The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “And the externals…? Bhatterji’s mate suggested a hardware fault.”

  “My equipment is mounted on a different quadrant of the rim. It’s just coincidence, ’Zizzy. The ship’s old. When was the last transit when we had no repairs to make?”

  Corrigan grimaced. “The family still has my great-grandfather’s tent. We only replaced the ropes three times, the poles twice, and patched every square inch of fabric….”

  “But it’s still the original,” she finished for him. There was a subtext there. It lay not only in the glint of her eye or the promise of her lips, but in that she could finish his jokes for him.

  “Well,” said Corrigan, “keep me informed.”

  A request that the engineer would have found insulting The Lotus Jewel took as supertext to Corrigan’s real needs. “I’ll give you a personal report,” was all she answered, but it sent Corrigan from the room with a glow. He would anticipate her visit the entire evening and—as she was chronically late for appointments—the pleasure of that anticipation would be all the more prolonged.

  It was only as Corrigan was leaving that The Lotus Jewel noticed the chronometer. “Oh, no! The captain’s funeral! It’s almost over!”

  “No one will be there,” Corrigan predicted. “Just Doctor Wong. No one else really liked the captain.”

  “I did,” said The Lotus Jewel. “He helped me when I needed it most.”

  “That’s hardly a reason for liking.”

  Corrigan’s insensitivity went beyond that of his obdurate skin. The Lotus Jewel’s did not. She watched him go with an uneasy feeling in her heart, as if for just a moment she had glimpsed a stranger.

  The Doctor

  When The River of Stars was reconfigured as a tramp freighter most of her main deck became superfluous, but the fitters and riggers at the Yards had been loathe to cut through pressure walls and load-bearing structures or vital power and life-support conduits and so they had left the disk itself intact. The cruel sentiment of the romantics held that her lovely lines could not be tampered with, and likely any such tampering would have destroyed her integrity in both senses of the word. And so, opulent staterooms that once housed the pampered rich (and, later and less splendidly, cohorts of emigrants) became stockrooms or storage areas housing only inanimate shipping pods—or were simply shut up and abandoned.

  This was less the problem it might have been, for the ship was built largely of solid smoke—that is, of aerogel—and her mass was but a fraction of what her size suggested; but mass was still a problem at the margin, where the ship made a profit or did not. Had her substance not been itself a valuable commodity, The River would never have lasted as long as she did. Like a whore, she sold bits and pieces of herself at every port of call to make up the difference, and so every year she became less and less what she once had been. Consequently, travel through the main deck often led to dark and deserted regions, down corridors that led nowhere, past rooms empty and abandoned.

  On this day, when the husk of Evan Hand was to be vaporized and his ions sprayed into the void, Fransziska Wong sought refuge among the shadows and forgotten memories of the G-ring. She found a room far out from the central core and there became very, very drunk. In this selfsame room, legend said, microtech mogul Gowery Bend had deflowered the American president during that infamous elopement. But that had been during the luxury years, when this entire room had been dedicated to the pampering of a single passenger and few, even among presidents, prized duty above pleasure. Nothing now remained of that era. There was a single relic of the more austere times that followed: A skeletal rack upon which desperate men and women had been carried dreaming off to Mars. Perhaps they too had been looking for high adventure and the sight of far, exotic places. If so, the doctor thought, they too had been fools.

  She wrapped one, long leg around a support strut of the rack and folded herself into a half-lotus. Then she zipped her coverall partway open and pulled out the inhaler fixed by a neck strap between her breasts. She popped the cap on the inhaler and squeezed a pure aerosol into her waiting lungs—a blend of drugs and chemicals of her own concoction, a blend delivering dreams, delivering oblivion, delivering release.

  The mist—she had no name for it; a name would make it too real—hit like a tsunami in her blood. She was borne away on its fury: smashed, drowned, lifted up, glorified, no more miserably huddled in an abandoned stateroom in a tawdry ship, but soaring through the endless night, transported on its frothing crest. She was as tall as Alice, larger indeed than The River of Stars itself, and could ponder that aged and ungainly craft from godlike altitudes. A flick of her finger could send it, with its infestation of people, spinning like a discus across the solar system. And yet, she would not, for she loved them all and yearned to bind their hurts.

  She would, someday; she would save them all. There would be a disaster—she was not sure what, but her eyes saw a distant explosion or a collision—and she would guide them all to safety. Or perhaps it would be an epidemic. Perhaps the same illness that had taken Captain Hand would return, more virulent, to finish the job. And Wong would labor sleepless nights to find the cure, preparing compounds and simples and programming microbots, and would with her own last gasp inject the saving medicine into each of the stricken crew, and she would be loved then in death more than she had ever been in life.

  Clever chemicals mimicked ghostly caresses, the warmth of phantom kisses, the massage of unseen fingers. Goosebumps rippled as, gulled, enzymes spurted from their enclosures. Warmth enveloped her; wetness seeped from the walls of her body. She wept at touches never granted, at entries never sought. Light touches, urgent touches, touches deep inside her being. Oh, what a grand ride she had, had she only a rider!

  There had been that boy in school in Goddard, gangly and awkward with his spurting limbs and cracking voice. Hands held, kisses clumsily exchanged, promises awaited but never received. Where was he now? From her lofty view atop the cosmos, Wong thought she could almost see him, far off and receding.

  And her first professor, with his clever repartee: brilliant, cynical, and, oh, so worldly. Stealing precious moments together until, inevitably, they had stolen one too many and he, faced with ultimatum, had chosen the safer haven of his wife.

  She was caught in the undertow now, the chemical tide swept away by the Canutian brooms of counteragents. A whirling maelstrom overwhelmed her with abandonment and loneliness. Homesickness stopped her throat and she espied Goddard City winking in the sun as it pin-wheeled around the Earth. She had not been there in years. Her meager savings could not afford the fare; and so she tramped from ship to ship, hoping one day to dock once more at home. But, with perverse frustration, Brownian motion kept her suspended in the Middle System. She could see that tight, little one-room flat in the Gamma-3 spoke where she had lived with her father and mother. She remembered the looming immensity of Earth querning outside the viewports, all blues and whites and greens and browns; colors so heartbreaking she wept to remember them.

  Hand was dust now. Vapor jetted aft, his atoms making the Void just that much less empty. He had rescued her, in the True Companions Bar, rescued her from the inchoate joy she had breathed and breathed and breathed again into her sorry lungs; convoyed her while she sweated the poisons from her blood; sustained her through the grief that followed. A jovial man, hearty, loving life; warmhearted, talkative, radiating harmony. Had he only been awaiting an invitation she had never found the courage to give?

  Bitter tears, then, for the potential happiness never now to be converted to the kinetic sort.

  True joy, Evan Hand had told the shuddering woman in the True Companions, never has a price. It is as free and as unexpected as a budding flower.

  And, as events had shown, as passing.

  Fransziska Wong huddled once again miserably in an emigrant’s bunk in an abandoned stateroom. It was dark. There had been no lights for years and electrostatics had woven the dust into crazed and elaborate cobwebs. She shivered uncontrollably
as the toxins sweated out of her.

  She had never performed an autopsy on Hand. She could not bear to treat the dear man as meat. But an exploration of the husk might have discovered his killer. Something exotic, something new or unexpected. Some reason why his death was such a mystery to her. “Ship,” she said, wondering if it were too late to stop the funeral.

  There was no answer, and it struck her that even the AI might have forgotten that this portion of the craft existed.

  She fought her way clear of the jumble of struts and returned to the ring corridor. The hall curved away from her in both directions, dimly lit by the few red self-powered lights that had not yet failed. An ill sort of passageway. One seemed perpetually on the verge of turning a corner, yet never actually doing so. “Ship,” she called again; and again there was no answer.

  Surely not all the pickups had failed in this ring. She made her way clockwise, her long, gangly legs scissoring, leaping her from wall to bulkhead like some strange, huge insect. An observer might have been startled at how graceful she became, arms and legs pushing and grasping and turning in half-conscious motion. Indeed, Bigelow Fife, watching from the shadows, marveled at the unexpected beauty. The spaceborn moved through free fall with the grace of swans in flight.

  Wong’s next call to Ship was answered with a far-off hiss as Ship tried vainly to hear and respond. Wong sighed like a reed pipe and her hands and feet splayed and found holds invisible to those not born to it. To all appearances she came to a dead halt in mid-flight. It would be too late by now. Hand was less than dust.

  Bigelow Fife spoke. “May I help?”

  Fransziska Wong turned to see a stranger. He was a dim shape in the gloomy corridor and for a moment she thought that this man too had been abandoned in place when the G-ring was sealed off. One last Martian emigrant, who had forgotten to disembark….

  “You must be the passenger,” she said. The River did ferry an occasional passenger. There were always those too impatient to await the next liner.

  His slight bow was at once courtly, gracious, and supercilious, as if he found their encounter secretly amusing. “Bigelow Fife, at your service.” What services he offered went unspoken. He had a small mouth and small gray eyes, but those eyes darted like striking birds, missing nothing, plucking meaning if it so much as showed its head. They seemed to be two living things, those eyes, perched in twin niches in his skull. “Your captain died, I heard. You’ve come off to be by yourself for the remembering of him.”

  Wong ran an arm across her face. “I didn’t know him long.”

  “Oh, it’s not the length that matters, but the depth.”

  The comment surprised her and she gave the man a more careful look. Stocky, but somehow ethereal, as if his bones were cast of aerogel. His tight, enhanced briefs gave modesty both a nod and a nudge; otherwise: sandals and a headband to contain his longish hair completed his garb. His pale skin was one to which the sun could be never more than an enemy. Obviously, a Lunatic. “He was a good man,” Wong heard herself say. “A good captain.”

  “I didn’t know the fellow.” And thus is simple truth simply cruel. Those darting eyes noticed her flinch and, reconsidering his words, Fife said, “Forgive me. I met him only the once when he offered me a transit on this lovely ship, but as a fellow man, naturally his death saddens me. I gather it was sudden.”

  “The onset, yes; but he lingered for a few days.” Could she find in that very brevity a reason for her failure? A slower onset, a few more days. Yes, she might have diagnosed him, found a treatment amongst her unguents and seed codes; but he had slipped like water between her fingers. She brushed again at her eyes.

  Fife observed the woman closely. She exuded a faint smell, at once fleshy and metallic, and damp circles had darkened her coverall under the arms and around her collar and at the small of her back. Her chest, visible through the lowered zipper, glistened with small beads of perspiration. Was there a sweat lodge on board, he wondered? A strange luxury for a tramp, the more so in that the crew were not of Luna.

  “If you need to mourn, I can listen.” He let the suggestion linger between them. A woman distraught meant opportunities opened, if properly cultivated—sorrow and loss being often parent to desire. Yet his compassion was as genuine as it was calculated. If one seeks to buy, only a fool offers brass.

  “I’d…rather not,” she said. But did he hear hesitation in her voice?

  He created a smile for her. “Sorrow, bottled, turns as rancid as vinegar; yet decanted, it cleanses.”

  “Are you a counselor of some sort?”

  He laughed at the incongruity. “In a strange sort of way, I suppose I am. I troubleshoot for Mohammed’s Mountains. When one of our crews cannot place its asteroid into a proper capture orbit, I’m the one they boost out to solve the problem.”

  “And Mo-Mo can’t afford a passenger ticket?”

  “Your captain Hand was to call on Dinwoody Poke in the Virgin Islands and from there I can goose the crew chief before his launch window closes up on him. Only…” And a brief frown crossed his pale features. “If we continue coasting, my shortcut may become a very long cut.” He shrugged. Bad luck was a fact of life and one dealt with it or not.

  Good luck, on the other hand, was something one created. He extended a hand. “I wouldn’t mind learning something of your captain. You seem to have known him. Let us find somewhere private where we can talk.”

  He could see the change in her eyes and knew that she understood his goals and objectives. The problem was: did she concur? Was consensus achievable, or had he misread the unzipped coverall?

  “Perhaps some other time,” she said.

  Fife tried and failed to parse the overtones in her voice. Well, it had been happenstance, not beauty that had drawn him—that and the momentary grace of her movement. In a more reflective mode and with more options to choose from, he might not have given this woman a second’s glance. Her looks bordered on plain and from the wrong side of the border. Why, jaws like that could strip cable; and a nose so great smell tomorrow’s breakfast. Yet, the swan had been thought at first a homely sort of duckling. There were more beauties than those that the eye perceived. Other senses gathered their own pleasures. He had heard all the stories of the spaceborn and their mastery of free-fall sex. He believed only half the tales, but they were the more interesting half.

  “Then ‘perhaps,’” he said with more asperity than he intended, for he did not like to burn bridges he might someday want to cross, “you ought not leave the door open, if you’d rather no visitors come within.”

  She followed his gesture, saw that she was exposed, and seized the zipper. Yet her fingers hesitated without drawing it shut. She looked him in the eye and Fife knew that fortune did indeed favor the brave. “Do you find me attractive?” she asked. There was a blunt challenge in her voice, as if she demanded lies, yet refused to accept them.

  Fife was devoted to the truth and to allowing cards to fall, yet he was not unmindful of prudence. “I believe you have a beautiful heart,” he answered which, while unresponsive, was the truth. The woman had been weeping openly, a sign of sentimentality not often found in the corridors under Luna. “And your movement is as graceful as any ballet.” He might normally have concluded by saying that in the dark all cats were gray, as he had a taste for aphorisms and clichés. Instead, he gestured at his own lustrously pearl body. “And a toad like myself can hardly deprecate another.”

  Wong smiled at the transparency of his offer. It was not the sort of intimacy her loneliness sought. It was only use. Yet if one could not be loved, to be useful was no small thing. “Have you ever kissed a toad?” she asked, knowing what residues lingered in her sweat, in the beads of perspiration that lined her lips and brow. “They say licking a toad can bring visions of joy.”

  Only a small, attenuated joy, nothing compared to the potent mist she had inhaled; but the unexpected jolt her sweat would give him would be a fit reprimand for his cold-eyed opportunism. Not the
transport of joy he would feel at his first taste of her, but the sharp, black despondency that would chase him once they had parted.

  The Log

  Sat. 12th inst. 40 days out of Achilles. Course laid on grand secant. Coordinates on J-2100 not fixed, due to transmitter malfunction noted hereunder. Manual bearings taken on Jupiter and Sun. Sun in Aqr.; Jupt. in Gem. Est. position 4.47 AU starward by 41°30' east of Jupiter meridian on the solar ecliptic. Velocity steady at 152 k/s. Engines idled for repairs. Weather holding; wind from the East-Sun-East; no solar flares noted. Departed this life E.D. Hand, late captain of this vessel. Sysop reports transmitter malfunction, reception intermittent. People employed at various tasks.

  There were only three of them, now that Hand was dead; but Gorgas had taken the captain’s chair as soon as the deck officers had entered the wardroom. This struck the other two as unseemly; Corrigan, because he was accustomed to the old order and change always came on him too suddenly, and Satterwaithe, because she had other notions of who ought to sit there.

  Gorgas had an agenda, of course. So did Satterwaithe.

  The wardroom had been designed for the larger crew of a larger craft. Coltraine’s people had filled it. The Purser’s department alone had boasted four senior officers plus their juniors, and the Sailing Master had commanded a staff of dozens. Now, nearly all the furnishings had been stripped; some in the original refit, some through sale, scrap, or cannibalization in the years since. A single table remained, surrounded by a half-dozen clip-chairs, illuminated by a single light. The remainder of the room was bare and dim, as if it were slowly fading.

  (Even under constant boost, a table and chairs were but marginally useful; in free fall, they were entirely notional. Yet the designers had possessed firm notions of propriety, and the image of finely uniformed officers bobbing about like so much flotsam was too ludicrous to be entertained.)