Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (31 page)

"Tape, mostly. Lots of tape. Same thing. They've come round to thinking it's all right. I brought some with me,—All right, I lied. I've got tapes. Some of the environmental stuff. My biochem." Just the pretty ones, those first of all. The ones with pictures of home. His home. He didn't think he could take them right now. It still hurt too much. "You can try one if you want." Turning Jeremy into somebody he could really
talk
to about Downbelow was a bonus he hadn't expected when he'd packed the tapes. But that seemed possible, and his spirits were higher than they had been since he'd boarded.

"Yeah," Jeremy said. "Sure! Wild! Can I borrow one tonight?"

He opened the drawer, took out his tape case, took out a pretty one.

And hesitated. "It could be scary for you. I don't know. It's a planet. You feel the weather. Thunder and all. It's a pretty good effect."

"Oh, hell," Jeremy said. "Can't be that bad." Jeremy took the tape and opened the wall panel at the side of his bunk, looking for pills.

"Take a quarter-dose, no more. This is stationer tape.
Planetary
tape. Lightning and reverse-curve horizons. If you climb the walls tonight it won't be my fault."

Jeremy grinned at him and shook out a pill. He split it. Offered the other half to him.

He opted for the biochem tape for his own reader. It wasn't jump they faced, just a night's sleep, and a night of no dreams but the ones the tape provided—a Downbelow tour for Jeremy and a night of life process chemistry for him.

He didn't care that he was into Chad for a room cleaning. He settled down with the headset and the tape going and with the drug that flattened out your objections to information coursing through his bloodstream.

It was the first time he'd taken tape aboard. It was the first time he'd trusted the people he was with enough to take that drug that made you so helpless, so compliant, so ready to believe what you were told. You didn't learn around strangers. You didn't, in his own experience, do it anywhere but locked in your own private room, safe from outside suggestion, but he felt safe to try, finally, in Jeremy's presence.

It meant a good night's sleep, a night in which he was back in things he knew and terms he understood. You forgot little details if you didn't use what you learned; tape could sharpen up what was getting hazy in your mind, and if he talked to Jake in engineering as Jeremy suggested, about getting into something that offered a little more headwork, he wanted to be sharp enough to impress Jake and not sound a fool if Jake asked him questions. This time through the old familiar tape he set his subconscious to wonder about things that a closed system like a ship's lifesupport might find problematic, and he wondered what tapes the ship's technical library might have that would let him brush up on specifics of the systems. The ship
had
a library. They might let him have tapes to study. If they trusted
him
, which had become an unexpected hurdle.

Talk to JR? Not damned likely.

"There's a problem," Bucklin put it, warning JR what was coming, and after that there was a junior staff meeting, a quiet and serial staff meeting, pursued down corridors, anywhere JR could find them. JR found Vince and Linda, among the first, in A deck main corridor, and made them late reporting to breakfast.

"What's this with a Welcome-in?" he asked "I said, did I not, let him alone?"

There were frowns. There were no effective answers.

He found Connor topside, B deck, and said, "It's off. No hazing. My orders."

He found Sue and Nike in A deck lifesupport, and asked, "Whose damn idea was it in the first place?"

He didn't get a satisfactory answer. What he got was, "He's a problem. He's a problem in everything, isn't he?"

He found
Chad
, and said, "If he cleans your room,
Chad
, he just cleans it. You keep your hands off him or you and I are going to go a round."

Chad
wasn't happy.

He went the whole route. Lyra and
Wayne
, Toby, and Ashley, all glum faces and unhappy attitudes.

And after he thought that he'd made the issue crystal clear, at mid-second shift he had a delegation approach him in the sim room, next to the bullet-car that reeked of the cold of the after holds. He was going in, not out, but he was still mentally hyped for the pilot-sims his career-track mandated—sims that
didn't
have anything to do with Pell's vid-game amusements. It was high-voltage activity that maintained his ability to track on high
V
emergencies, just as Helm had had to do when it met the Union carrier, and his state of mind at the moment was not optimal for intricate interpersonal politics. Bucklin had to know that.

It was Wayne and Connor,
Toby
,
Chad
and Ashley who pulled the ambush, and they'd done it in the cramped privacy of the core-access airlock, a small sealed room with a pressure door between it and the main A-deck corridor. It was only them, they could talk without senior crew in the middle of it, and
Bucklin
, damn him, had unexpectedly chosen to become their spokesman. JR found himself ready to blow, given just a little encouragement.

"The question is," Bucklin said as JR stood with his hand on the call-button that would give him the sim-car and take him away from their bedeviling. "The question is, this is what we've always done. Omitting it says something."

He dropped his hand from the button. Clearly he wasn't going to solve this in two seconds. Clearly, like dealing with Union carriers, sometimes the situation tested not one's speed in handling a matter, but one's self-control.

"Always isn't this time," he said to the group. "The guy is
not
one of us, he
didn't
grow up in our traditions, he
doesn't
know what we're up to, and we don't communicate all that well with that stationer-trained brain of his."

"It seems to me," said Ashley, "that those are
exactly
the reasons for having a Welcome-in."

"No," he said, and drew a calm breath. "The answer is
no
. It's an order."

"We did it for Jeremy,"
Wayne
pointed out.
Wayne
, next to Bucklin and Lyra, was their levelest head. "It was important then. It made lot of difference."

"And I'm telling you we can't do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man would have the proverbial cat. For another, he's a
stationer
."

"That's the problem, isn't it, up and down the list?"
Chad
said. "He's a stationer. He doesn't give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of us—and nobody ever called him on it."

"I called him on it. Immediately."

"Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn't stay for gatherings… say hello to him and you get stared at."

"Did you hear the word
order
,
Chad
? I
order
you to let this drop."

"Yessir, we hear, but—"

"We don't think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be," Toby said, all earnestness, "or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it
was
the Old Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was important to do the traditions. We're going to have babies on this ship. are we not going to welcome
them
in when they come up, or what?"

"I'm saying—" He faced a handful of juniors who'd survived all the War could throw at them. Who'd kept the traditions intact. Who hadn't given up the principles, the history, the
honor
of the ship. And who could tell them that the practices of a Welcome-in, centuries old, were stupid, silly, ridiculous?

The junior captain, the officer in charge of the juniors, wasn't even supposed to be involved in this, and
traditionally
speaking, hadn't been and hadn't sought it. He'd gotten involved at all, point of fact, because he'd given an order first not to do it in this case, and then to wait, and now they'd come back to him to argue for now rather than later, because his order was in their way. It was crew business and not
his
business, by centuries-old habit. There was a tradition in jeopardy here just in their having to confront him.

And more serious to the welfare of the ship, their unity, their way of defining who was who, their way of including someone new in the traditions—all that was threatened. His position, like Bucklin's, was defined by the lofty track toward the captaincy, but theirs was a network of relations with each other that would define all of their lifetime of working together. And he was looking down on it all from officer-height and saying, It's not that important—at a time when the crew as a whole was facing the greatest and most profound change in its mission since it had become, de facto, Mallory's backup.

They were feeling robbed. Robbed of their war, their victory, their outcome. He understood that. None of them liked what they saw as being sent away from a conflict that had cost them heavily. And he saw, staring into that lineup of faces, and taking in the fact that they were all male, that there was also the men-women issue. Lyra and Linda, female, made a small but separate society: their children, when they chose to get them, from whomever they chose to get them, were the hope of the ship, the hope, the future of
Finity's End
. Young men, and it was specifically the young men of the crew who'd come to him… they were the tradition-keepers, the teachers: men had their importance to a merchanter Family not in getting children, but in
being
Family, in bringing up their sisters' and their cousins' children. They were the guardians of tradition; and they were, potentially, men on a ship with a damaged tradition, a shattered ship's company, too
damn
many dead
Finity
brothers with too little memory on the part of the outside as to who'd died and what heroic sacrifices they'd made away trom the witness of stationers and worlds. There were all too many small, funny, or touching stories that had died with this uncle or that cousin, stories of the ship's finest hours that never would find their way into
Finity's
archive, or into the next generation.

The men of
Finity's End
alone knew
what
they were. The ship hadn't been able to leave Fletcher to the ordinary existence of a stationer, but they hadn't brought him in, either. Only the men could do that.

They were right. And after giving a halfway yes, he'd delayed too long. He'd weakened. He'd already gotten himself on the gravity slope by agreeing it had to be done.

"I'm still saying
wait
," he said, trying to recover what authority his wavering had undermined. Unpleasant lesson and one he was determined to remember. "I'm saying—just—whenever you do it, go easy. He's
not
a kid or a senior. He's had all those several years of waking transactions Jeremy hasn't had, and for all I can figure, his mind did something during those years besides learn algebra, all right? He's not a ship kid. Give him some credit for the age he looks—the way I did, dammit, over the damn drink. I think he's due that."

"He looks like you and me," Bucklin was quick to remind him. "When he hits Mariner dockside, nobody but us is going to know how old he is. And we're responsible for him. "

"I say he's gained a little more maturity than Jeremy. You're right he's got a body that mixes with adults, not kids. A body that's mostly done with its growing. He's Jeremy with a body at its fastest and his nerves a lot more under control. It's got to make a difference. He's been dealing with adults as an adult on station. Jeremy hasn't."

"You're not supposed to know about what goes on,"
Chad
said, "officially speaking. You don't know about it."

"I'm saying use your common sense!"

"That's fine,"
Wayne
said, "and we agree, sir, but you still don't know about it. You're not supposed to have been this far involved with it. Let us. That's what this is about. He's not
one
of us yet. He doesn't know us. We don't know him."

"Yeah," he said reluctantly, "I still don't know about it."

They left. He stood there, wired for the sim, literally. And telling himself he shouldn't interfere.

Then that the potential for someone getting hurt was high.

And that they'd probably do it sometime during evening rec. An ambush in one's quarters was the usual. A gang showed up, hauled you off to a storage area and ran you through the same silliness everybody endured once, during which you agreed who was senior and who wasn't

If he interfered and the crew found out he had, he could create a major problem, in their sense of betrayal.

But a
Finity
youngster knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he wasn't being killed. He knew it was a joke.

He put in a call to legal, to Madelaine's office, "Call Fletcher up there," he said to Blue, who took the call. "I want to talk to him, I don't want the whole ship to know."

"Problem?" Blue asked

"Not yet," he said.