The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (2 page)

millibars of CO2and rare gases.

I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt the tears freezing on my eyelids. I ignored the pain in my arm and chest and shifted so I could see the landscape beyond the field of boulders. It was a beautiful morning on a not particularly important planet circling an obscure G-class star and I was bleeding to death.

Unfair.

Ilay there gasping for air, watching the numbers on the stress indicators flicker past before the displays frosted over from my breath. But I didn’t need to watch their slow decline to know my life was gradually seeping into the cold. Minutes later I sensed footsteps behind me on the debris fan, two sets of them. I had never doubted that somebody would come for me; no exploration party could afford to leave anybody behind.

“…a good thirty meters, probably dead…”

The words cut through the static this time, but I was too cold and in too much pain to feel overjoyed. I peered out at the darkening world through slitted eyelids. The jagged breaks in my helmet were thick with frost and my face was numb. I could feel the cold wash down inside my suit, chilling my stomach and my groin.

I rolled slightly, crying out as my fractured ribs grated against each other. I smelled urine and felt vaguely embarrassed, knowing for sure that I had pissed in my suit.

“… all the way, careful…”

Hands grasped my shoulders and turned me on my back so I was staring up at the peach-colored sky. It was a deeper hue now, the pinkish red of sunset. I couldn’t believe I had lain there that long, that it was now almostdusk . I wondered why my teammates had been so slow in working their way off the cliff face and why I hadn’t frozen to death by the time they got there.

“…sealer …”

“…spray it on, hurry up…”

A face loomed over me, the first I could remember having seen all day. A woman, not old but not too young, her face distorted by the curvature of her helmet. She looked worried.

“…hear me…”

Her voice bellowed in my ears. I tried to nod. Ripples of something cloudy washed over my helmet and froze in thick, opaque smears. The hissing inside my suit faded. I could hear my own breathing again, ragged and deep. I also began to feel warmer as my life-support systems started to catch up.

“… on his side… have to try his arm or his buttocks… careful…”

Another shift and my cloudy helmet turned dark. I felt the suit bump against the rocks and promptly voided what was left in my bladder. They had turned me the wrong way so I was lying on my broken arm. I screamed with pain, though it came out more like a squeak. Somebody held the left leg of my suit and there was a brief prick as a hypodermic needle was shoved through thesuit’s disconnect, just below my bum.

“…don’t know if I got it… have to try the arm, too…”

“…we’re losing him…”

There was another prick through a shoulder disconnect. A moment later I couldn’t feel anything from my neck on down.

“… internal injuries, heavy bleeding… he won’t make it back to the Lander…”

“…he can hear you…”

“… then he’s in better shape than…”

“…shut up…”

The inside of my suit was now warm and comfortable. I drifted off into a world that had suddenly turned vague. I didn’t feel it at all when they lifted me up and carried me to the Rover. I was unconscious during most of the bumpy trip along the dry creekbed to pick up the others, jerking back to awareness only when they hoisted me into the Lander. Once they put me down to get a better grip on my suit and something tore inside my arm. There was a sudden spurt of warmth and I cried out again.

I was bleeding to death, didn’t they realize that?

I had a hazy impression of a control room jammed with banks of finger switches and amber readout screens. My rescuers stretched me out on an acceleration couch and the four of them huddled over me.

“…helmet …”

One of them worked the thumb locks on my neck disconnect,then lifted off the plastic bubble. There was a rush of air as the pressure equalized. The air inside the Lander was warm and smelled of sweat but at least it wasn’t laced with the acrid stink of piss.

A woman stared down at me, her helmet off. She was the same one who had inspected me at the bottom of the scarp. A meaty face, gray eyes, brows heavy enough to have been daubed on with greasepaint, short black hair, and the same worried look she’d had before. Tears glistened on her cheeks and I wondered vaguely what I meant to her orshe to me.

Her voice was harsh, commanding. “Get his suit off—hurry it up but don’t kill him.”

My body had been numbed by drugs but it still hurt when they shelled me out of my cocoon of permacloth and metal. The woman knelt on the deck beside me and ran her hands over the bloody inner-weave, testing for broken bones with the expertise of a surgeon.

“Compoundfracture of the left humerus , torn brachial artery—strip off the weave and get some tourniquets.”

I gazed at the overhead, only half conscious, indifferent to the cold metal of the automatic shears against my skin as they cut through the cloth and tubing. One of the crewmen started to adjust a pressure bandage on my arm and I turned my head to watch him. He had slipped out of his suit and inner-weave, kneeling naked on the deck as he worked with the sticky-cloth.

He looked about nineteen, perhaps twenty. High cheekbones, a large mouth, pale skin, pale hair chopped at the shoulder, pale eyes that masked whatever he was thinking, and a thin, hairless body that looked more agile than strong. There was a delicacy about him that had eluded his teammates and he was cursed with the type of prettiness that some young men have before all the cartilage and baby fat turn to bone and gristle. He wrinkled his nose.

“He stinks.”

The woman bent down for another quick inspection. “Clean him up. Strap on an IV pump, cover him with blankets, and lock him in.”

The pale eyes made a judgment. “He won’t make it to Inbetween Station.” I wondered how he knew but there were no clues on that pale face.

They rolled me on my side. Another crewman—thicker muscled than the first, with rough features that looked not quite finished—fumbled with some toweling, doing his best to sponge up the blood and urine that had soaked the weave around my groin. He was stubby-fingered, clumsy and close to tears.

“I think he’s going to die.”

The crewman with the pale hair slipped the needle end of a thin tube into a vein in the back of my hand and adjusted the flow from the pump. He nodded at the woman behind him, murmuring,“ She doesn’t want to hear that.”

But she had, and cut in curtly, “Everybody to stations.”

They slid into their control chairs and seconds later I felt the mattress beneath me harden as the Lander leaped into the sky. I started to drift again, the sensations of my body fading. If I were going to Reduction, this was a better way than most.

After a minute or two of acceleration, the couch relaxed and I knew we were floating in the dark of space. The pain had long since vanished; the only thing that still bothered me was that I couldn’t put names to the faces around me. I watched them as they worked their control panels and wondered who they were.Once the woman studied me for several minutes before going back to her board. Her expression was one of deep sadness and loss. I moved slightly on the acceleration couch just to reassure her that I was still alive.

The crewman who had sponged away the blood and urine, and another whom I hadn’t noticed before—smaller and faintly apprehensive—were busy with their instrument panels. The first glanced back several times to check on me. The other only looked at me once, embarrassed for someone who was dying.

It was obvious they all knew me. I didn’t know them at all.

The crewman with the pale hair was busy punching in calculations at his computer console. It was half an hour before he swiveled around to stare at me. I remember thinking he was more than just pretty, he was beautiful. But I didn’t like him and I knew he didn’t like me. For just a moment the pale eyes flared with feeling and he silently mouthed a few words.

What he said was: “
I hope you die
.”

I didn’t know whether it was a hope or a threat or a statement of fact—my mind was too fogged to make much sense of it or even to feel much reaction. What worried mewas not so much that I might die but that I might die not knowing who the other crew members were.

Or who I was.

Then the control room and those in it faded away. I wasn’t aware of it when we transferred to Inbetween Station; I had drifted into unconsciousness and the first of many nightmares.

****

In my dreams, I relived every second spent in exploration that morning, starting from the moment I stepped on the first rung of the ladder and climbed down to the surface of the planet. There was something before then—not much. I was in a metal coffin with my arms folded across my chest, staring through the clear plastic lid at a jungle of thick, silvery worms that were reaching out for me. Behind them were faces, hundreds of faces. The most vivid was that of the woman who had been in charge of the exploration team below. Another was of a man with a faint smile and sardonic eyes who could see into my very soul—a cold man in a trim black uniform who frightened me more than the worms. More than once I woke from the nightmares screaming and sweating and had to be sponged off by the nurse. “Drink this,” was all I remembered her saying, though I know she talked to me frequently and even held me when I woke up shaking. She was a soft woman; everything about her was soft—her face, her hands, her olive-colored skin, her voice…

If she had been a hard woman, I would have died.

She was young, her chubby sixteen-year-old’sbody covered by a white waistcloth and a thin halter. I worried that her youth meant I was so close to death an experienced nurse would have been wasted on me. But I didn’t worry all that much.Most of the time I slept, lost in my nightmares. Then one time period I woke up and stayed awake. I was in a sick bay with the railings on my bed raised and thin plastic straps holding me down so I couldn’t float off. There were other patients in the compartment, maybe a dozen all told. Several had IV pumps dripping fluid into their veins like I did and I assumed they were crewmen from other exploration teams.

A transparent glassteel partition blocked off an operating theater that was a forest of polished machinery. The bulkheads, the deck, and the overhead gleamed with soft white light from glow tubes inset where the bulkheads and the overhead met. Brightly colored anatomy charts enameled on one of the bulkheads were illuminated by light panels set to either side. Just beyond the hatchway’s shadow screen I could see a corridor, alive withcrewmen, that seemed to stretch for kilometers, the end of it fading into the distance. The ship was
huge
.

Mounted directly over my bed was a small screen with pictures constantly flickering across it—entertainment, I supposed, though I seldom had enough interest or energy to try and make sense of the images.

But the real show was on the other side of the three large ports in the exterior bulkhead. From my bed, I watched the stars wheel slowly past and caught an occasional glimpse of a planet’s surface far beneath us. I gradually realized the ship was in orbit over a world a thousand kilometers below.

“Drink this,” my child-nurse said once again.

She handed me a drink bulb filled with a grayish liquid. I sucked on its plastic tubing and tried to keep from gagging.

“What’s your name?” I mumbled.

“Pipit.”Behind her smile, her expression was watchful and curious. It would have made another girl look sly, but on Pipit it only made me less sure of her age.

“What’s mine?”

She didn’t answer, but leaned closer to stroke my forehead with her soft hands. “Shush,” she whispered.

“It’ll come back to you.”

Then one sleep period, when the sick bay was dark, somebody woke me up, murmured, “Down the hatch,” and held a drinking tube to my mouth. But the voice didn’t sound like Pipit’s and the hands didn’t feel like Pipit’s. I twisted away, crying. The hands became more insistent, trying to push the tube into my mouth. I fought back, calling faintly for help and flailing at my enemy, too weak to do much damage but strong enough to keep the tube away from my lips. I suspected that if I swallowed the liquid in the bulb, I would never wake up.

Then whoever itwas, was gone and Pipit was cradling me in her arms, calming my pounding heart. She asked me who had been there but I hadn’t seen their face. Exhaustion finally closed my eyes and I slept once again. There were more dreams and nightmares, mixed with brief periods of wakefulness. The woman on the Lander came to see me often and I had distinct memories of the pale-skinned crewman leaning over the bed rails. He watched me for hours, his pale eyes as speculative as they had been on board the Lander.

He said nothing at all.

Once Pipit showed up hand in hand with the crewman who had been so clumsy and so concerned for me aboard the Lander.He wasn’t wearing cling-titesandals and had to grip the side rails so a sudden movement wouldn’t push him halfway across the compartment.

“How do you feel?”

I remembered the harsh planes and angles of his face but I had forgotten the long brown hair that swirled about his head like a halo, lending him a grace his features lacked. But I didn’t pay much attention to him—I was watching Pipit work the meal dispenser at the far end of the compartment and thinking how hungry I was. Then I blinked back to my visitor.

I didn’t know his name but guessed he had come to see me because we had once been friends.

“Where am I?”

He looked worried.“On board the
Astron
.”

“The
Astron
,” I mumbled. It sounded familiar. “Who are you?”

He didn’t bother masking his disappointment; he had wanted badly for me to remember.

“Crow.”

Once he said it, I recognized the name, but that was all.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked blank.

“For your help on the Lander.”

Pipit now drifted over and fastened a meal tray to the side rails. I pried off the plastic covering with my good arm and sniffed the steam from the meat and the thick, gooey gravy that held it to the plate. I filled a scoop spoon and swallowed a mouthful, enjoying the lingering taste of the gravy. Then I promptly vomited.