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Prelude: The Ship They called herThe 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 andsoi-disant royalty. Those were the glamour years, when magsails ruled the skies, andThe 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 a
The Captain Even Dodge Hand, captain of the tramp shipThe River of Stars , sighed and stared into the ventilation duct in the ceiling of his cabin. The pain now seemed a sometime and faraway thing, something not quite real, as if it were happening to someone else. His body was but a husk, a thing of no matter. He felt that he—the “he” that was himself—had begun to float above that very body, leaving it behind. “Mr. Gorgas,” he said to the first officer, who sat a little apart engrossed in a ’puter. “Mr. Gorgas, I feel as if I were floating.” First Officer Stepan Gorgas barely glanced up from his laptop. “Of course, you’re floating. The engines are shut down. We’re not under acceleration.” He wondered en passant why Corrigan had not yet reported on the reason. “Note this in the log, Mr. Gorgas: As a man is dying, his soul floats off. The observation may be profound. See that it is posted.” Gorgas sighed. “So noted,” he said as he moved his Austrian infantry closer to Austerlitz. The lit
The Doctor WhenThe River of Stars was reconfigured as a tramp freighter most of her main deck became superfluous, but the fitters and riggers at the Yards had been loathe to cut through pressure walls and load-bearing structures or vital power and life-support conduits and so they had left the disk itself intact. The cruel sentiment of the romantics held that her lovely lines could not be tampered with, and likely any such tampering would have destroyed her integrity in both senses of the word. And so, opulent staterooms that once housed the pampered rich (and, later and less splendidly, cohorts of emigrants) became stockrooms or storage areas housing only inanimate shipping pods—or were simply shut up and abandoned. This was less the problem it might have been, for the ship was built largely of solid smoke—that is, of aerogel—and her mass was but a fraction of what her size suggested; but mass was still a problem at the margin, where the ship made a profit or did not. Had her substanc
The Log Sat. 12thinst. 40 days out of Achilles. Course laid on grand secant. Coordinates on J-2100 not fixed, due to transmitter malfunction noted hereunder. Manual bearings taken on Jupiter and Sun. Sun in Aqr.; Jupt. in Gem. Est. position 4.47 AU starward by 41°30’ east of Jupiter meridian on the solar ecliptic. Velocity steady at 152 k/s. Engines idled for repairs. Weather holding; wind from the East-Sun-East; no solar flares noted. Departed this life E.D. Hand, late captain of this vessel. Sysop reports transmitter malfunction, reception intermittent. People employed at various tasks. There were only three of them, now that Hand was dead; but Gorgas had taken the captain’s chair as soon as the deck officers had entered the wardroom. This struck the other two as unseemly; Corrigan, because he was accustomed to the old order and change always came on him too suddenly, and Satterwaithe, because she had other notions of who ought to sit there. Gorgas had an agenda, of course. So did
The Engineer The openness, the abandon, the sheer forever of space both terrified and seduced Ramakrishnan Bhatterji. While he contemplated the upcoming EVAsion; while he suited up; while Miko, like a knight’s squire, tested his valves and fittings; while he waited patiently in the afterlock for the pressure to drop to the ambient of space, Bhatterji trembled—in his limbs, in his guts, in his heart—but whether they were tremblors of eagerness or of fear he did not know. For, when he stepped outside and planted his boots on the ship’s skin, an exhilaration ran through him like an electric current and he became more heightened in all his senses—as if he could hear the grinding of the crystal spheres or smell the sharp tang of the aether. It always puzzled him afterwards that this euphoria faded so rapidly while the fear remained to haunt his dreams; as if joy were a tide, which, at its ebb, leaves exposed the jagged rocks. The engine cages, along with most other equipments, were mounted
The Engineer’s Mate Bhatterji resembled Grubb in the following manner. The cook could, from any random set of ingredients, concoct a meal. It might not be cordon bleu, but it would serve. Similarly, Bhatterji could concoct a repair from almost any random collection of parts and materials. It would not be OEM, but it would work. This was a valuable talent to have, because theRiver carried nowhere near the number and variety of parts that would be needed to restore two slagged Farnsworth cages to as-built condition. TheRiver lived from hand to mouth, poor even for a tramp. The difference between FOB and COD could be critical to her financial existence. During her more than two decades of tramping, onboard repair-and-maintenance inventory had been slashed and then slashed again. Reorder levels had been lowered and some part numbers dropped entirely, all in the name of reduced operating cost. Other items had been sold and pawned and bartered. After all, at constant boost no replacement was
The Passenger Bigelow Fife was possessed of an inquisitive mind. His profession as troubleshooter had made him so, unless it had been his mind’s bent that had led him to troubleshooting. It was a happy marriage, however it came about—certainly happier than any of the other marriages he had essayed—and it afforded him multiple opportunities for enjoyment; for if there is one thing of which the world has no insufficiency, it is trouble worth the shooting. He was a devotee of Truth and Fact and enjoyed collecting bits of them, keeping them in a box in the back of his head and occasionally stirring them up and arranging them in various patterns. He defined a problem as “the gap between ‘as-is’ and ‘should-be’” and immediately noted the existence of his chosen prey on boardThe River of Stars. The ship is coasting when it should be accelerating, he wrote in his journal. Of course, no great subtlety of thought was required to discern this. Lesser minds than his had already noticed the situati
The Second Mate Corrigan’s quarters were a reflection of his practical and orderly mind. The linens and towels were folded square. The prints on the wall were aligned. The audio I/O’s were sited where he spent most of his time: near the sling in the reading room, above the sleeping cage, in the fresher. Corrigan preferred books over screens when the reading was serious, which meant when it was most frivolous. These were arrayed in dog-boxes according to a complex internal logic comprising subject matter, chronology, and alphabet. Toiletries were aligned on their stayput pads in precisely the sequence in which he customarily used them in the morning. True, in the absence of acceleration the prayer rug had a lamentable tendency to drift off the floor. (A genuine flying carpet, he had told The Lotus Jewel one fey night when it had come loose entirely.) But otherwise, everything was—to use a phrase long obsolete and unknown to Corrigan—“shipshape, Bristol style.” There could be a cruelty t
The Wrangler Berth Twenty-four deCant had been suffering an especially obnoxious bout of space-sickness ever since the ship had begun freefing. She tried to tough it out—she was a Martian, after all, and they didn’t come any tougher than that—but her berthmates had endured one barf too many in the common room and they had bundled her off to see the doctor. Wong prescribed an antiemetic, but there was something about the case that niggled at her. “The nausea seems to be passing?” she asked when the girl had come to the clinic for her follow-up. “If you mean do I throw up any more, the answer’s not so much.” Wong looked up from the patient’s chart displayed on her med screen. “‘Not so much,’ or ‘not so often?’” DeCant’s face displayed the look that most adults receive when they ask for clarification from the young. “‘Not so often.’” “And you’ve never had this problem before….” Not really a question, since there were no notations on her chart for space-sickness; yet Wong knew that not eve
The Second Wrangler Bhatterji saw Raphael Evermore in the machine shop on third watch assembling a tool of some sort and he paused to watch the boy at work from the entryway. The wrangler’s features were stilled in a picture of intent concentration, almost as if he had been caught in a portrait digigraph. His eyes squinted as he focused on the work object; and his lips were pursed and slightly distended. Dark hair, just growing back, shadowed Evermore’s skull and framed features as fine and as delicate as carved ivory. Never had his comeliness beckoned the engineer more. Lissome and graceful of limb, and with a natural talent at the omnitool…Could there ever have been a more fortunate match? It lacked only the one essential element of Evermore’s consent. That had been withheld, and withheld in no uncertain terms; but Bhatterji, to whom consent mattered a great deal, could not turn his emotions off quite so easily; and so his eyes often caressed the young man whenever their paths crosse
The Accidental Captain Reviewing material usage in his day room, Gorgas noticed that stores withdrawals exceeded Bhatterji’s original bill of materials. The engineer was using more hobartium than expected. Such deviations from plan would have vexed Corrigan, but Gorgas knew that unexpected contingencies always arose to adjust prior expectations. Why, if it hadn’t been for Evan Hand… But Gorgas did not like to think of the debt he owed the late captain. He was not where he had thought to be at this point in his career; but here he was and he would make the best of it. It was considerably better than where he might have been. Sometimes, in idle moments—he did have some—he contemplated the lives he might have led—as a farmer and horse breeder on the Little Plain, as his father and grandfather had been. Or as a commodore in the Space Guard. Or as a captain on a Four Planets liner. Or as a husband and father rather than as a childless widower. He might have served on different ships, flown
The Missing Mate The shipbuilders who had designedThe River of Stars had given thought to the consequences of freefing and microgee. That trips of even modest duration could ravage the bones and the blood would not, they suspected, be a major selling point to the wealthy who were then the liner’s target. And so, an exercise hall had been included. Outboard on the main deck, the rim corridor was levitated on magnetic bearings and set spinning so that passengers and crew could exercise at Mars level spin-gravity. There were exercise machines and a circumferential running track and a staff of Personal Trainers, all of which (save the trainers) had been left in place during successive reconfigurations. The facilities were finer than a tramp crew required, but that was true of the main deck in general.The Riv’ might live from hand to mouth, but you couldn’t sneer at her accommodations. Some, like Gorgas, pursued the need for exercise with grim determination, but Bhatterji did so with utter
Interlude: Ship there are no nearby external objects scan air carbon dioxide 3023 ppm message grubb to hidei message packet sent engine thrust zero air pressure 70.3 kilopascals engines not operational there are no external transmissions received velocity 152.41 km/s jupiter datum stores withdrawal <fifty dekagrams superconductor, hobartium-32, transmitter-grade> deduction from inventory reorder point reached reorder card generated to purser’s office message sent spinhall rotation 1.998 revolutions per minute particulate filters clogged at following locations… It is a timeless and simultaneous world. Data roars into a net of distributed processors from countless sensors—a veritable Niagara of data, a ceaseless torrent, juggled, sorted, analyzed, and slotted. Servos adjust airflow or lighting or the direction of telescopes and other sensors, sometimes in response to internally-generated algorithms, sometimes in response to inputs fromthe outside . location of entity gorgas coordinat
The Third Wrangler Fransziska Wong thought Twenty-four’s name apt because that many looks passed over the young wrangler’s face. There was surprise and shock and horror and denial and all the rest. “What?” Surprise asked. “No!” shouted Shock. “O, my God!” cried Horror. But in the end, Denial won. “It can’t be true!” That was a lot of girls for one flesh. Three persons weren’t in it. Expecting tears, Dr. Wong held a wad of absorbent tissue across her desk, but her patient swatted it aside. “You’re lying!” (Anger had come to the support of Denial.) Wong tried to meet Twenty-four’s eyes and failed. She looked off to the computer, the ’botter, the wet-chem equipment, anywhere but at the poor, injured child. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the ’bot has analyzed your blood and there’s no—” Rationalization rallied to the cause. “They could’ve malfunctioned. ’Bots do that sometimes, don’t they? I mean, if they were programmed wrong in the first…” “It’s certainly possible,” Wong admitted and wonder
The Sysop It was customary in most ships to mark Flipover Day with some sort of ceremony. In the great liners, there were masked balls and the advent of King Jupiter, come to play jovial pranks on neophyte travelers, and even in the meaner ships it was a ferial day.The River had long marked the occasion with the Captain’s Feast, presided over and funded by that once-august personage. Some of Coltraine’s Feasts had been legendary, and even those of the Martian years made up in boister what they lacked in elegance. Of late, the Feast had grown less sumptuous—indeed, it hardly merited the name—but even Zachary Zackmeyer, pennywise though he had been, had carried on the tradition. So, even though braking would not be required until the ship reached the balk line ten days hence, Gorgas ordered the Flip when they reached the median of the grand secant and hosted the traditional meal that very evening. He felt that some note of normality was called for. He had bought a number of dressed and f
The Void Ram Bhatterji hovered over a pit endlessly deep and trembled with the readiness of a bridegroom before his bride—a cold, hard bitch of a bride, who would suck the life from her lover if she could, but who by that same lethal carelessness impressed life more firmly into a man’s awareness. Bhatterji trembled. His blood throbbed. His breath burned. Eagerness was a hard lump beneath his belly. Bhatterji finished the weld, and the white glare within the clamshell died. He unfastened the clamps that held it around the projector grid. “I’m ready to weld the Florence strut,” he announced to Evermore. “Almost cut away,” the apprentice told him. He was slicing off the mangled strut with a laser, collecting the metallic vapors in a static well he held in his left hand. Evermore wore a tether clipped securely to an eye bolt on the hull and he relocated this tether each time he shifted position. There were times, Bhatterji thought, when a sensible man did wear a line, but it signified a ma
The Least Wrangler Ivar Akhaturian had tagged Mr. Ratline as Demon-incarnate, Rave as Jealousy-incarnate, and Twenty-four as Love-incarnate; but Nkieruke Okoye he could not label at all because, Okoye being a pledged virgin, carnate was not in it. Ivar thought virginity a silly thing, but what else could he think having so willfully lost his? And so he accommodated himself to the loss by holding the forfeit of no great value. Maybe it was an Earth thing, he thought; and he was largely right. He thought the Igbo girl’s eyes looked inside the soul and saw everyone’s secret self. She seldom spoke and perhaps that made her seem wiser than she was. Whatever the reason, he believed he could tell her things. She listened and maybe could advise him what to do about this new and unexpected fatherhood of his. “No one can tell you that,” Okoye told the Least Wrangler. “It is like your clothing. I can see the color and the cut and the style but only you can say whether it fits well and you can wea
The Ping Stepan Gorgas was not a man to verbalize his thoughts, let alone his feelings. That did not mean he lacked for either. He was as silent as Okoye, though for different reasons. Satterwaithe believed him haughty; but he was only a man who thought and felt so clearly that he had no need to realize those inner certainties by saying them aloud. When angry, he seldom shouted. When amused, he seldom laughed. When he had an idea, he saw no need to chat about it. Yet no man is of a piece. All are motley. Gorgas awoke one morning to the endless sameness of his quarters and felt the urge to talk. Only there was, as there had been for too many years, no one to talk with. He opened his eyes to the same dull, gray walls, the same worn furniture. He did not immediately unfasten his blanket, but lay a while longer in its grip, staring at nothing, but thinking furiously. “It’s hard some days,” he told Marta’s image, which seemed to show surprise at hearing him speak. (Perhaps it did. The embed
The Acting First Satterwaithe had cobbled a work schedule that struck a compromise among normal shipboard duties, the sail prep project timeline, and sleep. But the Thursday Group dared no work while Gorgas held the watch. There were too many telltales and indicators on the bridge that might give the game away. That eliminated the better part of the day, and so they scurried about at night like forest kobolds busy at their lasts. Of work, duty, and sleep, it was the sleep that suffered. The interplay between Gorgas’s watch rotation and Satterwaithe’s work plan guaranteed that Corrigan seldom saw The Lotus Jewel. He held the second watch and she, the fourth, so that they lived at the antipodes of the day. This was unfortunate, because while a relationship might in theory be healed by an exchange of electronic mail, the smart money did not bet that way. Bridging the rift between them required a certain amount of synchronicity. When Satterwaithe took the watch from him, Corrigan would lea
The Sailing Master Eugenie Satterwaithe had been plying the solar system in concentric ripples ever since she had first jumped into that vast, dark ocean. She had flown in the beginning as a ballistic pilot: a young woman, lightning-witted, riding a fiery arc between the antipodes of Earth. There was nothing especially skilled about such work—the AI did all that was needful, save only the close docking with the LEO stations—and if something ever did go wrong, it was hard to imagine any duties save frantic futility or a vast and short-lived surprise. But ballistic pilots had “the glam” and they walked large steps, drank and sang with abandon, and made love with fierce intensity. “Lift fast; die young” was their motto and, though fatalities were actually rare, the risks were real enough; and it matters less what is true than what people think is true, no less so about themselves than about others. From ballistic, she had gone on the LEO circuit. Orbital pilots did not have the daredevil
The Boat Bigelow Fife was a methodical man. He was not incapable of spontaneity—he had become Wong’s paramour on a whim—but there was something calculating about even his intuition. Pondering the evidence—the lack of planning, the misallocation of resources, the obvious frictions in what should have been a smoothly oiled human machine—he had concluded that he could no longer trust the crew to salvage the situation, and so he must look to his own salvation. Wong took Fife’s suggestion to examine the ship’s boat as an invitation of another sort. She had often gone into the less-traveled regions of the ship to seek her solitary joys, so the assumption came naturally that he would do the same. When they had found the cutter at last, Wong expected Fife’s embrace, but this once she had mistaken his passion. He wanted exit, not entry. Even when in the acceleration couch she indicated her willingness, he seemed not to notice; and when he spoke it was to ask her technical questions to which she
The Mean Streets Nkieruke Okoye is an old woman who sits on the front stoop of a tumbledown tenement in a forgotten city. She seldom moves from her place, but sees everything that goes past: battered old cars thumping with bass, bangers swaggering with careless braggadocio, prowl cars and pensioners and prostitutes. Gray water gleams in potholes. Old newspapers whip crazily in the wind. A distant radio plays ancient jazz. At the street corner, a fat man perched atop a stool sells magazines from a kiosk. Somewhere in this blowzy, brawling city a man lies dead. The old lady on the front stoop doesn’t know of it, yet—the news has not reached this derelict pocket of the city—but ’Kiru knows that she will in time know something. It is a strange sort of city: one of sights and sounds, but of no smells and little touch: for this isNoir, a virtual city created by a gaming AI and inhabited by only seven living beings. All of the others, all of the teeming multitudes that pass her porch, are mor
The Third Watch As if she huddled close to a campfire in the night, Satterwaithe passed the third watch amidst the glow of readouts on an otherwise darkened bridge. She reviewed the logs and took bearings on Jupiter and on the asteroid that lay teasingly near their dead-ahead. Between pings, she monitored Ratline, who had taken the first wrangler and the engineer’s mate outside to dress the mast. Emerald lights on the ready board tracked the outside team’s progress, but Satterwaithe turned the command chair until it faced that segment of the darkness wherein sat the empty shell of the sailing master’s board. By rights, these indicator lights should have gleamed over there, and not on a virtual board conjured up by the ship’s AI. “Bridge?” It was the wrangler’s voice. Okoye. “Satterwaithe here.” “The motor for the—” A pause while Okoye no doubt consulted Ratline, for the words she spoke were then carefully pronounced. “—for the northeast mainsail delongator has been reconnected, and the
The Brawl Satterwaithe was certain that she had marshaled the sail project outside the boundaries of Gorgas’s attention. She had scheduled the tasks in out of the way places and at out of the way times and kept the circle of those who knew small enough that she could ensure confidentiality. Yet somehow Gorgas had learned.The boundaries of my attention might be broader than you think , his smug and knowing face told her when she had followed him back to his dayroom. It was the self-satisfied haughtiness she read there that infuriated, for none feel more outrage than the clever on finding themselves outmaneuvered. For Gorgas, who had overlooked every snatch of tangible evidence that had fallen his way, could not overlook thetheoretical possibility of the sail project. The more he thought on the matter, the more he realized that deployment must also have occurred to the ex-sailors and, knowing them as he did (which was not so well as he thought, but better than they believed) had conclude
The Clinic Wong treated the first officer for his wounds. “This will hurt,” she told the man hopefully and was pleased to see him wince at the application of the swab. “I can’t believe the two of you were fighting.” “I wasn’t,” Corrigan said. “Bhatterji was fighting. I just happened to be there.” Wong frowned. “You shouldn’t make light of it. Brawling among officers is a serious matter.” “You’re sounding like Gorgas,” he chided her. He took the cold pack she offered and held it against the swelling around his eye. “Besides, Bhatterji wasn’t serious.” Wong prepared a suture. “It looked serious to me.” “I’m not dead,” Corrigan pointed out, for Miko had passed along what the engineer had said after Evermore’s tumble. Wong approached with the suture. “Is it numb yet?” Corrigan touched his cheek. “No.” Wong inserted the needle anyway. “This won’t take long.” “Will I have a scar, afterward?” Wong paused and looked at him. “Why? Do you want one?” “I thought it might give me a dangerous look.”
The Balk Line What is it about a day long known and long expected that its advent occasions such surprise? As the ship approached the balk line, sudden new tasks were discovered, squeezed from the vacuum like so many pips from an orange. Bhatterji learned that a focusing ring had been misaligned; Corrigan noted a yaw in the ship’s dead-ahead. Even deCant found it needful to shift a few more cargo containers. Of all the crew, only Ratline found nothing overlooked, but only because he overlooked nothing. A calendar resembles a piston. Racing toward a deadline, it compresses a volatile mixture into a brief explosion. The crew ofThe River of Stars could feel that awful compression—kilopascal piling upon kilopascal—and each reacted in his or her own way. Gorgas quibbled and put the deck on watch-and-watch. Satterwaithe grew critical (well,more critical) and Corrigan tried to do everything himself. Brief scuffles and fights and arguments broke out overtop other, longer-established quarrels,
The Ghost When Gorgas opened his cabin door that evening to find the wranglers and the engineer’s mate en masse and weirdly costumed and crying out “Trick or Treat!” he could not for the life of him decide whether they had gone mad or he had. It was all Akhaturian’s idea, of course. If he could convince his berth to help him scrape varnish, it was child’s play to get them to roam the ship and collect sweets. He had thought of it a few days before and at first it had been only a notion to help Twenty-four decompress and to celebrate the torchlighting. But Okoye had overheard them planning and Akhaturian invited her to join them. Once Evermore saw that Okoye would participate, he joined in too, as if he were doing everyone a big favor, and indeed, as if it had been his idea all along. Okoye, in turn, went off and convinced Miko, who had never heard of any such a thing as Hallowe’en. There is little in the way of costuming available on a tramp freighter, but a few odds and ends and a bit
The ReBerth Every six hours, Gorgas and Satterwaithe spelled Corrigan and The Lotus Jewel on the deck and painted rocks and guided the ship through the tsunami. As this led to sleep in no better than four-hour snatches, ravel’d sleeves were never quite fully knit up. In particular, Corrigan found himself more and more at odds with Gorgas, who insisted on maintaining the grand secant bearing in the face of the tsunami. “Straight on ’till morning, Number One,” he said with that grating joviality of his when he turned the watch over. “Keep Jupiter centered in the dead-ahead.” “We ought to beat to starward,” Corrigan insisted, and not for the first time. “Nonsense,” said Gorgas. “No need for such a maneuver. Once we close on Jupiter, we will be in the Forbidden Zone, which is always swept free of objects.” “Our short-range radar,” Corrigan insisted, “has been picking up a great deal of rubble. At a hundred-twenty kiss…” “Yes,” said Gorgas. “That is exactly the point. The track radar will p
The Reef Ivar Akhaturian was assigned to every other blue watch when, as he perceived it, he assisted Corrigan in the piloting of the ship. The lad was sharp, Corrigan told Gorgas, for someone who had grown up in a gravity field. (Gorgas, who had also grown up in a gravity field, took no offense—and a good thing too, for nothing breeds hostility more than taking what has not been offered.) But then, Ivar had been piloting a jove-boat since the age of ten, helping his uncle run a threelium barge from Callistopolis to Port Galileo. So, although his experience in Jupiter’s gravity well gave him a bent to think in circles—or at least in ellipses—it was a decent foundation for the more hyperbolic thinking of torchship pilots. “It’s not that orbital mechanics plays no role,” Corrigan told the boy during one of their shifts together. “If Bhatterji snuffed the torches, Old Man Sol would tug at our coattails until we hit the heliopause, so our course would not be exactly a straight line, but mo
The Cook “What if,” Okoye asked Evermore, “the atoll is spread out more than Corrigan thinks?” The three sailors were donning their vacuum suits. It was standard procedure, but it carried an implication. Far more often than cages, sails required outside work. Certainly the possibility was on Evermore’s mind. “Then shroudsmen like us will earn our berths,” he said, striking a pose. “‘We’ll climb and splice in the driving hail.’” Ratline, who had been listening to the two youngsters with half an ear, snorted. “Boy, you been listening to Grubb too much. Ever been out there in the hail? Whoever wrote that song never done it, I can tell you. A stone hits you at transit velocity, what comes out the other end ain’t pretty. I remember…we near lost a sail coming through the Belt when Terranova raced theCalhoun to Jupiter. Me an’ Gooch Hatfield an’ Kin Dabwele an’—oh, God, I’ve forgotten so many faces—we were the watch above when Terranova tucked a little too close to one of the Phocaeas and gra
The Vane “Madam Sailing Master,” Gorgas said. “You have the conn.” It was a peculiar thing, but Satterwaithe, who had so long dreamed of returning to command ofThe River of Stars , barely noticed when she did. She had always thought to settle into the captain’s chair like a queen restored to her throne, but now that the time had come, she remained at the sailing master’s virtual panel and took hold of the joystick there. It seemed to her as she looked into the screen that she lay on her back and stared into the night sky. Closing her eyes briefly, she saw all the pieces that would have to fit together. Sensor data, bearing, engine thrust, sail drag…And behind those: power consumption, boron depletion, coolant usage…A jigsaw puzzle, indeed! “Sails, Engines, prepare for power diversion to radar paint. Ease back your consumption in four. Comm…Comm! Refresh the paint on the atoll. I want distances and vectors on every body in our forward cone and anything beyond that could wander in during
The Stone There is a human proverb to the effect that trouble comes in threes. In part, the proverb is parthenogenic, since one stops counting after three and begins anew, yet there may be a reason why so many cultures have held the number sacred. The loss of the foresail vane was not so critical as the loss of the Number Two CoRE magnet. From a higher perspective, neither was the loss of Raphael Evermore, though this only demonstrates the inadequacy of heights for proper perspectives. In any event, no one could be sure as yet that Evermore had been lost. No sooner had Ship reported that Number Two Engine was off line than Gorgas set Corrigan to recompute their course. Satterwaithe, if anything, was pleased and winked at the navigator, for the sails nearly made up for the lost engine power. They would hit Jupiter Roads at a higher speed than was proper, but could likely decelerate against the Jovian magnetosphere. When, a few minutes later, they lost the vane and perhaps the tangled fo
The Survey Ivar Akhaturian bounced through the C-ring corridor on the first under-deck. Everything in this sector was lit by the pale ruddy glow of the emergency lamps, so that the floor and walls and ceiling seemed awash in blood. It gave the hallway a strangely empty appearance. The shadows seemed blacker than usual, or perhaps only a darker shade of red. He thought about Rave Evermore. Turning a corner into a radial corridor, he found it blocked by an airtight door and, without pausing, bounced off it to find another route to the galley. In doing so, his feet struck the circular brace and the support gave off a hollow reverberation, somewhere in a low register, as if a church bell had rung deeper down inside the ship. The echo brought home to him how small he was and how large the vessel. He might bounce for days along its corridors without encountering another living soul. Coming to a halt at the intersecting ring corridor, he listened and heard nothing. He might have been alone on
The Cargo Master The engineer spoke to his mate of building a levee with such fierce determination and confidence of success that Miko could only conclude that the man had gone mad. Who knew better than she how honeycombed the ship was with passages, each one a bleed-off for the ship’s air. The ship was doomed—hership—and it came down hard on her how many millions of kilometers of hard vacuum lay about her. The Endless Ocean, some called it; and its waters were very deep and it shores far and solitary. Bhatterji had killed the ship. Miko had known that from the moment ’Kiru identified the spectrogram of the ruined coil. The engineer had used sail alloy to repair the CoRE magnet—and because of that ill-considered action, the magnet had failed, the vane had snapped, the fores’l tangled, and Rave Evermore tossed irretrievably by the wayside. She prayed to no gods but the Erinyes, but to them she prayed that Evermore had been killed by that savage snap so that he could be dead without know
The Cutter Corrigan enjoyed the play of numbers. They slid about his rows and columns, linked hands and danced across charts. Theygamboled. There could be no other word for it. Sometimes, in the gyre, he forgot that they were to align themselves for some purpose, much as a man enjoying the waves may forget that there is an ocean. Despite his passion for order, despite the rectilinearity of his quarters, he was acutely aware of the chaos that underlay everything, for as Poincaré had shown centuries before, even Newton’s clockwork universe had a madman working the gears. Even so, he was in the end uncomfortable with uncertainties and with contingencies, indeed, with choice itself. He liked to things set straight. This was why Gorgas found him a queer duck and why Corrigan thought his captain mad. He sat in his sling chair in his room, much comforted by the alignments, but his eyes kept straying to the madly twining calligraphy of Shumar’s print. How could he compute an escape for the cut
The Gift Four hours were no very considerable length of time, but they had room enough in them for thought and care. DeCant ran into the spinhall apartment to collect all of Akhaturian’s worldly goods and stuff them into a flight bag, for Ship had told her of Gorgas’s order to stand by the cutter. She worked with urgency and dispatch, taking each drawer and box in its turn, seizing from it all that was needful and leaving the rest without a qualm. Method makes the best use of minutes. It is haste that fritters time. Her own bag she had packed a few days before, just after Grubb had found the passenger in the cutter and she had been visited by her revelation. DeCant had known then that she must be prepared on an instant to depart. She had known that even before the vane had snapped, before the stone had struck. She had known it while she had welded seals with Akhaturian and Miko and had believed that Bhatterji might save the ship after all. Yet only a fool would have counted upon such a
The Ship’s Cat Ivar Akhaturian entered the cutter with the kitchen cat nestled contentedly in his arm. She was a fat cat. Prowling the marches of Grubb’s kitchen, how could it be otherwise? But she gave as good as she got. There were mice on board—there arealways mice on board—and the cat understood quid pro quo. Undoubtedly, she thought she received the better of the bargain. Her eyes were closed and she hummed while the boy stroked her. Akhaturian was good at that sort of thing. In like circumstances, deCant often did the same. “We can’t leave Anush Abar behind,” Akhaturian said with worried innocence. “She won’t breathe too much air, will she, Mr. Grubb?” The chief smiled. “I think we can fit her in.” “There is enough margin,” said Corrigan, though with more doubt and less cheer than Grubb. He actually queried Ship’s database regarding feline respiration rates before he felt at ease. Every new thing, in his regard, was an opportunity for new problems, and he told Akhaturian to confi
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 restoredThe 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 Last Supper 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 e
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
The First Wrangler This is the way of it among ghosts. The nkpuruk-obi may go a-wandering, but it must always come back or the body will die. A sour prank to pull upon a ghost for doing what to ghosts comes naturally: the penalty for ghosting is death. For the genuine haunting, for the true quill, a spirit is wanted. This is a far more serious and permanent a thing than a mere ghost. The maw is eternal and, if it pleases the Eze Ala Maw, will reincarnate after a time in some suitable form. The Ghost King is frugal and nothing good is wasted. In the mean time between death and birth, the spirit must abide as a shadow or a reflection; perhaps pooled in some corner or glimpsed for a moment in shining brass. And yet there may be more than one sort of shadow. That which Nkieruke Okoye saw was neither dark nor featureless. She knew that her own ghost was a-wandering, for she could look down upon the cot into which her body had been strapped and watch the shallow rise and fall of her own brea
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