The Wreck of the River of Stars
Page 38
“I see,” said Gorgas, although thus far he had actually seen nothing. What he meant was that he understood. Once Miko had mentioned their existence, the idea of the passageways was sufficient and Gorgas grasped their original purpose, their likely extent, and the reason why they had been sealed off and forgotten. A tingle of anticipation ran through him. “Show me, please.”
Why, what a curious grin, Miko thought, and that grin, more than the request, led her to open the panel for him.
“Ah, yes,” said Gorgas, first studying the terrain (as Jiyung should have done before Ürumqi), “this alcove is out of line-of-sight from most points in the room. Stewards could come and go quietly. I suspect this must have once been a dining room.” (There was a similar door in the bedroom. Staff members had come in there too, and many not so quietly.) Gorgas stepped inside the passage and looked left and right, although he could see very little in the blackness.
Miko said, “I carry a cold light when I’m inside.”
Gorgas nodded at this gloss to his unspoken comment. “Of course. And a ball of string, I should imagine.” (But Miko had never heard of Ariadne, so the reference was lost on her.) Gorgas took a step farther inside and the shadows fell across his face so that he seemed to become an empty coverall. “The topology must be rather complicated.” He smiled and his teeth alone caught the light.
He’s enjoying this, Miko thought, though for the life of her, she could not see why.
This is why. Gorgas the boy had always wanted to live in a house with a secret passage, and now that wish had been unexpectedly granted, if not by a fairy godmother, then by an elfin girl. He had always felt a keen disappointment when bookcases did not swing out or panels slide apart. Caves and tunnels and old mine shafts had attracted him too, because they had much in common with secret passageways.
He had met Marta through a caving club at university in Budapest. They had explored the catacombs under Castle Hill. Recollecting their outings together, Gorgas could almost hear the trickle of seeping water in crystalline chambers and the echoes of whispers within a womb of rock; feel the damp cold settling into his sweater; see the parti-colored mineral curtains glowing in the cold-lamps. Almost. “We used to explore caves and tunnels,” he said. “Marta and I.”
He had not meant to say that aloud. He was so accustomed to his interior monologues that their occasional leakage into the world beyond often went unnoticed. But Miko said, “Is Marta the woman in the holoplex in the other room?” And that brought Gorgas back from wherever it was he had started to go and the smile vanished on his return.
“I see this is not your first visit here.” His tone was harsh; his voice, clipped; his visage, suddenly severe. He stepped from the passageway and (sparing it one, last wistful glance) closed and sealed the door. “I’ll thank you to signal at the hoígh plate henceforth.”
Miko seldom cared about the impression she made. There is an old Carson poem that captures her: Take me as you find me/Or don’t take me at all…And of course, she had spent most of her life not being found. Yet the sudden change in Gorgas bothered her, and she regretted now the offence she had unwittingly given. It was the picture, she thought as the captain escorted her back to the dayroom and planted her before the desk and himself behind it. Something about the holoplex was hurtful, and hurtful in a very private way. She should not have mentioned seeing it.
“Now,” said Gorgas. “What did you want to see me about?”
Taking a stilling breath, she said, “What I came to ask you, captain, is…I mean, well, just how bad off are we? The ship, I mean.”
“Our situation has much improved,” he said, hoping to soothe and comfort the youngster.
“But it could improve a lot more,” Miko suggested, because much improved implies that the situation has lately been in need of improvement and, further, that the situation is not yet satisfactory.
Gorgas considered the girl for a moment and something in her iron posture reassured him, for it was not, as he had initially thought, the rigidity of fear. “There are a number of potential problems,” he admitted and found, paradoxically, that the weight of his concern was a little less.
“Like we might not, uh, make it to Ganymede?”
“I shouldn’t let that concern you.” Gorgas plucked a stylus from its foam holdfast and began flipping it end over end in his hand. “Of course, braking continuously at full power…”
“Is on the edge of the performance envelope. Yah, I know that.” Miko ran a hand across the queer blond stubble on her scalp. “The system’s been stuttering. The plume velocity cycles—first, we slow down too much, then Ship lets up on the brakes. The oscillations don’t seem to be damping, either. And number two’s been running a little hot since last night.”
For a wild moment, Gorgas thought she meant the second officer and contemplated (for a mercifully brief time) the idea of Satterwaithe “running hot.” Then he realized that Miko had referred to a ferocious ball of plasma rather than the sailing master, and said, not without some relief, “What does Bhatterji say about the stutter?”
“Just watch it close and call him if it red-lines.”
“Whereupon he will improvise God-knows what.”
Miko smiled. “That’s the Ram. Good thing we have the sails, right? Gives us a little margin.”
“The ship has come through difficult times before,” Gorgas assured her. “Once, when a juke jet stuck as we were sidling into Port Ceres—”
“Corrigan thinks we’re doomed,” Miko interjected, not because the captain’s story was uninteresting—which it was—but because this fixation of the first officer was the real reason she had come to see the captain, and she had grown impatient with dancing about it. Corrigan was so dedicated to facts that his wildest fancies often had an irrefutable substance to them, and this latest apprehension of his had agitated Miko considerably.
“Yes,” said Gorgas, “he thought so at Ceres, as well, and as you see…” He spread his arms, “…we are still here.”
“But he could be right, just this once…?”
“A man may arise each morning of his life and say, ‘Today I will die,’ and once in a long while he will be correct. But that does not mean we should take him seriously as a prophet.”
“Once is often enough,” Miko said. She had grown to know Corrigan while they had worked together, and she believed him a knowing man. Yet, Gorgas too had a reputation for careful thought, so where did truth lie? “You worry a lot, captain,” she said. “More than Corrigan, I think.” She did not add that she had watched him at times from the peepery while he sat awake during his off-watch and plied the AI with questions and calculations.
“A captain is supposed to worry,” Gorgas replied with a little laugh that was supposed to be reassuring as well as self-deprecating. “But Mr. Corrigan is a certain kind of man; and by that I mean, a man who is always certain.”
“I’d think that if he’s certain of disaster, he’d worry more’n anyone.”
“No, Ms. Hidei, though he might accept disaster more than anyone. Worry is something one does, not something one feels. It is an active sort of verb. Why, a man on death row,” Gorgas continued with greater animation, “accepting the inevitable, can grow as serene as a nun in cloister; but add the prospect of a pardon and he will worry to excess.”
Miko smiled faintly and briefly, but also genuinely. Gorgas had not thought her capable of smiling at all, and reciprocated with a matching curl of his own. Between the two of them, they might have created a genuine grin.
“Everyone calls me Miko,” the elf said.
“Even captains?”
Miko, tripped by a sudden memory of another man seated at this very desk, tumbled abruptly into a different time and place, from which locale she answered softly, “Even captains.”
Gorgas understood her change of tone and her blindish look, and something in it struck him as both tragic and lovely. “Evan Hand,” he said.
“Yah.”
“Well,
he was a personable sort, I grant him that.” Gorgas tried not to ask the question that came after. He struggled mightily against the words that pushed against his teeth, but in the end he yielded. “How did…how did you find him as a captain.”
“I didn’t,” said Miko. “He found me.”
“No, I meant that—” And Gorgas fell silent, realizing suddenly how much the girl’s humor resembled his own.
Miko was astonished at how different a man he became behind a smile. Why, he was not so dark complexioned at all! “Hand worried a lot too,” she told him, “from what I saw of him those few months. Only—if you don’t mind my saying so—you worry more about getting our cargo to port and Hand worried more about getting us to work together.”
“A happy crew, but impoverished.” Gorgas had intended irony, but being of a particular turn of mind, turned the phrase in his mind and became conscious that the crew had not been particularly happy of late. He looked at his stylus, suddenly aware that he had handled it continually since the conversation had started, and with a sudden move he stabbed it into its foam holdfast. “I’m not Hand, you know. I never can be. We are, were, different men.” He wondered why on Earth he was apologizing for that, and why to this elf, of all people.
“Yah,” said Miko, who wondered at the sudden gruffness in his voice. “And I’m not Bhatterji; and the Ram isn’t Enver Koch. And Aziz isn’t that Ranulf Echeverry I heard tell of. Not better, maybe not worse, either. Just different. Captain Hand…Well, he saved my life, in a sideways sort of way. No fault of yours that you didn’t; and if it’s all the same to you, I’ll be just as happy if you never need to.”
“Is that why you asked me that, about the ship?”
“You mean, will my life need saving again? I don’t know. Maybe. Only The Riv’, she means a lot to me, and I’d hate to see anything happen to her, whether I’m inside her or not when it does. People…You get up close enough to someone, he can look awful different. You think they feel the same way you do…about the ship, I mean, but it’s not the ship. It’s just the nuts and bolts; or it’s just the rules and structures. Never the ship herself; never the whole thing.”
Gorgas had found an anchor in the mate’s verbal whirligig and grabbed hold of it. “But it’s the ship that matters to you.”
“Yah.
“I’m happy to hear you say that…Miko.”
“So was Ship.” Gorgas laughed at the jest, but Miko turned away. “I best be going. My watch starts in two hours. Sorry I took up your time, captain. I didn’t mean to yadder like that.”
Gorgas waved a graceful indulgence. He hadn’t minded the intrusion at all, at least not after his initial pique. Bhatterji had said something at dinner once about the girl’s acerbity, but Gorgas had found her quite pleasant. “One thing,” he said, his words halting her by the door. “Once we have passed through the rubble field, would you mind showing me your steward’s passageways?”
Miko was not prepared for the request and could not place the weird delight she heard. The passages were her refuge, their qualities strictly utilitarian. She had explored them to learn her way around, not because they were dark and mysterious and led to unknown lands. She made another long and, to Gorgas, disconcerting appraisal of the captain, thinking that it was a different man than the one she had expected. “Yah. Yah, I’ll do that.”
“And, Miko. If you ever feel you need to talk about things…”
“Yah, I’ll do that too.”
“A curious girl,” he thought afterward, when he had retired for the day. “Quite pleasant and reserved.” For Gorgas, those two adjectives rubbed bellies. “Not very serene, though.” Gorgas had not thought Miko serene.
Corrigan was a serene man because his certainty brought acceptance. Perhaps it was the man’s faith, Gorgas thought. A Muslim submits to fate as the will of God, and it matters not whether the fate be pleasant or no. That quality confers on one an unbreakable courage in the face of adversity, but perhaps less audacity in overcoming it.
Gorgas lifted the holoplex from its cradle, something he had not done in years, and rubbed his thumb gently across the image. Perhaps the AI broadened Marta’s smile just a little in response to the pressure, which was odd because Marta used to smile in just the same way at this very touch. Gorgas studied that face long in silence, then sighed and placed the picture once more in its cradle.
“If only you had been less certain, dear.” And he rubbed the back of his right hand with his left.
Now the curious thing about The Lotus Jewel was that she really was beautiful. Some people are said to have piercing eyes, but hers actually left puncture wounds. She was, to use an old word now employed only by physicists, radiant, and radiant in precisely the way that physicists use the word. That is, whatever it was inside her that made her who she was streamed forth from her eyes and her voice and from her very presence and invigorated all who were about her. She was a Pandora’s box of a woman, keeping very little inside. She might have been rather more beautiful had she cultivated more of a reserve—had she been more like Okoye, for instance, who was really very plain but seemed prettier than she was because she hoarded herself. At the very least, the sysop might then have recognized her own beauty—for it was not, as she thought, on the outside at all. As it was, she knew that people loved her company and that people loved her flamboyance and that people loved her looks, but she was never quite certain that they loved her self.
“I will make you a skirt,” she told Okoye at breakfast one day. Grubb had prepared thick pots of whipped eggstuff and grilled slabs of carnic. The bread was liberally smeared with a marmalade he had fashioned from strawberry essence and basic gels. The drink had been fortified with flavorings and a suite of necessary vitamins. “’Kiru would look nice in a skirt, don’t you think?”
Grubb, of course, agreed. He would have agreed had she suggested the skirt for him, and not entirely without reason. Miko, the fourth person present, looked doubtful. She may not have been certain what a skirt was. “Does ’Kiru want a skirt?” she asked.
Okoye for her part chewed silently on a strip that suggested “bacon” without the awful necessity of having once been a pig. She was reluctant to speak because she knew how very much The Lotus Jewel wanted to do this for her. Okoye was not indifferent to material goods—only the wealthy could afford such indifferences—but her needs were simple and her wants were few. Yet to refuse a gift were an insult.
The room swayed and a mild vertigo seized them for a moment. Grubb glanced at Miko. “Another transient?”
The engineer’s mate grimaced. “Haven’t traced that malf yet.”
The chief grinned. “Be careful you don’t wear out the brake pads.”
Miko shook her head. “What are you talking about?”
Grubb was thinking about runaway trucks on the highways of his native Colorado, but he realized in time that an Amalthean could not properly understand the jest, so he said, “I guess the repairs weren’t quite up to specs.”
“Nah. It’s the whole engine suite that backfires, even One and Four. We figure it’s in the control system. Hey, if I understand this skirt thing, it may not be the sort of clothing our ’Kiru would want to wear in milly. Won’t it, well, float up?”
The Lotus Jewel had taken a bite of the marmaladen bread and, her mouth being full, waved her free hand back and forth rapidly. “Unh,” she said, and, “No,” when she had swallowed. “Freef skirts have a frame in them to keep their shape. Ram fashioned one for me from the pattern I gave him. I only have to dress it with the fabric.”
Miko laughed. “’Kiru already wears a steel cage down there.”
Okoye dropped her grill strip. “How can you say that?” she asked Miko. “What gives you the right to say that?” And she pushed herself from her seat and bolted from the room, caroming off the walls because she ran too fast for milly.
“What did I say?” asked Miko, but no one answered her.
The Lotus Jewel could not help but feel some responsi
bility for Okoye’s flight. An observer might have felt that Miko deserved the greater share of the blame; or Grubb, who had allowed a short bark of laughter to escape before he could prevent it; or even Okoye herself, who did not ask herself why the remark had smarted so. Yet The Lotus Jewel held the happiness of her friends to be her own special obligation and thus her own special failure.
Later, under the cap, as she sussed the tsunami in the ship’s path, The Lotus Jewel was still thinking of the poor Igbo girl and did not at first notice anything awry. There had to be some way to set things right again. ’Kiru and Miko had become friends, and it would be a terrible thing if the upset cap-sized into a quarrel. Miko already regretted the remark and had said as much after ’Kiru had gone, but hers was not an apologetic nature and she was quite capable of an obdurate defensiveness over the issue. Yet it was not clear to the sysop how she might smooth things over between the two.
It was on her third pass that she noticed the peculiar tumor on the sky. It lay just outside the footprint of their forward path and, because she had been told to focus on direct hazards to navigation, she very nearly passed on to the more detailed inspection of the dead-ahead zone. However, the tumor felt peculiar—she could not say why—and she told Ship to loop all previous scans of that particular body in accelerated time.
The lump came alive under her touch, like a cat struggling in a plastic bag. A somersaulting rock? But it did not quite have the feel of a somersaulting rock.