Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  As I approached the edge of the crowd, I met Maria Kempton, who was carrying a knitting handbag, a backpack, and her purse.

  “No roo pie for you, Maria?” I asked.

  “Something much better, Neil. Aren’t you coming with us?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s a shame”, she said sadly. “A real shame. I think you’d thrive on Nova. You’re a pioneer kind of fellow aren’t you?”

  “No longer. My adventuring days are over. All the best, Maria. You were good company on the voyage.”

  “You too. Burn my thesis for me, would you?”

  “Glad to. Don’t look back.”

  I’m not sure what made me say it, but thoughtlessly I blurted, “Maria, what about your grandchildren?”

  Her face froze, and then it just seemed to collapse into a haggard mess, her eyes as bleak as anything I had ever seen. She covered her face with her hands and hunched over, as if defending herself from a coming blow. She made a sound like a moan or a subdued wail.

  I put an arm around her shoulders.

  “I know, I know, it’s the hardest part”, I murmured sympathetically. “It won’t be easy to leave them behind.”

  Her whole body shuddered in a paroxysm of grief that bordered on despair. Finally, she looked up with haunted eyes and sobbed, “I don’t have any grandchildren. I don’t have any children either.”

  For a moment, I thought I hadn’t heard her correctly.

  “But the photos. . .”

  “I took them at a school, a long time ago. Strangers. Beloved little strangers. I never had a family of my own. Edwin was . . . they made him do it, you see . . . never to have children. If he wanted to do research, if he wanted to get ahead, he had to have the surgery. We fought about it. I told him I didn’t need a comfortable life. I needed a child. We needed a child. But they wore him down.”

  “So you pretended you had a family.”

  “We loved each other. We really did. But he was so afraid.”

  “Your knight?”

  “He was a knight in the beginning. And later, he felt he’d made the worst mistake of his life. We planned to build that cabin in the Simpson desert when we retired. We were going to make a place where we all could live, you see. We’d take in any illegals who escaped into the outback, any runaways who made it through the screen. Hide them, help them grow, love them.”

  “You’ll have a real family to look after on Nova. They need you.”

  She nodded as she dried her eyes. “The story gave me moments of happiness, Neil, as if the dream was more real than reality. And I couldn’t let go of it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to lie to you.”

  “They turned all of us into liars, Maria. But now there’ll be no more lies. You’ll have a chance to be what you always should have been.”

  She gave me a hug and went up the ramp. Others were going inside too.

  I spotted Dr. Arthur hustling toward the ramp, clutching a variety of items and pulling a wheeled crate, which I suppose was medical equipment. His face flushed red when he noticed me eying him coldly. He stopped in his tracks and headed in my direction with a cringe in his body and facial expression.

  “Dr. H-Hoyos”, he stammered, dropping his eyes.

  “The great escape artist”, I murmured through clenched teeth.

  “Try not to hate me”, he said in a pleading tone, his eyes filling with tears.

  “I don’t hate you”, I snarled—my tone implying, I just despise you, Doctor.

  “I had to give you that prescription. They made me do it.”

  “Made you do it?”

  He nodded up and down and still would not meet my eyes.

  “Your fear made you do it”, I said in a cold voice. “You didn’t have the courage to resist them.”

  “That’s true. And I didn’t know how to resist them. I am very ashamed of it. I betrayed everything I believed in as a physician. It was the worst mistake of my life—and I will regret it the rest of my life.”

  “Uh-huh”, I said with a nasty curl of the upper lip. “And I see that you’re off to the next stage of your life.”

  “Forgive me”, he pleaded in a small voice. “Please forgive me.”

  “Sure”, I snorted, “I forgive you.”

  I turned my back on him.

  He grabbed the sleeve of my jacket. “I . . . I tried to redeem myself, Dr. Hoyos. I was the physician who performed the autopsy on David Ayne. I’d lied about one person’s life—yours—but I thought I could make up for it a little by getting to the truth of another person’s life. They killed him, and when I realized what they’d done and how they’d done it, it opened my eyes. I understand a lot of things now that I didn’t when they used me.”

  “Okay”, I murmured halfheartedly. “Thanks for telling me.”

  We stood face to face for a few moments, looking at each other, thinking who knows what. I had no more words to speak, and neither did he. He turned away and went back to the ramp. I made my way toward Pia and Paul through clusters of people locked in tearful embraces.

  I stuck out my hand to Paul. He shook it and grimaced. “Is too bad. We won’t forget you.”

  I turned to Pia. She was crying. I put my arms around her and the baby.

  “Bye, girl.”

  “Bye.”

  I wouldn’t let her go. Or maybe she wouldn’t let me go. Paul and the Captain were silently regarding us. And then it happened:

  The elevator doors opened, and Elif Larson stepped out, followed by three men and two women, all carrying weapons—little hand-held pistol affairs that I had never seen before. Maybe they were designed to shoot bullets, maybe they fired e-volts that merely stunned.

  The Captain stepped forward to meet them.

  Enough to say that it went the way of all showdowns. Elf verbally laid down the law, backed up by his gang—or was it a posse? That was the question wasn’t it? On what side of the law did people stand? What exactly was the law, and did it any longer apply to our situation? Was Elf ultra vires or was the Captain? The Captain argued. The Elf restated the law. He insisted that everyone must go back to their rooms. The Captain insisted that all those preparing to depart should now board the shuttle.

  The Elf raised his gun and pointed it at the Captain. Calmly, the latter slowly lifted his arm and pushed it aside. The gang or posse bristled their weapons menacingly. Paul and three other young men bristled in return, fists clenched, gathering around the Captain.

  “Back off”, said Paul to the gang. They didn’t back off.

  Paul pulled his mastodon gun from his pocket and aimed it at Elf’s head. It was a high-caliber Russian army pistol, very old, but dangerous looking. He cocked the trigger.

  “Go away to your office”, said Paul. “Go back to Earth and scare children and mothers. We are going to another place.”

  He had just finished saying this when one of the gang fired at him, a line of blue light that buzzed as it hit Paul’s shoulder. Another flash struck the side of his head, and he fell to the floor unconscious. Pia screamed and ran to him.

  Suddenly, it was a free-for-all, full of punching and wrestling and blue flashes striking off in all directions. Paul had dropped his gun. I bent and picked it up, aimed and blew a hole in the floor at Elf’s feet. He flinched and aimed his weapon at me. I sidestepped and tripped (there is something to be said for bad legs). The blue flash missed me by a centimeter. The young men were now wrestling weapons from the DSI crew, and I kept firing at the floor and at the ceiling until the gun’s chamber emptied. I didn’t hit any flesh, but I shook a lot of people up and added to the general confusion. I suspect that most of our assailants had never before heard the report of a gun. Throughout their short, conditioned lives they had preferred to hypnotize, to immobilize, and then walk in and dominate. Several of them suffered hard punches on their chins and were disarmed. Then our guys hustled them back to the elevator and kicked them inside. The Captain had by then seized Elf’s nasty little weapon and proceeded to walk hi
m at gunpoint to the elevator. Elf was livid. Elf ranted. He threatened and raged. When our facilitators of social infrastructure were all safely inside the elevator, the Captain punched a code into the console, the doors closed, and our adversaries were whisked away to some other part of the ship.

  “Quickly, now”, he said to the rest of us. “Go on board and tell Vladimir to prepare for depressurization.”

  Paul was lifted and carried into the shuttle, Pia hurrying along beside him.

  There was no time for last good-byes. The portal ramp was just beginning to rise when two men came jogging down the concourse as fast as they could.

  “Wait, wait”, cried one of them.

  It was Dariush. The other was my doctor, Lieutenant Commander Nagakawa.

  The Captain ran into the bay and waved to Vladimir up in the pilot’s cabin, signaling through the window that he should delay a minute longer. The ramp lowered.

  Then the oddest thing occurred. Dariush knelt down on the floor before Nagakawa and bowed his head. The doctor lifted his right arm and made the sign of the cross over him. Dariush stood, they clasped hands, and then the doctor ran up the ramp and went inside.

  The portal closed, the bay doors closed, the depressurization bell rang, and I stood there helpless, realizing I would never again see my friends. Then they were gone.

  *

  Why had I not read the list of survivors? In retrospect, I see that I had abstracted those whom I didn’t know, or who were of no immediate concern for my life. All those I had grown close to were either dead or accounted for.

  But why had I stopped reading my mail? Was it because I preferred my habit of splendid isolation? The autonomous self adrift in a giant city-ship, fed by others, loved by others, selfishly nursing my wound? If I had extended more than cursory interest in the general condition of our remnant community, I might have looked beyond the enclosure of my pain, my guilt (or false guilt—who knows?). I might have seen that Elf was alive. Instead, because I had heard by word of mouth that Skinner had been vaporized, I presumed that his deputy had been with him on the day of disaster. Not so. Oh, lamentably not so.

  There were more confrontations, but none involving weapons other than the human mind, the human tongue. The ugliness of power struggles need not concern me here. Let me say that Elf backed off with his gang, and we did not see them again for a time. They did not frequent deck A. D was entirely their terrain. There were now only 114 people on board, and DSI was intimidated, I believe, by the sizeable body of energetic, determined men on the flight deck.

  *

  As I look back at those first weeks after our departure from Nova, I recall my feelings when the Kosmos received a message from the shuttle that it had safely landed on C-4. I went to my room to be alone, and there I wept from relief and gratitude.

  Vladimir had first flown around the planet at an altitude of thirty thousand meters, at a latitude that brought the vessel over the tower valley. Instrument readings were taken continuously and demonstrated that radioactivity was definitely in decline over the entire globe, though somewhat higher above the epicenter. Even so, here too it was falling and was now just above the hazard level. I was puzzled by this, since the magnitude of the blast indicated a massive fission-fusion bomb, which implied that it was very “dirty” and would contaminate the world for years to come. But it did not. Was it a neutron bomb? I found it hard to believe that’s what it was, because a neutron bomb would have created a blast very much smaller than a classic nuclear weapon, though destroying all life within its radius. In our catastrophe, the characteristics of both had been evident. I think we will never know what was used. I would have liked to discuss this in depth with Barton, but he took his own life six weeks into the voyage. His body was buried in space.

  *

  The messages from the shuttle were a relief, but I think a few of us regretted our decision to remain on board the Kosmos, myself among them. Later, all of us would regret it.

  The shuttle landed in a wide upland valley on C-4, a lush wilderness of mixed deciduous forest and natural grass pastures. Winding through the valley, coming down from a mountain range on the northern horizon, a river ran cold and clear, teeming with fish.

  The people renamed the generic shuttle Pioneer. Its fuel was irreplaceable, but there was enough left for foray flights that would help them get acquainted with their new homeland. They had plenty of maps.

  The men were busy in the forests bringing down trees for cabins they would build, using older laser saws and sometimes two-man bow saws (unbelievably, half-a-dozen had been found in the holds before the pioneers left the ship). In the interim, people were lodged in tents. Their mood was high; they felt they were at the birth of something beautiful, a humble renaissance, a new chance for the human race. As a contingent of the race, they were few in number, but they had more than enough people to begin the regeneration. A majority of them were young. There had been marriages soon after arrival. There were already three pregnancies, which was a heartening portent for the future—four children at the very beginning.

  Paul was recovering from the wounds in his head and shoulder. He was fully conscious and itching to get back onto his feet, so that he could build a cabin for his family. The winter in that region, though mild, would be cold enough. They needed to stock up firewood, to dry the fish they were catching in abundance, to prepare for the tilling of soil and a spring planting.

  My inbox contained several messages from people on Nova. There was one from Paul and one from Pia (worded with her old Pia-wit). There was even one from Vladimir, exhorting me to watch over Dariush. In addition, Dr. Nagakawa informed me (I think tongue in cheek) that I could cease taking my anti-psychotic medications. He urged me to “contemplate Hokusai”.

  The influx of unblocked mail told me that DSI no longer controlled the airways. Later, I learned that messages from Nova were being sent directly to the Captain’s private communication channel. They were forwarded from there to recipients throughout the ship, without interruption by the monitors. It looked like Elf and his band of un-merry men had backed off definitively. Yet I wondered if they were merely biding their time, lulling us into a false sense of security.

  *

  Dariush and I no longer met regularly, though we made a point of getting together often enough that I knew there had been no waning of our friendship. There was a quality of sadness in him, however, that I had not seen before and which I attributed to the loss of people dear to him. Little had I realized how close he had been to Xue. We talked about him one evening as we sat in the deserted Mexican bistro, where we had gone for old times’ sake.

  “He was the same age as me”, Dariush said. “Yet he became as a son.”

  “Did he ever show you his slide rule?” I asked.

  “Yes, and he explained its origins too. There is a history behind that man, one full of unknown sufferings, dreams, and hopes. His was a sacrificial life.”

  “He was always self-effacing, but he knew what to do when it was needed.”

  “This is true.” He paused and regarded me thoughtfully. “How little we understand the people we care about. How little we know them, really.”

  This was more an indictment of me than it was of him, though I don’t think he intended it as such.

  I changed the subject: “Barton is dead.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “He did away with himself.”

  “He blamed God, Neil. He blamed God for everything that has happened. I tried to reach him, tried to explain to him that we should look to ourselves for the cause of these evils.”

  “Maybe so, but why didn’t God prevent it?”

  “God did try to prevent it. He was moving in my heart and in Xue’s also, sounding an alarm bell. For my part, I did not listen as well as I might have. I could have done more, spoken more loudly. But in the end, I did not know enough, and I doubted. I worried that if I cried an alarm it would be dismissed as the irrational fear of an elderly scholar who had
no connection to the problems of physics. Even so, I should have tried.”

  “That’s hindsight. You can’t beat yourself over the head with it. You didn’t design that bomb. You didn’t make it detonate. And after it went off, you tried to save what could be saved. Don’t you think that counts for something . . . in God’s eyes?”

  “Yes”, he nodded. “Yet I know that we do not live perfectly in the will of God, always attentive to his promptings.”

  “If he is God, why doesn’t he speak louder, so we can hear him?”

  “He does speak. In a multitude of forms, he speaks. Yet our human nature does not want to hear what he says. We choose our own paths; we prefer to rise on our own terms. For us to accept that someone higher is speaking with authority—an ultimate authority over our lives—would cost too much, we think. Thus, we make ourselves more deaf. We turn our eyes and ears in other directions.”

  “He could still give us a good shake and catch our attention, couldn’t he?”

  “Neil, he has just given us a good shake. But will we learn from this? Will we see what is so plainly before our eyes? Man without God becomes a slave of the old gods, those demons, or else he becomes his own god and falls into another kind of darkness.”

  This was his theology again, his myth. I preferred a universe without gods of any kind, good or evil. And I knew he was probing this element of my interior life. He was really asking me if I had made a god of myself.

  “How can a man rely on anything?” I replied to his unspoken question. “How can a man know his duty and what true justice is?”

  “Are your questions rhetorical, Neil? Or are you asking me for my thoughts?”

  “Whatever, Dariush”, I shrugged.