Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

  He paused, thinking quietly, then added that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the towers had been a source of solar power for the ship, supplementary to the nuclear.

  “We are uncertain about the full range of energy design. The presence of radioactivity and propulsion tubes at the base of the vessel point to nuclear fusion, but again, how it worked is not yet clear. Next week, when the theorists and committees have all had their say, the rear third of the ship will be opened. Then we will have more facts to weigh.”

  Dariush now spoke up for the first time. “I concur with Dr. Xue regarding the towers’ purpose. All the star maps have been scanned and analyzed by the computer. Decryption of the hieroglyphic text on each map reveals that it is technical in nature. Their vocabulary in this field was quite well developed, and some of it remains obscure to us.”

  “What perplexes me”, I said, “is that the temple tablets, the three gold codices, were written in a primitive style. It just doesn’t seem to match with their technological language—and their accomplishments.”

  “This is true. Of course, they are much older documents. We should also keep in mind that religious codices, even certain nonreligious codices, might have been written in an elitist or gnostic style, that is to say, a form of temple language.”

  “Poetic?”

  “Yes, like an epic poem written in traditional style, one that moves the reader or listener by appealing to subjective feelings. As is the case with our own present civilization, a treatise on biology or astrophysics is rational thought expressed in a different form and style than, say, a poem or a song. The brain’s logic faculty is not needed for the latter; the creative intuition faculty is dominant, both in the composing and the listener’s inference.”

  Xue said, “That is so, my friend, yet the poem or song is dependent on a thought or a concept, and is not necessarily irrational. It may be meta-rational.”

  “Mmmm”, said Dariush, pondering this, swept into a vortex of his own rumination on the point.

  Because few in the room were much interested in this sidetrack, the general conversation returned to the mechanics and optics of the towers and their relationship to the “eyes” of the “god” on the cliff face above the temple of the ship.

  Everyone had seen photos or vids of it, but, oddly enough, only a minority of those present had seen images of the god in the temple crypt. I assumed this was because a plethora of scientific and historical material had been discovered at the same time, and thus the sculpture had not captured more than a passing interest. While it is human nature to be fascinated with morbidity, the attraction is a transient one. People can’t look at horror for long.

  Dariush, returning from his voyage to inner space, now spoke up. He described for us the sculpture’s purposes, and added other significant findings, such as the fact that the hundreds of thousands of skeletons in the temple were those of children. He finished with a verbal sketch of the sacrificial rites as they were recorded in the gold codex-3.

  People fell silent, frowning, quietly shaking their heads in disgust, or simply staring at the table top. No one knew what to say.

  Xue leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. In his quiet voice, toneless, he recited:

  The great snake lies ever half awake, at the bottom of the pit of the world, curled

  In folds of himself until he awakens in hunger and moving his head to right and to left prepares for his hour to devour.

  But the Mystery of Iniquity is a pit too deep for

  Mortal eyes to plumb. Come

  Yet out from among those who prize the serpent’s golden eyes,

  The worshippers, self-given sacrifice of the snake.

  Take your way and be ye separate.

  Be not too curious of Good and Evil;

  Seek not to count the future waves of Time;

  But be ye satisfied that you have light

  Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

  O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!

  None among the assembled guests responded. Dariush gazed at Xue thoughtfully. Pia’s eyes glistened with tears. Paul nodded in unspoken agreement. The Captain stared at his empty glass, then reached for the bottle.

  “More, anyone?” he asked, pouring wine into a few glasses held out to him.

  “Did you compose those lines?” Dariush asked Xue.

  “No, it’s by a poet named Eliot. He wrote it one hundred and seventy-five years ago.”

  “Got any of his poems with you?” I said.

  “Several in my head, Neil. I will write out a few passages for you, if you wish.”

  “Okay”, I shrugged.

  “Good and evil”, said Loka with a sigh. “The old story. It just keeps cropping up again and again, doesn’t it, no matter how hard they try to banish the idea.”

  “Oh, they never banish it, Loka”, said Jan. “They redefine what is good and what is evil.”

  “True. But it seems the concept does not go away.”

  “Because it is reality”, said Dariush. “The war in the heavens.”

  “Be ye satisfied that you have light”, mused Jan. “This race we’ve found had plenty of light. They were masters of light.”

  “The poet refers to an invisible light”, Dariush replied. “The ones who built the ship used the forces of physical nature to combat the true eternal Light.”

  And there it was again, Dariush’s theme: eternity, soul, the divine presence, the one true Light versus the appearance of light.

  “Perhaps we judge them too harshly”, said the Captain. “Without doubt, they had intelligence, yet there was ignorance too. Their evil—may I use this word?—their evil seemed right to them. It was like a light to them. They were wrong, but can we hold them to account for it?”

  “A little late for that”, I said, feeling sudden anger—strangely, anger against the forgiving people around me. “How much better it would have been if their ship had exploded in space before touching down on this beautiful world. An atomic blast would have wiped them all out.”

  “You presume to know the meaning of justice, Neil”, said Dariush, affixing me with a penetrating look.

  I retorted, “It’s plain enough to me what kind of justice was needed. Think of the millions murdered by this wretched tyranny. Think of their horrible acts committed against children. Think of the serpents they infested this planet with—a peaceful world, with only natural death until they arrived. They brought it all here.”

  “And now they are gone. You know the dates, Neil. You know their end approached when the true Light was born in our home world. And later, when he died and rose again, their end came. Then did the true Light spread throughout the cosmos unto infinity.”

  Dariush was my friend I did not want to push the discussion to the level of argument where hurtful things might be said. I shrugged and looked away. Doubtless, others in the room were uncomfortable, since this was a mixed gathering of theists and unbelievers, I presumed.

  “Stron called us a ship of fools”, I laughed half-heartedly. “And maybe we are. How can we know anything for certain? We do our best, and that’s all we can do.”

  Suddenly Paul sat up straighter, made a Russian gesture with his arms, scowled, and declared: “This is not ship of fools. This is ship of clever killers. We have snake on this ship. Not everyone—but many.”

  Pia put a hand on his arm, trying unobtrusively to calm him.

  Xue stepped in with his serene voice: “Our ship is a microcosm of the world back on planet Earth. Our companions on the voyage are people whom mankind considers its best, not its foolish. But without God, even the best are fools—bad fools. We take our humanity with us into the infinite sea.” No one offered a reply.

  Without warning, Pia began to cry. The rest of us, all men, felt helpless in the face of this force, the mysterious feminine heart. Or soul. Or whatever it was, absent within ourselves.

  Paul put an arm around her and murmured Russian words into her ears. He put his rig
ht hand gently onto her belly and held it there.

  “I’m sorry”, she sobbed. “But whenever I think about that monster in the crypt, I feel so afraid. I saw the photo of it only once. That was more than enough. Sometimes I dream about it. It’s alive and it’s thirsty. It wants more blood. It wants our baby’s blood.”

  “Shhhh, shhhh”, Paul whispered, holding her close.

  We made distracting small talk for a time, but it petered out, leaving an uncomfortable silence. By unspoken agreement, we three guests from the lower decks stood up and thanked the Captain, preparing to make our departure. I leaned down and put an arm around Pia’s shoulders, kissed her cheek, thumped Paul’s back, and bid them good night. They got up and kissed me in return, then left for their apartment. The Captain and the pilots walked the rest of us to the security elevator.

  “Thank you for coming”, he said as we stood in the KC lobby, waiting for the elevator to beep its unlock code.

  “Thank you for protecting this good couple”, I said to the Captain. “If there is anything we can do. . .”

  “Continue giving your encouragement, I think. She has protection here, though it isn’t airtight. Paul is upset because earlier today the director of DSI sent a formal letter, couriered by the hand of an agent, demanding that Pia return to deck B and surrender herself for termination of pregnancy.”

  “They know!” I groaned.

  “Yes. Someone in the flight crew has informed them. It is impossible to know who has done this, but it was unrealistic to expect it to be otherwise. Paul said that this is a ship of clever killers. He was expressing strong emotion, of course. Yes, there are killers on the Kosmos. But I believe the greater problem is in the majority, those who would never participate directly in it. They are silent accomplices, either informants or passive look-the-other-way types.”

  “But you are not”, said Xue, with a note of admiration.

  The Captain dropped his eyes and sighed. “I am a grandfather. I have one grandchild. If the world were different, I would have many.” His eyes clouded, and we asked no more questions. The elevator doors opened.

  “Good night, gentlemen”, he said with a salute. We three civilians saluted him back.

  Day 356:

  Postscript: Last night, arriving on deck B, we exited the elevator to find four DSI agents waiting for us. They stepped forward.

  Two of the pilots had accompanied us, Vladimir and Jan. Now the Pole advanced and handed an envelope to the agent in charge.

  “Letter from Captain to Dr. Skinner. Copy to Dr. Larson”, he said coldly. “Captain has sent message to Earth-base about this situation. DSI will not touch Dr. Sidotra. If she or her child is harmed, DSI will be broken, and you will go to prison. Understand?”

  The agents said nothing, but they took a step back.

  “Captain says Dr. Sidotra stays on KC and DSI will stay off KC, totally. Do not ask. Do not argue. You just obey. Understand?”

  “You can’t hide a baby on this ship”, one of them dared to say.

  Jan gave him a look that Vlad the Impaler would have admired. In a low Slavic rumble, he said, “If you can hide a murdered man, we can hide a baby. Now, go.”

  They went.

  Xue, Dariush, and I shook hands with the pilots, thanked them, and said our good nights. They stepped into the elevator and were gone.

  “Well, here we are in DSI country”, I said. “Any idea what we should do?”

  “I think we will not be bothered for the time being”, said Dariush. “Forgive me, but I must return to working on a text that was found in the walls of the central tower. The scan reached me this afternoon, and I would like to run it through cryptanalysis and then examine the results. Will you excuse me?”

  This left Xue and me alone in the echoing hallways of Concourse B.

  “Asian?” I asked.

  “I’m Amerasian actually”, he smiled.

  “I mean. . .”

  “How about a nice quiet bistro, Neil?”

  “An excellent proposal. Are you fond of exceedingly hot snacks?”

  “I abhor them. Why not Irish beer?”

  So we went down to deck D, and no one bothered us along the way, nor in the pub, nor at any time during the rest of the evening, nor today (so far so good).

  In the pub, we sipped at our beers and replayed the evening.

  “Looks like they’re backing off”, I said.

  “For a while, perhaps”, said Xue. “They will doubtless need to have numerous meetings in order to assess the situation.”

  “Let’s hope they have nine years of meetings.”

  “Let us hope so.”

  But his expression told me he didn’t think we would be that lucky. “That was an interesting comment you made about rational and meta-rational. Sometimes you perplex me, Owly.”

  “In what way, Nil?”

  “The stereotype. The emotionless oriental prodigy. Do you still have that slide rule?”

  When he and I first met at the inaugural meeting of the Loner’s Club, he had stepped out of the amorphous mass of humanity as a midget wearing thick, rimless eyeglasses; he was dressed even more nerdishly than my good self (his highly polished black shoes had two-inch soles, topped by a cuff of thin vermillion socks, blue trousers, white short-sleeved shirt, buzz-cut hair, the face of a twelve-year-old Buddha, and what looked like an antique manual slide rule poking out of his shirt pocket (along with five multicolored clip pens)).

  “So, you remember the slide-rule.”

  “How can I forget it, Owly? It shattered many of my assumptions about life, society, the history of the universe, and the destiny of the entire cosmos.”

  “If only I’d known, I would have brought two and given you one.”

  “How could you? Your grandfather was deceased by that time, wasn’t he?”

  “You remember him”, he said, and for a moment, his face betrayed an inner emotion. “About the extra slide rule, I was speaking metaphorically.”

  Xue’s slide rule was a manually operated analog computer—the kind that was used during the pre-computer era. Handmade of ivory, it was mind-stunningly complex, demanding actual brain work with the assistance of its numerous sliding bars, on which my fraternity fellow worked out logarithms, roots, trigonometry, multiplication, division, and a host of other functions. Later, as we got to know each other better, he tried to train me how to use it. I mastered a few functions, but it always seemed to me an enormous waste of time. I owned no less than three pocket computers that performed the same functions with much less brain and mechanical involvement. Yes, sometimes the batteries died, and sometimes I had no money to buy replacements, but it sure freed up my time for other things. Such as moping over unreachable girls. Brilliant me, I also had a problem with vodka as pain-killer in those days.

  I never met Xue’s grandfather, the man who made the amazing slide rule. He died in Beijing a year or so after seeing his little grandson, age nineteen, off to Princeton for his first year of post-doctoral research at the Einstein Institute for Theoretical Physics. I was still working on my doctorate at the time. At first, Xue had seemed to me an alien life form. An admirable alien life form, but still . . . There were no points of connection other than physics, loneliness, and nerddom.

  Xue had undoubtedly found me and my culture to be nearly incomprehensible. Later that year, after he had come to trust me, he told me a lot about the old man he loved so much. I even saw tears in his eyes for the first time. He sorely missed his family back in China. He also tried to interest me in Chinese poetry, which he explained would be a healthy antidote to excessive specialization in our field. I was not interested.

  Sitting in the Irish pub, nigh on sixty years later, we are old men. We have accomplished much. We are soon to die. We are soon to be noted in histories of science. I love him as a brother, very dearly actually, but I can’t say I really know him, not soul to soul.

  Did I just write soul?

  Well, it’s a serviceable word.

&n
bsp; “Ao-li”, I said, somewhere after my second cup of ale. “Did your grandfather make the little sculpture of the poet on the deer?”

  “No.” He smiled. “My great-grandfather made it. He gave it to my grandfather. My grandfather gave it to my father. My father gave it to me when I left China.”

  “You have two treasures, then.”

  “Do you have treasures, Neil?”

  I couldn’t think of an answer. What were my treasures? My boots? My pocket knife. Maybe the turquoise cube I’d given away to Pia? My cabin way up in the Santa Fe mountains? The carapace I’d surrounded myself with for these past many years, in privileged isolation?

  “Memories, maybe”, I said. “Those are probably my treasures. The goodness of my parents. Their love for me. The little bits and pieces of life they gave me out of their poverty. A few words, fragments of meaningful conversation.”

  “Of the conversations, what do you recall most often?”

  I had to think about that. And when I saw it I was surprised.

  “Mostly, I remember the things they said that told me who I was.”

  He nodded. “It is the same for me. We receive life so unthinkingly, often ungratefully. And this may be, in part, one of the causes of our worldwide devaluation of life in these times.”

  “What they’ve done to mankind is evil.”

  My use of the word made Xue pause and gaze at me silently for a few moments.

  “One wonders constantly how it happened”, he said. “How did man cease to know himself?”

  “We got distracted. We didn’t pay attention. We stopped listening. Those gifts you were given, Ao-li, were messages from the past, weren’t they?”

  “Yes, my forefathers were speaking to me, handing down to me their love, their countless sacrifices, their belief in me, embodied in a concrete form. And they are speaking still.”