Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (87 page)

O God
, I prayed silently,
please give us long years to grow in wisdom and grace. We have seen what we need to see. We are a people who honor you and turn to you. You are our life and our hope. Do we need any more than this? O Lord of heavens and earth, do not let us return to this ship too quickly. And if in your providence you deem it better, do not let us return ever again
.

I glanced out the window. The shuttle was tilting to horizontal, preparing for its vertical descent. It was good to see reality again. Inside the ship, we had been blind. There were no windows. Man had relied too much on his artificial sight. He had been enclosed inside a magnificent invention that gave him titanic powers at too great a cost. In the cases upon cases of archival material I was bringing home to my people, there were extraordinary documents that would testify to this. These and other items of historical importance would simultaneously reveal our potential for authentic greatness and our capacity for making a horror of existence: the glory of man fully alive in the grace of his Creator; and the depravity of man when he turned away from that grace and declared himself lord.

I thought back to Neil de Hoyos’ book,
The Voyage
, which generations of our people had read, brought to the planet by one of my ancestors. Who among us did not know the final words of that book:
O mankind, why, why are you so blind, when you can have this!

Little had we guessed that the book was incomplete, that a more terrible (and in a profound sense, more beautiful) addition to that famous work had been written by its author. He had penned it by hand and titled it
Return
, not realizing the irony in the word, believing at first he was on his way back toward the Earth.

I thought of what I had learned about the sacrifice of Xue Ao-li, who was known to us, but not fully known until now. Hoyos’ later journal gave us the inner man—the poet and believer willing to sacrifice his life for others. Then I thought of another man of sacrifice: Manuel, who had saved the ship and the planet Earth. A small person, an insignificant person—a soul so beautiful that his humility hid his glory until the very end. For the most part, I thought about Fr. Ibrahimi, whose life and death were entirely sacrificial, embodying both truth and love as a single unified whole.

I also pondered what I had learned about Hoyos himself—Neil, I had thought of him, had always thought of him since I first read his book during my youth. He had seemed to me then a courageous person, greatly at odds with the tyranny of Earth’s government and ruling social system, and this he surely was. He had been bold in resistance, highly intelligent, ruthlessly honest, and ferociously independent. I had admired these qualities. I had, in my own small way, tried to emulate them as best I could during my adolescent years, while seeking to avoid the man’s bitterness and lack of faith.

In this new journal, I saw something else in him, something which, if I had been more mature, wiser perhaps, I might have better understood when I was young. He wished to be good without Christ. As his friend Fr. Ibrahimi once told him, he wished to be good on his own terms. Neil had rejected the insight. He would face some truths about himself, but not all. He admitted to many faults, but it would be the final and fatal eruption of his rage that would reveal his gravest fault to him, his pride. He would kill an evil man, and in the process, he would kill another, the best man in his life. Then, in a frenzy of despair over what he had done, he sought to take his own life, though he was prevented from doing it. During the years that followed, he resisted the urge to self-destruction a number of times as the ship continued onward toward Earth. But that is not how it ended, because yet another man sacrificed his life.

Manuel had died because of Neil’s moment of rage when he had fired bullets into the ship’s vital command functions, and this was a truth that Neil could never forget. Thus, with Manuel’s death, there came one more test. At that point, Neil might well have taken the precipitous final step toward his personal annihilation—the end of all pain, as he thought it would be. But he did not. He chose to live with his guilt and not to carry it alone. He chose to serve others for the remainder of his life.

Strangely, as I had read through
Return
, its author had more and more reminded me of Dr. Felix Arthur. The two men were of different eras and cultures, and yet their personalities struck me as similar. It may be due to the fact that they were both scientists involved in crucial discoveries that would have momentous consequences for mankind. But I think it was more than this. Could it be that Neil was what Felix might have become if he had not been a man of faith? Could it be that Felix was what Neil might have become if he had had faith throughout his life, if in a moment of wholesome abandonment he had knelt before an authority higher than his own will—before a priest representing Christ himself—and if he then had climbed a spiral staircase, no longer alone?

As I mentioned earlier in this report, Felix Arthur was known to me personally. I first met him five years ago at a meeting in the city, when I was appointed to the team that would one day, hypothetically, board the mysterious object in the heavens. I did not know at the time that he had only a short while left to live, and that because of the man I would board the
Kosmos
far sooner than I expected.

Arthur was highly respected in academic and scientific circles. An astronomer, electrical engineer, inventor, and professor at the university, he was, despite all his accomplishments, a humble person. He was gentle-mannered, polite to a fault, and at times, the composer of dry, though not uncharitable, epigrams. In his free time, he was forever writing and revising a book on the laws of thermodynamics, but I know that his chief love was his family. His wife Eleanor, whom I knew less well than I did Felix, was a woman of warm heart, wit, and wisdom, and she was clearly the sustaining human source of his life. There were eight children, their spouses, and more than forty grandchildren. Doubtless his science was his pleasure, but his grandchildren were his joy, for he presided over the clan with a mixture of childlike affection and paternal dedication. Not one of his grandchildren, for example, failed to receive an annual birthday letter containing a poem, a joke, a reflective quote, along with an unusual seashell or bird feather, and, above all, the certainty of being known and loved as unique. Felix and Eleanor’s Christmas parties were a local institution; the decorating of the giant bristle-cone tree in the yard of their modest farmhouse was a ritual that few people of the surrounding shire cared to miss (he used multicolored fireflies and firebutterflies, then released them on Epiphany). An uncommonly loving man, he was loved in return. Only in the final year of his life did he come to have enemies—or more precisely, vehement critics. He responded to the newspaper attacks with great forbearance, without retaliation.

During the year following our first meeting, he had visited the abbey with increasing frequency, in order to ask my advice. I never inquired into the specifics of his research, and he, by the same standard, did not broach the topic. His questions were sometimes about important matters in his personal life, and at other times purely speculative. He was a devout man with a sensitive conscience, and he had a philosophical mind. He was strong and manly in character, yet blessed with a sweet temperament—a not uncommon mix. Never drawing attention to himself, he was very generous to people needing help of one kind or another, especially to families with many children. It seemed to me that if Felix had not been called to marriage he might have become an excellent monk. In the midst of a very full life, he worked hard to maintain a balance of activity and silence: he and his wife prayed the Office together daily and were often to be found in the Science Center chapel, side by side, interiorly recollected.

Though Arthur was twenty years older than I, our relationship had grown into that of a father and son, with myself in the default position of spiritual father. Yet it had the disturbing quality of reversing itself unexpectedly. On occasion, after giving him spiritual direction, I would find myself talking of personal matters that I shared with no one else—unresolved abstractions, my worries about this or that—nothing very intimate or very pressing, but serious enough that I felt greatly benefited by his perspective on matters. We had become close.

I recall especially one of the last conversations we shared. We met by accident at the annual Thanksgiving Festival in the Fields of Praise outside Stella Maris. There must have been more than eighty thousand people there that day, a majority of whom lived in the city and others who had come in from nearby towns and villages. After the celebration Mass had been offered on the high dais by the sea, we hundreds of priests and five bishops went down into the crowds to join in the general merriment and to meet with friends and neighbors.

As a monastic, I did not expect to bump into anyone I knew well, since mine is mainly a cloistered life at St. Benedict’s, and Foundation City is far from Stella Maris and a good deal smaller. Most of my spiritual directees are in the north.

Wandering through the crowds of people, I simply enjoyed the atmosphere, buoyed by the contagious happiness all around me. The sky was cloudless, the temperature mild for late autumn. The waiting banquet tables ringing the field would soon be groaning under the weight of the coming feast. I received many kind greetings offered by strangers, and occasional requests to bless crucifixes and scapulars—and newborn babies (always a particular pleasure).

At one point, I lingered on the edge of a lovely spontaneous incident: About a dozen children had joined hands and were dancing in a circle, singing and laughing all the while. Some of them held small handbells, which they rang with contrapuntal abandon (they had brought them for the
Gloria
, but clearly they knew how to put them to other uses). People gathered around to watch, and for all of us, I sensed, it was an unexpected delight in a day full of delights.

More and more children ran out from the crowd and joined the dancers, singing too, though it seemed to me that there was among them no agreement on a particular melody or set of lyrics. Yet it worked somehow, the unplanned creation of radiant wholeness, balance, harmony. It was beautiful, and it touched me deeply.

I had just begun clapping my hands in time with the rhythm when someone, literally, bumped into me, and I staggered, going down on one knee to break my fall. I looked up and saw that it was Felix Arthur.

With a chuckle, he helped me to regain my feet.

“Father Abbot,” he declared as he dusted off my habit, “you are out of your orbit!”

“Felix,” I answered in the same tone, “you are out of yours!”

“A wandering planet am I”, he laughed. “My apologies.”

“None needed. How are you, Felix?”

“I’m very well, Anselm”, he said with a bit of a smile and a mildly furrowed brow. “Yes, I believe I am quite well, after all.”

“After all?”

He smiled again but offered no further elucidation.

“Would you care to sit with me?” I asked.

“Gladly!”

As we walked toward the park near the river’s mouth, he explained that he had a free hour before the banquet began, when he would join his wife, who had gone to fetch some of their clan who lived in Stella Maris. We sat down on a less crowded stretch of grass beneath a giant
ficus
tree from which most of the syrupy yellow fruit had already been harvested. We plucked a few remaining orbs from the lower branches and sucked at them without conversing, in a restful mood, listening to the surf on the nearby beach, watching the antics all about us. At one point, a group of young people came by, bearing trays full of glasses, and they offered us white-berry wine. Felix and I sipped and contented ourselves gazing out over the southern sea, at the brightly colored sailboats in the bay, across the river at the capital buildings.

“Spiritually, I mean, or hope”, he said cryptically.

“Pardon me, Felix?” I asked.

“I mean I’m
ultimately
quite well.”

“Ah, your ‘after all’ qualifier, which I last heard more than twenty minutes ago.”

He chuckled. “Of course, you are no mind-reader, Anselm. Forgive me. Bemused and befuddled am I.”

“No more than usual, it seems to me. Or is something specific on your mind?”

“Something specific is definitely on my mind. May I speak of it confidentially?”

“Of course.”

“I wish to posit a moral question.” I nodded for him to continue.

“What would you theologians say about someone who made a great thing, quite a marvelous thing, that could benefit mankind, though to what degree, and how, would be uncertain?”

“I would say that the maker of the thing was exercising his God-given gifts.”

“Granted. Now add to the equation a few additional factors.”

“Such as?”

“What if mankind was not ready for this thing? What if its sudden appearance had the potential for disrupting his understanding of himself and his natural powers?”

“It would depend on whether or not the disruption itself had moral or immoral content, I would say. Would the invention, for example, communicate a falsehood?”

“Not a lie as such. Nor be inherently a lie. Yet it would have the potential—remaining potential only at a certain early stage—to deform man’s sense of his place in the hierarchy of creatures.”

“You’re touching upon the realm of theological cosmology, Felix. A rather significant
factor
, one might call it.”

“I’m referring to a kind of power, you see”, he went on. “Power combined with speed. Possibly speeds approaching the velocities achieved by our ancestors who came from Earth.”

“And look what happened to them? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I suppose that’s part of it.”

“We would have to consider that a tool is morally neutral, wouldn’t we?”

“Is it?” he asked, peering at me intently.