Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (79 page)

Now there were only a few contracting hours left.

The auto-navigation had set the course years ago, locked, fused, fated by my hand. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. I had climbed my own stairs. I had
made
my own stairs, and now I would see where they led to. Behind me were several hundred deaths that would not have occurred without my genius intervening in their lives. Ahead of me were billions upon billions of deaths.

I looked at the gun in my hand and pondered it. Should I put the muzzle to my temple and execute the executioner with Paul Yusupov’s weapon, Prince Felix’ weapon? Shoot Rasputin’s demon or
el ojo del Diablo
? Blow a hole in the hole?

Then I wondered if it wouldn’t be better, after all, to cut my throat. I patted the kit at my waist, and felt the old knife that I had owned since boyhood, the very blade with which I had incised my leg, stabbing at the poison that would have killed me young. And here it was again, the blade open, hilt gripped in my left hand, ready to slice through the pulsing jugular, my final, futile attempt to defeat the serpent’s venom, because
El Día de los Muertos
had arrived at last. This day would kill me, but I would kill myself first and prove my mastery over life and death.

Yes, I can do that
, I thought.
I would like to do it. It would be a token repayment for what I have done. But it is the easy way
.

I lowered the gun and the knife.

“No, Neil”, I declared. “You are going to watch this to the moment of impact. You will see the ultimate bonfire of your vanity.”

The ship passed more mine fields. Earth had analyzed our speed and trajectory. Now, they were detonating all the fields on the chance that the
Kosmos
would be in the middle of one at the exact microsecond when the atomic blast occurred. It was their last best hope, and it was useless. We sped onward through thousands of detonations, and none of them touched us.

“Scatology heads of the fifth dimension!” I sneered. “Always counting on your technology—worshipping it, drugged by it, and killed by it.”

Yeah, me too—the biggest scatology head of all time—the killer of killers and the killer of the innocent. The tyrants were all there on the target. And so were the red blossom children.

I could pray
, I thought.
I could ask for mercy from the God I don’t believe in, the maker of galaxies and wooden staircases. I could ask him to stop this ship. I could beg him to save the billions upon billions I am about to kill
.

For an instant, I wanted to pray for this. But I could not, because hope beyond all hope was not objective reality, because it was not rational, and most of all, because it was absurd to believe the impossible. For I knew that at the end of everything, there are no little old men with burros and jingling bells arriving from nowhere to save you.

“Watch it all”, I said aloud. “Watch it all until your eyes are vaporized, the ship is vaporized, the impact crater in the land or the sea is vaporized, and a hole is drilled so wide and deep into the molten core of Earth that its bowels spew out and the atmosphere ignites and death spreads its final word across the face of the earth in a firestorm that leaves nothing behind. You won’t feel a thing. You won’t hear anything at all. You will fall into the mouth of the Lord of the Night-gods, and you won’t even care.”

How many hours were left? It did not matter, O obsessive measurer, O calibrator of mankind’s end! Matter—anti-matter. Christ—anti-Christ. Time—anti-time. Minutes, hours, days, millennia, eons—all were meaningless.

There was a man standing near me. He had walked into the room without me seeing him at first. Then he stepped in front of the screen and blocked my view. His thoughtlessness enraged me.

“Do you mind?” I growled.

He turned, and I saw he was carrying a little black dog in his arms.

“
Hola!
” he greeted me in Spanish.

“Yeah
—hola
”, I said back at him.

“It looks bad”, he said.

“You think so, do you?”

“Maybe we’ll be okay.”

I stared at him and felt a wave of disgust at his naïveté.

“Go away”, I snapped.

“I do not want to go away,
Señor
Hoyos”, he replied in a quiet voice.

And then I knew who he was. This was the young ensign I had met at the Captain’s table. I had written my address on a napkin for him. He was almost a parody—short, chubby, a bit of a moustache, kindly eyes, a thatch of black hair that should have been cut long ago. A white uniform none too clean.

The dog whined and buried its nose in the crook of his elbow.

“This is Feedo”, he said. “Poor Feedo, his master and the lady die in the bomb on the planet. I look after him now, but he is very old. He is blind, and he is, you know, not always listening to me.”

“You should go to your room”, I said. “Lie down and go to sleep. You won’t feel a thing.”

“But I want to feel,
Señor
. I am awake. I am alive.”

“Not for long.”

“Is your cabin in the mountains of Santa Fe very nice? I would like to visit you, as you asked me.”

“It’s nice, but you won’t be visiting me there.”

“I would like to build a house where my parents could live.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate. I guarantee you won’t be my neighbor.”

“They say we will burn.”

“That’s right. Everything will burn.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No”, I said.

“I am a little bit afraid. But I think
Nuestro Señor
will come for us.”

“
Nuestro Señor
? I hate to tell you, but it’s too late for all that.”

“It is not too late.”

I said nothing. The rings of Saturn rolled past. “
Nuestra Señora
will help us. She will pray for us.”

“You think so? Take a look at the screen. In a couple of hours from now, we’re going to smash the biggest
piñata
of all time. And it won’t be candy that spills out.”

For a time we stared at the big show. He stroked the whimpering dog. I drank.

“
La
Madré
, she crushed the serpent’s head,
Señor
.”

“What is your name?” I asked, though it didn’t matter what his name was.

“My name is Manuel.”

“The serpent has won, Manuel. He devours everything.”

“No, he will not devour everything.”

He put the dog on the floor, where it curled up and went to sleep. Then he sat down in the seat beside me, too close. I looked away. What did he want from me? Comfort? A word of hope? Soon he would be dead because of me.

“Go away, Manuel”, I told him. “Don’t watch this.”

He did not look at the screen, the final hypnotic film of man’s demise. Instead, he gazed into my eyes and said: “
Pobrecito, Neil, estás tan triste. No te pongas triste, no estés triste. Todo va a estar bien
.”

Stunned, I stared at him. I knew those words!

“What!”

He said it again. Then he knelt down on the floor beside me and began to sing. It was some kind of prayer-song. He closed his eyes and lifted his arms, and the singing went on.

I glanced at the screen and saw Jupiter approaching.

“You must pray too, Benigno”, he said.

“Why did you call me
Benigno
?” I shouted, hating his stupid face.

He did not answer, merely increased the volume of his prayer, pleading with
Nuestro Señor
.

I reached into my jacket pocket—I don’t know why. To feel the power of a gun or a knife, I suppose.

One of my hands closed over something strange that felt like brittle paper and small sticks. I pulled it out to toss it away and saw in the palm of my right hand a bundle of the seed pods I had collected in the crystal forest on Nova. I shook them absentmindedly. They chimed.

And with that sound, something within me cracked. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I fell backward through time, back through the maze of many years and the complicated paths I had taken, back into the still pure moment when, as a child, I had danced and sang and rang my little bells in a desert. Without thinking, hardly knowing it, I slid from the chair and onto my knees.

I closed my eyes. I could not pray. But I was no longer a vortex of anti-light, no longer a void. In my soul, I saw only what I had once been—my small, young heart as I danced and sang and rang my bells, looking upward into the deep field of the infinite. I saw this and nothing more.

Manuel resumed praying as I wept.

We had just passed Jupiter’s moon Ganymede when Manuel suddenly dropped his arms and looked at me with wonder.

“
Señor
, I have seen something. In my heart, I see a room within a room. I see a bridge. And I am the bridge.”

“A bridge?”

He stood abruptly and took my hand, making me rise to my feet. “Come”, he said. “There is little time.”

Pulling me by the arm, he led me swiftly from the hall and to the closest elevator. Inside, he pressed buttons on the console, we descended, and got out on PHM. From there, we hurried along the concourse to a cross street and turned left on it. Now we were in a section of service bays for the energy grid, a wide avenue bordered by metal doors. I had seen them before, time and again, whenever I accompanied technicians blindly groping inside the ship’s complex systems, searching for a solution that had ever eluded us.

Manuel halted before a door on which was printed a large letter
N
. He threw it open and stepped inside. We were now in the entrance foyer to navigation’s energy section. A workbench on the wall opposite was littered with tools and small electronic components. Without hesitation, Manuel grabbed a spool of bare copper wire and then sprinted toward yet another door, leading deeper into the interior.

“What are you doing?” I asked, following close behind.

“I see it”, he said, striding forward into a maze of structures that resembled a great city at night, with thousands of windows blazing. He merely kept moving, now this way, now that; to the right down a corridor between waist-high boxes with blinking green lights, then left, up an alleyway between walls of circuitry tracks sealed beneath transparent covers. We were ants crawling through a giant computer.

“This way”, Manuel muttered to himself, without slackening his pace as he swerved into a cross street of consoles, all their lights blinking orange and red.

“How do you know where to go?” I called after him.

“I am listening”, he called back and then turned right into a street of higher consoles and disappeared.

I caught up with him a minute later, where he stood poised on the brink of a canyon about eight feet wide. We both peered into its lightless depths but could see no bottom to it.

“The place we must go is ahead. It is there”, he said, pointing to a raised track on the far side of the gap.

He dropped to his knees and unrolled a few feet of wire from the spool.

“Give me your knife”, he demanded. How did he know about my knife?

I handed it to him, and with it, he cut through the polyplast coating of a circuit track on our side of the canyon. That done, he slid one end of the copper wire beneath a metal filament and wrapped it around several times, and knotted it so that it would not slip off.

“It is not hot”, he explained, turning to me with large, black eyes. “But across this arroyo is another that is hot—you know, electric current is running. These two must connect.”

“But how?”

On the opposite side of the gap, the wall was sheer, leaving only a four-inch shelf along which ran the other circuit track. It would be impossible to jump to that side and not fall into the depths.

“A bridge is needed”, said Manuel. “You see, there are two roads, one on each side. This one has secret wound far along its track, deep in the body, but the scientists they have not found it. Here is the way to fix.”

“B-but how?” I stammered.

He got to his feet, slowly unrolling the spool of wire. Looking me steadily in the eyes, he said: “I will connect. Then navigation commands will work again. No propulsion is fix, only navigation. You must hurry, and tell Commander to change course.”

“This is insane! How can you be sure?”

For a few moments, he gazed into my eyes. Then he smiled. “Now, Benigno
—now
, we will climb the stairs together.”

Open-mouthed, I stood as one paralyzed, until he said with incontrovertible authority: “Go!”

*

We passed by the Earth with less than a thousand kilometers to spare. And then we continued to plummet into the infinite cosmos.

Hours later, I led the Commander and crew down into the bowels of the ship and found Manuel. In the place where I had left him was a strand of wire connecting the two circuits across the gap. We found his body at the base of the canyon, fifteen feet below. His neck had been broken, the fingers of his right hand burned.

I have tried to imagine how he did it. And I believe it was this way:

He had thought swiftly and planned every action, because there was no margin for error. It must have taken extraordinary determination, because he would know that even as he was about to save the ship—and our world—it would almost certainly cost him his life. First, he had unraveled several more feet of copper wire and cut it from the spool. Probably he clenched the wire in his teeth. After checking to make sure that the end connected to the dead track was secure, he lunged across the canyon with his arms outstretched, hoping against hope that he would be able to grab the housing of the live track on the other side, that it would not break, that he would not lose his grip on it. He caught it and did not fall.

With his body dangling over the abyss, his toes touching nothing but air, his left hand gripped the housing and supported his weight. With his right hand, he used my knife to slice through the polyplast coating at a shallow angle. There would have been a spark when the blade touched the metal track beneath, but the handle was nonconductive material. That done, he dropped the knife, and the clank when it hit bottom told him that it had had a long fall. It may be that he thought his only option after connecting the two tracks would be to drop away into the darkness in order to avoid pulling the wire loose. Or he might have considered a leap back to the other side, though this is unlikely, because the canyon was eight feet wide, and there was nothing from which to launch himself. Or he might have imagined himself gradually moving along the line of housing, hand over hand, toward some better purchase or the end of the canyon. But I do not think so. I believe he understood the power of the forces he was about to connect and what they would do to him. He would be the bridge—and the conductor.