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

by C. Paul Lockman

  When it came, in a moaning crescendo of pleasure, she timed her peak with that of her past self, remembering how she had gasped at the intensity of the spasms within her. She came as she watched herself accepting Paul’s final thrusts.

  Falik cradled a pillow and breathed hotly into its soft fabric. Turning over to straddle it, she pressed the pillow against her mound and rode it, rubbing impatiently on her clit, willing the sensations to return. Two fingers deep inside her catalyzed a second orgasm, leaving the pillow coated with her cum. Onto her back once more, she pressed it needfully against her sex, copying Paul’s rhythm within her, until more fingers – probing both of her warm openings – brought her third and most satisfying climax.

  Her breathing slowed gradually. Looking around reluctantly, she willed the confines of reality not to return, to give her just a little longer with him. For a delicious moment, part of her remained on Takanli, panting against the glass, feeling him exploding inside her.

  But I’m only on Daedalus. Alone, with a movie of the man I love.

  And I’m forty light-years from him.

  ***

  Chapter 12: Dinner on Triton

  Paul chewed slowly and resigned himself to being silently stared at by the two women.

  After some confusion and only slowly improving communications, Haley had presented him with a kind of scarlet carrot. It was sweet and mildly earthy, with a pleasing hint of ginger. Paul had plenty of time to appreciate its flavor while the two girls gawked, as stunned and uncertain as Paul had ever seen anyone. Infrequent flashes of conversation passed between them, hushed and rapid. Paul still understood absolutely nothing. For him, their language retained its hint of Finnish, but some words and sentences ended with complex, dragged-out tones which appeared to carry a particular inflection. Hal was hard at work on compiling a lexicon and translation system, but it was taking time, and the inability to communicate was frustrating and unnerving for them all. He willed the machine to work faster.

  Hal was also working to analyze the situation. Two women were awake and apparently healthy. From the looks of things, their main work was the tending a fertile and well-designed farm. Another woman, perhaps twenty earth years older, was in some kind of coma, but Hal could tell little more about her at this remove. There are only a finite number of circumstances in which these people would have ended up here, alone but with two freshly-buried corpses nearby. The nature of their ship taught him much, as did the materials used to construct the outer modules. Intensive agriculture, holographic data storage, solar power and other technologies were visible, or could be inferred, and despite its complexities, the language could be steadily decoded using pattern recognition software, and run through linguistic cross-reference algorithms.

  Hal finally spoke in Paul’s earpiece, his calm tones breaking the awkward silence. “Paul, our language problems are nearly over, but I need to fashion a mind-cap learning aid.”

  Paul finished the carrot and stood. The two women – a petite, olive-skinned brunette and an exceptionally pretty redhead – watched warily. “Hal, they look pretty freaked. What are the chances that a session with the Boffin’s learning toys will be seen as a threat?”

  “Well, we can’t say for sure.”

  Awesome, Hal. I knew I could rely on you.

  “But it’s urgent that we’re able to communicate. I think we should do it.”

  Paul stared back at the two women for a moment. Wasn’t it Clarke’s Third Law, he pondered, which reminded us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? Well, here comes some magic. Just don’t stab me because of it. Paul had little choice, he knew. Without the mind-cap, their communications would develop little beyond their current level, and they’d remain unable to answer Paul’s biggest question: why are you here?

  Despite his colossal abilities, Hal couldn’t simply wave a wand and conjure something into existence. The conversation of mass and energy laws pertained, here as everywhere. Instead, Hal asked for the outer airlock to be opened so that a trio of robots could be admitted into the small complex.

  “Did they make it?” Hal asked. “These temperatures are just terrible for their systems.” As the three robots wheeled themselves into the module, there was a loud shout from the darker woman. She glowered at the robots and brandished her knife as if about to stab one of the small machines.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, calm down!” Paul tried. It was the first time he’d raised his voice since his arrival. It shifted the women’s focus from the robots back to their visitors, who sat at the dining table, still in his space suit. Working quickly, the machines produced a semi-circular metal ring which tapered at the ends, about the size of a slender pair of headphones. “Hal, I need a distraction.”

  A second later, the constructor robot stood on its small, protruding legs and began hopping from one ‘foot’ to another while the opening measures of Sousa’s Washington Post march resonated through the complex. One of the girls dropped her knife in unalloyed shock. The other suppressed what looked very much like a smirk of delight. While they were occupied with the impossibly comical sight of the dancing robot, Paul slipped on the mind-cap and signaled Hal to begin the upload.

  Many people have tried to describe the sensation of knowing something which, quite simply, they knew nothing about, only a few seconds before. The best iteration of this came from a protégé of Garlidan, many years ago, who claimed that it was like a painter who suddenly had access to thousands of new colors on a vastly expanded palette. He could see them, and appreciate them, but did not yet know how they might combine; until he tried what he felt might be good blends or patterns, he wouldn’t know what the results might be. Paul now reached for new combinations, following an implicit linguistic map, and the results were impressive, if a little uneven at first.

  “I have a name. Paul. I am a friend of great distance.”

  Now Haley dropped her knife also. The answer came from the darker girl, her eyes wide in fear and expectation. “We are Kiri and Haley,” she said as she gestured to her friend. “This is not our home. We are trapped here.”

  “Reassure them, Paul,” Hal offered quietly in his ear. “Don’t ask too many questions; things here have obviously been difficult and we don’t want trauma resurfacing as we’re breaking the ice. But try to find out where they’re from and how long they’ve been here.”

  Paul recalled the debate as to whether Hal should address the women directly. It was decided that, given they’d almost stabbed a simple constructor robot, their reactions to a disembodied, talking super-computer would be impossible to predict.

  “I call this place Triton,” Paul said next, “a moon of the blue planet Neptune.”

  The two women glanced at each other. “We call it the Moon of the Insane.”

  “Hardly a hopeful moniker,” Hal opined in Paul’s ear. “We don’t need to know why they call it that. Try something else.”

  Paul thought for a second. “You have gardens. Is there enough eating for everyone?”

  “Gerund or infinitive?” Hal asked quietly, checking Paul’s newly-acquired grammar skills.

  “Sorry, is there enough to eat for everyone?”

  Kiri nodded. “We are good farmers,” she said with a modicum of pride. “We received one supply ship also. Did you see it?”

  Hal jumped in. “Deny seeing it. The canister is a stone’s throw from the two frozen bodies.”

  Paul shook his head. “My survey was very short. I mostly wanted to meet you.”

  They both smiled. Then the redhead spoke, for the first time since I’d learned their language. “Do you need to wear your space suit all the time?”

  By way of an answer, and with some relief, Paul unsnapped two hoses, pressed a button, shifted the torso section clockwise fractionally, and then lifted it straight over his head. It was like taking off a big, wooly sweater with a lot of technology attached to it. Then, he was able to pull down the sleeves and finally negotiate the flexible, if
rather heavy, suit torso past his arms and onto the floor. Beneath, he was wearing a black T-shirt which was drenched in sweat, despite the suit’s attempts to keep him cool.

  The leg section was easier; the connecting bands simply slid down over his hips, enabling him to cross his legs and pull the boots off, then drag the material down until he could pull the two legs off past his feet. For good measure, he removed the thermal trousers and ended up in a pair of gym shorts. Rather exhausted but happy to be free of the encumbrance, Paul set aside the two halves of his suit and grinned sheepishly at the girls.

  “You need new clothes. We also have a shower.” Paul nodded. “Wash yourself, then join us for a proper dinner. We can learn about each other then.” This was Kiri, who was proving to be the more confident of the two, and might have been a year or two older than Haley, in Paul’s estimation.”

  Paul reached for the right words. “You may have my thanks,” was how their language expressed gratitude.

  The shower was wonderful, all the more so for the low gravity. Paul became surrounded by big, shimmering globes of water, their shapes shifting jelly-like in a languid slow-motion. There was a moment or two to reflect. Contact had successfully been made, but he still didn’t know what to make of this bizarre, remote little outpost. What could have befallen them? It couldn’t possibly have been an attempt to colonize Titan; none of the major infrastructure was in place, a terraforming effort was leagues beyond the simple equipment they had, and with such a tiny gene pool, the population wouldn’t get far before crashing terminally.

  And who was the third female Hal could detect? Why hadn’t she joined the two girls? Was she hurt, or ill? Maybe dying, and soon to join the other two in their frozen graves, outside?

  But the biggest question remained Hal himself. Paul remembered the machine’s claim that this little outpost might offer technology useful to their mission to stop Julius. But now, he realized, Hal must have known that the argument was bogus. How could a pair of terrified refugees on a frozen moon possibly help him?

  As he dried off, brushing the globules of water from his skin, he gained a certainty that Hal had been guilty of something very unusual. Either, he reflected, Hal had decided upon a spontaneous act of random kindness.

  Or the great computer had finally made his first mistake.

  Chapter 13: City Boy

  Qelandi Spaceport

  It was exactly as if he were watching a massive, floating jellyfish swooping gracefully down to snag a morsel of food. Huge metal clamps extended from the carrier ship’s underside, locked the comparatively tiny cargo into place, and began a steady ascent back into a painfully blue sky. Behind it, in a long line which curved away to his right, Julius could see ten or twelve more of these huge balloon-ships, titans of Qelandi’s booming space freight economy, lining up to take their turn. Bulbous, incongruous, unlikely, but essential, these balloons – the largest as wide as a small city – plied a circuitous route from this baked-hot, almost featureless plateau up to the wispy cirrus clouds which encircled the moon.

  There, Julius knew, they would release their cargo, the smaller Cruisers and Freighters which comprised Qelandi’s busy commercial fleet, and ensure their safe departure. Dropped from the balloon as its clamps released, the cargo ships would light their own engines and head into orbit, either to drop off their cargo and return, or to venture further afield. Those whose journey required a quick turn-around to Qelandi could simply glide back in to a runway landing on one of Qelandi’s three spaceports. Others would be carried down by descending balloons and delicately lowered into to a docking bay. Within each bay was a world of activity, noise, confusion, welding sparks and – Julius was certain – both danger and opportunity.

  The boy from the arid valleys, from a band of cliff-top gatherers with their parched, scrawny goats, had come a long way indeed. Four years had passed since his tutor had illustrated the dangers of leaving Qelandi; Nammett had taken the old scholar entirely at his word, and vowed never to set foot on another planet in her life. Starships, she reasoned, were fine, since they were merely a mode of transport. Her brother ribbed Nammett mercilessly for her double-think, but she defended it with equal vigor: nothing bad will happen if you just stay on your ship.

  Julius, his awakening mind increasingly frustrated at the remoteness of their village, at the rigid conservatism of the elders, and at the maddening limitations of their archaic lifestyle, began to consider life elsewhere. The decision, when it came, was easier than he had ever expected. Were he to stay, he remembered telling Nammett one clear night as they lay under the stars, he would be channeled into his father’s business, perhaps with some dabbling in his mother’s field, pharmacology, and he would marry one of the dozen or so eligible girls in the village. And that would be it.

  Daydreaming to escape the trudging repetition of his days, Julius felt nothing but disappointment about the life prescribed to him by his society: hard work, the diligent application of ancestral skills, and a stout faith in the wisdom of The Five. Little else was thought possible. Few from these villages had ever left Qelandi; most had not ventured more than three days’ walk from the squat, baked-mud hut in which they had been born. Stories from ‘Returners’ were scarce, unreliable and annoyingly inconsistent. Some spoke of great opportunities beyond their moon, even beyond The Five (an idea which was met with fury by their teachers). Others foretold doom: space-faring itself was dangerous, they said, a stressful white-knuckle ride through the unknown vacuum and freezing cold. Qelandians were treated as third-class citizens throughout the system, ridiculed for their backwoods provincialism. Their faith in The Five, worst of all, was rejected by most outsiders as nothing more than a child’s myth adapted for adults.

  Julius had always pitied those who could not number The Five among their friends. He had accepted a long time ago that theirs was a star system like many others, and that ancient claims of Qelandi uniqueness were just self-serving embellishments of a simpler truth: this was a tiny, almost uninhabitable moon, a speck amidst the clouds of planets and moons which dotted the galaxy. He believed, though, as steadfastly as his parents and professors, that the Qelandi has been deliberately brought into a relationship with their Five Stars. Their purpose in life was to know these Five, to bear witness to them. To celebrate them, certainly. And to obey them when they chose to call.

  Those months, as Julius seemed to grow day by day, as his speaking voice suddenly became colored by a rich baritone, as he watched Nammett become a woman, as he contemplated his future, those months were long and hot and dry. Endlessly dry. He dreamt, like every other Qelandian, of lakes and streams, of the swimming pools the larger Cruisers were rumored to have. After all, the biggest body of water he had ever seen was a shallow, seasonal pond perhaps half a day from their home. It had vanished within three days, leaving behind the gasping remnants of a desperate ecosystem which had lost its race against the scorching suns. The incident stuck with him, bringing home an inarguable message: this place is dying and you need to leave.

  After that, the decisions came faster. He withdrew from the school, as was his right as a boy reaching his majority. He borrowed money from friends and, in order to travel across the parched moon in a little more comfort, bought a fourth-hand motorbike which broke several laws each time he kick-started its ancient motor. He sped around the villages and provincial towns of Qelandi, making an extraordinary amount of noise and coming increasingly to the attention of the local authorities.

  And the local girls, naturally. Seemingly from out of the woodwork came a legion of tanned beauties who made it their business to inform each other where he might be found, on a given day, and to make sure Julius was warmly welcomed. His bike, unbearably noisy though it was, served admirably as a courier vehicle, and Julius quickly found himself running errands for local merchants, members of the city council and anyone who needed an item – or a person – quickly transported without fuss or questions. He brought flour to bakeries, meat to restaurants, clients
to healers and healers to clients. A simple messaging system, accessed through a screen he was able to carry in his pocket – imagine! – enabled his services to be reserved in advance, and he scheduled full days of loud, lucrative buzzing around on his trusty motorbike, at the end of which he occasionally wondered if he might be going deaf.

  One day, a client needed a spare part urgently delivered to the Spaceport, a route Julius was just getting to know. The Qelandian preference for living in small, secluded communities of like-minded people meant that his destinations were often spread over the whole plateau. He quickly learned the fastest routes with the smoothest surfaces, and the places he might meet new admirers. His flamboyant arrivals on his noise-machine bike never failed to cause a local stir; offers of introductions, dates or just uncomplicated sex came flooding into his small, handheld lectern. He kept lists, but had yet to go any further than a polite glass of tea and some enjoyable flirting.

  The giant spaceport’s docking and landing area, where the huge balloons came sliding down from the heavens, was a hive of smooth, orderly technology, operated with military precision. Typically for such places, though, the assembly areas which flanked the landing spaces were a bazaar of confusion, noisy trading, urgent repair work, fervent recruiting and – as one experienced trader had confided to Julius on his second trip inside the Spaceport – more than a little illicit activity. Containers of illegal crops changed hands in smooth, oft-repeated deals. Smaller cases, packed with contents which could mean decades of jail time, were passed on in exchange for huge stacks of Qelandian currency. Whole cargo modules, as big as a three-room home, were transferred by nimble robot arms from one ship to another without so much as a customs inspection.