The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Gorgas having left all routine watch-keeping to the AI while the ship was coasting, the command deck was dark and silent when Corrigan cautiously entered. The only light came from the cold-lamps that marked hatchways or the sharp corners of equipment. None of the dials or readouts were active. The AI needed no such aids to vision.

  The silence was not quite complete. Corrigan’s own ragged breathing roared in his ears like a gale. He glanced once at the portal to the captain’s dayroom, as if expecting Gorgas to leap through and catch him out.

  Catch him out? He was second mate, acting first. He had as much right to be on the command deck as any, and more than most! Silently, he monkeyed to the captain’s door and pressed his ear to it.

  Nothing. It was the dog watch and Gorgas was probably asleep in his own quarters, a stateroom farther off. Corrigan sighed with relief, but he went about his work with as much silence as he could muster; and he did not turn on the lights.

  “Ship,” he whispered. “Activate controls for bunghole starter.”

  “Clarify instruction.” The AI’s voice thundered. Or perhaps it was only Corrigan’s heart that thundered. A few moments passed while he gathered his scattered thoughts. “Activate controls for Primary Sail Deployment Port.”

  A virtual panel appeared on one of the display screens, and three touch-icons lit. The hardware controls for sailhandling had been cannibalized and scrapped years before and, in any case, had not been used for nearly twenty years before that. Only these electronic ghosts remained, simulations of what had once been real, and they only because of the regulatory requirements of a joke classification. Like carrying a sailing master, he thought, not without a certain keen derision. Third Officer Satterwaithe was much like these controls. Only an image of what had once been real.

  Corrigan unfolded a long finger and stroked the activator icon twice. Ready lights switched from amber to green and his imagination heard the hum of relays far above him. The ambient monitors for the sail locker displayed a drop in air pressure.

  Satisfied, Corrigan reversed the process and shut down the system. When he was finished and told the AI to resume watchkeeping, the Ship reminded him that he had not annotated the log. Corrigan started at this. He hadn’t actually done anything wrong. He had confirmed function on some inactive equipment. That was all. Yet, he could not help feeling that he had crossed a line of some sort. And so he used a special code that The Lotus Jewel had given him to enter the Ship’s AI and erase all records of his test.

  There was no procedure for this.

  The Wrangler Berth

  Twenty-four deCant had been suffering an especially obnoxious bout of space-sickness ever since the ship had begun freefing. She tried to tough it out—she was a Martian, after all, and they didn’t come any tougher than that—but her berthmates had endured one barf too many in the common room and they had bundled her off to see the doctor. Wong prescribed an antiemetic, but there was something about the case that niggled at her.

  “The nausea seems to be passing?” she asked when the girl had come to the clinic for her follow-up.

  “If you mean do I throw up any more, the answer’s not so much.”

  Wong looked up from the patient’s chart displayed on her med screen. “‘Not so much,’ or ‘not so often?’”

  DeCant’s face displayed the look that most adults receive when they ask for clarification from the young. “‘Not so often.’”

  “And you’ve never had this problem before….” Not really a question, since there were no notations on her chart for space-sickness; yet Wong knew that not every illness was reported. The idea of “working through the pain” struck her as terribly foolish, as if viruses and microbes and fractures would yield to the force of a paramount will. But men and women who would never attempt to run a broken machine would shun sick call as a sign of weakness.

  “Ship’s usually under boost…” deCant said.

  “In port? During flipover?”

  “Those are usually short…. Well, sometimes it takes a while to shift cargo when we make port, but this here’s the longest I ever been freefed, I think.”

  “Can’t keep something down, if there’s no ‘down.’” Wong had been shy of joking ever since Gorgas’s rebuke following Evan’s death, but deCant was obviously hurting and Wong did not think it was the space-sickness entirely.

  “It was nothing jove,” deCant insisted. “It was only at start-of-watch, anyway. Sometimes, I look at my breakfast and feel queasy, like it’s gonna make me sick.”

  “You are eating, though.” It was more a demand than a question.

  “Yah. Carbs. You know, high energy.” And she made a muscle of her arm that startled Wong even though she knew that deCant was a cargo wrangler. “I grew a sweet tooth the size of Olympus Mons this past week.”

  Wong scratched a notation on the screen. “And the first bout of emesis—of nausea—was the fourteenth?” The ship had gone freef late the eleventh, about an hour before dear Evan Hand had passed, so why no nausea on the twelfth or thirteenth? She made another notation. “I’d like to insert a microbot into your bloodstream. It will take periodic samples so I can monitor your condition.”

  DeCant frowned. “You think it’s serious?”

  “Your medical record has no indication of previous space-sickness. It may be the length of time we’ve been freefing, or it may be something else. I just like to make sure.” She bounced to her console and set up the microbot parameters from deCant’s file. While she worked, she asked from curiosity why the girl was named Twenty-four. “It’s not a very common name.”

  The wrangler laughed. “No, not hardly.”

  Satterwaithe was standing just inside the clinic door, Wong suddenly noticed. The Third had a way of being places without seeming actually to arrive. You would glance up and she’d be there, just like that. The deck officer stood with arms crossed, radiating impatience without saying a word.

  Wong dropped her eyes. She had not been aboard The River of Stars long enough to grow firm opinions about her new crewmates. Yet it seemed to the doctor as if Satterwaithe were perpetually angry and she suspected that the anger was somehow directed at her. She wasn’t sure what she had done to offend the older woman; but she was sure it was something awful—so awful that neither one of them dared speak of it.

  DeCant too glanced at the older woman, then tossed her head and addressed Wong. “I’m a clone,” she said. “Isn’t that in there?” She pointed to the med comp. When Wong shook her head, deCant shrugged. “I ain’t ’shamed of it. It weren’t my doing.” She looked back at Satterwaithe standing by the door and regarded her silently for another moment before returning to the doctor. “I was the twenty-fourth embryo they decanted. Part of an experiment to rectify telomere loss.”

  Wong blinked, suddenly aware of the gnawing fear in the wrangler’s heart. Clones aged rapidly due to their shortened telomeres. Why in heaven was such crucial medical information missing from the file? “Do you ever see your sisters?” she asked with professional cheer. “I’m an Only. What is it like having—my goodness—twenty-three sisters?”

  “They’re all dead,” the teenager said flatly. “All but me—and four others they never decanted.” An angry shrug. “What the hell. We was—were—an experiment. I’m only around ’cause…My fosters told me a nurse smuggled me out of the lab one night. Somebody jimmied the papers so my adoption looked legit. You need to know all this stuff?”

  Wong nodded, but wondered why deCant thought that Satterwaithe needed to know as well. The Third Officer remained by the door, as impassive as a harem guard. Was she listening? She must be. “And your fosters named you Twenty-four deCant? That seems an awful—”

  “They was activists. They said I should know who I was and why I was and folk’s’d look at me and maybe stop growing us for experiments. They went in the Syrtis Dome Decompression,” deCant continued without so much as a change in tone, “and I decided I had enough of Mars; so I stowed aboard the Ares Shuttle, g
ot scut jobs around the Deimos Yards, and thought maybe I’d space out and look up my clone-mother. I ran into Captain Hand in Panic Town. He knew about me—about the cloning, I mean—and said he’d help me out. I figured the worst that could happen was I’d be the skipper’s doxy—and he was a sweet kind of guy, so maybe the worst wouldn’t be so bad.” DeCant shook her head. “God, he was a good man.” She locked defiant eyes on Wong. “He never touched me. You got to believe that. Not even after I started bleeding. I wouldn’t have minded, then; but now I’m glad he never did.”

  And what was that ice pick in Wong’s heart? It couldn’t be jealousy, could it? Did she suppose that she was the only woman Hand had never taken as a lover? Why, the Middle System must be full of women like that!

  After the microbots had been implanted and deCant had gone, Satterwaithe stepped forward. “I need stims,” she said. “A bottle.”

  “What a sad story…” Wong was still thinking about the girl.

  Satterwaithe was not. “A full bottle.”

  Wong blinked and focused on the Third. “Of stims?”

  Satterwaithe thought that the snake woman was a flighty sort. She never seemed to be entirely present, as if she only intersected normal space-time and the rest of her lay in some other dimension. “There’s a lot of work that wants doing. Some of us need to work extended hours.”

  Wong did not reach for her console. “Stims can be abused.”

  “I’m no addict.”

  Wong could not bring herself to dispute the point; yet she knew how easy it was to deny reality even to oneself. “I’ll design a ’bot,” she said sternly. “It will release a controlled quantity of stimulant for a specified time period. It can be activated or deactivated by command from my console. A monitor will track your vital signs through the ship’s grid and adjust the dosage as required.”

  The Third Officer shrugged impatiently. She knew what she wanted; she didn’t care how it was accomplished. “I’ll need more than one, then. One for each member of my task team. Perhaps as many as five.”

  “Very well. Bring them here later today for their insertions.”

  Wong was still staring in puzzlement at the door after Satterwaithe had left when a voice said, “She’s up to something.”

  “Something to do with ship repair,” Wong answered. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to speak to a disembodied voice.

  “Fixing the cages is the Ram’s task. The deck ain’t in it.”

  Wong looked around for the source. “You’re Miko, aren’t you? Mikoyan Hidei, the engineer’s mate? I recognize your voice.”

  “Yah. That’s me.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Here.”

  Was that smirk or play in that voice? Wong studied the room and finally located the girl behind the large air-exchange grille on the aft bulkhead near the ceiling. “Whatever are you doing in there?”

  “It’s just something I do. ‘Miko-in-the-walls.’ It’s sort of cozy, you know. Comfortable.”

  “Comfortable! Crawling through the air ducts?” But it might be that comfort has nothing to do with the physical.

  “Oh, there’s all sorts of passages back here. For maintenance and stuff. I guess when this was a luxury boat, they had passages for the stewards so they could run around without anybody seeing them.”

  “And are you playing hide and seek?”

  There was silence followed by a motion, barely perceptible through the grillwork, that Wong took to be a shake of the head. “‘Play’ gotta be earned.”

  “Ah. Yes, I suppose. You don’t like the Third Officer very much, do you?”

  “I don’t like a lot of people. Sometimes they don’t like me back, so it all works out. But that Genie Satterwaithe, she grinds me. Nothing’s ever good enough for her. I like you, though.”

  Oddly, that pleased the doctor, who straightened a little at the compliment. “You do?”

  “Yah. You like to help people. I think you’re the nicest one on board. After the captain.”

  Wong knew the girl meant Evan Hand. Gorgas was a cold man. Nice was not among his adjectives. “Thank you.”

  “That’s why I don’t think you should be with that man so much. He’s doesn’t really care for you. When we reach his port, he won’t even look back from the airlock.”

  “What man?” Wong asked with false puzzlement and a smile that was two parts fear.

  But there was no answer, and the shadow behind the grille was gone.

  How long had that strange, elfin girl been prowling the innards of the ship, she wondered? And what sights had she watched in silence through the slits of its portals and grilles?

  The greenhouse of a long-haul tramp is a center of color and light. Crazed by the lack of gravitational cues, the shoots and buds weave their long, wispy stems into a tapestry of green and red and yellow that slices the solar-equivalent lamplight into something approaching stained glass. At the farther end of the gallery, the color of fruit gives way, and odor triumphs over sight. There is a pungent, fleshy smell about the carniculture vats, accented but by no means countered by that of the live animals cowering in their pens. There are only a few of these, for those breeds are rare that can tolerate milligee acceleration, let alone free fall, without unreasoning terror.

  (Cats, to be sure; but Cat walks where she will. There were two cats aboard The River and they had come to a reasonable accommodation with each other, dividing the ship and its humans between them. Miko had come across one of them behind the walls near the galley and called her “Queen Tamar,” unaware that Ivar Akhaturian had named the self-same puss “Anush Abur.” The cat, for what it is worth, accepted both names with equal indifference. Of the second cat, she is little seen and then only when she wishes.)

  The biosystems chief had been born with the unfortunate name of Eaton Grubb and doomed thereby to a life in food preparation. The “Grubb” part was perhaps necessary by long patronymic custom, but his parents should have shown a less puckish sense of humor. He loved them dearly all his life, but they really should have called him “John.”

  But that which does not kill, strengthens; or so they say. Young Eaton had developed his own sense of humor. “As a child,” he told Nkieruke Okoye one time, “I was never certain whether I was introducing myself or describing my activity.” The First Wrangler, whose milk language was not even remotely kin to English, smiled because her inner sense told her she ought to, but she did not laugh at the joke for three days, when her mind finally pierced the curtain of spelling, phonetics, and slang with which English-speakers shrouded their inscrutable tongue. She repeated the phrase to herself several times in Igbo, but Consuming Food never struck her as a reasonable name for someone, nor even as remotely funny. English, ’Kiru decided, had too many words and its speakers felt obliged to play with the extra ones.

  But for whatever reason, she considered the chief the happiest person in the crew. Everyone else wanted to have what they did not or to be what they were not: to hold rank, or to avoid responsibility; to possess another, or to avoid possession; to flee the past, or to live in it. Eaton Grubb, who perhaps most deserved to have and to be more, desired it the least. ’Kiru sometimes wondered whether that was an infirmity of his or a strength.

  Grubb sang a great deal. No one on the ship sang so much or so well as he. He sang while he harvested meat from the vats. He sang when he tinctured the bland “carnic” with flavorings and odorants and fortified it with vitamins and minerals. The sheep—too stupid even to know they were in ziggy—were in theory available for his slaughter when the real thing was called for; but he sang to them too and what man can slaughter those he serenades?

  Okoye, her duties done for the day, kicked and listened and licked on a ginger sweetball he had made for her. Often, in the common room, Grubb accompanied himself on the concertina, but Okoye enjoyed the voice pure and unadorned, and that was why she often joined him in the galley. That and the sweetballs.

  “There’s wealth to be made
on the orbital trade

  Working the ships and the stations.

  If you man the lock at the cargo ship dock,

  You can look down on all of creation,

  My friend.

  You can look down on all of creation.”

  Grubb liked the old songs, the ones from the early days, when all of space had snuggled close to the breast of Mother Earth, and Mars was just an antic notion. The building of Leo Station and Goddard City and Tsiolkovskigrad; the first lunar mines at Artemis and Selene; the pearly necklace of powersats, the heroic fight against the asteroid rain. The time when three men had dared the Long Orbit to Calhoun’s Rock with nothing more than a chemical reaction for their motor. A time of raw energy and simple truths. Fortunes had been made in deed, and fortunes broken.

  There was no discontent in this love of his for a golden age. Genuinely humble, he viewed the world with a childlike awe and, accepting whatever befell, inherited the world often enough that the more cynical among the crew suspected his humility to be a sort of vice. Grubb was happy where he was and when he was, but he would have been as happy elsewhere and elsewhen. He really did know that the times he sang of had not been so rosy or sanitary as the songs made out, nor the truths quite so simple. There had been bodies in orbit, as there had earlier been bodies beside the trails of Siberia and Gansu and the American West; but if one must sing, why not sing of life the way it ought to have been? Myth could bear more truth than Fact.

  “From the STC link up to geosynch

  And from Goddard to Helios Light.

  The habitats spin and the dockhandlers sin

  As they soar through the starry night,

  My friend.

  As they soar through the starry night.”

  The song faded and Grubb sighed as, his feet anchored in stirrups for the leverage, he kneaded the carnic mass, working it to the right consistency for Fowl Matter. His eyes lost their focus and grew distant and he sighed again. Okoye had long decided that Grubb was the ship’s canary. When he stopped singing, it was time to worry.