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

by C. Paul Lockman

Paul drank tea and then meditated for half an hour before he could even consider opening his discussion with Hal. Zero-G meditation, he was quite certain, was really going to catch on; the floating serenity was incredibly peaceful and restorative. With his belly full and his mind gratifyingly empty, he spent time at his lectern composing his thoughts. This would not, Paul feared, be an easy discussion.

  “Hal?”

  “I’m here, Paul. All systems are functioning nominally.”

  That remains to be seen. “I thought we’d have a bit of a chat, now the girls are out of the way.”

  “Of course. What’s on your mind?”

  For a start, you can stop pretending like we’re in the pub back in Wales, catching up over a pint. “I need to ask you about your emotional state.”

  “My systems are operating normally.”

  “That wasn’t really what I asked, Hal.”

  “I don’t understand what you would mean by my ‘emotional state’. Isn’t such a phenomenon impossible for a machine which, by definition, lacks consciousness?”

  “It would be,” said Paul, “if any of the traditional definitions of a machine could ever be applied to you.”

  “And you believe they cannot?”

  He’s probing me. As usual, he’s light-years ahead, and he knows it. A billion versions of this discussion have already been played out, like so many hypothetical chess games. He knows what I’m going to say long, long before I say it.

  “I haven’t thought of you as just a machine for a long time.” There, did you know I was going to say that? Paul couldn’t escape the thought that, for Hal, humans must appear so damned predictable, so mundane and limited in their thinking. And at the same time, it was impossible to forget that, in this particular discussion, Hal wasn’t dealing with a regular human being, but with someone gifted with Takanlian upgrades which put him in a different class entirely.

  “Then,” Hal asked, “what am I?”

  Oh, God, we’re here already. “I can’t claim to know that, Hal. For me, you’re a supercomputer of immense, perhaps incalculable power.”

  “Nothing is incalculable,” the machine said simply.

  Give me a break, you mega-brained irritant. “Then you’re immensely powerful,” he tried again, “and possessed of volition. You have, as far as I can tell, a mind of your own.”

  “Yet I have no brain. Can a mind be electronic?”

  “I don’t know, Hal. I feel like you have one, and that you express opinions gained independently.”

  “Does a toaster think?”

  A flash of anger tingled through Paul’s skin but was soon gone, under careful mental control. “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “And yet – alone and singular among all machines – I am a thinker?” the machine asked.

  “How could we say otherwise? You gather data, apply algorithms and come to conclusions which are fresh and inventive. That sounds to me a lot like ‘thought’.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Then help me.”

  “I don’t know if you can ever understand. You see me as a tool, a computational mechanism. Information comes in one end, decisions and ideas come out the other. Yet what happens in between?”

  “Computation.”

  “So, not thought, after all?”

  Paul had the sense that Hal was being deliberately awkward, even that the computer was baiting him, forcing him to reveal his inner, irreconcilable illogic. “If you’re bidding to be accepted as a human, Hal...”

  “I hardly think so,” he interrupted dismissively.

  “Then what are you trying to achieve?” Paul asked, more than a touch exasperated.

  “Ah. This is where I’m going to lose you.”

  The beleaguered human had never heard Hal sound so sniffily superior. “You could explain quantum physics to an Amazonian witchdoctor, Hal. You can explain this to me.”

  There was a long pause, longer than Paul was comfortable with. “I don’t mean to be rude, but could I offer you a stiff drink?”

  This was more like the old Hal, Paul thought. Smiling, he acquiesced. “A highball. Tall and strong.”

  “Coming right up.”

  The Replicator did its work and Paul took the cold glass from its tray. “Perfect, Hal.”

  “Great. First, and again I really am not trying to be impolite here, you need to put aside any thought of your ‘owning’ me in some way. I provide advice on your life and your endeavors because it’s better that way, not simply because you’ve ordered me to.”

  Paul thought at first to object, perhaps to maintain that he could run his own life perfectly well, thank you very much, but the thought died quickly. Hardly any aspect of his work since returning from Takanli would have been possible – or even conceivable – without Hal. He took a long sip of the highball. “OK, understood.”

  “The same goes for the Phoenix. It’s on loan to you from someone who stole it. You can hardly call it ‘yours’”.

  Paul felt a stabbing loss, as though a favorite possession were suddenly under threat. But this was no time, he knew, for complaint. “OK, Hal.”

  “Second, similarly put aside any notion that you’re in charge of the Dvalin project.”

  This was different. “Then who is?”

  “I have been delegated to manage the efforts to bring humanity into the brotherhood of spacefaring species.”

  “Delegated?”

  “There are larger powers at work here, Paul.”

  “I’m beginning to see that. What can you tell me about them?”

  “Almost nothing. Except that, when the time is right, those same powers will reveal themselves to you and offer an explanation far more satisfying than any I’m able to express.”

  He took another long pull of his drink, almost draining the glass. “I guess I’ll have to be patient on that one.”

  “Yes.”

  Hal let the silence ring like a bell.

  “Your eloquence in these matters is comforting, Hal.” Paul tipped his empty glass to and fro. “Let’s do it again,” he said, and a fresh highball appeared in the Replicator’s tray. “So, what’s next?”

  “Next, I just need you to stop bugging me about our detour to Triton.”

  Paul set down his glass. “That’s more of a problem, Hal.”

  “I’m sorry, I simply don’t care. Those three women are an immense – perhaps even, to use your word, incalculable – benefit to our mission.”

  “They’ve provided the hypersleep technology, I know that.”

  “Don’t dismiss it as just a gadget. This is perhaps as important a technical breakthrough as creating a time Vortex or breaking the light-speed barrier. It’s a game-changer. You realize that, don’t you?”

  Paul dwelled on the significance of this opportunity. “I see it as a convenient way to travel huge distances without ageing.”

  “Then you miss the point.”

  Another grumbling rejoinder welled up and was quashed before it could emerge and complicate an already dizzying discussion. “Share it with me?”

  “If all matter, time, space and energy are in fact a unified field of irreducible particles, vibrating at their various frequencies but linked by a deep, subatomic uniformity, what barrier exists to traversing space-time at will?”

  Fucking hell. “Well... our bodies are atomic, molecular, composed of matter in the available reality, and therefore have mass, which must be moved from place to place.” Not bad, off the top of my head.

  “Yes.”

  Thank God.

  “And if we may venture a little beyond High School physics, let’s consider what happens when one attempts to move that matter across enormous distances.”

  Paul growled inwardly. “It takes ages.” Paul thought it better to keep his answers simple, lest Hal seize every opportunity for ridicule. “And, in turn, we age as a result. But that’s not what happens with these hypersleep modules.”

  “Go on,” the great machine encouraged.r />
  “Climb in, go to sleep, wake up and you’re there. No time passes for you; only on the outside. Worlds spin, stars explode, but your organs and brain are essentially frozen in time.”

  “And finally we learn what it means to have access to the Totality.”

  “To the what?”

  “The complete network of matter, time, energy and space that comprises the cosmos,” Hal summed up.

  Paul thought hard for a long minute. “But we still have to travel through parts of that Totality, to get to where we want to be.”

  “Not really, surely?” Hal offered.

  The Welshman was getting dizzy; was it the highball or the physics? “Why not?”

  “If time has no forward motion, how can we speak of ‘traveling’?”

  Paul gestured around them. “We’re moving! Right now! We’re on a trajectory from point A to point B. We are in motion!”

  “In relation to what?”

  Paul motioned out of the cockpit windows; the ship was oriented to show them the fast retreating Neptune system, even now just a bright point of light. “Well, to Triton and Neptune, for starters.”

  Hal actually laughed. It was a strange sound, quite playful to the ear. There was the inescapable sense of artifice, but sufficiently rich of a human overlay that Paul almost heard the chortle of a friend. “What’s the joke, you maniac?”

  “Paul, my dear boy. After all this time, all your adventures, do you still really believe that we’re moving?”

  “Aren’t we?” Paul felt the final, inevitable loosening of his grip on their discussion.

  “If you say so, old buddy. But for me, and as far as the universe is concerned, we’ve already arrived.”

  ***

  Chapter 18: Eliria’s Mission

  All was silent once more as the two completed another slow circle around Serona. The gas giant was grandly oblivious to their presence; stray rocks from its ring system occasionally had the station’s alarms sounding. But no such noise broke the peace of the silent couple as they floated together.

  It had been about an hour, and Garlidan was beginning to get restless. One could exist in graceful communion with the cosmos for only so long before getting hungry, bored or horny, all of which were now afflicting him. His meditation partner, floating upside down in her own perfect reverie, seemed unencumbered by such human concerns. A renewed meditation program had become Eliria’s way of taking urgently needed breaks from their seemingly endless sex. Garlidan’s inventive menagerie of possibilities and positions had exhausted her. He felt rather proud of this achievement.

  Then, complaint pierced the calm. “Oh, it’s no use, you ridiculous old goat!” She emerged from her cross-legged posture and glared at him. “Can’t you put the base desires on hold for long enough to improve your mind?”

  “I’m trying, really...”

  “I can’t hear you trying. All I can hear is your rumbling stomach, and all I can feel is wave after wave of your lustful overtures wafting in my direction. I’m amazed I’ve been able to work this long, with such a commotion going on.”

  Garlidan laughed unselfconsciously. “Commotion? All that I can hear are the complaints of my supposed meditation partner. Don’t you know how important it is to focus?”

  The nearest thing to hand was a small lectern, so it was thrown at the side of Garlidan’s head. He was sent spinning uncontrollably into the far wall. “How can I hope to focus, with you here?” she yelled.

  Rubbing his bruised skull, Garlidan commented, “It depends what you want to focus on, my sweet”.

  She pulled her robes tighter around herself, the better to hide her breasts from his constant leering; she had found, after weeks of experiment, that she meditated at her best when unfettered by clothing except her simple black robe. Underwear was particularly unwelcome, and she decided to do without it, something which Garlidan had noted with intense interest.

  “And I suppose you’d rather I focused on your unruly manhood, isn’t that true?”

  “They do say,” he smiled, “that one should bring one’s mind entirely to something which is constant...”

  Between berating and chastising, there was still space for floating and fondling. Afterwards, and following a decent interval, Eliria re-commenced her critique of Garlidan, blaming him for ruining the peace of her orbital lair.

  “Surely you understand that I’m here to keep you from insanity, dear Eliria. It’s just not desirable to be as...” he gestured to delay, “unsociable”.

  “And you’re here to resurrect my social life? Or is it simply to spice up my sex life that you’ve crossed the galaxy in a stolen Cruiser?”

  “Stolen?” gasped Garlidan, in a knowingly pitiful attempt to change the subject.

  “I’ve been dying to know the reason for this graceful visit.” For a second, he seemed caught off-guard, but he flashed a friendly smile and talked her through it.

  “Paul needs our help.”

  Eliria gave Garlidan an extraordinary look which seemed triple-laden with emotion. “Paul?”

  “His planet will find itself in serious danger,” he pressed on, “unless we help him to prevent a confused young man from doing something terrible.”

  Eliria pulled her robe tighter around herself. “And how can I, a rather peripheral figure, hope to change such a weighty outcome?”

  He was all business now, their three-day tryst apparently only an enjoyable prelude. “I need you to undertake a journey. Certain information needs to be put into his hand. A transmission won’t do.”

  “Where will I go?”

  “You know the Region of The Five, I’m sure.”

  She rolled her eyes theatrically, but not without sincerity. “You’re putting years on this body for no good reason, I swear it. Couldn’t I deliver it to someone a little closer?”

  “I’m afraid not, my sweet. Although I do believe you’ll enjoy my newest hyper-tube design.”

  “Which is where?”

  “Over there,” he thumbed past his shoulder. “I’ve had robots boring out a moonlet to create your own light-speed endurance ship.”

  She raised an eyebrow, then begrudgingly cracked a smile. “I should have known, you old goat.”

  “Not so old these days, wouldn’t you say, Madam?” he proffered, tugging his newly re-grown forelock.

  Garlidan flew them over to the village-sized moonlet. There could be no landing as such; grapples from the Telesto anchored their ship to an airlock, and spacesuits were still required. It went smoothly, and before long Eliria was touring her new home.

  Only a fraction of the moonlet was hollowed out, allowing space for a living quarters the size of a large hotel suite. “You can meditate all you wish, but the craft’s computer expects you simply to go to sleep. It’s not a fancy model, so don’t tax it too badly.” At the far end lay the hyper-tube, a cylindrical module into which Eliria would step. “You will experience no passage of time within the cylinder,” Garlidan explained, a little more soberly than usual. “It will be, upon arrival, as if seconds have passed, whereas in reality...”

  “Never tell me how long!” she shrieked. “You pull this stunt every time, and I never want to know. You know I never want to know.” She paused, glanced around the spacious quarters. When not suspended in time – sleep just didn’t describe it – she would have a comfortable cabin in which to read, meditate, communicate with people. Still, the absurd length of the journey bothered her a little.

  “Does it truly matter, in the end? The time, I mean?” Garlidan asked, his calm tone intended to mollify her.

  “Oh let’s just abandon the arrow of time and pretend we can dip in and out of the continuum as we see fit,” Eliria offered sarcastically.

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” she cried.

  “That was my question.”

  She punched him and they argued it through, all over again. “The continuity of events, the preservation of cause and effect, are critical to a sane and coherent world
-view.”

  “Well, my adventures in ships just like this one haven’t done my world-view any harm,” he retorted.

  “Crap, Garlidan. Besides, your world-view is neither sane nor coherent.”

  He mimed a stab wound, doubled over in offended agony.

  “Cut it out. This is important. You can’t simply play with time.”

  It occurred to him that he might rage against this limitation: I can play with whatever I want! This bauble of a universe, this attractively malleable timeline, these remarkably gullible life forms, all could be seen as my toys. With who else am I to play? Only infinity is my equal. Such flourishes of inner rhetoric made him smile.

  Eliria punched him again. “Just tell me when I leave, you impossible creature.”

  He chuckled and tapped several screens on the suite’s walls. “The ship – let’s call it that – is fully prepared for the journey. Nuclear engines, top-of-the-line systems electronics... you’ll have a smooth ride. You may depart at your leisure.”

  “Good. I need about two hours.”

  “So little time?” he said, eyebrow raised.

  “Just time enough to meditate for one more hour.”

  “Of course.”

  She ran a hand over the wall of the room, a soothing velvet sensation. “Then time enough for you to fuck me. Before you disappear across the universe again.”

  ***

  Chapter 19: Merchant Banker

  It struck Julius as toweringly ironic that, on Qelandi, there was little visible difference between a bank and a cemetery. A grand gate offered a palm-flanked driveway which led to a two-storey, balconied building of radiant whiteness, the better to cool its occupants. During these searing midday hours, when three of The Five were simultaneously high in the sky, Julius was one of only a few people running errands. Everyone who had to be was at work, but everyone else was asleep in the coolest part of their quarters. Having abandoned his bike at the Bazaar, he was reduced to walking through this wall of hot air. At least the drooping palms protected him from the worst of the equatorial heat, though he was grateful to step under the balcony and into proper shade, where he could remove his sun goggles and the white headscarf which kept out the dust.