Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (27 page)

Keep them busy picking nits, his predecessor in the role had warned him; never let them take on the real rules. Give them nits to worry at and they'll obey the big ones. Then Paul had added, smugly:
You
did.

Nits, hell. His predecessor had commanded the juniors through the dustup at Bryant's, when so many had died—among the juniors as well. That had been no waltz.

They gave
him
Fletcher on a damn milk run. It seemed, on the surface, a tame, and minor, duty, one that shouldn't set
his
lately pubescent hormones skewing wildly through the whole gamut of adrenaline charge. He'd had his last personal snit, oh, exquisitely dissected and laid out for him by Paul, right down to temper as his personal failing.

Not this time.

"Give him some leeway," he said to the others. "Just give him some leeway. He's not the same as having grown up here. He's not the same as anyone we've ever personally known."

"I hear he gave
you
trouble," Ashley said.

"Not lately."

"Not in fifteen minutes," Sue said. "He shoved that glass on you in front of everybody."

"Fine. I gave it to Vince. Who set up the situation, if we have to talk about fault." His temper
was
getting on edge. Sue had a knack for stirring it up. He hauled it back and put on the brakes. "I saw the drink and I was dealing with it. I didn't need a snot-nosed junior-junior to tell me that was a wineglass. Vince interfered. It blew. That's the end of it. We've got Fletcher, he's physiological seventeen, he probably drank on station, and somewhere, somehow in the plain fact he doesn't know a damn thing useful, we've got to fit him in at the bottom of the senior-juniors—"

"No!" from Nike.

"—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a year older than he is; but Fletcher's seventeen years weren't time-dilated. So do you want
my
orders, or are there other suggestions?"

"He's the baby," Connor said "I think we ought to do a Welcome-in."

Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It
wasn't
the idea he had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew privileges and he hadn't been through the process and the understandings and the acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.

"He's a little old for that," JR said.

"We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy," Sue said. "Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took it. So how's this guy holier than any of us?"

"He's upset, that's one difference. He wasn't born here. He's not one of us…"

"That's what a Welcome-in's
for
, isn't it?"
Chad
asked, with devastating reason.

But a bad idea. "Not yet. This isn't somebody straight down from the kids' loft. This isn't a green kid."

"Plenty green to me,"
Chad
said.

"He can't
do
anything," Lyra said. "He's not trained to do anything. He's a stationer. He's a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he's got to appreciate what he's joining."

JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group, one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of him in an emergency.

"So when do we do a Welcome-in?" Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad's tone it was an issue the way Fletcher's encounter with him over the wine glass was going to be an issue with Chad.

"Not yet," JR said. "Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he'll blow, and
that's
no good"

"Everybody blows," Connor said.

"Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy's size," Bucklin muttered, finally, a dose of common sense. "Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you."

There were sulks. They hadn't done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They hadn't known whether
Finity
would survive her next run, and they'd Welcomed-in Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn't seemed fair for any kid to die alone in the nursery, the ship's last kid, in years when they hadn't produced any
other
kids.

Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to station-time.

And very, very different.

"I say we go easy with him," JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin's clear statement of the facts had gained, "and we give him a little chance to figure us out. Then we'll talk. "

There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.

"Square up," JR said. "Don't sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a
senior
venue."

Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.

"I say with JR," said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, "we give him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn't, we talk again at Mariner."

"Just don't take him on," JR said. "If you've got a problem with him, refer it to me."

He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher's quarters this evening and try to talk it out with him. But he didn't trust that three-quarters of a wine glass in three gulps had improved Fletcher's logic. Or his temper. There were constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased slide.

He supposed he'd tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe hadn't been the ideal pair-up.

But putting him with him or Bucklin would inspire jealousy: Put him with Chad? There were two tempers in a paper sack. Connor, the same. Ashley or Toby would go silent and there'd be offense there. He couldn't think of anybody better than Jeremy, who could outright disarm the devil.

The Old Man and Paul both had warned him there weren't fast fixes for personal messes once they went wrong. You didn't just go running down to a case like Fletcher and tell him how to fix his life and expect cooperation, especially after a public scene such as they'd just had. Fletcher had to figure a certain amount out for himself, and meanwhile he and his crew had to figure out what a mind was like who'd been more than content to sink into a gravity well and never see the stars again. Stranger than the downers, in his own opinion. Downers at least had been born to endless cloud and murk.

Wood, a slim wand of it brought into space where wood was a rarity, feathers, where birds never flew… and spirals and dots and bands carved by hisa fingers—fingers no longer content to carve wood with stones, the scientist reminded them. Hisa of these times were quite glad to have sharp metal blades. Hisa accepted them in trade and called metal cold-cold. That had become the hisa word for it.

No matter how hard you tried to keep the Upabove out of Downbelow, humans didn't give up their ties to the technology they depended on and hisa learned to depend on it, too. But humans found it difficult to go down to a world again.

Fletcher lay on his bunk, his head a little light from the wine. His fingers drew peace from the touch of the feathers, damaged by a Downbelow rain. The touch of wood evoked memories far happier than where he was.

He didn't give up his resentments. He didn't give up his dreams, either. And maybe the experts
weren't
right that he'd done actual harm by going where he'd gone. Expert opinion had backed another theory, once, right up to the time before he was born. Then the idea had been to get the hisa into space, teach them technology, give them the benefits of the steel and plastics world above their clouded world. Hisa had been very clever with machines, quick to learn small jobs like checking valves, changing filters, reading dials.

Pell Station, short of personnel in its earliest days, and overwhelmed by events cascading about it, had
begun
with hisa at the heart of the operation, and they'd built the station around the presumption there'd always be hisa on Pell.

But human greed had tried to push things too fast on Downbelow. People had multiplied too fast. Had brought demands on the hisa for more, more, more of their grain, for organized work, for controlling Old River's floods and doing things on schedule.

Hisa hadn't taken to schedules and human demands. A hisa named Satin had led a hisa uprising—well, as uprisen as patient hisa ever got—back during the War.

Then a new set of experts had moved in, declared humans had done everything wrong and shut down a lot of operations the Base had used to have, restricted more severely the rotation of hisa up to the station, and dashed all expectations of hisa and humans working together.

Was it wrong that Melody and Patch had rescued a human child?

Was it wrong he'd grown up and found them again?

Was it wrong he'd dreamed of working with them—maybe a little closer than he should have gotten?

(But he
knew
them, and they knew him, his gut protested. He hadn't hurt them. He'd never hurt them.)

His fingers traced designs no human understood. He knew what scientists surmised the designs were: day-night in the pattern of black dots, Great Sun in the circles, Old River in the long curves and branches.

But maybe the curling patterns meant vines and seeds. Maybe it was fields and maybe it was hisa paths the lines meant. You could see anything you believed in, in hisa carving, that was the thing. And if he ever could ask Melody and Patch to read the stick for him, as sure as he knew their minds, he'd bet they'd read him something completely different every time he asked

So who was smarter? Hisa, with their patterns that could mean anything the day felt like meaning? Or humans who, in their writing and their image-making, pinned a moment down with precision, like a specimen on a board?

Was one better, or smarter, and ought hisa
not
to work on the station as much as some of them, individuals with preferences like every human, wanted to work?

He didn't think natural was better. He didn't think hisa should die young from infections, or lose their babies in floods or to fevers, or die of broken legs. But the authorities ruled there were hisa you could contact, but hisa who didn't work at the Base were completely off limits. And they went on dying of things station medicine could cure.

Experts said—better a few die like that than have another contact the way it had been when the Fleet military had invaded Downbelow. Humans never should have landed on Downbelow at all, was what one side said. Everything humans had ever done was harmful and wrong. They'd already robbed an intelligent species of their unique future and further contact could only do worse.

But wasn't a human-hisa future unique in the patterns of a wide universe, too? Wasn't it a surer chance for the hisa to survive, when worlds with life were so few? And wasn't it as important in the vast cosmos that two species had gotten together and worked together?

Seemed sensible to him that he'd done no harm.

They'd given him a gift that meant—surely—they weren't harmed.

But when he remembered that he was lying on a bunk in a ship speeding toward nowhere, and
away
from every meaning the stick had to anyone, a lump came up in his throat and his eyes stung.

Rotten stupid was what it was.

More experts. Quen, this time. Nunn.

Friends, he and Bianca. Running around together. Thinking of things together. For maybe fifteen whole, oblivious days, with disaster written all around them.

It shouldn't surprise him when it all fell apart. Things always did. He wrapped the feathered cords around the stick and put it away in the back of the drawer.

Then he fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, chasing away the ache in his chest with the remembrance of sunglare through green leaves. Jeremy came in from the party, late, and he pretended to be asleep as Jeremy clattered about and took a late shower.

When Jeremy had dimmed the lights and gone to bed, he got up and stripped his clothes off to go to sleep.

"There's a lot of the guys mad at you," Jeremy said out of the dark.

"Doesn't matter to me," he said.

"You shouldn't have taken the drink," Jeremy said.

"I don't want to hear about it," he said coldly. "They set 'em out, yeah, I'll drink one. Nobody had a sign up. Nobody told me stop."

"Vince was an ass," Jeremy said finally.

"Yeah," he agreed, feeling better by that small vindication. "Generally. So how was it?"

"Oh, it was fine." Jeremy settled, a stirring of sheet and a sighing of the mattress. A silence then, in the dark. "JR said everybody should lay off you and be polite."

"That so." He didn't believe it. But he couldn't see Jeremy's face to test the truth of it.

They were going to jump at maindawn, He was worried about sleeping through it. Forgetting the drug. Going crazy,

They were going to Mariner from here. They'd actually be at another star.

"Are they going to warn us tomorrow morning?" he asked Jeremy.

"About the jump? Yeah, sure, I'll guarantee you can't sleep through it. They'll be on the intercom. Fifteen minutes before. You got your drugs?"

"Yeah," When he was out of his clothes, he had the drugs in the elastic side pocket, on the bed, the way Jeremy had advised him. Always with him, "They're right here." He was still wobbly about the experience. Going into it out of the dark, he supposed one shift or the other had to have it in the middle of their night, but it was a scary proposition,

"Anybody from the party have a hangover," he said, "That'd be bad."

"The Old Man wouldn't show 'em any mercy," Jeremy said. "How are you, drinking that wine? You won't have a headache, will you?"

"Not usually." Stupid, he said to himself. He'd forgotten about the jump when he drank it all. He hoped he wouldn't.

He figured if he did he wouldn't, as Jeremy said, get any pity for it.

He shut his eyes. He didn't sleep, for a long, long time.

When the warning came it was loud, and scared him awake.

"
Fifteen minutes,"
it said. "
Rise and shine. We're on our way. Pull your pre-jump checks, latch down, tuck down, belt in, all you late party-goers. No sympathy from fourth shift
…
you get the next jump and we get the rec hall
…
move, move, move
…"