“What did he find?”
“Of course, he found fresh venom traces in every sample.”
“But that means David did die on the planet.”
“Not necessarily. The most disturbing evidence he discovered was in the molecular condition of cells. The crystallography tracks in the hemoglobin revealed conclusively that the body had been frozen for around thirty-eight to thirty-nine months.”
“But it doesn’t add up. You say the autopsy showed he died of venom. . .”
“We know there have been no snakes on the Kosmos. Moreover, the venom found in David’s body is the same as that found in the other victims, and matches exactly the proteases samples taken from AC-A-7 snakes—specifically the viper-like species that resembles our sub-species Crotalinae on Earth.”
“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”
“He died of asphyxiation and heart failure caused by radically lowered blood pressure, which is typical of proteasis-induced death. But cardiovascular damage can have other causes. The presence of venom in his system could also be obtained by other means.”
“Such as?”
“Immediately after thawing—if the body had been quick-frozen after death—all body fluids would again become mobile and fresh, manipulable. His blood could have been recycled through his system, and the venom added during the process.”
“You’re saying he was murdered.”
Pia nodded. “My friend thinks so. It seems that everything points in that direction. Why else would such discrepancies be present, especially the freezing, followed by a cover-up?”
“Obviously, whoever did this felt confident that no one would discover it.”
“They didn’t consider that scientists also have intuitions.”
“Has the doctor reported his findings?”
“Not yet. He’s feeling somewhat anxious.”
“He does not want to die of snake bite”, said Paul.
Pia continued: “After your talk three years ago, Neil, he began to ponder things with more circumspection. He’s a good observer. He didn’t know if your accusations about surveillance were based in reality. He had nothing to go on, nothing that would convince him, but he kept the file open in his mind, though he didn’t discuss it with anyone. Then he saw your poster about David being missing. He saved it, and now he knows that the dead man is the very one the administration said never existed.”
“Never existed but has now been found”, I said. “Hopefully, there are a lot of people on board like this doctor.”
“Hopefully. Until now, he had spotted nothing really out of the ordinary in medical protocols. Of course, when he told me about his autopsy findings, I told him about DSI’s and DM’s efforts to turn you into a psychotic. He argued that you were mentally ill and needed the medication. But even as he said it, I could tell he didn’t really believe it. I also confessed my failure to administer the pills.”
“That’s a risk, Pia”, I said. “Can you trust him? What if DSI spooks him and makes him retreat into complicity to save his own skin?”
“That might have been a problem until now, but no longer. Bad prescriptions can be the result of poor diagnosis, which can be explained away as human error. But murder can’t be explained away. And there the good doctor draws the line. He told me he’s convinced we’re dealing with a tyranny. The worst sort of tyranny, he said, because it disguises itself as benevolent, reasonable administration.”
“What will we do about this tyranny?” asked Paul in a low, Slavicly dangerous voice.
No one had any suggestions.
“Maybe we should meet this doctor”, I said. “Pia, would he be willing to talk with us?”
“I’ve already asked him, but he declined. However, he did write a complete report on his findings—albeit a private report. He’s going to give me a copy, which Paul will store for safekeeping as soon as I have it. The doctor insisted that he remain anonymous in word-of-mouth conversations and e-communications. Accusers are a tainted bunch, you realize, with little credibility and absolutely no means to overthrow the regime. He thinks that justice will be done only when the ship returns to Earth. As long as we’re under DSI authority, anything we say can be denied or drowned out by their countermeasures and distractions, and all to no good effect. In the meantime, he’s going to try to discuss this with others on the quiet.”
“And I will discuss with Captain”, Paul added.
I stared at the floor, pondering, adding and subtracting.
“He died sometime between thirty-eight and thirty-nine months ago, you say?”
Pia nodded. “You gave your talk on Day 2252, Neil. Just under 39 months ago.”
“I see.”
I suddenly found myself incapable of speech. I murmured good night and went back to my room.
(Note to myself: Get this most recent entry into Paul’s hands as soon as possible. If it’s found in my room, I will have a week of calamities.)
Day 222:
Paul has the unofficial autopsy report, which the Captain has radioed back to Earth base. My notes are also safe and sound. I want to murder two people on board, need I say who? Murder or justice? I could not, would not, do it. Still, the feeling remains.
Day 223:
Dariush just arrived back on board and will remain here for a few days. We shared a meal in the Mexican bistro this evening, and afterward we went for a walk to an art alcove on deck C, one we had never used before. There I told him about the private autopsy findings.
He fell silent and closed his eyes.
“It’s murder”, I said, interrupting his prayers. “I know it’s murder. But would we be able to prove it in court?”
Mute and glum, he shook his head uncertainly. We remained without speaking for a time, staring at the floor, both of us feeling quite helpless.
Hoping to break the looming paralysis, I asked Dariush if he was making progress in his work. He answered in a subdued voice that, yes, there was progress. Upward of four thousand tablets had been removed from the archives, with more being removed and scanned every day. Projecting from the number of wall blocks still to be opened, the tablets so far examined represent a fraction of what may be archived there.
“Are the hieroglyphics telling you anything?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, we do not yet have a key. As I mentioned to you before, there are patterns emerging, and a greater variety of ‘letters’, so we know it is a language. Of course, we have known this from the beginning. Our problem now is to find the decryption that unlocks it. I am going carefully through some of my own books to see if I can find anything helpful. I have a sense that it is there, lost in a forest of my old materials from Earth.”
“You think their language may be like some of our ancient ones.”
“I do not know. It is a sense, a feeling. Not necessarily even a productive scientific feeling. Intelligence, however, has a nature of its own, transcending all our world’s races and stages of civilization. It is possible that this alien race, much like us in several ways, developed similar language patterns.”
“So you’re not talking about a decryption key as such. You mean some kind of vague template.”
“Yes. And if the aliens were intelligent, as we know they surely were, and their brains were like ours biologically, it points in the direction of common development of logic and communication. The symbols would be different, arbitrary, that is, yet the processes would be similar if not the same.”
“I see. You’re searching for a needle in a haystack, but at least you have a haystack to look at.”
“Precisely.”
For a moment, he seemed to lose focus, his eyes clouded with distractions, or worry. I did not press him for more discussion and let him run to the end of whatever line of thought he was silently pursuing. Then to my surprise, I saw that the dark look was there again—the one which had so haunted him the day he asked me to pray with him, when he told me he was facing an “ocean of evil”.
“You??
?re thinking about David”, I said.
“Yes, Neil, I am. And also about the Temple of the Ship—”
“Is that what you call it now?”
“The archaeologists have given it this name, since clearly it was a site built for religious purposes.”
“Also scientific and archival.”
“For them—the aliens—there was no distinction between the three. Their scholarship, their science, their cult was a single unity.”
“Well, it’s true they had hideous art, but they were also very advanced. Not as far as we are now, but still. . .”
“Advanced? Yes, in terms of technology. But why have we found no cities? And this art you speak of was not merely art. The celestial being in the crypt of the Temple was an idol. Moreover, this idol drank copious amounts of blood—the blood of the aliens. There is so much about their society that remains inexplicable.”
“And that’s all we know.”
Now he looked directly into my eyes. “Neil, we have learned that all the skeletons examined in the crypt, without a single exception, were children.”
“Children? They were very small compared to us, that’s all.”
He shook his head. “The forensic people have completed their studies of the remains. Samples were taken from every skeleton type, ranging from the shortest to the tallest. All samples indicate that the bone cells were in growth stage when they died.”
I stared at him, not wanting to believe it.
“Maybe the adults were buried elsewhere in the huge vault”, I suggested.
“It is true that it is immense, and there are millions of skeletons. However, the hall was explored to its limits and numerous samples selected in every quadrant. Some of the remains were found to be very ancient, others more recent. But they are all children.”
“So, it was a communal tomb for their children.”
“No, Neil, it was not a mausoleum where they merely interred their dead. It was a temple where they performed human sacrifice.”
My throat closed and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. I said nothing, just stared at him unable to speak.
“Neil, please excuse me. I must return to my studies now.”
I could see he was overcome with emotion and did not want to talk any more. I watched him turn away and head off down the concourse. Like a sleepwalker, I returned to my room and lay down on my bed.
Day 224:
I awoke in a sweat, yelling, “No! I left it behind!”
For a few seconds, I saw a spiral staircase shining before me in the darkness. It had been part of the dream, I knew, but now I saw it with my eyes. Trying to clear my vision, I blinked rapidly, and the image faded, though it remained in my mind.
Then I remembered I was on a great ship in the heavens—floating above a heaven in the heavens. I was a scientist, a man of reason, devoted to objective reality.
I switched on the bedside light, threw off the covers, and sat up. Looking down at my hands, I saw they were clenched on my lap. They were old brown hands, wrinkled and roped with blue veins. My bare legs and feet were old too. The scar was there, as it always had been there.
The dream had terrified me, leaving me with a feeling of unbearable pain. It screamed at me, though I was now fully awake. You must look at this, niño, it said. It has been buried in the dark for too long.
Slowly, my heart ceased banging in my ears, and the rapid inflations of my chest returned to normal. I did not think of the monstrous idol in the Temple of the Ship. I did not think of the uncountable victims hidden away in that dark cellar of evil. Instead, I looked at the thing I did not want to remember: the journey I had made with my father when I was nineteen, the day he took me to Santa Fe to register me for my first year of college.
We were about halfway between Las Cruces and Santa Fe, traveling on an old gravel road that was rarely used after the twelve-lane expressway from El Paso to Albuquerque had been built thirty years before. This superbahn was straight as an arrow and permitted speeds of 180 km per hour. Our route, by contrast, was a rough one, and it sometimes dwindled to a single lane. It passed through a valley east of the Rio Grande that was appropriately named Jornada del Muerto, very dry and with few human habitations along the way, then it climbed laboriously through the San Andreas mountains. Occasionally, we passed old people leading donkeys, and sometimes a traveler making his way from nowhere to nowhere on foot. My father would stop and ask such solitaries if they wanted a ride, but they always took one look at our decrepit Hydra with its stinking compost tank on top, thanked us politely, and declined.
Our intention was to cross over into the northern end of the Tularos Valley on various little-used side roads, and in this way, we would bypass the old ruins of White Sands missile site and Alamogordo, and finally swing around Albuquerque and arrive unnoticed in Santa Fe. As was often the case, that year my father could not afford the vehicle insurance, nor the plate registration fee, and he hoped to avoid being spotted by the police.
For this and other reasons, I felt anger against him that day. I did not let it show, but I brooded and brooded, and sweated and sweated in the late August heat, nursing my many grievances against life. Why was I so angry? Sixty years later, I do not recall the reasons exactly. I have a memory of resentment against the bubbling in the tank above my head, the stench of rotting organics that escaped through a leak, and the inefficiency of the old methane compressor, the squeaking and rattling, the whine of the motor. I had a headache from the heat that was stewing my brain inside our tin pot of a car. I hated the broken air conditioner that we could not afford to fix, the stings of insects that hit my arm hanging outside the open window, the smell of my father’s body, which so often went unwashed because our water well was not deep enough. I hated my leg and ankle, my stupid ears, my secondhand clothing, my battered suitcase in the trunk, and of course my social status, which was as low as one could legally go and remain alive.
I had received a scholarship to the college only because I was (so they told me) a genius at physics, or at least a potential genius. This was my single resource. I was about to be thrown into a community of strangers—beautiful, privileged, young people who would take one look at me and decline to know me. Already I did not like them.
Thus I was tense with determination. Determined that over the long haul I would outshine them all intellectually, and in the short haul that I would arrive on time for registration, demolishing the common prejudice that my people were unreliable, unambitious, and unconcerned about the pressing matters of life, such as watching the clock. Mañana would no longer be my motto. Henceforth, Per ardua ad astra would be my motto (I had recently read this phrase in an astronomy book, and was insufferably proud that I had memorized it).
Sure enough, the car chose the worst possible moment in my life to break down. There was an ominous little “pop”, followed by chuff-chuff-chuff, a wheeze, and then we rolled to a stop. Instantly, the sun began to broil us.
“Ay, caramba”, my father mumbled, which made me angrier. I think I rolled my eyes and exhaled through my nostrils.
“Well, let’s see what the matter is”, he said in his patient tone, the tone that irritated me most.
So we got out of the car and walked all around it.
“What now?” I asked abruptly.
“I don’t know. Maybe I should look at the tubes.”
“Maybe you should”, I shot back in a tone that lacked our usual solidarity in trials. My disdain was just below the surface, and rising.
This drew a swift glance from him, and I felt sudden shame for my rudeness. Without comment, he opened the fuel-access hatches on the roof, and the front lid covering the engine that he had jerry-built from the far superior (though unrepairable) original motor.
“Ay, ay, ay”, he muttered as he checked all the components, one by one.
“What is it?” I demanded. “Do you see anything?”
“It looks okay to me. I don’t understand it.”
To make a l
ong and horrible story shorter, let me say that after two hours of tinkering we gave up trying to find the source of the trouble. My father sighed and unrolled an old tarp he kept stored in the trunk, and tied it between two piñon trees to make us some shade. We sat down on the ground under it and drank from our water bottles. Neither of us said anything. My life was in ruins.
“Why do we sit here?” I said after some time had passed.
“Maybe a car will come along”, he replied. “It will take us to a service station. There we can hire a tow truck.”
“But we have no money.”
“I have Uni credits”, he mumbled, not very convincingly. I had two hundred Unis coded into my personal card, but I wasn’t sure if he knew. After a short struggle with myself, I withdrew it from my hip pocket and handed it to my father with a facial expression that would have chilled the heart of the hungriest beggar.
He stared at the card and then delicately took it. He did not thank me; he did not say anything at all. He merely held the card in his hand and lowered his head, covering his eyes with the palm of his other hand.
I was very embarrassed. I had never heard my father weep before, not in all my long life of nineteen years. Generally, he was a most confident man, never daunted by setbacks and blows. But now, strangely, he looked defeated.
“Why do you cry!” I exclaimed, more a protest than a question.
He did not answer me, did not look at me.
Is this my father? I thought to myself. Is this what I have been given!?
The injustice of it, added to the constant burdens of our life, our endless striving that never got us anywhere, now hit me full force.
“Why are we so poor?” I shouted. But the question needed no answer. We both knew that our family was on the bottom of things because he could not make enough money to raise us up.
“Why are you and Mama always so sad?” I threw at him. “Why do you cry? Why does she cry all the time?”
This was unfair of me. The truth is, while he could not be called a jolly man, he hardly ever seemed despondent. And my mother rarely cried. Both of them were calm, generous people, full of good thoughts and kind words, and were ever involved in valiant attempts to make “our village” a welcoming place for the world’s unwelcome people.