Now, her affair with Ivar had started in this casual, proximate fashion, although she herself no longer remembered it that way. It had even had an element of calculation to it: Akhaturian as prophylaxis against Evermore. She would have denied the charge with the utmost ferocity had anyone laid it; but do not call her response hypocrisy. The true hypocrite is always self-reflective. Rather, call it growth. For love is never found; it is never given. It is built. If Twenty-four deCant could not remember the empty field whereon she had built her life with Ivar, it was because what she had erected there was so full of distracting wonders.
“You have carnic on your cheek,” the distracting wonder told her, still rubbing her shoulder gently.
“It’s not carnic,” she said. “It’s pastry. I was making dessert.” (Now, there was a thought to make Fife quail!) She rubbed her face with the back of her hand, which of course only smeared the dark red material.
Ivar kissed the smudge, licking off the fruit—and yes, he enjoyed the goo as much as the girl. It was not quite strawberry. There was a touch of something else. “Sweet,” he said, “but not as sweet as you.” Was there ever a line more hackneyed and more predictable? But Twenty-four did not shiver at the novelty and cleverness of Ivar Akhaturian’s rhetoric. That quiver had quite another origin. Hands spoke louder than lips, and lips spoke loudest when they did not speak at all. Twenty-four dipped her fingers in the mixing globe and smeared more of the fruit creme on her face—a warrior preparing her war paint. This time, she painted her lips as well.
Ivar needed more time for his tongue to seek out every morsel, to check whether any had perhaps gotten inside her mouth. “I’ll call you ‘Little Lollipop’,” he told deCant. Bigelow Fife, who had stepped into the kitchen in search of his desserts, watched with a curious revulsion. How like a pair of dogs in heat! The curiosity, however, outweighed the revulsion, so his eyes darted like seagulls, missing nothing. He saw the boy’s hand reach under the girl’s singlet. He saw the girl cross her arms over her head and pull that singlet off. He saw…What he saw was quite nice, if a trifle underdone. The girl smeared more of the dessert on herself for the boy to lick off. Did that make her a tart? The two of them giggled quietly as the game escalated and they rubbed the paste on each other. Fife had not done that since his first wedding banquet, when he had “fed” Gynna a piece of their cake. He took a step back at the tawdriness of it, but he did not take two.
Ivar didn’t mind being on the other end of the tongue, either. Twenty-four reached into a second mixing globe and lathered a whitish-yellow paste on him. When she began to lick it off, Ivar drew a sharp breath. “What. Flavor. Is that?” he asked.
“Banana,” she told him.
“How. Appropriate.”
The road led where it was bound to lead and Fife had long withdrawn his audience when Twenty-four deCant burst into sudden, inexplicable tears. Akhaturian paused as he resumed his coveralls, wondering if it was something he had done. “Hey,” he said taking her again in his arms, though now with different motives. “There’s no reason for that.” This was the first time he had ever criticized her.
“It’s, oh, it’s, Rave,” she said between gulps of air. She was crying so hard only one word at a time could escape. “Oh, Rave.”
It struck Ivar as a little peculiar that her tears over Rave should finally arrive just after they had made love. Yet, Twenty-four had been trying to cry for their lost friend since yesterday evening, and it might be that she had succeeded now only by coincidence.
DeCant, for her part, could not shake the feeling that a portion of her was split off, somewhere else, watching herself weep. All the while Ivar had been with her—fondling her, licking her, entering her—she had imagined that it had been Rave Evermore doing it. That was wrong, she knew, and she was ashamed to have imagined it, but Rave had barged in unbidden. It was the first time she had ever been unfaithful to Ivar. She did not tell him then. She did not tell him ever. It was something she would keep to herself for the rest of her life and, in some strange fashion, treasure.
When Grubb entered the breached Sail Prep room, he found the Palace of the Winter King. A rime of frozen air, tinged with subtle colors, covered every surface. This hoarfrost had a tendency to sublime on those bulkheads adjacent to heated and pressurized rooms and, indeed, from the footprints he and Bhatterji made, as well. In milly, the fog would settle and accumulate around their ankles until, drifting too close to the Ice Dragon’s breath, it froze out again as a layer of snow. Eventually, Grubb knew, it would evaporate into space entirely, leaving the room bone-dry and dark.
“Damn,” said Bhatterji; and Grubb, turning, saw the reason. Through the twisted tangle of the ship’s skin, the eternal night shone through, to cast faint, starlit shadows on the deck. Outside, the renegade air, minced to ions by the plasma of Bhatterji’s engines, danced blue and green in the sail’s magnetic field. Grubb turned his suit lamps off, the better to appreciate the sight. It was magic and, in its way, a terrible beauty.
“Gutted like a fish,” Bhatterji said, and for once did not suggest that he might fix it with a little sheet metal and some duct tape.
“No,” Grubb told him. “It’s more like a giant’s fist has punched through the shell.” Bhatterji turned his suit, but if he thought it mattered which simile were used, he said nothing in aid of it. “A total loss,” the biochief mourned, thinking of all the hours he had put in here, working on the sail with The Lotus Jewel and the others. The room would never be used again. The standing equipment remained, bolted to the deck—the knitters and the braiders and the like—but the bins of hand tools and spare parts stared back empty. The wind had carried everything loose away.
Bhatterji, for his part, only grunted. He had never thought of Sail Prep as anything but a loss. This is where they used up my spare hobartium, he thought. Grubb’s fist had been the fist of God, then, punishing the transgressors for their sins.
It was a Western fancy, that. His own god was less immanent and was on the whole less prone to stage tricks. The Brahma did not part waters or impregnate young girls, although it might show itself from time to time in human form. If god was anything, it was the whole of the universe and the human soul, two as one, indivisible. Atman is Brahma.
“Mr. Grubb! Mr. Bhatterji!”
The two men glanced toward the interior of the room, where they had left Akhaturian. Too small, Grubb had half-jested, the outgusting might carry you off. “What is it?”
The small figure held out his hand and Grubb thought for a moment he wanted it shaken. Then he saw the stony fragment the boy held. “It’s a piece of the rock,” Akhaturian said.
Grubb reached out and took it. “Why, so it is. A souvenir for you. Good luck, eh?” Bhatterji turned at that to look at him, but said nothing about the quality of luck the rock had already brought them. “D-type,” the biochief added after he had examined it more closely. “Organo-silicate. Quite common in the Thules. You never see this sort fall to Earth.”
Bhatterji had taken hold of the torn edge of the puncture. Air swirled around him, coating him, flashing off from the radiant heat. He looked as if he might bend the skin back into place with his own arms. Could Grubb be serious, he wondered. What did it matter? Anything this far out in the Gulf would surely be a Thule—a Hilda, at most—and nearly everything in those orbits was either D- or P-type. The mark of useless speech was that afterward the listener was neither wiser nor entertained. “Are we any closer to getting the ship fixed?” he asked.
Grubb turned, though Bhatterji could see no face behind the tinted visor, and stood silently for a while. Handing the rock back to Akhaturian, the chief said, “No.”
Akhaturian, equally invisible in his suit, said, “Mr. Bhatterji can fix anything.”
Bhatterji grunted and wished it were true, but made no other reply. That someone on board appreciated his skills was gratifying. That the kudos came at the one point where he saw no possibility of repair was pure, unadulterated irony.
&n
bsp; Ratline leaned closer to the screen. It was a way he had when intensity seized him. He would lean forward, invading another’s social space, as if his words would have greater impact if he shortened the distance they must travel. “Stop it right there, ’Kiru.”
’Kiru stopped the playback and tried not to look. This was the recording from Rave Evermore’s suitcam. To watch it was to see what Rave had seen. To watch it too intently was to be Rave Evermore. ’Kiru did not want that. There was grave danger in summoning ghosts.
“D’you see it?” the old man asked. “There were only three bundles.”
“Was the vane defective, then?” She could ask questions without looking. So long as Ratline told her what he saw, she did not need to look. Unbidden, tears trickled down her face and she wiped them away with a quick, impatient gesture.
“No. I tested every sector of every sail. I tested the vanes before I attached them, and I tested them after I attached them.”
“The other three bundles must have broken afterward, then.”
“Will you look at the muffing screen, ’Kiru! They’re not broken. They’re missing. They’ve been stripped from the cladding. That’s why the longitudinal cut was made.”
Okoye flinched both from the whiplash voice and from the view on the screen. She pretended it was a robot camera that had taken the picture. In that manner she could examine the long slice in the cladding. She could study the girdling where the cladding had been cut away entirely. She could see that two of the wire bundles were whole—though one was already frayed—and a third broken entirely. But the other three were, as Ratline had said, just not there. “Vaporized?”
“Without burning the cladding layer? No, some son of a bitch sliced the cladding open from here to—” He rapped the girdled area with his knuckle. “—to somewhere Evermore never reached. Then he snipped three of the bundles and pulled them out. That son of a bitch.”
Okoye barely heard him. There were a lot of places Evermore would now never reach. He was on his way to Wasat. He had the ship’s velocity, and that was still greater than helio-escape velocity. It was important not to think of such things. She had already viewed the record from beginning to…to when transmissions had ceased. She did not want to view that again. Anything was better than to view that again.
But Ratline would have his way. “Take it forward. Slow. More. More. Stop. Back up. There. Do you see it?”
Focus close upon the bright, flashing ends of the wires, where the wire bundle had just snapped and was frozen now in mid-parting. Yes, she saw.
“When the missing bundles were cut,” Ratline said, “the others were scored. When we dumped current into the cable, the hoop stress overcame the tensile strength of the remaining strands and they snapped and unraveled and—” Ratline jerked his hands apart, splaying his fingers as he spoke. “It makes me sick, vandalism does.” He turned to go, turned back, jabbed a finger at Okoye. “Make a summary for the captain. And for Gorgas too. Note the timeline and the key events. They’ll need it for the Board of Inquiry when we hit Galileo. I’m going to my cabin to review the magfield profiles. See if there’s damage to the other sails. You’ve got half an hour.”
Okoye acknowledged the order, but when Ratline was gone, told Ship what needed doing and had Ship do it all with the monitor dark and she did not even read the report when it was printed.
Gorgas studied Grubb’s face, hoping for some sign of wickedness, for wickedness could be punished, but honesty can only be endured. He had always known the chief as an indolent man, one who seldom took the lead, who never acted with dispatch, who always sought the easiest way. For five years Grubb had gone about his tasks quietly and with little fuss. Gorgas had never heard him express an opinion, and seldom even a preference—and those were always couched comfortably with demurrals and qualifications. That Grubb sat now before the captain’s desk and vigorously pressed his case could very nearly be counted upon as proof of what he said.
“How long?” asked Gorgas.
“A week.” There was no uncertainty in the chief’s voice.
Nevertheless, Gorgas asked, “Are you certain?” It was a question that would have enraged Bhatterji, and Gorgas raised his eyes momentarily to the engineer, who stood with arms folded in the corner by the wall, but Grubb minded the query not at all.
“I’ve mapped the air pressure across the entire ship. It’s a slow drop, but it’s steady.”
“Even with the airtight doors in place?”
Grubb shrugged. “There must be channels where the air is gusting out.”
“Then why hasn’t Ship alerted—?”
“Because Ship doesn’t know it. Ship is—I guess ‘numb’ would be right word. There are parts of the vessel that it hasn’t sensed in years. Out in the abandoned rings. Areas that have been gutted and stripped for refit or salvage or because the Zacker needed to raise some cash. That’s why it thought there were only three holes, not the five that Ratline saw. Look here…” And he leaned forward over Gorgas’s desk to point to the display on the screen. “You see this? That’s one of the rents, the big one. Must have been the first hit. And here, here, and here—those are the airtight doors that ought to seal off that particular volume. It’s the same on the other decks. But that gray area, that’s the part that was abandoned way back when. You see how there ought to be doors in there, to complete the cordon? I sent Ivar in there to look, and he found the corridors wide open. The doors never deployed. Some of them, the door’s aren’t even there.” Grubb flexed his long, delicate fingers into fists, rubbed the knuckles against his temples. “Just one breach, maybe we could have done something. Maybe even two. But not five.” He craned his neck to look at Bhatterji, who might have been graven of mahogany. “It’s not my area of expertise, but there’s one breach—the big one afore Sail Prep—that one…” Grubb fell silent and only shook his head.
Gorgas thought of the service corridors that Miko had found. He imagined streams of air wending through them. He imagined Miko herself carried away in their breath, crying out and reaching for him. “A week, you say?”
“By then the air will be as thin as on the Tibetan plateau. People live there. After that…No one lives atop Everest. I couldn’t say how many days after that. Maybe Dr. Wong could.”
Gorgas looked at Death, the fourth person in the room, and wondered why he had not recognized Him sooner. He turned to the engineer. “Do you concur.”
“No.”
It was an implacable word, as stolid as the man it came from and somehow, although it was a hopeful word, it did not ring hopefully in Gorgas’s ears. He thought for a moment of vast, tall cliffs; of the comforting arms of his father; of the strength that lies in denial. Hope, he knew, was a cruel virtue, for she was virtuous only when most needed. Any fool can be hopeful when the way to safety lies clear. It takes genuine strength to hope when there is none. “Do you have a plan?” he asked the engineer. “It will take us far longer than a week to enter Jupiter Roads, with the foresail hopelessly tangled and one engine out entirely—or do you intend to fix those as well in the week remaining?” He had not intended that that last should come out as sarcasm. He had had the genuinely mad thought that Bhatterji, in a crisis, could work wonders.
The engineer stood away from the wall. The motion was emphatic enough that he took flight and glided across Gorgas’s day room on motionless feet, like some squat ballerina en pointe. “Give me the wranglers,” he said, “and anyone else who can bend tin. Cutting and welding—”
“You can’t patch all five breaches…” Eaton Grubb said.
Bhatterji turned on him in sudden anger. “How do you know what I can or cannot do? I can find those other doors and set them manually, or I can build new ones. I can create a redoubt, here!” His finger stabbed Gorgas’s desktop. “Here in the center of the ship and in engineering. Seal off the core and evacuate the air from everywhere else. By pressurizing only the redoubt, we can make the air last longer.”
But could he make it last
long enough? Surely there were other regions that required pressurization. Gorgas could not help but frame the thought and so strongly did he think it that Bhatterji answered even his silence.
“And if not, at least we suffocate trying.” Bhatterji folded his arms again. “We have no alternative.”
“Yes, we do,” said Grubb. “The cutter.”
“The cutter!” said Bhatterji.
“Abandon ship?” said Gorgas. The ultimate in failure. How fitting that it should capstone his career.
“She’s all stocked and ready to go,” Grubb said. “Dr. Wong and the passenger prepped it on their own tick. The cutter could take us into the road-stead—or maybe rendezvous with one of the ships coming up the Martian radial.”
“Is the passenger competent,” said Gorgas, “to judge the boat’s space-worthiness?”
Grubb did not know. Fife had seemed confident. Grubb had found him belted in the pilot’s chair, prepared, he had thought, to take it out into the hail. A man could be no more confident in his abilities than to wager his life on them.
That confidence might be misplaced, of course. There was Evermore to consider. Fife, in a funk, may have grasped at a straw.
“Mr. Bhatterji,” said Gorgas when Grubb had made no answer, “I shall expect a survey of the battening you propose on my desktop within the day.” The engineer, who had been glaring at the chief, turned in surprise.
“The time I spend in planning,” he said, “could be spent in doing.”
“Tell Ms. Satterwaithe—” When the spirit was on him, Gorgas could be oblivious to the world, let alone to objections. “—to estimate the time and resources you will need.” He blinked, realized what the engineer had said, and added, “It needn’t take long, you know. Just an order of magnitude. She is rather good at that sort of thing. Mr. Grubb…” And here he turned toward the chief. “I wish you and Mr. Corrigan to survey the ship’s cutter. This Fife fellow may or may not know boats, but I’ll not accept his word before I commit to its use. Otherwise, boarding the cutter may be only another and crueler death sentence. Mr. Corrigan is to calculate possible courses for the cutter along the lines you suggested. I shall expect your report, also, within the day.”
The Wreck of the River of Stars Page 46