The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel

by Brian Stableford

  Maybe God, I thought, is trying to tell us something. Or maybe he just doesn’t like to make things too easy.

  Everyone has occasional attacks of philosophy. Even me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The shuttle carrying Jason Harmall and Angelina Hesse from Marsbase docked in the early evening, four hours before the Earth Spirit was due. Rumor flew back to us that they were whisked promptly into conference with Schumann, and we waited in the lab for the summons we knew to be due. It wasn’t long in coming.

  Harmall was a tall man—almost as tall as Zeno—but he was very slim; his fingers were long and delicate, his jaw deep and narrow. His hair was very fair and his eyes were blue. Angelina Hesse, by contrast, was much squarer of frame and countenance, with serious grey-brown eyes and auburn hair. They were both in the late thirties or early forties—which made me, I suppose, the baby of the party. (Zeno, if you translated his age into our years, was pushing fifty.)

  The Space Agency man demonstrated a rare capacity for observing the obvious by asking politely how old I was. I explained that I’d accomplished so much by working hard. He went on to make some equally platitudinous (and faintly insulting) observations about Zeno and the uniqueness of his position on Sule. I didn’t pay them much attention, and was glad when we could get down to business.

  Courtesy of Schumann, we had a genuine conference table; we also had a wall-screen uncovered, which indicated that we had a little picture-show to look forward to. The Earth Spirit had obviously been busy transmitting on a tight beam to Marsbase.

  “I want you both to understand,” said Harmall to Zeno and me, “that this is strictly a job for volunteers. If at any time you want out, simply say so, and you’re out. What I’m about to tell you is controlled information, and I’ll have to ask you not to repeat any of it for the time being—that’s just a formality. What needs to be said now is that the job is dangerous; maybe very dangerous. I have to know whether you’re prepared to accept that. Dr. Caretta?”

  “I’m in,” I said, unhesitatingly. It’s easy to be brave when you’re talking in abstractions.

  He only had to glance at Zeno, who nodded calmly.

  “Well then, I’ll be brief. Captain D’Orsay, late of the Ariadne, is coming in on the Earth Spirit, and she can provide full details of the whole story. The Ariadne was targeted at a star-cluster a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty light-years or so toward galactic center. There are something on the order of forty stars in the cluster, over half of them G-type. In getting there she made close enough passage to two other stars to be able to survey them for possible Earthlike planets, but drew a blank.

  “Ariadne, as you know, is a colony-ship, carrying three crews in suspended animation. Officers were awakened periodically to carry out systems checks and to evaluate incoming information.

  “Once into the cluster, she hit an apparent jackpot. The evidence suggests that at least ten of the G-types have planetary systems, and the odds seem good that at least half of those have life-supporting planets. Ariadne headed straight for the likeliest prospect, and found this.”

  Schumann dimmed the lights, and Harmall dabbed at a button on the screen with one of his long fingers. It was a still picture, not a video-tape, but it looked as sharp now as when it was taken.

  Earth, from space, looks blue with lots of white streaks. The continents never really show up very well, and they always look rather undistinguished—mottled and muddy—by comparison with the smooth, bright ocean. This world, by contrast, was mostly green-and-white. The clouds might have been Earthly clouds, white and voluminous. The other “Earthlike” worlds don’t have clouds like that. They either have a greenhouse atmosphere that is mottled in shades of grey without a break, or they have hardly anything at all. The surface below the clouds, if it really was land, appeared to be highly verdant. If there was water there, it must have been a virtual soup of photosynthetic algae.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of Angelina Hesse. She was watching me. Clearly, she’d already seen the peep-show.

  “It’s a very similar kind of world to our own,” said Harmall. “Apparently, though, it’s more stable. Less axial tilt, a trifle smaller, with a shorter day. A single moon, but much smaller than our own—less influential in terms of tides. Little evidence of tectonic activity and no noticeable vulcanism. Not much in the way of mountains; the seas are shallow and there are vast shallow swamps covering fully half the planetary surface. What you or I would call solid ground accounts for only a seventh of the surface, not counting islands in the swamplands, which are legion. No deserts, but there are polar ice-fields which—of course—are hidden here by cloud cover. The name given to it by the duty-crew is Naxos.”

  “Why?” I inquired.

  “Naxos,” explained Harmall, “was the island where Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus, and from which she was subsequently rescued by Dionysus, who gave her a place among the stars.”

  I wasn’t altogether convinced of the propriety of that, but it was hardly for me to question it.

  “One full crew was revived,” the blond man went on. “Captain d’Orsay, following the procedure laid down, floated a technical crew down to the surface. There they established a bubble-dome, following the rules with regard to sterile environments. The dome was completely sealed, with a space between the two membranes of the shell that could be evacuated, with a double airlock and the usual facilities for showering down. No one went outside, of course, without a sterile suit. This ground-crew consisted of twenty people. A reserve of thirty waited aboard ship. Six of the twenty were ecosystemic analysts, but as you can imagine, they’d had no opportunity to develop the experience that is routinely available nowadays. Similarly, their equipment was crude compared to what we can put into the field.

  “All the early results implied that the planet was both habitable and safe. The one obvious danger was oxygen intoxication: the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere at ground level is a little higher on Naxos than on Earth. They found no obvious evidence of biological threat. They found that the basis of the life-system was a nucleic acid similar to DNA, and that the supplementary cell biochemistry was a reasonable analogue of our own. They worked, of course, mostly with plant specimens, and they carried out their work with all due precautions—at least, we suppose that they did. In view of what happened, there must be some doubt. Perhaps they got careless when nothing showed up to worry them.”

  He paused, and began to prod the button under the screen again. The green world disappeared, to be replaced by a series of shots taken on the planet’s surface. All stills. Long-shots and close-ups, mixed in together. Stands of trees, individual flowering plants, flat expanses of tall grass. Ponds and streams decked out with rafts of vegetation or trailing pennants of weed. Insects ranging from small, rounded bugs to big dragonflies, with chimerical water-beasties thrown in for good measure. A few creatures that wore their skeletons inside instead of out, but none bigger than my hand, mostly soft and moist of skin—nothing that could properly be insulted if you decided to call it a frog.

  There were half a dozen points in the sequence where I wanted to call “stop,” but I let the chances go. There’d be other times. FTL journeys are notoriously boring—what’s there to do in zero-g but study hard?

  Then the pictures changed to interior shots. The dome and its staff. People at work and people at rest. The lab, where everyone wore plastic bags and polythene festoons made the whole working area into a parody of a membrane-filled cell. Chromatograms by the dozen, plotting out in pastel-colored clouds the chemical make-up of the not-so-very-alien life-system. White mice, unprotected by plastic bags, running free and waiting (though they surely didn’t know it!) to give warning of any pathogens by falling ill and maybe dying. Canaries, too, testing the local seeds for digestibility. The mice and the canaries looked suspiciously healthy, bearing in mind the baleful comments Harmall had appended to his last instalment of the Naxos saga.

  The show fini
shed without offering the least pictorial evidence of anything going wrong. The lights came on again.

  “Well?” I said to the man from the Space Agency.

  “They blew it,” he said. “They all died. Every last one, within the space of a single night. They never got a chance to find out what it was that hit them. They couldn’t provide the shipboard personnel with a single clue. They started dying, and they had no way to fight.”

  “Cross-systemic infection,” I said. “Instant epidemic. That’s what you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think,” replied Harmall. “That’s up to you, if you want the job.”

  “Nobody else went down from the ship?”

  Harmall shook his head. “By this time, the crew had the HSB in orbit and ready to burn. Captain d’Orsay considered that a state of emergency had arisen. The captains of the other crews were revived, and d’Orsay handed over command to Captain Juhasz. Rather than send a second technical crew to follow the first, he decided to wait for a time for a response to the beacon. He considered—correctly—that three hundred and fifty years of technical progress and expanding knowledge might allow him to call upon greater resources than he already had on the Ariadne. All further investigation of the surface was carried out by robot probes—which were not, of course, permitted to return.”

  “We three, then, are being invited to play detective?” This time the question came from Zeno.

  “That’s right,” said Harmall. “As I’ve said, there are manifest dangers. On the other hand, you start with one advantage: the bodies are there for examination. An autopsy might reveal the cause of death. Forewarned is forearmed.”

  “How long will they have been dead by the time we get there?” I wanted to know.

  “Nearly two months,” he told me.

  Obviously, it wasn’t going to be a nice job. On the other hand, I was only a humble geneticist. Angelina Hesse was a physiologist. In my book, that made her number-one scalpel-wielder. Zeno and I were the hit men—we had to sort out the cure once the disease was identified.

  “Why no pathologist?” I inquired.

  “There is one,” said Harmall. “He’s coming in from a station in the belt.”

  “A Soviet?”

  “That’s right. Vesenkov—know him?”

  I shook my head. Theoretically, the principle of freedom of information applies to research findings in pure science. For a while, I’d actually bothered to keep up with the bulletins published in English by the Soviets, but I’d eventually realized that they were never going to tell me anything non-trivial that I didn’t already know. Whether acknowledged or not, the principle of sovereignty extended to knowledge as well as to territory. We probably had agents who knew everything that appeared in the Soviets’ own bulletins, just as they had agents who read ours in the original, but information like that doesn’t filter back to the poor sods who do all the work.

  “This is a matter for the concern of the entire race,” said Harmall smoothly. “We’re obliged to permit a soviet observer to participate in our investigations. We asked them to supply a competent professional, and they of course agreed. He’ll be here in two days. The Earth Spirit should be just about ready to set out by then, assuming that you can have your equipment stowed quickly enough. You can discuss weight and size restrictions with the quartermaster. Are you still with us?”

  I was still with him. It had never crossed my mind to consider the possibility of backing out. Obviously, the Ariadne’s team had made a mistake. I thought of myself as the kind of man who never made mistakes. Ergo, I figured, there was nothing to be scared of.

  I broached what seemed to me, at the time, to be a much more important question. “On the basis of what you’ve shown us,” I said, “Naxos isn’t as...well-developed...as Earth. In an evolutionary sense, that is. All the vertebrates in those pictures are what we’d call primitive. Amphibious. The implication is that the cleidoic egg hasn’t yet appeared, nor internal temperature regulation as in Earthly mammals. I take it from what you said earlier that such a state of affairs wouldn’t be too surprising—climatic stability and an abundance of water seem to be the rule there. Am I right?”

  “There is no evidence of creatures resembling mammals,” he replied. “Our information is very limited, though. We would hesitate to make statements about the whole world on the basis of what was discovered in one locality in a matter of twenty days.”

  “You have supplementary evidence from the robots.”

  “Very little,” he said.

  He was playing coy. It wasn’t just scientific caution. For some reason, he didn’t want to jump to the oh-so-attractive conclusion that Naxos was a virgin world, ready for exploitation if only it could be demonstrated that humans could live there. Maybe, I thought, it was an official line, chosen so as to provide an excuse for holding the Soviets back from a more intimate involvement. If Naxos was what it seemed, then it surely was a matter to interest the whole human race; but while we could treat it as nothing more than another biological puzzle, with no real practical implications, it would be much easier for Space Agency to keep control.

  I didn’t bother to follow up the line of thought. It didn’t really interest me that much.

  “Have we finished for the time being?” asked Schumann.

  Harmall signaled that we had, though he looked around once more to see if there was any sign of anyone wanting to back out.

  “In that case,” said the director, “you’d better take Dr. Hesse to your lab, Lee. No equipment came up from Marsbase, and I doubt if Vesenkov will bring any from the Belt. You’d better start deciding what you need, before the Earth Spirit’s quartermaster begins telling you what you can’t have.”

  I was the last to leave the room, and as I looked back at Schumann, he said, “Good luck.” I realized then that he had meant the remark about being expendable.

  “You don’t really think there’s something there that we can’t handle, do you?” I asked him.

  “Why do you think Zeno is included?” he countered. His voice was low. Zeno was out in the corridor, moving away.

  “He and I are a good team?” I suggested.

  “A bug which knocks out humans just like that,” he said, snapping his fingers, “might take a little longer to dispose of a Calicoi. Or maybe it will work the other way around. Either way, someone could be on hand to watch it happen, and get the story back. That’s how dangerous Harmall thinks it is.”

  “You worry too much,” I told him.

  Directors are paid to be cautious to the point of paranoia. I preferred to think that Zeno was in for much the same reason that Vesenkov was in—because the Calicoi had every right to take an interest in the Ariadne’s discovery.

  “Well,” he said, “good luck anyway.”

  “Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll tell you the whole story, next time I pass this way.”

  I figured that I was in a position to be generous with my promises.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When they told me that the Department had decided to throw a party to bid us farewell, I was not exactly overjoyed. Indeed, I felt a distinct sinking feeling in my stomach. I could hardly refuse, though; it wouldn’t have done any good, and it would have offended a lot of people. So close to New Year’s Eve, it couldn’t actually be said that they needed another excuse to let their hair down, but on the other hand, when you’re so many millions of miles from home, who can say that they didn’t need it?

  As always, they took the partition walls down to increase the size of the common room and make room for a dance floor. Out there, the lights were dim and colored, and they had a couple of strobes set up. I decided that I wasn’t going near them. It was unlikely that my blackout had been caused by strobes interfering with my alpha rhythms, but I was damn certain that I wasn’t going to take the chance. I elected to stay in the brightly lit space behind the bar area, sipping the indigenous brew that the non-pedantic members our fraternity were pleased to call “wine.” I tried t
o look as if I was enjoying myself, just in case anybody cared. If challenged, I reckoned that I could always excuse my unease by explaining how sorry I was to leave good old Sule, which was a home from home to me.

  A few people drifted up to me to offer me their good wishes and ask polite but inquisitive questions about where I might be going and why. They weren’t upset when I explained why I couldn’t answer them.

  I was just wondering how long I ought to stick it out before tendering my apologies and pleading lack of sleep, when I was accosted by a woman I didn’t know. She was about fifty, with short-cropped grey hair, and looked rather like my mother’s older sister.

  “Dr. Caretta?” she asked.

  “I’m Lee Caretta,” I confirmed. There was something about the situation which was vaguely alarming, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.

  “I’m Catherine d’Orsay,” she said.

  I nodded vaguely, and it wasn’t until a half-frown crossed her face that it sunk in.

  “D’Orsay!” I exclaimed. “You’re the Captain of the....”

  “Not anymore,” she said, swiftly and flatly. “I handed over the command.”

  My mouth was still open and moving, but no sound came out. It was easy to see that she didn’t want to pursue the matter. I cast around for some other approach.

  “You don’t look old enough to be my fourteen times great-grandmother,” I observed, wishing after I said it that it didn’t seem so snide.

  She was up to it, though. “You don’t look old enough to be one of the top men in your field,” she countered.

  “You know how it is,” I said, piling gaffe upon gaffe. “These days, if you don’t make your mark before you’re thirty, you never will.”