The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (37 page)

She made no sign she knew me. I swallowed the wine and chewed the wafer, then slipped through the shadow screen after Hawk slipped out. He looked as if he had just seen God. Pipit was inside, lying naked on a hammock draped with various colored waistcloths. I had been used to seeing her with natural eyebrows and lips and with her hair in plaits. Now her eyebrows had been plucked and her lips smeared with red. Her hair lay loose about her shoulders; her olive skin gleamed with scented oil. She was too young, I thought. No amount of rouge and oil could make her look like a temple priestess, only a caricature of one.

I didn’t know whether she had seen me or not. She had closed her eyes and lay back in the hammock, waiting.

“Pipit,” I said softly.

Her eyes jerked open and I managed a smile, which quickly faded. Her pupils were small dots in her brown eyes. Before the ceremony had begun, she had been drugged. I wasn’t sure she even knew me.

“I’m not here to ‘create life,’ Pipit,” I said quietly.

“Sparrow…”

I caught the expression on her face and took her in my arms to calm her trembling.

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “I knew it would be like this. Huldah told me. It’s… the way it has to be done.” She hesitated. “I feel honored,” she lied.

“ Huldahwill make sure the father is Crow,” I said to reassure her. His name had been on the list and I knew that Huldah would match him with her.

She shook her head.

“Thrush was the first to see me.”

The Captain’s gift to his son, I thought, my mind flooding with anger. And Thrush would hardly have accepted Huldah’s bulb of wine.

“I’m sure Huldah can take care of it,” I muttered.

She stiffened in my arms and moved away, deliberately brushing the hair away from her face so I could see her expression. Her voice was cold and remote.

“It has its own life, Sparrow.”

I had been foolish to suggest abortion and suddenly wished I had slit Thrush’s throat when I had the chance.

“What about Crow?”

“He’ll take an interest.”

He would have no matter who the father was.

“Is there anything you want?” I asked.

“For you to stay a little longer,” she said in a suddenly seductive voice, opening her arms to me. I lightly stroked her shoulder,then shoved out through the shadow screen.“ That sleep period, I couldn’t bring myself to touch Snipe, not because she was new crew and I was old but because I couldn’t stand the thought of coupling.

The ceremony lasted for two weeks. During the final period I went back to see Pipit again, forcing myself to float down the corridor with its red and green banners and the ubiquitous cross-and-ovoid. Crow had visited her several times, once in the role of potential birth father, but I had the nagging feeling she might need to talk to somebody not caught up in ritual.

The corridor was crowded as usual, but few even noticed me, their eyes viewing glories to come that I had no desire to see. I was three shadow screens away when I suddenly flattened against the bulkhead. Abel had slipped out of Pipit’s compartment. Fortunately, he turned down the far end of the corridor and never saw me.

Then my suspicions began to grow; I wondered if he had ingratiated himself with the Captain once again and had been spying on Pipit. She had helped Huldah out in previous ceremonies and now she was an actress in this one, heavily drugged and probably willing to say anything…

I suddenly felt chilled. Snipe had said that Abel was aware I knew my past. If he were back in the service of the Captain, this time period might be my last as “Sparrow.”…

I slipped down the corridor after him, catching a glimpse of his fat figure as he floated around a distant corner. Half a dozen turns later, I frowned, confused as to where he was going. He wasn’t on his way to the bridge or to the Captain’s quarters. He seemed to be drifting aimlessly through the corridors, stopping briefly in the engine compartment to talk to a few crew members there, then pausing equally briefly in the gymnasium, where he nodded at some of those exercising. Each time he stopped, he was another level lower in the
Astron.
But I never guessed his destination until he got there. Reduction.

He slipped in through the shadow screen and I hesitated for only a moment before following. He hadn’t been spying on Pipit, he hadn’t dropped by her compartment to pry for information he could carry back to the Captain. He had gone to say good-bye.

“Abel.”

He had taken off his cling-titesand was seated on the ledge, gently massaging his feet. It would have been a homey scene if it weren’t for the equipment, the smells, and most of all, the open storage chamber against the rear bulkhead, its interior choked with a rust-colored mist.

“Close the hatch,Sparrow, it turns off the peep screen.” When I had dogged it down, he said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

His voice was friendly, almost avuncular, with none of the harshness and arrogance of the Abel I had known. Even the planes of his chubby face had softened. For the first time in perhaps years, he probably felt safe. Once inside Reduction, you were beyond anybody’s authority, even the Captain’s. Your future then was between you and the Great Egg.

I waved my hand around the compartment.

“Why?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Your life’s been too short this time for you to know the customs—at least to know them from the inside, where it counts. When your life is over, you go to Reduction. It’s that simple.”

“When your life is over,” I repeated stupidly.

“When that work of art you call your life is complete, when one more brush stroke won’t make a bit of difference.” He looked somber. “When there’s nothing to look forward to, when you can no longer help the ship or its crew, when your friends and your lovers are gone…”

He shook his head as I started to object.

“No false emotions, Sparrow. You’ve never liked me, you weren’t supposed to. If you had, I wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. As it is, there’s only one last thing I can do.” He suddenly smiled and winked and with that there was nothing left to remind me of the old Abel. “Cheat the Captain.”

“I don’t—”

He stripped off his halter and threw it in a waste chute. He was now naked, a fat old man who somehow hadn’t shed his dignity with his clothing.

“I’m surprised you haven’t guessed—or that Ophelia hasn’t told you.”

“Trials,” I said.

He nodded. “There’ll be much less resistance to them, at least for right now. And I was never…

popular.”

“On what charges?”I wanted to dissuade him from using the chamber, though I knew that if Abel went to trial, the Captain would be merciless.

“The right one, of course.Treason.I worked withNoah, the Captain must have guessed that—Noah and I were very close when we were younger. I never thought the arguments between us were convincing but I had to risk it. We needed somebody who could establish a rapport with Kusaka .”

He cocked his head.

“I understand you’re to succeed me.Dangerous job, Sparrow, especially for you. He’s not an easy man to know. Or like.”

He wrapped his flabby arms around his chest, trying to shield himself from the compartment chill. He glanced at the mist-filled chamber; I guessed it would be warm and comfortable once inside and he would merely slip away.

“There’s nothing I can say?” I asked, feeling miserable. This was an entirely new and likable Abel and I would know him for only a few minutes.

“Any way of dying is unpleasant, Sparrow, but the chamber is less unpleasant than most. And I’ll still be with you.” He deliberately made a joke of it. “Look for me at breakfast.”

I thought of how much skill it must have taken to be humble and obsequious before the Captain and then protect what little influence he had acquired by being antagonistic to the crew. He had sacrificed any chance of making friends and in the end was willing to sacrifice his life as well.

“You were the greatest actor on board,” I said. I meant it in a light vein but there was a note of sincerity to it that he found flattering.

“Why, thank you, Sparrow—that’s nice of you to say.”

He floated over to the chamber and tentativelydabbled a hand in the mist.

“What happens?” I asked, curious.

He was suddenly reticent.

“It’s painless for me but I wouldn’t watch if I were you.”

I had to ask.

“You never told the Captain.”

“Of your awareness?No, of course not.”

The hand he had put in the mist now looked pale, almost translucent. I began to sweat, despite the chill of the compartment.

“Why hasn’t anybody ever told me about myself?”

His expression became serious.

“We wanted you to remember, but at your own speed. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to recall all your lifetimes at once? A hundred different people live inside you, Sparrow. You’d have to pick one as the dominant personality and I imagine the others would object.”

I had thought about that once before but didn’t want to worry about it now.

“You ran the mutiny?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Hardly.As much as anybody could be said to run it, I suppose it’s been run by you. You’re the oldest livingmember, you’ve been one from the very beginning.”

He noticed the stricken expression on my face and hastened to reassure me.

“That’s only in a matter of speaking, Sparrow. Over the years, you’ve been the heart and soul of it but you’ve never had much of a role in the planning from generation to generation.” His voice turned grim.

“You’ve always been a member, but never for very long.”

I felt uneasy.

“That’s the trigger for flatlining , isn’t it?When the Captain finds out.”

He nodded.“One of them. Usually you’re not urged to join unless it looks as if you’ve had a breakthrough, as if you might remember something important. And then you have to be prepared. We were in a hurry this time because of the Dark…”

His voice trailed off. Neither of us had anything more to say to each other.

“Don’t look so glum, Sparrow—there’s no point to me starring in a trial for the Captain. To be honest, he’s always frightened me. He’s too inventive when it comes to ways of dying.”

He thrust a foot into the swirling mist.

“I’ve said my good-byes to Huldah but give my love to Ophelia. Just the way it sounds. Old men have their fantasies, too.”

He stepped into the chamber and let the thick mist wrap around him like a blanket. I had a glimpse of a peaceful face just before he made his final request.

“Privacy, Sparrow.”

I turned my back, undogged the hatch and slipped out. On my return to Exploration I noticed Banquo hurrying through the corridors leading to the lower levels.

But Abel could rest easy. Banquo would arrive much too late.

****

There were no drills now, no demands for data,no expectations of a new planetary landing in another two years or five. There wouldn’t be another one for generations. The sea of blackness ahead of us steadily expanded with the familiar constellations slipping to our rear. The uneasiness on board began to grow again. The birth allotments had been only a brief respite from the growing fear of the Dark. Ophelia and the other members of our cell wondered when the Captain would realize that if the crew couldn’t be bought, it might be intimidated. There would be another flurry of excitement nine months in the future when the birth mothers delivered, and after that…

After that, there would be no future, and we could expect more crew members to choose to die asJudah had.

But meanwhile Crow and I spent more time on the hangar deck running through the various training projections, this time more for entertainment than for knowledge we would never use. At other times Crow tinkered with the falsie for his compartment, reprogramming the images of the people in the square below and adding more rocket trails to the sky.

Eventually, even that palled. We still held drills but only Portia and Quince were serious about them. The rest of us were halfhearted, especially about the EVA maneuvers. Trainees were increasingly reluctant to go on them and Loon, predictably, was the first to refuse outright.

I could understand why. It was one thing to go into an Outside filled with stars. It was quite another when the only stars were behind the ship and ahead of you was a smothering blackness. Hawk and Eagle were the next to refuse and after that all EVA exercises were canceled. The mutiny slumbered along, the clandestine meetings shorter and shorter. Originally, there had been the camaraderie of conspiracy, debates about how new members were to be recruited and power seized. It was easy to guess who the new recruits were—they seemed to think their new role required them to couple enthusiastically with as many other would-be mutineers as possible. Then the secret sessions deteriorated into bitching about the Captain and finally to round-robins of complaints about ship life in general.

It was my idea to turn the mutiny into a game, to make it fun as well as good training. I gave our cell a name—theJudah cell—and we drew assignments, the object being to find out as much as we could about the person whose name we drew. How they spent their shifts, what they ate at meals,who they saw in their free time and, if they happened to have a liaison with another crew member, exactly what they did. Known members of your own cell weren’t excluded, and the sport came when you got up at a meeting and told everything you had found out about a fellow cell member. Frienships were shattered, but only for the moment, and more than once a small bacchanal ensued when all was revealed. I once drew Snipe’s name but wisely refused to play with her as the quarry. Later I drew Loon’s and reported at great length on his dalliances among the crew, not only with Ibis and her girlfriend but with Swallow and Grouse in Communications and with Crane in Maintenance. I almost—but not quite—felt ashamed when my report left him red-faced with embarrassment, while Crow clutched a nearby hammock and roared with laughter.

The next name I drew as part of the game was a member of another cell— Corin, my team leader in Exploration. Ophelia told me he had been a member of the mutiny long before she and Noah first tried to recruit me. My respect for him as a team leader had grown enormously and we had become friendly, frequently joking on shift or sharing smoke in his office.