The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel (21 page)

For all I knew, I might be as old as the Captain. Perhaps, like him, I had been attached to the first crew. Attached in the same sense that he had been attached—after all, we had outlived the others by a hundred generations.

I panicked at the implication and fled through the different levels back to the hangar deck. I wanted to look at Seti IV again and watch myself descend the ladder to its rocky surface and scratch an
H
in the sand. Somewhere in those simple actions were the reasons why nobody had told me about myself, why nobody could tell me.

Months ago, in sick bay, Noah had said that I was seventeen, a tech assistant on board the
Astron
. He had been more wrong than right—and he had known it all the time.

I was far older than seventeen. And whatever I was, I was much more than a simple tech assistant.

****

I ran the projection once more from the beginning, taking note of every detail. This time I could see that my spacesuit was a skintight data suit, rigged to function like a palm terminal and give tactile feedback. The result had been overwhelmingly real, at least for me.

I watched it to the end, once again impressed by Ophelia and Crow, so convincing here and so unconvincing in the historicals that Snipe staged.

I had frozen the last scene in the Lander and was studying it when I sensed somebodyslip in through the darkened hatchway behind me.

“You’re breakingCoventry coming here, Sparrow—that’s a reportable offense.”

I moved slightly so Ophelia had a better view of the projection.

“Sparrow’s inCoventry . Hamlet isn’t.”

I could hear the surprise in her sharp intake of breath.

“I’ll live forever, won’t I, Ophelia?”

“Not forever,” she said in a flat voice. “But long enough.”

I couldn’t read her expression in the dark of the hangar. I waved at the ghostly image of the artificial reality in front of me.

“All of it was a charade, wasn’t it, Ophelia?” I didn’t wait for her answer. “Your acting was very good. And Crow— Crow was excellent; I didn’t know he had it in him. Anybody watching the two of you would have thought you were mourning a lifelong friend.”

Her voice was inexpressibly sad. “We were.”

“How could you be?” I sneered. “I wasn’t dying—and you knew it.”

“No, you weren’t dying,” she agreed. “Hamlet was.”

As she had gradually become convinced that Hamlet was gone forever, that “Sparrow” was somebody she had never known, her attitude toward me had changed. Hamlet had been a friend, “Sparrow” a stranger, and she had reacted accordingly.

“And Pipit,” I said, not wanting to let my anger slip away. “She should get an award.”

“She should,” Ophelia agreed once again.“For patience. If the body thinks it’s been hurt, then it’s been hurt. You’ll live a long time but you’re not immortal, Sparrow, you can die. And you can be killed. You have a lot to thank Pipit for.”

If she meant to sober me, she succeeded.

“Why did they do it?”

“They knew the voyage would last a long time. They didn’t want the crew to forget.”

“Forget what?”

“What it’s like to be human.” She corrected herself. “What it was like to be human at the time of Launch. You haven’t changed since then.”

Another tumbler fell into place.

“The crew studies me, don’t they? You study how I react, how I think, how I talk, the importance I give to the things I do. Or you do. You watch me watching you. I’m a living mirror in which you can check your own image—that’s it, isn’t it?”

Huldahhad told me that nothing ever really changed on board. She hadn’t told me that I was the reason why.

“I wouldn’t make that comparison. You’re more like a RosettaStone , a link between what we are now and what we were when we left the Earth. That’s very important to us, Sparrow.”

“You could have studied the Captain,” I said.

“ Kusaka’smany things, but one of the things he isn’t is the same man who left the Earth two thousand years ago. He’s not at all like you, Sparrow. He remembers everything, he forgets nothing. He can’t.”

Then all the tumblers fell into place—or I thought they did.

“I’m only good for one generation, right, Ophelia? After fifteen or twenty years I’ve adapted to the ship, I react to situations just like any other crew member. My reactions are no longer… fresh… so I have to start all over again. I’m the phoenix that rises from its own ashes, the firebird. How do you do it, Ophelia?Drugs? So I can’t tell the real from the unreal? And then when I’m out of my mind and my memory is hazy, I find myself on Seti IV climbing a cliff that exists only for me.”

She was still staring at the scene in the Lander; I wasn’t even sure she had heard me.

“What happens then, Ophelia?”

I could sense her shiver in the darkness.

“Your memory’s flatlined ; you remember nothing before the accident.”

I recalled my nightmares and the host of faces that had surrounded me, the faces of all the crew members I must have known through the generations. And then Ophelia’s own face and that of the man in black.The Captain. I suddenly felt as helpless as I had in sick bay.

“Why?”

“Because it was your assignment!” she burst out. “Centuries ago, you must have volunteered tor it! You knew what it was all about back then—you’re the feedback loop that keeps all of us human! My God, how else would we even know, what ‘human’ is?”

“I’m a living relic,” I said bitterly. “You compare yourselves to me to see how far you’ve come from the ape. It must be amusing at times.”

She shook her head.

“You’re hardly an amusement, Sparrow. The
Astron
is a very tiny village, the only one in a country that stretches to infinity in whatever direction you care to look. There are only a few of us, and we get to know each other very well. Hardly anything ever changes on board and if it does, it changes so slowly we don’t realize it. Our lives are exactly like the lives of the generation before us. They’re very structured, limited lives. They can’t be anything else; they’re the result of two thousand years of ship culture. But you lived your life back on Earth. You’revery … unstructured. You’re very human. Watching you reminds us of what it’s like.”

I recalled being strandedOutside and was suddenly angry.

“If I’m so valuable why did you let me go on the walkabout? I could have died.”

She sighed.

“That’s right, you could have. I told you that. As it was, we did our best to protect you. But keeping you locked up in a compartment would have defeated your purpose.” With a touch of guilt, she added:

“Telling you who you are would have done the same thing.”

Squatting next to her, I was very much aware of her warmth,a very familiar warmth. At one point, she put a hand tentatively to her hair,then abruptly placed it in her lap. It was a touching moment; she had accepted that I was more than Sparrow even though she knew I was much less than…Hamlet. That was one question I suddenly wanted to ask her, but I asked another instead.

“What was I to Noah?”

I could sense her sudden discomfort.

“His best friend.Aaron and Noah ‘grew up’ together.”

“And Crow?”

“Hamlet took an interest. When Crow was very young;”

Crow had probably beenK2 ’s age. As Hamlet, I had been a father to him. His reactions to me were a lot easier to understand now. He had initially deferred to me; it had taken him a while to accept himself as my equal and a friend. With luck, everybody’s father eventually becomes their friend, but it hadn’t been that simple for Crow or probably for Noah. Had I taken an interest in Noah when he was very young?

Had he watched me go from father to friend to son?

“ Laertesnever existed,” I said. “What about Nerissa , my mother?”

Ophelia shrugged. “She did: But she wasn’t your mother.”

It would have been nice to have had one—one that I remembered.

“Who makes the decision to flatline ?”

“The Captain.But the necessity is apparent to all of us.”

“When you take away a person’s memories, that person dies,” I said slowly. “The Captain murdered Hamlet. And you helped.”

Her voice cracked.

“You think it was easy? It wasn’t—but it was necessary!”

“If the Captain finds out I know who I am, he’ll have me flatlined again, won’t he?”

She nodded.

“And you’ll tell him, won’t you?”

She hadn’t looked away from the projection since the moment she had slipped through the hatch and I wondered what attraction it held for her.

“Do you remember anything about Hamlet?”

I shrugged. “I know my life as Sparrow. That’s all.”

“Then continue being Sparrow,” she said coldly.

I recalled Noah and Abel in sick bay and how anxious they were that I remember who I had been. I finally knew… but I did not remember. I was sure that the difference was crucial.

“For the first time in generations, something’s changed, hasn’t it?”

Once again, I could sense her shiver.

“In a few weeks, we’ll be entering the Dark. We’ll never survive. Once in it, most of us will choose to die likeJudah .”

The Dark was the connection; it had always been the connection.

“Hamlet was part of your mutiny.” I grunted. “I’m not.”

I started for the hatch. It was close to shift time and we wouldn’t be alone much longer. Behind me, she warned, “You can never admit that you know, Sparrow.”

“Neither can you,” I said. “Not to Noah, not to anybody.”

Just before pushing through the shadow screen, I glanced back. Ophelia had run the projection to where I lay naked on the acceleration couch, her own image bent over mine, her fingers probing for broken bones. The real Ophelia was crying.

I hadn’t asked what Hamlet had meant to her, but now I knew.

For he who lives more lives than one, more deaths than one must die.

—from “The Ballad of Reading
Gaol
,” Oscar Wilde

It wasn’t long before I was excused fromCoventry , though it might have been safer had I stayed in. For the first few time periods after learning about my history, I caught myself playing a game: Who had known me as “Hamlet” and who had known me as “Aaron” and how good were they at pretending ignorance?

After a week I noticed that some crew members frowned when they glanced at me and talked in low voices among themselves when I passed by. I was giving myself away with comments that had more than a trace of sarcasm and with knowing looks whenever they talked to me. They had accepted “Sparrow”

while I was in the process of rejecting him.

I forced myself to forget that I had ever been anybody other than “Sparrow” and tried to project a mix of innocence and ignorance that I thought was appropriate. I spent more time with Tybalt and others outside the immediate ring of mutineers, glowered once or twice at Thrush to keep in character, and studiously ignored Heron. I was “myself” with Snipe more than with anybody else, probably because we spent most of our time wrapped around each other in her hammock rather than talking or working together.

The frowns gradually disappeared and I found it increasingly easy to become the “Sparrow” I had been before. Getting ready to explore a new planet helped, but even working with Ophelia I maintained the role. Once or twice she looked as if she were about to say something. I never gave her an opening. I was always alert, watching for the sudden shift in attitude that would indicate that somebody knew
I
knew and my days as “Sparrow” were numbered.

It was easy to determine who had joined the mutiny and who hadn’t been approached. Those who had joined frowned too much and were too conscious of themselves and their new status. They congregated in small clumps during mealtimes or in the corridors to talk among themselves, not yet aware that the best way to keep a secret is to forget you know it. Most of them were in Exploration, a few in Communications. With the exception of myself, I doubted that anybody had refused. They wouldn’t have been approached in the first place unless the mutineers were absolutely sure of the response. It was difficult to tell who had joined among the crew members in Maintenance since, without exception, all of them wore worried looks anyway. They knew better than anybody else the
Astron’s
chances of survival in the Dark. Tern, a thin, gawky engineering assistant, once tried to discuss the mutiny with me in the gymnasium. I discouraged him from talking about it, saying it was too public and too risky. I wasn’t thinking of Tern so much as I was thinking of myself.

Then there were those on the sidelines. Myself, of course, though I wasn’t the only one. There was Thrush, who observed his fellow crew members with quiet amusement. He had become his old smirking self, but with a certain detachment and a harder edge. And there were Banquo and Abel, both of whom worked too hard at maintaining poker faces and pretending they were unaware that anything at all was happening.

The crew was tense, excited and anxious about the upcoming exploration of Aquinas II. If any form of life were discovered, the mutiny would evaporate for lack of need—the
Astron
would finally be free to return home. But if the planet were as sterile as all the others, then the mutiny might spread like wildfire. What should I do? I wondered. Join it? I was already inclined to. Or side with the Captain, realizing that if he ever found out I had joined the mutiny, “Sparrow” would be flatlined like Hamlet and Aaron had been? It was a decision I didn’t have the courage to make.

The Captain had his eyes and ears among the crew, and I was convinced he knew every muscle twitch and stray thought of every crew member on board. He would have his arguments, his counterplots, and in the last analysis, he would have his powers as captain.

When it came to using them, I suspected he would be ferocious.

****

The one group on board not concerned with either Aquinas II or the mutiny was the very young. I found myself spending more and more time in the nursery, playing with the children and talking to Pipit. Ever since her decision to share Crow’s compartment after the rape, she had become increasingly more mellow and content. As always, she seemed wise beyond her years, and I guessed that when Huldah went to Reduction Pipit would take her place.