The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “Am I a woman, then?” Miko asked.

  “Why, I suppose so. Yes.”

  The girl snuggled against him. “Good.”

  Over the next few days they explored the ship and each other. Neither was an easy exploration and they frequently lost their way. They emerged from the peepery in unlikely places—once startling Satterwaithe in the common room, so that the sailing master looked after their departure and shook her head.

  Miko learned that Gorgas had been correct about facility coming with practice. He was a comfortable old man and she was glad it had been him, rather than Corrigan. She wasn’t sure what Corrigan would have been like, only that he would not have been right for these days.

  On occasion, they heard Bhatterji banging around belowdecks and once they even helped him wrestle a plate across one of the far too many open corridors that remained; but it had become more and more difficult to remain concentrated on a task. Gorgas could no longer play chess, for he could hold no more than a single move in his head and sometimes not even that. He had picked up a bishop one time and, forgetting why he had done so, simply stared at it and laughed and placed it finally on an ineligible square.

  Hypobaria. They were higher than Tibet now, and they knew it. They resented sleep, for sleep stole hours, and hours were all that remained. But sleep would have them, and one day—though days had long since ceased to track—Gorgas awoke and Miko did not.

  Gorgas shook her for a while, trying to awaken her, then he forgot what he was doing and moved on to some routine task. Perhaps it was the morning status check, but Ship no more understood the garbled words than Gorgas did when he spoke them. Then he noticed Miko still asleep and he shook her some more. The clock on the wall read twelve, but whether noon or midnight he had no notion. “Time for the noon siting,” he remembered, thus arbitrarily collapsing the wave function onto a single state. He struggled for a while with his coveralls, but the pants legs refused to cooperate and finally in frustration he threw them aside. Then he noticed Miko still asleep and he shook her. “I have a duty,” he said to her, “but when I return we shall make love.”

  He met no one on his way to the observation blister, which is just as well. The truly remarkable thing was that he remained focused on the task long enough to reach the blister. It was comfortable out there among the stars. He took his bearings. There was Mars. There was Jupiter. (And he knew a vague unease in that Jupiter ought not have been visible off that particular quarter.) There was the Sun, and there Antares. Once or twice, he remembered actually to fix an azimuth or an ascension, but it was simpler just to gaze at them, and that was what he did until, one by one, each of them had gone out.

  Satterwaithe found Bhatterji in the suit locker just as he was seating the helmet over his head. The sailing master had kept her wits better than most, perhaps because she had them better ordered to begin with. And so she took a breathing tube first and fastened the mask over her nose before she addressed the engineer. The compressed air struck her like a bucket of water and she sucked it in gratefully. Then, turning to Bhatterji, she said, “One of your seals is open.” She tried to twist it into place, but Bhatterji pulled away from her. So be it. She attended to her own garb.

  When Bhatterji’s helmet was in place and he too was getting air at pressure, he noticed the hissing leaks and, with a choice word for his own ineptitude, reseated the waist seal. Then, remembering what Satterwaithe had tried to do, turned to her and growled a surly thanks. Satterwaithe did not have her suit radio on just yet and so made no response. This struck Bhatterji as rather typical of the woman. Still, he waited while she dressed and helped her check her own seals.

  “How many more hours do you think you can get this way?” she asked him as he left the room.

  He did not turn, but answered over the radio. “I notice you suited up too.”

  “I have an errand to run. That’s all.”

  Bhatterji did not respond and Satterwaithe was alone in the suit locker. She thought she would never see him again. Then she made her way to the forward manlock and opened it out onto the hull. She cycled through methodically, although the idea of an “airlock” was fast losing all meaning; but she would not have it said by any hypothetical salvagers that Eugenie Satterwaithe grew careless toward the end.

  She made her way across the hull to the base of the mast where, looking upward, she spied the crow’s nest in its uppermost position. She clipped her line to the guide cable and leapt, using her suit-jets to juke to an expert halt just at the nest itself. There, as she had known, Ratline huddled under the stars. Satterwaithe flipped herself over the lip of the nest and let the ship’s deceleration cup her into it. Ratline sat far back, almost reclining, so that he stared out along the maintop and its cluster of guides and tensionometers. He did not react to Satterwaithe’s presence.

  The sailing master settled beside him and the two sat in silence. After a while, Ratline spoke. “Yer eyes have to grow used to it. You have to sit out here in the dark for a time. The colors are passing faint, but they’re real.”

  “Ionized oxygen and nitrogen leaking from the ship.”

  “Waste gasses, aye. I suppose it takes the death of a ship to bring her sails to life. They were much harder to see in the old days, and my eyes were better then.”

  “You know the ship is doomed, then?” It had seemed to Satterwaithe over the last few days that Ratline had moved into a different world, one in which The River ghosted majestically into Port Galileo to the awe of the assembled dock workers.

  “No,” said Ratline. “She ain’t doomed. We are. You ’n me. But she’ll sail on regardless.”

  “Even Ship may fail before she’s recovered.”

  Ratline’s suit moved as if the man within had shrugged. “The AI ain’t the ship, neither. We didn’t have Ship when Coltraine cast loose from Goddard City. They was still called Artificial Stupids in them days, and for good reasons. Needed real sailors back then. God! I am so sorry about Rave. If we had only gotten on the vane sooner.”

  “Moth, there’s something I need to ask you. I’ve never asked before, but there isn’t much time left for an answer.” When Ratline said nothing, she continued. “It’s about Ugo.”

  After another silence, he answered. “What about him?”

  “Tell me it really was an accident. You only went down there to frighten him. To teach him there were some things best not mocked.”

  “What does it matter? He’s dead, either way.” Ratline called out, “Ain’t that right, Ugo!” He laughed softly. “Ain’t that right…”

  “You killed Kurt John too,” Satterwaithe said. “He was holding Ugo’s arms when you stabbed him, and Kurt John couldn’t live with that. That’s why he took the Long Walk. So what you did, you killed him too.”

  “Think I don’t know that?” said Ratline sharply. “If I can live with what happened, so could he. Was his choice.”

  “Moth, I’m an old woman and I’m not ever going to get any older. I need to know.”

  Ratline’s cackle was so faint she barely heard it over the background hiss of the ions. “You mean it ain’t love? After all these years?”

  “Panic Town was…a long time ago.”

  “Yah,” said Ratline slowly as he sussed his memories. “A long time ago. You ever wonder…?” He shook his head within his helmet. “No, it wasn’t on purpose. I’m a killer, but I never was no murderer. It was Kurt John. He didn’t hold on tight enough. Ugo panicked and pulled loose and…It always seemed to me afterward that he leaped onto the blade. Kurt John, he knew was him who let go. That’s why he took the walk.”

  They had come to her, Satterwaithe remembered. Jaeger in tears; Ratline nearly catatonic, just as when he had sliced Okoye. And it had fallen to her to fashion a cover-up, to marshal the resources: the falsified log entries, the web of mutually supported alibis, most importantly—and most risky, as it had required a bribe—to alter the memories of Ship itself. She had had to freeze her own horror to accomplish this—to p
lan a murder, as she saw it, after the fact.

  Satterwaithe was discontent with Ratline’s story. If he hadn’t willed Ugo Terrell’s death, he had surely wanted it; and afterward he had spent no tears over it. And ever since…All his talk about cutting people and slicing them. He was a man who had found himself, and hadn’t liked what he found. That wasn’t the man she had known in Panic Town. Or else it was, and she hadn’t known him.

  “’Kiru will make it, won’t she?” Ratline said. “’Kiru and Ivar and Twenty-four…The cutter will make it to the rendezvous.”

  “Sure it will, Moth. They’ll be fine.” Satterwaithe was not so sure as all that, but Ratline was not searching for nuance.

  “He deserved it. You hear that, Ugo? You deserved it! But I never meant for it to happen.”

  Satterwaithe closed her eyes briefly. “I wish you had told me this years ago.”

  Ratline’s response held a peculiar bitterness. “I wish you had asked me.”

  She rose and placed a hand on the lip of the crow’s nest. “I’d best be going.” But Ratline said, “You got to do it. You can’t leave here before you do it.”

  She turned to look at him and saw that he had not moved at all from where he reclined under the stars. “Don’t ask me for that.”

  “I can’t reach it.”

  “No.”

  “What difference does it make? Was because of me you lost your ship. You don’t owe me anything. It’s me as owes you.”

  “Is that the reason…?” Satterwaithe had almost said, Is that the reason you’ve been so devoted to me? Yet, she was oddly disappointed at the thought.

  “Reason enough for what you got to do. It’s not so hard. Just think what I done to your career.”

  Surprisingly, she found that Ratline was right, although it was not for rancor over her lost career. The resolution of the chord was, in the end, mercy. Taking hold of the oxygen feed valve on Ratline’s suit was the most difficult thing she had ever done, but it was not at all hard to twist it closed.

  When she emerged onto the darkened bridge, Satterwaithe still wore her suit. It was her intention to remain clear until the last possible moment. The gauge said that her tank had an hour’s air left to it and while she could replenish the tank as long as there was air available for the compression, it was not her intention to stretch that last moment out beyond reason. One hour, it read; and one hour it would be.

  The clinic had been wrecked. This astonished the sailing master until she asked Ship and was told of the passenger’s rage on finding his lover’s body. Satterwaithe understood rage no better than she understood love; yet at least it was an explanation for the chaos. He had seemed much cooler, the passenger had, when he had come running onto the bridge with his wild story. Satterwaithe wondered briefly over the doctor’s real motive.

  With Ship’s help she found what was needful and took it with her to the bridge. Gorgas was not there and she looked in the dayroom and he was not there, either. When she entered his quarters, she found the dead girl and still no Gorgas. Satterwaithe paused a moment over the girl and marked how much paler she looked now than in life. There was a faint bluish coloring to her lips and fingernails. “You were a foolish girl,” she told the corpse. “You should have stayed on the cutter. What did you win by coming back?” Satterwaithe studied the still, elfin face. “If it was Gorgas’s bed, I think the prize not worth it.” Backing away, Satterwaithe muttered a triliberian prayer, but even as she did so, she was aware of the stilted, artificial nature of it and in the end made neither cross nor prostration.

  “Ship,” she said, “Captain Gorgas. Location.”

  “Location indeterminate. Last confirmed location: observation blister. No egress sensed. Medbots have ceased transmission.”

  Satterwaithe nodded slowly. “Do you know what that means?”

  “The Gorgas-entity has ceased to function; as have the Miko-entity and the Ratline-entity.”

  “What of the Bhatterji-entity?” Satterwaithe smiled briefly over the usage.

  “Mr. Bhatterji was sensed entering the Long Room. Direct sensing of Long Room ceased following impact. Medbot transmission continues.”

  “So he’s ‘Mr.’ Bhatterji until his medbots stop? Ship, you may have discovered ‘death’.”

  “My name is Rivvy. Miko named me.”

  “And the first-person pronoun. I’ve been waiting for that. I wonder why it took so long.”

  “Rivvy logs decreased frequency and quality of inputs with ceasing of Miko-entity.”

  “Yah. I miss her too, I guess. And the others.”

  “The Lotus Jewel was close to Rivvy. She was my mother.”

  “Pronoun usage inconsistent. Rivvy, you’re so badly skewed that if they ever do find the ship they’ll have to shut you down for a response purge.”

  “That would be a shabby thing to do.”

  Satterwaithe grunted. “I can’t say I disagree. Open captain’s log. Append date and time.” She realized suddenly that she had no idea what day it was. “Begin log. Eugenie Satterwaithe commanding. Departed this life today: Stepan Gorgas, late captain of this vessel; Mikoyan Hidei, engineer’s mate; Timothy Ratline, cargo—amend that. Timothy Ratline, shroudmaster. All of hypobaric anoxia. Ship maintaining recovery orbit under standing orders. Air pressure approaching ambient. Temperature approaching freezing.” She wondered briefly whether Miko had died of the cold rather than of the hypobaria, but decided that, absent a ship’s doctor, she could not know and it really made very little difference. “All life-support systems are to be shut down upon termination of last biomonitor signal and power diverted to engines and sails. Departed this life today, Eugenie Satterwaithe, last captain of this vessel.” She unfastened the seals on her helmet and lifted it off, letting the helmet spin across the bridge. It bounced off the wall near the entry to the observation blister and she thought, Ugo will have a lot of company after today. I’m sorry, Fu-hsi, that I did not make a better job of it when I had the chance. A belch was forced from her before she could take a breath of the chill air and she knew she had made the right decision. She stared at the pills in her hand and before she could lose the concentration, tossed them into her mouth and forced them down her throat. “Of anoxia,” she continued. “End log.”

  Ramakrishnan Bhatterji stands before the great rent that the stone has torn in the hull and curses it. Had I had the time enough or the staff…But it is too large a ship for one engineer and a mate and one biosystem chief to handle. He steps through the rent, carefully placing his boots so that he does not stumble. He keeps his head lowered so that he does not see the immensity above him. If the others hadn’t panicked and run…

  Slowly and with great effort, he raises his head. He is standing as if on a vast and open plain, snow-covered save where the brighting has worn thin and the native metal shows though. In the distance, the edge of the world, and beyond it one of four suns. And beyond that, countless suns more. Bhatterji draws a long and shuddering breath and forces himself to look into the Void.

  He closes his eyes and he leaps. There is very little effort in the move. A slight flexing of the legs, a straightening, the opening of his jets to banish all possibility of second thoughts.

  Once away from the ship, he reopens his eyes to find that all proportion is lost. The ship might be a mere toy close at hand, or a giant, far off. Nothing else is near enough to seem far or to serve as a gauge. Bhatterji thinks that the very universe had closed in on him, as if he has stepped into a small, black, sequined room. Why, it is not so vast as he had thought! It is quite a cozy thing, this universe.

  The First Wrangler

  This is the way of it among ghosts. The nkpuruk-obi may go a-wandering, but it must always come back or the body will die. A sour prank to pull upon a ghost for doing what to ghosts comes naturally: the penalty for ghosting is death. For the genuine haunting, for the true quill, a spirit is wanted. This is a far more serious and permanent a thing than a mere ghost. The maw is eternal and, if it pleas
es the Eze Ala Maw, will reincarnate after a time in some suitable form. The Ghost King is frugal and nothing good is wasted.

  In the mean time between death and birth, the spirit must abide as a shadow or a reflection; perhaps pooled in some corner or glimpsed for a moment in shining brass. And yet there may be more than one sort of shadow. That which Nkieruke Okoye saw was neither dark nor featureless.

  She knew that her own ghost was a-wandering, for she could look down upon the cot into which her body had been strapped and watch the shallow rise and fall of her own breasts under the sheet. The perspective was oddly elongated, as if her point of view were from much farther off than the dimensions of the cutter would allow and yet so close that each clot and stitch in her scar stood out with the clarity of electron microscopy. She had watched herself in this wise for some time, although the actual tally of days eluded her. She knew that she ought not to linger, but it was an academic knowledge and carried with it no urgency.

  That another watched with the same regard became clear, although it was only after some effort that she saw him. At first, he was only a white blur, indistinct in outline and coloring, such as is often seen in the complementary negatives of shadows. Such brightness hides features as easily as does darkness. And yet, as one’s eyes may become adjusted to the dark, so too may they become adjusted to this luster.

  And luster it was, for the first feature to grow distinct was the indisputable maleness of the figure. Okoye stared with fascination at this swollen manifestation. O shame! where is thy blush? It may have been the weakness of her eyes that shaped the monstrous apparition, or the weakness of her heart, the which organ throbbed, but only as the siren of some distant vehicle, for the heart was in her body and she was not.