“How long will we be enziggied?” demanded an intrusive basso voice. It was an angular voice, chopped fine by crisp consonants, each word delivered with such distinctness, the ending of one fully complete before the next dared raise its head, as to endow a simple greeting with the qualities of a pronouncement, and a simple query with those of a demand. Bhatterji, who did not much care for demands, placed a smile before his teeth and twisted to greet the intrusion.
Second Officer ’Abd al-Aziz Corrigan was a burnt cinder of a man, punk held too long in the fire. Partly, that was the endless sun of the sky-less void; partly too that was the artifice of the melanic micromachines that guarded his flesh from the continual rain of cosmic radiation. His skin had a leathery feel to it: hard, yet supple and with a mild, pungent odor, as if he had been fashioned from uncured hides. Like the ship’s doctor, he had the long, lanky body of the spaceborn, though he was a man of the ’Stroids, not of LEO. Bhatterji imagined him a snake, an image reinforced by his deep-set, reptilian eyes and by the way his tongue would dart out and wet his lips. The term snake was common enough in reference to the spaceborn, but polite folk avoided it; at least when any snakes were present.
“We haven’t located the source of the malf,” Bhatterji said. A grudging admission, pricked slowly off his teeth.
Corrigan’s eyes darted from Bhatterji to Miko. He disliked the dirt and the grime of the engine room. Even when everything was in place, it seemed cluttered and disorderly. Bhatterji himself was a squat lump of a man: ugly, with blunt fingers and a nose once broken in a fight and only indifferently repaired. Corrigan considered him not far removed from the brute engines he served.
The same could not be said of his mate. Elfin-featured, sallow-skinned, Mikoyan Hidei lay at the aesthetic antipodes to the engineer: graceful and sweet-tempered, with a smile that Corrigan found disturbingly alluring, and all the more mysterious for being seldom seen outside duty hours. The second officer followed Miko with his eyes, even while he addressed the engineer. “Coasting will stretch out our transit time. We’re drifting off course with the current, so the sooner you get it fixed, the better.”
Bhatterji, who had entertained no notion that delay would be a good thing, resented the deck officer pointing out the obvious. If there was anything Bhatterji did not know about the ship, it was not a thing that Corrigan could tell him. “I’ll fix it,” he growled. He didn’t like, either, the way the other man tossed antiquated magsail terms into his speech. No one called gravity “the current” any more. The old magsail hands never seemed to understand that history had passed them by.
“It might be a physical malf,” Miko said. “What if something damaged the projectors outside? If a projector’s out of alignment, wouldn’t that wreck the timing?”
Bhatterji considered the suggestion. “Yes, it could be. There are a number of possibilities. Software. Hardware.” He shook his head. “It’s difficult to say.”
“You’re wasting time,” Corrigan growled. “I don’t care what the malf is. I want it fixed.” It was not being “enziggied”—in zero g—that Corrigan minded. Being spaceborn, he found it more natural than weight. What he minded was anything out of order.
“I need more data,” Bhatterji insisted.
“Then get it.” Corrigan found the engineer’s constant dithering a frustration. Moving him to action was like pushing cable.
“I could go Outside,” Miko said to Bhatterji, “and check the hardware while you run the diagnostics inside…”
Bhatterji did not respond immediately, for the Void frightened him beyond measure. There was ionizing radiation from solar flares and, if not that, the endless cold or the endless vacuum or, quite simply, the endlessness itself. Lose contact with the ship, lose orientation, and a man would fall forever and ever—like Enver Koch tumbling into the dark. Sometimes, just before sleep took him, Bhatterji could hear his predecessor’s voice ever fainter over the comm.
But if the thought of going Outside frightened, it also enticed. Bhatterji began to tremble.
“I’ll check the cages myself,” he heard his own far-away voice say at last.
Corrigan fishtailed to go, having gotten what he came for; but he paused for a moment in the accessway that led to the main deck and turned back. “I almost forgot. Captain Hand died a half hour ago; so you can scratch your turns off the death watch.”
Bhatterji grunted as if punched in the belly. The news unsettled him, coming so soon after the engine malf. An ill omen, as if parts of the ship, human and mechanical, were shutting down one after the other. He dismissed the foreboding and turned to face the control panel. “Pull yourself together,” he told Miko. “There’s work to do.”
Miko bit on a thumb knuckle and hugged both arms tight, looking dazed. “I can’t help it. He was good to me. He took me in when I had nowhere to go.”
Brief pain, and briefer humor, crossed Ram’s heart. “That’s a common enough story on this ship. I remember when—” But that was a private memory, not for sharing. The captain had made a habit of picking up the discards and left behinds of other ships, Ramakrishnan Bhatterji not least among them.
The engineer could not help but think that, in dying, Captain Hand had made a grave mistake.
With the ship enziggied, “Moth” Ratline gathered up his wranglers and herded them into the cargo hold above the main deck for a bit of opportunistic straightening. The wrangler berth was used to his continual fussing. “A place for everything,” he liked to say, “and everything in its place.” Except, the wranglers noted, nothing ever seemed quite in its proper place. Rave Evermore had tracked the progress of one particular container from bin to bin within the hold and declared that it had accumulated several thousand kilometers of additional travel beyond its nominal interplanetary journey.
“But, the captain’s funeral,” said Nkieruke Okoye, the First Wrangler. “Should we not be there, to show respect?” The others had urged her forward, less from a great love for the late captain Hand, than from a great loathing for hard work.
But Ratline was unmoved. He knew from experience that a wrangler’s first goal in life was to avoid work; just as his own was to protect his young charges from the temptations of idleness. He grinned in what he thought was a friendly fashion—though the effort fell short in the minds of the wranglers—and said, “I’ve seen a captain.”
And indeed, captains in his world were two-a-penny. He’d seen all of them, from Coltraine to Hand. He’d seen them promoted, retired, resigned, and fired. Now he’d seen one die. There were no other ways he could think of to leave the bridge, so a milestone of sorts had been achieved.
Ratline was the oldest of the crew, and the only one to have been on the ship’s Articles from the very beginning. He’d been a cabin boy back then, proud in his elaborate uniform. Now he was all sinew and scar tissue and if his worn and dingy coveralls constituted a uniform it was only through careless nomenclature. Evermore and the other wranglers would never have believed it—their world was bounded entirely by the present—but Ratline had been a handsome lad. Half his prettiness had come from his uniform—red trim and epaulettes, gleaming brass buttons, MEMS fabric that rippled with changing patterns at a whispered command—but the rest had lain in his features and in his voice and in his carriage, which could (and often did) excite admiration with every stitch of uniform removed.
A tough life, the wranglers would tell each other when they thought about it at all, which was seldom, or when they contemplated their master’s youth, which was never. Yet, it had been tough, and in ways that wrangling cargo could never be. Cargo pods and strap cables had taken a finger off Ratline’s left hand and a hoist had once left a small depression in his skull—mass persists when even weight has fled—but other duties left other scars. There had been tasks for pretty, young cabin boys in the decadent years of the Fifties that the more Apollonian Zeds would never countenance. Ratline never spoke of it. Society then may have winked and nudged and leered, but little Timmy Ratline had
been on the butt end, and his smiles had been only for the tips.
“He never looks happy,” Ivar Akhaturian said after the wranglers had returned exhausted to their quarters. He hoped that his comment did not sound critical of the cargo master (in case the berth held him in reverence) nor too sympathetic (in case the berth despised him). Ivar was the newest of the wranglers, anxious to make a good impression, uncertain how that might be done. He was a cade boy. His mother had sold him to the ship “for a few years of seasoning” when The River had called at Callisto. He received room and board and an education; his mother received his wages.
Okoye lashed herself to a clip-chair in the wranglers’ common room and listened to the other three chatter. As First Wrangler, she had spent the better part of three years shifting cargo under Ratline’s eye, and possessed a broader perspective on such matters. Indeed, she often thought of herself as acting cargo master, since Ratline was six years older than Satan and given to long, solitary retreats into his cabin. No, he never does look happy, she thought, and wondered if there might be some long-buried wound festering beneath his skin, waiting to burst like a pustule and poison them all.
What distressed acting captain Stepan Gorgas most about Hand’s funeral was how few of the crew attended. Beside himself, there was only the engineer and his mate and the third officer, the four of them arrayed in various approximations of mourning around Central Hall. Bhatterji appeared properly grave, but his mate seemed to be in a trance, like a cow just after the knacking hammer. Eugenie Satterwaithe, the Third Officer, appeared just before the ceremonies were to begin and positioned herself near one of the entries, as if situated for a quick escape. Barely a corporal’s guard! Not that Gorgas had thought so well of Hand, but the office deserved respect.
Central Hall was a circular room set (happily enough) in the center of the lowermost deck. In more exalted days it had been a reception area and the Grand Staircase had spiraled up from the luxury modules below. Now the old stairwell was sealed off and only a narrow gangway led below to the maintenance tunnels and the external midship airlock through which Hand, vaporized, would shortly make his sublimed exit.
Satterwaithe had known Hand from the day the captain had been piped aboard, so Gorgas thought it fitting that she now be present when he was piped off. The symmetry pleased him in some indefinable fashion. Yet, Ratline, the other longtimer, did not appear. Nor even the doctor, which Gorgas found more than astonishing. It seemed a slap in the face, as if Wong had no further use for the man. Of all the sins in Gorgas’s book (and there were many) the worst was ingratitude.
When the announced time for the funeral arrived, Gorgas opened his link. “Ship,” he said solemnly, drawing the attention of the other mourners. “Funeral service. Evan Dodge Hand. Begin.”
“Dearly beloved,” said the Ship’s AI in appropriately doleful tones, “we are gathered today to pay a final farewell to our beloved captain, Evan Dodge Hand, Sixteenth Captain of the Magnetic Sail, The River of Stars.”
Startled, Gorgas pulled his ’puter from the pocket of his formal tunic and jotted some quick, urgent notes. In one short sentence the AI had made three errors.
First, despite its official designation and the supercargo coiled uselessly in the top-deck locker, The River of Stars was no longer a magnetic sail.
Second, to judge by the quantity of tears being shed, Hand had hardly been “beloved,” unless by Miko Hidei, who at least seemed on the verge of them.
And third, “we” were not gathered, since most of the crew had absented themselves.
He was not even entirely certain of the “sixteenth.” It depended on how one counted the post captains who had supervised the ship during its Jovian service.
Such gaffes might betoken a lurking malf in the neural net. Gorgas downloaded the list to the attention of The Lotus Jewel.
He glanced around the hall to see if the sysop had entered while he had been occupied with his ’puter. Of all the crew, The Lotus Jewel was the most pleasant to the eyes. Cheerful, intense, a good team player in Gorgas’s judgment. He was disappointed, though not surprised, to note her continued absence. Like so many of her unworldly kind, she was undoubtedly floating in her room with her head up her ass.
Gorgas was not quite correct about The Lotus Jewel, at least about which was up what. She was in the communications center just off the bridge. The main panel of the transmitter was open and fasteners and random objects floated about, so that the console seemed to have been frozen somehow in the midst of an explosion. Her hands were deep within the unit, like a surgeon fumbling for a spleen; and if her head was not entirely up inside as well, her face was close to it and bore a look of profound concentration.
Passing by (and passing by no coincidence), Corrigan glanced into the comm center and saw the disorder. Corrigan did not approve of clutter. Yet, his rebuke remained unspoken, because he did approve of The Lotus Jewel. He approved of her face (it was fine and broad, with high cheekbones, and eyes of a most peculiar blue) and he approved of her poise, which always seemed to him graceful, as if she were acutely aware of where each and every part of her body was in relation to the rest. He approved of her ass, which at the moment faced in his direction and so demanded his attention. And he certainly approved of her generous and loving nature, since he was the immediate and primary beneficiary of it.
It pleased him that the most exquisite creature on the ship was lover to ’Abd al-Aziz Corrigan, a man whose visage blanched the faces of so many wellsprung humans. That the carnal pickings on board The River might be slim he knew intellectually. Gorgas was too pompous, Grubb too virginal, Ratline too old, the wranglers too young, and Bhatterji too whatever Bhatterji was, so The Lotus Jewel had few options. Corrigan was not so naive as to suppose that no other pairings were possible, or that in the close confines of a ship most of those combinations would not eventually be tried. Yet it was to him that this delicate, golden-skinned wanton came.
Now, the spaceborn could be as graceful and (in their way) as beautiful as any wellsprung. They were filigrees; they were the intricate, twisting vines of medieval illuminations. Those raised deep within the gravity wells of Earth or Mars—or even of Luna—could seem lumpish by comparison. By rights, it ought to have been the doctor who enchanted the Second. They were two of a kind. But Corrigan found his own kind ungainly and ugly and lusted after the standard of beauty of another time and place.
(Besides, Corrigan was a man of the asteroids while Wong had grown up in Low Earth Orbit and they might not even reckon each other as “a kind.” Safe within the embrace of Earth’s magnetic field, Wong had never found the need for skin enhancers. Yet, such fine distinctions were lost on the likes of Bhatterji or Gorgas or even the otherwise perceptive Lotus Jewel. A snake was a snake. Not that there was anything wrong with that.)
Finally, when he had drunk in the sight of her almost more than his heart could bear, Corrigan checked the drape of his coverall, brushed at imagined detritus, and pulled himself inside the comm center.
The Communications Department comprised several rooms and had once been a suite reserved for special friends of the original owners. It had since been stripped, and utilitarianism had replaced luxury. Computer panels now gleamed where clever art had hung. Electric hums had replaced the fashionable music. This might actually have been an improvement.
The ship’s processors were physically dispersed, of course. No designer was such a fool as to place a ship’s entire neurosystem in one place—sub-units could be found scattered like Easter eggs here and there about the ship—but the comm center (and its slave station on the bridge itself) was a primary nexus. The Lotus Jewel could talk to any avatar of the ship’s AI. Teeping, she could see through the ship’s eyes, hear with its ears, speak with its lips. If she was not the ship’s brains—an image risible to more than one of her crewmates—she was at least its spinal cord.
“What seems to be the problem here?” Corrigan said.
The Lotus Jewel concentrated a mom
ent longer on her handheld and downloaded the data into the core with a whispered command. She had been aware of Corrigan’s regard for several minutes and had, while not losing focus on her work, displayed herself for his delight. The Lotus Jewel enjoyed life more fully than her own life could hold, and so some of it always spilled over into others’. She delighted in making people happy. Sometimes that meant nothing more than laughing at a joke or doing a small favor. Sometimes it meant a pleasant word or a pleasant glimpse. Sometimes, as with Corrigan, it meant a pleasant night.
“The superloop is still giving power,” The Lotus Jewel told him, “but I’m not transmitting.” Tonight, she told Corrigan with a posture.
The infatuation was not all on the second officer’s part. The Lotus Jewel enjoyed his company and his literate discourse and the strange, erotic frisson of the touch of his leathery skin. It was like the touch of an object: A thing that lived rather than a living thing.
“Is the malf serious?” he asked.
She shook her head. (And it was only through imagination that Corrigan saw long, golden locks waving in the air. Her skull was smooth-shaven and contained sockets for the interface cap, an exoticism that Corrigan found strangely alluring.) “Not until we raise Dinwoody Poke,” she said, “to drop off the passenger. Radars and sensors, all in working order. Receiving is intermittent. I’ll have transmission back before we need to talk to the port master.”
Corrigan drew a long face. “Any connection with the engine malf?”
“I don’t see how. The systems are distinct. Comm, power, navigation…There’s no crosstalk, except through Ship.”
The Wreck of the River of Stars Page 2
