The Doors of Eden

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Even without the evidence nestling in the heart of every living cell, the logic itself should be infinitely persuasive. Evolution is inevitable once you have an imperfectly self-replicating system in an environment of limited resources.

Oxygen is a shortcut to a higher energy lifestyle, a ticket to getting out of the bacterial ghetto to live the high life.

At the B&B they were told, to their faces, that breakfast wasn’t included. Neither of them dared ask what the other “B” was for, though they had fun inventing options.

She saw him write her off as stark raving mad quite early on, but he’d been well brought up—and she was the goddamn Ancient Mariner and wouldn’t let him make his excuses and leave.

On the land, things are worse than they might otherwise be, because the orthocones don’t care about it and use it as their heat sink.

there were hoaxers and Fortean buffs who had absolutely no grasp of what was or wasn’t fair game. Some of them had fallen through their hollow earths and Atlantean theories into all sorts of real-world political philosophies.

The woman stepped forwards, and at least she moved like a human being. He didn’t see any weapons, but he also wasn’t born yesterday.

This one diverges in what you might know as the Carboniferous era. Because for some reason palaeontologists ceased naming geological periods after obscure Welsh tribes and holiday regions on the English coast and became ruthlessly pragmatic about things. Carboniferous: coal-forming.

Not that you ever really need an excuse to slap a fascist.”

Bizarrely, her chief impression of them, past the horror and her Kenneth Grahame-related phobia, was that they looked terrified.

She tried to shout, then. It was surprisingly hard to, because it felt so very un-British. Yes, she was being abducted by murderous brutes, but was that really any reason to compromise her dignity?

It was a weird time for empathy to come calling, but he looked at Rove’s slight, polite smile and thought, Well, this is fucking pointless dickery, isn’t it. Oh, Rove would say it was to establish who was in charge, which would at least have been dickery with a point. But Lucas thought the dickery was its own point, here and now.

“One thing, Doctor,” she said. “Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I’m a woman, okay? Female. I don’t know what that really means to you, but it’s important to me.” There was a pause. Perhaps it was accessing files or remembering instructions from Rove. But Dr. Rat only twitched its whiskers. “That is acceptable,” the translator explained, probably quite mystified, but Kay was surprised how much better the concession made her feel. I can work with you, she decided. Or at least she could try.

“You do not do as you are told, and you are trouble. But of all those who are not us, you we trust most to do this thing.”

“It will work or it won’t,” Stig said, shrugging and looking away. If it was a Nissa figure of speech, it was an uninspiring one.

“Also, conduct yourselves with a minimum of confusion, as on the detection of your presence woeful consequences would transpire.” “You had better be our contact,” Mal grated. “Your surmise is accurate.” And it was tempting to poke fun at its broken English, except it meant the creature was impressively streets ahead of either Lee or Mal linguistically.

“Owing to superior planning, measures are in place for extraction of your co-specific. This onerous task falls to the pre-eminent Dr. Rat—to abstract fellow scholar Dr. Kay from her location and convey her herewith.”

“Measures are in place for great mendacity insofar as laboratory surveillance is concerned,” the translator explained.

“My honoured colleague, if matters fail to transpire as we wish, then we are both entirely fucked,” the translator said crisply. Kay did a double take, wondering where that vernacular had come from and whether some of this over-elaborate language wasn’t an artefact of translation at all but a very clever rodent having fun.

For a long while she wasn’t even sure who still had her—maybe the rat troopers had confiscated the crate for disposal or examination—but at last they stopped again and the lid was levered off, revealing the only two rodent faces she wanted to see. “It is not suitable for disembarkation,” the translator cautioned her. “However rejoice, for delivery is nigh.” “I am bloody glad to hear it,” Kay hissed back. “Your patience is appreciated,” she was told, which was so much like being put on hold by customer services that she mustered a chuckle.

If a lion could talk we could not understand him, it pronounced. She was absolutely certain it could have no real grasp of what a lion was, but maybe it had found the quote on Sabreur’s phone. Or possibly it had just downloaded the entire human datasphere into its unimaginable consciousness, and identified this as the key concept it wanted to convey.

“We healed, we…” He was short of the word, but then he pronounced carefully, “detoxified. We learned and did better. But this is still made landscape. We can never return it to what it was. The land is never still, and what we’ve made here cannot change and grow like a land should. It is a garden, but a garden is better than a wasteland.”

Your historical magicians, who you might scorn for their credulity, were deeply concerned with the rules and mechanics of how things work.

Cam was proving to be a good host, under the circumstances. There was a chamber for necessary biological functions—which was a horrible thought given they were inside a living creature. Cam had also opened orifices in one of the walls that could dispense food. Moreover, as a side effect of talking shop with Khan, it had apparently picked up something about cuisine. People were still experimenting with asking for particular dishes. The hit rate, in palatability, was about fifty per cent.

“What about the rats, though?” This from Mal. “You’ve seen how they live, en masse. They’re going to be stuck, aren’t they?” Kay blinked. “I don’t think you…We’re trying to stop the universe collapsing. We can’t pause along the way to effect fucking societal change in a non-human culture we know very little about. Priorities, love.”

“Nil desperandum, Lucas,” Rove said jovially, and then, because he was a patronizing sod, “That means ‘do not despair.’

Let’s say the Ediacaran had been alone for millions of years, this singular thing, and it was self-aware. Maybe it did think, ‘What if there was something else?’ And because it could, it created.

“We have spent more time on this plan than the universe actually contains. We have done it forwards and sideways and ass-backwards. We cannot make it work.” “There is a great distance between ‘cannot’ and ‘have not yet,’ ” the Nissa scientist insisted.