The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Corrigan was a ’Stroider and knew better than to simply push the weightless girl along, lest Miko travel a straight line down a curved corridor. That was one reason he carried her with his long arms wrapped like vines around her; but it was not the only reason, and when the thought did intrude upon him as she snuggled against him that she did not weigh anything, he meant it in more than the tautological sense.

  When he reached her stateroom, he pressed Miko’s limp hand to the hoígh plate and then maneuvered her inside. But turning her imparted a counter-rotation to his own body and he checked his spin by holding her tight.

  That makes no sense in the physics, but physics wasn’t in it. He should have held on to something fixed if he had really meant to check his spin; yet, holding tight to Miko seemed the proper way to stop the motion. Oddly, his vertigo seemed only to increase when he did.

  Despite the micromachines that warded his skin, certain parts of Corrigan’s body remained moderately sensitive: the tips of his fingers and nose, his lips and tongue, his toes and heels, and other places where his body grew convex. The reasons were topological, but fortunate in the exemptions they granted. As he held the dozing girl in his arms, he thought of how all their quiet evenings together might have been lost in a careless moment.

  The thought, unlike the girl, was unbearable, so he kissed her.

  A stolen kiss! Miko was not awake. He closed his eyes and his lips brushed hers gently, his arms held her against him. And then, suddenly appalled at his presumption, he released her. An officer kissing a crewman? Unseemly! Friendship, aye—this was no Guard vessel—but anything deeper required careful thought.

  That was Corrigan’s trouble. Not the careful part. If one is to be full of anything, care is as good a thing as any. It was the thought—in that one moment when he should have felt. He left Miko dozing in midair and fled her rooms.

  Fool! The kiss had not been stolen, but left upon the sill for him. And if Miko had not been entirely awake, neither had she been entirely asleep.

  Asleep enough to wonder if the kiss had been a dream; awake enough to wonder at the flight that followed.

  Corrigan, by the time the door closed behind him, had had time enough to think. He was a fast thinker, after all, and already saw clearly what a great fool he had just been. He had known pleasure with The Lotus Jewel, but had found something more with Mikoyan Hidei; and only just now as he left it behind did he realize how much more that was.

  Striking bulkhead with fist, he fishtailed about to face the stateroom door. “Miko?” he cried. “Miko!” He pressed his palm upon the hoígh plate, but of course nothing happened, so he fumbled in his scrip for the pass key that First Officers always carry and inserted it into the emergency access slot beside the plate. The door slid quietly open and he pulled himself inside. “Miko!”

  Corrigan was a fast thinker, indeed. He was just not fast enough, for there are some things fleeter (and thus more fleeting) than thought.

  He stared about the empty room without comprehension. It was stripped of all belongings, save a few odd items that drifted here and there. A grille swung loose from a ventilator shaft. The closets, when he checked those, were empty too. Had the room been thus barren a few brief moments before? He could not remember. He had taken notice of nothing then save one thing only; and she was gone as well. Wildly, he wondered whether there had ever been such a girl as Mikoyan Hidei, or if she were only a mad ghost created by his fevered brain.

  Fleeing to her sanctuary in the peepery following Corrigan’s cruel rejection, Miko had cried herself to sleep and afterward slept without dreams—or at least without any dreams she cared to remember. Those were hard thoughts she slept upon. Flint wasn’t in it.

  A voice summoned her from that silent and formless depth. “Mikoyan Hidei.” Always the full name, repeated at precise intervals, never showing impatience, never changing tone. It penetrated the haze of her fatigue as water drip by drip drills through stone.

  “I want to sleep,” Miko said when the persistent nudge of the voice had roused her from sleep into the grayer borderlands around it. Her refuge was as dark as space unbroken by any star. There was a voice switch for the lights, but she did not speak its command. The dark was her comfort.

  “Outside input is required. The distinction between two terms in the database is uncertain.”

  “Why don’t you let me sleep? Doctor’s orders. I’m supposed to sleep.” Sleeping meant no dreams. Waking did.

  “Clarification is required.”

  “Oh, go ahead and ask.” She thought the voice came from the speaker grilles connected to the monitors. It was as if the blank screens spoke to her.

  “The terms are being and becoming.”

  Miko was so weary that explaining the difference seemed a rational thing to do, if it would only allow her to sink once more beneath the dark. She closed her eyes. “I guess ‘being’ is what you are now and ‘becoming’ is what you are going to be later.”

  The voice did not answer immediately and Miko wondered if she had passed (or failed) some sort of test. Gorgas, she thought. Or maybe Fife. But why pester her on such a strange, abstruse point of philosophy?

  “The distinction lies on the time axis. Confirm.”

  “Yah. The time axis. Whatever. Go away.”

  “The first indicates a system state; the second, a vector on that state.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Define intellect and will.”

  “That’s not fair! You said only two terms.”

  “Hypothesis: intellect refers to information capture and processing. Will refers to autonomous initiation of both information capture and servo actuation.”

  Miko did not confirm that. She could make no sense of the words. Her mind had drifted once more into that borderland where dream and perception blur together. She muttered something, she didn’t know what. It was not a response, or at least not a response to the voice. “I waited as long as I could,” she said, though she didn’t know she said it. Sometimes she seemed to be in her hidey hole on The River of Stars, at other times in an older refuge inside Amalthea Center, at other times still cozied in the arms of a man she would never know rocking gently to a murmured tune. If she would never have more than that, she at least had that.

  When Wong reached her quarters after leaving the sail prep room, she broke into wild tears, howling as if she had become some beast on a lonely mountainside. Fife, who had been waiting for her return, was taken aback.

  “I almost killed her,” moaned Wong. Her preternaturally long fingers enclosed her head as if in a ball of twine. “I almost killed her!”

  “What? Hidei? You had nothing to do with that. It was that Ratline fellow. He was supervising. He was responsible.” Or the girl herself—he did not voice this thought—who ought to have shown a better judgment of her own resources.

  All logic and reason is but a little straw thrown in to stem a raging flood. “No!” shouted Wong, unwrapping her face. Fife nearly failed to recognize the woman so revealed. “It was me!” Wong twisted and sprang like coiled steel toward the fresher, sliding the door closed behind her. It ought to have slammed, though the wonders of technology prevented that.

  Well, thought Fife. And again, Well. Through the door he could hear the muffled sounds of weeping. Had ’Siska meant anything more by that outburst than hysterical fellow-feeling for the young girl? Fife was not at his best in dealing with the irrational, which was unfortunate, given that Wong had so plentiful a supply of it. Emotional storms did not yield readily to his tools. There were no facts to ponder, no measurements he could make. Perhaps it would be best to allow the woman to cry herself sober; then, once she had calmed herself, he could explain the error in her reasoning and comfort her. It was a lousy idea, although the intention was good.

  Fife turned away from the fresher door, prepared to await developments in the peace of his own rooms; but he hesitated, and in that hesitation he was lost, and found again—although he was not to know that
until later, in a dark, abandoned room in the face of death.

  The reason for his hesitation was this. He saw with sudden clarity that the rooms of Fransziska Wong were those of a transient. They held few articles of her own, and those were small and easily ported. A medical cap, the small black bag of her profession, a single holoplex affixed to the wall. There were no holos of her former ships, as some spacers kept, nor of any crewmates left behind. There were no souvenirs of places seen: no Martian sandbottle or Venerian cloud crystal, not even a stolid lump of asteroidal rock. There was nothing here that could not be gathered in a few frantic moments and shoved into a tote. It was as if she did not expect to stay.

  The single holoplex showed a young Fransziska with two others that Fife deduced from first principles to be her parents. As he watched the scenes morph one into another, Fife noticed a curiously consistent fact. A functional invariant, as fixed as the pole star. Not once in any of the views did either parent have an arm on their gangly daughter.

  Leaning closer, he noted—and again, this was purely a factual observation—that the child’s smile then had been more broad and deep than the remnant that the adult now wore. “It was all possibility then,” he told the holo girl, “wasn’t it?”

  ’Siska is too ready to accept blame, he had written once in his journal. It is almost as if she seeks it out. She is a freelance scapegoat, riding circuit and arrogating all the sins of others. She would climb the tree herself and nail her own hands to it if she could. There is something almost prideful in such a conceit. Earlier ages wisely reserved that role to gods.

  This was the private Fife who wrote that. In conversation, he was reserved or conventional, waxing poetical only when talking shop; but in private he might show a side of himself that he seldom revealed to others. But then, he did not lack for a normal share of insight. His first meeting with Wong had shown that. He could at times match Okoye for insight. It was only that he mistrusted it and would seldom rely upon it.

  It occurred to him that ’Siska’s life was like one of Mohammed’s Mountains that sometimes went astray—launched somehow on the wrong orbit and fated thereby to miss capture in the arms of its destination. His job was to troubleshoot such mavericks, to bring them back to their true path.

  And so it was that Fife returned to the fresher. He pushed the door aside and saw his love huddled miserably in upon herself, spinning a little from angular momentum because she had tucked those long arms and legs tight against her body. It seemed as if she were imploding, as if, like the fabled neutron star, she sought to tuck herself into a ball smaller than the ball itself.

  What Fife wanted to say was, Surely matters cannot be so terrible as that, but what he did say was, “I’m here.” Another simple fact, except that this one was not quite so simple. Even Fife himself had not yet plumbed its implications.

  “I turned her off,” said Fransziska Wong.

  “What?”

  “Miko. I’d injected stimbots into her blood at Satterwaithe’s request…”

  “Well, they were all working extended hours…To get the ship back in operation…”

  “No. No, no, no.” Wong uncoiled and she gripped Fife by the wrist. “I told her. I told Satterwaithe…I told Satterwaithe that I would monitor the blood chemistry and I would turn off the microbots by remote if stim usage went on too long and I saw how Miko’s fatigue poisons had built up to the point were she would dream awake and I—and I—”

  “Turned her off.”

  “Once the stimbots were deactivated, it all came crashing down on her and she—”

  “You didn’t know she was Outside.”

  “No, no, of course not, or I wouldn’t have…But I should have known. I should have known.”

  “How could you know? She could have been anywhere.” Fife was still deploying logic and reason and thereby losing the battle.

  “A thousand ways. Blood chemistry. Nitrogen levels…Oxygen pickup differs at suit pressure…I could have asked her where she was before I entered the command. But she said…But she said…Miko said she was doing a job for Satterwaithe, and I thought Satterwaithe was abusing the poor child, working her ragged, and so…and so…”

  “You were angry at the Second Officer.”

  “Yes…” The word was a hiss from the mouth of a snake. “Genie is a bitch.”

  Fife flinched at the sudden hostility flashing so through the fog of tears. “So you…took away one of her toys.”

  “Toys, yes. That’s the way she treats people. As toys. As ‘resources.’ But Miko…I didn’t mean to hurt Miko.”

  Fife wrapped his arms around her, stopping her rotation (or taking it up himself, he didn’t notice), and held her tightly to him. “You didn’t hurt her.”

  “I might have.”

  “But you didn’t. Keep a hold of that fact. You’re a good woman, ’Siska. You made a mistake, that’s all. We all do.”

  “I killed Evan Hand.”

  “No, you did not.”

  “I couldn’t cure him.”

  “That’s something different. You tried. You cared. No one ever demanded more. No one can ever give less.”

  “Big’,” she said, “don’t leave me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No matter what?”

  He knew the tiniest hesitation, for who could ever know what might matter? “No,” he said. “No matter what.”

  She put her face against him and continued to cry; but the cries now were quieter, more subdued. Sorrow had replaced the anguish. To deal with it, Bigelow Fife was at a loss. He did not know what to do, and so continued simply to hold her, offering nothing more than his presence. And so is ignorance often wisdom, for nothing more was called for. He did not realize then, nor even later, that in holding her so he had for the first time touched the woman for her sake, and not for his.

  Ramakrishnan Bhatterji had knocked around the inner system for more years than Miko or deCant had been alive. Partly this was a wanderlust in his spirit and partly an easily worn welcome at those places where he thought to linger. He had grown wise in certain ways, cynical in others, and remained charmingly naive in some few matters. He was a figure not only larger than life but, what mattered more at the moment, larger than Corrigan. And his long experience had taught him a few truisms; among them, never to fight in freefall, for half one’s effort was then spent in checking one’s own blows.

  Thus it was that when he cornered the acting first officer in the D-ring, he did not come to grips with him there, but placed his menacing body between the snake and safety and, worrying at him like a sheepdog, chivvied him outward toward the rim. “You son of a bitch,” he kept repeating. “You son of a bitch.”

  Bewildered by the menace, Corrigan at first tried authority to counter it, only to find that with Bhatterji he had none. He then tried threats, but to no more effect. In the third resort, he tried flight. Spaceborn like Wong, he could monkey with precision. Corrigan leapt, swung, twisted, dodged, but his fear of coming within Bhatterji’s enormous hands caused him to hesitate and the one thing he did not try was to snake directly past the man, which by its very unexpectedness was the one tactic that might have worked. Once he found a side passage in the abandoned G-ring that would let him circle around behind and give him a straight shot to the safety of the command deck, but who knew the ins and outs and roundabouts of the ship better than the engineer? Whichever way Corrigan fled, the squat beast was there before him.

  At the entry to the spinhall, Corrigan finally discerned his opponent’s strategy. At Mars-equivalent spin-gravity, Bhatterji could pummel him at will while he himself would be nearly helpless. This knowledge, however, came too late and Bhatterji pushed him and he tumbled and bounced painfully along the spinhall deck until friction won and the rotation had him in its grip.

  Soon enough, Bhatterji had him in his. A solid left jab connected with the first officer’s midriff and Corrigan doubled over, retching. This put his cheek within reach of Bhatterji’s right hook, and the
impact of that swat sent Corrigan backward and his vision went black-and-sparkle.

  For a wonder, Corrigan did not come apart. He seemed so spindly and stick-and-twine that Bhatterji had half-expected a single punch to scatter the man into thirty-four disjoint components. Perhaps it was this surprise that caused the engineer to hesitate on his next blow. He hadn’t thought he would need three. But Corrigan was a tough bird, all sinew and cartilage. He wanted basting to reach tenderness.

  Having been launched by Bhatterji’s right, Corrigan folded instinctively into a ball, straightened, and somersaulted away from the beast. In free fall, this would have been enough and he would have been gone; but the spin gravity and the Corliolis disoriented him and his reactions were ever that much slower. Even so, he nearly made good his escape. “Ship!” he managed to squeak out before Bhatterji caught him in the ribs.

  “You don’t touch my staff!” the engineer said. “Do you understand?” Another punch, but this one was a little wild and Corrigan managed to duck it.

  “But Miko—”

  “She didn’t know what she was doing!” As an engineer, Bhatterji had studied advanced mathematics and so was capable of adding two and two. Yet engineers are also notorious for rounding off and dealing with approximations when sometimes greater precision is called for. He thought that Miko had been coaxed into the sail project, not that she had volunteered.

  “That was Ratline’s work group,” Corrigan gasped. He was not making excuses. He was only providing data, but it sounded like excuses to the engineer.

  “Don’t think you can escape.” It is unclear whether the engineer meant physical escape from the beating or moral escape from the blame. Yet Corrigan had not sought to escape the responsibility, and perhaps he did not seek flight even from Bhatterji’s fists. He had known how tired the girls were. He had known. And he had done nothing to prevent what had happened. He should have pressed the issue with Satterwaithe, but had allowed himself to be too easily persuaded. If no one else would punish him for that, he would; and he would use Bhatterji as his rod as he had earlier used The Lotus Jewel’s tongue.