Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

  My new leg is half an inch shorter than the other. I will have to walk with a shoe insert now, if I want to avoid throwing my other bones out of alignment.

  Day 1550:

  Mmmm, it’s doing okay. I walk and walk and walk. It really hurts, but it’s pure pleasure not to hobble-lurch any more. I still limp—I will always have a limp. The shoe insert fit well in my cowboy boot, since the boots are three sizes too large for me anyway (some years ago I purchased on the black market my last pair of diamondback snakeskin; only one size had been available at the time). When I slipped my feet into them, I found that they were both comfortable. And they looked good—real good. I resisted an impulse to swagger down the hallways with my thumbs hitched in my belt, reverting to juvenile male, cowboy mode. I made do with clipping and clopping rhythmically for the first time since my adolescence.

  Day 1552:

  Now for an unexpected memory from my childhood:

  On the morning of my fifth birthday, our car broke down, and my father didn’t have enough money to pay for a tow truck or a mechanic. I observed my mother’s worried face, anxious over the demise of her plans to buy party things at a store in Las Cruces, and got worried myself. I looked at my father’s stoic face and felt suddenly uplifted by his confidence—which might have been authentic. He smiled down at me; then he picked me up and tossed me onto his shoulders, where I sat with my legs dropping down over his chest and my hands tightly squeezing his forehead. We used to call this “the camel ride” (as distinguished from piggy-back).

  “Come on, Benigno, let’s go for a walk”, he announced. “I’ve got a big surprise for you.”

  Thus he packed me into town, easily an hour’s walk in the sun. He was sweating hard but whistled lively tunes all the way. At a dime store, he purchased a bag full of party favors, and from there, we walked hand in hand to a nearby hardware store. In this establishment, he purchased a little red tricycle—my first. Heedless of the family finances or the state of the world’s economy, I leapt onto it with glee, my joy unsurpassed, and pedaled my jolly way out onto the sidewalk while my father negotiated with the proprietor the compiling of some debt.

  That done, we cycled to the last street leading out to the desert, and onto the highway. I must have giggled all the way. He walked behind, alert to traffic. Whenever a car approached, he would lift both me and the tricycle into his arms and step off the pavement. After the car passed, I was back down and off like a shot. Nearing Sunnyview Acres, we turned onto the side road that led to our village, and here the surface became more difficult for me to pedal. The old tarmac was bumpy, rutted, strewn with gravel, and increasingly scarred by heat fractures. It was a rough ride.

  “Papa!” I complained loudly. “Papa, the road is broken!”

  He laughed and said, “Sí, but we are not broken.”

  Day 1660:

  Reading my way through the novels on Dariush’s list, I’ve overdosed on nautical themes. I slipped back into e-addiction for a few weeks. Ojo del Diablo!

  I didn’t feel like watching the death-culture films. Instead, I watched a good deal of science fiction from the previous centuries. It was pretty funny stuff, though the fantaseering class got better as it steadily grew. After the inaugural century, however, the filmmakers were unable to resist throwing gobbets of gore at the audience while manipulating us with terror, horror, deus ex machinas, diabolus ex machinas, and every primitive instinct known to man. Nauseated, numbed, entranced, I finally realized what was happening and switched it all off, wishing I had a wholesome old hatchet to whack on the head of my max.

  Day 1705:

  This past week I fell again. I must say in my favor that I only watched the nine film versions of the ancient tale of Pinocchio, based on a book written by an Italian during the nineteenth century. I preferred the earlier film versions, yawned through the animated one made by some guy named Disney, loathed the famous remake from the twenty-first century (Pinocchio discovers his adolescent sexuality on the Island of Bad Boys), and relished a twentieth-century Italian one (charming, sad, beautiful), and ended up wishing I could become a real boy.

  Day 1708:

  Downloaded the e-book edition of Pinocchio from the library. Read it and loved it. There was a better mind at work in this story than the minds of those who created the films. Lots of ironic black humor and moral complexities, including some surprising details. For example, when the little conscience-cricket gets on Pinocchio’s nerves, the puppet boy smashes the cricket against a stone wall, and the creature’s brains go dribbling down the cobbles. Looks like things could be gruesome way back then.

  Day 1826:

  Five years completed, four more to go.

  On a whim, over breakfast I asked Xue if he would like to trade rooms with me. Facing forward to our destination, I’m on the port-side of the ship, he’s on starboard. I suggested it might offer a little variety, keep the left and right hemispheres of the brain limber and negotiating with each other. He had no strong objections to an exchange, but then thought it would be too complicated, considering our maxes. He explained that the max is sealed into each desk as a permanent component. It can’t be removed and packed along with you when you move house. Nor does the computer have a dock for copying files onto a portable memor. The desk itself would demand an engineering degree if you wished to dismantle and transport it to another room. Thus, Xue is wedded to his, and I am in uneasy cohabitation with mine. Ah, well, I’ll stay put where I am.

  Dwayne dropped off an anniversary gift. I found it on my desk top with a note attached:

  This stuff won’t hurt you. Black-market. If you talk, I die. Flush this note.

  No signature, but I know who wrote it.

  The polyplast bottle contained an aromatic fruity liqueur. I took a hesitant sip. Peach flavored. It had a very pleasant effect on me, far stronger than what they serve in the bistros.

  I called him on voice-max, the private number he had given me, and said, “Thanks for the gift.”

  “Yup.”

  “That was real nice of you. Wish I had something to give in return.”

  “Not necessary.”

  “I flushed what you asked me to flush.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Were you serious about the word die?”

  “Nope. But it could make my life tense if word gets around.”

  “Barter system flourishing?”

  “Yup.”

  “Want to come by my room? We could discuss astrophysics.”

  “Uh . . . okay. I get off shift at five. Can I drop in around seven?”

  “Yup”, I said. “Bring an extra glass.”

  Promptly at seven, a hand rapped at my door. I said, “Open”, and there stood Dwayne.

  “Well, come on in”, I drawled. “Take a load off your feet.”

  His mouth twitched microscopically into what I took to be his expression of enthusiasm.

  “This is really great liqueur”, I said, extracting the bottle from the cabinet. “I haven’t been a hard drinker for eons, but a fellow could change his mind after a sip or two of this. Did you make it yourself?”

  “Nope. Fair trade. Man in hydroponics makes it.”

  “You shouldn’t tell me such details. What if I’m tortured and I squeal on you?”

  “Dr. Hoyos, a guy like you would never talk.”

  “I appreciate the compliment, Dwayne.”

  He handed me an authentic shot-glass—real glass. I got out my standard-issue polyplast cup and poured us both a drink. “What on earth did you trade for this elixir of life?”

  “Did some jiggery-pokery on a guy’s max.”

  “Taught him protocols, eh?”

  “Nope. Turned off the listener, but coded it so no one knows it’s turned off. We recorded a random sound presentation, isolated with old firewall 2019.3 that I adapted and back-turned seven times in layered e-loops so anybody listening hears nothing but snores, showers, and films.”

  “I didn’t know you were a programmer.?
??

  “My hobby.”

  I glanced at the max on my desk.

  “And what, exactly, do you mean by listener?”

  “Don’t worry”, Dwayne said with a mere hint of a grin. “I did the same to your max.”

  “You what!”

  “Hope you don’t mind. But I figured you hate those guys as much as I do.”

  “I don’t hate anybody, Dwayne. Who and what are you talking about?”

  “I know you hate the way they rob us of privacy. I can tell. I see you head-butting them all the time.”

  Ah, yes, them. Doubtless, he meant my occasional disregard for ship’s rules.

  “They don’t rob us of privacy”, I said. “It says in the Manual that the maxes in residential rooms are each protected by a firewall.”

  “Well, sir, that’s what they say. But it ain’t so.”

  Ay caramba! I will bypass the angry comments that subsequently erupted from my mouth.

  “A minor question”, I said, when I had calmed down and had poured each of us another inch of peach ambrosia. “May I suggest, my friend, that you are guilty of invasion of privacy? Hmmm? Hmmm?”

  He bowed his head, nodding and nodding. “I know, sir. I know. I shoulda asked your permission. But I figured you’d be better off not knowing they’d been listening in on you.”

  “Really? And what else of mine did you invade?”

  He looked up at me with hurt in his eyes. “Nothing.”

  “Did you listen to my voice journal, read my paper journal?”

  “Nope”, he said.

  Somehow I knew he wasn’t lying. We sat in silence for a while.

  “You’re some weird cowboy, Dwayne”, I muttered at last.

  “Yeah, that’s true”, he mumbled, looking like a whupped puppy.

  “You never say much, do you? There’s a whole lot goes on inside that head of yours, so why don’t you ever talk?”

  He shrugged. “ That’s why I’m here.”

  He handed me a sheet of paper that looked like the newsprint one sees in museums—yellowed, stained, torn, smelling of age. On it was penned in old-fashioned calligraphy:

  My father’s father was a 16-year-old boy when he was incarcerated in a German prisoner of war camp during WWI. He was very tall and had lied about his age to get into the army. For the rest of his life, bits of shrapnel worked themselves out of his body. He was in constant physical pain for nearly 50 years. The pain pushed him in the direction of morphine addiction and alcoholism for the rest of his life. He died at age 65, fully in grace, faithful to the sacraments, living in a basement room in the home of one of his sisters. He was a man with nothing. . . only himself and Christ. I never in my life heard him speak a word, because I never met him. He had been banished from our family by my grandmother, who spun the myth that condemned him. She said he was a bad man. It took years for me to piece the true story together. He was a good man.

  His absence was a silence, made by the wounds he suffered and the poor choices he made in trying to overcome them.

  Certain kinds of silence are holy, the ground of being as presence, a life as a living word.

  Other kinds of silence are evil, caused by the external suppression of free speech.

  Other kinds are caused by the internal self-suppression of speech due to the terrible blows of injustice that destroy trust, creating suspicion of all other men: “No man can be trusted”, laments one of the writers in the Old Testament.

  Poor mankind, poor mankind. . .

  “Who wrote this?” I asked.

  “One of my ancestors. Great-grandfather or someone back then.”

  “This is a very old document. The First World War was almost two hundred years ago.”

  “I know. I looked it up. Learned a lot.”

  “Uh-huh. Reading history can be illuminating.”

  “Depends.” He paused, frowned. “Depends on what history y’read.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  “Yup. People were sure different in those days.”

  “It seems they were.”

  Seems? No, they were different. I remember some of the old people I knew when I was a boy. And my parents. And that’s recent history.

  “We’ve forgotten things”, said Dwayne.

  “I agree.”

  “Some of it wasn’t so good, but some of it might’ve been the best we ever had.”

  “There’s not much we can do about it now, is there?”

  “Guess not. That’s why I’m reading stuff like this. Figured it would be a long trip, so I brought along a bundle of old family papers.”

  “Discovering your roots, so to speak.”

  “Yeah. I thought you might be able to explain some of it.”

  I sighed, said nothing.

  “Like what, really, is a sacrament?” he said.

  “A what?” I said, covering. I know full well what it is, but I don’t go around admitting it to just anyone.

  “A sac-ra-ment.”

  “Didn’t you search it on your max?”

  “I did. It gave me a couple thousand references, and I got the gist of the thing. Or the gist of what those people thought it was. All the articles are cross-referenced under ‘Cult’ and ‘Cultic religion’ and ‘Dysfunctional mystical sects’—things like that.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why I’d hoped you wouldn’t mind us talking about the old days, when you were a kid.”

  “The old days?” I frowned like an ol’ cowpoke. “When I was a boy, things were pretty much as they are now—not quite so fast, but only by a hair.”

  “People like my ancestors would have known a very different kind of world.”

  “Yes, and, as you say, there were some bad things about that world. World War I was nasty enough, WWII was vastly worse, and WWIII, well, let’s not get into that.”

  “Uh, I never heard about any World War Three.”

  “Exactly. The slaughter was worse, just archived under a sanitized name. You say you’ve read the history?”

  “I saw the vids”, he shrugged. “They taught us even less about it at school. But now that I’m doing some deep reads, I’m patching a lot of it together. I can tell they taught us stuff with twists in it. We didn’t get the real thing.”

  “Yup, you gotta watch out for those twists, Dwayne. So many twists these days, it’s hard to find a straight patch.”

  “They had twists back then too. What I don’t get is why everyone in Western civilization was Christian, but they did all that evil.”

  “The ones who did it weren’t really Christian”, I said. “Where did you grow up? Somewhere in Nevada wasn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh. Small town named Antelope.”

  “Were people mostly good or mostly bad in your hometown?”

  “Mostly good, I think.”

  “Ever see real evil there?”

  “Yup.”

  “Did everyone do the evil?”

  “Nope.”

  “Was the evil committed, perchance, by people who had some position of authority in town?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes. They called in state authorities actually, with federal backup. Only they didn’t say it was evil. They said it was something we needed. Not everyone went along with them. A few people got themselves arrested for making a protest against it, people I knew. Their kids were taken to a state orphanage. I don’t know what ever happened to the parents because they didn’t come back—leastways not when I lived there. Antelope was kind of a backwater, you see, most people just trying to live quiet lives, working hard, making no trouble for other folks.”

  “And did the authorities explain to you that they were doing their evil only in order to help make you, the quiet folks, into better citizens?”

  “Yeah. How did you know that?”

  “Just a wild guess.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions. Maybe those people who went to jail got home again. Maybe they got their kids back.?
??

  “Maybe.” Maybe, but I don’t think so.

  “I never found out”, he went on. “We moved to Sacramento the next year, and I entered college there.”

  He told me more about the following years, his first job, a tech position at an aerospace company, and then the steps leading up to his presence on the Kosmos.

  At the end of his account, he fell silent, lost in thought, with his eyes on the floor and elbows on knees, arms dangling.

  He broke the silence by clearing his throat and looking me in the eyes, his expression troubled, straining toward something elusive to his thoughts.

  “You know, when I was reading up on the Christianity cult, I came across a saying by one of their holy men. I can’t get it out of my mind. He said, ‘We are losing the basic memory of mankind.’ ”

  “Losing the basic memory of mankind? What was his name?”

  “Can’t remember. Somebody shot him dead.”

  Dwayne and I talked for another couple of hours. His sentences got longer, mine got shorter. In the end, we made a pact to meet more often and to discuss the “real stuff”, as he called it.

  Day 1828:

  “We are losing the basic memory of mankind.” I can’t get it out of my mind either.

  This afternoon in the lounge, Maria Kempton said to me, “You’re awfully quiet lately, Neil.”

  “Just thinking about a lot of things.”

  “Not getting housebound are you? Cabin fever?”

  “No, no, nothing like that.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “Maria,” I said in a lowered voice, “did you know that our rooms are monitored?”

  “Monitored? What, by audio you mean? Good heavens, I don’t think so. Why would they do such a thing?”

  It’s interesting how everyone speaks about some nebulous, invisible over-authority as they. Who these people are is never defined. And I don’t think anyone is referring to the flight crew way upstairs on the top deck.