Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (60 page)

Now the camera shifted to a tilted “dashboard” beneath the five windows. It was metal alloy with an array of control components embedded in it—fairly simple design, with crystals, levers, and what appeared to be circuit tracks. Centrally positioned were three bronze pads in the shape of human hands.

I leaned forward in my seat, extending my right hand impulsively. Each of the hands had two thumb depressions. For a moment, I wondered if the “aliens” had six-digit hands, but then I recalled that among the thousands of skeletons examined in the cities and temple crypt all hands had five digits. Surely, the hand-pads were designed for control of some kind. Had they once responded to pressure or body-heat? Or did they swivel on unseen axles, forward and backward and sideways? If so, the two thumb depressions might have been designed for control by either the right or left hand.

The dashboard sloped down at an angle that declined toward flat horizontal, though still tilted a few degrees, with its upper side fused to the wall. It ran continuously on both sides of the chamber, forming an elongated letter U. There were no seats in the hall. Floor sockets in front of this countertop followed it all the way, and one of the scientists commented that probably many seats had once been installed here, and were removed after the flight.

I stayed rooted to my seat throughout these hours of preliminary familiarization. Later in the day, another program presented additional findings, with plenteous commentary from analysts.

While the craft is relatively simple compared to the
Kosmos
, it appears to have been designed to meet every basic human need throughout its voyage. The number of individual control panels embedded in the countertop along both sides of the U argues in favor of the theory that all functions on board were controlled from this room, everything from propulsion, navigation, communications, atmosphere, lighting, heat, water, etc. The control panels were each distinct in design, with hieroglyphics inscribed in the metal beside each crystal—the latter were a variety of colors and hues.

The great age of the bronze hands prohibited mobility at first, but engineers succeeded in lubricating one of them and manipulating it on unseen axles. It is surmised that these were the pilot’s (or pilots’) controls for pitch, roll, altitude, etc., during take-off and landing. A panel was cut out of the frame beneath the countertop, and inside was found a complex mechanism resembling gyroscopes within gyroscopes, with circuit connections from the hands and circuited into the floor. Gyroscopes only work where there is gravity. Were these instruments used exclusively for airflight above planetary surfaces? Did the ship have internal gravity generators as well?

Since the ship appears to have been designed for both air and space flight, it is presumed that when the aft section is opened we will find retracted wings and also propulsion vents for maneuvering in zero gravity.

Cryptanalysis tells us that the hieroglyphics beside crystal nodes on the various control panels are a mixture of mythic references and the purely pragmatic. For example, one inscription reads:
Flame of the Night-gods small
(meaning, “reduce nuclear propulsion”?). Another reads
Beast Sacred to the Lord of the Night-gods wings
(possibly, “extend [or] fold the ship’s retractable wings”?).

Sample cuts have been made into the base of the countertop at selected points, revealing only complex circuitry inside.

Though investigators say they feel they are poking about in the innards of a giant computer, it is a cyber-control system with no visual screens. There is perhaps one exception. Embedded in the dashboard immediately above the three bronze hands is a rectangle of diamondlike, transparent material. On the underside of this “glass” is a grid of thousands of hair-thin tubes, which may be akin to our primitive fiber optics. When I saw this, my heart skipped a beat, and I wondered if the “screen” once displayed star maps. Or it may have been the visual terminal for the ship’s master computer, which has yet to be located. Strangely, only one such screen has been found on board.

I remind myself that the original crew or authority of this craft did not have an exact picture of their destination, nor for that matter a scientific schema of our home solar system. According to codex-1, written by the Child of the Underworld (thankfully, long-dead), they had a poetic description that was accurate as far as it went. If his account is the sum of what they knew in the beginning, it would mean that the voyage pilots or authorities were given instruction as they went along, with the Night-gods whispering in their ears or through the mouth of the Ap-kalu.

     Above it we came unto the great sea that is constant night,

     Yet it is full of the flames of the Night-gods.

More suppositions on my part:

The panorama screen presentations have infrequently shown images of our home solar system inscribed on the walls of residential rooms on the lower deck. There is no commentary about this, apparently because our authorities, and especially our very own elfish Ap-kalu, have decided we don’t need to get into that. Undoubtedly, Elf and Skinner are still weighing the implications. Knowledge is power, and the power is theirs for the time being. People must wait until
they
decide what we should know. Nevertheless, enough has been seen and enough has been circulated through private conversations that we can guess the motives for the inscriptions. These “aliens” were homesick for their
Beautiful Planet
. Soaring far above the water-blanket, they had analyzed their own place of origins and depicted it accurately. But they had not yet seen their destination, which was only a pinprick of light in a heavens crowded with the flames of the Night-gods.

Man is a naming creature, Dariush once told me. During our outward voyage, he often lamented the impoverishment of modern languages, at least as they are spoken and written outside the realm of technical knowledge. He has chided me for my lapses into slang. He has also underlined to me the anomalies in language itself. He asserts that the breathtaking insights of Socrates and Aristotle, for example, or the natural wisdom of an earlier age, such as that of Solon the Law-giver of Athens, are clear indications that man, even on the brink of the prehistoric, was capable of highly advanced thought. Much of it was superior to our own thinking, which we in this era consider to be progressively more advanced than what went before. Early man’s conceptual and abstract powers were impressive.

Dariush believes, moreover, that the nature of language itself, its semantics, its semiotics, was more developed during that primitive stage of civilization. For example, Babylon with 600+ letters in its “alphabet” and the Hittite with 350. I am not convinced that larger alphabets relate to any larger configuration of
mind
. It points to something unusual about them, but what? Tyrannical, cruel, power-hungry, and morally depraved, those ancient civilizations had something that eludes me. One would not want to live for a single day in their company, yet . . . yet their mental capacity was different from ours. And perhaps that is what I am straining to understand: As a species, is
homo sapiens modernicus
evolving, or are we degenerating?

Then there is the question of the pre-flood civilization, evidence of which is now staring us in the face. The descendants of Noah had no such technology. Yet the Babylonians and Hittites and all the other races known to us had come from that survivor in his wooden ship. As his family multiplied and spread out over the reborn earth, living to great age and generating great numbers of offspring, did they move farther and farther away in time and geography from the original story of their miraculous rescue? Did the evil in man’s nature gradually increase as the memory of the flood dimmed? Did they retain only scraps and mutated versions that they interpreted according to their weaknesses, their desires, and even their growing attachment to evil? Did they lose the basic memory of mankind? Even in those early post-flood generations, had it become for them something of a myth? Was the Nimrod who built the tower of Babel harkening back to stories he had heard about the legendary peoples who lived before the flood? In his pride, in his disregard for the object lessons of his own history, did he desire to emulate the greatness of Krani-mhrod who had built the tower for the “sky-arrow”? We cannot know. We can only speculate.

Of course, in my own way, I am avoiding the implications—I admit this much. If what I have written above is true, then the biblical account is more or less accurate. It displays mythlike qualities, but it is a myth that occurred. The question follows, therefore, that if the biblical account is accurate, what should be my relationship to it? I will think about this later. For now, the presentations about the ship are totally engrossing.

As I said, man is a naming creature. And it looks like pre-flood man was no different from us in this regard. The ship has a name. Which brings me to a significant finding on its flight control deck. On the arched ceiling above the three bronze hands is a mural incised in the metal. It is a winged animal, clearly a reptile. Its wings extend from one side of the “cockpit” to the other. Its spiked head and neck is tilted back, fanged mouth wide open. In its left claw, it grasps the numerical symbol for 100. In its right claw, it grasps a star. Around the star are eighteen heliocentric planets. The star-sun is an embedded gold disk. The planets are merely incised, with the exception of the seventh, which is a blue nodule of lapis lazuli.

Engraved in the metal immediately below the mural and immediately above the front windows are hieroglyphics which say:

     
Heavens-ship Beast Sacred to the Lord of the Night-gods

These are also the words inscribed in stone above the mural on the cliff face.

Day 355
:

A rare privilege. By the Captain’s initiative, Xue, Dariush, and I were invited to join him and selected flight staff for dinner on KC deck.

About five o’clock this evening, Dariush and Xue knocked at my door. As we walked along the concourse toward the nearest elevator with access to KC deck, I mentioned to them my uneasiness about my status, wondering how closely I am being watched. Since the invitation had come by word of mouth, not through ordinary communication channels, we hoped that our sojourn would go unnoticed.

Alas, approaching the elevator, we came upon two people who looked very much DSI, one male, one female, both of them grim and determined.

The male stepped forward and said, “Where are you going?”

Xue replied, “We are going up to KC at the invitation of the Captain. A purely social affair.”

“It’s not allowed”, he said.

“It’s allowed if the Captain permits it”, said Xue, with his calmest Genghis Khan look.

“Well, it’s not allowed”, said the man with the standard repetitiousness of the imprisoned mind.

Then followed a dialogue that I need not record here. Let me say that it was an uneven match between an intelligent man and a bureaucratic male. Xue was polite and relentless. Whenever the agent was bested, he simply retreated into his zombie instructions. Neither of the two DSI agents carried weapons, and from this we may deduce that the department is so assured of its authority that they presume a word of command is enough to meet any situation, which in this case it was not.

There were a few concluding exchanges:

Xue
: I repeat, the Department of Social Infrastructure has no authority over KC deck.

Agent
: Yes, but you’re standing on deck B.

Xue
: Then we will now depart from deck B.

Agent
: No, you can’t. It’s not allowed.

Still, we did not have the access code for the elevator, and it looked like we were in a stalemate. Fortunately, at that point the elevator doors opened, and there stood two uninformed flight staff people, come to bring us on high.

I walked past the agent, but he grabbed the sleeve of my jacket.

“Not you”, he said. The female agent stepped close with a purposeful look.

I gave them my ol’ cowpoke smile and said, “Sonny, are you a facilitator or an animator?”

“I’m a facilitator, DSI-3 grade.”

“And your fellow employee?”

“She’s an animator, DSI-4.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I can tell you’re a couple of good kids in your heart of hearts. You just don’t know what you’re doing.”

“I know we’ve got orders to follow.”

“Well, buddy, I suggest you just go on over to the nearest library computer and type in the following search words, making sure you put quotation marks around the phrase: ‘I was just obeying orders.’ Then, after you’ve done that, and after you’ve read a few articles about that phrase, I’d like you two to go have a drink in the Mexican bistro. You’ll be my guest. Here’s my Uni-card.”

He shot a glance at the card and ignored it.

I went on: “Then, tomorrow, I’d like to take you out to supper as my guests. Do you like Asian or Indian? Maybe Afro? We’ll talk about what you’ve learned. Will you do that for me?”

I gave him a paternal pat on the shoulder and turned away while he was digesting this, though he didn’t let go of my sleeve. He was still wondering what he should do when the two flight staff waded into the thick of things and herded us three scientists into the elevator. They keyed the code, the doors closed upon the perplexed faces of the agents, and up we went into another country.

Seconds later, the doors opened, and we stepped out into a lobby. There, we were welcomed by a commander,
the
Commander, in fact: the second in command on the
Kosmos
. As I may have mentioned before, the ship is one kilometer in length and a quarter kilometer wide. I can’t describe the layout of everything on KC, because I saw only a fraction of it. To say the least, it was big and complex. The residential section is aft. We did not go in that direction but instead went forward along a wide central hallway toward the command centers. We passed several of these divisional wings along the way, identified by signs in various languages denoting what went on inside (propulsion liaison, navigation, officers’ mess, medical center, communications, etc.). I noticed a large cafeteria similar to those on the lower decks. There were no bistros or specialty restaurants.