Cherryh, CJ - Finity's End
Caroline J. Cherryh
A Union Alliance novel
Chapter I
A system traffic monitor screen showed a blip where none had existed in this
solar system. The wavefront of presence which had begun far, far out above the
star spoke a series of numbers to a computer in Pell Central and a name flashed
to displays throughout the room.
The master display, hanging two meters wide above the rows of traffic control
workstations, simultaneously flashed up the same name in glowing green.
Finity's End had come back to Pell.
"Alert the stationmaster," the master tech said, and the message flashed through
Pell Station's central paging system.
By that time the signal, coming in from the jump range buoy at the speed of
light, was four hours old. The Pell Central computers generated a predicted
course based on data changing by the split second, a path outlined in ordinary
green. The first projection supposed an abrupt drop in velocity well out from
Pell's Star.
Suddenly the huge display changed, bloomed with colors from red to blue, based
on the last three courses and velocities that ship had used coming into Pell on
that vector… and projected into the sun.
It made a bright, broad display across the ordinarily routine, direct-path
listings. It alarmed the newest technicians and sent hands reaching toward reset
toggles. Merchanters didn't dive that close, that fast, toward the sun.
That ship had. Once. Years ago. That fact was still in the computer record and
no one had purged it from files.
But the War was in the past. The navigational buoy, in its lonely position above
the star, noted all arrivals in the entry range, and the information it sent to
Pell Station showed no other blips attending the ship. Finity's End came alone,
this time, and the master tech calmly informed the junior technicians that the
pattern they saw was no malfunction, but no reason for alarm, either.
The buoy's information, incoming in those few seconds, was now a little further
advanced. It had already excluded some predictions, and the automated computer
displays continued to change as the buoy tracked that presence toward the
sun—four hours ago.
By now, in realtime and real space, the oldest of all working merchanters had
either blown off excess V and set its general course for Pell, or something was
direly wrong. Only the robot observer was in a position to have seen the ship's
entry, and second by second the brightly colored fan of possibility on the
boards dimmed as more and more of that remote-observer data came in. The fan of
projection shrank, and eventually excluded the sun.
The screen was far less colorful and the technicians were far less anxious ten
minutes further on, when the stationmaster walked in to survey the situation.
By now a message would be on its way from the ship to the station, granted that
the tamer projections on the displays were true.
The captain of the oldest merchanter ship still operating would be, predictably,
saluting the Pell stationmaster who, with his help, had founded the
The powers that dominated a third of human presence in the universe were about
to meet.
But stationmaster Elene Quen, also predictably, strode to a com-tech's
workstation and took up a microphone before any such lightspeed message could
reach her.
"Finity's End, this is Quen at Pell. Welcome in. What brings us the honor?"
As far as the eye could see,
As far as the eye could see, thickets stood gray-green and blooming with white
flowers beneath a perpetually clouded heaven.
Just beyond those thickets, huge log frames lay in squares on the earth, waiting
for the floods to come—and downers were at work intermittent with play.
Hisa was the name they called themselves. Brown-furred and naked but for the
strings of ornament and fur about necks and waists, they splashed cheerfully
through the dozen log-bounded paddies that were already flooded. In broad,
generous casts, they strewed the heavy, sinking grain.
Humans had watched this activity year upon year upon year of human residency at
Pell's Star.
And Fletcher Neihart could only watch, in the downers' world but not quite of
it, limited by the breather-mask that limited every human on the world. He'd
never been limited by such a mask in his youthful dreams of being here, a part
of the human staff on Downbelow: Pell's World, the same world that had swung
below Pell Station's observation window for all his life, tantalizing, clouded,
and forbidden to visitors.
But this was real, not photographs and training tape that only simulated the
world. Here the clouds were overhead, not underfoot.
Here, the hisa workers, free of masks and moving lightly, toiled the little
remaining time their easy world required them to work. Once the frames were
built and once the world spun giddily toward spring and renewal, the hisa and
the fields alike waited only for the rains.
Plants whose cycles were likewise timed to the monsoon were budded and ready. In
the forests that bordered the log-framed fields, swollen at the slight
encouragement of yesterday's showers, the sun-ripened puffers turned the air
gold with pollen. You touched a puffer-ball and it went pop. On this day of warm
weather and gusty breezes puffer-balls went pop for no apparent reason, and the
pollen streamed out in skeins. Pollen rode the surface of the frame-bound ponds
as a golden film. It made dim gold streamers on the face of
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Two hisa, also truant from work, made a game of the puffers at woods' edge,
skipping down a high bank of puffer-plants and exploding the white, gray-mottled
globes in rapid succession until their coats were gold.
Then they shook themselves and pollen flew in clouds.
"Gold, gold, gold for spring," Melody crowed at Fletcher, and scampered up to
the top of the bank above the river, as her co-truant Patch, whose human-name
came of a white mark on his flank, chased after her. Melody dived down again.
And up, in an explosion of puffer-balls. "Silly Fetcher! Come, come, come!"
Fetcher was what they called him. They wanted him to chase them. But the staff
wasn't supposed to run. Or climb. The safety of the breather-masks was too
important.
"Gold for us!" Patch cried and, under his playful attack, pollen burst from the
puffer-balls, pop, pop, pop-pop, in a chain of pixy dust explosions that caught
the fading light.
Fletcher, watching this game up and down the little rise next a stand of old
trees, exploded some of his own. That little hummock on which hisa played chase
was a just-out-of-reach paradise for a teen-aged boy: things to break that only
brought life and laughter—and created puffer-balls for next spring.
He was seventeen and he was, like the hisa, just slightly truant from the work
of the Base.
But down here no one truly cared about a little break in the schedule, least of
all the downers, who would all go walkabout when the springtime called, as it
was beginning to do.
A last few days to seed the frames. A last few days for pranks and games. Then
the monsoon rains would come, then the land would break out in blooms and
mating, and no one could hold the hisa to something so foolish as work.
A teen-aged boy could understand a system like that. He'd worked so hard to be
here, to be in the junior-staff program, and here was the payoff, a delirious
moment that more than matched his dreams.
The hisa shrieked and ran and, abandoning rules, he chased, into the thicket
along the river shore. They dived over the crest of another puffer-ball ridge.
They laid ambushes on the fly and caught him in a puff of pollen.
And after they'd chased up and down, and broken enough speckled puffer globes to
have the surface of the water, the rocks, and the very air among the tired old
trees absolutely gold with pollen, they cast themselves down by the noisy edge
of the water to watch the forever-clouded sky.
Fletcher sprawled beside them, flat on the bank. The breather-mask, its
faceplate thickly dotted with pollen now, was the barrier between him and the
world, and the need to draw air through the filtered cylinders of his mask left
him giddy and short of breath.
Breathe, breathe, breathe as fast as possible at the rate the mask gave him
oxygen. Downers when they worked Upabove, in the service passages of Pell, lived
in those passages at the high CO2 level that downers found tolerable. When they
exited those passages into the human corridors of the Upabove, they were the
ones to go masked.
On Pell's World, on Downbelow, the necessities were reversed, and humans were
the strangers, unmasked inside their domes and masked out of doors.
On Downbelow, humans always remembered they were guests—worked their own huge
fields and mills on the river plain south of here and tended their own vast
orchards at the forest edge to grow grain and fruit in quantities great enough
for trade with other starstations.
For more than they themselves needed, downers simply would not work. And what
they thought of so much hard work and such huge warehouses, one had to wonder.
It wasn't the hisa way, to deal in food. They shared it. One wondered if they
knew Pell Station didn't eat all the grain Pell operations grew on Downbelow.
There were wide gulfs of understanding between hisa and humans.
Risk yourself sometimes. Never risk a downer. Those were the first and last
rules you learned. Kill yourself if you were a fool, and some staffers had done
that: the air of Downbelow was more than high in CO2, it was heavy with
biologicals that liked human lungs too well. If your breathing cylinders and
your filters gave out, you could stay alive breathing the air of Downbelow—but
you were in deep, deep trouble.
Kill yourself if you were a fool. Run your mask cylinders out if you were a
total fool. But never harm a downer, never ask for downer possessions, never
admire what a downer owned. They didn't react as humans reacted. Bribes and
gifts of food or trinkets won points with them.
So, happily, did humans who'd play games. After all the theorizing and the
scientific studies, it came down to that: downers worked so they could live to
play. So the staff, to gain influence and good will with downers, played games.
Trainees brought up to the stringent, humorless discipline of the wartime
Upabove learned different rules down here—at least the ones in direct contact
with downers.
It made perfect, glorious sense to Fletcher.
Humans had learned, first of all lessons, not to be distressed when spring came
full and downers went wandering, leaving their work to the mercy of the floods.
The frames would hold the grain from scattering too far. The floods might lift
and drift a frame or two, losing an entire paddy, but there was no need to
worry. The hisa made enough such frames.
One year of legend the frames would all have gone downriver and the harvest
would have failed entirely, but humans had held the land with dikes to save the
hisa, as they thought. A wonderful idea, the downers thought when they came back
from springtime wandering, and they were very glad and grateful that kind humans
had saved their harvest, which they had been sure was lost.
But surely such disasters had happened before, and hisa had survived—by moving
downriver to other bands, most likely. And all the human anguish over whether
providing the dikes might change hisa ways had come to naught. A few free
spirits now experimented with dikes, like old Greynose and her downriver brood,
but the Greynose band worked fields where River ran far more chancily than here.
Improve the downer agricultural methods? Import Earth crops, or bioengineer
downer grain with higher yields?
floods. Humans farmed crops from old Earth only in the Upabove, in orbiting
facilities, to protect the world ecosystem, and those were luxuries, and scarce.
Crops native to Downbelow were the abundance that fed the tanks that fed the
merchant ships.
Processing could turn downer grain into bread and surplus could feed the fish
tanks that supplied colonies from Pell to Cyteen. The agricultural plantations
launched cargo up and received things sent down, sometimes by shuttle and not
infrequently by the old, old method of the hard-shell parachute drop through
Downbelow's seething and violent clouds.
The port and the launch site were busy, human places Fletcher had been glad to
leave in favor of this study outpost along
edge of deep, broad forest, things didn't move at any rapid pace and nothing
fell from the sky. Here a hisa population not that great in the world met humans
who monitored the effects of the vast operation to the south on hisa life,
looking for any signs of stress and growing a little grain as hisa grew it,
cataloging, observing—
And each spring for reasons linked to love and burrows and babies, downers would
forget their fields, follow their instincts and go walking—females walking far,
far across the hills and through the woods and down the river, with desirous
males tagging after.
Fletcher hadn't been down here long enough to have seen the migrations. He'd
come last year at harvest, and the monsoon was yet to come. He knew that there
were tragedies in the spring: death along with rebirth. There were falls, and
drownings… the old hands warned the young staffers of that fact: the oldest hisa
went walking, too, and deaths in spring were epidemic—spirit tokens, those
waist-cords and necklaces brought back by others to hang on sticks in the
burying-place. Every spring was risky, with the rains coming down and River
running high—and he worried about these two, Melody and Patch, his hisa, with
increasing concern.
You were supposed to be trained just to speak with downers on Pell Station.
But he'd met Melody illicitly on the station—oh, years ago, when he was eight, a
human runaway, a boy in desperate need of something magical to intervene—and
Melody, squatting down to peer at him in his hiding-place, had said, "You sad?"
in that strange, mask-muffled voice of hers.
How did you give a surly answer to a magical creature?
He'd been locked in his own shell, hating everything he saw, hiding in the
girders of the dock, moving from one to another cold and dangerous place to
evade station authorities who might be looking for a runaway.
His foster-family—his third foster-family—had been scum that day. All adults
were scum that day.
But you couldn't quite say that about an odd and alien creature who crouched
down near him in the cold, metal-tinged air and asked, "Why you sad?"
Why was he sad? He'd not even identified what he felt until she put her finger
on it. He'd thought he was mad. He was angry at most everything. But Melody had
asked what the psychs had skirted around for years, just put her finger right on
the center of things and made him wonder why he was sad.
A mother that committed suicide? Foster-families that thought he was scum? He'd
survived those. No, that wasn't it. He was sad because he hadn't anyone or
anywhere or anything and nobody wanted him the way he was. Not even his mother
had.
He'd said, "My mother's dead," though it had happened three years ago. And
Melody had patted his arm gently, as about that time Patch had shown up and
squatted down, too.
"Sad young human," Melody had explained to Patch. "Gone, gone he mama."
It made him feel as if he was three years old. Or five. As he'd been when his
mother had done the deed and left him for good and all. And he'd begun to feel
embarrassed, and caught in a lie that was just going to get wider. "Long time
ago," he'd said, in a surly tone. "Long time you sad," Melody had said, and put
her finger on it again, in a way the psychs had never been able to.
And somehow then—maybe it had been Patch's idea—they'd gotten him up on his feet
and talked to him about things that just didn't make any sense to him.
He knew he wasn't supposed to talk to them. The fact he was breaking a rule made
him inclined to go with them and get in real trouble, challenging the
authorities to take him out of the foster-family he'd been trying to escape.
He'd walked about with them for an hour in the open, uncaught, unreprimanded,
and he'd seen the amazing details about the station that downers knew. And then
one of Melody's mask cylinders had run out. They'd had to go to a locker within
the service tunnels to get another, and he'd discovered a secret world, a world
only licensed supervisors got to see—legally, among creatures only licensed
supervisors got to deal with—legally.
He'd gone home to his foster-family and apologized, lying through his teeth
about being very, very sorry. He'd stayed with that foster-family and followed
their rules for another three whole years because their residence was near the
access he knew to the maintenance tunnels. And the tunnels became his route to
various places about the station, and his refuge from anger. He used masks that
were for human maintenance workers, always in a locker by the access doors. He
did no harm. For the first time he had a Place that was always his. For the
first time in his life he had something to lose if he got caught. And for the
first time in his life he'd reformed his bad-boy ways, gotten out of the crowd
he was in and reformed so well the social workers thought his foster- family—his
worst family of the lot—had worked a miracle.
He'd stayed reformed: he'd improved in school, which brought rewards of another
kind. And even when, after the four-year rotation station workers were allowed.
Melody and Patch had gone back down to their world, he hadn't collapsed and
relapsed into his juvenile life of crime.
No. He'd already confessed at least part of his story (not the part about
actually going into the tunnels) to his guidance counselor and made a solemn
career choice: working with the downers on Downbelow.
Tough standards, tough program, tough academic work. But he'd made the program.
He'd gotten his chance.
And, not surprising, because former station workers lived and worked around the
human establishments on Downbelow, he'd met Melody and Patch inside an hour
after reaching the forest Base last fall. She was grayer. Patch wasn't as big as
he'd recalled. He'd grown that much in the nearly ten years since he'd seen
them, and he'd not known how old his Downers had been.
It might be her last fertile season, and Patch her last mate. No other male
pursued her that he knew of, and she would not, he understood, lead Patch all
that long a chase when her spring was on her—but then Patch couldn't walk so far
these days, either.
He wanted them back safely. But he knew, now, soberly, that ultimately he'd lose
them, too. So days were precious to him. And this day—this was the best day of
his life, this game of puffer-balls and pollen.
A hard downer finger poked him hard below the ribs, and he curled in
self-defense. Melody and Patch were in a prankish mood and, lying on his back on
the bank, he jabbed Patch back, which sent Patch screaming for the nearest
tree-limb. In the trees downers could climb like crazy, and a human in heavy
boots and clean-suit was not going to catch Patch.
Patch flung leaves at him. "Wicked, wicked," Melody cried, and flung a
puffer-ball, which disintegrated on impact. Pollen was everywhere. Patch
dropped, shrieking, from the tree.
Then it was pollen wars until the air was thick and gold again.
And until the restricted breathing had Fletcher leaning against a low-hanging
limb gasping for air and sweating in the suit.
The light was dimmer now.
"Sun goes walk," he said. One couldn't say to downers that Great Sun set, or
went down, or any such thing. The rules said so. Great Sun walked over the
hills. These two downers knew Great Sun's unguarded face, having been up in the
Upabove themselves, but it didn't change how they reverenced the star. He used
the downer expression: "The clock-words say humans go inside."
They looked, Melody and Patch did, at gray, cloud-veiled Sun above a shadowing
River. They slid arms about each other as they set out walking up the trail
toward the Base, being old mates, and comfortable and affectionate. Where the
trail widened, Melody put an arm about Fletcher, too, and they walked with him
back down the river path until, past three large paddy-frames, they came within
sight of the domes where humans lived, in filtered, oxygen-supplied safety above
the flood zone.
"You fine?" Patch asked. "You got bellyache?"
"No," he said, and laughed. Downers didn't brood on things. If you didn't want a
dozen questions, you laughed. They wouldn't let him be sad, and wouldn't leave
him in distress.
They were absolutely adamant in that.
So he laughed, and poked Patch in the ribs, and Patch poked him and ducked
around Melody.
Games.
"Late, late, late," he said. And then the alarm on his watch beeped, as all
across the fields quitting time announced itself on the 'link everyone wore.
"Oh, you make music, time go!"
Not that they grasped in the least what time really meant. On days when a lot of
the staff was out in the fields, the downers would gather to watch close to
quitting time, and exclaim in amazement at the hour every human in the fields
simultaneously quit work and headed back to Base, carrying whatever they'd been
using, gathering up whatever they'd brought with them. The downers understood
there was a signal and that it came with music. It was not the beep itself, the
Director said, it was the why that puzzled the downers. The old hands like
Melody and Patch, who'd seen the station change shift, and who'd worked by the
clock, could tell the younger downers that humans set great store by time and
doing things together.
("But Great Sun he come again," was Melody's protest against any such notion of
pressing schedule. "Always he come")
On Downbelow, in downer minds, there were always new chances, new tomorrows.
And one never had to do anything that pressing, that it couldn't wait one more
hour or one more day. You wanted to know when to go to your burrow? Look to
Great Sun, and go before dark. Or after, if you were in a mood to risk the
blindness of the nights.
One was never in too big a hurry. One could take the time to walk, oh, way off
the direct track home, in this still-strange notion (to a station-born human) of
being able to look across a wide open space to see what other people were doing
on other routes. Upabove, it would have been corridors and walls.
Here, on this happiest of all days, he found his path intersecting Bianca
Velasquez's route on her way home. They were in the same biochem seminar. They
mixed before discussion-session. She'd always hung around with Marshall Willett
and the
She was going to snub him. He could pretend to drop something and let her go by
while he rummaged in the gravel of the path. Like a fool. He could save himself
the sour end to a good day.
But it ought to be easy to look at Bianca. It ought to be easy to talk to her.
Hi, just a simple hi, and put the onus of politeness on her. Hi. Ready for the
biochem quiz? What job are you on? He had it straight. Civilized amenities were
very clear in his head until she almost looked at him and he almost looked at
her and by an accident of converging trails they were walking together.
Not just any girl. The girl. Bianca Velasquez, who'd drawn his eye ever since
he'd first seen her. Suddenly his brain was vacant. He couldn't look at her when
he couldn't think and his body temperature was rising in what he knew was a
glow-in-the-dark blush.
God, he was a fool. He must have inhaled puffer-pollen. He didn't know why he'd
chosen today to cross her path, just—there she'd been; and he'd done it
"Where were you?" she asked.
"Over there." He waved his hand at River. That sounded stupid. And she'd noticed
he was gone? God, if the supervisor had seen him…
"So where were you?"
"Oh, beyond the trees. Down by the River."
"Doing what?"
This downer I work with—Melody—she wanted to show me something." I work with. As
if he was a senior supervisor. That sounded like a fool. She'd rattled him just
by existing. He was already in a tangle and he'd only just opened his mouth.
"You're all over stuff."
He brushed his clean-suit "Puffer-balls." Thank God, he had his inspiration for
something to say. "It was all over. And the sun and everything. It was real
pretty. That's why I went"
"Where?"
Fast thinking. Panic. Decision. "I'll show you."
"Sure."
Oh, God. She said yes. He didn't expect her to say yes.
"When?" she asked
"Can you get away tomorrow?"
"How long?"
"No longer than I was today. About the same time. Right before sunset. When the
light's right"
"I don't know. We're not supposed to be alone down there."
She thought he was trouble. And he wasn't. He had maybe one sentence to change
her mind.
"Melody and Patch will be there. They used to work near my rez on the station,
I've known them for years before I came down. We'll be safe." He blurted that
out and then wished he hadn't been quite so forthcoming. She was a nice, decent
girl from a solid, rule-following family. He'd just told her something the
supervisors might not know from his records, and if they got to asking too close
questions of Melody and Patch, they in hisa honesty could accidentally say
something to get him canned from the program.
"All right," she said. "Sure. All right."
He could hardly believe it. She was from Family with a capital F, and he was
from a non-resident household with an f only for fouled-up. She wasn't somebody
who'd normally even talk to him on the Station. But she seemed to invite him to
hold her hand, brushing close as they walked and when he did slip his hand
around hers, her fingers were chaste and cold and listless, making him ask
himself was this the way Stationer Family girls were, or had he just made a
wrong, unwelcome move?
"Got to watch your hands when you go through decon," he said. "I'm all over
pollen."
"Yeah," she said, and gave a little squeeze of the fingers that made him
suddenly lightheaded. He wasn't mistaken. She did want to talk to him. He hadn't
imagined she was looking back at him in biochem.
He didn't expect this. He really didn't. "I thought you were, kind of, hanging
with Marshall Willett."
"Oh,
Willett, one of the Willetts, who'd been in close orbit around her for three
months, acting as if he owned the Base and the senior staff, besides.
He didn't know what to say. He had a dream, and quite honestly that dream wasn't
remotely Bianca Velasquez. It was being in this world and on this world on days
like today.
It was lasting to be a senior in the Program on Downbelow. Getting involved with
someone like Bianca wasn't a help: it was a hindrance he'd never sought
But—here she was. Interested—at least in holding hands. And what did he do?
She was smart She was far more serious-minded than Marshall Willett, whose
reason for being down here he privately suspected was a family trying to make
him do something for a career. Bianca was bright, she was pretty, she seemed to
care about the work, and that—in addition to being able to stay down here amid
the wonders of the planet for the rest of his life—that was just too much to ask
of luck.
No. Back to level: permanent duty on the world was all he wanted, and he
wouldn't risk that by making a wrong move on Bianca and her powerful Family, not
even if she was standing stark naked in the pollen-gold and the sun of that
bank.
God, he liked that image. She'd be so pretty. She had dark hair and olive skin.
She'd be all gold with the sun and the pollen coming down in streamers… well,
repaint that picture with breather-masks and the clean-suits. They'd plod about
in clumsy isolation while Melody and Patch scampered and threw puffer-balls at
them. And how much trouble could you get into with a girl, when neither of you
could take off the breather-masks and all you could touch was fingertips?
They walked along hand in hand toward the domes, which now were ghostly pale
against the rapidly advancing twilight. The white yard lights were on. Other
workers were coming home, too, walking much faster than they were.
Their paths split apart again where the path reached what they called the
Quadrangle, and the dorm-domes were very strict, male in one direction, female
in the other, if you were junior staff…
As if they didn't have good sense until their twentieth birthday and then mature
wisdom automatically happened; but in essence, he'd been glad to have the peace
the no-females rules brought to the guys' side, and tonight he was glad of it
because he didn't have to think of a dozen more clever things to say. He'd had
maybe five minutes walking with her, avoiding making a total fool of himself. He
had all night and tomorrow to get his thoughts together before he had to talk to
her again.
Oh, my God, he had a date with Bianca Velasquez.
It was impossible. He'd never gone with a girl. And having a Family girl like
Bianca actually make a date with him was… impossible. Bianca was so Family her
feet didn't touch the floor, so virginal and proper her knees locked when she
slept at night. He was disposed on one side of the equation to think it was some
kind of setup: he'd met numerous setups in his life, for no other reason than he
was nobody.
But over the weeks he had seen that she was smarter than that crowd, and maybe
bored with them, and, the thought came to him, maybe she was lonely, too.
round him because he was a Willett; Bianca was the only human being on the
Base—including the supervisors—who didn't have to give a damn that
a Willett, because she was a Velasquez. Velasquezes didn't have to give a damn
about Willetts, Siddons, Somervilles, or Kielers, which was the big clique down
here.
So what did she do? She held hands with him?
He didn't have a family at all. He was non-resident scum.
He also stood six feet, had learned self-defense on Pell's rough-and-tumble
White Dock, the bottom end of where he'd lived, at worst, with his fourth
family, and he could beat shit out of Marshall Willett. So maybe that was her
idea, her way of thumbing her nose at the lot of them. She'd been sort of a
loner, too, in the center of a cloud of admirers.
And
had no intention of asking of her, not because he didn't think of it, but
because, bottom line, his motive, unlike
kicked out of the program.
She acted shy. He squeezed her hand when they parted company. Senior staff
members habitually sat watch at the doors. They counted everybody in for the
night, for safety's sake, to be sure nobody was left out with a broken leg or a
dead breather-cylinder or something.
Nobody got a minute alone, if you were under twenty.
You were safe holding hands. If you couldn't manage the no sex rule till your
majority, the Director had told them plainly, there was no shortage of
applicants, ten for every slot they filled
Tomorrow, Bianca Velasquez had promised him, and Fletcher Neihart walked on down
the path to the men's dorms, past the monitors and into decontamination with a
preoccupation so thorough the monitor had to ask him twice to sign in.
Chapter II
Contents - Prev/Next
The restaurant was old enough to have gone from glamour to a look of hard use
and back to glamour again. Now it was beyond trends. Now it was a Pell Station
tradition: Pell's finest restaurant, with its lighted floor, its display of the
very real stars beyond the tables, features both of which were its hallmark,
copied elsewhere but never the same.
The new touch was the holo display that set those stars loose among the tables,
a piece of engineering Elene Quen had seen with the overhead lights on. The
sight destroyed the illusion, but the magic was such when the dark came back
that the senses were always dazzled, no matter what the reasoning mind knew of
the technology behind the illusion.
The waiters settled their distinguished party at the best table, reserved from
the hour Finity's End had returned her call. It was herself, her husband Damon
Konstantin, Captain James Robert Neihart and his brother captains,
Francie, and Alan. At this hour, the meal was breakfast for Francie and Alan,
supper for James Robert and Madison; and with all four of Finity's captains away
from the ship, business that had the ill grace to hit Finity's deck this close
after docking would fall into the hands of Finity's more junior staff.
Cocktails arrived, glasses clinked, faces marked by years of war broke into
honest smiles. Rejuv and time-dilation stretched out a life, but years on rejuv
left marks, too, on all of them. Captain James Robert Neihart in particular, a
hundred forty-nine years old as stations counted time, was fortyish in build,
but he was gray-haired and papery-skinned close-up, his face crossed with all
the hairline traces of the anger and laughter of a long, long life.
Seeing how the years had worn even on spacers, who played fast and loose with
time, and counted the years on ships' clocks separate from station reckonings,
Elene looked anxiously at her husband Damon, nearly two decades after the War,
and for a fleeting, fearful second she accounted of the fact that they were none
of them immortal. The years passed faster for her and for Damon than they did
for any spacer.
And she'd been a spacer herself until she'd elected what should have been a
one-year shore tour with a man she'd loved, a spacer's vacation on this shore of
a sea of stars, a deliberate dynastic tie with the Konstantins of Pell.
Fateful decision, that. Her ship, Estelle, hadn't survived its next run: Estelle
had become a casualty of the War years and the Quen name, once distinguished
among merchanters, had all but died in that disaster. No ship, no Name was left
of all she'd been. And so, so much had conspired to bind her here ashore. She'd
fought her War in the corridors of Pell.
And had she aged to their eyes? Had Damon, in the seven years since Finity's End
had last seen this port?
Were the captains of Finity's End all thinking, looking at her, How sad, this
last of the Quens growing old on station-time?
Last of the Quens would be the spacer view. But thanks to Damon she wasn't the
last of her Name. She'd borne two children, hers, and Damon's, for two equally
old, equally threatened lines. The Neiharts of Finity's End might not yet have
acknowledged the fact, but she'd more than given the heir of the Konstantins a
son, Angelo Konstantin, stationer, born and bred in his father's heritage: more
relevant to any spacer's hopes, she had a daughter, Alicia Quen. The Quens had
no ship, but they had a succession.
Cocktails, and small talk. Catching up on the business of seven years with a
thin, colorless: how have you been, how's trade, what's ever became of…?
They ordered supper, extravagantly. They were spacers in from the deep, cold
Beyond, on the start of a two-week dock-side liberty… the first truly wide-open
liberty since before the War. And that in itself was news that set the dock
abuzz.
"What's changed?" Damon echoed a question from
facilities, a lot of improvements all up and down the dock. There's a number of
new sleepovers, a couple of quality accommodations—"
"The garden,"Elene said.
"The garden,"Damon said. "You'll want to see that"
"Garden?" Francie asked. To a spacer, a garden produced greens: you grew them
aboard your own ship if you had leisure and room. A garden was a lot of lights
and timed water.
Pell's didn't grow just lettuce and radishes.
"Take it from me,"Elene said. "You'll be amazed."But she had a curious feeling
when she said it—listen to me, she thought. Here she was, praising Pell's
advantages to spacers, and she tested the queasy feeling she had as she caught
the words coming out of her mouth.
The mirror every morning showed her a stranger enmeshed in station business, and
lately her eyes looked back at her, bewildered and pained at the change in her
own face. Could she, going back all those years, still choose this exile and
want this rapid passage of years?
Supper arrived with the help of several waiters. "Very good,"James Robert said
after his initial sampling, and the company agreed it was indeed a seven-year
meal.
Rumors necessarily attended Finity's dealings on the docks, more than
odd statement they were on a true liberty. Rumors preceding this dinner had
reached her office, her breakfast table, even her bed—the latter straight from
Pell's Legal Affairs office, Damon's domain.
What was certain was that before she ever docked at Pell, Finity's End had made
a large draw on the Alliance Bank, a draw of 74. 8 million against both
principal and interest on the sum it had left on account for safekeeping in the
War. Listing her latest port of departure as Sol 1, Earth, she'd logged goods
for sale and made a modest trade of luxury goods on the futures market even
before docking, a procedure legal here at Pell.
The market had reacted. If Finity came in selling cargo, then Finity was buying.
Speculators had surmised from the instant she showed on the boards that, if she
bought, she'd buy staples like flour and dry sugar, cheap at Pell, or lower mass
cargo like pharmaceuticals, either one a reasonable kind of cargo for a ship in
Finity's kind of operation. Mallory of Norway, Pell's defense against the
pirates, could always use such commodities. Finity served Norway as supply; such
commodities rose in price. But since most direct shippers, even the most
patriotic and forgiving, would rather see their shipments actually reach the
destination they intended instead of being diverted to some lonely port out on
the fringes of civilization, the bids for hired-haul goods and mail stayed
stable.
Then, confounding all estimations, Finity's futures buy had turned out to be
goods for the luxury market, goods like downer wine.
Curious. The immediate speculation was that Finity meant simply to play the
futures market during a couple of weeks at dock, create a little uncertainty,
then dump those items on the market at the last moment, having made a one- to
two-week runup in price on speculation—not legal everywhere, but legal on Pell.
The market was jittery. Some political analysts, taking appearances as fact,
said that if Finity was buying high-quality cargo on her own tab, the
pirate-chasing business must be near an end, as some forecast it must be—and
needed to be. The expenditure of public funds for continued operations was a
burden on the economy.
The other opinion, completely opposite, was that some really big pirate action
was in the offing, some operation that needed deep cover, so Finity was buying
high-value (therefore low-mass) cargo with what only looked like her own funds
so as to look as if pirate-catching was no longer on her agenda.
The tally of ships of the former Fleet caught and dealt with varied with
accounts, even official ones. In the vast and deep dark of the Beyond, the
negative couldn't be proven, and a destroyed ship, given the legendary canniness
of the Fleet captains, was a wait-see, almost never a certainty. They thought
they'd accounted for certain carriers. But the Fleet captains were canny and
hard to nail. One Mazianni carrier with its rider ships was more than a
lightspeed firing platform: it was also a traveling, self-contained world,
deadly in its power and long-term in its staying power. A carrier, badly
damaged, could repair itself, given time. Even if Pell declared a victory,
surviving ships of the Fleet might pull off to the long-alleged secret base for
a generation or so and then return, making the rebel captain Mazian again a
major player in the affairs of the human species.
Elene inclined to a mix of those beliefs, convinced, first, that Mazian was a
threat diminishing rather than rising; second, that the end of the pirate wars
would be a wind-down and never a provable victory; and third, that the critical
danger to the human species was not in a Fleet mostly driven in retreat, secret
base or no secret base. The Fleet had been the demon in the dark for so long
that it had taken on a quality of myth, so potent a myth that Alliance and Union
administrators alike need only say the dire word Mazian, and a funding bill
passed
But the downside of that preoccupation with the Mazianni was an Alliance Council
refusing to take their eyes off the Fleet and look instead to their primary
competition: Union, the enemy the Fleet had fought before it turned to piracy.
Her own councillors said she was out of date, obsessed with history, unable to
forgive the Estelle disaster. She should become more progressive in her thinking
and give up the bitterness of a War grown inconvenient in modern politics.
Like hell.
"Seven years," Elene said, stalking her topic as the waiters carried off the
empty salad plates. She knew who was at surrounding tables, two of her loyal
aides and the policy chairman. She knew this area of the restaurant, she knew
the noise levels, precisely how far voices carried, which was not far at all.
She'd have skinned the maitre d' if he'd settled anyone in her vicinity who
didn't have a top clearance—since anyone who'd worked at all on the docks could
lip-read, a skill which defeated the device she had also seen with the lights
on, the one that also guaranteed the privacy of this table. "Seven years is too
long to wait for a good supper, Finity. What are our chances we'll see you more
often in the future?"
James Robert's expression was a parchment mask. The eyes, darting to hers, were
immediately lively and calculating.
"Fairly good," James Robert said, an answer the commodities dealers would be
very interested to hear. "Granted Union behaves itself." The inevitable stinger.
Yea and nay in two breaths. James Robert to the core.
"We're turning full-time to honest trade," Francie said. "At least that's our
ambition."
"Peaceful trade," Madison added, lifting his glass. "Confusion to Cyteen and to
Mother Earth."
"To peace," Damon said, more politic, and Francie and Alan emptied glasses to
the bottom.
Then the main course arrived, a flurry of carts and waiters, during which Finity
passed around the bottle and did their own wine-pouring, to the consternation of
the wait- staff—they were spacers to the bone, and if the waiters couldn't
handle empty glasses fast enough, then they did for themselves, ignoring station
protocols and etiquette as blithely as they'd done for decades. They were
nothing if not self-sufficient and reckless of external protocols.
As the Quens had once been, on their own deck, Elene could not but reflect. And
now the almost-last of the Quens finagled and hoped and connived for that right
again, cursing the waiters dithering in and out at the wrong moment.
She could sway the internal government of Pell. That was half the Alliance. The
approval of the Alliance Council of Captains—that was the sticking point in her
plans. And that meant, significantly, the leadership of James Robert Neihart.
"A brave new world of peace," she reprised, as the waiters and the cart went
away, and before the conversation could drift, "Finity, I have a proposal. Let
me assure you we're sound-secured here at this table, for a start, I think you
know that."
James Robert lifted his chin, looked at her through half-lidded eyes.
"A proposal for which I need funds and backing in Council."
Her husband Damon knew exactly what she was up to the minute she made the
opening: she was sure he did, and she knew he was holding all his arguments
resolutely behind his teeth. Two decades was time enough to say everything there
possibly was to say on the subject between them, and he couldn't deter her now,
make or break. If Finity's End was here to declare the War was entering a new
phase, if there was a change in the offing, she had her agenda.
"For what?" Madison asked "A crisis? A proposition?"
"Both," she said. Finity was not that far out of the current of things, at any
time. Finity's votes in the Alliance Council were regular, received on the
network of ship contacts that didn't rely on hyperspace, just regular ship
traffic at any station dock. "Peace with Union, yes, peace and trade, and ships,
Alliance ships. Built at Pell."
"We need another bottle," Madison said, "for this one."
James Robert, senior captain, hadn't given his reaction to the topic.
She signaled a waiter, hand signal, for three bottles. The maitre d' was in line
of sight. The wine arrived. There was the ancient etiquette of the bottle, the
glasses. The universe teetered on a mood, a small-talk graciousness that still
prevailed. The waiter filled glasses and withdrew.
She was acutely aware in the interim of a stationer husband at her side, a
patient man, a saint of a man, who slept alongside a shiplost spacer's heartache
and knew his home never was home to her. After two children and eighteen years,
what was between them was no longer the blind love they'd started with. They'd
seen and done too much, too desperately. But it was a lifelong commitment now, a
partnership she'd never altogether betray because it had held the same interests
too long. She reached, beneath the table, for his hand, and held it, a promise
strong as an oath, keen as a cry.
"It's a serious business," James Robert said when the waiters were gone.
She knew all the objections. One rebuilt ship, as they'd debated time and again,
opened up the question of what other War casualty ships might be resurrected and
where those ships would fit in the trade routes of the Alliance, in an age when
merchanters, with a vastly changed set of routes, were doing well, but not that
well.
Never mind Pell's internal debates in such a decision: merchanters, members of
the Alliance Council of Captains, had suballiances within their ranks; and if
Finity did her a favor on that scale, and backed her request for funds, then
debts would come due left and right, other ships to Finity, Finity to other
ships and to Pell—and Mallory. Favor-points in a merchanter crew meant owing
someone a drink, a duty-shift. On this scale, one favor nudged another until it
shook the recently settled universe all over again.
"I don't truly ask your business or your destination at the moment," she said.
"I don't ask why you've drawn what you have from the bank. That's Mallory's
business or it isn't and I won't put you in the position of lying to me. But
I'll tell you what's no news to you, and something we have to deal with. We both
know that Union is getting past the Treaty. What may be news is that there are
fourteen more ships pending construction. Union is building ships to put us out
of business, and it's doing it while we bicker." Having mapped out her arguments
for her ship in advance, oh, for sleepless nights and seven years, she tapped a
finger on the table surface to make her points and ignored all logic of why a
Quen ship should be first.
"I can name you the ships," she said. "I can tell you which shipyards." She'd
almost lay odds that Finity could name them, too. But James Robert gave her not
an iota of help or encouragement, the old fox. "One. The Treaty says Union won't
build merchant ships and Alliance won't build warships. Two: Union is hauling
cargo on military craft they're suddenly building with damned large holds. I'm
sure it's no news. Three: We're throwing our budget into armaments for our
merchant ships and we haven't built a single ship to counter the real danger.
Don't hand me the official denial: I wrote it. Four: We have a pie of a given
size, but we can have a larger one." Damn him, did he never react? She'd faced
him in negotiation before, and remembered only now how hard it was. "Five, cold
facts and you know them: We'll have no damned pie at all if we let Union build
military merchanters and build nothing but guns, ourselves. The plain fact is,
we're in a new war, a war for trade, and guns won't win it. We need new ships
licensed. And we can grit our teeth, take the pain in the budget, adjust our
trade routes and do that—or we can bicker on till we're all Union ships and we
have no choice."
Captain James Robert Neihart—who decades ago had refused Union and the Earth
Company officials alike the right to enter and inspect his ship. Captain James
Robert, who'd started the merchanters' strike that had made any merchant ship a
sovereign government, James Robert, who'd unified the merchanters finally
against Union and started the Company Wars… didn't so much as blink.
Neither did she, who'd settled on Pell, not Earth, for the new Merchanters'
Alliance headquarters, an independent Pell Station, as she'd demanded exist.
Together they'd dealt with double-dealing Earth and powerful Cyteen to keep
their independence, and they'd stood, James Robert and Elene Quen, as opposite
pillars holding the whole structure of the Alliance in balance: ship rights and
station rights, defined and agreed to, with a damn-you-all alike to Union's
claims to have won the War—and Earth's claims not to have lost it.
With the remnant of the Fleet preying on shipping, with civilization on the
brink of ruin, it had simply been more expedient for Union to agree to a neutral
Pell and a free Merchanters' Alliance. Now it was becoming less so. Now that the
pirate threat was less, Union was pushing the Treaty with the Alliance to
exercise every loophole for all it was worth and the merchanter captains of the
Alliance Council still temporized with the fraying of the treaty, aware
something should be done to prevent Union running over them, but never quite
willing to say this was the year to do it.
"You know what Union's going to say," James Robert said "To get them to accept
Alliance merchanters in their space, we have to stop the smuggling."
Back to the old argument from Unionside. She wasn't prepared to hear it from
James Robert.
"Can't be done," she said. In spite of herself she'd rocked back at the very
thought, and became conscious of her body language, braced at arm's length from
the table. At the same moment James Robert had leaned forward, taking up the
space she'd ceded, pressing the argument.
"Has to be done," James Robert said.
"On Union's say-so? Union's cheating every chance it gets."
"Union has a point. Mallory agrees. The black market is supplying Mazian."
Merchanters were, almost by definition, smugglers. Everyone ran their small side
business of trade that didn't go through station tariffs. It was a piddling
amount compared to what flowed through stations. It always had been. It was a
merchanter right to trade off-station and duck the taxes that were supposed to
be paid on two ships trading goods.
But she hadn't intended to talk about smuggling. She was thrown off her balance,
off her point of negotiation, and found herself still wondering why James
Robert, historic father of merchanter rights, had taken Union's side. "We can't
talk trade," she said, circling doggedly to the flank, "if we're facing a fleet
of non-Alliance merchant ships. Smuggling be damned We'll be working from
Union's rule book and only Union's rules if we sit idle and let them build ships
to out-compete the free merchanters. I want my ship, Finity. That's the issue,
here, I'm calling in debts. All I've got." If change was coming, if a whole new
phase of human life really was dawning, one without the Fleet, one in which even
James Robert Neihart would argue to curtail merchanter rights because they
couldn't otherwise get their share of Union's wealth and Earth's resources, then
maybe in the long run the pessimists were right. Maybe they'd end up, all of
them, with half of what they'd bargained for, and an age of less, not more,
prosperity, with fewer starstations, fewer centers of population, smaller
markets.
But, if for a brief while more, it might still matter to someone that Elene Quen
was a hero of the Alliance; she'd trade on that or anything else she owned to
get her Name back in space and get her descendants' share of the markets that
remained. "I want my ship, Yes, I want this to be the first ship of other ships
we build. Yes, I want us, the Alliance, and Pell and Earth to challenge Union on
what they're doing. I want us to go head to head with them and not let Union
pick our pockets for another twenty years. Maybe we'll be short of funds for a
while. But we'll survive as independents if we have ships. That's my proposal."
"I'll give you mine," James Robert said. "The smuggling has to be cut off. If
the Fleet's getting supply from us, we've become our own worst enemy. And to
enable that… the Merchanter's Alliance will ask all Alliance signatories for
lower tariffs."
There was the stinger. Less tax. At a time when the stations needed funds for
modernization and competed to get the merchanters to stay longer, spend their
funds at this starstation rather than another. "How much lower?"
"Starting at ten percent, and pegged to the increase in trade coming through the
stations when we're not trading off the record."
"That's difficult"
"So is persuading our brother merchanters. But if stations don't lower port
charges, and if we don't put moral force behind getting our people out of the
smuggling trade, we're going to see the Fleet has become us, that's the danger.
I can name you six, seven ships that are operating in that trade—hard evidence.
We want the tether reeled in. We want arrests threatened, ports sealed, where
documentation exists. And that will take a united Council of Captains, and it
will take a solid agreement from all the stations."
She envisioned the fuss that would raise, the Merchanter's Alliance trying to
keep all its own ships from doing what ships had always done, on the grounds
some few would supply Mazian. Some had always supplied Mazian.
But she could also envision a scenario in which, if the Treaty started
deteriorating, more would do it. If Mazian swore undying repentance for raiding
merchanter shipping, and if Union pushed merchanters too hard with its notion of
hauling cargo with state crews, in its own far routes, yes, she could envision
all of civilization blowing up. The War all over again. Once James Robert aimed
her eyes down that track it wasn't hard at all to envision it. If Union or Pell
or the merchant trade pushed too hard at each other and relations blew up,
Mazian didn't have to attack. He'd come in to the rescue, reputation
refurbished. A hero of Earth and Pell again—nightmarish thought.
There was a prolonged silence, in which Elene felt a chill in the constantly
cycling air, the slow dance of stars about the room.
"If we should back this ship of yours," James Robert said, "—let's have a clear
understanding… you're not talking about going back to space yourself. We
couldn't show that much favoritism. This is an act of principle you're
proposing. Do I understand that?"
They were far too old in this to be fools. There'd been a time when she'd
planned to stand fast on the name of her ship, on another Estelle.
"Let the Council name the ship. There are competent, reliable crew begging for a
berth. But my daughter will go to space."
"We could back that," James Robert said; and granted in that simple willingness
to talk that they were suddenly beyond initial negotiations. "We need you where
you are."
"My daughter will contribute her station-share," she opened the next round,
half-sure now of Neihart's support, because beyond that one point granted, all
else was inevitable, the whole cascade of debate among spacers—and the agreement
won the necessary outcome, in Union's backing off the building of merchant
ships. All, that was, if they could get Alliance united and agreed, God help
them, on a single program. Her daughter's station-share, millions, when no other
stranded spacer could come up with thousands, would make her owner- operator.
Not pilot, but policy-maker, "Can I count on you in Council?"
"I'll hear more about it."
James Robert was a trader first and foremost. And talk ran on to agreement and
dwindled to inconsequentials clear to the bottom of the second bottle,
James Robert, champion of merchanters against station governments, would use his
bully pulpit with other merchanters. She would use hers with Pell Station, The
immoveable negatives miraculously stood a chance of moving. An end to the
smuggling and black market that, dire thought, might be supplying Mazian?
It was possible that that flow of goods added up, somehow, to enough leakage of
goods through the system to be significant. They'd operated on the theory it was
Sol doing it; or that there were secret bases, supply dumps they had yet to
find.
But if there was a supply flow that they could cut off—then, then Mazian would
start suffering.
If they could have supply or non-supply to Mazian as a club to wield, keep Union
worried about a Mazianni resurgence if they threatened to collapse Alliance
trade, and if somehow by hook or by crook James Robert could get the fractious
merchanter captains in line one more time… it was a house of cards, precariously
balanced, but if they could do all that, they could argue with Union to back off
their construction of their own merchant fleet.
And that would create safe routes for new, tariff-paying merchanters, while
employing the shipyards of Pell, which would be the key argument to move the
industrial interests of Pell to agree to lower the tariffs and dock charges that
would increase merchanter profit and sweeten the deal…
It all fell miraculously in line, and her skin felt the fever-chill of almost
miracles. She'd invited James Robert and his fellow captains here to talk
urgently about the future. They'd come here equally eager to talk and to deal,
at this hinge-point of change in the universe,
And because she was here to put forward her requirements, she had everything.
Everything, because it was sane and it was right to build more ships, and it was
in everyone's best interests.
Even Earth's, in the long run, because it was good for the peace. They could
have their prosperity —if James Robert was right. They could gain everything.
Then James Robert said:
"There's one sticking-point. The old problem. The lawsuit,"
She hadn't utterly forgotten. She'd even been prepared to have it float to the
surface early in the dinner—but not now, not on the edge of agreement. It was
Damon's department, Legal Affairs. And her stomach was moderately in a
knot."Francesca's case."
"Third time," James Robert said moderately, "third time we've tried to settle
the matter with Pell. We sue, you counter-sue. Your bursar, I'm sure some clerk
in your office, just sent us a bill for a station-share."
"You're joking," Elene said.
"As we sent you one. I'm sure it will eventually cross your desk."
It hadn't yet. She was completely appalled. Her fingers, locked on Damon's,
clenched, begging silence. She was sure Damon was disturbed at the impropriety.
But James Robert was far too canny a man directly to suggest a linkage.
"A very basic question of merchanter sovereignty," James Robert said "I'm sure
our own Legal Affairs office made the point to yours some seven years ago that
we are prepared to go to court,—which with other matters at hand, is a very
untimely flare-up of an issue that should have been settled. We do not owe Pell
Station any station-share. We will not pay living expenses. We will pay
Francesca's medical bills. That is my statement." A wave of James Robert's hand,
a dismissal. "Just so you know there's no ill will."
A ship-share of Finitys End was an immense amount of money—and so was a
station-share on Pell. Francesca Neihart had run up medical bills, living
expenses. So had her son.
"The boy is a year from his majority" Damon said
"And seven years older than the last time we sued. We're in the middle of cargo
purchase. But here we are, with what seven years ago was a simple wash: your
debt for our debt. Now we're dealing with real money, fourteen point five
million credits of real money, which you will not see, I assure you in a very
friendly way, and which your courts will not attach, or freeze, because we will
sue the bloody clothes off you—so to speak."
James Robert did not bluff.
"The boy," Damon said, "is a ward of Pell courts."
Madison cleared his throat, in what became a very long silence. The Konstantins
were also known for stubbornness.
"He is our citizen," James Robert said. "And we no longer operate in harm's way.
I believe that was the exact objection of the court in prior years. We cannot
afford to debate this particular issue, Konstantin. Not at this particular
moment. Yet on principle, we will sue."
Damon, who'd never contradict his wife in the midst of negotiations—Damon viewed
the concept of law in lieu of God; and Damon was going to hit the overhead when
they got home tonight. Elene could feel it in the rock-hard tension of his hand,
his sharp, almost painful squeeze on her fingers. No children in a war zone, the
Children's Court had held, in spite of the fact that there were children on
every family merchanter ship out in space. The Children's Court had its hands on
one of those children and in a paralysis of anguish over the War one judge and
her own husband's office wouldn't let that child go. But in those critical
words, no longer operate in harm's way, the advocacy system, the judiciary,
which couldn't resolve its technical issues over Francesca Neihart's son because
the court-appointed social workers and psychiatrists wouldn't agree, had just
had its point answered.
Fletcher Robert Neihart had always been caught in the gears. It wasn't the boy's
fault that elements in Pell's administration resented being a trailing appendage
to the Merchanter Alliance, and some noisy few fools even thought that Pell
should assess merchant ships to see whether they were fit for children. It was a
ridiculous position, one that would have collapsed the whole merchanter trade
network and collapsed civilization with it—but they were issue-oriented
thinkers.
To complicate matters, years ago some clever child advocate in the legal office
had thought it a fine argument to claim a station-share and sue Finity during
wartime on the boy's behalf. In further bureaucratic idiocy, filing said claim
with the court thereafter had made no difference after that that 14.5 million
credits was a figure that never had existed, in or in any official assessment of
actual debt. Once that sum had gotten onto the documents, politicians and
bursars alike afraid to take the responsibility of forgiving a
fourteen-million-credit debt. So it was in the court records, and it would
persist until someone somewhere signed papers in settlement.
Now, to cap a macabre comedy teetering on the verge of tragedy, it sounded as if
the Pell Bursar's office, unstoppable as stellar gravity, had just billed Finity
for the amount outstanding on Pell's books and thereby annoyed the seniormost
and most essential captain in the Merchanters' Alliance, a man to whom Pell and
the whole Alliance owed its independence. And done so at the very moment the
peace and the whole human future most needed a quiet, well-oiled, dammit, even
slightly illegal personal agreement to fly through the approval process before
Pell's enemies knew what was going on.
Her long-suffering husband knew where she stood. Her children—both near
grown—they knew. Her son said she cared only for her daughter; her daughter said
bitterly that her own birth was nothing but a means to an end
Far too simple a box, to contain all the battles of a lifetime. Pell Station
knew what it wanted when it persistently elected a spacer and a zealot to the
office she held… that in her soul there were places of utter, star-shot black.
Means-to-an-end certainly covered part of her motives, yes.
Chapter III
Contents - Prev/Next
The next day—the next days—were glorious.
"This you female," Melody said, in their third meeting on the riverbank, and
peered into Bianca's faceplate in very close inspection, perhaps deciding
Bianca, this third day, was more than a chance meeting. "She young, good, strong
come back see you." Melody patted Bianca's leg. "You walk?"
This spring was what Melody meant: mating, the Long Walk, And Bianca didn't
understand. Bianca murmured something about coming from the Base, but Fletcher
blushed behind his mask and said, "Not yet, not yet for us."
Then Bianca was embarrassed. And indignant. "What did you tell her, Fletcher?"
"That I sort of like you," Fletcher said, looking at his feet. And Melody and
Patch flung leaves at them and shrieked in downer laughter.
He did sort of like her. At least he liked what he saw. What he'd imagined he'd
seen in Bianca's willingness to come back here twice. And on that grounds he was
suddenly out of his depth and knew it. He saw v-dramas and vid, and imagined
what it would be like to have a girl who liked you and who'd maybe—maybe be part
of the dream he'd dreamed, of living down here.
He hadn't gotten a lot of biochem done the last two nights.
This wasn't someday. This wasn't just dreaming. When he'd been a juvvie and
thought almost everything was impossible he'd had fantasies of coming down to
the world—he'd stow away on a shuttle. He'd pirate supplies and make an outlaw
dome, and get all the downers on his side.
Then the downers would join them and humans at the Base would never again see a
downer unless he said so. And the stationmasters would have to say, All right,
we'll deal. And he'd be king of Downbelow and Melody and Patch and he together
would run the world.
God, he'd been such a stupid juvvie brat in his daydreams, and now, realtime,
just having embarrassed himself, he had to admit he'd caught another case of the
daydreams almost as fantastical. She was embarrassed; he was. And if you shone
light on some daydreams they evaporated.
No Family girl was going to keep on hanging around him. She was probably just
trying to make Marshall Willett leave her alone. It had been two days of
happiness interspersed with anxiety and a biochem test he might have blown. That
was a pretty good run, as his runs went
He'd sounded like a fool. Reality was the best medicine for a case of daydreams,
and he went off in his acute embarrassment to go over to the water and squat
down and poke at stones at the river-edge, real stones, real world, important
things like that
His real life wasn't like the vids, and daydreams didn't come true for somebody
who wasn't anybody, somebody who for most of his life couldn't guarantee where
he'd be. It was mortally embarrassing to have to go back to your instructors at
school and have to say, with other kids listening, that, no, the reason you
didn't know about the test was your mail wasn't getting to you and, no, you
weren't still living at 28608 Green, you'd moved, and you were back at the
shelter again, or you were out and living with the Chavezes this week.
Then about the time the stupid teacher got the records straightened out you
still weren't getting your e-mail because you "just hadn't worked out" with the
Chavezes. It was pretty devastating stuff when you were eight.
It was doubly devastating if you'd just had a counselor so stupid he didn't even
shut his office door when he was talking about you to your foster parents—who
didn't want you anymore because they were pregnant and thought you'd interfere
with the baby.
It hadn't been fun. The administration eventually changed his psychiatrist to
somebody who still asked stupid questions and put him through the same
getting-to-know-you routine that by then had just about stopped hurting. It had
bored him, by then, because he'd been switched so often, to so many people with
court-ordered forms to fill out, you got a sample of the routines and you knew
by then it was just business, their caring. They were paid to care, by the hour.
The station paid foster-families.
They paid downers, but not in money, and not to take care of stray station kids:
Melody and Patch had cared for him for free.
A hand slipped over his shoulder. He thought it was Melody, and felt comforted.
But it wasn't Melody. It was Bianca who knelt down by him and touched her head
to his so the faceplates bumped edges, and he was just scared numb.
"What's the matter?" she asked. "What did I do?
God, the world was inside out. What did she do? She was kidding. She had to be.
But Bianca hugged her arm around him and he hugged her, and if it wouldn't have
risked their lives he'd have taken the mask off and kissed her.
"Oh," Melody said, from somewhere near. "Look, look, they make love."
"Dammit!" he said, breaking the first ten rules of residency on Downbelow, and
never would willingly curse Melody. He broke his hold on Bianca to rip up a
stick and fling, and double handfuls of flowers. "Wicked!" he cried, thinking
fast, and turning his reaction into a joke.
Melody squatted down, out of range of flower-missiles, and turned solemn,
watching with wide downer eyes. "Fetcher no more sad," Melody said "Good, good
you no more sad"
What did you say? What could you say, in front of the girl you hoped to impress,
and who knew what an ass you'd just been with downers you were here to protect
from human intrusions?
"I love you," he said to Melody, and fractured the rest of the rulebook, "You my
mama, Melody. Patch, you my papa, Love you."
"Baby grow up"Melody said. "Go walkabout soon, make me new baby."
God, what did it say about him, that he was so suddenly, so irrationally hurt?
He shifted about on one knee to see what Bianca thought, but you could hardly
see a human face through the mask.
As she couldn't see his. "Melody used to take care of me," he said to explain
things. The truth, but not all of it. To his teachers and the admin people and
his psychs and everybody, he was just trouble. They had families and Bianca had
Family, and he was always just that boy from the courts.
"Where was this?" Bianca asked, not unreasonably confused.
"A long time back on the station. I got lost, and they sort of—found me. And got
me home." He'd no desire to go into the sordid details. But he couldn't get a
reaction out of her masked face to tell him where he stood in her opinion. He
committed himself, totally desperate, a little trusting of the only girl he'd
ever really gone around with. "I used to sneak into the tunnels, to be with
them. And first thing I wanted when I got down here was to find Melody and
Patch."
"You're kidding." she said.
He shook his head, "Absolute truth."
"Is he making fun?" she asked Melody, breaking the first rule: never question
another human's character.
"He very small, very sad," Melody said, "Long time he sad. You happy he."
Sometimes you didn't know what downers meant when they put words together. He
guessed, with Melody, and thought that Melody approved of Bianca.
"Make he walk lot far," Patch chimed in helpfully,
"This is way too far," she said, teen slang… which you weren't supposed to use,
either. He guessed Bianca was overwhelmed with it all, and maybe adding it up
that she was with a kid who wasn't quite regulation. Or respectable. Or
following the rules. She sat there looking stunned, as far as a body could who
was wearing a mask, and he took a wild chance and put an arm around her.
She pushed him back, sort of, and he let go, fast, deciding he'd entirely
misread her.
But she patted his arm, then, the way they learned to, when they wanted
someone's serious attention,
"I believe you," she said, and slipped her hand down and held his fingers,
making them tingle, just touching her bare skin.
And by sunset walking home, not so long after, she held his hand again.
"I went through the program over in Blue," Bianca said, apropos of nothing
previous as they walked along the river-edge. "Did you ever go to the games?"
"Sometimes."
They had the big ball games on Wednesday nights. And the academy in rich Blue
Sector played schools like his, over in industrial, insystemer-dock White, where
he'd lived with the Wilsons. Sometimes the games ended with extracurricular
riot.
"Isn't it funny, we probably met," Bianca said.
"I guess we could have."
She couldn't imagine, he thought. From moment to moment he was sure she'd turn
on him when she got safely back to the domes and tell everything she'd heard.
But her fingers squeezed his, bringing him out of his fantasies of dismissal and
disgrace. She talked about ball games and school.
He wanted to talk to her about his feelings, At one wild moment he'd like to ask
her if she was as uncertain as he was about the line they'd crossed, holding
hands, walking holding tight to each other.
But what did he say? He felt as if his nerves and his veins were carrying a load
they couldn't survive.
Maybe normal people felt that way. Maybe they didn't. He wasn't ever sure. If
Melody didn't know and peer wisdom didn't say, he didn't know who he could ask.
Damn sure not the psychs.
Two legal papers waited Elene Quen's signature. In the matter pending before the
Court of Pell… lay atop: In final settlement of the aforesaid claim againstthe
merchant ship Finity's End, James Robert Neihart, senior captain, Finity's End,
her crew and company tender 150,000 credits to be held in escrow against all
charges whatsoever and of whatever origin, public or private, as of this date
pending, said amount to be placed in the Bank of Pell to clear all debts of
Fletcher Robert Neihart, a national of Finity's End.
The last descriptive represented a controversy settled at a fraction of the
claim's 14.5 million value. The 150,000 represented a reasonable valuation of
Francesca's intended stay on Pell, one year, plus her medical bills for a normal
birth, excluding interest.
Debt paid. Finity's End simply sent the agreed amount to the Bank of Pell, and
the legal dispute that had troubled all Finity's wartime dockings, was done
with. Further claims and debts of any sort would be judged against that 150,000
fund. It focused the political infighters and their lawyers on a single,
achievable prize, not a kid and his surrounding issues.
She signed the papers, stood up, and gave them to Finity's legal representative,
a young man they called, simply, Blue.
"It's done," she said. And had qualms about the one remaining step in Fletcher's
case. She'd never agreed to a spacer going downworld in the first place; it had
just stopped being easy to prevent him. With some degree of guilt she remembered
how she'd not objected strenuously when, four years ago, she'd become aware
Fletcher's juvenile fascination with downers now aimed at planetary science. The
study program had kept the boy off the police reports and given her four years
without a crisis with Fletcher. And now things came due.
Finity backing in the Council of Captains would build a merchanter ship for the
first time since the Treaty of Pell.
Union wouldn't have its way. That was the down-the-line outcome. Union thought
the Council of Captains couldn't reach a disinterested decision, or a unified
action, or get any two merchant ships to agree.
If Mallory of Norway was right and the black market was in fact Mazian's
pipeline to supply and funds, the notion that ships were slipping over into
Mazian's camp was very disturbing and very plausible. The War had been between
the Earth Company and Union in its earliest days— and the Alliance hadn't yet
existed. Merchanters had declared neutrality in what had been then a small-scale
dispute.
Merchanters had served both sides, excepting those merchanters actively enlisted
as gunships.
Meanwhile Earth had built the Fleet to enforce Earth's hold on the colonies and
to break Union's bid for independence; Earth had typically failed to realize
what it took to sustain a war on that scale, hadn't supplied the Fleet it had
launched, declaring that to be the colonies' job; the Fleet had taken to relying
on merchant shipping— buying off the black market during the War and engaging in
occasional outright piracy even before the Battle of Pell. The Fleet had
alienated the merchanters and it was the merchanters who had risen up against
them to drive them out—out far into the dark, when their bid to take Earth
itself had met Mallory and Union's and merchanter opposition. The Fleet, having
lost all its allies, had had to retreat into deep space… to obtain supply by
means that, indeed, no one had quite proved.
Most merchant ships had dealt with Mazian before the Battle of Pell; and once
James Robert raised the specter of continued merchant supply far more widespread
than anyone had added up, yes, it was chillingly reasonable that some
merchanters, to whom personal independence was a centuries-old ethic, might
still be willing to cut other merchanters' throats by continuing that trade on a
large and knowing scale. That trade, not conducted on station books, had
historically been hard to track—hard to develop statistics on what no station
could observe. And what James Robert suggested was that Mazian had found
large-scale ways to tap into the whole shadow trade, the meetings of ships at
isolated jump-points, where manifests and cargomasters' stamps miraculously
changed, and goods mutated or vanished on their way to the next port, altering
the very records on which the statistics and the tariffs were based.
It was also a network that extended routes beyond what any Station tracked as
regularly existing—no station could maintain records that covered every ship
contact, and every ship movement, when only station calls registered in the
ships' logs. The shadow market was a network where, theoretically, you could buy
anything that moved by ship. Union, with order, had never liked it. Union didn't
want Alliance merchanters serving its far, colonial ports—internal security,
Union insisted. Others said it was because Union didn't want Pell and Earth to
know how rapidly and how far it was expanding. At the same time Union was
aggressively building ships, Union had selected Alliance merchanters it would
allow to reach Cyteen, and favored them with deals designed to provoke divisive
jealousy among merchanters. That increased demands on Pell to lower dock charges
to match the favorable rates Union offered. But now James Robert came saying
that Union should gain its point, and that merchanters should restrict
themselves, and that all stations should lower tariffs in exchange for a
merchanter pledge to conduct all trade inside the tariffs.
That, James Robert implied, or watch the whole Alliance slide blindly into
Mazian's grasp—as she was worried about it sliding into Union hands.
But both of them had to admit that hard times would make some merchanters
desperate enough to trade with the devil—or to call him back as a hero, a savior
from grasping station politicians.
Conrad Mazian, hero. Themselves all as outlaws and traitors. The War renewed. It
wasn't a new thought. Just the resurgence of an old, old worry.
All stakes became far, far higher, in that thought. Union didn't want that
scenario for a future, either.
Finity going back to trade because the War was over? No. She'd lay odds that
there'd been no far-off victory. She'd also lay odds Mallory had sent Finity
back to merchant trade—for one urgent reason, to do exactly what James Robert
had done with her: cut deals only James Robert could cut. He'd evidently come to
her first, to get Pell lined up behind him, counting on her ability to deliver
Pell's vote.
After that, he was going to seek general merchanter approval—and where better to
do it but along the string of stars that were the stations almost Union and
almost Alliance, and doing a delicate ballet of relationship with both,
Mariner. Voyager. Esperance.
Then the merchanters themselves. No station, no government, no military
organization could sway several hundred highly independent merchanter captains
from a trade they thought was their God-given right to conduct, as no one could
get the same merchanter captains to agree to set up other merchanter captains in
business to compete with them. But this man might.
In the vids that came from Old Earth there were blue sky days. There never were
on Downbelow. The clouds had endless patterns, sometimes smooth, sometimes with
bubbled bottoms, sometimes with layers and sheets that traveled at different
speeds in the fierce winds aloft. Great Sun usually appeared through thick
veils—so that if the sun ever did show an edge of fire the downers took it for
an event of great importance.
But while downers revered Great Sun, and wanted to stand in polite respect and
wait for Great Sun's rare appearances, the time between those appearances was
just too long to endure.
So they made the Watchers, great-eyed and reverent statues that sat gazing at
the sky in lieu of living downers.
There were several such statues on a forested hill near the Base, only
knee-high, so you'd trip over them if you didn't know they were there. Two
looked up. One looked a little downward from the hill, and if you looked where
it was looking, you could see the Base itself through the trees,
Fletcher already knew where the site was, so he knew where Melody and Patch were
going when they climbed that hill. He followed, and Bianca trekked after him.
"Where are they going?" Bianca panted And then stopped cold as she saw the
images mostly hidden in the weeds. "Oh,—my."
She was impressed. Fletcher felt a warmth go through him.
"Bring watch sky" Patch said, with a wave of his arm all about. "Good see sky!"
Great view, was what Patch meant, and today it was on the downers' agenda to
look at the sky, for some reason—or maybe to show Bianca this special place, as
they'd shown it to him early last fall,
"It's wonderful," Bianca said "Do they know at the Base, I mean, do they know
this place is here?"
"I don't know," Fletcher said. "It's none of the researchers' business, is it,
if the hisa don't tell."
He had that attitude about it. He didn't know whether if he looked it up on the
computers back at the Base he'd find it was known to the researchers, and
off-limits especially to juniors in the program; but juniors in the program
didn't have personal hisa guides to bring them here, either.
It was a mark of how much Melody and Patch had accepted Bianca, he thought, that
all of a sudden this morning they'd snagged him away from brush-cutting and
wanted him to get Bianca.
"Banky," they'd called her when she came, addressing her directly. "Walk, walk,
walk."
That meant a fair hike. Three walks.
So Bianca had slipped out of her work this morning, too. It was easy. The job
got done sometime today. On the station they'd have had inquiries out after two
teens under supervision who took a morning break.
Here, they found a secret place and watched the clouds scud overhead.
"The clouds are really moving," Bianca said, pointing aloft as they sprawled
flat on their backs beside Melody and Patch. "There must really be a wind up
there."
"Rains come," Melody said, and reached out her hand and held Fletcher's tightly
in her calloused fingers.
Rains. The monsoon.
The weather reports at the Base had been saying there was a low in the gulf, up
from the southern continent But those were advisements relayed from the station;
the station watching from space was never that good about figuring out the
weather—ultimately, yes, the conditions were changing, but they were never
right. There were so many variables that drove the weather, and real
ground-level data came only from four places in the world, from the farms to the
south, the port, from a research station on the gulf shore, and from the Base,
from a primitive-looking little box full of instruments. The staff was in the
habit of joking that if you wanted to know the weather, the downers always knew
and the atmospherics people used dice.
But the clouds were darkening with a suddenness that raised the fine hair on his
arms. The monsoon was coming: born in space as he'd been, even he could feel
disturbance in the sudden change in the sky and in the air. That was why they'd
brought him and Bianca here. Melody and Patch pointed at the sky and talked
about the wind blowing the clouds. Maybe, he thought with a sinking heart, they
were feeling whatever drove downers to go on their wanderings. They would go
into danger in their preoccupation.
Maybe this was the last day he would ever see them. Ever.
"River he go in sky"Patch said with an expansive wave of a furry arm. "Walk with
Great Sun. Down, down, down he fall, bring up flower, lot flower."
Melody inhaled deeply. "Rain smell."
What might rain smell like? He wondered, among other things he wondered, but he
didn't dare risk it even for a second. The clouds were uncommonly gray today,
and if he'd had to guess the hour in the last fifteen minutes he'd think it more
and more like twilight, even though he knew it was noon. In one part of his mind
he was scared and disturbed. In another—he was suddenly fighting off a feeling
it was near dark. An urge to yawn.
A danger sign, if your cylinder was giving out. But he thought it was the light.
Light dimming did that to you, whether it was the mainday-alterday change on
station or whether it was the rotation of the planet away from the sun.
"Feels like night," Bianca said without his saying anything,
"Yeah," he said,
"Rain," Melody said, and in a moment more a fat drop hit Fletcher on the hand,
More hit the weeds with a force that made the leaves move.
"We'd better get back," Fletcher said, He was growing scared of a danger of a
more physical sort, lightning and flood. He'd seen occasional rain, but they'd
all been warned about the monsoon storms, about the suddenness with which floods
could cut them off from the paths they knew—dangers station-born people didn't
know about. From a sameness of weather, highs and lows, days and nights, they
were all of a sudden faced with what informational lectures told him was not
going to be the full-blown monsoon, not all in one afternoon.
Light flashed. Lightning, he thought. He'd rarely seen it except from the safety
of the domes.
Then came a loud boom that sounded right at hand, not distantly as he'd heard it
before. They'd both jumped. And Melody and Patch thought it was funny.
"Thunder," he insisted shakily. He was sure it was. Shuttles broke the sound
barrier, but only remotely from here. "I think we'd better think about moving"
"We take you safe," Melody said, and ran and patted the statues, talked a sudden
spate of hisa language to the statues, and left a single flower with them.
Then they scampered back, grabbed them by a hand apiece, and hurried them back
toward the Base as droplets pelted down, let them go then on their own and just
scampered ahead of them. A strong wind swept through the trees, making a rushing
sound he thought at first was water rushing.
A faint siren sound wailed through the woods, then, over the pelting rain: that
was the weather-warning, late.
The Base itself hadn't seen it coming. Not in time. Someone was scrambling for
the alarm switch. Someone was red-faced.
And they were a long way from shelter.
Chapter IV
Contents - Prev/Next
The adventurer teetered on the edge of a blue-edged pit.
Fell in. Slid, with heart-stopping swiftness, whipped a scary spiral through
stars, and shot out onto an unforgiving desert.
A dinosaur pack was on the horizon. Coming this way.
JR looked around for advantage, kicked the rocks around him.
A purple glow came from under the sand.
That was either another Hell level or a way out. He saw a big rock not so far
away, and moved it with improbable strength. Actinic light flooded up at him
through the sand, and he eased his feet into it. Slid in and down as the dino
pack roared up over his head and lumbering bodies shook the ground. Teeth
snapped and hot breath gusted after him.
Snaky purple ropes sprouted tendrils around him as he shot through the shapeless
black, retarding his fall.
He shot through their grasp and with a sudden drop his tailbone hit a soft
surface. Lights dimmed And brightened. Three times.
Game done.
He took off the helmet, raked a hand through his sweaty hair, and sat there on
the floor below the exit chute, breathing hard for a moment. Shaking. Telling
himself he was safe. Games were good. Games honed the reflexes. And no one's
life depended on him.
The adjacent chute spat out a cousin, Bucklin. And a second one, Lyra.
Equally exhausted, equally shaky. It was a rush, one that didn't mean life and
death, but combat-weary nerves didn't entirely believe it.
"Pretty good, for purple lights," Lyra said, out of breath.
"Yeah."
They hadn't done a vid ride since they were kids—vid rides had existed at
Earth's Sol Station,, but there'd been, thanks to that station's morality
ordinances, only kid themes or mocked-up combat, and they'd seen mostly
youngsters doing the one and wouldn't let their potential pilots do the other.
This ride mandated at least five feet in height, and adult spacers were doing
it, so they'd delved up the chits from their pockets and given it a try, as they
said, to test it out and see whether they'd clear the establishment for the
three youngest cousins.
JR got to rubbery legs. You had to work up there in the sim. Stupid as it all
was, it was, as Lyra had said, pretty good for purple lights and dinosaurs. He
was sweating and breathing hard. And had a few bruises from knocking into real,
though padded, walls.
This place advertised 47 rides, software-dependent. Some were hand-to-hand
combat Some were relaxing. Some were workouts. This one, rated chase-and-dodge,
proved that true. They were still sweating when they went out to a noisy little
soft-bar—no alcohol in this establishment, which had strict rules about doing
the ride straight There was a place down in White Sector that didn't check
sobriety, and that had a lot wilder adult content than the Old Man would like to
know about, JR strongly suspected.
But Finity had been gone from Pell too long, out where they'd been had been real
ordnance, real guns, and it wasn't sex he was principally worried about as an
influence on their youngest crew, although that was a concern with juniors
mentally old enough but physically not. What the Old Man restricted most for the
juniors on moral grounds were the space combat themes and, in the realm of
reality, contact with the rougher element of some docksides. JR, in direct
charge of the juniors, didn't want to let the junior-juniors unsupervised into
any establishment without knowing what the place was like—or (figuring that even
very young Finity personnel had reflexes other people might lack) whether there
were liabilities to other users.
It was fantastical enough, JR judged. The juniors wouldn't confuse it with
reality. It wouldn't give them nightmares—or encourage aggressive behavior.
It didn't mean he and the senior-juniors weren't going to slip down to Red or
White Sector when the junior-juniors were safely in their rooms and see what the
adult fare was like on the seamier side of Pell docks. The senior-juniors, his
own lot, had crossed that line to anything-goes maturity in the seven years
since they'd last made this port. They'd been out where combat was real, and
they'd walked real corridors where surprises weren't computer-spawned. They came
back to their port of registry after seven station-measured years of hard living
and real threats in deep space, and sat and sipped pink fruit drinks in a
soft-bar with painted dinosaurs and garish dragons on the walls as the rest of
their little band found their way out to the bar area and found their table.
Chad, Toby, Wayne, and Sue showed up, sweaty and flushed and admitting it
actually had been a little wilder than they expected.
"Won't hurt the juniors," was JR's pronouncement, between sips of his fruit
juice. Sweet stuff. Almost sickeningly sweet. It brought back kid-days with a
bitter edge of memory.
The whole trip brought back memories, a nightmare that wouldn't quite come
right, because the dead wouldn't come back and enjoy the things they'd known and
shared the last time they 'd been at Pell. A lot of the crew was having trouble
with that, ghosts, almost, the eye tricked, in a familiar venue, into believing
one face was like another face,
Or remembering that you'd been at a theater, and finding your group several
short of a momentary expectation, a memory, a remembrance of things past.
Ghosts, far more vivid than any computer sim… poignant and provoking dreams. But
you had to let them go. At his young age, he knew that. He'd just expected a bit
more…
Dignity,
Pell had been a grim, joyless place during the war, so the seniors said; he'd
seen it make its docks a rowdy, neon-lit carnival in the years since. Now… now
the place had dinosaurs, as if the place had finally, utterly, slipped its
moorings to reality.
So the Old Man said they were going back to trading, making an honest living,
the Old Man said, now that Mazian's pirates had gone in retreat and seemed apt
to nurse their wounds for some little time. At least for now, the shooting war
was over.
So where did that leave them, a combat-trained crew, brightest and best and
fiercest youth of the Alliance?
Testing out the facilities—desperate hard duty it was—that they were going to
let the junior-juniors into. Babysitting.
Well, that was the reversion the Old Man had talked about in his general speech
to the crew. They could have a real liberty this time, the Old Man had said, and
the Old Rules were in effect again, rules that had never been in effect in JR's
entire life, and he was the seniormost junior, in charge of the younger juniors.
The dino adventure was now the level of the judgment calls he made, a little
chance to play, act like fools… or whatever the easy, soft station-bred
population called it, when grown men sweated and outran imaginary dragons, while
paying money for the privilege.
This was station life, not much different than, say, Sol, or Russell's, or any
other starstation built on the same pattern, the same design, down to the
color-codes of its docks, an international language of design and function. Pell
was richer, wilder, fatter and lazier. Pell partied on with post-War abandon and
tried to forget its past, the memorial plaques here and there standing like the
proverbial skeletons at the feast. On this site the station wall was breached…
This was Q sector…
People walked by the plaques, acting silly, wearing outlandish clothes, garish
colors. People spent an amazing amount of money and effort on fashions that to
his eye just looked odd. Station-born kids prowled the docks looking for trouble
they sometimes found. Police were in evidence, doing nothing to restrain the
spacers, who brought in money; a lot to restrain station juveniles, who JR
understood were a major problem on Pell, so that they'd had to caution their own
junior-juniors to carry ship's ID at all times and guard it from pickpockets.
There was so much change in Pell. He couldn't imagine the young fashioneers gave
a damn for anything but their own bodies. His own generation was the borderline
generation, the one that had seen the War to end all wars… and even at
seventeen, eighteen ship-years, now, still a mere twenty-six as stations counted
time, he saw the quickly grown station-brats taking so damn much for granted,
despising money, but measuring everything by it
Hell, not only the station-brats were affected. Their own youngest were quirky,
strange-minded, too fascinated by violence… even shorter of decent upbringing
than his own neglected peers,—and that was going some.
Dean and Ashley showed up. Nike and Connor came next The waiter, forewarned, was
fast with the drinks, while they talked about the strangling plants effect and
the swamp and the engineering.
"Effex Bag," Bucklin said "Same one, I'll bet you." It was a full-body pocket
you dealt with. The things fought back as hard as you could provoke them to
fight, but a feed-back bag was self-limiting and you learned a fair lesson in
morality, in JR's estimation: at least it taught a good lesson about action and
reaction, and the effects here were more sophisticated than the primitive jobs
they'd met in their repair standdown at Bryant's, a notable long time ashore.
The quasi-dangers in any Effex Bag were all your own making. Hit it, and it hit
back, Struggle and it gave it back to you. Go passive and you got a tame, boring
ride,
"Pretty good jolt at the end," Dean said "They drop you real-space."
"Yeah," Nike said "About a meter. Soft."
"Junior-juniors'll like this one" JR said, deciding he couldn't take more of the
pink juice. He listened to his team wondering about trying the Haunted Castle
for another five credits.
Vid games and sims. Earth's cultural tourism run amok.
You could experience a rock riot. Swing an axe in a Viking raid, never mind that
they equipped the opposing Englishmen with Renaissance armor.
The reapplication of the pre-War Old Rules on Finity'sEnd had let them out
without restrictions for the first time in three decades, after the rest of the
universe had been war-free for close to twenty years, and this senior-junior,
listening to his small command discuss castles and dinosaurs, had increasing
misgivings about their sudden drop into civilian life. The fact was, he hadn't
had an unbridled fancy in his life and didn't know what to permit and what to
forbid, but after an education, both tape-fed, and with real books, that had
taught him and his generation the difference between a dinosaur, a Viking and
Henry Tudor, he felt a little embarrassed at his assignment. Foolish folly had
become his job, his duty, his mandate from the Old Man. And here they were,
about to loose Finity's war-trained youngest on the establishment.
Under New Rules or Old Rules, however, they didn't wear Finity insignia when
they went to kid amusements or when they went bar-crawling, or doing anything
else that involved play. It was a Rule that stood. Break it at your peril.
Finity insignia, in a universe of slackening standards, sloppy procedures,
almost-good instead of excellent, still stood for something. Finity personnel
wouldn't be seen falling on their ass in a carnival, not in uniform. But there
was one in his sight at the moment, a junior cousin violating the no-uniforms
rule. He indicated the cousin with a nod, and Bucklin looked.
"That's in uniform," Bucklin declared in surprise.
That was Jeremy, their absolute youngest: Jeremy, who eeled his small body among
the tables of sugar-high youth, wearing his silver uniform and with the black
patch on his sleeve.
He went for their table like a heat-seeking missile.
Business. JR revised his opinion and didn't even begin a reprimand. Jeremy's
look was serious.
"They got Fletcher," was Jeremy's first breath as Jeremy ducked down next to
them, "We got him. They signed a paper."
"Cleared the case?" JR was, in the first breath, entirely astonished. And in the
next, disturbed.
"Well, damn," Bucklin said.
It was more than Bucklin should have said to a junior-junior. But Jeremy's young
face showed no more cheerful opinion.
"What terms?" JR asked. "Is there any word how? Or why?"
"Did he apply to us?" The Fletcher Neihart case had gone on most of his life.
They'd never worked it out. Now with so many things changing, the Rules
upending, the universe settling to a peace that eroded all sensible behavior,
this changed.
"I don't know what they agreed," Jeremy said "I just heard they signed the
papers and he's on the planet or something, but they're going to get him up here
and we're taking him."
How in hell? was the question that blanked other thinking.
They, the junior crew, were not only turned loose among dinosaurs—all of a
sudden they had a station-born stranger on their hands.
"That all you know?" JR said
"Yes, sir, that's all. I just came from the sleepover. Sorry about the patch.
I'm getting out of here."
"This place is on the list," JR said meaning it was all right for
junior-juniors, and Jeremy's eyes flashed with delight that didn't reckon higher
problems.
"Yessir," Jeremy said "Decadent!"
"Vanish," JR suggested And should have added, Walk! but it was too late: Jeremy
was gone at a higher speed than made an inconspicuous exit. Even the
over-sugared teens in this place stared knowing who they were, and seeing that
in this lax new world Finity crew played like fools and sat and drank with the
rest of the human race.
Observers who had jobs besides games might have noticed too, and know that
Finity's seniormost juniors had just gotten a piece of not-too-good news on some
matter. That could start rumors on the stock exchange. If it ricocheted to the
Old Man, the junior crew captain would hear about it.
The junior crew, meanwhile, didn't break out in complaints, just looked somberly
at him—waiting for the word, the junior-official position from him, on a
situation that had just suddenly cast a far more uncertain light not only on
their liberty in this port, but on their whole way of working with one another.
"Well," JR said to his crew, moderately and reasonably, he thought, and trying
to put a cheerful face on the circumstances, "—this should be interesting."
"He's a stationer," was the first thing out of Lyra's mouth.
"He may be," JR said, "but you heard the word. If it's true, we've got him." He
tossed a money card at Bucklin and got up. "Handle the tab. I've got to talk to
the Old Man.
Rain blasted down. The clean-suits were plastered to their bodies as they
hurried down a scarcely existent path, and Fletcher's breath came short. The
light-headedness he suffered said he was needing to change a cylinder, but he
didn't want to stop for that, with the lightning ripping through the clouds and
the rain making everything slippery. They were already going to be late getting
back, and he knew their truancy was beyond hiding.
He had to get Bianca back safely. He had to think of what to say, what to do to
protect himself and her reputation; all the while his breaths gave him less and
less oxygen even to know where he was putting his feet.
His head was pounding. He slipped. Caught himself against a low limb and tried
to slow his breathing so he could get something through the cylinders.
"What's the matter?" Bianca wanted to know. "Are you out?"
"Yeah." He managed breath enough to answer, but his head was still swimming. He
had to change out. The rules said—they were posted everywhere—advise your
partner if you felt yourself get light-headed: if you were alone, shoot off the
locator beeper you weren't supposed to use in anything but life and death
emergency. But they weren't to that point. If he hadn't been a total fool. A
hand against his thigh-pocket advised him he was all right, he'd replaced the
last one—when? Just yesterday?
"Need one?" Bianca's voice was anxious.
"Got my spares. Let's just get there. Don't want to be logged any later than we
are." He kept moving to push a little more out of the cylinders he was using:
you could do that if you got your breathing down.
"They're gone!" Bianca said, then, looking around, and for a second his muddled
brain didn't know what she was talking about. "I didn't see them leave."
He hadn't seen Melody and Patch go, either. Desertion wasn't like them. But
downer brains grew distracted with the spring. Did, even on the station… and was
this it? he asked himself. Was it the time they would go, and had they left him?
Maybe for good? Or were they just scared of the storm?
The lightning flickered hazard above their heads… danger, danger, danger, a
strobe light would say on station. It said the same here, to his jangled nerves.
He walked, lightheaded and telling himself he could make it further without
stopping for a change—at least get them past the place where the trail looped
near the river: that was what scared him, the chance of being stranded or having
to wade. The tapes they'd had to watch on what the monsoon rains did when they
fell chased images through his head, of washouts, trees toppling, the land
whited out in rain.
Melody and Patch, he said to himself, must have sought shelter. There were
always old burrows on the hillsides, and hisa grew afraid when the light faded.
When Great Sun waned, there was no place for His children but inside, safe and
warm and dry.
Good advice for humans, too, but they daren't bed down anywhere but at the Base.
He heard his heart beating a cadence in his ears as, through the last edge of
the woods and the gray haze of rain, he saw the fields and the frames.
"We'll make it," he gasped
"But we're late," Bianca moaned. "Oh, God, we're late!"
They were fools. And Bianca was right, they were going to catch it, catch it,
catch it.
They reached where he'd been working—close to there, at any rate. He'd left a
power saw up on the ridge, and if he didn't have it when he checked in, he'd
catch hell for that, too.
"Keep going!" he said to her. "I'll catch up!" And when she started to protest
he shouted at her: "I left my saw up there. I'll catch up!"
She believed him, but she was arguing about the failing cylinder he'd complained
of, about how he was already short, and he couldn't run. "Change cylinders!" she
said, and held onto him until he agreed and got his single spare out of his
pocket.
Rain was pouring down on them and you weren't ever supposed to get the cylinders
wet, even if they had a protective shell. You got them out of the paper they
were in and all you had to do was shove them in, but you had to keep your head
and eject one and replace one, and then go for the other one. You weren't
supposed to run out of both cylinders at the same time, but he realized he'd
been close to it, and light-headed, as witness, he thought, the quality of his
decisions of the last few minutes.
Bianca tried to help his fumbling fingers, and opened the packet on one cylinder
of little beads. She was stripping it fast to hand it to him and he ejected one
of his.
Her tug on the packet spun the cylinder out of her wet hands and she cried out
in dismay. It landed in water, with its end open. Ruined. In the mask, it would
have survived a dunking. Not outside it.
And he was on one depleted cylinder, with his head spinning.
"All right, all right," he tried to tell her.
"I've got mine," she said, and got out one of her spares, and opened it while he
sucked in hard and held his breaths quiet, waiting for her to get it right, this
time, and give him air enough to breathe.
She got it unwrapped and to his hand this time. Shielding the end from the rain,
he shoved it in, then drew fast, quick breaths to get the chemistry started.
Then the slow seep of rational thought into his brain told him first that it was
working, and second, that they'd had a close call.
He let her give him the second cylinder, then: they still had one in reserve,
hers. You could lend a cylinder back and forth if bad came to worse, but you
never let both go out together.
He was all right and he'd cut it damned close.
"Fletcher?" Bianca said. "I'm going with you. We're down to three. Don't argue
with me!"
"It's all right, it's all right." He pocketed the wrappers: you had to turn them
in to get new ones, or you filled out forms forever and they charged you with
trashing. Same with the ruined cylinder. He was going to hear about it. It was
going on his record.
"Just leave the saw" she pleaded with him. "Say we were scared of the
lightning."
It was half a bright idea.
"We were late because of the cylinders," he said, with a better one, "and we can
still pick up the saw. Come on."
She picked up on the idea, willingly. She went with him down the side of one
huge frame to where he'd been cutting brush. They couldn't get wetter. The
lightning hadn't gotten worse.
It was maybe ten minutes along the curve of a hill to where he'd left the saw in
the fork of a tree. Safe, Waterproof.
But it wasn't there.
For a moment, he doubted it was the right tree. He stood a moment in confusion,
concluding that someone had gotten it, that it might have been—God help him—a
curious downer—a thought that scared him. But it most likely was Sandy
Galbraith, who'd been working not in sight of him, but at least knowing where he
was.
If it was Sandy checking on him and if she'd found the saw but not him, she'd
have been in a bad position of having to turn him in or having to explain why
she had his equipment.
If she'd been half smart and not a damn prig, she'd have left the saw where it
was and pretended she didn't see anything unless she needed to remember.
Damn.
"Sandy probably got it," he said, and that meant they were later and he had to
come up with a story for the missing saw, too.
He'd gone to look for Bianca because of the rain coming, that was it.
"Look," he said, as lightning whitened the brush, and they started slogging back
the ten minute walk they'd come out of the way already. "I'm going to catch hell
if somebody turned it in. What happened was, I knew you were by the river, and I
was worried about the rain, and I ran down there to warn you, and that was why I
left the saw."
She was keeping up with him, walking hard, and didn't answer. Maybe she didn't
like lying to the authorities. Maybe she was mad at him. She had a right to be.
"I know, I know," he said. "I don't want to lie, either, but I didn't plan on
the rainstorm, all right?" That she didn't leap at the chance to defend him made
him—not mad. Upset—because of the cascade of stupid things that had gone wrong.
Maybe he'd spent too much time with psychs in his life, but he could say
'displacement' with the best psych that was out there: he and the psychs had
talked a lot about his 'displacement.' And he was having a lot of displacement
right now, to the extent that if he really, really had the chance to pound hell
out of somebody, he would. He was upset, short of breath, and as they slogged
through the mud washing from the sides of the frame, and on to the road, which
was a boggy mess, he didn't know whether Bianca was mad at him or not. They
didn't have any breath left to talk. They just walked, until they were on the
approach to the domes.
"Remember what you've got to say," he said on great, ragged breaths. "If we've
got the same story they'll have to believe us. I left the saw to go after you
and I was running low on the cylinders and we were taking it slow coming back so
we'd save the cylinders so as not to run without a spare apiece." They didn't
let them have any more than a spare set, but they were supposed to come back to
the Base immediately if they were out without a spare. You were supposed to
stick with your buddy so you could share a set if you had to. And not run. That
part was important. That was the core of the excuse. "Got it?"
"Yes," she said, out of breath.
The domes were close now, veiled in rain as the doors of the admin dome opened
and a figure came out toward them.
Deep trouble, he thought. Administration knew. It was his fault.
JR stepped off the slow-moving ped-cab in front of number 5 Blue Dock, where a
gantry with skeins of lines and a lighted ship-status sign was the only evidence
of Finity's presence the other side of the station wall. Customs was on duty, a
single bored agent at a lonely kiosk who looked up as he came through the gate.
Customs manned such a kiosk in front of limp rope lines at every ship at
dock—and, at Pell, ignored most everything on a crew activity level.
The flash of a passport at the stand, a quick match of fingerprints on a plate,
and he made his way up the ramp, past the stationside airlock and into the
yellow ribbed gullet of the short access tube. The airlock inside took a fast
assessment of the pressure gradient between ship and station and, as it cycled,
flashed numbers and the current sparse gossip at him …I'm moving to the
DarkStar—Cynthia D. Someone had met up with someone interesting, gone off and
advised the duty staff of the fact she wasn't where she'd first checked in.
Finity personnel didn't do much of that.
Hadn't done much of it. Correction.
It was in a lingering sense of uncertainty that he walked out of the airlock and
into the lower corridor of his ship at dock. The Ops office door was open,
casting light onto the tiles outside, a handful of seniors maintaining the
systems that stayed live during dock, and whatever was under test at the moment.
JR put his head in, asked the Old Man's whereabouts.
The senior captain was aboard, was in his office, was at work, would see him.
He went ahead, down the short corridor past Cargo and by the lift into
Administrative. Senior captains' territory. Offices, and the four captains'
residences in B deck, directly above, all arranged to be useable during dock,
when the passenger ring was locked down.
It was a moment for serious second thoughts, even with honest administrative
business on his mind. Business he'd gotten by scuttlebutt, not official
channels.
He was damned mad. He realized that about the time he reached the point of no
retreat. He was just damned mad. He knew James Robert Sr. would have policy as
well as personal reasons for what he'd done. He even knew in large part what the
policy decisions were.
But the result had landed on his section.
He signaled his presence, walked in at the invitation to do so, stood at easy
attention until the Old Man switched off a bank of displays in the dimly lit
office and acknowledged him by powering his chair to face him.
"Sir," JR said. "I've just heard that Fletcher's coming in. Is that official?"
The light came from the side of the Old Man's face, from displays still lit. The
expression time had set on that countenance gave nothing away. The Old Man's
eyes were the reliable giveaway, dark, and alive, and going through at least
several thoughts before the sere, thin lips expressed any single opinion.
"Is it on the station news," James Robert asked, "or how did we reach this
conclusion?"
"Sir, it came on two feet and I came over here stat."
"Sit down."
JR settled gingerly into a vacant console chair.
The silence continued a moment.
"So," James Robert said, "I gather this provokes concern. Or what is your
concern about it?"
"He's in my command." He picked every word carefully. "I think I should be
concerned."
"In what way?"
"That we may have difficulty assigning him."
"Is that your concern?"
"The integrity of my command is a concern. So I came here to find out the
particulars of the situation before I get questions."
Again the long silence, in which he had time to measure his concerns against
James Robert's concerns, and James Robert's demands against him and a very small
rank of juniors.
James Robert's grand-nephew, Fletcher was. So was he.
James Robert's unfinished business, Fletcher was. James Robert said there were
new rules, the new Old Manual they'd been handed, and about which the junior
crew was already putting heads together and wondering.
"The particulars are," James Robert said, "that a member of this crew will join
us at board call. He'll have the same duties as any new junior, insofar as you
can find him suitable training. And yes, you are responsible for him. On this
voyage, with the press of other duties, I have no time to be a shepherd or a
counselor to anyone. In a certain measure, I shouldn't be. He's not more special
than the rest of you. And you're in charge."
"Yes, sir" Same duties as a new junior. A stationer had no skills. His crew,
already unsettled by a change in the Rules, was now to be unsettled by the news.
"I'll do what I can, sir."
"He's not a stationer," James Robert said directly and with, JR was sure, full
knowledge what the complaints would be. "This ship has lost a generation, Jamie.
We have nothing from those years. We've lost too many. I considered whether we
dared leave him—and no, I will not leave one of our own to another round with a
stationer judicial system. We had the chance, perhaps one chance, a favor owed.
I collected. We are also out from under the 14.5 million credit claim for a Pell
station-share."
"Yes, sir." Clearly things had gone on beyond his comprehension. He didn't know
what kind of an agreement might have hammered his cousin loose from Pell's
courts. He understood that, along with all other Rules, the situation with Pell
might have changed.
"So how far has the rumor spread?" James Robert asked him.
On Jeremy's two feet? Counting the conspicuous dress? "I think the rumor is
traveling, sir, at least among the crew. It came to me and I came here. Others
might know by now. I'd be surprised if they didn't."
"Jeremy."
"Yes, sir."
"Let a crew liberty without a five-hour check-in and they think the universe has
changed. Drunken on the docks, I take it, when this news met you."
"No, sir. Fruit juice in a vid parlor."
The Old Man could laugh. It started as a disturbance in the lines near his eyes
and traveled slowly to the edges of the mouth. Just the edges. And faded again.
"Life and death, junior captain. Ultimately all decisions are life and death.
It's on your watch. Do you have any objections? Say them now."
"Yes, sir," he said somberly. "I understand that it's on my watch."
"The generations were broken," James Robert said. "From my generation to yours
there was birth and death. There was a continuity—and it's broken. I want that
restored, Jamie."
"Yes, sir," he said.
"You still haven't a chart, have you?"
"Sir?"
"You're in deep space without a chart. We didn't entirely get you home."
He understood that the Old Man was speaking figuratively, this business about
charts, about deep space, expressions which might have been current in the Old
Man's youth, a century and more ago.
"Too much war," James Robert said. The man who, himself, had begun the War,
talked about charts and coming home. About charts for a new situation, JR
guessed. But home? Where was that, except the ship?
The Old Man got up and he got up. Then the Old Man, still taller than most of
them, set his hand on his shoulder, a touch he hadn't felt since he was, what?
Ten. The day his mother had died—along with half of Finity's crew.
"Too many dead," the Old Man said. "You'll not crew this ship with hire-ons when
you command her. You'll run short-handed, you'll marry spacers in, but you'll
never let hire-ons sit station on this ship, hear me, Jamie?"
The Old Man's grip was still hard. There was still fire in him. He still could
send that fire into what he touched. It trembled through his nerves. "Yes, sir,"
he said faintly, intimately, as the Old Man dealt with him.
"I've given you one of your cousins back. I've agreed to Quen's damned
ship-building. It was time to agree. It's time to do different things. Time for
you, too. You're young yet. You—and this lost cousin of ours—will see things and
make choices far beyond my century and a half."
"Yes, sir." He didn't know what the Old Man was aiming at with this talk of
crewing the ship, and building ships for Quen of Pell. But not understanding
James Robert was nothing new. Even Madison failed to know what was on the Old
Man's mind, sometimes, and damned sure their enemies had misjudged what James
Robert would do next, or what his resources were.
"Making peace," the Old Man said, "isn't signing treaties. It's getting on with
life. It's making things work, and not finding excuses for living in the past.
Time to get on with life, Jamie."
The Old Man asked, and the crew performed. It wasn't love. It was Family. And
Family forever included that gaping, aching blank where a generation had failed
to be born and half of them who were born had died. It was the Old Man reaching
out across those years of conflict and training for conflict—and saying to their
generation, Make peace.
Make peace.
God, with what? With a station obsessed with games and dinosaurs? With Union
more unpredictable as an ally than it had been as an enemy?
That prospect seemed suddenly terrifying in its unknowns, more so than the War
that had grown familiar as an old suit of clothes. The universe, like his whole
generation, was in fragments and ruin.
And the Old Man said, without saying a word, Do this new thing, Jamie. Go into
this peace and do something different than you've ever imagined in the day you
command.
He was back on that cliff again. Jump off, was James Robert's clear advice. Try
something different than he'd ever known.
And to start the process, of all chancy gifts, the Old Man gave him the new Old
Rules and a rescued cousin who wasn't any damn use to the ship except the bare
fact that getting Fletcher back closed books, saved the Name, prevented another
disaster in Pell courts.
And maybe redeemed a promise, a loose end the Old Man had left hanging.
Francesca herself had shattered, lost herself in a fantasy of drugs. But she'd
kept her kid alive and under her guardianship, always believing, by that one
act, that they'd come back.
Now they had. Maybe that was what the Old Man was saying, his message to Pell,
to everyone around them.
They'd come back. They'd kept the ship alive. They'd survived the War. And no
one had ever believed they'd do that much.
Chapter V
Contents - Prev/Next
There was no chance to slip into the domes unnoticed. Administration had come
looking for the two of them, an irritated Administration in the form of one of
the seniors, who stood suited up and rain-drenched, waiting as they came
breathlessly up the path.
"Ran out of cylinder" Fletcher began his story before Bianca had to say a thing.
"It was my fault. I left my saw." They weren't supposed to leave power tools
where hisa could get them in their hands. Responsible behavior was at issue. "We
went back after it and ran low on time. Somebody must have taken it on in.
Sorry."
The rain made a deafening lot of noise. The mask hid all expression. The man
from Staff Admin waved a hand toward the women's dorm."Get in out of the rain,"
he told Bianca. Then: "Neihart, you come with me."
It clearly wasn't the casual dismissal of the case he'd hoped for. It didn't
sound even like the forms and reports to fill out that led to a minor reprimand.
The staffer led him toward the Administration dome.
So they nabbed him as responsible and sent the Family girl off without a
reprimand. He was both glad they had put the responsibility on him—he'd talked
Bianca into going out there—and resentful of a system settling down on him with
familiar force. He figured he was on his own now, in more serious trouble than
he'd bargained for, and as he walked he calmly settled his story straight in his
head, the sequence, the way it had to work to make everything logical. He'd done
no harm. He could maintain that for a fact. He had hope of calming things down
if he just kept his head.
They walked in through the doors, out of the rain. And the senior staffer—the
name was Richards, but he didn't remember the rest—waved him through to the
interview room, where you could deal with Admin without going through decon, if
you didn't have long business there. It was a room where you could go in and
talk to someone through a clean-screen, or apply for a new breather-cylinder, or
fill out paperwork.
Left alone there, he sat on one of the two hard plastic chairs, rather than
appear to pace or fret: he was onto psychs with pinhole cameras. He knew the
tricks. He sat calmly and wove himself a vivid, convincing memory of seeing a
team member by the river when the rain started, a stand of trees that was real
close to the water, where somebody could get cut off by rising water.
Yes, he'd been stupid in leaving the saw: if you were dealing with
administrators, you always had to admit to some little point where you'd been
stupid and you could promise you'd never do that again, so they'd be happy and
authoritative. They could say he'd learned a lesson—-he had—and he'd be off the
hook. He'd learned a long time ago how to make people in charge of him go off
with a warm glow, having Saved him yet again and having Made Progress with their
problem child. He had the mental script all made out by the time the director
walked in from the other side of the transparent divider and sat down,
sour-faced, on the other side of the desk.
His bad luck it was Nunn; he had rather it had been the alterday director,
Goldman, who had a little more sense of humor.
Nunn had brought a paper with him. Nunn passed it through the little slot in the
divided desk.
"Mail, Mr. Neihart."
Mail? Complete change of vectors.
Different problem. Stupid change of direction. What was this, anyway?
Station trouble? If it was mail for him it was either his last set of foster
parents upset about something or it was lawyers. And a first glance at the
address at the top of the folded fax sheet said Delacorte & McIntire.
Lawyers.
His sixth set of lawyers. Four had resigned his case. Two had retired, grown old
in his ongoing legal problems. He went through lawyers almost faster than he'd
gone through foster-families.
Nunn was clearly waiting for him to read it in front of him and wanted some kind
of reaction. Admin had to know every time you sneezed down here and every time
you had a cross word with anybody. The rules that protected the downers didn't
let anybody go around them who had any personal or job problems, and if the
letter was anything the director considered bad news, he'd be yanked off duty
till he'd been a session with the psych staff.
Which with his other problems wasn't good. So he prepared himself to be very
calm, no matter what, and to convince the man there wasn't a thing in relation
to any human being or situation on Pell Station that could possibly upset him.
Except—the one thing that reliably could upset him.
Finity was in port. Here they went again. Seven years since the last lawsuit
from that quarter.
None of them, he told himself, had ever meant a thing.
The lawyers' letter said, after that opening tidbit: This is to apprise you… ran
down to: refiling of the petition to the Superior Court of Pell; and, like a
high-speed impact: The official reopening of your case ...
He read it to the end. McIntire wanted him to be aware, that was all: the legal
wars were starting again. They'd want depositions. Maybe another psych exam.
Dammit, he was one year short of past all this: one year short of his majority,
and they could mandate another psych exam, see whether his best interests were
being served… that was the way they always put it. His best interests.
Only this time—this time he wasn't exactly within walking distance of his
lawyer's office.
"They want you to take the next shuttle up," Nunn said. "Tomorrow."
He folded it again as it had been and gave it back to the director in the
pretense that the director hadn't read it first.
And he tried to assume a nonchalance he didn't feel, while his heart raced and
his mind scattered. "That's ridiculous. Respectfully, sir. That's ridiculous.
How much money are they going to spend on this?"
"They want you to take the flight."
"For a week on station? Two, at max? This is stupid. They do it whenever they're
in port. Don't they know that? This isn't any walk down to the court."
"Do you resent it? Do you think it's unfair?"
Oh, that was a psych question. Nunn wasn't real clever at it.
"I'm not real happy," he said calmly. "They don't say a thing about how long I'm
going to stay up there."
"Well, their idea, of course, is that you'll board their ship, isn't it?"
A cold day in hell was what he thought. Nunn's calm voice made his skin crawl.
"They sue every time they're in port. They always lose. It's just a waste of
time and money. They're worried because the station wants them to buy me a
station-share. They don't want to spend fourteen million. So everybody sues.
That's what this is about."
There was a little silence, then, a troublesome silence. He hadn't a notion why,
just—Nunn looked at him, and for some reason he thought Nunn knew something Nunn
wasn't telling him.
The man wanted him on that shuttle, and they wanted to get him out of here, that
was the first consideration. And if Bianca's family on the station had heard
about him and knew his history—God knew what strings they could pull. The
trouble he'd thought he was in for being late back from the field was nothing
against this trouble. And he didn't dare let Nunn see how upset he was. If you
were emotionally upset they sent you away from the downers. Fast.
A seventeen-year-old with no credentials in the program and a continuing
prospect of emotional upset? They'd send him Upabove with no return ticket. And
lawyers couldn't help him. Not even the court could overrule the scientists in
charge of downer welfare.
"I'd better go pack." His voice almost wobbled. He turned a breath into a
theatric sigh and cast Nunn the kind of exasperated, weary look he'd learned to
give police, lawyers, judges, authority in general. He didn't break into a sweat
and he didn't blow up. "So where's the shuttle schedule?" He feared one was
onworld. It was midweek. One should be. "What time does the shuttle go?"
"Tomorrow morning. You'd better pack all your stuff, all the same. Oh-seven
hundred, weather permitting, the car will pick you up at the dorm."
"Yes, sir," he said. He wasn't going to have days to get ready, then. And, pack
all your stuff. Nunn thought he'd be staying Upabove, then.
He'd think of something. He'd surprise them.
He'd make them fly him back.
Make them. He hadn't had a great deal of luck making anybody do anything. He'd
gotten in here only because he'd been a straight, clean student since he'd
reformed, and because he'd half-killed himself scoring high on the exams, but
that was getting into the program. Now, in a lawsuit, they weren't going to look
at his future. They were going to look at his past, which was nothing but
trouble. All his records were going to end up in court, public. They were going
to ask how somebody with a juvenile record had gotten into the program in the
first place. Everything he'd lived down was going to reappear. All his records.
A drug-dosing mother. All his sessions with station cops. His psychs had vouched
him clear of that; if only he could show a clean record in his work down here he
might have a chance.
Instead he'd lost equipment and been late. He'd picked one hell of a time to
slight the rules down here… with the lawsuit coming up again, and himself going
under the psychological microscope again to try to prove, no, he couldn't go to
space, he wasn't fit to go to space. He was too fragile to be deported.
How could he simultaneously prove he was rehabbed enough to be down here and not
fit to go with his relatives and get shot at along with his mother's ship?
And what did he say when they asked him what he'd been up to reporting late? I
lost my head? I was infatuated with a girl? And drag Bianca's name into it, and
let her Family in on it?
He hated his relatives with a fury beyond reason. He hated all humanity at the
moment.
He went out the doors, one after another, realizing, in a colder panic since the
test that brought him here, that they—the they in station administration who
lifelong had ordered him around—could now get him up to the station for their
own convenience in their lawsuit, but they might not get around to bringing him
back all that quickly, even if all things were equal and he hadn't just gotten
Bianca Velasquez into trouble—a shuttle ticket up, they'd pay for. Down, he
couldn't afford. That meant even if things went absolutely flawlessly, his
lawyers were going to have to sue to make them send him back, which would take
time, a lot of time.
They could ruin his life while they messed around and made up their minds. They
were ruining his life, just filling out their damned forms and sending him up to
the station again because the law said he had to be in court to say so.
Seven hundred hours. That was when the shuttle broke dock, flew, did whatever it
did. He heard the shuttles go over in the early mornings when the staff was
having breakfast. They'd roar overhead and people would stop talking for a few
beats and then they'd go on with their conversations.
Where's Fletch? they'd say tomorrow morning.
Bianca would miss him for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.
But what good would it do?
He'd never see Melody and Patch again, and they damned sure wouldn't understand
where he'd gone. The monsoon was coming. They could die in their long walk and
he wouldn't be here, he wouldn't know.
Rain washed over him and lightning whitened the door of the men's dorm as he
opened it and shoved his way through into the entry. In a shattered blur of
white he saw the usual pile of clean-suits for the cleaning crew to take, all
the masks hanging, clustered on their pegs. His mask should join them. He should
unsuit, go in, pack, as he was told.
But he didn't want to unsuit. Not yet. Not yet for going inside and facing the
questions he'd get from supervisors and the others in the program when he
started packing up. Emotions would answer. And that was no good, not for him,
not for his future. He wanted an hour, one hour, to walk in the rain—just to get
himself together, not to have a fight with Marshall Willett on his record.
And he'd reported to the Base. He'd checked in with Admin. He wasn't on anyone's
list as missing any longer. You could be outside. There wasn't a curfew on. If
he wanted to get wet, it was his choice, wasn't it?
His mask was on one cylinder.
Hell, he thought, and opened another mask, one on the pegs, and borrowed one, in
the thought he'd annoy someone, but nothing against the necessity of getting
himself a chance to cool down before he had to deal with anybody.
Then, to be safe, he borrowed one from another mask—it would risk whoever it was
to take both, in case they were stupid enough to ignore how light the mask was
and go out thinking they were set…
But then he wasn't as trapped. And in a fit of anger he raided a third and a
fourth mask. A fifth and a sixth. He wouldn't be trapped. He was going to miss
that shuttle. Maybe his lawyers could fight it through the court: they'd take
his side, and it was time for them to earn their station-given stipend. Get
himself up there in reach and some court order could get him set aboard his
relatives' ship, and then no court order could get him off. That was one
thought. The other was that right now he wanted not to have to see Marshall's
smug face and that most of all he wanted not to have to tell Bianca that he was
sorry, he wasn't like other people, lawyers owned him and they could deport him
if the courts didn't rule he was mentally unstable.
In which case they'd throw him out of the program anyway, and the station would
give him some makework job because his mental state made him unemployable at
anything else he was qualified to do.
He resettled his mask. He'd stuffed his pockets with cylinders until they
wouldn't hold any more. He walked out the door into the rain and the lightning
of a world that, until a quarter hour ago, had been happy and promising him
everything he could ever want.
He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.
If they caught him he could still lie and say he'd left the saw and only then
remembered it and didn't want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record.
He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.
But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he'd been snatched up
by the system. He'd usually had enough of whatever home they'd put him into, and
it was certain by the time he'd heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro
and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn't maintain
an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a
judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life,
and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.
And you'd say, in a high childish voice, That's a lie! And sometimes the court
believed you, but by then you knew it wasn't better, and wouldn't ever be
better, and things that hadn't been broken before the lawyers got into it would
be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was
anything left of ties to that family he'd break it up in his own stupid
actions—he'd go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back,
maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after
Melody had told him that truth about himself. He'd always come out of the
hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—
This time it wasn't anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he'd
lose. This time it was everything he'd ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch
themselves.
Just Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only
living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid
and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason
liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of
'people' the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he
thought about it, it wasn't a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was
seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it
was valid.
Bianca was what he'd say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his
motives for making trouble. He'd say, I've been working on developing
relationships. That was one of their own phrases. They'd like that. You couldn't
use words like transference and displacement, because they knew you were
psyching them when you did that, but relationships was a word that you could
use. He'd say he was just working things out about relationships—
The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had
to take now and couldn't help himself. He couldn't bear for the court psychs to
get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in
the order he controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If
they found out about Melody and Patch they'd dice that up, too, until, like his
foster-families, there wasn't any clean feeling left.
And he'd told Bianca. She knew. She'd talk. People always did, when the psychs
wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.
"You!" someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry.
Somebody had seen him. And he ran. He knew that he'd made a choice the moment
he'd started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn't stop.
"Come back here!" the staffer shouted. Desperate.
So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid
him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up
with the need for oxygen and started feeding him CO².
Red and gray warred in his vision. He slowed only because he had to. He walked,
blind and gasping, because he knew someone was behind him who might not run as
fast, but who'd be there, nonetheless.
The river roared beside him, swollen with the falling rain. When the man chasing
him got the notion he couldn't find him in the thicket and went back to report
that there was a fool out running in the woods, they'd send out more people with
more cylinders to look for him in a systematic way.
Old River's rising might cut them off, cover his tracks, keep him safe.
Old River he strong, Melody would say, Old River he drink all, all down he
catch.
Old River was both friend and enemy, god and devil to the hisa, stronger than
human courts or decrees or all the forces the Base could bring to bear. It might
kill him, but he didn't care. He knew he was stupid for running, and right now,
he didn't care. Back there at the Base, in the next few minutes, the word would
get around. Where's Fletch? Where's Fletch, the buzz would start. And then
they'd all start saying it.
And he didn't want to be there to hear it. Yes, they'd have the people out
searching. But slower than they'd be out searching, under other circumstances.
Their masks were missing cylinders. They'd have to fill out all that paperwork,
do all those reports. It gave him a strange, light-headed satisfaction. Die?
They wouldn't. Be inconvenienced? A lot. He felt a light-headedness not from
shortness of air, but from a single moment of victory he knew he'd pay for.
He'd worked all his life to get here, and in the end, it wasn't lawyers that
took him away, it was himself, because he'd blown it—and chosen to blow it—at
least he'd chosen it. Stealing those cylinders and running, that wasn't going to
be a minor rules infraction. But it was a choice, damn them all. It was his
choice. When things fell apart, he at least had that to say.
Lightning flashed and thunder cracked right above his head, above the tops of
the trees. His heart jumped and his knees wobbled with the adrenaline rush it
gave him. A planet's surface where electricity flew around like a loose power
line, that was a dangerous thing: water coursed beside the path, not tame Old
River any longer, but a rough-surfaced flood, Old River in one of his killing
moods.
Old River he mad, the downers would say.
Old River he catch you foot, drag you down. Melody had warned him of the
treachery of soft banks among the very first things she'd ever warned him when
he came to the planet. Old River was the devil who always lurked to take the
unwary, and Great Sun was the god—if downers had a religion. Which human experts
argued about in stupid technicalities.
You couldn't ask the downers that. They said if you asked you'd give them ideas
and it might pervert the whole course of downer development, turning it toward
something human.
So what were the domes, fools? Puffer-balls? Nature falling from the sky? They
didn't know about Old River. They recorded downer beliefs about Old River, they
knew the words, but Old River wouldn't cover for them, wouldn't protect them,
wouldn't take care of them, father and devil both.
He'd told Bianca—he'd told Bianca—his thoughts were tumbling wild as the water
near his foot—to say that they were late because he'd gone back to see about the
saw. Wasn't that what they'd agreed to say? That was what she'd have said, if
they went to her. As they would. He'd thought through so many variations on the
lie he'd confused himself.
But that was it, wasn't it? She was supposed to say that, if they questioned her
about being late. So he couldn't use the saw excuse.
He could say, well, he wasn't sure where he'd put the saw, and he remembered
later putting it somewhere else and he wanted to find it—
The hell, after that interview with Nunn? after being told to pack up?
He could still make a case for himself, he could say he'd just been that shaken
and wanted to keep his record clear in case he and Bianca had just missed
finding it out here, but, damn, nobody was going to believe that, and he was
never going to get reassigned down to the Base, never again. He'd blown all the
trust, all the credit he had for common sense…
His foot went in. Cold water pressed the one-way fabric to his leg, and,
sweat-osmosed, a trickle got through and into his boot before, one hand holding
a branch, the other braced against the moss, he hauled himself out and up to
squat on the bank.
Close. Soberingly close. Adrenaline had spiked. It fell, now, leaving tremors,
leaving a side aching and lungs burning with effort.
He knew he'd be smarter to go back on his own, and say—just say he was spooked,
and he'd been a fool, but he'd come back on his own, hadn't he?
If he was Marshall Willett, he'd get a second chance, no problem. Mama and papa
would buy it for him, pull strings, use up favor-points, and Marshall would get
one more chance. But he was Fletcher Neihart, a spacer-brat, son of no one, and
he'd used up all his second chances just surviving his mother's inheritance.
Disaster. The kid had run. Spooked. Elene Quen had the report on her desk, a
personal fax from Nunn, down at the Base, and she sat staring at it, reading it
for any wisdom she could get from it.
Damon had been upset with what she'd done in getting the court order.
Not as upset as she'd expected about the fact of her trading her influence on
Pell for Finity's support: that was a merchanter way of doing business and it
regarded merchanter relations. It was diplomacy, in which diplomats used every
card they had to use and did it in secrecy.
But about what she'd traded, about interference with the Children's Court, he'd
been unexpectedly upset—a distress about the boy's case which she hadn't
predicted, and still, after all these years on station, didn't understand. Damon
was a lawyer, before anything, and believed in processes of law as important for
their own sake, a viewpoint she flatly didn't share in her heart of hearts—only
took his advice, generally, when she crossed from port law, which she did
understand, into station law, which she detested on principle. Perhaps that was
the heart and soul of what was at issue.
The fact that Finity had a right to the boy? In Damon's eyes, that might be
disputable. In her eyes, that was absolute. That the station court had
repeatedly held against that right? In her mind, that was an outrage. Not her
outrage, because it wasn't her ship—she ain't my ship, she ain't my fight was
the rule on dockside—but now a deal had set her firmly on Finity's side in the
matter.
Process for its own sake? Importance of the process? The law might be Damon's
life. But it was an ornament, a baroquerie of station life. In space it just
might kill you.
Maybe, now, by the facts in this report, she'd just lost a kid, following the
station's damned processes. A letter from the boy's independent lawyers, acting
in his interest, had gotten to Nunn before her letter, and dammit, Nunn had
handed that letter to the kid and then let that kid walk out the door, trusting
he was dealing with a stationer mentality who'd tamely, because it was the
orderly thing to do, walk over and pack his belongings and surrender to the law.
Hell if. Fletcher Neihart might have lived on a station, but he hadn't been
brought up by Nunn's rules or Damon's law, not for the first five years of his
life. Not so long as Francesca Neihart had had her kid in hand. He might have
been born on a station, stuck on a station, educated on a station, but one
stationer family after the other had come back to the Children's Court saying
they couldn't handle him.
Now, enterprising lad, he'd stolen a bunch of cylinders, each one about eight
hours of oxygen—if you didn't push it. Three, or less, if you pushed it hard.
And a scared, mad kid didn't know moderation. The cylinders weren't fresh ones,
either. They added up the total use-hours from work records on the people he'd
stolen them from and came up with three days if he was pushing it.
The kid was trying to wait till Finity had left port, was what he was doing: he
was doing things that weren't totally bright on an adult level but that made
perfect sense to a kid She'd brought up two of her own, she knew station-born
sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from personal and recent experience, and right
now the desire to shake the runaway till his teeth rattled mingled with the fear
that spacer directness and stationer legality together might have pushed
Francesca's kid into deeper danger than his limited experience could comprehend.
The fact was, Fletcher Neihart was trying to stand off the whole Alliance court
system and her authority simultaneously, and he was doing a pretty good job of
it—because a starship couldn't sit at dock extra days. Finity couldn't wait. It
had schedules, obligations, operations, God knew, critical operations, with
desperate issues at stake. Fletcher was a Neihart. And he was holding off the
lot of them. Like mother, like son, and like the legendary man whose name he
carried.
And if Nunn had lost that kid, if thanks to people she'd put in charge of
critical operations, station management didn't deliver a live body to Finity
before undock, she would be in a hell of a mess. The agreement she and James
Robert had made for good and solid reasons of policy might stand, but the
decades-long friendship she had with the politically essential Neiharts might
not survive the event.
Hell of a thing for the kid—who right now was wandering a Downbelow woods on
three days worth of cylinders, in a state of mind she could more accurately
imagine than any court could. She knew what it was to be ripped loose from
everything and set adrift in a world that was never going to make gut-level
sense.
But she hadn't done wrong in signing the order or anything else she'd arranged
with the Neiharts of Finity's End. She was right—ethically, morally,
historically right. Leave things to Damon's precious law, and the whole human
race could go down the chute. They'd come near enough in the last phase of the
War: nobody had thrown a planet-buster, but they'd lost a station. They'd nearly
lost two. They could lose a planet the next time the human race went to war. In
order to prevent that happening, she had no illusions. Her enemies claimed she
wanted to destroy Union. That was so. But practically she knew she couldn't do
that. In plain diplomatic reality, the Merchanters' Alliance had to keep the
tight balance of power between themselves and Union, and they had to keep it
balanced no matter how frightening and uncomfortable the attempts of Mazian to
destabilize the Alliance and rebuild his power base, no matter the near-time
choices in terms of her political future, even of her own determination to save
the Quen name—let alone one kid's personal wishes about his domicile.
Fight the microbattles, the ones on paper, on conference tables, sometimes in
public posturings—so they never, ever had to fight another hot war or—the
alternative—lose what was human by acquiescing to Union's high-speed
expansionism.
Instant populations. Cultures planned and programmed by ReseuneLabs on Cyteen.
Ariane Emory. That was what she was fighting, with no knowledge even of their
enemy's internal workings, not at the level they needed in order to make
negotiation work. Emory was a name she knew very well, but the tight control
Union had maintained over ships near Cyteen had limited what she knew. She
planned in the absence of good intelligence information.
Time was what they had to gain. They'd faced, in Azov, in Emory, a faceless
enemy. An alienated humanity Earth had alienated over centuries. An alienated
humanity that didn't operate by the same rules. The very history and process
Damon venerated didn't work out there in the Beyond.
The Fletcher Neiharts of the universe, along with her longtime problem child,
were precious, every one of them. Her throwaway problem couldn't live under
Pell's law… and now that she devoted half an hour's sustained consideration to
the boy as he'd grown to be, she knew why he'd been inconvenient all his
life—that he couldn't thrive in a sealed bubble of a never-changing, zero-growth
world where every decision was for the status quo. He couldn't live in it unless
and until the system crushed him—and she had never let it do that. The
mentalities to respond to the problems Cyteen posed the rest of humanity
couldn't come out of Pell. Neither, for what she could see, could that response
come out of Earth, whose distance- and culture-blinded dealings had driven
Cyteen to become the alien culture it was in the first place.
She had such a narrow, narrow window in which to give a civilization-saving
shove at the clockwork of the system—in things gone catastrophically wrong
between Earth and its colonies in the earliest days of Earth's expansion
outward. The timeliness that had brought her Finity's End in its mission to
reconcile merchanters and Union was the same timeliness that demanded the
Alliance finally wake up to the economic challenge Union posed. It was the
pendulum-swing of the Company Wars: they'd settled the last War, they'd banded
together and shoved hard at the system to get it to react in one way; now the
reactionary swing was coming back at them, the people with the simplistic
solutions, and they had to stand fast and keep the pendulum from swinging into
aggressive extremism on one hand and self-blinded isolationism on the other.
She hadn't forever to hold power on Pell: a new election could depose her inside
a month. People too young to have fought the War were rabble-rousing, stirring
forces to oppose her tenure, special interests, all boiling to the top.
And they might topple her from the slightly irregular power she held if she'd
just killed a kid. James Robert Neihart hadn't forever to live in command of
Finity's End. He was pushing a century and a half, time-dilated and on rejuv.
Mallory's very existence was at risk every time she stalked the enemy, and she
never ceased
At least one set of hands on the helm of state were bound to change in twenty
years. That was a given, and God help their successors. Madison, James Robert's
successor, was a capable man. He just wasn't James Robert, and his word didn't
carry the Old Man's cachet with other merchanters.
The whole delicate structure tottered. Time slowed. Finity's End would have to
wait on a teenaged boy to come to his senses… or lose him, to its public
embarrassment, and her damnation, as things were running now.
And damn him, damn the kid
They lost him, the word floated through the meetings of Finity personnel on
dockside, and there were quiet meetings in cafes, in bars, in the places seniors
met and the junior- seniors could go, circumspectly. JR heard it from Bucklin in
one of those edge-of-reputable places you couldn't go with the juniormost
juniors. The honest truth, because he couldn't sort out how he felt about them
losing Fletcher, was that he was glad it was only Bucklin with him.
All the Old Man's hopes, he thought To start this voyage by finally losing
Fletcher…
What you want to happen, the saying went… What you want to happen is your
responsibility, too. He'd heard that dictum at notable points in his life, and
he wasn't sure how he felt right now.
Guilty, as if he'd gotten a reprieve, maybe. As if the entire next generation of
Neiharts had escaped dealing with a problem it could ill afford.
I will not lie. I will not cheat. I will not steal. I will never dishonor my
Name or my ship…
That pretty well covered anything a junior could get into. And as almost not a
junior, and in charge of the rest of the younger crew, he was responsible,
ultimately responsible for the others, not only for their physical safety, but
for their mental focus. If there was a moral failure in his command, it was his
moral failure. If there was something the ship had failed to do, that attached
to the ship's honor, the dishonor belonged to all of them, but in a major way,
to him personally.
The ship as a whole had all along failed Fletcher. His mother individually and
categorically had failed him.
And what was the woman's sin? A body that had happened to carry another Neihart
life, at a time when the ship hadn't any choice but put her ashore, because to
fail the call Finity's End had at the time hadn't been morally possible.
Finity's End had always been the ship to lead, the ship that would lead when
others didn't know how or where to lead; and she'd had both the firepower and
the engines to secure merchanter rights on the day that firepower became
important, when some ship had had to follow Norway to Earth.
It was impossible to reconstruct the immediacy of the decisions that had gotten
Francesca Neihart into her dilemma. It was certain that they'd had to go to
Norway's aid, and as he'd heard the story, they'd vowed to Francesca, leaving
her on Pell, that they'd be back in a year.
But it had been more than that single year, it had been five; and in that
extended wait, Francesca had failed, or whatever was happening to her had
conspired against her sanity. He didn't himself understand whether it was the
dubious pregnancy or the overdoses of jump drugs she'd taken while she was
ashore, or whether by then Francesca had just consciously chosen to kill
herself.
And worse, she'd done it with a kid involved, a Finity kid, that the station
wouldn't, in repeated tries and reasoned appeals and lawsuits, give back to
them.
In the sense that he was related to that kid and in the sense that he'd talked
himself into accepting responsibility for that kid, he felt a little personal
tug at his heart for Fletcher Neihart, his might-have-been youngest cousin who
was lost down there. The three hundred six lives that Finity had lost in the
War—three hundred seven if you counted Francesca, and he thought now they
should—were hard to bear, but they were a grief the whole ship shared. The most
had died in the big blow when the ship's passenger ring had taken a direct hit.
Ninety-eight dead right there. Forty-nine when they'd pulled an evasion at
Thule. Sixteen last year. Since they'd left Francesca, half the senior crew was
dead, Parton was stone blind, and forty-six more had some part of them patched,
replaced or otherwise done without. Juniors had died, not immune to physics and
enemy action. His mother, his grandmother, three aunts, four uncles and six
close cousins had died.
So on one level, maybe those of them who'd been under fire for seventeen years
were a little short on sympathy for Francesca, who'd suicided after five years
ashore. But in figuring the hell the ship had lived through, maybe no one had
factored in what Pell had been during those years. Maybe, JR said to himself,
she'd died a slower death, a kind of decompression in a station growing more and
more foreign and frivolous.
And with a son growing up part of the moral slide she'd seen around her?
Was that the space she'd been lost in, when she started taking larger and larger
doses of the jump drug and getting the drug from God knew where or how, on
dockside?
Out there where the drug had sent her, damn sure, she hadn't had a kid. Or cared
she had.
That was what he and Bucklin said to each other when they met in the sleepover
bar, in the protective noise of loud music and cousins around them.
"The kid's in serious trouble. Down there is no place to wander off alone,"
Bucklin said, "what I hear. There's rain going on. One rescuer nearly drowned. I
don't think they'll ever find him."
"Board call tomorrow," he said over the not-bad beer. "They're finishing loading
now. Cans are hooked up."
"They're holding the shuttle on-world," Bucklin said. "It's supposed to have
lifted this morning. Can you believe it? So much fuss for one of us?"
The stations didn't grieve over dead spacers. Didn't treat them badly, just
didn't routinely budge much to accommodate spacer rights, the way station law
didn't extend onto a merchanter's deck. Foreign territory. Finity's End had won
that very point decades ago, with Pell and with Union.
But right now, the whisper also was, among the crew—they'd found it out in this
port—Union might make another try at shutting merchanters out. Union had
launched another of the warrior-merchanters they were building, warships fitted
to carry cargo. The whisper, from the captains' contact with Quen and
Konstantin, was that there were many more such ships scheduled to be built.
Meanwhile Earth was building ships again, too, for scientific purposes, they
said, for exploration—as they revitalized the Sol shipyards that had built the
Fleet that had started the War. The whole damned universe was unravelling at the
seams, the agreements they'd patched up to end the War looked now only like a
patch just long enough for the combatants to renew their resources and for Union
to try to drive merchanters out of business. The rumor on Pell was that of
shipbuilding, too, ships to counter Union and maybe Earth.
And now cousin Fletcher had taken out running, the final, chaotic movement in a
bizarre maneuver, while the finest fighting ship the Alliance had was loaded
with whiskey, coffee, and chocolate she hadn't sold at Pell, and now with downer
wine.
"Luck to the kid," JR said, on a personal whim, and lifted his mug. Bucklin did
so, too, and took a solemn drink.
That was the way they treated the news when they heard it was all off, they'd
not get their missing cousin.
But by board call as Finity crew who'd checked out of sleepovers and reported to
the ship's ramp with baggage ready to put aboard, they met an advisement from
the office that boarding and departure would be delayed.
"How long?" JR asked their own security at the customs line, giving his heavy
duffle a hitch on his shoulder. "Book in for another day, or what?"
"Make it two," the word was from the cousin on security. "Fletcher's coming."
"They found him? " JR asked, and:
"He's coming up," the senior cousin said. "They got him just before he ran out
of breathing cylinders. I don't know any more than that."
There were raised stationer eyebrows at the service desk of the sleepover when
all the Finity personnel who'd just checked out came trooping back in with bag
and baggage. The Starduster was a class-A sleepover, not a pick-your-tag robotic
service. "Mechanical?" the stationer attendant asked.
"Unspecified," JR said, foremost of the juniors he'd shepherded back from the
dockside. The rule was, never talk about ship's business. That reticence wasn't
mandated clearly in the Old Rules, but it was his habit from the New Rules, and
he'd given his small command strict orders in the theory that silence was easier
to repair than was too much talk.
"What is this?" Jeremy asked, meeting him in the hallway of the sleepover as he
came upstairs. The junior-juniors were on a later call, B group. "We've got a
hold, sir?"
There was no one in the corridor but Finity personnel. "We've got an extra
cousin," JR said. "They found Fletcher."
"They're going to hold the ship for him?"
They'd always told the juniors they wouldn't. Ever. Not even if you were in
sight of the ramp when the scheduled departure came.
"She's held," JR said, and for discipline's sake, added: "It's unusual
circumstances. Don't ever count on it, younger cousin."
There was a frown of perplexity on the junior's face. Justice wasn't done. A
Rule by which Finity personnel had actually died had cracked. There were Rules
of physics and there were Finity's Rules, and they were the same. Or no one had
ever, in his lifetime, had to make that distinction before. Until now, they'd
been equally unbendable. Like the Old Man.
"How long?" Jeremy asked.
"Planets rotate. Shuttles lift when they most economically can."
"How long's that?"
"Go calc it for Downbelow's rotation and diameter. Look up the latitude. Keep
yourself out of trouble. I will ask you that answer, junior-junior, when we get
aboard. And stay available!" There were going to be a lot of questions to which
there was no answer, and Jeremy, to Jeremy's misfortune, had pursued him when he
was harried and out of sorts. The junior-juniors were going to have to stay on
call. They all were going to have to stay ready to move, if they were on a hold.
That meant no going to theaters or anywhere without a pocket-com on someone in
the group. That meant no long-range plans, no drinking, even with meals, unless
they went on total stand-down.
Francesca's almost-lamented son had just defied the authorities and the planet.
Beaten the odds, apparently.
As far as the cylinders held out.
Just to the point the cylinders had run out, by what he'd heard. By all
calculations, Fletcher should have died by now.
He didn't know Fletcher. No one did. But that said something about what they
were getting—what he was getting, under his command.
Pell and the new Old Rules had felt chancy to him all along. He'd felt relief to
be boarding, with the Fletcher matter lastingly settled; guilty as he'd felt
about that, there had been a certain relief in finality.
Now it wasn't happening.
And nothing was final or settled.
Chapter VI
Contents - Prev/Next
Customs wasn't waiting at the bottom of the ramp. Police were. Fletcher knew the
difference. He shifted an anxious grip on the duffle he'd been sure he was going
to have to fight authority for—again—and knew the game had just shifted
rules—again.
He walked ahead nonetheless, from the yellow connecting tube of the shuttle and
down onto the station dock, into the custody of station police.
He didn't know this batch of police. Many, he did know, and no few knew him by
name, but he was glad he didn't have to make small talk. He handed over his
papers, a simple slip from Nunn and his shuttle authorization, and halfway
expected them to put a bracelet on him, the sort that would drop an adult
offender to his knees if he sprinted down the dock, but they didn't.
"Stationmaster wants to see you," one informed him. "Your ship's waited five
days."
Maybe one or the other piece of information was supposed to impress him. But
he'd met Stationmaster Quen far too many times at too early an age, and he
didn't give an effective damn what kind of dock charges Finity's End was running
up waiting for him. So his interfering relatives had held a starship for him.
They could sit in hell for what he cared.
"Yes, sir," he said in the flat tone he'd learned was neutral enough, and he
went with them, wobbling a little. After the close, medicine-tainted air in the
domes and the too-warm sterile air of the shuttle, the station air he'd thought
of as neutral all his life was icy cold and sharp with metal scents he'd never
smelled before. Water made a puddle near the shuttle gantry, not uncommon on the
docks. The high areas of the dockside had their own weather and tended to
condense water into ice, which melted when lights went on in an area and heated
up the pipes.
Splat. A fat cold drop landed in front of him as he walked. It turned the metal
deck plates a shinier black was all. On Pell Station it had rained, too, clean
and bright gray just a few hours ago. It had been raining nonstop when he'd
left, when he crossed from the van into the shuttle passenger lounge. He'd been
able to see out the windows, the way he'd had his first view of Downbelow from
those doublethick windows, half a year ago.
He'd rather think of that now, and not see where he was. He had no curiosity
about the docks, no expectations, nothing but the necessity of walking, a little
weak-kneed, with the feeling of ears stuffed with cotton. They'd stopped up in
the airlock and the right one hadn't popped yet, petty nuisance. Down at the
shuttle landing, they'd given him a tranquilizer with the breakfast he hadn't
eaten. He'd had no choice about the pill. Not much resistance, either. Things
mattered less than they had, these last few days.
He went with the cops to the lift that would take them out of White Sector,
where the insystem traffic docked—the shuttles among them. He'd gone out the
selfsame dock when he'd made the only other trip of his life, down to Pell's
World. He came back to the station that way. If nothing intervened to prevent
his being transferred, he'd never use White again. He'd be down in Green, or
Blue, where holier-than-anybody Finity docked, too good for Orange or Red. Fancy
places. Money. A lot of money. Money that bought anything.
Anyone.
They took the lift. The lift car was on rails and sometimes it went sideways and
sometimes up and down or wherever it had to take you. This time the car went
through the core, around the funny little turn it did there and out another
spoke of the station wheel.
Hold on, the cops told him at one point, and he dutifully tightened his grip,
not arguing anything, not speaking, not looking at them.
During recent days, flat on his back in infirmary, while they dripped fluids
into him and scanned his lungs for damage he half wished he'd done, he'd had
ample time to realize the fix had been in before he ever ran, and to realize
that his lawyers weren't going to intercede this time. He'd sat by the window on
the way up, unable to see much but the white of Downbelow's clouds, until they
put the window-shields up and stopped him seeing anything of the world.
Necessary precaution against the chance tiny rock as they cleared Pell's
atmosphere. But he'd looked as long as he could.
Now, with cold and unfeeling fingers, he clung to the rail of the car while the
car finished its gyrations through the station core and shot down a good several
levels.
It jolted and clanked to a stop and let them out on more dockside, the cops
talking to someone on their audio. They brought him out onto the metal decking,
with the dark wall of dockside on one side, with its blinding spotlights and
ready boards blazoning the names and registries of ships. A group of people were
standing by a huge structural wall, ahead of him. One, the centermost, was the
Stationmaster.
Dark blue suit, aides with the usual electronics discreetly tucked in pockets;
security, with probably a fancy device or two—you couldn't always tell about the
eye-contact screens, or what the men were really looking at, but they weren't
station police, that was sure. He'd never met Elene Quen in her official
capacity. He guessed this was it.
"Fletcher," Quen said in a moderate, pleasant tone, and offered her hand, which
he took, not wanting to, but he'd learned, having been trained by lawyers. When
you were in something up to the hilt, you played along, you smiled so long as
the authorities were smiling. Sometimes it got you more when you'd been
reasonable: when you did pitch a fit on some minor point, you startled hell out
of them, and consequently got heard if you didn't also scare them.
But that wasn't his motive right now. Right now all he wanted was not to lose
his dignity. And they could take his dignity from him at any time.
"Do you have your visa?" she asked
He had. He'd expected to use it for customs. He fished it out of his coat pocket
and she held out her hand for it.
She didn't look at it. She slipped it into her suit pocket and handed him back a
different one.
He guessed its nature before he looked at the slim card in his fingers. It
hadn't Pell's pattern of stars for an emblem. It was the space-black of Finitys
End, a flat black disc for an emblem, no color, no heraldry, not even the name.
The first of modern merchanters was too holy and too old to use any contrived
emblem, just the black of space itself.
It was a fact in his hand. A done deal. This was his new passport
"You all right?" Quen asked him.
"Sure. No problems."
"Fletcher…" Quen wasn't slow. She caught the sarcasm. She started to say
something and then shut it down, nodding instead toward the dockside. "They're
boarding."
"Sure."
"You went where you weren't supposed to go," Quen said, as if anything he'd done
or could do had changed their intentions.
"I was invited to go." He ought to say ma 'am and didn't. "I was coming back on
my own when they found me."
"You risked lives of your fellow staff members."
"It was their choice to go out there. No one died."
That produced a long silence in which he thought that maybe, just maybe, he
could still throw his case back to the psychs.
"I tried to kill myself," he said, "all right?" He knew a station, even with its
capacity to absorb damage, didn't want a suicide case walking around loose. A
ship going into deep space couldn't be happy at all with the idea. And for a
moment he thought she really might send him off to the psychs and have a meeting
with the ship. If he just got beyond this current try then he'd be at least
eighteen by the time Finity cycled back again, eighteen years old and not a
minor any longer.
"Fletcher," Quen said, "you're good. I'll give you that. But you don't score."
She knew his game. Dead on. And he was too tired, too rattled, and too sedated
to come up with another, more skillfull card.
"Yeah," he said. "Well, I tried."
"Fletcher, I've tried to help you, I've set you up with people where I used up
favors to get you set. And you'd screw it up. Reliably, you'd screw it up."
"Yeah, well, they'd screw it up. How about that?"
"It's a possibility they did. But you never gave anyone a chance."
"The hell!" he said. Temper got past the tranquilizer, and he shut it down. She
wasn't going to needle him into reaction, or salve her conscience, either. "The
Neiharts aren't going to be happy with me. You know that."
"It's not a place to screw up, Fletcher. There's no place to go.—You look at me!
Don't drop your eyes. You look straight at me and you hear this. You give it a
good chance. You give it a good honest try and come back with no complaints from
them and after a year, in the year it's going to take them to get back here, you
can walk into my office as a grown man and say you want to be transferred back.
And I'll intercede for you. Then. Not now."
His heart beat faster and faster. He didn't say anything for the moment. She
waited. He threw out the next challenge: "I screwed up down there. Can you fix
that?"
"I can fix it up here enough to give you a post in the tunnels. You'd work with
downers. You'd stand a chance of working your way back to Downbelow."
It was too good. It was everything handed back to him. On a platter. Everything
but the downers that mattered. Years. Human years. A long time for them. Maybe
too long for Melody and Patch.
"But," Quen said, as firmly, "if you come back with anything on your record,
I'll give Finity the chance to decide whether they want you, and if they don't,
we'll see about an in-depth psych exam to see what you do need to straighten you
out. Do you copy, Mr. Neihart? Is that plain enough?"
"Yes, ma'am." All cards were bet. Straighten you out. That meant psych
adjustment, not just psych tests. It wasn't supposedly a big deal. Just an
instilled fear of sabotage was what they gave you, just a real horror of messing
up the station. But they'd find out, too, what he thought of the human species.
And they'd straighten that kink out of him. They'd rip the heart out of him.
Make him normal, so he could never, ever want to go back to Downbelow.
"It's serious business, Mr. Neihart. It's very serious, life-and-death business.
Are you unstable? Did you try to kill yourself?"
"No, ma'am. Not really."
"Logical decision, was it, to run off into the outback?"
"No. But I'd duck the ship. Miss the undock. Get sent to the psychs."
"It'd lose you your license, all the same."
"Yes, ma'am, but you were taking it away anyway. At least I wouldn't go on the
ship."
She thought about that a moment. She thought about him, and held his life and
sanity in the balance. The noise and clang and clank of the dockside machinery
went on around them, inexorable clank of a loader at work.
"That bad, is it, what we're doing to you?"
"I don't want them. I never wanted them. Hell if they want me."
"Wanting had nothing to do with it, Fletcher. By putting your mother off the
ship, they gave you and your mother a chance to live."
"Well, she died and none of them did damn well by me!"
"They were kind of busy saving this station. Earth. Humanity. In which, if I do
say so, they saved you. And saving the downers, if that scores with you. If the
Alliance had gone under, Mazian's Fleet would have had Downbelow for a source of
supply. They'd have employed very different management methods with the downers.
Or did they cover that in your history courses?"
They had. And he was glad Mazian wasn't at Downbelow, and that someone had kept
the Fleet far away. But the fact that the Neiharts were heroes in that fight
didn't mean anything on a personal level. It didn't bring his mother back. She'd
never been crazy enough the courts didn't dump her kid back with her. And she'd
never been sane enough to sign the papers that would give him up for
adoption—and for Pell citizenship. He didn't forgive her for that.
"Look at me," Quen said. He did, reluctantly, knowing that this was the other
woman largely responsible for his life—every screwed-up placement, every good,
every bad: Quen had personally intervened to keep him from the trouble he'd
gotten into any number of times. The fairy godmother. The magic rescue for him,
that had enabled him not to compete with the likes of Marshall Willett but to
stay out of complete disaster.
And the primary reason, maybe, his mother hadn't gotten psyched-over before she
killed herself. He didn't know what he felt about Quen. He never had understood.
I'll tell you something," Quen said. "You've got the best chance of your life in
front of you. But it's not going to be easy. You've walked off from every family
you've been put with. Aboard ship, you can't walk off; and no matter what you
think, you can't stop being related to these people. These are the real thing,
Fletcher. They're every fault you see in the mirror and every good point you
own. Give them a fair chance."
"Screw them!"
"Fletcher, get it through your head, I envy you. You've got a family. And they
want you. Don't be an ass about it, and let's get over there."
Her ship was destroyed in the War. With everybody on it. And he thought about
taking a cheap shot on that score, the way she'd come back at him, but she'd
held out hope to him, damn her, and she was the only hope. She gathered up her
aides and her security and the cops and they all walked over to the area of the
dock where the board showed, in lights, Finity's End. There was customs; she
walked him past. It was that fast. The gate was in front of him, and he looked
back, looked all around at Pell docks.
Looked back, in that vast scale, even imagining the Wilsons might show up. That
was his last foster-family, the one he was still legally resident with. The one
he even liked.
But the dockside was vacant of anybody but dockers and, he supposed, Finity
crew. Even his lawyers and his psychs were no-shows. Just Quen. Just the cops.
All the little figures, dwarfed by the giant scale of the docks, were strangers.
When he gave it a second thought he guessed he was hurt—hurt quite a bit, in
fact, but the lack of well-wishers and good-byes didn't entirely surprise him.
Maybe Quen hadn't told the Wilsons where he was. Or maybe the Wilsons had heard
about him running away on Downbelow, and just decided he was too crazy, too
lost, too damned-to-hell screwed up.
He didn't know what he'd say to them if they did show up, anyway. Thanks? Thanks
for trying? In the slight giddiness of vast scale and the fading tranquilizer,
he hated his lawyers, hated his families. Every one of them. Even the last.
"Good-bye," Quen told him. "Good luck. See you." She didn't offer her hand.
Didn't give him a chance to refuse it. "You go on up, give your passport to the
duty officer. Follow instructions. You're out of our territory from the time you
cross that line.—Matter of fact, this is the ship that won that particular point
of law as a part of the constitution. That was what the whole War meant. Welcome
to the future."
Screw you and your War, was what he thought as hydraulics wheezed and gasped
around the gate, and the huge gantry moved above him, like some threatening
dragon making little of anything on human scale. He had nothing to back up any
reply to Quen. He owned no dignity but silence and to do what she'd said, go
ahead and go aboard. So he left her standing and, passport in hand, took that
long, spooky walk, up that ramp and into a cold, lung-hurting tunnel far thinner
than the station walls.
He was aware there was black space and hard vacuum out there, beyond that yellow
ribbing. Walking down the tunnel looked like being swallowed by something, eaten
up alive. And it was. The cops would still be waiting at the bottom of the ramp
to be sure he went all the way down this gullet; but when he reached the lock
and confronted a control panel, he wasn't even sure what to do with the buttons.
They said he was spacer-born. And this damned thing had not even the courtesy of
labeling on the buttons.
Hell if he was going to walk back down and ask the Stationmaster which one to
push. Damn ships didn't ever label anything. The station hadn't labeled anything
until the last few years they finally put the address signs up, because they'd
been invaded once and didn't want to give the enemy any help.
He hated the War, and here he was, sucked into a place like a step backward into
a hostile time, right back into the gray, grim poverty of the War years. He
resented it on that score, too.
And since nobody did him the courtesy of advising Finity he was here, he could
stand here freezing in the bitter cold, or he could punch a button and hope the
top one was it and not the disconnect that would unseal the yellow walkway from
the airlock.
The airlock opened without his touching it.
So someone had told them he was here.
But no one was in the airlock to meet him.
He'd never seen a starship's airlock up close, except in the vids, and it was
unexpectedly large, a barren chamber with lockers and readouts he didn't
understand. He walked in and the door hissed shut. Heavily. He was in a
spaceship. Swallowed alive.
Not a citizen of Pell. He never had been. They'd never let him have more than
resident status and a travel visa. He knew all the ins and outs of that
legality. Entitled to be educated but not to vote. Entitled to be drafted but
not to hold a command. Entitled to be employed but not tenured.
Now after all his struggle to avoid it, he'd achieved a citizenship. He became
aware he had a citizen's passport in the hand that held the duffle strings, and
this was where he was born to be.
But Quen hinted that, too, could change.
Lie. They all lied.
The inner door opened, and he walked out of bright light into a dimmer tiled
corridor. No one was there. The corridor went back, not far, before four lighted
corridors intersected it, and then it quit. A ship's ring was locked stable
while they were at dock, and the four side corridors all curved up. The up would
be down when the ship broke dock and the ring started to rotate, but until it
did, this seemed all there was, a utilitarian hallway, showing mostly metal,
insulated floor, the kind of insulated plating you used if you thought a
decompression could happen.
A door to the right was open. He walked that far, his boots making a lot of
metal racket, but a woman came out and met him. So did another woman, and a man.
"Fletcher, is it?" the woman said, and put out a hand.
So, hell, what did he do? He purposely misunderstood and handed her the passport
"Welcome aboard," she said without a flicker, and pocketed it without looking at
it. "Not much time. I'm Frieda N. This is Mary B. And Wes. There's only one.
There's no other Fletcher, either. You're just Fletcher."
He'd never been anything else. Frieda N. held out her hand a second time, and he
took it, finding himself lost in the information flow, wondering if she was
related, how she was related and how any of these people were related to his
mother. His mother had talked about her mother. He had a grandmother. He didn't
know whether she was still alive or not, but spacers lived long lives, and
stationers aged faster. He supposed she might be here.
For the first time it came to him… there was something personal about these
people who assumed they owned him. These people who'd owned his mother. And left
her.
Others came into the hall. "This is your cousin June, Com 3. And Jake. Jake's
chief bioneer, lower deck Ops."
June was an older woman, with a dry, firm handshake, and communications didn't
seem to add up to anybody he needed to deal with. Jake had a thin face, a sober
face, and looked like a cop he knew: not unnecessarily an unpleasant man, but
somebody who didn't have much sense of humor.
Then another man came in, in the kind of waistlength, ribbed-cuff jacket spacers
wore over their coveralls where they were working near the cold side of the
docks. Silver-haired. A lot of stripes on the sleeve.
"Fletcher," Jake said, "this is Madison, second captain."
He'd already spotted authority, and took the hand when it was offered him,
feeling overwhelmed, wobbly in the knees, wobbly in his mental state, knowing he
was going to want to settle how to deal with these people, but all his scenarios
of defiance had evaporated, in Quen's little advisement, her outright bribe for
good behavior.
Not smart at least to screw things up from the start. Start friendly, start
sane, try, one more stupid time, to make the good impression with one more
damned family—his own family.
"Welcome aboard."
"Yes, sir," he said, and Finity's second captain held onto his hand, a
cold-chilled, dry clasp. He felt trapped for good and certain. I don't know you
people, he wanted to shout. I don't give a damn. And here he was doing the safe,
the sensible thing, as somebody else arrived to take his hand. It was a cousin
named Pete, a cargo officer, nobody, in his book. It was one more introduction,
and he wanted just to escape to somewhere private and shut the door.
"Welcome in, Fletcher." Pete was a dark-haired man with a trace of gray in a
beard unusual on dockside—you only saw them on spacers; and it was worth a
stare; he was aware he was staring, losing his focus, while strangers' hands
patted his shoulders, welcomed him in a chaos of names and emotions.
"Pete," Jake said, "you want to show Fletcher to the safe room?"
"Yeah, sure," Pete said, and indicated the duffle. "That's all the baggage you
brought? I'll stow it for you."
"Nossir," he said, and held onto it. Desperately. "No."
Pete relented. Jake said, "Get Warren to make him up a patch set soon as we
leave dock.—What's your height, son? Height and weight, Pell Standard. Six
feet?"
"About. Eighty-five kilos."
"Baggage weight?"
He knew what he'd come downworld with. What they let you bring. "Twenty-two."
"Got it." And with no more fuss and no more word about the duffle Pete took him
out to the corridor and to another room at the next cross-corridor, no simple
room, but a vast curved chamber, a VR theater, he thought, with railings where
everybody stood. Old people, younger ones. A theater full of relatives, hundreds
of them, all staring in sudden quiet in their conversations. "This is Fletcher,"
Pete called out, and someone cheered. "He's late, but he's here!" Pete said.
Others called out hellos and welcome aboard, and, grotesquely enough, applauded.
"Ten minutes," Jake called out, and Pete showed him to a place to stand in the
third row, where people leaned and reached out hands to shake, or patted his
back or his shoulders, throwing names at him. At distances out of reach, they
all talked about him: there couldn't be another topic in the room. Of the ones
in earshot, who called out names to him or introduced each other, there was a
Tom R., a Tom T., a Margaret, a Willy and a Will, there was Roger Y., Roger B.,
and a single Ned; there was a Niles senior, a man with silver at the temples,
and Jake's brother was Louis down in cargo, not to cross him with Lou on the
bridge, who was Scan 2, third shift.
Bridge ranks. Post designations. Old people. Senior crew, with hairline wrinkles
that spoke of rejuv.
Then a handful of crew trooped in with their quilted jackets literally frosted
with cold, ice cracking as they moved. There was a Wendy who looked barely in
her twenties, and a William and a Charles who wasn't Charlie because Charlie was
his uncle, chief medtech, who was at his station, and his mother was Angie.
There were half a dozen Roberts, Rob, Bob, Bobby, and Robbie and a kid they just
called JR, not to cross him with his uncle Captain James Robert, senior captain,
who besides being famous all over the Alliance always went by both names.
Pretentious ass, Fletcher said to himself.
Jim, James and Jamie were all techs of various kinds, old enough to have a touch
of gray; and there was McKenzie, Mac, Madden, and Madison that he'd already met.
He got the picture, if not most of the names. You carried Names, and there
wasn't much creativity about it inside a line of relations: the ones that
carried the same Names tended to be close cousins, the way they were introduced
Close cousins as opposed to remote cousins, which everybody was to each other.
Hi, he said uneasily to each out of reach introduction, saved by distance from
shaking hands, resenting the welcome, resenting them with all the integrity he
could muster. He'd had about half a mother, that was the way he thought about
it: he'd had about half her attention half the time, but that was all the real
relative he ever acknowledged. And here were a ship full of people all claiming
he was tied to them in some miraculous way that didn't mean a damn to him.
Friendly, he supposed so. People had been friendly before, in schools where it
was welcome in until they got to know him up close and discovered he wasn't up
to their standards in some way or another. Not part of the right clubs. Not part
of the right experiences. The right family. The right mother. The right
attitude.
He'd fought his sullen tendencies for years just to get into the program, no
reform, no real change in him. Just in his objectives. God, he'd been friendly.
He'd watched how the accepted ones did it and he'd learned the lessons and
copied—forged—good behavior. And here he was doing it all over again, new start,
one damned more time, one damned more try. Stunned, shocked, still marginally
battling the tranquilizer they'd given him, he did it by now on autopilot,
acting the shy, reserved, pleasant fool with every one of them while his brain,
behind a chemical shield the shuttle authorities had given him, was passing from
numbed shock to outright anger.
Hate you, he kept thinking while he smiled and shook hands. But that wouldn't
get him home again. Wouldn't ever get him to Downbelow.
The monsoons were starting. The shuttle had almost delayed launch because of the
weather and teased him with a last, aching hope that it couldn't get off the
ground and he'd miss his ship even yet
Hadn't worked, had it?
The monsoons were starting and Melody and Patch were off, by now. He'd not seen
them again.
He ran out of hands to shake, and people close enough to shout introductions at
him. "One minute," someone said, and he knew then that this was it: it was
countdown. Pete showed him a toe-hold, a long slot in the carpet, and encouraged
him to settle his toes there. He did, and gripped the safety rail, watching the
tendons on his own hands stand out as white as the knuckles.
Then someone started singing, for God's sake, one of those rowdy old spacer
songs, and the whole company started in, more men than women, deep voices.
Cousin, uncle, whatever-he-was Pete elbowed him in the ribs and grinned at him,
wanting him to pick up on the words and join in. It was a spooky sound: he'd
never heard singers who weren't hyped with sound systems, but this went through
the air and off the walls, and it was a lot of men's voices, singing about
space, singing about going there—when he didn't in the least want to.
That segued to another song that rocked and rollicked, that caught up his basic
fear of space and began with its music and moving beat to break into parts of
his soul he didn't want broken into right now, painful parts, aching with loss
at a parting he didn't want.
Came a powerful thump and clank, and a light started flashing in the overhead.
But that singing drowned other sounds as they started to move, and bodies
swayed. For a moment there wasn't any up or down, and he grabbed the rail hard.
Pete, next to him, grabbed him and held on, a human reassurance—nobody even
missing a beat except to laugh, and he had his toe hooked in the slot, but he
wasn't sure it was enough.
Terror whited out all other thoughts, then, terror that things were moving so
fast, that it was all real, and all his objections were spent to no avail.
They'd just broken their connection to Pell. They were backing away.
The floor began just slightly to be the floor again, but he was afraid to let
go, not clearly reasoning what had just happened, because Pete didn't let go of
his arm and something more might be coming. People were laughing, and the song
was rowdy and wild, while something in his heart went numb and the outer body
was shaking. He was afraid Pete knew how scared he was, and that they'd all make
some joke of it. But down, down, down his body settled, force pressing his feet
to the floor, while a terrified fraction of his mind told him the passenger ring
was rotating now, and the ship was still drifting back from the station dock,
inertial.
Came a stress then that made him lose his sense of up and down. Bodies, tightly
packed all around, swayed at the rails. People cheered, excited, glad to be
going.
The singing had stopped, with that. He kept a white-knuckled grip on the rail,
not knowing how long it would go on. Then it did stop, and there was thundering
quiet, as if he'd gone deaf.
"Good lad," Pete said. "We're away. Duty stations. Stay by the door and
somebody'll post you somewhere. Mind, if there's a take-hold, hang on to the
rails."
He unbelted amid snicks and snaps from all over the hall. He got shakily to his
feet as Pete hurried off, as people began moving for the door, everyone exiting
into the corridor with a buzz of talk and a feeling that everybody except him
knew where they were going and had to be there. Urgently.
He was scared of what they called take-holds, motion alarms. He'd seen enough
disasters in vids to make him nervous. He lost Pete in the rush and set himself
beside the door where Pete had told him to be, standing with his duffle beside
him as people moved hurriedly by him. He could see up the curved floor that was
walkable now and lighted in either direction, curves sharper than the vast
curves of Pell Station. If the scale was shorter, their rotation rate had to be
higher, and he felt sick at his stomach.
Cold. Chilled through. Everything was browned metal. Noisy. All around him,
hurrying bodies, sharp shouts of orders or information he didn't begin to grasp.
"Fletcher!"
He jerked about at the sharp address. The kid named JR came up to him. The
captain's nephew. Fa-mi-ly. Highest of the high on this ship.
"Stow that fast," JR said pointing at the baggage. "For future information,
you're not to carry baggage aboard. You turn it in at the cargo port. You get
around to your quarters first thing, get your stuff put away, don't leave any
latches open—
"I'm not stupid," he said.
"I didn't ask if you were stupid. I said latch the lockers tight."
"Look here…"
"I'm an officer," JR said. "Junior captain. You're excused for not knowing that.
Clean slate, fast orientation, pay attention. This is A deck. Up above is B.
Stay off B deck. Everything you want's on A until you've got orders to be on B.
Your quarters number is A26. You copy?"
"Yes."
"That's yes, sir, Fletcher, if you'll kindly remember."
"Yessir," he muttered, too tired to fight. This JR didn't look a day older than
he was. But he was the captain's nephew. He got the picture.
"Get your stuff tucked in, get down to A14—that's the laundry, same corridor,
down ten doors—and get some work clothes before we hit the safety perim and do
another burn. You've got time. That's about an hour. You draw three sets of
coveralls, underwear, what you need; and when we're underway that's where you'll
report for duty. A14."
"Laundry?"
"Laundry and commissary. You start out there, work your way up to galley. We'll
see later what you do know."
"Biochem. Life sciences." He didn't want a job. But he had most of his degree.
He'd worked for it. And he didn't do laundry.
"You'll get a chance at whatever you're qualified to do," JR said, tight-lipped
and tight-assed, about his size, maybe ten kilos less. And self-important as
hell. "While I'm at it, let me explain something to you as politely as I can.
This whole ship delayed five days for you. It never will again. If you're on a
liberty and you don't answer board call, you're on your own. We won't buy you
back twice. You know what two hundred twenty-four hours at dock costs this
ship?"
"Damn you all, you can leave me at this station and I'll be happy. Give me a
suit. I'll take my chances station'll rake me in. That's the only favor you
could do me!"
JR gave him a look as if maybe he hadn't quite understood that part of the
equation. "Then you're out of luck," JR said then. "If it were up to me, you'd
be on the dockside. But you're here. You're in my crew, and what I ask of you is
simple: show up on time, do your job, wait your turn and ask if you don't
understand something. This ship's on a schedule, it moves, and physics doesn't
care what your excuse is. If you hear a siren, you see these handholds?" JR
gripped a handle inset in the wall. "You grab one and hang on. That'd be an
emergency. It happens. If you don't hold on, you could die. Fourteen did, last
year. End warning. Go pick up your clothes at the laundry window. That's A14,
down to your right."
He picked up the duffle and started off.
"Yessir," he muttered, "yessir. Yessir." And walked off.
He had something material to lose if he got on the wrong side of this officer
who looked his age and acted as if he owned the ship. He learned fast. He took
the cues. He knew now the guy was a tight-assed jerk. He knew sooner or later
they'd come to discuss it again.
He went where he was told, feeling sick at his stomach and telling himself Quen
was probably conning him and had no intention of putting him back on station. He
wasn't important enough to matter to people on her level. He never had been.
The Neiharts were far more important to Quen, collectively. For their sake, that
jumped-up jerk nephew of the captain would be. And if by then they had an active
grudge, JR would use every influence to see him set down. He knew that equation,
in his heart of hearts.
Lies. Lies that moved him here, moved him there. When the world stopped shifting
on him for an hour, he'd think, and when he learned the new rules well enough to
know how to maneuver in this new family, he'd do something. Not yet. Not now.
Not soon enough to prevent being shipped out of the solar system. He had no hope
now except to live that year, and get back, and see if the court or Quen had
another round to play.
That wasn't, JR said to himself, watching the retreating view, the most
auspicious beginning of a situation he'd ever set up… and truth was, he hadn't
handled it as well as he could.
That was a seventeen-year-old, not someone in his mid-twenties. You forgot that
when you looked at him. It was too easy to react as if he were far older.
The Old Man had told him, when they knew the shuttle was on its way, "He's all
yours." And then added: "All these years. All these years, Jamie. The only one
of all the lost kids we'll ever get back."
Five days. Five days they'd held in port, with cargo in their hold, the heated
cans drawing power, the systems up, because until the third day, they hadn't
gotten a medical go-ahead on Fletcher's shuttle ride up, and they hadn't been
sure they could get a shuttle flight out through worsening atmospheric
conditions. Then it had been more expensive to bring systems down again and go
back on station power than it was to stay on their own pre-launch ready systems.
That meant that crew had had to board to run those systems, cycling in and out
of a departure-ready ship to the annoyance of customs and the aggravation of
crew stuck with the jobs and having to suit and clamber about in the holds.
Fletcher was welcome aboard and politely, even warmly, welcomed aboard, but it
was with a certain edge of irritation with their fast-footed cousin, from all of
them who'd been put on that unprecedented hold.
Fletcher had also broken ten thousand regulations down on the planet and fled
into the outback of Downbelow, just in case holding up a starship wasn't enough.
He'd been picked up at death's door and lodged in a Downbelow infirmary while
the planetary types and batteries of scientists tried to figure out what he'd
done, what he'd screwed with, what he'd screwed up and what damage he might have
done to the only alien intelligence in human reach.
A Finity crew member had done that. That was how the outside would remember it,
and Fletcher, an honorable name, would be notorious in rumor forever if he had
in fact lastingly harmed anything on the planet.
Quen had shoved Fletcher toward the ship at high speed, keeping him out of
station custody by taking him directly across the docks, not ever bringing him
into administrative levels and procedures where Pell administration could get
their experts near him for another round of questioning. Fast work from a canny
administrator.
And, thank God, Finity had been able to make departure on the schedule they'd
finally been able to set, while all Pell Station had to be buzzing with
speculation regarding the delay that kept Finity in port—speculation that was no
longer speculation as the news filtered through the station legal department and
the rumor mill that Finity was recovering a long-lost crew member. Then the
story had been all over station news.
Notorious in Finity's affairs from the day he was born, an embarrassment and a
tragedy on Finity's record from the hour his mother had begun her downward
drug-induced slide—Fletcher was all theirs now. Captain James Robert set great
store by recovering him, and he was somehow supposed to make something of him.
Meanwhile the report up from the medics on the planet said Fletcher's lungs were
clear.
So his guess was right and despite the speculation to the contrary, Fletcher
hadn't half tried to kill himself rather than be taken to the ship. Fletcher
could have walked out of the domes with no cylinders if he'd wanted to do that,
as best he understood the conditions down there.
No. It had been no suicide attempt, regardless of the speculation in the station
news. Fletcher simply had tried to lie low until schedule forced them to abandon
him again, and hell if the Old Man was likely to give him up on that basis. It
had come down to a test of patience, an incident now with an unwanted publicity
that could harm Quen at the very least
He found it significant that the Old Man hadn't even asked to see the nephew on
whom they'd spent such effort. It was a fair guess it was because the Old Man's
temper was still not back from hyperbolic orbit.
That meant, in the Old Man's official silence toward young Fletcher, the whole
business of settling Fletcher in was definitively his problem.
His problem, his unit, his command, and his job to fix.
"So what do you think?" Bucklin stopped beside him to ask as he stood thinking
on the Fletcher problem.
Bucklin had a temper where it came to junior misbehaviors; and he already knew
Bucklin was annoyed But Bucklin was also the one who'd stand by him,
next-in-command, as Madison had stood by the Old Man in the last century of
time, come hell or high water. They were right hand and left, both in the
captain's track, both destined for backup to Alan and Francie when they
succeeded Madison and the Old Man. They'd always been a set—and became closer
still over years that had seen their mothers lost, when half the juniors alive
had died in the blow-out, when they'd had no juniors born for all of Fletcher's
seventeen years.
The last kid. The very last until one of the women got Finity another youngest,
and until stationside encounters began to fill the long-darkened kids' loft:
that also was part of the change in the Rules. Real liberties. Unguarded
encounters. Finity's women were going off precautions, and some talked
excitedly, even teary-eyed, about babies—the scariest and most irrevocable
change in the Rules, the one that, at moments, argued that the Rules change was
permanent.
But the need for children born was also absolute. The ship had to, at whatever
risk, repopulate itself.
What do you think? Bucklin asked. What he thought was tangled with yesterday and
bitter losses.
"Just figuring," JR said. "Ignore the face. The guy's seventeen. Just keep
telling yourself those are station-years. The Old Man said it. Out of all those
years, he's all the replacement we've got. So here we are."
Chapter VII
Contents - Prev/Next
Number A26. At least they believed in posting numbers inside the ship. Fletcher
found the door of his quarters and elbowed the latch. It wasn't locked. And it
slid open on a closet of a room with two bunks, barely enough room between them
for a person to stand up. A couple of lockers at the end. God, it was a closet.
And two bunks? He had to share this hole? With one of them?
He wasn't happy. But it was a place, and until now he'd had none. He walked in
and the door shut the moment he cleared it. He stood there, appalled and this
time, yes, he tested it out, angry. He wanted to throw things. But there wasn't
a single item available except the duffle he'd brought, no character to the
place, just—nothing. Cream and green walls, lockers that filled every wall-space
above the mattresses and bed frames. Cream-colored blankets secured with safety
belts. That promised security, didn't it?
A check of the lighted panel at the end of the room, which looked to fold back,
showed a toilet and a shower compartment, a mirror, a sink, a small cabinet. The
place was depressingly claustrophobic. He checked the lockers out, found the
first right-hand one full of somebody's stuff—bad news, that was—and slammed it
shut, tried the left-hand side and found it empty, presumably for the clothes
he'd brought.
There was more storage under the bunk, latched drawers that pulled out. He
unpacked his duffle and stowed his dock-side clothes, his underwear, his
personal stuff, where he figured he had license to put them.
Most carefully, he unwrapped what he really wanted to put away safely, the most
precious thing—the hisa stick he'd wrapped in layers of his clothes.
The stick that customs hadn't found. That the authorities on Downbelow hadn't
confiscated. That everything so far had conspired to let him keep. It was hisa
work. It was a hisa gift.
It was illegal to touch, let alone to have and to take off-planet. But hisa
bestowed them on special occasions—deaths, births, arrivals. And partings.
He smoothed the cords that tied the dangling feathers. The wood—real wood—was
valuable in itself. But far more so was the carving, the cord bindings, the
native feathers—only a very, very few such items ever left Downbelow, and the
government watched over those with jealous protection from exploitation of the
species, their skills, their beliefs.
But this particular one was his. He'd told his rescuers how he'd gotten it, and
where he'd gotten it, and wouldn't turn it loose. The planetary studies
researchers had grilled him for hours on it, and he'd thought they might try to
take it—but they'd only asked to photograph it, and put it through decon, and
gave it back after that, and let him take it with him. He'd expected customs
would confiscate it and maybe arrest him for trying to smuggle it out, a hope he
actually entertained, thinking that maybe a snafu like that would get him
snagged in the gears of justice again and maybe keep him off the ship—but Quen's
intervention had meant he hadn't even had to deal with customs.
So one obstacle after another had fallen down, maybe Quen's doing all along, and
by now he supposed it really was his. And it was all he'd managed to take away
that meant anything to him.
It meant all the hard things. It meant lessons Melody had tried to teach him—and
failed.
It meant parting from where he'd been. It meant a journey. It meant eyes
watching the clouded heavens. It meant faith, and faithfulness.
Maybe a human who was born to space couldn't have the faith hisa had in Great
Sun. Maybe he couldn't believe that Great Sun was anything but what they said in
his education, a nuclear furnace. Maybe Great Sun wasn't a god, maybe there was
no god, or whatever hisa thought or expected when they looked to the sky. But
Melody was so sure that Great Sun would take care of his children, that Great
Sun would always come back, that the dark never lasted…
The dark never lasted.
For him it would. Forces he couldn't control had shoved him out where the dark
went on forever, where even Melody's Great Sun couldn't walk far enough or shine
brightly enough. That was where he was now.
But this stick he touched had lived, once. These feathers had flown in the
fierce winds, once. Old River had smoothed these stones. All these things, Great
Sun had made. And they were real in his hand, and he could remember, when he
felt them, what the cloud-wrapped world felt like. They were his parting-gift.
Hisa put such sticks on the graves of the dead, human and hisa. They put them
near the Watcher-statues. And when the researchers asked, bluntly, why, the hisa
didn't have the words to say.
But he knew. He knew. It was when you went away. It reminded you. It was a
memory. It was the River and Great Sun, it was weather and wind. It was all
those things that he'd almost touched, that the clean-suit only let him imagine
touching without a barrier. It was waking up to a sunrise, and watching the
world wake up. It was sleeping in the dark with no electric lights and waiting
for Great Sun to find his child again—knowing that Great Sun would come for him
the way Melody had come in the darkest hour of his childhood, when he was hiding
from all the crazed authorities.
That was the faith the hisa had. That was what he took away with him.
Bianca had sworn she'd wait for him. But he knew. People didn't keep such
promises. Ever. And hisa couldn't. Their lives were too short, too precious for
waiting. It was why they made the Watchers.
And now Quen had tried to psych him with this last-minute offer of hers… just a
psych-out. A ploy to get Fletcher to behave, one more time.
He wound the dangling cords about the stick and put it away in the back of the
underbunk drawer, behind his spare station clothes, so no prying roommate would
find it
He quietly closed the drawer, telling himself he was stupid even to think of
falling for Quen's line. He knew the drill. He could almost manage a cynical
amusement past the usual little lump in his throat that conjured all the other
bad times of his life. Have a fruit ice, kid. Have another. You'll like it here.
Look, we've got you a teddy bear.
Ten weeks later the new family'd be back to the psychs saying he was
incorrigible.
This one was already a disaster.
Work in the laundry, for God's sake. He'd pulled himself from police-record
nothing into a degree program in Planetary Studies, and his shiny new family had
him doing laundry and matching socks. That was damn near funny, too, so funny it
made the lump in his throat hurt like hell.
He latched the drawer. The locker didn't have a lock. The bath didn't have a
lock. When he looked at the door to the outside, it didn't have a lock. There
wasn't anywhere that was his.
All right, he said to himself for the tenth time in five minutes, all right,
calm down. A year. A year and he'd be back to Pell and he'd survive it and if
Quen reneged, he'd go to court. Do what they said, keep them happy until, back
at Pell after that year, he ran for it and held Quen to her word.
Meanwhile the captain's nephew had said go back down to the laundry and check
out some clothes. He could do that, while his heart hammered from anger and his
ears picked up a maddening hum somewhere just below his hearing and he wasn't
sure of the floor. He told himself he was going to walk around, telling himself
he wasn't going to be sick at his stomach, he wasn't even going to think about
the fact that the ship was moving. He walked out to the hall and down to A14, to
the laundry.
He wasn't the only one looking for clean clothes. He stood in a line of six, all
of whom introduced themselves with too damn much cheerfulness, a Margot with a
-t, a Ray, a Nick, a Pauline, a Johnny T., and a John Madison who, he declared,
wasn't related to the captain. Directly.
He didn't intend to remember them. He wasn't remotely interested. He was polite,
just polite. He smiled, he shook hands. Their chatter informed him you could
pick up more than laundry at the half-door counter. You could buy personal items
on your account, if you had an account, which as far as he knew he didn't. As he
approached the counter he could see, beyond the kid handing out the clothes, a
lot of shelves with folded clothing sorted somehow. He saw mesh sacks of laundry
left off and folded stacks of clean clothes picked up, and this supposedly was
going to be his post. Big excitement.
"Fletcher," he told the kid at the desk.
"Wayne," the kid said. He looked no more than sixteen. "Glad you made it. So you
take over here after next burn."
"Seems as if." He mustered no false cheerfulness. The other kid on duty, Chad,
went and got the size he requested "Finity patch is on," Chad said of the ship's
blues he got. "Personal name patch, Sam'll get to it as he can. He makes 'em.
He'll get it done for you before we go up."
Up meant leave normal space. He knew that. He knew it was regularly about five
days a ship took between leaving dock and exiting the system. "Yeah," he said.
"Thanks."
A small plastic bag landed on top of the stack of folded blues, toiletries, and
such. "There you go."
"Thanks," he said again, and carried his stack of slippery-bagged new clothes
back the way he'd come, along a corridor that curved very visibly up.
That was it. He was assigned, checked in, uniformed, and set.
His gut was in a knot. He wanted to hit the first thing he came to. Nothing made
sense. His stomach was sending him queasy signals that up and down were out of
kilter, the horizon curves were steeper than he'd ever dealt with, and he was
going to be a little crazy before he got off this ship, crazy enough he'd have
memorized JR, James Robert, John, Johnny, Jake, Jim, and Jimmy, Jamie and all
his damn relatives.
He opened the door to his room. This time there was a kid on the other bunk. A
kid maybe twelve, dark-haired, dark-eyed, eyeing him with equal suspicion.
"Hi," the kid said after a beat "I'm Jeremy."
"Yeah?" Defensively surly tone.
Defensively surly back. "I got lucky. We're bunkmates."
He must have frozen stock still a heartbeat. His heart speeded up. The rest of
the room phased out.
"No, we're not," he said, and threw his new issue down on the other bunk.
"I live here," was the indignant protest, in a pre-adolescent voice. "First."
"No way in hell. This does it! This is the limit!"
"Well, I don't want you here either!" the kid yelled back.
"Good," he said. His voice inevitably went shaky if he didn't let his temper
blow and the struggle between trying to be fair with a hapless twelve-year-old
and his desire to punch something had his upset gut in an uproar. It was the
whole business, it was every lousy, stinking decision authorities had made about
him all his life, and here it was, summed up, topped off and proposing he was
rooming with a damned kid.
He dumped his new clothes on the bed. The door had closed. He went back and hit
the door switch.
"They're about to sound take-hold," the kid's voice pursued him as he left. "You
can't find anybody! You'll break your neck!"
He didn't damn care. He started down the hall, and heard someone shout at him
and then footsteps coming.
"Don't be stupid!" Jeremy said, and caught his sleeve. "They're going to blow
the warning. You haven't got time to get anywhere else! Get back in quarters!"
The kid was in earnest. He had no doubt of that. He didn't want to give up or
give in, but the kid was worried, and maybe in danger, trying to stop him. He
yielded to the tug on his arm and went back toward the room, wondering if he was
being conned, or whether the kid knew what he was talking about. It was
convincing enough.
And they no sooner were back in the room with the door shut than a warning
sounded and Jeremy dived for his bunk.
"Belt in," Jeremy said, and he followed Jeremy's example, unclipped the safety
belts and lay down, with the siren screaming warning at them all the while.
"Got time, there's time," Jeremy said, horizontal and fastening his belt. "God,
you don't ever do that!"
He ignored the kid's concerns and got the belt snugged down, telling himself if
this turned out to be minor he was going to be madder than he was.
Then force started to build, not downward, but sideways, and the mattresses
tilted sideways, so that he had a changing view of the inside bottom of the bunk
beside him. His arms weighed three times normal, his whole body flattened and he
could only see the bottom of Jeremy's bunk, both rotated on the same axis, both
swung perpendicular to the acceleration that just kept increasing.
He couldn't fight it. He found himself shaking and was glad Jeremy couldn't see
it. He was scared. He could admit it now. He was up against something he
couldn't fight, caught up in a force that could break him if he ran out there in
the hall and pitted himself against it. It went on, and on.
And on.
And on.
There wasn't that much racket. Or vibration. Or anything. He shivered from fear
and ran out of energy to shiver. He couldn't see Jeremy. He didn't know what
Jeremy was doing. And finally he had to ask. "How long do we do this?"
"Three hours forty-six minutes."
Shivering be damned. "You're kidding!"
"That's three hours fifteen to go," Jeremy's high voice said. "We like to clear
Pell pretty quick. Lot of traffic. Aren't you glad you didn't go in the
corridor?"
He couldn't take being squashed in his bunk for three hours with nothing to do,
nothing to view, nothing to think about but leaving Pell. Or the ship hitting
something and everybody dying. "So what do you do when you're stuck like this?"
"You can do tape. Or read. Or music. Want some music?"
"Yeah."
Jeremy cut some on, from what source he wasn't sure. It was loud, it was
raucous, it was tolerable. At least he could sink his mind into it and lose
himself in the driving rhythm. Inexorable. Like the ship. Like the whole
situation.
It occurred to him finally to wonder where they were going. He'd never asked,
and neither Quen nor his lawyers had told him. Just—from Quen—the news he'd be
gone a year.
He asked when the music ran out. And the answer came from the unseen kid
effectively double-bunked above his head:
"Tripoint to Mariner to Mariner-Voyager, Voyager, Voyager-Esperance, Esperance,
and back again the way we came. There's supposed to be real good stuff on
Mariner. Fancier than Pell."
Partly he felt sick at his stomach with the long, long recital of destinations.
And he supposed he had to be glad their route was inside civilized space and not
off to Earth or somewhere entirely off the map.
But he felt his heart race, and had to ask himself why he'd felt this little…
lift of spirits when the kid said Mariner—which was supposed to be a sight to
see. As if he was glad to be going to places he'd only heard about and had
absolutely no interest in seeing.
But they were places Pell depended on. It wasn't the Great Black Nothing
anymore. He knew what places were out there. And Mariner was civilized.
"How you doing?" Jeremy asked in his prolonged silence,
"Fine." The compulsory answer. The polite answer. But he got a feeling Jeremy at
least considered him part of his legitimate business. And for a scruffy, skinny
twelve-year-old, Jeremy was level-headed and sensible. There were probably worse
people to get stuck with.
For a twelve-year-old. The obvious suddenly dawned on him. He knew that spacers
didn't age as fast as stationers. Sometimes they'd be ten, fifteen years off
from what you thought—little that the difference from stationers' ages had ever
mattered to him, and little he'd dealt with spacers except his mother. But—on a
kid—even a fraction of ten or fifteen years—was a major matter.
He was moderately, grudgingly curious. "Mind me asking?—How old are you?"
"Seventeen," was Jeremy's answer.
Good God, was his thought. Then he thought maybe the kid knew he was seventeen
and was ragging him.
"Same age as you," Jeremy's voice said from the bunk above his head. "We'd have
been agemates. Except your mama left."
"You're kidding. Right?"
"Matter of fact, no. I'm actually couple of months older than you. I was already
born when your mama left to have you on Pell, and there was question about
leaving me, but they didn't. So you're kind of like my brother.—We'd have been
close together, anyway."
He didn't know what he felt, except upset. He'd been through the this is your
brother routine four times with foster-families. He'd tried to pound one kid
through the floor. But this was not only an honest-to-God relative, this was the
kid he really would have grown up with, and been with, and done kid things with,
if his mother hadn't timed out on him and left him in one hell of a mess.
This was the path he really, truly hadn't taken.
"I wish you'd been born aboard," Jeremy said, "There weren't any kids after us
two, I guess you know. They couldn't have 'em during the War. They will, now.
But our years were already pretty thin. And then we lost a lot of people"
Fletcher found a queasiness in his stomach that was partly anger, partly—he
didn't know. He could see what he might have grown into by now, a scrawny
twelve-year-old body that was so strange he couldn't imagine what Jeremy's mind
was like, seventeen and stuck at physical twelve.
It wasn't natural.
It wasn't natural, either, their being separated. He didn't know. He didn't
know, from where he was lying, what kind of a life he'd missed. He only knew the
life he was leaving, with all it did mean.
Besides, all the sibs people had tried to present him had ended up hating him,
the way he hated them… except only Tony Wilson, who was in his thirties and his
last foster sib. Tony'd been distant. Pleasant. The Wilsons had recognized he
was a semi-adult, and just signed his paperwork, had him home from school dorms
for special holidays, provided a legal fiction of a family for him to fill in
school blanks with. Tony hadn't ever remotely thought he was a rival. He
supposed he'd liked Tony best of all the brothers he had, just for leaving him
the hell alone most of the time and being pleasant on holidays.
Their not showing up when he was shipped out… that hurt. That fairly well hurt.
So who the hell was Jeremy Neihart and why should he care one more time?
"So," Jeremy said in another long silence, "did you like it on the station?"
The question went right to the sore spot."Yeah," he said "Yeah, it was fine."
"You have a lot of friends there?"
"Sure," he said Everything was pleasant. Everything was fine. Never answer How
are you? with anything but, and you never got further questions.
"So—what'd you do for entertainment?"
There hadn't been any entertainment, hadn't been any letup. Just study. Just—all
that, to get where he'd been, where they ripped him out of all he'd accomplished
There wasn't an, Oh, fine… for that one.
"I've got a lot of tapes," Jeremy said when he didn't answer. "We kind of trade
'em around. I got some from Sol. We can pick up some more at Mariner, trade off
the skuz ones. I spent most of my money on tapes."
"I don't have any" he answered sullenly. Which wasn't the truth, but as far as
what a twelve-year-old would appreciate, it was the truth.
"You can borrow mine," Jeremy said
"Thanks"he said. He was too rattled and battered about any longer to provoke a
deliberate fight with the kid. The kid.
His might-have-been brother. Cousin. Whatever they might have been to each other
if not for the War and his addict mother.
On a practical level, Jeremy's offer of tapes was something he knew he'd be glad
of before they got to Mariner. He needed something to occupy his mind if they
had to lay about for hours like this, or he'd be stark, staring crazy before
they cleared the solar system. Tapes to listen to also meant he didn't have to
listen to Jeremy, or talk about might-have-beens, or deal with any of them. Plug
in, tune out. He didn't care what Jeremy's taste in music turned out to be, it
had to be better than dealing with where he was.
He was going to see the universe. Flat on his back and feeling increasingly
scared, increasingly sick at his stomach.
He did know some things about ships. You couldn't breathe the air on Pell
Station without taking in something about ships and routes and cargo. Besides
knowing vaguely how they'd travel out about five days and jump and travel and
jump, he knew they'd load and unload cargo and the captains would play the
market while the crew drank and screwed their way around the docks. Just one
long parry, which was why he had absolutely no idea who his father was. His
mother had just screwed around on dockside because, sure, no spacer gave a damn
who his father was. Mama was everything.
As he guessed Jeremy had a mother aboard, but he didn't know why Jeremy wasn't
living with her, or for that matter, what he was supposed to be to his
roommate's mother. Everybody aboard was related. It was all the J's. Jeremy,
James, Jamie and Johnny, Jane, Janette, Judy, Jill and Janice. Who the hell
cared?
What was it like for a mother to have a seventeen-year-old kid Jeremy's size?
What was it to have your mind growing older and your body staying younger than
it was?
Or was Jeremy more than twelve mentally? The voice didn't sound like it, Jeremy
wouldn't have lived those seventeen years, he guessed, but he'd have watched
seventeen years of events flow past him, in the news and on the ship. He'd—
Force just—quit. The bunks swung, and he grabbed the edges of the mattress with
the feeling he was falling.
"Takehold has ended," came from the speakers. "Posted crew, second shift, you
lucky people. All systems optimal."
Jeremy was unbelting and sitting up. He figured he dared. His head was still
feeling adrift in space.
"You play cards?" Jeremy asked.
"I can." He didn't want to. But he didn't want to do anything else, either. "Can
we go in the halls?"
"Corridors. Stations have halls. We have corridors. Just so you know. Vince'll
snigger, else. And we're off-shift right now. Best stay in quarters if you don't
want to work. You wander around, some senior'll put you to work. Poker?"
"How long do we have to stay lying around like this?"
"Oh," Jeremy said, "about another couple of hours. Till we clear the active
lanes."
"I thought that was what we were doing."
"Just gathering V. We'll run awhile at this V. Then step up again. Four or five
times before we get up to speed. We could do it all at once. But that's real
uncomfortable."
"Deal," he said glumly, and Jeremy bounced up, got into his bunk storage and
rummaged out a plastic real deck.
Twelve-year-old body, he thought, watching the unconscious energy with which
Jeremy moved. There were advantages to being twelve that even at seventeen you'd
lost.
"Favor points or money?" Jeremy asked.
He knew about favor points. If you lost you ended up doing somebody's work for
him. He had no money. He didn't know where he'd get any. He'd rather play for no
points at all, because Jeremy handled those cards with dexterity a dockside
dealer could envy.
"Points," he said.
"You haven't got an assignment yet."
"Yes, I do. Laundry."
"Oh, we all do that." The cards cascaded between Jeremy's hands. Fletcher bet he
could do it under accel, too. "Future points. How's that?"
"Fine," he said.
He lost an hour to Jeremy. And was trying to win it back when a buzzer went off
and scared him.
"Dinner," Jeremy said, scrambling to his feet to get the door.
Somebody, another kid, whose name Fletcher didn't bother to listen to, had a
sack, and out of that sack the junior handed them two box suppers, little
reusable kits containing—Fletcher's hopes crashed as he looked—cold synth cheese
sandwiches.
"Is this all we get?" Fletcher asked.
"Galley's shut down," Jeremy said "It'll be up next watch."
"How's the food then?"
"Real good," Jeremy said "We got real good cooks. Or we space 'em."
Tired joke, but reassuring. Fletcher ate his synth cheese sandwich and drank the
half-thawed fruit juice, trying to calm down. Very basic things had started
mattering to him. He'd just about lost his composure, finding out food this
evening was a sandwich. Shaky adjustment. Real shaky.
And here he was again. Been here before. Everything was new. Everything was the
same as it had ever been. Worse than it had ever been. Spent half his seventeen
years climbing out of the mess mama had left him in and here he was, back at the
starting point.
The real one this time.
The lump in his throat went away. Sugar and protein helped. He figured he'd get
good at poker on this cruise, if nothing else. Jeremy wasn't so bad, for mental
twelve-—or a little more than that. Probably others weren't.
When they ripped you out of one home and put you someplace else you tried never
again to think of where you'd been, or miss anything about it. You just built as
solid a wall as you could, So there was just a wall. Just a blank behind him. At
least until the pain stopped.
…
Two hours into maindark and the Old Man finally asked. "How's Fletcher?"
And JR, on the when-you're-free summons to the Old Man's topside office, gave
the answer he'd predetermined to give: "Autopilot. He's functioning. He's not
happy with this."
"One wouldn't think so," James Robert said. James Robert wasn't at his desk, but
in the soft chair from which he did a great deal of his business. Cargo listings
on the wall display screens had given way to system status reports and
navigational data. "Has Jeremy complained?"
Jeremy had a beeper. With instructions to use it. "No, sir. He hasn't." Jeremy
had seemed the best choice, over the junior-juniors there were. Vince was a
heller from the cradle, always had been, and Linda, female and thirteenish,
wasn't an option.
A lot of empty cabins. There'd easily been a place to put Fletcher alone, as
Jeremy had been alone, as Vince and Linda were alone. But he didn't rate it safe
for an uninformed, inexperienced passenger. Jeremy would warn him. Jeremy would
take care of him.
"You had an encounter with him," the Old Man said.
Not surprising that that news had made it topside. "I'm zeroing it out. Waiting
to see. Can't blame the guy for being on edge"
The Old Man just nodded, whether approving his attitude, or whether sunk in some
other thought. The Old Man brought up other business, then, the general
schedule, the maintenance windows, the expectations of other crew chiefs when
the junior command would have to supply hands and bodies. The jump would come on
main shift. Sometimes it did, sometimes it came during alterday. He'd expected
alterday this time, but no, apparently not.
There wasn't a mention of Fletcher's life-and-death problems in facing jump for
the first time, no special caution to be sure Fletcher got through it sane and
in one piece, JR accepted it, then, as all on his watch, literally, as all
things were that the sitting captains didn't specifically cover in other
assignments. The juniors were all mainday schedule. There weren't enough of them
for two commands, and they'd be working right up to the pre-jump. JR wondered
whether that schedule were just possibly tailored around the new cousin.
And some things, like non-spacers, weren't within his experience or his
observation.
"On the Fletcher question," JR said, in the Old Man's silence, "does he get
tape, or not, during jump? Should I take him into my quarters and see him
through it? "
All of them had experienced hyperspace in the womb. Experienced it until their
lives were strung out in it.
Fletcher was definitely a question mark.
"Leave tape study off," the Old Man said "I'd say, not this trip, for him or for
Jeremy. I'd say—you stay off tape, too. I want you able to respond."
"Yessir," he said
"Where he rides it out," the Old Man said, "is your discretion. You're closer to
the situation than I am. Tell him—"
Rare that the Old Man failed to have exactly what he wanted to say, exactly as
he wanted it
But the last few days of "Fletcher's lost" and "Fletcher's found" and "Fletcher
will be another day late" had worn on everyone, and based on past events, he
began to suspect the Old Man knew the uneasy feeling in the junior crew, and saw
deeper into his personal misgivings than he liked.
The Old Man's chain of consequences, on the other hand, went right back into the
decision to join Norway and leave Francesca.
The hero, the old warrior, said they had a peace to fight now, and they'd taken
on non-military cargo as well as an outsider, both for the first time in nearly
two decades.
But Mallory's War wasn't over, Mallory and the Old Man had had words of some
kind when last they'd met, out in the remote fringes of Earth's space. And
whatever they'd said, it was solemn and sobering in its effect on the Old Man,
who'd come back solemn and sad, and not one word had filtered down to his level.
Tell him—the Old Man had begun, and found no words for what to tell Francesca's
heir, either.
So there was no information for him, just an urging to make the situation work…
somehow… within the junior crew, where the Old Man didn't, on long-standing
principle, interfere. It was the future relationships of the members of that
crew to each other that they were hammering out in their conduct of a set of
duties and responsibilities all their own, the way Finity crew had done for more
than a century. In a certain measure the Old Man couldn't reach into that
arrangement to settle and protect one special case without skewing every
relationship, every reliance, every concept of personal honor and chain of
command the junior crew maintained
Fletcher had to make a Fletcher-shaped place in the crew. There couldn't be
less. Or more. And it wasn't the Old Man's job to do it. He got that from the
silence, when he knew that the Old Man had thought a very great deal about
Fletcher before he came aboard.
"I'll take care of him," JR said, and received back only a sidelong look from
the Old Man. When JR looked back in leaving, the Old Man was busy at his work
again, clearly with no intention of asking or saying further in the matter.
Chapter VIII
Contents - Prev/Next
Morning mess hall was another collection of cousins, mostly seniors. Fifty
people ate at a set time, on schedule—be hungry or skip it entirely, unless you
had an excuse or a favor-point with the cook, so Jeremy said.
Fletcher ate at the same table with Jeremy and two other only moderately
pubescent juniors, Vincent and Linda, both doubtless older in station years than
they seemed, but mentally like the age they looked, they mostly jabbered about
games or what they'd done on Pell docks, their speech larded with wild,
decadent, and fancy, juvvie-buzz that seemed current among their small set.
Mostly they ignored him, beyond the first exchange of names, turned shoulders to
him without seeming to notice it in the heat of their conversational passion,
and Jeremy's eyes lit with the game-jabber, too.
Being ignored didn't matter to Fletcher. He'd lain awake and tossed and turned
in his bunk. Jeremy had lent him music tapes and those had gotten him through
the dark hours.
But today he had to work with these kids who admittedly knew everything he
didn't; and he went with them when they'd had their breakfast—a decent
breakfast, if he'd had the appetite, which he didn't.
They all went, still jabbering about dinosaurs and hell levels, down to A14, and
in the next few hours he learned all about laundry, how to sort, fold, stack,
and keep a cheerful face right along with the two other juniors in the mess pool
with him and Jeremy.
They'd drawn Laundry as their work for this five-day stint… but not every day.
You didn't get stuck on one kind of job as a junior. That was a relief to learn.
The junior-juniors, the ship's youngest, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds
among whom he was unwillingly rated, drew such jobs relatively often. But so did
the mid-level techs, from time to time. Juniors, so Jeremy said, rotated through
Laundry to Minor Maintenance, to Scrub, to Galley, but there were jobs all over
the ship that were rotating jobs, or part-time jobs, or jobs people did only on
call.
Junior-juniors inevitably got the worst assignments, Fletcher keenly suspected.
Laundry was everybody's laundry; laundry for several hundred people who'd been
out on liberty for two weeks was a lot of laundry, sonic and chemical cleaning
for some tissue-fabrics, water-cleaning for the rough stuff, dry, fold, sort,
and stack by rank.
It filled the time that otherwise would have required too much thinking, and it
was a job where you did meet just about everybody, as people came to the counter
for pickup of what they'd sent in at undock and to pick up small store items
like soap refills for their showers, and sewing kits, and other odd notions.
Fletcher didn't remember all the names by half—except Parton, who was blind, and
who had one mechanical eye for ordinary things, Jeremy said, and the other one
was a computer screen for cargo data or anything else Parton elected to receive.
He didn't think he'd forget Parton, who asked him to stand still a moment until
his mechanical vision had registered a template of his face. He'd never met a
blind person. But Jeremy said Parton's left eye was sharp all the way into
situations where the rest of them couldn't see, and Parton didn't always know
whether there was light or not. His mechanical eye could spot you just the same.
Laundry pickup was a place to hear gossip—all the gossip in the ship, he
supposed, if you kept your ears open. He picked up a certain amount of
information on certain individuals even with no idea who he was hearing about,
and he heard how various establishments on Pell didn't meet the approval of the
senior captain.
Vincent and Linda talked about various places you'd go in civvies, and
restaurants you'd wear a patch to, meaning the ship's patch, he guessed. Someone
dropped by the counter and gave him his own, ten black circular ship's patches,
and small patches that said Finity's End and Fletcher Neihart. It was, he
supposed, belonging. He wasn't sure how he felt about them.
Jeremy handed him a sewing kit from off the shelf of supplies. "You stitch 'em
on," Jeremy said. "The shiny-thread ones are for dress outfits, the plain-thread
are for work gear. If they start looking tatty you get new ones or the watch
officer has a fit. I'll show you how, next watch."
Labels got your laundry back to you, that was one use of them he saw. You also
had a serial number. He was F48, right next to his name. He saw that in a roll
of tags that was also in the packet the man had given him. Those were just for
the laundry. It was a lot of sewing on tags.
Even in the underwear and the socks.
Labeled. Everything. Head to toe.
He didn't say anything. He didn't like it. On Base he'd had to do his own
laundry. Everybody did. You got your clothes back because you sensibly never
dumped them in bins with everybody else's. He'd never learned to sew anything in
his life, but he figured he'd learn if he wanted his socks and underwear back.
Labeling right down to his socks as Finity crew, though, he'd have skipped that
if he could. But counting they'd lose your underwear if you didn't, it seemed a
futile point on which to carry on a campaign of independence, or make what was a
tolerable situation today harder than it was. Nobody had done anything
unpleasant—or been too intrusively glad to see him. Vincent tried to engage him
about where he'd been, holding up the ship and making them late on their
schedule, but Jeremy told Vince to stop and let him alone and Vince, who came
only up to mid-chest on him, took stock of him in a long look and shut up about
it.
Jeremy wanted to talk about Downbelow when they got back to quarters after mess,
and that was harder. They sat there stitching his labels into his socks, and
Jeremy wanted to know what Downbelow looked like.
"Real pretty," he said.
"There's trees on Pell," Jeremy said
"Yeah. The garden. The ones on Downbelow are prettier." He jabbed his finger
with the needle, painfully so. Sucked on it. He and Jeremy sat on their
respective bunks, with a stack of his entire new wardrobe and all the clothes
he'd brought with him plus a pile of the clothes he'd gotten dirty so far, and
he wasn't sorry to have the help doing it.
He daydreamed for an instant about puffer-ball gold and pollen skeining down Old
River, beneath branches heavy with spring leaves. Rain on the water.
Jeremy chattered about what he'd seen in Pell's garden. And segued nonstop to
what he wanted to do after they got the patches stitched on. Jeremy wanted him
to go to rec with him tonight: there was a rec hall, with games and a canteen,
Jeremy said.
"I don't want to."
"Oh, come on. What are you going to do, else?"
It was a point. He'd be alone in this closet of a room. He was tired, but he'd
get to thinking about things he didn't want to think about.
He went. It was the same huge compartment they'd all been in during undock, only
now there were no railings. There were game machines. A vid area. Tables and
chairs, senior as well as junior crew playing cards, playing games, watching
vids. He suffered a moment of dislocation, and almost balked at the
transformation alone.
But the entertainments offered were very much like at the Base. Familiar
situation. You mixed with senior staff and techs and all. They just generally
didn't talk with junior staff.
"What do you play?" Jeremy asked him.
Dangerous question. He'd already lost ten hours to Jeremy at cards; but when he
glumly decided on vids, and looked through the available cards in the bin to the
side of the machines, he found an Attack game he hadn't seen since he was a
small kid. The card itself when he pulled it out was old, showing a lot of use;
but he remembered that game with real pleasure, and recalled he'd been pretty
good at it—for a seven-year-old. He might have a chance at this one.
He appropriated a machine. Meanwhile Vince and Linda had shown up, and thought
they'd join him and Jeremy.
He wasn't delighted, but he kept the expression off his face; he linked up with
the three of them, a little suspecting ambush. He didn't play vids, not for the
last four years, being short of opportunity and short of time, and he dropped
into the semi-world of state-of-the-art interactives with a little caution.
Blown. Blown in two seconds. He made four tries, but he couldn't come out of the
drop into the game fast enough with these kids to avoid getting blasted.
"This is enough," he said. But Jeremy jollied him out of quitting, said they'd
play partners, and after that he lived for maybe the equivalent of a station
hall block before he blew up.
He just wasn't very good at it. Or the point was, they were very, very good and
their reflexes were astonishingly fast. When he exited the game and took the
visor off he was a little disoriented from the intensity of the play they'd
forced him to. They were different when they took theirs off, hyped, nervous, so
much so that when they went for soft drinks at the bar he didn't know the Jeremy
he was dealing with. Jeremy's fingers twitched, his small body was like a wound
spring, and he sat and sipped a soft drink with Vince, who was a little saner,
while Jeremy and Linda went back into the game and had it out. A long game. You
could elect to watch the game on the screen where they were sitting; and Vince,
who said he was tired, did… while Jeremy and Linda were nearby, two people just
sitting at a table opposite each other, twitching occasionally, fingers moving
on the pads. But on the screen two fighters were stalking each other.
"They're good," he said to Vince, aware first of a twelve-, thirteen-year-old
boy's face, and second that Vince was, chronologically speaking, a year older
than he was.
And third that Vince was himself too hyped for rational conversation, arms and
shoulders twitching to the moves on the screen, jabbering strategy at Linda, who
was, he'd found out, Vince's fairly close cousin and year-mate.
He didn't react the way these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds did—but he'd never
seen any kid react the way these kids did, not the most dedicated gameheads
who'd haunted the vid parlors on Pell. Something in him said dangerous, and
something said alien. Something in his gut said he was going to be outmatched at
anything but cards with these kids, and that there was something direly skewed
about these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old twelve-year-olds.
Baby faces. Tiny bodies. High, pre-change voices. He could pick any of the three
of these kids up in one hand; but their reactions in games were tigerish. He'd
heard the word, and knew the association. Tigerish. Predatory, low brain
function, and fast.
Vince and he watched and drank soft drinks and ate chips as Jeremy and Linda
kept it up for another hour and a half before watch-end mandated their return to
quarters—a return which, like a lot of other odd things, said to him that these
weren't ordinary twelve-year-olds, who voluntarily delayed a game to sew patches
on clothes, who made their beds without a wrinkle, who didn't duck out on
rules—and kept a single Attack game going an hour and a half because nobody
could score.
He walked the steeply curving ring beside Jeremy, who still couldn't walk like a
normal human being, who was still electric and jumping with an energy he hadn't
discharged. And when they got into quarters Jeremy wasn't relaxed until he'd
spent a long time in the shower.
"You all right?" he asked Jeremy when the kid came out, stark naked, to dress
for bed.
"Yeah." Jeremy gave a little laugh and pulled on a tee and briefs to sleep in.
But there was something still a little breathless, a little strange about him.
Fletcher took his own shower and scrubbed as if he could scrub out the sight
he'd just seen, and asking himself how he felt about room-sharing with a
hype-head. That was what it reminded him of. He had seen people react that way.
On drugs.
He didn't remember his mother playing kid games with him. He remembered his
mother drugged out, but languid, most of the time, Remembered her more than once
sitting at the table in the apartment and staring into space she didn't need a
visor to see. But her arms would be hard like that, as if she were waiting for
something, and her face would be—
He couldn't remember her face anymore. Not clearly. He came closest he'd come in
years to remembering it with the women, senior crew, who came and went around
him today. They looked like her. All the people on this ship looked like her in
some subtle way, until those recent faces washed over what his mother had looked
like to him.
And he remembered the times, the scariest times, when she'd been as scarily
hyped as Jeremy had been in the game. How, at the last, she'd prowl the
apartment and bump into walls that weren't there for her. She'd held him in her
arms, the only times he could remember her holding him, and she'd say she saw
the stars, she saw all the colors of space, and she'd ask him if he could see
them, too.
He couldn't. Aged five, he'd thought there was something wrong with him, and
that he was stupid, because he hadn't been able to see the stars the way she
could. Thank God she hadn't given him any of what she was taking. She'd never
gone that far down.
He let the shower fans dry his skin and his hair. He came out of the bath,
abandoning the Base-induced modesty that had had him, on prior days, dressing in
the cramped bath space. Jeremy didn't give him more than a glance, so he guessed
it was nothing new in the intimacy of a crowded ship. Jeremy sat on his bunk
letting the cards cascade between his hands, cards flying between his fingers
and piling up again, sheer nervous energy.
Jeremy had already proved he was good at cards.
He lost three more hours. He won one back. And when he did win, Jeremy didn't
sulk about it like some twelve-year-olds he'd known, just said, well, he was
improving, and dealt another hand.
He was still sure he could swat Jeremy and his cousins aside in a straight-on
fight. But he wasn't sure, now, that he could exit without damage. He hadn't
factored in the possibility that his roommate was outright crazy. He hadn't
figured that others might be, that it might go with the territory, just being
out here, dealing with space. He'd known no spacers intimately but his mother
and Quen. All his life, he'd heard people say spacers were different or strange,
usually meaning it came in the blood and it accounted for his misbehaviors or
his quirks.
Maybe there was something to it. He no longer denied there could be reasons
besides upbringing that made spacers rowdy and made station police nervous when
spacers intruded into residential areas. They bullied people. They went in
groups and were loud and disorderly. They got drunk and knifed each other in
bars and the police just contacted ships responsible, never arrested anybody
unless they had the ship's officers present… because there'd been riots when a
station attempted to intervene in spacer troubles, and what a riot was like when
you got one, two thousand, ten thousand Jeremys all hyped and mad, he didn't
ever want to see.
The final tally of favor-points was thirteen hours. He lost the last time and
went to bed, with the prospect of another tomorrow exactly like this one.
He had no idea where the ship was by now. There were sounds he couldn't
identify, occasionally hydraulics, but they were flying along at what Jeremy and
his physics course called inertial. He lay in his bunk thinking about that until
he made himself queasy with the thought of running into something; and reminded
himself they weren't going through the ecliptic like insystemers, but nadir of
the system, clear of the planets and stations, clear of the star, out there
where only starships went.
On the next day he found his appetite for breakfast had increased. His stomach
had gradually settled to the feeling the ship gave him. His sinuses had quit
protesting the change in air pressure. At work, the frantic pace in the laundry
detail that had kept them moving during the first days had abated, and that
meant time on their hands. They talked. He didn't. They all folded sheets and
stacked them up and they talked about the vid game last night, which at least
was common ground, but he wasn't inspired to add any observations, past their
rapid chatter.
They talked on and he handed out shower soap to a cousin named Susan, who came
to the counter. She wanted to talk and make acquaintances: she was pretty,
dark-eyed, looked twenty and was just curious, he thought, and then reminded
himself this wasn't a pretty girl, it was a cousin, and you couldn't have
thoughts like that aboard, even if he was having them, and was far more
interested in her than in the game-chatter behind him. She said she worked in
cargo. He said he was in planetary studies.
She said she didn't know what there was to study about a planet. She wasn't
joking, he decided. His ardor cooled instantly, the conversation died a rapid,
distracted death as the game-chatter actually became more interesting than
talking to her, and maybe he managed to offend her. He was depressed after she'd
left.
Truly depressed. The new had worn off. The body and brain had stopped having to
move fast. Realization was settling in. He was among total strangers.
"What's the matter?" Jeremy asked him after a while.
"Tired," he said. And Vince took that as a cue to try to bait him:
"A little work get to you?"
He didn't answer. "Let him alone," Jeremy said and then Jeremy engaged Vince and
Linda in a game of cards in the other room—which was one of the thousand little
things that hinted to him that Jeremy might be wiser than twelve—or at least
more mature than Vince was. They played cards. He did small squares on the
handheld that he'd brought among his personal gear, a cheap, field-battered
handheld that held a couple of games, all his personal notes from classes and
sessions in the field. He didn't want to access those. He couldn't face the
memories. He just built squares on the sketchpad, trying to forget cousins.
JR came by and stopped at the counter, the first time he'd seen JR since
boarding, "So how are you feeling?" JR asked.
JR, who looked to be his age, and he was sure now both was and wasn't.
"Fine." He shut the handheld down and pocketed it, as inconspiciously as he
could, fearful they might object either to his using it or having an
unauthorized computer. Some places were touchy about it.
JR ignored it and took something from his breast pocket. He laid three little
sealed plastic packets on the counter. "Jump drugs. It's regulation you have
them on you at all times. You didn't report to infirmary when you boarded."
They were inevitability, staring him in the face. The event he most dreaded.
"Nobody told me."
"Fine. I'm telling you now, for all future time. Scared to give yourself a
shot?"
"No." He'd never done it. But he'd watched it.
"You just put it against your wrist and push the button. Kicks. If you have one
malfunction… they don't, but if it should happen, you're supposed to have a
second. Whenever you use one, you've got to drop by medical, that's A10. Day
before jump, there'll always be a box sitting out for you to take what you need
One packet on your person at all times when the ship is out of dock, an extra
when you're going for jump."
"There's three."
"This time, yes. Tripoint's supposedly safe as a dockside stroll these days, but
nobody on this ship would bet his sanity on it. A jump-point's a lot of dark
where you can still meet somebody you don't want to meet, and if we do, if we
should, you'd hear the siren blowing when you come out of jump, and you'd have
just enough time to hit yourself with that second shot. You've got to keep
clear-headed and do that or you're in serious trouble. Not to scare you, but
this ship has enemies. And people have gone into hyperspace without trank, but
most don't come down the way they went in."
He'd been scared of a lot of things in the last number of days. Being shot at by
pirates hadn't been on the immediate list. Coming awake in hyperspace hadn't
been. Now it was.
"When you board, for the record, next thing after you turn in your baggage at
the dock, the packets are on the counter, pick 'em up."
"Yeah, well, I had cops attached."
"No excuses next time. As you board, you take your duffle to the counter, pick
up the drugs, sign the list."
"You're going to let me off this ship?"
"Only seniors stay aboard. No deck space during dock. Unless you're sick. You
don't plan to be sick. And just once, and just for the record, never take this
stuff except when you're told to by an officer. That box sits on the counter on
the honor system. Take only what you're supposed to."
He'd been getting along well enough until cousin JR said that. "My mother was an
addict," he said. "That what you mean?"
"Never take it except when told by an officer. Standard instruction. That's the
rule. Nothing personal."
"Like hell."
There was the laundry counter between them. It was probably a good thing. The
card game was going on in the next room. There was nothing else to separate
them.
The silence between them went on a moment. JR's jaw muscles stood out in shadow.
But JR didn't inform him it was Like hell, sir.
"Obey the regulations," JR said. "Go back to work."
JR walked off.
He didn't know who was in the right about that encounter. He stood there with a
pocketful of what had killed his mother. The ship was going into jump with him
aboard, and if he didn't take the drug he'd meet whatever it was in hyperspace
that drove people crazy. The drugs were ordinary, they were what you had to take
to get through the experience, and his mother had died only because she
overdosed and depressed her nervous system. He knew all that.
And he knew that the clock was running down close to that event and that through
an oversight he'd almost not had the drugs he was supposed to have. That was a
fact, too, and if somebody hadn't checked and there'd been some kind of
emergency he knew he could have been in bad trouble. JR had come by to make sure
he had the drug and knew what to do, so he couldn't fault that as hostile
behavior. It was just the little extra remark that just hadn't been necessary.
He was scared. Scared of the event, terrified of the drug—he'd been tested for
it: the court had wanted to know if his mother had given it to him, to a
five-year-old. But her suicide had been solo. Probably not intended to happen
while he was home. She'd loved him. She kept getting him back from the social
system no matter how many times she gave him up. Wasn't that love?
"So what'd JR want?"
The card game was over. Jeremy was back at his elbow. Assigned to be there: he
suddenly drew that conclusion. Jeremy was always looking out for him not because
Jeremy gave a damn but because Jeremy had orders.
He opened the counter and left, walking fast, nowhere, and then toward his
quarters, which he realized was no refuge from Jeremy. He was cornered, and
stopped, in mid-corridor.
"You can't just walk off-duty," Jeremy said. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened," he said, and drew a couple of calmer breaths. He didn't want
to explain it. He didn't want to deal with it. And he didn't want to have to
hold together incipient panic with a twelve-year-old hanging on his arm. "When
are we going into jump?"
"About four hours."
"Today?"
"Is there a problem?"
Is there a problem? He wanted to laugh. Or cry. "No," he said. And turned back
toward the laundry. "Just keep Vince off me. I'm not in a good mood."
"Sure," Jeremy said, and walked with him.
He couldn't walk in with no commotion, Vince had to say something.
"Well, is cousin Fletcher going to take a walk?"
He grabbed a fistful of Vince's jumpsuit.
"Fletcher, stop!" Jeremy said, and tried to push him and Vince apart, no luck
where it came to budging his arm. "No fighting. Vince, cut it, don't hassle him!
Hear me?"
"Vince," Linda said, in what sounded like real fear, and pushed at Vince as if
Vince had a choice about it. She acted as if she might have prevented Vince
swinging at him. At least she gave Vince an excuse to take his thirteen-year-old
self in retreat about five paces and toward the next section of the laundry.
Jeremy and Linda did the age-old part of friends, calming Vince down as if he'd
been fierce and unrestrainable, just on the verge of swinging on somebody two
heads taller.
Vince had been flat pissing scared. Fletcher realized that, now, as he realized
the kid had gotten him angry enough to do damage, which wasn't called for. They
were kids, and it wasn't their fault the captain or whoever had put him down
with them. He wished on the one hand he'd gone ahead and hit Vince and improved
his attitude, But he told himself that a warning had settled it. He went back to
folding sheets, telling himself that whatever a batch of snot-nosed kids took in
stride, he could, and his mother's case wasn't his case, and he wasn't going to
panic or let the kids see how scared he was.
That was the trouble. He was scared. Scared of the drug as much as the jump, and
telling himself, rationally, there wasn't anything to be scared of. Sad about,
upset about, yes, but not scared.
Not in front of Jeremy.
"So how's he doing?" Bucklin asked before jump, and JR didn't find a ready
reply.
"Calm," JR said, "mostly." They were both on last moment patrol of the
corridors. The ship was about to do another burn, this one of short duration,
getting up to V enough to preserve vector and assure they didn't make a
momentary anomaly in the local sun. The warning had sounded, an order for all
but jump crew to go to their cabins and stay there. The endless, upward-curving
corridor was deserted, the doors all shut. They'd just passed the room Fletcher
shared with Jeremy, on their way to their own quarters, senior and
second-senior, the last two moving about down on A corridor, while upstairs, in
B, much the same process would be going on. They'd collected their e-rations,
they had their trank, and they were about to head for Tripoint, a set of three
large mass-points that would anchor their jump toward Mariner.
Relatively busy as jump-points went. You followed the same procedures as at a
star, but the triple mass made precise navigation tricky there. You could find
out where you were after you'd arrived, but your precise arrival was just a
little hard to coordinate. You got the latest navigational charts just before
the ship left, charts shot to you in the final informational packet. Finity
hadn't been through Tripoint recently, but some ships at dock had, and the
information they had on Tripoint's precise numbers had gone to Pell Central
along with the stock market data and civil records from Viking and Mariner and
everywhere else in the network.
Tripoint had its hazards, and a ship arriving there even these days was careful
who they met and who might be lurking. Since the War, this ship was always
careful, and went in with someone ready at the guns.
But he didn't think that was information their new cousin needed to know on his
first jump.
Feet appeared on the horizon. Two pair. Legs followed. Chad and Lyra were
walking the opposite direction in the ring, and they were meeting up. Circuit
complete.
"No ball of flame in A28?" Lyra asked
"Nothing exciting,"Bucklin reported. "We don't have to sit on him."
"Damn," Lyra said. "There goes my chance."
Joke. There wasn't any bunking about on board, New Rules, or Old. But cousin
Fletcher's felicitous sorting of the family genes—and his status as a
stranger—had drawn remarks among the femme-cousins.
Fletcher might be just seventeen, but he was a well put together and mature
seventeen, which, given he was new, was triggering interest spacers didn't
ordinarily feel toward a shipmate. He knew he probably ought to talk to Fletcher
about that. It wasn't something he could easily tell Jeremy to explain, Jeremy,
whose body didn't yet inform him what it would abundantly explain in the next
few years.
But given how Fletcher had exploded, given the level of tension Fletcher was
already carrying, it didn't seem quite the moment.
When their brand-new and fine-looking cousin did mix with spacers on a foreign
dockside in about ten days, subjective time, Fletcher would get offers… offers
that would presume experience to match the face and body. It was going to be
interesting.
They parted company, to separate quarters, the privilege of all the
senior-juniors in a ship with too many vacant cabins. They hauled cargo in some
of their unused space, right along with the huge shipping cannisters in the hold
and the rim. It was Earth goods and downer wine they carried inside, high-priced
cargo that needed not only gravity such as they could provide in the outer rim
but specific temperatures, for its safety.
They were moving slowly, this trip, laden with, besides their luxury goods,
plain staples: flour. They were vulnerable economically, vulnerable in terms of
self-defense… not as heavy mass as they'd ever hauled, but heavy enough a feel
to the ship to let them know they had cargo.
The last reports into Pell, from a ship inbound eight hours ago, said Tripoint
was safe, free from lurkers. But that could change with any heartbeat A starship
could arrive at Tripoint from various places, one of them a deep route, the sort
only non-cargo ships used, reachable by a ship that had a very high engine/mass
ratio. That deep route intersecting with a busy commercial route was what made
it so valuable in the War, and valuable after to the black market, and to those
just keeping an eye out—for various causes.
He was anxious about that place, on edge about this jump more than any except
the one into their turnaround point, at Esperance. The bridge could ill afford
distractions like a medical from A deck.
Chad and Lyra went on to their separate quarters. His and Bucklin's were side by
side, A20 and 21. They'd roomed together since they were knee-high to Jeremy.
They had separate quarters now, using the spare space as office, each of them,
but they stayed together. They walked in that direction.
"Well," Bucklin said, "here we are, on our way to respectable trade."
"Here's to it," JR said, and opened his own door, went in, sat down on a bunk he
hadn't visited in… how many hours?
There'd been staff meetings. Reviews about their handling qualities: the Old Man
wanted that hammered home to everybody who was used to Finity moving with a lot
more response than she'd have under these circumstances. Different set of rules,
both navigational and defensive. In an emergency, since the captain had
officially ordered him on standby and not on tape, he would be on-shift backup
to Madison, leaving Alan and Francie to enjoy a little deeper sleep and the
chance to do tape.
As short-handed as Finity had run, it could come on any given jump, any one of
the captains failing to make it—find the Old Man was pushing it with every jump,
stretched thin, year upon year upon year. Madison wasn't that far behind,
himself, and a rough exit and Alan and Francie doing tape at the time, could put
him in the Old Man's chair, giving orders to Helm simply because there wasn't
another alternative.
So he had the numbers to memorize, the instructions and locations in navigation
as well as the figures on their laded mass and moment in exit, and by the very
nature of his assignment memorizing them the old-fashioned way, the way they'd
done before the Old Man had given in and admitted that tape-study wasn't going
to turn the crew and particularly the juniors into Unionized automatons.
God, they'd even gotten hypermath through Vince's head since that blessed change
in the Rules.
And they couldn't short Jeremy his education the entire pass around their
course, not even a significant number of jumps. Jeremy was going to go on study
again in a couple of jumps or spend some of his rec evenings later this year
locked in a room with Fletcher and both of them doing deep-study.
He hadn't broken that small piece of news to the boys yet. Jeremy was still
delighted with his new roommate, with an almost-brother who was large, inept
with the routines, and mentally—
—different. Say that much for dealing with a stationer.
Much as he didn't like it.
He stowed the boots in his locker and tugged on the light-soled jumpboots that
would protect his feet if he had to move and still wouldn't cramp up during a
quasi-sleep that, in his body's time, would amount to about two weeks.
You didn't want tight clothing during that time, because your body wouldn't do
much of anything while the drug stayed in your body—you wouldn't move, but you
were just marginally aware. Your mind could process things, like dream-state,
and you could learn things of a factual sort, and if you were vastly disturbed,
at the edge of the state, as you were coming out, sometimes you could get up off
your bunk and do things marginally under the control of your conscious mind.
That was the spooky part—and never having known anyone who'd not been through
the experience of a hyperspace jump from way before birth, when pregnant women
had to get off mild thymedine and onto hyprazine, a drug which would
intentionally get to the fetal bloodstream, he had extreme last-minute regrets
about leaving Fletcher to Jeremy. Jeremy had a generally calming effect on
Fletcher—unless Fletcher hyped instead of tranked down, and thought he'd met the
devil in hyperspace.
Maybe he should pull Fletcher into his quarters. The rest of the crew wouldn't
take it as exalting Fletcher, but Jeremy would take it as a slap in the face.
Jeremy had a beeper; Jeremy was unfazed by jump and had been known to be up on
his feet during the dump-downs which the young smart-ass still illicitly did, he
was all but certain. Nobody among the juniors, including himself or Bucklin,
would be faster to have their wits about them if Fletcher did spook; he was sure
of that. Jeremy also had two extra doses of trank and knew what to do with them,
right through the plastic envelope on any available surface of his roommate if
he had to.
You didn't track a kid toward Helm if he didn't have the killer reflexes. And
Jeremy had them, better than anybody in years.
It remained to prove what they'd make out of Fletcher.
Chapter IX
Contents - Prev/Next
Fletcher sat on his bunk putting on the lighter boots and the light sweater
Jeremy advised, a lot calmer than he thought he'd possibly be now that the event
was on him. Jeremy's juvenile cheerfulness was reassuring. "It gets kind of
cold," Jeremy said matter-of-factly. "And you can't get up to get anything. You
might want to, but you'd lose your balance, even if you can think that far. They
really advise against it."
He'd thought people slept through it, numb to anything that happened to them.
But his mother had been aware enough, walking around. She'd talked to him when
she was on it. He didn't know how high a dose she'd been taking.
Too much, the last time… that was for damned certain. But it wasn't poison. It
was just a drug. A drug that thousands of people took regularly with no ill
effects.
The takehold sounded. He scrambled to get belted in, to get a pillow under his
head. And to get the book set up, which Jeremy had lent him. It fed out into a
game visor, for when he wanted it. It was an adventure story, something called
War of the Worlds. He wouldn't spend the hours with nothing to do but think
about his situation.
"Usually we take tape," Jeremy said, "usually it's math—or biology," A wrinkle
of Jeremy's nose. "But they want to kind of, you know, make sure you're all
right with this before they let you take tape during it. So I'm staying off tape
for the while, so I can help you if you, you know, need something."
"What's dangerous about it?" Stupid question. He knew the answers there were.
"Just, you know, if you didn't get set right and needed something."
"I thought you couldn't move."
"You shouldn't move. I mean, you can scratch your nose or something. You try not
to think about it, but your nose always itches. If you can find it and not hit
yourself in the eye. Best is just to relax. Watch the pretty lights. There's
usually lights."
"Usually?"
"If you're not doing tape. Or you think about stuff. Think about happy stuff.
Think about the happiest stuff you can think of. That's the best."
He damn sure didn't want nightmares. A solid month of nightmares. He didn't want
to think about it. "How many of these have you been through?"
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe… maybe fifty, sixty. And Tripoint. Tripoint's a cinch
now. You come out with shooting going on, alarms going off—that's where you just
lie there wondering…"
"Where's that?"
"Oh, Tripoint once. At Earth."
Somehow, on this ship, he didn't think the kid was lying. "On it?"
"Not on it. They were shooting, you could see it on the scopes. They were
shooting, just all hell going on." Jeremy was winding tighter, the way he'd been
with the vid games, muscles tight, hands balled into fists, beating a short,
small rhythm as if there were music Jeremy could hear. "Like, if you get
hulled,—we did, once—there's this sound—there's this sound goes through
everything. You don't hear it. And the lights going off. Everything's red when
you wake up, those emergency lights—"
"That happened?" He didn't think that was a lie, either. He'd hit a nerve of
some kind, touched off something, and the kid was scared—of what, he didn't
know—staring at sights he didn't see,
"Yeah, it happened." Breath came through Jeremy's teeth and he seemed clenched
tight, every muscle. "But we got 'em back. We got 'em back at Bryant's."The beat
of hands continued, a drumbeat against his drawn-up legs, rapid, tight
movements. And the engines cut in. "We're going. We're going. Here we go."
The kid was spooked. He'd expected he'd be crawling the walls in panic, but
Jeremy was wired, wound, caught up in memory Jeremy had just advised him not to
access: think of happy things. Jeremy wasn't thinking of happy memories.
"We don't take the drug now?" he asked Jeremy, any question, to gain some
doorway into Jeremy's private terror. The bunks were tilting, making their whole
cabin one double- deck bunk the way they did when the ship was accelerating. He
couldn't think of anything else to say but to question what he was trying, in
his own fear, to remember to do. "We wait for the announcement. Right?"
"Yeah," Jeremy's voice came to him. "Yeah, wait. Just wait. They'll say when."
He imagined Jeremy up above him, still spooked, still wound tight as a spring.
He didn't know whether Jeremy was always like this on jumps, or whether his own
fears were rational, or whether that last memory still haunted the kid. The ship
getting hulled…
That wasn't something ships survived. But Finity was a big ship; among the
biggest. And it had been, for years, fighting the Fleet, hunting the hunters
that preyed on shipping, firing and being fired on…
"Are we looking for any trouble?" he called up to Jeremy, trying without seeing
him, to test whether the kid was all right "Are we really going to Mariner? Is
that where we're really going?"
"Yeah," Jeremy said back, "On this vector? Yeah. Mariner via Tripoint, We're
hauling cargo. This time it's real cargo. For us, not for Mallory. Tons of
Scotch whiskey and coffee and chocolate. We used to haul missiles and
hard-rations."
Mallory. Mallory of Norway, The rebel captain who'd defended Pell. Cargo for
Mallory, whose ship had docked only rarely at Pell in his lifetime.
Supplying Mallory with necessities? Making cargo runs to the warships out in
space?
That was for history books. The War was something you heard about in
documentaries and vid games.
But Jeremy, at twelve, had been out on the fringes for seventeen years. This
ship had gotten hit during the War. Or after. During the pirate hunts, which had
danced in and out of the news all his life, just part of the background of his
life.
But it was real, out there.
Correction. Out here. On this ship he was on. It was very real to Jeremy. It had
never been unreal to Jeremy.
He wasn't hearing anything out of the kid. He wanted a voice. Wanted truth.
Wanted an estimation of what to expect out here. "You see any pirates?"
"What do you mean?" Jeremy asked.
"I mean, you ever come close to any? Recently?"
The force was slamming them into the mattresses. It wasn't easy to move, but
Jeremy had rolled over and looked over the edge of his bunk,
"Where do you think we've been for seventeen years? They teach you anything on
that station?"
He'd been a fool. "I guess not enough."
"Half this ship died," Jeremy said fiercely, hair hanging, face reddening. "My
mama and half of everybody aboard, some of them juniors who never knew what hit
'em. We got a decompression in half the ring and we had damn-all getting back to
a port where we could get us put back together. I wish we was still hunting them
and not going on this stupid trade run, massed up so we can't handle worth a
damn at an insystem wallow. Captain-sir wants us back to trading, and Captain
Mallory says the War's over, but they're still out there, there's pirates still
out there we haven't got, and Mallory's still hunting 'em. When I make senior,
damn-all, and if we haven't gotten after those bastards again, I'm going to jump
ship and join Mallory's crew. "
"You think they could try to raid us on this run?"
"I don't know." Jeremy's face had gone an alarming color from the strain of
hanging over the edge. "They say it's quiet right now and the stations don't
want to give us any more money to keep us out hunting. Madison says they haven't
got hit, is what. They've been safe for seventeen years and they don't want to
pay, and we're the reason they haven't been hit for seventeen years. Year we
were born and we left Pell, the station was a wreck."
The first years on Pell had been lean, that was sure. His childhood memories
were scarce food and a lot of construction.
"Let a ship get hit," Jeremy said out of the air above him, finally back all the
way in his bunk, "and you bet the merchanters are going to be yelling. Where's
Finity? They'll say. Why isn't Finity on the job? And maybe they'll pay the dock
charges for us, or all the ships will go on strike so the stations have to let
us dock and fuel on station-charge. That's what the Old Man did before. He shut
down all merchant traffic and nobody hauled. He did it when Union wanted to
Unionize us and he did it when the Earth Company wanted us not to trade
Union-side, and he did it to cut the Fleet off so the Fleet couldn't get supply.
We could do it again."
The merchanter strikes were famous. It was something he knew from school. "So
why don't you?"
"I don't know," Jeremy said, and then said, in a lower voice: "I think the
captain's getting old."
Captain James Robert Neihart. The Captain. The one who'd hauled him aboard and
wrecked his life. It seemed to him that the captain had power enough to get his
way. And that Quen did.
Jeremy didn't say any more. The acceleration kept up, and kept up. Fletcher put
the visor on and turned the book on, and moved only his thumb to change pages.
He was still scared. Maybe more so, but less so of the jump itself. The pirates
sounded more active than the station news had had the story. He hadn't meant to
tread on Jeremy's sensitivities. Jeremy had lost a mother, too, in the War, or
what passed for the peace, and they had that in common, as well as their birth.
He didn't know enough about history. He'd gotten through his courses without
having to know that much. He was good on the governments of Earth, far off
things that were more exotic than evocative of real pain. The construction had
been an inconvenience of his childhood, places you couldn't go, because there
was always construction in the way, but he'd actively avoided knowing about the
War, or his mother's reason for being where she'd died. He'd understood that Q
section had been pretty bad, and some of the people that had been in Q section
were still visiting the psychs. Some had even asked for a minor wipe, to purge
that time from their memories. Which said it had been pretty bad, because the
psychs had granted a wipe to some, and they hadn't even considered it for his
mother. Even if she later killed herself.
"This is James Robert. Jump in five minutes. First warning. Trank down.
Fletcher, welcome aboard, and have a sound sleep"
Me? he asked himself. The high and mighty senior and universally-famous captain
talked to him, in front of the whole damn crew?
"Trank down," Jeremy said from above him. "Now. You all right?"
"Yeah. Yes." He'd mapped out every move he needed to make. His hands were
shaking as he pulled the visor off and stowed it the way he'd been warned to
stow everything loose, shoved it in the tight elastic pocket at the edge of the
bunk. "Where's best to give it?" JR had said shoot it in the wrist, but Jeremy
knew easy ways for everything.
"Anywhere below the neck. Arm's fine. Push up your sleeve and just hit it."
He pulled out the packet with nightmares of dropping it, fought with the tear
strip, got his sleeve up and froze… just froze, hand shaking so he almost did
drop it.
"You give it yet?"Jeremy called down to him.
He pushed the packet hard against his bare forearm. The spring kicked. He didn't
feel it as sharply as he thought he should. It didn't sting. He held up the
clear packet to his eye. The plastic was flat against the backing, fluid
depleted. It had gone in. It looked as if it had. Maybe he should take the other
one. In case. Maybe it had ejected on the bedclothes instead of in his arm…
"Fletcher? Did you do it? Are you all right?"
"Yes!" He was shivering. But things were growing distant. He felt the drug
insinuating itself through his veins. It had gone in, he'd just been so scared
he hadn't felt the sting. He was getting slower…
Slower and lighter at the same time. Maybe the ship had cut the engines. It felt
that way…
"Fletcher…" he heard someone say…
They were looking for him…
Rain swept the trees in sheets, and battered the mask, making the seal against
his face slippery and uncertain as he traded cylinders—the first trade-out he'd
had to make, and sooner than he'd expected. That early depletion of a
life-and-death resource scared him; rather than squander another, he replaced
just one, just the one with the end gone dark red, all the way expired.
His hands were trembling as he shoved the replacement in, and he couldn't get
the rain-wet facial seal to take and reseal the way it ought. So he pressed it
hard against his face as he walked, mad, now, mad at all the world above and
half the world of Downbelow and knowing he had to focus down and get his wits
about him before he had an accident Downbelow just wouldn't forgive.
It was getting dark, now: simple fact in the domes, or on the station, where
twilight happened as a technological choice and a human hand could revise it.
Not out here. A dozen times he'd tell himself he had to just turn around, go
back, follow River home. But he'd long passed any hope of using any excuse he
could think of but one: he was lost.
And that was the truth. He'd gotten himself in such a mess now he didn't know
how to get out.
Couldn't blame anyone—not for the lost part. That was stupid. And if he died of
it, he couldn't pass the blame for that. He had a locator. And he walked without
losing it, because dammit, he wasn't giving up. Not yet. Not until he was a lot
closer to being out of cylinders than he was.
And maybe—maybe—it was a tiny idea, a forlorn and hopeless hope—maybe somebody
would find him, and maybe he would hold out until the ship undocked, or
until—remotest of all hopes—until they were so glad he was alive they'd
understand how hard they'd pushed him, and maybe he could engineer something if
he just got a chance to talk to the psychs.
He'd hated them lifelong. But right now he saw them as a chance: he was good at
talking to them. He'd say he'd spooked because of being followed and that at
first he'd really meant to get the saw before it went on his record. And then he
could break down and say it wasn't the idea, and he'd lied, and it was just
immaturity. He had just turned seventeen. You got some license to be immature,
didn't you? They gave plenty to Marshall Willett. Or Jim Frantelli. Jim had a
book full of reprimands on stupid things, and he didn't have any. Not one.
Wouldn't that count for something? Somewhere?
Or if they got onto him and said he couldn't come back to the program he could
talk to the downers. He'd tell Melody and Patch if he wasn't there after they
came back from the walk, they should sit down and strike. They'd get all the
downers behind him and they'd say no downer would work if they didn't have
Fletch—
He was kidding himself. It wasn't going to happen. Melody and Patch couldn't
organize something like that even if he could make them understand. They'd try
to help him, but they weren't the kind of downer that ran things. He didn't even
know if he'd find them out here, or if the rains had started the spring and
they'd have gone off somewhere he didn't know, all unknowing that their Fetcher
was in trouble.
He'd just needed—just needed to have some breathing room. A day or two before
people started invoking courts and lawyers and sending him through it all
again——
He'd worked hard. He'd be happy to work hard all his life, and earn the
station-share the ship was suing the station about and never spend a credit
except on food. He'd be good down here.
It just wasn't damn all fair, and he hated their damn ship and he hated the
family that had left his mother on the station.
Intellectually he knew they'd had no choice, sick as she was; but there was a
childish part of him that was mad about that; and a much more rational part that
hated them for their damned persistence, coming back again and again with their
lawsuits, and the station for its stupid automated accounting systems that kept
kicking the bill out again—when all they wanted was not to be billed for
fourteen and a half million c and all the station wanted was a quittance so they
could either put him on the books or get him off the books. It was two
authorities playing games with each other, all technicalities, for a stupid ship
that refused to pay his mother's bills and a station that refused to admit he
was born to a station-share and kept billing Finity for his existence here.
Stupid games. All these years that he'd been trying to get on the level and have
a life of his own, for God's sake, what did they want of him, except to go one
more round of lawsuits and make points on each other. He hated—
Mud sent him skidding, down, down, down in the twilight, and River was below. He
grabbed at things in fright, and got his hand on a branch, and held, having torn
muscles and scared himself. He hung there and slowly began to get his feet under
him, and crawled up the slope on his hands and knees, asking himself why it
mattered, and wouldn't it have been better after all if he'd just gone in and
saved everybody the bother.
It took him a long time to get his feet under him. When he walked again it was
with a knot of pain in his throat and a knot of fear around his heart, with no
notion where he was going.
To see as much of the world as he could see, he decided, before he pushed the
come-get-me button on the locator and admitted the dream was over. There wasn't
much point in wandering in the dark and using up cylinders. So he'd just sit
down and stay warm and not lose his head.
He was shivering when he did find a place to sit. The suit had a flash lining,
and you could pull a patch off and it would heat up. It would only do it once,
and then that suit was done and a discard, but he was going to be at the halfway
point of cylinders by tomorrow and he'd have to go back or he wouldn't come
back.
You wouldn't die of Downbelow's air right away. If you breathed it you got
medical problems.
Maybe if he just lied and told them he had breathed the air they'd keep him on
the station. They'd put him in the hospital, and they'd find out he hadn't, and
he'd be in a lot of trouble, but he wouldn't be on the ship.
Or maybe he'd just really do it, just take the mask off and come back really
sick and not have to think about the ship. He'd be a medical case, then, maybe
for the rest of his life, just like his mother.
But he'd seen that. He didn't want it.
He'd think about solutions tomorrow, he decided. He'd think when he had to
think. He pulled the patch to heat the suit, and felt the warmth spread in the
folds, first, then, gradually to the rest of his body.
Then there was nothing to do but sit there, while the rain roared in the trees
and River roared in his banks nearby.
Nunn would have gotten in a lot of trouble, Fletcher imagined, for thinking he
was going to walk tamely back to the dorm-dome. He was sort of sorry about that.
Nunn never had done anything to him.
It was damned hard not to think what a mess he'd gotten himself in. He wished he
had the strength to keep walking so he didn't have to listen to his own mind
work, and to his own common sense say how badly he'd screwed up.
If you had a cylinder go out while you were sleeping you just got slower and
slower and maybe didn't wake up. He should have checked out how far gone the
cylinders were before it got dark. He wasn't used to places that became dark
with no light switch to flip. It was dark, now, and he couldn't check them. That
was what they said. If you get lost, don't go to sleep. He could go by feel and
change out to ones he knew were new; but if he ran around with a bunch of
unwrapped cylinders in his pockets he could ruin a few, or he could get them wet
in the rain and the damp.
Hell with it, he thought. He thought he had enough time left on the ones that
were in.
The scare when he'd nearly fallen in Old River a while ago had begun, however,
to drive something of his self-preservation out of him. It had been a sharp,
keen danger, not the sickly kind of terror he hated so much worse—sitting in a
lawyer's office and listening to people disposing of his life. He'd nearly
fallen in the river and he began slowly to realize now he wasn't scared. Just
toss the dice, and maybe he'd decide to come back and maybe he wouldn't.
If he passed the safe limits of choice, then maybe he'd make it, and maybe he
wouldn't. In either case, he had more control over his life than the people who
ran things would ever give him.
He was screwing them up good, was what he was doing. They'd be upset, and he
wasn't damned sorry.
Probably Bianca would be upset, too, but then, Bianca didn't know his record.
When people found that out they quit caring, and most of them got away from him
so fast their tracks smoked.
Melody and Patch would be upset. Melody most of all. But Melody hoped for a new
baby. Hoped he'd grown up and found a girl of his own kind only so she could
have a baby and quit taking care of a messed-up human kid.
When he thought about that, he hurt inside. Aged seventeen, safe and secret in
the dark, he hurt, for all the things that had ever gone wrong___
They were calling him again…
Wouldn't let him be alone, and it was all he wanted…
…"Fletcher…"
"Fletcher," someone said from outside, and he blinked, shaky, sick. Someone—his
eyes were blurred—lifted his head up after several tries and succeeded after he
began to cooperate with the effort to lift him. Someone put something to his
lips and said, "Drink," so he closed his lips on the straw and drank. It was
what his body needed, a taste told him that.
The somebody was a younger cousin. Jeremy. The place was the ship.
The arm he was holding himself up with began to shake. The place smelled like
sweat and old clothes. "Something wrong with the ship?" He found the strength to
panic, and tried to sit up.
"No," Jeremy said, and slipped his arm free and let him struggle with the belts
that were holding him. "Keep drinking the juice. I'm senior by a month. I get
the shower first"
"Well, did something happen?" he called after Jeremy, thinking because it had
been so short a time, they must have aborted the run…But things had changed. He
felt his face—the little trace of beard, dead skin that rolled off under his
fingers. His clothes were disgusting. Like month-old laundry. The smell was him.
"We're at Tripoint," Jeremy called back from inside the shower. "Drink the
juice! You'll be sorry if you don't! We're going to be blowing V in a bit. Don't
panic if the ship sort of goes away. It just does that. It's kind of wild. About
two, three times."
He had three packets of the stuff. He drained the first. There was a terrible
moment of giddiness, where the deck seemed to dissolve under him and the walls
went nowhere. He was utterly disoriented, and slumped down on the bed until the
feeling went away.
"That was the first," Jeremy called out. "Damn, that was hard!"
"First what?" He felt sick at his stomach.
"K-dump," Jeremy yelled back. There was the sound of the shower. "Braking,
hyperspace style. We don't go up all the way, we just kind of brush it. Slows us
down"
He knew something about hyperspace. He'd never imagined feeling it. They'd just
touched the hyperspace interface. He felt shaky and ripped open another juice,
so thirsty his mouth felt dusty.
Things tasted too sweet, and too sour. The green walls had a flavor. The smell
had a color, and not a pretty one.
Most of all, the dreadful thing had happened, he was no longer at Pell, he was
out of reach of home, and the only thing he could think of was a desperate need
for liquid and what taste told him was in that liquid. He ripped open another
drink packet. He sat there sipping mineral-reinforced juice until Jeremy came
out to look for a change of clothes.
The intercom came on. What sounded like a mechanical voice called their names,
and Vince's and Linda's, and said, "Galley duty."
"Shower's yours," Jeremy said. "We've got galley this round. All those pots and
pans. Lucky us. But it's not bad. Rise and shine."
He felt like hell. And they were going to be working. The rebel part of him said
ignore it, lie here, make them come get him. But it was better than lying in a
bunk thinking. He stripped off and went to the shower, and was in the middle of
a steamy, lung-hydrating deluge when the siren sounded.
"Takehold!" Jeremy screamed from outside. "Stay put! Damn, what's he doing up
there?"
He didn't know what to do or which wall to brace himself against. The world
dissolved and reformed. The water hit him, boiling hot. Or the world had come
back. He leaned against the shower wall hoping to drown and not to be blown to
atoms. Shaking head to foot.
"You all right?" Jeremy yelled.
"The emergency has ended" a calm voice said on the intercom. "The ship is
stable. That was a reposition on receipt of an unidentified, now ID'ed as Union
military Amity. All clear. Request roll call and safety check,"
"Well, damn all, what are they doing here?" Jeremy said from outside the door.
"Bridge wants us to call in. You all right, Fletcher?"
"Fine," he said He stood there while the fans dried him off and he shook and
shivered in the warm air. He managed to ask, meekly, "Is something wrong?"
"Must be all right," Jeremy said through the door, "Helm must've not liked the
look of things. But we got our all clear. We can move about"
Move about? He was in the God-help-him shower. "Do we do that a lot?"
"Pretty rare we see anybody," Jeremy said "It's empty out here. We didn't nearly
hit her, understand. We just, if we see anybody, we change V. In case they, you
know, aren't up to any good. In case they fired. That is a Union carrier out
there."
"So?"
"So this is sort of Alliance territory. They can come here, just kind of nosing
around, but that's one big ship out there. Usually they'd send just a cruiser to
look around. That's a whole damn command center."
"Friendly?"
"Yeah. Sort of. It's pretty wild. Helm must've forgot we were hauling."
He opened the shower door and felt the chill outside. He dressed in clean
coveralls, trying to conceal the shakes he was suffering, He'd dropped weight,
he'd noticed that when he'd been in the shower. He felt hollow inside, and
wanted another fruit juice, but they were out.
"So are we still likely for a takehold?" he asked Jeremy. "Can we go down to the
galley, or are we stuck here?"
"We're supposed to be on the new Old Rules," Jeremy said, "whatever that means.
That everything's supposed to be looser and if we get a takehold it's not a
takehold like they're going to be shooting. Not unless they say ‘red.’ Then it's
serious and we're back on the old New Rules. But I guess the old New Rules still
apply on the bridge all the time. Damn, that was a stop! I bet they rearranged
the galley good and proper. Cook's going to be cussing the air blue."
They were crazy. The whole ship and its company was crazy, and he was still
shaking.
"But I guess it's all right to go," Jeremy said, "You ready? Guess they're not
going to shoot."
Chapter X
Contents - Prev/Next
Pure nerves, JR discovered when he reported in on the bridge. Nobody blamed
Helm. Their pilot had made a precautionary move when he picked up a carrier's
large presence in the local buoy information, maintaining V.
Then a fast drop to non-combatant stance, all before the rest of them knew
anything was going on and before the carrier's advanced, fire-linked systems
could read and confirm their ID off stored files. The deep spacetime punch and
quick relocation of their larger than average mass could, unhappily, have given
them a warlike, carrierlike, appearance—a paradoxical faster-than-light presence
that would propagate through the spacetime sheet in the same way a pin-drop
could make itself heard in a still room.
But they weren't, in that instant, helpless and spotted in the fire-path of the
carrier's hair-triggered defense systems. For one thing, in the hand of cards
that Old Man Inertia dealt, an entering ship always had the ace if they had a
pilot who knew how to use it. The entering ship could fire downslope if they
chose; reposition if they chose. If they hadn't been willing to meet the
carrier, they'd have gone silent and unlocatable somewhere along a track
dictated only by physics and the local mass—a track that carrier could
calculate, but not soon enough or precisely enough, on a ship that still carried
enough V to jump out again on the Viking heading. And fire as they did so.
That rapid stutter of presence they'd made, however, was delay enough to let
their systems determine that the presence in the jump-point was Union, not
Mazianni, and their subsequent stop let the carrier find out the same about
them, since they'd been lawfully using their ID when they came in.
It was still a jittery feeling, a once-enemy dreadnought in possession of the
Tripoint system and themselves in its crosshairs. By what JR detected on the
displays, the carrier didn't look at all to be in transit of the jump-point. It
was low-energy on a vector that said it had come from Viking, but it wasn't
proceeding. It was just sitting. Looking around. Logging traffic.
Prowling the edges of Alliance territory it wasn't supposed to visit… except on
specific invitation of Pell, which he didn't think it had.
Mallory's invitation, however, in the deep uncertainties of this post-War
period, might be the answer. The carrier was possibly—possibly—moving out of its
territory in order to back up Mallory in Earth space after they'd left Mallory
unattended. That would imply Finity's decision had been made many months earlier
than he thought it had—but it wouldn't be the first time he'd been caught
ignorant of Finity's high-level operations.
Junior officers were expected to guess, and to hone their strategic skills
against real situations, trying to outfigure senior officers. But it didn't help
junior officer nerves. He'd taken himself up to B deck at breakneck speed,
unshaven, still in flight-slippers, and checked in on the bridge. So had
Madison, who was supposed to be the next shift, and who obviated all necessity
for him to stay here—but stay he did.
In the duty of second-guessing command without disturbing operations, JR went up
to Scan 5's post and simply observed for a moment, in order not to disturb the
critical, multilevel operations of that post.
"Rider status," he asked Scan 5 after a moment of stable display.
"Uncertain," Five reported without turning in his chair. "Carrier ID confirmed
as Amity. Output normal, range 5 minutes."
The carrier, five minutes away as light traveled, had resumed ID output, a
measure of confidence as it looked them over. Scan and passive-recept alone,
however, couldn't entirely confirm what Amity was doing, whether it was sitting
there with its several rider-ships still attached and therefore harmless, or
whether it had already deployed them as heavy-fire platforms, lying
transmission-silent and ready at various points about the area. Finity's optics
were surely in play, along with other methods of search.
The carrier hadn't obliged their optics by turning a profile that would make its
status clear, either. He saw the fuzzy image and the enhancement and didn't take
that situation for a chance arrangement in their relative positions. Five
minutes was close, as ships reckoned entry positions. It was not close in
targeting.
They had had an uneasy working arrangement with Union military that had held for
nearly two decades. They'd even worked, though not lately, with this particular
carrier. Both Alliance and Union protected their secrets, and Union was still
very wary, particularly of Mallory's intentions, even after two decades.
Bucklin and Lyra showed up to take their stations: apprentice-posts, unassigned
chairs, like his, that left them able to observe, not necessarily to work at
this critical juncture. He made a quiet approach to his own regular post, near
the Old Man and Madison, noting that by now in ordinary procedure their bridge
shift should have changed. Madison's team was held, not yet called to duty, and
that changeover might be delayed indefinitely.
Then the Old Man engaged Com. Voice meant that senior officials had now made
station on the carrier, if they hadn't been there at the moment of their entry.
JR sat beside Bucklin and Lyra and put in his earpiece to catch the drift of
that message, relieved to hear the Old Man's voice addressing the Union captain
in a casualness that didn't betoken hostility.
Reassuring. There was code passing, now, he'd bet, words that didn't quite fit
the conversation, and there was at the same time he noted a relaxation of the
Old Man's features, a little hint of humor.
Madison spared JR a direct glance, a nod, a handsign that meant, ordinarily,
Ours, but meant, here, JR believed, Friendly approach.
A time-lagged response from Amity came then, that said:
"Greetings from the admiral and his respects for your efforts at Wyatt's,
Captain Neihart. You may pass that along to your colleague on Norway. I must say
your appearance is a surprise. I trust it forecasts success and not bad news at
Earth. Where are you bound?"
"Esperance. We've resigned from the chase, sir. We've gone simply to routine
cargo-carrying on this run, and we'll be back in the trade from now on if things
go as we plan. The pirate hunt is growing thin, success in that regard. Now we
have to teach these young people of ours the merchant trade, give them a new
view of the universe. Greetings to the admiral and our hopes for future
cooperation. We'll be quick to respond if we do spot trouble-sorry about that
reposition—but we're hauling cargo now and we'll even be taking mail from time
to time. Earth's as stable as I've seen it and we hope to have eliminated some
of the flow of goods we were concerned about. Salutations from our colleague and
expectations of good news from your arena."
Time-lagged conversations tended to run simultaneously and to change topics
multiple times in the same paragraph, following the informational wavefront that
had just come to the speaker.
"I wish I'd had the wherewithal to load full at Sol," the Old Man said, "A load
of whiskey, chocolate and wood on our last run, however. I'll send you over a
bottle of Mallory's favorite Scotch. Her compliments. And mine."
Audacious. And from Mallory? A Union carrier might not want to swallow a pill
Finity dispensed, fearing bombs or biologics. But it was a handsome gift at the
prices that prevailed past Pell
A startling implication of connections and conduits of information. The hell,
then, they hadn't known some Union contact might be here. Yet it had startled
Helm, appearing as it did? Revise all estimates: they'd expected a smaller ship,
but some ship.
The junior officer, kept in the dark and fed whatever data he could find by
feel, could at least surmise the fact that they'd expected someone, and spooked
for fear of the size of what they'd found. Helm might not have picked it up from
buoy input. Helm might have read the interface itself, and been just that fast
reacting to the unexpected.
"Delighted to receive fire," one of the most powerful warships in space answered
that offer. "Good voyage to you, Finity."
A Union carrier was going to search empty space for a beeper-can and a bottle of
Scotch whiskey?
Orders were passing. The ops crew down on A deck was finding a cannister,
basically a smuggler's rig, certainly not something you could buy at a station
outfitters—and an item which they did chance to have, by some cosmic and
unsuspected luck.
As he listened, Lyra, as the available junior-most crew, found herself
dispatched on an unusual mission to the captain's private bar.
"Is Scotch all of it?" he asked Madison as the attenuated conversation wound
down to sign-offs.
"Smart lad," Madison said, and nothing more.
So there was something from Mallory that didn't involve Scotch, something that
they'd been carrying in event of some such meeting somewhere along their course,
and that a Union carrier was now going to pick up.
Curious dealings they had. No, they wouldn't poison-pill a Union carrier. Not on
their fragile lives. There was something going on in this voyage that he'd lay
odds wasn't in the line of trade: Mallory's business, almost certainly so, and
Mallory was always a wild card in the affairs of Pell Station, apt to take any
side that served her purpose. She was a former merchanter, former Fleet officer
and bitterly opposed to Union. And had worked with Union against the Fleet.
There was no side she hadn't been on, at one time or another, including Earth's.
If Mallory was out there keeping an eye on something, even expecting this
carrier, or a carrier to be operating on this border, then there was something
afoot. He thought Mallory was back near Sol.
But there were some things for which the senior captains gave no answers because
there was no need-to-know, and because crew on liberties were vulnerable and
sometimes too damned talkative. Even Family crew.
The more people involved, the more chance of accidents. Clearly if Madison
wanted to tell him what was in that packet besides a bottle of extravagantly
expensive Scotch, Madison would have said, directly. And it was still the
junior's job to figure things out.
Foolish question he'd asked Madison. Pursuing confirmations, he checked his
output from Nav, and then got up to walk past Nav's more junior stations and
confirm their exact arrival point at the dark mass. He should have asked…
"How'd the kid make it through?" Helm 1 asked, Hans Andrew, blindsiding him on
the other matter of his reasonable concern as he passed the helmsman's chair.
Fletcher. If there'd been a problem in that department, it had been a junior
problem, and no one in senior crew had had time to ask him—until now. Odd and
eclectic, the concerns that sometimes came out of Helm, who more than anyone on
the ship was focused on the shadow of that carrier and on space at large.
"Fine. Jeremy reported in, they're fine." Jeremy had called him as his direct
report-to station while Fletcher was in the shower, and reported himself and
Fletcher as in good order. In the crisis, JR hadn't yet checked on the specific
details. Fletcher was alive, God hope he was sane.
Things were still questionable on the bridge.
"Sorry to do that to him," Helm muttered: Hans Andrew, peppershot gray and eyes
that, focused on his console, still frantically darted to small side motions
with the marginal come- down off a pilot's hype. JR suspected that Hans was
still tracking little if any of the intership communications—nor cared. When a
pilot decided to move his ship in reaction to a developing situation, he did so
on the situation, not on plan, not on policy, and sometimes not on the captain's
orders: had to, at the speeds Hans' mind dealt with. The active pilot was in one
sense the most aware individual on the ship; the gunner and Scan chief were
right behind, with guns autoed live the nanosecond Finity dropped into system.
Meanwhile Helm would ask about the new kid on A deck, but not about the carrier,
and Helm's eyes—one of them with a VR contact—would dart and track minutiae of
the ship's exterior environment on his instruments, alive to that with a focus
that concentratedly ignored any micro-dealings of ops. Unless you were the
captain, you didn't talk to Helm unless addressed by Helm. You didn't bother him
when he was hyped.
And he didn't answer Helm's comment except to dismiss a concern Helm had
evidently carried into hyperspace with him, a stray thought from a month ago. It
cleared an item from Helm's agenda. At the speed Helm's mind thought, mere human
transactions, the negotiations of captains and admirals, must take an eternity.
He walked on to the empty chairs at Nav. Bucklin joined him after about ten
minutes in which not much happened but routine and chatter back and forth with
the carrier regarding a month- ago solar flare off EpEri, Viking's sun. "We've
just dropped the beeper-can," Bucklin said in a low tone as he sat down in the
vacant chair beside him. "What do you make of this crazy goings-on?"
"An interesting voyage," JR said.
"I thought we'd retired."
The Old Man's full of surprises."
"You think Mallory's out there at the moment?"
He thought about it, all the deep dark fringes of the sprawling mass-point where
whole Fleets could hide, a hundred ships a mere pinprick on the skin of the
universe. Lose something out here? Easy as not knowing what tiny arc to sweep
with your scan, in a universe noisy with stars and blinded by local mass.
But he shook his head.
"No. Personally, I don't. I think she's somewhere at the other end of Earth's
space. While we lump along like an ore-hauler, on the merchant routes. That ship
won't use them." Meaning the carrier, meaning the commercial short hops. There
were further routes, that ships like that one, with its powerful engines, could
use. And he envied that Union ship its capacities, its hair-trigger systems,
with all his War-taught soul. State of the art, start to finish. Beautiful. A
life remote from a future of slogging about trading stops and loading cargo.
"There is the deep route out of here," he said to Bucklin. "The other thing that
carrier has, besides riders, is an admiral. They might be working with Mallory."
"She's telling that carrier where to look for trouble. That's what I'm thinking.
I think we're a go-between, I don't think Union wants their ships near her any
oftener than they can avoid it."
It was likely true, in principle. There were a lot of bitter grudges between
Union and Alliance, even between specific Union and Alliance ships—resentments
from the War years. Mallory very possibly stood off at one end of Alliance
space, telling Union where a Fleet operation might pop out of hyper-space in
their side, doing nothing that would bring her under Union guns… in these years
when the pirate operations were dying down and when, consequently, Union might
perceive their need for Mallory as less—as less, that was, if they were fools.
JR drew a long breath in speculation, thinking of the Hinder Stars, where their
patrols failed to keep universal security. That strand of stars, the set of
stars that had enabled the first starships to reach out from Earth to Pell, was
a bridge that no firepower man had yet invented could blow out of existence.
Stellar mass was damn stubborn in being where it was at any given moment.
If you moved like a carrier, on huge engines, and took those long-jump routes
only a light-laden ship could take, you could, however, bypass that bridge
entirely, take the direct route out of Tripoint to Earth—or out of it. Something
big could be coming.
A major battle, maybe.
And, God, God! for Finity to be read out of those universe-defining decisions?
Leave the big choices to the big carriers, and devil take the merchanters, after
all the dead they'd consigned to scattered suns?
A knot gathered in his throat as he saw nothing Finity could do right now in
what was important in the universe, not if Mazianni carriers arrived this second
full in their sights.
Finity couldn't maneuver. A closed-hold hauler couldn't dump cargo on a minute's
notice, the way a can-hauler could release the clamps and spill everything it
had into the shipping lanes.
And if they could dump cargo, they couldn't afford to: the Old Man had seen to
that first when he'd withdrawn their repair reserve at Sol for this cargo and
all those bottles of Scotch whiskey and crates of coffee and other highly
expensive items they'd taken on—and then lawfully declared at Pell, a little
honesty at which he'd winced when he learned it. No other merchanters willingly
paid all that tax, they always hedged the question on cargo-in-transit and just
didn't declare it.
What was in the Old Man's mind? he'd asked himself then. Playing by outmoded
rules? Acting on honor, as if that could carry them in a post-War universe that
was every ship for itself? He ached to see the Old Man, who said they had to
trade to survive, play by rules the universe didn't regard as important any
longer, and said to himself they were going to find themselves out-competed, if
that was the case.
He'd entertained hope it was only a short-term run, to sell off the luxury goods
for moderate profit at Pell.
But at Pell, they'd withdrawn their other major reserve and bought high-mass
staples as well as Pell luxuries, to carry on to Mariner, with the stated
objective of Esperance, the backdoor to Cyteen itself. He'd have hoped they were
a courier—except that some of Finity's women had believed the captain and gone
off their birth control. That was a decision. He couldn't imagine the mindset it
took to vote with one's own body to risk Francesca's fate.
Their run to Mariner and beyond felt, in consequence, unhappily real. They'd
left Pell as mercantile and committed as the captain had indicated, and he'd
never felt so helpless, sitting fat and impotent in front of a potential enemy.
As a future commanding officer of a significant Alliance merchant-warrior, he'd
never in a million years contemplated he'd see his ship absolutely helpless to
maneuver.
Finity signed off its transmission, signaling the carrier that it was about to
make its routine course change for Mariner. If there was an objection to that
procedure they were about to learn it. They'd fired a ridiculous missile. Now
they had to walk past the predator and see if it jumped.
The takehold sounded. Crew that happened to be standing found places to belt in.
He and Bucklin found theirs side by side, on the jump seats beside Helm.
In five minutes more they did a realspace burn that took them out of relational
synch and bow-on orientation to the carrier, and started the process of finding
inertial match relative to their next target.
Unlike Pell, Mariner had a different traveling vector than Tripoint. Their climb
out would be a burn, then a little space of heavy but automated computer work,
another few takeholds possible, and then a steep climb back to jump, shorter
than the struggle with a fair-sized star that they routinely had at Pell.
Tripoint mass was complex and tricky, and could give your sensors fits if you
didn't zero it all the way out as you set yourself up as sharing a packet of
spacetime with contrarily moving Mariner. That was Nav's job.
Madison switched their console output over to the Old Man's screens and put both
him and Bucklin on watch, while Madison and the Old Man engaged in urgent
discussion. The captain's data feed was a constantly switching priority of
input, from whatever his number two thought significant, and whatever a crew
chief in a crisis bulleted through on a direct hail.
Things stayed quiet. The screens switched in regular rotation, then one rapid
flurry as nav data started to come in.
He didn't sit the chair often, even figuratively, as when the captains passed
him the command screens. Now the third and fourth captains, Alan and Francie,
had come to the bridge, moving between takeholds. He saw their presence in the
numbers that showed on the Active list whenever a posted officer or tech arrived
on duty. All four captains were now in conference on the encounter, and he, with
Bucklin, sat keeping an eye on the whole situation with the real possibility of
them, momentarily more current than the captains, actually ordering Helm to
move.
Definitely a planned encounter, he concluded. Perhaps Mallory was positioning
Finity via Mariner clear to Esperance, their turn-around point, and calling
Amity to hold that intersection, hoping to trap something in the middle or drive
quarry to an ambush. There was hope yet that Finity was engaged in trade purely
as cover, and they wouldn't sit helpless in that encounter.
The steady tick of information past him tracked the beeper-can on a lazy course
that would ultimately intersect the carrier. The same screen said the carrier
had launched something considerably larger, at slow speed, probably a repair
skimmer, a far cry from any rider-ship, in pursuit of the Scotch.
Nothing threatened them. There were no other arrivals. It might be days, even a
week or two, before another ship came through Tripoint. The system buoy didn't,
a matter agreed on by treaty, inform them of the number of ships that were
recent, although ships left traces in the gas and dust of the point that their
instruments could assess for strength and time of passage. It was a security
matter, out here in the dangerous dark. All merchanters that came and went had
just as soon do so without overmuch advertisement to other merchanters—and
didn't want the buoy politicized—or information given to the military,
especially considering the Alliance military included potentially rival
merchanters. It was the age of distrust. And it was the age of self-interest
succeeding the age of self-sacrifice, as ships and stations alike fought for
survival in a changed economy.
Aside from the worry about pirate lurkers, and raids, smuggling went on hand
over fist in such isolation, goods exchanged in direct trade, without station
duty, illicit or restricted items, pharmaceuticals from Cyteen, rare woods from
Earth's forests. Nothing that ships that habitually paused and lurked here were
doing would bear close examination by station authorities.
That carrier out there was, in its way, another authority that would frown on
such free enterprise: ships that arrived here under that grim witness would be
intimidated, and wouldn't make the shadow-market exchanges common in such
meetings.
But stop the furtive trade? It would move to some other point until the carrier
was gone. And the carrier would go.
That carrier, rather than tracking what merchanters did, was going to be moving
somewhere the light of suns didn't reach. And Finity's End continued on,
slogging her way to jump.
A month and four days had passed. It was on the galley clock.
Seeing the date on that clock was when the fact came home to Fletcher that this
wasn't Pell, and Fletcher stood and stared a moment, knowing that the thin
stubble he'd shaved off his face in the shower wasn't a month's worth… but half
that, as much as a spacer aged.
Both were facts he'd known intellectually before he reported for work. But that
that disparate aging was happening to him as it had happened to Jeremy and all
the rest—it took that innocuous wall clock to bring the shock home to him.
Spacers weren't just them, any longer. It was himself who'd dropped out of the
universe for a month, and wasn't a month older.
But Pell was. And Bianca was. They'd never make up that time difference.
The rains were mostly done, now. The floods would be subsiding.
The grain would have started to grow. Melody and Patch would have made their
mating walk, made love, begun a new life if they were lucky.
But he wouldn't be there when they came back. If they came back. If Melody ever
had her longed-for baby. He wouldn't know.
"Yeah," Vince said, juvenile nastiness, "it's a clock. Seen one before?"
"Shut up," he said
It was crazy that this could happen. They'd changed him. He wasn't Fletcher
Neihart, seamlessly fitted into Pell's time schedules, any longer. He was
Fletcher Neihart who'd begun to age in time to Jeremy's odd, time-stretched
life.
It was a queasy, helpless feeling as he went to work at the cook-staff's orders,
and he kept a silence for a while, a silence the seniors present didn't
challenge.
They weren't bad people, the cook-staff: Jeff and Jim T. and Faye, all of whom
had been solicitous of him when he first came aboard. They'd worried about his
preferences, been careful to see he got enough to eat—a concern so basic and at
once so dear to Jeff's pride in his craft that he couldn't take offense.
Now he was their scrub-help, along with Vince and Linda and Jeremy, and he took
heavy pans of frozen food from the lockers, slid cold trays into flash ovens,
opened cabinets of tableware trays and food trays and handed them up to Linda,
who handed them to Vince and Vince to Jeremy.
At least in all the hurry and hustle he didn't have to think. They had nearly
two hundred meals to deliver to B deck mess, as many to set up here, on A, in
the mess hall adjacent to the galley. There were, besides all that, carts of hot
sandwiches to take up to B, for crew on duty in various places including the
bridge.
He didn't do that job. They didn't let him up into operations areas—they didn't
say so, but Vince ran them down to the lift and took them up. And there were
special, individual meals to serve as people came trailing in from cargo and
maintenance, wanting food on whatever schedule their own work allowed. It was a
busy place, always the chance of someone coming in. It was hard work. But hungry
people were happy people once they had their hands full of food, at least
compared to the duty down in laundry.
Fletcher snatched a meal for himself, and the others did the same, then had to
interrupt their break to get more trays out, because all of technical
engineering had unloaded at once from a meeting, and there were hungry people
flooding in.
That group came in talking about a ship they'd met. A Union ship.
Aren't we in Alliance territory? he wondered. Then he felt queasy, remembering
in the process that if he did have a view of the space outside the ship, it
wouldn't be anything like the Pell solar system schematic he'd learned in
school. No planets. No sun. Great Sun was far behind him.
They were at what they called a dark mass, a near-star and a couple of massive
objects that still wouldn't go to fusion if you lumped them all together.
The nature of the Tripoint mass was a fact to memorize, in school, a trade route
on which Pell depended. Fact, too, that Tripoint had been a territory they'd
fought over in the War. He'd grown up with the memorial plaques. On this site…
But here he was in the middle of it, and so was a Union ship, and the kid across
from him, his not-kid roommate with the twelve-year-old body, and Vince and
flat-chested Linda the same, they all chattered with awed speculations about
what a Union carrier was doing, or why, as the rumor was, the captain had talked
with it and fired a capsule at it.
"We might see action yet," Jeremy said happily. Fletcher didn't take it for
cheering news. But, the techs said, nothing had developed. The Union ship had
stayed put.
Another takehold warning came through. Finity had moved once, and then again,
and now it fired the engines again. They spent an hour in the safety-nook of the
galley playing vid games while the engineering people went to their quarters,
off-shift and resting. There was no hint of trouble.
Then there was cooking to do for future meals, mixing and pouring into pans and
layering of pasta and sauce while the end-shift meal cooked.
Pans from storage, thawed and heated, produced fruit pastry for dessert, with
spice Fletcher had never tasted before. Jeff the cook said it came from Earth,
and that gave him momentary pause. He was being corrupted, he thought. Fed
luxuries. He thought how he couldn't get that flavor on Pell, or couldn't afford
it; and he asked himself if he ever wanted to get to like it.
But he ate the dessert and a second helping, and told himself he might as well
enjoy it in the meanwhile and be moral and righteous and resentful later.
Shipboard had its advantages, and it was a moral decision to enjoy them while
they were cheap and easy: the spice, the tastes, the novelty of things. He was
mad, yes, he was resentful, and he was caught up in affairs he'd never wanted,
but he didn't, he told himself, need to make any moral points, just legal ones,
and only when he got back to Pell. Anything he chose to enjoy for the time
being—the fruit dessert, the absolutely best shower he'd ever had access to, a
better mattress than he'd ever slept on, all of that—he could equally well
choose to forego when the time came, nothing of his pride or his integrity
surrendered.
And the taste, meanwhile, was wonderful.
Galley duty, he decided, beat laundry all hollow. Laundry was work. On this
detail there was food. As much as you wanted. It was, besides, a duty with the
freedom of Downbelow about it—a work-on-your-own situation, with amicable people
to deal with as supervisors. He especially liked Jeff, the chief mainday cook, a
big gray-haired man who'd evidently enjoyed a lot of his own desserts, and who
bulked large in the little galley, but who moved with such precision in the
cramped space you were safer with him than with any three juniors. Jeff liked
you if you liked his food, that seemed the simple rule; and Jeff didn't ask:
anything complicated of him—like assumptions of kinship.
Cleanup after the cooking wasn't an entirely fun job, but it wasn't bad, either.
Word came to Jeff by intercom that the carrier had held its position and they
were going to do a run up to V in an hour, so the galley had to be cleaned up,
locked up, battened down, every door latched. Then, Jeff said, they could go to
quarters early, at maindark, that hour when the lights dimmed to signify a
twilight for mainday and dawn for alterday crew. Before, they'd had two hours
for rec and rest, but tonight the captains had declared no rec time. It was
early to bed, stuck in their bunks while the ship did whatever it did to get
where they were going,
He was moderately uneasy when the engines fired. He and Jeremy lay in their
bunks while the next, relatively short burn happened, a long, pressured wait.
After that, during what was announced as a fifty-minute inertial glide, Jeremy
played vid games, lying in his bunk, so hyped on his fantasy war it was hard to
ignore him, in his twitches and his nervous limb-moving and occasional sound
effects.
Jeremy might act as if he were on drugs, but Fletcher knew as a practical fact
of living with the boy that that wasn't the case. At times he was convinced that
Jeremy sank into his games because he was scared of what the ship was doing, and
he tried not to dwell on that thought. If Jeremy was scared, then he had no
choice but assume a kid used to this knew what to be scared of. But at other
times, as now, he wondered if that line blurred for Jeremy, as to what were
games and what weren't.
Join Mallory's crew when he grew up, Jeremy had said. Trade wasn't for Jeremy.
No such tame business. Jeremy wanted to fight Mazian's raiders.
History and life had shot along very fast in the seventeen station-side years
Jeremy had been alive—and for all the twelve violent and brutal years Jeremy had
actually been waking, Fletcher surmised, Jeremy had been right in the thick of
it, in that situation the court on Pell had refused to let him enter.
Jeremy had a dead mother, too. This ship had death in abundance to drive Jeremy;
as he guessed Vince and Linda were also driven—all of them stranger than kids of
twelve and thirteen ever ought to be.
And not even a precocious twelve or a fecklessly ignorant seventeen. Jeremy,
Vince, Linda all had the factual knowledge of those years. Jeremy indicated
that, unlike the present situation, they usually had tape during the couple of
weeks they did live during jump—briefing tapes making them aware of ship's
business, educational tapes teaching them body-skills and facts, informational
tapes informing them of history going on at various ports, all those very vivid
things that tape was, and all the vivid teaching that tape could evidently do
even more efficiently on the jump drugs than it did on the other brands of trank
that went with tape-study stationside. Tape could feel like reality, and if he
added up the tape Jeremy must have had in all those months tranked-out lying in
his bunk, he figured he could tack on a virtual college education and a couple
or three waking years of life on Jeremy's bodily twelve.
But while it was knowledge and technical understanding Jeremy had gained during
those lost, lifeless weeks, life lived at the time-stretched rate of two weeks
to every month of elapsed universal time while a ship was in jump, it still
wasn't real-life experience. It wasn't any kind of emotional maturity, or
physical development. They were mentally strange kids, all of the under-
seventeens, sometimes striding over factual adult business so adeptly he could
completely forget how big a gap his own natural growth set between them and
him—and sometimes, again, as now, they acted just the age their bodies were.
Humor consisted of elbow-knocking and practical jokes. Sex was to snigger at.
War and death were vid games, even in kids who'd seen their own mothers and sibs
die—that was the awful part. Jeremy had seen terrible, bloody things—and went
right back to his games, obsessed with bloody images and grinning as he shot up
imaginary enemies. Or real ones. Think what you're doing, he wanted to yell at
Jeremy, but by what little he'd been able to understand, Jeremy's whole life was
no different than those bloody games and Jeremy was fitting himself to survive.
That was the most unnerving aspect of the in-bunk vid wars. Linda wanted to be
an armscomper and target the ship's big guns. About Vince, he had no idea.
Himself, during the ship's maneuvering and slamming about, he shut his eyes and
listened to the music Jeremy lent him. He asked himself did he want to risk his
tape machine and his study tapes by using them during such goings-on, when if
they came unsecured they could suffer damage.
But without his tapes, even without them, if he ignored Jeremy's occasional
sound effects, he could see Old River behind his eyelids, and didn't need the
artificial memory to overlay his own vision.
A month gone by already. He was two weeks older and remembered nothing of it;
the planet was a month along, and after a few down, glum days, Bianca would have
put him and his problems away and gotten on with her life. The everlasting
clouds would have brightened to white. Melody and Patch would come back to the
Base.
They'd know now beyond a doubt that he'd gone. He thought about that while the
ship, having finished its short bursts and jolts, announced another long burn of
two hours duration.
He drew a deep breath as the buildup of pressure started, and let the music
carry him. It was like being swept up by Old River, carried along in flood.
Jeremy fought remembered battles and longed for revenge. He rode a tide of music
and memory, telling himself it was Old River, and Old River might have his
treacheries, but he had his benefits, too.
Life. And springtime.
Puffer-balls and games on the hillside, and skeins of pollen on the flood,
pollen grains or skeins of stars. They weren't going for jump yet. They were
just going to run clear of the mass-point. He was learning, from Jeremy, how the
ship moved
It was safer to think of home… of quitting time in the fields, and the soft gray
silk of clouds fading and fading, until that moment white domes all but glowed
with strangeness and the night-lights around the Base walks, coming on with
dusk, were very small and weak guides against the coming dark.
Back to the galley before maindawn: the ship had built up a high velocity toward
Mariner, and now they were scheduled for two days of quiet, uninterrupted
transit before their jump toward that port.
The cooks, so they declared, never slept late, and neither did the juniors
helping out in the galley. They made a breakfast for themselves of synth eggs
and fruit after they'd delivered breakfast in huge trays to the service counters
on A and B deck. The work had a feeling of routine by now, a comfortable sense
of having done things before that, once he was moving and doing, also gave him
an awareness of what the ship was doing, rushing toward their point of departure
with a speed they'd gained during last watch.
A smooth, ordinary process, except that jolt when they'd come into Tripoint. And
he tried to be calm about the coming jump. How could he be anxious for their
physical safety, Fletcher asked himself, when a ship that had survived the War
with people shooting at them, did something it and every other merchanter ship
did almost every two months of every year?
He decided he could relax a little. The gossip among the cook-staff still said
the Union carrier that had startled them on entry was watching their backs like
a station cop on dockside, and it still didn't seem to be bad news: there was no
move to hinder them, and if there'd been any Mazianni about, they'd have been
scared off by the Union presence, so they could dismiss that fear, too.
He was, he realized, already falling into a sense of expectations, after all
expectations in his life had been ripped away from him. Vince and Linda were,
hour by hour, tolerable nuisances, Jeremy was his reliable guide and general cue
on the things he had to learn, besides being a cheerful, decent sort of kid when
he wasn't blowing up imaginary pirates. Jeff the cook didn't care if he nabbed
an extra roll, or, for that matter, if anybody did. It was like deciding to
enjoy the fruit desserts. Life in general, he decided, was just fairly well
tolerable if he flung himself into his work and didn't think too hard or long
about where he was.
He even found himself caring about this job, enough to anticipate what Jeff
wanted and to try to win Jeff's good humor. No matter how he'd previously, at
Pell, resolved to stay sullen and just to go through the motions in his duties
for his newest family, he found there was no sense sabotaging an effort that fed
them fruit and spice desserts. Jeff Neihart appreciated with a pleasant grin the
fact that he stacked things straight and double-checked the latches the same as
people who were born here. It was worth a little effort he hadn't planned to
give, and he ended up doing things the careful way he could do something when he
cared.
Disorientation still struck occasionally, but those occasions were diminishmg.
Yes, he was in space, which he'd dreaded, but he wasn't in space: it was just a
comfortable, spice smelling kitchen full of busy people.
When, late in the shift, he took a break, he sat down to a cup of real coffee at
a mess hall table. He understood it was real coffee, for the first time in his
life, and he drank it, rolling the taste around on his tongue and telling
himself… well… it was richer than synth coffee. Different. Another thing he
daren't get too used to.
A ship, he was discovering, skimmed some real fancy items for its own use, and
didn't count the cost quite the way station shops would. On this ship, while
they had it, Jeff said, they had it and they should enjoy it.
There were points to this ship business that, really, truly, weren't half bad. A
year was a long time to leave home but not an insurmountable time. There were
worse things to have happened. A year to catch his balance, pass his eighteenth
year, gain his majority…
Jeremy came up and leaned on the table. "Madelaine wants you."
"Who's that?" he asked across the coffee cup.
"Legal."
His stomach dropped, no matter that there wasn't anything Legal Affairs could
possibly do to him now. He swallowed a hot mouthful of coffee and burned his
throat so he winced.
"Why?"
"I don't know. Probably papers to clear up. She's up on B deck. Want me to walk
you there?"
He didn't. It was adult crew and he didn't want any witnesses to his troubles,
particularly among the juniors. Particularly his roommate. All the old alarms
were going off in his gut. "What's the number up there?"
"I think it's B8. Should be. If it isn't, it's not further than B10."
"I can find it," he said. He drank the rest of the coffee, but with a burned
mouth it didn't taste as good, and the pain of his throat lingered almost to the
point of tears, spoiling what had been a good experience. He got up and went
down the corridor to the lift he knew went to B deck.
It was a fast lift. Just straight up, no sideways about it, and up to a level
where the Rules said he shouldn't be except as ordered. It was a carpeted blue
corridor: downstairs was tiled. It was ivory and blue and mauve wall panels.
Really the executive level, he said to himself. This part of the ship looked as
rich as Finity was. So this was what you lived like when you got to be senior
executive crew… and lawyers were certainly part of the essentials. Finity didn't
even need to hire theirs. It was one more damn cousin, and since lawyers had
been part and parcel of his life up till now, he figured it was time to get to
know this one.
This one—who'd stalked him for seventeen years and who he suddenly figured was
to blame, seeing how long spacers lived, for every misery in his life.
Madelaine? Such an innocent name. Now he knew who he hated.
It was B9. He found Legal Affairs on a plaque outside, and walked into an office
occupied by a young man in casuals one might see in a station office, not the
workaday jump suit they wore down where the less profitable work of the ship got
done.
"You're not Madelaine," he observed sourly.
"Fletcher." The young man stood up, offered a hand, and he took it. "Glad to
meet you. I'm Blue. That's Henry B. But Blue serves, don't ask why. Madelaine's
expecting you. "
"Thanks," he said, and the young man named Blue showed him into the executive
office, facing a desk the like of which he'd never seen. Solid wood. Fancy
electronics. A gray dragon of a woman with short-cropped hair and ice-blue eyes.
"Hello," she said, and stood up, came around the desk, and offered a cool, limp
hand, a kind of grip he detested.
She looked maybe sixty, old enough that he knew beyond a doubt she was one of
the lawyers behind his problems and that apparent sixty probably represented a
hundred. She was cheerful. He wasn't.
"So what's this about?" he asked. "Somebody forget to sign something?" He
feigned delight. "You've changed your minds and you're sending me home?"
Unflapped, she picked up a blue passport from off her desk and handed it to him.
"This is yours. Keep it and don't mislay it. I can reissue but I get surly about
it."
"Thanks." He tucked it in his pocket and was ready to leave.
"Sit down.—So how are you getting along?"
She knew he wasn't happy here and didn't give a damn.
Good, he thought, and sat. That judgment helped pull his temper back to level
and gave him command of his nerves. It was another lawyer. The long-term enemy,
the enemy he'd never met, but always knew directed his life. She was cool as
ice.
He could be uncommunicative, too. His lawyers had taught him: don't fidget, look
at the judge, don't get angry. And he wasn't. Not by half. "Am I having a good
time?" he countered her as she sat down and faced him across her desk, her
computer full of business that had to be more important to her than his welfare.
"No. Will I have a good time? No. I'm not happy about this and I never will be.
But here we are until we're back again."
"I know it's a hard adjustment."
"And you had to interfere in my life." He hadn't found anybody aboard he could
specifically blame. He'd have expected something official from the senior
captain, at least a face-to-face meeting, and hadn't gotten it—as if they'd
snatched him up, and now that they'd demonstrated they could, they had no
further interest in him. He resented that on some lower level of his mind. He
wouldn't have unloaded the baggage in her office, he hadn't intended to, but,
damn it, she asked. She wanted him to sit down and unburden his soul to her, in
lieu of the real authority on this ship—when she was the person, the one person
directly responsible for ten and more years of lawsuits and grief in his life,
not to mention present circumstances. He drew a deep breath and fired all he
had. "My mother was a no-good drughead who ducked out on me, you wouldn't leave
me in peace, and here I am, just happy as you can imagine about it."
"Your mother had no choice in being where she was. She did have a choice in
refusing to give up your Finity citizenship."
"She died! And excuse me, but what in hell did you think you were doing, ripping
up every situation I ever worked out for myself?"
There was a fairly long silence. The face that stared at him was less friendly
than the hisa watchers and just as still.
"I'm sorry you wanted the station, but you weren't born to the station,
Fletcher, and that's a fact that neither of us controlled. This universe doesn't
let you just float free, you know. There's a question of citizenship, your
birthright to be in a particular place, and birth doesn't make you a Pell
citizen. You were always ours, financially, legally, nationally. Francesca
wouldn't let you be theirs. She wanted you here. They just wouldn't let you
leave."
"The damn courts, you mean." In the low opinion he held of Pell courts they
could possibly find one small point of agreement. And she hadn't flared back at
him, had, lawyeresque, held her equilibrium. He even began to think she might
not be so bad, the way nobody on the whole ship had really turned out to be an
enemy. In giving him Jeremy, they'd left him nothing to fight. Nothing to object
to. In sending him here, to this woman, they gave him, again, nobody he could
fight with the anger he had built up. It was robbery, of a kind he only now
identified, that he really didn't want to hurt this woman.
"The damned courts," she said quietly, "yes, exactly so."
"Did you pay fourteen million?"
"You heard about that."
"Damn—excuse me—right I heard."
"They sued us to buy you a station-share and kept the case in limbo; meanwhile,
their own Children's Court wouldn't release you to us so long as the War
continued, or so long as we were working with Norway. And we don't give up our
own, young sir. Learn that first off. For good or for ill, this ship's deck is
sovereign territory and we don't give up our own and pay a fourteen million
credit charge on top of the outrage. If you want to know who put obstacles in
your path, yes, the Pell courts, who saw no reason to credit this ship for the
very fact there is a Pell judiciary and not an outpost of Union justice in its
place. Your mother fought tooth and nail to maintain custody of you. We would
have taken you at any pass through this system. Pell courts thought otherwise,
but they gave you no rights within Pell's law."
It had been a good day going, before Madelaine the lawyer called him in to tell
him what great favors they'd done him. Nothing to fight? She'd given him
something. Fourteen million credits and his life at issue. Civilization was
cancelled for the day. And he turned honest. "I don't want to be here. Doesn't
that count?"
"But the fact is, you had no right to be at Pell, either."
"I had every right!"
"Not the important right. Not the legal right. And they wouldn't give it to you
unless we paid for it because your rights lie on this ship where, from your
mother, you have citizenship and financial rights."
"Well, that's not my fault. I don't owe this ship. And I damned sure don't owe
my mother. She never did anything but mess up my life."
"She had little enough of her own. Your mother was my daughter's child. Your
grandmother died at Olympus. Unfortunately for both of us, it seems, I'm your
great-grandmother. Your closest living relative."
He'd fired off his mouth without knowing what he was firing at. He'd insulted
his mother as he was in the habit of doing with strangers rather than having
others do the sneering and the blaming and him do the defending. Lifelong habit,
and he'd just done it to the wrong person. He'd wondered what it would be like
to have a grandmother, or a godmother, back when he was reading nursery rhymes.
Stationers had them. If he had one he wouldn't ever be in foster homes. Would
he?
His godmother, however, wasn't a soft, plump woman with a wand and a pumpkinful
of mice. It was a spacefaring lawyer with eyes that bored right through you. And
not his god- mother, either. Not even his grandmother. His grandmother's mother,
two generations back.
"Francesca died when you were five," Madelaine said "That's too young really to
have known her. Or to have formed a good judgment."
He was prepared to back up a couple of squares and admit he'd been too quick.
But her judgment of him drew a shake of his head. He couldn't help it. "No. I
was there. I remember."
He remembered police, and his mother lying on the bed, not moving. He remembered
realizing something was wrong with her. Her hand had been cold, terribly cold
when he'd touched it. He'd known that wasn't right. And he'd called the
emergency squad. He remembered textures. Sensations. Everything, every tiniest
detail, was branded in his consciousness.
"She was a good woman," Madelaine said. "Good at what she did. She'd taken jump
drugs all her life with no trouble. The simple fact was, she was pregnant, too
late to abort, too early to deliver except to a birthlab, which she chose not to
do; we knew what we were facing—it's declassified now, so we can talk about it.
But it wasn't then, and going to a birthlab at her stage of pregnancy—we didn't
have the time for her to do that and recover. We just couldn't wait for her, if
she did it without us she'd still be stranded ashore, and she was in a hell of a
mess. There was nothing for anyone but bad choices. We said we'd be back in a
year. That didn't happen. We missed our appointment with her, and she crashed.
Just crashed, physiologically, psychologically. Depression sometimes follows a
birth. She started self-medicating. The hyprazine, particularly the hyprazine,
if you've taken it in jump, it gives you an illusion of being in space, and
that's what you take when you're pregnant. That illusion was what she was after,
Fletcher. Just so you know."
"You and JR have been talking. Right?"
Madelaine shook her head. "No. We haven't. What about?"
"The truth—" He could hardly breathe. He kept his voice calm. "She kept sending
me to welfare—and getting me back—until she finally went out on a trip and never
came down. And left me tangled in the damn court system. Then they couldn't put
me anywhere permanent and let anybody get attached to me because you kept suing
the station. Let me tell you. I made it through six foster-families, five of
them before I was fifteen. I made it through school. I made it through the
honors program and into graduate. I licensed to work on Downbelow in Planetary
Science, which is what I want to do, and where you called me from, and where I
left everything I care about. And you come along and jerk me up and out of that
to do your damn laundry and scrub mess hall tables, because you could do that
and I'm your property! Well, screw all of you! I'm trying to keep my head
straight because I know we can't turn this ship around, I haven't got money to
buy passage on any other ship, and I have to live out this year, but that's all!
That's all. Because when we get back to Pell I'm going to sue you to get off
this ship."
"It still won't give you Pell citizenship."
It failed to knock the wind out of him, as she clearly expected. He didn't want
to tell her about Quen's promise to him. She'd be the lawyer fighting him. He'd
already been stupid and said too much. His lawyers would certainly have told him
so.
"I had a girl back there," he said.
"Oh, is that it?"
"No! That's not it. It's not all it is." Naturally they wanted to wrap all his
problems up in that. But what he felt wouldn't be understandable to people who
didn't know what there was on a planet. He'd had a grandmother. She'd died. A
lot of people on this ship had died… along with Jeremy's close relatives. And
Madelaine— his grandmother… his great-grandmother—just stared at him, maybe
amused, maybe hurt by the truth he'd told, maybe not giving a damn for anything
but the ship's fourteen million. Since his mother died he'd never had to deal
with anybody who owned the same set of emotional entanglements to him that his
mother had had, and then he'd been five. Slowly the emotional shock of meeting
this woman reached through to him, the feeling of an emotional pain somewhere he
wasn't sure of, bone-deep and about to become acute, and tangled somewhere in
his mother's death.
"I was in Planetary Studies," he said. "That doesn't mean anything here. But it
mattered to me. It mattered everything to me."
"The stationmaster told us what you'd done. Both your extraordinary work to get
into the program, and the ruinous thing you did at the end." Madelaine's face
was sober. Her hands were steepled loosely before her, a tangle of fingers, an
attitude that somehow echoed a habit of someone else—his mother—he wasn't sure.
"Fact is, in your tender love of the planet, you broke laws, you fractured rules
designed to protect it and the downers from the well-meaning and the callous
users. I'm interested in why you'd do such a thing."
The lawyer. Wanting to know about laws. And asking into what wasn't her
business, except that the question also involved his attitude toward
rules-following, his behavior in a ship full of critical procedures. He was
tempted to lie, to make things far worse than they were.
But he didn't want to find himself restricted from the freedom he did have,
either.
"Did you have a reason for running off from the Base?" she pursued, and he tried
to organize his thoughts to give her the answer she'd both believe and take for
reassurance.
"Being pushed further than you can push me now," he said. "Further than anyone
can ever push me again. That's all. You can only lose so much."
"Were you thinking of suicide?"
"Maybe. Maybe not."
"Did you care about the downers? The stationmaster said you'd been consorting
rather closely with two of them."
Bianca talked. The information hit him like a hammer blow.
And then, on a next and shaky breath, Of course Bianca talked. I was gone. She
had a right to talk. It was nothing but expected—only the ruin of something else
important. Another support of his life kicked out from under him.
She was scared. She was involved and I involved her. A Family girl with a Family
on her back. Sure, she had to get straight with them. I had to be the one at
fault. I was gone, she had to be practical about it.
He'd hoped for a little more fortitude from her. Just a little heroism. But
she'd saved her own hide. Everyone did, when the chips came down.
"Despite your heritage,—you trained to work with the downers," Madelaine asked
sharply. "Why?"
"Because—" He almost said, Because I love them, but he wasn't going to let that
information loose. Because I never thought you'd get me away from Pell. Never
give a psych or a lawyer a handle to hold to. Not a real one. "Because they're
different. Because I don't like human beings much. How's that?"
"Sad if true."
"Downers don't kidnap people."
"And, as I know from brief experience, they don't understand human
relationships. It's very much the contrary of what you're supposed to be doing
with them. But you were intent on your own reasons."
"Reasons that they invited me to be with them. For years. I know the downers, I
know the two I dealt with."
"You know them better than the scientists and the researchers. You know them
well enough to defy the rules and endanger a half a hundred rescuers"
"It was their choice to be out there chasing me."
"Was it?" A shake of the lawyer's head. "Fletcher, I think you're better than
that. Difficult. So was my granddaughter. It's why you were born. She was in
love, in a year when any child was a hostage to fate. She knew that. She ran a
risk."
In love.
It's why you were born.
He had a merchanter for a mother and that meant he had no father. It was one of
the facts of his life: he had no father. How dare she throw that out for bait?
His mother knew who the father was and it wasn't some chance encounter in a
sleep-over?
He wouldn't take that bait. Not if his life depended on it.
He stood up. "I've got work to do."
Madelaine looked at him as if he were something on her agenda. No longer cool,
no longer remote. "God, you're like Francesca."
That, too, was a gut blow. He didn't know how hard until he'd walked out,
through the office, past the cousin named Blue, and out into the fancy carpeted
corridor.
Like Francesca. She looked at him with age-crinkled eyes and dismissed his best
shot with God, you're like Francesca…
He wasn't like his mother. He wasn't anybody's copy. His mother hadn't been like
him.
She was in love…
He'd not known his mother when she was seventeen. She might have sat in that
same chair. She might have used this same lift. Walked these same corridors…
Been in love…
He had a father somewhere. His great-grandmother knew who it was. She had all
the names, and held them as bait to draw him out, to get pieces of him in her
reach, more deft than any psych.
He was used to the station as his mother's venue. That was where she'd lived,
and Finity's End was where she'd come from.
But this corridor, these places, all this was a place she'd walked in, too, like
some hidden room of her life where she'd been as young as he was now and where
people remembered her in the same awkward, mistake-making years he was trying
his best to grow out of.
It shook him.
It totally revised his concept of where he was and what he'd come from and who
that seventeen-year-old twelve-year-old he roomed with really might have been to
him. Here he was wandering around blind, in her young years, meeting people
who'd wanted him because they'd lost her and to whom the whole reality of the
station was a locked room they couldn't get into, either. And Jeremy was the
bridge. Jeremy was the might-have-been, the one he'd always have been with. His
mother would be dead, maybe, with Jeremy's mother, with half the people on the
ship… and things would be a lot the same, but different, vastly different, too.
He rode the lift back to A deck and walked back where he'd come from. His nerves
weren't up to a challenge of things-as-they-were or a confrontation with
Madelaine Neihart. He just wanted to go back to the mess hall and to Jeremy,
that was all-even to go back to Vince and Linda. He couldn't feel the ship
moving, but they were shooting unthinkably fast toward the nadir of the Tripoint
mass-point, where another event he didn't understand would happen and they'd
more than accelerate: they'd plunge a second time out of the known universe into
a state his mother had chosen to live in, that she'd ultimately chosen to die
in.
He'd failed that unit in his physics class—how the universe didn't like the
state they'd be in, and spat them out reliably somewhere else. He agreed with
the universe: he didn't like the state they'd be in and he didn't want to
imagine it. He didn't know whether he could understand it, but when he'd had to
study it, he'd pleaded with his physics instructor he didn't want to take that
tape again, please God, he didn't want to… and the psychs had gotten into it.
Finally the school had exempted him and let him study it and just barely pass it
realtime, with pencil and paper, because the psychs said there were special
psychological reasons that the instructor and the school weren't equipped to
deal with. They'd offered to help him deal with it. And he'd said no. And
somehow it hadn't come up again.
No more exemption, now. No more psychs to step in and say let Fletcher alone: he
can't deal with it. The court had forgotten all about that fear when it gave him
up and stripped him of his Pell ID. His bitter guess was that it had stopped
mattering to most people the second somebody mentioned fourteen million credits.
Quen had reached out and tapped some judge on the shoulder and said, Let them
have him this time.
And ironically, completely unexpectedly, the only person in the whole affair who
cared—personally, cared, as it turned out—might have been the lawyer, Madelaine.
The crew at large, meanwhile, didn't know what he'd grown into, but thought the
courts were holding from them some poor stupid kid it was their right to have, a
kid whose spacer heritage would leap to the fore and instantly make him love
them.
The ship unfortunately didn't turn around to undo its mistakes. It only went
forward and it didn't stop for anything, that was what that long-ago physics
tape had told him… the universe abhorred their situation half in hyperspace and
half here and spat their bubble along the interface until a mass-point snatched
them into its gravity and jerked their bubble remorselessly flat. When he
thought about it, walking a corridor on a ship courting that event, the space
that connected him to Pell felt stretched thinner and thinner, as if his whole
universe could just tear and vanish.
His mother had died like that, hadn't she? Her mind had just—stretched thin
until one day there wasn't enough left to get her home again.
Madelaine had all the wit he hoped his mother had had, needle-sharp and quick as
he imagined now his mother might have been if she hadn't been out on drugs and
if he hadn't been a feckless five-year-old. He couldn't ever know her,
clear-eyed—couldn't ever sit in a room with her as he'd just sat with Madelaine,
to have clear memories, or to sort out her pluses and minuses. He had memories
of his mother being happy, and smiling, but he'd told himself in the maturer,
more brutal judgment of his teenage years that those had all been days when
she'd been high as the drugs could make her and still function—when the body was
on Pell Station, but she wasn't.
Love? She'd exuded just enough to rip the guts out of a kid. She loved somebody
whose name Madelaine dangled before him? Had his kid?
Then why in hell had she lost herself in drug-hazed space? Post-birth
depression? He wished it were that simple.
He went back to the mess hall and, finding there was nothing doing at the
moment, had a soft drink. They were free. It was one benefit of a situation that
felt, again, like the trap it was.
"So what'd Legal want?" Jeremy wanted to know,
"Just passport stuff," he said. He didn't talk about it. He didn't want Jeremy
for a confidant on this point. He didn't at all want Vince and Linda, who were
lurking for gossip. If Vince had opened his mouth right then, he'd have hit him.
He fought for calm. He tried to settle down and just go numb about the
situation, telling himself that a year, like all other periods of time, would
pass. He'd learned to wait in doctors' offices, in psychiatrists' offices, in
court. "Don't fidget," the adult of the month would say, and he'd stay still.
When he stayed still nobody noticed him. A year was long, but his fight to get
to Downbelow had been longer. He did know how to win by waiting. Don't feel
anything. Don't say much. Don't engage anybody the way he'd engaged the lawyer.
He'd made the one mistake up in Madeline's office… made the kind of mistake that
gave manipulative people and lawyers levers to use.
No. She'd already known him, before he ever walked in that door. He was her
great-grandson, and she'd lost her daughter and her granddaughter and now she
wanted a try at him, seeing his mother in him. That was something he'd never
faced. She was his honest-to-God real great-grandmother, and his mother had
lived on this ship.
She'd just died on Pell.
Chapter XI
Contents - Prev/Next
The shift went to bed, an exhausted mainnight in which visions of rain-veiled
river danced in Fletcher's eyes; and playing cards cascaded like raindrops,
inextricably woven images, in which somehow he owed days, not hours, and in
which he chased Jeremy through tunnels first of earth and then of garishly lit
steel and pipe, the latter of which looked miraculously like the tunnels on
Pell.
Next morning it was back to the galley before maindawn, help Jeff set out the
breakfast trays and get the carts up to B deck, but they were still cooking huge
casseroles for next jump… things that could warm up in a hurry, a lot of red
pepper involved. Taste was pretty dim after jump, so Jeff said, and by
Fletcher's estimation it was true; spicy things perked up the appetite. While
they were doing that, they'd had no further alarms, no changes in velocity. Jeff
said the ship's long, even run under inertia would give them the chance to get
some baking done. Cakes in the oven during a high-K run were doomed, so Jeff
said.
So whenever they hit an onboard stretch where they could spread out and cook,
they cooked for all they were worth: fancy pastries, casseroles, pies, trays of
pasta and individual packets for those hours people came in scattered There were
onions and fish from Pell, there was keis and synth ham, there was cabbage and
couscous and what they called animal protein, which was a kitchen secret nobody
should have to look at before it cooked. It came in pieces and mostly the
cook-staff ground it. There was rice from Earth and yellow grain from Pell;
there were sauces, there were gravies, there were fruit jellies that came from
Downbelow and wine solids and spices and yeasts that came from Earth. There were
keis sandwiches, fish sandwiches, and pro-paste sandwiches which Fletcher swore
he'd never eat again in his life; there were pickles and syrups and stuffed
pasta, string pasta, puff breads and flat-breads and meal and pro-paste pepper
rolls with hot sauce, and there were sausage rollups, which were their lunch,
and keis and ham rollups which were supper. The galley had rung with the
battering of pans and trays, swum in pots of sauce that went steaming into forms
of given sizes and had to be trundled on carts into the galley lift, where in
coats you put the stuff in deep-freeze on the very outer level of the rim in
what they called the skin. Out there among the structural elements of the
passenger ring, cold was the natural, cheap environment, requiring only a rack
for storage, no mechanism but a light; and you felt that cold burning right
through your boot-soles when you walked the grids. Fletcher made one trip down
with Jeff just to see what it was like, his closest approach to the
uncompromising night outside the hull; he was glad to get back up into warmth
and light of the ring.
All this day they worked on sandwiches, and of course, tastes of the current
batch. Nobody on regular cook-staff ever seemed to eat a meal: they sampled; and
the last job they put together, just before supper, was a giant pyramid of tasty
little sandwiches and another of sweets. Which to Fletcher's disappointment
didn't turn up on their menu. It went to B deck.
"We'll get some," Jeremy said as he watched the cart go. "Topside in the senior
mess. There's a get-together coming. Everybody's there."
"So?" he said. He wasn't at all enthusiastic about meetings. He remembered
board-call, and everybody together for that. It had been particularly
uncomfortable. And he'd worked hard today. He thought he had a right to those
desserts. "I'd rather read or something. Thanks."
"You're really supposed to go. It's all of second and third shift, and a lot of
first will come. That's why they've been handing us fast food today. Eat light."
"Is it a meeting, or what is it?"
"Not a meeting," Jeremy said as if he were a little slow. "Food. The fancy food.
It's a party. You know. People. Music. Party."
"Why?"
"'Cause that Union bunch is just sitting back there not bothering us, 'cause
we're in a big boring jump-point and we don't have anything much to do. Why not?
When you're downtimed and there's no pirates going to bother you, you throw a
party. Come on, Fletcher, you'll enjoy it. Be loose. Jump before main-dawn, but
tonight we shake things up, man. Be loose, be happy, it's got to be somebody's
birthday! That's what we say, it's somebody's birthday somewhere! Celebrate for
George."
"Who's George?" There was such a thing as ship-speak: the in-jokes sometimes
flew past him.
"King George V."
He'd thought, with his fascination with old Earth history, there was no way a
twelve-year-old from Finity was going to know King George of England. Or
England, for that matter, in spite of Jeremy's tape study. He was amazed. And
enticed. "Why George?"
"Well, because he's old and he's dead, and nobody throws him parties anymore, so
we do on Finity. When it's nobody else's birthday, it's for old King George!"
He'd walked into that one. "Why not?" he said. "Seems logical."
He still didn't entirely want to go, but he considered the food they'd been
working on all day; and he knew himself, that once he was committed to being
alone, knowing full well there was a party going on elsewhere, he'd feel
lonelier. I'd rather stay in my room and hate all of you might be the real
answer, but it wasn't, in Jeremy's clear opinion, going to be the accepted
answer.
Besides, Jeremy had, against all odds, made it sound like fun.
So they showered and put on clean, unfloured, unpeppered clothes without grease
spots, and went up to B deck. Fletcher's most dire apprehension in the affair
was that he might have to suffer through some formal introduction of himself,
standing up in front of people he didn't want to be polite to. "They're not
going to introduce me again, are they?" he'd asked Jeremy. "I don't want to be
introduced."
"They won't if you don't like," Jeremy said. "I'll tell them and they won't."
He still, riding up the lift to B deck, feared he couldn't escape another round
of j-names: John, James, Jerry and Jim. He was resigned to that idea, if not the
idea of another introduction, or any sentimental This is Francesca's baby on
anybody's part. As long as it stays George's party, he'd told Jeremy, when he'd
agreed. No surprises.
And when they walked up around the ring to the senior mess, he could see the
food laid out, he could see tables spread with linen; and he could see people,
the Family, all walking around or talking at random: no special recognition
looked to be in the offing, no ceremony, no conspicuous embarrassment and no
formality, either. The B deck rec hall turned out to be connected to the B deck
mess hall, a wall-to-wall segment of the whole ring, carpeted, the area that was
rec furnished with vid-game sets, not in use at the moment; a bar, which was in
use; and maybe fifty tables with linen tablecloths like some high-class
restaurant. The whole arrangement filled two segments of B deck's ring, with
only a little half-bulkhead and a drawn-back section door to separate rec from
the mess. There were maybe a hundred, two hundred people—all, God save him,
relatives—milling around in casual familiarity, with more arrivals coming in
from either end of the area.
There was a pool table, a game going there, in the rec section. That had drawn a
row of kibitzers. A couple of women played quiet, not-bad guitar in the
background, up at the end of the mess hall, and the sweets and snacks from the
mess hall were going fast. The bar opened up, and various mixed drinks and wine
glasses ready to be picked up were going off the counter as fast as the kids
serving could set them out, fifty, a hundred of them.
Held off on cheese sandwiches all day. Fletcher raided the dessert stack instead
and filled his mouth with sweet cream pastry.
"Fletcher."
He knew that voice. He turned and frowned at Madelaine. She had a glass of wine
in hand and was clearly not official at the moment.
"Glad you came, Fletcher," Madelaine said.
"Thanks," he said, and knuckled a suspected smear of cream off his lip. He
wouldn't have come at all if he'd known he'd run into her first off.
"Enjoy things," she said. And to his relief and gratitude, she didn't engage him
in intrusive, personal conversation, just smiled and walked past him, wine glass
in hand, leaving him free to wander around with Jeremy.
Jeremy, who was bent on telling him who was who.
"No good with the names," he said after six or seven. "There's too many J's in
the lot. I'm not going to remember. Unless you can point out King George. Who is
a G, isn't he?"
Jeremy thought that was funny. "Everybody is J's," he said, as if he'd never
added it up for himself. "Most, anyway. 'Cept you're Fletcher. Probably the
first Fletcher in fifty years."
"Why? Why's Fletcher the exception?"
"He was shot dead, a long time ago," Jeremy said. "He was the one getting the
hatch shut when the Company men were trying to board, and he did it and died on
the deck inside. Or there wouldn't be any of us. No Alliance. No Union."
He knew about the incident. He'd learned it in school, but he didn't know it was
a Fletcher Neihart who'd been the one to get the door shut when they tried to
trap Finity and arrest Captain James Robert. He knew about Finity's End saying
the Earth Company authorities weren't going to board, and the captain and crew
had sealed the ship and left the station and the authorities behind them,
refusing them authority over the ship and refusing station law on a merchanter's
deck. It was where the first merchanter's strike had started, when merchanters
from one end of space to the other had made it clear that trade goods didn't and
wouldn't move without merchant ships.
In a long chain of events, it was the incident that had started the whole
Company War.
History. Near-modern history, which he detested. He'd passed the obligatory quiz
on the details to get into the program. The Company War. Treaty of Pell, 2353,
and that had left civilization where it was when he'd been born, with Union on
one side and Alliance on the other and Earth not real happy with either of them.
And him stranded and his mother dead. That kind of history.
So, Jeremy said, somebody he was named after had gotten a critical hatch shut in
the original fracas between Company ships and Family ships, without which either
the ship wouldn't have gotten away or the cops who shot this long-dead Fletcher
would have died in the decompression that would have resulted if he hadn't shut
that hatch.
Pell knew about that kind of event. And he'd known about the start of the
Company War.
So the guy's name had been Fletcher. He didn't know why he should be proud of
some spacer who was a hundred years dead—but, well, dammit, he'd lived all his
seventeen years around the snobbery of the Velasquezes and the Willetts, the
Dees and the Konstantins, who'd been important because of their names, and
important mostly because of what dead people in their families had done, while
he'd never before had a sense of connection to anything but an addict mother and
a lawsuit.
Somebody died closing an airlock and did it with pieces of him shot away,
knowing otherwise there'd be vacuum killing more than the people shooting at
him—that was a levelheaded brave guy, in his way of thinking. While the
Willetts—they'd donated a warehouse full of stuff to the war effort. Big deal.
No one had been shooting at them.
And Fletcher Neihart meant that man, on this ship. Fletcher wasn't just a name.
It was a revision of who he was—for a moment.
He never had meant much. And that, he'd told himself when he'd been at a low
point of his teenaged years, scared spitless of the program placement tests,
that never meant much was the source of his strength: not giving much of a damn.
Like a gyro—kick it off balance a second and it swung right back. That
realization had kept him sane. Kept him aware of his own value, which was only
to himself.
Maybe that was why Madelaine's being here had upset him—why Madelaine had upset
him and why even yet he was feeling shaky. He'd instinctively seen a danger when
Madelaine had dangled the lure of his mother's motives and his father's name in
front of him yesterday.
He'd been in danger a second ago when he'd thought about famous relatives.
He was in danger when he began to slip toward thinking… being Fletcher Neihart
wasn't that bad a thing.
Yes, and Jeremy wasn't a bad kid, and they could get along, and maybe Jeremy
could make this year of enforced servitude not so bad. But he'd thought he could
rely on Bianca, too, and yesterday in the same conversation in which he'd
learned he had a great-grandmother and the lawyers he hated really loved him, in
the very same conversation Madelaine had proved Bianca had talked to authorities
and betrayed everything he'd shared with her about Melody and Patch,
It was nothing to get that angry about. Bianca had behaved about average, for
people he'd dealt with. Better than some. She hadn't talked until she'd been
cornered and until he'd already been caught and shipped off the planet,
So forget falling into the soft traps of potential relatives. Figure that Jeremy
would keep some secrets and advise him out of trouble, but he shouldn't get
soppy over it or mistake it for anything special. Jeremy had his orders, and
those orders came from authority just like Madelaine, if it wasn't Madelaine
herself. She wanted him to ask who his father was. He didn't damn well care.
Whoever it was hadn't come to Pell. Hadn't cared for him. Hadn't cared for his
mother.
Spacer mindset.
Safer just to disconnect from all of them, Jeremy too. He could be pleasant, but
he didn't have to commit and he didn't have to trust any of them. And that meant
he didn't have to get mad, consequently, when they proved no better and no worse
than anyone else. He'd learned that wisdom in his half a dozen family
arrangements, half a dozen tries at being given the nicely prepared room, the
nicely prepared brother, the family who thought they'd save him from his
heritage and a mother who hadn't been much.
In that awareness he walked in complete safety through the buzz of talk and the
occasional hand snagging him to introduce him to this or that cousin… screw it,
he thought: he wasn't possibly going to remember anything beyond this evening.
The names would sink in only over time and with the need to deal with one and
another of them. If he really, truly needed to know Jack from Jamie B., he'd ask
for an alphabetical list. In the meantime, everyone wore name tags.
He'd had a hard day, however, and what he did want to quiet his nerves and dim
the day's troubles wasn't on the dessert tray. He strolled over to the bar,
lifted a glass of wine, turned his shoulder before he had to deal with the
bartenders and walked off with it, sipping a treat he hadn't had at the Base but
that he had had regularly in the latest family. The Wilsons had collected their
subsidy from the station for taking care of him, he hadn't caused them trouble
(he'd been a model student who ate his meals out), he'd done his own laundry…
fact had been, he'd boarded at the Wilsons', and they were pleasant, decent folk
who'd had him to formal dinners on holidays at home or in nice restaurants, and
who hadn't cared if he hit their liquor now and again as long as he cleaned up
the bar and washed the glasses.
The wine tasted good. His nerves promised to unwind. He told himself to relax,
smile, have a good time, get to know as many of the glut of relatives as seemed
pleasant. Like Jeff. Jeff was all right. Even great-grandmother Madelaine was on
an agenda of her own, nothing really to do with him as himself, except as the
daughter-legacy Madelaine hoped he'd turn into. He would disappoint her, he was
sure.
But if she refrained from exercising authority over him and just took him as he
was, as she'd done when she'd failed to make a fuss over him here, he could
refrain from resisting her. He could be pleasant. He'd been pleasant to a lot of
people once he knew it was in his interest, as it seemed generally to be in his
interest on this ship.
He'd like to find a few cousins who were somewhat above twelve years of age.
He'd like to have someone to talk occasionally to whose passion wasn't
vid-games.
"God, you're not supposed to have that," Jeremy said, catching up to him.
"Had it on station ."
Jeremy was troubled by it. He saw that. But he had it now, and he wasn't going
to turn it in. He drank it in slow sips. He had no intention of gulping multiple
glasses and making an ass of himself.
"What's this?" He knew that young, high, penetrating voice, too. Vince had
showed up, with Linda. Inevitably with Linda. "You can't drink that."
Vince and his holier-than-thou, wiser-than-everyone attitudes for what Vince
wouldn't dare do when he was taller and older. He gestured with the
three-quarters full glass, "Have drunk it. When you grow up, you can give it a
try. Meanwhile, relax."
"You'll get on report," Vince said. "I'll bet you get on report."
"Fine. Let them ship me back. I'll cry tears."
"I wish they would," Vince said, one of his moments of sincerity, and about that
time a larger presence came up on him.
JR.
"He's drinking" Vince said as if JR had no eyes. Fletcher looked straight at JR.
"Somebody give you that?" JR asked in front of Jeremy and Vince and Linda. He'd
had enough family togetherness for the day. He drank three-quarters of a
well-hoarded glass down in three swallows.
"Here," he said, and handed the empty glass to JR. JR almost let it fall. And
caught it on the fly, not without spilling a couple of last drops to the
expensive carpet.
Fletcher walked off. He'd had enough party and celebration, and beyond that, he
wasn't in a frame of mind to stay around to be discussed or reprimanded in front
of his roommate, a twelve-year-old jerk, or a couple of hundred of his worst
enemies. It was easy to leave in the open-ended mess hall section. He just kept
walking to the lift, out where the light was dimmer and the noise was a lot
less.
JR held a glass he didn't want to be holding. He handed it to Vince, restraining
himself from immediate comment. He didn't know what exchange had preceded
Vince's complaint to him. Clearly cousin Fletcher had just overloaded on
something, be it wine or family.
He refused to get into he-saids with immediately involved junior-juniors and
walked to the bar to learn the plain facts. "Nate. Did you give Fletcher wine?"
Nate was one of the senior crew, now, lately of the junior crew, and Nate looked
distressed. "No. He just took it. I didn't know what to do. Has he got leave?"
"Not officially, no. You did right. You didn't make an incident. Vince and the
junior-juniors called him on it, though, and he flared and left."
"The guy wasn't real straightforward about asking for permissions, what it seems
to me. I think he knew it was off limits."
"Yeah. You and I both noticed. If he does it again just let him. I'll talk to
Legal and we'll find out whether there were agreements with him before he
boarded, or what."
"Trouble?" Bucklin turned up by him at the bar, Bucklin couldn't have missed
Fletcher's leaving.
"Vince sounded off about the drink. Fletcher's pissed."
"Cousin Fletcher came aboard pissed. Counting he was hauled here by the cops and
the stationmaster, I'm not personally surprised he and young Vince should go
critical. "
"It's on our watch," JR sighed. "We got him, he's ours."
"Maybe we could have airlock drill," Bucklm's tone was wistful, the suggestion
outrageous.
"I'm afraid that won't solve it." He couldn't quite joke about it, tempest in an
infinitesimal teacup though it might be. "Captain-sir wants him. Madelaine wants
him. I'm afraid we ultimately have to work him in."
"Between you and me only, this has a bad feeling." This time Bucklin wasn't
making a joke at all. "This guy doesn't want to be here. I mean, it's hard
enough to work him in if we wanted him. We're busy. We've got nothing but
unskilled labor in him. We had a fine thing going before we got lucky in the
court, and I appreciate we had a legal problem, but—where are we going to fit
him in?"
Bucklin left his complaint hanging after that, and after a moment, in his
silence on the issue, Bucklin walked away. Bucklin wasn't of a rank to say what
was floating in the air unsaid. We don't want him didn't half sum up the feeling
among the senior-juniors. They had had an integrated team that was turning their
last-born batch of juniors, ending with Jeremy, into a tight-knit unit that
would put the senior-juniors in crew posts in another couple of years, with
Jeremy and Vince and Linda their best backup for what was going to be, with
adequate luck, a sudden crop of babies forthcoming from this run. The
senior-juniors were a team tested literally under fire. However thin they were
in numbers, he saw the makings of a damned fine command in what his seniors had
left him and what he'd spent the last seven years putting together. Supposing
now that women did become pregnant, and that the nursery did acquire a new batch
of kids, he and Bucklin and Lyra had plans to set Jeremy and Vince and Linda in
charge of the ones who'd come out of the nursery as junior-juniors at just about
the time that trio hit physical maturity. It had all been going to work out
neatly, and then they got cousin Fletcher, of a physical size to fit with
senior-juniors, basic knowledge far beneath that of junior-juniors, and a surly
attitude to boot. Add to that a late-to-board-call stunt unprecedented in the
history of the ship, for which Fletcher had proved nothing but self-righteous
and angry.
It was wrong, the whole blown-out-of-proportion incident just now with the wine
glass was just damned wrong, both what Fletcher had done walking out and what
Vince had done lighting into him and what Jeremy had done standing confusedly in
the middle. It wasn't the drink. It was Fletcher's attitude that made no way for
anybody to back down; and as the saying went, it had happened on his watch.
On one level the Old Man didn't want to know the details, the excuses, or the
extenuating circumstances of the junior captain's failures; on another level,
the Old Man would rapidly know every detail that he knew the minute he walked in
here and wanted to know where Fletcher was, and there was nothing worse in God's
wide universe than an interview with Captain James Robert Neihart, Sr. when your
tally of mistakes went catastrophic—as it had just done in that little
damn-you-all gesture of Fletcher's.
He, supposed to handle things, had thought that in putting Fletcher with the
junior-juniors he had arranged Fletcher a berth that wouldn't expose his
ignorance, put demands on his behavior, or burden his own essential and often
working team with constantly babysitting Fletcher.
Yes, the senior crew including the Old Man had a load of personal guilt over
cousin Francesca, over the fact they hadn't made it back in time to prevent what
they were relatively sure had been a suicide.
Yes, Francesca had named her kid one of the signal names in Finity's history,
one of the names which, like James Robert, you didn't just bestow on your kid
without asking and without the bloodline to permit it.
Yes, Francesca had named him that name before she'd known she'd be left—she had
done it, he guessed, not out of bitterness, or to imply a guilt they all felt,
but to declare to a station who otherwise despised spacers that this was no
common kid.
Unfortunately that name had stayed on after her suicide to confound Finity
command, attached to a kid in the original Fletcher's line, a kid caught in the
wheels of jurisdiction and power games, a kid who by that name and Finity's
reputation necessarily attracted attention in spacer circles.
And yes, James Robert had wanted to get a kid named Fletcher, his grand-nephew,
out of the gears and out of station view. There'd be no shameful appendix to the
life of the first Fletcher, to append his name to a kid hellbent—JR had seen the
police reports—on conspicuous and public disaster, right down to his dive for
the outback.
Yes, Francesca's situation had been a tragedy. But a lot of people on Finity had
had a lot harder situation than Francesca's, in his estimation.
His mother was one, dead in the decompression. And Jeremy's. And Vince's
half-brother. Or ask Bucklin, who'd lost every close relative in his whole line
except Madison, and Madison, who'd lost everyone but Bucklin.
Damn right they were close, the ones left of the old juniors' group, the ones
like himself and Bucklin, who'd huddled together in nursery while the ship
underwent stresses that killed the weak. They'd seen kids grow weaker and weaker
until eventually they just didn't come out of trank at a given jump.
Damned right they'd earned the pride they had and damned right they didn't like
all they'd won handed to a stranger on a platter, particularly when the stranger
bitterly, insultingly rebuffed what welcome he was given.
He had a situation building, a resentment in his command. And it was his job to
find a way to deal Fletcher in.
"So how is he?" Madison asked, second captain, and JR felt heat rise to his
face, wondering what answer he possibly could find.
"He's not happy." To his left a guitar hit a quiet passage, strings ringing with
a poignantly soft tune he'd heard since he was small; "Rise and Go." Parting of
lovers. Partings of every kind. It was cliché. It never failed to send the
chills down his arms and the moisture to his eyes. It disturbed logic. Prompted
frankness. "Neither are we with him, sir, plainly speaking, sir."
"We had to take him," Madison said. "This was our chance. We couldn't leave
him."
"I'm aware of our obligation, sir. And mine. I'm not begging off from the
problem, only advising senior command that I've not made significant headway
with him."
"Not only our obligation," Madison said. "Elene Quen had a part in this."
That small, added information, so directly and purposefully delivered, struck
him off balance. And at that moment Madelaine wandered over with a drink in
hand.
"Jake's called ops downside," Madelaine said, "just to be sure, you know, that
Fletcher made his quarters without incident."
"I think he did," JR said. The kid was angry. Not stupid. And if Madison's
information bore out into something besides Family determination to recover one
of their own, there might be justification for that anger. Quen. Politics.
Deals.
"He swiped a drink," Madelaine said to Madison. "Pell Station let him, I'd be
willing to bet. Station rules. He didn't know he needed a go-ahead."
Madison frowned. "The body's old as JR, here. It's the mind that's under-aged.
Your call, junior captain. What will you do with him?"
"My call," JR said. "But this is a new one. Where do you rate him, sir?
Junior-junior, or not? He's Jeremy's age and far less experienced."
"And physically the same as your age. Look up the statutory years." Madison
spotted someone coming in by the up-ring entry, and drifted off with that
quandary posed, information half-delivered.
JR gazed after him in frustration. He drank, judiciously and seldom, and he had
twenty-six years for mental ballast. He also had the responsibility for issuing
such privileges to juniors under him. Was Madison saying give Fletcher
senior-junior privileges right off? He didn't think so.
And this hint of deals with Quen, that might have complicated the situation with
understandings and arrangements… no one had told him.
"What's this," he asked Madelaine, "that the name of Quen came up just now? I
know why we took him, on principle. He's Fletcher. But what are we doing taking
him in on this run, not asking for him after he's local eighteen and the court's
off his case? Is there something essential that I'm not hearing, here?"
"Oh, there's a fair amount you missed that night at dinner."
"With Quen? What did I miss?"
"The fact Quen very ably moved the courts to give us Fletcher when she wanted
to, after telling us for twelve years that she couldn't budge them. Now, that
may be an unfair suspicion. Possibly her position has changed: possibly she has
more power now; perhaps she simply called in a tall stack of favors." Madelaine
stopped—he knew that silence of hers: she was suddenly wondering how much to
tell the junior captain on a particular point, and a blurted question from him
right now would make her sure he wasn't qualified to know. So he stood quietly
while Madelaine took a sip of wine and thought about her next piece of
information.
"Quen wants a ship. She wants a Quen ship. And she wants James"—Madelaine was
one of a handful who called the senior captain James and not James Robert—"to
stand with her and get it approved."
"That, I already know."
"But it's more than that. Like Mallory, Quen is worried about Union's next
moves. Thinks the next war is going to be a trade war. Union's building ships it
proposes to put into trade and saying they don't violate the Treaty. We of
course say differently. Fletcher's an issue on his own and always has been, but
he's become an issue of trust between us and Quen. Quen proves to us she's got
power on Pell by delivering Fletcher to us, maneuvering past Pell's red tape—and
we'll stand by her in the Council of Captains and use our considerable stack of
favor-points with other ships to swing votes on the issue she wants—if she backs
us. We want tariffs lowered. An unrelated understanding, mark that."
He did. There was no linkage between the two events because both parties agreed
there wasn't a linkage. Yes, Finity could fail to carry out their part of the
deal, take Quen's gift of Fletcher and go on to oppose Quen in Council, because
there wasn't a linkage. But if Finity betrayed her, Quen wouldn't be their ally
on something else they wanted her vote on.
And what was there to deal for? Quen wanted a Quen ship: understandable. What
was there that Finity would be wanting from Quen? Lower tariffs didn't sound at
all related to the battle they'd been fighting against Mazian. It affected
merchanter profits and the price of goods. That was all that he saw.
Tariffs affected trade; trade affected international affairs. Did the question
have any relation to that Union ship out there, the most notable anomaly in this
voyage besides their own declaration they were going back to merchanting? Quen
detested Union, so he'd heard. And Quen had traded them the kid they'd held
hostage for seventeen years because now Quen wanted to build ships.
Build ships to keep Union from building ships to operate essentially on trade
routes within Union. That was a delicate and sticky point: pre-War and post-War,
all commercial trade routes in existence had been independent merchanter
freighter routes—all, that was, except the two routes between Cyteen and its
outermost starstations. On those two routes Union had always used its own
military transport, in supply of, the merchanters were given to understand,
fairly spartan stations, probably populated by Union's tailor-made humanity, for
what he knew. No merchanter in those days had been interested in going there.
That mistake had given Union a foothold in merchanter operations.
"So…" he asked Madelaine, "what is going on? How did Fletcher get into it,
besides as a bargaining chit? And why are we making deals with Quen? Or is that
what we're really doing on this voyage? Who are we fighting? Mazian? Or Union?"
"This is topside information," Madelaine said, meaning what she told the junior
first captain didn't go to the junior-juniors or even to Bucklin. "We were
always anxious to get Fletcher out. We didn't expect to get Fletcher this round.
We took him because we could take him. Quen happens to hold a general view of
the situation with Union we want her to act on, but we don't tell her that. We
have to let her persuade us at great effort, or she'll start arranging other
deals with otherp arties because she'll believe we folded too easy and we're up
to something. So Fletcher wasn't at issue… we snatched him up because we could;
we just didn't plan on him becoming a high-profile problem on this voyage."
Aside from the damage done his tight-knit command, he didn't like the ethical
shading of the transaction he was hearing about, for Madelaine's own
great-grandson. They were merchanters, and they bought and sold, but people
shouldn't fit into a category of goods. In that regard he felt sorry for anyone
caught in the turbulence around their dealings, Mallory's and Quen's. And if
Fletcher detected the nature of the dealings, it could certainly explain
Fletcher's state of mind.
"You're not to tell that," Madelaine said, extraneous to any prior
understandings she'd elicited of him. Madelaine was drinking wine and maybe just
a little bit more open than she'd have wanted to be. "Especially to Fletcher."
"You don't like Quen," JR observed. It seemed to him that Quen was an unanswered
question, and what her dealings had been were never clear.
"I don't, Madelaine said. "Not personally. I admire her. I don't like her. She
got personally involved with a stationer, kited off from Estelle because she was
head over heels in love with a bright young station lawyer and nobody could
prevent Elene doing any damn thing. It's uncharitable to say it, but that's the
case. Elene was on station when her ship died because Elene was having her way
in one of her romantical fancies. My Francesca was on station because she had no
damn choice, medically speaking, and we had to transfer her off and go in
fifteen minutes." Another sip of wine. "Now Elene's a hero of the Alliance and
my granddaughter's dead of an overdose. Quen didn't do one thing to make her
life easier while she was alive and alone there. Not one."
He was shocked, and tried to hide it. Madelaine had never unburdened that
opinion to him. But he hadn't been in the line of command the last time they'd
visited Pell and Madelaine's temper hadn't been ruffled by a sordid trade to get
her great-grandson back, either.
"I blame Elene," Madelaine said. "I blame Elene that she left her own ship. I
blame Elene that she didn't take Francesca in tow and provide a little personal
friendship. Granted Elene was busy and Elene was pregnant, too, but if she ever
extended a hand of friendship to my granddaughter before she hit the bottom I
have yet to hear it. If my Elizabeth had lived to get back to Pell, she'd have
had words for Quen. I reserve what I say. I'm only the girl's grandmother."
Francesca's mother, Elizabeth. Dead at Olympus. There were so many.
Madelaine nudged JR's arm with her wine glass. "Take a little extra care of my
great-grandson. Don't waste him in the junior-juniors. I know he's an ass, but
he's got possibilities. Personal favor."
JR drew in a slow, deep breath. He'd gotten snagged, broadsided, and boarded.
Aunt Madelaine was the ship's chief lawyer.
"I'll try," he said
"All you can do," Madelaine agreed.
"Any special advice?" he asked Madelaine.
"For dealing with him? Grow all-over fur. The boy's had no human ties. Damned
Pell courts." Sip of wine. The bottom of the glass, a little straw-colored
liquid remaining. "Get me another wine, there's a love. James has come. I won't
tell him what Fletcher did. None of us will. It just isn't important."
James Robert had come in, perhaps thinking he'd find a grateful, happy new
member in the Family. Madelaine went in that direction, damage control,
protection of her great-grandson, leaving him to get a refill at the bar, and
one for himself while he was at it.
James Robert and Madelaine were in heavy discussion when he brought the wine. He
put the glass in Madelaine's outheld hand, offered his other on the moment to
the Old Man, who hadn't gotten across the room before Madelaine's interception,
and the Old Man murmured an abstracted thanks and took it.
Talk among the seniors: a Union ship just sitting out there, having run recovery
on a bottle of Scotch. Quen and some high-powered agreement in their own vital
interest. Madelaine said it was tariffs, which pointed to a political agreement
inside the Alliance. The secrecy smelled to high heaven of some kind of
operation of Mallory's, while, third question, they were very publicly taking up
trade again, in a move that had to be gossiped wherever merchanters docked… and
the Fletcher incident had to dominate the gossip on Pell and everywhere else.
He had surmised their return to trade might be intended as a demonstration of
Alliance power, a demonstration of the safety they hoped they'd created in the
shipping lanes… at a critical moment when support of the starstation councils
for the continued pirate hunt was wavering.
And at a time when Union was handing out special privileges to merchanters who
wanted to sign on to wealthy Union instead of the economically struggling
Alliance. He didn't want to focus his career on fighting Union activity: he'd
trained all his life to fight Mazianni, and that was where his interest was, but
he could see that Union's actions, actions which Quen would find of interest,
constituted a smart move. Getting enough merchanters voluntarily signed into
Union would win for Union without a shot what the War hadn't gained for them by
all the ordnance expended. If merchanters started drifting over the Line and
signing with Union in any significant numbers the universe could see humanity
polarized again into two major camps. Then, depend on it, merchanters would see
themselves first regulated to the hilt, then entirely replaced by Union's own
ships: a merchanter desperate enough to clutch at Union financial support wasn't
analyzing his future further than the next set of bills.
It was the very situation that had started the War, the move to take over the
merchanters this time coming not from Earth's side, but from Union's side of the
border. One would think Union might have learned from Earth's experience with
the merchanters. Not so. The merchanters had formed their own state, at Pell,
and with a handful of stations balancing commitment between the Merchanter
Alliance and Union, and now Union started pushing to get the merchanters. The
starstations independence would go next, and then they'd reach for Earth. If
Mazian didn't step in.
Or if Mallory and Quen and the Old Man of Finity's End didn't draw a line and
say: no further.
And was that the message that went with the bottle in a black, starry sea? A
warning—from Mallory and from Finity, Stay our allies? Don't provoke us with
your recruitments and your ship-building? Yours is the glass house?
It was certain in their own minds that Mazian had a secret base, somewhere
within 20 lights of Pell, and that was an immense volume of space to search for
someone determined not to be found. The rest of human habitation was
concentrated in a comparatively small sphere at the center, where Mazian could
strike without warning—and escape to that remote base.
It required a network of informants to establish any kind of security. Union
didn't have that network. Mallory did. Mallory—who was once of the Fleet. And
they were such a network, they, the merchanters… who wouldn't talk to Union or
Alliance stationside officials with anything like the freedom with which they
talked to each other.
From Mazian's view, however, finding the heart of human civilization wasn't a
question of searching a 40-light sphere. It was a concentrated area Mazian could
easily strike, without warning and with a choice of targets that could send
chills down any civilized backbone. If a junior could venture a guess of his
own, it was worse than that: Mazian's aim might be to establish multiple bases,
scattered points from which to threaten the center—and Mazian's overriding
strategy might not be a crushing military strike but rather evading Mallory,
waiting for Union to get overconfident, and then maneuvering the Alliance or
Earth into so deep a diplomatic crisis with Union that the Alliance had no hope
except to forgive Mazian and recall him to take over the government. Then Mazian
could use those bases to hit Union. But merchanters would bleed in the process.
Against that backdrop, the captains of Finity'sEnd had held their meeting with
Quen and gotten some agreement out of her that they had wanted. Meanwhile they
were going back to trading, Union was still refusing to let Alliance merchanters
into its internal routes without them signing up as Union-based, and the Old Man
had wanted Quen to bribe him into supporting her in some scheme of her devising.
What in hell game were they playing?
He went back to the bar, picked up a glass of wine for himself. Bucklin and Chad
intercepted him on their own inquiry, having been out of the loop.
"So was that all about Fletcher?" Bucklin asked
"Some of it. Madelaine being his grandmother." Great-grandmother, but in a
Family's tangled exogamous web of greats, second and third cousins and nieces
and nephews on lives extended by time dilation and rejuv, you compressed
generations unless you were seriously trying to track what you were to each
other. "She's taking a personal interest. She wants this kid in very badly."
Silence greeted that revelation.
"About the drink," JR said. "Let it slide. He didn't know the rules. I'll think
about where he fits. He's not Jeremy's size. The body's as mature as we are. The
education's just way behind."
"Yeah, well." Bucklin sighed, and they took their drinks and walked over to the
rest of the junior-seniors, who'd staked out a table for eight. They pulled more
chairs over, until it was a dense, tight group, Lyra, Toby, Ashley, Sue and
Connor, Nike, Wayne, and Chad: as many different looks as they had
star-scattered fathers. Lyra, a year younger than Bucklin and third in command,
was the family's sole almost redhead, sporting an array of earrings and
bracelets she couldn't wear in ops. Lyra, and beside her, Toby, whose brown
complexion and shoulder-trailing kinky locks made that pair of cousins about as
far apart as the Family genes stretched.
Lyra and Toby had brought a dedicated bottle of wine from the bar. Bucklin and
he also had wine. The rest had soft drinks and fruit juice, and that was the
line Fletcher had crossed without permission: Fletcher had assumed, maybe
because he'd done it on station, that he had a right.
"Fletcher," JR said by way of explanation, "had a run-in with Vince, you'll have
noticed. He opted for his quarters. Presumably he got there. Jake checked."
"So did you explain the rules?" Connor asked over his own soft drink. By custom,
they didn't follow formal courtesies in rec hall or in mess. Complaints were
allowed; and he could have figured it would be Connor and Sue that spoke up for
the rule book.
"Fletcher's got a possible Extenuating." He saw frowns settle not only on those
two faces but all around. "He's a junior-junior, but Madison said it. The body
physiologically isn't."
"Body's not mind," Nike said, and swept an indignant hand from Wayne and Connor
on her right to Chad, Sue, and Ashley on her left. "When do we get wide-open
liberty on the docks? When do we sleepover where we like? Or take a wine off the
bar in front of the seniors and everybody?"
"You know when." He didn't want this debate over the issue, and their challenge
to him was the answer. No, maturity wasn't identical from ship to station on the
biological or the mental level, and there wasn't a neat equivalency. The
off-again on-again hormonal flux of time-dilated pubescent bodies that was the
number one reason they didn't get bar privileges was precisely the hormonally
driven emotional flux that set their nerves in an uproar when they were crossed.
His physical-sixteens and -fifteens were a pain in the ass; he was just emerging
from that psychological cocktail himself, and while at physical and mental
seventeen-to-eighteen and chronological and educational twenty-six he was just
getting his own nerves to a calm, sensible state. Yes, he still flared off, a
besetting sin of his. But the infinite wisdom of the Way Things Worked on a
short-handed ship had made him senior-most junior, responsible for all the
junior crew that was still in that stage.
Keep them busy picking nits, his predecessor in the role had warned him; never
let them take on the real rules. Give them nits to worry at and they'll obey the
big ones. Then Paul had added, smugly: You did.
Nits, hell. His predecessor had commanded the juniors through the dustup at
Bryant's, when so many had died—among the juniors as well. That had been no
waltz.
They gave him Fletcher on a damn milk run. It seemed, on the surface, a tame,
and minor, duty, one that shouldn't set his lately pubescent hormones skewing
wildly through the whole gamut of adrenaline charge. He'd had his last personal
snit, oh, exquisitely dissected and laid out for him by Paul, right down to
temper as his personal failing.
Not this time.
"Give him some leeway," he said to the others. "Just give him some leeway. He's
not the same as having grown up here. He's not the same as anyone we've ever
personally known."
"I hear he gave you trouble," Ashley said.
"Not lately."
"Not in fifteen minutes," Sue said. "He shoved that glass on you in front of
everybody."
"Fine. I gave it to Vince. Who set up the situation, if we have to talk about
fault." His temper was getting on edge. Sue had a knack for stirring it up. He
hauled it back and put on the brakes. "I saw the drink and I was dealing with
it. I didn't need a snot-nosed junior-junior to tell me that was a wineglass.
Vince interfered. It blew. That's the end of it. We've got Fletcher, he's
physiological seventeen, he probably drank on station, and somewhere, somehow in
the plain fact he doesn't know a damn thing useful, we've got to fit him in at
the bottom of the senior-juniors—"
"No!" from Nike.
"—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a
year older than he is; but Fletcher's seventeen years weren't time-dilated. So
do you want my orders, or are there other suggestions?"
"He's the baby," Connor said "I think we ought to do a Welcome-in."
Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It wasn't the idea he
had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew
privileges and he hadn't been through the process and the understandings and the
acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.
"He's a little old for that," JR said.
"We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy," Sue said. "Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took
it. So how's this guy holier than any of us?"
"He's upset, that's one difference. He wasn't born here. He's not one of us…"
"That's what a Welcome-in's for, isn't it?" Chad asked, with devastating reason.
But a bad idea. "Not yet. This isn't somebody straight down from the kids' loft.
This isn't a green kid."
"Plenty green to me," Chad said.
"He can't do anything," Lyra said. "He's not trained to do anything. He's a
stationer. He's a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he's got to appreciate
what he's joining."
JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of
first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the
nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior
ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance
for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior
into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group,
one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of
him in an emergency.
"So when do we do a Welcome-in?" Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad's
tone it was an issue the way Fletcher's encounter with him over the wine glass
was going to be an issue with Chad.
"Not yet," JR said. "Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he'll
blow, and that's no good"
"Everybody blows," Connor said.
"Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy's size," Bucklin muttered,
finally, a dose of common sense. "Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you."
There were sulks. They hadn't done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three
shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They
hadn't known whether Finity would survive her next run, and they'd Welcomed-in
Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn't seemed fair for any kid to
die alone in the nursery, the ship's last kid, in years when they hadn't
produced any other kids.
Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to
station-time.
And very, very different.
"I say we go easy with him," JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin's clear
statement of the facts had gained, "and we give him a little chance to figure us
out. Then we'll talk. "
There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.
"Square up," JR said. "Don't sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a senior
venue."
Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.
"I say with JR," said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, "we give
him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn't, we talk again at
Mariner."
"Just don't take him on," JR said. "If you've got a problem with him, refer it
to me."
He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher's quarters this evening and try
to talk it out with him. But he didn't trust that three-quarters of a wine glass
in three gulps had improved Fletcher's logic. Or his temper. There were
constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased
slide.
He supposed he'd tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe
hadn't been the ideal pair-up.
But putting him with him or Bucklin would inspire jealousy: Put him with Chad?
There were two tempers in a paper sack. Connor, the same. Ashley or Toby would
go silent and there'd be offense there. He couldn't think of anybody better than
Jeremy, who could outright disarm the devil.
The Old Man and Paul both had warned him there weren't fast fixes for personal
messes once they went wrong. You didn't just go running down to a case like
Fletcher and tell him how to fix his life and expect cooperation, especially
after a public scene such as they'd just had. Fletcher had to figure a certain
amount out for himself, and meanwhile he and his crew had to figure out what a
mind was like who'd been more than content to sink into a gravity well and never
see the stars again. Stranger than the downers, in his own opinion. Downers at
least had been born to endless cloud and murk.
Wood, a slim wand of it brought into space where wood was a rarity, feathers,
where birds never flew… and spirals and dots and bands carved by hisa
fingers—fingers no longer content to carve wood with stones, the scientist
reminded them. Hisa of these times were quite glad to have sharp metal blades.
Hisa accepted them in trade and called metal cold-cold. That had become the hisa
word for it.
No matter how hard you tried to keep the Upabove out of Downbelow, humans didn't
give up their ties to the technology they depended on and hisa learned to depend
on it, too. But humans found it difficult to go down to a world again.
Fletcher lay on his bunk, his head a little light from the wine. His fingers
drew peace from the touch of the feathers, damaged by a Downbelow rain. The
touch of wood evoked memories far happier than where he was.
He didn't give up his resentments. He didn't give up his dreams, either. And
maybe the experts weren't right that he'd done actual harm by going where he'd
gone. Expert opinion had backed another theory, once, right up to the time
before he was born. Then the idea had been to get the hisa into space, teach
them technology, give them the benefits of the steel and plastics world above
their clouded world. Hisa had been very clever with machines, quick to learn
small jobs like checking valves, changing filters, reading dials.
Pell Station, short of personnel in its earliest days, and overwhelmed by events
cascading about it, had begun with hisa at the heart of the operation, and
they'd built the station around the presumption there'd always be hisa on Pell.
But human greed had tried to push things too fast on Downbelow. People had
multiplied too fast. Had brought demands on the hisa for more, more, more of
their grain, for organized work, for controlling Old River's floods and doing
things on schedule.
Hisa hadn't taken to schedules and human demands. A hisa named Satin had led a
hisa uprising—well, as uprisen as patient hisa ever got—back during the War.
Then a new set of experts had moved in, declared humans had done everything
wrong and shut down a lot of operations the Base had used to have, restricted
more severely the rotation of hisa up to the station, and dashed all
expectations of hisa and humans working together.
Was it wrong that Melody and Patch had rescued a human child?
Was it wrong he'd grown up and found them again?
Was it wrong he'd dreamed of working with them—maybe a little closer than he
should have gotten?
(But he knew them, and they knew him, his gut protested. He hadn't hurt them.
He'd never hurt them.)
His fingers traced designs no human understood. He knew what scientists surmised
the designs were: day-night in the pattern of black dots, Great Sun in the
circles, Old River in the long curves and branches.
But maybe the curling patterns meant vines and seeds. Maybe it was fields and
maybe it was hisa paths the lines meant. You could see anything you believed in,
in hisa carving, that was the thing. And if he ever could ask Melody and Patch
to read the stick for him, as sure as he knew their minds, he'd bet they'd read
him something completely different every time he asked
So who was smarter? Hisa, with their patterns that could mean anything the day
felt like meaning? Or humans who, in their writing and their image-making,
pinned a moment down with precision, like a specimen on a board?
Was one better, or smarter, and ought hisa not to work on the station as much as
some of them, individuals with preferences like every human, wanted to work?
He didn't think natural was better. He didn't think hisa should die young from
infections, or lose their babies in floods or to fevers, or die of broken legs.
But the authorities ruled there were hisa you could contact, but hisa who didn't
work at the Base were completely off limits. And they went on dying of things
station medicine could cure.
Experts said—better a few die like that than have another contact the way it had
been when the Fleet military had invaded Downbelow. Humans never should have
landed on Downbelow at all, was what one side said. Everything humans had ever
done was harmful and wrong. They'd already robbed an intelligent species of
their unique future and further contact could only do worse.
But wasn't a human-hisa future unique in the patterns of a wide universe, too?
Wasn't it a surer chance for the hisa to survive, when worlds with life were so
few? And wasn't it as important in the vast cosmos that two species had gotten
together and worked together?
Seemed sensible to him that he'd done no harm.
They'd given him a gift that meant—surely—they weren't harmed.
But when he remembered that he was lying on a bunk in a ship speeding toward
nowhere, and away from every meaning the stick had to anyone, a lump came up in
his throat and his eyes stung.
Rotten stupid was what it was.
More experts. Quen, this time. Nunn.
Friends, he and Bianca. Running around together. Thinking of things together.
For maybe fifteen whole, oblivious days, with disaster written all around them.
It shouldn't surprise him when it all fell apart. Things always did. He wrapped
the feathered cords around the stick and put it away in the back of the drawer.
Then he fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, chasing away the ache
in his chest with the remembrance of sunglare through green leaves. Jeremy came
in from the party, late, and he pretended to be asleep as Jeremy clattered about
and took a late shower.
When Jeremy had dimmed the lights and gone to bed, he got up and stripped his
clothes off to go to sleep.
"There's a lot of the guys mad at you," Jeremy said out of the dark.
"Doesn't matter to me," he said.
"You shouldn't have taken the drink," Jeremy said.
"I don't want to hear about it," he said coldly. "They set 'em out, yeah, I'll
drink one. Nobody had a sign up. Nobody told me stop."
"Vince was an ass," Jeremy said finally.
"Yeah," he agreed, feeling better by that small vindication. "Generally. So how
was it?"
"Oh, it was fine." Jeremy settled, a stirring of sheet and a sighing of the
mattress. A silence then, in the dark. "JR said everybody should lay off you and
be polite."
"That so." He didn't believe it. But he couldn't see Jeremy's face to test the
truth of it.
They were going to jump at maindawn, He was worried about sleeping through it.
Forgetting the drug. Going crazy,
They were going to Mariner from here. They'd actually be at another star.
"Are they going to warn us tomorrow morning?" he asked Jeremy.
"About the jump? Yeah, sure, I'll guarantee you can't sleep through it. They'll
be on the intercom. Fifteen minutes before. You got your drugs?"
"Yeah," When he was out of his clothes, he had the drugs in the elastic side
pocket, on the bed, the way Jeremy had advised him. Always with him, "They're
right here." He was still wobbly about the experience. Going into it out of the
dark, he supposed one shift or the other had to have it in the middle of their
night, but it was a scary proposition,
"Anybody from the party have a hangover," he said, "That'd be bad."
"The Old Man wouldn't show 'em any mercy," Jeremy said. "How are you, drinking
that wine? You won't have a headache, will you?"
"Not usually." Stupid, he said to himself. He'd forgotten about the jump when he
drank it all. He hoped he wouldn't.
He figured if he did he wouldn't, as Jeremy said, get any pity for it.
He shut his eyes. He didn't sleep, for a long, long time.
When the warning came it was loud, and scared him awake.
"Fifteen minutes," it said. "Rise and shine. We're on our way. Pull your
pre-jump checks, latch down, tuck down, belt in, all you late party-goers. No
sympathy from fourth shift… you get the next jump and we get the rec hall… move,
move, move…"
Chapter XII
Contents - Prev/Next
The light came back. Melody would say Great Sun came walking back above the
clouds. As soon as Fletcher could see trunks of trees in the dawn he took up
walking, just following River; and River led him, oh, far, far up through the
woods. Rain drizzled down, but still not a downer appeared. Downers on such a
day would stay to their burrows, having more sense than to get wet and cold.
Or they'd gone wandering for love, walking as far as a female could, and farther
than some of the males, those less able, those less strong. That was the test.
That was what he was looking for, he began to think. That was the test he'd set
himself, the challenge, to overtake what he loved, lusted after, longed for with
a remote and bewildered ache. He was a young male. He'd been confused. But now,
beyond any psych's pat answers, he had a clear idea what he hoped to find in
this tangled woods, with its huge trees and its banks of puffer-globes
glistening with the mist. Like the downers who walked until a last suitor
followed, he was looking for someone who cared. Simple quest. Someone who cared.
He wasn't going to find that someone, of course. And ultimately, being only
human, he'd have to push that rescue button and let the ones who didn't give a
damn chase him down and bring him back, because the station paid them to do
that. His thinking was muddled and he knew it was, but it was comfort to think
the ache was common to all the world.
The sun grew brighter. The rain grew less.
He heard strange whistling calls, such as came constantly in the deep bush. No
one was sure what made some of those sounds. Sometimes he'd heard downers
imitate them.
There were clicks, and rising booms, and whistles.
A creature stared at him from the hillside. He'd heard of such big, gray
diggers, but they came nowhere near the Base, being shyer than the downers and
given to be harmless to humans if unmolested. It was a marvelous sight. It moved
on all fours, unlike downers, and chewed a frond of herbage, staring at him with
a blandly curious expression. It wasn't afraid of him. He wasn't quite afraid of
it, but the advice from lectures was not to go close or get in their way, and he
walked off the path and across to another clear spot to avoid it.
A shower of fronds came down on him, startling him and making him look up. A
downer was in the tree near him.
And his heart soared.
"Hello," he called it, hoping it might be a friend. He didn't think he knew this
downer, but he called out to it. "Good morning. Want Melody and Patch! Name
Fetcher." He ventured their hisa names, that he'd never used to another hisa.
"Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o my friends I want find."
"You come!" the downer said, decisively.
So it did understand, and that meant it was one who'd worked with humans and one
that might help him. Maybe the downers had heard a human was missing; but he'd
given a request, and rarely would a downer refuse. This one scrambled down the
fat, white-and-brown tree trunk and skipped ahead of him through the fronds that
laced over the trail.
So after all his fear he was rescued. Downers knew where he was. His imaginings,
his wild constructions of hope, the constructions of fantasy and rescue he'd
built in the dark to keep him going—his daydreams so seldom came true, and he'd
begun to believe this one would come to the worst, the most calamitous end of
all.
But now, instead, the last, the wildest and most fanciful hope, was taking shape
around him: yes, Melody and Patch knew he was lost. They'd whistled it through
the trees, or simply sent younger, quicker downers running to look for him. They
hadn't forgotten him. They still cared.
On and on the downer led him, until he was panting, short on oxygen and
staggering as he went.
The way it led him wasn't back the way he'd come. Or perhaps he'd gotten
oriented wrong with River: he'd been following the water, and perhaps in the
winding paths he could find on the high forested hills, away from observing the
direction of River's flow, he'd just turned around and started walking back
again. He'd be disappointed if that proved so, if suddenly between the trees he
found himself back at the Base, among the human-tended fields, nothing gained.
But the walking went on and on for hours, beyond anything he thought he could
do. He changed out mask cylinders. By then he had no idea where he was. But the
downer never quite lost him. He'd think he was hopelessly behind, and then the
whistling would guide him, past the thumping of his own pulse in his ear. He'd
fall, tripped in the awkward vision of the mask, and a shower of leaves would
fall around him, like a benediction, a gentle urging to get up again.
I'm using up the cylinders, he wanted to say to the downer, who never came close
enough long enough. He began to fear he was in danger after all, and that with
the best will in the world the downer would kill him, only from the walking.
A long, long walk (another cylinder-change along, it was) he saw the giant trees
of the forest began to grow fewer. Am I back after all? he asked himself. Was I
that far lost? And am I only back at the Base?
He was exhausted and in pain, and struggling to breathe, trying not to give up a
cylinder sooner than he'd wrung the last use out of it. He was ready, now, to be
back in safety.
But a bright gold of treeless land showed between the trees.
It wasn't the cleared hillsides around the Base. There was no white of domes or
dark green of trees, and Old River was far from him. It might be the further
fields, where humans grew grain in vast tracts, at Beta Site, near the shuttle
landing.
But those wouldn't be gold yet, just brown, turned earth.
It was the forest edge, for sure. And when he'd followed his guide to the last
fringe of forest giants he saw below him a hill sweeping on for a great
distance, down to a plain of last year's golden grass. In the heart of a
pollen-hazed distance, something like a set of figures stood, thick and strange,
and impossible to be alive.
Scale played tricks with his eyes. Tiny figures moved among the greater ones,
hisa, dwarfed by skyward-looking images.
He knew, then, what he saw—what he'd heard reported, at least, and seen only in
photographs.
It was the Spirit-place, the great holy place. The stone figures that watched
the sky, the great Watchers, of which their little ones on the hill were the
merest hint.
Humans didn't come here.
"Come-come," the downer said, beckoning as humans beckoned "Come-come, you come,
Melody child."
He walked a golden hill, that tore beneath his feet. He was losing the vision.
There was a feeling of falling… down and down.
Of arrival. He knew it now. The dream escaped his mind. Breaths came faster.
There was no cylinder restraining his air. There was no clean-suit. There was no
world…
He'd been in the best moment of his life. And wasn't there. Would never be.
Tears leaked between Fletcher's shut lids, and he drew tainted breath, and knew
why his mother had kept the dream, bought it on dockside. Knew why his mother
had loved it more than she'd loved him.
There'd been no future in the dream. He'd not known it could turn darker.
That moment, that very moment he'd want to hold, that was the one the arrival
ripped away from him, after all the pain.
There was just Jeremy scrabbling in his drawer, after clothes, there was just
Jeremy saying, "Drink the stuff. You've got to have it."
He'd have ignored Jeremy. But he couldn't ignore his stomach. It wanted; and he
reached numbly after the drink packets, the synth that pulled electrolytes back
into balance after hyperspace had done its worst to a human body.
After the dream was done.
"You shower first or me?" Jeremy asked him.
"You." He didn't want to move. It wasn't a favor Jeremy offered him. He wanted
to keep his eyes shut and try to recover that sight, that moment, when he'd met
all his hopes.
He could have them back. Could have had them forever. If something hadn't pulled
the ship in.
It was another month. What had pulled them in, if they weren't doomed to die in
empty space, had to be the star they'd been looking for.
They were at Mariner.
He gulped down his remaining drink packets, drowsed while Jeremy showered and
his own stomach settled. They made two more touches at the interface that almost
made him sick, and then he slept again. He came to with the intercom talking to
them.
"Jeremy, Vincent, Linda, Fletcher" It was the synthesized voice he'd heard last
time. Jeremy had told him there was a set-up in the computer where a random-sort
program juggled the electronic dice and put the scut-crews on whatever
assignment their luck assigned them. It activated the intercom to call your
team's cabins and even left mail in your mailbox.
"Laundry detail," it said.
"Damn!" Jeremy cried from inside the bath, and came out still damp and stark
naked. "No fair!"
At least, Fletcher thought, he knew how to do that job.
"Stupid machine!" Jeremy shouted at the ceiling and kept swearing.
Fletcher rolled out of bed, his clothes at that particular stage of sticking to
his body and dragging across dead skin that made him sure he didn't want to
linger in them. The effects of a month- long near dormancy weren't pretty on the
human body inside or out, he'd discovered. This time his gut wanted to protest,
and he made the bathroom in some haste.
Officers' meetings. Numbers that pertained to ship-sightings, stock reports,
futures and commodities… the same kind of information they'd tracked for
military purposes for nearly two decades, and from before JR had sat on staff;
but the information was never sifted down to military intelligence: the
availability of supply and the activity and origin of suspect ships—questions
which JR's brain kept following off-track of what his seniors were discussing.
Seniors reminisced instead about old port-calls, pre-War, early War. They talked
about the early days of Mariner Station, when everything had been bare metal,
and the details swirled around in a junior mind not quite sure whether this was
needful information or just the pleasurable talk of old crew, recalling hard
times which juniors nowadays didn't remember.
When they'd put into Mariner before, in his recollection, they hadn't traded.
The Old Man had had meetings with Mariner authorities and military authorities,
they'd had meetings with other captains and senior crew off other ships and
taken in the kind of information ships wouldn't ordinarily trade with each
other, information on the market more freely shared than made sense… if they
were rivals. They'd been no one's rivals, then.
Now they were going in to compete and consequently they wanted prices for what
they carried as high as possible.
Now secrecy mattered not because they didn't want Mazian and the Fleet to know
what they hauled and where they hauled it, but because they wanted to keep the
price of goods, apparently scarce, as high as they could manage until they sold
what they were carrying. Let somebody speculate that their load was all downer
wine (it wasn't) and the price of wine would plummet, taking their profit. Let
them speculate that they carried Earth chocolate and coffee (they did) and the
price of those goods would drop in three seconds on the electronic boards.
They were legally restrained from entering their goods on the market until
they'd reached a certain distance from Mariner, and Helm had run them as close
to that mark as they could at near- light before he'd dumped them down to the
sedate crawl at which they approached Mariner Station. .
At 0837h/m local their goods had gone up for sale on the Mariner Exchange, and
they had a vast amount of printout from Mariner, which was just old enough (two
hours light-speed) to make buys hazardous. The new guessing game was not what
Finity carried but what Finity wanted or needed. The price of goods would react.
Any ship dropping into Mariner system was going to affect prices when they began
to make their buys and as traders reassessed goods 'in the system' and their
effect on each other. And there was a ship, Boreale, already approaching dock.
Boreale was from Cyteen. That was interesting in the engineering and the
political sense: it was one of those new Cyteen quasi-merchanters with a
military, not a Family crew, coming from a port which specialized in biostuffs
(rejuv, plant and animal products, pharmaceuticals) as well as advanced tech.
Also a factor to consider on the question of that ship's cargo and the futures
market: farther ports deep in Union territory did produce metals and other items
that could drive down the prices of goods inbound from say, Viking, heavily a
manufacturing system.
It was, in short, a guessing game in which Mariner futures and commodities
traders could suffer agonies of financial doubt, a game on which Finity's profit
margin ticked up or down by little increments every time someone made a buy or
sell decision and changed the amount of goods available.
The market also reacted in a major way to every ship docking, because the black
box that every ship carried shot news and technical statistics to the station
systems, news derived from all starstations in the reporting system. The black
boxes wove the web that held civilization together. A single ship's black box
reported every piece of data from the last station that ship had docked at, and
thus every piece of data previously brought to that last station from other
ships of origins all over space. The information constituted pieces of a
hologram reflecting the same picture at different moments in time, and the
station's computers somehow assembled it all: births and deaths, elections,
civil records, deeds, titles, rumors, popular songs, books in data-form for
reproduction by local packagers, mail, production statistics, news, sports,
weather where applicable, star behaviors, navigational data, in-space incidents,
the total picture of everything going on anywhere humans existed so far as that
particular ship had been in contact with it. A last-minute load went into a ship
when it undocked and went out of a ship when it docked elsewhere, weighted by
the computers as most accurate where the ship had just been and least accurate
or least timely regarding starstations farthest from its last dock. The station
computers heard it all, digested it all, overlaid one ship's black-box report
over another and came up with a universe-view that included the prices of goods
at the farthest ports of the human universe… one that faded in detail
considerably regarding information from Cyteen or its tributaries—or from inside
Earth—but it was good enough to bet on, and pieces let a canny trader make canny
wagers.
The black box system also continually affected the local station-use commodities
market, as a shortage of, say, grain product on Fargone affected the price of
grain product everywhere in known space. A tank blew out at Viking and a major
Viking tank farm shut down a quarter of its production: the price of fish
product, that bane of a small-budget spacer's existence, actually ticked up
10/100ths of a credit everywhere in the universe, in spite of the fact that
every station produced it and there was no food staple cheaper than that:
somebody might actually have to freight fish product to Viking.
JR told himself this truly was a thrilling piece of news and that he should be
pleased and proud that Finity was at last occupied with details like that rather
than figuring how they could best spend the support credits they had to supply
ships like Norway with staples and metal, out in the deep, secret dark of
jump-points a ship laden the way they were loaded now couldn't reach. They still
would haul for Mallory—one run scheduled out when they were done with this loop,
as he understood—but there were other ships appointed to do that, a few, at
least, who regularly plied the supply dumps that Mallory used.
What was different from the last near-twenty years was that their schedule to
meet Mallory at a rendezvous yet to be arranged didn't call on them for their
firepower.
And at Pell, they'd officially given up the military subsidy that fueled and
maintained them without their trading. That was the big change, the one that
shoved them away from the public support conduit and onto the stock exchange and
the futures boards not with an informational interest in the content of the
boards—but with a commercial one.
Safer, Madelaine had argued, to haul contract. That meant hauling goods for
someone else who'd flat-fee them for haulage and collect all the profit, with a
bonus if their careful handling and canny timing, or blind luck ran the profit
above a pre-agreed amount, and liability up to their ears if something happened
to the cargo. It was steady, it was relatively safe, it guaranteed they got paid
as long as the goods got to port intact
But it didn't pay on as large a scale as a clever trader could make both hauling
and trading their own goods. They had the safer option; but Finity had never
done contract haulage as a primary job, and maybe it was just the Old Man's
pride that he disdained it now. James Robert and Madison had been doing trading
in ship-owned goods for a lot of years before the War, they'd watched the market
survive the War and blossom into something both vital and different, and by what
JR saw now, they just couldn't resist it
The Old Man and Madison were, in fact, as happy as two kids with a dock pass,
going over market reports. JR felt his brain numbed and his war-honed instincts
sinking toward rust. All he'd learned in his life was at least remotely useful
in what the two senior captains were doing, but not with the same application.
He wasn't even engaged in strategy thinking, like whether the ship near them
might be reporting to Union command. They knew that Boreale would do exactly
that—report to Union command—so there wasn't even any doubt of it to entertain
him.
Trade. Real trade. He still entertained the unvoiced notion that they were
engaged in information-gathering and intrigue about which neither the Old Man
nor Madison had told him. He went over the political and shipping news with a
trained eye and gathered tidbits of speculation that—were no longer useful in
the military sense, since they'd be outmoded by the time they got near someone
who reported to Mallory.
That ship they'd met at Tripoint continued to haunt him, and after the staff
meeting—knowing he'd lose points in the strange non-game they played, but not as
many as if he asked on a current situation—he snagged Madison to ask with no
hints about it whether that encounter had been scheduled.
"No," was Madison's answer. "They're watching, is all."
"Watching us."
"Watching for anything the Alliance is doing. Seeing what our next step is.
Being sure—odd as it might sound—that we aren't negotiating with the Fleet for a
cease-fire and a deal with Mazian independent of them. Earth's made some
provocative moves."
Mark that for a blind spot he should ponder at leisure. It wasn't enough to know
the honest truth about one's own intentions toward the enemy: an ally still had
to plan its security in secret and without entirely trusting anyone. One's
allies could take a small piece of information, foresee double-crosses and act,
ruinously, if not reassured.
And, true, Earth was building more ships, launching new explorations in
directions opposite to the Alliance base at Pell.
That Earth might someday make peace with the Fleet and amnesty them into its
service again… that was, in his book, a very sensible fear for Union or Pell to
have; but that they themselves, Finity, and Norway, would someday make peace
with the Fleet? Not likely. Not with Edger in the ascendant among Mazian's
advisors. Damn sure Mallory wouldn't. Union didn't remotely know Mallory or
Edger if they ever thought that
But then… Union hadn't had experienced military leaders when the War started.
They'd learned tactics and strategy from the study tapes on which Union's
education so heavily relied. But most of all they'd learned it from the Fleet
they were fighting, as the whole human race hammered out the tactics and
strategy of war at more than lightspeeds and with relativistic effects and no
realtime communications at all. He'd learned Fleet tactics by apprenticeship to
the Old Man and strategy from Mallory. The Fleet had developed uncanny skills
and still did things Union pilots couldn't match. Union, on the other hand,
sometimes did things that surprised you simply because it wasn't what one ought
to do… if one had read the ancient Art of War , or if one had understood the
Fleet.
Union was always hard to predict. Sometimes its actions were just, by
traditional approaches, wrong. Union was now their ally.
"Where do you suspect Mazian is right now?" he asked Madison. The estimation
could change by the hour. Like the market, only with more devastating local
consequences.
"I have absolutely no idea," Madison said. "The way I don't know where Mallory
is, either."
On the fine scale of the universe, that was not an unusual situation. "Do you
think she knows where Mazian is?"
There was a longer silence than he'd expected, Madison thinking that one over,
or thinking over whether it was needful baseline information, or a truth a
senior-junior ought to figure out for himself. "I think Mallory knows
contingency plans she'll never divulge. I think she knows a hell of a lot she'll
never divulge. I think they're her safety, even from us. Loose talk could reach
Union. I don't think their amnesty is worth a damn in her case."
"You think they'd go after her?"
"They'd be fools right now if they did. And I don't think they're fools. I think
they'd like to know a lot more about her operations than they know. I think they
lose a lot of sleep wondering whether someday we'll turn tables, make an
understanding with Earth, and go after them. Earth trying to get a foothold back
in space, establishing new starstations… in other directions… they view that
with great suspicion"
"Do you think Earth might become a problem?"
"We don't think so currently. But after the War, when we couldn't get a peace to
stick… you aren't old enough to remember. But we space farers had been
homogenous so long we flatly had forgotten how to deal with divergent views,
contrary interests, traders that we are. One thing old Earth is good at:
diplomacy."
"Good at it!" He couldn't restrain himself. "Their diplomacy started the War!"
"Not on their territory" Madison said with a nasty smile. The War never got to
them, did it? When we and Union chased Mazian's tail back to Sol space and we
lost him, it looked as if we were going to square off with the Union carrier…
Earth mediated that little matter. We frankly didn't know what hit us. First
thing we knew, we agreed, the Union commander agreed, each of us separately with
Earth; then we had to agree with each other or Earth would have flung us at each
other and watched the show from a distance. Learn from that. It's all those
governments, all those cultures on one world. They're canny about settling
differences. And we'd forgotten the knack. Four, five thousand years of
planetary squabbles have to teach you something useful, I suppose." Madison
folded up his input board and tucked the handheld into his operations jacket,
preparing to leave. "I don't know if we could have made peace without Earth."
"Would we have made war without them, sir? In your opinion.
"Far less likely, too. We'd have been an adjunct of what's now at Union. But
James Robert would have spit in their eye, still, when they tried to nationalize
the merchanters. We'd have fought them. We'd have had every merchanter in space
on our side. As we did. And we'd still have gained sovereignty on our own decks.
As we did. Think about it. It's all we merchanters ever really gained from all
the fighting we ever did. I just don't think we'd have blown Mariner doing it"
A Union spy had sabotaged a station—this station. Mariner. Pell had lost a dock
during the War. Mariner had depressurized all around the ring, and tens of
thousands of people who hadn't made it to sealed shelter had died. It was the
worst human disaster that had happened outside of Earth. Ever.
And, we merchanters. It was the first time he'd ever heard anyone on Finity use
that particular we. Or talk about a balance sheet, a profit-and-loss in the War.
It was a sobering notion, that the War wasn't just the War, immutable, always
there. There'd been a before. Was it possible there would be an after—and that
they wouldn't have gained a damned thing by all they'd done, all the blood
they'd shed?
Was it true, that even if you shoved at history and fought and struggled with
its course, the universe still did what it was going to do anyway?
Hell if.
He couldn't accept that.
Madison went on his way to the bridge, needed there, and he went his.
He hadn't found his way past Madison's reticence to ask what no one had yet told
him… the reason they'd split from Mallory, which he began to think held all the
other answers. No better informed than before he'd snagged the second captain,
JR picked up his own handheld and clipped it to a belt that did little else but
hold it—a great deal like the pistol he'd once worn, back in the bad old days
when fifteen-year-olds had gone armed everywhere on the ship.
They'd stopped doing that when they'd gotten through the business with Earth and
when it was sure they'd moved Mazian's raiders out of the shipping lanes. What
the likes of Africa and Europe had done when they boarded a merchanter didn't
bear telling their younger crew, but he'd grown up with a pistol on his hip and
instructions how to use it in corridors where you had to worry about a pressure
blowout.
At fifteen he'd been instructed to blow out the corridor where he was himself if
his only other prospect had been capture by the Fleet
Helluva way to grow up, he supposed. It was the only life he'd known. And when
they'd gotten past the worst of the mop-up, and when they could go through a
jump-point without being on high alert—then the Old Man had called the guns in,
and arranged that they'd be in lockers here and there about the ship, with no
latch on the cabinets (nothing on Finity was locked), but not to be carried
again. He'd felt scared when they'd taken the guns away. It had taken him this
long to get over being scared
And they hadn't ever had to use them. Their in-ship stand-down from arms had
lasted and the Old Man had been right,
Maybe this stand-down from arms would last, too, and maybe he needed to bear
down harder on the study of Viking fish farms.
Laundry wasn't anybody's favorite assignment. After-jump meant a load of sweaty
clothes. But it was better, Jeremy had said, than drawing the duty after
liberty, because there was no limit to how many outfits somebody could get dirty
on a two-week liberty, and there was a limit to how many clothes anybody totally
tranked out could get dirty during jump. So they had the light end of things,
and consequently they'd washed everything they had in the bins inside four
hours. The better and worse of such assignments was a detail of spacer life
Fletcher had never quite, somehow, imagined as potentially an item of curiosity
and least of all his problem.
But he'd learned how to manage his personal property, on this particular detail.
He'd learned, for instance, that by rules and regulations you left your last
work clothes for cleaning in the laundry on your way out to liberty, like at
Pell, and whoever got next laundry duty (it couldn't be them, because the
computer never doubled you on the same assignment) did all of it as they'd done,
on the run out from dock.
So there were rhythms to the jobs they did. The laundry didn't always operate at
the mad pace it had the last time. It was a burst of activity in this particular
period, and then last-minute special cleaning for officers' uniforms.
He learned, for instance, that a crew member on Finity had an issue of clothing
of which at least one dress and one work outfit stayed in the locker ready for
board-call and undock schedules or a senior officer talked seriously to you
about your wardrobe. A regular crew member took only flash stuff and civvies
ashore on a liberty, and wasn't allowed to wear work stuff on dock unless he was
working, which junior-juniors didn't have to do.
"So what if you wear work clothes?" he asked Jeremy as Jeremy worked beside him,
having given him this piece of information. "Another talk with an officer?"
"Why don't you try it?" Vince asked from behind his back.
That was at least the third snide and uninvited remark. Vince was still on him
about the drink from the bar last main-dark, from what he could figure; somehow
that really bothered Vince.
"After all," Vince said, "you don't have to follow the rules. Not you."
"Cut it out," Jeremy said
"Vince," Linda said
"Well, he didn't, did he?"
"Vince," Jeremy said
"I want to talk to you," Vince said to Jeremy, and those two went out in the
corridor and stayed gone awhile.
"Is Jeremy all right?" Fletcher asked Linda, and Linda didn't look at him,
quite. "Yeah. Fine," Linda said.
He was worried. Vince and Linda both were a little senior to Jeremy and he had
the idea they were both leaning on the kid. His agemate. Him.
He'd personally had enough of Vince's notion of subtlety. Adrenaline was up,
vibrating through him so he'd like to put Vince through the nearest wall if
Vince crossed him one more time about the drink issue. But Vince was too small.
At best he'd have to settle for bouncing Vince off the wall, which wasn't
satisfying at all, or holding him a few inches off the deck, which had
possibilities. But either would likely get him confined to the ship for a long,
boring couple of weeks and he found he was looking forward to liberty. He really
was. He figured he'd write home. He'd promised Bianca he'd write. Yes, she'd
caved in, she'd saved her neck, her career. He couldn't blame her, now that he'd
had time to think about it. He had a lot to tell her.
He'd write his foster-family, too. The Wilsons. Tell them he was all right. He
owed them that. He'd heard that junior crew had an allowance and he'd asked
Jeremy how much a letter cost: the answer was simply that letters didn't mass at
all, in a ship's black box, and if you didn't want physical copy to go, it was
ten c per link for handling.
That was a little more than he'd hoped, but a lot less than he'd feared, and
Mariner was a single-hop from Pell as you counted postage: jump-points, Jeremy
said, didn't count, only station hookups did; and for that ten c, they let you
have a fair amount of storage per letter.
He'd see Mariner and he'd write Bianca about it like a diary. He was a little
doubtful about the Wilsons, even shy about writing to them, in the thought maybe
they didn't want a letter from him after the trouble he'd caused at the end, but
he'd eaten enough of their holiday dinners: he could afford the cash at least to
tell them he was all right, even if none of them had come to see him off—for one
thing because he didn't depend on Quen to have even told them. She'd have known
they were a legal convenience—she'd set it up. But she probably didn't know,
because he'd not mentioned it even to the psychs, that they were the one batch
he'd really liked, and really called some kind of home.
He could write to Quen. One of those picture messages, the really neon, garish
ones, the sort spacers bought, if he were going to send one to Quen. If it
wouldn't cut seriously into his spending money he'd be downright tempted just
for the hell of it. But something nice and sentimental for the two really he was
going to send, maybe the picture sort that you could print out in holo. He
didn't know whether Bianca or the Wilsons had ever gotten a message from outside
Pell, and he figured they'd keep it and maybe like a picture they could repro
and look at
Jeremy and Vince came back. He looked at Jeremy for bruises or signs of
ruffling, but Jeremy didn't look to have been disturbed, just a little hot
around the edges and not looking at anybody.
He couldn't ask Jeremy then and there what Vince had wanted, or whether Vince
had given him a hard time. Things seemed peaceful. Vince and Jeremy settled to
playing cards. Business was so slow there wasn't an alterday crew into the
laundry once they closed up shop for the shift: their instructions were to leave
the laundry door open and the light on, however, and put a check-sheet and a pen
in the holder for people that took soap and other things, so they could keep the
reorder records straight and know who'd picked up their clothes.
Doesn't anybody ever steal? he wondered, and then he asked himself, Steal shower
soap? And decided it was silly. It was free. Their own job as guardians of the
laundry was largely superfluous once the washing and folding was all done: they
had to clean up, latch down, be sure cabinet doors were shut tight and otherwise
safed. Mostly they played cards. He figured at a certain point it was just a
place for them to be, out of the way and bothering no one essential to the ship.
Or maybe, at this stage of things, heading in, maybe everyone aboard was taking
a breather. Traffic in the corridor was the lowest and slowest it had been.
As it happened, they didn't go straight to the mess hall this end of shift.
Jeremy and he were supposed to check in with medical… again. It was a few
minutes standing in line, but the staff didn't do anything but prick your
finger, weigh you, and ask you a few questions, like: How are you sleeping? How
are you feeling? With him it was, Glad to see you, Fletcher. Had any problems?
How are the lungs?
In case he'd inhaled something on Downbelow. But he could say, for the second
time, he hadn't. They stuck his finger, looked at his lungs, listened to him
breathe…
"All fourteen million credits are safe," he said to the Family medics, and the
medic looked at him as if it was a bad joke. Probably it was pretty low and
surly humor.
"Do I get a liberty?" he asked.
"See no reason not," the medic in charge said
"Thanks." He'd no desire to offend the medics, or get on somebody's report to
JR. Clean record was his ambition right now, just get through it. Stay out of
run-ins with JR, who alone of the officers seemed to be in charge of his
existence. Get back to Pell. He had to produce a calm pulse for the medics and
he'd done that, forgetful of Vince: he thought of green leaves and sun through
the clouds, and when they dismissed him, he supposed they called him healthy.
Jeremy didn't get his lungs looked at. Jeremy just watched, cheerful again.
"So what was that with Vince?" He sprang the question on Jeremy as they walked
toward the mess hall. And Jeremy's good mood evaporated.
"Oh, Vince is Vince," Jeremy said.
"If he gives you a hard time about me, you know,—let me know."
Jeremy looked at him, a dark eye under a shelf of hair that was usually shading
his eyes. "Yeah," Jeremy said as if he hadn't quite expected that. "Yeah,
thanks."
He'd felt obliged to offer. He guessed Jeremy hadn't expected much out of him
and he knew Jeremy hadn't been completely happy to give up his (he now knew)
single room to be the only junior-junior with a roommate. But Jeremy had been
cheerful all the same, and stood up for him and tried to make the best of it,
and that was fairly unusual in the string of people he'd lived with. In this
kid, in this twelve-year-old body and combat-nerves mind, he had something
ironically like the guys he'd used to hang out with when he was a little younger
than Jeremy, guys well aside from what the sober adults in his life had wanted
him to associate with. He'd been into a major bit of mischief until he'd wised
up and gotten out of it
But, along with the mischief he hadn't gotten into any longer, had gone the
fellowship he hadn't had in the competitive Honors program. He'd invested in no
friendly companionship since he'd gotten involved so deeply in his goals,
except, well, Bianca, which had started out with a rush of something electric.
But no guys, no one to play a round of cards with or hang about rec with. He'd
evaded females in the crew. He'd let himself fall back into an earlier time when
girls were something the guys all viewed from a distance, when guys were mostly
occupied with looking good, not yet obsessed with hoping their inadequacies
didn't show… he'd been through all of it, and he could look back with, oh, two
whole years' perspective on the really paranoid stage of his life.
And maybe—he decided—maybe dealing with small-sized Jeremy in that sense felt
like a drop back into innocence and omnipotence.
Like revisiting his own brat-kid phase, when vid-games and running the tunnels
had been his total obsession. Getting away with it. Telling your friends how
wonderful you were. Yes, he grew tired of hearing blow-by-blow accounts of
maze-monsters and flying devils while Jeremy was beating him at cards, and the
words wild and dead-on and decadent were beginning to make his nerves twitch;
but there was something genuine and real in Jeremy that made him put up with the
rough edges and almost regret that he'd lose Jeremy when his year of slavery was
up. A few years ago, bitter and sullen with changes in his living arrangements,
he'd have declined to give a damn—or to invest in a quasi-brother he'd lose. But
he'd grown up past that; he'd had his experience with the Wilsons, and finally
the Program; and somewhere in the mix he'd learned there was something you
gained from the people that chance and the courts flung you up against, never a
big gain, but something.
So, for all those tentative reasons, walking back to mess, he decided he liked
his designated almost-brother, this round, among all the foster-brothers they'd
tried to foist off on him. And if Vince leaned on Jeremy again tomorrow, he'd
rattle Vince's teeth with no real effort and damn the consequences.
They played cards in the rec hall after supper this first evening in Mariner
system, and he won his time back from Jeremy plus six hours. Jeremy blew a hand.
That was something. Or he was getting suddenly, measurably better.
"Want to play a round?" It was one of the senior-juniors coming up behind his
shoulder as he collected the cards. He'd forgotten the name, but the convenient
patch on the jumpsuit said, Chad.
Jeremy scrambled up from the chair when Chad asked, dead-serious and looking
worried. The room was mixed company, seniors out of engineering watching a vid,
a couple of other card games, the senior-juniors over in the corner shooting
vid-games, and this guy, one of their group, wanted to play.
It wasn't right, Jeremy's behavior said it wasn't right
"Maybe you'd better play Jeremy," Fletcher said "He's better"
Chad settled into the chair anyway, determined to have his way. Chad looked
maybe a little younger than JR, not much, big, for the body-age. Chad picked up
the cards and dealt them. The stakes were already laid: get up and walk off from
this guy, or pick up the cards. Jeremy's distress advised him this was somebody
to worry about. He picked up the cards, hoping he could score that way.
Chad won the hand, a lapse of his concentration, his own fault. The guy didn't
talk, didn't ask anything, just played a hand and won it. They'd bet an hour.
"My hour," Chad said. "You clean my room tomorrow, junior-junior."
"I guess I do," he said. He'd lost, fair and square. He didn't like it, but he'd
played the game. He'd satisfied Chad's little power-play, didn't want another
hand, in any foolish notion he could win it back against a good, a very good
card player. He got up and left, and Jeremy caught him up in the corridor, not
saying anything.
He felt he'd been played for the fool, though he was grateful for Jeremy's cues,
and didn't want to talk about the bloody details of the encounter. More than
embarrassed, he was angry. Chad was one of JR's hangers-on, crew, cronies,
whatever that assortment amounted to, and JR hadn't been there; but at the
distance of the corridor, he saw the game beneath the game, and he knew winning
against Chad wouldn't have been a sign of peace.
"Did he cheat?" he asked Jeremy. He didn't think so, but he wasn't sure he'd
have caught it, and he wanted to know that, bottom-level.
"No," Jeremy said, "but he's pretty good."
It was better than his suspicion, but it didn't much improve his mood "Why don't
you go on back?" he said. "There's no point. I'm going to bed."
"Me, too," Jeremy said, for whatever reason, maybe that things weren't entirely
comfortable for a roommate of his in the rec hall right now. There'd been a
pissing-match going on. My skull's thicker than yours head-butting. And why Chad
had chosen to come over to their table and pick on him was a question, but it
wasn't a pleasant question.
They got to the cabin, undressed.
"When we get to Mariner, you know," Jeremy said, awkwardly enthusiastic,
"there's supposed to be this sort of aquarium place. It's wild. Really worth
seeing, what I hear. "
"Yeah."
"Well, we could kind of go, you know."
He let his surly mood spill over on Jeremy and Jeremy was trying to make the
best of it. Least of anybody on the ship was Jeremy responsible for Chad's
unprovoked attack on him.
He sat down on the bed; he thought about aquariums and Old River and how the
fish had used to come up in the shallows, odd flat creatures with long noses.
Melody had told him the name, but like no few hisa words, it was hisses and
spits. They had an aquarium on Pell, too.
But it was an offer. It was something to do. Mostly he wanted to send his
letters home. He didn't want Chad or anybody else setting him up for something.
And the coming liberty was a time when they might be out from under officers'
observation.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm kind of in a mood."
"Yeah," Jeremy said.
"You know I didn't want to be here. It's not my fault."
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "But you're all right, you know. I wish you'd been here all
along."
He didn't. Especially tonight. But he couldn't say it to Jeremy's earnest,
offering face. There was the kid, the twelve-year-old man, the—whatever Jeremy
was—who wanted to go with Mallory and fight against the Fleet, the kid who got
so hyped on vid-games he shook and jerked with nerves, and who wanted to tour an
aquarium on Mariner—probably, Fletcher thought, a whole lot more exotic to
Jeremy than it was to him. Jeremy shared what he wanted to do. Shared a bit of
himself.
Wished he'd had his company. That was saying something.
And because the moment was heavy and fraught with might-have-been's, he ducked
Jeremy's earnest look and bent down instead and pulled open his under-bunk
storage.
Where more than next morning's socks resided. Where what was important to him
resided.
In that moment of emotional confidences he took the chance, dug into the back of
it and took out what Jeremy probably had never seen, something hands had made
that weren't human hands.
"What's that?" Jeremy asked in astonishment, as he sat up and brought out the
spirit stick. The cords unwound, feathers settling softly in the air, and the
unfurling cords revealing the carvings in wood.
"Something someone gave me," he said. He was defensive of it, and all it was to
him. He thought to this moment he was a fool for unveiling it. But Jeremy's
reaction was more than he expected. It wasn't puzzlement. It was awe, amazement,
everything he looked for in someone who'd know what he was looking at and
appreciate what he treasured.
"It's hisa work," Jeremy said. "Where'd you get it?"
"It was a gift to me. That's where I lived. That's what I did. That's what I
worked all my life to get into." He handed it across the narrow gap and Jeremy
took it carefully in his hands, stick, cords, feathers, and all.
Jeremy handled it ever so carefully, looked at the carvings, at the cords,
fingered the wood, and then looked closely at a feather, stroking it with his
fingers. "I figure about the cords, maybe, but how'd they make this?"
He didn't know what Jeremy was talking about for a moment, and then by Jeremy's
fingers on the center spine and the edges of the feather he realized. "It's a
feather," he said, hiding amusement, and Jeremy instantly made his hands gentler
on the object.
"You mean like it came off a bird?"
"Not quite like the birds on Earth. They don't fly much. They kind of glide.
Some stay mostly on the ground. Downbelow birds."
"I never saw a feather close up," Jeremy said. "It's soft."
"Feathers from two kinds of birds. The wood comes from a little bush that grows
on the riverbank. Cords are out of grasses. You soak it and put a stick in it
and twist real hard while it's wet and it makes cord. There's a trick to
sticking the next piece in just as you're running out of the last one, so they
make a kind of overlay in the twist. I've watched them do it. They don't braid,
that's not something they invented. But they do this twist technique. If you do
a lot of them, you've got rope."
"Wild," Jeremy said, and fingered the cord and, irresistibly, the feathers.
"That's really wild. I've seen vids of birds. I never saw a feather, like, by
itself. Just from a distance. "
"They fall off all the time. You're not supposed to collect them. Hisa do. But
humans can't collect them."
"A bird with its feathers falling off." Jeremy thought that was funny.
So did he. "Not all at the same time. Like your hair falls out in the shower. A
piece gets tired and falls out and a new one grows. It's kind of related to
hair. Biologically speaking."
"That's really strange," Jeremy said. "Do you have a lot of this stuff?"
He shook his head. "I'm not supposed to have this one, but it was a gift and the
authorities didn't argue with me. The cops somehow got me past customs."
"What's this stuff mean? It's not writing."
"They don't write. But they make symbols. I'm not sure in my own head what the
difference is, but the experts say it isn't writing."
"This is so strange," Jeremy said. "What's it mean?"
"Day and night. Rain and sun. Grain growing"He became aware that rain and sun,
day and night, were words like the feather, alien to Jeremy, with all they
meant. Spacers didn't say morning and evening. It was first shift, second shift.
They didn't say day and night. It was mainday, maindark, alterday, alterdark.
And twilight was a time the lights dimmed and brightened again, mainday's
twilight, alterday's dawn. Stationers were like that, too. But on Downbelow you
rediscovered the lost words, the words humans had used to have, words that
clicked into a spot in your soul and took rapid, satisfying hold
Maybe that was why they had to bar humans from Downbelow, and let down only a
privileged, special few who could agree not to pick up feathers or stones.
"The little stones," he remembered to say, "water smoothed them. They tumble
over one another in the bottom of Old River as the water flows, just rubbing
against each other." He took account of Jeremy's literal interpretation of
molting feathers, and remembered a question he'd asked of a senior staffer. "You
don't ever see them move. But when Old River floods, it tumbles them."
Jeremy looked at him as if to see if that was a joke of any kind, and felt the
smoothness of the stones. "I was going to ask how," Jeremy said. "That's so, so
wild. I'm used to old rocks… but these must have been tumbling around a long
time."
"Rocks in space are older," he said. "Water's just pretty powerful. It carves
out cliffs, changes course, floods fields. Gravity makes it fall from high
places to low places and whatever's in the way, it flows around it or over it."
"How's it get high in the first place?"
"Rain. Springs." More miracle words to Jeremy. He didn't think Jeremy knew what
a spring was.
But Jeremy wanted to know things. That was what engaged him. Jeremy wanted to
know. He could liken some things to what Jeremy did know: condensation on high
dockside conduits. The big drops that hit you on the head when you were near the
gantries.
"It's just past monsoon, now," he said, dazed to admit the unfelt time-flow that
Jeremy took for granted "Hisa females will be pregnant, grain will be sprouting
in the fields and in the frames. There's a kind that only grows with its roots
in mud. There's a kind that only grows on dry land, in the open fields. We
interfered to improve the yield, but the thinking now is that we shouldn't have,
that it'd be a lot better if we'd left the hisa alone and not had them working
on the station or anything."
Jeremy handed the stick back carefully. "Do you think so?" Maybe Jeremy heard
the disbelief in his voice. Do you think so? Jeremy asked straight into his
privately-held, his cherished heresy. None of the staffers had ever seen it. But
Jeremy did. And deserved an answer he'd never give, in hearing of Pell
authorities, who could bar him from the planet as dangerous.
"I think maybe they'd gain something from developing at their own pace." The
cautious apology to official policy. But he plunged ahead. "Or maybe they'd gain
things from us we never thought of. Or they might die out without us. You know
there aren't that many sites in the world where there are hisa. World
population's given to be, oh, maybe twenty million."
"That's a lot."
"Not for a planet Not at all for a planet."
Jeremy was quiet for a moment. "Dead-on that Earth's got a lot." Jeremy had been
there, Jeremy had said so. The fabled and unreliable motherworld. Wellspring of
everything they knew about planets. All the preconceptions, all the right and
wrong perceptions.
"Yeah," he said "That's our model. That's what we know in the universe. That's
all else we know and it's a pretty small sample. Twenty million hisa on
Downbelow. A lot fewer platytheres on Cyteen."
"They're not intelligent."
"They don't seem to be." What he knew said that Cyteen's platytheres had gotten
too successful for their own environment, deforested vast tracts that then
became prey to weather patterns. And human beings on Cyteen had determined the
planet was more useful and more viable if they killed them all. Environmental
scientists on Pell were aghast.
But nature sometimes killed itself. Not all life succeeded. Could life intervene
to save life, when the end result would be extinction, or did nature know best?
He wasn't sure. It was all human judgment The hisa had watched the sky for as
long as hisa remembered, from before humans left Earth. Waiting for something to
happen from their clouded, starless sky. Was it a cultural dead end they'd
reached?
"You know a lot of stuff,"Jeremy said.
"I'm two years short of a degree in Planetary Science. You know? It's my life.
It's what's important to me. And somebody aboard asked me why study planets."
"Because you want to know!" Jeremy said, which did a lot to patch that young
woman's careless dismissal. "Because you want to know stuff. I do, anyway."
"I don't think what I know is real useful here."
"You know science, don't you?"
"A lot of life science."
"Well, tell JR. I'll bet he'd be interested. Life science is what keeps us
breathing, case of what's important, here. You probably ought to talk to Jake.
He's the bioneer."
"Probably I should," he said, "talk to Parton, that is." Dealing with JR, he
preferred to keep to a minimum. "Maybe I could do something besides laundry. "
"Oh, everybody does laundry sooner or later," Jeremy said. "Just the chief
engineer sends all the junior engineers to do it, right along with maintenance,
and the chief doesn't unless he loses a bet. But you 'prentice to Jake, is what
you do. Me, I'm off studies for the last couple of jumps because I'm watching
you so you don't turn green and die. Usually I'm on study tape. That's where
Vince goes after shift, That's where Linda goes. You just do sims until there's
a rush on, and then they call you in, like me, I do beginner pilot sims and scan
sims, because if I don't make the cut when I'm big enough, you know, for the
real test stuff, there's got to be something for me to do. God, I really don't
want to do scan. I really hate it." Jeremy was slapping his fist against his
leg, that nervousness he got from vid-games; now Fletcher knew where it came
from. "But even if I make Helm, I'll have to sit Scan in a crisis. Same as
Linda. She likes it, though. She thinks it's great."
"What's Vince?" He had to know. The set wasn't complete.
"Vince, he's Legal. That's what he wants to do, can you believe it? That and
archive and files and library. It's about the same. Records."
Vince at a desk, doing painstaking work. A lawyer. A librarian. Their hothead
wanted to keep books? The mind didn't easily form that image. Plead in court?
The judge would throw Vince in jail.
"I think you ought to talk to Jake, though," Jeremy said.
"I'm sure they've got my records." They don't care, was in his mind. But also
there was the glimmer of a use for himself. Not the use he wanted, but it was
using something he knew and having contact with the systems on a ship that did
technically interest him. A foam-steel planet, in those respects, recycling its
atmosphere and doing so in systems he wanted to see.
"You want me to talk to Jake?" Jeremy asked.
"I'll talk to him, sooner or later." He tucked the stick back into the drawer,
and shut it "Right now I guess it's enough I don't turn green and die."
"Medical said let you go through maybe four, five jumps before you do anything
like tape. The captains used to not let any of us do it. Used to make us learn
with books. But the information just comes too fast, that's what Paul said. Helm
said if pilots could do tape-sims to keep their skills up then the rest of us
weren't going to go azi-fied on a calculus tape. I'm glad. Dead-on I'd be an azi
if I had to learn calculus out of a book. You'd just see the blank behind the
eyes…" Jeremy gave his rendition of an automaten. "Did you learn from books on
Pell?"
"Tape, mostly. Lots of tape. Same thing. They've come round to thinking it's all
right. I brought some with me,—All right, I lied. I've got tapes. Some of the
environmental stuff. My biochem." Just the pretty ones, those first of all. The
ones with pictures of home. His home. He didn't think he could take them right
now. It still hurt too much. "You can try one if you want." Turning Jeremy into
somebody he could really talk to about Downbelow was a bonus he hadn't expected
when he'd packed the tapes. But that seemed possible, and his spirits were
higher than they had been since he'd boarded.
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "Sure! Wild! Can I borrow one tonight?"
He opened the drawer, took out his tape case, took out a pretty one.
And hesitated. "It could be scary for you. I don't know. It's a planet. You feel
the weather. Thunder and all. It's a pretty good effect."
"Oh, hell," Jeremy said. "Can't be that bad." Jeremy took the tape and opened
the wall panel at the side of his bunk, looking for pills.
"Take a quarter-dose, no more. This is stationer tape. Planetary tape. Lightning
and reverse-curve horizons. If you climb the walls tonight it won't be my
fault."
Jeremy grinned at him and shook out a pill. He split it. Offered the other half
to him.
He opted for the biochem tape for his own reader. It wasn't jump they faced,
just a night's sleep, and a night of no dreams but the ones the tape provided—a
Downbelow tour for Jeremy and a night of life process chemistry for him.
He didn't care that he was into Chad for a room cleaning. He settled down with
the headset and the tape going and with the drug that flattened out your
objections to information coursing through his bloodstream.
It was the first time he'd taken tape aboard. It was the first time he'd trusted
the people he was with enough to take that drug that made you so helpless, so
compliant, so ready to believe what you were told. You didn't learn around
strangers. You didn't, in his own experience, do it anywhere but locked in your
own private room, safe from outside suggestion, but he felt safe to try,
finally, in Jeremy's presence.
It meant a good night's sleep, a night in which he was back in things he knew
and terms he understood. You forgot little details if you didn't use what you
learned; tape could sharpen up what was getting hazy in your mind, and if he
talked to Jake in engineering as Jeremy suggested, about getting into something
that offered a little more headwork, he wanted to be sharp enough to impress
Jake and not sound a fool if Jake asked him questions. This time through the old
familiar tape he set his subconscious to wonder about things that a closed
system like a ship's lifesupport might find problematic, and he wondered what
tapes the ship's technical library might have that would let him brush up on
specifics of the systems. The ship had a library. They might let him have tapes
to study. If they trusted him, which had become an unexpected hurdle.
Talk to JR? Not damned likely.
Chapter XIII
Contents - Prev/Next
"There's a problem," Bucklin put it, warning JR what was coming, and after that
there was a junior staff meeting, a quiet and serial staff meeting, pursued down
corridors, anywhere JR could find them. JR found Vince and Linda, among the
first, in A deck main corridor, and made them late reporting to breakfast.
"What's this with a Welcome-in?" he asked "I said, did I not, let him alone?"
There were frowns. There were no effective answers.
He found Connor topside, B deck, and said, "It's off. No hazing. My orders."
He found Sue and Nike in A deck lifesupport, and asked, "Whose damn idea was it
in the first place?"
He didn't get a satisfactory answer. What he got was, "He's a problem. He's a
problem in everything, isn't he?"
He found Chad, and said, "If he cleans your room, Chad, he just cleans it. You
keep your hands off him or you and I are going to go a round."
Chad wasn't happy.
He went the whole route. Lyra and Wayne, Toby, and Ashley, all glum faces and
unhappy attitudes.
And after he thought that he'd made the issue crystal clear, at mid-second shift
he had a delegation approach him in the sim room, next to the bullet-car that
reeked of the cold of the after holds. He was going in, not out, but he was
still mentally hyped for the pilot-sims his career-track mandated—sims that
didn't have anything to do with Pell's vid-game amusements. It was high-voltage
activity that maintained his ability to track on high V emergencies, just as
Helm had had to do when it met the Union carrier, and his state of mind at the
moment was not optimal for intricate interpersonal politics. Bucklin had to know
that.
It was Wayne and Connor, Toby, Chad and Ashley who pulled the ambush, and they'd
done it in the cramped privacy of the core-access airlock, a small sealed room
with a pressure door between it and the main A-deck corridor. It was only them,
they could talk without senior crew in the middle of it, and Bucklin, damn him,
had unexpectedly chosen to become their spokesman. JR found himself ready to
blow, given just a little encouragement.
"The question is," Bucklin said as JR stood with his hand on the call-button
that would give him the sim-car and take him away from their bedeviling. "The
question is, this is what we've always done. Omitting it says something."
He dropped his hand from the button. Clearly he wasn't going to solve this in
two seconds. Clearly, like dealing with Union carriers, sometimes the situation
tested not one's speed in handling a matter, but one's self-control.
"Always isn't this time," he said to the group. "The guy is not one of us, he
didn't grow up in our traditions, he doesn't know what we're up to, and we don't
communicate all that well with that stationer-trained brain of his."
"It seems to me," said Ashley, "that those are exactly the reasons for having a
Welcome-in."
"No," he said, and drew a calm breath. "The answer is no. It's an order."
"We did it for Jeremy," Wayne pointed out. Wayne, next to Bucklin and Lyra, was
their levelest head. "It was important then. It made lot of difference."
"And I'm telling you we can't do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man
would have the proverbial cat. For another, he's a stationer."
"That's the problem, isn't it, up and down the list?" Chad said. "He's a
stationer. He doesn't give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he
pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of
us—and nobody ever called him on it."
"I called him on it. Immediately."
"Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn't stay for gatherings… say
hello to him and you get stared at."
"Did you hear the word order, Chad? I order you to let this drop."
"Yessir, we hear, but—"
"We don't think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be," Toby said, all
earnestness, "or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it was the Old
Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was
important to do the traditions. We're going to have babies on this ship. are we
not going to welcome them in when they come up, or what?"
"I'm saying—" He faced a handful of juniors who'd survived all the War could
throw at them. Who'd kept the traditions intact. Who hadn't given up the
principles, the history, the honor of the ship. And who could tell them that the
practices of a Welcome-in, centuries old, were stupid, silly, ridiculous?
The junior captain, the officer in charge of the juniors, wasn't even supposed
to be involved in this, and traditionally speaking, hadn't been and hadn't
sought it. He'd gotten involved at all, point of fact, because he'd given an
order first not to do it in this case, and then to wait, and now they'd come
back to him to argue for now rather than later, because his order was in their
way. It was crew business and not his business, by centuries-old habit. There
was a tradition in jeopardy here just in their having to confront him.
And more serious to the welfare of the ship, their unity, their way of defining
who was who, their way of including someone new in the traditions—all that was
threatened. His position, like Bucklin's, was defined by the lofty track toward
the captaincy, but theirs was a network of relations with each other that would
define all of their lifetime of working together. And he was looking down on it
all from officer-height and saying, It's not that important—at a time when the
crew as a whole was facing the greatest and most profound change in its mission
since it had become, de facto, Mallory's backup.
They were feeling robbed. Robbed of their war, their victory, their outcome. He
understood that. None of them liked what they saw as being sent away from a
conflict that had cost them heavily. And he saw, staring into that lineup of
faces, and taking in the fact that they were all male, that there was also the
men-women issue. Lyra and Linda, female, made a small but separate society:
their children, when they chose to get them, from whomever they chose to get
them, were the hope of the ship, the hope, the future of Finity's End. Young
men, and it was specifically the young men of the crew who'd come to him… they
were the tradition-keepers, the teachers: men had their importance to a
merchanter Family not in getting children, but in being Family, in bringing up
their sisters' and their cousins' children. They were the guardians of
tradition; and they were, potentially, men on a ship with a damaged tradition, a
shattered ship's company, too damn many dead Finity brothers with too little
memory on the part of the outside as to who'd died and what heroic sacrifices
they'd made away trom the witness of stationers and worlds. There were all too
many small, funny, or touching stories that had died with this uncle or that
cousin, stories of the ship's finest hours that never would find their way into
Finity's archive, or into the next generation.
The men of Finity's End alone knew what they were. The ship hadn't been able to
leave Fletcher to the ordinary existence of a stationer, but they hadn't brought
him in, either. Only the men could do that.
They were right. And after giving a halfway yes, he'd delayed too long. He'd
weakened. He'd already gotten himself on the gravity slope by agreeing it had to
be done.
"I'm still saying wait," he said, trying to recover what authority his wavering
had undermined. Unpleasant lesson and one he was determined to remember. "I'm
saying—just—whenever you do it, go easy. He's not a kid or a senior. He's had
all those several years of waking transactions Jeremy hasn't had, and for all I
can figure, his mind did something during those years besides learn algebra, all
right? He's not a ship kid. Give him some credit for the age he looks—the way I
did, dammit, over the damn drink. I think he's due that."
"He looks like you and me," Bucklin was quick to remind him. "When he hits
Mariner dockside, nobody but us is going to know how old he is. And we're
responsible for him. "
"I say he's gained a little more maturity than Jeremy. You're right he's got a
body that mixes with adults, not kids. A body that's mostly done with its
growing. He's Jeremy with a body at its fastest and his nerves a lot more under
control. It's got to make a difference. He's been dealing with adults as an
adult on station. Jeremy hasn't."
"You're not supposed to know about what goes on," Chad said, "officially
speaking. You don't know about it."
"I'm saying use your common sense!"
"That's fine," Wayne said, "and we agree, sir, but you still don't know about
it. You're not supposed to have been this far involved with it. Let us. That's
what this is about. He's not one of us yet. He doesn't know us. We don't know
him."
"Yeah," he said reluctantly, "I still don't know about it."
They left. He stood there, wired for the sim, literally. And telling himself he
shouldn't interfere.
Then that the potential for someone getting hurt was high.
And that they'd probably do it sometime during evening rec. An ambush in one's
quarters was the usual. A gang showed up, hauled you off to a storage area and
ran you through the same silliness everybody endured once, during which you
agreed who was senior and who wasn't
If he interfered and the crew found out he had, he could create a major problem,
in their sense of betrayal.
But a Finity youngster knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he wasn't
being killed. He knew it was a joke.
He put in a call to legal, to Madelaine's office, "Call Fletcher up there," he
said to Blue, who took the call. "I want to talk to him, I don't want the whole
ship to know."
"Problem?" Blue asked
"Not yet," he said.
The laundry was still quiet, so quiet it was down to cards, Jeremy teaching him
the trick shuffle and Fletcher about to concede that small fingers had their
advantage. Linda was watching—"Never got it myself," Linda said—when Vince
drifted in, and one of the seniors came with him.
"Thought you were going to clean my cabin," Chad said.
"Yeah, well," Fletcher said, and decided he wasn't going to learn the shuffle in
another round and he might as well do what he'd gotten himself into. He got up,
gave Jeremy his cards back and Chad gave him the cabin number, A39, a fair
distance around the rim.
"You do a good job," Chad admonished him.
"Yeah," he said, and left, telling himself he wasn't playing cards with Chad
again until there was revenge involved. He stopped by his own cabin and picked
up cleaning cloths, in the case Chad's place wasn't supplied, and told himself
Chad had probably trashed the place just to make his life difficult
A39. He opened the unlatched door. Stared in shock at Chad, among a gathering of
cousins packed into the room. "Sorry," he said, thinking at first blink he might
have interrupted some private gathering.
"No, come on in," one said. He didn't recall the name. The family resemblance
was close and common among all of them. He thought, well, maybe they were being
friendly, walked the rest of the way in, had just the least second's inkling of
something wrong in their expectant expressions, and was standing there with the
cleaning supplies in his hands when the cousin at the end of the bed bounced up
between him and the door and pushed the shut button. The door closed. Still,
joke, he thought.
The lights went out.
He ducked. He'd been in ambushes before. He knew one when it came down around
him, and he dropped the cleaning packets and tried to get at the door button by
blind accuracy in the dark. They were just as canny, and grabbed him as he was
trying to reach it, piled on him, shouting at the others that they had him as
they carried him painfully down to the floor between the end of the bunk and the
wall.
He got an arm free. He hit somebody. They pinned him down and then came a loud
ripping sound like cloth torn.They tried to hold his head as somebody tried to
tape his face and got his hair. He bucked as they continued sitting on him, he
tried to get knees or a foot into action, scored once someone else sat on his
legs, but they still managed to get tape wrapped around his face.
"Watch his nose, watch his nose,"somebody said, "don't cut his air off."
It was a stupid kid game and he was It. He'd been It before, and he didn't want
any part of it or them. He kept fighting, but it was a cramped space and
somebody was winding cord around his feet, struggle as he would.
At the same time they pasted tape across his eyes and one cheek, hard, got it
across his mouth in spite of his spitting and cursing. He was running out of
wind and there were enough of them finally to twist his arms together and get
cord around his hands, and sloppily around his body. He couldn't get enough air
past the tape and a nose gone stuffy from being hit, and meanwhile they picked
him up like a half-limp package and slung him onto the bed. He hit his head on
somebody's leg and stars shot through his vision.
"Fights damn good," somebody said, and there was a lot of panting and spitting
and sniffing, while the cousin he'd collided with swore and while he tried to
find a target to kick with both feet. "Hey, enough of that!"
They flung bedclothes around him, wrapped him, as he guessed, in blankets, and
then hauled him up and over somebody's shoulder, for another toss—he had no
idea. Being head down with someone's shoulder in his gut made it hard to
breathe. Blood rushing to his head made his nose stuff up worse. He tried to
kick, tried to advise the damn fools holding him he was having trouble
breathing, but they carried him—out the door, because there was nowhere in the
room to go with him. Out the door, down the corridor with him blindfolded to the
light and choking and struggling all the way.
"Stay still," somebody said, slapping him on the back, and they went onto a
different-sounding floor, like metal. Sounds reached him then of elevator doors
closing, then of a lift working, as the floor dropped.
He kicked wildly, tried to score in the cramped space, running out of air as
they reached the bottom. They carried him out of the lift into the ice-cold he'd
felt only in the freezer, and he heard the ring of their steps on metal grid as
they walked.
It was the freezer, it was the damn galley freezer they'd brought him to. He
began to think he'd pass out, maybe die in their stupidity. Or of purpose. He
didn't know now. He might never know. He'd be dead and they'd catch hell.
The guy carrying him dumped him down and let his feet hit the floor. The
pressure in his head shifted as they pushed him back against cold pipe, and
somebody tore the tape off his mouth.
He sucked in a fast deep gasp of ice-cold air and found something like pipe and
steps against his back, metal so cold it burned the bare skin of his hands. He
was still blind, he was still tied hand and foot, his head was still pounding
and his brain was hazed from want of oxygen.
Something touched his face, burning hot or burning cold, he couldn't tell.
Then they left him. He thought they did.
"Hey!" he yelled, and tried to hold himself up, unbalanced as he was, lost his
balance and fell—into someone's arms. They shoved him and he fell toward
somebody else, and around, and around. He knew the game. At any moment somebody
wouldn't catch him and he'd hit the metal floor, but he couldn't save himself,
couldn't do a damned thing unless he could get his balance.
They laughed. There were at least ten, twelve of them. High voices, girls, among
the others.
One caught him, held him upright. He hung there shivering and heard the quiet
shuffling of steps, the panting breaths around him.
"We have here Fletcher," that one said. "Who am I, Fletcher? Do you know?"
"Chad" He knew the voice. He'd never in his life forget it
"You're right." Chad tossed him off balance. Another caught him.
"Do you know me?" another voice asked.
"Go to hell," he said. He'd like to bring a knee up. With his feet tied, he
couldn't. They spun him around and tossed him from one to the next, until they
stopped and somebody sawed free the cords holding his feet.
He kicked. And missed, being blind.
"Temper, temper," the voice said.
"Find us, Fletcher," a female voice called to him, echoing in distance and metal
dark. "Find us and name us and you're free."
"He doesn't know our names." Male voice, on his left. Footsteps echoing on metal
grid.
"Fletcher." A voice he did know. Vince.
"Damn you, brat." It was still another direction. He was blind. He had no
concept what the place was shaped like, whether he could blunder off an edge,
down steps…
"Fletcher." Another voice. Older.
"Fletcher!" Jeremy. "Fletcher, come to me!"
Jeremy was in on it. He stopped turning, stopped playing their game at all, no
matter how they called.
"Fletcher, come here, come this way."
"Fletcher!"
"I said go to hell!" he yelled.
An icy bath of liquid hit him, full in the chest. He jerked, and convulsed, and
spat, and fell, hard, helplessly, on the grating.
"Dammit!" a male voice yelled. "Sue!"
He heard movement around him. He was drenched, in bitter, burning cold. He
couldn't get his legs to bear under him, he began to shiver so, muscles knotting
so it drove his knees together and his elbows against their ordinary flex. He'd
hurt his arm on the grating. It burned with a different fire.
"Who am I?" a female voice said. "Try again."
He couldn't talk coherently. He was shivering so violently he couldn't get his
jaws to work.
"Hey, guys," somebody said in a warning tone. Someone was close to him. He tried
to defend himself with a kick, but that one touched his face, got the edge of
the tape on his cheek, and then pulled away the tape across his eyes, ripping
brows and strands of hair along with it.
He was lying soaked, still with his hands tied, in the dark, and their faces
were lit with a lantern on the echoing metal grid, so they assumed a horror-show
aspect, gathered all around him against tall cannisters and girders and
machinery. It wasn't the freezer. It was somewhere else. Chad was there. He knew
that broad face. Vince and Linda were there. Jeremy was there, not saying a
thing.
He just stared at Jeremy. Even when they introduced themselves, one by one, and
said he had to learn the names to get loose, he just stared at Jeremy.
"My name's Jeremy," Jeremy said when it was his turn to talk, "and I was the
last they did this to. It's a Welcome-in, Fletcher, you got to go along with it,
you got to say what they say and learn the stuff and then you're one of us,
that's all, for good and ever. Welcome in."
He didn't know whether he ever wanted to talk to Jeremy again. What Jeremy said
he didn't doubt in the least: it was some form of Get the New Guy and he was
supposed to bend to the group and kiss ass until they'd gotten their bluff in.
But it wasn't just roughhousing. They'd put bruises on him and half-frozen him,
soaking him with water, they'd dumped him on the burning cold deck, and he
didn't give a damn what else they were doing, or threatened to do, he wasn't
playing their silly games to get In with them, not if he froze to death.
He started memorizing names and faces, all right. They wanted him to, and he
would, to remember where he owed what and for how long. He knew Chad, who'd
started this and set him up, and he learned Wayne who was the second voice,
who'd shoved him, and Connor, and a thin-faced girl named Lyra. Ashley was
another thin one, the quietest voice, Sue was a broad-faced girl with a cleft in
her chin, and that voice and her name had accompanied the water; Wayne had
protested it. There were two different scores. They sat there in the dark, lit
up like a horror show and going on with their stupid game, while he shivered and
his hair stopped dripping, probably frozen. They told him how he was welcome to
the ship, and how it was a great ship, and how he was lucky to be a Neihart and
how he'd put up a good fight.
Fine, he thought. They hadn't seen fight yet.
He didn't talk, not even when Jeremy tried to get him to say it was all right.
At least he was getting numb, and the fingers had stopped hurting.
Wayne got up and so did Ashley; the two of them took hold of him, pulling him to
his feet. "We'd better get him warm," Wayne said.
"He never said the names," Sue protested.
"He's freezing his ass off!" Wayne said. "Get the knife, get the damn cords
off."
The lift thumped into operation. It was coming down. Connor was saying it wasn't
good enough. He was trying just to stand, telling himself if they'd just listen
to Wayne he might get out of this.
"Ease off," someone said. "Someone's coming."
Rescue? He asked himself. An officer?
His knees were shaking so they almost tore the ligaments. He staggered off to
the side, and hit a pole and leaned on it, that being all he could do to stand
up.
"What in hell are you doing?" Male. Young as the rest. He was losing his ability
to stay on his feet. He wanted to fall down, and all that saved him was the fact
his chilled knees wouldn't unlock. "God, he's frozen! He's all over ice. Get him
topside, into the warm!"
"We can't take him topside!" Connor said. "Clean him up, first, get him some
clothes or there'll be hell."
There was argument about it. He stopped following it, The consensus was take him
to the cargo office where they could bring down heat; but he couldn't walk on
his own—they dragged him across to the wall, and opened a door, and flung a
light on that blinded him after the scant light of the lantern. Wayne had him
stand with his forehead against the wall, his eyes sheltered from the punishing
light, and cut the cords on his upper body, and his hands—that was all right.
Then somebody yanked his coveralls off his shoulders. They cracked with ice.
Warmer cloth landed on his back, somebody's coat tucked around him, a coat warm
from someone's wearing it.
They fussed about getting heat started, and a fan began blowing warm air in.
They stripped the coveralls the rest of the way off and wrapped coats around
him, made him sit in an ice-cold chair, at which he protested, and they
contributed another coat. He was starting to shiver so his teeth rattled.
"He could lose his ears," somebody said, the new one, the junior officer, after
that there was a lot of protest back and forth around him, about who'd thrown
the water and how he'd fallen and cut his arm and whether his fingers and ears
were all right. Chad maintained that they were and they hadn't had time to
freeze, but Lyra, more to the point, held her warm hands close to his head and
tried to warm them up, and it hurt.
Then Jeremy showed up, out of breath, with dry clothes and a blanket.
"I got them from the room," Jeremy said, his kid's voice shaking whether from
the running or from fright. "I got the heavy ones."
He took the clothes. He levered himself out of the chair and a tumble of coats
in his soaked and mostly frozen under-wear, no longer giving a damn about
females present. He dressed, beginning as he struggled with the clothes to feel
pain in his hands again, and in the joints he'd sprained simply in shivering.
The cord had left marks on his skin. His elbow was cut from his fall. The tape
had ripped his face and left it sore. His hair trailed around his face, dripping
again, after being stiff withice.
"are you all right?" Jeremy wanted to know. "Fletcher, God,—are you all right?
It was a joke. That's all, it was supposed to be a joke."
Jeremy was upset. Jeremy was sorry. Jeremy alone of all of them had meant it for
a joke. Stupid kid.
Wayne had seen things going to hell and used his head. The young officer had
found out and come after them. The rest—
They were somewhere in the depths of the passenger ring rim. It was
uncompromisingly dark and cold outside the little office. It was hard to think
of braving that dark and going out there again to get to the lift they'd come
down in; but he wanted to get out of here in one piece and back to A deck, if
they'd just let him, if they weren't going to try to cover up what they'd done
or try to threaten him to silence.
He took an uncertain step toward the door. Two. He could have gone hypothermic
if they'd left him much longer, and he'd given them all a show, because he'd
really been scared. He was still scared, because he didn't know what they'd do,
and because if he didn't get himself away from them, maybe they didn't know yet,
either.
"Fletcher," the newcomer said. Bucklin. That was the name. JR's shadow. Bucklin
had caught his arm. "This went too far. Way too far."
"Damn right it did." He managed that much coherently, and shook off the hand,
wanting the door.
"Just a minute," Bucklin said.
Just a minute was too long, way too long to spend with them. But when Bucklin
made him look back, he saw the one he wanted, zeroed in on Chad right behind
Bucklin's shoulder, and hit Chad square in the jaw. Chad teetered over a chair,
fell back into the office wall and knocked another conference chair over.
Fletcher touched the door control with a throbbing knuckle, only wanting out of
this place and away from their welcomes and their double-crossing.
"Chad!" Lyra yelled out, and he spun around as Chad barreled past Bucklin and
startled cousins tried to stop him. He used the chance the grappling cousins
gave him and punched Chad in the face.
Cousins grabbed him, too, and held on.
"Easy, easy, easy." The one holding his right arm was Bucklin.
"I'll kill him," he said, and Chad charged back at him, dragging cousins with
him. He got hold of Chad's collar and the collar ripped; Chad hit him in the gut
and he kept going, lit into Chad with a left and a head-shot right, out of
breath, crazed, until two cousins had his arms in separate locks and Chad tried
to use that to advantage. Fletcher kicked out, caught Lyra by accident as she
was trying to back Chad up.
"Easy!" Bucklin said into his ear, dragging back at him. He was sorry to have
hit Lyra, who'd warned him in the counter-attack. Chad never had laid a good hit
on him, but Chad's face was bloody. And Jeremy was in the way now.
"Easy," Jeremy said. "Fletcher, Fletcher,—easy. It's all right. We're getting
out of here, all right? We're getting out of here… we'll go home."
"Name's Bucklin," Bucklin said, and put pressure on the arm. "Lieutenant over
the juniors. This is officially over. It got way out of hand. Way beyond what
anybody intended. I'm going to let you go, now, Fletcher. I want you to stand
still a minute. I want you to hear apologies, and I want everybody involved in
this to stand and deliver loud and clear. Do you hear me, Fletcher?" There was a
pat on his shoulder, and he was trembling, partly with the strain on an arm he
didn't want broken and partly from unresolved nerves. "They'll apologize. No
more fighting. Have I got that, Fletcher?"
"I don't want anything from them," he said, out of breath. Bucklin's hold on his
arm let up anyway. "Let him go," Bucklin said, and had to repeat it: "Let him
go," until the other guy—it was Wayne—let go from his side.
"Apologies," Lyra said before he could bolt. She was limping. "Major sorry,
here, Fletcher. Bucklin's right. Way too much."
It was hard to walk out on a girl he'd kicked in a fight by accident. He stood
still, burning mad. Linda apologized, a sheepish mumble. Sue did. "I threw the
water," Sue said. "Bad judgment."
Damn premeditated, he thought, regarding Sue. Liquid water? Out there in that
cold? She'd brought it down here, with clear intent to use it.
The rest of them, the guys, he wasn't even interested in hearing. He opened the
door and walked off, blind in the dark except for the dim glow of the lift call
button that guided him across the gratings. He hit ice. His foot skidded,
costing his knee on the recovery.
"Fletcher!" Jeremy called after him, but he kept walking. Jeremy came clattering
over the grids, overtook him and tried to hold his hand from the call button. He
had such an adrenaline load on he hardly felt it, and could have brushed Jeremy
off, oh, three or four meters into the dark without half trying.
"I'm sorry," Jeremy said. "Fletcher, we're all sorry."
"That's fine," he said, and the lift door opened. He saw the choices, RIM, A,
and B. He took A, and rode it up alone to an astonishingly normal corridor,
where nothing had happened and two seniors walking by didn't notice anything
unusual about him.
He went to his cabin, took off the clothes he'd just put on, and showered until
he'd both warmed up and cooled off.
When he came out of the shower, still with the trap replaying itself in shadows
in recent memory, he found Jeremy had come home, and was sitting on his bed
shuffling cards.
He gave Jeremy the cold eye and picked up his clothes and started dressing.
"I'm sorry as hell," Jeremy said. Expressions like that jarred, from a
twelve-year-old's mouth. But Jeremy was twelve. He hadn't bucked his cousins to
warn him, but what could he expect of a twelve-year-old?
Still, he let the silence continue, if only to learn what would fall out of it.
"They always do it," Jeremy said plaintively. "To welcome you in."
"Is that what it is?" He fastened his coveralls and sat down to pull on his
boots. The adrenaline still hadn't run out. He could put his fist through
something, but Jeremy was the only target he had.
"They shouldn't have thrown the water," Jeremy said "That was pretty stupid."
"The whole thing was pretty stupid," he said, with a bitter taste in his mouth.
"I know the game. You could have said something to warn me. You know that? You
could have said something."
"You aren't supposed to know," was Jeremy's lame excuse.
"So everything's fine now. You just beat hell out of me, damn near suffocate me
with the tape, cut my arm so I bleed all over a pair of coveralls, play a hell
of a nasty joke and finish it up by throwing ice water on me, and now I'm
yourlong-lost cousin and glad to be one of the guys, is that the way it works?
You're not damn smart, you know that? Even for twelve, you're just not damn
smart."
"You didn't need to hit Chad like that," Jeremy said.
"What do you expect? What in hell did you expect, if you jump on a guy?"
"I'm sorry, Fletcher. You were supposed to say our names and we'd welcome you in
and nobody was supposed to get hurt at all. Not you, not anybody. It's just what
they always do when you come in."
"Well, it didn't work, did it?"
"No.I guess not."
He was mad. He was damned mad, and sore, and his hands were bruised and he still
wanted to kill Chad, who'd set him up with his room-cleaning and the card game.
Probably Jeremy had been in on it for days. Probably if there was somebody to be
mad at it ought by rights to be Jeremy. But Jeremy wasn't principally
responsible and Jeremy had been scared spitless and upset at the turn things had
taken. So had Wayne.
Of all of them he didn't choose to hate, Jeremy and Bucklin were on his list;
Bucklin who'd broken it up, Wayne, who'd used his common sense, and Lyra, whom
he'd kicked hard, not meaning to, and who'd taken it in stride and not held it
against him. Lyra, maybe.
Sue with her water-bucket was right on his list with Chad.
He drew a calmer breath. And a second one.
Jeremy sat there, dejected, in a long, long silence.
"Got a bandage?" he asked Jeremy, his first excuse to break the silence. "I
ripped my arm."
"Yeah," Jeremy said, and scrambled up and got him a plastic skin-patch. Jeremy
put it on for him. "There."
"Got my knuckle, too." He had. He didn't know whether he'd caught it falling or
cut it on Chad. "Chad better keep out of my way," he said. "At least for right
now. It's a long voyage. But right now I'm pissed. I'm real pissed."
"I think you broke Chad's tooth."
"He had it coming."
"If the captain finds out there was fighting, we're all going to be in his
office."
"It's not my problem." He stared Jeremy straight in the eye. "And if he asks me
I'll say be damned to the whole ship."
"Don't say that."
"Why shouldn't I say it? You ambushed me. I don't recall it was the other way
around."
"I mean don't say that about the ship."
"The hell with the ship!"
"No,"Jeremy said with a shake of his head. "No! You never say that about a ship.
You never say that, Fletcher! We're your Family. You're in, now. Maybe it was
screwed up, but it counted, and you're in, you're part of us."
"Do I get a vote about it?"
"Come on, Fletcher. Nobody meant anything bad. Nobody ever meant anything bad.
You were supposed to say the names and learn what they tell you—"
"No."
"Well, you were supposed to."
"That wasn't what they were after, Jeremy. Wise up. They wanted me to kiss ass.
That it was Chad and not me that got a broken tooth, no, Chad didn't plan on
that, did he? But that's what he got."
Nobody meant you should get hurt."
"Oh, let's add things up, here. Vince wouldn't shed any tears. Chad wouldn't.
Sue—"
"Oh, Sue's an ass. Vince is an ass. They know they're asses. They're trying to
grow out of it."
From the twelve-year-old mouth. He had to stare.
"I'm an ass, too," Jeremy said. "I try not to be."
"Then I forgive you," he said, "Bucklin and Wayne tried to use common sense and
Lyra warned me about Chad. But the others can go to hell."
"Ashley's all right"
"I'll take your word on Ashley." He'd hit a moment of magnanimous charity and
extended it likewise to the girls, excepting Sue. "Linda's not bad."
Jeremy shook his head. "Don't trust Linda. Especially not if you're on the outs
with Vince."
Jeremy was serious. And with spacers, it was probably true, there were
connections and he could get himself knifed. He'd heard stories off Pell
dockside. Read accounts in the news and congratulated himself he wasn't part of
it.
Now he was.
"A happy, loving family," he said, and felt the wobbles come back to his legs.
There were more than fears. There was betrayal. The captain wanted him aboard
because he didn't want to pay fourteen million. He understood that Madelaine
wanted him because of her dead daughter. He understood that, too. But the two of
them with their reasons had rammed him down everyone else's unwilling throats,
and he'd tried to make himself useful and get along where they put him and,
sure, they were going to welcome him in. The hell.
"I think you should talk to Bucklin," Jeremy said, "and get stuff straightened
out. JR didn't want them to do this. Everybody else thought it was, you know,
like maybe it would solve things."
"Solve things."
"Like, you'd fit in."
"You think that'd do it, do you?"
Jeremy was out of his depth with that. And so was he. If JR had tried to stop
it, it was because JR knew it was going to go the way it did and that certain
ones were laying for him, not like Jeremy, a little naive, but seriously, to get
their bluff in and make it stick. Those were the terms on which he'd have fitted
in. He'd been hazed before. You got a little of it in school. You got a little
of it in any new situation. But held upside-down and threatened with
hypothermia? He'd punched Chad with no thought whether he'd kill him. And Chad
had come after him the same way.
"Maybe I'm a little old for fitting in," he said to Jeremy, with a bitterness
that welled up black and real. "Maybe there isn't any fix for it. I don't belong
here."
There could be a fix."
"There isn't. Get that through your head This is real. It isn't a game. I'm not
playing games. Next batch of cousins lay a hand on me is going to be damn sorry.
You can pass that word along. But I think they know that."
"You can't go fighting on board,"Jeremy said.
"It's not my choice."
"Well, nobody's going to fight you."
"Fine. Go on to work. Get. Go."
Jeremy lingered.
"I'm not damn pleased, Jeremy! Get your ass to work! I'll be there when I want
to be there!"
Jeremy ducked out, fast. He'd upset the kid. Scared him, maybe—maybe upset his
sense of justice.
He figured he should go face down the job, the cousins, the situation, rather
than have it fester any longer. He reported to the laundry not too long after
Jeremy, met Vince and Linda and didn't say a word about the last hour and all
they'd been involved in together. Instead he went cheerfully about folding
laundry and let them sweat about what he thought or what he'd do, Vince and
Linda and Jeremy alike. He figured plenty of talking had gone on in the few
minutes after Jeremy arrived and before he did, and that plenty of talking was
going on elsewhere. He looked to get called by Legal or the captain at any
moment, maybe with the whole junior crew, maybe solo.
What they'd done, hurt. It hurt for reasons that had nothing to do with the cut
arm, the split knuckle and the cord-marks and the one blow Chad had gotten in on
him. It hurt in a way he wouldn't have expected, because he truly didn't give an
effective damn about his welcome or non-welcome on the ship. He didn't know why
he should be upset as profoundly as he was.
"Or maybe it was just the injustice of it. Maybe it was having them take
everything, for one reason and then once he got here and tried to make the best
of it, to gang up and try to take his self-respect.
Because that was what they'd wanted to break. His dignity, His self-control. All
those things he'd put up between him and a random universe. They'd struck
consciously and deliberately at what kept him whole. And he couldn't tolerate
that. They'd asked him to give up the last defenses he had, and turn himself
over, and play their game, and he wouldn't do that, or give up his pride, not
for anybody's asking.
Chapter XIV
Contents - Prev/Next
If the junior captain, on A deck, wasn't supposed to know about a Welcome-in,
the senior captains, on B deck, damn certain weren't supposed to know about such
an event; or to have to question the junior captain's common sense or ability to
command unless or until he gave them reason to think the junior command had made
a mistake.
In a few years, JR was well aware, the ship's entire existence might ride on the
wisdom of his decisions. Right now he found the entire crew's welfare still did,
the welfare not alone of one Fletcher Neihart, or even of the junior crew in
isolation from the rest, or of Chad, who was getting a broken tooth repaired in
sickbay.
There was no isolation of juniors from seniors once things had gone wrong, and
they had gone very seriously wrong.
"They jumped the gun and I didn't find out," Bucklin said, outside sickbay, when
JR had answered the call, "until somebody cued me the laundry was empty. That
was when I called you. And I had two places to look before I found where in the
rim they were. Chad didn't want the tooth fixed. Oh, no. Chad didn't want a
report filed with you, but I didn't give him that grace."
He heard out the whole story, the bucket of water, Sue's notion of getting a
fast agreement out of an argumentative customer she'd been scared was too strong
and too tall to handle: Sue had feared someone was going to get seriously hurt
in a melee, and she'd taken action to assure Fletcher folded
Not a bad idea, if it had worked.
His call to Legal Affairs had gotten a call out for Fletcher, but Fletcher
hadn't answered the call they sent. His hoped-for clandestine talk with Fletcher
hadn't happened. Chad and the crew hadn't waited. Fletcher had been dragged down
to the rim directly after Chad and the crew had approached him for a go-ahead,
with the result they now had; and Fletcher's failing to respond to a call… that
had assured that Madelaine was aware something odd was going on. It was a short
jump from Madelaine's office to the Old Man's.
"I want Fletcher here."
"Fletcher seems undamaged," Bucklin said, but added, hastily, "but he'll be
here."
JR walked into sickbay and stood, quietly, while senior cousin Mary B. finished
the dental work. Chad rolled a disconsolate eye in the direction of judge and
jury.
"There," Mary said, giving Chad a mirror. "Two stitches and a bond on the tooth.
Don't eat hard candy today"
"Is he in pain?" JR asked Mary.
"He's numb," Mary said. "Hit a wall, so I hear."
"The wall hit back," JR said. "Would you call Charlie down?" Charlie was the
medic of the watch, when he wasn't on com. "I'd like him and the wall both
looked at."
Mary gave him an arch look and went to do that before she tidied up her
equipment.
"You owe Mary some scrub time," he said as Chad climbed out of the chair. "About
ten hours of scrub time, including her quarters, I'd say."
"Yes, sir." Chad's mouth was numb. Chad met his eyes without flinching, credit
him that, JR thought. He just stood there a second, and Chad just stood.
"So?" JR said. "You jumped the gun on Bucklin, you got a little too enthusiastic
in your goings-on, and Sue resourcefully chucked a bucket of water on Fletcher.
Where did it go wrong?"
"I set him up," was what he guessed Chad said, past the deadening of the lip.
"He didn't go along with it. He told us go to hell. Then Bucklin got him loose,
and he took exception to me."
"Fletcher did."
"Yes, sir."
"So, was there a particular reason for him to take exception beyond that you set
him up? Just the color of your eyes? The idea of the moment?"
"I don't know, sir, but I apologize, sir."
"Did you apologize to him?"
"He walked out, sir."
"Do the words fucked-up clearly apply here?"
"Yes, sir. Fairly fucked-up."
"Thank you." He caught Mary's nod. She'd snagged Charlie and the medic was
coming down to give Chad the once-over.
Cousin Fletcher was not a slight young man. Neither was Chad, both of them
towering over him by half a head There was the potential for cracked ribs,
cracked teeth, or slightly more subtle damage, like the level of trust available
within the crew.
"You go sit over there." A nod toward the medic's station, the sliding doors of
which stood open, tables that were surgery when they had to be. "When Fletcher
gets in here, I want no repetition of the problem, do we have it clear, Mr,
Neihart?"
"Yes, sir, we do." It was a pathetic mumble. The stitches, two neat electronic
clips, were going to smart when the painkiller wore off.
Bucklin showed up. With Fletcher. An undamaged Fletcher, to look at him. A
brittle and angry Fletcher, ready to damn all of them to hell.
Jeremy trailed after, and hung about in the doorway.
"You," JR said, "out of here."
Jeremy vanished.
"You"—to Fletcher—"I want to talk to. Relax."
"Is this about the fight?"
Fletcher would manage to come at things head-on and with guns live. Not his best
feature. "If you've got any arena for improvement, Fletcher, it's your slight
tendency to meet people with a challenge, just one of those small problems I'm
sure you can improve. At this particular moment I'm sure there's some reason for
what I see here, which I'd rather not officially notice. How are you getting
along, in general?"
"Fine."
"Jeremy's all right with you?"
"Fine. Just fine."
"No problems with Jeremy?"
"No."
"That's good. How about the rest of the crew?"
And that got a direct look of Fletcher's dark, same-genetics eyes.
"You know what happened."
"Chad's report." He nodded to the end of the room, where Chad sat on the end of
a surgery table.
"I'm in here for a medical. Is that an excuse, or what? Or do I get another
round with him?"
"I want a medical report And some common sense. Listen to me, Fletcher." The
tone had Fletcher's attention to himself for about two heartbeats. "We have a
tradition on this ship, welcome-in the new guy. As you know—" Another gathering
of Fletcher's temper and Fletcher got past it. "Usually it's straight out of the
nursery, transition into the crew. Jeremy was the last. Kidnap the kid, play a
few pranks, a little ceremony, that's about the size of it. Two damn fools your
size going at each other weren't in the plan." He couldn't tell Fletcher's state
of mind at the moment. Fletcher's face was absolutely rigid. "It's a test—a test
of your sense of humor among other things."
"I got a taste of your jokes."
"I understand so. There were some pretty light-weight kids involved in what went
way out of parameters. You and Chad are a fair match. You kept it to that. I
respect that. They know they took it too far. I frankly tried to dissuade them
from the idea, but they wanted to welcome you in, in the serious sense, That's
the tradition."
"Welcome, is it?"
"It's what they meant. Know us. Fall into the order of things. Find a place.
With the crew. In the crew."
"It's a stupid tradition."
"It may be, but I'm asking you to take it the way it should have gone. No
grudges. They've done what they insisted on doing. It's over. You're in."
"I don't want to be in."
"That's another problem, but they've no right now to treat you as an outsider.
You understand that? There is a difference. And they made that difference, so
they have to accept you in with whatever privilege I grant."
"Damn if I care. Sir."
"Calm down, I say. You've got a right to be mad, but if you exercise it you'll
do yourself damage."
"More than they'd like to do? I don't think so. Welcome in, hell! I'm not
welcome here! That's real clear!"
"It was a bad start. Best I could do. I wasn't going to leave you alone for your
first jump; and me taking you in—that would put you in with the senior-juniors
where you don't fit. That was my thinking. Jeremy's a good kid He reacts fast.
He'd keep you out of trouble. Do you want to be moved?"
"Jeremy's fine." Fletcher seemed calmer, and stayed fixed on him without
evidence of skittering off into temper. "No problems with him."
"You're sure. Even after what happened."
"He's a kid."
"He is a kid. On the other hand… you're not. And you are. Coming off a station
where you don't cope with ship-time… you don't fit the ship's profile, that's
what we say. You're not in our profile. It's hard to figure where to put you."
"That's too bad."
Fletcher had a way of trying to get under his skin. Or he outright didn't
understand. And Charlie had shown up. Charlie—whose job was spacer bodies in all
their diverse problems.
"Fletcher, I want you, first of all, to get checked out. Go right over there and
sit down. Chad's been in getting his mouth fixed. No lasting damage.—Then,
Charlie, if you'd check out Chad. We're looking for dents."
It meant both Fletcher and Chad sitting on two adjacent tables in the surgery, a
traffic management pricklier than two rimrunners at a jump-point, and the same
possibilities of shots fired. "I'm not going to ask for any handshaking," JR
said, while Chad sat still and Fletcher stripped to the waist and got up on the
other table, jaw set.
"Hurt?" Charlie had provoked a wince, pressing on ribs, then bent an arm,
bringing a deeply gashed and bandaged forearm to view. "Lovely. So what did we
have here?"
"We had a small discussion," JR answered for both participants. "Charlie, we
have here one stationer, aged seventeen, one spacer, Chad, aged twenty. How old
are we?"
"Which one?" Charlie asked, having a close look mean-while into Fletcher's right
eye, preoccupied with inventory. "Our spacer is, what, a little short of
seventeen?"
"Sixteen," Chad muttered, "sir."
"So how old are we?" JR asked "For our stationer's benefit,—how old are we?"
Charlie backed off from the inspection of the other eye and gave Fletcher a slow
scrutiny, the same, then, to Chad. "The stationer is a mature seventeen,
probably having most of his height, not his ideal adult weight by about fifteen
kilos. The spacer is a mature and very tall sixteen-year-old physique, grew,
what was it? An inch since Bryant's?"
"Yessir," Chad said
"And putting on a couple of kilos off Jeff's fancy desserts," Charlie said Chad
blushed. He was putting it on around the middle. "But the stationer," Charlie
said, "our stationer lad is a different maturity, been through puberty, long
bones are stopping growth, secondary sexual traits normal at my last
examination…" Fletcher's mouth was a thin line, he was staring at the edge of
the table, possibly with a flush on Fletcher's face, but Charlie didn't proceed
to the comparative clinical details. "Emotionally, however" Charlie said, "the
equation is more different between them now than it will ever be in later life.
Fletcher, at seventeen, has lived every day of his seventeen years. He's not
grown up having the purge of emotional stress Chad's undergone every month or so
in hyperspace: his experience hasn't been subject to that deboot.
It's all been continuous, interrupted only by ordinary nightly dreamstate and
whatever psych counseling he's had." Fletcher shot Charlie a hard, burning look,
which Charlie didn't look to see. "Our spacer, now, has seen twenty years of
history; he was born during the War; he's seen combat for all his years. Our
stationer's seen three less years and his station's been at peace, whatever
internal events it's suffered. Our spacer's nineteenth and twentieth years were
spent in a sixteen-year-old body in the last stages of puberty, and he's not
expected to finish that process until he's at least twenty-one or twenty-two
depending on our travel schedule; he won't be posted to adult crew until he's at
least twenty-six or twenty-seven and won't enter apprenticeship until he gets at
least another physical year's growth. Meanwhile our stationer's already past the
growth spurt, the rapid changes in jaw, hair, primary and secondary sexual
development. Body and hormones reach truce. He's pretty well started on his
adult life, as stationers tend to be at his age.—On the other hand, when Chad
reaches his ship-time twenties, advantage pitches in the other direction. Our
spacer won't suffer the stress disease a stationer has: he has that monthly
emotional purge, granted he's not one of the rare poor sods that comes out of
jump depressed, and our Chad is not depressed. He'll be sixty station-years
before he needs to think about rejuv, and look forty, with the historical
experience of sixty, when our stationer who stayed on station-time for his first
seventeen years is just a little sooner on rejuv. If he doesn't want to ache in
the mornings," Charlie patted Fletcher's bare shoulder. "You survived.
Congratulations. But let's put a better bandage on the elbow."
"It's fine."
"Shut up, Fletcher," JR said. "Just sit still."
Fletcher sat, and gazed fixedly at the wall, endured the neoplasm Charlie shot
on for a patch, and the bandaging.
"You can shower with that."
"Thanks."
"Go and thrive. You're released. Done. Unless JR wants you."
Fletcher slid down from the table and began to pull his clothing to rights,
determinedly not looking at any of them, as Charlie moved on to Chad and the
mouth.
It was hard to judge Fletcher's limits and capabilities. Add everything Charlie
had said, plus bone-ignorant of safety procedures and any useful trade.
Try again, JR thought. "Difficult call, Fletcher. Difficult to judge where you
are."
"Where I don't want to be, is the plain fact."
"You were right at the start of everything, were you?" He'd known intellectually
that Fletcher was called up out of a study program. How adult it was, how much
career it might be, was all guesswork to him. "Now a career restart."
"I'm not interested in a restart," Fletcher said.
And, frankly, Fletcher was late to be starting anything. At any given jump, the
senior captain or third Helm or Scan or Com 1 might not wake up, and the
senior-juniors would be møving up, into real posts. It could make bad, bad blood
on that point if he couldn't finesse what Fletcher was, or might be. But he'd
made his initial determination, a junior personnel decision, and it was his
decision.
"Behind my unit and ahead of Chad's," he said, "there's no personnel from those
years. No one survived. That's the problem. There's no one to assign you with,
you're too far behind my set, and you and Chad, who'd be somebody to put you
with, have just pounded hell out of each other. That makes things somewhat hard
for me trying to put you somewhere constructive."
"How about back on Pell?" Fletcher asked, in hard, insubordinate challenge.
"Not my option. Not yours. I said you were in. I've got the job of finding you a
spot. You want some senior privileges—" It was the damned drink incident at the
bar that had touched off the mess, that and his failure to lay the law down
absolutely on one side or the other. He was aware Chad was listening, and Chad
would report exactly what the disposition was. So would he, faster than that. A
memo would hit the individual mail-boxes within the hour. And this time he
didn't count on their lifelong connections to straighten out the details: he
knew where he'd assumed it would happen with Fletcher. It hadn't worked itself
out; and decision, any decision, was better than no decision. "I'm creating a
class of one. Solo. You want your unique privileges, you've got bar rights at
family gatherings, but I'm insisting you stay in the approved junior-juniors'
sleepovers and not overnight elsewhere during liberty. More than that—I'm giving
you a duty. You take care of Jeremy, Vince, and Linda. It takes them off my
hands and gives me and my team a break from junior-juniors."
Fletcher gave him a straight-on look, as if trying to decide where the stinger
was.
"I don't know the regulations."
"They do. Jeremy won't con you, Vince will almost assuredly try." He made a
shift of his eyes to Chad, who was getting off the table. And back to Fletcher.
"You don't have to make apologies to each other. A love fest isn't required. I
do expect civil behavior. And a concentrated effort to settle your differences."
Fletcher absorbed that observation in long silence. He looked across the gap at
Chad, on whom Charlie had interrupted his examination.
"Chad," JR said, and Chad got down, jump suit bunched around his waist.
"Yessir."
"Chad, this is your cousin Fletcher."
"Yessir." It was a mumble, still. Chad drew a deep breath and offered his hand.
Fletcher took it, not smiling.
"Pretty good punch," Chad said magnanimously.
Fletcher didn't say a thing. Just recovered his hand.
"Go on," JR said, and Fletcher left.
"Damn station prig," Chad said when held gone. "But he sure learnt to fight
somewhere"
"Evidently he did," JR said dryly, and Chad got back on the table and endured
being poked and prodded.
"Ow," Chad said.
It wasn't a perfect solution, but it tied things down. Charlie had put a finger
on one significant matter. Tempers on what had been a burning issue almost
always settled a little after jump: hyperspace straightened out perspectives,
lowered emotional charges, made things seem trivial against the wider
universe—acted, in most instances, like a mood elevator. Some quarrels just
dissipated, grown too tenuous to maintain, and others fizzled after a few
half-hearted spats the other side of where they'd been.
Unfortunately they weren't approaching a jump where things would cool down. They
were on the inbound leg of the Mariner run, coming into port, where he had to
turn junior-junior crew loose on a dockside that had notoriously little sense of
humor with rule-breakers—a dockside made doubly hazardous because it was a
border zone between Alliance and Union and a minefield of political
sensitivities and touchy cops.
Finity on a trade run as an ordinary merchanter was going to be damned
conspicuous. He'd caught discussion among the senior crew, how various eyes were
going to be watching her and her crew for signs that she wasn't really engaged
in commerce, signs, he could fill in for himself, such as the absence of
underage crew on the docks, when all other ships let their youngsters go to the
game parlors and the approved kid haunts.
They had to let the junior-juniors go out there. They had to look normal. And he
had to get them back again, in one piece.
Put Fletcher in charge of the juniors who'd more or less been in charge of him?
It might straighten out the accidental kink that had developed in the order of
things. He'd have Fletcher report to him once daily about the state of the
juniors, he'd threaten Jeremy's life if they gave Fletcher a hard time, and he'd
have a daily phone call from Fletcher coincidentally confirming Fletcher's own
well-being and whereabouts, and necessitating the learning of rules and
regulations—which would have galled Fletcher's independent soul if he'd asked
Fletcher to report on himself, or to read the rule book and learn it.
It was as good as he could manage. Better than he'd hoped.
He went to B deck and filed a report with the Old Man's office, not a flattering
one to himself. "I've put Fletcher in charge of the juniors," he began it. And
explained there'd been an incident. He'd hoped not to face the Old Man directly,
but unfortunately the robot wasn't taking calls.
Vince and Linda gave Fletcher a speculating look when he came back to the
laundry. Jeremy stood and stared, his face grave and worried.
There wasn't enough work to keep them busy. There was nothing but cards.
Fletcher made a pass about the area looking for work to do, anything to keep him
from answering junior questions. But in his concentrated silence even Vince
didn't blurt questions or smart-ass observations, maybe having learned he could
get hurt
"Not enough work to justify four of us," Fletcher announced. "You handle what
comes in. I'm going to the room."
"You better not," Jeremy said in a hushed voice. "You'll catch hell."
"It's my room," he said. "I'll go to it."
But the intercom speaker on the wall came on with: "Fletcher."
Jeremy dived for it. "He's here," Jeremy volunteered, as if that was the source
of all help.
"Fletcher R., report to the senior captain's office."
"Shit," he said, and Jeremy instantly blocked the reply mike with his hand.
"He's coming," Jeremy said then. "He'll be right there."
"Going to catch hell," Vince muttered.
Fletcher thought of going to his room anyway, and letting the captain come to
him. But, he told himself, this was the person he wanted to see, the person who
should have seen him when he boarded and who never yet had bothered. This was
the Goda'mighty important James Robert who'd built the Alliance and fought off
the pirate Fleet, who finally found time for him, and who might be annoyed to
the point of making his life hell and fighting him on his hopes of leaving this
ship if he didn't report in.
"So where do I find him?" he asked Jeremy.
Vince, Linda and Jeremy answered, as if they were telling him the way to God.
"B7. There's these offices. All the captains. His is there, too."
Right near Legal. He knew his way. He walked out of the laundry station and down
to the lift, rode it to B deck, trying not to let his temper get out of control,
telling himself this was the man who could wreck him without trying.
Or finally understand the simple fact that he didn't want to be here, and maybe…
maybe just let him go.
The kids' description matched reality, an office setup a lot like Legal, a front
office where several senior crew worked at desks, all staff, offices to the
side.
And JR.
"You set this up," he said to JR, and was ready to turn and walk out.
"I don't make the captain's appointments," JR said. "Report the situation? I was
obliged to."
"Thank you," Fletcher said. So he wasn't to meet with the captain alone. He had
JR for a witness, to confuse anything he wanted to say. It wasn't going to be an
interview. It would be a reading of the rules.
He was here. He held onto his temper with both hands as JR opened the door and
let him in.
The Old Man everybody referred to wasn't that old to look at him, that was the
first impression he had as the Old Man looked up at him. He was prepared to deal
with some dodderer, but the eyes that met him were dark and quick in a
papery-skinned and lean face. The hand that reached out as the Old Man rose was
young in shape, but the skin had that parchment quality he'd seen on the very
long-rejuved. It felt like old fabric, smooth like that; and he realized he
hadn't consciously decided to take the Old Man's hand. He just had, suddenly so
wrapped in that question that he hadn't consciously noted whether JR had stayed
or what the office was like, until the Old Man settled back behind his desk and
left him standing in front of it. JR had stayed, and stood behind him, slightly
to the side.
It wasn't a big office. There was a thing he recognized as a sailing ship's
wheel on the wall between two cases of old and expensive books. There was a side
table, and a chart on the wall above it, a map of stations and points that had
lines on it in greater number than he'd ever seen.
Mostly there was the Old Man, who settled back in his chair and looked at him,
just quietly observed him for a moment, not tempting him to blurt out anything
in the way of charges or excuses prematurely.
Like a judge. Like a judge who'd been on the bench a long, long time.
"Fletcher," James Robert said, in a low, quiet voice, and made him wonder what
the Old Man saw when he looked at him, whether he saw his mother, or was about
to say so. "A new world, isn't it?"
He wasn't prepared for philosophy. Could have expected it, but it wasn't the
angle his brain was set to handle. He stood there, thoughts gone blank, and the
Old Man went on.
"We're glad to have you aboard. You've had a chance to see the ship. What do you
think?"
What did he think? What did he think?
He drew in a breath, time enough for caution to reassert itself, and for a
beleaguered brain to tell him not to go too far. And to stop at one statement.
"I think I don't belong here, sir."
"In what respect?" Quietly. Seriously.
List the reasons? God. "In respect of the fact I prepared myself to work on a
planet. In respect of the fact I'm totally useless to you. In respect of the
fact I'm no good anywhere except what I trained all my life to do"
"What did you train to do?"
"To work with the downers, sir." The man knew. And was trying to draw him out.
While he had JR at his shoulder for an inhibition.
"It's what I want to do."
"What's the nature of that work?"
He wasn't prepared to give a detailed catalog of his jobs, either. "Agriculture.
Archaeological research. Native studies. Planetary dynamics."
"All those things."
"I hadn't specialized yet."
"What would you have chosen?"
"Native Studies."
"Why that?"
"Because I want to understand the downers."
"Why would you want that?"
"Because I want to help them."
"How would you do that?"
Question begat question, backing him slowly toward a corner of the subject with
truth in it, a truth he didn't want to tell.
"By being a fair administrator."
"Oh, an administrator. A fair one. Just what they need."
The tone had been so quiet the barb was in before he felt it.
"Yes, sir, it beats a bad one. And they've had that, too."
"I'm very aware. So you were going into Native Studies. Getting a jump on the
administrator part, it seems. You'd formed acquaintances among the downers."
Bianca. It was the same thing Madelaine had hit him with. But now it had lost
its shock value.
"Yes, sir. I did. I knew them before I went down. And there's nothing in the
rules that covered that."
"I take it you checked."
"They're friends of mine! There's nothing I did that would harm them."
"Including going into the outback. Including endangering others. Including
meeting with downer authorities."
He'd told that to the investigators. He remembered lying in the bed, and them
recording everything he said. He'd had to explain the stick. That he hadn't
stolen it. So it hadn't been all Bianca.
"Why," the captain asked him, "would you break the regulations?"
"Because you pushed me."
"We weren't there. I don't think so. You made a decision. You went where you
were forbidden to go, you stole lifesupport cylinders—"
"One from each. If anybody got out there compromised it was their own stupidity.
You can feel it in the masks. They'd be too light."
Was that a slight smile on the captain's face? He didn't take it for one. And JR
was hearing entirely too much.
"You also," the captain said, "went out there to outwait us. Endangering your
downers, about whom you care so much."
"Outwait you, yes. But not to endanger the downers."
"How do you know that?"
"Because it wouldn't."
"You were sure of that."
"I know them. I was looking for the two I knew."
There was a long silence then. James Robert leaned forward, elbows on the desk,
fingers steepled in front of his lips. "Then," James Robert said, "you thought
it wouldn't hurt them. You took conscious thought."
"Yes, sir. If I'd thought I'd do them any damage I'd have turned around and
given up. Right then."
"Are you sure you didn't?"
"I am absolutely sure I didn't." He was scared, however, that the captain knew
more than he was saying… about what he'd boarded with. He waited to be accused.
"You invaded a downer shrine, on your own decision."
"It's not a shrine." Had he said that part of it? God! He didn't know now what
he had said to the investigators, or how much more they'd inferred. "It's a
ritual site. There's a difference."
"That's what they say."
"Yes, sir." They knew what he'd brought aboard. They were going to take it away
from him.
"And why did you go there?"
"A downer led me."
"Your friends did."
"No. A different one."
"And you still say you didn't do damage."
"I know I didn't. They accepted me there. They brought me there." There was more
that he hadn't said, but he wasn't willing now for the Old Man to direct the
conversation where he wanted it, chasing him into every corner of what he knew.
"I talked to Satin."
"So have I," James Robert said.
For a moment he didn't believe it. And then did. This was James Robert who'd
been on Pell when the foremost of downers had been on the station.
"I've met Satin," James Robert said. "An extraordinary creature. She went all
the way to Mariner, and came back talking about war."
He was impressed. In spite of everything.
"Do you know," James Robert said, "they had no word for war until we told them?"
"She wasn't on this ship."
"On another merchanter ship. On a far more ordinary voyage. But even so she
found the outside too threatening. She said the heavens were too troubled for
hisa. She came back to her world, by what I understand, to sit by the Watchers
and add her strength to the Watchers' strength. To dream the future."
A chill went over his arms. "What do you know about it?"
"I met her. I talked with her."
He was vastly more impressed with this man than he'd planned to be. He'd tried
to act righteous and the man turned out to know things that made him look like
the rules-infracting fool he knew in his heart he'd been. A fool that deserved
booting from the program—as they'd done with him, so thoroughly that Quen
couldn't even use reinstatement as a bribe.
Quen knew. Quen had told James Robert. And James Robert hadn't met with him
until now, when he'd have thought the captain who sued for his return would have
been at the head of the list.
"What I know," the captain said, "is the old ones sit by the Watchers and
believe for the people. They expect things from the sky. Hell, we showed up.
Something else might happen. There even might be peace. If you want my opinion,
that's what she's looking for. That's why she went back."
"They say don't attribute anything to them. That we can't know what they're
looking for."
"Bullshit. I know what she's looking for. All of us who dealt with her know what
she's looking for. You don't look so blind, either."
His heart was beating very fast.
"And what's that?" he challenged the captain. "What do you know that they
don't?"
"The meaning of not-war. We taught her the word for war. They didn't have it.
But they don't have a word for peace either. And that's what she waits to see.
She's got to be really old by now, in downer terms."
Silver. Like an image. The captain made Satin so real in his mind it hurt.
"Yes," he said. "She is."
"You know what this ship is, Fletcher, besides a recurring inconvenience in your
life?"
"No." The captain preempted what he'd have said. Diverted talk to the ship.
Which he didn't want.
"This ship," the captain said, "your ship, Fletcher, the way it was your
mother's, is the oldest merchanter still working. It's the one that broke open
the rebellion against the Earth Company. It had been started before, but we made
it inevitable. Your predecessor helped make it happen."
"I know that." He didn't want a history lesson. He knew about this ship, God, he
knew about this ship. He'd learned about his almost-immediate ancestor. This
ship was armed, it went God knew where, it was a warship in disguise, and it was
probably lying (he began to fear so, counting that carrier that had spooked the
ship back at the last jump) when it claimed it was going back to merchant trade.
"This is the ship," the captain continued in dogged patience, "that secured the
right that no matter what law a station is under, a merchanter's deck is
sovereign territory. Without that, merchanters would have been sucked right into
the War, or coopted by Union."
"I know that part, too."
"This is the ship that led the merchanter strikes, the first to resist Earth's
imposition of visas."
"At Olympus."
"Thule. Learn your Hinder Stars. There are those of us who remember, Fletcher.
And you have to. People who meet one of our crew expect you to remember, so be
correct on that point."
"I wasn't born then. You may have been, but I wasn't."
"I know other things, in your world. This ship, Fletcher, is what Satin hopes
for."
"No. Satin doesn't. Satin doesn't care what humans do."
"Yes, she does."
"It's a cheap try. The downers have no connection to us. They don't know why we
do what we do and we shouldn't confuse them."
"Did Satin tell you that?"
A shot straight to the gut.
"What did she say?" the captain asked. "Did she tell you that their culture is
equivalent to but aside from protohuman development and that she's a mirror of
ourselves?"
"No."
"I don't think it's her job, either. No more than it's your job to run her
planet for her."
"I never said it was."
"You have to take that line if you want to be an administrator. You have to work
with the committee, play with the team, and leave the downers alone. If the
committee had found out what you were doing they'd have had you on a platter,
and by now they probably do know and they've got three study groups and a
government grant to try to find out what happened. You were doomed. They'd have
had you out of that job in a year."
"It wouldn't have gone the way it did."
"Yes, it would. Because you questioned the most basic facts in the official
rulebook… that Satin's people have to be left alone and her people can't learn
anything they don't think of for themselves. Those are the rules, Fletcher. Defy
them at your own risk."
"I never risked them." It was the one thing he could say, the one thing he was,
in heart and head, sure of, that Nunn never would believe.
"I know that. I know that. And Satin won't talk to the researchers. Not to the
researchers. Not to the administrators. Do you think she's stupid? She has
nothing to say to them."
"What do you know? You talked to her once"
"Like you. You talked to her once."
"I've studied them all my life. I do know something about them."
"Something the researchers don't know?"
It sounded ludicrous. He was no one. He knew nothing.
"You love them?" the captain asked. That word. That word he didn't use.
"Love isn't on the approved list. Ask the professors."
"I'll give you another radical word. Peace, Fletcher. It's what Satin's looking
for. She doesn't know the name of it, but she went back to the Watchers to wait
for it. That's why she's there. That's why she folded downer culture in on
itself and gave not a damn thing to the researchers and the administrators and
all the rest of the official establishment. It was her dearest wish to go to
space. But we weren't ready for her."
"Satin went back to her planet rather than put up with the way we do business!"
Fletcher said. "Wars and shooting people on the docks didn't impress her. And
she didn't like the merchant trade. Downers give things, they don't sell them."
"When you met her, what did she tell you?"
His voice froze up on him. Chills ran down his arms. Go, she'd said. For a
moment he could hear that soft, strange voice.
Go walk with Great Sun.
"We talked about the Sun. About downers I knew. That was all."
"Peace, Fletcher. That's the word she wants. She knows the word, but we haven't
yet shown her what it means. She knows that the bad humans have to leave downers
alone. But that's not peace. We haven't been able to show it to her. We showed
her war. But we never have found her peace. And that's what we're looking for,
right now. On this ship. On this voyage"
"Fancy words."
"Peace is a lot more than just being left alone."
"You couldn't give it to her down there," the Old Man said. "You're a child of
the War. So is JR." His eyes shifted beyond Fletcher's shoulder, to a presence
he keenly felt, and wished JR had heard nothing of this. "Neither of you have
any peace to give her. And where will you get it, Fletcher? Your birthright is
this ship. This ship, that's trying to make peace work realtime, in a universe
where everybody is still maneuvering for advantage mostly because, like you,
like Jeremy and his generation, even like Quen at Pell, you're all too young to
know any better. You're as lost as Satin. You don't know what peace looks like,
either."
"What do you know about me or her? What the hell do you know?"
"The hour of your birth and the prejudice of several judges. The fear and the
anger that sent you running out where you knew you could die… we never wanted
you to be that afraid, Fletcher, or that angry."
"You don't want me! You wanted your fourteen million! And I was happy until you
screwed up my life! Besides, I wasn't trying to kill myself."
"But if you hadn't run out there, Satin would have come to the end of her life
without talking to Fletcher Neihart."
"What does that have to do with it?"
"Nothing, if you don't do anything. A great deal if you commit yourself to find
out what peace is, if you learn it, if you find it and take it to your
generation. Satin's still looking at the heavens, isn't she? Still waiting to
see the shape of it, the color of it, to see what it can do for her people,
Fletcher. Right now only a few of us remember what peace looked like, tasted
like, felt like."
He caught a breath. A second one. He'd never been up against anybody who talked
like James Robert. Everything you said came back at you through a different
lens.
James Robert did remember before the War. Nobody he knew of did.
"Work for this ship," he said in James Robert's long silence. "Is that what you
mean? Do the laundry, wash the pans…"
"All that we do," James Robert said, "keeps this ship running. I take a turn at
the galley now and again. I consider it a great pleasure."
"Yes, sir." He knew he'd just sounded like a prig.
"What good were you at laundry anyway? You think the first strike happened at
Olympus."
"Thule, sir."
"Good. Details matter. If it wasn't Thule everything would have been changed.
The borders, the ones in charge, the future of the universe would have been
changed, Fletcher. Details are important. I wonder you missed that, if you're a
scientist."
"Biochemist."
"Biochem? Biochem isn't related to the universe?"
"It is, sir. Thule."
"Precisely. I detest a man that won't know anything he doesn't imminently have
to. Just plod through the facts as you think you know them. 'Approximate is good
enough' makes lousy science. Lousy navigation. And keeps people following bad
politicians. Are you a rules-follower, Fletcher?"
The Old Man was joking with him. He took a chance, wanting to be right, aware JR
was measuring him and fearing the Old Man could demolish him. "I think you have
my record, sir."
A small laugh. A straight look. "A very mixed record."
"I'm for rules, sir, till I understand them."
"I knew your predecessor," the Old Man said. "There's a similarity. A decided
similarity."
He hoped that was a compliment.
"So JR tells me he's assigned you to keep young Jeremy in line."
"Jeremy's been keeping me in line, mostly."
A ghost of a smile. And sober attention again. "Biochem, eh?"
He saw the invitation. He didn't know whether he wanted it. James Robert had a
knack for getting through defenses, with the kind of persuasion he wanted to
think about a long time, because he'd gotten his attention, and told him the
truth in a handful of words, the way Melody had, once: you sad.
James Robert told him plainly what he'd always seen about the program: that if
you didn't believe what they said, follow their rules, you were out. And he'd
hedged it all the way, being new, following his dream, living his imaginings…
not looking at…
Not looking at what James Robert told him, that the Base wanted someone like
Nunn, someone who'd follow rules, not push them—because what ran the human
establishment on Downbelow wasn't on Downbelow. It was on Pell.
"You get a few ports further," the Old Man said. "We'll talk again. You have a
good time in this one, that's my recommendation."
The Old Man hadn't ever mentioned the fight. The hazing. Any of it. Or changed
JR's assignment of him.
"Yes, sir," he said. "I'll try to. Thank you."
The Old Man nodded. JR opened the door, let him out.
And came outside with him.
"Fletcher," JR said.
He turned a scowling look on JR, daring him to comment on personal matters.
"I didn't set you up to fail," JR said. "Any help you want, I will give you."
"Thank you," he said. He couldn't beg JR to forget what he'd heard. He had to
leave it on JR's discretion, whatever it might be, without trusting it in the
least. He left, back to the laundry, thinking… they'd talked about peace, and
he'd believed everything the Old Man said while he was saying it. It gave him
the willies even yet, when he considered that this ship hadn't been trading for
a living for seventeen years.
The Old Man said they were looking for peace, and that none of them knew what it
looked like.
He thought of Jeremy, talking of going to Mallory, carrying on the fight. Of
Jeremy, shivering in the bunk approaching jump, because the kid was scared.
The youngest of them had seen the least of what the Old Man said they were
looking for. They called it peace, when the Treaty of Pell had stopped Union
from going after the former Earth Company stations, when the stations agreed to
host the Merchanters' Alliance and Earth disavowed the Fleet… but the Fleet
hadn't surrendered. And there wasn't any peace.
And the oldest downer had gone back to her world to watch the heavens and
believe for her people.
Believing that there was something more, though she'd seen what war looked like.
Believing there'd be something else—when for thousands upon thousands of years
the Watcher-statues had watched the heavens, waiting…
For what? Visitors?
What peace? he should have asked the Old Man when he had the chance. What does
this ship have to do with it, when all it's done is fight? What are we doing,
when you say we're looking for peace? None of the juniors know what it is, for
very damn sure.
When did I say yes? When did I even start listening?
Anger tried to find another foothold. Resentment for being conned.
But this was a ship that had meant important things in the recent past.
What if? he began to ask himself. He, who'd met Satin, and looked into her eyes.
"Got chewed out, hey?" Vince asked when he got back to the laundry, and he just
smiled.
"No," he said in perfect good humor. "I just got put in charge of you three."
Vince's mouth stayed open. And shut.
"You're kidding," Linda said.
"No," he said. Jeremy grinned from ear to ear.
Chapter XV
Contents - Prev/Next
Liberty was coming. The mood all over the ship was excitement, anticipation. The
junior-juniors' attention for anything was scattered: liberty and stationside
and games were coming after days of duty and sticking by their posts.
It was, Fletcher thought as the ship prepared for docking, air to breathe—wider
spaces, not corridors, not the unsettling pervasive thrum that he'd grown used
to and that he now knew was the ring in its constant motion. Where they'd exit
in less than an hour wasn't going to be Pell, but it was a place that would look
like Pell, feel like Pell, be like Pell. He could do things ordinary people did
on stations, walk curves less steep than Finity's deck—go to a shop, look at
tapes. Maybe buy one. He was due a little money, a little cash, they'd said, for
incidentals. If he skipped a meal or two, he could buy a tape.
A third of personnel, including the bridge, and older crew, whose personal
quarters were in areas that would be downside during dock, could simply sit in
quarters during docking and undock, if they chose to do that. For the seniormost
crew not so blessed by the position of their cabins during ring lock-down, there
was the small theater topside, where a pleated floor (Jeremy had explained this
wonder of engineering), solid seating and safety belts were available. The whole
theater became stairsteps.
But for the able-bodied, they packed them into rec like sardines, and they rode
it through with takeholds and railings, just the way they'd done in undock. The
junior-juniors disdained the theater. Jeremy said docking was more fun than
undock.
Fletcher secretly wished they'd offered him a theater seat with the ship's
oldest. But, with Jeremy, he went down the corridor with his duffle, joining all
the other crew doing the same thing. There was a chute, Jeremy had forewarned
him, where you sent your duffle down to cargo; your baggage would meet you on
the docks. It was why you tied silly personal items to your duffle strings and
had your name stencilled in large letters. His was just what he'd boarded with,
plain, distinctive only in that it wasn't worn and stencilled. He'd put a ship's
tag on it, Jeremy's recommendation. He'd tied a bright civvy sock to the tag
strings, the only thing he owned amenable to serving as ID. He'd not brought
anything in his baggage but clothes and toiletries. And watching the way the
duffles went down the chute he was glad he'd packed nothing else.
"They're not damn careful" he said.
"Warned you," Jeremy said brightly, "They're more careful coming back. That's
the good thing. They know the incomings got fragiles."
The rec hall was transformed again. Machines and tables were out. The safety
railings were back. He and Jeremy stood, indistinguishable from the mob of other
silver-suited Finity crew, Linda and Vince each with senior crew protectively
spaced between them as Finity glided toward dock and occasional decel forces
shoved gently at the ship.
"Decoupling" the intercom said. "Condition yellow take hold."
That meant real caution. Next thing to Belt-in-if-you-can. Don't let go to
scratch your nose.
Gravity ebbed. Fletcher's stomach went queasy. Don't let me be sick. Don't let
me be sick. It's nerves. It's just nerves. Nothing out of the ordinary's going
on.
"Condition red take hold."
"Hold on tight," Jeremy said.
Big jolt. Not too bad, he thought.
Then a giant's hand grabbed them and suddenly slung everyone in the room hard
against the rails with a crash and a bang that echoed through the frame.
No one came loose. No one screamed. Fletcher thought his sore fingers had dented
the safety rail and his neck felt whiplash.
"That was the grapple," Jeremy said cheerfully, on the general exhalation and
mild expletives in the room, and added, "We're carrying a lot of mass."
"I could live without that." Fletcher congratulated himself he hadn't screamed.
His stomach was the other side of the wall. Jeremy had let go the rail to
stretch his back. "We didn't hear an all clear."
"We will," Jeremy said in cocky self-assurance, and in the very next instant the
intercom came on to give it:
"The ship is stable. We are in lock. Mainday three to stations."
Jeremy constantly scanted the rules. Fletcher had begun to notice that small
defiance of physics and warnings. Jeremy was confidently just ahead of
everything; he'd taught him some of his unsafe habits, which he knew, now that
he'd actually seen the written regulations for himself. And one part of
Fletcher's soul said the hell with it, the kid knew, while another part said
that since he was nominally in charge he ought to call the kid on it…
In a system the kid knew from before his birth.
He had his instructions from JR, all the same. Yesterday at shift-end a brand
new bound print of ship's rules had arrived in his quarters, a gift which
Fletcher acknowledged to himself he'd have chucked in the nearest waste chute a
day ago in disdain of the whole concept. Instead, knowing he had Jeremy to
oversee, he'd fast-studied it and memorized the short list in the front; he had
it in his duffle, and meant business. He'd advised the junior-juniors so: he'd
take no shots from the Old Man due to their putting anything over on him.
"Section chiefs report forward for passport procedures." "There you go," Jeremy
said.
Jeremy not only hadn't resented his appointment over him, the kid had actually
seemed to take pride in it—as well as in the fact he'd gotten that rise in rank
directly after the rough Welcome-in, when he'd, as Jeremy so delicately put it,
knocked the fool out of Chad.
"Meet you out there," Jeremy said as he extricated himself from the row of
cousins. He felt a pat on his back, a pat from other, older crew as he passed
them to get to the door… they knew he'd gotten an assignment, and they
encouraged him. Him, the outsider.
He made the door in a flutter-stomached disorganization, telling himself,
without feeling of his pocket, that, yes, he had his passport, and Jeremy's and
Vince's and Linda's, for which he was responsible.
He joined the other section chiefs, far senior, over sections far more important
to the ship. It was simply his job to get the junior-juniors through customs and
to get them back through customs on the way out. To save long lines when there
was no particular customs slow-down, section chiefs handled passports, ID'ed
their people for customs in a mass, and passed them through; but junior-juniors,
being minors, didn't handle their own passports at any time. He had to. In the
sleepover, being minors, they didn't sign their own bills.
He had to sign for them. He had to authorize expenses for the junior-juniors,
and he was to dole out credit in a reasonable way for pocket change, but meal
and authorized purchase bills went to his room. He'd thought it was a
watch-the-kids kind of baby-sitting JR had handed him. It had turned out to have
monetary and legal responsibilities attached. A lot of money. Several thousand c
worth, that he was supposed to dispense and account for.
There'd been a visicard hand-clipped to the front of the manual, a quick and
easy condensation of the rules, specific advisements for this port, even a good
fast study for the arcane procedures of getting into a sleepover—one of those
dens of iniquity stationers viewed as exotic and dangerous and about which
teenaged stationers entertained prurient curiosity. He was going to such a place
with a parcel of apparent twelve-year-olds forbidden to drink or to consort with
strangers. He took the card out of his breast pocket, thumbed the display on and
double-checked it while the line advanced another set of five, right down to his
group.
Phone the ship with your sleepover address code and enter it into your pocket
com first thing after registering and reaching your room. Do not carry cash
chits above 20 c at any time. Memorize the date and hour of board-call and
report no later than one hour before departure. If you overnight in another
sleepover, phone the ship. If injured or ill phone the ship. If arrested, phone
the ship. Note: White dock is off-limits to all deep-space personnel by local
statute. Junior personnel are limited to Blue and Green by order of the senior
captain. The senior staff reminds the crew that this is a tight port with strict
zoning. In past years, we have had military privilege. That is not in force now.
Be mindful of local regulations. Have a pleasant stay.
Sleepover rules and do's and don'ts were in the next screen. Third screen
provided a crewman other specific procedures in case of disaster, how to avoid
getting left here by his ship.
His ship. God. His ship. His independence was gone. He'd begun to rely on his
ship. He looked no different than the rest of them. His uniform made no
distinction of rank: he wore silver coveralls, with the black patch that had no
ship-name beneath it. They were instructed, all of them, the manual said, to
write simply spacer if asked for rank on any blank the station handed them, as
even the captains did, despite stations wanting to know more than that about the
internal business of merchanters, and wanting, historically, to regulate them.
Some ships complied. But spacer and Neihart was enough for the universe to know.
Arrogant. Stationers called Finity that.
At least, for his peace of mind, Finity personnel had booked a block of rooms
close together in the same sleepover. JR had told him personally no drinking on
station, and with the kids in tow and with Vince to keep an eye on, it seemed a
good idea. JR hadn't told him don't go sleep with any chance stranger who walked
up on him… but he had very soberly figured it out for himself that that practice
of free sex which so scandalized station-dwellers was not a good idea for him,
not in a situation the rules of which he was desperately studying, and not with
three kids he was responsible for getting back in one piece, and not with
strangers whose motives he could guess far less than he could guess those of his
shipmates.
The airlock cycled them through, letting them out into the cold yellow passage
to the station airlock, and through to the elevated ramp.
All the docks spread out in front of him from that vantage, the neon lights of
unfamiliar shops and establishments displaying an unfamiliar signage above the
heads of his fellow Finity spacers as they walked, down, down, down to the cor
doned area with the small customs kiosk.
He'd seen this procedure all his life… looking up, from the other end of the
proposition, standing, say, by one of the big structural pillars, watching the
arrival of a ship. This time he was one of the distant visitors, the customers,
the marks to some, the fearsome strangers to others.
The scene inside the airlock wouldn't be mysterious to him, now. Ever. He knew
the routines, he knew the names of the people around him—and this station didn't
know his name or have him in its records. No one on this station knew who he was
except as Finity crew, no one would answer familiar phone numbers. His station
looked exactly the same—but at home there was a neon Kittridge's Bar sign
opposite Berth Blue 6. Here it was the sign for Mariner Bank.
The shift and counter-shift of perspectives as his feet touched the dock itself
had him halfway numb. But he resolved not to gawk at the signs, not even to
think about them, for the sake of the butterflies holding riot in his stomach.
He waited his turn and reported his own small team through customs and registry
as Finity juveniles on liberty, four, counting himself.
Hands only moderately trembling—he'd feared worse—he slipped the passports
through the scanner, a modest number compared to what section chiefs in
Engineering had to present. Jake from Bio had a stack of passports, as a customs
officer read off James Thomas Neihart, James Robert Hampton-Neihart, Jamie Marie
Neihart, Jamie Lynn Neihart, and proceeded to June and Juliana in a patient,
mind-numbed drone. His agent handed him slips with each passport, slips that
said—he looked when he had walked clear of the line, still within Finity's
customs barriers—The importation or export of radioactive materials, biostuffs
and biostuff derivatives including genetic mimes is strictly controlled.
He'd been among the last crew chiefs. JR came behind him and, as he supposed,
took the senior-juniors' passports through the kiosk; by the time the airlock
spilled out JR's bunch, his own three crew members were already lugging their
duffles down the ramp. The press of Engineering midlevel crew had largely
cleared out; there was still a crowd at the crew baggage chute.
Bucklin walked past him, paused and slipped two messages into his hand. Fletcher
looked at them, mildly surprised, thinking one at least, maybe both, were from
JR. But one had Finity's black disc for a source, that was all. He read the
first slip as Bucklin walked away.
From the senior captain. Jr. Crew Chief Fletcher R. Neihart, it said. The senior
officers extend good wishes and willing assistance in the assumption of your new
duties. Should you have any need of assistance do not hesitate to call senior
staff.—James Robert Neihart,
He read it twice, first assuming it was routine, and then suspecting it might
not be and looking for meanings between the lines. It's your call was what he
saw on that second reading. Call too early and you're incompetent; call too late
and you're in my office.
Maybe he was too anxious. Maybe it was just a routine letter and a computer had
done it, the same way a computer called their names for duty assignments.
The other message was a sealed letter. He pulled the edges open. A credit slip
was inside.
Two credit slips. A pair of 40 c slips made out to him. Wrapped in a note. No
young person should go on first liberty without something in his pocket. Don't
spend it unless you find something totally foolish. This is personal money.
Allow me to act like a grandmother for the first time in years.—Love. Madelaine.
He didn't want charity. He didn't want Madeline's money, personal or otherwise,
even if 80 c had to be a trifle to her personal wealth.
Grandmother.
And Love? Love, Madelaine? Her daughter was dead. Her granddaughter was dead.
Allow me to act like a grandmother…
A lot of death. How did he say No thank you?
How did he avoid getting in her debt? How dared she say, I love you, his
great-grandmother, who didn't know damn-all about him.
And who knew more than anybody else aboard.
He pocketed the money with the messages, told himself forget it, enjoy it, spend
it, it wasn't an irrevocable choice and money didn't buy him, as he was sure
Madelaine didn't think it did—Say anything else about her, the woman wasn't that
shallow and it was just a gesture.
"Fletcher!" he heard, Jeremy's voice, and in a moment more Vince and Linda
rallied round. "We got to get our bags!" Jeremy said.
They walked over where baggage was coming out the conveyor beside cargo's main
ramp. The cargo hands, family, were tossing duffles to cousins who were there to
claim them, and Jeremy snagged all four in short order, for them to take up.
"Where do we go?" Linda wanted to know. "Where, where, where have they got us?
What's the number?"
"We're all at the Pioneer," Fletcher said. "It's number 28 Blue, that way down
the dock." He pointed, in the smug surety of location that came with knowing
they were docked at berth number 6 and the numbers matched.
"They got a game parlor at number 20," Vince said, already pushing. "It's on the
specs. I read it. There's this high-gee sim ride. It's just eight numbers down.
We can go there on our own…"
"The aquarium," Jeremy reminded him.
"Who wants stupid fish?" Linda asked "I don't want to look at something I've got
to eat!"
"Shut up! I do!"
"Game parlor this evening," Fletcher said "First thing after breakfast, the
Mariner Aquarium, all three of you, like it or not. Vids in the afternoon, and
the sim ride, if I'm in a good mood."
"You're not supposed to go with us," Vince said. "Go off to a bar or something.
You can get drinks. We won't say a word. Wayne did."
"Find JR and complain," Fletcher said. He heard no takers as he shepherded his
flock past the customs kiosk, a wave-through, as most big-ship arrivals were.
JR was even in the vicinity, with Bucklin and Chad and Lyra, as they cleared
customs, and he didn't notice Vincent or Linda lodging any protest.
You know stations, JR had said in his brief attached note, explaining the
general details of his duties and telling him the name and address of the
sleepover they'd be staying in. It gave him something to be, and do, and a
schedule, otherwise he foresaw he was going to have a lot of time on his hands.
He'd also been sure at very first thought that he didn't want to consider
ducking out or appealing to authorities or doing anything that would get him
left on Mariner entangled in its legal systems. That was when he'd known he'd
settled some other situation in his mind as a worse choice than being on Finity,
and that a grimly rules-conscious station one jump from where he wanted to be
was not his choice.
So, amused, yes, he'd do JR's baby-sitting for him, grudgingly grateful that he
was shepherding Jeremy and not the other way around. And JR's statement you know
stations went further than JR might expect. He knew Pell Station docks upside
and down. He knew a hundred ways for juveniles to get into trouble even Jeremy
probably hadn't even thought of, like how to get into service passages and into
theaters you weren't supposed to get to, how to bilk a change machine and how to
get tapes past the checkout machines without paying. He hadn't been a spacer kid
occasionally filching candy and soft drinks he wasn't supposed to have, oh, no.
He'd been on a first name basis with the police, in his worst brat-days; and
when JR had said, Watch Jeremy, his imagination had instantly and nervously
extended much further than JR might have expected, and to a level of
responsibility JR might not have entirely conceived. Jeremy's liberty wasnt
going to be nearly that exciting, because he wasn't going to let his charges do
any of those things. They gave him responsibility? He was going to come back to
the ship in an aura of confidence and competence that would settle all question
about whether Fletcher Neihart could be taken for a fool by three spacer kids.
The converse was not to be contemplated.
Confined to Blue and Green? That eliminated a whole array of things to get into.
It was the high-rent area, the main banks, the big dockside stores, government
offices, trade offices, restaurants and elite sleepovers.
It was where stationers who did venture into the docks did their venturing. It
also was where the well-placed juvvie predators looked for high-credit targets,
if this long-out-of-trade ship's crew was in any wise naive on that score.
Finity juniors as well as the high officers had their pre-arranged sleepover
accommodations in Blue, where, no, they wouldn't get robbed in a high-priced
sleepover, but short-changed, bill padded? They might as well have had signs on
their heads saying, Rich Spacers, Cash Here. It was a tossup in his estimation
whether Finity's reputation would scare off more of the rough kind of trouble
than it attracted of the soft-fingered kind.
The junior-juniors weren't going to handle their own money, not even the 20 c
cash chits: he'd dole it out at need, and he was very confident the local finger
artists couldn't score on him. He almost hoped they did try, on certain others
of the crew, notably Chad and Sue; he was confident at least the con artists
would flock. Pick-pockets. Short-changers, even at the legitimate credit
exchangers. Credit clerks would deal straight for stationers they knew were
going to be there tomorrow, and who'd surely be back to complain if they got the
wrong change. Spacers in civvies they might be just a little inclined to deal
straight with… in case they were stationers after all. Spacers in dock flash and
wearing their patches were a clear target for the exchange clerks; and God help
spacers at any counter who might be just a little drunk, and whose board calls
were imminent. Crooks of all sorts knew just as well as station administration
did which ships were imminently outbound. When a ship was scheduled outbound,
the predators clustered to work last moment mayhem.
He checked in at the desk, in this posh spacer accommodation that didn't at all
look like the den of iniquity stationer youngsters dreamed of. Blue and dusky
purple, soft colors, neon in evidence but subdued. There was a sailing ship
motif and an antique satellite sculpture levelled above a bronze ship on a
bronze sea, the Pioneer's logo, which was also on the counter. A sign said, We
will gladly sell you logo items at cost at the desk.
"Can we go to the vid-games before supper?" Jeremy asked.
"Maybe." He distributed keys. They had, for the duration, private rooms, an
unexpected bonus.
He also had a pocket-com. So did the juniors. There were three stories in this
hostel, all within what a station called level 9. The junior-juniors and he all
had third floor rooms, and this time they had locks.
He shepherded the noisy threesome upstairs via the lift, sent them to the rooms,
with their keys, to unpack and settle in and knock at his door when they were
done.
It was the fanciest place he'd ever visited. He opened the door on his own
quarters, and if the ship was crowded, the sleepover was a palace, a huge living
space, a bedroom separate from that, a desk, vid built-ins, a bath a man could
drown in.
He knew that Mariner was new since the War, but this was beyond his dreams. Two
weeks in this place. Endless vid-games, trips to see the sights.
He suffered a moment of panic, thinking about the money Madelaine had given him,
and everything really necessary already being paid for—
And then thinking about the ship, and home, and the hard, cold chairs in the
police station, and the tight, small apartment his mother had died in, in
tangled sheets, down the short hall from a scummy little kitchen where they'd
had breakfast the last morning and where he'd been looking for sandwiches… but
she hadn't made any…
He sat down on the arm of an overstuffed chair and looked around him in a kind
of stunned paralysis, his duffle with the sock for an ID dumped on immaculate,
expensive carpet at his feet. This kind of luxury was what she'd been used to.
He saw the barracks beds of the men's dorm, down at the Base. He heard the wind
outside, saw the trees swaying and sighing in the storm the night before he'd
left…
Came a different thunder. The kids knocked at the door, all three wanting to go
play games.
"God bless," Jeremy said, casting his own look around.
"Are they all like this?" he asked. "Are your rooms this big? This fancy?"
"About half this," Jeremy said "Kind of spooky, i'n't it? Like you really want
to belt in at night."
He had to be amused. "Stations don't brake."
"Yeah, stupid," Linda said. "If this place ever braked there'd be stuff
everywhere."
"Pell did, once," Jeremy said. "So did this place. It totally wrecked."
"In the War," Fletcher said. "They didn't brake. They went unstable. There's a
difference."
"Shut up, shut up," Linda said, and shoved Jeremy with both hands. "Don't get
technical. He'll be like JR, and we'll have to look it up!"
He was moved to amusement. And a sense that, yes, he could be the villain and
log them all with assignments.
But he wouldn't have liked it when he'd been anticipating a holiday, and if he
hadn't forgiven Chad for the hazing, he didn't count it against Jeremy, who'd
have to be included in any time-log he might be moved to make against Vince and
Linda.
"So what do you want to do?" he asked the expectant threesome, and got back the
expected list: Vids. Games. Shopping. And from Jeremy, over Linda's protests,
the aquarium.
He laid down the schedule for the next three days, pending change from on high,
and distress turned to overexcitement. "Settle down," he had to say, to save the
furniture.
The Pioneer was a comfortable lodgings—good restaurant, good bar—game parlor to
keep the junior-juniors occupied at all hours, which was no longer JR's concern.
Well… not officially his concern.
He was mirroring Francie this stop. That meant that whatever Francie did—Captain
Frances Atchison Neihart—he did, mirrored the duties, the set-ups, everything.
He didn't bother Francie with asking how he'd performed. He just ran ops on his
handheld just as if it were real, and, by sometime trips out to the ship,
checked the outcome against Francie's real decisions. Every piece of information
regarding crew affairs that Francie got, he got. Every page that called Francie
away from a quiet lunch, he also got. Every meeting with traders that Francie
set up, he set up in shadow, with calls that went no further than his personal
scheduler, without ever calling ship's-com on the unsecured public system or
betraying Finity's dealings to outsiders who might have a commercial interest in
them, he continually checked his own performance against a posted captain's.
It was occasionally humbling. The fact that he'd been in a noisy bar and hadn't
felt the pocket-com summon Francie to an alterday decision on a buy/no-buy that
would have cost the ship 50,000 if he'd been in charge… that was embarrassing.
Occasionally it was satisfying: he'd been able to flash Francie real data on a
suddenly incoming ship out of Viking that had a bearing on commodities prices.
That had made 24,000 c.
And it was just as often baffling. He'd never done real trade. Madison and
Hayes, their commodities specialist, had schooled him for years on the actual
market theoreticals he'd not paid adequate attention to, in his concentration on
the intelligence of ship movements they also provided. But the market now became
important. He usually didn't lose money in his tracking of his picked and
imaginary trades, but he wasn't in Hayes' class, and didn't have Madison's grasp
of economics. Madison enjoyed it. The Old Man enjoyed it. He tried to persuade
himself he'd learn to.
Anything you were motivated to buy came from somebody equally convinced it was
time to sell. That was one mock-expensive thing he'd learned at Sol. And a good
thing his buys were all theoretical.
But trade was not the only activity senior crew was conducting. He first began
to suspect something else was going on, by reason of the unprecedented set of
messages Francie was getting from the Old Man. Meeting at 0400h/m; meeting at
0800. Meeting not with cargo officers, but with various captains of various
other ships, at the same time Madison and Alan were holding similar meetings.
The Old Man had been socializing with the stationmaster, very much as the Old
Man had done at Pell… but more surprisingly so. The Old Man had a historical
relationship with Elene Quen. It would have been remarkable if they hadn't met.
It was understandable, he supposed, that the Old Man wanted to meet with
Mariner's authorities, considering that Finity was a new and major trader in
this system.
But there was anomaly in the messages that flew back and forth, notes which
didn't to his mind reflect interest in trading statistics. There was nothing,
for instance, that they traded in common with several of those appointments;
there was a requirement of extreme security; and there were requests for
background checks on every ship on the contact list, checks that had to be run
very discreetly, via an immense download of Mariner Station confidential
records—which were open to both Alliance and Union military, by treaty, but they
were not part of the ordinary course of trade.
All these meetings, a high-security kind of goings-on. Whatever the captains
were saying to other captains didn't bear discussion in the Pioneer's conference
rooms.
He could miss items when it came to trading. He didn't fail to notice a care for
security far greater than he'd have judged necessary. A ship traded what it
traded. She didn't need to consult the captains of other ships in such tight
security. She didn't need to consult the stationmasters of Mariner in private
meetings that lasted for ten hours, in shifts.
She didn't need to have an emergency message couriered by a spacer from a shiny
alleged Union merchanter that happened to be in port—the quasi-merchanter
Boreale, which if it hauled cargo only did so as a sideline. It was a Union
cargo-carrier, it wasn't Family, and it set the hairs on JR's neck up to find
himself facing a very nice-looking, very orderly young man who just happened to
drop by a hand-written and sealed message at Finity's berth.
Union military. He'd bet his next liberty on it. The physical perfection he'd
seen in aggregations of Union personnel made his skin crawl. But the young man
smiled in a friendly way and volunteered the information that they'd just come
in from Cyteen.
"I'm pleased to meet you," the young man said, shaking his hand with an
enthusiasm that cast in doubt his suspicions the man was azi. "You have my
admiration."
"Thank you," was all he knew how to say, on behalf of Finity crew, and stumbled
his way into small talk with a sometime enemy, sometime ally who wasn't
privileged to set foot aboard. He was sure the courier was at least
gene-altered, in the way that Cyteen was known to meddle with human heredity,
and he was equally sure that the politeness and polish before him was
tape-instructed and bent on getting information out of any chance remark he
might make.
They stood behind the customs line, short of Finity's entry port, where he'd
come to prevent a Union spacer from visiting Finity's airlock, and talked for as
long as five minutes about Mariner's attractions and about the chances for
peace.
He couldn't even remember what he'd said, except that it involved the fact that
Mariner hit your account with charges for things Cyteen stations provided free.
On one level it was a commercial for their trading with Union—a ridiculous
notion, considering who they were. On the other, considering they were
discussing details about Cyteen's inmost station, about which Cyteen maintained
strict security, he supposed the man had been outrageously talkative, even
forthcoming. Had the man in fact known what Finity was? Could their absence in
remote Sol space have taken them that far out of public consciousness?
No. It was not possible. People did know. And it had been decidedly odd, that
meeting. Like a sensor-pass over them, wanting information on a more intimate
level.
When he conveyed the envelope to the ops office inside the ship and the inner
seal proved to be a private message to the Old Man—he was on the one hand not
surprised by the address to the captain in the light of all the other hush-hush
going on; and on the other, he became certain that the whiskey bottle was only
the opening salvo in the business.
"Sir," he said, proffering that inner message across the desk, in the Old Man's
downside office, next door to ops. "From Boreale?"
"Thank you," the Old Man said, receiving the envelope, and proceeded to open it
with not a word more. The message caused the mild lifting of brows and a
slightly amused look.
The junior captain was not informed regarding what. "That's all," the Old Man
said, and JR felt no small touch of irritation on his way to the door.
He walked out with the dead certainty that he'd not passed the test. He'd gotten
far enough to know something was going on: his mirroring of Francie's duty time
told him the details of everything and the central facts of nothing, and he was
starting to feel like a fool. If he, inside Finity, couldn't penetrate the
secrecy, he supposed the security was working; but he had the feeling that the
Old Man had expected some challenge from him.
It was trade they were engaged in. It involved meetings with Quen, meetings with
Mariner authorities, meetings with other merchant captains, to none of which he
was admitted, and the Old Man, sure sign of something serious going on, had
never briefed him.
Definitely it was a test. He'd grown up under the Old Man's tutelage, closely so
since he'd come under the Old Man's guardianship. In a certain measure he was
the accessible, onboard offspring no male spacer ever had—and which the Old Man
had taken no opportunities to have elsewhere. While the Old Man had a habit of
letting him find out things, figuring that an officer who couldn't wasn't good
enough… he'd often reciprocated, letting the Old Man guess whether and when he'd
gotten enough information into his hands. And he wondered by now which foot the
Old Man thought he was on, whether he was being outstandingly clever, or
outstandingly obtuse.
Meetings. All sorts of meetings. And a whiskey bottle from Mallory.
What they were doing came from Mallory, was agreed upon with Mallory… and ran a
course from Earth to Pell to a Union carrier there was no human way to have set
up a meeting with—unless it had been far in advance, at least a year in advance.
Nothing he could recall had set it up, except that a year ago a courier run had
gone out from Mallory to Pell.
If something had gone farther than Pell it wouldn't necessarily have gone
through Quen. It could have gone through a merchant captain and through Viking
or Mariner to reach Cyteen, to bring that ship out to wait for them——
Had Fletcher's delay in boarding at Pell meant a Union carrier was sitting idle
for five days?
Remarkable thought. It might account for Helm's nervousness when they'd gone in.
A bottle of whiskey from Mallory and then all these meetings at a port which
accepted a handful of carefully watched, carefully regulated Union ships.
But if one counted the shadow trade—
If one counted the shadow trade, and a hell of a lot of the shadow trade went on
along their course, Mariner had a lot of shady contact. The next station over,
Voyager, was a sieve, by reputation: it couldn't communicate with anything but
Mariner, it was a marginal station desperately clinging to existence, between
Mariner and Esperance. The stations of the Hinder Stars, the stepping-stones
which Earth had used in the pioneering days of starflight to get easy ship-runs
for the old sublighters, had seen a rebirth after the War, and then, hardly a
decade later, a rapid decline as a new route opened up to Earth trade, a route
possible for big-engined military ships and also for the big merchant haulers,
which were consequently out-competing the smaller ones and close to driving the
little marginal merchanters out of business and out of their livelihood.
There was a lot of discontent among merchanters who'd suffered during the War,
who'd remained loyal, who now saw their interests and their very existence
threatened by big ships taking the best cargo farther, and by Union hauling
cargo on military ships. They'd won the War only to see the post-War economy eat
them alive.
And the Old Man was dealing with one of those cargo-hauling Union warships, and
talking to merchanter captains and station authorities?
What concerned Finity? The Mazianni concerned them. That and their recent spate
of armed engagements, not with Mazian's Fleet, but with Mazian's supply network.
He knew that, as the condition which had applied during Finity's most recent
operations.
They'd crippled a little merchanter named Flare, not too seriously. Left her for
Mallory… just before they'd made their break with pirate-hunting and come to Sol
and then to Pell. Flare was, yes, a merchanter like other merchanters, and like
no few merchanters, dealing with the shadow market. But Flare had been operating
in that market in no casual, opportunistic way: she'd been running cargo out
beyond Sol System, a maneuver that, just in terms of its technical difficulty
and danger, lifted the hair on a starpilot's neck: jumping out short-powered,
deliberately letting Sol haul them back. It gave them a starship's almost
inconceivable speed at a short range ordinarily possible only for slow-haulers,
freighters that took years reaching a destination. But it was a maneuver which,
if miscalculated, or if aborted in an equipment malfunction, could land them in
the Sun; and what they were doing had to be worth that terrible risk.
Flare had six different identities that they'd tracked at Sol One alone. You
didn't physically see a ship when it docked behind a station wall, and Mars
Station was another security sieve, a system rife with corruption that went all
the way up into administration and all the way back into the building of the
station.
He stopped in the hallway, saying to himself that, yes, Mazian was indeed
getting supply from such ships as Flare, well known fact of their recent lives;
and, second thought, it was after that interception that the Old Man had gone to
such uncommon lengths to put Finity into a strict compliance with the station
tariff laws which every merchanter operating outright ignored, cheated on, or
simply, brazenly defied—using the very principle of merchanter sovereignty which
Finity's End had won all those years ago.
That a ship couldn't be entered or searched without permission of the ship's
owners put a ship's manifest on the honor system. A ship could be denied
docking, yes, and there'd been standoffs: stations insisted on customs search or
no fueling; but a ship then told the customs agents which areas it would get to
search, and in tacit arrangements that accompanied such searches, their own
cabins full of whiskey, as crew area, could have gone completely undetected.
Third fact. Their luxury goods weren't getting offloaded even this far along
their course, and they were still paying those transit taxes, confessing to
their load and paying. They'd laded their hold with staples, sold off a little
whiskey and coffee at Pell and kept most of it. Added Pell wines and foodstuffs,
which were high-temperature goods and which had to take the place of whiskey in
those cabins.
And they weren't offloading all those goods at Mariner, either. The plan was, he
believed now, to carry them on to Esperance, where there was, as there was at
Mariner, a pipeline to Union.
But hell if they had to go that far to sell whiskey at a profit.
Pell, Mariner, Voyager, Esperance. They were the border stations, the thin
economic line that sustained the Alliance. Add Earth, and the stations involved
were an economic bubble with a thin skin and two economic powers, Earth and
Pell, producing goods that kept the Alliance going. Mariner was the one of the
several stations that was prospering. Yes, those stations all had to stay viable
for the health of the Alliance, and yet…
Union wouldn't break the War open again to grab them: the collapse of a market
for Union's artificially inflated population and industry was too much risk.
Union always trembled on the edge of too much growth too soon and expanded its
own populations with azi destined to be workers and ultimately consumers of its
production; but populations ready-made and hungry for Union luxuries and the
all-important Union pharmaceuticals were too great a lure. Union had ended the
War with a virtual lock on all the border stations. Now Union kept a mostly
disinterested eye to the border stations' slow drift into the Alliance system,
because Union didn't want to lose markets. Union was interested in Viking;
interested in the border stations, which had gone onto the Alliance reporting
system with scarcely a quibble. Nobody, not even Union, profited if the marginal
stations collapsed, and the vigorous support of Alliance merchanters also moved
Union goods into markets Union otherwise couldn't reach.
The Old Man was talking to Union this trip. And they'd left an important
military action to go off and enter the realm of trade. Madelaine, the night of
the party, had talked about tariffs, just before she went off the topic of deals
and railed on Quen.
He must have looked an idiot to Jake, who passed him in the corridor. He was
still standing, adding things up the slow way.
But he stood there a moment longer reviewing his facts, and then turned around
and signaled a request for entry to the Old Man's office.
The light gave permission. He walked in and saw James Robert look at him with a
little surprise, and a microscopic amount of anticipation.
Trade talks with Union," he said to the Old Man. "About the shadow market. Maybe
the status of the border stations. Am I a fool?"
The Old Man grinned.
"Now what ever would make you think that?"
"Esperance and Voyager are leakier than Mars, in black market terms, and if we
really wanted profit, we'd round-trip to Earth for another load of Scotch
whiskey."
"Is that all?"
"So it's not money, and we've suddenly become immaculate about the tariff
regulations. 1 know we have principles, sir, but it seems we're making a point,
and we're agreeing to Quen's shipbuilding and paying her station tariffs by the
book."
There was a moment of stony silence. "We don't of course have a linkage."
"No, sir, of course we don't. We got Fletcher for the ship. We got Quen to agree
to something else and we're talking to Union couriers. I'd say we advised Union
as early as last year we were shifting operations, and we promised them that
Quen can pull Esperance and Voyager into agreement on whatever-it-is without her
really raising a sweat, unless Union makes those two stations some backdoor
offer to become solely Union ports. And Union won't do that because they're a
military bridge to Earth and it would as good as declare war. Mariner, though,
could play both ends against the middle. Except if the merchanters themselves
threaten boycott. That would make Mariner fall in line."
A twitch tugged the edge of the Old Man's mouth. "Mariner isn't going to fight
us. But Mariner will play both sides. Security-wise, you just don't tell Mariner
anything except what you expect it to do. Its police are hair-triggered bullies,
on dockside. But its politicians have no nerves for anything that could lead to
another crisis or a renewal of Union claims on the station. The populace of
Mariner is invested in rebuilding, trade, profit. They're squealing in anguish
over the thought of lowered tariffs, but they're interested in the proposition
of merchanters doing all their trading on dockside"
"All their trading."
"If the stations lower tariffs the key merchanters will agree to pay the tax on
goods-in-transit and agree that goods will move on station docks. Only on
station docks. That lets us trace Mazian's supply routes far more accurately. It
stops goods floating around out there at jump-points where they become Mazian's
supply. And it stops Union from building merchant ships… that's the quid pro quo
we get from Union: we hold up to them the prospect of stopping Mazian and
stabilizing trade, which they desperately want."
He let go a breath. Stopping the smuggling… a way of life among merchanters
since the first merchanter picked up a little private stock to trade at his
destination… revised all the rules of what had grown into a massive system of
non-compliance.
"Are the captains going with it, sir?"
"Some. With some—they're agreeing because I say try it. That's why the first one
to propose the change had to be this ship. We're the oldest, we're the richest,
and that's why we had to be the ones to go back to trade, put our profits at
risk, lead the merchanters, pay the tariffs, and call in debts from Quen. The
shipbuilding she wants to launch is an easy project compared to bringing every
independent merchanter in space into compliance. But her deal does make a
necessary point with Union—we build the merchant ships and they don't. Building
that ship of hers actually becomes a bonus with the merchanters, a proof we're
asserting merchanter rights against Union, not just giving up rights as one more
sacrifice to beat Mazian. The black market is going to go out of fashion, and
merchanters are going to police it. Not stations, and not Union warships.
Esperance and Voyager are, you're right, weak points that have to get something
out of this, and the promise of their clientele paying tariffs on all the wealth
passing through there on its way to Cyteen is going to revise their universe."
"I'm amazed," was all he found to say.
"Mazian, of course, isn't going to like it. Neither are the merchanters that are
trading with him. As some are. We know certain names. We just haven't had a way
to charge them with misbehaviors. Consequently we are a target, Jamie. I've
wondered how much you could guess and when you'd penetrate the security screen.
Pardon me for using you as a security gauge, but if you've figured it, I can
assure myself that others with inside knowledge, on the opposing side, can
figure it out, too. So I place myself on notice that we have to assume from now
on that they do know, and that we need to be on our guard. We're about to
threaten the living of the most unprincipled bastards among our fellow
merchanters. Not to mention the suppliers on station."
"Sabotage?"
"Sabotage. Direct attack. Between you, me, and the senior crew, Jamie-lad, I'm
hoping we get through this with no one trying it. But if you hear anything,
however minor, report it, I don't want one of you held hostage, I don't want a
poison pill, I don't want a Mazianni carrier turning up in our path between here
and Esperance. The danger will go off us once we've gotten our agreement. But if
they can prevent us securing an agreement in the first place, by taking this
ship out, or by taking me out, they'd go that far, damn sure they would."
"I've put Fletcher out there on the docks with three kids."
"Oh, he's been watched. He's being watched." The Old Man gave a quiet chuckle.
"He's got those kids walking in step and saying yes, sir in unison."
It was literally true. He'd been watching Fletcher, too, on the quiet.
"But we've got Champlain under watch, too," the Old Man said. "Champlain's
listed for Voyager. They're due to go out ahead of us, six days from now."
JR was aware of that schedule, too. Champlain and China Clipper both were
suspect ships on their general list of watch-its. A suspect ship running ahead
of them on their route was worrisome.
"Once they've cleared the system," the Old Man said, "you'll see our departure
time change for a six-hour notice. Boreale can out-muscle them on the jump, and
Boreale is offering to run guard for us. I think we can rely on them. Let
somebody else worry for a change. We'll carry mail for Voyager and Esperance. We
can clear the security requirements for the postal contract and I'll guarantee
Champlain can't."
Mail was zero-mass cargo. It made them run light. The Union ship Boreale,
perhaps in the message he'd just hand-delivered to the Old Man, was going to
chase Champlain into the jump-point and assure that they got through safely.
How the times had changed!
"Yes, sir," he said "Glad to know that."
So he took his leave and the Old Man returned to his correspondence with
Boreale.
So they were pulling out early, to inconvenience those making plans. It had the
flavor of the old days, the gut-tightening apprehension of coming out of jump
expecting trouble. And it was chancier, in some ways. With Mallory you always
knew where you stood. The other side shot at you. You shot at them. That was
simple.
Here, part of the merchanters who should be working on their side was working
for the Mazianni and at the same time, representatives of their former enemy
Union might be working for Mallory.
He supposed he'd better talk to the juniors about security. The juniors,
especially the junior-juniors with Fletcher, were, on one level, sacrosanct: any
dock crawler that messed with a ship's junior crew was asking for cracked
skulls, no recourse to station police, just hand-to-hand mayhem, in the oldest
law there was among merchanters. Even station cops ignored the enforcement of
simple justice.
But he didn't want to deliver the Old Man any surprises. And Fletcher was worth
a special thought. Attaching Jeremy to him with an invisible chain seemed to him
the brightest thing he'd done at this port.
Chapter XVI
Contents - Prev/Next
Games, vids, more games, restaurants with a perpetual sugar high. It was
everything a kid could dream of… and that was when Fletcher began to know he
was, at stationbred seventeen, growing old. The body couldn't take the sugar
hits. The ears grew tired of the racketing games. The stomach grew tired of
being pitched upside down after full meals. So did Vince's, and the ship's
sometime lawyer lost his three frosty shakes in a game parlor restroom, and
didn't want to contemplate anything lime-colored afterward, but Vince was back
on the rides faster than Fletcher would have bet.
It meant, when he took them back to the sleepover nightly, that they were down
to the frazzled ends, exhausted and laying extravagant plans for return visits.
Linda had bought a tape on exotic fish.
And he'd gotten them back alive, through a very good meal at the restaurant,
past the sleepover's jammed vid parlor. He loaded them into the lift.
"Hello," someone female said, and he fell into a double ambush of very
good-looking women he'd never met, who had absolutely no hesitation about a
hands-on introduction.
"On duty," he said. He'd learned to say that. Jeremy and the juniors were
laughing and hooting from the open elevator, and he ricocheted into a third
ambush, this one male, in the same ship's green, who brushed a hand past his arm
a hair's-breadth from offense and grinned at him.
"What's your room number?"
"I'm on duty," he said, and got past, not without touches on his person, not
without blushing bright red. He felt it.
The lift left without him, the kids upward bound, and he dived for the stairs.
"Fletcher!" a Finity voice called out, and he caught himself with his hand on
the bannister.
It was Wayne, with a grin on his face.
"What's the trouble?"
"Not a thing," Wayne said cheerfully, and brushed off the importunate incomers
with a wave of his arm.
"The kids just went up."
"They'll survive," Wayne said "Join us in the bar."
"I'm not supposed to."
"JR's with us." Wayne clapped him on the shoulder. "Come on in."
He'd not had a better offer—on first thought.
On second, he was exceedingly wary it was a set-up.
Except that Wayne had been one of the solid, the reliable ones. He decided to go
to the door of the bar and have a look and risk the joke, if there was one.
It was as advertised, the senior-juniors with a table staked out and a festive
occasion underway. Wayne set a hand on his back and steered him toward the
group. JR beckoned him closer.
He took it for an order, set his face and walked up to the table… where Lyra
cleared back, Bucklin pulled up a chair, and JR signaled service. Chad was
there, Nike, Wayne, Sue, Connor, Toby, Ashley… the whole batch of them.
"Our novice here just shed three offers," Wayne announced. "They're in tight
orbit about this lad."
"Not surprised," Lyra said. "I would, if he weren't off-limits."
"You would, if you weren't off-limits," Connor gibed. "Come on, be honest."
He wasn't sure whether that was a joke at his expense or not, but the waiter
showed up and asked him what he was drinking. He took a chance and ordered wine.
Talk went on around him, letting him fall out of the spotlight. He was content
with that. They talked about the sights on the station. They talked about the
progress of the loading, they talked about the rowdy arrival—it was a freighter
named Belize, a small but reputable ship, no threat to anyone—and he had his
glass of wine, which tasted good and hit a stomach long unaccustomed to it. Chad
ordered another beer. There were second orders all around.
"I'd better get up to the kids," he said, and got up and started to move off.
"Good job," JR said soberly. "Fletcher. Good job. If you want to stay another
round, stay."
"Thanks," he said, feeling a little desperate, a little trapped. More than a
little buzzed by the wine. "But I'd better get up there."
"Fletcher," Lyra said "Welcome in."
Maybe it was a test. Maybe he'd passed. He didn't know. He offered money for his
share of the tab, but JR waved it off and said it was on them.
"Yessir," he said. Thank you." He escaped, then, not feeling in control of the
encounter, not feeling sure of himself in his graceless duck out of the
gathering and out of the bar.
But they'd invited him. His nerves were still buzzing with that and the alcohol,
and if spacers from Belize tried to snag him he drifted through them in a haze,
unnoticing. He rode the lift up to the level of his room, got out in a corridor
peaceful and deserted except for a slightly worse for wear spacer from Belize,
and entered his palace of a room, where he had every comfort he could ask for.
He'd written to Bianca. Things aren't so bad as I'd thought…
This evening he undressed, showered, and flung himself down in a huge bed that,
as Jeremy had said, you almost wanted safety belts for… and thought about
Downbelow, not from pain this time, but from the comfort of a luxury he'd not
imagined. Memories of Downbelow came to him now at odd moments as those of a
distant place—so beautiful; but the hardship of life down there was
considerable, and he remembered that, too—only to blink and find himself
surrounded by the sybaritic luxury of an accommodation he'd never in the world
thought he could afford. He had so many sights swimming in his head it was like
the glass-walled water, the huge fish patrolling a man-made ocean. His worlds
seemed like that, insulated from each other.
His hurts tonight were all in that other world. He'd felt good tonight. He'd
been anxious the entire while, not quite believing it was innocent until he was
out of that bar without a trick played on him, but his cousins had made the move
to include him, and he discovered—
He discovered he was glad of it.
He shut his eyes, ordered the lights out…
A knock came at the door. A flash at the entry-requested light.
Cursing, he got up, grabbed a towel as the nearest clothing-substitute, and went
to see who it was before he opened the door.
Jeremy.
"What's the trouble?" he asked, and didn't bother to turn the lights on,
standing there with a bathtowel wrapped around him and every indication of
somebody trying to sleep.
"Vince and Linda went downstairs. I told them not to. But you weren't here. And
they said they were going down to check…"
"I'm going to kill Vince," he said. "I may do it before breakfast." The lovely
buzz from the wine was going away. Fast. He leaned against the doorframe, seeing
duty clear. "Tell you what. You go downstairs, you tell them we just got a lot
of strangers off another ship, some of them are drunk, and if they don't get
their precious butts back up here before I get dressed and get down there,
they're going to be sorry."
"I'm gone," Jeremy said, and hurried.
He dressed. There was no appearance at the door. He went downstairs, into the
confusion of more Belize crew of both genders in the lobby, wanting the lift,
noisy, straight in from celebrating their arrival in port—and their collection
of spacers of different ships, not Belize and not Finity. He escaped a drunken
invitation and escaped into the game parlor where Belizers were the sole crew in
evidence—except the juniors, in an open-ended vid-game booth in which Jeremy,
not faultless, was an earnest spectator.
Then Jeremy spotted him, and with a frantic glance tugged at Linda to get her
attention to approaching danger. Vince, his head in the sim-lock, was oblivious
until he walked up and tapped Vince on the shoulder.
Vince nearly lost an ear getting his head out of the port.
"You're not supposed to be down here without me."
"So you're here."
"I'm also sleepy, approaching a lousy mood, and the crowd in here's changed,"
Fletcher said.
"You don't have to be in charge of us," Vince said. "You're younger than I am!"
"So act your age. Upstairs."
"Chad never chased after us."
"Fine. I'll call Chad out of the bar."
"No," Linda said "We're going"
"Thought so," he said "Up and out of here." He'd been a Vince type, once upon a
half a dozen years ago. And it amazed him how being on the in-charge side of bad
behavior gave him no sympathy. "Come on. I'm not kidding."
"We weren't doing a damn thing!" Vince said
"Come on," He patted Vince on the rump. "Still got your card wallet?"
Vince felt of the pocket. Fast. Frightened.
"Your good luck you do," he said, and gave it back to Vince.
"Yeah," Jeremy said mercilessly. And: "That's wild. How'd you do that?"
"I'm not about to show you." He put a hand on Jeremy's back and on Vince's and
propelled them and Linda through the jam of adult, drunken Belizers at the door.
"Up the stairs," he said to them, figuring the lifts were likely to be full of
foolishness, and unidentified spacers. He thought of resorting to JR, then
decided it was better to get the juniors into their rooms. He escorted them up
three flights, unmolested, onto their floor, just as a flock of spacers arrived
in the lift and came out onto the floor, with baggage, checking in, he supposed,
but the situation was clearly different than what seemed ordinary.
"In the rooms and stay there," he said, with an anxious eye to the situation
down the hall, where somebody was fighting with a room key. "Is it always like
this?" he had to ask the juniors.
"No," Jeremy said.
It was supposed to be a tight-rules station. He knew Pell would have had the
cops circulating by now. "Keep the doors locked," he said, saw all three juniors
behind locked doors, and went back down the stairs.
A Finity senior in uniform met him, coming up: the tag said James Arnold.
"We've got kind of a rowdy lot up there," he said to his senior cousin.
"Noticed that," Arnold said. "Where are you going?"
"JR," he decided, his original intention, and he sped on down the stairs to the
lobby, eeled past a couple more of the rowdy crew, and started through the lobby
with the intention of going to the bar.
JR, however, was at the front desk talking urgently to the manager.
He waited there, not sure whether he'd acted the fool, until JR turned away from
the conversation, the gist of which seemed to be the Belize crew.
"We've got them on our floor," he said to JR without preface. "James Arnold just
went up there."
"Good," JR said. "Were they all Belize?"
"Some. Not all."
"It's all right. Management screwed up, but we've checked some personnel out to
other sleepovers and they just put ten Belizers up where we'd agreed they
wouldn't be. They've a little ship, an honest ship, that's the record we have.
Just louder than hell. Just keep your doors locked. It's not theft you have to
worry about."
He didn't understand for about two beats. Then did. And blushed.
"Seriously," JR said, and bumped his upper arm. "Go in uniform tomorrow.
Juniors, too. That'll cool them down. Their senior officers know now there are
Finity juniors on the third floor. Keep an eye on who comes in, what patch
they're wearing. We've got lockouts on China Clipper, Champlain, Filaree, and
Far Reach, for various reasons. If you see those patches, I want to know it on
the pocket-com."
"What about the ones that aren't wearing patches?"
"We can't tell. That's the problem. But it's what we've got. Keep the
junior-juniors glued to you. The ships I named are a serious problem in this
port. Most are fine. But some crews aren't."
JR went off to talk to senior crew. He went back upstairs, not sure what to make
of that last statement, thinking, with station-bred nerves, about piracy, and
telling himself it might be just intership rivalry, maybe somebody Finity had a
grudge with, and it wasn't anything to have drawn him in a panic run
down-stairs, but JR hadn't said he was a fool. He picked up more propositions on
his way through the crowd near the bar. A woman on the stairs invited him to her
room for a drink—"Hey, you," was how it started, to his blurred perception, and
ended with, "prettiest eyes in a hundred lights about. I've got a bottle in my
kit."
"No," he said "Sorry, on duty. Can't." He said it automatically, and then it
occurred to him how very much the woman looked like Bianca.
He was suddenly homesick as well as rattled. He gained his floor, where Arnold,
in Finity silver, was conspicuously on watch. He felt strangely safer by that
presence, and his mind skittered off again to a pretty face and an invitation
he'd just escaped just downstairs.
Gorgeous. Not drunk. And part of a problem that his ship's officers had sallied
up here to head off. A problem that had chased the small-statured juniors to
their rooms.
Interested in him, he thought dazedly as he put his keycard in the door slot.
Interested not because he was from Finity and Finity was rich. He was in
civvies. He could have been anybody. She was interested in him. That absolutely
beautiful woman had wanted him.
His door opened. He made it in. Undamaged. Alone. Safe with the snick of that
lock, and telling himself there had to be something critically wrong with his
masculinity that he hadn't said the hell with the three brats and gone off with
the most glm-orous—hell, the only invitation of his life, including Bianca.
Intelligence, something said. Even while the invitation stayed a warm and
arousing thought. He'd made it through a spacer riot, well… at least a moment of
excitement that had gotten the officers' attention. His encounter on the stairs
was probably a wonderful young woman. He might even meet her in the morning… but
no, he had specific orders to the contrary. And what she wanted was too far for
a stationer lad on his first voyage and she was…
What was she, really, looking maybe late twenties?
Thirty? Forty?
He felt a little dazed. Not just about her. He'd caught invitations from all
over. He, Fletcher Neihart, who'd only in the last year gotten a real date. He
didn't know why the woman had looked at him, except here he didn't have a rep as
a trouble-maker working against him.
Maybe he had shiny-new written all over him. Maybe—
Maybe what that woman had seen was a man, not a boy. Maybe that was who he could
be.
He phoned the kids to be absolutely sure they were in their rooms and assured
them there was a Finity senior on watch. He had another shower after all that
running up and down stairs, and flung himself down in bed, in soft pillows, with
his hands under his head.
The ceiling shifted colors subtly, one of the room's amenities—something just…
just to be pretty. Something you had to pay for. And spacers lived like this.
Rich ones did… unlike anything he'd ever experienced.
But that was a bauble. The warmth in the bar tonight, the acceptance with JR's
crowd, that they hadn't been obliged to offer him—the pretty young women trying
to attract his attention, that was the amazing thing in his days here. And
tonight, the knowledge, dizzying as it was, that when things went chancy he
wasn't alone, he wasn't counted a fool, and he had a shipful of people to turn
up as welcome as Arnold and JR had done, to fend off trouble and know solidly
what to do.
It was damned seductive, so seductive it put a lump in his throat despite the
thin sounds of revelry that punctured the recent peace.
Did he still miss Downbelow? He conjured Old River in his mind, saw Patch
laughing at him from the high bank, and yet…
Yet he couldn't hear the sound, not Patch's voice, not Melody's. He could only
see the sunlight and the drifting pollen skeins. He couldn't remember the
sounds.
And Melody and Patch by now believed he'd gone… Bianca had gone on with her
studies, passed biochem, he did hope. What could she possibly know about where
he was?
He'd written to the Wilsons. I'm fine. I've done a lot of laundry. Now they've
put me in charge of the kids. Who are older than I am. You'll find that funny.
But my station years count, and they're far smaller than I am. I'm back doing
vid-games and losing… I know you'll be amused…
To Bianca he'd begun to write I love you… and he'd stopped, in the sudden
knowledge that what they'd begun had never had time to grow to that word. He'd
agonized over it. He'd not even been able to claim a heartfelt I miss you…
because he'd gotten so far away and so removed from anything she'd understand
that he didn't think about her except when he thought about Downbelow.
He'd written… instead. …I think about you, I wish you could see this place. It
seems so close to Pell, now. Before, it seemed so far…
He'd written… in a crisis of honesty… I've kind of bounced around, people here,
people there. I've never dealt with anybody I didn't choose…
If he added to that tonight, he'd write ... I don't think any group of people
since I was a kid ever looked me up and invited me in… but they did that,
tonight. It felt…
But he wouldn't write that to Bianca, no admission she wasn't the one and only
of his life… you weren't supposed to tell a girl that. No admission he'd had a
dozen offers tonight. No admission he'd felt excited…
No admission he'd been scared as hell walking up to that group in the bar, and
sure they were going to pull one on him, but he'd gone anyway, because he
wanted… wanted what they held out to him. He wanted inclusion. A circle closing
around him. He'd never felt complete in all his life.
He disliked Chad and Sue and Connor with less energy than he'd felt before he'd
spent a few days ashore. Now they were familiar faces in a sea of strangers.
He'd ended up talking to the lot of them, who'd made nothing of any grudge he
had. He'd just been in, and the double-cross and the pain and the bruises and
everything else had added up simply to being asked to that table to break one of
JR's rules and to be regarded as one of them, not one of the kids.
That event was unexpectedly important to him, so important it buzzed him more
than the wine, more than the woman trying to make connection with him, more than
anything that had happened.
It's a setup, he kept saying to himself. He'd believed things before. He'd even
believed one of his foster-brothers making up to him, best friends, until it
turned out to be a setup, and a fight he'd won.
And lost. Along with childish trust
He was dangerously close to believing, tonight, not the way he'd believed in
Melody and Patch, nothing so dramatic…just a call to a table where he'd not been
remarkable, just one of the set. He was theirs, because they had to find
something to do with him. Making his life hell had been an option to them, but
not the one they'd taken.
It was better than his relations with people at the Base, when he added it up.
He'd come in there determined to succeed and George Willett, who'd planned to do
just the minimum, had instantly hated him, so naturally the rest had to. He'd
come aboard Finity mad and surly, and JR, give him credit, had been more
level-headed than he had been, more generous than he had been…
He didn't exactly call truce or accept his situation on Finity. But for the
first sickening moment… he wasn't sure if he knew how to get home again. The
first actual place he'd visited, and he felt… separated… from all he had known,
and connected to the likes of JR and Jeremy and a grandmother who gave him a
handful of change on a first liberty.
He didn't know what was the matter with him, or why a handful of change and a
drink in a bar could suddenly be important to him… more important than two
downers he'd come to love. It was as if he had Downbelow in one hand and Finity
in the other and was weighing them, trying to figure out which weighed the
heaviest when he couldn't look at them or feel them at the same time.
It was as if the sounds had come rushing back to him and he could see Melody
saying, in her strange, lilting voice, You go walk, Fetcher?
You grow up, Fetcher?
Find a human answer… Fletcher?
Maybe he had to take the walk. Maybe the answer was out there.
Or maybe it was in that unprecedented come and join us he'd, for the first time
in a decade, gotten from other human beings.
"If Pell reaches agreement," the Mariner stationmaster said, and James Robert
declared, "Then bet on it. It's surer than the market."
Senior captains of a significant number of ships in port had happened to have
business on Mariner's fifth level Blue at the same time, and found their way to
a meeting unhampered this time by Champlain's attempts to get into the circuit
of information. Champlain was outbound this morning, and good riddance, JR
thought, if Champlain weren't headed to their next port
But in the kind of dispensation Finity had long been able to win on credentials
the Old Man swore they'd resigned, the Union merchanter Boreale changed its
routing and prepared an early departure.
In the same direction.
"If the tariff lowers and the dock charges lower," the senior captain of Belize
said, "we'd sign."
Talk of tariffs and taxes, two subjects JR had never found particularly engaging
until he saw the looks on the faces around him, senior captains of ships larger
than Belize looking as if they'd swallowed something sour.
Belize, a small, old ship, incapable of doing much but Mariner to Pell, Pell to
Viking and back again, saw its economics affected if the agreement of Mariner
and Pell pulled Viking into line with that agreement. Viking's charges, JR was
learning, were a matter of complaint among Alliance merchanters—while Union
willingly paid the higher fees, for reasons Alliance merchanters saw as simply a
pressure against them, encouraging the stations to excess.
A junior supplying water and running courier, as he'd been asked to do, he and
Bucklin, could learn a great deal of tensions he'd known existed, but which he'd
never mapped—the narrow gap between a station's charges for supplying a port and
a ship's costs of operation, a slim gap in which profit existed for the smaller
carriers.
But there were the windfall items: the few ships that had the power to make the
runs to Earth, in particular, had enormous opportunity… and to his stunned
surprise, the Old Man put that extreme profit up for trade as well.
A cartel, skimming off that profit, would assure the survival of the marginal
ships, the old, the outmoded. An entire system of trade, giving critical breaks
to the smaller ships.
"It won't work," Bucklin had said in the rest break after they'd first heard it.
"We'll take less for our goods?"
"If the little ships fail," he'd said to Bucklin, the argument he'd heard from
the Old Man, himself, "Union's going to move in."
Bucklin thought about that in long silence.
When that argument was advanced to them, the other captains had much the same
reaction—and came to much the same conclusion.
Then it seemed the major obstacle would be Union.
But, JR reasoned for himself, and saw it borne out in arguments he was hearing,
Union, growing among stars they had only vague reports of, responded to the
pirate threat with a fear out of all proportion to the size of the Mazianni
Fleet.
Probably it had to do with the fact that Union had been consistently outpiloted,
outgunned, and outflanked.
Possibly it even had to do with fear of a third human establishment in space, an
admittedly unhappy situation they'd all talked about aboard, but only in the
small hours of the watches and not in public. Union set great importance on
planning the human future, and a third human power arising from a base somewhere
outside their knowledge might not be a comfortable thought for them.
"What we have," the Old Man said now in his argument to the gathering of
captains and Mariner Station administration, "is a shadow route and a shadow
trade that's running clear from Earth, dealing in exotics like whiskey, woods,
that sort of thing, biologicals funneled on the short routes out of Sol… one
ship we did catch, Flare, a Sol-based merchanter doing short-haul trade—not
necessarily with Mazian, but for Mazian."
"Mazian's getting the profit, you mean." That was Walt Frazier of Lily Maid, a
small hauler, an old acquaintance of Madison's and the Old Man, by what JR
guessed.
"There's a well-developed shadow trade at Earth," the Old Man said. "As you may
know. Mars is a rich market. Luxury goods get off Earth, they go toward Mars. A
certain amount doesn't get there… written up as breakage during lift, just plain
left off the manifests. And the mini-network leaks a certain amount via
short-haul suppliers right on the docks of Sol One… but there's a fairly brazen
trade—or there's been a fairly brazen trade—siphoning off goods to ships the
like of Flare and several others we've been watching. They've been short-hopping
their illicits out just to the edge of the system where others are picking it up
and trading it on. We think certain interests in the Earth Company are
supporting Mazian by running cargo for him, and that there's a link between
thefts and smuggling in Sol One district—not war materiel: luxury goods.
Paintings. Foodstuffs. It's high money. Money does buy Mazian what he wants."
Among the captains, among four, there were a few exchanged glances and slow
nods, sharp interest from the others.
"And Flare is no longer operating," Joshua asked.
"Not Flare, but a ship named Jubal is. Was when we left Sol. Operating under
Mallory's close curiosity. We want to know where the goods are coming from, but
we also have an interest in tracing the route through the black market, and
figuring how it translates into supplies. We find it ironical that the primary
market for illicit luxuries is Cyteen. And the second-largest is Pell. Every
credit spent in the black market has a good chance of coming back as ammunition
and supply for the Fleet. It's picked up, run through the Hinder Stars, comes
into this reach not necessarily at Mariner: more likely at Voyager, where
security is less exacting, and then it travels on to Esperance, where it
connects to Cyteen. But those are the heavy items. Big-time smuggling. In the
same way, and adding up, money out of the whole shadow market is drifting into
Mazian's hands through the honest merchanters. People just like you and me. It's
a situation that can collapse stations. Collapse our markets. And have Mazian
and Union going at it hammer and tongs again across Alliance routes. All of us
will be fighting, if that happens, either that, or we'll be hauling for Union
trying to beat Mazian, and hoping to hell we don't get hit by raiders the first
voyage and the second and the third… That's the situation we came from, and if
we don't get fairness out of the stations regarding our needs, and if we don't
get compliance out of our own brothers and sisters of the merchant Alliance to
stop the trade that's feeding Mazian, we'll see the bad days back again and hell
staring us in the face. You remember the feeling. You've been out in the dark,
at some jump-point with a hostile on the scan and with no support in ten
lightyears. Don't leave Mallory in that condition. We're decent people. Let's
stick to principles, here. Let's realize how much the shadow-market does amount
to, and who's profiting."
God, the Old Man could rivet the rest of them. And he could use words like
principles, because he had them and acted by them. Nobody moved. JR thought,
This is how it was all those years ago. This is how he got them to unite in the
action that started the War.
"So what percentage are we talking about?" Lily Maid asked, to the point.
The Mariner stationmaster thought he was going to answer. The Old Man said:
"Pell's talking ten."
There was a slow intake of breath.
"No higher," Lily Maid said, and Genevieve agreed.
"Are we talking about ten across the board?" the station-master wanted to know.
'The luxury goods—"
"The point is," the Old Man said, "voluntary compliance. We voluntarily confess
the true manifest. If we install incentives to hedge the truth, if we need a
rulebook to tell what's right and wrong, there won't be universal compliance.
Flat ten."
There were long sighs, frowns, shiftings of position, literal and maybe
figurative. A junior witness to a major turn in human history didn't dare take
so much as a deep breath.
"It's a talking point," the stationmaster said "If Pell agrees on a universal
ten. If the black market stops. If Union agrees on the same percentage."
"We believe we can negotiate that point. They don't want a resurgence of raids.
And they're worried about what's getting onto the market. The luxury trade is
sending biologicals right back down the pipeline, right to Earth. Surprisingly,
Cyteen shares one thing with us: the belief that the motherworld, as our genetic
wellspring, should be sacrosanct . In that regard, and in what it takes to cut
Mazian off cold, we will have their cooperation. The fact that they may harbor
notions of cutting harder deals after we eliminate Mazian as a threat means that
we have two jobs to do, one of which is to strengthen, not weaken, our weakest
and slowest ships. This proposal of ours answers both needs."
They were listening. JR stood unmoving during discussion. He saw, from his
vantage, Bucklin, who stood guard outside the meeting room, talking with Thomas
B., who'd arrived with some news. Thomas B. left.
Then he saw Bucklin signal him, a fast set of hand-signals that said, in the way
of spacers who sometimes worked in difficult environments, Talk, Urgent,
Official.
He made his way around the edge of the room, and outside.
"Champlainers were in the Pioneer last watch," Bucklin said. "And Champlain's on
the boards for depart in two hours. Alan just found it out."
"God."Their security was breached and the perpetrators were headed out toward a
dark point of their next route. Armed and hostile perpetrators. "Where were
they?"
"Came in with Belize. Spent the night and left this morning. Belize's captain
doesn't know. They didn't have access to the ID we got from customs."
"Damn." They'd used their military credentials to get official records on the
Champlain and China Clipper crews. Belize couldn't do that. And even knowing
hadn't enabled them to spot everybody that came and went, any more than they
could go about warning other ships about ships that hadn't committed any actual
crime. "Just last watch, you're sure."
"Best I know, yes. Alan's handling it. And they're outbound; they went up on the
boards in the last thirty minutes. Apparently it was two of the Champlainers,
sleeping over with one Belize crew, on her invitation."
"Some party." He cast a look back through the glass where the meeting was still
going on, still at a delicate point. It wasn't a time to disturb the Old Man and
Madison. It wasn't a time to confront the Belize senior captain, who'd helped
support their proposals, among others. "I suppose it's too much to ask that the
Belizer remembers exactly what he told them, or what they discussed."
"She. And no, by what seems, she thinks there were two and she thinks they never
left the room."
Belize was a lively ship, say that for them.
"Can't interrupt right now," he said, "but five'll get you ten we get an early
board call. We might overjump that tub if we got moving. Let them stare down our
guns." He had his back to the windows to preclude lip-reading and didn't want to
create more distraction than his extended receipt of some message from Bucklin
might have done already. "I'd better get back in there," he said. "Nothing we
can do from here. Where's Tom gone?"
"Just passing the word about. Alan's orders."
"We'll go on boarding call. Just watch."
He went back into the meeting, took up a quiet, confident stance a little nearer
the door.
Belize had had a particularly hard run from Tripoint, and a mechanical that had
risked their lives getting in. To the Belize family's delight, they'd sold their
cargo right off the dock, the problem had turned out to be a relatively
inexpensive module, and he had every sympathy for the Belizers' desire to
celebrate, in a sleepover far fancier than they ordinarily afforded. They'd
lodged their juniors at the more junior-friendly Newton, and hadn't remotely
expected youngsters in a fancy lodging like the Pioneer. That was easily sorted
out, and they weren't bad people. The adult and randy Belizers, however, had
proceeded to drink the bar dry, and gone down the row, looking for assignations
the hour they'd docked—some of Finity's own had cheerfully taken them up on the
offer. They'd been quieter neighbors since the first night, goodnaturedly
gullible as they were, and now, damn! one of them had taken up with a ship their
own captain had put the avoid sign on.
Meanwhile the Belize senior captain had had a very cordial session with the Old
Man of Finity's End, and word was that bottles from Finity's cargo, duly
tariffed and taxed, were making their way to various ships. If spies were taking
notes of the number of captains who got together in a shifting combination of
venues, they must have a full-time occupation; what worried him, and what he was
sure would worry the Old Man, was the likelihood that Belize's internal security
was as lax as its concept of restricted residency.
If the Belize captain had talked too much to his own crew, some of their
business could have gotten into that sleepover room last night and right into
the ears of curious Champlainers.
Who now were outbound.
It had to be a successful stay on dockside, Fletcher said to himself: Jeremy had
a stomachache and all of them had run out of money. Here they were, standing in
line for customs three days earlier than their scheduled board call, a moving
line. Customs was just waving them through.
Their loading must have gone faster than estimated. And Fletcher was relatively
proud of himself. He'd had the pocket-com switch in the right position; he'd
gotten the call, figured out the complexities of the pocket-com to be able to
key in an acknowledgement that they were coming, and gotten the juniors to the
dock with no more delay than a modest and reasonable request from Jeremy to make
a last-minute dive into a shop near the Pioneer to get a music tape he'd been
eyeing. And some candy.
So Jeremy wasn't so sick as to forswear future sweets.
And instead of the slow-moving clearance of passports in their exit, they
advanced through customs at a walk, flashed the passport through the reader on
the counter, only observed by a single customs agent, tossed their duffles
uninspected onto the moving cargo belt for loading, and walked up the ramp to
the access tube, where for brief periods the airlock stood open at both ends to
let groups of them walk through.
"They are in a hurry," Linda said when she saw that.
"New Old Rules," Vince said. "Maybe they're going to do that after this. No more
lines."
"We've got a security alert," a senior cousin behind them said, breath frosting
in the chill of the yellow, ribbed access.
"About what?" Jeremy asked.
"Just a ship we don't like. But we're not going out alone." The cousin ruffled
Jeremy's hair and Jeremy did the time immemorial wince and flinch. "No need to
worry."
"So who are they?" Fletcher asked, not sure what security alert entailed,
whether it was a trade rivalry or a question of guns and something far more
serious.
"What we've got," the cousin behind that cousin said—one was Linny and the other
was Charlie T.—"what we've got is a rimrunner for the other side. But we've also
got an escort. Union ship Boreale is going to go our route with us."
A Union ship?
"Do we trust them?" Fletcher asked.
"Sometimes," Charlie T. said. And about that time the airlock opened up and
started letting them through, a fast bunch-up and a press to get on through and
out of the bitter cold. They went through in a puff of fog that condensed around
them. They'd put down a metal grid for traction as they entered the corridor,
and it was frosted and puddled from previous entries.
Mini-weather, Fletcher thought, his head spinning with the possibilities of
Union escorts, an emergency boarding. But the cousins around him remained
cheerful, talking most about Mariner restaurants and what they'd found in the
way of bargains in the shops. A cousin had a truly outlandish shirt on under the
silvers. And it was a strong contrast to his last boarding in that he knew
exactly where he was going, he knew they'd been posted to galley for their
undock duty—laundry would have been entirely unfair to draw this soon—and he was
actually looking toward his cabin, his bunk, his mattress and the comforts of
his own belongings after the haste and nonstop party of dockside, which he'd
thought would be hard to leave, when he'd gone out. He'd bought some books he
was anxious to read, he'd bought games that promised hours of unraveling, and
even a block of modeling medium—a long time since he'd had the chance to do any
model-making; he'd used to be good at it.
He took the sharp turn into the undock-fitted rec hall, herded his three charges
in to the rows of rails and standing cousins, but he had second thoughts about
Jeremy.
"Are you all right?" he asked, delaying at the start of the row and holding up
traffic. "You want to talk to Charlie, maybe get something for your stomach?
Maybe go to the sit-down takehold?"
"No," Jeremy said, and flashed a valiant grin. "I'm fine."
"If he gets sick everybody'll kill him," Linda said helpfully as Jeremy went on
into the row.
"Just if you don't feel right, tell me."
"No, I'm fine," Jeremy said, and they all packed themselves into the eighth row
among an arriving stream of cousins.
Everybody had called to confirm they were on their way, customs was expediting,
and the ship was go when ready, that was the buzz floating in the assembly. It
was the kind of thing Finity had used to do, or so the talk around him
indicated; and at the rate the prelaunch area was filling up they were going to
be clearing dock… the estimate was… maybe in twenty minutes.
Boreale, their Union escort, was on the same shortened schedule.
"What did this ship do?" Fletcher asked of Charles T. "Why are we suspicious?"
"It left dock early. Going our way."
"Is it going to shoot at us, or what?"
"It could have that intention," Charles T. said. "That's why Boreale is going
with us."
"What they think," said another cousin, turning around from the row in front,
"is that Champlain—that's the ship in question—is going to report somewhere
ahead of us. It's an outside possibility it might want to take us on. But not
two of us. Boreale's a merchanter only in its spare time, and it'd like that
ship to make a move. If we can build a case that ship's Mazianni, there are
alternatives we can take at Voyager."
"They've had a watch on our hull the whole time we're here"a third cousin said.
"So we're clean."
Watching for what? Fletcher wondered uneasily, but his mind leapt to uneasy
conclusions.
"Don't suppose they've watched theirs?" Charles T. said with a wicked grin.
"Tempting," Parton said.
The juniors were all ears. Even Jeremy.
Another flood of cousins poured in. "Ten minutes," the intercom said in the same
moment. "We've got a potential bandit, gentle cousins, but our intrepid allies
out of Union space are going to pace us in fond hopes of getting the goods on
the rascals. We'll make specific safety announcements before jump, but we're
clearing dock in plenty of time for Champlain to figure the odds, which we think
will discourage a wise captain from lingering to meet us in the jump-point. We
will be doing an unusual system entry just in case our piratical friends have
strewn our path with any hindrances, and we will post the technicals on the
maneuver for those of you who have a curiosity about the matter. Welcome aboard,
welcome aboard, welcome aboard. We hope your hangovers are less than you
deserve. Fare well to Belize and Mariner, and fond hopes for Esperance. Voyager
will be a working port, we regret to say, with restricted liberty and fast
passage."
There were groans.
"We're going to work?" Vince cried indignantly.
"Sounds like an interesting stop," a cousin said. "Are we hauling this trip, or
how much did we load?"
Time spun down. A last few cousins ran in, JR and Bucklin among them. Chad,
Connor and Sue followed, and then the rest of the juniors… probably on duty,
Fletcher said to himself. The icy mess in the corridor was a likely junior job,
of the sort that wouldn't wait for undock, during which icemelt could run and
metal grids could slide.
Odd thought… how much he'd gotten to figure out without half thinking about it.
His ship. His junior-juniors. His roommate. He'd been out on liberty, he'd come
back in charge of three kids who'd come around somehow to admitting that
seventeen waking years beat twelve and thirteen in a lot of respects: he'd been
in his element, and the one he was coming back to wasn't foreign, either, now.
He knew these people. He knew the sounds he'd heard before, and wished there
were a way to ask, when the undocking started, exactly what sound was what. He'd
stood and watched ships undock, from outside, and the lights would be flashing
and the hatches would seal, and the access tube would retract. Then the lines
would uncouple, the gantry arm would pull back.
Then the grapples. That was the loud one. The jolt. Somebody started a loud and
rowdy song, that subbed in the word Belize, and he found himself with a grin on
his face as Finity's End came free and powered back from dock.
One song topped another one, and they ran out of the rowdy ones and into the
sentimental, good-bye to the port, good-bye to lost loves…
He had an urge to chime in, but he was too conscious of the juniors beside him
and he couldn't sing worth a damn. He could listen. He could feel a little
shiver of gooseflesh on his arms, a little shortness of breath when the song
wound on to foreign ports and lost friends.
They knew. He wasn't different. He knew he was slipping under a spell, and that
Downbelow was getting farther and farther away. He'd heard about meetings, in
the chaff of conversation before undock. He'd heard about the captains getting
together and talking about peace.
And now Union was escorting an Alliance ship?
He'd thought he understood the universe, or all of it he needed to know. And
things weren't what he thought.
"Clear to move," the intercom said. "Twenty minutes to get your baggage and ten
to take hold, cousins. Move, move, move."
The front row filed out to the corridor and the next row was hot on their heels,
everybody moving with dispatch when it was their turn.
Cargo spat out baggage at high speed and fair efficiency. He'd bought a silly
cartoon trinket to hang from the tag, a distinction easier to spot, he'd
learned, than the stenciled name; and Jeremy had urged him to buy it. Other
people had colored cords, plastic planets, tassels… Jeremy's was a metal
enameled tag that said Mars, and a cartoon character of no higher taste than
his. Jeremy's duffle was already in the stack, but his wasn't.
Jeremy carted his off. Fletcher saw his own come down the chute and grabbed it,
double-checking the tag to be sure.
"Fletcher," JR said, turning up beside him, and instinct had him braced for
unpleasantness as he straightened and looked JR in the eyes.
"Good job," JR said. "I can't say all of it, even yet, but we've had a situation
working at this port… same that put that ship out ahead of us, and it wasn't a
place to let our junior-juniors in on the matter, or to let them wander the
dockside on their own. Toby and Wayne kind of kept an eye in your direction, you
may have observed at first, but you didn't need help, so they just pretty well
left things to you and after that we got swept into running security for the
captains' business and didn't check back, in the absence of distress signals.
But we didn't feel we had to. So we do appreciate it, and I'm speaking for all
of us."
He wasn't used to well-dones. He didn't have a repertoire of suitable polite
remarks. His face went hot and he hoped it didn't show.
"Thanks," he said. If he was one of the Willetts or the Velasquezes he'd have
learned how to shed compliments like water. But he wasn't. And stood there
holding a duffle with a plastic, large-eyed cartoon wolf for an identifying tag.
The one JR had against his leg sported a classy Sol One enamelled tag, which
he'd undoubtedly bought above Earth itself.
"We got out all right," JR said, "and regarding what the captain was talking
about to you before we made dock… and the reason we're running with an escort
right now… I'm warning you in advance we're not going to get much of a liberty
at Voyager. We can't guarantee their cargo handling and we're going to have to
search every can. This is not going to be a fun operation. But we have to do it.
We have to look as if we trust Voyager without actually trusting Voyager. Again,
that's for you to know. The junior-juniors aren't to know the details."
"And I am?" He couldn't help it He didn't see himself in the line of
confidences.
JR looked him straight in the face. "You need to know. You're watching the
potential hostages. And you need to know."
"You don't know me. Where do you think I'm so damn trustworthy?"
JR outright grinned. "Because you'd warn me like that."
He'd never been outflanked like that. He shut his mouth. Had to be amused.
"Takehold in ten minutes," the intercom advised them, and JR picked up his
baggage.
"Got to walk my quarter," JR said. And set off. "Don't forget your drug pickup!"
JR called back.
He would have forgotten. Remembered it by tomorrow, but he would have forgotten.
Fletcher took his duffle, slung it over his shoulder and walked in JR's
direction far enough to reach the medical station and the drug packets set out
in bundles.
Take 6, the direction said, a note taped to the side of the bin on the counter,
and the bin was three-quarters empty. He came up as JR was initialing the list
as having picked up his. JR took his six, and Fletcher signed in after and
filled his side pocket with the requisite small packets, asking himself, as his
source of information walked away, what circumstance could demand six doses.
Precaution on the precaution, he said to himself, and, drugs safely in pocket,
and feeling proof against the unknown hazards of yet another voyage, he toted
his duffle back the other direction, past the laundry and past a sign that
instructed crew not to leave laundry bundles if the chute was full.
Piled up on the floor inside, he well guessed, glad it wasn't his job this turn.
Galley was a far better duty.
He walked on to A26, to his cabin, anticipating familiar surroundings—and almost
reached to his pocket for a key as he reached the door, after a week in the
Pioneer. He reached instead to open the door.
Beds were stripped, sheets strewn underfoot. Drawers and lockers were open,
clothes thrown about. Jeremy, inside with his arms full of rumpled clothes,
stared at him with outright fear.
"What in hell is this?" he asked.
"I'm picking it up," Jeremy said.
"I know you're picking it up. Who did it? Is this some damn joke?"
"It's your first liberty."
"And they do this?"
"I'm picking it up!"
"The hell!" His mind flashed to the bar, to Chad sitting there with all the
others. Butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. He stood there in the middle of
the wreckage of a cabin they'd left in good order, feeling a sickly familiarity
in the scenario. No bloody wonder they'd been smiling at him.
He saw articles of underwear strewn clear to the bathroom, his study tapes and
what had been clean, folded clothes lying on a bare mattress. The drawer where
he kept his valuables was partially open, the tapes were out—the drawer showed
empty to the bottom, the drawer where he'd had Satin's stick; and he bumped
Jeremy aside, dropping to his knees to feel to the back of the storage.
Nothing. He got up and looked around him, rescued his tapes and the rumpled
clothes to the drawer and lifted the mattress, flinging it back against the
lockers to look under it.
"I'll check the shower," Jeremy said, and went and looked and came back with
more of his clothes.
No stick.
"Shit!" Fletcher said through his teeth. He looked in lockers, he swept up
clothes, he rummaged Jeremy's drawers.
Nothing. He slammed his hand against the wall, hit the mattress in a fit of
temper and slammed a locker so hard the door banged back and forth. A plastic
cup fell out and he caught it and slammed it into the wall. It narrowly missed
Jeremy, who stood, white-faced, wedged into a corner.
Fletcher stood there panting, out of things to throw, out of coherent thought
until Jeremy scuttled out of his corner and grabbed up clothes.
He grabbed the clothes from Jeremy, grabbed Jeremy one-handed and held him
against the wall. "Who did this?"
"I don't know!" Jeremy said. "I don't know, they do this sometimes, they did it
to me. First time you go on liberty—"
"Fletcher and Jeremy," the intercom said "Report status."
"We hit the wall," Jeremy reminded him breathlessly. "They want to know if we're
all right. Next cabin reported a noise."
"You talk to them."He wasn't in a mood to communicate.
He let Jeremy go and Jeremy ran and, fast talking, assured whoever it was they
were all right, everything was fine.
It took some argument. "One minute to take hold," another voice on the intercom
said then. "Find your places."
Jeremy started grabbing up stuff.
"Just let it go!" Fletcher said
"We have to get the hard stuff!" Jeremy cried, and grabbed up the cup he'd
thrown, the toiletry kit, the kind of things that would fly about in a disaster.
Fletcher snatched them from him, shoved them into the nearest locker and slammed
the door.
Then he flung himself down on the sheetless bed and grabbed the belts. Jeremy
did the same on his side of the room.
The intercom started the countdown. He lay there staring at the ceiling, telling
himself calm down, but he wasn't interested in listening.
They'd gotten him, all right. Good and proper. They'd probably been sniggering
after he left the bar.
Maybe not. Maybe Chad had. Chad and Connor and Sue, he'd damn well bet. They'd
cleared the cabins and the senior-juniors were still running around the ship,
well able to get into any cabin they liked, with no locks on any door.
"I'm real sorry!" Jeremy said as the burn started.
He didn't answer. The bunks swiveled so that he was looking at the bottomside of
Jeremy's, and so that he had a good view of the empty drawers and the underside
of the bunk carriage, and Satin's stick wasn't there, either. He even undid the
safety belts and stuck his head over one side of the bunk and the other, trying
to see the underside. He held on until acceleration sent the blood to his head
and, no, it wasn't stuck to the bottom of the bunk carriage, wasn't stuck to the
head of the bunk—wasn't stuck to the foot, which cost him a struggle to search.
He lay back, panting, and then snapped at Jeremy:
"Look down to your right, see whether it's down in the framework."
A moment. "It's not there. Fletcher, I'm sorry…"
He didn't answer. He didn't feel like talking. Jeremy tried to engage him about
it, and when he didn't answer that, tried to talk about Mariner, but he wasn't
interested in that, either.
"I'm kind of sick," Jeremy said, last ploy.
"That's too bad," he said. "Next time don't stuff yourself."
There was quiet from the upper bunk, then.
Chad. Or Vince. And he'd lean the odds to it being Chad.
He replayed everything JR had said, every expression, every nuance of body
language, and about JR he wasn't sure. He didn't think so. He didn't read JR as
somebody who'd enjoy that kind of game, standing and talking to him about how
well he'd done, and all the while knowing what he was walking into.
He didn't think JR would do it, but he wanted to talk to JR face to face when he
told him. He wanted to see the reactions, read the eyes, and see if he could
spot a liar: he hadn't been damn good at it so far in his life.
It hurt. Bottom line, it hurt, and until he talked to the senior-junior in
charge, he didn't know where he stood or what the game was.
Chapter XVII
Contents - Prev/Next
Boreale was also out of dock, likewise running light, about fifteen minutes
behind them. That made for, in JR's estimation, a far better feeling than it
would have been if they'd had to chase Champlain into jump alone.
It also made their situation better, courtesy of the station administration, for
Finity to have had access to Champlain's entry data, data on that ship's
behavior and handling characteristics gathered before they'd known they were
under close observation. They had that information to weigh against its exit
behavior and its acceleration away from Mariner, when Champlain knew they were
carefully observed.
That let them and Boreale both form at least some good guesses both about
Champlain's capabilities and the content of its holds. And at his jump seat post
on the bridge, JR ran his own calculations on that past-behavior record, keeping
their realtime position and Boreal's as a display on the corner of the screen,
and calling on a large library of such records.
Finity's End, in its military capacity, stored hundreds of such profiles of
other ships of shady character, files that ordinary traders couldn't access and
which (he knew the Old Man's sense of honor) they would never use in competing
against other ships in trade. The data included observations of acceleration,
estimates of engine output, maneuvering capacity, loading and trade information
not alone from Mariner, but black-boxed information that came in from every port
in the shared system—and they had that on Champlain.
He was very glad to have confirmation of what common sense told him Champlain
had done—which was exactly what they had done. She'd offloaded, hadn't taken in
much, had most of her hauling mass invested in fuel: she'd taken on enough to
replace what she'd spent getting to Mariner, but no one inspected the total
load. She was possibly even able to go past Voyager without refueling.
Finity had to fuel at Voyager. If they delayed to offload cargo and take on more
fuel, they'd lose their tag on Champlain even if Champlain did put into that
port. But Finity's unladed mass relative to their over-sized engines meant
they'd still handle like an empty can compared to Champlain, unless Champlain's
hold structure camouflaged more engine strength than the estimate persistently
turning up in the figures he was running.
Boreale was likewise high in engine capacity, and she was also far more
maneuverable than Champlain, if the figures they had on their ally of
convenience were right. They'd been hearing about these new Union
warrior-merchanters. Now they had their chance to observe one in action, and
Boreale couldn't help but be aware of their interest and who they reported to…
The com light blinked on his screen. Somebody wanted him. He reached idly and
thumbed a go-ahead for his earpiece.
Fletcher. A restrainedly upset Fletcher, who wanted to talk.
"I'm on duty," he said to Fletcher. "I'm on the bridge."
"That's all right," Fletcher said. "I'll wait as long as I have to."
The quiet anger in the tone, considering Fletcher's nature, said to him that it
might be a good idea to see about it now.
"I'll come down," he told Fletcher. "Where are you?"
"My quarters."
"I'll be there in a moment." He signaled temporarily off duty, and stored and
disconnected on his way out of the seat
Fletcher sat on the bed, in the center of the debris. And waited.
Jeremy had left to report to Jeff, in the galley, for both of them.
Fletcher sat, imagining the time it took to leave the bridge, walk to the lift
and take it down to A deck…
To walk the corridor.
He waited. And waited, telling himself sometimes the lift took a moment. People
might stop JR on the way…
The light by the door flashed, signaling presence outside.
Fletcher got up quietly and opened the door.
JR's face said volumes, in the fast, startled pass of the eyes about the room,
the evident dismay.
JR hadn't expected what he saw. And on that sole evidence Fletcher held on to
his temper, controlling the anger that had him wound tight.
"Jeremy went on to duty," he said to JR in exaggerated, careful calm. "This is
what we came back to."
"This…" JR said, and seemed to lose the word.
"This is a joke, right?"
"Not a funny one. Clearly."
He hadn't been able to predict what he himself would do. Or say. Or want. He was
angry. He wasn't, he decided now, angry at JR. And that was not at all what he'd
have predicted.
"I'd discouraged this," JR said. "It's supposed to be a joke, yes. Your first
liberty. But it shouldn't have happened. Was anything damaged?"
"Something was stolen."
JR had been looking at the damage. His eyes tracked instantly back again,
clearly not comfortable with that charged word. He'd deny it, Fletcher thought.
He'd quibble. Protect his own. Of course.
"What was?" JR asked
He measured with his hands. "A hisa artifact. A spirit stick. Wood. Carved, tied
up with cords and feathers."
"I've seen them. In museums. They're sacred objects."
"I had title to it."
"I take your word on it. You had it in your cabin. Where?"
"In the drawer." He indicated the drawer in question with a backward kick of his
foot "At the back of the drawer. Under clothes. I've been over every inch of the
room. Including under the bunk frames as they'd tilt underway. It's not here. I
don't give a damn about them tearing up the room. I don't like it, but that's
not the issue. The stick is. The stick is mine, it was a gift, and it's not
something you play games with."
"I'm well aware." JR looked around him and frowned, thinking, Fletcher surmised,
where it might be, or very well knowing the chief suspects on his own list
"I don't even know it's on this ship," Fletcher said "I don't know why they
thought it was funny to take it. I don't even want to imagine. I can point out
that the market value is considerable, for someone who might be interested in
that sort of thing. And that we've been in port."
He'd hit home with that one. JR frowned darker still.
"No one on this ship would do that," JR said.
"You tell me what they would and won't do. Let me tell you. Somebody sitting at
your table, in the bar the other evening, looked me straight in the eye knowing
damned well what he'd done. Or she'd done. They kept a real straight face about
it. Probably they had a good laugh later. I'm serving notice. I can't work with
people like that. I want off this ship. I gave you my best shot and my honest
effort. And this is what I get back from my cousins. Thanks. If you want to do
me a personal favor, sell me back to Pell and let me get back to my life. If you
want to do me a bigger favor, get me passage back from Voyager. But don't ask me
to turn a hand to help anybody on this ship. I want my own cabin, the same as
everyone else. I don't want to be with Jeremy. I don't want to be with anybody.
I want my privacy, I want my stuff left alone, I don't want any more of your
jokes, and I don't want any more crap about belonging here. I don't. I think
that point's been made."
JR didn't come back with an argument. JR just stood there a moment as if he
didn't know what to say. Then:
"Have you discussed this with Jeremy?"
"No, I haven't discussed it with Jeremy. I have nothing against Jeremy. I just
want the lot of you off my back!"
"I can understand your feelings. If you want separate quarters, I can understand
that, too. But Jeremy's going to be affected. He's taken to you in a very strong
way. I'd ask you give that fact whatever thought you think you ought to give.
I'll talk to the captains; I'll explain as much as I can find out. I'll find the
stick, among other things. And if you want someone to clean this mess up, I'll
assign crew to do that. If you'd rather I not…"
"No." Short and sharp. "I've had quite enough people into my stuff. Thanks." He
was mad as hell, charged with the urge to bash someone across the room, but he
couldn't fault JR on any point of the encounter. And he didn't hate Jeremy,
who'd left with no notion of his walking out. "I'll think about the room change.
But not about quitting. It's not going to work. You've screwed up where I was. I
don't ask you to fix it. You can't. But you can put me back at Pell."
"There's no way to get you passage back right now. It wouldn't be safe. You have
to make the circuit with us."
He wasn't surprised. He gave a disgusted wave of his hand and turned to look at
the wall, a better view than JR's possibilities.
"I'm not exaggerating," JR said. "We have enemies. One of them is out in front
of this ship likely armed with missiles."
"Fine. They're your problem."
"Fletcher."
Now came the lecture. He didn't look around.
"Give me the chance," JR said, "to try to patch this up. Someone was a fool."
"Sorry doesn't patch it." He did turn, and stared JR in the face. "You know how
it reads to me? That my having a thing like that on this ship was a big joke to
somebody on this ship. That the hisa are. That everything the hisa hold sacred
and serious is. So you go fight your war and make your big money and all those
things that matter to you and leave me to mine!
You know that hisa don't steal things? That they have a hard time with lying?
That war doesn't make sense to them? And that they know the difference between a
joke and persecution? I'm sure they'd bore you to hell."
"Possibly you're justified," JR said. "Possibly not. I have to hear the other
side of this. Which I can't do until I find out what happened. Let me be honest,
at least, with our situation—which is that we've got a hostile ship running
ahead of us, and there may be duty calls that I have to answer with no time for
other concerns. On time I do have control of, I'm going to find the stick, I'm
going to get answers on why this happened, and I'm going to get your answers. I
put those answers on a priority just behind that ship out there, which is going
to be with us at least all the way to Voyager. I don't consider the hisa a joke
and I don't consider anything that's happened a joke. This ship can't afford bad
judgment. You've just presented me something I don't like to think exists in
people I've known all my life, and quite honestly I'm upset as hell about it.
That's all I can say to you. I will follow up on it."
"Yessir," he found himself saying, not even thinking about it, as JR turned to
leave. And then thinking… so far as he had clear thoughts… that JR was being
completely fair in the matter, contrary to expectations, that he had just said
things that attacked JR's personal integrity, and that he had the split second
till JR closed the door to say something to acknowledge that from his side.
But with a flash on that meeting in the bar, he didn't trust JR, in the same way
he didn't trust anyone on the ship.
And the second after that door had closed… he knew that that wasn't an accurate
judgment even of his own feelings, let alone of the situation, and that he
should have said something. It was increasingly too late. The thought of opening
that door and chasing JR down in the corridors with other crew to witness didn't
appeal to him.
Not until he'd have to go a quarter of the way around the ship to do it; and by
then it was hard to imagine catching JR, or being able to retrieve the moment
and the chance he'd had.
It didn't matter. If JR hated his guts and supported his move to get off the
ship, it was all he wanted. Make a single post-pubescent friend on this ship,
and he'd have complicated his life beyond any ability to cut ties and escape.
That was the mathematics he'd learned in court decisions and lawyers' offices,
time after time after godforsaken time.
There was a sour taste in his mouth. He saw that meeting in the bar as a moment
when things had almost worked and he'd almost found a place for himself he'd
have never remotely have imagined he'd want… as much as he'd come to want it.
He couldn't go home. But he couldn't exist here, where clearly someone, and
probably more than one of the juniors, had not only expressed their opinion of
him, but had done it in spite of JR's opposition—not damaging him, because the
petty spite in this family no more got to him than all the other collapsed
arrangements had done. The illusions he'd had shattered were all short-term, a
minimum amount invested—so he only felt a fool.
What that act had shattered in JR was another question. He saw that now, and
wished he'd said something. But he hadn't done the deed. He hadn't chosen it. He
couldn't fix it. His being here had drawn something from JR's crew that maybe
nothing else would have ever caused.
Now it had surfaced. It was JR's job to deal with it as best he could. And he'd
let the door shut on a relationship it would only hurt JR now to pursue. If he
chased after it—he saw the damage he could do in the crew. He was outside the
circle. Again.
He began to clean up the room, replacing things in drawers and lockers, Jeremy's
as well as his own. And he saw that JR was right. Jeremy was in a hell of a
situation. Jeremy had latched on to him in lieu of Vince and Linda, with whom
Jeremy had avowed nothing in common but age; and now when he left, Jeremy would
have to patch that relationship up as a bad second choice.
Worse still, Jeremy had set some significance on his being the absent age-mate,
Jeremy's lifelong what-if, after Jeremy had, like him, like so many of this
crew, lost mother, father, cousins… all of the relationships a kid should have.
The last thing the kid needed was a public slap in the face like his moving out
of the cabin they shared, in advance of the time he made a general farewell to
the ship.
Jeremy was the keenest regret he had. In attaching to him, the kid had done what
he himself had done early in his life. The kid had just invested too much in
another human being. And human beings had flaws, and didn't keep their promises,
and all too often they ducked out and went off about their own business, for
very personal reasons, disregarding what it did to somebody else.
That was what it was to grow up. He'd always suspected that was the universal
truth. Now, being the adult, he did it to somebody else for reasons he couldn't
do anything about. And maybe understood a bit more about his mother, who'd done
the chief and foremost of all duck-outs.
He went to the galley when he'd finished the clean-up.
"Did you find it?" was Jeremy's very first question, and there was real pain in
Jeremy's eyes.
"No," he said. "JR's looking for it"
"We didn't do it," Linda said, from a little farther away.
Vince came up beside her.
"We'd have done it," Vince said, "but we wouldn't have stolen anything."
He'd never have thought he'd have seen honesty shining out of Vince. But he
thought he did see it, in the kids whose time-stretched lives made them play
like twelve-year-olds and look around at you in the next instant with eyes a
decade older.
"I believe you," he found himself saying, and thought then he'd completely
surprised Vince.
But he saw those three faces looking to him—not at him, but to him—in a way he'd
never planned to have happen to him or them. And he didn't know what to do about
it.
Bucklin was the first resort. Wayne was the second. Lyra the third. If one of
those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and
Bucklin said, first off:
"I can't imagine it."
Wayne simply shook his head and said, "Damn." And then: "What in hell was he
doing with a hisa artifact? Aren't those things illegal?"
Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. "Is it
remotely possible Fletcher faked it?"
He supposed he hadn't a devious enough mind even to have thought of that
possibility.
Or something in Fletcher's behavior had kept him from thinking so. He
entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the
underside. But he didn't believe it.
He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were with Fletcher, working in the mess
hall. "I want to talk to them," he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far
enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn't see expressions, let alone
overhear.
"What happened?" he asked Jeremy.
"We got back and it was just messed," Jeremy said
He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought
informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch
hunt. "Any observations?"he asked
"No, sir," Jeremy said.
"How's Fletcher behaving?"
"He's being real nice," Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. "You think maybe
we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?"
He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn't say so. He
didn't want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint Finity's name, no
matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard
the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when Finity's good name
had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were
critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the
captains had life and death business under their hands.
At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to
stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.
Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on Finity's unsullied
reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint Finity's good name with a
sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had
to ask themselves whether Finity was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as
legend said of the ship. Finity had been meticulously honest. Other captains and
the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept Finity and
Norway going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them,
trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there'd been a theft on a
ship no one else could get aboard?
Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth
could damage the ship and the Alliance. There was no clean answer. And the
matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it
upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for
his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever
existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it
ashore.
One last question, one out of Lyra's question: "What did this artifact look
like?"
"About this long." Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as
Fletcher had. "Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it's
carved all over."
"You did see it?"
"He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They're real feathers."
"I'm sure they are." Until Jeremy's description he had no evidence but
Fletcher's word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his
mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went
down as a fact, not just a report. "Did he say where he got it?"
"A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the
carvings mean something."
So much for Wayne's question whether it was legal. Fletcher claimed to have met
Satin, who had authority; Fletcher had come off-world and through customs.
Fletcher was entitled to have it, if Jeremy was right. He didn't know what the
black market was in such items, but it had to be toward fifty thousand credits.
And in any sane consideration, what did somebody in the Family want with fifty
thousand credits, when Finity paid for everything that wasn't pocket money on a
liberty, and where, if someone truly wanted something expensive, the Family
might vote it? There was nothing to buy with fifty thousand credits. There'd
been no requests for funds made and denied to anyone. There was just no motive
regarding money.
Fifty thousand might get Fletcher a passage back to Pell. That unworthy thought
had flitted through his mind.
But Fletcher hadn't missed board-call, hadn't skipped down the row of berths to
seek passage on some other ship bound back to Pell, and most significantly,
Fletcher hadn't even minutely derelicted his assigned duty to the juniors, and
he knew far more minute to minute where Fletcher had been during the liberty
than he could answer for anybody else in his command, including Bucklin.
And the juniors, as for their whereabouts, had been with Fletcher, the most
conscientious, the most rigorous supervision the junior-juniors had ever had in
their rambunctious lives.
He couldn't say that about the senior-juniors, who'd been scattered all over the
docks, running back to the ship on errands for senior command, a whole string of
errands which had put them aboard in a ship mostly vacated, a ship in which, if
you were aboard and past security, there was no watch on the corridors, beyond
the constant presence in ops and the captains intermittently in their offices.
That senior crew would do something so stupid was just beyond belief. It was
most assuredly his own junior crew that had done it—and it added up to an act
not for money but aimed at Fletcher.
He sent Jeremy back and had Jeremy send Linda to him.
"Do you know anything about this?" he asked Linda, and Linda shook her head and
returned her usually glum expression.
"No, sir. I don't. They shouldn't have done it, is what."
"What, they?"
"The they that did it. Whoever did it."
"No, they shouldn't. Go back and send Vince."
She went. Vince had stood at the threshold of the mess hall, looking this
direction, and when Linda went back, he started forward, walking more slowly
than the others, looking downcast.
"I didn't do it," Vince said before he even asked the question.
"You didn't do it."
"No, sir."
"Look at me."
Vince looked him in the eyes, but not without flinching.
"So what do you know that I ought to know?" he asked Vince.
"Nothing. I didn't do it."
"The pixies got in and did it, did they?"
"I don't know who did it," Vince said hotly. "I don't do everything that goes
wrong aboard this ship, all right?"
"Sir," he reminded the kid.
"Sir," Vince muttered. "I didn't do it, sir."
"I didn't think it was likely," he said, and Vince gave him a peculiarly
troubled look.
In the same moment he saw Fletcher coming toward them. Fletcher came up and set
a hand on Vince's back.
"He'd have told me," Fletcher said. "Sir."
He shut up, prevented by the very object of his charity. He saw a cohesive unit
in front of him. Linda had followed Fletcher halfway back and stood watching.
Jeremy had come up even with her, both watching as Fletcher violated protocols
to come to Vince's defense. It was Vince on whom suspicion generally settled—in
most anything to do with junior-juniors.
Which wasn't just. And Fletcher had just made that point.
"I take your assessment," he said to Fletcher. And to Vince: "Thank you,
junior."
"Yes, sir," Vince said; and JR left, with a glance at Fletcher, who met his eyes
without a qualm, in complete, unassailable command of their fractious
junior-juniors—the tag-end, the motherless, grown-too-soon survivors of the last
liberties Finity had enjoyed before these last two ports.
He didn't know what exactly had happened in the last couple of weeks on Mariner,
or what spell Fletcher had cast over the unruly juniormost, but he knew loyalty
when he saw it. Fletcher said he was leaving. If he did leave—he'd do lifelong
damage to those kids in the same measure he'd done good.
It was hard to conceive of the mental vacuum it would take even for a
junior-junior to have done the deed. For one of his crew to lay hands on
something that unique, that clearly, personally valuable—he almost thought it of
Sue… and even Sue's spur-of-the-moment notions fell short of the mark. Whoever
had taken it had known, even if it were perfectly safe, even if it was meant as
a joke, he had to assume some crueler intent far more like the charges Fletcher
had leveled. Whoever had done it, above the age of children, had to know the
minute they saw a wooden object that it was valuable, in fact irreplaceable, and
that meddling with it went beyond any head-butting welcome-in rituals.
Start through his own circle in the same way, in a hierarchy of suspects? Vince
had known, automatically, that he was the chief suspect, even when he knew that
Vince hadn't had an access that made it likely. Vince just assumed because
everyone else assumed. And in a society composed only of family,—he felt damned
sorry about the spot he'd just put Vince in, letting him sweat until the last.
Granted Vince had helped build that unfortunate position for himself over the
years. Sue and Connor had built theirs in exactly the same way; but damned if,
having done an injustice to Vince, he now wanted to charge in and put them
publicly and automatically at the head of his list of suspects.
He asked himself what he did want to do as he walked the corridor back to the
lift, and that list was unhappily short of resources.
The circuit took him past the laundry, which was in full operation, Connor
receiving bundles at the half-door that was the counter, a half-dozen cousins in
line to toss their laundry in.
"Get those six customers," he said to Connor, at the counter, and waved the line
on to do their business and clear out. "Then put the chute sign out and fold
up."
"What's this?" Chad asked, as he and Sue turned up from inside.
Chad. Connor, Sue, the whole threesome.
"Shut down for a quarter hour," he said. "Meeting in rec."
"What about?" Sue asked.
"No questions. Just show up." He went down to the nearest com-panel and used his
collective code to page all the senior-juniors at once, immediate meeting, shut
down and show.
Then he went to rec himself. Toby and Nike had been breaking down the boarding
config in rec and restoring the area's open space. They had rails in hand, and
the inflexible rule was that those long rails and the stanchions went into
storage one by one and immediately as they were dismounted, being the kind of
objects that, end-on, could deliver small-point impact with a high-mass punch.
"Got your page," Nike said. "What's up?"
"Wait for all of us. Stow that rail and wait."
"Trouble?" Toby asked, with what seemed genuine lack of information.
And, dammit, he was having to ask himself bitter questions and read nuances of
expression, forming conclusions of guilt or innocence on people he'd have to
rely on for his life. He'd known Nike when she was Berenice in the cradle. He'd
known Toby when he was scared of the dark in his new solo cabin, alone for the
first time in his life.
Bucklin arrived with Wayne. Chad and Connor and Sue came in. Dean, Lyra, and
Ashley came in, and there they were, every member of the crew under thirty and
over shipboard seventeen.
All that survived, except for four junior-juniors, the ship's whole future.
"Something happened among us," he said, standing, arms tucked, and made himself
watch the faces. "Somebody seems to have played a joke on Fletcher, and he's not
real upset about the stuff in the lockers or the bedsheets, but he wasn't
prepared for it. If he'd been expecting something like that he might have gotten
back to his quarters posthaste. He didn't. As a consequence, he and Jeremy spent
a couple of very bad hours under heavy accel with loose objects all around them
while we have a hostile ship in front of us and a Union stranger running on our
tail."
Very serious faces. Fully cognizant of the danger. Fully cognizant of the fact
they had trouble among themselves in ways no one had reckoned.
"Nobody got hurt," he said. "It was their good luck we didn't have an emergency.
But there's more to it than that. A keepsake disappeared, something personal
that can't be replaced. That's why Fletcher's upset. Now I've talked to the
junior-juniors. And I'm going to suggest that if possibly—possibly—this was just
extremely bad judgment, and somehow the object got misplaced—even damaged—it
would be a good idea if it turned up in my quarters. Or Fletcher's. I'm going to
hope on my faith in this crew that this event will happen within the hour. I'm
going to give this crew half an hour off-duty and I'm going to go back to the
bridge in the hope that this will in fact happen and we can find a way to patch
what's happened. I'm not going to answer any questions. If one of you knows what
I'm talking about and can solve the problem expeditiously I would be personally
grateful. If one of you wants to talk about it, you can page me. If anyone has
anything to add to the account, I'll listen right now."
There was absolute quiet. Bucklin and Lyra and Wayne looked at him. Sue looked
to Connor, and Chad looked at her, and for a moment he thought someone was going
to say something.
But heads shook in denial, Chad's, Sue's, and the ones who had looked to that
silent exchange looked back at him.
No answers. There was still hope, however, of a miraculous appearance.
"That's all, then," he said, and left and went to the lift, rode it up to A deck
in a mood that drew glances from senior crew he passed on his way to the bridge.
"How's it going?" he asked when he took his seat at the console. Trent, next
over, said, "No change."
He wished he could say that about the junior crew.
Chapter XVIII
Contents - Prev/Next
No missing artifact turned up in his cabin. JR went down to A deck, to his own
quarters, hoping and fearing… and fears scored. Hope got nothing. The missing
item wasn't on his bed, not on the sink.
He began to get angry, and to ask himself who in his command would be afraid to
come to him. Scared had to describe the perpetrator by now.
Except if someone from outside the ship had gotten past all their security… and
in that case why target Fletcher's room? The lifts all required a key when the
ring was locked down, a key that had to be gotten from the duty officer, so the
bridge couldn't be reached. The operations center would be a target, but that
had been manned around the clock, and nothing else was missing in the whole
ship.
He began to entertain again the notion that Fletcher might be a very good actor,
even that his exemplary behavior during the liberty was a set-up. There was no
one in the crew he wanted to suspect. That did leave Fletcher, maneuvering
everything, first to show the item to Jeremy and then to arrange to have it
missing and himself the wronged party.
Why? was the next question. Some notion of giving the ship hell?
Some ploy to get himself shipped back to Pell with apologies? It was the first
thing Fletcher had asked for.
Some bogused-up stick out of materials Fletcher could have gotten onplanet very
easily, carvings Fletcher could have done, the whole thing his ticket to Pell if
he could con a gullible junior-junior into serving as witness and setting the
whole crew at odds with each other.
He sat alone in A deck rec and enjoyed a cup of coffee that didn't entail going
down to the mess hall where Fletcher was working, because the thoughts that were
beginning to replay in his brain kept pointing to Fletcher as the origin of the
problem.
His pocket-com had, however, messages. A lot of messages. From Toby:
I didn't hear anything about it. It seems to me the junior-juniors might be
playing a prank, and it got out of hand.
From Ashley: I didn't hear anything. I assure you I would tell you if I had.
Nike came quietly up to him, and settled into the seat opposite his at the
table.
"I don't know who particularly had it in for Fletcher, but if you could kind of
tell us what's missing maybe we could look for it, in case, you know, somebody's
kind of scared to come forward?"
"In the whole ship? We're not talking about something the size of a shipping
cannister."
"So what is it?" Nike said. "If it was in Fletcher's cabin it was smaller than a
shipping can. But how big could it be? Like a piece of jewelry?"
"Bigger." He was down to games with people who'd be his life and death reliance
when they replaced senior crew. "Tomorrow," he said, hoping that the long hours
of mainnight would weigh on someone's conscience. "Tomorrow I might be more
specific."
Nike was the sort who'd badger after an answer. But she didn't. She got up
quietly and left. He saw her at the edge of the area talking to Bucklin, and saw
Bucklin shake his head
Bucklin came to him after that, sat down in the seat Nike had vacated and leaned
crossed arms on the table.
"This," Bucklin said, "is poisonous. Jamie, let me tell them at least what we're
trying to find."
"I'm not sure what we're trying to find. I'm not sure I trust Fletcher."
"You think he's putting one over on us? Why?"
"To get back to Pell! I don't know."
"Possible," Bucklin said. "But it's also possible Vince—or Linda—"
"Or Sue. Or Connor, or Chad. Maybe we should just post armed guard. You and I
stand in the corridor and shoot the first one that stirs toward another cabin."
Bucklin's shoulders slumped. "I'd rather think it was Fletcher."
"So would I. That's why I distrust my own wishes. Either he's the best liar in
lightyears about or he's suffered an extreme injustice, and I don't know which.
I don't know whether he's laughing at us or whether someone in this crew has
completely lost his senses."
"I think we ought to pull a search."
"For an object you could fit in a duffle and over an entire ship that's been
opened up to crew at dock."
"If someone hid it during dock you can eliminate half the ring."
"But not the entire damn hold."
"Possible. But you'd have to suit to go in the hold. In the ring skin you don't
have to. If Fletcher hid it, it'd be in places Fletcher knows, right near the
galley. If somebody else did it, that still means they'd play hob getting to
half the ring during dock, and they'd probably not want to stay long or climb
high to do it. I say we search the parts of the ring skin that are convenient
during dock, and search in the storage lockers and the office near the galley
stores first of all. That's where Fletcher was hazed. That could be the place
somebody might put it."
It made sense. "But we've got Champlain out there."
"I'd say if we're going to find that thing we look now, while we're still in
Mariner space. If we wait till the deep dark, damn sure it's going to be more
dangerous to go larking about in the ring. But if we don't do something to find
it, we've got to live with that, too.—And maybe—maybe somehow it'll materialize
so we can find it. It's a lot easier for it to turn up out there, you know, just
kind of—by happenstance."
"What's the matter with walking in and laying it on my bunk?"
"Your bunk is in your cabin, and your door is visible up and down the corridor
where we have cameras."
"What do they think? I'd say go in and do it anonymously and then sit on the
bridge and use the cameras?"
"I think everybody thinks this is a real serious issue that reflects pretty
badly on whoever did it, and maybe right now somebody is real scared that he's
completely lost your trust. I think whoever did it had rather die than have it
known."
He looked up at Bucklin. "You don't know who that someone is, do you?"
Bucklin's face registered—something. "Listen to us," Bucklin said. "Listen to us
talking to each other."
"Hell," JR said. Bucklin was his right arm, his friend, his closer-than-brother.
And he'd just asked if Bucklin was hiding something from him.
"We've got to do something," Bucklin said. "Yeah, we've got serious trouble out
in front of us. But we've got guns for that, and we've got a warship riding
beside us, protecting us. We've got defenses against the outside. This is right
at our heart"
"Go search where you think we ought to search." He'd told Bucklin what the
object was. It was time to relinquish that card regarding the rest of the crew.
"Send the crew by twos to do it."
"Including Fletcher?"
He drew a slow breath. "Everybody. Pair Jeremy with Linda for that duty. I'll go
with Fletcher, if nothing turns up right off."
"Do the seniors know what's going on?"
"I don't think so. Alan does. I told him. But this is a nasty, distracting
business. Bridge crew doesn't need to know, if we can clean it up. Let's just
keep this quiet. We're locked down during alterday. There's just this next watch
to look."
"When did you hear that?"
"That's the word that just came. We're going to do a hard burn during mainnight,
third watch. Straight into jump." A thought occurred to him. "If it was in the
ring skin and somebody didn't secure it before we spun up, hell, no telling
where it could get to."
"Damn. That is a thought. Not to mention where it could get to during the burn.
If somebody did hide it for a joke, and it slid under something, or into
something, they might not be able to find it."
"Wood and feathers. Low mass. God knows where it could get to." It was
frustrating, not even to know whether Fletcher could have chucked it down the
waste disposal. Surely nobody on Finity had grown up without knowing about the
hisa. Surely nobody on Finity could go into a cabin on a prank and taken
something made of wood and real feathers, in ignorance the thing was valuable.
Surely no one would destroy a thing like that. Take somebody's entire stock of
underwear and dispose of them in some unusual place, yes, in a minute. But not
real wood. Everybody aboard had seen wood,—hadn't they? Nobody was stupid enough
to mistake its value. Nobody aboard disrespected the hisa, the only other
intelligent life they'd found in the universe. That was just unthinkable, that
someone in the Family would have that attitude.
Bucklin nodded and got up. "I'll get started on it."
Word came to the galley: they were going up before main-dawn. Jeremy fairly
bounced with the news, and shoved a set of pans into the cupboard and latched it
tight, nerves, Fletcher thought, feeling his own nerves jangled, but no part of
Jeremy's fierce anticipation.
"What's going on?" he asked Jeff the cook—unwilling, at least uneasy, in
appearing to be more ignorant than the juniors he'd had put in his charge.
"That ship," Jeff said. "I imagine."
Fletcher didn't know what to imagine, and found himself peevish and short-fused.
Stations behaved themselves and stayed on schedule, and so did station-dwellers.
He habitually felt a tightness in the gut when even ordinary, minor things
swerved slightly off from an anticipated schedule, perhaps the fact that so many
truly sinister events in his life had begun that way. He was leaving Mariner,
going even farther from Pell. He had an enemy who wanted to spite him, he'd
tried to duck out of association with the family, and the juniors had conspired
to hold on to him.
He didn't say a word to Jeff. He just quietly left the galley and took a walk,
as circular a proposition as on a station, a long stroll past the machine shop,
the air quality station, lifesupport, all the gut and operations areas of the
ship, where things were quieter and the feeling of urgency settled. Read-outs
were on the corridor walls here. The noise of the machine shop working made him
wonder what in all reason someone could be doing on the edge of destruction. It
made him wonder so much he put his head in to look. And it was Tom T. using a
drill press on a small metal plate.
"So what's that?" he asked.
"Shower door latch."
"Oh," he said. It looked like one when he recalled their door. It was the socket
of the door. He was almost moved to ask why Tom would be fixing a shower door if
they were all going to be blown to hell and gone. But he just stood and watched.
He'd never been in a machine shop. There was a certain comfort in knowing
someone's leaky shower was going to get replaced.
"Did you make that?"
Tom pushed up his safety goggles and wiped his nose. Tom had gray hair, large,
strong-veined, competent hands. "We make about everything. Hell to get parts for
old items, and most of this ship is old."
"I guess it is." A ship that traveled from port to port wasn't going to find
brands the same, that was certain. "Interesting place."
"Ever done shop work?"
"No, sir."
Tom grinned. "You want to take a turn at it sometime, you come on in. The
youngers of this generation are all hellbent on pushing buttons for a living."
"I might." He figured he'd better get back to the galley before Jeff was
hellbent on finding out where he'd gone or what he was up to. I'll give it a
try. I'd better get back."
"Any time," Tom said. "Extra hands are always welcome."
He'd wanted to ask—Have you heard about us going to do a burn tonight? but he
didn't end up asking. People just did their jobs. Jeremy was wired. Linda and
Vince were jumpy. Tom fixed a shower door and Jeff was making lasagna.
He supposed it made a brittle kind of sense to do that. He, the stationer, he
decided to take the long way back to the galley, and to go all the way around
the ring.
Cabins, mostly, in the next two sections. After that, doors with numbers, and
designations like Fire System and two more just with yellow caution tags and Key
Only. And more cabins, everything looking so much like everything else he began
to be uneasy.
But after that he saw the medical station, and the main downside corridor, and
he felt reassured. He knew where he was now, beyond a doubt, and he walked on
toward the familiar venue of the laundry. It was a farther walk than he'd
thought, and he was moving briskly, thinking he really should have gone back the
way he'd come.
Running steps came from behind him, all out running. "Fletcher!"
Jeremy's voice. Jeff must have gotten worried and sent Jeremy the whole walk
around, after him.
He stopped, as Jeremy came panting up from off the curvature. "Where are you
going?" Jeremy gasped.
"In a circle," he said.
"Damn," Jeremy said. "You could've said."
"Sorry," he said, and clapped Jeremy on the shoulder as they walked, together,
on what was now the shortest way to reach the galley.
"You mad, or something?"
"No," he said, but ahead of them, the crew manning the laundry had come out to
stare at who had been running and making a commotion.
Chad. Connor. And Sue.
"What in hell's going on?" Connor said. "You running races out here?"
"We're doing what we damn well please," Fletcher said, feeling the anger rise up
in him, telling himself get a grip on it.
"Hey," Chad said as he passed, "we're looking for that stick thing."
He whirled around and hit Chad, hard, and didn't find two words in a string to
describe what he thought about Chad, the missing stick, and Chad's sympathy all
in one breath; Chad slammed into the wall and came back off it aimed at him, and
he drove his fist into Chad's rock-hard gut.
He heard people yelling, he felt people grabbing his shirt, pulling at his arms,
and meanwhile he and Chad went at it, hitting the walls, staggering back and
forth when Chad got a punch through and he shot one back with no science to it,
just flat-out bent on hammering Chad into the deck.
"Hey, hey, hey!" someone shouted close to his ear, and he paid no attention. It
was every damned sniping attack he'd ever suffered, and he hit and took hits
until he began to red-out and run out of wind, and to lean into the blows as the
opposition was leaning into him. Another flurry and they were both out of
breath. He took a clumsy roundhouse at Chad and glanced off, and Chad took one
at him and he took one at Chad. People were all around them, and when Chad swung
at him and halfway connected, somebody got Chad and another got him and pulled
them apart.
"I didn't steal your damn stick!" Chad yelled at him, spitting blood.
"I said shut up!" JR yelled. It occurred to Fletcher that JR had been yelling at
him, and JR had hold of him; Bucklin had Chad.
"He started it!" Sue said.
"I'm not damn well interested! Fletcher, straighten the hell up!"
Fletcher wiped his mouth and stretched an arm to recover his shirt onto his
shoulder. The hand came away bloody. His right eye was hazed and he couldn't
tell whether it was sweat or blood running into it. Chad was bloody. There were
spatters on the walls.
"Fletcher!" Jeremy said "Fletcher, don't fight anymore."
"All I said was…" Chad began.
"Shut up!" JR said, and jerked Fletcher back out of reach. "Madelaine wants to
see you."
"I'm not interested."
"You get the hell up there before she comes down here. Now!"
"I'll clean up, first."
"Just go on topside. Right now."
"Yessir," he said, because he still believed JR, out of a handful of people he
would listen to, and because he hadn't any other clear direction while the
universe was still far and hazed. He blotted at the eye with the back of his
hand, sniffed what tasted like blood down his throat, and shot a burning look at
Chad before he walked on toward the lift.
Light, quick steps ran behind him, and he spun around.
"Jeremy," JR said in a forbidding tone, and Fletcher looked at Jeremy through
his anger as if he saw an utter stranger—a scared and junior one, one he had no
motive to harm, but not one he wanted to touch him at the moment.
Not when he was like this and wanting nothing more than to finish what he'd
started.
But the fire was out of the encounter at the moment, and the lift car came to
the button and he got in and rode it up to B deck. A startled senior stared at
him as he wiped his nose to keep the blood off the carpet and walked into Legal.
Blue, at the desk inside, gave him a startled look, too.
"You want a tissue?" Blue asked pragmatically, and offered one.
"Thanks," he said, and as pragmatically took it and blotted his nose before he
went into Madelaine's office.
Madelaine just stared at him. Shocked.
He stared back, still mad, but not mad enough to drip on his grandmother's
carpet. He fell into a chair and made careful use of the tissue.
"Have another," Madelaine said, offering one. "JR?"
"Chad." His nose bubbled. "We were discussing my missing property."
"The spirit stick. I heard about it. I'm very sorry."
"Not your fault."
"I was dismayed. It's not like this crew."
"I'm not a good influence." He had to blot again. But the flow was less. "I made
my try at joining in. It's no good. I don't belong here."
"We don't know the whole story."
He didn't fly off. He took a careful, deep breath. "I do."
"What happened, then?"
"What, specifically, happened? Chad's pissed that I exist."
"Did he say that?" Madelaine asked.
"I don't think he's real damn happy at the moment!" He laughed, a bitter,
painful laughter. "It's the same damn thing. You think all everybody on this
ship is glad I'm here? Not half. Not half. I told JR I want to go back to Pell."
"But?"
"I didn't say but."
"I heard but. You told JR you wanted to go back to Pell, but…"
He let go a soft, bubbling breath. And blotted a flow down his upper lip. And
shook his head, because he thought about Jeremy and his throat acquired an
unexpected and painful knot.
The silence went on a moment.
"A but, nonetheless," Madelaine said "There are people on this ship disposed to
love you, Fletcher."
"Yeah, sure." She was trying to corner him with the love nonsense. He'd heard it
before.
"Is that so common?"
"Not so damn common," he said harshly. "I've heard it. This is your new brother,
Fletcher. You'll be great friends. This is your room, Fletcher, we fixed it just
for you. We're sorry, Fletcher, but this just isn't working out…"
He ran out of breath. And composure. And found it again, not quite looking at
Madelaine.
"Great intentions. But I'm getting to be a real connoisseur of families. I've
had a lot of them."
"We still haven't gotten to the but.—You wanted to go back to Pell, but—"
"I've forgotten."
"Do you want to go back to Pell?"
He didn't find a ready answer. "I don't know what I want. At this point, I don't
know."
"All right," she said, and got up. He took it for a dismissal, and he rose.
Madelaine came and put her hand on his arm; and then put her arms around him,
and gave him a gentle hug. And sighed and bit her lip when she stood back and
looked at him.
"Tell Charlie put a stitch in that or I'll be down there."
"It doesn't matter."
"Listen to your grandmother. James Robert wanted to talk with you about the
stick… I said let things ride a little, let the juniors try to work it out. We
have concerns outside our hull right now, and the captains can't divert
themselves to settle a quarrel. Operations crew can't. So they leave it to us.
And you to me, as the person responsible. Promise me. Peace and quiet. We'll
work it out."
"I'll try," he said.
"Fletcher. We're going up, third watch. Don't take anger into jump. Let it go,
this side. Let go of it."
Spooky advisement. He didn't take it as a platitude.
"All right," he said. And took his leave, and went out and down the lift again,
headed for sickbay, where he wasn't surprised to find JR, and Chad.
"Wait your turn," Charlie said.
"Yessir," he said, and set his jaw and gave Chad only an intermittent angry
glance.
It wasn't patched. Charlie did take the stitch, and it hurt. Charlie said he had
to cauterize the bloody nose because it was dangerous to take that condition
into jump, and that was even less pleasant. JR simply stood by, watching
matters, and when Charlie was done, relieved him to go off-duty and to his
quarters the way he'd sent Chad.
"And stay there," JR said shortly. "I don't care who's to blame, both of you
stay in quarters until after jump. That ship in front of us is going up, this
ship is engaged, and we can't afford distractions. I don't think Chad did it. Do
you hear me?"
By then the bruises were starting to hurt, and he didn't argue the question.
Charlie had shot him full of painkiller, and it had made the walls remote and
hazy. He was having trouble enough tracking what JR was saying, and had no
emotional reaction to it. He didn't even hate Chad anymore. He just thought,
with what remained to him of self-preservation, that he was going to have
trouble getting through jump, the way he was.
Fact was, when he got down off the table, he missed the door, and JR grabbed him
and walked him to his quarters, opened the door, and got him to his bunk.
"Sleep it off," JR said "We'll talk about it the other side."
Jeremy came in. Fletcher didn't know how long he'd been there, but he pretended
he was still sleeping. He heard Jeremy stirring about, and then Jeremy shook his
shoulder gently.
"I brought your supper."
"Don't want it."
"Dessert. You better eat. You'll be sick coming out of jump if you don't eat,
Fletcher. I'll bring you something else. I'll bring you anything you want…"
That was Jeremy, three new programs offered before he'd disposed of the first
one. Dessert… a heavy hit of carbohydrate… was somehow appealing, even if his
mouth tasted like antiseptic.
He struggled up to a sitting position. His eye, the one with the stitch in the
eyebrow, was swollen shut. His ribs felt massively abused. Jeremy set a tray in
his lap, and the offering was a synth cheese sandwich.
Considering the condition of his mouth, the detested synth cheese wasn't a bad
choice. He ate the sandwich. He ate the fruit tart dessert while Jeremy jabbered
on about the ship they were chasing having started a run, and how Finity's
engines were more powerful than any little pirate spotter's and how Jeremy
thought they didn't need the Union warship that was running beside them. If
Champlain tried a duck and strike maneuver, they'd scatter Champlain over the
jump-point
He wasn't so sure. And his head was spinning. The sugar tasted good. The rest
was just palatable. He supposed that he should be terrified of the possibility
of the ship going into combat, but maybe it was the perspective of just having
been there himself, on a smaller scale: he didn't care. Jeremy took the tray and
he lay down again and drifted out.
At some time the lights had dimmed. He slitted his eyes open on Jeremy moving
about the room, trying not to make a racket, checking locker latches. He
couldn't keep awake. Whatever Charlie had shot into him just wasn't going away,
and he thought about Chad and Connor and Sue, and the scene at the laundry
pickup. "We ever get our laundry turned in?" he asked, thinking that Chad was
going to have to do it, whatever he liked or didn't like, the work of the ship
had to go on. And Jeremy answered:
"Yeah, I took it down."
He drifted again. And waked with the intercom blaring warning.
"… ten minutes, cousins. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Get those packets organized.
Our spook friend went jump an hour ago and we're going early. Wake up and
acknowledge, on your feet and get belted in. This is going to be a hard dump on
the other side. You juniors belt in good and solid. Helm One says easy done but
the captain says we'll flatten pans in the galley. If you have any chancy
latches, tape 'em shut."
"Hot damn," Jeremy said. "We're on 'em."
"On what?" Fletcher asked thickly. And then he remembered Champlain, JR's talk
about missiles, and the chance there might be shooting. Then the fear that
hadn't been acute at his last waking seemed much more immediate. He tried to sit
up, looking for the packets, with the cabin swinging round on him. He was aware
of Jeremy doing the call-in, reporting to the computer they were accounted for.
Jeremy came back to him and had the packets, and some tape. "Going to fix these
so they don't slide out of reach," Jeremy said, and taped them to the edge of
the cot, except one, which Jeremy stripped of its protective coating. "You want
to take it yourself, or do you want me to shoot it?"
"A little early."
"It'll be all right. You take it. I got to see you do before I tuck in."
"Yeah," he said. Admittedly he was muzzy-headed. "Charlie gave me a hell of a
dose."
"One of those time-release things," Jeremy said as Fletcher put the packet
against his arm and let it kick. He didn't even feel the sting, he was that
numb.
"Double-dosed," he said. "Is that all right?"
"Charlie knows," Jeremy said, and found the ends of the safety belt for him as
he lay back. Fletcher snapped the ends, tucked a pillow under his head, asking
himself if he was going to wake up again, or if anything went wrong, whether
he'd ever know anything again. Did you have to wake up to die? Or if you died in
your sleep, did you ever know it had happened?
He couldn't do anything about it. He'd taken the shot. And Jeremy still sat
there. Watching him.
Just watching, for what seemed a long, long time.
What are you looking at? Fletcher asked, but he couldn't muster the coordination
to talk, feeling the uncertainty of one more drug insinuating itself through his
bloodstream. Jeremy set a hand on his shoulder, patted it but he couldn't feel
it. He was that numb.
"Five minutes. Five minutes, cousins. Whatever you're doing, get it set up,
we're about to make a run up."
"I don't want you to leave," Jeremy said distressedly "I don't want you ever to
leave, Fletcher. I don't want you to go back to Pell. Vince and Linda don't want
you to go."
He was emotionally disarmed, tranked, dosed, numb as hell and spiraling down
into a deep, deep maze of dark and shadows. He heard the distress in Jeremy's
voice, felt it in the pressure, no keener sensation, of Jeremy's fingers
squeezing his shoulder.
"Most of all I don't want you to go," Jeremy said. "Ever. You're like I finally
had a brother. And I don't want you to go away, you hear me, Fletcher?"
He did hear. He was disturbed at Jeremy's distress. And he began to be scared
for Jeremy sitting there arguing with him long past what was safe.
"Get to bed," he managed to mumble. After that the pressure of Jeremy's hand
went away, and he drifted, aware of Jeremy getting into his bunk.
Aware of the last intercom warning…
Gravity increased. The earth was soft and the sky was heavy with clouds…
"I don't want you and Chad to fight," a young voice said, and called him back to
the ship, to the close restraint of the belts, the pressure hammering him into
his bunk.
"I'd really miss you," someone said. "I would."
A long, long time his back pressed against the ground, and he watched the
monsoon clouds scud across, layers and layers of cloud.
Then he walked, on an endless wooded slope… in an equally endless fight for air…
Going for jump, he heard someone say…
Chapter XIX
Contents - Prev/Next
The Watcher-statues towered above the plain, large-eyed hisa images like those
little statues on the hill. But these were far larger, tricking the eye,
changing the scale of the world as Fletcher walked down toward them. Living hisa
moved among them, very small against the work that, when humans had seen it,
revised all their opinions about the hisa's lack of what humans called
civilization.
He knew that part. Only a very few artifacts ever left Downbelow. Everybody was
curious about the hisa, and if nothing prevented the plunder of hisa art, so he
understood, hisa artifacts would be stripped off the world and the culture would
collapse either for want of critical objects of reverence (or… whatever hisa did
with such things); or it would collapse because of the influx of culturally
disruptive trade goods and environmentally disruptive human presence.
Researchers didn't ordinarily get to go out to the images. Only a handful had
come here to photograph, and to deal with hisa.
And now, culmination of his dreams, he was here, approaching the most important
site humans knew of on Downbelow. His youthful guide brought him closer and
closer. He walked at the speed the scant air he drew through the mask would let
him move, with the notion that before he got to those statues surely some
authority, hisa or human, would stop him. It was too reckless, too wondrous a
thing for a nobody like him to get to see this place close up.
And yet no one did stop him. As he walked down the long hillside, he saw strange
streaks in the grass all around the cluster of dark stone images, and wondered
what those patterns were until he noticed that his guide's track was exactly
such a line, and so were his steps, when he cast a mask-hampered look back. They
were tracks of visitors, coming and going from every direction.
Hisa sat or walked among these images, some alone, some in groups, and they had
made the tracks across the land, most from the woods just as he did, but some
from the river, or the hills or the broad plain beyond. The rain that sifted
down weighed down the grasses, but nothing obliterated the traces.
Tracks nearer the images converged into a vast circle of trampled grass all
about the images and in among them, where many hisa feet must have flattened
last year's growth, wearing some patches nearest the base down to bare dark
earth. It struck him that from up above, this whole plain bore a resemblance to
a vast, childishly drawn sun: the circle of stone images, the tracks like rays
going out. But hisa didn't always see the sense of human drawings, so he wasn't
sure whether they saw that resemblance or that significance. They venerated
Great Sun, who only one day in thirty appeared as a silver brilliance through
Downbelow's veil of clouds, and that veneration was why they made their
pilgrimages to the Upabove: to look on the sun's unguarded face.
As these Watchers were set here to stare patiently at the sky, in order to
venerate the sun on the rare occasions the edge of the sun should appear: that
was the best theory scientists had of what these statues meant.
There were fifteen such Watchers in this largest site, huge ones. There'd been
three very much smaller ones on the hill to which Melody and Patch had led him
and Bianca. And what did that mean, the relative size of them, or the number?
He found himself walking faster and faster, slipping a little on the grass,
because his guide went faster on the downhill; and he was panting, testing the
mask's limits, by the time he came down among the images.
He stared up at the nearest one. Up. There was no other impulse possible. For
the first time in his life a hisa face towered above his, but not regarding him,
regarding only the heavens above. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
And when he looked around his guide was gone.
"Wait!" he called out, disturbing the peace. But his hisa guide might have been
one of ten, of twenty hisa of like stature. Three in his vicinity wore cords and
bits of shell very like his guide's ornament. Wide hisa eyes stared at him, of
the few hisa who remained standing and of the most who sat each or in clusters
at the front of a statue.
"Melody?" he called out. "Patch?" But there was such a stillness around about
the place that his calling only provoked stares.
What was he supposed to do? His guide had failed to tell him.
Where did he go? Push the button and call the Base for help?
He wasn't ready to do that. He wasn't ready to give up the idea that Melody and
Patch would come here at least for him to bid them good-bye; more than that,
getting past the administrative tangle he knew he'd added to his troubles—his
mind shied away from fantasies of hisa intervention, last-moment, miraculous
help. It didn't seem wrong, at least, to explore the place while he waited. Hisa
weren't ever much on boundaries, and, after the novelty of his shouting had died
away, hisa were wandering about among the images at apparent random, seeming
untroubled by his presence.
So he walked about unhindered and unadmonished, looking up at the statues, one
after the other, seeing minute differences in them the nature of which he didn't
know. Looking up turned his face to the misting rain and spotted his mask with
more water than the water-shedding surface could easily dispose of, water that
dotted the gray sky with translucent shining worlds, that was what he daydreamed
them to be: this was the center of the hisa universe, and he stood in that very
center, by their leave.
He spread wide his arms and turned, making the statues move, and the clouds
spin, so that the very universe spun as it should, and he was at the heart of
the world. He did it until he was dizzy, and then realized hisa were staring at
him, remarking this strange behavior.
He was embarrassed then and, being dizzy, found a statue at the knees of which
no one sat; he sat down like the others, exhausted, and realized he was beyond
light-headed. A breathing cylinder wanted changing. But not urgently so. He set
his hands on his knees and sat cross-legged, back straight. He was shivering,
and had a hollow in the middle of him where food and filtered water would be
very welcome. Excitement alone had carried him this far. Now the body was
getting tired and wobbly.
He breathed in and out in measured breaths until he at least silenced the
throbbing in his head and the ache in his chest Still, still, still, he said to
himself, pushing down his demand on the cylinders until he could judge their
condition.
He'd been cold and hungry many a time in his foolish childhood. He remembered
hiding from maintenance workers, back in his tunnel ventures. He'd gone without
water. Kid that he had been, he'd gotten on to how to manage the cylinders with
a finesse the workers didn't use, and pretended ignorance through the
instruction sessions when he'd come down to the world. He'd known oh, so much
more. He'd read the manuals understanding exactly what the technical information
meant, as he'd wager the novices didn't.
He leaned his head back against the stone, face to the sky. And drew a slow
breath.
In time he knew in fact he had to change one cylinder out, and did. He slept a
while, secure in two good cylinders.
Once, in an interlude between fits of rain, a hisa came over to him and said,
"You human hello," and he said hello back.
"You sit Mana-tari-so."
"I don't understand," he said,
"Mana-tari-so," the hisa said, and pointed up, to the statue.
It wasn't a word he'd learned, of the few hisa words he did know.
"He name," the hisa said.
"He name Mana-tari-so?" The statues, then, had names, like people, or stood for
people. He rested against the knees of Mana-tari-so.
"Do you know Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o?" He didn't pronounce Melody's and
Patch's names well. But he thought someone should know them.
"Here, there," the hisa said, and patted the statue. "Old, old, he." And
wandered off in the way of a hisa who'd said what he'd wished to say.
He knew something, he suspected, just in those few words, that the scientists
would want very much to know, but he could only ponder the meaning of it. Old?
Going back how far? And did it stand for a specific maker? And if that was the
case, how did a hisa merit the making of such a huge image, with only stone
tools? It was not the effort of one hisa. It couldn't be, to shape it and move
it and make it stand here.
He sat there cold and hungry and thirsty while the gray clouds went grayer with
storm. He sat there while lightning played overhead and thunder cracked. His
suit had passed its one flash heat, and had nothing more to give him except to
retain some of his body heat. But Mana-tari-so sheltered him from the wind, and
ran with water…
The earth shook. Heaved…
Became the ship… and a giant fist slamming at him.
He lay there, half-smothered by his own increasing weight, thinking… with
startled awareness where he was… We're going to die. We're out of jump. We're
going to die here…
Second slam.
"Fletcher!" he heard from Jeremy. "You all right, Fletcher?"
"Yeah," he said, as his stomach threatened to heave. "Yeah."
A third drop. A wild, nerve-jolting screech from Jeremy.
The damned kid took it like a vid ride. Enjoyed it. Fletcher caught a gulp of
air.
Told himself he couldn't take the shame of being sick. There was a way to take
it the way Jeremy did. He tried to find it. Tried to hold onto it.
"Stay belted! Stay belted!" the intercom said. "We're in, we're solid, but stay
belted. You juniors, this is serious." The hell, Fletcher thought. The hell. "I
don't think we'll use the shower yet," Jeremy said. "Drink all those packets!
Fast!"
The backup shift on this jump was second to first, Madison to James Robert, Helm
2 to Helm 1. Both shifts were on the bridge.
But JR, riding it out below, fretted and occupied his time shaving, flat in his
bunk, and taking a risk on a lightning-fast wash before he dressed. The
Clear-to-move was uncommonly late in coming, but the audio off the bridge was
reaching him while he lay there, and the captain's station echoed to a monitor
setup he had on his handheld, a test of fine vision, but what he heard, fretting
below, was a quarry fleeing the point, trying to elude their fast drop toward
the dark mass of the failed star that was the point.
They'd gone low, toward the mass, because a bat out of hell was going to come in
after them and above them, and Champlain must guess it.
He wanted to be on the bridge, but there wasn't a useful thing he could do but
watch, and he was watching here, as Bucklin would be watching, as Lyra would be
watching, and all the rest of them who had handhelds in regular issue. They were
held in silence, not disrupting the essential com flow, not even so far as
chatter between stations.
He waited. Waited, with an eye on the clock.
Saw, utterly silent, the appearance of another dot on the system scheme, and the
fan of probability in its initial plot, rapidly revising.
"There she rides!" Com was unwontedly exuberant. "Announcing the arrival of
Union ship Boreale right over us and bound after Champlain for halt and
question. Champlain is at a one-hour lag now, and projected as one and a half
hours and proceeding. We do not believe that Champlain has made a second
V-dump."
He wouldn't slow down to exchange pleasantries, JR said to himself, if he were
in the position of Champlain's captain, with an Alliance merchant-warrior and a
Union warrior- merchant on his tail.
What the Old Man and Boreale could do to a suspected pirate spotter inside
Mariner space was one thing. Outside that jurisdiction there was no law, and
Champlain knew it was no accident they'd gone out on the same vector and tagged
close behind her.
He had a bet on with himself, that almost all Champlain's mass was fuel and that
Champlain was going far across the local gravity well and away from them, before
she dumped V and redirected for Voyager. They were doing a light skip in and
out, light-laden themselves, in the notion of jumping first, transcending light
while Champlain was still a moving dent in space-time, and possibly beating
Champlain to Voyager. There was additional irony involved: that both they and
Boreale could do it, and that neither they nor Boreale wanted to show to each
other how handily they could do it in case their respective nations one day
ended up in conflict. And that they didn't entirely trust one another. There was
just the remotest chance it might be politically useful to one party or another
inside Union for one of the two principle ships defending the Alliance to
disappear mysteriously and just not make port
Dangerous ally they'd taken. The Old Man had chosen that danger instead of the
sure knowledge Champlain was no friend, and possibly did so precisely to
demonstrate trust.
More compelling persuasion in the affairs of nations, JR thought now, the
cessation of smuggling the Old Man proposed, the acceptance of Union negotiating
demands: to have Alliance suddenly accept Union proposals threw such a new
wrinkle into Union/Alliance affairs that Boreale wouldn't dare turn on them
without reporting that fact to Union headquarters. Unlike that carrier they'd
passed (and he was sure it was no coincidence: the two ships were almost
certainly working together), Boreale wasn't a zonal command center, and couldn't
act without authority.
But even the carrier Amity, back at Tripoint, couldn't set Union policy. A Union
commander in deep space had to act with some autonomy, but conversely the
restrictions policy laid on that autonomy were explicit. The Old Man had turned
all Union certainties into uncertainty by complying with what Union had asked of
them, and therefore it was likely the ship operating with them on this run was
going to protect them until it could get word there and back again from Cyteen.
He'd grown up in the tangled shadows of the Old Man's maneuvers, military and
diplomatic, and he'd learned the principles of Union behavior: Uncertainty
paralyzes: self-interest motivates. That, and: No local commander innovates
policy.
Mallory innovated with a vengeance. It had made her highly unpopular with every
nation, and annoyed the Alliance whose self-interest dictated they take the help
of the only carrier and the only Fleet captain they or Earth could get. But even
Pell didn't entirely trust Mallory.
Let it be a lesson, the Old Man had used to say when he was a junior Jeremy's
age. Unpredictability has its virtues. But it has its negotiating drawbacks.
Union's strategy hadn't always worked. Mallory's did more often than not. Mazian
had been betrayed by his own masters: and Mallory had said in his hearing, Never
serve Earth's interests and succeed at anything. Nothing touched off Earth's
thousand-odd factions like the suspicion that some one faction's policy might
really succeed.
Pell was a Quen monarchy primarily because Pell had Earthlike tendencies, with
one important difference. They chose an outsider to govern their outsider
affairs because they couldn't agree on one of their factional leaders holding
power. Mariner was, again, a monarchy masquerading as a democracy: since the
War, the same administrator had held power and set up an increasingly entrenched
group, the only ones who knew how to govern. Voyager, tottering on the edge of
ruin all during the War and fearing that peace might kill it… Voyager remained
an enigma. While Esperance, a consortium of interests, as best he'd been able to
figure its internal workings, clung to the Alliance only so long as it
successfully played Alliance against Union.
What they carried, something the Old Man had to hope the Mariner stationmaster
had not let leak in any detail to Boreale, was a firm proposal to shore up
Voyager's economy.
Voyager's survival was not in Union's short-term interest. If Voyager went
bankrupt, Esperance would have no choice but to swing into Cyteen's political
and economic Union a situation which the consortium on Esperance itself surely
couldn't want to happen, though individual members of that consortium might have
other notions. In helping them carry out their mission, however, Boreale not
only abetted the effort to close the black market, which was in Union's
interest, but aided Voyager's economy, which wasn't altogether in Union's
economic interest but was in interest of the peace, which was in Union's
long-term interest.
Higher policy. Boreale's captain, even if he knew both halves of the equation,
was going to be damned by his high command if he failed to render aid to Finity
if the question went one way and damned if he did render it, if the question
went the other, but as Union generally operated, that captain's career salvation
was going to be the simple fact Boreale had acted to uphold current policy.
So Boreale wouldn't blow them to hell out here away from witnesses, and would
concentrate instead on its proper target, a merchanter on the wrong side of
Union policy and Alliance law.
The Old Man bet their lives on it, but it was a good bet and a better bet than
being out here alone in the case that Champlain might have dumped down hard and
Finity would have exited jump into a barrage of fire. Might have won, all the
same, but this way there wasn't a shot fired. The Old Man's bet was won.
"Crew has one hour," the intercom said. "One hour to prepare for run up to jump.
We are not spending time here. Cargo is stable. Ship is stable. Rise and shine,
cousins, and get yourselves set. Our colleague is now in front of us and we're
on the track. Note: the captain regrets there will be no bar open at Mariner-
Voyager Point."
"What are we doing?" The junior apprentice appointee in charge of Jeremy and
company was no better informed than he'd ever been. He was reassured by the
levity on the Intercom, but the situation was far from clear.
"We're chasing that ship," Jeremy said happily. "Burn their ass, we will, if
they lag back."
"We're going to shoot?"
"Probably," Jeremy said. "Sure as sure that we're not running from it. Got to
move quick. You want me to get the sandwiches and you take the shower?"
"Yeah," he said. An hour, the announcement had said. An hour before they either
shot at somebody or went right back up again, still wobbly from the last jump.
Taking a shower under the circumstances was on one hand the stupidest thing he
could imagine, and on the other, he couldn't imagine anything more attractive
than getting out of the sweaty clothes he'd worn for a month unless it was the
news they weren't going to jump or shoot after all, and that didn't look
forthcoming.
He stripped and stuffed the old clothes into the laundry bag, hit the shower and
set the dial for five minutes.
The bruises were faded green. The stitched eyebrow felt healed and no longer
swollen. The cut lip felt normal.
He remembered how he'd acquired them, remembered he wanted to beat hell out of
Chad Neihart, but the heat of anger was as dim as weeks could make it… dim as a
weeks-neglected chemistry of anger could make it. He knew biology, and was
halfway glad to have the intervening cool-off, the diminished hormonal surges,
but he felt robbed by that elapsed time, too, robbed of something basically and
primally human, as effectively as he'd already been robbed of his sole tie to
home and the first girl he'd almost loved. Feelings went cold as yesterday's
breakfast. Human concerns diminished until he could contemplate going into a
fight as a technical problem, remote from A deck.
They probably wouldn't find the stick. The pranksters had probably gotten
scared, probably chucked it down a waste chute rather than get caught with it.
When he thought that, he could halfway resurrect the anger he'd felt a month
ago. Fight Chad Neihart again? It was inevitable that he would.
Trust him again? He didn't think so.
Love the girl he'd thought he loved? He wasn't sure what he'd felt and what he
did feel.
But he recalled something as recent as slipping into jump, Jeremy's I'd miss you
still echoed in his thinking. Jeremy would in fact miss him, as he'd miss
Jeremy, and as strange, he thought he'd miss Madelaine, who'd fought to get him
aboard, and who'd given him a tissue for a bloody nose.
He missed Downbelow.
But he'd miss people on Finity, too.
He'd never felt that, going away from the station to Downbelow.
He scrubbed hard, peeling away dead skin and scab and leaving new skin beneath.
He raced the shower dial, which would finish with a warm all-over wash-off. His
stomach remained queasy, not alone from the jump, but from the divergence
between mind and body, that just didn't muster the intensity of feeling he'd had
before. As if the water sluiced away passions and left conclusions intact but
without support. People on this ship wanted him. Others didn't. How much of
their feelings had jump leached out of them… and what would a second jump leave?
A placid acceptance of the theft?
Hell, no. He wouldn't let it. There'd be a reckoning. There'd be justice.
But did it take runaway hormones to make anger viable? Was it cowardice to let
it fall, or to find it was falling what did a sane human do, who'd gone off
where humans were never designed to go?
The water cycle hit from all sides, stung his skin in a short burst. Blinded
him.
He loved Melody and Patch, but that passion was fading, too, no more immune to
the onslaught of jump-space than his anger was. Spacers' loves flared in
sleepovers and died between jumps and became someone else in the next port,
nothing eternal but the brother- and sisterhood on the ships. Family wasn't
meeting someone and marrying; it was your relations, your shipmates, the
attachments close as Jeremy. I'd miss you… and that would resurrect itself.
Bianca was further and further behind. He was what, now? six weeks ahead of her
and three months further on?
Melody's pregnancy would be showing now, if she and Patch had succeeded. Her new
baby would be a visible fact. She'd spend her time in a burrow. She'd have gone
away from him of her own volition, grown absorbed in her future, not his past.
His love for them didn't diminish—their beginnings with him were almost as old
as his sense of self—but they were his foundation, not his present reality.
He came out into the cold air, found Jeremy had gotten back from what must have
been a sprint to the mess hall, with synth cheese sandwiches and cold drinks in
plastic containers. Jeremy finished his in a gulp, started stripping and went to
the shower, stuffing his laundry in the bag. "I'll take it to the laundry
chute," Jeremy said from the shower, before it cut on.
Fletcher dressed and tucked up on his bunk with the sandwich and fruit juice,
feeling not too bad and finding it hard to track on where they were in what
could be the edge of a fire-fight. Ordinary things went on, the ordinary
pleasures of clean clothes, a cold, sweet drink. Went on right down to the
moment it might all be over. And he'd fallen into the understanding of it.
He'd finished his sandwich when Jeremy came out and dressed.
"How are you feeling?" Jeremy asked
"Mostly healed up," he said
Jeremy wasn't surprised "You got that Introspect tape? You think you could lend
it?"
He'd bought it at Mariner. He'd played it several times. And Jeremy liked it.
"Yeah," he said, and asked himself if he wanted to set up a tape himself.
But visions of Downbelow still danced in memory, a day unlike no other day he
could ever imagine. Maybe he could recover that dream.
"Hello, cousins" came from the intercom, a different voice. "Here we are, second
shift taking over, a rousing applause for first shift which dropped us neatly
where we hoped to be and all the way down to synch with our port. Thanks to the
galley for a heroic effort, and all those sandwiches. We're on to Voyager,
where, alas, we're going to have to be on long hours. But the galley promises us
herculean efforts during our Voyager run-in. We are able to reveal to you now,
seriously, cousins, that we were engaged in negotiations with both Pell and
Mariner, and with numerous captains of the Alliance, who concurred in a plan
that now has Union working with us. This ship has become valuable to the peace,
cousins, in a way that command will explain in more detail past Voyager, but
Captain James Robert has a word for you in advance of our departure. Stand by."
"Wild," Jeremy said quietly. "He only does that when we're going in to fight."
"This is James Robert," the next voice said, and a chill went over Fletcher's
skin. "As Com says, more later, but this we do know. We're couriering in a
message Voyager will very much wish to hear. We're assuring its continued
existence in the trading network, one additionally assuring that Mazian will
lose the heart of the supply network that's kept him going. There's been a
black-market pipeline funneling Earth goods to Cyteen and war materiels to
Mazian, and that's about to stop. I'll fill you all in at Voyager, but console
yourselves for a very hard stay at Voyager that we're about to deal Mazian a
blow heavier than any he's had in years. Peace, cousins. Tell yourselves that
when you're on three hours of sleep and your backs hurt, and you're tired of
watching console lights that don't change. Voyager liberty is cancelled. We may
manage a few hours, but we're going to work like dockhands at this next port. As
an additional piece of news, our running partner Boreale is in hot pursuit of
Champlain, and if Champlain doesn't have the extra fuel we think she has, and
does pull in at Voyager, we can deal with that, too."
"We ought to hit them," Jeremy said in a tone of disappointment "Why's Boreale
get all the fun?"
"It's not fun, Jeremy!" Nerves made him speak out, and he gained a shocked look
in return. "It's not fun," he reiterated. "Listen to the captain who's done more
of hitting them than anybody."
"Maybe he's getting old."
"Maybe he always knew what he's been fighting for! And maybe you're too young to
know."
"I'm not too young!"
"I'm too young! Pell's been at peace, but the idea of no enemy anywhere? I've
never known that. But I lived with creatures who never fight each other, who
don't steal from one another, and people on this ship do! I've at least seen
peace, and you haven't!"
Jeremy looked at him, just stared, as if he'd become as alien as the downers.
"Maybe we can't be like that," Fletcher said, sorry if he'd hurt Jeremy's
feelings, and sorry to be at odds with him. "But we can be happy living a lot
closer to that, where people don't get killed for no good reason, and where
you're not taking what we could spend on building places for forests and blowing
it all up."
Jeremy didn't look happy. Or informed.
"Take hold," the intercom said. "Belt in, cousins. We're about to move."
"Somebody's got to get Mazian," Jeremy said. "Downers couldn't get him."
"Did you hear the captain? We are getting him. We're getting him worse than if
we blew up a carrier. Downers didn't get him. But they watch the sky and wait."
The count started. Then the pressure started and the bunks swung.
"I still wish we got that ship!" Jeremy shouted.
"I'm going to be happy if we get there in one piece!" Fletcher yelled back.
"It's no game, Jeremy. Get your head informed! You never saw what the captain's
looking for, you've never been there. But you've seen that tape I've got. They
didn't take that. You want to borrow it again? I can get it up to you!"
"No!" Jeremy shouted back. "I got a study tape to do."
"Scare you?" he challenged the kid. "Doesn't scare me."
"You scared of Champlain? I'm not!"
"Scared of a thunderstorm? I've walked in one!"
"Seen a solar flare? That's scary! I've seen Viking spit!"
He grinned, in this war of top-you. "I've seen the Old Man in his office!"
"That's scary," Jeremy said, and he could hear the grin in Jeremy's voice. They
played the game in increasing silliness until they'd reached bilious vats of
synth cheese, and the pressure made talk difficult They were moving. Faster and
faster.
"My sides hurt," Jeremy said, and they were quiet for a while.
Then Jeremy said, "I don't know what it'd be like, to just have liberties all
the time."
"Is that what you think we do, on station? We work jobs!"
"No, I mean, if we just went around to stations having liberties and trading and
going to dessert bars and seeing girls and that."
"And that. What's that?"
"You know."
He knew. Another grin. "Kid, your body's going to catch up to your ambitions
someday and the universe will make sense to you."
"It makes perfect sense now!"
"Out there without a chart, junior-junior. Someday you'll know."
"You sleep with any of those Belizers?"
"If I had I wouldn't tell you!"
"I bet you didn't."
"You'd be right. I'm particular."
"You ever?"
"Maybe."
"What was it like?"
"Like you've read in those books you're not supposed to be looking at in that
Mariner shop!"
"No fair. I was looking at the next row!"
"I'll bet you were." His ribs were getting tired from talking, but it whiled
away the time, and fought the discomfort as Finity climbed toward jump. Finally
voices gave out, and Jeremy resorted to his music tape.
He lay and stared at the underside of the bunk, then shut his eyes, asking
himself how he'd worked his way into this, and suddenly thinking no one at home
would even understand the exchange with Jeremy. That was, he supposed, when you
knew you'd become different, when you started sharing jokes with Finity's
youngest… and knowing nobody back home would understand.
It was… when you settled in to a run like this, knowing you could make a
fireball in the night, five or so lightyears from making a glimmer in anyone's
telescopes, and do it with a philosophical turn that said, well, it was more
likely you'd get to Voyager instead.
And, it was a place he'd never remotely imagined going. It was mysterious and
dark and primitive, by all he knew. It was a doomed and damned kind of place.
He'd say that to his stationer cronies of his junior-junior years and they'd
say, Wild, and talk about going. But when they got to his age, they'd begin to
talk about savings and getting more apartment space and whether to work extra
hours for the bigger space or take the free time and live in a closet.
On Finity you got damn-all choice what you'd work, what you'd wear, and you
didn't retire. He did live in a closet, and shared it, to boot. They were out
here with someone who was trying to kill them. For real.
God.
What made him settle in and say they'd probably make it?
What made him say to himself he didn't need the stick to read Satin's message,
and that they might in fact be what Satin was waiting for? He was in the heavens
Satin looked to for her answers.
"Approaching jump," the intercom said. "Trank down, and pleasant dreams,
cousins."
"You awake?" he asked Jeremy. He hadn't heard a sound out of the top bunk for
the last hour. "Yeah," Jeremy said. "I got it. How are you?"
"Fine," he said, and pulled the trank packet from where Jeremy had taped it a
month ago.
Stuck it to his arm and felt the kick, not even having worried about it.
"Pleasant dreams," he said.
"You too," Jeremy called down.
"We are in count, plus five minutes," Com said."Boreale has gone for jump and we
believe Champlain has gone out of the continuum ahead of us. We have had no
indications of hostile action. Stand by for post-jump crew assignments. We will
transit Voyager space in ordinary rotation, third shift to the bridge, fourth to
follow. Operations in all non-essential stations are suspended for the duration.
Galley service will go on, that's Wayne, Toby B., and Ashley. Laundry, scrub,
filter change all will be suspended. Translate that, get your rest, cousins.
You're going to need it when we dock. That's four minutes, twenty-nine seconds…"
Fletcher drew a deep breath, listening to the periodic reading of the count.
"I bet we could have gotten Champlain," Jeremy said at the one-minute mark.
"Maybe we could," Fletcher retorted, feeling the creak in ribs long protesting
the acceleration. "But Mazian's going to be madder if we cut off his supply."
"You really think we can do that?"
"You got to study something besides vid-games, kid! You can't make bread without
flour, and you can't get flour if the merchanters don't move. And flour's far
scarcer than iron for missile parts in this universe!"
"That's thirty seconds. Twenty-nine…"
He tilted his head back against the strain. The engines cut out for that moment
of inertial drift that generally preceded a jump.
"Sweet dreams," he yelled at Finity's warlike youngest. "Think about it! Grain
and flour, Jeremy! What the downers grow, what they lend us the land to grow!
Bread's a necessity for us, far more than ice and iron!"
The ship spread out to infinity and lifted… That was the way it felt…
He sat there all through the dark, aware of hisa around him, in the night. There
was no shelter but the images. There was no talk. Hisa waited, sitting much as
he sat, in the intermittent rain.
Is this a place where old hisa come to die? he began to wonder.
Did the young hisa mistake what I was looking for? Do hisa just wait here, and
starve, and die?
He grew more and more uneasy. His legs kept going to sleep. He'd been told that
lightning tended to hit the highest thing around, and he sat at the base of an
image that was one of fifteen highest points in the immediate area, exactly what
the Base seniors had said was not wise in a rainstorm.
Were all of them waiting for lightning to kill someone? Was that the kind of
game this was? Divine favor? Judgment from the clouds?
The rain came down in torrents for a while, then slacked off, as if nature had
grown weary of its rage.
After a long, long while he could see the shadows of the tall Watchers by some
source of light other than the lightnings.
He'd seen the sun go down. He'd been in the thick of the woods. He'd never in
his life really seen the sun rise from an unobstructed horizon, not as it did
now, just a gradual, soft light that at first he could scarcely detect. He could
never point to a moment and say that this was dawn. Light just became, and grew,
and defined the world around him.
He shifted sides: the leg nearest the ground had chilled to the point of pain,
and he could protect one side at a time. He changed out a cylinder, carefully
pocketing the spent wrapper.
He slept, then, perhaps simply from weakness. He truly slept, and waked in an
unaccustomed warmth. He opened his eyes and realized Great Sun was brighter than
he was accustomed to be, comforting the land.
He sat, absorbing the warmth, leaning on the knees of the statue, on
Mana-tari-so. He said to himself then that he should just wait, and never push
the button that would call for help at all. It wasn't a scary place. He was with
the hisa, and whatever this place was: it waited, it watched. It was all
expectation, and in a light-headed way, at this moment, so was he.
But a hisa took his arm, and wanted him to rise and walk, where, he had no idea.
A hisa never meant harm, at least. They were utterly without violence. And he
went, curious, wobbling on his feet from hunger and light-headedness and cramped
legs.
The hisa brought him to the base of the largest Watcher, and a little
gray-furred hisa, older than any hisa he'd ever seen.
"You walk in forest," the old hisa said—female, he thought. And he sank down to
his knees on the mat of golden grass, before this old, old creature. "You name
Fetcher."
"Yes." Something held him from blurting out a request for Melody and Patch. He'd
been before judges—and this was one, something told him so, with a sense of
hushed reverence that distant thunder could not disturb.
"Satin, I."
Satin! A shiver went down his spine. Satin, the downer who'd led in the War.
Satin, who'd been to space and come down again.
A very thin, elderly hand reached out to him, brushed dust from the mask
faceplate, then touched his bare, muddy fingers.
"You boy come watch Great Sun."
"Yes."
"What he tell you?"
"I don't know." Was he supposed to know something? Was he supposed to be wiser?
There was a time downers had made him better than he was. There was a time
downers had given him far better sense than he had. But what should he know now?
He didn't think there'd be an easy answer for the ship above their heads and for
the rules he'd broken.
"Not you place," Satin said, and lifted her chin, looked Up then at the heavens
with eyes tireless as the Watchers themselves. "There you place, Fetcher."
"I'm Melody's," he said, fearful of disrespecting this most important of hisa;
but Satin was wrong. He didn't belong up there. That was all the trouble. "I
belong to Patch and Melody. I don't want to go back up there. Ever."
A chill went down his back as those eyes sought his, with the mask between them.
"You walk with Great Sun. I walk with Sun my time, bad time, lot shoot, lot
die."
The War. War wasn't a word they were ever supposed to use with hisa.
"I know," he said.
"You walk with Sun," she said, and from the grass beside her took up a spirit
stick, a carved stick as long as a human's forearm, a carved stick done up with
woven strands and feathers and stones. He'd seen them on gravesites, at
boundaries, at important places hisa meant to mark. "Take," she said, and
offered it to him.
Humans weren't supposed to touch such things. But she offered it, and he took it
carefully in one hand. He saw intricate carvings, and the wear of age and the
discoloration at one end that said it might have been set in dark earth once.
"You take," she said.
He didn't know what to say. He couldn't own such a thing. Or maybe—maybe it was
a grave marker. They were, sometimes. Maybe it was his dying she meant.
"Why?" he asked. "Do what with it?"
"Go you place. You sleep with Mana-tari-no, make he no rest. You dream Upabove.
All you dream belong Upabove. You go there."
He didn't know what to say, or to do. He didn't want this answer.
"I want to see Melody and Patch," he said as clearly as he could, as forcefully
as he dared object.
"Not you dream," Satin said.
"I didn't dream. I didn't have a dream!" It was what hisa came here to do, that
was what the researchers said. They dreamed and the wise old ones interpreted
those dreams. They believed the old ones dreamed the world into reality. They
were primitive beings.
He looked into those old, wise eyes and saw—pity?
He grew angry. Or wanted to. But Melody had told him the truth all those years
ago. He wasn't angry. He was sad.
"You find dream up there." Satin gestured toward the sky. "Go walk you
springtime. Melody and Patch go walk. Time you go, Melody child."
It hurt. It hurt a great deal. But he knew the truth when, after a period of
self-delusion, he got the straight word from somebody who could see it.
Go away. Go back. You're hurting Melody.
It was true. He'd invited himself into Melody's life and never left. And downers
didn't live as long as humans. It was a big piece of Melody's life he'd taken
with his need, his problem.
Downer females didn't get pregnant until their last infant grew up.
Did Melody think that he was hers? In her heart of hearts, was that the reason,
that she wanted to be rid of him and couldn't—and couldn't have her baby until
he was out of her life?
He offered the stick back, with all it meant, every tie, every connection to the
hisa. He did it in hurt, and in what his pride insisted was anger and what
Melody had always insisted wasn't.
But Satin refused the stick. "You take," she said. "Belong you."
He couldn't speak for a moment. He didn't know the exact moment in their talking
together when the realization had happened, just that at a moment amid the pain
he felt assured that he'd been—not cast out: the gift of the stick proved that.
But sent out by them. Graduated. Dismissed, with his own business unfinished;
his messages unspoken; his plans shifted to a totally different course.
And by what he knew now, he had to go.
It was a good thing he wore a mask. The bottom seal was getting slick. And there
was a painful lump in his throat.
"Tell Melody and Patch I love them," he said finally. "I hope they're all right
this spring."
"Spring for them," Satin said, saying it as plainly to his ears as any human
could: it was too much for a hisa to bring up a human. Spring came. It carried
hope for Melody. And a hisa wise in the ways of the Upabove explained what
Melody and Patch were too kind, too gentle to say: Melody should forget her
human child, quit her lifetime of waiting for him and get on with the years she
had, she and Patch. Spring for them.
"I understand," he said, and got up, weary and weak as he'd grown. He made the
proper little bow hisa made to those they owed respect, and held the stick close
as he walked away.
He sighted toward the dark line of the woods, a long, long climb of the hill, on
mist-slicked grass. He was well clear of the trampled circle when he reached
into an inner, safe pocket, and found the locator device, and contrived, tucking
the precious stick under his arm, to push the complex button.
He could do two things, then. He could throw it away and let it simply advise
rescuers where he'd been.
Or he could start walking home, toward his assigned fate, wondering if he'd
already stayed too late, and whether the cylinders would last.
"Fletcher? Fletcher, wake up!"
"You're scaring me, Fletcher! Don't play games…" He blinked, angry at life, at
peace with dying. He couldn't remember why, until a junior-junior started
shaking him.
"You were out," Jeremy said. "God, Fletcher!"
"I'm fine," he said harshly, annoyed at being shaken, and then realized Jeremy
had already showered and changed
He'd been on Downbelow.
He'd been lost, dismissed. Sent away.
"We're here!—Are you all right?"
"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm fine."
He'd had Satin's gift in hand. Her gift, her commission.
But he'd lost it, had it stolen, whatever mattered at this point.
Go away. You too old, Fetcher. Time you go.
Had she known? Was there any way her images had whispered the future to her?
She hadn't said… go Upabove, to the station. She'd said… go walk with Great Sun.
Go to space. And giving him her token, she sent him away from Melody and Patch,
and into her sky.
To be robbed, by a crew supposed to be the best of the merchanters. By his
relatives.
His lip wasn't cut anymore. He'd almost forgotten Chad, and the theft, until he
searched with his tongue for that physical tag of his last waking moment, and
met smoothness and no pain.
"Fletcher?"
"I'm fine," he said harshly, the universal answer. He moved. He sat up. He
felt—he'd gone back there. He'd been there. He hadn't wanted to leave.
And when he came upright and tried to sit on the edge of his bunk, his stomach
tried to turn itself inside out.
Jeremy opened a drink packet, fast, made him drink it. The taste told him he
needed it. Jeremy pressed the second on him. He almost threw up, drew great
breaths of unhindered air.
"You had me scared."
"I was walking home," he said. "But I wake up here, and I didn't remember the
fight, I forgot, dammit"! He sat on the edge of his bunk in a frantic search
inside after pieces, trying desperately to find the anger, not at his fate, not
at Quen, or at the ship, but specifically with Chad… and it wouldn't come back.
It wouldn't turn on.
You not angry… Melody had said, remembered in his dream, and turned his feelings
inside out. But this time he wasn't sad, either—he was scared. Twice robbed.
Ten-odd lightyears had come between him, Chad, and the fight, and Mariner, and
all of it. It was two months ago… and the brain had cooled off and the anger had
gotten away despite his concentrated effort to remember it, and left only panic
in its place.
He'd failed a trust Satin had given him. He'd lost the stick. He didn't know
where to find Satin's gift. Didn't know where to find a piece of himself that
had just… slipped away in his sleep, leaving his intellect aware but his body
uninformed. Even his pain at losing Melody and Patch was getting dimmer, as if
it had been long ago, done, beyond recall—as it truly was.
He flung himself to his feet, stripped as if he could strip away the dreams. He
went to the shower and scrubbed away at the stink of loss and fear. He slammed
the shower door open and came out into the cold clear air determined to
resurrect his sanity and his sense of place in the universe, on this ship,
whatever the rules had become.
And to fight. To fight, if he had to.
He dressed. He contemplated doing his duty. He went through the motions of
anger, as if that could breathe life into it; but his brain kept saying it was
past, left behind, and his fear said if he didn't care, nobody cared. Intellect
alone tried to urge the body into rage, but all it achieved was disorientation.
He wanted—he didn't know what, any longer.
"Have we got a duty?" he asked Jeremy. They hadn't waked before without one. He
didn't know what the routine was, aside from that.
"We're supposed to stay in our bunks."
"Hell." The one time he wanted work to do. There was nothing. He was in a void,
boundless on all sides. He sat down on his bunk and raked hands through his wet
hair.
Satin. The stick he'd carried through hell and gone…
.His brain began to look for bits of interrupted reality. Finally found the key
one.
Voyager. "Where's the ship we were following? Where's Champlain?"
"I don't know," Jeremy said in a hushed voice. "Nobody's said yet. Fletcher,
you're being weird on me. You're scaring me."
"I want the stick back. I don't care what kind of a joke it is, it's over. I
want it back. You think you can communicate that out and around the ship?"
"JR's been looking for it. Everybody's been looking. I don't think they're
through—"
"Then where is it?" He scared Jeremy with his violence. He'd found the anger,
and let it loose, but it didn't have a direction anymore, and it left him
shaken. "I don't know whether JR might know all along where it is. And say I
should just have a sense of humor about it. But I don't. And for all I know the
whole damn ship thinks it's funny as hell."
"No," Jeremy said faintly. "Fletcher,—we'll find it. We'll look. They haven't
got us on any duty. We'll look until we find it"
"Yeah. Why don't we ask Chad along?"
"We'll find it."
"I think we'd have hell and away better shot at finding it if JR put out the
word it had better be found."
Jeremy didn't say anything.
And he was being a fool, Fletcher thought. The vividness of the Watcher dream
was fading. The feeling of loss ebbed down.
But the feeling of being robbed—not only of Satin's gift, but of his own
feelings about it—lingered, eating away at his peace. He'd come out of sleep in
a panic that wasn't logical, that was a weakness he'd gotten past. He'd changed
residences before and thrown away everything when he got to the new one…
photographs, keepsakes, last-minute, conscience-salving gifts. All right into
the disposal, no looking back, no regrets. And yet—
Not this time.
Maybe it was the spite in this loss.
Maybe it was the innocence and the stern expectation in the giver…
Maybe it was his failure, utterly, to unravel what he'd been given, or why he'd
been given it, or even whose it was.
Downers put them on graves. Put them at places of parting. Gave them to those
who were leaving, and the ones who carried them from a parting or a death would
leave them in odd places—plant them by the riverside, so the scientists said, in
utter disregard that Old River would sweep them away next season… plant them in
a graveyard… plant them on a hilltop where no other such symbols were in sight
and for no apparent distinction of place outside the downer's own whim.
And sometimes such sticks seemed to come back again. Sometimes a downer took one
from a gravesite and bestowed it on another hisa and sometimes they returned to
the one that had given the gift. One researcher had asked why, and the downer in
question had just said, "He go out, he come back," and that was all science had
ever learned.
He go out. He come back.
To a graveyard, with more strings and feathers added. Researchers took account
of such things, in meticulous studies that noted whether the sticks were set in
the earth straight, or slanted, or if the feathers were tied above or below
certain marks…
All that would mean things in the minds of the researchers, perhaps. He didn't
trust anything they surmised—he, as someone who'd been given one—someone who'd
carried one as a hisa had to carry such a gift. He'd had no place to store it,
no place to carry it…
And had the researchers with their air-conditioned domes and their cabinets and
their classifying systems never thought what it was to carry one, with no
pockets, ridiculous thought? When you had one in your trust, you just carried
it, was all, and it was with you, and at some point in the next day or so after,
he supposed downers felt a need to complete the job of carrying it, taking it to
a grave, or to Old River, or to stand on some hilltop, nearest the sky, just to
get on with their lives, get a meal, take a drink, do something practical.
He never got to find a place to let it go, that was the thing.
Satin gave it to him, laid the burden of it on him, saying… go to space,
Fletcher.
He'd brought it here and in that sense he'd carry it forever if he couldn't find
it. He'd carry the burden of it all his life, if the people he'd been sent to,
his own people, made a joke of it—if the ones who should accept him thought so
little of him and all he'd grown up to value.
He raked the hair back, head in his hands, had, he thought to himself, a clearer
understanding of Satin's gesture and of his banishment than any behaviorist ever
could give him.
Take this memory and go, Fetcher.
Be done with old things. Be practical. Feed yourself. Sleep. Let Melody go.
But that wasn't all of it, even yet. It was Satin's gift. It came from the one
hisa who'd gone to space, and back again. It wasn't just from any hisa. It was
from the authority all hisa knew and all humans recognized. It was Satin's gift
and Base administration hadn't dared say otherwise.
Then some stinking lowlife stole it, because an unwanted cousin came in as an
inconvenience, one who had had some other life than the ship.
He didn't think now that JR would have done it or countenanced it, but protect
the party responsible and try to patch it all up? That was JR's job, to keep the
bad things quiet and keep the crew working. He figured the Old Man might not
even have heard yet—if it was up to JR to report.
But no—he recalled now, piecing the details of pre-jump together: Madelaine
knew. And if Madelaine knew, he'd bet the Old Man did know.
He didn't think that the senior captain would approve such goings-on. In that
light, it was well possible that JR had had to explain the situation.
A weight came on the bunk edge beside him. Jeremy. With an earnest, troubled
look, itself an unspoken plea. He'd been seeing Downbelow, in his mind.
"The hell of it all is," he said to Jeremy, "the stick was like a trust. You
know what I mean? And if I get it back, I don't know what I'd do with it…
something Satin would want; but I don't know.—But it's for me to choose when and
where to do that Somebody else doing it… just tucking it away somewhere…" He was
talking to a twelve-year-old, who, even with his irreverence, believed in things
dim-witted twelve-year-olds believed, in magic, and a responsive universe,
things somebody older could still in his heart believe, but never dare say
aloud. "You know what that means? That they carry that stick. And that they've
taken on responsibility for something they probably wouldn't choose to carry,
but I'll tell you something about that stick. It won't turn them loose. That
thing's an obligation, that's what it is. And this ship won't ever be quit of it
if it doesn't give it back to me." He saw Jeremy's face perfectly serious,
absolutely believing. "And—no," he said to Jeremy, "I'm not going to look for
it. It's going to come back to me or this ship will change and change into what
somebody aboard wants it to be. I'm not going to play games with Chad about it.
He'd better hope he finds it and gets it to me before the captain steps in to
settle it, and I kind of think that's the instruction the captain's given JR.
You understand me? If the ship doesn't find it—it's going to be the ship's
burden, and the ship's responsibility, and as long as I live I won't trust Chad
Neihart. Maybe no one else will, either."
"What if it's not his fault?" Distress rang in Jeremy's voice. "What if he,
like, meant to give it back and something went wrong?"
"I said it. It's something you carry until you can lay it down. Downer
superstition, maybe. But it's true. I can tell you, either I'm going to forgive
Chad and his hangers-on, or I'm not. And I'm going to trust this ship or I'm
not. That's the kind of choice it is. You can pass that word where you think it
needs to be passed. Things people do don't altogether and forever get patched
up, Jeremy, just because they're sorry later. If Chad destroyed it… that says
something it'll take years for me to forget."
There was a long and brittle silence.
"He's not a bad guy," Jeremy said faintly.
"Can I trust him after this?" he asked. Yes, Jeremy believed in miracles, and
balances. And maybe it was callous to trade on it, but, dammit, he believed such
things himself, and maybe belief could motivate one other human being in the
crew. "Can I ever trust him? That's the question, isn't it?"
Jeremy didn't have an answer for him, even with a long, long wait. Just: "I'll
put the word around. This shouldn't have happened. It shouldn't, Fletcher. We're
not like that."
"I want to think so," Fletcher said. It was, at least in that ideal world of
these few moments' duration, the truth. Then, because the ensuing silence grew
uncomfortable: "Are they going to open rec, do you think, or not?"
"I think we're supposed to sit in quarters. At least until they give us a clear.
I'll lend you my tapes."
Fletcher got up and walked the six steps the cabin allowed before he fetched up
in front of the mirrored sink alcove. He saw Jeremy standing, too, watching him
with a distressed look on his face.
"Cards," he said to Jeremy, foreseeing otherwise Jeremy worrying at the matter
and himself pacing twelve steps up and back, up and back, for a long, long
number of hours. It was a situation Jeremy knew how to endure, this being pent
in quarters. He imagined the rule in force at other chancy moments, on Finity's
exits into lonely star systems, and the too-wise twelve-year-old with nothing
and no one to confide in.
Don't leave. He remembered Jeremy pleading with him, in a way that, maybe
hearing it when he was tranked, the way it did with tape-drugs, had settled into
his consciousness with peculiar force. He'd had borrowed brothers all his life.
He'd never had a foster brother as desperate, as lonely as Jeremy. There'd never
been a rivalry between them. Now—he began to see Jeremy adopting his trick of
leaving the coveralls collar undone, his trick of how he did a hitch in the
belt—
Even the cuff turn-up. The obsession, when they'd been on liberty, with finding
a sweater, a brown sweater, like his. God, it was laughable.
And enough to grab his heart, when he looked at the kid's face, the eyes that
searched his for every hint of advice, and, having just evoked it and brought it
into the open, how did he ignore it?
He didn't know how he felt now. Trapped, yes.
And at the same time gifted with something he'd never had, and now couldn't walk
away from… no more than Melody had walked away from a lost boy that day on Pell
docks.
Chapter XX
Contents - Prev/Next
Voyager lay ahead, a spark against a starry dark, swinging in orbit about a
stony almost-planet itself orbiting a smallish star.
No Boreale. No Champlain when Finity had broken out of hyperspace here. Just the
ion traces of ships that had come in…
And gone. Both. Champlain in the lead, one guessed, and Boreale in pursuit. A
nominally Alliance ship fleeing; and a Union ship, which without their
permission couldn't hunt in this space, in hot pursuit
The feeling on Finity's bridge was one of frustration. It was second watch in
charge of the jump out of Mariner-Voyager Point. That was Madison's crew, with
Francie's watch coming on—third watch; and for a buffer, and to handle
emergencies, and the senior-juniors, who'd fought the ravages of a double-jump
and hauled their depleted bodies out of bunks faster than no few of the seniors
could… anticipating the remote possibility of battle stations, and moving to be
there in case one of the seniors couldn't make it to station.
JR held the lead of that set.
But nothing. Just nothing. They turned out to be alone in the jump range, and
that was, for the ship, good news. JR told himself so—even if Madison hovered
after turnover with a general glum look, and even if Helm 2 had stayed around to
be a problem to Helm 3.
Battle nerves, with no battle, no answer, even, for simple human curiosity—and
the suspicion that a Union ship had just slipped their witness in Alliance space
with full opportunity to carry out an attack on what was, nominally, still an
Alliance ship.
That was JR's suspicion, at least. And at a time when they were trying their
damnedest to persuade Alliance merchanters to surrender to the Alliance
station-based government at Pell some of the rights Finitys End had once been
pivotal in winning.
Ignore the fact our Union ally just took out after an Alliance ship… and did it
one jump short of Esperance, the hardest sell they'd face? No matter that that
Alliance ship might be guilty of aiding the enemy, the enemy that had not that
long ago been their own Fleet; and no matter that some Alliance merchanters were
caught on the wrong side of the line. The Alliance found it hard to forgive
Union, who'd roughly handled some merchanters during the War and whose
territorial lines were now trying to choke some merchanters out of business.
Alliance was very ambivalent about rimrunners, ships skirting the edges of the
modern international alignments; and about dealings with Union; and while they
wanted Mazian kept at bay, it was not a universal sentiment that the Alliance
could exist without the bugbear of Mazian out in the dark—because that fear kept
Union behaving itself.
A Union ship taking on a merchanter would harden Alliance merchanter attitudes
at the same time it might incline Esperance Station attitudes toward an
agreement with Union. Get-tough policies regarding merchanter compliance weren't
going to win points with the small merchanters who were one economic catastrophe
away from having to run cargo they wouldn't ordinarily choose to be running. JR
didn't know what the Old Man thought of the situation. He hoped that the ion
signature they picked up was of a passage, not a battle shaping up to happen in
the witness of Esperance and anyone docked there.
He'd bet first that the Old Man, who was not on the bridge this jump, was well
aware, and second, that the Old Man was not amused at Boreale's giving chase
past Voyager without consultation. Likely he was already considering how he was
going to counter the negatives if the situation blew up.
They had, JR concluded, a potential problem. They'd given Boreale what Boreale
couldn't otherwise have gotten: a straight short-cut through Alliance space to
warn the Union's own presence at Esperance—reputedly there was a major one at
all times—that there was something in the offing. And that could be bad news—or
good
There was no possibility that the carrier they'd met at Tripoint had sent
Boreale: arrival times at Mariner didn't make it possible, but he was curious
enough to sit down and call up Mariner data to confirm that Boreale had, indeed,
been in port for a week before they'd gotten in. No. Even granted ships could
over-jump one another in hyperspace, that theory didn't fit the timeline.
Boreale had come in from Cyteen vector and it had no possibility of having been
sent by Amity. So its being there was honest.
Boreale's guarding them in the understanding that they were trying to get
merchanters into compliance with the customs regulations, that was honest, too.
So it was perfectly reasonable, aside from chasing Champlain, that they would
want to get on through to Esperance where, unlike at Voyager, they had a
straight shot to carry a message to Cyteen and could equally well contact other
ships whose black boxes had been in very latest communication with Cyteen, to
check out what was going on elsewhere. In Boreale's situation, they'd have done
exactly the same.
The Old Man had played it safe, and here they were. They had to go in at
Voyager, refuel, do their business of meetings with station administration, and
go through the routine motions of trade. They wouldn't slight Voyager by
bypassing it
The good break was that, in the slight imprecision of ship arrivals in a gravity
well, Helm had used the belling effect of a ship still at the interface to skip
a moderately loaded and very powerful ship well out even from the center of
system mass, which wasn't the center of the star… and the direction of that
skewing was toward the position Voyager station happened to be at this time of
its year. It was a beautiful job both from Nav and from Helm, a piece of skill
that had, all at the same time, simplified their dive toward the station, let
them speed faster longer than they'd dare at larger stations, and given them a
chance of making up time in what had become a race with Boreale toward
Esperance.
Ahead was the least modern station still functioning this side of Union, a small
station, with part of its ring under construction before the War, a
construction, their files said, which was now abandoned.
Pell, Mariner, Earth… Cyteen, as well, had strung multiple establishments
through the ecliptic of their stars. But impoverished Voyager was just Voyager,
in orbit about a tiny planet near a debris ring unpleasantly perturbed by a
smallish gas giant. Voyager had built a watchful defense not originally against
piracy but against high-velocity visitors. But its capabilities had found dual
use during the War—use which had kept it alive and kept it a port of call for
whatever side could hold it.
And that had been Mazian, for most of the War years.
Prior to the War, in the days of shorter-hopping ships, Voyager had been a
bridge toward the hope of more exotic mining at Esperance, but in post-War
years, mining had turned out less lucrative for Esperance than the lure of trade
with Cyteen. Mariner also wanted the promise of traffic between Pell and Cyteen,
if the peace held. Now, poised between Mariner and Esperance, Voyager was the
unfortunate waystop between two stars only fragilely interested in trading with
each other.
There was a time crunch on. They had a very little time at this star to turn
that situation around.
The Old Man arrived on the bridge. Madison and Alan alike stood up. JR did, and
all the other juniors on the bridge, in respect of the senior captain, who waved
them to be seated.
Madison delivered the first report, of which JR caught the salient details. Alan
delivered the second one. Frances had shown up in James Robert's wake, to hear
the general reports, and JR listened on the edges, aware of Bucklin having moved
up near him.
"Well," the Old Man said with a wry expression that framed official reaction,
"we have a need to get through this port and get our job done. We are going to
get turned around and get out of here in record time. All senior crew to round
the clock hull watch, all able-bodied to transfer of cargo, senior staff to what
I hope will be short meetings. I don't anticipate station will object to our
proposals at all, but the local merchant trade is likely to. And I'd rather have
had Boreale here with us. But we don't have that. What does the schematic show
us? Who's in port?"
"That's three interstellars, sir," Alan said, "end report."
That was incredibly thin traffic.
"We mustered better than that at our last conference with Mallory," the Old Man
said with a shake of his head. "Jamie. Who are they? Mariner origin or
Esperance?"
"Velaria left Mariner for Voyager a week ago, sir, Constance and Lucky Lindy
were before that. Nothing but ourselves, Boreale, and Champlain the last five
days. No ships from Esperance in port."
"Counting that a week's rated a long stay here, it's a reasonable expectation,
three ships. Voyager's apt to berth about five ships on any given twenty-four
hours, rarely ten. We're the fourth. Boreale and Champlain would have made it
almost to traffic congestion, for this port."
"Yes, sir," JR said. He'd been ready. It was a struggle, on a two-jump, to have
mental recall on everything you'd been supposed to track. It was a job skill. A
vital one, and he hadn't failed it.
"Four empty cans," the Old Man said, "food grade and clean, ride in the hold.
The job will be to test and transfer whatever we pick up on the local market to
assure ourselves a clean cargo, one can to the other. Senior crew will not have
forgotten this drill, our compliments to the junior crew, who will carry out a
great deal of the transfer. We will secure lodgings for all crew near the ship,
and crew will not separate from assigned groups, no matter what the excuse. We
will make an additional issue of clothing, purchased at the station. We will
forego ship's rules on patches and tags. Wes, you'll treat the details in a
general announcement. The station could use the trade, and we won't have access
to the laundry. Junior-juniors will stay particularly close, within safe
perimeters, and only senior staff will deal with food procurement, clothing
issue, all other activities where something from the outside comes aboard this
ship, including personal baggage, which will be extremely limited. Security Red
applies. Cargo will, however, be inert."
It was the old New Rules. Nothing came aboard without being scanned through,
logged, accounted for, and the crew member in question absolutely able to vouch
for its integrity. Security Red usually applied when they were hauling touchy
cargo… explosives, not uncommonly in the past. This time it wasn't the cargo's
volatility that prompted the precautions against sabotage. It was Voyager's.
The Old Man walked about then, taking a short tour past the number one stations,
the general boards, spoke a word with the Armscomper, who'd only begun to shut
down the hot switches, and with Tech 1, who'd handled the tracking on the
emissions signatures.
Habitually the Old Man also said a word to the observing staff, as they called
it: the senior-juniors, and JR waited, standing.
"I had a memo from Legal before jump," the Old Man said in a lowered voice. "I'd
like to see you in my office. Now."
"Yes, sir." It was not a topic he wanted to deal with on the bridge. It wasn't a
topic he wanted to deal with. And had to.
The Old Man left the bridge. JR looked at Bucklin, who cast him a look of
sympathy, and went to report a situation he'd hoped, pre-jump, to have solved.
"The situation on A deck," the Old Man said with no preamble, as JR stood in
front of that desk in the Old Man's office, the one with the bookcases, the
mementoes of old, wooden ships. Past the Old Man's iron control, JR had no
difficulty detecting distress: personal, distracting distress, which the senior
captain could well do without when he faced life and death decisions, peace and
war decisions.
"Not the captain's immediate concern, sir. I hope to have a solution."
"We've never had to use the word 'theft.' "
"I'm well aware, sir. I don't know what to say. I don't have an answer." At that
moment a message began on the intercom, a general advisement to the ship that
Boreale and Champlain had slipped through Voyager system and that they were
proceeding to dock and refuel.
"Security Red will apply here," the intercom said, Alan's voice, "and we will be
shifting cargo. The fact that Boreale has gone on in close pursuit of Champlain
remains a matter of concern, but it is not, at the moment, our concern…"
James Robert's finger came down on the console button and the announcement fell
silent in the small office.
"I think we know those details."
"Yessir," JR said.
"A spirit stick as I understand it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Smuggled aboard."
"Technically, yes, sir." It wasn't the illegality of it that he felt at
question, but the very question how anything of that unusual a nature had gotten
past his observation. "Legally in his possession."
Sometimes in the tests the Old Man set him he had to risk being wrong. "Sir, I
haven't considered what the case is. Evidence points to someone taking it, I've
requested its return, and no one's come forward."
"And there's been a fight."
"Yes, sir. There was a fight." Sometimes, too, the challenge was to hang on to a
problem and keep it off B deck. And conversely to know when to send it upstairs.
"I'd like to continue to handle this one, sir, on my own resources."
There was a long, a very long silence. If there was a space under the carpet
he'd have considered it. As it was he had to stand there, the subject of the
senior captain's very critical scrutiny at a time when a very tired, very
worn-looking senior captain took spare moments out of his personal rest time,
not his duty schedule.
"I take it the investigation is not at a standstill."
"No, sir. Ship movement took precedence, but this can't end with an acceptance
of this situation. That won't solve it."
The captain nodded slowly, in concurrence with that assessment, JR thought.
They risked losing Fletcher. That was one thing. They risked setting a
precedent, a mode of dealing with each other that might destroy them.
"Ship's honor," JR said faintly, in the Old Man's continued silence. "I know,
sir."
"Ship's honor," the Old Man said. "It's the means by which we dare ask those
other ships, Jamie, to put aside self-interest. In the last analysis, it's the
highest card we have. Think about it. Do we wish to give that up?"
"No, sir." It was hard to make a sound at all. Hard to breathe, until the Old
Man dismissed him to the relative safety of the corridor.
Five minutes later he gave Bucklin and Lyra orders.
In fifteen minutes, every unassigned junior including Fletcher was on
intercom-delivered notice that the Old Man had inquired about the object; and
juniors were spreading out through the ship this time on independent, not team,
search.
Give the culprit the opportunity to find the object, in whatever way he or she
wished. It wouldn't end it, but it would enable him to put the focus on the
interpersonal problem and discover what they were actually dealing with: a
theft, or the ruse, or the destruction of something irreplaceable.
Fletcher, however, was with the junior-juniors, all three, when he came on them
going through A deck's vacant cabins a search that, in the example he saw, had
boxes of whiskey moved, storages opened, bunks swung to look underneath, all
with amazing dispatch.
"Fletcher," JR said, and drew Fletcher outside the door to 40A. "The Old Man
expresses extreme concern. It's not a property issue. I don't consider it one.
He doesn't. If you want to file a complaint with him, that door will be open.
I'm asking you, personally, give me time to unravel this."
Fletcher had been moving boxes. His breaths came deep. "I didn't intend to get
involved," Fletcher said, and gave a move of the eyes toward the flurry of
activity inside. "They wanted to."
If it had been any other circumstance, he would have been dismayed at the
thought of the inexpert junior-juniors disarranging cargo. Thumps continuing to
come from inside the disused cabin. "I'm impressed with their enthusiasm," he
said.
And in the uneasy silence that followed between them: "Fletcher, we're
approaching a very dangerous dock. I hope we can resolve things prior to
docking. If not, I'm asking you, as I'll ask Chad, to refrain from
confrontations. Very serious negotiations are riding on it. Alliance-Union
negotiations. They could be adversely affected if two of our crew engage on
dockside." There was a moment more of silence, and diminishing hope of
Fletcher's understanding. "I'm asking your cooperation for a handful of days.
We're going to be working hard, tempers are going to be short. You're assigned
to watch the junior-juniors, the same as before, but I can take you off that if
you feel you'd be better separated from other personnel. You and the
junior-juniors can sit in a sleepover together and watch vids, if that's your
choice, and you won't have to work."
Fletcher stood there considering what he said. He increasingly expected Fletcher
to choose to stay to the sleepover, the safest choice, and the one, in the
absence of Fletcher's desire to cooperate, he still might order.
But Fletcher let go the frown, and glanced instead toward the doorway, where the
junior-juniors were conducting their search. Then he looked back.
"Even if provoked," Fletcher said. "As long as we're in dock. You've got my
promise."
"I'm glad to take your word," he said, and left the junior-juniors to their
activity. He hunted down Chad with the same proposition, and that quest required
a trip out into the rim, where in coats and gloves and with flashlights, Chad
had paired up with Wayne. Another glow, from around the girder-laced curve,
showed where Nike and Lyra were operating, in cold deep enough to get through
boots.
"I don't know why he picked me," Chad said "That's twice he's come at me like I
was the only one."
"I don't know why," he said "I can't defend it. I only know how important it is
we keep the peace. On both sides of this."
"I don't even know what the damn stick looks like," Chad said. "It's hard to
search for something when you only have a description of it. And that's all I
have."
Chad wanted to convince him he was innocent. He wished he believed it himself.
And yet he couldn't dismiss the possibility it was the case. "It's all I have,
too," he said to Chad.
"I think he did it," Chad said, breath frosting in the light, "and he's just
putting us to running rings. I think it's going to turn up somewhere and he'll
be the only one not surprised."
"If that's the case," he said. "If it's not the case, the real way this is going
to get solved is when we sit down together and look at each other without
suspecting the worst. Him. You. Wayne. Me. All of us."
"Chad's taking the brunt of this," Wayne said. "And I don't think he's to
blame."
"He doesn't want to be here, anyway," Chad said.
"And I just talked to the Old Man, and asked for more time. Give me some help,
Chad."
"Yessir. I won't fight."
He had a confidence in Chad he couldn't have in Fletcher, who hadn't been a
presence all his life. Chad might be on the wrong side of something, but he
wouldn't go against the answer he'd just given.
"Not even if he jumps you, Chad. If he does I'll settle it. I know it's hard
what I'm asking, but you're both of you strong hands we need, and I'd rather not
have you sitting it out in quarters."
"I got my tooth chipped the first time station-boy threw a punch out of
nowhere!"
"Chad."
"Yessir," Chad said.
"And don't call him that. No words, Chad, same as no fighting."
"Yessir," Chad said the second time.
"I take your word on it," he said, wishing it weren't Chad's word that was
utterly at issue.
And that Chad wasn't the only potential explosive in their midst. There was
Connor. There was Sue. There was Nike.
Vince seemed to have fallen in on the side of the offended, not the offenders.
Vince was, at least, off his mind.
No sign of the stick, not the first twenty-four hours, not the second, and the
junior-juniors, early and enthusiastic in their burst of energy, grew frustrated
and short-fused.
"We're not going to find it," Linda said.
"Probably," Fletcher said, "we have less chance than the ones in the outer
ring."
"We can go out there," Jeremy declared.
"No, we can't. I'm not being responsible for you clambering around in the dark.
Senior-juniors are searching that."
Jeremy's shoulders slumped. The junior-juniors were tired to the point of
exhaustion. They all had blisters.
And senior crew had found out, unofficially. A number had volunteered extra
hours, and hiding places they'd known when they'd been young and foolish.
Some of those searches surprised the junior-juniors, that anyone but them did
know those nooks and crannies.
Jake came, having gotten the general description, and said there'd been no
stones in the recycling traps, which indicated it hadn't gone into biomass,
unless somebody had thought of that and removed the stones before chucking it
into a disposal chute.
That was a logical place to search, one Fletcher hadn't thought how to handle in
terms of the chemistry; and Jake, the bioneer, had disposed of the question by
something so basic his school-fed theory hadn't even considered it.
Notes from all four of the captains turned up one by one in his personal pager,
saying, essentially, that the captains were aware, and that official issues
aside, if he wanted to discuss the matter, they stood ready to listen.
Fletcher didn't know how to answer, so he delayed answering. The first impulse
had been to say, Get me off this ship; and the second one had been a hesitancy
to say what might not, even yet, answer where he wanted to go, or what he wanted
to do.
He hadn't expected the flurry of senior help in the search.
He hadn't expected the junior-juniors, patching blisters, to keep looking.
He hadn't expected the senior-juniors to show up in the mess hall, half-frozen
from the ring skin, looking for hot coffee and looking exhausted as his own
small crew. That included Chad, who avoided looking at him, who pointedly looked
the other way when he stared.
It's destroyed, he said to himself, and Chad's scared to say so. It's destroyed
or it's lost and Chad can't find it.
But none of the senior-juniors talked much, least of all to him, and not that
much to each other. There was no rec, meals were catch-as-catch-can, and no one
associated together.
This is wrong, Fletcher said to himself, sitting in the A deck mess hall with a
coffee cup cooling between his own hands. Jeremy had gotten himself a cup of
coffee, and then Vince and Linda had, not their habit. Caffeine wouldn't,
Fletcher thought, improve Jeremy's already hair-trigger nerves. He wasn't sure
any of the junior-juniors were used to it. But he drank it; and they drank it, a
warm-up from the chill of places they'd searched.
Jeremy had fallen asleep yesterday night with the suddenness of a light going
off. He'd lain awake with the increasingly heavy responsibility of the ship's
search lying on his pillow, and he thought, today, This is wrong, with the
notion that if he stood up, said, Forget it, it's lost, it may never turn up… he
might free everyone, and relieve everyone's nerves, and just let it pass.
He got up, finally, with the notion of doing exactly that, and immediately the
junior-juniors wanted to jump up and follow.
"No," he said. "An hour alone. All right? And don't do anything stupid."
"Yessir," Jeremy said.
He went over to that other table, where Chad and Wayne and Connor were sitting.
"Where's JR?" he asked in a carefully neutral tone. "Do you have any notion?"
"Bridge," Wayne said, "last I heard. What's the problem?"
He couldn't go to the bridge. No one could go there without an authorization.
"Thanks," he said, frustrated in his resolution.
"What do you want?" Wayne asked, and he looked at Wayne, and the two he had most
problem with, and took resolution in both hands.
"To stop this. Just give it up."
"Why?" Wayne asked
"Because it's getting nowhere! Somebody lost it. I accept that. Just everybody
quit looking. It may turn up ten years from now. It may never turn up. That's
the way it is."
"I'll relay that to JR," Wayne said carefully. Neither Chad nor Connor said
anything. Chad did look at him, an angry look, a wary one. Connor didn't do that
much.
He went back to the juniors and sat down,
"We can't give it up," Jeremy said
"Even if we stop looking," Linda said, "we can't give it up."
It was, he thought, the truth, however Linda meant it. He had the captains'
messages stacked up and waiting, that he hadn't heard from Madelaine meant only
that Madelaine was either under orders or trying to restrain herself, and in all
the things that had happened aboard the ship, he could only fault a bad
situation and a natural resentment.
It was natural that the senior-juniors wished he'd never come aboard; and maybe
it was natural Jeremy and Madelaine and maybe the Old Man wanted him never to
leave. He'd become the center of a situation he'd never wanted, and everything
had gotten out of hand to the point it had damaged the ship.
Even if we stop looking we can't give it up…
He knew now what a delicate, interconnected structure he'd arrived in, and how
it had tried to fit him in, and how he'd damaged it without understanding it…
irrevocably so, perhaps. Stopping the search wouldn't cure it
Getting rid of him might relieve the pain, his and theirs, but it wouldn't cure
it. There wasn't even an organized evening mess in which he could snag JR into
private converse.
In another hour the intercom announced the docking schedule, and particulars of
assignments, and they were in their quarters packing duffles reversed in the
usual proportion of flash and work clothes: this time it was one dress outfit
and the rest work blues.
"This is James Robert Senior," the intercom said unexpectedly. "We have
completed cargo purchase and fueling arrangements prior to dock. Senior officers
will be engaged in negotiations vital to the peace of the Alliance. We have been
alert for any merchanter inbound from Esperance in the notion that such a ship
might have information on the two ships who jumped close to us. Keep your eyes
occasionally toward the station schedules and be aware that if such a ship
should come from Esperance vector, the situation might change rapidly and
dangerously. Be aware that this station has numerous black marketeers doing
business on the docks and that they may feel we threaten their interests. Be
alert. Do not violate the schedule and do not leave the accommodations except to
come straight to the ship for work. The sleepover is the finest we were able to
obtain, and it has some recreational facilities, but we do not believe there
will be extensive time aside from sleep and meals. We will not stow any can we
have not verified.
"You are all by now aware that there has been an incident aboard unprecedented
in this ship's history. I call on all involved to set aside the matter for the
duration of our stay, in the interests of all aboard, and I continue to express
confidence that the parties involved will find it in their capacity to resolve
the issue in a manner considerate of the ship's best interests and traditions of
honor.
"Enjoy your stay."
He had continued to fold clothing, Jeremy to tuck in small items like his tape
player.
Neither of them said anything. He wished now he'd never reported the theft or
made an issue. He said to himself he wanted it forgotten, beyond their next
jump, that, in the way of mystical things, he'd gained all he could from his
loss and stood to lose all he had, if he insisted on finding it.
The intercom droned on with assignments and shifts. The junior-juniors and Chad
were at opposite ends of a twenty-four-hour clock. They went down to the
assembly area and took their places, Vince and Linda attaching themselves from
somewhere farther back in the large, rail-divided rec hall; and Madelaine and
others noted their passage through the mob of cousins, giving them small pats on
the shoulder, as others did with him. Fletcher ducked his head and studied the
rail in front of him, not wanting to communicate. The junior-juniors stood fast
about him through the procedures, like some fiercely protective bodyguard, until
it was time for the section chiefs to go out and down to take care of customs.
It was, Fletcher discovered, not Pell, not Mariner. It looked more barren than
Pell's White Dock at the dead hours of alterday, as seedy as any between-shop
alley in White. And it had a look of danger, the way White Dock had been
dangerous, the domain of insystemers and cheap hustlers and those who wanted to
sink in among them for safety.
Customs was a wave-through. For everyone.
Baggage pickup was fast. Everyone had packed as lightly as possible and bags
came down the exit chute from cargo as if the handlers had slung them on six at
a time.
"The bag-end of stations for sure," he said to the junior-juniors when they set
out for their sleepover, a short march across the docks to a frontage of
gray-painted metal.
Definitely not Mariner. The promised Safe Harbor Inn was squeezed in between a
bar's neon light and a tattoo parlor.
Fifteen minutes later, with scant formality, they had their keys and found
themselves sandwiched into what they'd called a suite on the second level—with a
note from JR on his pager that occupants on the same floor were known smugglers
and that senior staff would walk the whole junior-junior contingent to their
duty shift every shift.
Their so-called luxury suite was one room, two beds, and a couch.
"God," Vince cried. "This is brutal. We're stuck in here?"
"We've got a vid," Jeremy said in desperate cheerfulness, and turned it on. The
program selection was dismal and, at one channel, Fletcher made a fast move to
stand in front of the screen.
Then he thought… what the hell. They were spacer juniors. They'd tossed Linda in
with him and Jeremy and Vince, and he figured it was because she was safer with
them than elsewhere, tagging around after some preoccupied senior crewwoman and
trying to catch up with her age-mates for duty.
"The hell with it all," he said, and gave up on censorship with the vid. Then
turned it off. "Yes, we're stuck. I brought my tapes. Vince and Jeremy, the bed
on the left, Linda, the right, I get the couch cushions and probably I've got
the better bargain. We'll splurge on supper, go to duty. It's three days max."
"Walking us to duty like babies," Linda sighed, and collapsed on the end of the
bed, her feet on her duffle. "Skuz."
It was, Fletcher thought, the other side of the spacing life. It wasn't all
palaces. His mother had known places like Mariner. But this was like post-War
Pell, this was like the apartment he'd shared with his mother, right down to the
plumbing that rattled. It wasn't a place he wanted to remember, in its details,
the cheap scenic paneling. The place had had a plastic tri-d painting, pink
flowers, right over the couch that was a makedown bed
And he'd gotten those couch cushions for his bed, on the floor. Odd thing to be
nostalgic about. But that was how little space they'd had. He'd had to walk on
the cushions to get past the arm of the couch, his mother had fitted him in that
tightly against the wall. His nest, she said. And then when welfare complained,
she'd gotten a bed for him, but he'd preferred the cushions, his homey and
comfortable spot. So after all that fuss they kept the cot behind the couch and
never set it up.
They ate supper, he and the juniors, they walked the only circuit they had, in
the lobby, they played a handful of game offerings in the game parlor. At 1200
hours a party of Finity crew formed in the lobby and walked, in a group, to the
dock, and to the cargo lock.
The instructions arrived, written, for each section head. He read them three
times, because it made no particular sense to be emptying one container into the
other. He went to the head of Technical over at the entry, a little sheepish.
"Are we emptying one can into another or is it something I'm missing in the
instructions?"
"Vacuuming it from one to the other. That's why we took on only food grade and
powders." Grace, Chief of Cargo Tech, the coat patch informed him. "Easier to
clean the vacuum with powders." He must have looked as bewildered as he felt,
because Linda, who'd tagged him over to ask, nudged his arm.
"They can kind of put a foreign mass in stuff, even powder like flour, and they
sort of make it assemble by remote, or sometimes it's on a timer. It's real
nasty. But it's got to have this little starter unit."
"It blows up," Grace said. "That's why we're analyzing the content on every can
and sifting through everything. Security Red. There's those with reason to wish
we'd fail to reach our next port."
"Because of the negotiations," he said.
"Because of that, and because some just had rather on general principles that we
didn't exist."
All the junior-juniors had gathered around. People wanted to blow up ships with
kids on them. That was why the court had kept him off Finity. Maybe the court
had saved his life. They talked about so many dead, the mothers of these three
kids among them, dying in a decompression.
He didn't ask. He lined the fractious juniors up to go in and get the coats they
were supposed to have. The cans were sitting outside on the dock, huge
containers, the size of small rooms. The message to the section heads said
something like fifteen hundred of those cans.
And they were going to transfer cargo from one to the next so they could be sure
of the contents?
He'd never been inside a ship's hold. He'd only seen pictures. He went up the
cargo personnel ramp, was glad to snatch a coat from the lockers beside the
access and to see the juniors wrapped up, too, on the edge of a dark place with
spotlights illuminating machinery, rows and rows of racks.
"Back there's hard vacuum," Jeremy said, pointing at another airlock with Danger
written large in black and yellow. Machinery clanked and clashed as a can came
in, swung along by a huge cradle. No place for kids, his head told him, but
these three knew better than he did.
"You got to keep to the catwalks," Vince yelled over the racket, breath frosting
against the glare and the dark. Vince slapped a thin rail. "Here's safe!
Nothing'll hit you in the head! Lean over the edge, wham! loader'll take your
head off!"
"Thanks for the warning," he said under his breath, and said to himself of all
shipboard jobs he never wanted, cargo was way ahead of laundry or galley scrub.
His feet were growing numb just from standing on the metal. Contact with the
rail leached warmth from his gloved hands. The proximity of a metal girder was
palpable cold on the right side of his face. "Colder than hell's hinges."
"You got a button in your pocket lining," Jeremy said, and he put his hand in
and felt it. Heated coat. He found it a good thing.
They were mop-up, was what the duty sheet said. Every can had to be washed down
and free of dust, as it paused before its trip into the hold. Cans that had been
set down, behind the concealment of the hatch, had to be opened, the contents
sampled, shifted to another can, and that can, its numbers re-recorded on the
new manifest, then had to be picked up by the giant machinery, and shunted to
their station while Parton and his aides were running the chemistry to prove it
was two tons of dry yeast and nothing else.
The newly filled cans acquired dust in the process. Dust was the enemy of the
machinery and it became a personal enemy. They took turns holding a flashlight
to expose streaks on the surface, on which ice would form from condensation even
yet, although the cold was drying the raw new air they'd pumped into the forward
staging area. Ice slicked the catwalks, a rime hazardous as well as nuisanceful.
Limbs grew wobbly with the cold, hands grew clumsy.
Fletcher called for relief and took the junior-juniors into the rest station to
warm up with hot chocolate and sweet rolls and sandwiches, before it was back
onto the line again.
"Wish we had that bubbly tub from Mariner," Jeremy said, cold-stung and
red-nosed over the rim of his cup. "I'd sure use it tonight."
"I wish we had the desserts from Mariner," Vince said.
"You and your desserts," Linda said. "We'll have to roll you aboard like one of
the cans."
"Not a chance," Vince said. "I'm working it all off. A working man needs a lot
of calories."
"Man," Linda gibed. "Oh, listen to us now."
"Well, I do," Vince said.
Fletcher inhaled the steam off the hot chocolate and contemplated another trip
out into the cold. He looked at the clock. They'd been on duty two hours.
They had four more to go.
The gathering in the Voyager Blue Section conference room was far smaller than
at Mariner, hardbitten captains, two women, one man, who wanted to know why
they'd been called, and what they had to do with Finity's End.
"Got no guns, no cash, nothing but the necessaries," the man in the trio said.
Carson was the name. Hannibal was the ship-name, a little freighter not on the
Pell list of ordinary callers, but on Mariner's regulars: JR had memorized the
list, had seen the -s- and question mark beside both Hannibal and Frye's
Jacobite, the one that was sharing the sleepover with them. That -s- meant
suspect. Jacobite did just a little too well, in their guesswork, to account for
runs only between Mariner and Voyager and maybe Esperance at need, but Esperance
was pushing it for a really marginal craft, no strain at all for Finity's End.
There was reason the small ships took to trading in the shadows, bypassing dock
charges, maximizing profits.
"We hope," the Old Man began his assault, "that we have a good deal in the
offing. We've got a problem, and we've got a solution, and let me explain the
making-money part of it before I get to the cost. It's not going to be clear
profit, but it's going to be a guarantee Voyager stays in business; it's going
to mandate your ships keep their routes, as the ones that have kept Voyager
solvent thus far. There's also going to be a repair fund, meaning credit
available for the short-haulers. Mariner's backing it. So's Pell. Voyager
stationmaster will speak for himself. We have a list of twenty-five small
haulers that stay within this reach. Those ships will see protection."
"The cost."
"You serve this reach and you make a profit doing it. You keep the trade only on
the docks and you pay the tariff."
"We pay the tariff," Hannibal said.
"On all trades," the Old Man said, and there was a little silence. The captains
liked the one part of it. Salvation for the small operator, vulnerable to
downtime charges and repair charges, was inextricably linked to cession of
ship's rights. Anathema.
"Who's going to say our competition pays the same?" That from Jamaica, captain
Wells, whose eyes darted quickly from one side to the other in arguments. "Who's
inspecting? Finity, arguing to let station inspectors on our decks?"
Difficult point, JR thought. Difficult answer, but the Old Man didn't pull the
punches.
"They'll pay," the Old Man said, "because there'll be a watch on the jump
points."
"No," Hannibal said.
"You're supplying Mazian," the Old Man said, more blunt and more weary than he'd
been at Mariner, and the captain of Hannibal sat back as JR registered a moment
of alarm. "Not necessarily by intent," the Old Man said in the next second. "But
that's where the black market's going, and that's why there's going to be a
watch at those jump points. The money that's not going to the stations will have
to get to the stations. And this is where the profit will be for you."
Totally different style with these hardbitten captains than the Old Man had used
at Mariner. JR took mental notes.
"We have an agreement in principle by Voyager, and the stationmaster will be
here within the hour to swear to it: there will be provision for ships that
register Voyager as their home port. Uniform dock charges, to pump money into
Voyager and do needed repair. More freight coming in, going out, more loads,
more profitable goods…"
"Too good to be true," Jacobite said. "What if we sign and we comply and here
comes a big fancy ship, say, Finity's size…"
"You get preference on cargo. You're registered here. You load first."
"Voyager's going to agree to that?" Clear disbelief.
"Voyager has agreed to that."
"Way too good to be true," Jamaica said. "Say I got a vane dusted to hell and
gone, and I'm going to borrow money, get it fixed and the Alliance is going to
come across with the money."
"In effect, yes."
"I'm already in hock to the bank."
"The idea is to preserve the ships that preserve this station. The Alliance is
not going to let a ship go, not yours, not any ship registered here. Fair
charges, fair taxes, stations build up and modernize and so do the ships that
serve them. You may have seen a Union ship go through here in the last few days.
That did happen. The Union border is getting soft. Union trade will come
through, possibly back through the Hinder Stars again."
There was alarm. The smaller ships couldn't make a jump like that. Then Jamaica
said:
"They open and they shut and they open, I don't ever bet on the Hinder Stars.
Waste of money."
"It's getting to be a good bet, at least for the Earth trade.
Chocolate. Tea. Coffee. Exotics of all sorts. Cyteen's two accesses to trade are
Mariner and Esperance. Voyager is right in the middle. If Esperance opened up a
second access to the Hinder Stars and on to Earth, Voyager could be in a
position to funnel goods along the corridor to Mariner, in a damned lucrative
trade competing with Pell's Earth route. If you survive the transition. That's
the plan. Shut down the black market, cut Mazian out of deals and the local
merchanters in."
There was consideration. There were thinking frowns, and a general pouring of
real coffee, which Finity had provided for the meeting. JR moved to assist, and
Bucklin set down a second pot to follow the first.
They were working as hard to sell three scruffy short-haulers on the plan as
they'd worked to sell far larger ships on the concept.
But these ships were the black marketeers, the shadow traders. This was Mazian's
pipeline, among the others, and these captains were beginning to listen, and to
run sums in their heads in the very shrewd way they'd dealt heretofore to keep
their small ships going.
They wouldn't say, aloud, we'll try to do both, comply and maintain ties with
Mazian. JR had the feeling that was exactly the thought in their heads.
But half compliance was better than no compliance, and half might become whole,
if the system began to work.
He went outside to bring in another platter of doughnuts. Hannibal's capacity
for doughnuts was considerable, and Jacobite's captain, in the habit of common
spacers at buffet tables, had pocketed two.
"Loading's going smoothly," Bucklin found time to say. "We've moved ahead of
schedule on that. But fueling's going to take the time. The pump's not that
fast."
"Figured," JR said, and had. The high-speed pumps at Pell and Mariner were
post-war. Practically nothing on Voyager was, except the missile defenses.
To a place like this, ships, if they would forego the shadow trade and pay
standardized dock charges, offered more than a shot in the arm. Ships to follow
them brought a transfusion of lifeblood to Voyager, which until now had seen
ships just as soon trade in the dark of the jump-points as stay in its dingy
sleepovers and spend money in its overpriced amusements. In the War, the honest
trade had gotten thinner still, as Union had taken exception to merchanters
supplying the Fleet and tried to cut off Voyager, as a pipeline to Mazian's
Fleet.
It had been one hell of a position for station and merchanters to be in, and one
which Alliance merchanters resolved never to get into again. Abandon Voyager?
Let Esperance slide into Cyteen's control?
No. Starting from a blithe ignorance at Pell, JR had acquired a keen
understanding of the reasons why small, moribund Voyager was a key piece in
keeping Esperance in the Alliance, and keeping trade going between Mariner and
Esperance inside Alliance space.
He knew now that Quen's deal about the ship she wanted to build would put her in
complete agreement with the position other Alliance captains had to take: new
merchant ships were useless if all trade ebbed toward Cyteen; and shoring up
Voyager would protect Pell's territory more effectively than the launch of
another Fleet.
That was why they'd agreed with her. The danger to the merchant trade now was in
fact less the Fleet than a resurgence of Union shipbuilding with the clear aim
of driving merchanters out of business.
So Voyager fish farms and an infusion of money to refurbish the Voyager docks
were part and parcel of the new strategy. Voyager could become a market, a
waystation: a station, given the wide gulf between itself and the Hinder Stars,
that might revive the Hinder Stars for a third try at life, if they could
establish a handful of ships capable of making that very long transit.
If the Hinder Stars could awake for a third incarnation free of pirate activity,
there was a future for the smaller merchanters after all.
Get Voyager functioning, the Fleet cut off, Union agreeing not to compete with
Alliance merchanters and get Union financial interests on the side of that
merchanter traffic, and they had the disarmament verification problem solved.
Alliance merchanters threaded through Union space, every pair of merchanter eyes
and every contact with a Union station (to some minds in Union) as good as a
Fleet spy recording their sensitive soft spots. But odd to say, they felt a lot
the same about Union ships carrying cargo into Mariner and Viking. There were
Unionside merchanters, honest merchanter Families whose routes had just happened
to lie all inside Union territory, and who now got more favorable docking
charges and privileges and state cargoes now that those ships had come out and
joined the Alliance.
To his personal knowledge none of those Families had succumbed to Union
influence and none would knowingly take aboard a Union operative. But love
happened, and you could never be sure there wasn't some stationer spouse of some
fourteenth-in-line scan tech on a ship berthed next to you whose loyalties were
suspect and who might be gathering data hand over fist.
That was the bright new age they'd entered.
He saw the years in which he might hold command on the bridge as a strange new
age, a time of balances and forces held in check.
With less and less place for the skills of the War. The Old Man, who remembered
the long-ago peace, had shown him at least the map of that future territory—and
it was like nothing either of them had ever seen.
Bed, the couch cushions arranged on the floor as a bunk, or the bare carpet, if
they'd had nothing else—a chance to lie horizontal came more welcome than any
time in Fletcher's life. The junior-juniors, past the giggle-stage and into
complaints, mixed-gender accommodations and all, went down and fell mostly
silent.
It was the second night, the second hard day, doing the same thing, over and
over, until Fletcher saw can-surface and felt the protest in his feet even when
he shut his eyes. The Vince-Jeremy argument about cold feet gave way to quiet
from that quarter, darkness, and an exhaustion deeper than Fletcher had ever
felt in his life.
Drunken spacers couldn't rouse any resentment, careening against the door, or
whatever they'd done outside. Fletcher just shut his eyes.
Hadn't had supper. They'd had too many rest-area sandwiches and too much hot
chocolate in the cargo hold office, and still burned off more energy than they'd
taken in.
They'd showered once they got back to the Safe Harbor, was all, for the warmth,
if nothing else, and Fletcher hoped the next shift got an immense amount done
that they wouldn't have to do.
He shut his eyes… plunged into black…
… wakened to dimmest light and twelve-year-old voices telling each other not to
wake Fletcher.
In the next second he saw a flash of light on the wall, moving shadows against
it, and heard the door shut. He rolled over, saw nothing but black, got up, and
banged his shin on a table.
"System. Light!" he ordered the robot, and, seeing the beds vacant, and hearing
nothing from the bathroom: "Jeremy? Dammit!"
He flung on clothes, not bothering with the thermal shirt, just the work blues
and the boots, and headed for the lift. Which didn't come.
He took the bare metal stairs and arrived down in the lobby. Third shift was
coming in, a scatter of juniors.
Chad and Connor.
"Fletcher!" Connor said.
He ignored the hail and went into the dining room, hoping for junior-juniors in
the press of spacers in the breakfast line.
"Fletcher." Connor. And Chad.
"I don't see the kids," he said.
"What'd they do?" Connor wasn't being sarcastic. It was concern. "Get past you?"
"Yes," he muttered, and went out into the lobby again, looking for
twelve-year-olds in the press of spacers in dingy coveralls with non-Finity
patches.
They were at the vending machines. Linda had a sealed cup in her hands.
"You got to watch them," Connor said at his shoulder.
"I was watching them," he retorted, wanting nothing to do with his help.
He went over to claim the kids.
"You weren't supposed to get up yet," Linda said, spotting him. "We were
bringing you hot chocolate."
With cup in hand. He let go a breath. "For what?"
"For breakfast."
He looked at his watch. For the first time. It was shift-change. Alterdawn.
1823h. And kid-bodies were justifiably hungry.
"You want breakfast?"
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "Yessir."
He was disreputable, in yesterday's clothes, but he marched them into the
restaurant, saw them fed.
A senior came by the table. "Board call, 0l00h tomorrow. We're moving faster
than we'd hoped."
He thanked the senior, who was stopping at every table. 0100h was in their
shift's night. They worked two shifts and then had to scramble to make
board-call.
"Tonight?" Vince said, screwing up his face. Linda slumped over her synth eggs
on a bridge of joined hands. Jeremy just looked worn thin.
They'd passed out painkillers in the rest-area, and they'd taken them,
preventative of the soreness they might otherwise feel, but hands still hurt,
feet still stung with the cold, noses were red and chapped, and as for
recreation at this port, Fletcher ached for his own bed, his own things; they'd
been too tired even to use the tapes when they'd gotten into the room. The vid
hadn't even tempted the junior-juniors. Showers had, and hot water produced
sleep. They'd just fallen into bed it seemed to him an hour ago.
And they had one more duty to get through, and then undocking.
At a time when they'd have been ready to fall into bed, they'd be boarding.
Twenty hundred hours and they had signatures on the line and scuttlebutt flying
through Voyager corridors—as if the whole station had waited, listening, for
what had become the worst-kept secret on the station: Voyager was getting an
agreement with its local merchanters, with Mariner, with Pell and potentially
with Union. News cameras showed up outside the restricted area where they'd held
the meetings, and outside the customs zones of every starship in dock. Crowds
gathered. The vid was live feed whenever the reporters could get anybody on
camera to comment: it was the craziest atmosphere JR had ever seen. It scared
him when he considered it, as—after a hike across the besieged docks, and
attended by all the public notice outside—the Voyager stationmaster, three of
the captains of Finity's End, and three of the scruffiest freighter-captains in
civilized space, along with members of Voyager Station's administration and
members of the respective crews, showed up in the foyer of the fanciest
restaurant on Voyager.
The maitre d' hastened them to the reserved dining room.
JR was well aware of their own security, who had been on site inspecting the
premises even before they'd confirmed the reservation. They'd gone through the
kitchens down to the under-cabinet plumbing and they were standing guard over
the foodstuffs allowing absolutely nothing else to be brought in unless Finity
personnel brought it.
He was linked directly to Francie's Tech 1, who was running security on station.
He was linked to Bucklin, who was shuttling between his watch over the door and
their security's watch on the kitchen.
He was linked to Lyra, who was linked to Wayne and Parton, who were back at the
Safe Harbor Inn, literally sitting in the hallway to watch the rooms.
And he was linked to Finity's ops, which told him they were working as hard as
humanly possible to clear this port while they still had something to celebrate,
and to get them on toward Esperance, where things were far less sure, and where
the celebration of an agreement would not be so universal.
Maybe it was an omen, however, that from no prior understanding, the party once
seated in the dining room took five minutes to arrive at a completely unified
menu choice, to help out the cooks, and Finity agreed to pick up the tab.
Besides providing a couple of cases of Scotch and three of Downer wine to the
ecstatic restaurant owner, who provided several bottles back again, enough to
make the party hazardously rowdy with the restaurant's crystal.
"To peace," was the toast. "And to trade!"
There was unanimous agreement.
"We may see this War finished yet," Jacobite said.
"To the new age," Hannibal proposed the toast, and they drank together.
"I began my life in peace," the Old Man said then. "I began my life in peace, I
helped start the War, and I want to see the War completely done with; I want to
see peace again, in my lifetime. Then I can let things go."
There was a moment of analysis. Then: "No, no," everyone had hastened to say,
the polite, and entirely sincere, wishes that Finity would continue in command
of the Alliance.
"No one else can do what you've done," the Voyager stationmaster said, and
Hannibal added:
"Not by a damn sight, Finity."
The Old Man shook his head, and remained serious. "That's not the way it should
be. It's time. I'm old. That's not a terrible thing. I never bargained for
immortality, and I can tell you relative youngsters there comes a time when you
aren't afraid of that final jump. A life has to end, and I'll tell you all, I
want mine to end with peace. That's my requirement. All loose ends tied. I want
this agreement."
There was lingering unease.
"You've got it, brother," Madison said with a laugh, and got the conversation
started again, simply skipping by the statement as a given.
Madison, himself almost as old.
It was a difficult, an unprecedented moment. JR drew a whole breath only after
Madison had smoothed things over, and asked himself then why the Old Man had let
the mood slip, or why he'd talked about his concerns.
Getting tired, he said to himself. The captain hadn't slept but a couple of
hours last night; and even the Old Man was human.
A hard effort, they'd made, to clear this port quickly, before the two ships
that had gone ahead of them had had the chance to gossip or disturb the quiet
atmosphere they hoped for—
But here at Voyager, thank God, they'd found no attempt to sabotage them, not by
low tech or high, not even a glitch-up at the hurried negotiations, where they'd
tried to hammer out financial information, and none in refueling. Just getting
the signatures on documents wouldn't actually speed specific negotiations at
Pell, Mariner, and Esperance, but it certainly put Voyager's vote in as favoring
the new system. The Voyager stationmaster, a reserved man courting a heart
attack, had looked every way he could think of for a trap or a disadvantage in
what they'd almost as a matter of course come to him to offer, and instead had
found nothing but good for him in the deal—so much so that they'd not only
gotten his agreement and that of his administration, they'd been inundated with
information handed to them on Esperance. It even included things they were
dismayed to be told, dealings which the Voyager stationmaster had found out,
evidently, regarding the stationmaster's affair with his wife's sister—that
tidbit of information had come out yesterday night at dinner, before the
specifics of their agreement were certain, and come out with the three merchant
captains present—but only one of them had been surprised.
A stationmaster who routinely had dinner with every captain willing to be
treated to dinner, at Voyager's best restaurant, certainly found out things.
Two bottles of wine administered in meetings like that, and the Voyager
stationmaster probably found out things the captains didn't even tell their next
of kin.
But last night, to them, the Voyager stationmaster had named names regarding
Esperance's near bedfellowship with Union. Then the captains, at the same table,
had outlined the easy operations of Esperance customs, and exactly what the
contacts were by which Esperance obtained luxury goods.
And those goods shipped right past Voyager, a golden pipeline from which neither
Voyager nor these captains could derive benefit. Damned right they were annoyed.
The party broke up, Jacobite's captain actually singing on the way down the
dock, the others with their respective crews headed off, God save their livers,
for more drinking, probably with their crews.
They had undock coming: that saved them a breakfast invitation with the station
administration. They parted company with a very delighted and only slightly
tipsy stationmaster, and took their security from the restaurant's kitchen, past
a straggle of determined news cameras, newspeople asking such questions as: Can
you talk about the agreement? How would you characterize the agreement?
No information was the Old Man's order. "Sorry," JR had to say, to one who tried
to catch him; and he hurried to overtake the rest on their walk back to the Safe
Harbor.
Madison had said, in privacy after last night's dinner, that they clearly had a
worse problem ahead of them than they'd imagined, regarding Esperance, and that
they might be down to using the scandal attached to the Esperance administration
for outright blackmail value if things were as bad as the Voyager information
intimated they were.
It had been a joke. But a thin one, even then. They had everything they wanted
at three stations, and they were going to be up against profit motives with a
fat, prosperous station which thought it could do whatever it pleased.
"We could turn around," Alan said when the topic came up as they were walking
back. "Let Esperance hear about the deal we've made so far with Sol, Pell,
Mariner and Voyager, and let them worry for a year whether they'll be included."
"Let them hear that Sol is in the deal," the Old Man had said, entirely
seriously, as JR, walking behind with Bucklin and their security, listened in
absolute quiet. "That's their source of luxury goods, in exactly the same way
and through the same connections by which it's been Mazian's source of matériel.
So Esperance is secretly talking about merchanters long-jumping from Esperance
to one of the old Hinder Star ports and getting to the new point from there
without Voyager, Mariner or Pell… becoming Union's direct pipeline to Earth.
That's still a long run. And those are big ships that have to do that run.
That's the tack we'll take with Esperance's local merchanters, and it's a true
argument: we'd be fine, we have the engines to make it, so we're not talking in
our selfish interest when we point out that the majority of merchanters couldn't
do it by that route. Small ships would find themselves cut out of the trade with
Earth in favor only of the likes of Boreale, run from Unionside, and I don't
think our brothers and sisters of the Trade will like to hear that notion, any
more than Esperance will like to hear their little scheme made public."
"If Quen has her way," Madison said, "more of Boreale's class will never be
built. Not by Union."
"And if I have my way, we won't spend those funds building Quen's super
long-haulers ourselves, either. We'll build enough ships to keep the stations
viable and building. Bigger stations, bigger populations; bigger populations,
more trade. Alliance stations will never top a planetary population, but our
markets are totally dependent on us—unlike Cyteen's. Esperance will never grow
grain and she'd get hellishly tired of fishcakes and yeast in six weeks, let
alone six years. Which is what she'll be down to if we pull the merchanters
together again and threaten to strike if they don't go along. We have them,
cousins. They may think they're going to doublecross us and go direct with
Earth, and they may think Union's new warrior-merchanters are going to be their
answer, but we, and Quen, have that cut off."
The Old Man, two glasses of wine in him, was still sharp and dead-on, JR said to
himself. It made self-interested sense even for merchanters like Hannibal.
"We don't want to say all of that," the Old Man said, "at Esperance. Not until
we have Union's agreement on the line, but they're already done for, in any
ambition to become the direct Union-Earth pipeline. We just have to get them to
sign the document we have. Let them do it in the theory they can doublecross us,
and get Union ships in. Those ships won't ever materialize because of Quen's
ship, and because of our agreement about the tariffs. And that means Union will
define its border as excluding Esperance, because we can give Union the security
and the trade it needs far better than some backdoor agreement they might make
with Esperance. They'll be left out without a tether-line. Just let drift. They
don't know that yet." A moment of silence, just their footfalls on the station
decking. Then the Old Man added: "In some regards, Mazian is the best friend
we've got. As long as Union fears he might come back a popular hero if they push
the Alliance too hard, we've got them, as well. Mallory wants to finish him. I
prefer him right where he is, cousins, out in the deep dark, in whatever peace
he's found."
What could you say to that? Even Francie and Alan had looked shocked.
About Madison, JR wasn't so sure.
And for himself, he feared it was the truth.
Chapter XXI
Contents - Prev/Next
Finity's End eased back from dock with the agility of a light load and a
surrounding space totally unencumbered by traffic, even of maintenance skimmers.
And the senior staff on the bridge breathed a sigh of relief to have the tie to
Voyager broken.
Francie was the captain sitting, at this hour. The Old Man, Madison and Alan,
the captains who'd been nearly forty-eight hours with no sleep during
last-minute negotiations and subsequent celebration, were off-duty, presumably
to get some rest as soon as they reached momentary stability.
But JR, with hands unblistered, face unburned, had taken Bucklin with him and
made his way topside immediately before the takehold, leaving A deck matters,
including the assembly area breakdown, to Lyra.
Those of them who'd drawn security and aide duty and stood guard and poured
water and provided doughnuts for the on-station conferences, sixteen of the crew
in all, had their own aches and had had less sleep than the captains, but they
lacked the conspicuous badge of those who, also short of sleep, had done the
brunt of the physical work during their two-day stay—the chapped faces and thin
and hungry look of those who'd broken their necks being sure the cargo they had
in their hold was what they'd bought, without any included gifts from their
enemies.
Among bridge staff who'd not been involved in the meetings, Tom T. had slippers
on, sitting Com with an ankle bandaged. There had been a few casualties of the
slick catwalks. The Old Man had pushed himself to exhaustion, so much so that
Madison had had to sub for him at the dockside offices.
JR hadn't even tried to go to sleep in the two hours he had left before he had
to report for board-call and get the assembly area rigged.
He and Bucklin had talked for a little while last night about what the Old Man
had said. They'd consulted together in the privacy of his room and in lowered
voices, before Bucklin had gone to his room, on the subject of their need of
Mazian, and the captain's pragmatic statement.
"He meant," he'd said to Bucklin, desperate to believe it himself, of the man
who was his hero, "that that's until we get the Alliance in order. We need a
lever."
"You suppose," Bucklin had said in return, "that Mallory knows what he thinks?"
Good question, that had been. And that, once his head had hit the pillow, hadn't
been a thought to sleep on, either.
If Mallory knew the Old Man was less than committed to taking down Mazian,
Mallory might well have come to a parting of ways with the Old Man, and sent
them off.
And if Mallory didn't know it, and that attitude the Old Man had expressed was
what the Old Man had been using as his own policy for years without saying so to
Mallory, it seemed to a junior's inexpert estimation well beyond pragmatism and
next to misrepresenting the truth.
He couldn't, personally, believe it. Mallory didn't believe in any compromise
with Mazian, and didn't count the War ended until Mazian was dead.
Neither did he. He saw the future of his command—of all of humankind—compromised
by any solution that left a still-potent Fleet lurking out in the dark. And that
was a view as settled in reality as his short life knew how to settle it.
But they were bidding to make changes.
They'd shown their real manifest to Voyager Station's agents as an earnest of
good faith, as they'd insist all other merchanters do.
And, again doing what they hoped to see legislated as mandatory, they backed
away from the station, leaving the mail to Hannibal, not taking trade away from
that small ship, to which the mail contract was an important income; letters
wouldn't get there as quickly as if they carried them, but get there they would.
They left now having obeyed laws not yet written, having had put several hundred
thousand credits into the local economy… done their ordinary business and taken
on their commercial load of foodstuffs, with, JR suspected, real nostalgic
pleasure on the Old Man's part, an example of the way things ought to work.
It had been five years since they'd last called at Voyager and JR found nothing
that much changed from what he remembered, unlike the vast changes at Pell and
Mariner But Esperance, in every rumor yet to hit them, had made changes on
Pell's and Mariner's scale: grown wilder, far more luxurious. Esperance had
survived the War by keeping on the good side of both warring sides, irritating
both, making neither side desperate enough to take action.
And by all the detail the Voyager stationmaster had told them last night and
before, Esperance Station had survived the peace the same way, playing Alliance
against Union far more than appeared on the surface. Smuggling hardly described
the free flow of exotic goods that Esperance had offered brazenly in dockside
market, only rarely bothered by customs and not at all by export restrictions:
they'd known that before they heard the damning gossip from the Voyager
stationmaster, regarding the conduct of the stationmaster's office.
Esperance was going to be an interesting ride.
That was what Madison had said last night, when they all parted company. It was
what nervous juniors had used to say when the ship went to battle stations. An
interesting ride.
And complicating their mission, as Francie had said, among other things in that
session last night, Mazian's sympathizers and supporters, including ships like
Champlain, had to have their chance to back off their pro-Mazian actions without
being criminalized. Those ships had to have not just one chance to reform, but
time to figure out that the flow really was going to dry up, that it wasn't
going to be business as usual, and that things wouldn't ever again rebound back
to what they had been—which had tended to be the case just as soon as the
Alliance enforcers were out of the solar system.
He understood Francie's observation. Once the small operators knew that there
were new economic rules, even the majority of them would reasonably move to
comply, but no one expected a ship fighting to keep itself fueled and operating
to voluntarily lead the wave of reform.
Hence Finity's extravagant show of compliance… and that proof, via the
restaurant, what their cargo was, because the persuasion most likely to convince
those operators came down to a single intangible: Finity's reputation.
They'd gotten something extraordinary in the enthusiasm of little haulers like
Hannibal, Jamaica and Jacobite. And the word would spread fast, among ships the
connections between which weren't apparent to authorities on stations.
"We will do a three-hour burn," intercom announced. "We will do a curtailed
schedule to get us up to jump. It's now 0308h. Starting at 0430h and continuing
until 0730 we will be in takehold. There will be a curtailed mainday, main meal
at 0800hfor both shifts, then cycle to maindark at 0930h for a takehold until
jump at approximately 0530 hours. We don't want to leave our allies unattended
any longer than necessary. We will do a similarly curtailed transit at the
point…"
"…and we will come in long before Esperance expects us. The captains inform us
this is the payoff, cousins, this is the place we make or break the entire
voyage. This is the place we came to deal with, and if we carry critical
negotiations off at this station, we'll take a month at Mariner on the return.
Meanwhile we have more of those stylish, straight from the packing box work
blues from Voyager's suppliers, and more of the galley's not-so-bad sandwiches,
flavor of your choice… synth cheese, synth eggs and bacon, and real,
Voyager-produced fish. Last in gets no choice. All auxiliary services will be
shut down until we clear Esperance."
"Clear Esperance?" was the question that went through the line at the laundry,
where Fletcher was in line. Toby and Ashley were on duty at the counter ahead,
and as bundles came sailing in, three brand new sets of blues came out to all
comers.
"He had to mean Voyager," was the come-back to that question, but some of the
seniors in line said, "Don't bet on it," and the intercom went on with a further
message,
"The senior captain has a message for the crew. Stand by."
"I think he really did mean Esperance," a cousin said glumly.
Fletcher, third from the counter as the frantic pace continued, didn't
understand what was encompassed in no services, but he had a feeling it meant
more inconveniences than they'd yet seen on this voyage.
"This is James Robert," the captain's voice said. "Congratulations on a job well
done. We're about to make up time critical to our mission. There remains the
small chance of trouble at the jump-point, if by the time we arrive there has
been an action between Boreale and Champlain, or if Champlain should evade
Boreale and stay behind to lay an ambush. This is a canny and dangerous opponent
with strong motives to prevent us reaching Esperance. Until we have reached
Esperance, then, this ship will stay on yellow alert and will observe all
security precautions in moving about the corridors. Expected point transit will
be two hours inertial for food and systems check. Juniors, please review
condition yellow safety precautions. Again, thank you for a job well done at
this stopover, and I suggest you lay in supplies of packaged food and medical
supplies for your quarters beyond the requirements to accommodate a double jump.
We don't anticipate a prolonged and unscheduled push either here or at the
jump-point, but the contingency should be covered. Priorities dictate we evade
confrontation rather than meet it. Good job and good voyage."
It was Fletcher's turn at the counter. He picked up clothes for himself and
Jeremy as he turned laundry in, and found Jeremy at his elbow when he turned
around. "Got the packets,"Jeremy said, showing a small plastic bag full, both
trank and the unloved nutrient packets, as best he guessed. Jeremy was just back
from the medical station.
There were a lot of the packets, of both kinds. Clearly medical had known their
schedule before the announcement.
"We're on a yellow," Jeremy said brightly and handed him the bag with the
medical supplies. "I'll get to the mess hall, and pick up some soft drinks and
some of those ration bars. They'll run out of the fruit ones first. You want the
red filling or the black?" Jeremy was already on the move, walking backwards a
few steps.
"Red!" It was an unequivocal choice. They'd had them while they were working,
along with the hot chocolate. The black ones were far too sweet. Jeremy turned
and took off at a faster pace, down the line that was still moving along.
"Hey, Fletcher," Connor said from the laundry line as he walked in the direction
Jeremy had gone. Connor and Chad were together. "Find it yet?"
Connor didn't need to have said anything. Clearly the truce was over. Fletcher
paused a moment and fixed Connor and Chad with a cold look, then walked on
around the curve to A26.
He laid the clothes and the bag from medical on Jeremy's bunk, and intended to
put the clothes and supplies away.
But, no, he thought. Jeremy might run out of pockets, between fruit bars and
soft drinks. He went out and on around to the mess hall, amid the traffic of
other calorie-starved cousins, and just inside mess hall entry met Jeremy coming
back, with fruit bars stuffed in his pockets and in the front of his coveralls
and two sandwiches and four icy-cold drink packets in his arms.
"That should supply the Fleet," Fletcher commented. "You want me to take some of
those?"
"I got 'em. It's fine. Well,—you could take the sandwiches."
He eased them out of Jeremy's arm before they flattened. The two of them started
back out of the mess hall area, and met Chad and Connor and Sue, inbound.
"There's Fletcher," Sue said. "Tag on to the kid, is it? Who's in charge of
whom, hey?"
He could tolerate the remarks. None individually was worth reacting to. But
tolerating it meant letting the niggling attacks go on. And on. And if he didn't
react to the subtle tries, they'd escalate it. He knew the rules from childhood
up. He stopped.
"You're begging for it," he said to them in a low voice, because there were
senior crew just inside, picking up their own supplies, and there were more
passing them in the corridor. "I'll take you three down to the storage and we'll
do some more hunting for what you stole, if that's what you're spoiling for. You
two guys going to have Sue do that, too?" He'd gotten the picture how it was in
that set, and all of a sudden that picture didn't include Chad as the
instigator. Not even Connor, who'd hailed him five minutes ago.
Sue was the silent presence. Small, mean, and constantly behind Connor's
shelter.
"Fletcher and his three babies," Connor said. "Brat watch suits you fine."
"Sue, are you the thief?"
"Fletcher." Jeremy nudged at his arm. "Come on. Don't. We got a takehold coming,
we'll get sent for a walk if we start trouble."
Sue hadn't said a thing.
"I'll tell you how it was," Chad said. "You did the stealing and you did the
hiding, so you could make trouble. You know damn well where that stick thing is,
if there ever was one."
"The hell!"
"The hell you don't."
"Come on," Jeremy said, "come on, Fletcher. Fletcher, we need to get back to
quarters. Right now. People can get killed. The ship won't wait."
"You kept the whole ship on its ear all the way to here," Chad said, "you made
us five days late getting out of Pell, and now we're running hard to make up.
Supposedly you got robbed and you had us looking all on our rec time, and hell
if you'll do it again, Fletcher."
"It wasn't my choice!"
"Well, it looks that way to me!"
"Fletcher!" Jeremy said, fear in his voice. "Chad,—shut up! Just shut up! Come
on, Fletcher."
Jeremy pulled violently at his arm. Seniors were staring.
"Is there trouble here?" a senior cousin asked. The tag on the coveralls said
Molly, and he'd met her in cargo, a hardworking, no-nonsense woman with strong
hands, a square jaw, and authority.
"No, ma'am," Jeremy said. "Come on. Fletcher, you'll get us in the Old Man's
office before you know it. Come on!"
Chad and company had shut up, under an equally burning stare from cousin Molly.
And Jeremy was right. There was only trouble if they tried to settle it here. He
took the decision to regard Jeremy's tug on his arm, and to walk away, with only
a backward and warning glance at Chad and Sue.
Tempers were short. They were short of sleep, facing another hard couple of
jumps by the sound of the intercom advisements, and Chad had re-declared their
war while they'd gotten to that raw and rough-inside feeling of exhaustion,
stinging eyes, aching backs, headache and the rest of it. Calm down, he tried to
say to himself, no profit to a brawl.
They'd fought. And things hadn't been notably better. Given a chance, he'd have
let it quiet down, but Chad had just made him mad. Touched old nerves. It was
all the Marshall Willetts, all the jealous sibs, all the school-years snide
remarks and school-mate ambushes; and he had it all again on this ship, thanks
to Chad.
"What's the matter?" Vince said when he ran into them in the corridor.
"Something the matter?"
"Not a thing," Jeremy said, relieving him of any necessity to lie. Vince had
gotten to looking to him anxiously at his least frown, and he felt one of those
anxious stares at his back as they walked to their cabin. He was all the while
trying to reason with himself, telling himself he only lost if he let Chad get
to him. He and Chad had had a dozen civil words on dock-side, yesterday, when
he'd misplaced the kids and Chad had been concerned. He didn't know how things
had suddenly turned around unless Chad was putting on an act.
Or unless somebody had gigged Chad into an action Chad wouldn't have taken on
his own.
They shut the door to their quarters behind them, shoved stuff in drawers, put
the trank and the nutri-packs into the bedside slings first, while Jeremy
started chattering about vid-games and dinosaurs.
Distraction. Fletcher knew it was. Nervous distraction as they sat down on their
respective bunks and opened their sandwiches and soft drinks.
Jeremy didn't want a fight and was trying to get his mind off the encounter.
But there was going to be a fight, and there'd be one after that, the way he
could see it going. He murmured polite answers to Jeremy, swallowed uninspiring
mouthfuls of the synth cheese sandwich and washed it down with fruit drink, but
his mind was on the three of them back in the mess hall entry, Chad, Connor, and
Sue.
That encounter, and the chance it hadn't been Chad who'd stolen the spirit
stick.
Sue was starting a campaign. He could have seen it out there, if he'd ever had
his eyes on other than Chad. She meant to make his life a living hell, and Sue
was a different kind of problem. Chad and Connor he could beat But he couldn't
hit Sue and Sue had every confidence that would be the case. She had the raw
nerve, maybe, to take the chance and duck fast if she was wrong and he swung on
her, but she was small, she was light, he was big, and he'd be in the wrong of
anything physical; damn her, anyway.
Chad and Connor had to have figured what Sue was doing. But if she was the
guilty one they didn't think so. And might not care. He was the interloper. Sue
did the thinking for Connor, and Chad wasn't highly creative, but he was the
brightest mental light in that group when he finally stirred himself to take a
stand.
He had used to do long reports on downer associations. Intraspecies Dynamics,
they called the forms they'd fill out, watching who worked with whom in the
fields and who touched whom and didn't touch and who chased and who ran, the
experts drawing their conclusions about how all of downer society worked. Now
he'd formed the picture on a different species: on how the whole junior crew
worked. JR and Bucklin ran things; Lyra and Wayne assisted, and tended to sit on
trouble when they found it, just the way JR directed them to do. Toby and Ashley
and Nike were a set, Nike being the active force there, but they were thinkers,
tech-track, not brawlers.
Sue and Connor were usually the active force in the Sue-Connor-Chad set: Sue
dominated Connor and wielded him like a weapon between her and the universe;
most of the time Chad just floated free, doing what he liked, generally a loner,
even in a group. Chad might not even like Sue much, but she was in, and that
defined things.
When Chad rose up with a notion of his own, though, Chad got in front of the
three of them and used his size to protect them. Connor followed Chad when Chad
chose to lead—leaving Sue to try to get control back to herself by picking their
fights.
Exactly what she'd been doing. Chad had been fair-minded after their first
fight, even civil on the dockside. But something had flared up out there beyond
the fact they'd all worked so far past raw-nerved exhaustion they were seeing
two of each other.
Sue's mouth had been working, was his bet. But Chad was the leader in that set,
a leader generally in absentia. He looked a little older, acted a little older.
In the way of junior crew on Finity, he'd probably been in charge of them when
they were like Jeremy and Vince and Linda. Connor hadn't grown into his full
size yet. But Chad had. Might have done so way early, by the build he had and
the way he went at things: Chad didn't fight with blind fury. Chad lumbered in
with a confidence things would eventually fall down in front of him—a moment of
amazement when they didn't—that came of generally having it happen.
He'd gotten to know Chad in their process of pounding hell out of each other, to
the point it had downright stung when Chad turned the accusation of theft back
on him. He'd actually felt a reversal of signals, after Chad's being a help to
him on dockside, in a way that he hadn't sorted out in the corridor—he could
have lit into Chad on the spot after Chad had said it, but it wasn't the sting
of the attack he'd felt, but that of an unfair change of direction.
Sue would have had every chance anyone else had had to get into his room and
take the stick, and Sue, unlike the others, might have destroyed it. Now there
was trouble, and Sue kept her two cousins in constant agitation rather than
letting anybody think about the theft.
"You listening to me, Fletcher?"
In point of fact, no, he hadn't been. He'd lost what Jeremy was saying.
"About Esperance," Jeremy said. "And the vid sims."
"Lost it," he confessed.
"Takehold imminent, time's up, cousins. Get in those bunks or wherever, tuck
down for a three-hour. Don't get caught in the shower. We're going to put a
little way on this happy ship…"
"I said I bet they have some neat sims there, I bet Union has some we've never
seen…"
"Probably they do." Provoke Sue to hit him, grab her and hold her feet off the
deck until she got scared, maybe, but it'd be a messy, stupid kind of fight and
he wasn't anxious to make himself a target for her to kick and hit and yell. He
didn't want Sue yelling mayhem and getting the whole crew against him. Chad and
Connor were going to side with her. It wasn't damn worth it
He had to do something when the takehold quieted down.
He mumbled a "Sure" to Jeremy's request to borrow his downer tape, and he pulled
it out and passed it to him.
By then they were one minute and counting, and he scrambled to get his own music
tape set up and snugged down with him.
He had two choices. Give up, let the situation bully him into that request to
get off the ship—he had the excuse he'd desperately wanted, he'd established
with JR that he wanted to leave and that he was justified, and what was he
doing? Now he was fighting for his place here, not to be run out. He didn't
quite know why, or how he'd come to the decision—the kid he shared this place
with was the reason, he thought, but not all of it.
He'd resolved somewhere, somehow, this side of Mariner, that they couldn't run
him out like this, because it wasn't a simple matter, his going or staying. It
wasn't even entirely Jeremy, but the complex arrangement that made Jeremy and
him partners.
One thing he knew: his going or staying wasn't going to be their choice.
He had to talk to Chad. Alone.
He had to find out whether it was Chad's notion to take him on, or whether Chad,
like him, was somebody's convenient target.
Chapter XXII
Contents - Prev/Next
The preparation for a long, double-jump run for Esperance had the feeling of the
old New Rules back again. It had the feeling of clandestine meetings in the deep
dark and the chance of shots exchanged. It seemed that way to JR, at least, and
touched nerves only a few months ago allowed to go quiet. People had a hurried,
businesslike look at every turn.
JR sat in the relative comfort of his on-bridge post as the engines cut in and
the acceleration pressed him back into the cushion. He watched the numbers tick
by, and saw around him a ship in top running order; saw the unusual status on
the fire panel, unusual only since they'd declared they were honest merchanters
again: the weapons were under test, and the arms-comp computer was up and
working on their course, laying down a constantly shifting series of
contingencies.
But space was empty around them.
It was that space ahead of them they had to worry about. And in this vacancy,
they were running fast getting out of system and on toward what could be ambush
of military kind at the next jump-point—or of diplomatic kind at Esperance.
Three hours.
Madeleine reported in to Alan, downtime chatter in the non-privacy of the
bridge, that they had the legal papers from Voyager in order. Jake's dry,
nonaccusatory report from Lifesupport suggested unanticipated change of plans
was going to create havoc in his service schedules and that he was going to
request that half of the type one biological waste be vented at the jump-point
rather than rely on the disrupted bacteriological systems to convert it.
When the ship being under power forced a long downtime, intraship messages flew
through the system—Hi, how was your stay? Missed you last night, saw a vid you'd
like, found this great restaurant…
There wasn't so much of the interpersonal chatter at Voyager. It mostly ran: I'm
dead, I've got frostbite, I'm getting too old for this, and, I saw vids I
haven't seen in twenty years. You know they've got stuff straight from the last
century? At the same time, and more useful, various department heads, also idle
but for the easy reach of a handheld, put their gripe lists through channels. It
was a compendium of the ship's small disasters and suggestions, like the
suggestion that the long Services shutdown was going to mean no clean towels and
people should hang the others carefully and let them dry.
There was one from Molly, down in cargo. JR: thought you should know. Chad and
Fletcher had an argument during burn-prep. Jeremy broke it up, on grounds of
ship safety. Chad accused Fletcher in the downer artifact business. Fletcher
objected. All involved went to quarters for takehold. For your information.
There were six others, of similar content, one that cited the specifics of
things said and added the information that it was not just Jeremy, Fletcher, and
Chad, but that Sue and Connor had been there.
That built a larger picture.
There was a note from Lyra that said she'd heard from Jeff about the near-fight,
but not containing the detail about Connor and Sue.
There was, significantly, no note from any of the alleged participants, and most
significantly, there was none from Jeremy, who was supposed to report any
problem with Fletcher directly to him.
The artifact matter was back on his section of the deck. They hadn't time before
Esperance to do another search; and the senior staff and particularly the Old
Man were going to hear about the encounter, and worry about it. And that made
him angry and a little desperate.
He sent back down to Lyra: The encounter between Chad and Fletcher. Who started
it?
Lyra answered, realtime: My informant didn't say. It was in the mess hall entry,
a lot of witnesses. I could venture a guess.
Don't guess, he sent back, trying to reason with his own inclination to be mad
at Fletcher for pushing it; and mad at his own junior-crew hotheads for pushing
Fletcher. He didn't know the facts, Lyra didn't know, and the facts of a
specific encounter coming from scattered reports didn't mass enough information
on the problems on A deck in general. He wished he could go to voice, for a
multiple conference with Bucklin and Lyra, to see whether three heads could make
any better sense of the situation with the junior crew; but ops kept jealous
monopoly over the audio channels during a yellow alert, and that would be the
condition until Esperance.
He keyed a query to Bucklin, instead, fired him the last five minutes' autosave
and beeped him. For Lyra:
I want you to tag Fletcher. This says nothing about my estimation of who's in
the wrong in the encounter. There're just too many on the other side for any one
person to track. He sent the I'm not happy sign, older than the Hinder Stars.
Lyra echoed it. So did Bucklin. He, Lyra, and Bucklin owned handhelds, with all
the access into Finity systems that went with it; and all the accessibility of
senior staff to their transmissions. Nothing in Finity command was walled off
from anybody at a higher level, and there wasn't anybody at a lower level than
the juniors were. He couldn't even discuss the theft without the chance of some
senior intercepting what was going on—and he didn't want the recurrence of the
matter racketing up to the Old Man's attention. That he couldn't find a solution
was more than frustrating: it was approaching desperation to get at the
truth—and the culprit wasn't talking.
I'm coming down there for mess, he said. It was his option, whether to be on A
deck or B, and right now it sounded tike a good idea to get down there as soon
as the engines shut down and crew began to move about.
We could confine junior crew to quarters, Bucklin sent back.
It was certainly an idea. There was no reason junior crew had to move about
during their jump-prep inertial glide. Services were shut down. There was no
work to be done.
It would at least let us get clear of system, Lyra sent.
It let them keep status quo with the juniors, as far as the mass-point—where,
the Old Man had warned them, senior crew might need their wits about them, with
no distractions.
Good idea, he said to Lyra's suggestion, and this time did key up the voice
function, going onto intercom to every junior-assigned cabin with an official
order. "This is JR," he said. "This is a change in instructions…"
"… Junior crew is to stay in quarters until further notice. Junior officers will
deliver meals to junior crew at the rest break, and I suggest you spend the time
reviewing safety procedures. If you have any special needs due to the change of
arrangements please indicate them to junior staff, and we will take care of
them."
"I think JR found out," Jeremy said from the upper bunk, the ship continuing
under hard push.
"Nothing happened, for God's sake!"
"I told you!" drifted down from the bunk above.
"You told me, hell!" He recalled he was supposed to be the senior in the
arrangement, and shut up, glumly so. He wished they'd get rec. Jeremy was hyped
and nervous, swinging his foot over the edge with an energy he hadn't complained
of yet, but he'd been on the verge.
"You just tell them shut up, is all," Jeremy said.
"Oh, that'd do a lot of good."
"Well, it's better than staring at them. They don't like staring."
"I don't care what they don't like." He had a printout in his lap and he dragged
a knee up to prop it against the force that made the page bend. "I'm reading,
anyway."
"What are you reading?"
"Physics for the hopeless," he said. It was the manual, the long version, in the
section on yellow alert. "What do they mean 'red takeholds'?"
"They're painted red"
"Why?"
"So you can see them. They're all those inset hand-grips up and down the
corridors, so you don't splat all over if we move."
"I guessed that. What's this red alarm?"
"The klaxon. If you hear the klaxon you grab hold where you are. If it's just a
bell you have time to run to any door and bunk down, two to a bunk, or you get
in the shower. If you're carrying anything you throw it in the shower and shut
the door."
It was in the print, clearer with Jeremy's condensed version.
"Why the shower?" Then the answer dawned on him, and he said, in unison with
Jeremy: "Smaller space."
"So you don't fall as far," Jeremy added cheerfully. "A meter's better than
three meters."
"Have you ever done that?"
"Stuck it out in the shower? Yeah. One time JR and Bucklin had six in their
quarters, one in each bunk, three in the shower."
"Counting them."
"No, Lyra and Toby snugged up on the bunk base and Toby broke his nose.
Everybody was coming back from mess and the take hold sounded, and I bunked down
with Angie."
"Who's Angie?"
"She kind of took care of me," Jeremy said. Then added, in a slightly quieter
voice: "She died."
He'd walked into it. Damn, he thought. "I'm sorry."
"Lot of people died," Jeremy said. And then added with a shaky sigh: "I'm kind
of tired of people dying, you know?"
What did you say? "Maybe that's past," he offered, best hope he could think of.
"Maybe if the ship's gone to trading for a living, then things can settle down."
"We're on yellow, right now."
Jeremy's worry was beginning to make him nervous. And he tried not to be. "Hey,
we gave the Union-siders a whole bottle of Scotch. They've got to be in a good
mood"
"I mean, you know, I didn't think I was going to like this trading business."
"So do you?"
"Yeah. Kind of. I didn't think I would."
"Neither did I. I thought being on this ship was the worst thing that could
happen to me."
"Mariner was wild," Jeremy said with what sounded like forced cheerfulness.
"Mariner was really wild."
"Yeah," he agreed. "It was."
"Did you like it?"
"Yeah," Fletcher said, and realized he actually wasn't lying.
"I did, too," Jeremy said. "I really did. It was the best time I ever had."
He couldn't exactly say that about it.
But he didn't somehow think Jeremy was conning him, at least to the limits of
Jeremy's intentions. That ever touched him, swelled up something in his heart so
that he didn't know how to follow that remark, except to say that the time they
had wasn't over, and there wasn't any use in their being panicked now.
"The ship doesn't wait," he said quietly. "Isn't that what they said when I was
late to board? The ship doesn't wait and nothing's ever stopped her. She's
fought Mazian's carriers, for God's sake. She's not going to run scared of some
skuz freighter."
"No," Jeremy agreed, with a nervous laugh, and sounding a little more like
himself. "No, Champlain might be tough, I mean, a lot of the rimrunners are
pretty good, but we're way far better."
"Well, then, quit worrying. What are you worried about?"
"Nothing. The takeholds and the lockdowns, this is pretty usual. This is pretty
like always." Jeremy was quiet a moment. Then, fiercely, but with the wobble
back in his voice: "I'm not scared. I never was scared. I'm just kind of
disgusted."
"With what?"
"I mean, I liked the liberties we had, I mean, you know, we could go out on
docks most always, and Sol Station was pretty wild."
"I imagine it was. You'd rather be back there?"
"No," Jeremy said faintly. "We couldn't ever go outside Blue Sector, ever.
They'd just kind of, you know, approve a couple of places we could go to, JR
would, or Paul, before him. But always line-of-sight with the ship berth. Even
the seniors couldn't. They had this place set aside, we'd stay there, and we
could do stuff only in Blue."
"You mean I was conned."
"Not ever. I mean, before Mariner that was the way it was. We got to go out of
Blue a little, at Pell. Pell was pretty good. But Mariner was the best. It was
really the best."
They're talking about us spending a month there."
"If it happens."
"It'll happen. I bet it happens." Fletcher was determined, now, to jolly the kid
out of it. "What's your first stop? First off, when we get there, what do you
want to do?"
"Dessert bar," Jeremy said.
"For a month?"
"Every day."
"They'll have to rate you as cargo."
Jeremy grinned and flung a pillow over the edge.
He flung it back. It failed to clear the level of Jeremy's bunk. Fletcher
retrieved the pillow and made two more tries at throwing it against the push.
"You'll never make it!" Jeremy cried
"You wait!" He unbelted and carefully, joints protesting, got out of his bunk,
standing on the drawers, pillow in hand. Jeremy saw him and tucked up, trying to
protect himself.
"No fair, no fair!"
"You started it!" He got his arm up and slammed the pillow at Jeremy's
midsection.
"Truce!" Jeremy cried. "You'll break your neck! Cut it out!"
"Truce," he said, and, leaving the pillow with Jeremy, got back down into his
bunk without breaking anything, a little out of breath.
"You all right?" Jeremy asked.
"Sure I'm all right. You're the one that cheats on the V-dumps! You're worried?"
"I don't want you to break your neck."
"Good. Suppose you stay in your bunk after jump, why don't you?"
"If you don't get up again."
"Deal."
He thought maybe Jeremy hadn't expected to get snagged into that. There was
silence for a while.
"Jeremy?"
"Yeah."
"You all right up there?"
"Yeah, sure."
There was more silence.
An uncomfortable silence. Fletcher couldn't say why he was worried by it. He
figured Jeremy was reading or listening to his music.
"So you say Esperance is supposed to be pretty good," he said finally, looking
for response out of the upper bunk. "Maybe they'll give us some time there."
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "That'd be better. That'd be a lot better than Voyager. My
toes still hurt"
"You put salve on them?"
"Yeah, but they still hurt."
"I don't think I want to work cargo."
"Me, either. Freeze your posterity off."
"Yeah," he said. The atmosphere was better then. "You got that Mariner Aquarium
book?"
"I lent it." He was disappointed. He was in a sudden mood to review station
amenities. "Linda and her fish tape."
"Yeah," Jeremy said. There was a sudden shift from the bunk above. An upside
down head, hair hanging. "You know she can't eat fish now?"
"You're kidding."
"Says she sees them looking at her. I'm not sure I like fishcakes, either."
"Downers eat them, with no trouble. Eat them raw."
"Ugh," Jeremy said. "Ugh. You're kidding."
"I thought about trying it."
"Ugh," was Jeremy's judgment. The head popped back out of sight "That's
disgusting."
The engines reached shut-down. Supper arrived fairly shortly. Bucklin brought
it, and it was more than sandwiches.
It was hot. There was fruit pie.
"Shh," Bucklin said, "Bridge crew suppers. Don't tell anybody."
"So why the lockdown?" Jeremy wanted to know.
But Bucklin left without a word, except to ask if they were set. And Fletcher
didn't feel inclined to borrow trouble.
They finished the dinners, tucked the containers into their bag into the
under-counter pneumatic, and began their prep for the long run up to jump,
music, tapes, comfortable clothing, trank, nutri-packs and preservable fruit
bars.
"We're supposed to eat lots," Jeremy said, "if we get strung jumps."
"You mean one after another."
"Yessir," Jeremy said, pulling on a fleece shirt. He still seemed nervous.
Maybe, Fletcher thought, there was good reason. But they kept each others'
spirits up. He didn't want to be scared in front of Jeremy; Jeremy didn't want
to act scared in front of him.
They tucked down for the night, let the lights dim.
In time the engines cut in, slowly swinging their bunks toward the horizontal
configuration.
"Night," Jeremy said to him.
Fletcher was conscious of night, unequivocal night, all around a ship very small
against that scale.
"Behave," he said, the way his mother had used to say it to him. "We'll be
fine."
"Yeah," Jeremy said. "You think Esperance'll be like Mariner?"
"Might be. It's pretty rich, what I hear."
"That's good," Jeremy said. "That's real good"
Then Jeremy was quiet, and to his own surprise the strong hand of acceleration
was a sleep aid. There was nothing else to do. He waked with the jump warning
sounding, and the bunk swinging to the inertial position.
"You got it?" Jeremy asked. "You got it?"
"No problem," he said, reaching for the trank in the dark. Jeremy brightened the
lights and he winced against the glare. He found the packet.
Count began. Bridge wanted acknowledgement and Jeremy gave it for both of them.
All accounted for.
On their way to a lonely lump of rock halfway between Voyager and the most
remote station in the Alliance.
Almost in Union territory. He'd heard that…
Rain beat on the leaves, ran in small streams off the forested hills. Cylinders
were failing, but Fletcher nursed them along to the last before he changed out.
Hadn't spoiled any. Hadn't any to spare. He kept a steady pace, tracing Old
River by his roar above the storm.
You get lost, he'd heard Melody say, Old River he talk loud, loud. You hear he
long, long way.
And it was true. He wouldn't have known his way without remembering that. The
Base was upriver, always upriver.
Foot slipped. He went down a slope, got to his knee at the bottom. Suit was
torn. He kept walking, listening to River, walking in the dark as well.
Waked lethargic in the morning, realizing he'd slept without changing out; and
his fingers were numb and leaden as he tried to feel his way through the
procedure. He'd not dropped a cylinder yet, or spoiled one, even with numb
fingers. But he was down to combining the almost-spent with the still moderately
good, and it took a while of shaking hands and short oxygen and grayed-out
vision before he could get back to his feet again and walk.
He changed out three more, much sooner than he'd thought, and knew his decisions
weren't as good as before. He sat down without intending to, and took the spirit
stick from his suit where he'd stashed it, and held it, looking at it while he
caught his breath.
Melody and Patch were on their way by now. Feathers bound to the stick were
getting wet in the rain that heralded the hisa spring, and rain was good. Spring
was good, they'd go, and have a baby that wouldn't be him.
Terrible burden he'd put on them, a child that stayed a child a lot longer than
hisa infants. The child who wouldn't grow.
He'd had to be told, Turn loose, let go, fend for yourself, Melody child.
Satin said, Go. Go walk with Great Sun.
That part he didn't want. He wanted, like a child, his way; and that way was to
stay in the world he'd prepared for.
But Satin said go. And among downers Satin was the chief, the foremost, the one
who'd been out there and up there and walked with Great Sun, too.
He almost couldn't get his feet under him. He thought, I've been really stupid,
and now I've really done it and Melody can't help. I'll die here, on this muddy
bank.
And then it seemed there was something he had to do…
couldn't remember what it was, but he had to get up. He had to get up, as long
as he could keep doing that.
He went down again.
Won't ever find me, he thought, distressed with himself. It must be the
twentieth time he'd fallen. This time he'd slid down a bank of wet leaves.
He tried to get up.
But just then a strange sound came to his ears.
A human voice, changed by a breather mask, was saying, "Hey, kid! Kid!"
Not anymore, he thought. Not a kid anymore.
And he held onto the stick in one hand and worked on getting to his feet one
more time.
He didn't make it—or did, but the ground gave way. He went reeling down the
bank, seeing brown, swirling water ahead of him.
"God!" A body turned up in his path, rocked him back, flung them both down as
the impact knocked the breath out of him. But strong hands caught him under the
arms, saving him from the water. There was a dark spot in his time-sense, and
someone sounded an electric horn, a signal, he thought, like the storm-signal.
Was a worse storm coming? He couldn't imagine.
Hands tugged at the side of his mask. His head was pounding. Then someone had
shoved what must be a whole new cylinder in, and air started getting to him.
"It's all right, kid," a woman's voice said. "Just keep that mask on tight.
We'll get you back."
The woman got him halfway up the slope. A man showed up and lifted, and he
finally got his feet under him.
He walked, his legs hurting. He hung on one and the other of his rescuers for
the hard parts, and drew larger and larger breaths, his head throbbing from the
strain he'd put on his body.
They got him down to a trail, and then someone had a litter and they carried
him. He lay on it feeling alternately that he was going to tumble off and that
he was turning over backwards, while Great Sun was a sullen glow through gray
clouds and the rain that sheeted his mask. It was hard going and his rescuers
didn't talk to him. Breathing was hard enough, and he figured they'd have
nothing pleasant to say.
By evening they'd reached the Base trail and he realized muzzily he must have
been asleep, because he didn't remember all of the trip or the turn toward the
Base.
Somebody waked him up now and again to see that he was breathing all right, and
he had two cylinders, now, both functioning, so breathing was a great deal
easier, better than he'd been able to rely on for the days he'd been out.
Satin didn't want him. Melody didn't want him…
The bottom dropped out of the universe. He was falling. Falling into the water.
He fought it.
Second pitch. It was V-dump. He wasn't on Old River's banks. He wasn't
suffocating. He was on a ship, a million—million klicks from any world, even
from any respectable star.
His ship was slowing down, way down, to match up with a target star. They were
all right.
No enemies. They'd have heard if there'd been enemies.
Finity's End was solidly back in the universe again, moving with the stars and
their substance.
He opened his eyes. Lay there, fumbled open a nutri-pack and sucked it down,
aware of Jeremy rummaging after one.
"You all right?" he asked Jeremy.
"Yeah, fine."
He saw Jeremy had gotten his own packet open. The intercom gave an all-clear and
told them their schedule. They had two hours to clean up, eat, and get back
underway.
He lay there, thinking of the gray sky spinning slowly around above the
treetops. Of rain on the mask. Of the irreproducible sound of thunder on the
hills.
The room smelled like somebody's old shoes. And two nutri-packs down, he found
the energy to unbelt and sit up.
"Shower," he said to the kid, as Jeremy stirred out of his bunk. "Or I get it."
"You can have it if you want," Jeremy said.
"No, priority to you." His stomach hadn't quite caught up. He had an ache in his
shoulders. Another in his heart. "Three hours at this jump-point. We'll both
make it."
"Yeah, we're going to make it," Jeremy said, and hauled his skinny body out of
the bunk. "No stinking Mazianni at the point, we're going to get to Esperance
and the Old Man's going to be happy and we'll be fine."
"Sounds good to me," he said, and while Jeremy went to the shower, he got up,
self-disgusted, out of a bed that wanted changing, in clothes that wanted
washing. He dragged one change of clothes out of the drawer, wished he had a
change of sheets. He got out one of the chemical wipes and wiped his face and
hands. It smelled sharp, and clean.
He could remember the stale smell of the mask flinging his own breath back at
him. He could remember the fever chill of the earth, and the uneven way his legs
had worked on the way home.
And Satin's stick in his hand. He'd refused to let go of it. He'd said, "Satin
gave it to me," when the rescuers questioned him, and that name had shaken them,
as if he'd claimed to have seen God.
He was here. He was safe.
He'd clung to the stick during that rescue without the remotest notion what to
do with it, or what he was supposed to do.
Satin, in that meeting, had seen further into his future than he could imagine.
She'd been in space. She knew where she sent him.
But he hadn't known.
He sat on the edge of his bunk, listening to the intercom tell them further
details, where they were, how fast they were going, numbers in terms he didn't
remotely understand.
But he was safe. He'd come that close to dying, and he sat here hurtling along
in chancy space and telling himself he was very, very lucky; and, yes, beyond a
doubt in his mind, now, Satin had sent him here. Satin, who'd known the Old Man.
He wondered if Satin had had the faintest idea he was a Neihart, or why he was
on her world, when she'd sent him into space. He'd never from his earliest youth
believed that downers were as ignorant as researchers kept trying to say they
were. But he'd never attributed mystical powers to them: he was a stationer, too
hard-headed for that—most of the time.
But underestimate them? In his mind, the researchers often did.
And in his dream and in his memory Satin had known his name.
Satin had known all about him.
She'd not gotten that from the sky. Sun hadn't whispered it to her. She'd talked
to Melody and Patch.
And knowing everything hisa could remotely know about him, she'd sent him… not
to the station. To his ship. Had she known Finity was in port? Had she known
even that, Satin, sitting among the Watcher-stones, to which all information
flowed, on quick downer feet?
Satin, who perhaps this moment was sitting, looking up at a clouded sky, and, in
the manner of an old, old downer, dreaming her peace, her new heavens, into
being.
She'd known. Yes, she'd known. As the Old Man of Finity's End had known—things
he'd never imagined as the condition of his universe.
"All right, cousins," the intercom said. "You can eat what you stowed before
jump or you can venture out for a stretch. Both mess halls will be in service in
ten minutes, so it's fruit bars and nutri-packs solo or it's one of those
hurry-up dinners which your bridge crew will be very grateful to receive.
Remember, there is still no laundry."
Jeremy came out of the shower smelling of soap and bringing a puff of steam with
him. It was far better air now. The fans were making a difference.
Downbelow slipped away in the immediacy of clean water and warmth and soap.
Fletcher stripped clothes and went, chased through his mind by images of woods
and water, the memory of air that wouldn't come, but the shower was safe and
clean and Jeremy was his talisman against nightmares and loss.
"Sir?" JR found the Old Man's cabin dimly lighted as he brought the tray in,
heard the noise of the shower, in the separate full bath Finity's senior crew
enjoyed. He ordered the lights up, set the meal in the dining alcove, and took
the moment to make the stripped bed with the sheets set by and waiting.
The Old Man did such things himself. The senior-juniors habitually ran errands,
down to laundry, down to the med station, and back, for all the bridge crew,
whose time was more valuable to the ship; but the senior crew usually did their
own bed-making and food-getting if they were at all free to do so.
In the same way the Old Man rarely ordered a meal in his quarters. He was always
fast on the recovery, always in his office before the galley could get that
organized.
Not this time. Not with the stress of double-jumping in and short sleep
throughout their stay at Voyager. He felt the strain himself, in aches and
pains. Mineral depletion. Jeff had probably dumped supplement in the fruit
juice, as much as wouldn't hit the gut like a body blow.
The shower cut off. JR poured the coffee. In a few more moments the bath door
opened and the senior captain walked out, barefoot, in trousers and turtleneck
sweater, in a gust of moist, soapy air.
"Good morning, sir." JR pulled the chair back as James Robert stepped into the
scuffs he wore about his quarters, disreputable, but doubtless comfortable. A
click of a remote brought the screen on the wall live, and showed them a
selection of screens from the bridge.
They were at the jump-point intermediate between Voyager and Esperance, a small
lump of nothing-much that radiated hardly at all. If there'd been any other mass
in two lights distance, the point would have been tricky to use… dangerous. But
there was nothing else out here, and it drew a ship down like a far larger mass.
Systems showed optimal. They were going to jump out on schedule. JR remarked on
nothing that was ordinary: it annoyed the Old Man to listen to chatter in the
morning, or after jumps. He simply stood ready to slide the chair in as the Old
Man sat down.
He looked up. The captain had stopped. Cold. Staring off into nowhere with a
sudden looseness in his body that said this was a man in distress.
JR moved, bumping past the chair, seized the Old Man's flaccid arm, steered him
immediately to the seat at the table.
The Old Man got a breath and laid a shaking hand on the table,
"I'll get Charlie," JR began.
"No!" the Old Man said, the voice that had given him orders all his life, and it
was hard to disregard it.
"You should have Charlie," JR said "Just to look—"
"Charlie has looked," the Old Man said. "Medicine cabinet, there in the bunk
edge. Pill case"
He left the Old Man to get into the medicine compartment, hauled out a small
pharmacy worth of pill bottles he'd by no means guessed, and brought them back
to the table. The Old Man indicated the bottle he wanted, and JR opened it. The
Old Man took the pill and washed it down with fruit juice.
"Rejuv's going," the Old Man said then. "Charlie knows."
It was a death sentence. A long-postponed one. JR sank down into the other
chair, feeling it like a blow to the gut
"Does Madison know?"
"All of them." The Old Man was still having trouble talking, and JR kept his
questions quiet, just sat there. The realization hit him so suddenly he'd felt
the bottom drop out from under him… this was what the Old Man had meant at
dinner that night back at Voyager. This was why it disturbed Madison: that he
was saying it in public, for others to hear, not the part about the peace, but
the part about finishing. The captain—the captain, among all other captains
Finity had known, was arranging all his priorities, the disposition of his
power, the disposition of his enemy, all those things… leading in a specific
direction that left his successors no problem but Mazian. That was why the Old
Man had said that peculiar thing about needing Mazian.
No, the Old Man hadn't quarreled with Mallory and then left in some decision to
pursue a different direction.
The Old Man had this one, devastatingly important chance to wield the power he'd
spent a protracted lifetime building.
Secure the peace. Accomplish it. And look no further into human existence. The
final wall was in front of him. The point past which never.
"Shall I call Madison, sir?" he asked the Old Man.
"Why?" the Old Man challenged him sharply. And then directly to him, to his
state of mind: "Worried?"
The Old Man never liked soft answers. Least of all now. JR sensed as much and
looked him in the eye. "Not for the ship, sir. You'd never risk her. But
Charlie's going to be mad as hell if I don't tell him."
The Old Man heard that, added it up—the flick of the eyes said that much—and
took a sip of coffee. "I'll thank you to keep Charlie at bay. I've taken to bed
for the duration of the voyage. I plan to get to Esperance."
"I'm grateful to know that, sir."
"Precaution," the Old Man said.
"Yes, sir."
"You don't believe it for a minute, do you?"
"I'm concerned."
"And have you been discussing this concern in mess, or what?"
"I haven't. You put one over on me, sir. Completely. I never figured this one."
"Smart lad," the Old Man said. "You always were." He lifted the lid on the
breakfast. Eggs and ham. Bridge crew got the attention from the cookstaff on
short time schedules. So did the captain. So did the senior-seniors, for their
health's sake.
"Yes, sir," he said. "Thank you. I try to be. I suggest you eat all of it and
take the vitamins. My shoulders are popping. I'd hate to imagine yours."
"The insufferable smugness of youth." James Robert looked up at him. The
parchment character of his skin was more pronounced. When rejuv failed, it
failed rapidly, catastrophically. Skin lost its elasticity. The endocrine system
began to suffer wild surges, in some cases making the emotions spiral out of
control. There might be delusions. Living a heartbeat away from the succession,
JR had studied the symptoms, and dreaded them, in a man on whose emotional
stability, on whose sanity, so very much depended.
"Waiting," the Old Man said, "for me to fall apart."
"No, sir. Sitting here, wondering if you were going to want hot sauce. They
didn't put it on the tray."
The Old Man shot him a look. The spark was back in his eye, hard and brilliant.
"You'll do fine," the Old Man said. "You'll do fine, Jamie."
"I hope to, sir, some years from now, if you'll kindly take the vitamins."
"In my good time," the Old Man said in a surly tone. "God. Where's respect?"
"For the living, sir. Take both packets."
"Out. Out! You're worse than Madison."
"I hope so, sir." He saw what reassured him, the vital sparkle in the eyes, the
lift in the voice. Adrenaline was up. "I'd suggest you leave the transit to jump
to Alan and Francie. Sir."
"Jamie, get your insufferable youth back to work. I'll be at Esperance. I'm not
turning a hand on this run until I have to."
"Yes, sir" he said, glad of the rally—and heartsick with what he'd learned.
"Out. Tell Madison he's got the entry duty. With first shift."
And not at all happy.
"I'm moving everybody up," the Old Man said with perfect calm. "I'm retiring
after this next run. You're to take Francie's post. Madison will take mine."
"Sir…"
"I think I'm due a retirement. At a hundred forty-nine or whatever, I'm due
that. I'll handle negotiations. Administrative passes to the next in line.
Filling out forms, signing orders. That's all going to be Madison's, Jamie-lad.
As you'll be junior-most of the captains. And welcome to it. I'm posting you. At
Esperance."
The Old Man had surprised him many a time. Never like this.
"I'm not ready for this!"
The Old Man had a sip of coffee. And gave a weak laugh, "Oh, none of us are,
Jamie. It's vanity, really, my hanging on, waiting for an arbitrary number, that
hundred and fifty. It's silliness. I'm getting tired, I'm not doing my job on
all fronts, I'm delegating to Madison as is: he'll do the nasty administrative
things and I do what I do best, at the conference table. Senior diplomat. I
rather like that title. Don't you think?"
"I'll follow orders, sir."
"Good thing. Fourth captain had damned well better. Meanwhile you've things to
clean up before you trade in A deck."
Fletcher. The theft. All of that. And for the first time in their lives he'd be
separated from Bucklin, who'd be in charge of the juniors until Madison himself
retired. He'd be taking over fourth shift, dealing with seniors who'd seen their
competent, life-long captain bumped to third.
He felt as if someone had opened fire on him, and there was nothing to do but
absorb the hits.
"Well?" the Old Man said
"Yes, sir. I'm thinking I've got mop-up to do. A lot of it."
"Better talk to Francie. You'll be going alterday shift, when ops is in
question. Better talk to Vickie, too." That was Helm 4. "You've shadowed Francie
often enough."
At the slaved command board—at least five hundred hours, specifically with
Francie. During ship movement, maybe a hundred. He had no question of his
preparation in terms of ship's ops. In terms of his preparation in basic good
sense he had serious doubts.
"Yes, sir," he said.
"Jamie," the Old Man said.
"Yes, sir?"
"The plus is… I get to see my succession at work. I get to know it will do all
right. There's no greater gift you can give me than to step in and do well.
Fourth shift will do Esperance system entry. You'll sub for Francie on this
jump. We'll hold the formalities after we've done our work there. King George
can wait for his party. We'll have occasion for our own celebration if we pull
this off. We'll be posting a new captain."
Breath and movement absolutely failed him for a moment. He had no words, in the
moment after that, except, quietly: "Yes, sir."
One hour, thirty-six minutes remaining, when Fletcher stood showered and
dressed; and the prospect just of opening the cabin door and taking a fast walk
around the corridor was delirious freedom. Jeremy was eager for it; he was; and
they joined the general flow of cousins from A deck ops on their way to a hot
pick-up meal and just the chance to stretch legs and work the kinks out of backs
grown too used to lying in the bunk. They fell in with some of the cousins from
cargo and a set from downside ops, all the way around to the almost unimaginably
intense smells from the galley.
"I could eat the tables," a cousin said as they joined the fast-moving line.
Jeremy had a fruit bar with him. He was that desperate. Everyone's eyes were
shadowed, faces hollowed, older cousins' skin showed wrinkles it didn't
ordinarily show. Everyone smelled of strong soap and had hair still damp.
Two choices, cheese loaf with sauce or souffle. They'd helped make the souffle
the other side of Voyager and Fletcher decided to take a chance on that; Jeremy
opted for the same, and they settled down in the mess hall for the pure pleasure
of sitting in a chair. Vince and Linda joined them, having started from the mess
hall door just when they'd sat down, and Jeremy nabbed extra desserts. Seats
were at a premium. The mess hall couldn't seat all of A deck at once. They
wolfed down the second desserts, picked up, cleaned up, surrendered the seats to
incoming cousins, and headed out and down the way they'd come.
"Can I borrow your fish tape?" Jeremy asked Linda as they walked.
"I thought you bought one," Linda said.
"I put it back," Jeremy said, and Fletcher thought that was odd: he thought he
recalled Jeremy paying for it at the Aquarium gift shop. Jeremy had bought some
tags and a book, and he'd have sworn—
He saw trouble coming. Chad, and Sue, and Connor, from down the curve.
"Don't say anything," he said to his three juniors. "They're out for trouble.
Let them say anything they want."
"They're jerks," Vince said.
The group approached, Sue passed, Chad passed—they were going to use their
heads, Fletcher thought, and keep their mouths shut.
Then Connor shoved him, and he didn't think. He elbowed back and spun around on
his guard, facing Chad.
"You turn us in?" Chad asked. "You get us confined to quarters?"
"Wasn't just you," Fletcher retorted, and reminded himself he didn't want this
confrontation, and that Chad might be the leader and the appointed fighter in
the group, but he didn't conclude any longer that Chad was entirely the
instigator. "We all got the order. You and I need to talk." A cousin with her
hands full needed by and they shifted closer together to let her by. Jeremy took
the chance to get in the middle and to push at Fletcher's arm.
"Fletcher. Come on. We're still in yellow. They'll lock us down for the next
three years if you two fight, come on, cut it out."
"Got your defender, do you?" Connor said, and shoved him a second time.
"Cut it!" Jeremy said, and Fletcher reached out and hauled him aside, firmly,
without even feeling the effort or breaking eye contact with Chad.
"You and I," Fletcher said, "have something to talk about."
"I'm not interested in talk," Chad said. "I'll tell you exactly how it was. You
came on board late, you didn't like the scut jobs, you didn't like taking
orders, and you found a way to make trouble. For all we know, there never was
any hisa stick."
"Was, too!" Jeremy said. "I saw it."
"All right," Chad said. "There was. Doesn't make any difference. Fletcher knows
where it is. Fletcher always knew, because he put it there, and he's going to
bring down hell on our heads and be the offended party, and we give up our rec
hours running around in the cold while he sits back and laughs."
"That isn't the way it is," Fletcher said. "I don't know who did it. That's your
problem. But I didn't choose it." Another couple of cousins wanted by, and then
a third, fourth and fifth from the other direction. "We're blocking traffic."
"Yeah, run and hide," Sue said. "Stationer boy's too good to go search the skin,
and get out in the cold…"
"You shut up!" Vince said, and kicked Connor. Connor lunged and Fletcher
intercepted. . "Let him alone," Fletcher said.
And Linda kicked Connor. Hard.
Connor shoved to get free. And Chad shoved Connor aside, effortless as moving a
door.
"I say you're a liar," Chad said, and Fletcher swung Jeremy and Linda out of
range, mad and getting madder.
"Break it up!" an outside voice said. "You!"
"Fletcher!" Jeremy yelled, and he didn't know why it was up to him to stop it:
Chad took a swing at him, he blocked it, and got a blow in that thumped Chad
into the far wall. Chad came off it at him, and Linda was yelling, Vince was.
He'd stopped hearing what they were saying, until he heard Jeremy yelling at
him, and until Jeremy was right in the middle of it, in danger of getting hurt.
"Chad didn't do it!" Jeremy shouted, clinging to him, dragging at his arm with
all his weight. "Chad didn't do it, Fletcher!Idid it!"
He stopped. Jeremy was still pulling at him. Bucklin had Chad backed off. It was
only then that he realized it was JR who had pulled him back. And that Jeremy,
all but in tears, was trying to tell him what didn't make sense.
"What did you say?" JR asked Jeremy.
"I said I did it.I took it."
"That's not the truth," Fletcher said. Jeremy was trying to divert them from a
fight. Jeremy was scared of JR, was his immediate conclusion.
"It is the truth!" Jeremy cried, in what was becoming a crowd of cousins, young
and old, in the corridor, all gathering around them. "I stole it, Fletcher, I'm
sorry. I didn't mean it."
"What did you mean?" JR asked; and Jeremy stammered out,
"I just took it. I was afraid they were going to do it, so I did it"
"You're serious."
"I was just going to keep it safe, Fletcher. I was. I took it onto Mariner
because I thought they were going to mess the cabin and they'd find it and
something would happen to it, but somebody broke into my room in the sleepover
and they got all my stuff, Fletcher!"
Everything made sense. The aquarium tape Jeremy turned out not to have. The
music tapes. The last-minute dash to the dockside stores. The thief had made off
with every purchase Jeremy had made at Mariner, Jeremy had broken records
getting back to their cabin to create the scene he'd walked in on.
But he wasn't sure yet he'd heard all the truth. Fletcher's heart was pounding,
from the fight, from Jeremy's confession, from the witness of everyone around
them. Silence had fallen in the corridor. And JR's hold on him let up, JR
seeming to sense that he had no immediate inclination to go for Chad, who
hadn't, after all, been at fault. Not, at least, in the theft.
"God," Vince said, "that was really stupid, Jeremy!"
Jeremy didn't say a thing.
"Somebody took it from your room in the Pioneer," JR said.
"Yes, sir," Jeremy said faintly.
"And why didn't you own up to it?"
Jeremy had no answer for that one. He just stood there as if he wished he were
anywhere else. And Fletcher believed it finally. The one person he'd trusted
implicitly. The one whose word he'd have taken above all others.
Jeremy was a kid, when all was said and done, just a kid. He'd failed like a
kid, just not facing what he'd done until it went way too far.
"Let him be," Fletcher said with a bitter lump in his throat. "It's lost. It
doesn't matter. Jeremy and I can work it out."
"This ship has a schedule," JR said. "And it's no longer on my hands. Bucklin,
you call it. It's your decision"
"Fletcher," Bucklin said. "Jeremy? You want a change of quarters? Or are you
going to work this out? I'm not having you hitting the kid."
Anger said leave. Get out. Be alone. Alone was safe. Alone was always
preferable.
But there was jump coming, and the loneliness of a single room, and a kid
who'd—aside from a failure to come out with the truth—just failed to be an
adult, that was all. The kid was just a kid, and expecting more than that, hell,
he couldn't expect it of himself.
He just felt lonely, was all. Hard-used, and now in the wrong with Chad and the
rest, and cut off from his own age and in with kids who were, after all, just
kids, who now were mad at Jeremy.
"I'll keep him," he said to Bucklin. "We'll work it out."
Lay too much on a kid's shoulders? It was his mistake, not Jeremy's, when it
came down to it: it was all his mistake, and he was sorry to lose what he'd
rather have kept, in the hisa artifact, but the greater loss was his faith in
Jeremy.
"You don't hit him," Bucklin said.
"I have no such intention," he said, and meant it, unequivocally. He knew where
else things were set upside down, and where he'd gotten in wrong with people: he
looked at Chad, said a grudging, "Sorry," because someone once in his half dozen
families had pounded basic fairness into his head. The mistake was his, that was
all. It wasn't Jeremy who'd picked a fight with Chad.
Chad wasn't mollified. He saw it in Chad's frown, and knew it wasn't that easily
over.
"All right, get your minds on business," Bucklin said. "A month the other side
of this place maybe you'll have cooled down and we can settle things. Honor of
the ship, cousins. We're family, before all else, faults, flaws, and stupid
moves and all; and we've got jobs to do."
By now the crowd in the corridor was at least twenty onlookers. There were quiet
murmurs, people excusing themselves past.
"We have"—Bucklin consulted his watch—"thirty-two minutes to take hold."
JR. said nothing. Chad and his company exchanged dark glances. Fletcher ignored
the looks and gathered up his own junior company, going on to their cabin, Vince
and Linda trailing them. He tried all the while to think what he ought to say,
or do, and didn't find any quick fix. None at all.
"Just everybody calm down," was all he could find to say when they reached the
door of his and Jeremy's quarters. "It's all right. It'll be all right We'll
talk about it when we get where we're going."
"We didn't know about it!" Vince protested, and so did Linda.
"They didn't," Jeremy said
"It was a mistake," he found himself saying, past all the bitterness he felt, a
too-young bitterness of his own that he spotted rising up ready to fight the
world. And that he was determined to sit on hard. "Figure it out. It's not
something that can't be fixed. It's just not going to happen in two happy words,
here. I'm upset. Damn right I'm upset. Chad's upset. Sue and Connor are upset
and all the crew who froze their fingers and toes off trying to find what wasn't
on this ship in the first place are upset, and in the meantime I look like a
fool. A handful of words could have solved this."
"I'm sorry," Jeremy said.
"About time."
"He didn't tell us," Vince said.
"You let him and me settle it. Meanwhile we've got thirty minutes before we've
got to be in bunks and safed down. We're going to get to Esperance, we're going
to have our liberty if they don't lock us down, and we're all four of us going
to go out on dockside and have a good time. We're not going to remember the
stick, except as something we're not going to do again, and if we make mistakes
we're going to own up to them before they compound into a screwup that has us
all in a mess. Do we agree on that?"
"Yessir." It was almost in unison, from Jeremy, too.
Earnest kids. Kids trying to agree to what they, being kids, didn't half
understand had happened, except that Jeremy was wound tight with hurt and guilt,
and if he could have gotten to anyone on the ship right this minute he thought
he'd wish for no-nonsense Madelaine.
"To quarters," he said. "Do right. Stay out of trouble. Give me one easy half
hour. All right?"
"Yessir," faintly, from Linda and Vince. He took Jeremy inside, and shut the
door.
Jeremy got up on his bunk, squatting against the wall, arms tucked tight,
staring back at him.
Jeremy stared, and he stared back, seeing in that tight-clenched jaw a
self-protection he'd felt in his own gut, all too many times.
Puncture that self-sufficiency? He could. And he declined to.
"Bad mistake," he said to Jeremy, short and sweet. "That's all I've got to say
right now."
Jeremy ducked his head against his arms.
"Don't sulk."
Back went the head, so fast the hair flew. "I'm not sulking! I'm upset! You're
going at me like I meant some skuz to steal it!"
"Forget the stick! You don't like Chad, right? You wanted me to beat up Chad, so
I could look like a fool, and it'd all just go away if you kept quiet and you
wouldn't be at fault. That stinks, kid, that behavior stinks. You used me!"
"Did not!"
"Add it up and tell me I'm wrong!"
Lips were bitten white. "I didn't want you to beat up Chad."
"So what did you want?"
"I don't know."
"Well, do better! Do better. You know what you were supposed to have done."
"Yeah."
"So why didn't you tell me the truth, for God's sake?"
"Because I didn't want you to leave!"
"How long did you think you were going to keep it up? Your whole life?"
"I don't know!" Jeremy cried. "I just thought maybe later it wouldn't matter."
He let that thought sit in silence for a moment. "Didn't work real well," he
said. "Did it?"
"Didn't," Jeremy muttered, head hanging. Jeremy swiped his hair back with both
hands. "I was scared, all right? I thought you'd beat hell out of me."
"Did I give you that impression? Did I ever give you that impression?"
Jeremy shook his head and didn't look at him.
"I thought the story was you were having a good time. Best time in your life.
Was that it? Just having such a great time we can't be bothered with telling me
the damn truth, is that the way things were?"
"I didn't want to spoil it!" Jeremy's voice broke, somewhere between
twelve-year-old temper and tears. "I didn't want to lose you, Fletcher. I didn't
want it to go bad, and I didn't know how mad you'd be and I didn't know you'd
beat up on Chad, and I didn't know they'd search the whole ship for it!"
Fletcher flung himself down to sit on the rumpled bed.
"I didn't know," Jeremy said in a small voice. "I just didn't know."
Fletcher let go a long breath, thinking of what he'd lost, what he'd thought,
who it was now that he had to blame. The kid. A kid. A kid who'd latched onto
him and who sat there now trying to keep the quiver out of his chin, trying to
be tough and take the damage, and not to be, bottom line, destroyed by this, any
more than by a dozen other rough knocks. He didn't see the expression; he felt
it from inside, he dredged it up from memory, he felt it swell up in his chest
so that he didn't know whether he was, himself, the kid that was robbed or the
kid on the outs with Vince, and Linda, and him, and just about everyone of his
acquaintance.
Jeremy couldn't change families. They couldn't get tired of him and send him
back for the new, nicer kid.
Jeremy couldn't run away. He shared the same quarters, and Jeremy was always on
the ship, always would be.
The history Jeremy piled up on himself wouldn't go away, either. No more than
people on this ship forgot the last Fletcher, shutting the airlock, and bleeding
on the deck.
Jeremy was in one heavy lot of trouble for a twelve-year-old.
And he, Fletcher, simply Fletcher, was in one hell of a lot of pain of his own.
Personal pain, that had more to do with things before this ship than on this
ship.
What Jeremy had shaken out of him had nothing to do with Jeremy.
He stared at Jeremy, just stared.
"You said you weren't going to give me hell," Jeremy protested.
"I didn't say I wasn't going to give you hell. I said I wasn't going to throw
you out of here."
"It's my cabin!"
"Oh, now we're tough, are we?" If he invited Jeremy to ask him to leave, Jeremy
would ask him to leave. Jeremy had to. It was the nature of the kid. It was the
stainless steel barricade a kid built when he had to be by himself.
"Jeremy." Fletcher leaned forward on his bunk, opposite, arms on his knees. "Let
me tell you. That stick's sacred to the hisa, not because of what it is, but
because it is. It's like a wish. And what I wish, Jeremy, is for you to make
things right with JR, and I will with Chad, because I was wrong. You may have
set it up, but I was wrong. And I've got to set it straight, and you have to.
That's what you do. You don't have to beat yourself bloody about a mistake. The
real mistake was in not coming to me when it happened and saying so."
"We were having a good time!" Jeremy said, as if that excused everything.
But it wasn't in any respect that shallow. He remembered Jeremy that last day,
when Jeremy had had the upset stomach.
Bet that he had. The kid had been scared sick with what had happened. And
trying, because the kid had been trying to please everybody and keep his
personal house of cards from caving in, to just get past it and hope the heat
would die down.
House of cards, hell. He'd made it a castle. He'd showed up, taken the kids on a
fantasy holiday; he'd cared about the ship's three precious afterthoughts.
He knew. He knew what kind of desperate compromises with reality a kid would
make, to keep things from blowing up, in loud tempers, and shouting, and a
situation becoming untenable. That was what knotted up his own gut. Remembering.
"It wouldn't have made me leave," he said to Jeremy.
"Yes, it would," Jeremy said. And he honestly didn't know whether Jeremy had
judged right or wrong, because he was a kid as capable as Jeremy of inviting
down on himself the very solitude he found so painful—the solitude he'd ventured
out of finally only for Melody and Patch.
And been tossed out of by Satin. To save Melody, Patch and himself.
Maybe the stick had a power about it after all.
He reached across and put his hand on Jeremy's knee. "It'll come right," he
said.
"It was that Champlain that took it," Jeremy said. "I know it was. That skuz
bunch—"
"Well, they're a little more than we can take on. Nothing we can do about it,
Jeremy. Just nothing we can do. Forget it."
"I can't forget it! I didn't want to lie, but it just got crazier and crazier
and everybody was mad, and now everybody's going to be mad at me."
He administered an attention-getting shake to Jeremy's leg. "By now everybody's
just glad to know. That's all."
"I hurt the ship! I hurt you! And I was scared." Jeremy began to shiver, arms
locked across his middle, and the look was haunted. "I was just scared."
"Of what? Of me being mad? Of me knocking you silly?" He knew what Jeremy had
been scared of. He looked across the five years that divided them and didn't
think Jeremy could see it yet.
Jeremy shook his head to all those things, still white-faced.
Afraid of being hit? No.
Afraid of having everything explode in your face, that was the thing a kid
couldn't put words to.
It was the need of somehow knowing you were really, truly at fault, because if
you never got that signal then one anger became all anger, and there was no
defense against it, and you could never sort it all out again: never know which
was justified anger, and which was anger that came at you with no sense in it.
And, finally, at the end of it all, you didn't know which was your own anger,
the genie you didn't ever want to let out—couldn't let out, if you were a
scrawny twelve-year-old who'd been everyone's kid only when you were wrong. You
were reliably no one's kid so long as you kept quiet and let nobody detect the
pain.
God, he knew this kid. So well.
"That's why you were sick at your stomach the morning we left Mariner. That's
why you wanted to go back and look for something. Isn't it?"
"I could get a couple of tapes. So you wouldn't know I got robbed. And I didn't
know what to do…" Jeremy's teeth were knocking together. "I didn't want you to
leave, Fletcher. I don't ever want you to leave."
"I'll try," he said. "Best I can do." Third shake at Jeremy's ankle. "Adult
lesson, kid. Sometimes there's no fix. You just pick up and go on. I'm pretty
good at it. You are, too. So let's do it. Forget the stick. But don't entirely
forget it, you know what I mean? You learn from it. You don't get caught twice."
And the Old Man's voice came on. "This is James Robert," it began, in the
familiar way. And then the Old Man added…
"… This is the last time I'll be speaking as a captain in charge on the bridge."
"God." Color fled Jeremy's face. He looked as if he'd been hit in the stomach a
second time. "God. What's he say?"
It didn't seem to need a translation. It was a pillar of Jeremy's life that
just, unexpectedly, quit.
It was two blows inside the same hour. And Fletcher sat and listened, knowing
that he couldn't half understand what it meant to people who'd spent all their
lives on Finity.
He knew the Alliance itself was changed by what he was hearing. Irrevocably.
"… There comes a time, cousins, when the reflexes aren't as sharp, and the
energy is best saved for endeavors of purely administrative sort, where I trust
I shall carry out my duties with your good will. I will, by common consent of
the captains as now constituted, retain rank so far as the outside needs to
know. I make this announcement at this particular time, ahead of jump rather
than after it, because I consider this a rational decision, one best dealt with
the distance we will all feel on the other side of jump—where, frankly, I plan
to think of myself as retired from active administration.
"I reached this personal and public decision as a surprise even to my fellow
captains, on whose shoulders the immediate decisions now fall. From now on, look
to Madison as captain of first shift, Alan, of second, and Francie, of third.
Fourth shift is henceforth under the capable hand of James Robert, Jr., who'll
make his first flight in command today, the newest captain of Finity's End."
The bridge was so still the ventilation fans and, in JR's personal perception,
the beat of his own heart, were the only background noise. He watched as the Old
Man finished his statement and handed the mike to Com 1, who rose from his
chair.
Others rose. In JR's personal memory there had never been such a mass diversion
of attention—when for a handful of seconds only Helm was minding the ship.
There were handshakes, well-wishes. There were tear-tracks on no few faces.
There was a rare embrace, Madison of the Old Man.
And the Old Man, among others, came to JR to offer a hand in official
congratulation. The Old Man's grip was dry and cool in the way of someone so
old.
"Bucklin will sit hereafter as first observer," the Old Man said. "Jamie. You've
grown halfway to the name."
"A long way to go, sir," JR said. "I'll pass that word, to Bucklin, sir. Thank
you."
The Old Man quietly turned and began to leave the bridge, then.
And stopped at the very last, and looked at all of them, an image that fractured
in JR's next, desperately withheld blink.
"I'll be in my office," the Old Man said gruffly. "Don't expect otherwise."
Then he walked on, and command passed. JR felt his hands cold and his voice
unreliable.
"Carry on," Madison said. "Alan?"
Third shift left their posts. Fourth moved to take their places.
His crew, now. Helm 4 was gray-haired Victoria Inez. She'd be there, competent,
quiet, steady. Not their best combat pilot: that was Hans, Helm 1. But if you
wanted the velvet touch, the finesse to put a leviathan flawlessly into dock,
that was Vickie.
The other captains left the bridge. The little confusion of shift change gave
way to silence, the congestion in JR's throat cleared with the simple knowledge
work had to be done.
JR walked to the command station, reached down and flicked the situation display
to number one screen. "Helm," he said as steadily as he had in him. "And Nav.
Synch and stand by."
"Yessir," the twin acknowledgements came to him.
He looked at the displays, the assurance of a deep, still space in which the
radiation of the point itself was the loudest presence, louder than the constant
output of the stars. They could still read the signature of two ships that had
passed here on the same track, noisy, making haste.
No shots had been fired. Champlain had wasted no time in ambush.
Boreale had wasted no time in pursuit. The action, whatever it was, was at
Esperance.
Before now, he'd made his surmises merely second-guessing the captain on the
bridge. Now he had to act on them.
"Armscomp."
"Yessir."
"Synch with Nav and Helm, likeliest exit point for Champlain. Weapons ready
Red."
"Yes, sir."
He authorized what only two Alliance ships were entitled to do: Finity and
Norway alone could legally enter an inhabited system with the arms board
enabled.
"Nav, count will proceed at your ready."
"Yessir."
Switches moved, displays changed. Finity's End prepared for eventualities.
He did one other thing. He contacted Charlie, in medical, and ordered a standby
on the Old Man's office. Charlie, and his portable kit, went to camp in the
outer office.
It was the captain's discretion, to order such a thing. And he ordered it before
he gave the order that launched Finity's End for jump, and gave Charlie time to
move.
They needed the Old Man, needed him so badly at this one point that he would
order medical measures he knew the Old Man would otherwise decline.
One more port. One more jump. One more exit into normal space. The Old Man was
pushing it hard with the schedule they'd set. And they had to get him there.
Chapter XXIII
Contents - Prev/Next
There was silence from the other bunk, in the waiting.
"Kid," Fletcher said after long thought. "You hear me?"
"Yeah." Earplugs were in. They were riding inertial, in this interminable
waiting, and they could see each other. Jeremy pulled out the right one.
"I've had time to think. I shouldn't have blamed you about Chad. I picked that
fight. Down in the skin. I hit him."
"Yeah," Jeremy said.
"Not your fault. Should have hit Sue."
"You can't hit Sue."
"Yeah, well, Sue knows it, too."
"You want to get her? I can get her."
"I want peace in this crew, is what I want. You copy?"
"Stand by," the word came from the bridge.
"Yessir," was the meek answer. "I copy."
Engines cut in.
Bunks swung.
"He's never done this before!" Jeremy said. "Kind of scary."
He thought so, too, though as he understood the way ships worked, he didn't
imagine JR with his hands on the steering. Or whatever it was up there. Around
there… around the ring from where they were.
"Good luck to us all," came from the bridge. "Here we go, cousins. Good wishes,
new captain, sir. Good wishes, Captain James Robert, Senior. You're forever in
our hearts."
"Amen," Jeremy said fervently.
"Esperance," Fletcher said. He'd looked for it months from now, not in this
fervid rush.
But it was months on. It was three months going on four, since Mariner. Going on
six months, since Pell.
It was autumn on Downbelow. It was coming on the season when he'd come down to
the world.
It was harvest, and the females would be heavy with young and the males working
hard to lay by food for the winter chill.
Half a year. And he was mere weeks older.
The ship lifted. Spread insubstantial wings…
Rain pattered on the ground, into puddles. Pebbles crunched and feet splashed in
shallow water as they carried him, as Fletcher stared at a rain-pocked gray sky
through the mask.
He knew he was in trouble, despite the people fussing over his health. They'd
rescued him, but they wanted him out of their program. They were glad he was
alive, but they were angry. Was that a surprise?
They carried him into the domes and took the mask off and his clean-suit off,
the safety officer questioning him very closely about whether he'd breached a
seal out there.
If he'd had his wits about him he'd have said yes and let them think he'd die,
and that alone would prevent him being shipped anywhere, but he stupidly
answered the truth and took away his best chance, not realizing it until he'd
answered the question.
They'd found the stick, too, and they wanted to take that from him before he got
into the domes, but he wouldn't turn it loose. "Satin gave it to me," he said,
and when they, like his rescuers, suggested he was crazy and hallucinating, he
roused enough to describe where he'd been: that he'd talked to the foremost
hisa, and the one, the rumor said, who could get hisa either to work or not to
work with humans, plain and simple. The experts and the administrators, who'd
suited to come out and meet them coming in, pulled off a little distance in the
heavily falling rain and talked about it, not quite in his hearing. They'd given
him some drug. He wasn't sure what. He wasn't even sure when. Four of the
rescuers had to hold him on a stretcher while the experts conferred, and he
supposed they were frustrated. They shifted grips several times.
But then someone from the medical staff came outside, suited up too, for the
purpose; and the doctor encouraged him to get on his feet, so that he could go
through decon, with people holding him.
They wanted to put the stick through the irradiation, and that was all right: he
took it back, after that, and wobbled out, stick and all, into a warm wrap an
officer held waiting for him.
Then they let him sit down and checked him over, pulse, temperature, everything
his rescuers had already done; and another set of medics went over those
reports.
After that, when he was so faint from hunger his head was spinning, they gave
him hot soup to drink, and put him to bed.
Nunn showed up meanwhile and gave him a stern lecture. He was less than
attentive, while he had the first food he'd had in days. He gathered that he'd
caused Nunn trouble with Quen, and that Nunn now found fault with most
everything he'd ever done in classes. He didn't see how one equated with the
other, but somehow Quen's directives had overpowered everything but the medical
staff. He got sick, couldn't keep the soup down; and Nunn left, that was the one
good thing in a bad moment. He had to go to bed, then, and they gave him an IV
and let him go to sleep.
But when he waked, the science office sent people with recorders and cameras who
kept him talking for hours after that, wanting every detail. He slept a great
deal. He'd run off five kilos, the doctor said, and he was dehydrated despite
being out in the rain for days. It was an endless succession of medical tests
and interviewers.
Last of all Bianca came.
He'd been asleep. And waked up and saw her.
"How are you feeling?" she asked him.
"Oh, pretty good," he said. "They bother you?"
"No. Not really."
"They're shipping me up," he said. "I guess you heard. My family wants me back.
On Finity's End."
"Yes," she said "They told me."
"You're not in trouble, are you?"
She shook her head.
And she cried.
He was incredibly dizzy. Drugged, he was sure, sedated so his head spun when he
lifted his head from the pillow. He fought it. He angrily shoved himself up on
one arm and tried to get up, tried to fight the sedative.
And almost fell out of bed as his hand hit the edge.
"Don't," Bianca said. "Don't. I've only got a few minutes. They won't let me
stay."
She leaned over and kissed him then, a long, long kiss, first they'd ever
shared. Only time they'd ever been together, except in class, without the masks.
"I'll get back down here," he said. "I'll get off that damn ship. Maybe they'll
put me in for a psych-over and I won't have to go with them."
"Velasquez." A supervisor had come to the door. "Time's up."
She hugged him close.
"Velasquez. He's in quarantine."
"I'll get back," he said.
"I'll be here," she said. Meanwhile the supervisor had come into the flimsy
little compartment to bring her out; and Bianca just moved away, holding his
hand as long as she could until their fingers parted.
He fell back and it was a drugged slide into a personal dark in which Bianca's
presence was like a dream, one before, not after the deep forest and the downer
racing ahead of him.
The plain was next. A golden plain of grass, with the watchers endlessly staring
into the heavens…
Not there any longer. Never there.
Esperance was where. Esperance.
"Jeremy?" He missed the noise from that quarter. Jeremy was very quiet.
"Yeah," he heard finally. "Yeah. I'm awake."
"We're there. You drink the packets?"
"Trying," Jeremy said. And scrambled out of his bunk and ran for the bathroom.
Jeremy was sick at his stomach. Light body, Fletcher said to himself, and drank
a nutri-pack, trying to get his own stomach calmed.
Esperance. Their turn-around point. Midway on their journey.
Chapter XXIV
Contents - Prev/Next
Boreale was a day from docking. Champlain was just coming into final approach,
an hour from dock.
JR looked at the information while he drank down the nutrient pack and assessed
damage. There was one piece of information he wanted, and it was delayed,
pending. Charlie would check on the Old Man. Meanwhile he knew his two problems
were there ahead of him, but not that much ahead, not so far ahead that they
could have made extensive arrangements.
He meditated ordering a high-speed run-in that would put them at dock not long
after the two ships in question.
It would also focus intense attention on them, at all levels of Esperance
structure, and might impinge on negotiations to come. Foul up the Old Man's job
and he'd hear about it.
He ordered the first and second V-dump, which removed that possibility—and
followed approach regulations for a major starstation.
Please God the Old Man was all right. He got down another nutri-pack.
A message from Charlie came through, welcome and feared at once. "He's
complaining," Charlie said. "Says he's getting dressed. Madison says he should
stay put."
He gave a little laugh, he, sitting on the bridge and waiting for Alan to
relieve him. Their plans had them saving first and second shift in reserve
throughout the run-in. Third and fourth were going to work in that
edge-of-waking way bridge crew sat ready during jump, and Vickie was going to be
at Helm on dock. That meant long shifts, but it also meant the Old Man was going
to get maximum rest during their approach.
So would Madison, whose feelings in this shift of personnel were also involved.
Madison had gone on the protected list right along with the Old Man, and while
Madison hadn't quite complained about Alan's and Francie's ganging up to take
all those shifts, Madison hadn't realized officially that he was being coddled.
"Tell the Old Man there's not a pan in the galley out of place, and Boreale will
be thinking about our presence on her tail as a major Alliance caution flag. She
won't innovate policy. Isn't that the rule?"
Don't quote me my own advisements!" the Old Man's voice broke in: that com-panel
on his desk reached anything it wanted to. Of course the Old Man had been
shadowing his decisions.
Then, quietly, "Not a pan out of place, indeed, Jamie. Good job."
"Thank you, captain, sir," JR said calmly, then advised Com 2 to activate the
intercom, because it was time. The live intercom blinked an advisory Channel 1
in the corner of his screen.
"The ship is stable," he began then, the age-old advisory of things rightfully
in their places and the ship on course for a peaceful several days.
Routine settled over the ship. Fletcher would never have credited how comforting
that could feel—just the routine of meals in the galley, and himself and the
junior-juniors stuck with a modified laundry-duty, a stack they couldn't hope to
work their way through in the four days, while senior-juniors drew the draining
and cleaning of spoiled tanks in Jake's domain—not an enviable assignment.
Meanwhile the flash-clean was going at a steady rate, since they had the
senior-seniors' dress uniforms on priority for meetings that meant the future of
the Alliance and a diminution of Mazian's options.
He'd never imagined that a button-push on a laundry machine could be important
to war and peace in the universe, but it was the personal determination of the
junior-junior crew that their captains were going into those all-important
station conferences in immaculate, impressive dress.
They had to run up to A deck to collect senior laundry: all of A deck was so
busy with clean-up after their run that senior staff had no time for personal
jobs. Linda and Vince did most of the errands: Jeremy for his part wanted to
stay in the working part of the laundry and not work the counter.
"No," Fletcher said to that idea. "You go out there, you work, you smile, you
say hello, you behave as your charming self and you don't flinch."
"They think I'm a jerk!" Jeremy protested.
"We know you're not. You know you're not. Get out there, meet people, and look
as if you aren't."
Jeremy wasn't happy. Sue and Connor showed up to check in bed linen, the one
item they were running for the crew as a whole, and Jeremy ducked the encounter.
Fletcher went out and checked the cousins off their list, and Jeremy showed up
after they were gone.
"You can't do that," Fletcher said. "You can't flinch. Yes, you're on the outs.
I've been on the outs. They've been on the outs. It happens. People get over it
if you don't look like a target."
"They're all talking about me."
"Probably they're talking about their upcoming liberty, if you want the honest
truth. Don't flinch. They forget, and it was an accident, for God's sake. It
wasn't like you stole it."
Jeremy moped off to the area with the machines, a maneuver, Fletcher said to
himself in some annoyance, to have him doing the consoling, when, no, it wasn't
a theft, and, no, losing it wasn't entirely Jeremy's fault.
Irreplaceable, in the one sense, that it was from Satin's hand; but entirely
replaceable, in another. He'd begun to understand what the stick was worth—which
he suspected now was absolutely nothing at all, in Satin's mind: the stick was
as replaceable as everything else downers made. You lost it? she would say—any
downer would say, in a world full of sticks and stones and feathers. I find
more, Melody would say.
No downer would have fought over it, that was the truth he finally, belatedly,
remembered. Fighting was a human decision, to protect what was a human memory, a
human value set on Satin's gift. It was certain Satin herself never would fight
over it, nor had ever meant contention and anger to be a part of her gift to
him.
In that single thought—he had everything she was. He had everything Melody and
Patch were.
And he suddenly had answers, in this strange moment standing in a ship's
laundry, for why he'd not been able to stay there, forever dreaming dreams with
downers. Satin had sent him back to the sky, and into a human heaven where human
reasons operated. She might not know why someone in some sleepover would steal
her gift, but a downer would be dismayed and bewildered that humans fought over
it.
But—but—this was the one downer who'd gone to space, who'd set her stamp on the
whole current arrangement of hisa and human affairs. This was the downer who'd
dealt with researchers and administrators and Elene Quen. She knew the
environment she sent him to. She'd seen war, and been appalled.
So maybe she wouldn't be as surprised as he thought that it had come to
fighting.
Maybe, he thought, that evening in the mess hall, when he and Jeremy were in
line ahead of Chad and Connor, maybe humans had to fight. It might be as human a
behavior as a walk in spring was a downer one. It might be human process, to
fight until, like Jeremy, like him, like Chad, they just wore out their
resentments and found themselves exhausted.
So he'd only done what other humans did. But a human who knew downers never
should have fought over Satin's gift. He most of all should have known
better—and hadn't refrained. It certainly proved one point Satin had made to
him—that he really was a wretched downer, and that he was bound to be the human
he was born to be, sooner or later.
And it showed him something else, too. Downers left the spirit sticks at points
of remembrance, at Watcher-sites, on graves. Rain washed them, and time
destroyed them—and downers, he now remembered, didn't feel a need to renew the
old ones. So they weren't ever designed to be permanent. He had the sudden
notion if he were bringing one to Satin, he could make one of a metal rod, a
handful of gaudy, stupid station-pins, and a little nylon cord. She'd think it
represented humans very well, and that it was, indeed, a human memory,
persistent as the steel humans used.
In his mind's eye he could imagine her taking it very solemnly at such a
meeting, very respecting of his gift. He imagined her setting it in the earth at
the foot of Mana-tari-so, and he imagined it enduring the rains as long as a
steel rod could stand. Downers would see it, and those who remembered would
remember, and as long as some remembered, they would teach. That was all it was.
It was a memory. Just a memory.
And no one could ever steal that, or harm it.
No one but him.
He'd been wrong in everything he'd done. He'd waked up knowing the simple truth
this time, but he'd still been too blind to see it. He'd felt Bianca's kiss, it
was so real. And that had been sweet, and sad, and human, so distracting he
hadn't been thinking about hisa memories. And that was an answer in itself.
Silly Fetcher, he heard Melody say to him. He knew now what he was too smart to
know before, when he'd set all the value on physical wood and stone.
Silly Fetcher, he could hear Melody say to him. Silly you.
He sleepwalked his way through the line, ended up setting his tray beside
Vince's, with Jeremy setting his down, too, across from him.
Chad and Connor were just at the hot table at the moment. Maybe it wasn't the
smartest thing, remembering keenly that he wasn't a downer and that those he
dealt with weren't—but he waited until he saw Chad and Connor sit near Nike and
Ashley.
Then, to Jeremy's, "Where are you going, Fletcher?" he got up, left his tray,
and went over two rows of tables.
He sat down opposite Chad, next to Connor. "I owe you an apology," he said,
"from way before the stick disappeared. I took things wrong. That doesn't
require you to say anything, or do anything, but I'm saying in front of Connor
here and the rest of the family, I'm sorry, shouldn't have done that, I
overreacted. You were justified and I was wrong. I said it the far side of jump,
and I'm still of that opinion. That's all."
Chad stared at him. Chad had a square, unexpressive face. It was easy to take it
for sullen. Chad didn't change at all, or encourage any further word. So he got
up and left and went back to the table with Vince and Linda and Jeremy.
"What'd you say to him?" Jeremy wanted to know.
It was daunting, to have a pack of twelve-year-olds hanging on your moves. But
some things they needed to see happen in order to know they ought to happen
among reasonable adults. "I apologized," he said.
"What'd he say?" Linda wanted to know.
"He didn't say anything. But he heard me. People who heard me accuse him heard
it. That's what counts."
Jeremy had a glum look.
"Chad's an ass," Vince said.
"Well, I was another," Fletcher said. "We can all be asses now and again. Just
so we don't make a career of it.—Cheer up. Think about liberty. Think about
cheerful things, like going to the local sights. Like going to a tape shop.
Getting some more tapes."
"My others got stolen," Jeremy said in a dark tone.
"Well, don't we have money coming?"
"We might," Vince said. "They said we were supposed to have some every liberty.
And we didn't get anything at Voyager."
"Ask JR," Linda said. "He's a captain now."
"I might do that," Fletcher said.
But Jeremy didn't rise to the mood. He just ate his supper.
That evening in rec he lost to Linda at vid-games, twice.
Won one, and then Jeremy decided to go back to the cabin and go to sleep.
That was a problem, Fletcher said to himself. That was a real problem. He was
beginning to get mad about it.
"Am I supposed to entertain you every second, or what?" he asked Jeremy when he
trailed him back. He caught him sitting on his bunk, and stood over him,
deliberately looming. "I've done my best!"
"I'm not in a good mood, all right?"
"Fine. Fine! First you lose the stick and now I'm supposed to cheer you up about
it, and every time I try, you sulk. I don't know what game we're playing here,
but I could get tired of it just real soon."
"Why don't you?"
"Why don't I what?"
"Go bunk by yourself. I was by myself before. I can be, again. Screw it!"
"Oh, now it's broken and we don't want it anymore. You're being a spoiled brat,
Jeremy. You owe me, but you want me to make it all right for you. Well, screw
that! I'm staying."
Jeremy had a teary-eyed look worked up—and looked at him as if he'd grown two
heads.
"Why?"
"Because, that's why! Because! I live here!"
Jeremy didn't say anything as Fletcher went to his bunk and threw himself down
to sit. And stare.
"I didn't mean to do it," Jeremy muttered.
"Yeah, you mentioned that. Fact is, you didn't do it, some skuz at Mariner did
it. So forget it! I'm trying to forget it, the whole ship is trying to forget it
and you won't let anybody try another topic. You're being a bore, Jeremy.—Want
to play cards?"
"No."
Fletcher got out the deck anyway. "I figure losing the stick is at least a
hundred hours. You better win it back."
Resignation: "So I owe you a hundred hours."
"Yeah, and Linda beat you twice tonight, because you gave up. Give up again? Is
this the guy I moved in with? Is this the guy who wants to be Helm 1 someday?"
"No." Jeremy squirmed to the edge of his bunk, in reach of the cards. Fletcher
switched bunks, and dealt.
Jeremy beat him. It wasn't quite contrived, but it was extremely convenient that
it turned out that way.
Esperance Station—a prosperous station, in its huge size, its traffic of
skimmers and tenders about a fair number of ships at dock.
Among which, count Boreale, which had sent them no message, and Champlain, which
had sat at dock for days during their slow approach, and because of which,
yesterday during the dog watch of alterday, Esperance Legal Affairs had sent
them notification of legal action pending against them.
Champlain was suing them and suing Boreale, claiming harassment and threats.
Handling the approach to Esperance docking as the captain of the watch, JR
reviewed the list of ships in dock. There were twenty ships, of which three were
Union, two smaller ships and Boreale; five were Unionside merchanters… ships
signatory to Union, and registered with Union ports. All were Family ships,
still, and four of them, Gray Lady, Chelsea, Ming Tien, and Scottish Rose, had
chosen to believe Union's promise that their status would never change: they
were honest merchanters who'd simply found Union offers of lower tariffs and
safe ports attractive and who'd believed Union's promise of continued tolerance
of private ownership of their ships. JR personally didn't believe it; nor did
most merchanters in space, but some had believed it, and some merchanters had
been working across the Line from before the War and considered Union ports
their home ports.
Those four ships were no problem. Neither were the three Union ships. They had
no vote. Union would dictate to them.
But the fifth of the Unionside merchanters, Wayfarer, was a ship working for the
Alliance while under Union papers: a spy, no less, no more, and they had to be
careful not to betray that fact.
There was, of course, Champlain, also a spy, but on Mazian's side—unless it was
by remote chance Union's; or even, and least likely, Earth's—that was number
eight.
Nine through eighteen were small Alliance traders, limited in scope:
Lightrunner, Celestial, Royal, Queen of Sheba, and Cairo; Southern Cross, St.
Joseph, Amazonia, Brunswick Belle, and Gazelle. Nineteen and twenty were
Andromeda and Santo Domingo, long-haulers, plying the run between Pell and
Esperance, and on to Earth. Those two were natural allies, and a piece of luck,
at a station where they already had a charge pending from a hostile ship, not to
mention a hostile administration.
Those two had likely been carrying luxury goods, having the reach to have been
at ports where they could obtain them; and they would be a little glad, perhaps,
that they'd sold their cargoes before Finity's cargo hit the market, as that
cargo was doing now, electronically. Madison was in charge of market-tracking.
"Final rotation," Helm announced calmly. They were on course toward a
mathematically precise touch at a moving station rim.
"Proceed," JR said, committing them to Helm's judgment. They were going in.
Lawyers with papers would be waiting on the dockside. Madelaine had papers
prepared as well, countersuing Champlain for legal harassment.
Welcome, JR thought, to the captaincy and its responsibilities. He hadn't asked
the other captains whether to launch a counter-suit. He simply knew they didn't
accept such things tamely, he'd called Madelaine, found that she'd already been
composing the papers; and the Old Man hadn't stepped in.
He didn't go, this time, to take his place in the rowdy gathering of cousins
awaiting the docking touch in the assembly area. Bucklin would be there. Bucklin
would be in charge of the assembly area setup before dock and its breakdown
after, and Bucklin would be overseeing all the things that he'd overseen.
That meant Bucklin wouldn't be at his ear with commentary, or the usual jokes,
or sympathy, even when Bucklin found free time enough to be up here shadowing
command. Bucklin wouldn't observe him for instruction, not generally. Bucklin
would concentrate his observation on Madison, ideally, and learn from the best.
It was a lonely feeling he had, in Bucklin's assignment elsewhere. It always
would be, until Bucklin found his own way to A deck. And the price of that,
Madison's retirement, neither of them would want
He sat, useless, once he'd given Helm the go-ahead. He sat through the
advisement of takehold, when crew would be making their way to the assembly
area, to stand together, wait together.
He had one critical bit of business, and that was turning up computer-handled
and optimum: the passenger ring started its spin-down as the takehold sounded,
preparing to lock down just before the touch at the docking cone. It was another
chance to rearrange the galley pans if that went short; and to break bones and
damage the mag-lev interface if it went long. He saw it, felt it, as for a
moment they were null-g in the ring.
Gliding in under Vickie's steady hand and lightning reflexes. From 10mps to 5,
down to .5, .2, .02.
Touch. Bang. Clang.
Machinery the size of a sleepover suite engaged and drew them into synch with
the station.
Docking crews would scramble to move in the gantry and match up the lines, to a
set of connectors on the probe that were not the same for every ship, last
vestige of a scramble of innovation and refitting. Things were changing, but
they changed slowly. Always, with machinery that functioned for centuries, it
worked till it broke, and change came when it could come.
He sent a Commend to Helm. Vickie wouldn't talk for a few minutes. Helm did that
to a human being. She wasn't in phase with the universe right now, and Helm 4
would literally walk her and Helm 2 off the ship after Helm 3 shut down the
boards.
"Thank you, one and all," he said to the bridge crew, and got up, hearing Com
making the routine announcements, sending the heads of sections off to customs.
"First shift captain," he intercommed Madison. "Legal Affairs will meet you at
the airlock with appropriate papers." That was reasonably routine, but the
papers in question were a countersuit, responding to papers they'd already
received electronically. He punched another personal page. "Blue, this is JR.
Are we going to have any customs troubles?"
"None yet," the reply came back to him.
Meanwhile the Purser flashed the advisement of a bloc of rooms engaged at the
luxury Xanadu, which, the Purser advised him, put them in with Boreale and with
Santo Domingo.
He keyed accept and trusted the Purser to advise Com to advise the crew.
Meanwhile the docking crew was engaging lines and Engineering was watching the
connections as thumps came from the bow. The access tube linked on with a clang.
The most of the crew would be getting ready to move, right below them. When he
finished here, which would be perhaps another hour if there were no glitches, he
would take the lift down to A deck. He would live with his pocket-com, sleep
aboard, fill out endless reports. He'd have no chance to hobnob with the juniors
in the bar, and he'd ride no more vid-rides in the amusement shops on any
station, ever. Chase young spacer-femmes in some bar? Not a captain of Finity's
End.
He looked forward to the negotiations as the only chance he'd have this
so-called liberty to have a little time with Bucklin, maybe coffee and doughnuts
in some side conference room, an interlude to meetings the importance of which
far outweighed any regrets on the fourth captain's part that he wouldn't sit and
talk for hours to his age-mates.
Paul, who'd gone to senior crew before him, was in third shift. Paul had taken
two ports and six jumps to quit turning up among the juniors down on A deck, as
if he were still forlornly hoping for something to span the gap from where he
was to where he'd been. But it had felt awkward, an undermining of his authority
as new officer over the juniors. He remembered how uncomfortable Paul had made
him. He wouldn't do that to Bucklin.
He had access to every message in the ship, if he wanted a sample, ranging from
Jeff's query of the schedule for first meal after undock, two weeks from now, to
the intercom exchange between Madison and Alan regarding the negotiations
meeting schedule.
Customs didn't hold them up, as they had feared might happen for days if
Esperance administration wanted to delay the meetings. Crew was exiting on
schedule. The lawsuit came in, the lawsuit went out. They'd arrived at 1040h
mainday, right near midday, and before judges had gone to lunch. That had proved
useful.
They sold their cargo. The voyage was profitable. They'd move the crates out of
the cabins next watch. They'd need two cargo shifts, counting that the crates
had to be moved by hand on floors that were, by now, stairs, as the pop-up
treads enabled industrious A and B deck crew to access areas of the ship that
otherwise would go inaccessible when the ring locked.
They'd handle that offloading with regular crew, no extras needed, and the cargo
hands would still get their five-day total liberty before they had to load again
for Pell.
All such things crossed his attention, as something he had to remember if plans
changed without notice. As they well could here.
He received notifications of systems status. No senior captain came to advise
him of procedures. Shut-down of systems saved energy and protected equipment,
and there was a sequence to the shut-downs. He was a little slower than the more
senior captains, because he was looking to the operations list. But he knew
that, of the hundred-odd systems that had to go to bed for the next few weeks,
they were safed, set, and ready for their wake-up when Finity next powered up.
Then he dismissed all but the ops watch, which would rotate by three-day sets.
They never left Finity without onboard monitoring.
No one said good job. No one frowned. He was relieved no one came running up
with an objection of something left undone. He knew things backward and forward,
and could have done the shut-down by rote. But he didn't take that risk. And
wouldn't, until nerves were no longer a factor.
He walked to the small lift that gave bridge access and took it down to ops,
where it let out.
He saw that ops was up and functioning, gave over the ship to the senior cousin
in charge—it happened to be Molly—and walked out to the cold, metallic air of
Esperance dockside and the expected row of neon lights the other side of the
customs checkpoint, among the very last to pick up his baggage—intending to do
it himself, though he had regularly done that duty for the Old Man, when they
weren't as short of biddable juniors as they were.
"No," Bucklin said, being in charge, now, of the senior-juniors handling crew
baggage. "Wayne's already taken it and checked you into your room."
"Understood," he said. Bucklin had handled it. Commenting on it would admit he'd
thought about it and not relied on Bucklin's finding a way to double-up
someone's duty. So there was no thank-you. What he longed to do was arrange a
meeting of the old gang in the sleepover bar in the off-shift, so they could
talk over things and get signals straight the way they'd always done. But he
couldn't. He couldn't even attend what Bucklin might have set up. "First meeting
with the stationmaster," he said, "is in three hours. You'll be there."
"Yes, sir," Bucklin said—as happy, JR said to himself, to have gotten his new
job done as he was to have gotten through the shut-down checklist unscathed.
"Want a personal escort to the sleepover?"
"Wouldn't turn it down."
"Finish up," Bucklin said to Lyra, his lieutenant, now, and the two of them,
like before their recent transformation, took a walk through customs and onto
docks where the neon signs were bright and elaborate and the sound of music
floated out of bars and restaurants.
Esperance in all its prosperous glory. Garish neon warred against the dark in
the high reaches of the dockside. Gantries leaned just a little in the curvature
of perspectives, and the white lights of spots, like suns floating in darkness,
blazed from the gantry tops.
"Fancy place," he said.
"Not quite up to Pell's standard," Bucklin said, and didn't ask what JR figured
was the foremost question in Bucklin's thoughts: how it felt to sit the chair
for real. But he didn't ask Bucklin how the juniors reacted, either.
Not his business any longer.
The meetings in which the Old Man was going to read the rules to the
stationmaster of Esperance, those were his business. That he had a voice in that
process was a very sobering consideration, and itself a good reason to follow
protocols meticulously. Every nuance of their behavior, even now, might be under
station observation, what with lawyers and station administrators looking for
ways to keep Esperance doing exactly what Esperance had been doing—balancing
between Union and Pell.
As some ships might be dubious where their advantage was—or where it might be a
month from now.
Someone had urged Champlain to sue. It was unlikely that a ship of Champlain's
character—a rough and tumble lot—would have organized it on their own. Someone
had pulled Champlain in on a short tether, and risked exposure of that
association. Possibly Champlain itself had gotten scared of the enemies she'd
gained—and put pressure on someone in this port for protection.
Protect us or we'll talk.
Or, conversely, someone wanted to stall and hinder Finity's approach to the
station authorities: sue Finity or they'd get no protection from their
stationside contacts.
Madelaine was going to shadow the negotiations this time: the ship's chief
lawyer, not at the table, but definitely following every move.
"Berth 2," Bucklin said as they walked. "And Champlain is 14."
"Not far enough," JR said. "We need a guard on the sleep-over, not obtrusive,
but we can't risk an incident—and they may try us—maybe to plant something,
maybe to start an incident."
"I've put out a caution," Bucklin said.
"No question you would. Damn, I'm missing you guys."
"Feels empty across the corridor."
He gave a breath of a laugh. "I lived through docking. I'm jumpy as hell."
"Don't blame you for that. How's the Old Man?"
Sober question. All-important question. "Last I saw he was doing all right." He
hadn't told Bucklin about the Old Man's rejuv failing. He thought about doing it
now. But he'd been told that on a need-to-know, and Bucklin wasn't on a
need-to-know. If it had involved a second captain's health, yes. But it didn't.
"Hard voyage," Bucklin said, not knowing that deadly fact. "At his age, it's got
to wear on him."
He didn't elaborate. They reached the sleepover frontage. He thought of ways he
could talk to Bucklin, if Bucklin played sometime aide and orderly. It wasn't
the way he'd have preferred it.
It was the way things were going to be.
Walking through Xanadu was like walking through the heart of a jewel, lights
constantly changing, most surfaces reflecting. It impressed the junior-juniors
no end. It impressed Fletcher.
So did the suite—an arrangement like Voyager with all of the junior-juniors in
one, but this time with enough beds. The bed in the central room was as huge as
the one at Mariner. The two adjacent bedrooms were almost as elaborate. Colors
changed on all the walls constantly. One wall of the main room was bubbles
rising through real water, like bubbly wine.
Linda had, of course, to squat down by the base of the wall and try to see where
the bubbles came from.
"Let's go on the docks," Jeremy said, and Fletcher was glad to hear the
impatience in Jeremy. The kid was getting over it. Liberty was casting its spell
over the junior-juniors, luring them with vid parlors and dessert bars and every
blandishment ever designed to part a spacer from his cash. Vid-games had become
important again, and the universe was back in order.
"There's a vid zoo," Linda said, from her examination of bubble production. "A
walk-through. It's educational. There's tigers and dinosaurs and zebras."
"Where'd you hear that?" Vince wanted to know.
"I looked it up while some people were lazing around."
"The hell," Vince said.
The bickering was actually pleasant to the ears. "Let's go downstairs," Fletcher
suggested, and instantly there were takers.
It took four hours to set up the initial meeting, that of ship's officers with
station officials. Station Legal Affairs said it didn't want the station
administrators to meet with a ship under accusation… that it would constitute a
legal impropriety.
The Old Man suggested the station officials could refuse to meet with a ship
under accusation, but they'd damn well better arrange a meeting for an Alliance
mission. Immediately.
Sitting aboard the ship, in lower deck ops, along with the other four captains,
with the beep and tick of cargo monitoring the only action on the boards, JR.
watched and listened to that exchange, on which Wayne ran courier. The Old Man
was perfectly unflappable, pleasant to every cousin and nephew and niece around
him. That was a bad sign for the opposition.
The Old Man dictated a message for Boreale, too, one to be hand-carried, a fact
which said how much the Old Man relied on the security of station communication
systems, even the secured lines, and all prudent officers took note of it. JR
wrote the message down and printed it; and Wayne ran that one, too, while Tom B.
ran courier for Madelaine's office back and forth in an exchange with Esperance
Legal to which JR was not privy.
The message to Boreale was simple. The suit is harassment and will not stand. We
will vigorously oppose it and defend you in the same matter. We will hope for
your attendance at one of our final meetings with ship captains at a time
mutually agreeable, and hope also for your support of the pertinent treaty
provisions with your own local offices.
What came back was:
We cannot of course speak for Union authorities, but we stand with you against
the lawsuit. We also hold that, in accordance with both Union immunity and
Alliance law, our deck is sovereign territory.
The latter sentence was complete irony. It was James Robert's own hard-won
provision in international law and the reason of the War in the first place; and
Boreale was invoking it to prevent Esperance station personnel from entering
their ship to search for records—as Finity held to the same right.
But Union held to no such thing within its own territory with ships signatory to
Union.
"They stand with us," Madison muttered when he heard the answer. "One could even
hope they were on our side when they took out after Champlain and started this
legal mess."
"But dare we notice that station hasn't charged Boreale?" Francie said. "They're
very careful of Union feelings at this port."
"Noticed that," Alan said. "Question is, how high does Boreale's captain rank
over whoever's in the Union Trade Bureau offices here. I think that Boreale has
the edge in rank, barring special instructions."
"I don't take Boreale's turning up at Mariner total coincidence," James Robert
said, breaking a long silence, and JR paid close attention, but as the least
informed, he'd kept quiet.
Not coincidence. "So," he ventured, "what was the carrier doing at Tripoint?"
"Mallory's business," Madison said. "We think that Mazianni operations have
shifted from Sol fringes to a new area the other side of Viking. We thought
there'd be something more Boreale's size sitting there observing. We got a
carrier and then Boreale's presence at Mariner. And a Mazianni ship running for
Esperance, the complete opposite direction, when taking out for Tripoint would
have thrown it right into the arms of that carrier."
He hadn't thought of Champlain's alternative course. Blind spot. Major blind
spot. He was chagrinned.
"So it ran this direction."
"Its chances were better with us. That carrier would have had it, no question,
Boreale wanted it but couldn't catch it, Boreale wanted them alive."
It would be a source of information, one that Union science could probe with no
messiness of courts, at least in the autonomy of the Union military operating in
what was technically a war zone.
Maybe we should let them, was the unethical thought that raced next through his
mind. Maybe we play too much by the law and that's why this has dragged on for
twenty years.
No. That wasn't correct. Their playing by the law was exactly what this whole
mission was about. Their playing by the law was the only thing that got the
cooperation of hundreds of independent merchanters, who otherwise would have
supported Mazian with supply at least intermittently and brought him back from
the political dead the moment things grew chancy. The result would have been
another, far deadlier war, with the whole human future at risk.
Cancel that thought.
"Various interests at Esperance aren't willing to see Champlain answering close
questions," Francie said. "That's my bet."
"It's mine, too," Madison said. "I think it's a very good bet. Champlain was
dead if it had gone to Tripoint. It knew what was waiting there. It might stay
alive if it ran this direction and threatened its own business partners. They're
here. On Esperance. At least one strong anchor for the whole Mazianni supply
network is right here… the contraband, the smuggling, the illicit trade in
rejuv, the whole thing. The other leak is probably Viking; but Viking isn't our
problem. Esperance is."
It made sense. It finally made sense, how the web was structured. And what the
gateway was for the high-priced goods to reach the paying markets, at Cyteen.
Cyteen officials didn't like it. But they still drank their Scotch, not looking
closely enough at whether it came via a legitimate merchanter or whether it
meant rejuv and biologicals were getting to Earth, to the wellspring of all that
was human, in trade for supply for Mazian's war machine.
The other captains discussed technical matters. The new one was just filling out
the holes in his understanding of what they were doing, and why they were doing
it, and why certain Cyteen factions would support them and certain ones
wouldn't. Some Cyteeners were defending their world. Others were making money.
Say that also about the position of Esperance in this affair. It had existed by
playing Union against Alliance, supporting and not supporting Mazian. It was
what the Old Man had said at Voyager: Mazian was essential… in this case, to
Esperance. Maybe even to them… because without him, Union would have had
Esperance, and the Alliance would have gone down Union's gullet. As it was,
Union would let Esperance slip firmly into the Alliance in return for secure
borders—secure from a threat Union itself was helping fund simply because Union
had an appetite for what their sole planet didn't produce.
Like lifestuff that wasn't poisonous, or otherwise deadly. Cyteen had made a
great matter over its rebellion from what was Earthlike; Cyteen wielded genetics
like a weapon; but when it came to creature comforts, Cyteen, just like some
this side of the Line, didn't look too closely at the label.
Like Pell, he thought. Like Pell, and its dinosaurs and sugar drinks scantly
removed from where thousands had died. People forgot. People were human and
didn't look too closely at what didn't look harmful. No single person's little
purchase of black-market coffee could affect the universe.
That was the dream people had, that little things were ignorable on a cosmic
scale.
Wind blew through virtual foliage. Moist air brushed the skin. It wasn't one of
those sims that you wore a suit to experience. You wore ordinary clothes, and
just put on disposable contacts. And walked.
And climbed. And walked some more. It might have been Downbelow, but it was too
green. They walked over soft ground, and around trees, following a hand-rope.
A tiger was resting in the undergrowth. It stood up, huge, and real, right down
to the details of its whiskers and the expression in its eyes.
Vince yelped, and the virtual cat jumped, spat, and retreated, staring at them.
Fletcher had to calm his own nerves and slow his own pulse. "Don't move," he
said. "Stand still."
The tiger rumbled with threat. The tail-tip moved, and muscles stayed knotted
beneath the striped fur. The place smelled of damp, and rot, and animal.
"It's really real," Linda said.
"Does a pretty good job," Fletcher said. The junior-juniors clustered around
him; and his own planet-trained nerves were in an uproar.
They edged past. The tiger followed them with a slow turning of its head.
A strange animal bolted away, brown, four-footed. The tiger bounded across the
trail in front of them.
"Damn!" Jeremy said.
Fletcher concurred. They'd had a children's version and a thrills version of the
zoo, and he began to know where he classified himself.
Or maybe too much immediacy and too much threat had made them all jumpy.
They walked out of the exhibit with rattled nerves and went through the gift
shop, spending money all the way.
Four hours to set up the meeting and then another hour while station officials
drifted in from various appointments, in their own good time. Alan and Francie
took charge and kept, contrarily, claiming that the senior captain was on his
way. On his way… for another hour and a half.
"Just sit there," Francie advised JR. "Just sit and be pleasant. Keep them
wondering."
So he took his place at the table beside Alan, and provoked stares from a long
table occupied by grim-faced station authorities and minor Alliance officials.
"Fifth captain," Alan introduced him. "James Robert Neihart, Jr."
JR returned the shocked glances, and suddenly, in possession of the conference
table, knew how hard that information had hit. These people hadn't known he
existed two seconds ago—another Captain James Robert, under tutelage of the
first.
Now titled with the captaincy, at a time when, just perhaps, they'd been
thinking the famous captain couldn't last much longer and that they knew his
successors.
Now they knew nothing.
"Gentlemen," JR said. "Ladies. My pleasure."
There was a moment of paralysis. That was the only way to describe it. They
didn't know what to do with him. They didn't know what his position was, how
much he knew, or why. In short, what they thought they knew had changed.
"We," the first-shift stationmaster said, trying to seize hold of what had no
handles, "we weren't informed. Is it recent, this fifth captaincy? We hope it
doesn't signal a crisis in the captain's health."
Vile man, JR thought. He'd never found a person snake so described on sight.
And, completely, coldly deadpan, he made his reply as close a copy of the Old
Man as he could muster.
"We aren't our apparent ages. Recent in whose terms, sir?"
Conversation-stopper. Implied offense—within the difference between spacer
perceptions and stationer perceptions.
And he'd asked a question. It hung in the charged air waiting for an answer as a
dozen faces down the long table hoped not to be asked, themselves, directly.
There was one gesture the senior captain had made his own. JR consciously smiled
the Old Man's dead-eyed, perfunctory smile. And at least the two seniormost
stationers looked far from comfortable.
"There is a succession," JR dropped into that silence. He'd thought he'd be
terrified, sitting at this table. He'd thought he'd conceive not a word to say.
Maybe it was folly that took him to the threshold of real negotiations, knowing
that the Old Man's arrival might be further delayed. It might be dangerous
folly. But the Old Man had taught him. "There always was a succession. It's our
way to shadow our seniors, so there's no transition. There never will be a
transition. But Mazian can't say the same. They went on rejuv back during the
War—to ensure no births. Those ships have no succession." A second, deliberate
smile. "We left only one of our children ashore. And at Pell we got him back.
Another Fletcher Neihart, as happens. Looks seventeen. Unlike me, he is."
For a moment the air in the room seemed dead still, and heavy. There was no way
for them to figure his real age. The face they were looking at was a boy's face.
But now they knew he wasn't.
Then a set of steps sounded in the hall outside. A good many of them. The Old
Man was arriving with his escort.
He was aware of body language, his own, constantly, another of the Old Man's
lessons. He deliberately mirrored calm assurance, to their scarcely restrained
consternation, and when Alan and Francie rose in respect to the Old Man and
Madison coming into the room, so did he. Four of those at the conference table,
in their confusion, rose, too.
"So you've met the younger James Robert," James Robert, Sr. said, and JR would
personally lay odds someone's pocket-com had been live and the feed going to the
Old Man for the last few minutes. "A pleasure to reach Esperance. I was just in
communication with the Union Trade Bureau. Very encouraging." James Robert sat
down as they all resumed their seats. "Delighted to be here," James Robert said,
opening his folder. He looked good, he looked rested, not a hair out of place
and the dark eyes that remained so lively in a sere, enigmatic mask swept over
the conspiratory powers of Esperance with not a hint of doubt, not of himself,
not of the Alliance, not of the force he represented.
"Welcome to Esperance," the senior stationmaster said.
Thank you." James Robert let him get not a word further. "Thank you all for
rearranging your schedules. You've doubtless received partial reports on the
trade situation and the pirate threat. I've just come from the edges of Earth
space, and from consultation with our Union allies on matters of security and
trade, and on the changing nature of the pirate activity hereabouts." This, to a
station that fancied its own private agreements with Union: it suggested Union
shifting positions: it suggested things changing; and JR very much suspected the
Old Man was going to follow that theme straight as a shot to the heart of
Esperance objections.
There were cautions out, in the instructions from Bucklin. Champlain being in
port. The crew was supposed to confine themselves to Blue Dock, and to go in
groups constantly, in civ clothing. Fletcher wore his brown sweater. So did
Jeremy, and now Linda said she wanted one.
"We can all have the same sweaters," Linda said.
"The idea," Fletcher objected, "is that civvies look different."
"So we look different," Linda said.
He was doubtful that Linda comprehended the idea at all. Linda understood unity,
not uniqueness. Linda wanted a sweater. Then Vince did. The notion that they
should look like a unit appealed to them, and protests that they might as well
put on ship's colors fell on deaf ears. So they shopped. Found exactly the right
sweaters, which the juniors insisted on putting on in the shop.
Next door to the clothing store was a pin and patch shop, a necessity. Esperance
patches and pins were in evidence, along with patches and pins from all over…
but the ones from Earth and the ones from Cyteen were the rarities, priced
accordingly.
It was obligatory to acquire pins or patches, for a first trip to a station, and
the junior-juniors, getting into the spirit of the merchanter and trading idea,
traded spare pins from Sol for theirs and then bought an extravagant number of
extras. The merchant was happy.
Then Vince fished up a Jupiter from his pocket and got a cash sale.
A first-timer to everything, however, had to buy, and Fletcher bought a couple
of high-quality Esperance pins. One for luck, Linda urged him, and at least one
for trade.
Then he bought another, telling himself he'd… maybe… give it to Bianca when he
got back to Pell. She'd like it, he thought. At least she'd know he'd thought of
her, at the very last star of civilized space.
It was a fairly rare pin. Worth a bit, back at Pell.
Hell, he thought, after he'd left the shop… after he was walking the dockside
with a trio of ebullient juniors… well, two, and an unnaturally glum Jeremy, who
sulked because nobody wanted to go look for an Esperance snow globe, which
Jeremy said he'd seen once, and wanted.
"They had one at the pin shop," Linda said.
"Not the same," Jeremy said sourly. "I know what I want, all right?"
"Tomorrow," Fletcher said. "There's a whole two weeks here, for God's sake."
"Tomorrow morning," Jeremy said.
"Deal." He should have gotten a pin for the Wilsons. He didn't think the Wilsons
would know what it was worth, and any pin would do… but he could get one before
he left, anyway. They'd be bound to drift past another shop, in two weeks
confined to Blue Sector.
Bianca, though, might know what a pin like that represented. She knew a lot of
odd things. If she didn't know, at least she wanted to know. That was what he'd
liked most about her.
And at Esperance, he finally realized he missed her. Missed her, at least, in
the way of missing a friend, after all the uproar of almost-love and maybe-love
and the feeling of desertion he'd felt, being ripped loose from everything.
So she'd talked to Nunn. He would have, too, in her situation. He'd been angry,
he'd been hurt. He hadn't been able to be sure what he felt about her, just
specifically about her, until he'd had been this long on Finity and into the
hurry and hustle of a sprawling family that made him mad, and swept him in, and
spun him about, and fought with him and said, like Jeremy beside him, like all
the juniors and the seniors, Fletcher, don't go…
Maybe he'd had an acute attack of hormones on Downbelow. He was in doubt now,
after this many temper-cooling jumps, about the reality of all he'd ever felt.
He'd been from nowhere in particular. Now he was someone, from somewhere. But
all the distance that had intervened and all the change in his own
understandings hadn't altered the fact that he'd liked Bianca a lot.
Maybe the hormone part came back if you got close again. Maybe when they met
they'd resurrect all of it, and be in love again—
He missed her—he knew that.
But there was less and less they had to tie them together. She hadn't seen the
sights he'd seen. She was locked into the circular cycles of a planet and its
seasons. She hadn't flung off the ties of a gravity well and skimmed the
interface faster than the mind could imagine, living out of time with the rest
of the human species. She hadn't stood in an arch of water on Mariner and
watched fish the size of human beings swim above her head.
He had so, so much to tell her when they met.
If they ever met.
He'd have to mail her the pin. He couldn't go back to the Program. He'd
fractured all the rules. He'd lost that for himself, in the perverse way he had
of destroying situations he knew he was about to be ripped out of and taken away
from. Especially if you almost loved them, you broke them, so you didn't have
them to regret. Sometimes you broke them just in case.
That was what he'd always done. He could see that now, too… how he always
managed the fight, always provoked the blowup, so he could say he'd left them,
and not the other way around. He had that definitely in common with Jeremy: the
quick flare of anger, the intense passion of total involvement—followed by angry
denial, total rejection. Go ahead. Move out. Don't speak to me.
Silly Fetcher. He could hear Melody saying it, when he'd been too kid-like
stupid even for her downer patience.
Silly Jeremy, he wished he knew how to say. Silly Jeremy. Be happy. Cheer up.
Change, to a prosperous station, was a frightening prospect.
Change and new information meant that those here who thought they knew how the
universe was stacked might not know what was in their own future.
Change in the Alliance and Union relationship might abrogate agreements on which
Esperance seemed secure. They stalled. They argued about minutiae. There was a
long stall regarding an alleged irregularity in the customs papers. That
evaporated. Then they discussed the order of the official agenda for an hour.
Madison was ready to blow. The Old Man smiled benignly, seated at the table,
while the Esperance stationmaster absented himself to consult with aides.
And came back after a half hour absence, and finally took his seat
"The legal problems," the stationmaster said then.
"Third on the agenda," Alan said.
"We cannot talk and discuss matters pertinent to a pending suit…"
"Third," Alan said.
"We're vastly disturbed," the Esperance stationmaster insisted, "by what seems
high-handed procedure regarding a ship against which no charges have been made,
sir. I want the answer to one question. One question, sir."
"Not one question," Madison said. "As agreed in the agenda."
"We can not agree to this order. We can't talk beyond a pending suit. We wish to
move for a meeting after the court has ruled."
"You can have that, with Finity's trade officer. In the meantime ... you're not
meeting with Finity's trade officer."
Madison, at his inflammatory best. JR tucked his chin down and listened to the
shots fly.
"I cannot accept Alliance credentials from a ship in violation of Alliance
guarantees."
"This is Alliance business, which you may not challenge, sir."
"I ask one question. One question. On what authority do you pursue a ship into
inhabited space?"
"What ship?" James Robert asked, interrupting his idle sketching on the
conference notepad—looking for that moment as if he had no clue at all, as if
he'd been in total lapse for the last few minutes, and JR's heart plummeted. Is
he ill? the thought came to him.
Outrage mustered itself instantly on the other side. Outrage perfectly staged.
"Champlain, captain."
James Robert looked at Madison on one side, and at Francie, Alan, and him, on
the other. Blinked. "Wasn't that ship docked when we entered system?"
"Final approach to dock, sir," JR said, and all of a sudden knew the Old Man had
been far from oblivious. "As we came into system. Days ahead of us."
"And what was its last port?"
"Mariner."
"While our last port was Voyager." It was dead-on focus the Old Man turned on
the Esperance officials. "Hardly hot pursuit. They'd passed Voyager-Esperance
before we got to that point. Our black-box feed will have the latest Voyager
data. Theirs won't. Ours will have an official caution from Mariner on their
behavior. Theirs won't reflect that. They undocked before we or Boreale left
Mariner. Seems a case of flight where no man pursueth, stationmaster. Boreale
might have had a dispute with them we know nothing of. We didn't chase them in.
And I invite anyone with doubts to examine the black-box record Esperance now
has from the instant we docked. It will show exactly the facts as I've given
them, including a stop at Voyager."
Bravo, JR thought, and watched the expressions of station officials deeply
divided, he began to perceive, between pro-Union and pro-Alliance sentiments…
and those who simply wanted to go on playing both ends against the middle. And
unless he missed his guess the stationmaster hadn't accessed their records yet
to know where they'd been. Careless, in a man leveling charges.
Careless and impromptu.
"But a military ship can access a black box on its technical level," the
stationmaster said. "And your turnaround at Voyager must have set a record,
Captain Neihart, if you stopped there."
That man was their problem. William Oser-Hayes. There was the chief source of
the venom. JR wanted to rise from the table and wipe the look from the man's
face.
"The Old Man did no such thing. "Necessarily," the Old Man said calmly "The
military does have read-access. And can delete information. But black boxes… and
you may check this with your technical experts, do show the effects of military
access. Ours wasn't accessed. Check it with your technical experts."
"Experts provided by Pell."
Oh, the political mire was getting deeper and deeper. Now it was all a plot from
Pell. And the Old Man was playing cards from a hand they had far rather have
reserved for court, for the lawsuit. It gave their legal opposition a forecast
of the defense they had against the charges, even if it was a very good
defense—an unbreakable defense in a port where the judiciary was honest.
The way in which certain members of the conference looked happier when the Old
Man seemed to win a point indicated they were not facing a monolithic
administration and that there was sentiment on Finity's side. But the fact that
Oser-Hayes did all the talking and that all the ones who looked happy when
Oser-Hayes seemed to score sat higher up the table indicated to him that they
had a serious problem—one that might well infect the judiciary on this station.
That the attack from the opposition had come from the Esperance judiciary and
not from, say, the Board of Trade or the other regulatory agencies clearly
indicated that the judiciary was their enemies' best shot, the branch most
malleable to their hands.
Not a fair court, JR said to himself. The legal deck was stacked, and they might
lose the suit even if the other side was a no-show and the evidence was
overwhelming. That they'd bullied their way into this meeting indicated
Oser-Hayes wasn't absolute in his power, that he regarded some appearances, and
had to use some window-dressing with some of his power base to avoid them
bolting his camp.
He was learning, hand over fist, that precisely at the moments one wanted to
rise out of one's seat and choke the life out of the opposition, one had to
focus down tightly and calmly and select arguments the same careful way a
surgeon selected instruments. Oser-Hayes was no fool: he meant to provoke the
choke-him reaction, which might get the Old Man to make a tactical error—if the
Old Man weren't one of the canniest negotiators alive. One time Oser-Hayes had
thought he was dealing with a drowsing elder statesman a little out of the
current of things: one time the Old Man had let him stumble into it, and start
the meeting. They were into the agenda, after balking for hours. A parliamentary
turn would see them handle it, and revert back to the top of the list before
Oser-Hayes could think how to avert it.
They were talking. They had accomplished that much.
But this talk of technical experts provided by Pell as a source of suspicion…
this talk of deliberate sabotage by agents from the capital of the Alliance—as
if the Alliance government and Alliance-certified technicians would likelier be
the source of misinformation and duplicity, not some scruffy freighter running
cargo in the shadow market and most probably spying for Mazian—that was a
complete reversal of logic. The black boxes on which the network that ran the
Alliance depended were of course suspect in Oser-Hayes' followers' minds; the
word of Champlain against them was of course enough to stall negotiations and
tangle them up in the issue of universal conspiracy, which Oser-Hayes insisted
on discussing.
Whatever the Old Man's blood pressure was doing at the moment, there was no sign
of it on his face. And the Old Man came back with perfect calm.
"Would you prefer those experts provided by Union, sir? I don't think we can
access them. But Boreale can certainly attest every move we've made. And the
next ship arriving in this port from the Mariner vector will most assuredly
reflect exactly the same information, as surely the stationmaster of Esperance
knows as well as any ship's captain—unless, of course, our technical experts
have gotten in and altered the main computers on Mariner, then accomplished the
same with seamless perfection on Voyager in ways that would withstand
cross-comparison for all future ship-calls at any station in the Alliance—"
"Sufficient time to have gotten signatures on documents is all you need."
"Ah. Is that your fear?"
"Apprehension."
"Apprehension. Well, in respect of your prudent apprehensions, we have the
precise case number that will pull up previous complaints on Champlain,
including those that will have different origins and dates than any ship-call
we've made. To save your technicians, I'm sure, weeks of painstaking effort…"
Weeks only if the technicians meant to stall.
"That is something our military status can do somewhat more efficiently: access
case numbers. In this case, the last stamp of access on the complaint itself
will be the court at Mariner."
Hours of meeting and they hadn't even gotten to the agenda. In that sense,
William Oser-Hayes was making all the political capital he could, and JR wagered
with himself that behind the scenes Oser-Hayes had people working the records,
excavating things with which they could be ambushed, burying them at least
beyond access within this port, although the very next ship to call at the
station would dump a load of information which would restore the missing files.
The Old Man hadn't mentioned the fact, but a military ship had the means to take
a fast access of a station's black-box system. JR remembered that suddenly in
the light of the local resistance. Finity under his command had taken such a
snapshot when they'd come in, a draw-down of station records and navigational
information exactly as they'd been at the moment of their docking.
It was a convenience, only, in these tamer days. Any ship that had recently left
the station for other space contained the same information, regularly uploaded
on leaving one station to download at the next. It was the getting of the
information immediately on arrival that was the military prerogative… because a
military ship might be called to action on an emergency basis, in which event it
might not have the ten or so minutes it took to receive the total update. They'd
drawn a feed when they came in; and they'd draw another any time they liked.
Again, military prerogative, useless to ordinary civilian ships, which couldn't
read their own black boxes: most people didn't routinely think about it,
although he was relatively sure it was no secret from station administrators
that military craft did that.
At the next rest break, he passed an order to Bucklin on his own and without
consulting the other captains. "Store the on-dock black-box information in the
secondary box. Do a simultaneous back-up to safe-cube. Have you got that?"
"Yessir."
"Second step. Take a daily feed from station, at the same time. Run a data
comparison. Every day."
They were alone, in the foyer of the meeting area, and Bucklin had with him a
piece of electronics very hostile to bugs.
"You think they're going to fix station records!" Bucklin asked.
"I think it's remotely possible. Any change in archived files, I want the
appropriate section leader notified and given a copy. If they try to change
history or wipe a record, I want to know it. This is all a quiet matter. This
Oser-Hayes is no fool. He could be doubling from Union—and Union itself has
factions that might be counter to Boreale's faction."
"Tangled-er and tangled-er."
"Very much so. Some faction or corporation on Cyteen Station might want
Esperance to break out of the Alliance; Boreale won't act on its own; and it's
very likely the Cyteen military will back us and the trade agreement with Pell.
The result is in their interest. Their trading interests won't universally like
it. Their station-folk will. It's far from settled, and my personal guess would
be that Cyteen's military would like it to be a done deal before Cyteen's more
complex factions find out about it: it wouldn't be the first time they've acted
to pre-empt their own legal process. I think Cyteen military, like that carrier
back at Tripoint, wants us to get this agreement through. But Oser-Hayes
doesn't."
Bucklin nodded. "I'll relay that. I'll sub in Wayne here till I get back."
It was the first decision, JR reflected, as he watched Bucklin go to the door
and call Wayne back, the first administrative decision he'd made in his new-made
captaincy—one which might duplicate what someone had already ordered, but if it
did, the more senior captain's instructions would take precedence. If it
conflicted, he would hear an objection. He didn't think he'd hear one over the
extravagant expense of one-write safe-cubes, which themselves were admissible in
court. In the meanwhile, if that information wasn't being collected, he wanted
it. The facts were vulnerable to technicians, if to no one else, and Oser-Hayes
might have cast aspersions on the honesty of the Pell-trained technicians who
maintained the black-box system on Esperance, but it didn't mean Oser-Hayes
might not subvert one tech to do something about damning evidence. Like
financial records.
The tone in which Oser-Hayes said Pell made it likely that distrust of the
central government and of Pell was a driving force in Esperance politics.
Distrust of this place, this station, this administration was becoming his.
They'd been to the vid zoo. They'd seen all the holo-sharks at the Lagoon. That
was two major amusements down on the first day.
They went to supper, in the moderately posh Lagoon, which Linda and Jeremy had
both wanted, where colored lights made the place look as if they were
underwater, and a sign advised that the same disposable contact lenses they'd
used in the exhibit would display Wonders of the Mystic Lagoon, purchasable for
a day's wages if you hadn't brought your own.
The junior-juniors were tired. Fletcher wanted the bubble-tub back in the
sleepover. In his opinion it was time to go back to the Xanadu and settle in for
the night. It was well past main-dark and the dockside, which never slept, had
gone over to the rougher side of its existence: neon a bit more in evidence, the
music louder, the level of alcohol in the passersby just that much higher.
But Jeremy moped along the displays, and wanted to stay on dockside a little
longer. "I'm not sleepy," he said.
"Well, I'm ready to go back," Vince said
"We've got two weeks here," Fletcher reminded them. "We agreed. Shopping
tomorrow. After breakfast."
"There's this shop—" Jeremy said, and dived off to a curio shop on the row they
walked, a crowded little place with curiosities and souvenirs on every shelf.
There were plastic replicas of Cyteen life. There were expensive plastic-encased
flowers and insects from Earth. There were packets of seeds done up with pots.
Grow them in your cabin and be surprised at the carnivorous flowers.
He didn't think he wanted one of those.
They looked. They looked at truly tasteless things, and walked off the fullness
of the supper on a stroll during which Jeremy ran them into every
hole-in-the-wall shop on the row.
The kids bought some silly things, finger-traps, a device older than
civilization, Fletcher was willing to bet. A plastic shark. Jeremy bought a
cheap ball-bearing puzzle, another device that defied time. The kid was cheering
up.
Good for that, Fletcher said to himself. It was worth an extra hour walking back
to the sleepover if it gave Jeremy something to do besides jitter and fret.
The meeting lurched and stonewalled its way toward an adjournment for the night,
the main topic as yet not on the table, and neither side satisfied… except in
the fact that nothing notably budged. Aides might have carried the details
forward during alterday, but there was nothing substantive to work on.
There was, by now, however, a safe-cube or two making sure that if Oser-Hayes
had altered data in a record supposed to be sacrosanct, they had a record of
before and after. JR was able to get to Madison without witnesses, and under
security, after the meeting had broken up and while Francie and a team of
discreetly armed security was making sure the Old Man, walking ahead of them,
reached the chosen restaurant without crises.
"I've ordered analysis and safe-storage of station feed, then and now," he said,
"Daily. Bucklin's gone to Gerald, called back personnel off leave."
"Good," Madison said, and by the thoughtful expression Madison shot him then, no
one else had ordered it. And Madison didn't fault his consumption of
multi-thousand credit cubes or the holding of the computer security staff off a
well-earned liberty. "Good move. Cube?"
"Yessir." The sirs still came naturally. "Yes. I know what it costs. But—"
"Run an analysis. I want to know the outcome. It would be stupid of the man. But
then—he's not the brightest light in the Alliance. He might think the next
passing ship would patch his little problem and no one would be the wiser.
Between you and me, the system has safeguards against that kind of thing. A
Pell-certified tech, under duress, would alter records quite cheerfully."
"Knowing there'd be traces."
"Knowing that, yes. That's an ears-only, not even for Bucklin.Yet"
"I well imagine."
They walked, he and Madison together, with security hindmost, along with Alan.
The restaurant wasn't far, one of those quiet, pricey affairs the Old Man
favored, randomly selected from half a dozen near the conference area.
First time in his life, JR thought, he might have gotten up even with the
captains he shadowed.
"Dinner," Madison said, "and then no rest for you and Francie and Alan. I have
messages I want carried."
The destination made sense. Immediately.
"We can't make headway with this station," Madison said. "So we go to the
captains first. This station is begging for confrontation. They won't like it.
But I think two ships will go with us without an argument. Don't plan on sleep
tonight."
He was supposed to approach another captain? He was supposed to carry out this
end of the proposition?
It was one thing to talk in conference with the Old Man as certain back-up. It
was another to walk onto another deck to persuade an independent merchanter to
strong-arm a station-master tomorrow. Things could blow up. He could set
negotiations back on a single failure to read signals. Or give the wrong captain
information that could end up back in Oser-Hayes' hands, or hardening merchanter
attitudes against them.
But he couldn't say no. That wasn't why they'd pushed him ahead in rank.
If they were late-night shopping, Vince wanted a tape store. They visited that,
and Vince bought two tapes. Thirty minutes, in that operation, and it was high
time, Fletcher decided, to get over-active junior-juniors back to the sleepover
before Linda had her way and talked him into another sugared drink that would
have them awake till the small hours.
"No," Fletcher said, to that idea.
Then Jeremy took interest in yet another curio shop, not yet sated with plastic
snakes and seeds and little mineral curiosities. "Just one more," Jeremy said.
"Just one more. "
If it made Jeremy happy. If it got them back to the sleep-over with everyone in
a good mood.
This one was higher class, one of those kind of shops that was open during
mainday and every other alterday, alterday traffic tending to lower-priced goods
and cheaper amusements. The door opened to a melodious chime, advising the idle
shopkeeper of visitors, and a portly man appeared. Justly dubious of
junior-juniors in his shop, that was clear.
"Just window-shopping," Fletcher said, and the man continued to watch them; but
he seemed a little easier in the realization of an older individual in charge of
the rowdy junior traffic.
"Decadent," Linda said, looking around. "Really decadent stuff."
The word almost applied. There were plastic-encased bouquets, and mineral
specimens, a pretty lot of crystals, and some truly odd geologic curiosities in
a case that drew Fletcher's eye despite his determination to keep ubiquitous
junior-junior elbows from knocking into vases and very pricey carvings in the
tight quarters.
Out of Viking's mines, the label said, regarding the lot of specimens in the
case, and the price said they were probably real-a crystal-encrusted ball,
brilliant blue, on the top shelf; a polished specimen of iridescent webby stuff
in matrix on the next shelf.
And, extravagantly expensive, and marked museum quality, a polished natural
specimen on the next shelf, labeled Ammonnite, from Earth, North America.
Fletcher's study told him it was probably real.
Real, and disturbing to find it here.
He was looking at that, when he became aware Jeremy was talking to the
shopkeeper, wanting something from another cabinet. He didn't know what, in this
place, Jeremy could possibly afford.
But he was amazed to see what the shopkeeper took out and laid on the counter at
Jeremy's request.
Artifacts. Pieces of pottery.
"Earth," the shopkeeper said. "Tribal art. Three thousand years old. Bet you
never saw anything like this."
Fletcher stopped breathing. He wasn't sure spacer kids understood what they were
seeing.
But a native cultures specialist did. And a native cultures specialist knew the
laws that said these specimens definitely weren't supposed to be here.
"Real, are they?" Fletcher asked, going over to look, but not to touch.
"Certificate of authenticity. Anyone you know a collector?"
He almost remarked, Mediterranean. But a spacer wasn't supposed to know that
kind of detail.
"Got any downer stuff?" Jeremy piped up.
That got an apprehensive denial, a shake of the head, a wavering of the eyes.
Fletcher understood Jeremy's interest in curio shops the instant he heard the
word downer in Jeremy's mouth. He bridged the moment's awkwardness with a
dismissive wave toward the Old Earth pottery and a flip of his hand toward the
rest of the shop. "I always had a curiosity," he said, playing Jeremy's game,
knowing suddenly exactly what was behind Jeremy's new enthusiasm for curio shops
and the other two junior-juniors' uncharacteristic support of his interest in
shops where they couldn't afford the merchandise. "I read a lot about the
downers. No market for the pottery. But I've got a market for downer stuff."
The shopkeeper shook his head. "That's illegal stuff."
Fletcher drew a slow breath, considered the kids, Jeremy, the situation. "Say I
come back later."
"Maybe." The shopkeeper went back to the back of the shop, took a card from the
wall, brought it back and wrote a number on it.
"Here."
Fletcher took the card, looked at it, saw a phone number, and a logo. "Is that
where?"
"Maybe." The shopkeeper's eyes went to the kids, and back again.
"They're my legs," Fletcher said, the language of the underworld of Pell docks.
"You want that market, I can make it, no question. You in?"
"See the man," the shopkeeper said "Not me. No way."
"Understood." Fletcher slipped the card into his pocket
"Specialties," the shopkeeper said.
"Loud and clear." Fletcher shoved at Linda's shoulder, and got her and the other
two juniors into motion.
Jeremy gave him a sidelong look as they cleared the frontage, walking along a
noisy dockside of neon light and small shops and sleepovers.
"Clever kid," Fletcher said. He'd had no idea the track Jeremy had been on,
clearly, in his sudden interest in curio shops.
"I said we'd get it back," Jeremy said.
"We?"
"I mean we."
"No."
"What do you mean, no? We're on to where there's downer stuff! This is where
that guy will sell it off clear to Cyteen!"
"I mean this is illegal stuff. I mean these people will kill you. All of you!
This is serious, you three. It's not a game."
"We know that," Jeremy said in a tone that chilled his blood. Jeremy, Fletcher
suddenly thought, who'd grown up in war. Linda and Vince, who had. All of them
knew what risk was. Knew that people died. Knew how they died, very vividly.
"Champlain's in port," Vince said. "So's the thief."
"So?" Fletcher said. "They might not sell it here. Not on the open market."
"Bet they do," Linda said. "I bet Jeremy's right."
"I don't care if he's right." He'd been maneuvered all day long by three clever
kids. Or by one clever kid, granted Vince and Linda might not have suspected a
thing until it was clear to all of them what Jeremy was after. "This isn't like
searching the ship. Look, we tell JR. He'll tell the Old Man and the police can
give the shop a walk-through." It sounded stupid once he was saying it. The
police wouldn't find it. He knew a dozen dodges himself. He knew how shopkeepers
who were fencing contraband hid their illegal goods.
"We can just sort of walk in there and find out," Jeremy said. "We're in
civvies, right? Who's to know? And then we can know where to point the cops. I
mean, hell, we're just kids walking around looking at the stuff. We won't do
anything. We can find out, Fletcher. Us. Ourselves."
It was tempting—to know what had happened to Satin's gift, and to get justice on
the lowlife that had pilfered it. They could even create a trail that could give
Finity a way to come at Champlain, who had the nerve to sue them: that word was
out even to the junior-juniors. He'd lay odds the crewman's thieving had been
personal, pocket-lining habit, nothing Champlain's captain even knew about—just
the regular activity of a shipful of bad habits, all lining their pockets at any
opportunity. The thief had been after money, ID's, tapes, anything he could
filch; and the lowlife by total chance had hit the jackpot of a lifetime in
Jeremy's room. Sell the hisa stick, here, in a port a lot looser than Pell, a
port where curios were pricey and labeled with museum quality?
Jeremy was right. It was a pipeline straight to Cyteen, for pottery that shop
wasn't supposed to have—he guessed so, at least. Maybe for plants and
biologicals illegal to have. Maybe the trade was going both ways, smuggling
rejuv out to Earth, rejuv and no knowing what: Cyteen's expertise in biologicals
of all sorts was more than legend—and Cyteen biologicals were anathema in the
Downbelow study programs—something they feared more than they did the easy
temptation to humans to introduce Earth organisms, which at least had grown up
in an ecosystem instead of being engineered for Cyteen, specifically to replace
native Cyteen microbes. He'd become aware how great a fear there'd been,
especially among scientists on Pell during the War, that Cyteen, outgunned and
outmaneuvered in space by the Fleet, would use biologics as a way of destroying
Downbelow. Or Earth. They hadn't; but now they were spreading on the illicit
route. Every scientist concerned with planets knew that.
And it immeasurably offended him that Satin's gift might become currency in a
trade that, after all the other hazards humans had brought the hisa, posed the
deadliest threat of all.
Go walk with Great Sun?
Take a hisa memory into space? What could Satin remember, but a world that trade
aimed to destroy for no other reason than profit and convenience?
He looked at the address of the card they'd gotten. It was in Blue. It was in
the best part of Blue, right in the five hundreds. They were standing at a shop
in the threes. Finity was docked at Blue 2, Boreale at Blue 5, and Champlain at
14. Being in charge of junior-junior security—he'd made it his business to look
at the boards and know that information.
"Come on," Jeremy said. "We can at least know."
They'd had the entire ship in an uproar, looking for what wasn't aboard; and
what Jeremy had known wasn't aboard. Now Jeremy argued for finding out where the
hisa stick really was.
And maybe that in itself was a good thing for the whole ship. Maybe Finity
officers could do something personally to get it back, as the kids could have a
part in finding it, and maybe then the whole ship could settle things within
itself.
Maybe he could settle things in himself, then. Maybe he could find a means not
to destroy one more situation for himself, and to get the stick back, so he'd
not have to spend a life wondering what Cyteen shop had bought a hisa memory…
and to whom it might have sold it, a curiosity, to hang on some wall
"All right," he said, suddenly resolved. "We take a look. Only a look. It's not
for us to do anything about it. We can at least look and see whether that guy
back there is putting us on. Which he probably is. Do you hear me?"
"Yessir," Jeremy said, the most fervent yessir he'd heard out of Jeremy in
weeks.
"Yessir," Vince said, and Linda bobbed her head.
"Behave," he said severely, and took the troops toward the five hundreds.
Chapter XXV
Contents - Prev/Next
Arnason Imports, Ltd. was the name of the shop, not one of those on the front
row, which Fletcher had rather expected, but one of those tucked into a nook
toward the rear of a maintenance recess between another import company and a
jeweler's. It wasn't a bad address. But it wasn't a shop of the quality that the
address might have indicated, either, and Fletcher had second thoughts about the
junior-juniors, the hour—which meant an area less trafficked than it would have
been in mainday. The jeweler's was closed. The other business was open, but it
had a sign saying No Retail.
"Not real prosperous," he said, with flashes on the dock-sides of his ill-spent
youth. "Just go slow." Jeremy was tending to get ahead of him. "Listen, you. I
want it understood. No smart moves here. Believe me."
"Yessir," Jeremy said, bounced on the balls of his feet in that nervous way he
had, and charged ahead.
There was no surety the stick was even in the shop. "Calm down," Fletcher
snapped, and the kids assumed a far quieter disposition. Jeremy was still first
through the door, setting off a buzzer, no melodious bell.
A man stood up from behind a desk all but overwhelmed by stacks of oddments,
boxes, masks, statuary, shelves with crystal specimens, more of the plastic
bouquets, fiber mats and dried plants, dried fish, one truly large one mounted
on a board. There was a whole mounted animal with horns, at which Vince
exclaimed, "Wild," and Linda looked appalled.
Jeremy was on to the display cabinets like a junior whirlwind, looking under
counters, into cabinets.
"Wild," Vince said again.
It was impressive. But the man at the counter was on his way to panic.
Fletcher whipped out the card and laid it on the table. "You came recommended,"
he said. "Man said you had a good stock."
"Best this side of Cyteen," the man said. "Mr…"
"James," he improvised, the fastest name to any Neihart tongue. But then he
remembered the Family name problem, and settled fast on what he knew was a
Unionside ship. "Off Boreale."
"Union."
"Out of Cyteen. Just doing a little business, here and there, got a few
contacts. Man asked me to, you know, pick him up a couple of good items at our
turnaround point. He's government." He'd heard about Cyteen officials on the
take. It was rumored, at least, on Pell docks. "I'm looking."
"Got any downer stuff?" Jeremy blurted out.
"The kid's crazy about downers," Fletcher said, at that nervous dart of the
eyes, and the man darted a glance back. "What I'm interested in is just the
unusual. The shop that referred us here, you know, said you might have some
back-room stock."
"There's the warehouse." Cagey answers. Saying nothing.
"Not interested in what you can see elsewhere. The man gives me money on
account, I'm not bringing him junk, you know what I mean?"
"What price range are you interested in?"
"Say my captain knows. Say that kind of finance. Not interested in running
contraband, understand. Just the unique piece. No boxes of stuff. Seen enough
woven mats to last me. Stuff's junk. Get those damn bugs in it and it falls
apart."
It was a piece of truth, something somebody who was dealing in downer goods
would know. If a mat was smuggled and not passed through sterilization,
microfauna came in the reeds. Destruction of whole illicit collections had
resulted.
"No fools here. We irradiate everything."
"Show me," he said, and shot the kids a be-still look.
The man went to the back door, and left it open while he rummaged just the other
side of the door.
He's got something, Jeremy lip-sent, exaggerated enough to read across a station
dock, and he lip-sent back, Shut up.
The man came back with several bundles. Unrolled mats, weavings, old ones.
Fletcher's heart beat fast. He knew which band had produced them.
He managed to brush idle fingertips across the simple pattern and look bored.
Another mat unrolled.
And Satin's stick landed atop it, unfolded out of tissue.
"God." From the back of Fletcher's elbow, Jeremy eeled past Vince and picked it
up, held it up to the light.
"Careful!" the man said.
"Jeremy," Fletcher said severely, and willed the boy quiet, his own heart
beating hard. He took the artifact from Jeremy's hand. "Looks genuine."
"Riverside culture, maybe Wartime. A lot of stuff got up here then."
When Mazian's forces occupied the planet and took what they damn well pleased.
"I'd believe it," he said easily. He'd dealt in pilfered goods. Never this class
of article. Price might be the giveaway of an amateur. "What's your valuation?"
"Oh, you've done this before."
"I said."
"You come in here with kids…"
"Good cover." He shrugged. "Say I could probably meet this. Customs is my
problem."
"I'll arrange which agent. If you meet the price."
This man was going to arrange which customs agent dealt with Boreale. This was
no small-time operator. And he'd believed the Boreale business.
"So…" he said carefully. "What are we talking about in exchange?"
"Sixty thousand."
"Fifty."
"Sixty firm. This isn't Green."
"Fifty-five."
"Fifty-nine and that's the bottom."
"Fifty-nine's fine, but I've got arrangements to make." He was faking it He had
no idea how transactions like this regularly passed, and he dreaded any move,
any helpful word from the junior-juniors crowded up against the counter on
either side of him.
"Arrangements are easy." The man reached for a paper invoice book. "You arrange
your captain does a bulk buy, Earth origin export I'll give you a certificate.
It'll be included." The man scribbled on the paper, tore it off, handed it to
him. "That's the total price. It's in there. You see that clears the bank. It'll
be in the crate."
He wasn't such a fool as to trust the system. He gave the man a doubting look.
"Got to talk to my captain, understand."
"The deal's not done till that payment's in the account. Anybody comes in here,
he could buy it if he meets the price."
Oldest sales push in the book. In Babylon, they must have used it. He gave the
man the eye.
"You get an offer, you go right ahead," he said. "Takes time to get things set
up. Can I reach you mainday?"
"Ask for Laz. My nephew does days. He'll find me."
"Got it." Figure that a place like this had the owner working alterday. Fletcher
pocketed the slip of paper, collected the junior-juniors, and left.
They walked out of sight of the door before Jeremy's patience fractured.
"Let's get the cops!"
"Wait a minute!" He grabbed Jeremy's shirt, stopping a rush to justice. "This
isn't a short-change job. This is major." Jeremy squirmed to be free and he
tightened his grip. "You think this guy doesn't have a deal with the cops?"
Jeremy stopped struggling.
"We're going to do exactly what we told him we'd do. We're going to go to our
ship's captains and see what they think."
"They're in meetings," Vince said.
"So we find Bucklin or somebody and see if we can get word to them. You just
calm down and let's get back to the sleepover. They'll show up there. It was a
smart idea, looking in the curio shops. We've got the facts. Let's just use our
heads."
"Yessir," Jeremy said, rubbing his arm.
He'd probably grabbed too hard. He was sorry about that. He patted Jeremy on the
back and the lot of them walked back toward the twos, toward the gathering-place
of Boreale crew and Finity crew alike, with their packages and their
information.
Found it and found a whole lot else, Fletcher was thinking. He knew operations
like this only by what he'd heard by rumor and by his study in planetary
cultures. If shops like this existed on Pell, they existed on a far smaller
scale.
The warehouse behind the shop, that was likely something to behold. And his
instincts reminded him that no local authority had done anything about it. Point
two, the man talked confidently about handling customs. About an elaborate
system of invoices and cargo packed as what it wasn't.
All of that said the system was well-organized, didn't fear the law much so long
as he put on a good appearance for the honest officials that might contact the
product on its way out, and that cops on the docks didn't stray into that shop.
All his instincts from his own days on the rough side of the docks said that the
man was doing what he did fairly well out in the open. There were more curio
shops here than anywhere he'd seen, and he'd bet none of them bore very close
inspection.
Ordinary theft didn't shock him. He knew that went on. This, however, the
traffic in planet-produced goods, and the stripping of planets of irreplaceable
artifacts, artwork, human history and downer faith… this was foul.
And dangerous. Slipping goods past the systems designed to stop it, also
happened to slip them past all the safeguards that detected small lifeforms, and
transferred biological materials into places they might, yes, die because they
were foreign. But they might not, too.
Satin's gift had come into hands like that. Satin's gift had found a system like
this. Mazian as an enemy… yes. He was in favor of that. But he wanted something
done about this trade, which didn't engage interest on an international level
the way something did that involved guns.
They were worried about Cyteen using genetic warfare… but they smuggled stuff
like this.
He brought his small troop into the Xanadu's lobby and looked for officers.
There was Lyra.
"Got to talk to you," he said. Keeping the junior-juniors quiet until they could
get Lyra to a quiet and private area near the bar was difficult but he managed
it, and Lyra looked at him with brow furrowed.
"What is this?"
"We found the stick," he said.
Lyra looked blank a moment.
"In a curio shop," Jeremy said, because he wasn't going fast enough. Jeremy
fairly vibrated with nerves. Linda and Vince were bobbing and restraining
themselves with utmost difficulty. "They're smugglers," Vince said. "They have a
whole back warehouse full of stuff."
"This isn't a joke, right?"
"No joke," Fletcher said. "Each stick is unique as a fingerprint. I know this
one. We tracked it down. We're absolutely sure. They offered me a deal on it,
sixty thousand and a fake cargo invoice, arranged through the captain."
"Through the Old Man?"
"I said I was from Boreale."
Lyra looked flummoxed and halfway amused. "This is a good one.—What in hell were
you doing out searching with the junior-juniors?"
"It was us tracked it down!" Jeremy said in his defense. "We figured the skuz
thief would sell it here, so we just checked the curios, and when we said downer
stuff, they sent us to this shop, Blue 512, just right across from Boreale!
Isn't that a kick?"
"You get to quarters," Lyra said. "You leave this to older crew,
junior-junior.—Fletcher, I'll get this information to Bucklin. The captains are
at supper. Or were." She checked her watch. "I'll see if I can call Bucklin."
"Yes'm," Fletcher said. "Tell him I can ID the stick, if they need that.
Meanwhile we're going to go upstairs."
"Game parlor!" Linda cried.
"Room!" Jeremy voted. "So we can hear when they call."
"Room," Fletcher said, and to forestall protests from Linda and Vince: "The
first-run vid, and lunch at the Lagoon tomorrow. Move."
The protocols of which ship to contact first and by what rank officer were
sticky in the extreme. It was a case of insult those most disposed to be your
allies or flatter those most likely to be your opposition, and the Old Man
simply phoned a complete mixed bag from the pricey restaurant and wanted to meet
their senior captains for drinks.
They held an impromptu high-level strategy meeting in the tiny banquet room of
one of Esperance's fanciest restaurants, next to the bar, and security ranged
from Finity crew in silver and immaculate Santo Domingo crew in dark greens, to
the polychrome non-regulation of Scottish Rose and Celestial, and finally to the
tasteful blues of Chelsea and the blue-greens of Boreale.
They started out the drinking and the meeting with those captains and solved the
protocol problem with each of the captains there calling someone and inviting
them for drinks… on a massive tab.
JR paced himself with the alcohol, and hobnobbed and good-fellowed his way
around the room. The restaurant had planned to close, and a staggering bribe
from Finity said it didn't. The crowd milled, socialized, Madison and the Old
Man holding court at this table and that, and secondary captains began to arrive
in numbers that spilled out of the banquet room and into the bar. Then the small
restaurant. It was Alliance captains, it was Family ships hauling for Union, it
was Union Boreale, whose reputation for strait-laced probity and cloned-man
humorlessness dissolved in multiple bottles and a wit that had the Celestial and
Santo Domingo captains alike wiping their eyes, red-faced.
Notably, Champlain's captains didn't get an invitation. "I'll bet my next year
of liberties Champlain's well aware," JR said to Bucklin, who was part of
security. "I wouldn't put it past their station friends to try to slip a ringer
onto the wait staff. Certainly they're not getting any sleep this watch."
"I'll see if we can find out from the waiters if anybody's suspect in that
department," Bucklin said.
Meanwhile JR brushed up against Madelaine, who'd also shown up. Madelaine and
Blue both were having a good time.
"No few legal offices here," Madelaine informed him, among other tidbits. "That
chap over there with the mustache, that's Santo Domingo. Old friends."
The ships' lawyers were getting together, frightening thought, mixing throughout
the bar and restaurant.
Oser-Hayes figured in a number of conversations. So did the infamous lawsuit, as
ship captains from both sides of the War wanted to know the progress of the
action against Mazian, and as war stories and reminiscences were the bulk of the
conversation.
Those, and the information someone had now let slip, that Pell and Mariner had
come to terms with Union and that the old Hinder Star routes might see another
rebirth via Esperance, which the local stationmaster was resisting.
The party now, with several new arrivals, outgrew the banquet room and the bar,
and the talk now regarded profits that could be made on a new Earth route using
Esperance as well as Mariner-Pell—except for the resistance of the Esperance
administration, which was doing everything it could to hang on to a failing
status quo.
The entire list of ships docked at Esperance, except Champlain, was represented
in the restaurant and bar, and JR circulated along with the rest, called on to
give the straight story about the lawsuit until he'd lost track of the times
he'd told it, asked about the captaincy on Finity's End and the Old Man's health
until he'd lost track of that subject, too. There was genuine concern about
Captain James Robert, genuine interest in a young captain who carried the name.
"Finity's best kept secret," a woman said, shaking his hand. "Pleased to meet
you." And proceeded to introduce him to half Celestial's senior crew. They were
no longer just the captains present. In the way of spacer gatherings, it had
spread to include several ranks down.
He edged around a group of senior officers and found Wayne, who'd just gotten
back from dockside. Wayne gave him a slip of paper, said it was a security
matter, and that required a trip over to one of the few lights in the room to
read the note.
It was from Lyra.
The item we were searching the skin for has turned up in a shop in Blue.
Instructions?
Damn, he thought. He couldn't detach Bucklin. They had a security need here as
great as there was possible to have in this end of space.
But he signaled Wayne and took Wayne and the note out to the area where Bucklin
and far more senior officers were standing watch.
He showed it to Bucklin, but he went on to show it to Tom R., who was in charge
of security. "The hisa artifact that went missing at Mariner," he said quietly.
"We've found it here. Champlain crew is the juniors' bet. No one's taken any
action. I just got this."
"Madelaine should see this. So should the Old Man."
It seemed a good idea. Security rated the matter as above their heads, and he
tended to agree. He dismissed Wayne back to Lyra to say they were working on the
problem, and wove his way back through the dimly lit room toward Madelaine.
"The artifact," he said, "here, in a shop. Champlain, most likely."
"Oh, that's interesting," Madelaine said in a predatory way. "Absolute
identification?"
"I don't know," he had to say. "But nothing hisa belongs in any shop here."
"Where's Fletcher?" Madelaine asked.
"I don't know that, either." All of a sudden he very much wanted to know that
answer, wished he'd sent Wayne after that information, and it was almost worth
chasing Wayne down to make sure. But Wayne had left, almost certainly, the room
was crowded, and his mission was to the Old Man himself.
"Sir." He came up at the Old Man's shoulder. "A word. A brief word."
"Back in a moment." The Old Man rose carefully, left the table and the
conversation with several old acquaintances, and moved into a dark corner where,
by the nature of the party, there was privacy.
"What's the problem?" the Old Man asked
"The juniors have found the hisa artifact in a shop in Blue. I don't know who
found it, I don't know how we know that's the one, but that's the initial
information."
"That's very interesting," the Old Man said, exactly as Madelaine had said.
"I thought you'd want to know. That's all."
"Keep it quiet for now. We'll talk. Tell them on no account talk to the police."
"Yessir," he said "I'll send a courier back." One of the seniors in security,
was his intention as he let the Old Man get back to his table and his
conversation, but he made it no farther than the next table when Madison snagged
him to know what that had been.
He shouldn't have sent Wayne back. He should have held him to serve as a
messenger… mistake he'd not have made if he'd used his head.
He went to Bucklin, who had a pocket-com. "Call Lyra. Tell her no action. None."
"Yessir," Bucklin said, and made the call on the instant, noise and all.
That was handled, and wouldn't blow up. He went to Tom, the senior security
chief present, and ordered a courier back to the Xanadu.
"I want to keep an eye on things," he said. "If somehow someone saw someone and
got nervous, I don't want junior-juniors on the docks. It's already a bad idea,
just with the meeting here."
"Yessir," Tom said.
He shouldn't have interfered in Bucklin's domain without asking Bucklin what
he'd done. It was a kneejerk reaction, to have given that last order, involving
junior crew. He wasn't pleased he'd done it; orders from too many levels were a
guaranteed way to foul a situation up; and he went back to Bucklin and pulled
him into a corner.
"I just ordered juniormost crew off the docks," he said. "Shouldn't have.
Sorry."
"Beat you to it an hour ago," Bucklin said with the ghost of a smile. "Captain,
sir."
They'd watched vid, waiting for a phone call. They'd played cards, waiting for a
phone call.
"They've got to do something," Jeremy said "I bet Lyra didn't even find
anybody."
"She'll tell them when she can get hold of them," Fletcher said, on the last of
a bad hand. "They're talking war and peace, here. It's not like they can break
off and go chasing after an illegal art dealer."
"Maybe we ought to put in a call to Legal," Vince said. "Madelaine could get a
warrant and get that place locked down until they search it."
Vince had a touching faith in the law. Fletcher didn't. But it was late to argue
the point. Linda had made two stupid plays, sheer exhaustion, and was still
trying. He himself was done for, with the hand he was holding.
Vince calmly did for all of them.
"That's where all the cards were hiding," Linda said in disgust.
"Got you," Vince said. "Want to play again?"
They were playing at the table in the main room of the suite. Fletcher gathered
up cards. "I think it's time to turn in. We don't know what we'll be into,
tomorrow. We'd better get some sleep."
There were grumbles, the evening ritual, but only halfhearted ones. Jeremy was
glum, and hindmost in quitting the table.
"Jeremy," Fletcher said, "it's not the stick that matters. We know. We found it.
If something happens, that's bad, but it's not the end of everything. You hear
what I'm saying? Cheer up. We'll do what we can tomorrow, and if we get it back
we'll celebrate and go to the Lagoon for supper. There's two weeks of liberty.
We've got time."
"Yessir," Jeremy said faintly, and went off to bed with Vince. Exhausted. They
all were. They'd stayed up far later than usual, after a day in which they'd
ricocheted all over Blue Sector, to every amusement the rules allowed, and now
they were faced with repeats of the notable things to do, leaving him nothing
with which to bribe the juniors into good behavior.
It was possible the rules might ease a little and let them spill over into
Green, particularly if Champlain pulled out—he thought that if he were the
captain of Champlain, he'd want to pull out very early, before, say, Finity's
End and Boreale finished their business; and that if he were in that unenviable
position, he'd want to take a route that didn't lay along Finity's route.
Champlain wasn't a big ship, by what he understood, and what it could do was
probably limited.
So he could sleep, tonight, secure in the knowledge they'd answered the burning
question what had happened to Satin's stick. He didn't want to think what could
happen to it; and from the early hope that perhaps it would be something the
captains could handle expeditiously, now he was looking to the more reasonable
hope there would be some kind of legal action. The alterday courts were for
drunks and petty disputes. The mainday courts were where you'd start if you had
a serious matter.
But even so, he'd told the kids the truth: war and peace was at issue, and
artifact smuggling was down on the list somewhere below cargo-loading and
refueling and Champlain's next port and current behavior.
He undressed, settled into a truly luxurious bed, ordered the automated lights
to dark, and shut his eyes.
Tomorrow, maybe.
Or maybe they'd work quietly, behind the scenes, and come down on that shop with
some sort of warrant before they left. It was disappointing to kids, who
believed in justice and instant results, two mutually exclusive things, as the
Rules of the Universe usually operated, and he didn't want them to lose their
natural expectation of justice somehow working… but it wasn't a reasonable hope
in light of everything else that was gojng on.
Other Finity staff were tired, too. And if they'd hit the pillows the way he
had, the deep dark was just too easy to fall into.
Dark and then the gray of hisa cloud.
The view along Old River's shores didn't change. But Old River changed by the
instant.
So did he, standing on that bank and watching the wind in the leaves. He and Old
River both changed. So did the wind. And leaves fell and leaves grew and trees
lived and died. The view wasn't the same. It just looked that way. And the young
man who stood there, like the river that flowed past the banks, wasn't the same.
He just looked that way.
He wanted Satin to know he'd tried. He wanted to know whether Melody and Patch
were having a baby… and just wondering that, he saw a darkness in the v of a
fallen log and the hill above him, a dark place, a comfortable place, for
downers.
He knew who lived there. It was a dream, he knew it was a dream, and he knew
that its facts were suspect as the instantaneity of its scene-changes, but he
was relatively sure what he saw, and who he knew was there.
In this dream it was months and months since he'd left. Half a year. And in the
swift hurtling of worlds around stars and stars around the heart of the galaxy
and galaxies through the universe… a certain time had passed, in the microcosm
of that living world. He had fallen out of time, but Melody and Patch lived to a
planet's turning and the more and less of Old River's flowing, and the lights
and darks of the clouds above. For them, time moved faster, and a baby was
growing, a new baby that wasn't him.
The young man stood on the bank… in the curious way of the dream he thought of
himself objectively, the visitor from the stars, timeless, skipping forward or
backward.
He stood in one blink, this young man, in the shabby cheap apartment of his
infancy, seeing the woman dead in the rumpled sheets, and aching because he'd
known her so little.
He stood watching a gang of young boys swagger along Pell docks, and was both
sorry for them and dismayed. They were such fools, and thought they knew the
shape of the universe.
He stood in the deep tunnels of Pell, and watched downers move through that
dark, muffled against the cold and carrying lights that made them look like
isolate stars.
He stood beside the fields on Downbelow, and looked for Bianca among the
workers, but couldn't find her. The young man walked from place to place, and
saw others he knew… stood in the corner of Nunn's office, and watched the man
work… visited the mess hall, and watched the young men and women come and go.
But the one face eluded him.
He needed to find her. He didn't know quite why, but it was urgent, and he
apprehended some danger. He tried to think where to search next, and went from
place to place, past people who didn't care, and downers bent on games.
A storm was coming. But that wasn't the danger. The danger was shapeless, and
had an urgency he couldn't identify.
"Fletcher!"
He jumped, leaden, and tangled in sheets and dark.
"Fletcher!"
It was Vince's voice. It was Vince's shadow at his bedside, scarcely visible
against the faint glow of the ceiling.
He wasn't on Downbelow. Bianca wasn't lost. He was in the dark of a sleepover at
the end of the space lanes and a kid he was watching had an emergency.
"Fletcher, Jeremy's gone."
Where would Jeremy go? He was still half asleep, and confused about where he
was… he'd been jolted out of a vivid dream of loss and searching, and it wasn't
Bianca missing, it was Jeremy, and it was real.
Esperance. The Xanadu.
"System. Lights on."
Light began, a soft flare of color in the ceiling.
"When?" he asked Vince.
. "I don't know. I just woke up and it's a big bed and he wasn't there."
The light was brighter by the moment, washing down the walls like veils of pink
and eye-tricking gold.
Fletcher rolled to the edge of the bed, trying to think, and thinking about
Esperance, and game parlors and kids sneaking downstairs in the sleepover for
hot chocolate and breakfast…
But it was Esperance. And there was more danger here than drunken Belizers.
"If he's gone after breakfast I'll skin him. Is Linda awake?"
"I don't know."
"Wake her. Everybody get dressed. If he's downstairs I'll lock him in quarters
when I catch him. God knows how he got past the watch." Docks outside began to
form itself in his mind's eye. Jeremy's discontent. Meetings among the captains.
Jeremy going out to find an officer who could get something in motion…
… regarding the hisa stick. The shop, and the man who ran it.
It wasn't just a kid skipping down to get breakfast or play vid games. Jeremy
might have gone back to the ship, maybe to contact somebody through ops, to try
to talk to an officer high enough to authorize something.
He put on clothes as fast as he could find them in the gathering light. He heard
the kids in the next room, heard Linda invite Vince to get out so she could
dress. She was hurrying.
Fletcher shoved on his boots. The room lights were up to half, now, in their
aurora-like dawn, but the light from the common hall flared bright and white as
Vince entered the bath.
Vince came out again. Instantly. "Fletcher, you got to come look!"
To the bathroom? He didn't ask. He went.
In filmy white soap, written across the mirror:
For the honor of the ship.
Chapter XXVI
Contents - Prev
The Old Man was still drinking coffee, but the captains of Celestial and Rose
were both in agreement about the agreement to cut Mazian's suppliers out and
more than a little high on enthusiasm and a new-found friendship. Other
captains, more sober, were sitting at tables, arguing the fine details, no few
of them clustered about the Old Man.
And the goings on of Boreale and Champlain were a major interest. Topics like
black market and Mazian always pricked ears up, most of the ships represented in
the group quite honestly willing to deal with any paying market, but not in
favor of behavior that went across the unspoken codes of conduct. There was
debate about Champlain's conduct. There was distrust of Boreale's rigging as a
warship conducting trade; there was uneasy, probing converse between ships
operating under Union registry and ships operating as Alliance traders, heads
together at small tables in the bar. The private dining room had grown too
crowded for anyone to sit except the Old Man and his constantly changing,
high-rank table companions.
Deals were being cut. The dock safety office had made one visit to be sure the
party was orderly: the establishment had exceeded occupancy limits, but nobody
wanted to deal with currently good-humored ship's officers.
Deals not only regarding the Alliance treaty. There were deals being done for
route-timing, two and three ships agreeing what they'd carry and when, to assure
better prices for their goods. There were a couple of younger officers casting
looks at each other that said they might end up sleeping-over.
JR thought by now he'd talked to every individual in the room, and rehearsed his
information and answered questions multiple times for each. He'd gone light on
the wine. He'd eaten bar crackers that lay like lead in his stomach and taken to
soft drinks as the only remedy for the crackers.
He'd wondered about the Old Man's stamina and now he was questioning his own,
granted that the Old Man had drunk only coffee and that the Old Man had been
sitting down throughout. Madison had joined him, and that table of mostly
white-haired seniors had gotten into heavy debate at this late hour.
He was numb. Just numb. Maybe it was because he hadn't paced himself, and the
old men of the ship knew better, and had known what they were setting up, and
had deliberately let this turn into the crush of bodies and hours-long party it
had begun to be.
Nobody had gotten rowdily drunk, nobody had been a fool. These were the heads of
spacer Families, given a chance to get the lowdown on Finity's business… that
had been the lure to bring them; then to vent their frustrations with
international politics with internationals in their midst; and finally to cut
specific deals. These people were high on adrenaline and high-stakes trade. And
the fact that Finity had supplied a little of the captain's stock to the event,
in the merchanter way of hospitality, was a finesse, as Rose's captain had said,
that they never got out of the standoffish stationmaster of Esperance.
Oser-Hayes buying a bottle and drinking with merchanter captains? Not damn
likely, in JR's opinion, having met the man. It was a new enough experience for
the captain of Boreale, who, however, was not a stupid man. Captain Jacques, as
he became known about the room, was a novelty, one of the faceless Unioners
given a human face, a handsome, youngish senior captain with the ramrod bearing
of Union military very evident about him, but willing to lift a glass and grin
ear to ear in a shocking good humor.
It was possible to like the man, and his secondary captains… only three of
Boreale's captains present. The unhappy fourth languished on duty, a rule that
couldn't be breached.
The captain of Rose grew so friendly as to slap the captain of Boreale on the
shoulder, and that immaculate uniform took a dose of whiskey, all in good humor.
A regular human being, JR heard someone say—before the pocket-com went off.
He went to the hall by the restrooms, which had a little quiet.
"This is JR."
"Lyra here. Jeremy's missing."
"Where's Fletcher?"
"Fletcher was asleep. He's gone after Jeremy, if he hasn't come looking for
you—"
"He hasn't. Keep this off the airwaves." Any station could monitor pocket-com
traffic. This administration was hostile. And the report should have gone up the
chain to Bucklin, before it came to him, but Lyra had been on her own for hours,
with a piece of information and a problem and long past time it should have gone
to a senior officer. He didn't fault her on that.
"Call the ship."
"I have called the ship. They said—"
"A courier's coming to you. Stay put. Sign off." If she weren't where she was
supposed to be she would have said so; and he didn't want details and addresses
going to potential eavesdroppers. He went out to the bar and snagged Bucklin.
"Get Wayne if you can do it on your way to the door. Get to Lyra at the Xanadu.
Get her info and move on it stat-stat-stat. Run! "
"What's—" Bucklin began to ask.
"Fletcher!" he said, and went looking for another Finity captain.
Fletcher ran, heart pounding, dodged around the sparse foot traffic of the end
of alterday, just before maindawn, the time when the docks were slowest and most
quiet. He'd run all the way from the two hundreds. The kid had gotten past
security—and so had he, just advised Lyra he was going to try to catch the kid
short of his goal and left Linda and Vince on orders to go explain to Lyra or
any senior they could knock out of bed.
Arnason Imports. The sign wasn't neon. It was painted, in the way of the better
shops, at its end of the nook position next shops far gaudier. He ran across
deck plates washed in neon green and red from a souvenir shop, dodged a drunk
window-shopper, and walked the last distance, trying to get his breathing under
control.
He'd say the kid had ducked curfew and the captain was looking.
That was why he'd run. He'd shake the kid till his teeth rattled when he got him
out of there.
The inconspicuous sign in the window posted hours as Mainday & Alterday Service.
The smaller one said: Back in an Hour… with no indication how long ago that hour
had started.
He tried the latch.
Knocked on the double window… quad-layered plastic that could withstand space
itself, if the dock should decompress.
The kid had gotten here. There was trouble, and the kid had found it. He was
sure of it. He wasn't quite to panic. But he hit the window hard enough to
bruise his fist.
Hit it again.
It wasn't discreet. It wasn't, probably, smart. He didn't think he should have
done that. But he'd flung down the challenge in a fit of temper, and if he
walked off now, they might have Jeremy, and a notion that questions were about
to come down on them.
If they were in there, the they who were dealing in stolen goods, he'd become a
problem to them vastly exceeding the problem a kid posed.
And if the alterday man was still there, that man knew Jeremy's face, knew
Jeremy's business, and knew his face as part of the same sticky problem.
He was in it. He couldn't let them keep that door shut. He couldn't walk off. He
could just hope that Lyra got JR or somebody. Fast.
He hit the window again, hard enough he thought he might have broken his hand.
The door opened. He was facing a man he didn't know. "Come inside," the man
said, seizing his arm, and pulled. A hard object came against his ribs. He was
facing the man he'd met last night, two others—and Jeremy.
That was a weapon up against his side. He didn't know what, and didn't
complicate his situation by moving. Jeremy kicked a man to get free, and the man
hit him.
"My captain knows where we are," Fletcher said, caught in a time-slowed moment
in which he had not the least idea what to do, but his priorities were clear:
not to get himself or Jeremy shot or taken elsewhere. "They're on their way. Now
what?"
"Son of a bitch!" The man from their first meeting was livid. And scared.
"They've got to have a warrant…"
"Not our captain," Jeremy said in his higher voice. "You're in deep trouble."
The man slapped Jeremy—far too hard. Dockside years of bullies schooled Fletcher
to keep absolutely still. Jeremy wasn't dead. Bleeding, yes. They stood in a
shop full of oddments, shelves, specimens, and three guys in a serious lot of
trouble with two prisoners and an artifact they didn't want—and with a whole
network involved, Fletcher would just about bet.
"Seriously," he said to the man from last evening, "I'd consider making a phone
call to your lawyers."
"Shut up!" the guy said, and the one holding him jerked his arm—not
steady-nerved, Fletcher guessed; and in the next second the man hit him in the
head. Dark exploded into his sight. He went to one knee…
"Fletcher!" Jeremy yelled, and he had the make on them, that these were men who
used guns. He was blind for the moment, and wanted just to get close to Jeremy,
get his hands on the kid. There were two ways out of this place. There was that
storeroom; and the front door. And they'd think about the front door, but maybe
not the other.
"Move!" The guy with the gun jerked him by the collar, and he staggered up and
moved toward Jeremy. There were four of them, last-night holding onto Jeremy,
short-and-wide between him and Jeremy, man-with-the-gun behind him and
skinny-man to the side with another gun… he tracked all that, saw the door, and
stayed docile while he passed short-and-wide with a gun in his back and
last-night holding onto Jeremy, steering him for the back door to this place.
"Captain's going to have your guts!" Jeremy said, and kicked at the man's shins.
The man maintained a grip on his arm and shoved him at the door, using one hand
to open it; and they were on the verge of going where they'd have a simultaneous
accident.
No time. Fletcher spun around and knocked man-with-a-gun into the shelves. Boxes
came down; and he didn't wait for skinny-man to close in. He dived at last-night
and saw a knife—feinted as if he had one and the fool's nerves reacted. The
knife went out of line just that far, and he shot an arm past the man's guard,
and rammed him aside, trying to get through the door; but a shot ricocheted off
it; and last-night was getting up.
He grabbed Jeremy and they ran past a row of stacked shelves, knocking down
displays and merchandise on their way to the door.
And man-with-the-gun showed up in their path.
He stopped cold. Kid and all.
The man motioned back toward the storeroom.
The man would shoot. He believed that. But the police had sniffers. Blood
anywhere and there was hell denying who'd been where. And now they were
thinking; now man-with-the-gun was in charge, last-night being down and nursing
a cut on his head.
"In there," man-with-the-gun said; and Fletcher kept a hand on Jeremy's
shoulder, stifled one attempt at a revolt, and steered him on through the door.
They'd gotten smart. Skinny-man was waiting inside with a gun on them.
"All right," he said. "You want a deal—"
"Get them out of here!" last-night said. "Use the safety-exit."
The tunnels, Fletcher thought. The maintenance tunnels. The dark network of
through which the conduits ran, the air ducts, emergency systems, wiring,
everything.
Every station, like every other station. Same blueprint: just the neon signs
were different. The whole might be different, but structure, on a modular level,
was absolutely identical.
Catwalks, dark. Lose a body in the tunnels and they were lost. Maybe for a
hundred years.
The gunman walked them back through the double row of shelves, back to a set of
boxes.
"Move those."
"Do it," Fletcher said, afraid Jeremy would try something desperate. The kid was
scared. And the kid had reflexes like steel springs. "Do it, Jeremy."
"Yessir," Jeremy said, and moved boxes back from the maintenance door.
Shopkeepers weren't supposed to have keys to places that gave access to the
maintenance tunnels. The doors should be locked to the outside.
"Open it," the man said, and Jeremy didn't know how to work the latch.
Skinny-man had to come close and do it, while Fletcher stood with the gun aimed
at him.
"Fletcher," Jeremy said plaintively.
"They don't dare do us harm," Fletcher said, playing the absolute, trusting
fool. "They know our ship knows where we are. And they'll search this entire
section."
Skinny-man swung the door open. The draft that came out was cold, and the depths
echoed as skinny-man, gun in hand, went out onto the catwalk.
"Move," the first man said, and Fletcher said carefully, "Go on, Jeremy."
Jeremy went and Fletcher followed right against him, took firm hold of the kid's
sweater and gave a sharp tug when they passed the door and the gun. Down!
"Run!" he yelled then, and shoved skinny-man into the rail and slammed the door
as he spun around.
Total black. The maintenance doors latched automatically when shut. There was
that second of total blindness… but skinny-man's gun went off, a deafening
sound, a burst of light that burst inches from him. Fletcher shoved him—shocked
when he felt resistance fail and heard a body thump and clang down the
pitch-black stairs.
"Jeremy, look out!"
He ran, down the steps in the dark, knew by memory where a landing was, where
Jeremy's thin body was huddled, clinging to the metal stairs. The man falling
must have gone right over him.
And in the same second, light blazed out from the opening door above.
He jerked Jeremy loose from his handhold and dragged him with him—oxygen
atmosphere in Esperance tunnels, no need of a mask. He knew the turnings, the
pitch of the stairs that turned and that let them go for another catwalk and
along Main Maintenance Blue.
Pursuit came down the steps and thundered along the catwalk, shaking the rail in
his hand. Somebody yelled—"Get a light, dammit!"
They were in Blue, in the fives. Next door, in the fours… they'd be in another
recess of shops. They could come out there. Get away. Get help.
"Where are we going?" Jeremy gasped.
"Just stay with me!" He didn't want Jeremy behind him as a target… but a buried
bit of knowledge said it didn't matter where Jeremy was: they were shooting
bullets, not needles, and a shot could go right through him and hit the kid. It
was distance and turns that could save them, and he took them in the dark, in
the lead.
The tunnel racketed with echoes, with footsteps of their pursuers trying to find
them. "Get someone out there on the docks!" he heard. They had a light. The beam
zigged and zagged across the maze of catwalks and girders and conduits, crossed
ahead of them, and lent him light to see the webwork of structural support and
tension cables and pipes.
He ran behind the beam, raced, lungs burning, toward the exit stairs for the
next section of shops. Climbed, towing Jeremy after him. His sides ached.
Jeremy's gasps were as loud as his as he reached the door and flipped the
emergency latch on a locked door with expert fingers.
The door opened into warmer dark, almost stifling warmth after the cold of the
tunnels.
Then light blazed around them. A burglar-light had come on. That meant an alarm
had sounded somewhere. He tugged Jeremy through the door into the warehouse of
some shipping company, and shut the door. It would latch. Please God it would
latch. The other one had been jimmied, surely. They didn't know how to open the
emergency latch: that was a tricky piece of business.
He got a breath. Two. Slid down the wall, feet braced on the store. "What did
you think you were doing?"
Jeremy sank down by him, gasping. "Nobody else was going to do anything!"
"Dammit, they hadn't had time!"
"Well, they weren't! They didn't! I walked in there and I asked to see it again
and I just ran—"
"Yeah, and they had a shoplifter lock and they triggered it from under the
counter before you ever got to the door!"
"Yeah," Jeremy admitted, with a sheepish glance up. "The door locked."
He didn't want to explain to Jeremy how he'd ever learned about such tricks. The
kid was white-faced, sweating.
"Thanks for the help," he said, elbow pressed against ribs aching from the
running.
Meanwhile there was a burglar alarm reporting their presence to the police. He
wasn't averse to being found by the cops. It was a lot better than where they'd
been. But he wanted to get out of it if they could; and he'd caught breath
enough. "Come on. Let's see if we can get a door open."
"Fletcher…"
He heard the note of fear. Heard the sound of footsteps coming down metal steps,
behind the wall.
He grabbed Jeremy's arm, pulled him through the warehoused boxes and barrels
toward a door that ought to lead out.
Hoping for a slow-down, for their pursuers to be baffled by the door latch.
Hearing it open behind them.
"Fletcher!" Jeremy had heard it.
He pulled Jeremy with him, ducked over an aisle and spotted a door with Fire
Access in red and white letters. That had to have a simple turn-toggle latch.
They'd broken through. He heard the footsteps, back among the aisles of boxes.
He felt the cold draft. His fingers sought the toggle and twisted. He shoved the
door open, shoved, against the air-pressure from the docks. Fools had left the
door open. He strained, established a crack, and a siren went off as a gale
streamed into his face. Jeremy pushed. He braced it wide enough for Jeremy to
get by him, and scraped his body out, jerked his leg free last, with a bash on
the ankle as it slammed.
"Come on," he said, hurrying Jeremy along. He limped, forced the leg to operate
despite the pain and ran for the docks.
Wanting all the witnesses they could get.
The wind began to wail again. They were opening that door behind them. A shot
rang out, hitting what, he didn't wait to see.
There was a free-standing block of shops at a right angle to the warehouse
frontage. He dragged Jeremy around the corner, in among spacers window-shopping
and bar-hopping, ran through, startled outcries in their wake.
Gunshots came from behind them. There were outcries, outrage, panic. He kept
running, dodged among passersby diving for cover.
"Stop!" someone yelled, and they didn't stop. Then Jeremy knocked someone down
and fell, himself, twisting in Fletcher's grip as Fletcher tried to get him on
his feet and keep going.
"What's going on," spacers around them demanded.
"Finity's End!" was all Fletcher could say, trying to hold a winded kid on his
feet. "Somebody call our ship!" He tried to run on, but the pain in his side was
all but overwhelming. Hands were helping him now, and he pulled Jeremy with him,
hearing the sounds of resistance behind him, shouts and curses around the
gunfire. There was nothing to say, no wind to say it with. He just took Jeremy
the direction open to him, vision too jarred and blurred to know where he was
going until he hit someone else and that someone grabbed him.
"Fletcher!"
Chad. Chad and Nike and Toby.
"The whole ship's looking for you!" Chad yelled at him.
"Guys after us," he tried to say, but about that time something sailed past
their heads and rebounded off a pressure window, bang!
Fletcher ducked into the door-recess of a shop, nearest refuge, got down with
arms across Jeremy, and Chad and Nike came in, flung themselves down as a
barricade as all hell broke loose outside. Others spotted their shelter, younger
crew, not Finity juniors, not even all of the same ship, but just at that moment
a pressure window exploded right across the aisle of shop fronts.
"They're shooting!" Nike cried.
Chains were out of pockets among the spacers and people were yelling. Jeremy's
head came up and Fletcher shoved it down again. He was shaking. He'd seen riot
break out. He saw this one. People with no idea what the fight was were arming
themselves, spacers aiming at whatever spacers had at issue.
Like stationers with guns.
"The whole damn dock!" Chad said between his teeth. "God, Fletcher. How'd you
manage this one?"
"They're trying to kill us!" Jeremy said indignantly.
Then the police showed up, a lot of police, with stunners they were using
indiscriminately; and chains swung. Fletcher grabbed an indiscriminate armful of
spacer kids and shoved heads down as a flung missile sailed past their refuge.
Nike risked her skull to reach up and try to shove the shop door open. It was
locked, people inside with the door barred. She slammed the door with her fist,
yelling, "We got kids, you damn fools! Open the door!"
Riot spilled past them, police literally stumbling into their shallow shelter,
being pushed there by the crowd, driven in retreat by chain-swinging spacers.
Someone stepped on Fletcher's leg and a chain cracked against the window over
their heads.
Then to a shout of "There they are!" silver-suits showed up.
Bucklin reached them, Bucklin, Wayne, and a handful of Finity seniors, creating
a barrier between them and the fight.
"Hold it!" Fletcher heard someone shout, then, a voice that hit nerves and
stopped bodies in mid-impulse, and he knew that voice… he thought he knew it.
"We've got kids here! Hold it, hold it, stop right there, you!"
JR. And Finity personnel. And when JR used that voice, bodies obeyed while minds
were thinking it over. Fletcher's own nerves had jumped. Now he just caught his
breath and waited for the missiles to stop.
But in the fading of riot around them, Chad and Nike got up. Toby did. Fletcher
let Jeremy and the kids up, then, and hauled himself to his feet, with an ankle
swollen tight against his boot.
"Hold it!" a voice yelled. The police advanced on the small collection they
made, police, with stunners.
"Hold it!" JR said, interposing himself, and Bucklin and the other Finity
personnel were right beside him. "Just back off," JR said to the Esperance
police, and chains might have disappeared into pockets or trash cans, but the
weapons were still there, Fletcher was sure of it. The police were armed, and
there were nerve-jolted spacers down from the last encounter.
"Who are you?" The age-old police voice.
"Captain James Neihart, merchanter Finity's End, and those are kids, here.
Nobody's pulling a weapon on our personnel."
"Rose's kids, too," a spacer said, and came in close, "Damned if you wave a
weapon near Rose's juniors, mister. Just stow it"
"Get out of there," the lead officer said, and two of the kids who'd run in for
shelter scrambled up and walked over to the man who spoke for Scottish Rose.
A lot more spacers had gathered, most in civvies, Finity personnel among them.
The police were increasingly outnumbered, and calling for reinforcements.
Fletcher heard the crackle of communications.
"Break it up," the lead cop said, and Jeremy yelled: "Those guys back there's
trying to kill us!" And to JR: "This shop had the stick, sir! It's back there in
the shop! There's guys chasing us."
"Not now," a spacer said with chilling finality.
"We have a breach in the maintenance system," the chief of the police said. "We
have windows broken. We have—"
"They shot at us!" Jeremy cried indignantly. "They were firing shots all over!"
"Jeremy found stolen property in a shop," Fletcher said. "I went in to get
Jeremy, and they took us both into the tunnels."
"You're responsible," the policeman said.
"We ran," Fletcher said. " We weren't the ones with the guns."
"You're under arrest," the cop said.
"No," JR said, and stepped between. So did Bucklin. In two blinks a wall of
Finity officers and assorted spacers had interposed themselves, blocking the
police from action.
"We've had a breach of the tunnels," the police objected.
"We have larceny of Finity property and assault against underage crew," JR said.
"Where's your ID?" the policeman asked. "You're not wearing any insignia. How do
we know who you are?"
"See the black patch?" a spacer said, not even theirs. "That's Finity. He says
he's a captain, mister, you get out of his way."
A policeman was using his clip-com. An electronic voice gave orders.
"We've got an impasse here," JR said. "And it's not going to budge. You can try
to arrest a handful of kids, which is not going to happen. On the other hand,
you can walk back to the five hundreds and take a look at Arnason Imports. And
you can start with treaty violation, which is a little out of your territory,
but I can guarantee Stationmaster Oser-Hayes will want all the information and
evidence he can get. I can add traffic in illicit goods, handling stolen
property, and all the way up to attempted murder. Finity's End is sovereign
territory, gentlemen, and we don't surrender our personnel, but we'll be happy
to file complaints and sign affidavits."
There was a muttering among the spacers, silence among the police. Fletcher kept
right beside Jeremy. It wasn't a time to say anything. But there was also a
human being he'd shoved off a ledge. While they were accounting for things—he
might have killed somebody.
"The tunnel passages behind the import shop," Fletcher said very quietly. And
the instincts of his younger years wanted to claim the man had slipped on the
catwalks and that a shove had had nothing to do with it, but Finity had
old-fashioned standards. "He was after us and I shoved him. Somebody needs to
find him." He added, because he knew damage to those tunnel lines was dangerous.
"Somebody needs to search the place. There's got to be lines hit. They were
shooting left and right."
"We'll want a statement."
"Our command will file a complaint in their name," JR said. "Meanwhile they're
complaining of stolen goods at Arnason's and we're filing charges right now. You
want a statement, I'll give you a statement. We want an immediate search of the
premises. I can assure you there'll be a warrant. Our legal office will be
contacting your legal office in short order, and I'd suggest the Stationmaster
may want answers from inside that shop."
The police were dubious.
"You get in there or we will," a spacer said. "They take spacer property in
there, we'll go in after it"
And weakening. "We need a complaint and a warrant."
"You've got a complaint. Your warrant should be in progress."
A new group showed up. With a lot of silver hair involved. A lot of flash
uniforms.
Ship's officers. A lot of them, Fletcher thought. He saw Captain James Robert at
the head of it. Madison.
There was a muttering of amazement among the spacers. The station cops didn't
initially, perhaps, know what they were facing.
"I'd say hurry with that warrant," JR said.
Oser-Hayes hadn't wanted a general meeting, involving the ships' captains… yet.
He had one.
JR settled at the end of the Finity delegation, knowing each and every face at
the meeting, this time, every captain that had been at that convocation, every
station officer that had been at the court.
There was a notable exception: Champlain was in the process of leaving
Esperance. The station wouldn't—legally couldn't—prosecute a spacer whose
captain chose to defend him, but they wouldn't allow that ship to dock, either.
Wayne poured water. Bucklin was standing watch at the door.
JR sat easily, cheerful in the foreknowledge of the captains' agreement to the
terms of the Pell agreement. He sat easily as the Old Man with perfect
self-assurance laid the hisa stick on the white table-cloth… a weathered,
battered stick worth far more than the statuary outside or the furnishings of
the room.
In this case it was worth Champlain's reputation, Finity's vindication, and a
serious example of the Esperance administration's mounting legal problems. There
were rumblings of discontent with Oser-Hayes' administration on a great many
fronts, not only among spacers who'd broken up a little of the docks in the
general discontent, but among stationers who'd known bribes were being passed to
let certain businesses run wide open and in contravention of the law.
And others, who'd known there was something not too savory operating in the
courts, the customs offices, the police department, and the tax commission. Name
it, and somewhere, somehow, money had opened and shut doors on Esperance.
Nothing had ever united all the offended elements before. Now Oser-Hayes hoped
there wouldn't be a vote of confidence… before they could get the Pell trade
agreement finalized.
No, the police had not opposed a unified gathering of ship's captains, officers
of the Merchanters' Alliance, and a warrant had fairly flown out of the judge's
office, enabling a very interesting search of Arnason Imports and a series of
arrests of Arnason owners anxious to prove they weren't the only company engaged
in illicit trade.
The station news service and the trendy coffee shops were abuzz with official
reports and delicious unofficial rumor.
They had an entire smuggling network exposed, not a harmless one, but a conduit
for stolen goods reaching all sorts of places… stolen artwork, artifacts,
weapons, rejuv and pharmaceuticals including biologicals. Esperance had had
something for everyone—including war surplus arms that were listed as
recyclables. What they'd found in two weeks at Esperance was a veritable
black-market treasure trove… and what they'd dismantled wasn't going to be back
in operation the moment the current set of merchanters pulled out.
Finity's End had an agreement with its brother merchanters to pass the word, the
total files, the archives on Esperance, and for one ship to stay in dock until
it had gotten agreements from the next ship to arrive that it would linger at
Esperance dock—free of excess charges, of course—to pass the word in turn.
In short, there was a great deal of shakeout in a very short time, a pace of
change that stationers found stunningly fast, but that spacers, accustomed to
arrange their affairs in two-week bursts of diplomacy, during docking, found
completely reasonable.
Yes, Oser-Hayes would have liked a four-, six-week delay. Oser-Hayes would have
spun things out for months and years if it had involved station law, with
injunctions, stays, postponements, court orders and all manner of tactics.
Not with the Alliance legal system on a two-week push.
And amid all the smooth textures and simple pearl gray and black of a modern
conference room, amid all the modern flash and glitter of spacers and the
smooth, expensive fashion of the stationmaster and his aides… a thing
indisputably organic, hard-used, hand-made of substances mysterious to
space-dwellers. Simple things, Fletcher had said, who'd been on a world. Wood.
Feather. Fiber.
Small, planet-made miracles.
"This," Captain James Robert said, with his hand on the hisa artifact, "this is
the artifact that led us to the problem. Not very large. Not very elaborate. But
important to one of my crew. It was a gift from Satin… Tam-utsa-pitan is her
name, in her language. But Satin… to us humans. She sent it. A wish for peace.
That's what we've come here to find, if you please.
"And in that sense," the Old Man said, "more than humans sit at this table.
Understand: we never could explain the War to the hisa, when the one who sent
this asked what it all meant. Peace may be an easier concept for them. Hard for
us to find. But, courtesy of the Finity crewman who lent this to our conference,
consider this the living witness of the other intelligent species swept up in
the events of our time. It'll lie here, while we try to find an answer and sign
a simple piece of paper that can clear reputations—"
Oh, watch Oser-Hayes' expression when the Old Man held out that possibility:
restoration, amnesty. A cleared name and a new chance to be immaculate. Damn
sure Oser-Hayes knew the details of all the operations that had ever run. There
might be nobody better to clean them up than a newly empowered convert to
economic orthodoxy.
"Meanwhile," the Old Man said with a deep, assured calm, that voice that took
the tumbling emotions of a situation and settled things to quiet, "meanwhile an
old hisa's sitting beneath her sky waiting for that answer. And her peace is
that much closer, in this place. I think we'll find it this time—at least among
ourselves."
"The whole damn dock, Fletcher. Holes everywhere, a dozen ships emptied out…"
Chad exaggerated. Chad had that small tendency. But the court had just met, on
the business of inciting a riot. It was vividly in memory.
"Fletcher came charging in there," Jeremy said, perched on the edge of the
chair, his whole body aquiver. "They all had guns and Fletcher just lit into
them with his bare hands!"
"Mild exaggeration," Fletcher said in an undertone. "You'll make me ridiculous.
Hear me?"
Henley's Soft-bar was the venue. The station repair crews were patching the last
leaks in the station's water and ventilation systems, rendering the name Arnason
Imports highly unpopular among two residency blocs of very rich stationers who'd
had their water cut off; and the man they'd found with two broken legs and a
broken arm in the depths of the tunnels would recover from the fall, but not so
easily recover from the charges filed against him.
Jeremy was sitting on Fletcher's right, Linda and Vince on his left. The
headlines on the station news above the adjacent liquor bar were full of
investigations and charges of which Finity's End was officially, today, judged
innocent.
In celebration of that fact, the juniors of Finity's End owned a large table in
Henley's. Bucklin and Wayne were on duty. They'd come in later. But meanwhile it
was on JR's tab. So was the rest of the liberty, unlimited ticket to ride, as of
this morning.
A round of soft drinks later, Madelaine showed up, in silvers, and patted
Fletcher on the shoulder. "Told you how they'd rule," Madelaine said, and
pressed a kiss on Fletcher's ear, to the laughter of the table.
But Fletcher didn't flinch. He caught Madelaine's hand and squeezed it, turning
in his chair, looking into Madelaine's eyes. Madelaine the dragon. Madelaine,
who'd led the effort in court.
"Grandmother," he said, and amended that, stationer-style: "Great-gran. You're a
damn good lawyer. Sit down. Have a sip. JR's buying."
"Uniform," Madelaine reminded him. "Even if you're perfectly proper. Later. On
the ship. When we undock. Behave. I got you out of this one, you. Don't break up
the furniture."
Madelaine was off with a pat on his shoulder. The table was momentarily quieter,
everyone eavesdropping.
The hearing today might have been a formality, a foregone conclusion—a verdict
against Finity would have provoked another chain-swinging riot. But the court
had had him scared, on principle. Courts could rule. Things could change.
Anything could be taken away. Rule of his life. If it was important to you, and
the courts got involved, anything could be taken away.
And he didn't want things taken away right now. He had something to lose—like
three junior-juniors, one fairly scuffed-up, all sitting with him sipping soft
drinks and figuring out how to spend the wildest liberty of their young dreams.
Like the senior-juniors, who were making tentative, wary approaches to him,
under a flag of truce.
Sue hauled out cash chits when the next drinks came. "One round's on me, my
tab," Sue said without quite looking at anybody. "Even's even, then. All you
guys."
It wasn't the money. It wasn't the drinks. It was the acknowledgement.
"Appreciated," Fletcher said, all that anybody said.
It was a start on repairs. He bought all the senior-juniors a round, in spite of
the free tab, because it was the gesture that was important. It dented the
finance he had left, but that was the way you did things. It was the gestures
that counted. You took a joke, you paid one back. You got as good as you gave.
And you owned up when you'd screwed up. Simple rules. Rules that made sense to
him in a way things never had.
They ate, they played rounds of vid-games, they had dessert, and they walked
back to the sleepover in a group, all the juniors except the ones on duty.
Fletcher lay in bed in the Xanadu that night watching the illusory colors drift
across a dark ceiling, thinking he'd talk to Jake about an apprenticeship when
he got aboard…
Thinking, so easily, of grayed greens, and Old River, and falling rain.
Thinking of a kid growing up, in a cabin alone while the ship rode through
combat, a kid who'd written high and wide ship's honor, when what he really
wanted to save was his own.
He got up and walked back to the kids' rooms, looked in on Linda's; and she was
asleep. Jeremy's and Vince's, and they were asleep, too.
They were all right. Jeremy had bruises and scrapes and so did he, but those
would all have faded, the other side of jump, and they were leaving in two days.
Some things faded, some things grew stronger. I love you wasn't quite in a
twelve-year-old's vocabulary. But it was in that brown sweater the kid almost
lived in. It was in the look he got, wanting his approval, his advice, in the
couple of fragile years before a kid knew everything there was possibly to know.
He couldn't go back, and sit on that bank for the rest of his life and watch Old
River roll by. He couldn't look at a forever-clouded, out-of-reach heaven,
knowing the stars were up there, and that all that was human went on in the
Upabove.
He couldn't sit on a station for months, waiting for his ship to come back to
him, out of a dark that had begun to be more real and more present in his
thoughts than sunrises and sunset had once been.
He'd been to the farthest edge of human civilization. And even it wasn't foreign
to him. The dark of space was where he lived, where he knew now he would always
live. The bright neon of stations, the brief, surreal passage through station
lives… that was carnival. Life for spacers was something else, out there, within
the ships.
He couldn't describe that view to a stationer. Couldn't tell Bianca, when they
met, what it was he'd found. He only knew he'd begun to move in a different time
than anything that swung around a sun. He could love. He could feel the pangs of
loss. It would hurt—there was no guarantee it wouldn't. But there was so much…
so very much… that had snared him in, hurried him along with the ship and kept
him moving. For the first time in his life… moving, and knowing where he
belonged.
Their cargo was Satin's peace. Not a perfect one. Not one without maintenance
cost. But the best peace that fallible humans could put together. Overseeing it,
making it work… that was their job.
"Fletcher?" Jeremy hadn't been asleep. Or picked his presence out of the air
currents. Or heard his breathing. The kid was uncanny in such things.
"Just being sure you were here," he said "I'm not going anywhere. Won't ever
duck out on you again, Fletcher. I promise."
"I'll hold you to that," Fletcher said.
… ◊ …
CJ. CHERRYH is the prolific, Hugo Award-winning author of Downbelow Station,
Cyteen, Rider at the Gate and almost 50 other books. She lives in Oklahoma.