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.

Part I

Murphy

Chapter 1

No, Murphy was most definitely not Paradise! I must admit that over the millennia of wanderings I had spent a long time thinking about the subject of my quest and finally realized that Paradise was an ambiguous concept. The Paradise that would suit me would undoubtedly have no relation to Christianity, Islam, or any other religion or cult flourishing on Old Earth. Judge for yourselves: in the Christian Heaven one was permitted to only play the lyre and sing hymns, and it was most definitely not a place to a restless merchant like me — no wonder Christ had thrown money changers out of the temple! Ancient Germanics and Scandinavians were a little more democratic in that respect, since their Valhalla allowed for battles, duels, and general drunkenness in the pleasant company of the one-eyed Odin, but such a pastime was also not my cup of tea. I was a peaceful man, and even though I knew how to stand up for myself, I preferred to avoid using blasters, spears, swords, and axes, or even good old-fashioned fisticuffs. The Muslim Eden looked to be more pleasant, without fighting or hymns, but with virgins and sherbet, but, alas, even that wasn't for me.

First of all, I wasn't circumcised; second, I preferred something stronger to sherbet; and third, regarding the virgins… Well, that was a separate conversation. After lengthy reflections and consultations with the Circe's computer, I came to the conclusion that I wouldn't like all the other models of Paradise: Buddhist and Shinto, Judaic and Hindu, as well as the Paradise of the Aztecs, the Ancient Egyptians, and the Mayans. So don't ask me exactly what Paradise I was looking for, as I wouldn't be able to provide you with an answer. But even if my idea of Paradise was vague, that did not mean that I wasn't capable of producing two or three decent ideas on that account. For example, through the process of elimination I had a very clear picture of what could not exist in Paradise and what was not Paradise. Thus, Murphy was most definitely not it.

This inference had nothing to do with the price I'd paid for Shandra. I'd given a kilo and a half of pure platinum for her (although without paying for her personal effects), but I was prepared to admit that I had never before made such a good acquisition. By the Black Hole! Not once in twenty thousand years!

When I'd visited Murphy last, this world was at the state of industrial rise. They already had nuclear power and were rapidly progressing in the social area, and there were no dangerous hints of communism, fascism, or a planetary war. I had assumed that the age of global projects was about to begin, when continents were connected by bridges hundreds of kilometers long, when rivers were turned back, when mountains were removed in one place and seas filled in in another. All these titanic activities were pretty dangerous to the ecology, but they rarely led to catastrophes, ignoring the sad examples of Yamaha and El Dorado. So I expected to find a fairly prosperous society where I'd be able to make a decent profit, as well as to benefit the locals. I surfaced from out of the timelessness of the Ramsden field in a good mood, hoping to make a few good deals. The Circe's holds and memory banks were filled with my usual goods: fashionable clothing, exotic animals like shabns and Pernian pterogeckos, all manner of literary nonsense, holographic films, and various rumors gathered across half of the galaxy.

I'd also assumed I was going to be able to sell works of art, which every nouveau riche on any prosperous and relatively new world desired. I was especially hopeful of getting rid of my Punjabi erotic figurines, an excellent guide for all kinds of sex, including a hundred and twenty-three ways of copulating in zero-g; in addition, they had been cast in superb silver with great artistic skill.

Punjab had been my last stop before Murphy and not a very pleasant one from a non-business standpoint. It was also not Paradise, if only because they were just beginning their puritanical period, when a skirt above the ankle was seen as a mortal sin. All worlds occasionally suffer from such illnesses, both young and old, but they weren't as dangerous as people tend to think. After all, when humans can live for millennia thanks to cellular regeneration, they need some variety; so it was natural when an age of rabid atheism gave way to a century of puritanical morality.

It ended up having a favorable effect on my trade dealings. Until Punjab started leaning towards Christian virtues, its wealthy citizens had a tendency to decorate their homes with risqué silver sculptures, which, as mentioned earlier, illustrated all kinds of sex, including the mysteries of lesbian love. Now, in the age of moral Renaissance, they had to destroy their treasures or send them to be melted down, even though many figurines had been skillfully made and were even something like family heirlooms. I gave those victims of rising morality triple the price of silver scrap and, after buying up these rarities to the last, filled the Circe's middle cargo hold with them. After the end of the deal, I, feeling justifiably pleased with myself, departed to the outskirts of the Punjab system at the cruising acceleration of 0.02g, engaged the Ramsden drive, and jumped thirty light years to Murphy. I was already anticipating the lines of wholesalers stretching to my shop, paying for the silver trinkets with containers of rhenium, gold, and platinum.

But reality turned out to be far sadder than my dreams. Murphy had been struck by a disaster, a calamity of the sort described by the scientists of Old Earth back in the twentieth century, long before I was born, and, as far as I knew, had never occurred in the entire human-occupied galaxy in twenty-plus millennia.

A comet had fallen on Murphy.

It was difficult to fault the Murphians for being totally unprepared for such an epochal event. Maybe if they had a couple qualified astronomers with optical telescopes, they'd have been able to detect the approach of the comet and prevent the disaster somehow, but visual astronomy was unpopular in this day and age. Who wanted to gaze at planets, asteroids, and other tiny celestial objects? The stars were a different matter! But if one was interested in stars and had a thick wallet, all one had to do was purchase a ship like my Circe and travel the galaxy. In the words of the Romans, Tepmora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis! — "The times change, and we change with them."

As for Murphy, it was too young a world to be ready for designing colonial transports and long-distance scouting liners. If the Murphians had a decent practice of exploring their own star system, they could've sent an automated ship to land on the comet and blow it to pieces with fusion charges. But they had no such practice. Their luminary, a small red K-type star, only had a pair of satellites besides Murphy: Angus, Mercury-like but even hotter, and Maeve, similar to Mars, but also colder and more lifeless. Understandably, the Murphians had about as many reasons to visit those celestial bodies as myself. And I didn't waste time by looking at uninhabited planets. The Murphian fleet—if one could call those pitiful tubs a fleet—consisted of a few dozen ion-thrust boats and barges. They were used for servicing orbital solar power plants, for launching TV and communication satellites, and for flying to the remains of the colony ship that had once brought the settlers from Brunnershabn—or Transformation, as that world was named now—to Murphy. As usual, the colony ship had been dismantled, and its remains used to build three orbital factories; all of them were used as zero-g foundries and for growing crystals for computers and android brains. So, as one could imagine, the Murphians had nothing to fight back with. But it didn't worry them much, since up until the last moment it seemed as if the comet would miss, and everything would be limited to a picturesque view of the sky and a two-meter tidal wave. After all, space was so big and planets were so small! But the projectile struck the bullseye, or, more precisely, a shallow coastal bay west of Murphy's only continent. The consequences?.. A destructive tsunami, earthquakes, eruptions of awakened volcanoes, plus a cloud of steam blocking out the sun for an entire year. What happened next?.. A grim story of civilization collapse, death, savagery, famine, and reluctant cannibalism… Only a small number of power plants (primarily solar) survived, which was a drop in the ocean for millions of people gripped by panic and utterly unaccustomed to the hardships of primitive life. For centuries they hadn't been faced with pain, suffering, and struggle for survival, and so their degradation was rapid and terrible. In the prosperous times they'd had either a Parliament or a Senate, which collapsed in the first days of the catastrophe, probably under the weight of all the responsibility. I wasn't going to blame the local leaders. After all, what had they been doing for the past four hundred years? Distributing welfare, handing out reproductive certificates, running certain services: police, courts, and the tax department… How could they have helped the crowds that had lost their homes, their desperate and hungry citizens? And those citizens soon realized that very few of them would survive. The rest would meet an unpleasant fate: some would be roasted on a spit, and others would be torn to shreds and eaten without any culinary delights.

Some time later, the mores softened, and relative order appeared among the significantly reduced population. Without prevarication, the ones most responsible for this were the adepts of the Archonate, a religious sect that hadn't been particularly popular during the time of prosperity and plenty. One could say a lot about their theological doctrine, but the Creator had given them a lot of endurance! They'd spent centuries listening to the mockery of their young compatriots, which, as one could imagine, helped build their self-discipline and gave them a sense of chosenness and unity. In fact, that unity was their main trump card, inherent in any small group where everyone knows and trusts one another and obeys their superiors without question or strife. In addition, they were sustained by their faith, an excellent knowledge of holy texts, and a peculiar concept of the Apocalypse that claimed that the Almighty could partially punish humanity for its sins before Judgment Day. Basically, the followers of the Holy Archonate were a lot let demoralized than the rest of the population, so was it any wonder that God had given them power over the planet? It was merely an act of divine justice!

At any rate, that was what Archon Geoffrey stated during our business negotiations, which were as fruitless as the sun-scorched plains of Angus. Geoffrey and I were meeting in his office/dormitory located deep in the Holy Basilica, a gloomy brick three-story building, whose shape was reminiscent of the unforgettable Pentagon. I would come down from the sky in the Circe's shuttle, while the Worthy and Venerable Archon (which was his full title) dove out from some nook and cranny of the Holy Chancellery. Two young novices in civilian clothes would escort me to his dormitory, but I could clearly see the bulges of their neural whips on their rough gray robes. Their glassy eyes told me one thing: they regretted that the old sinner French had missed the murderous comet by half a century.

This was completely unlike my usual method of interacting with the local population. A space trader was always greeted with respect, joy, or at least with the hope for a profitable deal. As a rule, I left Circe in orbit for two or three months, reserved a presidential suite at the finest local hotel, hired half a dozen agents, a pretty secretary, and, if necessary, bodyguards; then began the organization of various shows and auctions, alongside with a well-deserved vacation. But this standard program had fallen into a black hole on Murphy. What hotels, what agents, and what secretaries?.. All the trade and all dealings with interstellar wanderers were monopolized by the Archonate, as firmly as all the other activities, from diaper washing to singing holy hymns. There was nothing to be done about it, it was a totalitarian theocratic regime… No companies or consortiums, no free press, no private business with arrivals from the stars, and, of course, no pretty secretaries… To put it simply, not Paradise, definitely not Paradise!

The Strike of the Lord's Hammer (such was the local name for the catastrophe) had taken place about fifty years before my arrival, and those years were not the Murphians' best. Those who survived—to say nothing of those born in that troubled time—found themselves under total control and, it seemed, were not yet thinking about freeing themselves from it. Ideological pressure was a terrible thing, and it pushed and harmed the young most of all, like those novices with glassy eyes. I could picture what had been hammered into them since a very young age… Had the Lord's Hammer not struck the unrighteous, exactly the way the Archonate's holy fathers predicted?.. And had the Great Archimandrite himself not sworn to save his surviving children from the Creator's wrath, to enlighten their souls, and to set them on the path of piety, whether they wished it or not?.. If they did, then great; and if not, then there was an ancient military formula: if you can't, we'll teach you, if you won't, we'll make you! After all, everyone could suffer because of a few sinners. And the Lord, angered by the stubborn and the nonbelievers, could deal Murphy another blow! Would it not be better to appease Him with humility, so that He poured his wrath out on other worlds that had yet to feel His punishing might?.. And so on and so forth…

Basically, I hadn't found my Paradise here, plus I lost any hope of selling my silver figurines, my recordings of entertainment, the frivolous clothing from Secundus, and the long-legged shabns I'd once stolen on Malacandra… My business would've been utterly fruitless had Geoffrey not turned out to be such an energetic and insistent merchant. To tell the truth, he was mostly trying hard for his own sake rather than mine. A space trader was a rare beast, and it was difficult to imagine one leaving a planet emptyhanded, not selling anything, and, most importantly, not buying anything. Such a state of affairs would've lowered Geoffrey's standing in the Holy Archonate, which was why he was doing his very best trying to foist something on me. While not being his biggest fan, I still decided to meet him half-way. I agreed to purchase several books and video recordings related to the Hammer Strike, as this information would be useful to specialists on many worlds, and the general public wouldn't mind taking a look at a disaster. I also bought a pair of containers with thorium for my reactor, but thorium was really cheap, and I still had plenty of it aboard the Circe. Platinum was a different matter; this metal was expensive everywhere and, along with gold, rhenium, palladium, and other platinum group metals, served as the primary currency in the galaxy.

I had a decent supply of precious metals, and Murphy's resurging industry had a great need of them. But I didn't want to part with my platinum, especially since Archon Geoffrey had yet to offer me something truly valuable and worthy of such high payment. In desperation, he tried to sell me shards from the comet's holy core (rocks from a nearby landfill), fertilized zygotes of local animals (nothing out of the ordinary and no comparison to my shabns), plant seeds (ditto), and various godly writing, which was so boring it could serve as a cure for insomnia. With the most valuable item, a holographic recording of a service in the capital temple of Bailey-at-Kleis, Geoffrey screwed up and sold me this rarity for a song. He was a decent merchant but had no imagination at all and knew nothing of art, at least the part that had to do with dancing and singing. After watching the acquired hologram, I was able to confirm that the sight of Murphian religious mysteries was incredibly picturesque, and the choir (even though I wasn't able to understand a word) was above reproach. I could easily sell this recording on a dozen worlds at the highest price possible.

And so, we were negotiating, while my anxiety kept growing. After all, Murphy was no Paradise and also did not hold my interest from a business perspective, at least in the current era. I didn't like lingering in such places, even though time wasn't particularly valuable to me. I also didn't like being denied free access to the people and to enjoy life's little pleasures, like strolling through the streets of semi-recognizable cities, looking at ads and shop windows, dive into the local life, while also sniffing out a profitable deal. None of that was possible here. Archon Geoffrey had explained candidly that my presence on Murphy was seen as a demonic temptation for the common folk, capable of shaking their spiritual harmony. I wasn't precisely persona non grata, and yet…

I understood the sensitivity of the situation. I was seen as a wicked man here, one of those very same sinners the Creator was going to strike down in punishment sooner or later. But I was also a famous wicked man, and even the oldest of the natives could start wondering about the fact that Captain Graham French was ten or fifteen thousand years his senior, and would most likely outlive them by the same amount. This didn't really tie into the view of my wickedness and the divine retribution that I undoubtedly deserved. One didn't need to be a great theologian to figure out that longevity was the Lord's most precious gift. That was what the people of Old Earth had believed, and it was the same now, when humans were almost immortal thanks to CR, cellular regeneration.

Immortal! Almost! There was always that "almost"… Death came to everyone sooner or later, even to the lucky recipients of CR, usually as a result of a tragic accident. For example, a star could go supernova or a comet could fall on one's head… Aboard my Circe I was far better protected from such sad events than any Murphian. And did that not mean that a wicked man like me was truly blessed with God's grace? A dangerous example! And a very dangerous subject