The Wreck of the River of Stars - Softcover

The Captain
 
 
Even Dodge Hand, captain of the tramp ship The 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 little regimental squares wriggled across the map board on his clipscreen. It had fallen to his lot to sit with the captain during the dog watch this night, but that did not mean he relished the duty or that it demanded his full attention. There was little enough to engage the mind in watching a man die. Gorgas had served with Hand for eight years, longer than anyone in the crew save Satterwaithe and Ratline, and he had detested Hand for ninety-five months of that.
The captain became absorbed in a study of the ventilator grill. There were a great many squares in the grill, Hand thought. Perhaps countlessly many. An absurd notion, of course. They were discrete and so must be countable. The tally seemed somehow an important thing to do, and so Hand began to enumerate them. It grew cold in the cabin and he wanted to draw the covers up, but his arm would not move. It was as if he no longer had an arm. "Now, this is a curious thing," he said.
Gorgas was not paying close attention, but he realized after a few more minutes had gone by that Hand had not explained what the curious thing was. Glancing across the room, he noted the relaxed features on the captain's face, the eyes staring into the void. Gorgas sighed in irritation. "Ship," he said, rather curtly, as if the artificial intelligence had neglected a duty.
"Waiting," replied Ship.
"Message. To: Dr. Wong. Text: Hand has died. Send."
"Acknowledged."
Gorgas saved his screen with the French in mid-move and unbuckled from the seat so that he floated across the cabin. The Farnsworths boosted at just over four milligees, barely enough acceleration to give the room a vague notion of up and down, but Bhatterji had shut the engines down and Gorgas floated like an angel and hovered over the captain's bunk.
I have risen above the captain, he thought. So often true metaphorically and intellectually, the statement was now true literally. Gorgas did not touch the body or straighten its clothing or even close its eyes, but he did peer into the slack and peaceful face and note how those eyes seemed fixed on some distant sight. What was Hand looking at? he wondered. And why is he smiling?
At relinquishing command, probably. Consumed with the humor of sticking Gorgas with the gallimaufry that he had collected for crew at every port in the Middle System.
* * *
Fransziska Wong, M.D., the most recently-added component of that gallimaufry, seemed made all of sticks and twine, as if a good, hard shaking would be more g-force than her ligaments could withstand. Her forearms and lower legs were long and spindly, her breasts meager. Such was the curse of the spaceborn: That the flesh stretched out to extend the limbs was stolen from elsewhere in the body. At times, when she contemplated the images of beauty broadcast from Earth or Mars, this disturbed her.
Wong had taken her medical degree from Leo University in Goddard City, Low Earth Orbit, specializing (by necessity) in the maladies of microgravity. She had spent two years in Goddard's clinic, another two in High Nairobi, dreaming of adventure and the sight of far, exotic places. Then FS Ned DuBois had called into port shy a ship's doctor and she had seized the opportunity.
But the inside of a ship looked remarkably like the inside of an orbital habitat and, as she soon found, the insides of the warrens under Luna and Mars. Tight little rooms and tight little corridors; recycled air and recycled water and, after a time, recycled thoughts. Little by little over the years, she had given up the search for far exotic places, though she never did quite give up the hope that they existed.
The captain's body upbraided her. She had failed to save him; failed even to diagnose him. Carefully, she straightened the limbs, closed the eyes, covered the face. The dear man looked so fragile in death: smaller somehow, as if something inside were missing. Wherever else fancy might suppose he had gone, Evan Hand had departed The River of Stars.
First officer Gorgas, hunched so intently over his 'puter, had barely acknowledged her entrance, and Wong supposed him deeply involved in some administrative task required by the captain's death. She recorded the time in the ship's medical log and entered her confirmation. Legally, at that moment, the captain died; and it struck her that in some arcane, bureaucratic fashion she had just killed him.
"I suppose," she said as she tucked the sheets around the body to prevent it from drifting off while she fetched a body bag from stores, "that the ship will not be run in so 'Evan Hand-ed' a fashion now."
The first officer looked up from his 'puter. "What's that?" he said. "What's that? You're making a joke? With our captain only now passed away, you'd make a mockery of his name?"
Wong bowed her head at the rebuke. The pun had been one of Evan's favorite lines. He had often used it himself, and she had repeated it as a way of maintaining something of his antic humor. She hadn't meant it as mockery; but Gorgas, who had flown with the captain for many years must be taking the death most cruel hard, keeping it inside, as men so often did, yet needing, nevertheless, some word of kindness. "The ship will miss him," she said.
Certainly, she did. Evan had been lighthearted, always with a smile, always ready with a joke or a courtesy. The first officer struck her as serious, but with all the vices and none of the virtues that seriousness implied. Yet, she had been aboard The River only a short time and Gorgas's solemn demeanor, his snappishness, might be only a mask for the grief he felt at the passing of his old friend.
Gorgas, for his part, focused once more on his simulation of Austerlitz. The game's intelligence had shifted the French forces in a most unexpected manner. A glitch in the neural net's training? A subtle move whose implications he failed to see? He tried to concentrate on the miniature counters, but the doctor's remark kept coming back to him. What had she meant by such a joke? Hidden contempt? He had puzzled over Wong's presence ever since Hand had brought her on board at Achilles. She had the face of a horse and the disposition of a sheep; but Hand had worn such a broad grin that Gorgas wondered if she had given him more than a set of credentials. The Acts required that any transit of more than three months carry a medical doctor on the ship's Articles, but Hand had not hunted very long to fill the berth. A stroke of luck, he had said. A doctor left behind by her previous ship when she'd overslept and missed the departure. Yet it seemed to Gorgas, Achilles being as small as it was, that the Krasnarov's crew could not have hunted all that diligently for their missing physician.
* * *
Down in the bowels of the lower decks, in the dim, red-lit confines of the engineering control room, surrounded by sharp,...