The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  At precisely Zulu Noon, Gorgas fixed Jupiter in Gemini and triangulated against the Sun and Antares. (In theory, the ship ran on a secant line between Achilles and Jupiter, which for this transit made Scorpio the ship’s Backdrop.) The Ephemeredes, being sun-centered, placed Jupiter in Cancer, so it was a matter of simple spherical trigonometry to approximate the ship’s position, give-or-take a few million kilometers. He also verified the chronometer’s calibration, but that was just going through the motions, since the damaged comm could not receive the confirmation ping from the Fixed Point Observatory. Comparing the lag for Observatory time against shipboard time would give the precise radial distance from the Fixed Point. (It is difficult to take a pilot bearing when landmarks are all a whirligig.) Lacking the benchmark reduced navigation to dead reckoning, subject to drift and the cumulative effects of small deviations.

  The entire procedure could have been accomplished remotely from the control-room navigation panel. Indeed, he could have instructed Ship to take the sight and log it automatically. That was how Corrigan and Satterwaithe carried out the duty when it fell to them. But Gorgas had learned his trade as a middie in the ESA Space Guard, and what was then largely a means to harry the wasters from the Service was now a treasured bit of nostalgia for a fleeted youth. There is a right way and a wrong way; but there is also the accustomed way.

  Captain Anrej Kuziemski—the midship berth had named him “Kaptain Kooz”—had called young Gorgas “a snotty-nosed twerp of a middie,” but had always done so with a patient smile. He had taken Gorgas personally into the blister of the old Space Guard cutter Pierre Delacroix and shown him how to take his fix manually. (If you call setting dials and pressing buttons “manual.” An earlier generation would have snarfed coffee out its nose at the thought, but this was an age when intelligences did a great many tasks without supervision, so “manual” was a notional term.)

  When the boy first saw the magnificence of the heavens and grasped the great, whirling ballet of forces that bound everything his eye encompassed into a vast and universal dance, his heart nearly stopped. Perhaps it was to recapture that boy’s childlike wonder that Gorgas continued his routine of taking the fix in the blister. At times, he could almost feel the featherweight of Kooz’s arm draped across his shoulder as he ticked off the stars by name. It was close in that blister—cutters are not very roomy—so if that old man’s arm rested a little more firmly than it otherwise ought, it was due to the cramped quarters there, and nothing else. But then Gorgas had been as stolid and dreamy a youth as he was now a man and it was the ideal captain he remembered and not the real one. Which was just as well, because he remembered Kooz with genuine affection. There is little enough of that in the world to risk losing any.

  Returning to the control deck, Gorgas displayed his fix in the plotting tank: a threedy holoprojection of the ship’s progress.

  It was a day for frowning—which was also just as well, as it was something at which Gorgas excelled. He logged a marked divergence from the grand secant. The River was falling sunward more rapidly than Newtonian mechanics required.

  An increasing rate of change argued for an acceleration and that meant a force acting on the ship. A gravitational anomaly? He told Ship to calculate the size and location of a body sufficient to cause the noted divergence and Ship replied with what would have been an astonishing discovery in the annals of astronomy had it been anything more than a mathematical whimsy.

  With the Farnsworths shut down, the only other forces acting on the ship were the solar wind and the pressure of light; and the Riv’ was too massive for light pressure to matter. And so, a moment’s reflection resolved the puzzle. The ship’s radiation shield sloughed off charged particles in the event of a solar storm, but the transferred momentum created a drag that deflected the ship’s trajectory. Gorgas told Ship to recompute the trajectory, incorporating the new assumption.

  The altered projection appeared in the tank as a line of pale that, when extrapolated, passed near some of the Outer Virgins, one of which the tell-me stud labeled Stranger’s Reef. The other two were unnamed. The approach would not be very close, Gorgas saw; yet Virgins were notoriously chaotic—and there had been a Jovian passage in this region a sixmonth before.

  The n-body problem has no general solution, and the Belt contained a lot more bodies than n. Every so often Jupiter would ruffle the edges and stray rocks would rise from the Thules or the Hildas, or drop deeper in from the Friggas, depending on distance and vector. Gorgas was not sure where the three indicated asteroids actually were, but he was reasonably sure they were not where the AI thought them.

  He returned to his day room and sent for The Lotus Jewel. While he waited, he decided to assign Evermore to the engine repair project despite the engineer’s demurral. Bhatterji had never asked for help in all the years Gorgas had been aboard, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use it. He wrote out an order reassigning the wrangler as an engineer’s apprentice, second class, temporary, and launched it over the ship’s e-mail, happily unaware of the raw issues that lay between the wrangler and the engineer.

  The Lotus Jewel swam into the office as he was typing and stood by until he had finished.

  “I have an assignment for you,” Gorgas said without preamble. Where Hand had chatted and made small talk before getting around to what he wanted, Gorgas came directly to the point. If he noticed the tiniest narrowing of The Lotus Jewel’s brow at all, he ascribed it to intense concentration rather than to passing irritation. He handed her a data pin in a foam goat case. “Track down and verify the true orbits of these Outer Virgins,” he said. “Stranger’s Reef and two unnamed bodies that appear to be coor-biting with it.” Characteristically, he did not explain the reason for the request. Gorgas generally assumed that others knew what he did.

  In fairness, Corrigan or Satterwaithe would have understood immediately. As deck officers, they were well aware of the fey nature of the Outer Virgins. But The Lotus Jewel handled communications and pursing and took the piloting of the ship as a given. Ascribing the task to Gorgas’s whimsical curiosity, she added it to her already extensive do-later list. She had, after all, a sail to prepare.

  The Missing Mate

  The shipbuilders who had designed The River of Stars had given thought to the consequences of freefing and micro-gee. That trips of even modest duration could ravage the bones and the blood would not, they suspected, be a major selling point to the wealthy who were then the liner’s target. And so, an exercise hall had been included. Outboard on the main deck, the rim corridor was levitated on magnetic bearings and set spinning so that passengers and crew could exercise at Mars level spin-gravity. There were exercise machines and a circumferential running track and a staff of Personal Trainers, all of which (save the trainers) had been left in place during successive reconfigurations. The facilities were finer than a tramp crew required, but that was true of the main deck in general. The Riv’ might live from hand to mouth, but you couldn’t sneer at her accommodations.

  Some, like Gorgas, pursued the need for exercise with grim determination, but Bhatterji did so with utter delight. If his body was a temple, he was the Pope of his own religion. He gloried in the sweat and the pumping heart and the adrenaline, in the ache and protest of muscles. He explored what his body could do: on the rings, on the climbing ropes, on the horse, on the track, on the antique mass movers. His body was his instrument—in work, in play, in love—and he kept that instrument polished, fine-tuned, and calibrated.

  If Gorgas was a mind that lived in a body, for whom that body was a sort of vehicle to be maintained, Bhatterji to a large extent was his body, and his mind was never very far from what his body was telling him. The faded memories of the vivid pastels in which the spinhall had once been colored; the hiss of his breath pumping in and out; the heady rush of the oxygen into his blood; the slap of his running shoes against the plated aerogel floor; the cool rivulets of his sweat coursing across his skin; the odd, out-of-plumb feeling induced by
the Coriolis…These constant messages told him where he was and what he was and very nearly who he was.

  Bhatterji ran past Bigelow Fife, the passenger, who was lying aback performing bench-presses with mechanic precision. The Lunatic’s pale flesh quivered and rippled and Bhatterji hurried by before the man could notice and the social graces be called upon. Fife had done nothing to offend him—indeed, in their one short meeting in the machine shop, he had shown an understanding of engineering work—but the man’s body repelled the engineer. A man should take more pride in himself, he thought, whether Earthborn or not. Fife struck him as a craftsman who had left his tools to rust and there was in his mind no more culpable a sin.

  The Lotus Jewel understood Bhatterji’s love affair with his body, though his other loves left her baffled. She too enjoyed the suppleness and delicious sensations of physical exertion, though she shared that enjoyment more widely than did the engineer. Sometimes, the two of them exercised together—pacing each other around the track, more often in the ziggy bounceball room, where they would carom off the bulkheads and each other to swat the ball. In consequence, while The Lotus Jewel had many who loved her, only Bhatterji had become something like a friend.

  When he encountered her in his run around the spinhall, Bhatterji slowed his pace to a jog and the two of them set off in tandem, matching each other stride for stride. Not a word was spoken—breath was needed to bellows the lungs—but then, between the two of them, The Lotus Jewel owned most of the words.

  They passed young Evermore, who was working the static bar when he caught sight of them. Caught between loathing for the one and lust for the other, Evermore’s features twisted into a confusion so comical that, once out of his sight, The Lotus Jewel staggered to a laughing stop. Bhatterji, who had noticed only the loathing, halted a few paces farther on, unable to understand her laughter.

  “That poor boy,” she said. “He was so afraid the sight of my sweaty torso would arouse him and you would think it was meant for you.”

  Bhatterji, who still could not see the humor of it, growled. “He’s made those matters clear enough.”

  “Do you think I should run another lap, alone?” The Lotus Jewel said. “No one should fear to show their desires.”

  “You’re wrong,” Bhatterji told her. “They’re a fearful thing to show.”

  “Ah, that’s why you raced ahead of me. You were more afraid than he was.” She turned, wiping her forehead with a cloth she kept tucked in her waistband, and stared behind, as if she could see past the upward curve of the track. “He is a cute boy.”

  “With a tongue of venom.”

  The Lotus Jewel laid a hand on his arm. “Oh, Ram, we all make mistakes.”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant—that he had made a mistake in the offer or that Evermore had in the refusal.

  Ship could find nothing in its drawings archive resembling Evermore’s tool. Bhatterji had sketched the device as well as he could remember, and Ship’s neural net was entirely capable of recognizing a print that was “almost like” it without any particular instruction. But no matches had been found. Yet the thing that the lad had created could not simply have been an étude. It had had the look of purpose, the sort of look that an engineer recognizes. Whatever else the thing had been, it had been meant to do something.

  Bhatterji paced his room—in ziggy that meant, literally, to bounce off the walls—as puzzled over his own puzzlement as over the artifact itself. A second order puzzlement. Perhaps it was his pride. An engineer, he ought to be able to deduce function from form. The frustration built until he recognized its lack of fruit. Whatever Evermore had been doing in the machine shop, it would not advance the engine repair by a nanosecond. Yet, it was neither pride nor frustration that drove him from his quarters to swim the corridor; nor that his rooms lacked the scope for pacing.

  When he came at last to the door to Miko’s quarters, he told himself that it was mere happenstance; and when he pressed the hoígh plate, that it was to ask Miko if she had any idea what Evermore had been fabricating. In other words, Bhatterji was doing some fabricating himself.

  There was no response, and Bhatterji believed that his mate was within, watching him through the vista cell but spurning contact. This cannot continue, he told himself. I am her master and she is my mate. She does her job and does it competently, but it is not right that she turns from me. Master and mate need not be lovers. Enver Koch was not my lover; but he was my friend and mentor before the Void took him. It was a terrible thing, Miko, that I was blind and that you needed what I could not give. As terrible too that those who did know said nothing to either of us. Yet perhaps we can heal the rift. It is not so wide that we cannot bridge it, if only we both reach out. If I cannot love you, I can teach you. You have the capacity. Most of all you have the love for the ship that all true engineers must have. The ship is our one true lover; it is she who commands us. We two, then, are brother and sister.

  Inchoate thoughts, all a-jumble. He ought to leave a note. If she would not come to the door, she could at least read the note. He took the stylus from the hoígh plate and wrote on it.

  Let’s talk.

  He was not a man of words, at least of deep ones. It was always the lighter words that drifted to the surface and wafted trivially off his lips. Other words were there, boiling inside him; but, being weightier, they always sank and never made it to the tongue. As a result, while he often said what was on his mind, he seldom said what was in it.

  When he fishtailed to go, he kicked off on the door frame—and heard the door hush open behind him.

  Turning, he saw that no one floated in its frame, yet what could an open door mean, but an invitation? He pulled himself into Miko’s quarters, words of greeting on his lips.

  But the emptiness was evident immediately. Miko had apparently used only the first room and had put all her meager furnishings there. The other rooms bore no sign that any human had occupied them since the last of the Martian runs. There was little enough to furnish even the front room: a sleeping cage, a dresser, a dog-closet, a sling, a reading lamp. Debris scavenged from ship’s stores and from a handful of abandoned staterooms.

  The cage had the indefinable appearance of disuse, and the closet, when he checked it, was devoid of clothing. So where did Miko go now once her watch was over? To another room or to another’s room? To whose arms had she fled? Evermore’s? Not Akhaturian’s, not with deCant patrolling the marches of the boy’s bed. Fife’s? Grubb had told him that Fife was corking the doctor, which proved that God moved in ways more than mysterious—they were damn near whimsical. But Bhatterji did not think that Fife would turn down a second and more lissome offer. He struck the engineer as a calculating man and “one into two” was short division.

  Bhatterji determined to kill the passenger if he had taken advantage of the distraught girl.

  (Fife, floating in troubled wakefulness in the arms of the slumbering Wong, might have felt a ripple of that determination, for he frowned and looked apprehensively at the door. Then he turned and kissed the doctor’s forehead and touched her cheek with gentle, puzzled fingers.)

  Yet, if Miko were looking for her father, would she look to the passenger? Bhatterji could no more imagine Fife as a father than could Fife’s own son. And The Lotus Jewel owned Corrigan’s balls. If there were a father figure anywhere on board, it could only be the remote and authoritarian Gorgas, or the genial and generous Grubb.

  Gorgas joined Fife on the death list.

  (And Gorgas in his stateroom woke from a tormented dream and saw the holo of his late wife on the farther wall. Dead she was now for most of a decade, yet in his confused half-waking state, Gorgas saw the half-smile on those features and murmured, “Come to bed, dear,” before drifting once more into sleep.)

  Bhatterji could not imagine Grubb wishing harm to anyone; but neither does the sea wish harm to the lemming. Miko was determined to impale herself and, frustrated in her careful campaign on Bhatterji, might now offer hersel
f to the first opportunity—or the first opportunist.

  “Who made you her goddamned guardian?” he growled aloud. When he left the room he made sure the door was now properly fastened. Then, because he knew she would not come around to read it, he erased his message from the hoígh plate.

  Bhatterji did not know that Miko had retreated behind the walls, as she had on Amalthea, to seek a comfort that mere arms could never give.

  In the glory days, The River of Stars had sailed with a regiment of staff. There had been maids and musicians, sweepers and servers, cooks and call girls, jugglers and gigolos. Enchanting sights, toothsome meals, heady aromas, beautiful sounds, provocative touches—if there was a sense that wanted pleasing, there had been staff on board for the pleasing of it.

  But people who by their very existence affirm the rightness of the pecking order have no business sharing the spaces frequented by their betters. They are to be summoned or dismissed, and that is all. If they eat, drink, play, or fornicate, they must do it backstage, lest they remind their masters of a shared humanity. Even the crew had been careful to draw a distinction between those who ran the ship and those who ran errands.

  So, a series of half-decks and passageways had been included in the schematics, a network that enabled all those maids and servants and cabin boys to scurry about unseen, to appear only when and where their presence was required, and to duck out of sight once their duties were done. The staff corridors ran like alleys behind the staterooms, sometimes twisting or turning or running up or down a deck to avoid bisecting larger public spaces. The staff had called it “the peepery.”