The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Bigelow Fife, knowing his lover’s frame of mind, concluded that she had sacrificed herself in order that one person more could be saved. An oxymoron. If one more person were to be saved, why not Wong herself? Such a waste, he told himself over and over as he wended through the corridors of the derelict freighter. Such a waste.

  Yet it takes a certain calculated coldness to end one’s life merely to conclude a syllogism, and Wong had been neither cold nor calculating, nor even very certain. Fife, who was all three, could never have committed the act regardless how logical the reasoning; while Wong, who had, could never have imagined the reasoning. Logic wasn’t in it. The very act is proof of that. But Wong was a person to whom the opinions of others mattered a great deal. If Satterwaithe fashioned her companions in her own image, Wong was fashioned by their images of her. Fife was only the latest in a long string of ensorceled lovers, most of whom at the denouement had expressed strong opinions of her, and each such remonstration had chipped away at the person she once had been. There had been little left save splinters when Fife’s turn came, and so it could be said that if Wong had taken her own life, she had not taken very much.

  It would not be well to mention this to Fife, who was a man in grief, albeit a dispassionate and reasoned sort of grief. Even as he fled that dark, abandoned place of death, he reconstructed the disassembled personality of Fransziska Wong. The resurrection was a patchwork affair since, in spite of all, he did not truly know the woman and so filled in the gaps from his own imagination. It was a nobler Wong that emerged from the chrysalis of his mind—and had this intentional Wong been constructed earlier and impressed upon the doctor in living words, there might have been another ending entirely, although there is no guarantee that it would have been a happier one.

  Wong had become in some sense the fulcrum of his entire life, and he would date events henceforth by whether they fell before or after their meeting. He knew this as he knew a theorem in Euclid. It was so necessary a consequence that the steps leading to it vanished from view.

  On the bridge, he found Gorgas and Satterwaithe engrossed over the plotting tank. Satterwaithe had just told the captain that the projected path looked to be satisfactory “barring the unexpected” and Gorgas had chuckled over what he thought a mordant observation rather than a plain matter of fact. Fife interrupted—he was not unmindful of the clock—to tell them of Wong’s sacrifice. (He would repeat this heroic story later to as many as would listen, until he himself believed it implicitly. This was a form of mental antibody that prevented his consideration of any other reason—such as that his own rejection of her had been the proximate cause.)

  Neither Satterwaithe nor Gorgas were moved by the nobility of Wong’s gesture. The sailing master, in particular, thought the doctor a fool, though she did not say it aloud. In truth, it was not for lack of room aboard the cutter that either officer was staying. Satterwaithe did not know how she could explain that to the passenger, and so bent over the tank as if she were studying the sheaf of trajectories, and would not listen to the siren song of the passenger’s pleading.

  Fife, seeing that Satterwaithe would not be moved, turned to Gorgas. “Captain, she is after dying so that one of you may live. An act so terrible can’t be vain. You cannot let it be in vain.” In his own way, he demanded that the universe have meaning, for it is only meaning that mitigates the terror. “You come. Or command Bhatterji. Or…or someone.” He could not bring himself to ask for Ratline.

  “You ought to go, Stepan,” Satterwaithe said, for she assumed that by his silence Gorgas was considering the offer. “There’s no more you can do here. I can handle things.”

  Gorgas nodded thoughtfully and, turning to Fife, told the man to return to the cutter and that he would be along presently after he had seen to some few items. The passenger, whose personal anxiety had been slowly reviving, thanked him and hurried away. After he was gone, Gorgas shook his head. “What a pity about the doctor,” he said. “But she always did strike me as an ungrateful sort.”

  Satterwaithe, a moment later, said, “Ungrateful…”

  “Yes, I understand the passenger was in love with her, and here she has turned her back on him. An odd attraction, that,” Gorgas continued as he considered the matter further. “A Lunatic and a snake. She could never have gone home with him.”

  Satterwaithe scowled. “Sometimes, Stepan, you can be remarkably irritating.” She had in mind the way he would string sentences together in a sort of concatenation, as if each thought reminded him of another that was only tangentially related. Like the AI, he had a tendency to skew.

  The captain pondered the multiple possible meanings of Satterwaithe’s comment with his customary silence and so seemed to his companion to be unresponsive, which further irritated the woman.

  They continued to instruct the AI in the projected maneuvers and found it more difficult than they had anticipated, since for a great many contingencies of a general nature Ship required Rules rather than Instructions. At one point, Gorgas wished for The Lotus Jewel’s services and Satterwaithe enjoyed a moment in which she contemplated the sysop servicing the captain. It could not be other than a wildly bucking woman atop a passive and pensive Gorgas, and the juxtaposition of two such unlikely things caused a smile to flit across her countenance. (She was mistaken on at least three accounts and not least in conflating the pensive with the passive.) Still, even Satterwaithe admitted that training the AI would have proceeded more smoothly with a guild-certified sysop en rapport.

  After some time had gone by and the threads in the plotting tank had multiplied almost to incoherence, the sailing master spoke in passing to Gorgas. “I thought you were leaving in the cutter.”

  “You are mistaken, I think.”

  “Ah.” She reviewed Gorgas’s words to the passenger in her mind and supposed that there might be another reading. She looked to the clock. “Will you go down to see them off?”

  Gorgas shuddered. “Dear God, no! I can think of nothing more gruesome. And I do not trust my mettle, in any case. I have not your ice water in my veins, Genie. I fear I might bolt and scamper aboard, and then what would become of me?”

  “You would live?” Satterwaithe guessed. Inwardly, she wondered what he had meant by the ice water remark.

  Gorgas traced with his forefinger a bright orange line that Ship had plotted, following an iconic ship into the deserted regions of the Upper System. “What ship would take me after this? Why, no one will offer me so much as a purser’s berth! That is not life. No, that is not life. Stepan Gorgas is dead. This transit has killed him. And I dare not dissent from the verdict.”

  Satterwaithe said nothing and, after another moment had passed, Gorgas resumed his study of the sheaf of possibilities that Ship had projected, looking for the one that might have some meaning.

  The Lotus Jewel, Corrigan had been wont to say in his hackneyed fashion, would be late for her own funeral. In one meaning of the word late, this is a truism, but it was true also in the other sense of the word. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but there was nothing so geodesic in the sysop’s life. Hers was a pinball in full career. At suss school, she had been notorious among her classmates. Were she to run into a market to purchase a loaf of bread, they would say with knowing and affectionate smiles, she would emerge with several sacks of groceries—and, more likely than not, without the loaf of bread. This bent toward impulsiveness underlay both her generosity and her tardiness, for even the simplest act becomes complex by its diversions.

  She ought to have, as deCant had done, prepared her baggage beforehand. It was not as if time had leapt upon her suddenly. Rather it had crept toward her by stealth as it always did, moment by moment; and at each cautious footstep there had yet been plentiful time remaining. She had known perfectly well what she needed to take with her and so she had never given it much thought. But she had known only in general and not in particular and, faced now with the need, she hesitated over the details and wondered what sh
e might leave behind.

  “There are ninety minutes remaining,” Ship told her.

  “I know, I know.” The Lotus Jewel considered her options. It was not simply a question of which clothing and accessories to take. She was vain, in an oddly selfless way, but as she had constantly to remind Corrigan, she was not stupid and she had no intention of missing departure for the sake of a dingy coverall or two. Yet that was also the problem. Had there been marked disparities in value or sentiment, the choices would be as clear and as automatic as such choices ever came to her. It was only because there was so little to choose among that the selection consumed such time.

  She placed a small box of lipsticks in her satchel—she had gleaned the color range down to the barest minimum—turned back to her vanity and, along the way, paused at the suss station. The cap, like its twin on the bridge, was fitted particularly to her head. Given time enough and the money, she could always obtain another. Yet, until then, she would be unable to enter rapport with an AI and this, to a sysop, is close kin to falling blind. She placed the cap on her head, felt the nubs nestle comfortably into their sockets, and looked at herself in the mirror. The fiber optic harness that bristled from the cap like Medusa’s snakes resembled a head of unruly hair and it amused her to think that, were she ever to allow her locks to grow again, they would grow out in just this fashion.

  Disconnecting the harness from the panel required three separate moves, but when she had finished and she had brushed the cables back, the fibrops cascaded between her shoulder blades to her waist. Her hair had once done so, she remembered, and it had been much of the same golden color as these fibers. Yet her hair had never glittered and captured the light in quite this way.

  The cap she must keep, but the cables were standard. She decoupled the cap and stood shorn like Samson, and she her own Delilah. It was a literal shearing too, in that her powers left her and she became less of what she had been. She turned though the slowly falling, hair-fine fiber optics to nest the suss cap on its fitted headball. The fibrops writhed in the wafted air raised by her passage. She ran her hand along the cap’s smooth and gleaming surface, then snapped up the headball’s case and placed it beside her satchel as gently as if she had set her own skull there.

  Corrigan had given each of them a mass limit and The Lotus Jewel sought in her qualitative way to adhere to it. But the suss cap was ship’s equipment, and did not count against her personal mass allotment.

  Or did it?

  She scowled because she did not know the answer and asked Ship to ask Corrigan.

  “The boat’s AI doesn’t support that sort of interface,” Corrigan told her once the link was established.

  “I know that. Who do you think surveyed the system?” And why must Corrigan always tell her things she already knew? “But I need to take the cap with me.”

  Corrigan did not know that suss caps were attuned to their wearers and so her request stuck him as personal and whimsical—like taking a souvenir—and he answered with the special impatience he reserved for such things. “It’s your personal mass, then.”

  The Lotus Jewel coughed with weary frustration at the dead link. At this point, she recollected that she had gone initially to pull a selection of coveralls for the trip and hurried back to her dog closet. How many sets would she need for a twenty-seven day transit? She felt she might ask Corrigan about laundering facilities on the boat, but the notion of speaking to him again did not appeal. Four pair, at least; perhaps five.

  On the shelf above the flat-racks was an old goat case with her personal data pins. They were calibrated to her own synapses and without them her suss cap could not translate thoughts into commands, nor sensor readings into sensations. Ship knew the translations, to be sure, but it had had four years in which to learn them and had, in the process, learned to think much like The Lotus Jewel, which made rapport easier but much else more difficult.

  The sysop pulled the goat case out. It had been a long time since she had tutored a virgin AI and it would feel strange to probe into a fresh system—tentative at first, as she learned its reactions; then plunging deep within it, to quicken its avatars and embrace its con-volitions. Interfacing with Ship was like lying with an old friend and, because of that, lacked the excitement of discovery; but also for the same reason it lacked the uncertainty and risk that entering a new system always bore.

  Ship autoinitiated. “Has the copy of Ship been delivered aboard the boat?”

  The Lotus Jewel answered absently. She had become accustomed to Ship’s skew by now, and no longer bothered trying to counter it. Soon it would no longer matter. “Yes,” she said. “Miko took the pins with her.” She hefted the goat case and carried it to where her satchel waited. “I suppose I will need these, then.”

  “Query.”

  “Purpose: To train the new system.”

  “Clarification requested. ‘New system.’”

  “The one I need to grow from the copy.”

  “Clarification: the copy is Rivvy.”

  “Oh, I do wish Miko hadn’t given you that name. No, copy is not ‘Rivvy.’ Boat memory insufficient. Seed code is…A clone.”

  “Analog: Twenty-four deCant.”

  “Uh, confirmed, I suppose. Base information identical; learned knowledge base distinct.” Most of what constituted a neural net consisted of training and experience, the sort of information that could not be embedded in code. It struck The Lotus Jewel as odd that the neural net did not know that about itself. It really was not a well-integrated system. Its various components and avatars did not work well together. For this, she blamed The Carefree Fire, who had been sysop before her.

  “Query: discontinuity of function.”

  The Lotus Jewel was unsure what the AI meant, if the AI could be said to have “meant” anything. Tropism is not intent. “Clarification,” she said. “Discontinuity of learned knowledge base.”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Learned knowledge base not replicated in clone. Refreshed system will be distinct.”

  Seizing upon key words in the input from outside and pursuing hyperlinks thus revealed. Ship seines deebies and sees in an instant that the truth value is one. The extra memory that the Miko-entity has installed in the boat, while sufficient to contain the seed code, will not be sufficient to hold the knowledge base and learned neural firing patterns that characterize Ship-as-of-now. The system that will grow from the seed code will be identical to Ship in its architecture, but Ship finds no more comfort in this than would a condemned man watching a few of his stem cells leaving the prison in a Petri dish. The boat-entity will be not-Ship, breaking the continuity of the datastream.

  “There is a problem on the bridge,” Ship blurts.

  The Lotus Jewel skidded past the turn in the conversation and backtracked. “Clarification.”

  “Captain and sailing master conducting input. Purpose: retrieval orbit for eventual salvage. Syntax inexpert. Boron insufficient. Sails do not exist. Assistance is required.”

  The Lotus Jewel pursed her lips. Gorgas was trying to plan a trajectory that Ship could execute without its human servers. When the boron was depleted, further accelerations would rely on the sails alone. And Ship still did not believe in sails. The Lotus Jewel was no longer sure that she believed in them. Certainly, it had been a seductive belief and, like most seductions had ended badly. “Do I have time to teach you the secret handshake?” It shouldn’t take long, she felt. She had introduced avatars before, and if Gorgas really did need her help, she was disinclined to refuse. It would spite Satterwaithe, for one thing.

  “Failure of retrieval orbit implies helio-escape,” Ship added helpfully. “Direction d-Geminorum.”

  “Oh, all right.” The sysop returned to her headbox and retrieved the suss cap. “I’ll do it from here. No time to run to the bridge.” She snagged the fibrop harness from the floor with a graceful dip as she walked by and had reinserted it with half-conscious motions into the cap before she reached the panel in the com
m shack. When she had booted up and dropped her consciousness into the Simulated Void, she thought for a moment how she would miss this wonder once she had departed in the cutter. she asked amid the sensual pulse of the datastream.

  Ship told her.

  Gorgas and Satterwaithe, on the bridge, were grateful for her timely and unexpected intervention; but as they supposed she was linking from the cutter itself, they never saw any reason to mention how much time was really left.

  Corrigan finished his checklist and thumbed the square on the ’puter screen so the boat’s AI would accept his release. “Everything is ready,” he told his copilot. “Now, all as God wills.”

  Ivar Akhaturian nodded, though he was less certain that God was in it. He found his palms to be moist and rubbed them on his pants. “We won’t drift into the plume after we decouple, will we?”

  “No. We’ll decelerate faster, so The River will actually pull ahead of us. Tell me why.”

  Akhaturian no longer cared for the first officer’s pop quizzes. At one time, he had welcomed them as a chance to show off his knowledge. Later, he wondered if they might not be intended as a chance for the First to show off his knowledge. There was, in addition, the small matter of appropriateness. The circumstances were anything but normal, and it seemed to him that to pretend otherwise was a gross disservice. He wished, perversely, that Rave Evermore were with them, so that his cheerful confidence could balance Corrigan’s fatalism and Akhaturian’s own cautious uncertainty.

  “Our engine is smaller than the four giants on The River,” Corrigan insisted. “So why do we decelerate faster.”

  “Because of the muffing power-to-mass ratio! Now will you leave me alone!”

  Corrigan was taken aback by the outburst. They sat side by side in silence while the indicators blinked their bland assurances. Everything was ready. At least everything electromechanical. “I’m sorry,” said the boy and, “Would you…” said the First, the collision of which words induced a second silence.