Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (68 page)

The countdown began: Five minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes.

The narrator was at the one minute mark when I saw on the screen a figure run out of the temple gate and leap onto the hover platform. He jerked its control lever and rose at high speed, just as the narrator began, “ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

The camera zoomed for a close-up. It was Xue. He bent and picked up something in his hand. He was holding a stone plug and frantically trying to pack it into the central eye.

“Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Simultaneously, the spheres in the towers were uncovered, and three beams shot across the valley, the central one horizontal and aiming for the middle eye, the other two converging. It all happened at lightspeed, but I saw it as if in slow motion. I leaped to my feet just as a beam hit Xue’s right hand.

“No!” I yelled. “Ao-li, no!”

There was a flash, and his hand burst into flames. He flinched but did not waver. He was using both hands now, and with whatever muscle or bone power was left to him, he still tried to block the beam’s entrance. But it was too late. The other two beams were inside.

Xue jerked backward as his arms exploded; then he spun as the beam struck the side of his head. He toppled off the platform and hit the stone pavement far below.

Now all four screens displayed the progress of the beams: across the valley, through the eyes, through the temple, converging on the nose cone, through the midsection of the ship, through the three little bulkhead holes. They were now burning their way through the black veneer on the mini-reactor.

All four screens went white for a micro-second, and then they went black.

I stood there staring at the blank wall. Panting, my mouth wide open in a silent yell of protest, I was desperate to know what had happened, desperate to save Xue, even though he was beyond all help.

The people around me in the panorama room were on their feet too, anxiously discussing what they had just witnessed, shocked by the accident that had befallen the scientist at the cliff face, perplexed by the sudden loss of visual contact.

“O God, O God”, I groaned, as I hurried as fast as I could down the concourse in the direction of my room. Inside, I powered up the
max
and keyed in the program for the temple experiments. Blank. Only the words:
Transmission Interrupted
.

I keyed in the satellite view of the planet. And there was Continent 1 with a bright star blazing in its center, in the middle of the mountains. I zoomed and zoomed, and then I saw what I had dreaded, what I had somehow known I would find, though I had not admitted it to myself.

The entire valley between the western and central ranges and for a distance of sixty kilometers or more north and south of the temple was engulfed in flames, a massive fireball still spreading outward from its brilliant core of light. Thick clouds were rising around a firestorm that would form into a mushroom cloud greater in size than any that man had ever made.

Hardly breathing, I tapped the negative zoom key, and the continent shrank until the eastern and western oceans were visible. I zoomed on the western coast and saw heavy waves speeding away from the shore.

I checked Base-main, northwest of the temple region, and saw that it had not been directly hit by the blast, though the buildings were shaking and AECs were tipping onto their sides, with fissures spreading in the earth. People were running in all directions.

The same thing was happening everywhere, as if the continent itself had been shattered, like a rock thrown at a mirror, the splinters radiating outward. The extinct volcano in the northeast was streaming a trail of vapor. Herds of mammals were galloping panic-stricken on the plains; whales were diving toward deep water beyond the continental shelf. A shuttle parked at a marine base fell into the sea as the ground beneath it collapsed.

I zoomed out and saw that the brilliant star at the center of the catastrophe had begun to fade, replaced by an engorging cloud so dense and so high that its cap must be reaching an altitude of twenty or thirty kilometers.

I sat down and stared at the unfolding horror.

A hundred, two hundred kilometers from the epicenter, forests were flattened. The distant savanna regions were hazy with grass fires.

Xue was gone. Hundreds of people had been vaporized.

Where was Dariush? He had been absent from the ship for days. I went out and hurried to his room. Hard knocking on his door elicited no response. I found the nearest elevator and went down to the lowest level. But the elevator would not unlock for me, and I remembered that a special code was needed for accessing PHM.

After pounding the door with my fist, I went back up to B and hastened along the concourse until I found street 22 and the KC elevator. Using the code, I entered it and punched the PHM button. The elevator took me down, and at the bottom it opened.

I was now in the section of shuttle bays. Only one was in port, and its loading platform was open. A few people scurried about with anxious faces. I spotted Jan heading straight for the shuttle and intercepted him.

“Do you know what’s happened?” I asked.

“Yes, I know”, he said with a look. “I’m going down there. I have to save what I can.”

“Don’t go near the epicenter. Don’t go anywhere near the middle of the continent; it’s all radioactive. It’s spreading too, so get out as fast as you can.”

“Loka’s shuttle was in the valley. We have lost him. Many people died. There is a second shuttle at the marine station in the north. A third was in transit up to the
Kosmos
. That one is safe. It turned around and is heading for Base-main to see if there are survivors.”

“Then there are only two shuttles left. The one in the north fell into the sea.”

Jan’s face darkened, and he looked away.

“Was it Vladimir’s?” I asked.

“Yes, it was his. He may still be alive. I will go there too and try to find him.”

“I’m coming with you.”

“No, Dr. Hoyos, you cannot. You must stay with the people here. I think we have lost half our population, maybe more. Down there—down there on this planet, it is very dangerous. Radiation is only one thing. There are seismic problems and bad weather because of the blast.” He paused. “Do you know how it happened?”

“I do.”

“The three-eyed god did this, yes?”

“He did, and his makers did, and so did those among us who were like them. Dr. Xue died trying to stop them.”

“Then he too is gone. I am sorry. He was a good man.” Yes, a good man. We never guessed how good until the end. “I have to go now”, said Jan.

He entered the shuttle and sealed the hatch. A minute later, the bay doors closed, and the alarm started beeping for depressurization. I took the elevator up to KC.

Paul and Pia were in their apartment, sitting side by side on a sofa, holding the baby. Pia was weeping silently. Paul had his arms around her.

He leaped to his feet when I entered the room. “You hear what happen?” he cried.

I sat down and told them what I had seen on the panorama screen and my
max
. I related what Jan had said, that Loka was gone, and possibly Vladimir. I described Xue’s last minutes. Pia, who had been napping at the time, had missed it all. Paul had been watching on a screen in the navigation section. I had interrupted him in the process of telling her.

“Has anyone heard from Dariush?” I asked.

Stricken, they shook their heads.

“Is he not aboard?” Pia asked.

“The last I heard from him he was heading down to AS-VT for several days.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” she sobbed.

“We do not know many detail now”, said Paul. “Maybe he is okay.” Our eyes met, and we looked away from each other. I stood up and told them I was going to search for Dariush. I would contact them if I learned anything. They nodded mutely. But where would I look?

I tried the offices of translation and archaeology. I tried his room again. I checked our favorite library in the hope that he might have dozed through everything, slumped over a book. But he was nowhere to be found.

The next few hours were confusion. The order of our world had been shaken to the foundations. Who were dead, who were living, who had barely survived? We would not be able to assess our situation until the two shuttles were back on board with the remnants of the expedition.

The people I passed in the halls either bustled along, manic with useless purpose, or they were wandering disoriented. Perhaps others were in their private rooms staring at their
max
screens. The cafeterias were empty, as were the bistros and recreation centers. I don’t think I saw a single scientist, and it struck me that a good many of them, perhaps the majority, had been down on the planet, busy at their duties in the mission stations or congregating in the temple valley for the great moment.

I went back up to KC and spoke with some junior staff, offering to help in any way I could. But I really had nothing to offer, and they knew it. They suggested that I return to my room and wait there. The Captain would soon address the crew and passengers via the ship’s communications system.

*

I sat in my room and waited. And at some point during those hours I knew the truth of the matter. I knew that it had not been an accident. It had not been the result of hasty miscalculation. We had been lied to by the aliens—the aliens who were ourselves. They had deceived us. They planned it for us. It was waiting for us, even though we would not fall into their trap until two thousand years had elapsed. They could wait. They had the patience of serpents. And their malice.

Xue’s slide rule was inside my jacket pocket. I took it out and slid its bars back and forth distractedly. I made a cross with it. I unmade the cross.

I wanted to pray for his soul. As a boy, I had done that for people who had died. I had prayed for my parents’ souls when they died—there was that much faith left in me then. Since then, nothing.

What was this nothing, this no-thing inside of me? It was an ache, a void, a yearning so deep I could not fill it. I could only look down into the dark well of myself and wonder if there had ever been anything there. Like all the wells of my childhood, all the arroyos, all the inner reservoirs of tears, I had dried up in a desert. I
was
the desert.

I had been instrumental in the deaths of all these people. I had provided the key to the creation of the
Kosmos
. I had brought them here. And later, I had ignored Xue’s and Dariush’s warnings, their profound intuitions. Again and again, those intuitions had proved to be right, and my objections wrong—my eminently rational objections—my skeptical distancing from their supposed irrationality. But they too had played their parts. Dariush’s persistence had opened the path for discovery of the temple. Xue had helped me find the logic that made this ship, though in the end it had been my inscrutable friend who gave his life trying to stop the unthinkable.

The unthinkable had now happened. It was real. It was history, the past and the future fused in a fireball of the inescapable present.

I wanted to die. I wanted permanent escape. But I still feared death—that at least was left to me.

*

I had not slept the night before, and the stress of the day now overcame me. I lay down to rest my body for a few minutes and slipped into a light doze.

I dreamed of the spiral staircase in Santa Fe.

I awoke not knowing how long I had been asleep, minutes or hours I could not say. Rubbing my eyes, groaning with fatigue and grief, I was afflicted by an old memory. I had not thought about it for decades and now it returned in great force. I was seventy-eight years old, and I was a boy again.

It was the day my father drove me to Santa Fe for my first year at university. Scene after scene flashed past: the car breaking down, the old man with his burro and tinkling bells. The story of my murdered brother and sister. My resentment, my rage, my hatred. Then came the fire engine and the watchman named Pedro and the spiral staircase. Finally, my father’s confession. And my refusal to do as he had done, to kneel before God’s servant and admit my sins, asking for forgiveness. It all swam before my eyes, and I sat up in order to dispel a wave of dizziness.

My father and I had left the chapel and returned to the car. He checked the street map, and then we drove off to find the university’s registration office.

He said nothing for a time. I was silent too, wrestling with my emotions. There were so many of them—all bad.

“Benigno,” he said at last, in his quiet gentle voice, “in every man, there is a desire to rise.”

I did not reply. I knew that whatever he was about to say would be pious and wise. But I had finished with all that. I wanted none of it.

“There is for each of us a struggle”, he continued. “It is like climbing a mountain. Like climbing that staircase in the chapel. But the destination can sometimes be different from what we wanted.”

Heaven or hell
? I silently answered, supplying the predictable and inevitable conclusion.

“A man may strive for a heaven of his own making, and find himself in hell.”

Just as I had predicted!

My father went on: “He may find himself in hell and not know how he got there.”

“What world is this, then?” I fired my rebuttal at him. “What kind of universe, that we who are blind can step into hell and be found guilty of it?”

“We choose”, he said. “We choose many things along the way. And the choosing sets our course. And that is why a man must not choose blindly. If he makes a wrong course, he can change it, right up until the end of his life, but then it is harder. That is why we need God to guide us. He would guide you, if you’d let him. But he will not force you to obey.”

“He just drops us into hell if we don’t.”

“You are wrong, Benigno”, he said, his voice breaking. “That is not how he is.
We
choose hell. We choose to reject his mercy. He shows us a spiral staircase that leads up to Him. He climbs beside us, and within us too, if we let him. He wants to help us. But we so often insist on going alone.”