The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  When Corrigan spoke at last, he spoke without turning and if his three uninvited guests had begun to drift toward the door, the new tone in his voice stopped them. “Bhatterji is good,” he announced. “Give the devil his due, he does know his trade. Two engines slagged? Improvising spares he doesn’t have? In nineteen days? Even if he fails, I’ll tip my hat to him.” He pulled himself around with the easy grace of the spaceborn and Satterwaithe wondered at the man who now faced her, as if something new had burst from the chrysalis he had been. “But he may still fail! I wish him no ill luck, but only Allah knows what will come to pass. Prudence, if nothing else, requires we continue. As the hadith has it: ‘Trust in Allah, but tie up your camel.’”

  “Or,” Satterwaithe replied with a sardonic twist to her lips, “God helps those who help themselves.”

  It was a strange thing, but until that very moment he and Satterwaithe had never felt truly partners in their surreptitious enterprise. More often than not, they had been at loggerheads. Yet, now a strange and sudden bond united them. They both felt it, and they both wondered at it. “Genie,” he said, “study the PERT. See what you can juggle. You’re the organizer in this tub.” And in truth, he did admire the Third’s ability to pull things together. If Gorgas excelled at chess, Satterwaithe had mastered jigsaw puzzles.

  “And what about the hobartium?” The Lotus Jewel asked.

  “I can slip any task needing hobartium,” Satterwaithe considered aloud, “and flip the task sequence later, when we do scrounge some up. If Bhatterji fails, we can even cannibalize the engines.”

  Corrigan was skeptical. “Over Bhatterji’s dead body.”

  “That can happen,” Ratline said cheerfully. “But why wait? There’s hobie in the radiation belt and in the comm antennae.”

  “Not the belt!” said Satterwaithe, “if there’s a storm—”

  “Not the antennae!” said The Lotus Jewel, “if there’s a message—”

  “Wait…” And Corrigan’s raised hands brought such utter silence that he thought them for a moment endowed with some magical power. “Moth, don’t touch the belt if you can help it. Storm intensity at this altitude is usually low; but the way our luck has been running, we’d have the hundred-year flare while our belt was untied. LJ, you can’t transmit at all, is that right?” He barely waited for her nod. “And you’d need hobartium yourself for the repairs. So…Moth, go ahead and cannibalize what’s left in the transmitter—whatever the lithium spray didn’t ruin—but don’t touch the receiver or the radars. We’ll need the radars to take pilot bearings when we close on Port Galileo. Unless you want to run the Io Tube without bearings or without being able to hear the weather reports…? I didn’t think so. Check the abandoned areas on the main and lower decks, especially the orlop. There may still be unused equipment there with hobartium circuitry. LJ, bring me the data Gorgas gave you. I’ll finish his navigational calculations and either put his fears to rest or…” And here he managed a crooked grin. “Or add a new sense of urgency to our work.”

  “It would help to crunch the schedule if we had more hands,” Satterwaithe said.

  “Who?” asked Ratline.

  “Eaton Grubb is always singing about the old days,” Corrigan suggested.

  “What about Gorgas?” asked Satterwaithe.

  For a weird moment, Corrigan thought she had suggested the captain as an additional team member. When he realized his mistake, he laughed, which astonished the sailing master and puzzled the others. “If Gorgas can worry over as remote a chance as brushing Stranger’s Reef, he can see the need for Plan B. You know how he is, Genie. The man is never happy with only one contingency in play.”

  “But, he’s a—”

  “He’s a Farnsworth man. But he’s also captain of The River of Stars. I don’t think he’ll balk at a backup plan. We’ll review the feasibility study first—based on how much hobartium Moth can find—then we’ll take it to Gorgas. If Moth can’t find enough to finish the job…” He shrugged. “We can fold our hand without having made any promises.”

  “I’ll talk to Eaton,” said The Lotus Jewel, though she said it to Satterwaithe. She was still not talking to Corrigan.

  “And I’ll kill Bhatterji,” said Ratline. Then he laughed through his ragged teeth. “Only joking,” he assured them, and he laughed again. “Excuse me while I go prospecting.”

  After Ratline had gone, The Lotus Jewel said in her smallest voice, “Moth scares me, sometimes.” Corrigan and Satterwaithe traded glances over her studded scalp and each saw the same truth in the other’s eye.

  Afterward, Corrigan sought a measure of calm by losing himself in words. The Thoughts of Khalil el-Hikri were subtle and difficult to follow, as intricate in their own way as Shumar’s calligraphy. The saj required close attention and often meant something entirely different when read at another time, and yet Corrigan found his own thoughts wandering from the resonant and demanding poetry. He had actually faced Satterwaithe and won! At least he thought he had won. Yet, he had learned something, and that was that leadership meant securing the cooperation of others and not merely their obedience.

  That someone else was in the room with him pressed only gradually upon his senses. He could not say when he actually knew, for it was a slow awareness, built up from infinitesimals. A minute increase in the warmth of the room. The barely-heard susurrus of quiet breath. The strange pressure of immanence that the blind were said to feel.

  He jerked from his book to see Bhatterji’s strange, elfin assistant before him. So suddenly did he apprehend her that it seemed to him that she had materialized from the very air.

  “I didn’t hear the hoígh plate,” he said after a moment. “How did you get in?”

  Miko studied him with a disturbing air of appraisal, as if weighing him in a balance pan. “You and your friends are going to save the ship using the magnetic sail,” she said at last.

  There is a story told about Corrigan the boy. This is the story. A relative visiting Corrigan’s family compound on Pallas had shown him holos of Earth. One was of a herd of sheep in a pasture near As-Salt, in the hills above al-Quds, among which grazed one sheep with a dark coat. The uncle had laughed and said, “Now, there is the real ‘black sheep’ of our family.” And Corrigan the boy had gravely replied, “The fleece is black on this side…”

  That is, Corrigan was good with facts and seldom went beyond them, which was both his strength and his weakness. And so he knew two things about Miko and did not know a third.

  The first thing was that Miko had learned somehow of Plan B, and he wondered whether Bhatterji had sent the girl to dissuade him. But then he thought that this would be a strange thing for Bhatterji to do. For intimidation, an oaf is more effective than an elf.

  Unless he had sent her to seduce him, and by thus persuading Corrigan’s lower parts, convince his upper. Miko’s large eyes mixed innocence and youth with the hardness of untimely age. She still dressed androgynously but, while some might call her a mere girl, ’Stroiders married at sixteen, or even fourteen, so she was older in Corrigan’s frame of reference than she was for the Earth-born. “Husband-high,” as they said in the Belt. Yet there was something in her bearing too; as if time itself had passed at a different rate for her, and years had accumulated under her heart faster than they had ought. Perhaps if he had not so lately quarreled with The Lotus Jewel, Corrigan might not have noticed Miko the woman; but he had and so he did.

  The second thing that Corrigan knew about Miko was that she believed the plan would succeed. She had said would, and not try. Why he attributed such precision to her words, he could not say. Only that she used so few of them that each one seemed exactly chosen for its task.

  He did not deny what the girl had so plainly learned. “It seems sensible to have a backup plan,” he said.

  “Especially a plan the captain and the engineer don’t know about….” Miko’s voice echoed with the wink of shared and forbidden knowledge. She had not confided in Bhatterji.

/>   “We wanted to complete the feasibility study before presenting it.” Corrigan may even have believed that story by then, although they were well along into execution.

  “Sure,” Miko said carelessly. “I want to help.”

  Now the curious thing about Miko was how she loved the ship, and curious not only because the affection ran deeper than it ran long. She was an engineer-in-training and all that breed come to love their engines. But also the ship had rescued her—first on Amalthea when it swept her away into the Void, and then again when she had found sanctuary in its interstices after so fruitlessly throwing herself on Bhatterji. The routines of shipboard life had given her structure for the first time in her life and she clung to them as one falling into an abyss clings to close-by branches.

  Corrigan too was devoted to duty, although only because it was duty. He respected authority as a penniless man respects wealth, and followed procedures because they were the procedures.

  Miko had not sought him out because of this shared loyalty. The acting force was less the attraction of the acting first officer than it was the repulsion of the chief engineer. That a successful sail deployment would humiliate Bhatterji glittered like a diamond in her mind the moment when, listening from the vent, she had realized the Thursday Group’s intent; but that a certain shiver ran through her when Corrigan unfolded from his sling did not at the time register.

  This shiver betokened the third thing, the thing that Corrigan did not yet know.

  While Corrigan was recruiting the newest member for Plan B, The Lotus Jewel was weeping in the abandoned Starview Room. This large, now-featureless space had once been a lounge decked in the self-conscious decadence of the fifties. There had been a dance space, of course—In the milligee environment of constant boost, dancing fell just short of flying—and dining tables too where the pointlessly wealthy could savor the flesh of forbidden species. But there had been the snort tables and the leather rooms; the display couches for artful lovemaking; and bunghole row for the ankle grabbers’ anonymous invitations. And everywhere, mirrors. For that generation loved pleasure and loved tawdry and loved excess, but most of all they loved themselves; and all reproach they held as envy.

  Aside from the observation blister off the bridge, this was the one place on the ship where the stars could be seen directly, through a great lens of metallocene plastic. The Starview Room was never as successful as its designers had hoped. No matter how many diversions were laid out, or how many bodies offered or pharmaceuticals ingested, still the eye was drawn to the great lens and beyond it, to sun or moon or to the great river of stars itself. It was an awesome and infinite sight, a constant reminder of how small and insignificant the onlooker was; and that was the one reminder the self-satisfied patrons of that era could never abide.

  The paraphernalia of pleasure had later been replaced by ovens and mess tables for Martian colonists. Twenty-four deCant’s grandmother had been one of them. Here. In this very room. Eating her beans and rice and gnawing her biscuit and dreaming youthful dreams through the plastic window. The sight had never made her feel small. She was sailing to tame a world!

  The room was stripped and abandoned now. Tramp crews have little time for skygazing. Too much, they warned, and your soul would be sucked out of you; though that might be no more than the superstition of a time that had turned its back on decadence and pioneer austerity both, and settled zen-like into a gray and muddled pragmatism. If they had no eye for beauty, it was hardly beauty’s fault.

  There were exceptions. The Lotus Jewel was one. She found in the Starview Room neither intimidation nor rapture, but only contentment. If she had seen, had really seen, the endlessness of the Big Empty, she might have felt differently; but the splendor was a flat backdrop to her, merely colorful and beautiful, as jewels on a velvet gown might be beautiful. It might be said that, lacking much depth in herself, she found little elsewhere; but it might also be said that beauty was drawn to beauty. It could be the universe that gazed at her.

  Eaton Grubb too would often visit the Starview Room; but he found there, rather than contentment, a nameless melancholy that suited the romantic in him. A thousand tragic ballads welled in his throat. Poignant lyrics trembled on his lips. But the words drifted and tumbled in his mind, never quite finding form, as if they existed just below the level of his own awareness.

  He watched The Lotus Jewel sob quietly for a time and imagined all sorts of sorrows and tragedies behind her tears; but it was not in him to stand by when another hurt, and so he spoke up. “Is there something I can do?”

  The Lotus Jewel jerked at the sudden voice and turned with a hesitant smile breaking through her sorrow. “Who is that? Is that you?” But the smile faded when Eaton Grubb stepped from the shadowed entry into the light of a billion distant suns.

  Given the question, the smile, and its fading, Grubb knew instinctively who had given the golden woman tears. “What did he do to you?” he asked. Her tears glistened like crystal on her cheeks, so lovely that Grubb was loathe to brush them away. “It was Corrigan, wasn’t it?” Who else could cause The Lotus Jewel such misery but he who caused the antipodal joy? Yet, Grubb was loath to rely on inference. He needed confirmation in all things. He sang, perhaps, to hear his own existence.

  A solitary man, reticent in most things, Grubb joined in few games, often ate alone. Yet, for all that, he was a friend to most on board. Not the sort of friend for revelry, but rather the sort for revelations. People would tell him things without ever knowing that they had. He collected these confidences the way a magpie collects bright and glittery objects.

  He was also a sudden man, spurred by the moment and by chance. He might have backed quietly from the Starview Room before The Lotus Jewel noticed him, but that urge to spontaneity drove him to speak. Yet there was more to it than that. Beauty, whether of starlight or song or aroma or texture, enthralled him. He spoke because he could not tear himself away.

  “He called me stupid,” The Lotus Jewel cried. “Zizzy called me stupid.”

  “You aren’t stupid,” Grubb told her. He touched her on the arm. Grubb kept in touch with the world in a very literal way. He looked, he listened, he tasted, he sniffed, he touched. When he could, he combined them all. He had wanted to combine them all in the person of The Lotus Jewel for a very long time. The sight and sound of her were already his, but he longed also for the salt and the musk and the soft caress.

  The Lotus Jewel was as keenly aware of her surroundings as he was. Beneath Grubb’s singlet she could mark the contours of his affection and so knew not only his longing, but how long it was. This moon-faced man’s regard had always pleased her—she liked to be liked, which was why Corrigan’s disgust had hurt her so—and she turned to him as to a friend.

  “What should I do, Eaton?”

  “If it were me,” Grubb said, “I wouldn’t see the need to do anything. It’s up to him to apologize. You weren’t at fault.” Giving advice discomfited Grubb, yet if spontaneity bordered opportunism, so did reticence border desertion. He could not remain entirely silent.

  The Lotus Jewel did not see things in quite the same way. The rebuke had been deserved—only not from Corrigan! Not from Corrigan. It was because she had disappointed him that she wept, though she didn’t quite understand that herself. The knowledge hovered, wraithlike, below the horizon of her mind.

  “Corrigan does have a sharp tongue,” Grubb said.

  “He didn’t mean it.”

  “The crew doesn’t like him very much.”

  “But I do.”

  “He always spots one tiny, little infraction and takes all his bearings on that.”

  The Lotus Jewel looked up and tossed her head, though the tresses had been years ago cut away. “He can pick at nits,” she admitted. A comforting thought, that her transgression had been a nit. “I can’t be very stupid if I hold a master’s certificate in AI systems engineering, can I?”

  “Of course not.” Grubb could not conceive of any flaw in perfect
beauty. Certificates weren’t in it. The Lotus Jewel could have proclaimed herself Queen of Ceres and Grubb would have as happily agreed.

  “Thank you.” She laid a hand on his forearm. His arm was bare because, in his work with the ovens, Grubb favored a singlet over the coveralls most of the crew wore. She found his skin soft and pliant, very unlike Corrigan’s. The back of his arm was covered with fine hairs. She saw his skin prickle with goose bumps and smiled.

  “I must look awful,” she said; and indeed, this was a secret fear of hers: that her beauty was a vast and comic mistake, and someday a small boy in the passing crowd would point it out.

  “Impossible,” said Eaton Grubb.

  Grubb was a man of the senses, but sense is not passive. The Object does not merely impress itself like a seal upon wax, but fuses with the Subject in the act of knowing, which is why to know someone is a very intimate thing. The form of The Lotus Jewel had an intentional existence in the mind of Eaton Grubb that was wholly distinct from, though no less real than, the extensional existence of her matter floating there in the deserted Starview Room. And if this form were stripped of whatever flaws her matter may have possessed, why then who is to say that the flaws mattered?

  “You’re in love with me,” she said, as always with that note of hidden surprise, as if she could not quite give credence to it.

  “Always,” Grubb said softly. “I love everything about you.” He might have been mistaken in that. It might have been awe, and not love that he felt. He tried not to look at her breasts when he said it. He did not want to sully his love of her with mere lust, although the lust was there, and no mistake. “I love your dress uniform,” he said, picking something more neutral. “Red flatters you.”