Far Beyond the Stars

by Steven Barnes

  He understood the world he lived in, knew the stoops and streets of Harlem. He knew that in time he would take his place, would run numbers, make book—or perhaps he would finally find the spark of magic in his piano-playing, and maybe be able to make a living there.

  But for the most part, he could feel that he was … well, waiting for something. That there was some fate for him, some destiny for a skinny little Negro boy, something that he could not, as yet, dream of.

  It was impossible to believe that this thing, whatever it was, could hold any answers for him. And yet … and yet …

  He knew that there was a part of him that believed just that.

  Just that.

  He brushed the curtain aside, and gazed at it.

  Looked at this closely, the object seemed more as if it had been made out of glass. It didn't hum. It didn't glow, and he felt foolish at first to have squandered his hard-earned money, to have thought that there could possibly be anything unusual or great about this odd thing.

  But …

  He reached out to touch it—

  SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER

  25

  BENNY GASPED. It seemed that he was standing in the middle of a pool of water, only he was somehow sideways to the surface, and it reflected his face. There was more than one of him, and in fact, at this moment there seemed to be an infinite string of Bennys. One was dressed in the kind of twenties hipster clothes he had seen in his father's closet, and he wondered at that. And there was one dressed in a very conservative suit—better than anything Benny owned. But this Benny's head was bowed, his face heavily lined, as if the weight of the world hung on his bony shoulders. Strangely, he intuited that this Benny, this past Benny, was no older than he. And there was a Benny before that. A barefoot Benny wearing the clothes of a farmer. And then, before that, there was a Benny who wore the chains of a slave.

  His heart was thumping so fast that he thought it would burst out of his chest. He wanted to scream, but no words would emerge from his throat.

  Several Bennys were slaves. One wore the mark of the lash over his naked, muscular chest. One had had an eye burned out. Some seemed healthy and fit, but their faces were hooded, guarded, and the flame of awareness was almost extinguished.

  And he saw flashes of their lives—hard work, generations of thankless labor, generations who had suffered long years of deprivation in the service of men who considered them animals, who could buy or sell them, could force them to mate as they chose, could take their wives and children and sell them at their pleasure.

  The sheer oppressive weight of it was almost more than he could bear. He could feel the pressure crushing him down, breaking him down so that there was almost no strength to push back with, nothing inside him to say Yes! I am a human being, the same as you.

  He saw the cost of that, and felt what these men felt, knew that what they had endured was almost beyond his reckoning, and he cried out for relief, and release.

  He saw an even earlier Benny, one who crossed the ocean in chains, one surrounded by filth and vomit, in brotherhood with the miserable chained creatures around him, stolen from their land and shipped to the other side of the world to toil in anguish. Benny, in some disconnected part of himself, realized that he had sagged to his knees, and if he could have broken the connection between himself and the gem, he would have.

  But it went further still …

  Further into pain, into shame, into degradation, until he thought that he could not bear even one more moment of this, until he was certain he would die—

  Then suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, there was peace.

  Benny was floating now, above another scene. It was not idyllic, no. It was a world of work, and sometimes danger. But he was tilling a field in a green land—hard work, but the cattle he herded were his cattle, and the fruit of his labors belonged to him. There were children—he had children?—and he realized that in this land, at seventeen, he was already a man, a young warrior, who had proven himself and taken a wife.

  He watched her walk to him, bringing him a bowl of some kind of grain, mixed with sliced bananas. Her face was round and lovely, somehow different from the faces of Negro women in America. Her eyes were bright and filled with mischief, and on her head she wore a hat made of some kind of bright, folded cloth. Two small children were with her, and he understood that these were his children. The scene continued to play out, showing moments from this man's, this Benny's life. Walking to market. Harvesting. Celebrating. In what might have been moments, he experienced the totality of this Benny's existence. And then, on a day when the sun hid in shame behind treacherous clouds, he watched as men—black men—burst from behind bushes and captured this Benny, and his wife. His fleeing children were ignored.

  He and his woman were shackled, and carried to ships, to be handed to white men, who paid the black ones in guns.

  Benny lay curled on the ground, sobbing. Black men had stolen him? It was for their power that he had lost his freedom, his lands, his woman, his children?

  If this was true, then there was nothing but to hate all of humanity. There was no one, nothing to love in all the world. He was in a dark and lonely cave, and as far as he was concerned, could stay there for the rest of his life.

  It was almost too painful to watch the earlier Bennys' lives unfold. These were men who worked, hunted, crafted, loved, fought and died as free men, never dreaming of the fate which lay ahead of them.

  And what might they have thought, what might they have done if they had known that avaricious enemies would sail across the ocean to claim them, to haul them away?

  Would they have thought themselves inferior? Would they have feared? Would they have thought themselves animals? Would they have hated, railed against the elements, cursed their gods?

  Benny didn't know, because life for these men was untainted with the shadow of slavery, was without the slightest awareness of the tragedy to come.

  They were unaware of their "inferiority," if that was what it was that made them vulnerable to the monsters from across the sea. They were too busy loving their children and wives, tilling their land, raising their cattle, fishing their seas.

  Benny wept.

  The line of eternal Bennys stretched further and further back, their days a blur, and all the same, ultimately …

  Until one day …

  A Benny, many generations back, stood casting his nets from the shore. He was older than many of the other Bennys, but beneath the beard it was clearly the same man, with a lean, muscular body, and the carriage of a king.

  Lightning split the sky above him, and the clouds boiled with flame. Benny covered his face. He cowered as he watched the ocean turn crimson.

  Then something—a streak of fire unlike any lightning he had ever seen, screamed down out of the sky and struck the water. Where it struck, the water churned and steamed.

  Benny stood at the shore line, watching the display. Flame capered upon the waves, perhaps half a mile offshore, too far to swim. It was as terrifying as anything he had ever seen, but …

  Something in the back of Benny's mind screamed at him.

  There was some creature in pain out there, out beyond the surf, and without knowing what he was doing or entirely why he was doing it, Benny took his boat and began to paddle out through the surf. Something liquid flamed along the waves in little pools, and Benny was afraid that the boat would catch fire, but he maneuvered through the maze. As he came closer, he saw what seemed to be a big boat made of metal, something still incalescent and boiling the water around it.

  The side of it opened, and a man—or something that looked vaguely like a man—crawled out, its skin searing where it touched the side of the vessel. Strapped to its back was a sack of some kind. It tried to make it to the water but strength failed it and it lay on one of the metal protrusions, the flames lapping at it terribly.

  A voice—one which sounded between his ears rather than in them, screamed in agony.

  W
ithout understanding why, Benny dove from his boat, and swam in powerful strokes through the blazing ocean. Flame seared his hair, and he swallowed water as he dove to avoid burning. He was afraid, longed to turn back, but he kept hearing that voice in his head, kept hearing the call of a creature, different from him, but not so different that it could not feel pain, not fear death—crying for help.

  He reached it, and burned his own arms pulling it down the metal wing. It opened its eyes and looked at him, and they were so soft and deep, so filled with pain and fear, and yet with a kind of peace that Benny would carry with him always.

  He pulled the creature back to his canoe and began to paddle toward land.

  By the time Benny got to the beach, the strange metal ship had vanished beneath the waves.

  The man—if man it was, was barely breathing. His thin, fleshy lips pulled back from strange irregular teeth, its bloated abdomen sighed and bellowed as if it were trying to give birth. It clutched at Benny's hand, as if afraid to let him go. Again he met its eyes. And it spoke to him:

  I come from far away, it said. From a star called—

  (And here the star creature said something which made no sense. Benny, and then-Benny, interpreted it as a symbolic maze of distances and vectors, things which had to do with degrees of arc and gulfs light might cross over a span of years. And another part of Benny, one which was yet to be born, a future Benny said to him that the star the creature referred to was called Sirius.)

  I was given a gift, one that I should have shared with my people. Instead, I fled with it, intending to sell it. I traded with the wrong . . .

  (And here there was an image that Benny couldn't quite make out. Pirates? Thieves? Something dangerous, something deadly. Something that would search for what had eluded it.)

  I escaped them, but they damaged my ship. They cannot trace me here, but they will come one day. They will find your world. They will take everything.

  The little creature seemed to be expending its final strength: it shucked the backpack and handed it to Benny. He looked inside and nearly fainted.

  It was like a gem, twice the size of his fists, narrow in the middle and broad at either end. It glittered as he held it.

  I thank you for trying to save me, the little creature said. My sins could not be escaped. This is yours now—yours and your children's.

  The little creature reached out and with one nail, cut a little scratch in Benny's hand. He tried to jerk back, but with sudden, surprising strength, it held his arm, and held the wound over the surface of the gem.

  Shocked, frightened, and surprised, Benny was also amazed. Where his blood touched the surface of the gem, the fluid didn't slide off, but was rather absorbed. The gem turned yellow, and then red, and then the purest white he had ever seen. It seemed to sing to him.

  It is yours now, the little creature said. Use it well. Do not be greedy.

  And with that, it closed its eyes, and died.

  Benny stood there on the beach, gazing out over the steaming, burning ocean, holding the gem in his hands. He knew that he would bury the little creature, and then travel the miles to his village, where tonight, at the joining fire, he would tell them of a gift brought from the stars.

  SHUFFLE

  CHAPTER

  26

  BENNY LAY ON the exhibition hall floor, near insanity by now. He was curled upon his side, gibbering, the visions more than his mind could bear. Because now they flashed forward, back through all of the generations, and to the slavery, and through those generations, and through emancipation, through those hard years, to the present—and then—

  Oh, dear God, and then—

  Into his future. There was a Benny who graduated college, and then another who amassed a fortune selling hair pomade. A Benny who wasted his life with drugs, followed by one who saved lives and sacrificed his own as a firefighter.

  And there followed a string of Bennys who were dedicated to service, each in a more advanced and enlightened world. A Benny who lived to see a Negro President. A Benny—

  God! This was the Twenty-first century!

  Who saw men and women living on the moon, who saw the eradication of poverty and hunger on Earth, who saw man spreading out to the stars—

  The stars.

  And a Benny who was a leader of men, a maker of history, one who strode those stars, one who would become a legend—

  And that was when he awoke, screaming.

  Benny remembered bursting from the Hall of Nations, remembered men trying to stop him, remembered confusion, fear, too many worlds, too many Bennys exploding through his mind. Remembered being completely incapable of stopping the visions.

  He felt feverish, and barely remembered finding his way back to the train station, barely recalled dropping in his money, or the ride back to Harlem.

  All he could think of was the stars.

  Somehow, he managed to make it back to the house he shared with his aunt. He was having a difficult time remembering what had happened, the fragmentary memories already melting away like night frost before the morning sun.

  He saw no one that he knew along the way—or if he did, he didn't remember that he knew them, or that they might have called out to him, might have seen his zombie-like figure lurching its way through the streets.

  He remembered crawling onto his couch. He recalled vivid, electric dreams of the past, and of the future, and of otherwhen, but couldn't remember what had happened in those dreams. And when he awoke at three in the morning, tossing on the couch, he was no longer certain that he had ever been out to the fair at all.

  Was, in fact, no longer certain of anything.

  And by the time he awoke in the morning, he remembered nothing except that he had gone to the fair and wandered, but until the day he died, he would not remember what he had done, or what he had seen.

  "And you're telling me that this number will hit sometime this week?" the big man said. Benny nodded numbly.

  Big Sid was the local numbers banker. He had run things for years, and was, although a relatively small fish in the overall structure of things, a big man in the neighborhood. His mother and aunt had gone to school with Big Sid, and Sid, a fat, rather unattractive boy even then (judging from pictures) had always coveted his aunt, and while mourning her declining fortunes on the one hand, secretly enjoyed the influence he had gained on the other.

  He drummed his fingers. "And whatchu want me to do, boy?"

  "Sometime in the next week," Benny said calmly, "this number is going to hit, and at six hundred to one, that's good odds even if it took six months to hit, isn't it?" Benny waited, watching the adding machine behind Big Sid's eyes clicking through its paces. After a few more seconds, it came up dollar signs. "But it's just a week. I can't call it closer than that. Then after it does, I want you to help me place some bets," he said. "I'll need you to do that."

  Big Sid smiled and nodded. "Ardelia told me about that freak number you came up with. Got her a nice little pot of change. But you're right—if you do it again, we got us a little problem. At six hundred to one, it would be easier to kill your sorry black behind than pay you off, if the payoff is too high. We'll have to come up with something else."

  Ardelia leaned forward. "But we can do it?"

  "Ooh, yes." His little eyes gleamed greedily. "There are always ways."

  He looked at Benny as if he wanted to eat him up utterly. "You just wait a couple days, and if you hit the number again, Big Sid, he's going to take good care of you. Best believe it."

  Benny and Ardelia left the parlor, and he felt a small black cloud pulsing behind his eyes. Don't be greedy, it said.

  "Benny?" she asked, studying him with concern. "Are you all right?"

  He nodded. "I think I just need to be by myself for a while."

  Ardelia looked almost panicked but she also realized that she couldn't dissuade him. "All right, but—you take care of yourself."

  He waved her off and walked down to the youth center.

&nb
sp; The kids there stared at him, and a couple of them started to walk away. He was wondering what the hell that was all about, when Cass approached him. "Willie's ticked off big time," she said. "I think that you should lay low."

  "Why?" he asked, his head still spinning.

  "You said he was going to lose, and he lost. You said he was going to twist his ankle, and he did."

  Benny almost giggled, but managed to repress it. "Then I guess you're right—I'd better go."

  He had turned around and headed toward the door when a voice boomed out: "Where do you think you're going, punk?" The voice, beyond any doubt, was Willie. Worse, his entire coterie accompanied him.

  Worse still, Jenny was there. She pulled at Willie's arm, tugging him back out toward the street. "Willie, she said, "don't do this."

  "Little punk jinxed me," Willie said. "Put some kinda hoodoo into my head. How else you explain fouling out the way I did? Twisting my ankle chasing a damned grounder?"

  He stalked toward Benny, and seemed to fill up the entire room. "I'm going to get you, Benny," he said. "Maybe not here today, but you'd better keep looking over your shoulder—"

  Another voice came from behind them. "Wait a minute, boys—let's not have that." It was Cooley, wearing gray athletic sweats and resembling a stork even more than usual. "If there has to be a fight, let's have it right here, in the center, with some rules, all right?"

  Benny thought that over. They could fight here, and he would get creamed, or he could wait for it to happen out in the street, and get creamed there. Except there would be no coach, no one to stop Willie if he decided to stomp him as well. Would he really go that far? Benny couldn't predict it. He just knew that it was a risk he didn't want to take.

  "How about it?" Benny said. "You can beat the crap out of me in an alley, or you can do it right here in front of everyone."

  Willie growled, but then the idea began to appeal to him. "Deal, weasel," he said, and stuck out a huge hand. "You're gonna get yours. You've been asking for it for a long time."