Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (63 page)

He did not reply. For both of us, this was a veer toward the unstable realm of emotions.

“Neil, you were a word to me”, he said at last. “And you still are.” I shook my head, wondering what kind of “word” I could possibly be for the man.

I said, “If I had ever married, if I’d ever had a child, maybe many illegal children, I would have liked you to be an uncle for them. I would have been so happy to see you teach them to use a slide rule, or read a poem, or get to know a wee little fellow sitting on the back of an antlered stag.”

Now he grinned. “When can I come for a visit?”

“It’s a bit late for all that. But we can dream.”

“We can dream.”

“Care for another beer? It’s on me.”

“Thank you, but we must now put a pleasant cap upon the evening’s festivities. I must be up and about at five in the morning. Tomorrow we will try to elevate the tower floors.”

“Keep me informed?”

“I’ll keep you informed.”

We shook hands and he left.

I went to my room, looking over my shoulder in case DSI agents suddenly jumped out of the shadows to drag me away. But none appeared. I slept poorly that night and was in and out of consciousness, dragging bits of dreams with me. In one, I saw brown-skinned young people diving from a boat into deep cool water. They were my children. The children I didn’t have. Maybe the children I might have had. I can’t remember details now, but the spiral staircase was there too. Another of those synapse blips, I suppose.

Day 357
:

Not much to report by way of developments. No harassment from DSI. Both Xue and Dariush are below on the planet for a few days, engaged in their respective work at AS-VT.

True to his word, before he left, Xue gave me half-a-dozen sheets on which he had penned some poetry, including the snake poem that had made Pia cry. He says this writer’s work is
persona non grata
back on Earth, and thus he had committed a few to memory. I like this guy Eliot. He’s so refreshingly dire; no happy-think for him. I passed the poems on to Paul for insertion in my journal.

Day 359
:

This morning a brief e-voice message from Xue to say that engineers installed a generator in the base of Tower 1 and connected it to the ancient wiring of the original power source. The circuits were conductive and “live”. The hydraulic pistons were refilled, and the three columns on each level (total of six per tower) were lubricated. This, combined with experimenting with the levers (which turned out to be switches), succeeded in elevating the bottom floor / ceiling, which simultaneously elevated the top floor / ceiling. There was a din of squealing and groaning as the telescopic tubes were used for the first time in two millennia. Yet they were wonderfully designed, and the whole operation proved to be ridiculously simple.

The uppermost floor came to a stop beneath the broken shelf in the top chamber, which when intact would have made a rim to inhibit further rise. The sphere stationed on its rod at the radial core of the floor was now level with the center of the circular window. Sunlight pouring into the chamber from above passed through the prism inside the sphere, emerging as a thin beam, shooting outward through the window and hitting the cliff face on the other side of the valley. There, a panel of metal had been affixed to the mural, large enough to cover the eyes, since Drs. Hoang and Cowan had predicted the beam, concerned that it might do some heat damage inside the temple. The beam struck the metal at the position of the monster’s right eye and began to burn through. This was reported immediately by radio to the people in the tower. They covered the sphere with a canvas hood, and the beam instantly died.

Tonight we watched a panorama presentation about these experiments. An astronomer explained that the spheres were used by their makers to amplify starlight, and were not intended to direct the full power of solar rays into the temple. Night experiments began after sunset today. We’ll hear more about this tomorrow.

Day 369
:

Green Day again. A year has passed since the previous exercise in elevating our cosmic sensitivities, or “interplanetary bio-consciousness” as it is called officially.

There are few people onboard the
Kosmos
at present, so the green banners, scarves, and neckties were scarce here. Down on the planet, however, festivities were in full swing. On the panorama screen, I watched a few celebrations at various stations, dominated by an incompatible mixture of ecological cant and jargon and an any-excuse-for-a-party attitude, seasoned with mystical music.

One particularly nauseating performance occurred in the temple itself. There, accompanied by the piped-in music of flutes and drums, a bevy of maidens danced around the black altar cube. They were dressed in diaphanous green gowns that left nothing to the imagination. Somewhat frenzied, nearly erotic, and definitely euphoric, the ten young women twirled and pranced and sang in praise of a cosmic “lord” who held fire in one hand and arrows in the other. Their choreography resembled a coil, winding and unwinding hypnotically as they chanted. At the head of the dance, leading it all, was the old Russian psychiatrist lady who had been so offended by me looking at her scar years ago. She was now without doubt far into her eighties, which was unfortunate, since her gown was the flimsiest of all, nearly transparent.

With flailing arms, she repeatedly let fly full-throated cries rising from her arching abdomen, a crone-nymph on hallucinogens. As the event progressed, a soft, male voice-over informed the viewers of our need to reconnect to primitive “spirituality”, which entailed, apparently, a “rediscovery of the phallic” (thankfully not acted upon, at least not on screen, as far as I know, which isn’t saying much) and a “reintegration of light side and shadow side” for the sake of universal harmony.

(
Ay, caramba
! I turned it off and went for a long walk.)

Day 370
:

Today has been occupied with repeated practicing on the columns in all three towers. They are fully functional. Continual lubrication has lessened the squealing and groaning, and they now slide one inside the other with greater ease and speed.

The spheres are kept covered between dawn and dusk, avoiding all exposure to direct sunlight.

During their night experiments, astronomers at Tower 1 reported a powerful influx of star light, with the creation of a very thin beam that crossed the valley, striking the protective metal covering on the cliff face, burning a pin-hole in it, a few millimeters deep.

No one has yet come up with an explanation of how the whole optical arrangement worked to produce star maps. One hypothesis is that the alien astronomers manipulated light through the numerous hand-held bronze and brass instruments found on the shelves of the middle chambers in all three towers. Since each device contains lenses and prismatic crystals, light beams may have been redirected onto screens within the towers, and then copied exactly onto the inscribed stellar map-plates. Alternatively, the plates themselves may have been the screens, and the map was burned into the metal by the very light that came from their source stars.

Needless to say, for the time being, it is all conjecture.

Day 378
:

Astronomical experiments have been continuous throughout the past three weeks. Working only during the darkest hours of the night, the astronomers have tried applying various hand-held instruments to the sphere. They believe some apparatus is missing, perhaps only the framework that would have held the instruments in proper place for the production of maps. In any event, our attempts to replicate the old bronze plate maps have been stabs in the dark, producing only unidentifiable patterns on our own screens erected within Tower 1. It is the same with experiments in Towers 2 and 3. The results are random conglomerations of burn holes, and the computer can find no match with true stellar maps. If maps were once made with this configuration of instruments, we simply don’t know how to use them.

Day 380
:

I have been wondering over the lack of panorama presentations on the opening of the tail section of the temple ship. It may or may not have been done. This morning I knocked on Xue’s door in the hopes that he could tell me something about it.

I heard his muffled “Open” in Chinese, and the door disappeared into the wall. He was sitting on his bed with a book open on his lap. He closed it. I recognized it as the Bible disguised as quantum mechanics.

“Neil, I was just thinking about you. Come in.”

“Do you read this often?” I asked, pointing to the book.

He glanced at the
max
. I nodded that I understood.

“The wave particle duality still bothers me after all these years”, he said. “There is an applicability of Planck’s Constant that we need to investigate, mathematically, I should say.”

This was intentional gobbledygook, and we both smiled, knowing that if any monitor folks were listening, they wouldn’t know the difference and would begin shutting down their higher brain functions in order not to be bored to death.

“I was surprised when I discovered you owned a book like this”, I said.

“I find it most helpful. It opens vistas of cosmic theory that cannot be blocked by our normal scientific presumptions about the duality of energy and matter.”

He then spun me a complex equation designed for public consumption. It was gibberish. I chuckled and said, “Brilliant, Dr. Xue, brilliant!”

He continued: “I regret that this volume is in my own language, and thus is not accessible to you. Everyone should read it and ponder it. Were you able to locate one in Spanish or English?”

“In English. However, the author belonged to neither of those races, and thus we have potential difficulties with the translation. I struggle with the wave-particle duality especially.”

“Ah, yes, the uncertainty principle. Perhaps you should discuss it with Dr. Mirza. As a philologist, he may be able to help you.”

“His worldview is within certain restrictive parameters, I feel.”

“I believe he is not a restricted man. He is something of a polymath.”

“Or a peculiar savant.”

Xue shook his head. “No, he is not. Which becomes increasingly apparent the more one gets to know him.”

“I know him very well.”

“Do you?” Again, impasse.

“Where did you get the book?”

“My father gave it to me. It was his grandfather’s. A rare volume, you understand. Priceless, actually.”

“Another gift.”

“I think the greatest one.”

We had proceeded as far as we could go in this line.

“Ao-li, I came by to ask you if there has been any progress on the temple ship. Has the rear section been opened yet?”

“The initial cut into the bulkhead will take place the day after tomorrow.”

“Why have they waited so long?”

“There were concerns about the radioactivity. Interestingly, the black alloy that originally covered the ship is a material which blocks radioactive particles to a considerable degree. The atomics people are concerned that inside the propulsion section we will come upon a reactor that is not in decay, as we first supposed, but is nearly as potent as it once was. The presence of mild radioactivity within the rest of the ship, despite the black shield, seems to indicate this. To open it up could mean exposing staff to lethal doses of radiation.”

“So they’ve been thinking of ways to get around this?”

“Yes. Level-A hazardous material suits with air supply will provide some protection. But how much protection is not known at this point. When the incision is made with the anti-matter blade, the results will be carefully monitored. Once the cut is completed around a very small segment of the shield layer, the instruments will record the intensity of radiation coming through the original metal of the exposed bulkhead. If the
roentgen
units are too high, the shield fragment will be reinserted and the propulsion section left alone. That would be a disappointment to many people, due to their desire to learn more about the technology that powered the ship. However, if the rads are within acceptable limits, they will cut open a single door and enter that section.”

“Who decides what are acceptable limits?” I asked. “And another question: Won’t there be a risk of nuclear material spreading out into the temple itself, and beyond into the valley? A lot of people would be affected.”

“Yes, that is the worry. It’s why there have been so many delays. They have now weighed the risks against the potential rewards.”

“And endangering human life is not a major factor.”

“As always”, he whispered.

He opened the book and pointed to a passage. The Chinese characters were unintelligible to me, and I glanced at him curiously. He took a clip pen from his breast pocket and wrote on a slip of paper. He handed it to me and I read:

     For lo, the day is coming, blazing like a furnace,

     When all the proud and all who do evil will be stubble,

     And the day that is coming will set them on fire,

     Leaving neither root nor branch,

     Says the Lord of hosts.

(Malachi 3:19)

“Who is he?” I asked aloud.

Xue penned his reply:
The last prophet of the Old Testament
.

He stood and said he had to go catch a shuttle flight. I walked him to the elevator. There was no conversation between us. I was disturbed, but unable to explain to myself why I felt this way.

To my surprise, he withdrew from the inside pocket of his blazer the ivory slide-rule I had last seen when we were young men at Princeton. He slid the middle section from it and turned it at right angles, inserting it into a perpendicular groove. It was now a white cross.

He said nothing. I met his eyes. He then reassembled the slide rule into its usual position, and handed it to me.

“Will you keep this for me until I return?” he asked.

“If you wish”, I said. “May I ask why?”

Without replying, he gave me a long look and then entered the elevator. When the doors closed, I went back to my room. I did not know what to make of it, but I knew he had entrusted to me one of his most precious possessions.