The light came back. Melody would say Great Sun came walking back above the clouds. As soon as Fletcher could see trunks of trees in the dawn he took up walking, just following River; and River led him, oh, far, far up through the woods. Rain drizzled down, but still not a downer appeared. Downers on such a day would stay to their burrows, having more sense than to get wet and cold.
Or they’d gone wandering for love, walking as far as a female could, and farther than some of the males, those less able, those less strong. That was the test.
That was what he was looking for, he began to think. That was the test he’d set himself, the challenge, to overtake what he loved, lusted after, longed for with a remote and bewildered ache. He was a young male. He’d been confused. But now, beyond any psych’s pat answers, he had a clear idea what he hoped to find in this tangled woods, with its huge trees and its banks of puffer-globes glistening with the mist. Like the downers who walked until a last suitor followed, he was looking for someone who cared. Simple quest. Someone who cared.
He wasn’t going to find that someone, of course. And ultimately, being only human, he’d have to push that rescue button and let the ones who didn’t give a damn chase him down and bring him back, because the station paid them to do that. His thinking was muddled and he knew it was, but it was comfort to think the ache was common to all the world.
The sun grew brighter. The rain grew less.
He heard strange whistling calls, such as came constantly in the deep bush. No one was sure what made some of those sounds. Sometimes he’d heard downers imitate them.
There were clicks, and rising booms, and whistles.
A creature stared at him from the hillside. He’d heard of such big, gray diggers, but they came nowhere near the Base, being shyer than the downers and given to be harmless to humans if unmolested. It was a marvelous sight. It moved on all fours, unlike downers, and chewed a frond of herbage, staring at him with a blandly curious expression. It wasn’t afraid of him. He wasn’t quite afraid of it, but the advice from lectures was not to go close or get in their way, and he walked off the path and across to another clear spot to avoid it.
A shower of fronds came down on him, startling him and making him look up. A downer was in the tree near him.
And his heart soared.
“Hello,” he called it, hoping it might be a friend. He didn’t think he knew this downer, but he called out to it. “Good morning. Want Melody and Patch! Name Fetcher.” He ventured their hisa names, that he’d never used to another hisa. “Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o my friends I want find.”
“You come!” the downer said, decisively.
So it did understand, and that meant it was one who’d worked with humans and one that might help him. Maybe the downers had heard a human was missing; but he’d given a request, and rarely would a downer refuse. This one scrambled down the fat, white-and-brown tree trunk and skipped ahead of him through the fronds that laced over the trail.
So after all his fear he was rescued. Downers knew where he was. His imaginings, his wild constructions of hope, the constructions of fantasy and rescue he’d built in the dark to keep him going—his daydreams so seldom came true, and he’d begun to believe this one would come to the worst, the most calamitous end of all.
But now, instead, the last, the wildest and most fanciful hope, was taking shape around him: yes, Melody and Patch knew he was lost. They’d whistled it through the trees, or simply sent younger, quicker downers running to look for him. They hadn’t forgotten him. They still cared.
On and on the downer led him, until he was panting, short on oxygen and staggering as he went.
The way it led him wasn’t back the way he’d come. Or perhaps he’d gotten oriented wrong with River: he’d been following the water, and perhaps in the winding paths he could find on the high forested hills, away from observing the direction of River’s flow, he’d just turned around and started walking back again. He’d be disappointed if that proved so, if suddenly between the trees he found himself back at the Base, among the human-tended fields, nothing gained.
But the walking went on and on for hours, beyond anything he thought he could do. He changed out mask cylinders. By then he had no idea where he was. But the downer never quite lost him. He’d think he was hopelessly behind, and then the whistling would guide him, past the thumping of his own pulse in his ear. He’d fall, tripped in the awkward vision of the mask, and a shower of leaves would fall around him, like a benediction, a gentle urging to get up again.
I’m using up the cylinders, he wanted to say to the downer, who never came close enough long enough. He began to fear he was in danger after all, and that with the best will in the world the downer would kill him, only from the walking.
A long, long walk (another cylinder-change along, it was) he saw the giant trees of the forest began to grow fewer. Am I back after all? he asked himself. Was I that far lost? And am I only back at the Base?
He was exhausted and in pain, and struggling to breathe, trying not to give up a cylinder sooner than he’d wrung the last use out of it. He was ready, now, to be back in safety.
But a bright gold of treeless land showed between the trees.
It wasn’t the cleared hillsides around the Base. There was no white of domes or dark green of trees, and Old River was far from him. It might be the further fields, where humans grew grain in vast tracts, at Beta Site, near the shuttle landing.
But those wouldn’t be gold yet, just brown, turned earth.
It was the forest edge, for sure. And when he’d followed his guide to the last fringe of forest giants he saw below him a hill sweeping on for a great distance, down to a plain of last year’s golden grass. In the heart of a pollen-hazed distance, something like a set of figures stood, thick and strange, and impossible to be alive.
Scale played tricks with his eyes. Tiny figures moved among the greater ones, hisa, dwarfed by skyward-looking images.
He knew, then, what he saw—what he’d heard reported, at least, and seen only in photographs.
It was the Spirit-place, the great holy place. The stone figures that watched the sky, the great Watchers, of which their little ones on the hill were the merest hint.
Humans didn’t come here.
“Come-come,” the downer said, beckoning as humans beckoned “Come-come, you come, Melody child.”
He walked a golden hill, that tore beneath his feet. He was losing the vision. There was a feeling of falling… down and down.
Of arrival. He knew it now. The dream escaped his mind. Breaths came faster. There was no cylinder restraining his air. There was no clean-suit. There was no world…
He’d been in the best moment of his life. And wasn’t there. Would never be. Tears leaked between Fletcher’s shut lids, and he drew tainted breath, and knew why his mother had kept the dream, bought it on dockside. Knew why his mother had loved it more than she’d loved him.
There’d been no future in the dream. He’d not known it could turn darker.
That moment, that very moment he’d want to hold, that was the one the arrival ripped away from him, after all the pain.
There was just Jeremy scrabbling in his drawer, after clothes, there was just Jeremy saying, “Drink the stuff. You’ve got to have it.”
He’d have ignored Jeremy. But he couldn’t ignore his stomach. It wanted; and he reached numbly after the drink packets, the synth that pulled electrolytes back into balance after hyperspace had done its worst to a human body.
After the dream was done.
“You shower first or me?” Jeremy asked him.
“You.” He didn’t want to move. It wasn’t a favor Jeremy offered him. He wanted to keep his eyes shut and try to recover that sight, that moment, when he’d met all his hopes.
He could have them back. Could have had them forever. If something hadn’t pulled the ship in.
It was another month. What had pulled them in, if they weren’t doomed to die in empty space, had to be the star they’d been looking for.
They were at Mariner.
He gulped down his remaining drink packets, drowsed while Jeremy showered and his own stomach settled. They made two more touches at the interface that almost made him sick, and then he slept again. He came to with the intercom talking to them.
“Jeremy, Vincent, Linda, Fletcher” It was the synthesized voice he’d heard last time. Jeremy had told him there was a set-up in the computer where a random-sort program juggled the electronic dice and put the scut-crews on whatever assignment their luck assigned them. It activated the intercom to call your team’s cabins and even left mail in your mailbox.
“Laundry detail,” it said.
“Damn!” Jeremy cried from inside the bath, and came out still damp and stark naked. “No fair!”
At least, Fletcher thought, he knew how to do that job.
“Stupid machine!” Jeremy shouted at the ceiling and kept swearing.
Fletcher rolled out of bed, his clothes at that particular stage of sticking to his body and dragging across dead skin that made him sure he didn’t want to linger in them. The effects of a month- long near dormancy weren’t pretty on the human body inside or out, he’d discovered. This time his gut wanted to protest, and he made the bathroom in some haste.
Officers’ meetings. Numbers that pertained to ship-sightings, stock reports, futures and commodities… the same kind of information they’d tracked for military purposes for nearly two decades, and from before JR had sat on staff; but the information was never sifted down to military intelligence: the availability of supply and the activity and origin of suspect ships—questions which JR’s brain kept following off-track of what his seniors were discussing.
Seniors reminisced instead about old port-calls, pre-War, early War. They talked about the early days of Mariner Station, when everything had been bare metal, and the details swirled around in a junior mind not quite sure whether this was needful information or just the pleasurable talk of old crew, recalling hard times which juniors nowadays didn’t remember.
When they’d put into Mariner before, in his recollection, they hadn’t traded. The Old Man had had meetings with Mariner authorities and military authorities, they’d had meetings with other captains and senior crew off other ships and taken in the kind of information ships wouldn’t ordinarily trade with each other, information on the market more freely shared than made sense… if they were rivals. They’d been no one’s rivals, then.
Now they were going in to compete and consequently they wanted prices for what they carried as high as possible.
Now secrecy mattered not because they didn’t want Mazian and the Fleet to know what they hauled and where they hauled it, but because they wanted to keep the price of goods, apparently scarce, as high as they could manage until they sold what they were carrying. Let somebody speculate that their load was all downer wine (it wasn’t) and the price of wine would plummet, taking their profit. Let them speculate that they carried Earth chocolate and coffee (they did) and the price of those goods would drop in three seconds on the electronic boards.
They were legally restrained from entering their goods on the market until they’d reached a certain distance from Mariner, and Helm had run them as close to that mark as they could at near- light before he’d dumped them down to the sedate crawl at which they approached Mariner Station. .
At 0837h/m local their goods had gone up for sale on the Mariner Exchange, and they had a vast amount of printout from Mariner, which was just old enough (two hours light-speed) to make buys hazardous. The new guessing game was not what Finity carried but what Finity wanted or needed. The price of goods would react. Any ship dropping into Mariner system was going to affect prices when they began to make their buys and as traders reassessed goods ‘in the system’ and their effect on each other. And there was a ship, Boreale, already approaching dock.
Boreale was from Cyteen. That was interesting in the engineering and the political sense: it was one of those new Cyteen quasi-merchanters with a military, not a Family crew, coming from a port which specialized in biostuffs (rejuv, plant and animal products, pharmaceuticals) as well as advanced tech. Also a factor to consider on the question of that ship’s cargo and the futures market: farther ports deep in Union territory did produce metals and other items that could drive down the prices of goods inbound from say, Viking, heavily a manufacturing system.
It was, in short, a guessing game in which Mariner futures and commodities traders could suffer agonies of financial doubt, a game on which Finity’s profit margin ticked up or down by little increments every time someone made a buy or sell decision and changed the amount of goods available.
The market also reacted in a major way to every ship docking, because the black box that every ship carried shot news and technical statistics to the station systems, news derived from all starstations in the reporting system. The black boxes wove the web that held civilization together. A single ship’s black box reported every piece of data from the last station that ship had docked at, and thus every piece of data previously brought to that last station from other ships of origins all over space. The information constituted pieces of a hologram reflecting the same picture at different moments in time, and the station’s computers somehow assembled it all: births and deaths, elections, civil records, deeds, titles, rumors, popular songs, books in data-form for reproduction by local packagers, mail, production statistics, news, sports, weather where applicable, star behaviors, navigational data, in-space incidents, the total picture of everything going on anywhere humans existed so far as that particular ship had been in contact with it. A last-minute load went into a ship when it undocked and went out of a ship when it docked elsewhere, weighted by the computers as most accurate where the ship had just been and least accurate or least timely regarding starstations farthest from its last dock. The station computers heard it all, digested it all, overlaid one ship’s black-box report over another and came up with a universe-view that included the prices of goods at the farthest ports of the human universe… one that faded in detail considerably regarding information from Cyteen or its tributaries—or from inside Earth—but it was good enough to bet on, and pieces let a canny trader make canny wagers.
The black box system also continually affected the local station-use commodities market, as a shortage of, say, grain product on Fargone affected the price of grain product everywhere in known space. A tank blew out at Viking and a major Viking tank farm shut down a quarter of its production: the price of fish product, that bane of a small-budget spacer’s existence, actually ticked up 10/100ths of a credit everywhere in the universe, in spite of the fact that every station produced it and there was no food staple cheaper than that: somebody might actually have to freight fish product to Viking.
JR told himself this truly was a thrilling piece of news and that he should be pleased and proud that Finity was at last occupied with details like that rather than figuring how they could best spend the support credits they had to supply ships like Norway with staples and metal, out in the deep, secret dark of jump-points a ship laden the way they were loaded now couldn’t reach. They still would haul for Mallory—one run scheduled out when they were done with this loop, as he understood—but there were other ships appointed to do that, a few, at least, who regularly plied the supply dumps that Mallory used.
What was different from the last near-twenty years was that their schedule to meet Mallory at a rendezvous yet to be arranged didn’t call on them for their firepower.
And at Pell, they’d officially given up the military subsidy that fueled and maintained them without their trading. That was the big change, the one that shoved them away from the public support conduit and onto the stock exchange and the futures boards not with an informational interest in the content of the boards—but with a commercial one.
Safer, Madelaine had argued, to haul contract. That meant hauling goods for someone else who’d flat-fee them for haulage and collect all the profit, with a bonus if their careful handling and canny timing, or blind luck ran the profit above a pre-agreed amount, and liability up to their ears if something happened to the cargo. It was steady, it was relatively safe, it guaranteed they got paid as long as the goods got to port intact
But it didn’t pay on as large a scale as a clever trader could make both hauling and trading their own goods. They had the safer option; but Finity had never done contract haulage as a primary job, and maybe it was just the Old Man’s pride that he disdained it now. James Robert and Madison had been doing trading in ship-owned goods for a lot of years before the War, they’d watched the market survive the War and blossom into something both vital and different, and by what JR saw now, they just couldn’t resist it
The Old Man and Madison were, in fact, as happy as two kids with a dock pass, going over market reports. JR felt his brain numbed and his war-honed instincts sinking toward rust. All he’d learned in his life was at least remotely useful in what the two senior captains were doing, but not with the same application. He wasn’t even engaged in strategy thinking, like whether the ship near them might be reporting to Union command. They knew that Boreale would do exactly that—report to Union command—so there wasn’t even any doubt of it to entertain him.
Trade. Real trade. He still entertained the unvoiced notion that they were engaged in information-gathering and intrigue about which neither the Old Man nor Madison had told him. He went over the political and shipping news with a trained eye and gathered tidbits of speculation that—were no longer useful in the military sense, since they’d be outmoded by the time they got near someone who reported to Mallory.
That ship they’d met at Tripoint continued to haunt him, and after the staff meeting—knowing he’d lose points in the strange non-game they played, but not as many as if he asked on a current situation—he snagged Madison to ask with no hints about it whether that encounter had been scheduled.
“No,” was Madison’s answer. “They’re watching, is all.”
“Watching us.”
“Watching for anything the Alliance is doing. Seeing what our next step is. Being sure—odd as it might sound—that we aren’t negotiating with the Fleet for a cease-fire and a deal with Mazian independent of them. Earth’s made some provocative moves.”
Mark that for a blind spot he should ponder at leisure. It wasn’t enough to know the honest truth about one’s own intentions toward the enemy: an ally still had to plan its security in secret and without entirely trusting anyone. One’s allies could take a small piece of information, foresee double-crosses and act, ruinously, if not reassured.
And, true, Earth was building more ships, launching new explorations in directions opposite to the Alliance base at Pell.
That Earth might someday make peace with the Fleet and amnesty them into its service again… that was, in his book, a very sensible fear for Union or Pell to have; but that they themselves, Finity, and Norway, would someday make peace with the Fleet? Not likely. Not with Edger in the ascendant among Mazian’s advisors. Damn sure Mallory wouldn’t. Union didn’t remotely know Mallory or Edger if they ever thought that
But then… Union hadn’t had experienced military leaders when the War started. They’d learned tactics and strategy from the study tapes on which Union’s education so heavily relied. But most of all they’d learned it from the Fleet they were fighting, as the whole human race hammered out the tactics and strategy of war at more than lightspeeds and with relativistic effects and no realtime communications at all. He’d learned Fleet tactics by apprenticeship to the Old Man and strategy from Mallory. The Fleet had developed uncanny skills and still did things Union pilots couldn’t match. Union, on the other hand, sometimes did things that surprised you simply because it wasn’t what one ought to do… if one had read the ancient Art of War , or if one had understood the Fleet.
Union was always hard to predict. Sometimes its actions were just, by traditional approaches, wrong. Union was now their ally.
“Where do you suspect Mazian is right now?” he asked Madison. The estimation could change by the hour. Like the market, only with more devastating local consequences.
“I have absolutely no idea,” Madison said. “The way I don’t know where Mallory is, either.”
On the fine scale of the universe, that was not an unusual situation. “Do you think she knows where Mazian is?”
There was a longer silence than he’d expected, Madison thinking that one over, or thinking over whether it was needful baseline information, or a truth a senior-junior ought to figure out for himself. “I think Mallory knows contingency plans she’ll never divulge. I think she knows a hell of a lot she’ll never divulge. I think they’re her safety, even from us. Loose talk could reach Union. I don’t think their amnesty is worth a damn in her case.”
“You think they’d go after her?”
“They’d be fools right now if they did. And I don’t think they’re fools. I think they’d like to know a lot more about her operations than they know. I think they lose a lot of sleep wondering whether someday we’ll turn tables, make an understanding with Earth, and go after them. Earth trying to get a foothold back in space, establishing new starstations… in other directions… they view that with great suspicion”
“Do you think Earth might become a problem?”
“We don’t think so currently. But after the War, when we couldn’t get a peace to stick… you aren’t old enough to remember. But we space farers had been homogenous so long we flatly had forgotten how to deal with divergent views, contrary interests, traders that we are. One thing old Earth is good at: diplomacy.”
“Good at it!” He couldn’t restrain himself. “Their diplomacy started the War!”
“Not on their territory” Madison said with a nasty smile. The War never got to them, did it? When we and Union chased Mazian’s tail back to Sol space and we lost him, it looked as if we were going to square off with the Union carrier… Earth mediated that little matter. We frankly didn’t know what hit us. First thing we knew, we agreed, the Union commander agreed, each of us separately with Earth; then we had to agree with each other or Earth would have flung us at each other and watched the show from a distance. Learn from that. It’s all those governments, all those cultures on one world. They’re canny about settling differences. And we’d forgotten the knack. Four, five thousand years of planetary squabbles have to teach you something useful, I suppose.” Madison folded up his input board and tucked the handheld into his operations jacket, preparing to leave. “I don’t know if we could have made peace without Earth.”
“Would we have made war without them, sir? In your opinion.
“Far less likely, too. We’d have been an adjunct of what’s now at Union. But James Robert would have spit in their eye, still, when they tried to nationalize the merchanters. We’d have fought them. We’d have had every merchanter in space on our side. As we did. And we’d still have gained sovereignty on our own decks. As we did. Think about it. It’s all we merchanters ever really gained from all the fighting we ever did. I just don’t think we’d have blown Mariner doing it”
A Union spy had sabotaged a station—this station. Mariner. Pell had lost a dock during the War. Mariner had depressurized all around the ring, and tens of thousands of people who hadn’t made it to sealed shelter had died. It was the worst human disaster that had happened outside of Earth. Ever.
And, we merchanters. It was the first time he’d ever heard anyone on Finity use that particular we. Or talk about a balance sheet, a profit-and-loss in the War. It was a sobering notion, that the War wasn’t just the War, immutable, always there. There’d been a before. Was it possible there would be an after—and that they wouldn’t have gained a damned thing by all they’d done, all the blood they’d shed?
Was it true, that even if you shoved at history and fought and struggled with its course, the universe still did what it was going to do anyway?
Hell if.
He couldn’t accept that.
Madison went on his way to the bridge, needed there, and he went his.
He hadn’t found his way past Madison’s reticence to ask what no one had yet told him… the reason they’d split from Mallory, which he began to think held all the other answers. No better informed than before he’d snagged the second captain, JR picked up his own handheld and clipped it to a belt that did little else but hold it—a great deal like the pistol he’d once worn, back in the bad old days when fifteen-year-olds had gone armed everywhere on the ship.
They’d stopped doing that when they’d gotten through the business with Earth and when it was sure they’d moved Mazian’s raiders out of the shipping lanes. What the likes of Africa and Europe had done when they boarded a merchanter didn’t bear telling their younger crew, but he’d grown up with a pistol on his hip and instructions how to use it in corridors where you had to worry about a pressure blowout.
At fifteen he’d been instructed to blow out the corridor where he was himself if his only other prospect had been capture by the Fleet
Helluva way to grow up, he supposed. It was the only life he’d known. And when they’d gotten past the worst of the mop-up, and when they could go through a jump-point without being on high alert—then the Old Man had called the guns in, and arranged that they’d be in lockers here and there about the ship, with no latch on the cabinets (nothing on Finity was locked), but not to be carried again. He’d felt scared when they’d taken the guns away. It had taken him this long to get over being scared
And they hadn’t ever had to use them. Their in-ship stand-down from arms had lasted and the Old Man had been right,
Maybe this stand-down from arms would last, too, and maybe he needed to bear down harder on the study of Viking fish farms.
Laundry wasn’t anybody’s favorite assignment. After-jump meant a load of sweaty clothes. But it was better, Jeremy had said, than drawing the duty after liberty, because there was no limit to how many outfits somebody could get dirty on a two-week liberty, and there was a limit to how many clothes anybody totally tranked out could get dirty during jump. So they had the light end of things, and consequently they’d washed everything they had in the bins inside four hours. The better and worse of such assignments was a detail of spacer life Fletcher had never quite, somehow, imagined as potentially an item of curiosity and least of all his problem.
But he’d learned how to manage his personal property, on this particular detail. He’d learned, for instance, that by rules and regulations you left your last work clothes for cleaning in the laundry on your way out to liberty, like at Pell, and whoever got next laundry duty (it couldn’t be them, because the computer never doubled you on the same assignment) did all of it as they’d done, on the run out from dock.
So there were rhythms to the jobs they did. The laundry didn’t always operate at the mad pace it had the last time. It was a burst of activity in this particular period, and then last-minute special cleaning for officers’ uniforms.
He learned, for instance, that a crew member on Finity had an issue of clothing of which at least one dress and one work outfit stayed in the locker ready for board-call and undock schedules or a senior officer talked seriously to you about your wardrobe. A regular crew member took only flash stuff and civvies ashore on a liberty, and wasn’t allowed to wear work stuff on dock unless he was working, which junior-juniors didn’t have to do.
“So what if you wear work clothes?” he asked Jeremy as Jeremy worked beside him, having given him this piece of information. “Another talk with an officer?”
“Why don’t you try it?” Vince asked from behind his back.
That was at least the third snide and uninvited remark. Vince was still on him about the drink from the bar last main-dark, from what he could figure; somehow that really bothered Vince.
“After all,” Vince said, “you don’t have to follow the rules. Not you.”
“Cut it out,” Jeremy said
“Vince,” Linda said
“Well, he didn’t, did he?”
“Vince,” Jeremy said
“I want to talk to you,” Vince said to Jeremy, and those two went out in the corridor and stayed gone awhile.
“Is Jeremy all right?” Fletcher asked Linda, and Linda didn’t look at him, quite. “Yeah. Fine,” Linda said.
He was worried. Vince and Linda both were a little senior to Jeremy and he had the idea they were both leaning on the kid. His agemate. Him.
He’d personally had enough of Vince’s notion of subtlety. Adrenaline was up, vibrating through him so he’d like to put Vince through the nearest wall if Vince crossed him one more time about the drink issue. But Vince was too small. At best he’d have to settle for bouncing Vince off the wall, which wasn’t satisfying at all, or holding him a few inches off the deck, which had possibilities. But either would likely get him confined to the ship for a long, boring couple of weeks and he found he was looking forward to liberty. He really was. He figured he’d write home. He’d promised Bianca he’d write. Yes, she’d caved in, she’d saved her neck, her career. He couldn’t blame her, now that he’d had time to think about it. He had a lot to tell her.
He’d write his foster-family, too. The Wilsons. Tell them he was all right. He owed them that. He’d heard that junior crew had an allowance and he’d asked Jeremy how much a letter cost: the answer was simply that letters didn’t mass at all, in a ship’s black box, and if you didn’t want physical copy to go, it was ten c per link for handling.
That was a little more than he’d hoped, but a lot less than he’d feared, and Mariner was a single-hop from Pell as you counted postage: jump-points, Jeremy said, didn’t count, only station hookups did; and for that ten c, they let you have a fair amount of storage per letter.
He’d see Mariner and he’d write Bianca about it like a diary. He was a little doubtful about the Wilsons, even shy about writing to them, in the thought maybe they didn’t want a letter from him after the trouble he’d caused at the end, but he’d eaten enough of their holiday dinners: he could afford the cash at least to tell them he was all right, even if none of them had come to see him off—for one thing because he didn’t depend on Quen to have even told them. She’d have known they were a legal convenience—she’d set it up. But she probably didn’t know, because he’d not mentioned it even to the psychs, that they were the one batch he’d really liked, and really called some kind of home.
He could write to Quen. One of those picture messages, the really neon, garish ones, the sort spacers bought, if he were going to send one to Quen. If it wouldn’t cut seriously into his spending money he’d be downright tempted just for the hell of it. But something nice and sentimental for the two really he was going to send, maybe the picture sort that you could print out in holo. He didn’t know whether Bianca or the Wilsons had ever gotten a message from outside Pell, and he figured they’d keep it and maybe like a picture they could repro and look at
Jeremy and Vince came back. He looked at Jeremy for bruises or signs of ruffling, but Jeremy didn’t look to have been disturbed, just a little hot around the edges and not looking at anybody.
He couldn’t ask Jeremy then and there what Vince had wanted, or whether Vince had given him a hard time. Things seemed peaceful. Vince and Jeremy settled to playing cards. Business was so slow there wasn’t an alterday crew into the laundry once they closed up shop for the shift: their instructions were to leave the laundry door open and the light on, however, and put a check-sheet and a pen in the holder for people that took soap and other things, so they could keep the reorder records straight and know who’d picked up their clothes.
Doesn’t anybody ever steal? he wondered, and then he asked himself, Steal shower soap? And decided it was silly. It was free. Their own job as guardians of the laundry was largely superfluous once the washing and folding was all done: they had to clean up, latch down, be sure cabinet doors were shut tight and otherwise safed. Mostly they played cards. He figured at a certain point it was just a place for them to be, out of the way and bothering no one essential to the ship. Or maybe, at this stage of things, heading in, maybe everyone aboard was taking a breather. Traffic in the corridor was the lowest and slowest it had been.
As it happened, they didn’t go straight to the mess hall this end of shift. Jeremy and he were supposed to check in with medical… again. It was a few minutes standing in line, but the staff didn’t do anything but prick your finger, weigh you, and ask you a few questions, like: How are you sleeping? How are you feeling? With him it was, Glad to see you, Fletcher. Had any problems? How are the lungs?
In case he’d inhaled something on Downbelow. But he could say, for the second time, he hadn’t. They stuck his finger, looked at his lungs, listened to him breathe…
“All fourteen million credits are safe,” he said to the Family medics, and the medic looked at him as if it was a bad joke. Probably it was pretty low and surly humor.
“Do I get a liberty?” he asked.
“See no reason not,” the medic in charge said
“Thanks.” He’d no desire to offend the medics, or get on somebody’s report to JR. Clean record was his ambition right now, just get through it. Stay out of run-ins with JR, who alone of the officers seemed to be in charge of his existence. Get back to Pell. He had to produce a calm pulse for the medics and he’d done that, forgetful of Vince: he thought of green leaves and sun through the clouds, and when they dismissed him, he supposed they called him healthy.
Jeremy didn’t get his lungs looked at. Jeremy just watched, cheerful again.
“So what was that with Vince?” He sprang the question on Jeremy as they walked toward the mess hall. And Jeremy’s good mood evaporated.
“Oh, Vince is Vince,” Jeremy said.
“If he gives you a hard time about me, you know,—let me know.”
Jeremy looked at him, a dark eye under a shelf of hair that was usually shading his eyes. “Yeah,” Jeremy said as if he hadn’t quite expected that. “Yeah, thanks.”
He’d felt obliged to offer. He guessed Jeremy hadn’t expected much out of him and he knew Jeremy hadn’t been completely happy to give up his (he now knew) single room to be the only junior-junior with a roommate. But Jeremy had been cheerful all the same, and stood up for him and tried to make the best of it, and that was fairly unusual in the string of people he’d lived with. In this kid, in this twelve-year-old body and combat-nerves mind, he had something ironically like the guys he’d used to hang out with when he was a little younger than Jeremy, guys well aside from what the sober adults in his life had wanted him to associate with. He’d been into a major bit of mischief until he’d wised up and gotten out of it
But, along with the mischief he hadn’t gotten into any longer, had gone the fellowship he hadn’t had in the competitive Honors program. He’d invested in no friendly companionship since he’d gotten involved so deeply in his goals, except, well, Bianca, which had started out with a rush of something electric. But no guys, no one to play a round of cards with or hang about rec with. He’d evaded females in the crew. He’d let himself fall back into an earlier time when girls were something the guys all viewed from a distance, when guys were mostly occupied with looking good, not yet obsessed with hoping their inadequacies didn’t show… he’d been through all of it, and he could look back with, oh, two whole years’ perspective on the really paranoid stage of his life.
And maybe—he decided—maybe dealing with small-sized Jeremy in that sense felt like a drop back into innocence and omnipotence.
Like revisiting his own brat-kid phase, when vid-games and running the tunnels had been his total obsession. Getting away with it. Telling your friends how wonderful you were. Yes, he grew tired of hearing blow-by-blow accounts of maze-monsters and flying devils while Jeremy was beating him at cards, and the words wild and dead-on and decadent were beginning to make his nerves twitch; but there was something genuine and real in Jeremy that made him put up with the rough edges and almost regret that he’d lose Jeremy when his year of slavery was up. A few years ago, bitter and sullen with changes in his living arrangements, he’d have declined to give a damn—or to invest in a quasi-brother he’d lose. But he’d grown up past that; he’d had his experience with the Wilsons, and finally the Program; and somewhere in the mix he’d learned there was something you gained from the people that chance and the courts flung you up against, never a big gain, but something.
So, for all those tentative reasons, walking back to mess, he decided he liked his designated almost-brother, this round, among all the foster-brothers they’d tried to foist off on him. And if Vince leaned on Jeremy again tomorrow, he’d rattle Vince’s teeth with no real effort and damn the consequences.
They played cards in the rec hall after supper this first evening in Mariner system, and he won his time back from Jeremy plus six hours. Jeremy blew a hand. That was something. Or he was getting suddenly, measurably better.
“Want to play a round?” It was one of the senior-juniors coming up behind his shoulder as he collected the cards. He’d forgotten the name, but the convenient patch on the jumpsuit said, Chad.
Jeremy scrambled up from the chair when Chad asked, dead-serious and looking worried. The room was mixed company, seniors out of engineering watching a vid, a couple of other card games, the senior-juniors over in the corner shooting vid-games, and this guy, one of their group, wanted to play.
It wasn’t right, Jeremy’s behavior said it wasn’t right
“Maybe you’d better play Jeremy,” Fletcher said “He’s better”
Chad settled into the chair anyway, determined to have his way. Chad looked maybe a little younger than JR, not much, big, for the body-age. Chad picked up the cards and dealt them. The stakes were already laid: get up and walk off from this guy, or pick up the cards. Jeremy’s distress advised him this was somebody to worry about. He picked up the cards, hoping he could score that way.
Chad won the hand, a lapse of his concentration, his own fault. The guy didn’t talk, didn’t ask anything, just played a hand and won it. They’d bet an hour.
“My hour,” Chad said. “You clean my room tomorrow, junior-junior.”
“I guess I do,” he said. He’d lost, fair and square. He didn’t like it, but he’d played the game. He’d satisfied Chad’s little power-play, didn’t want another hand, in any foolish notion he could win it back against a good, a very good card player. He got up and left, and Jeremy caught him up in the corridor, not saying anything.
He felt he’d been played for the fool, though he was grateful for Jeremy’s cues, and didn’t want to talk about the bloody details of the encounter. More than embarrassed, he was angry. Chad was one of JR’s hangers-on, crew, cronies, whatever that assortment amounted to, and JR hadn’t been there; but at the distance of the corridor, he saw the game beneath the game, and he knew winning against Chad wouldn’t have been a sign of peace.
“Did he cheat?” he asked Jeremy. He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure he’d have caught it, and he wanted to know that, bottom-level.
“No,” Jeremy said, “but he’s pretty good.”
It was better than his suspicion, but it didn’t much improve his mood “Why don’t you go on back?” he said. “There’s no point. I’m going to bed.”
“Me, too,” Jeremy said, for whatever reason, maybe that things weren’t entirely comfortable for a roommate of his in the rec hall right now. There’d been a pissing-match going on. My skull’s thicker than yours head-butting. And why Chad had chosen to come over to their table and pick on him was a question, but it wasn’t a pleasant question.
They got to the cabin, undressed.
“When we get to Mariner, you know,” Jeremy said, awkwardly enthusiastic, “there’s supposed to be this sort of aquarium place. It’s wild. Really worth seeing, what I hear. “
“Yeah.”
“Well, we could kind of go, you know.”
He let his surly mood spill over on Jeremy and Jeremy was trying to make the best of it. Least of anybody on the ship was Jeremy responsible for Chad’s unprovoked attack on him.
He sat down on the bed; he thought about aquariums and Old River and how the fish had used to come up in the shallows, odd flat creatures with long noses. Melody had told him the name, but like no few hisa words, it was hisses and spits. They had an aquarium on Pell, too.
But it was an offer. It was something to do. Mostly he wanted to send his letters home. He didn’t want Chad or anybody else setting him up for something. And the coming liberty was a time when they might be out from under officers’ observation.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m kind of in a mood.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said.
“You know I didn’t want to be here. It’s not my fault.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “But you’re all right, you know. I wish you’d been here all along.”
He didn’t. Especially tonight. But he couldn’t say it to Jeremy’s earnest, offering face. There was the kid, the twelve-year-old man, the—whatever Jeremy was—who wanted to go with Mallory and fight against the Fleet, the kid who got so hyped on vid-games he shook and jerked with nerves, and who wanted to tour an aquarium on Mariner—probably, Fletcher thought, a whole lot more exotic to Jeremy than it was to him. Jeremy shared what he wanted to do. Shared a bit of himself.
Wished he’d had his company. That was saying something.
And because the moment was heavy and fraught with might-have-been’s, he ducked Jeremy’s earnest look and bent down instead and pulled open his under-bunk storage.
Where more than next morning’s socks resided. Where what was important to him resided.
In that moment of emotional confidences he took the chance, dug into the back of it and took out what Jeremy probably had never seen, something hands had made that weren’t human hands.
“What’s that?” Jeremy asked in astonishment, as he sat up and brought out the spirit stick. The cords unwound, feathers settling softly in the air, and the unfurling cords revealing the carvings in wood.
“Something someone gave me,” he said. He was defensive of it, and all it was to him. He thought to this moment he was a fool for unveiling it. But Jeremy’s reaction was more than he expected. It wasn’t puzzlement. It was awe, amazement, everything he looked for in someone who’d know what he was looking at and appreciate what he treasured.
“It’s hisa work,” Jeremy said. “Where’d you get it?”
“It was a gift to me. That’s where I lived. That’s what I did. That’s what I worked all my life to get into.” He handed it across the narrow gap and Jeremy took it carefully in his hands, stick, cords, feathers, and all.
Jeremy handled it ever so carefully, looked at the carvings, at the cords, fingered the wood, and then looked closely at a feather, stroking it with his fingers. “I figure about the cords, maybe, but how’d they make this?”
He didn’t know what Jeremy was talking about for a moment, and then by Jeremy’s fingers on the center spine and the edges of the feather he realized. “It’s a feather,” he said, hiding amusement, and Jeremy instantly made his hands gentler on the object.
“You mean like it came off a bird?”
“Not quite like the birds on Earth. They don’t fly much. They kind of glide. Some stay mostly on the ground. Downbelow birds.”
“I never saw a feather close up,” Jeremy said. “It’s soft.”
“Feathers from two kinds of birds. The wood comes from a little bush that grows on the riverbank. Cords are out of grasses. You soak it and put a stick in it and twist real hard while it’s wet and it makes cord. There’s a trick to sticking the next piece in just as you’re running out of the last one, so they make a kind of overlay in the twist. I’ve watched them do it. They don’t braid, that’s not something they invented. But they do this twist technique. If you do a lot of them, you’ve got rope.”
“Wild,” Jeremy said, and fingered the cord and, irresistibly, the feathers. “That’s really wild. I’ve seen vids of birds. I never saw a feather, like, by itself. Just from a distance. “
“They fall off all the time. You’re not supposed to collect them. Hisa do. But humans can’t collect them.”
“A bird with its feathers falling off.” Jeremy thought that was funny.
So did he. “Not all at the same time. Like your hair falls out in the shower. A piece gets tired and falls out and a new one grows. It’s kind of related to hair. Biologically speaking.”
“That’s really strange,” Jeremy said. “Do you have a lot of this stuff?”
He shook his head. “I’m not supposed to have this one, but it was a gift and the authorities didn’t argue with me. The cops somehow got me past customs.”
“What’s this stuff mean? It’s not writing.”
“They don’t write. But they make symbols. I’m not sure in my own head what the difference is, but the experts say it isn’t writing.”
“This is so strange,” Jeremy said. “What’s it mean?”
“Day and night. Rain and sun. Grain growing”He became aware that rain and sun, day and night, were words like the feather, alien to Jeremy, with all they meant. Spacers didn’t say morning and evening. It was first shift, second shift. They didn’t say day and night. It was mainday, maindark, alterday, alterdark. And twilight was a time the lights dimmed and brightened again, mainday’s twilight, alterday’s dawn. Stationers were like that, too. But on Downbelow you rediscovered the lost words, the words humans had used to have, words that clicked into a spot in your soul and took rapid, satisfying hold
Maybe that was why they had to bar humans from Downbelow, and let down only a privileged, special few who could agree not to pick up feathers or stones.
“The little stones,” he remembered to say, “water smoothed them. They tumble over one another in the bottom of Old River as the water flows, just rubbing against each other.” He took account of Jeremy’s literal interpretation of molting feathers, and remembered a question he’d asked of a senior staffer. “You don’t ever see them move. But when Old River floods, it tumbles them.”
Jeremy looked at him as if to see if that was a joke of any kind, and felt the smoothness of the stones. “I was going to ask how,” Jeremy said. “That’s so, so wild. I’m used to old rocks… but these must have been tumbling around a long time.”
“Rocks in space are older,” he said. “Water’s just pretty powerful. It carves out cliffs, changes course, floods fields. Gravity makes it fall from high places to low places and whatever’s in the way, it flows around it or over it.”
“How’s it get high in the first place?”
“Rain. Springs.” More miracle words to Jeremy. He didn’t think Jeremy knew what a spring was.
But Jeremy wanted to know things. That was what engaged him. Jeremy wanted to know. He could liken some things to what Jeremy did know: condensation on high dockside conduits. The big drops that hit you on the head when you were near the gantries.
“It’s just past monsoon, now,” he said, dazed to admit the unfelt time-flow that Jeremy took for granted “Hisa females will be pregnant, grain will be sprouting in the fields and in the frames. There’s a kind that only grows with its roots in mud. There’s a kind that only grows on dry land, in the open fields. We interfered to improve the yield, but the thinking now is that we shouldn’t have, that it’d be a lot better if we’d left the hisa alone and not had them working on the station or anything.”
Jeremy handed the stick back carefully. “Do you think so?” Maybe Jeremy heard the disbelief in his voice. Do you think so? Jeremy asked straight into his privately-held, his cherished heresy. None of the staffers had ever seen it. But Jeremy did. And deserved an answer he’d never give, in hearing of Pell authorities, who could bar him from the planet as dangerous.
“I think maybe they’d gain something from developing at their own pace.” The cautious apology to official policy. But he plunged ahead. “Or maybe they’d gain things from us we never thought of. Or they might die out without us. You know there aren’t that many sites in the world where there are hisa. World population’s given to be, oh, maybe twenty million.”
“That’s a lot.”
“Not for a planet Not at all for a planet.”
Jeremy was quiet for a moment. “Dead-on that Earth’s got a lot.” Jeremy had been there, Jeremy had said so. The fabled and unreliable motherworld. Wellspring of everything they knew about planets. All the preconceptions, all the right and wrong perceptions.
“Yeah,” he said “That’s our model. That’s what we know in the universe. That’s all else we know and it’s a pretty small sample. Twenty million hisa on Downbelow. A lot fewer platytheres on Cyteen.”
“They’re not intelligent.”
“They don’t seem to be.” What he knew said that Cyteen’s platytheres had gotten too successful for their own environment, deforested vast tracts that then became prey to weather patterns. And human beings on Cyteen had determined the planet was more useful and more viable if they killed them all. Environmental scientists on Pell were aghast.
But nature sometimes killed itself. Not all life succeeded. Could life intervene to save life, when the end result would be extinction, or did nature know best?
He wasn’t sure. It was all human judgment The hisa had watched the sky for as long as hisa remembered, from before humans left Earth. Waiting for something to happen from their clouded, starless sky. Was it a cultural dead end they’d reached?
“You know a lot of stuff,”Jeremy said.
“I’m two years short of a degree in Planetary Science. You know? It’s my life. It’s what’s important to me. And somebody aboard asked me why study planets.”
“Because you want to know!” Jeremy said, which did a lot to patch that young woman’s careless dismissal. “Because you want to know stuff. I do, anyway.”
“I don’t think what I know is real useful here.”
“You know science, don’t you?”
“A lot of life science.”
“Well, tell JR. I’ll bet he’d be interested. Life science is what keeps us breathing, case of what’s important, here. You probably ought to talk to Jake. He’s the bioneer.”
“Probably I should,” he said, “talk to Parton, that is.” Dealing with JR, he preferred to keep to a minimum. “Maybe I could do something besides laundry. “
“Oh, everybody does laundry sooner or later,” Jeremy said. “Just the chief engineer sends all the junior engineers to do it, right along with maintenance, and the chief doesn’t unless he loses a bet. But you ‘prentice to Jake, is what you do. Me, I’m off studies for the last couple of jumps because I’m watching you so you don’t turn green and die. Usually I’m on study tape. That’s where Vince goes after shift, That’s where Linda goes. You just do sims until there’s a rush on, and then they call you in, like me, I do beginner pilot sims and scan sims, because if I don’t make the cut when I’m big enough, you know, for the real test stuff, there’s got to be something for me to do. God, I really don’t want to do scan. I really hate it.” Jeremy was slapping his fist against his leg, that nervousness he got from vid-games; now Fletcher knew where it came from. “But even if I make Helm, I’ll have to sit Scan in a crisis. Same as Linda. She likes it, though. She thinks it’s great.”
“What’s Vince?” He had to know. The set wasn’t complete.
“Vince, he’s Legal. That’s what he wants to do, can you believe it? That and archive and files and library. It’s about the same. Records.”
Vince at a desk, doing painstaking work. A lawyer. A librarian. Their hothead wanted to keep books? The mind didn’t easily form that image. Plead in court? The judge would throw Vince in jail.
“I think you ought to talk to Jake, though,” Jeremy said.
“I’m sure they’ve got my records.” They don’t care, was in his mind. But also there was the glimmer of a use for himself. Not the use he wanted, but it was using something he knew and having contact with the systems on a ship that did technically interest him. A foam-steel planet, in those respects, recycling its atmosphere and doing so in systems he wanted to see.
“You want me to talk to Jake?” Jeremy asked.
“I’ll talk to him, sooner or later.” He tucked the stick back into the drawer, and shut it “Right now I guess it’s enough I don’t turn green and die.”
“Medical said let you go through maybe four, five jumps before you do anything like tape. The captains used to not let any of us do it. Used to make us learn with books. But the information just comes too fast, that’s what Paul said. Helm said if pilots could do tape-sims to keep their skills up then the rest of us weren’t going to go azi-fied on a calculus tape. I’m glad. Dead-on I’d be an azi if I had to learn calculus out of a book. You’d just see the blank behind the eyes…” Jeremy gave his rendition of an automaten. “Did you learn from books on Pell?”
“Tape, mostly. Lots of tape. Same thing. They’ve come round to thinking it’s all right. I brought some with me,—All right, I lied. I’ve got tapes. Some of the environmental stuff. My biochem.” Just the pretty ones, those first of all. The ones with pictures of home. His home. He didn’t think he could take them right now. It still hurt too much. “You can try one if you want.” Turning Jeremy into somebody he could really talk to about Downbelow was a bonus he hadn’t expected when he’d packed the tapes. But that seemed possible, and his spirits were higher than they had been since he’d boarded.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “Sure! Wild! Can I borrow one tonight?”
He opened the drawer, took out his tape case, took out a pretty one.
And hesitated. “It could be scary for you. I don’t know. It’s a planet. You feel the weather. Thunder and all. It’s a pretty good effect.”
“Oh, hell,” Jeremy said. “Can’t be that bad.” Jeremy took the tape and opened the wall panel at the side of his bunk, looking for pills.
“Take a quarter-dose, no more. This is stationer tape. Planetary tape. Lightning and reverse-curve horizons. If you climb the walls tonight it won’t be my fault.”
Jeremy grinned at him and shook out a pill. He split it. Offered the other half to him.
He opted for the biochem tape for his own reader. It wasn’t jump they faced, just a night’s sleep, and a night of no dreams but the ones the tape provided—a Downbelow tour for Jeremy and a night of life process chemistry for him.
He didn’t care that he was into Chad for a room cleaning. He settled down with the headset and the tape going and with the drug that flattened out your objections to information coursing through his bloodstream.
It was the first time he’d taken tape aboard. It was the first time he’d trusted the people he was with enough to take that drug that made you so helpless, so compliant, so ready to believe what you were told. You didn’t learn around strangers. You didn’t, in his own experience, do it anywhere but locked in your own private room, safe from outside suggestion, but he felt safe to try, finally, in Jeremy’s presence.
It meant a good night’s sleep, a night in which he was back in things he knew and terms he understood. You forgot little details if you didn’t use what you learned; tape could sharpen up what was getting hazy in your mind, and if he talked to Jake in engineering as Jeremy suggested, about getting into something that offered a little more headwork, he wanted to be sharp enough to impress Jake and not sound a fool if Jake asked him questions. This time through the old familiar tape he set his subconscious to wonder about things that a closed system like a ship’s lifesupport might find problematic, and he wondered what tapes the ship’s technical library might have that would let him brush up on specifics of the systems. The ship had a library. They might let him have tapes to study. If they trusted him, which had become an unexpected hurdle.
Talk to JR? Not damned likely.
“There’s a problem,” Bucklin put it, warning JR what was coming, and after that there was a junior staff meeting, a quiet and serial staff meeting, pursued down corridors, anywhere JR could find them. JR found Vince and Linda, among the first, in A deck main corridor, and made them late reporting to breakfast.
“What’s this with a Welcome-in?” he asked “I said, did I not, let him alone?”
There were frowns. There were no effective answers.
He found Connor topside, B deck, and said, “It’s off. No hazing. My orders.”
He found Sue and Nike in A deck lifesupport, and asked, “Whose damn idea was it in the first place?”
He didn’t get a satisfactory answer. What he got was, “He’s a problem. He’s a problem in everything, isn’t he?”
He found Chad, and said, “If he cleans your room, Chad, he just cleans it. You keep your hands off him or you and I are going to go a round.”
Chad wasn’t happy.
He went the whole route. Lyra and Wayne, Toby, and Ashley, all glum faces and unhappy attitudes.
And after he thought that he’d made the issue crystal clear, at mid-second shift he had a delegation approach him in the sim room, next to the bullet-car that reeked of the cold of the after holds. He was going in, not out, but he was still mentally hyped for the pilot-sims his career-track mandated—sims that didn’t have anything to do with Pell’s vid-game amusements. It was high-voltage activity that maintained his ability to track on high V emergencies, just as Helm had had to do when it met the Union carrier, and his state of mind at the moment was not optimal for intricate interpersonal politics. Bucklin had to know that.
It was Wayne and Connor, Toby, Chad and Ashley who pulled the ambush, and they’d done it in the cramped privacy of the core-access airlock, a small sealed room with a pressure door between it and the main A-deck corridor. It was only them, they could talk without senior crew in the middle of it, and Bucklin, damn him, had unexpectedly chosen to become their spokesman. JR found himself ready to blow, given just a little encouragement.
“The question is,” Bucklin said as JR stood with his hand on the call-button that would give him the sim-car and take him away from their bedeviling. “The question is, this is what we’ve always done. Omitting it says something.”
He dropped his hand from the button. Clearly he wasn’t going to solve this in two seconds. Clearly, like dealing with Union carriers, sometimes the situation tested not one’s speed in handling a matter, but one’s self-control.
“Always isn’t this time,” he said to the group. “The guy is not one of us, he didn’t grow up in our traditions, he doesn’t know what we’re up to, and we don’t communicate all that well with that stationer-trained brain of his.”
“It seems to me,” said Ashley, “that those are exactly the reasons for having a Welcome-in.”
“No,” he said, and drew a calm breath. “The answer is no. It’s an order.”
“We did it for Jeremy,” Wayne pointed out. Wayne, next to Bucklin and Lyra, was their levelest head. “It was important then. It made lot of difference.”
“And I’m telling you we can’t do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man would have the proverbial cat. For another, he’s a stationer.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it, up and down the list?” Chad said. “He’s a stationer. He doesn’t give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of us—and nobody ever called him on it.”
“I called him on it. Immediately.”
“Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn’t stay for gatherings… say hello to him and you get stared at.”
“Did you hear the word order, Chad? I order you to let this drop.”
“Yessir, we hear, but—”
“We don’t think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be,” Toby said, all earnestness, “or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it was the Old Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was important to do the traditions. We’re going to have babies on this ship. are we not going to welcome them in when they come up, or what?”
“I’m saying—” He faced a handful of juniors who’d survived all the War could throw at them. Who’d kept the traditions intact. Who hadn’t given up the principles, the history, the honor of the ship. And who could tell them that the practices of a Welcome-in, centuries old, were stupid, silly, ridiculous?
The junior captain, the officer in charge of the juniors, wasn’t even supposed to be involved in this, and traditionally speaking, hadn’t been and hadn’t sought it. He’d gotten involved at all, point of fact, because he’d given an order first not to do it in this case, and then to wait, and now they’d come back to him to argue for now rather than later, because his order was in their way. It was crew business and not his business, by centuries-old habit. There was a tradition in jeopardy here just in their having to confront him.
And more serious to the welfare of the ship, their unity, their way of defining who was who, their way of including someone new in the traditions—all that was threatened. His position, like Bucklin’s, was defined by the lofty track toward the captaincy, but theirs was a network of relations with each other that would define all of their lifetime of working together. And he was looking down on it all from officer-height and saying, It’s not that important—at a time when the crew as a whole was facing the greatest and most profound change in its mission since it had become, de facto, Mallory’s backup.
They were feeling robbed. Robbed of their war, their victory, their outcome. He understood that. None of them liked what they saw as being sent away from a conflict that had cost them heavily. And he saw, staring into that lineup of faces, and taking in the fact that they were all male, that there was also the men-women issue. Lyra and Linda, female, made a small but separate society: their children, when they chose to get them, from whomever they chose to get them, were the hope of the ship, the hope, the future of Finity’s End. Young men, and it was specifically the young men of the crew who’d come to him… they were the tradition-keepers, the teachers: men had their importance to a merchanter Family not in getting children, but in being Family, in bringing up their sisters’ and their cousins’ children. They were the guardians of tradition; and they were, potentially, men on a ship with a damaged tradition, a shattered ship’s company, too damn many dead Finity brothers with too little memory on the part of the outside as to who’d died and what heroic sacrifices they’d made away trom the witness of stationers and worlds. There were all too many small, funny, or touching stories that had died with this uncle or that cousin, stories of the ship’s finest hours that never would find their way into Finity’s archive, or into the next generation.
The men of Finity’s End alone knew what they were. The ship hadn’t been able to leave Fletcher to the ordinary existence of a stationer, but they hadn’t brought him in, either. Only the men could do that.
They were right. And after giving a halfway yes, he’d delayed too long. He’d weakened. He’d already gotten himself on the gravity slope by agreeing it had to be done.
“I’m still saying wait,” he said, trying to recover what authority his wavering had undermined. Unpleasant lesson and one he was determined to remember. “I’m saying—just—whenever you do it, go easy. He’s not a kid or a senior. He’s had all those several years of waking transactions Jeremy hasn’t had, and for all I can figure, his mind did something during those years besides learn algebra, all right? He’s not a ship kid. Give him some credit for the age he looks—the way I did, dammit, over the damn drink. I think he’s due that.”
“He looks like you and me,” Bucklin was quick to remind him. “When he hits Mariner dockside, nobody but us is going to know how old he is. And we’re responsible for him. “
“I say he’s gained a little more maturity than Jeremy. You’re right he’s got a body that mixes with adults, not kids. A body that’s mostly done with its growing. He’s Jeremy with a body at its fastest and his nerves a lot more under control. It’s got to make a difference. He’s been dealing with adults as an adult on station. Jeremy hasn’t.”
“You’re not supposed to know about what goes on,” Chad said, “officially speaking. You don’t know about it.”
“I’m saying use your common sense!”
“That’s fine,” Wayne said, “and we agree, sir, but you still don’t know about it. You’re not supposed to have been this far involved with it. Let us. That’s what this is about. He’s not one of us yet. He doesn’t know us. We don’t know him.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, “I still don’t know about it.”
They left. He stood there, wired for the sim, literally. And telling himself he shouldn’t interfere.
Then that the potential for someone getting hurt was high.
And that they’d probably do it sometime during evening rec. An ambush in one’s quarters was the usual. A gang showed up, hauled you off to a storage area and ran you through the same silliness everybody endured once, during which you agreed who was senior and who wasn’t
If he interfered and the crew found out he had, he could create a major problem, in their sense of betrayal.
But a Finity youngster knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he wasn’t being killed. He knew it was a joke.
He put in a call to legal, to Madelaine’s office, “Call Fletcher up there,” he said to Blue, who took the call. “I want to talk to him, I don’t want the whole ship to know.”
“Problem?” Blue asked
“Not yet,” he said.
The laundry was still quiet, so quiet it was down to cards, Jeremy teaching him the trick shuffle and Fletcher about to concede that small fingers had their advantage. Linda was watching—”Never got it myself,” Linda said—when Vince drifted in, and one of the seniors came with him.
“Thought you were going to clean my cabin,” Chad said.
“Yeah, well,” Fletcher said, and decided he wasn’t going to learn the shuffle in another round and he might as well do what he’d gotten himself into. He got up, gave Jeremy his cards back and Chad gave him the cabin number, A39, a fair distance around the rim.
“You do a good job,” Chad admonished him.
“Yeah,” he said, and left, telling himself he wasn’t playing cards with Chad again until there was revenge involved. He stopped by his own cabin and picked up cleaning cloths, in the case Chad’s place wasn’t supplied, and told himself Chad had probably trashed the place just to make his life difficult
A39. He opened the unlatched door. Stared in shock at Chad, among a gathering of cousins packed into the room. “Sorry,” he said, thinking at first blink he might have interrupted some private gathering.
“No, come on in,” one said. He didn’t recall the name. The family resemblance was close and common among all of them. He thought, well, maybe they were being friendly, walked the rest of the way in, had just the least second’s inkling of something wrong in their expectant expressions, and was standing there with the cleaning supplies in his hands when the cousin at the end of the bed bounced up between him and the door and pushed the shut button. The door closed. Still, joke, he thought.
The lights went out.
He ducked. He’d been in ambushes before. He knew one when it came down around him, and he dropped the cleaning packets and tried to get at the door button by blind accuracy in the dark. They were just as canny, and grabbed him as he was trying to reach it, piled on him, shouting at the others that they had him as they carried him painfully down to the floor between the end of the bunk and the wall.
He got an arm free. He hit somebody. They pinned him down and then came a loud ripping sound like cloth torn.They tried to hold his head as somebody tried to tape his face and got his hair. He bucked as they continued sitting on him, he tried to get knees or a foot into action, scored once someone else sat on his legs, but they still managed to get tape wrapped around his face.
“Watch his nose, watch his nose,”somebody said, “don’t cut his air off.”
It was a stupid kid game and he was It. He’d been It before, and he didn’t want any part of it or them. He kept fighting, but it was a cramped space and somebody was winding cord around his feet, struggle as he would.
At the same time they pasted tape across his eyes and one cheek, hard, got it across his mouth in spite of his spitting and cursing. He was running out of wind and there were enough of them finally to twist his arms together and get cord around his hands, and sloppily around his body. He couldn’t get enough air past the tape and a nose gone stuffy from being hit, and meanwhile they picked him up like a half-limp package and slung him onto the bed. He hit his head on somebody’s leg and stars shot through his vision.
“Fights damn good,” somebody said, and there was a lot of panting and spitting and sniffing, while the cousin he’d collided with swore and while he tried to find a target to kick with both feet. “Hey, enough of that!”
They flung bedclothes around him, wrapped him, as he guessed, in blankets, and then hauled him up and over somebody’s shoulder, for another toss—he had no idea. Being head down with someone’s shoulder in his gut made it hard to breathe. Blood rushing to his head made his nose stuff up worse. He tried to kick, tried to advise the damn fools holding him he was having trouble breathing, but they carried him—out the door, because there was nowhere in the room to go with him. Out the door, down the corridor with him blindfolded to the light and choking and struggling all the way.
“Stay still,” somebody said, slapping him on the back, and they went onto a different-sounding floor, like metal. Sounds reached him then of elevator doors closing, then of a lift working, as the floor dropped.
He kicked wildly, tried to score in the cramped space, running out of air as they reached the bottom. They carried him out of the lift into the ice-cold he’d felt only in the freezer, and he heard the ring of their steps on metal grid as they walked.
It was the freezer, it was the damn galley freezer they’d brought him to. He began to think he’d pass out, maybe die in their stupidity. Or of purpose. He didn’t know now. He might never know. He’d be dead and they’d catch hell.
The guy carrying him dumped him down and let his feet hit the floor. The pressure in his head shifted as they pushed him back against cold pipe, and somebody tore the tape off his mouth.
He sucked in a fast deep gasp of ice-cold air and found something like pipe and steps against his back, metal so cold it burned the bare skin of his hands. He was still blind, he was still tied hand and foot, his head was still pounding and his brain was hazed from want of oxygen.
Something touched his face, burning hot or burning cold, he couldn’t tell.
Then they left him. He thought they did.
“Hey!” he yelled, and tried to hold himself up, unbalanced as he was, lost his balance and fell—into someone’s arms. They shoved him and he fell toward somebody else, and around, and around. He knew the game. At any moment somebody wouldn’t catch him and he’d hit the metal floor, but he couldn’t save himself, couldn’t do a damned thing unless he could get his balance.
They laughed. There were at least ten, twelve of them. High voices, girls, among the others.
One caught him, held him upright. He hung there shivering and heard the quiet shuffling of steps, the panting breaths around him.
“We have here Fletcher,” that one said. “Who am I, Fletcher? Do you know?”
“Chad” He knew the voice. He’d never in his life forget it
“You’re right.” Chad tossed him off balance. Another caught him.
“Do you know me?” another voice asked.
“Go to hell,” he said. He’d like to bring a knee up. With his feet tied, he couldn’t. They spun him around and tossed him from one to the next, until they stopped and somebody sawed free the cords holding his feet.
He kicked. And missed, being blind.
“Temper, temper,” the voice said.
“Find us, Fletcher,” a female voice called to him, echoing in distance and metal dark. “Find us and name us and you’re free.”
“He doesn’t know our names.” Male voice, on his left. Footsteps echoing on metal grid.
“Fletcher.” A voice he did know. Vince.
“Damn you, brat.” It was still another direction. He was blind. He had no concept what the place was shaped like, whether he could blunder off an edge, down steps…
“Fletcher.” Another voice. Older.
“Fletcher!” Jeremy. “Fletcher, come to me!”
Jeremy was in on it. He stopped turning, stopped playing their game at all, no matter how they called.
“Fletcher, come here, come this way.”
“Fletcher!”
“I said go to hell!” he yelled.
An icy bath of liquid hit him, full in the chest. He jerked, and convulsed, and spat, and fell, hard, helplessly, on the grating.
“Dammit!” a male voice yelled. “Sue!”
He heard movement around him. He was drenched, in bitter, burning cold. He couldn’t get his legs to bear under him, he began to shiver so, muscles knotting so it drove his knees together and his elbows against their ordinary flex. He’d hurt his arm on the grating. It burned with a different fire.
“Who am I?” a female voice said. “Try again.”
He couldn’t talk coherently. He was shivering so violently he couldn’t get his jaws to work.
“Hey, guys,” somebody said in a warning tone. Someone was close to him. He tried to defend himself with a kick, but that one touched his face, got the edge of the tape on his cheek, and then pulled away the tape across his eyes, ripping brows and strands of hair along with it.
He was lying soaked, still with his hands tied, in the dark, and their faces were lit with a lantern on the echoing metal grid, so they assumed a horror-show aspect, gathered all around him against tall cannisters and girders and machinery. It wasn’t the freezer. It was somewhere else. Chad was there. He knew that broad face. Vince and Linda were there. Jeremy was there, not saying a thing.
He just stared at Jeremy. Even when they introduced themselves, one by one, and said he had to learn the names to get loose, he just stared at Jeremy.
“My name’s Jeremy,” Jeremy said when it was his turn to talk, “and I was the last they did this to. It’s a Welcome-in, Fletcher, you got to go along with it, you got to say what they say and learn the stuff and then you’re one of us, that’s all, for good and ever. Welcome in.”
He didn’t know whether he ever wanted to talk to Jeremy again. What Jeremy said he didn’t doubt in the least: it was some form of Get the New Guy and he was supposed to bend to the group and kiss ass until they’d gotten their bluff in.
But it wasn’t just roughhousing. They’d put bruises on him and half-frozen him, soaking him with water, they’d dumped him on the burning cold deck, and he didn’t give a damn what else they were doing, or threatened to do, he wasn’t playing their silly games to get In with them, not if he froze to death.
He started memorizing names and faces, all right. They wanted him to, and he would, to remember where he owed what and for how long. He knew Chad, who’d started this and set him up, and he learned Wayne who was the second voice, who’d shoved him, and Connor, and a thin-faced girl named Lyra. Ashley was another thin one, the quietest voice, Sue was a broad-faced girl with a cleft in her chin, and that voice and her name had accompanied the water; Wayne had protested it. There were two different scores. They sat there in the dark, lit up like a horror show and going on with their stupid game, while he shivered and his hair stopped dripping, probably frozen. They told him how he was welcome to the ship, and how it was a great ship, and how he was lucky to be a Neihart and how he’d put up a good fight.
Fine, he thought. They hadn’t seen fight yet.
He didn’t talk, not even when Jeremy tried to get him to say it was all right.
At least he was getting numb, and the fingers had stopped hurting.
Wayne got up and so did Ashley; the two of them took hold of him, pulling him to his feet. “We’d better get him warm,” Wayne said.
“He never said the names,” Sue protested.
“He’s freezing his ass off!” Wayne said. “Get the knife, get the damn cords off.”
The lift thumped into operation. It was coming down. Connor was saying it wasn’t good enough. He was trying just to stand, telling himself if they’d just listen to Wayne he might get out of this.
“Ease off,” someone said. “Someone’s coming.”
Rescue? He asked himself. An officer?
His knees were shaking so they almost tore the ligaments. He staggered off to the side, and hit a pole and leaned on it, that being all he could do to stand up.
“What in hell are you doing?” Male. Young as the rest. He was losing his ability to stay on his feet. He wanted to fall down, and all that saved him was the fact his chilled knees wouldn’t unlock. “God, he’s frozen! He’s all over ice. Get him topside, into the warm!”
“We can’t take him topside!” Connor said. “Clean him up, first, get him some clothes or there’ll be hell.”
There was argument about it. He stopped following it, The consensus was take him to the cargo office where they could bring down heat; but he couldn’t walk on his own—they dragged him across to the wall, and opened a door, and flung a light on that blinded him after the scant light of the lantern. Wayne had him stand with his forehead against the wall, his eyes sheltered from the punishing light, and cut the cords on his upper body, and his hands—that was all right. Then somebody yanked his coveralls off his shoulders. They cracked with ice. Warmer cloth landed on his back, somebody’s coat tucked around him, a coat warm from someone’s wearing it.
They fussed about getting heat started, and a fan began blowing warm air in. They stripped the coveralls the rest of the way off and wrapped coats around him, made him sit in an ice-cold chair, at which he protested, and they contributed another coat. He was starting to shiver so his teeth rattled.
“He could lose his ears,” somebody said, the new one, the junior officer, after that there was a lot of protest back and forth around him, about who’d thrown the water and how he’d fallen and cut his arm and whether his fingers and ears were all right. Chad maintained that they were and they hadn’t had time to freeze, but Lyra, more to the point, held her warm hands close to his head and tried to warm them up, and it hurt.
Then Jeremy showed up, out of breath, with dry clothes and a blanket.
“I got them from the room,” Jeremy said, his kid’s voice shaking whether from the running or from fright. “I got the heavy ones.”
He took the clothes. He levered himself out of the chair and a tumble of coats in his soaked and mostly frozen under-wear, no longer giving a damn about females present. He dressed, beginning as he struggled with the clothes to feel pain in his hands again, and in the joints he’d sprained simply in shivering. The cord had left marks on his skin. His elbow was cut from his fall. The tape had ripped his face and left it sore. His hair trailed around his face, dripping again, after being stiff withice.
“are you all right?” Jeremy wanted to know. “Fletcher, God,—are you all right? It was a joke. That’s all, it was supposed to be a joke.”
Jeremy was upset. Jeremy was sorry. Jeremy alone of all of them had meant it for a joke. Stupid kid.
Wayne had seen things going to hell and used his head. The young officer had found out and come after them. The rest—
They were somewhere in the depths of the passenger ring rim. It was uncompromisingly dark and cold outside the little office. It was hard to think of braving that dark and going out there again to get to the lift they’d come down in; but he wanted to get out of here in one piece and back to A deck, if they’d just let him, if they weren’t going to try to cover up what they’d done or try to threaten him to silence.
He took an uncertain step toward the door. Two. He could have gone hypothermic if they’d left him much longer, and he’d given them all a show, because he’d really been scared. He was still scared, because he didn’t know what they’d do, and because if he didn’t get himself away from them, maybe they didn’t know yet, either.
“Fletcher,” the newcomer said. Bucklin. That was the name. JR’s shadow. Bucklin had caught his arm. “This went too far. Way too far.”
“Damn right it did.” He managed that much coherently, and shook off the hand, wanting the door.
“Just a minute,” Bucklin said.
Just a minute was too long, way too long to spend with them. But when Bucklin made him look back, he saw the one he wanted, zeroed in on Chad right behind Bucklin’s shoulder, and hit Chad square in the jaw. Chad teetered over a chair, fell back into the office wall and knocked another conference chair over.
Fletcher touched the door control with a throbbing knuckle, only wanting out of this place and away from their welcomes and their double-crossing.
“Chad!” Lyra yelled out, and he spun around as Chad barreled past Bucklin and startled cousins tried to stop him. He used the chance the grappling cousins gave him and punched Chad in the face.
Cousins grabbed him, too, and held on.
“Easy, easy, easy.” The one holding his right arm was Bucklin.
“I’ll kill him,” he said, and Chad charged back at him, dragging cousins with him. He got hold of Chad’s collar and the collar ripped; Chad hit him in the gut and he kept going, lit into Chad with a left and a head-shot right, out of breath, crazed, until two cousins had his arms in separate locks and Chad tried to use that to advantage. Fletcher kicked out, caught Lyra by accident as she was trying to back Chad up.
“Easy!” Bucklin said into his ear, dragging back at him. He was sorry to have hit Lyra, who’d warned him in the counter-attack. Chad never had laid a good hit on him, but Chad’s face was bloody. And Jeremy was in the way now.
“Easy,” Jeremy said. “Fletcher, Fletcher,—easy. It’s all right. We’re getting out of here, all right? We’re getting out of here… we’ll go home.”
“Name’s Bucklin,” Bucklin said, and put pressure on the arm. “Lieutenant over the juniors. This is officially over. It got way out of hand. Way beyond what anybody intended. I’m going to let you go, now, Fletcher. I want you to stand still a minute. I want you to hear apologies, and I want everybody involved in this to stand and deliver loud and clear. Do you hear me, Fletcher?” There was a pat on his shoulder, and he was trembling, partly with the strain on an arm he didn’t want broken and partly from unresolved nerves. “They’ll apologize. No more fighting. Have I got that, Fletcher?”
“I don’t want anything from them,” he said, out of breath. Bucklin’s hold on his arm let up anyway. “Let him go,” Bucklin said, and had to repeat it: “Let him go,” until the other guy—it was Wayne—let go from his side.
“Apologies,” Lyra said before he could bolt. She was limping. “Major sorry, here, Fletcher. Bucklin’s right. Way too much.”
It was hard to walk out on a girl he’d kicked in a fight by accident. He stood still, burning mad. Linda apologized, a sheepish mumble. Sue did. “I threw the water,” Sue said. “Bad judgment.”
Damn premeditated, he thought, regarding Sue. Liquid water? Out there in that cold? She’d brought it down here, with clear intent to use it.
The rest of them, the guys, he wasn’t even interested in hearing. He opened the door and walked off, blind in the dark except for the dim glow of the lift call button that guided him across the gratings. He hit ice. His foot skidded, costing his knee on the recovery.
“Fletcher!” Jeremy called after him, but he kept walking. Jeremy came clattering over the grids, overtook him and tried to hold his hand from the call button. He had such an adrenaline load on he hardly felt it, and could have brushed Jeremy off, oh, three or four meters into the dark without half trying.
“I’m sorry,” Jeremy said. “Fletcher, we’re all sorry.”
“That’s fine,” he said, and the lift door opened. He saw the choices, RIM, A, and B. He took A, and rode it up alone to an astonishingly normal corridor, where nothing had happened and two seniors walking by didn’t notice anything unusual about him.
He went to his cabin, took off the clothes he’d just put on, and showered until he’d both warmed up and cooled off.
When he came out of the shower, still with the trap replaying itself in shadows in recent memory, he found Jeremy had come home, and was sitting on his bed shuffling cards.
He gave Jeremy the cold eye and picked up his clothes and started dressing.
“I’m sorry as hell,” Jeremy said. Expressions like that jarred, from a twelve-year-old’s mouth. But Jeremy was twelve. He hadn’t bucked his cousins to warn him, but what could he expect of a twelve-year-old?
Still, he let the silence continue, if only to learn what would fall out of it.
“They always do it,” Jeremy said plaintively. “To welcome you in.”
“Is that what it is?” He fastened his coveralls and sat down to pull on his boots. The adrenaline still hadn’t run out. He could put his fist through something, but Jeremy was the only target he had.
“They shouldn’t have thrown the water,” Jeremy said “That was pretty stupid.”
“The whole thing was pretty stupid,” he said, with a bitter taste in his mouth. “I know the game. You could have said something to warn me. You know that? You could have said something.”
“You aren’t supposed to know,” was Jeremy’s lame excuse.
“So everything’s fine now. You just beat hell out of me, damn near suffocate me with the tape, cut my arm so I bleed all over a pair of coveralls, play a hell of a nasty joke and finish it up by throwing ice water on me, and now I’m yourlong-lost cousin and glad to be one of the guys, is that the way it works? You’re not damn smart, you know that? Even for twelve, you’re just not damn smart.”
“You didn’t need to hit Chad like that,” Jeremy said.
“What do you expect? What in hell did you expect, if you jump on a guy?”
“I’m sorry, Fletcher. You were supposed to say our names and we’d welcome you in and nobody was supposed to get hurt at all. Not you, not anybody. It’s just what they always do when you come in.”
“Well, it didn’t work, did it?”
“No.I guess not.”
He was mad. He was damned mad, and sore, and his hands were bruised and he still wanted to kill Chad, who’d set him up with his room-cleaning and the card game.
Probably Jeremy had been in on it for days. Probably if there was somebody to be mad at it ought by rights to be Jeremy. But Jeremy wasn’t principally responsible and Jeremy had been scared spitless and upset at the turn things had taken. So had Wayne.
Of all of them he didn’t choose to hate, Jeremy and Bucklin were on his list; Bucklin who’d broken it up, Wayne, who’d used his common sense, and Lyra, whom he’d kicked hard, not meaning to, and who’d taken it in stride and not held it against him. Lyra, maybe.
Sue with her water-bucket was right on his list with Chad.
He drew a calmer breath. And a second one.
Jeremy sat there, dejected, in a long, long silence.
“Got a bandage?” he asked Jeremy, his first excuse to break the silence. “I ripped my arm.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said, and scrambled up and got him a plastic skin-patch. Jeremy put it on for him. “There.”
“Got my knuckle, too.” He had. He didn’t know whether he’d caught it falling or cut it on Chad. “Chad better keep out of my way,” he said. “At least for right now. It’s a long voyage. But right now I’m pissed. I’m real pissed.”
“I think you broke Chad’s tooth.”
“He had it coming.”
“If the captain finds out there was fighting, we’re all going to be in his office.”
“It’s not my problem.” He stared Jeremy straight in the eye. “And if he asks me I’ll say be damned to the whole ship.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why shouldn’t I say it? You ambushed me. I don’t recall it was the other way around.”
“I mean don’t say that about the ship.”
“The hell with the ship!”
“No,”Jeremy said with a shake of his head. “No! You never say that about a ship. You never say that, Fletcher! We’re your Family. You’re in, now. Maybe it was screwed up, but it counted, and you’re in, you’re part of us.”
“Do I get a vote about it?”
“Come on, Fletcher. Nobody meant anything bad. Nobody ever meant anything bad. You were supposed to say the names and learn what they tell you—”
“No.”
“Well, you were supposed to.”
“That wasn’t what they were after, Jeremy. Wise up. They wanted me to kiss ass. That it was Chad and not me that got a broken tooth, no, Chad didn’t plan on that, did he? But that’s what he got.”
Nobody meant you should get hurt.”
“Oh, let’s add things up, here. Vince wouldn’t shed any tears. Chad wouldn’t. Sue—”
“Oh, Sue’s an ass. Vince is an ass. They know they’re asses. They’re trying to grow out of it.”
From the twelve-year-old mouth. He had to stare.
“I’m an ass, too,” Jeremy said. “I try not to be.”
“Then I forgive you,” he said, “Bucklin and Wayne tried to use common sense and Lyra warned me about Chad. But the others can go to hell.”
“Ashley’s all right”
“I’ll take your word on Ashley.” He’d hit a moment of magnanimous charity and extended it likewise to the girls, excepting Sue. “Linda’s not bad.”
Jeremy shook his head. “Don’t trust Linda. Especially not if you’re on the outs with Vince.”
Jeremy was serious. And with spacers, it was probably true, there were connections and he could get himself knifed. He’d heard stories off Pell dockside. Read accounts in the news and congratulated himself he wasn’t part of it.
Now he was.
“A happy, loving family,” he said, and felt the wobbles come back to his legs. There were more than fears. There was betrayal. The captain wanted him aboard because he didn’t want to pay fourteen million. He understood that Madelaine wanted him because of her dead daughter. He understood that, too. But the two of them with their reasons had rammed him down everyone else’s unwilling throats, and he’d tried to make himself useful and get along where they put him and, sure, they were going to welcome him in. The hell.
“I think you should talk to Bucklin,” Jeremy said, “and get stuff straightened out. JR didn’t want them to do this. Everybody else thought it was, you know, like maybe it would solve things.”
“Solve things.”
“Like, you’d fit in.”
“You think that’d do it, do you?”
Jeremy was out of his depth with that. And so was he. If JR had tried to stop it, it was because JR knew it was going to go the way it did and that certain ones were laying for him, not like Jeremy, a little naive, but seriously, to get their bluff in and make it stick. Those were the terms on which he’d have fitted in. He’d been hazed before. You got a little of it in school. You got a little of it in any new situation. But held upside-down and threatened with hypothermia? He’d punched Chad with no thought whether he’d kill him. And Chad had come after him the same way.
“Maybe I’m a little old for fitting in,” he said to Jeremy, with a bitterness that welled up black and real. “Maybe there isn’t any fix for it. I don’t belong here.”
There could be a fix.”
“There isn’t. Get that through your head This is real. It isn’t a game. I’m not playing games. Next batch of cousins lay a hand on me is going to be damn sorry. You can pass that word along. But I think they know that.”
“You can’t go fighting on board,”Jeremy said.
“It’s not my choice.”
“Well, nobody’s going to fight you.”
“Fine. Go on to work. Get. Go.”
Jeremy lingered.
“I’m not damn pleased, Jeremy! Get your ass to work! I’ll be there when I want to be there!”
Jeremy ducked out, fast. He’d upset the kid. Scared him, maybe—maybe upset his sense of justice.
He figured he should go face down the job, the cousins, the situation, rather than have it fester any longer. He reported to the laundry not too long after Jeremy, met Vince and Linda and didn’t say a word about the last hour and all they’d been involved in together. Instead he went cheerfully about folding laundry and let them sweat about what he thought or what he’d do, Vince and Linda and Jeremy alike. He figured plenty of talking had gone on in the few minutes after Jeremy arrived and before he did, and that plenty of talking was going on elsewhere. He looked to get called by Legal or the captain at any moment, maybe with the whole junior crew, maybe solo.
What they’d done, hurt. It hurt for reasons that had nothing to do with the cut arm, the split knuckle and the cord-marks and the one blow Chad had gotten in on him. It hurt in a way he wouldn’t have expected, because he truly didn’t give an effective damn about his welcome or non-welcome on the ship. He didn’t know why he should be upset as profoundly as he was.
“Or maybe it was just the injustice of it. Maybe it was having them take everything, for one reason and then once he got here and tried to make the best of it, to gang up and try to take his self-respect.
Because that was what they’d wanted to break. His dignity, His self-control. All those things he’d put up between him and a random universe. They’d struck consciously and deliberately at what kept him whole. And he couldn’t tolerate that. They’d asked him to give up the last defenses he had, and turn himself over, and play their game, and he wouldn’t do that, or give up his pride, not for anybody’s asking.
If the junior captain, on A deck, wasn’t supposed to know about a Welcome-in, the senior captains, on B deck, damn certain weren’t supposed to know about such an event; or to have to question the junior captain’s common sense or ability to command unless or until he gave them reason to think the junior command had made a mistake.
In a few years, JR was well aware, the ship’s entire existence might ride on the wisdom of his decisions. Right now he found the entire crew’s welfare still did, the welfare not alone of one Fletcher Neihart, or even of the junior crew in isolation from the rest, or of Chad, who was getting a broken tooth repaired in sickbay.
There was no isolation of juniors from seniors once things had gone wrong, and they had gone very seriously wrong.
“They jumped the gun and I didn’t find out,” Bucklin said, outside sickbay, when JR had answered the call, “until somebody cued me the laundry was empty. That was when I called you. And I had two places to look before I found where in the rim they were. Chad didn’t want the tooth fixed. Oh, no. Chad didn’t want a report filed with you, but I didn’t give him that grace.”
He heard out the whole story, the bucket of water, Sue’s notion of getting a fast agreement out of an argumentative customer she’d been scared was too strong and too tall to handle: Sue had feared someone was going to get seriously hurt in a melee, and she’d taken action to assure Fletcher folded
Not a bad idea, if it had worked.
His call to Legal Affairs had gotten a call out for Fletcher, but Fletcher hadn’t answered the call they sent. His hoped-for clandestine talk with Fletcher hadn’t happened. Chad and the crew hadn’t waited. Fletcher had been dragged down to the rim directly after Chad and the crew had approached him for a go-ahead, with the result they now had; and Fletcher’s failing to respond to a call… that had assured that Madelaine was aware something odd was going on. It was a short jump from Madelaine’s office to the Old Man’s.
“I want Fletcher here.”
“Fletcher seems undamaged,” Bucklin said, but added, hastily, “but he’ll be here.”
JR walked into sickbay and stood, quietly, while senior cousin Mary B. finished the dental work. Chad rolled a disconsolate eye in the direction of judge and jury.
“There,” Mary said, giving Chad a mirror. “Two stitches and a bond on the tooth. Don’t eat hard candy today”
“Is he in pain?” JR asked Mary.
“He’s numb,” Mary said. “Hit a wall, so I hear.”
“The wall hit back,” JR said. “Would you call Charlie down?” Charlie was the medic of the watch, when he wasn’t on com. “I’d like him and the wall both looked at.”
Mary gave him an arch look and went to do that before she tidied up her equipment.
“You owe Mary some scrub time,” he said as Chad climbed out of the chair. “About ten hours of scrub time, including her quarters, I’d say.”
“Yes, sir.” Chad’s mouth was numb. Chad met his eyes without flinching, credit him that, JR thought. He just stood there a second, and Chad just stood.
“So?” JR said. “You jumped the gun on Bucklin, you got a little too enthusiastic in your goings-on, and Sue resourcefully chucked a bucket of water on Fletcher. Where did it go wrong?”
“I set him up,” was what he guessed Chad said, past the deadening of the lip. “He didn’t go along with it. He told us go to hell. Then Bucklin got him loose, and he took exception to me.”
“Fletcher did.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, was there a particular reason for him to take exception beyond that you set him up? Just the color of your eyes? The idea of the moment?”
“I don’t know, sir, but I apologize, sir.”
“Did you apologize to him?”
“He walked out, sir.”
“Do the words fucked-up clearly apply here?”
“Yes, sir. Fairly fucked-up.”
“Thank you.” He caught Mary’s nod. She’d snagged Charlie and the medic was coming down to give Chad the once-over.
Cousin Fletcher was not a slight young man. Neither was Chad, both of them towering over him by half a head There was the potential for cracked ribs, cracked teeth, or slightly more subtle damage, like the level of trust available within the crew.
“You go sit over there.” A nod toward the medic’s station, the sliding doors of which stood open, tables that were surgery when they had to be. “When Fletcher gets in here, I want no repetition of the problem, do we have it clear, Mr, Neihart?”
“Yes, sir, we do.” It was a pathetic mumble. The stitches, two neat electronic clips, were going to smart when the painkiller wore off.
Bucklin showed up. With Fletcher. An undamaged Fletcher, to look at him. A brittle and angry Fletcher, ready to damn all of them to hell.
Jeremy trailed after, and hung about in the doorway.
“You,” JR said, “out of here.”
Jeremy vanished.
“You”—to Fletcher—”I want to talk to. Relax.”
“Is this about the fight?”
Fletcher would manage to come at things head-on and with guns live. Not his best feature. “If you’ve got any arena for improvement, Fletcher, it’s your slight tendency to meet people with a challenge, just one of those small problems I’m sure you can improve. At this particular moment I’m sure there’s some reason for what I see here, which I’d rather not officially notice. How are you getting along, in general?”
“Fine.”
“Jeremy’s all right with you?”
“Fine. Just fine.”
“No problems with Jeremy?”
“No.”
“That’s good. How about the rest of the crew?”
And that got a direct look of Fletcher’s dark, same-genetics eyes.
“You know what happened.”
“Chad’s report.” He nodded to the end of the room, where Chad sat on the end of a surgery table.
“I’m in here for a medical. Is that an excuse, or what? Or do I get another round with him?”
“I want a medical report And some common sense. Listen to me, Fletcher.” The tone had Fletcher’s attention to himself for about two heartbeats. “We have a tradition on this ship, welcome-in the new guy. As you know—” Another gathering of Fletcher’s temper and Fletcher got past it. “Usually it’s straight out of the nursery, transition into the crew. Jeremy was the last. Kidnap the kid, play a few pranks, a little ceremony, that’s about the size of it. Two damn fools your size going at each other weren’t in the plan.” He couldn’t tell Fletcher’s state of mind at the moment. Fletcher’s face was absolutely rigid. “It’s a test—a test of your sense of humor among other things.”
“I got a taste of your jokes.”
“I understand so. There were some pretty light-weight kids involved in what went way out of parameters. You and Chad are a fair match. You kept it to that. I respect that. They know they took it too far. I frankly tried to dissuade them from the idea, but they wanted to welcome you in, in the serious sense, That’s the tradition.”
“Welcome, is it?”
“It’s what they meant. Know us. Fall into the order of things. Find a place. With the crew. In the crew.”
“It’s a stupid tradition.”
“It may be, but I’m asking you to take it the way it should have gone. No grudges. They’ve done what they insisted on doing. It’s over. You’re in.”
“I don’t want to be in.”
“That’s another problem, but they’ve no right now to treat you as an outsider. You understand that? There is a difference. And they made that difference, so they have to accept you in with whatever privilege I grant.”
“Damn if I care. Sir.”
“Calm down, I say. You’ve got a right to be mad, but if you exercise it you’ll do yourself damage.”
“More than they’d like to do? I don’t think so. Welcome in, hell! I’m not welcome here! That’s real clear!”
“It was a bad start. Best I could do. I wasn’t going to leave you alone for your first jump; and me taking you in—that would put you in with the senior-juniors where you don’t fit. That was my thinking. Jeremy’s a good kid He reacts fast. He’d keep you out of trouble. Do you want to be moved?”
“Jeremy’s fine.” Fletcher seemed calmer, and stayed fixed on him without evidence of skittering off into temper. “No problems with him.”
“You’re sure. Even after what happened.”
“He’s a kid.”
“He is a kid. On the other hand… you’re not. And you are. Coming off a station where you don’t cope with ship-time… you don’t fit the ship’s profile, that’s what we say. You’re not in our profile. It’s hard to figure where to put you.”
“That’s too bad.”
Fletcher had a way of trying to get under his skin. Or he outright didn’t understand. And Charlie had shown up. Charlie—whose job was spacer bodies in all their diverse problems.
“Fletcher, I want you, first of all, to get checked out. Go right over there and sit down. Chad’s been in getting his mouth fixed. No lasting damage.—Then, Charlie, if you’d check out Chad. We’re looking for dents.”
It meant both Fletcher and Chad sitting on two adjacent tables in the surgery, a traffic management pricklier than two rimrunners at a jump-point, and the same possibilities of shots fired. “I’m not going to ask for any handshaking,” JR said, while Chad sat still and Fletcher stripped to the waist and got up on the other table, jaw set.
“Hurt?” Charlie had provoked a wince, pressing on ribs, then bent an arm, bringing a deeply gashed and bandaged forearm to view. “Lovely. So what did we have here?”
“We had a small discussion,” JR answered for both participants. “Charlie, we have here one stationer, aged seventeen, one spacer, Chad, aged twenty. How old are we?”
“Which one?” Charlie asked, having a close look mean-while into Fletcher’s right eye, preoccupied with inventory. “Our spacer is, what, a little short of seventeen?”
“Sixteen,” Chad muttered, “sir.”
“So how old are we?” JR asked “For our stationer’s benefit,—how old are we?”
Charlie backed off from the inspection of the other eye and gave Fletcher a slow scrutiny, the same, then, to Chad. “The stationer is a mature seventeen, probably having most of his height, not his ideal adult weight by about fifteen kilos. The spacer is a mature and very tall sixteen-year-old physique, grew, what was it? An inch since Bryant’s?”
“Yessir,” Chad said
“And putting on a couple of kilos off Jeff’s fancy desserts,” Charlie said Chad blushed. He was putting it on around the middle. “But the stationer,” Charlie said, “our stationer lad is a different maturity, been through puberty, long bones are stopping growth, secondary sexual traits normal at my last examination…” Fletcher’s mouth was a thin line, he was staring at the edge of the table, possibly with a flush on Fletcher’s face, but Charlie didn’t proceed to the comparative clinical details. “Emotionally, however” Charlie said, “the equation is more different between them now than it will ever be in later life. Fletcher, at seventeen, has lived every day of his seventeen years. He’s not grown up having the purge of emotional stress Chad’s undergone every month or so in hyperspace: his experience hasn’t been subject to that deboot.
It’s all been continuous, interrupted only by ordinary nightly dreamstate and whatever psych counseling he’s had.” Fletcher shot Charlie a hard, burning look, which Charlie didn’t look to see. “Our spacer, now, has seen twenty years of history; he was born during the War; he’s seen combat for all his years. Our stationer’s seen three less years and his station’s been at peace, whatever internal events it’s suffered. Our spacer’s nineteenth and twentieth years were spent in a sixteen-year-old body in the last stages of puberty, and he’s not expected to finish that process until he’s at least twenty-one or twenty-two depending on our travel schedule; he won’t be posted to adult crew until he’s at least twenty-six or twenty-seven and won’t enter apprenticeship until he gets at least another physical year’s growth. Meanwhile our stationer’s already past the growth spurt, the rapid changes in jaw, hair, primary and secondary sexual development. Body and hormones reach truce. He’s pretty well started on his adult life, as stationers tend to be at his age.—On the other hand, when Chad reaches his ship-time twenties, advantage pitches in the other direction. Our spacer won’t suffer the stress disease a stationer has: he has that monthly emotional purge, granted he’s not one of the rare poor sods that comes out of jump depressed, and our Chad is not depressed. He’ll be sixty station-years before he needs to think about rejuv, and look forty, with the historical experience of sixty, when our stationer who stayed on station-time for his first seventeen years is just a little sooner on rejuv. If he doesn’t want to ache in the mornings,” Charlie patted Fletcher’s bare shoulder. “You survived. Congratulations. But let’s put a better bandage on the elbow.”
“It’s fine.”
“Shut up, Fletcher,” JR said. “Just sit still.”
Fletcher sat, and gazed fixedly at the wall, endured the neoplasm Charlie shot on for a patch, and the bandaging.
“You can shower with that.”
“Thanks.”
“Go and thrive. You’re released. Done. Unless JR wants you.”
Fletcher slid down from the table and began to pull his clothing to rights, determinedly not looking at any of them, as Charlie moved on to Chad and the mouth.
It was hard to judge Fletcher’s limits and capabilities. Add everything Charlie had said, plus bone-ignorant of safety procedures and any useful trade.
Try again, JR thought. “Difficult call, Fletcher. Difficult to judge where you are.”
“Where I don’t want to be, is the plain fact.”
“You were right at the start of everything, were you?” He’d known intellectually that Fletcher was called up out of a study program. How adult it was, how much career it might be, was all guesswork to him. “Now a career restart.”
“I’m not interested in a restart,” Fletcher said.
And, frankly, Fletcher was late to be starting anything. At any given jump, the senior captain or third Helm or Scan or Com 1 might not wake up, and the senior-juniors would be møving up, into real posts. It could make bad, bad blood on that point if he couldn’t finesse what Fletcher was, or might be. But he’d made his initial determination, a junior personnel decision, and it was his decision.
“Behind my unit and ahead of Chad’s,” he said, “there’s no personnel from those years. No one survived. That’s the problem. There’s no one to assign you with, you’re too far behind my set, and you and Chad, who’d be somebody to put you with, have just pounded hell out of each other. That makes things somewhat hard for me trying to put you somewhere constructive.”
“How about back on Pell?” Fletcher asked, in hard, insubordinate challenge.
“Not my option. Not yours. I said you were in. I’ve got the job of finding you a spot. You want some senior privileges—” It was the damned drink incident at the bar that had touched off the mess, that and his failure to lay the law down absolutely on one side or the other. He was aware Chad was listening, and Chad would report exactly what the disposition was. So would he, faster than that. A memo would hit the individual mail-boxes within the hour. And this time he didn’t count on their lifelong connections to straighten out the details: he knew where he’d assumed it would happen with Fletcher. It hadn’t worked itself out; and decision, any decision, was better than no decision. “I’m creating a class of one. Solo. You want your unique privileges, you’ve got bar rights at family gatherings, but I’m insisting you stay in the approved junior-juniors’ sleepovers and not overnight elsewhere during liberty. More than that—I’m giving you a duty. You take care of Jeremy, Vince, and Linda. It takes them off my hands and gives me and my team a break from junior-juniors.”
Fletcher gave him a straight-on look, as if trying to decide where the stinger was.
“I don’t know the regulations.”
“They do. Jeremy won’t con you, Vince will almost assuredly try.” He made a shift of his eyes to Chad, who was getting off the table. And back to Fletcher. “You don’t have to make apologies to each other. A love fest isn’t required. I do expect civil behavior. And a concentrated effort to settle your differences.”
Fletcher absorbed that observation in long silence. He looked across the gap at Chad, on whom Charlie had interrupted his examination.
“Chad,” JR said, and Chad got down, jump suit bunched around his waist.
“Yessir.”
“Chad, this is your cousin Fletcher.”
“Yessir.” It was a mumble, still. Chad drew a deep breath and offered his hand.
Fletcher took it, not smiling.
“Pretty good punch,” Chad said magnanimously.
Fletcher didn’t say a thing. Just recovered his hand.
“Go on,” JR said, and Fletcher left.
“Damn station prig,” Chad said when held gone. “But he sure learnt to fight somewhere”
“Evidently he did,” JR said dryly, and Chad got back on the table and endured being poked and prodded.
“Ow,” Chad said.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it tied things down. Charlie had put a finger on one significant matter. Tempers on what had been a burning issue almost always settled a little after jump: hyperspace straightened out perspectives, lowered emotional charges, made things seem trivial against the wider universe—acted, in most instances, like a mood elevator. Some quarrels just dissipated, grown too tenuous to maintain, and others fizzled after a few half-hearted spats the other side of where they’d been.
Unfortunately they weren’t approaching a jump where things would cool down. They were on the inbound leg of the Mariner run, coming into port, where he had to turn junior-junior crew loose on a dockside that had notoriously little sense of humor with rule-breakers—a dockside made doubly hazardous because it was a border zone between Alliance and Union and a minefield of political sensitivities and touchy cops.
Finity on a trade run as an ordinary merchanter was going to be damned conspicuous. He’d caught discussion among the senior crew, how various eyes were going to be watching her and her crew for signs that she wasn’t really engaged in commerce, signs, he could fill in for himself, such as the absence of underage crew on the docks, when all other ships let their youngsters go to the game parlors and the approved kid haunts.
They had to let the junior-juniors go out there. They had to look normal. And he had to get them back again, in one piece.
Put Fletcher in charge of the juniors who’d more or less been in charge of him? It might straighten out the accidental kink that had developed in the order of things. He’d have Fletcher report to him once daily about the state of the juniors, he’d threaten Jeremy’s life if they gave Fletcher a hard time, and he’d have a daily phone call from Fletcher coincidentally confirming Fletcher’s own well-being and whereabouts, and necessitating the learning of rules and regulations—which would have galled Fletcher’s independent soul if he’d asked Fletcher to report on himself, or to read the rule book and learn it.
It was as good as he could manage. Better than he’d hoped.
He went to B deck and filed a report with the Old Man’s office, not a flattering one to himself. “I’ve put Fletcher in charge of the juniors,” he began it. And explained there’d been an incident. He’d hoped not to face the Old Man directly, but unfortunately the robot wasn’t taking calls.
Vince and Linda gave Fletcher a speculating look when he came back to the laundry. Jeremy stood and stared, his face grave and worried.
There wasn’t enough work to keep them busy. There was nothing but cards. Fletcher made a pass about the area looking for work to do, anything to keep him from answering junior questions. But in his concentrated silence even Vince didn’t blurt questions or smart-ass observations, maybe having learned he could get hurt
“Not enough work to justify four of us,” Fletcher announced. “You handle what comes in. I’m going to the room.”
“You better not,” Jeremy said in a hushed voice. “You’ll catch hell.”
“It’s my room,” he said. “I’ll go to it.”
But the intercom speaker on the wall came on with: “Fletcher.”
Jeremy dived for it. “He’s here,” Jeremy volunteered, as if that was the source of all help.
“Fletcher R., report to the senior captain’s office.”
“Shit,” he said, and Jeremy instantly blocked the reply mike with his hand.
“He’s coming,” Jeremy said then. “He’ll be right there.”
“Going to catch hell,” Vince muttered.
Fletcher thought of going to his room anyway, and letting the captain come to him. But, he told himself, this was the person he wanted to see, the person who should have seen him when he boarded and who never yet had bothered. This was the Goda’mighty important James Robert who’d built the Alliance and fought off the pirate Fleet, who finally found time for him, and who might be annoyed to the point of making his life hell and fighting him on his hopes of leaving this ship if he didn’t report in.
“So where do I find him?” he asked Jeremy.
Vince, Linda and Jeremy answered, as if they were telling him the way to God.
“B7. There’s these offices. All the captains. His is there, too.”
Right near Legal. He knew his way. He walked out of the laundry station and down to the lift, rode it to B deck, trying not to let his temper get out of control, telling himself this was the man who could wreck him without trying.
Or finally understand the simple fact that he didn’t want to be here, and maybe… maybe just let him go.
The kids’ description matched reality, an office setup a lot like Legal, a front office where several senior crew worked at desks, all staff, offices to the side.
And JR.
“You set this up,” he said to JR, and was ready to turn and walk out.
“I don’t make the captain’s appointments,” JR said. “Report the situation? I was obliged to.”
“Thank you,” Fletcher said. So he wasn’t to meet with the captain alone. He had JR for a witness, to confuse anything he wanted to say. It wasn’t going to be an interview. It would be a reading of the rules.
He was here. He held onto his temper with both hands as JR opened the door and let him in.
The Old Man everybody referred to wasn’t that old to look at him, that was the first impression he had as the Old Man looked up at him. He was prepared to deal with some dodderer, but the eyes that met him were dark and quick in a papery-skinned and lean face. The hand that reached out as the Old Man rose was young in shape, but the skin had that parchment quality he’d seen on the very long-rejuved. It felt like old fabric, smooth like that; and he realized he hadn’t consciously decided to take the Old Man’s hand. He just had, suddenly so wrapped in that question that he hadn’t consciously noted whether JR had stayed or what the office was like, until the Old Man settled back behind his desk and left him standing in front of it. JR had stayed, and stood behind him, slightly to the side.
It wasn’t a big office. There was a thing he recognized as a sailing ship’s wheel on the wall between two cases of old and expensive books. There was a side table, and a chart on the wall above it, a map of stations and points that had lines on it in greater number than he’d ever seen.
Mostly there was the Old Man, who settled back in his chair and looked at him, just quietly observed him for a moment, not tempting him to blurt out anything in the way of charges or excuses prematurely.
Like a judge. Like a judge who’d been on the bench a long, long time.
“Fletcher,” James Robert said, in a low, quiet voice, and made him wonder what the Old Man saw when he looked at him, whether he saw his mother, or was about to say so. “A new world, isn’t it?”
He wasn’t prepared for philosophy. Could have expected it, but it wasn’t the angle his brain was set to handle. He stood there, thoughts gone blank, and the Old Man went on.
“We’re glad to have you aboard. You’ve had a chance to see the ship. What do you think?”
What did he think? What did he think?
He drew in a breath, time enough for caution to reassert itself, and for a beleaguered brain to tell him not to go too far. And to stop at one statement.
“I think I don’t belong here, sir.”
“In what respect?” Quietly. Seriously.
List the reasons? God. “In respect of the fact I prepared myself to work on a planet. In respect of the fact I’m totally useless to you. In respect of the fact I’m no good anywhere except what I trained all my life to do”
“What did you train to do?”
“To work with the downers, sir.” The man knew. And was trying to draw him out. While he had JR at his shoulder for an inhibition.
“It’s what I want to do.”
“What’s the nature of that work?”
He wasn’t prepared to give a detailed catalog of his jobs, either. “Agriculture. Archaeological research. Native studies. Planetary dynamics.”
“All those things.”
“I hadn’t specialized yet.”
“What would you have chosen?”
“Native Studies.”
“Why that?”
“Because I want to understand the downers.”
“Why would you want that?”
“Because I want to help them.”
“How would you do that?”
Question begat question, backing him slowly toward a corner of the subject with truth in it, a truth he didn’t want to tell.
“By being a fair administrator.”
“Oh, an administrator. A fair one. Just what they need.”
The tone had been so quiet the barb was in before he felt it.
“Yes, sir, it beats a bad one. And they’ve had that, too.”
“I’m very aware. So you were going into Native Studies. Getting a jump on the administrator part, it seems. You’d formed acquaintances among the downers.”
Bianca. It was the same thing Madelaine had hit him with. But now it had lost its shock value.
“Yes, sir. I did. I knew them before I went down. And there’s nothing in the rules that covered that.”
“I take it you checked.”
“They’re friends of mine! There’s nothing I did that would harm them.”
“Including going into the outback. Including endangering others. Including meeting with downer authorities.”
He’d told that to the investigators. He remembered lying in the bed, and them recording everything he said. He’d had to explain the stick. That he hadn’t stolen it. So it hadn’t been all Bianca.
“Why,” the captain asked him, “would you break the regulations?”
“Because you pushed me.”
“We weren’t there. I don’t think so. You made a decision. You went where you were forbidden to go, you stole lifesupport cylinders—”
“One from each. If anybody got out there compromised it was their own stupidity. You can feel it in the masks. They’d be too light.”
Was that a slight smile on the captain’s face? He didn’t take it for one. And JR was hearing entirely too much.
“You also,” the captain said, “went out there to outwait us. Endangering your downers, about whom you care so much.”
“Outwait you, yes. But not to endanger the downers.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it wouldn’t.”
“You were sure of that.”
“I know them. I was looking for the two I knew.”
There was a long silence then. James Robert leaned forward, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled in front of his lips. “Then,” James Robert said, “you thought it wouldn’t hurt them. You took conscious thought.”
“Yes, sir. If I’d thought I’d do them any damage I’d have turned around and given up. Right then.”
“Are you sure you didn’t?”
“I am absolutely sure I didn’t.” He was scared, however, that the captain knew more than he was saying… about what he’d boarded with. He waited to be accused.
“You invaded a downer shrine, on your own decision.”
“It’s not a shrine.” Had he said that part of it? God! He didn’t know now what he had said to the investigators, or how much more they’d inferred. “It’s a ritual site. There’s a difference.”
“That’s what they say.”
“Yes, sir.” They knew what he’d brought aboard. They were going to take it away from him.
“And why did you go there?”
“A downer led me.”
“Your friends did.”
“No. A different one.”
“And you still say you didn’t do damage.”
“I know I didn’t. They accepted me there. They brought me there.” There was more that he hadn’t said, but he wasn’t willing now for the Old Man to direct the conversation where he wanted it, chasing him into every corner of what he knew. “I talked to Satin.”
“So have I,” James Robert said.
For a moment he didn’t believe it. And then did. This was James Robert who’d been on Pell when the foremost of downers had been on the station.
“I’ve met Satin,” James Robert said. “An extraordinary creature. She went all the way to Mariner, and came back talking about war.”
He was impressed. In spite of everything.
“Do you know,” James Robert said, “they had no word for war until we told them?”
“She wasn’t on this ship.”
“On another merchanter ship. On a far more ordinary voyage. But even so she found the outside too threatening. She said the heavens were too troubled for hisa. She came back to her world, by what I understand, to sit by the Watchers and add her strength to the Watchers’ strength. To dream the future.”
A chill went over his arms. “What do you know about it?”
“I met her. I talked with her.”
He was vastly more impressed with this man than he’d planned to be. He’d tried to act righteous and the man turned out to know things that made him look like the rules-infracting fool he knew in his heart he’d been. A fool that deserved booting from the program—as they’d done with him, so thoroughly that Quen couldn’t even use reinstatement as a bribe.
Quen knew. Quen had told James Robert. And James Robert hadn’t met with him until now, when he’d have thought the captain who sued for his return would have been at the head of the list.
“What I know,” the captain said, “is the old ones sit by the Watchers and believe for the people. They expect things from the sky. Hell, we showed up. Something else might happen. There even might be peace. If you want my opinion, that’s what she’s looking for. That’s why she went back.”
“They say don’t attribute anything to them. That we can’t know what they’re looking for.”
“Bullshit. I know what she’s looking for. All of us who dealt with her know what she’s looking for. You don’t look so blind, either.”
His heart was beating very fast.
“And what’s that?” he challenged the captain. “What do you know that they don’t?”
“The meaning of not-war. We taught her the word for war. They didn’t have it. But they don’t have a word for peace either. And that’s what she waits to see. She’s got to be really old by now, in downer terms.”
Silver. Like an image. The captain made Satin so real in his mind it hurt.
“Yes,” he said. “She is.”
“You know what this ship is, Fletcher, besides a recurring inconvenience in your life?”
“No.” The captain preempted what he’d have said. Diverted talk to the ship. Which he didn’t want.
“This ship,” the captain said, “your ship, Fletcher, the way it was your mother’s, is the oldest merchanter still working. It’s the one that broke open the rebellion against the Earth Company. It had been started before, but we made it inevitable. Your predecessor helped make it happen.”
“I know that.” He didn’t want a history lesson. He knew about this ship, God, he knew about this ship. He’d learned about his almost-immediate ancestor. This ship was armed, it went God knew where, it was a warship in disguise, and it was probably lying (he began to fear so, counting that carrier that had spooked the ship back at the last jump) when it claimed it was going back to merchant trade.
“This is the ship,” the captain continued in dogged patience, “that secured the right that no matter what law a station is under, a merchanter’s deck is sovereign territory. Without that, merchanters would have been sucked right into the War, or coopted by Union.”
“I know that part, too.”
“This is the ship that led the merchanter strikes, the first to resist Earth’s imposition of visas.”
“At Olympus.”
“Thule. Learn your Hinder Stars. There are those of us who remember, Fletcher. And you have to. People who meet one of our crew expect you to remember, so be correct on that point.”
“I wasn’t born then. You may have been, but I wasn’t.”
“I know other things, in your world. This ship, Fletcher, is what Satin hopes for.”
“No. Satin doesn’t. Satin doesn’t care what humans do.”
“Yes, she does.”
“It’s a cheap try. The downers have no connection to us. They don’t know why we do what we do and we shouldn’t confuse them.”
“Did Satin tell you that?”
A shot straight to the gut.
“What did she say?” the captain asked. “Did she tell you that their culture is equivalent to but aside from protohuman development and that she’s a mirror of ourselves?”
“No.”
“I don’t think it’s her job, either. No more than it’s your job to run her planet for her.”
“I never said it was.”
“You have to take that line if you want to be an administrator. You have to work with the committee, play with the team, and leave the downers alone. If the committee had found out what you were doing they’d have had you on a platter, and by now they probably do know and they’ve got three study groups and a government grant to try to find out what happened. You were doomed. They’d have had you out of that job in a year.”
“It wouldn’t have gone the way it did.”
“Yes, it would. Because you questioned the most basic facts in the official rulebook… that Satin’s people have to be left alone and her people can’t learn anything they don’t think of for themselves. Those are the rules, Fletcher. Defy them at your own risk.”
“I never risked them.” It was the one thing he could say, the one thing he was, in heart and head, sure of, that Nunn never would believe.
“I know that. I know that. And Satin won’t talk to the researchers. Not to the researchers. Not to the administrators. Do you think she’s stupid? She has nothing to say to them.”
“What do you know? You talked to her once”
“Like you. You talked to her once.”
“I’ve studied them all my life. I do know something about them.”
“Something the researchers don’t know?”
It sounded ludicrous. He was no one. He knew nothing.
“You love them?” the captain asked. That word. That word he didn’t use.
“Love isn’t on the approved list. Ask the professors.”
“I’ll give you another radical word. Peace, Fletcher. It’s what Satin’s looking for. She doesn’t know the name of it, but she went back to the Watchers to wait for it. That’s why she’s there. That’s why she folded downer culture in on itself and gave not a damn thing to the researchers and the administrators and all the rest of the official establishment. It was her dearest wish to go to space. But we weren’t ready for her.”
“Satin went back to her planet rather than put up with the way we do business!” Fletcher said. “Wars and shooting people on the docks didn’t impress her. And she didn’t like the merchant trade. Downers give things, they don’t sell them.”
“When you met her, what did she tell you?”
His voice froze up on him. Chills ran down his arms. Go, she’d said. For a moment he could hear that soft, strange voice.
Go walk with Great Sun.
“We talked about the Sun. About downers I knew. That was all.”
“Peace, Fletcher. That’s the word she wants. She knows the word, but we haven’t yet shown her what it means. She knows that the bad humans have to leave downers alone. But that’s not peace. We haven’t been able to show it to her. We showed her war. But we never have found her peace. And that’s what we’re looking for, right now. On this ship. On this voyage”
“Fancy words.”
“Peace is a lot more than just being left alone.”
“You couldn’t give it to her down there,” the Old Man said. “You’re a child of the War. So is JR.” His eyes shifted beyond Fletcher’s shoulder, to a presence he keenly felt, and wished JR had heard nothing of this. “Neither of you have any peace to give her. And where will you get it, Fletcher? Your birthright is this ship. This ship, that’s trying to make peace work realtime, in a universe where everybody is still maneuvering for advantage mostly because, like you, like Jeremy and his generation, even like Quen at Pell, you’re all too young to know any better. You’re as lost as Satin. You don’t know what peace looks like, either.”
“What do you know about me or her? What the hell do you know?”
“The hour of your birth and the prejudice of several judges. The fear and the anger that sent you running out where you knew you could die… we never wanted you to be that afraid, Fletcher, or that angry.”
“You don’t want me! You wanted your fourteen million! And I was happy until you screwed up my life! Besides, I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”
“But if you hadn’t run out there, Satin would have come to the end of her life without talking to Fletcher Neihart.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“Nothing, if you don’t do anything. A great deal if you commit yourself to find out what peace is, if you learn it, if you find it and take it to your generation. Satin’s still looking at the heavens, isn’t she? Still waiting to see the shape of it, the color of it, to see what it can do for her people, Fletcher. Right now only a few of us remember what peace looked like, tasted like, felt like.”
He caught a breath. A second one. He’d never been up against anybody who talked like James Robert. Everything you said came back at you through a different lens.
James Robert did remember before the War. Nobody he knew of did.
“Work for this ship,” he said in James Robert’s long silence. “Is that what you mean? Do the laundry, wash the pans…”
“All that we do,” James Robert said, “keeps this ship running. I take a turn at the galley now and again. I consider it a great pleasure.”
“Yes, sir.” He knew he’d just sounded like a prig.
“What good were you at laundry anyway? You think the first strike happened at Olympus.”
“Thule, sir.”
“Good. Details matter. If it wasn’t Thule everything would have been changed. The borders, the ones in charge, the future of the universe would have been changed, Fletcher. Details are important. I wonder you missed that, if you’re a scientist.”
“Biochemist.”
“Biochem? Biochem isn’t related to the universe?”
“It is, sir. Thule.”
“Precisely. I detest a man that won’t know anything he doesn’t imminently have to. Just plod through the facts as you think you know them. ‘Approximate is good enough’ makes lousy science. Lousy navigation. And keeps people following bad politicians. Are you a rules-follower, Fletcher?”
The Old Man was joking with him. He took a chance, wanting to be right, aware JR was measuring him and fearing the Old Man could demolish him. “I think you have my record, sir.”
A small laugh. A straight look. “A very mixed record.”
“I’m for rules, sir, till I understand them.”
“I knew your predecessor,” the Old Man said. “There’s a similarity. A decided similarity.”
He hoped that was a compliment.
“So JR tells me he’s assigned you to keep young Jeremy in line.”
“Jeremy’s been keeping me in line, mostly.”
A ghost of a smile. And sober attention again. “Biochem, eh?”
He saw the invitation. He didn’t know whether he wanted it. James Robert had a knack for getting through defenses, with the kind of persuasion he wanted to think about a long time, because he’d gotten his attention, and told him the truth in a handful of words, the way Melody had, once: you sad.
James Robert told him plainly what he’d always seen about the program: that if you didn’t believe what they said, follow their rules, you were out. And he’d hedged it all the way, being new, following his dream, living his imaginings… not looking at…
Not looking at what James Robert told him, that the Base wanted someone like Nunn, someone who’d follow rules, not push them—because what ran the human establishment on Downbelow wasn’t on Downbelow. It was on Pell.
“You get a few ports further,” the Old Man said. “We’ll talk again. You have a good time in this one, that’s my recommendation.”
The Old Man hadn’t ever mentioned the fight. The hazing. Any of it. Or changed JR’s assignment of him.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll try to. Thank you.”
The Old Man nodded. JR opened the door, let him out.
And came outside with him.
“Fletcher,” JR said.
He turned a scowling look on JR, daring him to comment on personal matters.
“I didn’t set you up to fail,” JR said. “Any help you want, I will give you.”
“Thank you,” he said. He couldn’t beg JR to forget what he’d heard. He had to leave it on JR’s discretion, whatever it might be, without trusting it in the least. He left, back to the laundry, thinking… they’d talked about peace, and he’d believed everything the Old Man said while he was saying it. It gave him the willies even yet, when he considered that this ship hadn’t been trading for a living for seventeen years.
The Old Man said they were looking for peace, and that none of them knew what it looked like.
He thought of Jeremy, talking of going to Mallory, carrying on the fight. Of Jeremy, shivering in the bunk approaching jump, because the kid was scared.
The youngest of them had seen the least of what the Old Man said they were looking for. They called it peace, when the Treaty of Pell had stopped Union from going after the former Earth Company stations, when the stations agreed to host the Merchanters’ Alliance and Earth disavowed the Fleet… but the Fleet hadn’t surrendered. And there wasn’t any peace.
And the oldest downer had gone back to her world to watch the heavens and believe for her people.
Believing that there was something more, though she’d seen what war looked like. Believing there’d be something else—when for thousands upon thousands of years the Watcher-statues had watched the heavens, waiting…
For what? Visitors?
What peace? he should have asked the Old Man when he had the chance. What does this ship have to do with it, when all it’s done is fight? What are we doing, when you say we’re looking for peace? None of the juniors know what it is, for very damn sure.
When did I say yes? When did I even start listening?
Anger tried to find another foothold. Resentment for being conned.
But this was a ship that had meant important things in the recent past.
What if? he began to ask himself. He, who’d met Satin, and looked into her eyes.
“Got chewed out, hey?” Vince asked when he got back to the laundry, and he just smiled.
“No,” he said in perfect good humor. “I just got put in charge of you three.”
Vince’s mouth stayed open. And shut.
“You’re kidding,” Linda said.
“No,” he said. Jeremy grinned from ear to ear.