The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Which created the thrill: the touch or the words? Words can touch more deeply than a hand, for sound travels the shorter route to the brain. But Miko had spent years avoiding recognition, and praise caused her to pull back a little into her shell. “It wasn’t luck,” she said. “It was Evan Hand.”

  Now there was an unexpected chaperone! How could Hand be so much present when he was so thoroughly gone? Corrigan cocked his head. “Because he rescued you from Amalthea? From all you’ve told me, you had the situation under control. The Board had arrested that Burr fellow; and his hired assassin had that accident with his suit…. Well, it didn’t sound tome like you needed rescue,” he concluded. Corrigan did not care for the notion that he himself had ever needed rescue—least of all by Hand—and so he questioned whether Miko had.

  “Not from Burr or his hirelings,” Miko said. “He rescued me from the anticlimax.”

  In truth, Hand had rescued her from a great deal more than that. But if Miko did not quite comprehend the magnitude of her debt, she at least recognized that she bore one, and there was enough of Hand in her soul that she sought to deserve it. Where Hand had provided sustenance and shelter and comrades to his wounded birds, Miko sought nothing less than their salvation. All of them. Corrigan. Twenty-four and her boy-man. The strange, witchy girl. Poor, asthmatic Dr. Wong. They did not deserve to die. Nor even did those for whom she felt nothing or even felt outright antipathy. She might tell herself that she labored on the sail to discomfit The Ram; but she worked on the engine repairs as diligently. This needed more hours from her than a day provided, but she would save the ship as the ship had saved her.

  Over time, Miko’s explorations of the peepery had revealed other rooms. One such room, formerly a staff lounge, contained a bank of monitors completely filling one wall. The old-style Gyricon screens greatly puzzled her, as they received no signal. Had she traced the leads, they would have led her to clandestine sensors strategically placed in various staterooms; for the ever-so-polite staff had amused itself by watching the elegant passengers cavort in their native habitat. It astonishes how inelegant such people become when they think themselves unobserved. No one knew about the monitors: not the owners, not the crew, not the AI, and certainly not the paying customers. Fibrop engineers or comm techs who work as servants to escape groundside debts or only to see the stars, do not forget their old skills when they ship out.

  Sometimes the staff had placed bets on the performances they watched. Sometimes they made digital recordings, which proved variously entertaining, profitable, or fatal to their makers, depending on the ends to which they were employed. On one occasion, this clandestine peepery saved a life. On another, it started some gems on a convoluted journey to a certain shop in the lower levels of Port Rosario. Most often, however, the monitors provided only idle amusement.

  Knowing none of this history, Miko had tried to reactivate the monitors by connecting them to the ship’s AI system. All she had in mind was viewing morphy shows from the deeby or playing interactive games. But the link makes Ship aware of the passageway system for the first time, as if the sudden bloom of an arc lamp has illuminated an otherwise darkened stage. To say that Ship is surprised is to say too much. Surprise isn’t in it, only a wild oscillation in the back propagations as the neural net accommodates the new learnings. You can’t call that “surprise.”

  The Sailing Master

  Eugenie Satterwaithe had been plying the solar system in concentric ripples ever since she had first jumped into that vast, dark ocean. She had flown in the beginning as a ballistic pilot: a young woman, lightning-witted, riding a fiery arc between the antipodes of Earth. There was nothing especially skilled about such work—the AI did all that was needful, save only the close docking with the LEO stations—and if something ever did go wrong, it was hard to imagine any duties save frantic futility or a vast and short-lived surprise. But ballistic pilots had “the glam” and they walked large steps, drank and sang with abandon, and made love with fierce intensity. “Lift fast; die young” was their motto and, though fatalities were actually rare, the risks were real enough; and it matters less what is true than what people think is true, no less so about themselves than about others.

  From ballistic, she had gone on the LEO circuit. Orbital pilots did not have the daredevil air of their ballistic sibs. There was less of the go-for-broke in their work. The skills were different. Gravity played less of a role; inertia and Newton’s Third Law played more; and this showed in their demeanor: more grave, more patient, more inexorable. But then The Herald’s Lark had dipped into the Earth’s magnetosphere to dock at Celestial City and those gossamer sails seduced Satterwaithe from her very first sight of them. She mastered first magnetospheric sailing, running a tugboat between LEO and GEO; and then, on the Luna run, the far different, far grander skills of flight before the solar wind.

  A loner by nature, she found courier work flying a singleton for Reuters-Wells-Fargo. It was little more than a habitation sphere pulled along by a loop of hobartium, but she was her own boss. They stuffed the sphere with bonded packages, artifacts, and hard mail and, almost in afterthought, a sailor-pilot to work the shrouds. She flew the Red Ball route to Mars and the Green Ball back. Once, she even flew the Long Orbit around the sun when Mars had been in superior conjunction. A long, solitary time, that had been, and she had coasted into the Martian Roads with nearly too much delta-V for capture. But the packet she had carried must have been important, for the expected war between Syrtis and Marineris never came to pass.

  Mars had been her next lover—a rough and untutored lover who demanded much and gave little. Iron Planet Lines was hurting for arean ballistic pilots and snapped her up. That was near the tail-end of the go-go years, when things were settling down. Tiki Ferrér was bringing law and order to Port Rosario and, if a man’s life there was worth only a nickel, that was still an improvement on its prior valuation. Satterwaithe may have had a hand in that taming. The records are unclear. She could be pretty mean with a warden’s quarterstaff, and downright deadly with a pellet gun. She never spoke of it, but sometimes smiled quietly when the subject came up. Tiki Ferrér had used a quarterstaff too and another staff beside, and if Satterwaithe’s wells had long dried up, they had once flowed as freely as had primordial Mars itself. Not that she needed men; or women, either. Living with solitude, couriers learned to love it; and after a time a bedmate could seem a strange and alien thing. But need wasn’t in it. One’s most treasured possessions are seldom the necessities.

  She met Moth Ratline on Deimos. The main transfer terminal for intra-arean fractional-orbits was situated there. The River of Stars had come to dock and Ratline had taken shore leave to gawk at the ancient warrens the Visitors had dug. Fu-hsi was looking for shuttle pilots and, learning that Satterwaithe was both rocket jock and sailor, hired her on the spot.

  It couldn’t last. Satterwaithe wanted those captain’s rings and Fu-hsi wasn’t about to hand them over. So Eugenie posted for navigator on the Great Sail The Swan of Ares, moved up to sailing master in the trefoil Monarch, then to mate on the ’stroidal iron-boat The Black Diamond.

  Sails were fading by then. Satterwaithe could see which way the wind was blowing and it broke her heart, but the orbit to captain’s rings lay elsewhere. She declined a berth in City of Selene on the Jupiter harvest and used her guild seniority to bid down to master’s mate onto the Farnsworth ship, Aaron ben Shmuel. (And a good thing too. The magnostat Selene and all her crew would be engulfed by the Jovian atmosphere during the Great Flare of ’73.)

  Satterwaithe set herself to learning the Farnsworth and proved in the end a cannier master than most.

  “And she plied the tumbling asteroids

  From Billgray to Cybele.”

  That old song wasn’t written about her in particular; but it could have been.

  Satterwaithe was a far-seeing woman, though it was not Gorgas’s ever-branching tree of possibilities that she saw. Her future was as right as a carpenter’s r
ule, and if the universe insisted on twisting and turning, she soon set it straight. So, whether she had planned it so or not, when Centaurus Corporation sought a captain who knew both sail and cage, there were few enough who could cock their hats and one alone who had ever served in The Riv’.

  It was a sorry vessel that she took command of; nothing much like the dogged emigrant ship she had briefly known and nothing at all like the elegant liner it once had been. Yet Satterwaithe was incapable of saying no. Sails were where her heart lay, and when they vanished at the last, her heart vanished too.

  But it was because she had knocked about the Middle System for so many years that Satterwaithe awoke at three strokes after her watch had ended, though she lay awake for several minutes before she could track down the mouse of thought that had awakened her. When she had it, she pulled on a hasty singlet and kicked around the B-ring to the bridgeway.

  Satterwaithe found The Lotus Jewel on deck, idling in the captain’s chair and looking indelibly bored. Satterwaithe wondered that the ship’s whore hadn’t brought a man to spend the watch with her.

  The Lotus Jewel, hearing a sound behind her, swiveled the chair full round. Having already decided that Corrigan would come to her in the night, she had further decided to make his apology as difficult as possible. No wound galls so much as wounded pride. And while The Lotus Jewel was not a proud woman in the way that Satterwaithe was, a poor man robbed of a dollar feels the loss more keenly than a rich man that of his thousands.

  The sysop was pouting, Satterwaithe decided, settling for an easy category. She had been celibate for several hours and did not care for the experience. Oh, Satterwaithe could be cruel in her judgments. Tiki Ferrér was a precious memory, but he was only a memory.

  “You couldn’t sleep?” The Lotus Jewel asked. She might not like the flinty sailing master, but sympathy did not require liking.

  “Put the radar image on the viewscreen.”

  Technically, The Lotus Jewel was officer-on-watch, but she was third officer, temporary and acting, and she had never been one to stand on formalities. Satterwaithe’s abruptness irritated her, but it was a passing irritation. If Satterwaithe wanted an image, The Lotus Jewel would show her an image. That was what most people showed each another, anyway.

  Repeated laser mappings of the object had refined the resolution, so that much of the earlier haze and fuzziness was gone. Satterwaithe examined Stranger’s Reef with a small frown.

  “There’s no atoll,” she said at last.

  To The Lotus Jewel, a rock was a rock. “What’s an atoll?”

  In the days of magnetic sails, shiphandlers in the ’Stroids had always taken careful note of the close approaches to their worldlets, observing such minutiae as axes of tumble, reflectivity, vector, coupled bodies, and so on. One never knew when such a detail would prove vital. The iron boat Nikolai Kornev had survived only because her first officer remembered hearing of a body in an accessible orbit bearing plentiful water-ice. Such information was widely shared at depots and terminals and spaceport bars; for in the spare reaches of the Middle System, no spacer was the enemy of any other.

  Thus it was that deep in Satterwaithe’s memories lay a conversation from years past, in the notorious Unicorn Bar on Ceres, where she had traded shoptalk with three other master pilots. “Stranger’s Reef,” she remembered, “has a cloud of micro-bodies ballistically coupled to it. There’s no sign of them on the refined image.”

  “Is that what an atoll is? A lot of little mini-’stroids?”

  Satterwaithe did not correct the redundancy. “Did Ship think they were random noise and filter them out of the echo?”

  The Lotus Jewel called up the raw image; but, while there were a few spots that really might have been noise in the data, there was nothing like the atoll that Satterwaithe had once heard described.

  “Maybe they were stripped off by Jupiter,” The Lotus Jewel suggested. “Or maybe they’re too small to detect at this range. Or maybe—”

  “Or maybe that isn’t Stranger’s Reef…”

  “You mean the careful Mr. Corrigan made a mistake?”

  There was a strange elation in that question that Satterwaithe could not quite bring true. “No,” she said curtly. Corrigan was no leader, but she granted him his mastery of detail. “A Jovian passage is always chaotic. There may have been collisions, ricochets. The Reef was traveling with two companions when it was last observed. Jupiter could have shaken them like gaming dice and tumbled all of them onto unpredictable, new orbits.”

  “Then, you think this is one of the companions?”

  Satterwaithe folded her arms to ward off further stupid questions. “That, or a million other possibilities.”

  The sailing master turned her attention to the forward viewscreen. The starfield had been color-coded. The red dot so near Jupiter in the dead-ahead was the rock they had called Stranger’s Reef. In the upper right, a pale gray designated the empty region they had found earlier. Satterwaithe pondered the picture and its incompleteness. “The rock that the Younger Boyle observed just before Flipover Day. Did you prick it on the chart?”

  “Nobody told me to do that.”

  Satterwaithe turned from the screen and stared at The Lotus Jewel, who flushed and said, “We don’t have a positive fix because we can’t ping the muffing Fixed Point!”

  “Dead reckoning will do. Put an error ball around it, if it makes you feel better.” The Lotus Jewel lifted a hand to her throat mike but the sailing master stopped her. “Wait. Has Ship picked up any other rock messages?”

  The Lotus Jewel began to look uncomfortable. “One from Queen of the Yemen that I gave to Gorgas, and another from Inish Fail. I downloaded that to the bridge.”

  Where it was probably still sitting in the In-basket. “Have you been checking the receiving basket?”

  “I haven’t had time to—”

  “And why not?”

  The Lotus Jewel made a pair of fists and banged them on the arms of the chair, which in ziggy caused her to lift slightly from the cushions. “Because I’ve been helping the muffing sailing master prep the muffing sails for muffing deployment!”

  Satterwaithe grunted, then acknowledged the validity of the excuse with a curt nod. “My apologies, Sysop. But let’s upload to the chart, shall we?”

  There were nine messages, all told. Ship translated the Fixed Point coordinates in the messages into ship-centered, Ptolemaic coordinates and plotted a scatter of fuzzy blotches south and sunward of the body Corrigan had located. Satterwaithe studied the array silently for a considerable time, until The Lotus Jewel half-thought that the sailing master had fallen back to sleep. Then the officer pointed out a broad perimeter with her arm.

  “Give me a scan of this region.”

  “But Gorgas said…”

  “I don’t care what Gorgas said. I’ll square things with our acting captain. Do it.”

  The Lotus Jewel went under the cap and with her dataglove traced out the area Satterwaithe had wanted. She computed the cone required to cover the region and designated a nominal “sky.” This was the surface of a notional sphere at the limit of useful resolution. Ship calculated power usage and resolution and suggested some trade-offs among the area covered, the depth probed, the fineness of the mesh of pings, and other factors so that a useful estimate of size and position could be obtained without diverting power from other systems. That is, if there were any bodies in those positions. If the mesh were too coarse, swarms of bodies could hide in the cracks between. If it were too fine, the power drain would be prohibitive. Satterwaithe asked her twice what the holdup was, for there are no tasks more simple than those demanded of others.

  The Lotus Jewel nearly told the bitch to set up the muffing scan herself.

  (That was a hard conclusion to come from a woman so soft. And perhaps it would be unfair to call it anything so definite as a conclusion. Being a woman in constant motion, The Lotus Jewel very seldom came to one. Yet, when she felt especially oppressed by the
older woman’s criticisms, bitch would pop out of her mouth like the seed from an olive. Sometimes she amended her reaction to first-class bitch, which was at least a promotion. She could not say exactly why she felt that way. It was more a general perception than a detailed list of wrongs and offenses. Bhatterji, who had himself no great love for Satterwaithe, had asked the sysop once while they were washing up together after a game of bounceball, what the sailing master had done specifically to offend her, and The Lotus Jewel, almost in irritation, had answered that it was her general attitude. That was fair enough. It’s hard to gin up empathy for someone who thinks you’re a whore.)

  The scan took several minutes to prepare and send, and several minutes more to receive and integrate the bounceback. While they waited, the two women said little to each other. Satterwaithe asked how long it would take and The Lotus Jewel told her. The Lotus Jewel said she would throw the data onto the forward display as it came in and, when Satterwaithe did not say No, took that as assent.

  The pips appeared on the display like raindrops on a car’s windshield. First one, then a few others, then a few more as the echoes returned from farther out. Some were a little fuzzy, for resolution dropped off rapidly with distance, but you didn’t have to be Rave Evermore to connect those dots.

  Suddenly sisters, the two women groped for one another’s hand as they gazed at the horrid, speckled sky. The silence, broken only by their oddly synchronized breathing, ended when Satterwaithe whispered, half to herself, “Tsunami.”