Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (83 page)

Inside its entrance foyer, or stairwell, we found painted on the wall facing us the following words, in the French language, with an English translation:

Ascendez, s’il vous plait. Les habitants de la Kosmos sont ici. Nous vivons à l‘étage supérieur
. (Please go up. The people of the Kosmos are here. We live on the top floor.)

This was our first confirmation that the ship was the original exploration vessel that had brought mankind to Regnum Pacis. As we climbed upward through successive staircases, floor after floor, we learned that the ship’s primary energy source still functioned on every level. We kept our oxygen apparatus by our sides, but the atmosphere continued to be consistently breathable air. We also had gravity, light, and warmth. We did not try the closed doors at any of the landings and proceeded directly toward KC.

Pausing on a landing, which we estimated to be at the halfway mark, none of us were as short of breath as we had expected to be. One of the scientists pointed out that Earth’s gravity had been less than ours, and the ship had maintained what was normal on its home planet. We were now, he said, experiencing the benefits of a good diet or fast, with no loss of muscle strength. The comment occasioned smiles all around. I also felt grateful for the years during my youth when I had been an avid mountain climber, before I entered the monastery. Despite my advancing age, I now felt more invigorated than strained. I was also wearing my lightest habit, which I use for summer labors in the garden, and I was carrying little baggage, just my backpack, containing my portable Mass kit, notebooks, and a few changes of underclothing.

With nods to each other, we resumed the ascent. Finally, arriving at the topmost platform where the staircase ended, we found an open doorway awaiting us. Passing through it, we were now in a wide concourse. Pausing for a moment to orient ourselves, we looked left and right down an avenue that resembled a street of unbroken smoothness, as if made of polished limestone, shining with reflected light from overhead sources. Immediately in front of us stood a small wooden table upon which sat a vase of flowers.

I went down on my knees to inspect it and saw that the flowers were not organic but had been made with art and great diligence from tiny pieces of fabric. Handwritten on a piece of cardboard beside the vase was the following, again in French, but lacking any translation (the added translation is mine):

Bienvenue, chers frères
.

Nous sommes très heureux que vous ayez enfin venu. Trois d’entre nous restent. Nous vivons dans l’infirmerie, au bout du couloir à votre droite. N’ayez pas peur. Il n’ya pas de maladie. Nous sommes simplement vieux. Je suis bien et je m’occupe des deux autres
.

Avec l’amour
,

Marie

[Welcome, dear brothers.

We are very happy that you have come at last. Three of us remain. We live in the infirmary, down the hall to your right. Have no fear. There is no sickness. We are merely old. I am well, and I look after the other two.

With love,

Marie]

I translated for the team members, and without discussion, we turned right and walked toward the end of the hall. Passing through a set of double doors, we entered a section that looked less official, as the “avenue” now suddenly changed to a pavement of soft carpet. Many of the open doorways we passed revealed inner rooms with furniture of unusual design. We peeked inside two or three such chambers along the way and saw beds, chairs, tables, and the most extraordinary lifelike images on the walls—photographic, I think, though they were rich in colors. Mainly, these were scenes of forests and seas, and one an unknown city of immense size. Another was a landscape with red mountains rising above a golden plain where nothing appeared to grow.

Finally, we came to a second set of double doorways, on which was printed the word
Infirmary
in several languages. Obscuring half of them was a clumsily painted red cross that was clearly a later addition. We pushed the doors open and stepped inside.

The room was a spacious one, with two rows of beds, still covered by neatly arranged white cloths. One bed, the first on the right side, closest to the door, contained a body. Only a head capped by long white hair was visible, turned away from us. The form beneath the mauve blanket lay in the semi-fetal position, as if the person had just fallen asleep.

The team’s physician stepped forward and drew back the blanket and sheet, which began to fragment as they were moved. Beneath these covers was a skeleton. The bones were clean, the flesh long decayed; there was no smell of decomposition in the room. The covering fabrics and those beneath the body were stained, though dry and odorless.

“It is Marie, perhaps”, I ventured, and none of my companions replied.

The others stood for a while in silence, gazing down at the sad little form on the bed. Then one by one, they turned away and walked about the room, looking curiously at a variety of instruments on countertops, and into cupboards and closets. I blessed and anointed the body’s remains.

There were several items on the bedside table, all coated with a layer of dust: an empty carafe and drinking cup, a few books, a pen, a basket, full of pieces of colored fabric, and a half-completed cloth flower. There was also a small crucifix, carved from wood with not very great skill. It lay upon a few sheets of paper, which I now took up and read quietly to myself.

Her name was Marie Louise Durocher, and she had worked aboard the
Kosmos
as a kitchen assistant and, after the catastrophe, as a cook. She was twenty-one years old at the time of departure from Earth. Ten years later, when the pioneers chose to take the shuttle back to Regnum Pacis, she had been torn between going with them and staying on the ship, but in the end decided to return to Earth because she missed her mother and father very much, and she was their only child. After the near-collision with her home planet, when the ship had begun its long return to “AC-A-7”, she had suffered an emotional breakdown for a while, but people had been very kind to her and helped her through it. She had grown strong, she wrote, by serving others. She had known the ensign Manuel, before his death, before he saved the world and its people. They were friends. Later, when she was ill in her mind, she saw him in a dream, and he told her to pray and to trust. It was he who taught her from heaven how to serve, to find healing in this, and joy.

Who was Manuel? I wondered.

Marie had written a good deal more on these few sheets of paper, but the document was short on details and long on reflections about suffering, hope, love, and her faith in Christ. I strained for descriptions, but there were few, only the portrait of a soul and, even this, a sketch.

She had been eighty-four E-years old when the
Kosmos
returned to orbit around Regnum Pacis in Year 36 (RP-y). By then, there were only seven people left alive, all of them very old. Two years later, there were only three people left, all women. During the following year, wrote Marie, “My beloved sisters have passed away into the arms of infinite Love.” She had interred the bodies of her last two friends in the “
la mortuaire
”, and then waited.

The document clearly had been written during her final days of life, when she knew she had not much longer to live. She wrote that she now understood the pioneers would not come to the ship and rescue her. They might find her body some day, and if they did, she wished to bless them “from beyond the gates of death”. She prayed the visitors were in good health and good spirits. She hoped that some among them had come to know “
le
bon Dieu
”. If by a miracle everyone had come to know Him down there on the beautiful planet beneath her feet, the world she would never see again, then this was very good, and she was content to offer her “
petite sacrifice
” toward that end.

Her final words in this little memoir were:

I am alone. But I am not alone
.

That night, the team gathered with me in a large dining room off the KC main foyer, and I celebrated a Mass for the souls of the deceased. Each morning thereafter, we met for Mass, and often in the evenings for night prayer.

We ate our meals in the dining room also, after warming our food in the adjoining kitchen, since its cooking apparatus was not unlike ours at home, though it lacked our cookers’ electric coils, which glow red. These machines had glossy square tiles that looked incapable of doing anything at all, until with one touch of a button they became instantly hot. We slept in the private bedrooms ranged up and down the hall of the KC flight staff residence. The mattresses and coverlets were all in a state of deterioration, dry and fragile, crumbling at the touch, but we had our own bedrolls and blankets.

Throughout the ship, lights were dimmed or raised at regular intervals, leaving only small trains of miniature lights along hallways and in other public rooms, to guide our steps if need be. It left us with an uncanny feeling at first, and imagination could easily have inflated the phenomenon into a grand overseer watching our every move. When we realized that it was the ship’s system regulating the illusion of night and day, we adjusted to it quickly.

During the “days”, our attention was pulled in a thousand directions. My fellow team members will be writing their own accounts of our exploration. Therefore I will pass briefly over the practically inexhaustible details of our various researches, with a few exceptions. After the first day or so, when they had satisfied their initial fascination for the history and anthropology of the
Kosmos
people, they turned their attention to scientific matters, the gathering of technical information and artifacts.

The physician was perpetually busy in the medical wing, collecting smaller instruments and making notes and drawings of larger machines. As did all of us, he rued the absence of the newly invented photographic apparatus, which would have made a better record. But there were only six such prototype instruments in the laboratories of Regnum Pacis, and even if permission had been granted for one to be brought along, it would have been extremely difficult to transport about the ship (too large and too heavy for even four men to carry).

The chemist disappeared into the pharmacies, cataloguing and collecting samples from an inexhaustible store of medications.

The electrical engineer applied himself to finding his way into the labyrinth of the energy system, its nerves and entrails, so to speak. Since the ship was still “live”, this would be a perilous venture. He found the access portals on PHM on the fourth day, and thereafter we seldom saw him, though he returned to our headquarters late each evening with filled drawing pads and copious notes. Whenever we asked him what he had learned, he usually shook his head in some bewilderment: “Everything and nothing”, he said.

The astronomer searched for information pertinent to his field, limiting his activities to the Command center of KC, where there was a division with a large room of its own, labeled
Astronomy
, next door to a room labeled
Navigation
. He and the computer theorist, often assisted by the mathematician, knew that what they sought was asleep within the memory storage in the ship’s complex “brain”. Daily consultations between the three, and occasionally with the electrical engineer, brought them no closer to accessing whatever that mysterious power had been. Computer screens would light up at the tap of a lettered keyboard, but displayed nothing and responded to no amount of experimental typing on function command keys.

Knowing that their time was limited, these four men grew increasingly frustrated. They had hoped to obtain advanced optical instruments, presuming that these were connected to the astronomy computer terminals. For example, an inscribed label above a screen might say: Telescope 4, Navigation-14. Another might read Telescope 2, Stellar Obs-3. The actual telescopes were surely buried somewhere in the zone of the ship’s observation functions, but the locus of these was never found. From accounts of the original journey from Earth, we knew that there were also mobile lenses or “cameras” that had flown alongside the
Kosmos
. Our investigators eventually found their storage chamber in a subsection of the shuttle concourse. It contained several dozen identical “machines”, with parts that none of us could understand, other than their glass-like, optical lenses. Though cumbersome, the machines were lightweight, and six were stored in our shuttle’s hold.

The pilots and navigator were mainly occupied in the forward section of KC. They reported that several instrument panels appeared to have been damaged at some point in the past, and repaired. Here too they were met by nonresponse from the myriads of components. As a result, they restricted their activities to making exact diagrams and notes on the layout of the numerous piloting and control stations, meticulously drawing any and all labels they found, copying every number, symbol, and alphabetic letter, and their exact positions in the Command center.

Leaving me to my own random searches, the two other historians went off on forays through the several libraries, though their investigations proved to be fruitful only in the single library containing real books—pleasantly heavy in the hand, dusty, and smelling faintly of their bindings. None of these volumes were about technical subjects, being mainly works of the humanities. The electronic “books” and library terminals doggedly refused to activate.

Day after day, as we moved through the ship, we learned that not a single such electronic apparatus would respond to our touch. All computer terminals that we happened upon, both public and private, were found to be nonfunctioning. They lit up at the tap of a lettered keyboard, displaying a glowing blank screen, but would go no further. Whether this inaccessibility was by design or by accident, we did not know, and perhaps will never know.