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

by C. Paul Lockman

  It would not be too much to claim that the computer ‘enjoyed’ these experiments. By its own estimates, the store of human knowledge was being usefully expanded, and millions of future hypersleep travelers would benefit. Absorbed in these tests and taking complete notes on his work, Dave was not expecting a subspace communication; in fact, none were scheduled for the entire trip, as the Daedalus would be arriving, for reasons of safety, quite unannounced. The signature was unmistakable, however, and the message proceeded thus:

  EMERGENCY SUB-SPACE TRANSMSSION. ORIGIN: QUANTUM SUPERCOMPUTER ‘HAL’, IN EARTH ORBIT.

  MESSAGE READS: PLANNED ARRIVAL TIME OF DAEDALUS IN EARTH-MOON SYSTEM REGARDED AS PERILOUS.

  BE AWARE: MALICIOUS INTERFERENCE IN SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM BY CREW OF STARSHIP LARSSEN.

  DESTRUCTION OF DAEDALUS CERTAIN.

  CHRONOLOGICAL PARADOX INEVITABLE.

  RECOMMEND IMMEDIATE WAKE-UP PROCEDURES FOR THE CAPTAIN, DR. FALIK PALAAN AND CREWMEMBER PHY.

  REPEAT, EMERGENCY: TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION TO PREVENT TOTAL CREW LOSS. PARADOX INEVITABLE IF ARRIVAL IS NOT EFFECTED IN ELEVEN (11) EARTH DAYS FROM RECEIPT OF THIS TRANSMISSION.

  HAL OUT.

  Dave assembled what he had learned. The commander of another ship – this Larssen - was dangerously meddling in the received sequence of events, which would render the journey of the Daedalus impossible, according to the universal rules of cause and effect. Such a paradox would bring catastrophe, complete crew loss and failure of the primary mission. Their flight plan needed a major update, and this required The Captain. The computer immediately sent emergency wake-up codes to the three capsules.

  ***

  “Well, shipmates, if I look anything like as shitty as you two, my wife’ll never sleep with me again.” The Captain seated himself heavily on the floor of the bridge, unable at present even to reach his commander’s chair. Despite the computer’s best efforts with rotation and dampening, the G-effects of their headlong rush across interstellar space were punishing for the recently-awakened trio.

  “I’m surprised she ever agreed to sleep with you in the first place,” offered a terribly groggy Phy, who was fighting nausea and extreme disorientation.

  “Fuck you, grease monkey. I see you’ve lost none of your radioactive glow. Or your room-slaying sense of humor.” The Captain looked and sounded rough but would never resist a jibe about his comely wife, thirty years his junior and possessed both of spectacular beauty and a hedonistic reputation. Reactor engineers had ‘glowed’ ever since the first nuclear-powered spaceships; a well-worn trope, but he had to think of something. “You OK, Falik?”

  Falik, very plainly, felt like absolute shit but was trying hard to pull herself together. Nausea and gravity aside, her main concern was the lack of information; premature waking was only enacted in emergencies, but if they faced imminent danger, why wasn’t the whole crew struggling into consciousness? Why just these three? “Not good, Captain, but I’m improving. Can we get some data from the computer?”

  The Captain bellowed their AI to attention. “Right, Dave, out with it. What’s the big idea?”

  Daedalus’ computer succinctly conveyed Hal’s emergency message, to the slack-jawed alarm of the groggy trio. “Owing to the certainty of a Chrono-paradox, our arrival time is no longer safe. The ship must be in Earth orbit in eleven days.” As things stood, the display showed, they were going to be at least sixty days late.

  The Captain whistled. “By the Stars.” His brow was furrowed with concern at the prospect. “We’re going to have to get every last knot out of our sails.”

  Phy took a moment to hurdle the metaphor and then began ordering calculations from the computer. “We can push the throttles to the stops and be there in 16 days.”

  “That won’t work,” Falik warned gently, far more worried than she sounded. “We’re in a race with this lunatic. And coming second isn’t an option.” The danger, Falik quickly saw, was total. The crew of the Lawrence would be murdered, her own meeting with Paul rendered impossible, and then the journey of the Daedalus would become dangerously paradoxical. “Our arrival will be compromised. It can’t have happened. Or won’t be able to have happened,” she said, her brow furrowed.

  The Captain faced his engineer. “How about it, Phy? Can we push this old rust bucket a little quicker still?”

  Phy said nothing at first. Then, finally able to stand unassisted, he began interacting with Dave using parallel torrents of verbal and typed commands. “I’ll keep you posted,” he said. The Captain gave him a pat on the shoulder and then retreated to his quarters to drink down another liter of electrolyte.

  “Danny, I can’t see a way for us to muster anything like enough speed,” he concluded. “I don’t like the looks of our..”

  “Wait one,” the machine said. “I’m getting something within the sub-space transmission from Hal that I don’t really understand.”

  Phy read the suspect passage and asked Danny to run it through a couple of decoding programs. “There’s something… Right there… Is that a second message, underneath?”

  Danny scanned the data and found a string of text. “I don’t know why it’s there, but yes, it is. Displaying it now.”

  Phy read, and then re-read the message. It was an invitation of sorts, and perhaps their only hope for reaching the Earth before the rules of space and time would destroy them all. He worked on the trajectory the message implied, and then brought the results to the Captain.

  “Well?” The older man still wasn’t feeling great, but he gave Phy’s findings his full attention. Soon, his razor-sharp mind was whirring at it accustomed speed. “Hidden under the data… Audacious. Even risky. The kind of thing we’ve come to suspect from a certain kind of mind,” the Captain speculated with a wry smile.

  “It does bear all the hallmarks,” Phy agreed. “And he’s the only entity I know of with the power to create something like this.”

  They interrogated the display together. “So,” the Captain said, “where are we headed?”

  Phy took a deep breath, and told him.

  ***

  Chapter 23: Into the Belt

  Aboard the Orion, 1.7 billion miles out from Qelandi

  A comforting routine was setting in and Julius absolutely loved it. He operated on the same eight-hour cycles which defined all of their lives: eight hours’ watch, eight hours’ private time and eight hours’ sleep. It became a little more approximate than that almost at once, but Julius welcomed the imposition of an efficient structure unknown since the village, and he thrived within it.

  He got to know the ship. Apart from the crew lounge, the small and largely automated control room, and the individual cabins assigned to the crew, there wasn’t much to see. There was some storage, a couple of airlocks. The rest of the ship was basically inaccessible without a space suit, and there was nothing to do once you got there. Exposed to the vacuum were over three thousand massive, cylindrical and hexagonal chambers designed purely for the carriage of bulk ore. At present all were empty, but their mission to The Belt had the objective of filling as many as possible. Each dozen or so would, in the end, be worth more money than a Qelandian was ever likely to see in his lifetime. A thousand would have bought a major investment with the bank he’d visited before leaving. A hundred thousand – if the Orion could have hauled such a number - would have bought the bank itself.

  He befriended Arby, whose massive frame, he found, contained a heart of gold. Arby never missed a chance to make him laugh, reassure him about a problem, give sage advice or just get him partying when the time was right. A doctor would have called Arby a functioning alcoholic, but it somehow never seemed to interfere with his work. Zak kept a close eye on him – on all of them really – and not once in this lengthy trip did he have any cause to discipline them. Sanctions were few but extremely unpleasant: being confined to quarters, banned from partying or from the lounge itself, or (in extreme cases), being ejected from the crew. As this had never happened before, no one
even knew how it might be done.

  And he was enjoying the daily thrill of becoming gradually closer with Mesilla. He was awkward around her at first, often cripplingly self-conscious and shy, but she defused these tensions with her smile, a warm hug or a sassy joke. They often worked together, cleaning up the lounge or charting the local asteroids which, if unwatched, could ruin their trip real fast. On two occasions they had felt it prudent to order a course correction burn and, despite the modest additional cost, Zak always backed them up. Mesilla’s smile and the lithe, muscular shape of her petite body found their way into Julius’ dreams. And into a good deal of his waking time, too.

  This was the problem. Trained from his earliest years to frown on erotic thoughts, and to actively disapprove of pre-marital sex, Julius was torn between the rules of home and the rather different rules on the Orion. Who had supervisory authority over him here? Zak? The man who had given him drink and drugs on his first day on board? Or Arby, the loveable drunkard? Mesilla herself was no stranger to immorality, he’d become sure. Julius would be the sole standard bearer for the ethics his people cherished.

  Much of his personal time was spent reading the small library left to him by his predecessor. Julius was becoming conversant in AGI code, sufficiently enough to run some basic programs on the ship’s computer. But it was the worn book with the red, leather cover he had begun on his first day which really held his attention. Julius found himself re-reading it again and again until it became the only thing he ever sat down with. He never read it outside of his room, the better to keep his re-emerging beliefs from others, who might ridicule them; worse still, Mesilla might think him some kind of weird zealot with wooly, ancient pseudo-science for a religion. In truth, his faith had become increasingly firm and unwavering. The book had been key.

  The Will of the Five had first been written some six thousand Qelandi years before his birth, which made it by far the oldest book he had ever held. It recounted the tenets of a faith system at once familiar and surprising, at once dreadful and entirely at peace. It advised, in countless ways, an acceptance of reality. To struggle against what was real, it said, was to enter a crazed mental plain, a den of chance and rebellion, from which even a successful escape meant permanent scars.

  At first it made little sense. The book narrated the story of The Will, a mystical amalgam formed by webs of tiny particles which invisibly linked the Five Stars. This nebulous matrix had gained consciousness when sufficiently warmed by the stars, but remained invisible to humans. Qelandians, whose beliefs tallied closely with the author’s, agreed that the particle network was conscious, but didn’t necessarily hold that it had created Qelandi. Sufficient of the book felt familiar, though, for Julius to read on.

  In as many ways as he could, the author reiterated the importance of what actually is, as opposed to what we would prefer. Acceptance, and a host of synonyms for it, dominated almost every chapter. Methods were proposed, including quasi-meditative practices which taught resilience through pain. Frequent reminders of the immutable nature of reality – sometimes necessarily stark and uncomfortable - were grist to the devotee’s mill, an encouragement to keep up the good work of paying attention and accepting what was real.

  The message sank in, deep and quickly. Julius began to regard the world around him rather differently. His gaze lingered a little longer and he felt able to take in more detail. He found himself becoming more observant, more aware. The next chapters of the book only heightened this sensation, as he learned about time.

  Treated almost as a sixth star to the classic ‘Pentastria’ of the Five, time was also described as a consistent, caring entity who desired only the best for us, and who rejoiced in our gradual betterment. To rail against this elemental force would be as successful as ‘trying to topple a mountain by blowing on it’, the book cautioned. Ageing was the most natural thing imaginable, as was death. Once one understood this basic fact – that all things unfold and proceed at a determined, measured pace – then the content of time itself becomes less fleeting, more graspable. More real.

  This beautifully organic growth of Julius’ perceptual faculties was yet more remarkable for having taken place on a speeding space freighter. The stripped-down, regimented existence suited him perfectly. He found himself able to concentrate throughout increasingly long reading sessions, sometimes losing track of time as the manuscript absorbed him entirely. He memorized long sections of The Will of the Five, stopping to ruminate on its meaning, and on the guidance contained in its message.

  None of the crew recognized a change in him, although Mesilla noticed a more ready smile and a relaxed, happy-go-lucky demeanor, perhaps merely the giddiness to be expected on Julius’ debut cruise. Nothing seemed odd, until one night when they were watching a movie in the lounge. It had been Arby’s choice, a tele-play about a colony of fat people on a remote moon. Zak was enlivening the performance with his own piquant brand of commentary, while Mesilla painted her toenails. Arby’s choices typically received this kind of reaction. Zak once got so drunk during Arby’s proud screening of a rare, foreign-language film that he rose loudly to protest, staggered around the lounge, and then puked on the screen.

  The play, cast in a linked sequence of vignettes, seemed to center around a time-traveling nobleman who was forever getting himself into trouble by causing alterations to his own past. He scars himself for life by trying to teach his younger self to swim, in the hopes it will aid in an upcoming sporting event. He tries wooing a neighbor’s daughter, but has stupidly forgotten that he appears thirty years older than his usual self. Then came the anarchic comedy brought on by meeting his own mother. It was uneven but everyone basically enjoyed it. Or at least, enjoyed Zak’s take on the production.

  All except Julius. Almost from the start he had found himself profoundly uncomfortable. He knew it wasn’t a particularly good film, but didn’t feel this was the problem. It was something deeper. It took half the movie for him to figure it out, and by then his discomfort had become acute. Rather than cause a fuss or detract from Zak’s narration, he waited until the end and then approached Arby, who was mixing one of his giant pitchers of lurid, orange booze.

  “Arby, what do you think about traveling in time?” Julius watched Arby wield a foot-long stirrer, used to froth the orange mixture.

  “Sounds bananas to me,” he replied. “Lots of trouble there.”

  “Yes, all a bit farcical too. How could he still exist if he’d interrupted his parents’ meeting? There would be no ‘him’ there to travel back in time if he’d erased his own existence,” Julius contested.

  “He’s talking about a paradox, Arby. Remember that one?” Zak wandered in, looking a bit hammered.

  The engineer paused, took a massive swig of his frothy, orange beverage (which contained enough alcohol to fell a tree) and said, “Yes, Captain, I think I remember. But they can’t really exist, can they?”

  “He’s right,” Zak said, sitting heavily on a battered bar stool. “Lack of cause... causes, erm... causes lack of effects because of the lacking cause. Of course.”

  Julius smelled the orange drink and decided against a glass. “But don’t you think time should just be left alone?”

  “Whyzat?”

  “It did cause some pretty serious confusion, and that was just in a dumb, low-budget tele-play. No offence, Arby.” The big man shrugged. “In reality, the whole idea of where we are and why we’re here would be pulled apart; you said it yourself, kind of, that cause and effect need to stay linked.”

  “Yeah, but it’s impossible, isn’t it?” Arby asked. “Time travel, I mean. No one actually went and did it, right?”

  Zak’s face fell slightly and he poured himself a massive glass of the orange stuff. “Sure,” was all he said.

  “Zak?” Julius pulled up a bar stool next to the Captain’s and tried to engage him despite his obvious reluctance. “It’s all fantasy, surely? Traveling in time? I mean...”

  “I’m not a physicist, Julius. I
wouldn’t know.” Arby was emptying the pitcher straight down his throat. “And you know for damned sure Arby doesn’t know shit.” The engineer burped and fixed Zak with a frowning look which quickly transformed into a goofy smile. “Again, no offence, big man.”

  Julius left them to it and slouched around the room for a while, playing a couple of pin-ball machines and gazing out into space through the long, tall back windows. Mesilla silently approached and gave him a start as she sat right next to him in the alcove window. “Penny for your thoughts?” she asked kindly, putting a caring arm around him.

  Julius felt that tickling, warm sensation in his groin again and immediately willed his dick back into slumber. “I don’t know. The movie. Time travel. The guys, they didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  “That piece of crap? It’s just a lousy fantasy film, isn’t it?” Mesilla asked.

  “What do you think?” He looked squarely at her, genuinely wanting her advice.

  She took both his hands in hers and warmed them. Her natural effervescence extended beyond social ease and into an actual bodily heat which Julius could feel on his skin. Part of his mind wondered how she would look covered in sweat, naked...

  “I think it’s a big universe,” she said calmly. “I think we can’t know everything that goes on out there, and certainly not everything which ever has, or ever will.” Julius nodded. “So, somewhere, I’m sure scientists have dedicated centuries to figuring out time travel and, who knows, maybe even succeeded.”

  Julius stood suddenly. “I think they should be stopped from doing that.” Mesilla’s eyes went wide with surprise, her calmness suddenly vanished. “I think they’re trampling where they shouldn’t.”

  She stood with him, raised her palms to calm the young man, beckoned him to sit again. “Why, Julius? What’s wrong with experimenting?”