The deck reverberated and she heard another thud. The sound puzzled her, since they were surely out of the atoll by now. Then she heard it again and this time the portal to the Sail Prep room slammed shut and ’Kiru finally understood. Gorgas had ordered the airtight doors closed.
Three minutes later, having still not gotten a response from Ratline, she watched a half-meter of fibrop sensor line drift past her on its way to somewhere else. Not entirely comprehending its import, she followed its progress as it danced and twisted through the air until it came to rest among a score of other lightweight objects against the ventilator grille. “Now here is some ripe corn, by its look,” she said. She unbuckled and went to the grille where, holding her hand by it, she could feel a light current of air being sucked out of the room. She stared again at the deck over-head, where she had heard God skipping. “Could you not have found a less terrible chastisement?” she asked her chi. “I did like the boy, but I…” But an adult does not stand by, the proverb ran, and watch a goat die on its tether. “Ship?”
“Ready, Ms. Okoye.”
“Sails.”
“Ready.”
“Monitor and communication system. Available nodes. List.”
“Clarification. You want to know if you can keep in touch with Mr. Ratline from some other console.”
“Uh, yes. I think…I think this sector is losing air.”
“Wait one. Sensing. Confirmed. Pressure drop, Long Room is—”
“Abort. I don’t really want to know.”
“Main node, comm shack. Bridge console—cancel. Bridge console in use. Biosystem console, reconfiguration for requested use. Confirmed. You may transfer node to Biosystems.”
“Thank you. Message. To: Eaton Grubb. Text:—”
“Mr. Grubb has been informed you are coming.”
“Uh. Thanks again.”
“Prompt departure is advised, Ms. Okoye. Database indicates low air pressure is suboptimal for continued performance of entities.”
“Yah. That was my thought too. ‘The sun’s o’ercast with blood.’” But she powered down the board and locked it out. Then, stuffing her notes and the log into her pouch, she slung it over her shoulder and loped for the portal into the main quadrant stairwell.
To find it blocked by an airtight door.
Altogether, there were four egresses from the Long Room, other than the one that led to Sail Prep, and all four, she quickly discovered, were shuttered. Okoye paused at the last of them and rubbed her chin. “‘Which is the side which I must go withal?’” she wondered, and realized the answer in the asking. She had grown so accustomed to the vacuum suit that she had forgotten she was wearing it. A brief, grim smile split her features. “Why, the outside, of course.”
With that, she bounded to the suit rack and took her helmet off its headball. There, she paused, frozen, while memories destroyed her like a stone at a hundred kiss. She had last stood here, she had last hefted this selfsame helmet, when she had threatened to go out at Rave Evermore’s side.
And if she had, would he be safe now? Or would the both of them be missing? She had been so relieved when Mr. Ratline had ordered her to stay in and now the memory of that relief was her punishment. She avoided, even in her mind, the likely meaning of missing, but she dried her eyes before donning the helmet, for loose droplets inside a helmet could fog up her visor.
She emerged onto the upper hull into a faerie land of color and snow. Air billowed from a rent before her and froze into a cold, unnatural flurry that sublimed into a vapor where the breath of the engines touched it. All around her the vacuum swirled with faint colors.
It was from this maelstrom that a figure emerged and Okoye tried to tell herself that it was Rave Evermore, saved by courage, skill, and chance. But the colors and markings on the suit called her a liar before she could even form the hope.
At first, she thought the man was dancing and she wondered if this were Imo muri, the river-god, come down from the river of stars itself to take her away. But then she realized that these were the capers of a man who has just touched down at a high speed and at an angle. Ratline. The figure tilted and skipped and Okoye sucked in her breath, because it seemed to her as if he would skip off the edge of the hull itself and be fed as a holocaust into the fires of the Number One engine. Because of the ship’s unusual vector, the hull seemed not only a hill sloping away from the mast, but a hill that had been canted and upthrust by some subterranean upheaval.
Okoye pulled her lanyard from her belt and snapped it to a padeye on the hull and then she dove toward the hopscotching cargo master.
But Ratline grabbed hold of a radiator fin, lost his grip and spun into its companion. That stunned him, but he kept enough sense about him to seize hold of the bracing tube, around which he spun heels-up like a Cossack dancer. He had already regained his footing when he saw Okoye. Between ragged breaths, he cried over his suit channel, “Two out, Okoye! Two out, one in! Who told you to EVAde?”
It was only fear at his close escape that fueled his voice with such rage, for who can be more fearful than those who keep all their fears within?
“Two out, old man?” Okoye answered rage for rage. “When I see but one? Where is he? Where is he?”
Ratline struggled with the sentence and wondered who the woman was. He had long sought for fire in the quiet girl, but he had grown so used to her silences that this verbal assault baffled him. “Evermore? He’s gone.”
It outraged Okoye that he sounded no more concerned than that. “Gone, old man? Gone in which direction? Can we reach him in time?”
“It’s no use, girl. It’s no use. I didn’t see what happened. The vane snapped and…I don’t think there ever was any time.”
Did she hear just the faintest crack in that voice? She did not believe the old man had tears within him. “If Rave had stayed inside,” she snapped, as wild and hard as the foresail vane, “he would be safe with us.” And maybe Ratline would have been by that cable when it parted. Maybe Ratline would now be “missing.” It was sinful to wish that another had suffered Rave’s fate instead, and a vain wish beside.
Ratline laughed, though it was not a laugh of amusement, and pointed to the spouting geyser of air that lay forward of them. “Safe inside? And how safe is that?” He paused and contemplated the spray. After a while, more calmly, he said, “Was anyone else hurt?”
Okoye shook her head, but had to speak perforce. “Not in the way you mean.”
“They’ll die off once the airtight compartments are empty,” Ratline said—about the geysers, not about the crew, “but they are beautiful in their way.”
“Why?” she asked him.
And Ratline, who was not known for insight, understood that she did not ask why the geysers were beautiful, but why her friend was missing. He could not see her face through the visor of her suit. All he could see there was the reflection of the sun and the stars. It was as if a galaxy were wearing her suit. “Why? There is no why, Okoye. There’s only what, and sometimes how. Life has no meaning, so why should death?”
“You’re a terrible man. You are no-man. Everything human has been sucked out of you.”
“When you’ve seen as many die as I have, girl, it doesn’t stab as deep.”
“And is that a good thing?”
Ratline had no ready answer to that. He wasn’t sure that there were “good things” or “bad things,” only “things”—to be borne or not, without complaint. In this, he really was at one with the old pagans. Not the new pagans, with their laurels and solstices and their late, post-Christian reconstructions of a dead past; but the true quill: those stoics who had gazed at all the sorrows of the world without remorse or pity. But while it may be an admirable thing to bear one’s sorrows in this manner, it is quite a different thing to bear another’s so.
The Survey
Ivar Akhaturian bounced through the C-ring corridor on the first under-deck. Everything in this sector was lit by the pale ruddy glow of the emergency lamps, so
that the floor and walls and ceiling seemed awash in blood. It gave the hallway a strangely empty appearance. The shadows seemed blacker than usual, or perhaps only a darker shade of red. He thought about Rave Evermore. Turning a corner into a radial corridor, he found it blocked by an airtight door and, without pausing, bounced off it to find another route to the galley. In doing so, his feet struck the circular brace and the support gave off a hollow reverberation, somewhere in a low register, as if a church bell had rung deeper down inside the ship. The echo brought home to him how small he was and how large the vessel. He might bounce for days along its corridors without encountering another living soul. Coming to a halt at the intersecting ring corridor, he listened and heard nothing. He might have been alone on the ship.
He wasn’t certain how he felt about losing Rave. The older boy had tormented him, but Ivar missed it now, as he would miss a pulled tooth. He had never thought Rave terribly bright—he had often imagined the other boy as a block of wood—but he had been solid and reliable—which, to be sure, are also attributes of wooden blocks. That the second wrangler had been a wizard with the omnitool, he knew in an intellectual way. He had heard both Mr. Bhatterji and Mr. Ratline mention it. But that sort of creativeness Ivar regarded as mere dexterity, along the lines of the Wonderful Dancing Bear. It was a performance trick. It was not of the same order as navigational computations, which really were wonderful and complex.
Ivar found the alternate corridor and was pleased to see that this one was fully lit. It made him feel as if he had returned to the ship from somewhere else, although the lights did reveal how alone he was in a way that the shadows had not. At least in the darker halls he could pretend that there were other people on just the other side of the shades.
He heard voices. Dr. Wong and the passenger were in the galley. “All I know,” Dr. Wong was saying, “is that I could detect no signal from his medbots.”
She meant Rave, he knew. Ivar wondered if the lack of signals made the older boy more dead than if they had been blipping busily on Dr. Wong’s console. The passenger answered something that he could not make out. Somehow, the muffled buzz of the voices made Ivar feel even more isolated. This is all a bad dream, he told himself, but he knew he was lying and that knowledge negated all the benefits of self-deception.
Entering the galley, he found Mr. Fife seated in a clip chair at the long table, eating something from a stay-plate. The doctor, characteristically, stood. She was not accustomed to chairs, she had told Ivar one time, and even in milly she remained frequently unseated, holding the plate in her left hand, and handling the fork with her right. An awkward position, Ivar thought. He did not see how it could be anyone’s default mode. Sometimes he had seen the doctor place her fork or some other small object in midair, as if on a shelf, only to have it drop slowly to the deck. At first, Ivar had thought she was doing this deliberately, for comic effect. Ivar himself often clowned. Only later did he realize that it was sheer habit on her part. She turned at Ivar’s entrance and smiled. “Why, hello.”
Ivar Akhaturian thought the doctor’s smile was sadder than most people’s tears. He could not say why he thought so. It was not that the lady was persistently melancholy, although she did seem subject to mood swings, but that the wan curl to her lips reminded him somehow of the wreckage of Old First Habitat, whose scavenged remains nestled deep in the ice of the bowl valley below the rim-wall warrens of Callistopolis. OFH had once been a bustling center housing the pioneers sent to prepare what was then called “Callisto Base” and it had often made Ivar a little sad to see its present dishevelment. He planned to visit the ruins when The River reached Port Galileo at last and he received his shore leave. Ganymede lapped Callisto every doody-day; that is every twelve days or “duodecimal week,” and the shuttles ran thick between them.
Perhaps he would stop and see his mother too.
“Is Twenty-four here? I can’t stay long. I’m going with Mr. Grubb and Mr. Bhatterji to inspect the damage.”
“In the breached sectors?” asked Dr. Wong. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Yah. Where’s Twenty-four?” Maybe his head was loose, for it kept turning from side to side.
Fife did not look up from his meal, which was marble duck, a swirled blend of white and dark carnic. It was not a paragon of its type, for all that Grubb had blended it himself and set it in the keeper for deCant to prepare. Fife was a man who valued his eating, which was unfortunate, as Twenty-four was a girl who regarded it as a bothersome necessity. As it was, the carnic was overdone and the savor, only fair. “She’s in the kitchen,” Fife told the boy with considerable regret. Then, he replayed the lad’s remarks and did look up from his meal. “Why is the cook inspecting the damage?” He did not add, instead of cooking my meal, for when he sought information he did not clutter his questions with irrelevancies.
Dr. Wong laid her hand on his arm. “I’ve told you that, Big’. Eaton is the biochief. He’s the one who makes sure our biosphere stays viable.”
Fife grunted and turned again to his meal. He hoped the man was as good a chief as he was a chef. He glanced at his arm, then at ’Siska, and ascribed the lack of ardor at her touch to the tension of the previous day. They had embraced at the time of impact, he and the doctor, holding each other tightly—out of fear, he thought, as much as attraction.
Why do I not use the word love, even in my thoughts, he had written in his journal. Is it that I dread to love, or that I dread that somehow this is not it? He had considered for some time that second use of dread before allowing it to stand and saving the entry to memory.
He had thought that the ship would be smashed and that, kept from the boat he had so carefully prepared, he would die, and in some perverse fashion he had preferred to do so entwined with the doctor. There had been comfort there—if not an allaying of fears, then at least a sharing of them. He had toyed with a flux equation as a way of encapsulating that thought. Fear per square millimeter diminished the more square millimeters of soul shared it. Many of his pithier aphorisms he had expressed with such mathematical conceits. Yet, the theory failed to explain why it held not true for love, which, unlike light, waxed with the volume illuminated.
When he looked up again from his meal, the Akhaturian boy was gone. “You wouldn’t know it to look at him,” he told his lover, “that his friend has just died.”
“I’m sure he is hurting inside,” she said. “He may still be in denial. Something like death does not become real immediately, especially for the young.”
“That is why I said, ‘To look at him,’” Fife pointed out. He always tried to speak precisely and it irritated him that others failed to parse the precision, and tried to rebut statements he had not made. Who could say whether the lad hurt inside or not if, as ’Siska had pointed out, even Akhaturian himself did not yet know?
“We all feel badly about Rave,” Wong said.
Fife did not correct her grammar, for he suspected that the statement was literally true and that none of their feelings in the matter were especially well-tuned. ’Siska had cried a little when it was clear that the boy, whether dead or alive, was lost to the ship, but her sorrow had been as nothing to when the engineer’s mate had nearly tumbled. He wondered if that was because in this instance, although the outcome had been considerably more dire, it had not been the doctor’s fault.
People sometimes chide me, he would later write in his journal, that I do not feel as genuinely as others, but I suspect that my feelings may be more honest than theirs. If my feelings do not run as deep, they at least do not change depth on my own account. The boy’s death was a tragedy, surely, and I shall be writing a letter to his parents to express my sorrow, and perhaps give them an anecdote for the remembering of him. But it is a tragedy in the core meaning of the word, stemming as it does from the boy’s own hubris. This Evermore had thought to learn his task en passant. I overheard the Igbo girl say as much to her companions last night. A man who believes in his own skills may succeed ninety-nine ti
mes, but the one other time may kill him. (That had the sound of an aphorism, but it was not yet quite right.)
Rave Evermore was also the subject of discussion in the kitchen. There, Twenty-four deCant worried at her own lack of tears. “I feel like I should cry,” she said to Akhaturian over the mourning whoop-whoop of the fans that struggled to keep the air clear, “but I can’t. There ain’t no tears. It’s like it all happened somewhere else, and all I am is watching it through a big, thick slab o’ glass. Nothing touched me.”
Akhaturian wanted to say, I’ll touch you, but a sense of the proprieties stilled his tongue. Propriety was not, however, strong enough to still his hand, which reached out to stroke her bare arm. Twenty-four was wearing a singlet and shorts against the heat and humidity of the kitchen. This not only exposed her limbs, but did a poor job of concealing anything else. Her skin glittered with perspiration where it did not cake over with the dust from the flour and ground carnic. Akhaturian knew he wanted her, right there amidst the crazed greenery and fleshy smells of Grubb’s domain. His fingers searched under the shoulder strap of her singlet. “We’ll all miss Rave,” he said, but he was no longer thinking of Rave. It was a relief not to think about him.
Twenty-four accepted his touch and wondered if the thrill it sent through her made her a bad person, for she felt that Evermore’s death should have touched her, and here she was: ready to take her husband into her in lieu of mourning her friend. Did mourning require tears? Did it enjoin continence? Evermore used to invade her with his eyes, just as he had ’Kiru and The Lotus Jewel. He would have looked on Miko too, the Martian was convinced, save that Miko was seldom about to be looked upon.
Twenty-four might have gone with him. She might have been Rave Evermore’s wife. When she had signed the Articles at Port Deimos, Rave had been aboard less than a month, and the two of them in their common apprenticeship had found themselves thrown much together. Had ’Kiru not been present to supervise them, who could say what might have occurred? Proximity can succeed where attraction fails. Yet, the person that she imagined she was mattered a great deal to her, and a union grounded in mere convenience—as the wretched doctor had found with the passenger—was not who she wanted to be.
The Wreck of the River of Stars Page 45
