Finitys end, p.2
Finity's End, page 2
part #7 of Company Wars Series
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.
So what did she do? She held hands with him?
He didn’t have a family at all. He was non-resident scum.
He also stood six feet, had learned self-defense on Pell’s rough-and-tumble White Dock, the bottom end of where he’d lived, at worst, with his fourth family, and he could beat shit out of Marshall Willett. So maybe that was her idea, her way of thumbing her nose at the lot of them. She’d been sort of a loner, too, in the center of a cloud of admirers.
And Marshall—Marshall would want one thing from her first off, which Fletcher had no intention of asking of her, not because he didn’t think of it, but because, bottom line, his motive, unlike Marshall’s, wasn’t to get himself kicked out of the program.
She acted shy. He squeezed her hand when they parted company. Senior staff members habitually sat watch at the doors. They counted everybody in for the night, for safety’s sake, to be sure nobody was left out with a broken leg or a dead breather-cylinder or something.
Nobody got a minute alone, if you were under twenty.
You were safe holding hands. If you couldn’t manage the no sex rule till your majority, the Director had told them plainly, there was no shortage of applicants, ten for every slot they filled
Tomorrow, Bianca Velasquez had promised him, and Fletcher Neihart walked on down the path to the men’s dorms, past the monitors and into decontamination with a preoccupation so thorough the monitor had to ask him twice to sign in.
Chapter 2
The restaurant was old enough to have gone from glamour to a look of hard use and back to glamour again. Now it was beyond trends. Now it was a Pell Station tradition: Pell’s finest restaurant, with its lighted floor, its display of the very real stars beyond the tables, features both of which were its hallmark, copied elsewhere but never the same.
The new touch was the holo display that set those stars loose among the tables, a piece of engineering Elene Quen had seen with the overhead lights on. The sight destroyed the illusion, but the magic was such when the dark came back that the senses were always dazzled, no matter what the reasoning mind knew of the technology behind the illusion.
The waiters settled their distinguished party at the best table, reserved from the hour Finity’s End had returned her call. It was herself, her husband Damon Konstantin, Captain James Robert Neihart and his brother captains, Madison, Francie, and Alan. At this hour, the meal was breakfast for Francie and Alan, supper for James Robert and Madison; and with all four of Finity’s captains away from the ship, business that had the ill grace to hit Finity’s deck this close after docking would fall into the hands of Finity’s more junior staff.
Cocktails arrived, glasses clinked, faces marked by years of war broke into honest smiles. Rejuv and time-dilation stretched out a life, but years on rejuv left marks, too, on all of them. Captain James Robert Neihart in particular, a hundred forty-nine years old as stations counted time, was fortyish in build, but he was gray-haired and papery-skinned close-up, his face crossed with all the hairline traces of the anger and laughter of a long, long life.
Seeing how the years had worn even on spacers, who played fast and loose with time, and counted the years on ships’ clocks separate from station reckonings, Elene looked anxiously at her husband Damon, nearly two decades after the War, and for a fleeting, fearful second she accounted of the fact that they were none of them immortal. The years passed faster for her and for Damon than they did for any spacer.
And she’d been a spacer herself until she’d elected what should have been a one-year shore tour with a man she’d loved, a spacer’s vacation on this shore of a sea of stars, a deliberate dynastic tie with the Konstantins of Pell.
Fateful decision, that. Her ship, Estelle, hadn’t survived its next run: Estelle had become a casualty of the War years and the Quen name, once distinguished among merchanters, had all but died in that disaster. No ship, no Name was left of all she’d been. And so, so much had conspired to bind her here ashore. She’d fought her War in the corridors of Pell.
And had she aged to their eyes? Had Damon, in the seven years since Finity’s End had last seen this port?
Were the captains of Finity’s End all thinking, looking at her, How sad, this last of the Quens growing old on station-time?
Last of the Quens would be the spacer view. But thanks to Damon she wasn’t the last of her Name. She’d borne two children, hers, and Damon’s, for two equally old, equally threatened lines. The Neiharts of Finity’s End might not yet have acknowledged the fact, but she’d more than given the heir of the Konstantins a son, Angelo Konstantin, stationer, born and bred in his father’s heritage: more relevant to any spacer’s hopes, she had a daughter, Alicia Quen. The Quens had no ship, but they had a succession.
Cocktails, and small talk. Catching up on the business of seven years with a thin, colorless: how have you been, how’s trade, what’s ever became of…?
They ordered supper, extravagantly. They were spacers in from the deep, cold Beyond, on the start of a two-week dock-side liberty… the first truly wide-open liberty since before the War. And that in itself was news that set the dock abuzz.
“What’s changed?” Damon echoed a question from Madison. “A lot of new facilities, a lot of improvements all up and down the dock. There’s a number of new sleepovers, a couple of quality accommodations—”
“The garden,” Elene said.
“The garden,” Damon said. “You’ll want to see that.”
“Garden?” Francie asked. To a spacer, a garden produced greens: you grew them aboard your own ship if you had leisure and room. A garden was a lot of lights and timed water.
Pell’s didn’t grow just lettuce and radishes.
“Take it from me,” Elene said. “You’ll be amazed.” But she had a curious feeling when she said it—listen to me, she thought. Here she was, praising Pell’s advantages to spacers, and she tested the queasy feeling she had as she caught the words coming out of her mouth.
The mirror every morning showed her a stranger enmeshed in station business, and lately her eyes looked back at her, bewildered and pained at the change in her own face. Could she, going back all those years, still choose this exile and want this rapid passage of years?
Supper arrived with the help of several waiters. “Very good,” James Robert said after his initial sampling, and the company agreed it was indeed a seven-year meal.
