Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (37 page)

The fence now surrounds a compound of twenty prefabricated fiberglass residences that look like giant tubular pills, connected by utilidors to a central kitchen and dining, washing and recreation facility, the whole resembling a spoked wheel. There are also twenty laboratory buildings connected to the outer rim of the wheel. The major scientific teams are busily at work, gradually expanding their areas of research deeper into the continent. Certain staff will rotate back to the
Kosmos
monthly, allowing others to pursue studies in numerous sub-fields of each discipline. Botany, zoology, biology, and geology have pride of place. Next come the physics and chemistry people. There is a lot of grumbling in the
Kosmos
cafeterias, because all the scientists want to spend the entire year down there, not caged up in our superb orbiting prison, reading incoming data. Nevertheless, the authorities are adamant that all research must be done according to the planning originally worked out more than nine years ago.

Though he is not a grumbler by nature, Dariush laments with a forlorn air that no indigenous civilization has yet been discovered, not even a trace. The philologists and archaeologists are commiserating with each other, trying to keep themselves distracted by focusing on the marvels that the natural sciences are discovering.

Every day, dozens of missions head off into the hinterland and return with copious samples of flora and fauna, which are given preliminary analysis in the base labs, then ferried upward to the ship for further studies and storage. The information is continuous, torrential, often astounding. Everything is new, and yet we are examining only a small fraction of biological life.

For example:

There is a four-legged mammal, similar to the flying squirrel, with wide weblike skin flanges which when extended become “wings”, allowing this creature to soar from tree to tree, often hundreds of feet at a time. It eats fruit and builds spherical twig nests suspended from branches, in which it raises its young. Its calls are like that of a song bird, but when captured (a very easy thing to do, since it also forages for nuts fallen on the forest floor), it sits in the palm of the hand, gazing at its captor with interest. It will fall asleep on one’s shoulder.

On the other side of the mountain range, southeast of our base, there are large fresh-water lakes, hundreds of miles in circumference and very deep. The fish in them are abundant, their species completely, well,
fishlike
, living on insects and whatever they find to eat beneath the waves. One species resembling the lake trout is the size of a tuna. A salmon-like fish is twelve feet long, and tastes just as good, according to reports by the official tasters. All pre-dinner and post-dinner analysis confirmed that it was quite healthy for human ingestion. There are no exact matches with Earth fish, but so close are they in form and function that the marine biologists and ecologists have named a few, such as the
Salmo novus
.

A zoologist has returned to base with vid images of a mammal dwelling in the warmer regions farther north. About thirty feet long from hoofs to ears, it resembles a giraffe, with four stiltlike legs and an elongated neck, though its head is proportionately larger than a giraffe’s. Like the latter, it grazes on the upper branches of deciduous saplings. Its hide is cream-colored fur with gray vertical neck flashes. It travels in “family” groups, male, female, and three or four offspring of varying heights, and these are in close proximity to other families, forming what one might call tribes, which in turn are part of more populous nomadic groupings of their species that move slowly and peacefully across the landscape. This is the largest land mammal found to date.

Other images display a magnificent horselike creature that ranges across the savanna grasslands. Though its head bears some resemblance to that of the oryx antelope, its body is equestrian, about one and a half times larger than our horse. Its hide is cream-colored fur with a wide red-brown collar and breast. It enjoys breaking into a headlong gallop occasionally, prompted, I would guess, more by playfulness or an excess of energy than by fear, for the zoologists wander freely on foot among herds of the creatures without disturbing their grazing habits.

Apparently, the shallow coastal waters are full of “whales”. The low-orbit robots inform us that the seas are heavily populated with these and similar creatures. According to the scanners, they give off heat and thus are warm-blooded. They are uniformly white. Marine biologists conjecture that they are calving at this season, and may usually, throughout most of their lives, live in the deeper waters of the oceans. Manned oceanography teams begin their research next month when the shuttles will offload mini-subs on the north coast.

Day 65
:

Due to the loss of one staff member to snake bite, all teams must now wear fang-proof protective apparel and carry venom antidote with them whenever they venture beyond the compound. I wish them good luck, because antidotes are not infallible.

The unfortunate soldier was buried at a specially designated cemetery site on the rise of ground at the edge of the compound, beside the flag. He was given full military honors, recorded music, a stirring speech by the Captain, and suitably mournful words by Skinner. Marking the grave is an aluminum obelisk, surmounted by a blue orb on which is inscribed the soldier’s name.

Stron was interred the following day, with the same honors. I was not permitted to attend physically, despite the fact that he was a close friend. The entire astronomy team was shuttled down for it, as well as numerous other star performers. I watched the ceremony on my max. I shut the thing off when Skinner began to recite his artificially grieving and genuinely self-serving eulogy.

To console myself, I opened Stron’s book on quasars, the copy he’d left to me before he died. Since his death, I haven’t had the heart to open it. To my surprise, I found a personalized inscription penned in the flyleaf:

   To Neil, fellow voyageur,

Whoever looks deeply into the cosmos, and continues to look, cannot rest content with what he observes through the telescope. If he persists with courage and honesty, he will ask himself about the meaning and end to which the whole of creation is oriented. Once one veil is removed and our gaze penetrates deeper into “space”, we are faced with intellectual challenges and metaphysical ones.

   Time is not omnipotent. Time is not our god. The Grand Theorists of
Stultifera Navis
assert that, given enough time, anything is possible—anything! In a world lousy with epistemologists, no one thinks to ask how we
know
that time is endless.

   Call me a throwback, if you wish.

   Fraternally,

   Strachan McKie

“Stron, Stron”, I murmured to myself, closing the book. “Where are you now?”

Day 70
:

Metaphysical? Time is not our god? What’s that supposed to mean? His message to me reveals an aspect of the man that I hadn’t expected, despite the fact that in his preface to his book on quasars he refers to “intelligent design” and the “theory of evolution”, both of which are still politically charged expressions. Even so, in the main text, he never reveals where he stands on the matter. I find it difficult to believe that Stron was a “Creationist”. He was quirky enough to enjoy playing around the fringes of the Flat Earth Society, just for fun, just for its shock value. I think he may have been telling me to look further and deeper than (he presumes) I usually look. Judgmental right to the end, he was. Still, it’s hard to dismiss the questions posed by a genius.

There is so much to be learned from the seemingly limitless forms of life we have found that it would be easy to overlook the implications of context, that is, the universal patterns. First of all, there
is
life here. Why life? Why not just a periodic table of elements, as is the case with most of the planets discovered by man? Unmanned probes to the other seventeen planets of AC-A have sent back images that demonstrate there is no teeming life on any of them. However, on the two planets closest to Nova (AC-A-6, one step nearer to the sun, and AC-A-8, one step farther from it), landing modules obtained dust and rock samples that contained primitive “nuclei-bearing eukaryotes”, which Maria Kempton tells me are a form of life. Atmospheres on the seventeen are inhospitable to higher forms of life.

Second, it is phenomenal that Nova has produced organic life with ranks identical to Earth’s—kingdom, phylum, class, genus, species, etc. As on Earth, there is an astonishing diversity of specific living organisms, yet they are all within distinct categories, either plants, fish, reptiles, birds, mammals, fungi, or bacteria. Without exception, the properties common to them are their carbon- and water-based cellular composition, with complex organization and inheritable genetic codes.

I say
phenomenal
, as in a phenomenon according to the strict meaning of this term. Yet it is undeniable that behind each and every dimension of phenomena there is order, coded or otherwise. Stron seems to consider (at least as a possibility) a universal or meta-universal Designer using a common “language”. I prefer to stretch myself further, to comprehend a necessity entirely based in atomic determination. Totally outside my field, of course, but I can speculate.

Day 75
:

The soldier guys have set up a basketball court. First, they mowed the entire compound, then they worked for days grading a level spot into a regulation court, sprayed it with fast-set syntho concrete, set up poles with basket hoops, and without further delay threw themselves into the game. Some of the younger science guys have joined in. I’ve been watching hours of the stuff, wishing I could be down there.

Day 76

A mini golf course has been made. A mini electric golf cart whirrs around it. A mini Trillionaire putters away on it.

Ay caramba!

Day 85
:

More exotic creatures on the big screen:

Hundreds of butterfly species have been captured and categorized, though there must be many more kinds, since several new ones are found each day. Some are very tiny and luminescent at night, like fireflies, though they display a range of colors, not just our home planet’s pale green neon. Some flash off and on, others are constant. Generally, the majority of butterfly species are two to three times larger than Earth’s common ones, such as the monarch. Others, though few by comparison, are three and more feet from wing tip to wing tip. One bizarre species has a tiny head and beak that looks disturbingly like a hummingbird’s—though it is without doubt a kind of insect. Its head is ruby red, its wings magenta with black edges.

Very common is a bird like a turkey in appearance and habits. It has a call that’s different from ours (raucous as a crow’s), and it can fly short distances on its huge wings. Earthlings are slaughtering them in great numbers, and for the first time ever, we are served real meat in the cafeterias. I am told it is quite tasty, though not quite like turkey or chicken; more the flavor of a free-range ostrich that’s been too greedy in a cabbage patch. Easy to kill, they gaze at you calmly as you walk up to them while they’re pecking in the grasslands, gorging seeds even as they are hit over the head with a stick; they look momentarily surprised then drop dead without a quarrel.

There is a benign lizard north of here in the warmer zones, as large as a komodo dragon, slow moving, with five-fingered “hands” and opposable thumbs. It climbs trees at snail pace and eats mainly the antlike insects that swarm the branches. It also has chameleon characteristics. Put any color beside it, and suddenly its skin looks as if someone threw a bucket of garish paint over it. Zoologists have tried using artificial color swatches designed by the computers, and to these the chameleon skin swiftly adapts (though a bit slower than its instantaneous response to colors native to its surroundings). It matches the artificial colors exactly within a few seconds, hues that we haven’t yet found on this planet. What on earth is happening at the cellular level, or molecular level, is anyone’s guess. The labs are busy night and day on this one. Some vivisection experiments are underway, I hear. Not very “green” behavior, if you ask me. However, the pursuit of knowledge tends to sweep aside the objections, since knowledge is ever the deity to which sentiment must pay obeisance.

There have been some outraged cafeteria discussions, which I picked up from nearby tables. I overheard one lab person telling a friend that the “chameleon” screams like a human baby when it is subjected to the scalpel—even under anesthetic.

The “giraffes” continue to fascinate the zoologists, since they have a more complex social organization than other mammals we have so far found. One team isolated a very young one on the edge of a “tribal” group, intending to sedate it and bring it back to the base camp. When the dart brought it down, it emitted a single alarmed squeak. Without warning, the thirty or forty larger animals broke into a gallop and came to the rescue, surrounding the afflicted one. They did not attack the scientists, who had backed off, some at a run. Instead, the animals commenced a rapid high-step pounding of the earth all around the victim, flattening the grass, chopping it into fibers, as if seeking to destroy invisible predators with their hooves. One scientist suggests that this is behavioral adaptation as protection against snakes. Needless to say, the team beat a hasty retreat, leaving the young one asleep. Its two parents stood over it trumpeting from their long necks, a sound we hadn’t heard until now, very different from their usual low-pitched bovine noises. Even as the AEC got airborne, the team saw dozens more of the creatures converging from all directions.

Day 86
:

A knock at my door late in the evening. There in the hallway stood a man, looking at me with a mixture of worry and uncertainty.

“Can I come in?” he mumbled, showing me the sheet of paper that my fellows and I had distributed a couple years ago.