The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (12 page)

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 likely,” admitted Zeno. “but the possibility that these people had been poisoned once seemed highly
un
likely, 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.

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.