The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (19 page)

“It’s not over yet, Sparrow,” he once whispered as we passed in the corridor. I ignored him, but when Crow brokeCoventry , I mentioned it to him.

****

Crow risked punishment one time period after a lecture in Exploration when I brushed past him in the hatchway and he quietly murmured in my ear. An hour later I met him in the compartment with the falsie of the cave, the roaring fire at its back, and a night sky dusted with stars. Loon was with him and grinned at my apprehensive face when I floated through the shadow screen.

“The peep screen failed months ago, Sparrow—we helped it along.”

I was overwhelmed with gratitude and love for both of them.

“You’re taking a chance,” I warned.

“Not much of one.”

I edged closer to the fire, squatting on my heels and holding out my hands to warm myself. I knew it was all psychological, but right then I wanted to believe in it and I swore I could feel the heat.

“How’s Pipit?”

“Recovering.She’s staying with Loon and me. When we’re not there, Ibis is.”

Nobody interfered with partners, but Crow realized as well as I did that Thrush didn’t play by the rules. I stared into the firelight and drifted into a mood.

“Heron said it wasn’t over yet… between me and Thrush.”

Crow shook his head. “It’s over, Sparrow. The two of you will never be left alone now. Thrush knows it. They say the Captain talked to him privately and when Thrush left, he carried marks.”

I was shocked.

“The Captain
struck
him?”

He shrugged. “That’s what they say. I haven’t seen him.”

“He should’ve hit Heron,” I grumbled. “He’s the one who threw Thrush the strip of metal.”

“Nobody talks to Heron,” Loon offered. “They extendedCoventry to include him without the Captain’s orders.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I had to.

“What do they think of me?”

Crow shrugged. “They don’t understand you.Most of them.”

“You mean some do?”

“Some want to.”

“And you?”

He looked uncomfortable.

“I appreciate your wanting to punish Thrush. I… couldn’t.”

“And if I’d killed him?”

“What do you expect me to say?” He sounded agonized. “Thrush is
alive
.”

“And everybody thinks as you do.”

“Not everybody.”

“I almost killed him,” I repeated, the black mood deepening.

He edged away from the fire, which made it feel even warmer.

“Sparrow,” he said slowly, “if you had, would it have been just because of Pipit?”

I sighed. “No, it would not have been just because of Pipit.”

He looked immensely relieved. “That would have been an enormous burden for us.”

In a sense, I had done his dirty work in trying to punish Thrush. But the moment I thought this, I knew I was lying. Pipit had been an excuse. The truth was that I had harbored murder in my soul and I had gone after Thrush for reasons of my own.

“We’re different, you and I,” Crow said at last. He sounded as if it broke his heart to say it, and I knew another line was being drawn.

“Tell me how,” I said somberly.

He was silent for a moment, then: “Pipit is beautiful,” he burst out. “But so is Loon, so is Thrush, even Heron and Quince and Abel and Banquo ! They’re beautiful because they’re
alive.
They move and walk and talk and think and feel! Can you understand that, Sparrow? Even when they do something… bad, they’re still beautiful! I can’t imagine
killing
any one of them, I can’t imagine killing
anything!”

Crow wasn’t just being a good person who was incapable of hurting somebody else. His attitude came from two thousand years of hurtling through space in a metal tomb, of being alone in an immensity of nothing with no other life of any kind around you. Under those conditions, you would come to revere life. In saying what he had, Crow was also saying that he couldn’t help being himself any more than I could help being myself.

“But not everybody thinks that way,” I said.

“No,” he said reluctantly, “not everybody thinks that way.”

“They think more like me?” I asked, puzzled.

He looked away. “No, they don’t think like you, either, Sparrow. There’s no possible way they could.”

I was very different from anybody else in the crew; I already knew that. Hearing it from Crow didn’t make it any worse. Or better. But it confirmed that loneliness was all the future held for me.

“Make me laugh, Loon.”

It was a difficult five minutes but Loon had the gift and I was a more than willing audience. Once again I found myself entangled in Loon’s version of the latest scandal concerning Quince and Portia, of the rumors about the upcoming change of course after we finished exploring Aquinas II, and of the momentary break in training plays, which let Snipe reappear in some of her favorite roles. The last interested me the most and I found myself talking about Snipe and asking for gossip about her. Who she had been with, whether or not she had partnered—though I was sure I would have known
that

—and whether she ever mentioned me. InCoventry , I had become adept at reading and interpreting expressions; sometimes whole conversations were summarized in a look. But I had never known what, if anything, Snipe meant by her occasional enigmatic glance.

“So she doesn’t talk about me.”

Loon shook his head. “She doesn’t talk about you at all.”

I tried to shrug it off.

“Snipe talks about everybody, all the time,” Loon continued slyly. “But she never talks about you.”

I stared at him. “That’s strange.”

Loon grinned. “I thought so, too.”

****

I had no idea whether Snipe would breakCoventry or not; I didn’t plan to tempt her. But sometimes the most significant things that happen to a person happen with no plan at all. I had obtained permission from an indulgent Tybalt to see Snipe’s plays, and after the latest one I followed her back to her compartment, convinced I was actually on my way someplace else. It deceived others, and I even deceived myself, but it didn’t deceive her. When she got to her compartment she slipped in through the shadow screen but not before motioning me to follow. Once inside, I said, “The Captain—”

She smiled. “You can relax, Sparrow—not every compartment has a peep screen.”

She wiped the last bit of spray-on costume from her arm and flushed it down the waste chute, then relaxed in the string hammock and looked at me expectantly.

“Of course,” I said. I took off my eye mask. It was the polite thing to do. I was also curious—I had never been in her compartment, she had come to mine.

The falsie was surprising in its simplicity—a pleasant meadow with a small stream and a multicolored tent by its shore. Nearby, a horse chewed the grass that grew along the water’s edge. In the distance, almost hidden in haze, was a range of mountains. That was all, though I realized it would look considerably different under an evening sky blazing with constellations;

The simplicity itself made sense. Snipe worked with projections every shift, most of them military fantasies. She was probably tired of the complex and the alien.

Then I took another look, at the horse and changed my mind. It was all white, with an absurd twisted horn growing out of its forehead.

Before I could comment, she said, “I think it’s quite good,” and I murmured, “It’s beautiful.”

She looked at me sharply. “You’re not just saying that?”

“No,” I said, then mined it by adding, “Though the horse—”

“Unicorn,” she corrected with a trace of irritation. “I wasn’t sure how the horn grew—the horns on all the deer of the same period grew backward but it didn’t seem right for the unicorn.”

I suspected she was talking as fast as she was because I made her nervous, then decided there was no chance in the universe that I could make Snipe ill at ease.So much for my powers of perception.

“It would look better if it pointed straight up,” I said, trying to be tactful.

“The computer mentions them but I couldn’t find a pic of one,” she said. She had probably overlooked a file hierarchy. There are real animals and mythological animals and no data taxonomist would have combined them in a single file, though Snipe probably hadn’t known that. What a strange, fertile world Earth must have been, so teeming with life they could even make up animals!

She walked over to the unicorn and stroked its mane. Like Crow, she had a knack for making the falsie something to live in as well as something to look at. It struck me then that if I ever went blind, my own little world on the
Astron
would be unspeakably barren.

She watched me watching her and suddenly looked away. “You never told me you wanted me,” she said in a low voice.

I flushed. “Wasn’t it obvious?”

When she looked at me, for the first time I saw the woman hiding behind the girl. “Obvious?”

“I asked for you,” I said, embarrassed. “I’d been told it was ship’s custom.”

“Some things are.” She concentrated on the tangled mane.

“I… wasn’t very good,” I said.

“Those who are the most sincere are frequently the most awkward,” she murmured. Then: “Would you have been unhappy without me?”

I tried to edge away from the subject, “I’ve seen all your plays. I look for you at mealtimes. I’ve…

followed you in the passageways.”

“You should have told me how you felt.”

Right then I felt miserable.

“I…didn’t know how,” I said.

She smiled, the woman in Snipe completely in control. “I think you do.”

I reached for her and she dodged away. A moment later I was clutching my nose where I had banged into a bulkhead, doing my best to blink away the tears. She floated back to help wipe them away.

“You could have told me I did a good job with the falsie.”

“I said it was beautiful,” I squeaked through my fingers.

“You’re clumsy,” she said, but without her usual arrogance.

“Not always,” I defended, aware of her closeness but not knowing for sure how to act. Her sponging had changed to a quiet stroking. “I shouldn’t have had to goOutside to get you.”

Which was true.If I had been more aware during the walkabout, she wouldn’t have had to risk her life trying to save mine.

“You’re right,” I admitted with more than a touch of humility, “you shouldn’t have had to goOutside to get me.”

I had finally made up my mind to put my arm around her when she moved away, pushing over to the nearby tent and pressing the palm terminal in the middle of the coat-of-arms on the tent flap. The stream, the unicorn, and the tent faded away. The real compartment was more homelike than most, decorated with large string tapestries into which she had woven the same scene that was in the falsie. I hadn’t noticed it when I had first floated in; my eyes had been too full of her.

“I activate the falsie for guests. I seldom wink it on for myself—I see enough fantasy in the plays.”

She had turned Ophelia-like, efficient and mature, old beyond her years. Huldah told me later that I had come into Snipe’s life when she was at an awkward age. Despite her best precautions, she was growing up, and those moments when she put aside her playthings were becoming more frequent.

“I’m sorry about the drill.” I felt like I was apologizing to aSenior .

“You’re not to blame,” she said. “They told me about the tether.” She looked at me, curious. “Is that why you tried to kill Thrush?”

“One of the reasons,” I said cautiously.

“Don’t try it again. He’ll kill you instead. Or Heron will.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said, flushing.

She relaxed back into Snipe.

“No, you can’t,” she said. “Not yet.”

I was glad that nobody was around to tell Loon what happened next or an exaggerated and undoubtedly very funny version would have been all over the ship the following time period. I reached for her again and she moved away, but not too fast. Then we tangled with the hammock, and at what should have been a very tender moment we both burst out laughing. After that it was all play and laughter and jabs to the ribs. It gradually became more serious and gentle as we grew more familiar with each other. It was, I thought later, nothing at all like what I had seen in some of the more erotic image pix or what had been described by some of my fellow crew members. It was especially unlike what I had experienced the first time with Snipe.

Taking off each other’s waistcloths was enormously exciting, as was merely touching each other and hugging; afterward, she complained that her ribs hurt. We took turns going limp and letting the other feel wherever they chose; then I would lightly stroke the hairs on her arms and watch them quiver as the skin tightened. I wondered what idiot had divided the body into erogenous zones when all of her was erogenous, at least to me.

We spoke volumes without speaking at all and I knew without thinking about it that, whether either of us proved faithful to the other or not, right then we were partnering at some subconscious level that would last the rest of our lives.

But making love to Snipe was not without an element of guilt. A part of me kept insisting on comparing Snipe to Crow and even to Thrush.

I swore quietly to myself, realizing honesty had crept up on me as innocently as sleep, though it wasn’t nearly as welcome. The Captain was right; one of the reasons I hated Thrush was because he had encouraged me to feel something for him and then betrayed it… And I would not deny my feelings for Crow, though I insisted to myself that they were… different. For one, I wanted very badly to protect Snipe, even though I knew she could protect herself far better than I ever could…

I struggled with my emotions, then gave up and snuggled closer to Snipe. You loved who you loved when you lovedthem, it was as simple and as complicated as that.

Just before we finally drifted off, Snipe said, “You’re very gentle with women, Sparrow—you’re very different from what they told me.”

She was half asleep when she said it, or she wouldn’t have said it at all. But it was like hearing a tumbler fall in a lock when you start to work the combination.

Who had told her, and how had they known, when Snipe was the first woman I had ever made love to?