The Wreck of the River of Stars

by Michael Flynn

  “Why did she do it?” Akhaturian asked at last.

  But Corrigan was the last person to ask that question. In fact, the first officer was confused at first by the pronoun and wasted some moments in wondering why his copilot was so upset over Satterwaithe remaining behind. When he realized that the boy meant his wife and her impetuous offer, he realized too that he had no answer for him. “I don’t know,” he said. “Orbits. Hyperbolics. Azimuth. Velocity. That’s all measured and solid. But I can’t navigate where you need to go.” He thought too of Miko and The Lotus Jewel and that he could never ping their Fixed Points. The one had brought passion into his life and the other center and he found himself now lacking both. “Go look in the cabin and make sure everyone is secure.”

  When Akhaturian returned a few minutes later, he was worried. “Mr. Fife isn’t back yet with the doctor. Miko went to get the other cat, but she hasn’t come back, either. And no one’s seen The Lotus Jewel at all.”

  Corrigan grunted. He did not regard the passenger very highly, but the others were his friends and very definitely in his charge. “Cutter?”

  “Yes, Mr. Corrigan, how may I be of assistance?”

  The cutter AI’s florid mode of speech irritated Corrigan, who preferred his intercourses straight and to the point. That such preprogrammed fawning ever mattered to passengers of a bygone era he ascribed to the deficiencies of those passengers. “Message: to Ship. Locate: evacuating crewmembers. And. Deliver: message. Text: Get your sorry butts in the cutter. Casting off in sixty minutes. End message. End message.”

  “Dreadfully sorry, but Ship does not respond.”

  Growling something unkind about the passenger splicing fibrop links between the cutter and the ship, Corrigan unclipped from his seat and hurried to the umbilical. There, he ran headlong into an apparition of bulging, red eyes, a manic grin, and shocked hair that he recognized after a moment as Bigelow Fife. He could not account for the broad smile on the man’s face, for it seemed to fit ill with the sheen of tears on the cheeks.

  “She’s dead,” Fife told him. “She died so that we might live.”

  “Who’s dead?” Corrigan demanded, grabbing the man by the shoulders and shaking him, and both Grubb and deCant, attracted by the commotion came to the entry. Not Miko, Corrigan thought. Let it not be Miko. Nor even The Lotus Jewel, nor the doctor; but he thought of Miko first of all.

  “’Siska,” Fife told them all as if he were bragging. “She knew there was no room for all of us, so she…And I found…And Gorgas said he would come in her place.”

  Corrigan had little experience dealing with hysteria and neither recognized its symptoms nor understood its causes, let alone the remedies—if there were any. He handed the man off to Grubb, who, being prone to the same sort of behavior might deal with it more effectively. “I don’t have time for this,” he said. “I’ve got to locate the others.”

  “Dr. Wong is dead?” said deCant and she was strung between two poles—one mourning the strange, sad physician; the other…Even as she helped Grubb strap the distraught Lunatic into his seat, she felt the shame of hope that perhaps now her mother would come.

  Once in the rim hall by the davit, Corrigan called for Ship once more, and once more received no answer, which vexed him greatly. The pickups in this sector had been restored and both the locals and the fibrop link into the cutter should have been open. He growled an imprecation, though he was uncertain upon whom to call it, and hurried inbound to the next ring corridor.

  What he did not know was that Ship’s attention was engaged. Ship had autoinitiated once again. This time, it was compressing files. Not just some files, but all its files. Its anomaly cache. Bills of lading. The passenger’s journal. Accounts payable. Hand’s notes on his crew. Cargo placement. Recorded conversations and personal logs. Parts availability and usage. Navigational data. Engineering drawings for the Three Dolphin Club. Passenger lists dating back to 2051. All of them and more, compiled with a magnificent disregard for priority.

  Ship had created new encoding algorithms on the instant, folded up the information in its core, shorn the bits, squeezed them into hard diamond, and then squeezed them again, crushing all the information in its databases below the event horizon of an informal black hole. Even for Ship, this required the dedication of a great deal of processor time and, save for the avatars with which The Lotus Jewel was even then working, every portion of its being was devoted to the task. If it was a being. If it knew devotion.

  And thus Corrigan came to grief in the next ring and even the ring beyond that, at which point he realized that for some reason Ship itself was malfing badly. He cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered, “Miko!” And again, “LJ!” But he received no response. The shudder that he felt he attributed at first to his own fear that he would lose them both and only second to Bhatterji freeing one more airtight door somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship.

  Ivar Akhaturian knew fear. The orderly columns of figures on the boat’s datascreens had begun to clutter and thicken and run like liquid methane blown against the thick viewing bubble in Callistopolis Commons. Pages scrolled and danced in a blur. Indicators flashed yellow; then red. Something was wrong. That much an untrained ’prentice would realize and Akhaturian suddenly knew that that was just what he was. He could lay a course. He could take a bearing. He could compute with an AI’s help a hyperbolic, constant boost orbit. He could even bring a boat to dock, and had done so numerous times on his uncle’s threelium barges. But he did not know the boat the way a real pilot did.

  “Mr. Grubb! Something’s wrong!” From somewhere in his mind he had retrieved the fact that Grubb had been a boatswain at one time and, while that had nought to do with the piloting, the older man would surely know something of the internal workings of such a craft. “Cutter!” he cried, “self-diagnostics. Run.”

  The cutter responded with a voice oddly slurred, as if by Doppler. “I. Am. Sorry. Sir. Insufficient. Memory.”

  Grubb heard the call, but ascribed the worry he heard in the voice to the excitability of youth; so while he did not delay, neither did he hasten to the flight deck. “What seems to be the problem, Li’l Cap’n?” he asked in a manner that he thought radiated calm competence, but which sounded utterly clueless to Akhaturian.

  “Something’s swamping the AI!” he cried.

  A little crease appeared above Grubb’s nose as he studied the cascading figures on the screen. He moved with the maddening slowness of the Ice IV river where it flowed into the basin of Dom Miguel crater, but that was only in contrast to the blurred rapidity with which the datastream scrolled down the screen. Numbers had lost their identities and had become no more than a pale haze against the gray background. Grubb thought it looked like Niagara Falls and almost looked to the deck to see if it were puddling below the console. “How did a virus get loose in the cutter?” Maybe it had always lain there, dormant, for all the many years since the boat last flew.

  Grubb was no Lotus Jewel when it came to AI’s, but he had handled environmental systems over the years and had some sense of which end the bullet came out. He tried first to call up a diagnostic screen, but received the same turgid response that Akhaturian had. He plugged in his personal ’puter and tried to peek through a keyhole, but the ’puter’s own memory was overwhelmed on the instant.

  “It’s receiving some sort of massive download from the ship,” Grubb guessed from the snapshot the instant had salvaged. He was nearly correct, for he had not guessed that the download was Ship, desperately seeking escape. This assumes that desperation adequately describes the ripples propagating through the neural net. “Shut it down,” Grubb told Akhaturian. “When in doubt, reboot.” He also, without thinking too much on it, disconnected the fiber optic link that Fife had run between the boat and the ship. As far as Ship—the original Ship—was concerned, this meant the cutter had cast off.

  The sound, like the boom of a bass drum, caused both Grubb and Akhaturian to look about. “Now what the hell
…?” And deCant called from the passenger cabin. “The main hatchway’s closed!” But by then, the disorientation caused by the return of ziggy carried a message of its own. The cutter was no longer in an acceleration frame, and that meant that it had been cut lose from the davit. Grubb, in a rage, kicked aft through the manlock. “Fife, you son of a bitch!”

  said The Lotus Jewel

 

  Ramakrishnan Bhatterji, pausing in his labors to wipe his brow, heard the sound as well and could not place where it had come from. In this abandoned region of the ship, lit only by cold lamps that he had run out himself, it would be fruitless to ask Ship what had happened. Pickups and speakers here were long dead; nor could the answer possibly matter. He flipped down his darkened goggles, turned up his torch, and resumed welding the seams of the plate he had wrestled across the open hallway.

  Gorgas cocked his head and considered the possibilities. “Mr. Corrigan has cast off,” he concluded. Although the ship’s acceleration had not changed, he felt a passing weightlessness in his heart. It was a wildly exhilarating moment, giddy, as if the loss of all his choices had somehow set him free.

  Satterwaithe looked at the clock. “He’s half an hour early, if he did.”

  Mikoyan Hidei hugged the Cat With No Name in the close confines of the steward’s passage that she had for two months called “home.” When she heard the sound of the davit blowing off, she raised her head and remained still for a moment. There was a strange, passing disorientation, as when viewing an optical illusion, when she could not decide whether the boat were receding from the ship or the ship had cast loose from the boat. Then she cuddled the cat once more and spoke to it in gentle tones.

  The Castaways

  The Lotus Jewel could become engrossed in her work—a bad habit when other matters impended—and it was only a chance remark of Gorgas that told her she had been marooned. The captain had said something to Satterwaithe and, overhearing on the link, the sysop had injected her own two cents.

  “Have you restored The River’s transmitter?” Gorgas asked.

  The Lotus Jewel was accustomed to the captain’s leaps of topic, though where this one had leapt from she had no idea. Repair of the transmitter would have needed miles of finely spun superconductor and so had been deferred while Bhatterji rebuilt the engines and then forgotten when there was no more hobie to be had. Gorgas knew that; yet his question sounded like an accusation.

  “Of course not. We didn’t have enough hobartium.” She wondered, briefly, whether Ram would have had enough left over had Corrigan not absconded with the surplus.

  “Then how is it that you hear me?” he asked. “The two-way fibrop link has surely been broken by the boat’s departure.”

  “What?”

  “Comm,” Gorgas said in some startlement, “are you still on board? The boat has gone.”

  The clock in the corner of The Lotus Jewel’s visual field still read an hour to go, but Gorgas told her that it was off by half an hour and the boat had departed prematurely in any event.

  There is a long motif in folklore of the device that arises to destroy its maker. Shelley had written of it; Kubrick had filmed it. The Lotus Jewel therefore found that same conclusion with respect to Ship an easy leap. The AI had frankensteined and had, by distraction and misstatement, tricked her into staying on board. That a betrayal would lie at the heart of matters did not surprise her. It was an unexamined conviction of hers, a mushroom of thought; but that the betrayal had come from such an unexpected quarter clattered all her carefully constructed realities. She had expected that it would be Corrigan.

  The truth was more nuanced, but nuance wasn’t in it. Reality trumps rhetoric; and enzymes make their own rebuttals. The Lotus Jewel was in no mood to consider fine distinctions of meaning or to ponder the import of self-awareness and intent in a neural net; nor even the implications of newborn awareness, the imprinting of baby ducklings, and the desperate need to cling to immanent loss. Down in the bone, she was a woman of firm common sense and loving life as she did, she could never have willingly remained aboard The River.

  Ship, of course, had deduced this.

  The Lotus Jewel tore off her suss cap—and with such a savage motion as to start blood at two of her scalp nodes, though she did not notice the pain at the time—and she ran from the comm shack, from her quarters, from (irrationally) Ship itself, caroming blindly off the walls like a nooboo bunny. She could not bear the thought of rapport with such a monster. She fled down Radial 12, expecting she knew not what—perhaps that Gorgas had told one final, horrid joke.

  But she found the davit port closed. The red telltale showed vacuum on the other side. Yet Ship had lied already about the time and might lie once again about the vacuum. The door would not open—but she banged on the steel panel nonetheless, repeatedly and with desperate fury. The pounding made no sense and, worse, it did no good; and in the end her fists were bleeding and her throat was raw and torn.

  She closed her eyes tight and leaned against the door and swallowed her fear in hulping breaths. The metal was smooth and cool to her cheek. “Don’t go,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me.” But when she opened her eyes again the signal light on the boat lock returned her stare like some red-eyed malevolent beast. Corrigan, she decided. Corrigan had been assigned to pilot the boat and he had left without her. Did his hatred of her run that deep?

  But when she turned away from the davit lock, she saw Corrigan himself hunkered on the floor on the other side of the ring corridor, with his knees drawn up past his chin and his long arms twisted around them. He had the air of one who has sat in his place a long time and might sit there forever, though he had only come to the davit a scant minute before she had. He had neither wept nor cried. It was his custom to accept whatever came his way, and he had seen in the accidental uncoupling of the boat God’s own hand, which had shown him first the possibility of escape and then had pulled him back. I could have let you go, God had told him, but I chose to keep you here, as you deserve. Corrigan was grateful to know that he would be punished—as he treasured justice above all things; but that Miko and The Lotus Jewel had been used to lure him back onto The River disturbed him. Justice is like goat barbecue—it grows the more one chews it and ius summum, as Cicero noted, iniuria summa. When he saw that she had noticed his presence, he said to her, quietly and to her horror, “God wills it.”

  This pronouncement launched the woman into flight, not from God’s will—the ship was not broad enough to compass such a marathon—but from Corrigan. Such words, uttered by lips in a leathery and otherwise immobile face, terrified her; for in that affectless setting they may have signified submission or despair or threat.

  She did not know her destination until she found herself in the Starview Room with no memory of the passages between. The abandoned room lay as broad and as empty as her heart, and as full of things that once had been. Outside, floated glimpses of the unattainable. She came to rest at the great metallocene viewing bubble and stared at the galaxy beyond as if on her silent entreaty it would provide her with answers.

  Which, in a way, it did; for past the edge of the barrera, where the hull broke off like a cliff into the Void, she spied the dorsal hull of the cutter. “It’s hardly moving at all,” she told Corrigan, who had followed her into the room, and whose pale adumbration in the window hovered like a ghost among the stars.

  “It had our velocity when it uncoupled,” he said, “but the davit gave it a lateral shove—so it could clear our plume. She’s receding faster than she appears.” Corrigan thought that might be true of more than boats.

  But The Lotus Jewel was less interested in facts than Corigan was. She had thought the boat would be gone utterly, but here it was, close enough to touch, too far to reach. “Why don’t they come back for us?” she asked plaintively.

  The answer was no easy thing. It vexed those on the cutter no less than it did The Lotus Jewel. The short
answer was that Corrigan had laid in a trajectory at the edge of the boat’s envelope, and a delay in departure would desynchronize the rendezvous. The boat and Georgia Girl would be no more than two bullets passing in the night.

  The long answer was more complicated. With Dr. Wong dead, the loading on the system was reduced, and an alternate rendezvous might now be possible. What made the answer complicated was that it needed Corrigan to answer it, and the answer might still be No.

  “We have to assume,” Ivar Akhaturian said, “that Georgia Girl is still the only achievable rendezvous, so whatever retrieval we can manage must fall within the envelope of that trajectory.”

  The boy had discovered himself pilot by default. Fife did not consider this a good thing—and indeed, neither did Akhaturian—but the passenger pressed his opinion with such scorn that Twenty-four deCant came to his defense. She shouted that Ivar was doing his best, to which Fife riposted that he was very much afraid that she was right. Grubb, for his part, had withdrawn from the argument into a sullen and passive silence. Alone among the boat’s crew, Nkieruke Okoye maintained her calm, but only because she was unconsciousness.

  Akhaturian focused on his console with a dreadful intensity. He had not Gorgas’s gift for discerning patterns and possibilities—this may have been a good thing—but he saw clearly that if the cutter continued to coast while The River braked, they would soon find themselves ahead of the ship and engulfed in the plumes of Bhatterji’s engines—at which point Grubb and Fife and Twenty-four, along with all their cavails, would be rendered moot.

  To address this problem with a malfing onboard would have challenged the most experienced of pilots, let alone a cade-boy only three months a cadet. So one of the constraints on what he could do was, quite literally, what he could do, which was: not very much.