Chapter 11

The shift went to bed, an exhausted mainnight in which visions of rain-veiled river danced in Fletcher’s eyes; and playing cards cascaded like raindrops, inextricably woven images, in which somehow he owed days, not hours, and in which he chased Jeremy through tunnels first of earth and then of garishly lit steel and pipe, the latter of which looked miraculously like the tunnels on Pell.

Next morning it was back to the galley before maindawn, help Jeff set out the breakfast trays and get the carts up to B deck, but they were still cooking huge casseroles for next jump… things that could warm up in a hurry, a lot of red pepper involved. Taste was pretty dim after jump, so Jeff said, and by Fletcher’s estimation it was true; spicy things perked up the appetite. While they were doing that, they’d had no further alarms, no changes in velocity. Jeff said the ship’s long, even run under inertia would give them the chance to get some baking done. Cakes in the oven during a high-K run were doomed, so Jeff said.

So whenever they hit an onboard stretch where they could spread out and cook, they cooked for all they were worth: fancy pastries, casseroles, pies, trays of pasta and individual packets for those hours people came in scattered There were onions and fish from Pell, there was keis and synth ham, there was cabbage and couscous and what they called animal protein, which was a kitchen secret nobody should have to look at before it cooked. It came in pieces and mostly the cook-staff ground it. There was rice from Earth and yellow grain from Pell; there were sauces, there were gravies, there were fruit jellies that came from Downbelow and wine solids and spices and yeasts that came from Earth. There were keis sandwiches, fish sandwiches, and pro-paste sandwiches which Fletcher swore he’d never eat again in his life; there were pickles and syrups and stuffed pasta, string pasta, puff breads and flat-breads and meal and pro-paste pepper rolls with hot sauce, and there were sausage rollups, which were their lunch, and keis and ham rollups which were supper. The galley had rung with the battering of pans and trays, swum in pots of sauce that went steaming into forms of given sizes and had to be trundled on carts into the galley lift, where in coats you put the stuff in deep-freeze on the very outer level of the rim in what they called the skin. Out there among the structural elements of the passenger ring, cold was the natural, cheap environment, requiring only a rack for storage, no mechanism but a light; and you felt that cold burning right through your boot-soles when you walked the grids. Fletcher made one trip down with Jeff just to see what it was like, his closest approach to the uncompromising night outside the hull; he was glad to get back up into warmth and light of the ring.

All this day they worked on sandwiches, and of course, tastes of the current batch. Nobody on regular cook-staff ever seemed to eat a meal: they sampled; and the last job they put together, just before supper, was a giant pyramid of tasty little sandwiches and another of sweets. Which to Fletcher’s disappointment didn’t turn up on their menu. It went to B deck.

“We’ll get some,” Jeremy said as he watched the cart go. “Topside in the senior mess. There’s a get-together coming. Everybody’s there.”

“So?” he said. He wasn’t at all enthusiastic about meetings. He remembered board-call, and everybody together for that. It had been particularly uncomfortable. And he’d worked hard today. He thought he had a right to those desserts. “I’d rather read or something. Thanks.”

“You’re really supposed to go. It’s all of second and third shift, and a lot of first will come. That’s why they’ve been handing us fast food today. Eat light.”

“Is it a meeting, or what is it?”

“Not a meeting,” Jeremy said as if he were a little slow. “Food. The fancy food. It’s a party. You know. People. Music. Party.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause that Union bunch is just sitting back there not bothering us, ’cause we’re in a big boring jump-point and we don’t have anything much to do. Why not? When you’re downtimed and there’s no pirates going to bother you, you throw a party. Come on, Fletcher, you’ll enjoy it. Be loose. Jump before main-dawn, but tonight we shake things up, man. Be loose, be happy, it’s got to be somebody’s birthday! That’s what we say, it’s somebody’s birthday somewhere! Celebrate for George.”

“Who’s George?” There was such a thing as ship-speak: the in-jokes sometimes flew past him.

“King George V.”

He’d thought, with his fascination with old Earth history, there was no way a twelve-year-old from Finity was going to know King George of England. Or England, for that matter, in spite of Jeremy’s tape study. He was amazed. And enticed. “Why George?”

“Well, because he’s old and he’s dead, and nobody throws him parties anymore, so we do on Finity. When it’s nobody else’s birthday, it’s for old King George!”

He’d walked into that one. “Why not?” he said. “Seems logical.”

He still didn’t entirely want to go, but he considered the food they’d been working on all day; and he knew himself, that once he was committed to being alone, knowing full well there was a party going on elsewhere, he’d feel lonelier. I’d rather stay in my room and hate all of you might be the real answer, but it wasn’t, in Jeremy’s clear opinion, going to be the accepted answer.

Besides, Jeremy had, against all odds, made it sound like fun.

So they showered and put on clean, unfloured, unpeppered clothes without grease spots, and went up to B deck. Fletcher’s most dire apprehension in the affair was that he might have to suffer through some formal introduction of himself, standing up in front of people he didn’t want to be polite to. “They’re not going to introduce me again, are they?” he’d asked Jeremy. “I don’t want to be introduced.”

“They won’t if you don’t like,” Jeremy said. “I’ll tell them and they won’t.”

He still, riding up the lift to B deck, feared he couldn’t escape another round of j-names: John, James, Jerry and Jim. He was resigned to that idea, if not the idea of another introduction, or any sentimental This is Francesca’s baby on anybody’s part. As long as it stays George’s party, he’d told Jeremy, when he’d agreed. No surprises.

And when they walked up around the ring to the senior mess, he could see the food laid out, he could see tables spread with linen; and he could see people, the Family, all walking around or talking at random: no special recognition looked to be in the offing, no ceremony, no conspicuous embarrassment and no formality, either. The B deck rec hall turned out to be connected to the B deck mess hall, a wall-to-wall segment of the whole ring, carpeted, the area that was rec furnished with vid-game sets, not in use at the moment; a bar, which was in use; and maybe fifty tables with linen tablecloths like some high-class restaurant. The whole arrangement filled two segments of B deck’s ring, with only a little half-bulkhead and a drawn-back section door to separate rec from the mess. There were maybe a hundred, two hundred people—all, God save him, relatives—milling around in casual familiarity, with more arrivals coming in from either end of the area.

There was a pool table, a game going there, in the rec section. That had drawn a row of kibitzers. A couple of women played quiet, not-bad guitar in the background, up at the end of the mess hall, and the sweets and snacks from the mess hall were going fast. The bar opened up, and various mixed drinks and wine glasses ready to be picked up were going off the counter as fast as the kids serving could set them out, fifty, a hundred of them.

Held off on cheese sandwiches all day. Fletcher raided the dessert stack instead and filled his mouth with sweet cream pastry.

“Fletcher.”

He knew that voice. He turned and frowned at Madelaine. She had a glass of wine in hand and was clearly not official at the moment.

“Glad you came, Fletcher,” Madelaine said. “Thanks,” he said, and knuckled a suspected smear of cream off his lip. He wouldn’t have come at all if he’d known he’d run into her first off.

“Enjoy things,” she said. And to his relief and gratitude, she didn’t engage him in intrusive, personal conversation, just smiled and walked past him, wine glass in hand, leaving him free to wander around with Jeremy.

Jeremy, who was bent on telling him who was who.

“No good with the names,” he said after six or seven. “There’s too many J’s in the lot. I’m not going to remember. Unless you can point out King George. Who is a G, isn’t he?”

Jeremy thought that was funny. “Everybody is J’s,” he said, as if he’d never added it up for himself. “Most, anyway. ’Cept you’re Fletcher. Probably the first Fletcher in fifty years.”

“Why? Why’s Fletcher the exception?”

“He was shot dead, a long time ago,” Jeremy said. “He was the one getting the hatch shut when the Company men were trying to board, and he did it and died on the deck inside. Or there wouldn’t be any of us. No Alliance. No Union.”

He knew about the incident. He’d learned it in school, but he didn’t know it was a Fletcher Neihart who’d been the one to get the door shut when they tried to trap Finity and arrest Captain James Robert. He knew about Finity’s End saying the Earth Company authorities weren’t going to board, and the captain and crew had sealed the ship and left the station and the authorities behind them, refusing them authority over the ship and refusing station law on a merchanter’s deck. It was where the first merchanter’s strike had started, when merchanters from one end of space to the other had made it clear that trade goods didn’t and wouldn’t move without merchant ships.

In a long chain of events, it was the incident that had started the whole Company War.

History. Near-modern history, which he detested. He’d passed the obligatory quiz on the details to get into the program. The Company War. Treaty of Pell, 2353, and that had left civilization where it was when he’d been born, with Union on one side and Alliance on the other and Earth not real happy with either of them. And him stranded and his mother dead. That kind of history.

So, Jeremy said, somebody he was named after had gotten a critical hatch shut in the original fracas between Company ships and Family ships, without which either the ship wouldn’t have gotten away or the cops who shot this long-dead Fletcher would have died in the decompression that would have resulted if he hadn’t shut that hatch.

Pell knew about that kind of event. And he’d known about the start of the Company War.

So the guy’s name had been Fletcher. He didn’t know why he should be proud of some spacer who was a hundred years dead—but, well, dammit, he’d lived all his seventeen years around the snobbery of the Velasquezes and the Willetts, the Dees and the Konstantins, who’d been important because of their names, and important mostly because of what dead people in their families had done, while he’d never before had a sense of connection to anything but an addict mother and a lawsuit.

Somebody died closing an airlock and did it with pieces of him shot away, knowing otherwise there’d be vacuum killing more than the people shooting at him—that was a levelheaded brave guy, in his way of thinking. While the Willetts—they’d donated a warehouse full of stuff to the war effort. Big deal. No one had been shooting at them.

And Fletcher Neihart meant that man, on this ship. Fletcher wasn’t just a name. It was a revision of who he was—for a moment.

He never had meant much. And that, he’d told himself when he’d been at a low point of his teenaged years, scared spitless of the program placement tests, that never meant much was the source of his strength: not giving much of a damn. Like a gyro—kick it off balance a second and it swung right back. That realization had kept him sane. Kept him aware of his own value, which was only to himself.

Maybe that was why Madelaine’s being here had upset him—why Madelaine had upset him and why even yet he was feeling shaky. He’d instinctively seen a danger when Madelaine had dangled the lure of his mother’s motives and his father’s name in front of him yesterday.

He’d been in danger a second ago when he’d thought about famous relatives.

He was in danger when he began to slip toward thinking… being Fletcher Neihart wasn’t that bad a thing.

Yes, and Jeremy wasn’t a bad kid, and they could get along, and maybe Jeremy could make this year of enforced servitude not so bad. But he’d thought he could rely on Bianca, too, and yesterday in the same conversation in which he’d learned he had a great-grandmother and the lawyers he hated really loved him, in the very same conversation Madelaine had proved Bianca had talked to authorities and betrayed everything he’d shared with her about Melody and Patch,

It was nothing to get that angry about. Bianca had behaved about average, for people he’d dealt with. Better than some. She hadn’t talked until she’d been cornered and until he’d already been caught and shipped off the planet,

So forget falling into the soft traps of potential relatives. Figure that Jeremy would keep some secrets and advise him out of trouble, but he shouldn’t get soppy over it or mistake it for anything special. Jeremy had his orders, and those orders came from authority just like Madelaine, if it wasn’t Madelaine herself. She wanted him to ask who his father was. He didn’t damn well care. Whoever it was hadn’t come to Pell. Hadn’t cared for him. Hadn’t cared for his mother.

Spacer mindset.

Safer just to disconnect from all of them, Jeremy too. He could be pleasant, but he didn’t have to commit and he didn’t have to trust any of them. And that meant he didn’t have to get mad, consequently, when they proved no better and no worse than anyone else. He’d learned that wisdom in his half a dozen family arrangements, half a dozen tries at being given the nicely prepared room, the nicely prepared brother, the family who thought they’d save him from his heritage and a mother who hadn’t been much.

In that awareness he walked in complete safety through the buzz of talk and the occasional hand snagging him to introduce him to this or that cousin… screw it, he thought: he wasn’t possibly going to remember anything beyond this evening. The names would sink in only over time and with the need to deal with one and another of them. If he really, truly needed to know Jack from Jamie B., he’d ask for an alphabetical list. In the meantime, everyone wore name tags.

He’d had a hard day, however, and what he did want to quiet his nerves and dim the day’s troubles wasn’t on the dessert tray. He strolled over to the bar, lifted a glass of wine, turned his shoulder before he had to deal with the bartenders and walked off with it, sipping a treat he hadn’t had at the Base but that he had had regularly in the latest family. The Wilsons had collected their subsidy from the station for taking care of him, he hadn’t caused them trouble (he’d been a model student who ate his meals out), he’d done his own laundry… fact had been, he’d boarded at the Wilsons’, and they were pleasant, decent folk who’d had him to formal dinners on holidays at home or in nice restaurants, and who hadn’t cared if he hit their liquor now and again as long as he cleaned up the bar and washed the glasses.

The wine tasted good. His nerves promised to unwind. He told himself to relax, smile, have a good time, get to know as many of the glut of relatives as seemed pleasant. Like Jeff. Jeff was all right. Even great-grandmother Madelaine was on an agenda of her own, nothing really to do with him as himself, except as the daughter-legacy Madelaine hoped he’d turn into. He would disappoint her, he was sure.

But if she refrained from exercising authority over him and just took him as he was, as she’d done when she’d failed to make a fuss over him here, he could refrain from resisting her. He could be pleasant. He’d been pleasant to a lot of people once he knew it was in his interest, as it seemed generally to be in his interest on this ship.

He’d like to find a few cousins who were somewhat above twelve years of age. He’d like to have someone to talk occasionally to whose passion wasn’t vid-games.

“God, you’re not supposed to have that,” Jeremy said, catching up to him.

“Had it on station.”

Jeremy was troubled by it. He saw that. But he had it now, and he wasn’t going to turn it in. He drank it in slow sips. He had no intention of gulping multiple glasses and making an ass of himself.

“What’s this?” He knew that young, high, penetrating voice, too. Vince had showed up, with Linda. Inevitably with Linda. “You can’t drink that.”

Vince and his holier-than-thou, wiser-than-everyone attitudes for what Vince wouldn’t dare do when he was taller and older. He gestured with the three-quarters full glass, “Have drunk it. When you grow up, you can give it a try. Meanwhile, relax.”

“You’ll get on report,” Vince said. “I’ll bet you get on report.”

“Fine. Let them ship me back. I’ll cry tears.”

“I wish they would,” Vince said, one of his moments of sincerity, and about that time a larger presence came up on him.

JR.

“He’s drinking,” Vince said as if JR had no eyes. Fletcher looked straight at JR.

“Somebody give you that?” JR asked in front of Jeremy and Vince and Linda. He’d had enough family togetherness for the day. He drank three-quarters of a well-hoarded glass down in three swallows.

“Here,” he said, and handed the empty glass to JR. JR almost let it fall. And caught it on the fly, not without spilling a couple of last drops to the expensive carpet.

Fletcher walked off. He’d had enough party and celebration, and beyond that, he wasn’t in a frame of mind to stay around to be discussed or reprimanded in front of his roommate, a twelve-year-old jerk, or a couple of hundred of his worst enemies. It was easy to leave in the open-ended mess hall section. He just kept walking to the lift, out where the light was dimmer and the noise was a lot less.

JR held a glass he didn’t want to be holding. He handed it to Vince, restraining himself from immediate comment. He didn’t know what exchange had preceded Vince’s complaint to him. Clearly cousin Fletcher had just overloaded on something, be it wine or family.

He refused to get into he-saids with immediately involved junior-juniors and walked to the bar to learn the plain facts. “Nate. Did you give Fletcher wine?”

Nate was one of the senior crew, now, lately of the junior crew, and Nate looked distressed. “No. He just took it. I didn’t know what to do. Has he got leave?”

“Not officially, no. You did right. You didn’t make an incident. Vince and the junior-juniors called him on it, though, and he flared and left.”

“The guy wasn’t real straightforward about asking for permissions, what it seems to me. I think he knew it was off limits.”

“Yeah. You and I both noticed. If he does it again just let him. I’ll talk to Legal and we’ll find out whether there were agreements with him before he boarded, or what.”

“Trouble?” Bucklin turned up by him at the bar, Bucklin couldn’t have missed Fletcher’s leaving.

“Vince sounded off about the drink. Fletcher’s pissed.”

“Cousin Fletcher came aboard pissed. Counting he was hauled here by the cops and the stationmaster, I’m not personally surprised he and young Vince should go critical. ”

“It’s on our watch,” JR sighed. “We got him, he’s ours.”

“Maybe we could have airlock drill,” Bucklin’s tone was wistful, the suggestion outrageous.

“I’m afraid that won’t solve it.” He couldn’t quite joke about it, tempest in an infinitesimal teacup though it might be. “Captain-sir wants him. Madelaine wants him. I’m afraid we ultimately have to work him in.”

“Between you and me only, this has a bad feeling.” This time Bucklin wasn’t making a joke at all. “This guy doesn’t want to be here. I mean, it’s hard enough to work him in if we wanted him. We’re busy. We’ve got nothing but unskilled labor in him. We had a fine thing going before we got lucky in the court, and I appreciate we had a legal problem, but—where are we going to fit him in?”

Bucklin left his complaint hanging after that, and after a moment, in his silence on the issue, Bucklin walked away. Bucklin wasn’t of a rank to say what was floating in the air unsaid. We don’t want him didn’t half sum up the feeling among the senior-juniors. They had had an integrated team that was turning their last-born batch of juniors, ending with Jeremy, into a tight-knit unit that would put the senior-juniors in crew posts in another couple of years, with Jeremy and Vince and Linda their best backup for what was going to be, with adequate luck, a sudden crop of babies forthcoming from this run. The senior-juniors were a team tested literally under fire. However thin they were in numbers, he saw the makings of a damned fine command in what his seniors had left him and what he’d spent the last seven years putting together. Supposing now that women did become pregnant, and that the nursery did acquire a new batch of kids, he and Bucklin and Lyra had plans to set Jeremy and Vince and Linda in charge of the ones who’d come out of the nursery as junior-juniors at just about the time that trio hit physical maturity. It had all been going to work out neatly, and then they got cousin Fletcher, of a physical size to fit with senior-juniors, basic knowledge far beneath that of junior-juniors, and a surly attitude to boot. Add to that a late-to-board-call stunt unprecedented in the history of the ship, for which Fletcher had proved nothing but self-righteous and angry.

It was wrong, the whole blown-out-of-proportion incident just now with the wine glass was just damned wrong, both what Fletcher had done walking out and what Vince had done lighting into him and what Jeremy had done standing confusedly in the middle. It wasn’t the drink. It was Fletcher’s attitude that made no way for anybody to back down; and as the saying went, it had happened on his watch.

On one level the Old Man didn’t want to know the details, the excuses, or the extenuating circumstances of the junior captain’s failures; on another level, the Old Man would rapidly know every detail that he knew the minute he walked in here and wanted to know where Fletcher was, and there was nothing worse in God’s wide universe than an interview with Captain James Robert Neihart, Sr. when your tally of mistakes went catastrophic—as it had just done in that little damn-you-all gesture of Fletcher’s.

He, supposed to handle things, had thought that in putting Fletcher with the junior-juniors he had arranged Fletcher a berth that wouldn’t expose his ignorance, put demands on his behavior, or burden his own essential and often working team with constantly babysitting Fletcher.

Yes, the senior crew including the Old Man had a load of personal guilt over cousin Francesca, over the fact they hadn’t made it back in time to prevent what they were relatively sure had been a suicide.

Yes, Francesca had named her kid one of the signal names in Finity’s history, one of the names which, like James Robert, you didn’t just bestow on your kid without asking and without the bloodline to permit it.

Yes, Francesca had named him that name before she’d known she’d be left—she had done it, he guessed, not out of bitterness, or to imply a guilt they all felt, but to declare to a station who otherwise despised spacers that this was no common kid.

Unfortunately that name had stayed on after her suicide to confound Finity command, attached to a kid in the original Fletcher’s line, a kid caught in the wheels of jurisdiction and power games, a kid who by that name and Finity’s reputation necessarily attracted attention in spacer circles.

And yes, James Robert had wanted to get a kid named Fletcher, his grand-nephew, out of the gears and out of station view. There’d be no shameful appendix to the life of the first Fletcher, to append his name to a kid hellbent—JR had seen the police reports—on conspicuous and public disaster, right down to his dive for the outback.

Yes, Francesca’s situation had been a tragedy. But a lot of people on Finity had had a lot harder situation than Francesca’s, in his estimation.

His mother was one, dead in the decompression. And Jeremy’s. And Vince’s half-brother. Or ask Bucklin, who’d lost every close relative in his whole line except Madison, and Madison, who’d lost everyone but Bucklin.

Damn right they were close, the ones left of the old juniors’ group, the ones like himself and Bucklin, who’d huddled together in nursery while the ship underwent stresses that killed the weak. They’d seen kids grow weaker and weaker until eventually they just didn’t come out of trank at a given jump.

Damned right they’d earned the pride they had and damned right they didn’t like all they’d won handed to a stranger on a platter, particularly when the stranger bitterly, insultingly rebuffed what welcome he was given.

He had a situation building, a resentment in his command. And it was his job to find a way to deal Fletcher in.

“So how is he?” Madison asked, second captain, and JR felt heat rise to his face, wondering what answer he possibly could find.

“He’s not happy.” To his left a guitar hit a quiet passage, strings ringing with a poignantly soft tune he’d heard since he was small; “Rise and Go.” Parting of lovers. Partings of every kind. It was cliché. It never failed to send the chills down his arms and the moisture to his eyes. It disturbed logic. Prompted frankness. “Neither are we with him, sir, plainly speaking, sir.”

“We had to take him,” Madison said. “This was our chance. We couldn’t leave him.”

“I’m aware of our obligation, sir. And mine. I’m not begging off from the problem, only advising senior command that I’ve not made significant headway with him.”

“Not only our obligation,” Madison said. “Elene Quen had a part in this.”

That small, added information, so directly and purposefully delivered, struck him off balance. And at that moment Madelaine wandered over with a drink in hand.

“Jake’s called ops downside,” Madelaine said, “just to be sure, you know, that Fletcher made his quarters without incident.”

“I think he did,” JR said. The kid was angry. Not stupid. And if Madison’s information bore out into something besides Family determination to recover one of their own, there might be justification for that anger. Quen. Politics. Deals.

“He swiped a drink,” Madelaine said to Madison. “Pell Station let him, I’d be willing to bet. Station rules. He didn’t know he needed a go-ahead.”

Madison frowned. “The body’s old as JR, here. It’s the mind that’s under-aged. Your call, junior captain. What will you do with him?”

“My call,” JR said. “But this is a new one. Where do you rate him, sir? Junior-junior, or not? He’s Jeremy’s age and far less experienced.”

And physically the same as your age. Look up the statutory years.” Madison spotted someone coming in by the up-ring entry, and drifted off with that quandary posed, information half-delivered.

JR gazed after him in frustration. He drank, judiciously and seldom, and he had twenty-six years for mental ballast. He also had the responsibility for issuing such privileges to juniors under him. Was Madison saying give Fletcher senior-junior privileges right off? He didn’t think so.

And this hint of deals with Quen, that might have complicated the situation with understandings and arrangements… no one had told him.

“What’s this,” he asked Madelaine, “that the name of Quen came up just now? I know why we took him, on principle. He’s Fletcher. But what are we doing taking him in on this run, not asking for him after he’s local eighteen and the court’s off his case? Is there something essential that I’m not hearing, here?”

“Oh, there’s a fair amount you missed that night at dinner.”

“With Quen? What did I miss?”

“The fact Quen very ably moved the courts to give us Fletcher when she wanted to, after telling us for twelve years that she couldn’t budge them. Now, that may be an unfair suspicion. Possibly her position has changed: possibly she has more power now; perhaps she simply called in a tall stack of favors.” Madelaine stopped—he knew that silence of hers: she was suddenly wondering how much to tell the junior captain on a particular point, and a blurted question from him right now would make her sure he wasn’t qualified to know. So he stood quietly while Madelaine took a sip of wine and thought about her next piece of information.

“Quen wants a ship. She wants a Quen ship. And she wants James”—Madelaine was one of a handful who called the senior captain James and not James Robert—“to stand with her and get it approved.”

“That, I already know.”

“But it’s more than that. Like Mallory, Quen is worried about Union’s next moves. Thinks the next war is going to be a trade war. Union’s building ships it proposes to put into trade and saying they don’t violate the Treaty. We of course say differently. Fletcher’s an issue on his own and always has been, but he’s become an issue of trust between us and Quen. Quen proves to us she’s got power on Pell by delivering Fletcher to us, maneuvering past Pell’s red tape—and we’ll stand by her in the Council of Captains and use our considerable stack of favor-points with other ships to swing votes on the issue she wants—if she backs us. We want tariffs lowered. An unrelated understanding, mark that.”

He did. There was no linkage between the two events because both parties agreed there wasn’t a linkage. Yes, Finity could fail to carry out their part of the deal, take Quen’s gift of Fletcher and go on to oppose Quen in Council, because there wasn’t a linkage. But if Finity betrayed her, Quen wouldn’t be their ally on something else they wanted her vote on.

And what was there to deal for? Quen wanted a Quen ship: understandable. What was there that Finity would be wanting from Quen? Lower tariffs didn’t sound at all related to the battle they’d been fighting against Mazian. It affected merchanter profits and the price of goods. That was all that he saw.

Tariffs affected trade; trade affected international affairs. Did the question have any relation to that Union ship out there, the most notable anomaly in this voyage besides their own declaration they were going back to merchanting? Quen detested Union, so he’d heard. And Quen had traded them the kid they’d held hostage for seventeen years because now Quen wanted to build ships.

Build ships to keep Union from building ships to operate essentially on trade routes within Union. That was a delicate and sticky point: pre-War and post-War, all commercial trade routes in existence had been independent merchanter freighter routes—all, that was, except the two routes between Cyteen and its outermost starstations. On those two routes Union had always used its own military transport, in supply of, the merchanters were given to understand, fairly spartan stations, probably populated by Union’s tailor-made humanity, for what he knew. No merchanter in those days had been interested in going there. That mistake had given Union a foothold in merchanter operations.

“So…” he asked Madelaine, “what is going on? How did Fletcher get into it, besides as a bargaining chit? And why are we making deals with Quen? Or is that what we’re really doing on this voyage? Who are we fighting? Mazian? Or Union?”

“This is topside information,” Madelaine said, meaning what she told the junior first captain didn’t go to the junior-juniors or even to Bucklin. “We were always anxious to get Fletcher out. We didn’t expect to get Fletcher this round. We took him because we could take him. Quen happens to hold a general view of the situation with Union we want her to act on, but we don’t tell her that. We have to let her persuade us at great effort, or she’ll start arranging other deals with other parties because she’ll believe we folded too easy and we’re up to something. So Fletcher wasn’t at issue… we snatched him up because we could; we just didn’t plan on him becoming a high-profile problem on this voyage.”

Aside from the damage done his tight-knit command, he didn’t like the ethical shading of the transaction he was hearing about, for Madelaine’s own great-grandson. They were merchanters, and they bought and sold, but people shouldn’t fit into a category of goods. In that regard he felt sorry for anyone caught in the turbulence around their dealings, Mallory’s and Quen’s. And if Fletcher detected the nature of the dealings, it could certainly explain Fletcher’s state of mind.

“You’re not to tell that,” Madelaine said, extraneous to any prior understandings she’d elicited of him. Madelaine was drinking wine and maybe just a little bit more open than she’d have wanted to be. “Especially to Fletcher.”

“You don’t like Quen,” JR observed. It seemed to him that Quen was an unanswered question, and what her dealings had been were never clear.

“I don’t,” Madelaine said. “Not personally. I admire her. I don’t like her. She got personally involved with a stationer, kited off from Estelle because she was head over heels in love with a bright young station lawyer and nobody could prevent Elene doing any damn thing. It’s uncharitable to say it, but that’s the case. Elene was on station when her ship died because Elene was having her way in one of her romantical fancies. My Francesca was on station because she had no damn choice, medically speaking, and we had to transfer her off and go in fifteen minutes.” Another sip of wine. “Now Elene’s a hero of the Alliance and my granddaughter’s dead of an overdose. Quen didn’t do one thing to make her life easier while she was alive and alone there. Not one.”

He was shocked, and tried to hide it. Madelaine had never unburdened that opinion to him. But he hadn’t been in the line of command the last time they’d visited Pell and Madelaine’s temper hadn’t been ruffled by a sordid trade to get her great-grandson back, either.

“I blame Elene,” Madelaine said. “I blame Elene that she left her own ship. I blame Elene that she didn’t take Francesca in tow and provide a little personal friendship. Granted Elene was busy and Elene was pregnant, too, but if she ever extended a hand of friendship to my granddaughter before she hit the bottom I have yet to hear it. If my Elizabeth had lived to get back to Pell, she’d have had words for Quen. I reserve what I say. I’m only the girl’s grandmother.”

Francesca’s mother, Elizabeth. Dead at Olympus. There were so many.

Madelaine nudged JR’s arm with her wine glass. “Take a little extra care of my great-grandson. Don’t waste him in the junior-juniors. I know he’s an ass, but he’s got possibilities. Personal favor.”

JR drew in a slow, deep breath. He’d gotten snagged, broadsided, and boarded. Aunt Madelaine was the ship’s chief lawyer.

“I’ll try,” he said

“All you can do,” Madelaine agreed.

“Any special advice?” he asked Madelaine.

“For dealing with him? Grow all-over fur. The boy’s had no human ties. Damned Pell courts.” Sip of wine. The bottom of the glass, a little straw-colored liquid remaining. “Get me another wine, there’s a love. James has come. I won’t tell him what Fletcher did. None of us will. It just isn’t important.”

James Robert had come in, perhaps thinking he’d find a grateful, happy new member in the Family. Madelaine went in that direction, damage control, protection of her great-grandson, leaving him to get a refill at the bar, and one for himself while he was at it.

James Robert and Madelaine were in heavy discussion when he brought the wine. He put the glass in Madelaine’s outheld hand, offered his other on the moment to the Old Man, who hadn’t gotten across the room before Madelaine’s interception, and the Old Man murmured an abstracted thanks and took it.

Talk among the seniors: a Union ship just sitting out there, having run recovery on a bottle of Scotch. Quen and some high-powered agreement in their own vital interest. Madelaine said it was tariffs, which pointed to a political agreement inside the Alliance. The secrecy smelled to high heaven of some kind of operation of Mallory’s, while, third question, they were very publicly taking up trade again, in a move that had to be gossiped wherever merchanters docked… and the Fletcher incident had to dominate the gossip on Pell and everywhere else.

He had surmised their return to trade might be intended as a demonstration of Alliance power, a demonstration of the safety they hoped they’d created in the shipping lanes… at a critical moment when support of the starstation councils for the continued pirate hunt was wavering.

And at a time when Union was handing out special privileges to merchanters who wanted to sign on to wealthy Union instead of the economically struggling Alliance. He didn’t want to focus his career on fighting Union activity: he’d trained all his life to fight Mazianni, and that was where his interest was, but he could see that Union’s actions, actions which Quen would find of interest, constituted a smart move. Getting enough merchanters voluntarily signed into Union would win for Union without a shot what the War hadn’t gained for them by all the ordnance expended. If merchanters started drifting over the Line and signing with Union in any significant numbers the universe could see humanity polarized again into two major camps. Then, depend on it, merchanters would see themselves first regulated to the hilt, then entirely replaced by Union’s own ships: a merchanter desperate enough to clutch at Union financial support wasn’t analyzing his future further than the next set of bills.

It was the very situation that had started the War, the move to take over the merchanters this time coming not from Earth’s side, but from Union’s side of the border. One would think Union might have learned from Earth’s experience with the merchanters. Not so. The merchanters had formed their own state, at Pell, and with a handful of stations balancing commitment between the Merchanter Alliance and Union, and now Union started pushing to get the merchanters. The starstations independence would go next, and then they’d reach for Earth. If Mazian didn’t step in.

Or if Mallory and Quen and the Old Man of Finity’s End didn’t draw a line and say: no further.

And was that the message that went with the bottle in a black, starry sea? A warning—from Mallory and from Finity, Stay our allies? Don’t provoke us with your recruitments and your ship-building? Yours is the glass house?

It was certain in their own minds that Mazian had a secret base, somewhere within 20 lights of Pell, and that was an immense volume of space to search for someone determined not to be found. The rest of human habitation was concentrated in a comparatively small sphere at the center, where Mazian could strike without warning—and escape to that remote base.

It required a network of informants to establish any kind of security. Union didn’t have that network. Mallory did. Mallory—who was once of the Fleet. And they were such a network, they, the merchanters… who wouldn’t talk to Union or Alliance stationside officials with anything like the freedom with which they talked to each other.

From Mazian’s view, however, finding the heart of human civilization wasn’t a question of searching a 40-light sphere. It was a concentrated area Mazian could easily strike, without warning and with a choice of targets that could send chills down any civilized backbone. If a junior could venture a guess of his own, it was worse than that: Mazian’s aim might be to establish multiple bases, scattered points from which to threaten the center—and Mazian’s overriding strategy might not be a crushing military strike but rather evading Mallory, waiting for Union to get overconfident, and then maneuvering the Alliance or Earth into so deep a diplomatic crisis with Union that the Alliance had no hope except to forgive Mazian and recall him to take over the government. Then Mazian could use those bases to hit Union. But merchanters would bleed in the process.

Against that backdrop, the captains of Finity’s End had held their meeting with Quen and gotten some agreement out of her that they had wanted. Meanwhile they were going back to trading, Union was still refusing to let Alliance merchanters into its internal routes without them signing up as Union-based, and the Old Man had wanted Quen to bribe him into supporting her in some scheme of her devising.

What in hell game were they playing?

He went back to the bar, picked up a glass of wine for himself. Bucklin and Chad intercepted him on their own inquiry, having been out of the loop.

“So was that all about Fletcher?” Bucklin asked

“Some of it. Madelaine being his grandmother.” Great-grandmother, but in a Family’s tangled exogamous web of greats, second and third cousins and nieces and nephews on lives extended by time dilation and rejuv, you compressed generations unless you were seriously trying to track what you were to each other. “She’s taking a personal interest. She wants this kid in very badly.”

Silence greeted that revelation.

“About the drink,” JR said. “Let it slide. He didn’t know the rules. I’ll think about where he fits. He’s not Jeremy’s size. The body’s as mature as we are. The education’s just way behind.”

“Yeah, well.” Bucklin sighed, and they took their drinks and walked over to the rest of the junior-seniors, who’d staked out a table for eight. They pulled more chairs over, until it was a dense, tight group, Lyra, Toby, Ashley, Sue and Connor, Nike, Wayne, and Chad: as many different looks as they had star-scattered fathers. Lyra, a year younger than Bucklin and third in command, was the family’s sole almost redhead, sporting an array of earrings and bracelets she couldn’t wear in ops. Lyra, and beside her, Toby, whose brown complexion and shoulder-trailing kinky locks made that pair of cousins about as far apart as the Family genes stretched.

Lyra and Toby had brought a dedicated bottle of wine from the bar. Bucklin and he also had wine. The rest had soft drinks and fruit juice, and that was the line Fletcher had crossed without permission: Fletcher had assumed, maybe because he’d done it on station, that he had a right.

“Fletcher,” JR said by way of explanation, “had a run-in with Vince, you’ll have noticed. He opted for his quarters. Presumably he got there. Jake checked.”

“So did you explain the rules?” Connor asked over his own soft drink. By custom, they didn’t follow formal courtesies in rec hall or in mess. Complaints were allowed; and he could have figured it would be Connor and Sue that spoke up for the rule book.

“Fletcher’s got a possible Extenuating.” He saw frowns settle not only on those two faces but all around. “He’s a junior-junior, but Madison said it. The body physiologically isn’t.”

“Body’s not mind,” Nike said, and swept an indignant hand from Wayne and Connor on her right to Chad, Sue, and Ashley on her left. “When do we get wide-open liberty on the docks? When do we sleepover where we like? Or take a wine off the bar in front of the seniors and everybody?”

“You know when.” He didn’t want this debate over the issue, and their challenge to him was the answer. No, maturity wasn’t identical from ship to station on the biological or the mental level, and there wasn’t a neat equivalency. The off-again on-again hormonal flux of time-dilated pubescent bodies that was the number one reason they didn’t get bar privileges was precisely the hormonally driven emotional flux that set their nerves in an uproar when they were crossed. His physical-sixteens and -fifteens were a pain in the ass; he was just emerging from that psychological cocktail himself, and while at physical and mental seventeen-to-eighteen and chronological and educational twenty-six he was just getting his own nerves to a calm, sensible state. Yes, he still flared off, a besetting sin of his. But the infinite wisdom of the Way Things Worked on a short-handed ship had made him senior-most junior, responsible for all the junior crew that was still in that stage.

Keep them busy picking nits, his predecessor in the role had warned him; never let them take on the real rules. Give them nits to worry at and they’ll obey the big ones. Then Paul had added, smugly: You did.

Nits, hell. His predecessor had commanded the juniors through the dustup at Bryant’s, when so many had died—among the juniors as well. That had been no waltz.

They gave him Fletcher on a damn milk run. It seemed, on the surface, a tame, and minor, duty, one that shouldn’t set his lately pubescent hormones skewing wildly through the whole gamut of adrenaline charge. He’d had his last personal snit, oh, exquisitely dissected and laid out for him by Paul, right down to temper as his personal failing.

Not this time.

“Give him some leeway,” he said to the others. “Just give him some leeway. He’s not the same as having grown up here. He’s not the same as anyone we’ve ever personally known.”

“I hear he gave you trouble,” Ashley said.

“Not lately.”

“Not in fifteen minutes,” Sue said. “He shoved that glass on you in front of everybody.”

“Fine. I gave it to Vince. Who set up the situation, if we have to talk about fault.” His temper was getting on edge. Sue had a knack for stirring it up. He hauled it back and put on the brakes. “I saw the drink and I was dealing with it. I didn’t need a snot-nosed junior-junior to tell me that was a wineglass. Vince interfered. It blew. That’s the end of it. We’ve got Fletcher, he’s physiological seventeen, he probably drank on station, and somewhere, somehow in the plain fact he doesn’t know a damn thing useful, we’ve got to fit him in at the bottom of the senior-juniors—”

“No!” from Nike.

“—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a year older than he is; but Fletcher’s seventeen years weren’t time-dilated. So do you want my orders, or are there other suggestions?”

“He’s the baby,” Connor said “I think we ought to do a Welcome-in.”

Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It wasn’t the idea he had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew privileges and he hadn’t been through the process and the understandings and the acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.

“He’s a little old for that,” JR said.

“We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy,” Sue said. “Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took it. So how’s this guy holier than any of us?”

“He’s upset, that’s one difference. He wasn’t born here. He’s not one of us…”

“That’s what a Welcome-in’s for, isn’t it?” Chad asked, with devastating reason.

But a bad idea. “Not yet. This isn’t somebody straight down from the kids’ loft. This isn’t a green kid.”

“Plenty green to me,” Chad said.

“He can’t do anything,” Lyra said. “He’s not trained to do anything. He’s a stationer. He’s a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he’s got to appreciate what he’s joining.”

JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group, one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of him in an emergency.

“So when do we do a Welcome-in?” Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad’s tone it was an issue the way Fletcher’s encounter with him over the wine glass was going to be an issue with Chad.

“Not yet,” JR said. “Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he’ll blow, and that’s no good”

“Everybody blows,” Connor said.

“Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy’s size,” Bucklin muttered, finally, a dose of common sense. “Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you.”

There were sulks. They hadn’t done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They hadn’t known whether Finity would survive her next run, and they’d Welcomed-in Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn’t seemed fair for any kid to die alone in the nursery, the ship’s last kid, in years when they hadn’t produced any other kids.

Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to station-time.

And very, very different.

“I say we go easy with him,” JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin’s clear statement of the facts had gained, “and we give him a little chance to figure us out. Then we’ll talk. ”

There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.

“Square up,” JR said. “Don’t sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a senior venue.”

Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.

“I say with JR,” said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, “we give him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn’t, we talk again at Mariner.”

“Just don’t take him on,” JR said. “If you’ve got a problem with him, refer it to me.”

He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher’s quarters this evening and try to talk it out with him. But he didn’t trust that three-quarters of a wine glass in three gulps had improved Fletcher’s logic. Or his temper. There were constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased slide.

He supposed he’d tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe hadn’t been the ideal pair-up.

But putting him with him or Bucklin would inspire jealousy: Put him with Chad? There were two tempers in a paper sack. Connor, the same. Ashley or Toby would go silent and there’d be offense there. He couldn’t think of anybody better than Jeremy, who could outright disarm the devil.

The Old Man and Paul both had warned him there weren’t fast fixes for personal messes once they went wrong. You didn’t just go running down to a case like Fletcher and tell him how to fix his life and expect cooperation, especially after a public scene such as they’d just had. Fletcher had to figure a certain amount out for himself, and meanwhile he and his crew had to figure out what a mind was like who’d been more than content to sink into a gravity well and never see the stars again. Stranger than the downers, in his own opinion. Downers at least had been born to endless cloud and murk.

Wood, a slim wand of it brought into space where wood was a rarity, feathers, where birds never flew… and spirals and dots and bands carved by hisa fingers—fingers no longer content to carve wood with stones, the scientist reminded them. Hisa of these times were quite glad to have sharp metal blades. Hisa accepted them in trade and called metal cold-cold. That had become the hisa word for it.

No matter how hard you tried to keep the Upabove out of Downbelow, humans didn’t give up their ties to the technology they depended on and hisa learned to depend on it, too. But humans found it difficult to go down to a world again.

Fletcher lay on his bunk, his head a little light from the wine. His fingers drew peace from the touch of the feathers, damaged by a Downbelow rain. The touch of wood evoked memories far happier than where he was.

He didn’t give up his resentments. He didn’t give up his dreams, either. And maybe the experts weren’t right that he’d done actual harm by going where he’d gone. Expert opinion had backed another theory, once, right up to the time before he was born. Then the idea had been to get the hisa into space, teach them technology, give them the benefits of the steel and plastics world above their clouded world. Hisa had been very clever with machines, quick to learn small jobs like checking valves, changing filters, reading dials.

Pell Station, short of personnel in its earliest days, and overwhelmed by events cascading about it, had begun with hisa at the heart of the operation, and they’d built the station around the presumption there’d always be hisa on Pell.

But human greed had tried to push things too fast on Downbelow. People had multiplied too fast. Had brought demands on the hisa for more, more, more of their grain, for organized work, for controlling Old River’s floods and doing things on schedule.

Hisa hadn’t taken to schedules and human demands. A hisa named Satin had led a hisa uprising—well, as uprisen as patient hisa ever got—back during the War.

Then a new set of experts had moved in, declared humans had done everything wrong and shut down a lot of operations the Base had used to have, restricted more severely the rotation of hisa up to the station, and dashed all expectations of hisa and humans working together.

Was it wrong that Melody and Patch had rescued a human child?

Was it wrong he’d grown up and found them again?

Was it wrong he’d dreamed of working with them—maybe a little closer than he should have gotten?

(But he knew them, and they knew him, his gut protested. He hadn’t hurt them. He’d never hurt them.)

His fingers traced designs no human understood. He knew what scientists surmised the designs were: day-night in the pattern of black dots, Great Sun in the circles, Old River in the long curves and branches.

But maybe the curling patterns meant vines and seeds. Maybe it was fields and maybe it was hisa paths the lines meant. You could see anything you believed in, in hisa carving, that was the thing. And if he ever could ask Melody and Patch to read the stick for him, as sure as he knew their minds, he’d bet they’d read him something completely different every time he asked

So who was smarter? Hisa, with their patterns that could mean anything the day felt like meaning? Or humans who, in their writing and their image-making, pinned a moment down with precision, like a specimen on a board?

Was one better, or smarter, and ought hisa not to work on the station as much as some of them, individuals with preferences like every human, wanted to work?

He didn’t think natural was better. He didn’t think hisa should die young from infections, or lose their babies in floods or to fevers, or die of broken legs. But the authorities ruled there were hisa you could contact, but hisa who didn’t work at the Base were completely off limits. And they went on dying of things station medicine could cure.

Experts said—better a few die like that than have another contact the way it had been when the Fleet military had invaded Downbelow. Humans never should have landed on Downbelow at all, was what one side said. Everything humans had ever done was harmful and wrong. They’d already robbed an intelligent species of their unique future and further contact could only do worse.

But wasn’t a human-hisa future unique in the patterns of a wide universe, too? Wasn’t it a surer chance for the hisa to survive, when worlds with life were so few? And wasn’t it as important in the vast cosmos that two species had gotten together and worked together?

Seemed sensible to him that he’d done no harm.

They’d given him a gift that meant—surely—they weren’t harmed.

But when he remembered that he was lying on a bunk in a ship speeding toward nowhere, and away from every meaning the stick had to anyone, a lump came up in his throat and his eyes stung.

Rotten stupid was what it was.

More experts. Quen, this time. Nunn.

Friends, he and Bianca. Running around together. Thinking of things together. For maybe fifteen whole, oblivious days, with disaster written all around them.

It shouldn’t surprise him when it all fell apart. Things always did. He wrapped the feathered cords around the stick and put it away in the back of the drawer.

Then he fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, chasing away the ache in his chest with the remembrance of sunglare through green leaves. Jeremy came in from the party, late, and he pretended to be asleep as Jeremy clattered about and took a late shower.

When Jeremy had dimmed the lights and gone to bed, he got up and stripped his clothes off to go to sleep.

“There’s a lot of the guys mad at you,” Jeremy said out of the dark.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have taken the drink,” Jeremy said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said coldly. “They set ’em out, yeah, I’ll drink one. Nobody had a sign up. Nobody told me stop.”

“Vince was an ass,” Jeremy said finally.

“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling better by that small vindication. “Generally. So how was it?”

“Oh, it was fine.” Jeremy settled, a stirring of sheet and a sighing of the mattress. A silence then, in the dark. “JR said everybody should lay off you and be polite.”

“That so.” He didn’t believe it. But he couldn’t see Jeremy’s face to test the truth of it.

They were going to jump at maindawn, He was worried about sleeping through it. Forgetting the drug. Going crazy,

They were going to Mariner from here. They’d actually be at another star.

“Are they going to warn us tomorrow morning?” he asked Jeremy.

“About the jump? Yeah, sure, I’ll guarantee you can’t sleep through it. They’ll be on the intercom. Fifteen minutes before. You got your drugs?”

“Yeah,” When he was out of his clothes, he had the drugs in the elastic side pocket, on the bed, the way Jeremy had advised him. Always with him, “They’re right here.” He was still wobbly about the experience. Going into it out of the dark, he supposed one shift or the other had to have it in the middle of their night, but it was a scary proposition,

“Anybody from the party have a hangover,” he said, “That’d be bad.”

“The Old Man wouldn’t show ’em any mercy,” Jeremy said. “How are you, drinking that wine? You won’t have a headache, will you?”

“Not usually.” Stupid, he said to himself. He’d forgotten about the jump when he drank it all. He hoped he wouldn’t.

He figured if he did he wouldn’t, as Jeremy said, get any pity for it.

He shut his eyes. He didn’t sleep, for a long, long time.

When the warning came it was loud, and scared him awake.

Fifteen minutes,” it said. “Rise and shine. We’re on our way. Pull your pre-jump checks, latch down, tuck down, belt in, all you late party-goers. No sympathy from fourth shiftyou get the next jump and we get the rec hallmove, move, move…”


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