The Dark Beyond the Stars Read online

  Her voice was harsh, commanding. “Get his suit off—hurry it up but don’t kill him.”

  My body had been numbed by drugs but it still hurt when they shelled me out of my cocoon of permacloth and metal. The woman knelt on the deck beside me and ran her hands over the bloody inner-weave, testing for broken bones with the expertise of a surgeon.

  “Compound fracture of the left humerus, torn brachial artery—strip off the weave and get some tourniquets.”

  I gazed at the overhead, only half conscious, indifferent to the cold metal of the automatic shears against my skin as they cut through the cloth and tubing. One of the crewmen started to adjust a pressure bandage on my arm and I turned my head to watch him. He had slipped out of his suit and inner-weave, kneeling naked on the deck as he worked with the sticky-cloth.

  He looked about nineteen, perhaps twenty. High cheekbones, a large mouth, pale skin, pale hair chopped at the shoulder, pale eyes that masked whatever he was thinking, and a thin, hairless body that looked more agile than strong. There was a delicacy about him that had eluded his teammates and he was cursed with the type of prettiness that some young men have before all the cartilage and baby fat turn to bone and gristle. He wrinkled his nose.

  “He stinks.”

  The woman bent down for another quick inspection. “Clean him up. Strap on an IV pump, cover him with blankets, and lock him in.”

  The pale eyes made a judgment. “He won’t make it to Inbetween Station.” I wondered how he knew but there were no clues on that pale face.

  They rolled me on my side. Another crewman—thicker muscled than the first, with rough features that looked not quite finished—fumbled with some toweling, doing his best to sponge up the blood and urine that had soaked the weave around my groin. He was stubby-fingered, clumsy and close to tears.

  “I think he’s going to die.”

  The crewman with the pale hair slipped the needle end of a thin tube into a vein in the back of my hand and adjusted the flow from the pump. He nodded at the woman behind him, murmuring, “She doesn’t want to hear that.”

  But she had, and cut in curtly, “Everybody to stations.”

  They slid into their control chairs and seconds later I felt the mattress beneath me harden as the Lander leaped into the sky. I started to drift again, the sensations of my body fading. If I were going to Reduction, this was a better way than most.

  After a minute or two of acceleration, the couch relaxed and I knew we were floating in the dark of space. The pain had long since vanished; the only thing that still bothered me was that I couldn’t put names to the faces around me. I watched them as they worked their control panels and wondered who they were. Once the woman studied me for several minutes before going back to her board. Her expression was one of deep sadness and loss. I moved slightly on the acceleration couch just to reassure her that I was still alive.

  The crewman who had sponged away the blood and urine, and another whom I hadn’t noticed before—smaller and faintly apprehensive—were busy with their instrument panels. The first glanced back several times to check on me. The other only looked at me once, embarrassed for someone who was dying.

  It was obvious they all knew me. I didn’t know them at all.

  The crewman with the pale hair was busy punching in calculations at his computer console. It was half an hour before he swiveled around to stare at me. I remember thinking he was more than just pretty, he was beautiful. But I didn’t like him and I knew he didn’t like me. For just a moment the pale eyes flared with feeling and he silently mouthed a few words.

  What he said was: “I hope you die.”

  I didn’t know whether it was a hope or a threat or a statement of fact—my mind was too fogged to make much sense of it or even to feel much reaction. What worried me was not so much that I might die but that I might die not knowing who the other crew members were.

  Or who I was.

  Then the control room and those in it faded away. I wasn’t aware of it when we transferred to Inbetween Station; I had drifted into unconsciousness and the first of many nightmares.

  ****

  In my dreams, I relived every second spent in exploration that morning, starting from the moment I stepped on the first rung of the ladder and climbed down to the surface of the planet. There was something before then—not much. I was in a metal coffin with my arms folded across my chest, staring through the clear plastic lid at a jungle of thick, silvery worms that were reaching out for me. Behind them were faces, hundreds of faces. The most vivid was that of the woman who had been in charge of the exploration team below. Another was of a man with a faint smile and sardonic eyes who could see into my very soul—a cold man in a trim black uniform who frightened me more than the worms.

  More than once I woke from the nightmares screaming and sweating and had to be sponged off by the nurse. “Drink this,” was all I remembered her saying, though I know she talked to me frequently and even held me when I woke up shaking. She was a soft woman; everything about her was soft—her face, her hands, her olive-colored skin, her voice…

  If she had been a hard woman, I would have died.

  She was young, her chubby sixteen-year-old’s body covered by a white waistcloth and a thin halter. I worried that her youth meant I was so close to death an experienced nurse would have been wasted on me. But I didn’t worry all that much. Most of the time I slept, lost in my nightmares.

  Then one time period I woke up and stayed awake. I was in a sick bay with the railings on my bed raised and thin plastic straps holding me down so I couldn’t float off. There were other patients in the compartment, maybe a dozen all told. Several had IV pumps dripping fluid into their veins like I did and I assumed they were crewmen from other exploration teams.

  A transparent glassteel partition blocked off an operating theater that was a forest of polished machinery. The bulkheads, the deck, and the overhead gleamed with soft white light from glow tubes inset where the bulkheads and the overhead met. Brightly colored anatomy charts enameled on one of the bulkheads were illuminated by light panels set to either side. Just beyond the hatchway’s shadow screen I could see a corridor, alive with crewmen, that seemed to stretch for kilometers, the end of it fading into the distance.

  The ship was huge.

  Mounted directly over my bed was a small screen with pictures constantly flickering across it—entertainment, I supposed, though I seldom had enough interest or energy to try and make sense of the images.

  But the real show was on the other side of the three large ports in the exterior bulkhead. From my bed, I watched the stars wheel slowly past and caught an occasional glimpse of a planet’s surface far beneath us. I gradually realized the ship was in orbit over a world a thousand kilometers below.

  “Drink this,” my child-nurse said once again.

  She handed me a drink bulb filled with a grayish liquid. I sucked on its plastic tubing and tried to keep from gagging.

  “What’s your name?” I mumbled.

  “Pipit.” Behind her smile, her expression was watchful and curious. It would have made another girl look sly, but on Pipit it only made me less sure of her age.

  “What’s mine?”

  She didn’t answer, but leaned closer to stroke my forehead with her soft hands. “Shush,” she whispered. “It’ll come back to you.”

  Then one sleep period, when the sick bay was dark, somebody woke me up, murmured, “Down the hatch,” and held a drinking tube to my mouth. But the voice didn’t sound like Pipit’s and the hands didn’t feel like Pipit’s. I twisted away, crying. The hands became more insistent, trying to push the tube into my mouth. I fought back, calling faintly for help and flailing at my enemy, too weak to do much damage but strong enough to keep the tube away from my lips. I suspected that if I swallowed the liquid in the bulb, I would never wake up.

  Then whoever it was, was gone and Pipit was cradling me in her arms, calming my pounding heart. She asked me who had been there but I hadn’t seen
their face. Exhaustion finally closed my eyes and I slept once again. There were more dreams and nightmares, mixed with brief periods of wakefulness. The woman on the Lander came to see me often and I had distinct memories of the pale-skinned crewman leaning over the bed rails. He watched me for hours, his pale eyes as speculative as they had been on board the Lander.

  He said nothing at all.

  Once Pipit showed up hand in hand with the crewman who had been so clumsy and so concerned for me aboard the Lander. He wasn’t wearing cling-tite sandals and had to grip the side rails so a sudden movement wouldn’t push him halfway across the compartment.

  “How do you feel?”

  I remembered the harsh planes and angles of his face but I had forgotten the long brown hair that swirled about his head like a halo, lending him a grace his features lacked. But I didn’t pay much attention to him—I was watching Pipit work the meal dispenser at the far end of the compartment and thinking how hungry I was. Then I blinked back to my visitor.

  I didn’t know his name but guessed he had come to see me because we had once been friends.

  “Where am I?”

  He looked worried. “On board the Astron.”

  “The Astron,” I mumbled. It sounded familiar. “Who are you?”

  He didn’t bother masking his disappointment; he had wanted badly for me to remember.

  “Crow.”

  Once he said it, I recognized the name, but that was all.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He looked blank.

  “For your help on the Lander.”

  Pipit now drifted over and fastened a meal tray to the side rails. I pried off the plastic covering with my good arm and sniffed the steam from the meat and the thick, gooey gravy that held it to the plate. I filled a scoop spoon and swallowed a mouthful, enjoying the lingering taste of the gravy. Then I promptly vomited.

  I lay back, turning my face away as Crow frantically tried to catch the floating brown globules with the loose end of his waistcloth. Whatever other purposes Crow had in life, apparently one of them was to clean up after me.

  He looked down at me, stricken. “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Go away,” I said, and pulled the sheet over my face, too ashamed to talk any more and too filled with an envy that neither he nor Pipit would ever understand.

  The memories of their sixteen or eighteen years filled their heads like sugar in a bowl. But I had no memories. For all practical purposes, I had been born a few weeks before. I had no recollections of a mother or a father or a brother or a sister or friends or enemies or lovers. The only memories I possessed were those of the planet below, the Lander, and my nightmares in sick bay.

  They weren’t nearly enough.

  Pipit was always there now, usually with several small children who fingered the bedding and studied me with a grave curiosity. When she wasn’t attending me—she never seemed to nurse the other patients at all—Pipit played with the youngsters as they floated about the compartment. She seemed to enjoy the role of older sister or surrogate mother and she was very good at it. She anticipated what the children were going to do before they did it, even plucking them out of the air to hold them over the vacuum of a waste chute when they needed it.

  I discovered later it wasn’t nearly as simple as motherly anticipation.

  Finally, one time period when I awoke, the tube was gone. Pipit was waiting for me with a bowl and a scoop spoon, her chubby face starched with a grim determination.

  “You’ll have to keep this down.” Her voice was surprisingly hard.

  She fed me a mouthful of porridge. When it started to come back up, she clamped my mouth shut with her hands until the spasm passed and I had swallowed both the porridge and the bile that had risen with it. After ten minutes of turmoil, my stomach no longer had the strength to rebel. Several meals later, I was eating solids.

  It wasn’t many time periods after that when Pipit floated into the compartment, trailed by two more visitors. Both were old men wearing white halters, both had a caduceus stenciled on each shoulder, and both carried writing slates tucked in their sashes.

  One was fat and bald and red-faced and looked as if he had better things to do. The other was thinner, more awkward in his movements, his eyes bright behind a pair of ancient spectacles whose wire frames had been wrapped and rewrapped with tape.

  At my bedside, the fat one dropped three magnetic lines to anchor himself, folding his plump legs beneath him. He studied the instruments set in the bed’s headboard, clamped chubby fingers around my wrist, and took my pulse by hand, obviously lacking faith in the automatic readouts. His grip had the clammy feel that too much flesh always seems to have.

  I looked up at the thin one and mumbled, “Where am I?”

  “On board the Astron—didn’t Crow tell you?”

  “He didn’t tell me what it was,” I said, sullen.

  He gave me a reassuring smile. “The Aaron’s an exploration ship, interstellar. So far as we know, the only one. From Earth.” Somehow I knew that, though I knew nothing about the planet itself.

  Both of them waited expectantly for me to ask something more. The thin one was patient, his smile bright. The fat one was nervous, frowning and plucking absently at his sash to let me know his time was valuable. I guessed that both of them were acting, that the thin one was really impatient and that there was no other place the fat one would rather have been.

  “I’m Noah,” the thin one offered. “My friend here is Abel. They’re names from the Bible.”

  It surprised me that I knew what the Bible was.

  “They’re just names,” I said, still sulky. “Who are you?”

  Abel glanced at Noah, then back at me, annoyed with both of us. Noah smiled again, patiently playing the game. “We’re the ship’s doctors. Abel is a body doctor. I’m more concerned with the mind. But that isn’t what you wanted to ask, is it?”

  I was reluctant to answer. I had no memories, no name, and no knowledge of the Astron or my relationship to it, and that made me the most vulnerable person in the compartment.

  “Who am I?” I finally asked.

  Noah looked secretive and nodded to Pipit. She closed the shadow screen so we were alone with the other patients, none of whom were paying any attention to us. Noah and Abel hunched closer to the bedside while Pipit lingered a discreet distance away.

  “Who—”

  Abel interrupted, peevish. “It would be better if you told us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, turning my face away so they couldn’t see my anger. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “You don’t remember,” Abel corrected. He leaned closer, his breath heavy with reminders of his dinner. “Look at me,” he said curtly. “It makes it easier if I can see the eyes of the person I’m talking to.”

  Whoever I was, I was young. You used that tone on boys, you didn’t use it on men.

  “I don’t remember,” I repeated, even more surly.

  Abel snorted in disgust and glanced at Noah. “I told Huldah it would be no use,” he muttered. “We’re wasting our time with dangerous business.”

  Noah ignored him, his eyes huge behind lenses that were so full of scratches they were almost opaque. They went well with the antique spacesuits but not with the highly polished technology of the operating room beyond.

  “Tell me what you do remember. Go as far back as you can.”

  I told him about exploring the planet below, about falling from the face of the scarp, and about my teammates who had carried me back to the Lander.

  “Nobody ever called you by name?”

  I shook my head.

  “You don’t remember anything before climbing down the ladder?”

  For just a moment I stood before a door behind which were crowded all the memories I could no longer recall.

  “I started down the ladder,” I said. “I caught my foot, then I was on the surface and…” There was something more but it vanished quickly. “I’ve told you everyt
hing since then.”

  “We’re wasting our time,” Abel complained once more to Noah. But he made no move to leave.

  “It’s a form of amnesia,” Noah said, watching me closely. “Retrograde amnesia. You remember the accident and what you did after stepping off the ladder. Before then it’s… gone. The obvious cause was the fall from the scarp. It came very close to killing you.”

  “My memories will come back?” I asked.

  He and Abel shared a brief glance, then Noah tried to reassure me.

  “Memory loss is usually selective. You haven’t forgotten how to talk, you’ll relearn how to get around the ship, you’ll start to remember a lot of little things. The first memories to return are those closest to the trauma. You’ll remember more experiences and one will lead to another.” He hesitated. “If the condition persists, we can always try hypnosis or drugs.”

  There was no hint of guile on his face but his voice was full of it. My memories were gone—probably for good—and, for reasons of his own, he was as bitterly disappointed as I was.

  “Who am I?” I cried once more.

  There was no more pretense at reassurance; that game was over. “Somewhere inside, you know,” Noah said in a voice as full of desperation as my own.

  I was tired and started drifting off to sleep. “I don’t remember,” I muttered.

  “Somebody’s coming,” Pipit interrupted, her ear against the hatchway.

  Noah pushed away from the bedside and Abel yanked at his magnetic anchors. I watched them as they scrambled for the shadow screen. For the first time I realized that both of them had been badly frightened all the time they were talking to me—afraid not only of the questions they were asking but of what my responses might be.

  At the hatchway, Noah turned and blurted: “You’re a tech assistant on board the Astron, You’re seventeen years old. Your name is Sparrow.”

  Sparrow.

  Unlike “Crow,” the name didn’t mean a thing to me.

  Chapter 3

  As my nightmares tapered off, I spent more of my waking hours exercising in bed and trying to talk to the other patients. Pipit never served them, though occasionally I saw one sitting on the edge of his bunk eating from a tray. There was a steady buzz of conversation as they talked to each other, and a few of them groaned with pain as they slept.