Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (16 page)

“Well, sir, that’s what they say. But it ain’t so.”

Ay caramba
! I will bypass the angry comments that subsequently erupted from my mouth.

“A minor question”, I said, when I had calmed down and had poured each of us another inch of peach ambrosia. “May I suggest, my friend, that
you
are guilty of invasion of privacy? Hmmm? Hmmm?”

He bowed his head, nodding and nodding. “I know, sir. I know. I shoulda asked your permission. But I figured you’d be better off not knowing they’d been listening in on you.”

“Really? And what else of mine did you invade?”

He looked up at me with hurt in his eyes. “Nothing.”

“Did you listen to my voice journal, read my paper journal?”

“Nope”, he said.

Somehow I knew he wasn’t lying. We sat in silence for a while.

“You’re some weird cowboy, Dwayne”, I muttered at last.

“Yeah, that’s true”, he mumbled, looking like a whupped puppy.

“You never say much, do you? There’s a whole lot goes on inside that head of yours, so why don’t you ever talk?”

He shrugged. “ That’s why I’m here.”

He handed me a sheet of paper that looked like the newsprint one sees in museums—yellowed, stained, torn, smelling of age. On it was penned in old-fashioned calligraphy:

My father’s father was a 16-year-old boy when he was incarcerated in a German prisoner of war camp during WWI. He was very tall and had lied about his age to get into the army. For the rest of his life, bits of shrapnel worked themselves out of his body. He was in constant physical pain for nearly 50 years. The pain pushed him in the direction of morphine addiction and alcoholism for the rest of his life. He died at age 65, fully in grace, faithful to the sacraments, living in a basement room in the home of one of his sisters. He was a man with nothing. . . only himself and Christ. I never in my life heard him speak a word, because I never met him. He had been banished from our family by my grandmother, who spun the myth that condemned him. She said he was a bad man. It took years for me to piece the true story together. He was a good man.

His absence was a silence, made by the wounds he suffered and the poor choices he made in trying to overcome them.

Certain kinds of silence are holy, the ground of being as presence, a life as a living word.

Other kinds of silence are evil, caused by the external suppression of free speech.

Other kinds are caused by the internal self-suppression of speech due to the terrible blows of injustice that destroy trust, creating suspicion of all other men: “No man can be trusted”, laments one of the writers in the Old Testament.

Poor mankind, poor mankind. . .

“Who wrote this?” I asked.

“One of my ancestors. Great-grandfather or someone back then.”

“This is a very old document. The First World War was almost two hundred years ago.”

“I know. I looked it up. Learned a lot.”

“Uh-huh. Reading history can be illuminating.”

“Depends.” He paused, frowned. “Depends on what history y’read.”

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“Yup. People were sure different in those days.”

“It seems they were.”

Seems? No, they
were
different. I remember some of the old people I knew when I was a boy. And my parents. And that’s
recent
history.

“We’ve forgotten things”, said Dwayne.

“I agree.”

“Some of it wasn’t so good, but some of it might’ve been the best we ever had.”

“There’s not much we can do about it now, is there?”

“Guess not. That’s why I’m reading stuff like this. Figured it would be a long trip, so I brought along a bundle of old family papers.”

“Discovering your roots, so to speak.”

“Yeah. I thought you might be able to explain some of it.”

I sighed, said nothing.

“Like what, really, is a sacrament?” he said.

“A what?” I said, covering. I know full well what it is, but I don’t go around admitting it to just anyone.

“A
sac-ra-ment
.”

“Didn’t you search it on your
max
?”

“I did. It gave me a couple thousand references, and I got the gist of the thing. Or the gist of what those people thought it was. All the articles are cross-referenced under ‘Cult’ and ‘Cultic religion’ and ‘Dysfunctional mystical sects’—things like that.”

“I see.”

“That’s why I’d hoped you wouldn’t mind us talking about the old days, when you were a kid.”

“The old days?” I frowned like an ol’ cowpoke. “When I was a boy, things were pretty much as they are now—not quite so fast, but only by a hair.”

“People like my ancestors would have known a very different kind of world.”

“Yes, and, as you say, there were some bad things about that world. World War I was nasty enough, WWII was vastly worse, and WWIII, well, let’s not get into that.”

“Uh, I never heard about any World War Three.”

“Exactly. The slaughter was worse, just archived under a sanitized name. You say you’ve read the history?”

“I saw the vids”, he shrugged. “They taught us even less about it at school. But now that I’m doing some deep reads, I’m patching a lot of it together. I can tell they taught us stuff with twists in it. We didn’t get the real thing.”

“Yup, you gotta watch out for those twists, Dwayne. So many twists these days, it’s hard to find a straight patch.”

“They had twists back then too. What I don’t get is why everyone in Western civilization was Christian, but they did all that evil.”

“The ones who did it weren’t really Christian”, I said. “Where did you grow up? Somewhere in Nevada wasn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. Small town named Antelope.”

“Were people mostly good or mostly bad in your hometown?”

“Mostly good, I think.”

“Ever see real evil there?”

“Yup.”

“Did everyone do the evil?”

“Nope.”

“Was the evil committed, perchance, by people who had some position of authority in town?”

“Now that you mention it, yes. They called in state authorities actually, with federal backup. Only they didn’t say it was evil. They said it was something we needed. Not everyone went along with them. A few people got themselves arrested for making a protest against it, people I knew. Their kids were taken to a state orphanage. I don’t know what ever happened to the parents because they didn’t come back—leastways not when I lived there. Antelope was kind of a backwater, you see, most people just trying to live quiet lives, working hard, making no trouble for other folks.”

“And did the authorities explain to you that they were doing their evil only in order to help make you, the quiet folks, into better citizens?”

“Yeah. How did you know that?”

“Just a wild guess.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions. Maybe those people who went to jail got home again. Maybe they got their kids back.”

“Maybe.” Maybe, but I don’t think so.

“I never found out”, he went on. “We moved to Sacramento the next year, and I entered college there.”

He told me more about the following years, his first job, a tech position at an aerospace company, and then the steps leading up to his presence on the
Kosmos
.

At the end of his account, he fell silent, lost in thought, with his eyes on the floor and elbows on knees, arms dangling.

He broke the silence by clearing his throat and looking me in the eyes, his expression troubled, straining toward something elusive to his thoughts.

“You know, when I was reading up on the Christianity cult, I came across a saying by one of their holy men. I can’t get it out of my mind. He said, ‘We are losing the basic memory of mankind.’ ”

“Losing the basic memory of mankind? What was his name?”

“Can’t remember. Somebody shot him dead.”

Dwayne and I talked for another couple of hours. His sentences got longer, mine got shorter. In the end, we made a pact to meet more often and to discuss the “real stuff”, as he called it.

Day 1828
:

“We are losing the basic memory of mankind.” I can’t get it out of my mind either.

This afternoon in the lounge, Maria Kempton said to me, “You’re awfully quiet lately, Neil.”

“Just thinking about a lot of things.”

“Not getting housebound are you? Cabin fever?”

“No, no, nothing like that.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Maria,” I said in a lowered voice, “did you know that our rooms are monitored?”

“Monitored? What, by audio you mean? Good heavens, I don’t think so. Why would they do such a thing?”

It’s interesting how everyone speaks about some nebulous, invisible over-authority as
they
. Who these people are is never defined. And I don’t think anyone is referring to the flight crew way upstairs on the top deck.

“Why would they do such a thing?” she asked again, more amused than disturbed.

“I’m not sure. Perhaps they’re keeping an eye on our mental health.”

“Whatever for? We’re all grownups, and besides, this is a ship full of very intelligent, very responsible people—all of us.”

“Maybe some sociologist is doing research—you know, the first interstellar flight, a closed environment, a unique study group.”

“A bit far-fetched, Neil. They couldn’t do that without government approval.”

“This is a government ship.”

“Yes, true, but. . .”

She told me not to worry and returned to her knitting.

Day 1829
:

I have made an effort to keep up with this written journal, but there’s a subliminal drag on motivation. Regarding my voice journal, I asked Dwayne if there was a way we could prevent any monitoring of my
max
files. He looked solemn and murmured that he had already “fixed” that.

“What do you mean,
fixed
?” I asked. “And when did you do it? I haven’t been out of my room for days, except for meals.”

“Uh, actually, I did it all in one shot, fooling the audio snoop, blocking
max
access, installing unbreakable file encrypt. I did it around the end of year one.”

I just shook my head. “And how did you get access to my door code?”

“That was fairly simple.”

“Well,” I huffed, “it looks like I’ll have to change my code every hour on the hour.”

“That’ll sure keep your fellow passengers out. But the codes aren’t airtight, since there are override commands to unlock a door if someone forgets his code. Every day somebody or other forgets. But don’t worry, I keyed in an override of the override. If they ever want to have a look around your room, it would slow them down.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s kinda complicated. Anyway, just give me a call if you ever have problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Let’s say you get summoned to the principal’s office for being a bad boy in class. Let’s say they ask you some casual questions about your
max
, ask you if anyone’s been tinkering with it. They might tell you the ship’s master computer is blinking a warning that there’s a glitch in your
max
, and they’d like to send a tech guy in to see what the trouble is.”

“You’re saying they’d make it sound innocent as apple pie.”

“Yup. And it’d be your proof. It’d tell you that they’re real miffed, that they tried to get into your
max
and figured out they’ve been blocked. They’d have to be cagey about finding out just
how
they were blocked, because that would be a dead giveaway of their secret. That would be telling everyone on board that whoever’s in charge of surveillance is reading our secret diaries. Then they’d have to deal with the uproar. They wouldn’t want a revolt on their hands. So they’d be real subtle about it.”

“Thanks for the heads-up.”

“Yup.”

“Another question: Whenever I go searching on the
max
, can anyone else see where I’m going, read what I’m reading?”

“As we know, the
max
is theoretically a self-contained unit. That’s what the Manual says, and that’s what they told us at pre-departure briefing, right?”

“Right.”

“And we’ve discovered that they can jump right through standard firewall for some reason known only to themselves, right?”

“Right again.”

“Well, they must want to keep tabs on us in a bad way, because they also implanted a back-up micro trail leading in and out of each
max
. It’s a circuit that monitors and cross-checks all the regular airwave traffic in and out of your max. It’s also how they would read what you’ve been surfing.”

“In my case, there’s no harm done. But what about you? Wouldn’t your research into the Christian cult make trouble for you?”

“I fixed it. Sent them on a false trail. Did the same for yours too. I mean there’s probably about a thousand
max
units on board, and it would need a lot of manpower to check out where everyone’s gone surfing. But if anybody turns his eye on you and wants to track you, what they’re going to find out is you’re real fixated on astronomy and poisonous snakes.”

“Clever, Dwayne, very clever. In fact, I am fixated on the latter topic.”

We sat there for a while, nodding and nodding, staring at the floor. “You’ve been pretty thorough”, I said. “Is there any chance you might have overlooked something?”

“Such as?”

“Anything, really. Take for instance the tapeworms and botflies they use back on Earth.”

“The what?”

I described the nano-pests that had infested my home, and how I regularly zapped them.

Dwayne smiled. “Oh, those. I used to call ‘em flutterers and burrowers.”

“Seen any on the
Kosmos
?”

“Nope. Years ago, I put together something nanoid of my own. It alerts me whenever they’re around. Haven’t had a bleep since we left home.”

“I wonder why they don’t use them here. Rare is he who even knows they exist.”