Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (23 page)

"She was a good woman," Madelaine said. "Good at what she did. She'd taken jump drugs all her life with no trouble. The simple fact was, she was pregnant, too late to abort, too early to deliver except to a birthlab, which she chose not to do; we knew what we were facing—it's declassified now, so we can talk about it. But it wasn't then, and going to a birthlab at her stage of pregnancy—we didn't have the time for her to do that and recover. We just couldn't wait for her, if she did it without us she'd still be stranded ashore, and she was in a hell of a mess. There was nothing for anyone but bad choices. We said we'd be back in a year. That didn't happen. We missed our appointment with her, and she crashed. Just crashed, physiologically, psychologically. Depression sometimes follows a birth. She started self-medicating. The hyprazine, particularly the hyprazine, if you've taken it in jump, it gives you an illusion of
being
in space, and that's what you take when you're pregnant. That illusion was what she was after, Fletcher. Just so you know."

"You and JR have been talking. Right?"

Madelaine shook her head. "No. We haven't. What about?"

"The truth—" He could hardly breathe. He kept his voice calm. "She kept sending me to welfare—and getting me back—until she finally went out on a trip and never came down. And left
me
tangled in the damn court system. Then
they
couldn't put me anywhere permanent and let anybody get attached to me because
you
kept suing the station. Let me tell you. I made it through six foster-families, five of them before I was fifteen. I made it through school. I made it through the honors program and into graduate. I licensed to work on Downbelow in Planetary Science, which is what I want to do, and where you called me from, and where I left everything I care about. And you come along and jerk me up and out of that to do your damn laundry and scrub mess hall tables, because you could
do
that and I'm your property! Well, screw all of you! I'm trying to keep my head straight because I
know
we can't turn this ship around, I haven't got money to buy passage on any other ship, and I have to live out this year, but that's
all
! That's
all
. Because when we get back to Pell I'm going to sue you to get off this ship."

"It still won't give you Pell citizenship."

It failed to knock the wind out of him, as she clearly expected. He didn't want to tell her about Quen's promise to him. She'd be the lawyer fighting him. He'd already been stupid and said too much. His lawyers would certainly have told him so.

"I had a girl back there," he said.

"Oh, is
that
it?"

"No! That's
not
it. It's not all it is." Naturally they wanted to wrap all his problems up in that. But what he felt wouldn't be understandable to people who didn't know what there was on a planet. He'd had a grandmother. She'd died. A lot of people on this ship had died… along with Jeremy's close relatives. And Madelaine— his grandmother… his
great-
grandmother—just stared at him, maybe amused, maybe hurt by the truth he'd told, maybe not giving a damn for anything but the ship's fourteen million. Since his mother died he'd never had to deal with anybody who owned the same set of emotional entanglements to him that his mother had had, and then he'd been five. Slowly the emotional shock of meeting this woman reached through to him, the feeling of an emotional pain somewhere he wasn't sure of, bone-deep and about to become acute, and tangled somewhere in his mother's death.

"I was in Planetary Studies," he said. "That doesn't mean anything here. But it mattered to me. It mattered everything to me."

"The stationmaster told us what you'd done. Both your extraordinary work to get into the program, and the ruinous thing you did at the end." Madelaine's face was sober. Her hands were steepled loosely before her, a tangle of fingers, an attitude that somehow echoed a habit of someone else—his mother—he wasn't sure. "Fact is, in your tender love of the planet, you broke laws, you fractured rules designed to protect it and the downers from the well-meaning
and
the callous users. I'm interested in why you'd do such a thing."

The lawyer. Wanting to know about laws. And asking into what wasn't her business, except that the question also involved his attitude toward rules-following, his behavior in a ship full of critical procedures. He was tempted to lie, to make things far worse than they were.

But he didn't want to find himself restricted from the freedom he did have, either.

"Did you
have
a reason for running off from the Base?" she pursued, and he tried to organize his thoughts to give her the answer she'd both believe and take for reassurance.

"Being pushed further than you can push me now," he said. "Further than anyone can ever push me again. That's all. You can only lose so much."

"Were you thinking of suicide?"

"Maybe. Maybe not."

"Did you care about the downers? The stationmaster said you'd been consorting rather closely with two of them."

Bianca talked
. The information hit him like a hammer blow.

And then, on a next and shaky breath,
Of course Bianca talked. I was gone. She had a right to talk
. It was nothing but expected—only the ruin of something else important. Another support of his life kicked out from under him.

She was scared. She was involved and I involved her. A Family girl with a Family on her back. Sure, she had to get straight with them. I had to be the one at fault. I was gone, she had to be practical about it.

He'd hoped for a little more fortitude from her. Just a little heroism. But she'd saved her own hide. Everyone did, when the chips came down.

"Despite your heritage,—you trained to work with the downers," Madelaine asked sharply. "Why?"

"Because—" He almost said, Because I
love
them, but he wasn't going to let
that
information loose. Because I never thought you'd get me away from Pell. Never give a psych or a lawyer a handle to hold to. Not a real one. "Because they're different.
Because I don't like human beings much
. How's that?"

"Sad if true."

"Downers don't
kidnap
people."

"And, as I know from brief experience, they don't understand human relationships. It's very much the contrary of what you're supposed to be doing with them. But you were intent on your own reasons."

"Reasons that they invited me to be with them. For years. I
know
the downers, I know the two I dealt with."

"You know them better than the scientists and the researchers. You know them well enough to defy the rules and endanger a half a hundred rescuers"

"It was their choice to be out there chasing me."

"Was it?" A shake of the lawyer's head. "Fletcher, I think you're better than that. Difficult. So was my granddaughter. It's why you were born. She was in love, in a year when any child was a hostage to fate. She knew that. She ran a risk."

In love.

It's why you were born.

He had a merchanter for a mother and that meant he
had
no father. It was one of the facts of his life: he
had
no father. How
dare
she throw that out for bait? His mother
knew
who the father was and it wasn't some chance encounter in a sleep-over?

He wouldn't take that bait. Not if his life depended on it.

He stood up. "I've got work to do."

Madelaine looked at him as if he were something on her agenda. No longer cool, no longer remote. "God, you're like Francesca."

That, too, was a gut blow. He didn't know how hard until he'd walked out, through the office, past the cousin named Blue, and out into the fancy carpeted corridor.

Like Francesca
. She looked at him with age-crinkled eyes and dismissed his best shot with
God, you're like Francesca…

He wasn't like his mother. He wasn't anybody's copy. His mother hadn't been like him.

She was in love
…

He'd not known his mother when she was seventeen. She might have sat in that same chair. She might have used this same lift. Walked these same corridors…

Been in love…

He had a father somewhere. His great-grandmother
knew
who it was. She had all the names, and held them as bait to draw him out, to get pieces of him in her reach, more deft than any psych.

He was used to the station as his mother's venue.
That
was where she'd lived, and
Finity's End
was where she'd come
from
.

But this corridor, these places, all this was a place she'd walked in, too, like some hidden room of her life where she'd been as young as
he
was now and where people remembered
her
in the same awkward, mistake-making years he was trying his best to grow out of.

It shook him.

It totally revised his concept of where he was and what he'd come from and who that seventeen-year-old twelve-year-old he roomed with really might have been to him. Here he was wandering around blind, in
her
young years, meeting people who'd wanted him because they'd lost
her
and to whom the whole reality of the station was a locked room
they
couldn't get into, either. And Jeremy was the bridge. Jeremy was the might-have-been, the one he'd always have been with. His mother would be dead, maybe, with Jeremy's mother, with half the people on the ship… and things would be a lot the same, but different, vastly different, too.

He rode the lift back to A deck and walked back where he'd come from. His nerves weren't up to a challenge of things-as-they-were or a confrontation with Madelaine Neihart. He just wanted to go back to the mess hall and to Jeremy, that was all-even to go back to Vince and Linda. He couldn't feel the ship moving, but they were shooting unthinkably fast toward the nadir of the Tripoint mass-point, where another event he didn't understand would happen and they'd more than accelerate: they'd plunge a second time out of the known universe into a state his mother had chosen to live in, that she'd ultimately chosen to die in.

He'd failed that unit in his physics class—how the universe didn't like the state they'd be in, and spat them out reliably somewhere else. He agreed with the universe: he didn't like the state they'd be in and he didn't want to imagine it. He didn't know whether he
could
understand it, but when he'd had to study it, he'd pleaded with his physics instructor he didn't want to take that tape again, please God, he didn't want to… and the psychs had gotten into it. Finally the school had exempted him and let him study it and just barely pass it realtime, with pencil and paper, because the psychs said there were special psychological reasons that the instructor and the school weren't equipped to deal with. They'd offered to
help
him deal with it. And he'd said no. And somehow it hadn't come up again.

No more exemption, now. No more psychs to step in and say let Fletcher alone: he can't deal with it. The court had forgotten all about that fear when it gave him up and stripped him of his Pell ID. His bitter guess was that it had stopped mattering to most people the second somebody mentioned fourteen million credits. Quen had reached out and tapped some judge on the shoulder and said, Let them have him this time.

And ironically, completely unexpectedly, the only person in the whole affair who cared—personally, cared, as it turned out—might have been the lawyer, Madelaine. The crew at large, meanwhile, didn't know what he'd grown into, but thought the courts were holding from them some poor stupid kid it was their
right
to have, a kid whose spacer heritage would leap to the fore and instantly make him love them.

The ship unfortunately didn't turn around to undo its mistakes. It only went forward and it didn't stop for anything, that was what that long-ago physics tape had told him… the universe abhorred their situation half in hyperspace and half here and spat their bubble along the interface until a mass-point snatched them into its gravity and jerked their bubble remorselessly flat. When he thought about it, walking a corridor on a ship courting that event, the space that connected him to Pell felt stretched thinner and thinner, as if his whole universe could just tear and vanish.

His mother had died like that, hadn't she? Her mind had just—stretched thin until one day there wasn't enough left to get her home again.

Madelaine had all the wit he hoped his mother had had, needle-sharp and quick as he imagined now his mother might have been if she hadn't been out on drugs and if he hadn't been a feckless five-year-old. He couldn't ever know her, clear-eyed—couldn't ever sit in a room with her as he'd just sat with Madelaine, to have clear memories, or to sort out her pluses and minuses. He had memories of his mother being happy, and smiling, but he'd told himself in the maturer, more brutal judgment of his teenage years that those had all been days when she'd been high as the drugs could make her and still function—when the body was on Pell Station, but
she
wasn't.

Love? She'd exuded just enough to rip the guts out of a kid. She loved somebody whose name Madelaine dangled before him? Had his kid?

Then why in hell had she lost herself in drug-hazed space? Post-birth depression? He wished it were that simple.