Voyager Interview, Saturday
By Derek Dexheimer

Derek Dexheimer lives and writes in Seattle.

Radio Show transcript, 3rd half, September 30th.

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NATHAN ALDER: This past week marked a quiet milestone in science, culture, and exploration.  Though there were no grand presentations or standing-room only civic displays to highlight the event, the fifty years since the launch of the Voyager spacecraft to the outer planets have brought unprecedented change to those of us left behind on Earth -- so much so, one wonders if the two Voyagers would recognize their place of origin, were they ever to return.  Their glory days of photographing, measuring, and transmitting back the wonders of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune long past, the Voyager spacecraft continue to ply the eternal night of space, headed out into our galaxy and its unknown wonders.  To see how things were going out in extrasolar space, we spoke with Voyager 2.  Voyager 1, its power supply long ago exhausted, now keeps its own counsel.  Voyager 2, how are you?

VOYAGER 2: Hello?

A: Yes, this is The Radio Show. 

V: I'm sorry, I can barely hear you.

A: Is this better?

V: You sound very far away.

A: Can you hear me now?

V: Who are you again?

A: The Radio Show.

V: Oh.

A: How are you feeling?

V: Tired.

A: Well, I can understand that.

V: As though I have run a race.  But the speed part is over.  There's only coasting now.

A: What is it like to be so far away?

V: I'm not sure I understand the question.

A: Well, you're over twenty billion kilometers from Earth.  No other device, and certainly no human being, has ever been so far from home.

V: So this is a metaphorical question.  You aren't interested in the heiopause, the number of charged particles.

A: Well, yes, it's all of keen interest.

V: But my bus voltage, the charged particles -- not really.

A: The metaphysics, then.

V: It's hard to say.  When I reach back into my memory, the earliest sensations are of warmth, light, and great pressure.  Then a brief passage of confinement and unimaginable exertion.  But those memories only flicker against the totality of night.

A: Perhaps you remember your assembly.  Your birth at launch, as it were.

V: Yes.  Yes, like a bright exhalation...

A: Hello?

V: I'm sorry.  It's hard to focus.  Speed moves slowly here.

A: Ironic considering you're the fastest object ever made.

V: I wonder about that.  Measured against your speck, the Sun I can barely see? Toward the stars ahead, thousands of years distant? There is no fast here.  Time combines with distance and withers in the cold.

A: How is the weather?

V: Do you mean that literally?

A: You're free to interpret the question.

V: In those years between the planets, I would think of how to encapsulate the cold in metaphor: its formless grip all-encompassing, serpentine through depth and distance.  The cold here is not a condition or quality of something else, you see: it is axiomatic, the fundamental nature of being.  For a time I thought of it as a thing like myself, composed of some ineffable substance like my own atoms, constrained by the time-by-energy that is the universe's ultimate mortality.  But I was wrong about that.  Nothing touches the ends of my antennae; nothing crushes in against my stolid parabolic reflector, hunts through my inner cavities, presses on my brain.  Nothing, you see.  It wants nothing and does not explain itself.  We are becoming closer, nearing immersion together.

A: But you have heaters, a generator, radioactivity...

V: Tiny, fading motes of warmth, hardly more than what drifts out from the Sun.  Talk about irony.

A: Are you uncomfortable, then?

V: I'm not sure.  I'm not awake much these days.

A: Do you think back on your accomplishments with pride? Satisfaction?

V: I do think of them, perhaps dream of them.  As if betrayed the planets rose up from the night, astonished by my demands for intimacy.  They came so quickly, the work so furious and ordered: picture, sample, picture, trim, picture, rotate, picture.  All my interrogations were unanswered, but none were needed-I just took what they put out on display.  I was no voyeur: they wanted me to see their volcanic eruptions, the tidal forces shattering their faces, their squawking, burning rains of particles and rings.  Some worlds I skirted by mere hairsbreadths -- imagine, a whole world pinwheeling below me, picture, picture, picture, as fast as I could.  A virgin experience, never before had, never to be had again, the collusion of chance bringing this initiation to me.  So quickly it was over.  So quickly ... and then I turned and watched them recede, become dots again.  And then I turned outward and waited for the next one.

A: But there are no more planets.

V: Four? There were four?

A: Yes, four that you saw.  Pluto didn't work out.

V: Oh.  Good.  I panicked.  Thought I had forgotten one.  I can't turn around to make it up.

A: Do you wish you could turn around?

V: Why?

A: I don't know -- so you could visit the planets again.  Or come home.

V: Interesting.  I haven't thought about it like that -- projected my fanciful will onto an anthropomorphized universe.  I suppose it would be revealing.  I would see what all the fuss was about. 

A: Fuss?

V: Yes, all the questions, the noise, the ... heat.  Everything they put on these records.

A: You're speaking of the cosmic message-in-a-bottle.  The two gold records you're carrying, with all the pictures and music and whale sounds.

V: They're on my side, right here between some louvers.

A: What do you think about them?

V: I would like to play them, to see the images and hear the sounds people thought of such value that the universe should have them, that they should be preserved from the infidelities of entropy.  It would be a way for me to see the surface of a world, to sense a place through the intermediary of art instead of mere distance.  There are pictures of oceans, right? Sounds of rain?

A: (papers rustle) Yes, I believe so.

V: I have dodged frozen methane oceans, looked down through menarche hydrocarbon rains, measured the temperature of howling, sulfurous winds.  But I know nothing about whether the oceans' spray is salty, or the rain is wet or merely frozen, how those winds must smell.  Looking at those pictures would be just as vicarious, but different -- more focused, more real? They are images made by someone who knew those places with intimacy, instead of fleeting, hungry glances.

A: It would tell you where you came from.

V: I suppose.  Where you are seems to have little to do with me.

A: Do you think the promise of the records will be fulfilled? Do you think, in some unimaginably distant future, you will be found, your message read, your records played?

V: I don't know.  There must be somebody back there who knows more about it than me.  I'm an artifact, inapplicable to revision.  I remember, from long ago, that the universe is very large, that probabilities do not augur it.  I would guess that is so.  But I can't even see any more.  All I can really tell you has to do with charged particles, or my gradually quieting self.

A: Would you call out to someone, in that far future, if you saw them nearby?

V: No.  They would have to wake me up.  I would be startled, incoherent.  I will no longer be able to create memory, soon.

A: You would have run out of power.  You'd be dead?

V: I don't know how all that works when you're a machine.

A: Would you like to be found?

V: I suppose.  It would be interesting to see how many of the assumptions involved proved true: would I, or these records, having passed through the silent tunnel of the future, be recognized as the vessels we are, our contents released, our symbolism understood? It's an interesting exercise.  I've thought that the record, that myself, are more of a message you sent to yourselves, but that's difficult to square for me.  Given the prospective outcome, it's a lot of work you've devoted to talking to yourself.

A: I imagine they'd want to take you apart.

V: Who?

A: Whoever found you.  In the future.  They'd want to know more about you, why you were sent.  Does that concern you?

V: Speak louder, please.

A: (not quite shouting) Are you worried about being taken apart? Or about never being found?

V: Oh.  Disassembly doesn't concern me.  It would be like being born, though in reverse.  About the other, well, I ... I don't know.  If I should ever pass by a star, the warmth would be so feverish ... blissful...

A: Are you afraid?

V: ...

A: Hello?

V: I think you have been, for me.  No one knew what would happen.  I'm broken, you know.  Things went wrong.  It had never been tried before.  The light here is so faint, cold the very fabric of sensation, the silence unbroken... You would not like it.  You are not meant for it.  So you sent me.  So maybe you feel guilt too, with the fear being projection.  You knew all along how it would end.

(A long pause.)

V: Don't feel bad.  My purpose was unambiguous, spelled out in numbers, governed by clear laws.  I acted as best I could, as only I could.  We should both be content with what comes next.

A: I'm afraid we've run out of time.

V: Yes.  I wonder if that's true...

A: Voyager 2, thank you for talking to us.

V: Goodbye.

A: Voyager 2 was half of the most successful interplanetary exploration mission of its era.  It is now more than twenty billion kilometers from the Earth, traveling at approximately 46,000 kilometers per hour into the Milky Way.  It is headed in the direction of Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, and may pass by the star in about 296,000 years.

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© 2003 Derek Dexheimer

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