The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  From time to time, the other officers had eaten with the Thursday Group, by invitation or at Hand’s backstage urging. Gorgas had sat silent throughout the entire meal, or rather had spoken so rarely as to do for silence. The Thursday Group had taken that as a token of unfriendliness and had not invited the First back. Enver Koch’s unfriendliness had risen above mere tokenism. He had peppered the meal with his own anecdotes: stories in which, somehow, sailors came off second-best to engineers. It hadn’t helped that Koch had been a young engineer’s mate in the FS Forrest Calhoun during her infamous race with MS The River of Stars. It helped rather less that he brought the matter up at meal. The sailors had not wished him dead, but they had shed few tears afterward.

  Bhatterji, they never bothered to invite. “I’m a trifle too old for the likes of him,” said little Timmy Ratline through the mouth of the old man he had become.

  Ivar Akhaturian delivered the main course in a shining, self-contained serving vessel, which he laid on the suction grid in the center of the table before fishtailing off to see what further task Grubb had for him. Ratline loaned his wranglers out to the other departments. While he would never have admitted it to his charges, wranglers had little to do when the ship was in transit. Besides, the youngsters really ought to learn the ship, and that meant doing all the scut work.

  “Ah,” said Corrigan as he slid open the lid on the serving vessel. “Greased weasel.”

  Bigelow Fife drew back a bit and a look of profound uncertainty replaced the hunger that had been there. The Thursday Group had invited the passenger to their mess. At least he’s a new face, Ratline had told his tablemates. He might even have something new to say. “Greased weasel,” Fife repeated, though not in so agreeable a tone as the Second had used.

  Ratline cackled. “We only call it greased weasel. It’s really a gelatinized blend of the protein masses that Grubb gets when he cleans out his vats for a new culture. It’s got a better texture than your usual cow pie or fowl matter. Chewier.” He reached out and carved a slice off the end. Steam rose from the interior. “It doesn’t hurt that it’s a little gluey, either,” he continued while he put it on his suction plate. “That way it doesn’t float off when you’re not looking. I hate chasing my dinner across the room.”

  Reassured, Fife nodded. “He’s done it up well. I never saw vat scrapings molded before.” He squinted. “It almost does look like a weasel, if that’s what a weasel looks like.”

  Corrigan had to parse the sentence twice before he was certain; but, yes, the bleach-faced Lunatic had made a joke. It was unexpected enough that Corrigan laughed aloud, which earned him a puzzled glance from Satterwaithe.

  Fife commented that galleys on commercial liners gave more quotidian names to the meals they harvested, but Ratline disagreed. “Oh, we called ’em such, an’ worse, back in Toledo’s day. Just never told the passengers. Ah, here comes the barbed wire.”

  Akhauturian brought out a mass of rough vines—extrusions wound into a ball on the end of a wooden paddle and baked to a crispness. He fastened the handle into its table socket while Ratline nodded to Satterwaithe. “Captain, if you would do the honors?” Satterwaithe reached into the knot and, with a snap of her wrist, pulled off a handful, after which the other diners grabbed handfuls too. Corrigan’s extra reach always gave him an advantage at this.

  “It’s quite good,” Fife said. “Almost like taffy. The sort we serve in Luna is crispier. We call it ‘deep-fried spaghetti.’”

  “You have to snap it off,” Ratline explained. “If you pull it slow-like, it only stretches out.”

  Fife tasted. “Raspberry?”

  “Grubb’s got all sorts of fragrances and flavors. He’s mixed some interesting blends. Sometimes he puts a treat at the center of the ball before he runs it through the spinner.”

  Fife pursed his lips. “The flavor doesn’t quite go with the texture this time. But, as you say, ‘interesting.’” He dabbed at his lips. “Tell me, Mr. Ratline. You are after calling Mistress Satterwaithe, ‘captain.’ I thought custom permitted only one captain per ship.”

  The Thursday Group exchanged glances. “It’s because Eugenie is presiding this week,” Corrigan explained after a slight pause. “Captain comes from caput, which meant head in Latin, and Eugenie is sitting at the head of the table.”

  Fife nodded. “I see.” Although he decidedly did not. The glance his messmates had exchanged was enough to tell him that some other story lurked beneath so Latinate an explanation.

  “Eugenie is third mate,” Corrigan continued, casting a different sort of look at the president of the mess. “And sailing master.” Satterwaithe returned the gaze with a bland stare, saying much in a sphinxlike fashion.

  Fife raised his eyebrows. “The ship carries a master?”

  “Officially, The River is a hybrid ship,” Satterwaithe explained. “The sails are stowed on the topmost deck. If they are ever deployed, then I con the ship.”

  The passenger pursed his lips and accepted the fact. The others could almost see him process it, arrange it, file it. “A hybrid ship, is it? How often are you hoisting sail?”

  Three stony faces produced a silence that lasted just short of rude. “Not for years,” Satterwaithe said, picking up her drinking bulb from the stayput pad. “Not for years.”

  After the meal, by long tradition, Eugenie Satterwaithe gave the first toast. Like Bhatterji’s post–EVAsion decompression, it was a custom that had persisted long enough to take on many of the aspects of a natural law. “Gentlemen,” she said, floating as erect as ziggy allowed and holding her drinking bulb straight-arm in front of her, “I give you the Great Sail, MS The River of Stars. Long may she fly before the wind.”

  “The Great Sail!” the others echoed, Fife half a beat behind. They squirted the juice into their waiting mouths and the Thursday Group beamed at one another, as if Satterwaithe had said something true and profound. If Ratline beamed a little more broadly than his messmates, it may be that he, like Bhatterji, had a stash. Yet Ratline had been aboard The River longer than God had prowled the marches of heaven. If Bhatterji had the right to decompress and Satterwaithe to declare the first toast, then Ratline had the right to do whatever he damn-all pleased.

  “‘Long may she fly…’” Corrigan complained when they had all refastened themselves in their clip chairs. “She hasn’t been flying very much these past few days.”

  “I booked your ship,” Fife said, “because it promised a short run to my company’s worksite. Now…” And he wigwagged with his hand.

  “What do you expect of gimcrackery like a Farnsworth cage?” Satterwaithe asked catlike of no one in particular. “Too many components. Something’s always breaking. I heard,” she added with unseemly satisfaction, “that Bhatterji doesn’t have all the parts he needs.”

  Fife frowned. “I fear he may not finish in time.”

  “Oh, he’s canny enough with an omnitool,” Corrigan allowed. “He can fabricate what he doesn’t have.”

  The sailing master shrugged an indifferent agreement. “To hear him tell it, all he needs is a roll of duct tape.”

  Ratline snickered. “That isn’t all he needs—from what I hear. I’m keeping Akhaturian locked up for now. Isn’t that right, Ivar?” he asked the mess boy, who had brought in the desserts, and the youngster flushed deep crimson and fled the room.

  Corrigan did not pursue the cargo master’s sidebar. He turned to look at the nominal ceiling.

  “What is it?” Satterwaithe asked.

  “I thought I heard a thumping in the ducts,” the Second replied. “I hope the air compressor isn’t acting up again.”

  “Grubb hasn’t mentioned it.”

  “But while we coast,” said Fife, “will we not drift off our course? Or are we close enough to Jupiter that his attraction will keep up falling toward him?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Satterwaithe said, and looked to Corrigan for confirmation.

  The second mate and navigator shook his head. �
��The attractive force of Sol on the ship at our locus is about three hundred and fifty times greater than Jupiter’s.”

  “Then…will we begin falling toward the sun?”

  “Actually,” Corrigan said a bit smugly, “that problem was solved by Euler in 1760. You see, at transit speeds, we can regard both Sol and Jupiter as fixed points—”

  “Did you say 1760? Wouldn’t that solution be a bit, well…primitive?”

  “Oh, of course, we have our ephemeredes and numerical integration routines,” Corrigan assured him. “Ship can actually calculate an exact course. No need to rely on the crude approximations of olden days.”

  “Tell me,” Fife said, “your ship mounts four Wright and Oldis DFP’s, does it not?”

  Satterwaithe affected not to care and Corrigan said only, “Direct Fusion Power design, yes. They use a Ruggiero circular RF quadropole.”

  But Fife had not been looking to confirm a fact he had gotten quite reliably from the engineer himself. “Well, their top rating is only one-and-a-half milligees apiece—”

  “They were installed twenty years ago,” Corrigan said, taking Fife’s comment as a slur on the ship. “They’ve been rebuilt once or twice, but they’re still older than half the crew.”

  “An exaggeration, surely,” said Fife, who could not bear to let an hyperbole pass unmolested, “but what I meant is that—”

  “The sun’s monster big,” Ratline said, “but he’s a puny sort this high up. The current hereabout’s only twenty-five microgees. Those engines are plenty stronger enough.”

  Fife repressed his exasperation. He was a guest, after all, and guests did not abuse hospitality. And besides a show of irritation might interfere with data acquisition. “What I meant is that—I’ve watched your engineer at work—if he takes more than, what is it now, sixteen days? You will need more deceleration than the engines can give to match Jupiter.” Late was one thing. Whipping past at transit speed was something else.

  “What you really got to worry about…” Ratline said—and here he leaned across the table toward the passenger. “Is if Bhatterji doesn’t get ’em fixed. At transit speed we’re on hyperbolic orbit, which means: Next stop, Castor. Isn’t that right, Abdul?”

  “No, it would be Wasat, Delta Genimorum. In Arabic, Wasat means the middle—” Corrigan paused as a new thought appeared and hovered just in front of his eyes. It was a stunning thought and wanted contemplation.

  Satterwaithe waited, puzzled by Corrigan’s abrupt silence, before she filled it. “I wouldn’t worry over it, sir. Bhatterji will have the engines wrapped in duct tape long before we come anywhere near the balk line.”

  Corrigan’s continued silence was louder than Ratline’s words. Satterwaithe cocked her head and studied the second officer, who seemed consumed by some inward study. “Out with it, Mister Second,” she said. Fife, startled at the peremptory tone, wondered for a moment who ranked whom at this table.

  “I’m thinking,” Corrigan snapped, leaving no doubt where he thought rank lay.

  “Well, don’t let me interrupt the novelty of it,” Satterwaithe shot back.

  “No, indeed,” Corrigan murmured. “No, indeed.” For it really was a novelty—to Corrigan himself, no less than to others.

  Later, when a hunger of another sort had driven Fife to seek her out, the passenger told Fransziska Wong that he had just dined with the three most anal-retentive individuals he had ever met.

  The Second Mate

  Corrigan’s quarters were a reflection of his practical and orderly mind. The linens and towels were folded square. The prints on the wall were aligned. The audio I/O’s were sited where he spent most of his time: near the sling in the reading room, above the sleeping cage, in the fresher. Corrigan preferred books over screens when the reading was serious, which meant when it was most frivolous. These were arrayed in dog-boxes according to a complex internal logic comprising subject matter, chronology, and alphabet. Toiletries were aligned on their stayput pads in precisely the sequence in which he customarily used them in the morning. True, in the absence of acceleration the prayer rug had a lamentable tendency to drift off the floor. (A genuine flying carpet, he had told The Lotus Jewel one fey night when it had come loose entirely.) But otherwise, everything was—to use a phrase long obsolete and unknown to Corrigan—“shipshape, Bristol style.”

  There could be a cruelty to such tidiness. When a book had been removed from its allotted position, a profound unease seemed to fill the room until it had been returned. When a utensil was being used it seemed anxiously out of place. One felt guilty for having disturbed the order. The Lotus Jewel felt suffocated and sometimes, in desperation, she would shift his toiletries about at random when he wasn’t looking, imagining in consequence her lover shampooing with toothpaste or trying to brush his teeth with a comb.

  Often, she would wish that Corrigan were not quite so dependable. He ought to show up late once in a while. He ought to spin wild fancies. She had heard him tell tales of uttermost wonder—riding out an ice quake on Europa; reefing a sail by hand during a solar flare—all told in such matter-of-fact tones that she could wonder if he was reporting his own life at secondhand. If there was one thing he approached with anything like awe, it was The Lotus Jewel’s smooth, golden body. Perhaps for this reason as much as for any other, she continued to visit him—just to help him feel, instead of think.

  She came to him that evening, about the time that Fife was seeking the arms of Dr. Wong, to find the lights up high and the Second hooked to his reading sling. Corrigan scowled over a book disk in his screader while he made occasional notations in the rebellious pages of a daybook. The room was silent. She had noticed that about him, that he never played music for mood or background. The sort of music he preferred demanded listening, and not mere hearing: Complex melodies in strange scales over intricate rhythms; not at all the sort of tunes you could hum. The glow from the reader screen highlighted his angular face in odd ways, as if he were a modernist sculpture from the previous century.

  “Am I early?” The Lotus Jewel asked, with only a touch of pique that her entry had not been marked with its customary ceremony. Corrigan was the creature of habit, yet it was The Lotus Jewel disturbed by this break in his routine. In fact, she was—as always—late. She would be late, Corrigan was wont to say, for her own funeral.

  Corrigan’s head rose from the screen with the startled look of a man abruptly returned to his surroundings. He blinked at the sysop, then around at his quarters, as if to verify his own whereabouts. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t watching the time.”

  The Lotus Jewel was seized by the momentary fancy that time itself, unwatched by Corrigan, could run off. Clocks took their cue from the Second. She coasted across the spacious parlor and, touching down like a feather behind him, gripped his ropey shoulders in both hands and kneaded them. On his screader she saw diagrams, formulas, sketches. A bound paper technical manual was clipped to a free-floating book stand. “What are you reading?”

  “A little refresher,” Corrigan said as he closed his eyes and sighed under her ministrations. The Lotus Jewel leaned across his shoulder, placing herself cheek to his cheek, feeling the weird, smooth suppleness of his eternally beardless face, and studied the screader.

  “Magsails?” She was aware that he had turned, for his hot breath tickled her ear. He nuzzled against her.

  “Just an idea I’m playing with,” he murmured.

  “When you should be playing with me?” She ran a finger down the back of his neck. “How did those things work, anyway?”

  “Well…You put out a cable of superconductor that forms a hoop—”

  “A hoop? On the morphie shows they always looked solid.”

  Corrigan grimaced, as he always did when information strayed from the pure and factual. “That was what they call ‘artistic license,’” he commented. “The hoop is sixty-plus kilometers in diameter and only about as thick around as your arm, so normally you can’t see it. Just the run
ning lights and the aurora if the gas density is high enough. You see, the current sets up a magnetic dipole, which deflects the solar wind. The deflection produces a drag on the sail radially outward from the sun, and orientation of the dipole—Zubrin’s alpha—provides a thrust perpendicular to the radial drag-force.”

  Now, The Lotus Jewel’s question had been an idle one, as most of hers were, but Corrigan’s answers were generally more busy—ants to her grasshopper queries. She smiled and so did he, as much as his leathery skin would allow; but Corrigan’s was that of a beaming teacher, while the sysop’s was somewhat glazed.

  “So, what are you going to do,” she said, “unfurl the sails again?” He stiffened and drew back and she turned startled eyes on him, seeing the truth in his posture. “You are? You are! Oh, doobers! I’ve never seen magsails activated. Well, in morphies, sometimes. Like those pirate stories they used to make. But why would you…?”

  Corrigan grabbed her wrists and held them tight. “It’s just a notion. I want to bounce it off a few others to get their critique.”

  “Can I help? I’d like to help.”

  Corrigan’s smile was kind. “Sail handling doesn’t require the sysop.”

  She pulled away from him. That was not the answer she had wanted from him; though, in retrospect, it was the answer she ought to have expected. “I still want to help. There’s nothing for me to do on this bucket until Ram fixes my antennae.” In truth, she would have wanted to help in any case, but Corrigan was the sort of man who needed a reason for everything.