The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Twenty-four, meanwhile, ricocheted from one concern to another. It was very much in the spirit with which she shuffled containers about the cargo hold. She would flit from child-rearing to cargo-shifting to the sysop’s anger to Ratline’s obdurateness to the self-esteem of snakes to her long-lost mother (if “lost” is quite the right term for it)—all in the course of a single pause for conversation. Freighted with so many tasks and decisions, the girl attacked them all in parallel and so made little progress on any of them. Cargo lots danced endlessly about the hold. Tasks languished half-finished. Errands went un-run. They had not so much as picked a name for their child.

  This kaleidoscopic behavior was not her default mode. She could improvise like a juggler. Witness her chess game, in which she never employed a recognizable offense, but made them up on the spot. This sometimes worked brilliantly, and often failed as brilliantly. (That she never employed a defense, improvised or not, went without saying. She was pregnant, after all.) But it seemed to Ivar that there was a cutoff point, a peak load, when the juggler threw one too many balls in the air and they began to crash one after the other. So when he led her out to the spinhall one particular day, it was not only for the mandatory exercise. Instead, before Twenty-four could start into her warm-ups, he took her by the hand and swung his arm grandly across the hall’s expanse as if he had led her atop Mt. Nebo to show her the Promised Land.

  “Do you feel it?” he asked.

  DeCant did not like riddles. She did not want one more muffing question needing a muffing answer. “Feel what?” she snapped.

  “Mars.”

  A simple word, simply spoken. Mars. There had been a time when its very whisper had lured men and women from the safety of Earth and Moon and LEO to wager their lives against its abrasive moods. But Twenty-four had fled from the sand and the rock and the dry-ice snow, an orphan and a refugee from the Decompression, and for her the word held no allure, only the memory of ghastly death for those she had loved the most.

  “Mars?” she said. “Feel Mars?” The spinhall was broad, but not so broad as Marineris with its bright metallocene quarter-roof. She could see piping for the ship’s utilities, but they were puny things beside the “Grand Canal”—that great pipeline even now a-building from the ice caps to the settlements. Feel Mars? Feel Mars? Why, the only thing she felt was…

  Weight.

  She turned to him in sudden comprehension, saw his proud and bashful grin, and loved him more than she had ever loved any other thing in her short and lonely life. “Oh. I’m so stupid!”

  “No,” Akhaturian said. “You were just too busy to think about it.” He caught her in his arms and whirled her around.

  “Centrifugal force!” she cried.

  “Mars equivalent!” he hollered.

  “I’ll live in the spinhall!” she said. “She won’t be a snake. My baby won’t be a snake.”

  “He,” Ivar corrected her.

  “But there aren’t any rooms out here.”

  “To hell with staterooms and luxury!” Ivar said. “Who needs them? We’ll set up in one of the equipment alcoves. I’ll clear things with Mr. Corrigan—and The Lotus Jewel can reroute our ports and terminals.” Ivar was a hard boy to damp. Graphite rods weren’t in it, let alone a few minor details to settle. DeCant grew a little more excited each time she was struck by one of his verbal neutrons.

  “Maybe,” said Ivar, “’Kiru and Rave can help us build some partitions.”

  “Partitions?”

  “For privacy.”

  “Privacy?”

  Ivar Akhaturian was a prudish sort of sex maniac. When he blushed, as deCant had long discovered, he blushed all the way. “Th—th—this isn’t the Fifties,” he managed to stammer.

  “Too bad.” She gave him a wicked grin, full of vice and decadence, though she couldn’t hold it for long and broke into laughter just before he did. It wasn’t the Eighties, either.

  The Ping

  Stepan Gorgas was not a man to verbalize his thoughts, let alone his feelings. That did not mean he lacked for either. He was as silent as Okoye, though for different reasons. Satterwaithe believed him haughty; but he was only a man who thought and felt so clearly that he had no need to realize those inner certainties by saying them aloud. When angry, he seldom shouted. When amused, he seldom laughed. When he had an idea, he saw no need to chat about it.

  Yet no man is of a piece. All are motley. Gorgas awoke one morning to the endless sameness of his quarters and felt the urge to talk. Only there was, as there had been for too many years, no one to talk with. He opened his eyes to the same dull, gray walls, the same worn furniture.

  He did not immediately unfasten his blanket, but lay a while longer in its grip, staring at nothing, but thinking furiously. “It’s hard some days,” he told Marta’s image, which seemed to show surprise at hearing him speak. (Perhaps it did. The embedded chips that morphed the image might have been smart enough to react to verbal input.) “I don’t understand the point of going on. It would be different if I were headed somewhere, but I’m not.” The days seemed to pass for him with a depressing sameness. Bhatterji would chase his engine repair the way Achilles chased the tortoise, coming eternally closer without ever quite reaching it.

  “Marta,” he said again. “Something is wrong with the ship.”

  “Autocheck performed,” his grille announced. “Function verified. Compiling list of anomalies: first anomaly—”

  “Abort report,” Gorgas growled. And therein lay another source of his disquiet. Ship ought ought not to have responded to a passing remark. “Even if Bhatterji does get the engines patched,” he told the ghost of his wife, “and we limp into Port Galileo, the Yard work needed to bring her back to working condition will be more than the hulk is worth.” This would be his last transit, he thought, this accidental captaincy of his. The consortium would scrap the ship, pay off the crew, and that would be that. He would languish rockbound for the rest of his life, for who would hire a bad-luck captain? He would sit around in the Unicorn, drinking and complaining to other rockbound spacers, or cadging tales from those passing through. He could imagine himself keeping track of which ships docked, compiling lists of incidents, forming summaries and sending cranky reports to the Astrogational Union or uploading even crankier posts to the Astral Gazette. He could imagine himself thinking he was doing something useful.

  Gorgas shivered and unfastened his blanket at last and drifted across the room to the mirror. A pair of Space Guard commander’s shoulder straps were fastened there, so that he must look upon them each morning as he dressed. The one was torn a little at the snap. He touched it, remembering how it had gotten torn.

  It was strange. He could remember the Bakony mountains. He could remember fishing on Lake Balaton. (There had been an especially wily pike one summer and he had stalked it for many lazy, sun-warmed days before hauling it flapping into his skiff.) He could remember all these things; but he could not close his eyes and see them. It was as if he only knew of his memories and did not actually possess them. He stretched his arms out and flexed his fingers and elbows. How long had his bones been in space? Far too long, he thought. I will never see the Little Plain again.

  “Captain?” It was Corrigan’s voice over the bridge talker.

  Gorgas sighed and considered not taking the call. He had never asked to be captain. But who else was there? Who else was there? “Yes, Number One?”

  “The corrections to the Virginal orbits are finished.”

  “Have you taken their bearings yet?”

  “Negative. I’ve just called The Lotus Jewel to the bridge.”

  Gorgas made a fist of his left hand and rubbed the gnarled and swollen knuckles with his right. He wondered what Corrigan had found. There were so many possibilities….

  “Captain?”

  Gorgas firmly ordered his mind. “Yes, yes. Call Satterwaithe and have her come up too.”

  Corrigan acknowledged and Gorgas squinted at the rumpled face he saw in
the mirror. When had he become so old? He could not remember having grown old. He rubbed his cheeks with the flat of his hand. How would he look with a beard? Beards could add distinction. It would grow in white and grizzly, he was certain. A “space-dog” look. But in the meantime he would appear to be an old derelict who had let his appearance go.

  He wiped his face with a ’fresher towelette and ran a brush through his stubby hair. He pulled on yesterday’s coverall.

  Today would be different, a little. Today they would fix Stranger’s Reef.

  Belowdecks, already long awake and active, Ramakrishnan Bhatterji made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The jelly was a micron-thick solgel spread by vapor deposition and the “peanut butter” was a hybrid photonic glass of his own devising. Neither a glass nor a plastic, but partaking of the properties of both, it was transparent to certain specified wavelengths, and yet malleable into an infinity of patterns. He worked in a pale yellow light that cast his face and smock and even his shadow into strange, unearthly tones. Ordinary white light, which contained UV, would ruin the solgel.

  The engineer hummed as he worked. Unconsciously, he timed his motions to the rhythm of an old jazz raga. The notes swung in sudden, antic changes of tempo and key; and antic did his actions appear to any who watched.

  “Soft bake is finished,” Miko told him a moment before the slave AI flashed the message on Bhatterji’s goggles.

  “Very well,” he said. “Hand me the mask.”

  Miko stifled a yawn—she had been helping Okoye most of the night—and checked the reference number on her own goggle screens. Then, using her dataglove, she dragged the mask icon atop the icon for the photonic omnitool. On the physical stage, the mems aligned on one another like a microscopic marching band at a halftime show. Bhatterji inspected the array under magnification, noted a line width exceeding the tolerance, and nudged a few of the mems into place with a virtual prod.

  Once the mask was properly aligned, Bhatterji hit it with the UV laser and the unmasked polymers writhed and linked. He zoomed out for a panorama of the entire light guide and grunted satisfaction. “All right, Miko,” he said, “develop that and check the optical profile; then you can deposit the cladding layer while I watch.”

  Speech between the two of them remained purely professional. Bhatterji regarded quiet as a sort of healing and words unspoken as a kind of truce. Their present relationship of frosty silence was, therefore, something of an improvement and a move in a healthy direction.

  Later, when it was time to pigtail the chip, Bhatterji prepared to mount the fibrop bundle himself, which preparation his mate watched with disfavor.

  “How can I learn maintenance,” Miko complained, “if I never get to practice.”

  Bhatterji hunched over the work stage and kicked the magnification until the optic ports loomed as wide as the entry to the Bosporus tunnel. “This isn’t practice,” he said offhandedly. “This is the real thing.”

  “Aren’t repairs always the real thing?”

  He paused, flipped his goggs, and looked at her. “To various degrees of urgency.” Then, giving her greater scrutiny, he added, “Miko, you’re good; but you’re green, and you look fagged. Are you getting enough sleep?”

  “Sure,” she replied, but replied too easily.

  “Well, maybe you could do this. I think you could—and if we had even one more fibrop bundle in stock, I’d put you in these stirrups without a blink. But we don’t.” And he turned back to his work.

  That was one more tally against him in Miko’s database. Miko loved the ship and, like any lover, yearned to fondle her beloved.

  “Once this chip is finished,” Bhatterji said while he worked, “there remains only the Hanssen coils for the number two CoRE magnet.” And that meant, his heart told him, that the calibration work on the anode spheres must soon begin—outside, amid the pulsing flames. His own pulse hammered once, hard, like a burst from a Farnsworth cage. “We’ll need cobalt and rare earths—use the Landis Blend—and a spool of double-f grade hobartium. Why don’t you go fetch all that while I finish this. The bill of materials is on the desktop.”

  “Yes, master,” his assistant muttered, though not so loud that he could hear. She made enough of a drama of going to the stockroom that Rave Evermore, fabricating new ring guides two work bays over, gave her a curious glance as she passed by.

  She returned to the machine shop after a few minutes, trembling with exaltation and fear. “I’ve got the cobalt and the RE,” she said, “but there’s no hobartium in the stockroom.”

  Bhatterji straightened and flipped up his goggs again. “There were two spools left.”

  “They must have walked with Jesus, because they aren’t there now.”

  Bhatterji did not waste time on words like impossible. “We did a physical inventory at the very beginning of the project.” He was only thinking aloud, but Miko thought he was in denial. She knew perfectly well that they had taken inventory.

  “And we found a lot of shortages then,” he continued. Evermore, attracted by the activity, spun down the lathe and hoisted his face shield to listen. “And we calculated how much hobartium we would need,” Bhatterji concluded. “Perhaps the spools are in the wrong bin.”

  “I checked.”

  “Could we have used more than our estimates?”

  “You aren’t very meticulous in your record-keeping.”

  “If we can’t rewind the CoRE magnet,” he said tightly, “we can’t repair the focusing ring. And that means the number two engine can’t be restarted.”

  And that meant that it was already many days too late to start the braking burn.

  And it further meant that Bhatterji would fail. That was the source of Miko’s exaltation. It was also the source of her fear.

  The bridge of The River of Stars was an oval and had been laid out for a great sail liner towing a dozen luxury modules and servicing over a hundred passengers. Consequently, it boasted more than a dozen workstations for section officers and an array of data screens that tiled the ceiling. Now, like much else in the old vessel, half the consoles had been shut down and disconnected and the overhead “sistines” were dark.

  The command chair was at the aft focus of the ellipse, but Corrigan seldom sat there when he held the watch. This was not because he shunned command, but because the seat had not been designed for a man of his proportions. Freefing seemed far more natural to him. It also gave him an aura of impermanence, as he never remained long in any one spot. To Satterwaithe, he seemed continually out of focus.

  Satterwaithe occupied the clip chair at the ellipse’s other focal point, by one of the derelict boards. Once upon a time, that board had been the sailing master’s station. Corrigan, noting that, wondered what abandoned dreams occupied her thoughts.

  The Lotus Jewel, at the comm station on the west side of the bridge, focused resolutely on her own board. Large, the room might be, but not so large as to hold her and Corrigan both. She still loved him, otherwise she would not have felt so hurt; but she kept waiting for him to say something or to do something so they could make amends, and each time he did not, she added it to the hurt.

  The door to the dayroom opened and Gorgas came on deck, looking scruffy and half-groomed. Corrigan motioned toward the command chair, but Gorgas waved him off. “No, Number One. You have the bridge.” Then he found a monkey bar and levered himself to an observer’s spot by the plotting tank. Satterwaithe, following him with her eyes, thought, That’s where he always placed himself when he was first officer.

  “I’ve already verified,” Corrigan said, “that Stranger’s Reef is not in the dead-reckoning position.” Gorgas nodded, but he did not look up from the tank. He saw no need to acknowledge the obvious. To Corrigan he seemed disinterested.

  Corrigan spared a glance to the spatter of stars on the forward viewscreen. The River sped through space like a thrown pie, not like a discus, so ever since Flipover Day “forward” meant “feet first” for those who cared to ori
ent themselves to the nominal deck. “Comm,” he said, “take a bearing on the new coordinates.” By long tradition, no one on the bridge had a name; only a function.

  “Take a bearing, aye,” The Lotus Jewel replied. She could answer because she was speaking to the watch officer, not to Corrigan.

  When The Lotus Jewel pulled the comm hat over her head and fit it to the encephalic interfaces in her skull, it seemed to her that she became Ship. She saw what Ship saw, heard what Ship heard, felt what Ship felt (if Ship could be said to feel). She became large; she became powerful.

  She did not observe a simulation, for much of what she saw and heard and felt consisted of real-time signals, inputs that through her long and arduous training she had learned to visceralize. Some of these inputs were simple and direct—visual data to her goggles or radio messages to her earphones. Some she apprehended by analog—false color images representing E/M beyond the visual spectrum; a sound like rushing water portraying the datastream. (She compared it to Niagara Falls.) Temperature plates surrounding her face told of the radiation flux against the hull. When she turned her clip chair, she could feel the resistance caused by the spinhall’s angular momentum. Still other inputs were feelings induced in her body through biofeedback. The circulation of air and water through Ship’s internal channels became the circulation of her own blood. The boron levels for the engines became hunger; power, a tingling in her nerves. Malfs revealed themselves as itches or sores. Her identification with Ship became so complete and so parallel that she could sometimes forget that she was The Lotus Jewel.

  She could even reach out her hand and, enclosed as it was in a data glove, touch a star (which felt, via the feedback loop, most remarkably like a diamond). The velocity of approach was linked to the analog feedback circuit, so that the faster the ship approached a given object, the greater the pressure she felt when she “gloved” it and, the closer the object, the more quickly she felt the throb of the radar echo. The sky thus had a knobby, pulsating feel to it and it seemed, as she had told Okoye one time, that it was the sky that was rushing toward them rather than vice versa.