Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  I shook my head. “Sounds kind of pushy to me.”

  “We signed the contract”, she shrugged. “It was the only way to be part of this expedition. Fortunately, we’re permitted to choose our own topics.”

  “Have you chosen yours?”

  She smiled. “I’ve got a project on the go. It’s a sociological study.”

  “That’s a big leap from biology.”

  “Yes, but the overseers don’t see it that way. They think everything about humanity is biology. Care to read my manuscript?”

  “Uh . . . in all frankness, Maria,. . . much as I. . .”

  She laughed. “Good. A healthy reaction, Neil. You don’t have to read it. But let me say this: While I never tell lies, I do sometimes enjoy having a little joke. May I give you a thumbnail sketch of my thesis?”

  “Of course, please, sketch away and don’t hold back.”

  “Did you know that for the past three generations the declining kangaroo population has been a problem in Australia?”

  “I thought their overpopulation was your perennial problem.”

  “Right, ever since colonial days. But about seventy-five years ago, the ratio of human to roo began to reverse itself. Protein-deprived Aussies began to kill the creatures in large numbers, as well as the rabbits imported in the 1800s, which are the real pests, since they strip the country bare and multiply at astounding rates. Then the Green governments made it illegal—endangered species and all that. Aussies, as you may know, are a race of former criminals, and most of the time, we just function on basic common sense. Despite the laws, the roos and rabbits continued to decline, and the country continued to get greener. But that didn’t please the Greenies any. Their real, if unstated, problem was with people. So the mask came off, and they demanded an increase in the human depopulation controls. A lot of people wound up as residents of state zoos.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Uh, prison. The one-child accords were signed later, in my generation. You know the rest.”

  “And you’re writing a history of this?”

  “Let’s just say I’m writing a case study—the true case study.”

  “That’s risky.”

  “The first hundred pages will be so nuanced and so loaded with socially responsible jargon that the readers won’t know what’s coming. If I do it carefully, they’ll be nudged ever so gradually into seeing reality, despite their lifetimes of sucking in state and media propaganda.”

  “I didn’t know you were a terrorist, Maria.”

  “And proud of it. Privately, I call my book Out Malthusianizing the Malthusians. Its official title, registered with the DSI oversight committee, is Relevant Biofactors in Macropod Marsupial Population Statistics in the Australian Continent, 1886 to 2096, Volume I. Like it?”

  “Love it.”

  “If I ever complete the darn thing, it will be filed away in the computer and probably never read, not even by anyone capable of getting past the first few pages.”

  “Somebody might read it. Maybe when it’s archived back on Earth one day.”

  “Maybe. If they ever do, it could keep a few DSI overseers off the streets. Shock the future-shockers, you see. By the time they get wise to me, I’ll be a very, very old lady sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a cabin in the Simpson Desert, eating roo pie and rabbit stew.”

  Day 302:

  Xue cornered me in the lounge, where I was observing the inter-gender, interracial courting rituals of young scientists enclosed as specimens in their own experiment. It was amusing, it was interesting, it was entirely predictable. They’re all so brainy, but they do appear to have emotional lives, though in various degrees of openness. They are not stupid about the potential follies, yet they devise new forms of conversational gambits and body language that initiate relationships without commitment. Silly young folk, they will fall in love with each other regardless of all that armor—amour conquers armor every time. Inevitably, some heart-blood will flow in communion or spill out through open wounds. That is standard practice in our world, of course, but here we have a clinical chamber in which it is possible to observe at close hand any mutations that might arise.

  Civil marriages are legal back on Earth, though uncommon. Most people just bypass the paper work and settle the issue with a postcoital shake of the hands. However, official civil unions have been banned from the voyage because the sociologists and psychologists predetermined that they would make the social infrastructure too complicated (housing, cheating, legal hassles, divorces, etc.). Of course, sexual encounters are perfectly legal for all who desire them, but these remain a matter of private negotiations between the parties involved. All of this is in the contract everyone signed.

  In addition, most of the younger set were sterilized during the pre-flight stage, to which they had agreed because it doubled their wages. I declined DSI’s generous offer for several personal reasons, though not from any illusions that I might become the progenitor of a clan of little Hoyos. Doubtless, a few staff members have retained their potency or fertility, taking the long, long view that one day they might like to create a human child. This small minority, whom I heartily applaud in the secrecy of my thoughts, adds a certain mystery to the voyage. I presume that sexual encounters are indeed happening on board, and perhaps the fertile ones give to the situation the flavor of Russian roulette. Contraceptives sometimes fail, human relationships are a mess, and I hate to even think about it. Moving on quickly . . .

  What was I talking about? Oh, yes, Xue cornered me in the lounge.

  “Something for you, Neil”, he said with a bow and presented me with a slip of rice paper.

  “Shui-mo?” I asked, taking the paper delicately into my hands, feeling something akin to reverence. On closer inspection, I saw that it was a calligraphed poem.

  “I wanted to add a ship on a sea, implied rather than articulated, since elegance of line is everything in Shui-mo. After consideration, however, I decided this would make a hybrid of two languages. No, let the poem alone speak to Neil, I told myself.”

  “Thank you. I will treasure it.”

  The poem:

  My little boat is made of ebony;

  My flute stops are pure gold.

  Water loosens stains from silk;

  Wine loosens sadness from the heart.

  With good wine, a graceful boat,

  And a sweet girl’s love,

  Why be jealous of mere gods?

  —Li Po, 8th century

  Four magnet beads now hold it to the wall beside my pillow. Laying my weary head down to take my rest, I read it fairly often. One apprehends the invigorating winds of Asia, perspective, horizons.

  Day 307:

  There was another highlight this week:

  In order to stave off ennui, I decided to learn a new language, that is, Kashmiri. Of course, Hindi or Tamil, even Urdu, would probably be more useful in the long run, but one must have dreams, and I have not given up the fancy I once had as a young man—to live on a boat in my extreme old age, drifting through the floating lotus gardens of Lake Dal in Kashmir, lulled to sleep every night in sub-Himalayan breezes scented with water lilies and by the frantic mesmerizing music of northern India. Mesmerization begins as stimulation but ends as stupor, and in its best form, as sleep.

  (Aha! Here is the source of my recurring dreams. I now see that my subconscious popped the old Indian lady into the waterscape, just to humanize it.)

  In any event, while browsing in the book library, I happened to seat myself in an armchair beside a man of Indo-European appearance, who was reading Moby Dick with close attention. When he inserted a finger between pages, closed the book temporarily, and gazed upward into his own thoughts, I cleared my throat and broke his concentration. I need not write down every word of the convoluted discussion that ensued. In short, he is Dr. Dariush Ibrahimi Mirza, a philologist (one of six on board), originally from New Tehran, specialist in the Iranian languages, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, as well as ancient I
ndo-European and Semitic languages. He taught at Cambridge University before he was invited on the voyage. Regrettably, he has never studied Kashmiri.

  In manner, he is exquisitely polite, in temperament diffident, but a technical question easily catapults him into soliloquies or lectures. Exactly, exactly what I want. Later, through a search on the main computer, I learned that Mirza is a surname suffix that indicates nobility. Like everyone else on Earth, he is a democratic person, yet there lingers in his style the ethos of an older age: rich and monarchial. He is a very concentrated scholar, non-humorous, overgenerous with detailed facts that can mean nothing to anyone outside his field. He tells me he hopes to find evidence of civilizations on the planet, living or extinct, so that he can apply his skills to deciphering their writings. We have agreed to pursue a joint study of Kashmiri, since this language has similarities to other Indo-Aryan languages more familiar to him.

  Day 341:

  Our study progresses most amiably. We have developed a ritual of having a drink together after each session. The bistro on Concourse B serves alcohol diluted in various fruit juices, which I suspect are not quite organic but do taste like the real thing. Syntho-inebriation loosens sadness from the heart, Li Po might have said. Of course, alcohol consumption is strictly limited. The bartender knows who we are (each passenger has an identicard, which is scanned into his debit / credit account). There is not much to purchase on a pleasure cruise like this, and besides, all of our needs are more than adequately met. Still, it’s beneficial for morale to go out for a meal or a drink. It’s playacting, but most people indulge in it—more and more as the journey progresses.

  I can now remember—and say—fifty-eight Kashmiri words. I trotted them out for Dariush this evening as he sipped his mango drink and I sipped my pomegranate. When I had finished my recitation, he applauded with childlike enthusiasm. Then, tilting his head back and closing his eyes, he recited three hundred words or so. I listened to it all, impressed and silenced—mesmerized, one might say. I went to bed early and dreamed about a place I loved when I was a boy, the desert near Las Cruces.

  Day 365:

  A year! It went by so swiftly. What did I do with myself? I can’t remember a lot of it. In a circumscribed community, one’s life is relieved from tedium by the highlights of significant events: a surgical operation, a spark of affection in another human being, a shared interest, a mini-crisis. There is also relief in gleaning bits of knowledge, be it pithy or frivolous. The ship’s main computer holds pretty much everything recorded in human history. Apparently, each individual max contains about 25 percent of what’s in the master computer, this reduction due to a sensible avoidance of repetitiousness and amateurish material. If we want to, we can always access the master at terminals in the libraries. For example, my max gives me a choice of 5.7 million references (from twenty-nine thousand articles) on the subject of high-energy photons; the main computer offers one hundred and forty-two thousand articles on the subject. It would take me about three trillion years of constant reading to have a look at every page on my max alone, abridged though the little gismo may be.

  I know very well that e-surfing is a drug, addictive for shiftless people like me. Regardless, just for fun the other day, I said “search” into my max, and then the words, “conflict resolution between iguanas”. Seven thousand entries popped onto the screen. I said “mumbo jumbo pudding” and got three hundred entries. Then I spoke random gobbledygook, and got no entries. A good sign, because it means the computer is really thinking. Still trying to confound the cyberbrain, I said, “tuna wars”. To my surprise there were 2.3 million entries. I had no idea there had actually been wars over tunafish generations ago.

  I tried to beat the system one more time, and said “pine-bark beetle revolts—word specific override”. Bingo, success at last! I had whittled it down to three entries. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that two of the three were articles in little New Mexican online journals, reporting my arrest by the eco-police some years back. The third was also about the arrest, a damage-control, propaganda article in the Santa Fe Times written by the regional director of the department that arrested me. Ah well, it’s nice to know I’ve been recorded by history. Nobel guys are a dime a dozen, but genuine eco-criminals are rare.

  Eight more years to go.

  Day 492:

  Not a good sign. Not good at all. Months have passed since my last entry in this written journal. Numerous human encounters and private musings have occurred in my life since then, but I lack the motivation to recount them on paper. I have plenty of paper and my wrist is fine now, but my mind seems to have lost interest. At best, I dictate a weekly entry of significant happenings (or not so significant) into my voice diary. I can’t understand the gap. I have decided to get a grip on myself and squeeze out some written things—anything—a discipline that may invigorate me. My regimen of physical exercise continues without interruption, but that is only because I hate feeling decrepit. The mind is a subtler dimension, hidden, and its private struggles can do much damage, even turning you into one of those irrational street-persons of times past, who babbled their cryptic genius to strangers cornered on sidewalks. I do not want to become a ghost that haunts this ship.

  In my experience, scientists in old age tend to become obsessive, focusing entirely on minutiae in their own fields, growing ever more myopic, indifferent to their surrounding world. One has to work at broadening the range of interests. But when I make the effort, I sometimes sigh and ask, “What’s the point?”

  My sense is that love is the ultimate motivator. It takes a multitude of forms, this love. First and foremost is the reasonable love of self—in other words, self-respect. Then there is the love for expanding the horizons of knowledge for the benefit of others, many who are not yet born. If there is no aggravated pride in it, nor any feeding of a false persona, then it is an altruistic kind of love that seeks no personal reward other than the satisfaction of knowing that one has enhanced the life of others. It is a kind of fruitfulness. Is not this yearning toward fruitfulness written in the code of all human beings? I think so. Nevertheless, we can be totally blind to what we’re about when we pursue certain lines of activity. And I wonder why this yearning mostly dries up in the desert of human relationships. In a real desert, even a cactus will flower.

  Scratch the verbiage I have penned above, and . . . what I’m really saying is, I’m lonely. Ah, poor me, ol’ hound dog baying at the moon.

  Day 495:

  It’s been more than a year since Dwayne and I struck up our relationship—lone cowpokes sittin’ round the campfire tradin’ stories. Yup, nope, maybe, and every now and then a flash from his surprisingly well-stocked vocabulary. Not too long ago, over a game of traditional checkers, I asked him to stop calling me Dr. Hoyos.

  “Dunno if I can do that”, he replied, after giving it some thought.

  “Call me Neil”, I said with a tone of command. “After all, I called you Dwayne practically from the start.”

  “Uh-huh, but that sort of fit right.”

  “The whole world calls everybody by their first names, so why don’t you?”

  “Whole world calls what ain’t family, family, and what ain’t free, free, and what’s up, sideways or down altogether.”

  “Could you repeat that, please, Dwayne?”

  “I mean the hierarchical relationships in human affairs are really quite skewed, Dr. Hoyos.”

  “Hierarchical? Where did you ever learn that word?”

  He shrugged and failed to offer further response on the matter. Instead, he made a move, and said, “King me.”

  Every now and then, I bump into Stron McKie lurching down a corridor. He squints, beckons me into an alcove, and there we sip his clandestine whiskey. Today we went into covert mode beneath a marble statue—Greek, I think.

  “What on earth is this?” I gestured to the statue with disgust, in a state of mild alarm, actually.

  “This”, said Stron, with a glint in his sin
gle open eye, “is the Laocoön. Observe, Neil, observe what we are as a race. Look at him wrestling with the snakes. Here’s the poor fella trying to warn his countrymen that the gift horse is hollow, full of enemy soldiers, but the Trojans won’t listen. And those wretched gods won’t help either. They’re the worst of the lot. It’s them that sends the snakes out of the sea to devour poor old Laocoön and his sons.”

  “Er, Stron, do you think we could move to another spot?”

  “Sure, why not.”

  We headed down the concourse to the next alcove and slipped inside. This one contained an abstract painting by someone named Rothko. The label informed us that its title was Untitled. Swaths of mulberry blur. Very nice, but I’ve seen better carpets.

  “Forty million Uni for that one”, said Stron, with a distinctly sarcastic tone.

  “Let’s go”, I grumbled.

  The next alcove contained Whistler’s Mother, or possibly a fine, hand-painted copy.

  “That lady is a clone of my old Gran”, said Stron. “She too was overfond of the wee dram.”

  So there we stayed, and there we enjoyed our drams. Some scientists turn to Art in old age, some to golf, some to philosophical reflection, seeking a unified field theory of simply everything, with a door wide open to the meta-everything. It can take the form of religious philosophy, or it can take the form of cosmological aesthetics, but in all cases, it is a yearning forward to something. Something bigger than our petty selves.

  Perhaps that is why mankind has agreed to invest its resources in this voyage. We seek to spark our own global imagination, to experience vicariously the thrill of discovering the unknown other, be it an empty planet or an inhabited one. Why do we hope for aliens, our hypothetical long-lost brothers somewhere out there in expanding infinity? What does this yearning tell us about ourselves? That we are a very lonely race? That we are communal beings, expanding outward as our very universe expands? Alternatively, why would some (a small minority) hope that we are alone? Would this latter model assure us that we are a unique phenomenon? I don’t know. My attitude is one of wait-and-see.