The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  I wondered how she knew. It had been a stray thought at best; I hadn’t been about to ask and I knew my body hadn’t given me away.

  “We’re still friends?” I remembered when Crow had asked that and had a glimpse of how much it had meant to him when I realized how much it now meant to me.

  “Oh, yes, we’re friends.” And then a speculative look crept into her eyes. “But we’re not friends, too.”

  It wasn’t until after we parted that I realized all the time I had been asking Snipe questions and judging her character, she had been judging mine. On a personal basis, I knew instinctively that I had passed.

  But she had been passing judgment on another level as well; what its qualifications were, and whether or not I met them, I had no idea. But I suspected that the dead crewman in the strange compartment had played a part.

  Chapter 7

  Tybalt clung to the railing of the observation deck overlooking the main control room, watching me while I watched the crewmen swarming over the huge plotting globe in the control room below.

  “You don’t remember any of this, do you?”

  I shook my head. “No, sir, I wish I did—I’ve tried.”

  He slipped over the railing, motioning me to follow. Waving the operators aside, he pressed his hand to the palm terminal on the control board. The galaxy in the plotting globe exploded outward in light streaks that made the surface of the globe look like the working end of a brush.

  The streaks thinned and vanished, replaced by a single yellow star surrounded by seven planets, the two outer ones gas giants and the five inner ones iron core. The first was too close to the primary to have any prospects for life. The second was far more likely; the rest were too far away.

  “That’s Aquinas II,” Tybalt said, pointing. “We’ll be there in eight months. No sign of alien scouts, though there’s a chance we might run into some.”

  “Have you run into any before?” I asked, surprised.

  He nodded. “No doubt about it, though only a few ever caused us any trouble. Probably as frightened of us as we would have been by them.”

  Scouts. I felt the sudden thrill of danger and promptly strained my eyes by looking into the globe for exhaust glows impossible to see. Aquinas II was still too soon after Seti IV—but that was a fading thought.

  Tybalt palmed the terminal again and a column of statistics scrolled over the surface of the globe.

  “It’s your job to match physical descriptions with needed supplies when we go in. Watch for anything unusual that might require Shops to make special equipment.” He turned thoughtful as he read the flowing rows of numbers.

  “Composition reminds me a lot of Midas IV—did I ever tell you about Midas IV, Sparrow?” He caught himself, muttering, “No, of course not.”

  He lifted his hand and the scrolling in the globe vanished. “Try it.” He pressed my hand against the palm terminal. “Each pad is programmed for a specific number of functions. Move your palm and your fingertips—remember what happens and see if you can re-call the graph we just looked at. Don’t forget, pressure is as important as touch.”

  The soft face of the terminal molded itself to my hand. It felt like living flesh, sensitive to pressures and shifts of direction and the faint stroking of my fingers. It was quieter and less confusing than speech, faster and more precise than keyboarding.

  My mind remembered nothing but my palm and fingers remembered everything. It took only instants for the original graph to swim back into view.

  Tybalt grunted approval. “You learn fast, Sparrow, but then it was second nature to you before, no reason it shouldn’t be second nature now.”

  He scanned the columns again. “You know, we almost died on Midas IV,” he said. “Our shields were up going into orbit, nothing should have gotten through—but something did. Sucked out a dozen compartments before Damage Control closed the hatches. Never did know what they hit us with.”

  My admiration for Tybalt grew with every word.

  “What happened when the exploration teams landed?”

  He shrugged, still studying the image in the globe.

  “Not much of anything. The bastards were well hidden, we never found a trace. But camouflage is the oldest form of self-protection—we probably looked right at them a dozen times and never saw them.”

  After a few minutes Tybalt turned the palm terminal back to the chief computerman, a fat crewman named Corin. He had been working at another station and occasionally glanced over to check my progress. I was reluctant to leave; the terminal felt familiar and comfortable and I was very proud of my ability to operate it.

  In the small compartment where Exploration was headquartered, Tybalt pointed out the two types of suits: those that needed repair and those so far gone they were only good for cannibalizing parts. I inspected the cloth and the fittings, did a quick inventory, and felt the sweat start in my armpits. As a generational ship, the Astron must have had a huge surplus of suits at Launch, but that had been long ago. Those currently available had been patched and mended hundreds of times; few of their fittings were original issue.

  Tybalt hooked a leg around a shelf upright and folded his arms across his chest. We were alone and it was lecture time.

  “You’re very good with the palm terminals, Sparrow, you’re one of the best fingermen on board. Always were. You have a rapport with the computer that I wish I had, that everybody wishes they had. I used to fight with Ophelia—”

  He caught himself in the middle to sneeze and when he started talking again, he didn’t bother to finish the sentence. I wondered just what it was he used to fight with Ophelia about.

  He fumbled in his waistcloth and pulled out a small pipe similar to the Captain’s. Pipit was generous with her crop, I thought.

  Tybalt inhaled deeply from the pipe and held his breath. His eyes read my expression. “We don’t compete in our vices, the Captain and me,” he said in a strangled voice. “He doesn’t mind; I’m slated for Reduction someday and he’s not.” He let the smoke drain out his nostrils and relaxed but I sensed he was studying me again, wondering how much I had changed. “Don’t be ashamed of what you were before, Sparrow. You were hard working, loyal and a good friend.” He gave me a long look. “Still are, I hope.”

  “I’ve been told I was easy to work with,” I said with a trace of sarcasm, thinking he was repeating Crow.

  He shook his head. “Actually, you were a pain in the ass—you knew it all and let everybody know you knew it all. You and Thrush, you both knew too damned much.”

  If Crow had catalogued my faults instead of my virtues I might have believed him.

  “Thrush dislikes me,” I said casually.

  “Thrush dislikes everybody. But I’d watch myself around the bastard if I were you, he’s the one person…” He let the sentence fade into the air.

  I changed the subject. “What was Laertes like? You worked with him.”

  He shrugged. “Competent, brave, no malice in him. We were on the same team on Galileo III. Did I tell you that’s where I lost my foot?”

  Both he and Crow had dismissed Laertes in a sentence or two, and I wondered why. Had they disliked the man that much? “Laertes—” I began.

  Tybalt slipped the knee-high cling-tite off his left leg and twisted his stump from side to side.

  “You don’t remember, but I have a prosthesis that fits inside the sneak. I hardly miss the real thing when I’m down below.”

  Laertes was forgotten. I couldn’t take my eyes off Tybalt’s foreshortened limb, the skin pale and laced with scars. “How did it happen?”

  “They said it was a landslide. But that’s only partly true.” He stared at the smoke drifting toward an exhaust vent, not seeing me at all.

  “I’d been acting as scout. Galileo III was a dry planet, thin atmosphere, but we all knew there was a possibility of life. Water flowed under the surface—you wouldn’t have had to dig very deep to find it—and the polar caps were largely water ice. I was in a Rover, may
be two kilometers ahead of the rest, when I saw them.”

  He inhaled deeply again and I burst out, “Saw who?” while he was holding in the smoke.

  “There were three of them,” he said after he finally exhaled, “standing by some sort of flyer. They were my size, maybe a little larger. Red chitin for skin, arms and legs articulated like a lobster’s. A head where you would expect one to be, segmented eyes on stalks. Horrible to look at. I imagine I looked pretty horrible to them, too.”

  He tamped out the ash in his palm and held it close to the exhaust vent, where the ashes vanished in a puff of glory.

  “We saw each other about the same time. They had a weapon, I didn’t. I ducked when they shot and they hit the rocks above me. I was trapped by the landslide—buried me up to the waist. But before the rest of the crew caught up to me, my three red-skinned friends jumped in their machine and took off, flying low over the hills. Don’t know how they did it in that thin atmosphere but they did.”

  “Nobody saw them?” I asked, openmouthed.

  He shook his head. “That was the irony, Sparrow. We were looking for life but nobody believed me when I saw it. They said it was part of my delirium while I was waiting to be rescued.”

  I nodded. “And that’s when you lost your foot.”

  “Amputation on the spot,” he said proudly. “No anesthesia. I felt it for a long while afterward. Abel called it a phantom limb sensation.”

  The glow tubes started blinking red. The shift was over.

  “I turned in a report—the Captain commended me. Some of the crew disagreed, but I was there and they weren’t.”

  “How many planets have you explored?” I asked. I was already wondering if I could be transferred from Ophelia’s team to his.

  He spread out the fingers of his hand. “Five. Aquinas II will make it six. But this time if I meet something planetside, I’ll bring it back.”

  He unhooked his leg from the upright and pushed toward the hatchway. “You been to Communications yet? Cato was talking about you.” He grinned. “Speaking of someone who never liked you…”

  An hour later, when we parted, he left me with a glow of confidence and the certainty that we had once been good friends and true equals.

  I had no memory of what I had done to deserve either friendship or equality, but for the first time I had a sense of the person I had been before. I was a good fingerman, I was one of the best at maneuvering inside the ship, I liked books. As Huldah had suggested, I was finding my past in my present, I was putting myself back together.

  My only disappointment was that Tybalt hadn’t told me anything about Laertes. I made a mental note to ask more about him the next shift.

  But when I left, I really wasn’t thinking about Laertes. I was thinking about alien ships firing on the Astron, about creatures two meters tall, with red chitin for skin and eyes on stalks, who could be found hiding behind the next hillock waiting to ambush heroic explorers like myself.

  I knew that I would dream about them the next time I slept.

  Life quickly settled down to a routine once I had my job assignments. At mealtimes, I got long looks from Crow and Ophelia, but Hawk and Eagle were friendly and joked with me, as did the others. At first everybody had taken an extraordinary interest in what I had to say and fell silent when I talked. That gradually changed, though nobody lost interest in me completely.

  Surprisingly, Thrush sometimes smiled when we met, but he never let me see what was going on behind those pale eyes. I distrusted him even more because Heron remained unfriendly. He still dogged Thrush’s footsteps and I thought: Like dog, like master. If there had been any sincerity in Thrush’s occasional smile, Heron would have known and blessed my heels with a lick or two.

  When we ate, I sat next to Noah or Huldah. Tybalt and Ophelia were team leaders and I found myself tongue-tied when with them. Crow and Loon had drawn a circle around themselves and if I wanted to enter it, I knew I would have to dip my head and say I was sorry. I still didn’t have the knack for apology.

  Noah seemed oblivious of it all, talking quietly about the ship and the mission. Had he ever seen signs of alien life, as Tybalt had? He smiled and said, No, but then he hadn’t had Tybalt’s opportunities since he usually didn’t go in with a landing party. But he knew very well what went on below and asked questions about planets and CHZs that I frequently had to check out with the computer before I could answer them.

  To my surprised delight, Noah and Huldah started to “take an interest” and often invited me to share meals in their compartment while they filled me in on the history of the ship and the crew. Sometimes they invited younger crew members and once they made a point of introducing me to Swallow and Petrel, who worked in Engineering. Petrel was polite and standoffish, Swallow gawky and embarrassingly flirtatious, though there came a time when we were not so embarrassed with each other. I guessed that’s what Noah had in mind.

  I thought less and less about Laertes, finally accepting that I would never know him. But it no longer seemed to matter.

  At one meal break in Exploration, Noah brought along a worn metal chessboard and a set of ancient chessmen and asked me if I cared to play.

  I fingered one of the men and studied the board, then hooked a foot in a floor ring and sat beside Noah while he set up the pieces.

  It all struck me as familiar and remembering what Crow had once told me, I said, “I used to play, didn’t I?”

  He nodded. “You were very good. Of course”—he smiled—“you weren’t as good as me.”

  It took two meals before I was at ease with the game. Then I found myself gulping down my food so I could spend the last fifteen minutes of the period in deep thought opposite Noah, studying the pieces on the board and trying to decide on my next move. Nobody paid attention to me at all now and I could watch them with ten percent of my mind while the other ninety percent concentrated on bishops, knights, and pawns.

  Crow and I made up shortly after that, when I was alone in my compartment and felt the bulkheads pressing close around me. The touch of claustrophobia made me envy Crow his falsie of the ancient city and its lagoon. What I saw was what I got. Then I wondered if there might be something more.

  I untangled myself from the sling, drifted over to the palm terminal, and retrieved the inventory of furnishings for the compartment—the standard inventory for every living space on board. It didn’t take much searching to find the program and switch it on.

  When I turned around, my stomach tightened. The compartment had become an ancient library, with books racked on varnished wooden shelves that extended from floor to painted ceiling. Windows looked out on a green lawn and distant rolling hills. A thick carpet covered the floor and there were leather chairs with nearby lamps that cast a pleasant glow for reading. Outside, I could hear faint shouts and the crack of what I guessed to be a cricket bat. Inside, there was classical music.

  One shelf of books was real, the others illusion. I reached for one volume and the book vanished at the same moment that my fingers touched the metal bulkhead. There was a sudden glow from the terminal’s viewing screen. When I glanced at it, I saw an image of the book with the pages slowly turning.

  It was a compartment for an older man and I wondered why it had been assigned to me. Probably because if I were to design it, it would be the same—I wouldn’t change a single detail.

  “I wondered when you would look at it,” a voice said behind me.

  Crow and Loon had ducked in through the shadow screen. Crow smiled half apologetically. “Do you mind, Sparrow?”

  I shrugged, glad they had come but reluctant to admit it.

  They drifted in and sat in the two chairs opposite me. It took a moment before I realized they had brought in metal crates and were sitting on them. They were familiar with the falsie from… before.

  “It was kind of you to ask us in,” Loon said, trying to hide a grin. Crow took a small pipe from his waistcloth, lit it and handed it to me.

  “Want s
ome smoke?”

  I took it, inhaling cautiously. The smoke made me cough, but after a moment it also made me feel very much at ease.

  Loon accompanied the classical music with a few bars on his harmonica, then suddenly asked, “Did you hear about Quince and Portia in the equipment room?”

  He said it with a wink. I looked blank so he filled me in on all the details, including some I’m sure he made up on the spot. I started to giggle and found I couldn’t stop. Crow’s smile grew broader. They offered me more smoke and gossiped about other members of the crew and I spent half that sleep period alternating between shock and fits of laughter.

  It was the first time I had ever felt completely at home on board the Astron.

  ****

  One time period, after my shift was over, Crow took me down to Reduction, a compartment on the lowest level. My skin was crawling before we even got there, and once there, I didn’t want to stay very long. It was a small, tidy room with a low overhead and a metal ledge jutting out from the bulkhead to which you could secure yourself if you wanted to sit. There were tightly covered, well-scrubbed vats with a lot of piping along another bulkhead. Against the far one was a squat, sealed chamber with distillerylike apparatus on top. The compartment reeked of efficiency; it was the only one I had seen whose metal piping still shone and whose bulkheads still gleamed.

  It also smelled far different from the rest of the Astron. Buried beneath faint whiffs of disinfectant were odors of age and human waste and something else. Despite the glisten and the shine, I knew we were in a charnel house. The thought made me sick.

  At first I didn’t notice that one of the glass-fronted storage chambers against the near bulkheads was covered by a black sheet. Memories struggled within me and I was tempted to go over and lift the cloth; then I deliberately turned away. I had fought my nightmares once, I didn’t want them to return.

  Microscopes and other equipment were secured to a laboratory table in the center of the compartment. I floated over and put my ringer beneath the objective lens of one of the ’scopes, working the stage controls until the ridges of my fingerprints had become mountains. I let Crow look, then drifted down the table, running my hands over the other equipment. Set into the overhead were shelves holding bottles of different-colored reagents and lockers filled with laboratory glassware.