Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (86 page)

A swift examination of the place disclosed nothing to indicate that Hoyos had once lived here. It was stripped entirely bare. When I put my head into the little bathroom, however, I noticed a small piece of paper lying on the floor behind the toilet. Picking it up, I read: “Neil, don’t forget to bring your shaving gear. Sacristan needs to be tidy!—Neil.”

Clearly, the note was a reminder addressed to himself. I knew that the word
sacristan
was the term for a person who cleaned and minded a sacred place, specifically an altar and its sanctuary. Had Neil wanted to lend his shaving equipment to a person who performed this task? Or had
he
become the sacristan?

Following an intuition, I climbed the main stairway to Concourse A, and went along the hallway to the chapel. Entering it, I felt a wave of peace flow through me. Yes, this had been a holy place, and still was. Though the sacramental presence of Christ was not here, members of his Body had spent long years praying in this room, and listening to the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit. I glanced at my chalice sitting on the altar. Ever since the day I had found the chapel, I had been offering Mass here, accompanied by the team.

Now I did what I had not thought to do during my previous visits: I looked into every room of the old apartment. There was a kitchen, three bathrooms, and adjoining rooms, which I guessed had once been bedrooms, all of them devoid of furniture and decoration. At the end of a short hallway, just behind the wall of the altar area, I found a door that I took at first to be a closet. I opened it and looked within. When I did so, the dark interior become visible as the ceiling began to glow with a faint light. I did not know how to increase its luminosity, but there was enough to see by.

The room was about the size of one of our cells at St. Benedict’s, though more austere than the brothers usually keep their rooms. There was a simple platform bed without a mattress. Two blankets were folded at its foot. A hand-carved crucifix hung on the wall. On a bedside table lay a rosary made of knotted string. When I picked it up, its fibers fell apart in my hand.

Turning back toward the door, I noticed a single, recessed wall-shelf in the shadows. I withdrew the mobilight from my backpack and pointed its narrow beam at the shelf. The first thing it struck was a thick, clothbound book. I picked it up and found it to be in a good state of preservation. Opening its cover, I saw that the printed text was in Chinese script. Archbishop Hoang had been teaching me a few words, not many, just the names of apostles and books of the sacred Scriptures. I opened to a section deep between the covers and saw in the header the word
Isaiah
. I opened a section near the end of the volume—
John
. It was a Bible! My excitement expanded into joy as I realized I would be able to bring this great treasure back to the archbishop as a gift.

Again I pointed the beam at the shelf, and my eye was caught by a solid shape on top of a stack of papers. Peering closer, I saw that it was a metal sculpture of a deer with a rack of antlers. Sitting on its back, side-saddle, was a tiny man reading a scroll.

My heart beat faster as I understood what I was looking at. I had read about it and imagined it many times in my life, and here it was in the flesh. Picking it up with both hands, holding it tenderly, I scarcely believed that the moment was real. I was overcome with emotion as realms of memory, imagination, past, and present connected through this small symbol, so layered in meaning. After I had dried my eyes and put the sculpture carefully into my backpack, I resolved to give this second treasure to the archbishop as soon as I returned home.

Now my attention turned to the stack of papers upon which the sculpture had stood. I removed the yellowed, brittle sheets from the shelf and took them out into the hallway leading to the chapel, for my mobilight was fading. Reading the first page, I saw that it was a handwritten document bearing the signature of its author, Neil de Hoyos. Its title was
Return
.

Seated before the altar, I began to read through the manuscript. With growing fascination, I realized that it was a continuation of Hoyos’ journal
The Voyage
, and that it contained a wealth of information about the catastrophe and its aftermath. It also described events that had occurred during the ship’s return voyage to Earth. One after another, the mysteries were illuminated. The most shocking thing I learned was that Hoyos had been responsible for the death of Fr. Ibrahimi, and had also been the indirect cause of Manuel’s death. He had destroyed apparatus in the Command center, causing the ship to plummet out of control toward the home planet. Later still, the ship was driven by the damaged logic of its electronic master onto a wide course through the heavens, bringing it back to orbit above Regnum Pacis.

Even so, the man had become a sacristan. This indicated that he had found a degree of faith at some point after the final words of his second journal—“I can write no more”—were written. Among the last entries in the journal was a mention that the problem of deceleration / propulsion was solved during the second year following the near-collision with Earth. That event took place in 2117 E-y. His death was five years later in 2122 E-y. This was strong evidence that a community of faith had been formed very early on in the forty-year journey back to Regnum Pacis. Hoyos had lived in the room behind the altar as custodian of what by then was already a functioning chapel. Additional confirmation of his conversion, however, was not to be found in the journal but rather in the notes I had discovered in his coffin.

I completed reading the manuscript late in the afternoon. I felt very moved—and shaken. All my conjectures about what had happened during the long journey had been wrong. Other assumptions I had made about people and events were now proved facile at best. I decided to forego eating supper with my teammates and went down to PHM. Entering the
mortuaire
, I went first to Manuel’s coffin and opened it. The body within was that of a brown-skinned man in his early forties. Viewed from a few paces away, he could have been mistaken for a youth, but close up I could see the wrinkles about the eyes, the creases in the cheeks, the brush of silver at the temples. The hands were folded over a wooden crucifix that lay on his chest. The right hand was black, the skin burned away, revealing the bones of the fingertips.

I knelt and bowed my head. The surrounding silence was a voluble presence, peaceful, very still, poised in a weightless equilibrium of timelessness. I cannot now recall if I prayed for his soul, but I know that I asked him to pray for me and for the children yet unborn to the people of Regnum Pacis.

Our departure was scheduled for two days later. The team members were unanimous in their conviction that we needed another two weeks on board, a month, if possible. Since our radio reception was nil inside the bay, the pilots took the shuttle out into space for a few hours, floating alongside the ship and radioing the expedition authorities at the science base. When the contact was made, they pleaded for extra time. But those down on the planet could not see what we were seeing, could not understand what we were telling them. In their distanced objectivity, their primary concern was for our safety and that of the shuttle. They insisted that if we had learned the basic history of the ship’s presence and what had happened to its voyageurs, and if the hold was full or nearly full of material to bring back, then we should return home on schedule. Relenting a little, they granted us three additional days.

That night after supper in the dining room, we put our minds together and tried to work out an agreement. We had five days left in which to decide what more could be retrieved. Already the shuttle was three-quarters full of cases containing samples in various fields, and numerous small machines pried out of their countertops and walls (including twenty of the computers known as the
max
), and thousands of books.

The historians pointed out that most of the books they had loaded were of broad literary and historical interest, and that fully half of the volumes were not indispensable. They had not read far into any of the texts, but thought that many contained material of dubious quality. The histories, for example, had been present in the library by permission of Earth’s global authority, which had been a tyrannical one. Would any tyrant overlook the subversive potential in true histories? Almost certainly, the books were politically approved distortions of the past, and therefore could be removed from the shuttle’s hold with no significant loss. There was also some cultural and sociological writing that seemed to be tainted with ideology, and it too could be weeded out.

These two men, with assistance from myself, argued for certain replacements to be made: for example, selections from among the several hundred works of art in the concourse hallways and some heretofore unknown musical instruments found in an auditorium. After much discussion, a consensus was reached that a third of the space in the shuttle hold would be freed for the addition of these cultural artifacts. We spent an entire day loading paintings and musical instruments. Of course, on Regnum Pacis, we have fine paintings and musical instruments (especially winds and strings). But one large item was wholly unfamiliar to us—that is, until I read a label on its underside:
Casals Cello Co. Baltimore 2065
. Yes, a real cello! We will now be able to recreate its sounds, which were once so well known by the people of Earth.

Among the team, there was no disagreement about music, but there was vigorous debate over the paintings. The ship’s art, though it was all historically significant, was nevertheless an amalgam of the disorders of Earth’s later civilization. There were works of exalted imagination (truth expressed in beautiful forms), and there were works of degradation (falsehood expressed in both beautiful and ugly forms). There was some confusion over a painting I personally selected and carried downstairs to the bay with the help of one of the pilots. It was titled “Fall of the Rebel Angels”, a stunning visual panorama of a battle between good and evil angels. It was beautiful and horrible—and true. I argued for taking it with us by employing all my theological wits, and by reminding the team about the evil race who had engineered the catastrophe. In the end, everyone agreed that the painting could be included, albeit with a few bemused looks from some.

Of major concern were the bodies of the voyageurs. Each of us felt deeply about the matter. These were the people who had accompanied our ancestors across the heavens. A minority of the team suggested that we leave all the bodies on board so that the
Kosmos
would remain as a memorial, a kind of floating mausoleum orbiting Regnum Pacis in perpetuity. There was merit to the idea, but the majority of us, myself included, believed that we should bring back some, perhaps all, of the bodies for burial in the living soil of the new world.

However, there was not enough room left in the hold to bring every coffin. The available storage space would be barely sufficient for a total of twenty. With this in mind, on the morning of our last full day on board, we selected from among the deceased those representing the races of the founding pioneers, including African, Asian-oriental, East-Indian, Hispanic, Western European (Anglo, French, Germanic), and Slavo-Caucasian. Three bodies for each of these major groups. All coffins were opened, all names read and recorded, all facial features and skin color examined, and decisions made accordingly. On my insistence, the bodies of Manuel de los Santos, Marie Durocher, and Neil de Hoyos were included in the above categories. By that point, Marie’s remains had been put into an empty coffin and carried downstairs to be stored with the other bodies.

In addition, Fr. Ibrahimi Mirza represented Indo-European races, and two others represented Semitic peoples. A single Filipino represented the Pacific Islands peoples, and finally, one whose racial identity was not certain represented the indigenous peoples who had lived in diverse places throughout the old world. This made a total of twenty-three coffins, and there was not enough room for them all. In the end, space was made by offloading ten of the twenty
max
machines that had been stored in the shuttle hold.

On the morning of our departure day, we used the trolley to transport the coffins one by one to the shuttle. This took only a few hours because the freezer compartment was on the same floor and not far from the bay. When all was done, we stood back and glanced around the PHM concourse. Among us, there was none of the usual chatting or banter. The mood was solemn. I knelt down and prayed, and the others joined me silently. Standing, I made the sign of the cross over the ship, and then it was time to go. The pilots entered their cockpit; the rest of us entered the portal behind them and took our seats. The shuttle doors closed.

The bell began ringing, the red light flashed, and depressurization was underway. When the bay’s outer doorway slid upward and the infinite depths of space appeared, I felt anew the mystery and grandeur of what the
Kosmos
expedition had attempted, its strengths and weaknesses, its heroism and its errors, the hopes and failures of all those who had journeyed in the great ship in the heavens. Our time aboard had been as fleeting as a bird on the wing, now here, now gone. Soon it would be a memory, like a glimpse of a white whale surfacing and diving, leaving only the impression that it had been there, a sign, a presence, alien and beautiful and free. Man on this ship had not been free, but he had brought the longing for freedom with him, carefully guarded within himself, secret and silent until it was finally released. He had also brought his evil.

As we descended slowly toward Regnum Pacis, the team members did not converse with each other, and I think that all of us were feeling the pathos of the moment, knowing that we were at the conclusion of the last flight to the
Kosmos
. It might be many lifetimes, perhaps centuries, before man would, through gradual stages of development, rediscover the secrets of the old anti-gravity device or those of Felix Arthur’s invention.