The Parallel Man

by Richard Purtill

  Pellow’s voice brought me out of my trance. “Spectacular, isn’t it?” he said softly. “We take off on gravity-effect engines and it’s most economical to head straight for the sun, so you see the whole dayside.” Then he said more briskly, “There’s time for breakfast before we go Q. Not that you’ll feel the lack of it when you’re Q-time, but your body needs it and you might as well eat while you can still enjoy it.” From a niche in the wall very much like that in the “hospital” room he produced a tray of food and drink far tastier than the food in the “hospital” had been. Pellow grinned. “Trust a Greek captain to see that the Departure Day breakfast is a good one,” he said.

  The three flashes came again and the voice said, “Prepare to go Q.” Pellow shrugged and carried our dishes back to the niche where they were whisked away as if by invisible fingers. A whooshing sound as of a great wind sighed through the room for a moment and Pellow cocked his head to listen. “Letting air out of the cargo holds,” he said. “The captain leaves it till the last moment for some reason. Wonder what the cargo is that we’re supposed to be in charge of.” He went to his bunk and stretched himself out, turning his face to the wall. Three flashes again and the disembodied voice said, “Entering Q space.”

  In the View the starry sky blinked out, to be replaced by a curious gray blankness through which amorphous gray shapes moved slowly. After a moment I tore my eyes away and turned my face to the wall as Pellow had done. Waves of hot and cold seemed to move through my body and I had the unpleasant feeling that those gray shapes were moving unseen through the room and through my body. My heart pounded, then seemed to stop and start again. A weight seemed to rest on my chest and I struggled for breath, then the weight vanished and I was panting in shallow breaths. My sight blurred, then cleared again. Gradually I settled into a sort of dull apathy, as if my body and my emotions had been worn out by the rapid oscillations of sensation, and had retreated to a dumb quiescence,

  Pellow lifted his head and spoke in a dull monotone. “The first few minutes are the worst, after that your body overloads. You won’t feel like doing anything, but it’s important for you to move around, and take some nourishment when it’s provided, otherwise it’s worse when you come out of it. You can let yourself go during what would be the sleep period so long as you’re able to rouse yourself at the change of watches. It will seem like three or four days until we come out of Q and you’ll feel about as you do now for five or ten days afterward, unless you take some steps. I can help you there; starflitters get to know a few tricks . . .” His voice trailed off and he stared dully ahead of him.

  “What is this . . . this . . . state?” I asked him. Pellow gave the ghost of a shrug.

  “I’m not sure anyone knows, really,” he said. “We go outside of normal space and time, into—this. We call it quasi-space and quasi-time, Q space and Q time for short. We come back into realspace an immense distance away from where we started. Carpathia is twelve zir from Home; light takes about fifty odd years to make the journey. So far as anyone can tell the ship has taken no realtime at all to make he journey. If you could go Q near a planetary mass starflits would be a great deal easier. As it is, you have to get about fifty diameters out from your departure planet before you can flit and your point of arrival has to be a long way out from any planetary mass. We may take as much as a day or two realtime from POA to planetside. But we’ll still be in emotional freeze—we won’t care.”

  Indeed, I cared for little in the time that followed, or seemed to follow. But I forced myself to activity, mindful of Pellow’s warning. I did endless exercises, which never seemed to raise a sweat or leave me tired, forced myself to rise from the bed promptly at the bell which marked the change of watch, and made myself swallow the tasteless food which appeared in the niche in our cabin. On a long campaign I have been so tired that I fought and marched and choked down food like a man asleep yet walking; this was like those times except that I felt no weariness, only a dull apathy that made it easy to lie unmoving in my bunk during the time of “sleep.”

  The second “day” I went out of the door of my room, not because I had any desire to, but because some small part of my mind which still judged and willed told me that I should learn what I could of this vessel in which I rode. I wandered long gray corridors and saw sights which might almost have overturned my reason had my emotions not been frozen. Not all of the crewmen on that ship were human. Some were like giant lizards without tails, who walked on two feet. Their glittering black eyes had double lids and their face was covered with fine scales which grew larger on what you could see of their bodies. They were clothed, but more lightly clad than the human crewmen, as if they found the rooms too hot. There was a furred creature with three pale blue eyes and a feathered being with a head like an owl’s. Some of the crewmen who seemed otherwise human had grayish skin or strange vari-colored eyes.

  No one hindered me as I wandered through the corridors and I saw strange sights in some of the rooms that I ventured into. A large room held row after row of crystal boxes, each holding a human infant, dead or frozen in some strange sleep. Another room was like an antechamber to a larger room which was separated from it by a large transparent wall. Beyond the wall seemed to be pale green water in which floated something like a giant flower. But as I stood and gazed eyes opened in the flower and surveyed me with what seemed to be intelligence.

  Once I came to a door that seemed to be guarded by a crewman who stood beside it. I looked at him and made a gesture of inquiry. He spoke into a small disc on his wrist, seemed to listen, then touched a circle which opened the door. Inside was a great circular room filled with glittering shapes and lights which marched in slow patterns across panels. Before the panels sat crewmen, some human and some not. Several glanced my way; the feathered creature seeming to turn his head completely around to do so. At one end of the room was a chair like a throne, and behind it a semicircular sweep of carpeted floor. Pacing along this floor in what seemed to be a well-worn path, her hands clasped loosely behind her back, was the captain, Elena Petros. She came to the end of her carpeted area, turned and saw me. She gestured me to come to her and I walked over and stood at the edge of the carpet, somehow reluctant to step onto what seemed a private preserve.

  Her face and voice seemed almost normal as she greeted me, but it was all will power and magnificent control; her fine eyes had no sparkle and her body was slack when she did not make it move to her will. “You’re very active for a passenger, Citizen Thorn,” she said. “Some of them do nothing but stare at the walls. You’ll be glad of it when you get planetside; you should be out of freeze in the minimum time. Right now we’re busy trying to chart a possible anomaly.

  But come back to the bridge after we come out of Q; you’ll get a better view of planetfall from here. It won’t mean much at the time, but it will be something to remember.”

  I saluted and left her then, casting an incurious eye on crewmen who stared intently at lighted panels or manipulated curious instruments. Again I exercised, ate and prowled the corridors. Eventually, lights flashed again and a starry sky glowed again on the View in my room. A faint vibration began in the fabric of the ship and after a while one star began to shine more and more brightly. Soon it became a tiny disc, too bright to look at until Pellow touched a circle at the side of the screen and the brilliance faded to a bearable level. “This is a crew cabin,” he said. “Cut-off would be automatic on the View in a passenger cabin. Otherwise some passengers would stare at the primary till they damaged their sight.”

  He stood back from the View, then walked toward it, scanning the stars. Eventually he pointed to a star fainter than many of the others. “That’s a planet,” he said. “Probably Carpathia, because we seem to be heading for it.” He pressed another circle beside the view and the stars altered their pattern. The faint star was now a tiny disc and the star which had shone so bright was a white circle near the edge of the View. “Long way out yet,” he said. “We won’t land until tom
orrow. I’d try to sleep if I were you; it will be real sleep now that we’re out of Q.” I lay down on my bed and after a while began to feel drowsy. For the first time since I had boarded this strange craft I lost consciousness.

  I awoke feeling heavy and unrefreshed, cleaned myself up and made my way back to the circular room Elena Petros had called the “bridge.” Several panels in the room now showed starry sky with a blue disc in the center. The captain was seated in her thronelike chair and beckoned me to her side. On a great screen which faced her chair I saw starry sky and a blue disc the size of a man’s head at the center. It all looked very much as things had looked at the beginning of our voyage and I coldly realized a truth that had, for now, no emotional impact. We had journeyed the heavens, from to star.

  “Let’s have extreme magnification on the port city,” said Elena Petros, and suddenly the screen before us showed a view from a great height of a sprawling city, even larger than the city I had left to begin this voyage, but on a more human scale with buildings large and small, old and new, jumbled together.

  “This is Thorn,” said Captain Petros. For a moment I didn’t comprehend. Thorn was a little village, huddled below the Castle. Then a familiar outline caught my eye, and my eyes traced the craggy shape of the Hill of Thorn up to the towers and battlements above. There were a few changes, but very few. Standing above the vast alien sprawl of the unfamiliar city was Castle Thorn, the home of my fathers, which I had left, surely, no more than a week ago!

  7. Castle Thorn

  Elena Petros turned to me and asked with that same controlled appearance of normality, “Are you familiar with the city, Casmir?’’

  “My ancestors lived there,” I said, gesturing at the castle. She nodded. “Of course, Casmir Thorn; you’re named for the city. Your family must have left soon after Rediscovery, though; Carpathia hasn’t been in the Commonwealth all that long, if I remember the data fax we got on the planet. Do you have relatives here?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said. I wondered in a remote fashion what my emotions would have been if they had not been frozen by the enchanted voyage I had taken. For Thorn to have grown from the village I remembered to this sprawling city must have taken generation upon generation. Had our magical voyage taken centuries? But no, Pellow had said that these star voyages took no real time at all, despite the days that seemed to pass. And Pellow had no reason to lie—or had he? Whom could I trust, whom could I believe in this land of enchanters which seemed to have reached ot and engulfed my homeland? The problem was agonizing, but I felt no agony, locked as I was in the frozen emotions which were the price of star voyaging.

  We landed in the city as routinely as we had left the city where I had boarded Argo; there was another great stretch of the false lawn with the same glowing globes on high poles. There were fewer of the enigmatic structures, and only two of the great discs which must be “starships” like Argo. Of course, we felt nothing as the ship landed, but I felt a certain detached admiration for the evident competence and efficiency of Captain Petros and her crew as Argo settled her immense bulk on the false greensward as lightly as a leaf falling from a tree.

  “Finished with the engines,” said Elena Petros. “Open the sally port and prepare to receive planetary officials.” She turned to me. “We generally get rid of passengers fairly quickly, Casmir Thorn, but you and your companion are quasi-crew, If you’d like, use your cabin for a while until you get oriented here on Carpathia. The duty officer at the sally port will give you a ship’s badge which will get you in and out of the Starport and let you use the crew shuttles into the city.”

  “I thank you, Lady,” I said. Was Elena Petros merely being kind, or did she have some hidden motive, I wondered coldly. Perhaps she saw some advantage to be gained from learning more about my reasons for coming to Carpathia. Pellow had told me that the captain of an independent starship like Argo had to be a shrewd trader, quick to seize opportunity. Perhaps, too, Elena Petros had some interest in me as a man; there had been a certain spark between us before our emotions had been frozen.

  I turned to go, but she stopped me with a gesture. “I don’t know what your business is on Carpathia, Casmir Thorn,” she said, “but if you’re ready to leave before Argo lifts, come and see me about a real crew berth, The technical things can be learned—many of them can be autolearned. But the ability to function as well as you did in Q condition is something that’s very rare. This flit was just a delivery run. After it, we’re outward bound for some trading on our own. There’s wealth as well as adventure in the star trade. If that appeals to you, I can always use a good man.”

  I tried to put some feeling into my voice as I said, “I will remember your words, Captain, and I thank you again.” As I left the bridge I considered her offer. I was a man ripped out of his own place and flung into a world which was often incomprehensible. If I could find no way back to my own place, I could certainly do a great deal worse than to join the small, disciplined world of Argo. But before I abandoned the world I remembered to try to see what I could make of this new one, I wanted to know how and why I had lost my old world. I had a feeling that Mortifer might know, and Mortifer, according to the “fax” which Benton had given me, was not in this city of Thom.

  If it were not for my frozen emotions, I might have stormed my way into Mortifer’s presence and demanded an explanation. But in the cold light of reason, without emotion to influence me, I saw that the better course was to learn everything I could before trying to confront Mortifer. Most of the city was strange to me, but the castle which loomed above the city on its rocky crag was at least outwardly familiar. I decided to make it my first goal.

  Benton had given gifts of clothing to me when I left his lodge. During the voyage I had simply pulled on whatever garments came to hand, but now I looked through Benton’s gifts and did my best to find garments that would not have looked wildly out of place at my father’s court. At the sally port I was given a little circular patch of black which seemed to have a star gleaming in its center. “Most of us wear them over our C and C chip,” said the duty officer. “Marks us as starcrew and it’s no business of the planetaries how much credit we have, since we pay in ecus anyway. Captain said to treat you as crew, so I’ll give you the same advice as I’d give a new crewman. Stay in the port area until you come out of freeze; planetaries are often scared of starcrew or hostile to them. They don’t understand freeze and they have strange ideas about it. If you’re anxious to get out of freeze as quickly as possible, don’t fool around with the so-called emotional therapists; go to a blackout.”

  At my look of incomprehension, he explained, “They’re plays, short and pretty melodramatic. But somehow all that stage emotion seems to unfreeze your own emotions. See a good blackout and get a good night’s sleep and by tomorrow morning you may begin to feel human. If not, repeat treatment. We were two days on GE drive that’s two days out of Q. Cutting it a little fine, but you kept active in Q and that helps.”

  I hesitated, then decided to take his advice. Much as grudged the time, I realized that a man in emotional freeze was conspicuous and I did not want to be conspicuous when I set out to find what I could about Mortifer and about what had happened to me.

  There was certainly nothing recognizable and almost nothing Carpathian about the area around the starport. The men and women who filled the taverns and wandered the streets in various stages of emotional freeze were the same strange mixture of faces as I had encountered aboard Argo, along with others even stranger; lithe, brown creatures who seemed to slither rather than walk, and exotically plumed beings who almost seemed to float along.

  It was easy enough to find a blackout; there were several theaters near the starport gates. The first surprise was that the play featured both humans and the sealed lizard-like creatures I had learned to call Szilara. There were four players, a male and female Szilar, a man and a woman.

  The plot, looking back on it, was thin enough stuff; a tale of danger and
hairsbreadth escapes with the Szilara as villains, the woman as victim and the man as rescuing hero. But it was well written and well acted. At first it seemed merely interesting, then it became absorbing. At a tense moment in the plot I found myself gripping the arms of my seat and realized that my emotions were returning. By the end of the play I was joining in the catcalls which greeted the appearance of the villains and shouting myself hoarse to cheer on the hero.

  The play ended abruptly with the lights turned out at a high point of tension; the “blackout” from which the plays took their name. As the lights went on again and the audience filed out, I exchanged sheepish smiles with other men and women whose badges proclaimed them as starcrew. We felt foolish, but we felt human again.

  It was late and I headed for the starport gates, planning to get some proper rest and head for the castle in the morning. A small man in brown caught my attention with a courteous gesture as I strolled away from the theater and I paused to see what he wanted of me. On closer inspection there was something rather unpleasant about his smooth manner and foppish appearance, and I regretted not having ignored him. He came to my side and spoke in a low rapid voice, not looking at my face; “The honorable startrader may wish to complete his emotional recovery by sampling our wares,” he said, “the finest gynas, perfect simulacra of the most beautiful women in the Commonwealth, programmed for your pleasure. . .”

  I did not completely understand what he was offering, but I understood well enough to be disgusted. “Be off with you!” I said and raised my hand as if to cuff him. He cringed and slid off into the shadows.

  “Good for you, flitter,” said a woman’s voice behind me. I turned to see a richly dressed woman of considerable beauty, with a hardness to her voice and features that let me guess her profession. “Too many flitters are spending their credit on those mechanical dolls. Afraid of a real woman, most of them. If you’re not, I’ll give you a special rate for sending that puppet pimp about his business.”