The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online

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