The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  ****

  The memories crowded in, a hundred lifetimes, all demanding to be remembered, to be made complete. I had been a hero and I had been a villain, I had been everything it was possible for a man to be, beloved by most, hated by some. But whatever role I might have played, I was always the phoenix, the reminder of Earth and everything that had once been, the biological yardstick the crew compared themselves to in an effort to determine the depth of their own humanity and how much they might have changed.

  But now I was flying apart, I couldn’t hold them all, I couldn’t live a hundred different lives all at the same time…

  The part of me that had been a crewman named Sparrow suddenly realized why a crewman named Thrush had urged me to enter the compartment. I would see and I would remember and then I would go mad with the accumulated memories of a multitude of lifetimes. It was what a crewman named Abel had warned me would happen…

  I thrashed about, blundering into the preservation crypts and cutting my arm when I smashed the lid of the open case. The sudden pain cut through the psychological storm and all the memories started sorting themselves out in sequence, like amino acids in a kind of mental genetic code. I was mostly Raymond Stone plus a little of Hamlet and a great deal of Sparrow and mere touches of the rest. The others within me fought for a moment and then reluctantly gave up. Raymond Stone had been the first, Raymond Stone had precedence.

  I turned back to the crypts and went slowly down the line wiping away the grease and dirt from the plastic lids and the plaques above. The faces behind the plastic were rosy or olive or black or yellow but all were fresh and lifelike. I now remembered every one of them; I had been friends with them, had gone to parties with them and sometimes to bed, had known their children and their parents…

  Bobby Armijo, the comedian in shuttle school; Selma, who played mother to us all; Lewis, who couldn’t hold his liquor and was dangerous to drink with and apologetic for a full month after a binge; Iris, who loved all of us much too well but not often enough when it came to me; Tom, too witty for his own good and excessively proud of his Choctaw ancestry; Rich, who was like a brother to Iris and rumored to be more than a brother to Bobby…

  I drifted past the row with tears streaming down my face, at first fighting the memories because they hurt too much and then finally acknowledging them. They had been my friends and my lovers and my enemies—and they had been my crew. Now they were dead, their shining faces and their lifelike skin a lie.

  The readout screens above each case told the story. They were preserved in their nitrogen-filled crypts like so many sides of beef in a freezer. But the chemistry of life had stopped, their EM patterns had dissipated, their memories were dust, their appearance a fake…

  I pushed toward the hatchway that led to Kusaka’s private quarters. If Thrush was right, Sparrow’s crew only had air for an hour and maybe a little more. I kicked forward.

  My name was Raymond Stone.

  I was thirty years old.

  I was the return captain of the Astronomy and it was long past time to take her home.

  Chapter 31

  Michael Kusaka was sitting in his hammock, watching me cautiously, trying to guess who I was this time and just how much I remembered. There was a pellet gun on the ledge that served as a bedside table but he made no move toward it. Sparrow knew him well but it was the first time I had seen him since the mutiny so long ago. I was amazed that physically he hadn’t changed much. About my size; dark, smooth skin; damp black hair; a pencil moustache; and olive eyes that were good at smiling but masked whatever he was actually thinking.

  Sparrow saw him differently—but then to Sparrow he was The Captain, while to me he was peer and friend.

  “Hello, Ray.”

  I nodded. “Hello, Mike.”

  “We’re a long way from home,” he said.

  “We couldn’t get much farther,” I agreed.

  We were both nervous and fumbled for words. I stalled by looking around the compartment. It hadn’t changed much since I had first seen it on a tour during pre-Launch, which meant that everything in it was old. The paintings coated with plastic that had been sealed to the bulkheads—views of the Grand Canyon and the Taj Mahal and the Brazilian rain forest, what was left of it—were yellowed and brittle. The library of maybe five hundred or so volumes, which I had coveted then and still did, were rimmed with dust and dirt. A music cube and a tiny stack of chips beside it looked welded to the bedside ledge. I wondered if the chips still played, then guessed that if the bulkhead paintings had survived, the chips had, too.

  Holograms of Mike’s family were also sealed to the bulkheads, while a few sat on the ledge, curling and colorless, behind the pellet gun. There was one of Sachiko, his fragile and beautiful wife, to whom he had never been close, who’d enjoyed a brief career in Hong Kong films and viewed science and space with distaste. And one of Matthew, his estranged son, who had died during an exploration of Venus. It had been easy for Mike to sign off on Earth and elect to spend forty years in space.

  Except it had been a lot longer than forty years.

  We had been the two indispensable members of our crews and the doctors had spared neither expense nor technique to make sure we were immune to disease and illness. None of them had anticipated long life as a side effect.

  I made myself comfortable in the visitor’s sling to one side of his hammock. As Sparrow, I was painfully aware of time ticking inexorably away. As Raymond Stone, I couldn’t resist stealing a few moments to talk to a man who had once been my best friend.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said awkwardly.

  “A lot longer than it should have been.” Inside, Sparrow raged with anger and fear—he was hard to suppress.

  Mike passed it off. It was old home week and he played it to the hilt.

  “When was the last time? Not counting shakedown.”

  “Relay Station.” I couldn’t keep from smiling. Relay had been the huge space station that grew like Topsy while serving as a jumping-off point for the Moon and the O’Neill colonies. We had thrown a monumental drunk, and the last I had seen of Mike, he was disappearing down a corridor with a too-fleshy woman named Rusty. She had been raucous but comfortable, and was the one woman almost the entire crew had in common. Her rank had been Service Tech, First Class, a euphemism for government prostitute.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Ray. She was overrated.”

  He managed a shadowed smile but his eyes were still too busy judging me to join in.

  “Maybe by you, not by me.”

  We fell silent and I thought of how close we had once been, of whoring together in the Arizona training camps, of fishing expeditions to Wisconsin for walleye and muskie, of racing on San Francisco Bay in our daysailers…

  I glanced again at the holograms of Sachiko and Matthew. If I were back on Earth, they would have been dead longer than the pharaohs.

  “What happened to the O’Neill colonies, Mike?”

  The question took him by surprise. I could see him mentally review what he knew and what he thought he could safely say. I wondered if he would lie and pretend that nothing much had changed aside from the passage of time itself, that the dispatches he had written for Communications had actually happened. He surprised me.

  “All gone,” he said matter-of-factly, “a hundred years after we left. They never proved self-supporting and the participating governments cut back. Mitsubishi kept one going to the very end but by then it was only a research station.”

  He had decided that most of me was Raymond Stone and he could afford the truth. It still hurt to hear about the colonies, but I had guessed as much.

  “And Luna City?”

  We were both talking around what was really on our minds, but there was a lot of catching up to do. Luna City hadn’t been much of a city—never more than a thousand people lived there—but I had grown fond of the towering crater walls and the silence.

  “Same thing. It deteriorated into a research outpo
st and then they decided it wasn’t cost-effective, that nothing more could be learned that couldn’t be discovered with remote sensors and robotic installations. Within ten years they had malfunctioned and the bean counters decided they weren’t worth repairing.”

  “And after that, Relay Station no longer served a purpose, right?”

  He took a sip from the drink bulb in front of him, then looked embarrassed that he hadn’t offered me any. He waved it at me. “You want some? Ship brandy but better than nothing.” I shook my head. He took another sip and continued. “Relay Station was disassembled by 2200. Don’t ask me what happened to Rusty, she probably retired to a ranch in Mexico, fat and filthy rich.”

  If she was, it had been from tips; the government hadn’t approved of sin and definitely didn’t believe in paying much for it.

  “What about the Grand Tour—they ever finish her?”

  She had been the Astronomy’s bigger, better sister ship designed to be launched shortly after we returned.

  “She was scuttled before they ever finished the hull.”

  While we talked, I watched Mike and compared myself to him. He had become The Captain and I had become… something else. I was a little fuzzy about the training but I knew I was never intended for the role of phoenix. I had been put in the Freeze before they ever left Earth orbit and I wasn’t supposed to be revived until the first forty years were up and it was time for me and my crew to change places with Mike and his crew. One crew to take the Astronomy out and one to bring her back, that had been the plan. All of us were supposed to live out our lives as heroes back on Earth, and when we died, our ashes would be scattered over living dirt…

  “What happened, Mike? I mean, what happened between you and me.”

  ****

  The centuries between us had vanished. Mike and I and Relay Station had happened a week ago and Launch was yesterday.

  He shrugged. “They screwed up. We all expected they would. The ship cost too much, they’d put too much into it.” He tapped his head. “They wanted to hedge their bets so they rearranged my wiring. Programming, call it what you will. Don’t come back until you find life or forty years is up.”

  “But you didn’t go back at all,” I said.

  He frowned, searching for words to explain the unexplainable.

  “They didn’t realize they’d programmed two conflicting sets of instructions. Go back at the end of forty years—or go back once we’d found life? By the time the forty years had gone by, I knew that I was a long-lifer and didn’t have to go back. That reinforced the programming for not returning until after we’d found… something.” He laughed. “You always think you’re going to find it over the next hill—in the next system, during the next decade. It’s a gambler’s disease, you want to throw the dice just one more time. And I always was a gambler.”

  He hesitated.

  “I had no reason to go back, Ray—and I didn’t have to, I was going to live forever.” He grinned and suddenly became the Mike Kusaka I had hung out in bars with, the Mike Kusaka I had parried with, the Mike Kusaka who had been my best friend. “Everything they did to me, they did to you. You were going to live forever, too, except you were in the Deep Freeze and didn’t know it.”

  It was hard to keep him in focus. One moment I was seeing him with the eyes of Raymond Stone and the next I was looking at him as Sparrow. The two views didn’t coincide at all. To me, he was a friend. To Sparrow, he was The Captain—remote, authoritarian, the man who had sentenced three fellow crew members to suffocate on a cold and lifeless planet.

  “The crew,” I said slowly. “They didn’t want to continue.”

  He looked away, his face now shadowed by the light from the glow tube.

  “You know they didn’t.” He shrugged. “Most of the crew mutinied, maybe ten men remained loyal.”

  He was remarkably open, but inside me, Sparrow screamed it was a trick.

  “You knew you could keep on going,” I said. “You could run the ship—you were linked with the computer. But you couldn’t run the ship all by yourself, you needed a crew.”

  He turned cynical. “Come on, Ray. We weren’t out five years before Ilena had a kid. By the end of forty, there were sixty uncounted on board. It was obvious we could turn the Astron into a generational ship, breed replacement crews as we went.”

  “The mutiny failed,” I reminded him.

  “It almost didn’t,” he said dryly. “You were the return captain so they took you out of the Freeze and killed the rest of the return crew doing it. There was some shooting, some fighting, they were in too much of a hurry…” His voice trailed off.

  His telling was incomplete; he still hadn’t told me why the mutineers had failed. They had needed each other, it should have been a standoff. Except…

  I had been in the Freeze during most of the mutiny—the first I knew of it was waking up on a lab table with half a dozen needles stuck in my body and two frightened mutineers bending over me. After that, there had been a lot of shouting and the sharp reports of pellet guns. I had run through the corridors, trying to dodge the peep screens and the Captain’s men, not really knowing why I was running but terrified just the same. They had finally caught me and stretched me out on the table once again with Mike looking down at me, holding a hypodermic and mumbling how I-honest-to-God-wouldn’t-feel-a-thing. And then, darkness.

  Noah and Abel would have been disappointed; I hadn’t remembered anything important after all.

  “You didn’t put me back in the crypt,” I asked, puzzled. “Why not?”

  He made a bad joke of it.

  “You can’t refreeze meat, Ray. It loses its texture.”

  Some of Sparrow’s anger crept into my voice.

  “You flatlined my memories,” I accused.

  He looked at me in frustration.

  “What the hell was I to do? You would have been the focus of a mutiny every generation that came along. I finally hid you in plain sight, like the purloined letter. It wasn’t that difficult; you’d had amnesia before, from your car accident when you were seventeen. In a sense, it was your Achilles heel.”

  Not that difficult… I wondered how long it had taken him to program the artificial reality that was Seti IV and felt another surge of anger.

  “I didn’t have many options, Ray,” Mike apologized. “And after all, you actually played an important role, you were needed.”

  He had been clever and resourceful and in the long run it really hadn’t been his fault: The programming had proved too effective. It was what he wanted me to think. But he had left something out.

  I thought I heard a clock ticking and guessed it was Sparrow within.

  “They won’t come back,” I said.

  He knew I was talking about Sparrow’s crew and looked mildly surprised.

  “You really believe that?”

  “They won’t come back,” I repeated. “Not unless you return.” I made the mistake of thinking I could convince him. I wasn’t Sparrow now, I was his best friend. “You can’t run the ship by yourself, and without the others you can’t breed a new crew. It’s time to go home, Mike.”

  I don’t think he even heard me. He leaned forward in the hammock, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. Too bright.

  “We don’t need an entire crew, Ray. Three of us can do it—you and I and Thrush. All three of us are linked to the computer; we can seal off most of the ship and run Maintenance by ourselves.”

  The link to the computer was the key—but you had to be long-lived for the link to exist. Then, inside me, Sparrow warned that the best chess player is the one who convinces you his next move won’t be the obvious one.

  “It’s been thousands of years, Ray,” Mike said. “What have you got to go back to? You wouldn’t have signed on if you didn’t want to be an explorer.”

  The image of him and me and Thrush, voyaging forever into the great unknown, sickened me. Pipit, Crow, Ophelia, and the hundreds of others didn’t matter: They were mayflies.


  He watched the parade of emotions cross my face and his own expression hardened.

  “I can’t go back, Ray. I told you—they rearranged my wiring.”

  Neither side had been bluffing and that surprised me. The members of the new crew had made up their minds not to continue unless Mike turned back, and Mike couldn’t.

  No friendship can survive a lie if it’s serious enough. And right then I watched my own friendship with Mike dissolve like tissue paper in the rain. The lie was simple and brutal and I hadn’t wanted to look at it. Nobody but Mike had wanted to go on—he was the only one who had been programmed. He had to force the others.

  “The mutiny had failed before you ever caught me, hadn’t it, Mike? You pulled the plug on the return crew, didn’t you? Nobody in your crew was going to live long enough to return so they had no choice but to breed their own replacements and hope that someday their children could go back.”

  His voice turned acid. “Don’t think they didn’t jump at the chance.”

  We sat there and stared at each other. With time, friends change. And there had been more than enough time. He’d had his friends among the first crew, at least at the start. But they must have told their children what had happened, and then their descendants avoided him and fell silent when he approached. A man already alienated had grown more distant with every generation until the crews became merely part of the machinery, maintaining the ship and exploring the planets until they were replaced by still another generation.

  The movement was so slow I almost didn’t see it, his hand edging toward the pellet gun. I could feel my own in my waistband and wondered if he had seen its outline.