The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Which was why his heart nearly stopped when the door slid open in front of them. DeCant gave a little grunt of puzzled satisfaction, for she thought that she had done something to open it; but Akhaturian saw the slim figure floating in the doorway.

  “What exactly do the two of you want?”

  “Miko!” said deCant—and Akhaturian breathed a sigh of relief because, while their prowling had not gone undetected, it was not yet clear that they had been caught, for it occurred to him to wonder whether Miko ought to be on the other side of that particular door.

  DeCant took Miko’s question as a challenge. “That’s none of your business.”

  Miko had been following the two from the peepery ever since she had become aware of their nighttime rambling. She herself had slept for an entire day after her rescue the night before and now found herself at the widest awake when most everyone else was at their narrowest. That the two squeakers wanted something from the doctor’s office had been self-evident, but what that something might be concerned her, for a doctor’s cabinets are wonderfully diverse.

  “Why are you in the clinic?” Akhaturian asked the elf, for he had begun to wonder along the selfsame lines.

  “Stopping you.”

  “Just you try,” said deCant, pushing past the older girl, for few rights are defended more fiercely than the undeserved.

  An elf cannot match a Martian for body mass, nor for muscle tone; but Miko’s age gave her an edge, and the game of hide-and-seek she had played with her would-be killers on Amalthea put her over that edge. When push came to shove—and it did—deCant was hampered by her wish not to hurt the other girl. Miko had no such inhibitions. The two of them bounced and battered, fighting their own inertia as much as each other. A shove (deCant) or a punch (Miko) would send both of them sailing backward. A kick or a swing would set them spinning like over-achieving ballerinas. Miko connected with Twenty-four’s cheekbone, a lovely smack that put the Martian girl into a pinwheel and, as Miko had the lesser mass, the elf into a counterspin.

  “Ow!” deCant cried.

  That was enough for Akhaturian, who inserted himself between the two combatants just as they kicked off walls to close and grapple. Twenty-four had prevented him earlier from pushing between Bhatterji and Corrigan—she could imagine no happy outcome to that—but this squabble was not prosecuted with quite the same cold brutality as Bhatterji’s whipping of the first officer. Akhaturian cushioned their collision and provided a measure of stability to the fight, since now both girls could hold on to him while they flailed at each other. As these blows landed on Ivar as often as they connected with their target, it produced a certain amount of pain; but as Ivar rather liked the sensation of two girls rubbing against him, on the average he was comfortable.

  The swats and kicks came at longer intervals and were delivered with less force as, gradually, Akhaturian’s role as buffer began to outweigh his role as anchor. Finally, the two girls glared at each other and pushed away to different corners of the room, as if a bell had rung to end the round.

  Akhaturian had come out of the fray with a bloody nose, and deCant’s right eye was already discoloring, but Miko had managed affairs so as to avoid any cuts or bruises to herself. That Amalthean was a scrapper. Had she been playing for keeps, she would have landed more—and far more serious—blows. Ask Burr’s assassin, if you can. DeCant might not know it, but she was lucky. She had not yet realized the difference between acting tough and being tough.

  (Later, some of the crew, noting deCant’s black eye, looked askance at Akhaturian; while others, who had marked the bruises on the young Callistan’s face, frowned upon the clone. Dr. Wong took the two aside and counseled them on domestic violence, but deCant spoke up and said, “There weren’t nothing domestic about it, ma’am. It was wild clean through.” When Grubb, nursing romances of subtle revenge, asked “Little Lumber” who gave her the black eye, she told him, “No one gave it to me. I had to fight for it.” Miko, however, cut through the Martian swagger and set things straight with the others.)

  This is the way of it among the squalls of Earth when the winds come from the right quarter and bear moisture with them into the dry air. Clouds boil up and rub against the sky like fur on glass, and they darken and grow tight within themselves until they break, with a snap like parting cable, and the world turns for an instant all black and white. Rain pelts the ground, leaving little craters in the mud where the drops strike. The wind drives it, so it comes from every direction, and there is no turning one’s back. Folk pull in their shutters and curse their own delinquency when the rain wriggles in through the chinks in their shingling. They huddle tight around the hearth beneath the drumhead roof and tell stories or (if the hearth be electronic) watch the stories told by others.

  None of the three combatants knew of squalls. (A Martian sandstorm is a fearful thing, but it is not the same sort of thing.) Okoye could have told them. Indeed, the storms that walk in off the Bight of Benin are giants of their kind. She could have told them too how the smell of the land changes after the rain and how the sunlight may cast things in unexpected colors. The very air has an altered feel to it, all the ions having been discharged, and the breeze strokes the skin in a fresh way. There is, not only in a sense, but in all the senses, a newness to the world.

  The three youngsters no more understood the strange new perspective with which they now regarded one another than they understood the brief fury that had preceded it. Miko and Twenty-four barely knew each other—the intersection of their lives had not enough acreage on which to build a quarrel—but if one is spoiling, any fight will do, and a chance encounter is as good as a grudge.

  Miko, breathing hard but trying not to show it, remained wary and monkeyed herself between the two intruders and Wong’s cabinets. When, instead, deCant kicked off to the computer console, Miko asked, this time with genuine puzzlement, “What do you want in here?”

  “I told you,” deCant said. “I wanted to look something up in the doctor’s files.”

  She had not actually said that, but she thought she had. Miko, for her part, had fixed so firmly in her mind that deCant’s goal had been the drug cabinet that astonishment rendered her for a moment speechless. It is the way of it among humans that assumptions when unquestioned take on the attributes of fact. The Aristotelian schoolmen had found no need to look through the Pisan astronomer’s novel contraption. They had reasoned their way to the Moon’s pristine state from First Principles and the huffing and puffing of a dead Stagerite. Holding craters and maria impossible, they had no need to look. The Jesuit Clavius did peer through the lens, and it is said that he wept for joy to learn a new thing.

  Miko did not weep to learn she had been wrong. There was no weeping in her. Every tear she had ever had had been shed into a pillow in the Burr-Farm warren of Amalthea. She watched deCant boot the doctor’s system up and made no move to stop her. Next to what she had suspected, anything else seemed harmless. “What are you looking for?”

  “Genotypes,” deCant answered curtly while she tried a few of the more obvious passwords.

  Now Wong was no paranoid about security, but that didn’t mean she neglected her duties when it came to patient confidentiality. Her password consisted of the initial sounds of the first seventeen ideograms of Li-sau, a favorite poem of hers by K’ü Yüan, written in the days before First Emperor. No one could guess such a key, nor could she forget it, as she had read The Ch’u Elegies shortly after her affair with her professor, and the title “Incurring Misfortune” fell too close to the mark not to leave an indelible mark of its own. DeCant’s task was impossible and perhaps she knew that, for she worked at it with the sort of determination that only hopelessness can summon.

  Akhaturian, however, felt his partner’s answer to be inadequate and told the elf that deCant was trying to find her mother, and told her all about the cloning and how deCant had escaped a life as laboratory waste, and about the death of her fosters in the Syrtis Decompression, and that she now l
ooked to match her own genotype with that of Satterwaithe. Had deCant been any less intent on her work, she might have resented Akhaturian handing out her life so freely.

  Had Miko really cried every tear of hers into that long-ago pillow? Perhaps there was a single one left. Not much of a one, because it did not quite reach her eye, but she recognized in the clone’s quest her own aching loss of her father, and that made the two of them sisters.

  But unexamined assumptions really do look like facts. She had made that mistake once already and was not really entitled to make it twice, at least not in a single night. There could not possibly be the same longing in the two of them. Miko had loss, but deCant had never had possession. Twenty-four’s real mother—real in the only sense that mattered—had died in the Decompression; but even deCant understood that she could not search in those ruins. Why she sought an anonymous egg donor in preference to mourning her perished fosters is a mystery that she could not answer. Evan Hand might have, but Hand wasn’t in it any more.

  But that misplaced sense of comradeship was why Miko did what she did next. Turning to another console she entered a query and received an answer almost before the query was complete. “Here’s the access code,” she told deCant, handing her a slip of paper with a string of seventeen letters.

  DeCant took it, studied it a moment, then with a shrug entered the string. The screen smiled upon her and revealed a wealth of folders and files and links. Akhaturian, watching over her shoulder, whistled. “Where did you get the password from?” he asked Miko.

  “My invisible friend sent it to me.”

  Akhaturian twisted around to look at her. “I used to have an invisible friend too,” he said, “but he never actually sent me any e-mail.”

  “Hey,” said Miko brightly. “It’s who you know.”

  Nkieruke Okoye had worked with Miko on the sail project long enough that she marked the change to the Amalthean on their first encounter after the fight in Wong’s office. Miko’s aura had shifted just the smallest bit from the infrared, at which frequency she presented a heat source, to just inside the red, which had the effect of making her more visible—as well as less blistering. Okoye regarded this change as a hopeful sign. A shift toward the blue end of the spectrum meant the object was approaching.

  “I have a new friend,” Miko explained. Okoye took the elf’s new friend to be Twenty-four and guessed from the latter’s darkened eye the origin of the friendship, for there are those who respect pushback more than they do submission. Okoye was surprised, however, and a little hurt, as if she had lost something. Miko had but a small soul. The more who shared it, the less each received.

  “Get away with you, girl,” she told herself in her mother’s voice—unless it was this time her mother speaking for herself. “It may that the girl’s soul has grown. Plenty enough there to go around.”

  Corrigan had not yet come to an understanding of his hard-won solitude. It had crept upon him like a thief and had stolen from him the companionship he had thought he had. He arranged his toiletries with the same precision as always, but knew a vague discontent that The Lotus Jewel came no more by to disarrange them. Being a creature of habit, he had incorporated that very disarray (and its ritual rectification) into his daily routine. “I have done something to offend her,” he told himself, but he had quite forgotten what that something was. That she might take to heart a routine criticism did not occur to him, nor that his criticism had been anything but routine.

  Miko puzzled him even more. He had turned around and there she was, and had turned away and she had gone. She had by degrees won his affection and then, at the very cusp when that affection might have become something else, had vanished. He could make no sense of the entire episode. There was a fixity to his worldview, and Miko’s behavior was not fixed.

  And so he consigned both women to the bin of the inexplicable. The Eternally Mysterious Female. Had he gone to either one, he might have regained a friendship and more, perhaps even a bit of understanding. But he was not the sort of man to pursue another; which is too bad, as Miko in particular required pursuit. A youth spent on the run had led to a sort of elusiveness in her life. She wouldn’t stand still for anything.

  “That Corrigan,” The Lotus Jewel described him to her friend, Bhatterji, “is a hard and a cruel man. There’s a mean streak to him. He hurts.”

  “That Corrigan,” Miko told herself (for she was not the sort to entrust such confidences to another), “is an uncaring man. He has gone off to his own private Europa. He hurts.”

  “That Corrigan” was neither of these men, although he was a little of both. It was hesitation, not rejection, that had kept him from Miko’s bed; and he had cut The Lotus Jewel because he had been angry with himself. If he was cruel, he was at least uncaringly cruel, which may be a better thing than the more deliberate sort. Or may be not.

  The Balk Line

  What is it about a day long known and long expected that its advent occasions such surprise? As the ship approached the balk line, sudden new tasks were discovered, squeezed from the vacuum like so many pips from an orange. Bhatterji learned that a focusing ring had been misaligned; Corrigan noted a yaw in the ship’s dead-ahead. Even deCant found it needful to shift a few more cargo containers. Of all the crew, only Ratline found nothing overlooked, but only because he overlooked nothing.

  A calendar resembles a piston. Racing toward a deadline, it compresses a volatile mixture into a brief explosion. The crew of The River of Stars could feel that awful compression—kilopascal piling upon kilopascal—and each reacted in his or her own way. Gorgas quibbled and put the deck on watch-and-watch. Satterwaithe grew critical (well, more critical) and Corrigan tried to do everything himself. Brief scuffles and fights and arguments broke out overtop other, longer-established quarrels, much as waves heap over a vast, deep ocean. Even Nkieruke Okoye found herself snappish with young Ivar.

  Grubb, tears in his eyes, slit the throat of a young sheep, thinking that a feast upon real mutton would relax the crew and ease the pressure—a sort of pascal lamb—but it did not serve, and the crew rushed in and ate the peace meal piecemeal and rushed out the same way and barely savored the taste.

  Corrigan’s inclination to do everything himself stood him in good stead, as The Lotus Jewel was chronically late to the watch and he actually did have to do everything himself. Her tardiness seemed to him a moral failing and he wondered why he had never noticed it before.

  It would be pleasant to imagine Gorgas as a crusty old Cupid and to suppose that he had paired the sysop with the first officer on the blue watch with the notion that they could become reconciled by their proximity; or that he thought to separate The Lotus Jewel (who more and more took personally the criticisms that came her way) from Satterwaithe (who more and more chose to send them). In truth, there were only three possible pairings and, once he had determined on watch-and-watch, it did not take Gorgas long to work out the benefits and drawbacks of each.

  He had decided on the particular rotation for two reasons. First, that the captain and the first officer ought properly to alternate the command; and second, that one man and one woman on each watch struck him as aesthetically more pleasing than the contrary.

  When, an hour late, The Lotus Jewel finally arrived on deck, Corrigan gazed pointedly at the clock but, as the sysop was not looking at him, she did not get the point. She inserted herself into her usual clipchair at the comm station, attempting (as if it were possible, there being only the two of them on deck) to avoid his notice, and reviewed her board with an air of having been there all along. Corrigan narrowed his good eye as he studied her affected nonchalance.

  He did not ask her why she was late, which was just as well, for The Lotus Jewel had spent the time selecting her clothing and applying her makeup and Corrigan would have had a grave difficulty in processing that. The sysop had carefully considered a series of otherwise indistinguishable coveralls pulled from her dog closet. Aside from the old uniform that she wore on special
occasions and a few pieces she wore on shore leave, there was little to choose among them in fashion or color or cut; and that very lack of variety fed her dissatisfaction, as she was a woman who treasured diversity.

  The coveralls possessed more variety in grime and odor and wrinkle than they did in style, since standing the dog watch and helping Corrigan with the sails and diagnosing the malf in the AI had left little time over the prior weeks for such personal chores as laundry. She had finally selected (with much frowning and ejaculations of discontent) what she judged to be the freshest outfit of the lot. Corrigan had, in times gone by, told her that she looked wonderful regardless what clothing she wore, but that comment, though well-meant, was essentially ignorant.

  Makeup and accessories provided more possibilities. She finally settled on a bright lip and nail color (to lighten the overall drabness of her ensemble) and on cuff and ankle bands of complementary ’stroidal gold. A torc with a ram’s head buckle and a pair of beadwork slippers competed the ensemble. The torc and the slippers were gifts from Corrigan, though she had not chosen them for that reason—and a good thing, for Corrigan never noticed.

  Not that it mattered. The Lotus Jewel regarded her own body from the same perspective that Enver Koch had once regarded the ship—as the raw material of art; and if more critics enjoyed her oeuvre than had enjoyed Koch’s it was because her medium was more accessible. It seemed to her that the crew had grown less cheerful during the past two weeks—even Ram and young Evermore had waxed dour—and she had felt that gray, clammy hand seizing hold of herself. “I have some pride in my appearance,” she had told her appearance before leaving finally for her duty. “More than that slattern, Miko, at any rate.”