Voyage

by C. Paul Lockman

  With help, she regained her feet and then, shaking, sat on one of the high stools by the breakfast bar. I brought her a towel to begin the clean-up operation, but I knew only a shower would rinse such rivers of juice from her skin. She examined the hug, holding it to eye level.

  “Ninety millilitres”, she observed. “Not bad, especially for a third cum”.

  She was joking, of course. This was many times the average male ejaculation, an inhuman amount, so huge that most girls stare at me with amazed scepticism once I had finished.

  I shrugged. “One tries, Coral, one tries.”

  We took turns in the bathroom and I elected to take a shower, in part to clean my apparatus, and also to garner some time alone in what had been a hectic day. When I returned, the familiar scent of frying eggs had filled the kitchen. Chef Coral, back in her beautiful silk bathrobe, was whipping up a light breakfast.

  “What’s on the menu?” I asked, taking my seat at the breakfast bar. I glanced over and noted the measuring jug, now empty, next to the frying pan.

  “It’s a new creation I’m working on”, she replied, flipping the scrambled eggs in the pan. “I’m calling it Huevos del Diablo”. ‘Devil’s eggs’ or, if my language circuits could be trusted, ‘Devil’s Testicles’. I laughed most of the way through breakfast.

  *****

  “You need the car?” Hal retained his vigil except when it was inappropriate – i.e. when I was fucking someone – so he knew all that I knew via remote cameras on my suit lapels, microphones in my breast pocket and a nano-transmitter in my watch.

  “No. Actually, would you get my gym gear laid out? I feel like a run. I need to mull over some of this shit.”

  Twenty minutes later I was half way through the first of my six-minute miles. Going any faster would just draw attention, although it was pretty quiet as I headed past the Supreme Court building, skirted the Capitol on its south side and then got into a good rhythm as I hit the long stretch of the National Mall.

  Try to see it from their point of view. A fundamental power-shift; a huge hunk of free resources, just waiting to be accessed, right there in high earth orbit. They’re terrified. All the concepts they grew up with are vanishing – the Cold War, terrorism, the scrabble for oil – none of that stuff matters any more. It has been washed away. They must feel institutionally bankrupt, as though their role has simply evaporated. History, tradition, patriotism, service, sacrifice… all undermined.

  The tall, glass frontage of the Air and Space Museum echoed the sentiment. One of my first shuttles hung, sleek and beautiful, beside Rutan’s Spaceship One, Lindberg’s Spirit of St Louis and Yeager’s X-1 in the cavernous exhibition hall. I enjoyed the swell of pride.

  They’re not going to get on board. Forget the idea of partnership. They’re jealous, protecting their budgets and remits like squabbling divorcees. Unable to accept their own inevitable irrelevance. So Neanderthal, so selfish to risk a project like this for such petty reasons.

  I tempered my anger with a burst of speed, turning in a five and a half minute mile as I reached the tall obelisk of the Washington Monument. There were other runners out, I noticed, and I pegged back my pace as not to draw attention. Anyone who recognized my face could be a pain in the ass, and that was the last thing I wanted. I continued west.

  They could imprison me, call me a ‘threat to national security’, a ‘renegade’… accuse me of running a private nation state with its own sinister aims. It would be child’s play – look at the Bill Ayres debacle, how it distracted people… I still remembered the punditry – ‘palling around with terrorists’ – Oh, God if they managed to make some of that stuff stick, however ludicrous… The public might turn away; see not the grandeur but the grandstanding. They could be fickle, and were so easily manipulated… just when I needed their steadfastness…

  I ran the circuit around the Lincoln Memorial and headed North, breathing still steady – four steps for each inhalation, four more for each exhalation. I accelerated past the former IMF building and circled round towards McPherson Square.

  Well, if they were really prepared to do something spectacular, to play their trump card, then I should consider doing the same. I’ve controlled information so carefully – robotic builders but no replicators; conventional chemical-rocket shuttles, but no Cruiser; moon walks and space jumps, but no publicity on my visits further afield. To them I was a super-smart, über-rich playboy with brains and bottle… what if they knew it all? My phenomenal memory, reading ability, brain power? My cured cancer, my perfect eyesight, my cleansed heart and blood vessels? The time travel, the interstellar distances, the existence of fucking aliens, for Christ’s sake… What if…?

  The excitement of the quickly-forming plan sent me rampaging past the DC Historical Society and down Massachusetts Avenue like a greyhound chasing a rabbit. A sub four-minute mile, I noted with a smile, and all within my steady four-in, four-out breathing pattern. I shot past Union Station and headed through Stanton Park to the hotel, calling up Hal for a conference which would last past dawn.

  Chapter XLII: Paranoid Android

  Tuesday 11th October, 2033

  Washington, D.C.

  The routine for billions, hated by virtually all of them, but as ubiquitous in 2033 as breathing in and out – alarm, shower, coffee. Sundry tasks, maybe email or news. Out to work. Never enough time, never enough sleep.

  Crappy fluorescent lights. Desk. Power up the laptop. Joe had provided the coffee this morning, Liz noted with relief. She threw back two painkillers to ease the lingering results of last night’s bottle of Cabernet. The depressing clink as it hit the crowd of bottles at the bottom of her recycling bin… Not now, don’t think about it now. Just get the day started. So much to do.

  A Takanlian exchange journalist would wonder just what the fuck was going on, but this, in its unloveliest guise, was modern news media: fast, slick and (if at all possible) sexy. Little more than vapid, forgettable glue between advertising segments. If we were lucky, Liz frequently quipped, we’d get to scratch the surface today. Yesterday’s section on the Yangtze dam had taken two days to pull together, but was aired only twice, in a radically cut-down, thirty-eight second clip. Thirty-eight fucking seconds… Liz decided against more painkillers, despite the very obvious need. You drink because of this shit. Remember that. If 21st century journalism is going to kill you, at least let’s feel it happen.

  A sign on the wall reminded everyone of tomorrow’s date, and tomorrow’s event. Few more innovative monikers than ‘Asteroid Day’, or ‘A-Day’ had emerged, and so that was what they went with. ‘D-day’, for ‘Dvalin-Day’ was considered both historically loaded and a little silly. Tomorrow, the Boffins had assured them, would see the arrival of Dvalin into high earth orbit. The only problem was it was still invisible – the media directors had just about shit kittens once they’d learned that the sun’s glare would make earth-based observations very difficult, and so there would be no final, dramatic breaking manoeuvre visible from earth. The best we could hope for, they were told, was a deep-space feed from Dvalin’s own attendant photo-robot satellites, which had been neatly orbiting the billion-ton rock for years. In fact, the Boffins remarked with an awe reserved for this project, those little robots were the first products of the new industrial age, crafted entirely from asteroid material. But the directors were unmoved by the historical nature of the event – they wanted sexy, flashy imagery. And they weren’t going to get it.

  The morning meeting started slowly, with the directors waiting for several stragglers – their recycling bins surely as full as Liz’s – to make an appearance, get coffee and find their seats. The conference room did have a decent view out over the city to the north, but most were fixed doggedly on the smart screen which showed the day’s assignments, areas of focus, likely events. Having started at the top of the list, ‘A-Day’ was sinking fast, scuttled by its own orbital mechanics and the lack of a money-shot. When the thing was actually sitting high above the earth in
its final, geostationary orbit (whatever the fuck one of those might be, the director sighed) then we might get some up-to-date pictures of it.

  “OK, Liz and Joe… you get to track down the asshole who thought up this stunt, and get his mug on camera for his Big Day.” Joe stared heavenwards at once. “Don’t give me that shit… I want a ten-second sound bite, I want it today, and I want that dickhead to make sense for a change. Just get him to tell us if it’s going to hit the fucking earth and kill us all. That would be reassuring for our audience to know.”

  There were chuckles around the table, but not from Liz and Joe. As you’ll have gathered from the narrative thus far, I am a man who it can be rather hard to track down. Last year, I spent 23% of my time in space and another 17% at undisclosed locations. Media directors hated invisible, unreachable celebrities even more than they hated decelerating asteroids which wouldn’t behave photogenically. Numerous websites, run by new and fast-expanding data agencies, claimed to have up-to-date information as to my whereabouts, but I changed plans so abruptly (including leaving the planet in startlingly impromptu fashion) that they were seldom right. Liz would shake the tree, and see where she might catch me. My senate hearings continued – the obvious place to start. She rose as the meeting finished, and began making calls.

  *****

  In the end, Hal had to order me to put on the sleep inducer and get cleaned up, or I’d have shown up to the second day of the hearings groggy, unshaven and completely distracted. As it was, I strode out of the St. Anthony’s lobby on this slightly chilly Tuesday morning feeling like a trillion dollars. My long run through the sleeping city had worked out some kinks, unknotted some neural confusion, and now Hal and I had a master plan so ballsy that I was just vibrating with excitement. I had to wait 24 hours, he insisted. Once the first welcome delegation had reached the asteroid, I would make my move. Reams of instructions were beamed from Hal to the robots and replicators which swarmed upon, through and in orbit around Dvalin, like a cloud of metallic remoras earning their living from a titanic fish.

  A large photo of Dvalin, one I recognized as having been taken at initial contact by the deep-space automatons responsible for the asteroid’s capture, adorned the main projection screen in Dirksen 215. One could understand, certainly from that point of view, why the Chinese name for Dvalin translated as ‘Great Space Potato’. It lacked the charisma of Hadley Rille, or Olympus Mons; it failed to sport a curious feature like Herschel crater on Mimas, or the two-tone hues of Iapetus. It was just a big, old space rock, hanging there in the blackness like… well, if you were feeling unkind, Dvalin looked like a giant, interplanetary lump of shit. But it was an enormously valuable lump of shit. As we were all about to discover.

  This part of the show was mine to run, Senator Beasley made clear from the start. I had invented the project, managed it from day one, and it looked like I was about to bring it on home. Live robot camera feeds would keep us updated. I might even make some of it available to the media, although they’d probably screw it up; most seemed much more concerned that Dvalin would strike the earth. As if I’d be that stupid.

  ‘Hi everybody’. They just never seemed to get tired of it. The room came to an expectant quiet. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen”, I began, “today sees one the most important milestones of the Dvalin project. I might even say, if you’ll permit me a rhetorical flourish,” (and when had they not?) “that this could be one of the most significant days in earth’s history. Our planet is shortly to host a new moon, for the first time in billions of years.”

  “The asteroid is currently sliding into its parking orbit. This is preparatory to a final orbital manoeuvre which will bring Dvalin into GEO tomorrow.” A graphic demonstrated the two orbit-adjustment burns. This was a somewhat simplified telling of the tale, naturally. Dvalin’s banks of ion thrusters had been firing pretty well continuously, in one direction or another, for nearly fifteen years, steadily and slowly adjusting the great rock’s orbit around the sun, persuading it into a new orbit, around its new master, the earth. These final thrusters firings were the icing on the cake, but it made more sense to hype them – if only to generate positive publicity for the project. If Evelyn was right, we’d need as much of that as possible.

  “Once safely in GEO, the asteroid will be easily visible with the naked eye as a prominent point of light in the sky” – more graphics indicated how it would appear from different points on earth – “and will appear to hover over West Africa, where it will permanently remain on station.” This location, already controversial for some, was out of necessity. In order to build the elevator cable which would connect earth to Dvalin, an equatorial station was needed. Gabon was my favoured location, provided that local conditions could be worked out. Hal was optimistic.

  “Dvalin is a treasure trove of stupendous proportions. Although no-one has visited the asteroid yet,” (this was a bare-faced lie – I had been there dozens of times) “initial geological and structural findings are very encouraging. There is a predominance of water ice, with some methane, mixed in a slush with billions of tonnes of silica, iron, titanium, zinc, phosphorous and gold.” They always loved it when I mentioned the gold. The satirical cartoonist who contributed to the Guardian’s coverage of Dvalin had once portrayed the rock as a huge iteration of the Crown Jewels, gleaming in space, with a large ‘For Sale’ sign hanging off it. I have a copy here on my office wall at Sculthorpe and it never fails to make me smile.

  “Our robotic explorations have also uncovered evidence of amino acids and fullerenes, but I have to repeat”, for the billionth fucking time, “that there is absolutely no evidence of life on Dvalin. No microbes, no space worms, no little green men”. I lapped up the brief titter of mirth.

  ‘What there is, instead, is conservatively,” I began reading the well-worn list of Dvalin’s composition, “eight hundred million tonnes of water, sixty million tonnes of iron, at least forty million tonnes of other rare metals, and a host of useful organic chemistry. More detailed information will be available once initial geological work has begun”.

  I then swung into an hour-long presentation, aimed at the layman (and how many Senators really took the time to bone up on science?) and with plenty of cool graphics, mind-boggling numbers, and impressive engineering geekery. I took them through the workings of the ion engines which had nudged Dvalin into such a useful orbit, and then gave them a 101 course in orbital mechanics, explaining how geostationary orbit (or Clarke orbit, as it was known for many years, after the late, great sci-fi writer) enabled the rock to rotate around the earth at the same rate as the earth rotated on its own axis. 3-D graphics helped a lot. I held their attention pretty well, but I’d been speaking for over an hour when I finally noticed Evelyn Tanner at the back.

  She had an odd, worried expression on her face. A jolt of concern travelled from my balls to my chest in a disturbing, distracting way. The President had yet to make his speech – that might come tonight, I understood, and I had to be ready for it. There were rumblings on Capitol Hill that all may not be rosy in the garden when it came to relations between the Dvalin Project and the current administration, but there never seemed to be anything officialdom could do about it. I operated extra-judiciously, with global public consent – a new form of democracy, unelected but benevolent. It just seemed to have worked out that way. Exactly under whose authority I acted, if anyone’s, no-one was prepared to say, but the status quo held such promise that the world, its media and its governments seemed content to let me work.

  I clipped through the rest of the presentation, hiding my haste as I did so, and got wrapped in only another ten minutes. There were fusillades of questions – people were still apparently not philosophically or psychologically ready for the arrival of a new moon around the earth – and I dispatched them as quickly as manners would permit.

  Was Dvalin going to influence the earth’s tides? No. It is too small. How can we be certain it won’t hit the earth, now or later? Because the ion boosters will kee
p it where it is supposed to be. What happens when they run out of fuel? They never will; their fuel is extracted from Dvalin material. Who will own Dvalin? Right now, I do. But I’m going to make a gift of its resources, equitably divided. What gives you the right to appropriate solar system resources for a project of your own? What law prohibits it? Besides, I’m giving it all away. Will people be able to live on Dvalin? In large numbers, and soon. Why did you not consult the world’s governments before starting the project? Because they take ten years to agree on the shape of a symbol or the colour of a flag; and then five years later find compelling reasons why the original choice was flawed, and start all over again.

  Half an hour of this. Captain Tanner only looked more and more distressed as the Q&A dragged on lengthily, and I could do nothing but answer inane questions, the majority of the answers to which were already in the public domain. I nearly snapped at one Senator who asked, standing slowly and pointing a bony finger at me, “Young man, how do we all know this isn’t just one of your stunts? We all know what you’re like… how can we trust you? How do we know your space rock isn’t going to explode like a firework, or some other cockamamie trick?”

  I had learned to take a breath before answering the dumbest questions. It helped a lot. "Have I ever harmed anyone?” The room, if not the Senator, seemed to feel that I had not. “Or usurped a democratic government? Or annexed a nation state? Or concocted a hostile takeover?” The Senator felt his indignation leaking away. “I’ve given away trillions of dollars and invested almost all the rest in development projects designed to help mankind. That’s all I’m doing. That’s all I’m going to do.”