The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (13 page)

For some reason, that didn’t comfort me.

“Crow said my mother died early. Laertes must have been very important to me.” I had fixed on Laertes

; if Nerissa had died when I was very young, then Laertes must have been the most important person in my life. What I didn’t tell Huldah , though I think she knew,was that I desperately wanted a father, wanted somebody whom I could claim and who would claim me.

“You have the means, Sparrow,” she sighed. “Why don’t you use them? Find your own answers and perhaps they’ll have some relevance for you. If I answered all your questions, you would only have more questions.”

It was a rebuff, one I deserved. “The ship,” I said. “Life on board has always been the same?”

She looked at me sharply. “You mean,does it change from generation to generation? No, Sparrow, it remains the same. Life remained the same inEgypt for hundreds of years and so did life in the shtetls ofRussia . Change comes from the outside, seldom from within. And I think, right at Launch, they made sure that nothing would really change on board.”

I didn’t understand that, and wanted to ask more questions, but her eyes had dulled and her shoulders had slumped back into the posture of the plump little matron. It was time to go.

“I thank you for your time,” I said formally. I turned and almost ran into Pipit coming through the screen with several packets of herbs in her hand. She looked surprised and started to back out.

“Don’t go,” I said, “I’m leaving.” And then I stared hard at her and glanced back at Huldah .“Your daughter?” I said. I couldn’t believe I had missed the resemblance before.

“You used your eyes,” Huldah said approvingly.

Pipit floated over to her mother and the family portrait was complete. I couldn’t be sure who her father was but I thought I saw traces of Noah in her. Then I remembered sick bay and the many sleep periods when she had sat up with me, and her insistence that I get well.

“I should have thanked you long ago,” I said.

She looked embarrassed. “I did very little, Sparrow.”

I kicked over and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

“Then I thank you for very little,” I said and slipped away into the corridor. It was my first apology, but I knew it wouldn’t be my last and I was very proud of myself for having made it. Pipit was kind, she was generous of spirit, and she was beautiful. I could understand Crow’s adoration.

****

The sleep periods slid by and I became increasingly aware—at times painfully so—that I was sleeping alone. Like most young men, I found an outlet in my dreams. Sometimes I dreamed of Pipit, feeling guilty enough when I awoke that I would avoid her for several time periods. One period I awoke sweating and wet and realized with a shock that I had been dreaming of Ophelia. It didn’t make any sense, though I blushed when I saw her in Exploration and stammered when she asked me a question. She looked at me curiously and after lecture asked what was bothering me. I assured her nothing was wrong,then proved I was lying by fleeing from her through the corridor.

But most of the time I dreamed about Snipe, in situations and positions I was sure nobody had thought of before. I watched her in plays and found excuses to visit her on the hangar level. At the time, I was certain she didn’t know why; I was to discover later that at seventeen, I was far younger emotionally than most crew members my age and Snipe was far older. I finally talked about it with Tybalt while on shift.

“Snipe?” he said, disbelieving. “She’s a skinny little thing. I was afraid nobody would ever see anything in her.”

“I do,” I said, blushing still again.

He grinned. “I guess it takes all kinds. Why don’t you just ask her to sleep with you?”

I stuttered that of course she had no interest in me, that her only possible reaction would be rejection. Tybalt’s half smile faded.

“I keep forgetting,” he said slowly. “Sparrow, nobody on board the
Astron
ever turns anybody down the first time.Nobody. And nobody asks the second time unless they’ve been assuredit’s mutual.” He paused, searching for words. It was obvious that it was a ship’s custom he wasn’t quite sure how to explain.

There was a moment of awkward silence, broken when I blurted: “Babies, what about—”

“Contraception?”He raised an eyebrow. “It’s in the food—I thought you knew that.” Then he mumbled,

“Of course you didn’t,” and finally grumped, “It isn’t healthy for people to be a mystery to each other, Sparrow. We live too close together.” He shrugged. “It’s a small enough thing to do. I don’t know anybody for whom it’s a problem.”

But it turned out to be a problem for
me.
I finally stammered out my request to Snipe, who seemed neither overjoyed nor depressed by the prospect. She came to my compartment that sleep period and I made what I thought was love and then spent the rest of the period apologizing. Physically, Snipe was no longer a mystery but love itself remained one. I’d had no idea I could be so close to Snipe and yet not be close at all.

I went to the hangar deck as often as before to watch her in plays and discovered to my shocked surprise that there was still something I wanted from her. I wept when she died as Juliet, was won once again by her Katherine played against a very wooden Crow as king, and found her irresistible as a lithe and vivacious Rosalind pretending to be a boy.

There was more to Snipe than a rag and a bone and a hank of hair, as Tybalt frequently put it. I wanted desperately to know just what that “more” was. She fascinated me at the same time she irritated me; she could be coolly pragmatic one moment and wildly illogical the next, superior and aloof at the start of a conversation and warm and understanding by the end.

It didn’t help to realize that Snipe’s personality would stabilize with time and eventually she would irritate me less and fascinate me even more. At seventeen, I was in no mood to wait.

****

On station, Tybalt and I worked well together, and he was quick to admit it. I also found myself achieving a rapport with the palm terminal. As Tybalt had told me, its fleshy surface responded faster to a delicate touch than a hard push. I pared my fingernails and rubbed lotion into the palms of my hands so the skin was soft and supple. Sometimes I even scraped my fingertips so the nerve endings were closer to the surface. In the viewing globe, I could make the charts and equations flow so fast you couldn’t tell one from another, but I could still stop the display on the desired graph. I could make the numbers dance. Nobody else in the division could.

One shift Abel came by with Thrush in tow and they watched while I put the terminal pad through its paces. When I was through, Thrush said in a noncommittal voice: “You’re very good. Show me.”

It wasn’t a request, it was a command, and I glanced at Tybalt for his approval. Abel didn’t wait for Tybalt’s permission but nervously growled, “Do it,” so I showed Thrush a simple series of movements. He watched my hand with the same intent look I had noticed in Reduction,then duplicated my movements without a mistake. I ran through another, more complicated series. He made one mistake this time,then leaned back in the operator’s sling with a small smile of triumph. “All it takes is practice, right?”

“It takes more than that,” I said through clenched teeth.

He twisted smoothly out of the sling and hit me lightly on the arm.

“I don’t think so, Sparrow.”

He smiled again when he left and this time I read his expression with no difficulty. We were competitors, he and I, though I had no idea what for, nor did I know what the winner’s prize might be. A dozen work periods passed before Tybalt mentioned his adventures again. By now, I accepted them for what they were—memories of things not quite seen—and did my best to sift fact from fancy. I had been wide-eyed with awe before but now, thanks to Ophelia, I had growing doubts—and hated myself for having them.

We were alone and Tybalt settled into the headquarters sling, taking special pains so his foreshortened leg was free of the webbing. He reached for his pipe and turned the exhaust vent on high.

“I told you about the first landings I ever made, didn’t I?”

“Tell me again,” I encouraged. The names of the planets kept changing and I was no longer sure just which
were
his first landings.

“They were Alpha and Omega, twin planets in the Tau system,” he began. “They were dead planets—no moons and no tectonic activity, frozen to their cores. We had no hopes of finding lifethere, we knew those planets had never served as a cradle for it. Alpha was a cursory exploration, all ashes and pumice and ice. Omega was the more interesting—by far.”

Once again I was rapt with attention.

“Omega was as dead as Alpha, of course. But we found the remains of
something
that had been stranded there. We ran across slabs of rock that formed a huge lean-to—you could even see the blast marks where they had been cut from a nearby cliff. And there were tracks in the pumice surface where something huge had dragged itself over to the lean-to for shelter. The tracks were almost obliterated by small craters; the creature had been shot and wounded.”

As Tybalt talked, I could see the creature in my mind as clearly as if it were a projection on the hangar deck.Something with four stumpy legs and gray, rocklike skin with a shielded braincase out of which tiny eyes glared defiance at a hostile world.

The picture hung in my mind for a moment, then wavered around the edges and started to fade as doubt set in. The biggest handicap in believing Tybalt was that I wanted to so badly.

“You found the body?” I asked, knowing that he hadn’t.

“Its friends had come back for it,” he said with a note of regret. “You could see where the rescue ship had landed.” He used a stubby finger to draw a picture in the sweat on the bulkhead. “First there were the tracks of something pulling itself through the pumice, then those were partly erased by small craters during the fight, then a dozen of the craters were crushed in turn by the rescue ship settling on them.”

I was tempted to argue that the craters and the tracks had been made by meteorites, then thought better of it. He wasn’t trying to convince me, he was just telling me what he thought he had seen. Another time, I would have believed him implicitly, but the meeting in Ophelia’s compartment had introduced doubts.

“And nobody else saw them,” I said, prepared for disappointment.

“You’re right, Sparrow,” he sighed, “nobody else did.” He concentrated on filling his pipe. “It would be worth my life if I made that up.”

I thought I had done a better job of hiding my skepticism,then realized I was doing him a disservice by not being honest.

“Ophelia doesn’t believe you,” I said bluntly. “She claims there’s a rational explanation for everything you’ve ever reported.”

He banged his fist against the bulkhead. “Ophelia doesn’t believe in a damned thing!” He fought his anger for a moment,then shrugged. “Skepticism can blind you as much as faith. If you had never seen an elephant, there would be no end to the reasonable explanations for the path it left in a forest—none of which would include a lumbering beast with a small tail at one end and a large tail at the other, with an enormous head and two huge fans for ears.”

He smiled at his own imagery. “Look up ‘elephant’ in the computer’smemory, you’ll see what I mean.”

He leaned forward in the sling to poke me in the chest with his forefinger. “The galaxy is huge, Sparrow. To think we know all the requirements for the creation of life is hubris—and the gods don’t take kindly to that.”

I agreed. But I couldn’t shake the memory of Ophelia crying that there had been a hundred generations and a thousand systems and fifteen hundred planets and the crew of the
Astron
had yet to find a single living cell.

Ophelia and Noah had been very convincing in their arguments and they had scientific logic on their side. But so, in a sense, did Tybalt .

****

It didn’t take long for my shift at the palm terminal to become boring. I was skillful and fast and never made mistakes, though occasionally I came close. Those were the times when Thrush came to the compartment to practice. I never saw the results of what he did but I could tell by his frequent look of self-congratulation that he was gaining in dexterity and speed. Nobody ever told me why he was learning to work the palm terminals and I never asked.

Eventually, of course, I couldn’t resist checking out Tybalt’s landings. Unauthorized use of the computer was strictly forbidden but I was willing to risk it. Who would know what I did during those times when I was the only one on duty at the terminal?

Tybalt’sstories had become a part of his personality and were easy to forgive, if for no other reason than that they were entertaining. But whatever else they were, it turned out that Tybalt hadn’t made them up to pass the time with me. The reports of his landings on Alpha and Omega, Galileo III, and Midas IV were all logged in the computer. The official accounts were stripped of the romance of his stories but the details were the same, buried in the jargon required of a report to the Captain. I listened to him with more respect after that. I’m sure he knew I had checked his reports, but if he was offended, he never let me know.

It was much easier to check out Tybalt’s reports than it was to research the genealogy of the crew. Tybalt’s reports were finite but the genealogy went on forever. Researching the families on board was tedious, but it took courage to check out my own background. I was afraid of what I might find out. I waited until I was alone in the compartment with no danger of being interrupted, then took a deep breath and punched in my name. The earliest information that appeared in the viewing globe was the medical records from sick bay, detailing my time there after the accident on Seti IV. I asked for additional background but the words scrolling through the globe read:

All data concerning subject sealed because of acute stress due to amnesiac illness. Giving

subject life history information prior to
his own
recall will hinder complete recovery.

Forbidden to tell the truth, my friends had invented clumsy lies whenever I badgered them about my past. As usual, I owed them all an apology.