This is a fan translation of Captain French, or the Quest for Paradise (Капитан Френч, или Поиски рая) by Mikhail Akhmanov and Christopher Nicholas Gilmore.
Chapter 6
Time passed. We were heading to the edge of Murphy's system, from where I planned to fly to Barsoom. As always, our flight was made up of three stages: acceleration using main ion engines, free drifting (to move far away from the planet), and then a jump in the Ramsden field, or a transition, as it was called sometimes. During the jump, we were moving at near-light speeds and covered great distances in mere days, from our viewpoint, of course. For the denizens of planetary bodies, years passed, sometimes decades, but there was nothing to be done about that, such was the temporal paradox of the theory of relativity. So far, no one had learned to move through space faster than a ray of light, and I doubted that such a trick was even possible. And so, time passed. I'd healed the skin on Shandra's arms and familiarized her with all of the Circe's compartments, except for the tiny cubbyhole next to the thorium reactor and the Ramsden drive; she stopped calling the dining room a refectory or the bedroom a bedchamber and was already confidently giving commands to the robots. Exercises and swimming became a necessary part of our daily routine. They brought me a lot of pleasure: it was far more interesting to throw a ball at Shandra than to train with a robot. It wasn't long before we discovered that all this amusement whipped up our mutual attraction, and the route from the gym to the bedroom became a traditional pre-lunch procedure for us. Sex in reduced gravity had its own charm, but there were cases when we never even made it to the bed if Shandra attacked me on the springboard or in the pool. In those moments, we didn't concern ourselves with gravity.
In truth, her sexual proclivities flattered me greatly, but I was too old and wise to attribute them to my masculine charm. She was a passionate woman and had time for the pleasures of love, but she wasn't guided by physical need alone; first and foremost, she wanted to make me happy, feeling extreme gratitude towards me. Had I not pulled her out of the clutches of the Holy Archonate, having sacrificed a good amount of platinum? Had I not, after buying her out, granted her freedom and made her my lawful wife? Did I not spend all my time with her, care for her, groom her? Was I not teaching her a great many things, which Lady Killashandra, the mistress of the spaceship Circe, needed to know? Was I not showering her with gifts, decorating her with sinful trinkets, as Archon Geoffrey would have said? Yes, I was doing all that, generally for my own pleasure. Some pedant or psychoanalyst would have called it a form of expression of male egoism, but had never paid much attention to the opinion of pedants, or psychoanalysts, for that matter. Shandra liked the gifts, but they did not cause her to squeal with delight. I had no doubt that she would have been happy if I allowed her to wear that same pink jumpsuit from my shuttle. She would have worn it until it came apart at the seams and would have been only happy if I suggested that she walk around naked. At the very least, she enjoyed my tales far greater than the gifts; she listened to my stories with the hunger of someone who had spent forty years on a deserted island. But she wanted to help me even more than listen to the stories. After the cauldrons of the chaste sisters, no task frightened her; she would not have thought twice if I were to ask her to clean the engine nozzles in the company of robots.
Actually, I found her a more interesting task. My business primarily involved trading in ideas and demonstrating samples. Transportation of raw materials, except for the most expensive ones, like precious metals, was pointless; any inhabited world as as rich in ores and minerals as Mother Earth and require no such imports. By the same token, it was pointless to lug machinery, computers, or gliders for dozens of light years; in developed worlds, it was easier to reproduce them based on blueprints, and, in undeveloped worlds, they were useless due to a lack of spare parts, power sources, and experienced technicians. So what was left? Works of art, unusual animals, strange plants, and, naturally, ideas.
Ideas can be very different; for me, this category included scientific discoveries, technological innovations, specifications of various devices or machines, serious literary works and entertainment literature, recordings of spectacles and theatrical productions, recipes of strange dishes, music, and, of course, fashion. Fashion, or, in other words, dresses, suits, undergarments, an Everest of accompanying accessories, was an important part of my business even if a little risky; not every world accepted customs that were born a hundred parsecs away, in another galactic spiral. But if one still intended to sell something, then one would need to organize an exhibition, a genuine fashion show, with an auction, drinks, and snacks, in the style of Old Earth. Usually, I conducted such events in the Circe's main lounge (which was its primary purpose, by the way) or rented a showroom in one of the top hotels. But before the show, I needed to produce the samples (meaning, I had to give the appropriate instructions to the robots), hire agents, study their recommendations, send out invitations to journalists and the local trendsetters, and, most importantly, find suitable fashion models. It was not a simple issue; my models needed to be attractive, popular, and not terribly expensive, at least not enough to bankrupt me. Sometimes I got unlucky, sometimes I got lucky, and, at times, I got very lucky, when these girls would brighten up my loneliness after the show. But now I was no longer lonely; I had a woman, beautiful in every respect, with an excellent figure, innate grace, delicate feelings, and high intelligence. In addition, this woman had nothing to do outside of the bed, the gym, and enlightened conversations… It was pretty obvious where I was going with this.
Basically, I showed her the holograms of my previous shows, had a runway constructed in the big lounge, and reprogrammed two robots into dressers. While we were moving away from Murphy with the acceleration of point-two gs, Shandra started demonstrating her wardrobe, to her enormous benefit and my enduring pleasure.
By the time we were eight astronomical units from Murphy, I'd been forced to admit that our attempts were unsuccessful. Shandra was charming, graceful, and pretty, but I turned out to be an inept director; I knew that something was missing, but only God knew what that was! Or maybe Old Nick.
We went through her holograms, comparing them to the recordings of professional models, and I heard Shandra sighing with disappointment. Gradually, both of us arrived at the conclusion that beauty and innate charm were not all that a fashion model needed; this worthy profession had its own secrets, but I was incapable of revealing them to Shandra. In some ways, I was at fault for pulling her into something that had been too much for me. She was suffering her failure without reproach and was paying me back at night, when I was in her complete power. Here, in bed, she could get on top of me, both literally and figuratively, and let her emotions loose in a long furious ride, spurring and urging her stallion on. I had to admit that this painkilling recipe wasn't too bad, but, on occasion, I wasn't feeling too well.
Finally, I asked for a time out.
"It seems that we're dealing with an art form," I said, "and it's impossible to master all of its subtleties and nuances from a hologram. Let's take a breath, my dear. There are plenty of important things in the world, more important than the runway, and you will need to familiarize yourself with them. As for the runway… I think we'll find masters here and there who will be capable of giving you a few lessons."
I showed her how to use the Circe's databanks, and gave her Baslim-Krause's The Economy of Space Flight to start. To keep this read from drying her out completely and to help her pretty head in understanding it, I got The Legends of Old Earth, a beautiful work by van der Paulsson, from my library, adding entertaining novels to it, such as The Life and Opinions of Baron Munch, Dreams of Love, and "The Canterville Ghost". I also swore to her that, on Barsoom, she would be able to learn the craft from a top fashion model. Now our days were filled with work, and our nightly fits of passion started to abate, replaced by a more calm flow, exactly the rate and rhythm suitable for a man of my advanced age. Finally, the moment arrived when the local sun had turned into a bright dot on the star-studded sky, and the Circe reported that the Ramsden drive could be engaged. Such an event required preparation, I decided; I called up the popular science book Space Travel in Practice by Schaefer and Gius onto the screen, and Shandra and I read a few chapters. Naturally, the technical details were of no interest to her, but my fair lady did end up getting at least an idea of what awaited us.
Shaefer and Gius wrote, "The Ramsden field is directly linked to the fabric of space, for it is a material foundation of Creation, which gives birth to all other forms of radiation and the various microparticles. The first attempts at detecting this elusive substance were made in the twentieth century, and, according to scientific tradition, they are ascribed to Albert Einstein. Of course, the subject was only studied theoretically, as the converter had not yet been invented in that era, and its forebears, particle accelerators, were too unreliable and not powerful enough. However, Einstein had been unable to derive the fundamental equations of the Unified Field, which would have described all the types of the known interactions: the weakest and longest range (gravitational), more powerful (electromagnetic), and, finally, nuclear, which manifests itself with enormous force, but on small distances, on the scale of an atom. The honor of discovering the Unified Field goes to Christopher Ramsden, a brilliant physicist of the twenty-first century, who not only proved the theoretical side of his hypotheses, but also built the first converter, which performed two primary functions: the transformation of mass into energy and the reverse transition of radiation to mass. At that, he also discovered the so-called Sameness Law; the masses before and after a double conversion are equivalent to one another up to the Heisenberg uncertainty ratio. This conclusion worked for both non-living and living matter, and, therefore, the converter designed by Ramsden opened the doorway to the galaxy for humanity. Any object placed in the Ramsden field (for example, a spaceship with a crew) became able to move with the speed of light (c), or, more precisely, a speed nearly indistinguishable from c; as such, the distance of ten light years can be crossed in only a few minutes of subjective time."
What followed was an intricate mesh of equations. Obviously, Shandra was not privy to the quantum theory of the Unified Field, so I had no problems with skipping these pages. But, in the next section, Schaefer and Gius were describing the history of space travel, and this was where my lady was rapt at attention. No wonder! After all, they were writing about her husband, Old Cap Frenchie, the space monster!
"The history of space travel cannot be viewed as a triumphant road to the stars; it is full of tragic accidents, and the list of ships that have disappeared or sunk into oblivion is fairly long (see Appendix F). In almost every case, the main reason for all these tragedies are calculation errors or incorrect course plotting, as a result of which the ship emerges from the Ramsden field near large gravitating masses, a planet or a star. Their destabilizing effect was predicted theoretically and confirmed by a long and unfortunate practice. Perhaps, these tragedies could have been avoided, but the human mind possesses a certain inertia, which, along with the hope for a miracle, occasionally leads to lethal results. Many centuries had passed until the pilots realized that the Ramsden drive gave them a chance to reach any star in the galaxy, but this chance is never one hundred percent, as no computer is capable of precisely calculating a jump of forty or fifty parsecs. The longer the jump distance, the greater the uncertainty of the endpoint coordinates, which means that the probability of emerging near a planet or a star increases."
"It should be noted that the strategy of distant space flights completely reflects a navigator or a shipmaster's personality. Some of them, like the legendary Captain French, a great navigator, cross space using relatively short jumps, sacrificing speed for reliability and safety; others, for example, Rockwell Shard, catch the prize in a game of Russian roulette, jumping fifty or a hundred parsecs and risking to end up dangerously close to a gravitating mass. What pushes them towards this? A thirst for glory or an unhealthy appetite for risk? Rockwell Shard, the owner of the Mischievous Beauty and the record holder for jump distances, rejects both of these accusations. The universe is eternal, he claims, which means that, in time, every ship will turn to dust in a destabilizing gravity trap. From that viewpoint, both the Circe and the Mischievous Beauty have equal chances of ending up in Appendix F…"
After reading this passage, Shandra went pale, but I immediately calmed her down with a kiss. I knew how to counter Shard; in any case, I planned to end up in Appendix F far later than him.
"It looks like it says," my lady threw a glance of her green eyes at the screen, "that you must die. Is that true, Graham?"
I shrugged.
"Every existence comes to an end, my girl. Theoretically, the CR procedure promises us eternal life, but very few have lived for longer than three or four thousand years. Aging has no power over us, but who will protect us from accidents, human wickedness, wars, natural disasters? Sooner or later, they bring us to an end… I have lived a long life, over twenty thousand years, but I spent nine-tenth of that time in the Ramsden field, where the concept of time is extremely relative. So, in reality, I can't say how many years I have lived, twenty thousand or only two… But what does it matter? I'm alive and I plan to live for a long time!"
At the very least, until I find my Paradise, I added to myself. No matter what Rockwell Shard, the record holder for the longest jump, claimed, I was going to continue keeping to my strategy, which, as Schaefer and Gius correctly noted, ensured reliability and safety. Space as big, the universe was expanding, and, compared to it, the space near the stars, where a fatal destabilization could occur, was negligible. Which also meant that the chance for vaporization was also small. I could make a calculation error and miss the target, I could end up in the Magellanic Clouds, in the Pleiades, or in another galaxy, but the chance to end up in a dangerous area was one in a billion or even less.
But this prospect in particular caused many to refuse space travel, which I had never been able to understand. After all, no one could live forever, no one could predict one's own end, and, for most of us, death was a kind of a tragic surprise… And yet many still refused! Maybe because irrationality as an inseparable part of human nature, having taken deep roots in our soul, no matter how much we messed around with our genes… That was why people experienced fear before everything unfamiliar and unknown, which, at times, equated to unintentional suicide. For example, during the beginning of the age of CR, there were many individuals and religious groups who had refused to undergo the necessary procedures. In essence, they preferred the inevitability of decrepitude after half a century to a long life and an accidental finale… How foolish! Fortunately, it had outlived itself, as all the dissidents died out soon after.
I continued my reflections, "We're alive, my girl, and will live for many centuries, unless fate turns its back on us… I hope that we witness the invention of a faster-than-light drive, and then… Oh, then!.. I will buy it, even if I will have to mortgage the Circe's reactor and engines, and we will go on the farthest adventure yet! We will cross our galaxy, reach the Andromeda Nebula, we…"
Shandra listened to my fantasies with an indulgent smile.
"I will stay with you, if you want me to," she said. "We will be inseparable, like Tom and Jerry, my dear."
My eyes widened.
"Where did you find these ancient films? Those stories aren't in van der Paulsson's tales!"
"No," my fair lady agreed. "But I found other tales by Chaurles Perry, Asta Linren, and Bob Harvard, and they had so many things! About Mighty Mouse and Barbie Doll, about Bondy with two zeroes and a seven, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, about King Kong and his slayer Conan the Barbarian!"
Was it any wonder that I was proud of her? Inside this enchanting body burned the spirit of a true explorer! Now I was no longer afraid of her failure as a model; I was certain there would be a task for her. She had already joined the greatest army of all time, the peaceful host of viewers and readers, and the Circe's library was truly endless. After all, hundreds of heavy tomes had been written of Conan the Barbarian alone!
The interstellar drive had been engaged, and now we were speeding towards Barsoom's system like a warm living photon, lost among the icy darkness of space. An unprepared person would be gripped by a strange feeling in the Ramsden field; it seemed as if one was approaching the universal nirvana, step by step, a merging with some World Mind or God Himself. These sensations were reinforced by quiet incomprehensible voices that someone seemed to be whispering in one's ears, something clear and understandable during the jump, but inevitably slipping away from memory as soon as the ship emerged in normal space. One female mathematician, who had once shared my bed, insisted that she managed to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, but the essence of her thoughts had been lost somewhere aft of the Circe, in the dark abyss which we covered in a leap.
"I'm dreaming," she had complained, "that I am surrounded by a myriad doubles, and each of them wants to give me a piece of advice, a hint, a reminder, but they all speak together, so I can't understand a word."
The followers of various cults, whom I had, at times, transported, reacted to this whispering especially strongly. Some thought that they were being seduced by the Devil, directing them to the straight road to Hell, while others claimed that God was speaking to them, passing holy covenants to them, which needed to be told to all of humanity. I personally had gotten used to this phenomenon, and Shandra grew accustomed to it incredibly quickly. She had a healthy psyche, unlike my religious passengers. I'd had some trouble with them; they paid well, but occasionally demanded that I keep activating the Ramsden field, for they wanted to remember all the divine words whispered by the Creator. Naturally, I denied their requests, and, of course, immediately became their mortal enemy, a spawn of hell, and Satan's accomplice. On occasion, I'd even had to suppress a mutiny, which was significantly helped by the presence of the bulkheads in the habitation area.
The first time this had happened twelve or thirteen millennia ago; I didn't remember exactly, but I could ask the Circe. I'd been hired by a gentleman of dubious reputation, calling himself the First Prophet of the Children of the Lord's Light; it was probably the same light of which Archon Geoffrey had spoken. It was a religious sect from New Macedonia, fairly militant, which had attracted the attention of the local authorities. All of its members ended up losing their citizenship and reproductive rights; they could have probably given them an even stricter punishment: compulsory aging. But then I came along and allowed the Prophet (and my own greed) to convince me towards certain contractual obligations. Our contract provided for me delivering nearly fifty sectarians and the Prophet himself to a habitable world on the Periphery; they'd planned to settle down there, while I was to fly back to Macedonia to their brothers in faith, like an angel bearing the good news of Paradise. This entire operation had been supposed to take four or five hundred years of standard time; by the end of that time, those remaining on Macedonia were planning on building a large colony ship and say goodbye to their godless homeland. In those days, Macedonia, one of the relatively old worlds, had been two hundred light years away from the Periphery. Naturally, I could not have flown this distance in a single jump, and, besides, I planned to make stops on the way, trading and buying new cargo in border worlds, as permitted by our contract. I made a total of seventeen jumps, throwing a fashion show with drinks and snacks whenever I could, a sinful spectacle for my pious passengers. They prayed and grumbled; I offered them a free use of my shuttle to visit the planets during the stops, for rest and a change of scenery. My generosity remained unappreciated; they did not wish to observe a series of worlds steeped in debauchery, which reminded them of the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah. They were in a hurry to get to their Paradise, and into the Ramsden field! For their Prophet, each jump had become a celebration. He became more and more convinced that divine revelation was about to dawn on him, even though half of his companions (not as holy as their spiritual leader) were experiencing the same thing. The Prophet, however, did not believe that all such feelings were objective; he merely feared that God was going to speak to one of his fellow believers before him, which would imply that the Children of Light were in need of a new leader. Gradually, he arrived at the thought that I was somehow capable of influencing divine disposition, and that the Lord's voice could be best heard on the bridge. That was where he came, brandishing a Philip Farmer Three Stars blaster from his pioneering supplies. Holding me at gunpoint, he demanded that I immediately engage the drive, and we were located a mere two astro-units from some Peripheral backwater planet, maybe Selene or Scylla! In other words, I knew of no better way of ascending to Heaven, which was what I told the Prophet, while eyeing his Farmer apprehensively. I had to admit, it was a strong argument! Its owner was insistent and did not wish to hear anything about gravity, destabilization, and other sinful matters; apparently, he really wanted to speak with God!
I did not share that wish and, after approaching the control panel, pretended to plot the next jump. But it was nothing more than an illusion, smoke and mirrors; I was planning on signaling the Circe, but quietly, without raising my voice.
Heeding my cries for help, she sent a robot, and that nimble fellow sliced off the blaster with a heavy beamer. He also caught my opponent's limb, but, fortunately, the cut was clean, and the medical section was twenty feet away. My auto-surgeon sewed the victim's arm back, pumped him full of anti-shock serum with a sedative, after which our Prophet found himself in the ship's brig. Attempted mutiny was a serious crime, and I was well within my rights to throw him out into space, but I ended up showing leniency. After spending several years under arrest, my prisoner did not, after all that, earn his revelation, even though the brig was much closer to the bridge than the passenger cabins. Ultimately, I delivered them all to their new world, which was called Belle Reve and was already partially settled. All the large continents had been taken, but I was able to find a decent-sized island where I rid myself of the Prophet's companions and their leader, a rare case when I was forced to ignore my obligations! The island was rocky, the size of Greenland and with a similar climate, so even a blind man would never have confused it for heavenly gardens. But beggars couldn't be choosers: a mutiny aboard a ship and attempted murder were punished far more severely than a breach of contract. After returning to Macedonia, I discovered that the situation with the Children of Light had resolved itself. First of all, their new leader (who, by the way, had declared himself to be the First Prophet) was firmly sitting in his chair and had restrained his pious fervor; the government also met him halfway by rescinding its disenfranchisement edict. Those who still remembered the previous Prophet considered him an exile and a coward, who had abandoned his brethren in their hour of need. No more than three hundred people could be found on all of Macedonia who wished to join him, which was completely nonsensical: they couldn't build their own ship, and I had no intention of taking them aboard the Circe.
For me, that ancient history had two consequences. I already mentioned one: I'd had bulkheads installed in the habitation section's hallway, so now my bridge, my dining room, and my bedroom were secure from invasions by blaster-waving morons. As for the second… Well, it had taken many years, but I finally realized what I owed to those militant sectarians from Macedonia. They'd been looking for their Paradise, so now I wanted to find mine… I, a perpetual drifter, who had spent millennia wandering the galaxy, suddenly started dreaming of Heaven! Amusing, wasn't it? It was amusing for many reasons; for example, what would I do, after finding this hypothetical Paradise? I would be faced with a difficult choice: settle down there for good, stay there for a while, or continue my eternal wanderings. What would I choose? I didn't know… On the one hand, in Paradise, my Paradise, the Law of Confiscation did not exist, which meant that I would be able to stay there for an entire millennium without the risk of losing the Circe. On the other hand, I was a restless wanderer by nature. More than likely, I would leave my Paradise and spend my days being tormented by the memories of what had been gained and lost… This was why the thought of Paradise simultaneously attracted and frightened me.
But it was too early to discuss such topics with Shandra. I told her the story of the Macedonian exiles as an example of what we could expect during the jump. She nodded, I engaged the drive, and the familiar world around us was replaced by a shaky vague phantasmagoria. The Circe's reliable walls melted away, the colors drained, the scatterings of bright stars blurred into ghostly gray spots, while the nebulae and the distant galaxies vanished, consumed by the impermeable viscous darkness. In this great, immeasurable, and creepy void, we were helpless and alone; it placed us in a trance, it conjured up dreams, it lulled us to sleep, not gently and not with a secret deceit, but with complete and total indifference. We were falling into an abyss, each moment bringing us closer to something big and mysterious, while the muffled voices of time and space hummed just above the ears, muttered, cried, called, whispered… Then all this ended, and, glancing at the instruments, I confirmed that the Circe had not failed us; we'd emerged twenty AUs from Barsoom, above the ecliptic, in a perfectly safe area. The local green sun seemed like a tiny emerald disc from here, and our cruising speed relative to the star was only a few kilometers per second. Before starting the acceleration on the main engines, I asked Shandra what she'd felt. Her eyes, like the sun of Barsoom, darkened.
"I was remembering the time of chaos… It seemed to me as if all the children who had died during that time were surrounding me, crying, calling out, praying about something… But their voices were so weak and muffled! Like the squeaking of the bats that lived in the attics of our convent…"
"This was unpleasant to you?"
"No… Sad."
"Were you afraid?"
Her slender fingers slipper into my hand.
"I wasn't, Graham. You were here next to me."