Читать книгу The Gates of Eden - Brian Stableford - Страница 5

CHAPTER ONE

I was sitting in front of the TV, flipping the pages of the latest bulletin, when Zeno knocked on the door. He came in without waiting for an invitation.

He looked over my shoulder to see what was on the screen.

“It’s a holiday,” he said. “You’re supposed to be taking a break, no?”

“You have holidays on Calicos?” (It was one of those silly thoughts that just seemed suddenly odd, for no good reason. Somehow, I hadn’t thought of alien beings, however nearly human, having holidays.)

“Of course,” he replied. “Even this holiday—the beginning of the new year.”

“But not Christmas?”

“No,” he said. “Not Christmas.” He would have smiled, I’m sure, if he could. Anatomy, ever the comedian, had made sure that from a human point of view, he always looked doleful. He had a range of expressions, of course, that meant a lot to his own kind, but by our criteria they only varied his mien from slightly doleful all the way to extremely doleful. It was appropriate, in its way. His view of the world was not redolent with what you or I would call joi de vivre. He was dark green in color, with diamond-shaped scales distributed in a tough tegument, and a few eccentric cartilaginous extrusions here and there, but apart from that he was ordinary enough.

“It’s not work,” I assured him. “I’m just catching up on the latest squabbles between Biochemistry and Taxonomy. We’re bound to be called upon to referee. Genetics always has to arbitrate, in the long run. Good party last night, wasn’t it?”

I had to admire the way I’d slipped it in like that. I had to begin investigations quickly.

“I’m not sure,” he replied cautiously. “It’s difficult to know where goodness resides, from the human point of view.”

Zeno wasn’t his “real” name. It was just the name he’d adopted in order to live among humans. He sometimes said that he’d rather have selected the name of a more recent philosopher, but that “Schopenhauer” was too cumbersome and after studying the implications he’d regretfully declined the opportunity of calling himself “Kant.”

“I think I may have had too much to drink,” I said. “My memories are a little hazy.”

That was playing safe. Always construct an alibi.

“That’s strange,” he said. “I thought that you drank very moderately, and that you retired early to bed.”

I frowned. That didn’t sound too hopeful. Perhaps, for the period of the lost memory, I wasn’t at the party at all. If so, then where the hell was I? And what had I been doing?

“I see Scarlatti thinks he’s got a virus hook-up in some of his mice,” I said, pointing to the page of the Bulletin that was on the screen. “More power to the paranoids, I suppose.”

Zeno accepted the change of subject gracefully. “I don’t think the mice are suffering too terribly,” he said. “Last time I spoke to Scarlatti they were in the best of health. Nevertheless, it’s a serious matter. Cross-systemic infection isn’t to be taken lightly, even as a remote possibility. However....”

He cleared his throat politely, and I remembered that he must have come for a purpose. After all, as he said, it was a holiday. He hadn’t dropped in to discuss nucleic acid ubiquity or the progress of the induction experiments.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Schumann wants to see you.”

“Why couldn’t he use the phone?”

“He did. He called me. He wants to see us both.”

For a moment, I’d been very worried. Now I was just worried. At least, if it was something I’d done, Schumann didn’t yet know it was me. I swallowed anxiously. What on Earth could I have done in an hour, late on New Year’s Eve, that could have attracted the attention of the director so quickly? But then, we weren’t on Earth, were we? We were on Sule, where a man who does strange things and fails to remember them the next morning might be a very dangerous man to have around.

“Okay,” I said. I switched off the display and stood up. Zeno was taller than me by about a head. Whether he was exceptionally tall by the standards of his own people, or whether the Calicoi are a race of giants, I didn’t know. Zeno was the only one I’d ever met—the only one on Sule. There were half a dozen Calicoi in Marsbase, and maybe three times as many on Earth, but his was a unique position. He was the only alien helping us in our studies of alien biology. He was very useful, not just because he was good at his job, but also because he had a whole tradition of scientific inquiry to draw on that was differently directed than our own. Without Zeno as collaborator, I couldn’t have been anywhere near as successful as I was. We were a good team.

“What kind of holidays do you have, on Calicos?” I asked, as we walked along the corridor toward the administration section.

“Are there different kinds?” he asked. “I suppose there are, in a way. They become established by tradition—it is far easier to make a holiday than to cancel it. Like yours, our days of rest are the legacy of the past. Some are religious festivals, some commemorate important historical events.”

One could never cease to marvel at the parallels that could be drawn between the Calicoi and ourselves. It was easy to think of them as human beings in funny costumes—caricatures of ourselves. Their world, it seemed, had so very much in common with our own that they might have been the creation of some satirist, except that the satire lacked any significance. Biochemical destiny, it seemed, had neither a sense of humor nor a didactic purpose.

It wasn’t far to Schumann’s office—Admin was right next to Residential, in the other direction from the lab complexes. Organizers don’t like to have to walk too far to work. His assistant gestured us through with hardly a glance in our direction, but it seemed that she wasn’t really on duty. She’d just been called in for some particular task, and was obviously keen to get away again.

“See,” I murmured to Zeno, “we humans long since ceased to take holidays seriously. That’s why we’re the galaxy’s master race. I bet your lot still take Sundays off.”

He didn’t have time for a reply. We were already in the great man’s presence.

Schumann was going bald, and his beard had long since turned white. It was probably the worry that did it. He didn’t look as if he desperately wanted to be in his office either.

“Something’s come up,” he said.

I gritted my teeth, and waited for the bad news.

“A signal from FTL Earth Spirit came in forty minutes ago,” he went on. “They have clearance from Earth to pick up supplies here. They’re requisitioning food, equipment—and you.”

I just couldn’t take it in. Whatever I’d been ready for, it wasn’t news like this.

Zeno must have been taken by surprise, too. At least, he said nothing. We both waited for Schumann to go on.

“If it’s any consolation to you,” he said, “we’ll be sorry to lose you.”

“Hang on,” I said, finding my voice. “Since when did Sule become a refueling station for starships? And when did we become available for the draft? I don’t really want to be a crewman on the Earth Spirit or any other stardiver.”

The director shrugged his shoulders. “Sit down,” he said. He was never one to dispense with the formalities—he just took a little time to get around to them, on occasion.

We sat down. So did Schumann.

“Earth Spirit checked in with Marsbase the moment she came out of hyperspace,” he said. “She also got on the priority beam to Earth. Jason Harmall—he’s a space agency exec at Marsbase—will be jetting up here to meet her. He’s bringing a woman named Angelina Hesse—does that mean anything to you?”

I glanced at Zeno. “She’s a biologist,” I said. “Physiology—linked to our field. She’s very good.”

“Apparently,” Schumann went on, “she thinks highly of you, too. She named the pair of you as essential personnel. Harmail requested your secondment. A request from Harmall is the closest thing to a royal command I ever face.”

The whole thing had been ticking over in my mind for several minutes by now, and it fell into place at last.

“Jesus Christ!” I said. “They’ve found it! Earth Three!”

“I think,” murmured Zeno, “my friend means Calicos Three.”

Either way, it stacked up the same. We had twelve worlds on the books that boasted so-called Earthlike biology, but only two of them were worlds where human beings—or Calicoi—could walk around in comfort. The rest had no life more complicated than protista, and not enough oxygen to allow a man to breathe. For fifty years we’d been looking for the third world. It looked very much as if I’d hit the jackpot by being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Politically speaking, Earth Three might belong to Jason Harmall (whoever he might be), but biologically, it was going to be mine. And Zeno’s, of course. Not to mention Angelina Hesse...but I was sure there’d be enough to go around.

“I’m not sure that I understand,” said Zeno, in the meantime. “Everyone seems to be acting as though there were some urgency about this matter. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to have the Earth Spirit return to Earth orbit in order to be re-equipped?”

“Earth orbit is a long way away,” said Schumann. “Star Station is on the other side of the sun just now. Earth Spirit has to get back with the minimum possible delay. You aren’t going on any pleasure trip. There’s trouble.”

“How much?” I said. “And what kind?”

The director shook his head. “No information,” he said. “We’ve just been told what to do. She’ll be docking in thirty-six hours. Can you two get your affairs in order by then? Do you have someone who can take over necessary work in progress?”

I shrugged, having virtually lost interest in work in progress. “You must know something,” I said.

“Not about the kind of problems they’ve run into out there,” he said. “All I know is that the HSB that the Earth Spirit homed in on was lit by another ship—the Ariadne.”

“I never heard of an FTL ship called the Ariadne,” I said.

“That,” he said, “is the point. The Ariadne, so the reference tapes assure me, left Earth orbit three hundred and fifty years ago. She went the long way around.”

I’d already had my fill of surprises. My mind could no longer boggle. “Well, well,” I said, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. “So one of the flying freezers finally thawed out. Plan B worked out after all.”

“I’m sorry,” put in Zeno. “I don’t quite understand.” I looked at Schumann, but he just raised his eyebrows and let me tell it.

“It was long before the golden moment when our two species made the marvelous discovery that they were not alone,” I said. “When we first realized that hyperspace gave us a gateway to the universe but that we couldn’t navigate in it. We lost a number of ships which couldn’t find their way home before hoisting HSB-One. That solved half the problem—but the probes we sent out, jumping at random, kept coming out in the middle of nowhere. We realized for the first time how big space is and how little solar systems are. People got depressed about having the means to dodge the problems of relativity without having any obvious way to make it pay off. Without other HSBs to use as targets, hyperspace was just one big sea of nothing. It dawned on people pretty quickly that the only immediately obvious way to establish a hyperspace route to Alpha Centauri—or even to Pluto—was to transport an HSB on an orthodox ship at sub-light speed. It made the business of opening up the universe a pretty slow and painful one, but it was all we had—and all we have.

“Nowadays, of course, we use robot ships, which we dispatch with clinical regularity from Earth orbit, targeting them at all the G-type stars in the neighborhood. In those days, it wasn’t so obvious that that was the way to play it. We didn’t know then how very few of those stars would have planets with usable habitats—though we might have guessed that the neighborhood wasn’t exactly overpopulated by virtue of the fact that no one else had any HSBs already hoisted. The wise guys of the day decided that if hyperspace was a bust as far as quick access to the universe was concerned, they might as well put some eggs in another basket. The flying freezers were ships carrying a crew, mostly in suspended animation, and passengers—mostly conveniently packaged as fertilized eggs ready to be incubated in artificial wombs. The idea was that they were to travel from star to star, planting beacons but not hanging around. Eventually, it was thought, they’d find a new Earth, and could set about the business of colonization right away.”

“I don’t see how that makes sense,” said Zeno.

“It doesn’t,” said Schumann. “Not now. But it seemed to, then. Now we know that there are very, very few habitable worlds; and we also know that anywhere we can live is likely to be inhabited already. Neither of those things was obvious in the early days. We had no standards for comparison. There was a popular myth, bred by a couple of hundred years of speculation, that somewhere out in space we might find a paradise planet—green and lovely and hospitable, just waiting for people to move in. In fact, we thought there might be dozens of them. The idea of colonizing twenty or thirty planets via hyperspace seemed out of the question. Too difficult to sustain a warp field around anything much bigger than a touring caravan—too many trips to transport the essentials. Now, of course, if we really did find ourselves knocking at the Gates of Eden, we wouldn’t care if it took a thousand trips—because we’d know it was once in a dozen lifetimes. They were hoping it would be a regular thing; far easier to do the trick in one fell swoop. The colony ships seemed to make sense.”

“It wasn’t just that,” I pointed out. “This was the last part of the twenty-first century. The time of the Crash. We were making big strides in space, and stumbling over our feet at home. Earth itself was in a bad way. The colony ships made another kind of sense: they were a kind of insurance policy. Seeds...in case the parent plant shriveled up and died. Eggs in more than one basket, see?”

“I think so,” answered Zeno.

I turned my attention back to Schumann.

“How far did the Ariadne get?”

He shook his head. “No details—but the records show that she never planted a beacon. She never passed through a single system. That means she was rerouted from every one she got close enough to survey, probably with minimum slowdown. Taking into account the relativistic effects, I’d say she may have covered a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty light-years.”

Known space, as we are pleased to call it, is a bumpy spheroid about sixty light-years in radius. Only the G-type stars within it are “known,” of course. and not all of them. We could have done better, if we’d only worked harder. More ships, more strategy, more sense. A station a hundred and eighty light-years away—even if it were just a station, and not a living world at all, would be a very useful stepping stone.

“Toward galactic center?” I asked.

He nodded. After a moment’s pause, he said: “That’s all there is. I hate to push when you’ve just had such wonderful news, but you do have things to do here. I asked you once—can you hand over everything that needs to be carried on within the next day and a half?”

“Who to?” I asked, ungrammatically.

“That’s your problem,” he retorted. That’s how you get to be director—you have to know how to delegate. I forgave him for sounding tough. After all, he was stuck on Sule while we were about to set forth on the Great Adventure.

“Come on, friend,” I said to Zeno as I stood up, “the cause of civilization needs us. We are the conquistadores of the new Earth.” I glanced back at Schumann, and said: “They really must think we’re good, if they picked us out of all the men available.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the director, smoothing back the few grey hairs he had left. “Maybe they just think you’re expendable.”

I laughed. I really thought it was a joke!