The Wreck of the River of Stars
Page 33
The Lotus Jewel pulled the virtch hat over her head and fit the electrodes to the encephalic interfaces in her skull, cutting off the world of the bridge (one feature of which was ’Abd al-Aziz Corrigan) and dropping her into the immensity of the Simulated Void. She became Ship, or if not Ship, something larger and more important than a sysop on an ancient tramp. She could forget what and where and who she was, and she could coast through the Void and brush the stars. Whether this flight was more real than those the doctor took on the wings of her mist would be an interesting point to consider.
Corrigan, from curiosity, had once privately donned the cap, and experienced nothing more than a confusing kaleidoscope of sensations. One really needed training to use it, let alone use it well. Grubb, who alone among the crew might have matched The Lotus Jewel under the cap, had demurred when she had offered him the chance. He had heard stories about sysops strangely possessed by cybernetic demons, and had no desire to allow a neural net to initiate, through feedback, spontaneous activities inside his own, personal brain.
“Eaton,” the sysop whispered. “Of course.
>
The Lotus Jewel sighed in exasperation, but did not correct the AI’s form of address.
>
>
>
Satisfied, and even a little pleased with herself at this little exercise in problem-solving, The Lotus Jewel resumed her sensing, gently fingering the pinprick asteroids splayed before her and the duller, knobby pip of Jupiter just off the dead ahead. It did not occur to her that Grubb had no more time for laundry than she did. Like others in the crew, she thought of him as “the cook” and fancied that he had free time. But Grubb was responsible for the life-support systems, from the lithium scrubbers to the bio-screens. He ought to have had a mate and not simply the part-time help of Ratline’s wranglers. His work had the invisibility of routine.
I don’t mind, he told Okoye later, while he washed The Lotus Jewel’s clothing. Considering the odor, it actually falls within my Enumerated Duties of pollution control. Really, he was as much a love-slave as Akhaturian and purchased more cheaply, for a single down payment had been sufficient to secure his labor for life. Grubb wanted to possess The Lotus Jewel again more than he wanted anything, but he knew that repetition would dull the wonder of that mad encounter in the Starview Room; and the one thing he did not desire was to exchange madness for routine. So he treasured the ache of his abstinence and in the end grew to love it.
Outboard on the rim, Bhatterji examined the hoops of the Number Two anode sphere through his helmet’s infrared filter and saw that the residual heat was mottled and uneven, which was very odd indeed, as the focus had tested within tolerances on the initial calibration, two days earlier. “There is still some deflection,” he told his two assistants. “Lock out the injectors.”
Evermore, who was inside the ship, said, “Locked,” and Bhatterji chose to believe him.
Approaching the engine, the engineer pulled a Muller wrench from his tool holster. Then, positioning his boots in the stirrups at the base of the east-side focusing ring, he fastened it to the garnet bolt and pulled.
The bolt gave and the ring turned infinitesimally around its diameter. One degree, Bhatterji remembered, for each full revolution of the wrench. He looked once more at the anode through the IR screen, gauged from the heat pattern how bad the deflection had been, then gave the bolt a second turn before he fastened it down. “We’ll do another burst,” he told Evermore. The sharp clang he felt through his boot soles told him that Evermore had opened the injector ports, and Bhatterji added dryly, “Once I am behind the blast shield.” He wondered if Evermore hungered for a moment’s misunderstanding, if he longed to consume Bhatterji in the fire.
The engineer followed his tether back to safety behind the barrera, where Miko awaited with the portable instrument array. This was jacked into the special sensor ports on the sheltered side of the barrera. In theory, Miko could have done this from inside, but Gorgas had ordered strict observance of the two-out/one-in rule. Miko and Evermore had survived only because others had been outside with them and Gorgas would not take the chance on a solo EV Asion.
Bhatterji crouched with his back to the thick wall and set his visor to UV opaque. This was the part he hated most—to be out on the hull during an acceleration. “I’ve zeroed the monitors,” Miko told him and Bhatterji bowed his helmet to show he had heard. She couldn’t see his face through the opaquing. Bhatterji tried for nonchalance. “Evermore? Go ahead.”
“Calibration burst in three,” the apprentice told the ship at large. “In two, in one, and firing…”
God took a snapshot of the universe. The brief flash of the engine cast long, fleeting shadows across the forward hull and a white actinic glare that Bhatterji could sense even through the opaquing and his eyelids. He sometimes wondered what the engines looked like when they spoke. A light whiter than white. A light that engulfed the visible spectrum the way the ocean engulfed a raindrop. No eye could comprehend that sight. There were too many colors, and not all of them had names.
“Counterburst,” warned Evermore from the safety of the ship. Number Four flared briefly below the far horizon, and the ship, having canted slightly from the test burst, eased itself back into its former attitude. Bhatterji wondered whether the boy yearned to deviate from procedure and play with this wild, gargantuan toy. Bhatterji cleared his visor and glanced at his mate, who was already hunched over her array of sensors. “Miko?”
“Everything nominal.” She uploaded the pattern of the plume onto the display unit and Bhatterji pretended to study the faux-color image and the gauss levels and the plasma velocity, but in fact, he simply admired the terrible beauty of the image. It was a picture-book star, with bright arms stabbing out to the cardinal points: a real star formed from the real fusing of real particles. Bhatterji sometimes fancied that it might possess real, though infinitesimal, planets. It was a domesticated star, one raised in captivity and confined to a cage like a bird taught to sing for the amusement of its captors. But, oh, how it sang!
The engineer allowed a broad and relaxed smile to cross his features. An unexpected problem—something had misaligned the rings—but a couple of turns on the garnet bolt was all she needed. Everything nominal and still five hours before they hit the balk line. Bhatterji had always known there would be plenty of time to finish the job.
Relaxing against the barrera, his gaze was drawn to the aerogel mast. Bhatterji had seen that faerie pole often enough that it had become a part of the landscape, a blasted, winter-worn tree, stripped by time as surely as the oaks of Satterwaithe’s frigid homeland. Now it was hung about with a bewildering and intricate cat’s cradle. Cables ran from the top of the mast to a circular hoop, and from there other lines led to the motors on the rim and to openings into the sail locker. Seen straight-on, the rigging was radially symmetric, yet from Bhatterji’s angle it appeared crazed, as if the sky beyond were crackled pottery, and his mind read it as a farrago of crisses and crosses.
“It looks wrong,” he complained. “All those ropes and things.”
“Shrouds,” Miko said. She knew without turning from her instruments the source of his discontent.
“Shrouds…That’s what they wrap dead bodies in, isn’t it? I suppose a dead technolog
y isn’t much different. And that hoop and those poles sticking out to the sides…”
“The crosstree,” Miko told him, “and spars.”
“…it’s all too complicated. Give me the straightforward simplicity of a Farnsworth cage. Complexity is a sign of poor design. True beauty is always unaffected.”
Noticing motion near the tip of the mast, Bhatterji magnified his visor screen and saw an open bucket within which a suited figure moved. “Somebody’s up there,” he said in surprise. He had not known that anyone else was Outside and for a weird and wild instant thought that here was a sailor who had been forgotten long ago when the ship had been converted.
“In the crow’s nest?” said Miko. “That must be Ratline. He’s dressing the mast.”
Bhatterji snorted. “It looked better naked.” His fancy had been nearly correct, then, for if anyone qualified as a forgotten sailor, it was the ancient cargo master.
“Another few millies of braking from the sail can’t hurt,” Miko pointed out.
Miko’s defense of sailing struck Bhatterji as wrong. It was one thing for fossils like Satterwaithe and Ratline to brood on the Good Old Days, but Miko was young, and an engineer. “Of course, it hurts,” he said. “As long as those…‘shrouds’ are in place, I can’t reverse polarity on the Farnsworths to fire a retrograde burn. The plume would vaporize half the ropes.”
“The ‘rigging’.”
“All right, the ‘rigging’!” He spoke sharply because jargon irritated him. “So I’ll have to flip the ship because I can’t redirect the plume. Evermore?”
“Aye?”
“Give me a ten-count, four-square in five.”
“Four square, aye.”
Miko said, “But we’ve finished calibration, haven’t we?”
“Sure, but let Rave have some fun. He wants to play.”
“Ten second full burst in three,” Evermore told the ship. “In two, in one, and firing…Ten, and nine…”
And Bhatterji’s horizon was rimmed by white fire, as if furious suns were dawning at all four quarters of the world. The ship became once more a living thing, throbbing and pulsing. Bhatterji listened though the vibrations for any sign of discord and, feeling none, smiled as if a long-absent lover had returned.
“Do I need to tweak anything?” he asked Miko, confident that he did not. He had felt the balance. He had entertained doubts about Number Two, and had thought perhaps that he might need to feather Number Four to compensate, but everything was perfect. “You don’t need those instruments,” he told his mate who had turned once more to her bank of gauges. “Weren’t you watching Antares?” He pointed to Scorpio. “If the engines weren’t in balance, the ship would have canted and the mast would have swung one way or another. That mast does have some uses after all. Why, the ship herself is one vast analog gauge, if you know how to read her.”
Miko thought more precision might be called for. It seemed to her sometimes that Bhatterji made his decisions on little more than whimsy.
Gorgas, having belted himself into the captain’s chair, surveyed his domain and thought that, for the first time since the captaincy had been forced upon him, it really was his domain. Today, he would drive the ship; he would direct her toward her destination.
The Lotus Jewel sat capped at her station and Corrigan, at navigation. Because these were at opposite sides of the bridge, the two sat with their backs to each other.
“Engines?” said Gorgas.
“Engines ready,” said Evermore, who sat at the engine room repeater to Corrigan’s right. Bhatterji and his mate waited below in the engineering control room, suited up in case anything went wrong. Well, Miko was suited. Bhatterji didn’t think anything would go wrong—though his eye did stray intermittently to the telltales for Engine Number Two.
“Sails?” said Gorgas. And what an odd thing for him to say. In all his years plying the Middle System he had never called for the sailing master.
Yet the master’s station itself was vacant; its long-dead console blank. Instead, Corrigan answered from the navigation chair. “Ready for deployment. Sailing master and shroudmaster are standing by in the loft.” It was a bald-faced lie, and Corrigan knew it. Ratline was in the loft, and he had Okoye with him; but Satterwaithe had retired to her rooms.
“A sail and the engines,” Bigelow Fife said to the others gathered in the common room for the midday meal. “I don’t believe it has ever been tried. Certainly, I’ve never heard of it being done.” He watched the sweeper on the wall clock as it approached the mark.
“It gives us an edge,” Grubb assured him and set a platter of fowl matter on the table before him. “We’ll get near five millies with the engines—maybe a touch less, because Bhatterji may want to baby the two he fixed—and another millie from the sails.”
“Why three sails?” said Wong.
“It’s what we call a trefoil suit,” Grubb said, with the air of being an old hoopster. “The three vanes let the sailing master play with the size and shape of the magnetic field.”
“I think it’s doobers,” said Akhaturian, as he sliced a piece of fowl matter off for deCant and another for himself. He added a brush of spice-paste to his own slab.
Fife said, “I understand that you assisted with the, uh, preparations, Mr. Grubb?”
“Aye, that I did. You might say, I held everything together.” He did not elaborate on that—it was better to appear mysterious—but he had convinced The Lotus Jewel to remain with the project even after her blowup with Corrigan and to lazarus the sail-handling software from long-dormant archives. If he had not quite ensured that everything held together, he had at least ensured that everything did not fall apart.
That Grubb may have played a key role did not reassure the passenger. “Are you, then, after being a sailor?” he said with some uneasiness. “I hadn’t known.”
“Oh, no. How do you like your fowl, Mr. Fife? Is it seasoned to your taste? The genotype of this particular clone was modified to incorporate certain spices directly in the carnic.” (Akhaturian, sucking mightily on his water bottle, had already learned that.) “No, I was never a sailor,” Grubb continued, “but I know all the old songs.”
“The songs…” said Fife, choking like Akhaturian, though for different reasons.
“He’s a terrific singer,” said the least wrangler in a strained but enthusiastic voice. “Aren’t you, Mr. Grubb.”
Wong, who by now could read the body of her lover, suggested that Grubb had always worked under the direct supervision of one of the experienced sailors.
“Oh, that I did,” Grubb agreed, though it made his role sound less important. “Corrigan, mostly. He did the inside work, while Ratline handled the outside.”
“It’s terribly romantic,” said Wong. “Flying under sail.”
Now Fife was not even romantic about his loves but, being the sort of man who requires a web of cause and effect, he was practiced in the art of constructing facts—and what else is romance but the belief that facts have structure? He was touched, a little, by the antic notion of sails being resurrected from the urnfield of history; but, ever practical, he asked, “Will not sails and engines together be slowing us rather too much?”
Akhaturian nodded. “We’ll achieve the Jovian datum by late three-December, instead of ten-December. Of course,” he added thoughtfully, “we’ll still be fifty-five million klicks from Jupiter when we do….” He traded a secret wink with Grubb. “We can walk from there.”
“Walk!” Fife said, and Wong lowered her plate and stared at the least wrangler.
“Oh, as for that,” and Grubb waved a negligent hand while at the same time leaning forward. It was a trick of his whenever he had something in the gossiping trade to pass along. “I heard that the captain and the first officer have a plan. Once they’ve slowed down sufficient, they’ll shut off the cages and take the ship into port—under full sail.”
“Oh, how grand!” said Wong. And DeCant and Akhaturian both applauded.
“Into Jupiter Roads?” said Fife with more than a note of doubt.
“Engines, one-quarter power,” said Gorgas. “Navigation, maintain heading.”
“One-quarter power, aye,” said Evermore; then, to Ship, “Four-square, one-four.”
“Injectors opened,” Ship reported. “In three, in two, in one.”
The ship shrugged and down below, Miko hunched over the indicators, verifying feed rates, plume temperatures and velocities, especially on the two rebuilds. Bhatterji, gripping a monkey bar behind Miko, affected indifference. “All nominal,” Miko announced after several minutes of thrust had gone by with no evidence of blow-holes or temperature rungs; and Bhatterji, just the tiniest degree, relaxed.
“Uniform acceleration,” Ship told the bridge. “One-point-two milligee.”
“Increase power to one-half,” Gorgas said and, when this too proved satisfactory, he took the ship by stages to full. Throughout this procedure, the bridge was filled with a brief but intense clatter as small items, drifting about during the long days of freefing, fell deckward once again.
This peculiar precipitation in fact filled the entire ship. The old Rivers were long accustomed to it, but Fife was wont to transit on tauter ships and the liners took great pride in preventing such a ruckus. Even so, it was not the noise that bothered him so much as the stylus that fell like a hunter’s spear directly into his slice of fowl matter. He used a word of great and unpleasant surprise to express himself before removing it.
“It’s because the solar wind is so much faster even than transit velocities,” Akhaturian said in answer to an interrupted question of Fife’s. “So a sail can always harvest momentum from the wind, no matter how fast the ship is already going.”
“Ivar’s going to be a famous ship-handler some day,” Twenty-four deCant volunteered.
Fife raised an eyebrow, not because he didn’t believe the boast—regarding the future he tried to keep an open mind—but because he didn’t see the path from the comment to the accomplishment. “The first officer is instructing you in sail-handling? That seems an inefficient use of your class time.”