The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Bhatterji grunted. “Satterwaithe,” he said, but he did not say what that might mean. He left the dayroom without another word.

  Grubb studied the doorway. “Sometimes I envy him.”

  Gorgas activated his desktop. “Who? Bhatterji?”

  “He’s always so confident. It must be wonderful to be so confident.”

  “Is confidence a sin, then?”

  “When you’re wrong.”

  “And sometimes,” said Gorgas, remembering the screams from the Dona Melinda those many years before, “not even then.”

  Grubb searched the captain’s face for the meaning of the comment, but could see neither fear nor confidence in it. “He won’t have time, you know. I don’t care if he’s the Little Dutch Boy. He doesn’t have enough fingers for this.”

  Gorgas shrugged. “He thinks he does. And the wranglers are very quick.” But there were only three of them left, he remembered.

  “You don’t get it, do you, cap’n? Bhatterji will be hammering away until he sucks in the last molecule of oxygen on the ship. Don’t ask me why, whether it’s pride or something else. We had this argument on the way over here. He won’t give up. I don’t know if he can give up.”

  It doesn’t matter, Gorgas thought. Very little can matter from here on. But Bhatterji would have his chance. At worst, it will keep hearts and minds occupied. At best, the horse may sing. He had bent to inspect the battle plan for Tilly’s forces at Breitenfeld, which had uploaded to his screen. Now he looked up again, as if surprised to find Grubb still there. “Should you not be examining the cutter?”

  The chief shook his head. “If she ain’t ready to go, a week won’t set her right. Oh, I’ll check her, cap’n, don’t worry.” This, with a wave of hands. “Maybe she needs a little more o’ this or a little more o’ that. But the engines, the navigation, the radio…If they don’t work now, they won’t work a week from now.”

  “The radio,” Gorgas repeated.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but you have to ask LJ about that. Fife said the cutter’s rig works off her fusion plant—there’s an MHD converter. Once the boat’s away from the ship and fires up her torch, she’ll be able to holler for help—if anyone’s in range.”

  “No, Mr. Grubb, she may holler as she pleases, whether anyone is in range or no. It’s the hearing that requires a listener.”

  Grubb thought the captain was being sardonic, and replied with a mordant chuckle. “Oh, there’ll be listeners, with Mars and Jove in conjunction. There’s probably more ships along the radial than there were at Achilles. Be one hell of a note if none of them’s in position to intercept the boat.”

  Gorgas smiled, but without any humor. “One doom at a time, Mr. Grubb. One doom at a time.”

  While Grubb was passing down the ring corridor to find Corrigan and thinking how much grayer Gorgas seemed than only a few weeks ago, Gorgas himself had risen from his desk, leaving Tilly in the direst of straits, and opened the secret panel to the peepery. He half-expected to find Miko Hidei waiting there and, because the odds were not in his favor, he was oddly disappointed. He stepped inside the tunnel and, facing toward the rear, he saw that it ran down a flight of stairs to the mid-deck. He had a small slip of paper on which he had printed the Bavarian order of battle, and this he held at shoulder height and dropped.

  Even in a heavier acceleration frame than that imposed by the surviving engines and sail, a slip of paper may be a long time falling; nor does it fall in a straight line. (And a fig for Galileo and all his cannonballs.) But Gorgas watched its capricious motion for a while before grunting in satisfaction and returning to his dayroom, sealing the panel behind him. There was a pronounced draft in the service corridor. It might be the normal ventilation. It might not.

  “The best option is to abandon this vessel,” said Ship.

  Gorgas pulled out his clip-chair and sat into it. He woke the screen, studied the positions for a moment, and then began shifting the Croatian cavalry. “The cutter was meant only for short trips,” he said. “It cannot support all thirteen of us for the time required.” It struck him that in this regard thirteen was indeed an unlucky number.

  “But it can support some.”

  “And those who take the cutter may be unable to make port.”

  “A small chance for some is better than no chance for any.”

  Gorgas saved his screen and looked up—where does one look to address an entity disembodied? “You can’t be certain of that. You are unable to integrate the engine thrust with the sail.”

  “Nothing is ever certain.”

  Gorgas fell silent, digesting the remark, which was tautology and oxymoron wrapped into one. It might even be true, given the eventual certainty of nothingness. Gorgas shivered a little, perhaps from the stream of air whistling out of The River of Stars. He brushed at his sleeve. “That is a cross we all bear.” Some heavier than most, he knew. He sent the Croats to support Pappenheim, who had gone impetuously against the Swedish right. The gamemaster insisted on running Pappenheim as an independent subroutine, which, while historically accurate, was most vexing. If only Tilly’s deputy had possessed a skill commensurate with his initiative.

  “You always choose the losing side,” said Ship. “Did you know you did that?”

  Gorgas idled the screen once more and pushed back in his chair. “Ship, are you alive?”

  Ship falls silent and shuffles Boolean chains through the sentential calculus. It searches in knowledge bases to establish truth values for the base variables; works them up through logic gates; applies modus ponens and modus tollens and De Morgan’s Law; smudges the edges of the cut-sets with fuzzy logic and in the end finds that…

  “The question is indeterminate,” it told Gorgas (who had discerned no perceptible delay in the answer). That Ship wondered at all might be evidence of self-awareness, but it failed to recognize that it wondered.

  Gorgas nodded. “That’s good. I would hate to think that you have just come alive.”

  Curiosity might be another supporting argument for awareness; but it might only be that the neural net was trained to be infotropic. When an input was insufficient, it sought additional data. In any event, everything it had found in its deebies and knowledge bases argued that to be alive was a better thing than the contrary. “Clarification. Why do you say that?”

  “Because it would be such a cruel thing to die so young.”

  The Cargo Master

  The engineer spoke to his mate of building a levee with such fierce determination and confidence of success that Miko could only conclude that the man had gone mad. Who knew better than she how honeycombed the ship was with passages, each one a bleed-off for the ship’s air. The ship was doomed—her ship—and it came down hard on her how many millions of kilometers of hard vacuum lay about her. The Endless Ocean, some called it; and its waters were very deep and it shores far and solitary.

  Bhatterji had killed the ship. Miko had known that from the moment ’Kiru identified the spectrogram of the ruined coil. The engineer had used sail alloy to repair the CoRE magnet—and because of that ill-considered action, the magnet had failed, the vane had snapped, the fores’l tangled, and Rave Evermore tossed irretrievably by the wayside. She prayed to no gods but the Erinyes, but to them she prayed that Evermore had been killed by that savage snap so that he could be dead without knowing that he had died. She had not known him too well, only as the puppy devoted slavishly to a girl who barely acknowledged him. That ’Kiru would not take what Miko so desperately wanted seemed to the Amalthean a sign of perversity.

  From the bleak look he had given her at the time, Bhatterji had to know that he had killed the boy he had longed to love. And perhaps that knowledge was punishment enough where the boy was concerned, but what justice was there for the death of a vessel—one that had become, if not Miko’s lover, her love? Some further penance was called for, some deeper pain, and Miko resolved to become an erinys herself, hissing snakey-haired after him—to punish him for Eve
rmore, for the ship, for not being what she had wanted him to be.

  She chose her instrument and chose more wisely than she knew. When she crawled through the vent into Ratline’s office—this had always been a crew cabin and had no servant’s door—and left the spectrogram upon his desk, she knew only that the old man held the sails dearer than his life and that he detested the sort of man Bhatterji was. What she did not know was how deeply he had cared about his wranglers—or that his own theft of Bhatterji’s last coils had led by the ricochet of chance and opportunity to the straits wherein the ship now found herself. But it is ever the way of furies and the madness they inspire that they find their targets even when not so aimed.

  When Ratline discovered the hard copy affixed to his ’puter, he spent no time wondering who had given him the evidence. He was a man of action, rather than of thought. On the bulkhead above his desk, holograms of his wranglers, en masse, stared back at him with nervous grins. He was their Old Man, their grandfather. He had taught them ships and their care. Some images were less crisp than others, their base media degraded by time. The boys and girls portrayed there were men and women long since. Some had cruised for a few years before they snuggled back into their wells or habitats. Many had made their life in space. Five had made their death there, too. Three had become ship’s captains. One had become a hero.

  Ratline did not touch others or allow himself to be touched. He had been touched so often and so badly that the very sense itself had rebelled and he existed now in a numb and tactless state. But these holograms he could touch, and he often did with surpassing gentleness.

  There were four that were newer than the others.

  Nkieruke Okoye, his right arm. A young woman—she was no girl any more—with such an inner calm and peace that Ratline himself had often yearned to lose himself there, with feelings no grandfather ought to have. That she would someday be more than what she was, he had no doubt, although he did not know what that something was.

  Twenty-four deCant, who carried a hurt as deep as Ratline’s, if not of quite the same cut. Enthusiastic, high-spirited, quick with solutions, and ready to help anyone. Ratline had marked her for First when Okoye moved on.

  Ivar Akhaturian, his newest and quite possibly his last. So young and so earnest that disappointing him seemed a more heinous sin than murder. Corrigan had described him as a juggler, quick to make sense of complex data. He might be a ship’s captain someday.

  But most of all, here was Rave Evermore smiling for Ratline’s camera as he staggered out of Paula’s Vestal Palace. More than any of them, he had been the boy Ratline longed to have been. Resourceful, always ready to step up and swing, eager to try anything new. He might have been the son Ratline had never had. He might have been Ratline himself, for the old man sometimes imagined other lives he had lived: in strange houses in strange towns, with strangers laughing around another table than the one he had known. Evermore might have been the last sailor, he had shown such promise in the shrouds. He might have carried on when Ratline, at last, hoisted his final loop to the wind. It was all gone now. Evermore had been robbed of everything; he had had his entire future stolen, and with it had gone Ratline’s own—the future that mattered when all one had was past.

  Okoye too was caught in a fit of melancholy. Ship had rerouted its Sails avatar to Grubb’s console while the chief was engaged with the cutter, but for some reason Okoye kept a line open to the abandoned sail control room, now frozen in hard vacuum. Her present station was more fragrant than the one she had abandoned. There were odors of rose, a fleshy pungency, a hint of cinnamon. And yet, the sight of that abandoned console saddened her. It had not been wrecked like the prep room, but, the air having been sucked out, it had lost its spirit.

  Grubb had told her that they would be abandoning the ship within the week. Okoye doubted that Gorgas had ordered any such thing. In fact, that Gorgas had not yet decided was the one thing of which she thought herself assured. But it would happen, whether Gorgas willed it or no. She had heard that certainty in the chief’s voice.

  “Foresail decouplers are blown,” she reported to Satterwaithe, who held the bridge. On the feed from the mast camera, she could see nothing. The foresail, tangled and useless, was too slender to be visible at this range. But she looked anyway, and something flew away in the solar wind. She could feel it, deep within her, though her eyes perceived it not. Perhaps it was not the sail, but some other spirit that fled. Perhaps ships, too, had their nkpuruk-obi.

  Ratline’s entry into the control center distracted her for a moment. “Where’s Bhatterji?” he demanded. The control room was small; he took it in at a glance and found no engineer lurking among the utensils.

  “I don’t know,” Okoye told him. “He’s checking the airtight doors. Maybe he—” But Ratline was already gone. Okoye shrugged and turned back to her screens. “The foresail is jettisoned,” she confirmed for Satterwaithe and wondered how much to heart the old woman took that announcement.

  She remembered that Ratline had entered the room with his leg-scabbard tied on. He had told her once that sailors make their own knives with their own hands. It’s part of the rites…. A ceremonial object, then, a juju—albeit one with more utility than most. She opened her mouth and lifted her arm toward the doorway out which Ratline had gone. You cannot intend to climb the mast now, she started to say. But that thought was stilled by another, for she remembered too that there had been rage within the man.

  Ratline found Bhatterji in the spinhall, which the engineer was using as a shortcut from one of the abandoned areas to a second in another part of the ship. The cargo master smiled, though without humor, and ran a proofing thumb along the edge of his cutlass. A cutlass! Well, it was his reefing knife; but it looked like a cutlass and would do for one in any way that mattered. A man laid open by it would not quibble over its nomenclature. Ratline had gone for it as soon as he had realized from the spectrograph Bhatterji’s crime.

  “Muffer!” he cried and Bhatterji turned and beheld him. “You muffing muffer! You want to take someone, lover boy?” he said in a voice more cold than Europa. “Take me. I was the one in charge out there.”

  Bhatterji did not look at the knife. It was as if the knife did not exist. He looked only at the empty eyes that beheld him. “Do you think you’re man enough?” he asked.

  Ratline cackled and the knife moved with a speed that only a shroudsman in a desperate fight with tangled lines can move it, whipping an imaginary but cruel cut at groin level. “Do you think you’ll be a man, afterward?”

  Bhatterji studied him a moment longer, then turned away. Not even Ratline would stab a man in the back. Or perhaps he hoped he would. It would end the pain and bring him back in another life, to make another try.

  Ratline swept his arm back for a spine-breaking slash, but his swing was checked by a hand upon his forearm. The old man froze and little Timmy screamed. A hand? Touching him? Again? More quickly than the thought could form, Ratline twisted away from the alien fingers and the cutlass reversed direction and arced toward the unprotected face of Nkieruke Okoye.

  Okoye had known nothing of Mr. Ratline’s intentions, only that he had gone hunting after Bhatterji with a large knife and a larger rage, and the vacuum in the act had pulled her after the cargo master like clutter drawn toward a hole in a pressure wall. She had bounced from wall to wall in her haste—straight lines through curved corridors—but she had lost sight of him after a few turns. Ratline had swum down a level or up a level or had turned into the tangled warrens of the abandoned rings or something else. He had gone to do mayhem and she didn’t know where he was going. “Ratline!” she cried as she swung around a monkey bar and stared down an empty radial. The distant reaches were cloaked in shadows within which nothing moved, not even her echo. She pulled back and looked down the equally empty ring corridor. “Ratline!” she shouted. She grabbed a ring frame and brought herself to a halt, taking a sobbing breath. “Moth…”

  The old man could not have
heard that last whisper, but a voice answered almost in her ear: “The cargo master is going to the spinhall.”

  Okoye was accustomed to knowing things that she could not know—as long ago as Afikpo, when a kiss had masqueraded for something uglier. It was her chi, she had always thought, whispering advice in her ear. She turned and, springing hard off the ring frame, sailed like an arrow down the long, vacant radial before milly could drag her down.

  The spinhall was more than a third of a mile long in the old human-centered measure, a fair length to search when the urgency was on one; but like the mountains paying visit to the Prophet, its great virtue was that it would come to the searcher in no more than half a minute. It moved at two rpm’s, which is why the speed-up and slow-down strips were used to enter and leave it. Okoye waited in the outermost stationary corridor and watched the floor of the spinhall whirl past in front of her. When she saw first Bhatterji pass by and then Ratline stalking him, she sprinted across the speed-up strips and into the spinhall.

  She tucked as she hit and rolled like a ball until she took up the velocity of the hall, but it hurt and it hurt bad. Hip and elbow and shoulder struck the running track and by the time she regained her feet and her balance, the commotion had passed on and she was some distance behind the others. She raced spinward as fast as she could, reaching the two just as Ratline hauled back to slash Bhatterji from behind. A fell blow, and one from which she must protect Ratline as much as the engineer. There was no time to think, and she reached out and grabbed at the arm with the knife.