Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (66 page)

     In an age that is yet to come.”

     “We will write it,” we said, “though we know not many words.”

     “You know enough”, said the man of light.

     He placed his hand upon our heads.

     We closed our eyes, and when we opened them,

     He was no longer there.

     We have written our story in music that comes from the mouth.

     The man of light has gone from our eyes.

     Yet we feel him close.

     We are not afraid.

     I am ill, and I lie down on the soft soil of the cave. I do not rise up.

     Pho-rion holds my hand.

     Who are you who reads this?

     Do you hold it in your hands after a time and another time?

     Do you see my face?

     Can you hear my voice?

     Do you listen to the music that comes from my mouth?

     I Kitha-ré write this.

Dariush pointed to a few lines in a cruder script at the end, reading:

     I Pho-rion help Kitha-ré write this.

     I lie down.

     I sleep.

Day 387
:

I couldn’t write any more last night. I am not a sentimentalist. I do not enjoy tragedies. They make me fall into a rage that has no outlet. No outlet at all.

Even so, the story of Kitha-ré and Pho-rion seizes me with awe. Sorrow too, and love for them (these strangers I do not know, these poor children who died two millennia ago).

Let me finish the account of that day. Dariush spent a long time praying over the bodies. He blessed them with the sign of the cross. He knelt and for a few moments put the palm of his hand on the foreheads of their skulls. To other eyes, it might have seemed grotesque, macabre, but I didn’t feel that way, not at that moment. Dariush quietly wept, but he smiled as he wept. I hung my head, grieved and confused.

We covered Kitha-ré’s remains with stones. We built a cairn around Pho-rion’s.

After that, we began the labor of removing the slates from the cave. Back and forth, we crawled until we had made a stack outside the tunnel entrance. There we heard Vladimir calling our names from below, and spotted him standing by the lake, looking all around at the mountains. We shouted and waved, and he climbed up to the cave and helped us with the removal of the slates. We loaded them onto the AEC and flew back to the geology base. An hour later, the shuttle entered the
Kosmos
. I have no memory of us saying anything during the return journey.

How strange my room seemed to me when I entered it—sterile, a void filled with a man with a void inside him. I understood nothing about my feelings. I only felt them. Long past midnight, Dariush knocked on my door and entered with papers in his hand. He had scanned the slates, which he called “Kitha-ré’s Song”, and he gave me the auto-translation, annotated with his minor corrections. I’ve copied his polished version into yesterday’s journal entry. It was very close to his recital in the cave.

I thanked him, still so choked that I couldn’t say much.

“Do you know what their names meant?” I asked.

“
Kitha
is the word for the water bird that warbles like a loon, and
re
means ‘the heart of’.
Rion
means deer, and
pho
means ‘force of’ or ‘strength of’.”

Then he left me to ponder the meaning of it all.

Day 388
:

Last night, another strange dream: I am standing on the shore of a lake filled with floating water lilies. There are snow-covered mountain peaks in the distance. It is twilight, the sky striped with hues of red and violet. I am watching a brown-skinned, teenage boy who is seated on a chair by the lapping water, concentrating on sheets of paper on a music stand. A large cello leans on his shoulder, and in his right hand, he holds a bow. Lifting the bow, the boy is about to begin playing.

“What is your name?” I ask him.

He looks up at me, smiles, and says, “You know my name,
pitaji
.”

A light flashes from horizon to horizon.

“We have to get out of here!” I yell.

“Why?” the boy asks, gazing at me curiously.

The lake bursts into flames.

I wake up gasping for breath, my heart pounding.

Is he my son, the one who I might have fathered if I had chosen another path? Is he the past that could have been? Is he the future? Is he a translation of Kitha-ré and Pho-rion into a single symbol? Or is he just more flotsam from my disordered mind?

Day 390
:

A momentous day in terms of the expedition. The rear third of the temple ship has been entered. Radioactivity was within acceptable limits. Inside were found all manner of machines for water and oxygen regeneration, very unlike ours but identifiable by their ventilation and water pipes, which once fed the rest of the ship. A good deal of the upper space in the chamber is filled by spars that support the retractable wings. These are two immense isosceles triangles sitting on their cradles, once manipulated by gears and hydraulics that long ago seized shut. Between them hangs a giant gyroscope, connected by circuitry to the wall and to the wing gears. This construction is in fact three gyroscopes one inside the other.

Dominating the whole chamber is a nuclear reactor, caked in the black alloy that greatly reduces radioactive bleed. The fuel inside, though thousands of years old, undoubtedly has lost only a portion of its strength. It provided the thrust through the four main propulsion tubes at the base of the ship, and also fed a wheel of smaller cylinders connected to vents encircling the body of the ship, clearly designed for maneuvering in zero gravity.

There was a three-hour presentation on the panorama screens this evening. Xue was one of several scientists interviewed, but he was not given pride of place, since primary interest is focused on the ship’s aerodynamics and nuclear physics. He had only a sixty-second sound bite, in which he pointed out that there were a number of odd features in the tail section that suggested major changes had been made to the ship after its landing on the planet. He drew attention to three small holes halfway up the bulkhead wall (with a three-second still photo of them). They were first noticed when the black alloy veneer was removed from the bulkhead on the mid-ship side. Xue said that it was initially believed these were for nonmechanical circulation of air within the ship. Alternatively, there may once have been pipes passing through the holes, funneling heat from the reactor into the forward sections during space flight. In his opinion, he thought these explanations were superficial, since the ship has other more efficient circulation apparatus.

He concluded by pointing out that there is a pattern of triune holes in the temple complex and emphasized that the presence of these newly discovered holes should not be overlooked or hastily dismissed as insignificant. The next visual / sound bite displayed manipulation of the giant gyroscopes, which, despite their age, still spin nicely. This was followed by other fascinating presentations.

Day 391
:

Two minor developments, just for the record:

The Captain sent down to me the elevator codes for KC deck, couriered by hand. In the accompanying note, he renewed his invitation to move my personal quarters upstairs. Of course, I will not do so. Despite his concern, for which I am grateful, I feel this would only add to the siege mentality.

The Captain also said that if I wish to remain on deck B for the time being, I may have some degree of immunity, since he has warned DSI to keep their hands off me, and off anyone else in the ship, for that matter. He cautioned me against using normal e-communications, since
max
messages in and out of my room are probably monitored around the clock, and thus I should not rely on making a call for help that would only be blocked by DSI before it reached KC. He suggested that if I am ever in need of emergency sanctuary, I should get myself to the nearest KC elevator as quickly as possible.

After reading the note, I went for a stroll and located the one closest to me, a fifteen-minute walk forward on deck B, on cross street 22, between the portside and central avenues.

Second development: A note from Dariush, slipped under my door while I was napping, tells me that he will be at his office in Tower Valley for the next three days, assisting with decryption of hieroglyphics on mechanisms in the rear section of the temple ship.

He concludes by assuring me that the slates bearing “Kitha-ré’s Song” are safely archived with Paul. He is concerned about the way every translated document is expropriated by DSI. He worries, I think, that the song might disappear due to its religious implications.

Day 392
:

One never knows what will happen in this universe. As a precaution, I made a trial run, escape mode. It took me 12.5 minutes to reach the KC elevator, and another fifteen seconds to access it with the code. In total, the time between leaving my room and stepping out into the lobby of KC was 13 minutes. Not bad, but if something should happen unexpectedly, would I have that much time?

Arriving at the lobby, I asked a staff member if I could speak with Paul Yusupov. When he joined me a few minutes later, we had a pleasant chat. Mother and babe in the womb are doing well, he says. Pia is “
bolshoi
—very,
very
big.” She sleeps a lot, or reads, putters around the apartment, makes flower arrangements from a variety of Nova blossoms brought by their friends the pilots.

I gave him my most recent entries in the journal. We also discussed the ancient song Dariush and I had discovered. He said he had read the translation and had been moved by it. He was glad that in some way the boy and girl had been present at the wedding. I told him how pleased I was to leave the turquoise cube by the falls, as a memorial of their marriage. He thanked me, and then apologized that he had to get back to his crew. They were beginning the remote warm-up practice of navigational protocols—test runs for departure, six weeks from now. The ship’s computer will do the real work, he explained, but it was important to have human back-up and oversight. The procedure was all very familiar to his men, but it was best to keep it fresh in the mind. I said something about how easily we forget important things. He replied that we are always making trivia into crises and crises into trivia. Once again, I saw depths in the man that would not be immediately obvious to acquaintances. A boy with a sword, yes, but he also has a reflective mind.

Day 401
:

The baby is born! A girl!

She’s a week early, and it was a long, hard labor, but mother and child are doing just fine. I haven’t seen them yet. The news came via my favorite Igbo-Brit, who tapped on my door, grinning from ear to ear and blurting the news in a loud voice. Doubtless DSI also learned about the birth at that instant, via my
max
. Well, so what! Let them try something. They’d regret it.

“Paul says Pia needs a few days’ rest and then people can visit”, said Loka. “You can pop up anytime on Day 404 or after. Just use the code.”

“Give them my love.”

I am eager, I can’t wait. But yikes! Loka gave away a whole lot of information in two short breaths. The Elf and his sylvan band now know I have a code, and thus if they wish to take me into custody, they will do it by surprise. Following on that, the gamut of disinformation ploys will be ever at their disposal. They could make me into a serial killer for the records, a madman who had to be incarcerated in their prison. Or shot while resisting arrest.

Maybe I should move upstairs. No, that would be capitulation.

Day 403
:

Dariush was aboard for a few hours today, ostensibly to do research in the main computer, and more importantly to visit the newborn baby. He stopped by my room for a few moments. We went for a walk.

“I bear some messages for you, Neil. Pia and Paul are looking forward to you meeting their child tomorrow, if you can come.”

“Whaaaat!
If
I can come! I’ll be at their door before sunrise.”

“I have just come from her baptism. Her name is Katherine Teresa. She is very healthy. She is brown-skinned and has her mother’s eyes. There is plenty of Paul in her as well. She is very beautiful.”

Dariush handed me a slip of paper. On it was written a mixture of numbers and letters. I smiled, recognizing a quirky algorithm Xue and I had worked on in our youth.

“This is from Ao-li?”

“Yes, it is his door code. He asks that you retrieve his most favored book—the one you have discussed with him. He asks also that you bring this book and a sculpture of a deer to your room.”

“My room is hardly a safe place to keep them. Why does he want me to do it?”

“He did not say. He mentioned, however, that he is currently embroiled in a controversy with fellow committee members and with other committees involved in the examinations of the towers and the temple ship.”

“Did he explain what the trouble was?”

“He believes they are pressing for discoveries in a hasty manner. Our time is running out, you see. Departure is thirty-two days from now. Under the laws that govern the expedition, all personnel must return to Earth, since debriefings will be extensive when we arrive there. It is hoped that the findings and papers written by the scientific teams, with no member excepted, will generate the global funding for a second expedition. Xue argues that what we have already discovered will ensure a second expedition.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“Several teams are desperate to have a major discovery to bring back to Earth.”

“We have tons of major discoveries!”

“Yes, but they want a gem to cap their crowns. They want to power the ship. Our own mobile generators have been unable to do so—only the very simple hydraulics in the towers respond.”

“Power the ship? You mean they want to make it fly?”

“No, that is still in the realm of the fantastic. For now, they hope to reenergize the circuit systems, including functions as simple as the original lighting and as complex as the glass tablet in the command center, which they believe is a computer screen. If it is such, it could give them potential access to digital archives they think are embedded somewhere on board. This may enable them to extend the wings, analyze the bronze hands’ relationship to the wings, test the gyroscopes’ relationship to the command center, and activate many other functions.”