Far Beyond the Stars

by Steven Barnes

  Somewhere inside him there was something special. He knew it, and if he just had a chance, he would be able to find it. He knew that, too.

  He was almost out of money, and Jenny had begun complaining that her feet were sore. The other kids were starting to get restless too. They had gone by the Hall of Nations twice, and the exhibit had still been closed. Cooley had managed to find them other things to do, things to fill up their time, but Benny had begun to doubt that Cooley would be able to keep them in good spirits long enough to get them to the exhibition, assuming of course that the exhibition would even open.

  So they were on their way out of the fair, when he convinced them to walk the long blocks necessary to see the Hall of Nations, one last time.

  Complaining and grousing—the fair was an entire small world, it seemed—they went, and much to their surprise, when they got there, it was actually open.

  The Hall of Nations was a long white building—there were actually two of them, on either side of the Lagoon of Nations, a sparkling blue pool that never seemed to stop its shimmering and bubbling. It was near the Court of Peace, and the stepped waterfall of Italy's exhibit. The lagoon itself was eight hundred by four hundred feet and looked big enough to drown Rockefeller Center.

  So. This was where the poorer Nations hung up their shingle, he thought. Not bad, but it would have been wonderful if one of the African nations had a proud pavilion like even Poland had.

  But at least it wasn't represented by a little grass hut, or something. Images of natives capering around a roasting missionary, or Tarzan of the Apes rescuing a blond from a crowd of ravening native savages. That would have been a little much.

  But the inside of the Hall of Nations was tasteful, if rather quiet. There was an exhibit from Yugoslavia, one from Panama, and another from Siam. Cooley led them quickly through it, and back to one of the nooks, where he finally found the exhibit from the Mali Republic.

  It was labeled, simply, "Dogon Artifact."

  There was a curtain across an alcove, and an irregular radiance pulsing from behind it. A withered little black man sat on a stool, looking out at them as if doing a mental count, as if he were hoarding his remaining life energy, waiting for a critical mass of bodies to arrive before beginning his spiel.

  Benny looked at them, and then at a tapestry on one of the walls. Clearly, Mali (wherever that was) had little money to invest. He actually figured that there was a good chance that this little man had expended most of his money just getting here.

  The twelve students slid along a bend, and waited for the curator to begin. Then finally, he stood, and in a very thick accent began to speak.

  "Hello," he said. "I am Ajabwe. I come from Mali in Africa. My people, a great people, are the Dogon." He paused. "The legend says that many years ago my people were visited by a strange folk, who came from another star. It was said that they traveled in search of those who could understand, and that only a very small number of people could understand the gift that they offered. They said that they traveled in search of the few who had this, and when they found it, they would leave one of the Orbs with which they were entrusted. I do not know if the story is true, or how much of it is true—but it is said that these people either represented, or called themselves the Prophets." He looked out at them, and Benny had to admit that his smile was a little unnerving.

  "Perhaps one of you will be a Chosen One." Some of the white people in the audience chuckled, but not impolitely.

  He opened the curtain.

  The light flickered more strongly, and the breath froze in Benny's throat. The object behind the curtain was, simply, beautiful. Waves of blue fire rolled off of it like mist from a chunk of dry ice. The glow grew more and more intense, and he couldn't feel himself breathe, or even really think.

  They rose from the seats and filed past, prevented from approaching the strange shape by a velvet rope. It was, as they had said in the paper, about the size and shape of a large hourglass, thicker through the middle, of course, and that light. That light …

  He stared at it. Benny closed his eyes tightly, as if trying to keep the luminescence from washing through him, but it was of no use. It ignored his eyelids, as if it was radiating directly into his brain.

  Something … something was shifting deep within the orb, and he heard it, and it seemed to speak to him.

  But the words that it said were beyond him. He couldn't quite make them out … they stayed, remained just beyond his reach and his understanding.

  Then he was falling, and falling. The world seemed to open up, and he was lost.

  "Benny?" he heard, but couldn't see anything at all.

  "Benny, are you all right?" It was Jenny. She was calling to him. She was waking him up, and that meant that he must be sleeping and dreaming, but the dream had been so strange. He had had a brief, but brilliant vision that seemed like the Flash Gordon serials he had seen as a boy—only realer. Scary real, as real as the cars rolling down the street. That real.

  Benny opened his eyes, and he saw Jenny and Cassie standing over him and Mr. Cooley, with an expression of genuine concern behind his spectacles.

  "What … what happened?" Benny said groggily.

  "That's what I would like to know," Cooley said.

  Benny sat up, and felt the dizziness begin to recede. He shook his head and realized that the old African man Ajabwe was looking at him, too. Ajabwe, who seemed puzzled, asked: "Who are you, boy?"

  "Benny Russell?" Benny said.

  "Well, Benny Russell, I think that the gem has spoken to you."

  "What?"

  "It happened once before. A tall man, in robes. He said that he was a preacher. Are you a preacher?"

  "No," Benny said, confused.

  "I think that perhaps you are a leader in some way. The gem has spoken to you." He said this last as if it answered all questions.

  Benny rose unsteadily to his feet. The little man helped him up. Ajabwe's skin was warm and dry. Despite Benny's initial unease, he could not dislike this man.

  "You come back," the little old man said. "You come back and see me, and the stone—again."

  There was no answer that Benny could make, except to nod his head dumbly. He really couldn't do anything other than agree.

  The trip back to Harlem was uneventful. The entire group seemed to be somewhat subdued, perhaps by what had happened at the fair, perhaps something else. They seemed both solicitous of Benny and simultaneously rather wary of him. He couldn't figure it out—he had just collapsed, not displayed the symptoms of some terrible, infectious disease.

  "Why are they treating me like that?" he finally asked Cooley.

  "Like what?"

  "Like I'm Typhoid Mary or something? It's kind of spooky."

  Cooley gazed at him for a long moment before answering. "It probably has something to do with the way you were talking," he said.

  "Talking? I don't know what you mean."

  Cooley just gazed at him, and didn't say anything else.

  Jenny rested back against her seat, her eyes closed, long dark lashes quivering slightly.

  Only Cassie was still awake, alert, and watching him. "Cassie?" he asked. "What was that all about?"

  "You were saying things, Benny."

  "What kind of things?"

  She shrugged. "It didn't really make no sense."

  "Then tell me what it was."

  "Well, you were talking about the stars. You were saying that you could see the stars. That's all."

  Benny closed his eyes. The blackness behind them was filled with something that he had never glimpsed before. It was blackness, and a roiling series of clouds, and exploding stars, and out among them, men and women and other things. Creatures. But not monsters. Machines. Holes in space. He suddenly felt a lifting and turning within himself, a humming, as if he had touched some primal dynamo at the very core of creation.

  He opened his eyes again. The train still made its rickety way along the track. "Cass?" he said softly.
>
  "Yeah?" For a moment her tough-girl exterior had cracked and he saw something underneath it. And then …

  He saw not Cass, but Cassie. She was grown up and beautiful. And she knew about makeup and dressing, and she held her arms out to him, and—

  He felt something hot boiling within his blood, and he shook his head quickly. What the hell had that vision been about? He was imagining that he saw Cass, not as she was, but as she might be in another ten or fifteen years. That was crazy.

  She held his hand. "Yes? Was there something?"

  He shook his head. "No." He paused and then realized that that was a lie. "Cassie," he said. "When we were in the tent, didn't you see anything at all?"

  "Nothing," she said. And then settled her head back against the seat. Without opening her eyes she said, "Nothing at all."

  SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER 14

  1953

  TIME PASSED, days which were for Benny Russell among the best he had ever known. Wrapped in a cocoon of words, of images, of sounds and sensations that no one on Earth could create or understand but him, he wrote and wrote and wrote. Never had the words flowed so smoothly, so naturally, until it seemed that the story was telling itself to him, until it seemed that his fingers were just an electrical conduit and that through them flowed something which was not from Benny Russell, but of him.

  He felt like a painter might, who merely scraped primer off a canvas to find a masterpiece underneath. It was not work. It was something else.

  Celebration, perhaps.

  He needed little sleep, little food. He spurned the bed and simply drowsed for a few minutes at his desk, lost in the world that unfolded itself to him.

  Oh, in earlier stories he had written about a strange and strangely heuristic universe of the future, filled with creatures that had names vaguely familiar and simultaneously strange. He had written of adventures on far planets and of several tales of a Captain named Kirk who, bolder than most, went into the jaws of danger beside his crew, buckling every swash in sight. When readers complained that a real captain wouldn't place himself in such constant danger, he made a shift, wrote of another starship, where the captain and the captain's primary officer shared responsibility, and these stories found an even greater audience.

  And he had, upon occasion, slipped in a man or woman of his own skin color. A communications officer. A blind ensign. Even a wise woman of seemingly endless empathy. And he loved those scenes. But always, and ever, the primary responsibilities lay with those white people who captained the ship.

  Now, for the very first time, he was writing a tale about a man who looked like him, and the difference was startling. He had loved Kirk, and Picard—but he was Sisko. He could feel this man's pain, he could share his dreams. Sisko's triumphs and struggles called to the very deepest parts of Benny, made him consider every word in a manner he had never done before, made him strive to have every action, every thought and sensation not just honest but unique to both character and situation.

  This was not just the best work he had ever done.

  This was the work he had been born to do, and he knew it.

  And soon, so would the entire world.

  Sometime on the fifth day, Benny Russell roused himself from a near-somnambulant state and stared at the paper. At some point during the night, only half-aware, he had written "the end" in lowercase letters at the bottom of the page, rolled the sheet out of the typewriter, then simply lay his head in his arms and fallen into unconsciousness. After perhaps five hours of sleep in that fashion, he had awakened, and zombie-walked to his bed, where he fell upon it and slept like the dead. All day and into the following evening he slept.

  He arose that second night, and levered himself up. Certainly he had just had a dream. Certainly he hadn't really worked as he imagined he had. Hadn't he actually blistered his way through almost a hundred pages of paper in half that many hours?

  But then what was that neat stack of paper sitting beside his typewriter?

  It was a thick stack, and he regarded it with almost superstitious awe, not quite certain how to approach it. He brewed his coffee with one eye on the paper as if it might disappear if he blinked too hard or turned away.

  He sat and watched the paper, still not quite certain what to think, wondering if gremlins might have appeared in the middle of the night, unbidden, to perform this awesome task. The coffee boiled, and at last he poured himself a cup, then sat by the window and drank it slowly, listening to the sound of cars down outside his window. Finally, after almost ten more minutes had passed, he picked up the first page and began to read.

  Eva's Kitchen was a coffee shop on the corner of Lenox and 135th. It had been there for twenty years, serving up its steady diet of strong coffee and tender burgers, grilled lovingly by the big, soft woman who had owned it ever since buying it from its original owner. Rumor said that Eva had been a crackerjack clarinet player—some said that she had played with the Duke himself—until a fight, over a man of course, had smashed her mouth and ruined her embouchure.

  The rumor went further to say that the other woman had ended up in the morgue. Slinging hash, in comparison, seemed a good deal.

  In her prime, Big Eva Cunningham had been a sloe-eyed Mississippi beauty who even close to sixty years old (as she simply had to be), still had the ability to turn heads and draw wolf whistles on the occasions when she exposed a few inches of those fine brown legs.

  Benny's mouth began to water when Eva's Kitchen came into view, anticipating his favorite breakfast, and even more, anticipating a conversation with the woman who would serve it. He felt tired—in some ways more fatigued than he could remember feeling, but in others, he felt better than he had in years.

  In a thick manila envelope beneath his right arm, he held his masterwork, and life just didn't get much better than that.

  The restaurant was busy, as it always was, but he saw an empty seat at the counter and took it swiftly and quietly, aware that the counter girl had yet to spot him.

  This was bliss. He had the opportunity to watch the waitress without her awareness, an opportunity to enjoy the simple sight and sound of her, and he always reveled in that.

  She was five foot eight of brown sugar, with the sweetest hips imaginable, and legs that had been created on a sex fiend's lathe. Her hair was up, and fairly straight. He always felt a bit of irritation at this. It was the style, but she spent too many hours straightening her hair. She had "good" hair, and she enjoyed taking advantage of that and enjoyed flaunting it at every opportunity.

  She was a brown-skinned woman, generous of smile and laughter, simple in her tastes, loyal and warmhearted. And, he knew, she loved him.

  If he was very, very lucky, he would find his way to loving her as well, given time. He hoped so. A woman like this wouldn't wait forever.

  "Hey, Baby," she said, finally spotting him. "Have a seat." She reached across the counter, and took his hand. "The usual?"

  He shook his head negative. "How about scrambling the eggs today, Cassie?"

  As he watched her, that odd feeling came over him again. Suddenly, the rest of the grill seemed to disappear, and he saw her standing there in a jumpsuit of sorts, obviously a product of the same era he had described in his story. She was the same, but different. No more beautiful . . . perhaps more self-confident. And her name was …

  Kasidy Yates

  She was the woman who had stolen Benjamin Sisko's heart. He smiled to himself, slightly. The character of Kasidy Yates had yet to appear in his story, but he knew that after he sold this one, there would be another, and then another, and that Sisko would eventually meet Kasidy Yates, and that they would fall in love.

  "My," she said. "Aren't we feeling adventurous."

  She poured him a cup of coffee. He was simply bursting to give her his news. Finally he extracted the envelope from beneath his arm, slapping it on the counter in front of him. "It's done," he said proudly.

  "What is it?" Her eyes were gentle, unmocking, gen
uinely curious.

  "Only the best story I've ever written."

  She kissed him with a smile. "That's great, baby," she said. "I got some good news, too." She leaned forward, placing one of her hands over his. She looked him in the eye and when she spoke, it was with great sincerity.

  "I talked to Mrs. Jackson last night," she said. "She's serious about retiring in the next couple years. I asked her about selling this place to us and she said she'd be willing." She was almost bubbling with the news and he knew why. Eva's Kitchen meant security. It meant a future. And by sharing this news with him, he realized what she was actually saying.

  He cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Cassie, we've been over this. I have a job. I'm a writer."

  The warmth in her expression never flagged. God, this was a good woman, and they had known each other all their lives. "And how much money have you earned doing that?"

  He turned his palms up. "I've only been working at it for a few years."

  Her smile flattened slightly. "A few years? More like fifteen, if you count all those stories you wrote in the Navy."

  He shrugged. "That was amateur stuff."

  For just these moments, she had forgotten that there were other customers in the shop. Her expression was all love, all understanding. It reminded him of his mother's, and that, somehow, was the worst thing of all. "Baby," she said, "Neither one of us is getting any younger. Don't you see? This is our chance. We can make some money. Get married. You're always writing about the future—well, look around—this is our future."

  She meant that kindly, lovingly, but it was difficult for Benny to take it in that spirit. He looked around and saw the customers. They were the same ones he had seen here in Eva's on and off for the past ten years. There was the fat truck driver over there, having his morning coffee, and Ozzie, who ran the barber shop just behind him. A couple of local churchwomen, probably having breakfast before attending one function meeting or another, and a few of the girls who worked sewing clothes over a couple of blocks out.