Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (73 page)

*

Dariush and I no longer met regularly, though we made a point of getting together often enough that I knew there had been no waning of our friendship. There was a quality of sadness in him, however, that I had not seen before and which I attributed to the loss of people dear to him. Little had I realized how close he had been to Xue. We talked about him one evening as we sat in the deserted Mexican bistro, where we had gone for old times’ sake.

“He was the same age as me”, Dariush said. “Yet he became as a son.”

“Did he ever show you his slide rule?” I asked.

“Yes, and he explained its origins too. There is a history behind that man, one full of unknown sufferings, dreams, and hopes. His was a sacrificial life.”

“He was always self-effacing, but he knew what to do when it was needed.”

“This is true.” He paused and regarded me thoughtfully. “How little we understand the people we care about. How little we know them, really.”

This was more an indictment of me than it was of him, though I don’t think he intended it as such.

I changed the subject: “Barton is dead.”

“Yes, I heard.”

“He did away with himself.”

“He blamed God, Neil. He blamed God for everything that has happened. I tried to reach him, tried to explain to him that we should look to ourselves for the cause of these evils.”

“Maybe so, but why didn’t God prevent it?”

“God did try to prevent it. He was moving in my heart and in Xue’s also, sounding an alarm bell. For my part, I did not listen as well as I might have. I could have done more, spoken more loudly. But in the end, I did not know enough, and I doubted. I worried that if I cried an alarm it would be dismissed as the irrational fear of an elderly scholar who had no connection to the problems of physics. Even so, I should have tried.”

“That’s hindsight. You can’t beat yourself over the head with it. You didn’t design that bomb. You didn’t make it detonate. And after it went off, you tried to save what could be saved. Don’t you think that counts for something . . . in God’s eyes?”

“Yes”, he nodded. “Yet I know that we do not live perfectly in the will of God, always attentive to his promptings.”

“If he is God, why doesn’t he speak louder, so we can hear him?”

“He does speak. In a multitude of forms, he speaks. Yet our human nature does not want to hear what he says. We choose our own paths; we prefer to rise on our own terms. For us to accept that someone higher is speaking with authority—an ultimate authority over our lives—would cost too much, we think. Thus, we make ourselves more deaf. We turn our eyes and ears in other directions.”

“He could still give us a good shake and catch our attention, couldn’t he?”

“Neil, he has just given us a good shake. But will we learn from this? Will we see what is so plainly before our eyes? Man without God becomes a slave of the old gods, those demons, or else he becomes his own god and falls into another kind of darkness.”

This was his theology again, his myth. I preferred a universe without gods of any kind, good or evil. And I knew he was probing this element of my interior life. He was really asking me if I had made a god of myself.

“How can a man rely on anything?” I replied to his unspoken question. “How can a man know his duty and what true justice is?”

“Are your questions rhetorical, Neil? Or are you asking me for my thoughts?”

“Whatever, Dariush”, I shrugged.

“It seems you wish to be good on your own terms. You are a man of fine qualities, in many ways, a noble person, a man of courage. Yet you are also proud, for you think yourself alone in the universe.”

“I don’t think I’m alone. Here we are talking together, aren’t we?”

“Yes, but you feel very alone.”

Well, he was right; ultimately I did feel that way. But I wasn’t going to admit it, and I certainly wasn’t going to fuel his argument.

“Your qualities were given to you through your parents’ sacrifices”, he went on. “And other gifts were given to you as you grew and went out from your family into the world. Did you create these out of nothing?”

“I’ve done my best with what I have.”

“What you have? Do you think of these as your possessions? Can you not see that everything was given to you? God gave them to you.”

“Where was God when Xue was burned to death and shattered on the pavement?”

“He was with him . . . and in him.”

I frowned, thinking to myself that his theology or philosophy was a version of the endless variety of consolations humans clutch onto when the unthinkable occurs. I had mine, he had his.

“I believe in people”, I declared. “I believe we can make of our lives whatever we choose.”

“I believe this too, Neil. Within the limitations of our nature, this is so. Yet is there not a crucial element missing from your equation? If we choose blindly, we so often choose according to the impulses of what is unredeemed within our nature, or unpurified, I should say.”

“I thought your Christ redeemed everything.”

“Fundamentally, it is accomplished, yet the final part remains.”

“Accomplished but not accomplished?” I said, frowning.

“Science and our countless electronic servants tell us that all things are accomplished by the flick of a switch. We live surrounded and sustained by linear circuits. Thus, existence is perceived as a mechanism.”

“That’s a rather sweeping generality.”

“Perhaps.”

“And I fail to see your point.”

“My point is, time cannot be reduced to a mathematical equation and no more than that. From the perspective of eternity, we will, I believe, see the unfolding of human history as a drama that transpires in the blink of an eye. But we who are still within time cannot yet see it.”

“Answer me this, Dariush: In this blink of an eye, why are so many of Christ’s followers suffering? Why haven’t they changed the world for him?”

“We change the world in the most important way. First, we labor to conquer ourselves, and then to resist the spirit of the world. I know you grieve over the way the world is. It is your solution that is wrong.”

“Really? What do you think is my solution?”

“You strive always to prove yourself superior to the world and at the same time to make yourself apart from it.”

I don’t know why his words inflicted such sudden pain. I suppose I felt he was judging me. In answer, I merely shrugged. I reached for my cup of ale and drank in one gulp until it was empty. Then I stood up, preparing to make my departure in a cordial manner.

“The point is, Dariush, I have no way of knowing if your God exists or not. And frankly, I don’t care.”

“You care”, he said.

I smiled patiently, conveying my affection and pity for him.

“Neil, if the redeeming light of Christ were to go out of the world, mankind would swiftly fall into greater darkness—and then the world would be ruled not only by errors. It would be ruled by the diabolic.”

An image of the beast in the temple crypt passed through my mind, and then, strangely, an image of little children with red dots on their hands scattering into chaparral bushes, to hide.

I shook my head. “I’m very tired. Let’s call it a night.”

*

There was another significant conversation, though it ran along different lines. One day as I sat alone in the library on deck A, staring at the floor, he came into the room carrying a sheaf of paper.

“I wondered if I would find you here”, he began. “I have learned something important. These are translations of archival records from the period immediately preceding the internment of the ship.”

I sat straighter. “What do they say?”

“They say a great deal. During the past few days, I have tried to learn more about their thinking, their planning.”

“You mean why and how they made the bomb?”

“Exactly. A philologist-archaeologist must be something of a detective, you realize. Of course, hundreds of thousands of scans were auto-translated, and the bulk of them were awaiting intensive analysis when we return to Earth. Only a small minority had been subjected to further refinement by human analysis.”

“Such as the three codices under the temple altar.”

“Also Kitha-ré and Pho-rion’s song. A few other documents as well. However, in an effort to understand the minds behind the catastrophe, I tried word searches of the entire body of archive translations.”

“Words like
bomb
and
explosion
?”

“Yes. There were no results, of course. The bomb’s designers were clever enough to know that we might stumble across such references, alerting us to the danger. Moreover, they presumed that the bronze tablet in the tower exhorting us to focus the three lights of the sun into the eyes of the god would be sufficient incentive. They felt sure we would fall into their trap, beguiled by curiosity. And so we did.”

“And so we did. But what have you found?”

“You recall that we posited the construction of the road and causeway between the years 7980 to 7960 before the present. The excavation of the mountain for the making of the temple was completed during the same time period.”

“And the transportation and internment of the ship took five years.”

“That is correct. This probably occurred in the time immediately leading up to 7955
B.P
, because that is the year when temple rites began. However, the final sealing of the temple occurred at some point between 2064 to 2061
B.P
.”

“Nova-years or Earth-years?”

“Earth-years. I adjusted the codex dates to our chronology.”

“Then the ship has been sitting in the temple for around eight thousand years, and waited in the dark for two thousand of those years. But when did they make the bomb?”

“I am uncertain about this. However, I thought it unlikely that they would have created such a malevolent device, one so vulnerable to the sun, before the last moment. If that were the case, it would surely mean it was made shortly before the sealing of the temple. And on this supposition, I searched more diligently through the archives dealing with the final hundred years.”

“And . . .”

“There was too much material to read. Let me say that it was a horrifying portrait of a society going mad. There were plagues and revolts, countered by increasing suppression and regulation of their society, a proliferation of laws and police and military. The temple sacrifices grew in numbers even as their population declined. They understood that in practical terms this was a mistake, but the gods demanded it, and their belief in their gods assured them that it was the only path to survival.”

“From the plague, you mean?”

“From that. But more significantly, their astronomers were recording ‘lights in the heavens’ which had appeared in the direction of ‘the beautiful planet’, their planet of origins. They were told by the Night-gods that the ‘servants of the sky-god’ were gathering for a great battle and were coming to wreak vengeance on those who had escaped. Thus, more and more sacrifices to the Lord of the Night-gods were demanded in order to augment his power.” Dariush paused, frowning, doubtless worrying about my theological limitations.

“You realize that there can be no such augmentation in purely spiritual terms”, he continued. “It is the evil one’s nature to compound murder upon falsehood. It was the unleashing of his hatred. As his sphere of influence shrank, he sought to destroy everything he could in the realm of living creatures.”

“Uh . . . but why the bomb?”

Dariush looked down at the papers in his hands.

“It took them ten years to make, and they began the project not long after the first sightings of a new ‘star over the star of the beautiful planet’, which is how they expressed it. Later, there were more celestial phenomena, ‘fires in the heavens’, which they called the ‘warriors of the sky-god’. What these were exactly, and how they were manifested is not clear in the records. But one thing we know is that Nova’s rulers felt threatened in a way they had not for thousands of years.”

“And they thought a bomb would protect them?”

“No. They conceived it and built it as an act of vengeance against those who would come from the stars as servants of the ‘sky-god’.”

“Which, as it turns out, we are not.”

“Some of us are.” He paused for a moment and went on. “After selecting the archival material dealing with the hundred years leading up to the moment when the ship was locked behind the mountain gate, I searched for words such as
fire
and
flames
and
light
. I found that during the final ten years before the closing of the archives, these words appeared with increasing frequency, always in mythic terms and euphemisms.”

Dariush held up a sheet of paper.

“This translation is from an archive tablet inscribed shortly before the final sealing of the temple. It tells of a prophecy that came through the mouth of the last Ap-kalu. He speaks of a people who will come from
the beautiful planet
in another heavens-ship. They will be servants of the sky-god, and they must be destroyed as the final insult and shaming of the sky-god. When the codex was composed, the rulers of Nova knew that their days were numbered. Their population had by then declined to a fraction of what it once was. Their cities were mostly empty, save for the one we call City 4, the last to be built and the last to fall into silence, unremembered for millennia. There, the rulers and religious hierarchy lived among a remnant population, with more and more dying every day. Even then, they demanded that the sacrifice of children must continue.”

“You call it a prophecy. But how would their gods know the future?”

“The evil spirits could not know the future. Yet they could anticipate it. I think that the realm of the evil beings is one of fear as well as hatred. Thus they feared that the ‘sky-god’, who had been born on Earth and had overcome their dark lord on that planet, might one day go farther and bring the war to Nova through his servants. And thus they whispered in the minds and hearts of their human vassals.”

“Is there anywhere a mention of how they built the bomb?”