Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “Yes”, he nodded, reverently.

  When the first expeditions to Mars had completed their exhaustive studies and reported that there never had been any form of civilization, nor any sapient life, on that planet, my prof simply adjusted his interpretive lens.

  “There was a catastrophic change in the environment, and they were forced to move.”

  “Why didn’t they move here to our planet?” I asked. “It’s a pretty nice planet.”

  “Their motives are the highest, very pure, and it is against their principles to interfere dramatically with the evolution of more primitive sapient species. Guidance, yes, but never a mass immigration.”

  “So, where did they go?”

  “They wouldn’t have gone very far away from us. They remain Martian in identity, maintaining their distinct cosmological role, but it is my belief that they now dwell on a planet of one of the stars of the Alpha Centauri system.”

  And so forth. . . .

  Day 1095:

  Third anniversary of lift-off. Everyone is out celebrating in the restaurants and social centers. The hallways echo with the revelry of merrymakers, long past bedtime. As for me, I spent the day reading articles by twentieth and twenty-first-century radio-astronomers on the topic of planetary magnetism.

  It prompted a memory of something I’d learned in college but had forgotten: Einstein’s negative reaction when the evidence started pouring in that the universe is expanding. He refused to believe it, got real irritated, and wrote unpleasant notes to the offending scientists and journals. He didn’t want to believe it, even though his own work had provided some of the theoretical basis for the discovery. He was, in a word, emotional. To the man’s credit, he later publicly admitted that he had been wrong. So interesting—even with geniuses, compartmentalization disguises our subjectivity.

  I took a shower, had a good afternoon nap. Read some more. Checked my message box—nothing but my annual tax bill for the cabin in the mountains. It made me feel emotional, unscientific. Quick as a jack-rabbit, I sent back the payment code, which will reach the scribes in Santa Fe 1.5 years from now. I had thoughtlessly neglected to make arrangements before leaving home to have taxes automatically deducted from my bank account. This worries me. Will they confiscate my cabin and 0.75 acres of nearly vertical woods for unpaid back taxes? Are they that heartless? Surely, someone will explain to them that I am away on a rather important trip and will return.

  The latest messages from Earth are now dated 1.5 years ago, and the time lapses between them are growing, since they must cross an increasingly greater distance in order to catch up to us. In the meantime, AC-A-7 expands. The telescopes show a planet not unlike ours, with variations of dark and light blue, moving weather fronts, as well as stable surface formations that look like continents. A majority of these masses are dark green. Pale green, ocher, and tan areas ring the equator. Both poles have a white cap. The image is still very small, and even with computer enhancement (a guess, not a fact), details are too indistinct to be sure. But things are looking up. We may be able to land.

  Day 1096:

  Today, as we shared the weekly drink in our favorite bistro on Concourse B, Dariush expressed interest in the customs of my family.

  “Did you, the Spanish-speaking people of the Americas, have unique celebrations or distinctive symbolic traditions?” he asked.

  “We did.”

  “And do the people continue their practices in our times?”

  “I don’t think so. Though it’s possible some of it remains in remote places, villages perhaps, or individual families.”

  I recounted in detail the piñata festivals I had enjoyed as a child. He listened with shining eyes, as if he could see it all.

  “Wonderful, wonderful”, he said when I was finished. Then, curiously, a melancholic expression washed across his features. He dropped his eyes and remained in silence for a time.

  Looking up, he said, “I too was raised in a small place. It is a village on the shore of the Caspian Sea, at the foot of the mountains. We had beautiful traditions. Poetry and song. Storytelling was a great art in my family. Also the most delicious foods. My mother was very gifted in the making of sweets. She made sugar-date bread, poppy-seed pastries, halva with nuts and cardamom. Oh, I miss them very much. My father was a scholar, and from this, you may properly conclude that he was not a wealthy person. That is why we children enjoyed simpler lives than people now live. I swam often in the great sea, which was my joy, and I fished. When I was a boy, it was difficult for my parents to keep me out of a boat. It was a good life we lived there. We were far from the cities. Of course, it was not then possible to go to Tehran.”

  “Had it been built when you were a boy? I thought. . .”

  “I refer to the old capital. We could not go there because of the radiation, you understand. Did I mention that my father was blind? The bomb fell on the city when he was away from it on a journey to see relatives on the other side of the mountains. He was a young man at the time. He was walking through the mountains when there came the burst of light. He turned his face toward the city to see what had caused it, and the light damaged his vision. He was sixty kilometers from the blast, but its power was great.”

  “A lot of people died there.”

  “Yes. Millions in one instant.”

  “All of your father’s family?”

  “Most of them. Those who dwelt in Tehran.”

  “But what did he do then?”

  “He wisely hid himself in the rocks until the shock wave had passed, then he walked onward to the place where the other relatives lived. His eyes could see nothing, and he became lost at times, but his mind was a most excellent one, and he remembered the road well enough, for he had traveled it numerous times before. In the end, he found his relatives in their village by the Caspian. They took him in. He was at that time a graduate of the university. Everything he had once lived for was gone, but he kept the knowledge he had learned, and he passed it on to others. For the remainder of his life, he taught languages to village children. In time, he married a woman of the village, and I was born there. When I grew older, it became possible for me to study at the university that had been established in New Tehran, which was then a much smaller place than it is today.”

  “A hard life”, I said.

  “It was a beautiful life in many ways. My father has now passed away. I remember his beautiful smile, his calm voice, and his wisdom. He had immense hope in life. He taught this to me.”

  “Out of such tragedy and horror. . .”

  “Yes. But man grows as he overcomes suffering, does he not?”

  “Does he? And what about the dead? Why is this our fate?”

  “The acts of horror need not be our fate”, Dariush said. Then, pausing for a moment, he sighed. “Yet our condition changes little, generation after generation. Such is our infinite capacity for self-deception.”

  He regarded me thoughtfully, as if seeking confirmation that I understood. Or perhaps he sought to impart something more to me. But I could think of nothing to say.

  With a sudden change of expression, he smiled and stood up.

  “Neil, it is late. And I must learn ten more Kashmiri words before I sleep. I bid you a good night.”

  “Good night, Dariush”, I said as he walked away down the concourse.

  Day 1417:

  Stron, under the strong influence of a beverage, admitted to me that the whiskey he drinks and sometimes shares with me is not from a diminishing supply.

  “Ah, the black market”, I said. “I’ve heard rumors.”

  “I wouldn’t buy any of that rot-gut they concoct in the boiler room. I make it myself. Though I have to admit my supply of corn is obtained through certain channels in the alternative economy.”

  “Do you sell your product?”

  “Do I look like a whiskey baron? Naw, I consume the stuff!”

  “And sometimes share it with friends.”

  “If they play their cards
right.”

  Day 1461:

  Fourth anniversary. Nothing noteworthy happened today.

  Oh, before I forget, I found in my inbox this morning a text message from Dr. Étienne Pagnol, the biologist. No salutation or explanation, just two quotations:

  “La génération spontanée est une chimère.” (Spontaneous generation is an illusion.)

  —Dr. Louis Pasteur

  “I have been looking for spontaneous generation for twenty years without discovering it. No, I do not judge it impossible. But what allows you to make it the origin of life? You place matter before life and you decide that matter has existed for all eternity. How do you know that the incessant progress of science will not compel scientists to consider that life has existed during eternity, and not matter? You pass from matter to life because your intelligence of today cannot conceive things otherwise. How do you know that in ten thousand years one will not consider it more likely that matter has emerged from life?”

  —Dr. Louis Pasteur

  I was impressed by the talk Pagnol gave in the auditorium a few months ago. He and I have never met or exchanged communications, before or since. How on earth did he get my private e-address?

  I wrote a courtesy reply and clicked send:

  Thank you for note. Thought-provoking. Best regards. Hoyos.

  Day 1471:

  By coincidence or by his intent, I finally met Pagnol. He approached me in the library on deck B, where I happened to be doing some broad-ranging research on Pasteur. My max had not produced the quote’s source reference, though it offered millions of articles about Pasteur, one of the greatest scientists of his age, and of all time. Typing the quotation into the library’s terminal connected to the ship’s mega-computer produced only a handful of articles containing the quote, each of them tainted by snide (and scientifically spurious) attempts to debunk Pasteur’s theory of biogenesis—life comes only from life, he believed. All these centuries after Pasteur, no one has yet proved scientifically that life can arise spontaneously. Most irritatingly, there is nasty mythological thinking in these supposedly rational critics. Bad science. The stink is unmistakable. I wonder, do they ever have a good look at themselves in the mirror as they mouth off about people like Pasteur?

  Anyway, I had a chance to thank Pagnol in person. He told me the quotes came from an early biography. We then discussed biogenesis dispassionately, without commitment, though I emphasized that I remain undecided about the question of the origins of life. He thanked me warmly for the inaugural lecture I gave several years ago. I thanked him for his lecture. I told him I hoped to read one of his books. He told me he wanted to read one of mine. We parted.

  Day 1492:

  In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In twenty hundred and ninety-seven, the Kosmos sailed all the way to heaven (or just a tad short thereof).

  Did I mention that Dariush urged upon me the novel Moby Dick? I’ve just completed reading it. The story is quite fascinating, and the author especially intrigues me. What kind of consciousness could have produced such a work? Written 250 years ago, at a time we now consider to be primitive in terms of general knowledge and technology, the book reveals that people in those days had an inner life that was richer than we suppose. Maybe they were a whole lot richer than we think we are.

  Dariush has given me a list of other nautical novels to track down in the libraries (more than three hundred titles). My interest is piqued in the sense that ancient voyages were often very long, and the stories may tell me something about the way mariners coped with their enclosed spaces and their own brand of infinite sea. (List attached.)

  He urged me to begin with five specific titles: Treasure Island by R. L. Stevenson; The Old Man and the Sea by E. Hemingway; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S. T. Coleridge; Billy Budd, Sailor, by H. Melville; and Heart of Darkness by J. Conrad.

  “Why these five?” I asked.

  “They will launch you”, he said, not really answering my question.

  Day 1518:

  Well, here I am back in my room after two weeks in the recovery unit at the B surgery clinic. I crumbled to Pia-pressure and let the team of neurosurgeons (including her) cut open my leg, my ankle, and my foot. While they pottered around in there, I had a nice peaceful sleep—such lovely drugs they have these days. When I came out of it, I saw a ring of kindly faces looking down on me as if I were a baby in a bassinette. Swaying gently, I then thought I was lying in a little boat. I heard tinkling bells and singing, and for a few seconds I smelled the perfume of lilies. Is this my funeral? I wondered.

  It wasn’t. Now I am laid out on my own bed with fluffy pillows, a stack of maritime disaster books beside me, and my leg from knee to toes wrapped in a cast of dark blue, inflexible fabric. It has a flickering digital light panel along its side, signaling that inside, hundreds of electronic needles are stimulating neural connections. There’s no pain, just a faint tingling sensation, which is not unpleasant. Next week I have to be up and walking about. I’m losing muscle tone in my thigh from lack of use.

  Day 1527:

  Three times a day I shuffle up and down stretches of my concourse, dressed in T-shirt and short pajama bottoms. It makes passersby nervous (yikes, an old man in his underwear!), though the cast gives me some credibility. There’s pain now, but nothing I can’t live with. I don’t like taking drugs, regardless of how wonderful they make me feel. It’s odd to look down and see that my foot is flat, to sense the bare sole and toes touch the floor as they should. It will be interesting to see what the rest looks like when the mummy is unwrapped.

  Back to my bed, I go. Early this week, Dwayne dropped in and helped me relearn the protocols for the max’s film channels. He also enlarged the screen and showed me how to enhance dimensions for the older films, made before the 3D era.

  Despite my earlier determination to avoid the e-drug, I enjoyed it a lot. More and more it seemed. Finished with one film, I immediately wanted another. And another. One day I watched six from the first half of the twentieth century, most of them kind of bloodless, with cowboys and feathered Indians spinning in ballet twirls and plopping into the dust, falling from high rocks in the desert or from roofs in cardboard wild west towns. During the late twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, things got messier—a “realism” so intense that when one of the good guys got shot and blood and entrails were splashed across the screen, I jerked upright on the bed and yelled, “Noooooo!”, my heart pounding.

  I won’t describe the details. Let me say only that in the dozens upon dozens of films I watched, the majority exhibited a slavish devotion to every hideous detail of human death in degrading forms, costumed, of course, with cowboy hats and six-shooters. As always, there were plenty of horses, but these creatures alone were computer generated, due to the anti-cruelty-to-animals laws.

  Exhausted, zinging with unrelieved adrenaline, I switched to a documentary film about the making of westerns during the latter half of the twenty-first century. By then, the entertainment industry had grown to the size of 32 percent of our continental economy. Moreover, whole sections of the American Southwest had been “mandated” as culture preserves for the making of films, including grand canyons and painted deserts. Finally, I learned that many of the actors who played victims had chosen to be killed, since the industry gave a generous endowment to those willing to sacrifice themselves in this way for the good of the country. I find this incomprehensible, considering the self-preservation instinct in human nature. Maybe for some it was the only way to leave an inheritance to a child or a loved one; for others, perhaps, it was a productive form of suicide.

  I switched off the damned max and tried to forget the protocols.

  I grew up in one of those few places on Earth where hardly anyone owned a digital wall screen. My parents wouldn’t allow one in the trailer. They tried to discourage me from watching it at the homes of my friends the Aztecs. Imagine how hard this was on me. Imagine what it was like walking into a sho
pping mall beside your four-foot-six-inch-high mother, and you, yourself, age fourteen or fifteen, are not only a foot taller than her, you are also a member of a visibly underprivileged minority, you are not handsome, and you are more or less crippled. The mall is filled with electronics shops that your mother tries to speed you past. But when you halt in your limping tracks, mesmerized by a sex scene on a screen in a shop window, or people being blasted into bloody bits, you want desperately to see more. Your mother reaches up and clamps her hand over your eyes and drags you away.

  “Mamacita”, you protest all the way through the mall, “stop putting your hands on my eyes! I am not a child! It’s just pretend!”

  “It is el ojo del diablo!” she cries loudly, making the kind of public scene that prompts strangers to laugh at you—we’re quaint little Hispanics airing our familial conflicts, live drama for bored shoppers. It’s so humiliating you want to run away from home.

  Fortunately, around that time, I was also getting deeply interested in physics, and when I went away to college, I had already become obsessed with the subject, and was, as well, antisocial and an appreciator of solitary silence.

  Day 1535:

  This evening, I completed the last of Dariush’s five recommendations. Interesting tales, most of them with a dose of death as part of the plot. Not death as entertainment, however, but death entwined with moral complexities. These books are quite different from modern fiction, which I’ve never been able to read without falling asleep or suffering from nausea. It seems that human beings had different minds way back then.

  One of the novels, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was spoiled by its heavy-handed moralism. A sailor shoots an albatross and the judgment of hell falls upon him. The one by Conrad also left me ill at ease. What on earth was Dariush thinking when he recommended these?

  Day 1548, The Unwrapping:

  It was pretty ugly, I had to admit, even though it was my very own. Yup, there were the healed surgical incisions and the two white scars from my pocket knife. But the twisted muscles and / or ligaments (whatever the heck it was that got messed up inside years ago) now looked better aligned. What a pleasure to see that my ankle and foot no longer bent at the wrong angle, which was the result of favoring it for so many years. The calluses built up over more than half a century’s walking on the edge of the foot are still there, but no longer leathery.