The Dark Beyond the Stars : A Novel by Frank M. Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

asked.
    “You worked in Exploration with Ophelia,myself , and the others.Planetary profiles, equipment checks, team monitor for drills—that sort of thing. You were pretty good at all of them.”
    Which wasn’t really what I wanted to know from him.I’d find out soon enough what my job description was.
    “What made me different?” I said slowly. “What made me… me?”
    He was suddenly hesitant, trying to translate feelings into words—or trying to figure out what was safe to say and what wasn’t.
    “You liked to play chess—you used to play with Noah. You liked all kinds of games. You read a lot, you were hardworking,sometimes you were funny. And you were easy to be around.”
    He listed more of my virtues, but there was nothing personal, nothing of substance. Did I belch after I ate, did I talk in my sleep,did I wait too long between showers, had we ever raided Hydroponics together? Who hated me and what had I done to deserve it? And if that wasn’t the right question, then who loved me?And why?
    Maybe Crow and I hadn’t known each other very well after all. But I knew that we had. When he finished, I said, “We didn’t find anything on Seti IV, did we?”
    By now both Crow and Loon were sweaty-faced and I wondered if they would contradict each other if I asked them the same questions separately.
    “On Seti IV?No, we didn’t find anything, Sparrow.”
    How long had we stayed? I wondered. Had there been any hint that life had touched the planet, if only for a moment? I could ask Crow but I couldn’t trust what he might tell me.
    “My mother—she never came to sick bay.”
    “She died years ago,” Crow said quickly.
    Besides the unexpected sense of loss, there was the suspicion that he had answered too fast, that perhaps he had rehearsed his answers with Noah.
    “And my father?”
    “Biological?” He looked genuinely surprised. “None of us know our fathers, Sparrow—you’ve forgotten that.” His voice suddenly caught and he turned his face toward the windows so I couldn’t see his eyes.
    “Your father is… whoever takes an interest.”
    It was very quiet in the compartment now, the only noise that of the crowds and the squawking birds in the square below.
    “Somebody must have taken an interest,” I said desperately.
    “A lot of people did.” Then, even more hesitantly: “There was another casualty on Seti IV. Laertes. Volcanic eruption, the hot gases cooked him in his suit.” Crow must have been there when it happened, but he said it with all the emotion of a man who had memorized it.
    “He was my father?”
    “He took an interest.”
    I clipped the mask around my face, the plastic covering my eyes and curling into my ears. The windows and the fluttering curtains disappeared, the city below vanished, the murmurs of the birds and the people stopped. The three of us were alone in a tiny cubicle with sweating bulkheads.
    “I want to see where I live,” I said quietly.
    Crow pushed off the ledge and disappeared through the shadow screen behind him. I followed, finding myself in another small compartment not that much different from his own. A table and a mat, a hammock and a locker and half a dozen waistcloths tied to a bulkhead peg.
    Plus a bookcase with twenty or more volumes.
    I gently broke the slight pull of the magnetic headband that held one of them to the shelf and opened it, the plastic “paper” feeling greasy and fragile in my hands. There were volumes of fiction, more of essays and history, a few of poetry, and some technical manuals that were close to crumbling. Books were enormously costly and I wondered how I had ever acquired them. I glanced around the compartment again but the only thing remarkable about it was the books. Still, there was the indefinable air of somebody having lived there before me. It was difficult to accept the irony. The compartment was haunted bymyself .
    Crow wasn’t sure how to judge my silence. “The division has its own mess, Sparrow. We