Finity's End, page 8
part #7 of Company Wars Series
There was a little silence, then, a troublesome silence. He hadn’t a notion why, just—Nunn looked at him, and for some reason he thought Nunn knew something Nunn wasn’t telling him.
The man wanted him on that shuttle, and they wanted to get him out of here, that was the first consideration. And if Bianca’s family on the station had heard about him and knew his history—God knew what strings they could pull. The trouble he’d thought he was in for being late back from the field was nothing against this trouble. And he didn’t dare let Nunn see how upset he was. If you were emotionally upset they sent you away from the downers. Fast.
A seventeen-year-old with no credentials in the program and a continuing prospect of emotional upset? They’d send him Upabove with no return ticket. And lawyers couldn’t help him. Not even the court could overrule the scientists in charge of downer welfare.
“I’d better go pack.” His voice almost wobbled. He turned a breath into a theatric sigh and cast Nunn the kind of exasperated, weary look he’d learned to give police, lawyers, judges, authority in general. He didn’t break into a sweat and he didn’t blow up. “So where’s the shuttle schedule?” He feared one was onworld. It was midweek. One should be. “What time does the shuttle go?”
“Tomorrow morning. You’d better pack all your stuff, all the same. Oh-seven hundred, weather permitting, the car will pick you up at the dorm.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. He wasn’t going to have days to get ready, then. And, pack all your stuff. Nunn thought he’d be staying Upabove, then.
He’d think of something. He’d surprise them.
He’d make them fly him back.
Make them. He hadn’t had a great deal of luck making anybody do anything. He’d gotten in here only because he’d been a straight, clean student since he’d reformed, and because he’d half-killed himself scoring high on the exams, but that was getting into the program. Now, in a lawsuit, they weren’t going to look at his future. They were going to look at his past, which was nothing but trouble. All his records were going to end up in court, public. They were going to ask how somebody with a juvenile record had gotten into the program in the first place. Everything he’d lived down was going to reappear. All his records. A drug-dosing mother. All his sessions with station cops. His psychs had vouched him clear of that; if only he could show a clean record in his work down here he might have a chance.
Instead he’d lost equipment and been late. He’d picked one hell of a time to slight the rules down here… with the lawsuit coming up again, and himself going under the psychological microscope again to try to prove, no, he couldn’t go to space, he wasn’t fit to go to space. He was too fragile to be deported.
How could he simultaneously prove he was rehabbed enough to be down here and not fit to go with his relatives and get shot at along with his mother’s ship?
And what did he say when they asked him what he’d been up to reporting late? I lost my head? I was infatuated with a girl? And drag Bianca’s name into it, and let her Family in on it?
He hated his relatives with a fury beyond reason. He hated all humanity at the moment.
He went out the doors, one after another, realizing, in a colder panic since the test that brought him here, that they—the they in station administration who lifelong had ordered him around—could now get him up to the station for their own convenience in their lawsuit, but they might not get around to bringing him back all that quickly, even if all things were equal and he hadn’t just gotten Bianca Velasquez into trouble—a shuttle ticket up, they’d pay for. Down, he couldn’t afford. That meant even if things went absolutely flawlessly, his lawyers were going to have to sue to make them send him back, which would take time, a lot of time.
They could ruin his life while they messed around and made up their minds. They were ruining his life, just filling out their damned forms and sending him up to the station again because the law said he had to be in court to say so.
Seven hundred hours. That was when the shuttle broke dock, flew, did whatever it did. He heard the shuttles go over in the early mornings when the staff was having breakfast. They’d roar overhead and people would stop talking for a few beats and then they’d go on with their conversations.
Where’s Fletch? they’d say tomorrow morning.
Bianca would miss him for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.
But what good would it do?
He’d never see Melody and Patch again, and they damned sure wouldn’t understand where he’d gone. The monsoon was coming. They could die in their long walk and he wouldn’t be here, he wouldn’t know.
Rain washed over him and lightning whitened the door of the men’s dorm as he opened it and shoved his way through into the entry. In a shattered blur of white he saw the usual pile of clean-suits for the cleaning crew to take, all the masks hanging, clustered on their pegs. His mask should join them. He should unsuit, go in, pack, as he was told.
But he didn’t want to unsuit. Not yet. Not yet for going inside and facing the questions he’d get from supervisors and the others in the program when he started packing up. Emotions would answer. And that was no good, not for him, not for his future. He wanted an hour, one hour, to walk in the rain—just to get himself together, not to have a fight with Marshall Willett on his record.
And he’d reported to the Base. He’d checked in with Admin. He wasn’t on anyone’s list as missing any longer. You could be outside. There wasn’t a curfew on. If he wanted to get wet, it was his choice, wasn’t it?
His mask was on one cylinder.
Hell, he thought, and opened another mask, one on the pegs, and borrowed one, in the thought he’d annoy someone, but nothing against the necessity of getting himself a chance to cool down before he had to deal with anybody.
Then, to be safe, he borrowed one from another mask—it would risk whoever it was to take both, in case they were stupid enough to ignore how light the mask was and go out thinking they were set…
But then he wasn’t as trapped. And in a fit of anger he raided a third and a fourth mask. A fifth and a sixth. He wouldn’t be trapped. He was going to miss that shuttle. Maybe his lawyers could fight it through the court: they’d take his side, and it was time for them to earn their station-given stipend. Get himself up there in reach and some court order could get him set aboard his relatives’ ship, and then no court order could get him off. That was one thought. The other was that right now he wanted not to have to see Marshall’s smug face and that most of all he wanted not to have to tell Bianca that he was sorry, he wasn’t like other people, lawyers owned him and they could deport him if the courts didn’t rule he was mentally unstable.
In which case they’d throw him out of the program anyway, and the station would give him some makework job because his mental state made him unemployable at anything else he was qualified to do.
He resettled his mask. He’d stuffed his pockets with cylinders until they wouldn’t hold any more. He walked out the door into the rain and the lightning of a world that, until a quarter hour ago, had been happy and promising him everything he could ever want.
He walked down the puddled gravel path toward the river, and no one stopped him.
If they caught him he could still lie and say he’d left the saw and only then remembered it and didn’t want to leave the Base with a black mark on his record. He still had an escape. He always left himself one way to maneuver.
But he was scared this time, more than all the other times he’d been snatched up by the system. He’d usually had enough of whatever home they’d put him into, and it was certain by the time he’d heard it taken apart and analyzed and argued pro and con in court, that he was ready to be put elsewhere. You couldn’t maintain an illusion that you were normal when your foster-family got up in front of a judge and answered questions about their private lives and your private life, and lied right in front of you to make them sound better and you sound worse.
And you’d say, in a high childish voice, That’s a lie! And sometimes the court believed you, but by then you knew it wasn’t better, and wouldn’t ever be better, and things that hadn’t been broken before the lawyers got into it would be broken by the time they got through hashing it up in public. Or if there was anything left of ties to that family he’d break it up in his own stupid actions—he’d go immediately and get in trouble of some kind, just to hit back, maybe, because it hurt. He could see that from where he was now, and after Melody had told him that truth about himself. He’d always come out of the hearings worse than he went in, usually with a family in ruins—and this time—
This time it wasn’t anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he’d lose. This time it was everything he’d ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch themselves.
Just Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of ‘people’ the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it was valid.
Bianca was what he’d say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his motives for making trouble. He’d say, I’ve been working on developing relationships. That was one of their own phrases. They’d like that. You couldn’t use words like transference and displacement, because they knew you were psyching them when you did that, but relationships was a word that you could use. He’d say he was just working things out about relationships—
The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had to take now and couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t bear for the court psychs to get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in the order he controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If they found out about Melody and Patch they’d dice that up, too, until, like his foster-families, there wasn’t any clean feeling left.
And he’d told Bianca. She knew. She’d talk. People always did, when the psychs wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.
“You!” someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry. Somebody had seen him. And he ran. He knew that he’d made a choice the moment he’d started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn’t stop.
“Come back here!” the staffer shouted. Desperate.
So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up with the need for oxygen and started feeding him CO².
Red and gray warred in his vision. He slowed only because he had to. He walked, blind and gasping, because he knew someone was behind him who might not run as fast, but who’d be there, nonetheless.
The river roared beside him, swollen with the falling rain. When the man chasing him got the notion he couldn’t find him in the thicket and went back to report that there was a fool out running in the woods, they’d send out more people with more cylinders to look for him in a systematic way.
Old River’s rising might cut them off, cover his tracks, keep him safe.
Old River he strong, Melody would say, Old River he drink all, all down he catch.
Old River was both friend and enemy, god and devil to the hisa, stronger than human courts or decrees or all the forces the Base could bring to bear. It might kill him, but he didn’t care. He knew he was stupid for running, and right now, he didn’t care. Back there at the Base, in the next few minutes, the word would get around. Where’s Fletch? Where’s Fletch, the buzz would start. And then they’d all start saying it.
And he didn’t want to be there to hear it. Yes, they’d have the people out searching. But slower than they’d be out searching, under other circumstances. Their masks were missing cylinders. They’d have to fill out all that paperwork, do all those reports. It gave him a strange, light-headed satisfaction. Die? They wouldn’t. Be inconvenienced? A lot. He felt a light-headedness not from shortness of air, but from a single moment of victory he knew he’d pay for.
He’d worked all his life to get here, and in the end, it wasn’t lawyers that took him away, it was himself, because he’d blown it—and chosen to blow it—at least he’d chosen it. Stealing those cylinders and running, that wasn’t going to be a minor rules infraction. But it was a choice, damn them all. It was his choice. When things fell apart, he at least had that to say.
Lightning flashed and thunder cracked right above his head, above the tops of the trees. His heart jumped and his knees wobbled with the adrenaline rush it gave him. A planet’s surface where electricity flew around like a loose power line, that was a dangerous thing: water coursed beside the path, not tame Old River any longer, but a rough-surfaced flood, Old River in one of his killing moods.
Old River he mad, the downers would say.
Old River he catch you foot, drag you down. Melody had warned him of the treachery of soft banks among the very first things she’d ever warned him when he came to the planet. Old River was the devil who always lurked to take the unwary, and Great Sun was the god—if downers had a religion. Which human experts argued about in stupid technicalities.
You couldn’t ask the downers that. They said if you asked you’d give them ideas and it might pervert the whole course of downer development, turning it toward something human.
So what were the domes, fools? Puffer-balls? Nature falling from the sky? They didn’t know about Old River. They recorded downer beliefs about Old River, they knew the words, but Old River wouldn’t cover for them, wouldn’t protect them, wouldn’t take care of them, father and devil both.
He’d told Bianca—he’d told Bianca—his thoughts were tumbling wild as the water near his foot—to say that they were late because he’d gone back to see about the saw. Wasn’t that what they’d agreed to say? That was what she’d have said, if they went to her. As they would. He’d thought through so many variations on the lie he’d confused himself.
But that was it, wasn’t it? She was supposed to say that, if they questioned her about being late. So he couldn’t use the saw excuse.
He could say, well, he wasn’t sure where he’d put the saw, and he remembered later putting it somewhere else and he wanted to find it—
The hell, after that interview with Nunn? after being told to pack up?
He could still make a case for himself, he could say he’d just been that shaken and wanted to keep his record clear in case he and Bianca had just missed finding it out here, but, damn, nobody was going to believe that, and he was never going to get reassigned down to the Base, never again. He’d blown all the trust, all the credit he had for common sense…
His foot went in. Cold water pressed the one-way fabric to his leg, and, sweat-osmosed, a trickle got through and into his boot before, one hand holding a branch, the other braced against the moss, he hauled himself out and up to squat on the bank.
Close. Soberingly close. Adrenaline had spiked. It fell, now, leaving tremors, leaving a side aching and lungs burning with effort.
He knew he’d be smarter to go back on his own, and say—just say he was spooked, and he’d been a fool, but he’d come back on his own, hadn’t he?
If he was Marshall Willett, he’d get a second chance, no problem. Mama and papa would buy it for him, pull strings, use up favor-points, and Marshall would get one more chance. But he was Fletcher Neihart, a spacer-brat, son of no one, and he’d used up all his second chances just surviving his mother’s inheritance.
Disaster. The kid had run. Spooked. Elene Quen had the report on her desk, a personal fax from Nunn, down at the Base, and she sat staring at it, reading it for any wisdom she could get from it.
Damon had been upset with what she’d done in getting the court order.
Not as upset as she’d expected about the fact of her trading her influence on Pell for Finity’s support: that was a merchanter way of doing business and it regarded merchanter relations. It was diplomacy, in which diplomats used every card they had to use and did it in secrecy.
But about what she’d traded, about interference with the Children’s Court, he’d been unexpectedly upset—a distress about the boy’s case which she hadn’t predicted, and still, after all these years on station, didn’t understand. Damon was a lawyer, before anything, and believed in processes of law as important for their own sake, a viewpoint she flatly didn’t share in her heart of hearts—only took his advice, generally, when she crossed from port law, which she did understand, into station law, which she detested on principle. Perhaps that was the heart and soul of what was at issue.
The fact that Finity had a right to the boy? In Damon’s eyes, that might be disputable. In her eyes, that was absolute. That the station court had repeatedly held against that right? In her mind, that was an outrage. Not her outrage, because it wasn’t her ship—she ain’t my ship, she ain’t my fight was the rule on dockside—but now a deal had set her firmly on Finity’s side in the matter.
Process for its own sake? Importance of the process? The law might be Damon’s life. But it was an ornament, a baroquerie of station life. In space it just might kill you.
Maybe, now, by the facts in this report, she’d just lost a kid, following the station’s damned processes. A letter from the boy’s independent lawyers, acting in his interest, had gotten to Nunn before her letter, and dammit, Nunn had handed that letter to the kid and then let that kid walk out the door, trusting he was dealing with a stationer mentality who’d tamely, because it was the orderly thing to do, walk over and pack his belongings and surrender to the law.
Hell if. Fletcher Neihart might have lived on a station, but he hadn’t been brought up by Nunn’s rules or Damon’s law, not for the first five years of his life. Not so long as Francesca Neihart had had her kid in hand. He might have been born on a station, stuck on a station, educated on a station, but one stationer family after the other had come back to the Children’s Court saying they couldn’t handle him.
