Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (80 page)

It may be that he paused for a second or two before he took the final step. Then, with his free right hand, he took the end of the copper wire from his mouth and slid it carefully beneath the circuit wire, without touching it, pushing it against the wall, making it loop back upon itself above the live track.

Now he had no choice but to seize the end of the copper wire and jerk it down so that it connected with the track in such a way that it held. Only a second of time was needed to twist it tight—a precious and deadly second. He would have felt a severe jolt and heard a snap even as he let go and dropped away into the fathomless dark below.

*

Manuel’s sacrifice needs no eulogy from me, not even here at the end of my private journal, which no one will ever read. What he did was sufficient to avoid the destruction of mankind’s home. Indeed, he saved billions of lives.

During the months that followed, as we headed farther out into open space, technical staff replaced the temporary fix provided by the strand of copper with a permanent safe connection. They also followed this previously unsuspected trail, trying to locate the greater internal damage, which Manuel had called “the secret wound, deep in the body”. They found some of the source problems, but not all. The repairs were insufficient to restore total navigation control. However, during the second year after our near-collision with Earth, the problem of deceleration / propulsion was finally solved. The units lowered from the body of the ship without fail, and the test firings were perfect. Repeated tests confirmed that we could now change course for home.

But the navigation system did not respond when the Commander and crew attempted to change our coordinates for Earth. Deep within its alchemical mysteries, it had reverted to auto-function. Without permission, without human commands, it had reset our course, and no man now could change it.

The voyage is a wide ellipse through the galaxy. If no further complications develop, and if the stellar compass extrapolations are correct, the ship will arrive in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri approximately forty years from now, at which time, there will be few if any of us left alive.

The others—those who are like Manuel—have not condemned me. They know all that I have done, yet they welcome me. I go to their gatherings. I listen. I wait. Sometimes I hear the bells ringing in my childhood memory. Will I one day sing and dance with them? And even lift my arms, seeking what is . . .

I can write no more.

35 August,
A.D.
258

St. Benedict’s Abbey,
26 Mirza Lane, R. R. 2,
Foundation City, Queensland

Most Reverend Nicholas Hoang
Office of the Archbishop
Holy Family Cathedral
439 Ao-Li Avenue
Stella Maris, Queensland

My dear Archbishop Nicholas,

It is my hope that this letter will arrive in the city in time to greet you upon your return home from your sea voyage to the communities in Josephsland. I have heard that the children being confirmed this year are exceptionally well prepared by the sisters, and that their numbers are unprecedented. I know that all three bishops of that continent were most grateful for your offering to assist them with the sacraments. My cousin Mark, the bishop of Tower Valley, wrote to me before my own “journey” to say as much, and mentioned how moved he was that you would remain with them long enough to participate in the blessing of the new museum at the site of the original catastrophe. I pray that this and other events have been very fruitful, and that you return to us in excellent health. May God grant that you will shepherd the flock of the Lord on this our home continent for many more years to come!

If your schedule permits, I would like to come down-river before month’s end to give you a personal debriefing. There is a world of news to tell you. First and foremost, the ship is indeed, as we long supposed, the
Kosmos
itself. In the documents which accompany this letter, you will find a summary of our flight with my reflections regarding our findings, and an older handwritten manuscript (in English) which I believe will be of great interest to you. This, as well as my own interim report, I have translated into the Standard Tongue, with attached Appendices I, II, III, IV for Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, and Pan-Slavic translations (the brothers worked long hours on these). In addition, I am sending you a selection of significant short documents and other items of interest. When you open the package, I think you will forgive me this understatement when you see two of the treasures in particular.

As you will find when you read my interim report, it is somewhat informal, and even rambling. It is a collation of my first response to a momentous encounter with the past. For the present, I am still overwhelmed with impressions and quite distracted. I plan to write a more comprehensive history of the events (insofar as our newfound understanding will allow) and, with your permission, submit it to the archdiocesan library when it is completed, with copies to the regional libraries of the four continental governments and five territories. I would, as well, like to donate the original manuscripts to the central archives of the Commonwealth.

Please remember me in your prayers to our Savior, as I pray for you.

Holy peace be with you, in Him,
Abbot Anselm Yusupov, O.S.B.

Interim Report by Anselm Yusupov, O.S.B., on the first boarding of the spaceship
Kosmos
, 15 July to 2 August,
A.D.
258 (
A.D.
2485, Earth-year, est.).

Prologos
   The combined efforts of the continental and territorial agencies involved in making possible the flight to the ship were of a character that bodes well for future projects. It was understood by all the governments that our objective in retrieving information was not merely for the enhancement of our scientific knowledge. It was unanimously agreed that the use of any such forthcoming information would involve ethical and moral considerations, which would be discerned at future global conferences.

The flight was, I believe, primarily motivated by mankind’s desire to learn more about the history of the expedition that had led to the founding of a new civilization on our beloved planet. Moreover, we hoped that whatever we discovered would significantly enlarge our understanding of our ancestors.

As we know from our own history books, the pioneers landed by shuttle in the southern highlands of Queensland, which was then called Continent 4 (C-4). This occurred in the year that we now call Year One, or foundation year. The pioneers were loath to date their arrival as anything less than the real beginning of man’s presence here. The previous year, during which the
Kosmos
expedition had explored the planet and gathered samples to take back to Earth, was certainly acknowledged, but for understandable reasons, it was discounted as a period of transient and often shameful intervention by men in a world of uncorrupted beauty. Perhaps, too, the founders wished to put behind them the moral confusions they had experienced on the ship, and, moreover, to leave behind the horror of the bomb that had destroyed the majority of expedition members.

In any event, for our purposes here, the history of those years needs only a cursory outline:

In the year
A.D.
2097 (E-year chronology), the ship departed from Earth, arriving in orbit above Regnum Pacis (then called AC-A-7) by late 2106 E-y. Approximately a year was spent in exploration and gathering data and samples. Then the catastrophe occurred, and in early 2108 E-y, the ship departed on its return voyage to Earth.

As the communications transcripts of that nine-E-year period confirm, the journey was greatly troubled by violence and by technical breakdowns. Little more is known about it because the pioneers’ own technology was declining as the shuttle’s power source failed. Their focus at the time was primarily on establishing means of survival—food, shelter, heat, health matters, and so forth. Perhaps the psychology involved was also at fault: the desire to escape a past that was riddled with confusion, tyranny, falsehoods, and unnatural death. Lacking the means to reactivate (or repair) even the simplest of wave communication, their last received messages from the
Kosmos
told them only that the ship had narrowly escaped impact with Earth during the year 2117 E-y and had continued its voyage into the exo-solar regions beyond.

At that point, the pioneers’ communications system had all but ceased to function, due to the exhaustion of the shuttle’s internal power. Propulsion had become impossible during the first year, for lack of fuel, but the solar batteries continued for a time. Eventually, however, all such batteries and sundry other energy sources also failed and could not be restored, despite the best efforts of the pioneers. The harnessing of wind power for electricity would not occur for another two generations, when the first simple electric generators were made. Redevelopment of solar power followed shortly after. Until then, the pioneers’ attention was mainly focused on the tasks at hand, though I imagine they cast a glance at the night sky from time to time—and wondered. For them, agriculture was the foundation, and industry, as it grew, remained supplemental and small. One thinks of the myriad aspects of life that challenged our forefathers. With dedication and ingenuity, they applied themselves to the making of brickworks, glass, the water wheel, and grist mill, then the first small paper mill and reinvention of the printing press.

The pioneers had brought a quantity of paper with them, and did not develop their own paper manufacturing until more than a decade had passed. By then, they were entirely without electric energy of any kind, and were reduced to manual copying of documents initially printed from the few miniature hand-computers they had brought with them. These phenomenal machines are now at rest, enshrined in our museums, and it has not yet become possible to make them functional again. While the instruments still worked during the first few years, technical knowledge was looked for in what was called their “memory files”, and later in the small number of printed documents obtained before they failed. But these sources had provided little information about the simpler forms of technology needed at the time. Nor could the complex mechanisms developed by Earth’s later civilization be replicated. Many aspects of the powers that had brought man to the planet were by then beyond our grasp. Indeed, we have never recovered them—anti-gravity and anti-matter remain entirely mysterious to us in this present age.

In the early years, there was much discussion as to what the planet should be named.
Caelum Caeli
, heaven in the heavens, was considered for a time but discarded because of its historical connotations. Numerous variants, familiar to us all from our high-school texts, were also applied (one thinks of
Nova
and
Sundara Graha
). We know about these mainly through the writings of Dr. Maria Kempton and Dr. Pia Yusupov, who co-founded with Dr. Henry Arthur the first hospital. Cross-references were also derived from the account written by Dr. Neil de Hoyos, the physicist who returned to Earth with the
Kosmos
, and whose journal
The Voyage
(brought here by one of the pioneers) is still required reading for all students in second-year university courses. None of the suggested names for the planet satisfied the pioneers, and only at the first continental congress in
A.D.
68 was agreement reached. Thereafter,
Regnum Pacis
, Realm of Peace, was universally acknowledged as the name of our planet.

By the beginning of the third generation, a basic civilization was growing. It was a humane society governed by the pursuit of wisdom, by the constant effort to maintain a freely given unity of mind and spirit, governed most of all by the desire to love and to avoid the destructive errors of mankind’s past. There were churches and schools in every village. By the beginning of the fifth generation, there were numerous towns, and a city by the mouth of the Great River had been established—Stella Maris. There, a cathedral was built from the honey-colored limestone brought down from the White Mountains. That same decade saw the establishment of the first university.

From the perspective of more than two hundred and fifty years after the foundation, it is difficult for those who now live in the tenth generation to imagine what it was like for our ancestors. Without doubt, their strength of character, their faith, their overarching concern for the children born to them, enabled them to work with constant sacrifice so that there would be a future for the children—and for us. We who live a quarter of a millennium after them are sustained, often unthinkingly, as the recipients of immeasurable and oft-forgotten generosity.

From among the sixty-seven original pioneers, thirty-six people married, and in the first generation (arbitrarily, I count a generation as twenty-five years), these eighteen marriages brought forth seventy-four children. Most of these first marriages were unions of people in their mid-thirties to late forties. Thus, their child-bearing years were limited. In the second generation, however, there were a greater number of marriages and a larger number of children born. By the third, few people were counting. It was all fruitfulness, it was all a blessing. Love begat love, and the more bountiful the love, the more were the resources of the human community in dealing positively with our practical difficulties and our tendency to sin. Children were the great treasure of mankind. They grew to adulthood knowing they were loved, and they became capable of loving in turn, coming early to maturity and responsibility, for all around them at every moment of their lives they saw the giving of the self for the good of others.

Our people have never been census takers, but in general we know that there are now about 1.8 million people living on the four most populated continents and a quarter of a million more in communities throughout the five smaller Commonwealth territories. Everywhere, families are large and energetic, and, with few exceptions, happy. This is our world. We have all been born into it. It is our home.