Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (15 page)

Back to my bed, I go. Early this week, Dwayne dropped in and helped me relearn the protocols for the max’s film channels. He also enlarged the screen and showed me how to enhance dimensions for the older films, made before the 3D era.

Despite my earlier determination to avoid the e-drug, I enjoyed it a lot. More and more it seemed. Finished with one film, I immediately wanted another. And another. One day I watched six from the first half of the twentieth century, most of them kind of bloodless, with cowboys and feathered Indians spinning in ballet twirls and plopping into the dust, falling from high rocks in the desert or from roofs in cardboard wild west towns. During the late twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, things got messier—a “realism” so intense that when one of the good guys got shot and blood and entrails were splashed across the screen, I jerked upright on the bed and yelled, “Noooooo!”, my heart pounding.

I won’t describe the details. Let me say only that in the dozens upon dozens of films I watched, the majority exhibited a slavish devotion to every hideous detail of human death in degrading forms, costumed, of course, with cowboy hats and six-shooters. As always, there were plenty of horses, but these creatures alone were computer generated, due to the anti-cruelty-to-animals laws.

Exhausted, zinging with unrelieved adrenaline, I switched to a documentary film about the making of westerns during the latter half of the twenty-first century. By then, the entertainment industry had grown to the size of 32 percent of our continental economy. Moreover, whole sections of the American Southwest had been “mandated” as culture preserves for the making of films, including grand canyons and painted deserts. Finally, I learned that many of the actors who played victims had chosen to be killed, since the industry gave a generous endowment to those willing to sacrifice themselves in this way for the good of the country. I find this incomprehensible, considering the self-preservation instinct in human nature. Maybe for some it was the only way to leave an inheritance to a child or a loved one; for others, perhaps, it was a productive form of suicide.

I switched off the damned
max
and tried to forget the protocols.

I grew up in one of those few places on Earth where hardly anyone owned a digital wall screen. My parents wouldn’t allow one in the trailer. They tried to discourage me from watching it at the homes of my friends the Aztecs. Imagine how hard this was on me. Imagine what it was like walking into a shopping mall beside your four-foot-six-inch-high mother, and you, yourself, age fourteen or fifteen, are not only a foot taller than her, you are also a member of a visibly underprivileged minority, you are not handsome, and you are more or less crippled. The mall is filled with electronics shops that your mother tries to speed you past. But when you halt in your limping tracks, mesmerized by a sex scene on a screen in a shop window, or people being blasted into bloody bits, you want desperately to see more. Your mother reaches up and clamps her hand over your eyes and drags you away.

“
Mamacita
”, you protest all the way through the mall, “stop putting your hands on my eyes! I am not a child! It’s just pretend!”

“It is
el ojo del diablo!
” she cries loudly, making the kind of public scene that prompts strangers to laugh at you—we’re quaint little Hispanics airing our familial conflicts, live drama for bored shoppers. It’s so humiliating you want to run away from home.

Fortunately, around that time, I was also getting deeply interested in physics, and when I went away to college, I had already become obsessed with the subject, and was, as well, antisocial and an appreciator of solitary silence.

Day 1535
:

This evening, I completed the last of Dariush’s five recommendations. Interesting tales, most of them with a dose of death as part of the plot. Not death as entertainment, however, but death entwined with moral complexities. These books are quite different from modern fiction, which I’ve never been able to read without falling asleep or suffering from nausea. It seems that human beings had different minds way back then.

One of the novels,
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
, was spoiled by its heavy-handed moralism. A sailor shoots an albatross and the judgment of hell falls upon him. The one by Conrad also left me ill at ease. What on earth was Dariush thinking when he recommended these?

Day 1548, The Unwrapping
:

It was pretty ugly, I had to admit, even though it was my very own. Yup, there were the healed surgical incisions and the two white scars from my pocket knife. But the twisted muscles and / or ligaments (whatever the heck it was that got messed up inside years ago) now looked better aligned. What a pleasure to see that my ankle and foot no longer bent at the wrong angle, which was the result of favoring it for so many years. The calluses built up over more than half a century’s walking on the edge of the foot are still there, but no longer leathery.

My new leg is half an inch shorter than the other. I will have to walk with a shoe insert now, if I want to avoid throwing my other bones out of alignment.

Day 1550
:

Mmmm, it’s doing okay. I walk and walk and walk. It really hurts, but it’s pure pleasure not to hobble-lurch any more. I still limp—I will always have a limp. The shoe insert fit well in my cowboy boot, since the boots are three sizes too large for me anyway (some years ago I purchased on the black market my last pair of diamondback snakeskin; only one size had been available at the time). When I slipped my feet into them, I found that they were both comfortable. And they looked good—real good. I resisted an impulse to swagger down the hallways with my thumbs hitched in my belt, reverting to juvenile male, cowboy mode. I made do with clipping and clopping rhythmically for the first time since my adolescence.

Day 1552
:

Now for an unexpected memory from my childhood:

On the morning of my fifth birthday, our car broke down, and my father didn’t have enough money to pay for a tow truck or a mechanic. I observed my mother’s worried face, anxious over the demise of her plans to buy party things at a store in Las Cruces, and got worried myself. I looked at my father’s stoic face and felt suddenly uplifted by his confidence—which might have been authentic. He smiled down at me; then he picked me up and tossed me onto his shoulders, where I sat with my legs dropping down over his chest and my hands tightly squeezing his forehead. We used to call this “the camel ride” (as distinguished from piggy-back).

“Come on, Benigno, let’s go for a walk”, he announced. “I’ve got a big surprise for you.”

Thus he packed me into town, easily an hour’s walk in the sun. He was sweating hard but whistled lively tunes all the way. At a dime store, he purchased a bag full of party favors, and from there, we walked hand in hand to a nearby hardware store. In this establishment, he purchased a little red tricycle—my first. Heedless of the family finances or the state of the world’s economy, I leapt onto it with glee, my joy unsurpassed, and pedaled my jolly way out onto the sidewalk while my father negotiated with the proprietor the compiling of some debt.

That done, we cycled to the last street leading out to the desert, and onto the highway. I must have giggled all the way. He walked behind, alert to traffic. Whenever a car approached, he would lift both me and the tricycle into his arms and step off the pavement. After the car passed, I was back down and off like a shot. Nearing Sunnyview Acres, we turned onto the side road that led to our village, and here the surface became more difficult for me to pedal. The old tarmac was bumpy, rutted, strewn with gravel, and increasingly scarred by heat fractures. It was a rough ride.

“Papa!” I complained loudly. “Papa, the road is broken!”

He laughed and said, “
Sí
, but
we
are not broken.”

Day 1660
:

Reading my way through the novels on Dariush’s list, I’ve overdosed on nautical themes. I slipped back into e-addiction for a few weeks.
Ojo del Diablo!

I didn’t feel like watching the death-culture films. Instead, I watched a good deal of science fiction from the previous centuries. It was pretty funny stuff, though the fantaseering class got better as it steadily grew. After the inaugural century, however, the filmmakers were unable to resist throwing gobbets of gore at the audience while manipulating us with terror, horror,
deus ex machina
s,
diabolus ex machina
s, and every primitive instinct known to man. Nauseated, numbed, entranced, I finally realized what was happening and switched it all off, wishing I had a wholesome old hatchet to whack on the head of my
max
.

Day 1705
:

This past week I fell again. I must say in my favor that I only watched the nine film versions of the ancient tale of
Pinocchio
, based on a book written by an Italian during the nineteenth century. I preferred the earlier film versions, yawned through the animated one made by some guy named Disney, loathed the famous remake from the twenty-first century (Pinocchio discovers his adolescent sexuality on the Island of Bad Boys), and relished a twentieth-century Italian one (charming, sad, beautiful), and ended up wishing I could become
a real boy
.

Day 1708
:

Downloaded the e-book edition of
Pinocchio
from the library. Read it and loved it. There was a better mind at work in this story than the minds of those who created the films. Lots of ironic black humor and moral complexities, including some surprising details. For example, when the little conscience-cricket gets on Pinocchio’s nerves, the puppet boy smashes the cricket against a stone wall, and the creature’s brains go dribbling down the cobbles. Looks like things could be gruesome way back then.

Day 1826
:

Five years completed, four more to go.

On a whim, over breakfast I asked Xue if he would like to trade rooms with me. Facing forward to our destination, I’m on the port-side of the ship, he’s on starboard. I suggested it might offer a little variety, keep the left and right hemispheres of the brain limber and negotiating with each other. He had no strong objections to an exchange, but then thought it would be too complicated, considering our
max
es. He explained that the
max
is sealed into each desk as a permanent component. It can’t be removed and packed along with you when you move house. Nor does the computer have a dock for copying files onto a portable
memor
. The desk itself would demand an engineering degree if you wished to dismantle and transport it to another room. Thus, Xue is wedded to his, and I am in uneasy cohabitation with mine. Ah, well, I’ll stay put where I am.

Dwayne dropped off an anniversary gift. I found it on my desk top with a note attached:

This stuff won’t hurt you. Black-market. If you talk, I die. Flush this note
.

No signature, but I know who wrote it.

The polyplast bottle contained an aromatic fruity liqueur. I took a hesitant sip. Peach flavored. It had a very pleasant effect on me, far stronger than what they serve in the bistros.

I called him on voice
-max
, the private number he had given me, and said, “Thanks for the gift.”

“Yup.”

“That was real nice of you. Wish I had something to give in return.”

“Not necessary.”

“I flushed what you asked me to flush.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Were you serious about the word die?”

“Nope. But it could make my life tense if word gets around.”

“Barter system flourishing?”

“Yup.”

“Want to come by my room? We could discuss astrophysics.”

“Uh . . . okay. I get off shift at five. Can I drop in around seven?”

“Yup”, I said. “Bring an extra glass.”

Promptly at seven, a hand rapped at my door. I said, “Open”, and there stood Dwayne.

“Well, come on in”, I drawled. “Take a load off your feet.”

His mouth twitched microscopically into what I took to be his expression of enthusiasm.

“This is really great liqueur”, I said, extracting the bottle from the cabinet. “I haven’t been a hard drinker for eons, but a fellow could change his mind after a sip or two of this. Did you make it yourself?”

“Nope. Fair trade. Man in hydroponics makes it.”

“You shouldn’t tell me such details. What if I’m tortured and I squeal on you?”

“Dr. Hoyos, a guy like you would never talk.”

“I appreciate the compliment, Dwayne.”

He handed me an authentic shot-glass—real glass. I got out my standard-issue polyplast cup and poured us both a drink. “What on earth did you trade for this elixir of life?”

“Did some jiggery-pokery on a guy’s
max
.”

“Taught him protocols, eh?”

“Nope. Turned off the listener, but coded it so no one knows it’s turned off. We recorded a random sound presentation, isolated with old firewall 2019.3 that I adapted and back-turned seven times in layered e-loops so anybody listening hears nothing but snores, showers, and films.”

“I didn’t know you were a programmer.”

“My hobby.”

I glanced at the
max
on my desk.

“And what, exactly, do you mean by listener?”

“Don’t worry”, Dwayne said with a mere hint of a grin. “I did the same to your
max
.”

“You what!”

“Hope you don’t mind. But I figured you hate those guys as much as I do.”

“I don’t hate anybody, Dwayne. Who and what are you talking about?”

“I know you hate the way they rob us of privacy. I can tell. I see you head-butting them all the time.”

Ah, yes,
them
. Doubtless, he meant my occasional disregard for ship’s rules.

“They don’t rob us of privacy”, I said. “It says in the Manual that the
maxes
in residential rooms are each protected by a firewall.”