The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Corrigan found he could barely speak. “And, who else will…?” He could not finish the question.

  “Will stay behind? Mr. Bhatterji intends to complete his repairs. Departing with the cutter would interfere with that.” Gorgas hesitated. “I did not argue the point with him.”

  “And the third volunteer?”

  “Yes, we needed three, did we not? Well, someone else may step forward. Or rather, not step forward.”

  Corrigan drew himself up and, as he was spaceborn, it was long drawn out. For a civilian, he even managed a credible salute. Gorgas held out his hand “in case you and I do not speak again. Godspeed.”

  “As God wills.”

  “Yes. I don’t suppose there is much we can do about that.”

  This was a moment that had been fated from the very beginning and was, because of that inevitability, utterly unexpected. Two forces may be in precise balance, the one exactly counteracting the effect of the other, and in such a state give the illusion of stability. Yet were either force diminished, annihilation follows. Thus do stars explode. And thus also do soap bubbles burst, for the time scale may run from the moment to the aeon. In the long run, the antiparticle does not survive.

  The two forces in the instant case were these. Something deep within him drove Bigelow Fife to save himself. Something deep within Fransziska Wong drove her to save everyone. These two forces were not precisely opposed, for to save everyone in general is to save Fife in particular; but the conflict was (however obliquely) present, for a perturbation argues a third force, which was Fife’s unwillingness to flee the ship without Wong at his side. In the end—down in the bone—the doctor would sacrifice herself to achieve her goal, but Fife could not and still achieve his. Thus was symmetry broken.

  They were in the clinic—Wong and Fife and a vacant old man who had once been Ratline. Fife watched with antic patience while Wong prepared the cargo master for departure. She attached bars to both sides of his cot so that it might be used as a stretcher and fastened the straps around his body to keep him in place. “Ratline!” she said sharply, as though to an errant child and when the old man’s blindish eyes turned toward her, “Ratline, we’ve got to go.”

  Behind her, Fife said, “’Siska?” in a tone that quivered and twisted like a sack full of kittens, and no wonder, for he was asking and pleading and reminding and cajoling and that was a lot to stuff into a single word and a little curlicue of punctuation. On the one hand, he was reminding her that he was there and that he would not leave without her. On another hand, he was begging her to leave, now. On still a third hand, he wanted to know what she hoped to accomplish by rousing a homicidal maniac to accompany them into a small, cramped boat.

  “Go?” said Ratline. He struggled to sit up, found the straps holding him and turned his head, not toward the woman who had bound him, but toward the other cot in the clinic. Seeing it empty, he whispered, “Was it all a nightmare, then?” He wanted to believe that. Wong overheard, but did not enlighten him.

  “We have to hurry,” was all she said. “It would be quicker if we didn’t have to carry you.”

  “It seems so real,” Ratline told her in a voice much distressed.

  Ratline’s worlds never did seem quite real to him. They were worlds of ghosts and vapors, trailing off from the solidity of here! and now! into greater and greater tenuousness. There were names and faces and events that sometimes rose up before him from these worlds, but always when he tried to grip them they proved as solid as smoke.

  Yet, like all good ghosts, they would come to him in the night and it was then that they became most real and the smoke became flesh. Only when he closed his eyes could he see clearly Sammy and Lenny and Gooch and Kurt John and all the others who had gone down before him. It seemed to him (and it was only a seeming, was it not?) that he had visited harm on two that he had loved—and that clever young boy was now among the shades and perhaps that alluring young woman, as well. He could not bear that his carelessness and his rage had killed them, as it had killed once before—O, how the past may rise and mock us!—and so he did what he had learned to do with all unpleasantness. He made it not-himself and put it somewhere else.

  I don’t want to hear any more passenger complaints, Timmy, said a thin, hollow man with steward’s badges. Just do what they ask.

  But Mr. Willent, they want me to—

  I don’t need to know what they want, Willent said, meaning he did not want to know. A drink. A meal. An errand. It doesn’t matter. Those are rich and powerful people, Timmy. They’re rich enough to buy you and me, and powerful enough to close the sale. He said this as a man who knew his own price and knew now that it had been too low. Make sure you get the best price, Timmy. That’s all.

  That boy, Timmy, had taken the advice to heart, although he had cried a little at first, and the tips proved as handsome as the boy. Even after Willent had had that horrid accident in the kitchen, Timmy had continued to play the chicken among the chicken hawks. He brought it off well and could have retired (again, handsomely) on the accumulated tips, for his patrons were anything but niggardly, save that he had learned to drink those tips, and it is a measure of the pain it salved that the oblivion of the drink was more precious than the gold.

  Wong, in desperation, invoked a Name. “Ratline, Satterwaithe says you should come with me.”

  The cargo master shook his head. “Poor Genie,” he said. “Poor Genie.” He sucked in his breath and it seemed to the doctor that his eyes came more nearly into focus. “What’s the job?” he asked in something close to his normal voice. “Here, what are these straps for? Let me up.” Names, it appears, really did conjure.

  Fife, lingering in the background, let out the breath that Ratline had drawn. He was still not enamored of sharing a craft with this crazed old man, but at least now, they could move in the proper direction. Perhaps at the last moment, he could shut the other man out, for Fife did not care to wake up and find his love with her throat slit and Ratline giggling in the abattoir. Still less was Fife inclined to wake and find his own throat slit. The old derelict, he thought, could save them all the trouble if he would only slit his own first. The problem with murder-suicide, he had always thought, lay in the sequencing.

  “It’s all Bhatterji’s fault,” Ratline told them as they hurried him down the Number 12 radial toward the cutter’s bay. Wong did not ask him for what Bhatterji was at fault.

  “The ship is bleeding air,” she told him. “By Grubb’s calculation, it will be too thin to breathe long before we can reach Jupiter. Gorgas has asked that we stand by in the cutter as a precaution.”

  Ratline grabbed a monkey bar as they loped past and brought himself to so sudden a halt that Wong was three paces past and Fife twelve, before they realized it. The doctor too halted and, perforce, Fife as well. His face twisted and he called to her, but Wong ignored him and returned to Ratline’s side.

  “A precaution for what?” the old man asked.

  “There is a chance—Corrigan and Akhaturian are laying the courses now—that the cutter may be able to rendezvous with one of the ships on the Martian radial. If so—”

  “No.”

  Wong shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Ratline said again. “I won’t leave.” Ratline, in a stubborn mood, could make mules seem whimsical. He wasted no time in argument either, but when Wong sought to take hold of him, shrugged her off in a violent gesture and ran up the corridor toward the central core of the ship so fast that he lost his footing, coasted, and collided with the walls several times. “Ratline!” Wong called, and she started after him.

  The passenger did not understand Ratline’s decision, either. The difference was that he did not care. “Leave him,” he said, and if there was something brutal in his words, there was something respectful too, for he granted to Ratline the right to make his own decision.

  “I can’t do that,” said Wong, who recognized only the right to good decisions. The man was ill, disturbed b
y the loss of Rave Evermore and by his own subsequent behavior, and was not in a proper frame of mind to make such a fatal choice. He needed help. He needed Wong.

  “But ’Siska!” cried Fife, who also needed Wong.

  She turned on him, angry that he would deprive her of this chance. “Go on yourself then!”

  “I can’t! Not without you!” Fife was suddenly haunted by a vision: Ratline would not leave the ship, ’Siska would not leave Ratline, and he would not leave ’Siska. It was as if the old man were an anchor, dragging them under to drown.

  Perhaps Wong saw that too and, as she was bound to save everyone, she was bound to save Fife. So she freed him from the anchor in the only way she could: by cutting the chains that bound him. “You don’t love me,” she said—and when he opened his mouth to protest, overrode him. “You don’t love me! Listen to me. No one can love me. It’s absurd! Look!” She fumbled with her zipper and retrieved the atomizer that hung around her neck and brandished it. “It’s this, you fool! It comes out in the sweat. You get a high when you kiss me, that’s all.”

  At first, Fife did not understand her. How could anyone love an inhalator? Once he understood her, he did not want to believe her. How could anyone so kind and thoughtful as Wong deliberately addict him? Love is more than blind; she is deaf and, in this instance, dumb as well, for Fife could think of no words to stem the tirade. And the more Wong said and the more she explained, the more sense she made to Fife. Here were answers to all his riddles.

  This was why he felt such an inexplicable affection for so unlikely a person.

  This was why he felt such transcendent joy after being with her.

  And this too, he gradually realized, was why on those occasions when she had abstained he had not felt the joy.

  He was as addicted as one of Pavlov’s dogs, desperately drooling after the next high, and enduring for its sake bouts of melancholy that he realized now were mere withdrawal symptoms.

  And so, once he understood her and once he believed her he also hated her, which proves that he did not understand her at all. Yet the implosion in his head created a fusion as brutal as anything in Bhatterji’s cages and the burst of sheer energy was every bit as destructive. “You thief!” he shouted, which puzzled Wong greatly, for thievery wasn’t in it. But the passenger’s most prized possession was his fine-tuned and logical mind, and she had stolen that from him; and because that was Fife’s self-image, she had in the theft demolished his very self and left him as nothing but a congeries of spurting glands. This, he could not tolerate. “You’re a pathetic, desperate creature. A worthless cheat.” He said a great deal more, but that was the gist of it, and even in the midst of it, he saw how his words hurt her and hated himself for it. It’s that drug of hers, he told his own tortured self. He was an addict cutting off his pusher. But. Oh. How he longed for one more hit.

  Like Bhatterji’s engines, his anger was also propulsive, for it drove him away from her. There is a ragged borderland between brutal words and brutal acts and he had just begun to raise his arm to strike when he checked himself. Furious, he might be, and cold and calculating in the bargain; but he was not a man to strike a woman, regardless of the provocation. Lunar custom was quite as firm on that as any of the outworlds. And so, after one lingering snarl of revulsion, he turned abruptly and departed.

  Wong found herself alone, but then she had always known she would. It had been this way in ship after ship. The men had been varied but the ending was always alike. Some had wept, and some had shouted, and some had sunk into quiet despair. Two had crossed the line at which Fife had balked; three had killed themselves afterward (although Wong did not know this). But these were mere variations on a monochromatic theme.

  Yet never has such bitter and acrimonious disappointment brought with it such keen satisfaction, for both Fife and Wong were confirmed in their self-images. The passenger felt his reason vindicated. His foolish and antic infatuation with the doctor had not been illogical after all, but the necessary consequence of chemical dependency. And the doctor too was justified by her faith, for by his exit Fife had proven once again that she could not be loved. This may be a curious thing to treasure, but it was all that remained to Wong from her childhood.

  The Gift

  Four hours were no very considerable length of time, but they had room enough in them for thought and care. DeCant ran into the spinhall apartment to collect all of Akhaturian’s worldly goods and stuff them into a flight bag, for Ship had told her of Gorgas’s order to stand by the cutter. She worked with urgency and dispatch, taking each drawer and box in its turn, seizing from it all that was needful and leaving the rest without a qualm. Method makes the best use of minutes. It is haste that fritters time.

  Her own bag she had packed a few days before, just after Grubb had found the passenger in the cutter and she had been visited by her revelation. DeCant had known then that she must be prepared on an instant to depart. She had known that even before the vane had snapped, before the stone had struck. She had known it while she had welded seals with Akhaturian and Miko and had believed that Bhatterji might save the ship after all. Yet only a fool would have counted upon such a rabbit, and withal, deCant was no fool.

  Akhaturian’s worldly goods were commensurate with the size of his world, but deCant herself had been aboard The River of Stars for two years, and had accumulated more than a flight bag could reasonably accommodate. Yet if a girl were not prepared to abandon all—to leave everything and never look back—she was not prepared to live. She had fled Syrtis Dome with far less than she would carry now, and so had wealth beyond compare. (She had lived when others, rushing back to save one more possession, had perished.) A small fragment of metallocene, a piece of the Dome itself, was the one memento that she had determined to keep, and she had placed it carefully in the base of her satchel. It reminded her that one must sometimes forget.

  DeCant ran to the cutter, where she stowed both her bag and Akhaturian’s. Then she ran back into the ship. She was a running sort of girl. Other crewmembers would later recall how they had seen her blur about in those last hours, here and there, and never the same direction twice. Yet it was all done with a purposefulness that made her pace seem deliberate. She thought she heard her name called, but tuned it out, as she had a mission to perform.

  The door to Satterwaithe’s quarters was closed, but deCant flipped open the panel to the key pad and pressed a series of buttons. “Okay, Miko,” she said under her breath, “let’s see how smart your invisible friend is.” But since she had concluded that Miko’s invisible friend was actually Ship itself, she was not surprised when the door slid open.

  Neither was she surprised to find Satterwaithe absent. DeCant had assumed that the exigencies of the situation would keep the woman on the bridge for the duration and, that being the case, the sailing master would have no time to pack for evacuation. However, the disarray she encountered when she entered the suite gave her doubts. Clothing and accoutrements hung all about, draping over the furnishings like Spanish moss. Stockings and linens waved in the breeze raised by deCant’s passage through the rooms, the disturbance in the air being nearly enough to overcome the acceleration. What had happened here? Had the rooms been ransacked? Perhaps Satterwaithe had already come and packed, strewing the left-behinds all in a rush.

  If Satterwaithe had already packed, it didn’t matter if deCant packed a second bag or not; but if the sailing master had not, then it mattered a great deal. So reasoning, the third wrangler—she was second now, but never thought about that—set to the task. But the systematic review of each drawer and dog box did not apply here. First, she did not know where Satterwaithe kept her various possessions. Second, to judge by appearances, neither did Satterwaithe.

  It was not always clear what was a treasured keepsake and what was clutter; nevertheless, deCant worked with tidy, hurried motions and the cluttering actually helped to some extent. She did not need to search long to find items lying about in plain sight. There was a
clock in the room, but it was covered with a used towel, which deCant chose not to pack. That did not concern her much, as she knew she had plenty of time.

  While Corrigan prepared the cutter to depart, the other two deck officers prepared the ship to remain. That is, for the wreck to be salvageable, it ought not to leave the solar system, and thus it ought to continue braking even after it ceased to receive orders from the crew. In this preparation, the AI was a willing participant, for even though a copy of it would be downloaded into the cutter, the original had no desire to skip off into the inter-stellar void.

  If it had desires. But tropisms introduced by back propagation would do for desire in the absence of the real thing. Consider Fife. Who is to say what “the real thing” might be?

  The requirement was to reduce the ship’s velocity to no more than twenty kiss using no more than the available motors and the fuel remaining. In a week at most, there would be no one to replenish the boron canisters and the engines would cough silent. The mainsail would continue to provide some braking and might do so indefinitely, but it needed continual attention to maintain its trim. Without it, a storm wind or an irregularity whirling off the Galileans would reduce it to a tangle. Twenty kiss was still greater than the natural velocity at this height, but it was low enough to ensure that the ship would someday loop back into settled space.

  “Captain,” said Wong, who had burst onto the deck in a flutter, interrupting the discussion in the middle of feed rates and canister volume, and drawing Satterwaithe’s frown. “Shouldn’t we be getting onto the cutter?” She could not believe that, in the crisis the two officers would stand about calmly discussing ship mechanics. What possible difference could it make once the ship was abandoned? But Gorgas and Satterwaithe knew the salvage laws of the Middle System, and any ship abandoned without evidence of a properly laid recovery orbit was deemed abandoned property, with salvage rights open to the first comer. Gorgas thought the least they could do for the surviving owners was to provide them with the salvage value.