The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (3 page)

I lay back, turning my face away as Crow frantically tried to catch the floating brown globules with the loose end of his waistcloth. Whatever other purposes Crow had in life, apparently one of them was to clean up after me.

He looked down at me, stricken. “I’m sorry, I—”

“Go away,” I said, and pulled the sheet over my face, too ashamed to talk any more and too filled with an envy that neither he nor Pipit would ever understand.

The memories of their sixteen or eighteen years filled their heads like sugar in a bowl. But I had no memories. For all practical purposes, I had been born a few weeks before. I had no recollections of a mother or a father or a brother or a sister or friends or enemies or lovers. The only memories I possessed were those of the planet below, the Lander, and my nightmares in sick bay. They weren’t nearly enough.

Pipit was always there now, usually with several small children who fingered the bedding and studied me with a grave curiosity. When she wasn’t attending me—she never seemed to nurse the other patients at all—Pipit played with the youngsters as they floated about the compartment. She seemed to enjoy the role of older sister or surrogate mother and she was very good at it. She anticipated what the children were going to do before they did it, even plucking them out of the air to hold them over the vacuum of a waste chute when they needed it.

I discovered later it wasn’t nearly as simple as motherly anticipation. Finally, one time period when I awoke, the tube was gone. Pipit was waiting for me with a bowl and a scoop spoon, her chubby face starched with a grim determination.

“You’ll have to keep this down.” Her voice was surprisingly hard.

She fed me a mouthful of porridge. When it started to come back up, she clamped my mouth shut with her hands until the spasm passed and I had swallowed both the porridge and the bile that had risen with it. After ten minutes of turmoil, my stomach no longer had the strength to rebel. Several meals later, I was eating solids.

It wasn’t many time periods after that when Pipit floated into the compartment, trailed by two more visitors. Both were old men wearing white halters, both had a caduceus stenciled on each shoulder, and both carried writing slates tucked in their sashes.

One was fat and bald and red-faced and looked as if he had better things to do. The other was thinner, more awkward in hismovements, his eyes bright behind a pair of ancient spectacles whose wire frames had been wrapped and rewrapped with tape.

At my bedside, the fat one dropped three magnetic lines to anchor himself, folding his plump legs beneath him. He studied the instruments set in the bed’s headboard, clamped chubby fingers around my wrist, and took my pulse by hand, obviously lacking faith in the automatic readouts. His grip had the clammy feel that too much flesh always seems to have.

I looked up at the thin one and mumbled, “Where am I?”

“On board the
Astron
—didn’t Crow tell you?”

“He didn’t tell me what it was,” I said, sullen.

He gave me a reassuring smile. “The
Aaron’s
an exploration ship, interstellar. So far as we know, the only one.From Earth.” Somehow I knew that, though I knew nothing about the planet itself. Both of them waited expectantly for me to ask something more. The thin one was patient, his smile bright. The fat one was nervous, frowning and plucking absently at his sash to let me know his time was valuable. I guessed that both of them were acting, that the thin one was really impatient and that there was no other place the fat one would rather have been.

“I’m Noah,” the thin one offered. “My friend here is Abel. They’re names from the Bible.”

It surprised me that I knew what the Bible was.

“They’re just names,” I said, still sulky. “Who are you?”

Abel glanced at Noah, then back at me, annoyed with both of us. Noah smiled again, patiently playing the game. “We’re the ship’s doctors. Abel is a body doctor. I’m more concerned with the mind. But that isn’t what you wanted to ask, is it?”

I was reluctant to answer. I had no memories, no name, and no knowledge of the
Astron
or my relationship to it, and that made me the most vulnerable person in the compartment.

“Who am I?” I finally asked.

Noah looked secretive and nodded to Pipit. She closed the shadow screen so we were alone with the other patients, none of whom were paying any attention to us. Noah and Abel hunched closer to the bedside while Pipit lingered a discreet distance away.

“Who—”

Abel interrupted, peevish. “It would be better if you told us.”

“I don’t know,” I said, turning my face away so they couldn’t see my anger. “If I did, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“You don’t remember,” Abel corrected. He leaned closer, his breath heavy with reminders of his dinner.

“Look at me,” he said curtly. “It makes it easier if I can see the eyes of the person I’m talking to.”

Whoever I was, I was young. You used that tone onboys, you didn’t use it on men.

“I don’t remember,” I repeated, evenmore surly .

Abel snorted in disgust and glanced at Noah. “I told Huldah it would be no use,” he muttered. “We’re wasting our time with dangerous business.”

Noah ignored him, his eyes huge behind lenses that were so full of scratches they were almost opaque. They went well with the antique spacesuits but not with the highly polished technology of the operating room beyond.

“Tell me what you do remember. Go as far back as you can.”

I told him about exploring the planet below, about falling from the face of the scarp, and about my teammates who had carried me back to the Lander.

“Nobody ever called you by name?”

I shook my head.

“You don’t remember anything before climbing down the ladder?”

For just a moment I stood before a door behind which were crowded all the memories I could no longer recall.

“I started down the ladder,” I said. “I caught my foot,then I was on the surface and…” There was something more but it vanished quickly. “I’ve told you everything since then.”

“We’re wasting our time,” Abel complained once more to Noah. But he made no move to leave.

“It’s a form of amnesia,” Noah said, watching me closely.“Retrograde amnesia. You remember the accident and what you did after stepping off the ladder. Before then it’s… gone. The obvious cause was the fall from the scarp. It came very close to killing you.”

“My memories will come back?” I asked.

He and Abel shared a brief glance,then Noah tried to reassure me.

“Memory loss is usually selective. You haven’t forgotten how to talk, you’ll relearn how to get around the ship,you’ll start to remember a lot of little things. The first memories to return are those closest to the trauma. You’ll remember more experiences and one will lead to another.” He hesitated. “If the condition persists, we can always try hypnosis or drugs.”

There was no hint of guile on his face but his voice was full of it. My memories were gone—probably for good—and, forreasons of his own, he was as bitterly disappointed as I was.

“Who am I?” I cried once more.

There was no morepretense at reassurance; that game was over. “Somewhere inside, you know,” Noah said in a voice as full of desperation as my own.

I was tired and started drifting off to sleep. “I don’t remember,” I muttered.

“Somebody’s coming,” Pipitinterrupted, her ear against the hatchway. Noah pushed away from the bedside and Abel yanked at his magnetic anchors. I watched them as they scrambled for the shadow screen. For the first time I realized that both of them had been badly frightened all the time they were talking to me—afraid not only of the questions they were asking but of what my responses might be.

At the hatchway, Noah turned and blurted: “You’re a tech assistant on board the
Astron
, You’re seventeen years old. Your name is Sparrow.”

Sparrow.

Unlike “Crow,” the name didn’t mean a thing to me.

As my nightmares tapered off, I spent more of my waking hours exercising in bed and trying to talk to the other patients. Pipit never served them, though occasionally I saw one sitting on the edge of his bunk eating from a tray. There was a steady buzz of conversation as they talked to each other, and a few of them groaned with pain as they slept.

But they never looked at me or answered when I spoke. I wondered if my accident had scarred me, though my hands could find no evidence of it. I tried to catch a glimpse of my features in the polished metal of the bulkheads, but for some reason it would not yield a clear reflection of my face. One time period I tried to strike up a conversation with the crewman in the next bunk, a man about my age who wore a cast on his right arm. He was obviously in pain and my first try was sympathetic.

“The planet took me by surprise,” I said. “I guess it did you, too.”

He ignored me and started talking with a friend in another bunk. Ordinarily I would have shrugged and turned away, but I had been ignored for almost a month. It finally proved too much. I raised my voice. “You can at least say you don’t want to talk to me.”

He looked right through me, not acknowledging my presence at all, and began to rearrange his sheets.

“You can go to hell!” I shouted. I scrabbled about on my mattress, searching for something to throw at him.

Pipit appeared then, frowning.

“What’s wrong, Sparrow?”

I turned away from her, still grumbling. I made a note to resume the conversation once we were out of sick bay—but then, I would do my talking with my fists.

Eventually I gave up trying to communicate with my fellow patients and concentrated on Pipit as she played with the youngsters. Once it sounded like she was holding class. I stayed awake to listen as the children chanted their “ begats.”

“ Cuzcowas begat by Ibis who was begat by Ophelia who was begat by Wrasse who was begat…”

Cuzcowas perhaps three years old, a little girl who laughed a lot and was one of Pipit’sfavorites, though in reality they were all her favorites. I had no idea who Ibis was until I met a thin, nervous woman, a little older than Pipit, who was her coconspirator in farming a secret spice plot in Hydroponics. Ophelia was the woman who had been in charge of the exploration team on Seti IV, the planet where I’d had my accident, a planet now light-weeks behind us in the void.

The mothers usually picked up their children after shift. They were greeted with squeals of delight, but few of the children failed to wave good-bye to Pipit and some were reluctant to leave at all. It was Pipit who kissed it and made it well when they bumped themselves floating around the compartment, it was Pipit who hugged them when they needed it most, and it was Pipit who entertained them with simple fairy tales before nap time…

Crow and Ophelia still came to see me, but for Ophelia it had become more professional than personal; whatever deep concern she had felt for me on board the Lander had withered as I grew stronger. On the other hand, Crow seemed less formal and more open, joking and talking with me as he might have with any crew member. Occasionally I caught a wistful look and was reminded that when I had lost my memories, both he and Ophelia had lost someone close to them, someone I doubted that I could ever replace. Or ever know.

Then the time arrived when Pipit lowered the rails, untied the straps, and pulled me over to the shower stall.

“You smell,” she said primly. “You need a bath.”

She helped me strip off the bandages, then pushed me into the cubicle and scrubbed my back—hard—as the water jetted out to be sucked up by the intake vacuum. Nudity didn’t bother her, though I was painfully aware of her naked body and olive skin. I bit my lip in a vain attempt to prevent the eventual erection. She ignored it and finally I did, too. It obligingly went away. At the same time I resented the fact that after numerous sponge baths she knew my body as well as her own. The baths and her touch had become a source of erotic pleasure for me: I resented that, too. She finished vacuuming the water off my back, then handed me a clean waistcloth. There was a mirror just outside the shower stall—it had been steamed over when I entered—and I wiped it with a corner of the cloth. For the first time in my “life” I saw myself.

I thought I was very handsome.

I was thinner than Crow and looked older—I didn’t think by much. I was neither as tall nor as muscular, though there was no hint of adolescent babyfat . I had thick auburn hair, a reddish beard, and a straggling moustache. My eyes were a light green. Sometime in the past my nose had been broken, though I was convinced it made me look romantic. My skin was white even for someone with reddish hair—I hadn’t spent much time under the sick-bay health lamps—and my shoulders were slightly hunched. I had a flat stomach, big hands and feet, and a curly mat of rust-colored fuzz on my chest. My fingers were spatulate

, though the rest of me looked normal enough.

My name is Sparrow; I’m seventeen years old and a tech assistant on board the Astron. I was vastly pleased with myself.

“Everything’s there,” Pipit said matter-of-factly. “I checked.”

She had read my every thought. In the mirror, my face turned pink.

“I hope you enjoyed yourself,” I grunted. I slipped the cloth up and around my waist and knotted it, realizing a moment later that whatever else I hadforgotten, I hadn’t forgotten how to do
that
. Pipit took off her cling-titesand slipped them beneath her waistcloth. Then she switched off the shadow screen over the hatchway.

“Would you like to see the ship?”

I looked at the brilliantly lit corridor just beyond and watched the crewmen jostling each other as they floated down it, eventually to be lost in the distance.

I wanted to see the ship very badly.

****

We drifted through the hatch into the passageway outside, lined with color-coded piping that served as directions to the various living and working quarters. Names and assignments ran in a continuous illuminated strip along the bottom of the overhead. Pipit grabbed a ring jutting out from the bulkhead and pushedherself along, braking the same way.