Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (53 page)

“No”, I shook my head adamantly and took a step back. The men let me be. They wandered over to the staircase, and both of them, perhaps unconsciously, stroked its banister, looking upward through the spiral to the roof. As they talked with each other in quiet voices, I went back to the fire truck and inspected the metal ladders clamped to its side, a coil of rotting hose, and the driver’s cab. I took one of the candles and crawled beneath the machine to inspect its underbelly. Its complicated parts seemed to me a greater wonder of engineering than the staircase.

While I was crawling there on the floor, I was hit with renewed force by the reality of my missing brother and sister, and the anguish my mother had endured. I backed out and struggled to my feet.

I saw that the men had returned to the raised platform and its table, which I now knew was an altar. My father’s friend was seated on the top step in front of it, and my father was kneeling before him. What they said I do not know. When the watchman made the sign of the cross over my father, I understood. He was hearing his confession and absolving him.

I glared in outrage, wanting to cry, to shout, to scream that their beliefs could not stop evil. More than ever, I wanted to find the men who had hurt my family and kill their evil by killing them. A black devouring fire full of stench was boiling within me, and at the same time, it terrified me.

Now my father stood up and called to me in a gentle voice. “Neil, it has been a long time since you made confession.” I stared at him coldly, and retreated another step, shaking my head. “No”, I said.

There was a world of meaning in that single utterance: I had left all that behind. I had forever departed from our hiding and fearing, our status at the very bottom of the world, our criminality. My father was a good man—too good. I did not want his religion with its enormous demands and its few rewards and endless failures.
My
religion was about justice in
this
world, and I would continue to express my single dogma by killing as many snakes as I could trap or stalk, and, if possible, the human snakes who had made my parents suffer.

I told myself that this would have to wait. I would not return to Las Cruces immediately nor in the near future. I would register at the college in an hour from now. I would conquer that institution and climb. I would become a scientist, maybe a mathematician, maybe a master of physics, but in either case, I would become a man to be respected. I would be the genius they told me I could become, and for me there would be no more creeping into ruins and sandpits to escape the hunters. Red blossoms had never been painted on my hand, but they had been imprinted in my heart. From now on, I would never again permit such a brand to wound me. My heart would be cold. It would be as hard as steel, harder than an old wooden stairway. I would rise by my own strength.

“No”, I said again as both men waited.

Then the priest stood up and came to me. “I understand”, he said with sympathy, putting a hand on my shoulder. I shook it off.

“Neil”, my father exclaimed, offended by my rudeness.

The priest glanced at the staircase. “You will have a long road to travel, Neil. Life will take you to places that you cannot now know. But always, always, you must look up.”

I looked down at my feet, because I did not want, at that moment, to meet his eyes.

“You must look up”, he said again. “When it seems most impossible to you, a way will open before you.”

Without answering, I walked past him and limped to my father’s side. “
Papa
, I want to go. We must hurry if I am to register on time.”

And so we did.

Day 226
:

I studied in Santa Fe for four years and never returned to the chapel. It was demolished at some point, but whether or not the staircase was saved, I do not know. There is now a forty-story luxury hotel on the site of the cathedral, and on the site of the chapel, there stands a ten-story steel cube, which houses the state offices of DSI.

Scholarships took me to other universities. Every summer, I returned to Sunnyview Acres for a week’s vacation, unable to spare any more time than that, due to research projects at institutes in Europe and Asia. Long before my first Nobel, I won prizes, and with the award money, I was able to help my father buy his own dump truck and relieve my mother of the necessity of working at the cafe in Las Cruces where she had slaved for years. Later, when I was teaching at Princeton, I offered to buy them a house. Though they were touched and grateful, they declined the offer. They loved the village too much, and the remainder of their lives was spent there, hiding illegals and feeding those who could not find work. My father died of heat stroke in the cab of his truck while working on an irrigation canal during the terrible summer of 2074, when temperatures soared to 120°Fahrenheit in the shade, 49° Celsius. My mother lived a few years longer, preserved by the air conditioning unit I had installed in the trailer. Her life was expanded a little by the addition I built onto it, and the deeper water well I paid for. She loved to garden and gave away most of the food she grew.

We never spoke of her missing children, I don’t know why. As my early successes mounted one upon the other, I buried the subject in my memory and left aside my homicidal impulses. I think I continued to hate, but the hatred gradually subsided into a bedrock of resentment against the way things were in the world—a system that I vowed to myself I would always beat. No one would know my thoughts on these matters; no one would ever know my heart. I had moments of weakness, however, notably my speech in Stockholm, but I was getting older then, more confident that the government would not dare to erase me from the social spectrum. I was right about that, but wrong about hoping my words would make a difference.

Until her death, my mother still made
piñatas
for
los niños
, three times a year. Every July, she cried for three days.

Day 239
:

I have been unable to write during the past two weeks. I try to distract myself from the old memories, wounds freshly opened. Nor do I want to think about what lies below my feet on this planet. I’ve watched hours of baseball and basketball games, even a few films. I stare at my
max
screen and realize that I am no longer seeing anything on it. I have completed rereading Stron’s book, which has helped me to reorient a little. I pace the hallways. I swim at odd hours, alone. Why do I want to be alone with this pain? What is happening to my mind? I haven’t seen Pia and Paul since our discussion about David’s death. I miss them. Pia’s pregnancy must be showing. They are staying upstairs, as far away from DSI as they can get.

Poor sleep, more nightmares.

I have asked around, and no one I talk to recalls seeing any presentations on the findings of the forensic people who worked on the skeletons—the shocking fact that these are the remains of children. If what Dariush told me is true (and I have no reason whatsoever to disbelieve him), why hasn’t this become news?

Day 245
:

A tremendous breakthrough today, jarring me out of my stupor. At last, a city has been discovered. It happened this way:

For some time now, surveyors have continued to make probes into the road that crosses the Valley of the Towers, at regular intervals along its length. In the rubble-strewn pass through the western range, avalanches had buried the road too deeply to tell us anything. However, on the far side of the pass, probes picked up the route again, where there were no more rockfalls and only the natural deposits of organic material built up over millennia. The lower the road went into the western plain (which extends without interruption to the sea), the deeper the overlayer of soil they found. The forests are denser there, tropical in fact. About three kilometers from the last outcropping of the foothills, they lost the road. Random probes executed in a 180-degree arc soon found it again. The road had veered toward the north, gradually straightening out as it headed west-northwest.

The route continued onward for a distance of twenty-two hundred kilometers, ending near the mouth of one of the major rivers draining the continent. And here the probes began to hit a complex grid of buried cross streets or avenues. Detectable by the on-ground instruments only, all of the above findings had been invisible to the satellite scanners.

By human standards, the city is not a large one. It is 3.197 kilometers on three sides, presumably square. Its irregular westernmost side is eroded by the action of the sea. There are no ruins visible even at that end, though probes indicate traces of a grid of streets and cross streets beneath the seabed.

There is renewed excitement on board, as well as numerous presentations on the panorama screens. Interviews with experts and survey teams are feeding us plenty of data, combined with stirring scenes of the jungle meeting the ocean, the river’s estuary, colorful wildlife, as well as conjecture heaped upon conjecture.

Full-scale archaeological investigation of the site begins next week.

Day 258
:

Dariush is below on the planet. There were more new discoveries today. This morning, archaeologists working in the Temple of the Ship moved the black altar off of its metal base, and when the plate was removed, three sets of inscribed tablets were found beneath it, embedded in the stone floor in separate compartments. The topmost tablet of each was flush with the floor, face up. A program I watched informs us that the tablets are made of pure gold. An archaeologist expressed the opinion that these three hard codices could very well be “documents” relating to the foundation of their civilization, or, alternatively, relating to the purposes of the temple. If they can be deciphered, they may tell us a good deal about this race.

Day 267
:

A media presentation on the first tentative efforts to unearth the city. Sonar mapping has given the information that the walls of the city buildings are intact, though roofless. There were no exceptionally tall structures. Oddest of all is their uniformity. The overwhelming majority of them (98 percent) share their side and back walls with identical units. If each unit represents a family dwelling, or the dwelling of an individual, there could have been no more than a few hundred thousand residents of the city. All streets are geometrically precise, both north-south and east-west, at 90-degree angles to each other. The whole gives the impression of a beehive; though by contrast, bees would appear to be more creative.

There are a myriad of objects buried below, presumably “man-made” vessels of varying shapes and sizes that may have been used for food storage. A test shaft descended 29 meters before reaching the top of one dwelling or cubicle, and the floor was reached at a depth of 3.179 meters below it. Careful excavation brought to light the information that it was a two-room unit with a single window and door opening onto the earth-packed street. The walls and floors were brick, smoothly plastered with a limestone veneer. Clay pots, ocher and gray, were found in one of the rooms and brought intact to the surface; they are elegantly shaped and heavily glazed but lack decorations. When opened, one tightly sealed pot contained grains similar to spelt-wheat. Nearby were traces of oxidized metal cooking implements. If fabrics, rugs, or tapestries were once extant in the room, they had long ago dissolved. There was a brick bed frame with two skeletal remains lying upon it, the bones largely disintegrated. Gold fillings were found in the teeth of the remnant skulls. There were no personal adornments such as rings or beads of any kind. Time has erased much of what this house once contained, leaving only stone or gold and traces that give little explanation of the life that was lived there.

In a wall niche, there was a small stone sculpture of the winged three-eyed god.

Day 285
:

The city site is swarming with archaeologists and engineers, as well as their skilled helpers.

Two dozen shafts have been dug at evenly spaced distances. They reveal uniform stratification of soil, lacking any volcanic deposits such as that which entombed Pompeii and Herculaneum. Indeed, the closest volcano is a small, dormant one, fifteen hundred kilometers to the northeast. Upper layers reveal three periods when the river flooded its banks and covered the city, but this was long after the city died and was buried by the slower accumulation of detritus.

At this stage, it is difficult to know how and when all life ceased within it, but the early findings indicate a time roughly the same as the age when the road in Tower Valley ceased to be used. The greater depth of the city is attributed to the heavier soil deposits laid down by the more intense biological life in a tropical forest at sea level. To this must be added the minor river floods and also the likelihood of sea storms of unusual strength sweeping inland at one or more times during the fourteen hundred Nova-years since the city’s demise.

Day 287
:

More alien remains have been found in the dwellings, all in the same state of disintegration. Most of the units have one or two such skeletons. Radiation dating and atomic microscopy place the age of death circa fourteen hundred (+ or -) N-years ago (between two thousand and twenty-one hundred Earth-years ago). A distinctive feature, however, is that their height is considerably greater than that of the remains found in the temple. Theorists are now saying there were two races here: one tall, one very short; one master, one servant or possibly slave to the other. The gold teeth fillings in the taller race indicate that
it
was master. Yet the careful entombment of the smaller race indicates that the latter enjoyed the more exalted status. Such is the theory, such is the conflicting evidence.

I find it very odd that the public presentations never mention the forensic discovery: that the remains in the temple are those of children. Why is this not being openly discussed? Compared to the two-races theory, it is equally possible that the remains found in the city were adults and the sacrificed were their children.