The Watcher-statues towered above the plain, large-eyed hisa images like those little statues on the hill. But these were far larger, tricking the eye, changing the scale of the world as Fletcher walked down toward them. Living hisa moved among them, very small against the work that, when humans had seen it, revised all their opinions about the hisa’s lack of what humans called civilization.
He knew that part. Only a very few artifacts ever left Downbelow. Everybody was curious about the hisa, and if nothing prevented the plunder of hisa art, so he understood, hisa artifacts would be stripped off the world and the culture would collapse either for want of critical objects of reverence (or… whatever hisa did with such things); or it would collapse because of the influx of culturally disruptive trade goods and environmentally disruptive human presence.
Researchers didn’t ordinarily get to go out to the images. Only a handful had come here to photograph, and to deal with hisa.
And now, culmination of his dreams, he was here, approaching the most important site humans knew of on Downbelow. His youthful guide brought him closer and closer. He walked at the speed the scant air he drew through the mask would let him move, with the notion that before he got to those statues surely some authority, hisa or human, would stop him. It was too reckless, too wondrous a thing for a nobody like him to get to see this place close up.
And yet no one did stop him. As he walked down the long hillside, he saw strange streaks in the grass all around the cluster of dark stone images, and wondered what those patterns were until he noticed that his guide’s track was exactly such a line, and so were his steps, when he cast a mask-hampered look back. They were tracks of visitors, coming and going from every direction.
Hisa sat or walked among these images, some alone, some in groups, and they had made the tracks across the land, most from the woods just as he did, but some from the river, or the hills or the broad plain beyond. The rain that sifted down weighed down the grasses, but nothing obliterated the traces.
Tracks nearer the images converged into a vast circle of trampled grass all about the images and in among them, where many hisa feet must have flattened last year’s growth, wearing some patches nearest the base down to bare dark earth. It struck him that from up above, this whole plain bore a resemblance to a vast, childishly drawn sun: the circle of stone images, the tracks like rays going out. But hisa didn’t always see the sense of human drawings, so he wasn’t sure whether they saw that resemblance or that significance. They venerated Great Sun, who only one day in thirty appeared as a silver brilliance through Downbelow’s veil of clouds, and that veneration was why they made their pilgrimages to the Upabove: to look on the sun’s unguarded face.
As these Watchers were set here to stare patiently at the sky, in order to venerate the sun on the rare occasions the edge of the sun should appear: that was the best theory scientists had of what these statues meant.
There were fifteen such Watchers in this largest site, huge ones. There’d been three very much smaller ones on the hill to which Melody and Patch had led him and Bianca. And what did that mean, the relative size of them, or the number?
He found himself walking faster and faster, slipping a little on the grass, because his guide went faster on the downhill; and he was panting, testing the mask’s limits, by the time he came down among the images.
He stared up at the nearest one. Up. There was no other impulse possible. For the first time in his life a hisa face towered above his, but not regarding him, regarding only the heavens above. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.
And when he looked around his guide was gone.
“Wait!” he called out, disturbing the peace. But his hisa guide might have been one of ten, of twenty hisa of like stature. Three in his vicinity wore cords and bits of shell very like his guide’s ornament. Wide hisa eyes stared at him, of the few hisa who remained standing and of the most who sat each or in clusters at the front of a statue.
“Melody?” he called out. “Patch?” But there was such a stillness around about the place that his calling only provoked stares.
What was he supposed to do? His guide had failed to tell him.
Where did he go? Push the button and call the Base for help?
He wasn’t ready to do that. He wasn’t ready to give up the idea that Melody and Patch would come here at least for him to bid them good-bye; more than that, getting past the administrative tangle he knew he’d added to his troubles—his mind shied away from fantasies of hisa intervention, last-moment, miraculous help. It didn’t seem wrong, at least, to explore the place while he waited. Hisa weren’t ever much on boundaries, and, after the novelty of his shouting had died away, hisa were wandering about among the images at apparent random, seeming untroubled by his presence.
So he walked about unhindered and unadmonished, looking up at the statues, one after the other, seeing minute differences in them the nature of which he didn’t know. Looking up turned his face to the misting rain and spotted his mask with more water than the water-shedding surface could easily dispose of, water that dotted the gray sky with translucent shining worlds, that was what he daydreamed them to be: this was the center of the hisa universe, and he stood in that very center, by their leave.
He spread wide his arms and turned, making the statues move, and the clouds spin, so that the very universe spun as it should, and he was at the heart of the world. He did it until he was dizzy, and then realized hisa were staring at him, remarking this strange behavior.
He was embarrassed then and, being dizzy, found a statue at the knees of which no one sat; he sat down like the others, exhausted, and realized he was beyond light-headed. A breathing cylinder wanted changing. But not urgently so. He set his hands on his knees and sat cross-legged, back straight. He was shivering, and had a hollow in the middle of him where food and filtered water would be very welcome. Excitement alone had carried him this far. Now the body was getting tired and wobbly.
He breathed in and out in measured breaths until he at least silenced the throbbing in his head and the ache in his chest Still, still, still, he said to himself, pushing down his demand on the cylinders until he could judge their condition.
He’d been cold and hungry many a time in his foolish childhood. He remembered hiding from maintenance workers, back in his tunnel ventures. He’d gone without water. Kid that he had been, he’d gotten on to how to manage the cylinders with a finesse the workers didn’t use, and pretended ignorance through the instruction sessions when he’d come down to the world. He’d known oh, so much more. He’d read the manuals understanding exactly what the technical information meant, as he’d wager the novices didn’t.
He leaned his head back against the stone, face to the sky. And drew a slow breath.
In time he knew in fact he had to change one cylinder out, and did. He slept a while, secure in two good cylinders.
Once, in an interlude between fits of rain, a hisa came over to him and said, “You human hello,” and he said hello back.
“You sit Mana-tari-so.”
“I don’t understand,” he said,
“Mana-tari-so,” the hisa said, and pointed up, to the statue.
It wasn’t a word he’d learned, of the few hisa words he did know.
“He name,” the hisa said.
“He name Mana-tari-so?” The statues, then, had names, like people, or stood for people. He rested against the knees of Mana-tari-so.
“Do you know Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o?” He didn’t pronounce Melody’s and Patch’s names well. But he thought someone should know them.
“Here, there,” the hisa said, and patted the statue. “Old, old, he.” And wandered off in the way of a hisa who’d said what he’d wished to say.
He knew something, he suspected, just in those few words, that the scientists would want very much to know, but he could only ponder the meaning of it. Old? Going back how far? And did it stand for a specific maker? And if that was the case, how did a hisa merit the making of such a huge image, with only stone tools? It was not the effort of one hisa. It couldn’t be, to shape it and move it and make it stand here.
He sat there cold and hungry and thirsty while the gray clouds went grayer with storm. He sat there while lightning played overhead and thunder cracked. His suit had passed its one flash heat, and had nothing more to give him except to retain some of his body heat. But Mana-tari-so sheltered him from the wind, and ran with water…
The earth shook. Heaved…
Became the ship… and a giant fist slamming at him.
He lay there, half-smothered by his own increasing weight, thinking… with startled awareness where he was… We’re going to die. We’re out of jump. We’re going to die here…
Second slam.
“Fletcher!” he heard from Jeremy. “You all right, Fletcher?”
“Yeah,” he said, as his stomach threatened to heave. “Yeah.”
A third drop. A wild, nerve-jolting screech from Jeremy.
The damned kid took it like a vid ride. Enjoyed it. Fletcher caught a gulp of air.
Told himself he couldn’t take the shame of being sick. There was a way to take it the way Jeremy did. He tried to find it. Tried to hold onto it.
“Stay belted! Stay belted!” the intercom said. “We’re in, we’re solid, but stay belted. You juniors, this is serious.” The hell, Fletcher thought. The hell. “I don’t think we’ll use the shower yet,” Jeremy said. “Drink all those packets! Fast!”
The backup shift on this jump was second to first, Madison to James Robert, Helm 2 to Helm 1. Both shifts were on the bridge.
But JR, riding it out below, fretted and occupied his time shaving, flat in his bunk, and taking a risk on a lightning-fast wash before he dressed. The Clear-to-move was uncommonly late in coming, but the audio off the bridge was reaching him while he lay there, and the captain’s station echoed to a monitor setup he had on his handheld, a test of fine vision, but what he heard, fretting below, was a quarry fleeing the point, trying to elude their fast drop toward the dark mass of the failed star that was the point.
They’d gone low, toward the mass, because a bat out of hell was going to come in after them and above them, and Champlain must guess it.
He wanted to be on the bridge, but there wasn’t a useful thing he could do but watch, and he was watching here, as Bucklin would be watching, as Lyra would be watching, and all the rest of them who had handhelds in regular issue. They were held in silence, not disrupting the essential com flow, not even so far as chatter between stations.
He waited. Waited, with an eye on the clock.
Saw, utterly silent, the appearance of another dot on the system scheme, and the fan of probability in its initial plot, rapidly revising.
“There she rides!” Com was unwontedly exuberant. “Announcing the arrival of Union ship Boreale right over us and bound after Champlain for halt and question. Champlain is at a one-hour lag now, and projected as one and a half hours and proceeding. We do not believe that Champlain has made a second V-dump.”
He wouldn’t slow down to exchange pleasantries, JR said to himself, if he were in the position of Champlain’s captain, with an Alliance merchant-warrior and a Union warrior- merchant on his tail.
What the Old Man and Boreale could do to a suspected pirate spotter inside Mariner space was one thing. Outside that jurisdiction there was no law, and Champlain knew it was no accident they’d gone out on the same vector and tagged close behind her.
He had a bet on with himself, that almost all Champlain’s mass was fuel and that Champlain was going far across the local gravity well and away from them, before she dumped V and redirected for Voyager. They were doing a light skip in and out, light-laden themselves, in the notion of jumping first, transcending light while Champlain was still a moving dent in space-time, and possibly beating Champlain to Voyager. There was additional irony involved: that both they and Boreale could do it, and that neither they nor Boreale wanted to show to each other how handily they could do it in case their respective nations one day ended up in conflict. And that they didn’t entirely trust one another. There was just the remotest chance it might be politically useful to one party or another inside Union for one of the two principle ships defending the Alliance to disappear mysteriously and just not make port
Dangerous ally they’d taken. The Old Man had chosen that danger instead of the sure knowledge Champlain was no friend, and possibly did so precisely to demonstrate trust.
More compelling persuasion in the affairs of nations, JR thought now, the cessation of smuggling the Old Man proposed, the acceptance of Union negotiating demands: to have Alliance suddenly accept Union proposals threw such a new wrinkle into Union/Alliance affairs that Boreale wouldn’t dare turn on them without reporting that fact to Union headquarters. Unlike that carrier they’d passed (and he was sure it was no coincidence: the two ships were almost certainly working together), Boreale wasn’t a zonal command center, and couldn’t act without authority.
But even the carrier Amity, back at Tripoint, couldn’t set Union policy. A Union commander in deep space had to act with some autonomy, but conversely the restrictions policy laid on that autonomy were explicit. The Old Man had turned all Union certainties into uncertainty by complying with what Union had asked of them, and therefore it was likely the ship operating with them on this run was going to protect them until it could get word there and back again from Cyteen.
He’d grown up in the tangled shadows of the Old Man’s maneuvers, military and diplomatic, and he’d learned the principles of Union behavior: Uncertainty paralyzes: self-interest motivates. That, and: No local commander innovates policy.
Mallory innovated with a vengeance. It had made her highly unpopular with every nation, and annoyed the Alliance whose self-interest dictated they take the help of the only carrier and the only Fleet captain they or Earth could get. But even Pell didn’t entirely trust Mallory.
Let it be a lesson, the Old Man had used to say when he was a junior Jeremy’s age. Unpredictability has its virtues. But it has its negotiating drawbacks.
Union’s strategy hadn’t always worked. Mallory’s did more often than not. Mazian had been betrayed by his own masters: and Mallory had said in his hearing, Never serve Earth’s interests and succeed at anything. Nothing touched off Earth’s thousand-odd factions like the suspicion that some one faction’s policy might really succeed.
Pell was a Quen monarchy primarily because Pell had Earthlike tendencies, with one important difference. They chose an outsider to govern their outsider affairs because they couldn’t agree on one of their factional leaders holding power. Mariner was, again, a monarchy masquerading as a democracy: since the War, the same administrator had held power and set up an increasingly entrenched group, the only ones who knew how to govern. Voyager, tottering on the edge of ruin all during the War and fearing that peace might kill it… Voyager remained an enigma. While Esperance, a consortium of interests, as best he’d been able to figure its internal workings, clung to the Alliance only so long as it successfully played Alliance against Union.
What they carried, something the Old Man had to hope the Mariner stationmaster had not let leak in any detail to Boreale, was a firm proposal to shore up Voyager’s economy.
Voyager’s survival was not in Union’s short-term interest. If Voyager went bankrupt, Esperance would have no choice but to swing into Cyteen’s political and economic Union a situation which the consortium on Esperance itself surely couldn’t want to happen, though individual members of that consortium might have other notions. In helping them carry out their mission, however, Boreale not only abetted the effort to close the black market, which was in Union’s interest, but aided Voyager’s economy, which wasn’t altogether in Union’s economic interest but was in interest of the peace, which was in Union’s long-term interest.
Higher policy. Boreale’s captain, even if he knew both halves of the equation, was going to be damned by his high command if he failed to render aid to Finity if the question went one way and damned if he did render it, if the question went the other, but as Union generally operated, that captain’s career salvation was going to be the simple fact Boreale had acted to uphold current policy.
So Boreale wouldn’t blow them to hell out here away from witnesses, and would concentrate instead on its proper target, a merchanter on the wrong side of Union policy and Alliance law.
The Old Man bet their lives on it, but it was a good bet and a better bet than being out here alone in the case that Champlain might have dumped down hard and Finity would have exited jump into a barrage of fire. Might have won, all the same, but this way there wasn’t a shot fired. The Old Man’s bet was won.
“Crew has one hour,” the intercom said. “One hour to prepare for run up to jump. We are not spending time here. Cargo is stable. Ship is stable. Rise and shine, cousins, and get yourselves set. Our colleague is now in front of us and we’re on the track. Note: the captain regrets there will be no bar open at Mariner- Voyager Point.”
“What are we doing?” The junior apprentice appointee in charge of Jeremy and company was no better informed than he’d ever been. He was reassured by the levity on the Intercom, but the situation was far from clear.
“We’re chasing that ship,” Jeremy said happily. “Burn their ass, we will, if they lag back.”
“We’re going to shoot?”
“Probably,” Jeremy said. “Sure as sure that we’re not running from it. Got to move quick. You want me to get the sandwiches and you take the shower?”
“Yeah,” he said. An hour, the announcement had said. An hour before they either shot at somebody or went right back up again, still wobbly from the last jump. Taking a shower under the circumstances was on one hand the stupidest thing he could imagine, and on the other, he couldn’t imagine anything more attractive than getting out of the sweaty clothes he’d worn for a month unless it was the news they weren’t going to jump or shoot after all, and that didn’t look forthcoming.
He stripped and stuffed the old clothes into the laundry bag, hit the shower and set the dial for five minutes.
The bruises were faded green. The stitched eyebrow felt healed and no longer swollen. The cut lip felt normal.
He remembered how he’d acquired them, remembered he wanted to beat hell out of Chad Neihart, but the heat of anger was as dim as weeks could make it… dim as a weeks-neglected chemistry of anger could make it. He knew biology, and was halfway glad to have the intervening cool-off, the diminished hormonal surges, but he felt robbed by that elapsed time, too, robbed of something basically and primally human, as effectively as he’d already been robbed of his sole tie to home and the first girl he’d almost loved. Feelings went cold as yesterday’s breakfast. Human concerns diminished until he could contemplate going into a fight as a technical problem, remote from A deck.
They probably wouldn’t find the stick. The pranksters had probably gotten scared, probably chucked it down a waste chute rather than get caught with it.
When he thought that, he could halfway resurrect the anger he’d felt a month ago. Fight Chad Neihart again? It was inevitable that he would.
Trust him again? He didn’t think so.
Love the girl he’d thought he loved? He wasn’t sure what he’d felt and what he did feel.
But he recalled something as recent as slipping into jump, Jeremy’s I’d miss you still echoed in his thinking. Jeremy would in fact miss him, as he’d miss Jeremy, and as strange, he thought he’d miss Madelaine, who’d fought to get him aboard, and who’d given him a tissue for a bloody nose.
He missed Downbelow.
But he’d miss people on Finity, too.
He’d never felt that, going away from the station to Downbelow.
He scrubbed hard, peeling away dead skin and scab and leaving new skin beneath. He raced the shower dial, which would finish with a warm all-over wash-off. His stomach remained queasy, not alone from the jump, but from the divergence between mind and body, that just didn’t muster the intensity of feeling he’d had before. As if the water sluiced away passions and left conclusions intact but without support. People on this ship wanted him. Others didn’t. How much of their feelings had jump leached out of them… and what would a second jump leave? A placid acceptance of the theft?
Hell, no. He wouldn’t let it. There’d be a reckoning. There’d be justice.
But did it take runaway hormones to make anger viable? Was it cowardice to let it fall, or to find it was falling what did a sane human do, who’d gone off where humans were never designed to go?
The water cycle hit from all sides, stung his skin in a short burst. Blinded him.
He loved Melody and Patch, but that passion was fading, too, no more immune to the onslaught of jump-space than his anger was. Spacers’ loves flared in sleepovers and died between jumps and became someone else in the next port, nothing eternal but the brother- and sisterhood on the ships. Family wasn’t meeting someone and marrying; it was your relations, your shipmates, the attachments close as Jeremy. I’d miss you… and that would resurrect itself.
Bianca was further and further behind. He was what, now? six weeks ahead of her and three months further on?
Melody’s pregnancy would be showing now, if she and Patch had succeeded. Her new baby would be a visible fact. She’d spend her time in a burrow. She’d have gone away from him of her own volition, grown absorbed in her future, not his past. His love for them didn’t diminish—their beginnings with him were almost as old as his sense of self—but they were his foundation, not his present reality.
He came out into the cold air, found Jeremy had gotten back from what must have been a sprint to the mess hall, with synth cheese sandwiches and cold drinks in plastic containers. Jeremy finished his in a gulp, started stripping and went to the shower, stuffing his laundry in the bag. “I’ll take it to the laundry chute,” Jeremy said from the shower, before it cut on.
Fletcher dressed and tucked up on his bunk with the sandwich and fruit juice, feeling not too bad and finding it hard to track on where they were in what could be the edge of a fire-fight. Ordinary things went on, the ordinary pleasures of clean clothes, a cold, sweet drink. Went on right down to the moment it might all be over. And he’d fallen into the understanding of it.
He’d finished his sandwich when Jeremy came out and dressed.
“How are you feeling?” Jeremy asked
“Mostly healed up,” he said
Jeremy wasn’t surprised “You got that Introspect tape? You think you could lend it?”
He’d bought it at Mariner. He’d played it several times. And Jeremy liked it.
“Yeah,” he said, and asked himself if he wanted to set up a tape himself.
But visions of Downbelow still danced in memory, a day unlike no other day he could ever imagine. Maybe he could recover that dream.
“Hello, cousins” came from the intercom, a different voice. “Here we are, second shift taking over, a rousing applause for first shift which dropped us neatly where we hoped to be and all the way down to synch with our port. Thanks to the galley for a heroic effort, and all those sandwiches. We’re on to Voyager, where, alas, we’re going to have to be on long hours. But the galley promises us herculean efforts during our Voyager run-in. We are able to reveal to you now, seriously, cousins, that we were engaged in negotiations with both Pell and Mariner, and with numerous captains of the Alliance, who concurred in a plan that now has Union working with us. This ship has become valuable to the peace, cousins, in a way that command will explain in more detail past Voyager, but Captain James Robert has a word for you in advance of our departure. Stand by.”
“Wild,” Jeremy said quietly. “He only does that when we’re going in to fight.”
“This is James Robert,” the next voice said, and a chill went over Fletcher’s skin. “As Com says, more later, but this we do know. We’re couriering in a message Voyager will very much wish to hear. We’re assuring its continued existence in the trading network, one additionally assuring that Mazian will lose the heart of the supply network that’s kept him going. There’s been a black-market pipeline funneling Earth goods to Cyteen and war materiels to Mazian, and that’s about to stop. I’ll fill you all in at Voyager, but console yourselves for a very hard stay at Voyager that we’re about to deal Mazian a blow heavier than any he’s had in years. Peace, cousins. Tell yourselves that when you’re on three hours of sleep and your backs hurt, and you’re tired of watching console lights that don’t change. Voyager liberty is cancelled. We may manage a few hours, but we’re going to work like dockhands at this next port. As an additional piece of news, our running partner Boreale is in hot pursuit of Champlain, and if Champlain doesn’t have the extra fuel we think she has, and does pull in at Voyager, we can deal with that, too.”
“We ought to hit them,” Jeremy said in a tone of disappointment “Why’s Boreale get all the fun?”
“It’s not fun, Jeremy!” Nerves made him speak out, and he gained a shocked look in return. “It’s not fun,” he reiterated. “Listen to the captain who’s done more of hitting them than anybody.”
“Maybe he’s getting old.”
“Maybe he always knew what he’s been fighting for! And maybe you’re too young to know.”
“I’m not too young!”
“I’m too young! Pell’s been at peace, but the idea of no enemy anywhere? I’ve never known that. But I lived with creatures who never fight each other, who don’t steal from one another, and people on this ship do! I’ve at least seen peace, and you haven’t!”
Jeremy looked at him, just stared, as if he’d become as alien as the downers.
“Maybe we can’t be like that,” Fletcher said, sorry if he’d hurt Jeremy’s feelings, and sorry to be at odds with him. “But we can be happy living a lot closer to that, where people don’t get killed for no good reason, and where you’re not taking what we could spend on building places for forests and blowing it all up.”
Jeremy didn’t look happy. Or informed.
“Take hold,” the intercom said. “Belt in, cousins. We’re about to move.”
“Somebody’s got to get Mazian,” Jeremy said. “Downers couldn’t get him.”
“Did you hear the captain? We are getting him. We’re getting him worse than if we blew up a carrier. Downers didn’t get him. But they watch the sky and wait.”
The count started. Then the pressure started and the bunks swung.
“I still wish we got that ship!” Jeremy shouted.
“I’m going to be happy if we get there in one piece!” Fletcher yelled back. “It’s no game, Jeremy. Get your head informed! You never saw what the captain’s looking for, you’ve never been there. But you’ve seen that tape I’ve got. They didn’t take that. You want to borrow it again? I can get it up to you!”
“No!” Jeremy shouted back. “I got a study tape to do.”
“Scare you?” he challenged the kid. “Doesn’t scare me.”
“You scared of Champlain? I’m not!”
“Scared of a thunderstorm? I’ve walked in one!”
“Seen a solar flare? That’s scary! I’ve seen Viking spit!”
He grinned, in this war of top-you. “I’ve seen the Old Man in his office!”
“That’s scary,” Jeremy said, and he could hear the grin in Jeremy’s voice. They played the game in increasing silliness until they’d reached bilious vats of synth cheese, and the pressure made talk difficult They were moving. Faster and faster.
“My sides hurt,” Jeremy said, and they were quiet for a while.
Then Jeremy said, “I don’t know what it’d be like, to just have liberties all the time.”
“Is that what you think we do, on station? We work jobs!”
“No, I mean, if we just went around to stations having liberties and trading and going to dessert bars and seeing girls and that.”
“And that. What’s that?”
“You know.”
He knew. Another grin. “Kid, your body’s going to catch up to your ambitions someday and the universe will make sense to you.”
“It makes perfect sense now!”
“Out there without a chart, junior-junior. Someday you’ll know.”
“You sleep with any of those Belizers?”
“If I had I wouldn’t tell you!”
“I bet you didn’t.”
“You’d be right. I’m particular.”
“You ever?”
“Maybe.”
“What was it like?”
“Like you’ve read in those books you’re not supposed to be looking at in that Mariner shop!”
“No fair. I was looking at the next row!”
“I’ll bet you were.” His ribs were getting tired from talking, but it whiled away the time, and fought the discomfort as Finity climbed toward jump. Finally voices gave out, and Jeremy resorted to his music tape.
He lay and stared at the underside of the bunk, then shut his eyes, asking himself how he’d worked his way into this, and suddenly thinking no one at home would even understand the exchange with Jeremy. That was, he supposed, when you knew you’d become different, when you started sharing jokes with Finity’s youngest… and knowing nobody back home would understand.
It was… when you settled in to a run like this, knowing you could make a fireball in the night, five or so lightyears from making a glimmer in anyone’s telescopes, and do it with a philosophical turn that said, well, it was more likely you’d get to Voyager instead.
And, it was a place he’d never remotely imagined going. It was mysterious and dark and primitive, by all he knew. It was a doomed and damned kind of place.
He’d say that to his stationer cronies of his junior-junior years and they’d say, Wild, and talk about going. But when they got to his age, they’d begin to talk about savings and getting more apartment space and whether to work extra hours for the bigger space or take the free time and live in a closet.
On Finity you got damn-all choice what you’d work, what you’d wear, and you didn’t retire. He did live in a closet, and shared it, to boot. They were out here with someone who was trying to kill them. For real.
God.
What made him settle in and say they’d probably make it?
What made him say to himself he didn’t need the stick to read Satin’s message, and that they might in fact be what Satin was waiting for? He was in the heavens Satin looked to for her answers.
“Approaching jump,” the intercom said. “Trank down, and pleasant dreams, cousins.”
“You awake?” he asked Jeremy. He hadn’t heard a sound out of the top bunk for the last hour. “Yeah,” Jeremy said. “I got it. How are you?”
“Fine,” he said, and pulled the trank packet from where Jeremy had taped it a month ago.
Stuck it to his arm and felt the kick, not even having worried about it.
“Pleasant dreams,” he said.
“You too,” Jeremy called down.
“We are in count, plus five minutes,” Com said.”Boreale has gone for jump and we believe Champlain has gone out of the continuum ahead of us. We have had no indications of hostile action. Stand by for post-jump crew assignments. We will transit Voyager space in ordinary rotation, third shift to the bridge, fourth to follow. Operations in all non-essential stations are suspended for the duration. Galley service will go on, that’s Wayne, Toby B., and Ashley. Laundry, scrub, filter change all will be suspended. Translate that, get your rest, cousins. You’re going to need it when we dock. That’s four minutes, twenty-nine seconds…”
Fletcher drew a deep breath, listening to the periodic reading of the count.
“I bet we could have gotten Champlain,” Jeremy said at the one-minute mark.
“Maybe we could,” Fletcher retorted, feeling the creak in ribs long protesting the acceleration. “But Mazian’s going to be madder if we cut off his supply.”
“You really think we can do that?”
“You got to study something besides vid-games, kid! You can’t make bread without flour, and you can’t get flour if the merchanters don’t move. And flour’s far scarcer than iron for missile parts in this universe!”
“That’s thirty seconds. Twenty-nine…”
He tilted his head back against the strain. The engines cut out for that moment of inertial drift that generally preceded a jump.
“Sweet dreams,” he yelled at Finity’s warlike youngest. “Think about it! Grain and flour, Jeremy! What the downers grow, what they lend us the land to grow! Bread’s a necessity for us, far more than ice and iron!”
The ship spread out to infinity and lifted… That was the way it felt…
He sat there all through the dark, aware of hisa around him, in the night. There was no shelter but the images. There was no talk. Hisa waited, sitting much as he sat, in the intermittent rain.
Is this a place where old hisa come to die? he began to wonder.
Did the young hisa mistake what I was looking for? Do hisa just wait here, and starve, and die?
He grew more and more uneasy. His legs kept going to sleep. He’d been told that lightning tended to hit the highest thing around, and he sat at the base of an image that was one of fifteen highest points in the immediate area, exactly what the Base seniors had said was not wise in a rainstorm.
Were all of them waiting for lightning to kill someone? Was that the kind of game this was? Divine favor? Judgment from the clouds?
The rain came down in torrents for a while, then slacked off, as if nature had grown weary of its rage.
After a long, long while he could see the shadows of the tall Watchers by some source of light other than the lightnings.
He’d seen the sun go down. He’d been in the thick of the woods. He’d never in his life really seen the sun rise from an unobstructed horizon, not as it did now, just a gradual, soft light that at first he could scarcely detect. He could never point to a moment and say that this was dawn. Light just became, and grew, and defined the world around him.
He shifted sides: the leg nearest the ground had chilled to the point of pain, and he could protect one side at a time. He changed out a cylinder, carefully pocketing the spent wrapper.
He slept, then, perhaps simply from weakness. He truly slept, and waked in an unaccustomed warmth. He opened his eyes and realized Great Sun was brighter than he was accustomed to be, comforting the land.
He sat, absorbing the warmth, leaning on the knees of the statue, on Mana-tari-so. He said to himself then that he should just wait, and never push the button that would call for help at all. It wasn’t a scary place. He was with the hisa, and whatever this place was: it waited, it watched. It was all expectation, and in a light-headed way, at this moment, so was he.
But a hisa took his arm, and wanted him to rise and walk, where, he had no idea. A hisa never meant harm, at least. They were utterly without violence. And he went, curious, wobbling on his feet from hunger and light-headedness and cramped legs.
The hisa brought him to the base of the largest Watcher, and a little gray-furred hisa, older than any hisa he’d ever seen.
“You walk in forest,” the old hisa said—female, he thought. And he sank down to his knees on the mat of golden grass, before this old, old creature. “You name Fetcher.”
“Yes.” Something held him from blurting out a request for Melody and Patch. He’d been before judges—and this was one, something told him so, with a sense of hushed reverence that distant thunder could not disturb.
“Satin, I.”
Satin! A shiver went down his spine. Satin, the downer who’d led in the War. Satin, who’d been to space and come down again.
A very thin, elderly hand reached out to him, brushed dust from the mask faceplate, then touched his bare, muddy fingers.
“You boy come watch Great Sun.”
“Yes.”
“What he tell you?”
“I don’t know.” Was he supposed to know something? Was he supposed to be wiser? There was a time downers had made him better than he was. There was a time downers had given him far better sense than he had. But what should he know now? He didn’t think there’d be an easy answer for the ship above their heads and for the rules he’d broken.
“Not you place,” Satin said, and lifted her chin, looked Up then at the heavens with eyes tireless as the Watchers themselves. “There you place, Fetcher.”
“I’m Melody’s,” he said, fearful of disrespecting this most important of hisa; but Satin was wrong. He didn’t belong up there. That was all the trouble. “I belong to Patch and Melody. I don’t want to go back up there. Ever.”
A chill went down his back as those eyes sought his, with the mask between them. “You walk with Great Sun. I walk with Sun my time, bad time, lot shoot, lot die.”
The War. War wasn’t a word they were ever supposed to use with hisa.
“I know,” he said.
“You walk with Sun,” she said, and from the grass beside her took up a spirit stick, a carved stick as long as a human’s forearm, a carved stick done up with woven strands and feathers and stones. He’d seen them on gravesites, at boundaries, at important places hisa meant to mark. “Take,” she said, and offered it to him.
Humans weren’t supposed to touch such things. But she offered it, and he took it carefully in one hand. He saw intricate carvings, and the wear of age and the discoloration at one end that said it might have been set in dark earth once.
“You take,” she said.
He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t own such a thing. Or maybe—maybe it was a grave marker. They were, sometimes. Maybe it was his dying she meant.
“Why?” he asked. “Do what with it?”
“Go you place. You sleep with Mana-tari-no, make he no rest. You dream Upabove. All you dream belong Upabove. You go there.”
He didn’t know what to say, or to do. He didn’t want this answer.
“I want to see Melody and Patch,” he said as clearly as he could, as forcefully as he dared object.
“Not you dream,” Satin said.
“I didn’t dream. I didn’t have a dream!” It was what hisa came here to do, that was what the researchers said. They dreamed and the wise old ones interpreted those dreams. They believed the old ones dreamed the world into reality. They were primitive beings.
He looked into those old, wise eyes and saw—pity?
He grew angry. Or wanted to. But Melody had told him the truth all those years ago. He wasn’t angry. He was sad.
“You find dream up there.” Satin gestured toward the sky. “Go walk you springtime. Melody and Patch go walk. Time you go, Melody child.”
It hurt. It hurt a great deal. But he knew the truth when, after a period of self-delusion, he got the straight word from somebody who could see it.
Go away. Go back. You’re hurting Melody.
It was true. He’d invited himself into Melody’s life and never left. And downers didn’t live as long as humans. It was a big piece of Melody’s life he’d taken with his need, his problem.
Downer females didn’t get pregnant until their last infant grew up.
Did Melody think that he was hers? In her heart of hearts, was that the reason, that she wanted to be rid of him and couldn’t—and couldn’t have her baby until he was out of her life?
He offered the stick back, with all it meant, every tie, every connection to the hisa. He did it in hurt, and in what his pride insisted was anger and what Melody had always insisted wasn’t.
But Satin refused the stick. “You take,” she said. “Belong you.”
He couldn’t speak for a moment. He didn’t know the exact moment in their talking together when the realization had happened, just that at a moment amid the pain he felt assured that he’d been—not cast out: the gift of the stick proved that. But sent out by them. Graduated. Dismissed, with his own business unfinished; his messages unspoken; his plans shifted to a totally different course.
And by what he knew now, he had to go.
It was a good thing he wore a mask. The bottom seal was getting slick. And there was a painful lump in his throat.
“Tell Melody and Patch I love them,” he said finally. “I hope they’re all right this spring.”
“Spring for them,” Satin said, saying it as plainly to his ears as any human could: it was too much for a hisa to bring up a human. Spring came. It carried hope for Melody. And a hisa wise in the ways of the Upabove explained what Melody and Patch were too kind, too gentle to say: Melody should forget her human child, quit her lifetime of waiting for him and get on with the years she had, she and Patch. Spring for them.
“I understand,” he said, and got up, weary and weak as he’d grown. He made the proper little bow hisa made to those they owed respect, and held the stick close as he walked away.
He sighted toward the dark line of the woods, a long, long climb of the hill, on mist-slicked grass. He was well clear of the trampled circle when he reached into an inner, safe pocket, and found the locator device, and contrived, tucking the precious stick under his arm, to push the complex button.
He could do two things, then. He could throw it away and let it simply advise rescuers where he’d been.
Or he could start walking home, toward his assigned fate, wondering if he’d already stayed too late, and whether the cylinders would last.
“Fletcher? Fletcher, wake up!”
“You’re scaring me, Fletcher! Don’t play games…” He blinked, angry at life, at peace with dying. He couldn’t remember why, until a junior-junior started shaking him.
“You were out,” Jeremy said. “God, Fletcher!”
“I’m fine,” he said harshly, annoyed at being shaken, and then realized Jeremy had already showered and changed
He’d been on Downbelow.
He’d been lost, dismissed. Sent away.
“We’re here!—Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
He’d had Satin’s gift in hand. Her gift, her commission.
But he’d lost it, had it stolen, whatever mattered at this point.
Go away. You too old, Fetcher. Time you go.
Had she known? Was there any way her images had whispered the future to her?
She hadn’t said… go Upabove, to the station. She’d said… go walk with Great Sun. Go to space. And giving him her token, she sent him away from Melody and Patch, and into her sky.
To be robbed, by a crew supposed to be the best of the merchanters. By his relatives.
His lip wasn’t cut anymore. He’d almost forgotten Chad, and the theft, until he searched with his tongue for that physical tag of his last waking moment, and met smoothness and no pain.
“Fletcher?”
“I’m fine,” he said harshly, the universal answer. He moved. He sat up. He felt—he’d gone back there. He’d been there. He hadn’t wanted to leave.
And when he came upright and tried to sit on the edge of his bunk, his stomach tried to turn itself inside out.
Jeremy opened a drink packet, fast, made him drink it. The taste told him he needed it. Jeremy pressed the second on him. He almost threw up, drew great breaths of unhindered air.
“You had me scared.”
“I was walking home,” he said. “But I wake up here, and I didn’t remember the fight, I forgot, dammit”! He sat on the edge of his bunk in a frantic search inside after pieces, trying desperately to find the anger, not at his fate, not at Quen, or at the ship, but specifically with Chad… and it wouldn’t come back. It wouldn’t turn on.
You not angry… Melody had said, remembered in his dream, and turned his feelings inside out. But this time he wasn’t sad, either—he was scared. Twice robbed. Ten-odd lightyears had come between him, Chad, and the fight, and Mariner, and all of it. It was two months ago… and the brain had cooled off and the anger had gotten away despite his concentrated effort to remember it, and left only panic in its place.
He’d failed a trust Satin had given him. He’d lost the stick. He didn’t know where to find Satin’s gift. Didn’t know where to find a piece of himself that had just… slipped away in his sleep, leaving his intellect aware but his body uninformed. Even his pain at losing Melody and Patch was getting dimmer, as if it had been long ago, done, beyond recall—as it truly was.
He flung himself to his feet, stripped as if he could strip away the dreams. He went to the shower and scrubbed away at the stink of loss and fear. He slammed the shower door open and came out into the cold clear air determined to resurrect his sanity and his sense of place in the universe, on this ship, whatever the rules had become.
And to fight. To fight, if he had to.
He dressed. He contemplated doing his duty. He went through the motions of anger, as if that could breathe life into it; but his brain kept saying it was past, left behind, and his fear said if he didn’t care, nobody cared. Intellect alone tried to urge the body into rage, but all it achieved was disorientation.
He wanted—he didn’t know what, any longer.
“Have we got a duty?” he asked Jeremy. They hadn’t waked before without one. He didn’t know what the routine was, aside from that.
“We’re supposed to stay in our bunks.”
“Hell.” The one time he wanted work to do. There was nothing. He was in a void, boundless on all sides. He sat down on his bunk and raked hands through his wet hair.
Satin. The stick he’d carried through hell and gone…
.His brain began to look for bits of interrupted reality. Finally found the key one.
Voyager. “Where’s the ship we were following? Where’s Champlain?”
“I don’t know,” Jeremy said in a hushed voice. “Nobody’s said yet. Fletcher, you’re being weird on me. You’re scaring me.”
“I want the stick back. I don’t care what kind of a joke it is, it’s over. I want it back. You think you can communicate that out and around the ship?”
“JR’s been looking for it. Everybody’s been looking. I don’t think they’re through—”
“Then where is it?” He scared Jeremy with his violence. He’d found the anger, and let it loose, but it didn’t have a direction anymore, and it left him shaken. “I don’t know whether JR might know all along where it is. And say I should just have a sense of humor about it. But I don’t. And for all I know the whole damn ship thinks it’s funny as hell.”
“No,” Jeremy said faintly. “Fletcher,—we’ll find it. We’ll look. They haven’t got us on any duty. We’ll look until we find it”
“Yeah. Why don’t we ask Chad along?”
“We’ll find it.”
“I think we’d have hell and away better shot at finding it if JR put out the word it had better be found.”
Jeremy didn’t say anything.
And he was being a fool, Fletcher thought. The vividness of the Watcher dream was fading. The feeling of loss ebbed down.
But the feeling of being robbed—not only of Satin’s gift, but of his own feelings about it—lingered, eating away at his peace. He’d come out of sleep in a panic that wasn’t logical, that was a weakness he’d gotten past. He’d changed residences before and thrown away everything when he got to the new one… photographs, keepsakes, last-minute, conscience-salving gifts. All right into the disposal, no looking back, no regrets. And yet—
Not this time.
Maybe it was the spite in this loss.
Maybe it was the innocence and the stern expectation in the giver…
Maybe it was his failure, utterly, to unravel what he’d been given, or why he’d been given it, or even whose it was.
Downers put them on graves. Put them at places of parting. Gave them to those who were leaving, and the ones who carried them from a parting or a death would leave them in odd places—plant them by the riverside, so the scientists said, in utter disregard that Old River would sweep them away next season… plant them in a graveyard… plant them on a hilltop where no other such symbols were in sight and for no apparent distinction of place outside the downer’s own whim.
And sometimes such sticks seemed to come back again. Sometimes a downer took one from a gravesite and bestowed it on another hisa and sometimes they returned to the one that had given the gift. One researcher had asked why, and the downer in question had just said, “He go out, he come back,” and that was all science had ever learned.
He go out. He come back.
To a graveyard, with more strings and feathers added. Researchers took account of such things, in meticulous studies that noted whether the sticks were set in the earth straight, or slanted, or if the feathers were tied above or below certain marks…
All that would mean things in the minds of the researchers, perhaps. He didn’t trust anything they surmised—he, as someone who’d been given one—someone who’d carried one as a hisa had to carry such a gift. He’d had no place to store it, no place to carry it…
And had the researchers with their air-conditioned domes and their cabinets and their classifying systems never thought what it was to carry one, with no pockets, ridiculous thought? When you had one in your trust, you just carried it, was all, and it was with you, and at some point in the next day or so after, he supposed downers felt a need to complete the job of carrying it, taking it to a grave, or to Old River, or to stand on some hilltop, nearest the sky, just to get on with their lives, get a meal, take a drink, do something practical.
He never got to find a place to let it go, that was the thing.
Satin gave it to him, laid the burden of it on him, saying… go to space, Fletcher.
He’d brought it here and in that sense he’d carry it forever if he couldn’t find it. He’d carry the burden of it all his life, if the people he’d been sent to, his own people, made a joke of it—if the ones who should accept him thought so little of him and all he’d grown up to value.
He raked the hair back, head in his hands, had, he thought to himself, a clearer understanding of Satin’s gesture and of his banishment than any behaviorist ever could give him.
Take this memory and go, Fetcher.
Be done with old things. Be practical. Feed yourself. Sleep. Let Melody go.
But that wasn’t all of it, even yet. It was Satin’s gift. It came from the one hisa who’d gone to space, and back again. It wasn’t just from any hisa. It was from the authority all hisa knew and all humans recognized. It was Satin’s gift and Base administration hadn’t dared say otherwise.
Then some stinking lowlife stole it, because an unwanted cousin came in as an inconvenience, one who had had some other life than the ship.
He didn’t think now that JR would have done it or countenanced it, but protect the party responsible and try to patch it all up? That was JR’s job, to keep the bad things quiet and keep the crew working. He figured the Old Man might not even have heard yet—if it was up to JR to report.
But no—he recalled now, piecing the details of pre-jump together: Madelaine knew. And if Madelaine knew, he’d bet the Old Man did know.
He didn’t think that the senior captain would approve such goings-on. In that light, it was well possible that JR had had to explain the situation.
A weight came on the bunk edge beside him. Jeremy. With an earnest, troubled look, itself an unspoken plea. He’d been seeing Downbelow, in his mind.
“The hell of it all is,” he said to Jeremy, “the stick was like a trust. You know what I mean? And if I get it back, I don’t know what I’d do with it… something Satin would want; but I don’t know.—But it’s for me to choose when and where to do that Somebody else doing it… just tucking it away somewhere…” He was talking to a twelve-year-old, who, even with his irreverence, believed in things dim-witted twelve-year-olds believed, in magic, and a responsive universe, things somebody older could still in his heart believe, but never dare say aloud. “You know what that means? That they carry that stick. And that they’ve taken on responsibility for something they probably wouldn’t choose to carry, but I’ll tell you something about that stick. It won’t turn them loose. That thing’s an obligation, that’s what it is. And this ship won’t ever be quit of it if it doesn’t give it back to me.” He saw Jeremy’s face perfectly serious, absolutely believing. “And—no,” he said to Jeremy, “I’m not going to look for it. It’s going to come back to me or this ship will change and change into what somebody aboard wants it to be. I’m not going to play games with Chad about it. He’d better hope he finds it and gets it to me before the captain steps in to settle it, and I kind of think that’s the instruction the captain’s given JR. You understand me? If the ship doesn’t find it—it’s going to be the ship’s burden, and the ship’s responsibility, and as long as I live I won’t trust Chad Neihart. Maybe no one else will, either.”
“What if it’s not his fault?” Distress rang in Jeremy’s voice. “What if he, like, meant to give it back and something went wrong?”
“I said it. It’s something you carry until you can lay it down. Downer superstition, maybe. But it’s true. I can tell you, either I’m going to forgive Chad and his hangers-on, or I’m not. And I’m going to trust this ship or I’m not. That’s the kind of choice it is. You can pass that word where you think it needs to be passed. Things people do don’t altogether and forever get patched up, Jeremy, just because they’re sorry later. If Chad destroyed it… that says something it’ll take years for me to forget.”
There was a long and brittle silence.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Jeremy said faintly.
“Can I trust him after this?” he asked. Yes, Jeremy believed in miracles, and balances. And maybe it was callous to trade on it, but, dammit, he believed such things himself, and maybe belief could motivate one other human being in the crew. “Can I ever trust him? That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Jeremy didn’t have an answer for him, even with a long, long wait. Just: “I’ll put the word around. This shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t, Fletcher. We’re not like that.”
“I want to think so,” Fletcher said. It was, at least in that ideal world of these few moments’ duration, the truth. Then, because the ensuing silence grew uncomfortable: “Are they going to open rec, do you think, or not?”
“I think we’re supposed to sit in quarters. At least until they give us a clear. I’ll lend you my tapes.”
Fletcher got up and walked the six steps the cabin allowed before he fetched up in front of the mirrored sink alcove. He saw Jeremy standing, too, watching him with a distressed look on his face.
“Cards,” he said to Jeremy, foreseeing otherwise Jeremy worrying at the matter and himself pacing twelve steps up and back, up and back, for a long, long number of hours. It was a situation Jeremy knew how to endure, this being pent in quarters. He imagined the rule in force at other chancy moments, on Finity’s exits into lonely star systems, and the too-wise twelve-year-old with nothing and no one to confide in.
Don’t leave. He remembered Jeremy pleading with him, in a way that, maybe hearing it when he was tranked, the way it did with tape-drugs, had settled into his consciousness with peculiar force. He’d had borrowed brothers all his life. He’d never had a foster brother as desperate, as lonely as Jeremy. There’d never been a rivalry between them. Now—he began to see Jeremy adopting his trick of leaving the coveralls collar undone, his trick of how he did a hitch in the belt—
Even the cuff turn-up. The obsession, when they’d been on liberty, with finding a sweater, a brown sweater, like his. God, it was laughable.
And enough to grab his heart, when he looked at the kid’s face, the eyes that searched his for every hint of advice, and, having just evoked it and brought it into the open, how did he ignore it?
He didn’t know how he felt now. Trapped, yes.
And at the same time gifted with something he’d never had, and now couldn’t walk away from… no more than Melody had walked away from a lost boy that day on Pell docks.
Voyager lay ahead, a spark against a starry dark, swinging in orbit about a stony almost-planet itself orbiting a smallish star.
No Boreale. No Champlain when Finity had broken out of hyperspace here. Just the ion traces of ships that had come in…
And gone. Both. Champlain in the lead, one guessed, and Boreale in pursuit. A nominally Alliance ship fleeing; and a Union ship, which without their permission couldn’t hunt in this space, in hot pursuit
The feeling on Finity’s bridge was one of frustration. It was second watch in charge of the jump out of Mariner-Voyager Point. That was Madison’s crew, with Francie’s watch coming on—third watch; and for a buffer, and to handle emergencies, and the senior-juniors, who’d fought the ravages of a double-jump and hauled their depleted bodies out of bunks faster than no few of the seniors could… anticipating the remote possibility of battle stations, and moving to be there in case one of the seniors couldn’t make it to station.
JR held the lead of that set.
But nothing. Just nothing. They turned out to be alone in the jump range, and that was, for the ship, good news. JR told himself so—even if Madison hovered after turnover with a general glum look, and even if Helm 2 had stayed around to be a problem to Helm 3.
Battle nerves, with no battle, no answer, even, for simple human curiosity—and the suspicion that a Union ship had just slipped their witness in Alliance space with full opportunity to carry out an attack on what was, nominally, still an Alliance ship.
That was JR’s suspicion, at least. And at a time when they were trying their damnedest to persuade Alliance merchanters to surrender to the Alliance station-based government at Pell some of the rights Finitys End had once been pivotal in winning.
Ignore the fact our Union ally just took out after an Alliance ship… and did it one jump short of Esperance, the hardest sell they’d face? No matter that that Alliance ship might be guilty of aiding the enemy, the enemy that had not that long ago been their own Fleet; and no matter that some Alliance merchanters were caught on the wrong side of the line. The Alliance found it hard to forgive Union, who’d roughly handled some merchanters during the War and whose territorial lines were now trying to choke some merchanters out of business.
Alliance was very ambivalent about rimrunners, ships skirting the edges of the modern international alignments; and about dealings with Union; and while they wanted Mazian kept at bay, it was not a universal sentiment that the Alliance could exist without the bugbear of Mazian out in the dark—because that fear kept Union behaving itself.
A Union ship taking on a merchanter would harden Alliance merchanter attitudes at the same time it might incline Esperance Station attitudes toward an agreement with Union. Get-tough policies regarding merchanter compliance weren’t going to win points with the small merchanters who were one economic catastrophe away from having to run cargo they wouldn’t ordinarily choose to be running. JR didn’t know what the Old Man thought of the situation. He hoped that the ion signature they picked up was of a passage, not a battle shaping up to happen in the witness of Esperance and anyone docked there.
He’d bet first that the Old Man, who was not on the bridge this jump, was well aware, and second, that the Old Man was not amused at Boreale’s giving chase past Voyager without consultation. Likely he was already considering how he was going to counter the negatives if the situation blew up.
They had, JR concluded, a potential problem. They’d given Boreale what Boreale couldn’t otherwise have gotten: a straight short-cut through Alliance space to warn the Union’s own presence at Esperance—reputedly there was a major one at all times—that there was something in the offing. And that could be bad news—or good
There was no possibility that the carrier they’d met at Tripoint had sent Boreale: arrival times at Mariner didn’t make it possible, but he was curious enough to sit down and call up Mariner data to confirm that Boreale had, indeed, been in port for a week before they’d gotten in. No. Even granted ships could over-jump one another in hyperspace, that theory didn’t fit the timeline.
Boreale had come in from Cyteen vector and it had no possibility of having been sent by Amity. So its being there was honest.
Boreale’s guarding them in the understanding that they were trying to get merchanters into compliance with the customs regulations, that was honest, too.
So it was perfectly reasonable, aside from chasing Champlain, that they would want to get on through to Esperance where, unlike at Voyager, they had a straight shot to carry a message to Cyteen and could equally well contact other ships whose black boxes had been in very latest communication with Cyteen, to check out what was going on elsewhere. In Boreale’s situation, they’d have done exactly the same.
The Old Man had played it safe, and here they were. They had to go in at Voyager, refuel, do their business of meetings with station administration, and go through the routine motions of trade. They wouldn’t slight Voyager by bypassing it
The good break was that, in the slight imprecision of ship arrivals in a gravity well, Helm had used the belling effect of a ship still at the interface to skip a moderately loaded and very powerful ship well out even from the center of system mass, which wasn’t the center of the star… and the direction of that skewing was toward the position Voyager station happened to be at this time of its year. It was a beautiful job both from Nav and from Helm, a piece of skill that had, all at the same time, simplified their dive toward the station, let them speed faster longer than they’d dare at larger stations, and given them a chance of making up time in what had become a race with Boreale toward Esperance.
Ahead was the least modern station still functioning this side of Union, a small station, with part of its ring under construction before the War, a construction, their files said, which was now abandoned.
Pell, Mariner, Earth… Cyteen, as well, had strung multiple establishments through the ecliptic of their stars. But impoverished Voyager was just Voyager, in orbit about a tiny planet near a debris ring unpleasantly perturbed by a smallish gas giant. Voyager had built a watchful defense not originally against piracy but against high-velocity visitors. But its capabilities had found dual use during the War—use which had kept it alive and kept it a port of call for whatever side could hold it.
And that had been Mazian, for most of the War years.
Prior to the War, in the days of shorter-hopping ships, Voyager had been a bridge toward the hope of more exotic mining at Esperance, but in post-War years, mining had turned out less lucrative for Esperance than the lure of trade with Cyteen. Mariner also wanted the promise of traffic between Pell and Cyteen, if the peace held. Now, poised between Mariner and Esperance, Voyager was the unfortunate waystop between two stars only fragilely interested in trading with each other.
There was a time crunch on. They had a very little time at this star to turn that situation around.
The Old Man arrived on the bridge. Madison and Alan alike stood up. JR did, and all the other juniors on the bridge, in respect of the senior captain, who waved them to be seated.
Madison delivered the first report, of which JR caught the salient details. Alan delivered the second one. Frances had shown up in James Robert’s wake, to hear the general reports, and JR listened on the edges, aware of Bucklin having moved up near him.
“Well,” the Old Man said with a wry expression that framed official reaction, “we have a need to get through this port and get our job done. We are going to get turned around and get out of here in record time. All senior crew to round the clock hull watch, all able-bodied to transfer of cargo, senior staff to what I hope will be short meetings. I don’t anticipate station will object to our proposals at all, but the local merchant trade is likely to. And I’d rather have had Boreale here with us. But we don’t have that. What does the schematic show us? Who’s in port?”
“That’s three interstellars, sir,” Alan said, “end report.”
That was incredibly thin traffic.
“We mustered better than that at our last conference with Mallory,” the Old Man said with a shake of his head. “Jamie. Who are they? Mariner origin or Esperance?”
“Velaria left Mariner for Voyager a week ago, sir, Constance and Lucky Lindy were before that. Nothing but ourselves, Boreale, and Champlain the last five days. No ships from Esperance in port.”
“Counting that a week’s rated a long stay here, it’s a reasonable expectation, three ships. Voyager’s apt to berth about five ships on any given twenty-four hours, rarely ten. We’re the fourth. Boreale and Champlain would have made it almost to traffic congestion, for this port.”
“Yes, sir,” JR said. He’d been ready. It was a struggle, on a two-jump, to have mental recall on everything you’d been supposed to track. It was a job skill. A vital one, and he hadn’t failed it.
“Four empty cans,” the Old Man said, “food grade and clean, ride in the hold. The job will be to test and transfer whatever we pick up on the local market to assure ourselves a clean cargo, one can to the other. Senior crew will not have forgotten this drill, our compliments to the junior crew, who will carry out a great deal of the transfer. We will secure lodgings for all crew near the ship, and crew will not separate from assigned groups, no matter what the excuse. We will make an additional issue of clothing, purchased at the station. We will forego ship’s rules on patches and tags. Wes, you’ll treat the details in a general announcement. The station could use the trade, and we won’t have access to the laundry. Junior-juniors will stay particularly close, within safe perimeters, and only senior staff will deal with food procurement, clothing issue, all other activities where something from the outside comes aboard this ship, including personal baggage, which will be extremely limited. Security Red applies. Cargo will, however, be inert.”
It was the old New Rules. Nothing came aboard without being scanned through, logged, accounted for, and the crew member in question absolutely able to vouch for its integrity. Security Red usually applied when they were hauling touchy cargo… explosives, not uncommonly in the past. This time it wasn’t the cargo’s volatility that prompted the precautions against sabotage. It was Voyager’s.
The Old Man walked about then, taking a short tour past the number one stations, the general boards, spoke a word with the Armscomper, who’d only begun to shut down the hot switches, and with Tech 1, who’d handled the tracking on the emissions signatures.
Habitually the Old Man also said a word to the observing staff, as they called it: the senior-juniors, and JR waited, standing.
“I had a memo from Legal before jump,” the Old Man said in a lowered voice. “I’d like to see you in my office. Now.”
“Yes, sir.” It was not a topic he wanted to deal with on the bridge. It wasn’t a topic he wanted to deal with. And had to.
The Old Man left the bridge. JR looked at Bucklin, who cast him a look of sympathy, and went to report a situation he’d hoped, pre-jump, to have solved.
“The situation on A deck,” the Old Man said with no preamble, as JR stood in front of that desk in the Old Man’s office, the one with the bookcases, the mementoes of old, wooden ships. Past the Old Man’s iron control, JR had no difficulty detecting distress: personal, distracting distress, which the senior captain could well do without when he faced life and death decisions, peace and war decisions.
“Not the captain’s immediate concern, sir. I hope to have a solution.”
“We’ve never had to use the word ‘theft.’ “
“I’m well aware, sir. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have an answer.” At that moment a message began on the intercom, a general advisement to the ship that Boreale and Champlain had slipped through Voyager system and that they were proceeding to dock and refuel.
“Security Red will apply here,” the intercom said, Alan’s voice, “and we will be shifting cargo. The fact that Boreale has gone on in close pursuit of Champlain remains a matter of concern, but it is not, at the moment, our concern…”
James Robert’s finger came down on the console button and the announcement fell silent in the small office.
“I think we know those details.”
“Yessir,” JR said.
“A spirit stick as I understand it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Smuggled aboard.”
“Technically, yes, sir.” It wasn’t the illegality of it that he felt at question, but the very question how anything of that unusual a nature had gotten past his observation. “Legally in his possession.”
Sometimes in the tests the Old Man set him he had to risk being wrong. “Sir, I haven’t considered what the case is. Evidence points to someone taking it, I’ve requested its return, and no one’s come forward.”
“And there’s been a fight.”
“Yes, sir. There was a fight.” Sometimes, too, the challenge was to hang on to a problem and keep it off B deck. And conversely to know when to send it upstairs. “I’d like to continue to handle this one, sir, on my own resources.”
There was a long, a very long silence. If there was a space under the carpet he’d have considered it. As it was he had to stand there, the subject of the senior captain’s very critical scrutiny at a time when a very tired, very worn-looking senior captain took spare moments out of his personal rest time, not his duty schedule.
“I take it the investigation is not at a standstill.”
“No, sir. Ship movement took precedence, but this can’t end with an acceptance of this situation. That won’t solve it.”
The captain nodded slowly, in concurrence with that assessment, JR thought.
They risked losing Fletcher. That was one thing. They risked setting a precedent, a mode of dealing with each other that might destroy them.
“Ship’s honor,” JR said faintly, in the Old Man’s continued silence. “I know, sir.”
“Ship’s honor,” the Old Man said. “It’s the means by which we dare ask those other ships, Jamie, to put aside self-interest. In the last analysis, it’s the highest card we have. Think about it. Do we wish to give that up?”
“No, sir.” It was hard to make a sound at all. Hard to breathe, until the Old Man dismissed him to the relative safety of the corridor.
Five minutes later he gave Bucklin and Lyra orders.
In fifteen minutes, every unassigned junior including Fletcher was on intercom-delivered notice that the Old Man had inquired about the object; and juniors were spreading out through the ship this time on independent, not team, search.
Give the culprit the opportunity to find the object, in whatever way he or she wished. It wouldn’t end it, but it would enable him to put the focus on the interpersonal problem and discover what they were actually dealing with: a theft, or the ruse, or the destruction of something irreplaceable.
Fletcher, however, was with the junior-juniors, all three, when he came on them going through A deck’s vacant cabins a search that, in the example he saw, had boxes of whiskey moved, storages opened, bunks swung to look underneath, all with amazing dispatch.
“Fletcher,” JR said, and drew Fletcher outside the door to 40A. “The Old Man expresses extreme concern. It’s not a property issue. I don’t consider it one. He doesn’t. If you want to file a complaint with him, that door will be open. I’m asking you, personally, give me time to unravel this.”
Fletcher had been moving boxes. His breaths came deep. “I didn’t intend to get involved,” Fletcher said, and gave a move of the eyes toward the flurry of activity inside. “They wanted to.”
If it had been any other circumstance, he would have been dismayed at the thought of the inexpert junior-juniors disarranging cargo. Thumps continuing to come from inside the disused cabin. “I’m impressed with their enthusiasm,” he said.
And in the uneasy silence that followed between them: “Fletcher, we’re approaching a very dangerous dock. I hope we can resolve things prior to docking. If not, I’m asking you, as I’ll ask Chad, to refrain from confrontations. Very serious negotiations are riding on it. Alliance-Union negotiations. They could be adversely affected if two of our crew engage on dockside.” There was a moment more of silence, and diminishing hope of Fletcher’s understanding. “I’m asking your cooperation for a handful of days. We’re going to be working hard, tempers are going to be short. You’re assigned to watch the junior-juniors, the same as before, but I can take you off that if you feel you’d be better separated from other personnel. You and the junior-juniors can sit in a sleepover together and watch vids, if that’s your choice, and you won’t have to work.”
Fletcher stood there considering what he said. He increasingly expected Fletcher to choose to stay to the sleepover, the safest choice, and the one, in the absence of Fletcher’s desire to cooperate, he still might order.
But Fletcher let go the frown, and glanced instead toward the doorway, where the junior-juniors were conducting their search. Then he looked back.
“Even if provoked,” Fletcher said. “As long as we’re in dock. You’ve got my promise.”
“I’m glad to take your word,” he said, and left the junior-juniors to their activity. He hunted down Chad with the same proposition, and that quest required a trip out into the rim, where in coats and gloves and with flashlights, Chad had paired up with Wayne. Another glow, from around the girder-laced curve, showed where Nike and Lyra were operating, in cold deep enough to get through boots.
“I don’t know why he picked me,” Chad said “That’s twice he’s come at me like I was the only one.”
“I don’t know why,” he said “I can’t defend it. I only know how important it is we keep the peace. On both sides of this.”
“I don’t even know what the damn stick looks like,” Chad said. “It’s hard to search for something when you only have a description of it. And that’s all I have.”
Chad wanted to convince him he was innocent. He wished he believed it himself. And yet he couldn’t dismiss the possibility it was the case. “It’s all I have, too,” he said to Chad.
“I think he did it,” Chad said, breath frosting in the light, “and he’s just putting us to running rings. I think it’s going to turn up somewhere and he’ll be the only one not surprised.”
“If that’s the case,” he said. “If it’s not the case, the real way this is going to get solved is when we sit down together and look at each other without suspecting the worst. Him. You. Wayne. Me. All of us.”
“Chad’s taking the brunt of this,” Wayne said. “And I don’t think he’s to blame.”
“He doesn’t want to be here, anyway,” Chad said.
“And I just talked to the Old Man, and asked for more time. Give me some help, Chad.”
“Yessir. I won’t fight.”
He had a confidence in Chad he couldn’t have in Fletcher, who hadn’t been a presence all his life. Chad might be on the wrong side of something, but he wouldn’t go against the answer he’d just given.
“Not even if he jumps you, Chad. If he does I’ll settle it. I know it’s hard what I’m asking, but you’re both of you strong hands we need, and I’d rather not have you sitting it out in quarters.”
“I got my tooth chipped the first time station-boy threw a punch out of nowhere!”
“Chad.”
“Yessir,” Chad said.
“And don’t call him that. No words, Chad, same as no fighting.”
“Yessir,” Chad said the second time.
“I take your word on it,” he said, wishing it weren’t Chad’s word that was utterly at issue.
And that Chad wasn’t the only potential explosive in their midst. There was Connor. There was Sue. There was Nike.
Vince seemed to have fallen in on the side of the offended, not the offenders. Vince was, at least, off his mind.
No sign of the stick, not the first twenty-four hours, not the second, and the junior-juniors, early and enthusiastic in their burst of energy, grew frustrated and short-fused.
“We’re not going to find it,” Linda said.
“Probably,” Fletcher said, “we have less chance than the ones in the outer ring.”
“We can go out there,” Jeremy declared.
“No, we can’t. I’m not being responsible for you clambering around in the dark. Senior-juniors are searching that.”
Jeremy’s shoulders slumped. The junior-juniors were tired to the point of exhaustion. They all had blisters.
And senior crew had found out, unofficially. A number had volunteered extra hours, and hiding places they’d known when they’d been young and foolish.
Some of those searches surprised the junior-juniors, that anyone but them did know those nooks and crannies.
Jake came, having gotten the general description, and said there’d been no stones in the recycling traps, which indicated it hadn’t gone into biomass, unless somebody had thought of that and removed the stones before chucking it into a disposal chute.
That was a logical place to search, one Fletcher hadn’t thought how to handle in terms of the chemistry; and Jake, the bioneer, had disposed of the question by something so basic his school-fed theory hadn’t even considered it.
Notes from all four of the captains turned up one by one in his personal pager, saying, essentially, that the captains were aware, and that official issues aside, if he wanted to discuss the matter, they stood ready to listen.
Fletcher didn’t know how to answer, so he delayed answering. The first impulse had been to say, Get me off this ship; and the second one had been a hesitancy to say what might not, even yet, answer where he wanted to go, or what he wanted to do.
He hadn’t expected the flurry of senior help in the search.
He hadn’t expected the junior-juniors, patching blisters, to keep looking.
He hadn’t expected the senior-juniors to show up in the mess hall, half-frozen from the ring skin, looking for hot coffee and looking exhausted as his own small crew. That included Chad, who avoided looking at him, who pointedly looked the other way when he stared.
It’s destroyed, he said to himself, and Chad’s scared to say so. It’s destroyed or it’s lost and Chad can’t find it.
But none of the senior-juniors talked much, least of all to him, and not that much to each other. There was no rec, meals were catch-as-catch-can, and no one associated together.
This is wrong, Fletcher said to himself, sitting in the A deck mess hall with a coffee cup cooling between his own hands. Jeremy had gotten himself a cup of coffee, and then Vince and Linda had, not their habit. Caffeine wouldn’t, Fletcher thought, improve Jeremy’s already hair-trigger nerves. He wasn’t sure any of the junior-juniors were used to it. But he drank it; and they drank it, a warm-up from the chill of places they’d searched.
Jeremy had fallen asleep yesterday night with the suddenness of a light going off. He’d lain awake with the increasingly heavy responsibility of the ship’s search lying on his pillow, and he thought, today, This is wrong, with the notion that if he stood up, said, Forget it, it’s lost, it may never turn up… he might free everyone, and relieve everyone’s nerves, and just let it pass.
He got up, finally, with the notion of doing exactly that, and immediately the junior-juniors wanted to jump up and follow.
“No,” he said. “An hour alone. All right? And don’t do anything stupid.”
“Yessir,” Jeremy said.
He went over to that other table, where Chad and Wayne and Connor were sitting. “Where’s JR?” he asked in a carefully neutral tone. “Do you have any notion?”
“Bridge,” Wayne said, “last I heard. What’s the problem?”
He couldn’t go to the bridge. No one could go there without an authorization.
“Thanks,” he said, frustrated in his resolution.
“What do you want?” Wayne asked, and he looked at Wayne, and the two he had most problem with, and took resolution in both hands.
“To stop this. Just give it up.”
“Why?” Wayne asked
“Because it’s getting nowhere! Somebody lost it. I accept that. Just everybody quit looking. It may turn up ten years from now. It may never turn up. That’s the way it is.”
“I’ll relay that to JR,” Wayne said carefully. Neither Chad nor Connor said anything. Chad did look at him, an angry look, a wary one. Connor didn’t do that much.
He went back to the juniors and sat down,
“We can’t give it up,” Jeremy said
“Even if we stop looking,” Linda said, “we can’t give it up.”
It was, he thought, the truth, however Linda meant it. He had the captains’ messages stacked up and waiting, that he hadn’t heard from Madelaine meant only that Madelaine was either under orders or trying to restrain herself, and in all the things that had happened aboard the ship, he could only fault a bad situation and a natural resentment.
It was natural that the senior-juniors wished he’d never come aboard; and maybe it was natural Jeremy and Madelaine and maybe the Old Man wanted him never to leave. He’d become the center of a situation he’d never wanted, and everything had gotten out of hand to the point it had damaged the ship.
Even if we stop looking we can’t give it up…
He knew now what a delicate, interconnected structure he’d arrived in, and how it had tried to fit him in, and how he’d damaged it without understanding it… irrevocably so, perhaps. Stopping the search wouldn’t cure it
Getting rid of him might relieve the pain, his and theirs, but it wouldn’t cure it. There wasn’t even an organized evening mess in which he could snag JR into private converse.
In another hour the intercom announced the docking schedule, and particulars of assignments, and they were in their quarters packing duffles reversed in the usual proportion of flash and work clothes: this time it was one dress outfit and the rest work blues.
“This is James Robert Senior,” the intercom said unexpectedly. “We have completed cargo purchase and fueling arrangements prior to dock. Senior officers will be engaged in negotiations vital to the peace of the Alliance. We have been alert for any merchanter inbound from Esperance in the notion that such a ship might have information on the two ships who jumped close to us. Keep your eyes occasionally toward the station schedules and be aware that if such a ship should come from Esperance vector, the situation might change rapidly and dangerously. Be aware that this station has numerous black marketeers doing business on the docks and that they may feel we threaten their interests. Be alert. Do not violate the schedule and do not leave the accommodations except to come straight to the ship for work. The sleepover is the finest we were able to obtain, and it has some recreational facilities, but we do not believe there will be extensive time aside from sleep and meals. We will not stow any can we have not verified.
“You are all by now aware that there has been an incident aboard unprecedented in this ship’s history. I call on all involved to set aside the matter for the duration of our stay, in the interests of all aboard, and I continue to express confidence that the parties involved will find it in their capacity to resolve the issue in a manner considerate of the ship’s best interests and traditions of honor.
“Enjoy your stay.”
He had continued to fold clothing, Jeremy to tuck in small items like his tape player.
Neither of them said anything. He wished now he’d never reported the theft or made an issue. He said to himself he wanted it forgotten, beyond their next jump, that, in the way of mystical things, he’d gained all he could from his loss and stood to lose all he had, if he insisted on finding it.
The intercom droned on with assignments and shifts. The junior-juniors and Chad were at opposite ends of a twenty-four-hour clock. They went down to the assembly area and took their places, Vince and Linda attaching themselves from somewhere farther back in the large, rail-divided rec hall; and Madelaine and others noted their passage through the mob of cousins, giving them small pats on the shoulder, as others did with him. Fletcher ducked his head and studied the rail in front of him, not wanting to communicate. The junior-juniors stood fast about him through the procedures, like some fiercely protective bodyguard, until it was time for the section chiefs to go out and down to take care of customs.
It was, Fletcher discovered, not Pell, not Mariner. It looked more barren than Pell’s White Dock at the dead hours of alterday, as seedy as any between-shop alley in White. And it had a look of danger, the way White Dock had been dangerous, the domain of insystemers and cheap hustlers and those who wanted to sink in among them for safety.
Customs was a wave-through. For everyone.
Baggage pickup was fast. Everyone had packed as lightly as possible and bags came down the exit chute from cargo as if the handlers had slung them on six at a time.
“The bag-end of stations for sure,” he said to the junior-juniors when they set out for their sleepover, a short march across the docks to a frontage of gray-painted metal.
Definitely not Mariner. The promised Safe Harbor Inn was squeezed in between a bar’s neon light and a tattoo parlor.
Fifteen minutes later, with scant formality, they had their keys and found themselves sandwiched into what they’d called a suite on the second level—with a note from JR on his pager that occupants on the same floor were known smugglers and that senior staff would walk the whole junior-junior contingent to their duty shift every shift.
Their so-called luxury suite was one room, two beds, and a couch.
“God,” Vince cried. “This is brutal. We’re stuck in here?”
“We’ve got a vid,” Jeremy said in desperate cheerfulness, and turned it on. The program selection was dismal and, at one channel, Fletcher made a fast move to stand in front of the screen.
Then he thought… what the hell. They were spacer juniors. They’d tossed Linda in with him and Jeremy and Vince, and he figured it was because she was safer with them than elsewhere, tagging around after some preoccupied senior crewwoman and trying to catch up with her age-mates for duty.
“The hell with it all,” he said, and gave up on censorship with the vid. Then turned it off. “Yes, we’re stuck. I brought my tapes. Vince and Jeremy, the bed on the left, Linda, the right, I get the couch cushions and probably I’ve got the better bargain. We’ll splurge on supper, go to duty. It’s three days max.”
“Walking us to duty like babies,” Linda sighed, and collapsed on the end of the bed, her feet on her duffle. “Skuz.”
It was, Fletcher thought, the other side of the spacing life. It wasn’t all palaces. His mother had known places like Mariner. But this was like post-War Pell, this was like the apartment he’d shared with his mother, right down to the plumbing that rattled. It wasn’t a place he wanted to remember, in its details, the cheap scenic paneling. The place had had a plastic tri-d painting, pink flowers, right over the couch that was a makedown bed
And he’d gotten those couch cushions for his bed, on the floor. Odd thing to be nostalgic about. But that was how little space they’d had. He’d had to walk on the cushions to get past the arm of the couch, his mother had fitted him in that tightly against the wall. His nest, she said. And then when welfare complained, she’d gotten a bed for him, but he’d preferred the cushions, his homey and comfortable spot. So after all that fuss they kept the cot behind the couch and never set it up.
They ate supper, he and the juniors, they walked the only circuit they had, in the lobby, they played a handful of game offerings in the game parlor. At 1200 hours a party of Finity crew formed in the lobby and walked, in a group, to the dock, and to the cargo lock.
The instructions arrived, written, for each section head. He read them three times, because it made no particular sense to be emptying one container into the other. He went to the head of Technical over at the entry, a little sheepish.
“Are we emptying one can into another or is it something I’m missing in the instructions?”
“Vacuuming it from one to the other. That’s why we took on only food grade and powders.” Grace, Chief of Cargo Tech, the coat patch informed him. “Easier to clean the vacuum with powders.” He must have looked as bewildered as he felt, because Linda, who’d tagged him over to ask, nudged his arm.
“They can kind of put a foreign mass in stuff, even powder like flour, and they sort of make it assemble by remote, or sometimes it’s on a timer. It’s real nasty. But it’s got to have this little starter unit.”
“It blows up,” Grace said. “That’s why we’re analyzing the content on every can and sifting through everything. Security Red. There’s those with reason to wish we’d fail to reach our next port.”
“Because of the negotiations,” he said.
“Because of that, and because some just had rather on general principles that we didn’t exist.”
All the junior-juniors had gathered around. People wanted to blow up ships with kids on them. That was why the court had kept him off Finity. Maybe the court had saved his life. They talked about so many dead, the mothers of these three kids among them, dying in a decompression.
He didn’t ask. He lined the fractious juniors up to go in and get the coats they were supposed to have. The cans were sitting outside on the dock, huge containers, the size of small rooms. The message to the section heads said something like fifteen hundred of those cans.
And they were going to transfer cargo from one to the next so they could be sure of the contents?
He’d never been inside a ship’s hold. He’d only seen pictures. He went up the cargo personnel ramp, was glad to snatch a coat from the lockers beside the access and to see the juniors wrapped up, too, on the edge of a dark place with spotlights illuminating machinery, rows and rows of racks.
“Back there’s hard vacuum,” Jeremy said, pointing at another airlock with Danger written large in black and yellow. Machinery clanked and clashed as a can came in, swung along by a huge cradle. No place for kids, his head told him, but these three knew better than he did.
“You got to keep to the catwalks,” Vince yelled over the racket, breath frosting against the glare and the dark. Vince slapped a thin rail. “Here’s safe! Nothing’ll hit you in the head! Lean over the edge, wham! loader’ll take your head off!”
“Thanks for the warning,” he said under his breath, and said to himself of all shipboard jobs he never wanted, cargo was way ahead of laundry or galley scrub. His feet were growing numb just from standing on the metal. Contact with the rail leached warmth from his gloved hands. The proximity of a metal girder was palpable cold on the right side of his face. “Colder than hell’s hinges.”
“You got a button in your pocket lining,” Jeremy said, and he put his hand in and felt it. Heated coat. He found it a good thing.
They were mop-up, was what the duty sheet said. Every can had to be washed down and free of dust, as it paused before its trip into the hold. Cans that had been set down, behind the concealment of the hatch, had to be opened, the contents sampled, shifted to another can, and that can, its numbers re-recorded on the new manifest, then had to be picked up by the giant machinery, and shunted to their station while Parton and his aides were running the chemistry to prove it was two tons of dry yeast and nothing else.
The newly filled cans acquired dust in the process. Dust was the enemy of the machinery and it became a personal enemy. They took turns holding a flashlight to expose streaks on the surface, on which ice would form from condensation even yet, although the cold was drying the raw new air they’d pumped into the forward staging area. Ice slicked the catwalks, a rime hazardous as well as nuisanceful. Limbs grew wobbly with the cold, hands grew clumsy.
Fletcher called for relief and took the junior-juniors into the rest station to warm up with hot chocolate and sweet rolls and sandwiches, before it was back onto the line again.
“Wish we had that bubbly tub from Mariner,” Jeremy said, cold-stung and red-nosed over the rim of his cup. “I’d sure use it tonight.”
“I wish we had the desserts from Mariner,” Vince said.
“You and your desserts,” Linda said. “We’ll have to roll you aboard like one of the cans.”
“Not a chance,” Vince said. “I’m working it all off. A working man needs a lot of calories.”
“Man,” Linda gibed. “Oh, listen to us now.”
“Well, I do,” Vince said.
Fletcher inhaled the steam off the hot chocolate and contemplated another trip out into the cold. He looked at the clock. They’d been on duty two hours.
They had four more to go.
The gathering in the Voyager Blue Section conference room was far smaller than at Mariner, hardbitten captains, two women, one man, who wanted to know why they’d been called, and what they had to do with Finity’s End.
“Got no guns, no cash, nothing but the necessaries,” the man in the trio said.
Carson was the name. Hannibal was the ship-name, a little freighter not on the Pell list of ordinary callers, but on Mariner’s regulars: JR had memorized the list, had seen the -s- and question mark beside both Hannibal and Frye’s Jacobite, the one that was sharing the sleepover with them. That -s- meant suspect. Jacobite did just a little too well, in their guesswork, to account for runs only between Mariner and Voyager and maybe Esperance at need, but Esperance was pushing it for a really marginal craft, no strain at all for Finity’s End.
There was reason the small ships took to trading in the shadows, bypassing dock charges, maximizing profits.
“We hope,” the Old Man began his assault, “that we have a good deal in the offing. We’ve got a problem, and we’ve got a solution, and let me explain the making-money part of it before I get to the cost. It’s not going to be clear profit, but it’s going to be a guarantee Voyager stays in business; it’s going to mandate your ships keep their routes, as the ones that have kept Voyager solvent thus far. There’s also going to be a repair fund, meaning credit available for the short-haulers. Mariner’s backing it. So’s Pell. Voyager stationmaster will speak for himself. We have a list of twenty-five small haulers that stay within this reach. Those ships will see protection.”
“The cost.”
“You serve this reach and you make a profit doing it. You keep the trade only on the docks and you pay the tariff.”
“We pay the tariff,” Hannibal said.
“On all trades,” the Old Man said, and there was a little silence. The captains liked the one part of it. Salvation for the small operator, vulnerable to downtime charges and repair charges, was inextricably linked to cession of ship’s rights. Anathema.
“Who’s going to say our competition pays the same?” That from Jamaica, captain Wells, whose eyes darted quickly from one side to the other in arguments. “Who’s inspecting? Finity, arguing to let station inspectors on our decks?”
Difficult point, JR thought. Difficult answer, but the Old Man didn’t pull the punches.
“They’ll pay,” the Old Man said, “because there’ll be a watch on the jump points.”
“No,” Hannibal said.
“You’re supplying Mazian,” the Old Man said, more blunt and more weary than he’d been at Mariner, and the captain of Hannibal sat back as JR registered a moment of alarm. “Not necessarily by intent,” the Old Man said in the next second. “But that’s where the black market’s going, and that’s why there’s going to be a watch at those jump points. The money that’s not going to the stations will have to get to the stations. And this is where the profit will be for you.”
Totally different style with these hardbitten captains than the Old Man had used at Mariner. JR took mental notes.
“We have an agreement in principle by Voyager, and the stationmaster will be here within the hour to swear to it: there will be provision for ships that register Voyager as their home port. Uniform dock charges, to pump money into Voyager and do needed repair. More freight coming in, going out, more loads, more profitable goods…”
“Too good to be true,” Jacobite said. “What if we sign and we comply and here comes a big fancy ship, say, Finity’s size…”
“You get preference on cargo. You’re registered here. You load first.”
“Voyager’s going to agree to that?” Clear disbelief.
“Voyager has agreed to that.”
“Way too good to be true,” Jamaica said. “Say I got a vane dusted to hell and gone, and I’m going to borrow money, get it fixed and the Alliance is going to come across with the money.”
“In effect, yes.”
“I’m already in hock to the bank.”
“The idea is to preserve the ships that preserve this station. The Alliance is not going to let a ship go, not yours, not any ship registered here. Fair charges, fair taxes, stations build up and modernize and so do the ships that serve them. You may have seen a Union ship go through here in the last few days. That did happen. The Union border is getting soft. Union trade will come through, possibly back through the Hinder Stars again.”
There was alarm. The smaller ships couldn’t make a jump like that. Then Jamaica said:
“They open and they shut and they open, I don’t ever bet on the Hinder Stars. Waste of money.”
“It’s getting to be a good bet, at least for the Earth trade.
Chocolate. Tea. Coffee. Exotics of all sorts. Cyteen’s two accesses to trade are Mariner and Esperance. Voyager is right in the middle. If Esperance opened up a second access to the Hinder Stars and on to Earth, Voyager could be in a position to funnel goods along the corridor to Mariner, in a damned lucrative trade competing with Pell’s Earth route. If you survive the transition. That’s the plan. Shut down the black market, cut Mazian out of deals and the local merchanters in.”
There was consideration. There were thinking frowns, and a general pouring of real coffee, which Finity had provided for the meeting. JR moved to assist, and Bucklin set down a second pot to follow the first.
They were working as hard to sell three scruffy short-haulers on the plan as they’d worked to sell far larger ships on the concept.
But these ships were the black marketeers, the shadow traders. This was Mazian’s pipeline, among the others, and these captains were beginning to listen, and to run sums in their heads in the very shrewd way they’d dealt heretofore to keep their small ships going.
They wouldn’t say, aloud, we’ll try to do both, comply and maintain ties with Mazian. JR had the feeling that was exactly the thought in their heads.
But half compliance was better than no compliance, and half might become whole, if the system began to work.
He went outside to bring in another platter of doughnuts. Hannibal’s capacity for doughnuts was considerable, and Jacobite’s captain, in the habit of common spacers at buffet tables, had pocketed two.
“Loading’s going smoothly,” Bucklin found time to say. “We’ve moved ahead of schedule on that. But fueling’s going to take the time. The pump’s not that fast.”
“Figured,” JR said, and had. The high-speed pumps at Pell and Mariner were post-war. Practically nothing on Voyager was, except the missile defenses.
To a place like this, ships, if they would forego the shadow trade and pay standardized dock charges, offered more than a shot in the arm. Ships to follow them brought a transfusion of lifeblood to Voyager, which until now had seen ships just as soon trade in the dark of the jump-points as stay in its dingy sleepovers and spend money in its overpriced amusements. In the War, the honest trade had gotten thinner still, as Union had taken exception to merchanters supplying the Fleet and tried to cut off Voyager, as a pipeline to Mazian’s Fleet.
It had been one hell of a position for station and merchanters to be in, and one which Alliance merchanters resolved never to get into again. Abandon Voyager? Let Esperance slide into Cyteen’s control?
No. Starting from a blithe ignorance at Pell, JR had acquired a keen understanding of the reasons why small, moribund Voyager was a key piece in keeping Esperance in the Alliance, and keeping trade going between Mariner and Esperance inside Alliance space.
He knew now that Quen’s deal about the ship she wanted to build would put her in complete agreement with the position other Alliance captains had to take: new merchant ships were useless if all trade ebbed toward Cyteen; and shoring up Voyager would protect Pell’s territory more effectively than the launch of another Fleet.
That was why they’d agreed with her. The danger to the merchant trade now was in fact less the Fleet than a resurgence of Union shipbuilding with the clear aim of driving merchanters out of business.
So Voyager fish farms and an infusion of money to refurbish the Voyager docks were part and parcel of the new strategy. Voyager could become a market, a waystation: a station, given the wide gulf between itself and the Hinder Stars, that might revive the Hinder Stars for a third try at life, if they could establish a handful of ships capable of making that very long transit.
If the Hinder Stars could awake for a third incarnation free of pirate activity, there was a future for the smaller merchanters after all.
Get Voyager functioning, the Fleet cut off, Union agreeing not to compete with Alliance merchanters and get Union financial interests on the side of that merchanter traffic, and they had the disarmament verification problem solved. Alliance merchanters threaded through Union space, every pair of merchanter eyes and every contact with a Union station (to some minds in Union) as good as a Fleet spy recording their sensitive soft spots. But odd to say, they felt a lot the same about Union ships carrying cargo into Mariner and Viking. There were Unionside merchanters, honest merchanter Families whose routes had just happened to lie all inside Union territory, and who now got more favorable docking charges and privileges and state cargoes now that those ships had come out and joined the Alliance.
To his personal knowledge none of those Families had succumbed to Union influence and none would knowingly take aboard a Union operative. But love happened, and you could never be sure there wasn’t some stationer spouse of some fourteenth-in-line scan tech on a ship berthed next to you whose loyalties were suspect and who might be gathering data hand over fist.
That was the bright new age they’d entered.
He saw the years in which he might hold command on the bridge as a strange new age, a time of balances and forces held in check.
With less and less place for the skills of the War. The Old Man, who remembered the long-ago peace, had shown him at least the map of that future territory—and it was like nothing either of them had ever seen.
Bed, the couch cushions arranged on the floor as a bunk, or the bare carpet, if they’d had nothing else—a chance to lie horizontal came more welcome than any time in Fletcher’s life. The junior-juniors, past the giggle-stage and into complaints, mixed-gender accommodations and all, went down and fell mostly silent.
It was the second night, the second hard day, doing the same thing, over and over, until Fletcher saw can-surface and felt the protest in his feet even when he shut his eyes. The Vince-Jeremy argument about cold feet gave way to quiet from that quarter, darkness, and an exhaustion deeper than Fletcher had ever felt in his life.
Drunken spacers couldn’t rouse any resentment, careening against the door, or whatever they’d done outside. Fletcher just shut his eyes.
Hadn’t had supper. They’d had too many rest-area sandwiches and too much hot chocolate in the cargo hold office, and still burned off more energy than they’d taken in.
They’d showered once they got back to the Safe Harbor, was all, for the warmth, if nothing else, and Fletcher hoped the next shift got an immense amount done that they wouldn’t have to do.
He shut his eyes… plunged into black…
… wakened to dimmest light and twelve-year-old voices telling each other not to wake Fletcher.
In the next second he saw a flash of light on the wall, moving shadows against it, and heard the door shut. He rolled over, saw nothing but black, got up, and banged his shin on a table.
“System. Light!” he ordered the robot, and, seeing the beds vacant, and hearing nothing from the bathroom: “Jeremy? Dammit!”
He flung on clothes, not bothering with the thermal shirt, just the work blues and the boots, and headed for the lift. Which didn’t come.
He took the bare metal stairs and arrived down in the lobby. Third shift was coming in, a scatter of juniors.
Chad and Connor.
“Fletcher!” Connor said.
He ignored the hail and went into the dining room, hoping for junior-juniors in the press of spacers in the breakfast line.
“Fletcher.” Connor. And Chad.
“I don’t see the kids,” he said.
“What’d they do?” Connor wasn’t being sarcastic. It was concern. “Get past you?”
“Yes,” he muttered, and went out into the lobby again, looking for twelve-year-olds in the press of spacers in dingy coveralls with non-Finity patches.
They were at the vending machines. Linda had a sealed cup in her hands.
“You got to watch them,” Connor said at his shoulder.
“I was watching them,” he retorted, wanting nothing to do with his help.
He went over to claim the kids.
“You weren’t supposed to get up yet,” Linda said, spotting him. “We were bringing you hot chocolate.”
With cup in hand. He let go a breath. “For what?”
“For breakfast.”
He looked at his watch. For the first time. It was shift-change. Alterdawn. 1823h. And kid-bodies were justifiably hungry.
“You want breakfast?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “Yessir.”
He was disreputable, in yesterday’s clothes, but he marched them into the restaurant, saw them fed.
A senior came by the table. “Board call, 0l00h tomorrow. We’re moving faster than we’d hoped.”
He thanked the senior, who was stopping at every table. 0100h was in their shift’s night. They worked two shifts and then had to scramble to make board-call.
“Tonight?” Vince said, screwing up his face. Linda slumped over her synth eggs on a bridge of joined hands. Jeremy just looked worn thin.
They’d passed out painkillers in the rest-area, and they’d taken them, preventative of the soreness they might otherwise feel, but hands still hurt, feet still stung with the cold, noses were red and chapped, and as for recreation at this port, Fletcher ached for his own bed, his own things; they’d been too tired even to use the tapes when they’d gotten into the room. The vid hadn’t even tempted the junior-juniors. Showers had, and hot water produced sleep. They’d just fallen into bed it seemed to him an hour ago.
And they had one more duty to get through, and then undocking.
At a time when they’d have been ready to fall into bed, they’d be boarding.
Twenty hundred hours and they had signatures on the line and scuttlebutt flying through Voyager corridors—as if the whole station had waited, listening, for what had become the worst-kept secret on the station: Voyager was getting an agreement with its local merchanters, with Mariner, with Pell and potentially with Union. News cameras showed up outside the restricted area where they’d held the meetings, and outside the customs zones of every starship in dock. Crowds gathered. The vid was live feed whenever the reporters could get anybody on camera to comment: it was the craziest atmosphere JR had ever seen. It scared him when he considered it, as—after a hike across the besieged docks, and attended by all the public notice outside—the Voyager stationmaster, three of the captains of Finity’s End, and three of the scruffiest freighter-captains in civilized space, along with members of Voyager Station’s administration and members of the respective crews, showed up in the foyer of the fanciest restaurant on Voyager.
The maitre d’ hastened them to the reserved dining room.
JR was well aware of their own security, who had been on site inspecting the premises even before they’d confirmed the reservation. They’d gone through the kitchens down to the under-cabinet plumbing and they were standing guard over the foodstuffs allowing absolutely nothing else to be brought in unless Finity personnel brought it.
He was linked directly to Francie’s Tech 1, who was running security on station.
He was linked to Bucklin, who was shuttling between his watch over the door and their security’s watch on the kitchen.
He was linked to Lyra, who was linked to Wayne and Parton, who were back at the Safe Harbor Inn, literally sitting in the hallway to watch the rooms.
And he was linked to Finity’s ops, which told him they were working as hard as humanly possible to clear this port while they still had something to celebrate, and to get them on toward Esperance, where things were far less sure, and where the celebration of an agreement would not be so universal.
Maybe it was an omen, however, that from no prior understanding, the party once seated in the dining room took five minutes to arrive at a completely unified menu choice, to help out the cooks, and Finity agreed to pick up the tab.
Besides providing a couple of cases of Scotch and three of Downer wine to the ecstatic restaurant owner, who provided several bottles back again, enough to make the party hazardously rowdy with the restaurant’s crystal.
“To peace,” was the toast. “And to trade!”
There was unanimous agreement.
“We may see this War finished yet,” Jacobite said.
“To the new age,” Hannibal proposed the toast, and they drank together.
“I began my life in peace,” the Old Man said then. “I began my life in peace, I helped start the War, and I want to see the War completely done with; I want to see peace again, in my lifetime. Then I can let things go.”
There was a moment of analysis. Then: “No, no,” everyone had hastened to say, the polite, and entirely sincere, wishes that Finity would continue in command of the Alliance.
“No one else can do what you’ve done,” the Voyager stationmaster said, and Hannibal added:
“Not by a damn sight, Finity.”
The Old Man shook his head, and remained serious. “That’s not the way it should be. It’s time. I’m old. That’s not a terrible thing. I never bargained for immortality, and I can tell you relative youngsters there comes a time when you aren’t afraid of that final jump. A life has to end, and I’ll tell you all, I want mine to end with peace. That’s my requirement. All loose ends tied. I want this agreement.”
There was lingering unease.
“You’ve got it, brother,” Madison said with a laugh, and got the conversation started again, simply skipping by the statement as a given.
Madison, himself almost as old.
It was a difficult, an unprecedented moment. JR drew a whole breath only after Madison had smoothed things over, and asked himself then why the Old Man had let the mood slip, or why he’d talked about his concerns.
Getting tired, he said to himself. The captain hadn’t slept but a couple of hours last night; and even the Old Man was human.
A hard effort, they’d made, to clear this port quickly, before the two ships that had gone ahead of them had had the chance to gossip or disturb the quiet atmosphere they hoped for—
But here at Voyager, thank God, they’d found no attempt to sabotage them, not by low tech or high, not even a glitch-up at the hurried negotiations, where they’d tried to hammer out financial information, and none in refueling. Just getting the signatures on documents wouldn’t actually speed specific negotiations at Pell, Mariner, and Esperance, but it certainly put Voyager’s vote in as favoring the new system. The Voyager stationmaster, a reserved man courting a heart attack, had looked every way he could think of for a trap or a disadvantage in what they’d almost as a matter of course come to him to offer, and instead had found nothing but good for him in the deal—so much so that they’d not only gotten his agreement and that of his administration, they’d been inundated with information handed to them on Esperance. It even included things they were dismayed to be told, dealings which the Voyager stationmaster had found out, evidently, regarding the stationmaster’s affair with his wife’s sister—that tidbit of information had come out yesterday night at dinner, before the specifics of their agreement were certain, and come out with the three merchant captains present—but only one of them had been surprised.
A stationmaster who routinely had dinner with every captain willing to be treated to dinner, at Voyager’s best restaurant, certainly found out things.
Two bottles of wine administered in meetings like that, and the Voyager stationmaster probably found out things the captains didn’t even tell their next of kin.
But last night, to them, the Voyager stationmaster had named names regarding Esperance’s near bedfellowship with Union. Then the captains, at the same table, had outlined the easy operations of Esperance customs, and exactly what the contacts were by which Esperance obtained luxury goods.
And those goods shipped right past Voyager, a golden pipeline from which neither Voyager nor these captains could derive benefit. Damned right they were annoyed.
The party broke up, Jacobite’s captain actually singing on the way down the dock, the others with their respective crews headed off, God save their livers, for more drinking, probably with their crews.
They had undock coming: that saved them a breakfast invitation with the station administration. They parted company with a very delighted and only slightly tipsy stationmaster, and took their security from the restaurant’s kitchen, past a straggle of determined news cameras, newspeople asking such questions as: Can you talk about the agreement? How would you characterize the agreement?
No information was the Old Man’s order. “Sorry,” JR had to say, to one who tried to catch him; and he hurried to overtake the rest on their walk back to the Safe Harbor.
Madison had said, in privacy after last night’s dinner, that they clearly had a worse problem ahead of them than they’d imagined, regarding Esperance, and that they might be down to using the scandal attached to the Esperance administration for outright blackmail value if things were as bad as the Voyager information intimated they were.
It had been a joke. But a thin one, even then. They had everything they wanted at three stations, and they were going to be up against profit motives with a fat, prosperous station which thought it could do whatever it pleased.
“We could turn around,” Alan said when the topic came up as they were walking back. “Let Esperance hear about the deal we’ve made so far with Sol, Pell, Mariner and Voyager, and let them worry for a year whether they’ll be included.”
“Let them hear that Sol is in the deal,” the Old Man had said, entirely seriously, as JR, walking behind with Bucklin and their security, listened in absolute quiet. “That’s their source of luxury goods, in exactly the same way and through the same connections by which it’s been Mazian’s source of matériel. So Esperance is secretly talking about merchanters long-jumping from Esperance to one of the old Hinder Star ports and getting to the new point from there without Voyager, Mariner or Pell… becoming Union’s direct pipeline to Earth. That’s still a long run. And those are big ships that have to do that run. That’s the tack we’ll take with Esperance’s local merchanters, and it’s a true argument: we’d be fine, we have the engines to make it, so we’re not talking in our selfish interest when we point out that the majority of merchanters couldn’t do it by that route. Small ships would find themselves cut out of the trade with Earth in favor only of the likes of Boreale, run from Unionside, and I don’t think our brothers and sisters of the Trade will like to hear that notion, any more than Esperance will like to hear their little scheme made public.”
“If Quen has her way,” Madison said, “more of Boreale’s class will never be built. Not by Union.”
“And if I have my way, we won’t spend those funds building Quen’s super long-haulers ourselves, either. We’ll build enough ships to keep the stations viable and building. Bigger stations, bigger populations; bigger populations, more trade. Alliance stations will never top a planetary population, but our markets are totally dependent on us—unlike Cyteen’s. Esperance will never grow grain and she’d get hellishly tired of fishcakes and yeast in six weeks, let alone six years. Which is what she’ll be down to if we pull the merchanters together again and threaten to strike if they don’t go along. We have them, cousins. They may think they’re going to doublecross us and go direct with Earth, and they may think Union’s new warrior-merchanters are going to be their answer, but we, and Quen, have that cut off.”
The Old Man, two glasses of wine in him, was still sharp and dead-on, JR said to himself. It made self-interested sense even for merchanters like Hannibal.
“We don’t want to say all of that,” the Old Man said, “at Esperance. Not until we have Union’s agreement on the line, but they’re already done for, in any ambition to become the direct Union-Earth pipeline. We just have to get them to sign the document we have. Let them do it in the theory they can doublecross us, and get Union ships in. Those ships won’t ever materialize because of Quen’s ship, and because of our agreement about the tariffs. And that means Union will define its border as excluding Esperance, because we can give Union the security and the trade it needs far better than some backdoor agreement they might make with Esperance. They’ll be left out without a tether-line. Just let drift. They don’t know that yet.” A moment of silence, just their footfalls on the station decking. Then the Old Man added: “In some regards, Mazian is the best friend we’ve got. As long as Union fears he might come back a popular hero if they push the Alliance too hard, we’ve got them, as well. Mallory wants to finish him. I prefer him right where he is, cousins, out in the deep dark, in whatever peace he’s found.”
What could you say to that? Even Francie and Alan had looked shocked.
About Madison, JR wasn’t so sure.
And for himself, he feared it was the truth.