The Doors of Eden, page 1
The Doors of Eden
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Adrian Czajkowski
Excerpt from Children of Time copyright © 2015 by Adrian Czajkowski
Excerpt from Nophek Gloss copyright © 2020 by Essa Hansen
Cover design by www.blacksheep-uk.com
Cover images by Alamy/Getty/Shutterstock
Timeline illustration by Adrian Czajkowski
Author photograph by Ante Vukorepa
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936628
ISBN: 978-0-316-70578-3 (ebook)
E3-20200708-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prelude: The Ediacaran Period
Part 1: Down the Rabbit Hole
Chapter 1.
Interlude: The Wanderers
Chapter 2.
Interlude: The Philosophers
Chapter 3.
Interlude: The Warmongers
Chapter 4.
Interlude: The Posticthyans
Chapter 5.
Part 2: Looking Glass Creatures
Chapter 6.
Interlude: The Utopians
Chapter 7.
Interlude: The Dead
Chapter 8.
Interlude: The Aeronauts
Chapter 9.
Interlude: The Hunters
Chapter 10.
Interlude: The City-Builders
Chapter 11.
Part 3: Red Queen Hypothesis
Chapter 12.
Interlude: The Hedonists
Chapter 13.
Interlude: The Purists
Chapter 14.
Part 4: Red King’s Dream
Chapter 15.
Interlude: The Humans
Chapter 16.
Interlude: The Ediacaran
Chapter 17.
Chapter 17/1.
Chapter 17/2.
Chapter 17/3.
Postscript
Special Acknowledgements
Discover More
Extras
Meet the Author
A Preview of Children of Time
A Preview of Nophek Gloss
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Praise for The Doors of Eden
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Prelude: The Ediacaran Period
Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California
For three billion years the only life here has been microscopic. Bacteria have been leaching sustenance from strange chemicals in the bowels of the Earth or the depths of the sea. Ice comes, ice goes; the atmosphere for most of this time is a heady mix of chemicals either toxic to life or simply useless to it. There is life, though. For almost half the aeons since its formation, this world has known self-replicating organic entities. They’ve been bustling and thriving and dying and trying to outdo one another in a ferocious, invisible war for survival.
Life sometimes seems destined, to we fortunate ones who live at the far end of time’s telescope. But what were the chances of success? Hard to say, and the no man’s land between inorganic process and organic existence is a region, not a hard dividing line. We fondly believe there is no reversing that step, however, after a few very basic criteria are satisfied. Imagine life as a manual that includes instructions for replicating itself. The replication process is fallible, of course; everything is in this world. That leads to mutation and the possibility of change, and so to evolution. Here, a mutation can give one minuscule knot of organic chemistry the opportunity to replicate more efficiently than its neighbours. Its offspring faithfully copy the fortuitous error and thereby inherit it. 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.
For the longest time, all the dramas of this particular world could have played out in a drop of water, life was of so small a scale. We have some evidence of a few flowerings of more complex life developing. But either the ice came back, acidity rose or oxygen levels fell—and these early signs collapsed like enlightened empires before the tides of barbarism.
Three billion years passed like motes in a god’s eye. Life expanded to fit the meagre niches the world provided. And a constantly changing cast of life forms fled from one another, devoured their fellows like miniature tigers and traded genetic material like shady black marketeers hiding contraband in their trench coats. These life forms exploited the inorganic substrate of the world. Later, they exploited the organic matrix that was the graveyard of a million billion fast-lived generations of their forebears.
Then in this Archaean microbial age, some unicellular visionary made an explosive discovery—akin to mankind’s discovery of fire, in terms of its impact. A volatile, poisonous chemical was tamed. Since the dawn of the Earth, this chemical had voraciously attacked any element it came into contact with; now it became the servant of developing life. This first metabolizing of oxygen might have been a defence mechanism. A process that incorporated the dangerous substance rather than falling prey to it. Perhaps your ancient ancestors took wolf cubs from their mothers with a similar goal. And what a world of opportunity opened up! Oxygen is a shortcut to a higher energy lifestyle, a ticket to getting out of the bacterial ghetto to live the high life. Our cast of characters becomes more complex as a result. Life gets a new paint job, alloys and go-faster stripes, now there is something more powerful under the hood.
Next, single cells find advantage in numbers. Simple bacterial mats carpet the floors of every sea, shore to shore, washing up on lifeless beaches in a scummy slick of organic matter that cannot even decay properly yet. Then cells cling to each other, sharing the work so enough of them might even resemble some larger coherent being. But the next storm or riptide breaks them down again, to reform slowly, later. Some developing cells cling to those bacterial mats and rocks and sieve the water for organic detritus; some drift in the current. Cells evolve that can only survive in the company of their fellows, doing some small specialist role like an office worker who only deals with form G. But because the rest of the alphabet is also monitored, the paycheque still comes through every month. Multicellular life evolves exponentially, now it has that hard, oxygenated liquor to fuel it. Everywhere, a garden of life arises—the very first Eden. But it doesn’t support life like ours, or even our ancestors’. This is life of another caste entirely. A world of quilt-bodied things that lie supine upon the sea floor, or inch slowly across the bacterial mats without limbs or muscles, feeding upon them without mouths. They are a global community of organisms alien to us, and they live without tooth or claw, without eyes, without organs.
Our world was like this once. Go back six hundred million years and you wouldn’t know the difference. But this is not our world.
In this world, something awoke.
PART 1
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
1.
Her name was Lee, short for Lisa Pryor. Which, technically, was short for Lisa Chandrapraiar. But when her grandparents came to England from Pakistan, the immigration authorities had been having a rough day and so Pryor was what went on the paperwork. Her parents still called her Lisa, but Mal called her Lee and that was the important thing. After a while her other friends did too, because what Mal said tended to stick.
Mal was short for Elsinore Mallory, because her parents came from a particular social stratum where that was perfectly acceptable. However, she never forgave them for it.
They were nineteen. Lee was studying zoology at Reading, Mal was reading English Lit at Oxford—an establishment so exclusive that they had a whole other verb for what you did there. They’d only been friends in school because Lee’s parents had pushed hard to get her somewhere good and Mal’s parents had lost their starched
So Mal had been alone in the cloakroom, shoulders hunched inwards, head down, reading Lyall Watson’s The Nature of Things. And Lee had a tatty second-hand copy of that very book back home. She had never run into anyone else who’d read it; it was bonkers too, pure Forteana about the secret life of the inanimate world. Here, for the first time ever, was someone else who was interested in that stuff.
Mal had looked up defensively, anticipating more mockery from the chubby Pakistani girl who was staring wide-eyed at her. Yet somehow she’d understood exactly what Lee was after. From that moment, they’d been inseparable. Lee’s parents didn’t know what to make of her, and Mal’s certainly didn’t know what to make of Lee, but neither of them cared.
There followed years of sharing everything, from Dungeons and Dragons campaigns to their first intimate experience. This deepening of their relationship had seemed inevitable to both of them, but none of their parents ever guessed at it, locked into a mindset where such things didn’t happen.
Their other shared pastime was hunting monsters.
It started off passively, reading the Fortean Times, watching old reruns of Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, trawling the internet. There they found rumours of yetis, Mokele-Mbembe, the Jersey Devil and stray big cats. Two years before, though—before The Thing That Happened—they had started holidaying together. They had been seventeen, and Mal could always cadge some travelling money from her parents. They thought Lee was a good chaperone who would prevent their daughter from getting into compromising situations. In this they were absolutely and exactly mistaken. But it meant that when the pair of them wanted to go backpacking in Scotland, or visit Gévaudan to practise French, it all sounded perfectly respectable. Nobody knew they were casting themselves into the wilderness, desperate for a look at beasts that almost certainly didn’t live there.
Looking back, Lee couldn’t have honestly said whether they believed any of it. She could never quite recapture the mindset they’d had, not after what happened. They weren’t seriously looking to actually find proof, not exactly. They wanted to be the ones to take that vaunted blurry photo that might, in a certain light, look a bit like something was there: the ripple on the loch, the faintly anthropoid shadow in the woods.
And then, after we’d done it a couple of times, Mal picked a target for our next jaunt, and we actually found our monster.
Later, making a tenuous living writing cryptozoology articles for magazines and websites, Lee would explore the literary tradition where “monster” was a metaphor: the monstrosity inside us all along, the true villain being human nature, all of that. And she would feel like a fraud, because that wasn’t the kind of monster she and Mal had encountered. They met the other kind, with terrible claws and savage teeth. And how many other cryptid-hunters had experienced that moment, confronting the fugitive panther, standing before the ape-man, realizing that the true joy was in the quest. The actual finding holds only terror and loss.
*
Lee had been away from Mal for most of the summer term, sending her mournful emails and indulging in lonely midnight Skype calls. Mal had settled in better, up to her eyeballs in LARP and the university debating society. They’d been an item for years, but now they were apart and in that stage in a relationship where you constantly wonder, Is this more important to me than to her? Am I too needy? Am I trying to tie her down? These worries always disappeared the moment Lee actually got to speak with Mal. Nevertheless, every day she was away, Lee was newly terrified that Mal would suddenly remember she was white and posh—and go back to her own people, like some brief alien visitor to Earth.
Then exams were done, term was done, and Lee was willing the train faster all the way to Hemel and home. Her parents and siblings were given a five-minute window of her time before she was off, westward to Bracknell and the big old house Mal’s folks were still holding on to by their fingernails.
Mal, at that time: she was like porcelain. You’d think that she’d break into pieces with a little shove. For the longest time Lee had thoroughly envied her metabolism, because that girl could eat. Twice as much as Lee, whose mother would tut and nag about dress sizes and what nice boys might or might not want (a matter of supreme indifference to her), and yet Mal remained waif-like. She was so pale you could almost see through her; she dyed her short hair platinum because it annoyed her mother, and because she had a love-hate relationship with standing out. She hated strangers staring, hated the thought of people making judgements about her. Yet at the same time she couldn’t dress down and drab, like Lee usually did. A part of her had to be seen and heard, to know she was real.
Before university, of course, Lee worked out that Mal was so slim because most of what she ate she purged right out again. She became quite ill one summer, and her parents were frantic that someone would guess there was something wrong with her. She had private doctors and therapists, and they even packed her off to a kind of rehab centre for very rich people with eating disorders. Lee remembered living through that time as if under a shadow, taut with a strain she had nobody to talk to about. After the business with the too many pills they took her out of the centre, though, and stopped locking her in the house. Lee was able to see her again, and Mal was better after that.
When The Thing That Happened happened, Mal was still skinny, but you couldn’t see her bones quite as much. Lee’s worries about Mal meeting some Oxbridge wunderkind and running off with her had abated. More than that, Mal had been making plans.
“Lee,” she said, with that grin that went through Lee like sticking fingers in the mains socket. “We’re going on holiday.”
And of course they were; that was their tradition, to pack cameras and night-vision kit and go play cryptid detectives on some well-worn trail. This time, though, Mal had found something different. No Loch Ness Monsters or Lambton Worms, nowhere with a gift shop where the cryptid in question was immortalized as a gurning plushie. They felt their old yearning for new territory stirring.
That undiscovered country, as the bard said, from whose bourn no traveller returns…
*
YouTube was not, of course, undiscovered country. Discovery was entirely the point of YouTube. And if you looked hard enough, you could discover just about anything on it, although sometimes you had to wade through a lot of porn to find what you were looking for. One thing YouTube had, if you entered the right search terms, was a plethora of the Unexplained.
Mal and Lee were no longer wide-eyed naifs when it came to that sort of thing. They’d spent a dozen hysterical evenings over the last couple of years trawling the net to find cryptid videos, mysterious sightings of unknown species. Lee’s firm impression was that nine-tenths of the “unknown animal” videos on YouTube boiled down to (a) gross jellyfish, (b) bad special effects and (c) actual readily identifiable animals with the bad luck to be encountered by someone who’d apparently never seen a nature documentary. One of them, under the heading of MISTERY ANIMALS!!, had been just a regular heron. And the look in that heron’s eye had said, “Don’t you be pulling that internet shit on me,” or that’s what Mal had claimed.
So when they were huddled together on Mal’s bed, blinds drawn and her laptop balancing precariously across their knees, Lee hadn’t exactly been holding her breath.
The video Mal had found was titled Birdman of Bodmin?, and at least all three words were spelled correctly. The alliteration was a nice extra.
“This is going to be dumb,” Lee decided, leaning into Mal.
“Just watch.” And there had been a jag of excitement in the other girl’s voice that said that however dumb this dumb video was, they would be heading to Bodmin Moor that summer.
It purported to be footage from a security camera. Black-and-white nocturnal video of a suitably grainy quality, so that the viewer didn’t have to try very hard to start seeing things in the static-laden gloom. The viewpoint was immobile, angled to look down the stone wall of a two-storey building: there were suggestions of rectangular windows, and across from them, a corrugated wall, perhaps a barn. There was a gap of about ten feet between the buildings, cluttered with what might be farm implements and tarpaulined crates, a kennel on its side, a bicycle missing its front wheel. At the far extent of the view, after a security light was triggered, Lee could just make out the looming hulk of a Range Rover, crusty with mud. Or that was how she remembered it in retrospect. She could never quite square the precision of her recollection with the grainy quality of the video. Memory screwed you over like that.
