Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (11 page)

In which case they'd throw him out of the program anyway, and the station would give him some makework job because his mental state made him unemployable at anything else he was qualified to do.

He resettled his mask. He'd stuffed his pockets with cylinders until they wouldn't hold any more. He walked out the door into the rain and the lightning of a world that, until a quarter hour ago, had been happy and promising him everything he could ever want.

He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.

If they caught him he could still lie and say he'd left the saw and only then remembered it and didn't want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record. He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.

But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he'd been snatched up by the system. He'd usually had enough of whatever home they'd put him into, and it was certain by the time he'd heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn't maintain an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life, and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.

And you'd say, in a high childish voice, That's a lie! And sometimes the court believed you, but by then you knew it wasn't better, and wouldn't ever be better, and things that hadn't been broken before the lawyers got into it would be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was anything left of ties to that family he'd break it up in his own stupid actions—he'd go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back, maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after Melody had told him that truth about himself. He'd always come out of the hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—

This time it wasn't anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he'd lose. This time it was everything he'd ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch themselves.

Just
Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of 'people' the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he thought about it, it wasn't a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it was valid.

Bianca
was what he'd say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his motives for making trouble. He'd say,
I've been working on developing relationships
. That was one of their own phrases. They'd like that. You couldn't use words like
transference
and
displacement
, because they knew you were psyching them when you did that, but
relationships
was a word that you could use. He'd say he was just working things out about relationships—

The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had to take now and couldn't help himself. He couldn't bear for the court psychs to get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in the order
he
controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If they found out about Melody and Patch they'd dice
that
up, too, until, like his foster-families, there wasn't any clean feeling left.

And he'd told Bianca.
She
knew. She'd talk. People always did, when the psychs wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.

"You!" someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry. Somebody
had
seen him. And he ran. He knew that he'd made a choice the moment he'd started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn't stop.

"Come back here!" the staffer shouted. Desperate.

So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up with the need for oxygen and started feeding him CO².

Red and gray warred in his vision. He slowed only because he had to. He walked, blind and gasping, because he knew someone was behind him who might not run as fast, but who'd be there, nonetheless.

The river roared beside him, swollen with the falling rain. When the man chasing him got the notion he couldn't find him in the thicket and went back to report that there was a fool out running in the woods, they'd send out more people with more cylinders to look for him in a systematic way.

Old
River
's rising might cut them off, cover his tracks, keep him safe.

Old
River
he strong, Melody would say,
Old
River
he drink all, all down he catch.

Old
River
was both friend and enemy, god and devil to the hisa, stronger than human courts or decrees or all the forces the Base could bring to bear. It might kill him, but he didn't care. He knew he was stupid for running, and right now, he didn't care. Back there at the Base, in the next few minutes, the word would get around. Where's Fletch? Where's Fletch, the buzz would start. And then they'd all start saying it.

And he didn't want to be there to hear it. Yes, they'd have the people out searching. But slower than they'd be out searching, under other circumstances.
Their
masks were missing cylinders. They'd have to fill out all that paperwork, do all those reports. It gave him a strange, light-headed satisfaction. Die? They wouldn't. Be inconvenienced? A lot. He felt a light-headedness not from shortness of air, but from a single moment of victory he knew he'd pay for.

He'd worked all his life to get here, and in the end, it wasn't lawyers that took him away, it was himself, because he'd blown it—and chosen to blow it—at least he'd chosen it. Stealing those cylinders and running, that wasn't going to be a minor rules infraction. But it was a
choice
, damn them all. It was
his
choice. When things fell apart, he at least had that to say.

Lightning flashed and thunder cracked right above his head, above the tops of the trees. His heart jumped and his knees wobbled with the adrenaline rush it gave him. A planet's surface where electricity flew around like a loose power line, that was a dangerous thing: water coursed beside the path, not tame
Old
River
any longer, but a rough-surfaced flood,
Old
River
in one of his killing moods.

Old
River
he mad, the downers would say.

Old
River
he catch you foot, drag you down. Melody had warned him of the treachery of soft banks among the very first things she'd ever warned him when he came to the planet.
Old
River
was the devil who always lurked to take the unwary, and Great Sun was the god—if downers had a religion. Which human experts argued about in stupid technicalities.

You couldn't ask the downers that. They said if you asked you'd give them ideas and it might pervert the whole course of downer development, turning it toward something human.

So what were the domes, fools? Puffer-balls? Nature falling from the sky? They didn't know about
Old
River
. They recorded downer beliefs about
Old
River
, they knew the words, but
Old
River
wouldn't cover for them, wouldn't protect them, wouldn't take care of them, father and devil both.

He'd told Bianca—he'd told Bianca—his thoughts were tumbling wild as the water near his foot—to say that they were late because he'd gone back to see about the saw. Wasn't that what they'd agreed to say? That was what she'd have said, if they went to her. As they would. He'd thought through so many variations on the lie he'd confused himself.

But that was it, wasn't it? She was supposed to say that, if they questioned her about being late. So he
couldn't
use the saw excuse.

He could say, well, he wasn't sure where he'd put the saw, and he remembered later putting it somewhere else and he wanted to find it—

The hell, after that interview with Nunn? after being told to pack up?

He could still make a case for himself, he could say he'd just been that shaken and wanted to keep his record clear in case he and Bianca had just missed finding it out here, but, damn, nobody was going to believe that, and he was never going to get reassigned down to the Base, never again. He'd blown all the trust, all the credit he had for common sense…

His foot went in. Cold water pressed the one-way fabric to his leg, and, sweat-osmosed, a trickle got through and into his boot before, one hand holding a branch, the other braced against the moss, he hauled himself out and up to squat on the bank.

Close. Soberingly close. Adrenaline had spiked. It fell, now, leaving tremors, leaving a side aching and lungs burning with effort.

He knew he'd be smarter to go back on his own, and say—just say he was spooked, and he'd been a fool, but he'd come back on his own, hadn't he?

If he was Marshall Willett, he'd get a second chance, no problem. Mama and papa would buy it for him, pull strings, use up favor-points, and
Marshall
would get one more chance. But he was Fletcher Neihart, a spacer-brat, son of no one, and he'd used up all his second chances just surviving his mother's inheritance.

Disaster. The kid had run. Spooked. Elene Quen had the report on her desk, a personal fax from Nunn, down at the Base, and she sat staring at it, reading it for any wisdom she could get from it.

Damon had been upset with what she'd done in getting the court order.

Not as upset as she'd expected about the fact of her trading her influence on Pell for
Finity
's support: that was a merchanter way of doing business and it regarded merchanter relations. It was diplomacy, in which diplomats used every card they had to use and did it in secrecy.

But about
what
she'd traded, about interference with the Children's Court, he'd been unexpectedly upset—a distress about the boy's case which she hadn't predicted, and still, after all these years on station, didn't understand. Damon was a lawyer, before anything, and believed in processes of law as important for their own sake, a viewpoint she flatly didn't share in her heart of hearts—only took his advice, generally, when she crossed from port law, which she did understand, into station law, which she detested on principle. Perhaps that was the heart and soul of what was at issue.

The fact that
Finity
had a right to the boy? In Damon's eyes, that might be disputable. In her eyes, that was absolute. That the station court had repeatedly held against that right? In her mind, that was an outrage. Not her outrage, because it wasn't her ship—
she ain't my ship, she ain't my fight
was the rule on dockside—but now a deal had set her firmly on
Finity's
side in the matter.

Process for its own sake? Importance of the process? The law might be Damon's life. But it was an ornament, a baroquerie of station life. In space it just might kill you.

Maybe, now, by the facts in this report, she'd just lost a kid, following the station's damned
processes
. A letter from the boy's independent lawyers, acting
in his interest
, had gotten to Nunn
before
her letter, and dammit, Nunn had handed that letter to the kid and then let that kid walk out the door,
trusting
he was dealing with a stationer mentality who'd tamely, because it was the orderly thing to do, walk over and pack his belongings and surrender to the law.

Hell if. Fletcher Neihart might have lived on a station, but he hadn't been brought up by Nunn's rules or Damon's law, not for the first five years of his life. Not so long as Francesca Neihart had had her kid in hand. He might have been born on a station, stuck on a station, educated on a station, but one stationer family after the other had come back to the Children's Court saying
they
couldn't handle him.

Now, enterprising lad, he'd stolen a bunch of cylinders, each one about eight hours of oxygen—if you didn't push it. Three, or less, if you pushed it hard. And a scared, mad kid didn't know moderation. The cylinders weren't fresh ones, either. They added up the total use-hours from work records on the people he'd stolen them from and came up with three days
if
he was pushing it.

The kid was trying to wait till
Finity
had left port, was what he was doing: he was
doing
things that weren't totally bright on an adult level but that made perfect sense to a kid She'd brought up two of her own, she knew station-born sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from personal and recent experience, and right now the desire to shake the runaway till his teeth rattled mingled with the fear that spacer directness and stationer legality together might have pushed Francesca's kid into deeper danger than his limited experience could comprehend.

The fact was, Fletcher Neihart was trying to stand off the whole
Alliance
court system
and
her authority simultaneously, and he was doing a pretty good job of it—because a starship couldn't sit at dock extra days.
Finity
couldn't wait. It had schedules, obligations, operations, God
knew
, critical operations, with desperate issues at stake. Fletcher
was
a Neihart. And he was holding off the lot of them. Like mother, like son, and like the legendary man whose name he carried.

And if Nunn had lost that kid, if thanks to people she'd put in charge of critical operations, station management didn't deliver a live body to
Finity
before undock, she would be in a hell of a mess. The agreement she and James Robert had made for good and solid reasons of policy might stand, but the decades-long friendship she had with the politically essential Neiharts might not survive the event.

Hell of a thing for the kid—who right now was wandering a Downbelow woods on three days worth of cylinders, in a state of mind she could more accurately imagine than any court could. She knew what it was to be ripped loose from everything and set adrift in a world that was never going to make gut-level sense.

But she hadn't done wrong in signing the order or anything else she'd arranged with the Neiharts of
Finity's End
.
She
was right—ethically, morally, historically right. Leave things to Damon's precious law, and the whole human race could go down the chute. They'd come near enough in the last phase of the War: nobody had thrown a planet-buster, but they'd lost a station. They'd nearly lost two. They could lose a planet the next time the human race went to war. In order to prevent that happening, she had no illusions. Her enemies claimed she wanted to destroy
Union
. That was so. But practically she knew she couldn't do that. In plain diplomatic reality, the Merchanters' Alliance had to keep the tight balance of power between themselves and Union, and they had to keep it balanced no matter how frightening and uncomfortable the attempts of Mazian to destabilize the Alliance and rebuild his power base, no matter the near-time choices in terms of her political future, even of her own determination to save the Quen name—let alone one kid's personal wishes about his domicile.

Fight the microbattles, the ones on paper, on conference tables, sometimes in public posturings—so they never, ever had to fight another hot war or—the alternative—lose what was human by acquiescing to
Union
's high-speed expansionism.

Instant populations. Cultures planned and programmed by ReseuneLabs on Cyteen. Ariane Emory.
That
was what she was fighting, with no knowledge even of their enemy's internal workings, not at the level they needed in order to make negotiation work. Emory was a name she knew very well, but the tight control
Union
had maintained over ships near Cyteen had limited what she knew. She planned in the absence of good intelligence information.

Time was what they had to gain. They'd faced, in Azov, in Emory, a faceless enemy. An alienated humanity Earth had alienated over centuries. An alienated humanity that didn't operate by the same rules. The very history and
process
Damon venerated didn't work out there in the Beyond.

The Fletcher Neiharts of the universe, along with her longtime problem child, were precious, every one of them. Her throwaway problem couldn't live under Pell's law… and now that she devoted half an hour's sustained consideration to the boy as he'd grown to be, she knew why he'd been inconvenient all his life—that he couldn't thrive in a sealed bubble of a never-changing, zero-growth world where every decision was for the status quo. He couldn't live in it unless and until the system crushed him—and she had never let it do that. The mentalities to respond to the problems Cyteen posed the rest of humanity couldn't come out of Pell. Neither, for what she could see, could that response come out of Earth, whose distance- and culture-blinded dealings had driven Cyteen to become the alien culture it was in the first place.

She had such a narrow, narrow window in which to give a civilization-saving shove at the clockwork of the system—in things gone catastrophically wrong between Earth and its colonies in the earliest days of Earth's expansion outward. The timeliness that had brought her
Finity's End
in its mission to reconcile merchanters and
Union
was the same timeliness that demanded the
Alliance
finally wake up to the economic challenge
Union
posed. It was the pendulum-swing of the Company Wars: they'd settled the last War, they'd banded together and shoved hard at the system to get it to react in one way; now the reactionary swing was coming back at them, the people with the simplistic solutions, and they had to stand fast and keep the pendulum from swinging into aggressive extremism on one hand and self-blinded isolationism on the other.

She hadn't forever to hold power on Pell: a new election could depose her inside a month. People too young to have fought the War were rabble-rousing, stirring forces to oppose her tenure, special interests, all boiling to the top.

And they might topple her from the slightly irregular power she held if she'd just killed a kid. James Robert Neihart hadn't forever to live in command of
Finity's End
. He was pushing a century and a half, time-dilated and on rejuv. Mallory's very existence was at risk every time she stalked the enemy, and she never ceased

At least one set of hands on the helm of state were bound to change in twenty years. That was a given, and God help their successors.
Madison
, James Robert's successor, was a capable man. He just wasn't James Robert, and his word didn't carry the Old Man's cachet with other merchanters.

The whole delicate structure tottered. Time slowed.
Finity's End
would have to wait on a teenaged boy to come to his senses… or lose him, to its public embarrassment, and her damnation, as things were running now.

And damn him,
damn
the kid