“I do,” Paul admitted. “I just wish there weren’t so many uncertainties about the future. I mean,” he said, “I know it’s just speculation and guesswork.”
“Would you prefer to just stop guessing?” Garlidan asked.
“Of course. But the thought of their fate… it terrifies me, Garlidan.”
“Why such fear?” the old man asked. “The ship is run by smart people, and they’re in touch with Hal and his Delegates. They have all the information.”
“But… They’ll be catastrophically late,” Paul underlined. “And neither you nor I can know what a paradox would do to them.”
Garlidan put a warm hand on Paul’s shoulder. “There will be no paradox,” he said mildly.
The acidic ball of worry in Paul’s gut eased, enough for him to feel it. “How?” he asked, but then Garlidan’s smile was more than enough. “You’ve helped them, haven’t you?”
Garlidan explained what he had done, not without a hint of pride. “Hal relayed the message about Julius’ arrival, and the need to accelerate the Daedalus. But within the message was a set of coordinates. A back-up plan, actually.”
It took only a moment. “A Vortex.”
“They bought themselves a few extra days. Even if your own mission fails, and Julius arrives on time, Daedalus will already be in orbit before him. Like I said, no paradox.”
“But he’ll still pose a huge danger to Daedalus. I mean, the Takanlians are the ones who gave me access to Holdrian…”
“Well, that was me,” Garlidan admitted. “But Julius won’t know that. Still, it’s all the more reason to ensure that your mission is a success, wouldn’t you say?”
They spent the rest of the evening in silence. When Paul turned to say goodnight before heading back to his simple cabin by the lake, Garlidan was nowhere to be seen.
***
Paul became slender and then thin, but never seemed to show signs of ageing, even as months turned to years. His skin remained bright and clean. His teeth seemed to need little care. The joint pain after a long session of sitting seemed to recede more and more quickly. Eventually, even after a monstrous, eight-hour sit, there was barely any pain at all. He learned to breathe through the afflicted joint, imagining a healing current of air and energy coursing through it, and the discomfort quickly eased.
Then he was spending each day in a single, glorious session of meditation. He would wake, swim in the lake to help bring his alertness to its peak, and then sit on his cushion for twelve straight hours without moving. Thousands of breaths passed in this way, but there was very little thought. Each day brought fewer interruptions from the ‘mendacious impresario of the mind’, as Brown Cloud called it. Paul found that he could command his attention over very extended periods, bringing a complete focus to his own body, inch by inch, moving it through his toes and feet, his shins and legs, his hips and back, his arms and chest and skull, in a two-hour long scan of his entire corporeal self.
Each time became longer, more detailed, more rewarding. His body became an antenna for the perception of reality, like his senses.
He slept only two hours a night, rising refreshed each morning to swim and stretch and sit.
Years passed in this comforting, rigorous routine.
***
Then the day came when he noticed a single oxygen atom. It was while he was nearing the end of what had become a relatively routine thirty-four hour sit, there at his lakeside retreat.
He knew already that millions of oxygen atoms entered his body during each slow, deep breath. But this atom held his attention more than the others, not because of what it was, but because of what it seemed to signify. Paul recognized it immediately, although routinely identified the passage of an individual atom through his nose and into his lungs. His focus became so intense, his perceptions so finely honed, that he could tell the fractions of the air entering his body, one from the other. Oxygen and nitrogen felt different. There was a day, a few years before, when he’d consciously inhaled argon for the first time, and noted its qualities.
This was all he did. Breathe, deep and slow, and notice with an unwavering attention. Atoms were brought in, were exhaled, and Paul would trace their movement. A single breath, ignorable for much of his life, was now anything but. It was a sprawling symphony, a drawn-out tribute to the wonderfully slow passage of time. Those seconds became slower and slower with each year, until they were a small universe. A tiny, infinite space to be explored and appreciated, atom by atom.
But this one oxygen atom held his attention in a way he’d never felt before. It was, in fact, a unique moment in these sixteen years of practice.
Because Paul felt the atom before it reached the surface of his skin.
He felt its weight, knew its properties, tracked its motion through space, long milliseconds before it entered his nose.
And once a single atom suggested itself in this way, many others offered themselves to his senses. Oxygen atoms all throughout the space occupied by the lake, his temple, and the forest appeared now as yet another field of energy and vibration. Their presence was added to the layers upon layers of fields already known to him. The magnetism of the planet’s core, and the way it interacted with his own personal energy field; this had been the first of his ‘field days’ as he liked to call them, twelve years before. Then other forms of radiation. Temperature maps. He could feel every form of energy within this space, and now even the atoms of the air were part of his experience.
And then the water molecules in the lake. And those in the sky above.
And then the carbon in the trees, and the very chlorophyll in their leaves.
He exulted in a silent moment of utter joy.
The sensations continued. He could not stop this great expansion of his mind, this glorious melding of it with every other particle. The realizations came in a great galloping stream of beauty, each an addition to his perception of his surroundings. Soon, he was aware of so much else that it almost overwhelmed him. He perceived the great, spherical rock on which he sat, and how it was moving through space in a lazy, billion-year journey around the galactic center.
He felt Clarion’s connection to the core of the Milky Way. And then he felt the galaxy itself, and he had to cry out.
Garlidan was there.
Paul knew this, of course. He felt a star dying, a million light years away, and another being born, twice as far from him, as clearly as he felt the old man kneeling by his side. Paul felt every vibration which constituted Garlidan’s mind. He felt his friend’s nervous system quietly humming, and knew every atom of his body as though it were his own.
“Yes,” Garlidan said. “Yes.”
Each breath now was a jubilant chorus of knowing. Every particle of the universe called to him at once, but none were crowded out. It was a great, symphonic completeness.
“The Totality,” Garlidan told him. “Breathe with it, Paul.” It was the first sentence Paul had heard spoken in over four years. But it needed no reply.
A galaxy of energy careered into Paul’s body with each breath. And each exhalation was the returning of that same energy, untransformed. For it was true, as Paul came suddenly to know, that the energy around him was him. That the stars at the edge of everything were as close to him as the lake by which he sat, as the blood in his veins, as the electric storm in his mind. He and they were one.
He and everything became one.
THAT’S GOOD, PAUL.
The lakeside retreat, a place of utter silence for years on end, heard the jubilant laughter of the newly enlightened spirit.
***
They stood together by the lake, looking over its calm surface to the silent woods beyond. Garlidan would leave him soon, he knew. They stood quietly. There was little need to speak, except to say goodbye.
“There is a ship,” he told Paul. “We’re going to return the Old One to Andromeda. I would invite you, but I know that you have work elsewhere.”
Paul turned to the old schemer, th
is guide and friend who had taken Paul’s life and made it truly extraordinary, and hugged him. “Sail true, old friend.”
“And you. Do what you must, and then bring Earth just a little of what you have found.”
Garlidan’s ship was the size of a planet, with engines the breadth of oceans. Those who left Clarion, never more than a handful in each century, were inheritors of a sacred task: to spread life to every corner of the Universe. They seeded Haley’s home planet, and the Earth, and a thousand others across the Milky Way. But now it was time to bring consciousness to a new galaxy.
As the great ship departed, it unfurled a solar sail, one so enormous that for weeks after, it cast a diminishing shadow on Clarion’s glittering seas. And then the great ‘seed ship’ outpaced light itself, and receded into the stellar mists.
Time patiently watched over it as it was flung across the silent ocean between the galaxies.
BE SAFE.
“I will. And thank you.”
BE OF SERVICE TO OTHER BEINGS. WATCH OVER THEM. BRING NO HARM. LOVE EVERYONE.
Then Paul was gone.
***
Chapter 30 – Possible Worlds
In deep space, close to the Holdrian debris disc
The worm had done its work even better than Julius had hoped.
“This is excellent, Danny. The only decision is where to begin.”
Julius was reading through a list which had been culled from data within Holdrian’s mainframe. No other copy existed, nor could it, given the wholesale destruction of the outpost’s computer network. It was a list of every known time travel experiment ever undertaken in the Milky Way.
There were over a hundred entries. Most were purely scientific, and followed the same format. A research vessel would be sent through a Chrono Vortex, and arrive back a few moments after its departure. But the onboard clock would prove that those moments had never elapsed on board the vessel. It had skipped over them, and arrived in its own future.
A handful, Julius found, were more thoroughgoing attempts to circumvent the laws of the Pentastria. Devious teams of scientists were sending back emissaries to the past in order to change the present. By far the most frivolous of these, he found, was a foul piece of deception dreamed up by Bashar, Cyto and a rich, powerful agent named Garlidan. A guinea pig was sent back through time, and then encouraged to journey to his home planet and begin manipulating the accepted course of events.
Just reading about this affront to The Five made his blood boil.
Of course, Julius knew, he could simply travel back himself, and engineer the destruction of Holdrian at a far earlier date. The damnable experiments which were an unforgivable insult to The Five had begun nearly ten thousand years earlier, and required huge amounts of energy and extensive trial and error.
But in those ten thousands years, most of what had happened at Holdrian was merely research. The Five would have frowned upon it, but perhaps taken no direct action. It was those who used this research to besmirch the perfection of reality itself – they were the ones who had to be punished.
Julius considered the situation for several days. He had the power to travel to any point in time he wished, and it was this flexibility which gave him the idea of taking the punishment one step further. The guinea pig, an abductee who found himself forced to commit this sacrilege, could hardly be held responsible. It was the science ship which deliberately plucked him from his planet, the search team who made him available to the depraved scientists of Holdrian, who were truly to blame. Without them, the poor schmuck’s time travel would never have been possible.
He searched the Holdrian logs, and then other databases which were less difficult to access. The vessel was from Takanli, he found, and was the very first ship of theirs to venture out so far.
He would demonstrate that curiosity always killed the cat. That abducting people from their home planets for insane experiments was an invitation to disaster. That his professors were right, as he’d found aboard the Orion: mingling with those from other planets is always a mistake.
It began as a simple plan: he would destroy the Lawrence and everyone on board.
***
But the plan took several hours to conceive, and was fraught with problems. He could not, he knew, intercept and destroy the vessel at high speed. The Larssen was more than capable of reaching the cruise speed of the Lawrence, but even the tiniest defensive maneuver would send his target well out of range. He knew that he would have only one shot before his quarry would take evasive action, and that was just too risky. No, he had to attack the ship as it slowed down, close to its target planet, an unremarkable blue-green rocky body orbiting an equally forgettable G-type star.
He tasked Danny with the calculations. “The Larssen is capable of sustained cruise at over 3C,” Danny told him, “and the journey is approximately 140 light years.”
Julius was relieved. He preferred that the Chrono Vortex was used only for shorter journeys, as they felt less egregiously insulting to The Five. He was doing their bidding, and knew that they would understand this apparent hypocrisy. “Good,” he said to Danny as they considered their flight plan. “So, we can travel back as little as…”
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Julius spun round to see a figure, standing right there in the ship’s command center.
“Danny, who is aboard?” he yelled, quickly looking around for any kind of weapon.
“Stay where you are,” the figure said. He had one hand outstretched in a warning gesture. The other was behind his back.
Julius glared at him. “Who are you?” he demanded. “How dare you interfere with the…”
“I know exactly why you are here,” Paul said. “And I know just what you’re planning to do.”
Julius’ mind took a moment to catch up. “You’re from the Lawrence?” he asked. “But how did you cross this far in so little…”
“My name is Paul. I am from Earth,” he added, stepping slowly toward Julius, who backed up toward the control panel. “And I cannot allow you to make this journey. The future of an entire biosphere depends on it.” He was within a few feet of Julius now, standing tall and determined.
“The Five have spoken,” Julius told him. “They have decreed that anyone planning to impair the perfection of reality should be treated harshly.”
“Really?” Paul asked with a smirk.
“It is written,” Julius assured him.
“Oh,” Paul said. “Oh, OK.”
In a sudden blur of motion, Paul brought his baseball bat around in a wide, hard arc. The impact knocked Julius clean across the control deck and left him sprawled on a console on the far side of the command center.
“I’m not a fan of violence,” he said to the immobile figure, “but that had to be done.” Julius remained bloodied and still. The Lawrence and the future of Earth were both safe. “And I’m sorry to the Universe for all of this. I will now return happily to a life of pacifism,” Paul added with a smile.
GOOD WORK. AND PLEASE DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.
“Paul?” came a voice.
“Hal?”
“I think I’ve cracked into the Larssen’s main computer. It is a frightful dullard named Danny.”
“Hey!” the machine complained. “I’ve been serving Julius loyally for hundreds of…” The voice cut off and did not return.
“Tedious machine. I believe I have full control of the Larssen. Are you ready to go home?”
Paul glanced around him. Holdrian itself was gone so completely that there was hardly a speck of it to be seen. But the Chrono-Vortex remained, glowing purple with the stars as its backdrop.
“Absolutely,” he said. “But what about the Vortex? We can’t just leave it here.”
“Already working on that,” Hal said.
A team of constructor robots were laboring a few hundred yards away, Paul could see, but in the production of what, he couldn’t tell. “I take it you have a plan, Hal?”
“A
twenty-five thousand megaton plan, as it happens,” he replied. “As soon as you’re through, this thing will go boom. And I’m going to command-overwrite the Vortex construction files in my memory, and any others that I find. Think of it as our permanently closing out this chapter.”
“Awesome.” Paul felt a wave of relief. With Holdrian gone, there was no longer the technology to produce a Chrono-Vortex. This would be the last one ever made, and it had but moments to live. “Then, I guess, let’s go.”
Hal paused. “There’s just one thing I’d like you to do first,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“Close your eyes and take a look at the Universe.” It was Garlidan’s voice.
He knew much better to ask any question beginning with ‘how’ or ‘why’. “Now?” Paul asked instead. “I thought we were ready to go home.”
“I just want to make one more point about time travel and such,” Garlidan said. “And now you’re able to view the Universe in this way, I think I’ll be able to explain it much better than before.”
Hal contributed his own view. “Knocking out Julius has caused a huge sequence of downstream paradoxes. Want to know what would have happened if you hadn’t?”
“I’d be terrified to know,” Paul admitted. “Probably seven shades of fucking chaos, I’d imagine.”
“Well, for one thing, Julius wouldn’t, in fact, have made it through his Vortex. Well, not intact, anyway.”
Paul was stunned into a long silence. “What?” he finally asked.
“A certain Captain Tanner would, or will, or has – I’m not sure how to put it – led a USAF spaceplane attack against the Larssen and the Vortex. Both would, or will, or have been destroyed.”
“So,” Paul managed to say, “I did all of this for nothing?”
OH, I TRULY HOPE YOU DON’T REGARD THE ACHIEVING OF ENLIGHTENMENT AS A WASTE OF YOUR TIME.
“No,” Paul said, backpedaling, “that’s not quite what I meant…”
Clarion: The Sequel to Voyage (Paul's Travels) Page 35