Morning mess hall was another collection of cousins, mostly seniors. Fifty people ate at a set time, on schedule—be hungry or skip it entirely, unless you had an excuse or a favor-point with the cook, so Jeremy said.
Fletcher ate at the same table with Jeremy and two other only moderately pubescent juniors, Vincent and Linda, both doubtless older in station years than they seemed, but mentally like the age they looked, they mostly jabbered about games or what they’d done on Pell docks, their speech larded with wild, decadent, and fancy, juvvie-buzz that seemed current among their small set. Mostly they ignored him, beyond the first exchange of names, turned shoulders to him without seeming to notice it in the heat of their conversational passion, and Jeremy’s eyes lit with the game-jabber, too.
Being ignored didn’t matter to Fletcher. He’d lain awake and tossed and turned in his bunk. Jeremy had lent him music tapes and those had gotten him through the dark hours.
But today he had to work with these kids who admittedly knew everything he didn’t; and he went with them when they’d had their breakfast—a decent breakfast, if he’d had the appetite, which he didn’t.
They all went, still jabbering about dinosaurs and hell levels, down to A14, and in the next few hours he learned all about laundry, how to sort, fold, stack, and keep a cheerful face right along with the two other juniors in the mess pool with him and Jeremy.
They’d drawn Laundry as their work for this five-day stint… but not every day. You didn’t get stuck on one kind of job as a junior. That was a relief to learn.
The junior-juniors, the ship’s youngest, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds among whom he was unwillingly rated, drew such jobs relatively often. But so did the mid-level techs, from time to time. Juniors, so Jeremy said, rotated through Laundry to Minor Maintenance, to Scrub, to Galley, but there were jobs all over the ship that were rotating jobs, or part-time jobs, or jobs people did only on call.
Junior-juniors inevitably got the worst assignments, Fletcher keenly suspected. Laundry was everybody’s laundry; laundry for several hundred people who’d been out on liberty for two weeks was a lot of laundry, sonic and chemical cleaning for some tissue-fabrics, water-cleaning for the rough stuff, dry, fold, sort, and stack by rank.
It filled the time that otherwise would have required too much thinking, and it was a job where you did meet just about everybody, as people came to the counter for pickup of what they’d sent in at undock and to pick up small store items like soap refills for their showers, and sewing kits, and other odd notions.
Fletcher didn’t remember all the names by half—except Parton, who was blind, and who had one mechanical eye for ordinary things, Jeremy said, and the other one was a computer screen for cargo data or anything else Parton elected to receive. He didn’t think he’d forget Parton, who asked him to stand still a moment until his mechanical vision had registered a template of his face. He’d never met a blind person. But Jeremy said Parton’s left eye was sharp all the way into situations where the rest of them couldn’t see, and Parton didn’t always know whether there was light or not. His mechanical eye could spot you just the same.
Laundry pickup was a place to hear gossip—all the gossip in the ship, he supposed, if you kept your ears open. He picked up a certain amount of information on certain individuals even with no idea who he was hearing about, and he heard how various establishments on Pell didn’t meet the approval of the senior captain.
Vincent and Linda talked about various places you’d go in civvies, and restaurants you’d wear a patch to, meaning the ship’s patch, he guessed. Someone dropped by the counter and gave him his own, ten black circular ship’s patches, and small patches that said Finity’s End and Fletcher Neihart. It was, he supposed, belonging. He wasn’t sure how he felt about them.
Jeremy handed him a sewing kit from off the shelf of supplies. “You stitch ‘em on,” Jeremy said. “The shiny-thread ones are for dress outfits, the plain-thread are for work gear. If they start looking tatty you get new ones or the watch officer has a fit. I’ll show you how, next watch.”
Labels got your laundry back to you, that was one use of them he saw. You also had a serial number. He was F48, right next to his name. He saw that in a roll of tags that was also in the packet the man had given him. Those were just for the laundry. It was a lot of sewing on tags.
Even in the underwear and the socks.
Labeled. Everything. Head to toe.
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t like it. On Base he’d had to do his own laundry. Everybody did. You got your clothes back because you sensibly never dumped them in bins with everybody else’s. He’d never learned to sew anything in his life, but he figured he’d learn if he wanted his socks and underwear back.
Labeling right down to his socks as Finity crew, though, he’d have skipped that if he could. But counting they’d lose your underwear if you didn’t, it seemed a futile point on which to carry on a campaign of independence, or make what was a tolerable situation today harder than it was. Nobody had done anything unpleasant—or been too intrusively glad to see him. Vincent tried to engage him about where he’d been, holding up the ship and making them late on their schedule, but Jeremy told Vince to stop and let him alone and Vince, who came only up to mid-chest on him, took stock of him in a long look and shut up about it.
Jeremy wanted to talk about Downbelow when they got back to quarters after mess, and that was harder. They sat there stitching his labels into his socks, and Jeremy wanted to know what Downbelow looked like.
“Real pretty,” he said.
“There’s trees on Pell,” Jeremy said
“Yeah. The garden. The ones on Downbelow are prettier.” He jabbed his finger with the needle, painfully so. Sucked on it. He and Jeremy sat on their respective bunks, with a stack of his entire new wardrobe and all the clothes he’d brought with him plus a pile of the clothes he’d gotten dirty so far, and he wasn’t sorry to have the help doing it.
He daydreamed for an instant about puffer-ball gold and pollen skeining down Old River, beneath branches heavy with spring leaves. Rain on the water.
Jeremy chattered about what he’d seen in Pell’s garden. And segued nonstop to what he wanted to do after they got the patches stitched on. Jeremy wanted him to go to rec with him tonight: there was a rec hall, with games and a canteen, Jeremy said.
“I don’t want to.”
“Oh, come on. What are you going to do, else?”
It was a point. He’d be alone in this closet of a room. He was tired, but he’d get to thinking about things he didn’t want to think about.
He went. It was the same huge compartment they’d all been in during undock, only now there were no railings. There were game machines. A vid area. Tables and chairs, senior as well as junior crew playing cards, playing games, watching vids. He suffered a moment of dislocation, and almost balked at the transformation alone.
But the entertainments offered were very much like at the Base. Familiar situation. You mixed with senior staff and techs and all. They just generally didn’t talk with junior staff.
“What do you play?” Jeremy asked him.
Dangerous question. He’d already lost ten hours to Jeremy at cards; but when he glumly decided on vids, and looked through the available cards in the bin to the side of the machines, he found an Attack game he hadn’t seen since he was a small kid. The card itself when he pulled it out was old, showing a lot of use; but he remembered that game with real pleasure, and recalled he’d been pretty good at it—for a seven-year-old. He might have a chance at this one.
He appropriated a machine. Meanwhile Vince and Linda had shown up, and thought they’d join him and Jeremy.
He wasn’t delighted, but he kept the expression off his face; he linked up with the three of them, a little suspecting ambush. He didn’t play vids, not for the last four years, being short of opportunity and short of time, and he dropped into the semi-world of state-of-the-art interactives with a little caution.
Blown. Blown in two seconds. He made four tries, but he couldn’t come out of the drop into the game fast enough with these kids to avoid getting blasted.
“This is enough,” he said. But Jeremy jollied him out of quitting, said they’d play partners, and after that he lived for maybe the equivalent of a station hall block before he blew up.
He just wasn’t very good at it. Or the point was, they were very, very good and their reflexes were astonishingly fast. When he exited the game and took the visor off he was a little disoriented from the intensity of the play they’d forced him to. They were different when they took theirs off, hyped, nervous, so much so that when they went for soft drinks at the bar he didn’t know the Jeremy he was dealing with. Jeremy’s fingers twitched, his small body was like a wound spring, and he sat and sipped a soft drink with Vince, who was a little saner, while Jeremy and Linda went back into the game and had it out. A long game. You could elect to watch the game on the screen where they were sitting; and Vince, who said he was tired, did… while Jeremy and Linda were nearby, two people just sitting at a table opposite each other, twitching occasionally, fingers moving on the pads. But on the screen two fighters were stalking each other.
“They’re good,” he said to Vince, aware first of a twelve-, thirteen-year-old boy’s face, and second that Vince was, chronologically speaking, a year older than he was.
And third that Vince was himself too hyped for rational conversation, arms and shoulders twitching to the moves on the screen, jabbering strategy at Linda, who was, he’d found out, Vince’s fairly close cousin and year-mate.
He didn’t react the way these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds did—but he’d never seen any kid react the way these kids did, not the most dedicated gameheads who’d haunted the vid parlors on Pell. Something in him said dangerous, and something said alien. Something in his gut said he was going to be outmatched at anything but cards with these kids, and that there was something direly skewed about these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old twelve-year-olds.
Baby faces. Tiny bodies. High, pre-change voices. He could pick any of the three of these kids up in one hand; but their reactions in games were tigerish. He’d heard the word, and knew the association. Tigerish. Predatory, low brain function, and fast.
Vince and he watched and drank soft drinks and ate chips as Jeremy and Linda kept it up for another hour and a half before watch-end mandated their return to quarters—a return which, like a lot of other odd things, said to him that these weren’t ordinary twelve-year-olds, who voluntarily delayed a game to sew patches on clothes, who made their beds without a wrinkle, who didn’t duck out on rules—and kept a single Attack game going an hour and a half because nobody could score.
He walked the steeply curving ring beside Jeremy, who still couldn’t walk like a normal human being, who was still electric and jumping with an energy he hadn’t discharged. And when they got into quarters Jeremy wasn’t relaxed until he’d spent a long time in the shower.
“You all right?” he asked Jeremy when the kid came out, stark naked, to dress for bed.
“Yeah.” Jeremy gave a little laugh and pulled on a tee and briefs to sleep in. But there was something still a little breathless, a little strange about him.
Fletcher took his own shower and scrubbed as if he could scrub out the sight he’d just seen, and asking himself how he felt about room-sharing with a hype-head. That was what it reminded him of. He had seen people react that way. On drugs.
He didn’t remember his mother playing kid games with him. He remembered his mother drugged out, but languid, most of the time, Remembered her more than once sitting at the table in the apartment and staring into space she didn’t need a visor to see. But her arms would be hard like that, as if she were waiting for something, and her face would be—
He couldn’t remember her face anymore. Not clearly. He came closest he’d come in years to remembering it with the women, senior crew, who came and went around him today. They looked like her. All the people on this ship looked like her in some subtle way, until those recent faces washed over what his mother had looked like to him.
And he remembered the times, the scariest times, when she’d been as scarily hyped as Jeremy had been in the game. How, at the last, she’d prowl the apartment and bump into walls that weren’t there for her. She’d held him in her arms, the only times he could remember her holding him, and she’d say she saw the stars, she saw all the colors of space, and she’d ask him if he could see them, too.
He couldn’t. Aged five, he’d thought there was something wrong with him, and that he was stupid, because he hadn’t been able to see the stars the way she could. Thank God she hadn’t given him any of what she was taking. She’d never gone that far down.
He let the shower fans dry his skin and his hair. He came out of the bath, abandoning the Base-induced modesty that had had him, on prior days, dressing in the cramped bath space. Jeremy didn’t give him more than a glance, so he guessed it was nothing new in the intimacy of a crowded ship. Jeremy sat on his bunk letting the cards cascade between his hands, cards flying between his fingers and piling up again, sheer nervous energy.
Jeremy had already proved he was good at cards.
He lost three more hours. He won one back. And when he did win, Jeremy didn’t sulk about it like some twelve-year-olds he’d known, just said, well, he was improving, and dealt another hand.
He was still sure he could swat Jeremy and his cousins aside in a straight-on fight. But he wasn’t sure, now, that he could exit without damage. He hadn’t factored in the possibility that his roommate was outright crazy. He hadn’t figured that others might be, that it might go with the territory, just being out here, dealing with space. He’d known no spacers intimately but his mother and Quen. All his life, he’d heard people say spacers were different or strange, usually meaning it came in the blood and it accounted for his misbehaviors or his quirks.
Maybe there was something to it. He no longer denied there could be reasons besides upbringing that made spacers rowdy and made station police nervous when spacers intruded into residential areas. They bullied people. They went in groups and were loud and disorderly. They got drunk and knifed each other in bars and the police just contacted ships responsible, never arrested anybody unless they had the ship’s officers present… because there’d been riots when a station attempted to intervene in spacer troubles, and what a riot was like when you got one, two thousand, ten thousand Jeremys all hyped and mad, he didn’t ever want to see.
The final tally of favor-points was thirteen hours. He lost the last time and went to bed, with the prospect of another tomorrow exactly like this one.
He had no idea where the ship was by now. There were sounds he couldn’t identify, occasionally hydraulics, but they were flying along at what Jeremy and his physics course called inertial. He lay in his bunk thinking about that until he made himself queasy with the thought of running into something; and reminded himself they weren’t going through the ecliptic like insystemers, but nadir of the system, clear of the planets and stations, clear of the star, out there where only starships went.
On the next day he found his appetite for breakfast had increased. His stomach had gradually settled to the feeling the ship gave him. His sinuses had quit protesting the change in air pressure. At work, the frantic pace in the laundry detail that had kept them moving during the first days had abated, and that meant time on their hands. They talked. He didn’t. They all folded sheets and stacked them up and they talked about the vid game last night, which at least was common ground, but he wasn’t inspired to add any observations, past their rapid chatter.
They talked on and he handed out shower soap to a cousin named Susan, who came to the counter. She wanted to talk and make acquaintances: she was pretty, dark-eyed, looked twenty and was just curious, he thought, and then reminded himself this wasn’t a pretty girl, it was a cousin, and you couldn’t have thoughts like that aboard, even if he was having them, and was far more interested in her than in the game-chatter behind him. She said she worked in cargo. He said he was in planetary studies.
She said she didn’t know what there was to study about a planet. She wasn’t joking, he decided. His ardor cooled instantly, the conversation died a rapid, distracted death as the game-chatter actually became more interesting than talking to her, and maybe he managed to offend her. He was depressed after she’d left.
Truly depressed. The new had worn off. The body and brain had stopped having to move fast. Realization was settling in. He was among total strangers.
“What’s the matter?” Jeremy asked him after a while.
“Tired,” he said. And Vince took that as a cue to try to bait him:
“A little work get to you?”
He didn’t answer. “Let him alone,” Jeremy said and then Jeremy engaged Vince and Linda in a game of cards in the other room—which was one of the thousand little things that hinted to him that Jeremy might be wiser than twelve—or at least more mature than Vince was. They played cards. He did small squares on the handheld that he’d brought among his personal gear, a cheap, field-battered handheld that held a couple of games, all his personal notes from classes and sessions in the field. He didn’t want to access those. He couldn’t face the memories. He just built squares on the sketchpad, trying to forget cousins.
JR came by and stopped at the counter, the first time he’d seen JR since boarding, “So how are you feeling?” JR asked.
JR, who looked to be his age, and he was sure now both was and wasn’t.
“Fine.” He shut the handheld down and pocketed it, as inconspiciously as he could, fearful they might object either to his using it or having an unauthorized computer. Some places were touchy about it.
JR ignored it and took something from his breast pocket. He laid three little sealed plastic packets on the counter. “Jump drugs. It’s regulation you have them on you at all times. You didn’t report to infirmary when you boarded.”
They were inevitability, staring him in the face. The event he most dreaded. “Nobody told me.”
“Fine. I’m telling you now, for all future time. Scared to give yourself a shot?”
“No.” He’d never done it. But he’d watched it.
“You just put it against your wrist and push the button. Kicks. If you have one malfunction… they don’t, but if it should happen, you’re supposed to have a second. Whenever you use one, you’ve got to drop by medical, that’s A10. Day before jump, there’ll always be a box sitting out for you to take what you need One packet on your person at all times when the ship is out of dock, an extra when you’re going for jump.”
“There’s three.”
“This time, yes. Tripoint’s supposedly safe as a dockside stroll these days, but nobody on this ship would bet his sanity on it. A jump-point’s a lot of dark where you can still meet somebody you don’t want to meet, and if we do, if we should, you’d hear the siren blowing when you come out of jump, and you’d have just enough time to hit yourself with that second shot. You’ve got to keep clear-headed and do that or you’re in serious trouble. Not to scare you, but this ship has enemies. And people have gone into hyperspace without trank, but most don’t come down the way they went in.”
He’d been scared of a lot of things in the last number of days. Being shot at by pirates hadn’t been on the immediate list. Coming awake in hyperspace hadn’t been. Now it was.
“When you board, for the record, next thing after you turn in your baggage at the dock, the packets are on the counter, pick ‘em up.”
“Yeah, well, I had cops attached.”
“No excuses next time. As you board, you take your duffle to the counter, pick up the drugs, sign the list.”
“You’re going to let me off this ship?”
“Only seniors stay aboard. No deck space during dock. Unless you’re sick. You don’t plan to be sick. And just once, and just for the record, never take this stuff except when you’re told to by an officer. That box sits on the counter on the honor system. Take only what you’re supposed to.”
He’d been getting along well enough until cousin JR said that. “My mother was an addict,” he said. “That what you mean?”
“Never take it except when told by an officer. Standard instruction. That’s the rule. Nothing personal.”
“Like hell.”
There was the laundry counter between them. It was probably a good thing. The card game was going on in the next room. There was nothing else to separate them.
The silence between them went on a moment. JR’s jaw muscles stood out in shadow. But JR didn’t inform him it was Like hell, sir.
“Obey the regulations,” JR said. “Go back to work.”
JR walked off.
He didn’t know who was in the right about that encounter. He stood there with a pocketful of what had killed his mother. The ship was going into jump with him aboard, and if he didn’t take the drug he’d meet whatever it was in hyperspace that drove people crazy. The drugs were ordinary, they were what you had to take to get through the experience, and his mother had died only because she overdosed and depressed her nervous system. He knew all that.
And he knew that the clock was running down close to that event and that through an oversight he’d almost not had the drugs he was supposed to have. That was a fact, too, and if somebody hadn’t checked and there’d been some kind of emergency he knew he could have been in bad trouble. JR had come by to make sure he had the drug and knew what to do, so he couldn’t fault that as hostile behavior. It was just the little extra remark that just hadn’t been necessary.
He was scared. Scared of the event, terrified of the drug—he’d been tested for it: the court had wanted to know if his mother had given it to him, to a five-year-old. But her suicide had been solo. Probably not intended to happen while he was home. She’d loved him. She kept getting him back from the social system no matter how many times she gave him up. Wasn’t that love?
“So what’d JR want?”
The card game was over. Jeremy was back at his elbow. Assigned to be there: he suddenly drew that conclusion. Jeremy was always looking out for him not because Jeremy gave a damn but because Jeremy had orders.
He opened the counter and left, walking fast, nowhere, and then toward his quarters, which he realized was no refuge from Jeremy. He was cornered, and stopped, in mid-corridor.
“You can’t just walk off-duty,” Jeremy said. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened,” he said, and drew a couple of calmer breaths. He didn’t want to explain it. He didn’t want to deal with it. And he didn’t want to have to hold together incipient panic with a twelve-year-old hanging on his arm. “When are we going into jump?”
“About four hours.”
“Today?”
“Is there a problem?”
Is there a problem? He wanted to laugh. Or cry. “No,” he said. And turned back toward the laundry. “Just keep Vince off me. I’m not in a good mood.”
“Sure,” Jeremy said, and walked with him.
He couldn’t walk in with no commotion, Vince had to say something.
“Well, is cousin Fletcher going to take a walk?”
He grabbed a fistful of Vince’s jumpsuit.
“Fletcher, stop!” Jeremy said, and tried to push him and Vince apart, no luck where it came to budging his arm. “No fighting. Vince, cut it, don’t hassle him! Hear me?”
“Vince,” Linda said, in what sounded like real fear, and pushed at Vince as if Vince had a choice about it. She acted as if she might have prevented Vince swinging at him. At least she gave Vince an excuse to take his thirteen-year-old self in retreat about five paces and toward the next section of the laundry.
Jeremy and Linda did the age-old part of friends, calming Vince down as if he’d been fierce and unrestrainable, just on the verge of swinging on somebody two heads taller.
Vince had been flat pissing scared. Fletcher realized that, now, as he realized the kid had gotten him angry enough to do damage, which wasn’t called for. They were kids, and it wasn’t their fault the captain or whoever had put him down with them. He wished on the one hand he’d gone ahead and hit Vince and improved his attitude, But he told himself that a warning had settled it. He went back to folding sheets, telling himself that whatever a batch of snot-nosed kids took in stride, he could, and his mother’s case wasn’t his case, and he wasn’t going to panic or let the kids see how scared he was.
That was the trouble. He was scared. Scared of the drug as much as the jump, and telling himself, rationally, there wasn’t anything to be scared of. Sad about, upset about, yes, but not scared.
Not in front of Jeremy.
“So how’s he doing?” Bucklin asked before jump, and JR didn’t find a ready reply.
“Calm,” JR said, “mostly.” They were both on last moment patrol of the corridors. The ship was about to do another burn, this one of short duration, getting up to V enough to preserve vector and assure they didn’t make a momentary anomaly in the local sun. The warning had sounded, an order for all but jump crew to go to their cabins and stay there. The endless, upward-curving corridor was deserted, the doors all shut. They’d just passed the room Fletcher shared with Jeremy, on their way to their own quarters, senior and second-senior, the last two moving about down on A corridor, while upstairs, in B, much the same process would be going on. They’d collected their e-rations, they had their trank, and they were about to head for Tripoint, a set of three large mass-points that would anchor their jump toward Mariner.
Relatively busy as jump-points went. You followed the same procedures as at a star, but the triple mass made precise navigation tricky there. You could find out where you were after you’d arrived, but your precise arrival was just a little hard to coordinate. You got the latest navigational charts just before the ship left, charts shot to you in the final informational packet. Finity hadn’t been through Tripoint recently, but some ships at dock had, and the information they had on Tripoint’s precise numbers had gone to Pell Central along with the stock market data and civil records from Viking and Mariner and everywhere else in the network.
Tripoint had its hazards, and a ship arriving there even these days was careful who they met and who might be lurking. Since the War, this ship was always careful, and went in with someone ready at the guns.
But he didn’t think that was information their new cousin needed to know on his first jump.
Feet appeared on the horizon. Two pair. Legs followed. Chad and Lyra were walking the opposite direction in the ring, and they were meeting up. Circuit complete.
“No ball of flame in A28?” Lyra asked
“Nothing exciting,”Bucklin reported. “We don’t have to sit on him.”
“Damn,” Lyra said. “There goes my chance.”
Joke. There wasn’t any bunking about on board, New Rules, or Old. But cousin Fletcher’s felicitous sorting of the family genes—and his status as a stranger—had drawn remarks among the femme-cousins.
Fletcher might be just seventeen, but he was a well put together and mature seventeen, which, given he was new, was triggering interest spacers didn’t ordinarily feel toward a shipmate. He knew he probably ought to talk to Fletcher about that. It wasn’t something he could easily tell Jeremy to explain, Jeremy, whose body didn’t yet inform him what it would abundantly explain in the next few years.
But given how Fletcher had exploded, given the level of tension Fletcher was already carrying, it didn’t seem quite the moment.
When their brand-new and fine-looking cousin did mix with spacers on a foreign dockside in about ten days, subjective time, Fletcher would get offers… offers that would presume experience to match the face and body. It was going to be interesting.
They parted company, to separate quarters, the privilege of all the senior-juniors in a ship with too many vacant cabins. They hauled cargo in some of their unused space, right along with the huge shipping cannisters in the hold and the rim. It was Earth goods and downer wine they carried inside, high-priced cargo that needed not only gravity such as they could provide in the outer rim but specific temperatures, for its safety.
They were moving slowly, this trip, laden with, besides their luxury goods, plain staples: flour. They were vulnerable economically, vulnerable in terms of self-defense… not as heavy mass as they’d ever hauled, but heavy enough a feel to the ship to let them know they had cargo.
The last reports into Pell, from a ship inbound eight hours ago, said Tripoint was safe, free from lurkers. But that could change with any heartbeat A starship could arrive at Tripoint from various places, one of them a deep route, the sort only non-cargo ships used, reachable by a ship that had a very high engine/mass ratio. That deep route intersecting with a busy commercial route was what made it so valuable in the War, and valuable after to the black market, and to those just keeping an eye out—for various causes.
He was anxious about that place, on edge about this jump more than any except the one into their turnaround point, at Esperance. The bridge could ill afford distractions like a medical from A deck.
Chad and Lyra went on to their separate quarters. His and Bucklin’s were side by side, A20 and 21. They’d roomed together since they were knee-high to Jeremy. They had separate quarters now, using the spare space as office, each of them, but they stayed together. They walked in that direction.
“Well,” Bucklin said, “here we are, on our way to respectable trade.”
“Here’s to it,” JR said, and opened his own door, went in, sat down on a bunk he hadn’t visited in… how many hours?
There’d been staff meetings. Reviews about their handling qualities: the Old Man wanted that hammered home to everybody who was used to Finity moving with a lot more response than she’d have under these circumstances. Different set of rules, both navigational and defensive. In an emergency, since the captain had officially ordered him on standby and not on tape, he would be on-shift backup to Madison, leaving Alan and Francie to enjoy a little deeper sleep and the chance to do tape.
As short-handed as Finity had run, it could come on any given jump, any one of the captains failing to make it—find the Old Man was pushing it with every jump, stretched thin, year upon year upon year. Madison wasn’t that far behind, himself, and a rough exit and Alan and Francie doing tape at the time, could put him in the Old Man’s chair, giving orders to Helm simply because there wasn’t another alternative.
So he had the numbers to memorize, the instructions and locations in navigation as well as the figures on their laded mass and moment in exit, and by the very nature of his assignment memorizing them the old-fashioned way, the way they’d done before the Old Man had given in and admitted that tape-study wasn’t going to turn the crew and particularly the juniors into Unionized automatons.
God, they’d even gotten hypermath through Vince’s head since that blessed change in the Rules.
And they couldn’t short Jeremy his education the entire pass around their course, not even a significant number of jumps. Jeremy was going to go on study again in a couple of jumps or spend some of his rec evenings later this year locked in a room with Fletcher and both of them doing deep-study.
He hadn’t broken that small piece of news to the boys yet. Jeremy was still delighted with his new roommate, with an almost-brother who was large, inept with the routines, and mentally—
—different. Say that much for dealing with a stationer.
Much as he didn’t like it.
He stowed the boots in his locker and tugged on the light-soled jumpboots that would protect his feet if he had to move and still wouldn’t cramp up during a quasi-sleep that, in his body’s time, would amount to about two weeks.
You didn’t want tight clothing during that time, because your body wouldn’t do much of anything while the drug stayed in your body—you wouldn’t move, but you were just marginally aware. Your mind could process things, like dream-state, and you could learn things of a factual sort, and if you were vastly disturbed, at the edge of the state, as you were coming out, sometimes you could get up off your bunk and do things marginally under the control of your conscious mind.
That was the spooky part—and never having known anyone who’d not been through the experience of a hyperspace jump from way before birth, when pregnant women had to get off mild thymedine and onto hyprazine, a drug which would intentionally get to the fetal bloodstream, he had extreme last-minute regrets about leaving Fletcher to Jeremy. Jeremy had a generally calming effect on Fletcher—unless Fletcher hyped instead of tranked down, and thought he’d met the devil in hyperspace.
Maybe he should pull Fletcher into his quarters. The rest of the crew wouldn’t take it as exalting Fletcher, but Jeremy would take it as a slap in the face.
Jeremy had a beeper; Jeremy was unfazed by jump and had been known to be up on his feet during the dump-downs which the young smart-ass still illicitly did, he was all but certain. Nobody among the juniors, including himself or Bucklin, would be faster to have their wits about them if Fletcher did spook; he was sure of that. Jeremy also had two extra doses of trank and knew what to do with them, right through the plastic envelope on any available surface of his roommate if he had to.
You didn’t track a kid toward Helm if he didn’t have the killer reflexes. And Jeremy had them, better than anybody in years.
It remained to prove what they’d make out of Fletcher.
Fletcher sat on his bunk putting on the lighter boots and the light sweater Jeremy advised, a lot calmer than he thought he’d possibly be now that the event was on him. Jeremy’s juvenile cheerfulness was reassuring. “It gets kind of cold,” Jeremy said matter-of-factly. “And you can’t get up to get anything. You might want to, but you’d lose your balance, even if you can think that far. They really advise against it.”
He’d thought people slept through it, numb to anything that happened to them. But his mother had been aware enough, walking around. She’d talked to him when she was on it. He didn’t know how high a dose she’d been taking.
Too much, the last time… that was for damned certain. But it wasn’t poison. It was just a drug. A drug that thousands of people took regularly with no ill effects.
The takehold sounded. He scrambled to get belted in, to get a pillow under his head. And to get the book set up, which Jeremy had lent him. It fed out into a game visor, for when he wanted it. It was an adventure story, something called War of the Worlds. He wouldn’t spend the hours with nothing to do but think about his situation.
“Usually we take tape,” Jeremy said, “usually it’s math—or biology,” A wrinkle of Jeremy’s nose. “But they want to kind of, you know, make sure you’re all right with this before they let you take tape during it. So I’m staying off tape for the while, so I can help you if you, you know, need something.”
“What’s dangerous about it?” Stupid question. He knew the answers there were.
“Just, you know, if you didn’t get set right and needed something.”
“I thought you couldn’t move.”
“You shouldn’t move. I mean, you can scratch your nose or something. You try not to think about it, but your nose always itches. If you can find it and not hit yourself in the eye. Best is just to relax. Watch the pretty lights. There’s usually lights.”
“Usually?”
“If you’re not doing tape. Or you think about stuff. Think about happy stuff. Think about the happiest stuff you can think of. That’s the best.”
He damn sure didn’t want nightmares. A solid month of nightmares. He didn’t want to think about it. “How many of these have you been through?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe… maybe fifty, sixty. And Tripoint. Tripoint’s a cinch now. You come out with shooting going on, alarms going off—that’s where you just lie there wondering…”
“Where’s that?”
“Oh, Tripoint once. At Earth.”
Somehow, on this ship, he didn’t think the kid was lying. “On it?”
“Not on it. They were shooting, you could see it on the scopes. They were shooting, just all hell going on.” Jeremy was winding tighter, the way he’d been with the vid games, muscles tight, hands balled into fists, beating a short, small rhythm as if there were music Jeremy could hear. “Like, if you get hulled,—we did, once—there’s this sound—there’s this sound goes through everything. You don’t hear it. And the lights going off. Everything’s red when you wake up, those emergency lights—”
“That happened?” He didn’t think that was a lie, either. He’d hit a nerve of some kind, touched off something, and the kid was scared—of what, he didn’t know—staring at sights he didn’t see,
“Yeah, it happened.” Breath came through Jeremy’s teeth and he seemed clenched tight, every muscle. “But we got ‘em back. We got ‘em back at Bryant’s.”The beat of hands continued, a drumbeat against his drawn-up legs, rapid, tight movements. And the engines cut in. “We’re going. We’re going. Here we go.”
The kid was spooked. He’d expected he’d be crawling the walls in panic, but Jeremy was wired, wound, caught up in memory Jeremy had just advised him not to access: think of happy things. Jeremy wasn’t thinking of happy memories.
“We don’t take the drug now?” he asked Jeremy, any question, to gain some doorway into Jeremy’s private terror. The bunks were tilting, making their whole cabin one double- deck bunk the way they did when the ship was accelerating. He couldn’t think of anything else to say but to question what he was trying, in his own fear, to remember to do. “We wait for the announcement. Right?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy’s voice came to him. “Yeah, wait. Just wait. They’ll say when.”
He imagined Jeremy up above him, still spooked, still wound tight as a spring. He didn’t know whether Jeremy was always like this on jumps, or whether his own fears were rational, or whether that last memory still haunted the kid. The ship getting hulled…
That wasn’t something ships survived. But Finity was a big ship; among the biggest. And it had been, for years, fighting the Fleet, hunting the hunters that preyed on shipping, firing and being fired on…
“Are we looking for any trouble?” he called up to Jeremy, trying without seeing him, to test whether the kid was all right “Are we really going to Mariner? Is that where we’re really going?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said back, “On this vector? Yeah. Mariner via Tripoint, We’re hauling cargo. This time it’s real cargo. For us, not for Mallory. Tons of Scotch whiskey and coffee and chocolate. We used to haul missiles and hard-rations.”
Mallory. Mallory of Norway, The rebel captain who’d defended Pell. Cargo for Mallory, whose ship had docked only rarely at Pell in his lifetime.
Supplying Mallory with necessities? Making cargo runs to the warships out in space?
That was for history books. The War was something you heard about in documentaries and vid games.
But Jeremy, at twelve, had been out on the fringes for seventeen years. This ship had gotten hit during the War. Or after. During the pirate hunts, which had danced in and out of the news all his life, just part of the background of his life.
But it was real, out there.
Correction. Out here. On this ship he was on. It was very real to Jeremy. It had never been unreal to Jeremy.
He wasn’t hearing anything out of the kid. He wanted a voice. Wanted truth. Wanted an estimation of what to expect out here. “You see any pirates?”
“What do you mean?” Jeremy asked.
“I mean, you ever come close to any? Recently?”
The force was slamming them into the mattresses. It wasn’t easy to move, but Jeremy had rolled over and looked over the edge of his bunk,
“Where do you think we’ve been for seventeen years? They teach you anything on that station?”
He’d been a fool. “I guess not enough.”
“Half this ship died,” Jeremy said fiercely, hair hanging, face reddening. “My mama and half of everybody aboard, some of them juniors who never knew what hit ‘em. We got a decompression in half the ring and we had damn-all getting back to a port where we could get us put back together. I wish we was still hunting them and not going on this stupid trade run, massed up so we can’t handle worth a damn at an insystem wallow. Captain-sir wants us back to trading, and Captain Mallory says the War’s over, but they’re still out there, there’s pirates still out there we haven’t got, and Mallory’s still hunting ‘em. When I make senior, damn-all, and if we haven’t gotten after those bastards again, I’m going to jump ship and join Mallory’s crew. “
“You think they could try to raid us on this run?”
“I don’t know.” Jeremy’s face had gone an alarming color from the strain of hanging over the edge. “They say it’s quiet right now and the stations don’t want to give us any more money to keep us out hunting. Madison says they haven’t got hit, is what. They’ve been safe for seventeen years and they don’t want to pay, and we’re the reason they haven’t been hit for seventeen years. Year we were born and we left Pell, the station was a wreck.”
The first years on Pell had been lean, that was sure. His childhood memories were scarce food and a lot of construction.
“Let a ship get hit,” Jeremy said out of the air above him, finally back all the way in his bunk, “and you bet the merchanters are going to be yelling. Where’s Finity? They’ll say. Why isn’t Finity on the job? And maybe they’ll pay the dock charges for us, or all the ships will go on strike so the stations have to let us dock and fuel on station-charge. That’s what the Old Man did before. He shut down all merchant traffic and nobody hauled. He did it when Union wanted to Unionize us and he did it when the Earth Company wanted us not to trade Union-side, and he did it to cut the Fleet off so the Fleet couldn’t get supply. We could do it again.”
The merchanter strikes were famous. It was something he knew from school. “So why don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremy said, and then said, in a lower voice: “I think the captain’s getting old.”
Captain James Robert Neihart. The Captain. The one who’d hauled him aboard and wrecked his life. It seemed to him that the captain had power enough to get his way. And that Quen did.
Jeremy didn’t say any more. The acceleration kept up, and kept up. Fletcher put the visor on and turned the book on, and moved only his thumb to change pages.
He was still scared. Maybe more so, but less so of the jump itself. The pirates sounded more active than the station news had had the story. He hadn’t meant to tread on Jeremy’s sensitivities. Jeremy had lost a mother, too, in the War, or what passed for the peace, and they had that in common, as well as their birth.
He didn’t know enough about history. He’d gotten through his courses without having to know that much. He was good on the governments of Earth, far off things that were more exotic than evocative of real pain. The construction had been an inconvenience of his childhood, places you couldn’t go, because there was always construction in the way, but he’d actively avoided knowing about the War, or his mother’s reason for being where she’d died. He’d understood that Q section had been pretty bad, and some of the people that had been in Q section were still visiting the psychs. Some had even asked for a minor wipe, to purge that time from their memories. Which said it had been pretty bad, because the psychs had granted a wipe to some, and they hadn’t even considered it for his mother. Even if she later killed herself.
“This is James Robert. Jump in five minutes. First warning. Trank down. Fletcher, welcome aboard, and have a sound sleep”
Me? he asked himself. The high and mighty senior and universally-famous captain talked to him, in front of the whole damn crew?
“Trank down,” Jeremy said from above him. “Now. You all right?”
“Yeah. Yes.” He’d mapped out every move he needed to make. His hands were shaking as he pulled the visor off and stowed it the way he’d been warned to stow everything loose, shoved it in the tight elastic pocket at the edge of the bunk. “Where’s best to give it?” JR had said shoot it in the wrist, but Jeremy knew easy ways for everything.
“Anywhere below the neck. Arm’s fine. Push up your sleeve and just hit it.”
He pulled out the packet with nightmares of dropping it, fought with the tear strip, got his sleeve up and froze… just froze, hand shaking so he almost did drop it.
“You give it yet?”Jeremy called down to him.
He pushed the packet hard against his bare forearm. The spring kicked. He didn’t feel it as sharply as he thought he should. It didn’t sting. He held up the clear packet to his eye. The plastic was flat against the backing, fluid depleted. It had gone in. It looked as if it had. Maybe he should take the other one. In case. Maybe it had ejected on the bedclothes instead of in his arm…
“Fletcher? Did you do it? Are you all right?”
“Yes!” He was shivering. But things were growing distant. He felt the drug insinuating itself through his veins. It had gone in, he’d just been so scared he hadn’t felt the sting. He was getting slower…
Slower and lighter at the same time. Maybe the ship had cut the engines. It felt that way…
“Fletcher…” he heard someone say…
They were looking for him…
Rain swept the trees in sheets, and battered the mask, making the seal against his face slippery and uncertain as he traded cylinders—the first trade-out he’d had to make, and sooner than he’d expected. That early depletion of a life-and-death resource scared him; rather than squander another, he replaced just one, just the one with the end gone dark red, all the way expired.
His hands were trembling as he shoved the replacement in, and he couldn’t get the rain-wet facial seal to take and reseal the way it ought. So he pressed it hard against his face as he walked, mad, now, mad at all the world above and half the world of Downbelow and knowing he had to focus down and get his wits about him before he had an accident Downbelow just wouldn’t forgive.
It was getting dark, now: simple fact in the domes, or on the station, where twilight happened as a technological choice and a human hand could revise it.
Not out here. A dozen times he’d tell himself he had to just turn around, go back, follow River home. But he’d long passed any hope of using any excuse he could think of but one: he was lost.
And that was the truth. He’d gotten himself in such a mess now he didn’t know how to get out.
Couldn’t blame anyone—not for the lost part. That was stupid. And if he died of it, he couldn’t pass the blame for that. He had a locator. And he walked without losing it, because dammit, he wasn’t giving up. Not yet. Not until he was a lot closer to being out of cylinders than he was.
And maybe—maybe—it was a tiny idea, a forlorn and hopeless hope—maybe somebody would find him, and maybe he would hold out until the ship undocked, or until—remotest of all hopes—until they were so glad he was alive they’d understand how hard they’d pushed him, and maybe he could engineer something if he just got a chance to talk to the psychs.
He’d hated them lifelong. But right now he saw them as a chance: he was good at talking to them. He’d say he’d spooked because of being followed and that at first he’d really meant to get the saw before it went on his record. And then he could break down and say it wasn’t the idea, and he’d lied, and it was just immaturity. He had just turned seventeen. You got some license to be immature, didn’t you? They gave plenty to Marshall Willett. Or Jim Frantelli. Jim had a book full of reprimands on stupid things, and he didn’t have any. Not one. Wouldn’t that count for something? Somewhere?
Or if they got onto him and said he couldn’t come back to the program he could talk to the downers. He’d tell Melody and Patch if he wasn’t there after they came back from the walk, they should sit down and strike. They’d get all the downers behind him and they’d say no downer would work if they didn’t have Fletch—
He was kidding himself. It wasn’t going to happen. Melody and Patch couldn’t organize something like that even if he could make them understand. They’d try to help him, but they weren’t the kind of downer that ran things. He didn’t even know if he’d find them out here, or if the rains had started the spring and they’d have gone off somewhere he didn’t know, all unknowing that their Fetcher was in trouble.
He’d just needed—just needed to have some breathing room. A day or two before people started invoking courts and lawyers and sending him through it all again——
He’d worked hard. He’d be happy to work hard all his life, and earn the station-share the ship was suing the station about and never spend a credit except on food. He’d be good down here.
It just wasn’t damn all fair, and he hated their damn ship and he hated the family that had left his mother on the station.
Intellectually he knew they’d had no choice, sick as she was; but there was a childish part of him that was mad about that; and a much more rational part that hated them for their damned persistence, coming back again and again with their lawsuits, and the station for its stupid automated accounting systems that kept kicking the bill out again—when all they wanted was not to be billed for fourteen and a half million c and all the station wanted was a quittance so they could either put him on the books or get him off the books. It was two authorities playing games with each other, all technicalities, for a stupid ship that refused to pay his mother’s bills and a station that refused to admit he was born to a station-share and kept billing Finity for his existence here.
Stupid games. All these years that he’d been trying to get on the level and have a life of his own, for God’s sake, what did they want of him, except to go one more round of lawsuits and make points on each other. He hated—
Mud sent him skidding, down, down, down in the twilight, and River was below. He grabbed at things in fright, and got his hand on a branch, and held, having torn muscles and scared himself. He hung there and slowly began to get his feet under him, and crawled up the slope on his hands and knees, asking himself why it mattered, and wouldn’t it have been better after all if he’d just gone in and saved everybody the bother.
It took him a long time to get his feet under him. When he walked again it was with a knot of pain in his throat and a knot of fear around his heart, with no notion where he was going.
To see as much of the world as he could see, he decided, before he pushed the come-get-me button on the locator and admitted the dream was over. There wasn’t much point in wandering in the dark and using up cylinders. So he’d just sit down and stay warm and not lose his head.
He was shivering when he did find a place to sit. The suit had a flash lining, and you could pull a patch off and it would heat up. It would only do it once, and then that suit was done and a discard, but he was going to be at the halfway point of cylinders by tomorrow and he’d have to go back or he wouldn’t come back.
You wouldn’t die of Downbelow’s air right away. If you breathed it you got medical problems.
Maybe if he just lied and told them he had breathed the air they’d keep him on the station. They’d put him in the hospital, and they’d find out he hadn’t, and he’d be in a lot of trouble, but he wouldn’t be on the ship.
Or maybe he’d just really do it, just take the mask off and come back really sick and not have to think about the ship. He’d be a medical case, then, maybe for the rest of his life, just like his mother.
But he’d seen that. He didn’t want it.
He’d think about solutions tomorrow, he decided. He’d think when he had to think. He pulled the patch to heat the suit, and felt the warmth spread in the folds, first, then, gradually to the rest of his body.
Then there was nothing to do but sit there, while the rain roared in the trees and River roared in his banks nearby.
Nunn would have gotten in a lot of trouble, Fletcher imagined, for thinking he was going to walk tamely back to the dorm-dome. He was sort of sorry about that. Nunn never had done anything to him.
It was damned hard not to think what a mess he’d gotten himself in. He wished he had the strength to keep walking so he didn’t have to listen to his own mind work, and to his own common sense say how badly he’d screwed up.
If you had a cylinder go out while you were sleeping you just got slower and slower and maybe didn’t wake up. He should have checked out how far gone the cylinders were before it got dark. He wasn’t used to places that became dark with no light switch to flip. It was dark, now, and he couldn’t check them. That was what they said. If you get lost, don’t go to sleep. He could go by feel and change out to ones he knew were new; but if he ran around with a bunch of unwrapped cylinders in his pockets he could ruin a few, or he could get them wet in the rain and the damp.
Hell with it, he thought. He thought he had enough time left on the ones that were in.
The scare when he’d nearly fallen in Old River a while ago had begun, however, to drive something of his self-preservation out of him. It had been a sharp, keen danger, not the sickly kind of terror he hated so much worse—sitting in a lawyer’s office and listening to people disposing of his life. He’d nearly fallen in the river and he began slowly to realize now he wasn’t scared. Just toss the dice, and maybe he’d decide to come back and maybe he wouldn’t.
If he passed the safe limits of choice, then maybe he’d make it, and maybe he wouldn’t. In either case, he had more control over his life than the people who ran things would ever give him.
He was screwing them up good, was what he was doing. They’d be upset, and he wasn’t damned sorry.
Probably Bianca would be upset, too, but then, Bianca didn’t know his record. When people found that out they quit caring, and most of them got away from him so fast their tracks smoked.
Melody and Patch would be upset. Melody most of all. But Melody hoped for a new baby. Hoped he’d grown up and found a girl of his own kind only so she could have a baby and quit taking care of a messed-up human kid.
When he thought about that, he hurt inside. Aged seventeen, safe and secret in the dark, he hurt, for all the things that had ever gone wrong___
They were calling him again…
Wouldn’t let him be alone, and it was all he wanted…
…”Fletcher…”
“Fletcher,” someone said from outside, and he blinked, shaky, sick. Someone—his eyes were blurred—lifted his head up after several tries and succeeded after he began to cooperate with the effort to lift him. Someone put something to his lips and said, “Drink,” so he closed his lips on the straw and drank. It was what his body needed, a taste told him that.
The somebody was a younger cousin. Jeremy. The place was the ship.
The arm he was holding himself up with began to shake. The place smelled like sweat and old clothes. “Something wrong with the ship?” He found the strength to panic, and tried to sit up.
“No,” Jeremy said, and slipped his arm free and let him struggle with the belts that were holding him. “Keep drinking the juice. I’m senior by a month. I get the shower first”
“Well, did something happen?” he called after Jeremy, thinking because it had been so short a time, they must have aborted the run…But things had changed. He felt his face—the little trace of beard, dead skin that rolled off under his fingers. His clothes were disgusting. Like month-old laundry. The smell was him.
“We’re at Tripoint,” Jeremy called back from inside the shower. “Drink the juice! You’ll be sorry if you don’t! We’re going to be blowing V in a bit. Don’t panic if the ship sort of goes away. It just does that. It’s kind of wild. About two, three times.”
He had three packets of the stuff. He drained the first. There was a terrible moment of giddiness, where the deck seemed to dissolve under him and the walls went nowhere. He was utterly disoriented, and slumped down on the bed until the feeling went away.
“That was the first,” Jeremy called out. “Damn, that was hard!”
“First what?” He felt sick at his stomach.
“K-dump,” Jeremy yelled back. There was the sound of the shower. “Braking, hyperspace style. We don’t go up all the way, we just kind of brush it. Slows us down”
He knew something about hyperspace. He’d never imagined feeling it. They’d just touched the hyperspace interface. He felt shaky and ripped open another juice, so thirsty his mouth felt dusty.
Things tasted too sweet, and too sour. The green walls had a flavor. The smell had a color, and not a pretty one.
Most of all, the dreadful thing had happened, he was no longer at Pell, he was out of reach of home, and the only thing he could think of was a desperate need for liquid and what taste told him was in that liquid. He ripped open another drink packet. He sat there sipping mineral-reinforced juice until Jeremy came out to look for a change of clothes.
The intercom came on. What sounded like a mechanical voice called their names, and Vince’s and Linda’s, and said, “Galley duty.”
“Shower’s yours,” Jeremy said. “We’ve got galley this round. All those pots and pans. Lucky us. But it’s not bad. Rise and shine.”
He felt like hell. And they were going to be working. The rebel part of him said ignore it, lie here, make them come get him. But it was better than lying in a bunk thinking. He stripped off and went to the shower, and was in the middle of a steamy, lung-hydrating deluge when the siren sounded.
“Takehold!” Jeremy screamed from outside. “Stay put! Damn, what’s he doing up there?”
He didn’t know what to do or which wall to brace himself against. The world dissolved and reformed. The water hit him, boiling hot. Or the world had come back. He leaned against the shower wall hoping to drown and not to be blown to atoms. Shaking head to foot.
“You all right?” Jeremy yelled.
“The emergency has ended” a calm voice said on the intercom. “The ship is stable. That was a reposition on receipt of an unidentified, now ID’ed as Union military Amity. All clear. Request roll call and safety check,”
“Well, damn all, what are they doing here?” Jeremy said from outside the door. “Bridge wants us to call in. You all right, Fletcher?”
“Fine,” he said He stood there while the fans dried him off and he shook and shivered in the warm air. He managed to ask, meekly, “Is something wrong?”
“Must be all right,” Jeremy said through the door, “Helm must’ve not liked the look of things. But we got our all clear. We can move about”
Move about? He was in the God-help-him shower. “Do we do that a lot?”
“Pretty rare we see anybody,” Jeremy said “It’s empty out here. We didn’t nearly hit her, understand. We just, if we see anybody, we change V. In case they, you know, aren’t up to any good. In case they fired. That is a Union carrier out there.”
“So?”
“So this is sort of Alliance territory. They can come here, just kind of nosing around, but that’s one big ship out there. Usually they’d send just a cruiser to look around. That’s a whole damn command center.”
“Friendly?”
“Yeah. Sort of. It’s pretty wild. Helm must’ve forgot we were hauling.”
He opened the shower door and felt the chill outside. He dressed in clean coveralls, trying to conceal the shakes he was suffering, He’d dropped weight, he’d noticed that when he’d been in the shower. He felt hollow inside, and wanted another fruit juice, but they were out.
“So are we still likely for a takehold?” he asked Jeremy. “Can we go down to the galley, or are we stuck here?”
“We’re supposed to be on the new Old Rules,” Jeremy said, “whatever that means. That everything’s supposed to be looser and if we get a takehold it’s not a takehold like they’re going to be shooting. Not unless they say ‘red.’ Then it’s serious and we’re back on the old New Rules. But I guess the old New Rules still apply on the bridge all the time. Damn, that was a stop! I bet they rearranged the galley good and proper. Cook’s going to be cussing the air blue.”
They were crazy. The whole ship and its company was crazy, and he was still shaking.
“But I guess it’s all right to go,” Jeremy said, “You ready? Guess they’re not going to shoot.”
Pure nerves, JR discovered when he reported in on the bridge. Nobody blamed Helm. Their pilot had made a precautionary move when he picked up a carrier’s large presence in the local buoy information, maintaining V.
Then a fast drop to non-combatant stance, all before the rest of them knew anything was going on and before the carrier’s advanced, fire-linked systems could read and confirm their ID off stored files. The deep spacetime punch and quick relocation of their larger than average mass could, unhappily, have given them a warlike, carrierlike, appearance—a paradoxical faster-than-light presence that would propagate through the spacetime sheet in the same way a pin-drop could make itself heard in a still room.
But they weren’t, in that instant, helpless and spotted in the fire-path of the carrier’s hair-triggered defense systems. For one thing, in the hand of cards that Old Man Inertia dealt, an entering ship always had the ace if they had a pilot who knew how to use it. The entering ship could fire downslope if they chose; reposition if they chose. If they hadn’t been willing to meet the carrier, they’d have gone silent and unlocatable somewhere along a track dictated only by physics and the local mass—a track that carrier could calculate, but not soon enough or precisely enough, on a ship that still carried enough V to jump out again on the Viking heading. And fire as they did so.
That rapid stutter of presence they’d made, however, was delay enough to let their systems determine that the presence in the jump-point was Union, not Mazianni, and their subsequent stop let the carrier find out the same about them, since they’d been lawfully using their ID when they came in.
It was still a jittery feeling, a once-enemy dreadnought in possession of the Tripoint system and themselves in its crosshairs. By what JR detected on the displays, the carrier didn’t look at all to be in transit of the jump-point. It was low-energy on a vector that said it had come from Viking, but it wasn’t proceeding. It was just sitting. Looking around. Logging traffic.
Prowling the edges of Alliance territory it wasn’t supposed to visit… except on specific invitation of Pell, which he didn’t think it had.
Mallory’s invitation, however, in the deep uncertainties of this post-War period, might be the answer. The carrier was possibly—possibly—moving out of its territory in order to back up Mallory in Earth space after they’d left Mallory unattended. That would imply Finity’s decision had been made many months earlier than he thought it had—but it wouldn’t be the first time he’d been caught ignorant of Finity’s high-level operations.
Junior officers were expected to guess, and to hone their strategic skills against real situations, trying to outfigure senior officers. But it didn’t help junior officer nerves. He’d taken himself up to B deck at breakneck speed, unshaven, still in flight-slippers, and checked in on the bridge. So had Madison, who was supposed to be the next shift, and who obviated all necessity for him to stay here—but stay he did.
In the duty of second-guessing command without disturbing operations, JR went up to Scan 5’s post and simply observed for a moment, in order not to disturb the critical, multilevel operations of that post.
“Rider status,” he asked Scan 5 after a moment of stable display.
“Uncertain,” Five reported without turning in his chair. “Carrier ID confirmed as Amity. Output normal, range 5 minutes.”
The carrier, five minutes away as light traveled, had resumed ID output, a measure of confidence as it looked them over. Scan and passive-recept alone, however, couldn’t entirely confirm what Amity was doing, whether it was sitting there with its several rider-ships still attached and therefore harmless, or whether it had already deployed them as heavy-fire platforms, lying transmission-silent and ready at various points about the area. Finity’s optics were surely in play, along with other methods of search.
The carrier hadn’t obliged their optics by turning a profile that would make its status clear, either. He saw the fuzzy image and the enhancement and didn’t take that situation for a chance arrangement in their relative positions. Five minutes was close, as ships reckoned entry positions. It was not close in targeting.
They had had an uneasy working arrangement with Union military that had held for nearly two decades. They’d even worked, though not lately, with this particular carrier. Both Alliance and Union protected their secrets, and Union was still very wary, particularly of Mallory’s intentions, even after two decades.
Bucklin and Lyra showed up to take their stations: apprentice-posts, unassigned chairs, like his, that left them able to observe, not necessarily to work at this critical juncture. He made a quiet approach to his own regular post, near the Old Man and Madison, noting that by now in ordinary procedure their bridge shift should have changed. Madison’s team was held, not yet called to duty, and that changeover might be delayed indefinitely.
Then the Old Man engaged Com. Voice meant that senior officials had now made station on the carrier, if they hadn’t been there at the moment of their entry. JR sat beside Bucklin and Lyra and put in his earpiece to catch the drift of that message, relieved to hear the Old Man’s voice addressing the Union captain in a casualness that didn’t betoken hostility.
Reassuring. There was code passing, now, he’d bet, words that didn’t quite fit the conversation, and there was at the same time he noted a relaxation of the Old Man’s features, a little hint of humor.
Madison spared JR a direct glance, a nod, a handsign that meant, ordinarily, Ours, but meant, here, JR believed, Friendly approach.
A time-lagged response from Amity came then, that said:
“Greetings from the admiral and his respects for your efforts at Wyatt’s, Captain Neihart. You may pass that along to your colleague on Norway. I must say your appearance is a surprise. I trust it forecasts success and not bad news at Earth. Where are you bound?”
“Esperance. We’ve resigned from the chase, sir. We’ve gone simply to routine cargo-carrying on this run, and we’ll be back in the trade from now on if things go as we plan. The pirate hunt is growing thin, success in that regard. Now we have to teach these young people of ours the merchant trade, give them a new view of the universe. Greetings to the admiral and our hopes for future cooperation. We’ll be quick to respond if we do spot trouble-sorry about that reposition—but we’re hauling cargo now and we’ll even be taking mail from time to time. Earth’s as stable as I’ve seen it and we hope to have eliminated some of the flow of goods we were concerned about. Salutations from our colleague and expectations of good news from your arena.”
Time-lagged conversations tended to run simultaneously and to change topics multiple times in the same paragraph, following the informational wavefront that had just come to the speaker.
“I wish I’d had the wherewithal to load full at Sol,” the Old Man said, “A load of whiskey, chocolate and wood on our last run, however. I’ll send you over a bottle of Mallory’s favorite Scotch. Her compliments. And mine.”
Audacious. And from Mallory? A Union carrier might not want to swallow a pill Finity dispensed, fearing bombs or biologics. But it was a handsome gift at the prices that prevailed past Pell
A startling implication of connections and conduits of information. The hell, then, they hadn’t known some Union contact might be here. Yet it had startled Helm, appearing as it did? Revise all estimates: they’d expected a smaller ship, but some ship.
The junior officer, kept in the dark and fed whatever data he could find by feel, could at least surmise the fact that they’d expected someone, and spooked for fear of the size of what they’d found. Helm might not have picked it up from buoy input. Helm might have read the interface itself, and been just that fast reacting to the unexpected.
“Delighted to receive fire,” one of the most powerful warships in space answered that offer. “Good voyage to you, Finity.”
A Union carrier was going to search empty space for a beeper-can and a bottle of Scotch whiskey?
Orders were passing. The ops crew down on A deck was finding a cannister, basically a smuggler’s rig, certainly not something you could buy at a station outfitters—and an item which they did chance to have, by some cosmic and unsuspected luck.
As he listened, Lyra, as the available junior-most crew, found herself dispatched on an unusual mission to the captain’s private bar.
“Is Scotch all of it?” he asked Madison as the attenuated conversation wound down to sign-offs.
“Smart lad,” Madison said, and nothing more.
So there was something from Mallory that didn’t involve Scotch, something that they’d been carrying in event of some such meeting somewhere along their course, and that a Union carrier was now going to pick up.
Curious dealings they had. No, they wouldn’t poison-pill a Union carrier. Not on their fragile lives. There was something going on in this voyage that he’d lay odds wasn’t in the line of trade: Mallory’s business, almost certainly so, and Mallory was always a wild card in the affairs of Pell Station, apt to take any side that served her purpose. She was a former merchanter, former Fleet officer and bitterly opposed to Union. And had worked with Union against the Fleet. There was no side she hadn’t been on, at one time or another, including Earth’s.
If Mallory was out there keeping an eye on something, even expecting this carrier, or a carrier to be operating on this border, then there was something afoot. He thought Mallory was back near Sol.
But there were some things for which the senior captains gave no answers because there was no need-to-know, and because crew on liberties were vulnerable and sometimes too damned talkative. Even Family crew.
The more people involved, the more chance of accidents. Clearly if Madison wanted to tell him what was in that packet besides a bottle of extravagantly expensive Scotch, Madison would have said, directly. And it was still the junior’s job to figure things out.
Foolish question he’d asked Madison. Pursuing confirmations, he checked his output from Nav, and then got up to walk past Nav’s more junior stations and confirm their exact arrival point at the dark mass. He should have asked…
“How’d the kid make it through?” Helm 1 asked, Hans Andrew, blindsiding him on the other matter of his reasonable concern as he passed the helmsman’s chair. Fletcher. If there’d been a problem in that department, it had been a junior problem, and no one in senior crew had had time to ask him—until now. Odd and eclectic, the concerns that sometimes came out of Helm, who more than anyone on the ship was focused on the shadow of that carrier and on space at large.
“Fine. Jeremy reported in, they’re fine.” Jeremy had called him as his direct report-to station while Fletcher was in the shower, and reported himself and Fletcher as in good order. In the crisis, JR hadn’t yet checked on the specific details. Fletcher was alive, God hope he was sane.
Things were still questionable on the bridge.
“Sorry to do that to him,” Helm muttered: Hans Andrew, peppershot gray and eyes that, focused on his console, still frantically darted to small side motions with the marginal come- down off a pilot’s hype. JR suspected that Hans was still tracking little if any of the intership communications—nor cared. When a pilot decided to move his ship in reaction to a developing situation, he did so on the situation, not on plan, not on policy, and sometimes not on the captain’s orders: had to, at the speeds Hans’ mind dealt with. The active pilot was in one sense the most aware individual on the ship; the gunner and Scan chief were right behind, with guns autoed live the nanosecond Finity dropped into system.
Meanwhile Helm would ask about the new kid on A deck, but not about the carrier, and Helm’s eyes—one of them with a VR contact—would dart and track minutiae of the ship’s exterior environment on his instruments, alive to that with a focus that concentratedly ignored any micro-dealings of ops. Unless you were the captain, you didn’t talk to Helm unless addressed by Helm. You didn’t bother him when he was hyped.
And he didn’t answer Helm’s comment except to dismiss a concern Helm had evidently carried into hyperspace with him, a stray thought from a month ago. It cleared an item from Helm’s agenda. At the speed Helm’s mind thought, mere human transactions, the negotiations of captains and admirals, must take an eternity.
He walked on to the empty chairs at Nav. Bucklin joined him after about ten minutes in which not much happened but routine and chatter back and forth with the carrier regarding a month- ago solar flare off EpEri, Viking’s sun. “We’ve just dropped the beeper-can,” Bucklin said in a low tone as he sat down in the vacant chair beside him. “What do you make of this crazy goings-on?”
“An interesting voyage,” JR said.
“I thought we’d retired.”
The Old Man’s full of surprises.”
“You think Mallory’s out there at the moment?”
He thought about it, all the deep dark fringes of the sprawling mass-point where whole Fleets could hide, a hundred ships a mere pinprick on the skin of the universe. Lose something out here? Easy as not knowing what tiny arc to sweep with your scan, in a universe noisy with stars and blinded by local mass.
But he shook his head.
“No. Personally, I don’t. I think she’s somewhere at the other end of Earth’s space. While we lump along like an ore-hauler, on the merchant routes. That ship won’t use them.” Meaning the carrier, meaning the commercial short hops. There were further routes, that ships like that one, with its powerful engines, could use. And he envied that Union ship its capacities, its hair-trigger systems, with all his War-taught soul. State of the art, start to finish. Beautiful. A life remote from a future of slogging about trading stops and loading cargo.
“There is the deep route out of here,” he said to Bucklin. “The other thing that carrier has, besides riders, is an admiral. They might be working with Mallory.”
“She’s telling that carrier where to look for trouble. That’s what I’m thinking. I think we’re a go-between, I don’t think Union wants their ships near her any oftener than they can avoid it.”
It was likely true, in principle. There were a lot of bitter grudges between Union and Alliance, even between specific Union and Alliance ships—resentments from the War years. Mallory very possibly stood off at one end of Alliance space, telling Union where a Fleet operation might pop out of hyper-space in their side, doing nothing that would bring her under Union guns… in these years when the pirate operations were dying down and when, consequently, Union might perceive their need for Mallory as less—as less, that was, if they were fools.
JR drew a long breath in speculation, thinking of the Hinder Stars, where their patrols failed to keep universal security. That strand of stars, the set of stars that had enabled the first starships to reach out from Earth to Pell, was a bridge that no firepower man had yet invented could blow out of existence. Stellar mass was damn stubborn in being where it was at any given moment.
If you moved like a carrier, on huge engines, and took those long-jump routes only a light-laden ship could take, you could, however, bypass that bridge entirely, take the direct route out of Tripoint to Earth—or out of it. Something big could be coming.
A major battle, maybe.
And, God, God! for Finity to be read out of those universe-defining decisions? Leave the big choices to the big carriers, and devil take the merchanters, after all the dead they’d consigned to scattered suns?
A knot gathered in his throat as he saw nothing Finity could do right now in what was important in the universe, not if Mazianni carriers arrived this second full in their sights.
Finity couldn’t maneuver. A closed-hold hauler couldn’t dump cargo on a minute’s notice, the way a can-hauler could release the clamps and spill everything it had into the shipping lanes.
And if they could dump cargo, they couldn’t afford to: the Old Man had seen to that first when he’d withdrawn their repair reserve at Sol for this cargo and all those bottles of Scotch whiskey and crates of coffee and other highly expensive items they’d taken on—and then lawfully declared at Pell, a little honesty at which he’d winced when he learned it. No other merchanters willingly paid all that tax, they always hedged the question on cargo-in-transit and just didn’t declare it.
What was in the Old Man’s mind? he’d asked himself then. Playing by outmoded rules? Acting on honor, as if that could carry them in a post-War universe that was every ship for itself? He ached to see the Old Man, who said they had to trade to survive, play by rules the universe didn’t regard as important any longer, and said to himself they were going to find themselves out-competed, if that was the case.
He’d entertained hope it was only a short-term run, to sell off the luxury goods for moderate profit at Pell.
But at Pell, they’d withdrawn their other major reserve and bought high-mass staples as well as Pell luxuries, to carry on to Mariner, with the stated objective of Esperance, the backdoor to Cyteen itself. He’d have hoped they were a courier—except that some of Finity’s women had believed the captain and gone off their birth control. That was a decision. He couldn’t imagine the mindset it took to vote with one’s own body to risk Francesca’s fate.
Their run to Mariner and beyond felt, in consequence, unhappily real. They’d left Pell as mercantile and committed as the captain had indicated, and he’d never felt so helpless, sitting fat and impotent in front of a potential enemy. As a future commanding officer of a significant Alliance merchant-warrior, he’d never in a million years contemplated he’d see his ship absolutely helpless to maneuver.
Finity signed off its transmission, signaling the carrier that it was about to make its routine course change for Mariner. If there was an objection to that procedure they were about to learn it. They’d fired a ridiculous missile. Now they had to walk past the predator and see if it jumped.
The takehold sounded. Crew that happened to be standing found places to belt in. He and Bucklin found theirs side by side, on the jump seats beside Helm.
In five minutes more they did a realspace burn that took them out of relational synch and bow-on orientation to the carrier, and started the process of finding inertial match relative to their next target.
Unlike Pell, Mariner had a different traveling vector than Tripoint. Their climb out would be a burn, then a little space of heavy but automated computer work, another few takeholds possible, and then a steep climb back to jump, shorter than the struggle with a fair-sized star that they routinely had at Pell. Tripoint mass was complex and tricky, and could give your sensors fits if you didn’t zero it all the way out as you set yourself up as sharing a packet of spacetime with contrarily moving Mariner. That was Nav’s job.
Madison switched their console output over to the Old Man’s screens and put both him and Bucklin on watch, while Madison and the Old Man engaged in urgent discussion. The captain’s data feed was a constantly switching priority of input, from whatever his number two thought significant, and whatever a crew chief in a crisis bulleted through on a direct hail.
Things stayed quiet. The screens switched in regular rotation, then one rapid flurry as nav data started to come in.
He didn’t sit the chair often, even figuratively, as when the captains passed him the command screens. Now the third and fourth captains, Alan and Francie, had come to the bridge, moving between takeholds. He saw their presence in the numbers that showed on the Active list whenever a posted officer or tech arrived on duty. All four captains were now in conference on the encounter, and he, with Bucklin, sat keeping an eye on the whole situation with the real possibility of them, momentarily more current than the captains, actually ordering Helm to move.
Definitely a planned encounter, he concluded. Perhaps Mallory was positioning Finity via Mariner clear to Esperance, their turn-around point, and calling Amity to hold that intersection, hoping to trap something in the middle or drive quarry to an ambush. There was hope yet that Finity was engaged in trade purely as cover, and they wouldn’t sit helpless in that encounter.
The steady tick of information past him tracked the beeper-can on a lazy course that would ultimately intersect the carrier. The same screen said the carrier had launched something considerably larger, at slow speed, probably a repair skimmer, a far cry from any rider-ship, in pursuit of the Scotch.
Nothing threatened them. There were no other arrivals. It might be days, even a week or two, before another ship came through Tripoint. The system buoy didn’t, a matter agreed on by treaty, inform them of the number of ships that were recent, although ships left traces in the gas and dust of the point that their instruments could assess for strength and time of passage. It was a security matter, out here in the dangerous dark. All merchanters that came and went had just as soon do so without overmuch advertisement to other merchanters—and didn’t want the buoy politicized—or information given to the military, especially considering the Alliance military included potentially rival merchanters. It was the age of distrust. And it was the age of self-interest succeeding the age of self-sacrifice, as ships and stations alike fought for survival in a changed economy.
Aside from the worry about pirate lurkers, and raids, smuggling went on hand over fist in such isolation, goods exchanged in direct trade, without station duty, illicit or restricted items, pharmaceuticals from Cyteen, rare woods from Earth’s forests. Nothing that ships that habitually paused and lurked here were doing would bear close examination by station authorities.
That carrier out there was, in its way, another authority that would frown on such free enterprise: ships that arrived here under that grim witness would be intimidated, and wouldn’t make the shadow-market exchanges common in such meetings.
But stop the furtive trade? It would move to some other point until the carrier was gone. And the carrier would go.
That carrier, rather than tracking what merchanters did, was going to be moving somewhere the light of suns didn’t reach. And Finity’s End continued on, slogging her way to jump.
A month and four days had passed. It was on the galley clock.
Seeing the date on that clock was when the fact came home to Fletcher that this wasn’t Pell, and Fletcher stood and stared a moment, knowing that the thin stubble he’d shaved off his face in the shower wasn’t a month’s worth… but half that, as much as a spacer aged.
Both were facts he’d known intellectually before he reported for work. But that that disparate aging was happening to him as it had happened to Jeremy and all the rest—it took that innocuous wall clock to bring the shock home to him. Spacers weren’t just them, any longer. It was himself who’d dropped out of the universe for a month, and wasn’t a month older.
But Pell was. And Bianca was. They’d never make up that time difference.
The rains were mostly done, now. The floods would be subsiding.
The grain would have started to grow. Melody and Patch would have made their mating walk, made love, begun a new life if they were lucky.
But he wouldn’t be there when they came back. If they came back. If Melody ever had her longed-for baby. He wouldn’t know.
“Yeah,” Vince said, juvenile nastiness, “it’s a clock. Seen one before?”
“Shut up,” he said
It was crazy that this could happen. They’d changed him. He wasn’t Fletcher Neihart, seamlessly fitted into Pell’s time schedules, any longer. He was Fletcher Neihart who’d begun to age in time to Jeremy’s odd, time-stretched life.
It was a queasy, helpless feeling as he went to work at the cook-staff’s orders, and he kept a silence for a while, a silence the seniors present didn’t challenge.
They weren’t bad people, the cook-staff: Jeff and Jim T. and Faye, all of whom had been solicitous of him when he first came aboard. They’d worried about his preferences, been careful to see he got enough to eat—a concern so basic and at once so dear to Jeff’s pride in his craft that he couldn’t take offense.
Now he was their scrub-help, along with Vince and Linda and Jeremy, and he took heavy pans of frozen food from the lockers, slid cold trays into flash ovens, opened cabinets of tableware trays and food trays and handed them up to Linda, who handed them to Vince and Vince to Jeremy.
At least in all the hurry and hustle he didn’t have to think. They had nearly two hundred meals to deliver to B deck mess, as many to set up here, on A, in the mess hall adjacent to the galley. There were, besides all that, carts of hot sandwiches to take up to B, for crew on duty in various places including the bridge.
He didn’t do that job. They didn’t let him up into operations areas—they didn’t say so, but Vince ran them down to the lift and took them up. And there were special, individual meals to serve as people came trailing in from cargo and maintenance, wanting food on whatever schedule their own work allowed. It was a busy place, always the chance of someone coming in. It was hard work. But hungry people were happy people once they had their hands full of food, at least compared to the duty down in laundry.
Fletcher snatched a meal for himself, and the others did the same, then had to interrupt their break to get more trays out, because all of technical engineering had unloaded at once from a meeting, and there were hungry people flooding in.
That group came in talking about a ship they’d met. A Union ship.
Aren’t we in Alliance territory? he wondered. Then he felt queasy, remembering in the process that if he did have a view of the space outside the ship, it wouldn’t be anything like the Pell solar system schematic he’d learned in school. No planets. No sun. Great Sun was far behind him.
They were at what they called a dark mass, a near-star and a couple of massive objects that still wouldn’t go to fusion if you lumped them all together.
The nature of the Tripoint mass was a fact to memorize, in school, a trade route on which Pell depended. Fact, too, that Tripoint had been a territory they’d fought over in the War. He’d grown up with the memorial plaques. On this site…
But here he was in the middle of it, and so was a Union ship, and the kid across from him, his not-kid roommate with the twelve-year-old body, and Vince and flat-chested Linda the same, they all chattered with awed speculations about what a Union carrier was doing, or why, as the rumor was, the captain had talked with it and fired a capsule at it.
“We might see action yet,” Jeremy said happily. Fletcher didn’t take it for cheering news. But, the techs said, nothing had developed. The Union ship had stayed put.
Another takehold warning came through. Finity had moved once, and then again, and now it fired the engines again. They spent an hour in the safety-nook of the galley playing vid games while the engineering people went to their quarters, off-shift and resting. There was no hint of trouble.
Then there was cooking to do for future meals, mixing and pouring into pans and layering of pasta and sauce while the end-shift meal cooked.
Pans from storage, thawed and heated, produced fruit pastry for dessert, with spice Fletcher had never tasted before. Jeff the cook said it came from Earth, and that gave him momentary pause. He was being corrupted, he thought. Fed luxuries. He thought how he couldn’t get that flavor on Pell, or couldn’t afford it; and he asked himself if he ever wanted to get to like it.
But he ate the dessert and a second helping, and told himself he might as well enjoy it in the meanwhile and be moral and righteous and resentful later. Shipboard had its advantages, and it was a moral decision to enjoy them while they were cheap and easy: the spice, the tastes, the novelty of things. He was mad, yes, he was resentful, and he was caught up in affairs he’d never wanted, but he didn’t, he told himself, need to make any moral points, just legal ones, and only when he got back to Pell. Anything he chose to enjoy for the time being—the fruit dessert, the absolutely best shower he’d ever had access to, a better mattress than he’d ever slept on, all of that—he could equally well choose to forego when the time came, nothing of his pride or his integrity surrendered.
And the taste, meanwhile, was wonderful.
Galley duty, he decided, beat laundry all hollow. Laundry was work. On this detail there was food. As much as you wanted. It was, besides, a duty with the freedom of Downbelow about it—a work-on-your-own situation, with amicable people to deal with as supervisors. He especially liked Jeff, the chief mainday cook, a big gray-haired man who’d evidently enjoyed a lot of his own desserts, and who bulked large in the little galley, but who moved with such precision in the cramped space you were safer with him than with any three juniors. Jeff liked you if you liked his food, that seemed the simple rule; and Jeff didn’t ask: anything complicated of him—like assumptions of kinship.
Cleanup after the cooking wasn’t an entirely fun job, but it wasn’t bad, either. Word came to Jeff by intercom that the carrier had held its position and they were going to do a run up to V in an hour, so the galley had to be cleaned up, locked up, battened down, every door latched. Then, Jeff said, they could go to quarters early, at maindark, that hour when the lights dimmed to signify a twilight for mainday and dawn for alterday crew. Before, they’d had two hours for rec and rest, but tonight the captains had declared no rec time. It was early to bed, stuck in their bunks while the ship did whatever it did to get where they were going,
He was moderately uneasy when the engines fired. He and Jeremy lay in their bunks while the next, relatively short burn happened, a long, pressured wait. After that, during what was announced as a fifty-minute inertial glide, Jeremy played vid games, lying in his bunk, so hyped on his fantasy war it was hard to ignore him, in his twitches and his nervous limb-moving and occasional sound effects.
Jeremy might act as if he were on drugs, but Fletcher knew as a practical fact of living with the boy that that wasn’t the case. At times he was convinced that Jeremy sank into his games because he was scared of what the ship was doing, and he tried not to dwell on that thought. If Jeremy was scared, then he had no choice but assume a kid used to this knew what to be scared of. But at other times, as now, he wondered if that line blurred for Jeremy, as to what were games and what weren’t.
Join Mallory’s crew when he grew up, Jeremy had said. Trade wasn’t for Jeremy. No such tame business. Jeremy wanted to fight Mazian’s raiders.
History and life had shot along very fast in the seventeen station-side years Jeremy had been alive—and for all the twelve violent and brutal years Jeremy had actually been waking, Fletcher surmised, Jeremy had been right in the thick of it, in that situation the court on Pell had refused to let him enter.
Jeremy had a dead mother, too. This ship had death in abundance to drive Jeremy; as he guessed Vince and Linda were also driven—all of them stranger than kids of twelve and thirteen ever ought to be.
And not even a precocious twelve or a fecklessly ignorant seventeen. Jeremy, Vince, Linda all had the factual knowledge of those years. Jeremy indicated that, unlike the present situation, they usually had tape during the couple of weeks they did live during jump—briefing tapes making them aware of ship’s business, educational tapes teaching them body-skills and facts, informational tapes informing them of history going on at various ports, all those very vivid things that tape was, and all the vivid teaching that tape could evidently do even more efficiently on the jump drugs than it did on the other brands of trank that went with tape-study stationside. Tape could feel like reality, and if he added up the tape Jeremy must have had in all those months tranked-out lying in his bunk, he figured he could tack on a virtual college education and a couple or three waking years of life on Jeremy’s bodily twelve.
But while it was knowledge and technical understanding Jeremy had gained during those lost, lifeless weeks, life lived at the time-stretched rate of two weeks to every month of elapsed universal time while a ship was in jump, it still wasn’t real-life experience. It wasn’t any kind of emotional maturity, or physical development. They were mentally strange kids, all of the under- seventeens, sometimes striding over factual adult business so adeptly he could completely forget how big a gap his own natural growth set between them and him—and sometimes, again, as now, they acted just the age their bodies were. Humor consisted of elbow-knocking and practical jokes. Sex was to snigger at. War and death were vid games, even in kids who’d seen their own mothers and sibs die—that was the awful part. Jeremy had seen terrible, bloody things—and went right back to his games, obsessed with bloody images and grinning as he shot up imaginary enemies. Or real ones. Think what you’re doing, he wanted to yell at Jeremy, but by what little he’d been able to understand, Jeremy’s whole life was no different than those bloody games and Jeremy was fitting himself to survive. That was the most unnerving aspect of the in-bunk vid wars. Linda wanted to be an armscomper and target the ship’s big guns. About Vince, he had no idea.
Himself, during the ship’s maneuvering and slamming about, he shut his eyes and listened to the music Jeremy lent him. He asked himself did he want to risk his tape machine and his study tapes by using them during such goings-on, when if they came unsecured they could suffer damage.
But without his tapes, even without them, if he ignored Jeremy’s occasional sound effects, he could see Old River behind his eyelids, and didn’t need the artificial memory to overlay his own vision.
A month gone by already. He was two weeks older and remembered nothing of it; the planet was a month along, and after a few down, glum days, Bianca would have put him and his problems away and gotten on with her life. The everlasting clouds would have brightened to white. Melody and Patch would come back to the Base.
They’d know now beyond a doubt that he’d gone. He thought about that while the ship, having finished its short bursts and jolts, announced another long burn of two hours duration.
He drew a deep breath as the buildup of pressure started, and let the music carry him. It was like being swept up by Old River, carried along in flood.
Jeremy fought remembered battles and longed for revenge. He rode a tide of music and memory, telling himself it was Old River, and Old River might have his treacheries, but he had his benefits, too.
Life. And springtime.
Puffer-balls and games on the hillside, and skeins of pollen on the flood, pollen grains or skeins of stars. They weren’t going for jump yet. They were just going to run clear of the mass-point. He was learning, from Jeremy, how the ship moved
It was safer to think of home… of quitting time in the fields, and the soft gray silk of clouds fading and fading, until that moment white domes all but glowed with strangeness and the night-lights around the Base walks, coming on with dusk, were very small and weak guides against the coming dark.
Back to the galley before maindawn: the ship had built up a high velocity toward Mariner, and now they were scheduled for two days of quiet, uninterrupted transit before their jump toward that port.
The cooks, so they declared, never slept late, and neither did the juniors helping out in the galley. They made a breakfast for themselves of synth eggs and fruit after they’d delivered breakfast in huge trays to the service counters on A and B deck. The work had a feeling of routine by now, a comfortable sense of having done things before that, once he was moving and doing, also gave him an awareness of what the ship was doing, rushing toward their point of departure with a speed they’d gained during last watch.
A smooth, ordinary process, except that jolt when they’d come into Tripoint. And he tried to be calm about the coming jump. How could he be anxious for their physical safety, Fletcher asked himself, when a ship that had survived the War with people shooting at them, did something it and every other merchanter ship did almost every two months of every year?
He decided he could relax a little. The gossip among the cook-staff still said the Union carrier that had startled them on entry was watching their backs like a station cop on dockside, and it still didn’t seem to be bad news: there was no move to hinder them, and if there’d been any Mazianni about, they’d have been scared off by the Union presence, so they could dismiss that fear, too.
He was, he realized, already falling into a sense of expectations, after all expectations in his life had been ripped away from him. Vince and Linda were, hour by hour, tolerable nuisances, Jeremy was his reliable guide and general cue on the things he had to learn, besides being a cheerful, decent sort of kid when he wasn’t blowing up imaginary pirates. Jeff the cook didn’t care if he nabbed an extra roll, or, for that matter, if anybody did. It was like deciding to enjoy the fruit desserts. Life in general, he decided, was just fairly well tolerable if he flung himself into his work and didn’t think too hard or long about where he was.
He even found himself caring about this job, enough to anticipate what Jeff wanted and to try to win Jeff’s good humor. No matter how he’d previously, at Pell, resolved to stay sullen and just to go through the motions in his duties for his newest family, he found there was no sense sabotaging an effort that fed them fruit and spice desserts. Jeff Neihart appreciated with a pleasant grin the fact that he stacked things straight and double-checked the latches the same as people who were born here. It was worth a little effort he hadn’t planned to give, and he ended up doing things the careful way he could do something when he cared.
Disorientation still struck occasionally, but those occasions were diminishmg. Yes, he was in space, which he’d dreaded, but he wasn’t in space: it was just a comfortable, spice smelling kitchen full of busy people.
When, late in the shift, he took a break, he sat down to a cup of real coffee at a mess hall table. He understood it was real coffee, for the first time in his life, and he drank it, rolling the taste around on his tongue and telling himself… well… it was richer than synth coffee. Different. Another thing he daren’t get too used to.
A ship, he was discovering, skimmed some real fancy items for its own use, and didn’t count the cost quite the way station shops would. On this ship, while they had it, Jeff said, they had it and they should enjoy it.
There were points to this ship business that, really, truly, weren’t half bad. A year was a long time to leave home but not an insurmountable time. There were worse things to have happened. A year to catch his balance, pass his eighteenth year, gain his majority…
Jeremy came up and leaned on the table. “Madelaine wants you.”
“Who’s that?” he asked across the coffee cup.
“Legal.”
His stomach dropped, no matter that there wasn’t anything Legal Affairs could possibly do to him now. He swallowed a hot mouthful of coffee and burned his throat so he winced.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Probably papers to clear up. She’s up on B deck. Want me to walk you there?”
He didn’t. It was adult crew and he didn’t want any witnesses to his troubles, particularly among the juniors. Particularly his roommate. All the old alarms were going off in his gut. “What’s the number up there?”
“I think it’s B8. Should be. If it isn’t, it’s not further than B10.”
“I can find it,” he said. He drank the rest of the coffee, but with a burned mouth it didn’t taste as good, and the pain of his throat lingered almost to the point of tears, spoiling what had been a good experience. He got up and went down the corridor to the lift he knew went to B deck.
It was a fast lift. Just straight up, no sideways about it, and up to a level where the Rules said he shouldn’t be except as ordered. It was a carpeted blue corridor: downstairs was tiled. It was ivory and blue and mauve wall panels.
Really the executive level, he said to himself. This part of the ship looked as rich as Finity was. So this was what you lived like when you got to be senior executive crew… and lawyers were certainly part of the essentials. Finity didn’t even need to hire theirs. It was one more damn cousin, and since lawyers had been part and parcel of his life up till now, he figured it was time to get to know this one.
This one—who’d stalked him for seventeen years and who he suddenly figured was to blame, seeing how long spacers lived, for every misery in his life.
Madelaine? Such an innocent name. Now he knew who he hated.
It was B9. He found Legal Affairs on a plaque outside, and walked into an office occupied by a young man in casuals one might see in a station office, not the workaday jump suit they wore down where the less profitable work of the ship got done.
“You’re not Madelaine,” he observed sourly.
“Fletcher.” The young man stood up, offered a hand, and he took it. “Glad to meet you. I’m Blue. That’s Henry B. But Blue serves, don’t ask why. Madelaine’s expecting you. “
“Thanks,” he said, and the young man named Blue showed him into the executive office, facing a desk the like of which he’d never seen. Solid wood. Fancy electronics. A gray dragon of a woman with short-cropped hair and ice-blue eyes.
“Hello,” she said, and stood up, came around the desk, and offered a cool, limp hand, a kind of grip he detested.
She looked maybe sixty, old enough that he knew beyond a doubt she was one of the lawyers behind his problems and that apparent sixty probably represented a hundred. She was cheerful. He wasn’t.
“So what’s this about?” he asked. “Somebody forget to sign something?” He feigned delight. “You’ve changed your minds and you’re sending me home?”
Unflapped, she picked up a blue passport from off her desk and handed it to him. “This is yours. Keep it and don’t mislay it. I can reissue but I get surly about it.”
“Thanks.” He tucked it in his pocket and was ready to leave.
“Sit down.—So how are you getting along?”
She knew he wasn’t happy here and didn’t give a damn.
Good, he thought, and sat. That judgment helped pull his temper back to level and gave him command of his nerves. It was another lawyer. The long-term enemy, the enemy he’d never met, but always knew directed his life. She was cool as ice.
He could be uncommunicative, too. His lawyers had taught him: don’t fidget, look at the judge, don’t get angry. And he wasn’t. Not by half. “Am I having a good time?” he countered her as she sat down and faced him across her desk, her computer full of business that had to be more important to her than his welfare. “No. Will I have a good time? No. I’m not happy about this and I never will be. But here we are until we’re back again.”
“I know it’s a hard adjustment.”
“And you had to interfere in my life.” He hadn’t found anybody aboard he could specifically blame. He’d have expected something official from the senior captain, at least a face-to-face meeting, and hadn’t gotten it—as if they’d snatched him up, and now that they’d demonstrated they could, they had no further interest in him. He resented that on some lower level of his mind. He wouldn’t have unloaded the baggage in her office, he hadn’t intended to, but, damn it, she asked. She wanted him to sit down and unburden his soul to her, in lieu of the real authority on this ship—when she was the person, the one person directly responsible for ten and more years of lawsuits and grief in his life, not to mention present circumstances. He drew a deep breath and fired all he had. “My mother was a no-good drughead who ducked out on me, you wouldn’t leave me in peace, and here I am, just happy as you can imagine about it.”
“Your mother had no choice in being where she was. She did have a choice in refusing to give up your Finity citizenship.”
“She died! And excuse me, but what in hell did you think you were doing, ripping up every situation I ever worked out for myself?”
There was a fairly long silence. The face that stared at him was less friendly than the hisa watchers and just as still.
“I’m sorry you wanted the station, but you weren’t born to the station, Fletcher, and that’s a fact that neither of us controlled. This universe doesn’t let you just float free, you know. There’s a question of citizenship, your birthright to be in a particular place, and birth doesn’t make you a Pell citizen. You were always ours, financially, legally, nationally. Francesca wouldn’t let you be theirs. She wanted you here. They just wouldn’t let you leave.”
“The damn courts, you mean.” In the low opinion he held of Pell courts they could possibly find one small point of agreement. And she hadn’t flared back at him, had, lawyeresque, held her equilibrium. He even began to think she might not be so bad, the way nobody on the whole ship had really turned out to be an enemy. In giving him Jeremy, they’d left him nothing to fight. Nothing to object to. In sending him here, to this woman, they gave him, again, nobody he could fight with the anger he had built up. It was robbery, of a kind he only now identified, that he really didn’t want to hurt this woman.
“The damned courts,” she said quietly, “yes, exactly so.”
“Did you pay fourteen million?”
“You heard about that.”
“Damn—excuse me—right I heard.”
“They sued us to buy you a station-share and kept the case in limbo; meanwhile, their own Children’s Court wouldn’t release you to us so long as the War continued, or so long as we were working with Norway. And we don’t give up our own, young sir. Learn that first off. For good or for ill, this ship’s deck is sovereign territory and we don’t give up our own and pay a fourteen million credit charge on top of the outrage. If you want to know who put obstacles in your path, yes, the Pell courts, who saw no reason to credit this ship for the very fact there is a Pell judiciary and not an outpost of Union justice in its place. Your mother fought tooth and nail to maintain custody of you. We would have taken you at any pass through this system. Pell courts thought otherwise, but they gave you no rights within Pell’s law.”
It had been a good day going, before Madelaine the lawyer called him in to tell him what great favors they’d done him. Nothing to fight? She’d given him something. Fourteen million credits and his life at issue. Civilization was cancelled for the day. And he turned honest. “I don’t want to be here. Doesn’t that count?”
“But the fact is, you had no right to be at Pell, either.”
“I had every right!”
“Not the important right. Not the legal right. And they wouldn’t give it to you unless we paid for it because your rights lie on this ship where, from your mother, you have citizenship and financial rights.”
“Well, that’s not my fault. I don’t owe this ship. And I damned sure don’t owe my mother. She never did anything but mess up my life.”
“She had little enough of her own. Your mother was my daughter’s child. Your grandmother died at Olympus. Unfortunately for both of us, it seems, I’m your great-grandmother. Your closest living relative.”
He’d fired off his mouth without knowing what he was firing at. He’d insulted his mother as he was in the habit of doing with strangers rather than having others do the sneering and the blaming and him do the defending. Lifelong habit, and he’d just done it to the wrong person. He’d wondered what it would be like to have a grandmother, or a godmother, back when he was reading nursery rhymes. Stationers had them. If he had one he wouldn’t ever be in foster homes. Would he?
His godmother, however, wasn’t a soft, plump woman with a wand and a pumpkinful of mice. It was a spacefaring lawyer with eyes that bored right through you. And not his god- mother, either. Not even his grandmother. His grandmother’s mother, two generations back.
“Francesca died when you were five,” Madelaine said “That’s too young really to have known her. Or to have formed a good judgment.”
He was prepared to back up a couple of squares and admit he’d been too quick. But her judgment of him drew a shake of his head. He couldn’t help it. “No. I was there. I remember.”
He remembered police, and his mother lying on the bed, not moving. He remembered realizing something was wrong with her. Her hand had been cold, terribly cold when he’d touched it. He’d known that wasn’t right. And he’d called the emergency squad. He remembered textures. Sensations. Everything, every tiniest detail, was branded in his consciousness.
“She was a good woman,” Madelaine said. “Good at what she did. She’d taken jump drugs all her life with no trouble. The simple fact was, she was pregnant, too late to abort, too early to deliver except to a birthlab, which she chose not to do; we knew what we were facing—it’s declassified now, so we can talk about it. But it wasn’t then, and going to a birthlab at her stage of pregnancy—we didn’t have the time for her to do that and recover. We just couldn’t wait for her, if she did it without us she’d still be stranded ashore, and she was in a hell of a mess. There was nothing for anyone but bad choices. We said we’d be back in a year. That didn’t happen. We missed our appointment with her, and she crashed. Just crashed, physiologically, psychologically. Depression sometimes follows a birth. She started self-medicating. The hyprazine, particularly the hyprazine, if you’ve taken it in jump, it gives you an illusion of being in space, and that’s what you take when you’re pregnant. That illusion was what she was after, Fletcher. Just so you know.”
“You and JR have been talking. Right?”
Madelaine shook her head. “No. We haven’t. What about?”
“The truth—” He could hardly breathe. He kept his voice calm. “She kept sending me to welfare—and getting me back—until she finally went out on a trip and never came down. And left me tangled in the damn court system. Then they couldn’t put me anywhere permanent and let anybody get attached to me because you kept suing the station. Let me tell you. I made it through six foster-families, five of them before I was fifteen. I made it through school. I made it through the honors program and into graduate. I licensed to work on Downbelow in Planetary Science, which is what I want to do, and where you called me from, and where I left everything I care about. And you come along and jerk me up and out of that to do your damn laundry and scrub mess hall tables, because you could do that and I’m your property! Well, screw all of you! I’m trying to keep my head straight because I know we can’t turn this ship around, I haven’t got money to buy passage on any other ship, and I have to live out this year, but that’s all! That’s all. Because when we get back to Pell I’m going to sue you to get off this ship.”
“It still won’t give you Pell citizenship.”
It failed to knock the wind out of him, as she clearly expected. He didn’t want to tell her about Quen’s promise to him. She’d be the lawyer fighting him. He’d already been stupid and said too much. His lawyers would certainly have told him so.
“I had a girl back there,” he said.
“Oh, is that it?”
“No! That’s not it. It’s not all it is.” Naturally they wanted to wrap all his problems up in that. But what he felt wouldn’t be understandable to people who didn’t know what there was on a planet. He’d had a grandmother. She’d died. A lot of people on this ship had died… along with Jeremy’s close relatives. And Madelaine— his grandmother… his great-grandmother—just stared at him, maybe amused, maybe hurt by the truth he’d told, maybe not giving a damn for anything but the ship’s fourteen million. Since his mother died he’d never had to deal with anybody who owned the same set of emotional entanglements to him that his mother had had, and then he’d been five. Slowly the emotional shock of meeting this woman reached through to him, the feeling of an emotional pain somewhere he wasn’t sure of, bone-deep and about to become acute, and tangled somewhere in his mother’s death.
“I was in Planetary Studies,” he said. “That doesn’t mean anything here. But it mattered to me. It mattered everything to me.”
“The stationmaster told us what you’d done. Both your extraordinary work to get into the program, and the ruinous thing you did at the end.” Madelaine’s face was sober. Her hands were steepled loosely before her, a tangle of fingers, an attitude that somehow echoed a habit of someone else—his mother—he wasn’t sure. “Fact is, in your tender love of the planet, you broke laws, you fractured rules designed to protect it and the downers from the well-meaning and the callous users. I’m interested in why you’d do such a thing.”
The lawyer. Wanting to know about laws. And asking into what wasn’t her business, except that the question also involved his attitude toward rules-following, his behavior in a ship full of critical procedures. He was tempted to lie, to make things far worse than they were.
But he didn’t want to find himself restricted from the freedom he did have, either.
“Did you have a reason for running off from the Base?” she pursued, and he tried to organize his thoughts to give her the answer she’d both believe and take for reassurance.
“Being pushed further than you can push me now,” he said. “Further than anyone can ever push me again. That’s all. You can only lose so much.”
“Were you thinking of suicide?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Did you care about the downers? The stationmaster said you’d been consorting rather closely with two of them.”
Bianca talked. The information hit him like a hammer blow.
And then, on a next and shaky breath, Of course Bianca talked. I was gone. She had a right to talk. It was nothing but expected—only the ruin of something else important. Another support of his life kicked out from under him.
She was scared. She was involved and I involved her. A Family girl with a Family on her back. Sure, she had to get straight with them. I had to be the one at fault. I was gone, she had to be practical about it.
He’d hoped for a little more fortitude from her. Just a little heroism. But she’d saved her own hide. Everyone did, when the chips came down.
“Despite your heritage,—you trained to work with the downers,” Madelaine asked sharply. “Why?”
“Because—” He almost said, Because I love them, but he wasn’t going to let that information loose. Because I never thought you’d get me away from Pell. Never give a psych or a lawyer a handle to hold to. Not a real one. “Because they’re different. Because I don’t like human beings much. How’s that?”
“Sad if true.”
“Downers don’t kidnap people.”
“And, as I know from brief experience, they don’t understand human relationships. It’s very much the contrary of what you’re supposed to be doing with them. But you were intent on your own reasons.”
“Reasons that they invited me to be with them. For years. I know the downers, I know the two I dealt with.”
“You know them better than the scientists and the researchers. You know them well enough to defy the rules and endanger a half a hundred rescuers”
“It was their choice to be out there chasing me.”
“Was it?” A shake of the lawyer’s head. “Fletcher, I think you’re better than that. Difficult. So was my granddaughter. It’s why you were born. She was in love, in a year when any child was a hostage to fate. She knew that. She ran a risk.”
In love.
It’s why you were born.
He had a merchanter for a mother and that meant he had no father. It was one of the facts of his life: he had no father. How dare she throw that out for bait? His mother knew who the father was and it wasn’t some chance encounter in a sleep-over?
He wouldn’t take that bait. Not if his life depended on it.
He stood up. “I’ve got work to do.”
Madelaine looked at him as if he were something on her agenda. No longer cool, no longer remote. “God, you’re like Francesca.”
That, too, was a gut blow. He didn’t know how hard until he’d walked out, through the office, past the cousin named Blue, and out into the fancy carpeted corridor.
Like Francesca. She looked at him with age-crinkled eyes and dismissed his best shot with God, you’re like Francesca…
He wasn’t like his mother. He wasn’t anybody’s copy. His mother hadn’t been like him.
She was in love…
He’d not known his mother when she was seventeen. She might have sat in that same chair. She might have used this same lift. Walked these same corridors…
Been in love…
He had a father somewhere. His great-grandmother knew who it was. She had all the names, and held them as bait to draw him out, to get pieces of him in her reach, more deft than any psych.
He was used to the station as his mother’s venue. That was where she’d lived, and Finity’s End was where she’d come from.
But this corridor, these places, all this was a place she’d walked in, too, like some hidden room of her life where she’d been as young as he was now and where people remembered her in the same awkward, mistake-making years he was trying his best to grow out of.
It shook him.
It totally revised his concept of where he was and what he’d come from and who that seventeen-year-old twelve-year-old he roomed with really might have been to him. Here he was wandering around blind, in her young years, meeting people who’d wanted him because they’d lost her and to whom the whole reality of the station was a locked room they couldn’t get into, either. And Jeremy was the bridge. Jeremy was the might-have-been, the one he’d always have been with. His mother would be dead, maybe, with Jeremy’s mother, with half the people on the ship… and things would be a lot the same, but different, vastly different, too.
He rode the lift back to A deck and walked back where he’d come from. His nerves weren’t up to a challenge of things-as-they-were or a confrontation with Madelaine Neihart. He just wanted to go back to the mess hall and to Jeremy, that was all-even to go back to Vince and Linda. He couldn’t feel the ship moving, but they were shooting unthinkably fast toward the nadir of the Tripoint mass-point, where another event he didn’t understand would happen and they’d more than accelerate: they’d plunge a second time out of the known universe into a state his mother had chosen to live in, that she’d ultimately chosen to die in.
He’d failed that unit in his physics class—how the universe didn’t like the state they’d be in, and spat them out reliably somewhere else. He agreed with the universe: he didn’t like the state they’d be in and he didn’t want to imagine it. He didn’t know whether he could understand it, but when he’d had to study it, he’d pleaded with his physics instructor he didn’t want to take that tape again, please God, he didn’t want to… and the psychs had gotten into it. Finally the school had exempted him and let him study it and just barely pass it realtime, with pencil and paper, because the psychs said there were special psychological reasons that the instructor and the school weren’t equipped to deal with. They’d offered to help him deal with it. And he’d said no. And somehow it hadn’t come up again.
No more exemption, now. No more psychs to step in and say let Fletcher alone: he can’t deal with it. The court had forgotten all about that fear when it gave him up and stripped him of his Pell ID. His bitter guess was that it had stopped mattering to most people the second somebody mentioned fourteen million credits. Quen had reached out and tapped some judge on the shoulder and said, Let them have him this time.
And ironically, completely unexpectedly, the only person in the whole affair who cared—personally, cared, as it turned out—might have been the lawyer, Madelaine. The crew at large, meanwhile, didn’t know what he’d grown into, but thought the courts were holding from them some poor stupid kid it was their right to have, a kid whose spacer heritage would leap to the fore and instantly make him love them.
The ship unfortunately didn’t turn around to undo its mistakes. It only went forward and it didn’t stop for anything, that was what that long-ago physics tape had told him… the universe abhorred their situation half in hyperspace and half here and spat their bubble along the interface until a mass-point snatched them into its gravity and jerked their bubble remorselessly flat. When he thought about it, walking a corridor on a ship courting that event, the space that connected him to Pell felt stretched thinner and thinner, as if his whole universe could just tear and vanish.
His mother had died like that, hadn’t she? Her mind had just—stretched thin until one day there wasn’t enough left to get her home again.
Madelaine had all the wit he hoped his mother had had, needle-sharp and quick as he imagined now his mother might have been if she hadn’t been out on drugs and if he hadn’t been a feckless five-year-old. He couldn’t ever know her, clear-eyed—couldn’t ever sit in a room with her as he’d just sat with Madelaine, to have clear memories, or to sort out her pluses and minuses. He had memories of his mother being happy, and smiling, but he’d told himself in the maturer, more brutal judgment of his teenage years that those had all been days when she’d been high as the drugs could make her and still function—when the body was on Pell Station, but she wasn’t.
Love? She’d exuded just enough to rip the guts out of a kid. She loved somebody whose name Madelaine dangled before him? Had his kid?
Then why in hell had she lost herself in drug-hazed space? Post-birth depression? He wished it were that simple.
He went back to the mess hall and, finding there was nothing doing at the moment, had a soft drink. They were free. It was one benefit of a situation that felt, again, like the trap it was.
“So what’d Legal want?” Jeremy wanted to know,
“Just passport stuff,” he said. He didn’t talk about it. He didn’t want Jeremy for a confidant on this point. He didn’t at all want Vince and Linda, who were lurking for gossip. If Vince had opened his mouth right then, he’d have hit him.
He fought for calm. He tried to settle down and just go numb about the situation, telling himself that a year, like all other periods of time, would pass. He’d learned to wait in doctors’ offices, in psychiatrists’ offices, in court. “Don’t fidget,” the adult of the month would say, and he’d stay still. When he stayed still nobody noticed him. A year was long, but his fight to get to Downbelow had been longer. He did know how to win by waiting. Don’t feel anything. Don’t say much. Don’t engage anybody the way he’d engaged the lawyer. He’d made the one mistake up in Madeline’s office… made the kind of mistake that gave manipulative people and lawyers levers to use.
No. She’d already known him, before he ever walked in that door. He was her great-grandson, and she’d lost her daughter and her granddaughter and now she wanted a try at him, seeing his mother in him. That was something he’d never faced. She was his honest-to-God real great-grandmother, and his mother had lived on this ship.
She’d just died on Pell.
The shift went to bed, an exhausted mainnight in which visions of rain-veiled river danced in Fletcher’s eyes; and playing cards cascaded like raindrops, inextricably woven images, in which somehow he owed days, not hours, and in which he chased Jeremy through tunnels first of earth and then of garishly lit steel and pipe, the latter of which looked miraculously like the tunnels on Pell.
Next morning it was back to the galley before maindawn, help Jeff set out the breakfast trays and get the carts up to B deck, but they were still cooking huge casseroles for next jump… things that could warm up in a hurry, a lot of red pepper involved. Taste was pretty dim after jump, so Jeff said, and by Fletcher’s estimation it was true; spicy things perked up the appetite. While they were doing that, they’d had no further alarms, no changes in velocity. Jeff said the ship’s long, even run under inertia would give them the chance to get some baking done. Cakes in the oven during a high-K run were doomed, so Jeff said.
So whenever they hit an onboard stretch where they could spread out and cook, they cooked for all they were worth: fancy pastries, casseroles, pies, trays of pasta and individual packets for those hours people came in scattered There were onions and fish from Pell, there was keis and synth ham, there was cabbage and couscous and what they called animal protein, which was a kitchen secret nobody should have to look at before it cooked. It came in pieces and mostly the cook-staff ground it. There was rice from Earth and yellow grain from Pell; there were sauces, there were gravies, there were fruit jellies that came from Downbelow and wine solids and spices and yeasts that came from Earth. There were keis sandwiches, fish sandwiches, and pro-paste sandwiches which Fletcher swore he’d never eat again in his life; there were pickles and syrups and stuffed pasta, string pasta, puff breads and flat-breads and meal and pro-paste pepper rolls with hot sauce, and there were sausage rollups, which were their lunch, and keis and ham rollups which were supper. The galley had rung with the battering of pans and trays, swum in pots of sauce that went steaming into forms of given sizes and had to be trundled on carts into the galley lift, where in coats you put the stuff in deep-freeze on the very outer level of the rim in what they called the skin. Out there among the structural elements of the passenger ring, cold was the natural, cheap environment, requiring only a rack for storage, no mechanism but a light; and you felt that cold burning right through your boot-soles when you walked the grids. Fletcher made one trip down with Jeff just to see what it was like, his closest approach to the uncompromising night outside the hull; he was glad to get back up into warmth and light of the ring.
All this day they worked on sandwiches, and of course, tastes of the current batch. Nobody on regular cook-staff ever seemed to eat a meal: they sampled; and the last job they put together, just before supper, was a giant pyramid of tasty little sandwiches and another of sweets. Which to Fletcher’s disappointment didn’t turn up on their menu. It went to B deck.
“We’ll get some,” Jeremy said as he watched the cart go. “Topside in the senior mess. There’s a get-together coming. Everybody’s there.”
“So?” he said. He wasn’t at all enthusiastic about meetings. He remembered board-call, and everybody together for that. It had been particularly uncomfortable. And he’d worked hard today. He thought he had a right to those desserts. “I’d rather read or something. Thanks.”
“You’re really supposed to go. It’s all of second and third shift, and a lot of first will come. That’s why they’ve been handing us fast food today. Eat light.”
“Is it a meeting, or what is it?”
“Not a meeting,” Jeremy said as if he were a little slow. “Food. The fancy food. It’s a party. You know. People. Music. Party.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause that Union bunch is just sitting back there not bothering us, ‘cause we’re in a big boring jump-point and we don’t have anything much to do. Why not? When you’re downtimed and there’s no pirates going to bother you, you throw a party. Come on, Fletcher, you’ll enjoy it. Be loose. Jump before main-dawn, but tonight we shake things up, man. Be loose, be happy, it’s got to be somebody’s birthday! That’s what we say, it’s somebody’s birthday somewhere! Celebrate for George.”
“Who’s George?” There was such a thing as ship-speak: the in-jokes sometimes flew past him.
“King George V.”
He’d thought, with his fascination with old Earth history, there was no way a twelve-year-old from Finity was going to know King George of England. Or England, for that matter, in spite of Jeremy’s tape study. He was amazed. And enticed. “Why George?”
“Well, because he’s old and he’s dead, and nobody throws him parties anymore, so we do on Finity. When it’s nobody else’s birthday, it’s for old King George!”
He’d walked into that one. “Why not?” he said. “Seems logical.”
He still didn’t entirely want to go, but he considered the food they’d been working on all day; and he knew himself, that once he was committed to being alone, knowing full well there was a party going on elsewhere, he’d feel lonelier. I’d rather stay in my room and hate all of you might be the real answer, but it wasn’t, in Jeremy’s clear opinion, going to be the accepted answer.
Besides, Jeremy had, against all odds, made it sound like fun.
So they showered and put on clean, unfloured, unpeppered clothes without grease spots, and went up to B deck. Fletcher’s most dire apprehension in the affair was that he might have to suffer through some formal introduction of himself, standing up in front of people he didn’t want to be polite to. “They’re not going to introduce me again, are they?” he’d asked Jeremy. “I don’t want to be introduced.”
“They won’t if you don’t like,” Jeremy said. “I’ll tell them and they won’t.”
He still, riding up the lift to B deck, feared he couldn’t escape another round of j-names: John, James, Jerry and Jim. He was resigned to that idea, if not the idea of another introduction, or any sentimental This is Francesca’s baby on anybody’s part. As long as it stays George’s party, he’d told Jeremy, when he’d agreed. No surprises.
And when they walked up around the ring to the senior mess, he could see the food laid out, he could see tables spread with linen; and he could see people, the Family, all walking around or talking at random: no special recognition looked to be in the offing, no ceremony, no conspicuous embarrassment and no formality, either. The B deck rec hall turned out to be connected to the B deck mess hall, a wall-to-wall segment of the whole ring, carpeted, the area that was rec furnished with vid-game sets, not in use at the moment; a bar, which was in use; and maybe fifty tables with linen tablecloths like some high-class restaurant. The whole arrangement filled two segments of B deck’s ring, with only a little half-bulkhead and a drawn-back section door to separate rec from the mess. There were maybe a hundred, two hundred people—all, God save him, relatives—milling around in casual familiarity, with more arrivals coming in from either end of the area.
There was a pool table, a game going there, in the rec section. That had drawn a row of kibitzers. A couple of women played quiet, not-bad guitar in the background, up at the end of the mess hall, and the sweets and snacks from the mess hall were going fast. The bar opened up, and various mixed drinks and wine glasses ready to be picked up were going off the counter as fast as the kids serving could set them out, fifty, a hundred of them.
Held off on cheese sandwiches all day. Fletcher raided the dessert stack instead and filled his mouth with sweet cream pastry.
“Fletcher.”
He knew that voice. He turned and frowned at Madelaine. She had a glass of wine in hand and was clearly not official at the moment.
“Glad you came, Fletcher,” Madelaine said.
“Thanks,” he said, and knuckled a suspected smear of cream off his lip. He wouldn’t have come at all if he’d known he’d run into her first off.
“Enjoy things,” she said. And to his relief and gratitude, she didn’t engage him in intrusive, personal conversation, just smiled and walked past him, wine glass in hand, leaving him free to wander around with Jeremy.
Jeremy, who was bent on telling him who was who.
“No good with the names,” he said after six or seven. “There’s too many J’s in the lot. I’m not going to remember. Unless you can point out King George. Who is a G, isn’t he?”
Jeremy thought that was funny. “Everybody is J’s,” he said, as if he’d never added it up for himself. “Most, anyway. ‘Cept you’re Fletcher. Probably the first Fletcher in fifty years.”
“Why? Why’s Fletcher the exception?”
“He was shot dead, a long time ago,” Jeremy said. “He was the one getting the hatch shut when the Company men were trying to board, and he did it and died on the deck inside. Or there wouldn’t be any of us. No Alliance. No Union.”
He knew about the incident. He’d learned it in school, but he didn’t know it was a Fletcher Neihart who’d been the one to get the door shut when they tried to trap Finity and arrest Captain James Robert. He knew about Finity’s End saying the Earth Company authorities weren’t going to board, and the captain and crew had sealed the ship and left the station and the authorities behind them, refusing them authority over the ship and refusing station law on a merchanter’s deck. It was where the first merchanter’s strike had started, when merchanters from one end of space to the other had made it clear that trade goods didn’t and wouldn’t move without merchant ships.
In a long chain of events, it was the incident that had started the whole Company War.
History. Near-modern history, which he detested. He’d passed the obligatory quiz on the details to get into the program. The Company War. Treaty of Pell, 2353, and that had left civilization where it was when he’d been born, with Union on one side and Alliance on the other and Earth not real happy with either of them. And him stranded and his mother dead. That kind of history.
So, Jeremy said, somebody he was named after had gotten a critical hatch shut in the original fracas between Company ships and Family ships, without which either the ship wouldn’t have gotten away or the cops who shot this long-dead Fletcher would have died in the decompression that would have resulted if he hadn’t shut that hatch.
Pell knew about that kind of event. And he’d known about the start of the Company War.
So the guy’s name had been Fletcher. He didn’t know why he should be proud of some spacer who was a hundred years dead—but, well, dammit, he’d lived all his seventeen years around the snobbery of the Velasquezes and the Willetts, the Dees and the Konstantins, who’d been important because of their names, and important mostly because of what dead people in their families had done, while he’d never before had a sense of connection to anything but an addict mother and a lawsuit.
Somebody died closing an airlock and did it with pieces of him shot away, knowing otherwise there’d be vacuum killing more than the people shooting at him—that was a levelheaded brave guy, in his way of thinking. While the Willetts—they’d donated a warehouse full of stuff to the war effort. Big deal. No one had been shooting at them.
And Fletcher Neihart meant that man, on this ship. Fletcher wasn’t just a name. It was a revision of who he was—for a moment.
He never had meant much. And that, he’d told himself when he’d been at a low point of his teenaged years, scared spitless of the program placement tests, that never meant much was the source of his strength: not giving much of a damn. Like a gyro—kick it off balance a second and it swung right back. That realization had kept him sane. Kept him aware of his own value, which was only to himself.
Maybe that was why Madelaine’s being here had upset him—why Madelaine had upset him and why even yet he was feeling shaky. He’d instinctively seen a danger when Madelaine had dangled the lure of his mother’s motives and his father’s name in front of him yesterday.
He’d been in danger a second ago when he’d thought about famous relatives.
He was in danger when he began to slip toward thinking… being Fletcher Neihart wasn’t that bad a thing.
Yes, and Jeremy wasn’t a bad kid, and they could get along, and maybe Jeremy could make this year of enforced servitude not so bad. But he’d thought he could rely on Bianca, too, and yesterday in the same conversation in which he’d learned he had a great-grandmother and the lawyers he hated really loved him, in the very same conversation Madelaine had proved Bianca had talked to authorities and betrayed everything he’d shared with her about Melody and Patch,
It was nothing to get that angry about. Bianca had behaved about average, for people he’d dealt with. Better than some. She hadn’t talked until she’d been cornered and until he’d already been caught and shipped off the planet,
So forget falling into the soft traps of potential relatives. Figure that Jeremy would keep some secrets and advise him out of trouble, but he shouldn’t get soppy over it or mistake it for anything special. Jeremy had his orders, and those orders came from authority just like Madelaine, if it wasn’t Madelaine herself. She wanted him to ask who his father was. He didn’t damn well care. Whoever it was hadn’t come to Pell. Hadn’t cared for him. Hadn’t cared for his mother.
Spacer mindset.
Safer just to disconnect from all of them, Jeremy too. He could be pleasant, but he didn’t have to commit and he didn’t have to trust any of them. And that meant he didn’t have to get mad, consequently, when they proved no better and no worse than anyone else. He’d learned that wisdom in his half a dozen family arrangements, half a dozen tries at being given the nicely prepared room, the nicely prepared brother, the family who thought they’d save him from his heritage and a mother who hadn’t been much.
In that awareness he walked in complete safety through the buzz of talk and the occasional hand snagging him to introduce him to this or that cousin… screw it, he thought: he wasn’t possibly going to remember anything beyond this evening. The names would sink in only over time and with the need to deal with one and another of them. If he really, truly needed to know Jack from Jamie B., he’d ask for an alphabetical list. In the meantime, everyone wore name tags.
He’d had a hard day, however, and what he did want to quiet his nerves and dim the day’s troubles wasn’t on the dessert tray. He strolled over to the bar, lifted a glass of wine, turned his shoulder before he had to deal with the bartenders and walked off with it, sipping a treat he hadn’t had at the Base but that he had had regularly in the latest family. The Wilsons had collected their subsidy from the station for taking care of him, he hadn’t caused them trouble (he’d been a model student who ate his meals out), he’d done his own laundry… fact had been, he’d boarded at the Wilsons’, and they were pleasant, decent folk who’d had him to formal dinners on holidays at home or in nice restaurants, and who hadn’t cared if he hit their liquor now and again as long as he cleaned up the bar and washed the glasses.
The wine tasted good. His nerves promised to unwind. He told himself to relax, smile, have a good time, get to know as many of the glut of relatives as seemed pleasant. Like Jeff. Jeff was all right. Even great-grandmother Madelaine was on an agenda of her own, nothing really to do with him as himself, except as the daughter-legacy Madelaine hoped he’d turn into. He would disappoint her, he was sure.
But if she refrained from exercising authority over him and just took him as he was, as she’d done when she’d failed to make a fuss over him here, he could refrain from resisting her. He could be pleasant. He’d been pleasant to a lot of people once he knew it was in his interest, as it seemed generally to be in his interest on this ship.
He’d like to find a few cousins who were somewhat above twelve years of age. He’d like to have someone to talk occasionally to whose passion wasn’t vid-games.
“God, you’re not supposed to have that,” Jeremy said, catching up to him.
“Had it on station .”
Jeremy was troubled by it. He saw that. But he had it now, and he wasn’t going to turn it in. He drank it in slow sips. He had no intention of gulping multiple glasses and making an ass of himself.
“What’s this?” He knew that young, high, penetrating voice, too. Vince had showed up, with Linda. Inevitably with Linda. “You can’t drink that.”
Vince and his holier-than-thou, wiser-than-everyone attitudes for what Vince wouldn’t dare do when he was taller and older. He gestured with the three-quarters full glass, “Have drunk it. When you grow up, you can give it a try. Meanwhile, relax.”
“You’ll get on report,” Vince said. “I’ll bet you get on report.”
“Fine. Let them ship me back. I’ll cry tears.”
“I wish they would,” Vince said, one of his moments of sincerity, and about that time a larger presence came up on him.
JR.
“He’s drinking” Vince said as if JR had no eyes. Fletcher looked straight at JR.
“Somebody give you that?” JR asked in front of Jeremy and Vince and Linda. He’d had enough family togetherness for the day. He drank three-quarters of a well-hoarded glass down in three swallows.
“Here,” he said, and handed the empty glass to JR. JR almost let it fall. And caught it on the fly, not without spilling a couple of last drops to the expensive carpet.
Fletcher walked off. He’d had enough party and celebration, and beyond that, he wasn’t in a frame of mind to stay around to be discussed or reprimanded in front of his roommate, a twelve-year-old jerk, or a couple of hundred of his worst enemies. It was easy to leave in the open-ended mess hall section. He just kept walking to the lift, out where the light was dimmer and the noise was a lot less.
JR held a glass he didn’t want to be holding. He handed it to Vince, restraining himself from immediate comment. He didn’t know what exchange had preceded Vince’s complaint to him. Clearly cousin Fletcher had just overloaded on something, be it wine or family.
He refused to get into he-saids with immediately involved junior-juniors and walked to the bar to learn the plain facts. “Nate. Did you give Fletcher wine?”
Nate was one of the senior crew, now, lately of the junior crew, and Nate looked distressed. “No. He just took it. I didn’t know what to do. Has he got leave?”
“Not officially, no. You did right. You didn’t make an incident. Vince and the junior-juniors called him on it, though, and he flared and left.”
“The guy wasn’t real straightforward about asking for permissions, what it seems to me. I think he knew it was off limits.”
“Yeah. You and I both noticed. If he does it again just let him. I’ll talk to Legal and we’ll find out whether there were agreements with him before he boarded, or what.”
“Trouble?” Bucklin turned up by him at the bar, Bucklin couldn’t have missed Fletcher’s leaving.
“Vince sounded off about the drink. Fletcher’s pissed.”
“Cousin Fletcher came aboard pissed. Counting he was hauled here by the cops and the stationmaster, I’m not personally surprised he and young Vince should go critical. “
“It’s on our watch,” JR sighed. “We got him, he’s ours.”
“Maybe we could have airlock drill,” Bucklm’s tone was wistful, the suggestion outrageous.
“I’m afraid that won’t solve it.” He couldn’t quite joke about it, tempest in an infinitesimal teacup though it might be. “Captain-sir wants him. Madelaine wants him. I’m afraid we ultimately have to work him in.”
“Between you and me only, this has a bad feeling.” This time Bucklin wasn’t making a joke at all. “This guy doesn’t want to be here. I mean, it’s hard enough to work him in if we wanted him. We’re busy. We’ve got nothing but unskilled labor in him. We had a fine thing going before we got lucky in the court, and I appreciate we had a legal problem, but—where are we going to fit him in?”
Bucklin left his complaint hanging after that, and after a moment, in his silence on the issue, Bucklin walked away. Bucklin wasn’t of a rank to say what was floating in the air unsaid. We don’t want him didn’t half sum up the feeling among the senior-juniors. They had had an integrated team that was turning their last-born batch of juniors, ending with Jeremy, into a tight-knit unit that would put the senior-juniors in crew posts in another couple of years, with Jeremy and Vince and Linda their best backup for what was going to be, with adequate luck, a sudden crop of babies forthcoming from this run. The senior-juniors were a team tested literally under fire. However thin they were in numbers, he saw the makings of a damned fine command in what his seniors had left him and what he’d spent the last seven years putting together. Supposing now that women did become pregnant, and that the nursery did acquire a new batch of kids, he and Bucklin and Lyra had plans to set Jeremy and Vince and Linda in charge of the ones who’d come out of the nursery as junior-juniors at just about the time that trio hit physical maturity. It had all been going to work out neatly, and then they got cousin Fletcher, of a physical size to fit with senior-juniors, basic knowledge far beneath that of junior-juniors, and a surly attitude to boot. Add to that a late-to-board-call stunt unprecedented in the history of the ship, for which Fletcher had proved nothing but self-righteous and angry.
It was wrong, the whole blown-out-of-proportion incident just now with the wine glass was just damned wrong, both what Fletcher had done walking out and what Vince had done lighting into him and what Jeremy had done standing confusedly in the middle. It wasn’t the drink. It was Fletcher’s attitude that made no way for anybody to back down; and as the saying went, it had happened on his watch.
On one level the Old Man didn’t want to know the details, the excuses, or the extenuating circumstances of the junior captain’s failures; on another level, the Old Man would rapidly know every detail that he knew the minute he walked in here and wanted to know where Fletcher was, and there was nothing worse in God’s wide universe than an interview with Captain James Robert Neihart, Sr. when your tally of mistakes went catastrophic—as it had just done in that little damn-you-all gesture of Fletcher’s.
He, supposed to handle things, had thought that in putting Fletcher with the junior-juniors he had arranged Fletcher a berth that wouldn’t expose his ignorance, put demands on his behavior, or burden his own essential and often working team with constantly babysitting Fletcher.
Yes, the senior crew including the Old Man had a load of personal guilt over cousin Francesca, over the fact they hadn’t made it back in time to prevent what they were relatively sure had been a suicide.
Yes, Francesca had named her kid one of the signal names in Finity’s history, one of the names which, like James Robert, you didn’t just bestow on your kid without asking and without the bloodline to permit it.
Yes, Francesca had named him that name before she’d known she’d be left—she had done it, he guessed, not out of bitterness, or to imply a guilt they all felt, but to declare to a station who otherwise despised spacers that this was no common kid.
Unfortunately that name had stayed on after her suicide to confound Finity command, attached to a kid in the original Fletcher’s line, a kid caught in the wheels of jurisdiction and power games, a kid who by that name and Finity’s reputation necessarily attracted attention in spacer circles.
And yes, James Robert had wanted to get a kid named Fletcher, his grand-nephew, out of the gears and out of station view. There’d be no shameful appendix to the life of the first Fletcher, to append his name to a kid hellbent—JR had seen the police reports—on conspicuous and public disaster, right down to his dive for the outback.
Yes, Francesca’s situation had been a tragedy. But a lot of people on Finity had had a lot harder situation than Francesca’s, in his estimation.
His mother was one, dead in the decompression. And Jeremy’s. And Vince’s half-brother. Or ask Bucklin, who’d lost every close relative in his whole line except Madison, and Madison, who’d lost everyone but Bucklin.
Damn right they were close, the ones left of the old juniors’ group, the ones like himself and Bucklin, who’d huddled together in nursery while the ship underwent stresses that killed the weak. They’d seen kids grow weaker and weaker until eventually they just didn’t come out of trank at a given jump.
Damned right they’d earned the pride they had and damned right they didn’t like all they’d won handed to a stranger on a platter, particularly when the stranger bitterly, insultingly rebuffed what welcome he was given.
He had a situation building, a resentment in his command. And it was his job to find a way to deal Fletcher in.
“So how is he?” Madison asked, second captain, and JR felt heat rise to his face, wondering what answer he possibly could find.
“He’s not happy.” To his left a guitar hit a quiet passage, strings ringing with a poignantly soft tune he’d heard since he was small; “Rise and Go.” Parting of lovers. Partings of every kind. It was cliché. It never failed to send the chills down his arms and the moisture to his eyes. It disturbed logic. Prompted frankness. “Neither are we with him, sir, plainly speaking, sir.”
“We had to take him,” Madison said. “This was our chance. We couldn’t leave him.”
“I’m aware of our obligation, sir. And mine. I’m not begging off from the problem, only advising senior command that I’ve not made significant headway with him.”
“Not only our obligation,” Madison said. “Elene Quen had a part in this.”
That small, added information, so directly and purposefully delivered, struck him off balance. And at that moment Madelaine wandered over with a drink in hand.
“Jake’s called ops downside,” Madelaine said, “just to be sure, you know, that Fletcher made his quarters without incident.”
“I think he did,” JR said. The kid was angry. Not stupid. And if Madison’s information bore out into something besides Family determination to recover one of their own, there might be justification for that anger. Quen. Politics. Deals.
“He swiped a drink,” Madelaine said to Madison. “Pell Station let him, I’d be willing to bet. Station rules. He didn’t know he needed a go-ahead.”
Madison frowned. “The body’s old as JR, here. It’s the mind that’s under-aged. Your call, junior captain. What will you do with him?”
“My call,” JR said. “But this is a new one. Where do you rate him, sir? Junior-junior, or not? He’s Jeremy’s age and far less experienced.”
“And physically the same as your age. Look up the statutory years.” Madison spotted someone coming in by the up-ring entry, and drifted off with that quandary posed, information half-delivered.
JR gazed after him in frustration. He drank, judiciously and seldom, and he had twenty-six years for mental ballast. He also had the responsibility for issuing such privileges to juniors under him. Was Madison saying give Fletcher senior-junior privileges right off? He didn’t think so.
And this hint of deals with Quen, that might have complicated the situation with understandings and arrangements… no one had told him.
“What’s this,” he asked Madelaine, “that the name of Quen came up just now? I know why we took him, on principle. He’s Fletcher. But what are we doing taking him in on this run, not asking for him after he’s local eighteen and the court’s off his case? Is there something essential that I’m not hearing, here?”
“Oh, there’s a fair amount you missed that night at dinner.”
“With Quen? What did I miss?”
“The fact Quen very ably moved the courts to give us Fletcher when she wanted to, after telling us for twelve years that she couldn’t budge them. Now, that may be an unfair suspicion. Possibly her position has changed: possibly she has more power now; perhaps she simply called in a tall stack of favors.” Madelaine stopped—he knew that silence of hers: she was suddenly wondering how much to tell the junior captain on a particular point, and a blurted question from him right now would make her sure he wasn’t qualified to know. So he stood quietly while Madelaine took a sip of wine and thought about her next piece of information.
“Quen wants a ship. She wants a Quen ship. And she wants James”—Madelaine was one of a handful who called the senior captain James and not James Robert—”to stand with her and get it approved.”
“That, I already know.”
“But it’s more than that. Like Mallory, Quen is worried about Union’s next moves. Thinks the next war is going to be a trade war. Union’s building ships it proposes to put into trade and saying they don’t violate the Treaty. We of course say differently. Fletcher’s an issue on his own and always has been, but he’s become an issue of trust between us and Quen. Quen proves to us she’s got power on Pell by delivering Fletcher to us, maneuvering past Pell’s red tape—and we’ll stand by her in the Council of Captains and use our considerable stack of favor-points with other ships to swing votes on the issue she wants—if she backs us. We want tariffs lowered. An unrelated understanding, mark that.”
He did. There was no linkage between the two events because both parties agreed there wasn’t a linkage. Yes, Finity could fail to carry out their part of the deal, take Quen’s gift of Fletcher and go on to oppose Quen in Council, because there wasn’t a linkage. But if Finity betrayed her, Quen wouldn’t be their ally on something else they wanted her vote on.
And what was there to deal for? Quen wanted a Quen ship: understandable. What was there that Finity would be wanting from Quen? Lower tariffs didn’t sound at all related to the battle they’d been fighting against Mazian. It affected merchanter profits and the price of goods. That was all that he saw.
Tariffs affected trade; trade affected international affairs. Did the question have any relation to that Union ship out there, the most notable anomaly in this voyage besides their own declaration they were going back to merchanting? Quen detested Union, so he’d heard. And Quen had traded them the kid they’d held hostage for seventeen years because now Quen wanted to build ships.
Build ships to keep Union from building ships to operate essentially on trade routes within Union. That was a delicate and sticky point: pre-War and post-War, all commercial trade routes in existence had been independent merchanter freighter routes—all, that was, except the two routes between Cyteen and its outermost starstations. On those two routes Union had always used its own military transport, in supply of, the merchanters were given to understand, fairly spartan stations, probably populated by Union’s tailor-made humanity, for what he knew. No merchanter in those days had been interested in going there. That mistake had given Union a foothold in merchanter operations.
“So…” he asked Madelaine, “what is going on? How did Fletcher get into it, besides as a bargaining chit? And why are we making deals with Quen? Or is that what we’re really doing on this voyage? Who are we fighting? Mazian? Or Union?”
“This is topside information,” Madelaine said, meaning what she told the junior first captain didn’t go to the junior-juniors or even to Bucklin. “We were always anxious to get Fletcher out. We didn’t expect to get Fletcher this round. We took him because we could take him. Quen happens to hold a general view of the situation with Union we want her to act on, but we don’t tell her that. We have to let her persuade us at great effort, or she’ll start arranging other deals with otherp arties because she’ll believe we folded too easy and we’re up to something. So Fletcher wasn’t at issue… we snatched him up because we could; we just didn’t plan on him becoming a high-profile problem on this voyage.”
Aside from the damage done his tight-knit command, he didn’t like the ethical shading of the transaction he was hearing about, for Madelaine’s own great-grandson. They were merchanters, and they bought and sold, but people shouldn’t fit into a category of goods. In that regard he felt sorry for anyone caught in the turbulence around their dealings, Mallory’s and Quen’s. And if Fletcher detected the nature of the dealings, it could certainly explain Fletcher’s state of mind.
“You’re not to tell that,” Madelaine said, extraneous to any prior understandings she’d elicited of him. Madelaine was drinking wine and maybe just a little bit more open than she’d have wanted to be. “Especially to Fletcher.”
“You don’t like Quen,” JR observed. It seemed to him that Quen was an unanswered question, and what her dealings had been were never clear.
“I don’t, Madelaine said. “Not personally. I admire her. I don’t like her. She got personally involved with a stationer, kited off from Estelle because she was head over heels in love with a bright young station lawyer and nobody could prevent Elene doing any damn thing. It’s uncharitable to say it, but that’s the case. Elene was on station when her ship died because Elene was having her way in one of her romantical fancies. My Francesca was on station because she had no damn choice, medically speaking, and we had to transfer her off and go in fifteen minutes.” Another sip of wine. “Now Elene’s a hero of the Alliance and my granddaughter’s dead of an overdose. Quen didn’t do one thing to make her life easier while she was alive and alone there. Not one.”
He was shocked, and tried to hide it. Madelaine had never unburdened that opinion to him. But he hadn’t been in the line of command the last time they’d visited Pell and Madelaine’s temper hadn’t been ruffled by a sordid trade to get her great-grandson back, either.
“I blame Elene,” Madelaine said. “I blame Elene that she left her own ship. I blame Elene that she didn’t take Francesca in tow and provide a little personal friendship. Granted Elene was busy and Elene was pregnant, too, but if she ever extended a hand of friendship to my granddaughter before she hit the bottom I have yet to hear it. If my Elizabeth had lived to get back to Pell, she’d have had words for Quen. I reserve what I say. I’m only the girl’s grandmother.”
Francesca’s mother, Elizabeth. Dead at Olympus. There were so many.
Madelaine nudged JR’s arm with her wine glass. “Take a little extra care of my great-grandson. Don’t waste him in the junior-juniors. I know he’s an ass, but he’s got possibilities. Personal favor.”
JR drew in a slow, deep breath. He’d gotten snagged, broadsided, and boarded. Aunt Madelaine was the ship’s chief lawyer.
“I’ll try,” he said
“All you can do,” Madelaine agreed.
“Any special advice?” he asked Madelaine.
“For dealing with him? Grow all-over fur. The boy’s had no human ties. Damned Pell courts.” Sip of wine. The bottom of the glass, a little straw-colored liquid remaining. “Get me another wine, there’s a love. James has come. I won’t tell him what Fletcher did. None of us will. It just isn’t important.”
James Robert had come in, perhaps thinking he’d find a grateful, happy new member in the Family. Madelaine went in that direction, damage control, protection of her great-grandson, leaving him to get a refill at the bar, and one for himself while he was at it.
James Robert and Madelaine were in heavy discussion when he brought the wine. He put the glass in Madelaine’s outheld hand, offered his other on the moment to the Old Man, who hadn’t gotten across the room before Madelaine’s interception, and the Old Man murmured an abstracted thanks and took it.
Talk among the seniors: a Union ship just sitting out there, having run recovery on a bottle of Scotch. Quen and some high-powered agreement in their own vital interest. Madelaine said it was tariffs, which pointed to a political agreement inside the Alliance. The secrecy smelled to high heaven of some kind of operation of Mallory’s, while, third question, they were very publicly taking up trade again, in a move that had to be gossiped wherever merchanters docked… and the Fletcher incident had to dominate the gossip on Pell and everywhere else.
He had surmised their return to trade might be intended as a demonstration of Alliance power, a demonstration of the safety they hoped they’d created in the shipping lanes… at a critical moment when support of the starstation councils for the continued pirate hunt was wavering.
And at a time when Union was handing out special privileges to merchanters who wanted to sign on to wealthy Union instead of the economically struggling Alliance. He didn’t want to focus his career on fighting Union activity: he’d trained all his life to fight Mazianni, and that was where his interest was, but he could see that Union’s actions, actions which Quen would find of interest, constituted a smart move. Getting enough merchanters voluntarily signed into Union would win for Union without a shot what the War hadn’t gained for them by all the ordnance expended. If merchanters started drifting over the Line and signing with Union in any significant numbers the universe could see humanity polarized again into two major camps. Then, depend on it, merchanters would see themselves first regulated to the hilt, then entirely replaced by Union’s own ships: a merchanter desperate enough to clutch at Union financial support wasn’t analyzing his future further than the next set of bills.
It was the very situation that had started the War, the move to take over the merchanters this time coming not from Earth’s side, but from Union’s side of the border. One would think Union might have learned from Earth’s experience with the merchanters. Not so. The merchanters had formed their own state, at Pell, and with a handful of stations balancing commitment between the Merchanter Alliance and Union, and now Union started pushing to get the merchanters. The starstations independence would go next, and then they’d reach for Earth. If Mazian didn’t step in.
Or if Mallory and Quen and the Old Man of Finity’s End didn’t draw a line and say: no further.
And was that the message that went with the bottle in a black, starry sea? A warning—from Mallory and from Finity, Stay our allies? Don’t provoke us with your recruitments and your ship-building? Yours is the glass house?
It was certain in their own minds that Mazian had a secret base, somewhere within 20 lights of Pell, and that was an immense volume of space to search for someone determined not to be found. The rest of human habitation was concentrated in a comparatively small sphere at the center, where Mazian could strike without warning—and escape to that remote base.
It required a network of informants to establish any kind of security. Union didn’t have that network. Mallory did. Mallory—who was once of the Fleet. And they were such a network, they, the merchanters… who wouldn’t talk to Union or Alliance stationside officials with anything like the freedom with which they talked to each other.
From Mazian’s view, however, finding the heart of human civilization wasn’t a question of searching a 40-light sphere. It was a concentrated area Mazian could easily strike, without warning and with a choice of targets that could send chills down any civilized backbone. If a junior could venture a guess of his own, it was worse than that: Mazian’s aim might be to establish multiple bases, scattered points from which to threaten the center—and Mazian’s overriding strategy might not be a crushing military strike but rather evading Mallory, waiting for Union to get overconfident, and then maneuvering the Alliance or Earth into so deep a diplomatic crisis with Union that the Alliance had no hope except to forgive Mazian and recall him to take over the government. Then Mazian could use those bases to hit Union. But merchanters would bleed in the process.
Against that backdrop, the captains of Finity’sEnd had held their meeting with Quen and gotten some agreement out of her that they had wanted. Meanwhile they were going back to trading, Union was still refusing to let Alliance merchanters into its internal routes without them signing up as Union-based, and the Old Man had wanted Quen to bribe him into supporting her in some scheme of her devising.
What in hell game were they playing?
He went back to the bar, picked up a glass of wine for himself. Bucklin and Chad intercepted him on their own inquiry, having been out of the loop.
“So was that all about Fletcher?” Bucklin asked
“Some of it. Madelaine being his grandmother.” Great-grandmother, but in a Family’s tangled exogamous web of greats, second and third cousins and nieces and nephews on lives extended by time dilation and rejuv, you compressed generations unless you were seriously trying to track what you were to each other. “She’s taking a personal interest. She wants this kid in very badly.”
Silence greeted that revelation.
“About the drink,” JR said. “Let it slide. He didn’t know the rules. I’ll think about where he fits. He’s not Jeremy’s size. The body’s as mature as we are. The education’s just way behind.”
“Yeah, well.” Bucklin sighed, and they took their drinks and walked over to the rest of the junior-seniors, who’d staked out a table for eight. They pulled more chairs over, until it was a dense, tight group, Lyra, Toby, Ashley, Sue and Connor, Nike, Wayne, and Chad: as many different looks as they had star-scattered fathers. Lyra, a year younger than Bucklin and third in command, was the family’s sole almost redhead, sporting an array of earrings and bracelets she couldn’t wear in ops. Lyra, and beside her, Toby, whose brown complexion and shoulder-trailing kinky locks made that pair of cousins about as far apart as the Family genes stretched.
Lyra and Toby had brought a dedicated bottle of wine from the bar. Bucklin and he also had wine. The rest had soft drinks and fruit juice, and that was the line Fletcher had crossed without permission: Fletcher had assumed, maybe because he’d done it on station, that he had a right.
“Fletcher,” JR said by way of explanation, “had a run-in with Vince, you’ll have noticed. He opted for his quarters. Presumably he got there. Jake checked.”
“So did you explain the rules?” Connor asked over his own soft drink. By custom, they didn’t follow formal courtesies in rec hall or in mess. Complaints were allowed; and he could have figured it would be Connor and Sue that spoke up for the rule book.
“Fletcher’s got a possible Extenuating.” He saw frowns settle not only on those two faces but all around. “He’s a junior-junior, but Madison said it. The body physiologically isn’t.”
“Body’s not mind,” Nike said, and swept an indignant hand from Wayne and Connor on her right to Chad, Sue, and Ashley on her left. “When do we get wide-open liberty on the docks? When do we sleepover where we like? Or take a wine off the bar in front of the seniors and everybody?”
“You know when.” He didn’t want this debate over the issue, and their challenge to him was the answer. No, maturity wasn’t identical from ship to station on the biological or the mental level, and there wasn’t a neat equivalency. The off-again on-again hormonal flux of time-dilated pubescent bodies that was the number one reason they didn’t get bar privileges was precisely the hormonally driven emotional flux that set their nerves in an uproar when they were crossed. His physical-sixteens and -fifteens were a pain in the ass; he was just emerging from that psychological cocktail himself, and while at physical and mental seventeen-to-eighteen and chronological and educational twenty-six he was just getting his own nerves to a calm, sensible state. Yes, he still flared off, a besetting sin of his. But the infinite wisdom of the Way Things Worked on a short-handed ship had made him senior-most junior, responsible for all the junior crew that was still in that stage.
Keep them busy picking nits, his predecessor in the role had warned him; never let them take on the real rules. Give them nits to worry at and they’ll obey the big ones. Then Paul had added, smugly: You did.
Nits, hell. His predecessor had commanded the juniors through the dustup at Bryant’s, when so many had died—among the juniors as well. That had been no waltz.
They gave him Fletcher on a damn milk run. It seemed, on the surface, a tame, and minor, duty, one that shouldn’t set his lately pubescent hormones skewing wildly through the whole gamut of adrenaline charge. He’d had his last personal snit, oh, exquisitely dissected and laid out for him by Paul, right down to temper as his personal failing.
Not this time.
“Give him some leeway,” he said to the others. “Just give him some leeway. He’s not the same as having grown up here. He’s not the same as anyone we’ve ever personally known.”
“I hear he gave you trouble,” Ashley said.
“Not lately.”
“Not in fifteen minutes,” Sue said. “He shoved that glass on you in front of everybody.”
“Fine. I gave it to Vince. Who set up the situation, if we have to talk about fault.” His temper was getting on edge. Sue had a knack for stirring it up. He hauled it back and put on the brakes. “I saw the drink and I was dealing with it. I didn’t need a snot-nosed junior-junior to tell me that was a wineglass. Vince interfered. It blew. That’s the end of it. We’ve got Fletcher, he’s physiological seventeen, he probably drank on station, and somewhere, somehow in the plain fact he doesn’t know a damn thing useful, we’ve got to fit him in at the bottom of the senior-juniors—”
“No!” from Nike.
“—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a year older than he is; but Fletcher’s seventeen years weren’t time-dilated. So do you want my orders, or are there other suggestions?”
“He’s the baby,” Connor said “I think we ought to do a Welcome-in.”
Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It wasn’t the idea he had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew privileges and he hadn’t been through the process and the understandings and the acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.
“He’s a little old for that,” JR said.
“We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy,” Sue said. “Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took it. So how’s this guy holier than any of us?”
“He’s upset, that’s one difference. He wasn’t born here. He’s not one of us…”
“That’s what a Welcome-in’s for, isn’t it?” Chad asked, with devastating reason.
But a bad idea. “Not yet. This isn’t somebody straight down from the kids’ loft. This isn’t a green kid.”
“Plenty green to me,” Chad said.
“He can’t do anything,” Lyra said. “He’s not trained to do anything. He’s a stationer. He’s a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he’s got to appreciate what he’s joining.”
JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group, one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of him in an emergency.
“So when do we do a Welcome-in?” Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad’s tone it was an issue the way Fletcher’s encounter with him over the wine glass was going to be an issue with Chad.
“Not yet,” JR said. “Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he’ll blow, and that’s no good”
“Everybody blows,” Connor said.
“Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy’s size,” Bucklin muttered, finally, a dose of common sense. “Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you.”
There were sulks. They hadn’t done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They hadn’t known whether Finity would survive her next run, and they’d Welcomed-in Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn’t seemed fair for any kid to die alone in the nursery, the ship’s last kid, in years when they hadn’t produced any other kids.
Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to station-time.
And very, very different.
“I say we go easy with him,” JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin’s clear statement of the facts had gained, “and we give him a little chance to figure us out. Then we’ll talk. “
There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.
“Square up,” JR said. “Don’t sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a senior venue.”
Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.
“I say with JR,” said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, “we give him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn’t, we talk again at Mariner.”
“Just don’t take him on,” JR said. “If you’ve got a problem with him, refer it to me.”
He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher’s quarters this evening and try to talk it out with him. But he didn’t trust that three-quarters of a wine glass in three gulps had improved Fletcher’s logic. Or his temper. There were constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased slide.
He supposed he’d tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe hadn’t been the ideal pair-up.
But putting him with him or Bucklin would inspire jealousy: Put him with Chad? There were two tempers in a paper sack. Connor, the same. Ashley or Toby would go silent and there’d be offense there. He couldn’t think of anybody better than Jeremy, who could outright disarm the devil.
The Old Man and Paul both had warned him there weren’t fast fixes for personal messes once they went wrong. You didn’t just go running down to a case like Fletcher and tell him how to fix his life and expect cooperation, especially after a public scene such as they’d just had. Fletcher had to figure a certain amount out for himself, and meanwhile he and his crew had to figure out what a mind was like who’d been more than content to sink into a gravity well and never see the stars again. Stranger than the downers, in his own opinion. Downers at least had been born to endless cloud and murk.
Wood, a slim wand of it brought into space where wood was a rarity, feathers, where birds never flew… and spirals and dots and bands carved by hisa fingers—fingers no longer content to carve wood with stones, the scientist reminded them. Hisa of these times were quite glad to have sharp metal blades. Hisa accepted them in trade and called metal cold-cold. That had become the hisa word for it.
No matter how hard you tried to keep the Upabove out of Downbelow, humans didn’t give up their ties to the technology they depended on and hisa learned to depend on it, too. But humans found it difficult to go down to a world again.
Fletcher lay on his bunk, his head a little light from the wine. His fingers drew peace from the touch of the feathers, damaged by a Downbelow rain. The touch of wood evoked memories far happier than where he was.
He didn’t give up his resentments. He didn’t give up his dreams, either. And maybe the experts weren’t right that he’d done actual harm by going where he’d gone. Expert opinion had backed another theory, once, right up to the time before he was born. Then the idea had been to get the hisa into space, teach them technology, give them the benefits of the steel and plastics world above their clouded world. Hisa had been very clever with machines, quick to learn small jobs like checking valves, changing filters, reading dials.
Pell Station, short of personnel in its earliest days, and overwhelmed by events cascading about it, had begun with hisa at the heart of the operation, and they’d built the station around the presumption there’d always be hisa on Pell.
But human greed had tried to push things too fast on Downbelow. People had multiplied too fast. Had brought demands on the hisa for more, more, more of their grain, for organized work, for controlling Old River’s floods and doing things on schedule.
Hisa hadn’t taken to schedules and human demands. A hisa named Satin had led a hisa uprising—well, as uprisen as patient hisa ever got—back during the War.
Then a new set of experts had moved in, declared humans had done everything wrong and shut down a lot of operations the Base had used to have, restricted more severely the rotation of hisa up to the station, and dashed all expectations of hisa and humans working together.
Was it wrong that Melody and Patch had rescued a human child?
Was it wrong he’d grown up and found them again?
Was it wrong he’d dreamed of working with them—maybe a little closer than he should have gotten?
(But he knew them, and they knew him, his gut protested. He hadn’t hurt them. He’d never hurt them.)
His fingers traced designs no human understood. He knew what scientists surmised the designs were: day-night in the pattern of black dots, Great Sun in the circles, Old River in the long curves and branches.
But maybe the curling patterns meant vines and seeds. Maybe it was fields and maybe it was hisa paths the lines meant. You could see anything you believed in, in hisa carving, that was the thing. And if he ever could ask Melody and Patch to read the stick for him, as sure as he knew their minds, he’d bet they’d read him something completely different every time he asked
So who was smarter? Hisa, with their patterns that could mean anything the day felt like meaning? Or humans who, in their writing and their image-making, pinned a moment down with precision, like a specimen on a board?
Was one better, or smarter, and ought hisa not to work on the station as much as some of them, individuals with preferences like every human, wanted to work?
He didn’t think natural was better. He didn’t think hisa should die young from infections, or lose their babies in floods or to fevers, or die of broken legs. But the authorities ruled there were hisa you could contact, but hisa who didn’t work at the Base were completely off limits. And they went on dying of things station medicine could cure.
Experts said—better a few die like that than have another contact the way it had been when the Fleet military had invaded Downbelow. Humans never should have landed on Downbelow at all, was what one side said. Everything humans had ever done was harmful and wrong. They’d already robbed an intelligent species of their unique future and further contact could only do worse.
But wasn’t a human-hisa future unique in the patterns of a wide universe, too? Wasn’t it a surer chance for the hisa to survive, when worlds with life were so few? And wasn’t it as important in the vast cosmos that two species had gotten together and worked together?
Seemed sensible to him that he’d done no harm.
They’d given him a gift that meant—surely—they weren’t harmed.
But when he remembered that he was lying on a bunk in a ship speeding toward nowhere, and away from every meaning the stick had to anyone, a lump came up in his throat and his eyes stung.
Rotten stupid was what it was.
More experts. Quen, this time. Nunn.
Friends, he and Bianca. Running around together. Thinking of things together. For maybe fifteen whole, oblivious days, with disaster written all around them.
It shouldn’t surprise him when it all fell apart. Things always did. He wrapped the feathered cords around the stick and put it away in the back of the drawer.
Then he fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, chasing away the ache in his chest with the remembrance of sunglare through green leaves. Jeremy came in from the party, late, and he pretended to be asleep as Jeremy clattered about and took a late shower.
When Jeremy had dimmed the lights and gone to bed, he got up and stripped his clothes off to go to sleep.
“There’s a lot of the guys mad at you,” Jeremy said out of the dark.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have taken the drink,” Jeremy said.
“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said coldly. “They set ‘em out, yeah, I’ll drink one. Nobody had a sign up. Nobody told me stop.”
“Vince was an ass,” Jeremy said finally.
“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling better by that small vindication. “Generally. So how was it?”
“Oh, it was fine.” Jeremy settled, a stirring of sheet and a sighing of the mattress. A silence then, in the dark. “JR said everybody should lay off you and be polite.”
“That so.” He didn’t believe it. But he couldn’t see Jeremy’s face to test the truth of it.
They were going to jump at maindawn, He was worried about sleeping through it. Forgetting the drug. Going crazy,
They were going to Mariner from here. They’d actually be at another star.
“Are they going to warn us tomorrow morning?” he asked Jeremy.
“About the jump? Yeah, sure, I’ll guarantee you can’t sleep through it. They’ll be on the intercom. Fifteen minutes before. You got your drugs?”
“Yeah,” When he was out of his clothes, he had the drugs in the elastic side pocket, on the bed, the way Jeremy had advised him. Always with him, “They’re right here.” He was still wobbly about the experience. Going into it out of the dark, he supposed one shift or the other had to have it in the middle of their night, but it was a scary proposition,
“Anybody from the party have a hangover,” he said, “That’d be bad.”
“The Old Man wouldn’t show ‘em any mercy,” Jeremy said. “How are you, drinking that wine? You won’t have a headache, will you?”
“Not usually.” Stupid, he said to himself. He’d forgotten about the jump when he drank it all. He hoped he wouldn’t.
He figured if he did he wouldn’t, as Jeremy said, get any pity for it.
He shut his eyes. He didn’t sleep, for a long, long time.
When the warning came it was loud, and scared him awake.
“Fifteen minutes,” it said. “Rise and shine. We’re on our way. Pull your pre-jump checks, latch down, tuck down, belt in, all you late party-goers. No sympathy from fourth shift… you get the next jump and we get the rec hall… move, move, move…”