The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Corrigan was practiced in the deflection of mass and velocity and momentum, though his leaps and twists and pirouettes were clumsy under the radial acceleration that gripped him. Yet they were effective more often than not. Had he not been in the spinhall, Bhatterji would never have touched him. As it was, Corrigan’s long, chitinous forearms deflected most of the blows aimed at him—and allowed enough to land as he thought he deserved.

  Bhatterji did not notice this; nor did he ask himself why the accident to Miko had enraged him to this degree. There were reasons, and they were not entirely the reasons of an engineer.

  If Bhatterji’s life was a performance, he could not logically object to an audience. Akhaturian and deCant watched amazed from their nook as the fighters struggled past them. The Least Wrangler would have darted out to separate them, but deCant, more sensibly, restrained him and contacted the bridge where, it being the early morning, Gorgas had just taken the watch from The Lotus Jewel. Then, the wrangler called Dr. Wong.

  But Wong was already in the spinhall, bag in hand. “Stop it!” she cried, stepping from the slidewalk. “Stop it this minute!”

  It would not be fair to say that the doctor broke up the fight. It was more that the fight had come to an end of itself. Bhatterji had finished meting out and Corrigan had finished accepting, and by good fortune the two had finished together. The acting first slumped to the floor and, to the surprise of Wong and the others who were now arriving, one by one, Bhatterji reached out a hand to help him up. Corrigan pulled himself up along the arm and his eyes met those of his assailant.

  “I wouldn’t hurt her,” he said in wounded reasonableness. “I would never hurt her.”

  Corrigan’s tone startled Bhatterji, who looked more closely at the deck officer and studied him with a frown. “Then see that you do not,” he said. “In any way.”

  Corrigan understood. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  By this time, Gorgas had arrived from the bridge and had stepped between the two, though Corrigan and Bhatterji continued to stare at each other with a strange and puzzled wonder. The Lotus Jewel had arrived too, at Gorgas’s heels, but hearing that last exchange between her friend and her onetime lover, turned abruptly and fairly ran into the slidewalk exit.

  The Clinic

  Wong treated the first officer for his wounds. “This will hurt,” she told the man hopefully and was pleased to see him wince at the application of the swab. “I can’t believe the two of you were fighting.”

  “I wasn’t,” Corrigan said. “Bhatterji was fighting. I just happened to be there.”

  Wong frowned. “You shouldn’t make light of it. Brawling among officers is a serious matter.”

  “You’re sounding like Gorgas,” he chided her. He took the cold pack she offered and held it against the swelling around his eye. “Besides, Bhatterji wasn’t serious.”

  Wong prepared a suture. “It looked serious to me.”

  “I’m not dead,” Corrigan pointed out, for Miko had passed along what the engineer had said after Evermore’s tumble.

  Wong approached with the suture. “Is it numb yet?”

  Corrigan touched his cheek. “No.”

  Wong inserted the needle anyway. “This won’t take long.”

  “Will I have a scar, afterward?”

  Wong paused and looked at him. “Why? Do you want one?”

  “I thought it might give me a dangerous look.”

  Wong snorted and bent to her task. She had to lean close to him to stitch him up and Corrigan, enduring the needlework patiently, slowly became aware of her as a woman. Corrigan did not know the LEOn well. He had dealt with her only in his official capacity but he had found the doctor gentle and caring on those occasions. He remembered how concerned the woman had been over Miko’s tumble. In all, a kind and sympathetic person, one to whom love came easily—too easily, to judge by her liaison with the passenger. This ease puzzled Corrigan who found love rather hard to come by. Strange, he thought, how he never found himself attracted by other spaceborn, for if he were, this would be a most attractive woman.

  One of Wong’s ’puters chimed and the doctor craned a neck to scan the readout. “No internal damage,” she said.

  “Bhatterji is a craftsman,” Corrigan allowed. “Is that what warned you? The medbots you injected in me?”

  His mention of the medbots seemed to bother the doctor, although he did not know why. “No,” she said, after a moment. “I was called on the comm. Gorgas, I think. Why were you fighting?”

  “It was over Miko,” he explained. “Bhatterji blamed me for what almost happened.”

  “Blamed you?” said Wong. “Why you?” She pulled the suture and cut the thread. “The thread will dissolve after the cut closes in a few days. I’ll give you an unguent to salve it.”

  Corrigan accepted the jar. “I suppose because the sail project was my idea.”

  “Do you think it was your fault?”

  Corrigan shook his head. “Not directly, but I…”

  “Then whose fault was it?”

  The intensity in the doctor’s questioning startled Corrigan and he studied her a moment before answering. Was the woman thinking forward to the inquiry already? “Everyone,” he said, aware of how defensive he sounded. “Ratline was in charge out there, Satterwaithe should have been monitoring, Okoye should have been watching, I should have paid more attention to the hours we were all putting in.”

  “Share the blame widely enough,” Wong said, “and no one gets enough of it to matter.”

  “It approaches guiltlessness asymptotically,” Corrigan agreed. He unbuckled from the doctor’s table and twisted himself to a sitting position. He ran a finger along his cut and Wong said not to do that, so he snagged the cold pack, which was floating in the air beside him, and held it to his eye. “We all like Miko,” he told her. “She’s a hard one to like, but we manage.”

  “I don’t understand two men your age fighting over a girl like that.”

  That startled Corrigan so much he lost his grip on the cold pack. “It wasn’t like that at all! It was about the tumble. Besides, for Bhatterji…a girl…I mean…”

  Wong knew what he meant. “What has sex got to do with it?” she asked. “There is more to the girl than that. Why, sex is the single thing most easily come by in this ship.”

  Corrigan made a joke of it. “Then why can’t I seem to get any these days?”

  Wong cocked her head like a bird. “Do you want some?”

  Corrigan’s chuckle died a sudden and terrified death. Surely the doctor was not offering herself! He had a sudden vision of the two of them wildly entwined here on this very examining table, furious and intent on their business, building on their caresses until…Until Miko would walk unannounced through the door.

  Involuntarily, Corrigan glanced in that direction. “Uh, no,” he said as he monkeyed off the table. “My face hurts too much for that sort of work-out, but…” Here he did take a chance and pressed her on the arm. “Thanks for the offer.” But he said it in such a way that she could take it, if she wished, for a deliberate misunderstanding, an arch wink that they both knew Wong’s comment had not been meant as a serious proposal.

  Wong, watching him go, sighed and began putting her tools away. Why Miko, she wondered, and not her? Men had never fought over her favor. Yet, here was this girl and Corrigan was besotted with her and Ram Bhatterji thought he was her father. The door slid shut behind the deck officer and Wong stared at it for a long pause before finishing her tasks. She had all but disrobed for him, and the only thing she had proven was what she had always known.

  In the corridor outside the clinic, Corrigan found Bhatterji waiting for him. The navigator froze and considered his escape routes, but the engineer only said, “Is everything all right?”

  Corrigan touched his cheek, remembered Wong’s warning, and grimaced. “Considering,” he said.

  Bhatterji grunted and turned to go, but he turned back before he left. “She’s had hurts
enough,” he said. “She doesn’t need another.”

  Corrigan knew the engineer did not mean Wong. “Yes. Her father.”

  “She told you, did she? Then you know how vulnerable she is. More to the point, you know that I know.”

  “I wouldn’t…”

  But Bhatterji was gone before Corrigan could say what he wouldn’t do.

  Okoye approached her encounter with Ratline with genuine trepidation. She actually sought him out, which was something she seldom did, for he was not a man that welcomed company. Yet at times Okoye thought that no man of all the souls on board needed seeking out more than did Timothy Ratline. It was a dangerous quest, with no promise of treasure at its end, but Okoye felt pulled to it. There was a vacuum in the heart of the old man, colder and harder than that which enveloped the ship—and what glittered there in the internal night might be a diamond, or it might be ice, and the only way to know for certain was by whether it could ever melt.

  Normally the cargo master was easy to locate: just follow the bellowing and at the epicenter would be Mr. Ratline and one of his hapless wranglers. Ratline was a great one for getting the job done and regarded time lost as the ultimate sin. Since the wranglers were always losing bits of it here and there, they came under his caustic penances with distressing frequency.

  He was not in his office, where Okoye looked first, nor in the cargo hold, where her unexpected entrance caused much duck and cover on the part of the squeakers. (There were times when she positively sympathized with Mr. Ratline; and she chastised the two as if she had been the Rat himself. Ivar, who had never heard harsh words from the quiet Igbo girl, gaped in astonishment while Twenty-four, though no less surprised, stared back with saucy defiance.)

  “They are only like children new-come upon a candy factory,” Mr. Grubb had told her one time. “In a while, it will not consume them so much.” Okoye thought that the “while” in question might not be in her lifetime and prayed to her grandmother—a fine leopard that lounged on a baobab near Afikpo—that she would not become so much a slave to her flesh when she chose to share that flesh with another, but she thought she heard Grandmother snicker on the bounceback.

  She tried Ratline’s stateroom next, but he was not there, or was not answering hoígh plates if he was. She touched her communicator and called Rave; but Rave was occupied in setting up that morning’s engine calibration burn and had not seen his nominal boss. “…and a good thing too,” he finished and addressed an endearment to her which Okoye chose to ignore. “Sheep-eyes,” the girl muttered to herself, just as if she could see the look that Evermore had given her at the other end of the link. “The boy doesn’t know what he wants. Or he knows it too well.”

  As Okoye logged off, an incoming call informed her, “Mr. Ratline is on the mast.” Just that, without so much as a how-do-you-do.

  Automatically, Okoye said, “Thank you,” but then wondered whom she was thanking, as the only ones who knew she was even looking for the cargo master were the other three wranglers and she had already asked them. “Who is this?”

  “Nkieruke Okoye,” the voice said.

  ’Kiru had doubts, as she was not in the habit of calling herself. Just to be certain, she checked and found both souls accounted for. “Well, now,” she said, detaching the comm unit from her belt and inspecting it to find the link now dead, “here be a fine mystery. ‘Wherefore are these things hid?’” Then, with a gesture of impatience, she restored the unit to its place. “Not two grains of wheat to be found, I think, and not worth the finding in all that chaff.”

  On her way to the sail prep room, however, she realized that the Voice—for so she now thought of it—had answered her question with faultless exactitude. “Well, now,” she said as she paused in the passageway, “here be a fine humor, as well.” There was a taste of Gorgas in the humor, though it had not tasted quite like Gorgas.

  In the sail prep room, she found Ratline removing his helmet. He turned an eye on her, which he managed without quite turning his entire head. “Why did you call me in? I was busy.”

  Okoye had not called him in—she hadn’t even known where he was until scant moments ago—but astonishment won over puzzlement and even over intent. “You went out alone,” she said, which was not what she had come to say, but which seemed to want saying.

  Ratline affixed his helmet to the headball and splayed himself in the torso rack as if readying himself for a quartering. “There was work that wanted doing…” He grunted and wriggled his way down the torso. “If the sodomite is going to test his engines,” his muffled voice said from within, “the shrouds have to be belayed.”

  “It’s not right to EVAde alone. ‘Two out, one in.’ That’s what you always told me.”

  Ratline emerged from the hard torso like a snake newly shed of its skin. “I know the rules.” He turned his back and pulled down his lowers.

  “What if something had happened?”

  Ratline snorted and positioned the lowers underneath the torso. The whole arrangement resembled a dismembered spaceman. “What could happen?”

  “You could have tumbled off the masthead,” Okoye said.

  At last he turned and looked at her full-on. “Is that what’s botherin’ you, girl? Kick. It’s over with. Miko’s sleeping it off. She’ll be good as new when she wakes up.”

  Okoye thought that Miko, even when new, had not had things so very good. “Miko does not trouble me,” she persisted. “You do.”

  Ratline took on a wary look, as if from across the expanse of the sail prep room Okoye had approached him too closely. “Me? I’m your supervisor. It’s my job to trouble you.” In truth, the man was a little afraid of his assistant. There was something ghost-like about the quiet young girl. She was as dark as a shadow and silence often does for knowing. Perhaps he had heard that Grubb was short of yams.

  “‘Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,’” Okoye quoted, “‘And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.’”

  Ratline whipped his tether with sudden rage and even though she was far out of its reach, Okoye pushed back from the lash. “I’m not the one who fell asleep on the job!” Ratline shouted. “She is. I’m the one who muffing rescued her when she did! And you too, you stupid git.”

  “I saw you,” Okoye said. “In my rear view. You turned and saw that she had tumbled, and you turned your back and kept on working on the shroud! I need to know why.” This was the terrible question for whose asking she had sought the cargo master.

  “You need a man’s dick up you, that’s what you need.”

  “Your words hurt only yourself. They make you smaller, and meaner.” It was not entirely true that his words did not hurt. Others might dismiss Ratline’s outbursts by telling themselves he did not mean them; but Okoye knew he did. She knew that his anger was more real than the man himself and that it wore his body like a mask. It was a lifelike mask, wrought in the natural style of the Yoruba, so that Ratline took on the appearance of a human being without taking on much else. The wild fancies carved in Igboland would have been more honest.

  That mask cracked, just a bit, and for a moment little Timmy Ratline peeked out with a look of such devastation that Okoye wanted to leap across the room and comfort him in her arms. That would be a mistake, she knew. She had seen the man recoil from even casual, accidental touches. “There was time,” he whispered. Then, more strongly, “If I’d left the line without dogging it, we would have had all that work to do over! I had to finish that before jetting off. Do you understand that, you miserable socket? There was time for both, but they had to be done in proper order.”

  Okoye understood; and yet did not. There was something cold and empty about a heart that could weigh the inconvenience of rework against a human life, let alone one that could find them of equal weight.

  And what if there had been no time for both? Which would he have done?

  Breaking and entering bothered Akhaturian considerably, for he was a law-abiding boy at heart, but deCant was stressed
and, when stressed, the clone would defy conventions, regulations, and even the very laws of nature. Akhaturian had relieved her of one worry, perhaps her biggest worry; but someone buried beneath a ton of sand, while grateful for the removal of a thousand pounds of it, might be forgiven for still feeling a little pressure. Akhaturian fretted over his companion’s growing recklessness, but he bobbed along in her wake, helpless to stop her.

  “What I meant,” Akhaturian said as deCant studied the hoígh plate, “was that the only way to learn if your genotype matches Satterwaithe’s is for Dr. Wong to show you the data.” He said this no doubt in the belief that deCant did not already know it and if he only said it again, she would finally remember.

  “She’d never show me,” deCant whispered.

  “Even if you can get inside the clinic…” Akhaturian dropped his voice to her same whisper. “…you can’t get into her files without the password.”

  “One thing at a time. Once we figure out how to get through the door, we can keep coming back until we figure the password out.”

  “What if someone sees us?”

  “Who? After the fight this morning, and the engine calibration tests all day long, everyone is racked. Nine chances out of ten, no one will come over to this sector of the deck.”

  Nine chances out of ten? Akhaturian worked the math in his head. If they came back each night, it was even odds that they would be caught within the week. “What about Dr. Wong?”

  DeCant swiveled like a fish and frowned at him. “If you don’t want to help me, at least hush up. Or git back to yer room.”

  “Our room,” he said, and he did not move from the spot. The doctor, he consoled himself, would be engaged, as she was most every night, and was hardly likely to leave what she was getting merely to roam darkened corridors and check that her office door was closed. Akhaturian could not imagine that anyone would voluntarily forgo that particular pleasure, even the unlikely likes of Wong and Fife.