The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (18 page)

Thrush had tasted victory and when next he flashed by, his eyes glittering in the dusk, he was careless. I caught him by the wrist and twisted hard, catching a sharp piece of metal when it flew from his hand.

“My turn,” I murmured. I slashed his cheek and caught his upper arm with the metal, then wrapped my legs around his waist, slippery with sweat, and held the metal strip to his neck. I could feel his muscles relax; he knew if he made any movement at all I would cut his throat.

“Tell me why,” I said in a low voice.

“I told you.”

“Not Pipit,” I said. “Me.All along, why me?”

“You know why,” he whispered. “I’m the better man.”

I didn’t have time to wonder what he meant. There were hurried movements in the shadows now, a scurrying, and then the remaining glow tubes started to flicker on.

“Go ahead, cut it,” Thrush muttered. “It’s the last chance you’ll get.”

I wanted him to whimper, to be afraid,to plead. But he wasn’t going to do any of those—and by not doingthem, he was going to win once more. I fought with myself,then abruptly made up my mind. I couldn’t afford to lose again. I tensed my arm to pull the blade across his windpipe and only then did I catch any tremor of fear from him.

For his sake and mine, it was enough.

I held him a moment longer, then cursed and let him go, throwing away the bloody strip of metal. Suddenly Tybalt grabbed my arm and yanked me to one side while Banquo did the same to Thrush. The overhead glow tubes were all on now and I stared at the audience with surprise. It looked as if half the crew had assembled to watch the fight.

“You’re a fool,” Tybalt grunted as he hustled me toward the hatch. “You never were before but for some reason I don’t understand, you’ve become one now.”

****

Abel attended to both of us in sick bay, Banquo and little Quince standing by as guards. Quince wasshy

, unwilling to look directly at either me or Thrush. Both he and Banquo carried short rods of thick metal which I supposed were meant to be clubs. I wondered if they would actually use them and guessed that Quince definitely wouldn’t but that Banquo might. Thrush and I glared at each other but both of us knew better than to start the fight all over again.

Abel worked quickly, carefully squeezing together the edges of the cut on my thigh and spraying it with an antiseptic adhesive. It stung and I winced, not afraid to show it. Thrush had made a face when Abel closed the wound on his arm, and that gave me permission to do the same, or so I felt.

“You should have thought it might hurt before making idiots of yourselves,” Abel said. “But neither of you were thinking, were you?”

“My face,” I said. “Will it scar?”

He shrugged. “Both of you will probably scar. But nobody on board is going to feel sorry for you if you do.”

I looked at Thrush only once and that to verify what my nose had told me. Some time during the fight, he had pissed in his waistcloth. I took grim satisfaction in that,then remembered he had challenged me to cut his throat even though he had been scared to death. A brave man and a dangerous one—I had humiliated him and he would never get over it.

But the overwhelming hatred I felt for him had burned itself out.So had any attraction. Abel had just finished stitching up Thrush when there was a small commotion in the corridor and the Captain pushed in through the shadow screen. He nodded at Abel. “You can finish up later.”

After the fat doctor had gone, the Captain sat on the magnetic counter top, gripping the edge so he wouldn’t float off.

“I don’t suppose either of you has an explanation,” he said quietly. Thrush looked away and said nothing. Finally I said, “Did you talk to Pipit?” I was surprised by the antagonism in my voice.

He nodded. “I saw her and talked to her. Right now I’m more interested in why the two of you tried to kill each other.”

I glanced at Thrush. “He would have killed me,” I said.

The Captain looked irritated. “And in all likelihood you would have killed him if you hadn’t been stopped.”

“I stopped myself,” I said, sullen.

His eyes were very bright and very thoughtful.

“Answer my question, Sparrow. Why?”

“I’m a friend of Pipit’s,” I said.

“So was Thrush—at one time. ”My jaw dropped. He shot a contemptuous look at Thrush and said,

“Not a very wise one or a very compassionate one. You were in love with her, weren’t you, Thrush?

And when she didn’t return it, you began to hate her.”

Thrush looked away, sullen, and didn’t answer. The Captain slipped off the counter and floated in silence for a moment while he devised a punishment. “Both of you are inCoventry until we arrive at Aquinas II. When not on station, you’re confined to quarters except by special permission. There’ll be no talking to each other or to anybody else except in the line of duty. All crew members are likewise forbidden to talk to you or have anything to do with you. If they do, the same punishment applies to them.”

He turned to at Thrush. “You’re dismissed. Sparrow, I want to see you in my quarters—now.”

I floated after him, trailed by a nervous Quince and Banquo . Once in the Captain’s office, they were excused and we were alone, the Captain lounging in his sling and I floating unhappily in front of him, the huge port with its view of Outside on my left and the array of peep screens with their subdued chatter on my right.

“You fought for Pipit’s honor,” he mocked.“How noble.”

“Crow couldn’t,” I said in a brittle voice.

“You’re right, he couldn’t. I imagine he went through a very personal little hell when the two of you discovered Pipit. But that doesn’t mean that nobody else would have fought for her—or that the crew wouldn’t have thought of some suitable punishment for Thrush. You were a little too eager, Sparrow. Why?”

Objections flooded my throat but I choked them off. Anything I said would only succeed in condemning me.

“Pipit will recover, Sparrow. But if you hadn’t been interrupted, Thrush never would have.”

“Thrush… violated ship’s custom,” I finally said, quoting Loon.

“Ship’s custom.” The Captain thought about it for a moment. “Sparrow, we have our drills and our duties on board but we can’t work all the time. Sex is the great leveler, what people do to fill up the empty hours, the empty feelings. Nobody’s exempt from sharing themselves with their fellow crew members.At least once.”

“Thrush had already been with her,” I said in a low voice. “It was her right to refuse him after that.”

“You’re so sure she did?”

“Yes,” I said. “She wouldn’t lie.”

He looked in my eyes and I would have sworn he read my mind.

“Tell me, Sparrow, were you thinking of Pipit when you were getting up the nerve to slit Thrush’s throat?”

The hot words died on my tongue. He waved at the peep screens behind him. “There are no secrets, Sparrow. I thought you knew that.”

I paled. The Captain had watched Thrush and me in Reduction.

“So you know I had reason to hate him,” I said in a husky voice.

“Before, during or after?”The Captain leaned forward in the sling. “Not before, you’d found a friend you empathized with.And not during, certainly.Only after. Why, Sparrow? A sense of betrayal when he said you’d been an easy conquest?”

I stood there, white-faced and mute.

“Well, why?” he roared.“Because you felt ashamed?Because you’d lost your pride? Thrush is the only real scientist we’ve got on board and you would’ve slit his throat like a pig at slaughter over something schoolboys have done since time began!”

“We were smoking—” I started.

“—so you could lose the inhibitions you didn’t want anyway.” He looked at me in disgust and relaxed back in the sling, clasping his hands behind his head.

“Were you hurt in the heart, Sparrow?”

I could feel the color rise in my face, and shook my head.

He smiled faintly. “I didn’t think so, you’re not the type. So it must have been your ego.” Sarcastically:

“He hurt your feelings.”

“He… humiliated me,” I said desperately.

“I didn’t say he was wise, Sparrow, only valuable.”

The silence gathered and I waited to be dismissed but he was in no hurry.

“I don’t know why he did it, Sparrow.” He shrugged. “Maybe he wanted to know you better—that’s one way, especially if you’re lacking in empathy. For a young man, sex is the fool’s gold of the emotions.”

He turned to look at the peep screens and I knew a quick scan told him everything he wanted to know about what was happening on board.

“Two thousand years,” he said quietly. “I did everything there was to do in the first two hundred and then I got bored. I had sex with everybody in the crew, I found all the buttons you can push, all the possible movements and positions, all the phrases you can utter, all the promises you can make. I indulged in all of my fantasies and all of theirs. Then my interest turned clinical and I merely watched. Now I look away because it sickens me.Monkeys, masturbating in a zoo.”

He looked back at where I stood sweaty and embarrassed.

“That’s not cynicism, Sparrow, that’s reality—my reality at any rate. Unlike the rest of the crew, I can’t make permanentliaisons, I can’t take lovers or become attached. What’s a moment for me is a lifetime for others, and I have to watch them grow old and dry and feeble. It’s like a time-lapse film of a rose whose petals curl and brown and eventually drop off.” He paused and looked at me quizzically. “You don’t know what time-lapse photography is, do you? Or even a rose. Sorry, Sparrow, I forgot.”

The meeting was over and I turned to leave.

“I regret what happened to Pipit but she’ll get over it. So will you. Thrush won’t. He wants something very badly but he can’t have it.”

He waved a hand and I left, wondering why he had defended Thrush when it was obvious that Pipit and I were the aggrieved. At least Pipit was. I wasn’t so sure of myself anymore and the more I thought about it, the more I despaired. Nobody else on board would have reacted as I did; that convinced me once again that I had little in common with the rest of the crew.

I had begun as a freak and a freak I would remain.

Igot used to the silence easier than I thought. It spared me defending behavior the rest of the crew found irrational and for which I really had no defense. We neither thought alike nor felt alike and any explanations I cared to offer would have made no sense to them. I wasn’t sure they would have made sense to me.

Not everybody disapproved, if that’s the word. I noticed at mealtime that Pipit always found something extra to put on my plate. And when we jostled through the hatchway entering or leaving Exploration, Crow would be at my side and find a moment to squeeze my shoulder. If the Captain had been watching, he would have seen nothing. Or so I thought. At least, Banquo and Abel never did. As for myself, I had changed. Until the fight, I had been seventeen. Now I had almost killed a man and seventeen was long ago. Most of the crew ignored me, but Tybalt and Noah did little things to show they remained friends. After meals, Noah played games of chess with himself and I would float over to watch. I quickly discovered that I was always his unseen opponent. He would open with one of the moves I usually used and then play the game as if I were sitting opposite him. He was a master player and seldom made a move on “my behalf” of which I disapproved. Occasionally he caught my eye and I thought I could see a smile, though it was nothing any peep screen could have detected. Tybaltwas stern and, for him, officious, but there was always time for an impromptu “lecture” and smoke in the privacy of the small Exploration office.

I quickly discovered therewas certain benefits to living inCoventry . Forbidden to talk, I found myself listening and observing more acutely. I silently cheered on the lovemakers in Exploration who hid behind a Rover and explored each other while Ophelia rattled on about what we might find when we explored Aquinas II. And Quince’s occasional nuzzling of Portia now struck me as both affectionate and funny. The first real break inCoventry came when Abel inspected our wounds in sick bay.

“You’re healing fast,” he noted.The only signs that I had ever been cut were now faint traces of pink snaking over the flesh.

“You’re disappointed,” I said.

“Satisfied,” he corrected me, then lowered his voice and added, “Don’t snap at the hand that helps you, Sparrow.”

“You’re talking to me,” I pointed out. “The Captain wouldn’t approve.”

He ignored the sarcasm. “It’s permitted in the line of duty.” And then, in a quiet mumble: “You’ve made enough enemies, why make another of me?”

He had a point, and I shut up. I watched intently when he examined Thrush. The pink tracery on his skin was as faint as my own; though Abel made no comment, I knew that he was surprised, which in turn surprised me.

Before I left, I asked again if we would scar. He shook his head.

“Apparently not.Both of you will be as handsome as you were before, which wasn’t… very.”

It was more conversation than I’d had in two weeks and I enjoyed every syllable. Thrush had become even more of an enigma to me. Likemyself , he was noticeably older. He now took little interest in the crew members around him, not even looking at Pipit when she served him at mealtimes. He worked hard—and he worked all the time. At his computer station, he was becoming almost as good as I, though my ability to manipulate the palm terminal came to me naturally while Thrush’s was learned reflex.

Between us, there were no bitter looks, no words,no feelings. But I never turned my back. I knew instinctively that he still had plans for me, though I now suspected his plans involved more than just me. Not that he ever said anything, though Heron couldn’t resist dropping hints until Banquo warned him that he, too, could be subject toCoventry .

Heron was also a mystery to me. Everybody knew he had thrown the blade to Thrush, but somehow he had evaded punishment. I watched him carefully after that. He was a lumpish man with few graces who skulked through the corridors rather than floated and was constantly at Thrush’s heels. Since he was good at fetching and carrying, Thrush treated him more as a convenience than a companion. I guessed that Heron would have wanted more, but he had to settle for what he got.