The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “I need you!” Miko insisted, not yet having understood the nature of Bhatterji’s refusal. “I’m ready. I want you.” She was very near pleading—she was pleading—still half-drunk with the thought of her blooming. Understandable, that she would have misread Bhatterji’s flamboyant virility. If the engineer had seen his own desires in his androgynous mate; why, so had the mate seen in him.

  “You want your father,” Bhatterji thought with his mouth. “And now Evan Hand is dead.”

  Miko did not thank him for the insight. Instead, she slapped him across the face with unrestrained fury and fled, weeping and naked, into Corridor C where, without even noticing, she nearly collided with the passenger, Bigelow Fife, who (watching the teenager’s retreat) wondered into what antic sort of ship he had booked his passage.

  The Passenger

  Bigelow Fife was possessed of an inquisitive mind. His profession as troubleshooter had made him so, unless it had been his mind’s bent that had led him to troubleshooting. It was a happy marriage, however it came about—certainly happier than any of the other marriages he had essayed—and it afforded him multiple opportunities for enjoyment; for if there is one thing of which the world has no insufficiency, it is trouble worth the shooting. He was a devotee of Truth and Fact and enjoyed collecting bits of them, keeping them in a box in the back of his head and occasionally stirring them up and arranging them in various patterns.

  He defined a problem as “the gap between ‘as-is’ and ‘should-be’” and immediately noted the existence of his chosen prey on board The River of Stars.

  The ship is coasting when it should be accelerating, he wrote in his journal. Of course, no great subtlety of thought was required to discern this. Lesser minds than his had already noticed the situation. Where he differed was in his reaction. He became something of an art critic. This is clearly a situation in which urgency is the governing priority. Certainly, there is impact—He wrote this with no sense of irony—but the impending deadline is clearly the most stringent constraint. If the engines are not back on line by the thirty-first, the ship will be too fast to enter Jupiter Roads, which will delay our arrival. Therefore—He used therefore a great deal when he wrote—Therefore, efforts ought to hinge on ensuring the timing of the solution rather than its expense. Alacrity without haste is called for. He was also fond of the epigram, which he could coin like a national mint, albeit one short of precious metals. He did not wonder whether a deadline might be anything other than “impending.”

  It must not be supposed that Fife was unaware of the sea of humanity in which he swam. He engaged it with gusto. Consider Dr. Wong. Unfortunately, he engaged the animate using the same tools with which he engaged the inanimate, which is rather like employing a cold chisel for heart surgery. His penchant for Truth and Fact had left a wake in his life in which bobbed three ex-wives, as many ex-lovers, and a son who had not spoken to him in five years. These estrangements puzzled him, and from time to time he worked the problem. It was on his to-do list, and occasionally he added data, searching for the root cause.

  Criticism being a parasitical occupation, every critic needs an artist.

  Bhatterji had begun fabrication of the missing spares and the machine shop was a-hum with the sounds of metal and plastic and composite as they yielded to his will and became something more. Some pieces were built or assembled or shaped on automatic tools, which he and Miko had spent the morning programming. Others, however, required the human touch, which Bhatterji provided.

  As he grew progressively aware that he was being watched, Bhatterji added little filips to his labors. Everything he did, he did with a flourish. He didn’t just turn a hand tool, he tossed it spinning and caught it on the shy turn. He didn’t merely insert a laser welder inside an orifice; he made a rapier thrust that unerringly found its mark. He was a virtuoso of the machine shop and didn’t mind a bit if everyone else knew too. Life was a goddam performance, and that meant there ought to be applause. That he might appear clownish (or worse, inefficient) to an onlooker did not occur to him, though it certainly did to Bigelow Fife, who scowled and made notes. It was a natural mistake on Fife’s part. Bhatterji was not an artist, but a performer. The critical standards are different.

  That someone was watching, Bhatterji could see from the drift of Miko’s eyes. “Watch closely as I apply the tool to the working surface,” the engineer said. Miko glanced across his shoulder and he added, more brusquely than he had intended, “Pay attention.”

  The tool was sharp, but Miko’s glance, sharper. It was in little ways like this that they discussed the previous evening.

  She assisted him dutifully: fetching bar stock, sharpening tools, catching shavings in a vacuum hood lest they spread and damage intakes and ducts. Bhatterji missed the bond that had been between them and he did not know whether it was recoverable or not. Rework is never quite the same as new, relationships being no different from engines in that regard. He could not fathom why Miko had deceived him. When he thought about what had happened the previous night in his quarters, it was with embarrassment and a touch of regret that a girl so boyish in appearance could not, in fact, be a boy.

  Nevertheless, if there were no longer devotion, there was duty. Miko was his mate and he owed her the instruction he would have given any other apprentice. And so this morning they stood across the omnitool from each other, feet firmly planted in the stirrups for leverage, and if neither the engineer nor the mate quite acted as if nothing had gone askew between them, it was not for lack of trying.

  “I tie into the database template, thus. The turn should remain within the specified tolerance. But remember that when the ship is under acceleration, there will be a tendency to favor the aftward direction due to deflection. The deflection will be on the order of nanometers, but that can be critical for certain components.” He raised his head, caught Miko’s eyes as they began to drift again. “Understand?”

  Miko’s nod was neither eager nor affirming, but only a curt acknowledgement, all that the detestable man deserved. She could not understand why Bhatterji had teased her so with promises, only to humiliate her. She had imagined being ravished by this solid, brutally-shaped man; had imagined a faux resistance—the No that meant Yes. To find herself rebuffed, and insulted in the bargain…

  Peeking through the ventilation grilles of Amalthea, Miko had watched the act in all its permutations, from the furtive to the enthusiastic to the merely compliant. Yet it remained for her only something observed and not something felt. She was dying of thirst, but had never tasted water.

  She ought to cut him, slice off those treasured parts of him; but the ship needed his skills, and Miko felt a hard loyalty to the ship and to the late and ever-more-regretted Evan Hand. Once the ship was back in operation…She had waited a long time to revenge herself on Clavis Burr. She could wait her revenge on Bhatterji as well, and savor the anticipation.

  Miko did not know what the mushroom-skinned passenger wanted. He simply hung about in the back of the machine shop and stared at them with what she took to be a supercilious curl to his lip. Perhaps it was directed at the engineer.

  Or perhaps not. Miko had noticed the man in the corridors from time to time and wondered why he pranced about naked—or as near to it as failed to matter. If it was to show off his body, he needed a better show, because the muscle tone was so poor that he seemed more a gelatinous mold of a man than the genuine article.

  Unfair, she told herself. Bhatterji had the look of hard-edged masculinity, yet the athletic shell of muscle and poise contained a boy-lover. So symmetry might demand that the passenger’s repellant appearance conceal a kind and loving nature. She noticed the bulge in his shorts and wondered if it were not herself that he had come to gaze upon. Miko tossed her head in what she imagined was a sultry, feminine gesture—earning no response from the mushroom man and another rebuke from Bhatterji to pay attention.

  But Fife was there simply to see how the work was progressing and had no interest in the sexu
al farce that had played out in engineering. It was the omnitool that he concentrated on, that and the part taking shape. He had seen the girl naked—and in a way she too was a part taking shape—but he had seen her with a curious disinterest. Lunatics, stripped for the sunlamps that lined their tunnels, saw too many teats and cods to be much taken with any particular instance of them. Yet, were he not already smitten with Wong, he might have considered the girl’s potential. Down in the bone, all he required was willingness.

  “He wants me,” Miko told Bhatterji when, after a few pointed questions that showed the man no stranger to a machine shop, Fife had left and they were cleaning their tools and racking them away.

  “What? Who?” The engineer’s thoughts, like Fife’s had been centered on the job. “What are you talking about?”

  “The passenger. He wants to fuck me. He was hard for me.” Miko wanted Bhatterji to know what he was missing; to know that she was desirable to real men.

  But Bhatterji was immune to that sort of innuendo. “Fife? He’s a Lunatic. They all wear codpieces. Well, the men do. I don’t know why.”

  Miko flushed because, having been reminded, she now recalled hearing that about Lunar customs. “I don’t care. He wants me. I could tell by the way his eyes raped me.”

  “He looks at everything that way. He does have strange eyes. They never seem still. Why are you so determined to abase yourself, Miko? When the time comes, find someone who cares about you.”

  “What would you know about it?”

  Bhatterji shrugged. “Why not Evermore? He’s closer to your own age.”

  “He’s a boy. A woman wants a man.”

  It was so comical that Bhatterji wanted to cry. He himself had wanted Evermore because he was a boy.

  Acting Captain Gorgas regarded Fife as little more than an especially animate piece of cargo. He thought to encounter the man periodically and exchange ritual greetings; he expected to entertain him formally at the captain’s table once a week. He did not expect the cargo to come into his dayroom and demand an accounting of his stewardship.

  A plaint about the damaged comm, surely. Passengers were forever calling ahead. And they might ask about ETA, since by definition passengers had to be somewhere, sometime. But they did not ask about repair plans and PERT schedules and resource allocation.

  “Don’t you worry, Mr. Fife,” he said heartily when Fife had run down his list of concerns. “We have everything well in hand.”

  If it irritated Gorgas to be asked impertinent questions, imagine how it irritated Fife to receive impertinent answers. If there was one thing he knew about—and there were actually two or three—it was inserting bodies into trajectories and while the bodies he moved about generally fell free, their behavior was not in principle different from a torch ship. “Your engineer seems to be taking his time about things,” the Lunatic snapped. (He had watched the man play at fabrication. Dancing and prancing…The wasted effort! The wasted motion! Why, there had not even been any prints in view! How could the engineer remember all the specifications and tolerances? A few questions afterward had sufficed to reveal that the man had no real plans at all. Fife had itched to take the matter in hand and lay out more efficient schedules and procedures. It was what he did for a living.) “You are aware, I suppose, that this ship must begin deceleration within the next seventeen days?”

  While Gorgas agreed regarding Bhatterji’s pace and his bent for improvisational theater, he was not about to say so to a mere passenger. “I assure you, we are on top of things.” Gorgas knew Fife was a corporate troubleshooter, but that did not signify. In the first place, there was no trouble to shoot. Bhatterji knew what needed doing; it was just a matter of his doing it. And in the second place, in a world partitioned into crew and cargo, it never even occurred to him to ask for Fife’s assistance. Being on the passenger manifest, Fife was manifestly a passenger.

  “You do have contingency plans…” Fife suggested. This was as close as he came to offering the help that was not requested and, when the captain replied, “Of course,” he gave the matter no further thought. He had resigned himself already to a late arrival at Dinwoody Poke, and a sensible man did not rail against that which he could not alter. For all the confidence he had in his own abilities, he was not a forward man. Not that he was shy, but he needed some sign of welcome; if not a glowing cross in the heavens, then at least an open coverall zipper. In hoc signo, venerio.

  Yet, Fife’s visit had given Gorgas something to ponder and, as he was a ponderous sort of man, Gorgas spent the evening in consultation with the ship’s AI, creating scenarios on his pixwall. Each man pursues his own pleasures, and such was Gorgas’s solitary vice.

  (Gorgas did not spurn the other vices, but he knew enough not to seek them among his own crew. It was bad for discipline. A captain ought not to have special friends. It could lead to the appearance of favoritism or, worse, to the reality of it. And so, from the moment when he had realized that the helm of The River of Stars would one day be forced upon him, he had endeavored to avoid friendships. In this he had succeeded, and with such wholehearted cooperation on the part of the crew that the choice could hardly be said to have been entirely his.)

  Gorgas excelled at chess because he could foresee the branching forest of possibilities as it twisted serpentine into the future. He could think ten moves deep. Not that the ability guaranteed victory—sometimes he only saw defeat the sooner—but working out the possibilities gave him the sort of pleasure that Bhatterji found in mentoring likely young lads, or that Corrigan found in rereading a favorite old text, or that Ratline found when he shut himself alone inside his rooms.

  There was no end of contingencies, since anything done could be done wrong. The recovery plans themselves could go awry, and so there must be contingencies even for the contingencies. Most of these would never be called upon—when you worked the probabilities, they were less likely than Satterwaithe’s smile—but they must be contemplated, even if only to be dismissed. Bhatterji might misalign the rings; or the motor on the omnitool might short out; or there might be insufficient stock of the superconducting hobartium. In fact, when one considered how many things could possibly go wrong, it was a miracle that anything ever went right.

  Bhatterji had estimated a completion time, but Gorgas knew the work would take longer. That was why he set the completion date for the twenty-eighth. There was an inherent asymmetry to the universe. When the unexpected happened—and it always did, for the unexpected was, paradoxically, the most expected thing—it seldom resulted in faster and smoother operations. Adding the extreme time estimates along the critical path of the engineer’s nominal repair plan, Gorgas noted that the resulting two-week drift toward the sun would bring them to the outer reaches of the Virgin Islands. That suggested a whole new suite of externally induced, class II failure modes, not least of which was collision with a rogue worldlet lately teased out of the Belt. The orbits of such bodies were “chaotic,” so that they appeared by mischief. The joke among navigators was that the ephemeredes were out of date the moment they were computed.

  Still, no stone ought go unturned, especially stones of such size as the ’Stroids. Gorgas smiled briefly at his internal joke. At one-fifty kiss, even a small fragment could do much damage. In fact, now that he thought on it, a small fragment had already done much damage.

  Yet, if the odds on such a collision were vanishing small, those on two collisions were small squared. Infinitesimal. And given that one had already occurred—

  Gorgas knew again the chill he had felt during Bhatterji’s original damage survey. There are many clichés and proverbs to voice his unease. Birds of a feather flock together, is what Fife might have said, had he pondered the matter. But Gorgas did not think in clichés. Or he did, but they were a different order of cliché namely: The multiplication of probabilities applies only to independent, random events. “But those are mere assumptions,” he reminded himself. In the real world, events often proved dependent or nonrandom and
one must resort to conditional probabilities. Given that one collision has already occurred, what then is the likelihood of another? An altogether different proposition, because it depended on why so unlikely a thing had happened in the first place.

  He drafted a memo to Corrigan requesting an analysis of all Known Bodies in the Outer Belt—in particular, of the Hildas and the Friggas—whose orbits may have been perturbed by the recent Jovian passage, and another to The Lotus Jewel stressing the importance of restoring full power to the forward sensor array. He was forever writing such memos; so much so, that their value had responded to the inexorable law of supply and demand. Unknown to Gorgas, a rule had arisen among the rest of the crew: if he really wants it, he’ll ask a second time.

  After Ship had dispatched the memos, Gorgas set up the Battle of Cerro Gordo on his pixwall. Gorgas preferred such simulations to standard chess because, there being so many more pieces with so many more move options, the game was more challenging and the outcome less predictable. He chose the Mexican side for the same reason. Santa Ana should not have lost the battle, despite the superior American artillery. Pillow had utterly bungled his attack and Twiggs had deviated from Scott’s orders. Santa Anna’s problem, Gorgas had once decided, was that while he was a better general than history had judged him, he was not nearly so good a one as he had judged himself. A more humble man, more willing to listen to his officers, would have triumphed and set history upon a different course.

  It was the custom of the old magsail hands to gather for dinner every Thursday in the officer’s mess, in consequence of which they called themselves the Thursday Group. Corrigan, Satterwaithe, and Ratline took turns funding the meal from their personal accounts. Sometimes The Lotus Jewel or Grubb joined them or, by special dispensation, the First Wrangler, who was neither officer nor chief. The cook and the wrangler, in particular, were much taken by the romance of sailing days and enjoyed especially Ratline’s yarns, for he could spin tales of the River herself. (So could Satterwaithe, at least one tale, though she never spoke of it and the others who knew never asked.) Hand, who had also flown sails, used to preside at these meals, although he never heaped scorn on the Farnsworths as the others did. He had guided sails and he had guided torches, he used to say. It’s the guidance that matters, not the device.