The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Their chatter attracted Ratline’s attention and he hollered at them to get back to work. “This ain’t no damn tea party.”

  “It never is,” said Miko aside to Okoye.

  “Something is bothering him,” Okoye said of the cargo master.

  “You mean he’s not always like this?”

  The Igbo girl shook her head. She did not know how she knew, but she knew that some sort of struggle was taking place deep inside the void that was Ratline’s heart. Yet, how could she put words to it, if Ratline could not? “And the arthritis and the sinews?” she asked the engineer’s mate.

  “Oh, springs lose their springiness and lubricants grow gummy and photocells get dimmed by dirt. They really are alive when you stop to think of it. Machines are. Maybe they’re the most alive things on the ship.”

  This time Okoye was certain the Amalthean was joking. Later, she became less certain.

  “What is that you’re humming?” Miko asked while they refastened the casement to the tommy roll’s whirligig. “It was—” She paused searching for a word and not finding it because the word she wanted was lovely, and she had no referent for it in her life.

  But she did not need words when she spoke to Nkieruke Okoye. “It is called ‘The Mother Confronts the Dawn.’” Okoye hadn’t known she was even humming it until Miko asked. Circumstance had stolen up on her and planted the music in her head.

  “What a peculiar title! Is it from your homeland?”

  Startled, Okoye laughed. To think that such music might come from little Afikpo-in-the-bush! “No, dear girl, it be a tone poem in the European tradition, with all harmony and counterpoint a-jangle; but the composer—Selim Haverstrom—he was using the scales of the Eastern tradition and the rhythm of the African. Why, I could not hum the half of it were I having three mouths to do it.”

  Miko stared at her workmate with astonishment. “That is the longest sentence I’ve ever heard you speak.”

  Okoye thought about it and considered that it was likely true.

  “I don’t know much about music,” Miko confessed. “I never heard much, growing up. I had other priorities.”

  And might that not be the very reason why the Amalthean girl’s soul was the size of a ground nut? Okoye hummed more tunes as they worked, simple tunes that she had heard Mr. Grubb sing. “The Leaving of LEO,” “Estrada Brilliantinha,” “Na Novy Domu,” and others. She didn’t sing the words, although she knew some of them. With her inner eye she watched Miko listen. Miko did not join in, but Okoye was patient. Witchy girls learned patience.

  Later that night, after she had gone to bed, a noise in the corridor woke Okoye, but she floated in her sleeping cage and stared into the darkness because she could not quite place the sound. Something had struck the bulkhead; but she listened for a while and heard nothing more, and so she drifted off again to an uncertain sleep.

  The second time the sound came, Okoye slithered out of her bag and fumbled in the darkness for her singlet. She noticed that two hours had gone by on the clock, though it seemed but a moment to her. Her sleep seldom bore dreams and so seemed of no duration. She was always surprised that morning came so soon.

  Okoye fastened the straps on her singlet, then paused. Things had no doubt gone bump in the night before and never disturbed her sleep. “You are a crazy girl,” she told herself in her mother’s voice. “Why you always be poking into things?” But she did not unfasten her garment and had already kicked gently toward the door when the sound came again.

  She entered the corridor and Ship, sensing her presence, dutifully activated the sector lights around her, but this only accentuated the shadows that lurked around the curves of the corridor. It was as if the gloom were a palpable thing and the lamps had only illuminated it. The ship lay quiet.

  Okoye kicked off the door pad, caromed off the inner corridor bulkhead—why, that was the sound she had heard earlier!—and grabbed the monkey bar before Ratline’s door. There she hesitated and was about to turn back when the sound came again. A dull smack, as if something flat had struck a wall. It was not the same sound as before. She slapped the hoígh plate and the sounds within suddenly ceased. She slapped it again, and there was no answer. She put her lips to the door and said in a shouted whisper, “Ratline! I know you be awake. Is something wrong?”

  There was no response, no sound of movement within. She slapped the door directly and said, “Ratline!” And again received silence.

  She had just turned away when the door slid open and, spinning ’round at the sudden noise, she saw the cargo master weaving uncertainly within the frame. His eyes were red and rheumy and his bare shanks dangled from under a belted nightshirt of unexpected red silk. He held something snake-like in his right hand, and his gaze was venomous, but blank; as if he saw nothing but hated everything. “What is it?” And his breath was acid and metallic.

  Okoye did not flee, though it took an effort of will. “You banged into my wall coming past,” she said. “It woke me up. I thought you might be hurt.”

  “If you want to kiss my hurt and make me better, come back when your kisses mean something, or I hurt somewhere useful.”

  Ratline was the only one on board from whom Okoye sensed nothing in her inner pool. He made no ripple; cast no reflection. It was as if he were an empty bottle, and more than empty: as if he were a vacuum capable of sucking everyone else within the void of his heart. That he might think of her sexually frightened her beyond measure. “Are you drunk?” she asked, for Ratline, though often surly, was seldom deliberately hateful.

  The cargo master’s smile was gap-toothed sly. “You want some, girlie? Come on inside. If I’ve been bad, you can spank me.” What he held, she saw now, was a leather strop.

  She knew it had been a mistake to investigate the sounds. Not that she was in danger from this spindle-shanked, drunken old wreck—the teachings of the sisterhood had included self-defense—but she would remember in the morning this man, and she could never, ever look on him again as she had before.

  If there was anything left to salvage in the heart of the ruin that Timmy Ratline had become, it lay in his next words. “Wait,” he said as she turned away. And then, after a pause, “’M sorry. D’n mean it. D’n mean it.” His arms ached and his eyes felt like sandpaper. The old wounds he had never seen throbbed. “Jus’ tired, ’Kiru. I’m jus’ tired.” He made no move to touch her. He had never had children—he could never have had children—but ’Kiru and Rave and the others were his, and though he could discipline like a Spartan, he could not bear to hurt them. Sometimes, when he forgot how many years had passed, he thought himself almost one of them.

  “I finely foun’ some hobie,” he said, pushing aside from the door so that she could look within at two coils, wrapped and tied and floating in the air. “I spen’ all night drawn it to wire.”

  Okoye blinked at the treasure, knew she should find joy in it, since it meant that the Great Sail would fly once more; yet there was something about the dull-gray matte wire that filled her with profound unease. “You drew all that yourself?”

  “From odds ’n’ ends. Couldn’t bear her disappointment,” he said; then staring at Okoye earnestly, added, “You unnerstan’ that, don’ you? I could bear her disgrace, but not her despair.” He turned and gazed at the precious wire. “Almost like the old days, it was…Drawin’ and spinnin’ up in th’ sailmaker’s berth, me ’n ol’ Sammy M’Cloud. I was sail-maker’s mate by then…We had five spinning machines to braid cable and they’d hum and clack an’…Oh God,” he wiped a tear, “those were days.”

  “I thought you were a—”

  “Cabin attendant? Yah, for a while, when I was young and purty. When I grew hair where some didn’t like it, I went for sailor. Climbin’ the mast. Cuttin’ ’n splicin’. You gotta watch that hoop stress. One time a jib sail parted and the whip end cut poor Lenny Connover in half, space suit and all. His hand was still holding the torch.” Ratline laughed and then laughed again. After a moment, he quieted.
He looked at the wire once more and shook his head sadly. “It wasn’t like the old days,” he said quietly. “Not really.”

  Ship conducts a complete survey of relict memory associated with the sail locker, the Long Room, and the loci of the Corrigan-entity and the other entities that correlate with him. It runs a x2 analysis of the resulting contingency table and finds a significant association at the 85th percentile. Chisquare is not an especially powerful test of significance, nor 85% anything approaching certainty: but it will do for a hunch.

  The Least Wrangler

  Ivar Akhaturian had tagged Mr. Ratline as Demon-incarnate, Rave as Jealousy-incarnate, and Twenty-four as Love-incarnate; but Nkieruke Okoye he could not label at all because, Okoye being a pledged virgin, carnate was not in it. Ivar thought virginity a silly thing, but what else could he think having so willfully lost his? And so he accommodated himself to the loss by holding the forfeit of no great value. Maybe it was an Earth thing, he thought; and he was largely right. He thought the Igbo girl’s eyes looked inside the soul and saw everyone’s secret self. She seldom spoke and perhaps that made her seem wiser than she was. Whatever the reason, he believed he could tell her things. She listened and maybe could advise him what to do about this new and unexpected fatherhood of his.

  “No one can tell you that,” Okoye told the Least Wrangler. “It is like your clothing. I can see the color and the cut and the style but only you can say whether it fits well and you can wear it comfortably.” Privately, she was as appalled as Wong had been. Ivar and Twenty-four were too young! Too young in Lagos. Too young in Calabar. Too young even in Afikpo, where marriage did come sooner than in the big cities. Yet she withheld judgment, unsure whether the customs of her village were the laws of the universe.

  “I don’t know if I’m ready.”

  “No one is ever ready.”

  “I’ll do the right thing.”

  “I know you will.”

  “I love her. I really do. I don’t care what Rave says.”

  “Love is not enough.” At least, not the hormonal sort of love that Ivar meant; not the rush, not the irresistable pulse of the blood. The pledge that Okoye had taken when her flows began had warded her through that phase—far enough to spy, on the remoter shore of adolescence, the other lumber with which a house was built.

  Ivar did know that love alone was not enough, but he knew it as he knew most things: as an idea, as an abstraction. He did not yet know it in his belly. It had no kinetics for him. Okoye sensed the turmoil in the lad. There was wild remorse and cringing fear and, inevitably, boyish pride. That endothermic mix had not yet congealed into anything solid, let alone into anything that had a name, but Okoye did not sense calm, and that was good, for calm was not called for.

  It had become nearly impossible for deCant and Akhaturian to be alone together for any length of time without getting naked. This seemed to them the most natural thing, but the sheer insistence of it bothered the Least Wrangler. It was as if his behavior were compelled by a force of nature and not by an act of will; and so he tried by various stratagems to engage his attention on something else, on anything else, just to prove to himself that he could refrain from the earthy deed if he wanted to. It never worked. He never actually wanted to.

  This carnal predestination did not bother Twenty-Four deCant, for it meant one decision fewer to fret her. This single facet of her life at least was a fait accompli, in which she need only enjoy the accomplishment and leave the rest to fate. For all else, her life had become a whirligig of competing decisions and tasks and uncertainties.

  Okoye had been coopted onto some mysterious task by Corrigan, and Evermore had been assigned to work under Bhatterji; so all of Ratline’s scut work fell on the shoulders of Akhaturian and deCant and, as she was the senior of the two, more on hers than his. DeCant had lost count of her assignments, although she consoled herself with the thought that, like the integers, they were at least countable. Ratline had told them to redeploy the entire cargo hold; and that, in turn, required that each container’s mass be confirmed, a new location assigned, and the pods themselves physically undogged, shifted, and redogged in their new homes. And, by the way, don’t forget to enter the new location in the database. Not having been told the reason for all the shifting, the two junior wranglers regarded the project as one more reprise of Ratline’s insane desire to work them to death.

  There were a great many pods in the hold, and Ratline’s calculations started them into an intricate quadrille. DeCant had opened the dance in media res, and more than once had to undo a move in order to get at the next container on her list. Ivar imagined a closed loop trajectory in the state space of load locations—really—in which the same loads shifted endlessly in and out of the same bins. He had never heard of Sisyphus, but he thought the concept loudly enough that Twenty-four eventually scowled at him.

  “I’m not a logistics expert,” she snapped after they had to pull five loads they had just shifted because the sixth load to be moved was dead behind them. “It’s a muffing Chinese puzzle, is what it is.”

  “If we laid out the sequence logically…” Ivar ventured. But he only ventured, because, in the first place, he was loath to criticize his beloved and in the second place, the said beloved gave him no opportunity to finish the thought.

  “I don’t have time for that! I have to shift these loads, and in between that I have to help The Lotus Jewel debug some old signal filter she’s resurrected. And in between that, I have a baby growing inside me….”

  A baby was worry enough, but hers was doomed to be a snake and while she had nothing against snakes personally, both Corrigan and the doctor were obviously unhappy and deCant grieved to deliver a baby to a life as joyless as theirs. Yet she had committed herself to the child’s upbringing, and that care would bind her to Ivar for the duration and bar them both for many years from ever seeing their homes. A Martian marriage was less than a lifetime’s commitment, but not when viewed from deCant’s end of the lifetime.

  “And in between that, I have to look after you….”

  That last was a hurtful thing to say, however true it was. DeCant was only a little older than Akhaturian—when measured in standard years—but it sometimes came home to her how much younger in other metrics the Callistan boy really was. She would fret that she had trapped him by her own carelessness; and at other times that she had trapped herself. But she dared not mention these concerns to Ivar because, dutiful as he was, he would blame himself for all her worries.

  I’m sorry, she would imagine him saying. I didn’t know this would happen.

  Which, of course, he was and he hadn’t; but out of respect for his pride she did not want to hear him say it.

  Partnering with Ivar really ought to have had more thought given it. It ought to have been entered upon with purpose, and not for mere happenstance. Yet the careful weighing of alternatives had never been her way. Taking things as they came had always served her well in the past, but she had not enough past to call it experience and, as events had proven, consequences really did matter. She had taken Ivar as he came, and now look where they were. Still, she was a girl who enjoyed her pleasures and, Okoye being pledged, the only alternative to Ivar had been Raphael Evermore.

  Evermore was stimulating company, alert and outspoken. He and deCant were really much alike, yet there was something about him that always struck her as selfish. She had seen that from the first day, when Rave had so eagerly welcomed her aboard at Port Deimos. He was polite, even courtly, but he had smiled to excess and deCant distrusted teeth. Ivar liked his johnny well enough—all boys did, and deCant suspected that even Gorgas had not forgotten that he owned one—but in the game of cat-and-johnny, Ivar tried earnestly to make the cat purr too. Rave, she suspected, would not. So it may be that she had pulled one boy into the breach to deny entry to the other.

  “…And in between that,” she announced molto crescendo, “I have my muffing mother to find!”

  DeCant’s life was being
progressively circumscribed. Choices were being shuttered off, one after another, like blocked pods in the cargo hold. She was an imaginative girl, and that was a part of her problem. At times, she could imagine too much.

  Once, working past her shift, she grabbed a late snack in the officers’ mess. Corrigan had come upon her and scolded her about proper procedures and deCant, saucy as you please, snagged an apple from the dog box and took a very deliberate bite from it right in front of him before she fled the room.

  The next morning, having been sent by The Lotus Jewel to fetch a power board from stores, deCant stopped to answer some few demands of Ratline, added three more tasks to her list as a result, and just plain forgot the chore. It was a difficult thing to push The Lotus Jewel into remonstration, but deCant managed it and, taking little pleasure in being the target for once, returned counter-battery fire and palmed the cat at the older woman. The two of them had not spoken since, and deciding how (or whether) to mend the rift had become one more muffing line item on her muffing to-do list.

  Several times she had even lashed out at Ivar, though she cried afterward at her own small-mindedness. In darker moods, she prophesied that one day he would leave her, and described the day in such detail that she seemed almost to have been there and had come back through time with a trip report. She dismissed his furious protestations of loyalty. What, after all, did he know? Had Ivar not the power to absorb hurts indefinitely, her growing acerbity might have fulfilled her own prophecy.

  But Ivar formed a kind of heat sink for her frustrations. He was young, but in that old-young fashion of the youth of the outer worlds, and not so young as to think that it was at him that her anger was aimed. He was possessed of that sort of patience that is sometimes mistaken for indecision; but he had fixed it in his mind that he would endure anything, anything at all, in order to keep her with him. He would excuse her every fault, content that she would run out of faults long before he did of excuses.