The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  Corrigan wiped his lips and jackknifed from the table in that weird, articulated manner the spaceborn had. “I’ll get right back on it,” he said. And he sailed out of the mess, followed moments later by The Lotus Jewel.

  “Drag on the hobartium belt,” said Satterwaithe to Gorgas. “And you never saw fit to tell us?”

  “It’s plain enough,” the captain answered with genuine surprise. “You’ve been taking your daily sighting, haven’t you? I logged it in the plotting tank and…Oh.” Another thought struck him. “The ammeters may be in need of calibration. The measured current in the belt is too low to account for the observed deflection. Perhaps you ought to check that, Madam Second.”

  Satterwaithe too rose from the table. “Perhaps I will.” She knew quite well, now that it had been pointed out, that the extra deflection must be due to the relict current induced in the sails by the belt’s magfield, so Gorgas’s order sounded overly sly to her; as if Gorgas knew all about the sail project, and was using this roundabout way of telling her that he knew. She gathered Ratline with a nod and the two of them followed after the others.

  Bhatterji drummed the table with his fingers. He could not comprehend why Gorgas had withheld the information about Stranger’s Reef—or was the man really only smoking out remote possibilities? It seemed to him that Gorgas could hare off into odd pockets of probability and obsess too much on might rather than on is. He wondered if the whole bogeyman of Stranger’s Reef might be meant only to incite him into action on the engines. “Perhaps I had better crunch the engine repairs,” he said dryly. “Just in case.”

  Gorgas, who had returned to his meal, said, “Surely,” without even looking back up.

  Confirmed in his guess, Bhatterji pushed away. In ziggy, it was impossible to throw one’s napkin to the table, but the engineer did manage a credible imitation of stalking from the room.

  Gorgas had not expected everyone to so precipitously abandon their chicken half-eaten, so when he looked up again from his stay-plate, he gazed around the empty table wondering where everyone had gone. He had only asked gently whether they had been doing their jobs. He turned to the passenger.

  “You see, Mr. Fife, the power of the office. My first captain told me this, and I did not believe him; but I see now it is true. The captain’s merest whim is taken immediately as an order.”

  Fife, who had seen no such a thing as that, frowned and said, “The ship is in trouble.”

  Gorgas laughed. “Oh, there’s no cause to worry, sir. A good captain is always thinking ahead; always considering possibilities. The engines will be on line soon.”

  But Fife shook his head, for he had not meant that. Craning his neck, he noticed Wong still hovering near the ceiling like some child’s helium balloon at a party. He smiled at her and the promise of her lips even while he realized how much, with those great, long forearms of hers, she resembled a preying mantis.

  ’Abd al-Aziz Corrigan, flustered by the knowledge of his dereliction, sought the sanctuary of his own suite, where the reassuring orderliness of his quarters calmed him. The books and spools, lined up like schoolchildren in their racks; the sleeping cage, folded and tucked away; the prayer rug, now held to the deck with stay-put pads but oriented precisely in the direction of Earth, and hence, of Mecca; the mirror, the chronometer, the signed print of Michael Shumar’s elegant calligraphy, all aligned precisely with walls and floors. A world of right angles and, hence, a world in which every angle was right.

  But he had barely monkeyed across the ziggy bars to his sling when the door sang open behind him and The Lotus Jewel invaded his space with her anger and her agitation and her disorder. “How could he do that to me!” she cried. “Oh, I was so embarrassed!”

  Corrigan turned on her. “That’s all you heard?” he snapped. “Your embarrassment?”

  The Lotus Jewel stopped fishlike in mid-room, her mouth open as if gulping air. She had expected agreement, and sympathy, and mutual commiseration. She had not expected anger, let alone such brutal disappointment. Oh, Corrigan could be cutting—but The Lotus Jewel had never before been on the cutting edge. “I,” she said. “Well,” she said. “Of course, the captain embarrassed you too but—”

  But Corrigan was not interested in who had been embarrassed. The sin was negligence. Embarrassment was only part of the penance. That it was only a small part accounted for what he said next, for Corrigan was a man who believed in punishment and, Gorgas having been derelict in the meting of it, the navigator was determined to whip himself with scorpions. “That’s it?” he said with disdain. “That’s all it is? How you feel about it? Are you really so stupid?”

  The scorpion, of course, was the anger of his lover.

  The Lotus Jewel consumed her life making others happy, but that she lay frequently on her back did not make her a doormat. “I’m no more stupid than anyone else in this room,” she answered, trading venom for contempt.

  But venom is nothing to a snake. “Stranger’s Reef? Gorgas wanted a fix on Stranger’s Reef, and you just didn’t get around to it?” Despite the crescendo, there were too many rugs and tapestries about for his words to echo, which was too bad, for if they had he might have heard the sound of them.

  Even yet, The Lotus Jewel did not understand the intensity of Corrigan’s reaction. She was no navigator and knew nothing of that wild and notoriously eccentric body. A possible brush with a frozen rock meant less to her than this brush with a frozen man. “It’s not like you busted hump analyzing the Jovian passage,” she said. “Gorgas didn’t tell me how important it was. He’s always tossing off those little jobs of his. He’s given me half a dozen in the past week.”

  “Are any of the others,” Corrigan said in a voice like a metronome, “to do with the piloting of the ship?”

  It was a Möbius sort of scolding: one-sided and twisted in on itself. The single thing that Corrigan might have said to make peace between them was to acknowledge his own guilt, for the one-sidedness of his reproach mattered more to The Lotus Jewel than its justice.

  “Well, that’s fine,” the sysop snapped. “I’ve only repaired the receiver. I haven’t been wasting my muffing time.”

  The non sequitur puzzled Corrigan, who raised his arms and made a move to wrap her in them; but Satterwaithe and Ratline, with impeccable timing, chose that moment to signal at his hoígh plate. And just as well too before Corrigan could learn how feeble an amends an embrace could be.

  The two of them hovered in the room staring at each other for a moment. If the stares were not exactly those of hate, they were no longer those of love, and that was a terrible thing, for the chill of departed love can be deadlier than the sizzling vitality of hate. Where there is motion—even if it is flight—there can be a change of direction. It is motionlessness that leaves one fixed and unalterable.

  There was still time. Words had been said, but other words were still possible. Corrigan did not have to answer the hoígh plate, but he did, and Satterwaithe and Ratline poured into the room in a tide of complaint. Perhaps he thought that admitting the others would, like inserting carbon rods into a pile, damp a reaction teetering on the verge of critical. That neither of he nor The Lotus Jewel was inclined to continue the argument in the presence of others simulated a kind of peace between them. Corrigan could mistake that for a genuine peace, if he wished; but it might have been better had he allowed the reaction to go to completion. There is nothing like an explosion for vaporizing the underbrush and revealing the underlying topography. The Lotus Jewel, in particular, wondered why he had chosen the word stupid rather than some other encomium. There are degrees to these sorts of things. Some cuts wound deeper than others.

  “I’ve reviewed the plotting tank,” Satterwaithe announced without preamble. If she was aware of the tension in the room, she gave no sign. “Gorgas is doping dreamweed if he thinks there’s danger of grounding on Stranger’s Reef. Our track is well outside the margin of error.”

  Corrigan had no great insight into the human he
art—he was no Okoye, no deCant—but being trapped like Bhatterji’s ions between a superior who did not covet the captaincy and a subordinate who did, he could not help but be aware of the forces at work around him. Satterwaithe too smugly assumed that the numbers were right because they supported the answer she wanted.

  But Corrigan, who knew how fragile and uncertain a thing a number could be, stopped himself from lashing out at Satterwaithe as he had lashed out at The Lotus Jewel. Instead, he replied ever so matter-of-factly, “If the margin of error is correct; and if the error bars bracket the True Position.”

  The old woman stiffened and the lines in her face hardened (though no one had ever thought them especially soft). “I would have thought those calculations would be done by now,” she said sweetly. “Especially with the two of you working so closely together.”

  Corrigan retreated to truculence. “I applied Bhatterji’s Rule: If the captain really wants it, he’ll ask twice.” He never paused to think how that would sound to The Lotus Jewel—that he had just offered up the very excuse that he had refused to accept from her.

  “We’re taking lessons from an engineer now?” Ratline said.

  Satterwaithe silenced the cargo master with a look and turned back to Corrigan. “How long will this work for Gorgas take?” she asked. “I need you to calibrate the collar gauges for the mains’l.”

  Corrigan, though he bridled at the tone, seized upon technical detail as a drowning man upon flotsam. “Why the collar gauges?”

  “The whole sensor array needs to be rewired,” Ratline explained. “I just finished checking it this morning.”

  Corrigan blew his breath out in frustration. This entire project was taking longer and eating more resources than he had expected. Originally, he had thought only to unfurl the jib to buy more time for the repairs. That might have been done four days ago, but with the obstinancy of the universe when confronted with the plans of humankind, the jib had proven unusable: scarred and poisoned by solar radiation. Ratline had thought it the original sail, never replaced because no one had ever taken the ship’s hybrid status seriously. “What does the rewiring do to our schedule?” Corrigan asked.

  Satterwaithe shrugged. “Pushes it out three more days. That’s why we have to hump, hump, hump.”

  “It won’t do us any good if Bhatterji lights up before we can kick amps.”

  “Tell me something I didn’t know.”

  Ratline did not understand the obsessions of Genie and the snake, although he did understand that they were different. He did not care whether the sail unfurled before or after the engines lit, although the idea of sticking it to Bhatterji had a definite appeal. He did not even much care whether the sail provided the edge that saved the ship. Down in the bone, he may not even have cared if the ship was saved at all. There was only one thing that mattered, and that was seeing the great loop of the mains’l glow one more time in his life. The vision rose before him every night when he closed his eyes and scared away the other ghosts.

  The ship would be careened and scrapped when they made Galileo. Ratline saw that clear. He thought the others did too though no one had mentioned it yet. This transit would be the end of The River of Stars, and if she had to end, then she ought to end under sail. Not because it would help, not because it would aggrandize, but only because it would be right. He knew what needed doing, and he would see it done. In his own pragmatic way, Ratline was as much the romantic as Grubb.

  “We’ll need…” and Satterwaithe flipped open her ’puter and summoned a memo with her stylus ring, “we’ll need…Here it is. Thirty-three Kandle brackets…”

  “Thirty-three,” said Corrigan.

  Satterwaithe looked at him. “We can salvage seventeen of the sensors. Moth has green-flagged them. Also, that Oberndorf shunt we recovered from the rotten jib can be used…. The splitters we already knew about…. Two spools of I/R fibrop…And a spool and a half of ffg-gauge hobartium, grade XV or better.”

  Forgotten in the technobabble was The Lotus Jewel, who was not accustomed to being forgotten and did not care at all for the experience. Satterwaithe and Ratline were perhaps the only two on board capable of ignoring the sysop; and Corrigan, when the task was on him, could grow single-minded. He could hold the problem’s clear definition and cool distance and, most of all, its comforting mass of data, as a shield against other problems less well defined, less distanced, and far less measured.

  But by so seizing upon the issue Satterwaithe had raised, he left his quarrel with The Lotus Jewel in abeyance and she could not perceive that as anything other than another deliberate snub. She was wrong—it was not deliberate—but perhaps that was more damning. Had Corrigan known he was doing it, he might have known to stop.

  The Lotus Jewel listened to the discussion. There was not much else she could do. The others were between her and the door, for one thing. For another, she was looking for an opening to draw Zizzy’s attention back to her so she could finish what he had started. Yet while she waited, the room crept upon her consciousness, which was not an easy thing for a room to do. She saw the dog boxes so neat in their rows. She saw the prints on the wall. She saw how even Corrigan himself, floating in the air, seemed somehow to align on these same rectilinear coordinates. Horrifyingly, the analog chronometer behind him proclaimed 6:00. The only things curved, she thought, were the funny, squiggly letters in one of the wall hangings—and herself. She began to wonder whether she might be out of place in such a room.

  In fact, she was; for on every other visit, her place had been in the center of things. Now she was on the periphery, and it gave her a different perspective. She studied the prayer rug fastened to the floor and remembered how, with great fuss and precision, Corrigan would realign it every few days as the bearing of the Earth changed sufficiently along the ship’s transit. What she could not remember was ever seeing him pray upon it.

  When the opening came for her to speak, it was not the opening she had been waiting for. Satterwaithe had read down her list and mentioned the hobartium requirements and The Lotus Jewel in sudden recollection said, “Oh!”

  That drew every eye toward her and placed her once again in the center. “I forgot to tell you,” she said. “I received a stock-out notice from Ship. There are only two spools left, and those are dedicated to Bhatterji.”

  Satterwaithe looked at her from what seemed a very long distance. “And you waited until now to tell us?” Satterwaithe did not have a high opinion of the sysop. She did not have a high opinion of very many people. In her more honest moments, she did not have a high opinion of herself.

  “Well, I forgot!” The Lotus Jewel said. “I was getting ready for the dinner and the rock message from the Younger Boyle had just come in and—”

  “Yes,” said Satterwaithe. “It’s always something.”

  “Bhatterji’s a waster,” said Ratline. “There should have been enough hobie, but he always uses more than he needs.”

  “Is that the reason?” asked Satterwaithe.

  “It doesn’t matter what the reason is,” Corrigan said. “If we had known before dinner, what could we have done?”

  “I can think of one or two things,” Ratline said.

  “What?” said Corrigan. “Stabbing Bhatterji?”

  Satterwaithe went pale at this reminder and Ratline’s face darkened. He leaned toward Corrigan. “You think you’re so muffin’ smart, you muffin’ snake? You don’t know what you’re talking about! If ever a man’s ribs did want steel between them, it’s that boy lover’s!”

  “Well,” Corrigan told him evenly, “try to wait until after he’s repaired the ship.”

  Ratline blazed; his face thrust forward. “We’re going to repair the ship. Remember?”

  “Without any more hobartium?” Corrigan asked gently.

  “So we’ll hoist without the muffing sensor array! Free sailing!”

  “Into Jupiter Roads, without knowing sail status? Into that magnetosphere?”

  Ratline was ready to l
eap on the First. His fingers arced like claws. And Corrigan waited to receive him, for there is a form of combat among the ’Stroider snakes, born in part from the martial arts of the Earthly East and in part from the unique properties of free fall, and he was in such a mental state that he welcomed the prospect of combat. But he and Ratline were both distracted by Satterwaithe’s sigh.

  It was a long one, that sigh, and demanded their attention. It seemed to go on and on and on, every particle of breath hissing out of her. Indeed, she seemed to deflate and her eyes took on a dull luster, as if a lamp that had always burned behind them had just been extinguished. Had there been acceleration, she would have slumped, but as it was, she only hung limply in the air. “’Dul’s right,” she said. “If we were only behind schedule, we might have caught up; but if Bhatterji’s gobbled up all the hobartium…” She glared at The Lotus Jewel as if the sysop were personally responsible; but she could not maintain the glare and looked away into some far corner of the room. “I had hoped…” she whispered. “I had hoped…” She did not say for what she had hoped, but Ratline, with astonishing tenderness, said, “I know.”

  Corrigan snaked to face the wall of his quarters, intending by this to signal that they all should leave; but in turning he saw affixed before him the holo of his old quattro, City of Amman. It was a simple ship—only a chassis towing a string of cargo pods—yet lovely in her own way. What could replace the awe of working the crow’s nest on a jammed shroud motor, high up the mast over an ocean black and a trillion light-years deep? Not feeding boron canisters to an ever-hungry engine. Nothing could, this side of death.

  He hovered there, motionless for a long moment, and the others remembered afterward how he had seemed to go into a place apart, as if all the rest of the world had ceased to exist. Satterwaithe was struck by his stillness. It was as if time had stopped and not the acting first. The Lotus Jewel noticed the intense melancholy on his face, and this was a strange thing for her to notice since Corrigan’s face was not an expressive one, stiffened as it was by his microbotic skin enhancers. She even thought, as she admitted later, that the melancholy stemmed from their earlier quarrel. Ratline…But who ever knew what Ratline thought?