Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (3 page)

He'd gone home to his foster-family and apologized, lying through his teeth about being very, very sorry. He'd stayed with that foster-family and followed their rules for another three whole years because their residence was near the access he knew to the maintenance tunnels. And the tunnels became his route to various places about the station, and his refuge from anger. He used masks that were for human maintenance workers, always in a locker by the access doors. He did no harm. For the first time he had a Place that was always his. For the first time in his life he had something to lose if he got caught. And for the first time in his life he'd reformed his bad-boy ways, gotten out of the crowd he was in and reformed so well the social workers thought his foster- family—his worst family of the lot—had worked a miracle.

He'd stayed reformed: he'd improved in school, which brought rewards of another kind. And even when, after the four-year rotation station workers were allowed. Melody and Patch had gone back down to their world, he hadn't collapsed and relapsed into his juvenile life of crime.

No. He'd already confessed at least part of his story (not the part about actually going into the tunnels) to his guidance counselor and made a solemn career choice: working with the downers on Downbelow.

Tough standards, tough program, tough academic work. But he'd made the program. He'd gotten his chance.

And, not surprising, because former station workers lived and worked around the human establishments on Downbelow, he'd met Melody and Patch inside an hour after reaching the forest Base last fall. She was grayer. Patch wasn't as big as he'd recalled. He'd grown that much in the nearly ten years since he'd seen them, and he'd not known how old his Downers had been.

It might be her last fertile season, and Patch her last mate. No other male pursued her that he knew of, and she would not, he understood, lead Patch all that long a chase when her spring was on her—but then Patch couldn't walk so far these days, either.

He wanted them back safely. But he knew, now, soberly, that ultimately he'd lose them, too. So days were precious to him. And this day—this was the best day of his life, this game of puffer-balls and pollen.

A hard downer finger poked him hard below the ribs, and he curled in self-defense. Melody and Patch were in a prankish mood and, lying on his back on the bank, he jabbed Patch back, which sent Patch screaming for the nearest tree-limb. In the trees downers could climb like crazy, and a human in heavy boots and clean-suit was not going to catch Patch.

Patch flung leaves at him. "Wicked, wicked," Melody cried, and flung a puffer-ball, which disintegrated on impact. Pollen was everywhere. Patch dropped, shrieking, from the tree.

Then it was pollen wars until the air was thick and gold again.

And until the restricted breathing had Fletcher leaning against a low-hanging limb gasping for air and sweating in the suit.

The light was dimmer now.

"Sun goes walk," he said. One couldn't say to downers that Great Sun set, or went down, or any such thing. The rules said so. Great Sun walked over the hills. These two downers knew Great Sun's unguarded face, having been up in the Upabove themselves, but it didn't change how they reverenced the star. He used the downer expression: "The clock-words say humans go inside."

They looked, Melody and Patch did, at gray, cloud-veiled Sun above a shadowing River. They slid arms about each other as they set out walking up the trail toward the Base, being old mates, and comfortable and affectionate. Where the trail widened, Melody put an arm about Fletcher, too, and they walked with him back down the river path until, past three large paddy-frames, they came within sight of the domes where humans lived, in filtered, oxygen-supplied safety above the flood zone.

"You fine?" Patch asked. "You got bellyache?"

"No," he said, and laughed. Downers didn't brood on things. If you didn't want a dozen questions, you laughed. They wouldn't let him be sad, and wouldn't leave him in distress.

They were absolutely adamant in that.

So he laughed, and poked Patch in the ribs, and Patch poked him and ducked around Melody.

Games.

"Late, late, late," he said. And then the alarm on his watch beeped, as all across the fields quitting time announced itself on the 'link everyone wore.

"Oh, you make music, time go!"

Not that they grasped in the least what time really meant. On days when a lot of the staff was out in the fields, the downers would gather to watch close to quitting time, and exclaim in amazement at the hour every human in the fields simultaneously quit work and headed back to Base, carrying whatever they'd been using, gathering up whatever they'd brought with them. The downers understood there was a signal and that it came with music. It was not the beep itself, the Director said, it was the
why
that puzzled the downers. The old hands like Melody and Patch, who'd seen the station change shift, and who'd worked by the clock, could tell the younger downers that humans set great store by time and doing things together.

("But Great Sun he come again," was Melody's protest against any such notion of pressing schedule. "Always he come")

On Downbelow, in downer minds, there were always new chances, new tomorrows.

And one never had to do anything
that
pressing, that it couldn't wait one more hour or one more day. You wanted to know when to go to your burrow? Look to Great Sun, and go before dark. Or after, if you were in a mood to risk the blindness of the nights.

One was never in too big a hurry. One could take the time to walk, oh,
way
off the direct track home, in this still-strange notion (to a station-born human) of being able to look across a wide open space to see what other people were doing on other routes. Upabove, it would have been corridors and walls.

Here, on this happiest of all days, he found his path intersecting Bianca Velasquez's route on
her
way home. They were in the same biochem seminar. They mixed before discussion-session. She'd always hung around with Marshall Willett and the Dees. Who didn't hang around with him.

She was going to snub him. He could pretend to drop something and let her go by while he rummaged in the gravel of the path. Like a fool. He could save himself the sour end to a good day.

But it ought to be easy to look at Bianca. It ought to be easy to talk to her. Hi, just a simple hi, and put the onus of politeness on her. Hi. Ready for the biochem quiz? What job are you on? He had it straight. Civilized amenities were very clear in his head until she almost looked at him and he almost looked at her and by an accident of converging trails they were walking together.

Not just any girl.
The
girl. Bianca Velasquez, who'd drawn his eye ever since he'd first seen her. Suddenly his brain was vacant. He couldn't look at her when he couldn't think and his body temperature was rising in what he knew was a glow-in-the-dark blush.

God, he was a fool. He must have inhaled puffer-pollen. He didn't know why he'd chosen today to cross her path, just—there she'd been; and he'd done it

"Where
were
you?" she asked.

"Over there." He waved his hand at River. That sounded stupid. And she'd noticed he was gone? God, if the supervisor had seen him…

"So where were you?"

"Oh, beyond the trees. Down by the River."

"Doing what?"

This downer I work with—Melody—she wanted to show me something."
I work with
. As if he was a senior supervisor. That sounded like a fool. She'd rattled him just by existing. He was already in a tangle and he'd only just opened his mouth.

"You're all over stuff."

He brushed his clean-suit "Puffer-balls." Thank God, he had his inspiration for something to say. "It was all over. And the sun and everything. It was real pretty. That's why I went"

"Where?"

Fast thinking. Panic. Decision. "I'll show you."

"Sure."

Oh, God. She said yes. He didn't expect her to say yes.

"When?" she asked

"Can you get away tomorrow?"

"How long?"

"No longer than I was today. About the same time. Right before sunset. When the light's right"

"I don't know. We're not supposed to be alone down there."

She thought he was trouble. And he wasn't. He had maybe one sentence to change her mind.

"Melody and Patch will be there. They used to work near my rez on the station, I've known them for years before I came down. We'll be safe." He blurted that out and then wished he hadn't been quite so forthcoming. She was a nice, decent girl from a solid, rule-following family. He'd just told her something the supervisors might not know from his records, and if they got to asking too close questions of Melody and Patch,
they
in hisa honesty could accidentally say something to get him canned from the program.

"All right," she said. "Sure. All right."

He could hardly believe it. She was from Family with a capital F, and he was from a non-resident household with an f only for fouled-up. She wasn't somebody who'd normally even talk to him on the Station. But she seemed to invite him to hold her hand, brushing close as they walked and when he did slip his hand around hers, her fingers were chaste and cold and listless, making him ask himself was this the way Stationer Family girls were, or had he just made a wrong, unwelcome move?

"Got to watch your hands when you go through decon," he said. "I'm all over pollen."

"Yeah," she said, and gave a little squeeze of the fingers that made him suddenly lightheaded. He wasn't mistaken. She
did
want to talk to him. He hadn't imagined she was looking back at him in biochem.

He didn't expect this. He really didn't. "I thought you were, kind of, hanging with Marshall Willett."

"Oh,
Marshall"
Her disgust dismissed the very name and being of Marshall Willett, one of
the
Willetts, who'd been in close orbit around her for three months, acting as if he owned the Base and the senior staff, besides.

He didn't know what to say. He had a dream, and quite honestly that dream wasn't remotely Bianca Velasquez. It was being
in
this world and
on
this world on days like today.

It was lasting to be a senior in the Program on Downbelow. Getting involved with someone like Bianca wasn't a help: it was a hindrance he'd never sought

But—here she was. Interested—at least in holding hands. And what did he do?

She was smart She was far more serious-minded than Marshall Willett, whose reason for being down here he privately suspected was a family trying to make him do
something
for a career. Bianca was bright, she was pretty, she seemed to
care
about the work, and that—in addition to being able to stay down here amid the wonders of the planet for the rest of his life—that was just too much to ask of luck.

No. Back to level: permanent duty on the world was all he wanted, and he wouldn't risk that by making a wrong move on Bianca and her powerful Family, not even if she was standing stark naked in the pollen-gold and the sun of that bank.

God, he
liked
that image. She'd be so pretty. She had dark hair and olive skin. She'd be all gold with the sun and the pollen coming down in streamers… well, repaint that picture with breather-masks and the clean-suits. They'd plod about in clumsy isolation while Melody and Patch scampered and threw puffer-balls at them. And how much trouble could you get into with a girl, when neither of you could take off the breather-masks and all you could touch was fingertips?

They walked along hand in hand toward the domes, which now were ghostly pale against the rapidly advancing twilight. The white yard lights were on. Other workers were coming home, too, walking much faster than they were.

Their paths split apart again where the path reached what they called the Quadrangle, and the dorm-domes were very strict, male in one direction, female in the other, if you were junior staff…

As if they didn't have good sense until their twentieth birthday and then mature wisdom automatically happened; but in essence, he'd been glad to have the peace the no-females rules brought to the guys' side, and tonight he was glad of it because he didn't have to think of a dozen more clever things to say. He'd had maybe five minutes walking with her, avoiding making a total fool of himself. He had all night and tomorrow to get his thoughts together before he had to talk to her again.

Oh, my
God
, he had a
date
with Bianca Velasquez.

It was impossible. He'd never gone with a girl. And having a Family girl like Bianca actually make a date with him was… impossible. Bianca was so Family her feet didn't touch the floor, so virginal and proper her knees locked when she slept at night. He was disposed on one side of the equation to think it was some kind of setup: he'd met numerous setups in his life, for no other reason than he
was
nobody.

But over the weeks he had seen that she was smarter than that crowd, and maybe bored with them, and, the thought came to him, maybe she was lonely, too.
Marshall
seemed to think the Sun and all the planets sort of naturally swung round
him
because he was a Willett; Bianca was the only human being on the Base—including the supervisors—who didn't have to give a damn that
Marshall
was a Willett, because
she
was a Velasquez. Velasquezes didn't have to give a damn about Willetts, Siddons, Somervilles, or Kielers, which was the big clique down here.