The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Earth Spirit
was a kind of mobile sardine can.
Ariadne,
by contrast, was an ancient castle where no one lived except a handful of tourist guides and a king without a kingdom.

It was old; it was labyrinthine in its complexity; it was a weird place to be. “It,” of course, was more properly “she,” but I couldn’t think of
Ariadne
as a ship. It was a little world.

Castles, of course, are inhabited mostly by the ghosts of the distant past. Their walls and staircases recall the sound of marching men-at-arms, of torchlight and torture, of knighthood and martyrdom. There is a coldness about them.
Ariadne
was inhabited mostly by the ghosts of the future. Its belly was pregnant with a million unborn children; eggs ready to begin division but callously interrupted; empty plastic wombs waiting patiently to be full. And as for coldness...there were row upon row of crystal sarcophagi, where you could sleep the dreamless sleep, if you wished, in the certainty of reincarnation; left-handed time machines.

The king without a kingdom?

That was Morten Juhasz, the captain among captains, to whom Catherine d’Orsay had surrendered her short-lived and ill-fated command. He was hawk-faced and firm of countenance, a machine for issuing commands. He was long and lean, and it would have been easy to believe that he had given up taking his shots if it were not for the fact that one could not imagine his bones being brittle.

His attitude to us was ambivalent. He recognized the inescapable logic that led to our being called in, but he resented the necessity. I think he would have liked it better if he could reasonably have given the job to one of his own back-up ground crews. He didn’t want outsiders to solve his problems for him. He would have liked it even more if the first crew had succeeded—if Naxos had been as hospitable as, at first glance, it seemed. He knew well enough, though, that if there were authentic experts in alien biology to be used, who could bring to bear years of personal experience and the legacy of centuries of inquiry, then his own people had to step aside.

I was pleased to be assigned a cabin again, if only for a couple of days before we set off on the next stage of the journey (straight down). I felt tired after the long trip on the
Earth Spirit
, where I’d spent a lot of time in my bunk but had slept very badly, almost afraid to dream. To have four walls around me, separating my space from the rest of the universe, was a needful luxury. I didn’t particularly want to retreat into it, to spend hours glorying in my own company—I just wanted to know that I had it, and that it was there if I needed it.

There was no conducted tour of the
Ariadne
; we were called instead to a conference with the shipboard’s ecosystemic analysts, to make sure that every idea and item of data had its full exposure. It didn’t solve much: the hypotheses that came out were the ones we’d already looked at; the new information relating to the nature of Naxos’ life-system merely served to emphasize still further how closely related it was to Earth or Calicos. There are remarkably few biochemical options open to an evolving water-based life-system, and Naxos had found all the easy answers to all the difficult problems. The non-conclusion which the conference reached was that we didn’t know, and weren’t likely to find out except by continuing our investigations on the surface.

By the time I retired to my lonely cell, the exhaustion was really eating into my spirit and I was beginning to feel depressed. I knew that I was probably building up to a nightmare, but the knowledge didn’t help. If anything, it only increased the probability. I wanted to get to bed, but circumstances conspired to find delays in the shape of visitors. I wasn’t the only one, it seemed, who was looking for new opportunities in the luxury of temporary privacy.

The first person to come knocking at my door was Jason Harmall.

He closed the door behind him, carefully, and waited for me to invite him to sit down. There was nowhere to sit except the bed. I took the top end and let him have the other.

He produced from his pocket a small device that looked rather like the seed-case of a poppy, broken off with three inches of stem—except, of course, that it was made of metal.

“What’s that?” I asked, meekly, as he handed it to me.

“A transmitter,” he said. “It won’t work directly. You record a message into it, and then switch functions. It scrambles the message and fires it out as a kind of beep.”

“You, I take it, have the receiver to match?”

He nodded.

“I’m not a secret agent,” I pointed out.

“I am,” he replied evenly.

I looked down at the thing I was holding for a few moments, then said, “Why me?”

“Don’t feel privileged,” he said. “Dr. Hesse has one too.”

“The idea is that anything
I
may find out is privileged information, I suppose? If we figure it out first, we forget to inform Vesenkov.”

“I’m not particularly worried about Vesenkov,” he said. “I’m not a fool. I know that you’ll have to work together, and that you’ll be pooling your resources. Vesenkov can be told everything he needs to know—and Zeno too, of course. But Juhasz insists on sending one of his own people down with you—he argued for half a dozen, but I persuaded him that one is enough. It will be Captain d’Orsay, not a scientist. You shouldn’t have any trouble keeping
her
on the outside of your investigation. And when you know the answer, you tell
me,
not her—and not Juhasz.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t
have
to cooperate.”

His blue eyes didn’t waver. “Dr. Caretta,” he said gently, “I presume that you do intend to return to the solar system when this is over. You weren’t considering staying here forever?”

I thought it over. “All right,” I said. “I do have to cooperate. But I cooperate better when I understand what I’m doing.”

“It’s simple enough,” he said. “The
Ariadne
mission is...out of date. It no longer fits in with our ambitions. Captain d’Orsay, I fear, doesn’t quite see things that way. Captain Juhasz even less so. I don’t think there’s any chance of persuading them to see things our way. Ergo...it may be necessary to take independent action. Quietly, of course. Very quietly. There’s no need for you to feel any sense of moral dilemma. Your interests lie with ours—indeed, I’d go so far as to say that you are one of us.”

I was too tired to want to start an argument about us-es and thems, but there was one point that occurred to me as well worth raising.

“They’re going to float us down to the surface, aren’t they? We’re going to ride down in shielded tin cans with chutes.”

“That’s correct,” he said.

“That means we have to get picked up again. I see your point about our being dependent on the
Earth Spirit
to take us home, but we’re just as dependent on the
Ariadne
to provide a shuttlecraft that will pick us up. But you want me to hold out against Juhasz if we find out what went wrong with the first crew.”

“You have nothing to worry about,” he assured me.

“Reassure me,” I told him.

“Dr. Caretta,” he said, in his nice, soft voice, “if you find out what killed those men—and give us a chance to beat it—you won’t have to worry about the possibility of being marooned. We’ll be beating a path to your door.”

I looked again at the metal toy that was undoubtedly a part of the armory of every well-equipped spy in known space.

I shrugged, and said, “I don’t see what I can lose.”

He nodded his approval. He was clearly a man who understood the pragmatic point of view. Then he left.

When the second knock sounded I felt a slight surge of desperation. I jumped to the conclusion that it was Catherine d’Orsay, come to keep me from my sleep and to feed my eventual bad dreams with the anxious prospect of being asked to serve as a double agent. Mercifully, I was wrong. It was, instead, Angelina Hesse, who only wanted to discuss the awkwardness of being a spy for one side.

She showed me her little toy, and I said: “Snap.”

“I feel uncomfortably like a cat’s paw,” she said. Obviously, she’d no more been prepared for this than I had. She’d been plucked from her laboratory in exactly the same way; she’d done far too much good work in biology to have been wasting time spying on the side.

“If we were cat’s paws,” I pointed out, “we’d have claws.”

“Stupidly,” she said, “I hadn’t quite realized how valuable this planet might be. When the news was broken, I thought of it as a tremendous break—in the context of the study of paratellurian biology. The other implications....”

She let the sentence dangle.

“They wouldn’t let d’Orsay communicate with Earth,” I said glumly. “She confided in me.
She
hadn’t realized what a hot potato it was, either—but I bet she knows now. She went back to the system expecting to find a humanitarian Utopia, cemented together out of three centuries and more of technical and moral progress. I think she was disappointed with what she found.”

“How do you think they’ll react when they find out that Space Agency wants to abort their program—after three hundred and fifty years?”

“Not pleased. Especially when they’re parked on the very doorstep of success.”

“They’ll go mad,” she said. It was possible that she wasn’t speaking figuratively.

“What can they do?” I asked. It was meant to be a hypothetical question, accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders, indicating that Juhasz, Catherine d’Orsay
et al.
were—like ourselves—merely helpless pawns of a fate they could not control.

“They could switch off the HSB,” she replied quietly.

She’d had more time to think since Harmall had had his little confidential chat with her. Now I did some hard thinking of my own—trying to remember just how disillusioned Catherine d’Orsay had been at our little farewell party, and trying to imagine just how Morten Juhasz might have taken the news she’d brought back.

“Do you suppose,” I said eventually, “that Harmall might have had the
Earth Spirit
followed?” It had occurred to me that a shipload of soldiers just might come popping out of hyperspace at any moment.

“Maybe,” she said.

“This,” I opined, “might turn into a real hornet’s nest.”

She shook her head pensively. “More likely Harmall will want to play it softly. String them along. Let them think our plan and theirs are compatible. He won’t spring any traps until he holds all the cards. Our job has to be settled first, before anyone can act.”

“By
our
plan, you mean Harmall’s...Space Agency’s.”

“Isn’t it ours?”

I wasn’t so sure. “If Harmall had come to me back on Sule,” I said, “and told me that I’d have to be party to a complicated double-cross, I just might have spit in his eye.”

“Why do you think he didn’t?” she asked, sensibly. I had to concede the point.

“Anyhow,” she went on, “do you think that the best way to exploit Naxos—given that we’re living in 2444 and not 2094—is to let the
Ariadne
zygotes come to term? If this world
is
habitable—and empty of intelligent life—it’s one of a kind.”

I looked her in the eye. “I don’t see why the
Ariadne
can’t
carry through the original schedule,” I said. Worlds are big places. There’s room enough for everyone.”

“Space Agency may not think that way.”

“I wish I knew which way they do think. Come to that, I wish I knew exactly whose vested interests Harmall stands for. Whether you and I are part of ‘our’ plan or not, I wish I knew who is. Exactly what plan does Harmall want to put in place of the
Ariadne
’s original program? Who does it involve? Are the Soviets in on it? Come to that, is
Earth
in on it? We poor paws don’t even know for sure who’s riding the cat. The more I think about this business, the less I like it. If they
did
close down the HSB....”

“The
Earth Spirit
could still find her way home,” she pointed out.

“But if we missed her,” I observed, “we’d have missed the last bus.”

“What’s switched off,” she said, “can be switched on again.”

“Yeah—but when? The
Ariadne
’s program is rather long-term. If Juhasz wants to get it well and truly off the ground without the possibility of interference, he’ll need years. Twenty, maybe thirty. It’s all very well becoming the galaxy’s foremost expert on the biology of Naxos, but I don’t want to be a pioneer the while.”

“You’re young enough,” she said, with a wry smile.

“You’re not exactly old enough to be my mother,” I told her.

Silence fell, briefly. She broke it by saying: “We don’t appear to have many options, do we?”