Beyond the Farthest Suns

  Elwood would later move on to make a name for himself in Christian publishing, and to help First Lady Nancy Reagan write her autobiography.

  “Perihesperon” is something of a downer, all about inevitable doom and bravery. It contains some back story on Anna Sigrid Nestor, however, and isn’t that bad, after all these years.

  It was the six-hour sleep period for the pas­sengers. Parabolas of light divided the corridors where dim lamps glowed orange. Black carpet on the floors dulled the girl’s footsteps. The ordinary sounds of shipboard machinery continued. The muted hum of the blowers and the barely audible click-whine of the periodic engine bursts comforted Karen a little, but she was still disturbed by her solitude.

  Her parents hadn’t been in the cabin. She shuf­fled across the carpet in blue quilted robe and knitted slippers, long brown hair quickly combed back behind her ears. As she passed beneath the corridor lights, the top of her head glowed in a yellow crescent and her face fell into umber shadow.

  She reached out to touch the wall for balance, unsteady with the new strength in her step. As planned, the ship’s artificial gravity had dropped another quarter since she fell asleep.

  Something had scratched the yellow enamel on one wall. She examined the revealed layers of primer and white undercoating, the gray plastic bulkhead beneath.

  “Hello?” she called hesitantly into an empty cabin.

  The cabin’s beds had been tucked away in the wall. Nets stuck out a little sloppily from drawer edges. The desk lamp glowed. She moved on.

  The lounge waited two decks down, and beneath that, the level reserved for the crew—on this flight three men, pilots or copilots or whatever they called the people who monitored the automated ship—and two stewards. One pilot and one stew­ard were female, young and friendly. Karen had talked to them the day before. She thought perhaps they could explain what was going on.

  The central elevator didn’t work. She descended an emergency ladder to the lounge and stood in the hatchway, jaw clenched tight.

  Card tables had been drawn out. The theater screen’s doors had been pulled aside. Chairs lay toppled and cards scattered as if wind had blown through the room.

  A woman’s tote bag lay next to one overturned chair, its contents spilled. Something red puddled on the carpet, too bright to be blood. She dipped her finger into it and sniffed. Nail polish. A rup­tured autospray.

  Eyes wide and nostrils flushed with the cold, sniffling in the chill air, she returned to the ladder and its tight tube and descended to the crew level.

  “Hello?” she called again. No answer. It was impossible, but she was alone on the ship.

  Everybody was gone.

  Servos clicked and whined. She jumped as a voice spoke from the control room. “Flux rate five thousand hertz, emission velocity point-nine-nine c, time of pulse zero seven-zero-five hours. Request acknowledgement of previous engine analysis.”

  She returned to the empty control room and listened to the calm requests of the unattended computer.

  Beyond the wide transparent panels, stars burned clear and bright, drifting slowly past the window. The ship tumbled and rolled in space. She knew enough about their journey to understand that no such motion was part of the flight plan.

  The brownish mass of Hesperus rolled into view, sparsely striped with ice clouds and gray volcanic smudges. Even from a thousand kilometers the broad crater-scarred roads and cities showed as distinct markings. Hesperus’s life had vanished in war before humankind had lost its body hair and crossed thumb and little finger.

  “Correction of axis yaw in four minutes seven seconds. Please explain cause of yaw. Damage report is incomplete.”

  More frightened, she descended the ladder again, fingers clawing at the rungs, breath coming in harsh rasps.

  Recreation occupied two decks below the crew quarters, adjoining a zero-gravity gymnasium. The door to the gymnasium had been sealed. The door’s window fogged with drops of frost. She leaned against the far wall, lip quivering.

  This is ridiculous, she thought. I’m starting to cry. I will not cry. She pushed herself from the wall and ran around the curving corridor, circling the deck, peering into the automated galley, empty, and the in-flight storage area. Tears streamed down her cheeks when she completed the inspection and stood again in front of the gymnasium.

  If they were all inside the closed room, then—

  She brightened immediately and pushed the button for the door to open. It stayed shut. The frost on the window slowly cleared and she looked inside.

  A wide black streak marred the chamber floor. The rubber matting had burned and bubbled. Something had been wedged against a bulkhead high above the door, a patch of some sort, bulging outward toward the closed-off cor­ridor which ringed the lower level.

  “I’ll be damned,” a low voice said to one side. “I thought no one made it.” She twisted around to face the man standing a few meters away. He wasn’t a passenger, she knew immediately, and he wasn’t a mem­ber of the crew. A stowaway?

  “Where is everybody?” she asked, keeping her tone smooth.

  “Went out like lights a half-hour ago. They’re gone, honey. Were you in your cabin?” She nodded and examined him as though dreaming. He was old and nut-brown, face lightly etched with lines, nose broad, eyes large and black and calm. He wore green coveralls. An orange lump twitched on his shoulder.

  “Where are they?” she asked, not wanting to understand.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. Snuffed out in minutes. Meteoroid took out a man-sized hole in the lower level, and all the doors were jammed open when it plowed through the safety center. She was airless in less than a minute.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Everybody’s dead. Sorry, honey.”

  “No,” she said, backing away from him. “No!” She ran back along the corridor and up the narrow stairs, hair flying. The man in green stood motionless and looked at where she had stood, his face empty. The lump on his shoulder stirred and extended two horny palps to scratch at his ear. “Stop that,” he said and the palps withdrew. “We’ve got more problems than I expected.”

  When Karen reached her room she looked at the empty nets, still extended, and remembered the card game that had been planned. Her only thought—and part of her coolly considered it ridiculous—was that she was twelve years old and now she was an orphan. What was she going to do?

  There was one more body for him to throw out of the ship. Under different circumstances he would have kept the bodies in cold storage, as many as possible, but there was no point in that now. He removed the contorted steward­‘s corpse and placed it in the lock, closing the inner hatch. He slipped into his spacesuit, adjusted the seals, and opened the three outer hatches. Hand clenched on the grips, he braced himself against the playful push of out-rushing air and frozen mist. He kicked the body into space with all his strength and said a brief prayer. Already stiffening in the cold, the body twisted around its central axis and began a slow journey away from the ship.

  How was he going to tell the girl what was wrong? He closed the hatch, climbed out of the suit, and hung it up neatly in its rack. The orange lump stirred uneasily on his shoulder and he patted it as he locked off the one ruptured level and restored the elevator to operation.

  Then he went to find the girl’s cabin.

  She sat on her bed, one hand entwined in the netting, staring at the opposite wall with its screen-picture of terrestrial desert. She turned to look at the old man as he walked into the door frame, then turned away.

  “My name’s Cammis Alista, Alista my calling name,” he said. “What’ll I call you?”

  She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. Then she said, “Karen.”

  “We’re in trouble, Karen.”

  “Who are you?” she asked. “I don’t remember you on the ship.”

  “I wasn’t,” Alista said. “I’m
a drifter. Had my own ship, shared it with Jerk here.” He patted the orange thing. “We stay away from the lanes mostly, but we have to cross paths with the big ships now and then. We saw that your ship was in trouble. We came aboard.”

  Karen knew enough about interplanetary distances to think that was hardly credible. She shook her head back and forth, trying to show with one part that she was smart enough not to believe him, and with another part that she didn’t care.

  “I happened to be following your assigned orbit,” he said. “Hooked up with your path when you sling-shotted around Hesperus to cut travel time to Satiyajit. I was searching for satellites around Hesperus—alien artifacts bring a good price, you know.”

  She looked at him again, trying to analyze his features, and scowled at the thing he called Jerk. “Where’s your ship?”

  “I approached your ship and made a mistake. Didn’t keep out of the way of a flux pulse. You were tumbling pretty badly, I thought the computers would have shut down the drive, but they hadn’t. You roasted my outer shell like so much cake batter. Got me pretty good, too, with subsidiary scatter.” He smiled a twisted smile and shrugged at the thought of what that meant.

  “I didn’t do it to you,” she said.

  “I didn’t mean you, your ship …”

  “It’s not my ship,” she said.

  “You’re right,” Alista gave in, shrugging again. “It’s not really even a ship any more. The safeties were destroyed and part of the guidance computer. I turned off the engines when I came aboard through the meteor hole. The com­puter still acts as if the engines were running. It clicks its servos and whistles its little electric songs as though everything’s OK. My guess is, about two hours ago you were to start the flux pulses which would estab­lish your path to Satiyajit, but now we’re starting to curve back toward Hesperus. The computer put the ship in orbit after the accident, very eccentric, but we’ll stay up here all the same.”

  He fell silent and shook his head at his own blabbering. “I’m not insensitive, honey, I know what you must be feeling.” He knuckled his eyes. Drops of water beaded on the back of his hand.

  “We’re not going to Satiyajit?”

  “No chance. Not for a while anyway. They’ll be sending ships out soon. They’ll be here in a few weeks.”

  “We’ll be alive then?”

  He lied. “I don’t see why not. Hey, feel like a little food?” She said no and slumped down with her elbows on her knees. She was going to cry now. She knew it with certainty and didn’t care whether he was there or not. Mother and Father were dead. Why was she alive?

  The first sob shook her softly. The second was more violent. Alista backed out of the door and said he would fix some food.

  The machines in the automatic galley were in good condition, and he punched up two synthecarn dinners. Jerk moved restlessly on his shoulder and squeaked its own demands for sustenance. Alista played with the con­trols of the machines for a moment and came up with a reasonable substitute for a yeast biscuit. He fed this to the animal as he gathered courage to face the girl again.

  His lie wouldn’t help. Their present orbit would take them right through a belt of Hesperus’s moonlets. If they were lucky enough to escape them, in less than a day they’d be running through the belt again. A rescue ship wouldn’t reach them for a couple of weeks. He wouldn’t live that long anyway. He had no more than three days.

  Jerk could out­last them all by encysting and floating around in the wreckage.

  He took the covered trays to the girl’s cabin. Pre­tending suspicion, she picked a morsel from her meal, then ate it in small bites while he watched from the desk chair. Her eyes had puffed with crying. She was very young, he thought. Fourteen, fifteen? Perhaps younger. She wasn’t what he would call beautiful, but there was a simple regularity to her features which produced a pleasing effect. It was a face which any man could grow to love over the years far more than any rubber-stamp beauty. “Listen,” he said. “You know how to take care of yourself on this thing?”

  She nodded as she ate. “Why?”

  “I just wanted to know. I’m not …” But he shook his head and filled his mouth with food, chewing and smiling, shaking his head. Could he feel the creeping dis­integration of his flesh? Would he hide in a locked sealed cabin the last few hours, so she wouldn’t see?

  Karen stood up and asked if he’d picked out a room yet. His look of surprise irritated her. Did he think she was concerned about him? No. She was dead inside. She couldn’t be concerned about anything any more.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  “Well, you’d better find one.”

  “OK,” he said. He took both trays and left, standing in the door frame for a moment, as he had stood before. “You’ll be all right, Karen?” His questions were curiously accented in the middle, as though each query were half a statement of fact.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He went to find a cabin and get some sleep.

  When Alista came awake, he shut off the net that had held him in place during the night and kept him warm in the mesh pajamas he’d borrowed. He put everything in its place as though the occupant would be back soon. He had chosen the first officer’s cabin, feeling more comfortable in the room of a man who had faced risks as his official duty. If such a man’s time came in such a meaningless way, that was his gamble.

  A passenger’s cabin would have made Alista nervous.

  He found Karen in the lounge cleaning up the scattered cards and taking out the spilled nail polish with solvent. “Damn,” she said. “It eats the carpet, too.”

  “Do you want breakfast?” he asked.

  “I’ve fixed some already,” she said.

  “I’ll get some more myself then.”

  “Yours is all ready. It’s in the warmer.”

  “Thank you.” Looking around the compartment, he com­mented that it looked better and she shrugged.

  “You put them all outside?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Why?”

  “You know.” He looked at her sternly. She looked away and took a deep breath.

  When he had finished his food he tapped the orange lump with his finger and it came to life, protruding eyes on stalks and waving palps. “Ever seen anything like Jerk before?”

  Karen shook her head. She didn’t want to look at it, or ask any questions, or have it explained to her.

  “When I get back from the control room I’ll tell you about Jerk. I’m going to shut down the computer and cut the servos. We lose a little battery power each time they switch on the engine pumps.”

  “You stopped the fuel feed?” she asked.

  “I did,” Alista said, taking hope from the un­prompted question.

  He checked the ship’s position by shooting the sun rising over the bloated arc of Hesperus and taking an angle from distant bright Sirius. Comparing his findings with the computer, the ma­chine followed his calculations to three figures. The ship’s brains weren’t scrambled, then. He threw out his own paper and questioned the guidance systems about their position and orbital velocity.

  Their speed was increasing. They were approaching Perihesperon. In a few minutes they’d make their first pass through the lunar belt at—he checked the readout—twenty-two thousand kilo­meters per hour. At that velocity it would be useless to try to dodge moonlets with the ship’s maneuvering and docking engines.

  He didn’t feel old, watching the planets fill the screen. He didn’t feel very old at all, but then he couldn’t sense the breakdown of his cells either. Flexing his arms, stretching his legs to increase circulation, he felt like a young man, not at all ready to give up.

  Something dark blotted out the planet for the blink of an eye. Then a sharply defined scatter of chunks went past. A haze of dust made the ship tremble and buck.

  They were through. First pass
age.

  He returned to the lounge, practicing smiles and wiping them away as they inevitably approached fatuousness.

  “Hey!” he said. “I’m going to tell you about Jerk, hm?”

  She nodded.

  “I picked him up from a dealer on Tau Ceti’s Myriadne. He—it—whatever, comes from a place where the air is so bad nothing can breath it, so he breaks down silicates for his oxygen. He eats plants that absorb his own kind when they’re dead, and the whole thing …” he indicated the ecological pattern with a circling finger, “…means that no animal kills another animal to survive. So he’s docile and smart …” He stopped and didn’t feel like saying anything more, but he finished the sentence, “because he absorbs from your own personality, so he’s as smart as his owner.”

  Karen was looking at the spot the solvent had made on the carpet.

  “He, she, it, doesn’t matter,” Alista said. “Jerk doesn’t care.”

  “Did something happen to you?” she asked. “I mean, when you came near the ship.”

  Alista felt like a small child who wanted to say some­thing, but couldn’t. He was eighty years old and he felt so much like a child that he wanted to find a sympathetic breast and weep. But he was a man long used to death, and finding a frightened weakness in himself made him more reluctant to say or do anything.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to die?”

  “Yes, dammit! Be quiet. Don’t say anything.”

  And he turned to walk out. A day, two days. That was all.

  How long did she have?

  The second passage through the belt went smoothly. Alista investigated the emergency shields to see what they could repel. They could absorb and transfer impacts from anything up to nine tons. But the shields required safeties to activate them and a guidance system to pinpoint their maximum force on the approaching object. Neither were in working order.

  Karen stayed to herself, read­ing fitfully or trying to sleep, and he stayed in the bridge cabin, idly searching all possible avenues of escape.