Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “What’s the cost?”

  “Five hundred Unis for two hours, one hundred extra for each additional hour.”

  “Thanks, I’ll just take my free hours.”

  She nodded with a whiff of disappointment, told me to lay myself down on the centrally positioned anti-gravity foam pad floating above the horizontal base of the sphere.

  “I’d prefer to sit on the floor”, I said. “Can we get rid of the flying carpet?”

  She firmed her lips, nodded again, and tapped her remote, making the pad descend into a rectangular orifice that opened in the floor. A panel slid across it. Another tap, and the anti-gravity unit descended and was likewise capped. I sat down and crossed my legs, Indian style. She went out, closing the door quietly behind her. A minute later, a subtle musical theme swelled from invisible sources. The lights dimmed, and on the sphere all around me there materialized three-dimensional blue sky, desert vistas with horizon and mountains, a circle of sagebrush around me, a hawk soaring above, the sounds of wind and bird cries, a coyote yipping.

  It was a fascinating display of technology, and half an hour of it was pleasant enough, though before long, it began to stir up too much longing. Beside me, a campfire crackled with a pot of coffee burbling on it. I was suddenly irritated by the lack of smells. I wished I’d taken the drug. Instinctively, I wanted more and more and more. I wanted it to be real. I wanted to go home! Of course, I knew I was being seduced, regardless of the illusion of choice, but more worrisome was the realization that I was on the verge of not caring about the cost, nor about the abandonment of my self to someone else’s manipulation of my subconscious.

  I got up, pushed open the door, and left, never to return.

  Day 985:

  Pia has been encouraging me (read, nagging me) to conquer the pull of lethargy by taking up swimming.

  “Oh yeah”, I said with a laugh. “I heard there was a swimming pool onboard.”

  “It’s on level D. I do laps there every morning”, she replied.

  I begged off, pleading that I had once nearly drowned in the Rio Grande, my single attempt at swimming during my post-snakebite youth.

  “It’s usually crowded”, she said, ignoring my excuse. “I suggest you go at odd hours. Are you a night owl?”

  “Definitely. Is there a shallow end?”

  “Definitely.”

  She went on to tell me that regular swimming would exercise my whole body without jarring any joints. It could even improve my limp.

  “Give it a try, Neil, maybe in the middle of the night, when it’s quieter.”

  Thus, for the sake of undeclared Platonic love, I agreed to give it a try. I passed a few days of ambivalence, however, before making the final decision to locate the pool. I checked the index in the Manual, impressed yet again by how much the Kosmos contained. It struck me as sensible that the ship’s designers had placed the pool near the bottom. If there were leaks, neither Picasso nor Rothko nor Whistler would be soaked (the gravity generators are situated on PHM, in a ship-length component, which in an ocean-going vessel would have been called the “keel”).

  I thought I might go between three and four in the morning when few if any passengers would be there to laugh at me nervously paddling about in the kid’s end of the pool with my rubber ducky.

  Day 987:

  At three o’clock this morning, I got up, dressed myself in my khaki shorts and T-shirt, slung a white towel around my shoulders, and padded barefoot (illegally) down Concourse B to the staircase. The lights in the concourses are dimmed from midnight until six in the morning, but there’s plenty enough to see by.

  Arriving at level D, I turned left and walked toward what I think is the rear end of the ship (its symmetry still disorients me) until I came upon a wall sign displaying a little manikin doing a crawl in waves, with illuminated arrows pointing to a cross-avenue. I followed directions and arrived, in due course, at a physical recreation complex somewhere midway between port and starboard. The pool area faced the corridor, with a wall of transparent floor-to-ceiling panels. Within, a glimmering blue sea, perfectly still, without a ripple or a shark fin, awaited me. I made a burbling noise like a man speaking under water—the word “Open”. An effeminate electronic voice oozed in reply, “Repeat, please.”

  “Open”, I said in plain Spanish. The doors slid apart and I entered.

  The ceramic tile borders were warm underfoot. There was no smell of chlorine, no sound of lapping, no lifeguard. The atmosphere was uterine, an audible hush. At the other end stood a high diving board. At the near end, steps led down into the pool. I descended and gingerly dipped a toe into the water, which to my pleasant surprise was body temperature, then waded out farther until I was submerged to the sternum of my chest. I laughed, and, using my good leg as a spring, I jumped upward and slapped my hands on the surface, sending tremors concentrically in all directions. The waves chattered at the edges of the pool.

  I jumped up and down for a few minutes, gleefully making tsunamis until an old nonsense song awakened somewhere inside me, just notes of music without any lyrics. I threw my head back, warbling and hooting and laughing, submerging and spluttering, then rising and singing again. I felt so good, so free, so young.

  For the sake of historical accuracy, I should mention that I do know how to swim. I just lost my taste for it when I nearly drowned all those years ago in the Rio Grande. Pausing in the Kosmos pool, I let the waves subside, seeing again that decisive event as if it had occurred this very morning:

  I was fifteen years old. I limped badly in body and mind, morosely certain that I had recovered as much as I ever would from the damage done by my knife. I was angry as hell about it, brooding and keeping to myself. I shunned my old friends because their vitality was a constant reminder of my loss, and because we no longer could do anything interesting together.

  Late one afternoon, I headed out toward the desert in the direction of the arroyo where the snake had got me. I had a .22 in hand, and I was bent on vengeance. At the edge of the trailer park, I happened upon an old buddy of mine, an Aztec named Alvaro. He and his pals (whose names I cannot now recall) were sitting on stones in a circle, playing cards and passing around a brown paper bag from which they sipped. I saw that they had only just opened the bottle since they were still pretty sober and their humor was congenial.

  “Hoyos,” called Alvaro, “come and play with us.”

  “Nah”, I growled. “I got something to do.”

  “How come you give us the cold shoulder all the time?”

  I grunted, shrugged, and limped onward into the chaparral.

  Alvaro sprang to his feet and came running after me. He jumped in front to block my path and grabbed the strap of my gun, bringing me to a full stop. He was several inches shorter than me but tough as rawhide, brown-skinned, black-haired, not much Spanish in him. He had a reputation for being loyal to anyone he befriended, for drinking underage, for petty crime, and for ferocious courage.

  “That’s no answer!” he barked.

  “Only answer you’re going to get”, I snarled back.

  I knew him well enough to see that he was about to fly into one of his enormous tempers and pop me on the face with his fist. Instead, with flaming eyes and flaring nostrils, he caught himself, and after looking my bad leg up and down, he met my eyes.

  “Come on, Benigno, don’t be like that”, he said in a cajoling tone. “Me and the muchachos, we’re going swimming.”

  “I don’t swim”, I replied in my most surly manner, trying to shake off his hand.

  “You lie! You used to swim with us all the time.”

  “What about the cops? They catch you swimming and drunk, you’re in big trouble.”

  “Didn’t you hear? Big crash on the interstate, ten-car pile-up. Every cop in the region’s over there, so no one’s looking our way for once.”

  Scowling, I considered his invitation. “Come on, chico, don’t act like a gringo.”

  “It only takes one cop or a D
SI to catch you”, I said. “Then you’re dead.”

  Alvaro was an illegal, as were some of the other muchachos. “You want me to hide in the sand hole all my life?” he said. “I been fooling them ever since red flower days.”

  “It only takes one mistake.”

  “I don’t make mistakes. Besides, you’re legal, so nothing’s going to happen to you. Scared to get your feet wet?”

  “I ain’t scared.”

  “Then come with us.”

  In those days, I was aware of little more than my chronic rage; I had not noticed, until that moment, my loneliness. Thus, despite my filthy mood, I went with him. We walked back to the card game, which the players packed up in short order, and then we all crept through the mesquite trees in the direction of the river. I dragged myself along at the rearguard, taking my own un-sweet time about it.

  We sat in the bushes by the Rio Grande for a couple of hours, playing cards, sipping from various bottles, smoking cigarettes, watching the sky in case any DSI hovercraft showed up unexpectedly. I drank more than I had planned. The rage was gone, leaving a rotten though not unpleasant melancholy in its wake. I didn’t say much, but I couldn’t help smiling at the crazy jokes being tossed around. The Aztecs were in high spirits, and I began to feel somewhat improved myself. When the sun set and twilight threw a nice cover over us, they crawled out of the bushes, stripped down to their undershorts, and plunged into the water, hooting and screaming. I did not join them. I drank some more and watched.

  At one point, Alvaro came up out of the river and stood on the shore, beckoning me in.

  “Come on, Hoyos; don’t be scared; the water’s great.”

  “I ain’t scared”, I snapped, slipping back into my mood.

  “Yeah, you’re scared. You think life’s gonna hand you a tortilla full of mierda every day of the week.”

  “Yeah, well it does. It already did.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’ll just sit here and wait for the next pile of mierda to hit.”

  “Coward!” he mumbled, with a haughty look.

  If he had shouted it, I wouldn’t have been provoked. But the way he said it, as if he meant it, triggered something in me. I stood up and hobbled down to the shore and pushed him hard on the chest. He staggered and fell into the mud. He leaped up and pushed me back. My balance was not great, due to the leg, and I fell into the mud. I tripped him. Then we flew into a punching match, yelling and thrashing about in the horizontal position. Some of the muchachos swam toward us to break it up.

  We both scrambled to our feet and resumed punching. I hit him hard on the nose, and it began to bleed. He landed a good one to my stomach, and I doubled over, down on one knee. Then I threw myself at him, tumbling us both into the water, where the bashing and adolescent roaring went on for some time, until, I suppose, we had both exhausted ourselves. At that point, the Aztecs arrived, separated us, and hauled us back onto shore. The bottles were passed around, cigarettes were lit, and a good deal of joshing was launched by the others in order to defuse the situation.

  I looked at Alvaro warily.

  He looked at me warily.

  Then we both started laughing—uncontrollable, cathartic laughter. He fell down on the mud and rolled around, guffawing and bleeding, holding his belly. I dropped to my knees, gasping and bleeding, and pretty hysterical too.

  “H-h-hoyos”, Alvaro crowed when he could speak again. “Today I will not kill you. Do you know why I will not kill you?”

  “No. Tell me why you think you will not kill me, though you would not be able to do it anyway.”

  “I will not kill you because your Mama and Papa saved my life when I was a red blossom kid. And your Mama she taught me how to read; she gave me education because I cannot go to the school.”

  “Fair trade”, I said.

  On an impulse, I tore off my clothing and lurched toward the river, screaming as I dove into the water, and the last sound I heard was the cheering of the Aztecs.

  The river was colder than I thought it would be. My unused muscles went into violent spasm as the current swept me into deeper water. I struggled against it, trying to swim, but I was full of alcohol and drained by the fistfight. I went down in a panic and only survived because Alvaro dove in after me and pulled me up from the bottom. He and his pals dragged me onto the shore and knocked the water out of my lungs at the very last minute before I was to expire and go onward prematurely, anonymously, Nobel-less, into eternity.

  Eight months later, Alvaro was shot to death by an undercover mall marshal while trying to get into a sandwich machine at a shopping complex in Tucson, Arizona. At the time, he had been hitchhiking through the Southwest, looking for under-the-radar farm work. He was having no luck, and the day he died he was desperately hungry. When the news reached our village, I decided then and there never to swim again.

  Standing in the Kosmos pool all these years later, I sighed, remembering Alvaro, wondering what he might have become if given even a fraction of a chance. In his honor, I did a dog paddle from one side of the pool to the other, forcing my legs to resist the pull of gravity, also resisting my psychological need to touch bottom. I did just fine. Then I performed something like a breaststroke back and forth. This was followed by a crawl. I did a few more lateral laps and really liked the feel of it. The pain in my lower leg and bad ankle was down to minimal.

  Finally, winded, I stood up in shallow water and surveyed the inland sea. The waves I had made were still kissing the distant shores. Eyeing the diving board, I shook my head emphatically. “No way”, I murmured, and meant it.

  But then it crossed my mind how pleasant it would be to tell Pia that I had done real lengths. Taking a deep breath, I eased my body forward and launched into a long, slow crawl. Little by little, the old muscle memory returned, some of it sluggish but mostly not. At one point, I stopped to tread water and let my legs glide downward. My toes no longer touched the bottom. This gave me a moment of near panic, but I pressed onward, resuming a carefully paced and deliberately meditative crawl above the suction of the abyss.

  I touched the distant rim and turned around for the homeward journey, arriving where I’d started with neither mishap nor undue alarm nor water in the lungs. It was a great feeling to have mastered an old enemy after a lapse of more than half a century.

  I did a few more lengths. On the final one, I was struck with a moment of awe when I realized that I was lazily performing laps in a miniature body of water within a vessel that was, itself, doing one great lap on an infinite sea. The micro-abyss within the macro-void. I could not tell which of these I was afloat upon. The Kosmos was speeding toward AC-A-7 at around one hundred and seventy thousand kilometers per second, a velocity impossible for the human mind to conceptualize, except abstractly. The ship was doing the unthinkable, conceptualizing and actualizing simultaneously. And I, swimming in the opposite direction at the moment, was maintaining a speed of about one kilometer per hour.

  The immensity of it, the apparent contradictions of it, seemed visual for a second or two. It stunned me and immobilized me. Fortunately, this occurred in shallow water. I got out of the pool and dried myself, feeling my mind stretching to breaking point. And because I did not want it broken, I shook off the images of proportion and relativity and returned to my room for a sleep, which proved to be a luxuriously deep one.

  Day 1002:

  Today, my first invitation to visit the home of a neighbor. It was triggered when I stopped Xue in the hallway and asked if I could make a copy of the poem he gave me and pass it on to someone else. He agreed without hesitation, then asked me to come along to his room because he wanted to show me something.

  I won’t embarrass the poor fellow by leaving a detailed paper record of what his room looks like. Let me at least say that while it is structurally identical to mine, the difference can be seen at every turn. It is pin-neat. It is obsessively neat. It is pathologically neat. The few books on his shelves are arranged according to finely sliced cat
egories. There are no photos beaded to the walls. It looks like no one really lives here. Back home in my real cabin in the mountains, I have high-class litter everywhere and keep adding to it: stacks of books on side tables, my writing desk a heap of papers, fascinating phenomena from nature sitting on window sills, a giant wasp nest hanging from the rafters, a magnificent horse’s skull in the entrance hall, waiting to greet my hypothetical visitors, etc., etc. By contrast, Xue’s cell is a shrine devoted to pristine oriental order.

  “Are you a Buddhist, Ao-li?” I asked him upon entering his little home away from home.

  “No, though I am sympathetic to its aesthetics.”

  “A Confucian, then?”

  “I admire the concepts of harmony in the Dao, but no, I am not a disciple of Confucius in the religious sense.”

  “You keep a real clean house.”

  “It is restful, and conducive to clear thought.”

  “You should get out more, have a little fun.”

  “I’ll make an effort.”

  “Don’t tell me you spend all your time doing physics. You gave me that poem, after all. And there’s your Shui-mo too, though I haven’t seen any evidence of it.”

  “I will show you when my skills are more developed.”

  “Well, it’s good to see you’ve got some diversion.”

  “Mastery of different languages, rational and supra-rational, is an essential part of comprehending harmony. Macrocosm, for example, cannot be truly understood without the celestial language that derives from beyond it.”

  He was getting all obscure on me, which is a trait of his. I was still absorbing the aforementioned when he said, “I have something to show you that may illuminate the answers to your many questions.”

  He went to a closet cupboard, said what I think is the word open in Chinese, and the door vanished sideways. Within, sitting alone on a shelf, was a sculpture of some kind. He picked it up carefully and brought it to me.