Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (6 page)

Day 24
:

Throughout my life, I have tried to limit e-mail and voice mail. I have disciplined myself to check it only once a week. Interestingly, it is more than three weeks since I last felt the urge to check. The
max
gives me total service that accesses Earth as well as the all-ship’s communication system. This morning, I opened up my inbox and found several hundred messages waiting for me. It took a day to wade through them all. There was nothing really personal, nothing that needed a reply, just official “bon voyages” from all manner of institutes and space agencies and publishers with contract offers. The only message that edged in the direction of intimacy was one from the president of the Association of Cactus Growers of America, who said that the gang in Santa Fe would really miss me, and could I please bring them back an “alien prickly pear”, if I should find any on that planet. I sent back a one-line message promising I’d keep my eyes open.

Day 25
:

There are scads of public lectures scheduled for anyone interested in hearing them. These can be attended in the privacy of one’s room by keying in the event via the
max
. Alternatively, one may be physically present in the theater where lectures are delivered. We have so many experts on board it’s unlikely that topics will be exhausted.

A social animator invited the five Nobel guys to give the inaugural lectures. We are a dry, dusty lot, but our fields and our prizes will probably draw a few people. The first, mine, is tomorrow night.

Day 26
:

Close to two hundred people showed up, filling the theater. Since I am an old hand at guest lecturing in universities, I delivered an erudite and perhaps baffling address derived from my NP materials, spiced up a bit with conjectures about warped-space / warped-time and gravity effects, drawing the audience toward the climax with my final words:

“Does relativity relativize existence? We may
feel
that it does, since our psychological / perceptual / conceptual bearings are determined by planetary-based measurements, and tend to blur and even disorient us in the face of principles of cosmic physics. Yet relativity has no pretensions to being an ontological system. Indeed, philosophy may in the end prove to be a more coherent model of existence than physics.”

As I had prearranged, at this point, the screen filled with photos of Alpha Centauri. Hubble-8 is now parked outside the orbit of Pluto-Charon, giving us the best shots of our destination we’ve ever had.

The star Alpha Centauri is of course a close grouping of three stars: the white binary stars Alpha Centauri-A and Alpha Centauri-B, and the red dwarf Proxima Centauri (or AC-C), which revolves around the two binaries. Proxima is technically our closest neighbor, but so dense, so packed magnetically, that we will give her a wide berth. AC-A is a tad larger than our sun, AC-B a tad smaller.

Then came the zoom photo of AC-A. Her planets appeared, all eighteen of them, in wondrous diversity, colors, sizes. Three of them are considerably larger than our Earth, but do not qualify as gas giants. Binary stars are unfavorable to the formation of giants.

Then the zoom to AC-A-7, the planet of our desire. The seventh out from the system’s sun, slightly larger than Earth, slightly farther from its sun than Earth is from our sun. The advance probes that were sent out into the deep several years ago compose a telescope array about twenty kilometers wide, which gives us data integrated into an image the size of a pea. Increase the magnification beyond this, and we get a blur composed of square pixels. But it
is
blue, which may be gas clouds or may be water. Our onboard telescopes will give us steadily improving pictures, the closer we get to the destination.

I wanted music to accompany the visuals. After considering the soaring violin in Vaughan Williams’
The Lark Ascending
, and the saccharine arias of Ciccoletti’s latest opera,
The Seas of Mars, I
had discarded both in favor of the magnificent drama of Holst’s
The Planets
.

As the symphony progressed, a tremendous stillness settled on the crowd. Strangely, many people in the audience began weeping, mostly women, but also a few men wiping their eyes. The audience sat in silence for a few minutes, then left the auditorium one by one.

Day 27
:

After an early breakfast, I went down to the arboretum and found that the lighting had been dimmed, with only pinprick lights along the pathways to guide nocturnal strollers. I was alone, like an old man in a park walking his dog just before dawn. The birds had been turned off, and the sound system was playing one of Mozart’s concertos for wind instruments. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes.

Later, a gardener passed by and spotted me in the shrubbery.

“Morning, sir.”

“And a good morning to you”, I replied.

“It’s only 0600 hours, but I could turn on the sunrise, if you’d like.”

“No thanks.”

“People usually start coming around 0700. That’s when I turn on the birds. Would you like the birds now?”

“No, the Mozart is excellent. Is classical played every morning? If so, I’d make a habit of sitting in.”

“You’re welcome any time, night or day. The music isn’t always classical though. I like variety, so we do a lot of ethnic and folk. African. Celtic. Some soft Blues.”

“Jazz?” I asked.

“I’m a Jazz-fiend myself, Neo-Orleans and Post-J, but I listen to it in my own room.”

“How about Ancient Rock?”

He frowned. “We don’t do that to the trees.” He shook his head. “It warps proper molecular growth. Inhibits budding, flowering, fruiting. But with Mozart, Bach, the softer kind of Chopin, even some of the quieter Beethoven, you get an unusual response.”

“Such as?”

“Increased growth rate. The stems and leaves gradually turn toward the speakers, as if they’re yearning for the source.”

“You’re sure you’re not imagining it? They can’t possibly
enjoy
classical.”

“Well, they don’t have personalities, but there
is
significant positive response. It’s entirely bio-based, of course.”

“Of course.”

He paused, musing, and said, “We’re bio-based too.”

I refrained from launching a strained discussion of the nature of intelligence.

“It’s their spirit”, he went on. “Spirits communing with each other.”

Yikes, a philosophical gardener! I beat a hasty retreat.

Day 28
:

Half-asleep, I sat bolt upright in bed and clicked on the spotlight. Grabbed a sheet of paper and my fountain pen:

   Proposition A: The phenomenology of Music presents a coherent, universal “language” based in physics.

   Proposition B: Music is a sensory manifestation of wave theory.

   Proposition C: Music is wave as manifestation of “spirit”.

   Question: If all of the above is true, what is “spirit”?

Day 30
:

Me and the cleaner guy have struck up a kind of trans-class chumminess. He told me his name is Dwayne. I told him mine is Neil. His masklike face hides a sardonic sense of humor, which can be evoked after you stay with him a while in discussions dominated by his stock responses: Yup. Nope. Maybe. He ejected me from my room this morning in order to give my personal space its mandatory monthly hygiene scrub. He used an odd assortment of tools, including old-fashioned rubber gloves, a sponge, and a bucket of antiseptic water. A traditionalist craftsman. I stood out in the hall, watching him work, and asked him where service personnel have their quarters.

“Downstairs”, he said.

More digging brought forth the interesting information that even people with the lowest status have their own private rooms, like everyone else. His is on level D, mine on B, the trillionaires on A. These privileged folks, he tells me, have a luxury suite. (It seems that hierarchy is unavoidable in human affairs.) His own room is pretty much like mine, he says, maybe a couple of feet shorter, no desk, but bigger on the entertainment side of things for after-hours diversion.

“Films?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“What kind of films?”

“Good, bad, and ugly.”

“You mean the old cowboy film?”

“Huh? I don’t know any by that name. But there’s quite a range.” He paused, flicked me a look, and added: “Not that I’m home on it.” He cracked a droll smile, then got back to work.

Great guns! Thus, we have dialogues too, and I find they are as fun as any I’ve had so far, and better than my technical discussions with Xue. Dwayne and I are linked by nostalgia for the culture of the wild west, sagebrush and cactus, coyotes yipping under full moons, garish sunsets, etc. He is originally from rural Nevada but got scooped up when state borders were changed, and Los Angeles was declared one of America’s ten metro-states. He was employed by a space technology firm for some years, has a degree in process engineering, another in computer science, but is glad to be on board the
Kosmos
as a glorified janitor.

Dwayne showed me how to access the films through a special key on my max. It quadruples the wall screen and pops up a menu, which has more than three hundred and eighty thousand titles to choose from. After he left, I shut it down and tried to forget the access procedure. Where are my cacti when I need them?

Day 60
:

A few sociological observations:

Flight crew wears dark blue uniforms. We don’t see many of them during our daily life. Occasionally, I spot them in the restaurants or bistros, rarely in the cafeteria feed-lots. Other staff members have uniforms too, when they are on duty. For example, the kitchen staff wear white, two-piece outfits with hair nets. Medical staff wears robin’s egg blue, same design. Maintenance staff (cleaning, laundry, etc.) wear pale green. Social facilitator staff wear ordinary business suits with neck ties (identical for male and female facilitators). When off duty, all working people dress themselves in a rather narrow selection of ordinary clothes—whatever was trendy at the time we left Earth.

Women seem to be more inventive than men in this regard. They either have queen-size wardrobes stashed away somewhere, or they are constantly busy making alterations. Many of them must have brought needle and thread on the voyage. Intentional anachronism: none of them know what a needle or a thread is. They probably have electronic gadgets that unravel seams and stitch the cloth into new shapes. Jewelry is also a big item.

They are very vulnerable to stylistic herd mentality, for reasons which throughout my entire life I have never—never—been able to understand. This year they all wear their collars up, touching their chins; last year they had no collars on their blouses and wore pantsuits, with cleavage. The year before, it was demure lace at the throat and a skirt from the waist to the knees, below which the pant legs remained black elasto-cling, unhealthily constrictive. The skirt has risen to mid-thigh in recent months. How do they communicate to each other what they must do next?

My own sartorial standards are simple and unchanging: cowboy boots, jeans, checkered shirt, red bandana around my neck, and my thousand-
Uni
tweed blazer over the upper torso. Strapped to my waist is a frayed leather belt. Clipped to it is the trusty survival kit I bought during my teens with my first wages, containing the old fold-knife, flint, and compass. You never know when you might need to hijack a jet or find your way back to your home planet.

Day 110
:

I try to put in two or three hours each day, working on pet theories, doodling with unified field conjectures, inventing mathematical neologisms (Neil-ogisms), having my fun. It keeps the mind alert and stimulates motivation with the promise that I just might extend the frontiers a little. However, after three months of it, my attention is wandering. I am experiencing what I have so rarely felt in my life, a sense of “boredom”. When I first realized what was happening, I felt a stab of fear. Would this infect me more and more, I wondered? Would I become a tiger, pacing a cage, and end up frothing at the mouth and clawing the walls of my room? Or (more apt) would I become a flea bouncing frantically inside a matchbox? Such hallucinatory prospects paralyzed me for a few moments, and during this brief but horrible event, I glanced at
max
(don’t capitalize him, Neil, for heaven’s sake, don’t capitalize that name!), afflicted with a sudden craving for a film to watch. Socially approved escape mechanism number one. An escape encapsulated within an interstellar escape mechanism of epic proportions, a multitude of escapes stacked one inside the other, like Chinese boxes or Russian Marushka dolls.

I tore my eyes away from
max
—from
the
max—pulled on my snake bite boots and went for an angry, limping hike all around the four concourses, avoiding every elevator and driving myself up and down the stairways. It helped. But it left me a little rattled.

I gotta get out more!

Interesting how my written notes have become fewer and farther between. I make entries in my voice diary each day, small memos, noting the names of those whom I meet: for example, my weekly chats with Xue, and also the nonscheduled exchanges I’ve had with the astronomer Strachan McKie of the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh, designer of the new tower at the ROE, author of many brilliant, somewhat idiosyncratic books—yes, the very man after whom the McKie Ultra Deep Field was named—that apparently empty corner of space where he discovered about three thousand new galaxies and more than eighty new quasars.

Encounters with McKie are neither lengthy nor memorable, seasoned as they are with his crabby comments and complaints, his antisocial nature demanding that human interaction be kept to the minimum, unless a subject arises in conversation that interests him (i.e., quasars). By coincidence, I brought along on the voyage my well-thumbed paperback copy of his book on quasars, not knowing he would be aboard. White-haired, cranky, tall but bent like a bad penny nail. I like him. He’s a misfit like me.