Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel

by Michael D. O'Brien

  “It’s not responding either, sir. It’s got to be an auto-function that’s blocking our commands.”

  The Commander turned on his heel and went forward to his post. I followed close behind him. He clicked the ship’s communications network and spoke into it, calling all computer people to KC immediately.

  The Commander then sent a message to Earth-base, informing them what was happening.

  *

  Continuous searches were made in Navigation’s innermost control center, deep in the ship’s energy section on PHM. But a manual control for the off / on function, if there was such a thing, was never found. In our present situation, the absence of such a mechanism seemed to be an insane omission on the part of the ship’s designers. Placing limitless confidence in the KC terminals, they had not foreseen this kind of crisis. Thus, our frustration steadily gave way to feelings of suppressed panic. Weeks passed, technicians came and went, slaved over terminals with shaking hands, but in the end, they threw up their arms in dismay, as perplexed as anyone else.

  When the reply from Earth arrived, it was coded top secret. The communications people had decrypted the message and printed it out in plain English for the Commander’s eyes only. I was standing beside him when he read it quietly to himself. His face paled, and then he turned to me as if he did not see me. The paper had fallen from his hands. I picked it up and read it. He was instructed by Earth-base, on the authority of the World Federation, to destroy the ship. For a moment, the Commander stared at me, and then he seemed to recognize me. A wave of bitterness washed across his features, but he said nothing and abruptly turned away, heading toward the exit door. I caught up with him as he was entering the KC elevator. He ignored my presence, his face still white, his brow sweating.

  We got out on PHM, and made our way swiftly to the propulsion department.

  The Czech engineer was sitting in an easy chair beside the main reactor, chuckling to himself as he watched a comedy on his mobile max. The Commander tried to catch his attention courteously, but the engineer scowled and ignored him.

  The auxiliary reactor was humming, and I could hear the faint whisper of the maneuver vents firing outside the hull, turning us slowly, slowly, toward our final destination.

  The Commander picked up the max and shut it off. Then he described the situation to the man and instructed him to shut down all electric power in the ship.

  “Do you mean flip the switch, boss?” the other asked with an ironic look.

  “Shut everything off”, the Commander snapped. “We have to kill the navigation.”

  “Turn it off upstairs, why don’t you?”

  “The navigation commands aren’t working.”

  “With my deepest apologies, boss, but there is no switch down here. I can turn off nothing.”

  “What! This is the energy source for the ship!”

  “Yes, but the designers cleverly protected it from us fallible human beings. No one is allowed to shut off all the power with one click. You see, we always need air, we need water, we need—”

  “Then how do we do it?”

  “You would have to spend two days unlocking the fail-safes for the ship’s energy system. This requires three engineers, each with his permission and unique code-key. I can show you the service portal, if you wish. But it won’t help you. There are back-up batteries too—somewhere else, not here—navigation will continue to run even if the reactor is shut down.”

  The Commander fumed, his lips working angrily.

  “Put the reactors into meltdown”, he barked. “The ship must be destroyed.”

  The engineer looked at the Commander as if the latter were insane.

  “What are you talking about?” he huffed.

  “Blow this ship up!”

  “A reactor meltdown does not cause a nuclear explosion”, said the engineer as if he was trying to explain the obvious to a tedious child. “It will produce steam, yes; lethal radioactive emission, yes; fire, yes; some damage, yes; but there will be no large explosion. Besides, this ship is stronger than the containment building of a power plant.”

  “Then how do we demolish it?”

  “You cannot . . . unless . . . unless . . .”

  “Tell me, man, and make it quick!”

  “We power up the deceleration tubes from the propulsion reactor—anti-matter-catalysed fusion. Reverse thrust, you see. The tubes fire inside the ship, and then we break into pieces. Simple, no?”

  “Simple”, the Commander murmured. “Then do it—and do it now!”

  The engineer put a little flask to his lips and took a long drink from it. He sighed and said, “I have no controls for it here. You must do it from KC.”

  Back upstairs, we went at a run down the corridors into KC command and arrived at the deceleration console. I closed my eyes, preparing myself to be disintegrated. Command after command was entered, but nothing happened.

  None of the anti-matter gurus had survived the blast on Nova. If Xue had been here and given enough time, he might have been able to rig the anti-matter propulsion units to backfire into the ship or, with luck, collapse our entire mass into a microscopic black hole. But he was not here.

  Navigation people came forward and informed the Commander that the instrument readings continued to show that the ship was adjusting itself perfectly for intersection with Earth’s orbit, and if the present course continued we would impact with the planet within thirty-eight hours.

  *

  They tried everything possible to change us from a massive missile into a fine rain of debris. On the last morning of my life, when I realized that we could not stop what was about to happen, I returned to my room on deck B. There, I changed my clothing, dressing myself in my fine black suit, which I had last worn for Pia’s wedding. White shirt and bolo tie. My old snake knife snapped into its case at my waist. I shined my cowboy boots. As an afterthought, I shaved my face and combed the few remaining strands of my hair.

  “It’s my party”, I snorted at the contorted face in the bathroom mirror.

  As I was preparing to leave my quarters, I happened to glance at the poet-deer on the shelf. This in turn led to a bitter last look at Xue’s Bible and his slide rule. After filling the revolver chambers with bullets, I tucked the weapon into my belt. Then I went out and found the closest bistro. I took a jug of vodka from its stores and went forward to the panorama hall.

  The room was empty. I was relieved because I wanted to be alone for this. I sat down on the padded bench, front row center, the best seat in the house. Now I would watch the greatest epic in the history of film.

  The screen was 3D real time. We had just passed Pluto, with about seven hours to go until impact.

  Speed gives you relativity. So does alcohol. During those inebriating hours, I laughed and laughed and sipped and sipped. What kind of laughter was this? I do not know. It was black and bitter in a way that I had never before experienced. Not merely the absence of internal light, a dying bird struggling blindly in a tar pit. No, it was something closer to the inversion of light into a deeper inversion of darkness—a psychological mobius loop that twisted upon itself in an infinite descent.

  Spiraling ever downward, I looked inward to the fast-flashing film of my life, its unceasing honors, its secret failures. Its losses and helpless rage, its murderous ambitions in the name of justice, the spiral staircase, which I saw myself shattering with an axe. And mixed with these were the dreams I had had during the voyage—the images thrown up by my subconscious—the aged woman in a turquoise sari looking at me with love, the girl bringing me a golden bowl of food, offering it to me if I would accept, urging me to eat, calling me pitaji. Then more fractured images: Alvaro with a bullet shattering his skull, my mother with her belly cut open and my brother and sister pulled from her body like rats. My own beautiful children leaping into a lake of floating water lilies, then me leaping and laughing in the ocean waves with them at my side, and the boy playing the cello—my son, or myself as I might have been. I saw
the love running through everything, oft-beleaguered love, and love now dying in the suction of absolute despair, the approaching conflagration of all love, the final extinction of love.

  By now, Earth had realized we were its incoming nemesis. We flashed through a barrage of nuclear missiles, too fast for them to lock onto us. Then we penetrated mine fields, a needle at lightspeed, passing through a haystack without touching a straw. There were explosions in space behind us as we touched the mines’ sensors and in split seconds were beyond their range as they detonated.

  Now there were only a few contracting hours left.

  The auto-navigation had set the course years ago, locked, fused, fated by my hand. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I had climbed my own stairs. I had made my own stairs, and now I would see where they led to. Behind me were several hundred deaths that would not have occurred without my genius intervening in their lives. Ahead of me were billions upon billions of deaths.

  I looked at the gun in my hand and pondered it. Should I put the muzzle to my temple and execute the executioner with Paul Yusupov’s weapon, Prince Felix’ weapon? Shoot Rasputin’s demon or el ojo del Diablo? Blow a hole in the hole?

  Then I wondered if it wouldn’t be better, after all, to cut my throat. I patted the kit at my waist, and felt the old knife that I had owned since boyhood, the very blade with which I had incised my leg, stabbing at the poison that would have killed me young. And here it was again, the blade open, hilt gripped in my left hand, ready to slice through the pulsing jugular, my final, futile attempt to defeat the serpent’s venom, because El Día de los Muertos had arrived at last. This day would kill me, but I would kill myself first and prove my mastery over life and death.

  Yes, I can do that, I thought. I would like to do it. It would be a token repayment for what I have done. But it is the easy way.

  I lowered the gun and the knife.

  “No, Neil”, I declared. “You are going to watch this to the moment of impact. You will see the ultimate bonfire of your vanity.”

  The ship passed more mine fields. Earth had analyzed our speed and trajectory. Now, they were detonating all the fields on the chance that the Kosmos would be in the middle of one at the exact microsecond when the atomic blast occurred. It was their last best hope, and it was useless. We sped onward through thousands of detonations, and none of them touched us.

  “Scatology heads of the fifth dimension!” I sneered. “Always counting on your technology—worshipping it, drugged by it, and killed by it.”

  Yeah, me too—the biggest scatology head of all time—the killer of killers and the killer of the innocent. The tyrants were all there on the target. And so were the red blossom children.

  I could pray, I thought. I could ask for mercy from the God I don’t believe in, the maker of galaxies and wooden staircases. I could ask him to stop this ship. I could beg him to save the billions upon billions I am about to kill.

  For an instant, I wanted to pray for this. But I could not, because hope beyond all hope was not objective reality, because it was not rational, and most of all, because it was absurd to believe the impossible. For I knew that at the end of everything, there are no little old men with burros and jingling bells arriving from nowhere to save you.

  “Watch it all”, I said aloud. “Watch it all until your eyes are vaporized, the ship is vaporized, the impact crater in the land or the sea is vaporized, and a hole is drilled so wide and deep into the molten core of Earth that its bowels spew out and the atmosphere ignites and death spreads its final word across the face of the earth in a firestorm that leaves nothing behind. You won’t feel a thing. You won’t hear anything at all. You will fall into the mouth of the Lord of the Night-gods, and you won’t even care.”

  How many hours were left? It did not matter, O obsessive measurer, O calibrator of mankind’s end! Matter—anti-matter. Christ—anti-Christ. Time—anti-time. Minutes, hours, days, millennia, eons—all were meaningless.

  There was a man standing near me. He had walked into the room without me seeing him at first. Then he stepped in front of the screen and blocked my view. His thoughtlessness enraged me.

  “Do you mind?” I growled.

  He turned, and I saw he was carrying a little black dog in his arms.

  “Hola!” he greeted me in Spanish.

  “Yeah—hola”, I said back at him.

  “It looks bad”, he said.

  “You think so, do you?”

  “Maybe we’ll be okay.”

  I stared at him and felt a wave of disgust at his naïveté.

  “Go away”, I snapped.

  “I do not want to go away, Señor Hoyos”, he replied in a quiet voice.

  And then I knew who he was. This was the young ensign I had met at the Captain’s table. I had written my address on a napkin for him. He was almost a parody—short, chubby, a bit of a moustache, kindly eyes, a thatch of black hair that should have been cut long ago. A white uniform none too clean.

  The dog whined and buried its nose in the crook of his elbow.

  “This is Feedo”, he said. “Poor Feedo, his master and the lady die in the bomb on the planet. I look after him now, but he is very old. He is blind, and he is, you know, not always listening to me.”

  “You should go to your room”, I said. “Lie down and go to sleep. You won’t feel a thing.”

  “But I want to feel, Señor. I am awake. I am alive.”

  “Not for long.”

  “Is your cabin in the mountains of Santa Fe very nice? I would like to visit you, as you asked me.”

  “It’s nice, but you won’t be visiting me there.”

  “I would like to build a house where my parents could live.”

  “Well, that’s unfortunate. I guarantee you won’t be my neighbor.”

  “They say we will burn.”

  “That’s right. Everything will burn.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No”, I said.

  “I am a little bit afraid. But I think Nuestro Señor will come for us.”

  “Nuestro Señor? I hate to tell you, but it’s too late for all that.”

  “It is not too late.”

  I said nothing. The rings of Saturn rolled past. “Nuestra Señora will help us. She will pray for us.”

  “You think so? Take a look at the screen. In a couple of hours from now, we’re going to smash the biggest piñata of all time. And it won’t be candy that spills out.”

  For a time we stared at the big show. He stroked the whimpering dog. I drank.

  “La Madré, she crushed the serpent’s head, Señor.”

  “What is your name?” I asked, though it didn’t matter what his name was.

  “My name is Manuel.”

  “The serpent has won, Manuel. He devours everything.”

  “No, he will not devour everything.”

  He put the dog on the floor, where it curled up and went to sleep. Then he sat down in the seat beside me, too close. I looked away. What did he want from me? Comfort? A word of hope? Soon he would be dead because of me.

  “Go away, Manuel”, I told him. “Don’t watch this.”

  He did not look at the screen, the final hypnotic film of man’s demise. Instead, he gazed into my eyes and said: “Pobrecito, Neil, estás tan triste. No te pongas triste, no estés triste. Todo va a estar bien.”

  Stunned, I stared at him. I knew those words!

  “What!”

  He said it again. Then he knelt down on the floor beside me and began to sing. It was some kind of prayer-song. He closed his eyes and lifted his arms, and the singing went on.

  I glanced at the screen and saw Jupiter approaching.

  “You must pray too, Benigno”, he said.

  “Why did you call me Benigno?” I shouted, hating his stupid face.

  He did not answer, merely increased the volume of his prayer, pleading with Nuestro Señor.

  I reached into my jacket pocket—I don’t know why. To feel the power of a gun
or a knife, I suppose.

  One of my hands closed over something strange that felt like brittle paper and small sticks. I pulled it out to toss it away and saw in the palm of my right hand a bundle of the seed pods I had collected in the crystal forest on Nova. I shook them absentmindedly. They chimed.

  And with that sound, something within me cracked. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I fell backward through time, back through the maze of many years and the complicated paths I had taken, back into the still pure moment when, as a child, I had danced and sang and rang my little bells in a desert. Without thinking, hardly knowing it, I slid from the chair and onto my knees.

  I closed my eyes. I could not pray. But I was no longer a vortex of anti-light, no longer a void. In my soul, I saw only what I had once been—my small, young heart as I danced and sang and rang my bells, looking upward into the deep field of the infinite. I saw this and nothing more.

  Manuel resumed praying as I wept.

  We had just passed Jupiter’s moon Ganymede when Manuel suddenly dropped his arms and looked at me with wonder.

  “Señor, I have seen something. In my heart, I see a room within a room. I see a bridge. And I am the bridge.”

  “A bridge?”

  He stood abruptly and took my hand, making me rise to my feet. “Come”, he said. “There is little time.”

  Pulling me by the arm, he led me swiftly from the hall and to the closest elevator. Inside, he pressed buttons on the console, we descended, and got out on PHM. From there, we hurried along the concourse to a cross street and turned left on it. Now we were in a section of service bays for the energy grid, a wide avenue bordered by metal doors. I had seen them before, time and again, whenever I accompanied technicians blindly groping inside the ship’s complex systems, searching for a solution that had ever eluded us.

  Manuel halted before a door on which was printed a large letter N. He threw it open and stepped inside. We were now in the entrance foyer to navigation’s energy section. A workbench on the wall opposite was littered with tools and small electronic components. Without hesitation, Manuel grabbed a spool of bare copper wire and then sprinted toward yet another door, leading deeper into the interior.