Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels)

by C. Paul Lockman

  “I am angry!” the computer yelled.

  “I can tell,” Paul replied softly. “And whatever supercomputers do in those situations where humans might just take a deep breath and count to ten, I want you to do that.”

  “I don’t think that will help,” Hal replied.

  “OK,” Paul said, “let’s try this. I want you to suspend all non-essential calculation for ten seconds. Can you do that?”

  His tone remained gruff. “Yes. Complying.” Paul’s mind raced during this quiet time. Could Hal become emotional? If so, could that morph into an emotional instability? He knew almost nothing about Hal’s original manufacture, he realized. Cyto had just told him to trust the machine to make the correct choice, even in the most dire or complex of scenarios. Yet he had confessed to feeling anger. It made Paul’s hairs stand on end.

  “Hal, you may resume computation. As you do so, please tell me why you’re upset. Is it your discussion with Anne?”

  “Of course. She replied illogically and denied me the opportunity to try the reanimation procedure.”

  Paul suddenly got it. “You had been looking forward to that, hadn’t you?”

  “It provided a challenge far more satisfying than designing plants. It could really make a difference.”

  Paul poured himself a glass of tea from the galley’s small Replicator. “Hal, we’re in the distant past, right?”

  “Still some 2000 years before our datum, 2034,” he answered crisply.

  “Well, what happens when you start reanimating the dead?”

  “They are given a second chance...”

  “I know all of that,” he interrupted. “But say you resurrect Anne’s husband. Couples do what couples do when they’re cooped up for ages together, and they wind up having kids. And those kids survive their parents are rescued in forty years by… I don’t know, maybe a passing survey ship. What happens then?”

  “I don’t see your point,” the machine said evasively.

  “Their DNA enters a gene pool it has no business entering,” Paul said sternly. “You corrupt the established flow of events. People would then be born when they are not meant to be. Societies would very subtly shift. Politics would be pulled one way or the other. Tiny events like this could have inter-galactic impact. Do you understand?”

  “Of course,” he replied, his tone more measured.

  “Then Hal, for the love of God, why are we here, messing with these refugees? Julius is still out there, right now.”

  “Well, strictly speaking, he will be out there in about twenty centuries’ time.”

  “Whatever, Hal. He’s a crazy bastard who wants to destroy all that is good in the Earth’s future. Can’t we leave this minefield and chase him down?”

  “I have orders,” Hal said, without ceremony.

  “Well, they’re not from me.”

  “No, they are not.”

  Paul frowned angrily at the machine. Why didn’t I suspect this before? He considered pressing Hal as to who was truly in charge, but instead stood and grabbed his suit helmet. “Hal, I’m going to walk over to the camp and tell the girls that we’ll be ready to go in twelve hours. And by then, when we finally leave this frozen piece-of-shit moon, you’ll have explained exactly what the fuck is going on here.” He snatched up his gloves and hurriedly dressed for the short traverse across Triton’s unforgiving ice.

  ***

  “It really is great to see you looking so well.”

  Paul and Anne sat on benches, each one side of the farm’s small access path. “I guess any improvement on where I was can be considered a major success,” Anne admitted. “I wouldn’t care to go back there again.”

  “Hal is a miracle worker,” Paul offered, still inwardly frustrated with the genius machine and his backroom connivances.

  They walked slowly through the farm together. Anne’s sickly emaciation had given way to a healthier, more robust look which spoke of good nutrition and exercise, and her footfalls were sure and even on the farm’s plastic flooring. They reached another bench and sat once more.

  “Paul, I’m happy that you’re able to take Haley and Kiri from here. It will certainly be a better life for them.”

  He nodded. “I’ll take them back to Earth, or wherever they want to go, as soon as we have completed our mission.”

  Anne began awkwardly. “They are in a relationship. You should know that. A romantic relationship,” she clarified.

  Paul cleared his throat. “I really don’t have any plans in that direction,” he said. “To me, they are refugees, being transported to safety.”

  “And I’m very grateful for your help,” she said again.

  “If I may?” Hal intervened politely.

  “Sure, Hal,” Paul said. Provided you’re not going to propose turning her husband into a zombie again.

  “We ask only one thing in return,” Hal said.

  “Oh? And what is that?” Anne asked.

  “The fulfillment of potential,” Hal said, rather dryly. “You have enormous abilities in the fields of microbiology and genetics.”

  Anne reddened slightly. “That’s very kind of you, Hal, but I am many light-years from my lab.”

  “Anne, one of the first duties of a scientist is to ensure accuracy. I must fault you on this occasion.”

  “I’m sorry?” she asked, confused.

  “Take a look in the fourth module.” They stood together and headed toward it and, as they approached, the door swished open. Instead of storage shelves and tankage, the module now held a state-of-the-art microbiology lab. There were large screens and wireless lecterns, microscopes and centrifuges, a whole a host of high-end equipment. It was necessarily small, but to Anne it was the best lab setup she could ever have imagined.

  “A lifetime of achievement,” Hal said. “That is what you will provide, in exchange for the girls’ safe passage.” Anne was speechless. “You will have access to every journal in the galactic archive, for this and every other year,” Hal promised. “Replicators will produce whatever precursor chemicals, seed stock or equipment you might need. And I’ll always be around if you need me.”

  They left Anne to wander her new lab space, her face lit up as though her birthday had come early. “This is what I’m talking about, Hal,” Paul told the machine, his voice troubled. “You’re changing the timeline in important ways. I mean, I’m sure she’ll make some great discoveries with that setup, but they wouldn’t have happened without our landing here. In fact, they’d all have been dead in a few years. “

  “And this, on balance, is a better outcome, don’t you think?” Hal countered.

  “That’s not the point,” Paul said.

  “It is precisely the point. Humanity will now succeed in ways it otherwise wouldn’t. Our whole mission is impelled by that same directive.”

  “But now she’ll live for decades more than she should.”

  “And humanity has somehow survived into 2034, when by rights it should have been overtaken by nuclear catastrophe and disastrous climate change. You had no problem signing up for altering that particular outcome.”

  “OK,” Paul sighed, “you’ve got me there. Turns out we’re both hypocrites.”

  From the new Replicator installed in the lab’s wall came a cocktail glass, brimming with a Martini.

  Paul raised it. “What are we drinking to, you son of a bitch?”

  “Here’s to hypocrisy,” Hal quipped, “and the ceaseless good which comes from it.”

  ***

  The crucial day was on them quickly. Hal’s robots finished the next stage of their modifications to the base, installing a small fitness facility and a sauna. Anne already had a galaxy-class electronic library and a Takanli brain-cap for accelerated learning. The base communications system had been hugely boosted, allowing Anne sub-space contact throughout the galaxy. The possibilities became laid before her like a jeweled carpet; only this saved her from the savage pain of separation.

  Haley was nervous to be moving on
, her heart aching for her mother, while Kiri was simply nervous about the unknowns which lay ahead. But these anxieties hardly dampened their enthusiasm for departure; too much was promised for them to seriously consider staying. Mostly, they were both just worried about Anne. She and Hal were full of assurances that Anne would flourish and enjoy a bright future of learning and writing, but they couldn’t help shuddering as they imagined her there, for decades, so entirely alone.

  Paul let the goodbyes last as long as he dared before sensitively shepherding the girls to the airlock. Anne had composed final advice for her daughter and whispered it caringly into her ear as they hugged closely, tightly, one last time. Anne kissed her and they pressed foreheads together, whispering final thoughts as Kiri found her way into the airlock and began donning her suit.

  “Be compassionate among the stars,” she advised quietly. “And don’t worry about being poor, or being rich. You know now that love is the only currency that matters. Become rich in it, Haley. And be safe.”

  She watched on the camp’s new external cameras as the three suited figures stepped carefully along the craggy pathway which led to the Phoenix. The ramp lowered and they made their way inside. Across the chaotic ice of this remote moon, she saw them waving. Then they were rising in their ship, accelerating into the darkness, and were gone.

  She sat and cried for long minutes. But then something made her stand, brush off her beta-cloth overalls and allow a calm, sure sense of purpose fill her up. Her hands clasped together and there were the beginnings of a smile. “Right,” she said to herself, and strode into the farm.

  ***

  Paul had to admit that, with the three of them bouncing around in zero-G, and their gear not yet properly stowed, the Phoenix was just a little cramped. He encouraged the two women, who were buzzing with excitement as the ship left the Neptune system, to tidy everything up and meet him around the table in the ship’s galley for their pre-sleep meal.

  He was very reassured to find Haley and Kiri entirely unphased by the thought of hypersleep. “If the Aldebaran had kept going,” Haley explained, “we’d have entered hypersleep and stayed there for about six hundred of your years.”

  Paul whistled. “And that was considered safe?” he wondered.

  “That was considered routine,” Kiri told him. “Both our home planets belonged to a federation. A kind of loose political union of planets and off-world habitats,” she explained. “The federation sent colony ships all over the place, over a period of… what would it be…?”

  Haley did some quick mental math. “Ten thousand years or more,” she calculated. “We ended up seeding about three hundred planets and moons, with plans to seed thousands more. Each would receive four or five waves of colonists, each bringing a million tons of supplies and equipment.”

  “Jesus, you guys don’t think small, do you?” The Phoenix, Paul found, was very much Minor League compared to the giant colony ships sent out by the federation. Even Daedalus, at maximum capacity, would have been hard pushed to haul even five percent of the Aldebaran’s cargo.

  “So,” Kiri said, “your planet is called Earth, right?”

  “The one and only,” Paul confirmed.

  “And is it part of a federation, like our planet?”

  “Nope,” Paul answered. “Until a few years ago, no one on Earth had concrete proof that we weren’t the only abode of life. Hell, we only starting discovering planets around other stars when I was a kid.”

  If the two women found Earth to be backward, neither said so. “But now it’s different? Now they know?” asked Kiri.

  Paul sipped the giant smoothie which was constituted his pre-sleep meal. “Well, yeah. That was down to me, I’m afraid.”

  “You initiated first contact?” Haley asked, surprised.

  “Not exactly. I was snatched up from a hilltop by the Lawrence, a Takanli science vessel. I returned to the exact same spot, a few hours later, after my time-travel trip from Holdrian.” This much he had already explained. “But I brought back Hal and a huge range of Takanli tech. Eventually, as I became pretty famous and started to bend the rules a little, I was forced to admit that I hadn’t invented all the technology I was using.”

  “Forced to?” Kiri asked. “Why?”

  “There was,” Paul recalled with a slight grin, “a pretty memorable incident in Washington, D.C., the capital of one of Earth’s most important countries.”

  Kiri stared at him. “Did you use alien technology without warning people?”

  “I didn’t really have a choice,” Paul said. “The government was about to take down a really important project I had started, and the only way to defend it was to openly use Hal and some pretty far-out technology.” He briefly described his retreat from Capitol Hill under the encircling Blue Sphere, dragging Beasley and that cute journalist to the Mall before taking off in the Phoenix. “That pretty much blew people’s minds.”

  “No kidding!” Haley laughed.

  “After that, there was nothing else we could do. Hal sent emissaries down to every major public space and they started educating the public about Takanli, and the technologies they’d given us.”

  Kiri sipped her own smoothie, a banana concoction packed with nutrients and amino acids which would help keep her alive during hypersleep. “Did it work? Do Earth people understand, now?”

  Paul wondered quite how to put it. Earth would become a new home to Haley and Kiri, unless they changed their minds, and Paul didn’t want to represent his home planet in a poor light. “More or less,” he equivocated. “There are still some people who ascribe all of these events to mystical causes.”

  They stared at him, completely blank.

  “You know, God and such.”

  “Who’s God?” they asked together.

  There’s a question for the ages. “A lot of humans still believe that the universe had a conscious creator who now rules over us,” Paul explained.

  Haley set down her smoothie. “That’s kinda ridiculous,” she said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you this,” Paul said, motioning to the Replicator for a refill. “I’ve learned that, whatever the facts might tell us, what really governs human behavior, and the way they understand the universe, is their beliefs. And we have to respect those, even if they’re patently crazy.”

  They were nodding, he saw. “Our education system promotes a similar idea,” Haley said. “But there are colonies which claim that their original inhabitants…”

  “Their seeds, we call them,” Kiri said.

  “That their seeds were sent by a supernatural being. Or even by the stars themselves.”

  “Yeah,” Kiri confirmed. “There’s a lot of star worship, for some reason. If colonies get themselves cut off, maybe by an accident or something, or suffer catastrophic data loss because of a big electro-magnetic storm, or a war, then they sometimes end up reaching for those philosophies to help make sense of where they came from.”

  Haley was nodding. “We learned about a colony which entirely lost its collective memory of where it had originated from, and replaced it with a really colorful storytelling tradition.”

  “Fun stories,” Kiri agreed.

  “But completely unrelated to the truth,” Haley pointed out.

  Paul smiled. “The best ones often are.”

  It was time, they knew, to prepare for hypersleep. Hal had vetoed any further exploration of the Sol system, including an enterprising plan to bury a hilarious message under the surface on Mars, right where they knew the Viking 2 lander would arrive in 1976. “Oh, come on,” Paul complained. “What’s the point in going all this way if we can’t have a little fun?”

  “You’re a blithering idiot,” Hal retorted, “and you’ve learned nothing from all my patient explanations about observing the sanctity of the space-time continuum. This isn’t Back To The Future, you know.”

  Paul relented and helped his two passengers make their final preparations. As they were finishing up, with the Phoenix neat and tidy, Ha
ley made a quiet, red-faced request.

  “Sure,” Paul said, and retreated to the cockpit, where he drew down a curtain which gave the two women complete privacy. Paul spent the next hour trying his best not to visualize their two beautiful, naked forms, entwined around each other in zero-G, indulging in the last sex they would have for nearly three centuries. They were quiet, for the most part, but there are some sounds, Paul found, which are absolutely unmistakable.

  Once satisfied, the women asked for his help to strap into their hypersleep modules. Dressed in white underwear and nestled comfortably into the soft, foam interior, they were rendered almost immobile as the reactive polymer foam began slowly to harden around them. Neither found this uncomfortable, especially as the sedation process began as soon as their bodies were molded to the polymer.

  This miraculous substance played a key role, Paul knew, although he also found it faintly ridiculous. The only thing which would shake the passengers up would be a collision, and at 99.98% of the speed of light, they couldn’t hope to survive an impact. Still, he spoke calmly to them as they became increasingly sleepy and the polymer hardened around them, obscuring all but their faces and a patch of skin around the heart, where sensors were attached. They both managed a few words before drifting off. Haley wished him good luck. Kiri thanked him for getting them off Triton. And then the modules were sealed and Paul was alone.

  He strapped himself into the pilot’s seat. The ship’s artificial horizon was level, absent its usual gravity-inducing roll. Remaining in zero-g throughout the long cruise would place less pressure on essential systems, and waking up in zero gravity was more comfortable. Besides, the two new modules were mounted on the cabin’s ceiling, on either side of his own, and this way, they wouldn’t wake up with the sensation that they were about to fall. He glanced back at the still unfamiliar, redesigned interior of the Phoenix, with its two sleeping women. His own hypersleep module – a significant upgrade on the simpler unit in which he had traveled home to 2008 – remained on the central ceiling panel of the ship’s cabin. It awaited him, but he was not yet ready.