The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  When Bigelow Fife rose from the doctor’s supine form that evening, he knew a curious sense of dissatisfaction. For the first time since he had possessed the snake woman in the abandoned G-ring, he felt no soaring euphoria, only the usual pleasure he received from the deed.

  “What’s wrong?” the doctor asked.

  “Nothing,” he told her, speaking, as always, absolute truth. He drew himself into the fresher, found a sponge, and began to clean up.

  “Something’s bothering you.”

  Maybe I’m ill, he thought. He stared at his eyes in the mirror, checking for signs. Maybe those swings of mood he had had lately were manic-depressive events brought on by some imbalance in brain chemistry. “It’s nothing,” he assured her, meaning the nothing he had felt. Had his earlier elations been due only to the exoticism of Wong’s strange articulated body? If so, familiarity with its passages had dulled the appetite and signaled perhaps that it was time to move on—were there anyone to move onto.

  In the fresher mirror, through the crack in the half-closed door, he watched Fransziska Wong wriggle free of the sleeping cage like a moth from its chrysalis and Fife was overwhelmed by a sudden irrational surge of desire. And here was another mystery.

  He had been in love before, but never since his first, naive puppy love with such inexplicableness. He could see plainly how plain Wong was: Horse-faced and angular; not at all the soft, pale, rounded sort one pursued in Luna. Exotic, yes; but mere exoticism does not capture the Lunatic heart. Quite the contrary, for conventions are highly regarded there. And yet he felt as if a vital part of him were missing, and Fransziska Wong held it in her gracile hands.

  “Do you love me?” the doctor asked.

  Fife recoiled from the question. He had heard its long coming, like the Doppler of an approaching tunnel car in the Tycho-Coughlin tube. He had heard it before Wong had even thought to ask it, having extrapolated from previous case examples. “I don’t know,” he admitted slowly, and to his own surprise. He came and stood in the doorway of the fresher. “I certainly care about you.” Wong smiled sadly in response, although he had used care in its original meaning of mental suffering or grief. And indeed, although he often felt an unrestrained joy when he was with her, bleak despondency haunted him after parting.

  Unbound now, Wong swung, monkey-like, across the room, coming to a stop before him. She took the sponge from his hand and gently laved him. Fife shivered under her touch and his body saluted her administrations. “It’s been a long time,” she said while she cleansed him, “since anyone has loved me.”

  “Really? It’s only been a half an hour,” he said, essaying a joke that, perversely, seemed to sadden his partner.

  “Just give me a moment,” she said, dispossessing him from the fresher. As she moved past him, her flesh rubbed smoothly against his, dry and warm—which he found curious because usually after lovemaking she would, thin as she was, “sweat like a horse.”

  Fife treasured puzzles as a sand rover did a vein of ironstone; so he squirreled the dry skin away in a corner of his mind, next to the fact that he had not this time felt the wonted euphoria of their previous encounters. He rubbed the two facts together and wondered if they were related.

  Wong said from the fresher, “Do you ever dream?”

  Fife had gathered his garments and paused with his cod in his hand. “Why, yes. I suppose so.”

  “When I was a girl,” Wong said, “I always dreamed I would be a hero someday. I would plug a deadly leak in Goddard’s pressure hull, or I would guide people to safety, or I would nurse them through a mysterious plague.” In Wong’s drawn-out sigh were all the lives she would someday save, all the people she would comfort, all the wrongs she would right.

  Fife knew a flash of irritation. It was not enough that they had had sex; now she wanted to be intimate. “You became a doctor,” he pointed out.

  “That’s what my parents always told me,” she said, in tones that Fife could not decipher. “‘If you want to help people so much, be a doctor and at least be paid for it.’” There was a pause and, thinking the revelations done, Fife pulled his shorts on and adjusted his cod.

  “They prided themselves on being practical,” her voice added.

  Fife grunted. He wondered if Wong was preparing to “save” him in some fashion; that, deprived of saving humanity, she would settle for a human.

  When Wong emerged a moment later from the fresher, he had the momentary impression that the doctor was flying through the air like a guardian angel. The image amused him, considering her earlier confession, so he was smiling when Wong coasted gracefully to a stop before him. She took this as welcome and wrapped her limbs around him like a vine around a trellis.

  Wong was still nude, but had applied a pale lipstick, which, against her dusky skin, produced a curiously erotic effect. He noted her arousal in the languid, sleepy look in her eyes, in the firmness of the mannish nipples pressed against him, in the tropic heat of her body, in the eager hunger of the kiss she planted on his mouth. Just a good-bye kiss, she explained as they embraced.

  More than good-bye, it said come back. Fife felt himself swell, all his senses heightened, so that Wong could have caressed him from the Far Side of the Moon or whispered endearments from the depths of Valles Marineris and still make him shiver with delight. When their lips parted, he gasped.

  Wong herself was only half in the world, her soul soaring amid enzymatic fantasies. The lips are among the body’s most sensitive tissues and she had, in private, tinctured the lipstick with her mist. “You’ll miss me when we’re apart,” she murmured from somewhere high above the galactic plane. A statement? A prophecy? A command?

  “Yes,” he said to all three. “Very much.”

  In his own cabin afterward, Fife knew the melancholy that he so often felt after parting from her. It had been like this with his first wife at Coughlin High under the ringwall of Riccioli. Not so exquisite, perhaps—it had been furtive and fumbling and amateurish—but the pain had been real. Discovered in the end, they had stood before the magistrate with willing, lovesick hearts and a ludicrous belief in happiness everlasting. No one since then, until now, had touched Fife in quite the same way, and he had long-since ceased belief in anything ludicrous.

  Yet, a devotion to truth forced him to admit that love often nested in unlikely niches. It did not require beauty to flourish. In those eternal seconds when the universe contracted to a small knot of pleasure and the body expanded to fill a universe, beauty could appear: in a smile, in a glance, in a gesture, in a tone of voice. Wong was by no measure beautiful, but there were things about her where Fife found beauty.

  The Sysop

  It was customary in most ships to mark Flipover Day with some sort of ceremony. In the great liners, there were masked balls and the advent of King Jupiter, come to play jovial pranks on neophyte travelers, and even in the meaner ships it was a ferial day. The River had long marked the occasion with the Captain’s Feast, presided over and funded by that once-august personage. Some of Coltraine’s Feasts had been legendary, and even those of the Martian years made up in boister what they lacked in elegance. Of late, the Feast had grown less sumptuous—indeed, it hardly merited the name—but even Zachary Zackmeyer, pennywise though he had been, had carried on the tradition.

  So, even though braking would not be required until the ship reached the balk line ten days hence, Gorgas ordered the Flip when they reached the median of the grand secant and hosted the traditional meal that very evening. He felt that some note of normality was called for.

  He had bought a number of dressed and frozen birds at Callisto Market, for Marta, his late wife, had prepared an unparalleled paprikàs csirke that he sought constantly to recapture on his palate. He could picture it in his mind, recollect the enjoyment, though the precise taste and smell of it eluded him. It may have been the idea of the chicken rather than its savor that filled him with such pleasure.

  For it was as much a symbol as a meal. It had its context
in his memories; its recollection came festooned with associations. It was no such simple a thing as chicken and paprika and a bed of steaming noodles. There was that wood-hewn house in the Bakony-hegy, surrounded by tall conifers and quarreling birds. The fog of the early morning during the Little Summer after the leaves had turned. Fishing for pike from a lazy boat on Lake Balaton. There was the sense of freedom and solitude, of God’s voice whispering through the fine needles. There was Marta, too, plump-faced, with her half-smile, so very worldly when, after a bottle of aged badacsony szürkebarát, she cozied with him beneath the hand-quilted comforter.

  He remembered too the touch of her hand, light and gentle upon his—one of his few tactile memories—and from time to time in distracted moments he would rub the back of his own hand and derive from that a strange and wistful contentment.

  Grubb always tried his best to prepare the chicken to Gorgas’s liking. He took great pains with the proportions and the ingredients and the temperatures and all the arts of the kitchen. And yet the results always fell short of those meals that Gorgas remembered from the Bakony mountains, for it was not the meal at all that he remembered.

  His guests had dressed in finery, or what would do for finery. The Lotus Jewel was the peacock among them, for all that she was a hen, although Bhatterji in his cream sherwani might have rivaled her, had the sherwani draped a body half so attractive. The sysop wore her old red-and-gold uniform from the Mooncrest Lines with a glittering brooch-and-earring set and jeweled slippers. She had chosen a tint for her lips and nails that set off, without crudely matching, the colors of her uniform. Dr. Wong and the passenger entered together wearing domino masks, which had the strange effect of making them both seem rather sinister. Wong’s mask was white and Fife’s, black, and Gorgas thought irresistably of the tiny spots of contrary color that marked the yin and the yang. As for Gorgas, himself…Well, a Space Guard uniform would have been inappropriate, but he did have a fine silk blouse with puffed sleeves and straight-legged trousers that he could tuck into a pair of soft calfskin boots. The ensemble, held elastically at cuff and waist and ankle, was disposed to billowing, so that he looked overall like one of those animals fashioned from children’s balloons.

  Yet for all the air of festivity, conversation around the dinner table was strained and hesitant, as it had been since Gorgas had assumed the presidency of the officers’ mess. Long silences fell, broken only by the clinking of tableware, the occasional pro forma compliment for the meal (directed to Grubb when he made his brief appearances) and the equally pro forma thanks (directed to Gorgas). When Hand had presided, the officers’ mess had been a more noisy affair, with a song or a story often called for. But Gorgas was altogether a more quiet man, and some of that quiet had seeped down the table until it had engulfed even The Lotus Jewel at its foot.

  He had served in the European Space Guard, Gorgas had, rescuing yachters in LEO, intercepting smugglers on the Long Orbit; but sometimes he forgot how a captain’s personality could set the tone of the mess table, even on a civilian tramp. He was lost so often in his own thoughts that he could miss the deferential silence that surrounded him.

  “The receiver is working again,” The Lotus Jewel announced, and it was a measure of the quietude that it took several moments for the others to register her words as something more than a slightly louder silence. Corrigan reacted first.

  “Can we transmit a distress call?”

  That engaged Satterwaithe’s attention. “No need for that.” And she gave her nominal superior a Significant Look.

  The Lotus Jewel said, “No, only reception. No transmission yet.”

  “Have you heard anything, then?” Dr. Wong asked. “Have there been any messages?”

  And that drew Bigelow Fife’s attention away from his meal. As the captain’s guest he sat at Gorgas’s right hand and had been enjoying the texture of real meat for a change. It had been a long while since he had tasted anything but carnic. Yet the croak of Wong’s voice rang like bells in his ears and he turned toward his love as a flower toward the sunlamps.

  “There ought be a message for me,” he said. “Mo-Mo must be after wondering where I’ve gotten to.”

  “Oh, no,” said The Lotus Jewel. “I wasn’t clear. There were no messages for the ship. We’re too far off our flight plan because of the coasting, and I can’t broadcast our actual coordinates. But I did intercept some general ship-to-ship chitchat and one of the regular beamcasts.”

  “What news?” asked Wong.

  It was a wonder, the way they all leaned forward to hear. Perhaps they had missed the radio as much as the engines.

  “Well, there’s been an election on Mars,” The Lotus Jewel told them. “Someone named Opdyke is the new director-general of Greater Syrtis.”

  “Tantalus Opdyke,” supplied Fife.

  Corrigan made a long face. “Who cares which tyrant the Martians elect? The way they lord it high and mighty over the Belt, Red Party or Green doesn’t matter—”

  “Except maybe to the Martians,” suggested Fife in the reasonable tones of a bystander. “The asteroids aren’t what you would call self-supporting. It takes more delta vee to fare from rock to rock than it does to drop to Mars, or even down to Luna. If the Belt did cut itself off from Mars, were would you get your nitrogen and other—”

  “I’ve heard all the arguments,” Corrigan cut him off. “I still say a Martian is a damned—”

  “Twenty-four deCant is a Martian,” Wong cautioned him.

  “Maybe, but she was smart enough to show the place her heels.”

  “Twenty-four hails from the Marineris Free State,” Ratline told them. “They don’t get along with Syrtis.”

  “What else did you intercept?” Bhatterji asked The Lotus Jewel. He himself placed no great importance on politicians, Martian or otherwise. “It’s the season for the Inner System Cup…”

  Satterwaithe rolled her eyes, but The Lotus Jewel, who also enjoyed sports, reported that Old Europa had taken the LEO crown and would face either L4 or the geosynch champion. Bhatterji laughed and clapped his hands. “Up Europa!” he said and made a fig at Fife. “And that for L-Four.”

  The troubleshooter blinked. “You must be confusing L-Four with Luna. Lunatics don’t play bounceball.”

  “No,” Ratline leered. “Their national sport is prancing around naked.”

  Fife began to say something about Vitamin D and the warren sunlamps; and Satterwaithe, with a doubtful glance at Fife’s repulsively pale body, said, “That is entirely too much sharing.”

  “Oh, it’s a sight that some might enjoy.” Ratline had been sampling his stash earlier and his aim was off. The knowing smirk he sent Bhatterji’s way stabbed Fransziska Wong, instead.

  The doctor pushed up from the table and freefed nearly to the nominal ceiling bulkhead before she thought to halt herself. “I,” she said. “I,” while the others gaped at her, astonished, and waited for the verb.

  “You said there were ship messages?”

  Gorgas was such a quiet man that for a maniac moment no one at the table could place exactly where the question had come from. They looked one to the other in confusion until, taking their cue from Fife, they all turned toward the head of the table.

  “Yes,” said The Lotus Jewel, collecting herself. “Several ship-to-ship and a few with ports. Some were too distant to hear clearly, but the AI ran digital enhancements and—”

  “Could I have them?” Gorgas could ask all he wanted, but it always came out sounding like a demand. He couldn’t help it; it was inherent in his habits of speech. The Guard was as fine a corps as ever patrolled a shoreline, but the polite conventions eluded its alumni.

  “I’ll bring the datapin within the hour,” The Lotus Jewel said.

  “And the reassessment of Stranger’s Reef. I’m still awaiting that.”

  The Lotus Jewel had completely forgotten Gorgas’s request. She tackled her chores in the same order that she received them, and so it had gone to the bottom of he
r got-to-do list, below the antenna repair, below her assistance to Corrigan and the others on the sails. So she knew abruptly from the matter-of-fact impatience in Gorgas’s voice that she had gravely disappointed him. “Oh,” she said. “It’s not, uh, fininshed.”

  “Stranger’s Reef?” Corrigan said, puzzled equally by Gorgas’s request and The Lotus Jewel’s queerly defensive reaction.

  “Our course goes nowhere near Stranger’s Reef,” Satterwaithe said with benign certainty. Gorgas’s opinion of Evan Hand was as nothing to Satterwaithe’s opinion of Gorgas.

  “The drag on the ship from the radiation belt,” Gorgas said after a sip of his fruit punch, “has been adding a constant deflection, putting our dead reckoning near the margin of error in the Reef’s True Position.”

  “But not within the margin of error,” Satterwaithe insisted.

  Gorgas knew a spasm of irritatation. Planning wanted contingency, not certainty. Wait to be certain and you waited too long. Satterwaithe was a fine one for organizing. Give her an objective and she could pinch resources from the very vacuum of space to accomplish it; but laying out the objectives in the first place was a black art to her. Small wonder, Gorgas thought with self-satisfaction, that the fourth ring had been stripped from her cuff. “The True Position and its margin of error awaits Mr. Corrigan’s analysis of the most recent Jovian passage.”

  And now it was Corrigan’s turn to retreat into defensiveness. “There have been…difficulties in the computations.” He might have added that his time had been spent subversively on a clandestine project, but that seemed impolitic. “Difficulties,” he said again, and his queerly distinct way of speaking endowed the word with ominous portent.

  “Well, there’s no great urgency,” Gorgas allowed. Thinking through the algorithms and data seining that were required, Gorgas was hard-pressed to see any difficulties beyond the sheer tedium of setting up and running the computations; but he had not actually worked the problem himself and so granted his acting first the benefit of the doubt. “Only a contingency I would like to lay to rest.”