Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “I see your point. It is a supposition, but one worth considering.”

  Vladimir nodded emphatically. “So, you understand, gentlemen—if, as is supposed, we do have the meeting of all lines exactly here, we are left with one uncertainty.”

  “Do you mean the depth?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Paul affirmed. “He is telling us there is something below, may be, but we do not see how far down is it.”

  Vladimir turned his instrument screen toward us, and we crowded close to look.

  “Ah”, I said. “We’ve been thinking two-dimensionally. Your machine has been thinking three-dimensionally, and has proposed a convergence of all lines exactly where they touch the rock face, somewhere beneath the ground we’re standing on.”

  “If my theory is correct, and the coordinates for all lines are correct, the convergence point is approximately 2.78 meters beneath your feet, Dr. Hoyos.”

  “Really? This kind of guesswork is probably way off the mark.”

  “Then let us discover if I am a good or bad guesser.”

  With that, we resumed pulling loose rock away from the cliff. Paul went back to the AEC and returned shortly with a kit box that contained a variety of implements. One was a pneumatic bar with a chisel point. A squeeze of the handle drove it a foot length into hard ground, shunting rocks to the side. There were also a suction hose and two traditional shovels. Even with such tools, I could not sustain the physical labor for long. I tired first, and Dariush had to stop to catch his breath not long after. Eventually, we just sat down on the ground and watched the two young men throw themselves into the task.

  Working as a team, they wasted no effort, and within an hour had cleared away a concave basin about nine feet wide by four feet deep.

  “If we are right,” said Vladimir, “we are very close. Maybe we will find a door, or the top of a door. Maybe a key in a lock. It will shake the whole mountain and crack open a big golden gate.”

  “Inside is fairy palace full of big gold coins!”

  “And a big red dragon, Pavel!”

  They were still laughing when both of them suddenly froze. Paul dropped to his knees.

  “We have find something”, he exclaimed.

  Dariush and I hurried to the edge of the pit and there beheld both men down on their knees brushing dirt away from the exposed cliff face.

  “What is it?”

  “Is markings in stone”, murmured Paul. “Not many, but big. Look.” I looked and did not see much at first. There were a few wedge-shaped incisions in the stone. Chiseled below them was an outline of the feathered tips of extended wings, like those of an eagle or an art angel. Another hour of digging brought to light a winged, manlike creature, with a horned head and a three-eyed, humanoid face. From beneath the navel of the naked form protruded something like a spear, its sharp tip pointing to the left, while the face was half-turned to the right. Its legs and feet stretched downward, three times longer than its torso, each of its ten toes extended into claws. Its arms stretched horizontally, ending in claw-like hands. Clenched in its left hand was a feathered arrow. In the open palm of its right hand, there was a shape like a flame.

  The four of us stepped back and gazed at the image for some minutes, stunned to silence.

  “Is this what they looked like?” Paul asked, speaking as if to himself.

  “It is a cultic symbol, I think”, said Dariush. “It represents a celestial being or a god.”

  “I hope so”, I murmured, for I did not like the feel of the character depicted here.

  “This was made by good artist”, said Paul.

  “The style is sophisticated”, Dariush replied. “The hand of the one who carved it was sure of what he was doing.”

  “It is like an Egyptian carving,” said Vladimir, “in the temple of pharaoh.”

  “It is similar to Egypt’s cartouches, only in the sense that both are pictographs incised in stone. And both are elegant. Here the similarity ends.”

  “Isn’t there a winged god in Egyptian cosmology?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Dariush answered with a nod, “but in their bas-reliefs and painted murals, pharaohs’ artists took pains to create an effect of natural human anatomy. Though stylized and hieratic, depictions of their gods were clothed and retained subtleties and warmth, united to divine principles. Their cosmology was mistaken, and I believe influenced by evil spirits to some degree, yet there was ever a human element in it. This figure before us seems quite inhuman—in fact, evil.”

  “He looks like a man”, objected Vladimir. Then with a shrug he added, “A man with three eyes.”

  “And claws”, I said.

  “And horns”, said Paul.

  “In any event, we are too close to its discovery to be able to interpret it properly”, said Dariush. “We must learn its context. Perhaps there is more below, still buried.”

  The younger men again began to dig, taking care not to scrape the cliff with their tools, lest they damage anything.

  A few centimeters below the feet of the “god” an incised line appeared, running straight down into the ground. Carefully, Paul dug away gravel and some larger rocks. Another hour of excavation increased the size of the pit and exposed a further three feet of descending line. Finally, a few more shovelfuls cleared away debris, and the line ended at a disk-shaped incision.

  Hastily the men worked on, and soon it was apparent that a broader and more complex scene had been carved on the mountain’s face:

  There were three disks ranged side by side, each separated by about a foot length. The largest was in the center, approximately half a meter in diameter (the line touched its top). The one on the left was slightly smaller. The disk on the right was no more than an eighth the size of the others.

  “Do you think—?” I began.

  “Dig deeper”, Dariush insisted.

  “Yes, yes”, said Paul, shoveling frantically. Vladimir stepped back and watched him.

  We did not have long to wait. The vertical line continued its descent beneath the central disk. A few more scoops of gravel unearthed its destination—a horizontal row of spheres of varying sizes—eighteen of them. The line touched the seventh from the left, and there it ended.

  “You understand what we are looking at?” said Paul.

  We all nodded in the affirmative.

  Everyone sat down at once, Dariush and I at the rim of the excavation, and the two young men in the dirt and rubble. For a time, we could say nothing.

  By now the sun—AC-A—was setting beyond the teeth of the western range. Vladimir stood up and dusted off the trousers of his uniform. He put his instrument to the disk of the hieroglyphic AC-A and checked the readings. He shook his head. Then he placed the instrument to the smaller disk of its seventh planet, and now the instrument began beeping steadily.

  “As I thought”, he smiled. “I am a good guesser.”

  “A maximum good guesser”, declared Paul, leaping to his feet and punching him on the shoulder.

  The other laughed and checked his wristwatch. “The hour is late”, he said. “ The shuttle at the geology base will be loaded. We must return.”

  “We will come again soon?” Dariush asked. “As soon as it is possible.”

  Day 184:

  It is out of our hands now. Dariush reported our findings to the archaeology team leader, and he in turn approached DSI. With only a little hesitation, the DDSI mandated a full-fledged exploration team, including the archaeologists, Dariush’s linguistics people, and engineers for excavation of the site. In practical terms, this has been swiftly translated into the building of a mission base in the valley between the towers and the cliff mural. It is nearly completed. Media programs on the Kosmos’ panorama screens have shown the establishment of a compound with a perimeter fence, ten residence pods, and working annexes for examining any artifacts that may be discovered, as well as an AEC landing pad. The base is situated on the higher ground overlooking the trench, midway between the towers and the cliff.
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  Quite rightly, the discovery has been attributed to Dariush and his detective work. Thankfully, no one has inquired about who went along for the joyride. I have melted away into the invisibility of the dysfunctional. With all the attention now focusing on the site, sneaking downstairs for more on-ground adventures is impossible. The region is being strictly supervised “for security reasons”, which probably means for the purpose of preserving a heritage site, protection of artifacts, and preventing amateurs from stomping all over the place with their little pails and shovels. While I regret my exclusion, I know that my friend will be telling me everything, and I can also watch what happens via 3D programs, some of them in real-time.

  The news of the discovery has electrified the entire crew and all science teams—the thrill, the mystery, the shock of the incontrovertible fact that we are not alone in the universe. It is interesting to listen to the common themes that arise in overheard cafeteria discussions and the official commentary in media presentations: Were they colonizers, or were they tourists like us? Or were they native to the planet? And where are they now? Did they have wings and three eyes, or were those details only symbolic? What, really, did they look like?

  Day 186:

  Beautiful news today.

  Paul and Pia invited me to be their guest at supper in the restaurant on deck A—the European menu. We ate French, which is to say that there were some exquisite sauces on the nova-turkey. We drank ersatz wine and sipped from a smuggled flask of real nova-berry liqueur. The former tasted superb, the latter sweet and somewhat green, still fermenting but much more satisfying than the standard chemical composition of the “Bordeaux”.

  After the meal, the newlyweds leaned forward, beaming, Pia blushing.

  “We are expecting a baby”, she whispered.

  I laughed and threw up my arms in jubilation.

  “Hearty, hearty congratulations!” I erupted too loudly. “May he, or she, be the first of many!”

  “Shhh, shhh, Neil”, said Paul putting a finger to his lips. “Please, we do not wish to advertise our criminal activities.”

  “Oh, sorry. Still, it’s wonderful news. The best!”

  “Yes, but we’ll have to be careful”, Pia said, with a wrinkle of her brow. “Fortunately, we’re living on KC deck, where we have some protection. But if word reaches DSI, there’s going to be a struggle. We would have to defend our child, because he or she is an illegal on more than one count.”

  “I see. Hopefully the Captain will be sympathetic.”

  “We tell him last night, and he like this”, Paul replied soberly. “And so will be many of flight crew, I think. But not everyone. Soon, my Pia become very big, and then we cannot hide it.”

  “You could stay upstairs until the baby is born”, I said, turning to her.

  “I can, and will. I’m pretty sure we’ll avoid compulsory abortion. But that doesn’t rule out confiscation after the baby’s born.”

  I felt my scalp begin to tingle, and a primitive anger rushing upward from some forgotten chamber of my psyche.

  “They not do this”, whispered Paul with what can only be called a deadly smile. His eyes became steel as he patted his jacket pocket.

  “Your mastodon gun?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I am civilized man”, he said in a deceptively calm voice. “But if barbarian try to hurt our child, I will make him . . . how do you say . . . extinct.”

  Yes, barbarians like Skinner and his Elf, and all the barbarians just like them who control the entire world.

  And that prompted a thought: They controlled our home planet. To a great degree, they controlled the floating micro-world of the Kosmos. But could they really extend their grasp so far as to control all life on our newfound land? Perhaps this unpopulated planet needed human beings, as many as we could provide.

  “How attached are you to Earth?” I asked.

  Pia and Paul reached for each other’s hands.

  “You read our thoughts”, said Paul.

  Day 197:

  Dariush is now living in the archaeology station in Tower Valley, as we have come to call it. However, every few days he returns to the Kosmos by shuttle, ostensibly because he is not willing to have his private library ferried down to the somewhat Spartan station, and he needs to study his unique collection of resource materials in search of any similarity between Earth’s ancient languages and the hieroglyphics inscribed above the winged creature. Apparently, even the omniscient ship’s computer does not possess the text of certain ancient manuscripts. He has a private room of his own down there, but it is noisy at all hours with youngish types talking in the hallways, partying, etc. “Like a cheap hotel”, he says. “The walls are thin.” I believe he also returns to the ship in order to reconnect with his co-religionists for prayers together, and for his secret Mass. This is probably his main reason.

  The AS-VT (archaeology station, Valley of the Towers) is not yet fully operational, and until it is, no further excavations have been undertaken. All other stations continue to send great quantities of material up to the holds, mineral samples and biological specimens predominantly. The quest for utilitarian knowledge remains our global religion. I, too, did my part in making this utilitarian voyage possible, though I remain (privately) an anti-utilitarian humanist—my version of religion, I guess. Or maybe I’m just a survivalist.

  Dariush told me this evening what I had already learned via the special media program: Excavation of the mural site begins tomorrow. He will have to be down there in case linguistic findings turn up. The hieroglyphics obsess him.

  “Despite the wedge shape of the incisions, which is reminiscent of Mesopotamian cuneiform, they do not truly resemble any script produced by the races of Earth, as far as I can see”, he said. “If there were a marked similarity, we might have been able to begin deciphering them.”

  “So, you’ve hit a blank wall.”

  “Not entirely. In the inscription, there is the indelible earmark of language. Because it is short, I have isolated only sixteen distinct ‘letters’ or, in laymen’s terms, a partial ‘alphabet’. However, there is no Rosetta Stone, so to speak.”

  “And you have no idea what it’s telling you. But it has to be about the picture, doesn’t it?”

  “Possibly. The inscription could be the name of the winged deity—I am convinced it can only be a cultic image, not literal. Or it may speak about the nature of the solar systems of Alpha Centauri. Possibly it refers to something very different.”

  “Do you remember the line in the mural that heads straight down into the soil beneath it?”

  “I think about it constantly. Especially I ponder that it probably indicates a subsidiary progression, which we have still to see in its entirety. The god creates the systems of the three sister stars, and then from the middle star, which is clearly AC-A, the line traces downward to the subsystem of her eighteen planets. And then. . .”

  “And then the line continues downward from the seventh planet—Nova.”

  “Yes, and this is the most exciting part. Where will that line lead us? Will we find an ancient map inscribed in the stone? Will it show us a continent, then a valley, then the ruins of a city, and finally a buried archive? Tomorrow we will learn more.”

  Day 199:

  I will try to be brief, since I don’t want to be away from the panorama screen too long. This is what they have found:

  Yesterday morning an excavation machine began its work. First, it penetrated the soil at a spot in the center of the trench, five hundred meters out from the cliff, digging a test shaft straight down. The shaft reached the hard bottom of the trench at 1.29 meters below the surface, confirming preliminary electronic readings. The base was stone. The shaft was expanded and the debris funneled up to an examination field beside the station, where the soil and organic material was put through a giant sifting machine that delicately screens everything falling into its mouth, checking for artifacts (nothing found, so far). More of the stone pavement was
then exposed and found to be made of flat, artificial blocks, exactly the same dimensions as the large blocks of the tower walls. Mathematically precise, the surfaces and sides of the blocks had been cut, not chiseled. Several were removed and taken above ground for further examination. Beneath them was found hard-packed gravel, and below that were more layers, the strata approximately 105 meters deep, with intermediate layers of paving blocks separated exactly by a depth of 1.59 meters. At the very bottom of these levels was solid rock, the roots of the mountain chain. The depth of 105 meters down to rockbed is the first departure from the consistent mathematical gymnastics performed by the aliens. Doubtless, they broke their obscure rules only because of the subterranean configuration of the mountain roots. If this is their home planet, dare I call them “aliens”? Well, they are alien to us.

  A number of interim conclusions have been reached by soil and geology experts:

  Though the figures are not absolute, it is estimated that the road was last used circa fourteen hundred years ago by Nova reckoning, the figures adjusted for the different length of its year and the character of the planet’s seasons, based on a theoretical 3.5-cm rise of soil deposits per century. This translates into somewhere between two thousand and twenty-one hundred years ago by Earth time.

  When the road was actually built is anyone’s guess.

  Measured from side to side, the stone pavement is 31.79 meters wide—which is also the towers’ diameter. Its borders remain perfectly aligned along the entire length of the exposed section.

  There can be no doubt that it was designed to bear heavy loads. This is further indicated by a discovery that came late in the first day, when the excavator machine had exposed nearly twenty meters of road in the direction of the cliff: traced along its bed are three parallel “tracks” of mineral deposits, which the station metallurgist has sampled and examined. It is iron oxide. He believes it is the remnant of completely oxidized rails. These lead straight toward the cliff base, which is still buried under soil and debris fallen from the mountain over the centuries.