Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (44 page)

By then the bruises were starting to hurt, and he didn't argue the question. Charlie had shot him full of painkiller, and it had made the walls remote and hazy. He was having trouble enough tracking what JR was saying, and had no emotional reaction to it. He didn't even hate
Chad
anymore. He just thought, with what remained to him of self-preservation, that he was going to have trouble getting through jump, the way he was.

Fact was, when he got down off the table, he missed the door, and JR grabbed him and walked him to his quarters, opened the door, and got him to his bunk.

"Sleep it off," JR said "We'll talk about it the other side."

Jeremy came in. Fletcher didn't know how long he'd been there, but he pretended he was still sleeping. He heard Jeremy stirring about, and then Jeremy shook his shoulder gently.

"I brought your supper."

"Don't want it."

"Dessert. You better eat. You'll be sick coming out of jump if you don't eat, Fletcher. I'll bring you something else. I'll bring you anything you want…"

That was Jeremy, three new programs offered before he'd disposed of the first one. Dessert… a heavy hit of carbohydrate… was somehow appealing, even if his mouth tasted like antiseptic.

He struggled up to a sitting position. His eye, the one with the stitch in the eyebrow, was swollen shut. His ribs felt massively abused. Jeremy set a tray in his lap, and the offering was a synth cheese sandwich.

Considering the condition of his mouth, the detested synth cheese wasn't a bad choice. He ate the sandwich. He ate the fruit tart dessert while Jeremy jabbered on about the ship they were chasing having started a run, and how
Finity's
engines were more powerful than any little pirate spotter's and how Jeremy thought they didn't need the Union warship that was running beside them. If
Champlain
tried a duck and strike maneuver, they'd scatter
Champlain
over the jump-point

He wasn't so sure. And his head was spinning. The sugar tasted good. The rest was just palatable. He supposed that he should be terrified of the possibility of the ship going into combat, but maybe it was the perspective of just having been there himself, on a smaller scale: he didn't care. Jeremy took the tray and he lay down again and drifted out.

At some time the lights had dimmed. He slitted his eyes open on Jeremy moving about the room, trying not to make a racket, checking locker latches. He couldn't keep awake. Whatever Charlie had shot into him just wasn't going away, and he thought about
Chad
and Connor and Sue, and the scene at the laundry pickup. "We ever get our laundry turned in?" he asked, thinking that Chad was going to have to do it, whatever he liked or didn't like, the work of the ship had to go on. And Jeremy answered:

"Yeah, I took it down."

He drifted again. And waked with the intercom blaring warning.

"…
ten minutes, cousins. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Get those packets organized. Our spook friend went jump an hour ago and we're going early. Wake up and acknowledge, on your feet and get belted in. This is going to be a hard dump on the other side. You juniors belt in good and solid. Helm One says easy done but the captain says we'll flatten pans in the galley. If you have any chancy latches, tape 'em shut
."

"Hot damn," Jeremy said. "We're on 'em."

"On what?" Fletcher asked thickly. And then he remembered
Champlain
, JR's talk about missiles, and the chance there might be shooting. Then the fear that hadn't been acute at his last waking seemed much more immediate. He tried to sit up, looking for the packets, with the cabin swinging round on him. He was aware of Jeremy doing the call-in, reporting to the computer they were accounted for.

Jeremy came back to him and had the packets, and some tape. "Going to fix these so they don't slide out of reach," Jeremy said, and taped them to the edge of the cot, except one, which Jeremy stripped of its protective coating. "You want to take it yourself, or do you want me to shoot it?"

"A little early."

"It'll be all right. You take it. I got to see you do before I tuck in."

"Yeah," he said. Admittedly he was muzzy-headed. "Charlie gave me a hell of a dose."

"One of those time-release things," Jeremy said as Fletcher put the packet against his arm and let it kick. He didn't even feel the sting, he was that numb.

"Double-dosed," he said. "Is that all right?"

"Charlie knows," Jeremy said, and found the ends of the safety belt for him as he lay back. Fletcher snapped the ends, tucked a pillow under his head, asking himself if he was going to wake up again, or if anything went wrong, whether he'd ever know anything again. Did you have to wake up to die? Or if you died in your sleep, did you ever know it had happened?

He couldn't do anything about it. He'd taken the shot. And Jeremy still sat there. Watching him.

Just watching, for what seemed a long, long time.

What are you looking at
? Fletcher asked, but he couldn't muster the coordination to talk, feeling the uncertainty of one more drug insinuating itself through his bloodstream. Jeremy set a hand on his shoulder, patted it but he couldn't feel it. He was that numb.

"Five minutes. Five minutes, cousins. Whatever you're doing, get it set up, we're about to make a run up.
"

"I don't want you to leave," Jeremy said distressedly "I don't want you ever to leave, Fletcher. I don't
want
you to go back to Pell. Vince and Linda don't want you to go."

He was emotionally disarmed, tranked, dosed, numb as hell and spiraling down into a deep, deep maze of dark and shadows. He heard the distress in Jeremy's voice, felt it in the pressure, no keener sensation, of Jeremy's fingers squeezing his shoulder.

"Most of all
I
don't want you to go," Jeremy said. "Ever. You're like I finally had a brother. And I don't want you to go away, you hear me, Fletcher?"

He did hear. He was disturbed at Jeremy's distress. And he began to be scared for Jeremy sitting there arguing with him long past what was safe.

"Get to bed," he managed to mumble. After that the pressure of Jeremy's hand went away, and he drifted, aware of Jeremy getting into his bunk.

Aware of the last intercom warning…

Gravity increased. The earth was soft and the sky was heavy with clouds…

"I don't want you and
Chad
to fight," a young voice said, and called him back to the ship, to the close restraint of the belts, the pressure hammering him into his bunk.

"I'd really miss you," someone said. "I would."

A long, long time his back pressed against the ground, and he watched the monsoon clouds scud across, layers and layers of cloud.

Then he walked, on an endless wooded slope… in an equally endless fight for air…

Going for jump
, he heard someone say…

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…