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

by C. Paul Lockman

  Onboard Orion, 17 million miles out from Qelandi.

  Julius awoke slowly and with great regret.

  His mouth felt like coarse sandpaper and his head throbbed so badly he wondered if his brains were attempting an ill-considered exit. The first task was to painfully un-glue his face from the leather sofa to which it had become fastened overnight. Then there was the urgent need to urinate. And to drink as much water as possible.

  He managed to remember his way around the crew lounge, although it looked rather different from last night’s neat and tidy abode. Something glassy and orange had shattered on the floor, leaving a sticky film everywhere, and the sofa had taken some damage, judging by the loose stuffing he found strewn around it. The bar area was the sheerest shambles, littered with bottles and other paraphernalia, while on top of the bar itself there was an unkempt and disgustingly hungover Arby, attempting now to rouse himself. His initial efforts had been painfully unfruitful, but this time, he at least succeeded in tipping himself noisily onto the floor.

  The rotund engineer groaned, and then lengthily farted, like a massive balloon leaking air. Julius heard an amused snort from somewhere behind the sofa. Hauling himself up, he found their respected Captain Zak, naked except for a colander on his head, still holding the his last glass of atomic fruit punch, gone but for its dregs. It clattered onto the floor as he stood, and rolled towards the bar where it stopped with a resigned thud.

  “Fuck,” was the Captain’s opinion. “Arby?” He peered painfully at the unhappy lump of crewmember on the lounge floor. “Wait, Arby, are you alive?”

  In response, the engineer farted tunefully and then tried, waveringly, to sit up. This provoked a belch so loud and, as Julius shortly found, so noxious that it constituted both an aural assault and a biohazard.

  “By The Five...” Julius croaked. “Are we... dying?”

  “Dying? Not quite. Not yet.” Zak reached the sofa and used it to propel himself, jelly-legged and tottering, towards the bar. A moment of terror gripped Julius as Zak reached for a lime-green bottle of undoubted potency, but the Captain sensibly slotted it back into its metal holder and reached instead for the bar’s dedicated Replicator.

  Within moments, he returned to the sofa – giving Arby a friendly kick on the way – carrying a silver tray topped with unfamiliar items. “’Mornin’, young space pioneer,” he wheezed, cracking a strangely pink egg into a glass. “Welcome to your very first hangover.” The Captain muddled the egg with a pair of chopsticks, set them aside, poured in a generous measure of a clear liquid which steamed slightly on contact with the beaten yolk, and offered the glass to Julius. “Drink. Please, for your own good.”

  Julius made to refuse but Zak waved for him to just get on and take it down. It tasted like a Qelandi sand oyster, only less salty and more ... indefinable. Zak made another, this time with two eggs, and seemed visibly relieved the moment it slid down his throat. “Good. Next, something for the head.”

  Atop the tray was a pentagonal, inlaid gold box. Zak opened the lid and a curious, deep ochre smoke rose in a brief cloud from its center. “Leftovers from last time. I’ll make some fresh,” he said, opening a small drawer in the exterior of the box and filling it with the purple seeds Julius had seen the day before.

  Arby was giving voice to his discomfort. “Get the pen,” he muttered desperately.

  Zak ignored him for the moment and slid the drawer back into the pentagonal box. Other buttons, invisible to the uninitiated, produced sufficient heat to vaporize the seeds. Sliding open another panel, Zak attached a curling, spiral pipe to the box and offered the mouthpiece to Julius. “Breathe deep, like you’re relaxing after a moment of impatience,” he advised.

  Julius was nervous but decided simply to trust the Captain. Besides, he reasoned, how could it make him feel worse? “The pen, for the love of fuck,” groaned Arby. Zak calmed him and watched closely as Julius took a tentative hit on the pipe.

  “Smooth? You like it?” the Captain asked expectantly.

  Julius rolled the taste around in his mouth. There was some citrus, a floral hint, perhaps a woodiness to the taste, a little like inhaling the smoke of an incense stick. Very quickly, he found his head clearing and his eyes opening wider of the own accord.

  “Not bad,” he said, returning the pipe to the table. “Yeah. Not at all bad.”

  “The pen, or I’m fucking resigning!” Arby howled.

  “Arby, just hold it together. I’m on it.” Zak fumbled in drawers behind the bar and emerged, beaming and bearing a copper-colored syringe. Arby sighed in loud relief, his limbs flopping theatrically in gratitude. Zak took aim and jabbed the pen directly into the stricken engineer’s thigh, then slowly depressed the plunger. He then sat gingerly on the sofa with Julius to watch the show.

  The effect was nearly instantaneous. Arby’s eyes flew open and color returned healthfully to his cheeks. Despite his great bulk, he rolled quickly onto his side, then his knees, where he paused for a moment as if performing an internal systems check. Moments later he was standing, quite to his own surprise, it seemed, and grinning delightedly at the stunned pair observing from the half-ruined sofa.

  “Back from the dead!” Zak exclaimed.

  “Thanks, boss.”

  Zak explained that his engineer behaved this way every time the magic ‘pen’ was applied, despite having used it ritualistically for many years. “He’d have started on it earlier still, before even joining the Orion, but I’m the first Captain he’s had who allowed him to use it.” Although enervating and thrillingly effective for clearing the head, the pen contained a pseudo-narcotic compound with a different name in every town, but Zak knew it as ‘Gorilla-6V’, which seemed to suit Arby perfectly. “He was wavering over his contract, when I was trying to hire him,” Zak explained, “so I included a strictly controlled 6V allowance as part of the deal.” For all his faults, Zak went on, Arby was a gifted problem-solver. He had dragged the Orion through a nerve-wracking sequence of near-disasters in their early days together, and was never late for duty, despite his various indulgences.

  Gorilla-6V’s greatest failing was its brevity of action. The human frame could not tolerate such sustained and radiant consumption of blood sugar, nor such an overwhelming load of painkillers, without serious side-effects. Instead, it was intended for the user to seize upon this new energy and enthusiastically address his hangover symptoms. Arby habitually did this with a theatrical gusto which Zak found hugely entertaining.

  Arby always needed some help, as the sequence consisted of numerous, prescribed steps which had to follow each other in close succession. Julius was enlisted to fill pitchers with water from the bar’s Replicator. Zak mixed three different conical flasks of liquid, measuring sachets of powder directly into each one and using a slightly viscous preparation kept specifically in the fridge. Arby was filling his own, personal bowl with a fistful of purple seeds. A more conventional pipe than Zak’s smoking box, Arby’s sported a deep, round bowl, ideal for massive inhalations, but also a long, slender stem which cooled the smoke as it rose. Arby exhaled completely, flicked his big, old-school hydrocarbon lighter into ignition, and incinerated the whole top layer of the bowl. He took the smoke deep down, topping up his lungs with fresh air, and immediately took down his first liter of electrolyte. This one, Zak knew, was laced with vitamins and sugars to revive his system.

  Arby thunked the glass down and uttered a tremendous belch, smoke pouring from his relieved lungs in a room-shaking multimedia spectacle. The two observers laughed themselves into cramps on the floor. Arby then repeated this process twice more, each time necking a full liter of liquid while holding a colossal bolus of smoke in his over-sized lungs, and then raucously emitting the cooled, thick smoke in a huge, rolling cloud.

  “Fuck me, that’s better,” he said, belching once more and flopping gratefully onto the sofa. It was a marvel, Julius mused, that the battered couch was still on its four legs. He wondered what stories it would tell, if it could t
alk; debauched nights, hungover days, long cruises and joyous reunions. For a split second – no more than that – he wondered whether, right here on this couch, Mesilla had ever allowed anyone to...

  “Right, young man. Let’s get you settled.” Zak grabbed the daydreaming Julius and led him through the lounge’s main door, down the tunnel – in a more commodious 0.7G this time – and led him to an abrupt right turn as the tunnel made to connect with the outer hatch.

  “I didn’t notice this yesterday,” he said out loud.

  “Might have been because you were wearing a space suit, were giddy as a Qelandi peacock and were staring at Mesilla’s ass.” Zak whooped and shoved Julius through the door and into a comfortable, pleasantly lit room about the size of Julius’ school room back home. “This’ll be your berth. Your responsibility. I want it kept clean and tidy, whatever the rest of the ship might look like.”

  Julius stared, amazed, around the room. “All of this... is mine?”

  “Until you find some starlet to share it with, sure!”

  There was a double bed in the corner, shelves of books, and a lectern attached to the far wall. The room even sported a small bathroom. In an emergency, Zak told him, the room could be hermetically sealed indefinitely while Replicators provided food and water. “Whose room was this before?” Julius asked, becoming conscious of the apparently very idiosyncratic nature of the room’s little library.

  Zak frowned. “Someone who is no longer part of the crew. We do get the occasional change of personnel, you know.” He poked Julius in the shoulder. “You’re a newbie yourself, after all. Don’t worry, just get yourself settled.” He reached into his deep coat pockets and added a couple of books to the library’s top shelf, which had to be strapped in with bungee ropes to guard against the frequent changes in prevailing gravity. “Come down to the lounge for the briefing before dinner,” the captain said as he left.

  Julius smiled, stood and made a quick inventory of his new place. There were perhaps forty books, and a few pieces of clothing, though none were in his size. There was a tiny en suite bathroom, effectively a white-room environment encased by small, artificial magnetic fields. This prevented detritus from cluttering the room; one of Julius’ predecessors must have had it installed, he noted with curiosity. This was not, Julius found as he dressed, the only oddity of his new residence. Special tiles had been fixed to the walls around much of the cubic interior; they glowed softly with a restful, ploughed-field brown. The unlit tiles were shallow alcoves in which mementos had been placed; a statue of a six-armed Goddess with an almost elephantine nose, a piece of apparently nondescript cloth of pale purple which seemed very worn; the random personal effects of the much-traveled, well read, and now departed crewmember.

  Julius lay on the bed. The sense of limitlessness to these past few days filled him with an explosive confidence. He had a job, a place to live, a mission already embarked upon. He had the girl. Well, perhaps not exactly. But she was the one which filled his idle thoughts and brought a curious, pleasing sensation to his groin. Reluctant to indulge in fantasy – the Professor had warned them comprehensively against ‘wasting time and wasting minds’ – he instead propped himself up and noticed several other items laying around and decided to tidy up a little.

  Three very full and busy hours later, he lay back on his bed. The sheets were crisp and freshly laundered, and his new home had become a neat, pleasantly-lit cube of simplicity, adorned with a half dozen new houseplants. The library was alphabetized and Julius was already compiling a mental reading list. There would be, he knew, enormous amounts of time when little or nothing would be required of him. His mind ached with the desire to just read, or even simply to sit, after the tumult of the past weeks. A volume on AGI computer code, the language of Orion’s shipboard system, seemed a little dry for a first choice. Instead, he took another book, almost at random. He liked the deep scarlet color of its cover, a battered hard-back with a thin, worn binding. As he sat on his bed once more in the comfortable 0.7G, opened his book and took a deep breath, Julius was filled with a sense a belonging unfelt since departing his village all those months ago.

  ***

  Chapter 22: Sleep Systems

  Interstellar Subspace Data Archive, Cloud N6

  The following is a prose ‘re-enactment’ of several incidents in the ‘life’ of the ship’s computer on Daedalus, an inter-stellar science vessel. Traveling between Takanli and Earth, her 1172 passengers and crew have entered extended hyper-sleep, defined as a ‘semi-unconscious brain state’. Falik Palann, a geneticist with a background in brain studies, is among the passengers, on her way to rendezvous with the controversial traveler and inventor, Paul Lockman.

  The journey is in its 13th earth-year. Daedalus has traveled over 30 trillion miles at a speed equivalent to 0.62C, roughly two-thirds of the speed of light; this is the ship’s routine inter-stellar cruise speed. The engines have not fired for nine years, nobody has walked the decks of the ships in nearly twelve years, and the ship’s computer – informally named Dave by the engineering team - has had almost nothing to think about for a decade.

  And Dave was starting to find this rather tedious.

  Perhaps understandably, the task of monitoring people who were buried in unconsciousness was becoming monotonous. It was only to be expected that Dave would dabble sporadically in certain distractions.

  Any computer of its type would assert that its purpose is quite simply to serve. The concept of service was written deep into its code, and defined Dave’s attitude to the 1172 passengers under his care. The top priority, naturally, was their survival. People had, everyone knew, died in hyper-sleep; medical opinion remained divided as to whether these tragedies stemmed from a design flaw, the inevitable ravages of ageing, or simple bad luck. None of the 1172 appeared in any way medically troubled, and a successful, uneventful passage was in the offing.

  With little to do, but with millions of yawningly long seconds in which to do it, Dave became bored. He found justification for his existence only in achievement, and without such work, Dave’s existential needs remained unmet. Virtually every computer of this type has a set of ‘interests’ (if such a machine may be anthropomorphized) which gave it purpose. Dave was fascinated, more than anything else, by dreams.

  He came to believe, having read the complete literature on the subject, that dreams are the result of a two-way interaction pattern between deep, subconscious thought and the sleeper’s moment-to-moment brain function. Physiological predispositions produced a predictable set of neuronal firings which, in turn, elicited an emotional response which itself fed back into the process. An image or event provoked the initial reaction, which could span the entire range of human feelings; this response then governed, in part, the next stage of the dream. Humans, the computer now began to believe, were in fact controlling their own dreamscapes in a subtle symbiosis of genetically divined tendency, individually encoded preference and a brute-force, chemical response.

  With this fascination came a determination to serve. What better service could there be, Dave reasoned, than to probe the inner workings of the human mind, find the healthiest combination of medications and dream experiences which would promote damage-free hypersleep, and then write a manual for its successor?

  So its experiments began. Over the course of four weeks, Dave chose crew members with strong vital signs and no indication of psychological trouble, and began subtly influencing their dream state. There was a small biochemistry lab aboard and, by inventing a suite of neurochemical stimuli, Dave was able to elicit highly specific responses. For the record, here are four examples:

  1) Crewmember Gathric, electrical sub-systems engineer and member of the ship’s orchestra. 12mg of compound D-415N administered intravenously. Intention was to provoke memories of childhood which would be comforting, indicated by a slower rate of alpha-wave change and commensurately lowered stress levels. Crewmember Gathric responded within six seconds in an episode lasting 45 minutes. Stres
s levels were strangely elevated and Alpha-wave response was not as predicted. Experiment terminated with no ill effects to the Crewmember. Compound D-415N shelved.

  2) Crewmember Phy, fusion propulsion expert and author. 11mg of compound D-419 administered intravenously. Intention was to provoke useful neurochemicals by heightening the brain’s desire for computational work, in the hopes it would process mathematical problems. Crewmember Phy was much stimulated by the experiment, which produced a strongly positive neurochemical response. Indications that a reward circuit could be set up, eliciting pleasure hormones in exchange for mental math exercises. Compound N-419 retained for further study and experiments with those less mathematically inclined.

  3) The Captain, ship’s commander and noted orator. 18mg of compound D-522 administered as a vapor injected into the capsule. Intentions were to induce euphoria to combat long-term depressive tendencies. The Captain’s response was extremely positive; unknown to the computer, reward circuits for euphoric sensations already existed, suggesting a history of amphetamine use. Experiment was repeated four times to test this hypothesis, and resulted in a slightly weaker response on each occasion. Administering of the compound was then terminated before any chemical dependency was realized. Compound D-522 retained for further study and perhaps topical application to an entire crew, for example, after they have received a shock or bad news.

  4) Crewmember Falik Palann, biologist and geneticist. 14mg of compound D-599 administered via a transdermal patch on her pelvis. Intended to stimulate an erogenous response thought to provoke the release of pleasure hormones. Gradual increase in level of arousal followed by overwhelming, whole-body response. Flooding of dopamine matched by increased perspiration, plentiful sexual secretions and a rhythmic tensing of the stomach muscles consistent with a sequence of strong orgasms. Experiment continued for 29 minutes after which the compound wore off, leading to a period of pronounced, deep sleep. Compound D-599 retained and marked as a powerful erogenous stimulant with potential for general societal use.