The Dark Beyond the Stars Read online

  But they never looked at me or answered when I spoke. I wondered if my accident had scarred me, though my hands could find no evidence of it. I tried to catch a glimpse of my features in the polished metal of the bulkheads, but for some reason it would not yield a clear reflection of my face.

  One time period I tried to strike up a conversation with the crewman in the next bunk, a man about my age who wore a cast on his right arm. He was obviously in pain and my first try was sympathetic.

  “The planet took me by surprise,” I said. “I guess it did you, too.”

  He ignored me and started talking with a friend in another bunk. Ordinarily I would have shrugged and turned away, but I had been ignored for almost a month. It finally proved too much.

  I raised my voice. “You can at least say you don’t want to talk to me.”

  He looked right through me, not acknowledging my presence at all, and began to rearrange his sheets.

  “You can go to hell!” I shouted. I scrabbled about on my mattress, searching for something to throw at him.

  Pipit appeared then, frowning.

  “What’s wrong, Sparrow?”

  I turned away from her, still grumbling. I made a note to resume the conversation once we were out of sick bay—but then, I would do my talking with my fists.

  Eventually I gave up trying to communicate with my fellow patients and concentrated on Pipit as she played with the youngsters. Once it sounded like she was holding class. I stayed awake to listen as the children chanted their “begats.”

  “Cuzco was begat by Ibis who was begat by Ophelia who was begat by Wrasse who was begat…”

  Cuzco was perhaps three years old, a little girl who laughed a lot and was one of Pipit’s favorites, though in reality they were all her favorites. I had no idea who Ibis was until I met a thin, nervous woman, a little older than Pipit, who was her coconspirator in farming a secret spice plot in Hydroponics. Ophelia was the woman who had been in charge of the exploration team on Seti IV, the planet where I’d had my accident, a planet now light-weeks behind us in the void.

  The mothers usually picked up their children after shift. They were greeted with squeals of delight, but few of the children failed to wave good-bye to Pipit and some were reluctant to leave at all. It was Pipit who kissed it and made it well when they bumped themselves floating around the compartment, it was Pipit who hugged them when they needed it most, and it was Pipit who entertained them with simple fairy tales before nap time…

  Crow and Ophelia still came to see me, but for Ophelia it had become more professional than personal; whatever deep concern she had felt for me on board the Lander had withered as I grew stronger. On the other hand, Crow seemed less formal and more open, joking and talking with me as he might have with any crew member. Occasionally I caught a wistful look and was reminded that when I had lost my memories, both he and Ophelia had lost someone close to them, someone I doubted that I could ever replace. Or ever know.

  Then the time arrived when Pipit lowered the rails, untied the straps, and pulled me over to the shower stall.

  “You smell,” she said primly. “You need a bath.”

  She helped me strip off the bandages, then pushed me into the cubicle and scrubbed my back—hard—as the water jetted out to be sucked up by the intake vacuum.

  Nudity didn’t bother her, though I was painfully aware of her naked body and olive skin. I bit my lip in a vain attempt to prevent the eventual erection. She ignored it and finally I did, too. It obligingly went away. At the same time I resented the fact that after numerous sponge baths she knew my body as well as her own. The baths and her touch had become a source of erotic pleasure for me: I resented that, too.

  She finished vacuuming the water off my back, then handed me a clean waistcloth. There was a mirror just outside the shower stall—it had been steamed over when I entered—and I wiped it with a corner of the cloth. For the first time in my “life” I saw myself.

  I thought I was very handsome.

  I was thinner than Crow and looked older—I didn’t think by much. I was neither as tall nor as muscular, though there was no hint of adolescent babyfat. I had thick auburn hair, a reddish beard, and a straggling moustache. My eyes were a light green. Sometime in the past my nose had been broken, though I was convinced it made me look romantic. My skin was white even for someone with reddish hair—I hadn’t spent much time under the sick-bay health lamps—and my shoulders were slightly hunched. I had a flat stomach, big hands and feet, and a curly mat of rust-colored fuzz on my chest. My fingers were spatulate, though the rest of me looked normal enough.

  My name is Sparrow; I’m seventeen years old and a tech assistant on board the Astron.

  I was vastly pleased with myself.

  “Everything’s there,” Pipit said matter-of-factly. “I checked.”

  She had read my every thought. In the mirror, my face turned pink.

  “I hope you enjoyed yourself,” I grunted. I slipped the cloth up and around my waist and knotted it, realizing a moment later that whatever else I had forgotten, I hadn’t forgotten how to do that.

  Pipit took off her cling-tites and slipped them beneath her waistcloth. Then she switched off the shadow screen over the hatchway.

  “Would you like to see the ship?”

  I looked at the brilliantly lit corridor just beyond and watched the crewmen jostling each other as they floated down it, eventually to be lost in the distance.

  I wanted to see the ship very badly.

  ****

  We drifted through the hatch into the passageway outside, lined with color-coded piping that served as directions to the various living and working quarters. Names and assignments ran in a continuous illuminated strip along the bottom of the overhead. Pipit grabbed a ring jutting out from the bulkhead and pushed herself along, braking the same way.

  “Do exactly as I do,” she said. “It’s more difficult than it looks.”

  But it wasn’t—it was something I had done before and it didn’t take me long to relearn it.

  On that first tour, the Astron was a world spread over a dozen different levels, with compartments filled with gleaming machinery and passageways that went on forever. Pipit showed me the machine shops where they worked on maintaining the equipment, the enormous hangar deck for Inbetween Station and the Lander plus the balloon and submarine probes, then took me through the various tech shops where I saw exploration suits and support gear hanging in neat rows along the partitions.

  I even caught a glimpse of a crowded mess compartment with crewmen eating at stainless-steel tables and working in the galley. None of them glanced up when I paused in the hatchway to watch, reminding me of the patients in sick bay. Pipit finally nudged me away, saying that most of the divisions, my own included, had their personal mess.

  The next stop was Communications, a large, gleaming compartment jammed with radio equipment and a dozen personnel too busy to pay much attention to us. On the bulkhead outside was a clipboard with a sheaf of the latest weekly messages from a remote Earth printed on crisp plastic sheets. I glanced at one or two, brief summaries of politics and economics, and then Pipit was tugging me away.

  Hydroponics was in the after portion of the ship. I stared openmouthed at the troughs of green plants racked from deck to overhead in rows that stretched for hundreds of meters. Pipit motioned me to follow her and floated toward a distant section of the compartment, where some plant troughs were hidden beneath the nutrient piping. She pinched off a leaf, crushed it in her fingers, and held them out for me to smell. The fragrance made my nose itch.

  “Mint,” she said, reaching over to break off a leaf from another plant. “Anise.” She put her fingers to my lips. “Don’t tell.”

  She shot off and I trailed after, still bemused by the different smells on her fingertips.

  In the stern, I was awestruck by the huge water-filled pool, blue with Cherenkov radiation, that housed the ship’s Locke-Austin fusion engines. The compartment was three
levels high, and I spent several minutes gawking at the nearly naked technicians, protected by their shields, hovering around the huge machinery. Then Pipit tugged at me once again, saying it was time to go.

  The crew’s quarters were small cubicles off the main corridors, subdivided by shadow screens into living spaces for families or singles. All of them were filled with comfortable foam furniture and magnetic tapestries that clung to the bulkheads. I wanted to stop and talk to the crew members I saw inside but Pipit shook her head, frowning.

  “There’s too much to see,” she protested.

  A number of the crewmen in the passageways wore clear plastic masks that covered their eyes and ears. I supposed they worked in the drive chamber, where the glare of the lights was almost blinding. Unlike the crewmen in the mess hall, several of them nodded and called me by name. I wondered how well I had known them and if we had ever worked together.

  One crowded passageway was filled with flickering lights, flashing signs, and colored cloth awnings at which I stared, fascinated.

  “It’s the ship’s bazaar,” Pipit said, uneasy.

  I took a closer look and decided this was where crew members traded or sold articles they no longer desired or objects they had made. I wanted to see what was for sale but Pipit clung to my arm, shaking her head.

  “You’re doing too much,” she warned. “It’s time to go back.”

  I was tired, but not that tired, and Pipit’s concern had begun to irritate me. I dodged past her down the corridor, losing myself among the awnings and the piles of goods and crowds of crewmen.

  But even though the shelves were piled high with bolts of cloth, musical instruments, toys, and bedding, the counters themselves were nearly bare. There wasn’t much actually for sale—two or three books of thin plastic sheets, some tiny hangings knotted from colored string, a slate similar to the ones Noah and Abel carried tucked inside their waist-cloths…

  What finally caught my eye was a bookseller’s stall. I fingered an ancient volume of poetry lying alone on the counter. The book was beautiful, the print on the plastic pages still crisp and black. I leafed quickly through it, entranced by the words that danced before my eyes.

  “How much is this?” I asked the old woman who was selling it. The shelf behind her was thick with volumes but she was only willing to part with the one thin book of poems.

  “A thousand hours,” she murmured. “I can’t read it anymore.” For the first time, I noticed the cataracts that clouded her eyes. They shouldn’t have been a problem, not considering the equipment in the infirmary.

  Pipit caught up with me and clutched my shoulder. “We should go back,” she warned again. “It’s time to go back.”

  I laughed and darted down the corridor. When I spotted a hatchway, I dove through it—and suddenly had to catch my breath. I was at the hub of what looked like a gigantic wheel slowly turning around me. Crew members stood on the distant rim, working with exercise apparatus. Handholds on the rotating bulkhead led to the rim and I grabbed at the nearest one, eager to see what the crew members were doing.

  I had no idea I would be among them so soon. I clung for a moment to my handhold; then it was torn from my grasp and I fell to the rim. I clutched at the handholds as they flashed by, breaking my fall, then flattened out on the deck at the bottom, staring up at the oblong hatchway twisting round and round far above my head.

  I now had weight and found it difficult to move. My breathing was labored and I could sense that my heart was under a strain.

  “You managed to find the gymnasium,” I heard Pipit say behind me. Then, with less sarcasm and more concern: “You ready to go back now?”

  I nodded weakly and she helped me to my feet.

  “Easy does it,” a voice said. I turned to find Crow steadying me. His skin was shiny with sweat, his eyes as worried as Pipit’s. Others had stopped their workouts with the spring-bars and the exercise cycles to stare at me. I felt foolish, even more so when I noticed the pale-faced crewman among them. Crow and Pipit helped me back up to the hatch. My body ached where I had struck the handholds on the way down and I winced with every movement.

  Reentering sick bay, I forgot to brake. I grabbed frantically at something to stop myself, then crossed my arms in front of my face as I sailed toward one of the beds close to my own. I braced myself for a jarring collision with the patient in it, my mouth already forming apologies.

  The bed and its occupant turned out to be as insubstantial as the air itself. I didn’t stop until I struck the opposite bulkhead, slipping through two more beds and their patients. They winked out of existence as I passed through, then flickered back into view as I receded.

  I froze, concentrating on the other patients as they talked among themselves or sat on the edges of their cots while they ate their meals. None of them seemed aware of my sudden entrance or, as usual, that I even existed. I reached out to touch the nearest one and my hand passed through him with no resistance whatsoever.

  I had watched them for weeks but never noticed their obvious lack of reality. They slept in beds with no restraints to hold them in, they ate from standard food trays and they sat as flat upon their mattresses as if the sick bay were planet-bound.

  I glared at Pipit, then made the connection with the crewmen in the corridor who had been wearing masks.

  “Give me a mask,” I said in a voice blurred by anger.

  A dozen strips of transparent plastic were tied to a nearby bulkhead peg and Pipit handed me one without a word. I clipped it around my head, staring openmouthed as the familiar surroundings disappeared.

  The sick bay was actually a small, almost empty compartment that held half a dozen beds. I was the only patient. The bulkheads were dull and oily looking; I could never have seen my reflection in any of them. The deck was a beaten sheet of metal worn by the passage of generations of magnetic sandals. A few of the glow tubes flickered where the bulkheads and the overhead met; two of them had burned out. The anatomy charts were discolored and chipped; one light panel was broken, the other was dark.

  There was no glassteel partition through which I could see banks of shining machinery in a spotless operating theater. In fact, there was no operating theater. Nor were there any ports through which I could stare at the stars or watch a planet revolving majestically a thousand kilometers below.

  I had been looking at the ship as it once had been, not as it was now. Beneath the images formed by the intersecting planes of light, the Astron was old, old past anything I could imagine.

  Pipit stood there, biting her lip as she searched for words to calm me. I ignored her and dove for the outer passageway.

  On my tour with Pipit, the ship had been spacious and clean, sparkling with chrome and stainless steel. Now it was ancient and cramped, the passageways shorter, the compartments tiny, the bulkheads stained with blotches of rust. The sight and feel and taste of aging metal was everywhere; the stink of oil was like a fog. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before, then realized my eyes had blinded my other senses—I hadn’t smelled the stench or noticed that the bulkheads were damp with generations of human sweat.

  Communications was a small, cluttered compartment with three crewmen who stared at me curiously, then went back to idly checking their instruments. A writing slate with the latest communication from Earth—a brief message of encouragement—scrawled on it, hung on the bulkhead outside. It was dated from the year before.

  The racks of hydroponic tubs were real, though not nearly as extensive as I remembered. The plants were just as green, but some of the grow lights were dim and others had burned out. The compartment that housed the fusion drive, while still huge, seemed smaller than before. There was no mess hall, no files of crewmen waiting in line to be served, no galley filled with gleaming bake ovens and ranges. Where it had been was a small, empty compartment that contained no odors of cooking, no crumbs of food.

  The old woman was still in the now-bare corridor selling her one precious volume. There was no shelf behin
d her jammed with other books. She looked at me with pity peeking out from behind the clouded lenses of her eyes. I felt the same for her—the Astron held neither the equipment nor the knowledge to heal her sight.

  On the way back, I glanced into several of the living cubicles, now devoid of their rich tapestries and elegant furniture. They were tiny cells, equipped with string hammocks, an occasional worn plastic table, a shelf attached to a bulkhead… There was very little else.

  I braked more expertly when I entered sick bay this time and yanked off my eye mask. The ports and stars promptly reappeared, as did the compartment beyond with its make-believe machinery. My fellow patients went on about their business, as oblivious of me now as they had been before. I held the mask before my eyes and once again was alone with Pipit.

  I was seventeen years old, I thought bitterly, a youthful mariner on an ancient ship bound for God only knew where.

  Pipit winced at the expression on my face. “You’ve forgotten the compartment falsies,” she said. Then she burst into tears.

  I was young and cried too easily, but this time tears were beyond me.

  Chapter 4

  I spent two more time periods in sick bay, most of it undergoing tests by Abel, who apparently wanted to make sure that my broken bones were healed and I was fit for duty. He poked and prodded, full of unconvincing “hmmms” and variations of “Does it hurt?” I was wearing the mask over my eyes and ears but neither he nor Noah mentioned it.

  “You’re healthy,” Abel finally grunted. “You’re well enough to work so you can earn what you eat.”

  I resented his attitude, resented the ship, and was full of sarcasm. “I’m your only patient but you seem to eat well enough.”

  Noah smothered a grin but Abel’s plump features hardened with outrage.