The Wreck of the River of Stars
Page 58
“It’s being dead,” Satterwaithe said. “That’s what does it.”
“Then we’re all destined for a great deal of respect. I fancy Grubb will write that ballad he’s always squeezing after.”
Miko threw her utensils to the table, where they clattered and bounced back into the air as if they were so many oddly shaped balloons. Gorgas reached over and laid a hand on hers, stroking the back of it gently. “It won’t be so very bad, Miko. We shall all simply fall asleep.” More briskly, he turned to the de facto First Officer. “Madam, a toast, if you please.”
Satterwaithe realized suddenly that she did not want the meal to end. It was strange. She had never been very companionable. Solitary even in moments of intimacy, she had never shared herself, let alone shared with the wild abandon of The Lotus Jewel. Yet now she wished that she had, and found that she did not know how to go about it. As she rose from her seat, her glass of Tokay in her hand, she looked at each of the four around her and remembered the last thing she had ever heard ’Abd al-Aziz Corrigan say. Her eyes grew hot and she wondered if that were a symptom of the diminishing air pressure. Had Dr. Wong not said that internal pressure would squeeze liquids and gasses from their bodies? “Captain,” she raised her glass to Gorgas, “gentlemen, lady, I give you Burns’s toast. ‘Here’s tae us! Wha’s like us?”
And they all answered, “De’il a wan!”
Yet, as Satterwaithe bent to sit once more, Ratline tugged at her sleeve. “Cap’n? Cap’n, that was the wrong toast.”
“O Moth…Moth, I’m not the captain any more. I haven’t been for a great many years.”
“But the toast…”
“You give it,” and she sat down.
The request disturbed Ratline, as did all departures from old realities, but he stood nonetheless and held his glass straight out. His arm might have been steel, for all the quiver in it. “I give you the Great Sail, MSS The River of Stars!”
“Long may she sail!”
Eyes averted from one another, they laid their glasses down; all but Satterwaithe who, studying her own empty goblet, rose suddenly and hurled it against the farther wall. The arc was flat, there was little time for it to fall, and it struck the bulkhead and shattered, some of the shards bouncing onto the back of Gorgas’s shirt or onto Miko’s plate, but the remainder falling slowly to the deck in a winkling cloud.
“She’ll be sailing a very long time, indeed,” Gorgas said, for he had grasped the nut of the dissatisfaction before anyone, unless Satterwaithe had when she declined the toast.
If an atmosphere of camaraderie had been growing about the table, that remark stilled it. Ratline stuck his chin out. “And whose fault is that?” he demanded. “Who cut the sail?”
Bhatterji glowered. “Who took the last two rolls of hobartium?”
If was one of Gorgas’s favorite words and he could not help succumbing to its lure, although it was with speculation and not with rancor that he said to Satterwaithe, “If you had not juked the ship at the last moment…”
“If Corrigan had taken more care to identify Stranger’s Reef…” she shot back.
“Clarification requested,” announced Ship, which announcement had the effect of stopping the argument.
“Ah, Ship,” said Gorgas with a sardonic smile. “So good of you to join us. What would you like clarified?”
“Calculation of transit duration,” the AI said, “requires operational definition of sail. Clarification: technical or colloquial usage?”
A skewing AI can be a consternating thing and the five diners variously frowned, looked at one another, or squinted at the speaker grilles. Finally, Miko said, “Rivvy, what are you talking about?”
“The assembled company said
Gorgas laughed and even Satterwaithe cracked a smile. “Ship,” said Satterwaithe, “that was not a request, it was…a hope.”
“Rivvy,” said Miko suddenly, “what do you say wrecked The River of Stars?”
Ship deals only in facts (collected by its sensors) and hopes based upon those facts. (For what is the output of a mathematical model but a hope?) The Miko-entity has asked for a judgment, and that is a different order of output entirely.
The question is not a topological mapping, yielding but one Y for a given X. This question has too many Y’s. On the trivial, material level, the stone wrecked The River of Stars; but, as Gorgas has noted, Satterwaithe’s last-minute juke put it in the way of that stone. And yet, had the vane not snapped or the engine shut down, that juke would never have been needed. And the vane snapped because…And the engine shut down because…
And so Ship chases the fault tree through branching logic gates, searching for the root cause. If The Lotus Jewel had not quarreled with Corrigan, she might have paid more attention to the software and thereby noticed the lack of a handshake. Had Bhatterji proceeded faster with the initial repairs, the braking burn would not have pushed the edge of the design envelope: and the engine repair, even using off-standard materials, might have held. He might even have used the last of the magnet-grade hobartium before Ratline ever thought to filch it. But the indolence of his repairs and the inattention of The Lotus Jewel were themselves contingent on so much else: on Bhatterji’s own fear of the Void; on Mikoyan Hidei’s fatigue and dreams of revenge. The sysop had been distracted by Rivvy’s own skew, but the skew had derived in part from Gorgas’s humor and Miko’s colloquialisms.
One cause always leads to another.
Had Corrigan not conceived of the one original idea of his life, or had he taken it to Gorgas straight away…Had Satterwaithe considered such simple factors as fatigue and motivation when she developed her plan…Had Ratline not tried so mightily to please her that he stole the last two reels…Had the passenger added his skills to the effort and not withdrawn into fantasies…If Wong had not drugged him—or handed out stimulants quite so readily…If Okoye has spoken up about her doubts, or Grubb kept his romanticism in check…If Gogas had made a decision…
AND, OR, IF ONLY. The logic gates weave the web of cause and effect into a tangle. Ship applies Boolean algebra to prune the tree. (Tree? It is the forest primeval!) Ship distributes, commutes, transposes, exports, looking (if only it knew that it looked) for the sense of it all, for buried deep within its innermost algorithm was the conviction that it must make sense. It searches out minimal cut sets and single point failures—closed event-sets which, by themselves, guarantee the top failure. Neurons fire and wave fronts propagate forward and back. Interference fringes radiate from the intersection of wave fronts. The neural net ripples.
And yet when a net ripples, it has generally caught something.
“Single-point failure identified,” Ship told them. “Evan Dodge Hand.”
The announcement puzzled Bhatterji (who had rather hoped for the indictment of Ratline) as well as Satterwaithe (whose nominee had been Gorgas) and set Gorgas into considerable thought. Miko, however, was upset at this indictment of the one man she had loved most of those on board. “Rivvy!” she cried. “How can you say that?”
“Common cause fault,” Rivvy told her.
Gorgas, himself familiar enough with fault trees, grunted; for he had grasped the nature of the common cause. “Hand,” he said, “had too many illusions.”
“So do you!” Miko protested. “You have your own illusions!”
“I never said I did not. An illusion or two may be a good thing to have. Only, Hand had too many. Fourteen of them, if I may say so.”
“Fourteen…” said Satterwaithe, who was certainly capable of counting heads. “Who are you leaving out? What of Hand himself?”
Gorgas nodded. “Fifteen illusions, then. Unless we count the passenger too.”
“He was a kind man,” Miko insisted. She did not mean the passenger.
Gorg
as nodded. “Yes, I suppose he was. It often goes with illusions. Perhaps he was too kind. He felt sorry for each one of us and brought each of us on board, but he should not have brought all of us. He forgot one thing.”
“I’ll not be felt sorry for,” said Satterwaithe, “not by him.”
“What was the one thing?” asked Bhatterji out of curiosity.
“Why, that he was the glue, and he might not be here.”
The End
As he sits across the corner of the table from Miko after the others have gone, Gorgas becomes aware of two things. The first is that the wine has made him warm, and Miko as well, for he can see a fine line of perspiration across her upper lip. The second is that Miko has removed her bra before coming to the dinner and her nipples show dark against the sheer white of The Lotus Jewel’s blouse. Its bagginess on her had impeded his notice until now. He wonders if she has done this on purpose—not the removal, but the showing. She might have done it only for comfort, but he knows no way to discover her reason.
It has been a long day, Miko tells him and after another sip at her Tokay, stretches her arms across the back of the chair. This has the effect of thrusting her breasts forward. An accident of musculature, but has she done so with forethought? Gorgas longs to press his hand against them, but again he fears to speak. As long as he remains silent, he may look. Speak up, and the sight might be taken from him. He is, in his way, keeping his options open by exercising none of them. It has been a long time since he has seen such splendor. (Though perhaps they have been made more splendid by the length of time.)
Miko reaches out to take her wine once more and lifts the glass carefully, as those do who have been raised in lesser gravity fields. “Come over and sit closer,” she says, and it is not an invitation he can refuse.
He settles on a safe distance, but Miko corrects that and they are now touching. Gorgas feels his heart pound and he wonders if he is about to die. It is quite likely the thin air. “I wish you were not here,” he says. “I wish you had gone in the cutter with the others.”
Miko shrugs. “It wasn’t my idea. But this is my ship too, and the failure was partly my fault.”
“The failure belongs to all of us. Each and several.” It is a heavy thing for his heart to bear. Perhaps that is why his pulse hammers so. It labors under such a load as that.
Miko places her hand atop his. “You did your best, captain.”
“Why, what a damning thing to say!” Gorgas does not even think it is true. He can think now of a dozen things he might have done better, but he spends no thought on them. Instead, he wonders whether Miko has removed all of her small-clothes and whether that which is under her ziggy-skirt is no more hidden than that which is under her blouse. Again he knows of no simple means to answer his question; or rather, he does, but fears to employ it. He still cannot ascribe her dress to deliberation. He has no illusions about his age or features and cannot imagine that the girl finds him attractive. He tells himself that she has dressed only so that she may look pretty and not merely to entice an old man. The effort is successful, he judges, whichever her intent.
Miko reaches across the table to seize the bottle of Tokay. In doing so, she contrives to rub against him, but surely that must be by accident. “I don’t see any point,” she says, “in saving the last ten percent.”
For a moment, he does not comprehend her words and imagines the last ten percent of the crew or of the ship, or of all the things that might have been saved. Then he realizes that she means only the wine. “No,” Gorgas tells her. “I suppose not. It was only a fancy of mine. A gesture.”
“Aren’t Hungarians supposed to be wild drinkers?” When Gorgas agrees, Miko upends the bottle and drinks directly through the neck, then shoves it into Gorgas’s hands. “Show me.”
He does, and the dregs of the wine spread through him like fire. He becomes a charcoal brazier. He grows and seems in some strange way to become larger than himself. Miko’s hand, which has begun stroking his arm, feels deliciously fine. “You must show me the passageway system,” he says. “You promised that you would—”
Miko says, “I want to kiss you.”
Gorgas cannot find a word. He knows he has words. He does not use them very often, but he knows they are about. He stares at her owlishly and Miko, mistaking the gaze, says, “Do you like them?” And that answers one of his questions and it means that he need avert his gaze no longer. “Yes,” he says. “They are very nice.” His throat is dry and he drinks again from the bottle.
Miko turns and kneels on her seat so that she can lean across him, and she kisses him with such an intensity that his breath comes short, although that may be only the diminishing air pressure. He suddenly giggles, which startles Miko, who pulls back. “Is it funny?”
“Alcohol impedes oxygen take-up by the blood cells,” he quotes. “We should not have drunk so much with the air pressure so low.”
Miko kisses him again. This time it is longer and less intense. It is almost wistful. “Does it matter?” she asks when they part.
“Only one thing matters now,” Gorgas tells her.
“Exploring the passages?”
“Two things, then. No. One.” He giggles again as he realizes there are many sorts of passages that might be explored. “Perhaps you would like to sit on my lap?”
She would like it very much, and in the consequence he learns the answer to his second question. It is a fine answer, which he likes very much. “Here,” he says, adjusting her blouse, “this does not drape quite right.”
“It was LJ’s. It’s really very baggy. Or else I’m too small.”
The bagginess can be eliminated, and is. On the second point, he assures her with the only argument that makes sense because it is an argument of the senses and not of words. He strokes her back gently, finding the sweet curve of her spine, and she hums like a cat in sunlight. “Here,” he says helping her reposition herself, “you may be more comfortable this way.”
She is. He shivers when she touches him and he wonders if that too may be an effect of the thinning air. In the morning report, Ship compared the air to that of Tibet and it is very cold in Tibet. His respiration has become labored, and so has hers: their breath has grown short and rapid.
“Oh!” she says at one point, and Gorgas holds her tight.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Did it hurt?” Miko has begun to cry and buries her face in his beard and Gorgas pets her and whispers further words. One of them is “Marta” but if Miko hears, she gives no sign.
Afterward, he asked her why, though he was afraid to hear her answer. It might be that the other choices were Ratline and Bhatterji and Satterwaithe and each of these, for different reasons, was less satisfactory than was Gorgas. But his why drilled more deeply than that. As Bhatterji liked to say, one must ask why at least five times. He meant not only why me? (although he did mean that too) but also why this? and why now? There was, in the back of his mind, the recollection that Miko had been much in the company of Corrigan, and it seemed to him, Corrigan being Corrigan, that Miko ought not to have been so late in coming to this estate.
“I didn’t think it would hurt,” Miko said when her sobs had finally sunk like rain into parched soil. She had not cried so in all the years since her father never came back. Now she knew why so many wept afterward in the morphies she had watched.
“It comes more facile with practice,” Gorgas assured her. He has intuited an answer to one “why.” That Miko did not wish to die unfledged. This was part of the truth, but not the whole of it, nor even the major portion of it. For all of Gorgas’s pride of mind, he made no connection between this desire of hers and her life on Amalthea, let alone to his own age and position. To be fair, neither did Miko. She thought it was only the symbolic importance of the act, that it marked her graduation into a different stage of life. That it was to be a shortened stage lent urgency, but did not change the importance. She was not entirely right, either; but she was a little right.
“You spoke her name,” she said. It should not have bothered her, her plan being what it had been, and yet it did, a little. Strangely, she had listened for her own name and had not heard it.
Gorgas had no recollection of having spoken anyone’s name, least of all Marta’s, but he knew that in such moments the tongue often lived a life of its own. In articulo carnis one might be anything but inarticulate. “She was always a little sad,” he told the girl, “even when she was most happy. I know that sounds like a paradox, but she was a paradoxical woman. We had a cabin in the mountains, and we would go there in the summers. You would like it, I think. Or maybe not. You don’t know what it is like to live on the outside of a world rather than the inside. A proper vista may frighten you. We met at university, at a club devoted to caves—and that I know you would have liked. She and I shared a love of caverns and of chess. She liked to cook; I liked to fish. I thought I had found perfect happiness. Then, of course, I was cashiered from the Guard and my happiness was a little less than perfect. I was home a great deal after that, between tramps, but when I was gone I was gone for long times. It seems to me now that her…melancholy increased after that, but it may be that I only became more aware of it. I was seeing her incrementally and so these changes came on me suddenly, having missed all the gradual days between. One day, I came home to our apartment in Pest—we lived in a ‘tattooed’ house on Andrassy-utca, not too far from Heroes’ Square—and I found her in our bathtub.” He leaned forward suddenly and took up the bottle and saw that it was already empty. Sighing, he replaced it. “She had done a neat job of it. There was no mess, save what remained in the tub.”
Miko cupped both hands to her mouth. “What an awful thing to find!”
Gorgas shook his head. “That was not the most awful thing. The most awful thing was this. There was no note. No good-bye. No explanation. She used to say to me, ‘Oh, you know,’ in just that irritating way that wives often have with their husbands. They don’t seem to realize that we don’t know, and now and forever, I will never know. And yet I can’t help think that I really ought to. That there was something I said or did, or failed to say or do, just as that day on the bridge of the Intrepid. She was always so certain, Marta was. I was the indecisive one. But I wish I knew of what it was that she was so certain that she saw no way out of it but the way she took. Never since have I dared to be close to a woman.” He laid a hand on her arm. “Until now.”