The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (38 page)

I suddenly felt uneasy about my spying. The game had turned serious. Now I found myself listening more than I talked. I quickly learned the difference between casual listening, when you concentrate more on what you’re going to say next than on what the other person is telling you, and a professional awareness of content and nuance.

Corinled an unexciting life, vacillating between partnering with Gull in Communications and Raven in Maintenance. He worked out regularly in the gymnasium, though he never seemed able to lose the ridge of fat that circled his waist. He was old crew, not new, which meant he was even more of a mystery to the other members of my cell than he was to me.

His one character flaw wasn’t immediately obvious—he simply took too much interest in crew members whom I knew were mutineers. He listened as carefully to me as I listened to him and was as difficult to follow about the ship as I knew I was. I had no desire for anyone to trace me to the weekly meetings in the cave compartment and it quickly became apparent that Corin also had appointments that he wished no one to know about.

I told what I knew about him at a cell meeting, careful not to draw conclusions. Loon looked bored and said, “Who cares if he has another life?”

But Snipe listened carefully to what I had to say. “ Corin’san accomplished actor. I’ve watched him in a number of historicals . He could be acting now.”

Ophelia frowned. “Those with contacts to other cells, ask for further information on him.”

But on a ship where everybody normally knew everything about everybody else, few seemed to know much about Corin .

During the next dozen time periods, I finally tracked Corin to a remote corridor where he disappeared. The next time I followed him there, I allowed him just enough of a lead so he couldn’t accuse me of stalking him, rounded the corner, and ran into Crow.

I guessed why he was there and asked, “Who did you draw?”

“ Banquo.”

We stared at each other, our suspicions confirmed. Both Banquo and Corin had come to this corridor and disappeared, no doubt together. We floated down it, glancing into empty compartments. It was Crow who mustered the courage to barge through the occasional shadow screen pretending he was giddy on smoke,then back out with apologies. Not many compartments were occupied; life was receding from this corridor, and soon it would be abandoned.

I hesitated at the large hatch closing off one of the two vacant tubes that had made up the original
Astron

.

“It’s sealed,” Crow said, dismissing it. “There’s no life support in the deserted tubes anyway.”

I took his words on faith but tugged halfheartedly at the wheel that secured the hatch, more out of curiosity than in any expectation it would open. It gave and when I pulled harder, the hatch silently turned on its hinges. There was no sudden hiss and while the air felt chilly, it certainly wasn’t the cold of outer space.

“Small leaks,” I guessed. “Given enough time, the pressure would have equalized and there would be enough heat transfer to warm it.”

We peered in, saw nothing,then drifted through, closing the hatch quietly behind us and shivering in the chilly darkness. From one of the compartments there was the flicker of a glow tube and the soft murmur of voices. Only two, I decided after a moment. Corinand Banquo .

“Can you hear what they’re saying?” Crow whispered. I shook my head and he said, “We should get closer.” He started to drift toward the light.

I grabbed his arm. “Maybe they’re almost through.”

He hesitated,then followed me back out the hatch. We had barely made it into the next corridor when we heard Banquo and Corin leave.

“I wonder what they talked about,” Crow mused.

“About us,” I said.“About other cells.” I was angry because in my mind I had built Corin up as something of a replacement for Tybalt . Now I felt like a fool. “He’s a good listener. After this, his cell members will have to be careful what he hears.”

****

Crow and I came back the next time period, eager for a chance to explore. We lingered a moment at the end of the deserted passageway, then slipped unseen through the hatchway into Section Two of the
Astron,
a primary residence tube that hadn’t been in use for at least five hundred years. The air was still—I could feel no stray currents against my face—and smelled strange. I suspected it was fresher than the air in the main tube, which was fouled by body odors and the stink of oil. Crow had brought a portable glow lamp and we made our way slowly down the corridor, stopping briefly in the compartment where Banquo had met with Corin . Some threads had adhered to the bulkhead where one of them had bumped into it, and their cling-titeshad left faint marks on the oil-and-dust-caked deck. There wasn’t a great deal to see. When the crew finally deserted Section Two, they hadn’t left much behind. Some lengths of worn tether line; a dirty food tray that somebody had thrown in a corner, the traces of food paste dried to a black scab; a soiled waistcloth; a string tapestry still sealed to one of the bulkheads…

In one compartment, I made a genuine find—a discarded volume of fiction, clinging by its magnetic headband to the underside of a ledge. Its pages crumbled when I opened it and we hurriedly left to avoid breathing the dust. In another, I noticed a terminal pad and drifted over to it. Crow said, “If it works, you’ll be talking to ghosts.” I shrugged and positioned my palm on the still-resilient pad.

“Let’s see what happens.”

I pressed, and much to my amazement the power light flickered on. The computer in Section Two was a slave to the one in the main tube and drew little power of its own. When the tube had been sealed off, apparently no one had thought to disconnect it. Curious, I retrieved the compartment inventory and turned on the falsie.

We were suddenly surrounded by phantoms, gray buildings that towered into gray clouds overhead, gray storefronts with displays of gray dresses and suits and gray people walking by. There was no color and the forms were insubstantial and wavering; I could see the bulkheads through them and Crow watching me as I worked the pad.

“There’s not enough power,” I said. “Even if there were, it’s not a very imaginative falsie.”

“Street scene,” Crow sniffed, playing the critic. “We’ve become more sophisticated since then.”

But what city?And what street?And why did it seem so familiar?

I flicked it off and we continued down the corridor, pausing briefly in what was left of Section Two’s Hydroponics compartment. The grow lights had been ripped out, probably as spares for those in the main tube, leaving only the metal troughs and the plastic mesh. Some dried roots stuck in the plastic crumbled to powder when I touched them. I shivered, and not from the chill. Crow wasright, there were ghosts all around us.

We drifted through a dozen more empty levels and found nothing. Finally Crow said, “Let’s go back, I’m due on shift in an hour. There’s nothing here.”

I nodded and we retraced our steps. Three levels below the main one, I touched Crow on the shoulder and floated down a short corridor to Section Two Communications, or what was left of it—an example of the
Astron’s
redundancy. Like the other equipment rooms, this one had been cannibalized, though not completely. The receivers that automatically scanned the cosmic haystack for possible indications of life had been robbed of their chips and wiring. What remainedwas a terminal pad and a viewing globe. The equipment connected to the globe hadn’t been stripped. I could still access the Section Two computer.

“I’m cold,” Crow said, shivering.

“Give me a minute.”

I powered up the pad, wondering what I should retrieve in the globe,then chose the last dispatch that had been received from Earth. I had seen only the scrawled messages posted every few months or so outside Communications in the main tube. The bubbles of RF information were still spreading out from that remote planet and every now and then we would skim the surface of a faint message. Crow was clenching his thighs together, a sure sign we couldn’t spend much more time there. He would have to find a waste chute soon but there weren’t any operating ones in this section. And there was no possibility of pissing in a corner and hoping it would puddle there and stay.

“Look,” I said.

“Damn
it,” Crow groaned, and drifted over to see what I was pointing at in the globe. At first it was vague and insubstantial,then the words firmed up and became readable. The message was a religious one and fragmentary at that, in a language that seemed only dimly related to what we spoke on the
Astron.
There were no scientific references in it at all.

“For Christ’s sake,” Crow said, his bladder temporarily forgotten. “It’s a plea for better crops.”

I retrieved the previous messages and we read about wars and famines, strange plagues and political movements. As I went further back toward Launch there were occasional passing references to the
Astron
and finally the familiar litany of best wishes and brief messages from the descendants of relatives left behind.

“How many years have gone by?” I asked Crow.

It was an effort for him to break his concentration.

“What?”

“How many years have gone by on Earth?The difference in elapsed time on board ship and back there?”

I hadn’t thought much about time dilation before, but it was vastly important now. We had traveled far enough at high velocities so there would be a substantial difference. The years on Earth would have slipped by much faster than those on board ship.

“Maybe ten thousand—give or take a century or two.”

The ship was a static society; nothing had changed much despite the steady deterioration of the ship itself and the decrease in the size of the crew. But on Earth governments had come and gone, wars had been fought, minor ice ages had covered parts of the Northern Hemisphere,the very continents had drifted another few feet apart.

It struck me that the dispatches we were reading had little in common with those filed over the past few years by the Communications division in the main tube. According to those, nobody had forgotten us, the governments that had combined to send us were still in existence, and there had been a steady stream of exhortations to venture even further into the deeps…

“I can’t hold it any longer,” Crow groaned.

“It’d be a sure sign somebody was here,” I murmured.

I hastily powered down and we hurried back to the main level, cracked the hatch to see if anybody was coming, then slipped through and headed for the nearest waste chute. Back in my compartment, we sat in thoughtful silence on the hammock until finally Crow said, “Who wrote them, Sparrow?”

“The dispatches in Section Two?”

“No, the ones our own Communications division posted.”

“Probably the Captain.Who else?”

When they got that last dispatch, had that ancient crew tried to mutiny? I wondered. That would have been a crisis point for them, one as significant as the death ofJudah and going into the Dark were for us.

“What did it mean?” Crow asked. “That last dispatch?”

“I don’t know—but taken together they mean the Captain has no real authority. The governments that sent us have vanished, there’s nobody depending on us, there’s no one awaiting our return.” It suddenly struck me as both tragic and funny. “There is noKingdomofSpain , Crow.”

He didn’t understand the reference. Then he glanced at my hands and frowned. “What’s the matter, Sparrow?”

I was flexing my fingers, balling them into a fist, straightening them out one by one,then curling them into a fist again.

Ophelia had done the same thing when she tried to convince me of the uniqueness of life. Then she had claimed the only life in the universe was on the
Astron
and in “that thin green layer of scum” covering our home planet.

Now I wondered what had happened to life on Earth. Putting the dispatches from Section Two in chronological order showed that disaster had followeddisaster, the population had declined to some small farmers, the government to some sort of priesthood. Had wars and plagues reduced them to that? Had there been irreversible changes in the ecosphere? Had life itself survived?

“We have to return,” I said.

But I wasn’t sure there was anything to return to.

Perhaps that thin green layer of scum covering Earth had vanished completely and now the only life in the entire universe was that on board the
Astron.

Mark keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality Given our reality, the truth doesn’t it.

—Werner Erhard

A nybodyin the cell could call a meeting. Crow and I called the next one. Once again we met in the cave compartment. Ophelia was the first to arrive, followed by Loon and Snipe. They looked at me, curious, but I kept my face carefully blank.

I made no move to turn on the shadow screen after they entered and they guessed something was wrong. Loon looked apprehensive, glanced at Crow for explanations, received none, and turned back to me, frowning. Ophelia started to complain, took another look at my face, and shut up. Snipe made a show of studying her fingernails. She didn’t like surprises and she wasn’t prepared to like this one. A moment later, Grebe floated in, followed by little Quince and then Malachi from Engineering, a frail, elderly man with a sharp mind who had many friends among the old crew. I didn’t have the “sense” that Snipe and Ophelia had, but I could observe and investigate and I knew with certainty that all three were members of other cells. If any of the others knew, they pretended not to. Once they had made themselves comfortable, I drifted over to the hatch and sealed it. This was the first time we had ever met in a sealed compartment.

Ophelia was quicker than the others.

“You’ve discovered an informer,” she said with dawning awareness.

I nodded.“ Corin. He’s one of the Captain’s men.”

There was a shocked silence.

“The Captain knows about us?” Loon was terrified.

I shrugged. “He’s probably always known about some of you.” I devoutly hoped that I wasn’t included.