Paul felt the need to apologize, but there were no words to commiserate them after the loss of the Aldebaran. He remembered days during his relationships back on Earth which were seemingly labeled, ‘days when I could say nothing right’, and wondered if this was such a day.
Instead of replying, he turned awkwardly back to the stunning view. As he watched, a pair of tiny bright dots appeared to the left – the sunward side – of Neptune and began a slow, synchronized dance towards the deep blue disc of the planet.
“Hey, I see two of the moons,” Paul announced. “Do we know which one is which?”
Kiri pointed to another wall chart. It showed the thirteen moons of Neptune, grouped into ‘regular’ moons, which orbit in the same direction as Neptune’s own spin, and ‘irregular’ ones, which did the opposite. Triton, where they stood, was in the latter group. Paul quickly located the two moons which were just now beginning to transit the blue disc of their planet.
“We call these two Despina and Galatea,” he informed the girls courteously, drawing on his encyclopedic knowledge of the solar system. Several of Neptune’s moons, probably including these two, had been captured during Neptune’s distant past, rather than forming from the disc of material which surrounded the embryonic planet. They had been performing this intricate, orbital dance for many millennia, since before Takanli was even inhabited. Since before Holdrian was smashing atoms for fun. Maybe even, he thought with a smile to himself, since before Garlidan himself. “These two are just little guys, under 100km across,” he recalled.
“We know,” Kiri said, a little annoyed at the assumption that they might need educating about their own system by this visitor. “We considered all of these moons as landing sites, of course. Those two had too many disadvantages.”
“Low gravity, for one thing,” Haley pointed out. “Plus, Triton has a thin atmosphere,” she explained, “which allows us to mine its nitrogen for fertilizers.”
“Your navigator and pilot must really be something. How far did you have to travel in the Epsilon after the accident?” he asked Kiri.
But Kiri said nothing. “Too long,” Haley said, intervening. “How do we express time to this visitor?” she asked Kiri, but the dark woman remained silent. Haley thought for a second, then reddened slightly before asking, “Do women on your planet experience reproductive cycles?”
Paul blinked. “Yes, they sure do.”
“And what do you call the period of time Triton takes to complete an orbit?” Haley asked.
“About six days, if memory serves.” Which it does, with sparkling accuracy.
“OK. One of our reproductive cycles is about... five of those orbits.”
Paul did the calculations. “Sounds like a cycle of 28 days, like Earth’s women have,” he announced, surprised.
“That means we were in the Epsilon for about a hundred days, give or take,” Haley told him.
Paul whistled softly. “That must have been tough. Was there no means of hibernating until you arrived in Neptune orbit?”
Kiri abruptly placed a hand over Haley’s mouth and then dragged her from the Epsilon, through the hub, and into the nearest farm module. Paul blinked for a second and then followed, but kept his distance, worried that he’d broken some unknown social code. With the door closed, he could hear only a muffled argument. It became a little clearer as he tip-toed closer. The risk of being found eavesdropping, he decided, was worth the chance to discover quite what the hell was going on.
“He hasn’t tried to hurt us, or to steal anything,” Haley was pointing out. “We’ve just been peacefully learning about each other. Why spoil it?”
Kiri’s voice was louder and angrier. “He arrived here, out of nowhere, uninvited and in a ship we’ve never seen before, asking all kinds of questions,” Kiri complained.
“Wouldn’t you?” Haley demanded. “I mean, at first glance, would you have the slightest idea how we came to be here, like this?”
“I would know better than to interrogate complete strangers,” Kiri retorted. “And he’s so obviously a man...”
“A kind man,” Haley countered. “And he hasn’t even tried to touch us.”
“Not yet,” Kiri snapped back. “But they always do.”
Their two silhouettes were just visible through the frosted glass of the module’s doors, and Paul could see Haley reach out to embrace her friend. “Take it easy,” she was saying. “They’re not all like him.”
Kiri calmed a little. “I’d like to think so. I just don’t like him asking about our ship so much.”
They hugged for a long moment and then made for the door. Paul jumped up quickly and dashed over to sit on the steps which led into the Epsilon. He crossed his legs and feigned a patient posture just before the door opened.
Paul stood as they emerged from the farm, which provided a green backdrop. “I’m sorry,” Haley began.
“I’m not,” Kiri added. Haley scowled at her, but Kiri was unmoved.
“OK,” Paul said, hands up as if in surrender. “Can we all just be completely honest with each other?”
“We haven’t lied to you,” Kiri objected.
“But you haven’t been entirely straight with me, either. You two… You’re not alone here, are you?” Paul asked.
Kiri took an aggressive step forward. “That’s got nothing to do with you,” she rasped.
Haley reached for Kiri’s hand. “Love, please wait a second. He’s just trying to understand our…”
“I think it’s time for you to leave,” Kiri told him.
Hal’s voice was in Paul’s earpiece again. “Tell her that’s impossible.”
“I couldn’t leave,” Paul argued, trying to ignore the machine’s peanut-gallery opinions, “without being sure you would be OK on your own here. We touched down on Triton to see if you needed rescue.”
“Rescue? Rescue!?” Kiri spat. “We have food, and light, and water, and we’re mining the air... do we look like we need rescue?”
Paul took a deep breath. “Well, those are great achievements. But they’ve clearly come too late for the two dead people in the ground, out there.” The two women froze, staring at him. “And perhaps also for whoever that immobile person is, in that module you wouldn’t show me on our tour,” he added, pointing to the far wall.
His sudden, stern tone silenced the two refugees. For a moment, the only sounds within the little complex were the fans which fed air to the farms.
“Haley.... Kiri,” he said, his voice more relaxed now. He addressed them with an open, honest face. “I’m trying to do the right thing.” He reached for the right words at this critical moment. “I’ve spent my whole adult life ensuring that my home planet doesn’t self-destruct. Right now, I’m on a mission to intercept the only thing capable of plunging my race back into an endless dark age. But we heard your signal, and now I’m here. I only want to help you.”
“By stealing from us?” Kiri said, her eyes narrow.
What the hell? “Stealing?” Paul asked, confused. “Stealing what?”
They refused to answer. Hal was there again, in Paul’s ear. “Tell them you’re not going to steal anything. Keep them calm.”
The machine’s interruptions were bothering the hell out of Paul, and he almost decided to take out the earpiece. “Kiri, listen to me. The Phoenix has some of the best engines ever built. There’s an onboard Replicator which can produce anything I ask for. I just need to give it an example, or a design. My ship’s CPU might be a huge pain in the ass sometimes,” he added, “but he’s a quantum supercomputer. Essentially, my best friend and closest colleague is an enlightened genius who knows everything. What could I possibly want to steal from you?”
Haley took Kiri’s hand and looked straight at Paul. “I think we should all sit down together. There has been... well... a pretty serious misunderstanding.”
The ship’s dinner table served well for this parley, which was deliberately delayed for ten minutes while everyone took a breath. Paul used th
ose minutes to lecture Hal on his habit of needlessly interrupting. “Let me just say again,” Paul began, “that I wish you no harm, and that I want to help you if I can.”
“We accept that.” Haley looked hard at her girlfriend. “Don’t we, Kiri?”
She shrugged and Haley squeezed her hand. “Yes, we accept that,” she muttered. “But we’re people who have been through a lot. Don’t test our resolve.”
Paul leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands. “I won’t. I promise. Now, let’s clear a few things up.” He had poured water for them all, and set down glasses before Haley and Kiri, before sipping from his own and placing it calmly on the table. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“To steal our hypersleep technology,” said Kiri with absolute conviction.
On Earth, Paul was known for his eloquence and rhetorical flare. But his response to Kiri’s accusation was little more than a furrowed brow. “Huh?”
She stared at him. “You’re not here for the hibernation technology?”
“I didn’t even know you had it,” Paul explained, entirely honestly. “I guess my faithful ship’s computer omitted to mention it.” He was furious at this deception. So far, he’d kept quiet about his growing rift with Hal, but his anger briefly boiled over. “Sometimes, Hal, you truly are the bloody limit.”
For the first time, the computer spoke. It was a calm voice, slightly metallic, and piped through the Epsilon’s computer and over small speakers mounted on the dining room walls. “Haley and Kiri, I think it’s time for me to introduce myself.”
The two women, faced with a disembodied utterance in their own language, stared around the cabin in perplexed confusion. “Where is that coming from?”
“My name is Hal, and I am accompanying Paul on his journey.”
Haley was staring at Paul, awaiting some kind of context. “This is my computer. His name, as he says, is Hal. He is tremendously powerful but absolutely benign. It is because of him that we have met.”
“I’d like to express how sorry I am for not being honest with you from the beginning,” Hal said. “Our meeting is, I confess, rather more than the happenstance of random events.”
In English, Paul spoke his mind. “Hal, if this is going where I think it’s going, then you’re a complete bastard.”
“But I, for one, welcome such serendipity,” the machine continued. “We are in a position to greatly help each other.”
“Your ship’s computer planned this?” Haley exclaimed. “You’re not working for a huge company, or a government?”
Paul thought back to the Earth and the changes he had brought. “I can promise you that the profit motive is absolutely not among my reasons for being here.”
“But we were right, weren’t we?” Kiri said angrily. “You’re here for the hypersleep modules.”
“All yours, Hal,” Paul said, sitting back and folding his arms.
“Yes,” he said. “This technology would triple or quadruple Paul’s chances of surviving his journey.”
Kiri was putting her agile mind to good use. “But you couldn’t have known we’d have those modules,” she said. “We could have been anyone. Smugglers, or exiled revolutionaries. There was no certainty we’d be colonists with advanced technology.”
“Well,” the supercomputer began, “I ran a lot of numbers. I was able to predict the fate of the Aldebaran, or a ship of its nature, despite the long odds. Given enough time, a colony ship was bound to find itself in trouble, and close enough to our solar system for the survivors to end up here. In fact, I can surmise that it has happened several times before.”
“Hal? Are you kidding me right now?” Paul asked, incredulous.
“Starships have criss-crossed the galaxy since before the formation of the Earth, Paul. Life has already had billions of years had to develop and thrive and spread. Thousands of space-faring civilizations have come and gone. Haley’s colony group aboard the Aldebaran were merely were the latest in an endless flotilla, stretching back down the eons. We’re all searching, Paul,” he finished, rather mystically. “And the sea refuses no river.”
Paul reverted to English for what was his strongest ever reprimand of his computer. “You duplicitous son of a bitch,” he began. “First, you con me into landing way out here, and force me to lie to these two terrified women. You hide your true motives and leave me in the dark, stumbling around on an icy moon with a depressurizing suit. And all you’ve got by way of an explanation is some Zen bullshit?”
Hal said nothing.
“When we’re done on Triton, you and I are going to have a serious talk.”
As Paul gave Hal a piece of his mind, Haley and Kiri were locked in a complex discussion. Their whispered tones were barely audible. Finally, Haley said, “We need some time alone to discuss this. Is your... Is Hal able to hear us, wherever we are?”
Hal reassured them. “I have disabled my microphones and other forms of monitoring. You may speak in complete confidence. Please accept my word of honor,” the machine was at pains to reiterate. Haley and Kiri exchanged a glance and retreated to the far end of the camp, where the dimmed the lights and slid the door closed behind them.
“Yeah, you’re proving to be perfectly trustworthy, aren’t you, old friend?” Paul muttered.
“What’s the problem?” Hal asked. “I made a reasonable guess, and I was right. And now it looks likely we’ll be able to secure some valuable new technology. The kind of thing I can’t produce on board the Phoenix.”
“Why can’t you?” Paul demanded.
“Because the Phoenix is to the Aldebaran as a flintlock musket is to a Predator drone. They’ve mastered time itself, Paul. Their colonization effort would have stalled completely without it. Bashar and Cyto would give anything for a few minutes with their engineers. I’ve never even seen the designs for those modules before. When I scanned the camp from orbit and saw the modules, I knew I had made the correct guess about who they were, and how they ended up here.”
“Congratulations,” Paul said with heavy sarcasm.
“Thank you. It was a real long shot. But the modules are a game-changer for our mission to stop Julius.”
“Great, wonderful. So why the fuck didn’t you tell me all of that before we set down here?”
“Because,” Hal explained, “setting down here might have brought us info conflict with the survivors. I couldn’t guess who they might be, or how many. I mean, you should be very thankful that they turned out to be a pair of attractive women, rather than a squadron of heavily-armed troops.”
“Sure,” Paul quipped. “And they’re both just so into me right now. Notice how they’ve been unable to keep my hands off me since we arrived?”
“It’s better than getting shot at.”
“So,” Paul summed up, “you pictured a dangerous adversary objecting to my stealing their technology. And you figured I’d refuse to have anything to do with that.”
“Yes. There wasn’t a scenario within which you’d agree that violence was worth the acquisition of the technology.”
“Because it isn’t,” Paul shot back.
“I don’t agree.”
Paul pinched the bridge of his nose for a long moment. “Are we about to get into a debate about the ‘needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few’?”
“Probably,” Hal admitted.
“Well, we’re not doing it now. And in the future, you’ve got to discuss these things with me before you send me to fuckin’ Neptune to burgle someone’s tech.”
“You’d have refused,” Hal pointed out. “You’d have reminded me that the Phoenix wouldn’t last long in a fight, and that we were condemning our mission to a disastrous end even before it had properly begun.”
“So you deceived me. And you badly complicated my relationship with Haley and Kiri, who now think I’m the liar.”
Hal either couldn’t understand Paul’s problem with this, or was refusing to. “Everyone will get what they want now,” he countered. “You�
��ve picked up two valuable new traveling companions. I’ll be able to replicate the hypersleep modules and we’ll be able to play with hypersleep-time like a child plays with Lego,” he promised. “Haley and Kiri are going to be rescued from certain death and will now get to see something of the galaxy. Sounds like a huge win-win to me.”
But Paul saw both sides of this exchange, and didn’t like what he saw. “Yeah, that’s undoubtedly wonderful, Hal. But I’ll say it again, because you just aren’t getting it. You lied to me.”
Hal’s retort was unusually savage. “Paul, for a smart guy, you are sometimes unbearably stupid.”
“We’ve decided some things,” Kiri announced as the pair returned to the dining room. Paul took a breath, relaxed his balled fists, and tried to set aside his confrontation with Hal. There would, he knew perfectly well, be more to say later, and plenty of time in which to do it. “We have some questions for you both and we expect truthful answers.”
“No problem. Hal?”
“I will not lie to you,” he said simply.
“That’d be a first,” Paul muttered in English.
“Very well,” said Kiri. “Hal, you made the decision to land here, so we want you to answer this: What was your mission, before you came to Neptune?”
“Very well,” Hal said. “I was activated by a scientist called Cyto, who leads the research team at Holdrian. He ordered me to accompany Paul on his journey back to the Earth, where Paul had given himself a remarkable assignment. Informed that the Earth was heading for environmental and social disaster, he undertook to persuade persuaded humanity to put aside some seriously bad habits, such as polluting their planet and buying non-renewable items that they didn’t need.”
The two women took all of this in. “How did you know that your planet was heading for this disaster?” Haley asked.
Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels) Page 16