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

just don’t know for sure. Ships that can’t get home can’t tell us why. We only have information on the runs which work out right. That’s what we have to settle for, until someone masters the conceptual geometry in theory well enough to tell us what the hell we’re actually doing. All we know at present is that it works—usually.”
    I’m sure they’re working on it,” I murmured. It was hard enough on the imagination, no doubt, when they discovered that ordinary spacetime has four dimensions. The extra ones necessary for figuring in hyperspace may not quite defeat our mathematical capabilities, but they do strange things to our three-dimensional habits of thought.
    The cockpit, for good reasons, was the least cramped space on the ship, and it was noticeable, once we’d had our little tours, that the man who got invited back (if that’s the right phrase) more often than anyone else was the Space Agency man. Maybe he and Alanberg shared a secret passion for word games. Or maybe one another. More likely, Harmall simply played VIP.
    The rest of the crew worked in what they called “slots,” for very good reasons. Apart from the quartermaster, they were basically machine-watchers and fixers. The quartermaster was a manwatcher (and fixer). It was difficult to talk to them about their work, in the same way that it’s always difficult to talk to highly trained specialists, but they were more approachable in connection with their private obsessions. One was crazy about eighteenth century music; one was writing a novel; one was writing a book about the early social evolution of man and the historical break separating hunter-gatherer societies from agricultural societies; one was using spare time on the ship’s computers to do fundamental research in artificial intelligence; the last (the quartermaster) was using the rest of the spare time for exercises in computer art. I never did find out what the captain did for laughs. The advantage of all these hobbies, of course, was that none of them took up more space than a couple of bookplates and a bagful of playbeads. The trouble with any kind of biology is that you need organic things (preferably live ones) to work with. There are no amateur naturalists on star-ships.
    Contrary to popular belief, living so close to other people that you’re virtually in their pockets is no way to get to know them. When the only privacy available is that attendant upon fulfilling the most basic and vulgar of bodily functions, the ability to be by yourself becomes a valuable commodity. Starship life is the best possible introduction to the art of ignoring people—and to the equally valuable but often underestimated art of being ignored. You become so adept at these fascinating skills that—paradoxically—it’s easy to feel threatened by loneliness. All the apparatus of camaraderie which is so easy to maintain when you interact with others only by choice and within delimited periods of time can easily break down, or come to seem utterly hollow and meaningless, when you’re within a few meters of five other people for twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. God only knows how rabbits cope.
    This is not, of course, to say that meaningful conversations did not take place, or that our transit time to the edge of beyond was fruitless in terms of learning things we needed to know. By playing back databeads supplied by Captain d’Orsay on handheld bookplates we increased our acquaintance with the information her ill-fated groundcrew had actually managed to transmit—food for thought that we desperately needed to nourish our starveling minds.
    “Everything,” I confided to Zeno and Angelina Hesse, at one of our frequent discussion seminars, “points to one single conclusion. They should not have died. The fact of their dying sticks out like a sore thumb as the one incoherent circumstance in a compelling and familiar pattern.”
    (I do not talk like that all the time—only when the mood