Again I pointed the beam at the shelf, and my eye was caught by a solid shape on top of a stack of papers. Peering closer, I saw that it was a metal sculpture of a deer with a rack of antlers. Sitting on its back, side-saddle, was a tiny man reading a scroll.
My heart beat faster as I understood what I was looking at. I had read about it and imagined it many times in my life, and here it was in the flesh. Picking it up with both hands, holding it tenderly, I scarcely believed that the moment was real. I was overcome with emotion as realms of memory, imagination, past, and present connected through this small symbol, so layered in meaning. After I had dried my eyes and put the sculpture carefully into my backpack, I resolved to give this second treasure to the archbishop as soon as I returned home.
Now my attention turned to the stack of papers upon which the sculpture had stood. I removed the yellowed, brittle sheets from the shelf and took them out into the hallway leading to the chapel, for my mobilight was fading. Reading the first page, I saw that it was a handwritten document bearing the signature of its author, Neil de Hoyos. Its title was Return.
Seated before the altar, I began to read through the manuscript. With growing fascination, I realized that it was a continuation of Hoyos’ journal The Voyage, and that it contained a wealth of information about the catastrophe and its aftermath. It also described events that had occurred during the ship’s return voyage to Earth. One after another, the mysteries were illuminated. The most shocking thing I learned was that Hoyos had been responsible for the death of Fr. Ibrahimi, and had also been the indirect cause of Manuel’s death. He had destroyed apparatus in the Command center, causing the ship to plummet out of control toward the home planet. Later still, the ship was driven by the damaged logic of its electronic master onto a wide course through the heavens, bringing it back to orbit above Regnum Pacis.
Even so, the man had become a sacristan. This indicated that he had found a degree of faith at some point after the final words of his second journal—“I can write no more”—were written. Among the last entries in the journal was a mention that the problem of deceleration / propulsion was solved during the second year following the near-collision with Earth. That event took place in 2117 E-y. His death was five years later in 2122 E-y. This was strong evidence that a community of faith had been formed very early on in the forty-year journey back to Regnum Pacis. Hoyos had lived in the room behind the altar as custodian of what by then was already a functioning chapel. Additional confirmation of his conversion, however, was not to be found in the journal but rather in the notes I had discovered in his coffin.
I completed reading the manuscript late in the afternoon. I felt very moved—and shaken. All my conjectures about what had happened during the long journey had been wrong. Other assumptions I had made about people and events were now proved facile at best. I decided to forego eating supper with my teammates and went down to PHM. Entering the mortuaire, I went first to Manuel’s coffin and opened it. The body within was that of a brown-skinned man in his early forties. Viewed from a few paces away, he could have been mistaken for a youth, but close up I could see the wrinkles about the eyes, the creases in the cheeks, the brush of silver at the temples. The hands were folded over a wooden crucifix that lay on his chest. The right hand was black, the skin burned away, revealing the bones of the fingertips.
I knelt and bowed my head. The surrounding silence was a voluble presence, peaceful, very still, poised in a weightless equilibrium of timelessness. I cannot now recall if I prayed for his soul, but I know that I asked him to pray for me and for the children yet unborn to the people of Regnum Pacis.
Our departure was scheduled for two days later. The team members were unanimous in their conviction that we needed another two weeks on board, a month, if possible. Since our radio reception was nil inside the bay, the pilots took the shuttle out into space for a few hours, floating alongside the ship and radioing the expedition authorities at the science base. When the contact was made, they pleaded for extra time. But those down on the planet could not see what we were seeing, could not understand what we were telling them. In their distanced objectivity, their primary concern was for our safety and that of the shuttle. They insisted that if we had learned the basic history of the ship’s presence and what had happened to its voyageurs, and if the hold was full or nearly full of material to bring back, then we should return home on schedule. Relenting a little, they granted us three additional days.
That night after supper in the dining room, we put our minds together and tried to work out an agreement. We had five days left in which to decide what more could be retrieved. Already the shuttle was three-quarters full of cases containing samples in various fields, and numerous small machines pried out of their countertops and walls (including twenty of the computers known as the max), and thousands of books.
The historians pointed out that most of the books they had loaded were of broad literary and historical interest, and that fully half of the volumes were not indispensable. They had not read far into any of the texts, but thought that many contained material of dubious quality. The histories, for example, had been present in the library by permission of Earth’s global authority, which had been a tyrannical one. Would any tyrant overlook the subversive potential in true histories? Almost certainly, the books were politically approved distortions of the past, and therefore could be removed from the shuttle’s hold with no significant loss. There was also some cultural and sociological writing that seemed to be tainted with ideology, and it too could be weeded out.
These two men, with assistance from myself, argued for certain replacements to be made: for example, selections from among the several hundred works of art in the concourse hallways and some heretofore unknown musical instruments found in an auditorium. After much discussion, a consensus was reached that a third of the space in the shuttle hold would be freed for the addition of these cultural artifacts. We spent an entire day loading paintings and musical instruments. Of course, on Regnum Pacis, we have fine paintings and musical instruments (especially winds and strings). But one large item was wholly unfamiliar to us—that is, until I read a label on its underside: Casals Cello Co. Baltimore 2065. Yes, a real cello! We will now be able to recreate its sounds, which were once so well known by the people of Earth.
Among the team, there was no disagreement about music, but there was vigorous debate over the paintings. The ship’s art, though it was all historically significant, was nevertheless an amalgam of the disorders of Earth’s later civilization. There were works of exalted imagination (truth expressed in beautiful forms), and there were works of degradation (falsehood expressed in both beautiful and ugly forms). There was some confusion over a painting I personally selected and carried downstairs to the bay with the help of one of the pilots. It was titled “Fall of the Rebel Angels”, a stunning visual panorama of a battle between good and evil angels. It was beautiful and horrible—and true. I argued for taking it with us by employing all my theological wits, and by reminding the team about the evil race who had engineered the catastrophe. In the end, everyone agreed that the painting could be included, albeit with a few bemused looks from some.
Of major concern were the bodies of the voyageurs. Each of us felt deeply about the matter. These were the people who had accompanied our ancestors across the heavens. A minority of the team suggested that we leave all the bodies on board so that the Kosmos would remain as a memorial, a kind of floating mausoleum orbiting Regnum Pacis in perpetuity. There was merit to the idea, but the majority of us, myself included, believed that we should bring back some, perhaps all, of the bodies for burial in the living soil of the new world.
However, there was not enough room left in the hold to bring every coffin. The available storage space would be barely sufficient for a total of twenty. With this in mind, on the morning of our last full day on board, we selected from among the deceased those representing the races of the founding pioneers, including African, Asian-oriental, East-Ind
ian, Hispanic, Western European (Anglo, French, Germanic), and Slavo-Caucasian. Three bodies for each of these major groups. All coffins were opened, all names read and recorded, all facial features and skin color examined, and decisions made accordingly. On my insistence, the bodies of Manuel de los Santos, Marie Durocher, and Neil de Hoyos were included in the above categories. By that point, Marie’s remains had been put into an empty coffin and carried downstairs to be stored with the other bodies.
In addition, Fr. Ibrahimi Mirza represented Indo-European races, and two others represented Semitic peoples. A single Filipino represented the Pacific Islands peoples, and finally, one whose racial identity was not certain represented the indigenous peoples who had lived in diverse places throughout the old world. This made a total of twenty-three coffins, and there was not enough room for them all. In the end, space was made by offloading ten of the twenty max machines that had been stored in the shuttle hold.
On the morning of our departure day, we used the trolley to transport the coffins one by one to the shuttle. This took only a few hours because the freezer compartment was on the same floor and not far from the bay. When all was done, we stood back and glanced around the PHM concourse. Among us, there was none of the usual chatting or banter. The mood was solemn. I knelt down and prayed, and the others joined me silently. Standing, I made the sign of the cross over the ship, and then it was time to go. The pilots entered their cockpit; the rest of us entered the portal behind them and took our seats. The shuttle doors closed.
The bell began ringing, the red light flashed, and depressurization was underway. When the bay’s outer doorway slid upward and the infinite depths of space appeared, I felt anew the mystery and grandeur of what the Kosmos expedition had attempted, its strengths and weaknesses, its heroism and its errors, the hopes and failures of all those who had journeyed in the great ship in the heavens. Our time aboard had been as fleeting as a bird on the wing, now here, now gone. Soon it would be a memory, like a glimpse of a white whale surfacing and diving, leaving only the impression that it had been there, a sign, a presence, alien and beautiful and free. Man on this ship had not been free, but he had brought the longing for freedom with him, carefully guarded within himself, secret and silent until it was finally released. He had also brought his evil.
As we descended slowly toward Regnum Pacis, the team members did not converse with each other, and I think that all of us were feeling the pathos of the moment, knowing that we were at the conclusion of the last flight to the Kosmos. It might be many lifetimes, perhaps centuries, before man would, through gradual stages of development, rediscover the secrets of the old anti-gravity device or those of Felix Arthur’s invention.
O God, I prayed silently, please give us long years to grow in wisdom and grace. We have seen what we need to see. We are a people who honor you and turn to you. You are our life and our hope. Do we need any more than this? O Lord of heavens and earth, do not let us return to this ship too quickly. And if in your providence you deem it better, do not let us return ever again.
I glanced out the window. The shuttle was tilting to horizontal, preparing for its vertical descent. It was good to see reality again. Inside the ship, we had been blind. There were no windows. Man had relied too much on his artificial sight. He had been enclosed inside a magnificent invention that gave him titanic powers at too great a cost. In the cases upon cases of archival material I was bringing home to my people, there were extraordinary documents that would testify to this. These and other items of historical importance would simultaneously reveal our potential for authentic greatness and our capacity for making a horror of existence: the glory of man fully alive in the grace of his Creator; and the depravity of man when he turned away from that grace and declared himself lord.
I thought back to Neil de Hoyos’ book, The Voyage, which generations of our people had read, brought to the planet by one of my ancestors. Who among us did not know the final words of that book: O mankind, why, why are you so blind, when you can have this!
Little had we guessed that the book was incomplete, that a more terrible (and in a profound sense, more beautiful) addition to that famous work had been written by its author. He had penned it by hand and titled it Return, not realizing the irony in the word, believing at first he was on his way back toward the Earth.
I thought of what I had learned about the sacrifice of Xue Ao-li, who was known to us, but not fully known until now. Hoyos’ later journal gave us the inner man—the poet and believer willing to sacrifice his life for others. Then I thought of another man of sacrifice: Manuel, who had saved the ship and the planet Earth. A small person, an insignificant person—a soul so beautiful that his humility hid his glory until the very end. For the most part, I thought about Fr. Ibrahimi, whose life and death were entirely sacrificial, embodying both truth and love as a single unified whole.
I also pondered what I had learned about Hoyos himself—Neil, I had thought of him, had always thought of him since I first read his book during my youth. He had seemed to me then a courageous person, greatly at odds with the tyranny of Earth’s government and ruling social system, and this he surely was. He had been bold in resistance, highly intelligent, ruthlessly honest, and ferociously independent. I had admired these qualities. I had, in my own small way, tried to emulate them as best I could during my adolescent years, while seeking to avoid the man’s bitterness and lack of faith.
In this new journal, I saw something else in him, something which, if I had been more mature, wiser perhaps, I might have better understood when I was young. He wished to be good without Christ. As his friend Fr. Ibrahimi once told him, he wished to be good on his own terms. Neil had rejected the insight. He would face some truths about himself, but not all. He admitted to many faults, but it would be the final and fatal eruption of his rage that would reveal his gravest fault to him, his pride. He would kill an evil man, and in the process, he would kill another, the best man in his life. Then, in a frenzy of despair over what he had done, he sought to take his own life, though he was prevented from doing it. During the years that followed, he resisted the urge to self-destruction a number of times as the ship continued onward toward Earth. But that is not how it ended, because yet another man sacrificed his life.
Manuel had died because of Neil’s moment of rage when he had fired bullets into the ship’s vital command functions, and this was a truth that Neil could never forget. Thus, with Manuel’s death, there came one more test. At that point, Neil might well have taken the precipitous final step toward his personal annihilation—the end of all pain, as he thought it would be. But he did not. He chose to live with his guilt and not to carry it alone. He chose to serve others for the remainder of his life.
Strangely, as I had read through Return, its author had more and more reminded me of Dr. Felix Arthur. The two men were of different eras and cultures, and yet their personalities struck me as similar. It may be due to the fact that they were both scientists involved in crucial discoveries that would have momentous consequences for mankind. But I think it was more than this. Could it be that Neil was what Felix might have become if he had not been a man of faith? Could it be that Felix was what Neil might have become if he had had faith throughout his life, if in a moment of wholesome abandonment he had knelt before an authority higher than his own will—before a priest representing Christ himself—and if he then had climbed a spiral staircase, no longer alone?
As I mentioned earlier in this report, Felix Arthur was known to me personally. I first met him five years ago at a meeting in the city, when I was appointed to the team that would one day, hypothetically, board the mysterious object in the heavens. I did not know at the time that he had only a short while left to live, and that because of the man I would board the Kosmos far sooner than I expected.
Arthur was highly respected in academic and scientific circles. An astronomer, electrical engineer, inventor, and professor at the university, he was, despite all his accomplishments, a humble person
. He was gentle-mannered, polite to a fault, and at times, the composer of dry, though not uncharitable, epigrams. In his free time, he was forever writing and revising a book on the laws of thermodynamics, but I know that his chief love was his family. His wife Eleanor, whom I knew less well than I did Felix, was a woman of warm heart, wit, and wisdom, and she was clearly the sustaining human source of his life. There were eight children, their spouses, and more than forty grandchildren. Doubtless his science was his pleasure, but his grandchildren were his joy, for he presided over the clan with a mixture of childlike affection and paternal dedication. Not one of his grandchildren, for example, failed to receive an annual birthday letter containing a poem, a joke, a reflective quote, along with an unusual seashell or bird feather, and, above all, the certainty of being known and loved as unique. Felix and Eleanor’s Christmas parties were a local institution; the decorating of the giant bristle-cone tree in the yard of their modest farmhouse was a ritual that few people of the surrounding shire cared to miss (he used multicolored fireflies and firebutterflies, then released them on Epiphany). An uncommonly loving man, he was loved in return. Only in the final year of his life did he come to have enemies—or more precisely, vehement critics. He responded to the newspaper attacks with great forbearance, without retaliation.
During the year following our first meeting, he had visited the abbey with increasing frequency, in order to ask my advice. I never inquired into the specifics of his research, and he, by the same standard, did not broach the topic. His questions were sometimes about important matters in his personal life, and at other times purely speculative. He was a devout man with a sensitive conscience, and he had a philosophical mind. He was strong and manly in character, yet blessed with a sweet temperament—a not uncommon mix. Never drawing attention to himself, he was very generous to people needing help of one kind or another, especially to families with many children. It seemed to me that if Felix had not been called to marriage he might have become an excellent monk. In the midst of a very full life, he worked hard to maintain a balance of activity and silence: he and his wife prayed the Office together daily and were often to be found in the Science Center chapel, side by side, interiorly recollected.
Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel Page 67