Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  But I digress. Today, in the interests of expanding my own horizons, I dug deep into my luggage (a nostalgia item, a nineteenth-century, Wells Fargo saddlebag) and brought forth from this trove a gemstone, four inches square, a turquoise cube carved by the hand of an Apache, Zuni, Spaniard, or late Americano. I had unearthed it in the desert while hunting rabbits during my second year at university. Among its intriguing characteristics are lines inscribed on six sides, indicating its mathematical octahedron; in addition, there are pinpoint bores for the zonohedron vertexes. I tried to explain to Pia what an anomaly this was, but I lost her after a reference to three-dimensional Euclidian space.

  “It’s beautiful”, she said.

  “It’s yours”, I replied.

  Her face lit up as she held it (reverently) in the palm of her hand. She said nothing, her eyes growing moist. Then I noticed a silent thought arise behind the tears: Why is he giving me this?

  I put on my cowboy act, made little jokes, and exuded paternity, just so she wouldn’t be troubled by any false notions about my motives. But how to explain to an extremely lovely, feminine, highly accomplished young woman that you simply are glad of her being. You wish to enrich her life, tell her stories that will, perhaps, extend her own horizons a little farther. You admire her. You wish to thank her for making the sacrifices that have helped her become what she is. To speak such words would ruin them. Let the little stone speak.

  She thanked me in a quiet voice, and said that she would cherish it. An old-fashioned expression, quaint, endearing. I grinned, slapped my knees, and stood up, told her I had to go see about a horse. She laughed and we said no more.

  Day 511:

  Why do people give gifts to those they care about? Often it’s something the recipient doesn’t really need. Lately, I’ve received a couple myself. One thing for certain, in my case, it ain’t physical attraction or romantic delusions. My guess is that it’s a variation on what I feel for Pia. They’re saying they’re glad I exist, glad I’m here on the ship with them, that somehow I make their lives more interesting. A physicist who limps along the corridors with his game leg, dressed in jeans and smoky checkered shirt, shod in cowboy boots, and gets reprimanded by a “social animator” for wearing them in the cafeteria, brightens up their day. They appreciate that I’m a bad old boy who just might shoot a bandito but would never, never insult a lady or be so thoughtless as to perform experiments that would suck them all into a black hole of absolute gravity. People are either irritated by “characters” or admire them disproportionately.

  Today I received another gift. This one from Dwayne. How he got my e-mail address, I cannot guess. In any event, there suddenly appeared on my max screen an image of a middle-age cowboy in a wide sombrero, squinting at me, blowing smoke off the barrel of his six-shooter. The voice-over said in a rough, growly tone, “The only good alien is a dead one.”

  Last year he gave me (as a hand-written, hand-delivered note) his personal communications code, explaining that I could use it if I ever needed help accessing films on my max. This would bypass the normal bureaucratic procedure for calling service personnel and consequent delays. Ferreting about in my desk drawer, I found the slip of paper and typed in the numbers, summoning the suspected culprit. When he came online in audio-visual mode, I said, “Thanks for the message.”

  “Yup”, he said, not even cracking a smile.

  “Do you realize how politically incorrect that caption was?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you really want to kill aliens?”

  “Nope.”

  “Who’s the guy in the photo?”

  “An actor. Twentieth-century guy.”

  “He’s new to me. Was he a real cowboy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It would be a thrill to be one, wouldn’t it.”

  After a short pause, Dwayne asked, “You mean, be an actor or a cowboy?”

  “Cowboy.”

  “Then, yup.”

  “Lots of danger.”

  “It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.”

  We signed off. I wracked my brains for something to give him in return. Nothing came to mind. Chinese poetry would hardly do. And I doubt he’s interested in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Maybe the dialogue is the mutual gift.

  Day 604:

  Maria Kempton’s husband was killed by a kangaroo.

  Really, I’m serious. Life is very strange. Stranger still, she tells me that she first met him decades earlier when he saved her from another aggressive kangaroo. At first, I wondered if she was putting me on. But as she told the story, the tears in her eyes laid this suspicion to rest.

  “We were on a tour”, she said. “Most of us were new faculty at SU. I’d never met him before, hadn’t even noticed him. The bus stopped for lunch in the outback, at a station where in those days people tried to make a living by raising sheep. I loved the desert, very dry but not as barren as it seems. Of course, I’d seen kangaroos and wallabies in the zoo, but not in their natural habitat. I wanted to see one up close, and spotted a young joey nibbling grass behind the roadside café where we were eating. I tiptoed closer and closer to him, with my camera in hand. Its mother bounded over and kicked me. I tried to get away, and tripped and fell onto the ground. The mother began to kick me harder, and I got some cuts, plus a lot of bruises. Out of nowhere, Edwin—my husband’s name was Edwin—Edwin came running with a stick and threw himself between me and the kangaroo. He beat it back, and it leaped away into the desert with its joey. Edwin was cut too, bleeding more than I was, actually. By then, everyone from the bus came running.”

  “A brave knight”, I said.

  She nodded. “He was.”

  “The freak incident that ended his life occurred some forty years later, on a family holiday. A male kangaroo attacked him while he was down on his knees looking for botanical specimens at the edge of the desert. No one was able to determine why it happened. The animal just came in a fury, without provocation, kicking and slashing like a maniac. Before he could rally, one of the claws severed the jugular vein in his neck. Maria, their children, and grandchildren threw rocks at the kangaroo, and it retreated. Edwin was dead within a few minutes.

  “So you see,” she said, “when I received the invitation to be part of the staff on the Kosmos, I felt. . .”

  I know what she felt. A chance to escape the pain of unbearable loss, to explore something bigger than tragedy, and perhaps to make a new beginning toward the end of one’s life.

  I said none of this. Just squeezed her hand and excused myself.

  I’ve been doing some research and have learned that kangaroos are usually not aggressive; it’s very rare for them to attack a human without provocation. I found the news of Edwin’s death in an archive file of the Sydney Morning Herald. One muses on whether the kangaroo that was the occasion of his meeting his wife was the ancestor of the kangaroo that killed him. On the next page was an article by an eco-politician, writing about the need to obey the endangered species laws, under a banner headline: Save the Kangaroo!

  Day 717:

  I asked Dwayne what he is paid for his janitorial services.

  “I mean,” I said apologetically, “I hope they’re paying you good wages.”

  “Very good”, he said.

  “Not that you can spend it, really. I’m curious to know why the large number of service personnel continues to work so diligently, while the rest of us sit back and enjoy a sabbatical.”

  “This way we get to come on the voyage. That’s payment enough for most of us. But we also get double the pay we’d be earning back home. With no place to spend it, other than a meal out now and then, this means that in twenty years all us deck-swabbers and bottle-washers will be able to retire young. I’ll be forty-eight years old when I see Earth again.”

  “Not a bad employment opportunity.”

  “And an adventure thrown into the bargain.”

  Recalling that sterilized people get double pay, I
said, “Uh . . . forgive me for asking, but do you hope to be married some day?”

  “Yup.”

  “Hope to have children?”

  I had used the plural, as in illegal. He fixed me with a cool, level stare. “Yup.”

  “What will you do when you retire?”

  “Buy a small ranch, raise horses, and . . . raise children.”

  “A worthy dream. May it become reality. By the way, have you ever seen the Santa Fe Mountains?”

  We talked on about his dreams for some time. He had thought everything through in great detail. He wanted a family, independence—big horizons. I told him about my real cabin in the mountains. His eyes got all visionary as he tried to imagine it.

  “So you dreamed too, Dr. Hoyos”, he said at last.

  “I did. It took patience and ingenuity getting there. It cost a lot. I don’t mean money.”

  “I know you don’t mean money. You mean the way things are.”

  “Yes, the way things are.”

  Day 730:

  Second year completed. No changes in the panorama outside the window, at least none that my eyes can detect. Only the three sisters are slightly brighter, their magnitudes increasing at snail’s pace. Telescopic zoom now gives us AC-A-7 as a well-defined sphere, very small, no surface details visible.

  Day 819:

  Here I am again, the lapsed journalist. Nothing much to report. I have at least five hundred Kashmiri words tucked away in my head, enough to make me functional in a certain state of northern India. Dariush the Great is master of a vocabulary numbering upward of three thousand words. He is not competitive about it; he is an enthusiast. We enjoy simple conversations in Kashmiri. Who could have predicted this for my life!

  Stron’s drinking is getting worse. Where does he find the stuff? I’ll bet he stashes it in that little highland castle he calls his room. Nevertheless, he is always coherent.

  Maria is doing well. She does a lot of knitting in public places, and younger folk gather around her. She has made many friends. Every home needs a mother, and she’s great at it. Maria the truly Great.

  Pia and I joke whenever we meet, just to keep things on an even keel. I believe she has found somebody to love among the flight staff. I see her nose to nose with him in various bistros now and then. The symptoms are unmistakable. I am pleased to observe that I am happy about it, since this reaction reveals to me that my affections are unselfish. How unseemly it would be, indeed pathetic, if the case were otherwise. Poor old Quasimodo.

  Day 846:

  Memory. My father.

  I was seventeen years old, not yet graduated from high school. Hadn’t kissed a girl, not for lack of optimism. Still succumbing to mad crushes that remained entirely hidden from other human beings. My main distraction from this sweet desperation was reading science and pursuing an obsessive-compulsive habit of killing snakes. Hundreds of them fell before my wrath each year. I harvested them from the glue board daily with unhealthy glee. I stalked them in the desert with unflagging determination. I had purchased my first set of cowboy boots by then, with money earned at the box factory during summer break. The boots were snakeskin laminate with a diamond pattern. I got a lot of teasing about it at school, but this ruffled not a feather of my homicidal soul—more accurately, my serpecidal soul. I wore the boots along with leather chaps whenever I went out into the desert with my .22, and later my .303, which blasted my victims conclusively. Later, a shotgun—even more satisfying.

  I was a bit deranged at the time, but my parents understood, even approved.

  That year, my father and I had built onto the trailer a plywood box extension that became my new bedroom. It seemed a mansion to me, with a ceiling taller than the trailer’s. It had inbuilt bookshelves, stuffed full in short order. I kept a collection of rattler tails in a jar on a shelf. My mother insisted on a crucifix on the wall near the foot of the bed, so that I could look at it every night before falling asleep and see it again upon waking. But I was lapsing. My new religion was all about justice in this world. It had a single dogma. Nailed to the outside wall on the backside of the trailer were three whopping great rattler pelts, two diamondbacks that I’d shot in the bushes at the edge of the trailer park, and a sulphur yellow black-tail, which I’d shot out of a piñon tree. They were protected species, but I didn’t give a rip about that. I could have gone to jail for what I’d done, but I was never caught. The neighbors never told on me. They all hated snakes too.

  Yup, I was seventeen years old and angry about fate, about life (though rather glad to have it), plus the other standard teenage stuff. I had pimples, my ears stuck out too far, and all of this was snarled up with the unfairness of the limp. I knew that I could never be part of the basketball team. Never.

  My father was now working as a heavy-equipment operator, outside of Santa Fe, pulling in good money. He and my mother had agreed that any extra should be invested in saving to put a down payment on his own dump truck, which would enable him to operate independently of the big guys. But this meant delaying the purchase of a home of our own. He drove down to Las Cruces on weekends, hoping that our beat-up 2031 Hydra would make it there and back again. He’d bought the thing, used, for a thousand Unis and disconnected its solar power and hydrogen apparatus, re-rigging it for compost-biomethane fuel. I think he bought it mostly because the logo looked like a guy in a cowboy hat. I always wondered if the Malaysians designed the logo with full knowledge that they were making a great big Yankee joke. I rather doubt it.

  (Note: Back home in my real cabin, I have five rusting Hydra logos nailed to the wall of my garage. Also some snakeskins. They will have disintegrated by the time I return—the skins, I mean, not the cowboys.)

  So, this one Saturday afternoon, we were prowling along the arroyo bed, both of us with .22s in hand, earnestly looking for the snake that had messed up my life three years earlier. I think in retrospect that his earnestness was less than mine, but his intention was strong, a commitment to justice. Or maybe just showing me I wasn’t alone.

  We had no luck, then or later, in finding any big rattler in the arroyo. Perhaps it died of old age, but I hope its life ended badly.

  The day was hot, and we were sweating hard. We agreed to take a break and climbed up out of the arroyo, searching for something to sit on. Not far away, we found a fallen mesquite tree. It’s not common to find one of them down because it has a long taproot. But this particular tree had tried to grow out of a pile of stones, and at some time in the recent past, a high wind had done the job. The ground was littered all about with its dead leaves and screw-beans. We kicked the thorns off the trunk to make safe sitting places, and deposited ourselves accordingly. It was a nice moment.

  “We need a fire”, said my father.

  The weather was hot as blazes, but we both knew what he meant. I gathered mesquite twigs and made a heap of them, with dry bean pod as kindling, then fired it. I added larger branches as the flames caught hold. The smell of burning mesquite is the best perfume in the world. Smiling, we sat back down on the trunk, taking sips from our canteens.

  I can’t recall how long we remained without speaking. I remember only that the silence was comfortable, though it seemed to stretch longer than usual.

  At last, he said in a raspy whisper, “Benigno, I’d cut off both my legs if I thought it would help you walk straight.”

  I froze, choked, sad, happy, unable to say anything because my father was not a man to express emotions.

  I nodded and nodded, but he was looking somewhere else.

  “I know, Papa”, I said, when I could find my voice.

  Standing up, he whacked the dust off his jeans with his hat, squinted into the lowering sun, clicked his tongue, and said:

  “Yup. We got maybe an hour before we should head for home. Let’s go get that rattler.”

  We never did get the rattler, but it didn’t matter so much after that.

  Day 867:

  I often overhear people in the cafeterias comparing note
s on their DEC experiences, clearly a very popular recreational activity. Everyone on board has a right to a monthly free suspension of reality in these digital environmental chambers. I thought I should give it a try, reminding myself that I could always walk out if I didn’t like it. I signed onto a waiting list for the chamber on my floor, and after three weeks of waiting, it was my turn.

  The DEC on deck B is situated on the central avenue, halfway between the ship’s bow and stern. In the “hospitality foyer”, I was greeted by a comely maiden, who offered me a mobile screen listing hundreds upon hundreds of “environments”. Friendly and helpful, she walked me through the index, suggesting things like “Be an Actor in a Hollywood Crime Drama” (extremely popular), “An Afternoon in the Louvre” (also a hot item), “Swimming with the Blue Whale”, “Lost in the California Redwoods”, and so on.

  “Got any deserts?” I interjected at one point.

  She frowned and continued to search the index. “We don’t get many requests for that”, she murmured, absorbed in her work. “Maybe you’re the first. Oh, yes, here we are—four entries. The Sahara, the Gobi, the Great Australian, and the American Southwest.”

  “I’ll take the American.”

  She smiled with pleased approval. Her accent was American, I think, or omni-continental, and I could tell she was professionally happy for me. In any case, she led me into a labyrinth of halls and adjoining rooms from which came the faint sounds of people at bliss in their environments of choice. As we entered my chamber, I saw that it was the interior of a white sphere with a flat base platform.

  “I’ll need your identicard, Dr. Hoyos”, she said with a slightly more formal air. I fished it out of my back pocket and handed it to her.

  “Now, for specifics”, she continued. “Do you prefer the total sensory or just the visual / audio package?”

  I explained that I didn’t really know what either of the options entailed.

  “Well, if I may suggest, I think you’ll want to try the total sensory. As you know, the DEC is free, but for an additional fee you can enjoy smells, touch, taste, and the psychological experience of total reality. It’s more than watching a movie. Far, far more, and you get it with just a teensy sip of a delicious enhancer beverage.”