The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Corrigan stroked her with his fingertips. “Bhatterji isn’t the right man to work on your antennae.”

  Which, if one was needed, was reason enough for what they did next.

  There was something unnatural about Farnsworth engines, Corrigan believed. Farnsworths pushed a ship through the universe—Man’s will cutting a swath across the void. But magsails had submitted to the greater will of Nature and let the universe pull the ship in the natural swathes formed by the leeward thrust of the solar wind against the windward pull of the solar mass. Sailing large, beating off from planetary wells or the more insidious shoals of fieldless asteroids, skipping off the magnetosphere of Earth or Jupiter, a man was at one with the Void—living with it, not defying it.

  He had by necessity learned to con Farnsworths, and the learning had been no comfort. Retread, his captain-instructors had smirked behind their hands. But it was either learn to operate cages or languish rockbound for the rest of his life.

  The worst of it was not the new, pedestrian way of thinking but the abandonment of his very life. In his sailing days, Corrigan had danced out among the shrouds, splicing cables, unjamming the reefing motors, sometimes just sitting in the crow’s nest high out the mast, surrounded by the fleeting colors of ionized waste gasses, alone with the universe, cupped in the patient, persistent microgravity of the forward thrust of the sail. After, he would slip off his perch and drop to the forward hull (although it was actually the ship that rose to meet him). The more flamboyant hands would turn somersaults or twists on the way down, it being a matter of pride to “drop well.” Never was a man more alive, more at peace, with all the universe ahead of him, than among the loops and shrouds of the Great Sails. The Farnsworth cage was like a reefing knife, slicing through the shrouds of his life, snipping off his past, his youth, his dreams, everything he had ever been, everything he had ever hoped to become.

  There have always been golden ages, and they have always ended yesterday. The transition to Farnsworth cages had bothered the younger Corrigan rather more than The Lotus Jewel’s playful rearrangement of his toiletries, but in the end for much the same reason.

  The sail locker was cramped and dimly lit. Though it covered the entire top deck abaft the forward hull, there would not have been enough room to stand upright, even had there been acceleration enough for standing. It was not a space meant for human work.

  The glow of the cold-lights the Thursday Group had brought along gave their faces a pasty complexion, as if they were three zombies brought back from the grave. In its way, an appropriate image, for this was the crypt in which the superconducting coils had been interred.

  “Well?” Corrigan asked with ill-concealed impatience. If the sail locker was confining to Satterwaithe and Ratline, imagine the elongated body of the spaceborn folded into such tolerances. Satterwaithe shifted her gauge to a different location on the sail cable and studied the output. “There’s still a trickle current running through her,” she said. Ratline, who was holding the cable taught with mesh gloves, grunted. “After all these years? Takes a lot of work to quench one of these babies.”

  “Not when I’m the one who quenched it.” Satterwaithe unsnapped the gauge, folded it, and tucked it in her coverall pocket. Ratline relaxed his hold. He flexed his fingers, rubbed his arms. “That takes me back a ways, cap’n. It surely does that. Why, I remember when Terranova—”

  “The trickle’s a problem, isn’t it?” Corrigan asked Satterwaithe. He meant it only as a comment, not as a question, but the Third looked at her nominal superior.

  “Hoop stress from the current,” she said. “The loop wants to circularize, has been slowly circularizing for however long the trickle’s been going. It’ll snap off its guides the minute we release the stays and jam in the bunghole.” She gestured aloft, to the Primary Sail Deployment Port.

  “I thought that baby was fighting me,” Ratline said as he pulled off his sail-handling gloves. “Not quite alive, if you know what I’m saying, but not dead.”

  “It was the solar flare three months back,” Satterwaithe decided. “Hand ramped up the radiation belt to deflect the sleet. The belt’s magfield probably induced a complementary current up here in the locker.” She looked at Corrigan. “You remember what a problem that used to be.”

  “Of course, I remember. I may never have been a River when she was under sail, but I was sailing master on Starwing and Third on The City of Amman.” (But those were lesser ships, he knew, plying niche trades in the interstices spurned by the torch ships. Nothing at all like the Great Sails his companions had flown.)

  “I wasn’t questioning your competence, Corrigan.”

  The hell she wasn’t. Corrigan had always felt like an outsider on the River. If magsail hands held themselves above those who flew by torch, those who had sailed The River of Stars held themselves above even other sailors. And Satterwaithe could never forget that she had once, however briefly, captained the Great Sail. More to the point, she could not let Corrigan forget it.

  Corrigan doubted that he could linger as a subordinate on a ship he had once commanded and, had he been Evan Hand, would have felt uneasy to have such an officer under him. He thought that the legal requirement that hybrid ships carry a master may have compelled Hand to offer and Satterwaithe to accept; yet, this only showed the limits of Corrigan’s imagination. Home is where the heart is, an old truism has it; but it became old by being true. Eugenie Satterwaithe might have accepted a post lower even than Third Officer to return to The River of Stars, though she would not have admitted such a sentiment even to herself. Besides, Hand had been a great one for sheltering wounded birds.

  “All right,” Corrigan said, “we can quench the hoop by raising the temperature. There are standard procedures for that. What about the deployment winches and the bunghole starter?”

  “Number four winch looks okay,” Ratline reported. He had not waited out the strain between the two deck officers, but had proceeded with his own checklist. If God was in the details, as Flaubert had once said, then Ratline was His most devoted acolyte. Already he had swum off toward Number Three Deployment Winch.

  “Best way to test the bunghole starter,” Satterwaithe said, staring into the darkness where their cold-lights did not penetrate, “is to activate the motor.”

  “Let’s not do that while we’re in here,” Corrigan suggested.

  He had meant it as a joke, but Satterwaithe had not looked for jokes from him. She looked away, into the dark interior of the loft. “We don’t have so many sailors on board,” she said, “that I can afford to waste any.” Unspoken, the phrase lingered, even you, Corrigan.

  “I know how Gorgas thinks,” Corrigan said. “If we go to him with a plan, we better have all the diacriticals on our consonants. He can pick holes in DSM sheathing. Funny,” he added. “If we weren’t a hybrid ship on paper, these cables would have been sold off years ago, just for the material value. It was only the regulations that—”

  Satterwaithe continued to stare into the darkness. “Do you think that wise?”

  “What?” He thought she meant keeping the sails, which made no sense.

  “To tell Gorgas?”

  “Ah. He is the captain,” Corrigan pointed out, not lacking a certain satisfaction at reminding the Third of her place in the order of things.

  “Pro tem.”

  “Look, Satterwaithe—” And Satterwaithe turned to face him. “Plan A is to fix the Farnsworths, right? But Bhatterji is taking his good old time about it—even the passenger’s noticed—and he may have a problem fabbing the components he needs; so it’s only sensible to have a Plan B in reserve. Gorgas can see that. If nothing else, we can run out a staysail until Bhatterji finishes tinkering, push the balk line out a few days…or else we’ll go skating clear past Jupiter.”

  “But ’Dul,” Satterwaithe pressed him, “don’t you see the possibilities? A staysail, sure. Lending a hand, that’s fine. But we could do so much more. The ship is crippled; and The Lotus Jewel can�
��t even call for help. What if we bring the ship in—under sail? Think about it! Imagine the sight at Port Galileo! Imagine the humm!”

  Corrigan had only wanted to buy time for the repairs and had not thought beyond that; but the sudden image of the Great Sail coruscating in the Jovian winds as she sidled up to Ganymede suddenly entranced him. Oh, yes! Oh, what a grand sight that would be!

  “I suppose we could evaluate the situation,” he ventured. “Run feasibility studies. See if we have the resources for full deployment.”

  “And keep quiet about it until we know.”

  Corrigan considered that, then nodded. “No sense raising expectations, or making promises we can’t fulfill.”

  Satterwaithe clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll see I’m right, Mr. Second. Don’t think for a moment that torch men like Bhatterji or Gorgas will accept salvation by sail. They’ll try to ‘but’ us to death. You just told me yourself what Gorgas is like. Imagine how he’ll pick away at a plan he dislikes in the first place. And the others might not care one way or the other; but because they don’t, we can’t count on them, either.”

  “The Lotus Jewel will help us,” Corrigan said, “and Ratline thinks his First Wrangler will too.”

  Satterwaithe shook her head. “I don’t want humm running around the ship.”

  Corrigan thought the Third used first-person singular a little too often. “All right. I’ll tell LJ to stay quiet. You tell Ratline to say the same to Okoye.” But Ratline still called Satterwaithe “captain,” so if Corrigan were sure of anything it was that Ratline would follow whatever course Satterwaithe laid. There was a bond there, an old one, between the Third and the cargo master; though of what sort Corrigan was unsure. A debt, perhaps; an obligation. But Ratline was no mere hound wagging a faithful tail for his former master, and there were times when Corrigan wondered which it was who owed the debt.

  If it was not nostalgia for sails that drove the Second Mate, but only comfort in accustomed ways, it was ambition that drove the Third. Once a man or woman has worn four rings on her sleeve, no lesser number will ever serve. Perhaps that was why Eugenie Satterwaithe seemed insubordinate to Corrigan even when she sat silent in a meeting. There was something about the way she listened that made her appear to be giving orders. It had been a long time since anyone aboard the River had worn uniforms; but the cuff rings were there, and no mistake.

  Now Satterwaithe was as fallible as anyone else in The River of Stars, and that was very fallible, indeed. Yet she was usually well-informed and picked up humm the way a cheap suit picks up lint. Sometimes she thought she knew more than she did, but that was rare. She might have been one of the River’s better captains, right up there with Johnson and Fu-hsi had she had more time at it. Certainly, Satterwaithe believed so, and the knowledge of what she might have been galled.

  The Thursday Group met the next day in Satterwaithe’s quarters, giving her home-field advantage. Corrigan found those quarters cluttered and untidy; a bad enough situation under acceleration, unbearable during ziggy. Flexscreens, seedies, styluses, women’s undergarments! were all a-jumble, some even floating about. He had to restrain himself from fetching and stacking and stowing. It wasn’t just disorderly, it was unfeminine! He had some pretty firm notions of what was feminine and what was not; but then, he didn’t have to be one and so could pass judgment with the serenity of an outsider. (That some of his own traits might strike others—Bhatterji, for instance—as effeminate did not occur to him.) Satterwaithe was neither a Madonna nor a nymph, and that confused him; primarily because he confused the feminine with his own desires and, while Satterwaithe conjured many emotions in his breast, desire was not numbered among them. So he took refuge in a label. Genie was a lizard.

  Now, Satterwaithe had bedded more than a few women in her time, it is true; but she’d also had as many men. Call her eclectic. She preferred men—in younger days, when she had preferred at all—but she generally preferred them underneath, and in the Middle System submissive men were on back order.

  In any event, as The Lotus Jewel had once purred, Satterwaithe’s well-springs had dried up years before. The urge came on her less frequently than of yore and, when it did, was more apt to trigger a spasm of annoyance than spasms of any other sort. Corrigan was not especially young, but young enough that the Deed obsessed him at times. That Satterwaithe was immune to such cravings made her more alien in his mind than Bigelow Fife, the Mushroom Man with the Clockwork Mind.

  Satterwaithe had developed a plan for sail deployment. It was a good plan, complete with procedures, PERTs, and estimates for materials and manpower, for she was a past master at juggling resources. Most of the information she had found in moribund deebies in Ship’s library and the remainder in her own treasured manuals.

  But Corrigan had read the same manuals. “The procedure requires a berth of six able sailors,” he said. Corrigan was not a man prone to errors of fact. Unfortunately, as he often pointed these facts out to those who were, he had acquired a reputation as a carper. His comment irritated Satterwaithe less because it was true than because Corrigan seemed to take unseemly satisfaction in the bruiting.

  “We have five people,” she said. “Three able sailors, a wrangler, and a nerd. That’s nearly enough. We’ll just have to stretch a little.” She herself had often stretched beyond her limits, and assumed that others could do likewise, if only properly motivated.

  Corrigan bristled. “LJ is more than a computer nerd.”

  To Satterwaithe, Corrigan was beside the point. “All right then. Three sailors, a wrangler, and a slut.”

  That evoked shouted words—until Ratline, of all unlikely people, smoothed things over. Ratline was comfortable carrying out anyone’s plan—too comfortable, since he often did the carrying out before the plan was made—but the bad feelings between the two deck officers bothered him considerable. He was secure enough in his own place that he could recognize dominance games when he saw them. (Dominance? Satterwaithe in whips and leather? Corrigan grabbing his ankles? Ratline grinned. He had his own private amusements.)

  “Abdul is right,” he said. “We don’t have six able sailors. Five might manage a deployment, even if two are nooboos; but that’s only theory. We gotta be practical, cap’n. But there is software to resurrect and there’s some ’prentice tasks elsewhere that we can simplify to trainee level. As for the rest, my First Wrangler can handle most of what a ’prentice can do.”

  Corrigan raised his brows. “Rewrite the procedures?” Procedures were not quite holy writ to him, but they were at one with his orderly bathroom and his personal library of books and intricate, academic music. He had always struck Satterwaithe as—well—incorrigible, were she inclined to puns. Stuck forever in the same orbit. And while it might be a very nice and comfortable orbit, the eventual sameness of it would sooner or later drive her insane. And so, imputing as always her own tastes to others, she supposed that it must have already done so to Corrigan, and that he was more than a little mad.

  “Moth,” she said, “you’ve mentioned simplifying some tasks. Are there any tasks that can be eliminated completely?”

  “If a task did not need doing,” Corrigan commented, “it would never have been written into the procedures.”

  But Ratline squinted and pursed his lips. “Now, hold on a bit,” he said searching his memories. “Seems to me there were a couple of readiness checks we used to do on the sails because the loops were spun from hobartium XVI. That stuff had bad ductility. If our sails aren’t that alloy, we don’t need to do those tests, do we?”

  “The Institute of Sailing Engineers probably kept the checks as a safeguard. Other compounds might have ductility problems too…. Or a particular sail in a lot might be nonconforming…”

  “The ISE,” Satterwaithe snapped impatiently, “probably kept the checks for CYA. Public standards accumulate fossil requirements the way ships accumulate radiation scars. But eliminating a step is only one option. We could combine tasks, or resequence the
tasks, or reassign them….”

  “I had a notion,” Ratline said, “back when I was a sail-handler, for a special tool for bunging the catline through its way-grommet. That’s outside work. Vacuum suit, and up the pole. Bet my tool could cut the time in half.”

  Satterwaithe nodded. “That’s the sort of thinking we need. Let’s bring the procedure inside the envelope of the time and resources we can marshal rather than carp about resources we don’t have.”

  Corrigan nodded reluctantly. “I see your point….” Then in a sudden burst of authority—he was senior officer present, after all—he turned to Ratline. “Can you fabricate your tool, Mr. Ratline or do you need Bhatterji?”

  The cargo master shook his head. “I got a wrangler—Rave Evermore—who’s handy enough. Bhatterji lets him use the machine shop for hobbies—he’s a handsome laddy—but he doesn’t bother the boy.” Ratline’s grin lacked a tooth or two, and that gave his smiles a sinister cast. “He knows the kid would rip his lungs out if he tried anything. Do I tell Rave what the tool is for?”

  Before he could stop himself, Corrigan looked to Satterwaithe, who shook her head slightly, though she let Corrigan confirm the order. “No,” said the Second. “If he asks, spin some plausible justification.”

  Satterwaithe slapped the table. “Good. The three of us can go over the process flow tonight and look for opportunities to shorten and simplify the work, so we can handle the job without a full sailing berth. We just want to slow the ship into Jupiter, so we don’t need full rigging. We’ll meet…” She consulted a wrist calendar. “Tomorrow at twenty-two hundred to compare critiques. Here? Or your quarters, ’Dul?”

  ’Abd al-Aziz Corrigan disliked the nickname Satterwaithe had invented for him. He disliked even more the notion that the disorder of this meeting might encroach on his private space. “Here is fine, ‘Genie.’” Which assent, by odd coincidence, gave Satterwaithe once more the home-court advantage.