The Wreck of the River of Stars
Page 27
It is a strange sort of city: one of sights and sounds, but of no smells and little touch: for this is Noir, a virtual city created by a gaming AI and inhabited by only seven living beings. All of the others, all of the teeming multitudes that pass her porch, are morphs operated by the system. ’Kiru doesn’t know which are her fellow players. Only “Sam Shovel,” the private investigator, would she recognize, because she has played in this VRld before.
Occasionally, she calls a greeting to one or another of the passing throng, conjuring names for them. ’Megwu. Nweke. Sopulu. ’Haji. Names from home. The game master plays along with the gag and some of the morphs turn and wave, for the AI has been seeded to incorporate player actions into the game. None of the players ever see the irony.
The Lotus Jewel played the role of Sam Shovel, private investigator. It was not a role she liked, nor one for which she was very apt. The passenger, Bigelow Fife, was far better disposed to collect, collate, and interpret clues. So were Corrigan, or Gorgas. In fact, it would be hard to name anyone on board who was not better at putting the pieces together than The Lotus Jewel.
There was nothing wrong with her intuition, though. She almost always caught the killer. This so irritated Bigelow Fife that the passenger had withdrawn from play not long after the ship had left Achilles.
More so than the others, The Lotus Jewel was aware of the artificial nature of Noir. Compared to the Niagara that coursed through her sensors when she sussed the ship, what she received through her VR goggles and data gloves was a meager congeries of sights and sounds. Things seemed more real under the cap, perhaps because they were real.
On a whim, The Lotus Jewel moved her point-of-view toward a wooden newsstand on the corner. She had no reason to suppose that the data file represented by the fat man behind the counter would contain any useful information, but “ask no questions, expect no answers.” The vendor-morph looked up at the detective-morph’s approach and growled “Waddaya want?”
She wondered if the vendor was a computer algorithm or one of the other players. In theory, player morphs could always be distinguished from algores because humans were more flexible and creative and had a broader range of responses. But that was only theory. In practice, humans could be remarkably algorithmic.
A popper window supplied a menu of choices and she fingered
The Lotus Jewel pouted. “Who did that?”
“The killer, I bet,” said Evermore. His morph was a banger girl soliciting by an abandoned factory across the street. “The news vendor must have known something important and the killer acted to silence him.”
“Quiet,” said Akhaturian. “Breaking character spoils the suspension of disbelief.”
“It’s only a game,” Evermore responded. He had shot the vendor himself as a purely random act just to see what the AI would do. Bound by the strange attractor of logic and structure, the game master tried to incorporate errors and other random moves into its scenario. Twice, in previous games, he had boxed the AI into a conundrum and the set-piece mystery had deepened into surrealism, but on every other occasion, the AI had successfully reconfigured the scenario without contradiction. Evermore was not trying to sabotage the game, but he liked to play with things, and games were no exception.
The distinction between playing and playing with may seem a fine one, but there it is. Evermore would be welding a part, or shifting some cargo, or cooking a meal, and he’d get a notion and he’d go with it just to see what would happen. Sometimes his play improved matters. (Even Ratline admitted that the boy’s modifications had made it easier for the bunger to run the catline through the way-grommet.) More often, he muffed—as he had while cutting the Florence strut. But if it is true that we learn by our mistakes, Evermore would one day be a very wise man. Or dead. But death, being the ultimate mistake, must surely yield the ultimate learning.
Searching for Miko, Bhatterji came on the gamers from the corridor off the mess hall. He paused a moment in the doorway while he identified each player; then, not finding his quarry, he bellowed, “Has anyone here seen Miko?”
His voice echoed on the streets of Noir, coming from the very air, as if God were speaking, and shattered the illusion of reality. One by one, the players lifted their goggs and frowned at him.
“We’re busy,” Evermore snapped.
Bhatterji liked play as well as any man on ship, and more than most, but it did not strike him that virtual role-playing qualified as “busy.”
The Lotus Jewel shook her head. “I haven’t seen Miko since dinner.” None of the other players said anything.
“We have an EVAsion in two hours to install the Hanssen coil on Engine Two,” Bhatterji said—as if knowing his purpose would cause them suddenly to recall Miko’s whereabouts. All he got on the bounceback was Grubb’s bland inquiry, “Does that mean you’re almost done?”
Bhatterji thought it ill-behooved anyone playing games to fuss over the punctuality of those doing work. He could have rebuilt the entire hull from scrap metal with his teeth and his bare hands and all he would get from his crewmates would be it’s about time.
“Where did you find the hobartium?” The Lotus Jewel asked. “I thought you were all out?”
Bhatterji looked away from her, toward the doorway, as if expecting Miko. “Oh, I miscounted,” he said, “and I scrounged some from old equipment.”
Evermore struck a pose. “You don’t need Miko,” he said. “I’m supposed to do the outside work.”
Bhatterji turned to him. “Are you ready for it?” he asked in a voice he intended as kindly.
“I’m not afraid!”
“That wasn’t my question. Two out, one in. That’s the rule. If you and Miko want to cast runes to decide, go ahead; but she knows the Hanssen coil and you don’t.”
Evermore shrugged. “So, I’ll learn by doing.”
Bhatterji could remember saying much the same to Enver Koch. “A boy after my own heart.”
Evermore, who had actually started to smile, closed up like a box turtle. “Only with a knife,” he said. Grubb stifled a laugh and The Lotus Jewel was scandalized.
“What an awful thing to say!” She looked to Bhatterji. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”
“Maybe you ought to stay inside this time,” the engineer told the boy. “It’s Miko’s turn.”
Turning away from Evermore to end the discussion, he did not see the desolate look or the clenched fists. What he did see, once he had the angle, was the dark, puffy flesh around The Lotus Jewel’s eyes and the slackness to her cheeks. “You look beat,” he said.
“I’ve been telling her she needs more rest,” Grubb said with the air of one whose advice has been spurned. “Our whole crew is getting haggard.”
“Yah?” said Bhatterji. “Doing what?” If his question did not sound sarcastic, it was not for want of effort. Grubb bristled and very nearly told him exactly what. He did not feel that he owed Corrigan anything, especially after the way he had treated LJ, yet he had given his word to Ratline that he would keep quiet about the sail project and, if his own romantic sense of honor did not stay his lips, his fear of the cargo master did.
“We been having aerosol problems,” he said. It sounded weak, even to himself, and it earned him a curious glance from Akhaturian, who knew better.
“And I’ve been working on Ship,” The Lotus Jewel said, which was a stronger answer because it was truer. In veritas, virtuus. “This is the first relaxation”—and she waved an arm at the game console—“the first relaxation I’ve had in days.”
“You mean the skewed responses Ship’s been giving lately?” Bhatterji asked. “Why did it put out that alarm the other day over the shuttles? The Riv’ hasn’t carried shuttles since the Martian run.”
“I said I’m working on it!” Surprised, the engineer backed away. The Lotus Jewel made a hasty brush at vanished lo
cks. “It isn’t like I haven’t a ton of work to do!” Her voice had risen to a shout and Grubb reached over and laid his hand on her forearm. “Easy,” he said.
The engineer frowned. “I don’t like it when machines act unpredictably. I was on Iskander Pasha when its AI skewed. Can you BDO the net?”
“I know my business,” said The Lotus Jewel sharply. “A crew this size couldn’t run a Big Dumb Object. Besides, the whole system’s massively parallel. It was built back in the fifties—it may be the oldest continually operating neural net in the Middle System—and it’s been altered and modified and reconfigured who-knows-how-many times. It self-modifies too. No one knows the actual configuration any more. To isolate any of its functions I would need a regiment of code monkeys and a clean sheet.”
“It makes me nervous,” Bhatterji said.
“Yah,” said The Lotus Jewel, weary now. “Me too.” After a moment’s pause, she added, “I’m sorry, Ram. I didn’t mean to bite your head off.”
Miko had entered the game room from the opposite entryway, unnoticed by anyone save Okoye. “We ready to start on the coils?” she said. All eyes turned to her and, in the momentary silence, she said, “What?”
“I’ve been looking all over the ship for you,” Bhatterji said.
“I know. I got your message just now.”
“I didn’t send one.”
Miko shrugged.
’Kiru Okoye was such a quiet girl that the others sometimes forgot she was there. It was an operational sort of invisibility, on a par with her knack for turning randy boys into yams. She wondered why Mr. Bhatterji was so evasive and The Lotus Jewel so defensive and what strange, new thing had grown between Rave and the engineer. It came to her suddenly—she could not say from where, though she suspected on a wind from the north north-west—that they were all deeply afraid.
There were reasons enough. If Bhatterji failed and the engines never lit, the ship would go skating on forever—or as near forever as mattered—whipping starward of Jupiter on a hyperbolic orbit. But the AI was acting peculiar too, and it frightened Okoye that the woman who knew the system best was deeply worried and trying not to show it. Beyond these were other worries, some of them small and personal, yet looming all the greater because they were closer.
Okoye felt each fear, great and small, resonate in her own heart, building into a cacophony of unheard cries, as if she had become a kind of echo chamber. Charybdis churned her inner pool. Vertigo overcame her.
She unbuckled, intending to flee the room, but the fey moment passed as suddenly as it had come on and she blinked and took a vast breath, as a swimmer does when coming up for air. “It is not a gift I treasure,” she scolded her chi.
Twenty-four deCant hurried to Okoye’s side as she left the room. “I’m worried about Rave,” the girl said in a low voice. Akhaturian, ballistically coupled to her, nodded in agreement. Okoye thought he would nod at anything his wife said, which tended to diminish the significance of the affirmation.
“He be scared,” Okoye answered. She realized that she herself was still trembling. “I guess we all are.”
“Scared?” DeCant gave her a peculiar look, as if she were talking of a different boy. “Not Rave. He’s not afraid of anything. That’s why I’m worried. He thinks he has to prove something to Bhatterji, and he may do something stupid.”
Rave did something stupid each day, Okoye thought, though it usually involved trying to impress Okoye, not the engineer. He wanted to prove something to himself, not to Bhatterji. That might be a mark of character or of foolhardiness, depending on what he proved. “He hates Bhatterji,” Okoye said.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
Okoye had no ready answer for that one; but she did wonder how little deCant could be so certain about what drove the other wrangler. Surely, Raphael Evermore did not confide such things to the Martian girl!
Or did he? Okoye sometimes sensed a strange covalence between the two wranglers. They were much of an age—Twenty-four would be celebrating her Saucy Sixteen in another month—and she had come on board not too long after Rave. For Evermore, the attraction was easy to diagnose. Twenty-four was female. No more arcane theory than that was required. Twenty-four, for her part, evinced a distaste for the Earth boy, but there seemed a fascination, as well. Okoye did not think the fascination fleshly. One needed no more than fellowship to worry about a berthmate. It may simply have been the Rave’s impervious swagger, to which she had been exposed for two years before Ivar appeared on board—and in comparison to which Ivar seemed as tentative as an orchestra tuning up. Yet these things had a way of morphing over time and one sort of fascination could become another. The Earth’s polarity flipped 180 degrees every now and then, and that was an entire planet. Why expect greater stability from a pair of sixteeners? Okoye, from her superior wisdom of eighteen, hoped that the possibility did not bode ill for poor Ivar, for in games of confidence the lad was poorly armed.
The Void did not terrify Miko as it did Bhatterji, but it did make her uncomfortable. She was accustomed to a life closely hemmed by walls, and the walls outside were uncommonly far off. Towing behind her the newly rewound Hanssen coil and a portable tool shop, she followed Bhatterji across the broad flat plain of the aft hull toward the tower of the Number Two engine. The small, bright disk that was Jupiter gleamed overhead and cast conflicting shadows to those the distant sun threw across the pitted hull. There was a small mote beside Jupiter that might possibly be Io. Amalthea would not have been visible at all, nor would Miko have searched for the sight of it.
The coil was massive, but once in motion, Miko needed no further work to keep it moving. It was stopping it that gave one pause.
Bhatterji designated a spot on the hull. “Dog it there,” he said.
“I still don’t like this,” she answered.
“Did I ask you that?”
“We don’t have procedures for this.”
“And I don’t have time for cycling in and out half-a-dozen times while we tune the coil.”
Miko threw a drag line around a padeye on the hull and let the friction on the cable slow the coil to a halt. It hovered a few feet from the plates and Miko threw another line to snug it while they worked. “Where did you find the hobie?” she asked.
“I told you. I scrounged it. Some old equipment lying around.”
“Is it the right gauge?”
In free fall, it was impossible for anyone to stop short; so Bhatterji continued to coast ahead. “I should have brought Evermore.”
Listening inside, the third wrangler silently agreed. Miko was okay, he thought, but she went by the book too much.
Miko was a classicist and Bhatterji a jazzman. They both made music, but neither understood how the other did it. When you got right down to the bone, Miko needed to know the score. (As for Evermore, he never made music. He took the instruments apart to see how they worked.)
“Rave drew the wire,” Bhatterji said. “Rave? Did you draw it to the right gauge?”
The third wrangler answered from inside the ship. “Think so. Felt right.”
“Feel better, Miko?” Bhatterji laughed because he knew she did not.
Afterward, Miko could not help a twinge of regret that Bhatterji had repaired Engine Two, after all. Not because the fourth engine would give the ship the braking power needed to reach Jupiter—she was as anxious as anyone to restore the ship to full operations—but because now the magnetic sail would not.
For Corrigan, it was more than a twinge, for what greater dejection can there be than that felt by a superfluous savior? He had worked to this one goal against all duty. He had sacrificed a part of what he had thought himself to be on the altar of what he once had loved. Now all his plans seemed pointless vapors. The sail was no longer needed to buy them time, let alone to provide the missing power.
“That son of a bitch is going to pull it off,” Satterwaithe said, and Miko thought that the harsh old woman had rather see the ship lost than see it
saved by Bhatterji.
Miko, for her part, had not wished so much to see Bhatterji fail, as to see him upstaged. She had never cared about the sail, as such. She had cared about Bhatterji, in that strange inverted way that the disappointed have of regarding what they once had craved. That Corrigan’s hopes had been crushed by that detestable man was one more sin against him. She could bear Corrigan’s disappointment in fact much less well than could Corrigan himself; but that was because she loved something that he did not.
“There’s still the calibration burns,” Satterwaithe said later when the Thursday Group met privately to review the schedule. “He’s only got four days left to calibrate both engines. I don’t think he can do it.”
“The mast needs dressing,” Corrigan reminded her. “And the same four days.”
“So we just crunch our schedule a little more than he does his.”
“I’ll take Okoye and Hidei out tonight,” Ratline said.
“They’re both worn out,” Corrigan cautioned him.
Ratline grinned. “Our team doesn’t have good depth on the bench, does it?” he said. “You want I should put Grubb or your Lotus Jewel out there?”
The idea of Grubb on the mast terrified Corrigan. Grubb’s milieu was the microscopic, and there admittedly he excelled; but any machine visible to the naked eye tended to baffle him. As for The Lotus Jewel, she had not spoken to him other than officially for days and, while she had resuscitated the old sail-handling software for them, he could not envision her doing heavy physical work. In this he was mistaken, but his hesitancy grew from a reluctance to confront her personally and not from any realistic assessment of her capabilities. “I’ll go out myself,” he said, taking the easier course. “I can dress a mast as well an anyone.”