The Dark Beyond the Stars Read online

  “There’s more medical equipment here than in sick bay,” I murmured.

  “People don’t get sick on board,” Crow whispered, “but they do die.”

  We didn’t hear anybody come up behind us, though I could usually tell if someone was approaching by the disturbance in the air currents.

  “Crow’s right, nobody gets sick. But nobody lives forever, either. On the Astron, nothing ever goes to waste—we’re a closed system, we can’t afford the loss of mass.”

  Abel had drifted through the hatchway without my being aware, a warning that big as he was, his size was no handicap in getting around. Following close behind was Thrush.

  There were no restricted signs but I felt guilty anyway. “Crow was just showing me the ship,” I said.

  Abel glanced at Crow, who nodded vigorous assent.

  “I planned on showing it to you soon enough. Everybody on board has to acknowledge their own mortality, and a tour of Reduction is the first step.”

  It was logical that Abel, as the ship’s doctor, would be in charge of Reduction, but I had no idea why Thrush was there. He answered my question before I even had a chance to ask it.

  “I’m assisting, Sparrow—one of my duties.” He drifted over to the bank of storage chambers and lifted one end of the black sheet. To my surprise, an expression of clinical detachment suddenly replaced his usual arrogant smirk. It was the first time I had ever seen the look of a scientist.

  Abel joined him for a moment, then turned back as Crow and I edged closer to the hatchway. His look of perpetual irritation had vanished.

  “You understand, Sparrow—when people come here we have to ease them out of life and make sure their water and minerals and proteins are preserved for the ship.”

  “When people come here,” I repeated, feeling stupid. I couldn’t visualize anybody deliberately going to Reduction to die. At least, I had never seen one. Then I realized they probably went during shift, when the passageways were mostly empty and few would be watching.

  A flash of Abel’s usual impatience returned. “I told you that people only die from accidents on board. There is no sickness, they just get older and older. There comes a time when the quality of one’s life is such it’s no longer worth living. Eventually they come here.”

  Crow was standing behind me, tugging at the back of my waistcloth. He wanted desperately to leave and so did I.

  I looked over at the chamber, where Thrush was still inspecting something beneath the black sheet.

  “Who was he?”

  “Judah.” A shadow passed over Abel’s face and I vaguely remembered a slender, middle-aged man with a perpetually worried face at breakfast. Judah had been one of Abel’s few friends.

  I bowed and said formally, “I regret your loss and thank you for the gift of knowledge.”

  Abel bowed slightly in return. Thrush looked up from the vacuum sink where he was washing his hands and said quietly, “Don’t get lost, Sparrow.”

  “I won’t,” I said, antagonistic as always when it came to Thrush. “You’re not the one who’s showing me around.”

  “Your loss,” he murmured, smiling.

  Then I had one of those flashes of insight that sometimes come to a person. Abel had lied to me. Judah hadn’t been old and he hadn’t been ill and he hadn’t come to Reduction. He had died in his own compartment—the compartment with the quarantine sign that I had explored a dozen sleep periods before.

  I really didn’t know much about the ship or its crew but I was learning that there were informers and plots and deep differences among the crew members. I suspected in that atmosphere it might have been easy for a man to die.

  Chapter 8

  Within a few time periods Crow and Loon and I became inseparable. We explored the distant recesses of the ship, drifting down deserted corridors and poking into empty compartments that held faint reminders of their former occupancy: a face mask that had been thrown in a corner, a piece of writing slate, a wadded-up waistcloth… Everything was thick with dust and at times the emptiness and the silence were so overwhelming we spoke in whispers.

  Once, Crow and I were alone in a large compartment—Loon had come along but hadn’t caught up with us yet—when the cabin suddenly filled with the noise of clinking dinner utensils and ghostly voices.

  Crow glanced wildly around and whispered, “Be quiet!” I froze, drifting slightly with the eddying air currents. But it wasn’t Crow’s command that had frozen me, it was the voices themselves, crisp and clear in the silence.

  “… a day for a picnic…”

  “… called him… Lincoln’s getting better…”

  “… hurt in the fall on Bishop VI…”

  “… visual drama where the hills meet the sky…”

  “… this was called punch…”

  Loon floated in through the hatch, laughing. Crow cuffed him, half in anger, and Loon fled to the far end of the compartment, still cackling.

  “I couldn’t find the projection, only the audio. It sounds like some sort of party.”

  Crow was watching me intently, ignoring Loon, who caught the expression on my face and promptly shut up.

  “What’s the matter?” Crow asked.

  “The voices.”

  I concentrated, trying to sort them out so I could follow conversations. Names, I needed names—but the names wouldn’t come.

  Crow sighed. “They’re from a long time ago, Sparrow.”

  I shook myself. “A long time ago,” I agreed. I didn’t tell them that the voices had jogged buried memories, that several of them sounded like people I had known. Familiar faces had bobbed in the back of my head and then vanished before I could associate a name or experience with any of them.

  Hydroponics was another favorite stop; once I got sick from eating what I found out later were green tomatoes. Another time we consumed half a row of strawberries before guilt finally caught up with us. Crow grew very quiet and I knew he was thinking that Pipit would accuse him of stealing the fruit and then she wouldn’t talk to him for a half a dozen time periods.

  I envied Crow her attentions and I even envied him her anger. There were times when he shared Pipit’s compartment and I particularly envied him those moments. In my mind, I frequently cast myself in his role, only with Snipe playing the part of Pipit.

  I often went to the plays on the hangar deck because Snipe was in them. I fell in love with her as Juliet and had lewd thoughts when she played Cleopatra opposite Noah’s Caesar. She had a flair for playacting that few of the others had, though Ophelia seemed perfectly cast as Lady Macbeth.

  To my amazement, one of the best of the actors was Loon, who starred as a character named Bottom in a play about ancient Greece. He played his harmonica and danced to a tune he had made up to go with the words “the raging rocks and shivering shocks” from the play. The applause was tremendous and Loon was the star of the show, though even he grew sick of the words and tune: Everybody sang them when he showed up for breakfast or when they passed him in the corridors.

  As we got closer to the Aquinas system, Crow became more preoccupied and troubled. When I was with him, there were long stretches of silence when he seemed about to tell me something, then changed his mind and drew back. One time period after we had seen a training play, he waited until the corridor was deserted, then tugged me into an empty compartment. He closed the shadow screen and pressed his hand over the palm terminal to activate the falsie.

  A moment later, we were standing in a cave with a warm fire at our backs and a night sky blazing with stars beyond the cavern’s mouth. Somewhere in the darkness an owl hooted and small animals rustled in the brush. I shivered when a wolf howled in the forest below.

  “I come here when I want to be alone,” Crow said quietly. “I like to look at the stars and think.”

  He sat on the rocky floor of the cave and I sat beside him, shifting my cling-tites slightly and pressing my knees to my chin so my bum was actually in contact with the metal deck. I should have k
ept silent and given him a chance to talk but for some reason I had started to think about Reduction. I couldn’t shake the image of the black sheet draped over the storage chamber that held Judah.

  “Where do we go when we die, Crow?”

  It was a child’s question and I felt embarrassed the moment I asked it.

  “Where do we go?” Crow repeated, surprised. “To Reduction, of course.”

  “After that.”

  He shrugged. “Back to the Great Egg, I suppose—it’s where all life eventually goes.”

  Sitting in the darkness next to Crow was the closest I had been to another human being since Pipit had held me after one of my nightmares. For just a moment, I let myself be carried away by my emotions.

  “Do you ever get lonely, Crow?”

  I wasn’t thinking of Crow, of course—I was thinking of myself and Snipe.

  “No, I don’t get lonely,” he said finally. “I suppose some people do. Some people will always be lonely, they were born that way.”

  He didn’t add “poor bastards” but I supposed he was thinking it and I wondered if it included me. He shifted uneasily in the darkness.

  “Sparrow?”

  “What?”

  He hesitated a moment, then changed his mind and said, “Forget it.”

  I should have encouraged Crow to tell me what was bothering him, but perception usually comes with age and I was too young.

  “Do you think we’ll ever meet them?” My mind had drifted once again and I was searching for exhaust trails among the stars.

  “Meet who?”

  “Tybalt’s aliens.”

  Curtly: “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t really believe they’re out there, do you?”

  Crow didn’t answer but stood up and pushed over to the glowing palm terminal. The night sky and the cave faded. “We’ve got a shift coming up, Sparrow.” He didn’t look at me but grabbed a bulkhead ring and kicked out through the shadow screen.

  I finally sensed his disappointment and suddenly wondered what he had wanted to talk about.

  I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  ****

  For a week, the rumor was that after Aquinas II there would be a major change in the Astron’s course. I hadn’t paid much attention, on the ground that it would affect my life not at all. But one time period, after her early lecture, Ophelia asked me to drop by for a meal, suggesting that I needed help to catch up. I worried about it enough so that when I did drop by, I had no appetite at all. She wasn’t alone and I couldn’t decide at first whether to be relieved or disappointed. My imagination supplied motives for both her original concern for me and the hostility to which it had gradually changed.

  Crow nodded when I drifted in; he didn’t look very friendly. Loon had been quietly playing his harmonica and now stopped and secured it in his waistcloth. Corin, the chief computerman, was present but seemed so nervous and upset I wondered why he was there. Snipe nodded at me, her expression reserved and distant.

  Crow said, to nobody in particular, “I’ll secure the hatchway,” and started to dog down the actual metal hatch. I was astonished. Shadow screens had always been enough for privacy; nobody ever violated them. The dogged-down hatch was an added precaution but I had no idea why or against whom.

  Ophelia was working with Noah at the small food dispenser. She looked up and said, “We’ll be ready in a moment, Sparrow.” Her voice was neutral and told me nothing. Everybody had fallen silent when I drifted in and I realized dinner had been a pretext—this was a meeting of interested parties and the subject of interest was me.

  The meal was a bland protein mush with no spices or forming. I had choked down about half of it when Noah said, “You should ignore Thrush, Sparrow. He’s no respecter of authority.”

  I felt bewildered; I hadn’t been thinking about Thrush at all. But I said, “He should be—the Captain’s a great man.”

  Ophelia looked up from her tray. “Tybalt thinks so.” She obviously thought I was parroting him.

  There was another long pause with only the click of utensils against the trays to break the quiet.

  “Michael Kusaka was a good choice for captain,” Noah said, and for some reason that struck me as far different from saying he was a good captain. No one added anything and I took their silence as a challenge.

  “When I saw the Captain, he told me the purpose of the Astron, why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do.” I felt some of the enthusiasm returning and smiled in remembrance. “He said I was as important to the ship as he was. It’s not true but I thank him for saying it.”

  Noah nodded in apparent agreement. “All of us are important to the ship,” he said, which also wasn’t quite what I meant.

  Ophelia fought to hold her tongue, lost the battle and burst out: “At Launch, Kusaka might have been a good choice for captain. He isn’t now.”

  I stared at her in shock. I didn’t know what to say. Everybody else concentrated on their trays; that all of them agreed with Ophelia was obvious.

  “If the Captain died,” Noah said, not looking up, “who would you be… honored… to serve under, as a replacement?”

  It was a strange question but the answer was easy.

  “Tybalt.”

  “I thought you might say that,” Noah murmured.

  “He has the same feel for the ship as the Captain,” I blurted. “Probably more than anybody else, he knows why we’re out here. He even gave his foot for the mission on Galileo III!”

  “Amputated on the spot, wasn’t it?” Ophelia’s sarcasm was thick.

  I looked at her, startled. “What?”

  “Tybalt had his foot amputated on the spot on Galileo III. Isn’t that what he told you?”

  I glanced over at Corin, who hastily looked away. He had told her about my conversations with Tybalt, I thought angrily. The Captain wasn’t the only one who had informers.

  “Yes,” I said, indignant at the betrayal. “He was very brave to—”

  “Galileo III,” Ophelia interrupted coldly, “is a planet with virtually no atmosphere. It would have been instant death if we had opened his suit. They took off his foot in the Lander while he was still out of his mind and babbling from exhaustion.” She sneered. “It’s easy to see aliens if you’re out of your mind.”

  I looked at the others for support, but none of them met my eyes. I had once considered them friends; now it seemed they had all become my enemies.

  “I was there,” Corin affirmed nervously. “When Ophelia and I found Tybalt, he was delirious. There was no possibility of doing anything for him until we got him back to the Lander.”

  They hadn’t believed Tybalt’s tale about the aliens. And I didn’t want to believe them. If I did, I suspected I would have to believe the next thing they told me and the next thing after that. Eventually, I would find myself believing everything they told me and I desperately didn’t want to. I also realized they really weren’t attacking Tybalt, they were attacking the Captain, and for that I despised them.

  “What difference does it make how he lost it?” I protested, sullen.

  Ophelia stared at me. “You and Tybalt recently inspected some suits, didn’t you?”

  She apparently knew everything I had done during shift. I nodded and she said, “How many expeditions do you think they’ve been used for?”

  I shrugged. “Hundreds.”

  “And how many more do you think they’ll be good for?”

  I didn’t want to answer.

  “Well, Sparrow, how many?” she repeated.

  I cleared my throat. “A dozen,” I said slowly. “Not many more.”

  “And how many more generations do you think the Astron will support?”

  “I don’t know. I have no idea.” I had never consciously thought about it until then.

  “Guess,” Ophelia said in a tight voice. “A hundred? Two hundred?”

  I was no engineer, I was a seventeen-year-old tech assistant who had lost h
is memories and had little knowledge of the ship. But I remembered the glow tubes that had burned out, the worn decks of the compartments and the passageways, the layers of dust on the hangar deck and on the equipment in Shops, the cannibalized Rovers, the rotting fabric of the exploration suits, and the all-pervasive stink of thousands of years of oil and sweat.

  “Not two hundred. Not one hundred. I… don’t know how many.”

  I glanced at Crow for moral support but his only expression was one of pity. Corin was studying his hands, probably worried about what I might say the next time I saw Tybalt. Loon nervously fingered his harmonica; neither he nor Snipe looked at me. Oddly, Noah met my stare but with a look of such desperation that I felt as much pity for him as Crow obviously did for me.

  Ophelia kicked over to the palm terminal and pressed her hand to it. The bulkhead fell away, to be replaced by Outside. The deck of the compartment now stopped abruptly at outer space, the illusion so convincing that I grabbed for a floor ring to keep from floating out.

  It occurred to me that the Captain had not been entirely truthful when he said that what I saw on the bridge was what I got. Perhaps that was true of the bridge itself, but Outside had been a simulation and I had looked at it with eyes that gilded it with color and a sense of wonder. What I looked at now was stark and forbidding, a universe of harsh light, glowing dust, and filaments of flaming gases. No part of it reminded me of diamonds or emeralds or rubies.

  Ophelia was outlined against Outside, floating against a background of broken crystal. She pointed out the limbs of the galaxy and the blackness between.

  “Kusaka wants to take the Astron to a region where the stars are closer together and older and where, presumably, there would be more planets to explore. Theoretically, that would increase our chances of finding life.” She placed her palm on an edge of one of the limbs of the galaxy, two-thirds of the distance from the center. “We started here.” She moved her hand to a nearby spur of stars, closer toward the center. “We’re going there. But to get there, we have to cross the Dark.”