Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (24 page)

He went back to the mess hall and, finding there was nothing doing at the moment, had a soft drink. They were free. It was one benefit of a situation that felt, again, like the trap it was.

"So what'd Legal want?" Jeremy wanted to know,

"Just passport stuff," he said. He didn't talk about it. He didn't want Jeremy for a confidant on this point. He didn't at all want Vince and Linda, who were lurking for gossip. If Vince had opened his mouth right then, he'd have hit him.

He fought for calm. He tried to settle down and just go numb about the situation, telling himself that a year, like all other periods of time, would pass. He'd learned to wait in doctors' offices, in psychiatrists' offices, in court. "Don't fidget," the adult of the month would say, and he'd stay still. When he stayed still nobody noticed him. A year was long, but his fight to get to Downbelow had been longer. He did know how to win by waiting. Don't feel anything. Don't say much. Don't engage anybody the way he'd engaged the lawyer. He'd made the one mistake up in Madeline's office… made the kind of mistake that gave manipulative people and lawyers levers to use.

No. She'd already known him, before he ever walked in that door. He was her
great-grandson
, and she'd lost her daughter and her granddaughter and now she wanted a try at him, seeing his mother in him. That was something he'd never faced. She was his honest-to-God real great-grandmother, and his mother had
lived
on this ship.

She'd just
died
on Pell.

The shift went to bed, an exhausted mainnight in which visions of rain-veiled river danced in Fletcher's eyes; and playing cards cascaded like raindrops, inextricably woven images, in which somehow he owed days, not hours, and in which he chased Jeremy through tunnels first of earth and then of garishly lit steel and pipe, the latter of which looked miraculously like the tunnels on Pell.

Next morning it was back to the galley before maindawn, help Jeff set out the breakfast trays and get the carts up to B deck, but they were still cooking huge casseroles for next jump… things that could warm up in a hurry, a lot of red pepper involved. Taste was pretty dim after jump, so Jeff said, and by Fletcher's estimation it was true; spicy things perked up the appetite. While they were doing that, they'd had no further alarms, no changes in velocity. Jeff said the ship's long, even run under inertia would give them the chance to get some baking done. Cakes in the oven during a high-K run were doomed, so Jeff said.

So whenever they hit an onboard stretch where they could spread out and cook, they cooked for all they were worth: fancy pastries, casseroles, pies, trays of pasta and individual packets for those hours people came in scattered There were onions and fish from Pell, there was keis and synth ham, there was cabbage and couscous and what they called animal protein, which was a kitchen secret nobody should have to look at before it cooked. It came in pieces and mostly the cook-staff ground it. There was rice from Earth and yellow grain from Pell; there were sauces, there were gravies, there were fruit jellies that came from Downbelow and wine solids and spices and yeasts that came from Earth. There were keis sandwiches, fish sandwiches, and pro-paste sandwiches which Fletcher swore he'd never eat again in his life; there were pickles and syrups and stuffed pasta, string pasta, puff breads and flat-breads and meal and pro-paste pepper rolls with hot sauce, and there were sausage rollups, which were their lunch, and keis and ham rollups which were supper. The galley had rung with the battering of pans and trays, swum in pots of sauce that went steaming into forms of given sizes and had to be trundled on carts into the galley lift, where in coats you put the stuff in deep-freeze on the very outer level of the rim in what they called the skin. Out there among the structural elements of the passenger ring, cold was the natural, cheap environment, requiring only a rack for storage, no mechanism but a light; and you felt that cold burning right through your boot-soles when you walked the grids. Fletcher made one trip down with Jeff just to see what it was like, his closest approach to the uncompromising night outside the hull; he was glad to get back up into warmth and light of the ring.

All this day they worked on sandwiches, and of course, tastes of the current batch. Nobody on regular cook-staff ever seemed to eat a meal: they sampled; and the last job they put together, just before supper, was a giant pyramid of tasty little sandwiches and another of sweets. Which to Fletcher's disappointment didn't turn up on
their
menu. It went to B deck.

"We'll get some," Jeremy said as he watched the cart go. "Topside in the senior mess. There's a get-together coming. Everybody's there."

"So?" he said. He wasn't at all enthusiastic about meetings. He remembered board-call, and everybody together for that. It had been particularly uncomfortable. And he'd worked hard today. He thought he had a right to those desserts. "I'd rather read or something. Thanks."

"You're really supposed to go. It's all of second and third shift, and a lot of first will come. That's why they've been handing us fast food today. Eat light."

"Is it a meeting, or what is it?"

"Not a
meeting
," Jeremy said as if he were a little slow. "Food. The fancy food. It's a
party
. You know. People. Music. Party."

"Why?"

"'Cause that Union bunch is just sitting back there not bothering us, 'cause we're in a big boring jump-point and we don't have anything much to do. Why
not
? When you're downtimed and there's no pirates going to bother you, you throw a party. Come on, Fletcher, you'll enjoy it. Be loose. Jump before main-dawn, but tonight we shake things up, man. Be loose, be happy, it's got to be somebody's birthday! That's what we say, it's somebody's birthday somewhere! Celebrate for George."

"Who's George?" There was such a thing as ship-speak: the in-jokes sometimes flew past him.

"King George V."

He'd thought, with his fascination with old Earth history, there was no way a twelve-year-old from
Finity
was going to know King George of
England
. Or
England
, for that matter, in spite of Jeremy's tape study. He was amazed. And enticed. "Why George?"

"Well, because he's old and he's dead, and nobody throws him parties anymore, so we do on
Finity
. When it's nobody else's birthday, it's for old King George!"

He'd walked into that one. "Why not?" he said. "Seems logical."

He still didn't entirely want to go, but he considered the food they'd been working on all day; and he knew himself, that once he was committed to being alone, knowing full well there was a party going on elsewhere, he'd feel lonelier.
I'd rather stay in my room and hate all of you
might be the real answer, but it wasn't, in Jeremy's clear opinion, going to be the accepted answer.

Besides, Jeremy had, against all odds, made it sound like fun.

So they showered and put on clean, unfloured, unpeppered clothes without grease spots, and went up to B deck. Fletcher's most dire apprehension in the affair was that he might have to suffer through some formal introduction of himself, standing up in front of people he didn't want to be polite to. "They're not going to introduce me again, are they?" he'd asked Jeremy. "I don't want to be introduced."

"They won't if you don't like," Jeremy said. "I'll tell them and they won't."

He still, riding up the lift to B deck, feared he couldn't escape another round of j-names:
John, James, Jerry and Jim
. He was resigned to that idea, if not the idea of another introduction, or any sentimental
This is Francesca's baby
on anybody's part. As long as it stays George's party, he'd told Jeremy, when he'd agreed. No surprises.

And when they walked up around the ring to the senior mess, he could see the food laid out, he could see tables spread with linen; and he could see people, the Family, all walking around or talking at random: no special recognition looked to be in the offing, no ceremony, no conspicuous embarrassment and no formality, either. The B deck rec hall turned out to be connected to the B deck mess hall, a wall-to-wall segment of the whole ring, carpeted, the area that was rec furnished with vid-game sets, not in use at the moment; a bar, which was in use; and maybe fifty tables with linen tablecloths like some high-class restaurant. The whole arrangement filled two segments of B deck's ring, with only a little half-bulkhead and a drawn-back section door to separate rec from the mess. There were maybe a hundred, two hundred people—all, God save him, relatives—milling around in casual familiarity, with more arrivals coming in from either end of the area.

There was a pool table, a game going there, in the rec section. That had drawn a row of kibitzers. A couple of women played quiet, not-bad guitar in the background, up at the end of the mess hall, and the sweets and snacks from the mess hall were going fast. The bar opened up, and various mixed drinks and wine glasses ready to be picked up were going off the counter as fast as the kids serving could set them out, fifty, a hundred of them.

Held off on cheese sandwiches all day. Fletcher raided the dessert stack instead and filled his mouth with sweet cream pastry.

"Fletcher."

He knew that voice. He turned and frowned at Madelaine. She had a glass of wine in hand and was clearly not official at the moment.

"Glad you came, Fletcher," Madelaine said.

"Thanks," he said, and knuckled a suspected smear of cream off his lip. He wouldn't have come at all if he'd known he'd run into her first off.

"Enjoy things," she said. And to his relief and gratitude, she didn't engage him in intrusive, personal conversation, just smiled and walked past him, wine glass in hand, leaving him free to wander around with Jeremy.

Jeremy, who was bent on telling him who was who.

"No good with the names," he said after six or seven. "There's too many J's in the lot. I'm not going to remember. Unless you can point out King George. Who
is
a G, isn't he?"

Jeremy thought that was funny. "Everybody
is
J's," he said, as if he'd never added it up for himself. "Most, anyway. 'Cept you're Fletcher. Probably the first Fletcher in fifty years."

"Why? Why's Fletcher the exception?"

"He was shot dead, a long time ago," Jeremy said. "He was the one getting the hatch shut when the Company men were trying to board, and he did it and died on the deck inside. Or there wouldn't
be
any of us. No
Alliance
. No
Union
."

He knew about the incident. He'd learned it in school, but he didn't know it was a Fletcher Neihart who'd been the one to get the door shut when they tried to trap
Finity
and arrest Captain James Robert. He knew about
Finity's End
saying the Earth Company authorities weren't going to board, and the captain and crew had sealed the ship and left the station
and
the authorities behind them, refusing them authority over the ship and refusing station law on a merchanter's deck. It was where the first merchanter's strike had started, when merchanters from one end of space to the other had made it clear that trade goods didn't and wouldn't move without merchant ships.

In a long chain of events, it was the incident that had started the whole Company War.

History. Near-modern history, which he detested. He'd passed the obligatory quiz on the details to get into the program. The Company War. Treaty of Pell, 2353, and that had left civilization where it was when he'd been born, with
Union
on one side and
Alliance
on the other and Earth not real happy with either of them. And him stranded and his mother dead. That kind of history.

So, Jeremy said, somebody he was named after had gotten a critical hatch shut in the original fracas between Company ships and Family ships, without which either the ship wouldn't have gotten away or the cops who shot this long-dead Fletcher would have died in the decompression that would have resulted if he hadn't shut that hatch.

Pell knew about that kind of event. And he'd known about the start of the Company War.

So the guy's name had been Fletcher. He didn't know why he should be proud of some spacer who was a hundred years dead—but, well, dammit, he'd lived all his seventeen years around the snobbery of the Velasquezes and the Willetts, the Dees and the Konstantins, who'd been important because of
their
names, and important mostly because of what dead people in
their
families had done, while he'd never before had a sense of connection to anything but an addict mother and a lawsuit.

Somebody died closing an airlock and did it with pieces of him shot away, knowing otherwise there'd be vacuum killing more than the people shooting at him—that was a levelheaded brave guy, in his way of thinking. While the Willetts—they'd donated a warehouse full of stuff to the war effort. Big deal. No one had been shooting at them.

And Fletcher Neihart
meant
that man, on this ship. Fletcher wasn't just a name. It was a revision of who he was—for a moment.

He
never had meant much. And that, he'd told himself when he'd been at a low point of his teenaged years, scared spitless of the program placement tests, that
never meant much
was the source of his strength: not giving much of a damn. Like a gyro—kick it off balance a second and it swung right back. That realization had kept him sane. Kept him aware of his own value, which was only to himself.

Maybe that was why Madelaine's being here had upset him—why
Madelaine
had upset him and why even yet he was feeling shaky. He'd instinctively seen a danger when Madelaine had dangled the lure of his mother's motives and his father's name in front of him yesterday.

He'd been in danger a second ago when he'd thought about famous relatives.

He was in danger when he began to slip toward thinking… being Fletcher Neihart wasn't that bad a thing.

Yes, and Jeremy wasn't a bad kid, and they could get along, and maybe Jeremy could make this year of enforced servitude not so bad. But he'd thought he could rely on Bianca, too, and yesterday in the same conversation in which he'd learned he had a great-grandmother and the lawyers he hated really loved him, in the very same conversation Madelaine had proved Bianca had talked to authorities and betrayed everything he'd shared with her about Melody and Patch,

It was nothing to get that angry about. Bianca had behaved about average, for people he'd dealt with. Better than some. She hadn't talked
until
she'd been cornered and until he'd already been caught and shipped off the planet,

So forget falling into the soft traps of potential relatives. Figure that Jeremy would keep some secrets and advise him out of trouble, but he shouldn't get soppy over it or mistake it for anything special. Jeremy had his orders, and those orders came from authority just like Madelaine, if it wasn't Madelaine herself. She wanted him to ask who his father was. He didn't damn well care. Whoever it was hadn't come to Pell. Hadn't cared for him. Hadn't cared for his mother.

Spacer mindset.

Safer just to disconnect from all of them, Jeremy too. He could be pleasant, but he didn't have to commit and he didn't have to trust any of them. And that meant he didn't have to get mad, consequently, when they proved no better and no worse than anyone else. He'd learned that wisdom in his half a dozen family arrangements, half a dozen tries at being given the nicely prepared room, the nicely prepared brother, the family who thought they'd save him from his heritage and a mother who hadn't been much.

In that awareness he walked in complete safety through the buzz of talk and the occasional hand snagging him to introduce him to this or that cousin… screw it, he thought: he wasn't possibly going to remember anything beyond this evening. The names would sink in only over time and with the need to deal with one and another of them. If he really, truly needed to know Jack from Jamie B., he'd ask for an alphabetical list. In the meantime, everyone wore name tags.

He'd had a hard day, however, and what he did want to quiet his nerves and dim the day's troubles wasn't on the dessert tray. He strolled over to the bar, lifted a glass of wine, turned his shoulder before he had to deal with the bartenders and walked off with it, sipping a treat he hadn't had at the Base but that he had had regularly in the latest family. The Wilsons had collected their subsidy from the station for taking care of him, he hadn't caused them trouble (he'd been a model student who ate his meals out), he'd done his own laundry… fact had been, he'd
boarded
at the Wilsons', and they were pleasant, decent folk who'd had him to formal dinners on holidays at home or in nice restaurants, and who hadn't cared if he hit their liquor now and again as long as he cleaned up the bar and washed the glasses.

The wine tasted good. His nerves promised to unwind. He told himself to relax, smile, have a good time, get to know as many of the glut of relatives as seemed pleasant. Like Jeff. Jeff was all right. Even great-grandmother Madelaine was on an agenda of her own, nothing really to do with him as himself, except as the daughter-legacy Madelaine hoped he'd turn into. He would disappoint her, he was sure.

But if she refrained from exercising authority over him and just took him as he was, as she'd done when she'd failed to make a fuss over him here, he could refrain from resisting her. He could be pleasant. He'd been
pleasant
to a lot of people once he knew it was in his interest, as it seemed generally to be in his interest on this ship.

He'd like to find a few cousins who were somewhat above twelve years of age. He'd like to have someone to talk occasionally to whose passion wasn't vid-games.

"God, you're not supposed to have that," Jeremy said, catching up to him.

"Had it on station ."

Jeremy was troubled by it. He saw that. But he had it now, and he wasn't going to turn it in. He drank it in slow sips. He had no intention of gulping multiple glasses and making an ass of himself.

"What's this?" He knew that young, high, penetrating voice, too. Vince had showed up, with Linda. Inevitably with Linda. "You can't drink that."

Vince and his holier-than-thou, wiser-than-everyone attitudes for what Vince wouldn't dare do when he was taller and older. He gestured with the three-quarters full glass, "Have drunk it. When you grow up, you can give it a try. Meanwhile, relax."

"You'll get on report," Vince said. "I'll bet you get on report."

"Fine. Let them ship me back. I'll cry tears."

"I wish they would," Vince said, one of his moments of sincerity, and about that time a larger presence came up on him.

JR.

"He's drinking" Vince said as if JR had no eyes. Fletcher looked straight at JR.

"Somebody give you that?" JR asked in front of Jeremy
and
Vince
and
Linda. He'd had enough family togetherness for the day. He drank three-quarters of a well-hoarded glass down in three swallows.

"Here," he said, and handed the empty glass to JR. JR almost let it fall. And caught it on the fly, not without spilling a couple of last drops to the expensive carpet.

Fletcher walked off. He'd had enough party and celebration, and beyond that, he wasn't in a frame of mind to stay around to be discussed or reprimanded in front of his roommate, a twelve-year-old jerk, or a couple of hundred of his worst enemies. It was easy to leave in the open-ended mess hall section. He just kept walking to the lift, out where the light was dimmer and the noise was a lot less.