The Gates of Eden. Brian Stableford

all this,” I said. “There are all kinds of history tapes in the data-store. You could get a blow-by-blow account of the whole thing.”

      “I could,” she said. “But tapes don’t necessarily select things in accordance with what the inquiring mind wants or needs to know. And tapes don’t make guesses.”

      “Neither do I,” I told her.

      “Do you trust Jason Harmall?” she fired at me.

      “No one’s asked me to,” I countered.

      “Would you trust him?”

      “I don’t trust anyone,” I said. “Except my mother. And maybe Zeno. But he looks like a bit of a bastard to me, if that’s what you’re angling for. Why?”

      “Dr. Caretta,” she said softly, “I’ve been on a journey of three hundred and fifty years, across the big desert of empty space. I’ve aged over ten years, lived in short stretches of ten and fifteen weeks. I did all that because I believed, passionately, in what the Ariadne was for. I sometimes get the impression that no one here really cares what the Ariadne was for, and that I’m being prevented from getting through to people who might. I want the Ariadne’s mission to be completed. Jason Harmall isn’t going to stop me. I’m looking to you for help...you have to help me make Naxos safe for colonization.”

      “Harmall doesn’t want to stop you,” I told her weakly.

      “I don’t know what Harmall wants,” she said. “But I’m not taking anything for granted.”

      I hesitated before asking, but in the end I just had to. “What do you think it was that killed your ground crew?”

      “If I knew,” she said, “we wouldn’t need you, would we?”

      “And just suppose,” I went on carefully, “that whatever it was, it can’t be beaten. Suppose it makes Naxos forever 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.