The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “What is it, Mr. Grubb?” she asked. He had often asked her to call him by his first name, but Okoye had a firm sense of propriety and thought that he was secretly pleased that she used the honorific. There was little enough politeness in the world that she would not diminish its store. She had been raised in Afikpo, where the young knew to respect their elders.

  “There is something wrong with the ship,” Grubb said.

  “Mr. Bhatterji and Miko are working on the engines. They expect—”

  But Grubb shook his head. “It’s not her engines, ’Kiru, it’s her heart. It’s been torn out of her. Haven’t you noticed how things have changed since Evan died?”

  She had, in fact. Something of a dispirit had settled on the crew. With Hand’s death had come a feeling that they were now adrift; and who could say that Ship, picking up the cues, was not adrift for the same reason? Even for those who had disliked the man—and Okoye knew there were some—Hand had been at the center of their personal universes.

  Now here is the curious thing about the late Evan Dodge Hand. Though he had been vapor for nearly a week, each member of his erst-while crew felt his presence. A Heisenbergish sort of captain, he had survived the opening of his casket, and in being no longer anywhere in particular was now somehow everywhere in general.

  “We’re still readjusting,” she ventured. “It is being just bad luck all these things happening together.”

  “Bad luck.” Grubb again ceased his kneading. “When has there never been bad luck?” He twisted in the stirrups and looked at her over his shoulder. “Have you ever played bounce ball, ’Kiru? Have you ever missed a return and said it was just a bad bounce?”

  ’Kiru never had—missed a return, that is—and so had never needed an excuse, but she knew what Grubb had meant to say and so she simply agreed. There were no bad bounces, only missed opportunities. One might fail the return, but that was hardly the fault of the ball.

  Twenty-four deCant sought out Okoye later in the common room, while the First Wrangler was screading Pandya’s Cold, Gray Shores, a picaresque roman à clef of Pandya’s husband and their friends and the very first sail that had ever flown. Okoye had read it four times already, and never the same way twice as she followed the hyperlinks among the texts. “’Kiru,” deCant said. “’Kiru, do you have time today to help me shave my head? My hair is growing out too long and I need to chop it back.” She rubbed her short brush flat, but the strands rose again and trembled like grass in an uncertain breeze.

  “It’s not so long,” Okoye said.

  “Oh, but why wait? I like to keep it short so it doesn’t get in my way. I wish I had hair like yours. You never have to cut it. It just grows in those tight little curls.”

  Okoye fought an impulse to brush a hand across her own scalp. She made no response but followed the other wrangler across the room. Personal comments made her uncomfortable. Not that Twenty-four’s compliment had been intrusive, but Okoye did not often talk about herself, or indeed much at all. She was a solitary sort, quiet and reserved and this made her more than a little strange to those like deCant, for whom solitude was something like a disease to be cured. Okoye knew that deCant was less concerned with her hair than with being alone.

  Sometimes Okoye did not know exactly what she knew—she only felt it as a sort of premonition—but she would look up one day or search her heart and there it would be: Knowledge that she could not possibly have. Perhaps it was only a very refined intuition, built up from observation and her deep knowledge of body language learned from the sisterhood. Or perhaps it was a kind of telepathy. Her mind was a still, quiet pool of water, and if the thoughts and emotions of others could in some unfathomable manner leak out, they would surely cause ripples there.

  The clone fastened herself into the sling by the vacuum duct and Okoye turned the suction on; then she rummaged in the drawer for the shaver. “Down to the scalp?” she asked.

  “Drive them nubs into hiding,” deCant agreed, “so they’re a-feared to show their face for a while.”

  DeCant spoke foolishly, Okoye thought, because she was young. It was as if silence horrified her as much as solitude and she felt driven to fill it up with words. Even random, foolish words. The accusation was probably unfair, so Okoye did not voice it. Some people just liked to chatter. Others preferred quiet. Odd, that the two of them had found themselves in the same berth. She turned the shaver on.

  Or not so odd. Though one could no longer ask Hand.

  “I think I may have found my clone-mother.” DeCant spoke matter-of-factly. Okoye wondered how anyone could blurt out such private matters, even to a friend—and the Igbo girl did consider herself a friend of the young clone; indeed, of anyone who would accept her friendship. She even felt an affection for Moth Ratline, and he was a very hard man to like. She made a noncommittal noise, but that was not needful because deCant simply kept talking.

  “I weren’t sure for a long time, but Cap’n Hand know’d I was a clone when he signed me on for cabin boy, and he wanted to help me, so he must’a been trying to find my mother.”

  Okoye wasn’t sure how well that string held together as a syllogism, but she said nothing while she ran the shaver across the girl’s scalp. She wondered, were she herself a clone, would she have been so anxious to find some woman whose only connection was an egg dropped off in a lab? The act must have meant far less to the donor than it had come to mean to Twenty-four deCant. “The donor might not even know,” Okoye said.

  But that had been said before; and the answer—“A DNA screening doesn’t care if someone remembers”—had become a sort of mantra. But there were thousands of women in the Middle System; even more under Mars and Luna and in the habbies; billions on dirty old Earth. Okoye did not point out the practical difficulties of needle hunting in a dozen such haystacks. It wouldn’t have mattered. If deCant couldn’t see the impossibilities herself, no one could possibly point them out to her.

  That Hand had intended to help deCant, Okoye did not doubt. There was her own situation as case in point. But that such “help” meant locating an egg donor, she doubted very much. Yet she was loathe to destroy hopes, even illusory ones—especially illusory ones. And so she maintained a silence into which deCant could pour her words.

  “I been thinking on it hard these last two years,” deCant said. “First, I thought maybe my ma would be at one of our ports o’ call, but now I think she’s here on board and the cap’n was just waiting for the right time.”

  Now that caused Okoye’s shaver to skid off the scalp! “Ms. Satterwaithe?” she said, for who else would have been on Mars fifteen years ago or more? “But you’re not at all like her!” Surprise could let the words pop out, even from her quiescent throat.

  (Miko, hiding in the closed-off stewards’ accessway, was better at holding hers in, and only a small squeak escaped her, which Okoye thought was a briefly seized bearing in a distant air-circulation fan. Half the squeaks and bumps the crew had been hearing for the past four and a half months were from Miko-in-the-walls.)

  “She’s old and I’m young. I’m trying to find a picture of her when she was young.”

  “I don’t think she’s the picture-saving sort.”

  “There must be something in Ship’s deeby, if I only knew the access codes.”

  Okoye, having already gushed her few words, fell back into silence. She doubted that anything must be simply because deCant wanted it so, although in this way the clone really was like Satterwaithe. But Okoye could not imagine the Third Officer as an egg donor. Selling eggs for money did not lie on the woman’s orbit; and the altruistic advancement of medical science was in another bubble universe entirely. Besides, if deCant were Satterwaithe’s clone, Dr. Wong would surely have said something.

  Or…Okoye did not like to think ill of another, but Wong did not have a very high opinion of her own skills and she might have good reasons for holding that opinion.

  Speculation was bootless. Were problems solvable by worry, this wou
ld be a carefree ship, for Okoye worried to excess. About Ratline. About Wong. About deCant. Perhaps that, and her habitual quietude, was why others often came to her. She was a heat sink for their emotions. They might not expect her to solve anything for them, but at least they were assured of a listening. There was something about the long fall of words into the deep well of Okoye’s mind that comforted them. Maybe it was the distant splash.

  So she didn’t just shave deCant’s head as she listened to the girl chatter. She rubbed the scalp and massaged the neck and shoulders. Okoye wished her friend would give up her hopeless search. It risked toppling over into an obsession, and obsessions could consume entire lives, and not only those of the obsessed. Fire had a way of riding the wind, of leaping fences and running wild. Twenty-four would be much happier if she could accept herself and, more importantly, accept the deaths of her fosters. But Okoye knew that such advice would be rejected. If people did not much expect solutions from the lips of their friends, still less did they welcome them.

  When the shaving was done and the girl had talked herself out—and Okoye had paced herself so that the two coincided—Twenty-four said, “I always feel so much better when you do my hair. All tingly and relaxed.”

  Okoye, putting the equipment away and turning off the vacuum, said, “Thank you.”

  DeCant turned and gripped Okoye’s wrist. “No, I should thank you. For helping me with my problem.”

  The Igbo girl was startled by the genuineness of the thanks. Twenty-four had come into the commons deeply anxious, but now radiated calm and purpose. Reviewing the one-sided conversation in her mind, Okoye could not see where she had helped at all.

  After deCant had left to exercise in the spinhall, Okoye returned to her novel. Yet she found it difficult to concentrate. In Pandya’s long-ago, quasi-fictional world, the moral dilemmas seemed so clear-cut. Why was reality always a muddle? She thought she ought to speak with Dr. Wong or Third Officer Satterwaithe. She did not want to make trouble for Twenty-four, but that she ought to speak to someone was clear. Yet the one person in whom she knew she could have confided was now dead. Twenty-four’s search for her egg donor was doomed to fail, and that was bad enough; but there was an infinitesimal chance that it might succeed, and that would be worse.

  Ivar Akhaturian was soft and round, like dough not yet baked hard. As Least Wrangler, he deferred to everyone on board. He always assumed that others knew better than he what he ought to do. When his mother pocketed the bounty and told him to go with Captain Hand, he had obeyed without a second thought. And later, when Third Wrangler deCant had told him to come with her, he had obeyed with equal thoughtlessness. It wasn’t in him to defy authority and, since he ascribed authority to any and all others, he seldom defied anything. Only in play did he show initiative, and there he could dream up endless activities by which the four wranglers could amuse themselves in the interstices of Ratline’s attention.

  Evermore called him a wink and said that deCant had a leash around his johnny-come; but while Ivar might be young, he was not so young as to confuse envy with truth. Rave’s problem was very simple. He was horny for Twenty-four, but the Martian had chosen Ivar over him. Sometimes Akhaturian wished that the older boy would not tease him so much, but thought that if he persevered, Evermore would eventually grow tired of the sport. In this, he underestimated Evermore’s capacity for invention.

  Twenty-four was the most wonderful and beautiful woman Akhaturian had ever known, save only his mother; and his mother had never made him feel good in the way that Twenty-four did. Just to think of her made him stiff; though that Twenty-four might have a hardness of her own he never considered. Operant conditioning is what Dr. Wong called it. Associate pleasure with a face and soon the face alone gives pleasure; but the doctor was a lonely and bitter woman and had her own operant conditions to worry over. Akhaturian would never have believed her, anyway. He thought he was in love.

  Love meant mooning and moping and writing the number 24 over and over and thinking seven times a minute about being with her. Sublimation wasn’t in it. His work suffered, but only a little, as he was perfectly capable of wrangling cargoes and imagining Twenty-four’s naked breasts at the same time. He handled both tasks with neophyte awkwardness, but he was eager to learn.

  And there was this one odd thing about his deference. Because he expected others to know more and to be the best, everyone he worked with did that work just a little bit better. When he asked Okoye questions about cargo wrangling, she was surprised to realize how much she herself had mastered in five short years. When he studied navigation with Corrigan, the Second found a vaster (and unexpected) store of patience within himself. When he told Grubb how delicious the food was, Grubb studied his essences and fragrances with greater diligence. Even Twenty-four found her search for casual pleasure shading over into something else. What it came down to was this: The little dook was so eager and so grateful and he so obviously expected that all would go well that no one wanted to disappoint him.

  So a paradox had emerged even in the short four months that Akhaturian had been aboard. Without ever leading, he had become a leader. It was Okoye who first noticed this and puzzled over it for some time. There was nothing timid about Ivar Akhaturian. The boy would tackle the most dangerous task serene in the confidence that no one would order him to work he could not handle. If he ever found his center, Okoye thought, Akhaturian could be a captain as fine as Evan Hand had been. Indeed, for a time she wondered whether Ivar were not ndichie—Hand’s soul returned in an unlikely package—save for the fact that the boy had come before the man had gone, and Hand’s maw would undoubtedly reincarnate as an elephant, it was that large a thing.

  Akhaturian feared Mr. Ratline as he feared little else, and with good reason; for Ratline was perfectly willing to throw people into situations they could not handle should the needs of the moment so ordain. It was the eternal scowl that frightened the Least Wrangler: that inward-turning, smoldering glow, as if anger had been carved into the man’s face with a red-hot knife. Akhaturian took to avoiding the cargo master whenever he could, and soon learned the byways and cubbyholes of the labyrinthine ship. He became quite good at avoidance, a skill admired and envied by the others in the berth. A quick eye could oft mark him swimming up a gangway scant moments before Ratline would crawl down another. He became so adept at it that Ratline sometimes forgot that he even had a fourth wrangler.

  The contract with his mother had specified an education as well as an employment. Ratline was content that Hard Knocks be the instructor and that learning grow from experience. He never missed an opportunity to quicken the boy’s knowledge, but he always waited until the occasion required it. No use lecturing, he once said to Corrigan (who had worked up an elaborate instructional curriculum pursuant to the contract), not until the kid is ready. They always learn more if they come and ask. It had been said of Ratline that he cared nothing for any man or thing—but he cared about his young charges, and protected and even nurtured them in his own harsh and sour manner. It was this facet of the man that Okoye had sensed and it was why she, of only two on board, harbored anything like affection for him. For she had once learned an important lesson from an ancient European folk tale about a magic island, a young woman, and her monstrous host; and the lesson was this: that a person must be loved before he becomes lovable.

  “I don’t understand,” Akhaturian said one day and, as it was the phrase with which he was most likely to begin a sentence, no one in the common room paid him any attention at first. They were, all four of them, bone-tired from having replaced the lithium valve under Ratline’s falcon-like supervision and, like a puddle on sunbaked earth, the question needed time to soak in. Finally, although she hesitated to ask a question with so many possible answers, Okoye said, “What don’t you understand?”

  “Everything,” said Evermore, doing the lad’s answering for him. DeCant, leaping to her bedmate’s defense, gave the older boy a scowl and said, “He’s new,” which was n
ot quite the same as denying the charge.

  “I mean about the balk line,” Akhaturian said. “Why do the engines have to be back on line before then? At the speed we’re going, we’ll actually reach Jupiter sooner than we planned.”

  “Dummy,” said Evermore. “That’s just the problem.”

  “You should ask Mr. Corrigan,” Okoye suggested. “He knows navigation the best.”

  “Not as well as Hand did,” Evermore said, “but Hand is gone and I don’t have time to explain.” Akhaturian could admit to ignorance with utter conviction. Evermore could not, but this was not because he pretended to know more than he did. It was self-deception and not conceit. That sort of blind confidence can lead one to tackle jobs not yet mastered, although for that very reason can also lead to their mastery.

  “You see, we’re moving between two fixed points…” Mr. Corrigan explained when Akhaturian had tracked him down to the bridge, where he was computing the ship’s position by dead reckoning. (This was a procedure in navigation akin to book inventory in materials management. It was a number that ought to be true, but seldom was.)

  “But Jupiter isn’t a fixed point!” Akhaturian protested. “And neither is Achilles. They’re both moving at, uh, at fourteen kiss.”

  Corrigan laughed. It was always more difficult to explain such matters to the wellsprung than to the spaceborn. “We only call them fixed points, because they don’t move relative to each other. Achilles sits in a stable cusp which is always the same distance ahead of Jupiter. We boost partway, coast for a while to save on boron, flip, then brake. But it takes the same energy to slow us down as to speed us up, so the de-boost has to start at the balk line—in our case, at two hundred and sixty-three million klicks out—or we’ll be going too fast to enter HoJO—that’s High Jovian Orbit—unless,” and this he could not help but add, “we find an additional source of deceleration.”