Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Then the zoom to AC-A-7, the planet of our desire. The seventh out from the system’s sun, slightly larger than Earth, slightly farther from its sun than Earth is from our sun. The advance probes that were sent out into the deep several years ago compose a telescope array about twenty kilometers wide, which gives us data integrated into an image the size of a pea. Increase the magnification beyond this, and we get a blur composed of square pixels. But it is blue, which may be gas clouds or may be water. Our onboard telescopes will give us steadily improving pictures, the closer we get to the destination.

  I wanted music to accompany the visuals. After considering the soaring violin in Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, and the saccharine arias of Ciccoletti’s latest opera, The Seas of Mars, I had discarded both in favor of the magnificent drama of Holst’s The Planets.

  As the symphony progressed, a tremendous stillness settled on the crowd. Strangely, many people in the audience began weeping, mostly women, but also a few men wiping their eyes. The audience sat in silence for a few minutes, then left the auditorium one by one.

  Day 27:

  After an early breakfast, I went down to the arboretum and found that the lighting had been dimmed, with only pinprick lights along the pathways to guide nocturnal strollers. I was alone, like an old man in a park walking his dog just before dawn. The birds had been turned off, and the sound system was playing one of Mozart’s concertos for wind instruments. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes.

  Later, a gardener passed by and spotted me in the shrubbery.

  “Morning, sir.”

  “And a good morning to you”, I replied.

  “It’s only 0600 hours, but I could turn on the sunrise, if you’d like.”

  “No thanks.”

  “People usually start coming around 0700. That’s when I turn on the birds. Would you like the birds now?”

  “No, the Mozart is excellent. Is classical played every morning? If so, I’d make a habit of sitting in.”

  “You’re welcome any time, night or day. The music isn’t always classical though. I like variety, so we do a lot of ethnic and folk. African. Celtic. Some soft Blues.”

  “Jazz?” I asked.

  “I’m a Jazz-fiend myself, Neo-Orleans and Post-J, but I listen to it in my own room.”

  “How about Ancient Rock?”

  He frowned. “We don’t do that to the trees.” He shook his head. “It warps proper molecular growth. Inhibits budding, flowering, fruiting. But with Mozart, Bach, the softer kind of Chopin, even some of the quieter Beethoven, you get an unusual response.”

  “Such as?”

  “Increased growth rate. The stems and leaves gradually turn toward the speakers, as if they’re yearning for the source.”

  “You’re sure you’re not imagining it? They can’t possibly enjoy classical.”

  “Well, they don’t have personalities, but there is significant positive response. It’s entirely bio-based, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  He paused, musing, and said, “We’re bio-based too.”

  I refrained from launching a strained discussion of the nature of intelligence.

  “It’s their spirit”, he went on. “Spirits communing with each other.”

  Yikes, a philosophical gardener! I beat a hasty retreat.

  Day 28:

  Half-asleep, I sat bolt upright in bed and clicked on the spotlight. Grabbed a sheet of paper and my fountain pen:

  Proposition A: The phenomenology of Music presents a coherent, universal “language” based in physics.

  Proposition B: Music is a sensory manifestation of wave theory.

  Proposition C: Music is wave as manifestation of “spirit”.

  Question: If all of the above is true, what is “spirit”?

  Day 30:

  Me and the cleaner guy have struck up a kind of trans-class chumminess. He told me his name is Dwayne. I told him mine is Neil. His masklike face hides a sardonic sense of humor, which can be evoked after you stay with him a while in discussions dominated by his stock responses: Yup. Nope. Maybe. He ejected me from my room this morning in order to give my personal space its mandatory monthly hygiene scrub. He used an odd assortment of tools, including old-fashioned rubber gloves, a sponge, and a bucket of antiseptic water. A traditionalist craftsman. I stood out in the hall, watching him work, and asked him where service personnel have their quarters.

  “Downstairs”, he said.

  More digging brought forth the interesting information that even people with the lowest status have their own private rooms, like everyone else. His is on level D, mine on B, the trillionaires on A. These privileged folks, he tells me, have a luxury suite. (It seems that hierarchy is unavoidable in human affairs.) His own room is pretty much like mine, he says, maybe a couple of feet shorter, no desk, but bigger on the entertainment side of things for after-hours diversion.

  “Films?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “What kind of films?”

  “Good, bad, and ugly.”

  “You mean the old cowboy film?”

  “Huh? I don’t know any by that name. But there’s quite a range.” He paused, flicked me a look, and added: “Not that I’m home on it.” He cracked a droll smile, then got back to work.

  Great guns! Thus, we have dialogues too, and I find they are as fun as any I’ve had so far, and better than my technical discussions with Xue. Dwayne and I are linked by nostalgia for the culture of the wild west, sagebrush and cactus, coyotes yipping under full moons, garish sunsets, etc. He is originally from rural Nevada but got scooped up when state borders were changed, and Los Angeles was declared one of America’s ten metro-states. He was employed by a space technology firm for some years, has a degree in process engineering, another in computer science, but is glad to be on board the Kosmos as a glorified janitor.

  Dwayne showed me how to access the films through a special key on my max. It quadruples the wall screen and pops up a menu, which has more than three hundred and eighty thousand titles to choose from. After he left, I shut it down and tried to forget the access procedure. Where are my cacti when I need them?

  Day 60:

  A few sociological observations:

  Flight crew wears dark blue uniforms. We don’t see many of them during our daily life. Occasionally, I spot them in the restaurants or bistros, rarely in the cafeteria feed-lots. Other staff members have uniforms too, when they are on duty. For example, the kitchen staff wear white, two-piece outfits with hair nets. Medical staff wears robin’s egg blue, same design. Maintenance staff (cleaning, laundry, etc.) wear pale green. Social facilitator staff wear ordinary business suits with neck ties (identical for male and female facilitators). When off duty, all working people dress themselves in a rather narrow selection of ordinary clothes—whatever was trendy at the time we left Earth.

  Women seem to be more inventive than men in this regard. They either have queen-size wardrobes stashed away somewhere, or they are constantly busy making alterations. Many of them must have brought needle and thread on the voyage. Intentional anachronism: none of them know what a needle or a thread is. They probably have electronic gadgets that unravel seams and stitch the cloth into new shapes. Jewelry is also a big item.

  They are very vulnerable to stylistic herd mentality, for reasons which throughout my entire life I have never—never—been able to understand. This year they all wear their collars up, touching their chins; last year they had no collars on their blouses and wore pantsuits, with cleavage. The year before, it was demure lace at the throat and a skirt from the waist to the knees, below which the pant legs remained black elasto-cling, unhealthily constrictive. The skirt has risen to mid-thigh in recent months. How do they communicate to each other what they must do next?

  My own sartorial standards are simple and unchanging: cowboy boots, jeans, checkered shirt, red bandana around my neck, and my thousand-Uni tweed blazer over the upper torso. Strapped to my waist is a frayed leather
belt. Clipped to it is the trusty survival kit I bought during my teens with my first wages, containing the old fold-knife, flint, and compass. You never know when you might need to hijack a jet or find your way back to your home planet.

  Day 110:

  I try to put in two or three hours each day, working on pet theories, doodling with unified field conjectures, inventing mathematical neologisms (Neil-ogisms), having my fun. It keeps the mind alert and stimulates motivation with the promise that I just might extend the frontiers a little. However, after three months of it, my attention is wandering. I am experiencing what I have so rarely felt in my life, a sense of “boredom”. When I first realized what was happening, I felt a stab of fear. Would this infect me more and more, I wondered? Would I become a tiger, pacing a cage, and end up frothing at the mouth and clawing the walls of my room? Or (more apt) would I become a flea bouncing frantically inside a matchbox? Such hallucinatory prospects paralyzed me for a few moments, and during this brief but horrible event, I glanced at max (don’t capitalize him, Neil, for heaven’s sake, don’t capitalize that name!), afflicted with a sudden craving for a film to watch. Socially approved escape mechanism number one. An escape encapsulated within an interstellar escape mechanism of epic proportions, a multitude of escapes stacked one inside the other, like Chinese boxes or Russian Marushka dolls.

  I tore my eyes away from max—from the max—pulled on my snake bite boots and went for an angry, limping hike all around the four concourses, avoiding every elevator and driving myself up and down the stairways. It helped. But it left me a little rattled.

  I gotta get out more!

  Interesting how my written notes have become fewer and farther between. I make entries in my voice diary each day, small memos, noting the names of those whom I meet: for example, my weekly chats with Xue, and also the nonscheduled exchanges I’ve had with the astronomer Strachan McKie of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, designer of the new tower at the ROE, author of many brilliant, somewhat idiosyncratic books—yes, the very man after whom the McKie Ultra Deep Field was named—that apparently empty corner of space where he discovered about three thousand new galaxies and more than eighty new quasars.

  Encounters with McKie are neither lengthy nor memorable, seasoned as they are with his crabby comments and complaints, his antisocial nature demanding that human interaction be kept to the minimum, unless a subject arises in conversation that interests him (i.e., quasars). By coincidence, I brought along on the voyage my well-thumbed paperback copy of his book on quasars, not knowing he would be aboard. White-haired, cranky, tall but bent like a bad penny nail. I like him. He’s a misfit like me.

  Also, there is Dr. Maria Kempton of Sydney University, whom I first met in a lounge one evening when I was feeling shiftless. She initiated the conversation, asked if I was Dr. Hoyos the physicist. Inwardly I sighed, since I am not dedicated to my reputation. A lively irrational discussion with a real child would have been so much more rewarding, but, alas, children are entirely absent from our little venture, and are a somewhat endangered species back on our home planet.

  Kempton is in her early sixties, but it took no stretch of the imagination to see that she had once been a lovely young woman. She opened the exchange by mentioning that we have something in common because we are both lapsed members of Mensa.

  “You have lapsed?” I exclaimed with feigned shock.

  “Yes, long ago. High IQs don’t guarantee that you remember to keep your membership renewal up to date.”

  I knew why I had once been a member—I had been badgered into it by Xue for reasons of prestige—but I was curious to know her reason and asked why she had joined the elite brain club.

  “Well, I was very young”, she said with a thoughtful look. “It was pride in the beginning. And loneliness. The desire to find people with whom I could discuss things without them wondering if I was a dysfunctional, masculinized gnome.”

  “Which you very obviously are not”, I replied with a little bow, dropping my cowboy accent, since I quickly realized she is one of those totally honest people you meet from time to time.

  “Thank you, Dr. Hoyos.”

  “Please call me Neil.”

  “Neil. I’m Maria.”

  I asked about her area of expertise. Microbiology, she informed me, then launched into an intriguing conjecture about what kind of life we may find on our destination planet, that is, if we find any life. It is possible, she says, though by no means certain. However, AC-A-7 is in the Habitable Zone, is about the same size as Earth, about the same distance from AC-A as Earth is from our sun; moreover, AC-A is only a little larger than our sun. These “abouts” and “littles” represent immense distances and quantities, and thus we can only hope to find life there.

  “Even if we do”, she added, “the planet could be millions of years younger or older than ours, and whatever life it may have could be either extremely primitive or dying out in its end phase.”

  “Then there’s the various sorts of ionizing radiation”, I added, “which we have no way of measuring at this point.”

  “Mmmm, yes, the gamma rays and x-rays, you mean. Without sufficient shield, I suppose that would put an end to things pretty quick.”

  “They’d never get started, actually.”

  An enjoyable conversation. It concluded with her showing me photographs of her grandchildren. Yes, she has more than one. Apparently, she and her husband had three children, since Australia was the last state to sign the one-child global policy accords. Each of their children married and produced a single legal child, for a total of three! She’s a very lucky woman. A strange joy took hold of me as I examined those bright shining faces. This was followed by a cordial goodbye on both our parts, and an agreement to talk again if we should happen to bump into each other.

  As I said, there is a great deal to interest me on board, everything from the hydroponics garden (they have a good selection of vegetables, succulent vine fruits, and vividly colored flowers), to the arboretum (a wide selection of trees from every continent), to chess games in the commons, aerobics tracks around the ship on all four concourses, flights of stairs, sports and exercise rooms, and libraries.

  (Note to myself: I really, really must read the Manual more carefully. I recently discovered that indexed under ship’s services are the libraries, more than I had stumbled upon during my first exploration of the concourses. Taking a peek into one of them, I had assumed they were all the same: digital, “oak”-lined, full of arm chairs and fake fireplaces burning fake logs, visually appealing but lacking any tactile books. Today, however, while roving through deck A, I stumbled upon the single actual library, containing close to twenty thousand volumes, intelligently selected.)

  Despite the myriad choices that lend themselves to keeping one active and interested, this does not consume so much of my day that I am deprived of an opportunity to make voice records in my e-diary. But I notice that I’ve lately been skipping days at a time. This written journal suffers even more from such lapses. Does consciousness change with the alteration of space-time? I would expect so, but it is not really measurable. Maybe the anorexia of the journal entries is no more than a case of my wrist muscles squeaking their little protests. “Stop writing all the time, Neil”, they say. “Just enjoy life.” My ankle hurts more than usual; I’m not sure why. I’ll make an appointment with a doctor. There are plenty on board. Hmmm, now whom should I choose? Or do they choose for us? Guess I’ll find out.

  Day 121:

  It turns out that they do indeed assign specific lists of potential patients to specific doctors. It would be interesting to check out the lists, to see who got who, and try to figure out why. I think they keep this information confidential since it would encourage musical chairs and create logistical havoc, human beings being what we are. My physician is a young East-Indian lady, Dr. Pia Sidotra. She’s a specialist in tropical medicine, infectious diseases, and toxicity (industrial / chemical accidents). Graduate in General Medicine from M
umbai University, surgery from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, tropical medicine at Djakarta U.

  During our first consultation, I tried to keep my defensive force-field up. I don’t automatically trust doctors. I especially don’t trust young, brilliant, women doctors. First of all, they are professionals in highly prestigious positions, which implies that they have successfully navigated the world we live in, and are almost certainly very pleasant creations of the government, full of clone thoughts regarding basic human questions. In my experience, they have issues to work out. It may be said, to their credit, that they have to strain to be detached, even though practitioners in their field generally treat humans like bio-mechanisms. But ladies can slip into caring too much, and thus they tend to overcompensate by becoming harder than men. They are also so thorough and good at what they do that in the end it’s just easier to die than to endure all the trouble and testing they like to put a person through. Give me liberty or give me death, I say.

  In any event, that was my attitude when we shook hands and began the consultation. She surprised me, however, by initiating a battery of oral health questions, using a pencil on paper on clipboard on knee.

  “That’s antiquarian of you”, I opined. “One might go so far as to say anachronistic. I hope you approve of anesthetic for surgeries.”

  “In extreme cases”, she said, with a small smile.

  “Well, I’m a really extreme case.”

  “I can see you are.” She paused and glanced down at her clipboard. “Dr. Hoyos, we’ve received no transmissions from your HUMVS here at the medical center. Of course, it’s your choice to wear one or not, but according to medical law, I have to inquire about it, to make sure you haven’t lost the transmitter without realizing it.”

  “I just decided not to use it.”

  She made a check mark on her paper.

  “Test done?” I asked. “Did I pass?”

  “I need to take your vital signs first.”

  After she had wrapped a pressure band around my arm and tapped a button to take the readings, I asked her if she had chosen to have a humvee implant or patch for herself.