“The right one, of course. Treason. I worked with Noah, the Captain must have guessed that—Noah and I were very close when we were younger. I never thought the arguments between us were convincing but I had to risk it. We needed somebody who could establish a rapport with Kusaka.”
He cocked his head.
“I understand you’re to succeed me. Dangerous job, Sparrow, especially for you. He’s not an easy man to know. Or like.”
He wrapped his flabby arms around his chest, trying to shield himself from the compartment chill. He glanced at the mist-filled chamber; I guessed it would be warm and comfortable once inside and he would merely slip away.
“There’s nothing I can say?” I asked, feeling miserable. This was an entirely new and likable Abel and I would know him for only a few minutes.
“Any way of dying is unpleasant, Sparrow, but the chamber is less unpleasant than most. And I’ll still be with you.” He deliberately made a joke of it. “Look for me at breakfast.”
I thought of how much skill it must have taken to be humble and obsequious before the Captain and then protect what little influence he had acquired by being antagonistic to the crew. He had sacrificed any chance of making friends and in the end was willing to sacrifice his life as well.
“You were the greatest actor on board,” I said. I meant it in a light vein but there was a note of sincerity to it that he found flattering.
“Why, thank you, Sparrow—that’s nice of you to say.”
He floated over to the chamber and tentatively dabbled a hand in the mist.
“What happens?” I asked, curious.
He was suddenly reticent.
“It’s painless for me but I wouldn’t watch if I were you.”
I had to ask.
“You never told the Captain.”
“Of your awareness? No, of course not.”
The hand he had put in the mist now looked pale, almost translucent. I began to sweat, despite the chill of the compartment.
“Why hasn’t anybody ever told me about myself?”
His expression became serious.
“We wanted you to remember, but at your own speed. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to recall all your lifetimes at once? A hundred different people live inside you, Sparrow. You’d have to pick one as the dominant personality and I imagine the others would object.”
I had thought about that once before but didn’t want to worry about it now.
“You ran the mutiny?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“Hardly. As much as anybody could be said to run it, I suppose it’s been run by you. You’re the oldest living member, you’ve been one from the very beginning.”
He noticed the stricken expression on my face and hastened to reassure me.
“That’s only in a matter of speaking, Sparrow. Over the years, you’ve been the heart and soul of it but you’ve never had much of a role in the planning from generation to generation.” His voice turned grim. “You’ve always been a member, but never for very long.”
I felt uneasy.
“That’s the trigger for flatlining, isn’t it? When the Captain finds out.”
He nodded. “One of them. Usually you’re not urged to join unless it looks as if you’ve had a breakthrough, as if you might remember something important. And then you have to be prepared. We were in a hurry this time because of the Dark…”
His voice trailed off. Neither of us had anything more to say to each other.
“Don’t look so glum, Sparrow—there’s no point to me starring in a trial for the Captain. To be honest, he’s always frightened me. He’s too inventive when it comes to ways of dying.”
He thrust a foot into the swirling mist.
“I’ve said my good-byes to Huldah but give my love to Ophelia. Just the way it sounds. Old men have their fantasies, too.”
He stepped into the chamber and let the thick mist wrap around him like a blanket. I had a glimpse of a peaceful face just before he made his final request.
“Privacy, Sparrow.”
I turned my back, undogged the hatch and slipped out. On my return to Exploration I noticed Banquo hurrying through the corridors leading to the lower levels.
But Abel could rest easy. Banquo would arrive much too late.
****
There were no drills now, no demands for data, no expectations of a new planetary landing in another two years or five. There wouldn’t be another one for generations. The sea of blackness ahead of us steadily expanded with the familiar constellations slipping to our rear.
The uneasiness on board began to grow again. The birth allotments had been only a brief respite from the growing fear of the Dark. Ophelia and the other members of our cell wondered when the Captain would realize that if the crew couldn’t be bought, it might be intimidated. There would be another flurry of excitement nine months in the future when the birth mothers delivered, and after that…
After that, there would be no future, and we could expect more crew members to choose to die as Judah had.
But meanwhile Crow and I spent more time on the hangar deck running through the various training projections, this time more for entertainment than for knowledge we would never use. At other times Crow tinkered with the falsie for his compartment, reprogramming the images of the people in the square below and adding more rocket trails to the sky.
Eventually, even that palled. We still held drills but only Portia and Quince were serious about them. The rest of us were halfhearted, especially about the EVA maneuvers. Trainees were increasingly reluctant to go on them and Loon, predictably, was the first to refuse outright.
I could understand why. It was one thing to go into an Outside filled with stars. It was quite another when the only stars were behind the ship and ahead of you was a smothering blackness. Hawk and Eagle were the next to refuse and after that all EVA exercises were canceled.
The mutiny slumbered along, the clandestine meetings shorter and shorter. Originally, there had been the camaraderie of conspiracy, debates about how new members were to be recruited and power seized. It was easy to guess who the new recruits were—they seemed to think their new role required them to couple enthusiastically with as many other would-be mutineers as possible. Then the secret sessions deteriorated into bitching about the Captain and finally to round-robins of complaints about ship life in general.
It was my idea to turn the mutiny into a game, to make it fun as well as good training. I gave our cell a name—the Judah cell—and we drew assignments, the object being to find out as much as we could about the person whose name we drew. How they spent their shifts, what they ate at meals, who they saw in their free time and, if they happened to have a liaison with another crew member, exactly what they did.
Known members of your own cell weren’t excluded, and the sport came when you got up at a meeting and told everything you had found out about a fellow cell member. Frienships were shattered, but only for the moment, and more than once a small bacchanal ensued when all was revealed.
I once drew Snipe’s name but wisely refused to play with her as the quarry. Later I drew Loon’s and reported at great length on his dalliances among the crew, not only with Ibis and her girlfriend but with Swallow and Grouse in Communications and with Crane in Maintenance. I almost—but not quite—felt ashamed when my report left him red-faced with embarrassment, while Crow clutched a nearby hammock and roared with laughter.
The next name I drew as part of the game was a member of another cell—Corin, my team leader in Exploration. Ophelia told me he had been a member of the mutiny long before she and Noah first tried to recruit me. My respect for him as a team leader had grown enormously and we had become friendly, frequently joking on shift or sharing smoke in his office.
I suddenly felt uneasy about my spying. The game had turned serious.
Now I found myself listening more than I talked. I quickly learned the difference between casual listening, when you concentrate
more on what you’re going to say next than on what the other person is telling you, and a professional awareness of content and nuance.
Corin led an unexciting life, vacillating between partnering with Gull in Communications and Raven in Maintenance. He worked out regularly in the gymnasium, though he never seemed able to lose the ridge of fat that circled his waist. He was old crew, not new, which meant he was even more of a mystery to the other members of my cell than he was to me.
His one character flaw wasn’t immediately obvious—he simply took too much interest in crew members whom I knew were mutineers. He listened as carefully to me as I listened to him and was as difficult to follow about the ship as I knew I was. I had no desire for anyone to trace me to the weekly meetings in the cave compartment and it quickly became apparent that Corin also had appointments that he wished no one to know about.
I told what I knew about him at a cell meeting, careful not to draw conclusions. Loon looked bored and said, “Who cares if he has another life?”
But Snipe listened carefully to what I had to say. “Corin’s an accomplished actor. I’ve watched him in a number of historicals. He could be acting now.”
Ophelia frowned. “Those with contacts to other cells, ask for further information on him.”
But on a ship where everybody normally knew everything about everybody else, few seemed to know much about Corin.
During the next dozen time periods, I finally tracked Corin to a remote corridor where he disappeared. The next time I followed him there, I allowed him just enough of a lead so he couldn’t accuse me of stalking him, rounded the corner, and ran into Crow.
I guessed why he was there and asked, “Who did you draw?”
“Banquo.”
We stared at each other, our suspicions confirmed. Both Banquo and Corin had come to this corridor and disappeared, no doubt together. We floated down it, glancing into empty compartments. It was Crow who mustered the courage to barge through the occasional shadow screen pretending he was giddy on smoke, then back out with apologies. Not many compartments were occupied; life was receding from this corridor, and soon it would be abandoned.
I hesitated at the large hatch closing off one of the two vacant tubes that had made up the original Astron.
“It’s sealed,” Crow said, dismissing it. “There’s no life support in the deserted tubes anyway.”
I took his words on faith but tugged halfheartedly at the wheel that secured the hatch, more out of curiosity than in any expectation it would open. It gave and when I pulled harder, the hatch silently turned on its hinges. There was no sudden hiss and while the air felt chilly, it certainly wasn’t the cold of outer space.
“Small leaks,” I guessed. “Given enough time, the pressure would have equalized and there would be enough heat transfer to warm it.”
We peered in, saw nothing, then drifted through, closing the hatch quietly behind us and shivering in the chilly darkness. From one of the compartments there was the flicker of a glow tube and the soft murmur of voices. Only two, I decided after a moment. Corin and Banquo.
“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Crow whispered. I shook my head and he said, “We should get closer.” He started to drift toward the light.
I grabbed his arm. “Maybe they’re almost through.”
He hesitated, then followed me back out the hatch. We had barely made it into the next corridor when we heard Banquo and Corin leave.
“I wonder what they talked about,” Crow mused.
“About us,” I said. “About other cells.” I was angry because in my mind I had built Corin up as something of a replacement for Tybalt. Now I felt like a fool. “He’s a good listener. After this, his cell members will have to be careful what he hears.”
****
Crow and I came back the next time period, eager for a chance to explore. We lingered a moment at the end of the deserted passageway, then slipped unseen through the hatchway into Section Two of the Astron, a primary residence tube that hadn’t been in use for at least five hundred years.
The air was still—I could feel no stray currents against my face—and smelled strange. I suspected it was fresher than the air in the main tube, which was fouled by body odors and the stink of oil. Crow had brought a portable glow lamp and we made our way slowly down the corridor, stopping briefly in the compartment where Banquo had met with Corin. Some threads had adhered to the bulkhead where one of them had bumped into it, and their cling-tites had left faint marks on the oil-and-dust-caked deck.
There wasn’t a great deal to see. When the crew finally deserted Section Two, they hadn’t left much behind. Some lengths of worn tether line; a dirty food tray that somebody had thrown in a corner, the traces of food paste dried to a black scab; a soiled waistcloth; a string tapestry still sealed to one of the bulkheads…
In one compartment, I made a genuine find—a discarded volume of fiction, clinging by its magnetic headband to the underside of a ledge. Its pages crumbled when I opened it and we hurriedly left to avoid breathing the dust. In another, I noticed a terminal pad and drifted over to it.
Crow said, “If it works, you’ll be talking to ghosts.” I shrugged and positioned my palm on the still-resilient pad.
“Let’s see what happens.”
I pressed, and much to my amazement the power light flickered on. The computer in Section Two was a slave to the one in the main tube and drew little power of its own. When the tube had been sealed off, apparently no one had thought to disconnect it. Curious, I retrieved the compartment inventory and turned on the falsie.
We were suddenly surrounded by phantoms, gray buildings that towered into gray clouds overhead, gray storefronts with displays of gray dresses and suits and gray people walking by. There was no color and the forms were insubstantial and wavering; I could see the bulkheads through them and Crow watching me as I worked the pad.
“There’s not enough power,” I said. “Even if there were, it’s not a very imaginative falsie.”
“Street scene,” Crow sniffed, playing the critic. “We’ve become more sophisticated since then.”
But what city? And what street? And why did it seem so familiar?
I flicked it off and we continued down the corridor, pausing briefly in what was left of Section Two’s Hydroponics compartment. The grow lights had been ripped out, probably as spares for those in the main tube, leaving only the metal troughs and the plastic mesh. Some dried roots stuck in the plastic crumbled to powder when I touched them. I shivered, and not from the chill.
Crow was right, there were ghosts all around us.
We drifted through a dozen more empty levels and found nothing. Finally Crow said, “Let’s go back, I’m due on shift in an hour. There’s nothing here.”
I nodded and we retraced our steps. Three levels below the main one, I touched Crow on the shoulder and floated down a short corridor to Section Two Communications, or what was left of it—an example of the Astron’s redundancy. Like the other equipment rooms, this one had been cannibalized, though not completely. The receivers that automatically scanned the cosmic haystack for possible indications of life had been robbed of their chips and wiring. What remained was a terminal pad and a viewing globe. The equipment connected to the globe hadn’t been stripped. I could still access the Section Two computer.
“I’m cold,” Crow said, shivering.
“Give me a minute.”
I powered up the pad, wondering what I should retrieve in the globe, then chose the last dispatch that had been received from Earth. I had seen only the scrawled messages posted every few months or so outside Communications in the main tube. The bubbles of RF information were still spreading out from that remote planet and every now and then we would skim the surface of a faint message.
Crow was clenching his thighs together, a sure sign we couldn’t spend much more time there. He would have to find a waste chute soon but there weren’t any operating ones in this section. And there was no possibility of pissing in a
corner and hoping it would puddle there and stay.
“Look,” I said.
“Damn it,” Crow groaned, and drifted over to see what I was pointing at in the globe. At first it was vague and insubstantial, then the words firmed up and became readable. The message was a religious one and fragmentary at that, in a language that seemed only dimly related to what we spoke on the Astron. There were no scientific references in it at all.
“For Christ’s sake,” Crow said, his bladder temporarily forgotten. “It’s a plea for better crops.”
I retrieved the previous messages and we read about wars and famines, strange plagues and political movements. As I went further back toward Launch there were occasional passing references to the Astron and finally the familiar litany of best wishes and brief messages from the descendants of relatives left behind.
“How many years have gone by?” I asked Crow.
It was an effort for him to break his concentration.
“What?”
“How many years have gone by on Earth? The difference in elapsed time on board ship and back there?”
I hadn’t thought much about time dilation before, but it was vastly important now. We had traveled far enough at high velocities so there would be a substantial difference. The years on Earth would have slipped by much faster than those on board ship.
“Maybe ten thousand—give or take a century or two.”
The ship was a static society; nothing had changed much despite the steady deterioration of the ship itself and the decrease in the size of the crew. But on Earth governments had come and gone, wars had been fought, minor ice ages had covered parts of the Northern Hemisphere, the very continents had drifted another few feet apart.
It struck me that the dispatches we were reading had little in common with those filed over the past few years by the Communications division in the main tube. According to those, nobody had forgotten us, the governments that had combined to send us were still in existence, and there had been a steady stream of exhortations to venture even further into the deeps…
“I can’t hold it any longer,” Crow groaned.
The Dark Beyond the Stars Page 30