The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  He found the spot he wanted and inserted the board. “Don’t tell me why he does anything. You haven’t known him as long as I have.”

  “Make sure you lock these boards out until they’ve been dry-tested.”

  “I know what I’m doing!” The cry was accompanied by a sharp look. Then, after seeing Miko’s hurt and angry face, Corrigan added more softly, “Yah. I’ll miss him too. He’s a mean muffer, and twisted in the bargain, but after the first couple of years you get used to having him around.”

  Grubb, who was activating the lithium filters—switches going snap, snap, snap—overheard the comment and grinned. “He shore licked you some. Folks don’t bond any closer’n that.”

  “Grubb, how would you like to be my best friend?”

  The chief laughed and closed and locked the switch bank he had been working on. “I better make sure L’il Lumber gets on board. Ol’ Hard-ass shore had her knickers knotted up over the girl…” He spoke in the hope that someone would tell him why, gossip being to him as bright tatter to a magpie. Corrigan shrugged because he didn’t know. Miko, who thought she could guess, also said nothing.

  When Grubb had gone, Miko said, “Ratline won’t leave the ship.”

  Corrigan did not move for a moment, then he took another board and inserted it. “I suppose I should have expected that.” He sighed. “Gorgas has his three volunteers, then.”

  “Volunteers?” said Fife, who had seized upon the conversation as a means to avoid his thoughts. “For what?”

  “To stay behind,” Corrigan told him. “Our rendezvous is twenty-seven days out, if everything goes right. That means ten people—counting the two squeakers as one. Even so, we’re on the edge. One more person would sink us.”

  Fife digested that. The cargo master had declared his intent shortly after recovering from his daze, before he could have known about the limitations on the lifeboat. “I don’t think that old maniac is staying because he wants to help us.”

  Fife was probably right, but Corrigan was angry anyway. “Does it matter why, as long as it does?”

  “You can count ’Kiru at half-load too,” Miko said with a hook of her thumb at the comatose girl. “As long as she’s sedated, she’s breathing shallower.”

  Three volunteers were staying. And one of them, Corrigan knew, should have been him. Justice demanded it, but Gorgas had demanded something else. Guilt warred with relief in his soul. “As God wills,” he muttered, seeking an elusive peace.

  Fife heard otherwise. “I would say it is how the Equation wills.”

  The first officer spun his seat to face the passenger. “What a barren universe you live in, Fife! So vast and so empty, and yet no room in it for God.”

  “Actually,” Fife said, “I heard that He takes up a lot of room. ‘Omnipresent,’ isn’t He? An unnecessary axiom.”

  “Without God,” Corrigan insisted, “there is no reason for anything.” This greatly surprised Miko, who had never noticed while peeping any religious behavior on the first officer’s part. But matters may appear differently in extremis than they do in comfort and Corrigan had discovered diverse things in the previous few days. If there are no atheists in foxholes, the same is largely true of lifeboats.

  Largely, but not entirely, as Fife too had fallen back upon his childhood beliefs. “Of course there’s reason. There’s Reason itself. A god is nothing more than an excuse to avoid responsibility.” He spoke, as Corrigan had spoken, from the heart, although (again as Corrigan) also from agitation.

  “Reason?” said Corrigan. “What is reason? Why should we not cut one another’s throat for the chance of a seat on this boat? That would the logical, reasonable thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

  “But we are not after doing that, are we? These things have a way of working out among reasonable men.” Fife spoke, infuriatingly, as a reasonable man. Behind him, the injured girl groaned in her sleep.

  “That’s an easy thing to say when you’re already sitting in the boat.”

  Fife stiffened and Corrigan was astonished to see him fumble with his cincture and unbuckle from his seat. “Excuse me,” the passenger said, although he addressed no one in particular. “Excuse me.” He stood and hurried from the boat. In the umbilical, he jostled past Grubb, who was herding the weeping deCant before him. The young girl hugged a satchel to her breast as if it contained all the treasure of the world.

  The chief frowned after Fife’s retreating form. “What was that about? I’d’ve thought he was ’poxied to that seat.”

  Corrigan shrugged and eyed the clock as he turned back to his preparations. “I don’t know, but he had better be back in two hours.”

  “Oh, he’ll be back,” Grubb assured him. “That’s one thing, you can count on. He looks out for Bigelow Fife, he does.”

  “Yes,” said Miko. “I think he uses reason as his god.”

  Now, the necessary consequence of Fife’s reasoning was that natural selection would eventually weed out the self-sacrificing from among the self-interested and produce a universe that revolved around the Self; and while the Self may be a fine thing to worship—certainly a satisfying thing to worship—it imposes a numerous and terribly fallible pantheon upon humanity. The Old Pagans had at least confined themselves to a few hundred deities, and kept them decently offstage.

  But Fife had not fled from the eloquence of Abd al-Aziz Corrigan. He bounded and stumbled up the Number Twelve radial because he had been moved by the eloquence of Nkieruke Okoye.

  The clinic was quiet. There were a few sounds nestled here and there like ground squirrels in the winter. The refrigerated storage unit hummed to itself. The air-pressure line to the medbot fabrication tank hissed from a small leak that had never been worth fixing. A faint tick-tick-tick from the circulation vent might have been a bomb or a disapproving matron, but was in fact a warped ventilator fan farther back in the conduit. These were small sounds, so tentative that they might not even be called sounds at all, but only the suggestions of sounds.

  The clinic was also disheveled. Medical instruments, unguents and salves, simples and compounds, were set about in their jars and tubes or had been laid upon trays. There may have been an order to it all, but the unpracticed eye failed to pick it out. In medias res, Fransziska Wong sat on her work stool with her feet planted in the stirrups, surrounded by the whispering sounds and the accoutrements of her profession and the impatient tick-tick-tick of that fan blade. She had begun packing her medical kits for the evacuation, pondering which might be needed in the next twenty-seven days and fretting because, like some wild hybrid of Corrigan and Gorgas, anything seemed possible and all of it seemed bad. Now, she only stared into her open black bag with a smile on her face.

  Into this quiet tableau, Fife burst like fireworks. “’Siska!” he cried. “You can save them! Every one! A sedative! Timed release! A medbot program! Something that will keep us all at a low metabolism. Just Corrigan and his little copilot need to be active. The rest of us can sleep. We’ll use less air that way. Like that black girl! We can stretch our resources. We can do it! Oh, ’Siska! We can save them all!” This sort of frenzy was very unlike Fife. The sentences jumped about like popcorn. They hardly made a proper syllogism. Oh, the reasoning was there, and no mistake. Fife’s ejaculations could be shuffled about to make an argument. But it is not only the God-struck who babble in tongues when the spirit is upon them. Fife had realized in his epiphany that when the equations do not work out, one may sometimes alter the coefficients. The road to Damascus it was not, but it was the road out of the cutter and into the doomed ship and that might have been the harder journey. Fife was genuinely inspired and had not even noticed that he had shifted from you to we in the matter of universal salvation. He was a strange sort of prophet to bring the Good News, but if God can choose carpenters and camel merchants, why not troubleshooters?

  Now, there is another reading. If Fife were genuinely addicted to the saturated body of Fransziska Wong, he might have, in the self-centered core of his
being, been casting about for any logical reason to run to her, so that he might feel again that transcendent joy and the two of them might weep upon each other’s breast. Any excuse might do, even a splendid good deed. The reason was no less rational for being a rationalization.

  Yet, during the time that he had sat with increasing impatience in the cutter, thinking about Wong and her entrapments, he had found himself remembering not the sweaty, desperate exaltations in which they had joined, but the tender and chaste embrace in the ’fresher when a lonely woman had thought that she had harmed a young girl. It had come to him gradually that he cared about the woman in ways for which chemicals could not account. This was probably the desperate justification of the addict, but maybe it was not. Whatever the atomic motivation, he had run back into the ship when, by sitting quite still and fondling his indignation, he would have been safe, or at least as safe as anyone else in the cutter. And he had gone back with a plan to help the doctor achieve her lifelong dream. This was no small thing, for one may sacrifice much to achieve one’s dreams, but to make sacrifices to achieve another’s argues that even for so self-centered a man as Fife, there was more to him than his center.

  It was a good plan too and possessed but three flaws.

  The first was that those who had elected to stay behind had not done so in the main because the cutter lacked sufficient air regeneration capacity. Whether stubbornness, despair, or the sorrow of old wounds, their reasons were not entirely addressable by this scheme of Fife’s.

  The second was that it was a delicate thing to keep so many people teetering in the edge of unconsciousness. That edge is a fine one and the drop on the other side longer and deeper than the Void itself. It would require medbots of uncommon cunning to maintain an optimum level of sedative. Too little, and there would be no point. Too much, and the abyss waited. There was seed code that might be used, but it would take time to grow the programs and spin the micromachines. Perhaps Wong would have had sufficient time, perhaps not; but that was moot because of the third reason.

  Fife became aware as he explained his idea that Wong reacted not at all to his excitement. She continued to sit and to smile and Fife grew a little irritated and began to wonder what was inside the medical bag that was so funny. “Didn’t you hear me?” he cried, and of course she had not.

  He realized that at last, and perhaps it had taken him some little while to see it because down in the bone he had refused to see it. But the thought finally did force its way in, as if by a carpenter’s maul, and all the sight and smell of it flooded his mind. His legs gave way and, were the acceleration frame any stronger than a few milligees, he would have collapsed to the floor. As it was, he took on a peculiar, shrunken posture as he staggered to her side. “’Siska!” he cried aloud, though not so loud that she could ever hear. “Oh, ’Siska…” He seized her about the shoulders and she slowly twisted and fell into his arms. Still pliant, he noted. Rigor had not yet set in. She could not have been dead long. He held her to him and kissed her, and when he had done that he kissed her again. He said many other things besides her name. Some of it was to chastise her for abandoning him. Some of it, things he really ought to have said weeks before. He used a word he had not dared use for years out of fear that it was not germane, and now that he knew it was—or thought that he knew it was—it was of little use.

  He cuddled with the thing and spoke tenderly and stroked the stubble on its scalp and the long, subtle curves of its articulated arms. His heart hammered at his ribs and his breath came in short gasps. Everything was outlined in a pearl white glow: cabinets, medbotter, bag, utensils, the thing that lay in his arms, even he himself, for it seemed as if he floated above all the room.

  He remembered all the times he had treated her carelessly and thought what it must have meant to her. It was altogether a strange sort of interlude, for he neither sought pleasure nor gave it, and when he had said her name for the last time, he carried the thing to the one remaining cot in the clinic and laid it there, arranging the arms and legs in a dignified fashion and fastening the belts against the impious drift of milly and ziggy. He said no sacred words over it—indeed, he did not know any—but he did stand a further while in silence by its side.

  He had been wrong that time when the two of them had discovered the cutter. Fife knew that now. To tumble from the ship was not the most lonely death imaginable. There were other tumbles, into vacuum colder and harder, and into which no parting voice could pierce.

  Reaching down, he seized the inhaler that hung around the thing’s neck, and with a savage yank pulled it off. He knew why she had died with such a smile, coasting high above the universe with galaxies jewels at her feet, transported in an ecstasy greater than any he had ever known from the juices of her body. Greater perhaps than any she had ever known, for he was certain that she had breathed a deeper and longer dose than ever before. Dose after dose after dose until her wretched lungs were filled to overflowing and no more oxygen could find its way in. “That should have been what I did,” he told himself in a moment of un–self-conscious truth. “It was I who should have filled her up.”

  He looked at the clock. There was an hour remaining. “Ship!”

  “Ready, Mr. Fife.”

  He paused, struck by a sudden thought, and said, “Could you have stopped her?”

  “Clarification requested.”

  “Never mind. Abort. Query. Medbot programming. Sedative delivery. Depressed breathing rate. Sublethal dose. Time limit for fabrication: under one hour. Request feasibility.”

  “Clarification requested.”

  If Wong could not live, then perhaps her dream could. “Can you construct a medbot to specifications in less than an hour?”

  “Medical computer and micromachining station are not accessible by Ship.”

  Fife sighed and gave up. It had been a mad notion in the first place. How could he hope to duplicate in under an hour what it had taken Wong many years to learn?

  “Input requested,” said Ship.

  “Yes,” said Fife in a voice as dead as his feelings. “What is it?”

  “Dr. Wong has ceased to function. Confirm.”

  “Yes…Confirmed.”

  “Resource availability on cutter has increased by twenty-seven person-days.”

  For the first time in his life, Fife lusted to destroy a machine. It was a rage so sudden and intense that he was taken utterly by surprise and it seemed to him as if he were merely an observer trapped in a runaway tube-car. He made no effort to clean up the mess afterward. When he left the clinic, he paused once at the door to look back and it seemed to him that she might come suddenly racing after him, as she so often had. Then he shoved the inhaler into his pocket and departed.

  The Ship’s Cat

  Ivar Akhaturian entered the cutter with the kitchen cat nestled contentedly in his arm. She was a fat cat. Prowling the marches of Grubb’s kitchen, how could it be otherwise? But she gave as good as she got. There were mice on board—there are always mice on board—and the cat understood quid pro quo. Undoubtedly, she thought she received the better of the bargain. Her eyes were closed and she hummed while the boy stroked her. Akhaturian was good at that sort of thing. In like circumstances, deCant often did the same.

  “We can’t leave Anush Abar behind,” Akhaturian said with worried innocence. “She won’t breathe too much air, will she, Mr. Grubb?”

  The chief smiled. “I think we can fit her in.”

  “There is enough margin,” said Corrigan, though with more doubt and less cheer than Grubb. He actually queried Ship’s database regarding feline respiration rates before he felt at ease. Every new thing, in his regard, was an opportunity for new problems, and he told Akhaturian to confine the cat to the nether regions of the boat, away from the control room.

  Proceeding aft, Akhaturian passed Miko coming fore. She had been in the engine ready room—it was really more like a closet—verifying that Fife had properly attached the boron and hydrogen lines to the injector
ports. One could never quite trust laymen in these matters. That she herself had only a few months’ practice with Farnsworth engines did not signify, nor did Fife’s entirely acceptable work. She was an engineer’s mate, and she had pride of place.

  “Why hello, Queen Tamar!” Miko said, addressing the cat first, as protocol demanded; then, to the boy, she added, “You’ve got both cats, then?”

  Akhaturian suspected some joke in the making and, although he was unsure whether joking were warranted at this point, he accepted it as a shield against death and tragedy. DeCant had already told him what had happened on the bridge and he was trying to come to terms with the way his wife had so casually offered to abandon him and die. Akhaturian was anxious to secure the cat so that he might return forward and secure deCant. He was afraid she might drift off from him. “Both cats?” he said and tried to think what the punch line might be.

  “You said you were fetching ‘Anush Abar,’ and this is ‘Queen Tamar.’”

  “This is Anush Abar,” Akhaturian said.

  Mikoyan Hidei was entirely capable of adding one and one, and did so now. She and Ivar had christened the same cat with different names. The other, the Cat With No Name, was still at large in the abandoned regions of The River of Stars. “Tell Corrigan I’ll be right back,” she said to the least wrangler as she turned into the side passage to the umbilical. “Tell him the crystalline beams are set right.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get the other cat.”

  Akhaturian ascribed Miko’s concern for the animal to the same manic mood that had overtaken all of them. In this he was only partly right. The Amalthean did indeed feel that the cat needed rescue, but it was not the only reason she went back inside. Fife had required a rational excuse to perform an irrational deed. Miko was not so particular.

  Corrigan, when Akhaturian told him about the cat, was focused on his preflight checklist, and so answered with half his mind and firmly hoped that the second cat would not tip the resource balance into the red.