The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (42 page)

The pressure was no longer on the Captain, it was on us. He had taken hostages and none of us knew what plans he had for them. But I couldn’t forget the conversation with Ophelia about limiting the size of the crew once we ventured into the Dark.

The next sleep period I spent staring at the overhead and thinking of Pipit and the other birth mothers, wondering what the Captain might do next. Lack of sleep combined with an overactive imagination; what happened then was spontaneous and part of nobody’s plan.

One of the Captain’s men lost his nerve, I lost my temper, and the bloody revolt began.

The next time period we ate breakfast in silence. Loon worked the food machine, with mediocre results, though none of us had much of an appetite. Grow hunched by himself in a corner while Ophelia talked to him in low tones; then she gave up and pushed away, glancing at me and shaking her head. Corin was nervous and ate with a false heartiness. Thrush floated in, glanced around and sensed the mood, then slipped out. Crow’s dark eyes followed him and I could feel the battle going on within— Huldah’s breeding program would soon be put to the acid test. Then Crow handed his plate to Loon and kicked out into the corridor.

I pushed my own plate aside and started after him.

Snipe grabbed my arm. “You can’t help him, Sparrow.”

“I can’t help any of them,” I said bitterly. “But I can keep Crow from doing something foolish.”

The detention corridor was four levels down, one above Reduction. There was a crowd of about thirty at one end, almost all of them new crew, arguing with the frightened Captain’s man who had been assigned guard duty. A pellet gun was stuck loosely in his waistcloth but he made no move to touch it, trying to hold back the crowd with outstretched arms. I remembered him from Maintenance—a gangly twenty-year-old named Goose. He had probably become a Captain’s man for the sake of the red strip of cloth around his upper arm and an occasional smile and pat on the back from the Captain himself. I mingled with the crowd and listened to the rumors, some of which made my hair stand on end. An entire generation was to be skipped in birth allotments, the children were to be aborted, the birth mothers sterilized… I caught up with Crow, who managed a twisted smile and said, “I’m just here to observe, Sparrow.For right now.”

“Don’t lie,” I said. “What were you going to do?”

He looked away in uneasy agony. “I don’t know.”

“The Captain forbids any unauthorized personnel in this corridor!”

Goose’s voice was high-pitched and nervous. The crowd was gradually pushing him back but none of them struck or threatened him. I glanced at the corridor behind me. The Captain must know of the commotion; reinforcements would arrive any moment.

“You’ve got no right!” somebody shouted, which struck me as odd since they must know by now that nobody had any rights, not in the Captain’s eyes.

“Get the Captain!” I spotted Eagle and next to him, Hawk. Neither one could pass up this sort of excitement. But I worried that the crowd was playing into the Captain’s hands. It was growing and I feared what might happen next.

Crow read me and said bitterly, “They won’t do anything. They can’t.”

Huldahhad emasculated an entire generation… Then I wondered what they could do in any event. The Captain had the arms; he controlled the ship. And whatever else it was, this wasn’t the type of demonstration that would convince him of anything.

I looked around the crowd and tried to locate the leaders. There were a few up front and several in the middle who were doing most of the shouting but it didn’t look as if it were planned. It was a spontaneous demonstration of fear and anger, one of the many things we hadn’t counted on. Another of the Captain’s men appeared at the far end of the corridor—Cato himself—and I guessed others were slipping through the passageways behind us. I pulled at Crow and said, “Let’s get out of here—we’ll be trapped.” He started to fall back and I turned to follow, then saw Tern at the front of the crowd, a little to one side of Goose. Tern was in love with Swift—I remembered him waiting outside her compartment during the ritual—and Loon had said they intended to partner after the birth of her child. There were moreCaptain’s men at the far end of the corridor now. I changed my mind and tried to force my way through the crowd to reach Tern, all the time shouting for the crowd to disperse. The demonstration would be a golden opportunity for the Captain to drum up trials of those who had disobeyed his edict.

“Tern!”

He heard me and twisted around for a brief glance, then continued arguing with Goose. I was almost up to him when he pushed Goose aside and shot down the corridor, yelling for Swift. I think nobody but me heard the small report of the pellet gun above the shouting of the crowd. The air in the corridor suddenly turned pink with a fine red mist and there was an abrupt silence as all the actors froze in tableau. I’m sure at first they thought the air system had been sabotaged again. Then they realized what had happened and a low moan filled the passageway. I remembered playing with the children in the nursery. If one hurt, they all hurt.

And if Tern was dying, the new crew would feel each failing moment. At the far end of the corridor, a Captain’s man threw away his pellet gun and vomited into his waistcloth. He was probably the one who had fired, something he wouldn’t forgive himself for as long as he lived. I pushed past Goose and hurried up to Tern, who was floating motionless in the air. I caught him gently and turned him over to see the wound. He had been shot in the neck and blood was spurting in small red balloons from his torn throat to float away in the air currents or flatten in bright red splotches against the nearby bulkhead.

His lips moved as he murmured, “Swift?” Then his eyes glazed over and for the first time in my life as Sparrow, I saw something that was living—something that could think and talk and eat and make love—

die. One moment he was alive, trembling in myarms, and the next he was gone. Whatever was Tern had vanished and I was holding something good only for Reduction.

The corridor had emptied except for several crewmen being held halfheartedly by the Captain’s men. Everybody looked sick and those who had been close friends of Tern were crying. I remembered again Tybalt’s abortive effort at target practice and Tern’s refusal to shoot at a target symbolic of something living.

Huldahwas right; she had needed five more generations. But she hadn’t had them and the members of the new crew were going to pay a hideous price.

“You’re responsible,” a nervous Cato chattered at me, his teeth bared as if he were going to bite. “You and Ophelia, talking against the Captain…”

“Get out of my way,” I growled, and shoved him aside. I shot up the corridor toward the Captain’s quarters, never realizing until later that if Cato had shot me in the back he would have been commended for his action.

I didn’t know what to expect and I didn’t particularly care, but this couldn’t go on.

****

It didn’t surprise me that the Captain was waiting.

By the time I got there, I remembered that I was supposed to be a young tech assistant who had once been close to the Captain and was outraged and frightened by Tern’s murder. I could have avoided the Captain altogether but that wouldn’t have been in character and would be just as dangerous as my bitter protests.

Banquoshowed me in and went back to his post in the corridor. The Captain was alone at his desk, checking some writing slates.

“Cato killed Tern,” I said, the words tumbling out. “Tern was in the detention corridor but he wasn’t doing anything, he—”

The Captain held up a hand. He looked puzzled and mildly concerned and I made the mistake of taking him at face value, of assuming that he didn’t know, despite the peep screens at his back.

“Tell me what happened—from the beginning, Sparrow.”

I took a deep breath and said that I had heard about a disturbance in the detention corridor, went to see what was happening and tried to get the crowd to disperse. I had shouted at Tern to leave but he had been worried about Swift—

“The guards were posted to keep crewmen away,” the Captain interrupted, frowning. “If anybody wanted to see one of the birth mothers, they should have applied for a pass. It would have been granted.”

“There were rumors,” I said. “That detention—”

The Captain interrupted again. “It’s customary to give birth mothers private quarters until their delivery date.” I didn’t know whether he was lying or not. Then, too casually: “What sort of rumors, Sparrow?”

He was friendly and sympathetic; there was no indication he would penalize me for telling the truth. When I was through, he shook his head in dismay. “Do you think any of those would have been good for the ship, Sparrow?”

“No, of course not,” I said slowly.

“Then why would I have ordered them?”

“They were just rumors,” I defended sullenly. “I didn’t say I believed them.”

“You tried to get the crewmen to disperse?”

I nodded. “I did my best.”

He looked past my shoulder. “What happened down there, Cato?”

I twisted around. Cato had come in behind me, his expression one of fear of the Captain and anger toward me.

“A riot in the detention corridor.Some crewmen showed up and threatened the guard; apparently they wanted to take the birth mothers away. One of the crewmen broke past the guard and he was shot—not intentionally, the guard tried to shoot over his head.”

“Your men need more practice,” the Captain said dryly. He nodded at me. “Sparrow tells me he tried to get them to disperse.”

Cato’s mouth turned down at the corners.

“Hardly.He urged them on.”

I started to protest but the Captain held up his hand to quiet me and said, “Return to your post, Cato, I’ll talk to you later.”

After Cato was gone, the Captain turned back to me, still friendly. “You shouldn’t antagonize Cato, Sparrow. But I can’t believe you’d urge a crowd to riot.” He pushed out of his chair and drifted over to the port. It was the last time I would see him outlined against the vast expanse of the galaxy.

“What should I do, Sparrow? The crew doesn’t want to continue with the mission, it’s onlymyself and a few dozen crewmen who want to keep going.” He clasped his hands behind his back, silent for a moment. Then: “What would you do if you were me?”

I was amazed that he had faced the truth so easily. Would he think of going back? I wondered. The Captain seemed open to my advice and the temptation was too great. I abandoned all caution and hastened to give it.

“Go back,” I said. “We can’t make it across the Dark.”

I couldn’t tell whether he was disappointed or not.

“You have the figures?”

I reeled them off from memory—the lack of supplies, the necessary cutbacks in crew size, the diminishing ability to actually maintain the ship—

The Captain held up his hand with a half smile.

“Did you know we’ve received signals in the waterhole frequency from the other side?”

He was giving me a last chance to recant, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept the lie. I tried to argue around it.

“It doesn’t change the figures.” I stumbled over them once again. He stared at me and I finally saw beyond the look of friendship to the real face beneath. I had forgotten that he was a better actor than I had ever thought of being.

“But success is there, just waiting for our arrival,” he mused. I wondered if he really believed what he was saying. He turned to gaze out the port. “You know, Sparrow, I’ve done the best I could, for a hundred generations.Until this one. And now people I thought I could trust are holding secret meetings, sabotaging the
Astron
…”

I couldn’t beleve he was indulging in self-pity, and I was right—he wasn’t. When he looked back at me, the thin veil of friendship had vanished altogether and his voice was savage and cold.

“Of all the crewmen on board, you owed me your trust, Sparrow. I befriended you when you needed a friend, I punished your enemies.” By that, I knew he meant Heron, not Thrush. He smiled faintly. “You remind me of another crewman.Hamlet. You know him well, don’t you?”

I was lost.

“You’re the icon, Sparrow. But you know it. And because you know it, you’re no longer useful to the ship. You wanted to know who you were and you found out. Poor Sparrow—a little knowledge was a dangerous thing. It turned you against me, against the mission, and against the welfare of the crew.”

He suddenly hit his desk with his fist, showing me the same kind of out-of-control anger he’d shown Banquo .

“God, you take me for a fool! You’re the leader of the mutiny; how could you assume I wouldn’t know that?” He pushed over to face me and I could see the veins pulsing in his neck and forehead. “You’re right about the crew numbers for the future. I regret them, but one thing I won’t regret is that we’ll no longer need an icon. But don’t worry about being flatlined —not this time, Sparrow!”

I was going to be sent to Reduction.

He drifted back to his desk, dismissing me as completely as he had Noah and Tybalt when he had condemned them.

When I finally found my voice, I sounded very young and very angry.

“Your mission was to find life,” I shouted, “but you failed because there isn’t any! Instead, you’re going to kill what little there is because you think you’re God!”

His face had become friendly and placid once again. The words dried in my throat; I don’t think he even heard what I had said.

“Of all the crewmen you’ve been, I think I liked Sparrow the best.” He smiled, without malice, and there was honest regret in his voice. “That was because Sparrow liked me as well.”

He was right, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. The bond between me and Captain Kusaka had finally snapped for good.

I suddenly felt air currents at my back and realized Banquo had come up behind me. What I did then was automatic, without any thought or warning. I doubled up, kicked off my cling-titeswith one easy motion and braced my feet against the desk for leverage. A moment later I had shot past a startled Banquo and through the hatch into the corridor beyond.