The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (46 page)

He made a bad joke of it.

“You can’t refreeze meat, Ray. It loses its texture.”

Some of Sparrow’s anger crept into my voice.

“You flatlined my memories,” I accused.

He looked at me in frustration.

“What the hell was I to do? You would have been the focus of a mutiny every generation that came along. I finally hid you in plain sight, like the purloined letter. It wasn’t that difficult; you’d had amnesia before, from your car accident when you were seventeen. In a sense, it was your Achilles heel.”

Not that difficult… I wondered how long it had taken him to program the artificial reality that was Seti IV and felt another surge of anger.

“I didn’t have many options, Ray,” Mike apologized. “And after all, you actually played an important role, you were needed.”

He had been clever and resourceful and in the long run it really hadn’t been his fault: The programming had proved too effective. It was what he wanted me to think. But he had left something out. I thought I heard a clock ticking and guessed it was Sparrow within.

“They won’t come back,” I said.

He knew I was talking about Sparrow’s crew and looked mildly surprised.

“You really believe that?”

“They won’t come back,” I repeated. “Not unless you return.” I made the mistake of thinking I could convince him. I wasn’t Sparrow now, I was his best friend. “You can’t run the ship by yourself, and without the others you can’t breed a new crew. It’s time to go home, Mike.”

I don’t think he even heard me. He leaned forward in the hammock, his eyes bright with enthusiasm.Too bright.

“We don’t need an entire crew, Ray. Three of us can do it—you and I and Thrush. All three of us are linked to the computer; we can seal off most of the ship and run Maintenance by ourselves.”

The link to the computer was the key—but you had to be long-lived for the link to exist. Then, inside me, Sparrow warned that the best chess player is the one who convinces you his next move won’t be the obvious one.

“It’s been thousands of years, Ray,” Mike said. “What have you got to go back to? You wouldn’t have signed on if you didn’t want to be an explorer.”

The image of him and me and Thrush, voyaging forever into the great unknown, sickened me. Pipit, Crow, Ophelia, and the hundreds of others didn’t matter: They were mayflies. He watched the parade of emotions cross my face and his own expression hardened.

“I can’t go back, Ray. I told you—they rearranged my wiring.”

Neither side had been bluffing andthat surprised me. The members of the new crew had made up their minds not to continue unless Mike turned back, and Mike couldn’t.

No friendship can survive a lie if it’s serious enough. And right then I watched my own friendship with Mike dissolve like tissue paper in the rain. The lie was simple and brutal and I hadn’t wanted to look at it. Nobody but Mike had wanted to go on—he was the only one who had been programmed. He had to force the others.

“The mutiny had failed before you ever caught me, hadn’t it, Mike? You pulled the plug on the return crew, didn’t you? Nobody in your crew was going to live long enough to return so they had no choice but to breed their own replacements and hope that someday their children could go back.”

His voice turned acid. “Don’t think they didn’t jump at the chance.”

We sat there and stared at each other. With time, friends change. And there had been more than enough time. He’d had his friends among the first crew, at least at the start. But they must have told their children what had happened, and then their descendants avoided him and fell silent when he approached. A man already alienated had grown more distant with every generation until the crews became merely part of the machinery, maintaining the ship and exploring the planets until they were replaced by still another generation.

The movement was so slow I almost didn’t see it, his hand edging toward the pellet gun. I could feel my own in my waistband and wondered if he had seen its outline.

Selmaand Bobby Armijo , Lewis and Iris, Dave and Rich, and the eight hundred and ninety others who had volunteered for the Freeze and never woken up were suddenly vivid in my memory.

“Why didn’t you just kill me, Mike?Why the purloined-letter routine?”

He looked surprised. “You were the return captain—if we’d found life, you’d be the one to take the
Astronomy
back. And if anything happened to me, you were my replacement. I couldn’t kill my own replacement,Ray, that would’ve endangered the voyage.”

Nobody could endanger the voyage, not even the captain… Two thousand years ago, some minor bureaucrat in charge of programming had saved my life. And then, in anger, a jealous Sparrow made the mistake of saying the obvious.

“You’ve got one replacement, you don’t need two.”

Mike’s hand closed around the pellet gun and he aimed it at my chest. He now sounded as indifferent as he had when condemning Noah and Tybalt at their courts-martial, but at least he solved the last of the mysteries.

“You’re right, Ray. Thrush can act as my replacement. That’s why I had him.”

He fired. At the same time I jerked to one side, fumbling in my waistcloth for my own pellet gun. I never got the chance to use it. His foot caught me in the stomach and the gun went flying into the other compartment. I felt blood puddling on my skin where the pellet had grazed me; then we were grappling in the center of the cabin.

It had taken valuable minutes for my friendship with Mike to finally fade, to realize that his own for me had vanished two thousand years before. What power hadn’t corrupted, time had. I had been impressed and affected by what he told me, as he had intended I should be, but he hadn’t impressed Sparrow or Hamlet or the others inside me. They had anticipated deception and prepared me for it.

****

He was strong and quick. But I didn’t suffer from the sense of inferiority Sparrow might have had—I had beaten Mike before. He still had the pellet gun and I grabbed his wrist and cracked it against the ledge. He grunted and kneed me in the groin. I let loose and shot across the compartment, scraping my scalp on the hatch.When I shook my head, a thin stream of tiny red globules jetted into the air. I turned back to him and saw his face fixed in the same intense look of concentration that he had when he played handball. He didn’t play to lose.

I dove for him and he fired the pellet gun again. I twisted aside in midair, crashing into the bookshelf. The air was suddenly filled with bits of paper and plastic and I held my breath when I sailed through them. I grabbed his wrist with my hands and once more tried to loosen his grip on the gun. We both had purchase now. He had wrapped his legs around one of the uprights his hammock was tied to and I had gripped the ledge with my own. It was a test of pure strength and he was stronger. The hand that held the pellet gun slowly swiveled until it was pointed dead center at my chest. He could just as easily have aimed at my head; I thought grimly that only our former friendship prevented it. It would have been too much even for him to see my features explode in a mist of bone and blood.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” he murmured. “This isn’t easy.”

But it seemed all too easy to me. Inside, I could hear Sparrow silently screaming, not only because I might die and he as well but because if I didn’t, I would probably kill his Captain. Sparrow had never quite recovered from that first meeting on the bridge.

I had kept my hand on his wrist and jerked it aside just before he pulled the trigger. The gun misfired. Like everything else on board, it was corroded and falling apart. I wrenched it away and threw it in a corner.

Mike drove an elbow into my rib cage and I flailed backward. He was faster than me in maneuvering in no gravity. My back hit the bulkhead as he wrapped his hands around my neck, his thumbs pressing against my windpipe. I waited until he had set himself, then clasped my hands together and thrust them up between his arms, breaking the hold.

We flew apart, ending up at opposite ends of the cabin. Breathing was painful and blood was still misting out of my scalp. Across from me, Mike tried desperately to retain an appearance of calm but his skin was shiny with sweat and he was gulping air as hard as I was.

“In two thousand years, you were the only one I could really talk to… you were my last link to the original crews.” He flashed a smile. “‘The universe is not only… queerer than we suppose, but queerer…

than we
can
suppose.’ That used to be your favorite quote, Ray.” He held out a hand. “Come… with us,” he pleaded, and I swore because I could feel a part of myself respond.

“Sure, Mike,” I said, and felt no guilt at all when I butted him in the stomach a split second later and wrapped my arms around his waist. I held him in a bear hug and squeezed while he thrashed in the air, trying desperately to catch his breath. When he went limp, I loosened my hold and dragged him through the hatchway into the compartment that contained the preservation crypts of the return crew.

“Look at them, Mike. They almost look alive, don’t they? RememberSelma ?And Iris? There was a time when you thought the world of Iris.And Bobby? He worshiped you, he would have done anything for you, and eventually he died for you. Nine hundred men and women, Mike, and you murdered them all!”

“I had… no choice,” he muttered, and turned away. I grabbed him by the hair and twisted his head so he was staring directly at the crypts and the silent figures within.

“You murdered nine hundred people to keep on going and you never found a goddamned thing! You don’t want to go back now because that would be admitting it was all for nothing and you can’t face that!”

He looked up at me then, his head wobbling,his eyes wide and filled with horror. For two thousand years the
Astron
had been his stage and he had played The Captain. Now the play was over and once again he was Michael Kusaka , an ordinary man who had lived too long and lost himself among the years.

“Every sleep period I ask their forgiveness,” he whispered. “And they forgive me, Ray! They forgive me!”

I couldn’t look at him. I was going to have to choose between pity and justice and I wasn’t sure I could. Mike had become the Wandering Jew, pacing his five hundred meters of steel deck, praying for absolution every night and searching for it every morning. The only crews that had been real for him were his own and mine, the replacement crew, frozen in its preservation crypts. The crews that came after were faded copies, faces he never remembered,names he quickly forgot. If Thrush had refused him, Mike would have gone into the Dark by himself, an alienated man whose alienation had finally become terminal.

For Mike, relative immortality had meant two thousand years of damnation. He suddenly squirmed in my hands and I lost my grip, my fingers slippery with blood and perspiration. He darted out from under my arms, his fingers stretched out for my pellet gun which he had kicked into the compartment, where it was now floating a meter away. If he got it, I knew I wouldn’t be as lucky the second time.

I scooped it up before he could touch it, flipping in midair so I was facing him, the pellet gun in my hand. I watched the color drain from his face and the sanity slowlyreturn to his eyes. I fought to catch my breath, the words coming out in short bursts.

“We’re going back—”

He smiled and held up his hands. “You win, Ray.”

His back was to the preservation crypts and over his shoulder I could see the dead faces ofSelma and Bobby Armijo and Lewis and Tom and Rich. I was the captain now, and I knew the penalty for what Mike had done, both to my crew and to Sparrow’s. I remembered how Sparrow had felt when he held the blade to Thrush’s throat. I now felt the same way and inside me, Sparrow agreed. I knew Mike hadn’t meant what he said. And I knew Sparrow and I couldn’t afford to lose. Not again.

“—without you,” I finished.

I pulled the trigger of the pellet gun; at the same time, Mike lunged for me. The pellet caught him in the shoulder and he flew backward, crashing into the one empty preservation crypt, the one that had once contained me. There was a flash of blue light as the dead machinery sprang to life. In the glare I could see Mike’s look of startled surprise fade to one of acceptance.

I thought,
Christ, it’s still working!
and yanked him out. It was much too late. The skin on his face and chest was gray and hard, the soft tissues of his lips and eyes ruptured by the fine ice crystals that had formed almost instantly.

Michael Kusaka had been raised with a code of honor, but two thousand years had bleached almost all of it out of him. The faint look of acceptance at the end was the only indication that a trace of it still remained. Another time, another place, and if Mike had had a knife his losing might have ended with ritual and ceremony. Both of us would have felt better about it.

I floated by his side, remembering Relay Station and how we had once been friends. I cradled him in my arms and whispered, “Jesus, I’m sorry…” while inside me, Sparrow wept. Mike clutched my shoulders and pulled me close so I could hear him as he tried to work his frozen lips and tongue.

“No such thing as… free will, Ray… You had no choice, either… You were programmed to go back…”

Everything they had done to him, they had done to me, Mike had said. Two thousand years before they had wound us up and we had gone through our paces ever since, convinced we were masters of our own destinies. Mike had been programmed to take the
Astronomy
out and I had been programmed to bring her back. He had known about himself, but I had never known about myself. Or maybe he had lied to the bitter end, unable to face the truth.

I held him, feeling the terrible cold of his chest and head and watching as he struggled for breath and the frost covered him until I couldn’t see his face at all.

After a minute the air rattled out of his lungs for the last time and what I held in my arms was meat.

****

I drifted back to the outer compartment, gripping my side where I still bled. Crow was waiting for me. He looked sick and I wondered what had happened, then glanced over at Thrush, nursing a bleeding lip. Crow was holding a pellet gun and I guessed he had taken it away from Thrush. Crow had committed violence, and I was grateful that he had, but it would be a while before he forgave himself. Both of them stared at me. I had looked seventeen when I pushed into the Captain’s living quarters, but then I had thought I was seventeen. Now I knew my true age was thirty and I looked the part.