Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (2 page)

Mamá
had a point about snakes. My sneakers were falling apart, and lately I’d grown so fast there were two inches of ankle showing beneath the cuffs of my jeans. Another reason to find a job.

A few minutes later, I rounded a bend in the arroyo and, without noticing it, stepped on a diamondback rattler that lay coiled on a flat rock. It leaped and bit me just above the ankle. I stumbled sideways and fell onto the stones, the gun clattering away. I reached for it, and fired wildly in the direction of the snake, but it was already disappearing into a crevasse in the rocks.

Inspecting my leg, I saw that the swelling around the fang marks was spreading quickly. I unbuttoned my trail knife from the kit at my waist, clenched my teeth, and cut two slices into the flesh. There was no way I could suck out the poison, so I used both hands to compress the area around the wound and squeeze out as much as possible. The blood dripped, but the fangs must have hit deep, because the swelling was worse now, and it felt as if someone was putting a blowtorch to my leg. Using my belt, I made a tourniquet below my knee, and stifling a cry, I cut deeper. As the blood began to flow, I tried to stand up, intending to hobble home as fast as I could, praying for time.

But it was no good. I felt dizzy, and now there was a corona of light around everything. I took a few steps, then collapsed. My head ached, and I could not keep my eyes open because the sunlight was another kind of fire.

Without warning, something wet and hot laved my face. I pushed it away, but it returned, along with whimpering.

“Rusty”, I croaked, frightened by the sound of my rasping voice. “Rusty boy, go get
Mamá
.”

*

During the year following this event, a high school teacher visited me in the hospital, and later at my home in the trailer park. He brought books. These were mostly about science. Natural history, astronomy, a bit of physics, and a bit of math, things that he thought might help me with my lagging studies. I had never been a good student, and now it seemed that I would become one of Education’s countless casualties. But with little to do other than staring at ceilings and lavishing a good deal of affection on my dog, my attention was hooked, and then engrossed. I began to read in the subjects that had been arbitrarily brought to my attention, and begged for more. At first, my mind felt strained to its outer limits, and then the thing caught hold and I simply devoured. Five years later, I entered a college in Santa Fe, New Mexico, majoring in physics.

The Ship

     I went into the little boat

     I had crafted with wood and tears.

     I rowed it to the true horizon

     Beyond the gate of my fears.

—Xue Ao-li,
Beijing Poems

October 13, 2097

Earth base—Africa

I awoke from a dream of remembering. I do not mean that I awoke remembering a dream, though I did that too. The dream itself was about remembrance: the act and the mystery of it.

I had fallen asleep somewhere near mid-Atlantic and did not open my eyes again until the captain of our thirty-passenger Tesla announced that we were about to cross the west coast of Africa. Details of the dream were clear for a few seconds: I am lying on a bed in a little boat. I am very frail, older than I am now. An elderly woman is seated on a chair beside me. She is East-Indian, dressed in a turquoise sari. There is such love in her face—a beautiful face, the eyes wise but childlike. I feel great love for her, though I don’t know who she is. Or maybe in the dream I had loved her a long time. In the dream, I seemed to know.

After I awoke, the feeling of love burned quietly inside me. This was natural enough, a pleasant illusion generated by my chronic aloneness, I suppose. Was she that girl I met in Santa Fe half a century ago, grown old? Was the dream a longing for what might have been? Probably it was. Yet, in the strange ways of dreams, it had seemed so real—for a few moments more real than the objective reality of the aircraft that was bearing me on the first stage of my journey. I also felt an urgency in it, as if it was exhorting me: Remember. And remember remembering. Even as the details begin to fade, I record it here in order not to forget it.

Love
. How to write this word without prying the lid off a Pandora’s box of illusory images and misinterpretations. If I had paid any attention to it throughout my life, my greatest achievement would not have become reality. I would not be going where I am now going.

For more than a year, I had been marveling over the photographs of the
Kosmos
and reading a constant stream of reports, the standard medium-security documents sent to all scientific personnel, just to keep us informed. During the past six months, there had been, as well, the regional meetings mandatory for anyone who hoped to take part in the expedition as essential staff or as a token presence. I was a token. It had not been forgotten that my theoretical work was at the foundations of the project, but neither was it overestimated. An army of space technologists, engineers, propulsion experts, astronomers, designers, and so forth had taken the mathematical formulas and turned them into the living dream. I had fulfilled my purpose, and it was only the government’s sociopolitical agenda—that is, public relations and the self-image of the member states cooperating in the venture—that ensured my involvement at this late stage.

Thus, obeying instructions from the administration, I flew at the appointed time from America to the great northern desert in Africa, and after the rather lengthy three-hour flight, we began our descent to the airstrip of what I presumed was the ship’s base station. We came in from the west, and because the station was nestled in the hollow of hills I was not afforded a view of the
Kosmos
itself, which I thought must be in the desert beyond. Viewed from the air, the administrative complex looked to be a small city of white, single-story structures spreading horizontally throughout the valley. It was not on any map that I knew of, despite its considerable population, more than ten thousand people, none of whom were visible at the moment, since they would be hiding in the shade to escape the blaze of the sun. The pilot cut the jets as he switched to hover power over the tarmac, and then descended vertically. When we touched down, he taxied the Tesla off the end of the strip and into an underground hangar. This proved to be a cavernous expanse of concrete, the largest man-made structure I had ever seen. It was filled with hundreds of parked jets, much like an autopark in more cosmopolitan settings.

A disembarkation tube clamped itself onto the door, which opened in an instant, permitting me and my fellow passengers a graceful exit. At the end of the tube, each of us was welcomed by an official escort, one per person. Mine was an efficient young woman with digital identibadge embedded on the breast of her uniform, a smile on her face, and a script that she recited by rote, albeit employing my name, position, and honorifics with admirable ease, as if we were long acquainted. Then she led me along a hallway, the ceiling illuminated by an unknown source, the piped air refreshingly cool. My cowboy boots clomped arrhythmically on the floor of shining white marble, while her stiletto heels clicked rhythmically beside me as she made polite chat.

Arriving at the main reception area, I was delivered to the initial security screening and passed through without too many problems. Eyebrows were raised over the compact survival kit clipped to my belt, containing my old fold-knife and other small items. I explained that it was a medical device for the pedicare of crippled feet. They hesitated, then waved me through the scanner. I was lucky. And my status helped, as well as the pathetically exaggerated limp I had produced for the occasion.

My flight was not the only one that would arrive today, and I knew there would be hundreds of specialists on the
Kosmos
, not counting service personnel. The ship could accommodate a thousand, I guessed, judging by the dimensions outlined in the information package. However, to sustain such a large number of people for nineteen years without the aid of supplementary resources would make for certain restrictions.

We Americans, along with a contingent of Koreans and Brits who had just arrived, were guided to a platform and into a rapid transit tube. We sat down on the plush seats, gazing out the windows at blank white walls, and when the doors hissed closed, we were propelled through the heart of the hills. Five minutes later, the machine stopped, and we stepped out onto a platform that appeared to be the lobby of a grand hotel. It was indeed a hotel, though one with a very selective guest list. Like all other buildings I had seen so far, it had only a single story above ground. I was to learn that there were eight more, below ground. A distinctive quality of this edifice was that one whole side was open to natural light, built on the slope of a hill facing north, away from the sun.

My room was scented with a vaguely oriental perfume, the soft carpet was subtly colored, and the furniture lean in design but luxuriously upholstered. The bed looked like something you shouldn’t lie down on because you would never want to get up again. Framed artwork had cosmic themes: Hubble-8 galaxy photos, the new station on Mars, and an imaginative depiction of the planets of Alpha Centauri. The latter image appeared to be hand-painted, though I expect it was machine made. When I drew back the curtains to see what lay beyond, I had my first sight of the ship. There in the desert, about a mile away, she rested on her cradle. She was immense and very beautiful.

At first I just looked, amazed, shaking my head. Stunned, actually. The photos and diagrams I had seen had not imparted her three-dimensionality—not even my home holoscreen had conveyed the impact of her substantiality. Neither had the media images captured the sweetness of her ovoid form, like one of those beautiful white stones one finds on beaches in diverse places of the world, the kind you hold in the hand, not wanting to let it go. You always take it home with you. Always. Beauty is radiant wholeness, balance, harmony. The ship was a perfect manifestation of these. It was also the apotheosis of latent power. A week from now, the power would be unleashed.

*

Days of briefing followed, lectures from department heads, giving us a sense of the complexity of the expedition as well as delineations of responsibility. There will be flight staff and scientific staff for the voyage itself, and another set of scientific staff for investigation of the planet. Also some tagalongs, such as myself and a few famous names. I haven’t yet met everyone.

The hand-out sheets we received at one briefing tell us that the warm bodies are divided into the following categories:

Ship’s flight crew (total 60):
captain and subsidiary ranks, navigation people, communications, liaison staff for the following categories.

Service staff (total 200):
food, cleaning, laundry, mundane troubleshooting, all of which is grouped under the title “Maintenance” (our basic needs).

Scientific staff for voyage (total 171):
subcategories as follows: botanists (8); physicians (12); nurses and paramedics (18); pharmacists (8); astronomers of various kinds (10); atmosphere controllers and recyclers (16); atomic fusion engineers (12); technicians assisting the aforementioned (6); anti-matter gurus / overseers (8); computer fail-safe watchmen (8); odd and sundry experts in extremely obscure fields (17). Add to the above categories the following social sciences: psychologists / counselors (16); psychiatrists (4); sociologists (8); community facilitators, a.k.a. social engineers (20).

Scientific staff for destination planet (total 238):
There is some overlap with voyage scientists, because certain people will be working during the voyage and also working on the planet. I’ve subtracted these duplicates to arrive at the following figures for those who will work exclusively at on-ground exploration: botanists (20); zoologists (20); biologists (22); chemists (13); geologists (26); land transport staff (18); pilots for the four ship-to-ground shuttles (8); physicians (4); data analysts (12); astronomers (4); anthropologists (7); archaeologists (16); linguistic geniuses (10); assistants to the aforementioned (10); military support technologists, a.k.a. security and protection from aliens (48).

Tagalong (total 8):
Nobel prize scientists (5); aging trillionaires who contributed money to the project (2); nephew of the current Federation president (1). Stowaways (uncertain).

And there we have it. The
Kosmos
will bear a known 677 people from our home planet to planet Alpha Centauri A-7, our closest neighbor in the galaxy, just next door, a mere 4.37 light-years away. (See attached list, names, and positions of all personnel.)

*

Well, here we are at last. Theory metamorphosed into solid fact. I recall the day I stood before a microphone in the concert hall in Stockholm, to deliver my acceptance speech of a Nobel Prize for Physics. It was, in fact, my second Nobel Prize, a distinction that has rarely occurred in the history of the Foundation. My previous award had been shared with another physicist, but this one was for me alone, specifically for my work in the dynamics of anti-matter enhancement and catalyzed fusion power. It was all on paper, but interstellar flight was now no longer unthinkable. The “mechanics” were within the range of human capacity, and I had mapped it out. I was forty-seven years old at the time.

I remember clearing my throat, adjusting my eye glasses, and shuffling my papers as the audience waited. I paused, feeling the ache in my ankle, recalling for a moment my vulnerable humanity. Throughout most of my life, I had lived with it and not given it much thought, regretting only that I had cut too deep with the knife and severed things that should never be severed—tendons, nerve connections. Perhaps the wound had also saved my life. Then, for no reason whatsoever, none at least that I might have articulated for the attending king, the scientists, and other dignitaries, I saw myself as a small boy dancing in the desert, yearning upward, and ringing a bell.