The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel (15 page)

He left the rest to our powers of inference.

“All right,” I said, when it didn’t look as if anyone else was going to break the silence. “So I don’t get along very well with women. It may seem surprising, but that doesn’t bother me as much as it should. I’m married to my work, and I don’t see anything wrong with that. We live in enlightened times, remember—I’m entitled to run my own life. It doesn’t
bother
me.”

“Is that why you black out the memories?” asked Angelina. “So that it needn’t bother you? Why do you black them out—because they seem to you to be a kind of failure?”

Zeno reached out and caught her arm, and she immediately stopped. “I’m sorry, Lee,” she said.

“It’s all right,” I said. Then, after a moment’s hesitation: “It’s not as if it’s anything that
matters
very much. I don’t go berserk when I black out. I don’t hurt anyone or damage anything. Why should I be grounded just because I lose a few memories here and there? They’re
personal
—they don’t affect my work. I’m one of the top men in my field. What could I do if I was grounded? All the vital research in paratellurian stuff is quarantined—the satellite stations, Marsbase. What the hell do you
expect?”

“Lee,” said Angelina, her voice slow with the embarrassment, “I think you should see someone about it. About the nightmares. You really ought to find out why....”

“For Christ’s sake!”
I shouted at her, “I know why I have nightmares.”

She recoiled from the vehemence of my yell.

“You do?”

“Of course I bloody do. Do you think I’d tolerate having nightmares all my bloody life unless I knew there was a
reason?”

She turned again to Zeno, and said, “This isn’t helping. It’s not what we need to know.”

“Maybe not,” said Zeno, softly. “Do you want us to stop, Lee? We don’t want to trespass on your private concerns. We thought...that you might remember seeing something that would confirm a rather fantastic hypothesis. It doesn’t matter that much—and we do seem to have drifted from the point. But if there’s any way we can help....”

I tried to raise myself up on my elbows, to get my head as high off the pillow as I could.

“We might as well get it over with,” I said, with a sigh. “If I don’t tell you, you’ll burn with curiosity and you’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. We might as well get it all out into the open.

“I’ve had nightmares ever since I was thirteen. Terrible nightmares—the kind that makes you wake up sweating...maybe even screaming. Sometimes, things that happen in my life induce them—sometimes things that happen to me, but more often just things I
hear
about. Things in books...newstapes, more often. I suppose that was one reason I had for always wanting to get out into space. Somehow, I thought it would be better, away from
the world,
away from the triggers that set off the dreams. It was better, too. Better...but they didn’t altogether stop. They never will—I know that. Things will still happen to me that remind me...and though I can black them out of my memory I can’t stop them shaping my dreams. I can’t stop the nightmares, because the cause is always there, and always will be there, and nothing will ever knock it out of my memory.

“When I was thirteen, you see, I lived alone with my mother. We didn’t have much money. We lived in a two-bedroom flat in a tower block. It wasn’t the best area of town. Robbery was endemic—generations of people had lived in the area through centuries of hard times. Maybe a thousand years of the struggle for civilized existence. Generations of buildings, too, bulldozed and rebuilt maybe twice every hundred years, but somehow always the same. The world changed—the Crash had come and gone; before that all kinds of changes going all the way back to the industrial revolution. But one thing had always been the same: people like us were on the fringe, the ragged edge of society. Whatever state the world was in, we were poor. Not starving poor, except during the Crash generations themselves, but
mean
poor and
resentful
poor and
angry
poor. The weak in a strong nation, the non-affluent in an affluent society...relatively speaking.

“Anyhow, it was a bad neighborhood. Everybody got robbed once in a lifetime...one in thirty was prematurely killed...one in two suffered some kind of serious injury inflicted by another. Two men broke in one night, when we were asleep. We had nothing much to steal...they looked for something else to make up for their trouble—to make it worth their while. I ran into my mother’s bedroom. They followed me from the sitting-room. I tried to yell but one of them put a hand over my mouth, then put a rag into it, and tied a gag so tight I thought I’d choke. Then he tied me to the bedpost—not by my wrists or by my ankles, but with a cord around my neck. My hands were free, but I couldn’t untie it, and the more I struggled the more I thought I’d choke. I almost strangled myself, I guess, through sheer terror.

“They raped my mother, one after the other, on the floor. They told her they’d kill me if she wasn’t quiet, and she never screamed. She hardly made any sound at all, but she couldn’t stop sobbing. All the way through, she just kept sobbing, because she couldn’t stop. There was nothing I could do, and nothing anyone could do. They were rough. They forced her...well, never mind that.

“They...were wearing masks. Stupid masks, made out of cardboard for children to wear. The masks didn’t even cover their faces fully—only their eyes and their noses. I don’t know how they could see through the eyeholes. But they never took the masks off. Never. They were Dracula masks. Just children’s things, trash from some street-market stall or joke shop. Stupid. There was nothing I could do, you see...except pull the cord tighter around my throat, until I nearly died.

“After that, I had nightmares. So did she, at first. She outgrew hers, I think—or perhaps she just learned to keep them inside her. When I had mine, then, she’d come into my room and sit on the bed and hold me, but it would take so long for them to go away, and sometimes she’d just start sobbing, and she’d cry as she held me, just the way she had...before.

“And since then, you see, I’ve always had nightmares. Always. Things to do with sex...well, they just tend to remind me. That’s all. There’s nothing more to it than that. Nothing at all.”

When I looked up, I saw that Angelina was crying. I couldn’t quite understand why.

She looked back at Zeno, and said, “I think we ought to leave it now.”

It seemed as if he didn’t even hear her. He appeared to be lost in thought. Then his eyes focused, once again, on my face.

“Lee,” he said, “what was your mother’s name?”

I didn’t see the relevance.
“Is,”
I said. “She’s alive and well and living in England. Her name is Evelyn. Everyone calls her Eve.”

Angelina seemed just as puzzled as I was, but Zeno continued. “Was she less than average height. slightly thin features...with dark hair cut short? Pardon me for saying ‘was,’ but that
is
what I mean. When she was in her thirties, did she fit that description?”

“Yes,” I said, still wondering how and why this qualified as a topic of conversation.

“So was the woman whose body we didn’t find,” he said quietly. “I think what you saw and what you thought you saw weren’t quite the same thing. Your internal censor may have been a little overanxious. I think you
thought
you saw the face of your mother, superimposed on the features of one of the aliens. And I think that what you were trying so hard to say, in that last message which you couldn’t remember trying to send, was: ‘Adam and Eve.’ Could that be right?”

I still couldn’t remember a damn thing. Nothing came flooding back into my mind, and there was no moment of therapeutic abreaction. But
another
part of my mind—the calculating part—did react, because I suddenly saw what he was getting at, and realized what his theory regarding the aliens and the murders and the impossibility of colonizing Naxos must be.

“So we stand at the Gates of Eden after all,” I whispered, “but we can’t pass through.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“The trouble is,” I said, when we’d talked it through and knew exactly what our theory entailed, “that they won’t believe us. Who could we convince, on the kind of evidence we have?”

“Vesenkov?” suggested Angelina.

We looked at Zeno, who knew Vesenkov better than we did. He shook his head. “Vesenkov’s a pathologist. His imaginative horizons are constrained by the human body and its diseases. In any case, if we could win him with argument and sheer sincerity, it might not do us much good. He’s hardly more trustworthy than we are, in the eyes of Captains Juhasz and d’Orsay.”

“Did Simon Norton come down with the shuttlecraft?” I asked suddenly. “
He
’ll see the sense of it—he’s the only one I know of who’s on the right wavelength.”

“I don’t know,” said Angelina. “I don’t know what he looks like. I only heard his voice over the radio, and I haven’t mentioned it for fear of causing embarrassment.”

“Ask,” I said. “Find out if he’s here, and get a message to him saying that if he’d like to discuss the central enigma, Lee Caretta would be pleased to have his company for a while.”

“What’s the central enigma?” she asked.

“He knows,” I told her.

When she went out, I let my head drop back onto the pillow, momentarily.

“Are you up to this?” asked Zeno.

“Sure I am,” I told him. “I can’t get up and dance to take my mind off the pain, but thinking hard works just as well. I just wish that I didn’t have this swelling on my nose—it gives me a funny feeling when I breathe. Anyway, if you left me alone to get some deep and healing sleep, I’d probably have bad dreams.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “About—all of that.”

His clarity of expression was usually much better than that. Long association with humans was obviously leading him into bad habits.

“Do things like that happen on Calicos?” I inquired.

“Where there is intelligence,” he said, “there is also evil. Where there is consciousness, there are nightmares. Where there is strength, there is violence.”

“Here, too?”

“I am sure of it.”

“Hell,” I said, “think what nightmares
they
might have.”

“They will fear as we fear,” he went on, now firmly fixed in his philosophical rut. “Death, dissolution, depersonalization.”

“Shapeshifting frogmen are just as vulnerable to
angst
and panic as the rest of us,” I mused, refusing to take it quite as seriously as he intended it. “That’s good to know. Even though they’ve invented a new biology, they’re stuck with the same old existentialism. Good for God, I say. Original sin is a great leveler.”

He didn’t say “you should know,” which demonstrated his sensitivity to the feelings of others, and proved that he was just a little more discreet than most human beings. Not superhuman, though—not like the Adam and Eve of Naxos.

For the first time (or so it seemed) in a very long time, luck was on our side. Simon Norton had come down with the shuttlecraft, and my name—or maybe the mention of the central enigma—was bait enough to make him come along.

“How are you, Dr. Caretta?” he asked, like the well-brought-up boy he undoubtedly was.

“As well as can be expected,” I told him. “My name’s Lee, by the way. Have a seat.”

When he’d sat down he glanced around at Zeno and Angelina, who were so unmistakably
waiting
that he must have known something was up.

“Don’t tell me you solved it,” he said. “Just by thinking about it.”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t solved it. But I have found the ideal laboratory for studying it. If you want to know about the control of structure, and the heritability of that control, you may learn far more in ten years on Naxos than in a century back on Earth. There’s only one problem.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The problem is that the very thing that makes Naxos such an ideal laboratory for that kind of research also makes it an
extremely
dangerous place.” I paused, for effect, and then went on: “Naxos is too dangerous even to think of colonizing, Simon. If Juhasz tries to move in here, all his people will be wiped out, and three hundred and fifty years will be thrown away just like
that.”

I snapped my fingers.

I had tried to sound so confident that I couldn’t be disbelieved. I had tried to fill my words with a flat certainty of tone that would permit no disagreement. It worked—almost.

“You’ll have to convince me of that,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Because after I’ve convinced you, you’ll have to convince Catherine D’Orsay, who will in turn have to convince Juhasz. If the chain breaks down, people are going to die.”

“Go on,” he said.

“Do you know what Haeckel’s law is?”

“Of course. ‘Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.’ Only it’s false, at least in the sense that Haeckel intended it. He thought that embryos
literally
passed through phases representative of the evolutionary ancestry of their species. It’s not as simple as that.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “the human embryo does at one stage grow structures that resemble gills. There’s a sense in which the adult human being doesn’t incorporate all the potential contained in its genetic apparatus. By the time the human baby is born, it’s pretty much a copy in miniature of what it’s going to be when it reaches its final form. The same is true, more or less, of birds and reptiles, and even fish. But the amphibians, which came
between
fish and reptiles, cultivated a different kind of...call it ‘ontological philosophy.’”

“I know all this, Dr. Caretta.”

“I know,” I assured him. “But there’s an argument in it. The information you have—it’s the rhetoric that I’m trying to get across. Bear with me. What do you know about axolotls?”

“They’re extinct.”

“Apart from that.”

“The axolotl was the larval stage of a kind of salamander. But it didn’t have to undergo metamorphosis to the adult form before breeding. If its habitat stayed wet enough, it could grow reproductive organs while still a larva, and breed without bothering with the adult form at all.”

“That’s right. It kept its ontological options open. Now, just suppose that things had been a little different on the ancient Earth. Suppose physical conditions and climate had been much more stable. Suppose water had been much more generously distributed across the surface. Suppose the selective pressure which encouraged the amphibians to develop the cleidoic egg, so that a favored few of their number could become reptiles, wasn’t very strong. Suppose the evolutionary story had therefore taken a different tack, investing heavily in the kind of strategies that we can see palely foreshadowed in the axolotl, with the emphasis not only on metamorphosis but on extending the range of possible metamorphoses and the degree of control that an organism’s nervous system could exert
over
processes of metamorphosis. Do you see where the argument heads?”

He sighed, and I could tell that he was getting impatient. He wanted to get to the punch line, but I had my reasons for going one step at a time. The speculative part of the argument had to be as nearly seamless as was possible—compelling in its plausibility.

“It leads to a world like Naxos,” he said, “where the amphibians never gave way to reptiles, and where the higher animals have several possible forms and can change from one to another as circumstances demand. When they swim, they can shape themselves for swimming; when they walk, they can shape themselves for walking; when they’re attacked they can grow some kind of defensive apparatus if they’re not taken too much by surprise; when they’re asleep they can make themselves well-nigh invulnerable by turning themselves into hard-shelled pseudo-rocks. We’ve heard from Dr. Hesse about your adventures in the everglades.” He paused, and grinned, and then said: “By the way, is it true that you recited John of Gaunt’s speech from
Richard II
while the aliens were torturing you?”

“Only a bit of it,” I replied dryly. “And it was
before
they started hitting me. Can I get back to the argument?”

He nodded.

“We’re about to move beyond the bit that’s as easy as ABC,” I said. “So try to concentrate. What the swamp monsters do is interesting, but it’s not terribly exciting, even to paratellurian biologists who have carefully cultivated and nurtured a sense of wonder. If the indigenes couldn’t do anything more exciting than that, they’d be freaks, but not particularly exciting freaks. I think they can do more. I think that they’re unique even within this life-system, for very good evolutionary reasons.

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that all the other animal species, apart from the aliens who captured me, seem fairly primitive? Doesn’t it seem to you that there’s a yawning gap in the diversity of vertebrate forms?”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose so. But it seems to me that perhaps the aliens are a bit more primitive than we assume. I don’t doubt that they have a certain intelligence, at a very low level, but the artifacts they have aren’t very much more sophisticated than the tools used by certain animal species on Earth. The fact that their nervous systems are complicated enough and sophisticated enough to have developed large brains is already accounted for in what you’ve said about investing in control over processes of metamorphosis. It seems to me that the aliens might be much more closely related to what you call the swamp monsters than is immediately obvious.”

“That’s reasonably good thinking,” I told him, careful to keep him sweet. “But there’s one thing that you aren’t really taking into account—and that’s your beloved central enigma: the question of
how
this facultative metamorphosis and multiple-structure potential is organized.”

“I don’t see any particular difficulty,” he said. “It’s just a matter of increased genetic potential. Like axolotls—only more so.”

“In the case of the primitive animals—the swamp monsters—that may be so,” I said. “But I think the
higher
vertebrates, a long time ago in the evolutionary past, developed a neater trick—a trick which increased their potential quite markedly.”

“It can’t have been much of a trick,” he said, “if the higher vertebrates all died out except for the aliens themselves.”

“That,”
I said confidently, “is where you’re wrong. It’s
because
it was such a neat trick that only one species of higher vertebrate exists today; and it’s
because
it was such a neat trick that the lone species of higher vertebrate is much more dangerous than you imagine. The aliens may not be very sophisticated in technological terms, but in the sense that really matters—in terms of their biology—the indigenes aren’t the primitives you imagine them to be. In a sense, they’re more advanced than we are, and more advanced than we can ever become. So advanced that here on Naxos we couldn’t even begin to compete with them.”

“Go on,” he said.

“Your central enigma,” I reminded him, “wonders how it is that bodies come to have the complex structures that they do. It wonders how cells, which all have the same set of genes, become differentiated into hundreds of different types, all specifically located for collaboration in the organization of function. It wonders how an egg which has one set of coded instructions can divide repeatedly so that the bundle of cells it becomes get steadily more complicated and more highly-organized. The swamp-monsters seem to be even cleverer than we are, because their genetic systems not only have to organize the development of one organized structure but of several. That implies that their genetic apparatus must become more extensive and more highly organized itself. Presumably, there’s a limit to that extension and organization, which means that swamp monsters can’t really be all
that
versatile. Three or four stereotyped forms is probably all they can manage.

“But there’s another kind of organization that a life-system like this one might be able to go in for. Suppose it was possible not simply to hold one genetic system complex enough to embody four different possible morphs. Suppose it was possible to have two different genetic systems, each one coding for a different morph, so that the organization of the manifest form could be passed from one integrated system to another.”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ve supposed it. So what?”

“It’s not just a different kind of organization,” I said. “It’s a whole new ball game. Because along with it comes a whole new way for the organism to increase its metamorphic range. It no longer has to develop new forms by trial and error. It can work by co-opting new potentials. It can absorb new genetic systems whole. Your new brand of organism only has to develop one special trick—the trick which allows it to absorb other species and their genetic potentials into itself, to become gradually omnicompetent. The development of the ‘higher vertebrates’ here on Naxos was, in part, a matter of adaptive radiation and the development of new specializations. But there came a time when diversification was no longer a matter of the production of different species, because those species learned to fuse and recombine themselves into one single species that incorporated all the potentials the separate species had developed. It had to be that way—no other outcome was possible.