The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (5 page)

“Neither do I,” I told her.

“Do you trust Jason Harmall?” she fired at me.

“No one’s asked me to,” I countered.

“Would
you trust him?”

“I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Except my mother. And maybe Zeno. But he looks like a bit of a bastard to me, if that’s what you’re angling for. Why?”

“Dr. Caretta,” she said softly, “I’ve been on a journey of three hundred and fifty years, across the big desert of empty space. I’ve aged over ten years, lived in short stretches of ten and fifteen weeks. I did all that because I believed, passionately, in what the
Ariadne
was for. I sometimes get the impression that no one here really cares what the
Ariadne
was for, and that I’m being prevented from getting through to people who might. I want the
Ariadne
’s mission to be completed. Jason Harmall isn’t going to stop me. I’m looking to you for help...you have to help me make Naxos safe for colonization.”

“Harmall doesn’t want to stop you,” I told her weakly.

“I don’t know what Harmall wants,” she said. “But I’m not taking anything for granted.”

I hesitated before asking, but in the end I just had to. “What do you think it was that killed your ground crew?”

“If I knew,” she said, “we wouldn’t need you, would we?”

“And just suppose,” I went on carefully, “that whatever it was, it can’t be beaten. Suppose it makes Naxos forever uninhabitable by men?”

“If that really were the case,” she said levelly, “then the
Ariadne
wouldn’t have completed her mission. We’ve taken three and a half centuries already. Another two or three would be comfortably within our compass.”

She bid me good night, then, but I had a feeling she’d be asking more questions in time to come. She was a brave lady, I decided, but just a trifle odd. Maybe she was entitled to be.

When a woman gets to be four hundred years old, she’s entitled to worry about her age.

CHAPTER SIX

The journey through hyperspace, sad to relate, was boring and uncomfortable. The first day and a half I was sick, partly because of the zero-
g
but mainly because of the shots they gave me to protect me from the physiological effects of the zero-
g
. The trip wasn’t supposed to take a long time, but in hyperspace you can never be absolutely certain how long it
is
going to take, and it would have been a pity to have to go down to the surface of a new world with bones that were even a
bit
more fragile than usual.

Zero-
g
fills me with a curiously strong sense of tedium if I have to stay in it too long. I like to float, and the sensation itself doesn’t bother me, but I find it difficult to
work
in zero-
g
, and it doesn’t take me long to get restless if I’ve nothing to do with my hands. Staring at screens isn’t really work—not when it’s all that you can do.

The worst thing of all about being on the
Earth Spirit
, though, was the sleeping accommodation. Only the captain—not Catherine d’Orsay, the
Earth Spirit
’s captain—had a cabin to himself. The rest of us were wedged in three deep on either side of a gangway so narrow that you had to move along it sideways. For privacy, there was a thin plastic curtain in the color of your choice. Mine was black. I didn’t like sleeping where other people could hear me. Sometimes I talked in my sleep.

The
Earth Spirit
had a crew of six, not counting its captain, whose name was Alanberg. She wasn’t really built to carry six passengers in addition, and our equipment was also putting pressure on such free space as was available. Everybody knew that we just had to put up with it, but no one thought he or she was expected to pretend to like it.

Alanberg did his best to make the run smooth. He invited us one by one to spend a watch in the cockpit, where he explained the instruments and controls to us. When my turn came, I was faintly surprised by the dullness of the account. The screen which reproduced an image of what was supposedly outside was too obviously a computer playing simulation games. All the information was there: the HSBs scattered over the projection for all the world like red-headed pins stuck in a military map.

“What does it really look like?” I asked him.

“It doesn’t
look
like anything,” he answered. “Light does propagate in hyperspace, but haphazardly. It’s virtually instantaneous, but it’s subject to all kinds of spatial drift. A beam breaks down and scatters very quickly. Seen from here, the
Ariadne
HSB—which isn’t, of course, radiating in the visible spectrum at all—looks to the receptors like a sort of misshapen archery target filling half the field. The computer sorts out the photons of the appropriate wavelength and plots the apparent direction of origin, then gradually builds up a scattergram. We simply point at the region of highest destiny and let the warp-field jump us in that direction. Then we replot and jump again. What kind of path we actually follow there’s no way of telling, but the optimum is something like three jumps an hour, ship’s time. If we take longer jumps we drift too far from the target and in the long run it isn’t worth it.”

“Is there some kind of limit beyond which you’d find it impossible to zero in on a beacon, even though you could still pick up its signal?”

“Maybe,” he said. “That’s one reason for having three beacons around Mars, but we just don’t know for sure. Ships that can’t get home can’t tell us why. We only have information on the runs which work out right. That’s what we have to settle for, until someone masters the conceptual geometry in theory well enough to tell us what the hell we’re actually doing. All we know at present is that it works—usually.”

I’m sure they’re working on it,” I murmured. It was hard enough on the imagination, no doubt, when they discovered that ordinary spacetime has four dimensions. The extra ones necessary for figuring in hyperspace may not quite defeat our mathematical capabilities, but they do strange things to our three-dimensional habits of thought.

The cockpit, for good reasons, was the least cramped space on the ship, and it was noticeable, once we’d had our little tours, that the man who got invited back (if that’s the right phrase) more often than anyone else was the Space Agency man. Maybe he and Alanberg shared a secret passion for word games. Or maybe one another. More likely, Harmall simply played VIP.

The rest of the crew worked in what they called “slots,” for very good reasons. Apart from the quartermaster, they were basically machine-watchers and fixers. The quartermaster was a manwatcher (and fixer). It was difficult to talk to them about their work, in the same way that it’s always difficult to talk to highly trained specialists, but they were more approachable in connection with their private obsessions. One was crazy about eighteenth century music; one was writing a novel; one was writing a book about the early social evolution of man and the historical break separating hunter-gatherer societies from agricultural societies; one was using spare time on the ship’s computers to do fundamental research in artificial intelligence; the last (the quartermaster) was using the rest of the spare time for exercises in computer art. I never did find out what the captain did for laughs. The advantage of all these hobbies, of course, was that none of them took up more space than a couple of bookplates and a bagful of playbeads. The trouble with any kind of biology is that you need organic things (preferably live ones) to work with. There are no amateur naturalists on star-ships.

Contrary to popular belief, living so close to other people that you’re virtually in their pockets is no way to get to know them. When the only privacy available is that attendant upon fulfilling the most basic and vulgar of bodily functions, the ability to be by yourself becomes a valuable commodity. Starship life is the best possible introduction to the art of ignoring people—and to the equally valuable but often underestimated art of being ignored. You become so adept at these fascinating skills that—paradoxically—it’s easy to feel threatened by loneliness. All the apparatus of camaraderie which is so easy to maintain when you interact with others only by choice and within delimited periods of time can easily break down, or come to seem utterly hollow and meaningless, when you’re within a few meters of five other people for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. God only knows how rabbits cope.

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?