Читать книгу The Gates of Eden - Brian Stableford - Страница 9

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 to 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.”

She let that one die the death it deserved. After a suitable pause, she said, “Do you mind if I talk to you—somewhere where we don’t have to compete with the music?”

I put my plastic cup down on a shelf, and wiped my hand on the back of my trousers because a little of the fluid had somehow spilled on to my fingers.

“Sure,” I said. “We can slip into sick bay. It’s just down the corridor and it’s always quiet when nobody’s ill.”

There was a half-frown again, as if she didn’t think the sick bay was entirely appropriate, but she nodded. As we went out of the door I inclined my head back in the direction of the frenetic festivity.

“Hasn’t changed much since your time, I guess?”

“No,” she said. “That’s the most alarming thing about these last few days. Everything is so tediously familiar.”

“Wouldn’t have been too different if it were seven hundred years ago,” I observed. “Except that we wouldn’t be on a space station and we’d have funny costumes on. Dancing and drinking are the hardy perennials of human behavior.”

“And sex,” she added dryly.

“Yes,” I answered. “That too.”

“If I’d stepped out of 1744 into the twenty-first century,” she said, “I’d notice plenty of differences. But from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth...I keep on looking, but I’m damned if I can find them.”

I opened the door of the sick bay, and stood aside to let her go through. She looked at the beds draped with plastic curtains, and moved to the main desk. She took the chair from behind it; I borrowed one from beside the nearest bed.

“There are reasons for that,” I said, referring to the lack of perceptible changes in the human condition.

“So I’ve heard,” she replied.

“What can I do for you?”

“You can help me out with a few explanations.”

I raised my eyebrows, signaling: Why me?

“I’ve already tried Harmall,” she said. “I’ve also talked to your boss, Schumann. I keep getting stalled. The secretive voice of authority.”

“What makes you think I’ll tell you anything they won’t? What makes you think I can?”

“I daresay you can’t,” she said. “And that might be the advantage I need. If you don’t know, you have to guess—and guesses aren’t secret, are they?”

“For the very good reason that they might not be right.”

She shrugged. “Why won’t they let me go to Earth?” She fired the question at me like a rifle shot.

“Maybe they need you aboard the Earth Spirit on the trip back to your brand new HSB,” I suggested. “Harmall did sort of promise us a fuller briefing on the situation as viewed from the Ariadne.”

“There are plenty of people aboard the Ariadne who could brief you on arrival,” she said. “You’d want to look over the data yourselves, anyhow. I wasn’t planning to go back; I was planning to carry the news all the way home. And I was planning to do my talking to a lot more people—and a lot more important people—than Jason Harmall. As things stand, I don’t even know if anyone on Earth even knows that the Ariadne reached her target.”

“They’ll know,” I assured her. “They just might not want it to become common knowledge. Information control.”

“That,” she said, “is what needs explaining. You’re telling me that the finding of Naxos isn’t going to be publicized—that the whole affair is going to be handled in secret by a select group of politicians and scientists?”

“That’s right,” I told her. “Does that surprise you?”

“Not really,” she answered, with the ghost of a sigh. “But I was rather hoping that I might be surprised, if you see what I mean.”

I nodded.

“Tediously familiar,” she said. “Every way I turn. There’s still a Soviet bloc, I hear, and they’re still ‘they’ while we’re ‘us.’ I really do find that very hard to swallow, after all this time. It seems as though the whole solar system has been in suspended animation, right along with me.”

I found a paper clip, and began studiously unwinding it. Rumor has it that paper clips go all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire, except that there wasn’t any paper then. Parchment clips, I suppose they’d be. Similar in design, anyhow.

“Not far wrong, I suppose,” I told her. “You’d have set sail on the great starry sea during the early generations of the Crash, I guess. I never was much good at dates. It wasn’t really a crash—more a kind of slow fizzle. The world failed to end, with either a bang or a whimper. It just descended into a kind of torpor. A failure of the agricultural base, spread over six or seven generations. No one cause—just a gradual unwinding of the ecosystem’s balancing mechanism. A couple of wars and their aftermath helped, but they weren’t crucial. Deforestation, soil exhaustion, pollution—they were what did it, by degrees. The fossil fuels never ran out, oddly enough, but getting them out of the ground...that was something else. Mining and industry continued as best they could, but the primary production system went slowly to hell, and took everything else along with it. There was a forced rethinking of priorities. The green machine broke down and the only effort that made any sense was trying to get it working again. They failed. They just had to wait until it repaired itself. A lot of people died...not all at once, as if there were a second deluge or a great plague, but one by one, here and there, a decade or two before their time. Famine spread, until it wasn’t just in Africa and Southeast Asia anymore, but in everybody’s back yard. Everybody—whether he was a Latin American peasant or a citizen of New York, had to start thinking about cultivating his garden—literally.

“There’s a kind of irony, I suppose, that everyone had thought of the ecosystem as something wonderful and eternal, and of the political system as something transient and arbitrary. You might think that during the century of the greenhouse effect, when the climate temporarily went crazy, the first thing to go would be the governments of the day, their bureaucracies and their ideologies. Not a bit of it—they endured, with astonishing tenacity. There were revolutions, and invasions, and all the usual routine things like that, but at the end of the day the map looked pretty much as it had done at the beginning. Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere escalated, and it got hotter for a while, but it was surprisingly short lived—we can say this with equanimity now, I guess, though people down there in those days spent their entire lifetimes being surprised. The ecosystem did regenerate, without our doing anything conspicuous to help it except try to stop hurting it. I suppose that on Earth, they’re just about back to where they were in the early twenty-first century, which is not bad considering. But we have had three hundred and fifty years, or thereabouts, when we had to put the very possibility of progress on the shelf, insofar as it depended on Earthly events. Not much went on in the way of research, practical or theoretical, as you’ll probably understand. There is a school of thought, mind you, which says that the Crash didn’t make much difference anyway—that we were already close to the end of progress, at least in theory, simply because we’d already induced just about all that we can induce, given the limits of the human sensorium.

“Having said all that, though, there’s one other point that needs to be mentioned, and that is that one tiny segment of the human race has stood rather to one side of all the troubles. Out here in space, things always looked different. Not that the various habitats in space were ever genuinely independent of Earth—but no matter how short the peasants went, the spacemen always got theirs. They didn’t need so very much, as things turned out, and they could provide a good deal in return—mostly beamed-down power, but even apart from that, the people on Earth were always prepared to give the spacers priority. I think you must know more than I do about the mentality behind that.”

“And progress went on the shelf out in space, too?” she queried.

“That depends what kind of progress you mean,” I said. “Mostly, I’d say yes. There was nothing like Sule a hundred years ago, or even fifty. A research establishment in space was something really strange even when I was at school. The progress they made out here through those long centuries of hardship was simply physical progress. They built things. They gradually extended the human domain. New stations, new ships. All the time, of course, they never stopped looking for new worlds, but we’d grown just a little cynical about that particular dream in recent years.”

She was silent for a few minutes, thinking it over. I let her think. I’d gone on long enough. I was wishing now that I’d brought my drink with me from the party. My throat felt dry.

“So there’s still a Soviet bloc,” she said. “And there’s still a free world.”

“It’s a little bit more complicated than that,” I said.

“It always was.”

“There’s not much real antagonism between them,” I said. “For all that they have different laws concerning ownership, and for all that they still attack one another’s philosophies in the interests of maintaining their own social solidarity, they get along all right. At least, the Soviets-in-space get along well enough with our-side-in-space. There’s another dimension of ‘us’ and ‘them’ now. There’s us—and there’s the ones down the bottom of the big well.”

“Well?”

“Gravity well. Earth is the big well. Mars is the little one.”

“Yes,” she said, “of course. And who exactly is it that is so concerned with maintaining secrecy? Is it us—or is it us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Or care?”

“There’s no payoff in caring. I try to live with it. There’s a school of thought which holds that post-Crash civilization is wiser than pre-Crash because no one expects things to be perfect. We’ve all accepted, so it’s said, that we live in an imperfect world, and always will. Idealism and hedonism, it’s said, have both declined markedly since their heyday.”

“You keep saying: ‘So it’s said.’ Don’t you believe it?”

“How do I know what it was like in the olden days? You tell me.”

“I would,” she assured me, “if only I could look long enough to find out.”

“You don’t really need me to tell you all this,” I said. “There are all kinds of history tapes in the data-store. You could get a blow-by-blow account of the whole thing.”

“I could,” she said. “But tapes don’t necessarily select things in accordance with what the inquiring mind wants or needs to know. And tapes don’t make guesses.”

“Neither do I,” I told her.

“Do you trust Jason Harmall?” she fired at me.

“No one’s asked me to,” I countered.

“Would you trust him?”

“I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Except my mother. And maybe Zeno. But he looks like a bit of a bastard to me, if that’s what you’re angling for. Why?”

“Dr. Caretta,” she said softly, “I’ve been on a journey of three hundred and fifty years, across the big desert of empty space. I’ve aged over ten years, lived in short stretches of ten and fifteen weeks. I did all that because I believed, passionately, in what the Ariadne was for. I sometimes get the impression that no one here really cares what the Ariadne was for, and that I’m being prevented from getting through to people who might. I want the Ariadne’s mission to be completed. Jason Harmall isn’t going to stop me. I’m looking to you for help...you have to help me make Naxos safe for colonization.”

“Harmall doesn’t want to stop you,” I told her weakly.

“I don’t know what Harmall wants,” she said. “But I’m not taking anything for granted.”

I hesitated before asking, but in the end I just had to. “What do you think it was that killed your ground crew?”

“If I knew,” she said, “we wouldn’t need you, would we?”

“And just suppose,” I went on carefully, “that whatever it was, it can’t be beaten. Suppose it makes Naxos forever uninhabitable by men?”

“If that really were the case,” she said levelly, “then the Ariadne wouldn’t have completed her mission. We’ve taken three and a half centuries already. Another two or three would be comfortably within our compass.”

She bid me good night, then, but I had a feeling she’d be asking more questions in time to come. She was a brave lady, I decided, but just a trifle odd. Maybe she was entitled to be.

When a woman gets to be four hundred years old, she’s entitled to worry about her age.