The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel

by Brian Stableford

  “...something,” I finished, very weakly. “I can’t remember what I saw.”

  “What about the last message?” asked Zeno, his voice still very gentle.

  I tried hard to remember. “I think I said: ‘They’ve got me and they’re going to kill me...I’ll transmit now and start again...I’ll keep going as long as I can.’ All you’d have gotten after that would be the much-interrupted sound of screaming.”

  I didn’t like the way they were both looking at me.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Zeno. But Angelina gestured him into silence, and looked at me even more intensely.

  “That’s when you blacked out?” she asked, forming the words carefully.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Anything else that came over must have been the sound of them conversing among themselves.”

  She turned to Zeno and said, “Have you got the tape?”

  He moved back to the desk. I watched him as he retrieved a small playback machine from the work surface.

  When he sat down again, he turned it on. I heard again the last words I’d spoken—the last words I remembered speaking. Then there was the long series of on/off transmissions, with nothing recognizable coming through. That went on for three minutes or so. Then, surprisingly—to me—there was another substantial transmission. It lasted some forty-five seconds. Most of the noises were stuttering, barking sounds that were more like the grunting of a pig than a human voice. It sounded as if someone were trying to form words but choking as he did so, unable to force out more than the odd consonant. In the middle, though, one word formed clearly. It was unmistakably the word “vampire.” Then, as the stuttering grew even more desperate, there was a thrice-repeated syllable that I took to be “damn.” Finally, the voice trailed off into an eerie screech; the single vowel sound “Eeeeeeeee!” growing higher in pitch like a feedback scream in a public address system.

  Afterward, Zeno switched off the tape.

  “That’s me?” I asked.

  “No one else was there.” This observation came from Zeno.

  “What does it mean, Lee?” asked Angelina.

  I swallowed hard and said, “I don’t know.”

  “When I came into the clearing,” said Angelina, levelly, “they were no longer beating you. They were crouching around your body, almost as if they were fighting to get at you. I thought at first that you were dead, and they were fighting for the meat. But it wasn’t that—they weren’t jackals at a kill. They weren’t trying to suck your blood, Lee—they were trying to touch you with their fingers. You lost a lot of blood, Lee—and lumps of flesh, too. Somehow, they ingested most of it, but not through their mouths. But this was later—it must have been fully ten minutes after you sent that last message. Do you think that...whatever you saw...has something to do with that?”

  I shook my head, and lowered my eyes. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t remember.”

  There was a long pause, while Angelina and Zeno looked at one another to share their puzzlement.

  “Look, Lee,” she said. “As regards the aliens, Zeno and I think we have it all pieced together. We think we know what happened, but for the moment, it’s all speculation. It’s an a priori argument with no real foundation in what I actually saw. I think we might prove it to Juhasz, given time, but it’s just possible that you can prove it for us, by giving us the missing piece. We aren’t sure, but we think you may have seen something vitally important. I don’t want to lean on you too hard when you’re in this sort of state, but if we’re right, this planet isn’t ever going to be colonized—not the way Juhasz wants to do it, and not any way Harmall might want to do it either. It’s dangerous in a way that neither of them could have anticipated, and in a way that neither of them will be willing to believe. I don’t think we have the time for a slow and steady investigation. I think we may all be in deadly danger. We need you to remember, Lee—and remember spontaneously. It’s the only check we can possibly have on our theory.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told her, “but it’s no use. I can’t remember.”

  Angelina turned again to Zeno, and said, “We’ll have to tell him.”

  Zeno shook his horny head, and said, “Not yet.”

  She thought for a moment, then said, “Okay.” She turned back to me. “Why did you go into the forest alone?” she asked. “What happened to your sterile suit? The aliens didn’t take it off you, did they?”

  I didn’t answer.

  Eventually, she said: “You can’t remember that, either, can you, Lee?”

  I rested my head on my forearms, and said, “No.”

  “What do you remember?”

  Again, I couldn’t find an appropriate answer.

  “Do you remember anything that happened after we set up the tent?”

  It was out now, and there was nothing that could be done about it. My answer was flat and emotionless. “I don’t even remember setting up the tent.”

  “Have you had other blackouts like that?”

  “Not here.”

  “Elsewhere?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “New Year’s Eve,” said Zeno suddenly.

  It was only a guess, but I conceded the point. “That was the first in a long time,” I said. “I never lost so much as a minute since I came to Sule, before then. Nightmares, yes, but no memory loss.”

  “Nightmares?” echoed Angelina. “Do you have a lot of nightmares?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  “Did you have a nightmare the night before you went off on your own?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And...when they were hitting me...maybe after they stopped...I was hallucinating. I was dead, and listening in at my funeral...it started odd, then got crazy.”

  “Was there a vampire?”

  “There’s always the vampire,” I told her. “But not that kind. Suffocating...I don’t know. Something strange. Inexplicable.”

  “Did you ever see a psychiatrist about these nightmares?”

  “Of course not. Do you think they’d have let me out into space if they’d known—if anyone had known?”

  “Maybe they’d have been right not to,” she suggested.

  Curiously, I’d never thought of that before. For the moment, she’d run out of questions. I didn’t see where all this was getting us. Apparently, neither did she, because she said as much to Zeno.

  “I think we might help him to remember,” said Zeno.

  I wasn’t sure I liked that. I’d known that it was what they were driving at all along, but it seemed more sinister now. As though they wanted to make me remember everything.

  “Shall I tell you what happened?” asked Angelina. “Before you decided to strike out on your own, I mean.” The tone of her voice suggested that it was something she didn’t particularly want to talk about. By now, though, we were all party to some idiotic tacit conspiracy, and I knew that it would all have to come out. As much of it as could come out.

  “Go on,” I said sullenly.

  “I tried to seduce you,” she said, and stopped.

  “What!”

  The exclamation seemed to fall upon the empty air. She didn’t respond, though she must have felt that we were both expecting her to. She looked from one to the other of us, and said: “Well, what do you want—a blow by blow account?”

  Nobody said a word.

  “It’s not as if anything much was going to happen,” she said. “After all, we were wearing plastic suits, for God’s sake! But it was the last chance we were going to have to enjoy any privacy. I wasn’t looking for much...I just wanted you to—hold me, I suppose. Talk to me. Exchange expressions of devotion. It’s not unnatural, you know. Hero and Leander, remember?”

  I received this peroration in silence. I still couldn’t remember a damn thing.

  “And if you say,” she began, “that I’m old enough....”

  “Shut up!”

  We’d been talking very quietly, and the
way I yelled then cut across the conversation like a bolt of lightning. But no one seemed to respond. It was as though we’d moved into territory where something like that no longer counted as surprising.

  “At the party,” said Zeno slowly, “back on Sule. The last time I saw you was when you were talking to a girl—one of the new techs who came in with the Christmas shift. From Astronomy, I think....”

  He left the rest to our powers of inference.

  “All right,” I said, when it didn’t look as if anyone else was going to break the silence. “So I don’t get along very well with women. It may seem surprising, but that doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I’m married to my work, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. We live in enlightened times, remember—I’m entitled to run my own life. It doesn’t bother me.”

  “Is that why you black out the memories?” asked Angelina. “So that it needn’t bother you? Why do you black them out—because they seem to you to be a kind of failure?”

  Zeno reached out and caught her arm, and she immediately stopped. “I’m sorry, Lee,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” I said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “It’s not as if it’s anything that matters very much. I don’t go berserk when I black out. I don’t hurt anyone or damage anything. Why should I be grounded just because I lose a few memories here and there? They’re personal—they don’t affect my work. I’m one of the top men in my field. What could I do if I was grounded? All the vital research in paratellurian stuff is quarantined—the satellite stations, Marsbase. What the hell do you expect?”

  “Lee,” said Angelina, her voice slow with the embarrassment, “I think you should see someone about it. About the nightmares. You really ought to find out why....”

  “For Christ’s sake!” I shouted at her, “I know why I have nightmares.”

  She recoiled from the vehemence of my yell.

  “You do?”

  “Of course I bloody do. Do you think I’d tolerate having nightmares all my bloody life unless I knew there was a reason?”

  She turned again to Zeno, and said, “This isn’t helping. It’s not what we need to know.”

  “Maybe not,” said Zeno, softly. “Do you want us to stop, Lee? We don’t want to trespass on your private concerns. We thought...that you might remember seeing something that would confirm a rather fantastic hypothesis. It doesn’t matter that much—and we do seem to have drifted from the point. But if there’s any way we can help....”

  I tried to raise myself up on my elbows, to get my head as high off the pillow as I could.

  “We might as well get it over with,” I said, with a sigh. “If I don’t tell you, you’ll burn with curiosity and you’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. We might as well get it all out into the open.

  “I’ve had nightmares ever since I was thirteen. Terrible nightmares—the kind that makes you wake up sweating...maybe even screaming. Sometimes, things that happen in my life induce them—sometimes things that happen to me, but more often just things I hear about. Things in books...newstapes, more often. I suppose that was one reason I had for always wanting to get out into space. Somehow, I thought it would be better, away from the world, away from the triggers that set off the dreams. It was better, too. Better...but they didn’t altogether stop. They never will—I know that. Things will still happen to me that remind me...and though I can black them out of my memory I can’t stop them shaping my dreams. I can’t stop the nightmares, because the cause is always there, and always will be there, and nothing will ever knock it out of my memory.

  “When I was thirteen, you see, I lived alone with my mother. We didn’t have much money. We lived in a two-bedroom flat in a tower block. It wasn’t the best area of town. Robbery was endemic—generations of people had lived in the area through centuries of hard times. Maybe a thousand years of the struggle for civilized existence. Generations of buildings, too, bulldozed and rebuilt maybe twice every hundred years, but somehow always the same. The world changed—the Crash had come and gone; before that all kinds of changes going all the way back to the industrial revolution. But one thing had always been the same: people like us were on the fringe, the ragged edge of society. Whatever state the world was in, we were poor. Not starving poor, except during the Crash generations themselves, but mean poor and resentful poor and angry poor. The weak in a strong nation, the non-affluent in an affluent society...relatively speaking.

  “Anyhow, it was a bad neighborhood. Everybody got robbed once in a lifetime...one in thirty was prematurely killed...one in two suffered some kind of serious injury inflicted by another. Two men broke in one night, when we were asleep. We had nothing much to steal...they looked for something else to make up for their trouble—to make it worth their while. I ran into my mother’s bedroom. They followed me from the sitting-room. I tried to yell but one of them put a hand over my mouth, then put a rag into it, and tied a gag so tight I thought I’d choke. Then he tied me to the bedpost—not by my wrists or by my ankles, but with a cord around my neck. My hands were free, but I couldn’t untie it, and the more I struggled the more I thought I’d choke. I almost strangled myself, I guess, through sheer terror.

  “They raped my mother, one after the other, on the floor. They told her they’d kill me if she wasn’t quiet, and she never screamed. She hardly made any sound at all, but she couldn’t stop sobbing. All the way through, she just kept sobbing, because she couldn’t stop. There was nothing I could do, and nothing anyone could do. They were rough. They forced her...well, never mind that.

  “They...were wearing masks. Stupid masks, made out of cardboard for children to wear. The masks didn’t even cover their faces fully—only their eyes and their noses. I don’t know how they could see through the eyeholes. But they never took the masks off. Never. They were Dracula masks. Just children’s things, trash from some street-market stall or joke shop. Stupid. There was nothing I could do, you see...except pull the cord tighter around my throat, until I nearly died.

  “After that, I had nightmares. So did she, at first. She outgrew hers, I think—or perhaps she just learned to keep them inside her. When I had mine, then, she’d come into my room and sit on the bed and hold me, but it would take so long for them to go away, and sometimes she’d just start sobbing, and she’d cry as she held me, just the way she had...before.

  “And since then, you see, I’ve always had nightmares. Always. Things to do with sex...well, they just tend to remind me. That’s all. There’s nothing more to it than that. Nothing at all.”

  When I looked up, I saw that Angelina was crying. I couldn’t quite understand why.

  She looked back at Zeno, and said, “I think we ought to leave it now.”

  It seemed as if he didn’t even hear her. He appeared to be lost in thought. Then his eyes focused, once again, on my face.

  “Lee,” he said, “what was your mother’s name?”

  I didn’t see the relevance. “Is,” I said. “She’s alive and well and living in England. Her name is Evelyn. Everyone calls her Eve.”

  Angelina seemed just as puzzled as I was, but Zeno continued. “Was she less than average height. slightly thin features...with dark hair cut short? Pardon me for saying ‘was,’ but that is what I mean. When she was in her thirties, did she fit that description?”

  “Yes,” I said, still wondering how and why this qualified as a topic of conversation.

  “So was the woman whose body we didn’t find,” he said quietly. “I think what you saw and what you thought you saw weren’t quite the same thing. Your internal censor may have been a little overanxious. I think you thought you saw the face of your mother, superimposed on the features of one of the aliens. And I think that what you were trying so hard to say, in that last message which you couldn’t remember trying to send, was: ‘Adam and Eve.’ Could that be right?”

  I still couldn’t remember a damn thing. Nothing came flooding back into my mind, and there was no moment of therapeutic abreactio
n. But another part of my mind—the calculating part—did react, because I suddenly saw what he was getting at, and realized what his theory regarding the aliens and the murders and the impossibility of colonizing Naxos must be.

  “So we stand at the Gates of Eden after all,” I whispered, “but we can’t pass through.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “The trouble is,” I said, when we’d talked it through and knew exactly what our theory entailed, “that they won’t believe us. Who could we convince, on the kind of evidence we have?”

  “Vesenkov?” suggested Angelina.

  We looked at Zeno, who knew Vesenkov better than we did. He shook his head. “Vesenkov’s a pathologist. His imaginative horizons are constrained by the human body and its diseases. In any case, if we could win him with argument and sheer sincerity, it might not do us much good. He’s hardly more trustworthy than we are, in the eyes of Captains Juhasz and d’Orsay.”

  “Did Simon Norton come down with the shuttlecraft?” I asked suddenly. “He’ll see the sense of it—he’s the only one I know of who’s on the right wavelength.”

  “I don’t know,” said Angelina. “I don’t know what he looks like. I only heard his voice over the radio, and I haven’t mentioned it for fear of causing embarrassment.”

  “Ask,” I said. “Find out if he’s here, and get a message to him saying that if he’d like to discuss the central enigma, Lee Caretta would be pleased to have his company for a while.”

  “What’s the central enigma?” she asked.

  “He knows,” I told her.

  When she went out, I let my head drop back onto the pillow, momentarily.

  “Are you up to this?” asked Zeno.

  “Sure I am,” I told him. “I can’t get up and dance to take my mind off the pain, but thinking hard works just as well. I just wish that I didn’t have this swelling on my nose—it gives me a funny feeling when I breathe. Anyway, if you left me alone to get some deep and healing sleep, I’d probably have bad dreams.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “About—all of that.”