Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (13 page)

Looked back, in that vast scale, even imagining the
Wilsons
might show up. That was his last foster-family, the one he was still legally resident with. The one he even liked.

But the dockside was vacant of anybody but dockers and, he supposed,
Finity
crew. Even his lawyers and his psychs were no-shows. Just Quen. Just the cops. All the little figures, dwarfed by the giant scale of the docks, were strangers.

When he gave it a second thought he guessed he was hurt—hurt quite a bit, in fact, but the lack of well-wishers and good-byes didn't entirely surprise him. Maybe Quen hadn't told the
Wilsons
where he was. Or maybe the Wilsons had heard about him running away on Downbelow, and just decided he was too crazy, too lost, too damned-to-hell screwed up.

He didn't know what he'd say to them if they did show up, anyway.
Thanks
? Thanks for trying? In the slight giddiness of vast scale and the fading tranquilizer, he hated his lawyers, hated his families. Every one of them. Even the last.

"Good-bye," Quen told him. "Good luck. See you." She didn't offer her hand. Didn't give him a chance to refuse it. "You go on up, give your passport to the duty officer. Follow instructions. You're out of our territory from the time you cross that line.—Matter of fact, this is the ship that won that particular point of law as a part of the constitution. That was what the whole War meant. Welcome to the future."

Screw you and your War, was what he thought as hydraulics wheezed and gasped around the gate, and the huge gantry moved above him, like some threatening dragon making little of anything on human scale. He had nothing to back up any reply to Quen. He owned no dignity but silence and to do what she'd said, go ahead and go aboard. So he left her standing and, passport in hand, took that long, spooky walk, up that ramp and into a cold, lung-hurting tunnel far thinner than the station walls.

He was aware there was black space and hard vacuum out there, beyond that yellow ribbing. Walking down the tunnel looked like being swallowed by something, eaten up alive. And it was. The cops would still be waiting at the bottom of the ramp to be sure he went all the way down this gullet; but when he reached the lock and confronted a control panel, he wasn't even sure what to do with the buttons. They said he was spacer-born. And this damned thing had not even the courtesy of labeling on the buttons.

Hell
if he was going to walk back down and ask the Stationmaster which one to push. Damn ships didn't ever label anything. The
station
hadn't labeled anything until the last few years they finally put the address signs up, because they'd been invaded once and didn't want to give the enemy any help.

He hated the War, and here he was, sucked into a place like a step backward into a hostile time, right back into the gray, grim poverty of the War years. He resented it on
that
score, too.

And since nobody did him the courtesy of advising
Finity
he was here, he could stand here freezing in the bitter cold, or he could punch a button and hope the top one was it and not the disconnect that would unseal the yellow walkway from the airlock.

The airlock opened
without
his touching it.

So someone
had
told them he was here.

But no one was in the airlock to meet him.

He'd never seen a starship's airlock up close, except in the vids, and it was unexpectedly large, a barren chamber with lockers and readouts he didn't understand. He walked in and the door hissed shut. Heavily. He was
in
a spaceship. Swallowed alive.

Not a citizen of Pell. He never had been. They'd never let him have more than resident status and a travel visa. He knew all the ins and outs of that legality. Entitled to be educated but not to vote. Entitled to be drafted but not to hold a command. Entitled to be employed but not tenured.

Now after all his struggle to avoid it, he'd achieved a citizenship. He became aware he had a citizen's passport in the hand that held the duffle strings, and this was where he was born to be.

But Quen hinted that, too, could change.

Lie. They all lied.

The inner door opened, and he walked out of bright light into a dimmer tiled corridor. No one was there. The corridor went back, not far, before four lighted corridors intersected it, and then it quit. A ship's ring was locked stable while they were at dock, and the four side corridors all curved
up
. The
up
would be
down
when the ship broke dock and the ring started to rotate, but until it did, this seemed all there was, a utilitarian hallway, showing mostly metal, insulated floor, the kind of insulated plating you used if you thought a decompression could happen.

A door to the right was open. He walked that far, his boots making a lot of metal racket, but a woman came out and met him. So did another woman, and a man.

"Fletcher, is it?" the woman said, and put out a hand.

So, hell, what did he do? He purposely misunderstood and handed her the passport

"Welcome aboard," she said without a flicker, and pocketed it without looking at it. "Not much time. I'm Frieda N. This is Mary B. And Wes. There's only one. There's no other Fletcher, either. You're just Fletcher."

He'd never been anything else. Frieda N. held out her hand a second time, and he took it, finding himself lost in the information flow, wondering if she was related, how she was related and how any of these people were related to his mother.
His
mother had talked about
her
mother. He had a grandmother. He didn't know whether she was still alive or not, but spacers lived long lives, and stationers aged faster. He supposed she might be here.

For the first time it came to him… there was something personal about these people who assumed they owned him. These people who'd owned his mother. And left her.

Others came into the hall. "This is your cousin June, Com 3. And Jake. Jake's chief bioneer, lower deck Ops."

June was an older woman, with a dry, firm handshake, and communications didn't seem to add up to anybody he needed to deal with. Jake had a thin face, a sober face, and looked like a cop he knew: not unnecessarily an unpleasant man, but somebody who didn't have much sense of humor.

Then another man came in, in the kind of waistlength, ribbed-cuff jacket spacers wore over their coveralls where they were working near the cold side of the docks. Silver-haired. A lot of stripes on the sleeve.

"Fletcher," Jake said, "this is Madison, second captain."

He'd already spotted authority, and took the hand when it was offered him, feeling overwhelmed, wobbly in the knees, wobbly in his mental state, knowing he was going to want to settle how to deal with these people, but all his scenarios of defiance had evaporated, in Quen's little advisement, her outright
bribe
for good behavior.

Not smart at least to screw things up from the start. Start friendly, start sane,
try
, one more stupid time, to make the good impression with one more damned family—his own family.

"Welcome aboard."

"Yes, sir," he said, and
Finity's
second captain held onto his hand, a cold-chilled, dry clasp. He felt trapped for good and certain. I don't know you people, he wanted to shout. I don't give a damn. And here he was doing the safe, the sensible thing, as somebody else arrived to take his hand. It was a cousin named Pete, a cargo officer, nobody, in his book. It was one more introduction, and he wanted just to escape to somewhere private and shut the door.

"Welcome in, Fletcher." Pete was a dark-haired man with a trace of gray in a beard unusual on dockside—you only saw them on spacers; and it was worth a stare; he was aware he was staring, losing his focus, while strangers' hands patted his shoulders, welcomed him in a chaos of names and emotions.

"Pete," Jake said, "you want to show Fletcher to the safe room?"

"Yeah, sure," Pete said, and indicated the duffle. "That's all the baggage you brought? I'll stow it for you."

"Nossir," he said, and held onto it. Desperately. "No."

Pete relented. Jake said, "Get Warren to make him up a patch set soon as we leave dock.—What's your height, son? Height and weight, Pell Standard. Six feet?"

"About. Eighty-five kilos."

"Baggage weight?"

He knew what he'd come downworld with. What they let you bring. "Twenty-two."

"Got it." And with no more fuss and no more word about the duffle Pete took him out to the corridor and to another room at the next cross-corridor, no simple room, but a vast curved chamber, a VR theater, he thought, with railings where everybody stood. Old people, younger ones. A theater full of relatives, hundreds of them, all staring in sudden quiet in their conversations. "This is Fletcher," Pete called out, and someone cheered. "He's late, but he's here!" Pete said. Others called out hellos and welcome aboard, and, grotesquely enough, applauded.

"Ten minutes," Jake called out, and Pete showed him to a place to stand in the third row, where people leaned and reached out hands to shake, or patted his back or his shoulders, throwing names at him. At distances out of reach, they all talked about him: there couldn't be another topic in the room. Of the ones in earshot, who called out names to him or introduced each other, there was a Tom R., a Tom T., a Margaret, a Willy and a Will, there was Roger Y., Roger B., and a single Ned; there was a Niles senior, a man with silver at the temples, and Jake's brother was Louis down in cargo,
not
to cross him with Lou on the bridge, who was Scan 2, third shift.

Bridge ranks. Post designations. Old people. Senior crew, with hairline wrinkles that spoke of rejuv.

Then a handful of crew trooped in with their quilted jackets literally frosted with cold, ice cracking as they moved. There was a Wendy who looked barely in her twenties, and a William and a Charles who wasn't Charlie because Charlie was his uncle, chief medtech, who was at his station, and his mother was Angie. There were half a dozen Roberts, Rob, Bob, Bobby, and Robbie and a kid they just called JR, not to cross him with his uncle
Captain
James Robert, senior captain, who besides being famous all over the
Alliance
always went by both names.

Pretentious ass, Fletcher said to himself.

Jim, James and Jamie were all techs of various kinds, old enough to have a touch of gray; and there was McKenzie, Mac, Madden, and
Madison
that he'd already met.

He got the picture, if not most of the names. You carried Names, and there wasn't much creativity about it inside a line of relations: the ones that carried the same Names tended to be close cousins, the way they were introduced

Close cousins as opposed to remote cousins, which
everybody
was to each other.

Hi
, he said uneasily to each out of reach introduction, saved by distance from shaking hands, resenting the welcome, resenting
them
with all the integrity he could muster. He'd had about half a mother, that was the way he thought about it: he'd had about half her attention half the time, but that was all the real relative he ever acknowledged. And here were a ship full of people all claiming he was tied to them in some miraculous way that didn't mean a damn to him.

Friendly, he supposed so. People had been friendly before, in schools where it was
welcome in
until they got to know him up close and discovered he wasn't up to their standards in some way or another. Not part of the right clubs. Not part of the right experiences. The right family. The right mother. The right attitude.

He'd fought his sullen tendencies for years just to get into the program, no reform, no real change in him. Just in his objectives.
God
, he'd been friendly. He'd watched how the accepted ones did it and he'd learned the lessons and copied—
forged
—good behavior. And here he was doing it all over again, new start, one damned more time, one damned more try. Stunned, shocked, still marginally battling the tranquilizer they'd given him, he did it by now on autopilot, acting the shy, reserved,
pleasant
fool with every one of them while his brain, behind a chemical shield the shuttle authorities had given him, was passing from numbed shock to outright anger.

Hate you
, he kept thinking while he smiled and shook hands. But that wouldn't get him home again. Wouldn't ever get him to Downbelow.

The monsoons were starting. The shuttle had almost delayed launch because of the weather and teased him with a last, aching hope that it couldn't get off the ground and he'd miss his ship even yet

Hadn't worked, had it?

The monsoons were starting and Melody and Patch were off, by now. He'd not seen them again.

He ran out of hands to shake, and people close enough to shout introductions at him. "One minute," someone said, and he knew then that this was it: it was countdown. Pete showed him a toe-hold, a long slot in the carpet, and encouraged him to settle his toes there. He did, and gripped the safety rail, watching the tendons on his own hands stand out as white as the knuckles.

Then someone started singing, for God's sake, one of those rowdy old spacer songs, and the whole company started in, more men than women, deep voices. Cousin, uncle, whatever-he-was Pete elbowed him in the ribs and grinned at him, wanting him to pick up on the words and join in. It was a spooky sound: he'd never heard singers who weren't hyped with sound systems, but this went through the air and off the walls, and it was a lot of men's voices, singing about space, singing about going there—when he didn't in the least want to.