Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  Unaware of these experiments, workers in the tower radioed a query, asking about an intense beam of nearly blinding light that had appeared below them in the pass and continued onward into the west.

  I learned much of this while having supper with Xue in the deck-B cafeteria. He said: “Neil, I don’t have a lot of time this evening. I’ve been asked to participate in a new investigative team, which includes three astronomers and two optics specialists, Dr. Hoang of Seoul University and Dr. Cowan of Rinmen Beijing University. I just came from a meeting with them. We’re working on collating the preliminary data regarding the light beams and the temple ship. At this point, we know that the light of a man-made, 40-watt lamp, when directed into the hole within the ship, exits the ship at a magnitude perhaps a thousand times stronger than the source. It passes through only one of the three orifices in the mountain wall, and exits the cliff face at an even greater magnitude, not measurable at this point. We experimented by placing a metal plate over the cliff exit hole, and within a few seconds, the beam burned through the plate. Its trajectory over the valley brought it straight down the middle of the pass.”

  “Was it a weapon of some kind?”

  “I do not know. Actually, I think not. Remember, we have directed a beam outward from the ship as an arbitrary experiment. It is equally likely that these prisms were intended to direct light into the ship.”

  “A power source, then.”

  “Perhaps. Or it might have been associated with astronomical observations.”

  “I’ve been wondering about the astronomy towers. Wouldn’t one tower have been enough for reading the heavens?”

  “We would think so. But the makers of this system could have had purposes connected to their symbology. For example, the winged being had three eyes, hence the three holes. My belief is that there were three towers originally.”

  “If so, there’s one tower yet to be found.”

  “Our committee reached an agreement with the archaeological oversight committee that a search would be undertaken. We began by excavating at likely spots in the pass.”

  “That’s a large area to search, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, very large. However, it is relatively straight. If there is a third tower, one dependent on an optimum vantage point, it would most likely be at the highest point on the floor of the pass. This point, as it happens, is exactly below the two towers, and forms a line with them. Add to this the aliens’ obsession with mathematical relationships, and I think we will find our missing component in fairly short time.”

  “You still call them ‘aliens’?”

  “Dariush has described the findings to me—the remains in the temple crypt, the forensic evidence, and his translations of the early codices. I am convinced he is right about the origins of this race.” He paused. “It is merely easier to say aliens than to say ‘the others’ or ‘our forefathers’.”

  I shuddered. “Our forefathers. There’s a chilling thought.”

  “Indeed. Besides, on this planet they were aliens. We all are.”

  “Regarding the missing tower, Ao-li, I can see the logic of your theory, but if there’s one situated in the pass, and if its dimensions are the same as the other two, wouldn’t it have blocked the road?”

  “Not necessarily. The tower could have been constructed after the internment of the ship. In addition, the mouth of the pass opens wide at that point, and if there is a tower there, I think we will find that the road either swerves around one side of the tower or divides and goes around it in two branches, then reunites into a single track after it enters the valley.”

  “So that’s where you’ll start digging?”

  “Excavation has already begun in the valley, in the shallower soil deposits five hundred meters from the height of ground at the entrance to the pass. However, preliminary instrument readings in the deeper deposits at the approach to the pass indicate that the road has begun to divide.”

  “Eureka!” I exclaimed.

  “I must catch the next shuttle, Neil”, he said with a smile, picking up his tray and rising to his feet. “I will keep you informed.”

  “I really appreciate it, Ao-li. Life on the Kosmos is pretty dull these days. You’re very kind.”

  He put the tray down on the table. “Neil, we’ve been friends for how many years?”

  I shrugged. “Lots and lots.”

  “Do you remember our times at Princeton? And the Loner’s Club?”

  “Yup, how can I forget? I did it as a joke, figured I’d establish a fraternity with only one member—until you popped up, that is.”

  “Our numbers instantly doubled. A fraternity with two members. A pity we never grew beyond that.”

  “It was a relief. Did I ever confess to you that when I put up the poster, I intended it as an antisocial terrorist act, a kultur kamikaze free-fall without a parachute?”

  Xue shook his head. “I didn’t know.”

  “It was just the kind of fatalistic black humor I used to excel in. Really immature exhibitionism. The psychiatrists would have had a field day on my psyche, if I’d ever let one near me. Don’t you remember the crazed drunk who had no friends?”

  “Do you remember the lonely Chinese boy who had no friends?”

  “I remember meeting an inscrutable super-brain who looked like he needed nobody’s help. When you came along, so exquisitely polite and so eager to join, how could I say no?”

  “Do you also recall when we began to work together on the antimatter equations?”

  “Un-huh, those were good times. I liked the beer too.”

  “I remember everything, Neil. I remember especially how you never hesitated to supply the missing elements for my theories.”

  “As you supplied missing elements in mine.”

  “For my part, motivation was purely quid pro quo in the beginning. And that’s one of the reasons I esteem you, despite your cowboy boots and your inability to pay your Mensa dues. You were never a quid pro quo guy, never a bargainer, never a trader. You cashed in no chips, and you called in no favors. Never. You were always a giver. And that’s a rare kind of person. I would not have won the Nobel without you, and you have not once reminded me of this throughout all the years since then.”

  “Nonsense. I never would have won the Nobel without you.”

  We left it at that.

  Day 344:

  I talked with Paul at the pool last night. He looked worried. The director of Medicine has sent a clipped inquiry up to the KC clinic, addressed to Pia, asking why she had failed to attend a mandatory meeting of onboard medical staff.

  She replied by voice mail, apologizing, explaining that she had been ill.

  There is another meeting scheduled for next week, to be held at the DM offices on deck D. She is “required” to be there. No explanation was given.

  If she attends, no one will fail to take note of the fact that she is very pregnant.

  “Can’t she resign or retire?” I asked Paul.

  “If she do this, DSI rule say she not part of KC and must move down to her own room on Concourse B. Then she is under their authority again.”

  “We sure as hell have a lot of rules in this ship. You should just ignore them. And do keep Pia upstairs. No more strolling down to other levels.”

  “Yes”, he nodded. “Maybe we be safe. Eight, nine weeks and baby is born.”

  “What is the Captain’s position on this?”

  “Long time ago, on voyage, he send message to Earth-base about DSI going bad. Now first answer from Earth come back to him. It say, all law for voyage still is law. Follow Manual.”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” I shook my head. “That can’t be. He sent the complaint letter to Earth just before we arrived at AC-A-7. Lightspeed there and back, we’re looking at close to eight years for a message turn-around time.”

  “Yes. But he send earlier message about DSI problem in year four, and others later. This is first reply. There will be a hearing—government court—when we return home
, when all Captain’s message have arrive at Earth-base. Until then, DSI is boss.”

  “Not on KC deck I hope.”

  “Not on KC. Is law they have only lower decks.”

  Day 350:

  As excavators opened up more and more of the road, they confirmed the instrument readings, which had told them two roads were merging after a division higher up. Nearing the height of ground at the head of the pass, they unearthed the division, after which the two road branches bent in a wide symmetrical tangent. The pass had suffered a great deal of rubble-fall over the millennia, including avalanches of heavy stuff. The road was now covered to an average depth of forty meters, in some places fifty and sixty meters. Excavation proceeded with slower progress.

  Day 353:

  Xue was right. The third tower is located exactly where he thought it would be. The whole site has been cleared, leaving the tower exposed down to its base in the floor of the pass.

  As with T-1 and T-2, T-3 has a ceiling / floor cap made of the seemingly indestructible black metal. It is undamaged. The anti-matter tool was flown in and an incision made. Men went down the hole.

  The bottom two layers of the tower are intact and are identical to those of the other towers. The third, uppermost layer is largely nonexistent, though its collapsed building blocks, before they were cleared away, composed much of the debris covering the lower levels.

  The tower is positioned exactly equidistant from the two flanking towers. There is a sphere inside. It too is equidistant from the other two spheres, to within a centimeter.

  Beyond the tower, the pass begins its descent into the west. If our mechanics staff were able to elevate the sphere to the height it was designed for, it would have a clear line of sight to the arc of the planet.

  On-ground astronomers are busily pointing mobile telescopes westward along the pass, counting the hours until nightfall. Beyond the horizon, the star field will doubtless confirm what the Kosmos astronomy people have already discovered: in that direction lies our home solar system. They have made computer-generated star maps, dating back progressively through thousands of Nova-years B.P. calibrated for this longitude / latitude / day-time. Needless to say, the universe is in motion, yet their calculations demonstrate that alignment occurs—probably on dates pertinent to the history and religion of the ones who made the towers.

  Day 354:

  Further exploration of the interior of the ship was delayed while the foregoing investigations were underway. I should say, rather, that the final third or tail end of the ship remained unexamined. I must now return to describing the forward section and its three levels. To recap:

  The bottom floor was exclusively residential—sleeping, cooking, eating, and hygiene for those at the top of the flight hierarchy.

  The middle floor was a barren black temple section, containing only an “altar” cube, the incised mural of the Lord of the Night-gods’ pet beast, and the three holes leading to the nose cone.

  On the morning when the top deck was investigated, I hastened to the panorama hall with keen interest, since this would be our first glimpse of the temple ship’s control center, and it would be in real time. The hall on my floor was nearly deserted, since a majority of people are downstairs on the planet. I had a good seat, front row center.

  Close on the heels of three scientists, the camera ascended a stairway from its base in the ship’s cultic chamber on the middle deck. Arriving at the top, the vid shot went immobile as scientists and media men paused to take in the scene. Before us was a single, long chamber—a hall as wide as the ship and a third its length, tapering toward the nose. The walls were a half-dome tunnel matching the outer hull. The ceiling in the forward section sloped down steeply to the floor, as this upper deck was at the tip of the “arrow”. The ceiling, walls, and floor were composed of dull metal plates with barely discernible, welded seams.

  As the camera moved forward, I saw that there were five “windows” in the extreme forward end of the chamber. Three of these were slits in the wall immediately above the nose cone, uncannily similar to the pilot windows of our Earth-based mega cargo planes or rocket craft of the early space era. Measurements were taken—each window slit was 0.3179 meters high by 3.179 meters wide. A few meters aft of the nose were two more identical slits, one on each side. The windows were thick transparent panels of a diamond-like material. They were blocked by the external wall of the hull. It is logical to presume that during the ship’s voyage the forward windows were not covered by metal. If this is true, the metal was installed over the windows after the ship landed on Nova, or perhaps during the internment of the ship, for reasons that we cannot presently understand.

  Now the camera shifted to a tilted “dashboard” beneath the five windows. It was metal alloy with an array of control components embedded in it—fairly simple design, with crystals, levers, and what appeared to be circuit tracks. Centrally positioned were three bronze pads in the shape of human hands.

  I leaned forward in my seat, extending my right hand impulsively. Each of the hands had two thumb depressions. For a moment, I wondered if the “aliens” had six-digit hands, but then I recalled that among the thousands of skeletons examined in the cities and temple crypt all hands had five digits. Surely, the hand-pads were designed for control of some kind. Had they once responded to pressure or body-heat? Or did they swivel on unseen axles, forward and backward and sideways? If so, the two thumb depressions might have been designed for control by either the right or left hand.

  The dashboard sloped down at an angle that declined toward flat horizontal, though still tilted a few degrees, with its upper side fused to the wall. It ran continuously on both sides of the chamber, forming an elongated letter U. There were no seats in the hall. Floor sockets in front of this countertop followed it all the way, and one of the scientists commented that probably many seats had once been installed here, and were removed after the flight.

  I stayed rooted to my seat throughout these hours of preliminary familiarization. Later in the day, another program presented additional findings, with plenteous commentary from analysts.

  While the craft is relatively simple compared to the Kosmos, it appears to have been designed to meet every basic human need throughout its voyage. The number of individual control panels embedded in the countertop along both sides of the U argues in favor of the theory that all functions on board were controlled from this room, everything from propulsion, navigation, communications, atmosphere, lighting, heat, water, etc. The control panels were each distinct in design, with hieroglyphics inscribed in the metal beside each crystal—the latter were a variety of colors and hues.

  The great age of the bronze hands prohibited mobility at first, but engineers succeeded in lubricating one of them and manipulating it on unseen axles. It is surmised that these were the pilot’s (or pilots’) controls for pitch, roll, altitude, etc., during take-off and landing. A panel was cut out of the frame beneath the countertop, and inside was found a complex mechanism resembling gyroscopes within gyroscopes, with circuit connections from the hands and circuited into the floor. Gyroscopes only work where there is gravity. Were these instruments used exclusively for airflight above planetary surfaces? Did the ship have internal gravity generators as well?

  Since the ship appears to have been designed for both air and space flight, it is presumed that when the aft section is opened we will find retracted wings and also propulsion vents for maneuvering in zero gravity.

  Cryptanalysis tells us that the hieroglyphics beside crystal nodes on the various control panels are a mixture of mythic references and the purely pragmatic. For example, one inscription reads: Flame of the Night-gods small (meaning, “reduce nuclear propulsion”?). Another reads Beast Sacred to the Lord of the Night-gods wings (possibly, “extend [or] fold the ship’s retractable wings”?).

  Sample cuts have been made into the base of the countertop at selected points, revealing only complex circuitry inside.

  Though investigators say t
hey feel they are poking about in the innards of a giant computer, it is a cyber-control system with no visual screens. There is perhaps one exception. Embedded in the dashboard immediately above the three bronze hands is a rectangle of diamondlike, transparent material. On the underside of this “glass” is a grid of thousands of hair-thin tubes, which may be akin to our primitive fiber optics. When I saw this, my heart skipped a beat, and I wondered if the “screen” once displayed star maps. Or it may have been the visual terminal for the ship’s master computer, which has yet to be located. Strangely, only one such screen has been found on board.

  I remind myself that the original crew or authority of this craft did not have an exact picture of their destination, nor for that matter a scientific schema of our home solar system. According to codex-1, written by the Child of the Underworld (thankfully, long-dead), they had a poetic description that was accurate as far as it went. If his account is the sum of what they knew in the beginning, it would mean that the voyage pilots or authorities were given instruction as they went along, with the Night-gods whispering in their ears or through the mouth of the Ap-kalu.

  Above it we came unto the great sea that is constant night,

  Yet it is full of the flames of the Night-gods.

  More suppositions on my part:

  The panorama screen presentations have infrequently shown images of our home solar system inscribed on the walls of residential rooms on the lower deck. There is no commentary about this, apparently because our authorities, and especially our very own elfish Ap-kalu, have decided we don’t need to get into that. Undoubtedly, Elf and Skinner are still weighing the implications. Knowledge is power, and the power is theirs for the time being. People must wait until they decide what we should know. Nevertheless, enough has been seen and enough has been circulated through private conversations that we can guess the motives for the inscriptions. These “aliens” were homesick for their Beautiful Planet. Soaring far above the water-blanket, they had analyzed their own place of origins and depicted it accurately. But they had not yet seen their destination, which was only a pinprick of light in a heavens crowded with the flames of the Night-gods.