The Dark Beyond the Stars

by Frank M. Robinson

  Nobody said, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.” Nobody had to. Casual friendships flared into great passions and those of us who had paired off began to regret it when there was so much more of life yet to sample.

  I can’t remember what Snipe and I argued about—it was trivial and I’m sure I started it—but it ended with Snipe moving out of my compartment back to her tent by the peaceful stream. She never lost her temper, though I made a show of losing mine to mask my feelings of guilt. Snipe was hurt and wanted to talk about it but I told her, loftily, that there was nothing more to say. She stared at me, then said somberly, “There’s sex and there’s partnering—I thought you knew the difference.”

  After that, she was nothing but understanding, and that was a mistake. An argument might have brought us together; “understanding” drove us apart.

  Similar dissensions shredded Crow’s relationship with Pipit and within a few time periods we teamed up to rut our way through the Astron. We knew it was against ship’s custom for anybody on board to turn us down, at least the first time, and we took full advantage. Neither of us was interested in asking a second time. My ego expanded rapidly. So did Crow’s. Neither he nor I paid much attention to the looks of disapproval from fellow crew members when we paused in the corridors to compare notes and match scores. But it was hard to ignore Thrush’s all-knowing smirk.

  The Captain had said that sex was the fool’s gold of the emotions and it seemed all too true. But while I didn’t learn much about individual crew members, I learned a lot about the social structure of the ship. The dominant form of partnering was couples but triads were not uncommon and neither was the occasional small group. I was curious about all of them, and they about me. Even when my promiscuous period was over, I was surprised how much of my curiosity remained.

  Two events brought my rutting to an end. The first was that Swallow asked me to bed. She was a plain woman—perhaps pretty or charming to others, but not to me. I tried to dissuade her by pretending she wasn’t serious. But she was, and I had to remind myself it was ship’s custom not to refuse the first time. Crow seemed to have no problem in similar situations, but I was different from Crow and I found the sex not only unpleasant but difficult.

  The second event was more complicated.

  My dreams didn’t stop, though they were far more fragmentary. In most of them I saw myself as Hamlet. I helped raise an infant Crow as if he were my son and watched a young girl gradually grow to an aggressive and beautiful maturity. Eventually we became lovers. After more than one sleep period I woke still feeling Ophelia’s breath on my shoulder and the touch of her fingers on my back.

  One period I slept more fitfully than usual, never quite sure whether I was Hamlet or Sparrow. When I finally gave up on slumber, I slipped quietly out of my compartment and down the passageway to Ophelia’s. I stole in through the shadow screen without announcing myself, pausing only a moment to get my bearings. I was in a cave on a hillside with a forest of tall pine trees spread out below. Constellations twinkled in the night sky and moonlight glinted off the snow that furred the branches of the trees. I could hear the occasional snap of a twig in the forest and I thought I saw the shadowy forms of wolves prowling among the trees, a thought confirmed a moment later by their distant howls.

  Falsies weren’t required to be original; Ophelia had been content to copy hers from the one Crow and Loon had turned into a “safe house.” She was curled up near the embers of a fire and I felt my way over to her. It was easy to slide into the character of Hamlet, though a part of me still clung nervously to Sparrow.

  I murmured, “Ophelia,” at the same time lying next to her on the “skins” before the fire. She woke instantly, her muscles tense. She recognized me and started to push me away, but I pleaded, “Please don’t,” using the voice of Hamlet.

  She closed her eyes and relaxed. I leaned into her, my arms sliding easily around her waist.

  It was very strange. It was pleasant but not pleasant. I gradually realized that Hamlet could never be more than a role, that I remembered only bits and pieces of his life. Playing at being him was like trying to recognize a face in the splinters of a shattered mirror.

  Mechanically, I aped the Hamlet of my dreams. When I was through I leaned against the cave wall, very much aware of the steel bulkhead at my back. Through it all, Ophelia had never responded.

  “My God, I’m sorry,” I murmured.

  “Hamlet’s dead,” she said quietly. “You’re Sparrow. Be Sparrow.”

  “I’ve been playing at being somebody else,” I whispered in shame.

  “You’ve been playing at being a fool,” she said. There was no condemnation in her voice but the words stung.

  For a few time periods after that I became a hermit, withdrawing into work and my library, burying myself in my books and my duties. I made a point of apologizing to my former bed partners until I realized that no apology was needed, that what had been of passing interest to me had been of passing interest to them as well. Emotion returned is usually in direct proportion to emotion invested, and there had been precious little of that.

  I missed Snipe badly. It wasn’t long before we were standing by her stream while I tried to explain myself. She was calm and considerate and—so I thought—totally uninvolyed.

  After I stammered my apologies, she said simply, “Why, Sparrow?”

  I explained the pressures on board, the feeling that the number of my tomorrows might be limited and I had wanted to live as much as I could today.

  “That’s a surface reason,” she said. “I don’t believe it’s the real one.”

  She was right and I knew it. My voice dried up. When I finally found it again, I sounded lonely and desperate. I was going to have to trust her if I wanted her to love me, and for some young men trusting somebody is amazingly difficult to do. It was for me.

  I recalled what the Captain had told me and shivered. “You’re going to grow old,” I said in a cracked voice. “Some day you’ll die.”

  “So will Sparrow,” she said simply. “Probably before me.”

  I should have known. She and Ophelia had been too close. I had deluded myself as I had with Noah; she had to have known.

  No matter how careful I was, sooner or later the charade would end and “Sparrow” would be gone, to be replaced by another seventeen-year-old tech assistant named Nuptse or Batura, whose best friend would be K2 and who would probably fall deeply in love with Denali.

  That time would undoubtedly come, but until then I was Sparrow and I had Sparrow’s life to lead.

  Snipe and I resumed where we had left off. Shortly afterward, Pipit moved back to Crow’s compartment. To Pipit’s dismay, Loon soon followed. Ibis paired off with a young woman named Kestrel in Maintenance, though Loon visited her more often than friendship required and I guessed they had remained casual lovers.

  I would like to say we all lived happily ever after, but happiness is hardly a constant in one’s life. The unexpected is.

  And part of the unexpected was that while Snipe and I were close, I always sensed a thin barrier between us but could never determine its cause.

  ****

  For Ophelia, I had been her link to Hamlet, a constant reminder of him—until that sleep period when I tried to take his place and she finally realized Hamlet was gone for good.

  I had awakened in Ophelia the memories of a Hamlet she had been trying to forget. What I hadn’t known, what my dreams had failed to tell me, was that Hamlet and Tybalt had competed for Ophelia and Tybalt had lost. After Hamlet had been flatlined, somebody who looked like him had taken his place. There was no way I could ever be Hamlet, though Ophelia might have had hopes until that moment when she awoke to discover an impostor lying beside her.

  Afterward, I caught her looking at Tybalt with eyes suddenly soft with speculation. He had once wanted to partner with her, and he had also been Hamlet’s best friend. There was little time for romance now, but Tybalt and Ophelia made the mo
st of it. Love softened Ophelia’s personality, her figure thinned, and her features lost their sharpness. Tybalt in turn seemed younger and less dour, more concerned with his appearance and less likely to make a show of favoring his crippled leg. He trimmed his moustache, darkened his beard, and walked around the gravity-plus gymnasium with only a trace of a limp.

  A dozen time periods after they had found each other, both seemed edgy and distracted. Their match had been made with more enthusiasm than thought, something apparent even to them though they hadn’t wanted to admit it. Ophelia was one of the leaders of the would-be mutiny and Tybalt was one of the Captain’s staunchest supporters. Even at the beginning, I knew that each would try to convert the other despite whatever promises they made to never discuss it.

  One time period Tybalt asked me to meet him after shift. I reluctantly agreed, knowing what he wanted to discuss. His compartment was as Spartan as any other, with a tiny locker, a hammock, some string paintings on the bulkheads, and half a dozen technical manuals on a small shelf. I took off my eye mask, curious to see the fantasy in which Tybalt lived, and was surprised when the compartment remained unchanged.

  I guessed what had happened and said, “Can you restore the falsie?”

  He shrugged and thumbed the palm terminal. A moment later I felt like gasping for breath. Wisps of fog swirled about my head, and if the falsie had been reality I would have been choking on methane. I was standing in a shallow valley of jumbled rock, the reddish sun low in the sky.

  Then the fog lifted and I could see the alien ship that had crashed into a mountainside a kilometer or so away. It was bowed in the middle, a gigantic boomerang. It was a corroded olive green and there were obvious hatchways in the side through which nothing human had ever passed.

  It was huge—half a kilometer from one end to the other. There were no signs of life and no sound except the rasping of the wind, Tybalt had picked that one moment of quiet just before the cannons speak or a voice cries “Charge!” or the rockets start falling.

  The whole scene lay just outside the window of what had been Tybalt’s compartment and was now his fort. At any moment lobster men with red chitin for skin would crawl out of the alien ship and lope toward the bunker where a brave Tybalt would blast them to kingdom come.

  It was a strange mix of fantasy and pathos. If he had his way, Tybalt would never meet death via Reduction; he would die facing an enemy.

  Then the falsie shifted and I was inside a bunker, looking at a desperate Tybalt who stared at me from the haven of his hammock.

  I was torn between cynicism and compassion—part of me wanted to laugh and another felt like crying. I had come a long way since Tybalt had entertained me with his stories of exploration and battles with unseen enemies.

  “Do you think there’s anything out there, Sparrow?”

  I had done as much research as possible but I guessed that Tybalt had as well. All I could offer were opinions and mine weren’t necessarily superior to his.

  “What do you think, Tybalt?”

  “I know the possibilities. And I know what I saw.”

  He had seen what he had desperately wanted to see, but I could never convince him of that.

  “And Ophelia doesn’t believe in what you saw.”

  “We argued. We both knew we would. Ophelia… doesn’t believe in anything.”

  He was talking to me as if I were a Senior and I wondered if he was talking to Sparrow or to Hamlet. Ophelia was frank and outspoken and I was convinced she was right. But she was going to pay a price for being right and she was going to make Tybalt pay one, too.

  “You told me that about Ophelia months ago,” I reminded him.

  He drifted over to the bunker window and stared out at the landscape and the ship beyond. “They wouldn’t have sent us on a useless mission,” he said slowly. “Back on Earth, they must have had some reason for believing.”

  They’d had a thousand reasons, I thought. And every one of them had proved false.

  I let him talk himself out. At the end, he said sadly: “I don’t think Snipe believes, either.”

  I found out later that she, too, had been trying to convince him the galaxy was barren. Snipe had yet to learn that some arguments have no winners, only losers.

  I floated up beside him and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “You saw what you saw,” I said gently, and once again saved my life.

  ****

  Whatever doubts Tybalt may have had, he resolved—but at a cost. Ophelia and he grew distant and barely spoke. Tybalt took it out on the rest of us by staging drills on the hangar deck. It was hand-to-hand combat no matter how green our faces or how reluctant most of us were to hurt each other. Outside of his training zone, we could believe whatever we wanted, but when we were taking orders from him, we would believe as he did. Somewhere in the universe there were enemy aliens and if we ever met them, we would be prepared.

  In his enthusiasm and devotion to what he considered his duty, Tybalt made the one mistake a commanding officer should never make: He lost touch with his troops. From hand-to-hand we went to simple weapons—pellet guns. It was Tybalt’s idea to have some of the programmers create projections of alien life forms to use as target practice. When struck by the laser-aiming aid on the gun, the aliens promptly died in various realistic ways, all of them excessively gory.

  Hawk, Loon, and I, plus Tern and Falcon, both from Maintenance, were scheduled to try out the new forms of target practice that Tybalt had developed. Tern was first. He turned out to be an excellent marksman, hitting the spidery alien directly in its lumpy forehead.

  The head and face instantly disappeared in an explosion of shattered bone and a spray of red mist. A second later Tern’s stomach self-destructed and for minutes afterward the rest of us devoted ourselves to cleaning up the area with whatever wipes we could find.

  Tybalt stared at Tern with an amazement that quickly turned to anger and disgust.

  “You’re on report!” he snapped. Then: “You’re up next, Loon.”

  “I think Tern killed it,” Loon said, straight-faced. He made no move toward the firing position and the rest of us tried to smother our laughter.

  Tybalt fingered the palm terminal and another alien suddenly appeared on top of a dune a hundred feet away.

  “He didn’t kill this one.”

  “If he saw what happened to his friend, maybe he’ll go away.” Loon suddenly sounded timid and a little frightened. He had realized his jokes weren’t going to make the projection disappear.

  “Get into position, Loon.”

  “No.” This time Loon’s voice had more strength to it, though his face was white with strain.

  “Now!” Tybalt bellowed.

  Loon threw the pellet gun away and we watched, astonished, as it drifted toward the far bulkhead.

  “I won’t destroy anything living,” Loon said flatly.

  Tybalt looked uncertain of what to do.

  “All right, stand down, Loon—you’re on report to the Captain. Hawk, you’re next.”

  Hawk had to clear his throat twice before he finally managed to squeak: “I won’t do it.” Another pellet gun sailed toward the bulkhead.

  Tybalt placed his hands on his hips and glared. “Any of the rest of you have the courage?”

  None of us moved.

  “What if it shot at you first?” Tybalt asked slowly.

  There was more puzzlement than anger in his voice and I felt sorry for him. He had failed to see what was coming even though he had been getting signals ever since the drill started.

  Hawk blanched and cleared his throat a dozen times but the words wouldn’t come. It was a new idea to him, one he had never considered before.

  “It’s only a projection,” Tybalt urged. “It’s not really alive—you know that.”

  “It’s a symbol of something that’s alive,” Hawk finally said, trying to explain the unexplainable to himself as well as to Tybalt. “The difference… isn’t that great.”

/>   Tybalt stared at us for a full minute and we stared back with all the fascination that a bird is supposed to feel for a snake. Finally he said, “You’re dismissed,” and went to retrieve the guns.

  I was the last one to the hatch, pausing when I heard Tybalt behind me.

  “Ophelia and I could have saved ourselves the arguments. There isn’t going to be any mutiny, Sparrow—they’ll never fight.”

  It was one of the few times when I thought Tybalt was absolutely right.

  Chapter 19

  None of us slept the last two time periods before our first landing on Aquinas II. We were ten thousand kilometers out and the planet was a swollen yellow-brown globe. To the eye, it was featureless except for an occasional streak of dirty yellow or black in the smog that hid its surface. But our instruments had penetrated the veil; we knew that there were mountains of rock and water ice, as well as oceans of methane, and that methane snow fell on methane ice caps.

  On the one hand, the chances of life seemed promising but on the other, the intense cold ruled against it. Gravity was a little more than Earth normal, the terrain was rough, the atmosphere heavy and thick. Judging by the turbulent cloud cover, there were strong surface winds. Visibility would be limited and working in the high winds dangerous.

  Despite the cold and the too-recent memory of the cautionary projections, the primordial soup presented possibilities. It was remarkable how we concentrated on them and ignored the dangers. Once we had landed, who would be the first to find life? Even the would-be mutineers were caught up in the lottery.

  During the sleep period before the landing, we clustered in the various working spaces or in the compartments of friends. Close to a hundred crew members would be going down. My team included Hawk, Eagle, Crow, and Snipe. Ophelia and Portia were the Seniors in command. Loon, Thrush, and Heron had been assigned to the team commanded by Tybalt and Quince.