Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (64 page)

Day 384
:

Dariush and I met at the bistro this evening. I brought up the subject of the temple dance, asked him what he thought about it.

In answer, he just closed his eyes and sighed deeply.

“Poor people, poor people”, he eventually murmured.

I did not press him on the matter. To change the subject, I asked him if he had come across anything especially interesting in his recent translations. He said, yes, it was all interesting; every day brought more to light. For a moment, he looked irritated, which was quite unlike him.

“Neil, the translations have been expropriated by DSI. They have decided that it is not in the best interests of the expedition to release the truth about the origins of the ship. For the time being, most of our people believe that aliens created it.”

“Do you mean to say that you can’t look at your own translations?”

“The archaeology and philology teams can
look
at them. We may continue to translate and refine them, but we are not permitted to publicize our findings. This is why there have been no media presentations about the archives. You realize that most people are more interested in the technology than in the minds who made it.”

“Yes, that’s true. I must admit, Dariush, that I’m not much different than other people in this regard.”

“It is the dimension of
logos
again.” Oh no, I thought to myself, here comes a lecture. “Neil, if you are a true
logos
and I am a true
logos
, then there is the possibility of the
dia-logos
—a true dialogue.”

“True dialogue? What is true dialogue in a world like ours?”

“Our world is drowning in communication, but starving for genuine
communio
—the union of true communion.”

“True communion. I wonder what that is.”

Not to be dissuaded by my lack of enthusiasm, Dariush pressed onward with his theme: “Profound communion, the flow of celestial language, becomes possible when we are speaking on the firm foundation of the
Logos
, the Word who became flesh, the One who redeemed the universe.”

“Redeemed the universe?” I murmured. “Does the universe seem redeemed to you?”

He gazed peacefully, compassionately, into my eyes. I did not like it. I did not want to hear any more of his theological dissertations.

“Now is not the time”, I whispered.

“When is the proper time?” he gently replied.

“Why do you waste your efforts on me, Dariush?” I erupted. “Why do you even like me? I’m a hard case.”

He smiled at me with affection. “You do not know yourself, Neil.” I shook my head, wished him a good night, and returned to my room.

Day 386
:

At 6
A.M.
, a knock at my door woke me from a dream. In it, I had been wading into ocean waves, breaking on a beach of white sand. Seven young people were with me—children and adolescents—the two youngest holding my hands. All of us were laughing and leaping together into the breakers. They were my own children. Looking back to shore, I saw a woman, their mother, waving at me. I felt intense joy.

Regretting the loss, I shook off the last of the dream and groped my way out of bed.

“Who is it? What do you want?” I said through the closed door.

“It is I”, said a muffled voice.

“Open”, I grumbled.

There stood Dariush and the Russian shuttle pilot, Vladimir.

“Neil, let us go for a
walk
”, said my friend in a low voice.

“This is early for a constitutional stroll.”

“I invite you to take with me a very long walk upon a beautiful mountain”, he whispered. “Are you interested?”

“Ravenously.”

“Good. Our excellent friend Volodya came to me just now with a message from Pia and Paul. They cannot leave KC deck, but they have asked that you and I return to their wedding place and leave a memento of that great event.”

“
Kosmos
departs for Earth on Day 435”, murmured Vladimir. “Our opportunities to clandestinely visit the planet will be very few from now on.”

“Then this may be my last chance.”

We followed the pilot on a circuitous trail through the ship that brought us to a single elevator on a side street of Concourse C. We went down to the lower deck and boarded a shuttle without being observed. As before, it took the usual route out into space and precipitously down to the surface of Nova, leveling off over the ocean east of Continent 1. We landed at a geology base, donned our orange suits and hats, and boarded an AEC for the short flight into the mountains.

Our approach was from a direction we had not taken during the previous flights. Avoiding the great north-south valley, where there was a good deal of ground activity and air traffic, we came up over the range from the east and dropped softly into the bowl of the beloved alpine glen.

When we stripped off our suits and walked down the ramp onto the moss, the pure air invigorated me, and the chiming bells of the woods delighted my ears and my heart. Birds swooped low over the little lake; the waterfall burbled pleasantly.

“I’ll really miss this place”, I said to Dariush.

“I too am loath to leave it”, he replied. “It is like a portion of the world restored to Eden.”

“We’ll remember it when we’re back on Earth.”

“Yes. Now we must absorb every aspect, that it might live in our memories as a sign.”

A sign? I wondered. Well, I suppose the place was a kind of sign—of love, of the eternally renewed hopes of wedding days. Of kindness and good fellowship. Of beauty.

The three of us stood by the lakeshore for a time, just listening, looking, soaking it all up.

Vladimir turned to me and gave me a piece of paper. I read:

Neil,

Will you permit me to make a memorial of the gift you gave to me years ago? I know that you gave it to me as something that is very precious to you, the little cube of turquoise. Paul and I treasure it greatly and do not lightly part from it. I hope you understand. Some day when we are back home, we will look up into the heavens, and we will see a bright star and know that on its best planet there is our cube. It is so much smaller than the evil cubes in the temple. But it is infinitely greater and more beautiful. It is, in a sense, a word that we leave behind us. Thank you for giving us such a word, for enabling us to “speak” it.

Pia

Vladimir gave me the turquoise, which sat in the palm of my hand, radiating its astonishing blueness under the warm sunlight.

“They ask that it be planted beside the waterfall”, he said. “Will you do it, Dr. Hoyos?”

“Of course.”

We climbed up the low banks of the lake and stood beside the rim of the falls. I put the cube down on a bare rock, wondering if it would remain there undisturbed for eons. Perhaps Pia and Paul’s child or grandchild, or a person further down the line of their generations, would return on a future expedition and find it, recalling the ones who had left it here for him.

Dariush closed his eyes and prayed for God’s blessing upon the young couple and their baby, and for all the lives that might come from them. He also prayed for the countless souls who had once lived on this planet.

Prayers completed, Vladimir and Dariush made the sign of the cross.

Immediately after that, the Russian peeled off his uniform and jumped into the water below the falls.

Dariush and I stood above, laughing as he hooted and thrashed about.

“I am, I regret”, Dariush commented in his most ponderous manner, “a little too old for that.”

“Me too”, I said. “I’d hate to cross an infinite sea only to drown in a pond.”

“Nevertheless, Neil, I think elderly gentlemen are still permitted to walk. Shall we?”

“Let’s do.”

We walked for an hour, circling the valley twice before returning to the shuttle for a lunch that Vladimir had packed for us. He was now sleeping, stretched out on a blanket by the falls. We two older men ate sandwiches and drank from water bottles. As we finished off the meal with succulent nova-fruit that tasted like a cross between kiwi and sweet lemon, Dariush gazed up at the snow-capped peaks around us, lost in his own thoughts. The afternoon had begun.

“I would like to climb higher”, he said at last. “How is your leg? Would you care to come too?”

“My leg’s no worse than it’s always been. Let’s go.”

Because the sun was high and the air hot, we took a route up the lower slopes leading to the purple shadows cast by a mountain on the north side of the valley. The footing was easy going on soft turf, and the first traces of scree that had slid down from above with the passage of time. It was a gray shale, very small fragments.

We soon passed out of the sun’s glare and saw a herd of deer higher on the glen, where the mountain proper began. They did not startle as we approached, and merely gazed at us for a few minutes before wandering off, nibbling grass as they went.

Dariush and I sat down on a rock to catch our breath. The rise, though gradual, had demanded energy we were not used to exerting. I was seventy-eight years old, and he wasn’t much younger. For a time, we gazed over the valley, with its blue alpine lake, the pale green woods surrounding it, and on the far side of the trees, the AEC. By the falls, our pilot was still stretched out, asleep or drowsing.

“Higher?” asked Dariush. I nodded, and we resumed our climb.

We had not gone far when he paused and stood for a moment looking at a darker shadow at the base of a cliff directly ahead of us, about thirty meters away. He said nothing, but walked toward it with a purpose.

When we arrived there, we saw what had not been evident from below: a low crawl space about three feet high. I’m sure we would not have entered it to investigate, if Dariush had not spotted something on the rock above the opening. Though overgrown with lichen, it looked like a crude image cut into the stone. He scraped away the growth, and we saw what was clearly the shape of a deer, no larger than a hand. Facing it was an image of a bird, the same size.

“This is interesting”, he murmured. “Who could have made these?”

“They look old”, I said.

“Yes, very old. It may be there is a cave inside. Perhaps it was used long ago as a shelter for hunters during inclement weather.”

He removed a flashlight from his pocket and pointed it into the dark recess below the images.

“Not a cave. It is a natural tunnel, an irregularity in the mountain. I confess I earnestly desire to look within.”

“Well, if you must”, I said dubiously. “Let’s hope there are no saber-tooth tigers in there.”

He dropped to his knees and crawled inside. I followed with some reluctance, though my interest was piqued.

We had gone a few feet through this tunnel when it took a turn, rising and to the left. A minute’s crawling brought us to the end, a stack of flat stones that blocked any further progress.

“Too bad”, I said. “Time to go back.”

“Wait, Neil”, said Dariush with excitement. “These stones were laid by human hands, and it was done from farther within.”

He began to push on the topmost stone. It gave a little, and then toppled away into the darkness beyond. I crawled up beside him, and together we pushed away more stones. When the passage was clear, we crept onward, Dariush first and me at his heels. As he flashed his light around, we saw that we were now inside a small cave. We stood up, the tops of our heads brushing the roof. The air was dry and smelled of dust. The floor was fine gravel and sand. The entire space looked to be no more than ten feet wide by fifteen or eighteen feet long.

“There’s nothing here”, I said.

“There is something here”, he replied with an odd tone of certainty.

Foot by foot, we investigated the cave, until by accident we stumbled upon what looked like human remains. Though coated with dust and sunken into the gravel floor, it was clearly a skeleton, curled in the fetal position.

Dariush knelt and inspected it carefully. “A child”, he said. “Or a young adolescent, judging by the length of the femur and fibula.” He flashed the light about the skull. “There is no damage to the cranium, and I can see no broken bones. It seems to me that this person died in sleep, not by violence.”

“Sickness or starvation perhaps?”

“Perhaps.”

He pointed the light along the bones of one arm, which extended out from the rib cage, with the hand and fingers resting on a pile of flat stones. This pile was neatly arranged, a rough rectangle rising two feet above the floor. Dariush sat back and thought for a few minutes. Then, with deliberation, he removed the top stones and looked down into a cavity within.

“There is another skeleton”, he said. “Also a child.”

“I wonder what brought them here?” I asked. “What was their story? We’ll never know.”

“The deer and the bird seem to indicate that they were here for a time. Time enough to leave a mark of their presence.”

“Someone else could have made the images. I don’t see any tools here.”

“These children may have used a stone to chip the image into the cliff. As you saw, it is crude, not incised mechanically.”

Thinking that there might be tools or artifacts within the “tomb”, we removed more stones, fully exposing the remains. And that’s all there was—simple bones, a life interred in an unmarked grave, without history, without explanation. Yet the position of the other skeleton showed us that at least one had grieved.

When we had finished removing all the cap stones, we noticed that the wall by the feet was twice as thick as the one at the head. Dariush directed his flashlight at that end, and now we saw that a double layer of slate fragments had been stacked inside the outer wall. He removed the top one and inspected it closely. There was a sharp inhalation of breath, silence, and then he said, “Hieroglyphics.”

We removed every slab that had hieroglyphics, twenty in all, the thin slate covered in the ancient script we had come to know from the temple archives. The inscriptions looked to have been scratched with a sharp stone, the letters crudely executed, as if by an immature hand.