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

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.

CHAPTER SIX
     
    The journey through hyperspace, sad to relate, was boring and uncomfortable. The first day and a half I was sick, partly because of the zero- g but mainly because of the shots they gave me to protect me from the physiological effects of the zero- g . The trip wasn’t supposed to take a long time, but in hyperspace you can never be absolutely certain how long it is going to take, and it would have been a pity to have to go down to the surface of a new world with bones that were even a bit more fragile than usual.
    Zero- g fills me with a curiously strong sense of tedium if I have to stay in it too long. I like to float, and the sensation itself doesn’t bother me, but I find it difficult to work in zero- g , and it doesn’t take me long to get restless if I’ve nothing to do with my hands. Staring at screens isn’t really work—not when it’s all that you can do.
    The worst thing of all about being on the Earth Spirit , though, was the sleeping accommodation. Only the captain—not Catherine d’Orsay, the Earth Spirit ’s captain—had a cabin to himself. The rest of us were wedged in three deep on either side of a gangway so narrow that you had to move along it sideways. For privacy, there was a thin plastic curtain in the color of your choice. Mine was black. I didn’t like sleeping where other people could hear me. Sometimes I talked in my sleep.
    The Earth Spirit had a crew of six, not counting its captain, whose name was Alanberg. She wasn’t really built to carry six passengers in addition, and our equipment was also putting pressure on such free space as was available. Everybody knew that we just had to put up with it, but no one thought he or she was expected to pretend to like it.
    Alanberg did his best to make the run smooth. He invited us one by one to spend a watch in the cockpit, where he explained the instruments and controls to us. When my turn came, I was faintly surprised by the dullness of the account. The screen which reproduced an image of what was supposedly outside was too obviously a computer playing simulation games. All the information was there: the HSBs scattered over the projection for all the world like red-headed pins stuck in a military map.
    “What does it really look like?” I asked him.
    “It doesn’t look like anything,” he answered. “Light does propagate in hyperspace, but haphazardly. It’s virtually instantaneous, but it’s subject to all kinds of spatial drift. A beam breaks down and scatters very quickly. Seen from here, the Ariadne HSB—which isn’t, of course, radiating in the visible spectrum at all—looks to the receptors like a sort of misshapen archery target filling half the field. The computer sorts out the photons of the appropriate wavelength and plots the apparent direction of origin, then gradually builds up a scattergram. We simply point at the region of highest destiny and let the warp-field jump us in that direction. Then we replot and jump again. What kind of path we actually follow there’s no way of telling, but the optimum is something like three jumps an hour, ship’s time. If we take longer jumps we drift too far from the target and in the long run it isn’t worth it.”
    “Is there some kind of limit beyond which you’d find it impossible to zero in on a beacon, even though you could still pick up its signal?”
    “Maybe,” he said. “That’s one reason for having three beacons around Mars, but we