Union Alliance – Finity’s End – Cherryh, C. J.

    Cherryh, CJ – [Union-Alliance] – Finity’s End Finity’s End Caroline J. Cherryh A Union Alliance novel

 

    Chapter I Contents -Next

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 CO.

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.