Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (8 page)

We weren’t permitted to bring personal flora or fauna on the voyage. Only the ship’s official botanists and zoologists have authority in those departments. Our first step on the planet will be absolutely sterile, just to make sure we don’t ruin someone else’s ecosystem. Wise move. Still, I do wish I could have smuggled on board my little potted
Echinopsis chacoana
, with its splendid white flower, and also
Opuntia polyacantha
, with its brilliant crimson blooms. What a consolation it would be to have one’s own personal organic friends to care for in this lonely universe. Like humans, they are a combination of prickles and glory. Alas!

Day 299
:

Speaking of prickles, and not much glory, Dr. Strachan McKie waxed personal today when we ate together in the cafeteria. It began when he banged down his tray on the table, sat himself across from me, and commenced: “They’re bona fide idiots up there on the secret deck.”

“Why do you say that, Stron?” I asked, intrigued.

“They’re protocol zombies, that’s why. I just had a talk with the chief flight astronomer, and asked him why the hell the on-planet astronomers aren’t invited upstairs. He said something to the effect that personally,
personally
, he’d be ever so pleased to have me take part in the cabal, but it’s against the rules. Against the rules, he said, the sniveller.”

Then followed a stream of colorful Scottish invective. The mood tab behind his ear began flashing an ugly red. I heard a faint tinny voice coming from somewhere near it.

“Shut up!” he bellowed, and tore the thing from his skin. Fuming, he tossed it onto the floor. Then he opened his shirt front and ripped a humvee from his chest, throwing it onto the floor as well.

“Ouch”, he snarled, since his unpremeditated violence had made him lose a few white chest hairs.

“Why would such a sensible idea be against the rules?” I pressed.

“What?” he barked.

“Why is it against the rules to have both sets of astronomers getting together?”

“They don’t want any cross-pollination.”

“Intellectual cross-pollination, you mean?”

“Right. He says they want two sets of eyes observing from different perspectives. Triangulation. Depth perception.”

“Sounds like nonsense to me, Stron. It’s good policy in some fields, but I can’t for the life of me see why it would be useful to astronomers in our situation. You’re all in the same spot, aren’t you? And you still will be when we land on the planet.”

“Exactly”, he growled. “So what’s going on here?”

“Maybe nothing more than knee-jerk territorialism.”

“Maybe. At best, it’s knee-jerk compartmentalization, minus the knee.”

I laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t let it get under your skin. Surely, they don’t see any more than we see on the public screens.”

“Aye, but they do get to look at a whole lot more instruments than we do. I want to see the spectrographs. I want magnetic readings, gravity aberrations, full-spectrum wave records—the lot.”

I now recalled that among his many achievements, Stron is the discoverer of the spectrum factor that is widely known in the astronomy community as the “McKie edge”. This is a light anomaly that he posits as a bio-signature of chlorophyll-bearing photosynthetic plants in atmospheres where ozone, oxygen, and methane are present.

“You want to see the edge”, I said.

“Damn right, I want to see the edge! But the boys upstairs want to keep it all to themselves so they can write the definitive papers on the big discovery. One small step for a man, one giant leap for the onboard astronomers.”

His face was now flaming, his hands clenched.

“You may be right”, I said. “Still, it’s not worth a heart attack.”

That brought him up short. He glared at me with one eye closed.

“What’s your favorite sport?” I asked.

“My favorite sport?”

“Yeah. Mine’s basketball. What’s yours.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Hoyos. And don’t distract me. This is serious.”

“I know it’s serious. Answer my question.”

He snorted. “Curling.”

“Stones on ice?”

“No, not just stones on ice. Not tin box rinks and artificial ice with synthetic stones smacking while the vidcams blink-blink-blink.”

“Then what . . . really . . . is curling?”

“You’re a tricky man, Hoyos.”

“I know. So, what’s real curling?” Stron sat back and closed his eyes.

“Curling is every sense you can imagine uniting in concentrated ecstasy. It’s art. It’s war. It’s history. It’s sheer poetry.” He opened his eyes. “
Hard
poetry, you understand.”

“That’s an interesting insight. In what way is it hard poetry?”

“Imagine a frozen loch, braced by mountains, thick, clear ice, blue-green, all the snow blown off by an angry wind. Imagine the pure air, your cheeks flushed with the cold, the oxygen pumping through your blood, thoughts clear, feelings high. You hear the sound of a real rock rumbling along the echoing ice and smacking another rock, sending it in a trajectory, with angle, speed, and distance all estimated, subject to the vagaries of nature.”

“Like billiards.”

“Only superficially. With curling, you have total joy, total investment of the body, mind, and soul, not escape from the self. But these paltry descriptions are a disgrace. There are no words to express its beauty.”

“I’d love to learn the game some day. If we ever return to Earth. . .”

“If we ever return to Earth, you come to Scotland. Not the tourist’s Scotland, mind you. You come and see me.”

“I will.”

“I think you mean it, lad.”

“I do mean it.” And I did.

The flame was waning from his face, burred humor lurking on the frontiers of his personality, the hands curled around his knife and fork but no longer clenched. You wouldn’t want to be within eight feet of him if he had a claymore sword in his hands, but he was, almost certainly, the greatest living astronomer in the world.

He threw a huge chunk of scrambled “egg” down his throat and peered at me with some interest. “Heard your lecture. Very good.”

“Thank you.”

“Would have been better without the gawdawful music.”

“Tastes vary. I hear people liked that part.”

“No accounting for taste. Your gravity conjectures match my own.”

I leaned forward. “Do they? Tell me more.”

He did, and I listened, growing increasingly amazed by what this great mind had conceptualized. At the end of it, he pushed back his chair and stood. “Do you take a drink?”

“I’m not much of a drinker these days. Though I do like a dram now and then.”

He grinned. “Good. I’ve got just the right stuff for you.
Coom wi’s
.”

In a little art alcove on Concourse C (under a Picasso-lady cut into pieces and badly reassembled), we sipped clandestine thirty-year-old whiskey from a flask that he produced from inside his ratty tweed blazer. First, he checked up and down the hallway to make sure no one would happen along and see us.

“We needn’t hide in corners, Stron”, I said with a laugh. “There’s no surveillance on board.”

He said nothing in reply, just fixed me with an intimidating look.

“Oh, I get it. You don’t want anyone and everyone lining up for a free drink, right?”

“Wet your gullet while you can”, he growled, pushing the flask toward me again.

When we were comfortably fuelled and mellowed, he told me he had to get back to work and further informed me that he had decided we should talk again. And so, I hope, we shall.

Day 300
:

Many people have voyage-related jobs. More than two hundred others are here only in view of planet-work, and thus have a lot of free time on their hands. Recalling my own nasty bout with claustrophobia and aimlessness, I wondered how they fill their idle hours, when, in fact, all their hours are idle hours. Or so I thought. I asked Stron what he does to cope with this. He told me that he needs three lifetimes to complete the papers he’s writing. He says he is also performing experiments in a private laboratory.

“You need a laboratory for astronomy?” I asked.

“Different research entirely, Hoyos. I’ve developed a fascination for physics.”

“Wonderful, Stron, wonderful!”

“ ‘Tis indeed. However, though I hate to disappoint you, it’s not astrophysics to which I’m referring. Nor theoretical physics. More a practical application: the relationship between hydrogen and oxygen and various organic compounds and how they behave under pressure and heat, the condensation process—that sort of thing.”

“Ah”, I said, bored.

I asked Dwayne the cleaner guy what he does to make his off-hours pass quickly.

“Books”, he replied. “What kind of books?”

“All kinds.”

“And what about the other maintenance people?”

“Plugged in.”

“Pardon me?”

“Plebeian mind-nummers.”

“They like Math?”

“Numb. Numbing. Nummers, not num-bers.”

“So, what are plebeian mind-nummers?”

“The old maximum e-drug. Surfing, vids, films, holo-porn.”

“Digital environmental chambers?”

“DECs? Yup, there’s a lotta people hooked on them too.” He paused and looked me squarely in the eyes for a moment. “Um, I think you should avoid using the
max
as much as you can, Doctor.”

“Really? Why?”

“Uh, it’s addictive. Sorry, I gotta go now. Bye.”

I had supper with Xue and raised the topic of boredom, something from which he has never suffered. I was certain he would have projects on the go, and I was right. We also chatted about the problem in general: the nine years of time to kill for more than two hundred people on board.

“Didn’t you know, Neil? Didn’t you read the contract you signed?”

“That ridiculous contract, Owly! No, I most certainly did not read all 180 pages of it, including the numerous appendixes and small print. I’m still trying to make headway in the Manual, and that’s 2,200 pages.”

“Right. But in principle, it’s better to read the documents you sign, don’t you think?”

“Yeah, in principle.”

“Well, my point is, in the contract, it states that the scientists who are designated only for planet work are mandated to do research and write papers during the outward bound flight—‘as a contribution to humanity’ the contract says. It may produce some useful developments, but I believe it’s mainly a make-work project to keep people busy.”

“I see. And why don’t I know about this? Nobody’s making
me
do research.”

“You really didn’t read the fine print. The contract exempts the Nobel winners from that stipulation. I expect they thought we’d suffer from the opposite problem, too much intellectual eagerness.”

“Well, they’re wrong, at least in my case.”

Later, in the lounge, I happened upon Maria Kempton and asked her if she was doing “mandated” research.

She frowned. “Yes, well, we have to, don’t we? Otherwise, they would dock our pay and
mandate
counseling sessions with DSI.”

I shook my head. “Sounds kind of pushy to me.”

“We signed the contract”, she shrugged. “It was the only way to be part of this expedition. Fortunately, we’re permitted to choose our own topics.”

“Have you chosen yours?”

She smiled. “I’ve got a project on the go. It’s a sociological study.”

“That’s a big leap from biology.”

“Yes, but the overseers don’t see it that way. They think everything about humanity is biology. Care to read my manuscript?”

“Uh . . . in all frankness, Maria,. . . much as I. . .”

She laughed. “Good. A healthy reaction, Neil. You don’t have to read it. But let me say this: While I
never
tell lies, I do sometimes enjoy having a little joke. May I give you a thumbnail sketch of my thesis?”

“Of course, please, sketch away and don’t hold back.”

“Did you know that for the past three generations the declining kangaroo population has been a problem in Australia?”

“I thought their overpopulation was your perennial problem.”

“Right, ever since colonial days. But about seventy-five years ago, the ratio of human to roo began to reverse itself. Protein-deprived Aussies began to kill the creatures in large numbers, as well as the rabbits imported in the 1800s, which are the real pests, since they strip the country bare and multiply at astounding rates. Then the Green governments made it illegal—endangered species and all that. Aussies, as you may know, are a race of former criminals, and most of the time, we just function on basic common sense. Despite the laws, the roos and rabbits continued to decline, and the country continued to get greener. But that didn’t please the Greenies any. Their real, if unstated, problem was with people. So the mask came off, and they demanded an increase in the human depopulation controls. A lot of people wound up as residents of state zoos.”

“Pardon me?”

“Uh, prison. The one-child accords were signed later, in my generation. You know the rest.”

“And you’re writing a history of this?”

“Let’s just say I’m writing a case study—the true case study.”

“That’s risky.”

“The first hundred pages will be so nuanced and so loaded with socially responsible jargon that the readers won’t know what’s coming. If I do it carefully, they’ll be nudged ever so gradually into seeing reality, despite their lifetimes of sucking in state and media propaganda.”

“I didn’t know you were a terrorist, Maria.”

“And proud of it. Privately, I call my book
Out Malthusianizing the Malthusians
. Its official title, registered with the DSI oversight committee, is
Relevant Biofactors in Macropod Marsupial Population Statistics in the Australian Continent, 1886 to 2096, Volume I
. Like it?”

“Love it.”

“If I ever complete the darn thing, it will be filed away in the computer and probably never read, not even by anyone capable of getting past the first few pages.”

“Somebody might read it. Maybe when it’s archived back on Earth one day.”

“Maybe. If they ever do, it could keep a few DSI overseers off the streets. Shock the future-shockers, you see. By the time they get wise to me, I’ll be a very, very old lady sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a cabin in the Simpson Desert, eating roo pie and rabbit stew.”