“That’s not the most efficient route,” Danny pointed out. He betrayed no signs of emotion at Julius’ arbitrary rejection of a plan which had been a thousand years in the making.
“Prepare to undock in two hours,” Julius instructed him. “After that, I’ll be giving you new instructions for the Orion.”
“Very well. May I update you on our progress against Holdrian’s defense systems?”
“Please do.”
It took time, and Danny went into great detail. Holdrian, he knew, was among the most secretive and best-defended outposts in the galaxy. But no computer had even been given a thousand years to work on methods for defeating it. Danny had been courting, manipulating and quietly usurping the Holdrian defense matrix. The outpost was anticipating the ship’s arrival, but were instructed to take no action.
“The only problem,” Danny admitted, “is that I cannot predict the chances of a spontaneous, human intervention. Once the defenses are breached, our presence may be made known to human operators. In that case, our approach may be seen as a threat, and Holdrian might take action.”
Julius didn’t need to ask what this might mean. The example of Tamur was still ever-present in his mind. But that brave fool was ill-prepared for such a complex mission, whereas Julius had a millennium of research behind him.
“We’ll deal with events as they occur,” Julius assured him. “The Five will guide us to success. Have no fear.”
***
“Two hours, nineteen minutes to arrival.”
“Understood.” Julius sat in his commander’s seat in the main module of Larssen, and waited for the latest in a very long sequence of objections from Danny.
“Julius, I know you’ve requested that I suspend my safety protocols, but I feel that I need to warn you once more…”
“For the thirty-sixth time?” Julius said. He’d kept a count on a notepad. I can’t fault you for trying, Danny. But you just don’t understand.
“The Orion is now ahead of us by 7.26 million miles. Its speed remains unchanged, at 0.86C. At present course and speed…”
“I know, Danny,” Julius said.
“But, captain… I wish you would reconsider…”
“No.”
“But…”
“Suspend,” Julius instructed the worried machine. “Anything new from Holdrian?”
“No, captain,” Danny reported. “The defenses continue to anticipate the arrival of both Orion and Larssen as though both are visiting dignitaries. No action will be taken.”
“Excellent.”
“But I cannot imagine this will remain true for much longer.”
“Why, Danny?” Julius asked. His skin was tingling in anticipation, a sensation he’d been enjoying for the last few hours. Whatever digital magic Danny had wrought was, so far, proving sufficient to unlock the armor protecting the most secret, and by far the most evil, of all places.
“Because of the level of danger the Orion presents.”
There were a hundred reasons why it shouldn’t have happened, but as the clock ticked and Orion barreled along its course, pulsing its maneuvering thrusters slightly to make minute adjustments, time was running out for the inventors of time travel.
“One hour and six minutes until our own arrival, Julius,” Danny said, concern now clearly inflecting his tone, “but only ninety seconds until Orion will reach Holdrian.”
“Understood.” The tingling had reached his feet, and he could barely sit still now.
“Julius, I wish you would allow me to take emergency evasive action,” Danny pleaded.
“No.”
“I can’t imagine,” Danny continued, “that you’ve really thought this through.”
“There will be no course change, Danny,” Julius responded.
“Forty seconds until…” The machine was programmed to announce ‘arrival’, but this was hardly suitable. “Thirty seconds until impact.”
“Very well. Please put Holdrian on the main viewer, Danny. I’d like to see it.”
The image flickered briefly and then showed a slowly rotating, metal sphere, perhaps seven thousand miles across. It was perennially in full, planet-wide sunlight, thanks to an array of orbiting mirrors which gathered and focused the ambient light from thousands of nearby stars. Holdrian was surrounded by a cloud of moonlets, ships and artificial satellites too numerous to count. Three gigantic solar farms, each over a thousand miles across, glittered in its orbit. And on the near side, a purple storm of lights told Julius that these evil-doers were distorting time, even now, as their own existence was in such peril. The Orion would fly within a few hundred miles of the purple cloud, on its way to annihilation.
“A maximum-thrust burn would achieve only an seven hundred mile separation… five-fifty… three-twenty…” Danny told him.
“No burn, Danny,” Julius insisted. “Did the virus complete its work?”
“Yes, but, Julius, please. The ship will be…”
“Completely destroyed,” Julius said. “Yes, I know. Did the virus return the data I asked for?
“It did. But please consider Holdrian. It is a unique example of…”
Alarms sounded, a deafening blaring which Julius ignored. An emergency recording began: “Proximity alert. Impending collision. Proximity alert…”
“No action, Danny.”
“Eight seconds to impact! Please, let me pulse the Orion’s engines!”
“Stand down, Danny. That’s an order.” Still, his voice had not risen above conversational pitch. Nothing in his tone spoke of the shattering emergency he was perpetrating. And none among the tiny staff overseeing Holdrian’s metallic, planet-sized sphere of laboratories and docks, synthesis plants and research modules, storage tanks and power systems, none of them saw the mile-long missile until it was far too late.
“Three… two… one…
Orion struck the planet at its equator, traveling at over 570,000,000 miles per hour.
Every molecule of Holdrian was instantly scattered. There was a titanic flash which birthed a blooming hemisphere of debris, expanding at near lightspeed from the impact point. Nothing in orbit on the far side of Holdrian could survive the lethal cloud of shrapnel. Nearly a billion tons of atomized, hurtling fragments consumed the mini-system, its host of attendant moons and manmade satellites, is refueling infrastructure, its off-planet labs, its communications and defense arrays, and its giant solar farms. In less than the blink of an eye, nothing but obliterated shards of wreckage remained.
Except, twinkling uncertainly among the spinning fragments of the carnage, were uncertain purple lights. They flashed and pulsed, apparently confused and knocked off their rhythm by the Orion’s obliterating assault. Then they settled and awaited what might come next.
“The Chrono-Vortex,” he breathed, staring at the purple cloud. “It survived.”
***
Chapter 28 – Through The Rings
Aboard the Phoenix
Approaching Clarion
All was quiet aboard the Phoenix. Hal remained mute, as he had been ordered, permitting Paul and Garlidan this important time to practice. From what he’d overheard and seen, the process of preparing for their arrival at Clarion had not been without its bumps in the road.
“Let’s try again,” Garlidan said. “I only wish Mistress Eliria were here to help, but she insisted that I be the one to impart this particular wisdom.”
The two men rotated very slowly in the mid-deck of Phoenix, which now served the same role as the meditation modules on Eliria’s station. Hal eliminated all extraneous noise – fans, pumps and the like – so that his passengers could focus purely and entirely on their breathing.
“I’m doing my best, Garlidan,” Paul protested. “I know the kind of focus you mean, and I can bring it to my breath,” he explained, “for about eight or ten breaths. But then…”
“Thought intervenes. I know, dear boy, I know. The mind is an unquiet place. Rumination and speculation and memory and desire, all see
k to crowd out the calmness with their clamor.”
Paul stretched. Even in zero-G, keeping the same cross-legged posture for forty minutes at a time, as Garlidan insisted, was hard work for his muscles. “I’ve tried yelling at those thoughts,” he explained.
Garlidan chuckled. “Yelling at them?”
“Yeah, you know, in my own mind,” Paul told him. “Hey, you! You’re a thought! You’re not welcome here, so fuck off!”
This gave the old man a good laugh. “Oh, my dear boy. Does that feel, to you, like the response of a calm and unruffled meditator?”
Paul smirked. “Not really.”
“Guide those thoughts away, rather than chasing them. Observe them float past, like a cloud on a windy day.”
Paul nodded and resumed the posture. “I like that. Let me try it.”
They were silent for another hour as Paul worked on the time-honored and hard-won principle of ‘non-attachment’. Garlidan’s advice rang in his ears whenever he found himself distracted. Which was often; thoughts of food, cocktails, impressive vistas, beautiful women, and of course sex arrived in his mind in a sporadic trickle. Paul gradually learned not to seize each one and interrogate it: ‘why are you here? Can’t you see I’m trying to meditate, for Christ’s sake?’
Instead, he let them go, let them pass like clouds, like pedestrians in a crowd. Like the meaningless drivel they truly were.
“Better?” Garlidan asked. “You seem better. More focused. Let’s have some tea.”
Hal spun the Phoenix to simulate 0.85G and the Replicator produced a Ming dynasty teapot, steaming with the aroma of jasmine. “Yeah,” Paul said, words coming slowly after such mental effort. Strangely, it was the effort of trying not to think which tired him the most. “Yeah, a little better. Whenever I think of something, I just try to…”
“Let it go. Don’t even try. Permit its passing. Let its departure be as smooth and inevitable as was its arrival.”
Paul sipped his tea and stared for a moment out of the cockpit windows. Hal was about to reverse the spacecraft for their deceleration burn, but for the moment, Clarion remained a bright point of light, dead ahead. “Garlidan?”
“Hmm?” the old man asked, blowing a pleasing wave form across the surface of his teacup.
“How am I going to get home?” Paul asked a little sheepishly.
Garlidan looked at him across the rim of the teacup. “Is that bothering you?”
“I don’t think I’d be human if it didn’t. I know I’m a hell of a long way from home, and I know that’s where Falik will be. Hal has told me not to worry, but you know what he’s like,” Paul quipped.
“I do,” Garlidan answered, entirely sincere. “He’s probably the most perfect computational and decision-making machine in the history of the galaxy.”
“So I should trust him?” Paul asked. “I mean, he did some pretty weird things on our way here.”
“Did he endanger you?” Garlidan asked, taking another sip.
“Well, a bit, yes. But that was mostly my fault. I should have looked where I was going on that shitty, icy surface.”
“Has he given you any reason to doubt his abilities?” Garlidan asked next.
Paul thought long and hard about this. “Abilities? No. But loyalties,” Paul said pointedly, “yeah. I think I have some concerns about that.”
“Don’t,” Garlidan said simply. “I want you to relax about Hal. He loves you, actually. There’s no way he’d allow anything bad to happen.”
Paul considered this while they finished their tea. “So, he’s not becoming a little unpredictable in his old age?”
“He’s maturing,” Garlidan explained. “He’s communicating with you, I think you’ll agree, better than he ever has.”
“Yes, when he’s not hiding important truths,” Paul argued.
“Let it go. Consider only the present moment. Trust the rest to people who love and admire you. Come on, let’s get back to it.”
Hal nulled the roll and the gravity quickly ebbed away. They resumed their posture and their calm focus on a single object: the breath. Towards the end of the hour, Paul noticed that his mind was playing new tricks on him, bringing up a range of music, movie quotes and personal memories seemingly designed to entertain him, to alleviate what his mind saw as an unacceptable level of boredom.
But there was something else, too. In those final few hours before arriving at Clarion, Paul could have sworn that his own neural networks, the channels for his thoughts and emotions, were being streamlined and honed. Garlidan had promised physical changes, and Paul thought he could literally feel them beginning. Every thought and action seemed couched in a very slightly greater amount of time, as though he’d previously been rushing his way through life, but was now abiding by the steady pulse of the universe around him. No longer at odds with it, he’d begun to move and think in a way which agreed with it.
And as they practiced, serene and silent in the cabin of the Phoenix, they approached the outer part of Clarion’s ring system.
***
Paul stared out of the cockpit windows, agog. “I know I should probably say something more eloquent at a moment like this,” Paul admitted, “but… Holy shit, Garlidan.”
“Grand, isn’t it?” the old man said. “A spectacular creation. So deliberate and refined.”
“Creation?” Paul muttered. “Someone designed and made this?”
“Many people,” Garlidan told him. “Over many millennia.”
Faced with what he could see, Paul found the very notion of human agency utterly ridiculous.
Clarion was surrounded by a ring system of staggering size and complexity. It was well over a hundred times broader than the gleaming bands of ice and rock which surrounded Saturn. Thick, iridescent fields, spun over the millennia into a giant, mesmerizing disc, encircled the planet. They protected Clarion, shielding it from unwelcome outsiders and errant comets.
“There’s more water ice in those rings,” Garlidan pointed out, “than in the entirety of your solar system.”
“Jesus,” Paul breathed.
“Their numbers are in constant flux, obviously, but there are sixteen thousand moons. Nearly eight hundred are larger than the Earth’s moon.”
Paul’s mind boggled, straining to contemplate even a tiny fraction of the absurd vista before him. There were more objects here, of a myriad sizes and shapes, spinning and colliding and merging and forming, than Paul could ever have conceived existed in a galaxy. And yet, they formed only the outermost layers of a system of shield-rings which was some hundred and fifty million miles across.
“Are any of the moons inhabited?” Paul asked. Surely, he thought, such a vast system would host a population numbering in the trillions.
“Right now?’ Garlidan asked.
“How do you mean?”
“The population rather depends on the retreatants,” Garlidan explained.
“The who?”
“Those who come to Clarion. They are a very, very select group, Paul. I don’t think the system has ever hosted more than eighty people at once. At the moment there are around thirty-five. As of this evening, there will be thirty-seven,” he smiled.
“Or thirty-eight, if I may be so bold as to include myself,’ Hal said.
Paul could see now that the ring divisions were not entirely empty. Large moons swept these empty bands, enduring endless impacts and, he could see, occasionally shattering into rocky smears of debris within the otherwise empty ring spaces. He counted over a hundred divisions. Focusing on the rings became a meditative practice in itself; they had little to do as Hal guided them in. After a while, Paul began to see patterns emerging in the complex spatial relationships within the rings, with spokes and regular striations within the material of the rings.
“Harmonic resonance,” Garlidan told him after Paul had become curious enough to ask. “The physics of music, played out here in rock and ice and empty space.” More than one musician, Paul was told, had made his way to Cl
arion to study the Harmony of the Spheres, that elemental family of ratios which are both naturally occurring and pleasing to the human ear. “He found that the rings are ‘singing’, in a way,” Garlidan explained. “He left the commune to live on one of the larger ring fragments. That was nearly a thousand years ago. I suppose,” the old man said wistfully, “he’s still there, working on a composition, or just listening to the ethereal music surrounding him.”
Hal brought the Phoenix into the Clarion system on a trajectory which was tilted to the crowded ecliptic plain, the better to avoid collisions. He proceeded steadily, aware of the singular nature of their visit. As they passed over the inner divisions, he alerted Garlidan.
“We’re receiving a welcome message.”
“Relay it, please,” Garlidan said. He was gathering his few belongings and packing them into a leather satchel.
“Peace, tranquility and love,” the voice came. It was clear and firm but approachable, like that of a parish priest, Paul thought. “These are our values, and the only ones we would seek to impose upon others. Do you affirm these simple truths to be your own, also?”
“We do,” Garlidan said.
“Very well. Approach and dock where you please. You will be met.”
As they closed on the planet itself, passing the final icy bands of the inner ring system, Paul saw that Clarion was a strange amalgam of Araj Kitel and Holdrian. It was a bespoke planet, rocky and oceanic, green and brown and white. It was both familiar and alien, as if a jigsaw puzzle of the Earth had been scrambled and rearranged. But in orbit around this serene, blue-green ball were a host of gleaming structures, and Paul quickly concluded that Clarion had at least six space elevators, and that their stations were all linked by a giant donut-shaped ring which ran concentric to the equator of the planet.
“That’s a hell of an orbital infrastructure,” Paul said, “for a planet with such a tiny population.”
One of the orbiting stations was their destination, he saw. Phoenix burned into a geostationary orbit above the planet’s equator. Hal nudged them into a neat docking with one of the stations, a glittering horseshoe of metal attached to a cable which stretched 50,000 miles and more, down to the surface.
Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels) Page 33