The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  That was a mistake, as the thought she had had no time for would have told her. Ratline twisted and suddenly that blade was swinging backhanded toward her. Hard enough and fast enough, were she of a mind for such calculations, to sever her neck. She had time to cry “Ratline!” one last time, and then it was over.

  Bhatterji heard Ratline’s first, inarticulate shout and turned in time to see the cargo master whirl upon the First Wrangler. What struck him afterward and stayed with him for the rest of his life was not the wrangler’s cry, nor the rictus on Ratline’s face, nor even the glittering blade as it swung, but rather the wild vacancy he saw in the old man’s eye. It was as if a vital part of the man were no longer within him, so that he seemed hollow in some indefinable way. Okoye could have told him what was missing, but Okoye’s attention was just then fixed on other matters.

  The blade had a keen edge. Ratline stropped it lovingly each evening in the privacy of his room. He even spoke to it sometimes, although he knew that it was a strange thing to do and his voice would drop to a whisper when he did it—hoping, perhaps, that he would not hear himself. He used the strop for other purposes too and had the welts to prove it.

  Three things happened then at once. Okoye, who felt the spirit of the blow coming, ducked. Ratline, who saw what his phobia had driven him too, checked his swing. Bhatterji, who saw murder about to happen, threw himself at the cargo master in a flying tackle. If any one of these things had been done, Okoye would have been safe. If any two of them had been done, she might have escaped. But because all three happened, the duck, the check, and the shove realigned the blow so that the flat of the blade fell upon Okoye’s face and laid her cheek open and broke two teeth.

  It might have been worse. It might have been an entire head worse. Ratline screeched when he saw the blood splash and his own, dear ’Kiru, drop to the deck in a loose heap. Bhatterji, in horror, looked from the fallen wrangler to Ratline and their eyes met and in that meeting Okoye achieved her purpose and saved the cargo master from his vengeance on the engineer.

  “Oh, God,” said Ratline.

  “I’ll call Wong,” said Bhatterji. Wong was not God, but was more readily available, though Ratline’s summons did no harm.

  A call was unneeded. Half the crew was already racing through the corridors and rings toward the spinhall. Ship had watched without understanding, for understanding was as far beyond Ship as it was from any of the entities within it, but there was a subroutine for injuries and alarums.

  Gorgas was in the observation blister because that was one of only two places in the ship where he could pretend that he was not in the ship. The other was by the plotting tank, when the bridge lights were low. By concentrating his sight and, more importantly, his mind on the distant galaxy (or on its simulacrum in the tank) he could by degrees forget that anything else around him existed. This was a feat easily encompassed, for most of his waking life was spent on its brink. He knew, and knew at so deep a level that he could not doubt it, that had Evan Hand been still captain, this current state of affairs would not have come to pass. He began to count the stars outside, seduced by the lure of their immense numbers. Yet he could not help but think that, were he to divide the view into a fine grid, he could take a sample of grid squares and, from the counts within them and the assumption of Poisson’s law, form an acceptable estimate. The idea held him in awe for a moment: that infinity could be grasped by such a finite process.

  If he were to smash the canopy, the air would rush out, would probably suck him out bodily with its force, and achieve explosively what must otherwise happen more subtly. He even went so far as to strike the dome with his fist, which of course effected only bleeding knuckles. No designer had ever imagined such an assault, but the metallocene was proofed against it. Gorgas, surprised at the sudden pain—he was always surprised at the physical world—put the knuckles in his mouth and tasted blood. Like smell, its close cousin, taste runs deep into the hindbrain, and the smack of blood on his lips called up memories of the same bitter tang many years ago in a tatooed house on a busy street.

  “Captain?” He could hear the voice faintly from the entry tube and recognized it as the doctor’s. Gorgas sighed. Though he dreaded to hear what the woman had come to tell him, duty was the very last thing left to him. With unconscious effort, he wormed his way backward down the tube and onto the bridge. There, Satterwaithe, who had not left the bridge since taking command of the sails, turned from her fascination with the environmental readouts to give him an inscrutable glance.

  The doctor waited for him by the bridgeway. “Well?” he said.

  Wong was astonished at how calmly the captain was taking the disaster. He is like a rock, she thought, and took some little courage from it. “Okoye will live—no thanks to Ratline—though she’ll have a terrible scar if she does not reach a regen unit within the next two weeks. I’ve sewn it up and I’ve implanted tooth buds in her sockets. I won’t know about the eye until she wakes up and tells me what she sees. Or if she sees anything.”

  Gorgas nodded slowly. “I understand.”

  “I don’t know what I could have done to prevent this,” the doctor went on.

  Gorgas cocked his head, as he knew precisely what the doctor could have done, which was absolutely nothing; but before he could say anything, a dull thud rang through the ship’s structure.

  His first thought was, Not another one! And that same thought evidently seized the others, for they too jerked where they stood and looked in one direction or another.

  Then Satterwaithe put a hand to her ear, listened to the comm, and said with not a little relief, “I don’t believe it.” She turned to Gorgas. “Bhatterji just dropped an old airtight door into place. By hand. Number E-thirty-two.” She turned to the keyboard and, since Ship could sense nothing in that region, entered the information into the database herself. Another black bar appeared on the projected schematic and showed the airtight containment extending one corridor farther around the wound.

  “Do you think he can do it?” Gorgas asked.

  Satterwaithe shook her head. “He’s already found three other corridors with no doors at all. Hidei and the wranglers are welding a ‘cork’ into one of them, but given the time needed and the likelihood that there are more…” She gave the bleak shrug of a scrounger who has found nothing more to be scrounged.

  Gorgas nodded once more. “Very well.” And once more he impressed the doctor with his sangfroid.

  “It’s Ratline that worries me,” the doctor said.

  “Eh? Ratline?” Gorgas returned his attention to Wong. “What about him?”

  “He doesn’t come ’round. He doesn’t talk. He just sits there and stares.”

  “At Okoye?”

  Wong shook her head. “At nothing. He smiled at me.”

  “Ratline!” The thought of Ratline smiling terrified the captain.

  “Yes. And he said, ‘He deserved it.’ Very clearly. He hasn’t said anything since.”

  Satterwaithe had begun listening. “That was all he said?” she asked sharply. And Wong nodded.

  “He meant Bhatterji,” Gorgas suggested.

  “I suppose.” But Satterwaithe knew he hadn’t, and did not know whether to be thankful for the pronoun or not. Once before, Ratline had gone into such a fugue, and for much the same reason, and in consequence his fate and hers had been ever since inextricably bound.

  Gorgas turned away from both women and coasted to the plotting tank, where he stared at the meaningless positions for a moment longer. The tsunami and the atoll it had thrown in their path were far to the west now. Space before them was once more empty, save for the Jovian system so teasingly and unattainably near.

  “Captain,” said Wong, “do you know the symptoms of hypobaria?”

  Gorgas shook his head. “Loss of consciousness, I suppose, as the air becomes too thin to breathe.”

  “That is the end of it, not the beginning. There is sinus pain and flatulence as the gasses within our bodies sque
eze out. There is numbness in the extremities, short-term memory loss, the loss of peripheral perception—so called, tunnel vision, but…Do you know how Twenty-four deCant survived the Decompression?”

  Gorgas supposed the question relevant. The breaches in the hull and the fracture of the Syrtis Dome had obvious parallels, though the consequences varied in their scope. “No.”

  “Her parents secured her breathing mask first. I suppose it’s a natural thing for a parent to try to save the child. It smacks of selfishness to look to one’s self first. But hypobaria clouds the judgment. By the time they had the child fitted out, they had forgotten what they were doing—that short-term memory loss—and did not bother to secure their own. Probably, they no longer cared. Hypobarics typically die happy.”

  “And the point, doctor?”

  “Don’t wait too long before deciding that we need to take to the cutter.”

  Satterwaithe, listening, was astonished at the effrontery. Not that it was uncalled for, but that she had never thought the doctor would take the call.

  Gorgas, for his part, desired mightily to take offense at the scarcely-veiled chastisement, but could not in faith do so. His own indecisiveness had delivered him to this time and place, and so it was fitting that he grapple with it now at the end. He nodded gravely. “Your advice is well taken.”

  Wong, who had expected ire, and so had broached the issue parabolically—that is, by a parable—felt a queer disappointment, and stumbled mentally, as if she had pushed against a door to find it unlatched. In that moment, although she would never know it, she really did achieve her childhood dream and save the crew, at least some of them, for such things are seldom accomplished by dramatics.

  Satterwaithe stopped her before she could leave. “You meant her fosters, didn’t you? When you said deCant’s ‘parents.’ The girls is a clone, I thought.”

  “Do words mean that much to you? Can’t you deal with the substance rather than the labels? I don’t know what deCant is. There’s no notation in her medical record. Evan left a note that he planned to help the girl achieve closure. According to Twenty-four, Evan knew about the cloning, but he did not mention it in his note. Perhaps the story was only something the girl used to create distance between herself and her loss.”

  “Distance.”

  Wong regarded the sailing master with such objectivity that Satterwaithe felt herself for the moment a medical specimen, stained and painted onto a microscope slide. Because the doctor seldom behaved objectively it seemed more freighted with significance. “Yes,” said Wong. “Emotional distance. I would think you’d know a great deal about that. Twenty-four is a girl who believes very strongly in right and wrong, and it must have seemed to her a very wrong thing that she survived the Decompression when her parents did not.”

  Wong looked once more from the captain to the sailing master. They stood, the both of them, as if in separate worlds, looking neither at the her nor at each other. She turned once more to leave.

  Gorgas braced his arms against the lip of the tank. “Doctor.” Wong paused and waited. “I think you should move Okoye and Ratline into the cutter and make them fast. If…If we need to abandon this ship…I do not want them to delay us.”

  Satterwaithe turned away from them and stared once more at the shadows. “You didn’t deserve it, either,” she told one of them.

  Corrigan and The Lotus Jewel, having completed their survey of the cutter, arrived on deck to take the watch. “Grubb is still testing the air regen unit,” Corrigan said, “but he gave me a rough estimate of two hundred-fifty man-days. The engine and the navigational computer dry-tested okay, though you never can tell until you light the torch whether she’ll burn right. I asked Bhatterji to check the focusing ring, but he told me he had no time for it.”

  “The radio and the onboards are the same,” The Lotus Jewel said. “The self-diagnostics all check, but she’s an older rig. The power comes from an MHD generator using a bleed-off from the fusion plume, and the antenna deploys only after separation.”

  “That’s bloody foolish,” said Satterwaithe. “It means one cannot—”

  “—verify function until the boat fires up.” The Lotus Jewel brushed imaginary locks from her forehead and sought the comm station clip-chair. “I know my job. Don’t tell me my job.”

  Satterwaithe, who generally told everyone their job, arched her brows in surprise. “That was not a criticism of anyone in particular.”

  “Oh, get fucked, Genie,” said The Lotus Jewel with more weariness than anger. “Do us all a favor and just get fucked. If you’d been screwing Gorgas here instead of screwing with the sails, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  “Just a moment,” said Gorgas, who was not at all pleased at the prospect thus aroused.

  Satterwaithe tilted her chin. “I would never dare compete with a professional in her own field.” It was an odd thing to say and a puzzled moment passed before everyone realized that she had just called the sysop a whore. The Lotus Jewel squealed with rage and Corrigan shouted reflexively in her defense. Only Gorgas realized, amid the clamor, that the sailing master had avoided the larger point the sysop had raised. “Just a moment,” he said again, but he might as well have not spoken. The argument had become a three-way one, for the enumeration of hurts always recalls older ones and The Lotus Jewel did not need defense from the likes of Corrigan. Satterwaithe may have cried the loudest, for the bolt thrown against her had sunk the deepest, but Corrigan knew that “screwing with the sails” had been his idea first, though it did not occur to him that there had been an “instead of” tucked away unseen inside that phrase.

  So accustomed was Twenty-four deCant to finding Akhaturian close by that his disappearance caused her some disorientation as if, not knowing where he was, she was no longer certain of her own location. She searched in increasing consternation until Ship, autoinitiating once more, sent her out to the spinhall equipment bay that they had remodeled into their home and there she found him sitting in the dark in silence.

  The facilities were spartan compared to the suites they had both occupied off the wranglers’ common room. There was a bed rather than a sleeping cage. Chairs and a table that were more than just notional. A book-and-seedy rack. A console that allowed deCant to do as much of her work as possible within the centrifugal embrace of the spinhall. Everything was close in upon itself, and that included Akhaturian.

  She found him in a pensive mode, sitting before the console screen in their quarters. He noted her entry and nodded briefly, but he did not grace her with his attention. DeCant caught his silence and lowered herself to another seat and while Akhaturian studied the computer screen she studied him, for the screen was also blank.

  When he spoke at last, he spoke cryptically. “From the entry strips you can see it, every thirty seconds or so.”

  DeCant said nothing, but she sensed that this was a very different boy than the one she had married. He seemed more substantial, somehow; and at the same time he seemed as if something had broken inside. Yet, there are different sorts of breakages. A rafter might break and bring with it the collapse of a building; but fetters might break too, with other consequences entirely.

  “It’s very red,” he added.

  DeCant nodded and Akhaturian turned at last and looked straight at her with an utterly baffled expression. “She almost died,” he said and there was in his words an element of disbelief, as if he could not credit that such a thing was possible. “First Rave, now ’Kiru. Somebody should clean up the blood where she was hacked, but no one ever will, because what would be the point?” He heard the edge in his own voice and stared in surprise at the fists his two hands had become. When he looked again at Twenty-four, he asked plaintively, “What happens next? Will it be me, or you? Don’t go near Ratline. Don’t go near him.”

  “Ratline didn’t mean it.”

  “That’s the worst part about it. Don’t you see? If he had meant to do it, I could understand how it could happen. But he loved �
�Kiru, so it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “He was angry over Rave. Not just with Bhatterji. He blamed himself too, for taking him outside, and it just bubbled over.”

  “How can you know something like that?”

  DeCant shrugged. “I keep wanting to think of him as bad, but I can’t do it.”

  “So, he doesn’t mean it, but people he likes keep getting hurt.”

  “It’s the ghost, Ugo Terrell, punishing Ratline.”

  “That isn’t very funny.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be.”

  He reached out to her. “I don’t want anything ever to happen to you.”

  She took him. “I’d have a pretty dull life, then, wouldn’t I?”

  “I mean, anything bad.”

  “Oh, in that case…” She kissed him in sorrow. “…you’re way too late.”

  He thought she meant her pregnancy, but she didn’t. She was thinking of all the other things in her life, from her close escape from the laboratory, to her fosters’ deaths, to Satterwaithe’s denial, to the death and injury of her friends. She held him close to her. “Do you know what I like about you?”

  “This?”

  “No. I mean, well, sure I like that. But what I really like is that you always try to do the right thing.”

  He pulled away from her and regarded her curiously. “Is that so rare that you find it valuable?”

  She pulled him against her and cradled his head in her arms. “More precious than rubies.”

  The Cutter

  Corrigan enjoyed the play of numbers. They slid about his rows and columns, linked hands and danced across charts. They gamboled. There could be no other word for it. Sometimes, in the gyre, he forgot that they were to align themselves for some purpose, much as a man enjoying the waves may forget that there is an ocean. Despite his passion for order, despite the rectilinearity of his quarters, he was acutely aware of the chaos that underlay everything, for as Poincaré had shown centuries before, even Newton’s clockwork universe had a madman working the gears. Even so, he was in the end uncomfortable with uncertainties and with contingencies, indeed, with choice itself. He liked to things set straight. This was why Gorgas found him a queer duck and why Corrigan thought his captain mad.