Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  It was dark metal, very old, spotted with rust. A stag with a great rack of antlers, about eight inches tall by eight inches long. Sitting on its back, side-saddle, was a little man reading a scroll with intense concentration. The deer’s head was turned sideways, looking at me.

  First it made me laugh, so whimsical did it seem, as if this were the artist’s intention. Then I felt a subtle kind of . . . of what? Some kind of happiness maybe?

  “Obviously not a literal scene”, I said.

  “Correct, not literal.”

  “But what does it mean? What is it saying? How old is it? Where did you get it?”

  “So many questions, Neil. Let the image speak.”

  I did, and he observed me in his peculiar Xue way, quietly smiling to himself.

  “It’s really beautiful”, I sighed. “But I don’t pretend to understand it.”

  “It is a depiction of the spirit of poetry.”

  “Ah”, I said, handing it back to him.

  Day 1003:

  The sculpture was given to Xue years ago by his father. His was a family of artisans who for generations have made such things and sold them in a little shop on a side street in a poorer section of Beijing.

  Today, while surfing, I found a surprising quote from the nineteenth-century British novelist Charles Dickens. Recalling that Pia likes his books, I decided to e-mail it to her, along with Xue’s Li Po poem, addressing my message to her name, care of her clinic, since I don’t have her private address. Before tapping the send button, however, I reconsidered.

  Electric communication will never be a substitute for the face of someone who with their soul encourages another person to be brave and true.

  —Charles Dickens

  Whew, what a close call! I deleted the message and wrote it out by hand on a sheet of my white bond paper, which I folded into an airplane with her name on the wings. I took it down to the clinic to deliver it personally, but Pia wasn’t on duty, so I asked one of her colleagues to give it to her. Li Po was also delivered as an airplane. Dreams take wings.

  Later in the day, there was a knock at my door. I said, “Open”, and the door disappeared into the walls. No one was there. Suddenly a brown arm and hand appeared and fired a green paper airplane into the room. The door slid shut. Astonished (no one has ever come a-calling before), I picked up the airplane. Inked on it in purple script were the words: Thanks, pardner.

  Day 1005:

  Earlier today I gave a copy of the Li Po poem to Dariush. He read it and seemed thrilled. This evening after our usual study session, as we were sipping our drinks in the bistro, he said in Kashmiri: “I must tell you, Neil, that the poem stirred something in me. These intuitions emerge from the hearts of every race and at every period of history.”

  “This is so”, I replied sagely (in English). “Human emotions produce universal images.”

  Replying in that language, he said, “By the word heart, I do not mean the emotions. I mean the deepest intuitions in the soul.”

  “The soul. A much-debated topic.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Are you saying you believe it exists, that it’s more than just the flashing of synapses at a subtle neurological level, which stimulates a particular zone of the brain?”

  “I believe it is more than that. Would you not agree that one can map precisely the ancient road that passes through the lands between Rome and Naples in Italy, and at the same time, one may remain largely ignorant of the men who built that road in ages past, and equally ignorant of the vanished civilization that passed to and fro on it?”

  “Forgive me, Dariush, but the analogy is flawed.”

  “As are all analogies. But, oh, look at me; I am distracted from my subject, which is poetry. After you gave me the Li Po this morning, I did some research. By the way, where did you find it?”

  “The physicist Xue Ao-li gave it to me.”

  Surprisingly, Dariush convulsed into chortling laughter (I have never before seen him crack a smile) and threw his arms in the air.

  “Oh splendid”, he said. “How interesting these coincidences. You see, I, too, have brought you a poem.”

  “Really?” I sat back, chuckling nervously. This is a little weird, I thought to myself.

  “Yes, yes”, he went on, “Yet, before I give it to you, I must explain that my composition is only loosely based on the original. Though the sense is close, the wording and some images are slightly altered.”

  With a deferential nod of his head, he handed me a sheet of paper, upon which were lines penciled in a crabbed script. “It is based on a fourteenth-century Kashmiri poem by a mystic named Laleshvari”, he added as I began to read.

  [The paper inserted here]:

  The Lamp of Knowledge

  O my elusive lamp of knowledge,

  Your flame fanned by a throat’s soft flute

  Reveals my soul’s plight;

  Darkness is around me now,

  And I within it sealed.

  Yet may I bring forth my light

  As seed locked within the soil

  Will break the surface of the field

  And bear its golden fruit.

  I looked up, intrigued by this apparently new enthusiasm. His eyes shone, black and eager; he looked just like a badger emerging from its winter hole at the first breath of spring.

  “Interesting”, I said. “But I can’t say I really understand it.”

  “That is fine, Neil, that is fine. A poem is a good seed, no?”

  “No. I mean, yes. Er . . . maybe.”

  Our discussion concluded with more crypticism on his part. As we were parting to go our separate ways, Dariush gazed at me with a fond, paternal look, which was quite odd, since he is at least five years younger than I am.

  “Your background is Spanish, is it not?” he asked.

  “Spanish-American, with a drop of Scottish thrown into the mix. Do you know Spanish?”

  “Regrettably, I do not. None of the Romance languages are within my sphere of scholarship. As you can see, I have made an effort to master English, with its subtextual Romance influence, but this is because it is a necessity in the present world, after Chinese, though I am only superficially conversant in the latter’s major tongues.”

  “I must introduce you to my friend Xue Ao-li.”

  “Please, this would benefit me—such a man, such a language, and a shared poetic interest. Regarding your own background, however, I am more interested in the symbolic and historical influences.”

  “I know a bit of my own history, but about symbolic influence I’m afraid I’m a nitwit.”

  “Ha-ha”, he laughed—the second time in our acquaintance—and wagged his index finger pedantically at me. “The seed, Neil, the seed!” Then he went off down the concourse without a backward glance.

  Day 1006:

  Memory: My mother.

  Our suburb of Las Cruces was called Sunnyview Acres. It was sunny all right. The hundred or so trailers in the community were ovens that for a good part of the year baked the brains of all those who lived inside them. Most of us were Hispanics, with a scattering of Vietnamese and less-affluent Québecois (who called themselves “snow-birds”).

  From spring to late autumn, residents kept discarded rubber tires on their roofs, covered by sheets of splintered plywood scavenged from the local dump and held down by more rubber tires. This kept the trailers cooler than they might otherwise have been, but even so, certain months were brutal, the community dominated by lethargy, bad moods, drinking, and domestic squabbles. The good, the bad, and the ugly lived side by side.

  Mostly people were good. A majority of families were intact, each with a mother and a father. There were plenty of children.

  My mother had been born in southernmost California. Her culture was Mexican and very Catholic. My parents worshipped at Mass once a week when a traveling Franciscan friar parked his old pickup truck in the dusty “plaza” at the core of Sunnyview Acres and rang a handbell to call the faithful
to prayer. A surprising number of people attended. He heard confessions beforehand—there was usually a long line for this—and afterward he offered the Mass using the truck’s tailgate as an altar. I liked him because he was sincere, simple, kind, and handed out candy to the children just before packing up to drive on to his next mission territory. People supported him by giving auto-fuel and food. It was technologically impossible (as well as illegal) to transfer Uni credits to him. He didn’t have an account anywhere in this world. He was a dedicated man, since in those days the churches were closed, due to the indifference of a once-Christian nation and, sporadically, government crackdowns on organized religion.

  We were not organized, but we were religious. Fray Ramon called us his “parish”. How it came to be that so many Catholics had congregated in one spot, I don’t know. The elderly ladies with rosary beads and lace headscarves were forever reminding us that Nuestra Señora, the Mother of Christ, had inspired our families to come together, each via a diverse chain of circumstances, without any planning on our parts. The truth is, few if any of us had chosen to live here for spiritual reasons, and I think all of us would have made our escape in a flash if circumstances had allowed it. Nevertheless, it was not an unhappy community.

  There are so many things I remember about my mother. I mentioned that she had a tendency to anxiety, which in retrospect I realize was not unfounded. But that was not a big part of her personality, certainly not a big part of my experience of her. Most of all, she was a person who loved. She loved me, my father, the children of the neighborhood, the infirm and the ill, pretty much anyone who crossed her path. It was she who first called Sunnyview Acres “our village”. And, I believe, she made it so. This was partly due to her personality and partly because our people were not exactly ecstatic about living in a parking lot for the socially undesirable. Calling it “our village” made it a home.

  She was always heading out of the trailer on this or that errand: a pot of soup for an invalid, helping at the birth of a child, teaching little ones to read, patching up a quarrel between neighbors, making birthday cards for the motherless or the fatherless. She was never an interfering sort, but she had a knack for showing up in people’s crisis moments and disarming them. Everyone loved her. The old ladies called her Madrecita, little mother. And so she was to many.

  One of her major traditions was the making of piñatas. Three times a year she made them—for Easter, the feast of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, and Christmas Day. December was my favorite month of the year, the temperature mercifully cooler, but mainly I loved it because it was a time crammed with anticipations, since the latter two feasts were only weeks apart. As Mamacita put it, the newborn Jesus was “the little King of the poor”. The Virgin of Guadalupe was “she who overcomes the devourer” or (more emphatically) “she who crushes the serpent’s head”. And that was just fine by me.

  I recall the numerous piñatas my mother made over the years, from the time I first began to walk until I left home for college. As big as a pumpkin, each one was unique, each an elaborate creation. First she inflated with her own breath a big latex balloon—she had long ago purchased a boxful from a man who used to sell lighter-than-air helium balloons at a novelty shop in Albuquerque. Over the balloon, she laid strips of scrap paper soaked in a paste made from flour and water. Layer after layer went onto it, until, days later, it was hard and dry enough for painting. She used brilliant colors applied in flamboyant designs. Sometimes she tied red wool tassels onto the seven spokes that radiated out from it, sticks that she poked into the body. It was the common Mexican custom to use spherical clay pots covered with colored paper, but my mother felt this would be a waste of a good pot. Moreover, she derived such pleasure from her creativity that even if a host of such pots were at hand I don’t think she would have used them.

  The seven horns, she explained to me when I was very young, represented the seven deadly sins. If we could smash all the horns without breaking the piñata’s body, there would be an extra prize. Then we could break the piñata itself, which according to her symbology represented the breaking of our wills so that the good inside of us would spill out for others.

  In later years, I read that other interpretations are widespread among Hispanic people, but all things considered, and not without some bias, I prefer hers.

  For the children of the village, the prime objective was never the overcoming of deadly sins or the human will. We liked our wills very much and exercised them whenever we could get away with it. At that point in our lives, we had no knowledge of any but a few of the unmentionable sins. No, we were after the treasure inside the piñata: the dried fruit, salted almonds in tiny cloth bags, confetti, a child’s dime-store ring that sported a huge “diamond”, and, above all, the candy in a variety of flavors and wrappers.

  She always completed the piñata the day before a feast, and together we filled it through a hole in the top, gleefully adding anything we could find that would excite a child’s heart or tongue. When we were ready, my father tied it up with strong cord, and then we all went off to bed, smiling in the darkness of our rooms.

  The piñata was our gift to the village. My mother was in the habit of standing in the middle of the makeshift dusty plaza at sunset on a feast day and wildly clanging a brass handbell to summon anyone who might be interested. When a crowd had gathered, and a bonfire of mesquite brush was flaring nicely, my father slung the piñata cord over a rope stretched between two trailers on opposite sides of the plaza. He hoisted it up where it swayed deliciously above our heads. Usually a few old men would appear, strumming their guitars, and a few younger ones with beer bottles in their hands showed up to watch the event—remembering what they had felt when they were children.

  The mothers of the community would organize the children, anywhere from thirty to a hundred, depending on the ebb and flow of the population. They would hand out sticks and shout strident orders that the littlest ones must be given first crack.

  The smallest made valiant efforts to whack the giant piñata, but my father would pull on his rope and make it gently dance up and down and swing this way and that. Hardly ever did los pequeños niños cry over their failures, because they knew they would get a reward later and also because they were shy of all the attention. Soon everyone was laughing and shouting encouragements. This part took a long time, but it warmed us up. Now and then a deadly sin would suffer a glancing blow and tilt sideways.

  Then the next rank of children, a year older, would have a try. One by one, each child took his turn. Now my father’s evasive actions demanded more ingenuity. A few more horns got smacked, one might fall off entirely and cracks appear in the poor piñata’s body. This was greeted by maniacal cheers and shouts to bring on the next age group.

  Usually by the time the ten-year-olds were up to bat, everyone was chanting:

  Dale, dale, dale; no pierdas el tino,

  Porque si lo pierdes, pierdes el camino.

  (Hit it, hit it, hit it; don’t let your aim go astray,

  Because if you lose it, you lose your way.)

  Even the dignified Vietnamese, who usually clustered in an ethnic group, broke ranks and danced and chanted in their language, scooting their children into the lines of the hopeful. At last, the twelve-year-olds would line up for their turn. My father was sweating by then, the old men were strumming madly, the crowd had worked itself into a fever.

  The older children had the biggest challenge of all. Each would be blindfolded. Seasoned veterans of the event, they leaped about and swung the stick with amazing dexterity and intuition, listening for the tell-tale swish of air and the hum of the ropes. Crack-smack-crack. Now the will was sagging, with numerous fractures and hints of its treasure showing, though as yet unspilled.

  Finally, some lucky soul would give a terrific, well-placed blow, and the piñata would collapse, disgorging is contents in a shower. The children rushed in, as did a few clucking mothers, who prevented the scene from becoming a free-for-all. Many time
s, when I was one of the youngest, an older boy or girl would help me gather a few candies and trinkets, lest I be swept aside in the melee.

  Day 1008:

  Within the past week, I’ve had three cultural encounters. This is unprecedented. I am not a culture guy (except for a few favorite music composers). Yet out of nowhere, a poem, a sculpture, and a literary quote have unexpectedly been dropped into my mind and now reside there. I don’t think there’s a probability theorist on board whom I could consult about it, and thus I’m left to my own interpretation.

  It’s alluring to develop theories out of coincidences, but if you let it go too far, you can slide into delusional states of consciousness. Then you see messages and confirmations in everything. It’s projection, of course. Like believing the Appian Way or the Egyptian pyramids were made by aliens. Loss of objective context is the problem. If the faulty mode of ingesting and interpreting reality is not corrected, it degenerates still further into hearing “voices”.

  During my university years, I enjoyed some friendly dialogues with one of my profs, a super-intelligent guy. As we got to know each other better, he sometimes took me out to lunch and expounded his private theories about absolutely Everything. His reasoning, his context, was totally articulate. He explained (and demonstrated with impressive facts drawn from all the sciences) that Martians had planted human life on Earth, and that there were “guides” from that race still among us, benevolent and disguised, helping us to “mature” into a higher consciousness, moving us toward the era when we would take our proper place in “the galactic community”.

  I raised the objection that the guides didn’t seem to be doing a great job of it, considering the messes we earthlings kept getting ourselves into.

  Solemnly, he replied: “Neil, that is because we so rarely listen to them. Their voices are speaking clearly, but we are deaf.”

  “Do you hear the voices?” I asked.