The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “Ever since then, ol’ Ugo, he roams the ship at night, a-looking for revenge. Jaeger joined him the next day. He went out the airlock from remorse, they say—only, maybe something drove him to it. Maybe something, or someone, turned that lock handle for him. And now…” Grubb looked from each to each one around him. “And now, the sails have been raised once more!” And he garnished that with a harsh chord from his instrument, which startled the squeakers considerably and even The Lotus Jewel blanched.

  Grubb received the applause of silence. They looked at one another with unease, especially those who had been acting as sailors for the past weeks. Okoye considered the multitude of shadows with which the ship was drenched and wondered if there might not be one more than there ought to be. Perhaps Satterwaithe’s effort to raise the sail had not been entirely wise. When the silence finally broke, it was Bhatterji who broke it.

  “Well,” he said, “at least I’m not on his list, though I can think of two on board that old Ugo might harrass.”

  Grubb shrugged. “Genie was the captain, and the Board said when they stripped her ring that she ought to have known what was brewing among her officers. And Ratline was at that mess table with Jaeger and the other sailors. But who is to say that Ugo has not tormented them—and this ship—all these years? She surely has been a bad-luck ship.”

  Okoye thought that Ratline was a very tormented man, indeed, although she had always ascribed that to hauntings within rather than hauntings without. “I had not heard,” she said softly, “that someone held the poor man’s arms.”

  “Well, that was never proven, ’Kiru,” Grubb admitted, though he always hated to ruin a good tale with the need for evidence. It spoiled the atmospherics. “But if you’re thinking about our own two sailors, forget it. Genie was asleep—it happened on third watch and the second officer found her in her quarters with the news—and Ratline…Well, Ratline had an alibi, so the Board ruled. All the sailors at that table had alibis.”

  “And they all died,” Fife intoned contra basso, “one by one over the years…” He threw his head back and barked a laugh. “Classic,” he said. “Meets all the parameters: a ghastly crime, an unexplained death, a lingering curse. Excellent. I thank you, Mr. Grubb.”

  The chief worked his squeezer and his chords migrated slowly into a major key. “I wouldn’t thank me, if I were you. If Ugo thinks you’re laughing at him…Well, it might go hard.”

  It seemed to deCant—who had artfully thrown her arms around Ivar in mock terror during the narrative—that Fife was the sort to deconstruct such stories even when told by his own children. Rather than hear the story, he would dismember it, discuss each piece with horrifying sincerity, and explain its role and antecedents. She could imagine the light of mischief in his children’s eyes snuffed on the instant and it saddened her, as death always did.

  Mock terror was one thing, but genuine tragedy bordered on the morbid. Grubb decided that matters had waxed too serious and began to liven things up with more cheerful music.

  “My siggy and I made merry-o

  Way down in Port Rosario…”

  Evermore presented himself to Okoye with a bow just short of courtly and, seeing that the others had also linked hands and that the whole was to be a joint venture, the Igbo girl accepted—though Rave squeezed her hand rather more firmly than she thought proper. Dancing in milly required greater facility than any but The Lotus Jewel possessed, but a chain dance was dancing only by courtesy, and less skill was needed than enthusiasm. It was more of a mad recombinant of a conga line, crack-the-whip, and follow-the-leader, albeit with a touch of rhythmic coordination. Tap and bounce and spin and twist, the chain snaked around the greenhouse gallery, among the plants, around the carniculture vats while the narrator and his significant other found all sorts of unlikely adventure in and around Old Mars.

  “My love and I made up and down

  In every nook in Panic Town.”

  The line took flight and leapt into the air, coasting in a gentle parabola to a touchdown on the far side of the room. Flowers gave up their perfumes and the thrum-thrum of the circulating fans, lending a ground to Grubb’s concertina, played breezes across their faces and the waving faerie stalks. The promenade ended with the dancers entangled in a fair approximation of a DNA molecule before it broke up into laughing nucleotides—although some dancers retained a handful of covalent bonds.

  Okoye saw no harm in letting Evermore retain her hand. She was charged, and it was not a negative charge. She even sang a little as the wranglers skeltered afterward along the ring corridor toward their quarters. “I am a saucy sailor,” she sang, “and I fly the waves of night.” There was more to the song, but Evermore heard only the saucy part and wondered if the celebration had diluted her resolve. When they reached the radial corridor to the spin-hall, where they went their separate ways, he pressed his luck and offered a kiss to her cheek.

  It seemed as if the entire universe held its breath. Even the continual background whirr of the Caplan pumps seemed to pause, and the giggles and whispers of the junior wranglers fell still. Motion froze, as if Miko and Twenty-four and Ivar had been put into stasis. It was a quantum sort of moment. There were two things that could happen, two universes that might be born.

  Those two universes made quite a splash in Okoye’s inner pool, so much so that the normally quiet girl was startled into something even deeper than silence by what sloshed over. Why you be running so fast, girl? her mother asked her within that silence, and Okoye had no very good answer.

  And so she offered Evermore her cheek and felt the warmth of his lips upon it. And because he must steady himself in milly his hand rested on her waist. There was more pressure in him than Bhatterji found in his spherical anodes a picosecond before the burst. Okoye respected that pressure and feared it and—again like Bhatterji before his engines—felt also the seductive lure of its release.

  Perhaps for this reason, to show that no special meaning ought to attach to the kiss, or perhaps to prove to those two uppity universes that a third one was possible, she then turned to the others and offered each of them a kiss as well. Ivar and Twenty-four took theirs as from a big sister, but Miko, with a sly grin, returned hers full on Okoye’s lips, which startled Okoye greatly and terrified Evermore beyond measure.

  Afterwards, those who remained remembered that night as the last unaffectedly happy one aboard that unhappy ship, for even Ratline’s private, tear-wracked sobs counted for joy in his ancient heart.

  The Re-Berth

  Every six hours, Gorgas and Satterwaithe spelled Corrigan and The Lotus Jewel on the deck and painted rocks and guided the ship through the tsunami. As this led to sleep in no better than four-hour snatches, ravel’d sleeves were never quite fully knit up. In particular, Corrigan found himself more and more at odds with Gorgas, who insisted on maintaining the grand secant bearing in the face of the tsunami. “Straight on ’till morning, Number One,” he said with that grating joviality of his when he turned the watch over. “Keep Jupiter centered in the dead-ahead.”

  “We ought to beat to starward,” Corrigan insisted, and not for the first time.

  “Nonsense,” said Gorgas. “No need for such a maneuver. Once we close on Jupiter, we will be in the Forbidden Zone, which is always swept free of objects.”

  “Our short-range radar,” Corrigan insisted, “has been picking up a great deal of rubble. At a hundred-twenty kiss…”

  “Yes,” said Gorgas. “That is exactly the point. The track radar will pick out the larger objects at a distance, the search radars will warn us of the rubble closer by, and the armoring on the hull will protect us from the gravel. Oh, did you know? Earth will have herself a new meteor shower in a few years.” Gorgas smiled, as if he had said something useful.

  Corrigan stared at him and hesitated before asking, “What?”

  “Our tsunami. Ship has projected its path. It is slowing into its apogee and will drop en masse to the Inner System.”

  “That is
not exactly our immediate concern,” Corrigan said through his teeth. He looked to Satterwaithe for support, but the sailing master gave no joy on the bounceback. She would have ordered dead-ahead, herself, had she held the command. Most shiphandlers in the Trojan Gulf would have done the same, and for the same reasons. The shortest distance really is a straight line and there is too much empty space to worry much about the parts that aren’t. It was Corrigan’s fretting that was out of tune.

  “But if…” Corrigan said.

  “Yes, Number One,” said Gorgas, reaching the end of his patience. “‘But if’ the odds do play out, then you may dodge. Poisson statistics suggest a close approach to two objects, plus or minus three. The radars will give you sufficient warning—you do have a capable sysop to advise you—and, in extremis, you may juke the ship. I have so noted in the log.”

  Poisson statistics suggested no such thing. Two plus or minus three meant there was a finite probability of encountering minus-one asteroid. It irritated Corrigan that Gorgas had used not the Exact Poisson, but the Normal Approximation.

  The first officer thought that taking such risks was most unlike the captain. However, he had confused indecisiveness with risk aversion, and it was the decision and not the risk that was uncharacteristic. Gorgas had in his life taken enormous risks and was quite aware of the odds in this case—more so than Corrigan in fact, as he had actually calculated them—and while the knowledge had induced in him a perceptible weight gain from sweetballs and such, he saw no other way to avoid a catastrophic loss than by risking one. Corrigan did not yet appreciate the effect that an old, tattered shoulder strap might have on a man who had contemplated it one day too many.

  For Gorgas had determined not to repeat certain past mistakes. “The singular thing,” he had told Marta two days before, “is to bring the ship in with her cargo intact. It has become more than a matter of profit, it has become a matter of pride. The ship is first and last and, as this will be her last transit, it must be done in a first-class manner.” Mikoyan Hidei, who was listening from the steward’s peepery, understood the sentiment, and admired the captain for it, as we always admire those who speak in consonance to our own heart. What she did not understand was why, in a convulsive gesture, Gorgas then ripped the old shoulder strap from its place on his dresser mirror and threw it into the waste duct.

  She only knew that it was a subtly different man who turned away from the glass, and she began to look at that man thereafter with greater reflection.

  Corrigan, as always during his watch, bobbed about the control room like so much flotsam. He bounced from comm station to plotting tank to engine room repeater to short-range radars to the telescopic view of Jupiter. He checked the heading and velocity, the trim and balance, the laser paints and bounceback, much as a man approaching a rendezvous with his lover will compulsively and repeatedly check his grooming.

  He drove because he saw before him the bright, black gleam of failure, which is altogether a strange sort of thing to drive toward. Every stumble, every error, he knew to be the seed of ultimate failure and he treasured each such event with a glum satisfaction.

  The Lotus Jewel had donned her cap immediately upon entering and it seemed to Corrigan that she had fallen into a pocket universe. She always did when she sussed the ship, but she also did it when she did not want to talk to Corrigan. He wondered now whether she might not be napping. “Ship,” he said.

  “Waiting, Mr. Corrigan.”

  “Ask the sysop if she can find a soft spot in the tsunami we are overtaking.”

  “Clarification. ‘Soft spot.’ A region in which the perceived pushback from radar sensory analogs is less.”

  “Affirmed.” Corrigan was amused that Ship had suggested the clarification itself, which it did not often do. Though forbidden by Gorgas to turn the ship, he saw no reason not to look for regions into which he might turn it.

  “The definition is found in The Suss Book of The Desert Rose.”

  Corrigan did not know what to say to that, as he was wary of being sucked into a simulated conversation—at least with a machine. Ship’s replies often sounded responsive, but they were merely constructed by grammar engines from key word and context-sensitive searches. “I suppose so,” he allowed.

  “Hypothesis. A soft spot is a region in which a safe path may be more readily found.”

  Corrigan was saved from the need to comment on that observation because The Lotus Jewel, having gotten the pass-along of his original request, had touched the sky, and now removed her cap to answer him.

  “I’ve displayed the density in the plotting tank,” she said, tossing hair that was not there. “The whole sky feels mushy because we can’t ping the Fixed Point, so everything out there feels like little cotton balls; but the yellow region seems to have the fewest known bodies.”

  Corrigan grunted. “Which means if we do turn in that direction, we’ll hit an unknown body…” He wasn’t sure if he believed that, but he took a certain satisfaction in saying it.

  “You’re the navigator,” The Lotus Jewel said, as if she had explained something.

  Corrigan looked up from the tank and struggled to parse the sysop’s sentence as anything other than a statement of fact. It had sounded like something more, and yet he failed to see the hidden part beneath the waters. Finally, he gave it up and lapsed once more into silent contemplation.

  As nearly as Corrigan could tell, the distribution of the asteroids in the tsunami was random, which meant, as Gorgas had calculated from the density, that a straight, Newtonian path would likely pass close to two of them. Yet, given a Pareto distribution of body sizes, for every large object the laser probes saw, there could be dozens of smaller objects that would not appear until they came in range of the sweep radar. Gorgas might contemplate that prospect with equanimity, but Corrigan did not.

  The Lotus Jewel, meanwhile, turned her attention to the imaging. “How, in all of empty space, did we manage to aim our ship so directly at Stranger’s Reef?”

  Now, she was not entirely precise about this. The body they had called Stranger’s Reef was as near the dead-ahead as did not matter, but it did not lie directly on it and, as Satterwaithe had noted, it was not the Reef, after all. Still, the measurement uncertainty, the drift caused by the wind on their radiation belt, the perturbation caused by the initial engine malf, and the inexorable, Newtonian linearity of their path during the long coast, blurred whimsically by Bhatterji’s calibration burns and tugged this way by Jupiter and that way by the sun, had combined into a generalized anxiety and feeling of helplessness, so that the crew no more knew their own True Position than they did that of the ship or of the objects among which they passed. And so, among other astonishments, Satterwaithe had grown passive and Gorgas had made a decision.

  Corrigan shrugged and said, “Everything will be as Allah wills.”

  “Is your Allah a board-certified navigator?”

  Corrigan frowned at the question, which seemed to him to touch on blasphemy, although for a wild moment he thought it was the Board of Pilot-Examiners that had been blasphemed. “Don’t talk foolishness.”

  The Lotus Jewel clenched her hands and it looked to Corrigan as if she meant to pound the console into rubble. “You keep calling me that! I’m not a fool!”

  “I can only go by the data.” That, from a man known to worship the Fact.

  What Corrigan did not understand was that his soi-disant lover felt trapped in some mad version of Noir, unable to escape the surreal adjustments of a lunatic game master, unable even to guess what the right move might be. Hand’s death. The engine and transmitter damage. The material shortages. Near-fatal tumbles. There must be, she felt, a simple explanation for it all.

  Normally, she took life as she found it, which is to say in a random and chaotic fashion; but she had begun to suspect that down in the bone there must be order and purpose. Those who, like Fife, had troubleshot a great many problems knew from hard experience that causes were particular and manifold;
but being unpracticed at that art, The Lotus Jewel believed thoughtlessly in the singular and universal.

  In the dim-red dungeon of the engine control room, the gatling fire of the Farnsworth cages could be felt as a quick-step march beat, as if God were using the ship for a snare drum. The two closer engines were the stronger beats and when they fired one could discern the other sounds that clustered around the primary implosion. The hum of the CoRE magnets—or rather, of the generators that powered them; the clack of the inserters; the less-easily described sound—like gravel on a tin roof—made by the Number One boron feed pump just outside the control room.

  On panels, displays gleamed, dials swung, numbers blinked. Streaming data blurred on one screen and another—useless displays to anyone but Ship, except that the roiling, hypnotic form of the stream, so much like a great waterfall, was itself a sort of information. The deck shivered.

  “We’re pushing those cages awful hard,” Miko told the engineer. “Right up to the edge.”

  Bhatterji, who had lived most of his life on the edge, did not see the problem. “There’s margin,” he assured the girl. “Coax the cages a little and they’ll give you more than you thought they had in them.”

  “They aren’t alive, Ram. You can’t sweet-talk an anode sphere—”

  “Have you ever tried it?”

  “—and you don’t have to do it, ’cause we got the sail for a cushion.”

  “Sailing,” said Bhatterji with heavy irony, “is labor-intensive. They’ll need a berth of more than an old man and a girl to handle that much sail. Mark my words. Nothing good will come of it. Meanwhile…” He looked at his two assistants and shook his head, but he wasted no time now in wishing for himself a larger or a more experienced berth. “Miko, you and I will alternate in ten-hour watches. I realize that this is a heavy responsibility and that you are not entirely ready for it. Your mate’s rating is temporary and awaits your board examinations. Nevertheless…”