The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  However, the repairs, though extensive, ought not be beyond the skills of an experienced engineer and a bright, if green, mate. Some of the more routine work could even be farmed out to Ratline and his wranglers.

  Bhatterji would have jumped right into the work—sooner begun, sooner done—but Miko insisted on checking inventory first and Bhatterji was inclined to humor his mate. Where he had grudged Gorgas an hour, he gladly gave Miko half a day. But then, he did not desire Gorgas.

  “There ought to be nine Sheffield brackets in here!” Miko complained when, working down the list of required components, they found that particular dog box empty.

  “It’s not a high-use item.” Bhatterji was philosophical about the lack. Book count, the engineer believed, was only cause for agitation. That it would ever match the physical count was a fable believed only by accountants and small children.

  He envisioned flat stock bent, folded, and pierced. A straightforward machining operation. He would give it to Evermore to do. The boy was a fair hand with an omnitool, for all that he was prone to perfectionism and creativity. Bhatterji thought no great ill of either the perfect or the creative, but sometimes they were the enemy of the good enough. Evermore would file and plate and polish, intent on producing the very best Sheffield bracket that had ever been produced, even when only a rough-out was called for…unless some notion seized the boy halfway through and the brackets mutated into Kress flanges on a whim. Evermore would produce art where only craft was needed. Bhatterji himself was something of a showman, but he distrusted artists. He regarded Evermore as a trainer does a colt: eager, but lacking in discipline. The boy needed a master to take him in hand, save that the hand had already been rebuffed.

  “There were twenty-one Sheffields on the previous purchase order,” Miko said, recalling him to the present, “and only twelve were used.”

  Bhatterji grunted and leaned across Miko’s shoulder. “Let me see the screen.” When he saw Koch’s old entry, he knew what must have happened.

  “Those brackets come at a dozen the crate,” he said. “Enver probably needed some for an overhaul—What’s the date on that purchase order? Yes, see there? I told you they weren’t used much—so he ordered a crate from, let’s see…from White and Hammontree at Agamemnon.”

  “But…”

  “Miko, twelve brackets were bought and twelve were used, and all the keystroke errors in the Middle System will not conjure nine more from the aether.”

  Shortages in themselves did not bother Bhatterji. Record-keeping had never been a great concern of his. As he liked to say, there were always workarounds. He could even admit that he enjoyed hacking the workaround far more than the plug-and-play of routine repair. He and Miko spent the remains of the day and a large portion of the evening adjusting Gorgas’s plan in light of the shortages. (What really bothered Bhatterji, what frosted him thicker than the Europa ice shell was how much Gorgas had gotten right. The man wasn’t entitled!) Bhatterji made a few other alterations as a matter of engineering style and also because, like any dog, he had to pee on the hydrant to make it his. Miko found standardized fabrication procedures in Ship’s deeby for most of the missing parts, scribbled new ones for two of the others, created a PERT using some old program management software lurking in the ship’s library, and estimated probable completion times and let the AI identify the Critical Path. Bhatterji didn’t see the need for all the detail work. That wasn’t how the cat learned to swim! But Miko liked things neat and orderly and, being green, held to the sides of the pool.

  Still, even the longest day draws closed, and Bhatterji finally called a halt. “If we push it any more,” he explained, “we’ll muff and have to redo it anyway come morning. Why don’t we head for my quarters and decompress.”

  Miko barely hesitated. “Sure, Mr. Bhatterji. I’d like that.”

  “Ram,” Bhatterji said. “Off-duty, I’m ‘the Ram.’”

  And the Ram was ready for duty. Bhatterji had denied himself for a very long time, and the frustrated longing, building from Amalthea to Achilles to the Trojan Gulf, had become itself an exquisite sort of pleasure. The mate too had become aware of his gaze and posed deliberately to attract it. So, while Bhatterji had unspoken motives in proposing the invitation, Miko had some too in accepting. Youth, after all, was the new wine, awaiting only the corkscrew to pour itself forth.

  The River being a former luxury ship, Bhatterji had installed himself in a four-room suite in C-ring, lower deck, and decorated it to his own taste. This meant a certain amount of sports memorabilia. Holograms of young men jumping and throwing and grabbing. A stunning, candid portrait of Theo Cruz-O Malley at the Summer Games in Brasilia: muscles bunched, arm extended in a spray of sweat, his grimace of pain just shading into triumph because he had known the moment he released that discus that it would travel farther than any ever had before. But there was also a surprising layer of beauty in the decor beyond even the beauty of men’s bodies in exertion. The colors were the sharp grays and pinks and blacks of the “Noovo Decaux” style of the late Eighties, but with the severe linearity broken here and there by the wild disarray of float-flowers in globular vases and spare Japanese scroll paintings. The sleeping cage was padded in satin and featured handholds and stirrups for the leverage so needed in free fall when one slept unalone.

  Miko stopped before a large black-and-white digigraph. The face was that of a stranger, square and sharp and deeply lined. His close-cropped hair was a brilliant white; his cheeks stubbled salt and pepper for want of shaving. The smile was one of quiet satisfaction; and the squinting eyes looked on something farther off than the camera.

  “Who is that?” Miko asked, accepting the squeeze bottle Bhatterji offered.

  Bhatterji’s glance was one of long familiarity. “Enver Bey Koch.”

  “He’s the man who tumbled last year.” It was not a question, but Bhatterji answered anyway.

  “Yes,” he heard himself say. “He was the man who tumbled. I was his mate for four years.”

  “Mr. Grubb told me about it.”

  “He would. He’s like an old woman, Grubb is.”

  “He’s fun to listen to.”

  The flash of jealousy was brief, for the chief did not play in Bhatterji’s arena. Bhatterji saluted the photograph with his bottle. “Here’s to you, Enver. Who’s like you?”

  Miko, after a moment, imitated the gesture. “Here’s to you.” Then, after a thoughtful sip, she said, “He looks like a strong man. I mean inside. He knows what he wants to do and he’s going to do it—and he knows he will do it well.”

  “All that from a digigraph?” Bhatterji was amused at the critique, and not only because it was accurate.

  “All that from a digigraph,” Miko agreed. “It’s a fine portrait. It captures the man.”

  Bhatterji shrugged. “Digitogaphy is only a hobby of mine, but I think I’ve gained some facility at it.”

  “You did that?” Miko’s surprise was feigned. Grubb had already mentioned Bhatterji’s hobby. This one, anyway.

  “I have…other digigraphs I could show you.”

  “Maybe you could capture my portrait too someday?”

  “A nude, maybe,” Bhatterji suggested with desperate flippancy.

  “Maybe.” Miko had not brought too many inhibitions into the room and wasted little time in discarding them. And beside, Bhatterji had spiked the neer.

  Now, alcohol on board spacecraft had been forbidden under the Prague Convention of 2042, following the City of Halifax disaster. The Halifax’s sail tangle in itself had been repairable, but alcohol inhibits oxygen take-up by the cells, and the bends immobilized the sailors when they went down to suit pressure to cut away the shrouds. Unable to tack into braking orbit, the Great Sail and all 217 souls aboard impacted 47 kilometers southeast of Sojourner Truth.

  Which meant that what Bhatterji stashed in his quarters was illegal under international law. But then Bhatterji himself was illegal in more than a few jurisdictions. His was an analog,
not a digital soul; that is, he believed in a graduated temperance, rather than in a strict binomial prohibition. Neither he nor Miko would be depressurizing soon enough for a little alcohol to matter.

  At least, that was Bhatterji’s opinion. Miko had heard rumors of the stash from the wranglers and from Eaton Grubb, who seemed to know every scrap of gossip on the ship. The defiance of law and regulation seemed only slightly more alarming than the winkage implicit in the general awareness. Yet, forbidden fruit entices, and Miko was not immune to its allure.

  Bhatterji was neither fool nor predator. He wanted Miko more than he wanted anything on the ship other than the anode grids for Number Two; but he wanted Miko’s love and assent even more. So it was not to seduce that he spiked the near-beer he handed his assistant. He added only a tincture, enough to relax without clouding the judgment.

  Of course, an epidemic runs with greater fire through a virgin field than it does through a robust, immunized population. It was the idea of alcohol, not the alcohol itself that intoxicated Miko. If one is eager to shed inhibitions, why any excuse will do! Intoxication is a state of mind. Men have gotten drunk on power, or love, or the glory of God.

  Bhatterji did not turn down the lights. He did not play seduction games, or at least he believed that he did not. He did put a soft jazz-raga on the player, but only because he enjoyed the endless, intricate improvisations of the Forties and would have played one even had he been alone. Like the decor, the music dated him. There was something profoundly old-fashioned about the engineer, as if he had inexplicably found himself in the wrong decade. One expected cheek whiskers or moiré suits.

  The lack of acceleration added a playful element to their tête-à-tête. He and Miko would drift around their several axes on the whimsies of a gesture, and they took to grabbing and tugging on one another to check their motions. This caused Miko to laugh in delight and Bhatterji to delight in the laugh.

  “I’m drunk,” Miko explained. Bhatterji, who knew to the dram how little he had spiked the neer, smiled and said nothing.

  They discussed the repairs, and Bhatterji pressed his optimism until Miko agreed that it was simply a matter of time and sweat. “It’s not like I haven’t had to duct-tape this old bucket a time or two in the past,” Bhatterji said. “It’ll take a week, maybe two. Balk line isn’t until the thirty-first, so there’s no urgency. Best to do it right.”

  “How long have you been aboard the River?”

  Miko already knew the answer, but Bhatterji knew the conversation was mere prelude, a dance. “Four years,” he said. “No, five. Before that…Well, that was before.”

  “Where were you before?”

  Bhatterji’s hesitation was fractional, but real. “Some things,” he said, “I don’t talk about. There was a man, years ago. He’s dead.”

  “Grubb says you were escaping from the police.”

  “Grubb doesn’t know everything. Only Evan Hand knew everything, and Hand—” Now what could he say about Evan Dodge Hand without pricking old sores?

  “I thought there might be an exciting story there. I was escaping too and the captain helped me get away.”

  Bhatterji knew a moment of sadness, of the irretrievable recession of the past. Old friends, gone; old memories, forgotten. Matters known once but to three, then two, now known only to one. “He was a good man,” he said. “A good man.” Gorgas’s great problem, the engineer decided, was that he would never be Evan Hand.

  “I know.” Miko’s eye had begun to tear. Bhatterji was close enough to brush it away with his thumb.

  “It was less than murder,” he said. Then, to Miko’s enquiring gaze: “Why I was anxious to leave Outerhab-by-Titan. It was less than murder, but more than a parking ticket.” It occurred to him suddenly that, with Jupiter and Saturn in superior conjunction as they were, he was as far from Outerhab as it was possible to get in human space.

  Miko said, “I think you’re a dangerous man with a mysterious past.”

  “The past is like an ass. Everyone has one, but you’re mighty particular who you show it to.”

  “I’m not that particular,” Miko said.

  “About showing me your past?”

  Miko laughed at the feigned confusion. “That too.” Bhatterji put an arm around Miko’s shoulders and Miko leaned against his breast. “Do you know what life is like on an asteroid farm?” his mate said quietly. “There’s no rest; there’s no time to be yourself. Standing watch from wake-up to sleep, except for the Board’s mandated school time. Monitor the oxygen, monitor the mass growth, crawl out and splice a wire, replenish the culture vats. Harvest and dehydrate and compact and bale. Then load the freighter when it docks. And don’t be too slow and don’t let the mass spoil or you’d get a beating within an inch of your life.”

  Bhatterji hesitated. “I’m sure your parents loved you,” he ventured.

  “I’m sure they would have too.”

  Bhatterji pondered the tenses, and found the meaning in the depths of Miko’s eyes.

  “Mom died when I was five and Pa, something went out of him. He couldn’t make a go of it anymore.” Miko snuggled against him while speaking, nestled in the crook of Bhatterji’s arm. “He heard about jobs up Europa-way. Good pay, but no place to take a kid. So, when I was six, he signed over everything he owned to a neighbor to pay for my keep and promised he’d be back when he made his nut.”

  “But he never came back,” Bhatterji guessed.

  Miko’s head jerked. “No. He must have been killed in the ice mines. He would have come back, otherwise. He would have sent word if he’d been able.”

  “Yes,” said Bhatterji, who was not so sure as all that. “Of course, he would have.” And it might even have been true. As the song had it: The ice of Europa is laced with red blood. Jupiter kneaded her moons with cruel indifference to the men and women who prowled on and under their surfaces.

  “The moment the torch lit on the shuttle,” Miko went on, “Clavis Burr took everything for himself. Suddenly he had equipment, and stock in the Company, and title to three more ministroids in the Jovian Ring, and I was day labor on one of his farms. I hated him for that. He broke his word to my father. He spent my life!”

  Bhatterji stroked Miko’s stubbled scalp. “Ah, Miko,” he said sadly.

  “I took it as long as I could. There were years, when I was six, seven, when I waited each day to see my father walk through the portal at Burr-Farm number three and sweep me away. I was too young to understand what he meant about coming back. I thought it would be only a few days. So every morning I woke up and I thought, Today! And every evening I went to bed and prayed, Tomorrow! But before long there had been too many tomorrows and I knew he was never ever coming back. After a while, I could not even…not even remember what he looked like.”

  Bhatterji held Miko tight. “It’s all right now,” he said. “It’s all right now.”

  Miko laid a hand on Bhatterji’s thigh. “I ran away as soon as I was able. I was twelve, I think. Do you know how easy it is to lose yourself in a warren? There are passageways and tunnels. Panels no one opens unless something’s foo. I lived in the walls of Amalthea, coming out for food—or to sabotage a piece of Burr equipment. That’s how I learned engineering.” A bitter laugh. “By reverse engineering. I learned how to build by taking things apart. I lived to strike back at him; to make him hurt for what he’d done. Then, one day, I heard that the Board would hold a town meeting at Amalthea Center and I broke into the room through a ventilation duct and denounced Burr to the governors.”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “Some did. Burr jumped up and called me a crazy kid and a runaway and a vagrant; but some others who were there remembered how rich he had suddenly gotten after my father had boarded me with him. The governors promised an inquiry and Burr promised to see me dead.” Miko sighed. “I don’t think I would have minded dying, then, if I could just pull him down with me. It was touch and go for a while, though the Board finally did take Burr down—bu
t a dead snake still tries to bite. Burr knew how to buy men who would kill for money and the money had already been paid. By then, I knew every passage and tunnel in the warren, so if I didn’t want to be found, I wasn’t found. When the company cops finally tracked down the assassin, they found he hadn’t paid enough attention to his helmet seals.”

  Bhatterji shuddered. “A gruesome end for anyone.”

  But Miko only shrugged. “A peaceful end, if you ask me. You pass out from anoxia before your head explodes. Well, he came looking for trouble and he found it, and how many men find what they seek so quickly? The worst part afterward was the anticlimax. I dreamed for years of destroying Burr. It was all I lived for. Now he was down, and I had nothing.”

  “And so, enter Evan Hand.”

  Miko brushed a tear. “He offered me a berth and I took it.”

  The line between compassion and desire is a fine one. The heart does not always note it. It is as fine a line as the one between the hunter and the hunted. The dance passes across the boundary, the roles grow blurred. In the end, the prey seeks the spear and impales itself upon it. Bhatterji held Miko’s head and pressed a kiss, and Miko responded as if the engineer had blown across hot coals.

  So intent was Bhatterji on the kisses and on the eager unfastenings that followed that it was only when Miko was naked that the engineer realized what half the crew had always known.

  “You’re a girl!”

  Miko tossed her head and said, “I’m a woman!”

  A solemn protest, though on the evidence not quite true. It is a rare woman who can pass for a young boy, even among the elfin folk of the lesser moons. “How old are you?” Bhatterji demanded, even as he wondered on which scale one measured the age of children like Miko.

  “Old enough,” she said, “to know what I want.”

  Is anyone ever old enough for that? Miko was secretive by nature and, until she had blurted out her life history to Bhatterji, had not spoken more than a few words in all the time she had been aboard. Yet the engineer’s ignorance was vincible. He had seen what he longed for most and had not questioned it. If Evermore had not so thoroughly rejected him, he might have looked more closely. But then, he had always confused woman with feminine and feminine was among those many things that Miko was not.