The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  His visor darkened as he passed the penumbra of the plume and the universe was suddenly reduced to abstractions and to data sucked from it by clever sensors. A radar map appeared on his visor in lieu of the cutter itself. Readouts of velocity, distance, and bearing replaced the parallax and the relative motion that his eyes had beheld. There were no longer stars and planets, nor indeed a freighter. Gorgas and Ratline and Satterwaithe and Bhatterji—and Miko—existed only in the past, in a universe he had abandoned, while Grubb and the othes did not yet exist, as he had not yet entered theirs. There was only Corrigan and the cutter.

  The readouts scrolled across his faceplate so fast that he wondered why they were displayed at all. The illusion of information. One number flashed and held: The compressed gas that moved his suit was running low, which he had expected. It was a long distance for a suit, and acceleration had been required the entire way. Coasting, in this context, was another way of standing still. Corrigan examined the stream of numbers representing distance and velocity. “Estimate closing velocity and time,” he said, and he studied the results of the analysis with deep interest. He was Heisenberg’s cat, caught in a sightless cocoon. He could match the cutter’s velocity or he could match the cutter’s position. He could not do both.

  He opted for position and remembered with some irony the advice he had given The Lotus Jewel. Relative closing velocity would be just under one meter per second, which sounded less fast than it would feel.

  Corrigan had leapt too late. The cutter had slipped too far aft. The two acceleration frames now differed too greatly. At the crucial moments, as he closed on the boat, his visor cleared too slowly. This was a cruel thing for God to do, to let him see his fate a moment before he found it. Corrigan would not have known what “a bug on the windshield” meant and the impact gave him no opportunity to learn. He did not know how many bones broke—most of them, he suspected—but the shattering of his visor when it struck the hull made an enumeration moot. He had a moment to recognize what had happened and to whisper the kalima shahada: “Ash hadu an la illaha il Allah, wa ash hadu ana Muhammad abduHu wa Rasul’Allah,” and that last word wafted into the Void with his last breath before even the first pain arrived.

  The Last Supper

  Mikoyan Hidei lingered in the peepery for several days after the cutter had gone, nestled comfortably within the close walls of her refuge. She watched morphies on the peep bank, crept into the pantry when no one else was about to spy her, and peeped on the others now and then when curiosity overcame her. Sometimes, she held long and very strange conversations with Ship. The others knew she was aboard, of course. She had heard them calling; though since the cutter’s departure, they had called less frequently. Satterwaithe and Ratline did not care where she was, but then they had cared about very little for a very long time and had fallen out of the practice. Ratline, in particular, came down from the crow’s nest only to absorb a hasty meal before returning to his solitary perch. Bhatterji, who did care, continued to moil obsessively on his cordon. Once, encountering Ratline in the pantry, the engineer tried to convince the cargo master to help with the welding—all the extant airtight doors now being in place—but Ratline only snickered and said that he’d not get him alone in those remote corners of the ship.

  Gorgas also cared and had a general notion of where Miko might be holding herself. On the third day, having prepared to take the part of General Riall at Chippewa, he suddenly blanked the screen with an impatient cry and, turning from the console made for the hidden doorway in the alcove. The opening required a few moments, as he fumbled a bit finding the latch; but soon he was standing inside the stewards’ corridor. The zephyr was more pronounced now. The departing air brushed at his cheek, stirred the hairs there. He had been right about the beard: it had come in salt-and-pepper. He could not decide whether it made him appear distinguished. “I shall ask Miko,” he decided. There was no point served by asking any of the others. Yet he had gone to the passageway system before he had thought to ask about the beard, so it may be there were other things he meant to say.

  “Ship?”

  “Waiting.”

  “Do you have a fix on Miko?” Gorgas had given up the use of sysop syntax. Ship understood most questions, and the danger of skewing its responses no longer mattered.

  “Location indeterminate.”

  Gorgas considered the situation, then stepped out of the doorway so that he could see his ’puter screen. “Display all initial fixes of Mikoyan Hidei during the previous three days.”

  “Clarification. Map of loci where Ms. Hidei appears in the world.”

  The particular phrasing surprised and captivated the captain. “Ah. ‘Appears in the world.’ It must seem that way to you, I suppose. Coming out of nowhere, like that, out of regions where you have no sensors. Just a name on the roster; with no physical reality.”

  “Clarification. ‘No physical reality’.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Gorgas chuckled quietly over the pun. Were Miko’s appearances then, in Ship’s purview, instances of a word made flesh?

  “Query. Should additional loci, where Ms. Hidei disappears, be included?”

  “Yes. Display plot on my dayroom console.”

  A schematic duly appeared, and Gorgas studied the cluster of points. “Ship, overlay regions covered by sensors.” To ask for a map of unsensed regions would have, quite literally, made no sense to Ship. It is impossible to know what one does not know.

  “Ms. Hidei calls Ship, Rivvy.”

  Ship could miscue in the strangest fashion, but it amused Gorgas that the AI thought it had a name. “Did she sprinkle you with water when she named you?” he asked. The requested overlay had appeared on the screen and he studied the pattern of the dots with respect to the “empty quarter,” the unsensed regions. Ship interpreted data topologically, not spatially. It had no concept of the ship qua ship, only as a network. Gorgas noted a scattering of points throughout the vessel and suspected that Miko used the air ducts and maintenance tunnels as well as the stewards’ passageways. He also noted thick clusters around certain spaces, sketching a perimeter.

  “Water is contraindicated for electronic equipment,” Ship told him.

  Miko knew Gorgas’s coming long before he came. Shuffles and bumps and an occasional slight vibration were his heralds. She knew it was him—who else could it possibly be? Ugo Terrell? She made no attempt to flee or hide, but continued to sit in the sofa and stroke the Cat With No Name. The cat purred and Miko hummed with it, speaking to it without words. When the creature twisted in her arms, she said, “Come in,” without turning to face the breathless man.

  Gorgas, winded from his perambulations through the hidden passes of the ship, lowered himself to the sofa beside the girl and sat with his hands upon his knees. He said nothing for a few moments while he waited for his thudding heart to still and he sucked deeply on the attenuating air. “The air is already palpably thinner,” he said. “I believe I may have mountain sickness.” When Miko made no response, he laid a different course. “This is quite a cozy retreat,” he said, “though a bit spartan.”

  Miko had, by the use of movable panels, created a sort of room-within-a-room. It was a hut, close and hemmed, in which a sofa and a desk and a lamp huddled in upon themselves. Gorgas thought it might be a grotto, existing as it did within a cave. The solitary lamp in the center gave light to the surroundings much like a campfire in a forest. Most of the accouterments were functional: a static precipitator, a cooler. A bank of monitors of some unknown function formed one wall of the hut. The whole reminded Gorgas less of a room than of a nest. “Ah, I see where Grubb’s missing microwave has gotten to.”

  Miko said, “Do you want me to give it back? Maybe I can catch him.”

  Gorgas smiled. “I don’t think that is called for.”

  “Retrieval orbit all set?” she asked him. “I never seen Wasat, but I’d hate it if this ship was lost forever.”

  “Yes, thanks to The Lotus Jewel.”


  “Good. That was a terrible thing Rivvy did to her. I hope she and Corrigan made it across.”

  Gorgas had heard nothing from the cutter, which might by time-honored aphorism constitute good news. Somehow, he rather doubted it. Grubb or someone would have called. Rather than address Miko’s hope, he said, “Ship showed me how to find you.” Miko said nothing to this, and Gorgas added, “At times, Ship seems almost alive.”

  Miko looked up from the cat. “If you believe Rivvy is alive, then she is. I don’t think that Fife character ever really believed the rest of us were alive, so you tell me which one is more human.”

  “I think you are too harsh on the man.”

  “Am I? Ask me if I care or what difference it makes if I do. Have you seen Dr. Wong?” When Gorgas nodded, she said, “Fife killed her.”

  “What! He told me she had, ah…”

  “She croaked herself, sure; but it was Fife what drove her to it. Rivvy told me all about it.”

  “You liked the doctor,” said Gorgas. “She struck me as not quite up to the task.” The comment struck him as petty and he looked away. “Ah, nil nisi bonum.”

  “She was the nicest person on the ship.”

  Niceness and competency were, to Gorgas, orthogonal axes. He could not imagine that an excess of the former might counterbalance a deficiency in the latter. “Genie and I held the funeral two days ago. Why didn’t you come?”

  Miko shrugged. “To watch meat fry?”

  “You seemed to feel differently at Hand’s funeral.”

  The eyes she turned on him were still and solemn. “Captain, that was a long, long time ago.”

  Gorgas rubbed the trouser legs of his coverall. “The others always thought you stiff and cold, but it isn’t that at all, is it?”

  “I failed them.”

  The pronouncement startled Gorgas, coming as it did with such an overture of pain that even he could hear it. “Who did you fail?”

  “All of them. Dr. Wong, ’Kiru…I’m the one who set Ratline off. I told him about Ram cutting the sail, but I didn’t think it through, I was so angry; and because of me ’Kiru had her head chopped off!”

  “Hardly chopped off!”

  “Enough of it to matter! She’ll never be the same. She trusted people. She liked Ratline. And I knew Fife was wrong for the doctor, but I didn’t know how to stop them, and look what happened!”

  Gorgas was not a man for touching, but he did place an awkward hand on her shoulder. “You take too much blame. You ought to leave some of it for us.”

  Miko shook her head in jerks. “I don’t think they’re going to make it, Ivar and Twenty-four and them.” And that was her fault too. “If I hadn’t gone running after a stupid cat! I ought to wring its stupid little neck.” Her words were harsh, but she made no move to execute them.

  After a while Gorgas said, “I did my best,” but in fact he had not, and he was acutely aware of that. He had overlooked details and facts that did not fit with his conceptions. He had not monitored Bhatterji closely enough. He had failed to realize the potential of the sail, and consequently it had not been properly integrated into the plan. Had Satterwaithe been able to work openly…But even now the captain did not fully realize how intractable he could appear to others.

  The orlop deck of The River of Stars at the very bottom of the great disk, had once been filled with equipment. Graingers and mud huts, repeaters and heat exchangers, fluid beds and vapor columns, Caplan pumps and Scannell boxes—squatting in lines or in clusters, variously humming and gurgling and hissing and clanking in a chorus banged out by mad dwarves in a hot, moist, red-lit subterrain. Some of the equipment—the air plant, the ilmenite bunker, the mud huts that tapped the engine plasma for electricity—remained in situ, although their numbers were fewer and their cacophony was much diminished. The machines that had serviced the luxury modules were long gone, and the whole deck now had a wide-open and abandoned look to it. There had been few rooms or corridors on the orlop, which was the narrowest of the five, and after it had been gutted in the refit, it had been used for a time as a cargo bay. It carried no cargo now.

  Miko could hear the hiss as she entered the orlop from one of the stairwells leading down from the lower deck. The sound differed from the hiss of escaping air that she sometimes heard in the narrower passages where, in response to the dictates of Bernoulli, the constant zephyr freshened into something stronger. There was an electric overtone to this sound, a harsh sibilant accent, and she was not surprised when a moment or two later she spied at the far end of the deck a bright, whitish-blue star. Bhatterji, welding another of his useless patches.

  When she came up behind him he gave no sign that he had noticed, but continued working the bead across the top of a plate that he had positioned in a stairwell. It was an awkward position, made more awkward by the limited number of arms he could deploy. Miko watched a while in silence.

  Bhatterji said, “Half the gangways onto this deck are wide open,” which meant that, unless he had taken lately to monologues, he had noted her arrival after all. “This one leads five levels up into a sector open to space. No one seems to have planned for airtights on the vertical passages. I don’t know why.”

  “Ram, do you think this is heroic? It’s not. It’s useless, and it only makes you ridiculous.”

  Bhatterji stopped welding, but he did not turn around and the flame from the torch did not die. Neither did he speak. Encouraged by this positive response, Miko continued.

  “Ram, the ship is a muffing maze. There are too many damn passages.”

  When Bhatterji turned, his face was twisted into a dark glower. There was something chthonic about him, as if his forehead, cheeks, nose, chin were boulders in a tunnel face just now dynamited and about to slump and cave in. The dark goggles, so close to his skin tone, transformed him into an alien, eyeless creature, fitting for one so subterranean. “What are you trying to say?” he demanded.

  It was very clear what the girl was trying to say, but Bhatterji was determined not to hear it.

  “Give it up,” she said. “There’s no point any more.”

  The engineer turned his back and resumed welding. Vapors curled from the end of the welding rod, to be sucked up by the static well he held in his other hand before more than a whiff of the acrid odor could escape. Miko climbed the steps and took the well from him and held it, standing with her back to the glare. Shadows danced down the stairwell, blue-gray in the stannic light. The two of them worked together in silence in that fashion for some minutes.

  It was Bhatterji who broke the silence. “Why did you stay?” he asked as he concentrated on his weld.

  “The boat left early. I came back for the cat and the boat left before I could get back.”

  Bhatterji nodded and continued to weld. The seam grew. He shifted position and crouched to seal the bottom edge. Miko sat on the step, still with her back to the blinding torch. “Why did you stay?” he asked her again.

  “At first I thought that Fife character panicked. He was so anxious to leave before. But it was Rivvy. She found out there was no room for her in the cutter’s system, so she cast the boat off before The Lotus Jewel could board.”

  “I always said that a skewing AI meant trouble.”

  “Rivvy didn’t understand. She knew she couldn’t leave, so she wanted her sysop to stay.”

  “It was just a tropism. Neural nets don’t ‘want’ anything.”

  “She’s dead, you know. The Lotus Jewel.”

  Bhatterji hesitated fractionally as he welded. “I heard.”

  “Gorgas told me that she flew right into the cutter’s plume.”

  “I heard!”

  “Dr. Wong’s dead too. The passenger found her.”

  “I heard that too.”

  “Fife said that she killed herself to make room for one more person in the cutter.”

  Bhatterji shook his head. “Stupid.”

  “Wong wasn’t stupid. She just wasn’t clever like you.”


  Bhatterji turned on her. “And now we’re both dead, stupid her and clever me, so I don’t see how it makes any difference.”

  “I liked her. She wanted to help people.”

  Bhatterji idled his torch. “‘Help people.’ And what do you think I’m doing here?”

  “Wasting your time. But I like you too.”

  “Do you? You have an odd way of showing it.”

  “I’m not saying that I never…Ram, why did you cut the vane on the foresail?”

  “I needed the hobartium. How was I to know that madwoman was planning to raise the sail? How was I to know that it would snap and—” He stopped abruptly and resumed welding. Miko realized that he was going back across a seam he had already finished.

  “That’s why you stayed,” she said. “You never believed you would save the ship. It was because Rave was—”

  Bhatterji quenched the torch, turned, and lifted his goggles. The sudden white of his eyes frightened her. “Rave isn’t here,” he said. His arm swept wide in the narrow stairwell, clipping her accidentally across the cheek. “He’s out there. With Enver Koch. And you, you still haven’t told me why you’re here.”

  “Gorgas wants to hold a dinner before…Before. He’s invited everyone.”

  “I didn’t mean why did you come down to the orlop. I meant why—”

  “I know what you meant, Ram. I just don’t know the answer.”

  Bhatterji grunted. “I’ve heard that sometimes a child will run back into a burning building because he can’t bear to leave home.”

  “And The River is my home?” Miko shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never had one before, so I don’t know what one feels like.” Miko looked at her hand and turned the static well off. “I guess I’m pretty stupid too.”

  The engineer nodded. “As stupid as Satterwaithe, or Ratline, or Wong…”

  “Or you?” she challenged with some heat.

  “No,” he shook his head. “No, you’re not nearly as stupid as that.” He gathered his equipment, handing some of it to Miko, and descended the stairs. Miko popped the vapor plug from the static well chamber. It was still steaming and she bobbed it one-handed so it wouldn’t burn her. She lifted the tool bag to her shoulder and followed him. “Where to next?”