Finity's End

Chapter 19

The Watcher-statues towered above the plain, large-eyed hisa images like those little statues on the hill. But these were far larger, tricking the eye, changing the scale of the world as Fletcher walked down toward them. Living hisa moved among them, very small against the work that, when humans had seen it, revised all their opinions about the hisa’s lack of what humans called civilization.

He knew that part. Only a very few artifacts ever left Downbelow. Everybody was curious about the hisa, and if nothing prevented the plunder of hisa art, so he understood, hisa artifacts would be stripped off the world and the culture would collapse either for want of critical objects of reverence (or… whatever hisa did with such things); or it would collapse because of the influx of culturally disruptive trade goods and environmentally disruptive human presence.

Researchers didn’t ordinarily get to go out to the images. Only a handful had come here to photograph, and to deal with hisa.

And now, culmination of his dreams, he was here, approaching the most important site humans knew of on Downbelow. His youthful guide brought him closer and closer. He walked at the speed the scant air he drew through the mask would let him move, with the notion that before he got to those statues surely some authority, hisa or human, would stop him. It was too reckless, too wondrous a thing for a nobody like him to get to see this place close up.

And yet no one did stop him. As he walked down the long hillside, he saw strange streaks in the grass all around the cluster of dark stone images, and wondered what those patterns were until he noticed that his guide’s track was exactly such a line, and so were his steps, when he cast a mask-hampered look back. They were tracks of visitors, coming and going from every direction.

Hisa sat or walked among these images, some alone, some in groups, and they had made the tracks across the land, most from the woods just as he did, but some from the river, or the hills or the broad plain beyond. The rain that sifted down weighed down the grasses, but nothing obliterated the traces.

Tracks nearer the images converged into a vast circle of trampled grass all about the images and in among them, where many hisa feet must have flattened last year’s growth, wearing some patches nearest the base down to bare dark earth. It struck him that from up above, this whole plain bore a resemblance to a vast, childishly drawn sun: the circle of stone images, the tracks like rays going out. But hisa didn’t always see the sense of human drawings, so he wasn’t sure whether they saw that resemblance or that significance. They venerated Great Sun, who only one day in thirty appeared as a silver brilliance through Downbelow’s veil of clouds, and that veneration was why they made their pilgrimages to the Upabove: to look on the sun’s unguarded face.

As these Watchers were set here to stare patiently at the sky, in order to venerate the sun on the rare occasions the edge of the sun should appear: that was the best theory scientists had of what these statues meant.

There were fifteen such Watchers in this largest site, huge ones. There’d been three very much smaller ones on the hill to which Melody and Patch had led him and Bianca. And what did that mean, the relative size of them, or the number?

He found himself walking faster and faster, slipping a little on the grass, because his guide went faster on the downhill; and he was panting, testing the mask’s limits, by the time he came down among the images.

He stared up at the nearest one. Up. There was no other impulse possible. For the first time in his life a hisa face towered above his, but not regarding him, regarding only the heavens above. He felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

And when he looked around his guide was gone.

“Wait!” he called out, disturbing the peace. But his hisa guide might have been one of ten, of twenty hisa of like stature. Three in his vicinity wore cords and bits of shell very like his guide’s ornament. Wide hisa eyes stared at him, of the few hisa who remained standing and of the most who sat each or in clusters at the front of a statue.

“Melody?” he called out. “Patch?” But there was such a stillness around about the place that his calling only provoked stares.

What was he supposed to do? His guide had failed to tell him.

Where did he go? Push the button and call the Base for help?

He wasn’t ready to do that. He wasn’t ready to give up the idea that Melody and Patch would come here at least for him to bid them good-bye; more than that, getting past the administrative tangle he knew he’d added to his troubles—his mind shied away from fantasies of hisa intervention, last-moment, miraculous help. It didn’t seem wrong, at least, to explore the place while he waited. Hisa weren’t ever much on boundaries, and, after the novelty of his shouting had died away, hisa were wandering about among the images at apparent random, seeming untroubled by his presence.

So he walked about unhindered and unadmonished, looking up at the statues, one after the other, seeing minute differences in them the nature of which he didn’t know. Looking up turned his face to the misting rain and spotted his mask with more water than the water-shedding surface could easily dispose of, water that dotted the gray sky with translucent shining worlds, that was what he daydreamed them to be: this was the center of the hisa universe, and he stood in that very center, by their leave.

He spread wide his arms and turned, making the statues move, and the clouds spin, so that the very universe spun as it should, and he was at the heart of the world. He did it until he was dizzy, and then realized hisa were staring at him, remarking this strange behavior.

He was embarrassed then and, being dizzy, found a statue at the knees of which no one sat; he sat down like the others, exhausted, and realized he was beyond light-headed. A breathing cylinder wanted changing. But not urgently so. He set his hands on his knees and sat cross-legged, back straight. He was shivering, and had a hollow in the middle of him where food and filtered water would be very welcome. Excitement alone had carried him this far. Now the body was getting tired and wobbly.

He breathed in and out in measured breaths until he at least silenced the throbbing in his head and the ache in his chest Still, still, still, he said to himself, pushing down his demand on the cylinders until he could judge their condition.

He’d been cold and hungry many a time in his foolish childhood. He remembered hiding from maintenance workers, back in his tunnel ventures. He’d gone without water. Kid that he had been, he’d gotten on to how to manage the cylinders with a finesse the workers didn’t use, and pretended ignorance through the instruction sessions when he’d come down to the world. He’d known oh, so much more. He’d read the manuals understanding exactly what the technical information meant, as he’d wager the novices didn’t.

He leaned his head back against the stone, face to the sky. And drew a slow breath.

In time he knew in fact he had to change one cylinder out, and did. He slept a while, secure in two good cylinders.

Once, in an interlude between fits of rain, a hisa came over to him and said, “You human hello,” and he said hello back.

“You sit Mana-tari-so.”

“I don’t understand,” he said,

“Mana-tari-so,” the hisa said, and pointed up, to the statue.

It wasn’t a word he’d learned, of the few hisa words he did know.

“He name,” the hisa said.

“He name Mana-tari-so?” The statues, then, had names, like people, or stood for people. He rested against the knees of Mana-tari-so.

“Do you know Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o?” He didn’t pronounce Melody’s and Patch’s names well. But he thought someone should know them.

“Here, there,” the hisa said, and patted the statue. “Old, old, he.” And wandered off in the way of a hisa who’d said what he’d wished to say.

He knew something, he suspected, just in those few words, that the scientists would want very much to know, but he could only ponder the meaning of it. Old? Going back how far? And did it stand for a specific maker? And if that was the case, how did a hisa merit the making of such a huge image, with only stone tools? It was not the effort of one hisa. It couldn’t be, to shape it and move it and make it stand here.

He sat there cold and hungry and thirsty while the gray clouds went grayer with storm. He sat there while lightning played overhead and thunder cracked. His suit had passed its one flash heat, and had nothing more to give him except to retain some of his body heat. But Mana-tari-so sheltered him from the wind, and ran with water…

The earth shook. Heaved…

Became the ship… and a giant fist slamming at him.

He lay there, half-smothered by his own increasing weight, thinking… with startled awareness where he was… We’re going to die. We’re out of jump. We’re going to die here…

Second slam.

“Fletcher!” he heard from Jeremy. “You all right, Fletcher?”

“Yeah,” he said, as his stomach threatened to heave. “Yeah.”

A third drop. A wild, nerve-jolting screech from Jeremy.

The damned kid took it like a vid ride. Enjoyed it. Fletcher caught a gulp of air.

Told himself he couldn’t take the shame of being sick. There was a way to take it the way Jeremy did. He tried to find it. Tried to hold onto it.

“Stay belted! Stay belted!” the intercom said. “We’re in, we’re solid, but stay belted. You juniors, this is serious.” The hell, Fletcher thought. The hell. “I don’t think we’ll use the shower yet,” Jeremy said. “Drink all those packets! Fast!”

The backup shift on this jump was second to first, Madison to James Robert, Helm 2 to Helm 1. Both shifts were on the bridge.

But JR, riding it out below, fretted and occupied his time shaving, flat in his bunk, and taking a risk on a lightning-fast wash before he dressed. The Clear-to-move was uncommonly late in coming, but the audio off the bridge was reaching him while he lay there, and the captain’s station echoed to a monitor setup he had on his handheld, a test of fine vision, but what he heard, fretting below, was a quarry fleeing the point, trying to elude their fast drop toward the dark mass of the failed star that was the point.

They’d gone low, toward the mass, because a bat out of hell was going to come in after them and above them, and Champlain must guess it.

He wanted to be on the bridge, but there wasn’t a useful thing he could do but watch, and he was watching here, as Bucklin would be watching, as Lyra would be watching, and all the rest of them who had handhelds in regular issue. They were held in silence, not disrupting the essential com flow, not even so far as chatter between stations.

He waited. Waited, with an eye on the clock.

Saw, utterly silent, the appearance of another dot on the system scheme, and the fan of probability in its initial plot, rapidly revising.

“There she rides!” Com was unwontedly exuberant. “Announcing the arrival of Union ship Boreale right over us and bound after Champlain for halt and question. Champlain is at a one-hour lag now, and projected as one and a half hours and proceeding. We do not believe that Champlain has made a second V-dump.”

He wouldn’t slow down to exchange pleasantries, JR said to himself, if he were in the position of Champlain’s captain, with an Alliance merchant-warrior and a Union warrior-merchant on his tail.

What the Old Man and Boreale could do to a suspected pirate spotter inside Mariner space was one thing. Outside that jurisdiction there was no law, and Champlain knew it was no accident they’d gone out on the same vector and tagged close behind her.

He had a bet on with himself, that almost all Champlain’s mass was fuel and that Champlain was going far across the local gravity well and away from them, before she dumped V and redirected for Voyager. They were doing a light skip in and out, light-laden themselves, in the notion of jumping first, transcending light while Champlain was still a moving dent in space-time, and possibly beating Champlain to Voyager. There was additional irony involved: that both they and Boreale could do it, and that neither they nor Boreale wanted to show to each other how handily they could do it in case their respective nations one day ended up in conflict. And that they didn’t entirely trust one another. There was just the remotest chance it might be politically useful to one party or another inside Union for one of the two principle ships defending the Alliance to disappear mysteriously and just not make port

Dangerous ally they’d taken. The Old Man had chosen that danger instead of the sure knowledge Champlain was no friend, and possibly did so precisely to demonstrate trust.

More compelling persuasion in the affairs of nations, JR thought now, the cessation of smuggling the Old Man proposed, the acceptance of Union negotiating demands: to have Alliance suddenly accept Union proposals threw such a new wrinkle into Union/Alliance affairs that Boreale wouldn’t dare turn on them without reporting that fact to Union headquarters. Unlike that carrier they’d passed (and he was sure it was no coincidence: the two ships were almost certainly working together), Boreale wasn’t a zonal command center, and couldn’t act without authority.

But even the carrier Amity, back at Tripoint, couldn’t set Union policy. A Union commander in deep space had to act with some autonomy, but conversely the restrictions policy laid on that autonomy were explicit. The Old Man had turned all Union certainties into uncertainty by complying with what Union had asked of them, and therefore it was likely the ship operating with them on this run was going to protect them until it could get word there and back again from Cyteen.

He’d grown up in the tangled shadows of the Old Man’s maneuvers, military and diplomatic, and he’d learned the principles of Union behavior: Uncertainty paralyzes: self-interest motivates. That, and: No local commander innovates policy.

Mallory innovated with a vengeance. It had made her highly unpopular with every nation, and annoyed the Alliance whose self-interest dictated they take the help of the only carrier and the only Fleet captain they or Earth could get. But even Pell didn’t entirely trust Mallory.

Let it be a lesson, the Old Man had used to say when he was a junior Jeremy’s age. Unpredictability has its virtues. But it has its negotiating drawbacks.

Union’s strategy hadn’t always worked. Mallory’s did more often than not. Mazian had been betrayed by his own masters: and Mallory had said in his hearing, Never serve Earth’s interests and succeed at anything. Nothing touched off Earth’s thousand-odd factions like the suspicion that some one faction’s policy might really succeed.

Pell was a Quen monarchy primarily because Pell had Earthlike tendencies, with one important difference. They chose an outsider to govern their outsider affairs because they couldn’t agree on one of their factional leaders holding power. Mariner was, again, a monarchy masquerading as a democracy: since the War, the same administrator had held power and set up an increasingly entrenched group, the only ones who knew how to govern. Voyager, tottering on the edge of ruin all during the War and fearing that peace might kill it… Voyager remained an enigma. While Esperance, a consortium of interests, as best he’d been able to figure its internal workings, clung to the Alliance only so long as it successfully played Alliance against Union.

What they carried, something the Old Man had to hope the Mariner stationmaster had not let leak in any detail to Boreale, was a firm proposal to shore up Voyager’s economy.

Voyager’s survival was not in Union’s short-term interest. If Voyager went bankrupt, Esperance would have no choice but to swing into Cyteen’s political and economic Union, a situation which the consortium on Esperance itself surely couldn’t want to happen, though individual members of that consortium might have other notions. In helping them carry out their mission, however, Boreale not only abetted the effort to close the black market, which was in Union’s interest, but aided Voyager’s economy, which wasn’t altogether in Union’s economic interest but was in interest of the peace, which was in Union’s long-term interest.

Higher policy. Boreale’s captain, even if he knew both halves of the equation, was going to be damned by his high command if he failed to render aid to Finity if the question went one way and damned if he did render it, if the question went the other, but as Union generally operated, that captain’s career salvation was going to be the simple fact Boreale had acted to uphold current policy.

So Boreale wouldn’t blow them to hell out here away from witnesses, and would concentrate instead on its proper target, a merchanter on the wrong side of Union policy and Alliance law.

The Old Man bet their lives on it, but it was a good bet and a better bet than being out here alone in the case that Champlain might have dumped down hard and Finity would have exited jump into a barrage of fire. Might have won, all the same, but this way there wasn’t a shot fired. The Old Man’s bet was won.

“Crew has one hour,” the intercom said. “One hour to prepare for run up to jump. We are not spending time here. Cargo is stable. Ship is stable. Rise and shine, cousins, and get yourselves set. Our colleague is now in front of us and we’re on the track. Note: the captain regrets there will be no bar open at Mariner-Voyager Point.”

“What are we doing?” The junior apprentice appointee in charge of Jeremy and company was no better informed than he’d ever been. He was reassured by the levity on the Intercom, but the situation was far from clear.

“We’re chasing that ship,” Jeremy said happily. “Burn their ass, we will, if they lag back.”

“We’re going to shoot?”

“Probably,” Jeremy said. “Sure as sure that we’re not running from it. Got to move quick. You want me to get the sandwiches and you take the shower?”

“Yeah,” he said. An hour, the announcement had said. An hour before they either shot at somebody or went right back up again, still wobbly from the last jump. Taking a shower under the circumstances was on one hand the stupidest thing he could imagine, and on the other, he couldn’t imagine anything more attractive than getting out of the sweaty clothes he’d worn for a month unless it was the news they weren’t going to jump or shoot after all, and that didn’t look forthcoming.

He stripped and stuffed the old clothes into the laundry bag, hit the shower and set the dial for five minutes.

The bruises were faded green. The stitched eyebrow felt healed and no longer swollen. The cut lip felt normal.

He remembered how he’d acquired them, remembered he wanted to beat hell out of Chad Neihart, but the heat of anger was as dim as weeks could make it… dim as a weeks-neglected chemistry of anger could make it. He knew biology, and was halfway glad to have the intervening cool-off, the diminished hormonal surges, but he felt robbed by that elapsed time, too, robbed of something basically and primally human, as effectively as he’d already been robbed of his sole tie to home and the first girl he’d almost loved. Feelings went cold as yesterday’s breakfast. Human concerns diminished until he could contemplate going into a fight as a technical problem, remote from A deck.

They probably wouldn’t find the stick. The pranksters had probably gotten scared, probably chucked it down a waste chute rather than get caught with it.

When he thought that, he could halfway resurrect the anger he’d felt a month ago. Fight Chad Neihart again? It was inevitable that he would.

Trust him again? He didn’t think so.

Love the girl he’d thought he loved? He wasn’t sure what he’d felt and what he did feel.

But he recalled something as recent as slipping into jump, Jeremy’s I’d miss you still echoed in his thinking. Jeremy would in fact miss him, as he’d miss Jeremy, and as strange, he thought he’d miss Madelaine, who’d fought to get him aboard, and who’d given him a tissue for a bloody nose.

He missed Downbelow.

But he’d miss people on Finity, too.

He’d never felt that, going away from the station to Downbelow.

He scrubbed hard, peeling away dead skin and scab and leaving new skin beneath. He raced the shower dial, which would finish with a warm all-over wash-off. His stomach remained queasy, not alone from the jump, but from the divergence between mind and body, that just didn’t muster the intensity of feeling he’d had before. As if the water sluiced away passions and left conclusions intact but without support. People on this ship wanted him. Others didn’t. How much of their feelings had jump leached out of them… and what would a second jump leave? A placid acceptance of the theft?

Hell, no. He wouldn’t let it. There’d be a reckoning. There’d be justice.

But did it take runaway hormones to make anger viable? Was it cowardice to let it fall, or to find it was falling what did a sane human do, who’d gone off where humans were never designed to go?

The water cycle hit from all sides, stung his skin in a short burst. Blinded him.

He loved Melody and Patch, but that passion was fading, too, no more immune to the onslaught of jump-space than his anger was. Spacers’ loves flared in sleepovers and died between jumps and became someone else in the next port, nothing eternal but the brother- and sisterhood on the ships. Family wasn’t meeting someone and marrying; it was your relations, your shipmates, the attachments close as Jeremy. I’d miss you… and that would resurrect itself.

Bianca was further and further behind. He was what, now? six weeks ahead of her and three months further on?

Melody’s pregnancy would be showing now, if she and Patch had succeeded. Her new baby would be a visible fact. She’d spend her time in a burrow. She’d have gone away from him of her own volition, grown absorbed in her future, not his past. His love for them didn’t diminish—their beginnings with him were almost as old as his sense of self—but they were his foundation, not his present reality.

He came out into the cold air, found Jeremy had gotten back from what must have been a sprint to the mess hall, with synth cheese sandwiches and cold drinks in plastic containers. Jeremy finished his in a gulp, started stripping and went to the shower, stuffing his laundry in the bag. “I’ll take it to the laundry chute,” Jeremy said from the shower, before it cut on.

Fletcher dressed and tucked up on his bunk with the sandwich and fruit juice, feeling not too bad and finding it hard to track on where they were in what could be the edge of a fire-fight. Ordinary things went on, the ordinary pleasures of clean clothes, a cold, sweet drink. Went on right down to the moment it might all be over. And he’d fallen into the understanding of it.

He’d finished his sandwich when Jeremy came out and dressed.

“How are you feeling?” Jeremy asked

“Mostly healed up,” he said

Jeremy wasn’t surprised “You got that Introspect tape? You think you could lend it?”

He’d bought it at Mariner. He’d played it several times. And Jeremy liked it.

“Yeah,” he said, and asked himself if he wanted to set up a tape himself.

But visions of Downbelow still danced in memory, a day unlike no other day he could ever imagine. Maybe he could recover that dream.

“Hello, cousins” came from the intercom, a different voice. “Here we are, second shift taking over, a rousing applause for first shift which dropped us neatly where we hoped to be and all the way down to synch with our port. Thanks to the galley for a heroic effort, and all those sandwiches. We’re on to Voyager, where, alas, we’re going to have to be on long hours. But the galley promises us herculean efforts during our Voyager run-in. We are able to reveal to you now, seriously, cousins, that we were engaged in negotiations with both Pell and Mariner, and with numerous captains of the Alliance, who concurred in a plan that now has Union working with us. This ship has become valuable to the peace, cousins, in a way that command will explain in more detail past Voyager, but Captain James Robert has a word for you in advance of our departure. Stand by.”

“Wild,” Jeremy said quietly. “He only does that when we’re going in to fight.”

“This is James Robert,” the next voice said, and a chill went over Fletcher’s skin. “As Com says, more later, but this we do know. We’re couriering in a message Voyager will very much wish to hear. We’re assuring its continued existence in the trading network, one additionally assuring that Mazian will lose the heart of the supply network that’s kept him going. There’s been a black-market pipeline funneling Earth goods to Cyteen and war materiels to Mazian, and that’s about to stop. I’ll fill you all in at Voyager, but console yourselves for a very hard stay at Voyager that we’re about to deal Mazian a blow heavier than any he’s had in years. Peace, cousins. Tell yourselves that when you’re on three hours of sleep and your backs hurt, and you’re tired of watching console lights that don’t change. Voyager liberty is cancelled. We may manage a few hours, but we’re going to work like dockhands at this next port. As an additional piece of news, our running partner Boreale is in hot pursuit of Champlain, and if Champlain doesn’t have the extra fuel we think she has, and does pull in at Voyager, we can deal with that, too.”

“We ought to hit them,” Jeremy said in a tone of disappointment “Why’s Boreale get all the fun?”

“It’s not fun, Jeremy!” Nerves made him speak out, and he gained a shocked look in return. “It’s not fun,” he reiterated. “Listen to the captain who’s done more of hitting them than anybody.”

“Maybe he’s getting old.”

“Maybe he always knew what he’s been fighting for! And maybe you’re too young to know.”

“I’m not too young!”

“I’m too young! Pell’s been at peace, but the idea of no enemy anywhere? I’ve never known that. But I lived with creatures who never fight each other, who don’t steal from one another, and people on this ship do! I’ve at least seen peace, and you haven’t!”

Jeremy looked at him, just stared, as if he’d become as alien as the downers.

“Maybe we can’t be like that,” Fletcher said, sorry if he’d hurt Jeremy’s feelings, and sorry to be at odds with him. “But we can be happy living a lot closer to that, where people don’t get killed for no good reason, and where you’re not taking what we could spend on building places for forests and blowing it all up.”

Jeremy didn’t look happy. Or informed.

“Take hold,” the intercom said. “Belt in, cousins. We’re about to move.”

“Somebody’s got to get Mazian,” Jeremy said. “Downers couldn’t get him.”

“Did you hear the captain? We are getting him. We’re getting him worse than if we blew up a carrier. Downers didn’t get him. But they watch the sky and wait.”

The count started. Then the pressure started and the bunks swung.

“I still wish we got that ship!” Jeremy shouted.

“I’m going to be happy if we get there in one piece!” Fletcher yelled back. “It’s no game, Jeremy. Get your head informed! You never saw what the captain’s looking for, you’ve never been there. But you’ve seen that tape I’ve got. They didn’t take that. You want to borrow it again? I can get it up to you!”

“No!” Jeremy shouted back. “I got a study tape to do.”

“Scare you?” he challenged the kid. “Doesn’t scare me.”

“You scared of Champlain? I’m not!”

“Scared of a thunderstorm? I’ve walked in one!”

“Seen a solar flare? That’s scary! I’ve seen Viking spit!”

He grinned, in this war of top-you. “I’ve seen the Old Man in his office!”

“That’s scary,” Jeremy said, and he could hear the grin in Jeremy’s voice. They played the game in increasing silliness until they’d reached bilious vats of synth cheese, and the pressure made talk difficult They were moving. Faster and faster.

“My sides hurt,” Jeremy said, and they were quiet for a while.

Then Jeremy said, “I don’t know what it’d be like, to just have liberties all the time.”

“Is that what you think we do, on station? We work jobs!”

“No, I mean, if we just went around to stations having liberties and trading and going to dessert bars and seeing girls and that.”

“And that. What’s that?”

“You know.”

He knew. Another grin. “Kid, your body’s going to catch up to your ambitions someday and the universe will make sense to you.”

“It makes perfect sense now!”

“Out there without a chart, junior-junior. Someday you’ll know.”

“You sleep with any of those Belizers?”

“If I had I wouldn’t tell you!”

“I bet you didn’t.”

“You’d be right. I’m particular.”

“You ever?”

“Maybe.”

“What was it like?”

“Like you’ve read in those books you’re not supposed to be looking at in that Mariner shop!”

“No fair. I was looking at the next row!”

“I’ll bet you were.” His ribs were getting tired from talking, but it whiled away the time, and fought the discomfort as Finity climbed toward jump. Finally voices gave out, and Jeremy resorted to his music tape.

He lay and stared at the underside of the bunk, then shut his eyes, asking himself how he’d worked his way into this, and suddenly thinking no one at home would even understand the exchange with Jeremy. That was, he supposed, when you knew you’d become different, when you started sharing jokes with Finity’s youngest… and knowing nobody back home would understand.

It was… when you settled in to a run like this, knowing you could make a fireball in the night, five or so lightyears from making a glimmer in anyone’s telescopes, and do it with a philosophical turn that said, well, it was more likely you’d get to Voyager instead.

And, it was a place he’d never remotely imagined going. It was mysterious and dark and primitive, by all he knew. It was a doomed and damned kind of place.

He’d say that to his stationer cronies of his junior-junior years and they’d say, Wild, and talk about going. But when they got to his age, they’d begin to talk about savings and getting more apartment space and whether to work extra hours for the bigger space or take the free time and live in a closet.

On Finity you got damn-all choice what you’d work, what you’d wear, and you didn’t retire. He did live in a closet, and shared it, to boot. They were out here with someone who was trying to kill them. For real.

God.

What made him settle in and say they’d probably make it?

What made him say to himself he didn’t need the stick to read Satin’s message, and that they might in fact be what Satin was waiting for? He was in the heavens Satin looked to for her answers.

“Approaching jump,” the intercom said. “Trank down, and pleasant dreams, cousins.”

“You awake?” he asked Jeremy. He hadn’t heard a sound out of the top bunk for the last hour. “Yeah,” Jeremy said. “I got it. How are you?”

“Fine,” he said, and pulled the trank packet from where Jeremy had taped it a month ago.

Stuck it to his arm and felt the kick, not even having worried about it.

“Pleasant dreams,” he said.

“You too,” Jeremy called down.

“We are in count, plus five minutes,” Com said. “Boreale has gone for jump and we believe Champlain has gone out of the continuum ahead of us. We have had no indications of hostile action. Stand by for post-jump crew assignments. We will transit Voyager space in ordinary rotation, third shift to the bridge, fourth to follow. Operations in all non-essential stations are suspended for the duration. Galley service will go on, that’s Wayne, Toby B., and Ashley. Laundry, scrub, filter change all will be suspended. Translate that, get your rest, cousins. You’re going to need it when we dock. That’s four minutes, twenty-nine seconds…”

Fletcher drew a deep breath, listening to the periodic reading of the count.

“I bet we could have gotten Champlain,” Jeremy said at the one-minute mark.

“Maybe we could,” Fletcher retorted, feeling the creak in ribs long protesting the acceleration. “But Mazian’s going to be madder if we cut off his supply.”

“You really think we can do that?”

“You got to study something besides vid-games, kid! You can’t make bread without flour, and you can’t get flour if the merchanters don’t move. And flour’s far scarcer than iron for missile parts in this universe!”

“That’s thirty seconds. Twenty-nine…”

He tilted his head back against the strain. The engines cut out for that moment of inertial drift that generally preceded a jump.

“Sweet dreams,” he yelled at Finity’s warlike youngest. “Think about it! Grain and flour, Jeremy! What the downers grow, what they lend us the land to grow! Bread’s a necessity for us, far more than ice and iron!”

The ship spread out to infinity and lifted… That was the way it felt…

He sat there all through the dark, aware of hisa around him, in the night. There was no shelter but the images. There was no talk. Hisa waited, sitting much as he sat, in the intermittent rain.

Is this a place where old hisa come to die? he began to wonder.

Did the young hisa mistake what I was looking for? Do hisa just wait here, and starve, and die?

He grew more and more uneasy. His legs kept going to sleep. He’d been told that lightning tended to hit the highest thing around, and he sat at the base of an image that was one of fifteen highest points in the immediate area, exactly what the Base seniors had said was not wise in a rainstorm.

Were all of them waiting for lightning to kill someone? Was that the kind of game this was? Divine favor? Judgment from the clouds?

The rain came down in torrents for a while, then slacked off, as if nature had grown weary of its rage.

After a long, long while he could see the shadows of the tall Watchers by some source of light other than the lightnings.

He’d seen the sun go down. He’d been in the thick of the woods. He’d never in his life really seen the sun rise from an unobstructed horizon, not as it did now, just a gradual, soft light that at first he could scarcely detect. He could never point to a moment and say that this was dawn. Light just became, and grew, and defined the world around him.

He shifted sides: the leg nearest the ground had chilled to the point of pain, and he could protect one side at a time. He changed out a cylinder, carefully pocketing the spent wrapper.

He slept, then, perhaps simply from weakness. He truly slept, and waked in an unaccustomed warmth. He opened his eyes and realized Great Sun was brighter than he was accustomed to be, comforting the land.

He sat, absorbing the warmth, leaning on the knees of the statue, on Mana-tari-so. He said to himself then that he should just wait, and never push the button that would call for help at all. It wasn’t a scary place. He was with the hisa, and whatever this place was: it waited, it watched. It was all expectation, and in a light-headed way, at this moment, so was he.

But a hisa took his arm, and wanted him to rise and walk, where, he had no idea. A hisa never meant harm, at least. They were utterly without violence. And he went, curious, wobbling on his feet from hunger and light-headedness and cramped legs.

The hisa brought him to the base of the largest Watcher, and a little gray-furred hisa, older than any hisa he’d ever seen.

“You walk in forest,” the old hisa said—female, he thought. And he sank down to his knees on the mat of golden grass, before this old, old creature. “You name Fetcher.”

“Yes.” Something held him from blurting out a request for Melody and Patch. He’d been before judges—and this was one, something told him so, with a sense of hushed reverence that distant thunder could not disturb.

“Satin, I.”

Satin! A shiver went down his spine. Satin, the downer who’d led in the War. Satin, who’d been to space and come down again.

A very thin, elderly hand reached out to him, brushed dust from the mask faceplate, then touched his bare, muddy fingers.

“You boy come watch Great Sun.”

“Yes.”

“What he tell you?”

“I don’t know.” Was he supposed to know something? Was he supposed to be wiser? There was a time downers had made him better than he was. There was a time downers had given him far better sense than he had. But what should he know now? He didn’t think there’d be an easy answer for the ship above their heads and for the rules he’d broken.

“Not you place,” Satin said, and lifted her chin, looked Up then at the heavens with eyes tireless as the Watchers themselves. “There you place, Fetcher.”

“I’m Melody’s,” he said, fearful of disrespecting this most important of hisa; but Satin was wrong. He didn’t belong up there. That was all the trouble. “I belong to Patch and Melody. I don’t want to go back up there. Ever.”

A chill went down his back as those eyes sought his, with the mask between them. “You walk with Great Sun. I walk with Sun my time, bad time, lot shoot, lot die.”

The War. War wasn’t a word they were ever supposed to use with hisa.

“I know,” he said.

“You walk with Sun,” she said, and from the grass beside her took up a spirit stick, a carved stick as long as a human’s forearm, a carved stick done up with woven strands and feathers and stones. He’d seen them on gravesites, at boundaries, at important places hisa meant to mark. “Take,” she said, and offered it to him.

Humans weren’t supposed to touch such things. But she offered it, and he took it carefully in one hand. He saw intricate carvings, and the wear of age and the discoloration at one end that said it might have been set in dark earth once.

“You take,” she said.

He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t own such a thing. Or maybe—maybe it was a grave marker. They were, sometimes. Maybe it was his dying she meant.

“Why?” he asked. “Do what with it?”

“Go you place. You sleep with Mana-tari-no, make he no rest. You dream Upabove. All you dream belong Upabove. You go there.”

He didn’t know what to say, or to do. He didn’t want this answer.

“I want to see Melody and Patch,” he said as clearly as he could, as forcefully as he dared object.

“Not you dream,” Satin said.

“I didn’t dream. I didn’t have a dream!” It was what hisa came here to do, that was what the researchers said. They dreamed and the wise old ones interpreted those dreams. They believed the old ones dreamed the world into reality. They were primitive beings.

He looked into those old, wise eyes and saw—pity?

He grew angry. Or wanted to. But Melody had told him the truth all those years ago. He wasn’t angry. He was sad.

“You find dream up there.” Satin gestured toward the sky. “Go walk you springtime. Melody and Patch go walk. Time you go, Melody child.”

It hurt. It hurt a great deal. But he knew the truth when, after a period of self-delusion, he got the straight word from somebody who could see it.

Go away. Go back. You’re hurting Melody.

It was true. He’d invited himself into Melody’s life and never left. And downers didn’t live as long as humans. It was a big piece of Melody’s life he’d taken with his need, his problem.

Downer females didn’t get pregnant until their last infant grew up.

Did Melody think that he was hers? In her heart of hearts, was that the reason, that she wanted to be rid of him and couldn’t—and couldn’t have her baby until he was out of her life?

He offered the stick back, with all it meant, every tie, every connection to the hisa. He did it in hurt, and in what his pride insisted was anger and what Melody had always insisted wasn’t.

But Satin refused the stick. “You take,” she said. “Belong you.”

He couldn’t speak for a moment. He didn’t know the exact moment in their talking together when the realization had happened, just that at a moment amid the pain he felt assured that he’d been—not cast out: the gift of the stick proved that. But sent out by them. Graduated. Dismissed, with his own business unfinished; his messages unspoken; his plans shifted to a totally different course.

And by what he knew now, he had to go.

It was a good thing he wore a mask. The bottom seal was getting slick. And there was a painful lump in his throat.

“Tell Melody and Patch I love them,” he said finally. “I hope they’re all right this spring.”

“Spring for them,” Satin said, saying it as plainly to his ears as any human could: it was too much for a hisa to bring up a human. Spring came. It carried hope for Melody. And a hisa wise in the ways of the Upabove explained what Melody and Patch were too kind, too gentle to say: Melody should forget her human child, quit her lifetime of waiting for him and get on with the years she had, she and Patch. Spring for them.

“I understand,” he said, and got up, weary and weak as he’d grown. He made the proper little bow hisa made to those they owed respect, and held the stick close as he walked away.

He sighted toward the dark line of the woods, a long, long climb of the hill, on mist-slicked grass. He was well clear of the trampled circle when he reached into an inner, safe pocket, and found the locator device, and contrived, tucking the precious stick under his arm, to push the complex button.

He could do two things, then. He could throw it away and let it simply advise rescuers where he’d been.

Or he could start walking home, toward his assigned fate, wondering if he’d already stayed too late, and whether the cylinders would last.

“Fletcher? Fletcher, wake up!”

“You’re scaring me, Fletcher! Don’t play games…” He blinked, angry at life, at peace with dying. He couldn’t remember why, until a junior-junior started shaking him.

“You were out,” Jeremy said. “God, Fletcher!”

“I’m fine,” he said harshly, annoyed at being shaken, and then realized Jeremy had already showered and changed

He’d been on Downbelow.

He’d been lost, dismissed. Sent away.

“We’re here!—Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

He’d had Satin’s gift in hand. Her gift, her commission.

But he’d lost it, had it stolen, whatever mattered at this point.

Go away. You too old, Fetcher. Time you go.

Had she known? Was there any way her images had whispered the future to her?

She hadn’t said… go Upabove, to the station. She’d said… go walk with Great Sun. Go to space. And giving him her token, she sent him away from Melody and Patch, and into her sky.

To be robbed, by a crew supposed to be the best of the merchanters. By his relatives.

His lip wasn’t cut anymore. He’d almost forgotten Chad, and the theft, until he searched with his tongue for that physical tag of his last waking moment, and met smoothness and no pain.

“Fletcher?”

“I’m fine,” he said harshly, the universal answer. He moved. He sat up. He felt—he’d gone back there. He’d been there. He hadn’t wanted to leave.

And when he came upright and tried to sit on the edge of his bunk, his stomach tried to turn itself inside out.

Jeremy opened a drink packet, fast, made him drink it. The taste told him he needed it. Jeremy pressed the second on him. He almost threw up, drew great breaths of unhindered air.

“You had me scared.”

“I was walking home,” he said. “But I wake up here, and I didn’t remember the fight, I forgot, dammit!” He sat on the edge of his bunk in a frantic search inside after pieces, trying desperately to find the anger, not at his fate, not at Quen, or at the ship, but specifically with Chad… and it wouldn’t come back. It wouldn’t turn on.

You not angry… Melody had said, remembered in his dream, and turned his feelings inside out. But this time he wasn’t sad, either—he was scared. Twice robbed. Ten-odd lightyears had come between him, Chad, and the fight, and Mariner, and all of it. It was two months ago… and the brain had cooled off and the anger had gotten away despite his concentrated effort to remember it, and left only panic in its place.

He’d failed a trust Satin had given him. He’d lost the stick. He didn’t know where to find Satin’s gift. Didn’t know where to find a piece of himself that had just… slipped away in his sleep, leaving his intellect aware but his body uninformed. Even his pain at losing Melody and Patch was getting dimmer, as if it had been long ago, done, beyond recall—as it truly was.

He flung himself to his feet, stripped as if he could strip away the dreams. He went to the shower and scrubbed away at the stink of loss and fear. He slammed the shower door open and came out into the cold clear air determined to resurrect his sanity and his sense of place in the universe, on this ship, whatever the rules had become.

And to fight. To fight, if he had to.

He dressed. He contemplated doing his duty. He went through the motions of anger, as if that could breathe life into it; but his brain kept saying it was past, left behind, and his fear said if he didn’t care, nobody cared. Intellect alone tried to urge the body into rage, but all it achieved was disorientation.

He wanted—he didn’t know what, any longer.

“Have we got a duty?” he asked Jeremy. They hadn’t waked before without one. He didn’t know what the routine was, aside from that.

“We’re supposed to stay in our bunks.”

“Hell.” The one time he wanted work to do. There was nothing. He was in a void, boundless on all sides. He sat down on his bunk and raked hands through his wet hair.

Satin. The stick he’d carried through hell and gone…

His brain began to look for bits of interrupted reality. Finally found the key one.

Voyager. “Where’s the ship we were following? Where’s Champlain?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy said in a hushed voice. “Nobody’s said yet. Fletcher, you’re being weird on me. You’re scaring me.”

“I want the stick back. I don’t care what kind of a joke it is, it’s over. I want it back. You think you can communicate that out and around the ship?”

“JR’s been looking for it. Everybody’s been looking. I don’t think they’re through—”

“Then where is it?” He scared Jeremy with his violence. He’d found the anger, and let it loose, but it didn’t have a direction anymore, and it left him shaken. “I don’t know whether JR might know all along where it is. And say I should just have a sense of humor about it. But I don’t. And for all I know the whole damn ship thinks it’s funny as hell.”

“No,” Jeremy said faintly. “Fletcher,—we’ll find it. We’ll look. They haven’t got us on any duty. We’ll look until we find it”

“Yeah. Why don’t we ask Chad along?”

“We’ll find it.”

“I think we’d have hell and away better shot at finding it if JR put out the word it had better be found.”

Jeremy didn’t say anything.

And he was being a fool, Fletcher thought. The vividness of the Watcher dream was fading. The feeling of loss ebbed down.

But the feeling of being robbed—not only of Satin’s gift, but of his own feelings about it—lingered, eating away at his peace. He’d come out of sleep in a panic that wasn’t logical, that was a weakness he’d gotten past. He’d changed residences before and thrown away everything when he got to the new one… photographs, keepsakes, last-minute, conscience-salving gifts. All right into the disposal, no looking back, no regrets. And yet—

Not this time.

Maybe it was the spite in this loss.

Maybe it was the innocence and the stern expectation in the giver…

Maybe it was his failure, utterly, to unravel what he’d been given, or why he’d been given it, or even whose it was.

Downers put them on graves. Put them at places of parting. Gave them to those who were leaving, and the ones who carried them from a parting or a death would leave them in odd places—plant them by the riverside, so the scientists said, in utter disregard that Old River would sweep them away next season… plant them in a graveyard… plant them on a hilltop where no other such symbols were in sight and for no apparent distinction of place outside the downer’s own whim.

And sometimes such sticks seemed to come back again. Sometimes a downer took one from a gravesite and bestowed it on another hisa and sometimes they returned to the one that had given the gift. One researcher had asked why, and the downer in question had just said, “He go out, he come back,” and that was all science had ever learned.

He go out. He come back.

To a graveyard, with more strings and feathers added. Researchers took account of such things, in meticulous studies that noted whether the sticks were set in the earth straight, or slanted, or if the feathers were tied above or below certain marks…

All that would mean things in the minds of the researchers, perhaps. He didn’t trust anything they surmised—he, as someone who’d been given one—someone who’d carried one as a hisa had to carry such a gift. He’d had no place to store it, no place to carry it…

And had the researchers with their air-conditioned domes and their cabinets and their classifying systems never thought what it was to carry one, with no pockets, ridiculous thought? When you had one in your trust, you just carried it, was all, and it was with you, and at some point in the next day or so after, he supposed downers felt a need to complete the job of carrying it, taking it to a grave, or to Old River, or to stand on some hilltop, nearest the sky, just to get on with their lives, get a meal, take a drink, do something practical.

He never got to find a place to let it go, that was the thing.

Satin gave it to him, laid the burden of it on him, saying… go to space, Fletcher.

He’d brought it here and in that sense he’d carry it forever if he couldn’t find it. He’d carry the burden of it all his life, if the people he’d been sent to, his own people, made a joke of it—if the ones who should accept him thought so little of him and all he’d grown up to value.

He raked the hair back, head in his hands, had, he thought to himself, a clearer understanding of Satin’s gesture and of his banishment than any behaviorist ever could give him.

Take this memory and go, Fetcher.

Be done with old things. Be practical. Feed yourself. Sleep. Let Melody go.

But that wasn’t all of it, even yet. It was Satin’s gift. It came from the one hisa who’d gone to space, and back again. It wasn’t just from any hisa. It was from the authority all hisa knew and all humans recognized. It was Satin’s gift and Base administration hadn’t dared say otherwise.

Then some stinking lowlife stole it, because an unwanted cousin came in as an inconvenience, one who had had some other life than the ship.

He didn’t think now that JR would have done it or countenanced it, but protect the party responsible and try to patch it all up? That was JR’s job, to keep the bad things quiet and keep the crew working. He figured the Old Man might not even have heard yet—if it was up to JR to report.

But no—he recalled now, piecing the details of pre-jump together: Madelaine knew. And if Madelaine knew, he’d bet the Old Man did know.

He didn’t think that the senior captain would approve such goings-on. In that light, it was well possible that JR had had to explain the situation.

A weight came on the bunk edge beside him. Jeremy. With an earnest, troubled look, itself an unspoken plea. He’d been seeing Downbelow, in his mind. “The hell of it all is,” he said to Jeremy, “the stick was like a trust. You know what I mean? And if I get it back, I don’t know what I’d do with it… something Satin would want; but I don’t know.—But it’s for me to choose when and where to do that. Somebody else doing it… just tucking it away somewhere…” He was talking to a twelve-year-old, who, even with his irreverence, believed in things dim-witted twelve-year-olds believed, in magic, and a responsive universe, things somebody older could still in his heart believe, but never dare say aloud. “You know what that means? That they carry that stick. And that they’ve taken on responsibility for something they probably wouldn’t choose to carry, but I’ll tell you something about that stick. It won’t turn them loose. That thing’s an obligation, that’s what it is. And this ship won’t ever be quit of it if it doesn’t give it back to me.” He saw Jeremy’s face perfectly serious, absolutely believing. “And—no,” he said to Jeremy, “I’m not going to look for it. It’s going to come back to me or this ship will change and change into what somebody aboard wants it to be. I’m not going to play games with Chad about it. He’d better hope he finds it and gets it to me before the captain steps in to settle it, and I kind of think that’s the instruction the captain’s given JR. You understand me? If the ship doesn’t find it—it’s going to be the ship’s burden, and the ship’s responsibility, and as long as I live I won’t trust Chad Neihart. Maybe no one else will, either.”

“What if it’s not his fault?” Distress rang in Jeremy’s voice. “What if he, like, meant to give it back and something went wrong?”

“I said it. It’s something you carry until you can lay it down. Downer superstition, maybe. But it’s true. I can tell you, either I’m going to forgive Chad and his hangers-on, or I’m not. And I’m going to trust this ship or I’m not. That’s the kind of choice it is. You can pass that word where you think it needs to be passed. Things people do don’t altogether and forever get patched up, Jeremy, just because they’re sorry later. If Chad destroyed it… that says something it’ll take years for me to forget.”

There was a long and brittle silence.

“He’s not a bad guy,” Jeremy said faintly.

“Can I trust him after this?” he asked. Yes, Jeremy believed in miracles, and balances. And maybe it was callous to trade on it, but, dammit, he believed such things himself, and maybe belief could motivate one other human being in the crew. “Can I ever trust him? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

Jeremy didn’t have an answer for him, even with a long, long wait. Just: “I’ll put the word around. This shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t, Fletcher. We’re not like that.”

“I want to think so,” Fletcher said. It was, at least in that ideal world of these few moments’ duration, the truth. Then, because the ensuing silence grew uncomfortable: “Are they going to open rec, do you think, or not?”

“I think we’re supposed to sit in quarters. At least until they give us a clear. I’ll lend you my tapes.”

Fletcher got up and walked the six steps the cabin allowed before he fetched up in front of the mirrored sink alcove. He saw Jeremy standing, too, watching him with a distressed look on his face.

“Cards,” he said to Jeremy, foreseeing otherwise Jeremy worrying at the matter and himself pacing twelve steps up and back, up and back, for a long, long number of hours. It was a situation Jeremy knew how to endure, this being pent in quarters. He imagined the rule in force at other chancy moments, on Finity’s exits into lonely star systems, and the too-wise twelve-year-old with nothing and no one to confide in.

Don’t leave. He remembered Jeremy pleading with him, in a way that, maybe hearing it when he was tranked, the way it did with tape-drugs, had settled into his consciousness with peculiar force. He’d had borrowed brothers all his life. He’d never had a foster brother as desperate, as lonely as Jeremy. There’d never been a rivalry between them. Now—he began to see Jeremy adopting his trick of leaving the coveralls collar undone, his trick of how he did a hitch in the belt—

Even the cuff turn-up. The obsession, when they’d been on liberty, with finding a sweater, a brown sweater, like his. God, it was laughable.

And enough to grab his heart, when he looked at the kid’s face, the eyes that searched his for every hint of advice, and, having just evoked it and brought it into the open, how did he ignore it?

He didn’t know how he felt now. Trapped, yes.

And at the same time gifted with something he’d never had, and now couldn’t walk away from… no more than Melody had walked away from a lost boy that day on Pell docks.