The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  The next shift she showed up on the bridge with a young woman and announced that I needed an assistant recordkeeper and she had found one for me.

  “You remember Denali, Sparrow.”

  Denali smiled and I smiled tentatively back. I had met her first in Pipit’s nursery and had watched her grow into a young and beautiful woman. I remembered that Ophelia had introduced me to Snipe, and guessed that Snipe was now passing on the favor.

  “A moment, Denali.” I took Snipe by the hand and led her back to our living quarters.

  “Why, Snipe?”

  She stroked my cheek and said, “Look at me, Sparrow. See me as I am now, not as I was yesterday. Who will take care of you when I’m gone? I trust Denali.”

  Snipe remained a part of my household for many time periods after that, though eventually she moved in with Loon and Crow. Once again she had become interested in the historicals and fantasy; she and Loon had much in common. When I visited them, I noted that the unicorn, which had vanished shortly after we first partnered, had returned to graze by the stream. In the distance, outside a camp of tents with flying pennons, knights were jousting.

  Ophelia and Grebe partnered for the remainder of their lives; then, one time period, both vanished, apparently having agreed to go to Reduction together. I missed Ophelia more than she could have guessed.

  We made one stop at a system where Communications reported a signal in the waterhole. There were seven planets, two of which had possibilities. We explored both. On the second, we lost K2 in a landslide. I grieved for months.

  And then one sleep period, a bowed and hobbling Snipe slipped through the shadow screen and said simply, “Will you go with me, Sparrow?”

  We went to Reduction together and sat on the ledge and I held her tight, my arms wrapped around her thin shoulders. She murmured something to herself and I leaned closer to listen.

  “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day.

  It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

  That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear…”

  “‘I have more care to stay than will to go,’” I said gently.

  She laughed quietly and pushed me away.

  “Is that the best you can do?” she said with mock scorn and I found myself looking at the Snipe of sixty years before. I started to weep and she put her fingers on my lips as Pipit once had and said, “Shush, Sparrow.” Then her voice thinned and she murmured, “Help me in, please.”

  I led her over to the chamber, undid her halter and helped her slide into the swirling red mists until only her face was visible. She smiled at me and said, “Privacy, Sparrow,” then closed her eyes. I waited until she faded from view, then went back to my quarters and exiled Denali for six months.

  A year later, I had one last party with Crow and Loon and a youngster to whom Loon had taught his songs and his skill with the harmonica. There was smoke for all and Denali and I floated near the window that opened out on St. Mark’s Square, our arms entwined, and laughed as Loon and Samson and a young girl named Dido traded off playing duets.

  When it was over and the others had left, Crow turned to me, concerned.

  “Your face gets longer by the year, Sparrow. What’s wrong?”

  I hesitated, then shrugged. Crow and I had never kept anything from each other.

  “You’re getting older and I’m not,” I said, my voice thick with regret.

  A slight smile played around the corners of his mouth.

  “You want to go to Reduction ahead of time, that’s your choice, Sparrow.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” I objected.

  He looked a little impatient with me.

  “You’re feeling sorry for us, am I right, Sparrow?”

  I hesitated, then admitted it. “I guess so.”

  He shook his head in mock despair.

  “You’re the captain, Sparrow, but… you still don’t know us very well.”

  I thought of the conversation I’d once had with Huldah about the new crew.

  “You’re right, in one sense I don’t know you very well.”

  “The truth is, our lives are pretty full, probably more than yours, at least in a personal sense.” He said it in a low voice, as if he were confiding a secret, and perhaps he was. “We’re never lonely, Sparrow, we… share our memories. We’re privy to each other’s lives in a way that you and members of the old crew never can be. You can talk to each other about your lives, you can observe each other’s lives, but you can’t… live each other’s lives. In a sense, we can.” He smiled. “We see ourselves as others see us—you know the poem. But you may not remember the next line: ‘It wad frae monie a blunder free us, An’ foolish notion.’ You can’t really see yourself, Sparrow, and you can’t really see us.”

  His comment hurt. If I had ever studied myself as closely as the crew once had, I might have discovered who I really was far sooner, if only through my anachronisms of thought and speech, which must have fascinated them. I had never looked at myself with the objectivity that the crew had; I had never listened to myself as closely as they had.

  I had spent endless hours searching for my past in the computer’s memory matrix. I could have saved myself endless time and trauma by looking within rather than without. Noah had been right: Somewhere inside, I had known.

  “We don’t go to Reduction because we’re old,” Crow continued. “We go because we’ve exhausted life. Abel tried to tell you that once.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, then said: “You feel sorry for me.”

  He nodded, his face somber. “I always have.” He broke into another smile. “We all go back to the Great Egg, Sparrow. Life is finite, even for you—you won’t live forever, if that’s any consolation.”

  I hugged him when I left and we made plans to share a meal the next time period.

  But when the next time period came, I ate alone.

  ****

  To live your life with no regrets was the most important thing I learned from Crow. I settled back and let the generations roll over me, watching with fascination the never-ending shuttling of the genes as they wove the tapestry of life. It was a shock when in the eighth generation of the return, I played chess with a youngster named Ant and suddenly found myself pitted against Noah’s basic game plan. I didn’t believe in reincarnation, but I became convinced there were collective memories that could be passed along genetically as well as eye color or the shape of one’s nose.

  And during the ninth generation, when I saw a young man dragging his foot, I thought that fate had once again thrown the same combination and I was staring at Tybalt. It wasn’t until two time periods later, when he was no longer limping, that I realized he had merely stubbed his toe—and in any event, an amputated foot was hardly a gene-linked trait. But I had wanted desperately to believe, I missed Tybalt that much.

  The faces changed and I grew forgetful and knew I was being humored but didn’t really object. I had a box seat at the greatest show in the universe. I gradually learned to recognize personality traits as well as features until I could follow entire families through the dance of life and predict in advance the basic character of the children of the birth mothers.

  Nature repeated itself frequently, though never in quite the same way. But there came a time when I saw again the face of Crow and looked into the eyes of Snipe and heard Loon playing his harmonica in a distant corridor. I was developing a great fondness for humanity; I often wondered why Mike never had, and regretted that he had missed so much.

  But I also had my dark periods when I would lie in a hammock on the hangar deck, stare at the unwinking stars overhead and think of the crew sleeping below. I felt crushed by my responsibility for them. They were the only life for thousands of light-years around, perhaps the only life there was in an interstellar desert populated by occasional lumps of rock or flaring globes of burning gas or bits of black capable of swallowing everything, including light itself…

  At such times I prided myself on
saving the last few members of the human race, even though they were no longer quite human. But that didn’t matter, they were alive. Genetic divergence was well under way and I knew if I lived long enough, someday I would wind up as the only true human being in a zoo of my own making…

  Thrush had become my best friend. We had been formal and distant for years after the mutiny, though I never had cause to complain about his work. He partnered with nobody, which worried me, and watched from the sidelines as Pipit’s son, Baffin, grew to manhood. I think it was by mutual consent with Crow and Pipit that he never “took an interest,” though I knew he itched to teach the boy some of his own skills.

  Suddenly, or so it seemed, the boy was middle-aged, and finally elderly, and Thrush still had not changed at all. By that time both Pipit and Crow had gone to Reduction. Eventually Baffin vanished as well. The long life that Michael Kusaka had bestowed on Thrush had stopped with him. In all that time, Baffin and Thrush had never spoken a word to each other.

  Once Baffin was gone, Thrush disappeared into his compartment and didn’t come out until I sent a message asking him to share a meal with me.

  Pipit’s successor many times removed didn’t have Pipit’s flair with spices but the meal was more than adequate and to my satisfaction Thrush had a good appetite.

  We ate largely in silence; after we had finished, he leaned back in his sling, his hands loose in his lap, and waited. He still looked the same but the arrogance had been replaced by an air of reserve. We tolerated each other, though I was beginning to think that it was a little more than tolerance. Of all the crew, only Thrush was left of those I had known as Sparrow.

  “You and Baffin never spoke,” I said.

  He looked uncomfortable.

  “Neither Crow nor Pipit would have encouraged it.”

  “But you would have liked to.”

  He looked away. “Yes, I would have liked to.”

  I didn’t pursue it any further; the hurt was too obvious.

  “I’ve somebody I want you to meet,” I said.

  He looked more polite than interested.

  “Oh? Who?”

  I grinned. “I think he’s here now.”

  Aral had been allowed in by the corridor guard and now floated over to the table, his olive-black eyes wide with curiosity. He was seven years old and had never been in the compartment before, nor seen the simulations beyond the port.

  “You know Thrush, Aral—he’s the Astron’s scientist.”

  Aral clasped his hands behind his back and bowed formally, too shy to actually touch fingers. Thrush studied him, curious.

  “Would you like to see the solar system, Aral?” I asked.

  He nodded, interest bright in his eyes.

  There had been no simulation beyond the port, only the “off” sheet of gray. I played my hand over the terminal pad and a moment later, Saturn and its satellites filled the port.

  Aral drifted over until his hands and nose touched the glass.

  “That’s Titan,” he said, pointing. “And that’s Enceladus, it’s ice…”

  “Which one has life?” I asked.

  He looked at me with a young boy’s eager contempt for ignorance.

  “There’s no life, it’s too cold!”

  I laughed. “Would you like to see the Triffid nebula?”

  We went through a dozen of the views, then I shooed him out.

  “He needs someone to take an interest,” I said to Thrush.

  “Nobody has?” He looked surprised.

  “The boy has his problems—one of them being he’s too bright. How about you, Thrush?”

  He froze up, disappointing me.

  “Is that an order?”

  “I ceased giving you orders generations ago,” I murmured.

  Thrush ignored the boy for a month, then thawed, and soon they were inseparable. Aral grew to be his assistant and eventually “took an interest” in a young girl who showed Pipit’s talent for biology. I finally told Thrush that Aral was his great-grandson.

  The next generation, Thrush started a school and even began to partner, usually with one of the mothers of his flock of students. We gradually grew closer until we regularly took our meals together and spent more than one sleep period planning the procedures to follow once in Earth orbit.

  Then one time period Thrush drifted in unannounced with a large mirror under his arm. He placed it on my desk and motioned me over so we could look in it together.

  For the first time in generations, I started to tremble; Thrush had to put his hand on my shoulder to calm me. In the mirror, my own face looked back, unlined, unmarred by the passage of time. But Thrush’s pale hair had turned silver and a crescent of fine wrinkles had formed under his eyes.

  “You’ll have to take the Astron in yourself, Ray.”

  Thrush lived fourteen generations. When he went to Reduction, he left me the cube of plastic that “Sparrow” had first noticed on the Captain’s desk. The small blue and white flowers with their roots embedded in fine sand and tiny pebbles hadn’t faded at all.

  I made a silent promise to Thrush that when we landed, one of the first orders of business would be to replace the plastic cube and its frozen flowers with a vase of real ones.

  ****

  Two generations before planetfall, I indulged myself and changed what had been a tradition on board. I took out the roster of the return crew and started assigning proper names to the children of the birth mothers. Robert Armijo and Selma Delgado and Tom Youngblood and Lewis Downes and Iris Wong and the others had never been able to return to Earth in person, but now they would do so, if only in name. It was my own small tribute to their memory and one that pleased me enormously.

  The solar system had gradually been growing on the view screen; in the fifth year of the twentieth generation of the return we were once again in Earth orbit, high above a blue planet swathed in bands of white clouds. I had worried that the Earth would appear as a waterless rock covered with sand dunes like Mars, or hidden beneath the thick yellow smog of an atmosphere like that of Venus.

  “Instrument readings, Crow?” I murmured.

  “What?”

  I looked over in annoyance at the husky engineer who had taken the readings of the atmosphere. At first I couldn’t figure out why he was staring at me, puzzled; then I recalled what I had said.

  “Sorry, Lewis—instrument readings, please.”

  He had looked too much like Crow; the mistake had been a natural one. But it was one that I was making more and more and I wondered if I was coming to one of those watersheds in life, when you age suddenly and dramatically.

  He recited the figures and I nodded as he went down the list. The proportions of oxygen and nitrogen were the same, though those of the rare gases had changed moderately and carbon dioxide was a little down. Much to my surprise, the ozone layer was intact—in the intervening millennia, it had reconstituted itself.

  I raised my voice slightly.

  “Bring up the magnification, Iris.”

  The view of the planet below grew alarmingly until we weren’t more than a few hundred miles above the surface. It took two hours to make a complete orbit and I watched intently as we swung over the land and the oceans below. The Richat structures in West Africa, ancient reminders of meteor impacts, were the same. The outlines of the continents were also the same, though Baja California had finally separated from the mainland.

  The mountains and bays and lakes for the most part hadn’t changed, but Asia’s Lake Balkhash had disappeared and it looked as if San Francisco Bay was completely filled in, whether by natural causes or by intent there was no way of knowing.

  But what I was really looking for, I didn’t see at all.

  “Any signs of cities, Bob?”

  I had almost called him Loon—but though he looked the same, I doubted that Bob Armijo had ever played the harmonica or danced through the corridors.

  “None, Captain.”

  After a second orbit, Lewis drifted over a
nd said, puzzled: “There’s no detectable electromagnetic radiation of any kind.”

  No indications of technology or of human life, I thought, at least none as I had known it. I remembered the string of dispatches that Crow and I had found so long ago in the Communications department of Section Two.

  “That’s not good, is it?” I murmured.

  Lewis shook his head, his brown hair floating in a halo around his face, and once again I thought of Crow.

  “A team of us could take the Lander and go down,” he offered.

  It was tempting but dangerous.

  “We’ll try a probe first and bring back a sample,” I said. He looked disappointed. “We’ve lived a hundred and twenty-two generations at a constant temperature and in a sterile atmosphere, Lewis. Send somebody down to the only planet we know of that has life and we could be dead within a week.”

  “Sorry, Captain, I didn’t think.”

  “You’re as anxious as I am,” I said easily. “Send a probe and when we get it back, we’ll see what’s down there.”

  It was another half dozen orbits before I watched the probe dropping down through the atmosphere. We guided it under radio control toward one of the flat areas in North America, the part I remembered as farmland. We would bring back atmospheric samples and a core sample of topsoil for lab analysis.

  Better the devil we knew, I thought. Nobody on board had any experience with a planet where there was life in every drop of water and under every rock and if you didn’t eat it first, it would eat you.

  For the next time period, all of us were nervous and ill at ease. Lewis and Iris and I practically lived on the bridge, and all of us were getting ripe, but nobody wanted to take the time to shower for fear he would miss something.

  I was alone with my thoughts while we waited. With the members of the crew, conversation seemed to be falling into disuse and I knew it was because they sensed each other’s feelings so completely and precisely that speech was used primarily for transmitting information.