Outward Borne (44 page)

DePat pulled a box out of the back of the
truck and opened it to show Martha a sleeping puppy. “It is a
Brownie, one of the first litters born here.”

Martha screeched in disbelief. What a prize.
No one would have one of these, and it was so cute, just a puff of
deep brown fur. She carried it inside to show her mom.

DePat agreed that they could bring
the Brownie to dog shows, not to compete, of course, it was not
recognized, but to exhibit, and made them promise not to breed the
dog. “We will be building up our breeds,” he said, “and, of course,
we want to keep the lines clean. Browns are very trainable and very
loyal to their family, but make sure you are tough with him, or he
will start training you.”

They left with hugs and kisses,
and promises to send photos and stuff. Miky, as the pup was named,
became a very well known little dog.

Chapter 23 Michael DePat
Keifer

I thought I knew about the Alien
Planet Cube, it was very famous, but DePat told me a very different
story. He had two memory cubes, and no way to access either one of
them. That was his real goal, and the Alien Planet Cube was his
means to do it. He was relieved to have gotten the cubes back from
Martha Merit, he told me, but by themselves, they were little more
than curiosities. He needed, if he could get one built, a
custom-designed Earth computer, with a great many purpose-built
chips and a lot of new software that would be capable of
downloading the data from the cubes in a usable form. It would be
very difficult, very expensive, and he could never have it done in
secret.

The Outward Voyager had
investigated twenty-eight life-supporting planetary systems during
its long voyage. It had amassed detailed records on each solar
system and its associated planets - satellite surveys, surface
scans, surveys by low altitude drones, landings whenever abundant
life was present. All of this geological, biochemical, and
biological data had been collected by the ObLaDas and transferred
to the data storage device that became known as the Alien Planet
Cube.

There was no doubt that this huge
body of work would be of great interest to Earth. It was exciting
to think of the extraordinary discoveries that could be held in the
palm of one’s hand. The publicly professed intent of the disclosure
of this information was to win favor for the Voyager community for
their lifetime, and that was all good, even wonderful, but DePat’s
real purpose, or that of the ObLaDas who put it together, was to
motivate Earth scientists to build the data access computer
system.

DePat decided to reveal the
existence of the Alien Planet Cube a U.S. Astrophysical Society
meeting. The 2066 meeting was held in Denver that year. He
contacted the Committee Chairwoman, Dr Emily Beatrice, but she was
reluctant to allow DePat to address the meeting. It was apparent
that she considered him some sort of novelty act. Dr Beatrice knew
that the Voyagers had taken no part in ObLaDas’ astronomy or
planetary probes, so it was unlikely that DePat would have anything
of interest to present to the Society, serious as it was. However,
DePat had been told about some of the alien planet files and made a
careful recitation of what he remembered. That was sufficient. He
did not mention the cube.

DePat was given a speaking slot at
the meeting. It was scheduled for mid-week, in the late afternoon.
His presentation was given no particular publicity, just one of
many, but the room was full nevertheless. DePat talked in general
terms about the type of data and the level of detail that the
ObLaDa probes were able to accumulate. That was frustrating for his
audience to hear, thinking, as they did, that all that wonderful
knowledge had flown away, but it hadn’t. He held up the little box,
the Alien Memory Cube, and offered to turn it over to the Society
if they would undertake to solve the computer access problem. His
offer provoked a good deal of excitement, as well it might, but the
conversation at the cocktail party, which followed immediately, was
about the problems of making an interface. There was some
skepticism, and there were very mixed feelings about DePat’s
condition that the data be made available to everyone on
Earth.

The following day, the worlds’
news organizations descended on the Society. It would become the
biggest Voyager story since the landing four years earlier.
Fortunately, DePat had taken Bill Hanson’s advice and arranged for
the conference leaders to handle the press coverage. Dr Beatrice
was in her glory. DePat kept his attention on the main chance, and
met in private with the computer experts.

It took fifteen months for the
engineers to successfully translate the data stream into something
intelligible, and another eight to collect, organize, and reference
the information. The Society had networked a great many people to
work on the project, and they put together a very good show
summarizing the material, complete with pictures of alien species
and their home planets. And, true to their word, all of this data
was made available via the Internet to anyone, without restriction,
who wanted to see it. Needless to say, it set off a wave of
interest in space, and myriad discussions of what it all meant and
where we, the people of Earth, fit in. The huge data collection is
still being mined for new insights, but the costly computer was set
aside once all the cube’s data had been successfully removed. The
cube itself was put into the Smithsonian Museum, and the computer
sat unused. The Voyagers had assisted in the translation of the
Ship language in return for its future use, but it was three years
after the Alien Planet Cube was revealed before DePat was able to
begin his work on the other memory file, the one he called the
Voyager Cube.

From the beginning, DePat Kiefer
had been well known. Initially, for being a strikingly handsome
young man, but more so after he presented the Alien Planet Cube to
the world. He continued to appear in society more than most of the
Voyagers, and later became hyper-famous, for he was the first to
fall in love with, court, and marry an Earth-born woman, my
grandmother, Linia Madison Kiefer. You can imagine! From that time,
through the birth of my father, and for many years thereafter,
their every gesture and thought, good times and bad, became a
public event.

My grandmother Linia must have
been an exceptional person, but I did not really know her. She died
when I was only six. She must have had great courage to marry a
Voyager, and to raise a child, my father, amidst constant public
attention. All of the impertinent questions she faced, wondering if
her baby would be normal and all. I thought that I had some memory
of her walking in the forest and standing under a large tree full
of singing birds. Then I saw a video of the scene and realized that
I only remembered the image. My one sure memory is of her seated in
a chair, with her hair white, grasping the arms of the chair. We
were alone in a room. She must have been looking after me shortly
before she was taken away. I do not remember ever talking with her,
only sitting in the chair. I wish I had.

My father was all but conceived
and raised in public. Like Bertrand Russell, he claimed to have
been famous before he was born. Every event, from his gestation
onward, was in the news. When he got older and went to school, they
had to hide him to give him something like a normal life, as if
hiding was normal. Even the games he played as a child appeared on
video. They obtained his school papers and criticized them in the
national news. Then when he started to go out with girls, the
girls’ wardrobe was critiqued. It must have been terrible. The
thought of something like that kept me from asking out girls until
the Senior Prom. What a disaster that was. Father told me that the
most difficult thing he had to deal with, and what made him
defensive and insecure to this day, was the fact that he had always
been treated as someone special, even though he knew that he had
never done anything special at all.

It is ironic that DePat and Linia
were arrested after they expressed their opposition to manned space
travel. The government was pretty weak and ineffectual in those
days, and functioned primarily to fund big corporate projects.
Their latest scheme was to revive the massive manned space program
that had been curtailed after the failed Mars mission of 2057.
Through much of his public life, DePat had visited schools where he
spoke about life in space and aliens from other planets, and Linia
had published a series of children’s books and video’s on space
travel. Naturally, they were asked their opinion on manned
interplanetary space flights. My grandfather knew that our
technology was still too primitive to allow safe manned space
travel, and at this time, the inclusion of humans on these
planetary missions was expensive and essentially
pointless.

“
What would they do when they got
there? Set up automated equipment?” DePat would ask. Manned space
flight costs 100-times more than a robotic flight, maybe more, he
pointed out. “If we sent a robot to Mars every year for a hundred
years, we might find something worthwhile for a man to do there,
perhaps not.” This was another government program intended to sound
worthy and to funnel huge sums of money, in this case ten trillion
dollars, to their supporters in the space industry, none of who
appreciated DePat’s frank, but quotable comments.

DePat was not the only Voyager
that was critical of the space program, and the cumulative
influence of these high-visibility critics provoked the powerful,
entrenched space conglomerates to coerce the government into
conducting an anti-Voyager campaign. After the Voyagers’ statements
threatened to endanger passage of the proposed space program, the
government’s Media for National Security Office designated them
subversive nationals, in a broad attempt to discredit their
standing. Favorable news articles were banned, and a fear-campaign
was started based on the Voyagers’ unusual behavior and
questionable background, even raising, once again, the assertion
that they were alien beings in human form. Bohemian Grove was
sealed, individuals were prevented from leaving the site, and all
communication with the outside was blocked. Ultimately, several of
the more outspoken Voyagers were imprisoned, including DePat and
Linia.

Both of my parents, Lewis and
Regina Kiefer, took up an increased public role at that time. They
spoke out in support of the Voyagers’ freedom and their oft-stated
ideals, ideals the nation still held dear. The Voyagers were seen
as a good, harmless people who staunchly maintained high
principles, while at the same time, were often too shy to take part
in society. The emotional bond between the populous and the
Voyagers strengthened, in spite of the hostile publicity campaign,
and it eventually undercut the manned space proposal.

Not many Voyagers survived that
period of imprisonment for long. They did not have a lengthy
lifespan on Earth; few lived to be seventy years old. It was
because of their radiation exposure in space, they say. When the
number of surviving Voyagers dwindled, the Bohemian Grove compound
was closed, and the Voyager Trust built individual homes for the
survivors. Grandfather was given a single-story home that stood on
the edge of a fifteen acre enclosed park located in the hills north
of San Anselmo, California. It was a peaceful, attractive place.
Large trees and rounded, grass-covered hills, golden in the summer
sunlight, surrounded the small, wooden house that was modeled after
the famous craftsman homes of two hundred years before.

For years before he moved into his
house, Grandfather had worked to decipher and organize the jumbled
maze of almost random data that filled the Voyager Memory Cube. He
expected to find the information that he had collected about the
humans’ history while on the Outward Voyager, but he quickly
discovered that the ObLaDas had loaded a tremendous amount of
additional information on the cube. It appeared to contain most of
the knowledge that the ObLaDas had ever acquired.

That data was, however, so random
and undefined that he was hardly able to sort through it, much less
make sense of it. He achieved a great deal, I think. He downloaded
and organized all of the content, and he completed the difficult
interpretation and sequencing work for large sections of the
humans’ Outward Voyager history. The ObLaDas computers probably had
some way to sort and identify the data files, he speculated, but
the Earth-built machine that he had could not do it. The material
that DePat gave me held vast untouched assemblies of technical
information about the mission and space, as well as files on the
ObLaDas and their home planet. It would to be my job to organize it
and to make it public. It will not be easy, Grandfather told me at
the time, but he had made some arrangements that would help. Or at
least allow me to get help if I needed it.

Grandfather got me into UC
Berkeley. My grades would not have not done it, I know that for
sure. He saw it as a strong, protective environment. I found it
pretty intimidating, but I was able to work on the ObLaDa data as a
graduate student in history within Dr. Wysocki’s group, with a
grand plan to publish an e-media book on the Voyagers’ history as
part of my thesis. That was all confidential, of course. At the
time, I did not know how important, perhaps dangerous is a better
word, the ObLaDa knowledge was. DePat gave me access to his files,
but he insisted that their existence be kept secret for as long as
possible. The government, or some even less desirable force, would
be there in a trice if they heard the slightest rumor that unknown
ObLaDa data existed, and who knows what they would do with it.
Nothing good I suspect.