Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (22 page)

He was moderately uneasy when the engines fired. He and Jeremy lay in their bunks while the next, relatively short burn happened, a long, pressured wait. After that, during what was announced as a fifty-minute inertial glide, Jeremy played vid games, lying in his bunk, so hyped on his fantasy war it was hard to ignore him, in his twitches and his nervous limb-moving and occasional sound effects.

Jeremy might act as if he were on drugs, but Fletcher knew as a practical fact of living with the boy that that wasn't the case. At times he was convinced that Jeremy sank into his games because he was
scared
of what the ship was doing, and he tried not to dwell on that thought. If Jeremy was scared, then he had no choice but assume a kid used to this knew what to be scared of. But at other times, as now, he wondered if that line blurred for Jeremy, as to what were games and what weren't.

Join Mallory's crew when he grew up, Jeremy had said. Trade wasn't for Jeremy. No such tame business. Jeremy wanted to fight Mazian's raiders.

History and life had shot along very fast in the seventeen station-side years Jeremy had been alive—and for all the twelve violent and brutal years Jeremy had actually been waking, Fletcher surmised, Jeremy had been right in the thick of it, in that situation the court on Pell had refused to let him enter.

Jeremy had a dead mother, too. This ship had death in abundance to drive Jeremy; as he guessed Vince and Linda were also driven—all of them stranger than kids of twelve and thirteen ever ought to be.

And not even a precocious twelve
or
a fecklessly ignorant seventeen. Jeremy, Vince, Linda all had the factual knowledge of those years. Jeremy indicated that, unlike the present situation, they usually had tape during the couple of weeks they did live during jump—briefing tapes making them aware of ship's business, educational tapes teaching them body-skills and facts, informational tapes informing them of history going on at various ports, all those very vivid things that tape was, and all the vivid teaching that tape could evidently do even more efficiently on the jump drugs than it did on the other brands of trank that went with tape-study stationside. Tape could
feel
like reality, and if he added up the tape Jeremy must have had in all those months tranked-out lying in his bunk, he figured he could tack on a virtual college education and a couple or three waking years of life on Jeremy's bodily twelve.

But while it was knowledge and technical understanding Jeremy had gained during those lost, lifeless weeks, life lived at the time-stretched rate of two weeks to every month of elapsed universal time while a ship was in jump, it still wasn't real-life experience. It wasn't any kind of emotional maturity, or physical development. They were mentally strange kids, all of the under- seventeens, sometimes striding over factual adult business so adeptly he could completely forget how big a gap his own natural growth set between them and him—and sometimes, again, as now, they acted just the age their bodies were. Humor consisted of elbow-knocking and practical jokes. Sex was to snigger at. War and death were vid games, even in kids who'd seen their own mothers and sibs die—that was the awful part. Jeremy had seen terrible, bloody things—and went right back to his games, obsessed with bloody images and grinning as he shot up imaginary enemies. Or real ones. Think what you're doing, he wanted to yell at Jeremy, but by what little he'd been able to understand, Jeremy's whole life was no
different
than those bloody games and Jeremy was fitting himself to survive. That was the most unnerving aspect of the in-bunk vid wars.
Linda
wanted to be an armscomper and target the ship's big guns. About Vince, he had no idea.

Himself, during the ship's maneuvering and slamming about, he shut his eyes and listened to the music Jeremy lent him. He asked himself did he want to risk his tape machine and
his
study tapes by using them during such goings-on, when if they came unsecured they could suffer damage.

But without his tapes, even without them, if he ignored Jeremy's occasional sound effects, he could see
Old
River
behind his eyelids, and didn't need the artificial memory to overlay his own vision.

A month gone by already. He was two weeks older and remembered nothing of it; the planet was a month along, and after a few down, glum days, Bianca would have put him and his problems away and gotten on with her life. The everlasting clouds would have brightened to white. Melody and Patch would come back to the Base.

They'd know now beyond a doubt that he'd gone. He thought about that while the ship, having finished its short bursts and jolts, announced another long burn of two hours duration.

He drew a deep breath as the buildup of pressure started, and let the music carry him. It was like being swept up by
Old
River
, carried along in flood.

Jeremy fought remembered battles and longed for revenge. He rode a tide of music and memory, telling himself it
was
Old
River
, and
Old
River
might have his treacheries, but he had his benefits, too.

Life. And springtime.

Puffer-balls and games on the hillside, and skeins of pollen on the flood, pollen grains or skeins of stars. They weren't going for jump yet. They were just going to run clear of the mass-point. He was learning, from Jeremy, how the ship moved

It was safer to think of home… of quitting time in the fields, and the soft gray silk of clouds fading and fading, until that moment white domes all but glowed with strangeness and the night-lights around the Base walks, coming on with dusk, were very small and weak guides against the coming dark.

Back to the galley
before
maindawn: the ship had built up a high velocity toward Mariner, and now they were scheduled for two days of quiet, uninterrupted transit before their jump toward that port.

The cooks, so they declared, never slept late, and neither did the juniors helping out in the galley. They made a breakfast for themselves of synth eggs and fruit after they'd delivered breakfast in huge trays to the service counters on A and B deck. The work had a feeling of routine by now, a comfortable sense of having done things before that, once he was moving and doing, also gave him an awareness of what the ship was doing, rushing toward their point of departure with a speed they'd gained during last watch.

A smooth, ordinary process, except that jolt when they'd come into Tripoint. And he tried to be calm about the coming jump. How could he be anxious for their physical safety, Fletcher asked himself, when a ship that had survived the War with people shooting at them, did something it and every other merchanter ship did almost every two months of every year?

He decided he could relax a little. The gossip among the cook-staff still said the Union carrier that had startled them on entry was watching their backs like a station cop on dockside, and it still didn't seem to be bad news: there was no move to hinder them, and if there'd been any Mazianni about, they'd have been scared off by the Union presence, so they could dismiss that fear, too.

He was, he realized, already falling into a sense of expectations, after all expectations in his life had been ripped away from him. Vince and Linda were, hour by hour, tolerable nuisances, Jeremy was his reliable guide and general cue on the things he had to learn, besides being a cheerful, decent sort of kid when he wasn't blowing up imaginary pirates. Jeff the cook didn't care if he nabbed an extra roll, or, for that matter, if anybody did. It was like deciding to enjoy the fruit desserts. Life in general, he decided, was just fairly well tolerable if he flung himself into his work and didn't think too hard or long about where he was.

He even found himself caring about this job, enough to anticipate what Jeff wanted and to try to win Jeff's good humor. No matter how he'd previously, at Pell, resolved to stay sullen and just to go through the motions in his duties for his newest family, he found there was no sense sabotaging an effort that fed them fruit and spice desserts. Jeff Neihart appreciated with a pleasant grin the fact that he stacked things straight and double-checked the latches the same as people who were born here. It was worth a little effort he hadn't planned to give, and he ended up doing things the careful way he could do something when he cared.

Disorientation still struck occasionally, but those occasions were diminishmg. Yes, he was in space, which he'd dreaded, but he wasn't
in
space: it was just a comfortable, spice smelling kitchen full of busy people.

When, late in the shift, he took a break, he sat down to a cup of real coffee at a mess hall table. He understood it was
real
coffee, for the first time in his life, and he drank it, rolling the taste around on his tongue and telling himself… well… it was richer than synth coffee. Different. Another thing he daren't get too used to.

A ship, he was discovering, skimmed some real fancy items for its own use, and didn't count the cost quite the way station shops would. On this ship, while they had it, Jeff said, they had it and they should enjoy it.

There were points to this ship business that, really, truly, weren't half bad. A year was a long time to leave home but not an insurmountable time. There were worse things to have happened. A year to catch his balance, pass his eighteenth year, gain his majority…

Jeremy came up and leaned on the table. "Madelaine wants you."

"Who's that?" he asked across the coffee cup.

"Legal."

His stomach dropped, no matter that there wasn't anything Legal Affairs could possibly do to him now. He swallowed a hot mouthful of coffee and burned his throat so he winced.

"Why?"

"I don't know. Probably papers to clear up. She's up on B deck. Want me to walk you there?"

He didn't. It was adult crew and he didn't want any witnesses to his troubles, particularly among the juniors. Particularly his roommate. All the old alarms were going off in his gut. "What's the number up there?"

"I think it's B8. Should be. If it isn't, it's not further than B10."

"I can find it," he said. He drank the rest of the coffee, but with a burned mouth it didn't taste as good, and the pain of his throat lingered almost to the point of tears, spoiling what had been a good experience. He got up and went down the corridor to the lift he knew went to B deck.

It was a fast lift. Just straight up, no sideways about it, and up to a level where the Rules said he shouldn't be except as ordered. It was a carpeted blue corridor: downstairs was tiled. It was ivory and blue and mauve wall panels.

Really the executive level, he said to himself. This part of the ship looked as rich as
Finity
was. So
this
was what you lived like when you got to be senior executive crew… and lawyers were certainly part of the essentials.
Finity
didn't even need to hire theirs. It was one more damn cousin, and since lawyers had been part and parcel of his life up till now, he figured it was time to get to know this one.

This one—who'd stalked him for seventeen years and who he suddenly figured was to blame, seeing how long spacers lived, for every misery in his life.

Madelaine? Such an innocent name. Now he knew who he hated.

It was B9. He found
Legal Affairs
on a plaque outside, and walked into an office occupied by a young man in casuals one might see in a station office, not the workaday jump suit they wore down where the less profitable work of the ship got done.

"You're not Madelaine," he observed sourly.

"Fletcher." The young man stood up, offered a hand, and he took it. "Glad to meet you. I'm Blue. That's Henry B. But Blue serves, don't ask why. Madelaine's expecting you. "

"Thanks," he said, and the young man named Blue showed him into the executive office, facing a desk the like of which he'd never seen. Solid wood. Fancy electronics. A gray dragon of a woman with short-cropped hair and ice-blue eyes.

"Hello," she said, and stood up, came around the desk, and offered a cool, limp hand, a kind of grip he detested.

She looked maybe sixty, old enough that he knew beyond a doubt she was one of the lawyers behind his problems and that apparent sixty probably represented a hundred. She was cheerful. He wasn't.

"So what's this about?" he asked. "Somebody forget to sign something?" He feigned delight. "You've changed your minds and you're sending me home?"

Unflapped, she picked up a blue passport from off her desk and handed it to him. "This is yours. Keep it and don't mislay it. I can reissue but I get surly about it."

"Thanks." He tucked it in his pocket and was ready to leave.

"Sit down.—So how
are
you getting along?"

She knew he wasn't happy here and didn't give a damn.

Good, he thought, and sat. That judgment helped pull his temper back to level and gave him command of his nerves. It was another lawyer. The long-term enemy, the enemy he'd never met, but always knew directed his life. She was cool as ice.

He could be uncommunicative, too. His lawyers had taught him: don't fidget, look at the judge, don't get angry. And he wasn't. Not by half. "Am I having a good time?" he countered her as she sat down and faced him across her desk, her computer full of business that had to be more important to her than his welfare. "No. Will I have a good time? No. I'm not happy about this and I never will be. But here we are until we're back again."

"I know it's a hard adjustment."

"And you
had
to interfere in my life." He hadn't found anybody aboard he could specifically blame. He'd have expected something official from the senior captain, at least a face-to-face meeting, and hadn't gotten it—as if they'd snatched him up, and now that they'd demonstrated they could, they had no further interest in him. He resented that on some lower level of his mind. He wouldn't have unloaded the baggage in her office, he hadn't intended to, but, damn it, she asked. She wanted him to sit down and unburden his soul to her, in lieu of the real authority on this ship—when she was the person, the one person directly responsible for ten and more years of lawsuits and grief in his life, not to mention present circumstances. He drew a deep breath and fired all he had. "My mother was a no-good drughead who ducked out on me,
you
wouldn't leave me in peace, and here I am, just happy as you can imagine about it."

"Your mother had no choice in being where she was. She did have a choice in refusing to give up your
Finity
citizenship."

"She died! And excuse me, but what in
hell
did you think you were doing, ripping up every situation I ever worked out for myself?"

There was a fairly long silence. The face that stared at him was less friendly than the hisa watchers and just as still.

"I'm sorry you wanted the station, but you weren't born to the station, Fletcher, and that's a fact that neither of us controlled. This universe doesn't let you just float free, you know. There's a question of citizenship, your birthright to be in a particular place, and birth doesn't make you a Pell citizen. You were always ours, financially, legally, nationally. Francesca wouldn't let you be theirs. She wanted you here. They just wouldn't let you leave."

"The damn courts, you mean." In the low opinion he held of Pell courts they could possibly find one small point of agreement. And she hadn't flared back at him, had, lawyeresque, held her equilibrium. He even began to think she might not be so bad, the way nobody on the whole ship had really turned out to be an enemy. In giving him Jeremy, they'd left him nothing to fight. Nothing to object to. In sending him here, to this woman, they gave him, again, nobody he could fight with the anger he had built up. It was robbery, of a kind he only now identified, that he really didn't want to hurt this woman.

"The damned courts," she said quietly, "yes, exactly so."

"Did you pay fourteen million?"

"You heard about that."

"Damn—excuse me—right I heard."

"They sued us to buy you a station-share and kept the case in limbo; meanwhile, their own Children's Court wouldn't release you to us so long as the War continued, or so long as we were working with
Norway
. And we don't give up our own, young sir. Learn that first off. For good or for ill, this ship's deck is sovereign territory and we don't give up our own and pay a fourteen million credit charge on top of the outrage. If you want to know who put obstacles in your path, yes, the Pell courts, who saw no reason to credit this ship for the very fact there
is
a Pell judiciary and not an outpost of Union justice in its place. Your mother fought tooth and nail to maintain custody of you. We would have taken you at any pass through this system. Pell courts thought otherwise, but they gave you no rights within Pell's law."

It had been a good day going, before Madelaine the lawyer called him in to tell him what great favors they'd done him. Nothing to fight? She'd given him something. Fourteen million credits and his
life
at issue. Civilization was cancelled for the day. And he turned honest. "I don't want to be here.
Doesn't that count
?"

"But the fact is, you had no right to be at Pell, either."

"I had every right!"

"Not the important right. Not the legal right. And they wouldn't give it to you unless we paid for it because your
rights
lie on this ship where, from your mother, you have citizenship and financial rights."

"Well, that's not my fault. I don't owe this ship. And I damned sure don't owe my mother. She never did anything but mess up my life."

"She had little enough of her own. Your mother was my daughter's child. Your grandmother died at
Olympus
. Unfortunately for both of us, it seems, I'm your great-grandmother. Your closest living relative."

He'd fired off his mouth without knowing what he was firing at. He'd insulted his mother as he was in the habit of doing with strangers rather than having others do the sneering and the blaming and him do the defending. Lifelong habit, and he'd just done it to the wrong person. He'd wondered what it would be like to have a grandmother, or a godmother, back when he was reading nursery rhymes. Stationers had them. If he had one he wouldn't ever be in foster homes. Would he?

His godmother, however, wasn't a soft, plump woman with a wand and a pumpkinful of mice. It was a spacefaring lawyer with eyes that bored right through you. And not his
god-
mother, either. Not even his grandmother. His grandmother's
mother
, two generations back.

"Francesca died when you were five," Madelaine said "That's too young really to have known her. Or to have formed a good judgment."

He was prepared to back up a couple of squares and admit he'd been too quick. But her judgment of him drew a shake of his head. He couldn't help it. "No. I was there.
I remember
."

He remembered police, and his mother lying on the bed, not moving. He remembered realizing something was wrong with her. Her hand had been cold, terribly cold when he'd touched it. He'd known that wasn't right. And he'd called the emergency squad. He remembered textures. Sensations. Everything, every tiniest detail, was branded in his consciousness.