The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

“life” I saw myself.
    I thought I was very handsome.
    I was thinner than Crow and looked older—I didn’t think by much. I was neither as tall nor as muscular, though there was no hint of adolescent babyfat . I had thick auburn hair, a reddish beard, and a straggling moustache. My eyes were a light green. Sometime in the past my nose had been broken, though I was convinced it made me look romantic. My skin was white even for someone with reddish hair—I hadn’t spent much time under the sick-bay health lamps—and my shoulders were slightly hunched. I had a flat stomach, big hands and feet, and a curly mat of rust-colored fuzz on my chest. My fingers were spatulate
    , though the rest of me looked normal enough.
    My name is Sparrow; I’m seventeen years old and a tech assistant on board the Astron. I was vastly pleased with myself.
    “Everything’s there,” Pipit said matter-of-factly. “I checked.”
    She had read my every thought. In the mirror, my face turned pink.
    “I hope you enjoyed yourself,” I grunted. I slipped the cloth up and around my waist and knotted it, realizing a moment later that whatever else I hadforgotten, I hadn’t forgotten how to do that . Pipit took off her cling-titesand slipped them beneath her waistcloth. Then she switched off the shadow screen over the hatchway.
    “Would you like to see the ship?”
    I looked at the brilliantly lit corridor just beyond and watched the crewmen jostling each other as they floated down it, eventually to be lost in the distance.
    I wanted to see the ship very badly.
    ****
    We drifted through the hatch into the passageway outside, lined with color-coded piping that served as directions to the various living and working quarters. Names and assignments ran in a continuous illuminated strip along the bottom of the overhead. Pipit grabbed a ring jutting out from the bulkhead and pushedherself along, braking the same way.
    “Do exactly as I do,” she said. “It’s more difficult than it looks.”
    But it wasn’t—it was something I had done before and it didn’t take me long to relearn it. On that first tour, the Astron was a world spread over a dozen different levels, with compartments filled with gleaming machinery and passageways that went on forever. Pipit showed me the machine shops where they worked on maintaining the equipment, the enormous hangar deck for Inbetween Station and the Lander plus the balloon and submarine probes, then took me through the various tech shops where I saw exploration suits and support gear hanging in neat rows along the partitions. I even caught a glimpse of a crowded mess compartment with crewmen eating at stainless-steel tables and working in the galley. None of them glanced up when I paused in the hatchway to watch, reminding me of the patients in sick bay. Pipit finally nudged me away, saying that most of the divisions, my own included, had their personal mess.
    The next stop was Communications, a large, gleaming compartment jammed with radio equipment and a dozen personnel too busy to pay much attention to us. On the bulkhead outside was a clipboard with a sheaf of the latest weekly messages from a remote Earth printed on crisp plastic sheets. I glanced at one or two, brief summaries of politics and economics, and then Pipit was tugging me away. Hydroponics was in the after portion of the ship. I stared openmouthed at the troughs of green plants racked from deck to overhead in rows that stretched for hundreds of meters. Pipit motioned me to follow her and floated toward a distant section of the compartment, where some plant troughs were hidden beneath the nutrient piping. She pinched off a leaf, crushed it in her fingers, and held them out for me to smell. The fragrance made my nose itch.
    “Mint,” she said, reaching over to break off a leaf from another plant.“Anise.” She put her fingers to my lips. “Don’t tell.”
    She shot off and I trailed after, still bemused by the different smells on her