Voyage

by C. Paul Lockman

  “Yeah, I know”, he seemed faintly irritated. I should probably just keep quiet. “They got a Red Cube up there waiting for you, and the Boffins left one of those funky little learning devices for your head. You just plug it in, and off you go.” He ducked past me but shot well over. “God damn, go get that, would ya?”

  I gave him a look. He winked, disappeared and reappeared a split-second later holding the ball. “Damn, this Relocation business is just the business”, he chortled. “OK, you listening?” I nodded. “Once you get to the station, you’re gonna see some rare, rare shit. I mean they got stuff there which will blow your fuckin’ mind. And you’re gonna step right into the middle of it. Personally, I think you’re crazy as a rat in a tin shit-house, but who am I, anyway?”

  He planted another gorgeous curler into the top corner. “Should go professional”, he muttered. “Right now”, he was talking to me again, “we gotta get your ass ready to fly. And you’ll need to get your equipment. They got Boffins here too”, he noted, setting up once more, “Boffins that would make those Takanli eggheads look like schoolboys”. This time I jumped in, got the ball and dragged it away. “Bitch”, he snarled.

  Falik applauded from the sideline. We had only hours left together. I winced at the thought. “So how did you get here?”

  He smacked the ball down with his fist, let it bounce away. “Look, you need to keep your shit together. Don’t be dwelling on unnecessary shit. Just focus, man, focus.” He held me by the shoulders. “You got an important job, man”, he said, his voice softer, “you need to keep your eyes on the prize”. He ran to collect the ball this time and flicked it up for me to volley. I jumped, connected, and executed a neat overhead kick to plant the ball in the net. “Nice, dude.”

  Garlidan had walked onto the pitch during this last exchange. “Our communicators are back on. They’re requesting a meeting with you when you are ready.”

  I had an idea. “Hey, Jackson?” He turned. “This is a flexible reality, right?” He nodded. “So, if we wanted, we could recreate anything of which these scientists have any experience, right?”

  “Yeah. What do you want?”

  Twenty minutes later I was dressed in a black shirt and shorts and we were jogging out of the tunnel. I followed the teams out and took up my position in the centre circle, checked my watch. As far as my feeble mind was concerned, this was the World Cup, it was 1986, and Diego Maradona was leading the Argentine attack against England. Only this time, there would be no fucking Hand of God.

  *****

  Righteous indignation satisfied, at least in my own Universe, I returned with a highly amused Falik and Garlidan to the main corridor. Security was just as tight leaving as it was entering and we were obliged to strip down once more. Garlidan was either being respectful towards my girlfriend or he was gay. I didn’t mind which, I just preferred having her all to myself. I managed to stealthily slip a finger in her pussy as she bent down to remove her panties. She was permanently wet, I reasoned. “More later for you, too”.

  The meeting would take place back in the original conference room. This was a formality, Jackson has told us on leaving, nothing to worry about. I took a seat and waited for the others to Relocate in. Slightly to my surprise, they walked in through the door, greeted me perfunctorily, and took seats on the opposite side. The same six humanoids, plus a very short, dwarf-like humanoid in a white suit. He introduced himself.

  “Welcome to the Chrono-Transfer process. My name is Gamni and I handle the legal elements of this work. I am not a native of Holdrian but make an appearance when I am needed.” He looked around at his colleagues. They were stony faced as ever. He seemed faintly amused by them. “We have some paperwork to do, and then we’ll let you enjoy the rest of the evening.”

  He handed over a sheaf of documents in a regular manila folder. The touches from my own planet were incredible. They were highly sensitive to my own background. I must make a note to thank them for these kindnesses. Particularly righting the wrong of the 1986 World Cup. That was hugely cathartic.

  I begin skim-reading the documents. “If I may paraphrase… and you’re welcome to take as much time as you need to read through this… but in brief, they are formal agreements covering the use of our Chrono-Transfer facilities. You’ll need to sign them before we can allow you to proceed to the Research facility and meet the team there. I’m afraid this is not negotiable.”

  There were some sixty pages, but with the Boffin’s implants I could read at a staggering pace and raced through them in a minute. Basically, I was to do exactly as I had originally agreed. I could not change the time to which I would be transported. I could not alter the sequence of events we had laid out, including my departure in the Cruiser, for any reason. I could not bring with me any objects not listed on the original manifest. I could not discuss the program, its staff, or any element of the science related to Chrono-Transfer with anyone, ever. Their computers would know if I was lying, or intended to defraud them. The consequences of this, the documents made clear, were fairly serious.

  “This seems entirely in order. Let’s be clear”, I offered, “I regard the ability to travel in this was as indispensable and as cherished gift. I would do nothing to jeopardise the procedure or cause offence to your team.”

  Gamni nodded and indicated where I should sign, offering his pen. “Sign your life away”, he quipped.

  I scribbled my signature on the two required lines, dated it, initialled two more places, and we were done. I had taken an irreversible step. And I was scared shitless.

  *****

  I politely refused the offer of a dinner with the President of Holdrian, who I guessed was White Cloud’s more affable, sociable face. Maybe tomorrow night, or any other time. Daedalus was already fully fuelled and had taken on a couple of interesting computer chips which should fetch enough to compensate the crew quite handsomely for the overtime and the stress of lightspeed. The Captain was both delighted with his ship and crew, and anxious to be away. Apart from selling the chips to the highest bidder, he had further business in the Outer Rim which would not wait, and he was reluctant to push the ship above 0.04-C on the way back. Too much of a good thing, he joked. I thanked him, asked him to pass on my thanks to his crew, and my best to Jasira and Xathan, and closed the connection. Bless him, the salty old space dog.

  And with the departure of Daedalus came the departure of Falik and Garlidan. There was no other way to return them to Takanli in anything like reasonable time. Spending two weeks here with me would mean an extra two years of travel on freighters and shuttles, and the Ministry was reluctant to grant her that much more leave. We chose to eat in our accommodation, a cosy wooden cabin on the edge of the rainforest. Eating out on the deck, with a stream rolling past and exotic birds landing on the deck’s railings, we spent the time in a companiable silence. What could we say to each other? ‘I’ll miss you?’ Or, ‘I’ll see you soon’? Saying anything seemed ridiculous when words would inevitably fail at the task.

  After dinner we spent a long hour holding each other and staring into each other’s eyes. I remember it now as one of the most loving moments I ever spent, and perhaps the most painful. Laying her on the bed, I took in the sight of her wonderful, naked body once more before tasting her, everywhere, committing each scent, each taste, each touch to memory. The smell of her hair as I kissed her neck and her ears. The feel of her soft skin under my hands. The wetness between her legs and the heavenly taste of her juices as I licked her labia, parted them, searched out her entrance with my tongue.

  And the feeling of my cock being massaged, stroked, licked by this beautiful girl. She tenderly sucked me, lavishing love and attention on my cock. But we both wanted the same thing, one last time. She straddled me, placed me at her entrance, and slid down onto me, filled herself with my member, rocked to and fro. I watched her come, wonderfully. I kissed her whenever she came close, her mouth, her face, her forehead, her breasts. I watched my shaft disappearing with each stroke into
the beautiful, soft folds of her cunt. And I held her as we shouted together, peaked together, orgasmed together. One final spurting of my seed into her body, one last torrent of my warm cum.

  We held each other, in silence, made our final promises, final vows. When I awoke, she was gone. A Red Cube was on the pillow, with a note which said:

  ‘Remember.’

  Chapter XXIX: Perspectives

  I was depressed for days. I sleep-walked through meetings, induction lectures and discussions about the space-time continuum, real versus unreal history and the ‘Grandfather Effect’. I promised not to kill anyone. They insisted on this, citing serious knock-on effects. I must not interfere with the natural processes of the Earth, they said. “How the fuck would I ever manage to do that?” I snapped, irritated.

  The lectures were mostly boring and they should just have given me Red Cubes and leave me to it. I missed her. God, I missed everything about her. I found I couldn’t masturbate, which built up tensions long kept at bay. I couldn’t even get turned on thinking about the Raptor. Not even a mild boner. Her absence, the first for seven months, was just killing me. I even missed weird, likeable old Garlidan and his fruit concoctions, plotting with me in the Captain’s bar.

  Then, after nearly two weeks, someone noticed. These, like the people of Takanli, were not emotive beings, but they were empathic enough to recognise when a fellow being was in distress. I was lying in my room, as I often did, staring at the ceiling, when there was a soft knock at the door.

  It was Samuel L Jackson. “Oh, man, what the hell do you want? Another kickabout?” He shook his head, pushed past me into the room, stood in the middle.

  “Wassup?”

  I shrugged. “Dude, I’m not in the mood for visitors, OK? Having a tough couple of weeks here.”

  He pulled out cigarettes, lit one, sat on the couch opposite the bed. “Yeah, so I heard. In fact, I hear you got your head right the way up your ass.”

  I bristled. “Look, I didn’t ask for any of this and now she’s gone I just can’t…”

  He stood, puffing out an angry cloud of smoke. It even turned red as it filled the space. “Bull-shit you didn’t ask for this! You saw what was happening on the Earth and you wanted to do something about it. Isn’t that right?”

  I nodded, slightly sheepish. He had never raised his voice to me before. In fact, this was the first time I’d been shouted at since leaving Earth.

  “Well, do you still want to go? Or are you going to hang around here with your thumb up your butt feeling sorry for yourself?” I just stared at the carpet. He angrily put out the cigarette. “Fuck this shit, man. We are out of here.” He grabbed my wrist and before I could object, we had Relocated.

  *****

  I didn’t recognise the place at all. We were on a street, flanked by buildings which appeared to have been ravaged by fire. The road markings were very familiar, but chunks of the street had been torn up, as if by machines. Light poles on both sides of the street had been felled like trees, sprouting multicoloured wires. Many of the houses had lost their roofs.

  “Come walk with me”, said Jackson, pulling out another cigarette. “I want to show you something.” We continued together down the street, with its battered surface and charred buildings. In the distance I could see more rows of burned out houses, exposed timbers, smashed glass and uprooted trees.

  We turned a corner and my heart sank as it never had before. “You recognise where we are now?”

  This was my street. Well, it had been. I began jogging, then sprinting down to find my house. I had bought it four years before leaving Earth, with money inherited after my father died. I had got friends round to redecorate, sow the lawn, build fences and paths. I had loved this building as much as I had any in my life.

  And now it was a wreck. The roof was gone, revealing what had been my attic and, I guess, my bedroom. All the upper storey walls had caved in, destroying much of the house. Downstairs, it looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to everything. It was just beaten up, paint gone, bricks knocked out, wooden banisters shattered.

  I sank to my knees. Jackson stood over me. I let the tears fall. “When?”

  Jackson checked something on his communicator. “Well, from the time you leave Earth, there is a gap of about 26 years between your departure date and the reality we’re seeing.” He glanced around, sniffed the air cautiously, pessimistically. “No-one lives here anymore. The houses were abandoned because of a plague, then ransacked by the hundreds of thousands of homeless. The corporations refused to shore up the government and everything just stopped working. They called it punishment for ‘alterations in consumer habits’. We stopped buying their shit, they stopped feeding us, clothing us, giving us power and gas. And then, this.”

  He nudged me and we watched the horizon blossom into an orange glow, like a sunrise, but far stronger. It grew into a ball of flames, growing up into the sky, dispersing clouds and providing its own, the characteristic mushroom cloud of a nuclear blast.

  “There are plenty of those. Thousands.”

  I sobbed. A fragment by my feet turned out to be a piece of a toy fire engine, like the one I had when I was a kid. I held it up to Jackson, tears rolling down my face.

  “OK, let’s get you out of here. I think I made my point.”

  He took my wrist again and we were back in my room. I was still crying, but the switch back to my own present sobered me. I went to the bathroom, washed the soot off my hands, splashed water on my face, smoothed down my hair.

  Jackson was smoking again, sitting on the couch. “Hey”, I said, voice still tight, “can I get one of those?”

  We sat together and talked about what we had seen and how it had happened, smoking our way through the rest of the pack. He listened. He offered opinions. Together, we straightened out my head. I had things to do.

  “When did they say I can get up to the Cruiser?”

  He stubbed out his smoke, exhaled. “Any time you want.”

  I took a long deep final drag, enjoying the sensations but remembering why I had quit. I stubbed out the smoke, stood, flexed my shoulders and looked Jackson in the eye.

  “Alright, then. Let’s go.”

  *****

  The concept was a little more complex than climbing into a DeLorean and screeching off to 88 mph. Sadly, there could be no such thing as a flux capacitor, and no presently available technology could turn my sleek, silver Cruiser into a time machine in its own right. Holdrian Chrono-Travel depended on the creation of a stable Closed Time-like Curve. This in turn depended on the manipulation of six wormholes, three of them naturally-occurring in deep space, three more created by the scientists.

  It was impressed upon me that this system would only facilitate time travel to a date after the creation of the wormhole cluster. Happily for us, it was created over 3000 years ago, but the rate of development had been necessarily glacial. There had been experiments, with mixed success. Unmanned vessels had managed to travel through the wormholes, and therefore through time, with no ill-effects. They then parked themselves in space and awaited collection by their future owners. One such craft had remained in stasis, patiently anticipating collection, for 300 years. It’s retrieval was a seminal scientific breakthrough,

  Only two manned missions had ever been attempted. The first was a partial success. Eight years ago, a ship carrying two scientists and a complex sensor package was sent back. This was before precise calibrations had permitted exactitude when it came to choosing the arrival date. They had done as ordered, travelled back and set up camp on a remote moon of Holdrian. Thirty years later, the camp was located but both scientists were dead. Despite a media blackout, rumours abounded that a murder-suicide had taken place. They had driven each other insane.

  The second was more of a success. Bassar and Cyto, two of the most respected scientists in the program, who had spent their lives working on this project, had been sent through. This time, everything went to plan. They travelled back only six mo
nths into the past and this time stayed with their vessel, which was the size of an old Soviet-era Salyut space station. They had enough space and time to themselves and even found it possible to continue their post-doctoral work on quantum physics and causality. Seconds after they were sent, their station was Relocated and brought back to the research site. They were the only surviving humans who had ever travelled through time, and now were joint directors of the project.

  To rub it in just a bit more, the humanoid team decided to examine me on this information, including a full run-down of the quantum effects within the wormholes, the manner of their construction by artificial processes (which had required the energy of several suns) and all of the safety implications. The examination took four hours, at the end of which I needed a drink.

  “The invitation to dine with the President remains open. He is anxious to meet you.” I was slightly surprised. At our first meeting, White Cloud didn’t seem anxious to do anything other than float off to his next meeting. Could I stand a whole evening of his robot voice, his chopped-up sentences? Not to worry, provided they had the synthesised scotch, I stood a chance.

  The President was already due to entertain that evening, and I was added to the guest list. It was a party at his private residence in one of the tallest buildings in this surprisingly modest city. I packed away my learning and research gear, took a quick, hot shower, and was escorted by a team of guards to the building, which was a ten minute walk from the institute. Apparently, it had been decided to walk me through town, so that the populace could take a look at me. I had learned that their time travel experiments were the focus of attention and a good deal of gossip, and many were anxious to clap eyes on the latest guinea pig.