The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (20 page)

We were three weeks out from Aquinas II and now had accurate measurements of its gravity, the composition of its atmosphere, the mean distance from its primary, and its range of surface temperatures. It was a cold planet, colder than Seti IV, without any signature of life at all. That was no surprise, though some of us still had hopes.

TheSeniors made up a training projection in which Crow, Hawk, and Eagle rolled across a desert planet in a Rover heading for a distant mountain range. I watched, fascinated, as they climbed one of the steeper slopes. We were neglecting something, I thought, and caught up with the brilliance of my idea I approached Ophelia once the play was over.

“We took image pix on Seti IV,” I said. “Why not review those? It would be better than actors in a projection background—we would be dealing with reality rather than with astronomical models.”

“ SetiIV?” She looked at me with suspicion,then shook her head. “It’s a good idea, Sparrow, but the image cameras malfunctioned and we have no records of Seti IV.” She turned bitter. “It shouldn’t surpriseyou, you know the state of our equipment. In any event, there was nothing there.”

She had missed the point—it wasn’t what we had or hadn’t found, but how we had gone about it that would have been helpful to us. I thought she was too quick to dismiss the idea and wondered if it wasn’t because it was my suggestion. I brought it up with Tybalt but to my surprise he was snappish and unfriendly.

“You know better than to complain to me about anotherSenior , Sparrow.”

“I’m not complaining,” I protested. “I just think it’s a good idea. In a few weeks, we’ll be on the surface. A review of what happened on Seti IV would be invaluable.”

He shook his head. “Ophelia was right about the cameras. No great loss, there was nothing much to record.”

But he didn’t meet my eyes and I couldn’t believe he had so little to say when ordinarily he would go on for hours about any planet on which he had set foot.

When I was alone at the palm terminal, I retrieved the data we had on Seti IV and was disappointed once again. There was little information, much less than for a standard exploration survey of any planet, and most of it struck me as random. The planet wasnotable, it seemed, primarily because it was where I had fallen from a cliff.

I tried to forget about it, but it came back to me again when I was watching another training projection in which a survey team tried to rescue Heron, lost somewhere on a distant planet. This time I was so fascinated I almost forgot it was Heron and that I hoped the team would exercise its better judgment and leave him there.

I went back to the computer and tried again, scanning every file that might have data on Seti IV. There was next to nothing. Then one sleep period I had an inspiration and stole onto the hangar deck. The corridors were empty, there were no guards, and since it was off shift, nobody was on duty. I placed my hands on the terminal where Snipe activated the projections for her plays. Most of the planetary surfaces that floated across the empty hangar deck were meant for instruction.By now I had seen and been bored by most of them.

On impulse, I retrieved an inventory. It was possible that any image pix of Seti IV might have been misfiled. I scanned the list of hundreds, noting that at the bottom a dozen more were under computer lock.

I started tosweat, afraid somebody would walk in and report my unauthorized use of the terminal. I rubbed my hand against my thigh to increase the circulation and sensitivity,then nervously started to

“pick” the lock.

The last few projections were far more complicated than the ordinary training plays or even the compartment falsies, mere three-dimensional images meant only to be perceived. These were artificial realities with which the observer could interact. You were not only
in
your surroundings, you could reach out and touch objects and even move them about as you desired. To crewmen wearing the necessary data suits, the “realities” were very real indeed.

The hangar deck filled with ghostly images framed by the intersecting planes of light: A water planet with crew members from the
Astron
climbing over a reef in a lifeless sea; a frozen planet with glaciers of methane ice and rock formations that looked like ancient castles; a world of iron and granite that constantly shook beneath the explorers’ feet and where thousands of volcanoes belched lava at an angry sky.

I slowed the action until the realities solidified, catching my breath when an explorer in the first one ripped open his exploration suit on a rock and drowned in seconds. On the world of ice, one of the explorers fell down a crevasse and was buried forever. Still another crewman was lost in a sudden unexpected lava flow on the volcano world.

These were cautionary tales of what might happen if we weren’t careful. They were probably scheduled for showing immediately before we ventured down to Aquinas II. If shown too soon, they would lose their impact. Give Loon enough time to invent a parody and their warning would be lost in laughter. The last of the realities was of a desert planet with a team in a Rover bouncing along a dried-up riverbed on its way to a distant mountain range. There were jumps in the action, as there had been in the others. You established the crew in the Rover, then you cut to getting out at the base of a cliff, and finally you focused on one explorer dangling against the rocky face.

I watched, stunned, as the rope that held him frayed against the cliff and he plummeted to the stones below. A few moments of a closeup on the ground, then another scene shift to dusk and the rest of the team gathered around him, spraying quick-freeze on his cracked helmet to prevent the loss of air. The action was badly timed—with his fractured helmet, the crewman would have lost his air long before the rest of his team got to him.

But that hardly concerned me. The planet was Seti IV and the face of the crewman in the fractured helmet was my own.

****

I turned it off and sat there in the dark, feeling the sweat grease my skin and trying to control the sudden skipping of my heart. It was an artificial reality—which meant that Seti IV and my fall from the face of the scarp had never really happened at all.

But everybody on board the
Astron
had conspired to make me think it had. Once again, they had all lied to me and once again I had no idea why. The lies had been clever and had involved everybody. What little information there was in the computer about “ SetiIV” had been planted there in the event that I became curious. Even the warning in the computer not to give me my life history had been a lie—nobody on board had been about to. Quite the contrary, they had kept it from me. I went back to the beginning and reviewed the entire projection, from climbing down the ladder to the rocky surface below, to the ride in the Rover with crew members whose faces I never saw, to the fall from the scarp and Ophelia bending over me, to the ride back to the Lander. It even included scenes inside a mock Lander and an Inbetween Station. But, of course, I really had been in sick bay. None of it made much sense, but what made the least was the sincerity of Loon’s embarrassment and of Thrush’s hostility and of the loss that I read on the faces of Ophelia and Crow. If they had been acting, then it had been great acting. But I had seen them in some of Snipe’s plays and they had been anything but great. Ophelia was always too formal and Crow usually looked confused trying to fake emotions he didn’t feel. For Pipit, I had been a bona fide patient; even though I never had any real injuries, my suffering was real enough.

I played the projection one more time, convinced that the answers were buried within. I watched myself appear in the hatchway of the Lander,then cautiously descend the ladder, pausing for just a moment as I stepped onto the rocky ground. I left the palm terminal and pushed into the scene, standing beside

“myself” as I kicked at a small pebble and laboriously scrawled an
H
in some drifted sand. Back at the terminal I stopped the scene and stared at it.Just the one letter, nothing more. Why would I have done it? Why would anybody?Of course.An initial. Except that my name began with an
S
. Only my fingers were working now. My emotions were frozen and I didn’t dare let them thaw. I accessed the crew’s roster and ran through the
H’
s but I knew everybody who was listed. Then, on impulse, I dropped back one generation. Most of that crewwere still alive; the others were strangers to me and I guessed they had made the journey to Reduction. But the crewman I was looking for had to be listed—after all, he had consumed food and air and water and had taken up living space. I planned on reading the biography of each vanished crew member whose name began with
H
, but I didn’t have to go beyond the first.

Hamlet.

I moved my hand slightly on the terminal pad to retrieve more information, and the words dissolved and flowed into a brief notice:

All data concerning subject sealed because of acute stress due to amnesiac illness. Giving

subject life history information prior to
his own
recall will hinder complete recovery.

The data were protected by a guardian shell and there, was no way I could break it. I sat there in shock, staring at the screen. I could not imagine amnesia victims in successive generations. The odds would not allow for it. I put my hand back on the pad and went still another generation back. Most of the names were unfamiliar now and I had nothing to guide me—there was no
H
scrawled in the sand to serve as a clue. Unfortunately, time was running out; in another hour or so they would be using the hangar deck for more instruction plays.

But the biography I was looking for was very short, and the names tumbled through the screen faster than I expected. This time, the name was the very first.

Aaron.

A dozen more and I shut the computer down and drifted off the darkened hangar deck. There was no possible way there could have been an amnesia victim in every generation. But there was exactly one approximately every twenty years. The information on them was far more fragmentary than that on Laertes had been. In fact, there was no information at all; in each case an identical guardian shell served as a computer block. What did the shells contain? Or were they empty?

I struggled against the obvious. But before I could accept it, I had to find some way of proving it. The obvious was that there was no new amnesia victim in every generation. We were all the same victim.

****

When you eliminate the improbable, you’re left with the impossible. But I couldn’t confide in anybody on board, I couldn’t ask for help in searching for clues. There was only the artificial reality itself, the names that had bobbed up in the rosters of the different crews, and the guardian shells in the computer. And, of course, there was myself.

I was sweaty and unhappy, finding it difficult even to speculate about what I should do next. I floated through the corridor back to my compartment, my mind mostly blank, absently trying to scratch my thigh where a small drop of sweat had nested in the hairs. The itch was persistent; I glanced down and once again my mind froze with shock.

It had been two weeks since Thrush gashed my leg. It had been a deep cut and I had lost a lot of blood, but the cut had vanished without a trace. I fingered where it had been, pressing hard against the flesh. There was no pain at all, only the pressure of my fingers.

I was terrified by what this hinted. I was healthy; I healed faster than anybody else on board. Abel should have been surprised but hadn’t been, and that was a clue I had been a fool to ignore. I drifted through the corridors, oblivious of the few crewmen who passed silently by, then floated through the lower levels to Reduction. Nobody was there, the peep screen was off, and there were no guards—there was no need of them. My skin began to crawl but I drifted in and quickly examined all the equipment, desperately trying to remember everything Thrush had told me. For the first time, I was glad of his tour and the education he had given me, even though the price he charged had been far too high. I kept returning to a large, transparent cylinder in one of the corners. A body-scanner, Thrush had called it. He had run through its operation, more interested in displaying his knowledge than making sure I knew how it worked. We had been smoking and the details were fuzzy but I thought I could manage it without help.

I floated over to it and ran my hands down the glassite walls. How do you tell your age? I mused. The skin loses its elasticity as you grow older, and muscles atrophy from lack of use. The teeth are probably the best indicators of all—they rot with time, they wear down over the years. But mine had never hurt and I guessed they would tell me nothing. If what I thought was true, I probably grew them the way a salamander grows tails.

That left the skeleton. I might knit quickly but it was doubtful that I could grow a new tibia at will. I set the dials and ducked in. Once inside, I felt nothing; the only signs that the body-scanner was even operating were two metal rings that floated up and down the transparent walls. On the bulkhead opposite, a screen lit up; I watched with interest as the rings slowly painted the picture of a skeleton as they passed over my body.

A few moments later I was inspecting a portrait of my own insides. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, though I could make out the vague blur of cartilage. Wasn’t it compressed in older people? I assumed it was, though I was less sure it would be under weightless conditions. I couldn’t tell whether mine was or not and finally assumed it wasn’t—I suffered from no aches or pains, I had no difficulty moving or working my joints.

Then I caught my breath and looked closer at the screen, my heart pounding. The bones in my arms, legs, and rib cage were covered with dozens of faint, thin lines.

Bone fractures.Healed breaks.

How many times in his life did even the most active explorer break a bone?Once?Twice?Maybe three times? How many lifetimes would it have taken to accumulate all the breaks in my bones? How many lifetimes of roaming the surfaces of strange planets, of falling from cliffs or skidding down slopes of methane ice or scrambling out of the way of sudden lava flows?