The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Miko knocked on his doorjamb and entered the office. “I told the captain we’re starting in the morning.”

  Bhatterji looked at his mate, looked back at the valve. He nodded. Miko waited a moment longer, then left. Outside she told Evermore, “The Ram didn’t say a word. He just sat there,” and Rave threw his arms out and said, “You’re going Outside with a catatonic. Wonderful.”

  Inside, Bhatterji’s gaze traveled from valve to catalogs to drawings, never alighting long on any one thing. Passengers, when the ship carried any, would thank the captain and thank the pilot and thank the ever-loving cook; but did they ever thank the engineer? Yet, try the easting from the Trails to the Leads without one! With the anodes running hot and the injectors spitting synchronized crystalline beams of boron and hydrogen and the flicker belching the same raw fire as the sun itself. This sorry ship held together only because he—he!—held it firm in his grip. Yet, never a kind word did he hear from anyone. Not from Corrigan, not from Satterwaithe, not from Gorgas. And Ratline…He shivered. He was afraid of Ratline. Even Miko, who might have been his heart’s companion, had turned on him coldly. Perhaps Enver Koch had felt this same isolation. Thinking on it, Bhatterji wondered for the first time whether his old chief’s tumble into the Void might not have been voluntary.

  His hands trembled at the memory: at the faint, falsely-cheerful voice over the link. Look the ship after, Ram, he had said. She takes looking after, she does.

  Enver Koch had looked upon The River of Stars as a sculptor looks upon clay. She had been a work in progress, and he had to some extent rebuilt the vessel around its crew many times over. There was hardly a system or structure that did not have his thumbprints on it. “A face like a law of nature,” someone had once said of him. Bhatterji fancied that was a quotation of some sort, but it fit the man. He had gone habitually with a stubble on his cheeks, but in the manner of a man who seldom had time to shave rather than that of a man who seldom bothered.

  Arrogant, some of the crew had called Koch, since he had never been reticent about his own skills and accomplishments. He was what made the ship work, and he knew it. Engines, boron-11, lithium coolant, air filters, hydraulics—mere clay until Koch breathed life into them. And perhaps it had been arrogance; though if it were, it had been arrogance hard-earned.

  Bhatterji, himself no child, had followed him like a child.

  His distracted gaze had come to rest at last on the drawing he had made a week ago of Rave Evermore’s strange fabrication. It had matched no tool in Ship’s memory, and Bhatterji had finally shrugged it off as an étude. But now he saw with sudden clarity that it was a compound lever. That flange rested on a datum. That lever, when pushed up, would force that other down. The instrument was meant to push something through something else. A meager epiphany, perhaps, but if the instrument had a purpose, so too had its creator.

  “Ship,” he said. “Library. Search request.”

  “Waiting, Mr. Bhatterji.”

  Mister Bhatterji? That was a new enhancement. Had The Lotus Jewel taught the AI voice recognition? “Query. Are there archival CADs?”

  “Several. Also two cats, though not archived.”

  Bhatterji gritted his teeth. Ship was going weird on them again. Damn Gorgas, if he had been futtering the logics! “Tooling, design drawings of. Archived but seldom accessed. Existence of.”

  “Existence confirmed.”

  Oh, that was helpful. “Specify.”

  “Master drawing folders in archive. First folder: Original configuration through rev. B. Second folder: Baseline configuration, Mars transport, rev. C through J. Third folder: Magnostat configuration, rev. K. Sailing master’s database: Great sail suit. Sailing master’s database: Trefoil sail suit. Sailing master’s database: Magnostat suit, Jovian service. Sailing master’s database: Magnostat suit, Terrestrial service. Detail drawings, Flux dump omnitester. Detail drawings—”

  Bhatterji gritted his teeth. He should have known better than to ask such an open-ended question. “Abort.”

  “—and ghostly files.”

  Bhatterji pulled back. “What? Ghostly? What is that? Explain.”

  “Erasure removes flags from file fragments. Fragments persist until overwritten. Hypothesis. Requested search located such fragments in disused memory bins. Output partially duplicates archival drawings. Output uncertain.”

  Bhatterji laughed. “The computer’s got déjà vu!” He hadn’t known how badly he needed to laugh until just that moment. “Oh, that is too wonderful!” And he was in sudden good humor beside, for Ship had reminded him that he did not lack for hobartium after all.

  The Acting First

  Satterwaithe had cobbled a work schedule that struck a compromise among normal shipboard duties, the sail prep project timeline, and sleep. But the Thursday Group dared no work while Gorgas held the watch. There were too many telltales and indicators on the bridge that might give the game away. That eliminated the better part of the day, and so they scurried about at night like forest kobolds busy at their lasts. Of work, duty, and sleep, it was the sleep that suffered.

  The interplay between Gorgas’s watch rotation and Satterwaithe’s work plan guaranteed that Corrigan seldom saw The Lotus Jewel. He held the second watch and she, the fourth, so that they lived at the antipodes of the day. This was unfortunate, because while a relationship might in theory be healed by an exchange of electronic mail, the smart money did not bet that way. Bridging the rift between them required a certain amount of synchronicity.

  When Satterwaithe took the watch from him, Corrigan would leave the bridge and make not for his quarters but for the sail locker, where he supervised the efforts of the hopelessly romantic ’Kiru Okoye and the hopelessly inept Eaton Grubb. It was during the last two hours of this time block that The Lotus Jewel would make her usually belated appearance, which congruence should have been an opportunity for both of them. But these two hours at the end of Corrigan’s long, weary day were two hours at the beginning of The Lotus Jewel’s. She would nap fitfully during the first watch—there was the peculiar problem with the AI to work on—then she would awaken in poor humor to work on the sail for a little while before her own six-hour watch on deck in the small hours of the night. None of this gave her a very cheerful outlook.

  Corrigan, for his part, had grown more focused on the task to the exclusion of all else. The work consumed him. It took great, gulping chunks of him into its maw, so that there actually seemed to be less of him than before. He felt a mounting sense of fatalism; but paradoxically, the more he thought their efforts would end badly, the more he insisted that those efforts be done right. This put him on a collision course with The Lotus Jewel, who was beginning to wonder if they ought to be done at all. Something was not right with the AI and she half-feared that she could not work that problem all day, mend sails all evening, and watch the bridge all night. With her growing weariness, she felt Corrigan receding from her very heart, as if he had tumbled into some internal Void. She had grown accustomed to being the center of his existence and, now that she was not, felt oddly disoriented. She could not, in a manner of speaking, ping the Fixed Point any more.

  Bhatterji could have told her the engineering of it had she asked. Most bonds fail due to fatigue.

  “The tension!” Corrigan cried. “You’ve got to maintain the tension!” He meant the cable tension in the braiding machine; but what the hell, he was doing a good job of maintaining the tension in every other sense. Grubb, distracted by Corrigan’s shout, lost his grip on the winding wrench and it whipped around the machine’s long axis and struck the stop block on the other side in a shower of sparks and a clatter that made them all jump. Okoye, whose skull the wild wrench had missed by less distance than a word would take to cover, whispered to herself, “As good as a mile? I think not half so good.” Then she waited for her nkpuruk-obi to return. The braider continued knitting cable, but with the tension out, it began to ball. Corrigan uttered an oath and his long arm snaked out and struck
the emergency stop. The steady rickety-tick stopped.

  “A mare’s nest,” Corrigan said. “You’ve knit a muffing mare’s nest!” Okoye studied the tangled ball of wire and thought that more than mares might nest in it. She did not ask who he had meant by you, but The Lotus Jewel, running the take-up reel, had had only one cup of coffee since awakening and was not nearly so circumspect.

  “It wasn’t their fault,” she said.

  Corrigan scissored his arms and legs and was suddenly inches from The Lotus Jewel’s face. Okoye did not see how he did this, for she was still numb, staring at the long handle of the tension wrench and remembering how close it had flashed by her face. She had felt the breeze, like that of a flapping wing. Grubb’s terror beat at her from the other side of the braider. He had let go of the handle! He had let it slip from his hands! When her eyes met his, she saw they were wide and white.

  “Not their fault?” Corrigan said to The Lotus Jewel, so close that the sysop could smell the curious redolence of his chitinous skin. “That leaves only you or me. Whose fault was it, then?”

  She turned away. Though willing to deflect the blame, she would neither assign nor accept it. Corrigan’s hand seized her by the shoulder and turned her to face him again. “Whose fault?” he insisted.

  “I don’t know!” she shouted. “I don’t know, but…”

  “But what?”

  The Lotus Jewel had had no idea upon its birth what thought would follow the but, only now she did. It had been growing slowly beneath her mind, and now she saw it plain. “You don’t think this is all coincidence, do you?”

  Corrigan blinked and drew back from her just a little, releasing her shoulder, which sent her into a half spin that she checked with a hand on the take-up reel. “All what?” he asked.

  “All everything. Hand dying. The damage to the engine and my transmitter. The drag on the ship turning us toward Stranger’s Reef. The accident with Rave. Ship’s odd behavior. Do you really think it’s all been by chance?”

  For a single, glorious moment, The Lotus Jewel’s construction of facts hung before them like a star over a stable. The audacious simplicity, the all-encompassing nature of the explanation seemed almost an argument for its truth. Corrigan had felt the odds piling up against them, but he had never imagined that anyone had piled them. Who? And to what purpose?

  But a moment’s thought was all it required, because the answer was that no one on board had either the foresight or the ability to orchestrate such a mare’s nest of events. In the middle system, close calls were, if not a daily event, not at all uncommon. Jupiter did tease virgins. People did die. Equipment did fail. There was no necessary connection among these disparate facts.

  Thus far, Corrigan’s reasoning had stood him true. Then he made a most grievous mistake.

  He laughed.

  The Lotus Jewel stared at him for one astonished moment; then she slapped his face as hard as she could, cutting off the laugh with reciprocal astonishment before she dove from the room.

  Corrigan’s skin was thick, in several meanings of the word. But while the slap had barely stung him physically, it had hurt most dreadfully. He rubbed his cheek and turned to the others, as if inviting them to share his surprise and outrage.

  From Grubb, he received no share. The biosystem chief, who had begun to reach for the tension wrench, pulled his hand back, gave Corrigan a frozen glare, and followed the sysop from the sailmaker’s loft.

  That left Okoye, whose face revealed neither approval nor condemnation; though, seeking the former, Corrigan scored neutrality as the latter. “Go find Ratline,” he snapped. “Tell him he has a mare’s nest to splice out.” Okoye hesitated only a moment, then fled the room as well.

  “And she didn’t even put a flag in the reel to mark the tangle,” the Acting First muttered. He pulled a yellow ribbon from the drawer under the control panel and tied it to the braid just ahead of the mare’s nest. He turned the machine from stop to idle; then, after gripping the wrench handle in the approved manner—one hand near the free end, the other near the center—he hit the Go button with his elbow and turned the wrench around the axis of the braid, twisting it tight. He could feel the throbbing of the knitters through his arms. Rickety-tick. Rickety-tick. Before the indexer could pull the cable forward, he somersaulted his own body to the tension-man’s side of the braid without once loosening his hold on the wrench. This was not an approved maneuver nor easy to execute in ziggy. Back on the old Happen Stan’s, Sail-maker 1/cl. Vasily Santiago would have chewed his apprentice several new bodily orifices for trying it; but the deck officer that apprentice had become saw no other recourse. Not if the work were to be done on time; not when your crew had walked out on you.

  It was Mikoyan Hidei who poured the balm on Corrigan’s abraded soul. She pursued Plan B with neither the holy fervor of the Thursday Group nor the rosy nostalgia of Grubb or Okoye. A successful deployment would discomfit Bhatterji, and that was what mattered.

  But it was not quite all that mattered. Since coming aboard The River of Stars, Miko had learned that more than one thing might matter, and so she had grown less single-minded than when she had stalked Clavis Burr through Jupiter’s piglet moon. Corrigan, in short, had become more than a mere instrument with which to wreak vengeance on Bhatterji. He intrigued her in a manner that the engineer never had. He engaged her mind and not only her desires.

  And so she began to seek Corrigan’s company in ways that did not seem seeking—that even she herself did not at first recognize as seeking. The First held the second watch and Miko found excuses to report on engine status directly to the bridge when she came off shift. She volunteered to replace The Lotus Jewel on Plan B’s third watch after Corrigan’s insult had sent the sysop sulking to her tent. She appeared from time to time in his own quarters, emerging from the peepery always in those moments when he was not attentive to his surroundings. (Corrigan began to wonder if she were not an elf in a more literal sense.) During those visits, she would listen quietly to his plaints and stories and ideas and hopes. Miko knew how to listen in quiet. Lurking in the conduits of Amalthea Center had taught her that art and it would have been an art well worth the acquisition, had the tuition not been so high.

  They often took a late-evening snack together. Once, Miko fell asleep in the crook of his arm and she looked so very much like a napping kitten that Corrigan had rather cut his arm off than move and wake her.

  Her story leaked out of her in small driblets that Corrigan eventually blended into a whole. At least the factual aspects. The subtext, he was deaf to, and Miko kept her own feelings close, lest she expose herself again to humiliating rejection. Yet, if she had been mistaken earlier regarding Bhatterji, so was she mistaken now about Corrigan, although the mistake was different. The engineer had rejected a blatant and shameless offer; the First might notice nothing short of that. More than once, while they worked in the sail locker or chatted in his quarters, Miko contrived to brush against him, a tactic she had watched from behind countless grilles in Amalthea Center. But Corrigan’s skin was thick and Miko’s touches too light. Her bumps were too artfully accidental to elicit anything more from him than an occasional, “Excuse me.” And so Miko began to wonder if he noticed her at all.

  Now, Corrigan was not devoid of feelings. He was a man of deep, often eruptive feelings. But he was not a man of subtlety in those feelings. When he loved, he loved hugely; when he sorrowed, no Void was vaster or more empty. The Lotus Jewel’s newfound sullenness both wounded and puzzled him and any other emotion simply fell into this pit and vanished.

  “Do you ever talk to her?” Corrigan asked Miko one late evening after they had finished the last of the shroud braces. He meant, did Miko ever talk to The Lotus Jewel. Perhaps he thought they giggled together in private and shared girlish secrets—that the playful, radiant, outgoing woman whispered confidences to this quiet, painstaking, reclusive girl.

  It did not offend Miko that Corrigan spoke to her of his longing for another w
oman. Miko had her own longings, but they did not demand exclusivity. There was room there for a Lotus Jewel or two. “No,” she said. “Not really.”

  She and Corrigan ate a late snack of push pockets that Miko had liberated from Grubb’s storage. These were envelopes of puri bread containing flavored pâtés and reinforced with nutrients. Grubb made and wrapped several such each evening and left them for the night shift. Miko’s pocket was redolent of lamb and chutney and filled her mouth with the hot sting of curry. (The lamb was not quite a lie, though it did fall short of the truth. What Grubb harvested from his carnic vats had the essence of lamb, but it had never gamboled on awkward legs across a flowered meadow. Which may be just as well.)

  “All that’s left now,” Miko said after a swallow, “is to dress the mast. Right?”

  Corrigan nodded, but his face bore a distant look, as if he were not entirely present. “She’ll get over it, won’t she?”

  Miko shrugged, for it mattered little to her what The Lotus Jewel got over. The sysop was possessed of those attributes that Art had named Beauty, but her every attribute was the converse of Corrigan: light where he was dark, short where he was long, pliable where he was stiff. But because Miko viewed passion with such dispassion, she had an inkling that what Corrigan felt was less a desire for another than an aversion for himself.

  Sensing her silent regard, Corrigan paused with his push pocket halfway raised. “What?”

  “Nothing,” said the elf, “only you look like a man bearing all the troubles of the world.” She had heard that once in a morphy show, but it had the happy advantage of being both true and heartfelt.

  “Someone has to bear it,” Corrigan said, though less with bitterness than with weary acceptance—almost, in fact, with pride. “Gorgas certainly won’t. And Genie…Well, she has her own distractions.” It was the glory, Corrigan had decided. Satterwaithe cared nothing about the ship, only about reclaiming her lost prerogatives. He looked again at Miko and remembered that this young woman too cared about the ship. He placed a hand upon her shoulder, insensitive to the thrill that ran through her at his touch, and said, “Fortunately, I have you to help me. It was a lucky day when you came on board.”