The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Twenty-four unbelted from the sling and kicked away from the doctor’s desk, disgusted at the awful thing the woman had suggested. It was true what they said about snakes: they ate their young. “I could never do that!” And thus does a burden become a badge.

  Wong, startled at the reaction she had gotten, remained speechless until the girl had reached the door, when she said very quietly, “It will look like me.”

  Twenty-four deCant turned and stared at the woman from LEO. “What do you mean? There ain’t nothing of you in it.”

  Wong unfolded from her sling and leapt suddenly to a monkey bar affixed to the ceiling. She displayed her gangly, stick-and-string body, her long calves and forearms. “It’s not genetic,” she cried. “You can’t believe it’s genetic. Free fall confuses the developmental cues; it distorts the morphogenesis. You can’t suppose there have been enough years for people like me to evolve, can you?”

  “No,” said Twenty-four, meaning of course I didn’t think that. “No,” she said again, meaning something else entirely. Like all Martians, Twenty-four had known she would one day have children, but she had never thought they would be snakes; and “once a snake, always a snake.” Such a child could never be brought down to Mars or Luna; perhaps not even to the Galilean moons. Twenty-four had left Mars intending never to return, but with a spaceborn child to care for, she never could; and thus does circumstance make mockery of choice.

  Wong knew the life of the ugly duckling, strange and fey and deformed. She knew the anger and bitterness of parents trapped aloft, blaming each other, cutting each other when they thought the child would not hear. “You can’t want this for your child,” Wong said waving her forearm down her body and meaning that Wong did not want it for herself. Bigelow Fife alone named her beautiful, but who knew better than she how distorted was his judgment? “It’s only a mass of cells yet,” the doctor insisted. “There is no brain, no heart, no form.”

  “No,” said Twenty-four. “There’s only possibilities.”

  And that, more than the alien body of her child-to-be, frightened her beyond all measure.

  Afterward, the doctor asked the air, asked the ducts, asked the grille whether she had been right to speak so to the wrangler; but Miko, had she been lurking, might only have shrugged. Amalthea was little enough of a world. Not so little as to completely fool the morphogenetic unfolding, but enough so as to make it suspicious. She was taller, thinner, of slightly different proportions than a wellsprung human of her age—not obviously a snake, but on the faerie side of things. How else had she fooled Bhatterji for four months without ever intending it?

  Having lived among snakes and elves on Amalthea, it was the squat, lumpish wellsprung that seemed odd and exotic to her. The occasional Martian or Lunatic or Earthling who passed through Amalthea Center was an object of curiosity. But that was mere accustom. Beauty was not in it. Beauty had never been a factor in Mikoyan Hidei’s short and harried life.

  The bride did not wear white. No color so pristine existed anywhere aboard The River of Stars. Nor were Martians much on ceremony. Nothing was borrowed; nothing was blue—unless it was Rave Evermore on seeing deCant taken out of bounds. Dress was casual, the affair strictly utilitarian. There was not so much as a sheep’s head in a rice pot. Gorgas had told Ship to research the Martian statutes—a proper Martian wedding, he had told Satterwaithe, to the latter’s complete disinterest—but there was little to be found beyond the signing of a binding contract; and the reading of its terms was less than inspiring.

  Those that seed ’em, got to feed ’em, the Martian proverb ran. The settlements had not the resources to take on wards of the state or to deal with the wildings of the demi-raised; so custom required “nurture, support, and stability of home life until emancipation for any children begotten by a couple,” and the fines were heavy for those delinquent in their duties. There was nothing in the boilerplate about “love” or “honor” or parting at death, unless as an afterthought by the couple themselves. There is something very lean and efficient about pragmatism, but humans thrive on mummery and the assembled witnesses found the whole event vaguely dissatisfying.

  Martians did fall in love, for duty is a colder thing around which to wrap one’s limbs than is a partner’s body, though they tried never to allow love to interfere with good sense. DeCant was passing fond of Akhaturian, which was at least a good start on a fourteen-year-commitment. Certainly, Okoye had hope for them, though she was a hopeful girl and could always spare a little for others. Evermore was more prone to list the reasons why it could not possibly work out—although certain hopes of his own may have influenced him.

  Okoye chided Evermore when the four wranglers retired to their common room. “Before you say anything, you really ought to list the plusses and the minuses.”

  “Plus and minus add up to zero,” he said. “If I did that, I would never say anything.”

  “We’ll count that as a plus,” said Akhaturian, who had entered the room behind him. He had deCant in tow—literally, for Grubb had told him at the contractory that a husband ought to carry his bride across the threshold to their quarters. In zero gravity, that was not a burdensome thing. DeCant saw no more point to it than Akhaturian did, but the Least Wrangler did not want to disappoint Grubb, and deCant did not want to disappoint the Least Wrangler; so she played for the time the passive role of cargo. From the fetus’s point of view, she actually was a cargo pod, and she derived both amusement and dismay from that.

  “Shut up, wink,” Evermore counseled the lad. He did not really dislike the younger boy, but Ivar really had no business getting laid while Evermore went celibate. “I wonder why that Miko didn’t come to the wedding.”

  “She’s a very private person,” Okoye said.

  “She’s a muffing hermit,” Evermore answered. “She needs to get out more.” By this, he meant that Raphael Evermore should get more chances to look her over; but the curious thing was that Miko considered herself outside when she was most inside. (She had attended the contractory. There is a servant’s peepery abaft Central Hall, where the ceremony had been held.) From the passageways and ducts she could observe everything of interest on board the ship and study on any situation before committing. If that isn’t outside, nothing is. What Evermore should have said was that Miko should come in more often. Miko herself, who had followed the wranglers backstage to the common room made no comment on his observation.

  Fransziska Wong lingered in the crew’s mess the next morning while she forced her first cup of coffee down her throat. Black and unsweetened, something to shock the system into booting up for the day, the brew was not very good. Grubb had cloned once too often from a mother bean that had been a poor specimen of C. arabica to begin with. Yet Wong was loathe to complain and hurt his feelings.

  Most of the other crew had been and gone. The wranglers had bounced laughing out of the room like neutrons in a chain reaction and Bhatterji had packed in enough breakfast to feed whole worldlets before he and Evermore and Miko left to weld the anode hoops. Now Wong lingered alone in the mess with nothing to look forward to but her weekly review of the biomonitor data. Detail work always bored her. Calibration checks, indicator monitoring, tracking charts, record keeping, summarizing, archiving…Such work never seemed of much consequence. After a while, Grubb and young Akhaturian came out of the galley and began to clean the dining table.

  Wong did not normally use tables herself. Being spaceborn, she had always considered them a notional thing, so she drank her coffee while floating with the air currents. Wellsprung humans often found that disconcerting and felt a need to gather around a board. There was some communal value to this custom. It meant that diners had to look at one another while they fed.

  Grubb wiped the table’s surface with an emulsion of microbotic cleansers and turned up the suction. The myriad vacuum ports that pocked the table’s surface served the dual purpose of holding plates and cups in place and sucking loose crumbs and droplets into the recovery system,
where other microbots separated important compounds from the general muck. Some of the salvage eventually made it back into the carnic tanks. What Grubb did with it then was anybody’s guess—though nobody did.

  Akhaturian beat the air with a sticky-broom, waving the web of adhesive fibers this way and that in what must have been a set pattern but which looked to Wong like random flailing. He worked with solemn earnestness.

  “’Kiru tells me he’s always that way,” Grubb responded when, after the youngster had moved out of earshot, Wong made the observation. “Last transit, just after we left Wheredahell with a load of gaseous metal for Achilles—that was the stop when you signed on, so this was just before—Ratline was on the prod about something and he told Ivar to scrape down the racks in the Number Four cargo bay and recoat them. Why, the way Ivar hopped to it, you’d’ve thought he’d been promoted to Sky Marshal of the Guard! He even had me bring his lunches up to the cargo deck rather than take time off. ’Kiru and the others, they stopped by to lend him sympathy and somehow they wound up lending him a hand. There he was, all whistling and a-smiling; and Rave, he asks Ivar what in the buckle of the Belt he’s so happy about and Ivar goes on about inner peace and the rhythm of the work and the zen; and before you know it, he’s got them right there with him, a-scraping and a-cleaning.” Grubb laughed and shook his head. “Never saw the like of it. Never did. No matter what he’s doing, it’s always the most important thing in the world. Cooking, cleaning, shifting cargo, or—to judge by the results—pumping into our little Two-Four.”

  Wong’s faint smile died. “Twenty-four didn’t know what she was doing. Boredom isn’t a good reason to make a baby.”

  Grubb spread his hands. “I reckon not; but don’t be too sure the seduction wasn’t the other way ’round. I told you. When Ivar sets his mind to something, it’s the most important thing there is. If he could get that girl to remove varnish for him, he could certainly get her to remove her clothes. It’s a lot less work and a lot more fun, zen or no zen.”

  Wong compressed her lips. “You make him sound so cold-blooded,” she called after Grubb as he passed out of sight into his utility room.

  “Oh, scheming ain’t in it,” his voice told her. He reemerged with an air paddle. “Ivar wanted that girl like iron wants a magnet, but it wasn’t like he laid out any intercept course. She nabbed him. That’s the way it is with him. He doesn’t catch, he gets caught. He didn’t go round up his berth to help him scrape those cargo racks, neither. The berth came to him—and got sucked into it somehow. Maybe they felt sorry for him. I sure hate to disappoint the little guy. Maybe that’s why ‘Little Lumber did the number.’”

  “Little Lumber?”

  Grubb smiled. “Two-by-four.” He waved the paddle through the air in several places about the room, then squinted at the adhesive face. “You can’t really see anything on these things,” he told her. “The real inspection is when I culture the agar; but the procedure says first I do a visual.” He placed the paddle in a snap-bag and winked at Wong. “Who knows? Maybe someday I’ll pick up something macroscopic…” He sealed the bag with his thumb and forefinger and looked around the mess hall with pride. “There,” he said. Then, looking back to Wong: “You don’t approve of Ivar and Two-Four, do you? I mean what they’ve gone and done.”

  The doctor shook her head. “Should I? They’re too young.”

  “To you and me, maybe. Out here…? I don’t know. But one thing I do know. Ivar, when it came straight at him, he didn’t say if, but, or maybe. He just stepped into it and swung. That ought to tell you something.”

  “It was the wrong decision. He’ll regret it later, or she will; and they’ll wind up resenting each other—and the baby.”

  Grubb rubbed his nose with his forefinger. “Maybe, but which is more important? That they make the right decision, or that they’re the ones who make it? Because, I’ll tell you, the only way to ensure that they never choose wrong is to not let them choose at all.”

  “Throw them in the deep end, sink or swim? It seems cruel.”

  “It is. But who’s to say the other way isn’t? Second-guessing, meddling, never letting them fumble…Keeping them children forever, like on Earth. And that’s assuming that the Folks Who Know Better really do. Ivar…” Grubb glanced around the room to make sure the boy had not come back. “Ivar, he’s all right. He’s not much now, but the foundation’s sound.”

  “He doesn’t understand what he’s getting into. Neither does Twenty-four.”

  “Does anyone? Youth ain’t in it. There’s lots of women older than Little Lumber who choose less wise than she did.”

  Wong wondered if Grubb’s remark was aimed at her. His broad face lay bland and open, but Grubb, they said, was privy to everything that went on aboard ship. Yet, how could he know which choices were wise and which were not? Knowledge was not wisdom. Twenty-four deCant was pretty, in a sassy, dark-haired, high-spirited way. She had the luxury of choice. Some women had to accept what was offered—or take what was not.

  Wong sucked the last of the coffee from her cup. It was cool and bitter and she made a face. Grubb laughed. “Wretched, ain’t it?”

  “Oh, no. I let it get too cool.”

  Grubb reached out and touched her on the arm. “Bad coffee ain’t your fault.” Then, as if that had reminded him, he swam to the urn and filled his own ziggy-cup. “Two-Four, she comes from Marineris. Do you know what the Free State’s motto is?” Wong shook her head and Grubb told her. “Learn or Die.”

  Wong shivered. The worldview implied by that simple phrase appalled her. “That’s…” She could think of no word brutal enough. “…cold.”

  “So’s Mars, doc. So’s Mars. The mean temperature there is as mean as it gets. Their motto’s not a proposal, it’s a simple fact of life. Little Lumber was only looking for a little fun, but, like Ivar, she’s playing the hand she was dealt. Now she’ll learn something.”

  “A high price for learning.”

  “Not learning costs more.” Grubb shook his head. “This ain’t LEO, doc, nor Earth. You and me, we’re strangers out here. Let’s not tell ’em how to order their lives.”

  Wong saw that she would not persuade the chief to help the two children. To her, his casual approval of Martian mores was every bit as chilling as the mores themselves, and his willingness to “let things happen as they happened” betokened a terrible callousness.

  Curiously, Grubb thought the same of Wong, so there might be more than one sort of callus. He himself did not so much approve of Martian ways as acknowledge them. It was not, he felt, his place to say. This might be interpreted, variously, as tolerance for the principles of others or as a lack of principles of his own. In his view, the doctor’s willingness to meddle—always for another’s own good—revealed a fundamental and a perhaps not entirely unwitting contempt.

  Grubb’s coffee seared his mouth and he held it a moment before he swallowed. He could follow the warmth all the way down his throat to his stomach, almost as if that temperature gradient defined the boundaries of his organs—as if his very being were defined by the sensations at its perimeter. Studying the doctor over the rim of his cup, he wondered what Fife had intended by seducing the woman. That it might have been an act of kindness did not occur to him, for Fife struck him as a man who did nothing without some advantage in mind. But that his assessment of the man was largely true did not mean that it was entirely true, and it is in the gap between large and entire that people become real.

  Grubb himself might have slept with the doctor out of pity, for he was by nature kindly. But as he was ever a man who enjoyed the senses and remained alert to the opportunities, it may be that the great difference between Grubb and Fife was that when Fife took advantage he was at least aware of doing so. And pity is not kindness, in any event. If anything could have so pricked Wong that her surface tension ripped her asunder, it would have been pity.

  This is the moment when that would have happened. In the empty mess hall, Grubb grew slowly
aware of Wong’s sweetish odor, one compounded of several parts sweat, medicinals, soaps, and other elements, and never quite obliterated by niggardly sponge baths. And she, becoming aware of his regard, turned her eyes on him. These were the selfsame eyes he had always seen in her; but this time they seemed to Grubb as large as Earth’s Moon when she floats near the horizon.

  He touched her again on the arm and she waited expectantly and then he said, “You deserve a better life.”

  There. That was it. That was what would have done it. A kind word leading on to mutual pleasure, but a pleasure which would, upon its evaporation, reveal the pity that drove it—and that would have destroyed her. Fife, for all his faults, had not slept with her from pity, and so had inoculated her, a little, against her awful need to be loved. He was a vaccine—a weaker version of the real thing that incited protective antibodies against it. That Grubb knew Wong had a lover erased pity from his words. That Wong knew Wong had a lover erased need from her heart.

  So none of that desperate, miserable, temporary happiness ever happened—but it might have happened; and Fransziska Wong, M.D., might have sensed that, because as she turned away from Grubb a very small smile of brief but genuine joy lit her face.