“Neither”, she replied quietly, without taking her eyes off my beeping graphs.
“May I ask why not?”
“I’ve always been concerned about the long-range effects of wave transmissions on living cells—only as an amateur interest, you understand. Perhaps an overly suspicious one.”
“I’ve been concerned too, for other reasons.”
“Physics?”
“No, philosophical—only an amateur interest, you understand—combined with general ornerariness.” Again she smiled.
“Would you like to know your vital signs results?”
“Just a summation, please.”
“You’re a very healthy man for your age. How do you keep fit?”
“I attribute it to fresh air, fresh water, natural and illegal foods, minimal electronic wave exposure, certain criminal activities that harm no one but myself, and so forth.”
“Excellent”, she said.
She hadn’t tripped over the words illegal and criminal. This was one unusual doctor.
“And how about exercise?” she asked.
“Only mental. Theoretical physics keeps a guy on his toes.”
And so it went. Our conversation, which had begun so stiffly, became free-form banter. She told me that, much as she admired my achievements in science, reading theoretical physics had always shut down her higher brain functions. I reassured her that this was probably true for most of mankind. She mentioned that she likes the novels of Charles Dickens and Indian love songs. I told her that I once saw a Bollywood film, but the love song put me to sleep after thirty minutes of uninterrupted passionate chanting.
By now, I realized she was something of an anomaly: an authentically charming person, humorous, sensitive, definitely not a clone-thinker. Her eyes sparkled, and she waggled her head a little whenever she made a joke. Later, on the way back to my room, I suddenly burst out laughing when I got one of her subtler ones.
I should mention that she told me my right wrist may need no more than a little rest and penetrating muscle cream, but she has also scheduled more extensive tests. My ankle interested her a lot: the scar, the limp, the neurological damage, the story that goes with it. In the telling, I tried not to embellish.
“You were lucky”, she said.
“I had a good dog.”
“Was his name Lucky?”
“No, his name was Rusty.”
“A good pal.”
“The best.”
“Without Rusty, the history of the human race would have turned out quite differently.”
“Aw, shucks, Ma’am, you exaggerate my importance”, I drawled.
“Shucks, Dr. Hoyos, I don’t think I do.”
If I’d had a Stetson hat, I would have popped it onto my head and squinted into the sunset. When you’re sixty-eight years old, you can get away with being coy, shuffling in the direction of a mild playfulness without alarming beautiful young women. They just see Dad, and chuckle.
Day 137:
With pen in my left-hand fingers, I’m scratching this explanatory note. Right wrist diagnosed with median neuropathy—carpal tunnel syndrome. I needed surgery. It’s done. Hand and wrist in cast. (Attached digital photo, self-made with left hand. Sorry for blur.)
Dr. Sidotra asked me if I want her to open up my ankle and do some tinkering with a team of neurologists. I said no. Told her I like my limp, it gives me character.
Day 153:
The ship is now cruising at maximum velocity. We are slightly above half-lightspeed. This will put us in the neighborhood of the sister stars around nine years from now. Some time will be lost in deceleration, which begins five months out from our destination.
Day 204:
Feels good to be writing again. Not much to write home about. I’ve read a lot of books since my last entry (see attached list). Some loss of the finer mind / brain / motor control in the fingers. Pia says it will return with practice. I don’t want to waste paper, so make do by scribbling with the stylus on the max’s imprint tablet. Seems to work well, since there is some improvement as long as I keep sending messages along the neuron paths, waking up the little fellows in my wrist and hand, one by one.
Day 206:
I woke from a strong dream last night. In it, I was as old as I am now. An elderly woman—an East Indian woman—was seated beside me. We were on the afterdeck of a wooden houseboat, holding hands and watching birds flying over a lake. There was lapping water, floating water lilies perfuming the air, a slight breeze. A soaring mountain range rose above the far shore. The woman turned to me, and I saw that there was great love in her face, a beautiful face, her eyes wise and innocent. I was in love with her. In the dream, it seemed that I had loved her a long time.
She said, “You know me, Neil.”
I answered, “Yes, but what is your name?”
When I awoke, the feeling of love burned quietly inside me, lingering a little. It has been such a long time since I felt anything like that. Tears started running down my cheeks. I put a stop to it quickly.
Day 291:
Rereading this journal some months after the above entry, I discovered that I had a similar dream on the flight from America to Africa. (See entry, 13 October, 2097, Earth base—Africa.) So, two dreams about an Indian lady, one of them occurring before I met Pia. The women in the dreams didn’t look like Pia grown old, nor was there the sense of Pia-ness. Though I am fond of the few Indians I have met during my life, I have no exceptional attraction to them. Well, there was one, that girl I met at college, though it came to nothing. What was her name? Raina or Ryka, if I recall correctly. No, it was Raissa.
Obviously my subconscious is sending me oddly consistent cryptic messages. I am feeling my old age, am approaching the crest beyond which is precipitous decline. Yet I remain lonely for what might have been, for a family of my own, for a legacy of human lives to bequeath to the future. A torch hurled across the abyss of time. Too late for all that. Emotionally, dreams can suffice for reality. About the objective future, well, we must leave that to the future archivist, if there be a future for our sad little island-universe race.
I don’t feel much like writing. The visual screen shows no change outside the “window”. It’s beautiful, but static; the channel never changes. Only AC-A-7 has changed. It is closer but still a blur.
The human mind is stimulated by change, motivated by meeting the challenge of novelty or threat or pleasure, rewarded with the sensations of being instrumental in altering environments, and will persevere in this as long as there is some degree of perceivable progress. People turn to knitting baby booties, doing crossword puzzles, collecting rare coins; they may even make an effort to understand E=mc2 or to study the genetic adaptations of cacti, but in all cases, they need to see some fruit of their labors.
We weren’t permitted to bring personal flora or fauna on the voyage. Only the ship’s official botanists and zoologists have authority in those departments. Our first step on the planet will be absolutely sterile, just to make sure we don’t ruin someone else’s ecosystem. Wise move. Still, I do wish I could have smuggled on board my little potted Echinopsis chacoana, with its splendid white flower, and also Opuntia polyacantha, with its brilliant crimson blooms. What a consolation it would be to have one’s own personal organic friends to care for in this lonely universe. Like humans, they are a combination of prickles and glory. Alas!
Day 299:
Speaking of prickles, and not much glory, Dr. Strachan McKie waxed personal today when we ate together in the cafeteria. It began when he banged down his tray on the table, sat himself across from me, and commenced: “They’re bona fide idiots up there on the secret deck.”
“Why do you say that, Stron?” I asked, intrigued.
“They’re protocol zombies, that’s why. I just had a talk with the chief flight astronomer, and asked him why the hell the on-planet astronomers aren’t invited upstairs. He said something to the effect that personally, personally, he’d be ever so pleased to ha
ve me take part in the cabal, but it’s against the rules. Against the rules, he said, the sniveller.”
Then followed a stream of colorful Scottish invective. The mood tab behind his ear began flashing an ugly red. I heard a faint tinny voice coming from somewhere near it.
“Shut up!” he bellowed, and tore the thing from his skin. Fuming, he tossed it onto the floor. Then he opened his shirt front and ripped a humvee from his chest, throwing it onto the floor as well.
“Ouch”, he snarled, since his unpremeditated violence had made him lose a few white chest hairs.
“Why would such a sensible idea be against the rules?” I pressed.
“What?” he barked.
“Why is it against the rules to have both sets of astronomers getting together?”
“They don’t want any cross-pollination.”
“Intellectual cross-pollination, you mean?”
“Right. He says they want two sets of eyes observing from different perspectives. Triangulation. Depth perception.”
“Sounds like nonsense to me, Stron. It’s good policy in some fields, but I can’t for the life of me see why it would be useful to astronomers in our situation. You’re all in the same spot, aren’t you? And you still will be when we land on the planet.”
“Exactly”, he growled. “So what’s going on here?”
“Maybe nothing more than knee-jerk territorialism.”
“Maybe. At best, it’s knee-jerk compartmentalization, minus the knee.”
I laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t let it get under your skin. Surely, they don’t see any more than we see on the public screens.”
“Aye, but they do get to look at a whole lot more instruments than we do. I want to see the spectrographs. I want magnetic readings, gravity aberrations, full-spectrum wave records—the lot.”
I now recalled that among his many achievements, Stron is the discoverer of the spectrum factor that is widely known in the astronomy community as the “McKie edge”. This is a light anomaly that he posits as a bio-signature of chlorophyll-bearing photosynthetic plants in atmospheres where ozone, oxygen, and methane are present.
“You want to see the edge”, I said.
“Damn right, I want to see the edge! But the boys upstairs want to keep it all to themselves so they can write the definitive papers on the big discovery. One small step for a man, one giant leap for the onboard astronomers.”
His face was now flaming, his hands clenched.
“You may be right”, I said. “Still, it’s not worth a heart attack.”
That brought him up short. He glared at me with one eye closed.
“What’s your favorite sport?” I asked.
“My favorite sport?”
“Yeah. Mine’s basketball. What’s yours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Hoyos. And don’t distract me. This is serious.”
“I know it’s serious. Answer my question.”
He snorted. “Curling.”
“Stones on ice?”
“No, not just stones on ice. Not tin box rinks and artificial ice with synthetic stones smacking while the vidcams blink-blink-blink.”
“Then what . . . really . . . is curling?”
“You’re a tricky man, Hoyos.”
“I know. So, what’s real curling?” Stron sat back and closed his eyes.
“Curling is every sense you can imagine uniting in concentrated ecstasy. It’s art. It’s war. It’s history. It’s sheer poetry.” He opened his eyes. “Hard poetry, you understand.”
“That’s an interesting insight. In what way is it hard poetry?”
“Imagine a frozen loch, braced by mountains, thick, clear ice, blue-green, all the snow blown off by an angry wind. Imagine the pure air, your cheeks flushed with the cold, the oxygen pumping through your blood, thoughts clear, feelings high. You hear the sound of a real rock rumbling along the echoing ice and smacking another rock, sending it in a trajectory, with angle, speed, and distance all estimated, subject to the vagaries of nature.”
“Like billiards.”
“Only superficially. With curling, you have total joy, total investment of the body, mind, and soul, not escape from the self. But these paltry descriptions are a disgrace. There are no words to express its beauty.”
“I’d love to learn the game some day. If we ever return to Earth. . .”
“If we ever return to Earth, you come to Scotland. Not the tourist’s Scotland, mind you. You come and see me.”
“I will.”
“I think you mean it, lad.”
“I do mean it.” And I did.
The flame was waning from his face, burred humor lurking on the frontiers of his personality, the hands curled around his knife and fork but no longer clenched. You wouldn’t want to be within eight feet of him if he had a claymore sword in his hands, but he was, almost certainly, the greatest living astronomer in the world.
He threw a huge chunk of scrambled “egg” down his throat and peered at me with some interest. “Heard your lecture. Very good.”
“Thank you.”
“Would have been better without the gawdawful music.”
“Tastes vary. I hear people liked that part.”
“No accounting for taste. Your gravity conjectures match my own.”
I leaned forward. “Do they? Tell me more.”
He did, and I listened, growing increasingly amazed by what this great mind had conceptualized. At the end of it, he pushed back his chair and stood. “Do you take a drink?”
“I’m not much of a drinker these days. Though I do like a dram now and then.”
He grinned. “Good. I’ve got just the right stuff for you. Coom wi’s.”
In a little art alcove on Concourse C (under a Picasso-lady cut into pieces and badly reassembled), we sipped clandestine thirty-year-old whiskey from a flask that he produced from inside his ratty tweed blazer. First, he checked up and down the hallway to make sure no one would happen along and see us.
“We needn’t hide in corners, Stron”, I said with a laugh. “There’s no surveillance on board.”
He said nothing in reply, just fixed me with an intimidating look.
“Oh, I get it. You don’t want anyone and everyone lining up for a free drink, right?”
“Wet your gullet while you can”, he growled, pushing the flask toward me again.
When we were comfortably fuelled and mellowed, he told me he had to get back to work and further informed me that he had decided we should talk again. And so, I hope, we shall.
Day 300:
Many people have voyage-related jobs. More than two hundred others are here only in view of planet-work, and thus have a lot of free time on their hands. Recalling my own nasty bout with claustrophobia and aimlessness, I wondered how they fill their idle hours, when, in fact, all their hours are idle hours. Or so I thought. I asked Stron what he does to cope with this. He told me that he needs three lifetimes to complete the papers he’s writing. He says he is also performing experiments in a private laboratory.
“You need a laboratory for astronomy?” I asked.
“Different research entirely, Hoyos. I’ve developed a fascination for physics.”
“Wonderful, Stron, wonderful!”
“ ‘Tis indeed. However, though I hate to disappoint you, it’s not astrophysics to which I’m referring. Nor theoretical physics. More a practical application: the relationship between hydrogen and oxygen and various organic compounds and how they behave under pressure and heat, the condensation process—that sort of thing.”
“Ah”, I said, bored.
I asked Dwayne the cleaner guy what he does to make his off-hours pass quickly.
“Books”, he replied. “What kind of books?”
“All kinds.”
“And what about the other maintenance people?”
“Plugged in.”
“Pardon me?”
“Plebeian mind-nummers.”
“They like Math?”
�
�Numb. Numbing. Nummers, not num-bers.”
“So, what are plebeian mind-nummers?”
“The old maximum e-drug. Surfing, vids, films, holo-porn.”
“Digital environmental chambers?”
“DECs? Yup, there’s a lotta people hooked on them too.” He paused and looked me squarely in the eyes for a moment. “Um, I think you should avoid using the max as much as you can, Doctor.”
“Really? Why?”
“Uh, it’s addictive. Sorry, I gotta go now. Bye.”
I had supper with Xue and raised the topic of boredom, something from which he has never suffered. I was certain he would have projects on the go, and I was right. We also chatted about the problem in general: the nine years of time to kill for more than two hundred people on board.
“Didn’t you know, Neil? Didn’t you read the contract you signed?”
“That ridiculous contract, Owly! No, I most certainly did not read all 180 pages of it, including the numerous appendixes and small print. I’m still trying to make headway in the Manual, and that’s 2,200 pages.”
“Right. But in principle, it’s better to read the documents you sign, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, in principle.”
“Well, my point is, in the contract, it states that the scientists who are designated only for planet work are mandated to do research and write papers during the outward bound flight—‘as a contribution to humanity’ the contract says. It may produce some useful developments, but I believe it’s mainly a make-work project to keep people busy.”
“I see. And why don’t I know about this? Nobody’s making me do research.”
“You really didn’t read the fine print. The contract exempts the Nobel winners from that stipulation. I expect they thought we’d suffer from the opposite problem, too much intellectual eagerness.”
“Well, they’re wrong, at least in my case.”
Later, in the lounge, I happened upon Maria Kempton and asked her if she was doing “mandated” research.
She frowned. “Yes, well, we have to, don’t we? Otherwise, they would dock our pay and mandate counseling sessions with DSI.”
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Page 6
