Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “It seems you wish to be good on your own terms. You are a man of fine qualities, in many ways, a noble person, a man of courage. Yet you are also proud, for you think yourself alone in the universe.”

  “I don’t think I’m alone. Here we are talking together, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but you feel very alone.”

  Well, he was right; ultimately I did feel that way. But I wasn’t going to admit it, and I certainly wasn’t going to fuel his argument.

  “Your qualities were given to you through your parents’ sacrifices”, he went on. “And other gifts were given to you as you grew and went out from your family into the world. Did you create these out of nothing?”

  “I’ve done my best with what I have.”

  “What you have? Do you think of these as your possessions? Can you not see that everything was given to you? God gave them to you.”

  “Where was God when Xue was burned to death and shattered on the pavement?”

  “He was with him . . . and in him.”

  I frowned, thinking to myself that his theology or philosophy was a version of the endless variety of consolations humans clutch onto when the unthinkable occurs. I had mine, he had his.

  “I believe in people”, I declared. “I believe we can make of our lives whatever we choose.”

  “I believe this too, Neil. Within the limitations of our nature, this is so. Yet is there not a crucial element missing from your equation? If we choose blindly, we so often choose according to the impulses of what is unredeemed within our nature, or unpurified, I should say.”

  “I thought your Christ redeemed everything.”

  “Fundamentally, it is accomplished, yet the final part remains.”

  “Accomplished but not accomplished?” I said, frowning.

  “Science and our countless electronic servants tell us that all things are accomplished by the flick of a switch. We live surrounded and sustained by linear circuits. Thus, existence is perceived as a mechanism.”

  “That’s a rather sweeping generality.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And I fail to see your point.”

  “My point is, time cannot be reduced to a mathematical equation and no more than that. From the perspective of eternity, we will, I believe, see the unfolding of human history as a drama that transpires in the blink of an eye. But we who are still within time cannot yet see it.”

  “Answer me this, Dariush: In this blink of an eye, why are so many of Christ’s followers suffering? Why haven’t they changed the world for him?”

  “We change the world in the most important way. First, we labor to conquer ourselves, and then to resist the spirit of the world. I know you grieve over the way the world is. It is your solution that is wrong.”

  “Really? What do you think is my solution?”

  “You strive always to prove yourself superior to the world and at the same time to make yourself apart from it.”

  I don’t know why his words inflicted such sudden pain. I suppose I felt he was judging me. In answer, I merely shrugged. I reached for my cup of ale and drank in one gulp until it was empty. Then I stood up, preparing to make my departure in a cordial manner.

  “The point is, Dariush, I have no way of knowing if your God exists or not. And frankly, I don’t care.”

  “You care”, he said.

  I smiled patiently, conveying my affection and pity for him.

  “Neil, if the redeeming light of Christ were to go out of the world, mankind would swiftly fall into greater darkness—and then the world would be ruled not only by errors. It would be ruled by the diabolic.”

  An image of the beast in the temple crypt passed through my mind, and then, strangely, an image of little children with red dots on their hands scattering into chaparral bushes, to hide.

  I shook my head. “I’m very tired. Let’s call it a night.”

  *

  There was another significant conversation, though it ran along different lines. One day as I sat alone in the library on deck A, staring at the floor, he came into the room carrying a sheaf of paper.

  “I wondered if I would find you here”, he began. “I have learned something important. These are translations of archival records from the period immediately preceding the internment of the ship.”

  I sat straighter. “What do they say?”

  “They say a great deal. During the past few days, I have tried to learn more about their thinking, their planning.”

  “You mean why and how they made the bomb?”

  “Exactly. A philologist-archaeologist must be something of a detective, you realize. Of course, hundreds of thousands of scans were auto-translated, and the bulk of them were awaiting intensive analysis when we return to Earth. Only a small minority had been subjected to further refinement by human analysis.”

  “Such as the three codices under the temple altar.”

  “Also Kitha-ré and Pho-rion’s song. A few other documents as well. However, in an effort to understand the minds behind the catastrophe, I tried word searches of the entire body of archive translations.”

  “Words like bomb and explosion?”

  “Yes. There were no results, of course. The bomb’s designers were clever enough to know that we might stumble across such references, alerting us to the danger. Moreover, they presumed that the bronze tablet in the tower exhorting us to focus the three lights of the sun into the eyes of the god would be sufficient incentive. They felt sure we would fall into their trap, beguiled by curiosity. And so we did.”

  “And so we did. But what have you found?”

  “You recall that we posited the construction of the road and causeway between the years 7980 to 7960 before the present. The excavation of the mountain for the making of the temple was completed during the same time period.”

  “And the transportation and internment of the ship took five years.”

  “That is correct. This probably occurred in the time immediately leading up to 7955 B.P, because that is the year when temple rites began. However, the final sealing of the temple occurred at some point between 2064 to 2061 B.P.”

  “Nova-years or Earth-years?”

  “Earth-years. I adjusted the codex dates to our chronology.”

  “Then the ship has been sitting in the temple for around eight thousand years, and waited in the dark for two thousand of those years. But when did they make the bomb?”

  “I am uncertain about this. However, I thought it unlikely that they would have created such a malevolent device, one so vulnerable to the sun, before the last moment. If that were the case, it would surely mean it was made shortly before the sealing of the temple. And on this supposition, I searched more diligently through the archives dealing with the final hundred years.”

  “And . . .”

  “There was too much material to read. Let me say that it was a horrifying portrait of a society going mad. There were plagues and revolts, countered by increasing suppression and regulation of their society, a proliferation of laws and police and military. The temple sacrifices grew in numbers even as their population declined. They understood that in practical terms this was a mistake, but the gods demanded it, and their belief in their gods assured them that it was the only path to survival.”

  “From the plague, you mean?”

  “From that. But more significantly, their astronomers were recording ‘lights in the heavens’ which had appeared in the direction of ‘the beautiful planet’, their planet of origins. They were told by the Night-gods that the ‘servants of the sky-god’ were gathering for a great battle and were coming to wreak vengeance on those who had escaped. Thus, more and more sacrifices to the Lord of the Night-gods were demanded in order to augment his power.” Dariush paused, frowning, doubtless worrying about my theological limitations.

  “You realize that there can be no such augmentation in purely spiritual terms”, he continued. “It is the evil one’s nature to compound murder upon falsehood. It was the unleashin
g of his hatred. As his sphere of influence shrank, he sought to destroy everything he could in the realm of living creatures.”

  “Uh . . . but why the bomb?”

  Dariush looked down at the papers in his hands.

  “It took them ten years to make, and they began the project not long after the first sightings of a new ‘star over the star of the beautiful planet’, which is how they expressed it. Later, there were more celestial phenomena, ‘fires in the heavens’, which they called the ‘warriors of the sky-god’. What these were exactly, and how they were manifested is not clear in the records. But one thing we know is that Nova’s rulers felt threatened in a way they had not for thousands of years.”

  “And they thought a bomb would protect them?”

  “No. They conceived it and built it as an act of vengeance against those who would come from the stars as servants of the ‘sky-god’.”

  “Which, as it turns out, we are not.”

  “Some of us are.” He paused for a moment and went on. “After selecting the archival material dealing with the hundred years leading up to the moment when the ship was locked behind the mountain gate, I searched for words such as fire and flames and light. I found that during the final ten years before the closing of the archives, these words appeared with increasing frequency, always in mythic terms and euphemisms.”

  Dariush held up a sheet of paper.

  “This translation is from an archive tablet inscribed shortly before the final sealing of the temple. It tells of a prophecy that came through the mouth of the last Ap-kalu. He speaks of a people who will come from the beautiful planet in another heavens-ship. They will be servants of the sky-god, and they must be destroyed as the final insult and shaming of the sky-god. When the codex was composed, the rulers of Nova knew that their days were numbered. Their population had by then declined to a fraction of what it once was. Their cities were mostly empty, save for the one we call City 4, the last to be built and the last to fall into silence, unremembered for millennia. There, the rulers and religious hierarchy lived among a remnant population, with more and more dying every day. Even then, they demanded that the sacrifice of children must continue.”

  “You call it a prophecy. But how would their gods know the future?”

  “The evil spirits could not know the future. Yet they could anticipate it. I think that the realm of the evil beings is one of fear as well as hatred. Thus they feared that the ‘sky-god’, who had been born on Earth and had overcome their dark lord on that planet, might one day go farther and bring the war to Nova through his servants. And thus they whispered in the minds and hearts of their human vassals.”

  “Is there anywhere a mention of how they built the bomb?”

  “Nothing that we would call science. Like other major documents, it is poetic in nature, expressed in terms that were meaningful for them but remain mysterious to us. Here is an example: ‘Two flames of the Lord of the Night-gods lie sleeping in the belly of the beast that is sacred to the Lord of the Night-Gods’—their name for dragon.”

  “And their name for the ship.”

  “Yes. Like a dragon, it is an entity that flies, it is consecrated to their evil deity, and it is deadly.”

  “What else does it say?”

  “The text continues: ‘One flame is lesser and one is great. The lesser will awaken the greater, that the light of the Lord of the Night-gods may shine forth, be it soon or in ages hence. Then shall the sky-god be shamed as in days of old, and all shall bow down and remember the one who ever rules the heavens.’ ”

  Again Dariush paused in his recitation. “Go on,”, I said.

  “ ‘Prosperity and reward, the Lord of the Night-gods brings to the realms of man. Thus they will know that he bestows both good and ill, and those who follow him shall soar and know that they are gods.’ ” Dariush cast a glance at me. “Here is the final entry, Neil: ‘The gate is closed, and the chant of finding is placed in the middle tower on the high road that leads to bliss. The chant will show them the way.’ ”

  “The gate is closed?” I objected. “Wouldn’t this mean the scribe was interred inside the temple? He would have archived the tablet and then lain down to die.”

  “Not necessarily. The gate may have been closed, leaving a single block open for the scribe to make his exit. No adult skeletal remains have been found in the temple crypt, despite our searches in all its sections. Though the millions of skeletons have not all been examined, the thousands that have been are, without exception, those of children. I think it likely that if the scribe had died there, his remains would be fairly close to the staircase or near the sculpture of his god.”

  “Well, it’s a moot point. The deed was done. The chant indeed showed us the way.”

  Dariush sighed. “ ‘Those who follow him shall soar and know that they are gods.’ The ancient temptation, you see.”

  “Yes, I see”, I replied. “And I see more than that.”

  “What do you see?” he asked expectantly.

  “I see what religion does to human minds.”

  *

  Throughout the following weeks, I performed my cleaning tasks, lit the kindling in the fireplace, and fed the fire with larger pieces of wood, ate meals regularly, and tried to walk a little every day. I sat in the arboretum sometimes, and after locating its audio control panel, I resumed my early morning habit of listening to Mozart. Music as wave of spirit? Was there really such a thing as spirit? Was spirit sub-subatomic energy? What then was personality? What was beauty, and why did it affect the human bio-mechanism as positively as it did the plants? When I noticed that some of the smaller bushes were wilting for lack of water, I located the irrigation controls and took over that task as well. Mostly I kept to myself, restless and brooding.

  I recall sitting among the soothing trees early one morning. I had by then found a way to silence the artificial birdcalls. That day, I felt indifferent to the usual music and left it off. There was a control for the sounds of wind, however, so I set the volume to low, sat back on the park bench, and closed my eyes.

  I was again in the desert of New Mexico, perched on a fallen mesquite tree. My father was beside me, and at our feet a campfire crackled as it consumed twigs and the dead husks of bean pod. Sweet smoke was in the air.

  Benigno, he said, I’d cut off both my legs if I thought it would help you walk straight.

  “How does a man walk straight in this life?” I whispered aloud. “How can a man know his duty?”

  There is right, and there is wrong in this world, my son.

  “This I know, Papacito, this I know. But where are the borders?”

  The borders are not east and west, Benigno; they are not north and south.

  “But how do I find them?”

  Look up and you will find them.

  “Look up to the sky?”

  Look up to the heavens above the heavens.

  “But that is what the aliens told us, the aliens who were ourselves.”

  I speak of another heavens, the true heavens which you will find.

  “But it is too late for that now.”

  Only when a man’s last breath has ceased is it too late. Turn now and climb.

  The campfire crackled as I threw another handful of bean pods onto the flames. They burst and flared, their sparks rising into the blue sky above the desert of New Mexico.

  I opened my eyes, and my father was gone.

  *

  Turn now and climb, he had said. But where would I turn? How would I climb? Gazing upward at the ceiling four stories above me, I watched electronic clouds passing across the illusion of infinite blue.

  I returned to my room and sat down on the bed. I opened Xue’s Bible at random and stared at the inscrutable text, straining toward what I had lost. I could only sense it and did not know what it was. An impressionist memory-bank of origins perhaps, piñatas and feast days, a thousand times kneeling in the dust of the plaza to receive the host on my ignorant tongue, my mother’s tears, my f
ather’s inexhaustible courage in the face of defeat. Perhaps, too, I needed to know that Xue had been real. Though he was gone, the volume in my hands was a touchstone of his presence.

  *

  I remember Dariush as the signal presence during my last portion of life. There is anguish in the memories, because of what happened.

  We shared several good exchanges before the end. I recall especially the evening he appeared in my doorway with a whimsical Persian smile on his face.

  “Neil, I have come to invite you to a celebration.”

  “I’m not a crowd person, Dariush, but thanks anyway”, I said.

  “It will be a crowd of two, my friend. Won’t you come? It is to honor a lady well known to us both.”

  “Pia?”

  “Today is December 12th on Earth, and if the space / time continuum has not played us a mischief, we may still celebrate the feast of the Mother of Guadalupe.”

  “You know about her?”

  “Who has not heard about her!”

  His remark was highly debatable, but driven by simple curiosity, I got up and followed him.

  He led me to the Mexican bistro, and therein I saw that he had been busy. Strings of multicolored Christmas lights had been hung from the ceiling, luminous in the darkened space. Chairs and tables had been pushed back, leaving only a solitary table and two chairs in the center of the room.

  I half-smiled, wondering what he was up to. Like a gracious maitre d’hotel, he conducted me to the table and bade me take my seat. A white candle burned on the turquoise tablecloth.

  From the bistro kitchen, he brought a steaming plate of tacos dribbled with salsa sauce. Back to the kitchen, he went and returned with another serving bowl. Setting it on the table with a flourish, he declared: “Cucarachas, Neil. I made it myself.”

  I burst out laughing. “I think you mean enchiladas, Dariush. Cucarachas are cockroaches.”

  He sat down and peered into the serving bowl, filled with tortillas smothered in hot chili peppers and sliced olives. Then he too erupted—a chortling old scholar’s laugh, his face turning red, tears of hilarity slipping from his eyes.

  Why did we laugh like that? How was it possible we were still capable of laughter? Did we no longer care that so many people had died? No, I think it was because we cared so much, and the silly joke gave us a temporary reprieve from the crushing grief. When we had recollected ourselves, we began to eat. There was a flagon of nova-berry wine too, and a bottle of cold Mexican beer that we split between us.