The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  Only one glow tube was on, which left most of the compartment in shadow. I froze, waiting until my eyes had adjusted to the gloom. The Captain’s sling was empty and the only real light came from the after sleeping compartment and office. I could hear the low murmur of conversation and felt the hair on the back of my neck stiffen. The Captain was still up, talking to somebody—probably Cato. My armpits and palms were slimy with sweat and I debated leaving, though I was also tempted to edge closer so I could overhear the conversation or quickly search the cabin for any stock of weapons.

  I hesitated, convinced I was being foolish. If he kept pellet guns anyplace, it would be in the after compartment.

  The few slates I carried with me suddenly seemed like a feeble excuse for being there. I made up my mind to go, hoping that Banquo was still occupied at the other end of the corridor. My courage had slipped away and my heart had started to race. Then I froze again. The huge port that took up one whole side of the compartment lacked its usual display and for once showed Outside as it looked from the hangar deck. It was as if the whole side of the ship were open to outer space. I had to fight a moment of vertigo, panicked that I might float out to be lost between the light dusting of stars on the left and the ocean of blackness on the right…

  Darkness and the Deep, I thought bleakly. Here we were, a group of frightened, chattering primates light-years away from the safety of the jungle, breeding and fighting within the steel confines of a tiny artificial world that had been launched millennia ago. Once it was gone, there might be no life left in the universe and no point at all to the vast explosions of matter and the whirling lumps of rock and bubbles of gas that filled the void and…

  I swallowed my fears and started going through the compartment. If the Captain came in, I would try and bluff my way out. If Banquo interrupted me, I would do the same, though I doubted I could convince either one.

  I drifted over to the Captain’s desk. The viewing globe was empty and there was nothing else on the desktop with the sole exception of the ancient paperweight that I had first seen on the bridge. I held it for a moment, then carefully put it back.

  I silently slid open the drawers in the desk, making sure that none of the contents escaped into the compartment. They held nothing but a few small writing slates. I pushed them shut, then floated over to the bookcases against the opposite bulkhead. I ran my fingers across the bindings, managed to read a few of the titles and fought down an urge to steal one or two.

  It was an odd morality—I could lead a mutiny against the Captain but I couldn’t steal one of his books.

  From somewhere there came the tiny tick of a clock and once again I was paralyzed with fear. Time was running out; they couldn’t keep Banquo away forever and the Captain could wind up his conference at any moment. I shivered and groped my way past the bookcases, then turned to stare at the compartment. I had searched everywhere. Any armory had to be in the after compartment, as I had thought all along.

  I took a final look at the huge port on my left, the Captain’s desk and chair, his hammock for the occasional nap, and the row of bookcases—along with the dining table and the private food machine, the only real touch of luxury in a compartment almost as Spartan as those of the crew.

  I started for the hatch, then grabbed a floor ring to stop myself. The dining table. With a cloth stretched taut over the top and reaching to the deck, anchored with magnetic lines. I drifted over, broke the magnetic seals and folded back the cloth. Beneath the table was a cabinet with metal doors. I felt for the latch and quietly forced it open.

  Some of the pellet guns were still in cosmoline that had hardened to a rocky feel and appearance. I did a quick count. Perhaps twenty guns, plus tins of ammunition. Ten of them had been fired and I guessed that these were the ones issued for target practice. I wondered which one Heron had used when he had tracked me on Aquinas II. It was a morbid thought, but practical—if I knew which one it was, at least I could be certain that it worked.

  The ones in hardened cosmoline I knew were useless—you would have to crack them out and the barrels were probably sealed with the stuff. But the other ten presumably worked; I guessed that they were all the firing power the Captain had.

  I started to gather them all up, then realized I didn’t dare. If the mutiny was to start the next time period, it would be different. But one gun might not be missed. I took what looked like the best one and a small tin of ammunition and stuffed them in my waistcloth. My possession of them wouldn’t be immediately obvious to either the Captain or Banquo, though a quick search would not only mean flatlining, it would probably send me to Reduction.

  I floated back toward the hatch, then hesitated once again.

  There was still a low murmur of conversation coming from the after compartment, and curiosity quickly overcame prudence. I pushed toward it, keeping to one side to avoid being outlined in the light. I flattened myself against the bulkhead and peeped in. There was little to see: an outer compartment that was largely in shadow and a smaller one beyond, which held a sleeping sling and apparently little else. The Captain wasn’t in sight but his voice was clear and I could make out specific words, though not the sense of what he was saying. He sounded as if he were in the outer compartment but I couldn’t see him in the gloom.

  Then once again the hair on the back of my neck stiffened. I had been there a good five minutes but I had never heard anybody else speak. It occurred to me that there were moments when even the Captain was alone and afraid, moments when he retreated to the after compartment and held long conversations with himself.

  I was partly right and also, dreadfully, wrong.

  ****

  By the next time period, the Captain knew that he had lost a weapon. When I went to see him on ship’s business, he was in a thin-lipped fury, though he never indicated he suspected me. Banquo was the chief object of his anger and I was a silent witness to his brief interrogation. I had drifted in with some writing slates of supply statistics at the moment the Captain was facing a white-faced Banquo across his desk.

  “You were on duty and a commotion started and you left your post. That’s simple enough. It never occurred to you that it was a diversion?”

  To my surprise, Banquo defended himself.

  “It was my duty to investigate—you would have ordered me to if you had been awake. And the crewmen checked out.”

  “They wanted you to investigate because they knew I wasn’t awake—wasn’t that obvious?”

  “I said I checked them out. I did my duty—”

  It happened so fast I couldn’t believe it. The Captain backhanded Banquo across the face, leaving a white welt that quickly turned red. Banquo fingered his cheek; he was livid with anger. He stood there a moment, trembling, a huge hulk of a man who had been loyal to the Captain all of his life and now, in an instant, had seen his loyalty shattered. Even though he was old crew, he had a built-in aversion to violence, and that had been stripped away as well. I had no idea what he would do; I don’t think he himself knew.

  There was an ominous silence, then the Captain said in a low voice, “I give you permission, Banquo—go ahead, strike.”

  The Captain was out of control, I thought with amazement. The veins in his forehead and neck pulsed with anger, his eyes were narrow with rage. Banquo stared for a moment; then his flush faded and he turned away without a word and pushed outside to the corridor to take up his post. I thought at first the Captain had faced him down, then realized the same thing Banquo had—if he had struck, the Captain would have killed him.

  The Captain glared at me and snarled, “He probably took the gun himself,” then nodded at the slates in my hand. “Leave them. And I don’t want to see any more statistics for the next dozen time periods—or you, either.”

  I had been hovering there, quaking with guilt, and left as quickly as I could. It was a side of the Captain I had never seen before and hoped I never saw again. Sweating with rage, out of control, capable of murder… He was more than a match
for all of us and I began to think we would never be prepared to deal with him.

  Our final plan was simple, too simple. We would pick a specific time, then cripple the ship. We had a lot of work to do beforehand, from a final effort to subvert as many of the Captain’s men as we could to a systems analysis of the ship’s functioning so we could disable it with precise strikes. The end result would be to force the Captain to return to Earth. It had become an article of faith that he could not run the ship himself and that once we had convinced him of that, he would have to turn back.

  In retrospect, it was all wishful thinking. I would wake in the middle of a sleep period realizing how flimsy our plan was and yet fail to find any fault with the logic. The Captain had to go back…

  But we had no textbooks on mutinies and ours was flawed from the very beginning. It lurched to a start long before we were ready, and whatever it was, it was no body blow to the operation of the ship. Everybody had their pet idea on how to cripple the Astron, tried that idea out first, and then told me about it. The mutiny never spun out of control because it was never in control.

  The first blow was at Hydroponics, a blockage in a nutrient valve that wasn’t discovered until three rows of soybeans had turned brown and useless.

  Nobody raised an alarm; the withering could have happened in the natural course of events. And then a proud Ibis told me what she had done. I was harsh and probably frightened her but I desperately didn’t want to warn the Captain of what we were planning.

  The next assault came the following breakfast period and was a good deal more serious than turning off a spigot in Hydroponics. Halfway through the meal Snipe wrinkled her nose. At first I thought the food machine had malfunctioned or that one of the children in the compartment hadn’t made it to a waste chute in time. Somebody, I never discovered who, had linked the waste-processing units with air support. We had long been used to foul air but we weren’t used to the new odors and I doubted that anyone ever could be.

  The last attempt was against the water system. Without warning, the drinking water began to taste like bile.

  The three events in less than a dozen time periods convinced everybody it was no coincidence. More important, they alerted the Captain. His move was immediate and drastic. All the birth mothers were sequestered in an off-limits corridor with armed guards at both ends and no chance for anybody to see them without a permit.

  The pressure was no longer on the Captain, it was on us. He had taken hostages and none of us knew what plans he had for them. But I couldn’t forget the conversation with Ophelia about limiting the size of the crew once we ventured into the Dark.

  The next sleep period I spent staring at the overhead and thinking of Pipit and the other birth mothers, wondering what the Captain might do next. Lack of sleep combined with an overactive imagination; what happened then was spontaneous and part of nobody’s plan.

  One of the Captain’s men lost his nerve, I lost my temper, and the bloody revolt began.

  Chapter 29

  The next time period we ate breakfast in silence. Loon worked the food machine, with mediocre results, though none of us had much of an appetite. Grow hunched by himself in a corner while Ophelia talked to him in low tones; then she gave up and pushed away, glancing at me and shaking her head. Corin was nervous and ate with a false heartiness. Thrush floated in, glanced around and sensed the mood, then slipped out. Crow’s dark eyes followed him and I could feel the battle going on within—Huldah’s breeding program would soon be put to the acid test. Then Crow handed his plate to Loon and kicked out into the corridor.

  I pushed my own plate aside and started after him.

  Snipe grabbed my arm. “You can’t help him, Sparrow.”

  “I can’t help any of them,” I said bitterly. “But I can keep Crow from doing something foolish.”

  The detention corridor was four levels down, one above Reduction. There was a crowd of about thirty at one end, almost all of them new crew, arguing with the frightened Captain’s man who had been assigned guard duty. A pellet gun was stuck loosely in his waistcloth but he made no move to touch it, trying to hold back the crowd with outstretched arms. I remembered him from Maintenance—a gangly twenty-year-old named Goose. He had probably become a Captain’s man for the sake of the red strip of cloth around his upper arm and an occasional smile and pat on the back from the Captain himself.

  I mingled with the crowd and listened to the rumors, some of which made my hair stand on end. An entire generation was to be skipped in birth allotments, the children were to be aborted, the birth mothers sterilized… I caught up with Crow, who managed a twisted smile and said, “I’m just here to observe, Sparrow. For right now.”

  “Don’t lie,” I said. “What were you going to do?”

  He looked away in uneasy agony. “I don’t know.”

  “The Captain forbids any unauthorized personnel in this corridor!”

  Goose’s voice was high-pitched and nervous. The crowd was gradually pushing him back but none of them struck or threatened him. I glanced at the corridor behind me. The Captain must know of the commotion; reinforcements would arrive any moment.

  “You’ve got no right!” somebody shouted, which struck me as odd since they must know by now that nobody had any rights, not in the Captain’s eyes.

  “Get the Captain!” I spotted Eagle and next to him, Hawk. Neither one could pass up this sort of excitement. But I worried that the crowd was playing into the Captain’s hands. It was growing and I feared what might happen next.

  Crow read me and said bitterly, “They won’t do anything. They can’t.”

  Huldah had emasculated an entire generation… Then I wondered what they could do in any event. The Captain had the arms; he controlled the ship. And whatever else it was, this wasn’t the type of demonstration that would convince him of anything.

  I looked around the crowd and tried to locate the leaders. There were a few up front and several in the middle who were doing most of the shouting but it didn’t look as if it were planned. It was a spontaneous demonstration of fear and anger, one of the many things we hadn’t counted on.

  Another of the Captain’s men appeared at the far end of the corridor—Cato himself—and I guessed others were slipping through the passageways behind us. I pulled at Crow and said, “Let’s get out of here—we’ll be trapped.” He started to fall back and I turned to follow, then saw Tern at the front of the crowd, a little to one side of Goose. Tern was in love with Swift—I remembered him waiting outside her compartment during the ritual—and Loon had said they intended to partner after the birth of her child.

  There were more Captain’s men at the far end of the corridor now. I changed my mind and tried to force my way through the crowd to reach Tern, all the time shouting for the crowd to disperse. The demonstration would be a golden opportunity for the Captain to drum up trials of those who had disobeyed his edict.

  “Tern!”

  He heard me and twisted around for a brief glance, then continued arguing with Goose. I was almost up to him when he pushed Goose aside and shot down the corridor, yelling for Swift.

  I think nobody but me heard the small report of the pellet gun above the shouting of the crowd. The air in the corridor suddenly turned pink with a fine red mist and there was an abrupt silence as all the actors froze in tableau. I’m sure at first they thought the air system had been sabotaged again. Then they realized what had happened and a low moan filled the passageway. I remembered playing with the children in the nursery. If one hurt, they all hurt.

  And if Tern was dying, the new crew would feel each failing moment.

  At the far end of the corridor, a Captain’s man threw away his pellet gun and vomited into his waistcloth. He was probably the one who had fired, something he wouldn’t forgive himself for as long as he lived.

  I pushed past Goose and hurried up to Tern, who was floating motionless in the air. I caught him gently and turned him over to see the wound. He had been shot in the neck
and blood was spurting in small red balloons from his torn throat to float away in the air currents or flatten in bright red splotches against the nearby bulkhead.

  His lips moved as he murmured, “Swift?” Then his eyes glazed over and for the first time in my life as Sparrow, I saw something that was living—something that could think and talk and eat and make love—die. One moment he was alive, trembling in my arms, and the next he was gone. Whatever was Tern had vanished and I was holding something good only for Reduction.

  The corridor had emptied except for several crewmen being held halfheartedly by the Captain’s men. Everybody looked sick and those who had been close friends of Tern were crying. I remembered again Tybalt’s abortive effort at target practice and Tern’s refusal to shoot at a target symbolic of something living.

  Huldah was right; she had needed five more generations. But she hadn’t had them and the members of the new crew were going to pay a hideous price.

  “You’re responsible,” a nervous Cato chattered at me, his teeth bared as if he were going to bite. “You and Ophelia, talking against the Captain…”

  “Get out of my way,” I growled, and shoved him aside. I shot up the corridor toward the Captain’s quarters, never realizing until later that if Cato had shot me in the back he would have been commended for his action.

  I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t particularly care, but this couldn’t go on.

  ****

  It didn’t surprise me that the Captain was waiting.

  By the time I got there, I remembered that I was supposed to be a young tech assistant who had once been close to the Captain and was outraged and frightened by Tern’s murder. I could have avoided the Captain altogether but that wouldn’t have been in character and would be just as dangerous as my bitter protests.

  Banquo showed me in and went back to his post in the corridor. The Captain was alone at his desk, checking some writing slates.

  “Cato killed Tern,” I said, the words tumbling out. “Tern was in the detention corridor but he wasn’t doing anything, he—”