Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “Always.”

  Day 121:

  My new doctor at the clinic is the transfer guy from KC. Pia reassured me that he is totally savvy. I will continue to receive a placebo every morning and will not, it is to be hoped, go crazy at any time in the near future.

  During a swim in the pool last night, Paul confirmed that the doctor can be trusted. He’s a flight officer in his own right, also a surgeon. The man dislikes DSI’s ways, and a good many other things back on Earth, though he keeps quiet about it generally. A real subversive, he has agreed to change places with Pia so she and Paul can be together. That’s heroic self-sacrifice, I’d say.

  This morning, a dialogue of sorts, beginning verbally, then completed on a scrap of paper:

  The doctor, I discovered, was fiftyish and oriental.

  “Good morning, Dr. Hoyos, I’m Lieutenant Commander Nagakawa.”

  I made a flash decision to play the idiot for the sake of surveillance. “Good morning. Are you Chinese? I have a good friend who’s Chinese.”

  “I’m glad for you. I’m Japanese. I have a good friend who’s American.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s hard to tell you people apart. You all look alike.”

  I laughed. His eyes crinkled, his mouth curled at the edges.

  Sometimes probes like this are amiable attempts to puncture the racial barrier, albeit rather lame ones. Race fascinates me, though I am no racist. I love Xue like a brother—the brother I never had. I esteem him infinitely more than many a Waspa (White Anglo-Saxon Post-Agnostic) and some Hispanics I’ve known. The lieutenant commander’s swift riposte told me we were on the same wavelength.

  “So, Dr. Sidotra informs me that you haven’t been feeling well lately.”

  “Yeah, I keep forgetting things. Sometimes I imagine bad things and think they’re real. But not so much any more. Mostly, I just feel freaky and don’t know why.”

  “I understand. That’s why it’s important to keep taking your medication.”

  He handed me the pill and a cup of water. I tossed them down my throat. That done, he scribbled on a scrap of paper and showed it to me.

  Placebo. Paul says don’t forget to swim.

  I nodded that I understood. He crumpled the paper and soaked it under the dispensary tap, then fed it down the drain, along with a little bad pill.

  Slightly louder than was needed, he said, “The medication can make some patients drowsy and listless. I suggest you keep up a regime of exercise. You could get run down if you don’t do aerobics daily. Walking and swimming are the best.”

  “I love to swim.”

  “Excellent, but I recommend you never swim alone.”

  “Okay. Uh, Doctor, when are we gonna go home?”

  “Home?”

  “Earth.”

  “Ah, yes. According to the schedule, we’ll be heading back in about eight months from now.”

  “Okay. Well, I gotta go now. ‘Bye.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  “Yup.”

  Day 127:

  I had a strange dream last night. A young Indian girl, a teenager with a lovely face, came to me with a golden dish, full of steaming food. She knelt before me and said, “Try to eat more pitaji.”

  I woke up feeling very lonely. This evening I went to the pool at my usual hour and found Pia and Paul doing laps. During a break, I told them about the dream and how the girl had been asking me to eat something called “pitaji”. Was there really such a food? Pia looked at me curiously and said, “Sounds like you dropped a comma. In Hindi, pitaji means ‘father’ or ‘papa’.”

  I guess it was one of those inexplicable items the subconscious mind throws up now and then. Perhaps it was the flashing of an obscure neuron connection established when I gave Pia away (Indian, female, love, paternal, etc.). Maybe it was an imaginative detail from the life I might have had, or a word spoken by my girlfriend half a century ago.

  Day 140:

  At last, there came a day when a watershed of distracting social events on the Kosmos coincided with resumption of continuous shuttle flights, creating a flurry of activity that would help cover another clandestine landing on Nova.

  There was little warning. I had only just returned to my room after breakfast when there came a knock on my door. There stood Dariush and one of Paul’s best men, the Polish shuttle pilot.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I grinned and pulled on my cowboy boots real fast.

  The three of us took the route through the maze that had led to my previous trip. This time, however, the shuttle hold was empty, since needed materials had already been delivered to the planet. The shuttles were now mainly occupied in bringing the findings on Nova up to the Kosmos’ storage holds.

  In the cockpit, Dariush and I strapped ourselves into seats immediately behind the pilot’s. I was tense with anticipation because my previous ride had been totally blind, my experience of departure, transit, and arrival completely sealed inside containers. Now, I watched the bay doors rumble closed, and then beeping and announcements warned that the bay was being depressurized. When the outer door opened, the shuttle simply slid into space, assisted by bursts from its side propulsion vents, until it was free of the great ship. Now gravity was gone, and additional short bursts maneuvered our vessel in a slow, rolling tangent that brought her nose toward the planet below us. The intoxicating view of a three-dimensional orb suspended on the deep waters of the abyss rose up in front of me. Then the rear propulsion units were powered on, and we accelerated downward in what looked like a precipitous plunge that could only end in disaster. I kept my wits by focusing on the heavens all around me, the black infinity crammed with the most brilliant stars I had ever seen. It was impossible to look in the direction of AC-A’s flaring disk, but I could look out the port window at her two sister stars without flinching, though their magnitude was the most intense I had ever seen with my naked eye.

  When the shuttle hit the upper rim of the troposphere, the pilot eased out of the dive and the angle of descent steadily lessened. Now our velocity declined and friction roar increased as we penetrated the lower atmosphere, and finally we were coasting over an ocean in the direction of a huge land mass. The rear propulsion units ceased, and the airspace jets took over, maintaining a moderate speed that would prevent us overshooting our destination. Within minutes, we were flying east of a mountain range, going ever lower, decelerating all the while, until we were now only a few thousand meters above a plain.

  “We’ll be landing at a geology and mining station”, said the pilot. “As soon as we touch down, you must dress yourselves in the orange suits. Fr. Ibrahim, Dr. Hoyos, we will transfer to an AEC very quickly, so please be ready.”

  “How much time will we have for exploration, Jan?” Dariush asked.

  “We’ll have plenty of time. The station teams will need six to eight hours for loading the cargo.”

  He killed the jets and hover took over. We touched down lightly a minute later, and the portal in the shuttle hold hissed open. Dariush and I unbuckled, dressed rapidly in our monkey suits, and followed Jan down the ramp onto the ground.

  This station was more developed than the marine base I had seen, with twice the number of pods and additional large hangars or storage sheds. Beyond the compound, the mountains loomed close, though they might have been ten miles away or forty, since their height made distances deceptive.

  We walked to a short runway adjacent to the shuttle’s landing pad, boarded an AEC, and prepared for takeoff. Jan established radio communication with a voice in the station, confirmed a flight plan, and with a smile, he pressed the “go” button. Contrary to my expectations, we did not rocket forward along the runway. We ascended vertically with only a background hum and with nary a tremble in the craft. When it reached a thousand meters, the jets were turned on, and we accelerated southward along the line of the mountain massif, climbing to a higher altitude as we went.

  Unlike the flight we had made on the wedding
day, we were now on the eastern side of the most eastern of the three ranges. Our pilot soared upward and banked to the west, taking the craft high over the crests of two ranges and then down into the valley that flowed north-south between the central and western range. He banked to the left and followed the valley southward. Not long after, he descended still further and eased back on the forward thrust. Ahead of us in the green bottom lands, a faint shadow-line cut straight across from the western mountains on our right toward those in the east. As the line approached, Jan brought us down to a hundred meters above the trees and switched to hover power. I looked upward at the heights and peered at the two towers of stone. Though still distant, they were distinct enough that I could see they were singular oddities in the alpine zone above the tree line. Dariush was staring at them too.

  Our pilot turned the craft away from them and commenced a slow cruise toward the central range, following the depression in the terrain. Its trajectory was just as the satellite maps had shown us. Now, however, we realized that only high-altitude reconnaissance would have spotted the entire configuration, its undeviating course through the surrounding forest. From ground level, or near the ground as we were, it looked only like forest growing out of a dip in the bottom land. Yet the crowns of the trees within the trench were ten to twenty feet lower than the adjacent trees, and this phenomenon was continuous from the pass all the way to the opposite mountains. A trail of low trees was a common characteristic of dry riverbeds that have been encroached with the passage of time, yet old channels of that sort always took a meandering course. In marked contrast, our trough or trench did not seem to vary its route across the valley, a distance that looked to be around twelve or fifteen miles. I asked Jan what the actual distance between the ranges was, and he checked something on his instrument panel.

  “Approximately 19.9 kilometers”, he replied.

  At this lower altitude, we noted another distinguishing feature of the trench. Along the upper edges on both sides, there was a band of trees standing higher than those of the forest stretching away in all directions. This too was consistent along its entire length.

  As we neared its termination point, we slowed to full hover before a flat cliff face that soared vertically a thousand meters or more before breaking up into rougher formations.

  “Should we land?” the pilot asked.

  “Yes, please, Jan”, Dariush replied.

  With that, we began to descend, and nestled into a gap in the woods near the cliff, not far from the edge of the trench.

  When we disembarked, the three of us immediately set out to learn more. First, we climbed upward through the trees growing from the mound bordering the trench, a sloping wall about twenty feet high. Arriving at the top, we then crossed forty feet of level ground and came to the brink of the trench itself. Gazing down, we saw that it was crowded with woods, though its foliation was thinner and the trees spaced farther apart, as if the soil was poorer in the depression. Even so, it looked entirely natural, for the forest floor was thick with moss and ferns and old fallen trunks.

  I picked up a dead branch for use as my walking stick, and after a nod to each other, the three of us made our way slowly downward. When we reached the bottom of the trench, we glanced in every direction, looking for old stone ruins, monoliths, anything that would give evidence about its makers. There was nothing.

  “But where does this thing go?” Jan asked.

  Now we turned our eyes to the very end of the trench, a few paces away from us. There were no markings on the cliff face that we could see; nor was there a natural cave or an artificial one. Abruptly halted by the lack of anything that would point to an answer, as if our rational minds had collided with the stone itself, our imaginations now began to fly about in every direction.

  “If this trench was man-made, it may have been a canal for funneling water to the lowlands beyond the western range”, I suggested.

  “A plausible explanation, Neil,” Dariush replied, “yet the western range is amply endowed with snow packs and rivers that would supply the west. There would be no need to drain this central range.”

  “Yes, you’re right.”

  “Was it a road to carry materials from mining operations higher in the mountains?” asked Jan. “At one time, there might have been chutes funneling ore down from above. Here in this spot vehicles could have received the ore and transported it to smelters beyond the pass.”

  “It’s possible”, I said. “But I don’t think anyone has found evidence of industrial activity beyond the mountains.”

  “None”, said Dariush. “I have checked the maps carefully from here to the western rim of the continent, and there is not a single topographical anomaly that would indicate buried cities or industrial sites.”

  “They may be buried very deep”, Jan countered.

  “Perhaps. If they are there, they would be of great antiquity, covered with ages upon ages of detritus.”

  “Surely there’d be a few standing buildings”, I said.

  “If they were made of stone and once stood very tall.”

  “You say that this road ends at the far side of the pass.”

  “Yes, there it ends, or disappears, since beyond that point the natural verdure blankets everything. At this latitude on the planet, the forests are lavish at altitudes lower than these mountain valleys.”

  “Well, it’s a complete mystery”, I murmured, shaking my head. “As long as we’re exercising our imaginations, why don’t we take the AEC higher and see if there are any remnants of mining operations up above?”

  “Shall we do it?” asked Jan.

  “A moment longer, please”, murmured Dariush, walking in the direction of the cliff face. He stopped in front of it, his head moving this way and that, then tilting back as he gazed upward at the soaring mass. The surface looked uniformly bare for a thousand meters or more. As far as we could see, there were no marks on it, other than the random scorings of time and a few shrubs growing out of small cracks.

  “No street signs”, I said to Dariush. “No door.”

  He nodded, yet his face told me that he still wasn’t satisfied. “Let us look higher”, he said at last.

  We climbed back into the AEC, and Jan fired it, and we were airborne. Slowly, he elevated the craft on hover power, at a rate of ascent that covered about a hundred meters per minute, plenty of time for our eyes to inspect the features of the rock face. Half an hour later, we reached a titanic fracture in the mountain’s flank, and paused, suspended above the valley, peering closely at every detail. It lacked any trace of roads, shafts, or caves, and there was no access to the heights above. It had been created by the forces of nature. We continued rising for another hour until we reached the peak, none the wiser.

  After that, our pilot took us on an extended tour all around the peak and through nearby hanging valleys. Presently, we found ourselves gliding over the site of Pia and Paul’s wedding. There we descended in order to take a short break and, I think, to relive a little of that beautiful day.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen”, said Jan when we had landed and depressurized. “Now I will have a nap.” He pulled his cap down over his brow, leaned back in his seat, and closed his eyes.

  Dariush and I exited through the portal and walked into the woods in the direction of the lake. There was a good breeze blowing, and the trees were swaying, creating a symphonic effect of light refraction and the sound of tinkling bells.

  “The crystal forest”, mused Dariush.

  “A perfect name for it”, I agreed.

  When we came to the glade by the lake, we noticed a disc of compressed grass where the newlyweds had pitched their tent. On the shore near the waterfall, I found two letter Ps made with pebbles, linked with the letter t—or maybe it was a plus sign.

  Dariush stopped and silently gazed at the lake’s riffled surface. With his right hand, he made the sign of the cross over it. From his pocket, he removed a capped jar, which he opened. Then, with thumb and forefinger, he took
from it a granular white substance and threw it into the lake in four directions, his lips moving all the while.

  “Blessed salt, Neil”, he explained when he was done. “A symbol, a sign with authority. I claim this place, and this planet, for the Lord of the universe, our Savior.”

  “Does it need claiming?” I asked, with a note of skepticism.

  “It is his, for all things were made through him, by him, and for him. Even so, there is a war in the heavens.”

  “A war? There hasn’t been a war for nearly a hundred years.”

  “I mean the war that will last until the end of time. And thus, this little place may need reclaiming. I have also prayed that the entire planet will come under Christ’s sovereignty—if it has fallen, as ours once fell.”

  Out of respect for the man, I voiced no further objections. Though I did say, half-humorously, “Well, we’ve yet to meet Nova’s Adam and Eve.”

  “We have, however, met its serpents”, he countered.

  We smiled at each other, and by unspoken agreement left off any further theological discussion.

  Deciding to amble around the lake, we first hopped on step-stones across the brook that fed the waterfall. I slipped and soaked my boots. I was about to pull them off but hesitated, debating with myself about the danger of snakebite. Overcoming my fears in the end, I went barefoot for the remainder of the stroll. It felt so good to walk on the warm blue grass, to inhale its perfume, to feel the cool breeze on my cheek. The crystal symphony simultaneously stimulated and consoled. All in all, it was the most enchanting place I had ever seen; in fact, it was perfection. We circled the lake within minutes, soon finding ourselves again by the waterfall. I sat down on the grass and dabbled my feet, drowsy under the influence of the burbling waters, the crystal forest, and the little songbirds that had appeared, soaring in the air above us.

  Dariush knelt down beside me. He remained motionless for a time, and I presumed he felt as I did, well contented and so soothed that he had no need for distracting conversation.

  At one point, he raised his right hand again and made the sign of the cross over the mountain on the other side of the lake. That done, he resumed praying, still kneeling, his body upright. He was immobile for longer than seemed natural, his face in repose, his eyes closed. I watched him uneasily, feeling somewhat impatient, but kept myself occupied by observing the valley’s unequalled beauty.