Mikoyan Hidei lingered in the peepery for several days after the cutter had gone, nestled comfortably within the close walls of her refuge. She watched morphies on the peep bank, crept into the pantry when no one else was about to spy her, and peeped on the others now and then when curiosity overcame her. Sometimes, she held long and very strange conversations with Ship. The others knew she was aboard, of course. She had heard them calling; though since the cutter’s departure, they had called less frequently. Satterwaithe and Ratline did not care where she was, but then they had cared about very little for a very long time and had fallen out of the practice. Ratline, in particular, came down from the crow’s nest only to absorb a hasty meal before returning to his solitary perch. Bhatterji, who did care, continued to moil obsessively on his cordon. Once, encountering Ratline in the pantry, the engineer tried to convince the cargo master to help with the welding—all the extant airtight doors now being in place—but Ratline only snickered and said that he’d not get him alone in those remote corners of the ship.
Gorgas also cared and had a general notion of where Miko might be holding herself. On the third day, having prepared to take the part of General Riall at Chippewa, he suddenly blanked the screen with an impatient cry and, turning from the console made for the hidden doorway in the alcove. The opening required a few moments, as he fumbled a bit finding the latch; but soon he was standing inside the stewards’ corridor. The zephyr was more pronounced now. The departing air brushed at his cheek, stirred the hairs there. He had been right about the beard: it had come in salt-and-pepper. He could not decide whether it made him appear distinguished. “I shall ask Miko,” he decided. There was no point served by asking any of the others. Yet he had gone to the passageway system before he had thought to ask about the beard, so it may be there were other things he meant to say.
“Ship?”
“Waiting.”
“Do you have a fix on Miko?” Gorgas had given up the use of sysop syntax. Ship understood most questions, and the danger of skewing its responses no longer mattered.
“Location indeterminate.”
Gorgas considered the situation, then stepped out of the doorway so that he could see his ’puter screen. “Display all initial fixes of Mikoyan Hidei during the previous three days.”
“Clarification. Map of loci where Ms. Hidei appears in the world.”
The particular phrasing surprised and captivated the captain. “Ah. ‘Appears in the world.’ It must seem that way to you, I suppose. Coming out of nowhere, like that, out of regions where you have no sensors. Just a name on the roster; with no physical reality.”
“Clarification. ‘No physical reality’.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Gorgas chuckled quietly over the pun. Were Miko’s appearances then, in Ship’s purview, instances of a word made flesh?
“Query. Should additional loci, where Ms. Hidei disappears, be included?”
“Yes. Display plot on my dayroom console.”
A schematic duly appeared, and Gorgas studied the cluster of points. “Ship, overlay regions covered by sensors.” To ask for a map of unsensed regions would have, quite literally, made no sense to Ship. It is impossible to know what one does not know.
“Ms. Hidei calls Ship, Rivvy.”
Ship could miscue in the strangest fashion, but it amused Gorgas that the AI thought it had a name. “Did she sprinkle you with water when she named you?” he asked. The requested overlay had appeared on the screen and he studied the pattern of the dots with respect to the “empty quarter,” the unsensed regions. Ship interpreted data topologically, not spatially. It had no concept of the ship qua ship, only as a network. Gorgas noted a scattering of points throughout the vessel and suspected that Miko used the air ducts and maintenance tunnels as well as the stewards’ passageways. He also noted thick clusters around certain spaces, sketching a perimeter.
“Water is contraindicated for electronic equipment,” Ship told him.
Miko knew Gorgas’s coming long before he came. Shuffles and bumps and an occasional slight vibration were his heralds. She knew it was him—who else could it possibly be? Ugo Terrell? She made no attempt to flee or hide, but continued to sit in the sofa and stroke the Cat With No Name. The cat purred and Miko hummed with it, speaking to it without words. When the creature twisted in her arms, she said, “Come in,” without turning to face the breathless man.
Gorgas, winded from his perambulations through the hidden passes of the ship, lowered himself to the sofa beside the girl and sat with his hands upon his knees. He said nothing for a few moments while he waited for his thudding heart to still and he sucked deeply on the attenuating air. “The air is already palpably thinner,” he said. “I believe I may have mountain sickness.” When Miko made no response, he laid a different course. “This is quite a cozy retreat,” he said, “though a bit spartan.”
Miko had, by the use of movable panels, created a sort of room-within-a-room. It was a hut, close and hemmed, in which a sofa and a desk and a lamp huddled in upon themselves. Gorgas thought it might be a grotto, existing as it did within a cave. The solitary lamp in the center gave light to the surroundings much like a campfire in a forest. Most of the accouterments were functional: a static precipitator, a cooler. A bank of monitors of some unknown function formed one wall of the hut. The whole reminded Gorgas less of a room than of a nest. “Ah, I see where Grubb’s missing microwave has gotten to.”
Miko said, “Do you want me to give it back? Maybe I can catch him.”
Gorgas smiled. “I don’t think that is called for.”
“Retrieval orbit all set?” she asked him. “I never seen Wasat, but I’d hate it if this ship was lost forever.”
“Yes, thanks to The Lotus Jewel.”
“Good. That was a terrible thing Rivvy did to her. I hope she and Corrigan made it across.”
Gorgas had heard nothing from the cutter, which might by time-honored aphorism constitute good news. Somehow, he rather doubted it. Grubb or someone would have called. Rather than address Miko’s hope, he said, “Ship showed me how to find you.” Miko said nothing to this, and Gorgas added, “At times, Ship seems almost alive.”
Miko looked up from the cat. “If you believe Rivvy is alive, then she is. I don’t think that Fife character ever really believed the rest of us were alive, so you tell me which one is more human.”
“I think you are too harsh on the man.”
“Am I? Ask me if I care or what difference it makes if I do. Have you seen Dr. Wong?” When Gorgas nodded, she said, “Fife killed her.”
“What! He told me she had, ah…”
“She croaked herself, sure; but it was Fife what drove her to it. Rivvy told me all about it.”
“You liked the doctor,” said Gorgas. “She struck me as not quite up to the task.” The comment struck him as petty and he looked away. “Ah, nil nisi bonum.”
“She was the nicest person on the ship.”
Niceness and competency were, to Gorgas, orthogonal axes. He could not imagine that an excess of the former might counterbalance a deficiency in the latter. “Genie and I held the funeral two days ago. Why didn’t you come?”
Miko shrugged. “To watch meat fry?”
“You seemed to feel differently at Hand’s funeral.”
The eyes she turned on him were still and solemn. “Captain, that was a long, long time ago.”
Gorgas rubbed the trouser legs of his coverall. “The others always thought you stiff and cold, but it isn’t that at all, is it?”
“I failed them.”
The pronouncement startled Gorgas, coming as it did with such an overture of pain that even he could hear it. “Who did you fail?”
“All of them. Dr. Wong, ’Kiru…I’m the one who set Ratline off. I told him about Ram cutting the sail, but I didn’t think it through, I was so angry; and because of me ’Kiru had her head chopped off!”
“Hardly chopped off!”
“Enough of it to matter! She’ll never be the same. She trusted people. She liked Ratline. And I knew Fife was wrong for the doctor, but I didn’t know how to stop them, and look what happened!”
Gorgas was not a man for touching, but he did place an awkward hand on her shoulder. “You take too much blame. You ought to leave some of it for us.”
Miko shook her head in jerks. “I don’t think they’re going to make it, Ivar and Twenty-four and them.” And that was her fault too. “If I hadn’t gone running after a stupid cat! I ought to wring its stupid little neck.” Her words were harsh, but she made no move to execute them.
After a while Gorgas said, “I did my best,” but in fact he had not, and he was acutely aware of that. He had overlooked details and facts that did not fit with his conceptions. He had not monitored Bhatterji closely enough. He had failed to realize the potential of the sail, and consequently it had not been properly integrated into the plan. Had Satterwaithe been able to work openly…But even now the captain did not fully realize how intractable he could appear to others.
The orlop deck of The River of Stars at the very bottom of the great disk, had once been filled with equipment. Graingers and mud huts, repeaters and heat exchangers, fluid beds and vapor columns, Caplan pumps and Scannell boxes—squatting in lines or in clusters, variously humming and gurgling and hissing and clanking in a chorus banged out by mad dwarves in a hot, moist, red-lit subterrain. Some of the equipment—the air plant, the ilmenite bunker, the mud huts that tapped the engine plasma for electricity—remained in situ, although their numbers were fewer and their cacophony was much diminished. The machines that had serviced the luxury modules were long gone, and the whole deck now had a wide-open and abandoned look to it. There had been few rooms or corridors on the orlop, which was the narrowest of the five, and after it had been gutted in the refit, it had been used for a time as a cargo bay. It carried no cargo now.
Miko could hear the hiss as she entered the orlop from one of the stairwells leading down from the lower deck. The sound differed from the hiss of escaping air that she sometimes heard in the narrower passages where, in response to the dictates of Bernoulli, the constant zephyr freshened into something stronger. There was an electric overtone to this sound, a harsh sibilant accent, and she was not surprised when a moment or two later she spied at the far end of the deck a bright, whitish-blue star. Bhatterji, welding another of his useless patches.
When she came up behind him he gave no sign that he had noticed, but continued working the bead across the top of a plate that he had positioned in a stairwell. It was an awkward position, made more awkward by the limited number of arms he could deploy. Miko watched a while in silence.
Bhatterji said, “Half the gangways onto this deck are wide open,” which meant that, unless he had taken lately to monologues, he had noted her arrival after all. “This one leads five levels up into a sector open to space. No one seems to have planned for airtights on the vertical passages. I don’t know why.”
“Ram, do you think this is heroic? It’s not. It’s useless, and it only makes you ridiculous.”
Bhatterji stopped welding, but he did not turn around and the flame from the torch did not die. Neither did he speak. Encouraged by this positive response, Miko continued.
“Ram, the ship is a muffing maze. There are too many damn passages.”
When Bhatterji turned, his face was twisted into a dark glower. There was something chthonic about him, as if his forehead, cheeks, nose, chin were boulders in a tunnel face just now dynamited and about to slump and cave in. The dark goggles, so close to his skin tone, transformed him into an alien, eyeless creature, fitting for one so subterranean. “What are you trying to say?” he demanded.
It was very clear what the girl was trying to say, but Bhatterji was determined not to hear it.
“Give it up,” she said. “There’s no point any more.”
The engineer turned his back and resumed welding. Vapors curled from the end of the welding rod, to be sucked up by the static well he held in his other hand before more than a whiff of the acrid odor could escape. Miko climbed the steps and took the well from him and held it, standing with her back to the glare. Shadows danced down the stairwell, blue-gray in the stannic light. The two of them worked together in silence in that fashion for some minutes.
It was Bhatterji who broke the silence. “Why did you stay?” he asked as he concentrated on his weld.
“The boat left early. I came back for the cat and the boat left before I could get back.”
Bhatterji nodded and continued to weld. The seam grew. He shifted position and crouched to seal the bottom edge. Miko sat on the step, still with her back to the blinding torch. “Why did you stay?” he asked her again.
“At first I thought that Fife character panicked. He was so anxious to leave before. But it was Rivvy. She found out there was no room for her in the cutter’s system, so she cast the boat off before The Lotus Jewel could board.”
“I always said that a skewing AI meant trouble.”
“Rivvy didn’t understand. She knew she couldn’t leave, so she wanted her sysop to stay.”
“It was just a tropism. Neural nets don’t ‘want’ anything.”
“She’s dead, you know. The Lotus Jewel.”
Bhatterji hesitated fractionally as he welded. “I heard.”
“Gorgas told me that she flew right into the cutter’s plume.”
“I heard!”
“Dr. Wong’s dead too. The passenger found her.”
“I heard that too.”
“Fife said that she killed herself to make room for one more person in the cutter.”
Bhatterji shook his head. “Stupid.”
“Wong wasn’t stupid. She just wasn’t clever like you.”
Bhatterji turned on her. “And now we’re both dead, stupid her and clever me, so I don’t see how it makes any difference.”
“I liked her. She wanted to help people.”
Bhatterji idled his torch. “‘Help people.’ And what do you think I’m doing here?”
“Wasting your time. But I like you too.”
“Do you? You have an odd way of showing it.”
“I’m not saying that I never…Ram, why did you cut the vane on the foresail?”
“I needed the hobartium. How was I to know that madwoman was planning to raise the sail? How was I to know that it would snap and—” He stopped abruptly and resumed welding. Miko realized that he was going back across a seam he had already finished.
“That’s why you stayed,” she said. “You never believed you would save the ship. It was because Rave was—”
Bhatterji quenched the torch, turned, and lifted his goggles. The sudden white of his eyes frightened her. “Rave isn’t here,” he said. His arm swept wide in the narrow stairwell, clipping her accidentally across the cheek. “He’s out there. With Enver Koch. And you, you still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
“Gorgas wants to hold a dinner before…Before. He’s invited everyone.”
“I didn’t mean why did you come down to the orlop. I meant why—”
“I know what you meant, Ram. I just don’t know the answer.”
Bhatterji grunted. “I’ve heard that sometimes a child will run back into a burning building because he can’t bear to leave home.”
“And The River is my home?” Miko shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never had one before, so I don’t know what one feels like.” Miko looked at her hand and turned the static well off. “I guess I’m pretty stupid too.”
The engineer nodded. “As stupid as Satterwaithe, or Ratline, or Wong…”
“Or you?” she challenged with some heat.
“No,” he shook his head. “No, you’re not nearly as stupid as that.” He gathered his equipment, handing some of it to Miko, and descended the stairs. Miko popped the vapor plug from the static well chamber. It was still steaming and she bobbed it one-handed so it wouldn’t burn her. She lifted the tool bag to her shoulder and followed him. “Where to next?”
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 cloud 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 what 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.”
“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 <playback> ‘Long may she sail.’ <end playback>. Was the request for expected duration under actual magnetic sail or for expected duration under power of any sort? Mean time to failure differs under each assumption.”
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.
Gorgas 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.”