The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  The Lotus Jewel, seeing sheep’s eyes on Evermore and being always ready to smooth the course of love, held her own fruit bomb on high. “Here’s to…What shall it be, kids?”

  Okoye searched within herself. “Let us tell sad tales of the death of kings.”

  The sysop gave her a puzzled look, for she had been expecting another, more lusty sort of toast—and might have heard one too had Evermore spoken first. “What?”

  Okoye sighed. “To Evan Hand,” she said, raising her bomb. The others hesitated a moment, but met her bomb with theirs. “To Evan Hand,” they repeated. The toast struck The Lotus Jewel as morbid, not at all a prelude to a good time and the three of them sucked their nectars in silence.

  But silence was anathema to The Lotus Jewel. “He was a good man,” she said finally for no other reason than to break it. “A good captain.”

  “He was okay,” Evermore allowed.

  The Lotus Jewel nudged him playfully on the shoulder. “How many captains have you known? Compared to the Zacker, he…”

  “It’s not a comparative scale,” Evermore responded. “I measure against absolute standards.”

  “For captains? I didn’t know there were any…”

  “Sure there are.” He tallied his fingers. “Percentage of transits completed without error. Cargo penalties as a ratio to cargo value carried. Crew turnover per annum. You can measure all sorts of things.”

  “Except what’s important,” said Okoye.

  “Like what?”

  “Hand cared about us.”

  Evermore looked abruptly off. “I’d rather a captain know his craft than that he care about me.” By this he meant a certain kind of caring, as his encounter with Bhatterji earlier that evening was still fresh in his mind.

  “Well, you’ve got your wish, then,” The Lotus Jewel said. “Gorgas doesn’t care about anything. I’ll grant him the craft, though.”

  “You liked Captain Hand,” Okoye said to The Lotus Jewel, not so much as a question as a statement of fact.

  The sysop smiled as she recollected other moments. “He was a lot of fun. He had a laugh that—oh, but you know what he was like. I never saw a frown on him.” It surprised her, she not being the reflective sort, to realize how much she missed the man. He had given her a fresh start after her disgrace at Mooncrest, and that leap of faith in the face of her reputation had affected her a great deal more than she had realized. “At least his soul is at rest now,” she said.

  “The Egyptians,” said Evermore with cheerful irrelevancy, “believed that a person had three souls.”

  The Lotus Jewel thought this the straight line to a forthcoming joke and turned toward him with a sparkle of anticipation. Even after Evermore had explained about mummies and ancient funeral practices the sysop waited a moment longer for a punch line she was sure was coming, but whose outlines she could not yet discern.

  “Three souls!” said Okoye. “Why, that violates parsimony! Two souls are quite sufficient.”

  This would do for a punch line and The Lotus Jewel laughed with the unfettered delight of incomprehension. She felt that what Okoye had said was funny, although she could not say just quite why she felt so. But Okoye had spoken up only because the extra soul really did surprise her.

  Evermore, because he was intensely interested in the girl’s every breath and utterance, and also because he was an intensely curious person, asked, “Why two?”

  While Okoye was reticent in personal matters and seldom spoke for the sake of hearing her own voice, she had no trouble answering a question. There are, after all, different forms of silence and some of them involve talking. “There is the eternal soul,” she said, “which is called maw, and there is also the life force, or nkpuruk-obi, which dies when the body dies. The life force may also leave the body during life—under a great fright, for example—although if it does not soon return, the body will die. After death, the maw becomes a shadow, which is why it is very bad luck to step on a shadow. It angers the ghost, and nothing good can come of that. Later, they are reincarnated, some as leopards or elephants or trees. We call them ndichie—‘returners.’ The Amuneke Igbo believe only evil souls return as trees, but that only shows what foolish folk they are. Why, my very own grandfather is now a baobab, and he was as fine a man as ever lived.”

  “Which gives,” said Evermore, “a whole new meaning to the phrase to vegetate.”

  The Lotus Jewel laughed again, but Okoye thought that the joke had been somewhat blasphemous and to change the subject, she asked the older woman who “the Zacker” was.

  “Zachary Zackmeyer was captain before Hand. To hear Satterwaithe and Ratline tell it, he was awful.”

  “Oh,” Evermore said with a careless wave of his fruit bomb, “since when have those two ever said good of anything?”

  “Ram told me,” The Lotus Jewel said, “that it was the Zacker who let the ship fall to pieces and Enver Koch had to put them all back together.”

  “Or at least that’s what Koch told Bhatterji,” Evermore said with a grin. Then, without even a pause, he asked, “So what was it you two were doing inventory on?”

  Okoye almost turned around, for it seemed as if the question had snuck up on her from behind. Evermore was still trying to connect the dots. Here are the dots. One: His sexual desires were in a more or less permanent state of eager frustration. Two: Girls his age were said to have the same sexual desires as boys. Three: ’Kiru was pledged not to be with a boy. Four: ’Kiru had just spent long hours alone with The Lotus Jewel. The one thing he never thought of was that those particular dots might not belong in the same picture.

  “I ran the accounts,” The Lotus Jewel said, “and the engine repairs are going to cost us a sack of troy once we hit Port Galileo. Corrigan wanted to see what we still have on board that we can sell off.” It sounded true, and it might even be true. A deception works better when it is true.

  “You could start with all that old equipment on the rim,” Evermore said. “All it does is get in the way when we have to do Outside work. Except…who would want to buy that junk?” The wrangler laughed.

  There was no romance in Evermore’s soul for all that the boy sought romance at every opportunity. That might even be the reason for the seeking. It is the thirsty man who most desires the cup. Evermore had the sort of features in the egg that might suit romance were he older. Square-faced, solid, with laughing eyes and a chin that threatened dimples, it was a face that could grow to be handsome once it had been sufficiently seasoned. For now, it balanced on the cusp between “handsome” and “cute.” Okoye could understand what had drawn Bhatterji; and she could also understand that a boy might worry a great deal about being thought “cute.”

  “You two are no fun,” The Lotus Jewel complained. She took the empty bulbs from them and pushed off to the cooler to fetch replacements. Okoye watched Rave watch her and puzzled over his evident fascination with a woman with entirely too much surface area. She could not imagine decorating herself with such paints and odors as The Lotus Jewel used; nor would the woman’s laughter and casual touching ever come quite natural to her.

  “You’re very quiet,” Rave said, turning to her—but from him it did not sound the indictment it had from the lips of The Lotus Jewel. It was an interested observation, perhaps even an approving one, for Rave Evermore too liked to keep his own counsel. For some reason, this pleased the Igbo girl, who ducked her head and let a smile’s ghost answer.

  “You know,” he continued in confidence, “you’re just as pretty as she is.”

  Okoye did not need the toss of his head to know to which she Evermore had referred. It was the sincerity she heard in his voice that shocked her. “Why, that only shows what poor judgment you have.”

  “No, didn’t you hear me before? I always use absolute standards.”

  Was he trying to ingratiate himself with her by such flattery? Did he think she would foreswear her oath and grant him her favors for the sake of a passing compliment?

 
Yet, flattery is the vice of praising someone for a quality she has not got. One cannot flatter the rose by calling it red, nor the birdsong by calling it sweet. Beauty might have crossed the line had Evermore spoken it of Nkieruke Okoye, but pretty did not. The boy was correct when he said that he always measured from a datum. Okoye did not believe even that much and so she dodged the label; but she was not always right about others, let alone about herself.

  The Accidental Captain

  Reviewing material usage in his day room, Gorgas noticed that stores withdrawals exceeded Bhatterji’s original bill of materials. The engineer was using more hobartium than expected. Such deviations from plan would have vexed Corrigan, but Gorgas knew that unexpected contingencies always arose to adjust prior expectations. Why, if it hadn’t been for Evan Hand…

  But Gorgas did not like to think of the debt he owed the late captain. He was not where he had thought to be at this point in his career; but here he was and he would make the best of it. It was considerably better than where he might have been.

  Sometimes, in idle moments—he did have some—he contemplated the lives he might have led—as a farmer and horse breeder on the Little Plain, as his father and grandfather had been. Or as a commodore in the Space Guard. Or as a captain on a Four Planets liner. Or as a husband and father rather than as a childless widower. He might have served on different ships, flown with different comrades, known a different woman. These alternities, as he called them, intrigued him and he would devote considerable thought to the contingencies under which they might have arisen. He saw his life as an eternally self-pruning tree, each moment pinching off some possibilities while opening others.

  This is the paradox of free will. It is free because it limits freedom. Every Yes is a chorus of No’s. When he had married Marta, he had forbidden himself all other women. When he had sat for his master’s boards, he had turned away from other careers. And yet, while he had trimmed himself of an infinity of possibilities, he saw still an infinity lying ahead.

  So it was not that Bhatterji had deviated from the plan that annoyed Gorgas. It was that Bhatterji had not bothered to inform him of the changes. Gorgas was answerable to The River’s owners for the ship’s performance, down to the last rivet, and I didn’t know was not an acceptable answer. “How am I to manage a ship,” he growled aloud, “when I don’t know what my people are doing.”

  Now there was an understatement! Miko, watching from the air vent, nearly burst an eardum stifling a laugh. She herself knew pretty much what every crewmember was about, from fornication to fabrication, though even she did not yet know what the Thursday Group’s activities added up to. She couldn’t be everywhere, all the time; and sometimes she did not understand what she saw. She thought Dr. Wong suffered from asthma.

  But watching Gorgas at work was like watching the stars pass by the ship. There was motion but it took a subtle mind to perceive it, and that vice Miko did not have. Twisting, she guided herself back out of the ducts, past an idle fan to a hatch that led into a maintenance way behind the D-ring corridor.

  Gorgas meanwhile, after a distracted glance toward the muffled thump where Miko took a corner too wide, continued to review the stores withdrawals. Ratline and Lotus Jewel were catching up on their own maintenance, he read—Ratline on the mass-driver and Lotus Jewel on the transmitter antenna array. That was all very well. The mass driver was critical for “fly/bye” deliveries to destinations not worth the delta-vee of a docking; and the transmitter was essential for navigation. Yet both projects were consuming hobartium that Bhatterji might need. He ought to caution them. The ship could live without the mass driver until they raised Port Galileo, where the Yards could handle it; and repairing the comm equipment could be delayed until they were within hailing range of a port. He put out stop orders on both projects.

  Now, The Lotus Jewel was in fact working on her comm equipment—the forward sensor array, in particular, was critical—but she had withdrawn twice the materials that she needed, turning the excess over to Corrigan to use in make-and-mend on the sails. Ratline did not bother with such trifles. He did no work on the mass driver for the simple reason that it needed none. With The Lotus Jewel’s help, he had inserted a back-dated maintenance report into Ship’s memory, but that was only a fig leaf.

  In this manner Gorgas missed his first opportunity to learn of Plan B.

  His senses enclosed in virtch hat and data gloves, his motions translated by clever linkages to the microcosmic scale, Bhatterji roamed the plains of a chip the size of Gujarat State. The whole vast universe beyond had faded to background noise. The tang of metal and grease and foam might reach his nose, the hiss of air or the clank of foot on rung or deck might approach his ear, but none were granted admission to his awareness. It might be that he could be struck dead by an enemy—and there were those with cause to hate him—and he would not notice until he had finished the job and removed his goggles, and headphones, and gloves.

  When he finally did so and saw that Gorgas had been watching from the stairwell, it was with no great delight, for Stepan Gorgas was an unsatisfying audience. He took Bhatterji’s artistry so much for granted that he thought nothing exceptional in the work at hand and so granted no kudos. Yet exceptional it was. Bhatterji knew it. He wished everyone else did too.

  “So, cap’n,” he said as he cleaned up, “what brings you down to the bowels?”

  “Your progress report is late,” the captain said.

  The engineer turned away to make an adjustment to the work theater. “Too busy making progress to make reports.”

  “Do you need more hands?” Gorgas said. “More hands make light the work, eh?”

  “More likely, they get in each other’s way,” the engineer suggested. “Miko and I can handle things. We’ll get everything rigged, don’t worry.” That Gorgas thought the job beyond him irritated Bhatterji, but he made a conscious effort to maintain his equanimity.

  But Gorgas had no such thought. He assumed eventual success, but was concerned over the eventuality of it. The sooner “everything was rigged,” the less the penalty for late delivery. “What about Evermore? Hidei can do journeyman work while he does apprentice work. Evermore is good with tools.”

  “No.”

  “Eh? I thought you liked the lad.”

  Bhatterji turned and scowled at the captain, wondering if that were meant as a sly dig. “He doesn’t follow instructions very well.”

  To Gorgas, the response conjured images of pots admonishing kettles, though he said nothing about it—which was too bad, because Bhatterji might actually have enjoyed the jibe. “Today is day five,” Gorgas said.

  Bhatterji grunted. “I thought today was the seventeenth.”

  Gorgas wondered if the engineer were being disingenuous. “After today, we will need all four engines if we are to slow into Jupiter.”

  Bhatterji turned away from him and twisted some controls at random on his microstage. “We always did.”

  After this unsatisfactory interview with the engineer, Gorgas proceeded to the bridge and wriggled through the access tunnel into the observation blister. He had suspended the watches, but a daily sighting was still logged because that was the way it had been done in the Guard.

  The blister was positioned halfway out toward the rim of the disk, so that when the ship was under acceleration the observer seemed balanced precariously on the slope of a broad, circular hill. Outboard, the hull fell off toward the barrera that bounded the rim. Inboard, it rose slightly toward a gentle peak from which thrust the long, archaic mast. Gorgas thought for a moment that the lock for the forward warehouse was partly open; but when he asked Ship, the AI said that it was closed, so he decided it must be some trick of light and shadow.

  The sun was a pewter diamond, a heraldic sun, with stylized rays at the compass points induced by small imperfections in the tinted, metalocene plastic through which Gorgas viewed it. Along the galactic plane roiled the Milky Way, the ship’s eponym, the river of stars: a riot so den
se that the sky seemed white and the gaps and voids and nebulae became black suns within it. There were faint sounds too; though these came from within the ship. Clicks and hums; a steady vibration from the Caplan pumps for the life-support systems; now and then, a creak or a distant thunk. The whisper of cool air brushed Gorgas’s cheek and brought with it a faint metallic odor.

  Not that Gorgas noticed any of that. He was not a man attentive to his senses. He was an idealist; which is to say, a man for whom ideas are more real than the senses. When he glanced toward the sun to center it in the crosshairs of the Black Telescope, he did not see a pewter diamond, nor anything of the sort. Not that he lacked a sense of awe and beauty, because what he did perceive was a writhing mass of fusing plasmas balanced in a continual struggle between the luminal impulse to fling itself into the infinite void and the gravitational demand to collapse forever. That is, he saw what he knew rather than that he knew what he saw. There is more than a little awe in such a vision—perhaps more than in finding jewels or rivers in the firmament—and even considerable beauty. One observes always through an instrument and the instrument is always imperfect, so which distortion is the truth is a fine point.

  Gorgas was not a stupid man. Hand had been eclectic in his choice of crew, but he had never picked for stupid. But Gorgas conceived things so clearly that he trusted his visions more than his vision and often saw only what he expected to see. By itself, this was no great failing—as long as he had Corrigan to check him on matters of fact; but it was Corrigan who had undogged the bunghole to test the davits (and The Lotus Jewel who had ensured that Ship did not notice.) Light and shadow were not in it. Smoke and mirrors were.