Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (28 page)

[I got out.]

Feeling very, very shaken, I made my way slowly back to deck B. Little firecracker that I once was, all my powder had fizzled out. By the time I arrived at Stron’s room, I was frightened and, I must admit, struggling against a sucking undertow of hopelessness. I knocked.

“Well, we can count our lucky stars”, said Stron with a grin when I was inside his room and the door closed behind me. “You’re still at liberty, I see.”

“Am I?” I murmured.

We both glanced at his
max
.

“It’s off”, he said. “We can talk.”

I shook my head, put my forefinger to my lips, and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”

So we went out and rambled along the concourse with our heads together. Stron patted his breast pocket repeatedly and pulled tufts of white hair from his ears. At length, we found a suitable culture alcove and stepped inside. There, safely out of line of sight, he withdrew a flask from his inner breast pocket and offered me a sip of whiskey. I took it gratefully, even as I eyed the “art”—a painting of some naked ladies in Avignon. Nothing to provoke the animal appetites, since they looked like pieces of broken pottery trying desperately to look sensual.

I said, “One of the little details Dwayne warned me about before he disappeared is that even when a
max
is powered down, it’s always listening. And we can’t presume we have privacy any longer.”

“It’s recording too, I’d wager,” muttered Stron, “with an auto-screening program that goes beep and blinks a red light in some far-off office if we use key words like ‘bomb’ or ‘privacy’.”

“Or ‘dirk’.”

“That one would fetch the human analysts. They’d come running.”

“Considering our current status as subversives and mission underminers, I expect they keep live staff on our case around the clock. But there’s worse, Stron. I’ve just had a nasty meeting with the deputy director of DSI.”

“How nasty?”

“Very. Want to listen to it?”

I tapped my lapel button, and he stood with his ear cocked in rapt attention, his face cranky, his white eyebrows tufting upward like a horned owl, but his shoulders slumping more and more, until toward the end he looked totally beaten. He sipped whiskey and stared at the floor for a time. Then he sighed and said, “I told you he was dangerous.”

I nodded.

“Good thing you recorded that farce”, he went on. “It’s so interesting, the Jekyll-and-Hyde thing—two personalities, two styles—and this is the man who controls our destiny.”

“Controls our destiny? I wouldn’t go that far.”

“The Mysterious Stranger still hasn’t put in an appearance, I take it?”

I shook my head. “Nothing. Not even a hint.”

“Everyone on board has seen the missing person posters by now. If he was free, I would expect him to send you something clandestinely, maybe something cryptic, just to let you know he’s all right.”

“I would expect so too. I think it’s a bad sign. It means he really is in custody and being held incommunicado.”

“They probably made him crack, and he’s told them everything he’s done.”

“Probably. I just don’t understand why they didn’t slap him on the wrist and send him back to work.”

“And why the erasing of his name from every known archive, eh? I’ll bet he’s lying on a cold slab in a freezer down in the holds. Or maybe converted into anti-matter.”

“There’s no need to get paranoid”, I muttered.

“Neil, who started this revolt?”

“All right, all right, all right. But I never meant it to go this far. I thought we’d blow the cover off a bureaucratic nastiness and settle the business reasonably.”

“Aaargh, how did a bright lad like you ever develop such a phobia against extremism?”

“Extremism is irrational and alarmist. It is not objective. It is not scientific.”

“Neither is murder and cover-up.”

“Right, but let’s keep our wits about us, for heaven’s sakes.”

Stron took a long sip from his flask and said something guttural that sounded like: “
Ufollisutstanswellneronekinseeettinknonswiznstrongnernefererelquintasthermzilf
.”

“What?” I demanded, because I feared that my co-conspirator might be going daft.

“I said, ‘Of folys that stande so well in their owne conceyt that they thinke none so wyse, stronge, fayre, nor eloquent, as they are themselves’.”

“Say that again, in English, please.”

“That
was
English”, he snapped. His chest began to heave with irritation, and he took another sip. I noted that his hair was all askew, as if he had gone to extra trouble this morning before the mirror, as if he regularly messed up his hair to make himself look more eccentric.

He swallowed his whiskey and said, slowly, emphatically, as if explaining something simple to a mentally deficient child: “I said: ‘Of fools that stand so well in their own conceit that they think there are none so wise, so strong, and so fair as they are themselves’.”

“I see. And that’s what you think of me?”

“Naw!” he barked. “I was referring to the powers that be on this ship of fools. It was a quotation. It was a literary quote from a famous text in our native language.”

“
Your
native language.”

“It’s a line written by a bonny Scotsman named Alexander Barclay, who in 1509 translated into English the all-time classic and best-seller,
The Ship of Fools
.”

“I never heard of it.”

“The original was written by a Swiss German living in Basel, a fellow named Sebastian Brandt. It was published in 1494 as
Narrenschiff
, and then translated into Latin under the title
Stultifera Navis
. Translations into several European languages followed, and more have appeared ever since.”

“
Ship of Fools
—any inference intended?”

“Inference and implication heartily intended. It’s an allegorical satire, you see. It tells the tale of a vessel populated by the deranged, the silly, or the simply stupid who, as they sail aimlessly along, get themselves into all kinds of trouble, all of it their own making. No captain, no pilot, just a gabble of goosey egoists and nincompoops absorbed in their own petty theories and desires. The Renaissance produced a ton of fables and paintings using that motif. Brandt’s was the best, of course.”

“And does the story end well?”

“Only if the reader pays attention.”

“It was a warning, then?”

“Right. Or a mirror, methinks. The ship crisscrossed the rivers and canals of Europe with its pathetic cargo of lunatics, searching for a fool’s paradise—the origin of our modern expression. Some writers and artists were merely mocking the follies of man, but some were mocking the Church, because it was supposed to be the ark of salvation, you see, and in those days it wasn’t doing a good job. Dis-edifying, one might say.”

Without asking, I took the flask from Stron’s hand and had a swig for myself.

“Which approach did Brandt take?”

“He was a theologian, and a loyal one”, said Stron, grabbing the flask from me. “His was true satire, because he wanted to point out how men deceive themselves, with the objective of making people better.”

“And Barclay?”

“A godly Scotsman, he made a faithful translation, very witty in its own right.”

“And you, Stron, are you a godly Scotsman?”

My abruptness took him aback for a moment. He scowled at me with one eye as he thought about my question.

“Naw”, he replied. “Naw, I am not. But equally, Neil, equally—or more than equally—I do not worship in the new church of our times.”

Failing to grasp what he meant, I said, “Well, whatever remains of the church is scattered and pretty much underground in our times.”

“The new church I refer to is thriving above-ground and controls nearly everything. And do you know what it worships?”

“No.”

“It worships
humanity
and no other. Which means it worships some men at the expense of other men. It’s Narcissus adoring his own image. And, as you should know, this new god demands an enormous number of sacrificial victims.”

I shook my head dubiously.

His brash tone and exaggerated accent went down to the minimum: “The missing children, Neil, the missing children! Why are they missing in untold numbers, eh?”

“Yes, but that’s anti-religion.”

“And thus it succumbs to the worst religious impulses of all. Back on Earth, didn’t you ever cast a casual glance beyond the borders of your computer screen or your antiquarian books? Have you cast a probing glance along the streets and avenues of this ship?”

“Didn’t you hear what I said to Larson? And what I said in Stockholm? Don’t you think I’ve been taking a good look around?”

“Yes, in a way. And you’ve concluded that some things are not right. You’ve been brave and bold about it too, and canny when you need to be. That’s why I’m with you in this. But I don’t think you really understand how dark it can get.”

“Maybe I don’t, Stron.” I frowned, sinking into my own thoughts, my own confusions.

“Well”, he muttered, staring at the floor, “the next move is theirs.”

Day 2408
:

I awoke this morning to find that DSI had moved quickly.

First, a flood of new visual presentations of our destination appeared in all the panorama rooms on the four main concourses. These were also available for viewing on personal
max
es. The three stars are now visible “to the naked eye” (the true-scale digital images) as small orbs: two golden spheres and a smaller red coal.

The
Kosmos
has deployed more robot telescopes, coasting in formation like minnows beside a whale, an array spanning about ten kilometers on each side of the ship, triangulating on the Alpha Centauri system. The close-ups reveal massive solar flares on the two larger suns, shooting hundreds of thousands of kilometers out from their surfaces. The new telescopic images of AC-B’s five planets are gripping, but AC-A’s eighteen planets are even more stunning, displaying a wide variety of sizes and colors. It is now confirmed that among them only Planet 7 has an Earth-like environment.

There are many distinct features visible: moving weather patterns, clouds, storms, an atmosphere like that of our home planet. The spectrographs indicate a higher degree of oxygen and lower carbon dioxide. No large volcanoes, only a few small ones ringing tectonic plates, producing relatively low atmospheric pollution. There are oceans, and they are water. There are four main continents and five lesser ones; the latter are island masses larger than Australia. The land / sea ratio is different from Earth’s: there is more land on AC-A-7, though the seas may be deeper than ours. Due to our distance, depth readings are unreliable.

The land masses appear to be covered with botanical life, unless all that luscious green is colored dust. A desert belt girds the equator, no more than 25% the size of our own desert belt back home. The polar ice caps are smaller too, which indicates a warm, moderate global climate, with fewer extremes. The planet has three small moons (all smaller than our moon). They are barren and cratered, colors respectively bright white, pale brown, and gray.

The audio commentary to these
son et lumière
presentations informed us that, so far, we have received no signals of any kind from AC-A-7. Its night side displays not a single light of human habitation.

It was difficult not to be distracted and enthralled by the presentations. Even as I watched them, a little scene from my childhood arose spontaneously in my mind’s eye, though at first I did not understand why.

My mother was painting a
piñata
. She laid a wide brush stroke of crimson red onto the hardened white paper. Beside it, she painted a wide swath of yellow, without touching the red. Immediately, the crimson changed before my eyes: it now seemed orange.

Then it hit me: optics involves psychological interpretation, perceptual subjectivity. Similarly, in a ship where little seems to be happening, where everything is ordinary and tending to become banal, a single voice cries out that a man is missing. This is a stark assault upon consciousness, a stroke of brilliant color. Then, if there suddenly appears all around it other strokes of color that are much more brilliant, the significance of a missing janitor dwindles. The context has changed everything. Clever, clever DSI.

The second response was a tenderly expressed letter sent via
max
mail to everyone on board. Both Stron and Xue told me that theirs arrived about six o’clock this morning. Even I received one. It read as follows:

   To all staff and passengers of the
Kosmos
:

Many of you will have seen the unauthorized hand-out sheet distributed yesterday by Dr. Neil de Hoyos. In it, he expressed his concern that a crew member of the ship was missing. The executive staff of the mission to AC-A-7 wish to reassure you that the person he refers to is not missing. The objective reality is that this is a figment of Dr. Hoyos’ imagination. While we believe him to be sincere, the allegations he makes are directly related to ongoing problems he has had with his personal health. For the past few months, he has been receiving medical treatment for his condition, which involves disorders in his brain chemistry that result in severe depression and occasional eruptions of delusional behavior. With regret, we must inform you that the distribution of yesterday’s hand-out was one such episode.

   Dr. de Hoyos is one of the most respected scientists of our times. His accomplishments in physics have earned him two Nobel Prizes as well as many other honors from the human community. He well deserves these honors. It is unfortunate, therefore, that the subject of his private physical and mental difficulties must become public knowledge. The executive committee, after much discussion, and with hesitation, concluded that it would be beneficial for the good of the mission to share this information with you, in order to reassure you that there is no need for concern regarding the allegations, for they are entirely the product of Dr. Hoyos’ imagination.