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Cherryh, CJ - Finity's End

Caroline J. Cherryh

A Union Alliance novel

Chapter I

A system traffic monitor screen showed a blip where none had existed in this

solar system. The wavefront of presence which had begun far, far out above the

star spoke a series of numbers to a computer in Pell Central and a name flashed

to displays throughout the room.

The master display, hanging two meters wide above the rows of traffic control

workstations, simultaneously flashed up the same name in glowing green.

Finity's End had come back to Pell.

"Alert the stationmaster," the master tech said, and the message flashed through

Pell Station's central paging system.

By that time the signal, coming in from the jump range buoy at the speed of

light, was four hours old. The Pell Central computers generated a predicted

course based on data changing by the split second, a path outlined in ordinary

green. The first projection supposed an abrupt drop in velocity well out from

Pell's Star.

Suddenly the huge display changed, bloomed with colors from red to blue, based

on the last three courses and velocities that ship had used coming into Pell on

that vector… and projected into the sun.

It made a bright, broad display across the ordinarily routine, direct-path

listings. It alarmed the newest technicians and sent hands reaching toward reset

toggles. Merchanters didn't dive that close, that fast, toward the sun.

That ship had. Once. Years ago. That fact was still in the computer record and

no one had purged it from files.

But the War was in the past. The navigational buoy, in its lonely position above

the star, noted all arrivals in the entry range, and the information it sent to

Pell Station showed no other blips attending the ship. Finity's End came alone,

this time, and the master tech calmly informed the junior technicians that the

pattern they saw was no malfunction, but no reason for alarm, either.

The buoy's information, incoming in those few seconds, was now a little further

advanced. It had already excluded some predictions, and the automated computer

displays continued to change as the buoy tracked that presence toward the

sun—four hours ago.

By now, in realtime and real space, the oldest of all working merchanters had

either blown off excess V and set its general course for Pell, or something was

direly wrong. Only the robot observer was in a position to have seen the ship's

entry, and second by second the brightly colored fan of possibility on the

boards dimmed as more and more of that remote-observer data came in. The fan of

projection shrank, and eventually excluded the sun.

The screen was far less colorful and the technicians were far less anxious ten

minutes further on, when the stationmaster walked in to survey the situation.

By now a message would be on its way from the ship to the station, granted that

the tamer projections on the displays were true.

The captain of the oldest merchanter ship still operating would be, predictably,

saluting the Pell stationmaster who, with his help, had founded the Alliance.

The powers that dominated a third of human presence in the universe were about

to meet.

But stationmaster Elene Quen, also predictably, strode to a com-tech's

workstation and took up a microphone before any such lightspeed message could

reach her.

"Finity's End, this is Quen at Pell. Welcome in. What brings us the honor?"

As far as the eye could see, Old River ran.

As far as the eye could see, thickets stood gray-green and blooming with white

flowers beneath a perpetually clouded heaven.

Just beyond those thickets, huge log frames lay in squares on the earth, waiting

for the floods to come—and downers were at work intermittent with play.

Hisa was the name they called themselves. Brown-furred and naked but for the

strings of ornament and fur about necks and waists, they splashed cheerfully

through the dozen log-bounded paddies that were already flooded. In broad,

generous casts, they strewed the heavy, sinking grain.

Humans had watched this activity year upon year upon year of human residency at

Pell's Star.

And Fletcher Neihart could only watch, in the downers' world but not quite of

it, limited by the breather-mask that limited every human on the world. He'd

never been limited by such a mask in his youthful dreams of being here, a part

of the human staff on Downbelow: Pell's World, the same world that had swung

below Pell Station's observation window for all his life, tantalizing, clouded,

and forbidden to visitors.

But this was real, not photographs and training tape that only simulated the

world. Here the clouds were overhead, not underfoot.

Here, the hisa workers, free of masks and moving lightly, toiled the little

remaining time their easy world required them to work. Once the frames were

built and once the world spun giddily toward spring and renewal, the hisa and

the fields alike waited only for the rains.

Plants whose cycles were likewise timed to the monsoon were budded and ready. In

the forests that bordered the log-framed fields, swollen at the slight

encouragement of yesterday's showers, the sun-ripened puffers turned the air

gold with pollen. You touched a puffer-ball and it went pop. On this day of warm

weather and gusty breezes puffer-balls went pop for no apparent reason, and the

pollen streamed out in skeins. Pollen rode the surface of the frame-bound ponds

as a golden film. It made dim gold streamers on the face of Old River.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Two hisa, also truant from work, made a game of the puffers at woods' edge,

skipping down a high bank of puffer-plants and exploding the white, gray-mottled

globes in rapid succession until their coats were gold.

Then they shook themselves and pollen flew in clouds.

"Gold, gold, gold for spring," Melody crowed at Fletcher, and scampered up to

the top of the bank above the river, as her co-truant Patch, whose human-name

came of a white mark on his flank, chased after her. Melody dived down again.

And up, in an explosion of puffer-balls. "Silly Fetcher! Come, come, come!"

Fetcher was what they called him. They wanted him to chase them. But the staff

wasn't supposed to run. Or climb. The safety of the breather-masks was too

important.

"Gold for us!" Patch cried and, under his playful attack, pollen burst from the

puffer-balls, pop, pop, pop-pop, in a chain of pixy dust explosions that caught

the fading light.

Fletcher, watching this game up and down the little rise next a stand of old

trees, exploded some of his own. That little hummock on which hisa played chase

was a just-out-of-reach paradise for a teen-aged boy: things to break that only

brought life and laughter—and created puffer-balls for next spring.

He was seventeen and he was, like the hisa, just slightly truant from the work

of the Base.

But down here no one truly cared about a little break in the schedule, least of

all the downers, who would all go walkabout when the springtime called, as it

was beginning to do.

A last few days to seed the frames. A last few days for pranks and games. Then

the monsoon rains would come, then the land would break out in blooms and

mating, and no one could hold the hisa to something so foolish as work.

A teen-aged boy could understand a system like that. He'd worked so hard to be

here, to be in the junior-staff program, and here was the payoff, a delirious

moment that more than matched his dreams.

The hisa shrieked and ran and, abandoning rules, he chased, into the thicket

along the river shore. They dived over the crest of another puffer-ball ridge.

They laid ambushes on the fly and caught him in a puff of pollen.

And after they'd chased up and down, and broken enough speckled puffer globes to

have the surface of the water, the rocks, and the very air among the tired old

trees absolutely gold with pollen, they cast themselves down by the noisy edge

of the water to watch the forever-clouded sky.

Fletcher sprawled beside them, flat on the bank. The breather-mask, its

faceplate thickly dotted with pollen now, was the barrier between him and the

world, and the need to draw air through the filtered cylinders of his mask left

him giddy and short of breath.

Breathe, breathe, breathe as fast as possible at the rate the mask gave him

oxygen. Downers when they worked Upabove, in the service passages of Pell, lived

in those passages at the high CO2 level that downers found tolerable. When they

exited those passages into the human corridors of the Upabove, they were the

ones to go masked.

On Pell's World, on Downbelow, the necessities were reversed, and humans were

the strangers, unmasked inside their domes and masked out of doors.

On Downbelow, humans always remembered they were guests—worked their own huge

fields and mills on the river plain south of here and tended their own vast

orchards at the forest edge to grow grain and fruit in quantities great enough

for trade with other starstations.

For more than they themselves needed, downers simply would not work. And what

they thought of so much hard work and such huge warehouses, one had to wonder.

It wasn't the hisa way, to deal in food. They shared it. One wondered if they

knew Pell Station didn't eat all the grain Pell operations grew on Downbelow.

There were wide gulfs of understanding between hisa and humans.

Risk yourself sometimes. Never risk a downer. Those were the first and last

rules you learned. Kill yourself if you were a fool, and some staffers had done

that: the air of Downbelow was more than high in CO2, it was heavy with

biologicals that liked human lungs too well. If your breathing cylinders and

your filters gave out, you could stay alive breathing the air of Downbelow—but

you were in deep, deep trouble.

Kill yourself if you were a fool. Run your mask cylinders out if you were a

total fool. But never harm a downer, never ask for downer possessions, never

admire what a downer owned. They didn't react as humans reacted. Bribes and

gifts of food or trinkets won points with them.

So, happily, did humans who'd play games. After all the theorizing and the

scientific studies, it came down to that: downers worked so they could live to

play. So the staff, to gain influence and good will with downers, played games.

Trainees brought up to the stringent, humorless discipline of the wartime

Upabove learned different rules down here—at least the ones in direct contact

with downers.

It made perfect, glorious sense to Fletcher.

Humans had learned, first of all lessons, not to be distressed when spring came

full and downers went wandering, leaving their work to the mercy of the floods.

The frames would hold the grain from scattering too far. The floods might lift

and drift a frame or two, losing an entire paddy, but there was no need to

worry. The hisa made enough such frames.

One year of legend the frames would all have gone downriver and the harvest

would have failed entirely, but humans had held the land with dikes to save the

hisa, as they thought. A wonderful idea, the downers thought when they came back

from springtime wandering, and they were very glad and grateful that kind humans

had saved their harvest, which they had been sure was lost.

But surely such disasters had happened before, and hisa had survived—by moving

downriver to other bands, most likely. And all the human anguish over whether

providing the dikes might change hisa ways had come to naught. A few free

spirits now experimented with dikes, like old Greynose and her downriver brood,

but the Greynose band worked fields where River ran far more chancily than here.

Improve the downer agricultural methods? Import Earth crops, or bioengineer

downer grain with higher yields? Control Old River? Hisa crops needed the

floods. Humans farmed crops from old Earth only in the Upabove, in orbiting

facilities, to protect the world ecosystem, and those were luxuries, and scarce.

Crops native to Downbelow were the abundance that fed the tanks that fed the

merchant ships.

Processing could turn downer grain into bread and surplus could feed the fish

tanks that supplied colonies from Pell to Cyteen. The agricultural plantations

launched cargo up and received things sent down, sometimes by shuttle and not

infrequently by the old, old method of the hard-shell parachute drop through

Downbelow's seething and violent clouds.

The port and the launch site were busy, human places Fletcher had been glad to

leave in favor of this study outpost along Old River. Here, in fields on the

edge of deep, broad forest, things didn't move at any rapid pace and nothing

fell from the sky. Here a hisa population not that great in the world met humans

who monitored the effects of the vast operation to the south on hisa life,

looking for any signs of stress and growing a little grain as hisa grew it,

cataloging, observing—

And each spring for reasons linked to love and burrows and babies, downers would

forget their fields, follow their instincts and go walking—females walking far,

far across the hills and through the woods and down the river, with desirous

males tagging after.

Fletcher hadn't been down here long enough to have seen the migrations. He'd

come last year at harvest, and the monsoon was yet to come. He knew that there

were tragedies in the spring: death along with rebirth. There were falls, and

drownings… the old hands warned the young staffers of that fact: the oldest hisa

went walking, too, and deaths in spring were epidemic—spirit tokens, those

waist-cords and necklaces brought back by others to hang on sticks in the

burying-place. Every spring was risky, with the rains coming down and River

running high—and he worried about these two, Melody and Patch, his hisa, with

increasing concern.

You were supposed to be trained just to speak with downers on Pell Station.

But he'd met Melody illicitly on the station—oh, years ago, when he was eight, a

human runaway, a boy in desperate need of something magical to intervene—and

Melody, squatting down to peer at him in his hiding-place, had said, "You sad?"

in that strange, mask-muffled voice of hers.

How did you give a surly answer to a magical creature?

He'd been locked in his own shell, hating everything he saw, hiding in the

girders of the dock, moving from one to another cold and dangerous place to

evade station authorities who might be looking for a runaway.

His foster-family—his third foster-family—had been scum that day. All adults

were scum that day.

But you couldn't quite say that about an odd and alien creature who crouched

down near him in the cold, metal-tinged air and asked, "Why you sad?"

Why was he sad? He'd not even identified what he felt until she put her finger

on it. He'd thought he was mad. He was angry at most everything. But Melody had

asked what the psychs had skirted around for years, just put her finger right on

the center of things and made him wonder why he was sad.

A mother that committed suicide? Foster-families that thought he was scum? He'd

survived those. No, that wasn't it. He was sad because he hadn't anyone or

anywhere or anything and nobody wanted him the way he was. Not even his mother

had.

He'd said, "My mother's dead," though it had happened three years ago. And

Melody had patted his arm gently, as about that time Patch had shown up and

squatted down, too.

"Sad young human," Melody had explained to Patch. "Gone, gone he mama."

It made him feel as if he was three years old. Or five. As he'd been when his

mother had done the deed and left him for good and all. And he'd begun to feel

embarrassed, and caught in a lie that was just going to get wider. "Long time

ago," he'd said, in a surly tone. "Long time you sad," Melody had said, and put

her finger on it again, in a way the psychs had never been able to.

And somehow then—maybe it had been Patch's idea—they'd gotten him up on his feet

and talked to him about things that just didn't make any sense to him.

He knew he wasn't supposed to talk to them. The fact he was breaking a rule made

him inclined to go with them and get in real trouble, challenging the

authorities to take him out of the foster-family he'd been trying to escape.

He'd walked about with them for an hour in the open, uncaught, unreprimanded,

and he'd seen the amazing details about the station that downers knew. And then

one of Melody's mask cylinders had run out. They'd had to go to a locker within

the service tunnels to get another, and he'd discovered a secret world, a world

only licensed supervisors got to see—legally, among creatures only licensed

supervisors got to deal with—legally.

He'd gone home to his foster-family and apologized, lying through his teeth

about being very, very sorry. He'd stayed with that foster-family and followed

their rules for another three whole years because their residence was near the

access he knew to the maintenance tunnels. And the tunnels became his route to

various places about the station, and his refuge from anger. He used masks that

were for human maintenance workers, always in a locker by the access doors. He

did no harm. For the first time he had a Place that was always his. For the

first time in his life he had something to lose if he got caught. And for the

first time in his life he'd reformed his bad-boy ways, gotten out of the crowd

he was in and reformed so well the social workers thought his foster- family—his

worst family of the lot—had worked a miracle.

He'd stayed reformed: he'd improved in school, which brought rewards of another

kind. And even when, after the four-year rotation station workers were allowed.

Melody and Patch had gone back down to their world, he hadn't collapsed and

relapsed into his juvenile life of crime.

No. He'd already confessed at least part of his story (not the part about

actually going into the tunnels) to his guidance counselor and made a solemn

career choice: working with the downers on Downbelow.

Tough standards, tough program, tough academic work. But he'd made the program.

He'd gotten his chance.

And, not surprising, because former station workers lived and worked around the

human establishments on Downbelow, he'd met Melody and Patch inside an hour

after reaching the forest Base last fall. She was grayer. Patch wasn't as big as

he'd recalled. He'd grown that much in the nearly ten years since he'd seen

them, and he'd not known how old his Downers had been.

It might be her last fertile season, and Patch her last mate. No other male

pursued her that he knew of, and she would not, he understood, lead Patch all

that long a chase when her spring was on her—but then Patch couldn't walk so far

these days, either.

He wanted them back safely. But he knew, now, soberly, that ultimately he'd lose

them, too. So days were precious to him. And this day—this was the best day of

his life, this game of puffer-balls and pollen.

A hard downer finger poked him hard below the ribs, and he curled in

self-defense. Melody and Patch were in a prankish mood and, lying on his back on

the bank, he jabbed Patch back, which sent Patch screaming for the nearest

tree-limb. In the trees downers could climb like crazy, and a human in heavy

boots and clean-suit was not going to catch Patch.

Patch flung leaves at him. "Wicked, wicked," Melody cried, and flung a

puffer-ball, which disintegrated on impact. Pollen was everywhere. Patch

dropped, shrieking, from the tree.

Then it was pollen wars until the air was thick and gold again.

And until the restricted breathing had Fletcher leaning against a low-hanging

limb gasping for air and sweating in the suit.

The light was dimmer now.

"Sun goes walk," he said. One couldn't say to downers that Great Sun set, or

went down, or any such thing. The rules said so. Great Sun walked over the

hills. These two downers knew Great Sun's unguarded face, having been up in the

Upabove themselves, but it didn't change how they reverenced the star. He used

the downer expression: "The clock-words say humans go inside."

They looked, Melody and Patch did, at gray, cloud-veiled Sun above a shadowing

River. They slid arms about each other as they set out walking up the trail

toward the Base, being old mates, and comfortable and affectionate. Where the

trail widened, Melody put an arm about Fletcher, too, and they walked with him

back down the river path until, past three large paddy-frames, they came within

sight of the domes where humans lived, in filtered, oxygen-supplied safety above

the flood zone.

"You fine?" Patch asked. "You got bellyache?"

"No," he said, and laughed. Downers didn't brood on things. If you didn't want a

dozen questions, you laughed. They wouldn't let him be sad, and wouldn't leave

him in distress.

They were absolutely adamant in that.

So he laughed, and poked Patch in the ribs, and Patch poked him and ducked

around Melody.

Games.

"Late, late, late," he said. And then the alarm on his watch beeped, as all

across the fields quitting time announced itself on the 'link everyone wore.

"Oh, you make music, time go!"

Not that they grasped in the least what time really meant. On days when a lot of

the staff was out in the fields, the downers would gather to watch close to

quitting time, and exclaim in amazement at the hour every human in the fields

simultaneously quit work and headed back to Base, carrying whatever they'd been

using, gathering up whatever they'd brought with them. The downers understood

there was a signal and that it came with music. It was not the beep itself, the

Director said, it was the why that puzzled the downers. The old hands like

Melody and Patch, who'd seen the station change shift, and who'd worked by the

clock, could tell the younger downers that humans set great store by time and

doing things together.

("But Great Sun he come again," was Melody's protest against any such notion of

pressing schedule. "Always he come")

On Downbelow, in downer minds, there were always new chances, new tomorrows.

And one never had to do anything that pressing, that it couldn't wait one more

hour or one more day. You wanted to know when to go to your burrow? Look to

Great Sun, and go before dark. Or after, if you were in a mood to risk the

blindness of the nights.

One was never in too big a hurry. One could take the time to walk, oh, way off

the direct track home, in this still-strange notion (to a station-born human) of

being able to look across a wide open space to see what other people were doing

on other routes. Upabove, it would have been corridors and walls.

Here, on this happiest of all days, he found his path intersecting Bianca

Velasquez's route on her way home. They were in the same biochem seminar. They

mixed before discussion-session. She'd always hung around with Marshall Willett

and the Dees. Who didn't hang around with him.

She was going to snub him. He could pretend to drop something and let her go by

while he rummaged in the gravel of the path. Like a fool. He could save himself

the sour end to a good day.

But it ought to be easy to look at Bianca. It ought to be easy to talk to her.

Hi, just a simple hi, and put the onus of politeness on her. Hi. Ready for the

biochem quiz? What job are you on? He had it straight. Civilized amenities were

very clear in his head until she almost looked at him and he almost looked at

her and by an accident of converging trails they were walking together.

Not just any girl. The girl. Bianca Velasquez, who'd drawn his eye ever since

he'd first seen her. Suddenly his brain was vacant. He couldn't look at her when

he couldn't think and his body temperature was rising in what he knew was a

glow-in-the-dark blush.

God, he was a fool. He must have inhaled puffer-pollen. He didn't know why he'd

chosen today to cross her path, just—there she'd been; and he'd done it

"Where were you?" she asked.

"Over there." He waved his hand at River. That sounded stupid. And she'd noticed

he was gone? God, if the supervisor had seen him…

"So where were you?"

"Oh, beyond the trees. Down by the River."

"Doing what?"

This downer I work with—Melody—she wanted to show me something." I work with. As

if he was a senior supervisor. That sounded like a fool. She'd rattled him just

by existing. He was already in a tangle and he'd only just opened his mouth.

"You're all over stuff."

He brushed his clean-suit "Puffer-balls." Thank God, he had his inspiration for

something to say. "It was all over. And the sun and everything. It was real

pretty. That's why I went"

"Where?"

Fast thinking. Panic. Decision. "I'll show you."

"Sure."

Oh, God. She said yes. He didn't expect her to say yes.

"When?" she asked

"Can you get away tomorrow?"

"How long?"

"No longer than I was today. About the same time. Right before sunset. When the

light's right"

"I don't know. We're not supposed to be alone down there."

She thought he was trouble. And he wasn't. He had maybe one sentence to change

her mind.

"Melody and Patch will be there. They used to work near my rez on the station,

I've known them for years before I came down. We'll be safe." He blurted that

out and then wished he hadn't been quite so forthcoming. She was a nice, decent

girl from a solid, rule-following family. He'd just told her something the

supervisors might not know from his records, and if they got to asking too close

questions of Melody and Patch, they in hisa honesty could accidentally say

something to get him canned from the program.

"All right," she said. "Sure. All right."

He could hardly believe it. She was from Family with a capital F, and he was

from a non-resident household with an f only for fouled-up. She wasn't somebody

who'd normally even talk to him on the Station. But she seemed to invite him to

hold her hand, brushing close as they walked and when he did slip his hand

around hers, her fingers were chaste and cold and listless, making him ask

himself was this the way Stationer Family girls were, or had he just made a

wrong, unwelcome move?

"Got to watch your hands when you go through decon," he said. "I'm all over

pollen."

"Yeah," she said, and gave a little squeeze of the fingers that made him

suddenly lightheaded. He wasn't mistaken. She did want to talk to him. He hadn't

imagined she was looking back at him in biochem.

He didn't expect this. He really didn't. "I thought you were, kind of, hanging

with Marshall Willett."

"Oh, Marshall" Her disgust dismissed the very name and being of Marshall

Willett, one of the Willetts, who'd been in close orbit around her for three

months, acting as if he owned the Base and the senior staff, besides.

He didn't know what to say. He had a dream, and quite honestly that dream wasn't

remotely Bianca Velasquez. It was being in this world and on this world on days

like today.

It was lasting to be a senior in the Program on Downbelow. Getting involved with

someone like Bianca wasn't a help: it was a hindrance he'd never sought

But—here she was. Interested—at least in holding hands. And what did he do?

She was smart She was far more serious-minded than Marshall Willett, whose

reason for being down here he privately suspected was a family trying to make

him do something for a career. Bianca was bright, she was pretty, she seemed to

care about the work, and that—in addition to being able to stay down here amid

the wonders of the planet for the rest of his life—that was just too much to ask

of luck.

No. Back to level: permanent duty on the world was all he wanted, and he

wouldn't risk that by making a wrong move on Bianca and her powerful Family, not

even if she was standing stark naked in the pollen-gold and the sun of that

bank.

God, he liked that image. She'd be so pretty. She had dark hair and olive skin.

She'd be all gold with the sun and the pollen coming down in streamers… well,

repaint that picture with breather-masks and the clean-suits. They'd plod about

in clumsy isolation while Melody and Patch scampered and threw puffer-balls at

them. And how much trouble could you get into with a girl, when neither of you

could take off the breather-masks and all you could touch was fingertips?

They walked along hand in hand toward the domes, which now were ghostly pale

against the rapidly advancing twilight. The white yard lights were on. Other

workers were coming home, too, walking much faster than they were.

Their paths split apart again where the path reached what they called the

Quadrangle, and the dorm-domes were very strict, male in one direction, female

in the other, if you were junior staff…

As if they didn't have good sense until their twentieth birthday and then mature

wisdom automatically happened; but in essence, he'd been glad to have the peace

the no-females rules brought to the guys' side, and tonight he was glad of it

because he didn't have to think of a dozen more clever things to say. He'd had

maybe five minutes walking with her, avoiding making a total fool of himself. He

had all night and tomorrow to get his thoughts together before he had to talk to

her again.

Oh, my God, he had a date with Bianca Velasquez.

It was impossible. He'd never gone with a girl. And having a Family girl like

Bianca actually make a date with him was… impossible. Bianca was so Family her

feet didn't touch the floor, so virginal and proper her knees locked when she

slept at night. He was disposed on one side of the equation to think it was some

kind of setup: he'd met numerous setups in his life, for no other reason than he

was nobody.

But over the weeks he had seen that she was smarter than that crowd, and maybe

bored with them, and, the thought came to him, maybe she was lonely, too.

Marshall seemed to think the Sun and all the planets sort of naturally swung

round him because he was a Willett; Bianca was the only human being on the

Base—including the supervisors—who didn't have to give a damn that Marshall was

a Willett, because she was a Velasquez. Velasquezes didn't have to give a damn

about Willetts, Siddons, Somervilles, or Kielers, which was the big clique down

here.

So what did she do? She held hands with him?

He didn't have a family at all. He was non-resident scum.

He also stood six feet, had learned self-defense on Pell's rough-and-tumble

White Dock, the bottom end of where he'd lived, at worst, with his fourth

family, and he could beat shit out of Marshall Willett. So maybe that was her

idea, her way of thumbing her nose at the lot of them. She'd been sort of a

loner, too, in the center of a cloud of admirers.

And Marshall—Marshall would want one thing from her first off, which Fletcher

had no intention of asking of her, not because he didn't think of it, but

because, bottom line, his motive, unlike Marshall's, wasn't to get himself

kicked out of the program.

She acted shy. He squeezed her hand when they parted company. Senior staff

members habitually sat watch at the doors. They counted everybody in for the

night, for safety's sake, to be sure nobody was left out with a broken leg or a

dead breather-cylinder or something.

Nobody got a minute alone, if you were under twenty.

You were safe holding hands. If you couldn't manage the no sex rule till your

majority, the Director had told them plainly, there was no shortage of

applicants, ten for every slot they filled

Tomorrow, Bianca Velasquez had promised him, and Fletcher Neihart walked on down

the path to the men's dorms, past the monitors and into decontamination with a

preoccupation so thorough the monitor had to ask him twice to sign in.

Chapter II

Contents - Prev/Next

The restaurant was old enough to have gone from glamour to a look of hard use

and back to glamour again. Now it was beyond trends. Now it was a Pell Station

tradition: Pell's finest restaurant, with its lighted floor, its display of the

very real stars beyond the tables, features both of which were its hallmark,

copied elsewhere but never the same.

The new touch was the holo display that set those stars loose among the tables,

a piece of engineering Elene Quen had seen with the overhead lights on. The

sight destroyed the illusion, but the magic was such when the dark came back

that the senses were always dazzled, no matter what the reasoning mind knew of

the technology behind the illusion.

The waiters settled their distinguished party at the best table, reserved from

the hour Finity's End had returned her call. It was herself, her husband Damon

Konstantin, Captain James Robert Neihart and his brother captains, Madison,

Francie, and Alan. At this hour, the meal was breakfast for Francie and Alan,

supper for James Robert and Madison; and with all four of Finity's captains away

from the ship, business that had the ill grace to hit Finity's deck this close

after docking would fall into the hands of Finity's more junior staff.

Cocktails arrived, glasses clinked, faces marked by years of war broke into

honest smiles. Rejuv and time-dilation stretched out a life, but years on rejuv

left marks, too, on all of them. Captain James Robert Neihart in particular, a

hundred forty-nine years old as stations counted time, was fortyish in build,

but he was gray-haired and papery-skinned close-up, his face crossed with all

the hairline traces of the anger and laughter of a long, long life.

Seeing how the years had worn even on spacers, who played fast and loose with

time, and counted the years on ships' clocks separate from station reckonings,

Elene looked anxiously at her husband Damon, nearly two decades after the War,

and for a fleeting, fearful second she accounted of the fact that they were none

of them immortal. The years passed faster for her and for Damon than they did

for any spacer.

And she'd been a spacer herself until she'd elected what should have been a

one-year shore tour with a man she'd loved, a spacer's vacation on this shore of

a sea of stars, a deliberate dynastic tie with the Konstantins of Pell.

Fateful decision, that. Her ship, Estelle, hadn't survived its next run: Estelle

had become a casualty of the War years and the Quen name, once distinguished

among merchanters, had all but died in that disaster. No ship, no Name was left

of all she'd been. And so, so much had conspired to bind her here ashore. She'd

fought her War in the corridors of Pell.

And had she aged to their eyes? Had Damon, in the seven years since Finity's End

had last seen this port?

Were the captains of Finity's End all thinking, looking at her, How sad, this

last of the Quens growing old on station-time?

Last of the Quens would be the spacer view. But thanks to Damon she wasn't the

last of her Name. She'd borne two children, hers, and Damon's, for two equally

old, equally threatened lines. The Neiharts of Finity's End might not yet have

acknowledged the fact, but she'd more than given the heir of the Konstantins a

son, Angelo Konstantin, stationer, born and bred in his father's heritage: more

relevant to any spacer's hopes, she had a daughter, Alicia Quen. The Quens had

no ship, but they had a succession.

Cocktails, and small talk. Catching up on the business of seven years with a

thin, colorless: how have you been, how's trade, what's ever became of…?

They ordered supper, extravagantly. They were spacers in from the deep, cold

Beyond, on the start of a two-week dock-side liberty… the first truly wide-open

liberty since before the War. And that in itself was news that set the dock

abuzz.

"What's changed?" Damon echoed a question from Madison. "A lot of new

facilities, a lot of improvements all up and down the dock. There's a number of

new sleepovers, a couple of quality accommodations—"

"The garden,"Elene said.

"The garden,"Damon said. "You'll want to see that"

"Garden?" Francie asked. To a spacer, a garden produced greens: you grew them

aboard your own ship if you had leisure and room. A garden was a lot of lights

and timed water.

Pell's didn't grow just lettuce and radishes.

"Take it from me,"Elene said. "You'll be amazed."But she had a curious feeling

when she said it—listen to me, she thought. Here she was, praising Pell's

advantages to spacers, and she tested the queasy feeling she had as she caught

the words coming out of her mouth.

The mirror every morning showed her a stranger enmeshed in station business, and

lately her eyes looked back at her, bewildered and pained at the change in her

own face. Could she, going back all those years, still choose this exile and

want this rapid passage of years?

Supper arrived with the help of several waiters. "Very good,"James Robert said

after his initial sampling, and the company agreed it was indeed a seven-year

meal.

Rumors necessarily attended Finity's dealings on the docks, more than Madison's

odd statement they were on a true liberty. Rumors preceding this dinner had

reached her office, her breakfast table, even her bed—the latter straight from

Pell's Legal Affairs office, Damon's domain.

What was certain was that before she ever docked at Pell, Finity's End had made

a large draw on the Alliance Bank, a draw of 74. 8 million against both

principal and interest on the sum it had left on account for safekeeping in the

War. Listing her latest port of departure as Sol 1, Earth, she'd logged goods

for sale and made a modest trade of luxury goods on the futures market even

before docking, a procedure legal here at Pell.

The market had reacted. If Finity came in selling cargo, then Finity was buying.

Speculators had surmised from the instant she showed on the boards that, if she

bought, she'd buy staples like flour and dry sugar, cheap at Pell, or lower mass

cargo like pharmaceuticals, either one a reasonable kind of cargo for a ship in

Finity's kind of operation. Mallory of Norway, Pell's defense against the

pirates, could always use such commodities. Finity served Norway as supply; such

commodities rose in price. But since most direct shippers, even the most

patriotic and forgiving, would rather see their shipments actually reach the

destination they intended instead of being diverted to some lonely port out on

the fringes of civilization, the bids for hired-haul goods and mail stayed

stable.

Then, confounding all estimations, Finity's futures buy had turned out to be

goods for the luxury market, goods like downer wine.

Curious. The immediate speculation was that Finity meant simply to play the

futures market during a couple of weeks at dock, create a little uncertainty,

then dump those items on the market at the last moment, having made a one- to

two-week runup in price on speculation—not legal everywhere, but legal on Pell.

The market was jittery. Some political analysts, taking appearances as fact,

said that if Finity was buying high-quality cargo on her own tab, the

pirate-chasing business must be near an end, as some forecast it must be—and

needed to be. The expenditure of public funds for continued operations was a

burden on the economy.

The other opinion, completely opposite, was that some really big pirate action

was in the offing, some operation that needed deep cover, so Finity was buying

high-value (therefore low-mass) cargo with what only looked like her own funds

so as to look as if pirate-catching was no longer on her agenda.

The tally of ships of the former Fleet caught and dealt with varied with

accounts, even official ones. In the vast and deep dark of the Beyond, the

negative couldn't be proven, and a destroyed ship, given the legendary canniness

of the Fleet captains, was a wait-see, almost never a certainty. They thought

they'd accounted for certain carriers. But the Fleet captains were canny and

hard to nail. One Mazianni carrier with its rider ships was more than a

lightspeed firing platform: it was also a traveling, self-contained world,

deadly in its power and long-term in its staying power. A carrier, badly

damaged, could repair itself, given time. Even if Pell declared a victory,

surviving ships of the Fleet might pull off to the long-alleged secret base for

a generation or so and then return, making the rebel captain Mazian again a

major player in the affairs of the human species.

Elene inclined to a mix of those beliefs, convinced, first, that Mazian was a

threat diminishing rather than rising; second, that the end of the pirate wars

would be a wind-down and never a provable victory; and third, that the critical

danger to the human species was not in a Fleet mostly driven in retreat, secret

base or no secret base. The Fleet had been the demon in the dark for so long

that it had taken on a quality of myth, so potent a myth that Alliance and Union

administrators alike need only say the dire word Mazian, and a funding bill

passed

But the downside of that preoccupation with the Mazianni was an Alliance Council

refusing to take their eyes off the Fleet and look instead to their primary

competition: Union, the enemy the Fleet had fought before it turned to piracy.

Her own councillors said she was out of date, obsessed with history, unable to

forgive the Estelle disaster. She should become more progressive in her thinking

and give up the bitterness of a War grown inconvenient in modern politics.

Like hell.

"Seven years," Elene said, stalking her topic as the waiters carried off the

empty salad plates. She knew who was at surrounding tables, two of her loyal

aides and the policy chairman. She knew this area of the restaurant, she knew

the noise levels, precisely how far voices carried, which was not far at all.

She'd have skinned the maitre d' if he'd settled anyone in her vicinity who

didn't have a top clearance—since anyone who'd worked at all on the docks could

lip-read, a skill which defeated the device she had also seen with the lights

on, the one that also guaranteed the privacy of this table. "Seven years is too

long to wait for a good supper, Finity. What are our chances we'll see you more

often in the future?"

James Robert's expression was a parchment mask. The eyes, darting to hers, were

immediately lively and calculating.

"Fairly good," James Robert said, an answer the commodities dealers would be

very interested to hear. "Granted Union behaves itself." The inevitable stinger.

Yea and nay in two breaths. James Robert to the core.

"We're turning full-time to honest trade," Francie said. "At least that's our

ambition."

"Peaceful trade," Madison added, lifting his glass. "Confusion to Cyteen and to

Mother Earth."

"To peace," Damon said, more politic, and Francie and Alan emptied glasses to

the bottom.

Then the main course arrived, a flurry of carts and waiters, during which Finity

passed around the bottle and did their own wine-pouring, to the consternation of

the wait- staff—they were spacers to the bone, and if the waiters couldn't

handle empty glasses fast enough, then they did for themselves, ignoring station

protocols and etiquette as blithely as they'd done for decades. They were

nothing if not self-sufficient and reckless of external protocols.

As the Quens had once been, on their own deck, Elene could not but reflect. And

now the almost-last of the Quens finagled and hoped and connived for that right

again, cursing the waiters dithering in and out at the wrong moment.

She could sway the internal government of Pell. That was half the Alliance. The

approval of the Alliance Council of Captains—that was the sticking point in her

plans. And that meant, significantly, the leadership of James Robert Neihart.

"A brave new world of peace," she reprised, as the waiters and the cart went

away, and before the conversation could drift, "Finity, I have a proposal. Let

me assure you we're sound-secured here at this table, for a start, I think you

know that."

James Robert lifted his chin, looked at her through half-lidded eyes.

"A proposal for which I need funds and backing in Council."

Her husband Damon knew exactly what she was up to the minute she made the

opening: she was sure he did, and she knew he was holding all his arguments

resolutely behind his teeth. Two decades was time enough to say everything there

possibly was to say on the subject between them, and he couldn't deter her now,

make or break. If Finity's End was here to declare the War was entering a new

phase, if there was a change in the offing, she had her agenda.

"For what?" Madison asked "A crisis? A proposition?"

"Both," she said. Finity was not that far out of the current of things, at any

time. Finity's votes in the Alliance Council were regular, received on the

network of ship contacts that didn't rely on hyperspace, just regular ship

traffic at any station dock. "Peace with Union, yes, peace and trade, and ships,

Alliance ships. Built at Pell."

"We need another bottle," Madison said, "for this one."

James Robert, senior captain, hadn't given his reaction to the topic.

She signaled a waiter, hand signal, for three bottles. The maitre d' was in line

of sight. The wine arrived. There was the ancient etiquette of the bottle, the

glasses. The universe teetered on a mood, a small-talk graciousness that still

prevailed. The waiter filled glasses and withdrew.

She was acutely aware in the interim of a stationer husband at her side, a

patient man, a saint of a man, who slept alongside a shiplost spacer's heartache

and knew his home never was home to her. After two children and eighteen years,

what was between them was no longer the blind love they'd started with. They'd

seen and done too much, too desperately. But it was a lifelong commitment now, a

partnership she'd never altogether betray because it had held the same interests

too long. She reached, beneath the table, for his hand, and held it, a promise

strong as an oath, keen as a cry.

"It's a serious business," James Robert said when the waiters were gone.

She knew all the objections. One rebuilt ship, as they'd debated time and again,

opened up the question of what other War casualty ships might be resurrected and

where those ships would fit in the trade routes of the Alliance, in an age when

merchanters, with a vastly changed set of routes, were doing well, but not that

well.

Never mind Pell's internal debates in such a decision: merchanters, members of

the Alliance Council of Captains, had suballiances within their ranks; and if

Finity did her a favor on that scale, and backed her request for funds, then

debts would come due left and right, other ships to Finity, Finity to other

ships and to Pell—and Mallory. Favor-points in a merchanter crew meant owing

someone a drink, a duty-shift. On this scale, one favor nudged another until it

shook the recently settled universe all over again.

"I don't truly ask your business or your destination at the moment," she said.

"I don't ask why you've drawn what you have from the bank. That's Mallory's

business or it isn't and I won't put you in the position of lying to me. But

I'll tell you what's no news to you, and something we have to deal with. We both

know that Union is getting past the Treaty. What may be news is that there are

fourteen more ships pending construction. Union is building ships to put us out

of business, and it's doing it while we bicker." Having mapped out her arguments

for her ship in advance, oh, for sleepless nights and seven years, she tapped a

finger on the table surface to make her points and ignored all logic of why a

Quen ship should be first.

"I can name you the ships," she said. "I can tell you which shipyards." She'd

almost lay odds that Finity could name them, too. But James Robert gave her not

an iota of help or encouragement, the old fox. "One. The Treaty says Union won't

build merchant ships and Alliance won't build warships. Two: Union is hauling

cargo on military craft they're suddenly building with damned large holds. I'm

sure it's no news. Three: We're throwing our budget into armaments for our

merchant ships and we haven't built a single ship to counter the real danger.

Don't hand me the official denial: I wrote it. Four: We have a pie of a given

size, but we can have a larger one." Damn him, did he never react? She'd faced

him in negotiation before, and remembered only now how hard it was. "Five, cold

facts and you know them: We'll have no damned pie at all if we let Union build

military merchanters and build nothing but guns, ourselves. The plain fact is,

we're in a new war, a war for trade, and guns won't win it. We need new ships

licensed. And we can grit our teeth, take the pain in the budget, adjust our

trade routes and do that—or we can bicker on till we're all Union ships and we

have no choice."

Captain James Robert Neihart—who decades ago had refused Union and the Earth

Company officials alike the right to enter and inspect his ship. Captain James

Robert, who'd started the merchanters' strike that had made any merchant ship a

sovereign government, James Robert, who'd unified the merchanters finally

against Union and started the Company Wars… didn't so much as blink.

Neither did she, who'd settled on Pell, not Earth, for the new Merchanters'

Alliance headquarters, an independent Pell Station, as she'd demanded exist.

Together they'd dealt with double-dealing Earth and powerful Cyteen to keep

their independence, and they'd stood, James Robert and Elene Quen, as opposite

pillars holding the whole structure of the Alliance in balance: ship rights and

station rights, defined and agreed to, with a damn-you-all alike to Union's

claims to have won the War—and Earth's claims not to have lost it.

With the remnant of the Fleet preying on shipping, with civilization on the

brink of ruin, it had simply been more expedient for Union to agree to a neutral

Pell and a free Merchanters' Alliance. Now it was becoming less so. Now that the

pirate threat was less, Union was pushing the Treaty with the Alliance to

exercise every loophole for all it was worth and the merchanter captains of the

Alliance Council still temporized with the fraying of the treaty, aware

something should be done to prevent Union running over them, but never quite

willing to say this was the year to do it.

"You know what Union's going to say," James Robert said "To get them to accept

Alliance merchanters in their space, we have to stop the smuggling."

Back to the old argument from Unionside. She wasn't prepared to hear it from

James Robert.

"Can't be done," she said. In spite of herself she'd rocked back at the very

thought, and became conscious of her body language, braced at arm's length from

the table. At the same moment James Robert had leaned forward, taking up the

space she'd ceded, pressing the argument.

"Has to be done," James Robert said.

"On Union's say-so? Union's cheating every chance it gets."

"Union has a point. Mallory agrees. The black market is supplying Mazian."

Merchanters were, almost by definition, smugglers. Everyone ran their small side

business of trade that didn't go through station tariffs. It was a piddling

amount compared to what flowed through stations. It always had been. It was a

merchanter right to trade off-station and duck the taxes that were supposed to

be paid on two ships trading goods.

But she hadn't intended to talk about smuggling. She was thrown off her balance,

off her point of negotiation, and found herself still wondering why James

Robert, historic father of merchanter rights, had taken Union's side. "We can't

talk trade," she said, circling doggedly to the flank, "if we're facing a fleet

of non-Alliance merchant ships. Smuggling be damned We'll be working from

Union's rule book and only Union's rules if we sit idle and let them build ships

to out-compete the free merchanters. I want my ship, Finity. That's the issue,

here, I'm calling in debts. All I've got." If change was coming, if a whole new

phase of human life really was dawning, one without the Fleet, one in which even

James Robert Neihart would argue to curtail merchanter rights because they

couldn't otherwise get their share of Union's wealth and Earth's resources, then

maybe in the long run the pessimists were right. Maybe they'd end up, all of

them, with half of what they'd bargained for, and an age of less, not more,

prosperity, with fewer starstations, fewer centers of population, smaller

markets.

But, if for a brief while more, it might still matter to someone that Elene Quen

was a hero of the Alliance; she'd trade on that or anything else she owned to

get her Name back in space and get her descendants' share of the markets that

remained. "I want my ship, Yes, I want this to be the first ship of other ships

we build. Yes, I want us, the Alliance, and Pell and Earth to challenge Union on

what they're doing. I want us to go head to head with them and not let Union

pick our pockets for another twenty years. Maybe we'll be short of funds for a

while. But we'll survive as independents if we have ships. That's my proposal."

"I'll give you mine," James Robert said. "The smuggling has to be cut off. If

the Fleet's getting supply from us, we've become our own worst enemy. And to

enable that… the Merchanter's Alliance will ask all Alliance signatories for

lower tariffs."

There was the stinger. Less tax. At a time when the stations needed funds for

modernization and competed to get the merchanters to stay longer, spend their

funds at this starstation rather than another. "How much lower?"

"Starting at ten percent, and pegged to the increase in trade coming through the

stations when we're not trading off the record."

"That's difficult"

"So is persuading our brother merchanters. But if stations don't lower port

charges, and if we don't put moral force behind getting our people out of the

smuggling trade, we're going to see the Fleet has become us, that's the danger.

I can name you six, seven ships that are operating in that trade—hard evidence.

We want the tether reeled in. We want arrests threatened, ports sealed, where

documentation exists. And that will take a united Council of Captains, and it

will take a solid agreement from all the stations."

She envisioned the fuss that would raise, the Merchanter's Alliance trying to

keep all its own ships from doing what ships had always done, on the grounds

some few would supply Mazian. Some had always supplied Mazian.

But she could also envision a scenario in which, if the Treaty started

deteriorating, more would do it. If Mazian swore undying repentance for raiding

merchanter shipping, and if Union pushed merchanters too hard with its notion of

hauling cargo with state crews, in its own far routes, yes, she could envision

all of civilization blowing up. The War all over again. Once James Robert aimed

her eyes down that track it wasn't hard at all to envision it. If Union or Pell

or the merchant trade pushed too hard at each other and relations blew up,

Mazian didn't have to attack. He'd come in to the rescue, reputation

refurbished. A hero of Earth and Pell again—nightmarish thought.

There was a prolonged silence, in which Elene felt a chill in the constantly

cycling air, the slow dance of stars about the room.

"If we should back this ship of yours," James Robert said, "—let's have a clear

understanding… you're not talking about going back to space yourself. We

couldn't show that much favoritism. This is an act of principle you're

proposing. Do I understand that?"

They were far too old in this to be fools. There'd been a time when she'd

planned to stand fast on the name of her ship, on another Estelle.

"Let the Council name the ship. There are competent, reliable crew begging for a

berth. But my daughter will go to space."

"We could back that," James Robert said; and granted in that simple willingness

to talk that they were suddenly beyond initial negotiations. "We need you where

you are."

"My daughter will contribute her station-share," she opened the next round,

half-sure now of Neihart's support, because beyond that one point granted, all

else was inevitable, the whole cascade of debate among spacers—and the agreement

won the necessary outcome, in Union's backing off the building of merchant

ships. All, that was, if they could get Alliance united and agreed, God help

them, on a single program. Her daughter's station-share, millions, when no other

stranded spacer could come up with thousands, would make her owner- operator.

Not pilot, but policy-maker, "Can I count on you in Council?"

"I'll hear more about it."

James Robert was a trader first and foremost. And talk ran on to agreement and

dwindled to inconsequentials clear to the bottom of the second bottle,

James Robert, champion of merchanters against station governments, would use his

bully pulpit with other merchanters. She would use hers with Pell Station, The

immoveable negatives miraculously stood a chance of moving. An end to the

smuggling and black market that, dire thought, might be supplying Mazian?

It was possible that that flow of goods added up, somehow, to enough leakage of

goods through the system to be significant. They'd operated on the theory it was

Sol doing it; or that there were secret bases, supply dumps they had yet to

find.

But if there was a supply flow that they could cut off—then, then Mazian would

start suffering.

If they could have supply or non-supply to Mazian as a club to wield, keep Union

worried about a Mazianni resurgence if they threatened to collapse Alliance

trade, and if somehow by hook or by crook James Robert could get the fractious

merchanter captains in line one more time… it was a house of cards, precariously

balanced, but if they could do all that, they could argue with Union to back off

their construction of their own merchant fleet.

And that would create safe routes for new, tariff-paying merchanters, while

employing the shipyards of Pell, which would be the key argument to move the

industrial interests of Pell to agree to lower the tariffs and dock charges that

would increase merchanter profit and sweeten the deal…

It all fell miraculously in line, and her skin felt the fever-chill of almost

miracles. She'd invited James Robert and his fellow captains here to talk

urgently about the future. They'd come here equally eager to talk and to deal,

at this hinge-point of change in the universe,

And because she was here to put forward her requirements, she had everything.

Everything, because it was sane and it was right to build more ships, and it was

in everyone's best interests.

Even Earth's, in the long run, because it was good for the peace. They could

have their prosperity —if James Robert was right. They could gain everything.

Then James Robert said:

"There's one sticking-point. The old problem. The lawsuit,"

She hadn't utterly forgotten. She'd even been prepared to have it float to the

surface early in the dinner—but not now, not on the edge of agreement. It was

Damon's department, Legal Affairs. And her stomach was moderately in a

knot."Francesca's case."

"Third time," James Robert said moderately, "third time we've tried to settle

the matter with Pell. We sue, you counter-sue. Your bursar, I'm sure some clerk

in your office, just sent us a bill for a station-share."

"You're joking," Elene said.

"As we sent you one. I'm sure it will eventually cross your desk."

It hadn't yet. She was completely appalled. Her fingers, locked on Damon's,

clenched, begging silence. She was sure Damon was disturbed at the impropriety.

But James Robert was far too canny a man directly to suggest a linkage.

"A very basic question of merchanter sovereignty," James Robert said "I'm sure

our own Legal Affairs office made the point to yours some seven years ago that

we are prepared to go to court,—which with other matters at hand, is a very

untimely flare-up of an issue that should have been settled. We do not owe Pell

Station any station-share. We will not pay living expenses. We will pay

Francesca's medical bills. That is my statement." A wave of James Robert's hand,

a dismissal. "Just so you know there's no ill will."

A ship-share of Finitys End was an immense amount of money—and so was a

station-share on Pell. Francesca Neihart had run up medical bills, living

expenses. So had her son.

"The boy is a year from his majority" Damon said

"And seven years older than the last time we sued. We're in the middle of cargo

purchase. But here we are, with what seven years ago was a simple wash: your

debt for our debt. Now we're dealing with real money, fourteen point five

million credits of real money, which you will not see, I assure you in a very

friendly way, and which your courts will not attach, or freeze, because we will

sue the bloody clothes off you—so to speak."

James Robert did not bluff.

"The boy," Damon said, "is a ward of Pell courts."

Madison cleared his throat, in what became a very long silence. The Konstantins

were also known for stubbornness.

"He is our citizen," James Robert said. "And we no longer operate in harm's way.

I believe that was the exact objection of the court in prior years. We cannot

afford to debate this particular issue, Konstantin. Not at this particular

moment. Yet on principle, we will sue."

Damon, who'd never contradict his wife in the midst of negotiations—Damon viewed

the concept of law in lieu of God; and Damon was going to hit the overhead when

they got home tonight. Elene could feel it in the rock-hard tension of his hand,

his sharp, almost painful squeeze on her fingers. No children in a war zone, the

Children's Court had held, in spite of the fact that there were children on

every family merchanter ship out in space. The Children's Court had its hands on

one of those children and in a paralysis of anguish over the War one judge and

her own husband's office wouldn't let that child go. But in those critical

words, no longer operate in harm's way, the advocacy system, the judiciary,

which couldn't resolve its technical issues over Francesca Neihart's son because

the court-appointed social workers and psychiatrists wouldn't agree, had just

had its point answered.

Fletcher Robert Neihart had always been caught in the gears. It wasn't the boy's

fault that elements in Pell's administration resented being a trailing appendage

to the Merchanter Alliance, and some noisy few fools even thought that Pell

should assess merchant ships to see whether they were fit for children. It was a

ridiculous position, one that would have collapsed the whole merchanter trade

network and collapsed civilization with it—but they were issue-oriented

thinkers.

To complicate matters, years ago some clever child advocate in the legal office

had thought it a fine argument to claim a station-share and sue Finity during

wartime on the boy's behalf. In further bureaucratic idiocy, filing said claim

with the court thereafter had made no difference after that that 14.5 million

credits was a figure that never had existed, in or in any official assessment of

actual debt. Once that sum had gotten onto the documents, politicians and

bursars alike afraid to take the responsibility of forgiving a

fourteen-million-credit debt. So it was in the court records, and it would

persist until someone somewhere signed papers in settlement.

Now, to cap a macabre comedy teetering on the verge of tragedy, it sounded as if

the Pell Bursar's office, unstoppable as stellar gravity, had just billed Finity

for the amount outstanding on Pell's books and thereby annoyed the seniormost

and most essential captain in the Merchanters' Alliance, a man to whom Pell and

the whole Alliance owed its independence. And done so at the very moment the

peace and the whole human future most needed a quiet, well-oiled, dammit, even

slightly illegal personal agreement to fly through the approval process before

Pell's enemies knew what was going on.

Her long-suffering husband knew where she stood. Her children—both near

grown—they knew. Her son said she cared only for her daughter; her daughter said

bitterly that her own birth was nothing but a means to an end

Far too simple a box, to contain all the battles of a lifetime. Pell Station

knew what it wanted when it persistently elected a spacer and a zealot to the

office she held… that in her soul there were places of utter, star-shot black.

Means-to-an-end certainly covered part of her motives, yes.

Chapter III

Contents - Prev/Next

The next day—the next days—were glorious.

"This you female," Melody said, in their third meeting on the riverbank, and

peered into Bianca's faceplate in very close inspection, perhaps deciding

Bianca, this third day, was more than a chance meeting. "She young, good, strong

come back see you." Melody patted Bianca's leg. "You walk?"

This spring was what Melody meant: mating, the Long Walk, And Bianca didn't

understand. Bianca murmured something about coming from the Base, but Fletcher

blushed behind his mask and said, "Not yet, not yet for us."

Then Bianca was embarrassed. And indignant. "What did you tell her, Fletcher?"

"That I sort of like you," Fletcher said, looking at his feet. And Melody and

Patch flung leaves at them and shrieked in downer laughter.

He did sort of like her. At least he liked what he saw. What he'd imagined he'd

seen in Bianca's willingness to come back here twice. And on that grounds he was

suddenly out of his depth and knew it. He saw v-dramas and vid, and imagined

what it would be like to have a girl who liked you and who'd maybe—maybe be part

of the dream he'd dreamed, of living down here.

He hadn't gotten a lot of biochem done the last two nights.

This wasn't someday. This wasn't just dreaming. When he'd been a juvvie and

thought almost everything was impossible he'd had fantasies of coming down to

the world—he'd stow away on a shuttle. He'd pirate supplies and make an outlaw

dome, and get all the downers on his side.

Then the downers would join them and humans at the Base would never again see a

downer unless he said so. And the stationmasters would have to say, All right,

we'll deal. And he'd be king of Downbelow and Melody and Patch and he together

would run the world.

God, he'd been such a stupid juvvie brat in his daydreams, and now, realtime,

just having embarrassed himself, he had to admit he'd caught another case of the

daydreams almost as fantastical. She was embarrassed; he was. And if you shone

light on some daydreams they evaporated.

No Family girl was going to keep on hanging around him. She was probably just

trying to make Marshall Willett leave her alone. It had been two days of

happiness interspersed with anxiety and a biochem test he might have blown. That

was a pretty good run, as his runs went

He'd sounded like a fool. Reality was the best medicine for a case of daydreams,

and he went off in his acute embarrassment to go over to the water and squat

down and poke at stones at the river-edge, real stones, real world, important

things like that

His real life wasn't like the vids, and daydreams didn't come true for somebody

who wasn't anybody, somebody who for most of his life couldn't guarantee where

he'd be. It was mortally embarrassing to have to go back to your instructors at

school and have to say, with other kids listening, that, no, the reason you

didn't know about the test was your mail wasn't getting to you and, no, you

weren't still living at 28608 Green, you'd moved, and you were back at the

shelter again, or you were out and living with the Chavezes this week.

Then about the time the stupid teacher got the records straightened out you

still weren't getting your e-mail because you "just hadn't worked out" with the

Chavezes. It was pretty devastating stuff when you were eight.

It was doubly devastating if you'd just had a counselor so stupid he didn't even

shut his office door when he was talking about you to your foster parents—who

didn't want you anymore because they were pregnant and thought you'd interfere

with the baby.

It hadn't been fun. The administration eventually changed his psychiatrist to

somebody who still asked stupid questions and put him through the same

getting-to-know-you routine that by then had just about stopped hurting. It had

bored him, by then, because he'd been switched so often, to so many people with

court-ordered forms to fill out, you got a sample of the routines and you knew

by then it was just business, their caring. They were paid to care, by the hour.

The station paid foster-families.

They paid downers, but not in money, and not to take care of stray station kids:

Melody and Patch had cared for him for free.

A hand slipped over his shoulder. He thought it was Melody, and felt comforted.

But it wasn't Melody. It was Bianca who knelt down by him and touched her head

to his so the faceplates bumped edges, and he was just scared numb.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "What did I do?

God, the world was inside out. What did she do? She was kidding. She had to be.

But Bianca hugged her arm around him and he hugged her, and if it wouldn't have

risked their lives he'd have taken the mask off and kissed her.

"Oh," Melody said, from somewhere near. "Look, look, they make love."

"Dammit!" he said, breaking the first ten rules of residency on Downbelow, and

never would willingly curse Melody. He broke his hold on Bianca to rip up a

stick and fling, and double handfuls of flowers. "Wicked!" he cried, thinking

fast, and turning his reaction into a joke.

Melody squatted down, out of range of flower-missiles, and turned solemn,

watching with wide downer eyes. "Fetcher no more sad," Melody said "Good, good

you no more sad"

What did you say? What could you say, in front of the girl you hoped to impress,

and who knew what an ass you'd just been with downers you were here to protect

from human intrusions?

"I love you," he said to Melody, and fractured the rest of the rulebook, "You my

mama, Melody. Patch, you my papa, Love you."

"Baby grow up"Melody said. "Go walkabout soon, make me new baby."

God, what did it say about him, that he was so suddenly, so irrationally hurt?

He shifted about on one knee to see what Bianca thought, but you could hardly

see a human face through the mask.

As she couldn't see his. "Melody used to take care of me," he said to explain

things. The truth, but not all of it. To his teachers and the admin people and

his psychs and everybody, he was just trouble. They had families and Bianca had

Family, and he was always just that boy from the courts.

"Where was this?" Bianca asked, not unreasonably confused.

"A long time back on the station. I got lost, and they sort of—found me. And got

me home." He'd no desire to go into the sordid details. But he couldn't get a

reaction out of her masked face to tell him where he stood in her opinion. He

committed himself, totally desperate, a little trusting of the only girl he'd

ever really gone around with. "I used to sneak into the tunnels, to be with

them. And first thing I wanted when I got down here was to find Melody and

Patch."

"You're kidding." she said.

He shook his head, "Absolute truth."

"Is he making fun?" she asked Melody, breaking the first rule: never question

another human's character.

"He very small, very sad," Melody said, "Long time he sad. You happy he."

Sometimes you didn't know what downers meant when they put words together. He

guessed, with Melody, and thought that Melody approved of Bianca.

"Make he walk lot far," Patch chimed in helpfully,

"This is way too far," she said, teen slang… which you weren't supposed to use,

either. He guessed Bianca was overwhelmed with it all, and maybe adding it up

that she was with a kid who wasn't quite regulation. Or respectable. Or

following the rules. She sat there looking stunned, as far as a body could who

was wearing a mask, and he took a wild chance and put an arm around her.

She pushed him back, sort of, and he let go, fast, deciding he'd entirely

misread her.

But she patted his arm, then, the way they learned to, when they wanted

someone's serious attention,

"I believe you," she said, and slipped her hand down and held his fingers,

making them tingle, just touching her bare skin.

And by sunset walking home, not so long after, she held his hand again.

"I went through the program over in Blue," Bianca said, apropos of nothing

previous as they walked along the river-edge. "Did you ever go to the games?"

"Sometimes."

They had the big ball games on Wednesday nights. And the academy in rich Blue

Sector played schools like his, over in industrial, insystemer-dock White, where

he'd lived with the Wilsons. Sometimes the games ended with extracurricular

riot.

"Isn't it funny, we probably met," Bianca said.

"I guess we could have."

She couldn't imagine, he thought. From moment to moment he was sure she'd turn

on him when she got safely back to the domes and tell everything she'd heard.

But her fingers squeezed his, bringing him out of his fantasies of dismissal and

disgrace. She talked about ball games and school.

He wanted to talk to her about his feelings, At one wild moment he'd like to ask

her if she was as uncertain as he was about the line they'd crossed, holding

hands, walking holding tight to each other.

But what did he say? He felt as if his nerves and his veins were carrying a load

they couldn't survive.

Maybe normal people felt that way. Maybe they didn't. He wasn't ever sure. If

Melody didn't know and peer wisdom didn't say, he didn't know who he could ask.

Damn sure not the psychs.

Two legal papers waited Elene Quen's signature. In the matter pending before the

Court of Pell… lay atop: In final settlement of the aforesaid claim againstthe

merchant ship Finity's End, James Robert Neihart, senior captain, Finity's End,

her crew and company tender 150,000 credits to be held in escrow against all

charges whatsoever and of whatever origin, public or private, as of this date

pending, said amount to be placed in the Bank of Pell to clear all debts of

Fletcher Robert Neihart, a national of Finity's End.

The last descriptive represented a controversy settled at a fraction of the

claim's 14.5 million value. The 150,000 represented a reasonable valuation of

Francesca's intended stay on Pell, one year, plus her medical bills for a normal

birth, excluding interest.

Debt paid. Finity's End simply sent the agreed amount to the Bank of Pell, and

the legal dispute that had troubled all Finity's wartime dockings, was done

with. Further claims and debts of any sort would be judged against that 150,000

fund. It focused the political infighters and their lawyers on a single,

achievable prize, not a kid and his surrounding issues.

She signed the papers, stood up, and gave them to Finity's legal representative,

a young man they called, simply, Blue.

"It's done," she said. And had qualms about the one remaining step in Fletcher's

case. She'd never agreed to a spacer going downworld in the first place; it had

just stopped being easy to prevent him. With some degree of guilt she remembered

how she'd not objected strenuously when, four years ago, she'd become aware

Fletcher's juvenile fascination with downers now aimed at planetary science. The

study program had kept the boy off the police reports and given her four years

without a crisis with Fletcher. And now things came due.

Finity backing in the Council of Captains would build a merchanter ship for the

first time since the Treaty of Pell.

Union wouldn't have its way. That was the down-the-line outcome. Union thought

the Council of Captains couldn't reach a disinterested decision, or a unified

action, or get any two merchant ships to agree.

If Mallory of Norway was right and the black market was in fact Mazian's

pipeline to supply and funds, the notion that ships were slipping over into

Mazian's camp was very disturbing and very plausible. The War had been between

the Earth Company and Union in its earliest days— and the Alliance hadn't yet

existed. Merchanters had declared neutrality in what had been then a small-scale

dispute.

Merchanters had served both sides, excepting those merchanters actively enlisted

as gunships.

Meanwhile Earth had built the Fleet to enforce Earth's hold on the colonies and

to break Union's bid for independence; Earth had typically failed to realize

what it took to sustain a war on that scale, hadn't supplied the Fleet it had

launched, declaring that to be the colonies' job; the Fleet had taken to relying

on merchant shipping— buying off the black market during the War and engaging in

occasional outright piracy even before the Battle of Pell. The Fleet had

alienated the merchanters and it was the merchanters who had risen up against

them to drive them out—out far into the dark, when their bid to take Earth

itself had met Mallory and Union's and merchanter opposition. The Fleet, having

lost all its allies, had had to retreat into deep space… to obtain supply by

means that, indeed, no one had quite proved.

Most merchant ships had dealt with Mazian before the Battle of Pell; and once

James Robert raised the specter of continued merchant supply far more widespread

than anyone had added up, yes, it was chillingly reasonable that some

merchanters, to whom personal independence was a centuries-old ethic, might

still be willing to cut other merchanters' throats by continuing that trade on a

large and knowing scale. That trade, not conducted on station books, had

historically been hard to track—hard to develop statistics on what no station

could observe. And what James Robert suggested was that Mazian had found

large-scale ways to tap into the whole shadow trade, the meetings of ships at

isolated jump-points, where manifests and cargomasters' stamps miraculously

changed, and goods mutated or vanished on their way to the next port, altering

the very records on which the statistics and the tariffs were based.

It was also a network that extended routes beyond what any Station tracked as

regularly existing—no station could maintain records that covered every ship

contact, and every ship movement, when only station calls registered in the

ships' logs. The shadow market was a network where, theoretically, you could buy

anything that moved by ship. Union, with order, had never liked it. Union didn't

want Alliance merchanters serving its far, colonial ports—internal security,

Union insisted. Others said it was because Union didn't want Pell and Earth to

know how rapidly and how far it was expanding. At the same time Union was

aggressively building ships, Union had selected Alliance merchanters it would

allow to reach Cyteen, and favored them with deals designed to provoke divisive

jealousy among merchanters. That increased demands on Pell to lower dock charges

to match the favorable rates Union offered. But now James Robert came saying

that Union should gain its point, and that merchanters should restrict

themselves, and that all stations should lower tariffs in exchange for a

merchanter pledge to conduct all trade inside the tariffs.

That, James Robert implied, or watch the whole Alliance slide blindly into

Mazian's grasp—as she was worried about it sliding into Union hands.

But both of them had to admit that hard times would make some merchanters

desperate enough to trade with the devil—or to call him back as a hero, a savior

from grasping station politicians.

Conrad Mazian, hero. Themselves all as outlaws and traitors. The War renewed. It

wasn't a new thought. Just the resurgence of an old, old worry.

All stakes became far, far higher, in that thought. Union didn't want that

scenario for a future, either.

Finity going back to trade because the War was over? No. She'd lay odds that

there'd been no far-off victory. She'd also lay odds Mallory had sent Finity

back to merchant trade—for one urgent reason, to do exactly what James Robert

had done with her: cut deals only James Robert could cut. He'd evidently come to

her first, to get Pell lined up behind him, counting on her ability to deliver

Pell's vote.

After that, he was going to seek general merchanter approval—and where better to

do it but along the string of stars that were the stations almost Union and

almost Alliance, and doing a delicate ballet of relationship with both,

Mariner. Voyager. Esperance.

Then the merchanters themselves. No station, no government, no military

organization could sway several hundred highly independent merchanter captains

from a trade they thought was their God-given right to conduct, as no one could

get the same merchanter captains to agree to set up other merchanter captains in

business to compete with them. But this man might.

In the vids that came from Old Earth there were blue sky days. There never were

on Downbelow. The clouds had endless patterns, sometimes smooth, sometimes with

bubbled bottoms, sometimes with layers and sheets that traveled at different

speeds in the fierce winds aloft. Great Sun usually appeared through thick

veils—so that if the sun ever did show an edge of fire the downers took it for

an event of great importance.

But while downers revered Great Sun, and wanted to stand in polite respect and

wait for Great Sun's rare appearances, the time between those appearances was

just too long to endure.

So they made the Watchers, great-eyed and reverent statues that sat gazing at

the sky in lieu of living downers.

There were several such statues on a forested hill near the Base, only

knee-high, so you'd trip over them if you didn't know they were there. Two

looked up. One looked a little downward from the hill, and if you looked where

it was looking, you could see the Base itself through the trees,

Fletcher already knew where the site was, so he knew where Melody and Patch were

going when they climbed that hill. He followed, and Bianca trekked after him.

"Where are they going?" Bianca panted And then stopped cold as she saw the

images mostly hidden in the weeds. "Oh,—my."

She was impressed. Fletcher felt a warmth go through him.

"Bring watch sky" Patch said, with a wave of his arm all about. "Good see sky!"

Great view, was what Patch meant, and today it was on the downers' agenda to

look at the sky, for some reason—or maybe to show Bianca this special place, as

they'd shown it to him early last fall,

"It's wonderful," Bianca said "Do they know at the Base, I mean, do they know

this place is here?"

"I don't know," Fletcher said. "It's none of the researchers' business, is it,

if the hisa don't tell."

He had that attitude about it. He didn't know whether if he looked it up on the

computers back at the Base he'd find it was known to the researchers, and

off-limits especially to juniors in the program; but juniors in the program

didn't have personal hisa guides to bring them here, either.

It was a mark of how much Melody and Patch had accepted Bianca, he thought, that

all of a sudden this morning they'd snagged him away from brush-cutting and

wanted him to get Bianca.

"Banky," they'd called her when she came, addressing her directly. "Walk, walk,

walk."

That meant a fair hike. Three walks.

So Bianca had slipped out of her work this morning, too. It was easy. The job

got done sometime today. On the station they'd have had inquiries out after two

teens under supervision who took a morning break.

Here, they found a secret place and watched the clouds scud overhead.

"The clouds are really moving," Bianca said, pointing aloft as they sprawled

flat on their backs beside Melody and Patch. "There must really be a wind up

there."

"Rains come," Melody said, and reached out her hand and held Fletcher's tightly

in her calloused fingers.

Rains. The monsoon.

The weather reports at the Base had been saying there was a low in the gulf, up

from the southern continent But those were advisements relayed from the station;

the station watching from space was never that good about figuring out the

weather—ultimately, yes, the conditions were changing, but they were never

right. There were so many variables that drove the weather, and real

ground-level data came only from four places in the world, from the farms to the

south, the port, from a research station on the gulf shore, and from the Base,

from a primitive-looking little box full of instruments. The staff was in the

habit of joking that if you wanted to know the weather, the downers always knew

and the atmospherics people used dice.

But the clouds were darkening with a suddenness that raised the fine hair on his

arms. The monsoon was coming: born in space as he'd been, even he could feel

disturbance in the sudden change in the sky and in the air. That was why they'd

brought him and Bianca here. Melody and Patch pointed at the sky and talked

about the wind blowing the clouds. Maybe, he thought with a sinking heart, they

were feeling whatever drove downers to go on their wanderings. They would go

into danger in their preoccupation.

Maybe this was the last day he would ever see them. Ever.

"River he go in sky"Patch said with an expansive wave of a furry arm. "Walk with

Great Sun. Down, down, down he fall, bring up flower, lot flower."

Melody inhaled deeply. "Rain smell."

What might rain smell like? He wondered, among other things he wondered, but he

didn't dare risk it even for a second. The clouds were uncommonly gray today,

and if he'd had to guess the hour in the last fifteen minutes he'd think it more

and more like twilight, even though he knew it was noon. In one part of his mind

he was scared and disturbed. In another—he was suddenly fighting off a feeling

it was near dark. An urge to yawn.

A danger sign, if your cylinder was giving out. But he thought it was the light.

Light dimming did that to you, whether it was the mainday-alterday change on

station or whether it was the rotation of the planet away from the sun.

"Feels like night," Bianca said without his saying anything,

"Yeah," he said,

"Rain," Melody said, and in a moment more a fat drop hit Fletcher on the hand,

More hit the weeds with a force that made the leaves move.

"We'd better get back," Fletcher said, He was growing scared of a danger of a

more physical sort, lightning and flood. He'd seen occasional rain, but they'd

all been warned about the monsoon storms, about the suddenness with which floods

could cut them off from the paths they knew—dangers station-born people didn't

know about. From a sameness of weather, highs and lows, days and nights, they

were all of a sudden faced with what informational lectures told him was not

going to be the full-blown monsoon, not all in one afternoon.

Light flashed. Lightning, he thought. He'd rarely seen it except from the safety

of the domes.

Then came a loud boom that sounded right at hand, not distantly as he'd heard it

before. They'd both jumped. And Melody and Patch thought it was funny.

"Thunder," he insisted shakily. He was sure it was. Shuttles broke the sound

barrier, but only remotely from here. "I think we'd better think about moving"

"We take you safe," Melody said, and ran and patted the statues, talked a sudden

spate of hisa language to the statues, and left a single flower with them.

Then they scampered back, grabbed them by a hand apiece, and hurried them back

toward the Base as droplets pelted down, let them go then on their own and just

scampered ahead of them. A strong wind swept through the trees, making a rushing

sound he thought at first was water rushing.

A faint siren sound wailed through the woods, then, over the pelting rain: that

was the weather-warning, late.

The Base itself hadn't seen it coming. Not in time. Someone was scrambling for

the alarm switch. Someone was red-faced.

And they were a long way from shelter.

Chapter IV

Contents - Prev/Next

The adventurer teetered on the edge of a blue-edged pit.

Fell in. Slid, with heart-stopping swiftness, whipped a scary spiral through

stars, and shot out onto an unforgiving desert.

A dinosaur pack was on the horizon. Coming this way.

JR looked around for advantage, kicked the rocks around him.

A purple glow came from under the sand.

That was either another Hell level or a way out. He saw a big rock not so far

away, and moved it with improbable strength. Actinic light flooded up at him

through the sand, and he eased his feet into it. Slid in and down as the dino

pack roared up over his head and lumbering bodies shook the ground. Teeth

snapped and hot breath gusted after him.

Snaky purple ropes sprouted tendrils around him as he shot through the shapeless

black, retarding his fall.

He shot through their grasp and with a sudden drop his tailbone hit a soft

surface. Lights dimmed And brightened. Three times.

Game done.

He took off the helmet, raked a hand through his sweaty hair, and sat there on

the floor below the exit chute, breathing hard for a moment. Shaking. Telling

himself he was safe. Games were good. Games honed the reflexes. And no one's

life depended on him.

The adjacent chute spat out a cousin, Bucklin. And a second one, Lyra.

Equally exhausted, equally shaky. It was a rush, one that didn't mean life and

death, but combat-weary nerves didn't entirely believe it.

"Pretty good, for purple lights," Lyra said, out of breath.

"Yeah."

They hadn't done a vid ride since they were kids—vid rides had existed at

Earth's Sol Station,, but there'd been, thanks to that station's morality

ordinances, only kid themes or mocked-up combat, and they'd seen mostly

youngsters doing the one and wouldn't let their potential pilots do the other.

This ride mandated at least five feet in height, and adult spacers were doing

it, so they'd delved up the chits from their pockets and given it a try, as they

said, to test it out and see whether they'd clear the establishment for the

three youngest cousins.

JR got to rubbery legs. You had to work up there in the sim. Stupid as it all

was, it was, as Lyra had said, pretty good for purple lights and dinosaurs. He

was sweating and breathing hard. And had a few bruises from knocking into real,

though padded, walls.

This place advertised 47 rides, software-dependent. Some were hand-to-hand

combat Some were relaxing. Some were workouts. This one, rated chase-and-dodge,

proved that true. They were still sweating when they went out to a noisy little

soft-bar—no alcohol in this establishment, which had strict rules about doing

the ride straight There was a place down in White Sector that didn't check

sobriety, and that had a lot wilder adult content than the Old Man would like to

know about, JR strongly suspected.

But Finity had been gone from Pell too long, out where they'd been had been real

ordnance, real guns, and it wasn't sex he was principally worried about as an

influence on their youngest crew, although that was a concern with juniors

mentally old enough but physically not. What the Old Man restricted most for the

juniors on moral grounds were the space combat themes and, in the realm of

reality, contact with the rougher element of some docksides. JR, in direct

charge of the juniors, didn't want to let the junior-juniors unsupervised into

any establishment without knowing what the place was like—or (figuring that even

very young Finity personnel had reflexes other people might lack) whether there

were liabilities to other users.

It was fantastical enough, JR judged. The juniors wouldn't confuse it with

reality. It wouldn't give them nightmares—or encourage aggressive behavior.

It didn't mean he and the senior-juniors weren't going to slip down to Red or

White Sector when the junior-juniors were safely in their rooms and see what the

adult fare was like on the seamier side of Pell docks. The senior-juniors, his

own lot, had crossed that line to anything-goes maturity in the seven years

since they'd last made this port. They'd been out where combat was real, and

they'd walked real corridors where surprises weren't computer-spawned. They came

back to their port of registry after seven station-measured years of hard living

and real threats in deep space, and sat and sipped pink fruit drinks in a

soft-bar with painted dinosaurs and garish dragons on the walls as the rest of

their little band found their way out to the bar area and found their table.

Chad, Toby, Wayne, and Sue showed up, sweaty and flushed and admitting it

actually had been a little wilder than they expected.

"Won't hurt the juniors," was JR's pronouncement, between sips of his fruit

juice. Sweet stuff. Almost sickeningly sweet. It brought back kid-days with a

bitter edge of memory.

The whole trip brought back memories, a nightmare that wouldn't quite come

right, because the dead wouldn't come back and enjoy the things they'd known and

shared the last time they 'd been at Pell. A lot of the crew was having trouble

with that, ghosts, almost, the eye tricked, in a familiar venue, into believing

one face was like another face,

Or remembering that you'd been at a theater, and finding your group several

short of a momentary expectation, a memory, a remembrance of things past.

Ghosts, far more vivid than any computer sim… poignant and provoking dreams. But

you had to let them go. At his young age, he knew that. He'd just expected a bit

more…

Dignity,

Pell had been a grim, joyless place during the war, so the seniors said; he'd

seen it make its docks a rowdy, neon-lit carnival in the years since. Now… now

the place had dinosaurs, as if the place had finally, utterly, slipped its

moorings to reality.

So the Old Man said they were going back to trading, making an honest living,

the Old Man said, now that Mazian's pirates had gone in retreat and seemed apt

to nurse their wounds for some little time. At least for now, the shooting war

was over.

So where did that leave them, a combat-trained crew, brightest and best and

fiercest youth of the Alliance?

Testing out the facilities—desperate hard duty it was—that they were going to

let the junior-juniors into. Babysitting.

Well, that was the reversion the Old Man had talked about in his general speech

to the crew. They could have a real liberty this time, the Old Man had said, and

the Old Rules were in effect again, rules that had never been in effect in JR's

entire life, and he was the seniormost junior, in charge of the younger juniors.

The dino adventure was now the level of the judgment calls he made, a little

chance to play, act like fools… or whatever the easy, soft station-bred

population called it, when grown men sweated and outran imaginary dragons, while

paying money for the privilege.

This was station life, not much different than, say, Sol, or Russell's, or any

other starstation built on the same pattern, the same design, down to the

color-codes of its docks, an international language of design and function. Pell

was richer, wilder, fatter and lazier. Pell partied on with post-War abandon and

tried to forget its past, the memorial plaques here and there standing like the

proverbial skeletons at the feast. On this site the station wall was breached…

This was Q sector…

People walked by the plaques, acting silly, wearing outlandish clothes, garish

colors. People spent an amazing amount of money and effort on fashions that to

his eye just looked odd. Station-born kids prowled the docks looking for trouble

they sometimes found. Police were in evidence, doing nothing to restrain the

spacers, who brought in money; a lot to restrain station juveniles, who JR

understood were a major problem on Pell, so that they'd had to caution their own

junior-juniors to carry ship's ID at all times and guard it from pickpockets.

There was so much change in Pell. He couldn't imagine the young fashioneers gave

a damn for anything but their own bodies. His own generation was the borderline

generation, the one that had seen the War to end all wars… and even at

seventeen, eighteen ship-years, now, still a mere twenty-six as stations counted

time, he saw the quickly grown station-brats taking so damn much for granted,

despising money, but measuring everything by it

Hell, not only the station-brats were affected. Their own youngest were quirky,

strange-minded, too fascinated by violence… even shorter of decent upbringing

than his own neglected peers,—and that was going some.

Dean and Ashley showed up. Nike and Connor came next The waiter, forewarned, was

fast with the drinks, while they talked about the strangling plants effect and

the swamp and the engineering.

"Effex Bag," Bucklin said "Same one, I'll bet you." It was a full-body pocket

you dealt with. The things fought back as hard as you could provoke them to

fight, but a feed-back bag was self-limiting and you learned a fair lesson in

morality, in JR's estimation: at least it taught a good lesson about action and

reaction, and the effects here were more sophisticated than the primitive jobs

they'd met in their repair standdown at Bryant's, a notable long time ashore.

The quasi-dangers in any Effex Bag were all your own making. Hit it, and it hit

back, Struggle and it gave it back to you. Go passive and you got a tame, boring

ride,

"Pretty good jolt at the end," Dean said "They drop you real-space."

"Yeah," Nike said "About a meter. Soft."

"Junior-juniors'll like this one" JR said, deciding he couldn't take more of the

pink juice. He listened to his team wondering about trying the Haunted Castle

for another five credits.

Vid games and sims. Earth's cultural tourism run amok.

You could experience a rock riot. Swing an axe in a Viking raid, never mind that

they equipped the opposing Englishmen with Renaissance armor.

The reapplication of the pre-War Old Rules on Finity'sEnd had let them out

without restrictions for the first time in three decades, after the rest of the

universe had been war-free for close to twenty years, and this senior-junior,

listening to his small command discuss castles and dinosaurs, had increasing

misgivings about their sudden drop into civilian life. The fact was, he hadn't

had an unbridled fancy in his life and didn't know what to permit and what to

forbid, but after an education, both tape-fed, and with real books, that had

taught him and his generation the difference between a dinosaur, a Viking and

Henry Tudor, he felt a little embarrassed at his assignment. Foolish folly had

become his job, his duty, his mandate from the Old Man. And here they were,

about to loose Finity's war-trained youngest on the establishment.

Under New Rules or Old Rules, however, they didn't wear Finity insignia when

they went to kid amusements or when they went bar-crawling, or doing anything

else that involved play. It was a Rule that stood. Break it at your peril.

Finity insignia, in a universe of slackening standards, sloppy procedures,

almost-good instead of excellent, still stood for something. Finity personnel

wouldn't be seen falling on their ass in a carnival, not in uniform. But there

was one in his sight at the moment, a junior cousin violating the no-uniforms

rule. He indicated the cousin with a nod, and Bucklin looked.

"That's in uniform," Bucklin declared in surprise.

That was Jeremy, their absolute youngest: Jeremy, who eeled his small body among

the tables of sugar-high youth, wearing his silver uniform and with the black

patch on his sleeve.

He went for their table like a heat-seeking missile.

Business. JR revised his opinion and didn't even begin a reprimand. Jeremy's

look was serious.

"They got Fletcher," was Jeremy's first breath as Jeremy ducked down next to

them, "We got him. They signed a paper."

"Cleared the case?" JR was, in the first breath, entirely astonished. And in the

next, disturbed.

"Well, damn," Bucklin said.

It was more than Bucklin should have said to a junior-junior. But Jeremy's young

face showed no more cheerful opinion.

"What terms?" JR asked. "Is there any word how? Or why?"

"Did he apply to us?" The Fletcher Neihart case had gone on most of his life.

They'd never worked it out. Now with so many things changing, the Rules

upending, the universe settling to a peace that eroded all sensible behavior,

this changed.

"I don't know what they agreed," Jeremy said "I just heard they signed the

papers and he's on the planet or something, but they're going to get him up here

and we're taking him."

How in hell? was the question that blanked other thinking.

They, the junior crew, were not only turned loose among dinosaurs—all of a

sudden they had a station-born stranger on their hands.

"That all you know?" JR said

"Yes, sir, that's all. I just came from the sleepover. Sorry about the patch.

I'm getting out of here."

"This place is on the list," JR said meaning it was all right for

junior-juniors, and Jeremy's eyes flashed with delight that didn't reckon higher

problems.

"Yessir," Jeremy said "Decadent!"

"Vanish," JR suggested And should have added, Walk! but it was too late: Jeremy

was gone at a higher speed than made an inconspicuous exit. Even the

over-sugared teens in this place stared knowing who they were, and seeing that

in this lax new world Finity crew played like fools and sat and drank with the

rest of the human race.

Observers who had jobs besides games might have noticed too, and know that

Finity's seniormost juniors had just gotten a piece of not-too-good news on some

matter. That could start rumors on the stock exchange. If it ricocheted to the

Old Man, the junior crew captain would hear about it.

The junior crew, meanwhile, didn't break out in complaints, just looked somberly

at him—waiting for the word, the junior-official position from him, on a

situation that had just suddenly cast a far more uncertain light not only on

their liberty in this port, but on their whole way of working with one another.

"Well," JR said to his crew, moderately and reasonably, he thought, and trying

to put a cheerful face on the circumstances, "—this should be interesting."

"He's a stationer," was the first thing out of Lyra's mouth.

"He may be," JR said, "but you heard the word. If it's true, we've got him." He

tossed a money card at Bucklin and got up. "Handle the tab. I've got to talk to

the Old Man.

Rain blasted down. The clean-suits were plastered to their bodies as they

hurried down a scarcely existent path, and Fletcher's breath came short. The

light-headedness he suffered said he was needing to change a cylinder, but he

didn't want to stop for that, with the lightning ripping through the clouds and

the rain making everything slippery. They were already going to be late getting

back, and he knew their truancy was beyond hiding.

He had to get Bianca back safely. He had to think of what to say, what to do to

protect himself and her reputation; all the while his breaths gave him less and

less oxygen even to know where he was putting his feet.

His head was pounding. He slipped. Caught himself against a low limb and tried

to slow his breathing so he could get something through the cylinders.

"What's the matter?" Bianca wanted to know. "Are you out?"

"Yeah." He managed breath enough to answer, but his head was still swimming. He

had to change out. The rules said—they were posted everywhere—advise your

partner if you felt yourself get light-headed: if you were alone, shoot off the

locator beeper you weren't supposed to use in anything but life and death

emergency. But they weren't to that point. If he hadn't been a total fool. A

hand against his thigh-pocket advised him he was all right, he'd replaced the

last one—when? Just yesterday?

"Need one?" Bianca's voice was anxious.

"Got my spares. Let's just get there. Don't want to be logged any later than we

are." He kept moving to push a little more out of the cylinders he was using:

you could do that if you got your breathing down.

"They're gone!" Bianca said, then, looking around, and for a second his muddled

brain didn't know what she was talking about. "I didn't see them leave."

He hadn't seen Melody and Patch go, either. Desertion wasn't like them. But

downer brains grew distracted with the spring. Did, even on the station… and was

this it? he asked himself. Was it the time they would go, and had they left him?

Maybe for good? Or were they just scared of the storm?

The lightning flickered hazard above their heads… danger, danger, danger, a

strobe light would say on station. It said the same here, to his jangled nerves.

He walked, lightheaded and telling himself he could make it further without

stopping for a change—at least get them past the place where the trail looped

near the river: that was what scared him, the chance of being stranded or having

to wade. The tapes they'd had to watch on what the monsoon rains did when they

fell chased images through his head, of washouts, trees toppling, the land

whited out in rain.

Melody and Patch, he said to himself, must have sought shelter. There were

always old burrows on the hillsides, and hisa grew afraid when the light faded.

When Great Sun waned, there was no place for His children but inside, safe and

warm and dry.

Good advice for humans, too, but they daren't bed down anywhere but at the Base.

He heard his heart beating a cadence in his ears as, through the last edge of

the woods and the gray haze of rain, he saw the fields and the frames.

"We'll make it," he gasped

"But we're late," Bianca moaned. "Oh, God, we're late!"

They were fools. And Bianca was right, they were going to catch it, catch it,

catch it.

They reached where he'd been working—close to there, at any rate. He'd left a

power saw up on the ridge, and if he didn't have it when he checked in, he'd

catch hell for that, too.

"Keep going!" he said to her. "I'll catch up!" And when she started to protest

he shouted at her: "I left my saw up there. I'll catch up!"

She believed him, but she was arguing about the failing cylinder he'd complained

of, about how he was already short, and he couldn't run. "Change cylinders!" she

said, and held onto him until he agreed and got his single spare out of his

pocket.

Rain was pouring down on them and you weren't ever supposed to get the cylinders

wet, even if they had a protective shell. You got them out of the paper they

were in and all you had to do was shove them in, but you had to keep your head

and eject one and replace one, and then go for the other one. You weren't

supposed to run out of both cylinders at the same time, but he realized he'd

been close to it, and light-headed, as witness, he thought, the quality of his

decisions of the last few minutes.

Bianca tried to help his fumbling fingers, and opened the packet on one cylinder

of little beads. She was stripping it fast to hand it to him and he ejected one

of his.

Her tug on the packet spun the cylinder out of her wet hands and she cried out

in dismay. It landed in water, with its end open. Ruined. In the mask, it would

have survived a dunking. Not outside it.

And he was on one depleted cylinder, with his head spinning.

"All right, all right," he tried to tell her.

"I've got mine," she said, and got out one of her spares, and opened it while he

sucked in hard and held his breaths quiet, waiting for her to get it right, this

time, and give him air enough to breathe.

She got it unwrapped and to his hand this time. Shielding the end from the rain,

he shoved it in, then drew fast, quick breaths to get the chemistry started.

Then the slow seep of rational thought into his brain told him first that it was

working, and second, that they'd had a close call.

He let her give him the second cylinder, then: they still had one in reserve,

hers. You could lend a cylinder back and forth if bad came to worse, but you

never let both go out together.

He was all right and he'd cut it damned close.

"Fletcher?" Bianca said. "I'm going with you. We're down to three. Don't argue

with me!"

"It's all right, it's all right." He pocketed the wrappers: you had to turn them

in to get new ones, or you filled out forms forever and they charged you with

trashing. Same with the ruined cylinder. He was going to hear about it. It was

going on his record.

"Just leave the saw" she pleaded with him. "Say we were scared of the

lightning."

It was half a bright idea.

"We were late because of the cylinders," he said, with a better one, "and we can

still pick up the saw. Come on."

She picked up on the idea, willingly. She went with him down the side of one

huge frame to where he'd been cutting brush. They couldn't get wetter. The

lightning hadn't gotten worse.

It was maybe ten minutes along the curve of a hill to where he'd left the saw in

the fork of a tree. Safe, Waterproof.

But it wasn't there.

For a moment, he doubted it was the right tree. He stood a moment in confusion,

concluding that someone had gotten it, that it might have been—God help him—a

curious downer—a thought that scared him. But it most likely was Sandy

Galbraith, who'd been working not in sight of him, but at least knowing where he

was.

If it was Sandy checking on him and if she'd found the saw but not him, she'd

have been in a bad position of having to turn him in or having to explain why

she had his equipment.

If she'd been half smart and not a damn prig, she'd have left the saw where it

was and pretended she didn't see anything unless she needed to remember.

Damn.

"Sandy probably got it," he said, and that meant they were later and he had to

come up with a story for the missing saw, too.

He'd gone to look for Bianca because of the rain coming, that was it.

"Look," he said, as lightning whitened the brush, and they started slogging back

the ten minute walk they'd come out of the way already. "I'm going to catch hell

if somebody turned it in. What happened was, I knew you were by the river, and I

was worried about the rain, and I ran down there to warn you, and that was why I

left the saw."

She was keeping up with him, walking hard, and didn't answer. Maybe she didn't

like lying to the authorities. Maybe she was mad at him. She had a right to be.

"I know, I know," he said. "I don't want to lie, either, but I didn't plan on

the rainstorm, all right?" That she didn't leap at the chance to defend him made

him—not mad. Upset—because of the cascade of stupid things that had gone wrong.

Maybe he'd spent too much time with psychs in his life, but he could say

'displacement' with the best psych that was out there: he and the psychs had

talked a lot about his 'displacement.' And he was having a lot of displacement

right now, to the extent that if he really, really had the chance to pound hell

out of somebody, he would. He was upset, short of breath, and as they slogged

through the mud washing from the sides of the frame, and on to the road, which

was a boggy mess, he didn't know whether Bianca was mad at him or not. They

didn't have any breath left to talk. They just walked, until they were on the

approach to the domes.

"Remember what you've got to say," he said on great, ragged breaths. "If we've

got the same story they'll have to believe us. I left the saw to go after you

and I was running low on the cylinders and we were taking it slow coming back so

we'd save the cylinders so as not to run without a spare apiece." They didn't

let them have any more than a spare set, but they were supposed to come back to

the Base immediately if they were out without a spare. You were supposed to

stick with your buddy so you could share a set if you had to. And not run. That

part was important. That was the core of the excuse. "Got it?"

"Yes," she said, out of breath.

The domes were close now, veiled in rain as the doors of the admin dome opened

and a figure came out toward them.

Deep trouble, he thought. Administration knew. It was his fault.

JR stepped off the slow-moving ped-cab in front of number 5 Blue Dock, where a

gantry with skeins of lines and a lighted ship-status sign was the only evidence

of Finity's presence the other side of the station wall. Customs was on duty, a

single bored agent at a lonely kiosk who looked up as he came through the gate.

Customs manned such a kiosk in front of limp rope lines at every ship at

dock—and, at Pell, ignored most everything on a crew activity level.

The flash of a passport at the stand, a quick match of fingerprints on a plate,

and he made his way up the ramp, past the stationside airlock and into the

yellow ribbed gullet of the short access tube. The airlock inside took a fast

assessment of the pressure gradient between ship and station and, as it cycled,

flashed numbers and the current sparse gossip at him …I'm moving to the

DarkStar—Cynthia D. Someone had met up with someone interesting, gone off and

advised the duty staff of the fact she wasn't where she'd first checked in.

Finity personnel didn't do much of that.

Hadn't done much of it. Correction.

It was in a lingering sense of uncertainty that he walked out of the airlock and

into the lower corridor of his ship at dock. The Ops office door was open,

casting light onto the tiles outside, a handful of seniors maintaining the

systems that stayed live during dock, and whatever was under test at the moment.

JR put his head in, asked the Old Man's whereabouts.

The senior captain was aboard, was in his office, was at work, would see him.

He went ahead, down the short corridor past Cargo and by the lift into

Administrative. Senior captains' territory. Offices, and the four captains'

residences in B deck, directly above, all arranged to be useable during dock,

when the passenger ring was locked down.

It was a moment for serious second thoughts, even with honest administrative

business on his mind. Business he'd gotten by scuttlebutt, not official

channels.

He was damned mad. He realized that about the time he reached the point of no

retreat. He was just damned mad. He knew James Robert Sr. would have policy as

well as personal reasons for what he'd done. He even knew in large part what the

policy decisions were.

But the result had landed on his section.

He signaled his presence, walked in at the invitation to do so, stood at easy

attention until the Old Man switched off a bank of displays in the dimly lit

office and acknowledged him by powering his chair to face him.

"Sir," JR said. "I've just heard that Fletcher's coming in. Is that official?"

The light came from the side of the Old Man's face, from displays still lit. The

expression time had set on that countenance gave nothing away. The Old Man's

eyes were the reliable giveaway, dark, and alive, and going through at least

several thoughts before the sere, thin lips expressed any single opinion.

"Is it on the station news," James Robert asked, "or how did we reach this

conclusion?"

"Sir, it came on two feet and I came over here stat."

"Sit down."

JR settled gingerly into a vacant console chair.

The silence continued a moment.

"So," James Robert said, "I gather this provokes concern. Or what is your

concern about it?"

"He's in my command." He picked every word carefully. "I think I should be

concerned."

"In what way?"

"That we may have difficulty assigning him."

"Is that your concern?"

"The integrity of my command is a concern. So I came here to find out the

particulars of the situation before I get questions."

Again the long silence, in which he had time to measure his concerns against

James Robert's concerns, and James Robert's demands against him and a very small

rank of juniors.

James Robert's grand-nephew, Fletcher was. So was he.

James Robert's unfinished business, Fletcher was. James Robert said there were

new rules, the new Old Manual they'd been handed, and about which the junior

crew was already putting heads together and wondering.

"The particulars are," James Robert said, "that a member of this crew will join

us at board call. He'll have the same duties as any new junior, insofar as you

can find him suitable training. And yes, you are responsible for him. On this

voyage, with the press of other duties, I have no time to be a shepherd or a

counselor to anyone. In a certain measure, I shouldn't be. He's not more special

than the rest of you. And you're in charge."

"Yes, sir" Same duties as a new junior. A stationer had no skills. His crew,

already unsettled by a change in the Rules, was now to be unsettled by the news.

"I'll do what I can, sir."

"He's not a stationer," James Robert said directly and with, JR was sure, full

knowledge what the complaints would be. "This ship has lost a generation, Jamie.

We have nothing from those years. We've lost too many. I considered whether we

dared leave him—and no, I will not leave one of our own to another round with a

stationer judicial system. We had the chance, perhaps one chance, a favor owed.

I collected. We are also out from under the 14.5 million credit claim for a Pell

station-share."

"Yes, sir." Clearly things had gone on beyond his comprehension. He didn't know

what kind of an agreement might have hammered his cousin loose from Pell's

courts. He understood that, along with all other Rules, the situation with Pell

might have changed.

"So how far has the rumor spread?" James Robert asked him.

On Jeremy's two feet? Counting the conspicuous dress? "I think the rumor is

traveling, sir, at least among the crew. It came to me and I came here. Others

might know by now. I'd be surprised if they didn't."

"Jeremy."

"Yes, sir."

"Let a crew liberty without a five-hour check-in and they think the universe has

changed. Drunken on the docks, I take it, when this news met you."

"No, sir. Fruit juice in a vid parlor."

The Old Man could laugh. It started as a disturbance in the lines near his eyes

and traveled slowly to the edges of the mouth. Just the edges. And faded again.

"Life and death, junior captain. Ultimately all decisions are life and death.

It's on your watch. Do you have any objections? Say them now."

"Yes, sir," he said somberly. "I understand that it's on my watch."

"The generations were broken," James Robert said. "From my generation to yours

there was birth and death. There was a continuity—and it's broken. I want that

restored, Jamie."

"Yes, sir," he said.

"You still haven't a chart, have you?"

"Sir?"

"You're in deep space without a chart. We didn't entirely get you home."

He understood that the Old Man was speaking figuratively, this business about

charts, about deep space, expressions which might have been current in the Old

Man's youth, a century and more ago.

"Too much war," James Robert said. The man who, himself, had begun the War,

talked about charts and coming home. About charts for a new situation, JR

guessed. But home? Where was that, except the ship?

The Old Man got up and he got up. Then the Old Man, still taller than most of

them, set his hand on his shoulder, a touch he hadn't felt since he was, what?

Ten. The day his mother had died—along with half of Finity's crew.

"Too many dead," the Old Man said. "You'll not crew this ship with hire-ons when

you command her. You'll run short-handed, you'll marry spacers in, but you'll

never let hire-ons sit station on this ship, hear me, Jamie?"

The Old Man's grip was still hard. There was still fire in him. He still could

send that fire into what he touched. It trembled through his nerves. "Yes, sir,"

he said faintly, intimately, as the Old Man dealt with him.

"I've given you one of your cousins back. I've agreed to Quen's damned

ship-building. It was time to agree. It's time to do different things. Time for

you, too. You're young yet. You—and this lost cousin of ours—will see things and

make choices far beyond my century and a half."

"Yes, sir." He didn't know what the Old Man was aiming at with this talk of

crewing the ship, and building ships for Quen of Pell. But not understanding

James Robert was nothing new. Even Madison failed to know what was on the Old

Man's mind, sometimes, and damned sure their enemies had misjudged what James

Robert would do next, or what his resources were.

"Making peace," the Old Man said, "isn't signing treaties. It's getting on with

life. It's making things work, and not finding excuses for living in the past.

Time to get on with life, Jamie."

The Old Man asked, and the crew performed. It wasn't love. It was Family. And

Family forever included that gaping, aching blank where a generation had failed

to be born and half of them who were born had died. It was the Old Man reaching

out across those years of conflict and training for conflict—and saying to their

generation, Make peace.

Make peace.

God, with what? With a station obsessed with games and dinosaurs? With Union

more unpredictable as an ally than it had been as an enemy?

That prospect seemed suddenly terrifying in its unknowns, more so than the War

that had grown familiar as an old suit of clothes. The universe, like his whole

generation, was in fragments and ruin.

And the Old Man said, without saying a word, Do this new thing, Jamie. Go into

this peace and do something different than you've ever imagined in the day you

command.

He was back on that cliff again. Jump off, was James Robert's clear advice. Try

something different than he'd ever known.

And to start the process, of all chancy gifts, the Old Man gave him the new Old

Rules and a rescued cousin who wasn't any damn use to the ship except the bare

fact that getting Fletcher back closed books, saved the Name, prevented another

disaster in Pell courts.

And maybe redeemed a promise, a loose end the Old Man had left hanging.

Francesca herself had shattered, lost herself in a fantasy of drugs. But she'd

kept her kid alive and under her guardianship, always believing, by that one

act, that they'd come back.

Now they had. Maybe that was what the Old Man was saying, his message to Pell,

to everyone around them.

They'd come back. They'd kept the ship alive. They'd survived the War. And no

one had ever believed they'd do that much.

Chapter V

Contents - Prev/Next

There was no chance to slip into the domes unnoticed. Administration had come

looking for the two of them, an irritated Administration in the form of one of

the seniors, who stood suited up and rain-drenched, waiting as they came

breathlessly up the path.

"Ran out of cylinder" Fletcher began his story before Bianca had to say a thing.

"It was my fault. I left my saw." They weren't supposed to leave power tools

where hisa could get them in their hands. Responsible behavior was at issue. "We

went back after it and ran low on time. Somebody must have taken it on in.

Sorry."

The rain made a deafening lot of noise. The mask hid all expression. The man

from Staff Admin waved a hand toward the women's dorm."Get in out of the rain,"

he told Bianca. Then: "Neihart, you come with me."

It clearly wasn't the casual dismissal of the case he'd hoped for. It didn't

sound even like the forms and reports to fill out that led to a minor reprimand.

The staffer led him toward the Administration dome.

So they nabbed him as responsible and sent the Family girl off without a

reprimand. He was both glad they had put the responsibility on him—he'd talked

Bianca into going out there—and resentful of a system settling down on him with

familiar force. He figured he was on his own now, in more serious trouble than

he'd bargained for, and as he walked he calmly settled his story straight in his

head, the sequence, the way it had to work to make everything logical. He'd done

no harm. He could maintain that for a fact. He had hope of calming things down

if he just kept his head.

They walked in through the doors, out of the rain. And the senior staffer—the

name was Richards, but he didn't remember the rest—waved him through to the

interview room, where you could deal with Admin without going through decon, if

you didn't have long business there. It was a room where you could go in and

talk to someone through a clean-screen, or apply for a new breather-cylinder, or

fill out paperwork.

Left alone there, he sat on one of the two hard plastic chairs, rather than

appear to pace or fret: he was onto psychs with pinhole cameras. He knew the

tricks. He sat calmly and wove himself a vivid, convincing memory of seeing a

team member by the river when the rain started, a stand of trees that was real

close to the water, where somebody could get cut off by rising water.

Yes, he'd been stupid in leaving the saw: if you were dealing with

administrators, you always had to admit to some little point where you'd been

stupid and you could promise you'd never do that again, so they'd be happy and

authoritative. They could say he'd learned a lesson—-he had—and he'd be off the

hook. He'd learned a long time ago how to make people in charge of him go off

with a warm glow, having Saved him yet again and having Made Progress with their

problem child. He had the mental script all made out by the time the director

walked in from the other side of the transparent divider and sat down,

sour-faced, on the other side of the desk.

His bad luck it was Nunn; he had rather it had been the alterday director,

Goldman, who had a little more sense of humor.

Nunn had brought a paper with him. Nunn passed it through the little slot in the

divided desk.

"Mail, Mr. Neihart."

Mail? Complete change of vectors.

Different problem. Stupid change of direction. What was this, anyway?

Station trouble? If it was mail for him it was either his last set of foster

parents upset about something or it was lawyers. And a first glance at the

address at the top of the folded fax sheet said Delacorte & McIntire.

Lawyers.

His sixth set of lawyers. Four had resigned his case. Two had retired, grown old

in his ongoing legal problems. He went through lawyers almost faster than he'd

gone through foster-families.

Nunn was clearly waiting for him to read it in front of him and wanted some kind

of reaction. Admin had to know every time you sneezed down here and every time

you had a cross word with anybody. The rules that protected the downers didn't

let anybody go around them who had any personal or job problems, and if the

letter was anything the director considered bad news, he'd be yanked off duty

till he'd been a session with the psych staff.

Which with his other problems wasn't good. So he prepared himself to be very

calm, no matter what, and to convince the man there wasn't a thing in relation

to any human being or situation on Pell Station that could possibly upset him.

Except—the one thing that reliably could upset him.

Finity was in port. Here they went again. Seven years since the last lawsuit

from that quarter.

None of them, he told himself, had ever meant a thing.

The lawyers' letter said, after that opening tidbit: This is to apprise you… ran

down to: refiling of the petition to the Superior Court of Pell; and, like a

high-speed impact: The official reopening of your case ...

He read it to the end. McIntire wanted him to be aware, that was all: the legal

wars were starting again. They'd want depositions. Maybe another psych exam.

Dammit, he was one year short of past all this: one year short of his majority,

and they could mandate another psych exam, see whether his best interests were

being served… that was the way they always put it. His best interests.

Only this time—this time he wasn't exactly within walking distance of his

lawyer's office.

"They want you to take the next shuttle up," Nunn said. "Tomorrow."

He folded it again as it had been and gave it back to the director in the

pretense that the director hadn't read it first.

And he tried to assume a nonchalance he didn't feel, while his heart raced and

his mind scattered. "That's ridiculous. Respectfully, sir. That's ridiculous.

How much money are they going to spend on this?"

"They want you to take the flight."

"For a week on station? Two, at max? This is stupid. They do it whenever they're

in port. Don't they know that? This isn't any walk down to the court."

"Do you resent it? Do you think it's unfair?"

Oh, that was a psych question. Nunn wasn't real clever at it.

"I'm not real happy," he said calmly. "They don't say a thing about how long I'm

going to stay up there."

"Well, their idea, of course, is that you'll board their ship, isn't it?"

A cold day in hell was what he thought. Nunn's calm voice made his skin crawl.

"They sue every time they're in port. They always lose. It's just a waste of

time and money. They're worried because the station wants them to buy me a

station-share. They don't want to spend fourteen million. So everybody sues.

That's what this is about."

There was a little silence, then, a troublesome silence. He hadn't a notion why,

just—Nunn looked at him, and for some reason he thought Nunn knew something Nunn

wasn't telling him.

The man wanted him on that shuttle, and they wanted to get him out of here, that

was the first consideration. And if Bianca's family on the station had heard

about him and knew his history—God knew what strings they could pull. The

trouble he'd thought he was in for being late back from the field was nothing

against this trouble. And he didn't dare let Nunn see how upset he was. If you

were emotionally upset they sent you away from the downers. Fast.

A seventeen-year-old with no credentials in the program and a continuing

prospect of emotional upset? They'd send him Upabove with no return ticket. And

lawyers couldn't help him. Not even the court could overrule the scientists in

charge of downer welfare.

"I'd better go pack." His voice almost wobbled. He turned a breath into a

theatric sigh and cast Nunn the kind of exasperated, weary look he'd learned to

give police, lawyers, judges, authority in general. He didn't break into a sweat

and he didn't blow up. "So where's the shuttle schedule?" He feared one was

onworld. It was midweek. One should be. "What time does the shuttle go?"

"Tomorrow morning. You'd better pack all your stuff, all the same. Oh-seven

hundred, weather permitting, the car will pick you up at the dorm."

"Yes, sir," he said. He wasn't going to have days to get ready, then. And, pack

all your stuff. Nunn thought he'd be staying Upabove, then.

He'd think of something. He'd surprise them.

He'd make them fly him back.

Make them. He hadn't had a great deal of luck making anybody do anything. He'd

gotten in here only because he'd been a straight, clean student since he'd

reformed, and because he'd half-killed himself scoring high on the exams, but

that was getting into the program. Now, in a lawsuit, they weren't going to look

at his future. They were going to look at his past, which was nothing but

trouble. All his records were going to end up in court, public. They were going

to ask how somebody with a juvenile record had gotten into the program in the

first place. Everything he'd lived down was going to reappear. All his records.

A drug-dosing mother. All his sessions with station cops. His psychs had vouched

him clear of that; if only he could show a clean record in his work down here he

might have a chance.

Instead he'd lost equipment and been late. He'd picked one hell of a time to

slight the rules down here… with the lawsuit coming up again, and himself going

under the psychological microscope again to try to prove, no, he couldn't go to

space, he wasn't fit to go to space. He was too fragile to be deported.

How could he simultaneously prove he was rehabbed enough to be down here and not

fit to go with his relatives and get shot at along with his mother's ship?

And what did he say when they asked him what he'd been up to reporting late? I

lost my head? I was infatuated with a girl? And drag Bianca's name into it, and

let her Family in on it?

He hated his relatives with a fury beyond reason. He hated all humanity at the

moment.

He went out the doors, one after another, realizing, in a colder panic since the

test that brought him here, that they—the they in station administration who

lifelong had ordered him around—could now get him up to the station for their

own convenience in their lawsuit, but they might not get around to bringing him

back all that quickly, even if all things were equal and he hadn't just gotten

Bianca Velasquez into trouble—a shuttle ticket up, they'd pay for. Down, he

couldn't afford. That meant even if things went absolutely flawlessly, his

lawyers were going to have to sue to make them send him back, which would take

time, a lot of time.

They could ruin his life while they messed around and made up their minds. They

were ruining his life, just filling out their damned forms and sending him up to

the station again because the law said he had to be in court to say so.

Seven hundred hours. That was when the shuttle broke dock, flew, did whatever it

did. He heard the shuttles go over in the early mornings when the staff was

having breakfast. They'd roar overhead and people would stop talking for a few

beats and then they'd go on with their conversations.

Where's Fletch? they'd say tomorrow morning.

Bianca would miss him for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.

But what good would it do?

He'd never see Melody and Patch again, and they damned sure wouldn't understand

where he'd gone. The monsoon was coming. They could die in their long walk and

he wouldn't be here, he wouldn't know.

Rain washed over him and lightning whitened the door of the men's dorm as he

opened it and shoved his way through into the entry. In a shattered blur of

white he saw the usual pile of clean-suits for the cleaning crew to take, all

the masks hanging, clustered on their pegs. His mask should join them. He should

unsuit, go in, pack, as he was told.

But he didn't want to unsuit. Not yet. Not yet for going inside and facing the

questions he'd get from supervisors and the others in the program when he

started packing up. Emotions would answer. And that was no good, not for him,

not for his future. He wanted an hour, one hour, to walk in the rain—just to get

himself together, not to have a fight with Marshall Willett on his record.

And he'd reported to the Base. He'd checked in with Admin. He wasn't on anyone's

list as missing any longer. You could be outside. There wasn't a curfew on. If

he wanted to get wet, it was his choice, wasn't it?

His mask was on one cylinder.

Hell, he thought, and opened another mask, one on the pegs, and borrowed one, in

the thought he'd annoy someone, but nothing against the necessity of getting

himself a chance to cool down before he had to deal with anybody.

Then, to be safe, he borrowed one from another mask—it would risk whoever it was

to take both, in case they were stupid enough to ignore how light the mask was

and go out thinking they were set…

But then he wasn't as trapped. And in a fit of anger he raided a third and a

fourth mask. A fifth and a sixth. He wouldn't be trapped. He was going to miss

that shuttle. Maybe his lawyers could fight it through the court: they'd take

his side, and it was time for them to earn their station-given stipend. Get

himself up there in reach and some court order could get him set aboard his

relatives' ship, and then no court order could get him off. That was one

thought. The other was that right now he wanted not to have to see Marshall's

smug face and that most of all he wanted not to have to tell Bianca that he was

sorry, he wasn't like other people, lawyers owned him and they could deport him

if the courts didn't rule he was mentally unstable.

In which case they'd throw him out of the program anyway, and the station would

give him some makework job because his mental state made him unemployable at

anything else he was qualified to do.

He resettled his mask. He'd stuffed his pockets with cylinders until they

wouldn't hold any more. He walked out the door into the rain and the lightning

of a world that, until a quarter hour ago, had been happy and promising him

everything he could ever want.

He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.

If they caught him he could still lie and say he'd left the saw and only then

remembered it and didn't want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record.

He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.

But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he'd been snatched up

by the system. He'd usually had enough of whatever home they'd put him into, and

it was certain by the time he'd heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro

and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn't maintain

an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a

judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life,

and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.

And you'd say, in a high childish voice, That's a lie! And sometimes the court

believed you, but by then you knew it wasn't better, and wouldn't ever be

better, and things that hadn't been broken before the lawyers got into it would

be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was

anything left of ties to that family he'd break it up in his own stupid

actions—he'd go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back,

maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after

Melody had told him that truth about himself. He'd always come out of the

hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—

This time it wasn't anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he'd

lose. This time it was everything he'd ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch

themselves.

Just Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only

living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid

and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason

liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of

'people' the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he

thought about it, it wasn't a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was

seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it

was valid.

Bianca was what he'd say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his

motives for making trouble. He'd say, I've been working on developing

relationships. That was one of their own phrases. They'd like that. You couldn't

use words like transference and displacement, because they knew you were

psyching them when you did that, but relationships was a word that you could

use. He'd say he was just working things out about relationships—

The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had

to take now and couldn't help himself. He couldn't bear for the court psychs to

get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in

the order he controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If

they found out about Melody and Patch they'd dice that up, too, until, like his

foster-families, there wasn't any clean feeling left.

And he'd told Bianca. She knew. She'd talk. People always did, when the psychs

wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.

"You!" someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry.

Somebody had seen him. And he ran. He knew that he'd made a choice the moment

he'd started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn't stop.

"Come back here!" the staffer shouted. Desperate.

So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid

him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up

with the need for oxygen and started feeding him CO².

Red and gray warred in his vision. He slowed only because he had to. He walked,

blind and gasping, because he knew someone was behind him who might not run as

fast, but who'd be there, nonetheless.

The river roared beside him, swollen with the falling rain. When the man chasing

him got the notion he couldn't find him in the thicket and went back to report

that there was a fool out running in the woods, they'd send out more people with

more cylinders to look for him in a systematic way.

Old River's rising might cut them off, cover his tracks, keep him safe.

Old River he strong, Melody would say, Old River he drink all, all down he

catch.

Old River was both friend and enemy, god and devil to the hisa, stronger than

human courts or decrees or all the forces the Base could bring to bear. It might

kill him, but he didn't care. He knew he was stupid for running, and right now,

he didn't care. Back there at the Base, in the next few minutes, the word would

get around. Where's Fletch? Where's Fletch, the buzz would start. And then

they'd all start saying it.

And he didn't want to be there to hear it. Yes, they'd have the people out

searching. But slower than they'd be out searching, under other circumstances.

Their masks were missing cylinders. They'd have to fill out all that paperwork,

do all those reports. It gave him a strange, light-headed satisfaction. Die?

They wouldn't. Be inconvenienced? A lot. He felt a light-headedness not from

shortness of air, but from a single moment of victory he knew he'd pay for.

He'd worked all his life to get here, and in the end, it wasn't lawyers that

took him away, it was himself, because he'd blown it—and chosen to blow it—at

least he'd chosen it. Stealing those cylinders and running, that wasn't going to

be a minor rules infraction. But it was a choice, damn them all. It was his

choice. When things fell apart, he at least had that to say.

Lightning flashed and thunder cracked right above his head, above the tops of

the trees. His heart jumped and his knees wobbled with the adrenaline rush it

gave him. A planet's surface where electricity flew around like a loose power

line, that was a dangerous thing: water coursed beside the path, not tame Old

River any longer, but a rough-surfaced flood, Old River in one of his killing

moods.

Old River he mad, the downers would say.

Old River he catch you foot, drag you down. Melody had warned him of the

treachery of soft banks among the very first things she'd ever warned him when

he came to the planet. Old River was the devil who always lurked to take the

unwary, and Great Sun was the god—if downers had a religion. Which human experts

argued about in stupid technicalities.

You couldn't ask the downers that. They said if you asked you'd give them ideas

and it might pervert the whole course of downer development, turning it toward

something human.

So what were the domes, fools? Puffer-balls? Nature falling from the sky? They

didn't know about Old River. They recorded downer beliefs about Old River, they

knew the words, but Old River wouldn't cover for them, wouldn't protect them,

wouldn't take care of them, father and devil both.

He'd told Bianca—he'd told Bianca—his thoughts were tumbling wild as the water

near his foot—to say that they were late because he'd gone back to see about the

saw. Wasn't that what they'd agreed to say? That was what she'd have said, if

they went to her. As they would. He'd thought through so many variations on the

lie he'd confused himself.

But that was it, wasn't it? She was supposed to say that, if they questioned her

about being late. So he couldn't use the saw excuse.

He could say, well, he wasn't sure where he'd put the saw, and he remembered

later putting it somewhere else and he wanted to find it—

The hell, after that interview with Nunn? after being told to pack up?

He could still make a case for himself, he could say he'd just been that shaken

and wanted to keep his record clear in case he and Bianca had just missed

finding it out here, but, damn, nobody was going to believe that, and he was

never going to get reassigned down to the Base, never again. He'd blown all the

trust, all the credit he had for common sense…

His foot went in. Cold water pressed the one-way fabric to his leg, and,

sweat-osmosed, a trickle got through and into his boot before, one hand holding

a branch, the other braced against the moss, he hauled himself out and up to

squat on the bank.

Close. Soberingly close. Adrenaline had spiked. It fell, now, leaving tremors,

leaving a side aching and lungs burning with effort.

He knew he'd be smarter to go back on his own, and say—just say he was spooked,

and he'd been a fool, but he'd come back on his own, hadn't he?

If he was Marshall Willett, he'd get a second chance, no problem. Mama and papa

would buy it for him, pull strings, use up favor-points, and Marshall would get

one more chance. But he was Fletcher Neihart, a spacer-brat, son of no one, and

he'd used up all his second chances just surviving his mother's inheritance.

Disaster. The kid had run. Spooked. Elene Quen had the report on her desk, a

personal fax from Nunn, down at the Base, and she sat staring at it, reading it

for any wisdom she could get from it.

Damon had been upset with what she'd done in getting the court order.

Not as upset as she'd expected about the fact of her trading her influence on

Pell for Finity's support: that was a merchanter way of doing business and it

regarded merchanter relations. It was diplomacy, in which diplomats used every

card they had to use and did it in secrecy.

But about what she'd traded, about interference with the Children's Court, he'd

been unexpectedly upset—a distress about the boy's case which she hadn't

predicted, and still, after all these years on station, didn't understand. Damon

was a lawyer, before anything, and believed in processes of law as important for

their own sake, a viewpoint she flatly didn't share in her heart of hearts—only

took his advice, generally, when she crossed from port law, which she did

understand, into station law, which she detested on principle. Perhaps that was

the heart and soul of what was at issue.

The fact that Finity had a right to the boy? In Damon's eyes, that might be

disputable. In her eyes, that was absolute. That the station court had

repeatedly held against that right? In her mind, that was an outrage. Not her

outrage, because it wasn't her ship—she ain't my ship, she ain't my fight was

the rule on dockside—but now a deal had set her firmly on Finity's side in the

matter.

Process for its own sake? Importance of the process? The law might be Damon's

life. But it was an ornament, a baroquerie of station life. In space it just

might kill you.

Maybe, now, by the facts in this report, she'd just lost a kid, following the

station's damned processes. A letter from the boy's independent lawyers, acting

in his interest, had gotten to Nunn before her letter, and dammit, Nunn had

handed that letter to the kid and then let that kid walk out the door, trusting

he was dealing with a stationer mentality who'd tamely, because it was the

orderly thing to do, walk over and pack his belongings and surrender to the law.

Hell if. Fletcher Neihart might have lived on a station, but he hadn't been

brought up by Nunn's rules or Damon's law, not for the first five years of his

life. Not so long as Francesca Neihart had had her kid in hand. He might have

been born on a station, stuck on a station, educated on a station, but one

stationer family after the other had come back to the Children's Court saying

they couldn't handle him.

Now, enterprising lad, he'd stolen a bunch of cylinders, each one about eight

hours of oxygen—if you didn't push it. Three, or less, if you pushed it hard.

And a scared, mad kid didn't know moderation. The cylinders weren't fresh ones,

either. They added up the total use-hours from work records on the people he'd

stolen them from and came up with three days if he was pushing it.

The kid was trying to wait till Finity had left port, was what he was doing: he

was doing things that weren't totally bright on an adult level but that made

perfect sense to a kid She'd brought up two of her own, she knew station-born

sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from personal and recent experience, and right

now the desire to shake the runaway till his teeth rattled mingled with the fear

that spacer directness and stationer legality together might have pushed

Francesca's kid into deeper danger than his limited experience could comprehend.

The fact was, Fletcher Neihart was trying to stand off the whole Alliance court

system and her authority simultaneously, and he was doing a pretty good job of

it—because a starship couldn't sit at dock extra days. Finity couldn't wait. It

had schedules, obligations, operations, God knew, critical operations, with

desperate issues at stake. Fletcher was a Neihart. And he was holding off the

lot of them. Like mother, like son, and like the legendary man whose name he

carried.

And if Nunn had lost that kid, if thanks to people she'd put in charge of

critical operations, station management didn't deliver a live body to Finity

before undock, she would be in a hell of a mess. The agreement she and James

Robert had made for good and solid reasons of policy might stand, but the

decades-long friendship she had with the politically essential Neiharts might

not survive the event.

Hell of a thing for the kid—who right now was wandering a Downbelow woods on

three days worth of cylinders, in a state of mind she could more accurately

imagine than any court could. She knew what it was to be ripped loose from

everything and set adrift in a world that was never going to make gut-level

sense.

But she hadn't done wrong in signing the order or anything else she'd arranged

with the Neiharts of Finity's End. She was right—ethically, morally,

historically right. Leave things to Damon's precious law, and the whole human

race could go down the chute. They'd come near enough in the last phase of the

War: nobody had thrown a planet-buster, but they'd lost a station. They'd nearly

lost two. They could lose a planet the next time the human race went to war. In

order to prevent that happening, she had no illusions. Her enemies claimed she

wanted to destroy Union. That was so. But practically she knew she couldn't do

that. In plain diplomatic reality, the Merchanters' Alliance had to keep the

tight balance of power between themselves and Union, and they had to keep it

balanced no matter how frightening and uncomfortable the attempts of Mazian to

destabilize the Alliance and rebuild his power base, no matter the near-time

choices in terms of her political future, even of her own determination to save

the Quen name—let alone one kid's personal wishes about his domicile.

Fight the microbattles, the ones on paper, on conference tables, sometimes in

public posturings—so they never, ever had to fight another hot war or—the

alternative—lose what was human by acquiescing to Union's high-speed

expansionism.

Instant populations. Cultures planned and programmed by ReseuneLabs on Cyteen.

Ariane Emory. That was what she was fighting, with no knowledge even of their

enemy's internal workings, not at the level they needed in order to make

negotiation work. Emory was a name she knew very well, but the tight control

Union had maintained over ships near Cyteen had limited what she knew. She

planned in the absence of good intelligence information.

Time was what they had to gain. They'd faced, in Azov, in Emory, a faceless

enemy. An alienated humanity Earth had alienated over centuries. An alienated

humanity that didn't operate by the same rules. The very history and process

Damon venerated didn't work out there in the Beyond.

The Fletcher Neiharts of the universe, along with her longtime problem child,

were precious, every one of them. Her throwaway problem couldn't live under

Pell's law… and now that she devoted half an hour's sustained consideration to

the boy as he'd grown to be, she knew why he'd been inconvenient all his

life—that he couldn't thrive in a sealed bubble of a never-changing, zero-growth

world where every decision was for the status quo. He couldn't live in it unless

and until the system crushed him—and she had never let it do that. The

mentalities to respond to the problems Cyteen posed the rest of humanity

couldn't come out of Pell. Neither, for what she could see, could that response

come out of Earth, whose distance- and culture-blinded dealings had driven

Cyteen to become the alien culture it was in the first place.

She had such a narrow, narrow window in which to give a civilization-saving

shove at the clockwork of the system—in things gone catastrophically wrong

between Earth and its colonies in the earliest days of Earth's expansion

outward. The timeliness that had brought her Finity's End in its mission to

reconcile merchanters and Union was the same timeliness that demanded the

Alliance finally wake up to the economic challenge Union posed. It was the

pendulum-swing of the Company Wars: they'd settled the last War, they'd banded

together and shoved hard at the system to get it to react in one way; now the

reactionary swing was coming back at them, the people with the simplistic

solutions, and they had to stand fast and keep the pendulum from swinging into

aggressive extremism on one hand and self-blinded isolationism on the other.

She hadn't forever to hold power on Pell: a new election could depose her inside

a month. People too young to have fought the War were rabble-rousing, stirring

forces to oppose her tenure, special interests, all boiling to the top.

And they might topple her from the slightly irregular power she held if she'd

just killed a kid. James Robert Neihart hadn't forever to live in command of

Finity's End. He was pushing a century and a half, time-dilated and on rejuv.

Mallory's very existence was at risk every time she stalked the enemy, and she

never ceased

At least one set of hands on the helm of state were bound to change in twenty

years. That was a given, and God help their successors. Madison, James Robert's

successor, was a capable man. He just wasn't James Robert, and his word didn't

carry the Old Man's cachet with other merchanters.

The whole delicate structure tottered. Time slowed. Finity's End would have to

wait on a teenaged boy to come to his senses… or lose him, to its public

embarrassment, and her damnation, as things were running now.

And damn him, damn the kid

They lost him, the word floated through the meetings of Finity personnel on

dockside, and there were quiet meetings in cafes, in bars, in the places seniors

met and the junior- seniors could go, circumspectly. JR heard it from Bucklin in

one of those edge-of-reputable places you couldn't go with the juniormost

juniors. The honest truth, because he couldn't sort out how he felt about them

losing Fletcher, was that he was glad it was only Bucklin with him.

All the Old Man's hopes, he thought To start this voyage by finally losing

Fletcher…

What you want to happen, the saying went… What you want to happen is your

responsibility, too. He'd heard that dictum at notable points in his life, and

he wasn't sure how he felt right now.

Guilty, as if he'd gotten a reprieve, maybe. As if the entire next generation of

Neiharts had escaped dealing with a problem it could ill afford.

I will not lie. I will not cheat. I will not steal. I will never dishonor my

Name or my ship…

That pretty well covered anything a junior could get into. And as almost not a

junior, and in charge of the rest of the younger crew, he was responsible,

ultimately responsible for the others, not only for their physical safety, but

for their mental focus. If there was a moral failure in his command, it was his

moral failure. If there was something the ship had failed to do, that attached

to the ship's honor, the dishonor belonged to all of them, but in a major way,

to him personally.

The ship as a whole had all along failed Fletcher. His mother individually and

categorically had failed him.

And what was the woman's sin? A body that had happened to carry another Neihart

life, at a time when the ship hadn't any choice but put her ashore, because to

fail the call Finity's End had at the time hadn't been morally possible.

Finity's End had always been the ship to lead, the ship that would lead when

others didn't know how or where to lead; and she'd had both the firepower and

the engines to secure merchanter rights on the day that firepower became

important, when some ship had had to follow Norway to Earth.

It was impossible to reconstruct the immediacy of the decisions that had gotten

Francesca Neihart into her dilemma. It was certain that they'd had to go to

Norway's aid, and as he'd heard the story, they'd vowed to Francesca, leaving

her on Pell, that they'd be back in a year.

But it had been more than that single year, it had been five; and in that

extended wait, Francesca had failed, or whatever was happening to her had

conspired against her sanity. He didn't himself understand whether it was the

dubious pregnancy or the overdoses of jump drugs she'd taken while she was

ashore, or whether by then Francesca had just consciously chosen to kill

herself.

And worse, she'd done it with a kid involved, a Finity kid, that the station

wouldn't, in repeated tries and reasoned appeals and lawsuits, give back to

them.

In the sense that he was related to that kid and in the sense that he'd talked

himself into accepting responsibility for that kid, he felt a little personal

tug at his heart for Fletcher Neihart, his might-have-been youngest cousin who

was lost down there. The three hundred six lives that Finity had lost in the

War—three hundred seven if you counted Francesca, and he thought now they

should—were hard to bear, but they were a grief the whole ship shared. The most

had died in the big blow when the ship's passenger ring had taken a direct hit.

Ninety-eight dead right there. Forty-nine when they'd pulled an evasion at

Thule. Sixteen last year. Since they'd left Francesca, half the senior crew was

dead, Parton was stone blind, and forty-six more had some part of them patched,

replaced or otherwise done without. Juniors had died, not immune to physics and

enemy action. His mother, his grandmother, three aunts, four uncles and six

close cousins had died.

So on one level, maybe those of them who'd been under fire for seventeen years

were a little short on sympathy for Francesca, who'd suicided after five years

ashore. But in figuring the hell the ship had lived through, maybe no one had

factored in what Pell had been during those years. Maybe, JR said to himself,

she'd died a slower death, a kind of decompression in a station growing more and

more foreign and frivolous.

And with a son growing up part of the moral slide she'd seen around her?

Was that the space she'd been lost in, when she started taking larger and larger

doses of the jump drug and getting the drug from God knew where or how, on

dockside?

Out there where the drug had sent her, damn sure, she hadn't had a kid. Or cared

she had.

That was what he and Bucklin said to each other when they met in the sleepover

bar, in the protective noise of loud music and cousins around them.

"The kid's in serious trouble. Down there is no place to wander off alone,"

Bucklin said, "what I hear. There's rain going on. One rescuer nearly drowned. I

don't think they'll ever find him."

"Board call tomorrow," he said over the not-bad beer. "They're finishing loading

now. Cans are hooked up."

"They're holding the shuttle on-world," Bucklin said. "It's supposed to have

lifted this morning. Can you believe it? So much fuss for one of us?"

The stations didn't grieve over dead spacers. Didn't treat them badly, just

didn't routinely budge much to accommodate spacer rights, the way station law

didn't extend onto a merchanter's deck. Foreign territory. Finity's End had won

that very point decades ago, with Pell and with Union.

But right now, the whisper also was, among the crew—they'd found it out in this

port—Union might make another try at shutting merchanters out. Union had

launched another of the warrior-merchanters they were building, warships fitted

to carry cargo. The whisper, from the captains' contact with Quen and

Konstantin, was that there were many more such ships scheduled to be built.

Meanwhile Earth was building ships again, too, for scientific purposes, they

said, for exploration—as they revitalized the Sol shipyards that had built the

Fleet that had started the War. The whole damned universe was unravelling at the

seams, the agreements they'd patched up to end the War looked now only like a

patch just long enough for the combatants to renew their resources and for Union

to try to drive merchanters out of business. The rumor on Pell was that of

shipbuilding, too, ships to counter Union and maybe Earth.

And now cousin Fletcher had taken out running, the final, chaotic movement in a

bizarre maneuver, while the finest fighting ship the Alliance had was loaded

with whiskey, coffee, and chocolate she hadn't sold at Pell, and now with downer

wine.

"Luck to the kid," JR said, on a personal whim, and lifted his mug. Bucklin did

so, too, and took a solemn drink.

That was the way they treated the news when they heard it was all off, they'd

not get their missing cousin.

But by board call as Finity crew who'd checked out of sleepovers and reported to

the ship's ramp with baggage ready to put aboard, they met an advisement from

the office that boarding and departure would be delayed.

"How long?" JR asked their own security at the customs line, giving his heavy

duffle a hitch on his shoulder. "Book in for another day, or what?"

"Make it two," the word was from the cousin on security. "Fletcher's coming."

"They found him? " JR asked, and:

"He's coming up," the senior cousin said. "They got him just before he ran out

of breathing cylinders. I don't know any more than that."

There were raised stationer eyebrows at the service desk of the sleepover when

all the Finity personnel who'd just checked out came trooping back in with bag

and baggage. The Starduster was a class-A sleepover, not a pick-your-tag robotic

service. "Mechanical?" the stationer attendant asked.

"Unspecified," JR said, foremost of the juniors he'd shepherded back from the

dockside. The rule was, never talk about ship's business. That reticence wasn't

mandated clearly in the Old Rules, but it was his habit from the New Rules, and

he'd given his small command strict orders in the theory that silence was easier

to repair than was too much talk.

"What is this?" Jeremy asked, meeting him in the hallway of the sleepover as he

came upstairs. The junior-juniors were on a later call, B group. "We've got a

hold, sir?"

There was no one in the corridor but Finity personnel. "We've got an extra

cousin," JR said. "They found Fletcher."

"They're going to hold the ship for him?"

They'd always told the juniors they wouldn't. Ever. Not even if you were in

sight of the ramp when the scheduled departure came.

"She's held," JR said, and for discipline's sake, added: "It's unusual

circumstances. Don't ever count on it, younger cousin."

There was a frown of perplexity on the junior's face. Justice wasn't done. A

Rule by which Finity personnel had actually died had cracked. There were Rules

of physics and there were Finity's Rules, and they were the same. Or no one had

ever, in his lifetime, had to make that distinction before. Until now, they'd

been equally unbendable. Like the Old Man.

"How long?" Jeremy asked.

"Planets rotate. Shuttles lift when they most economically can."

"How long's that?"

"Go calc it for Downbelow's rotation and diameter. Look up the latitude. Keep

yourself out of trouble. I will ask you that answer, junior-junior, when we get

aboard. And stay available!" There were going to be a lot of questions to which

there was no answer, and Jeremy, to Jeremy's misfortune, had pursued him when he

was harried and out of sorts. The junior-juniors were going to have to stay on

call. They all were going to have to stay ready to move, if they were on a hold.

That meant no going to theaters or anywhere without a pocket-com on someone in

the group. That meant no long-range plans, no drinking, even with meals, unless

they went on total stand-down.

Francesca's almost-lamented son had just defied the authorities and the planet.

Beaten the odds, apparently.

As far as the cylinders held out.

Just to the point the cylinders had run out, by what he'd heard. By all

calculations, Fletcher should have died by now.

He didn't know Fletcher. No one did. But that said something about what they

were getting—what he was getting, under his command.

Pell and the new Old Rules had felt chancy to him all along. He'd felt relief to

be boarding, with the Fletcher matter lastingly settled; guilty as he'd felt

about that, there had been a certain relief in finality.

Now it wasn't happening.

And nothing was final or settled.

Chapter VI

Contents - Prev/Next

Customs wasn't waiting at the bottom of the ramp. Police were. Fletcher knew the

difference. He shifted an anxious grip on the duffle he'd been sure he was going

to have to fight authority for—again—and knew the game had just shifted

rules—again.

He walked ahead nonetheless, from the yellow connecting tube of the shuttle and

down onto the station dock, into the custody of station police.

He didn't know this batch of police. Many, he did know, and no few knew him by

name, but he was glad he didn't have to make small talk. He handed over his

papers, a simple slip from Nunn and his shuttle authorization, and halfway

expected them to put a bracelet on him, the sort that would drop an adult

offender to his knees if he sprinted down the dock, but they didn't.

"Stationmaster wants to see you," one informed him. "Your ship's waited five

days."

Maybe one or the other piece of information was supposed to impress him. But

he'd met Stationmaster Quen far too many times at too early an age, and he

didn't give an effective damn what kind of dock charges Finity's End was running

up waiting for him. So his interfering relatives had held a starship for him.

They could sit in hell for what he cared.

"Yes, sir," he said in the flat tone he'd learned was neutral enough, and he

went with them, wobbling a little. After the close, medicine-tainted air in the

domes and the too-warm sterile air of the shuttle, the station air he'd thought

of as neutral all his life was icy cold and sharp with metal scents he'd never

smelled before. Water made a puddle near the shuttle gantry, not uncommon on the

docks. The high areas of the dockside had their own weather and tended to

condense water into ice, which melted when lights went on in an area and heated

up the pipes.

Splat. A fat cold drop landed in front of him as he walked. It turned the metal

deck plates a shinier black was all. On Pell Station it had rained, too, clean

and bright gray just a few hours ago. It had been raining nonstop when he'd

left, when he crossed from the van into the shuttle passenger lounge. He'd been

able to see out the windows, the way he'd had his first view of Downbelow from

those doublethick windows, half a year ago.

He'd rather think of that now, and not see where he was. He had no curiosity

about the docks, no expectations, nothing but the necessity of walking, a little

weak-kneed, with the feeling of ears stuffed with cotton. They'd stopped up in

the airlock and the right one hadn't popped yet, petty nuisance. Down at the

shuttle landing, they'd given him a tranquilizer with the breakfast he hadn't

eaten. He'd had no choice about the pill. Not much resistance, either. Things

mattered less than they had, these last few days.

He went with the cops to the lift that would take them out of White Sector,

where the insystem traffic docked—the shuttles among them. He'd gone out the

selfsame dock when he'd made the only other trip of his life, down to Pell's

World. He came back to the station that way. If nothing intervened to prevent

his being transferred, he'd never use White again. He'd be down in Green, or

Blue, where holier-than-anybody Finity docked, too good for Orange or Red. Fancy

places. Money. A lot of money. Money that bought anything.

Anyone.

They took the lift. The lift car was on rails and sometimes it went sideways and

sometimes up and down or wherever it had to take you. This time the car went

through the core, around the funny little turn it did there and out another

spoke of the station wheel.

Hold on, the cops told him at one point, and he dutifully tightened his grip,

not arguing anything, not speaking, not looking at them.

During recent days, flat on his back in infirmary, while they dripped fluids

into him and scanned his lungs for damage he half wished he'd done, he'd had

ample time to realize the fix had been in before he ever ran, and to realize

that his lawyers weren't going to intercede this time. He'd sat by the window on

the way up, unable to see much but the white of Downbelow's clouds, until they

put the window-shields up and stopped him seeing anything of the world.

Necessary precaution against the chance tiny rock as they cleared Pell's

atmosphere. But he'd looked as long as he could.

Now, with cold and unfeeling fingers, he clung to the rail of the car while the

car finished its gyrations through the station core and shot down a good several

levels.

It jolted and clanked to a stop and let them out on more dockside, the cops

talking to someone on their audio. They brought him out onto the metal decking,

with the dark wall of dockside on one side, with its blinding spotlights and

ready boards blazoning the names and registries of ships. A group of people were

standing by a huge structural wall, ahead of him. One, the centermost, was the

Stationmaster.

Dark blue suit, aides with the usual electronics discreetly tucked in pockets;

security, with probably a fancy device or two—you couldn't always tell about the

eye-contact screens, or what the men were really looking at, but they weren't

station police, that was sure. He'd never met Elene Quen in her official

capacity. He guessed this was it.

"Fletcher," Quen said in a moderate, pleasant tone, and offered her hand, which

he took, not wanting to, but he'd learned, having been trained by lawyers. When

you were in something up to the hilt, you played along, you smiled so long as

the authorities were smiling. Sometimes it got you more when you'd been

reasonable: when you did pitch a fit on some minor point, you startled hell out

of them, and consequently got heard if you didn't also scare them.

But that wasn't his motive right now. Right now all he wanted was not to lose

his dignity. And they could take his dignity from him at any time.

"Do you have your visa?" she asked

He had. He'd expected to use it for customs. He fished it out of his coat pocket

and she held out her hand for it.

She didn't look at it. She slipped it into her suit pocket and handed him back a

different one.

He guessed its nature before he looked at the slim card in his fingers. It

hadn't Pell's pattern of stars for an emblem. It was the space-black of Finitys

End, a flat black disc for an emblem, no color, no heraldry, not even the name.

The first of modern merchanters was too holy and too old to use any contrived

emblem, just the black of space itself.

It was a fact in his hand. A done deal. This was his new passport

"You all right?" Quen asked him.

"Sure. No problems."

"Fletcher…" Quen wasn't slow. She caught the sarcasm. She started to say

something and then shut it down, nodding instead toward the dockside. "They're

boarding."

"Sure."

"You went where you weren't supposed to go," Quen said, as if anything he'd done

or could do had changed their intentions.

"I was invited to go." He ought to say ma 'am and didn't. "I was coming back on

my own when they found me."

"You risked lives of your fellow staff members."

"It was their choice to go out there. No one died."

That produced a long silence in which he thought that maybe, just maybe, he

could still throw his case back to the psychs.

"I tried to kill myself," he said, "all right?" He knew a station, even with its

capacity to absorb damage, didn't want a suicide case walking around loose. A

ship going into deep space couldn't be happy at all with the idea. And for a

moment he thought she really might send him off to the psychs and have a meeting

with the ship. If he just got beyond this current try then he'd be at least

eighteen by the time Finity cycled back again, eighteen years old and not a

minor any longer.

"Fletcher," Quen said, "you're good. I'll give you that. But you don't score."

She knew his game. Dead on. And he was too tired, too rattled, and too sedated

to come up with another, more skillfull card.

"Yeah," he said. "Well, I tried."

"Fletcher, I've tried to help you, I've set you up with people where I used up

favors to get you set. And you'd screw it up. Reliably, you'd screw it up."

"Yeah, well, they'd screw it up. How about that?"

"It's a possibility they did. But you never gave anyone a chance."

"The hell!" he said. Temper got past the tranquilizer, and he shut it down. She

wasn't going to needle him into reaction, or salve her conscience, either. "The

Neiharts aren't going to be happy with me. You know that."

"It's not a place to screw up, Fletcher. There's no place to go.—You look at me!

Don't drop your eyes. You look straight at me and you hear this. You give it a

good chance. You give it a good honest try and come back with no complaints from

them and after a year, in the year it's going to take them to get back here, you

can walk into my office as a grown man and say you want to be transferred back.

And I'll intercede for you. Then. Not now."

His heart beat faster and faster. He didn't say anything for the moment. She

waited. He threw out the next challenge: "I screwed up down there. Can you fix

that?"

"I can fix it up here enough to give you a post in the tunnels. You'd work with

downers. You'd stand a chance of working your way back to Downbelow."

It was too good. It was everything handed back to him. On a platter. Everything

but the downers that mattered. Years. Human years. A long time for them. Maybe

too long for Melody and Patch.

"But," Quen said, as firmly, "if you come back with anything on your record,

I'll give Finity the chance to decide whether they want you, and if they don't,

we'll see about an in-depth psych exam to see what you do need to straighten you

out. Do you copy, Mr. Neihart? Is that plain enough?"

"Yes, ma'am." All cards were bet. Straighten you out. That meant psych

adjustment, not just psych tests. It wasn't supposedly a big deal. Just an

instilled fear of sabotage was what they gave you, just a real horror of messing

up the station. But they'd find out, too, what he thought of the human species.

And they'd straighten that kink out of him. They'd rip the heart out of him.

Make him normal, so he could never, ever want to go back to Downbelow.

"It's serious business, Mr. Neihart. It's very serious, life-and-death business.

Are you unstable? Did you try to kill yourself?"

"No, ma'am. Not really."

"Logical decision, was it, to run off into the outback?"

"No. But I'd duck the ship. Miss the undock. Get sent to the psychs."

"It'd lose you your license, all the same."

"Yes, ma'am, but you were taking it away anyway. At least I wouldn't go on the

ship."

She thought about that a moment. She thought about him, and held his life and

sanity in the balance. The noise and clang and clank of the dockside machinery

went on around them, inexorable clank of a loader at work.

"That bad, is it, what we're doing to you?"

"I don't want them. I never wanted them. Hell if they want me."

"Wanting had nothing to do with it, Fletcher. By putting your mother off the

ship, they gave you and your mother a chance to live."

"Well, she died and none of them did damn well by me!"

"They were kind of busy saving this station. Earth. Humanity. In which, if I do

say so, they saved you. And saving the downers, if that scores with you. If the

Alliance had gone under, Mazian's Fleet would have had Downbelow for a source of

supply. They'd have employed very different management methods with the downers.

Or did they cover that in your history courses?"

They had. And he was glad Mazian wasn't at Downbelow, and that someone had kept

the Fleet far away. But the fact that the Neiharts were heroes in that fight

didn't mean anything on a personal level. It didn't bring his mother back. She'd

never been crazy enough the courts didn't dump her kid back with her. And she'd

never been sane enough to sign the papers that would give him up for

adoption—and for Pell citizenship. He didn't forgive her for that.

"Look at me," Quen said. He did, reluctantly, knowing that this was the other

woman largely responsible for his life—every screwed-up placement, every good,

every bad: Quen had personally intervened to keep him from the trouble he'd

gotten into any number of times. The fairy godmother. The magic rescue for him,

that had enabled him not to compete with the likes of Marshall Willett but to

stay out of complete disaster.

And the primary reason, maybe, his mother hadn't gotten psyched-over before she

killed herself. He didn't know what he felt about Quen. He never had understood.

I'll tell you something," Quen said. "You've got the best chance of your life in

front of you. But it's not going to be easy. You've walked off from every family

you've been put with. Aboard ship, you can't walk off; and no matter what you

think, you can't stop being related to these people. These are the real thing,

Fletcher. They're every fault you see in the mirror and every good point you

own. Give them a fair chance."

"Screw them!"

"Fletcher, get it through your head, I envy you. You've got a family. And they

want you. Don't be an ass about it, and let's get over there."

Her ship was destroyed in the War. With everybody on it. And he thought about

taking a cheap shot on that score, the way she'd come back at him, but she'd

held out hope to him, damn her, and she was the only hope. She gathered up her

aides and her security and the cops and they all walked over to the area of the

dock where the board showed, in lights, Finity's End. There was customs; she

walked him past. It was that fast. The gate was in front of him, and he looked

back, looked all around at Pell docks.

Looked back, in that vast scale, even imagining the Wilsons might show up. That

was his last foster-family, the one he was still legally resident with. The one

he even liked.

But the dockside was vacant of anybody but dockers and, he supposed, Finity

crew. Even his lawyers and his psychs were no-shows. Just Quen. Just the cops.

All the little figures, dwarfed by the giant scale of the docks, were strangers.

When he gave it a second thought he guessed he was hurt—hurt quite a bit, in

fact, but the lack of well-wishers and good-byes didn't entirely surprise him.

Maybe Quen hadn't told the Wilsons where he was. Or maybe the Wilsons had heard

about him running away on Downbelow, and just decided he was too crazy, too

lost, too damned-to-hell screwed up.

He didn't know what he'd say to them if they did show up, anyway. Thanks? Thanks

for trying? In the slight giddiness of vast scale and the fading tranquilizer,

he hated his lawyers, hated his families. Every one of them. Even the last.

"Good-bye," Quen told him. "Good luck. See you." She didn't offer her hand.

Didn't give him a chance to refuse it. "You go on up, give your passport to the

duty officer. Follow instructions. You're out of our territory from the time you

cross that line.—Matter of fact, this is the ship that won that particular point

of law as a part of the constitution. That was what the whole War meant. Welcome

to the future."

Screw you and your War, was what he thought as hydraulics wheezed and gasped

around the gate, and the huge gantry moved above him, like some threatening

dragon making little of anything on human scale. He had nothing to back up any

reply to Quen. He owned no dignity but silence and to do what she'd said, go

ahead and go aboard. So he left her standing and, passport in hand, took that

long, spooky walk, up that ramp and into a cold, lung-hurting tunnel far thinner

than the station walls.

He was aware there was black space and hard vacuum out there, beyond that yellow

ribbing. Walking down the tunnel looked like being swallowed by something, eaten

up alive. And it was. The cops would still be waiting at the bottom of the ramp

to be sure he went all the way down this gullet; but when he reached the lock

and confronted a control panel, he wasn't even sure what to do with the buttons.

They said he was spacer-born. And this damned thing had not even the courtesy of

labeling on the buttons.

Hell if he was going to walk back down and ask the Stationmaster which one to

push. Damn ships didn't ever label anything. The station hadn't labeled anything

until the last few years they finally put the address signs up, because they'd

been invaded once and didn't want to give the enemy any help.

He hated the War, and here he was, sucked into a place like a step backward into

a hostile time, right back into the gray, grim poverty of the War years. He

resented it on that score, too.

And since nobody did him the courtesy of advising Finity he was here, he could

stand here freezing in the bitter cold, or he could punch a button and hope the

top one was it and not the disconnect that would unseal the yellow walkway from

the airlock.

The airlock opened without his touching it.

So someone had told them he was here.

But no one was in the airlock to meet him.

He'd never seen a starship's airlock up close, except in the vids, and it was

unexpectedly large, a barren chamber with lockers and readouts he didn't

understand. He walked in and the door hissed shut. Heavily. He was in a

spaceship. Swallowed alive.

Not a citizen of Pell. He never had been. They'd never let him have more than

resident status and a travel visa. He knew all the ins and outs of that

legality. Entitled to be educated but not to vote. Entitled to be drafted but

not to hold a command. Entitled to be employed but not tenured.

Now after all his struggle to avoid it, he'd achieved a citizenship. He became

aware he had a citizen's passport in the hand that held the duffle strings, and

this was where he was born to be.

But Quen hinted that, too, could change.

Lie. They all lied.

The inner door opened, and he walked out of bright light into a dimmer tiled

corridor. No one was there. The corridor went back, not far, before four lighted

corridors intersected it, and then it quit. A ship's ring was locked stable

while they were at dock, and the four side corridors all curved up. The up would

be down when the ship broke dock and the ring started to rotate, but until it

did, this seemed all there was, a utilitarian hallway, showing mostly metal,

insulated floor, the kind of insulated plating you used if you thought a

decompression could happen.

A door to the right was open. He walked that far, his boots making a lot of

metal racket, but a woman came out and met him. So did another woman, and a man.

"Fletcher, is it?" the woman said, and put out a hand.

So, hell, what did he do? He purposely misunderstood and handed her the passport

"Welcome aboard," she said without a flicker, and pocketed it without looking at

it. "Not much time. I'm Frieda N. This is Mary B. And Wes. There's only one.

There's no other Fletcher, either. You're just Fletcher."

He'd never been anything else. Frieda N. held out her hand a second time, and he

took it, finding himself lost in the information flow, wondering if she was

related, how she was related and how any of these people were related to his

mother. His mother had talked about her mother. He had a grandmother. He didn't

know whether she was still alive or not, but spacers lived long lives, and

stationers aged faster. He supposed she might be here.

For the first time it came to him… there was something personal about these

people who assumed they owned him. These people who'd owned his mother. And left

her.

Others came into the hall. "This is your cousin June, Com 3. And Jake. Jake's

chief bioneer, lower deck Ops."

June was an older woman, with a dry, firm handshake, and communications didn't

seem to add up to anybody he needed to deal with. Jake had a thin face, a sober

face, and looked like a cop he knew: not unnecessarily an unpleasant man, but

somebody who didn't have much sense of humor.

Then another man came in, in the kind of waistlength, ribbed-cuff jacket spacers

wore over their coveralls where they were working near the cold side of the

docks. Silver-haired. A lot of stripes on the sleeve.

"Fletcher," Jake said, "this is Madison, second captain."

He'd already spotted authority, and took the hand when it was offered him,

feeling overwhelmed, wobbly in the knees, wobbly in his mental state, knowing he

was going to want to settle how to deal with these people, but all his scenarios

of defiance had evaporated, in Quen's little advisement, her outright bribe for

good behavior.

Not smart at least to screw things up from the start. Start friendly, start

sane, try, one more stupid time, to make the good impression with one more

damned family—his own family.

"Welcome aboard."

"Yes, sir," he said, and Finity's second captain held onto his hand, a

cold-chilled, dry clasp. He felt trapped for good and certain. I don't know you

people, he wanted to shout. I don't give a damn. And here he was doing the safe,

the sensible thing, as somebody else arrived to take his hand. It was a cousin

named Pete, a cargo officer, nobody, in his book. It was one more introduction,

and he wanted just to escape to somewhere private and shut the door.

"Welcome in, Fletcher." Pete was a dark-haired man with a trace of gray in a

beard unusual on dockside—you only saw them on spacers; and it was worth a

stare; he was aware he was staring, losing his focus, while strangers' hands

patted his shoulders, welcomed him in a chaos of names and emotions.

"Pete," Jake said, "you want to show Fletcher to the safe room?"

"Yeah, sure," Pete said, and indicated the duffle. "That's all the baggage you

brought? I'll stow it for you."

"Nossir," he said, and held onto it. Desperately. "No."

Pete relented. Jake said, "Get Warren to make him up a patch set soon as we

leave dock.—What's your height, son? Height and weight, Pell Standard. Six

feet?"

"About. Eighty-five kilos."

"Baggage weight?"

He knew what he'd come downworld with. What they let you bring. "Twenty-two."

"Got it." And with no more fuss and no more word about the duffle Pete took him

out to the corridor and to another room at the next cross-corridor, no simple

room, but a vast curved chamber, a VR theater, he thought, with railings where

everybody stood. Old people, younger ones. A theater full of relatives, hundreds

of them, all staring in sudden quiet in their conversations. "This is Fletcher,"

Pete called out, and someone cheered. "He's late, but he's here!" Pete said.

Others called out hellos and welcome aboard, and, grotesquely enough, applauded.

"Ten minutes," Jake called out, and Pete showed him to a place to stand in the

third row, where people leaned and reached out hands to shake, or patted his

back or his shoulders, throwing names at him. At distances out of reach, they

all talked about him: there couldn't be another topic in the room. Of the ones

in earshot, who called out names to him or introduced each other, there was a

Tom R., a Tom T., a Margaret, a Willy and a Will, there was Roger Y., Roger B.,

and a single Ned; there was a Niles senior, a man with silver at the temples,

and Jake's brother was Louis down in cargo, not to cross him with Lou on the

bridge, who was Scan 2, third shift.

Bridge ranks. Post designations. Old people. Senior crew, with hairline wrinkles

that spoke of rejuv.

Then a handful of crew trooped in with their quilted jackets literally frosted

with cold, ice cracking as they moved. There was a Wendy who looked barely in

her twenties, and a William and a Charles who wasn't Charlie because Charlie was

his uncle, chief medtech, who was at his station, and his mother was Angie.

There were half a dozen Roberts, Rob, Bob, Bobby, and Robbie and a kid they just

called JR, not to cross him with his uncle Captain James Robert, senior captain,

who besides being famous all over the Alliance always went by both names.

Pretentious ass, Fletcher said to himself.

Jim, James and Jamie were all techs of various kinds, old enough to have a touch

of gray; and there was McKenzie, Mac, Madden, and Madison that he'd already met.

He got the picture, if not most of the names. You carried Names, and there

wasn't much creativity about it inside a line of relations: the ones that

carried the same Names tended to be close cousins, the way they were introduced

Close cousins as opposed to remote cousins, which everybody was to each other.

Hi, he said uneasily to each out of reach introduction, saved by distance from

shaking hands, resenting the welcome, resenting them with all the integrity he

could muster. He'd had about half a mother, that was the way he thought about

it: he'd had about half her attention half the time, but that was all the real

relative he ever acknowledged. And here were a ship full of people all claiming

he was tied to them in some miraculous way that didn't mean a damn to him.

Friendly, he supposed so. People had been friendly before, in schools where it

was welcome in until they got to know him up close and discovered he wasn't up

to their standards in some way or another. Not part of the right clubs. Not part

of the right experiences. The right family. The right mother. The right

attitude.

He'd fought his sullen tendencies for years just to get into the program, no

reform, no real change in him. Just in his objectives. God, he'd been friendly.

He'd watched how the accepted ones did it and he'd learned the lessons and

copied—forged—good behavior. And here he was doing it all over again, new start,

one damned more time, one damned more try. Stunned, shocked, still marginally

battling the tranquilizer they'd given him, he did it by now on autopilot,

acting the shy, reserved, pleasant fool with every one of them while his brain,

behind a chemical shield the shuttle authorities had given him, was passing from

numbed shock to outright anger.

Hate you, he kept thinking while he smiled and shook hands. But that wouldn't

get him home again. Wouldn't ever get him to Downbelow.

The monsoons were starting. The shuttle had almost delayed launch because of the

weather and teased him with a last, aching hope that it couldn't get off the

ground and he'd miss his ship even yet

Hadn't worked, had it?

The monsoons were starting and Melody and Patch were off, by now. He'd not seen

them again.

He ran out of hands to shake, and people close enough to shout introductions at

him. "One minute," someone said, and he knew then that this was it: it was

countdown. Pete showed him a toe-hold, a long slot in the carpet, and encouraged

him to settle his toes there. He did, and gripped the safety rail, watching the

tendons on his own hands stand out as white as the knuckles.

Then someone started singing, for God's sake, one of those rowdy old spacer

songs, and the whole company started in, more men than women, deep voices.

Cousin, uncle, whatever-he-was Pete elbowed him in the ribs and grinned at him,

wanting him to pick up on the words and join in. It was a spooky sound: he'd

never heard singers who weren't hyped with sound systems, but this went through

the air and off the walls, and it was a lot of men's voices, singing about

space, singing about going there—when he didn't in the least want to.

That segued to another song that rocked and rollicked, that caught up his basic

fear of space and began with its music and moving beat to break into parts of

his soul he didn't want broken into right now, painful parts, aching with loss

at a parting he didn't want.

Came a powerful thump and clank, and a light started flashing in the overhead.

But that singing drowned other sounds as they started to move, and bodies

swayed. For a moment there wasn't any up or down, and he grabbed the rail hard.

Pete, next to him, grabbed him and held on, a human reassurance—nobody even

missing a beat except to laugh, and he had his toe hooked in the slot, but he

wasn't sure it was enough.

Terror whited out all other thoughts, then, terror that things were moving so

fast, that it was all real, and all his objections were spent to no avail.

They'd just broken their connection to Pell. They were backing away.

The floor began just slightly to be the floor again, but he was afraid to let

go, not clearly reasoning what had just happened, because Pete didn't let go of

his arm and something more might be coming. People were laughing, and the song

was rowdy and wild, while something in his heart went numb and the outer body

was shaking. He was afraid Pete knew how scared he was, and that they'd all make

some joke of it. But down, down, down his body settled, force pressing his feet

to the floor, while a terrified fraction of his mind told him the passenger ring

was rotating now, and the ship was still drifting back from the station dock,

inertial.

Came a stress then that made him lose his sense of up and down. Bodies, tightly

packed all around, swayed at the rails. People cheered, excited, glad to be

going.

The singing had stopped, with that. He kept a white-knuckled grip on the rail,

not knowing how long it would go on. Then it did stop, and there was thundering

quiet, as if he'd gone deaf.

"Good lad," Pete said. "We're away. Duty stations. Stay by the door and

somebody'll post you somewhere. Mind, if there's a take-hold, hang on to the

rails."

He unbelted amid snicks and snaps from all over the hall. He got shakily to his

feet as Pete hurried off, as people began moving for the door, everyone exiting

into the corridor with a buzz of talk and a feeling that everybody except him

knew where they were going and had to be there. Urgently.

He was scared of what they called take-holds, motion alarms. He'd seen enough

disasters in vids to make him nervous. He lost Pete in the rush and set himself

beside the door where Pete had told him to be, standing with his duffle beside

him as people moved hurriedly by him. He could see up the curved floor that was

walkable now and lighted in either direction, curves sharper than the vast

curves of Pell Station. If the scale was shorter, their rotation rate had to be

higher, and he felt sick at his stomach.

Cold. Chilled through. Everything was browned metal. Noisy. All around him,

hurrying bodies, sharp shouts of orders or information he didn't begin to grasp.

"Fletcher!"

He jerked about at the sharp address. The kid named JR came up to him. The

captain's nephew. Fa-mi-ly. Highest of the high on this ship.

"Stow that fast," JR said pointing at the baggage. "For future information,

you're not to carry baggage aboard. You turn it in at the cargo port. You get

around to your quarters first thing, get your stuff put away, don't leave any

latches open—

"I'm not stupid," he said.

"I didn't ask if you were stupid. I said latch the lockers tight."

"Look here…"

"I'm an officer," JR said. "Junior captain. You're excused for not knowing that.

Clean slate, fast orientation, pay attention. This is A deck. Up above is B.

Stay off B deck. Everything you want's on A until you've got orders to be on B.

Your quarters number is A26. You copy?"

"Yes."

"That's yes, sir, Fletcher, if you'll kindly remember."

"Yessir," he muttered, too tired to fight. This JR didn't look a day older than

he was. But he was the captain's nephew. He got the picture.

"Get your stuff tucked in, get down to A14—that's the laundry, same corridor,

down ten doors—and get some work clothes before we hit the safety perim and do

another burn. You've got time. That's about an hour. You draw three sets of

coveralls, underwear, what you need; and when we're underway that's where you'll

report for duty. A14."

"Laundry?"

"Laundry and commissary. You start out there, work your way up to galley. We'll

see later what you do know."

"Biochem. Life sciences." He didn't want a job. But he had most of his degree.

He'd worked for it. And he didn't do laundry.

"You'll get a chance at whatever you're qualified to do," JR said, tight-lipped

and tight-assed, about his size, maybe ten kilos less. And self-important as

hell. "While I'm at it, let me explain something to you as politely as I can.

This whole ship delayed five days for you. It never will again. If you're on a

liberty and you don't answer board call, you're on your own. We won't buy you

back twice. You know what two hundred twenty-four hours at dock costs this

ship?"

"Damn you all, you can leave me at this station and I'll be happy. Give me a

suit. I'll take my chances station'll rake me in. That's the only favor you

could do me!"

JR gave him a look as if maybe he hadn't quite understood that part of the

equation. "Then you're out of luck," JR said then. "If it were up to me, you'd

be on the dockside. But you're here. You're in my crew, and what I ask of you is

simple: show up on time, do your job, wait your turn and ask if you don't

understand something. This ship's on a schedule, it moves, and physics doesn't

care what your excuse is. If you hear a siren, you see these handholds?" JR

gripped a handle inset in the wall. "You grab one and hang on. That'd be an

emergency. It happens. If you don't hold on, you could die. Fourteen did, last

year. End warning. Go pick up your clothes at the laundry window. That's A14,

down to your right."

He picked up the duffle and started off.

"Yessir," he muttered, "yessir. Yessir." And walked off.

He had something material to lose if he got on the wrong side of this officer

who looked his age and acted as if he owned the ship. He learned fast. He took

the cues. He knew now the guy was a tight-assed jerk. He knew sooner or later

they'd come to discuss it again.

He went where he was told, feeling sick at his stomach and telling himself Quen

was probably conning him and had no intention of putting him back on station. He

wasn't important enough to matter to people on her level. He never had been.

The Neiharts were far more important to Quen, collectively. For their sake, that

jumped-up jerk nephew of the captain would be. And if by then they had an active

grudge, JR would use every influence to see him set down. He knew that equation,

in his heart of hearts.

Lies. Lies that moved him here, moved him there. When the world stopped shifting

on him for an hour, he'd think, and when he learned the new rules well enough to

know how to maneuver in this new family, he'd do something. Not yet. Not now.

Not soon enough to prevent being shipped out of the solar system. He had no hope

now except to live that year, and get back, and see if the court or Quen had

another round to play.

That wasn't, JR said to himself, watching the retreating view, the most

auspicious beginning of a situation he'd ever set up… and truth was, he hadn't

handled it as well as he could.

That was a seventeen-year-old, not someone in his mid-twenties. You forgot that

when you looked at him. It was too easy to react as if he were far older.

The Old Man had told him, when they knew the shuttle was on its way, "He's all

yours." And then added: "All these years. All these years, Jamie. The only one

of all the lost kids we'll ever get back."

Five days. Five days they'd held in port, with cargo in their hold, the heated

cans drawing power, the systems up, because until the third day, they hadn't

gotten a medical go-ahead on Fletcher's shuttle ride up, and they hadn't been

sure they could get a shuttle flight out through worsening atmospheric

conditions. Then it had been more expensive to bring systems down again and go

back on station power than it was to stay on their own pre-launch ready systems.

That meant that crew had had to board to run those systems, cycling in and out

of a departure-ready ship to the annoyance of customs and the aggravation of

crew stuck with the jobs and having to suit and clamber about in the holds.

Fletcher was welcome aboard and politely, even warmly, welcomed aboard, but it

was with a certain edge of irritation with their fast-footed cousin, from all of

them who'd been put on that unprecedented hold.

Fletcher had also broken ten thousand regulations down on the planet and fled

into the outback of Downbelow, just in case holding up a starship wasn't enough.

He'd been picked up at death's door and lodged in a Downbelow infirmary while

the planetary types and batteries of scientists tried to figure out what he'd

done, what he'd screwed with, what he'd screwed up and what damage he might have

done to the only alien intelligence in human reach.

A Finity crew member had done that. That was how the outside would remember it,

and Fletcher, an honorable name, would be notorious in rumor forever if he had

in fact lastingly harmed anything on the planet.

Quen had shoved Fletcher toward the ship at high speed, keeping him out of

station custody by taking him directly across the docks, not ever bringing him

into administrative levels and procedures where Pell administration could get

their experts near him for another round of questioning. Fast work from a canny

administrator.

And, thank God, Finity had been able to make departure on the schedule they'd

finally been able to set, while all Pell Station had to be buzzing with

speculation regarding the delay that kept Finity in port—speculation that was no

longer speculation as the news filtered through the station legal department and

the rumor mill that Finity was recovering a long-lost crew member. Then the

story had been all over station news.

Notorious in Finity's affairs from the day he was born, an embarrassment and a

tragedy on Finity's record from the hour his mother had begun her downward

drug-induced slide—Fletcher was all theirs now. Captain James Robert set great

store by recovering him, and he was somehow supposed to make something of him.

Meanwhile the report up from the medics on the planet said Fletcher's lungs were

clear.

So his guess was right and despite the speculation to the contrary, Fletcher

hadn't half tried to kill himself rather than be taken to the ship. Fletcher

could have walked out of the domes with no cylinders if he'd wanted to do that,

as best he understood the conditions down there.

No. It had been no suicide attempt, regardless of the speculation in the station

news. Fletcher simply had tried to lie low until schedule forced them to abandon

him again, and hell if the Old Man was likely to give him up on that basis. It

had come down to a test of patience, an incident now with an unwanted publicity

that could harm Quen at the very least

He found it significant that the Old Man hadn't even asked to see the nephew on

whom they'd spent such effort. It was a fair guess it was because the Old Man's

temper was still not back from hyperbolic orbit.

That meant, in the Old Man's official silence toward young Fletcher, the whole

business of settling Fletcher in was definitively his problem.

His problem, his unit, his command, and his job to fix.

"So what do you think?" Bucklin stopped beside him to ask as he stood thinking

on the Fletcher problem.

Bucklin had a temper where it came to junior misbehaviors; and he already knew

Bucklin was annoyed But Bucklin was also the one who'd stand by him,

next-in-command, as Madison had stood by the Old Man in the last century of

time, come hell or high water. They were right hand and left, both in the

captain's track, both destined for backup to Alan and Francie when they

succeeded Madison and the Old Man. They'd always been a set—and became closer

still over years that had seen their mothers lost, when half the juniors alive

had died in the blow-out, when they'd had no juniors born for all of Fletcher's

seventeen years.

The last kid. The very last until one of the women got Finity another youngest,

and until stationside encounters began to fill the long-darkened kids' loft:

that also was part of the change in the Rules. Real liberties. Unguarded

encounters. Finity's women were going off precautions, and some talked

excitedly, even teary-eyed, about babies—the scariest and most irrevocable

change in the Rules, the one that, at moments, argued that the Rules change was

permanent.

But the need for children born was also absolute. The ship had to, at whatever

risk, repopulate itself.

What do you think? Bucklin asked. What he thought was tangled with yesterday and

bitter losses.

"Just figuring," JR said. "Ignore the face. The guy's seventeen. Just keep

telling yourself those are station-years. The Old Man said it. Out of all those

years, he's all the replacement we've got. So here we are."

Chapter VII

Contents - Prev/Next

Number A26. At least they believed in posting numbers inside the ship. Fletcher

found the door of his quarters and elbowed the latch. It wasn't locked. And it

slid open on a closet of a room with two bunks, barely enough room between them

for a person to stand up. A couple of lockers at the end. God, it was a closet.

And two bunks? He had to share this hole? With one of them?

He wasn't happy. But it was a place, and until now he'd had none. He walked in

and the door shut the moment he cleared it. He stood there, appalled and this

time, yes, he tested it out, angry. He wanted to throw things. But there wasn't

a single item available except the duffle he'd brought, no character to the

place, just—nothing. Cream and green walls, lockers that filled every wall-space

above the mattresses and bed frames. Cream-colored blankets secured with safety

belts. That promised security, didn't it?

A check of the lighted panel at the end of the room, which looked to fold back,

showed a toilet and a shower compartment, a mirror, a sink, a small cabinet. The

place was depressingly claustrophobic. He checked the lockers out, found the

first right-hand one full of somebody's stuff—bad news, that was—and slammed it

shut, tried the left-hand side and found it empty, presumably for the clothes

he'd brought.

There was more storage under the bunk, latched drawers that pulled out. He

unpacked his duffle and stowed his dock-side clothes, his underwear, his

personal stuff, where he figured he had license to put them.

Most carefully, he unwrapped what he really wanted to put away safely, the most

precious thing—the hisa stick he'd wrapped in layers of his clothes.

The stick that customs hadn't found. That the authorities on Downbelow hadn't

confiscated. That everything so far had conspired to let him keep. It was hisa

work. It was a hisa gift.

It was illegal to touch, let alone to have and to take off-planet. But hisa

bestowed them on special occasions—deaths, births, arrivals. And partings.

He smoothed the cords that tied the dangling feathers. The wood—real wood—was

valuable in itself. But far more so was the carving, the cord bindings, the

native feathers—only a very, very few such items ever left Downbelow, and the

government watched over those with jealous protection from exploitation of the

species, their skills, their beliefs.

But this particular one was his. He'd told his rescuers how he'd gotten it, and

where he'd gotten it, and wouldn't turn it loose. The planetary studies

researchers had grilled him for hours on it, and he'd thought they might try to

take it—but they'd only asked to photograph it, and put it through decon, and

gave it back after that, and let him take it with him. He'd expected customs

would confiscate it and maybe arrest him for trying to smuggle it out, a hope he

actually entertained, thinking that maybe a snafu like that would get him

snagged in the gears of justice again and maybe keep him off the ship—but Quen's

intervention had meant he hadn't even had to deal with customs.

So one obstacle after another had fallen down, maybe Quen's doing all along, and

by now he supposed it really was his. And it was all he'd managed to take away

that meant anything to him.

It meant all the hard things. It meant lessons Melody had tried to teach him—and

failed.

It meant parting from where he'd been. It meant a journey. It meant eyes

watching the clouded heavens. It meant faith, and faithfulness.

Maybe a human who was born to space couldn't have the faith hisa had in Great

Sun. Maybe he couldn't believe that Great Sun was anything but what they said in

his education, a nuclear furnace. Maybe Great Sun wasn't a god, maybe there was

no god, or whatever hisa thought or expected when they looked to the sky. But

Melody was so sure that Great Sun would take care of his children, that Great

Sun would always come back, that the dark never lasted…

The dark never lasted.

For him it would. Forces he couldn't control had shoved him out where the dark

went on forever, where even Melody's Great Sun couldn't walk far enough or shine

brightly enough. That was where he was now.

But this stick he touched had lived, once. These feathers had flown in the

fierce winds, once. Old River had smoothed these stones. All these things, Great

Sun had made. And they were real in his hand, and he could remember, when he

felt them, what the cloud-wrapped world felt like. They were his parting-gift.

Hisa put such sticks on the graves of the dead, human and hisa. They put them

near the Watcher-statues. And when the researchers asked, bluntly, why, the hisa

didn't have the words to say.

But he knew. He knew. It was when you went away. It reminded you. It was a

memory. It was the River and Great Sun, it was weather and wind. It was all

those things that he'd almost touched, that the clean-suit only let him imagine

touching without a barrier. It was waking up to a sunrise, and watching the

world wake up. It was sleeping in the dark with no electric lights and waiting

for Great Sun to find his child again—knowing that Great Sun would come for him

the way Melody had come in the darkest hour of his childhood, when he was hiding

from all the crazed authorities.

That was the faith the hisa had. That was what he took away with him.

Bianca had sworn she'd wait for him. But he knew. People didn't keep such

promises. Ever. And hisa couldn't. Their lives were too short, too precious for

waiting. It was why they made the Watchers.

And now Quen had tried to psych him with this last-minute offer of hers… just a

psych-out. A ploy to get Fletcher to behave, one more time.

He wound the dangling cords about the stick and put it away in the back of the

underbunk drawer, behind his spare station clothes, so no prying roommate would

find it

He quietly closed the drawer, telling himself he was stupid even to think of

falling for Quen's line. He knew the drill. He could almost manage a cynical

amusement past the usual little lump in his throat that conjured all the other

bad times of his life. Have a fruit ice, kid. Have another. You'll like it here.

Look, we've got you a teddy bear.

Ten weeks later the new family'd be back to the psychs saying he was

incorrigible.

This one was already a disaster.

Work in the laundry, for God's sake. He'd pulled himself from police-record

nothing into a degree program in Planetary Studies, and his shiny new family had

him doing laundry and matching socks. That was damn near funny, too, so funny it

made the lump in his throat hurt like hell.

He latched the drawer. The locker didn't have a lock. The bath didn't have a

lock. When he looked at the door to the outside, it didn't have a lock. There

wasn't anywhere that was his.

All right, he said to himself for the tenth time in five minutes, all right,

calm down. A year. A year and he'd be back to Pell and he'd survive it and if

Quen reneged, he'd go to court. Do what they said, keep them happy until, back

at Pell after that year, he ran for it and held Quen to her word.

Meanwhile the captain's nephew had said go back down to the laundry and check

out some clothes. He could do that, while his heart hammered from anger and his

ears picked up a maddening hum somewhere just below his hearing and he wasn't

sure of the floor. He told himself he was going to walk around, telling himself

he wasn't going to be sick at his stomach, he wasn't even going to think about

the fact that the ship was moving. He walked out to the hall and down to A14, to

the laundry.

He wasn't the only one looking for clean clothes. He stood in a line of six, all

of whom introduced themselves with too damn much cheerfulness, a Margot with a

-t, a Ray, a Nick, a Pauline, a Johnny T., and a John Madison who, he declared,

wasn't related to the captain. Directly.

He didn't intend to remember them. He wasn't remotely interested. He was polite,

just polite. He smiled, he shook hands. Their chatter informed him you could

pick up more than laundry at the half-door counter. You could buy personal items

on your account, if you had an account, which as far as he knew he didn't. As he

approached the counter he could see, beyond the kid handing out the clothes, a

lot of shelves with folded clothing sorted somehow. He saw mesh sacks of laundry

left off and folded stacks of clean clothes picked up, and this supposedly was

going to be his post. Big excitement.

"Fletcher," he told the kid at the desk.

"Wayne," the kid said. He looked no more than sixteen. "Glad you made it. So you

take over here after next burn."

"Seems as if." He mustered no false cheerfulness. The other kid on duty, Chad,

went and got the size he requested "Finity patch is on," Chad said of the ship's

blues he got. "Personal name patch, Sam'll get to it as he can. He makes 'em.

He'll get it done for you before we go up."

Up meant leave normal space. He knew that. He knew it was regularly about five

days a ship took between leaving dock and exiting the system. "Yeah," he said.

"Thanks."

A small plastic bag landed on top of the stack of folded blues, toiletries, and

such. "There you go."

"Thanks," he said again, and carried his stack of slippery-bagged new clothes

back the way he'd come, along a corridor that curved very visibly up.

That was it. He was assigned, checked in, uniformed, and set.

His gut was in a knot. He wanted to hit the first thing he came to. Nothing made

sense. His stomach was sending him queasy signals that up and down were out of

kilter, the horizon curves were steeper than he'd ever dealt with, and he was

going to be a little crazy before he got off this ship, crazy enough he'd have

memorized JR, James Robert, John, Johnny, Jake, Jim, and Jimmy, Jamie and all

his damn relatives.

He opened the door to his room. This time there was a kid on the other bunk. A

kid maybe twelve, dark-haired, dark-eyed, eyeing him with equal suspicion.

"Hi," the kid said after a beat "I'm Jeremy."

"Yeah?" Defensively surly tone.

Defensively surly back. "I got lucky. We're bunkmates."

He must have frozen stock still a heartbeat. His heart speeded up. The rest of

the room phased out.

"No, we're not," he said, and threw his new issue down on the other bunk.

"I live here," was the indignant protest, in a pre-adolescent voice. "First."

"No way in hell. This does it! This is the limit!"

"Well, I don't want you here either!" the kid yelled back.

"Good," he said. His voice inevitably went shaky if he didn't let his temper

blow and the struggle between trying to be fair with a hapless twelve-year-old

and his desire to punch something had his upset gut in an uproar. It was the

whole business, it was every lousy, stinking decision authorities had made about

him all his life, and here it was, summed up, topped off and proposing he was

rooming with a damned kid.

He dumped his new clothes on the bed. The door had closed. He went back and hit

the door switch.

"They're about to sound take-hold," the kid's voice pursued him as he left. "You

can't find anybody! You'll break your neck!"

He didn't damn care. He started down the hall, and heard someone shout at him

and then footsteps coming.

"Don't be stupid!" Jeremy said, and caught his sleeve. "They're going to blow

the warning. You haven't got time to get anywhere else! Get back in quarters!"

The kid was in earnest. He had no doubt of that. He didn't want to give up or

give in, but the kid was worried, and maybe in danger, trying to stop him. He

yielded to the tug on his arm and went back toward the room, wondering if he was

being conned, or whether the kid knew what he was talking about. It was

convincing enough.

And they no sooner were back in the room with the door shut than a warning

sounded and Jeremy dived for his bunk.

"Belt in," Jeremy said, and he followed Jeremy's example, unclipped the safety

belts and lay down, with the siren screaming warning at them all the while.

"Got time, there's time," Jeremy said, horizontal and fastening his belt. "God,

you don't ever do that!"

He ignored the kid's concerns and got the belt snugged down, telling himself if

this turned out to be minor he was going to be madder than he was.

Then force started to build, not downward, but sideways, and the mattresses

tilted sideways, so that he had a changing view of the inside bottom of the bunk

beside him. His arms weighed three times normal, his whole body flattened and he

could only see the bottom of Jeremy's bunk, both rotated on the same axis, both

swung perpendicular to the acceleration that just kept increasing.

He couldn't fight it. He found himself shaking and was glad Jeremy couldn't see

it. He was scared. He could admit it now. He was up against something he

couldn't fight, caught up in a force that could break him if he ran out there in

the hall and pitted himself against it. It went on, and on.

And on.

And on.

There wasn't that much racket. Or vibration. Or anything. He shivered from fear

and ran out of energy to shiver. He couldn't see Jeremy. He didn't know what

Jeremy was doing. And finally he had to ask. "How long do we do this?"

"Three hours forty-six minutes."

Shivering be damned. "You're kidding!"

"That's three hours fifteen to go," Jeremy's high voice said. "We like to clear

Pell pretty quick. Lot of traffic. Aren't you glad you didn't go in the

corridor?"

He couldn't take being squashed in his bunk for three hours with nothing to do,

nothing to view, nothing to think about but leaving Pell. Or the ship hitting

something and everybody dying. "So what do you do when you're stuck like this?"

"You can do tape. Or read. Or music. Want some music?"

"Yeah."

Jeremy cut some on, from what source he wasn't sure. It was loud, it was

raucous, it was tolerable. At least he could sink his mind into it and lose

himself in the driving rhythm. Inexorable. Like the ship. Like the whole

situation.

It occurred to him finally to wonder where they were going. He'd never asked,

and neither Quen nor his lawyers had told him. Just—from Quen—the news he'd be

gone a year.

He asked when the music ran out. And the answer came from the unseen kid

effectively double-bunked above his head:

"Tripoint to Mariner to Mariner-Voyager, Voyager, Voyager-Esperance, Esperance,

and back again the way we came. There's supposed to be real good stuff on

Mariner. Fancier than Pell."

Partly he felt sick at his stomach with the long, long recital of destinations.

And he supposed he had to be glad their route was inside civilized space and not

off to Earth or somewhere entirely off the map.

But he felt his heart race, and had to ask himself why he'd felt this little…

lift of spirits when the kid said Mariner—which was supposed to be a sight to

see. As if he was glad to be going to places he'd only heard about and had

absolutely no interest in seeing.

But they were places Pell depended on. It wasn't the Great Black Nothing

anymore. He knew what places were out there. And Mariner was civilized.

"How you doing?" Jeremy asked in his prolonged silence,

"Fine." The compulsory answer. The polite answer. But he got a feeling Jeremy at

least considered him part of his legitimate business. And for a scruffy, skinny

twelve-year-old, Jeremy was level-headed and sensible. There were probably worse

people to get stuck with.

For a twelve-year-old. The obvious suddenly dawned on him. He knew that spacers

didn't age as fast as stationers. Sometimes they'd be ten, fifteen years off

from what you thought—little that the difference from stationers' ages had ever

mattered to him, and little he'd dealt with spacers except his mother. But—on a

kid—even a fraction of ten or fifteen years—was a major matter.

He was moderately, grudgingly curious. "Mind me asking?—How old are you?"

"Seventeen," was Jeremy's answer.

Good God, was his thought. Then he thought maybe the kid knew he was seventeen

and was ragging him.

"Same age as you," Jeremy's voice said from the bunk above his head. "We'd have

been agemates. Except your mama left."

"You're kidding. Right?"

"Matter of fact, no. I'm actually couple of months older than you. I was already

born when your mama left to have you on Pell, and there was question about

leaving me, but they didn't. So you're kind of like my brother.—We'd have been

close together, anyway."

He didn't know what he felt, except upset. He'd been through the this is your

brother routine four times with foster-families. He'd tried to pound one kid

through the floor. But this was not only an honest-to-God relative, this was the

kid he really would have grown up with, and been with, and done kid things with,

if his mother hadn't timed out on him and left him in one hell of a mess.

This was the path he really, truly hadn't taken.

"I wish you'd been born aboard," Jeremy said, "There weren't any kids after us

two, I guess you know. They couldn't have 'em during the War. They will, now.

But our years were already pretty thin. And then we lost a lot of people"

Fletcher found a queasiness in his stomach that was partly anger, partly—he

didn't know. He could see what he might have grown into by now, a scrawny

twelve-year-old body that was so strange he couldn't imagine what Jeremy's mind

was like, seventeen and stuck at physical twelve.

It wasn't natural.

It wasn't natural, either, their being separated. He didn't know. He didn't

know, from where he was lying, what kind of a life he'd missed. He only knew the

life he was leaving, with all it did mean.

Besides, all the sibs people had tried to present him had ended up hating him,

the way he hated them… except only Tony Wilson, who was in his thirties and his

last foster sib. Tony'd been distant. Pleasant. The Wilsons had recognized he

was a semi-adult, and just signed his paperwork, had him home from school dorms

for special holidays, provided a legal fiction of a family for him to fill in

school blanks with. Tony hadn't ever remotely thought he was a rival. He

supposed he'd liked Tony best of all the brothers he had, just for leaving him

the hell alone most of the time and being pleasant on holidays.

Their not showing up when he was shipped out… that hurt. That fairly well hurt.

So who the hell was Jeremy Neihart and why should he care one more time?

"So," Jeremy said in another long silence, "did you like it on the station?"

The question went right to the sore spot."Yeah," he said "Yeah, it was fine."

"You have a lot of friends there?"

"Sure," he said Everything was pleasant. Everything was fine. Never answer How

are you? with anything but, and you never got further questions.

"So—what'd you do for entertainment?"

There hadn't been any entertainment, hadn't been any letup. Just study. Just—all

that, to get where he'd been, where they ripped him out of all he'd accomplished

There wasn't an, Oh, fine… for that one.

"I've got a lot of tapes," Jeremy said when he didn't answer. "We kind of trade

'em around. I got some from Sol. We can pick up some more at Mariner, trade off

the skuz ones. I spent most of my money on tapes."

"I don't have any" he answered sullenly. Which wasn't the truth, but as far as

what a twelve-year-old would appreciate, it was the truth.

"You can borrow mine," Jeremy said

"Thanks"he said. He was too rattled and battered about any longer to provoke a

deliberate fight with the kid. The kid.

His might-have-been brother. Cousin. Whatever they might have been to each other

if not for the War and his addict mother.

On a practical level, Jeremy's offer of tapes was something he knew he'd be glad

of before they got to Mariner. He needed something to occupy his mind if they

had to lay about for hours like this, or he'd be stark, staring crazy before

they cleared the solar system. Tapes to listen to also meant he didn't have to

listen to Jeremy, or talk about might-have-beens, or deal with any of them. Plug

in, tune out. He didn't care what Jeremy's taste in music turned out to be, it

had to be better than dealing with where he was.

He was going to see the universe. Flat on his back and feeling increasingly

scared, increasingly sick at his stomach.

He did know some things about ships. You couldn't breathe the air on Pell

Station without taking in something about ships and routes and cargo. Besides

knowing vaguely how they'd travel out about five days and jump and travel and

jump, he knew they'd load and unload cargo and the captains would play the

market while the crew drank and screwed their way around the docks. Just one

long parry, which was why he had absolutely no idea who his father was. His

mother had just screwed around on dockside because, sure, no spacer gave a damn

who his father was. Mama was everything.

As he guessed Jeremy had a mother aboard, but he didn't know why Jeremy wasn't

living with her, or for that matter, what he was supposed to be to his

roommate's mother. Everybody aboard was related. It was all the J's. Jeremy,

James, Jamie and Johnny, Jane, Janette, Judy, Jill and Janice. Who the hell

cared?

What was it like for a mother to have a seventeen-year-old kid Jeremy's size?

What was it to have your mind growing older and your body staying younger than

it was?

Or was Jeremy more than twelve mentally? The voice didn't sound like it, Jeremy

wouldn't have lived those seventeen years, he guessed, but he'd have watched

seventeen years of events flow past him, in the news and on the ship. He'd—

Force just—quit. The bunks swung, and he grabbed the edges of the mattress with

the feeling he was falling.

"Takehold has ended," came from the speakers. "Posted crew, second shift, you

lucky people. All systems optimal."

Jeremy was unbelting and sitting up. He figured he dared. His head was still

feeling adrift in space.

"You play cards?" Jeremy asked.

"I can." He didn't want to. But he didn't want to do anything else, either. "Can

we go in the halls?"

"Corridors. Stations have halls. We have corridors. Just so you know. Vince'll

snigger, else. And we're off-shift right now. Best stay in quarters if you don't

want to work. You wander around, some senior'll put you to work. Poker?"

"How long do we have to stay lying around like this?"

"Oh," Jeremy said, "about another couple of hours. Till we clear the active

lanes."

"I thought that was what we were doing."

"Just gathering V. We'll run awhile at this V. Then step up again. Four or five

times before we get up to speed. We could do it all at once. But that's real

uncomfortable."

"Deal," he said glumly, and Jeremy bounced up, got into his bunk storage and

rummaged out a plastic real deck.

Twelve-year-old body, he thought, watching the unconscious energy with which

Jeremy moved. There were advantages to being twelve that even at seventeen you'd

lost.

"Favor points or money?" Jeremy asked.

He knew about favor points. If you lost you ended up doing somebody's work for

him. He had no money. He didn't know where he'd get any. He'd rather play for no

points at all, because Jeremy handled those cards with dexterity a dockside

dealer could envy.

"Points," he said.

"You haven't got an assignment yet."

"Yes, I do. Laundry."

"Oh, we all do that." The cards cascaded between Jeremy's hands. Fletcher bet he

could do it under accel, too. "Future points. How's that?"

"Fine," he said.

He lost an hour to Jeremy. And was trying to win it back when a buzzer went off

and scared him.

"Dinner," Jeremy said, scrambling to his feet to get the door.

Somebody, another kid, whose name Fletcher didn't bother to listen to, had a

sack, and out of that sack the junior handed them two box suppers, little

reusable kits containing—Fletcher's hopes crashed as he looked—cold synth cheese

sandwiches.

"Is this all we get?" Fletcher asked.

"Galley's shut down," Jeremy said "It'll be up next watch."

"How's the food then?"

"Real good," Jeremy said "We got real good cooks. Or we space 'em."

Tired joke, but reassuring. Fletcher ate his synth cheese sandwich and drank the

half-thawed fruit juice, trying to calm down. Very basic things had started

mattering to him. He'd just about lost his composure, finding out food this

evening was a sandwich. Shaky adjustment. Real shaky.

And here he was again. Been here before. Everything was new. Everything was the

same as it had ever been. Worse than it had ever been. Spent half his seventeen

years climbing out of the mess mama had left him in and here he was, back at the

starting point.

The real one this time.

The lump in his throat went away. Sugar and protein helped. He figured he'd get

good at poker on this cruise, if nothing else. Jeremy wasn't so bad, for mental

twelve-—or a little more than that. Probably others weren't.

When they ripped you out of one home and put you someplace else you tried never

again to think of where you'd been, or miss anything about it. You just built as

solid a wall as you could, So there was just a wall. Just a blank behind him. At

least until the pain stopped.

…

Two hours into maindark and the Old Man finally asked. "How's Fletcher?"

And JR, on the when-you're-free summons to the Old Man's topside office, gave

the answer he'd predetermined to give: "Autopilot. He's functioning. He's not

happy with this."

"One wouldn't think so," James Robert said. James Robert wasn't at his desk, but

in the soft chair from which he did a great deal of his business. Cargo listings

on the wall display screens had given way to system status reports and

navigational data. "Has Jeremy complained?"

Jeremy had a beeper. With instructions to use it. "No, sir. He hasn't." Jeremy

had seemed the best choice, over the junior-juniors there were. Vince was a

heller from the cradle, always had been, and Linda, female and thirteenish,

wasn't an option.

A lot of empty cabins. There'd easily been a place to put Fletcher alone, as

Jeremy had been alone, as Vince and Linda were alone. But he didn't rate it safe

for an uninformed, inexperienced passenger. Jeremy would warn him. Jeremy would

take care of him.

"You had an encounter with him," the Old Man said.

Not surprising that that news had made it topside. "I'm zeroing it out. Waiting

to see. Can't blame the guy for being on edge"

The Old Man just nodded, whether approving his attitude, or whether sunk in some

other thought. The Old Man brought up other business, then, the general

schedule, the maintenance windows, the expectations of other crew chiefs when

the junior command would have to supply hands and bodies. The jump would come on

main shift. Sometimes it did, sometimes it came during alterday. He'd expected

alterday this time, but no, apparently not.

There wasn't a mention of Fletcher's life-and-death problems in facing jump for

the first time, no special caution to be sure Fletcher got through it sane and

in one piece, JR accepted it, then, as all on his watch, literally, as all

things were that the sitting captains didn't specifically cover in other

assignments. The juniors were all mainday schedule. There weren't enough of them

for two commands, and they'd be working right up to the pre-jump. JR wondered

whether that schedule were just possibly tailored around the new cousin.

And some things, like non-spacers, weren't within his experience or his

observation.

"On the Fletcher question," JR said, in the Old Man's silence, "does he get

tape, or not, during jump? Should I take him into my quarters and see him

through it? "

All of them had experienced hyperspace in the womb. Experienced it until their

lives were strung out in it.

Fletcher was definitely a question mark.

"Leave tape study off," the Old Man said "I'd say, not this trip, for him or for

Jeremy. I'd say—you stay off tape, too. I want you able to respond."

"Yessir," he said

"Where he rides it out," the Old Man said, "is your discretion. You're closer to

the situation than I am. Tell him—"

Rare that the Old Man failed to have exactly what he wanted to say, exactly as

he wanted it

But the last few days of "Fletcher's lost" and "Fletcher's found" and "Fletcher

will be another day late" had worn on everyone, and based on past events, he

began to suspect the Old Man knew the uneasy feeling in the junior crew, and saw

deeper into his personal misgivings than he liked.

The Old Man's chain of consequences, on the other hand, went right back into the

decision to join Norway and leave Francesca.

The hero, the old warrior, said they had a peace to fight now, and they'd taken

on non-military cargo as well as an outsider, both for the first time in nearly

two decades.

But Mallory's War wasn't over, Mallory and the Old Man had had words of some

kind when last they'd met, out in the remote fringes of Earth's space. And

whatever they'd said, it was solemn and sobering in its effect on the Old Man,

who'd come back solemn and sad, and not one word had filtered down to his level.

Tell him—the Old Man had begun, and found no words for what to tell Francesca's

heir, either.

So there was no information for him, just an urging to make the situation work…

somehow… within the junior crew, where the Old Man didn't, on long-standing

principle, interfere. It was the future relationships of the members of that

crew to each other that they were hammering out in their conduct of a set of

duties and responsibilities all their own, the way Finity crew had done for more

than a century. In a certain measure the Old Man couldn't reach into that

arrangement to settle and protect one special case without skewing every

relationship, every reliance, every concept of personal honor and chain of

command the junior crew maintained

Fletcher had to make a Fletcher-shaped place in the crew. There couldn't be

less. Or more. And it wasn't the Old Man's job to do it. He got that from the

silence, when he knew that the Old Man had thought a very great deal about

Fletcher before he came aboard.

"I'll take care of him," JR said, and received back only a sidelong look from

the Old Man. When JR looked back in leaving, the Old Man was busy at his work

again, clearly with no intention of asking or saying further in the matter.

Chapter VIII

Contents - Prev/Next

Morning mess hall was another collection of cousins, mostly seniors. Fifty

people ate at a set time, on schedule—be hungry or skip it entirely, unless you

had an excuse or a favor-point with the cook, so Jeremy said.

Fletcher ate at the same table with Jeremy and two other only moderately

pubescent juniors, Vincent and Linda, both doubtless older in station years than

they seemed, but mentally like the age they looked, they mostly jabbered about

games or what they'd done on Pell docks, their speech larded with wild,

decadent, and fancy, juvvie-buzz that seemed current among their small set.

Mostly they ignored him, beyond the first exchange of names, turned shoulders to

him without seeming to notice it in the heat of their conversational passion,

and Jeremy's eyes lit with the game-jabber, too.

Being ignored didn't matter to Fletcher. He'd lain awake and tossed and turned

in his bunk. Jeremy had lent him music tapes and those had gotten him through

the dark hours.

But today he had to work with these kids who admittedly knew everything he

didn't; and he went with them when they'd had their breakfast—a decent

breakfast, if he'd had the appetite, which he didn't.

They all went, still jabbering about dinosaurs and hell levels, down to A14, and

in the next few hours he learned all about laundry, how to sort, fold, stack,

and keep a cheerful face right along with the two other juniors in the mess pool

with him and Jeremy.

They'd drawn Laundry as their work for this five-day stint… but not every day.

You didn't get stuck on one kind of job as a junior. That was a relief to learn.

The junior-juniors, the ship's youngest, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds

among whom he was unwillingly rated, drew such jobs relatively often. But so did

the mid-level techs, from time to time. Juniors, so Jeremy said, rotated through

Laundry to Minor Maintenance, to Scrub, to Galley, but there were jobs all over

the ship that were rotating jobs, or part-time jobs, or jobs people did only on

call.

Junior-juniors inevitably got the worst assignments, Fletcher keenly suspected.

Laundry was everybody's laundry; laundry for several hundred people who'd been

out on liberty for two weeks was a lot of laundry, sonic and chemical cleaning

for some tissue-fabrics, water-cleaning for the rough stuff, dry, fold, sort,

and stack by rank.

It filled the time that otherwise would have required too much thinking, and it

was a job where you did meet just about everybody, as people came to the counter

for pickup of what they'd sent in at undock and to pick up small store items

like soap refills for their showers, and sewing kits, and other odd notions.

Fletcher didn't remember all the names by half—except Parton, who was blind, and

who had one mechanical eye for ordinary things, Jeremy said, and the other one

was a computer screen for cargo data or anything else Parton elected to receive.

He didn't think he'd forget Parton, who asked him to stand still a moment until

his mechanical vision had registered a template of his face. He'd never met a

blind person. But Jeremy said Parton's left eye was sharp all the way into

situations where the rest of them couldn't see, and Parton didn't always know

whether there was light or not. His mechanical eye could spot you just the same.

Laundry pickup was a place to hear gossip—all the gossip in the ship, he

supposed, if you kept your ears open. He picked up a certain amount of

information on certain individuals even with no idea who he was hearing about,

and he heard how various establishments on Pell didn't meet the approval of the

senior captain.

Vincent and Linda talked about various places you'd go in civvies, and

restaurants you'd wear a patch to, meaning the ship's patch, he guessed. Someone

dropped by the counter and gave him his own, ten black circular ship's patches,

and small patches that said Finity's End and Fletcher Neihart. It was, he

supposed, belonging. He wasn't sure how he felt about them.

Jeremy handed him a sewing kit from off the shelf of supplies. "You stitch 'em

on," Jeremy said. "The shiny-thread ones are for dress outfits, the plain-thread

are for work gear. If they start looking tatty you get new ones or the watch

officer has a fit. I'll show you how, next watch."

Labels got your laundry back to you, that was one use of them he saw. You also

had a serial number. He was F48, right next to his name. He saw that in a roll

of tags that was also in the packet the man had given him. Those were just for

the laundry. It was a lot of sewing on tags.

Even in the underwear and the socks.

Labeled. Everything. Head to toe.

He didn't say anything. He didn't like it. On Base he'd had to do his own

laundry. Everybody did. You got your clothes back because you sensibly never

dumped them in bins with everybody else's. He'd never learned to sew anything in

his life, but he figured he'd learn if he wanted his socks and underwear back.

Labeling right down to his socks as Finity crew, though, he'd have skipped that

if he could. But counting they'd lose your underwear if you didn't, it seemed a

futile point on which to carry on a campaign of independence, or make what was a

tolerable situation today harder than it was. Nobody had done anything

unpleasant—or been too intrusively glad to see him. Vincent tried to engage him

about where he'd been, holding up the ship and making them late on their

schedule, but Jeremy told Vince to stop and let him alone and Vince, who came

only up to mid-chest on him, took stock of him in a long look and shut up about

it.

Jeremy wanted to talk about Downbelow when they got back to quarters after mess,

and that was harder. They sat there stitching his labels into his socks, and

Jeremy wanted to know what Downbelow looked like.

"Real pretty," he said.

"There's trees on Pell," Jeremy said

"Yeah. The garden. The ones on Downbelow are prettier." He jabbed his finger

with the needle, painfully so. Sucked on it. He and Jeremy sat on their

respective bunks, with a stack of his entire new wardrobe and all the clothes

he'd brought with him plus a pile of the clothes he'd gotten dirty so far, and

he wasn't sorry to have the help doing it.

He daydreamed for an instant about puffer-ball gold and pollen skeining down Old

River, beneath branches heavy with spring leaves. Rain on the water.

Jeremy chattered about what he'd seen in Pell's garden. And segued nonstop to

what he wanted to do after they got the patches stitched on. Jeremy wanted him

to go to rec with him tonight: there was a rec hall, with games and a canteen,

Jeremy said.

"I don't want to."

"Oh, come on. What are you going to do, else?"

It was a point. He'd be alone in this closet of a room. He was tired, but he'd

get to thinking about things he didn't want to think about.

He went. It was the same huge compartment they'd all been in during undock, only

now there were no railings. There were game machines. A vid area. Tables and

chairs, senior as well as junior crew playing cards, playing games, watching

vids. He suffered a moment of dislocation, and almost balked at the

transformation alone.

But the entertainments offered were very much like at the Base. Familiar

situation. You mixed with senior staff and techs and all. They just generally

didn't talk with junior staff.

"What do you play?" Jeremy asked him.

Dangerous question. He'd already lost ten hours to Jeremy at cards; but when he

glumly decided on vids, and looked through the available cards in the bin to the

side of the machines, he found an Attack game he hadn't seen since he was a

small kid. The card itself when he pulled it out was old, showing a lot of use;

but he remembered that game with real pleasure, and recalled he'd been pretty

good at it—for a seven-year-old. He might have a chance at this one.

He appropriated a machine. Meanwhile Vince and Linda had shown up, and thought

they'd join him and Jeremy.

He wasn't delighted, but he kept the expression off his face; he linked up with

the three of them, a little suspecting ambush. He didn't play vids, not for the

last four years, being short of opportunity and short of time, and he dropped

into the semi-world of state-of-the-art interactives with a little caution.

Blown. Blown in two seconds. He made four tries, but he couldn't come out of the

drop into the game fast enough with these kids to avoid getting blasted.

"This is enough," he said. But Jeremy jollied him out of quitting, said they'd

play partners, and after that he lived for maybe the equivalent of a station

hall block before he blew up.

He just wasn't very good at it. Or the point was, they were very, very good and

their reflexes were astonishingly fast. When he exited the game and took the

visor off he was a little disoriented from the intensity of the play they'd

forced him to. They were different when they took theirs off, hyped, nervous, so

much so that when they went for soft drinks at the bar he didn't know the Jeremy

he was dealing with. Jeremy's fingers twitched, his small body was like a wound

spring, and he sat and sipped a soft drink with Vince, who was a little saner,

while Jeremy and Linda went back into the game and had it out. A long game. You

could elect to watch the game on the screen where they were sitting; and Vince,

who said he was tired, did… while Jeremy and Linda were nearby, two people just

sitting at a table opposite each other, twitching occasionally, fingers moving

on the pads. But on the screen two fighters were stalking each other.

"They're good," he said to Vince, aware first of a twelve-, thirteen-year-old

boy's face, and second that Vince was, chronologically speaking, a year older

than he was.

And third that Vince was himself too hyped for rational conversation, arms and

shoulders twitching to the moves on the screen, jabbering strategy at Linda, who

was, he'd found out, Vince's fairly close cousin and year-mate.

He didn't react the way these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds did—but he'd never

seen any kid react the way these kids did, not the most dedicated gameheads

who'd haunted the vid parlors on Pell. Something in him said dangerous, and

something said alien. Something in his gut said he was going to be outmatched at

anything but cards with these kids, and that there was something direly skewed

about these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old twelve-year-olds.

Baby faces. Tiny bodies. High, pre-change voices. He could pick any of the three

of these kids up in one hand; but their reactions in games were tigerish. He'd

heard the word, and knew the association. Tigerish. Predatory, low brain

function, and fast.

Vince and he watched and drank soft drinks and ate chips as Jeremy and Linda

kept it up for another hour and a half before watch-end mandated their return to

quarters—a return which, like a lot of other odd things, said to him that these

weren't ordinary twelve-year-olds, who voluntarily delayed a game to sew patches

on clothes, who made their beds without a wrinkle, who didn't duck out on

rules—and kept a single Attack game going an hour and a half because nobody

could score.

He walked the steeply curving ring beside Jeremy, who still couldn't walk like a

normal human being, who was still electric and jumping with an energy he hadn't

discharged. And when they got into quarters Jeremy wasn't relaxed until he'd

spent a long time in the shower.

"You all right?" he asked Jeremy when the kid came out, stark naked, to dress

for bed.

"Yeah." Jeremy gave a little laugh and pulled on a tee and briefs to sleep in.

But there was something still a little breathless, a little strange about him.

Fletcher took his own shower and scrubbed as if he could scrub out the sight

he'd just seen, and asking himself how he felt about room-sharing with a

hype-head. That was what it reminded him of. He had seen people react that way.

On drugs.

He didn't remember his mother playing kid games with him. He remembered his

mother drugged out, but languid, most of the time, Remembered her more than once

sitting at the table in the apartment and staring into space she didn't need a

visor to see. But her arms would be hard like that, as if she were waiting for

something, and her face would be—

He couldn't remember her face anymore. Not clearly. He came closest he'd come in

years to remembering it with the women, senior crew, who came and went around

him today. They looked like her. All the people on this ship looked like her in

some subtle way, until those recent faces washed over what his mother had looked

like to him.

And he remembered the times, the scariest times, when she'd been as scarily

hyped as Jeremy had been in the game. How, at the last, she'd prowl the

apartment and bump into walls that weren't there for her. She'd held him in her

arms, the only times he could remember her holding him, and she'd say she saw

the stars, she saw all the colors of space, and she'd ask him if he could see

them, too.

He couldn't. Aged five, he'd thought there was something wrong with him, and

that he was stupid, because he hadn't been able to see the stars the way she

could. Thank God she hadn't given him any of what she was taking. She'd never

gone that far down.

He let the shower fans dry his skin and his hair. He came out of the bath,

abandoning the Base-induced modesty that had had him, on prior days, dressing in

the cramped bath space. Jeremy didn't give him more than a glance, so he guessed

it was nothing new in the intimacy of a crowded ship. Jeremy sat on his bunk

letting the cards cascade between his hands, cards flying between his fingers

and piling up again, sheer nervous energy.

Jeremy had already proved he was good at cards.

He lost three more hours. He won one back. And when he did win, Jeremy didn't

sulk about it like some twelve-year-olds he'd known, just said, well, he was

improving, and dealt another hand.

He was still sure he could swat Jeremy and his cousins aside in a straight-on

fight. But he wasn't sure, now, that he could exit without damage. He hadn't

factored in the possibility that his roommate was outright crazy. He hadn't

figured that others might be, that it might go with the territory, just being

out here, dealing with space. He'd known no spacers intimately but his mother

and Quen. All his life, he'd heard people say spacers were different or strange,

usually meaning it came in the blood and it accounted for his misbehaviors or

his quirks.

Maybe there was something to it. He no longer denied there could be reasons

besides upbringing that made spacers rowdy and made station police nervous when

spacers intruded into residential areas. They bullied people. They went in

groups and were loud and disorderly. They got drunk and knifed each other in

bars and the police just contacted ships responsible, never arrested anybody

unless they had the ship's officers present… because there'd been riots when a

station attempted to intervene in spacer troubles, and what a riot was like when

you got one, two thousand, ten thousand Jeremys all hyped and mad, he didn't

ever want to see.

The final tally of favor-points was thirteen hours. He lost the last time and

went to bed, with the prospect of another tomorrow exactly like this one.

He had no idea where the ship was by now. There were sounds he couldn't

identify, occasionally hydraulics, but they were flying along at what Jeremy and

his physics course called inertial. He lay in his bunk thinking about that until

he made himself queasy with the thought of running into something; and reminded

himself they weren't going through the ecliptic like insystemers, but nadir of

the system, clear of the planets and stations, clear of the star, out there

where only starships went.

On the next day he found his appetite for breakfast had increased. His stomach

had gradually settled to the feeling the ship gave him. His sinuses had quit

protesting the change in air pressure. At work, the frantic pace in the laundry

detail that had kept them moving during the first days had abated, and that

meant time on their hands. They talked. He didn't. They all folded sheets and

stacked them up and they talked about the vid game last night, which at least

was common ground, but he wasn't inspired to add any observations, past their

rapid chatter.

They talked on and he handed out shower soap to a cousin named Susan, who came

to the counter. She wanted to talk and make acquaintances: she was pretty,

dark-eyed, looked twenty and was just curious, he thought, and then reminded

himself this wasn't a pretty girl, it was a cousin, and you couldn't have

thoughts like that aboard, even if he was having them, and was far more

interested in her than in the game-chatter behind him. She said she worked in

cargo. He said he was in planetary studies.

She said she didn't know what there was to study about a planet. She wasn't

joking, he decided. His ardor cooled instantly, the conversation died a rapid,

distracted death as the game-chatter actually became more interesting than

talking to her, and maybe he managed to offend her. He was depressed after she'd

left.

Truly depressed. The new had worn off. The body and brain had stopped having to

move fast. Realization was settling in. He was among total strangers.

"What's the matter?" Jeremy asked him after a while.

"Tired," he said. And Vince took that as a cue to try to bait him:

"A little work get to you?"

He didn't answer. "Let him alone," Jeremy said and then Jeremy engaged Vince and

Linda in a game of cards in the other room—which was one of the thousand little

things that hinted to him that Jeremy might be wiser than twelve—or at least

more mature than Vince was. They played cards. He did small squares on the

handheld that he'd brought among his personal gear, a cheap, field-battered

handheld that held a couple of games, all his personal notes from classes and

sessions in the field. He didn't want to access those. He couldn't face the

memories. He just built squares on the sketchpad, trying to forget cousins.

JR came by and stopped at the counter, the first time he'd seen JR since

boarding, "So how are you feeling?" JR asked.

JR, who looked to be his age, and he was sure now both was and wasn't.

"Fine." He shut the handheld down and pocketed it, as inconspiciously as he

could, fearful they might object either to his using it or having an

unauthorized computer. Some places were touchy about it.

JR ignored it and took something from his breast pocket. He laid three little

sealed plastic packets on the counter. "Jump drugs. It's regulation you have

them on you at all times. You didn't report to infirmary when you boarded."

They were inevitability, staring him in the face. The event he most dreaded.

"Nobody told me."

"Fine. I'm telling you now, for all future time. Scared to give yourself a

shot?"

"No." He'd never done it. But he'd watched it.

"You just put it against your wrist and push the button. Kicks. If you have one

malfunction… they don't, but if it should happen, you're supposed to have a

second. Whenever you use one, you've got to drop by medical, that's A10. Day

before jump, there'll always be a box sitting out for you to take what you need

One packet on your person at all times when the ship is out of dock, an extra

when you're going for jump."

"There's three."

"This time, yes. Tripoint's supposedly safe as a dockside stroll these days, but

nobody on this ship would bet his sanity on it. A jump-point's a lot of dark

where you can still meet somebody you don't want to meet, and if we do, if we

should, you'd hear the siren blowing when you come out of jump, and you'd have

just enough time to hit yourself with that second shot. You've got to keep

clear-headed and do that or you're in serious trouble. Not to scare you, but

this ship has enemies. And people have gone into hyperspace without trank, but

most don't come down the way they went in."

He'd been scared of a lot of things in the last number of days. Being shot at by

pirates hadn't been on the immediate list. Coming awake in hyperspace hadn't

been. Now it was.

"When you board, for the record, next thing after you turn in your baggage at

the dock, the packets are on the counter, pick 'em up."

"Yeah, well, I had cops attached."

"No excuses next time. As you board, you take your duffle to the counter, pick

up the drugs, sign the list."

"You're going to let me off this ship?"

"Only seniors stay aboard. No deck space during dock. Unless you're sick. You

don't plan to be sick. And just once, and just for the record, never take this

stuff except when you're told to by an officer. That box sits on the counter on

the honor system. Take only what you're supposed to."

He'd been getting along well enough until cousin JR said that. "My mother was an

addict," he said. "That what you mean?"

"Never take it except when told by an officer. Standard instruction. That's the

rule. Nothing personal."

"Like hell."

There was the laundry counter between them. It was probably a good thing. The

card game was going on in the next room. There was nothing else to separate

them.

The silence between them went on a moment. JR's jaw muscles stood out in shadow.

But JR didn't inform him it was Like hell, sir.

"Obey the regulations," JR said. "Go back to work."

JR walked off.

He didn't know who was in the right about that encounter. He stood there with a

pocketful of what had killed his mother. The ship was going into jump with him

aboard, and if he didn't take the drug he'd meet whatever it was in hyperspace

that drove people crazy. The drugs were ordinary, they were what you had to take

to get through the experience, and his mother had died only because she

overdosed and depressed her nervous system. He knew all that.

And he knew that the clock was running down close to that event and that through

an oversight he'd almost not had the drugs he was supposed to have. That was a

fact, too, and if somebody hadn't checked and there'd been some kind of

emergency he knew he could have been in bad trouble. JR had come by to make sure

he had the drug and knew what to do, so he couldn't fault that as hostile

behavior. It was just the little extra remark that just hadn't been necessary.

He was scared. Scared of the event, terrified of the drug—he'd been tested for

it: the court had wanted to know if his mother had given it to him, to a

five-year-old. But her suicide had been solo. Probably not intended to happen

while he was home. She'd loved him. She kept getting him back from the social

system no matter how many times she gave him up. Wasn't that love?

"So what'd JR want?"

The card game was over. Jeremy was back at his elbow. Assigned to be there: he

suddenly drew that conclusion. Jeremy was always looking out for him not because

Jeremy gave a damn but because Jeremy had orders.

He opened the counter and left, walking fast, nowhere, and then toward his

quarters, which he realized was no refuge from Jeremy. He was cornered, and

stopped, in mid-corridor.

"You can't just walk off-duty," Jeremy said. "What happened?"

"Nothing happened," he said, and drew a couple of calmer breaths. He didn't want

to explain it. He didn't want to deal with it. And he didn't want to have to

hold together incipient panic with a twelve-year-old hanging on his arm. "When

are we going into jump?"

"About four hours."

"Today?"

"Is there a problem?"

Is there a problem? He wanted to laugh. Or cry. "No," he said. And turned back

toward the laundry. "Just keep Vince off me. I'm not in a good mood."

"Sure," Jeremy said, and walked with him.

He couldn't walk in with no commotion, Vince had to say something.

"Well, is cousin Fletcher going to take a walk?"

He grabbed a fistful of Vince's jumpsuit.

"Fletcher, stop!" Jeremy said, and tried to push him and Vince apart, no luck

where it came to budging his arm. "No fighting. Vince, cut it, don't hassle him!

Hear me?"

"Vince," Linda said, in what sounded like real fear, and pushed at Vince as if

Vince had a choice about it. She acted as if she might have prevented Vince

swinging at him. At least she gave Vince an excuse to take his thirteen-year-old

self in retreat about five paces and toward the next section of the laundry.

Jeremy and Linda did the age-old part of friends, calming Vince down as if he'd

been fierce and unrestrainable, just on the verge of swinging on somebody two

heads taller.

Vince had been flat pissing scared. Fletcher realized that, now, as he realized

the kid had gotten him angry enough to do damage, which wasn't called for. They

were kids, and it wasn't their fault the captain or whoever had put him down

with them. He wished on the one hand he'd gone ahead and hit Vince and improved

his attitude, But he told himself that a warning had settled it. He went back to

folding sheets, telling himself that whatever a batch of snot-nosed kids took in

stride, he could, and his mother's case wasn't his case, and he wasn't going to

panic or let the kids see how scared he was.

That was the trouble. He was scared. Scared of the drug as much as the jump, and

telling himself, rationally, there wasn't anything to be scared of. Sad about,

upset about, yes, but not scared.

Not in front of Jeremy.

"So how's he doing?" Bucklin asked before jump, and JR didn't find a ready

reply.

"Calm," JR said, "mostly." They were both on last moment patrol of the

corridors. The ship was about to do another burn, this one of short duration,

getting up to V enough to preserve vector and assure they didn't make a

momentary anomaly in the local sun. The warning had sounded, an order for all

but jump crew to go to their cabins and stay there. The endless, upward-curving

corridor was deserted, the doors all shut. They'd just passed the room Fletcher

shared with Jeremy, on their way to their own quarters, senior and

second-senior, the last two moving about down on A corridor, while upstairs, in

B, much the same process would be going on. They'd collected their e-rations,

they had their trank, and they were about to head for Tripoint, a set of three

large mass-points that would anchor their jump toward Mariner.

Relatively busy as jump-points went. You followed the same procedures as at a

star, but the triple mass made precise navigation tricky there. You could find

out where you were after you'd arrived, but your precise arrival was just a

little hard to coordinate. You got the latest navigational charts just before

the ship left, charts shot to you in the final informational packet. Finity

hadn't been through Tripoint recently, but some ships at dock had, and the

information they had on Tripoint's precise numbers had gone to Pell Central

along with the stock market data and civil records from Viking and Mariner and

everywhere else in the network.

Tripoint had its hazards, and a ship arriving there even these days was careful

who they met and who might be lurking. Since the War, this ship was always

careful, and went in with someone ready at the guns.

But he didn't think that was information their new cousin needed to know on his

first jump.

Feet appeared on the horizon. Two pair. Legs followed. Chad and Lyra were

walking the opposite direction in the ring, and they were meeting up. Circuit

complete.

"No ball of flame in A28?" Lyra asked

"Nothing exciting,"Bucklin reported. "We don't have to sit on him."

"Damn," Lyra said. "There goes my chance."

Joke. There wasn't any bunking about on board, New Rules, or Old. But cousin

Fletcher's felicitous sorting of the family genes—and his status as a

stranger—had drawn remarks among the femme-cousins.

Fletcher might be just seventeen, but he was a well put together and mature

seventeen, which, given he was new, was triggering interest spacers didn't

ordinarily feel toward a shipmate. He knew he probably ought to talk to Fletcher

about that. It wasn't something he could easily tell Jeremy to explain, Jeremy,

whose body didn't yet inform him what it would abundantly explain in the next

few years.

But given how Fletcher had exploded, given the level of tension Fletcher was

already carrying, it didn't seem quite the moment.

When their brand-new and fine-looking cousin did mix with spacers on a foreign

dockside in about ten days, subjective time, Fletcher would get offers… offers

that would presume experience to match the face and body. It was going to be

interesting.

They parted company, to separate quarters, the privilege of all the

senior-juniors in a ship with too many vacant cabins. They hauled cargo in some

of their unused space, right along with the huge shipping cannisters in the hold

and the rim. It was Earth goods and downer wine they carried inside, high-priced

cargo that needed not only gravity such as they could provide in the outer rim

but specific temperatures, for its safety.

They were moving slowly, this trip, laden with, besides their luxury goods,

plain staples: flour. They were vulnerable economically, vulnerable in terms of

self-defense… not as heavy mass as they'd ever hauled, but heavy enough a feel

to the ship to let them know they had cargo.

The last reports into Pell, from a ship inbound eight hours ago, said Tripoint

was safe, free from lurkers. But that could change with any heartbeat A starship

could arrive at Tripoint from various places, one of them a deep route, the sort

only non-cargo ships used, reachable by a ship that had a very high engine/mass

ratio. That deep route intersecting with a busy commercial route was what made

it so valuable in the War, and valuable after to the black market, and to those