They called her The River of Stars and she spread her superconducting sails to the solar wind in 2051. She must have made a glorious sight then: her fuselage new and gleaming, her sails shimmering in a rainbow aurora, her white-gloved crew sharply creased in black-and-silver uniforms, her passengers rich and deliciously decadent. There were morphy stars and jeweled matriarchs, sports heroes and prostitutes, gangsters and geeks and soi-disant royalty. Those were the glamour years, when magsails ruled the skies, and The River of Stars was the grandest and most glorious of that beautiful fleet.
But the glory years faded fast. Coltraine was still her captain when the luxury trade dried up and the throngs of the rich and famous slowed from a torrent to a trickle, and even those who still craved the experience could see that it was no longer the fashionable thing to do. But as he told Toledo when he handed her the command, the luxury trade had been doomed from the start. Sex and vice and decadence were more safely found earthside. There were yet honorable—if more quotidian—pursuits for a ship with such wings to her.
Mars was the happening place back then. Adventurers, sand-kings, ne’er-do-wells, terraformers, second sons, bawdy girls, and zeppelin pilots—Mars sucked them in, broke some and spat others out. Even crewmembers would sometimes cash out on reaching Mars and head for the gaudy enticements of Port Rosario. “Some of them struck it rich,” the old song had it,
“And some of them Mars struck dead
And some showed up in the hiring hall,
Begging their old berths back.”
Toledo and, later, Johnson and Fu-hsi carried hopes outbound and the shattered fragments back. There was a raw energy to the age that tired old Earth hadn’t seen since the taming of LEO during the Terrible Teens, and The River took greater pride in pushing the frontier out than she ever had in stroking the rich and famous.
It was the Farnsworth engine that finally brought her low. Fu-hsi saw it coming and resigned, the only one of her captains ever to do so; and so it fell to Terranova to see the once proud vessel humiliated. Magnetic sails had ruled space for forty years, and The River of Stars for almost twenty of them, but Farnsworth engines made the Jovian moons the new frontier. The Luna-Ganymede Race went down in history, and the magnetic sail went down to the fusion thruster. Terranova should never have taken the bet; but it was a matter of pride—and pride loves loss above surrender.
For a while, hovering in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, The River maintained a precarious trade harvesting hydrogen from the gas giant’s outer atmosphere. Passing the long hours under the maddening whine of the compressors, the Rivers told each other how important they still were.
“The Farnsworths can’t fly
Without the ‘H’ we supply.”
But in their hearts they knew they were no more than water boys for the nukes.
In 2083, Centaurus Corporation bought MSS The River of Stars and fit her with a quartet of Farnsworth cages in the Deimos Yards. To the crew it was the final humiliation. Sacrilege, some of the old-timers shouted as they resigned their berths; and the engineer and his mate received a less than heartfelt welcome from the remnant. She kept her sails and rigging—for flexibility, management claimed—and her precious MS designation. Officially, she was a “hybrid ship,” unofficially, a bastard. The sailing master brooded over the situation and, four days out of Deimos, cycled through the ’lock for the Long Walk, leaving the engineer behind with a knife in his heart.
It was the scandal of the day. The Board of Inquiry was a sensation, the disposition, foregone. Centaurus put The River of Stars on the block without ever flying her.
Save The Riv’! the cry went up; and sailing enthusiasts, brimming with nostalgia for the days of grace and romance, pledged their ounces and grains—though there was little of grace or romance to save by then. The crew threw their bonuses and hazard pay into the pot. Coltraine himself, on his deathbed, added a generous codicil to his will. The consortium bought her up, stripped her down, and rigged her for cargo. Long gone were the luxury modules, the Three Dolphin Club, the Black Sky Casino. Now she was reduced to the single, broad disk of the old primary decks—and large portions of its interior spaces had been abandoned in place. Only the long, faerie, aerogel main mast recalled sailing days gone by—but the mast was purely ornamental. The bottom line ruled and, after one last and all-too-brief flight under sail, the superconducting hoops were coiled into stowage.
And so it was that in 2084 of the Common Era, MSS The River of Stars cast loose as a tramp freighter, hustling after cargoes across the Middle System.
After that, her luck turned bad.