The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  He was still trying to convince me and I was puzzled why it was so important to him. After all, I had been “Sparrow” for less than a year, and if he wanted it, I would cease being Sparrow tomorrow. But Noah was wrong in one respect. My memories could hardly matter to the Captain; he already knew everything that lay buried in them.

  I wondered if he had tried to convince Hamlet or Aaron or any of the other crewmen I had once been.

  I was convinced that he had—and also that he had failed.

  ****

  My next meeting with the Captain was unexpected and hardly by invitation. There was an enclosed weightless handball court in the center of the gymnasium where I sometimes played with Hawk or Loon and where tournaments with crewmembers from Maintenance were occasionally held. I was good, the best player in Exploration, though playing under conditions of no gravity was hard, sweaty work. It required a knowledge of where the ball would be at any given moment and the ability of a contortionist, so I struck the bulkheads with the softer parts of my anatomy when I misjudged my direction or speed, as I frequently did.

  Half a dozen time periods after the meal with the Captain, I was alone in the court, batting the plastic ball against the front bulkhead and waiting for Hawk to show up, when the Captain slipped in through the hatch.

  “I asked your friend if I could take his turn.”

  I knew it was a game stolen from a busy schedule and I guessed he considered our discussion over dinner unfinished—and important. Within the confines of the court we would be alone for the first time, without Escalus to mount guard or carry tales back to his crew mates.

  We threw fingers to see who would serve first. I won the serve and scored a fast two points; then the game seesawed back and forth. He won, 21 to 16. I noticed his hands weren’t red or puffed even though we played bare-handed. At one time leather gloves or paddles were used, but that had been generations ago, and part of the masochistic thrill of the game was bare palm against hard ball.

  Apparently the Captain played often. He was fast and adept at picking off balls in flight just before they hit the bulkheads. I consistently scored with corner serves where the ball rebounded parallel to, and scant centimeters away from, the metal walls. The Captain was very good—but then, I reminded myself, he’d had two millennia in which to improve his game.

  So, I suspected, had I, which diminished some of my pride in beating my fellow crew members. I wondered if the Captain and I had ever played before in one of my other lifetimes and guessed that we had.

  After the game I doubled over, my hands clasping my knees, trying to catch my breath. The Captain pushed over to one of the bulkheads and tapped on a palm terminal. The glow tubes darkened and the bulkheads faded away, to be replaced by projections of Outside—the Outside I was familiar with, suffocatingly black except for the brilliant, lifeless sparkles of the stars. Only the outline of the Captain against the crystal-strewn sky reminded me of where I really was.

  “How many stars in our galaxy, Sparrow?”

  It took a moment for me to find my voice.

  “Billions,” I chattered. “A hundred billion, maybe two.”

  “Subtract the numbers of red giants and super-giants, they exist too short a time for life to develop on any possible planets. Then take away the binaries and any three-star systems. The likelihood of planets circling them would be small to begin with and even if there were, their orbits would create conditions too erratic to support life. Forget the dwarf stars; if a star is too small it has no continuously habitable zone at all—chances are its planets would be perpetually frozen.”

  He had drifted close enough to me in the darkness so I could feel his body warmth. His voice was an insidious whisper in my ear, nibbling away at Noah’s arguments.

  “How many stars remain that are possibilities for life, Sparrow? Stars that are neither too hot nor too cold, neither too large nor too small nor too short-lived—stable stars of medium size that could serve as an incubator and then a nursery for life. How many, Sparrow?”

  The glow tubes abruptly came back on and the walls of the court swam into view. The Captain was staring at me, his expression both thoughtful and suspicious. He had been playing cat and mouse with me; dinner had been meant to throw me off my guard.

  “Well, how many?” he suddenly roared. “Take a goddamned guess!”

  “I d-don’t know,” I stuttered. “Maybe a billion. Maybe ten billion.”

  “Good round numbers,” he said with satisfaction. He tossed me the ball. “Your serve, Sparrow.”

  He had spoiled my game and came within a point of a whitewash before I fought my way back. I tried to force myself to forget he was the Captain and think of him as just another opponent, but I found it impossible.

  At the end of the game, he said: “I asked you to do some studying, Sparrow. Do you know what the Green Bank equation is?”

  I mumbled, “Yes, sir.”

  “It’s a speculative equation for determining the number of communicating civilizations in the galaxy. You have to factor in the rate of star formation each year, then the number of stars that can support planets. Estimate the percentage of planets that can support life, the possibilities of intelligent life, the possibilities of a technical civilization arising, and then the lifetime of that civilization.”

  He caromed the ball around the corners of the compartment and caught it on the fly on its return. He had known where it was going to be every second of its journey. Complete control, I thought. He had meant that as a demonstration.

  “What’s the minimum figure for N, the number of communicating civilizations?” he suddenly asked.

  I wildly plugged figures into the equation, then saw the obvious answer.

  “One,” I blurted. “It can never be less than one.”

  He nodded approvingly.

  “That’s right, Sparrow. The Earth makes it one. And the high end?”

  “I… don’t know,” I said. “I suppose there are different estimates.”

  “In the millions, Sparrow—not a very high ratio but not so small, either.”

  “We haven’t found any life—” I started to object.

  “Because we havent really looked,” he interrupted. “But we don’t have to investigate every possibility; we can eliminate the vast majority of the unlikely candidates at a distance.

  The remaining possibilities are usually…very possible indeed.”

  He noticed my expression and raised an eyebrow. “You don’t agree?”

  He was pushing me and for that I was grateful. When pressed I had no thoughts at all of who I once had been. I could only be—and was—Sparrow.

  “But we haven’t found—” I repeated, sweating.

  “—any life at all, though, like Tybalt, I’m not so sure we haven’t run across traces of its former presence. But there’s nothing wrong with the basic assumptions. It’s a matter of… time.”

  He laughed, but there was a bitter edge to his laughter.

  “‘To hold infinity in the palm of your hand’ is a bit of poetry, Sparrow. To imagine that the ordinary lifetime is a substantial piece of eternity is pure egoism. To the person who lives it, perhaps. To the universe, it’s less than the tick of the second hand of a ten-year clock.”

  He threw the ball against the bulkhead again and caught it on the rebound without taking his eyes off me. He was reading me now, judging every twitch and grimace.

  “Time is why the Astron is a generational ship, time is why I’m the captain. Many variables can be factored into the Green Bank equation, but the one that nobody figured on was the time needed for a ship such as ours to find one of those planets harboring life. The more time spent, the more lifeless planets eliminated, the greater our odds in finding one with life. And considering the time already spent, by now the odds in our favor are very great indeed.”

  “I’m sure they are, sir,” I said, which was an inane reply but exactly what seventeen-year-old Sparrow would say.

  He smiled. “One mor
e game?”

  I surprised myself. There are times when you play above your head, when no matter how good your opponent is, you can’t lose. My serves became almost impossible to return and my saves were little short of phenomenal. He wasn’t going to win this game by staying in the backcourt and simply placing his shots. But suddenly he was above me, behind me, below me, off to one side, hawking the ball like no one I had ever played before. He was moving so fast I seldom saw him push off from one of the walls.

  I thought I was moving just as fast, but he won the game, 21 to 19.

  At the end of it, both of us glistened with sweat; if he had suggested another, I would have refused—it wasn’t in me. I went to shake his hand and was surprised when he drew it back.

  “Sorry, Sparrow,” he said with a tight smile, “I can’t.”

  He held up his right hand so I could see that his index finger was puffed and bent back at an impossible angle. He had broken it when he had skimmed too close to the bulkhead to pick off a rebound. It had probably happened at the very start but he had ignored the agony for the rest of the game.

  Despite the smile, there was no friendship in his olive-black eyes.

  “Some advice, Sparrow, and I have no objections if you tell your friends.” His voice hardened. “I don’t play to lose.”

  ****

  The computer verified everything the Captain had told me, but it supplied no conclusion. The Captain and Ophelia had started from the same point: There was life on at least one planet in the galaxy. Earth. For the Captain, that was the vital fact supporting all the other evidence that we were not alone, that life was not only ubiquitous in the galaxy but that there were millions of civilizations as advanced as our own.

  For Ophelia and Noah, life had happened once, but despite the flood of organic molecules to be found almost everywhere you cared to look, the odds were against the miracle of life happening again. It had taken half a billion years for primitive single-celled organisms to appear on the infant Earth, simple cells that could move and ingest organic molecules and replicate. It had taken an additional two billion for cells of different types to learn how to cooperate and live symbiotically with each other, to share the chores of a difficult existence. By then the simple cell had developed a nucleus and with it the ability to change and become something better… and more complicated.

  It had taken enormous periods of time, blind nature trying again and again and again. How many things had to go exactly right for all of that to happen? How many things could have gone wrong?

  It had taken two and a half billion years to develop that first nucleated cell, an additional half billion plus for multicelled animals to appear, and another three to four hundred million before plants and animals struggled out of the oceans to thrive on the steaming beaches. After that, following each other in comparatively rapid succession, had come the early reptiles, the dinosaurs, the mammals, and finally the timid, brainy primates. Eventually, the first adventuresome ape dropped from the trees to shamble about on two legs, discovering to its delight that it had been gifted with a year-round sex urge and was destined to populate the primitive Eden.

  After a point, the growth of life had been very logical and almost predictable.

  It was the first three steps that had proved to be so enormously difficult. The role of luck had loomed far too large and those three steps had taken much too long—a total of almost three and a half billion years for the first multicelled creatures and a future filled with possibilities. One-quarter the lifetime of the universe itself.

  It had happened once, but I couldn’t imagine it ever happening again.

  Both Ophelia and the Captain were right. Whether you believed life to be a one-time occurrence, never to repeat itself, or an inevitable development in the existence of a planet, yours was a religious belief.

  Along with Tybalt and what I suspected was a minority of the crew, I had shared the Captain’s.

  My problem now was that I had lost my faith.

  ****

  A few-time periods later, I had my second dream about what life had been like aboard the Astron generations before. Again, I was Sparrow but not Sparrow—but not Hamlet or Aaron, either. My name was Oryx.

  I lived on a vastly different Astron, with all the tubes occupied by a crew more than three times as numerous. All the glow tubes worked and the metal bulkheads were dry and clean, most of them painted a soothing beige. Those that weren’t painted were so shiny I could clearly see my face in them. The exploration suits were white and new, racked in a compartment where everything had its appointed place. There was no dust packed in the corners or coating the crates of spare parts preserved in still-soft cosmoline.

  I worked in Maintenance and envied those in Exploration, who lorded it over the rest of us. I was still an icon of sorts, a reminder of all that had once been back on distant Earth, but few hung on my every word or watched me covertly to see how I might react to different situations. The Earth was a much more recent memory and hadn’t yet receded into the mists of fantasy.

  I shared a compartment with a young girl who resembled Ophelia a little and Snipe a great deal, and a technician my own age who reminded me of Loon with a dash of Hawk thrown in. Seal laughed a lot and loved to tease me; Bear was kind and gentle. I was happy and lived much as Sparrow did, looking forward with enthusiasm to each new planet we explored and longing to feel its surface beneath my feet. Standing apart from myself in the dream, I was mildly surprised that it didn’t make much difference who I slept with—Seal or Bear, I loved them both. But I had been Oryx for a number of years and my attitudes had changed greatly since I had last been flatlined. In my dream, as Sparrow, I knew it wouldn’t be long before Oryx’s memories would be erased once again.

  There were more personnel in all divisions and there were far more specialties than I knew as Sparrow. There were machine shops, electrical shops, stores, computer and biological labs. The equipment in sick bay was complicated and efficient and I wondered what had happened to it, then guessed it had been cannibalized over the generations. Instead of two doctors there were half a dozen, all with their areas of expertise. One even specialized in diseases of the eyes and the mouth; in my dream, I noticed no crewman who suffered from cataracts.

  We didn’t have a division mess but ate in a large dining compartment with magnetic plates on steel tables and light straps to hold us in the chairs bolted to the deck. It was as much a ritual as a meal, and one that everybody anticipated with pleasure.

  One particular meal was etched in my mind after I woke, sweating and with a hammering heart. There had been the usual swirl of conversation around the table and much of it remained in my memory. A fat team leader named Meerkat who looked remotely like Portia had been talking in glowing terms about Eridani III, around which we were orbiting.

  “It’s a beautiful surface. If we could breathe the air it would be a great day for a picnic down there.”

  Next to her, Loris, a short, ruggedly-built Rover mechanic, picked at the meal on her plate.

  “This looks like what they used to call ham. Probably doesn’t taste like it but at least Lincoln’s getting better.”

  Somebody else said, “Don’t be hard on Lincoln; ever since he was hurt in the fall on Bishop VI he hasn’t been the same around the food machines.”

  Meerkat again: “I’m looking forward to going back next time period, there’s real visual drama where the hills meet the sky.”

  And Loris once more, holding up a drink bulb and squinting curiously at the contents: “I think this was called punch, diluted ethyl alcohol with some flavoring and fruit in it. I’d give a lot to sample the real thing.”

  Then there was abrupt silence. The Captain had floated in. He looked a little different to me-as-Oryx than he did to me-as-Sparrow. It was his eyes, I thought. They looked younger, they hadn’t seen as much.

  He said nothing but sat at the head of the table and quietly ate his meal. The conversation in the compartment started up again, but
it was muted. Watching the crewmen as they nibbled at their food, I noticed their occasional glance at the Captain.

  I was shocked. They lived in deadly fear of him and along with the fear went the sour smell of hatred. Few of them bothered to hide it. As Oryx, I knew why—but before the reason could come to mind, I woke up, sweating and clutching my hammock, overwhelmed by a deep sense of loss.

  The scene in the mess hall matched the dialogue I had heard a few months before when I had explored the empty compartment with Crow and Loon. I had faces to go with the voices now: Bear and Seal and Loris and Meerkat. But I remembered little beyond my relationship with Bear and Seal and the talk around the mess table with Loris and Meerkat.

  I lay there in the darkness, thinking about the dream and wondering why the fear and especially the intense hatred of the Captain by that very early crew. It hadn’t been hatred for somebody who was cruel or somebody whose orders were unreasonable.

  They hated him because of something he had done, something unforgivable that had frightened them badly.

  Another chunk of my memories had returned and with it an intense foreboding. What would it be like, I wondered, if I remembered my one hundred lifetimes all at once?

  Chapter 18

  The closer we came to Aquinas II, the faster the tempo of the drills and lectures. The tempo of our personal lives ran faster as well. It was probably much the same in a war. We knew we might not live through it, so we did as much living as we could beforehand. By now we had seen the cautionary projections once too often, and sapping our enthusiasm for the landing was the thought that some of us might not return. We were also afraid that if we found no life, there would be the journey into the Dark—a metaphor for death if there ever was one—or the possibility of mutiny and everything it implied.

  Tybalt didn’t help. He was preparing for more than the exploration of a planet that might or might not have been blessed with life. In every way he could, Tybalt made plans for his own version of a war. The Captain did little to stop him. In retrospect, I think the Captain probably encouraged him. The possibility of life might be pure fantasy but Tybalt’s activities in organizing assault squads and defensive teams— just in case—lent an air of reality to it.