The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Pleased, The Lotus Jewel straightened a wristband and (because she knew what he was trying so hard not to look at) doubled over to adjust an ankle band too. “Do you like it?” she said as she straightened. “I’ve had it since I was purser in the old Mooncrest Tranquility. I took the insignia off when they…After I resigned my berth there…But I still wear it for the captain’s dinners.”

  “I know,” said Grubb with a swallow. “I’ve seen you in it. And the earrings and the brooch, they’re gold, aren’t they? I thought about being a jeweler once, but I didn’t have the knack for it.”

  “They’re Martian ironstone, the earrings are. You can see the black-and-red flecks in the facets. Go ahead, take a closer look.” And Grubb leaned toward her to see the specks and learned that there are no neutral subjects.

  In orbital mechanics, it is well known that the closer a satellite orbits its primary, the faster it must move to maintain its altitude—until the stresses of acceleration overcome the material strength of the body itself. It is called Roche’s Limit, this minimum safe distance, and any satellite that crosses it bursts asunder into countless tumbling shards. Saturn won her rings in that manner, or so it is said, and became thereby the most beautiful body in the High System.

  Grubb cried out as he crossed the limit, and The Lotus Jewel as well, in quick Oh’s! that might have been of surprise or delight or both, between sudden and eager kisses. Closer and faster, they scattered pieces of themselves into a ring about them. The earrings and the brooch glittered like ice moons in the light of the galaxy outside—those millions of stars, unreachably distant, yet so numerous as to cast shadows and throw strange colors across her soft, tawny contours. Color, shape, texture, aroma, flavor, and tone combined into that grand harmony that Grubb had always sought—and which afterward filled him with an intense melancholy that he treasured for the rest of his days.

  The Lotus Jewel had not been unfaithful to her lover, for she had given Grubb only a body, and not a heart. (She was profligate with the tangible, but the spiritual she hoarded like a miser.) Nothing had been planned. The sudden tearing need had been as unexpected and as overwhelming to her as it had been to Grubb, as if they had both been suddenly possessed by a strange and wonderful force, but she wasted no time in wondering why. She was a creature entirely of the moment.

  It was different with Miko and Corrigan. They were both careful by nature. Their orbits moved slowly, and in well-defined paths. There would be no impact, no sudden bursting—only the long, patient curvature of space and time pulling them in. The Lotus Jewel had shared her flesh with Eaton Grubb yet had not broken faith with Corrigan; but Corrigan, who had not so much as touched the elfin girl, already had, for he had looked upon Miko as a man looks upon a woman, with his heart. It was only that his heart did not yet know it.

  Neither Grubb nor The Lotus Jewel could find the second earring, though they searched a long time. Perversely, it had come to rest against the great viewing window and was lost, one small stellar cluster against the whole wild universe beyond; and so they did not see it. The loss saddened Grubb more even than it did The Lotus Jewel, for he did love beautiful things and wept to lose them.

  The Void

  Ram Bhatterji hovered over a pit endlessly deep and trembled with the readiness of a bridegroom before his bride—a cold, hard bitch of a bride, who would suck the life from her lover if she could, but who by that same lethal carelessness impressed life more firmly into a man’s awareness. Bhatterji trembled. His blood throbbed. His breath burned. Eagerness was a hard lump beneath his belly.

  Bhatterji finished the weld, and the white glare within the clamshell died. He unfastened the clamps that held it around the projector grid. “I’m ready to weld the Florence strut,” he announced to Evermore.

  “Almost cut away,” the apprentice told him. He was slicing off the mangled strut with a laser, collecting the metallic vapors in a static well he held in his left hand. Evermore wore a tether clipped securely to an eye bolt on the hull and he relocated this tether each time he shifted position. There were times, Bhatterji thought, when a sensible man did wear a line, but it signified a man’s helplessness before the Void—or his belief in his helplessness—and belief informed behavior.

  “Take your time,” Bhatterji said mildly, but with enough sarcasm that Evermore straightened and made no move. The boy’s grip on the cutting torch clenched and unclenched. Its laser cut through steel; a suit’s fabric would be as nothing. One swipe and Bhatterji would no more bedevil him. “We do what the ship wants first,” Bhatterji told him. “Later, we do what we want.”

  He undogged his clamshell. Evermore still had not moved. “Are you going to finish that strut?” Gorgas had wanted action, Gorgas would get action.

  Evermore capitulated. “I’ll finish it.”

  “Fine.” Bhatterji squatted and unclipped Evermore’s tether. “Move around to the other side. You’ll never get a clean cut from that angle.” When Evermore clambered monkey-style around the support cage, never losing contact with the hull, Bhatterji added, “And if you damage those focusing rings—”

  Evermore oriented himself and resumed cutting. Bhatterji grunted and turned away, having gotten what he wanted. As he did so, the Milky Way caught his eye. The vast starry river seemed to flow across the heavens like the sacred Ganges itself. He could swear that he saw it moving, as if he could dive into it and be carried off cleansed to eternity. When he looked back to Evermore, the boy was trying to control the laser and the static well and keep hold of the ship at the same time. As that required three hands, he held strut and static well with the same hand.

  Bhatterji sighed in exasperation. The boy didn’t need leverage for a laser cut. As it was, the grip was awkward. Bobble the static well and—

  —And the metallic vapors created by the laser torch blossom like an incandescent globe, engulfing glove and arm, scorching the fabric, and splashing silvery filigrees across the metalocene faceplate.

  Not a good thing, Bhatterji thought, observing the accident with peculiar and detached calm, but not immediately dangerous if one reacted quickly.

  Which Evermore did, though not with the necessary efficiency. He reached for his damaged visor with both hands, crying out in surprise and shock. A violent motion, it pushed him free of the Farnsworth cage. “Fool!” said Bhatterji. “The static well!”

  But Evermore had already released the static well and the charged metallic vapor, deprived now of its sink, coated the rails of the cage. Evermore himself drifted farther from the ship, still crying, “My visor! It’s cracking!”

  Bhatterji stared into the waiting maw of the Void and knew that moments mattered. He activated his suit’s targeting software. “Go there,” he told the suit when he had the boy centered in the crosshairs, and he dove single-mindedly into the black pool of space.

  The two of them, master and apprentice, fell and fell. The ship is not accelerating, Bhatterji reminded himself. We share the same velocity, the ship and I. The River will not pull irretrievably ahead. But he did not look to his rear display for fear that the universe would call him Liar. His heart hammered at the bars of his ribs like a prisoner craving release. Please, he thought. Please. He could not say with whom he pled, nor even what he pled for. Just that one thought, over and over. Please.

  When he reached Evermore, the suddenness of the contact surprised him. Proportion and distance had ceased to exist, and so he did not know how close the boy was until he had him in his arms. Evermore struggled, still crying about his visor. Shut up, Bhatterji wanted to tell him. Shut up, shut up, shut up! He could not orient himself with the boy twisting so in his grip, and if he could not find the ship again, he could not jet them back. Evermore would drag him into the Void too. Falling forever, Bhatterji thought. Drowning among the stars, like Enver Koch. And what purpose would that serve? Panic carried a price, and a man must pay his debts.

  Bhatterji released Evermore.

  “Oh, God, don’t leave me!” Evermore shouted.


  “Quiet,” Bhatterji growled. He looked quickly around. Up. Down. There! The ship, at 4:00 low, was already noticeably smaller. Or was that too only another illusion of perspective? Bhatterji seized Evermore’s trailing tether before it could drift past and he hauled the two of them together, turning the boy so that they both faced the ship. “Don’t move.” He should have said, Be quiet, too, for Evermore continued to sob. Bhatterji centered the ship in his crosshairs. “Go there,” he told the suit, and he pushed the now limp form toward the engineering lock on the lower hull. “Miko,” he called the ship. “Open the dock.”

  “Is Rave all right?”

  “His faceplate is scored and opaqued by metallic vapor. The score lines could be stress concentrators. I’m bringing him in.”

  Evermore said, “I shit my pants. Oh God, I shit my pants.” Surreptitiously, Bhatterji reached around the front of Evermore’s suit and yanked loose the cable for his radio.

  The bay doors slid open, spewing a mist of fine snow because Miko hadn’t waited for the chamber to reach vacuum before cycling it. The exterior and interior lights came on—a brilliant white—casting sharp-edged shadows that separated night from day in jagged chunks.

  The doors were sliding closed even while Bhatterji passed between them. Air dumps filled the vacuum. A howling wind caught him and silence gave way to a great rushing sound. The throbbing vibrations of the pumps seemed curiously in time with his own heart, and the windsong with the grateful exhalation of his lungs.

  Only then, with the outerlock sealed and the air pressure approaching ship ambient, did Bhatterji turn Evermore around to study his visor. There were silvery streaks across the darkened plastic, as if some god had cried iron tears and they had frozen on the boy’s face. Evermore’s pale, wide-eyed visage was a ghost behind the darkened and opaque visor. On closer inspection, Bhatterji saw that some of the tracks had indeed scored the visor, and from the tip of one metallic streak radiated a fine hairline.

  Suddenly overwhelmed by a vision of what might have been, Bhatterji seized the other and enfolded him in a clumsy, suited embrace. Evermore was a passive lump, neither returning nor rejecting the pressure. Now, thought Bhatterji. Now is the time for panic and fear. And the dogs of Mars did sweep through him, in such wild career that he trembled in their turbulent wake. It was a fine point whether he held so tightly to Evermore because of the lad’s near brush with death or to still his own sudden and uncontrolled shivers. A pulse of irresistible desire overwhelmed him, a brutal urge to hammer away and prove that, once again, he lived and had triumphed over the bitch Void.

  The inner doors swung open and Miko entered the dock, and the moment she did Evermore pushed Bhatterji violently away. “Don’t you touch me, you pervert!” And he swung gauntleted fists, whose impact Bhatterji absorbed in silence. “Don’t you touch me! You tried to kill me!”

  Miko put a restraining hand on Evermore’s arm and he shrugged it off, but he didn’t swing his fists again. Bhatterji broke his seals and lifted his helmet off and, a moment later, Evermore did the same. He would not look at Bhatterji. The engineer held out his arm. “Let me see the visor.” Evermore threw the helmet, but Bhatterji had expected that and caught it neat. He studied it first from the outside, then pulled it on to see how it looked from the inside. “Fractured,” he announced after he had taken it off, “but not cracked. You did well to brace it with your hands, yes.” The boy had been doing nothing of the sort. He had brought his hands to his face from sheer terror. “However, the better practice is to reduce suit internal pressure to minimum and to seal the blast shield in place over the visor. Why did you not—?” Bhatterji feigned sudden understanding. “Ah, I see. The connection to your communicator came loose in the accident. No wonder I could not hear you.”

  Miko said, “But, I—” And Bhatterji silenced her with a look.

  “Enter a work order,” Bhatterji told her. “Replace visor on helmet number…” He read the serial number off the helmet. “Attention Ratline.”

  “Ratline?” She caught the helmet he tossed her.

  “He’s the suit-tech on this bucket, and he’s got nothing better to do while I fix the ship. Evermore, why don’t you shower and relax.” He turned to Miko and laughed. “The first time I took a tumble like that I learned why these suits come equipped with diapers!” And he laughed again, hugely, and he never looked at Evermore.

  Miko caught the odor when Rave passed her, but she said nothing until she was alone with Bhatterji. “Did you really soil yourself the first time you tumbled?”

  Bhatterji had been studying the visor, pressing the hairline fracture with his thumbs. Miko could see the way his hands trembled. Suddenly, the visor popped and cracked. Bhatterji looked up and glanced at the inner lock, where Evermore had gone. “I’m glad he didn’t see that…. Of course, I did. I wasn’t the first and Evermore won’t be the last. Any man the Void doesn’t terrify isn’t a real man. He’s a robot, or he’s a fool; and the Void will kill them both.”

  “Rave said you tried to kill him.” Miko brought out the accusation casually, as if discussing the malfunction of a boron injector.

  “Kill him?” Bhatterji looked toward the inner lock again. “He’s still walking around.”

  “I saw you unclip his tether.”

  “So he could move to the other side of the Florence strut. I thought he would reconnect. He always does. He tries to play it safe and careful, but that’s mad. There is no ‘safe’ out here. It’s a subtle trap, ever to think you’re safe.” He heard the rising inflections in his voice and folded his shaking hands abruptly into fists. When he spoke again, his voice was calmer. “No, Miko. When I decide to kill a man, he doesn’t go off afterward and shower.”

  When Bhatterji had gone himself, to the spinhall to run the urge out of his blood and exhaust his fears and desires in his sweat, Miko remained thoughtfully in the engine control room, shutting down the systems they had been using, making certain everything was secured. What Bhatterji had said, there at the end, was the most chilling thing she had heard since coming aboard The River of Stars.

  Because The River was officially a hybrid ship, the Long Room on the upper deck held a full complement of knitters and splicers and braiders; but because no one had taken the designation seriously for a long time, the sail-making equipment had been left in a state of slowly accumulating disrepair. Okoye did not understand how unused equipment could wear out and it was left to Miko, the renegade engineer, to explain.

  It is hard to say what drew these two together: the Igbo girl who could read another’s soul and the Amalthean girl with little soul to read. They were much of an age: a little older than the other youngsters, a little younger than the older crew. Miko had grown up faster, so Okoye seemed the younger of the two; but Okoye had grown up more fully, so that Miko also seemed the younger.

  “It’s simple,” the elf explained while they both rested after having torn down a balky tommy roll. “Cyberalzheimer’s sets in and the stupes forget how to do their jobs. Oh, and sometimes the sinews grow loose or the eyes get dim or the joints arthritic.”

  “Go away, girl,” Okoye said in her mother’s voice. (A helpful voice. Whenever Okoye used it, away on Earth her mother would be silenced, which greatly irritated the woman. I wish ’Kiru would use her own voice more often, she would complain to her neighbors, though the neighbors were secretly grateful.) “Machines be not people to grow old and crippled.” Sometimes when she was flustered, her English would revert to a strange blend: part Niger-Congo, part Elizabethan. (For who are greater lovers of Shakespeare, greater lovers of fine words finely spoken, than the folk of the hill country above the Oil Rivers? Why, the great traveling road show from Ibadan that had celebrated the Bard’s 500th birthday had drawn the people in their tens of thousands, audiences that had raised a great hiss whenever the actors spoke because 10,000 pairs of lips whispered the lines along with them.) “You are making fun of a poor country girl.”

  Fun was something Miko ne
ver made. She was deadly serious every moment of her life. Okoye should have known that. Little soul the Amalthean orphan might have, but that little was adamantine. Yet, if Okoye should have known, then likely she did know and the Igbo girl only meant to draw her companion out from herself. She just may have been as wise and as clever as Ivar Akhaturian thought.

  One time in her village near Afikpo, Nkieruke Okoye had turned a boy into a yam. She did this by drawing the boy away from the village, then sneaking back and putting a large tuber in his bed. His mother had raised a wail on the discovery and the neighbors had taken it up. The policeman, when he arrived, was puzzled and took the yam into custody, where he kept a close watch over it should it take a mind to become a boy again. When the lad himself reappeared bruised and scratched and sleepless from the bush the next day and admitted that he had chased ’Kiru for a kiss of her and had gotten lost, everyone had a great laugh and said what a fine joke it had been and his mother made a soup from the yam. A fine trick, they all agreed, but everyone looked sideways at her afterward, for she had been promised to the boy. The “sitting policeman” had spoken with the “standing policeman” and the scroll had been read and both sets of parents had signed. By rights, the boy could have asked for more than a kiss.

  He had, but ’Kiru never mentioned that. As for the boy, he did not wish to become a yam again.

  “It’s the media,” Miko explained. “It deteriorates over time. The magfield raised by the radiation belt, stray cosmic rays, simple aging of the material substrate…If you don’t migrate the information now and then, the machine loses bits and the Artificial Stupids that run them become even stupider.” She wagged a thumb at the ranks of machines. “That’s what happened to Number Two spinner. Deader’n Dizzy’s mouse. Can’t use it at all.”