The Gates of Eden: A Science Fiction Novel by Brian Stableford Page A

check,” Angelina pointed out. “Did the food come from the same source, and, if so, what was its history?”
    “Canaries,” put in Vesenkov. “Mice too.”
    “That’s a point,” I admitted. “What happened to the animals? Did they die too? And if so, when?”
    We thought about that for a minute. Nobody knew. No data. We checked with Catherine d’Orsay, but she didn’t know either. She did, however, express the opinion that the food would have come out of individual tubes rather than from some common source, which made twenty simultaneous attacks of food poisoning seem unlikely.
    This left us, as you will realize, dramatically short of hypotheses. Aberrant viruses, for all their secondary elaboration, seemed to be left in the lead. Privately, no doubt, we all considered such unlikely outsiders as the possibility that malevolent indigenes had zapped them all with telepathic mind-crunchers, but nobody was going to say a thing like that out loud.
    “The more I think about it,” I observed, “the more likely it seems that this mysterious killer might sneak up on us, too.”
    That one buried the conversation. I could have gone on to solicit opinions as to why we’d volunteered to get ourselves into this position, but it seemed pointless. We all knew well enough. It was the age-old dream of the gates of Eden slowly opening wide, with St. Peter standing there to tell us that we’d served out our sentence and cleansed our souls of original sin, and could now come back in. Catherine d’Orsay maybe had it worse than the rest of us, but we all had it—even Vesenkov and Jason Harmall.
    We weren’t put off by the danger because we knew, after all, that the serpent would still be lurking under the tree of knowledge, and that this time we had to put paid to his little tricks. You can’t expect to live in paradise unless you pay the price, now can you?

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
    Earth Spirit was a kind of mobile sardine can. Ariadne, by contrast, was an ancient castle where no one lived except a handful of tourist guides and a king without a kingdom.
    It was old; it was labyrinthine in its complexity; it was a weird place to be. “It,” of course, was more properly “she,” but I couldn’t think of Ariadne as a ship. It was a little world.
    Castles, of course, are inhabited mostly by the ghosts of the distant past. Their walls and staircases recall the sound of marching men-at-arms, of torchlight and torture, of knighthood and martyrdom. There is a coldness about them. Ariadne was inhabited mostly by the ghosts of the future. Its belly was pregnant with a million unborn children; eggs ready to begin division but callously interrupted; empty plastic wombs waiting patiently to be full. And as for coldness...there were row upon row of crystal sarcophagi, where you could sleep the dreamless sleep, if you wished, in the certainty of reincarnation; left-handed time machines.
    The king without a kingdom?
    That was Morten Juhasz, the captain among captains, to whom Catherine d’Orsay had surrendered her short-lived and ill-fated command. He was hawk-faced and firm of countenance, a machine for issuing commands. He was long and lean, and it would have been easy to believe that he had given up taking his shots if it were not for the fact that one could not imagine his bones being brittle.
    His attitude to us was ambivalent. He recognized the inescapable logic that led to our being called in, but he resented the necessity. I think he would have liked it better if he could reasonably have given the job to one of his own back-up ground crews. He didn’t want outsiders to solve his problems for him. He would have liked it even more if the first crew had succeeded—if Naxos had been as hospitable as, at first glance, it seemed. He knew well enough, though, that if there were authentic experts in alien biology to be used, who could bring to bear years of personal experience and the legacy of centuries of inquiry, then his own people had