The Dark Beyond the Stars, Page 5

  I had just made up my mind to return when a quarantine sign by one of the shadow screens caught my eye. I hesitated, curious. If somebody was sick, why weren’t they in sick bay? I thought about it a moment longer, but my imagination had been too busy conjuring up mysteries about the ship and curiosity got the best of me. I pushed silently through the screen, all primed to apologize for intruding.

  The compartment was empty. The only signs of occupancy were some loose waistcloths floating in the stray air currents and a few books on the terminal ledge. I glanced at the titles, noting that a page had been turned down in one of them, sacrilege for anything that fragile. I picked it up and read the marked paragraph about life and death. The mere reading of it made me shiver.

  I started to back out, then noticed there were dark stains on the floor mat and on the bulkhead around the waste chute. I ran my fingers lightly over the mat. The stains weren’t quite dry; the mat was still damp to the touch. My fingers came away faintly streaked with red. I shivered and kicked back to the shadow screen.

  I paused again at the hatchway and took off my eye mask. The compartment falsie was far different from that of Crow and Loon’s. I was on a hillside just below the ruins of a castle whose main tower was circled with stone steps. The plain below was bare of grass, the few trees on it stripped of their leaves, their trunks blackened by fire.

  My eyes lingered on the steps around the tower and automatically followed them to the top—or tried to. Something was wrong with the perspective: The steps never quite got there. You went up and up but at the same time you were going down…

  It was a clever optical illusion. I guessed the falsie was meant as a joke, though a dark one. Then I coupled it with the passage in the book and wondered if it had been programmed as a commentary on life itself. For the first time, it occurred to me that there might be crewmen on board with problems more serious than my own.

  I pushed through the shadow screen and returned to my own living quarters, more tired than before and more thoughtful. I read for a few minutes, then turned off the glow tube, my mind preoccupied with the strange compartment, who had lived there, and what had happened to them.

  Just before I fell asleep it struck me as odd that the falsie had been left on and the deck mat was still damp with stains. The only reason I could think of was that an investigation was in progress and the dark-stained mat and the falsie were evidence that somebody had died in that compartment.

  And that they might have had help.

  Chapter 5

  “Sparrow! Wake up, mister!”

  I sat up, startled, reaching in a reflex action for a book, which was now clinging to the metal bulkhead. I had dozed off before I had a chance to put it back on the shelf.

  “Let’s go, Sparrow.”

  I twisted out of the hammock, blinking in the sudden flare of light, and looked over at the man who had called my name. His features were almost lost in the gloom of the shadow screen, though I could make out the chevron of Security stenciled on a bulky shoulder and the bulge of a pellet gun in his waistcloth. I was annoyed at being woken up, I objected to the stink of him, and I resented the obvious pleasure he took in his own authority.

  “The Captain wants to see you.”

  The Captain …

  He shoved me into the corridor while I was still rubbing the sleep out of my eyes. We shot through almost empty passageways, at one point passing through the corridor where I had seen the quarantine sign. It was gone now and I wondered if I had seen it at all, if the strange compartment hadn’t been one of my nightmares.

  I had no time to brood about it. We spiraled upwards through the different decks of the ship, my guide staying close behind and showing me the way by blows to alternate shoulders. On the last level there were two guards outside the hatchway to what I guessed was the bridge. Before I could enter, Abel suddenly filled the opening, and I flattened against a bulkhead. He glanced at me sourly, then sailed down the corridor like a balloon. I didn’t have time to wonder what he was doing there; the next moment I was pushed into the compartment.

  The bridge was enormous. Suspended in the middle was a small halo of light surrounding the figure of a man seated behind a floating control panel. The panel itself encircled a plotting globe of Outside, all of it clinging to an almost invisible arch of crystal that grew from the deck. The globe with its three-dimensional projection of the galaxy was the center of a compartment whose bulkheads were the Astron’s hull and whose windows were huge ports that extended the equivalent of two levels from deck to overhead.

  Outside the ports was a slightly-above-the-ecliptic view of the galaxy, a brilliant fuzzy ball of light, orangish-yellow at its core, surrounded by spiral arms of cloudy blue flecked with bright dots of red and white and smudges of green.

  The dark of space, lit by a thick sprinkling of diamonds and emeralds and rubies. It was a color-enhanced simulation beautiful beyond belief.

  My eyes were getting used to the dark now and I could make out the technicians hovering about other control panels around the periphery of the compartment. Scattered among them were crewmen wearing the Security chevron. There were a lot of them and I felt tiny prickles of fear, wondering why there were so many. I put on my eye mask but there were no changes in the compartment nor in the view through the ports.

  “What you see is what you get, Sparrow. Please come here.”

  The voice was soft but it cut easily through the murmur in the compartment. I pushed over, trailing my hands against the crystal arch so I slowed to a stop perhaps half a meter from the control panel. The light from the plotting globe outlined the man sitting in a sling beside it, his face partly hidden by a haze of smoke coming from a small bowl he held in his hand.

  The Captain.

  I looked down, both embarrassed and frightened, and noted the small metal plaque inlaid in the desktop, captain michael kusaka. His name was unique to him, I thought with surprise; he wasn’t named after a mountain or a bird or a character from the Bible or Shakespeare.

  The fragrant smoke from the bowl tickled my throat and I coughed. He held it up so I could see the stem curving away from its bottom.

  “It’s called tobacco, Sparrow. Pipit raises the plant in Hydroponics and I have it dried and shredded so I can smoke it in this pipe.” He smiled. “Private stock—rank has its privileges, so they say. I’ll put it out if you prefer.”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer but shook the glowing embers into a small vacuum catch-all in front of him. He stood up and held out his hand and I grasped it. The palm was thick and muscular, the fingers long, the back hairless. His grip was strong enough to make me wince.

  The smoke drifted away and I could see his face clearly, though I was careful not to stare, preferring to sneak an occasional glance. The hair on his head was black and straight, just starting to gray above the temples. He had a thin black moustache, neatly trimmed, that accentuated his high cheekbones. His eyes were dark, partly hidden by heavy black brows. Later, I was to remember those dark eyes better than anything else. He had very little body hair. His skin was a golden brown from sun lamps, fine-pored and faintly damp to the touch. His face was narrow, the nose sharp, the mouth thin, his expression intelligent and searching. He also looked like he frowned more often than he smiled. I guessed he was about forty years old.

  When he stood up, I didn’t get the impression of a big man so much as a powerfully built one—larger than me but smaller than Crow. His skin was parchment thin and his muscles were tight and well defined; you could see their interplay whenever he moved. He looked immensely strong, but the impression of strength went beyond muscle. He was used to having his way, to being obeyed, and I was smart enough to recognize that as a superior kind of strength. He wore black shorts and halter but there were no captain’s insignia stenciled on his shoulders. He didn’t need any.

  I never got over that first impression. I started to shiver then, my skin developing tiny bumps.

  “Anything wrong, Sparrow?”<
br />
  The murmuring in the control room died away and I knew that everybody was watching us, listening to every word we said. I felt very small.

  “No, sir,” I lied, “nothing at all.” My voice squeaked and gave me away but there was no helping that.

  He smiled again, whether in recognition of my shyness or in an attempt to calm my sudden fears, I wasn’t sure.

  “I’m glad you’re up and around, Sparrow. Your division was worried about you. So was I.”

  He convinced me without really trying, the concern and the friendship obvious in his face, and I was deeply flattered. He had deliberately lent me stature in front of the others.

  I mumbled an almost inaudible “Thank you, sir.”

  It was difficult to continue meeting his eyes, and my own wandered once again to the control panel. I was fascinated by the projection of the galaxy in the plotting globe, noted the various writing styli clinging to the panel top, then fastened on a small cube of transparent plastic. It contained tiny white and blue flowers whose roots were embedded in a thin layer of sand and pebbles, all of it preserved for eternity within the solid cube. It was beautiful and strange but oddly out of place on the panel.

  The Captain leaned back comfortably in the sling. “Tell me about Seti IV and your accident. I have Ophelia’s report but I’d like to hear yours.”

  His tone invited confidence: He was a fellow crew member asking about my adventures on that now distant planet. I told him how beautiful Seti IV had looked that day, about my accident and how I had been convinced that I was going to die. He seemed immersed in my story, his eyes never leaving my face. I realized with amazement that nobody else on the bridge mattered to him right then quite so much as I did.

  “You don’t remember anything before the landing on Seti IV?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nothing about your life on board? Nothing about your friends, maybe a love partner?”

  I looked at the deck and mumbled, “I’ve tried my best to remember, sir.”

  He shrugged. “It’ll come back. You’re not the only crewman who’s suffered from amnesia.”

  I thought later that his casual reassurance was the only false note in the entire conversation.

  ****

  He pushed out of the sling and glided over to the ports, motioning me to follow. I thought I was good at maneuvering in free fall but he was much better. He twisted gracefully in space, his feet barely brushing the arch, to slow to a halt a few centimeters away from Outside, his outstretched fingers resting lightly on the thick glass. I drifted up beside him and he put a hand on my shoulder. My skin promptly broke out in bumps again.

  “Do you know why we’re here, Sparrow?”

  He didn’t raise his voice but somehow it filled the bridge. I could sense those in the compartment coming to attention—the Captain was talking as much to them as he was to me.

  “Out there are the Deeps, Sparrow. We’re the first ship sent out from Earth to explore them, we’re the advance party for civilization. We’ve been entrusted with the most important mission given to any group of human beings—to find life forms other than our own. There’s no event in human history as important to the race as the task of this ship.”

  I shivered on cue. He waited a moment before waving a hand that took in all of Outside.

  “It’s vast beyond imagining, Sparrow—a galaxy teeming with billions of stars and millions of planets and hundreds of thousands of civilizations and untold numbers of creatures that crawl or swim or fly or live out their lives in the muck.”

  There was a note of exaltation in his voice, and I stared at him with awe. His head was silhouetted against the vast field of stars, his face backlit by the faint glow from the plotting globe behind us, his mouth open, his eyes glittering in the semidarkness.

  “Do you ever wonder what we’ll discover, Sparrow?” He didn’t look at me, but his hand squeezed my shoulder so hard it hurt. “Most of those civilizations will be friendly. Some of them won’t. Whatever the case, we’ll be the first to take back word that we’re not alone, that the same God that guides our destinies guides theirs as well.”

  He paused for a long moment, lost in the immensity of Outside. Then he ruffled the hair on the back of my head and his voice dropped to a more personal level.

  “Your name will go down in history, Sparrow. So will mine and that of everybody else on board.”

  He had listed me first and I was almost sick with pride and excitement. If he had asked, I would have given my life for him right then and there. Then he turned away from the port and drifted back to the plotting globe and the soft bubble of light that surrounded it. There was a low murmur in the compartment as the crewmen picked up their duties again.

  “We haven’t found life yet, Sparrow, but we very well may on Aquinas II—we’ve detected radio frequencies in the waterhole range.” He fumbled with his pipe and tamped in some tobacco from a small pouch. “I think this time we’ll find it. We’ll need the help of everybody on board then, especially the younger members of Exploration like yourself. I may even go in with you on the first Lander.”

  “I’d be honored, sir.”

  I had noticed a slight quiver around his mouth when I had spoken before and now I noticed it again.

  “If not on Aquinas II, it will be soon enough,” he murmured as an afterthought. Then he promoted me to friend and confidant with a quick, self-deprecating smile. “A race whose drive systems have attained one-tenth the speed of light could colonize the galaxy in something like ten million years, Sparrow. We could do it ourselves. In the lifetime of the universe, ten million years is hardly a blink.”

  He concentrated on his pipe for several moments and when he started talking again, I wasn’t sure whether it was to himself or to me.

  “We’re overdue to start running into the colonies of something else.”

  There was an unmistakable note of worry in his voice and I glanced toward the ports, half expecting to see a telltale streamer of light that would indicate another ship close by, one that was alien and dangerous and a threat to the entire human race. I was acutely aware that we were a picket ship probing the unknown, that we represented mankind’s furthest reach and were the only ship out there that could warn Earth of an alien invasion.

  I thrust out my hand to shake the Captain’s, to show him that he could count on me. In my haste, I brushed aside the small plastic cube with its tiny flowers trapped inside. I grabbed it before it could float too far away from the control panel and gripped it tightly, panicked at having disturbed it.

  It didn’t feel right. There should have been hard edges where the sides of the cube met but there weren’t any. It was subtly, oddly deformed.

  “It’s a paperweight, Sparrow—a memento of Earth.” The Captain was smiling faintly, watching my face.

  I opened my fingers and stared at the cube. The edges were rounded where the plastic had… slumped? Heat, I thought, then realized the Astron had probably been at a constant temperature since the day it was launched. The edges must have been worn from… handling? And if so, how long would it have taken? I set the cube down, its magnetic base gripping the panel top.

  “The begats,” I said, my mind numb. “How far back do they go?”

  “A hundred and two generations.” He concentrated on his pipe again. “On board ship, a generation is approximately twenty years.”

  The Astron had spent two thousand years, give or take a few decades, in the depths of space. More than a hundred generations of crewmen had been born, lived, and died during its voyage.

  The security guard was drifting toward me; my session with the Captain was over. I shook his hand for the last time, smothering my surprise at what he had said.

  “The previous captains would be proud of you, sir.” I sounded as pompous as only a seventeen-year-old can sound, but I wanted to assure him that I was ready to march in his army.

  He shook his head, still faintly smiling, still watchful, still curious which way my th
oughts might jump.

  “There’s been only one captain of the Astron, Sparrow. It’s an honor I’ve held since Launch.”

  For a long moment I couldn’t say anything. “I’m s-sorry, sir,” I finally stammered. “I didn’t know.” I sounded like I was offering condolences rather than trying to hide my shock.

  His smile turned sardonic. “I bear up, Sparrow.”

  The guard was by my side then and I followed him into the passageway, still unwilling to believe what I had heard. The Captain as old as the ship itself? I could think of no reason why he would lie, so I accepted it—and suddenly felt angry.

  How many times had he given a still-wet-behind-the-ears crew member the same enthusiastic speech he had given me? Two thousand times? Ten thousand times? And how often had he heard the same response? The slight quiver around his mouth as I had talked to him… He knew all the variations by heart, he had been mouthing what I was saying at the very moment I was saying it.

  I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t know.

  It struck me then just how short my own life was when compared to the Captain’s, and I was both envious and afraid. He had enlisted me as friend and follower with ridiculous ease. Well, why not? He knew everything there was to know about human beings; he’d had more than two thousand years in which to study them, to learn how to manipulate them.

  I wanted to hate him for it but I couldn’t. The truth was, I wanted desperately to believe in a Captain who told me that he needed me, who had let me know that I was both friend and companion, whose outstretched arms had briefly encompassed the entire galaxy with its billions of stars and myriad life forms, who had given me the one thing in life I needed above all else—purpose. I would be willing to do a great deal for the man who gave me that.