Chapter IV

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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

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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

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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.