Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel (46 page)

God.

What made him settle in and say they'd probably make it?

What made him say to himself he didn't need the stick to read Satin's message, and that they might in fact be what Satin was waiting for? He was in the heavens Satin looked to for her answers.

"
Approaching jump
," the intercom said. "
Trank down, and pleasant dreams, cousins
."

"You awake?" he asked Jeremy. He hadn't heard a sound out of the top bunk for the last hour. "Yeah," Jeremy said. "I got it. How are you?"

"Fine," he said, and pulled the trank packet from where Jeremy had taped it a month ago.

Stuck it to his arm and felt the kick, not even having worried about it.

"Pleasant dreams," he said.

"You too," Jeremy called down.

"
We are in count, plus five minutes
," Com said."Boreale
has gone for jump and we believe
Champlain
has gone out of the continuum ahead of us. We have had no indications of hostile action. Stand by for post-jump crew assignments. We will transit Voyager space in ordinary rotation, third shift to the bridge, fourth to follow. Operations in all non-essential stations are suspended for the duration. Galley service will go on, that's
Wayne
, Toby B., and Ashley. Laundry, scrub, filter change all will be suspended. Translate that, get your rest, cousins. You're going to need it when we dock. That's four minutes, twenty-nine seconds…
"

Fletcher drew a deep breath, listening to the periodic reading of the count.

"I bet we could have gotten
Champlain
," Jeremy said at the one-minute mark.

"Maybe we could," Fletcher retorted, feeling the creak in ribs long protesting the acceleration. "But Mazian's going to be madder if we cut off his supply."

"You really think we can do that?"

"You got to study something besides vid-games, kid! You can't make bread without flour, and you can't get flour if the merchanters don't move. And flour's far scarcer than iron for missile parts in this universe!"

"That's thirty seconds. Twenty-nine…
"

He tilted his head back against the strain. The engines cut out for that moment of inertial drift that generally preceded a jump.

"
Sweet dreams
," he yelled at
Finity's
warlike youngest. "Think about it! Grain and flour, Jeremy! What the downers grow, what they lend us the land to grow! Bread's a necessity for us, far more than ice and iron!"

The ship spread out to infinity and lifted… That was the way it felt…

He sat there all through the dark, aware of hisa around him, in the night. There was no shelter but the images. There was no talk. Hisa waited, sitting much as he sat, in the intermittent rain.

Is this a place where old hisa come to die? he began to wonder.

Did the young hisa mistake what I was looking for? Do hisa just wait here, and starve, and die?

He grew more and more uneasy. His legs kept going to sleep. He'd been told that lightning tended to hit the highest thing around, and he sat at the base of an image that was one of fifteen highest points in the immediate area, exactly what the Base seniors had said was not wise in a rainstorm.

Were all of them waiting for lightning to kill someone? Was
that
the kind of game this was? Divine favor? Judgment from the clouds?

The rain came down in torrents for a while, then slacked off, as if nature had grown weary of its rage.

After a long, long while he could see the shadows of the tall Watchers by some source of light other than the lightnings.

He'd seen the sun go down. He'd been in the thick of the woods. He'd never in his life really seen the sun rise from an unobstructed horizon, not as it did now, just a gradual, soft light that at first he could scarcely detect. He could never point to a moment and say that this was dawn. Light just became, and grew, and defined the world around him.

He shifted sides: the leg nearest the ground had chilled to the point of pain, and he could protect one side at a time. He changed out a cylinder, carefully pocketing the spent wrapper.

He slept, then, perhaps simply from weakness. He truly slept, and waked in an unaccustomed warmth. He opened his eyes and realized Great Sun was brighter than he was accustomed to be, comforting the land.

He sat, absorbing the warmth, leaning on the knees of the statue, on Mana-tari-so. He said to himself then that he should just wait, and never push the button that would call for help at all. It wasn't a scary place. He was with the hisa, and whatever this place was: it waited, it watched. It was all expectation, and in a light-headed way, at this moment, so was he.

But a hisa took his arm, and wanted him to rise and walk, where, he had no idea. A hisa never meant harm, at least. They were utterly without violence. And he went, curious, wobbling on his feet from hunger and light-headedness and cramped legs.

The hisa brought him to the base of the largest Watcher, and a little gray-furred hisa, older than any hisa he'd ever seen.

"You walk in forest," the old hisa said—female, he thought. And he sank down to his knees on the mat of golden grass, before this old, old creature. "You name Fetcher."

"Yes." Something held him from blurting out a request for Melody and Patch. He'd been before judges—and this was one, something told him so, with a sense of hushed reverence that distant thunder could not disturb.

"Satin, I."

Satin! A shiver went down his spine. Satin, the downer who'd led in the War.
Satin
, who'd been to space and come down again.

A very thin, elderly hand reached out to him, brushed dust from the mask faceplate, then touched his bare, muddy fingers.

"You boy come watch Great Sun."

"Yes."

"What he tell you?"

"I don't know." Was he supposed to know something? Was he supposed to be wiser? There was a time downers had made him better than he was. There was a time downers had given him far better sense than he had. But what should he know now? He didn't think there'd be an easy answer for the ship above their heads and for the rules he'd broken.

"Not you place," Satin said, and lifted her chin, looked Up then at the heavens with eyes tireless as the Watchers themselves. "
There
you place, Fetcher."

"I'm Melody's," he said, fearful of disrespecting this most important of hisa; but Satin was wrong. He
didn't
belong up there. That was all the trouble. "I belong to Patch and Melody. I don't want to go back up there. Ever."

A chill went down his back as those eyes sought his, with the mask between them. "You walk with Great Sun. I walk with Sun my time, bad time, lot shoot, lot die."

The War.
War
wasn't a word they were ever supposed to use with hisa.

"I know," he said.

"You walk with Sun," she said, and from the grass beside her took up a spirit stick, a carved stick as long as a human's forearm, a carved stick done up with woven strands and feathers and stones. He'd seen them on gravesites, at boundaries, at important places hisa meant to mark. "Take," she said, and offered it to him.

Humans weren't supposed to touch such things. But she offered it, and he took it carefully in one hand. He saw intricate carvings, and the wear of age and the discoloration at one end that said it might have been set in dark earth once.

"You take," she said.

He didn't know what to say. He couldn't own such a thing. Or maybe—maybe it was a grave marker. They were, sometimes. Maybe it was his dying she meant.

"Why?" he asked. "Do what with it?"

"Go you place. You sleep with Mana-tari-no, make he no rest. You dream Upabove. All you dream belong Upabove. You go there."

He didn't know what to say, or to do. He didn't
want
this answer.

"I want to see Melody and Patch," he said as clearly as he could, as forcefully as he dared object.

"Not you dream," Satin said.

"I
didn't
dream. I didn't have a dream!" It was what hisa came here to do, that was what the researchers said. They dreamed and the wise old ones interpreted those dreams. They believed the old ones dreamed the world into reality. They were primitive beings.

He looked into those old, wise eyes and saw—pity?

He grew angry. Or wanted to. But Melody had told him the truth all those years ago. He wasn't angry. He was sad.

"You find dream up
there
." Satin gestured toward the sky. "Go walk you springtime. Melody and Patch go walk. Time you go, Melody child."

It hurt. It hurt a great deal. But he knew the truth when, after a period of self-delusion, he got the straight word from somebody who could see it.

Go away. Go back. You're hurting Melody.

It
was
true. He'd invited himself into Melody's life and never left. And downers didn't live as long as humans. It was a big piece of Melody's life he'd taken with his need, his problem.

Downer females didn't get pregnant until their last infant grew up.

Did Melody think that he was hers? In her heart of hearts, was that the reason, that she
wanted
to be rid of him and couldn't—and couldn't
have
her baby until he was out of her life?

He offered the stick back, with all it meant, every tie, every connection to the hisa. He did it in hurt, and in what his pride insisted was anger and what Melody had always insisted wasn't.

But Satin refused the stick. "You take," she said. "Belong you."

He couldn't speak for a moment. He didn't know the exact moment in their talking together when the realization had happened, just that at a moment amid the pain he felt assured that he'd been—not cast out: the gift of the stick proved that. But
sent
out by them. Graduated. Dismissed, with his own business unfinished; his messages unspoken; his plans shifted to a totally different course.

And by what he knew now, he had to go.

It was a good thing he wore a mask. The bottom seal was getting slick. And there was a painful lump in his throat.

"Tell Melody and Patch I love them," he said finally. "I hope they're all right this spring."

"Spring for them," Satin said, saying it as plainly to his ears as any human could: it was too much for a hisa to bring up a human. Spring came. It carried hope for Melody. And a hisa wise in the ways of the Upabove explained what Melody and Patch were too kind, too gentle to say: Melody should forget her human child, quit her lifetime of waiting for him and get on with the years she had, she and Patch.
Spring for them
.

"I understand," he said, and got up, weary and weak as he'd grown. He made the proper little bow hisa made to those they owed respect, and held the stick close as he walked away.

He sighted toward the dark line of the woods, a long, long climb of the hill, on mist-slicked grass. He was well clear of the trampled circle when he reached into an inner, safe pocket, and found the locator device, and contrived, tucking the precious stick under his arm, to push the complex button.

He could do two things, then. He could throw it away and let it simply advise rescuers where he'd been.

Or he could start walking home, toward his assigned fate, wondering if he'd already stayed too late, and whether the cylinders would last.

"Fletcher? Fletcher, wake up!"

"You're scaring me, Fletcher! Don't play games…" He blinked, angry at life, at peace with dying. He couldn't remember why, until a junior-junior started shaking him.

"You were
out
," Jeremy said. "God, Fletcher!"

"I'm fine," he said harshly, annoyed at being shaken, and then realized Jeremy had already showered and changed

He'd been on Downbelow.

He'd been lost, dismissed. Sent away.

"We're
here
!—Are you all right?"

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I'm fine."

He'd had Satin's gift in hand. Her gift, her commission.

But he'd lost it, had it stolen, whatever mattered at this point.

Go away. You too old, Fetcher. Time you go.

Had she known? Was there any way her images had whispered the future to her?

She hadn't said… go Upabove, to the station. She'd said… go walk with Great Sun. Go to
space
. And giving him her token, she sent him away from Melody and Patch, and into her sky.

To be robbed, by a crew supposed to be the best of the merchanters. By his relatives.

His lip wasn't cut anymore. He'd almost forgotten
Chad
,
and
the theft, until he searched with his tongue for that physical tag of his last waking moment, and met smoothness and no pain.

"Fletcher?"

"I'm fine," he said harshly, the universal answer. He moved. He sat up. He felt—he'd gone back there. He'd been there. He hadn't wanted to leave.

And when he came upright and tried to sit on the edge of his bunk, his stomach tried to turn itself inside out.

Jeremy opened a drink packet, fast, made him drink it. The taste told him he needed it. Jeremy pressed the second on him. He almost threw up, drew great breaths of unhindered air.

"You had me scared."

"I was walking home," he said. "But I wake up
here
, and I didn't remember the fight, I
forgot, dammit"! He sat on the edge of his bunk in a frantic search inside after pieces, trying desperately to find the anger, not at his fate, not at Quen, or at the ship, but specifically with
Chad
… and it wouldn't come back. It wouldn't turn on.

You not angry… Melody had said, remembered in his dream, and turned his feelings inside out. But this time he wasn't sad, either—he was
scared
. Twice robbed. Ten-odd lightyears had come between him,
Chad
, and the fight, and Mariner, and all of it. It was two months ago… and the brain had cooled off and the anger had gotten away despite his concentrated effort to remember it, and left only panic in its place.

He'd failed a trust Satin had given him. He'd lost the stick. He didn't know where to find Satin's gift. Didn't know where to find a piece of himself that had just… slipped away in his sleep, leaving his intellect aware but his body uninformed. Even his pain at losing Melody and Patch was getting dimmer, as if it had been long ago, done, beyond recall—as it truly was.

He flung himself to his feet, stripped as if he could strip away the dreams. He went to the shower and scrubbed away at the stink of loss and fear. He slammed the shower door open and came out into the cold clear air determined to resurrect his sanity and his sense of place in the universe, on this ship, whatever the rules had become.

And to fight. To
fight
, if he had to.

He dressed. He contemplated doing his duty. He went through the motions of anger, as if that could breathe life into it; but his brain kept saying it was past, left behind, and his fear said if he didn't care, nobody cared. Intellect alone tried to urge the body into rage, but all it achieved was disorientation.

He wanted—he didn't know what, any longer.

"Have we got a duty?" he asked Jeremy. They hadn't waked before without one. He didn't know what the routine was, aside from that.

"We're supposed to stay in our bunks."

"Hell." The one time he
wanted
work to do. There was nothing. He was in a void, boundless on all sides. He sat down on his bunk and raked hands through his wet hair.

Satin. The stick he'd carried through hell and gone…

.His brain began to look for bits of interrupted reality. Finally found the key one.

Voyager. "Where's the ship we were following? Where's
Champlain
?"

"I don't know," Jeremy said in a hushed voice. "Nobody's said yet. Fletcher, you're being weird on me. You're scaring me."

"I want the stick back. I don't care what kind of a joke it is, it's over. I want it back. You think you can communicate that out and around the ship?"

"JR's been looking for it. Everybody's been looking. I don't think they're through—"

"
Then where is it?
" He scared Jeremy with his violence. He'd found the anger, and let it loose, but it didn't have a direction anymore, and it left him shaken. "I don't know whether
JR
might know all along where it is. And say I should just have a sense of humor about it. But I don't. And for all I know the whole damn ship thinks it's funny as hell."

"No," Jeremy said faintly. "Fletcher,—we'll find it. We'll look. They haven't got us on any duty. We'll look until we find it"

"Yeah. Why don't we ask
Chad
along?"

"We'll find it."

"I think we'd have hell and away better shot at finding it if JR put out the word it had better be found."

Jeremy didn't say anything.

And he was being a fool, Fletcher thought. The vividness of the Watcher dream was fading. The feeling of loss ebbed down.

But the feeling of being robbed—not only of Satin's gift, but of his own feelings about it—lingered, eating away at his peace. He'd come out of sleep in a panic that wasn't logical, that was a weakness he'd gotten past. He'd changed residences before and thrown away
everything
when he got to the new one… photographs, keepsakes, last-minute, conscience-salving gifts. All right into the disposal, no looking back, no regrets. And yet—

Not this time.

Maybe it was the spite in this loss.

Maybe it was the innocence and the stern expectation in the giver…

Maybe it was his failure, utterly, to unravel what he'd been given, or why he'd been given it, or even whose it was.

Downers put them on graves. Put them at places of parting. Gave them to those who were leaving, and the ones who carried them from a parting or a death would leave them in odd places—plant them by the riverside, so the scientists said, in utter disregard that Old River would sweep them away next season… plant them in a graveyard… plant them on a hilltop where no other such symbols were in sight and for no apparent distinction of place outside the downer's own whim.

And sometimes such sticks seemed to come back again. Sometimes a downer took one from a gravesite and bestowed it on another hisa and sometimes they returned to the one that had given the gift. One researcher had asked why, and the downer in question had just said, "He go out, he come back," and that was all science had ever learned.

He go out. He come back.

To a graveyard, with more strings and feathers added. Researchers took account of such things, in meticulous studies that noted whether the sticks were set in the earth straight, or slanted, or if the feathers were tied above or below certain marks…

All that would mean things in the minds of the researchers, perhaps. He didn't trust anything they surmised—he, as someone who'd been
given
one—someone who'd carried one as a hisa had to carry such a gift. He'd had no place to store it, no place to carry it…

And had the researchers with their air-conditioned domes and their cabinets and their classifying systems never thought what it was to carry one, with no pockets, ridiculous thought? When you had one in your trust, you just carried it, was all, and it was with you, and at some point in the next day or so after, he supposed downers felt a need to complete the job of carrying it, taking it to a grave, or to Old River, or to stand on some hilltop, nearest the sky, just to get on with their lives, get a meal, take a drink, do something practical.

He never got to find a place to let it go, that was the thing.

Satin gave it to him, laid the burden of it on him, saying… go to space, Fletcher.

He'd brought it here and in that sense he'd carry it forever if he couldn't find it. He'd carry the burden of it all his life, if the people he'd been sent to, his own people, made a joke of it—if the ones who should accept him thought so little of him and all he'd grown up to value.

He raked the hair back, head in his hands, had, he thought to himself, a clearer understanding of Satin's gesture and of his banishment than any behaviorist ever could give him.

Take this memory and go, Fetcher.

Be done with old things. Be practical. Feed yourself. Sleep. Let Melody go.

But that wasn't all of it, even yet. It was
Satin's
gift. It came from the one hisa who'd gone to space, and back again. It wasn't just from
any
hisa. It was from the authority all hisa knew and all humans recognized. It was Satin's gift and Base administration hadn't dared say otherwise.

Then some stinking lowlife stole it, because an unwanted cousin came in as an inconvenience, one who had had some other life than the ship.

He didn't think now that JR would have done it or countenanced it, but protect the party responsible and try to patch it all up? That was JR's job, to keep the bad things quiet and keep the crew working. He figured the Old Man might not even have heard yet—if it was up to JR to report.

But no—he recalled now, piecing the details of pre-jump together:
Madelaine
knew. And if Madelaine knew, he'd bet the Old Man did know.

He didn't think that the senior captain would approve such goings-on. In that light, it was well possible that JR had had to explain the situation.

A weight came on the bunk edge beside him. Jeremy. With an earnest, troubled look, itself an unspoken plea. He'd been seeing Downbelow, in his mind.

"The hell of it all is," he said to Jeremy, "the stick was like a trust. You know what I mean? And if I get it back, I don't know what I'd do with it… something Satin would want; but I don't know.—But it's for me to choose when and where to do that Somebody else doing it… just tucking it away somewhere…" He was talking to a twelve-year-old, who, even with his irreverence, believed in things dim-witted twelve-year-olds believed, in magic, and a responsive universe, things somebody older could still in his heart believe, but never dare say aloud. "You know what that means? That they carry that stick. And that they've taken on responsibility for something they probably wouldn't choose to carry, but I'll tell you something about that stick. It won't turn them loose. That thing's an obligation, that's what it is. And this ship won't ever be quit of it if it doesn't give it back to me." He saw Jeremy's face perfectly serious, absolutely believing. "And—no," he said to Jeremy, "I'm not going to look for it. It's going to come back to me or this ship will change and change into what somebody aboard wants it to be. I'm not going to play games with
Chad
about it. He'd better hope he finds it and gets it to me before the captain steps in to settle it, and I kind of think that's the instruction the captain's given JR. You understand me? If the ship doesn't find it—it's going to be the ship's burden, and the ship's responsibility, and as long as I live I won't trust
Chad
Neihart. Maybe no one else will, either."

"What if it's not his fault?" Distress rang in Jeremy's voice. "What if he, like, meant to give it back and something went wrong?"

"I said it. It's something you carry until you can lay it down. Downer superstition, maybe. But it's true. I can tell you, either I'm going to forgive
Chad
and his hangers-on, or I'm not. And I'm going to trust this ship or I'm not. That's the kind of choice it is. You can pass that word where you think it needs to be passed. Things people do don't altogether and forever get patched up, Jeremy, just because they're sorry later. If
Chad
destroyed it… that says something it'll take years for me to forget."

There was a long and brittle silence.

"He's not a bad guy," Jeremy said faintly.

"Can I trust him after this?" he asked. Yes, Jeremy believed in miracles, and balances. And maybe it was callous to trade on it, but, dammit, he believed such things himself, and maybe belief could motivate one other human being in the crew. "Can I ever trust him? That's the question, isn't it?"

Jeremy didn't have an answer for him, even with a long, long wait. Just: "I'll put the word around. This
shouldn't
have happened. It shouldn't, Fletcher. We're not like that."