The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “Scram!” shouted Miko and she slapped the cutoff button for Number Two. Perversely, the twin crystalline beams continued to flicker and Miko slapped the button a second time and then a third. “Turn it off, Rivvy! Shut it down, now!” She had already slapped the button a fourth time before she realized that the engine had finally gone dead. She cupped her face in her hands to stifle a scream.

  Bhatterji, preternaturally calm, came up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Easy,” he said. “Calmly.” Then, after a moment: “What is the damage?”

  “The coils were overheating,” Miko explained. “The magnetic insulation started to flash and I scrammed the engine.” The sensor bank signaled a vapor cloud around the magnet and she captured a spectrograph of it with the laser. Her eyes danced from gauge to gauge, verifying the shutdown. “It should have taken more heat that that,” she said. “There should have been at least another eight hours before we reached the cutout limit. Engines!”

  “Yes, Miko?” Ship responded.

  “Diagnostic. Engine two. CoRE magnet. Run.”

  “You needn’t be so brusque,” Ship replied.

  “Just run the muffing diagnostic!”

  Bhatterji shook her by the shoulder. “Stop that,” he ordered. “You talking to the AI as if it were a person!”

  “It is! A frightened and stubborn person. It doesn’t know about the sails, so it thinks—”

  “You know that’s not true. It’s your own input that’s skewing the responses. The neural net back propagates from what you say and begins to mimic you.” If anyone qualified as frightened and stubborn, Bhatterji thought, it was his mate. “Engines,” he called. “Thrust balance. Calculate. Assume sail thrust, per input…thus. Balance thrust.” He turned again to Miko. “You need to keep the vector sum through the ship’s center of mass, not cry about a slow cutoff.”

  “Muffer.” The curse came out tired and halfhearted.

  Bhatterji took the clip chair beside her. “What is it?”

  “It’s just that…Everything is falling apart!” She wrapped her head in her arms. “First the captain, then the engines and transmitter, now the AI…” The ship, her refuge, was become a house built upon the sand.

  “I fixed the engines,” Bhatterji reminded her.

  She lifted her head from her sheltering arms. “Not well enough, I guess.”

  Bhatterji shrugged hugely and she sensed a moment of uncontrollable anger in the man, much as in the instant before the compacted ions in the anode sphere fused. But the moment passed, and Bhatterji’s great fists moved only a fraction. “I suppose I should not have expected gratitude, even from you.”

  His self-pity disgusted her. Was he seeking for compliments? For a pro forma demurral? “Even from me? Why should I be grateful to you…boy lover?”

  The engineer sighed. “I hear Ratline on your lips. The combination does you no credit. Had you been a boy, we would have been lovers. You had no qualms about seducing me when you believed otherwise. If you did not gain your desires, neither did I.”

  “So we’re even? Is that what you mean?”

  He shook his head. “No, we both lost.”

  “Think a lot of yourself, don’t you? What makes you think I lost anything? What makes you think I haven’t had every man on this ship?”

  She might have thrown snowballs against metallocene for all the reaction she received on the bounceback. Bhatterji moved his head from side to side. “I would have known.”

  “You don’t know muff. Have you ever even tried it with a woman?”

  Bhatterji leaned toward her and, though she tried to back away from him, his hand pressed hard on her shoulder. “Once,” he said, “when I was very young. It was not pleasant for me, and I doubt that it was for her. I did not know myself then.”

  “And now you do.”

  Another shrug. “I know someone. It might be me.” He released her, unseated himself, and coasted across the room to the comm panel. “Finish your diagnostic. I’ll do the site inspection once we are past the atoll. Meanwhile, I must inform Gorgas that the sails are…no longer a luxury.”

  “They never were a luxury,” Miko told him. “They were a dream.”

  He turned. “Really.” It was not a question. He gave her no chance to respond but rang up the bridge. Miko, seething, turned to the control panel and stared at the spectrograph display without seeing it. How could she have ever thought of rapprochement with this man? He had begun to seem kindly to her, a mentor, someone she could admire if not love. And now he was angry, though she had given him no cause for it.

  The spectrograph, when she finally focused on it, was an unfamiliar one, and that deepened her irritation. She had memorized every circuit, every phase diagram, every procedure relating to the engines. To have forgotten one seemed a failure, and Miko, no less than Bhatterji, detested failure. “Rivvy,” she said, “which alloy is the one displayed?”

  “Displayed spectrograph is not in deeby.”

  That she herself may have forgotten one spectrograph out of dozens was an irritation. That Ship might do so was an astonishment. “Search all deebies,” she said. Bhatterji had been scrounging. He might have used a superconductor grade not normally employed in engine work. That might explain the early flash-off as well.

  “Alloy not found.”

  Miko scowled. But Engine could access any deeby in Ship, so how…? She stiffened. Any deeby but one. She spun her seat to face Bhatterji. The engineer, having finished talking with the bridge, saw something in her posture or something in her face or only something in the suddenness of her motion and stood in quiet stillness with a face like the side of a cliff. Miko spun back to her screen. “Rivvy, copy the spectrograph to ’Kiru in the Long Room. Message. To: Okoye. Text: ’Kiru, do you recognize this hobie alloy? End message. Send.” When she looked again to Bhatterji the face had not weathered at all. She began to tremble.

  The bounceback from Okoye came only moments later. “Sails tells me it’s a loop alloy, used for jibs, staysails, vanes, and other small fields. Why?”

  Miko did not answer, but switched her channel to the bridge and called for Mr. Corrigan. And in all this time the engineer never spoke a word.

  There were only four things about the vane that surprised Evermore and the first was how stiff it was. It hung in the weightlessness of space with only the lightest of support from the guys and the running rigging, yet it had not so much as rippled when he clipped his tether on to it. It was almost as if it were a solid thing.

  That cable was as thick as his arm and the cladding that wrapped it and maintained its temperature was white, and yet the vane had the trick of drifting out of his sight and hiding in the black, star-spangled immensity that surrounded him. Ratline was a pulsing light in the distance; the ship, a small disk many kilometers away. He could, if he wanted, imagine himself alone in the Void, a long, long way from anything and anyone. Okoye’s voice in his ear, reciting sail parameters through the hissing static, kept him ghostly company.

  The immensity around him had direction, and not mere extent. Jupiter lay far below and Wasat just to the west of it, deeper still, at the bottom of an immense bowl. It was a puny sort of down, a mere suggestion whispered by the vector sum of the accelerations working on the ship and hence on himself, but enough to remind him that, were his tether to come loose, he would fall.

  I could drop to the ship, he comforted himself. Sailors did that—real sailors did—and Corrigan had told him it was a matter of pride to “drop well.” And yet, he did not hang directly over the ship, but some 30 kilometers to the side. Below him was…Wasat. And in that instant, Evermore knew a small portion of the terror that nested in Ram Bhatterji’s mind.

  It would take—he did the calculations rapidly, meaning he asked his suit’s AI—more than twenty minutes to complete the fall, sufficient time to jet inboard to a position above the ship and let the ship catch him as on a salver. Yet to negotiate a landing there at the relative velocity he would acquire would de
mand expert suit-handling and, while Evermore considered himself an expert in all things not yet tried, even his heart quailed at the prospect of daring such a feat.

  The sails had rigging that ran down to the shroud motors and cat-holes that rimmed the ship, and sailors had generally used them when traveling out to the sails and back, but the vanes themselves looped out from the rim of the sail and owned but a single feathering shroud at their apices. He made that shroud his goal. When he reached it, he would have a swift, secured route down to the ship. There was an implied safety to that.

  Evermore struggled to keep the cable centered in the crosshairs of his spotlight while he moved along the vane. Even in milly, it was hard to keep from twisting and drifting. He could have told Suit to maintain a constant attitude, but he did not want to exhaust his steering jets in case he might need them later. He was, in a very mild way, hanging from a tightrope over an infinite pit, monkeying along, hand over hand. We must be in the thick of the atoll by now, he thought, and glanced about despite the knowledge that he would never see anything.

  “Current in the vane just dropped by a third,” Okoye announced from inside the ship.

  Ratline answered. “I heard you. Was there any heat?”

  “Wait one…no. No heat.”

  “Hunh. No increase in resistance, then…Doesn’t sound like normalization. Sounds more like a circuit went dead.”

  Perhaps the momentary distraction was necessary for Evermore to look upon the cable with fresh eyes, for when he returned his attention to his inspection and gripped the sail loop, he saw that it had been sliced longitudinally. The cladding was stiff, but the hoop stress in the vane pushing out against the cut caused it to pucker slightly, as if the cable were smiling at him through slightly parted lips. Startled, Evermore looked back the way he had come and saw that the gash had been running for some length now and he had missed seeing it at first. “Oh, muffer,” he growled.

  “What was that?” Ratline asked over the suit-to-suit.

  “Nothing.” Evermore did not want to admit that he had been daydreaming. He must have continued his “inspection” on autopilot even while staring down at the ship, looking for an impossible-to-see atoll, and listening to the conversation between ’Kiru and his boss. He began to inch his way back to find where the cut had started. A cut, he noted, and not a tear. The edges were too neat.

  The search was lengthy. That is, he searched along the length of the cable, but he found the origin in less than a minute. “Boss!”

  “What is it?” Coincidently synchronized, Ratline’s voice and ’Kiru’s blended into a peculiar harmony of baritone and contralto, so that they answered in accord.

  “The cladding’s been stripped,” Evermore said, hardly believing his own words. “The cable’s been girdled for about a handsbreadth. The wire bundles are exposed.” In fact—he looked closer—the wire bundles were the only thing holding the vane together. This was the second thing about the vane that surprised him.

  “Repeat that,” Ratline ordered, then when he had understood, added, “Put the view on your suitcam. The AI can collate the images better.”

  Obediently, Evermore centered the damage in his crosshairs. The cladding was entirely stripped in a circle around the barrel of the cable, exposing the gray insulation. That color must be why he missed seeing it the first time, Evermore excused himself.

  “It looks picked at,” Ratline said. “Reach in and spread the packing material—don’t worry, the hoop stress makes the whole thing rigid—and spread the packing material apart with your fingers. I want to see if there’s any damage to the wire bundles and coolant lines.”

  With some hesitation, Evermore complied. Ratline would not have told him to do it if there were any danger of a shock. He reached in and tried to pull the material apart. It had the look of cotton and, to the feedback pads in the fingers of his gauntlets, a spongy consistency. It stretched and lifted, but only partly.

  Suddenly, his fingers found where the aerogel had been also cut. He worked his fingers into the cut and pulled the sides apart.

  It was like opening a wound. He saw several conduits running left-to-right. One of them seemed to be blowing smoke. Ratline told him to freeze the frame on his suitcam.

  “One of the coolant lines is nicked,” the shroudmaster announced after a moment’s study. “The droplets seep out and sublime in the vacuum. What the muff happened here?”

  Okoye, watching the narrowcast from the sail console, thought the answer obvious. Someone had taken a knife and cut the cladding away to get an opening and then sliced along the skin like a surgeon making an incision. The farmers outside Afikpo used to girdle the trees like that, she remembered. They would pick an area of forest and cut away a ring of bark around the trunk. When the trees died, they would clear the land and farm it while their original plot grew wild and renewed its fertility.

  It killed the trees, she remembered. She reached out and raised the magnification on the image. Evermore chose that moment to move elsewhere so Ratline could examine the longitudinal slice through his camera. Okoye told Sails to recall the previous image and place it on a second screen.

  When she had blown it up she could see that lines ran through the cable like the veins and arteries and nerves through a human arm. (The aerogel insulation would even do for muscle tissue, as the cladding did for skin.) Near the nicked coolant line, she saw another conduit with a bright line scribed across it, where a knife blade had scored but not quite cut through. Closer in, there were other lines similarly cut. One was a wire bundle bristling cat’s whiskers. Some of the strands in the bundle had been cut, probably by the same knife strokes.

  “Rave, Mr. Ratline, I see only three wire bundles, not six—and one of those is cut through and another is badly frayed.”

  Evermore returned to the site and leaned close so his cameras would pick it up. Magnifying the view for the benefit of the others, Evermore too saw the glint where a blade had scored the wire bundles. Even as he watched, more strands from the second bundle frayed and snapped.

  Now, Evermore, when he had set out with Ratline, had thought that he might die gloriously—smashed perhaps by a stone from the atoll, or incinerated if the superconductor normalized. Death was to him a pose, a morphie scene, something he could picture without the affect of pain. It had dramatics without drama; it had pathos without sorrow.

  What he had not contemplated was that he might die stupidly. When he saw that the wire bundle was coming apart, he reached out instinctively to grasp the two ends of the cable to hold them together. This was not a good idea, for Lenz’s Law means that flux will attempt to remain constant and in doing so will impart a considerable tension at the circumference of a sail and, as some sailors have remarked, a “distressingly large” hoop stress of nearly a thousand megapascals.

  All of which meant that, when the wire bundle snapped, the ends flew apart with a force that no human arms could hold. The loose end might have sliced through the cladding itself had the cladding not already been slit for its convenience. Like a snake striking from its hole, it whipped out in a blur of motion and sliced off Evermore’s left hand at the wrist. The wrangler stared in incomprehension at the mist that sprayed like pumped aerosol into the Void around him; but fortunately (or not) he did not contemplate this amputation for more than a moment.

  The failure of the sixth and last wire bundle, triggered by the violent motion of the fifth, caused the entire cable to part at the girdle cut and sling Evermore into the Void. The lanyard on his tether slid until it reached the broken end; then slipped off, leaving him for the second and final time in his life tumbling into the Void. This was the fourth and last thing that surprised him, for the whip end of the cable struck just under his left armpit and cut through the layers of Kevlar and fabric like a thick, dull knife—smashing the hardware, tearing the fabric, breaking bones and severing arteries. The arm was wrenched off at the shoulder and he had an instant to contemplate this strange, loose, spinning object that had
once been a part of himself, before there were no more surprises, no more instants, and no more self.

  Okoye did not know this immediately and neither did Ratline. The current in the vane had dropped the moment the fifth wire bundle had snapped and Okoye had glanced across to the gauge and the warning light. When she turned again to the feeds from the suit cameras, the last bundle had already parted, and she saw nothing but snow on Evermore’s channel. “Rave,” she said, alarmed—but that was all for now. “I’ve lost your visual.” When she received no response, she added (rather stupidly, as she later thought about it), “and I’ve lost your audio as well.” She flipped channels. “Mr. Ratline, I can’t raise Evermore.”

  But Ratline had his own problems. He had just left the junction box to join Evermore and study the damage the boy had found when he sensed the loss of tension at the far end of the cable and, recognizing the symptoms from long experience, dropped down the length of his tether before he had given the matter conscious thought. It was this property that marked the living sailor from the dead, for he who stops to think is often at a disadvantage—although, as Evermore had already unwittingly demonstrated, he who never stops to think is often disadvantaged as well.

  Ratline found himself, after a minute of total disorientation, dangling from the end of a hopeless tangle consisting in part of his tether and in the other part of the broken vane. The two had wound around each other more tightly than snakes in love. Even while he studied the situation (because now was the time for thinking), Ratline saw the free end swoop around and curlicue one last lazy loop around the junction box cat line, so that the rigging here now had the twisted look of a tropical jungle. He had the momentary fancy that the cable was a serpent and that it was hunting for him.

  With some part of his awareness, he heard Okoye calling him; but he had no time for chatter and did not respond. The cable, as he traced it with his suit light, had wrapped around some of the fores’l shrouds. There was no way to extricate his tether from that awful tangle, and so the only thing for it was to detach the life line from his belt and skinny out the tangle until he could reach the catline, down which he could slide to the ship. He only weighed a couple hundred grams—about half a pound on the human scale—so even though he massed the same as always, it would not strain his arms to play tree sloth for a few minutes.