to change, and their limbs changed, too. They squatted back on their haunches, and then began to stand erect. With the forms they had worn in order to confront me first of all it would have been impossible, but by the time they came to their feet it was possible. They ceased to be vicious carnivores, ready to leap upon their prey and rend its flesh, and became humanoid, with smooth skin, able hands and steady eyes.

  The middle one puckered his lips, and again I thought he might spit in my eye, but instead he emitted a long sequence of sounds, like notes from a flute punctuated by clicks and pops. No human larynx had a cat in hell’s chance of generating patterns of sound like that, and I knew immediately that if we were ever going to talk to these people we’d need synthesizers to help us.

  “That’s a cute trick,” I said, trying to sound friendly. I was referring to the shape-shifting, of course, but it didn’t matter a damn. I could have recited poetry or sung rude songs—it would all have been white noise to them.

  They weren’t even talking to me, it transpired. The speech was an instruction, not an attempt to communicate with me, and what it commanded the kingpin’s companions to do, it seemed, was to grab the alien and hold him fast. That’s what they did. They took an arm each and yanked me to my feet.

  “Take it easy, now,” I said, trying to sound as soothing and nice as possible. They were surprisingly strong, considering that they could apparently dissolve and reconstruct their sinews at not much less than a moment’s notice.

  The leader made some kind of gesture, accompanied by a little click-and-whistle, and my captors encouraged me to move off. Not to put too fine a point on it, in fact, they dragged me.

  I tried to indicate by words and gestures that if they wanted me to go with them I was willing and could walk, but they continued dragging me regardless. All attempts to establish some kind of rapport came to nothing.

  Within minutes, rapport and its achievement were no longer the matters foremost in my mind. As I stumbled along between the two who were holding me, taken faster than I cared to go, the coarse grass and the brambles began to tear at my feet, and before we’d gone a couple of hundred meters I knew that my worst fears about the possibility of walking home in bare feet were justified.


  Their feet—in fact, their entire legs—were protected by some kind of horny tegument, dark green in color, which contrasted with the silkier texture of the skin covering their upper bodies. Maybe they thought I could grow myself armor just as easily; maybe they just didn’t care. They didn’t stop, though, and they made no attempt to make things easier.

  Within half an hour I was in absolute agony, and the only thought that could stand out against the backcloth of raw pain was the desperate hope that it would end. The only freedom left to me was the decision to try to cooperate, and stay on my feet, or to let go completely and let them drag me. The only difference it made was how much of me—and which particular bits of flesh—were being cut to ribbons.

  I had never imagined a first contact between intelligent species taking that form. A touch of aggression, by all means, a trifling misunderstanding with respect to the “take me to your leader” routine, but not the reduction of one partner in the great moment to a gasping, pain-wracked wreck as a consequence of a short walk in the wilderness.

  By the time we did stop, I’d long since stopped paying much attention to my surroundings. It seemed impossible that I would ever pay much attention to anything else at all, in fact, but when I was finally thrown down on the ground, I was astonished how quickly my scattered wits accumulated. The pain didn’t go away, but somehow it grew duller once it was no longer subject to constant renewal. Once the torn flesh was no longer being tortured, it settled down to the routine production of pain, which seemed quite bearable by comparison.