Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel
The people around me in the panorama room were on their feet too, anxiously discussing what they had just witnessed, shocked by the accident that had befallen the scientist at the cliff face, perplexed by the sudden loss of visual contact.
“O God, O God”, I groaned, as I hurried as fast as I could down the concourse in the direction of my room. Inside, I powered up the max and keyed in the program for the temple experiments. Blank. Only the words: Transmission Interrupted.
I keyed in the satellite view of the planet. And there was Continent 1 with a bright star blazing in its center, in the middle of the mountains. I zoomed and zoomed, and then I saw what I had dreaded, what I had somehow known I would find, though I had not admitted it to myself.
The entire valley between the western and central ranges and for a distance of sixty kilometers or more north and south of the temple was engulfed in flames, a massive fireball still spreading outward from its brilliant core of light. Thick clouds were rising around a firestorm that would form into a mushroom cloud greater in size than any that man had ever made.
Hardly breathing, I tapped the negative zoom key, and the continent shrank until the eastern and western oceans were visible. I zoomed on the western coast and saw heavy waves speeding away from the shore.
I checked Base-main, northwest of the temple region, and saw that it had not been directly hit by the blast, though the buildings were shaking and AECs were tipping onto their sides, with fissures spreading in the earth. People were running in all directions.
The same thing was happening everywhere, as if the continent itself had been shattered, like a rock thrown at a mirror, the splinters radiating outward. The extinct volcano in the northeast was streaming a trail of vapor. Herds of mammals were galloping panic-stricken on the plains; whales were diving toward deep water beyond the continental shelf. A shuttle parked at a marine base fell into the sea as the ground beneath it collapsed.
I zoomed out and saw that the brilliant star at the center of the catastrophe had begun to fade, replaced by an engorging cloud so dense and so high that its cap must be reaching an altitude of twenty or thirty kilometers.
I sat down and stared at the unfolding horror.
A hundred, two hundred kilometers from the epicenter, forests were flattened. The distant savanna regions were hazy with grass fires.
Xue was gone. Hundreds of people had been vaporized.
Where was Dariush? He had been absent from the ship for days. I went out and hurried to his room. Hard knocking on his door elicited no response. I found the nearest elevator and went down to the lowest level. But the elevator would not unlock for me, and I remembered that a special code was needed for accessing PHM.
After pounding the door with my fist, I went back up to B and hastened along the concourse until I found street 22 and the KC elevator. Using the code, I entered it and punched the PHM button. The elevator took me down, and at the bottom it opened.
I was now in the section of shuttle bays. Only one was in port, and its loading platform was open. A few people scurried about with anxious faces. I spotted Jan heading straight for the shuttle and intercepted him.
“Do you know what’s happened?” I asked.
“Yes, I know”, he said with a look. “I’m going down there. I have to save what I can.”
“Don’t go near the epicenter. Don’t go anywhere near the middle of the continent; it’s all radioactive. It’s spreading too, so get out as fast as you can.”
“Loka’s shuttle was in the valley. We have lost him. Many people died. There is a second shuttle at the marine station in the north. A third was in transit up to the Kosmos. That one is safe. It turned around and is heading for Base-main to see if there are survivors.”
“Then there are only two shuttles left. The one in the north fell into the sea.”
Jan’s face darkened, and he looked away.
“Was it Vladimir’s?” I asked.
“Yes, it was his. He may still be alive. I will go there too and try to find him.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“No, Dr. Hoyos, you cannot. You must stay with the people here. I think we have lost half our population, maybe more. Down there—down there on this planet, it is very dangerous. Radiation is only one thing. There are seismic problems and bad weather because of the blast.” He paused. “Do you know how it happened?”
“I do.”
“The three-eyed god did this, yes?”
“He did, and his makers did, and so did those among us who were like them. Dr. Xue died trying to stop them.”
“Then he too is gone. I am sorry. He was a good man.” Yes, a good man. We never guessed how good until the end. “I have to go now”, said Jan.
He entered the shuttle and sealed the hatch. A minute later, the bay doors closed, and the alarm started beeping for depressurization. I took the elevator up to KC.
Paul and Pia were in their apartment, sitting side by side on a sofa, holding the baby. Pia was weeping silently. Paul had his arms around her.
He leaped to his feet when I entered the room. “You hear what happen?” he cried.
I sat down and told them what I had seen on the panorama screen and my max. I related what Jan had said, that Loka was gone, and possibly Vladimir. I described Xue’s last minutes. Pia, who had been napping at the time, had missed it all. Paul had been watching on a screen in the navigation section. I had interrupted him in the process of telling her.
“Has anyone heard from Dariush?” I asked.
Stricken, they shook their heads.
“Is he not aboard?” Pia asked.
“The last I heard from him he was heading down to AS-VT for several days.”
“Oh, no! Oh, no!” she sobbed.
“We do not know many detail now”, said Paul. “Maybe he is okay.” Our eyes met, and we looked away from each other. I stood up and told them I was going to search for Dariush. I would contact them if I learned anything. They nodded mutely. But where would I look?
I tried the offices of translation and archaeology. I tried his room again. I checked our favorite library in the hope that he might have dozed through everything, slumped over a book. But he was nowhere to be found.
The next few hours were confusion. The order of our world had been shaken to the foundations. Who were dead, who were living, who had barely survived? We would not be able to assess our situation until the two shuttles were back on board with the remnants of the expedition.
The people I passed in the halls either bustled along, manic with useless purpose, or they were wandering disoriented. Perhaps others were in their private rooms staring at their max screens. The cafeterias were empty, as were the bistros and recreation centers. I don’t think I saw a single scientist, and it struck me that a good many of them, perhaps the majority, had been down on the planet, busy at their duties in the mission stations or congregating in the temple valley for the great moment.
I went back up to KC and spoke with some junior staff, offering to help in any way I could. But I really had nothing to offer, and they knew it. They suggested that I return to my room and wait there. The Captain would soon address the crew and passengers via the ship’s communications system.
*
I sat in my room and waited. And at some point during those hours I knew the truth of the matter. I knew that it had not been an accident. It had not been the result of hasty miscalculation. We had been lied to by the aliens—the aliens who were ourselves. They had deceived us. They planned it for us. It was waiting for us, even though we would not fall into their trap until two thousand years had elapsed. They could wait. They had the patience of serpents. And their malice.
Xue’s slide rule was inside my jacket pocket. I took it out and slid its bars back and forth distractedly. I made a cross with it. I unmade the cross.
I wanted to pray for his soul. As a boy, I had done that for people who had died. I had prayed for my parents’ souls when they died—there was that much faith left in
me then. Since then, nothing.
What was this nothing, this no-thing inside of me? It was an ache, a void, a yearning so deep I could not fill it. I could only look down into the dark well of myself and wonder if there had ever been anything there. Like all the wells of my childhood, all the arroyos, all the inner reservoirs of tears, I had dried up in a desert. I was the desert.
I had been instrumental in the deaths of all these people. I had provided the key to the creation of the Kosmos. I had brought them here. And later, I had ignored Xue’s and Dariush’s warnings, their profound intuitions. Again and again, those intuitions had proved to be right, and my objections wrong—my eminently rational objections—my skeptical distancing from their supposed irrationality. But they too had played their parts. Dariush’s persistence had opened the path for discovery of the temple. Xue had helped me find the logic that made this ship, though in the end it had been my inscrutable friend who gave his life trying to stop the unthinkable.
The unthinkable had now happened. It was real. It was history, the past and the future fused in a fireball of the inescapable present.
I wanted to die. I wanted permanent escape. But I still feared death—that at least was left to me.
*
I had not slept the night before, and the stress of the day now overcame me. I lay down to rest my body for a few minutes and slipped into a light doze.
I dreamed of the spiral staircase in Santa Fe.
I awoke not knowing how long I had been asleep, minutes or hours I could not say. Rubbing my eyes, groaning with fatigue and grief, I was afflicted by an old memory. I had not thought about it for decades and now it returned in great force. I was seventy-eight years old, and I was a boy again.
It was the day my father drove me to Santa Fe for my first year at university. Scene after scene flashed past: the car breaking down, the old man with his burro and tinkling bells. The story of my murdered brother and sister. My resentment, my rage, my hatred. Then came the fire engine and the watchman named Pedro and the spiral staircase. Finally, my father’s confession. And my refusal to do as he had done, to kneel before God’s servant and admit my sins, asking for forgiveness. It all swam before my eyes, and I sat up in order to dispel a wave of dizziness.
My father and I had left the chapel and returned to the car. He checked the street map, and then we drove off to find the university’s registration office.
He said nothing for a time. I was silent too, wrestling with my emotions. There were so many of them—all bad.
“Benigno,” he said at last, in his quiet gentle voice, “in every man, there is a desire to rise.”
I did not reply. I knew that whatever he was about to say would be pious and wise. But I had finished with all that. I wanted none of it.
“There is for each of us a struggle”, he continued. “It is like climbing a mountain. Like climbing that staircase in the chapel. But the destination can sometimes be different from what we wanted.”
Heaven or hell? I silently answered, supplying the predictable and inevitable conclusion.
“A man may strive for a heaven of his own making, and find himself in hell.”
Just as I had predicted!
My father went on: “He may find himself in hell and not know how he got there.”
“What world is this, then?” I fired my rebuttal at him. “What kind of universe, that we who are blind can step into hell and be found guilty of it?”
“We choose”, he said. “We choose many things along the way. And the choosing sets our course. And that is why a man must not choose blindly. If he makes a wrong course, he can change it, right up until the end of his life, but then it is harder. That is why we need God to guide us. He would guide you, if you’d let him. But he will not force you to obey.”
“He just drops us into hell if we don’t.”
“You are wrong, Benigno”, he said, his voice breaking. “That is not how he is. We choose hell. We choose to reject his mercy. He shows us a spiral staircase that leads up to Him. He climbs beside us, and within us too, if we let him. He wants to help us. But we so often insist on going alone.”
Yes, he was right about that. I preferred alone.
I loved my father. I loved his goodness. But I was not like him. I would climb my own staircases. I would make my own staircases.
“Do not forget him, Neil.”
“I won’t, Papacito”, I said, relenting a little. “You shouldn’t worry so much about me.”
*
Had Xue suspected that a catastrophe was looming? Or had he only exercised scientific caution? Did he foresee that something more than a nuclear accident was about to happen, that it would be a bomb, prepared deliberately far in advance for those who would one day trigger it? He had shouted “isotopes” and “fission”. But I think his frantic last-minute attempt to stop the explosion was an act that could only be impelled by certainty. He knew what would happen, and he knew he would probably die trying to prevent it.
The little reactor on top was the fission trigger for the larger cache of fuel, which became the fusion bomb. Like a hydrogen bomb, only a thousand times greater in power. What fuel did they use? Neither liquid deuterium nor solid lithium deuteride seem likely. It was probably an element unknown to us, derived from the minerals of Nova.
*
I slept again, and dreamed about a planet covered in fire with a black puncture hole in its center. I awoke in a state of terror, afraid that a chain reaction had spread throughout Nova and that it was burning below my feet.
I powered the max and keyed the satellite view. The planet was still there, revolving serenely on its axis, with its seas and all but one of its continents as they had been before. Over C-1, there was a thick haze, streaming westward across the ocean with the prevailing wind currents. I zoomed on the central mountain ranges, but the cloud cover was too thick to see anything—dirty brown, purple, and gray, with numerous patches of flame where the remaining forests still burned.
When I keyed to the ship’s main communications site, a media announcer appeared, speaking in midsentence: “. . . indicate that radioactivity is highest in the center of the continent but is spreading on the hurricane-force winds generated by the explosion. Three extinct volcanoes have also erupted, and earthquakes of magnitude 10 and higher on the Richter-Mercalli scale have devastated Base-main and all the mission bases. Two shuttles and their pilots have survived the disaster and are returning shortly to the Kosmos with the last of the survivors. One is due to enter port within the next twenty minutes; the other is preparing to lift off from the geology base on the eastern side of the mountains. The number of survivors is not yet known. We will update this report with the latest news as it happens. Stay tuned to Kosmos Media.”
This was followed by the Earth flag rippling in the wind and emotional background music. Then a recital of the Earth Charter by a man’s voice in tones of infinite wisdom. Then a recording of a children’s choir singing on the shore of an ocean, 4.37 light-years away. I gazed at their shining faces, wondering who they were, wondering if they had all lost brothers or sisters. If so, they were survivors too. I switched off the max and went out.
Within minutes, the KC elevator brought me to the lowest deck. There I waited in the shuttle concourse, among a group of people from all the departments, including cooks and cleaning people, flight officers, and a number of medical staff with a line of gurneys ready to roll. I saw no DSI uniforms, and something dark in me hoped that the department staff had all been in the valley at the time of the disaster.
The Captain and his second-in-command stepped out of an elevator and joined us.
Two of the bays were open and empty; the third was closed and silent. The fourth was beeping its pressurization signal. A shuttle had arrived.
*
Thirty-nine survivors were brought out on stretchers and gurneys, or stumbled down the ramp on their own. Few were those without the marks of the disaster upon their bodies and faces. Many were showing prelim
inary symptoms of radiation burn, though they surely would have been hundreds of kilometers away from the epicenter.
I felt certain I would momentarily see Jan coming out. Instead it was Vladimir, carrying one end of a stretcher, with Dariush on the other end, whispering to the form lying on it. It was Jan, groaning, his face red and blistering, his hands lifted beseechingly.
The medical staff took over and began to ferry people by elevator to the clinics on the decks above. The Captain and Vladimir accompanied them. I went up in a large elevator with Dariush. The cubicle was crowded, with two semi-conscious people on gurneys, a doctor and three nurses, and other wounded, who were stunned and weeping.
I caught Dariush’s eye.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yes. I was on the shuttle coming back to the Kosmos when the blast occurred. We turned around in mid-journey and headed to Base-main.”
The elevator came to a halt, and the doors opened. It was deck A. The medical people rolled the gurneys into the hallway and raced toward the clinic. I caught Dariush by the arm and asked, “What did you find at Base-main?”
“Among the many dead, I found the body of our friend Étienne.”
“Oh no, not Pagnol too!”
“We carried into the shuttle all the bodies we could find, and the few survivors. After that, we went around the coastal regions trying to locate people at the marine bases. The turbulence was severe. When we landed at the northern marine base, Jan’s shuttle had already landed there, a safe distance from the sea. We ran to the base and found him pulling those still alive from the buildings—there were not many. Then he saw Vladimir’s shuttle capsized in the sea not far from the shore—the new shore, for the land had collapsed. Even as we watched, the base slid into the water. Jan ran to the edge and dove in. He swam to the shuttle and pulled himself up on it. He banged on the sides, but there were no answers from within. He used his remote to open the portal. When it opened, the vessel began to fill with water, sinking very quickly. He dove in through the portal, and a minute later he brought Vladimir out.”