The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (36 page)

I had been only casually friendly with other members of the crew, but now spent more time with Jay and Finch from Communications and Grebe from Maintenance. Jay and Finch were my age—“Sparrow’s”

age—and boasted a lot, telling me more about attitudes in Communications than I could ever have discovered by direct questioning. I was also becoming more adept at recognizing members of the “new”

crew, not so much by how they related to me but by how they related to each other. Jay and Finch roughhoused quite a bit and got into more than one argument with each other, a dead giveaway that they were of older stock. I felt more comfortable with them than with many members of the new crew and we got along fine.

Grebe was a huge hulk of a man, as careful with his strength as Crow was with his. Along with Wren, he spent much of his time playing with Cuzco in the nursery; at least, they were there every time I dropped by to seeK2 . New crew, I thought, not only because of their gentleness but because they could sense Cuzco ’s moods and needs. In any squalling pile-up in a corner, they knew exactly where Cuzco was and whether or not she needed rescuing. And Cuzco knew when they were coming to visit while they were still floating through the outside corridor.

I liked Grebe and Wren a lot.

Corinhad taken over Tybalt’s role in Exploration, though I thought he catered too much to Thrush. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was jealous. Apparently that occurred to Corin as well. I was soon invited into the small office for a little conversation and smoke. Corin had taken on many of Tybalt’s personality quirks, though he never went so far as to adopt a belief in Tybalt’s aliens.

“You miss Tybalt a lot, don’t you?” he once asked.

I had just taken a puff and was holding in my breath, so I merely nodded.

“He was the best team leader we ever had,” Corin said. There was a touch of sadness in his voice that I noted with approval.

He went on to praise Tybalt’s good points and comment with humor on his failings.

“When you come down to it,” I said, “he really only had one fault: He believed in monsters.”

“He didn’t believe in them enough,” Corin said darkly.

I was becoming fond of Corin , though nobody would ever completely replace Tybalt in my affections. Then a sixth sense warned me and I put my emotions in check. There had been a time when I was fond of Thrush, too.

Within a month the lines were drawn and I guessed the choosing of sides was almost complete. The tension was palpable. What would happen now, nobody seemed quite sure. Refuse to go on shift?

Somehow that didn’t seem to be what was needed. Or what would work.

****

I finally reestablished contact with the Captain when I reported to him on inventories of life-support supplies on board. The report wasn’t complete but I knew I didn’t dare wait any longer or there would be questions as to why I had stayed away and whether I was still upset about Tybalt and Noah. I was—I always would be—but I couldn’t afford to show it.

As always, he was standing in front of the enormous port, looking at a view of the galaxy that was overwhelming in its beauty. It was his standard view ofOutside , a view the rest of us seldom saw: a computer-enhanced portrait alive with reds and greens and purples with vast streams of gas arcing through the middle, obscuring even greater wonders.

He turned and nodded when Banquo announced me. Noting the slates in my hand, he said, “ Escalus,get Sparrow half a dozen blanks.” I handed over the computations,then paused to admire the view. It was one I had never seen before and the Captain motioned for me to come closer.

“It’s a computer simulation of the Great Wall, Sparrow.”

Aside from the beauty of color and composition, I could make no sense of it at all.

“The great what, sir?”

“It’s a wall of galaxies—half a billion light-years long, a quarter billion light-years wide, and fifteen million light-years thick.” He floated closer to the port and pointed out three largely empty areas. “Did you know there were holes in the universe, Sparrow?”

How many times had he looked at Outside? I wondered. Yet he still took the same pleasure in it. He drifted back to his desk and touched its terminal pad.

The scene faded, to be replaced by an angry splotch of color against a field of stars, with filaments of green and yellow gases splashing out from a small spot of white at the center.

“That’s the remnants of the Bevis supernova, a star that exploded a thousand years ago.”

It was beautiful; but for me, at least, it was an empty beauty. I didn’t know what to say. His hand touched the pad again and probably the most spectacular view of all appeared.

“That’s M20,” the Captain said with a touch of awe, “the Triffid nebula—as seen from Earth. If God’s anyplace, I think He’s there.”

I stared at the swirl of colorful gases and tried to match it up with the view from the hangar deck. The most we ever saw were fields of crystal with very little color or dimension. They had their own beauty, but it was a quiet, cold, and distant beauty—the beauty of reality. I wondered if the Captain ever looked at the stars like that, but I knew he didn’t. Nor did he see the Dark as we saw it, an area of emptiness as treacherous as any sea of quicksand on ancient Earth. He saw only the fire and the color and the possibilities in the star systems on the other side.

Something about the Captain’s fascination struck me as odd and later, when I was alone with the computer, I researched it. The closest I could come to a name for it was “rapture of the deep,” which deep-sea divers occasionally suffered from on Earth—the desire to go on and on, ever deeper into the sea. It was a hallucinogenic effect caused by the nitrogen in the bloodstream under conditions of high pressure.

I had no idea what caused its equivalent in the Captain, and more important, I knew of no way to cure it. Another view suddenly appeared beyond the port and then another and still another.

“You don’t see their beauty, do you Sparrow?” the Captain asked.

“Yes,” I said simply, “I do.”

There was a thin disappointment in his voice.

“But there are things more beautiful to you.”

It was my turn to pause, wondering just how important my answer might be.

“There are views I value as much, sir.”

He laughed.“The compartment falsies? I understand the one Thrush programmed is quite remarkable.”

He lightly stroked the terminal pad again. This time I gasped.

The star-filled landscapes of Outside vanished completely. What was just beyond the port now was a carefully tended garden. There was a large pine tree in the foreground, with a limb heavy with needles coming into the scene from below, then a sweep of raked white gravel that curved from the base of the port around to the right, vanishing behind a nearby hill. The hill itself was covered with green shrubs and dark bushes with deep-red flowers. Several large rocks had been carefully placed in the middle of the wide stream of pebbles to deliberately break up the expanse of white.

“It exists in reality?” Iasked, wonderstruck.

“It’s a replica of the garden scene just outside a window of the Adachi museum in westernHonshu . Look them up, Sparrow.” He leaned forward to touch something I hadn’t noticed at first—two flower petals lying on the field of gravel—then swept his hand upward. “The petals establish a line that pulls your eye to the rocks
here
and then up the hill.”

“It’s beautiful,” I murmured.“And… different.”

He smiled slightly.“From the stars? Not really. They both represent purity in nature.”

He talked to me then, not as if I were a seventeen-year-old technician, but as if I were a true peer. And for the first time, I realized that I was. Of all the people he had ever talked to on the
Astron,
he must have talked to me the most often.Me, and all the crewmen I had once been. It was the only glimpse I ever had of Michael Kusaka the man, rather than “The Captain.” He talked of a culture I knew little about, of his home in ancientJapan , of the growing of bonsai and the elaborate nature of rock gardens and even the writing of haiku, something I grew to love myself.

Constellations change

But the shining stars still dance

My heart is peaceful

I wondered why he was allowing me this glimpse of himself and decided he was still trying to persuade me of… what? And was it only “Sparrow” he was trying to persuade?

We ate and sipped some wine and then it was time to go. I picked up the blank slates from Escalus and thanked the Captain, wavering once again between seeing him as personal friend and seeing him as the man who had condemned Noah and Tybalt . But my heart had hardened, and no overtures of friendship could change the fact that the Captain had lied, murdered, and was leading the
Astron
to disaster. He stopped me at the hatchway and smiled. “There’ll be no mutiny, Sparrow.” I immediately thought of Ophelia and Snipe and the others and felt my face go white. He read my expression, as I suspected he would, and added, “Don’t worry about any of your friends.”

Mass
, he had called Noah and Tybalt .

I was halfway through the shadow screen when he suddenly said: “Do you believe in free will, Sparrow?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“I don’t know, sir. Do you?”

He shook his head sadly and said, “No, I don’t. I can’t.”

When I finally left, I caught a last glimpse of the view just outside the port. It was the one of the Triffld nebula.

Later, I searched the computer for the simulation of the garden but never found it. I think after the Captain had shown it to me, he erased it from the computer’s memory matrix.

****

The next time period the new birth allotments were announced and the mutiny collapsed. Twelve births were to be allowed, far more than any of us had expected. I had thought the allotment would be three, to make up for Heron, Noah, and Tybalt . I hadn’t anticipated a replacement forJudah , thinking his death would compensate for the natural attrition of ship’s resources.

The tension vanished overnight, replaced by excitement and a wave of gossip about who the birth mothers and potential fathers might be. There would be a dozen mothers and almost a hundred would-be fathers, almost two-thirds of the male members of the crew. The odds were the best they had been for generations.

On a personal basis, the birth allotments meant nothing to me. It would be a charade if Iwere on the list of those eligible and the Captain knew it. For the others, it would be their chance to play God. Few things mattered more—the chance to create life, to watch via ’scope as it grew from a tiny cluster of cells to a fetus and then a living creature with the capacity to talk and think and wriggle its fingers and toes, a sponge for love that would return as much as it was given…

The crew had searched for life for two thousand years, but the only place they had ever found it was on the
Astron.
To have a part in its creation was of vastly more importance—at least for the moment—than a mutiny or even the ship’s venture into the Dark.

The creation of life would happen in the next year. The death of the
Astron
and everybody on it was generations away. Then I realized I was whistling in the dark.Judah ’s death could mean that extinction would happen this generation.

It was Ophelia who reminded me of the inevitable. She came to see me in the Exploration office. Corin had left to read the list of nominations posted outside the Captain’s compartment, and for a few moments we were alone.

“You realize the rate of attrition won’t support the allotments.”

“I know,” I said, “I took the figures to the Captain.”

“Did he even look at them?”

I shrugged. “Who knows?”

She was driving at something but as usual wanted me to come to the same conclusions myself.

“What’s the alternative, if the ship can’t support them?”

I ran the figures over in my mind.

“If the ship can’t support them, then future allotments will have to be cut drastically.”

She shook her head.

“It’s too good a weapon, Sparrow. He may need it again.”

I frowned, wondering what she had in mind, then went cold when I realized what it was.

“Involuntary shortening of the lifespan,” I said slowly.“Or possibly more trials.”

“Given a choice, Kusaka would prefer more trials,” she said bitterly. “They’d serve a dual purpose—eliminate malcontents and bring the size of the crew down to attrition levels.”

She was about to say more but Corin had come back with a broad grin painted on his face. He slapped me on the back.

“We’re both on the lists,” he said. I faked a smile and congratulated him. When I turned back to Ophelia, she had disappeared.

Four time periods later, it was my turn with one of the birth mothers. The corridor was decorated with colored scrim and models of a cross inside an ovoid—the Great Egg. Other crew members were waiting outside the compartments, their expressions a combination of solemnity and joy. I felt uneasy and nervous. It was a rite of passage for them. It was also barbaric and I wondered what I could compare it to. Maybe to the erotic duties of priestesses in some ancient temples, except that most of those priestesses were prostitutes and the worshipers knew it, paying for their favors with temple offerings. This was as close as the
Astron
came to having a religion, and coupling with the birth mothers would probably be as close as any of the crew members came to religious ecstasy. The smell of rut was heavy in the passageway, the crew members obviously ready for what awaited them within. I nodded to Tern, first in line outside Swift’s compartment, and mumbled a few words of encouragement to Loon, who looked vaguely uncertain about it all.

Huldahpushed her way through the crowd, handing out small bulbs of wine and wafers, blessing both the crew members and the forthcoming happy events. I watched her intently, trying to decide if there was a difference among the bulbs of wine she passed out. But however she didit, she was more clever than that. The contraceptive drugs in the food had been eliminated during the ritual period and I guessed the bulbs of wine Huldah gave some would-be fathers were laced with fast-acting versions of the drugs. Huldah would control who was fertile and who wasn’t. But she never told me and I never knew for sure until much later.