Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (70 page)

He seemed happy to see me, like a long-lost cousin. Who knows, maybe he was a long-lost cousin, if you traced us both back to the Aztecs and the Conquistadores.

I asked him how he was coping with it all.

“I have lost friends”, he said, his face falling, tears in his eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“You lost friends too,
Señor
Hoyos. I am sorry for this.”

What could one say? We were sorry. Everyone was sorry. To change the subject, I asked him if he was regular KC staff or just borrowed from the kitchens on lower decks.

“I was an ensign in the navy”, he replied. “Then I was seconded to space fleet and chosen for the voyage.”

He left and I read the message, an invitation to dine that evening with the Captain.

It was a downcast group of people who met in his private quarters. The Captain, the Commander, Vladimir, a few other flight staff, Pia and Paul and the baby, Dariush, a nuclear physicist named Barton, and myself.

Barton, it turned out, had planned to be in the temple on the day of the explosion, but at the last moment, he had decided to remain on the
Kosmos
. I could see well enough that he was a taciturn, cautious kind of man, which was probably why he had held back that day. British, fortyish, and afflicted with classic academic myopia, he told us that he had considered it unwise to clump all the nuclear physicists in a single room in proximity to a highly unpredictable experiment. He had been influenced to some extent, I now learned, by conversations with Xue.

As we ate a meal of simple vegetables and nova-salmon (the last we would probably eat), he gave an account of the current condition on the planet’s surface.

“Low-orbit scans have been tracing the spread of radiation. Significantly, it is declining sharply as it moves westward over the sea, and has fallen to less than 3% strength as it touches C-2. The fall-out is heavier material than we first thought; it and dust are descending by gravity or being precipitated out in the tremendous storms caused by the blast. This is extraordinary good news, to say the least.”

No one around the table responded. It was hard to think of anything post-blast as extraordinary good news.

“What’s the condition of the epicenter?” I asked.

“It’s certainly the worst event in recorded history. The crater is more than thirty kilometers in diameter, and unmanned probes sent into it tell us that it’s basically a shallow bowl of fused glass—green and purple glass. The temple mountain is gone, and all the nearby mountains have changed shape as a result of combined blast, earthquakes, and avalanches. The pass through the western mountains is twice as wide now and nothing remains of anything on the temple side of the range. The land everywhere is absolutely barren. It’s like a moonscape. Only on the outer rim of the continent are there any remnant forests—however, these are no more than blackened stumps. A few fires are still burning.”

“What was radioactivity at the epicenter?” asked the Captain.

Barton gave a figure. “Surprisingly low after four days”, he said. “I simply cannot imagine what fuel they were using, or how, precisely, it was brought to the state of chain reaction. This is unknown physics, but in my estimation it would have been a smaller
fission
bomb driven into the mass of nuclear fuel which became the
fusion
bomb.”

“I agree”, I said. “That’s the only way it could have happened. You saw the two so-called reactors in the tail of the ship, I’m sure.”

“Yes. And I’m guessing the innocent blighter on top was the fission bomb. Even so, consider this, Hoyos: They may have found some elements not on our periodic table—which, according to our current state of knowledge, is absurd—or perhaps not—I don’t know. Now the larger ‘reactor’ was certainly immense, and if it contained only fissionable material, then it could have created an explosion larger than any mankind has made. And so it did. But this would not account for the colossal size and effects of the explosion. My guess is that the designers of the bomb had interred a much, much larger cache of fuel in a chamber beneath the ship, connected by a hidden channel or channels. Add to this the fact that there are significant seismic faults running into those mountains, and. . .”

“What’s happening with the seismic aftershocks?” I asked.

“Declining in number and magnitude. Lava flow from the three erupting volcanoes is decreasing. Two other unstable volcanoes on the closest continents are venting steam but exhibiting no immediate threat of massive eruption.”

He went on to say the tsunamis in the southern hemisphere had done some damage to coastal regions, but the seas had absorbed the waves and were nearly back to normal patterns. The planet was big and resilient—magnificent, actually. The other continents appeared to have suffered no great harm, and in ten years time, even C-1 would have regenerated its flora, possibly tree saplings. Perhaps some fauna had survived as well. In a hundred years, all that would remain as evidence of the blast would be the immense glass bowl, though it too would be slowly covered by wind-blown dust, soil runoff, and subsequent organic growth.

Barton had just concluded the above when a flight officer came into the room and addressed the Captain in a quiet voice. “Sir, Sobieski is dead.”

Vladimir half-rose from his chair and exclaimed in a stricken voice, “Jan!”

Dariush stood and excused himself, saying he would go to the clinic now.

Paul covered his eyes, and Pia put a hand on his arm. The Captain stood, speechless for the moment. Then, in a quiet voice, he too excused himself and left the room.

Soon after, we all went our separate ways.

Barton suggested we find a place to talk. We took the elevator down to deck D, the concourse on which he lived. He wanted another drink, he said, and I had no reason to object. We entered the Indian restaurant, the doors wide open and no sign of customers or serving staff inside. I took a seat at a table, and he went behind the counter to see what could be found in the way of alcohol—anything to numb our feelings. He brought back two cold beers.

“What a bloody disaster”, he snarled. “We’re in a hell of a mess. We have one shuttle left and only one pilot for it.”

“That’s more than enough for when we get back to Earth. Besides, the base in Africa will have other shuttles to come up and fetch us.”

“True”, he nodded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound bitter.” Bitter? I wondered. What was his bitterness compared to mine? Mine was a vat of acid. He didn’t know yet. He hadn’t added it all up. He was sharing a drink with the man who had made it happen.

I knew this was false guilt, or half-false. I hadn’t
made
it happen. But there were a whole lot of people dead or dying because I had made it possible for them to come along on this great adventure. “Have you seen any DSI staff?” I asked. He scowled. “None so far. Hopefully they all got fried.” It was a harsh thing to say, wishing people dead. It matched my own emotions of the moment. How satisfying to see the bad guys shot, just the way it should be, just like a cheap western.

“You know,” Barton continued, oblivious to my thoughts, “Oppenheimer said it when he observed the first nuclear explosion, the bomb he helped make. As the fireball and mushroom cloud rose up into the sky over New Mexico, he quoted the Hindu scriptures.”

“
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds
”, I said.

“That’s right. That’s the one.”

“It was from the
Bhagavad Gita
, the
Song of God
.”

“What god was that, I wonder?” Barton snorted.

“It was Krishna”, I said, pointing to a blue-skinned deity in one of the wall paintings. “The supreme being in disguise, you see. He was quite a slaughterer, this supreme being.”

“Aren’t they all? One wonders which of them is the front-runner in the body-count department.”

“Oh, Krishna was right up there with the best of them. For example, he explained to a warrior named Arjuna, riding into battle on a chariot, why it was permissible for him to slaughter his grandfather, his teacher, and his other relatives. You see, when Arjuna spotted his family among the enemy host, he got cold feet, dropped his bow, and refused to fight.”

“Decent of him.”

“Then Krishna the great lord of the universe gave him a stern lecture. ‘Arjuna,’ he said, ‘this isn’t worthy of a hero like you. Your duty is to fight. Those who have joined forces against us must perish. Attachment to friends and relatives should not stand in the way of your duty.’

“ ‘How can a man know his duty?’ asked Arjuna. And Krishna replied: ‘Don’t think of the results. Don’t say, ‘These people are yours, and others aren’t yours.’ You have to understand, my boy, that everyone who is born has to die. Justice is more important than people.’ And then the zeal to fight returned to Arjuna—he picked up his bow, and went forth to the battle.”

“Lovely”, said Barton sourly. “And where’s the justice down there on
Mundus Novus
?”

It was a good question. It was rhetorical, of course, but it needed to be asked, and indeed I asked it, though I kept my thoughts to myself. It struck me that people are always real and that Justice, by contrast, is a debatable topic. Justice, justice, so often reshaped by those who would wield it, depending on their cultures and myths, depending on whether they think they are supreme beings or isolated bio-mechanisms floating alone in the universe. Which one were you, J. Robert Oppenheimer? And why did the occult mythologies of the East have such appeal for you? Was Krishna better than the God of your ancestors? Or was he just a lot more like you? You considered yourself beyond guilt, didn’t you? You looked original sin in the face, as you once confessed in a candid moment, and you didn’t recognize it.

“Original sin”, I murmured, realizing that Barton was staring at me, waiting for a response.

“What?” he said as if he’d never heard the term before. Maybe he hadn’t.

I shrugged. He finished his beer in a gulp and pushed back his chair.

“Good night, Hoyos. I need some sleep.”

After he left, I found another bottle of beer in the cooler and drank it on the spot. I also searched for vodka and found a flask of the synthetic kind. I took it with me to my room and sat down on my bed, staring at my feet. I sipped from the neck of the flask, and I thought a little. Then I took some swigs that burned all the way down, and I thought some more.

Why did we of the enlightened West call our first nuclear weapon, the “Trinity” explosion? This god, our defensive god, gave birth to an “Original Child”, who burned and obliterated our family, so that they would not kill us, we were sure; we were very sure it was right and just. And so we did it again and again.

Oppenheimer once said that when a man of science sees something that is technically sweet, he goes ahead and does it. Only later, after he has enjoyed his technical success, does he think about what he has done. That is the way it was with the first atomic bomb. That is the way it was with us on Nova.

Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, Teller, all you who preceded me in our great calling, you were riding on the wrong chariot! Didn’t you know what you would unleash? Didn’t you realize you had launched an age in which millions upon millions would be obliterated by your rational brilliance, your light of the lord of the night-gods?

After I drank the vodka to the last drop, I felt good—real good.

“Here’s to the heroes of science!” I raised my arm in a toast. “Here’s to heroes of the deaggressivization of mankind!” I lurched to my feet and stumbled into the bathroom. “And here’s to a hero like you!” I declared to the man staring at me in the mirror.

*

Departure was delayed and delayed. There was still a thread of hope that we would receive more distress signals from individuals or from isolated beacon posts where a remnant might have gathered. None came.

Finally, the Captain gave us the statistics of our demise. Broadcasting live through the all-ship communications system, he told us that of the 677 people who had departed from Earth ten years before, two had died on the outward bound journey, two more had died of snakebite on Nova, 459 had died in the blast and subsequent firestorm and earthquakes. Of the forty survivors brought back to the ship, thirty-three had since died.

This was a total of 496 dead. We were now a group of 181 people living on a ship designed to comfortably accommodate a thousand. We were less than a third of the original voyageurs.

After the Captain had concluded speaking, I powered up my
max
. None of our on-ground cameras had come through the devastation, but our satellite cameras were still in operation. I accessed the realtime vid images of C-1. The skies were clear over the continent, which now was a gray landscape speckled with patches of charcoal gray. Even the glass bowl at the epicenter reflected no light, since falling ash had covered it. I zoomed to the central mountain range and crept southward past the crater toward the place where the beloved valley had been, only five or so miles from the blast. It was gone. The mountains that once had held it in a close embrace were broken, though portions of them were still standing. The lake and the crystal forest had vanished. The cave of Kitha-ré and Pho-rion was buried under a thousand meters of shattered rock. All the plentiful snowcaps had melted, and numerous canyons were filled with dirty cascades of run-off.

Base-main was a junkyard covered with dust. I zoomed to the hill where the flag had been unfurled more than a year ago. The site was barren, the flag gone. However, there were four sparkling beads nearby, vaguely blue, which must have been the toppled globes of the grave-markers. Beneath the ashes lay the bodies of Stron and David and the other two victims.

*

Departure seemed an anticlimax. The flight staff, nearly a third of our total number, were busy in the command center. The remainder of us watched on panorama screens as the
Kosmos
did a slow roll away from the planet, though visually, it seemed to the eye that the planet was suddenly leaving its orbit and spiraling upward out of sight. When the ship reached its proper plane and bearings for the return voyage, the cameras adjusted and Nova came into view again. We were now on the side of the planet in daylight, facing three continents that had never been explored, except by high-altitude scan surveys or token visits by subs and AECs. We had left our view of dusk over C-1, and now as the main propulsion engines ignited, morning was spreading across C-4 in the northern hemisphere and C-5 in the south, with the smaller C-6 floating on the ocean east of them, midway between the two. Nova seemed as serene as ever. Though a bomb had destroyed C-1, the other eight continents still radiated their lavish green—life irrepressible. But it was not really irrepressible, I knew. A few more bombs like that and the planet would have become a sterilized orb.