The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  I was tempted to argue that the craters and the tracks had been made by meteorites, then thought better of it. He wasn’t trying to convince me, he was just telling me what he thought he had seen. Another time, I would have believed him implicitly, but the meeting in Ophelia’s compartment had introduced doubts.

  “And nobody else saw them,” I said, prepared for disappointment.

  “You’re right, Sparrow,” he sighed, “nobody else did.” He concentrated on filling his pipe. “It would be worth my life if I made that up.”

  I thought I had done a better job of hiding my skepticism, then realized I was doing him a disservice by not being honest.

  “Ophelia doesn’t believe you,” I said bluntly. “She claims there’s a rational explanation for everything you’ve ever reported.”

  He banged his fist against the bulkhead. “Ophelia doesn’t believe in a damned thing!” He fought his anger for a moment, then shrugged. “Skepticism can blind you as much as faith. If you had never seen an elephant, there would be no end to the reasonable explanations for the path it left in a forest—none of which would include a lumbering beast with a small tail at one end and a large tail at the other, with an enormous head and two huge fans for ears.”

  He smiled at his own imagery. “Look up ‘elephant’ in the computer’s memory, you’ll see what I mean.” He leaned forward in the sling to poke me in the chest with his forefinger. “The galaxy is huge, Sparrow. To think we know all the requirements for the creation of life is hubris—and the gods don’t take kindly to that.”

  I agreed. But I couldn’t shake the memory of Ophelia crying that there had been a hundred generations and a thousand systems and fifteen hundred planets and the crew of the Astron had yet to find a single living cell.

  Ophelia and Noah had been very convincing in their arguments and they had scientific logic on their side.

  But so, in a sense, did Tybalt.

  ****

  It didn’t take long for my shift at the palm terminal to become boring. I was skillful and fast and never made mistakes, though occasionally I came close. Those were the times when Thrush came to the compartment to practice. I never saw the results of what he did but I could tell by his frequent look of self-congratulation that he was gaining in dexterity and speed. Nobody ever told me why he was learning to work the palm terminals and I never asked.

  Eventually, of course, I couldn’t resist checking out Tybalt’s landings. Unauthorized use of the computer was strictly forbidden but I was willing to risk it. Who would know what I did during those times when I was the only one on duty at the terminal?

  Tybalt’s stories had become a part of his personality and were easy to forgive, if for no other reason than that they were entertaining. But whatever else they were, it turned out that Tybalt hadn’t made them up to pass the time with me. The reports of his landings on Alpha and Omega, Galileo III, and Midas IV were all logged in the computer. The official accounts were stripped of the romance of his stories but the details were the same, buried in the jargon required of a report to the Captain.

  I listened to him with more respect after that. I’m sure he knew I had checked his reports, but if he was offended, he never let me know.

  It was much easier to check out Tybalt’s reports than it was to research the genealogy of the crew. Tybalt’s reports were finite but the genealogy went on forever. Researching the families on board was tedious, but it took courage to check out my own background. I was afraid of what I might find out.

  I waited until I was alone in the compartment with no danger of being interrupted, then took a deep breath and punched in my name. The earliest information that appeared in the viewing globe was the medical records from sick bay, detailing my time there after the accident on Seti IV. I asked for additional background but the words scrolling through the globe read:

  All data concerning subject sealed because of acute stress due to amnesiac illness. Giving subject life history information prior to his own recall will hinder complete recovery.

  Forbidden to tell the truth, my friends had invented clumsy lies whenever I badgered them about my past. As usual, I owed them all an apology.

  But nothing had really changed. All the statement said was that nobody could tell me about my past. It didn’t say I couldn’t find out for myself.

  I rubbed my hands together, cracked my knuckles, then placed my palms back on the terminal pad and watched the words go tumbling through the globe. Nerissa was real, though, as Crow had told me, she had gone to Reduction a few years before and her mother—my grandmother—two decades before that. There was also a Laertes who seemed to fit both Tybalt’s and Crow’s descriptions. Unfortunately, the information on him seemed strangely sketchy.

  I frowned and traced him back through his mother and grandmother. He and his ancestors were mentioned less and less frequently until, about the fifth generation back, no further information about them appeared in the records. The intricate weaving back and forth of his genetic lines feathered and after five generations Laertes’ line vanished from the ship’s company.

  There was only one possible reason. In addition to Tybalt and Crow lying to me about Laertes and Huldah evading my questions, somebody had made false entries in the computer. They had been prepared for my questions about my mother. They hadn’t thought I would take an even greater interest in my “father.”

  I sat there in shock, my hands lying loosely on the terminal’s skin. Why? I wondered. Why the lies and the elaborate pretense? Why the attempt to tamper with the computer, however crudely?

  But there was no arguing with the conclusion.

  “Laertes” had never existed.

  Chapter 11

  Instead of accusing my friends of breaking faith and lying about the nonexistent Laertes, I withdrew into myself, resolving not to trust those who had been closest to me. Inexplicably, I chose to trust the one whom I had good reason to trust the least.

  I returned to see Huldah but was greeted by a pleasant, vacant-faced matron who responded to my angry questions with a look of hurt bewilderment and an offer of some of Pipit’s herbal tea. I reminded her that we had talked before but she claimed she couldn’t remember.

  Later, I wondered why I hadn’t asked Huldah about Nerissa, or even pursued her through the computer’s memory. But she and my grandmother had died years before; their line stopped with me. There was no end to the information I found out about her, most of which indicated that she was much like any mother and did all the things that mothers usually do. Everybody I talked to remembered her in excruciating detail—leading me to suspect they didn’t really remember her at all.

  Knowing Laertes would have lent me dimension and identity; knowing him would have meant knowing myself because I would have known the person I had patterned myself after. If he had ever really lived, even in death he would still have left some traces of himself behind.

  But once again I found myself existing in a vacuum, dating my life from my memories of Seti IV and from when I had awoken in sick bay. What little I had gleaned about myself from Tybalt and Crow was now suspect. If they had lied about Laertes, why wouldn’t they have lied about me?

  So I kept to myself, avoiding those I had been close to before, even Snipe. I still smarted from the knowledge that she had slept with me because it was ship’s custom not to refuse, not because she had wanted to. She had given no indication that she found me attractive or even liked me and I wasn’t willing to confirm her indifference now that she was free to refuse.

  I begged off dropping by Crow’s compartment for smoke and gossip and while on shift I discovered reasons to continue working with the palm terminal when ordinarily I would have taken a break with Tybalt. I practiced long hours with the terminal, discovering nuances in its operation that I hadn’t suspected before. When I wasn’t working, I read the books in the “library” that served as my compartment. Some of them seemed familiar to me and I hoped they would provide a clue to the type of person I had once been
.

  After I made it plain that I wanted very little to do with anybody, my friends were offended and reluctantly left me alone. That hurt me even more and the hurt fed upon itself. What I wanted, of course, was to be reassured of their friendship and talked out of my dark mood.

  The one crewman who didn’t leave me alone was Thrush. He sensed something was wrong and watched me closely at mealtimes, when I played chess indifferently if at all with Noah, and in Exploration, where my relationship with Tybalt had grown more distant and professional.

  Thrush made his first overture of friendship one time period when I was flying down a corridor lost in my own thoughts and missed the bulkhead ring I would normally have caught to change direction. I had just flipped in midair so I would hit the bulkhead bum first when a hand grabbed my arm and jerked me to a halt.

  “Slow down, Sparrow, you’re not that good yet.” I twisted and stared full into the pale eyes of Thrush.

  I shook free. “Everybody overshoots once in a while,” I said in a chilly voice. I started down the corridor again, afraid I would be late for my shift in Exploration.

  Behind me he said, “You don’t like me very much, do you?”

  I turned to face him. Thrush was a logical target for my hostility.

  “Not many crew members do.”

  He shrugged. “At times, I regret it.” That surprised me and without thinking, I found myself drifting down the corridor with him. Right then, I was as much of an outcast as he was, and mutual misery accomplished the impossible by turning Thrush into acceptable company.

  “You’re very good at the terminal,” he said with a sideways glance. “It will take me a while to catch up.”

  I felt a surge of warmth for him at the same time I heard a dozen warning bells. Thrush was being friendly and Thrush never did anything without reason.

  When the conversation limped to its natural death, he suddenly said, “You’ve seen the ship?”

  “Too many times.”

  “Do you know how it works?” I looked puzzled and he explained patiently, “The ship is a machine, Sparrow. You don’t know how it works if you only know how pieces of it work.”

  He had the same expression on his face that I had seen in Reduction and when he was at the palm terminal. It had nothing to do with lust or anger or joy or contentment. It was the expression of a man who wanted to know more than he did, who would always want to know more than he did, and it indicated an attitude that I would eventually admire above all else.

  But at the time I misunderstood him and said, “I don’t want to know how Reduction works.”

  “I wasn’t going to show you—not yet.” He said it with a sly smile that was both an offer and a dare.

  I knew my own job and knew it well, but I didn’t know much beyond it; I had never thought of the ship as a single mechanism.

  It was Thrush who showed me, describing how the huge fusion motors in Engineering were tied into the memory matrix of the Astron’s biocomputer. Then he explained the inherent fragility of the latter. It was living, he said, and subject to its own illnesses and diseases. The piping was sealed and if it were ever breached, the memory fluid would become contaminated, the neural net would die, and in short order the ship would become a drifting hulk.

  He also explained that the Astron was actually a “cluster ship,” not a single cylinder but a group of three, two of which had long been abandoned. I had no idea that so much of the Astron was deserted and vacant, that as the crew had shrunk, it had gradually receded into the central cylinder. Even though the ship was a closed system and everything was recycled, there were still unavoidable losses. Over the generations, living in the Astron had been like living in a balloon with a slow leak.

  There was nothing that Thrush didn’t seem to know about the Astron, from the plants in Hydroponics to the vacuum vents and the recycling system that kept the air breathable, if not completely free from the stink of the crew. His thirst for knowledge was a part of Thrush’s personality that I had never seen before. Or maybe it was a different personality entirely.

  With that new assessment went both respect and admiration. From time to time, I had a glimpse of what was really happening, but it was lost in my own eagerness to learn. Thrush was showing me his personal treasures and I felt more and more in his debt.

  I wondered how I could have misjudged him so badly.

  Once, Ophelia cornered me and said, “Thrush has no use for you, Sparrow. Be careful.” When I grew sullen and didn’t answer, she shrugged and said, “My God, you’re such a fool,” and drifted away. Crow and Loon were the next to try and reason with me.

  “He means you no good, Sparrow,” Crow warned.

  “How would you know?” I cried. “All of you combined against him a long time ago, you never gave him a chance.”

  “He never gave us one,” Loon said in a dry voice.

  “He doesn’t lie,” I said hotly.

  “Not with words, Sparrow.”

  I didn’t know what he meant and turned away. Behind me, Crow murmured: “Be careful, Sparrow. He’s one of the Uncounted—he violates ship’s customs.”

  I never asked what he meant and I never noticed what was so obvious to Crow and Ophelia and everybody else. I envied Thrush his intelligence and his knowledge and I envied him in other ways as well. I went out of my way to watch him as he exercised in the gymnasium and to admire the play of the muscles beneath his parchment-thin skin. When he sped through the corridors, his movements were fluid and precise, the mark of a man who knew exactly where he was in space at any given moment. More than anybody else on board, he was graceful.

  In short, I was blinded by his brilliance, his physical beauty, and what I had come to consider his generosity of mind. What I never would have believed, and what nobody could have told me, was that I was being seduced and the whole ship was witness to it. I should have guessed, of course; Heron’s jealousy should have been enough to warn me.

  What I clung to later was that I never confided in Thrush as I did in Crow, nor did I joke with him or gossip. And while I was relaxed during most of the time I spent with Crow or even with Snipe, I was never relaxed with Thrush. At times I tried to talk to him about my lost memories and what they meant to me, but he never encouraged it and I knew that I was boring him.

  In turn, he seldom talked about himself. But it came as no surprise when he finally told me the Captain had “taken an interest” in him. Once Thrush told me that, I should have anticipated the invitation to share a meal with him and the Captain. Thrush hid his feelings of self-importance but I was properly impressed and, of course, properly grateful.

  I told nobody else but showed up early on the bridge, telling the guard that I was waiting for Thrush. Abel left just before Thrush arrived, his mouth turning down at the corners when he saw me, his greeting sour and perfunctory. Then Thrush arrived and we kicked through the bridge area into the next compartment, the Captain’s private quarters.

  The Captain was standing at a huge port, staring at the stars beyond, one hand lightly touching the glass and the other behind his back. I wondered if it was a pose for my benefit, but when we eventually left, he had resumed it. I knew I would never see Outside the same way he did and envied him his view.

  His nod to Thrush was casual, the one to me slightly less so. He offered his hand and I shook it once, formally, then glanced around the compartment while he greeted Thrush. There were paintings on the bulkheads, along with intricate string tapestries and comfortably padded slings; a desk and a dinner table stood in the middle. When I took a closer look, I discovered the paintings were of deserts and forests and canyons on a planet that only the Captain remembered firsthand.

  There was a murmur of conversation coming from somewhere behind me and I glanced around, startled—I had thought we were the only ones there. Where the bulkheads met the overhead, there was a bank of view screens, dozens of them, showing compartment interiors with crewmen eating or sleeping, and corridors with tiny figures floati
ng to their shifts in Hydroponics and Engineering.

  It bothered me that the Captain could look into any area of the Astron any time he wanted, that while shadow screens gave us privacy when it came to each other, there was none at all when it came to him. I had seen the view screens scattered throughout the ship but nobody had told me they were the eyes and ears of the Captain.

  “Don’t look so concerned, Sparrow—the peep screens are precautionary. I seldom watch them.”

  He gestured at the table and Thrush and I floated over. A stony-faced crewman, Escalus, served us in silence, then quietly sat guard just outside the hatchway to the sleeping compartment. He kept an eye on us while we ate, and I decided Escalus was watchdog as well as waiter.

  The food was well-formed and tasty but no better than what I had enjoyed with Noah and Huldah or that Pipit served at division mess. If anything, it was a touch below the latter, the only indication the Captain wasn’t aware of everything that happened on board.

  “Tybalt says you’ve become very proficient with the palm terminal.”

  This time, I wasn’t quite as naive. It was going to be a game of conversational chess and I suspected he was better at it than Noah.

  “Thrush is learning fast, too,” I offered.

  The Captain looked mildly surprised. Thrush shot me a wooden glance and I realized too late that he hadn’t wanted the Captain to know. Another bite of food and then: “What else is happening in your life, Sparrow?”

  I guessed that he wanted me to fill him in on the details of the mutiny but I sidestepped the opportunity.

  “Tybalt’s told me about his landings.” I realized immediately that I had made a mistake.

  “Oh? And what did he tell you?”

  “He told me about his encounters with aliens—his near encounters.”

  There was a sudden silence except for the slight sounds of eating. Thrush was intent upon his plate but the Captain pushed his away and leaned back in his sling, his dark eyes curious.