Bhatterji let the torch and the oxy tanks drop. It was a slow dropping—eight seconds before they hit the floor. In the empty expanse of the orlop, the clatter echoed as if a thousand Bhatterjis had dropped a thousand torches. “Dress for dinner, I suppose.” He turned to leave and did not look back.
Melancholy twisted within the captain. He felt it stir whenever the conversation lulled; but it did not overwhelm him nor did it show on his hospitable surface as he welcomed his guests, and for that he was grateful. It was important to end well, but what use an ending if there is no story? As Bhatterji had once told Evermore: Everyone dies—it is no signal accomplishment—but not everyone lives. Gorgas had become acutely aware of this lack. He had spent all his life avoiding decisions, confident in his subordination that his hypothetical decisions would have surpassed those actually reached by the men and women he served. He had mistaken hesitancy for judiciousness and had owned the luxury of this mistake for so long as he was not called upon actually to judge. In hindsight (which he had similarly mistaken for wisdom), he always knew that he had ascertained the proper course. The error lay in not recognizing that proper course among so many others also ascertained. He might have spent his remaining days replotting the course of his life, as he had refought so many lost battles, finding triumph at last in worlds that had never been. Instead, he had cooked a meal.
He prepared the paprikás csirke, of course—no other meal was conceivable under such a circumstance—and served it with a Tokay from his private locker. He had planned to uncork the bottle upon docking at Port Galileo but, with that finale no longer in the offing, he thought to celebrate an unsuccessful transit instead. (“We achieved ninety percent of our objective,” he consoled his fellow diners, “so we shall drink ninety percent of the contents.” And so saying, scritched a line on the bottle with the gem in his ring.) The rich, sweet taste seemed to startle Ratline, who had previously only his homemade brew for a standard.
They dined in the captain’s dayroom, a more comfortable setting now that there were but five of them. The mess would have been too large; and would have reminded them of how many were now absent. The chicken was excellent, or at least everyone averred its excellence and claimed that Gorgas had surpassed Eaton Grubb himself—and it may be that the captain did indeed match those long-ago meals that his Marta had served him—although he never said afterward, even to his private log.
They all of them dressed in their finest, knowing it would be the last captain’s feast the ship would ever see. In the case of Ratline and Satterwaithe, “finest” was not very fine, although they did clean up and Satterwaithe pressed her coveralls and Ratline wore some gemstones on his ears and wrists that no one had ever suspected he owned. Bhatterji wore a terri wool cream sherwani, hand-stitched with gold thread, over embroidered jutti and kurta paijamas. Across his shoulder, he had thrown a gharchola stole. Oh, he was a fine sight, and might have graced a nawab’s palace in some former day. Even Ratline was startled into admiration, for they had all forgotten how much this rough-hewn man loved beauty. Gorgas, their host, dressed in the colorful Magyar garb that he favored at such times.
Miko, arriving last of all, was the surprise, for she had donned the ziggy skirt that The Lotus Jewel had made for Okoye, thus revealing a pair of legs which, like Ratline’s jewelry, had previously been hidden away. The cargo master and the chief engineer delivered courtly accolades on their unexpected appearance; Satterwaithe and Gorgas admired in silence. (Rivvy, searching her knowledge base, compares them to other specimens of their kind, and concludes that it is the novelty and not any objective excellence that has elicited the appreciative regard of the others.) Miko also wore an old blouse that The Lotus Jewel had left behind and, the blouse being larger than the girl it draped, the others did not realize at first that it was translucent.
The table conversation was light, if melancholic, propelled by the smack of the chicken and lubricated by the wine. The diners had accustomed themselves to their fate. They had each freely chosen it and, while choice need not imply contentment, open complaint at this point would be unseemly. Gorgas thought there might even be something invigorating about the odor of burnt bridges; that the charred stench was a sort of incense transporting one with morbid joy.
Satterwaithe had never suffered from the “paralysis of analysis” that afflicted Gorgas. Her head was as full of things as was Gorgas’s, but they were not quite the same kinds of things, no more than the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle resemble those of a chess set. The things in Satterwaithe’s head were more neatly arranged than those in Gorgas’s, in odd contrast to the things in Satterwaithe’s room, which were always a-jumble. When she spoke, one could hear the outline markers, an involuted succession of Roman numerals and letters. This orderliness of thought often gave her an air of certainty even when she was improvising—perhaps, especially when she was improvising. She had always found authority bounding to her like little puppy dogs, but if she was a little less certain now than she once had been, it was because her clear, shining vision had proven no more than a mirage in the desert. Corrigan might have warned her of that. He had never seen a desert, but it was in his blood and he should have recognized the wavy insubstantiality of what the Thursday Group had marked on its horizon. He very nearly had, in his quarters that day when he quarreled with The Lotus Jewel, save that he too was seduced by the dream. It was then and there that the brilliant vision had begun to tarnish, though neither Satterwaithe nor Corrigan had known it at the time, for then and there Ratline had determined to filch Bhatterji’s hobartium.
Gorgas suggested when they seated themselves that they say grace and the others, bemused by the proposal, regarded one another with various mixes of puzzle, impatience, and disinterest—until Satterwaithe, who disliked hesitation above all else, surprised them all by leading them in a genuine, if formulaic prayer.
The prayer revealed Eugenie Satterwaithe to be a trilobite, which amused the others and vexed the sailing master, who was not partial to such self-revelation. “The term trilobite is offensive,” she instructed them. “The correct term is triliberian, which refers to the Three Books.”
“What three books is that?” Miko asked, for the intellectual currents of Earth had never seeped into the wainscoting of Amalthea Center.
“The Law, the Good News, and the Recitations,” Satterwaithe said. “Father, Son, and Spirit.” She did not explain further, regarding it as none of their business.
Gorgas pursed his lips. “That would be Torah, Gospel, and Koran, would it not?”
“Leaving out,” Bhatterji said with some amusement, “the Upanishads.”
“Just as well, Mr. Bhatterji,” Gorgas assured him. “It’s quite a feat to be counted as heretical by three different religions. Why bait a fourth?”
Ratline cackled. “That may mean there’s some truth to it. Genie, I never took you for a god-shouter.”
Satterwaithe had not been active in her faith for a great many years. Like much else in her life, it had lay buried in a small vase in the Greater Syrtis Urnfield. Yet, the dismissive tone of her dinner companions nettled her. It was one thing to question one’s own beliefs; another entirely to hear them questioned by outsiders. “We don’t shout,” she said sharply, “we—”
But Miko interrupted. “I don’t think there is a god,” she said to her plate. “Not one, not three—not even three hundred, Ram.” She looked up and around the table. “How do you explain what happened—to the ship, to Rave and ’Kiru and the others—if some god is looking out for us?”
“You’re assuming the gods care,” Bhatterji said, “or that they take a hand in our affairs. If,” he added slyly to his wine cup, “there be gods at all.”
“I suppose,” Gorgas said, “that we will all know the truth of it before many more days have passed.” He sighed, and it seemed to him that the sigh took more effort than it should have, as if there were not enough air for the real thing.
The reminder passed across the conversation like a c
loud before the sickle moon and Gorgas, replacing his wineglass on the table, noticed a spattering of droplets slowly descending and realized that his hand must have shaken. Some subjects were best not thought upon. “Try a palatschinke?” he said, passing the tray down the table.
The talk turned to other days. Satterwaithe recalled courier days on the Red Ball line. Ratline told them the story of Terranova’s race against the FS Forrest Calhoun, to which, though the tale was more than twice-told, even Bhatterji listened with courtesy. Miko asked how each of them had first come aboard The River and, to start things off, repeated her own tale. Burr’s betrayal of her father, her guerilla vengeance, the confrontation before the Board, the assassin’s death.
“I was a cade boy,” Ratline said. “What they call a ‘cade boy’ now, though back then there weren’t any term for it. It was supposed to be a grand adventure for us squeakers, a great opportunity. See the planets; learn a trade. We had scholarships and everything. Shipboard classes. Bright, shiny uniforms…” His smile darkened and he impaled a bit of chicken and held it before his eyes, the better to study it. “They thought they could toss us a few trinkets and that would make it right, what they did.” His eyes shifted to Bhatterji, lingered there only briefly before passing to Miko. “Our steward, he had an accident too.”
Now Ratline was another who might have shown Satterwaithe the flaws in her vision, for he fancied himself a cold-eyed realist who “called a spade a goddamned shovel,” and he had not in other cases hesitated to deflate a balloon or two. He was no visionary. Experience mattered to him, not speculation, certainly not fantasy. He set his course by dead reckoning, taking his bearings from one experience to the next. But in this manner, he had gone by increments badly off-course, for a man who goes by his experiences really ought to have new ones now and then. Ratline’s were all in the past, so bygone days were more real to him than was the present itself. This might be called realism but it stretches the point.
Ratline was something that had broken and had never been repaired. He kept the bits and pieces rigidly separated, so that one memory seldom spoke to another and wholeness never emerged from the wound. They became a sort of kaleidoscope, a jumble of fragments that tumbled just on the verge of creating a mosaic.
“How did I come aboard?” Satterwaithe mused when her turn came. “It was Fu-hsi who hired me as a shuttle pilot, back when The Riv’ was still an emigrant ship…” And she spun them a tale of bad old days in Port Rosario. It was not the only tale, nor even the most important. There had been a man there, one with a brave heart who had dared not only the taming of the notorious town but also the far more dangerous task of taming Eugenie Satterwaithe. It had been the best sort of love, solidly founded on mutual respect, and its consummation had seemed more beginning than end. And it might have been, it might have been; although Satterwaithe had never been a one for dwelling on alternities and, while this prevented the sort of regret that plagued Gorgas, it robbed her too of a wistfulness that might have softened her edges. She had known that were she to have stayed, she would visit that urnfield every day of her life, until she had no more life of her own. There were too many memories in her lover’s eyes for her to bear gazing into them any longer. And so she had gone, and never regretted it until this very day.
But none of this did she tell her dinner companions. They were not the sort of memories that wanted sharing and, more importantly, she was not the sort to share them. Nor did she suppose that the company was prepared to hear them. Let it be her final love—with the Sail—and not her penultimate one that formed the woof of her story. Let a younger Ratline appear and strut briefly across her stage (and the older version grin at this caper), let Fu-hsi make a bow from the wings, let the story, for all its age, look forward and not to the past.
Bhatterji dressed well, he posed well, he could, when the talk was small enough, sparkle his conversation with irony and wit. His great regret at that table was that there was no one there that he might charm. He found it difficult to speak of passion and longing. His tongue became as clumsy as his appearance suggested. “Hand picked me up at Outerhab-by-Titan,” he said when a silence had formed in the wake of Satterwaithe’s remembrance. “Four, five years ago.”
“I remember that transit,” Gorgas commented. “We lost money on it.”
Bhatterji shrugged. “Saturn was never the happening place. It’s about as hardscrabble as it gets. Mostly science types living on stipends. The threelium trade there never took off, so there wasn’t much loose change available for tramps like us. It was the butt end of nowhere.”
“The butt end,” Ratline said. “Must be why you went there.” But Bhatterji ignored him. He held his right hand up and slowly it balled into a fist. He studied it with fascination, as if it had come alive and were clenching on its own. “I killed a man,” he said in a voice more distant than Outerhab itself.
Gorgas thought he had heard incorrectly. “What was that? You…what?”
“With my fist. I didn’t think he would…break…so easily.” The engineer looked from the fist to his four companions. “It was a fair fight,” he said. “What I mean is, it was not fair, but the advantage was to the other side. He came at me with a pipe when my back was turned. He meant to break my skull.” The first slowly unclenched, like a blooming flower.
“Why?” asked Gorgas.
Ratline, who should have quipped, “Why not?” stayed silent and Bhatterji, glancing at that bland and guileless face, wondered whether the cargo master even remembered the incident in the spinhall. A primordial innocence informed the old man’s eyes and mouth. “It was the butt end of nowhere,” he said again. “I was lonely. I thought he was ready.”
“Is that what the row was all about?” asked Satterwaithe. She turned to Miko. “I was prepping the ship for departure when Hand and Koch came running back to the dock herding your boss ahead of them.”
Bhatterji said, “I’d taken him to Feeley’s—Ratline, you know the place: the finest dining establishment in Outerhab and the lowest dive imaginable. I’d taken him there for what I thought would be an intimate dinner and a…prelude. Enver and the captain were there too, and they saw what happened. My…friend refused and I turned to go and he grabbed a pipe and…Ah, the details don’t matter, though I can close my eyes and see the shine of the steel bar top and the glasses on it, smell the sour neer, hear the buzz of talk—and the sudden silence after his head had struck the edge of the bar. Sometimes I think I can hear the sound of the neckbone snapping. The boy was popular, and everyone in that place turned on me but the few that had seen the beginning. Enver was one of the latter. He helped me hold them off until the captain could clear a way out the door. Enver could throw a punch…I owe him my life.”
Ratline leaned toward Satterwaithe and whispered, “It’s always those penny-ante debts that cause the most problems,” but Satterwaithe scowled and said, “Let’s not talk of debts just now.”
“I heard later that another man died in the riot,” Bhatterji finished, “but whether I struck him or Enver did or someone else entirely, I don’t know.” He turned to Miko. “I don’t know if that makes me a ‘dangerous man’ or only a desperate one.” Then, to the table at large, he said, “But two men are dead because of what I did. I think about it sometimes. I wonder if I could have saved myself without…harming him. At other times, I remember that I did not really love the boy, that I was only lonely, and if I had not done or said certain things…”
“I know how you feel,” said Gorgas, which was a remark so unexpected and unbelievable that they all turned to him in astonishment. “Only with me it was quite the opposite,” he continued nearly unaware of their regard. “There was a yacht—the Dona Melinda. People forget…We have been lifting and dropping around Old Earth for over a hundred years, and people forget what nine-point-eight meters per second per second means. The yachters were a young couple on their honeymoon and they dropped from orbit at too steep an angle. Atmospheric friction—Miko, you wouldn’t know w
hat that means, would you? Well, there were four or five things the Guard cutter could have done. Or maybe six. And maybe half of those options would have worked, but it wasn’t easy to see which half. I was officer on watch and, weighing the pros and cons, I could not decide. They screamed, you know. I mean the crew on deck. They screamed at me to do something, anything, but they only distracted me. The sounds we heard over the comm…I don’t think those were screams. They could not have come from a human throat.” Gorgas had been twisting and turning his dinner fork as he spoke and, realizing that at last, he put it firmly to the table. “So you see, Mr. Bhatterji, I too sometimes wonder—if only I had done or said certain things…”
“Stepan!” Satterwaithe cried. “All these years and you’ve never spoken of it?”
Gorgas lifted his silverware and cut a slice of his chicken. “Would you have? The Guard kept it off the newsfeeds—bad publicity, and all that—but I was cashiered. How could they keep me on? They ripped the badges off my shoulders. Afterward…nothing was ever said, but I fancy some sort of word was passed. No one would hire me…until Evan Hand.”
“Another good deed from the master boy scout,” said Satterwaithe. “I always hated him for that overweening kindness of his.” Evan Dodge Hand had called her one day to say he needed a sailing master and the pathetic gratitude she had felt then at being offered a meaningless crumb galled her to the present day, and colored every recollection she had ever had of the late captain.
Gorgas was surprised at the bitterness he heard. “Did you? I never hated the man. I despised him, though. I thought him ineffectual. Lately,” and he paused a moment in thought, “Lately, my respect for him has grown.”
The Wreck of the River of Stars Page 57