The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Okoye clapped a hand to her mouth, lest her nkpuruk-obi escape, she was that startled by his answer. Why, here was a sandbar of a boy! A careless canoe might come to grief upon him, nine parts of his ten being hidden under the tide of his hormones. He might be worth a second look—once the tide had gone out.

  Taking a deep breath, she reminded herself that at transit speed she would never feel a stone and snatched her own helmet from its headball. “All right. If your intent is so savage-wild—” For some reason, she was angry with him, as if he had betrayed her in some fashion.

  But Ratline stopped her when she and Evermore reached the lock. “Two out, Okoye. One in. That’s the rule.”

  Okoye told him what he could do with the rule but, although Ratline was pleased with the fire he saw at last, he remained adamant. “You stay at the board,” he said, “and feed me status updates. If the cladding red-lines, we’ll need to duck.”

  Okoye knew it was hopeless to argue and knew also a shameful relief that she would not go out with them. She turned to Evermore. “Rave,” she cautioned him, the words tumbling out of her, “on the vane, you’ll be thirty kilometers from the ship. Whatever you do, whatever you do, don’t unclip from the rigging. Do you hear me? No matter what Bhatterji might think.”

  Her sudden urgency surprised him and he glanced to Ratline for some sort of confirmation. But the old man’s face was locked up and his eyes were turned inward. If he was aware of Okoye’s outburst, he gave no sign. “Why should I care what Bhatterji thinks?”

  “It’s just that I don’t—”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “If I see a stone coming, I’ll duck. And don’t worry about the Rat, either. Anything that hits him will break into tiny pieces.”

  “You are a foolish boy,” she scolded him in her mother’s voice. “You be speaking nonsense, and you know it.”

  “What, no kiss for the hero about to go forth?” He spoke grandly and struck another comic-opera pose, shrouding his dearest yearning in mockery so that refusal would not hurt so badly.

  “You are no hero, you foolish boy. No one is a hero when they go forth. It is only in the coming back that they may be heroes.”

  “All right, then.” Evermore grinned. “That’s a promise.”

  His riposte confused her a moment because he was much faster at connecting the dots than she was. But she was much better at knowing his heart than he was. (She ought not to have been. It was his heart, after all.) And so she realized a moment later than he did that she had promised him the kiss on his return. “Now who is being foolish, girl,” her mother told her.

  Okoye could imagine the kiss. Her arms would wrap around his neck and his around her waist. Their lips would press long and tenderly together. They would share their breath—their spirits, in the old, literal meaning of the word. Then they would part slowly and gaze long at each other. But that was an act that promised too much, and she was not ready to make such promises.

  “Be careful,” she said, stepping back.

  And the boy dared to take what had not been offered. “Don’t worry, ’Kiru,” he said as her hand rose too late to protect her lips from his sudden theft. “We’ll be okay. The Rat worked the sails for twenty years, and he’s only seen someone drilled once.”

  Okoye clenched her fists over the bloodless euphemism he had so thoughtlessly spouted. “I’d rather he didn’t see it twice.”

  “Miko,” said the soft voice in her headset, “temperature in Number Two CoRE magnet will reach cut-out limit in eight hours, given the present rate of increase.”

  Miko Hidei placed a hand over her ear and leaned forward, although the talker was a throat mike attached to her headset and the posture gained her nothing. “I know,” she told Ship. “I been watching as close as you.” Indeed, the other gauging on the panel had faded into a kind of wallpaper, so focused was she on this single readout.

  “Request override to reset limit.”

  “No.” Miko looked quickly to see if Bhatterji had heard her, but the engineer was engaged at the panel for Number Three. For some reason, the counteracting thrust from the foresail had not been forthcoming—some difficulty with the sail—and Bhatterji was busily recomputing cage temperatures and the ion spacing in the crystaline beams for the west side engine. She saw him speak into his own throat mike and thought it passing strange that she and Ram could converse with the same avatar of Ship at the same time. Miko leaned forward again and said in a lower voice, “Do not override. Maintain current set point.”

  “Automatic cut out of Number Two will reduce braking thrust below levels needed to attain the Jupiter datum. Failure to attain Jupiter datum implies hyperbolic escape trajectory, direction Delta Geminorum. Hyperbolic escape trajectory indicates extended transit times.”

  A laugh nearly escaped her. She did not know the phrase ironic understatement. In the struggle with Clavis Burr and his hired killer, the topic had seldom arisen. But even so, she would not have thought Ship capable of it. Wasat lay 59 light years distant, which at current velocities would require a transit time of 2100 years. Extended transit times, indeed!

  “Estimated time of arrival, Delta Geminorum, falls beyond expected operational availability of equipment.”

  Yah, Miko thought, including the crew. She wondered if Rivvy had applied that extrapolation to itself. Was it because it feared death that it resisted shutting down Number Two, or was that reading too much anthro into the morph?

  “We’re not going to shoot out of the solar system,” she told Ship. “Even if we do have to shut down Number Two, we can use the sails to beat back to Jupiter. It’ll just take longer, is all.”

  “Sensing detects no sails. Background information: Sails removed in 2054.”

  Ivar had been right, that clever little wink. If he had only been a little more clever or a little more quick or a little more both, The Lotus Jewel could have written a patch. Instead, Ship now had a split personality (to the extent that it had a personality.) “I told you before, Rivvy. Sails is a different avatar and Engines doesn’t have a handshake with it. You can speak to Sails yourself over the voice channel, if you don’t believe me.”

  “The entity called ‘Sails’ is an input from outside.”

  Miko gave up. A voice link would be useless for coordination in any event. The datastream was too enormous for voice channel bandwidth. It would be like drinking Niagara Falls with a Dixie Cup. “The sails are really there,” she said.

  “Input is presumed correct, based on average truth-value of past inputs from the Miko-entity, but unverified in present case by empirical test.”

  In other words, Ship wanted to know if Miko were pulling its leg. Like Grubb, Ship knew only what it could sense. “As soon as we’re through this atoll,” she told the Engines avatar, “The Lotus Jewel will patch you to Sails. Then you’ll see.”

  “The Lotus Jewel is Rivvy’s mother.”

  Rivvy was not deliberately changing the subject. Rather, its response algorithm had keyed off the wrong words in Miko’s inputs, fished in its knowledge base, and come up with another screwball remark. According to The Lotus Jewel, skew was the main reason why cheeseheads employed a simplified, if fractured syntax. The fewer words in an input string, the fewer possibilities for a “miscue.” Miko tended to speak conversationally to the AI, so she was probably responsible for its increasingly erratic responses. Rivvy had become as difficult to keep on-topic as Captain Gorgas.

  “Look, Rivvy, if we don’t shut down the magnet on Number Two before the temperature hits the quench point, the focusing rings will slag and we’ll never be able to repair them.”

  “Repair protocols and bills of material can be found in file number Em-three—”

  “Abort. Rivvy, we can’t repair the magnet a second time because we used up all the spare hobartium.”

  “Inventory records show two spools remain in stock.”

  Rivvy could be remarkably smart, Miko thought, but remarkably dense too—another description which, on reflec
tion, could be applied to Gorgas. The AI was behaving so unreasonably that she almost thought it had become human. “Ram didn’t enter all his inventory withdrawals into your deeby.”

  “That is a violation of inventory management procedures.”

  Now the neural net was channeling Corrigan. Miko sighed in exasperation. “Trust me.”

  There is a moment’s pause while Ship accesses and reviews library texts on ethics and philosophy, teasing out the meaning of trust from the tangled skeins of words therein. That a word might be a reference for which there was no physical referent had come as something of a shock—or at least as something of an interference fringe in its back-propagations. Trust seems a word of this sort.

  Ship compiles all previous input statements from the outside, discards those which are simple commands, and analyzes the truth-value of the remaining subset. The results are unsatisfying. Some statements-of-fact are unverified and unverifiable by objective means. Some can only be tested against other inputs from the outside.

  Ship accesses other deebies: Evan Hand’s private notes on his crew, the journal the passenger keeps, the medical records, the captain’s log, recorded statements exchanged among the entities themselves…It employs fuzzy logic and assigns fractional truth-values to unverified statements.

  In the end—and the end is but microseconds later—Ship concludes that trust is the equivalent among entities of a reliability distribution function. That the Miko-entity has asked for Ship’s trust may therefore imply that Ship is itself an entity. Ship dedicates a segment of its processor time to consider the implications of this premise.

  Rave Evermore had difficulty keeping up with Ratline, who jetted out the long line at what seemed to the wrangler a higher velocity than was safe. The old man had gotten a head start too, for Evermore for ’Kiru’s sake had double-checked his lanyard buckle. When he looked up again, Ratline was a distant blink in the heavens, a bright star, like Lucifer, only he had worked the trick in reverse, rising into the heavens rather than the contrary.

  While he coasted out the ’long line, Evermore had time to think, yet those thoughts were all a-jumble. He was a great one for connecting the dots, but first he had to have a few dots. With three or four of them he could sketch the Mona Lisa. He wondered first if he had been too forward with ’Kiru, kissing her as he had; and then, second, whether he had not been forward enough. He knew no more about the battle of Ürumqi than had Mikoyan Hidei, but he knew a forward strategy could often win the day. Yet ’Kiru was entirely serious about her commitment and Evermore respected that, no matter how frustrated he became. His father’s belt buckle had left a sear on his thigh that day when he had been caught with Beth-lynn, and that had branded him with the limits of what he might dare essay. The scar sometimes itched, but he could not scratch it suited up as he was.

  When Evermore finally reached the rim of the sail, Ratline had already attached the instrument box to the shunt for the vane. The defective vane was one of several such loops spaced around the sail like petals around a sepal. While the cable was as thick as his arm, Evermore had to remind himself that it was there. The cladding was white, which helped when his suit lights hit it, but it was still hard to see against the spattered backdrop of space. He looked toward the ship, 30 kilometers behind him and slightly below in the acceleration frame. It seemed like a toy ship, barely visible as a disk, and hidden behind a glimmering curtain where the waste gasses from the engines were being drawn through the sail’s magnetic field. If he lifted his gauntlet, he could hold the entire craft between his thumb and finger.

  Turning nervously about, he glanced toward Jupiter, which had grown to the size of a pea. He saw no sign of the atoll, but then of course he would not. Asteroids in the Thules and the Friggas tended toward dark bodies, and he supposed the same would apply to the rubble. That didn’t keep him from looking about, like a man expecting ghosts.

  “When do we reach the atoll?” he asked Ratline, hoping that his voice came out sounding casual.

  Ratline did not check the time. “Another few minutes, I suppose. Don’t let it bother you. We’ll pass right through and you’ll never know it—and if not…” He cackled.—“Well, you’ll never know that, either. One way or the other, it’s not worth wooling over. Muff! I’m not finding anything wrong on the electrical. Flux pump output is nominal. Evermore, hook onto the vane—yes, shift your tether—and run a physical inspection of the cable. The cladding is tough, but there may be a break somewhere. I’ll jet over to the other junction and check the electrical there. No sense you dangling around watching me. Where’s your reefing knife?”

  “My reefing knife?”

  Ratline pulled from a scabbard on his thigh a metaloceramic blade that caught and magnified the sunlight. Evermore could see that its edge faded into transparency where it had been micromachined to the thickness of a single molecule. “In case you need to hack a tangle or a dead line.”

  “I…don’t have one.”

  “Every shroudsman has one. He makes ’em his own self. It’s part of the rites of…ah, muff it. You’d probably hack a live loop just to learn about hoop stress. Go on. Check the cable for radiation damage or sanding or whatever. Meet me over at the other junction.” He gestured vaguely toward the far end of the vane.

  Evermore transferred his tether from the foresail to the vane and turned once more to look toward Jupiter. When he did, he saw a bright speck that he had not noticed before, brighter than anything else in the sky before them saving King Jove himself. He gave an involuntary cry. “It’s the atoll!” he said, feeling the terror rip through the screen of his nonchalance.

  Ratline looked where the boy pointed. “Damned bright for an asteroid,” he said. After a pause, he added, “It’s moving.” And a moment later, “Against the grain.”

  Ratline’s calm reassured the boy, although he did wonder whether Ratline would not face certain death with the selfsame calm. “What is it?”

  “It’s a ship,” Ratline decided. “Outbound on the radial, up from Mars and braking in for Jupiter Roads.”

  “Oh.” Evermore knew relief, and not a little foolishness. His face grew hot and he was glad that no one could see him. “Oh. A ship? Hey, ’Kiru! Did you hear what Ratline just said? There’s a ship out there!”

  “Be a load of traffic on the radial these days,” Ratline commented.

  “Why’s that?” asked Evermore.

  “Conjunction,” Ratline told him. “Shorter transit uses up less boron, so there’s a traffic spike on the grand radial route every two years or so.” He scanned the skies. “Probably scores of ships, strung out from here to Mars like a necklace of pearls.”

  “It’s a beautiful sight,” said Evermore. “Like the evening star on Earth. She looks close enough to touch.”

  Ratline answered with a laugh. “Not hardly.”

  “How far off is she?”

  “Hard to say. Could be a four, like us, and close by; or a twenty-four, away off. Or anything in between. It’s something we never saw with sails,” the old man admitted. “We never saw each other passing by like this.”

  Evermore nodded and continued to watch the bright spark. “I wonder which ship she is?”

  “It’s the Henry Joy,” The Lotus Jewel told the three deck officers. “I’m picking up the edge of her transmissions to Port Galileo.”

  “Odd.” Satterwaithe turned to Gorgas. “We were talking about the Henry Joy only a few days ago.”

  “Not so odd,” Gorgas suggested. “Or rather not the odds you may think. We’re forever talking about ships we’ve known or served in. How many names have come up en passant during this transit? Any vessel we encountered would likely be one that we’ve mentioned.”

  Satterwaithe was not a very romantic person herself, but sometimes she thought Gorgas the very antiparticle to romanticism, destroying it at a single touch—which only shows how everything is a matter of degree.

  “The Joy is on the triangle trade,” The Lotus Jewel told them, passi
ng along the information Ship intercepted. “Up from Mars to the Galileans, then west to Patroclus and back down.”

  Gorgas grunted and glanced at the plotting tank. “By which time, Earth and Venus will have swung east of the Sun, which lines them up quite nicely for a loop down through the Inner System. By God, that would be a run! Why, I haven’t seen the Inner System since…” He sighed softly and examined a memory that had surfaced. “It would be nice to see Earth once more, would it not? Eh, Number One?”

  To Corrigan, Earth was a deadly and alien world, but he smiled politely and said, “I suppose.”

  Satterwaithe looked at Gorgas strangely. “Sentimental for Earth, are you?” Her own memories of Earth were devoid of sentiment. Tight, dingy row houses on narrow, winding streets, facades darkened by a patina of coal dust that a century and a half of natural gas and Midlands rain had not washed clean. She had loved it as a child, but children love notoriously well and will treasure the most unlikely places.

  Gorgas gazed on some inner space, inaccessible to his companions. “No, Madam Sailing Master. It is not the Earth that I miss.” More than that he did not say, so that the others wondered exceedingly.

  “Perhaps we should signal,” The Lotus Jewel suggested. When the three officers asked her with what she answered breezily, “Oh, something will come up, I imagine,” and she gave Corrigan a meaningful glance. The meaning, of course, was that if everything that had happened had been planned, then this close encounter must also have been planned. Perhaps the ship and cargo were to be lost for insurance purposes, while the crew would make a hairsbreadth escape and be transported by Joy. As for the direction of the glance, who but the navigator had the means to arrange these various collisions and encounters?