Finity's End

Chapter 14

If the junior captain, on A deck, wasn’t supposed to know about a Welcome-in, the senior captains, on B deck, damn certain weren’t supposed to know about such an event; or to have to question the junior captain’s common sense or ability to command unless or until he gave them reason to think the junior command had made a mistake.

In a few years, JR was well aware, the ship’s entire existence might ride on the wisdom of his decisions. Right now he found the entire crew’s welfare still did, the welfare not alone of one Fletcher Neihart, or even of the junior crew in isolation from the rest, or of Chad, who was getting a broken tooth repaired in sickbay.

There was no isolation of juniors from seniors once things had gone wrong, and they had gone very seriously wrong.

“They jumped the gun and I didn’t find out,” Bucklin said, outside sickbay, when JR had answered the call, “until somebody cued me the laundry was empty. That was when I called you. And I had two places to look before I found where in the rim they were. Chad didn’t want the tooth fixed. Oh, no. Chad didn’t want a report filed with you, but I didn’t give him that grace.”

He heard out the whole story, the bucket of water, Sue’s notion of getting a fast agreement out of an argumentative customer she’d been scared was too strong and too tall to handle: Sue had feared someone was going to get seriously hurt in a melee, and she’d taken action to assure Fletcher folded.

Not a bad idea, if it had worked.

His call to Legal Affairs had gotten a call out for Fletcher, but Fletcher hadn’t answered the call they sent. His hoped-for clandestine talk with Fletcher hadn’t happened. Chad and the crew hadn’t waited. Fletcher had been dragged down to the rim directly after Chad and the crew had approached him for a go-ahead, with the result they now had; and Fletcher’s failing to respond to a call… that had assured that Madelaine was aware something odd was going on. It was a short jump from Madelaine’s office to the Old Man’s.

“I want Fletcher here.”

“Fletcher seems undamaged,” Bucklin said, but added, hastily, “but he’ll be here.”

JR walked into sickbay and stood, quietly, while senior cousin Mary B. finished the dental work. Chad rolled a disconsolate eye in the direction of judge and jury.

“There,” Mary said, giving Chad a mirror. “Two stitches and a bond on the tooth. Don’t eat hard candy today.”

“Is he in pain?” JR asked Mary.

“He’s numb,” Mary said. “Hit a wall, so I hear.”

“The wall hit back,” JR said. “Would you call Charlie down?” Charlie was the medic of the watch, when he wasn’t on com. “I’d like him and the wall both looked at.”

Mary gave him an arch look and went to do that before she tidied up her equipment.

“You owe Mary some scrub time,” he said as Chad climbed out of the chair. “About ten hours of scrub time, including her quarters, I’d say.”

“Yes, sir.” Chad’s mouth was numb. Chad met his eyes without flinching, credit him that, JR thought. He just stood there a second, and Chad just stood.

“So?” JR said. “You jumped the gun on Bucklin, you got a little too enthusiastic in your goings-on, and Sue resourcefully chucked a bucket of water on Fletcher. Where did it go wrong?”

“I set him up,” was what he guessed Chad said, past the deadening of the lip. “He didn’t go along with it. He told us go to hell. Then Bucklin got him loose, and he took exception to me.”

“Fletcher did.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So, was there a particular reason for him to take exception beyond that you set him up? Just the color of your eyes? The idea of the moment?”

“I don’t know, sir, but I apologize, sir.”

“Did you apologize to him?”

“He walked out, sir.”

“Do the words fucked-up clearly apply here?”

“Yes, sir. Fairly fucked-up.”

“Thank you.” He caught Mary’s nod. She’d snagged Charlie and the medic was coming down to give Chad the once-over.

Cousin Fletcher was not a slight young man. Neither was Chad, both of them towering over him by half a head. There was the potential for cracked ribs, cracked teeth, or slightly more subtle damage, like the level of trust available within the crew.

“You go sit over there.” A nod toward the medic’s station, the sliding doors of which stood open, tables that were surgery when they had to be. “When Fletcher gets in here, I want no repetition of the problem, do we have it clear, Mr. Neihart?”

“Yes, sir, we do.” It was a pathetic mumble. The stitches, two neat electronic clips, were going to smart when the painkiller wore off.

Bucklin showed up. With Fletcher. An undamaged Fletcher, to look at him. A brittle and angry Fletcher, ready to damn all of them to hell.

Jeremy trailed after, and hung about in the doorway.

“You,” JR said, “out of here.”

Jeremy vanished.

“You”—to Fletcher—“I want to talk to. Relax.”

“Is this about the fight?”

Fletcher would manage to come at things head-on and with guns live. Not his best feature. “If you’ve got any arena for improvement, Fletcher, it’s your slight tendency to meet people with a challenge, just one of those small problems I’m sure you can improve. At this particular moment I’m sure there’s some reason for what I see here, which I’d rather not officially notice. How are you getting along, in general?”

“Fine.”

“Jeremy’s all right with you?”

“Fine. Just fine.”

“No problems with Jeremy?”

“No.”

“That’s good. How about the rest of the crew?”

And that got a direct look of Fletcher’s dark, same-genetics eyes.

“You know what happened.”

“Chad’s report.” He nodded to the end of the room, where Chad sat on the end of a surgery table.

“I’m in here for a medical. Is that an excuse, or what? Or do I get another round with him?”

“I want a medical report And some common sense. Listen to me, Fletcher.” The tone had Fletcher’s attention to himself for about two heartbeats. “We have a tradition on this ship, welcome-in the new guy. As you know—” Another gathering of Fletcher’s temper and Fletcher got past it. “Usually it’s straight out of the nursery, transition into the crew. Jeremy was the last. Kidnap the kid, play a few pranks, a little ceremony, that’s about the size of it. Two damn fools your size going at each other weren’t in the plan.” He couldn’t tell Fletcher’s state of mind at the moment. Fletcher’s face was absolutely rigid. “It’s a test—a test of your sense of humor among other things.”

“I got a taste of your jokes.”

“I understand so. There were some pretty light-weight kids involved in what went way out of parameters. You and Chad are a fair match. You kept it to that. I respect that. They know they took it too far. I frankly tried to dissuade them from the idea, but they wanted to welcome you in, in the serious sense. That’s the tradition.”

“Welcome, is it?”

“It’s what they meant. Know us. Fall into the order of things. Find a place. With the crew. In the crew.”

“It’s a stupid tradition.”

“It may be, but I’m asking you to take it the way it should have gone. No grudges. They’ve done what they insisted on doing. It’s over. You’re in.”

“I don’t want to be in.”

“That’s another problem, but they’ve no right now to treat you as an outsider. You understand that? There is a difference. And they made that difference, so they have to accept you in with whatever privilege I grant.”

“Damn if I care. Sir.”

“Calm down, I say. You’ve got a right to be mad, but if you exercise it you’ll do yourself damage.”

“More than they’d like to do? I don’t think so. Welcome in, hell! I’m not welcome here! That’s real clear!”

“It was a bad start. Best I could do. I wasn’t going to leave you alone for your first jump; and me taking you in—that would put you in with the senior-juniors where you don’t fit. That was my thinking. Jeremy’s a good kid. He reacts fast. He’d keep you out of trouble. Do you want to be moved?”

“Jeremy’s fine.” Fletcher seemed calmer, and stayed fixed on him without evidence of skittering off into temper. “No problems with him.”

“You’re sure. Even after what happened.”

“He’s a kid.”

“He is a kid. On the other hand… you’re not. And you are. Coming off a station where you don’t cope with ship-time… you don’t fit the ship’s profile, that’s what we say. You’re not in our profile. It’s hard to figure where to put you.”

“That’s too bad.”

Fletcher had a way of trying to get under his skin. Or he outright didn’t understand. And Charlie had shown up. Charlie—whose job was spacer bodies in all their diverse problems.

“Fletcher, I want you, first of all, to get checked out. Go right over there and sit down. Chad’s been in getting his mouth fixed. No lasting damage.—Then, Charlie, if you’d check out Chad. We’re looking for dents.”

It meant both Fletcher and Chad sitting on two adjacent tables in the surgery, a traffic management pricklier than two rimrunners at a jump-point, and the same possibilities of shots fired. “I’m not going to ask for any handshaking,” JR said, while Chad sat still and Fletcher stripped to the waist and got up on the other table, jaw set.

“Hurt?” Charlie had provoked a wince, pressing on ribs, then bent an arm, bringing a deeply gashed and bandaged forearm to view. “Lovely. So what did we have here?”

“We had a small discussion,” JR answered for both participants. “Charlie, we have here one stationer, aged seventeen, one spacer, Chad, aged twenty. How old are we?”

“Which one?” Charlie asked, having a close look mean-while into Fletcher’s right eye, preoccupied with inventory. “Our spacer is, what, a little short of seventeen?”

“Sixteen,” Chad muttered, “sir.”

“So how old are we?” JR asked “For our stationer’s benefit,—how old are we?”

Charlie backed off from the inspection of the other eye and gave Fletcher a slow scrutiny, the same, then, to Chad. “The stationer is a mature seventeen, probably having most of his height, not his ideal adult weight by about fifteen kilos. The spacer is a mature and very tall sixteen-year-old physique, grew, what was it? An inch since Bryant’s?”

“Yessir,” Chad said.

“And putting on a couple of kilos off Jeff’s fancy desserts,” Charlie said Chad blushed. He was putting it on around the middle. “But the stationer,” Charlie said, “our stationer lad is a different maturity, been through puberty, long bones are stopping growth, secondary sexual traits normal at my last examination…” Fletcher’s mouth was a thin line, he was staring at the edge of the table, possibly with a flush on Fletcher’s face, but Charlie didn’t proceed to the comparative clinical details. “Emotionally, however,” Charlie said, “the equation is more different between them now than it will ever be in later life. Fletcher, at seventeen, has lived every day of his seventeen years. He’s not grown up having the purge of emotional stress Chad’s undergone every month or so in hyperspace: his experience hasn’t been subject to that deboot.

“It’s all been continuous, interrupted only by ordinary nightly dreamstate and whatever psych counseling he’s had.” Fletcher shot Charlie a hard, burning look, which Charlie didn’t look to see. “Our spacer, now, has seen twenty years of history; he was born during the War; he’s seen combat for all his years. Our stationer’s seen three less years and his station’s been at peace, whatever internal events it’s suffered. Our spacer’s nineteenth and twentieth years were spent in a sixteen-year-old body in the last stages of puberty, and he’s not expected to finish that process until he’s at least twenty-one or twenty-two depending on our travel schedule; he won’t be posted to adult crew until he’s at least twenty-six or twenty-seven and won’t enter apprenticeship until he gets at least another physical year’s growth. Meanwhile our stationer’s already past the growth spurt, the rapid changes in jaw, hair, primary and secondary sexual development. Body and hormones reach truce. He’s pretty well started on his adult life, as stationers tend to be at his age.—On the other hand, when Chad reaches his ship-time twenties, advantage pitches in the other direction. Our spacer won’t suffer the stress disease a stationer has: he has that monthly emotional purge, granted he’s not one of the rare poor sods that comes out of jump depressed, and our Chad is not depressed. He’ll be sixty station-years before he needs to think about rejuv, and look forty, with the historical experience of sixty, when our stationer who stayed on station-time for his first seventeen years is just a little sooner on rejuv. If he doesn’t want to ache in the mornings,” Charlie patted Fletcher’s bare shoulder. “You survived. Congratulations. But let’s put a better bandage on the elbow.”

“It’s fine.”

“Shut up, Fletcher,” JR said. “Just sit still.”

Fletcher sat, and gazed fixedly at the wall, endured the neoplasm Charlie shot on for a patch, and the bandaging.

“You can shower with that.”

“Thanks.”

“Go and thrive. You’re released. Done. Unless JR wants you.”

Fletcher slid down from the table and began to pull his clothing to rights, determinedly not looking at any of them, as Charlie moved on to Chad and the mouth.

It was hard to judge Fletcher’s limits and capabilities. Add everything Charlie had said, plus bone-ignorant of safety procedures and any useful trade.

Try again, JR thought. “Difficult call, Fletcher. Difficult to judge where you are.”

“Where I don’t want to be, is the plain fact.”

“You were right at the start of everything, were you?” He’d known intellectually that Fletcher was called up out of a study program. How adult it was, how much career it might be, was all guesswork to him. “Now a career restart.”

“I’m not interested in a restart,” Fletcher said.

And, frankly, Fletcher was late to be starting anything. At any given jump, the senior captain or third Helm or Scan or Com 1 might not wake up, and the senior-juniors would be moving up, into real posts. It could make bad, bad blood on that point if he couldn’t finesse what Fletcher was, or might be. But he’d made his initial determination, a junior personnel decision, and it was his decision.

“Behind my unit and ahead of Chad’s,” he said, “there’s no personnel from those years. No one survived. That’s the problem. There’s no one to assign you with, you’re too far behind my set, and you and Chad, who’d be somebody to put you with, have just pounded hell out of each other. That makes things somewhat hard for me trying to put you somewhere constructive.”

“How about back on Pell?” Fletcher asked, in hard, insubordinate challenge.

“Not my option. Not yours. I said you were in. I’ve got the job of finding you a spot. You want some senior privileges—” It was the damned drink incident at the bar that had touched off the mess, that and his failure to lay the law down absolutely on one side or the other. He was aware Chad was listening, and Chad would report exactly what the disposition was. So would he, faster than that. A memo would hit the individual mail-boxes within the hour. And this time he didn’t count on their lifelong connections to straighten out the details: he knew where he’d assumed it would happen with Fletcher. It hadn’t worked itself out; and decision, any decision, was better than no decision. “I’m creating a class of one. Solo. You want your unique privileges, you’ve got bar rights at family gatherings, but I’m insisting you stay in the approved junior-juniors’ sleepovers and not overnight elsewhere during liberty. More than that—I’m giving you a duty. You take care of Jeremy, Vince, and Linda. It takes them off my hands and gives me and my team a break from junior-juniors.”

Fletcher gave him a straight-on look, as if trying to decide where the stinger was.

“I don’t know the regulations.”

“They do. Jeremy won’t con you, Vince will almost assuredly try.” He made a shift of his eyes to Chad, who was getting off the table. And back to Fletcher. “You don’t have to make apologies to each other. A love fest isn’t required. I do expect civil behavior. And a concentrated effort to settle your differences.”

Fletcher absorbed that observation in long silence. He looked across the gap at Chad, on whom Charlie had interrupted his examination.

“Chad,” JR said, and Chad got down, jump suit bunched around his waist.

“Yessir.”

“Chad, this is your cousin Fletcher.”

“Yessir.” It was a mumble, still. Chad drew a deep breath and offered his hand.

Fletcher took it, not smiling.

“Pretty good punch,” Chad said magnanimously.

Fletcher didn’t say a thing. Just recovered his hand.

“Go on,” JR said, and Fletcher left.

“Damn station prig,” Chad said when he’d gone. “But he sure learnt to fight somewhere.”

“Evidently he did,” JR said dryly, and Chad got back on the table and endured being poked and prodded.

“Ow,” Chad said.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it tied things down. Charlie had put a finger on one significant matter. Tempers on what had been a burning issue almost always settled a little after jump: hyperspace straightened out perspectives, lowered emotional charges, made things seem trivial against the wider universe—acted, in most instances, like a mood elevator. Some quarrels just dissipated, grown too tenuous to maintain, and others fizzled after a few half-hearted spats the other side of where they’d been.

Unfortunately they weren’t approaching a jump where things would cool down. They were on the inbound leg of the Mariner run, coming into port, where he had to turn junior-junior crew loose on a dockside that had notoriously little sense of humor with rule-breakers—a dockside made doubly hazardous because it was a border zone between Alliance and Union and a minefield of political sensitivities and touchy cops.

Finity on a trade run as an ordinary merchanter was going to be damned conspicuous. He’d caught discussion among the senior crew, how various eyes were going to be watching her and her crew for signs that she wasn’t really engaged in commerce, signs, he could fill in for himself, such as the absence of underage crew on the docks, when all other ships let their youngsters go to the game parlors and the approved kid haunts.

They had to let the junior-juniors go out there. They had to look normal. And he had to get them back again, in one piece.

Put Fletcher in charge of the juniors who’d more or less been in charge of him? It might straighten out the accidental kink that had developed in the order of things. He’d have Fletcher report to him once daily about the state of the juniors, he’d threaten Jeremy’s life if they gave Fletcher a hard time, and he’d have a daily phone call from Fletcher coincidentally confirming Fletcher’s own well-being and whereabouts, and necessitating the learning of rules and regulations—which would have galled Fletcher’s independent soul if he’d asked Fletcher to report on himself, or to read the rule book and learn it.

It was as good as he could manage. Better than he’d hoped.

He went to B deck and filed a report with the Old Man’s office, not a flattering one to himself. “I’ve put Fletcher in charge of the juniors,” he began it. And explained there’d been an incident. He’d hoped not to face the Old Man directly, but unfortunately the robot wasn’t taking calls.

Vince and Linda gave Fletcher a speculating look when he came back to the laundry. Jeremy stood and stared, his face grave and worried.

There wasn’t enough work to keep them busy. There was nothing but cards. Fletcher made a pass about the area looking for work to do, anything to keep him from answering junior questions. But in his concentrated silence even Vince didn’t blurt questions or smart-ass observations, maybe having learned he could get hurt.

“Not enough work to justify four of us,” Fletcher announced. “You handle what comes in. I’m going to the room.”

“You better not,” Jeremy said in a hushed voice. “You’ll catch hell.”

“It’s my room,” he said. “I’ll go to it.”

But the intercom speaker on the wall came on with: “Fletcher.”

Jeremy dived for it. “He’s here,” Jeremy volunteered, as if that was the source of all help.

“Fletcher R., report to the senior captain’s office.”

“Shit,” he said, and Jeremy instantly blocked the reply mike with his hand.

“He’s coming,” Jeremy said then. “He’ll be right there.”

“Going to catch hell,” Vince muttered.

Fletcher thought of going to his room anyway, and letting the captain come to him. But, he told himself, this was the person he wanted to see, the person who should have seen him when he boarded and who never yet had bothered. This was the Goda’mighty important James Robert who’d built the Alliance and fought off the pirate Fleet, who finally found time for him, and who might be annoyed to the point of making his life hell and fighting him on his hopes of leaving this ship if he didn’t report in.

“So where do I find him?” he asked Jeremy.

Vince, Linda and Jeremy answered, as if they were telling him the way to God.

“B7. There’s these offices. All the captains. His is there, too.”

Right near Legal. He knew his way. He walked out of the laundry station and down to the lift, rode it to B deck, trying not to let his temper get out of control, telling himself this was the man who could wreck him without trying.

Or finally understand the simple fact that he didn’t want to be here, and maybe… maybe just let him go.

The kids’ description matched reality, an office setup a lot like Legal, a front office where several senior crew worked at desks, all staff, offices to the side.

And JR.

“You set this up,” he said to JR, and was ready to turn and walk out.

“I don’t make the captain’s appointments,” JR said. “Report the situation? I was obliged to.”

“Thank you,” Fletcher said. So he wasn’t to meet with the captain alone. He had JR for a witness, to confuse anything he wanted to say. It wasn’t going to be an interview. It would be a reading of the rules.

He was here. He held onto his temper with both hands as JR opened the door and let him in.

The Old Man everybody referred to wasn’t that old to look at him, that was the first impression he had as the Old Man looked up at him. He was prepared to deal with some dodderer, but the eyes that met him were dark and quick in a papery-skinned and lean face. The hand that reached out as the Old Man rose was young in shape, but the skin had that parchment quality he’d seen on the very long-rejuved. It felt like old fabric, smooth like that; and he realized he hadn’t consciously decided to take the Old Man’s hand. He just had, suddenly so wrapped in that question that he hadn’t consciously noted whether JR had stayed or what the office was like, until the Old Man settled back behind his desk and left him standing in front of it. JR had stayed, and stood behind him, slightly to the side.

It wasn’t a big office. There was a thing he recognized as a sailing ship’s wheel on the wall between two cases of old and expensive books. There was a side table, and a chart on the wall above it, a map of stations and points that had lines on it in greater number than he’d ever seen.

Mostly there was the Old Man, who settled back in his chair and looked at him, just quietly observed him for a moment, not tempting him to blurt out anything in the way of charges or excuses prematurely.

Like a judge. Like a judge who’d been on the bench a long, long time.

“Fletcher,” James Robert said, in a low, quiet voice, and made him wonder what the Old Man saw when he looked at him, whether he saw his mother, or was about to say so. “A new world, isn’t it?”

He wasn’t prepared for philosophy. Could have expected it, but it wasn’t the angle his brain was set to handle. He stood there, thoughts gone blank, and the Old Man went on.

“We’re glad to have you aboard. You’ve had a chance to see the ship. What do you think?”

What did he think? What did he think?

He drew in a breath, time enough for caution to reassert itself, and for a beleaguered brain to tell him not to go too far. And to stop at one statement.

“I think I don’t belong here, sir.”

“In what respect?” Quietly. Seriously.

List the reasons? God. “In respect of the fact I prepared myself to work on a planet. In respect of the fact I’m totally useless to you. In respect of the fact I’m no good anywhere except what I trained all my life to do.”

“What did you train to do?”

“To work with the downers, sir.” The man knew. And was trying to draw him out. While he had JR at his shoulder for an inhibition.

“It’s what I want to do.”

“What’s the nature of that work?”

He wasn’t prepared to give a detailed catalog of his jobs, either. “Agriculture. Archaeological research. Native studies. Planetary dynamics.”

“All those things.”

“I hadn’t specialized yet.”

“What would you have chosen?”

“Native Studies.”

“Why that?”

“Because I want to understand the downers.”

“Why would you want that?”

“Because I want to help them.”

“How would you do that?”

Question begat question, backing him slowly toward a corner of the subject with truth in it, a truth he didn’t want to tell.

“By being a fair administrator.”

“Oh, an administrator. A fair one. Just what they need.”

The tone had been so quiet the barb was in before he felt it.

“Yes, sir, it beats a bad one. And they’ve had that, too.”

“I’m very aware. So you were going into Native Studies. Getting a jump on the administrator part, it seems. You’d formed acquaintances among the downers.”

Bianca. It was the same thing Madelaine had hit him with. But now it had lost its shock value.

“Yes, sir. I did. I knew them before I went down. And there’s nothing in the rules that covered that.”

“I take it you checked.”

“They’re friends of mine! There’s nothing I did that would harm them.”

“Including going into the outback. Including endangering others. Including meeting with downer authorities.”

He’d told that to the investigators. He remembered lying in the bed, and them recording everything he said. He’d had to explain the stick. That he hadn’t stolen it. So it hadn’t been all Bianca.

“Why,” the captain asked him, “would you break the regulations?”

“Because you pushed me.”

“We weren’t there. I don’t think so. You made a decision. You went where you were forbidden to go, you stole lifesupport cylinders—”

“One from each. If anybody got out there compromised it was their own stupidity. You can feel it in the masks. They’d be too light.”

Was that a slight smile on the captain’s face? He didn’t take it for one. And JR was hearing entirely too much.

“You also,” the captain said, “went out there to outwait us. Endangering your downers, about whom you care so much.”

“Outwait you, yes. But not to endanger the downers.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it wouldn’t.”

“You were sure of that.”

“I know them. I was looking for the two I knew.”

There was a long silence then. James Robert leaned forward, elbows on the desk, fingers steepled in front of his lips. “Then,” James Robert said, “you thought it wouldn’t hurt them. You took conscious thought.”

“Yes, sir. If I’d thought I’d do them any damage I’d have turned around and given up. Right then.”

“Are you sure you didn’t?”

“I am absolutely sure I didn’t.” He was scared, however, that the captain knew more than he was saying… about what he’d boarded with. He waited to be accused.

“You invaded a downer shrine, on your own decision.”

“It’s not a shrine.” Had he said that part of it? God! He didn’t know now what he had said to the investigators, or how much more they’d inferred. “It’s a ritual site. There’s a difference.”

“That’s what they say.”

“Yes, sir.” They knew what he’d brought aboard. They were going to take it away from him.

“And why did you go there?”

“A downer led me.”

“Your friends did.”

“No. A different one.”

“And you still say you didn’t do damage.”

“I know I didn’t. They accepted me there. They brought me there.” There was more that he hadn’t said, but he wasn’t willing now for the Old Man to direct the conversation where he wanted it, chasing him into every corner of what he knew. “I talked to Satin.”

“So have I,” James Robert said.

For a moment he didn’t believe it. And then did. This was James Robert who’d been on Pell when the foremost of downers had been on the station.

“I’ve met Satin,” James Robert said. “An extraordinary creature. She went all the way to Mariner, and came back talking about war.”

He was impressed. In spite of everything.

“Do you know,” James Robert said, “they had no word for war until we told them?”

“She wasn’t on this ship.”

“On another merchanter ship. On a far more ordinary voyage. But even so she found the outside too threatening. She said the heavens were too troubled for hisa. She came back to her world, by what I understand, to sit by the Watchers and add her strength to the Watchers’ strength. To dream the future.”

A chill went over his arms. “What do you know about it?”

“I met her. I talked with her.”

He was vastly more impressed with this man than he’d planned to be. He’d tried to act righteous and the man turned out to know things that made him look like the rules-infracting fool he knew in his heart he’d been. A fool that deserved booting from the program—as they’d done with him, so thoroughly that Quen couldn’t even use reinstatement as a bribe.

Quen knew. Quen had told James Robert. And James Robert hadn’t met with him until now, when he’d have thought the captain who sued for his return would have been at the head of the list.

“What I know,” the captain said, “is the old ones sit by the Watchers and believe for the people. They expect things from the sky. Hell, we showed up. Something else might happen. There even might be peace. If you want my opinion, that’s what she’s looking for. That’s why she went back.”

“They say don’t attribute anything to them. That we can’t know what they’re looking for.”

“Bullshit. I know what she’s looking for. All of us who dealt with her know what she’s looking for. You don’t look so blind, either.”

His heart was beating very fast.

“And what’s that?” he challenged the captain. “What do you know that they don’t?”

“The meaning of not-war. We taught her the word for war. They didn’t have it. But they don’t have a word for peace either. And that’s what she waits to see. She’s got to be really old by now, in downer terms.”

Silver. Like an image. The captain made Satin so real in his mind it hurt.

“Yes,” he said. “She is.”

“You know what this ship is, Fletcher, besides a recurring inconvenience in your life?”

“No.” The captain preempted what he’d have said. Diverted talk to the ship. Which he didn’t want.

“This ship,” the captain said, “your ship, Fletcher, the way it was your mother’s, is the oldest merchanter still working. It’s the one that broke open the rebellion against the Earth Company. It had been started before, but we made it inevitable. Your predecessor helped make it happen.”

“I know that.” He didn’t want a history lesson. He knew about this ship, God, he knew about this ship. He’d learned about his almost-immediate ancestor. This ship was armed, it went God knew where, it was a warship in disguise, and it was probably lying (he began to fear so, counting that carrier that had spooked the ship back at the last jump) when it claimed it was going back to merchant trade.

“This is the ship,” the captain continued in dogged patience, “that secured the right that no matter what law a station is under, a merchanter’s deck is sovereign territory. Without that, merchanters would have been sucked right into the War, or coopted by Union.”

“I know that part, too.”

“This is the ship that led the merchanter strikes, the first to resist Earth’s imposition of visas.”

“At Olympus.”

“Thule. Learn your Hinder Stars. There are those of us who remember, Fletcher. And you have to. People who meet one of our crew expect you to remember, so be correct on that point.”

“I wasn’t born then. You may have been, but I wasn’t.”

“I know other things, in your world. This ship, Fletcher, is what Satin hopes for.”

“No. Satin doesn’t. Satin doesn’t care what humans do.”

“Yes, she does.”

“It’s a cheap try. The downers have no connection to us. They don’t know why we do what we do and we shouldn’t confuse them.”

“Did Satin tell you that?”

A shot straight to the gut.

“What did she say?” the captain asked. “Did she tell you that their culture is equivalent to but aside from protohuman development and that she’s a mirror of ourselves?”

“No.”

“I don’t think it’s her job, either. No more than it’s your job to run her planet for her.”

“I never said it was.”

“You have to take that line if you want to be an administrator. You have to work with the committee, play with the team, and leave the downers alone. If the committee had found out what you were doing they’d have had you on a platter, and by now they probably do know and they’ve got three study groups and a government grant to try to find out what happened. You were doomed. They’d have had you out of that job in a year.”

“It wouldn’t have gone the way it did.”

“Yes, it would. Because you questioned the most basic facts in the official rulebook… that Satin’s people have to be left alone and her people can’t learn anything they don’t think of for themselves. Those are the rules, Fletcher. Defy them at your own risk.”

“I never risked them.” It was the one thing he could say, the one thing he was, in heart and head, sure of, that Nunn never would believe.

“I know that. I know that. And Satin won’t talk to the researchers. Not to the researchers. Not to the administrators. Do you think she’s stupid? She has nothing to say to them.”

“What do you know? You talked to her once”

“Like you. You talked to her once.”

“I’ve studied them all my life. I do know something about them.”

“Something the researchers don’t know?”

It sounded ludicrous. He was no one. He knew nothing.

“You love them?” the captain asked. That word. That word he didn’t use.

“Love isn’t on the approved list. Ask the professors.”

“I’ll give you another radical word. Peace, Fletcher. It’s what Satin’s looking for. She doesn’t know the name of it, but she went back to the Watchers to wait for it. That’s why she’s there. That’s why she folded downer culture in on itself and gave not a damn thing to the researchers and the administrators and all the rest of the official establishment. It was her dearest wish to go to space. But we weren’t ready for her.”

“Satin went back to her planet rather than put up with the way we do business!” Fletcher said. “Wars and shooting people on the docks didn’t impress her. And she didn’t like the merchant trade. Downers give things, they don’t sell them.”

“When you met her, what did she tell you?”

His voice froze up on him. Chills ran down his arms. Go, she’d said. For a moment he could hear that soft, strange voice.

Go walk with Great Sun.

“We talked about the Sun. About downers I knew. That was all.”

“Peace, Fletcher. That’s the word she wants. She knows the word, but we haven’t yet shown her what it means. She knows that the bad humans have to leave downers alone. But that’s not peace. We haven’t been able to show it to her. We showed her war. But we never have found her peace. And that’s what we’re looking for, right now. On this ship. On this voyage”

“Fancy words.”

“Peace is a lot more than just being left alone.”

“You couldn’t give it to her down there,” the Old Man said. “You’re a child of the War. So is JR.” His eyes shifted beyond Fletcher’s shoulder, to a presence he keenly felt, and wished JR had heard nothing of this. “Neither of you have any peace to give her. And where will you get it, Fletcher? Your birthright is this ship. This ship, that’s trying to make peace work realtime, in a universe where everybody is still maneuvering for advantage mostly because, like you, like Jeremy and his generation, even like Quen at Pell, you’re all too young to know any better. You’re as lost as Satin. You don’t know what peace looks like, either.”

“What do you know about me or her? What the hell do you know?”

“The hour of your birth and the prejudice of several judges. The fear and the anger that sent you running out where you knew you could die… we never wanted you to be that afraid, Fletcher, or that angry.”

“You don’t want me! You wanted your fourteen million! And I was happy until you screwed up my life! Besides, I wasn’t trying to kill myself.”

“But if you hadn’t run out there, Satin would have come to the end of her life without talking to Fletcher Neihart.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Nothing, if you don’t do anything. A great deal if you commit yourself to find out what peace is, if you learn it, if you find it and take it to your generation. Satin’s still looking at the heavens, isn’t she? Still waiting to see the shape of it, the color of it, to see what it can do for her people, Fletcher. Right now only a few of us remember what peace looked like, tasted like, felt like.”

He caught a breath. A second one. He’d never been up against anybody who talked like James Robert. Everything you said came back at you through a different lens.

James Robert did remember before the War. Nobody he knew of did.

“Work for this ship,” he said in James Robert’s long silence. “Is that what you mean? Do the laundry, wash the pans…”

“All that we do,” James Robert said, “keeps this ship running. I take a turn at the galley now and again. I consider it a great pleasure.”

“Yes, sir.” He knew he’d just sounded like a prig.

“What good were you at laundry anyway? You think the first strike happened at Olympus.”

“Thule, sir.”

“Good. Details matter. If it wasn’t Thule everything would have been changed. The borders, the ones in charge, the future of the universe would have been changed, Fletcher. Details are important. I wonder you missed that, if you’re a scientist.”

“Biochemist.”

“Biochem? Biochem isn’t related to the universe?”

“It is, sir. Thule.”

“Precisely. I detest a man that won’t know anything he doesn’t imminently have to. Just plod through the facts as you think you know them. ‘Approximate is good enough’ makes lousy science. Lousy navigation. And keeps people following bad politicians. Are you a rules-follower, Fletcher?”

The Old Man was joking with him. He took a chance, wanting to be right, aware JR was measuring him and fearing the Old Man could demolish him. “I think you have my record, sir.”

A small laugh. A straight look. “A very mixed record.”

“I’m for rules, sir, till I understand them.”

“I knew your predecessor,” the Old Man said. “There’s a similarity. A decided similarity.”

He hoped that was a compliment.

“So JR tells me he’s assigned you to keep young Jeremy in line.”

“Jeremy’s been keeping me in line, mostly.”

A ghost of a smile. And sober attention again. “Biochem, eh?”

He saw the invitation. He didn’t know whether he wanted it. James Robert had a knack for getting through defenses, with the kind of persuasion he wanted to think about a long time, because he’d gotten his attention, and told him the truth in a handful of words, the way Melody had, once: you sad.

James Robert told him plainly what he’d always seen about the program: that if you didn’t believe what they said, follow their rules, you were out. And he’d hedged it all the way, being new, following his dream, living his imaginings… not looking at…

Not looking at what James Robert told him, that the Base wanted someone like Nunn, someone who’d follow rules, not push them—because what ran the human establishment on Downbelow wasn’t on Downbelow. It was on Pell.

“You get a few ports further,” the Old Man said. “We’ll talk again. You have a good time in this one, that’s my recommendation.”

The Old Man hadn’t ever mentioned the fight. The hazing. Any of it. Or changed JR’s assignment of him.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll try to. Thank you.”

The Old Man nodded. JR opened the door, let him out.

And came outside with him.

“Fletcher,” JR said.

He turned a scowling look on JR, daring him to comment on personal matters.

“I didn’t set you up to fail,” JR said. “Any help you want, I will give you.”

“Thank you,” he said. He couldn’t beg JR to forget what he’d heard. He had to leave it on JR’s discretion, whatever it might be, without trusting it in the least. He left, back to the laundry, thinking… they’d talked about peace, and he’d believed everything the Old Man said while he was saying it. It gave him the willies even yet, when he considered that this ship hadn’t been trading for a living for seventeen years.

The Old Man said they were looking for peace, and that none of them knew what it looked like.

He thought of Jeremy, talking of going to Mallory, carrying on the fight. Of Jeremy, shivering in the bunk approaching jump, because the kid was scared.

The youngest of them had seen the least of what the Old Man said they were looking for. They called it peace, when the Treaty of Pell had stopped Union from going after the former Earth Company stations, when the stations agreed to host the Merchanters’ Alliance and Earth disavowed the Fleet… but the Fleet hadn’t surrendered. And there wasn’t any peace.

And the oldest downer had gone back to her world to watch the heavens and believe for her people.

Believing that there was something more, though she’d seen what war looked like. Believing there’d be something else—when for thousands upon thousands of years the Watcher-statues had watched the heavens, waiting…

For what? Visitors?

What peace? he should have asked the Old Man when he had the chance. What does this ship have to do with it, when all it’s done is fight? What are we doing, when you say we’re looking for peace? None of the juniors know what it is, for very damn sure.

When did I say yes? When did I even start listening?

Anger tried to find another foothold. Resentment for being conned.

But this was a ship that had meant important things in the recent past.

What if? he began to ask himself. He, who’d met Satin, and looked into her eyes.

“Got chewed out, hey?” Vince asked when he got back to the laundry, and he just smiled.

“No,” he said in perfect good humor. “I just got put in charge of you three.”

Vince’s mouth stayed open. And shut.

“You’re kidding,” Linda said.

“No,” he said. Jeremy grinned from ear to ear.