The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (50 page)

I was alone with my thoughts while we waited. With the members of the crew, conversation seemed to be falling into disuse and I knew it was because they sensed each other’s feelings so completely and precisely that speech was used primarily for transmitting information. I kept wondering if there was any life at all on the Earth.And, if there were, whether the crew could live with it. And what would the descendants of the crew be like in another hundred generations? Would they be content to remain on the Earth? I doubted it. Tybalt’s fever dreams had become the stuff of legend. They had all been fiction and delusion, but there was no denying their impact as inspiration. There would be a relaxation time and then they would go out again, maybe even crossing the Dark this time.Perhaps not so much to explore as to colonize, though that was a vastly long time in the future.

“Captain?”

I shook myself out of the half doze I had fallen into.

“The probe’s back, Captain. We’ve builta P -3 containment on the hangar deck where we can open it.”

I pushed out of my chair and kicked through the hatchway, and a few moments later half a hundred of us were gathered around the plastic containment watching while Iris manipulated the jury-rigged remotes to open the small drone and take out the core sample.

We held our collective breath as she slowly picked through the collection of dirt and stones. For an agonizing moment I thought there was nothing at all, then—“Go back, Iris—gently.”

The tiny scalpels felt their way back through the muck, stopping at the smudge of
something
that I had seen. They brushed away the grains of dirt,then carefully unfolded a splotch of green. I stared at it, and for the first time in generations wiped away tears without embarrassment. I glanced up at the faces of Iris and Lewis and Bob and Selma but their features kept shifting and I found myself looking at Crow and Snipe and Ophelia and Loon and all the others with whom I had lived the most important life of my hundred and twenty or so.

“Do you see it?” I cried, and I was talking to all of them, Crow and Snipe as well as Lewis and Iris. “Do you see it?”

For centuries I had been a broken-field runner carrying a case of eggs across a plain filled with rocks and potholes—perhaps all the humanity in the universe, maybe all the life in the universe—and finally I was safely home.

In the containment, separated now from the dirt and sand that had crushed them, were several perfectly formed sprigs of clover.The first bit of life I had seen in almost three thousand years that hadn’t been grown on the
Astron
itself.

I had gambled—and I had won.

The crew around me shouted and clapped each other on the back and for once used actual words to say what they felt.

I backed away and drifted over to the port and looked out at the Earth so close below. I had no idea whether human beings were still living there or not.

But if they weren’t, they soon would be.

We shall not cease from exploration
And
the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we
started And know the place for the first time.

—from “Little
Gidding
.” by T. S. Eliot

Iwas relaxed and alone on the bridge, having tired of the party on the hangar deck. I felt old. It was the end of the story. We had all come back—Aaron and Huldah and Noah and Abel and Michael Kusaka and Ophelia and Snipe and Crow and Loon and Thrush, all of us. In one form or another, we were all up on the hangar deck, drinking too much and storing up enough regrets for the next year and perhaps more. We would take the Lander down and explore the Earth as we had any other planet, in exploration suits and with bottled air, and we would go through the ultraviolet sprays when we returned to make sure we weren’t carrying some hardy bug that could kill us all. At the moment, as a life form, we were amazingly fragile, susceptible to every bacterium or virus we might run across. Sooner or later we would have to abandon our suits and establish a colony, and then the mortality rate would be frightening. We would adapt, of course; we always had. But my job was done. I could either hang around out of curiosity or let myself grow old—I was convinced it was a matter of will as much as anything else, though I had noticed the first faint lines around my eyes and a blemish on the back of my hand that I suspected was a liver spot. I had lived a very long life but I wasn’t going to live forever. And if I ever got bored, there was always Reduction and my own belated return to the Great Egg. I turned the viewing port up to maximum magnification, so I could see the coastlines and make out the bright spots of cities—if there had been any. And that bothered me. No cities, no EM radiation, no plumes of smoke from any factories below, no sparkles in theSahara after nightfall marking the camp fires of the nomads…

I was searching the globe below for any indication of man when suddenly I caught my breath. I thought then of Mike and Noah—Mike, who had been mostly wrong but a little bit right, and Noah, who had been mostly right but a little bit wrong.

In their search for life in the vastness of the universe, neither of them had ever considered a third

alternative.

That life might find them.

I readjusted the viewing globe while my thumping heart settled back into normal rhythm and I reassured myself that no race could have traveled this far through the empty void without developing as vast a respect for life as we had…

In the viewing globe, the image leaped into sharp focus.

Sweeping into view, thrusting out from the terminator that gradually crept over the world below, was the outline of a huge, alien ship.

Something fromOutside had beat us home.

Footnote