The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (26 page)

Tybaltfingered the palm terminal and another alien suddenly appeared on top of a dune a hundred feet away.

“He didn’t kill this one.”

“If he saw what happened to his friend, maybe he’ll go away.” Loon suddenly sounded timid and a little frightened. He had realized his jokes weren’t going to make the projection disappear.

“Get into position, Loon.”

“No.” This time Loon’s voice had more strength to it, though his face was white with strain.

“Now!” Tybaltbellowed.

Loon threw the pellet gun away and we watched, astonished, as it drifted toward the far bulkhead.

“I won’t destroy anything living,” Loon said flatly.

Tybaltlooked uncertain of what to do.

“All right, stand down, Loon—you’re on report to the Captain. Hawk, you’re next.”

Hawk had to clear his throat twice before he finally managed to squeak: “I won’t do it.” Another pellet gun sailed toward the bulkhead.

Tybaltplaced his hands on his hips and glared. “Any of the rest of youhave the courage?”

None of us moved.

“What if it shot at you first?” Tybalt asked slowly.

There was more puzzlement than anger in his voice and I felt sorry for him. He had failed to see what was coming even though he had been getting signals ever since the drill started. Hawk blanched and cleared his throat a dozen times but the words wouldn’t come. It was a new idea to him, one he had never considered before.

“It’s only a projection,” Tybalt urged. “It’s not really alive—you know that.”

“It’s a symbol of something that’s alive,” Hawk finally said, trying to explain the unexplainable to himself as well as to Tybalt . “The difference… isn’t that great.”

Tybaltstared at us for a full minute and we stared back with all the fascination that a bird is supposed to feel for a snake. Finally he said, “You’re dismissed,” and went to retrieve the guns. I was the last one to the hatch, pausing when I heard Tybalt behind me.

“Ophelia and I could have saved ourselves the arguments. There isn’t going to be any mutiny, Sparrow—they’ll never fight.”

It was one of the few times when I thought Tybalt was absolutely right.

None of us slept the last two time periods before our first landing on Aquinas II. We were ten thousand kilometers out and the planet was a swollen yellow-brown globe. To the eye, it was featureless except for an occasional streak of dirty yellow or black in the smog that hid its surface. But our instruments had penetrated the veil; we knew that there were mountains of rock and water ice, as well as oceans of methane, and that methane snow fell on methane ice caps.

On the one hand, the chances of life seemed promising but on the other, the intense cold ruled against it. Gravity was a little more than Earth normal, the terrain was rough, the atmosphere heavy and thick. Judging by the turbulent cloud cover, there were strong surface winds. Visibility would be limited and working in the high winds dangerous.

Despite the cold and the too-recent memory of the cautionary projections, the primordial soup presented possibilities. It was remarkable how we concentrated on them and ignored the dangers. Once we had landed, who would be the first to find life? Even the would-be mutineers were caught up in the lottery.

During the sleep period before the landing, we clustered in the various working spaces or in the compartments of friends. Close to a hundred crew members would be going down. My team included Hawk, Eagle, Crow, and Snipe. Ophelia and Portia were theSeniors in command. Loon, Thrush, and Heron had been assigned to the team commanded by Tybalt and Quince.

I was grateful for the separation.

The team leaders and otherSeniors kept to themselves but none of the younger would-be explorers like myself could sleep. My teammates and I found refuge among the cannibalized Rovers in Exploration, where we passed around some smoke and speculated about what we would find on Aquinas II. Snipe managed to get hold of a crude relief map of the landing area and we crowded around while Crow focused the rays of a portable glow lamp on it. Snipe and Crow were mutineers, but this was their first planet and they were as enthusiastic as the rest.

“Base camp should be here, to the north of this small mountain called Trefil . It’s relatively flat but it won’t take long to travel by Rover to the scarps and the highlands.”

“It looks flat,” Snipe said thoughtfully, “but it wouldn’t have to be very rough to make travel difficult.”

Hawk nudged me in the ribs. “What do you think our chances are of finding life, Sparrow?”

He and the others waited anxiously for my opinion, forgetting for a moment that I was only Sparrow. For all practical purposes planetary exploration was as new to me as it was to them, regardless of how many planets Aaron, Hamlet, and my previous incarnations had investigated. The only planet I had memories of didn’t exist.

I shrugged. “It’s cold, probably too cold for life.”

“Life as we know it,” Eagle said, disappointed at my response.

“It doesn’t mean it was always too cold,” Hawk added.

Tybaltwas not without a few star pupils.

“We should try and get some sleep,” Crow said, yawning.

“Yeah, we should,” Eagle agreed, and tied the end of his waistcloth to the rusted rollbar of a Rover so he wouldn’t drift away. He crossed his arms over his chest and Crow dimmed the glow tube and for all of thirty seconds nobody said a word.

“What was the gravity?” Hawk suddenly asked.“One point one? It’s going to be difficult walking around in our suits with that much gravity and the strong winds.”

I swore silently and untied my own waistcloth from a convenient steering wheel.

“Don’tworry, you’ll be so heavy it’ll be hard to blow you away.” I pushed toward the shadow screen. I had decided to go to the hangar deck and sleep under the stars. The
Astron
was so oriented in its parking orbit that you couldn’t see Aquinas II from there and the deck would probably be deserted. The corridors were empty, though I could hear the hum of muted conversations behind the shadow screens that cloaked most of the working spaces and living compartments. I floated through the well that tied the decks together, passing by the one that housed the Captain’s quarters. It was the only deck completely lit and I supposed the Captain was holding a meeting with some of the team leaders. The hangar deck was two levels away and I had just started to twist around for a landing when I felt the light touch of air currents at my back.

“Sparrow.”

I grabbed at a nearby bulkhead ring to slow myself. When I turned, I saw the Captain close behind me, his eyes gleaming in the soft light from the glow tubes. For the first time, he was wearing something that looked like an official uniform—a skintight black halter that extended from his neck to his wrists and ankles. It was a moment before I noticed the fine tubing and realized it was the inner-weave for an exploration suit.

“I’ll be going in with you,” he said, smiling,then turned apologetic. “Not with your team—I’ll be setting up the base camp a few hours from now.” He clapped me on the back. “Aquinas II is the best possibility we’ve seen in generations, and God willing, I’m sure we’ll find something.”

Two thousand years of disappointments and he was still a true believer. I didn’t know whether to admire him or be depressed. His reaction was probably invariable, a conviction that this time was it, that this time the long voyage was not in vain. If Ophelia was right, he wasn’t capable of any other reaction.

“I’m looking forward to it, Sparrow. What about yourself?”

The Captain’s spirit was catching. Once again I could feel my emotions flip-flop towards him.

“My team can’t wait,” I said, which was true. “Neither canI .” Which was not true—the back of my mind was crowded with second thoughts.

“Nobody can,” he said. Then: “Where’s your team? They can’t be the only onessleeping, everybody’s holding camp meetings all over the ship. I’d like to talk to them.”

The king, cheering on his loyal troops before the battle.

“Exploration—the glow tubes are out but they’re probably still talking.”

He pushed off for the well. “See you down below, Sparrow.”

It was then I said something I should have had the brains to keep to myself, knowing it would come back to haunt me.

“What happens if we don’t find anything?”

He spun around, no longer smiling.

“Then we’ll just have to keep looking, won’t we?”

I continued to the hangar deck, slipping through the shadow screen and hoping nobody else was there. One dim glow tube marked a distant well, but except for that, it was completely dark. I was feeling along the bulkhead for the palm terminal—its location light was out—when I ran into a loose bundle of tether line that some idiot had failed to secure. Loose coils of line were one of the major hazards on board; the spring and the tension in the coils lent them a life of their own. I kicked at it, annoyed, and some of the coils floated up around my legs and waist; I could even feel one slide across my throat. I pulled at a loop and the line around my neck promptly tightened.

Angered, I tugged various strands at random and then heard the faint rumble of a take-up reel. Somewhere in the dark somebody had turned it on, or else my tugging had triggered the reel into action. The rope grew taut and I flailed helplessly in the air as I was pulled toward the reel. Would somebody else have the same idea and come up to the hangar deck to look at the stars and sleep? Initially, I had wanted to be by myself. Now I would have been grateful if the entire ship’s company had joined me.

It was getting harder to breathe and I panicked, only wrapping the coils tighter around my body. But I was also making a lot of noise, crashing into the bulkheads while I shouted for help. A nearby glow tube suddenly came on and a voice said, “Don’t move,you’re only making it worse.”

He was behind me but I could tell by the voicewho it was and I froze. Hands plucked at the coils around my waist, trying to unknot the line, and a moment later I was free to rub my throat and curse that it had to be Thrush who had saved my life.

His pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. “It’s not like you to hide from all that enthusiasm below, Sparrow.” I started to say something and he held up a hand. “You don’t have to thank me—I didn’t do it for you, I did it for me. If you’d choked to death, I’d be the first one they’d blame.”

He disappeared through the shadow screen, leaving me to massage my neck and stare at the spot where he had been. In retrospect, I thought I had heard movement when I first came on deck. And what was Thrush doing there anyway? I shrugged; probably the same as me. I couldn’t believe my struggles could wrap the line around my neck so tightly but neither could I believe that Thrush had flicked the switch on the take-up reel. His own logic was too convincing—he would be the first the crew would accuse. It didn’t occur to me until later that I had more enemies than one and that Thrush had indeed saved my life. He had told the truth when he gave his reasons, but he hadn’t told the whole truth.

****

Aquinas II was hell.

It was storming and winds buffeted the Lander for almost an hour before we found a safe place to set down. We were frightened and sick; even Tybalt and Ophelia looked green around the gills. When little Quince ducked into the lavatory for five minutes, I guessed he had chosen to empty his stomach in private.

We settled in a rocky area half a dozen kilometers from base camp and two from a methane river that had gouged a rocky channel and left cliffs towering fifty meters on either side. Despite what we might have thought before, once on the planet’s surface we all had hopes of finding living creatures inthe eddies of the river or simple fossils in the stratum of the confining cliffs. It was a relatively young planet and none of us thought that any life forms would be very large or threatening. But I also knew none of us had forgotten the monsters Tybalt had conjured up for target practice.

The Rover had been weatherized and we huddled in its belly as it lumbered over rocks and forded small streams on its way toward the river. The wind howled around the metal hull while we fingered our way through the snow and smog with searchlights. We could see ahead for perhaps thirty meters; then everything was veiled by the swirling, dirty snow.

We didn’t stop until we were near the river and boulders blocked the way. Portia ordered the hatches opened and we crawled out into the slush that was building up around the treads. I had a sense of deja vu even though Aquinas II was vastly different from Seti IV. Was it really happening? I wondered.Or had I been drugged and stuffed into a data suit to fumble my way through another artificial reality, one as real to me as a genuine planet?

But there were familiar faces behind the visors of those around me and their voices were comfortingly loud in my headset.

“ Tybalt’steam will explore the riverbank and descend to the stream itself.” Another Rover had clanked up and Ophelia waved at the suited figures as they climbed out and trudged toward the river, maybe a hundred meters away. Before they had gone a quarter that distance, their helmet lights were lost in the driving snow. “Eagle, Hawk, and Crow, go with Portia. Sparrow andSnipe, follow me.”

She turned toward a low-lying scarp another hundred meters in the other direction. The river originally had been wider and over the eons had cut itself two beds.

I followed Ophelia, fighting my way against the screaming wind, suddenly afraid that I might lose both her and Snipe in the gloom. My life-support systems were working at maximum but I could still feel the cold seeping through tiny chinks in my boots and sense it chilling the tips of my gloves. A small leak in the suit and I would freeze to death before I could get back to the Lander. Ophelia was in the lead and I worried whenever she disappeared in a sudden swirl of dirty snow. It worried me just as much that the wind seemed to be getting stronger and I was losing traction because the slush was freezing in the grooves of my boots. If we hit a slope and I started to slide, there would be little I could do to stop.

Hamlet, I thought bitterly, would laugh at all of this; but then, he’d had twenty years of practice at being Hamlet and I’d had only a few months being Sparrow. It’s easy to be brave when you’ve had the experience.