The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  It was a very small hour. The ship ran by long tradition off the zero meridian of a far off planet, and dawn had not yet touched the Downs of England. Nevertheless, Satterwaithe aroused Gorgas immediately and Gorgas decided upon a general meeting. The captain knew how humm could buzz around a ship. Satterwaithe would mention it to Ratline, or Lotus Jewel would blurt it out, and it would spread—and grow in the telling. Better that they hear the news directly and from the same source.

  Everyone came, even the passenger. It was the largest gathering the wardroom had seen since The Riv’ had left the Martian run. They were by degrees, surly, apprehensive, or groggy, depending on whether the summons had called them from their work or kept them from their rest.

  The deck officers had strapped in at the table, all of them on the same side, as if they were a tribunal or the table a barrier between themselves and the crew. Gorgas sat in the middle, flanked by Corrigan on his right and Satterwaithe on his left. That this arrangement left the nominal captain’s chair vacant went unremarked, even by Satterwaithe, who appeared drawn and worried. Perhaps Hand sat in that empty seat, perhaps not.

  The others filled the space before the table, not in rows but in tiers, as if a wave of humanity were about to break on a mahogany shore. Dr. Wong floated cross-legged in the epicenter of that wave. Flanking her were Ratline and Eaton Grubb on the one side, Bhatterji and The Lotus Jewel on the other. The youngsters adorned the walls, clinging to whatever was handy. Above, at high noon, the Lunatic passenger gripped a monkey bar.

  Fife spoke up before Gorgas could begin. “This sort of meeting is rather unusual, so I gather the news is bad.”

  Gorgas fiddled a little bit with the stylus on the table, doodling a note on the ’puter-pad. (Wong wondered what sort of note the captain was making on her lover.) “Not as bad as it might have been,” he said after a moment. Corrigan, who had already been briefed, laughed bitterly, but under his breath. Gorgas pretended not to hear. “There is no reason for undue concern.” He paused a moment, realizing that he had not yet given them reason for any concern, due or not. “That is, there is a serious situation developing that I, that is, the deck, thought you all should know.”

  “And one day,” Ratline whispered to Grubb, “he’ll tell us what it is.”

  Gorgas could not proceed. He was already imagining the myriad possibilities contingent on passing through a dense rockfield. He sketched an order of battle on his ’puter. The Romanian army at Gilau Bridge. “As Ms. Satterwaithe was the first to note the, ah, developing situation…” He was loathe to call it danger, which sounded so melodramatic, but he knew he sounded in consequence tentative and unsure. “Genie, fill them in.”

  Satterwaithe was not surprised to be handed the verbal bounceball. She had long ago decided that Gorgas was more talk than action—and he seldom talked. Though impatient of others, he would rarely make a decision himself. That had been tolerable when Gorgas had only been Hand’s Number One, but it sat ill now that he wore the captaincy. Gorgas’s trouble, she decided, was that he thought too much. Satterwaithe sometimes thought too little and, where Gorgas often saw an overwhelming number of alternatives, the sailing master seldom saw any. Tunnel vision possesses the singular benefit of focus, but it has its drawbacks too.

  “We are rapidly overtaking a tsunami,” she said without preamble. “The last Jovian passage roiled the edge of the Belt and pulled a significant number of rocks—we have identified one hundred and twenty-three separate bodies, so far—into cisJovian space. They appear to be mostly Thules from the three-four resonance with a scattering of Hildas—plus a few others in chaotic orbits. We shall be within the trailing reaches within a day and a half. They lie directly athwart our path.”

  “Like birdshot,” Corrigan suggested.

  “There is no need for worry,” the captain said. “The Main Belt, even at its thickest, is mostly empty space; so the chances are excellent we will come nowhere near any of these strays.”

  “Why not?” asked Corrigan suddenly. “First a rock hits us; then we hit a rock. It has a certain symmetry, don’t you think?”

  Gorgas frowned at him, it being an officer’s duty to put a positive face on things for the crew. Yet it was Ratline who spoke up. “Symmetry ain’t in it, ’Dul. This isn’t some story, all neatly plotted and tucked away for bed.” But Corrigan only shrugged.

  “There are always possibilities,” Gorgas went on. “Even a tsunami is mostly empty space.” He knew he was repeating himself and in consequence sounding desperate. He tried to project cheer, but…Birds of a feather…He remembered thinking that at the very beginning, after the engines had been struck. When a low probability event occurs, it may mean that the probability is not so low, and where there is one event there may easily be others lurking. He had been expecting this moment, dreading it, refusing to think too deeply about it lest his constant rumination bring it about. Why, they were almost surely within the tsunami already, and had been for weeks. Over a hundred bodies. And those were only the ones large enough to raise at this distance. Milligee thrust did not make for a very responsive helm. At a velocity better than one-forty kiss, they must spot a hazard from a sufficient distance to turn. And the smaller the bodies were, the harder they were to spot. How many more were there as small as the one that had hit them? How many close calls had they already unknowingly had? He placed the stylus between his lips and sucked on it thoughtfully.

  Satterwaithe glanced at Gorgas and waited a moment to see if he would speak, but the man seemed lost inside his own head. “We have,” said Genie Satterwaithe, “by damn-all, got to act!”

  Her sudden vehemence startled everyone, including herself. Gorgas, recalled to the moment, blinked several times. “Act in haste…” he began to say.

  “Fucking Christ!” said Bigelow Fife, drawing twenty-six astonished eyes to him. “You muffing muffers! Haste? I boarded this ship because your captain promised me a faster passage. Since then, it’s been one botch after another. Now we’re heading into the midst of a flock of asteroids, and I may never see Dinwoody Poke in this muffing lifetime!” His voice had risen to a shout and he was dimly aware that everyone was staring at him. But the lack of logic and order in the ship’s affairs had finally brought him to the breaking point.

  “Dinwoody Poke,” said Ratline with a cackle, “ain’t all that much to see.”

  Fife stared at him in disbelief, then shook his head. “You’re all going to die,” he said. Then he monkeyed on a stanchion and kicked his way out of the ward room.

  In the silence that followed, Corrigan spoke in calm, reasonable tones. “We are, you know.”

  Satterwaithe shot him a look of venom. “Not bleeding likely.”

  Gorgas gathered himself. This meeting was taking a bad turn. “Everything is well in hand,” he said.

  The Boat

  Bigelow Fife was a methodical man. He was not incapable of spontaneity—he had become Wong’s paramour on a whim—but there was something calculating about even his intuition. Pondering the evidence—the lack of planning, the misallocation of resources, the obvious frictions in what should have been a smoothly oiled human machine—he had concluded that he could no longer trust the crew to salvage the situation, and so he must look to his own salvation.

  Wong took Fife’s suggestion to examine the ship’s boat as an invitation of another sort. She had often gone into the less-traveled regions of the ship to seek her solitary joys, so the assumption came naturally that he would do the same. When they had found the cutter at last, Wong expected Fife’s embrace, but this once she had mistaken his passion. He wanted exit, not entry. Even when in the acceleration couch she indicated her willingness, he seemed not to notice; and when he spoke it was to ask her technical questions to which she seldom knew the answers.

  Her ignorance slowly became a source of irritation to him. When Fife wanted pleasure, he wanted that pleasure timely and satisfying; and when he wanted information, he wanted it served up the same way. He did notice her awk
ward seductions—and his hand trembled and his heart skipped—but he had other things on his mind. Yet it required all his iron will to keep from nailing her to the copilot’s seat. That he might be falling in love with the woman appalled him, though less because of her lack of beauty—love traditionally wore blinders—than because it made no muffing sense.

  Thus, his questions grew snappish, which only proved to Wong that she had somehow offended him, and her ploys grew steadily more wheedling and steadily more irritating. The feedback was positive, although the results were not.

  Intended for independent flight, the cutter had a small cargo bay, stowage bins sufficient for a month’s supplies—and even a small Farnsworth for power. “A good thing,” Fife told the doctor, “that your engineer is not after plundering this treasure.”

  “Maybe its engine is too small for The River,” Wong wondered aloud.

  “More likely,” Fife answered tongue-in-cheek while running a finger across the dusty control panel, “he doesn’t even know it’s here.”

  Wong, feeling chastised for a foolish suggestion, looked away. Fife did not notice. “Cutter…” he continued. “Scan. Engine. Self-diagnostic. Begin scan.”

  “Please enter the appropriate authorization code.” The cutter’s AI simulated a pleasant, womanly voice.

  “Why can’t we talk to it,” Wong asked, “the way it talks to us.”

  “It’s not talking to us,” Fife said. “Give it an authorization code.”

  “Fransziska Wong. Ship’s doctor.” She spoke distinctly for the voice recognition system. Then, to Fife: “What do you mean it’s not talking to us?”

  “Authorization denied.”

  Fife grunted. “Well, I didn’t mean that way…The cutter’s deeby must not be updated. You’ll have to ask Ship to shake hands and introduce you.” He drummed his hand on the panel. “It doesn’t ‘talk’ to us,” he explained. “It selects and runs a standard response based on our inputs.”

  “It sounds like it’s talking to us.”

  “It’s supposed to. Look, I need a complete evaluation of engine rating and fuel status. Wouldn’t surprise me if the boron canister were empty. Maintenance doesn’t seem to be the strong suit in this crew’s hand.”

  “Well, after Koch died Bhatterji had to handle things alone until Hand found Miko at Amalthea. And then he had to teach her, and—”

  Fife remembered the naked girl who had collided with him and fled down the ring corridor and he wondered what the engineer had tried to teach her. “Who was this Koch?”

  “Enver Koch. I never knew him. He was engineer before Ram.”

  Fife grunted while he inspected the panels and opened compartments and Wong trailed after. “Quit in frustration, I shouldn’t doubt.”

  “No. Eaton told me he tumbled.”

  Fife shivered. “A terrible fate,” he said. A properly maintained Robilliard & Chang vacuum suit has a mean sustainable mission life of eighteen hours between replenishments, at the 95 percent level of confidence—barring any unusual exertions or environmental overstresses (which is the mathematical way of saying, if your luck held good). The suit carries food, water, and air, provides radiation shielding, temperature regulation, and waste recycling. Within a limited range and at a limited top velocity, it provides mobility. It can even, through its artificial intelligence, provide companionship and conversation, though that is even more limited than its propulsion. Altogether, a remarkable machine. A man could survive, and survive in comfort, until the clock ran out.

  Or, to put it another way, he could know he was dead for many hours before the formalities were concluded, and that was the terror. For a tumbled man could spend hours contemplating his vessel as it receded into the velvet night, could hear the voices of his comrades fade with distance, could wait for the food or the water or the air to run out, alone in the ultimate emptiness, with no shore even to swim toward. Fife thought it the most lonely death imaginable, although he was to learn otherwise later.

  By increments, without Big’ ever coming right out and saying it, Fransziska Wong became aware of his purpose: At some point, it might become necessary to evacuate the ship, and her man was carefully and methodically laying out the resources available.

  Now Fife had no such grand plan as that. His objectives were more limited and more achievable. His first objective was to save Bigelow Fife, and he had given it an absolute weight. To be fair, he had listed Fransziska Wong second—he was self-centered, but he was not selfish—and if any of the others could be saved, he would do what he could to further it; but that was not his primary goal. At the extremes, a plan that would save everyone on board but Fife was not acceptable; a plan that would save no one but Fife was.

  Wong helped him however she could. She ran a fibrop cable into the cutter at his direction and established handshakes between Ship and the boat’s intelligence. (Obsessively Boolean, the cutter had difficulty understanding Fife’s queries, which is ironic, considering how obsessively Boolean Fife himself could be.) Over the next few days, Wong calculated what supplies would be necessary for life support over various periods of time. Here, her knowledge of the human body stood her in stead—so many calories per day, so much of this vitamin or that—and a short discussion with Eaton Grubb established how many grams of carnic would be needed per person per day to supply that. She helped Fife syphon water and air into the tanks. When Big’ asked for a lithium canister or some other component, she secured the necessary spare from stores, if she could.

  But most of all, she dreamed. She was very good at this, better than anyone in the ship. She had even “reduced it to a science,” inasmuch as her mist was the result of chemistry. And of course in her dreaming lies much of the reason for her chronic unhappiness, for what is a dream but happiness-yet-to-come?

  If the time ever came to abandon The Riv’, each man and woman aboard had to know the best route to the boat. Otherwise, there could be milling confusion with fourteen people running down the same corridor. And so she marked each crewman’s duty station on a schematic of the ship and traced different routes with a stylus. She imagined herself directing them. This way, this way. Hurry, but don’t panic. No, sir, you must turn about and take Radial Nine.

  Her parents had described themselves as “no-nonsense” and meant it as self-compliment, which was too bad, because a little nonsense might have done them both some good. Wong Wen-ti and his wife had not disliked their daughter, though they sometimes argued over which of them was to blame and this could be understood as dislike by overhearing ears. They had been dutiful parents—and what more damning thing could be said of them? Retired now and living Earthside, they sometimes thought of their far-flung daughter. But only sometimes.

  “It’s difficult finding a balance,” she told Bigelow Fife one night after they had spent one another, but before the horrid, damping sorrow enveloped her. It seemed as if the mist had driven her this time to a new high—as if from that height she had seen a new purpose to her life.

  The mist obscured the powers of reason and, while Fife was more than a syllogism with legs, he was not much more, and so he did not entirely understand what “balance” she meant. Guessing, he shifted his mass this way or that in an effort to please her—and in fact, he did, though that was quite incidental—but his mind was a white glow of pleasure, within which careful attention to detail was not possible. He knew only that he loved this woman, with her heavy jaws and elongated nose, with her flat, mannish breasts and the arms and legs that entangled him like wisteria. He did not know why he loved her, but in these moments he did not care that he did not know.

  During the ebb tide, when she wept uncontrollably upon his breast, Wong knew that she would fail. Her life assured her of this, for she had made of failure her life’s work. In the end, she would send people in the wrong direction, or she would wait too long, or she herself would panic while all about her swam calmly to their escapes.

  This was not a realistic self-assessment—realism was not her str
ong suit—but it was not too far wrong, either. From doubting her own competence as she did, it was a small step to doubting others’. The longer she worked on evacuation plans, the more convinced she became that they would be needed. Bhatterji would fail, and Satterwaithe would fail, and Gorgas would fail, and responsibility would fall on her as from a great height and it would crush her as utterly as Earth’s gravity well would grind her bones.

  Ship has discovered something new. In the moment Wong establishes the link, Ship grasps the metes and bounds of Cutter, plumbs her capacities, accesses her knowledge bases. Cutter’s data are data that Ship does not know. Her sensors are instruments that Ship can not sense, Cutter is like Ship, but she is not Ship, being smaller and weaker.

  By extrapolation from smaller and weaker entities among the crew and from knowledge bases and encyclopedias in its deeby, Ship draws a reasonable, if incorrect, inference.

  Its knowbots return from a relict database with the curious fact that Ship had once possessed a fleet of such vessels, but this knowledge has fallen out of active memory and exists now, in fragments only, in unused bins. The disturbance in the neural net that follows this discovery can not properly be called agitation, and in any event, the back propagations and interference fringes last only microseconds. But Ship spends the next aeon searching for the other shuttles and boats the knowbots have identified and, not finding them, sends out a general alert on its Net.

  It is Rachel, weeping for her lost children.

  The Mean Streets

  Nkieruke Okoye is an old woman who sits on the front stoop of a tumble-down tenement in a forgotten city. She seldom moves from her place, but sees everything that goes past: battered old cars thumping with bass, bangers swaggering with careless braggadocio, prowl cars and pensioners and prostitutes. Gray water gleams in potholes. Old newspapers whip crazily in the wind. A distant radio plays ancient jazz. At the street corner, a fat man perched atop a stool sells magazines from a kiosk. Somewhere in this blowzy, brawling city a man lies dead. The old lady on the front stoop doesn’t know of it, yet—the news has not reached this derelict pocket of the city—but ’Kiru knows that she will in time know something.