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.