The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (16 page)

“The indigenes aren’t just one more swamp-monster species, Simon. They’re not just intelligent frogs. They’re hundreds of species all rolled into one, and they have the capability to absorb into their own genetic potential the genetic potential of any new species that comes along—
including the genetic potential of a species from another life-system!
Because you see, Simon, although life here evolved in a way very different from life on Earth, there’s still a very high degree of biochemical compatibility. At a fundamental level, our genetic
material
is very similar to theirs.”

I stopped then, to let him work through the implications in his own mind. He wasn’t quite as quick as me—after all, I’d a much fuller background in paratellurian biology than he had, and was better adapted in consequence to seeing possibilities—but he was clever enough.

“You mean,” he said, “that those creatures could absorb the potentials of the human genetic system. They could add human form to their repertoire of metamorphoses.”

“It’s worse than that,” I told him. “What I’m trying to get across to you is the fact that
they’ve already done it!”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Catherine d’Orsay, needless to say, was much less ready to go for it. Even with the help of Simon Norton, we had a difficult job convincing her that what we were saying made sense. She tested its strength in every way she could.

“You’re telling me,” she said, “that the nineteen people in the dome were killed by an alien wearing human form.”

“It’s the one way that it all makes sense,” said Angelina. “The woman whose corpse we never found must have been killed out there in the forest. They took her sterile suit, carved her up the way they carved Lee up, to drink blood and torn tissue through their fingertips. Then, having added her form to their repertoire, they sent one of their number back to the dome wearing her face and her suit.”

“But even if I concede the physical transformation, this alien in disguise wouldn’t be able to pass for human. It wouldn’t be able to talk. It wouldn’t even know how to open the dome.”

“Think about it, captain,” said Angelina, her voice almost pleading. “Opening the airlock doors is simple. There’s no lock on them—nobody worries about the dome being invaded because they know that in order to get through both doors an invader has to pass through the sterilizing chamber. Anything not wearing a sterile suit is rendered very dead by the shower process. A child could open the doors. There doesn’t have to be anyone else present, to issue a challenge or offer a greeting. All the alien had to do was pick its moment. Once inside the living quarters, the water tank is conveniently at hand. All it had to do was lift the lid and spit. Among their many other talents, the aliens have absorbed a defense mechanism which involves spitting venom. Once that was done, all it had to do was seal its suit up and walk out the same way it walked in. The aliens may be savages, but they’re not stupid. Nothing we’re attributing to them is outside their behavioral compass.”

“Why did they do it?” asked the captain.

“Because it’s their
modus operandi.
Absorb and destroy. Co-opt the potential of the enemy, and then destroy him, lest ye shall find thyself co-opted in thy turn. That’s the law of life here. You could never make a peace treaty with natives like these—they’re programmed for a war of extinction.”

“They didn’t attempt to absorb the other members of the party. Why not?”

“They were betrayed by their assumptions. They thought they didn’t have to. Once they’d used the poison, they couldn’t—like some snakes back on Earth they’re not immune to their own venom. They couldn’t take in poisoned blood. They took for granted the fact that they only needed to absorb one set of genes—because, you see, there’s no sexual differentiation on this world. There doesn’t need to be, because the advantages it confers on Earthly species aren’t applicable in this life-system, so far as the amphibians are concerned. The aliens are hermaphrodites, and they assumed that once they could make multiple copies of one human individual, they’d have the ability to breed in that particular morph, recombining and redistributing the genes. Incestuous, certainly, but possible—these individuals don’t need to worry about hereditary defects in their offspring.... Their offspring just drop the defective morph from their repertoire. They didn’t realize that in order to play recombination games with human genes, they’d need two complementary sets. By the time that became clear to them, it was too late for them to go after an Adam to pair with their Eve. Too late...until we arrived.

“Now they have everything they need. They can not only assume the appearance of human beings—they can breed in that morphological state. You see, captain, in a sense you—or rather
we
—have already colonized Naxos, in the only way that is or ever will be possible.”

Catherine d’Orsay looked at me, and then at Zeno, as if to make sure that we were all in accord. Then she looked at Simon Norton, with an expression on her face which suggested that she believed him guilty of a terrible betrayal.

“This is crazy,” she said.

“This is an alien life-system,” I informed her. “It doesn’t have to abide by our version of sanity.”

“You don’t have a single atom of proof that this is anything but a fantastic story.”

“All we have,” said Angelina steadily, “is the knowledge that it fits. And the conviction that it makes sense, genetically.”

“You still have no proof. I have to have proof—you do see that, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said sadly. “But you know what your proof is going to have to be, don’t you?”

She considered, and then said, “If we could capture an alien....”

“Difficult,” I said. “And maybe we could watch him for half a year without his turning into anything more homely than a big frog.
If
we could hold him that long.”

She continued thinking, searching her imagination for a way to prove us wrong—if we
were
wrong—or to convince herself that we were right, if right we were.

“Captain,” I said, “your people are walking around now in sterile suits. That gives them a measure of protection. How is it ever going to be possible to have people living normally on a world like this, if there’s even a possibility that we might be right about the capabilities of this life-system? There may be no infectious diseases that we can’t handle, no deadly biochemical incompatibility between the local fruits and human stomachs. That isn’t what counts here—it isn’t what matters. You can’t fight these aliens. If you meet them head on in a war of extermination, the probability is that you’ll lose. They hold all the important advantages, and you have only firepower. You can’t fight shape changers, captain...and the war has already started. You know full well that if we’re right, the proof will make itself manifest very shortly, when your people start getting killed. Are you going to wait for that to happen?”

She looked me in the eye, and her expression was very grave as she gave her answer—the only answer, I suppose, that she could give.

She said, “I have to.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When we gave the explanation yet again, talking directly to Juhasz on the radio, we didn’t get quite the hostile reception I was expecting. It seemed to be sinking into his consciousness that maybe we were more than just saboteurs, sent out by the evil governments of Earth to subvert his glorious mission. But he, too, was unsatisfied with what was still essentially a web of inspired guesses. He wanted an alien, dead and dissected, with these multiple talents displayed in a comprehensive account of its incredible physiology.

The trouble with fluid protoplasm, though, is that it decays far more rapidly than human cell structure. The rescue mission hadn’t brought back an entire corpse from the scene of my epic battle, and the tissue samples they had collected were frustratingly uncommunicative when Zeno, Angelina and
Ariadne
’s biologists tried to agree on the significance of what they could divine of its properties. While these attempts to prove our case made little progress, Captain d’Orsay ordered that no one should ever be alone outside the dome, that an armed guard should be placed at both airlocks to challenge all who tried to enter, and that every man and woman should carry—and be prepared to use—a firearm.

Naturally, it wasn’t enough.

Sometime during the second day of our attempt to find supporting evidence in the laboratory, two men disappeared. They had been sent to recover the remains of the aliens Angelina had shot. They had radios and maintained intermittent contact until they were in the vicinity of the crucial site. Then there was silence.

Catherine d’Orsay came to the sickroom to give me this news, and her face was ashen as she told me. I think she knew, then, that it was all over, and that I was going to be proven correct, but she couldn’t admit it. She owed herself the certainty of final proof, and the
Ariadne
mission was too heavily committed now to be aborted without that proof being crystal clear.

She could have ordered everyone to stay in the dome, but she didn’t. She knew that such a move would only lead to a delay in resolution. Instead, she stressed the need for absolute caution, and she waited for something unequivocal to emerge.

The next day, it happened. Two of the
Ariadne
’s crew—one a man and one a woman—were attacked by two persons wearing sterile suits. Mercifully, although the aliens now had two rifles, the attackers had no firearms. Perhaps it simply was not their way; perhaps they were not quite as intelligent as they might have been.

The woman was injured after a hand-to-hand encounter with one of the attackers, but the man was able to bring her back after the attackers had been put to flight. He was sure that both attackers were wounded by bullets, but they had nevertheless made good their escape. He would have tracked them, he said, were it not for his duty to his companion. Catherine d’Orsay’s immediate reaction was to order out a hunting party, commissioned to follow the trail of the wounded aliens, but Angelina asked her to wait.

The injured woman was brought into the sick bay, and laid on a cot not far from mine.

Angelina asked the woman if she could recognize the face of the person who had attacked her, and she replied that she was sure that she could.

“Can you stand, Lee?” asked Angelina then of me.

I stood up, and hobbled on my wounded feet to stand at the head of the injured woman’s bed. Catherine d’Orsay was present, watching carefully.

“Is this the face?” asked Angelina.

The woman’s expression was quite unfathomable as she stared up at me.

“Yes,” she said. “But when he attacked me, he didn’t have that swollen nose.”

“No,” I said. “That’s the legacy of experience, not genetics.” I turned to Angelina and said: “It’s lucky I’m so young. I still have the face that nature intended—more or less. At forty, so I’m told, people have the faces they deserve.” To Catherine d’Orsay, I simply said: “Well?”

She tried to look impassive as she answered, but it was clear that her hopes had finally been consigned to the graveyard of dreams.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

We didn’t strip the dome—instead we sealed it up in order to keep out prying eyes and hands. Someone would be back: not colonists, but someone. Simon Norton asked me if I might be among their number, and I said “Perhaps.” It certainly wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility.

“It’s not inconceivable,” he said reflectively, “that we might learn to communicate with them and persuade them that there are advantages to peaceful cooperation.”

“It’s not impossible,” I conceded, “but I for one wouldn’t be happy teaching them a human language—though it would probably be much easier for them to master one than for us to master theirs. At present they can’t
really
pass for human, but if they could....”

“Today Naxos,” he murmured. “Tomorrow the universe.”

I nodded.

“But if we could steal their children,” he said, “and rear them according to
our
priorities, what might we not do with them?”

“We’d be preparing the way for our eventual destruction,” I replied. “It might be a slower process than letting them infiltrate, but the result would be the same. They’re too good. We couldn’t control them.”

He shook his head, and said: “I don’t know.” He was, by nature, an optimist.

“You don’t have to stay with the
Ariadne
,” I told him. “There’s an empty berth on the
Earth Spirit
. Maybe you could come back here, if you wanted to.”

He looked genuinely shocked “We’ve lost far too many men as it is,” he said. “Men and equipment. This mistake has cost us dearly. It isn’t going to be easy, when we finally get to where we’re going.”

“Are you sure that you’re going anywhere?” I asked. He was; there was no doubting it.

“Can you really stand to go back into the freezer now?” I went on. “Maybe another three hundred and fifty years before your next landfall. And when you get there, maybe another world like Naxos, attractive but deadly. There’ll be no help then, you know. None of the three captains will license the lighting of another beacon. They’ll make
Earth Spirit
a present of the one in orbit here, but Juhasz will consider that the cost of experience. If you think it’s possible to persuade the shapeshifters of the benefits of mutual cooperation, why don’t you even think it desirable to reach some accommodation with Earth?”

“I don’t think you understand,” he told me.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think I do. Let’s call it an enigma.”

And Simon, of course, was one of the saner ones. Once having accepted the inevitability, Catherine d’Orsay had quickly recovered her outward calm and authority, but how much the experience had cost her in terms of bankrupt emotional investment I couldn’t judge. I spoke to her only once, and that briefly, before the shuttlecraft lifted.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that things turned out this way. I really am.”

“You were never with us,” she said colorlessly.

“No, but I was never against you. Juhasz was wrong in thinking that. He didn’t need to dump us in the swamp. If he hadn’t, though, things might have turned out worse. Even taking into account the fact that I was nearly flayed alive, I guess you could say that we were lucky. We jumped to the right conclusion, and jumped it in a hurry. It might have taken a lot longer, and a lot more deaths. The original Ariadne died on Naxos, you know. Your mission came close to suffering the same fate.

“If we’re trading allusions,” she replied, “one might recall that Leander was killed one stormy night, trying unsuccessfully to reach an assignation with Hero.”

That one stung, but I forgave her. She didn’t know how close it was to the mark—the
Ariadne
’s people might be swapping rumors about my reciting John of Gaunt’s speech, but nothing I’d said to Zeno and Angelina had been or ever would be repeated.

“The trouble with allusions,” I said, “is that there never really is a true parallel. Your myth, you see, is missing Theseus—and it was Theseus, after all, that the story was all about. You could speak about the dark labyrinth between the stars, with just a little poetic license, but who were you guiding through it?”

She looked me in the eye, and without a flicker of expression she said: “Mankind.”

“It’s still wrong,” I pointed out. “Theseus deserted Ariadne. In this case, it’s Ariadne that’s deserting—unless, of course, you do decide to plant another HSB if you ever reach a destination.”

“You’re right,” she conceded, without a qualm. “It doesn’t fit. If we’ve been deserted, it’s only by people like Jason Harmall. But you might also remember that Ariadne’s death on Naxos was only a brief intermission in her career. She eventually found her rightful place among the stars. Which is more than can be said for Leander.”

I had to give it up. It was obvious that I couldn’t win. I never enjoyed the benefits of a classical education.

I didn’t get to bandy words with Morten Juhasz after we got back to the
Ariadne
—a lost opportunity that I didn’t much regret. There was one slightly edgy interview, though, between Angelina, myself and Jason Harmall.

It began well enough, with our thanking him for having played his part in getting me out of deep trouble with some of my skin still on my back. Then we apologized, for being such incompetent spies.

“But it didn’t really matter, as things turned out,” I observed. “Did it?”

“I think you might have made more of an effort,” he purred.

“We might have,” I agreed, “if we’d known exactly who and what we were supposed to be working for.”

“Space Agency,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“No doubt,” I replied. “But speaking for myself, I’ve been trying to work out exactly whose interests Space Agency is supposed to be promoting these days. If it’s only doing what it’s supposed to do, I don’t see the necessity for a cloak-and-dagger section at all.”

“Forget it, Lee,” said Angelina. It was good counsel. A wise man would have accepted it, but I was still smarting from recent wounds, and my sense of discretion wasn’t all that it might have been.

“We have more in common with the
Ariadne
’s people than is immediately obvious, haven’t we?” I asked. By “we,” of course, I meant Space Agency. I was entitled to call it “we,” being a member in reasonably good standing, albeit at a low level. “They’re declaring independence, deliberately taking what they imagine to be the fate of mankind into their own hands, taking the whole responsibility. Space Agency is doing the same, isn’t it? Not that Marsbase and the satellites are going to declare their independence, of course—it’s all just a
de facto
affair, achieved by information control. We’re substituting our own goals for those of the governments of Earth, very quietly.”

“Earth is stuck in a rut.” said Harmall evenly. “It’s too close to the brink of disaster, and it will never escape that brink. The only progress there’s been for five hundred years has been progress in space. From the standpoint of the future, Dr. Caretta, we are mankind. Not just Space Agency—it’s not as narrow as that. The off-world Soviets, too. It’s not a rebellion, you know. It’s just that we are the ones who are in control of destiny. It is, as you put it, simply a
de facto
affair. It’s simply a matter of preventing Earth from exporting her problems into the universe.”

“You amaze me,” I said. I meant it literally. He smiled at me, as if I were simply being naïve, and the smile made me think I’d lost, though I hadn’t really been arguing.

When he’d gone, I said to Angelina: “I bet Vesenkov’s a better secret agent than we are.”

“Probably,” she replied.

We went to join Zeno for a sociable meal, so that he could explain to us how Naxos fitted into the great cosmic scheme. He’d already worked it all out; for him, there had to be some kind of metaphysical significance to it all, apart from playing silly games with mythological allusions, and I knew in advance that it wasn’t going to be a hymn to the everlasting glory of humankind...or even humanoid kind.

“All the other worlds which are possessed of what you call paratellurian biology,” he pointed out, “are more violent and more changeable than Earth or Calicos. The disruptive forces against which life must contend in order to preserve its organization are that much greater, and life is simpler and more primitive in its accomplishments in consequence. Naxos is the first world we have found that is more stable than Earth and Calicos, where the life-system is
not
in contention with forces even as violent as those which operate on our homeworlds. It may be that for every world like Calicos in the universe at large, there is also a world like Naxos. Our hopes of expansion into the galaxy, and domination of its spaces, may be more fragile than we have so far imagined.”

“Not really,” I told him. “The shapeshifters may be cleverer than we are—maybe you could say that they were much better adapted to their environment. That doesn’t mean that they’d ever become competitors. You could argue that
because
they’re much better adapted to their immediate environment, they have no incentive to leave it. From our point of view they may not be living in paradise, but from their viewpoint life is comfortable.”

“Passing space travelers would have said the same about your own remote ancestors,” he countered. “And in any case, such innocence as the men of Naxos once possessed is shattered now. There is a serpent in their Eden, and if they are to come to terms with it, they must make progress—
our
kind of progress. We have seen the future, Lee, and it does not belong to beings like us. We are transients in the universe, the products of a sidetracked evolutionary process. If it is not the men of Naxos who will come into the inheritance we hoped might be ours, it will be creatures more akin to them than to us. We would be blind if we did not recognize the significance of what we have learned about life in these last few days.”

“It won’t affect our lives,” I pointed out. “We can cherish our illusions while we pass our time here—just as the captains of the
Ariadne
can.”

“Certainly,” said Zeno. “But the point is that we know them to be illusions. We know that we are merely pawns in a game whose settlement is beyond our scope.”

“We always knew that,” I said. “Didn’t we?”