He was moderately, grudgingly curious. “Mind me asking?—How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” was Jeremy’s answer.
Good God, was his thought. Then he thought maybe the kid knew he was seventeen and was ragging him.
“Same age as you,” Jeremy’s voice said from the bunk above his head. “We’d have been agemates. Except your mama left.”
“You’re kidding. Right?”
“Matter of fact, no. I’m actually couple of months older than you. I was already born when your mama left to have you on Pell, and there was question about leaving me, but they didn’t. So you’re kind of like my brother.—We’d have been close together, anyway.”
He didn’t know what he felt, except upset. He’d been through the this is your brother routine four times with foster-families. He’d tried to pound one kid through the floor. But this was not only an honest-to-God relative, this was the kid he really would have grown up with, and been with, and done kid things with, if his mother hadn’t timed out on him and left him in one hell of a mess.
This was the path he really, truly hadn’t taken.
“I wish you’d been born aboard,” Jeremy said, “There weren’t any kids after us two, I guess you know. They couldn’t have ’em during the War. They will, now. But our years were already pretty thin. And then we lost a lot of people.”
Fletcher found a queasiness in his stomach that was partly anger, partly—he didn’t know. He could see what he might have grown into by now, a scrawny twelve-year-old body that was so strange he couldn’t imagine what Jeremy’s mind was like, seventeen and stuck at physical twelve.
It wasn’t natural.
It wasn’t natural, either, their being separated. He didn’t know. He didn’t know, from where he was lying, what kind of a life he’d missed. He only knew the life he was leaving, with all it did mean.
Besides, all the sibs people had tried to present him had ended up hating him, the way he hated them… except only Tony Wilson, who was in his thirties and his last foster sib. Tony’d been distant. Pleasant. The Wilsons had recognized he was a semi-adult, and just signed his paperwork, had him home from school dorms for special holidays, provided a legal fiction of a family for him to fill in school blanks with. Tony hadn’t ever remotely thought he was a rival. He supposed he’d liked Tony best of all the brothers he had, just for leaving him the hell alone most of the time and being pleasant on holidays.
Their not showing up when he was shipped out… that hurt. That fairly well hurt.
So who the hell was Jeremy Neihart and why should he care one more time?
“So,” Jeremy said in another long silence, “did you like it on the station?”
The question went right to the sore spot.“Yeah,” he said “Yeah, it was fine.”
“You have a lot of friends there?”
“Sure,” he said Everything was pleasant. Everything was fine. Never answer How are you? with anything but, and you never got further questions.
“So—what’d you do for entertainment?”
There hadn’t been any entertainment, hadn’t been any letup. Just study. Just—all that, to get where he’d been, where they ripped him out of all he’d accomplished
There wasn’t an, Oh, fine… for that one.
“I’ve got a lot of tapes,” Jeremy said when he didn’t answer. “We kind of trade ’em around. I got some from Sol. We can pick up some more at Mariner, trade off the skuz ones. I spent most of my money on tapes.”
“I don’t have any.” he answered sullenly. Which wasn’t the truth, but as far as what a twelve-year-old would appreciate, it was the truth.
“You can borrow mine,” Jeremy said.
“Thanks,”he said. He was too rattled and battered about any longer to provoke a deliberate fight with the kid. The kid.
His might-have-been brother. Cousin. Whatever they might have been to each other if not for the War and his addict mother.
On a practical level, Jeremy’s offer of tapes was something he knew he’d be glad of before they got to Mariner. He needed something to occupy his mind if they had to lay about for hours like this, or he’d be stark, staring crazy before they cleared the solar system. Tapes to listen to also meant he didn’t have to listen to Jeremy, or talk about might-have-beens, or deal with any of them. Plug in, tune out. He didn’t care what Jeremy’s taste in music turned out to be, it had to be better than dealing with where he was.
He was going to see the universe. Flat on his back and feeling increasingly scared, increasingly sick at his stomach.
He did know some things about ships. You couldn’t breathe the air on Pell Station without taking in something about ships and routes and cargo. Besides knowing vaguely how they’d travel out about five days and jump and travel and jump, he knew they’d load and unload cargo and the captains would play the market while the crew drank and screwed their way around the docks. Just one long party, which was why he had absolutely no idea who his father was. His mother had just screwed around on dockside because, sure, no spacer gave a damn who his father was. Mama was everything.
As he guessed Jeremy had a mother aboard, but he didn’t know why Jeremy wasn’t living with her, or for that matter, what he was supposed to be to his roommate’s mother. Everybody aboard was related. It was all the J’s. Jeremy, James, Jamie and Johnny, Jane, Janette, Judy, Jill and Janice. Who the hell cared?
What was it like for a mother to have a seventeen-year-old kid Jeremy’s size?
What was it to have your mind growing older and your body staying younger than it was?
Or was Jeremy more than twelve mentally? The voice didn’t sound like it, Jeremy wouldn’t have lived those seventeen years, he guessed, but he’d have watched seventeen years of events flow past him, in the news and on the ship. He’d—
Force just—quit. The bunks swung, and he grabbed the edges of the mattress with the feeling he was falling.
“Takehold has ended,” came from the speakers. “Posted crew, second shift, you lucky people. All systems optimal.”
Jeremy was unbelting and sitting up. He figured he dared. His head was still feeling adrift in space.
“You play cards?” Jeremy asked.
“I can.” He didn’t want to. But he didn’t want to do anything else, either. “Can we go in the halls?”
“Corridors. Stations have halls. We have corridors. Just so you know. Vince’ll snigger, else. And we’re off-shift right now. Best stay in quarters if you don’t want to work. You wander around, some senior’ll put you to work. Poker?”
“How long do we have to stay lying around like this?”
“Oh,” Jeremy said, “about another couple of hours. Till we clear the active lanes.”
“I thought that was what we were doing.”
“Just gathering V. We’ll run awhile at this V. Then step up again. Four or five times before we get up to speed. We could do it all at once. But that’s real uncomfortable.”
“Deal,” he said glumly, and Jeremy bounced up, got into his bunk storage and rummaged out a plastic real deck.
Twelve-year-old body, he thought, watching the unconscious energy with which Jeremy moved. There were advantages to being twelve that even at seventeen you’d lost.
“Favor points or money?” Jeremy asked.
He knew about favor points. If you lost you ended up doing somebody’s work for him. He had no money. He didn’t know where he’d get any. He’d rather play for no points at all, because Jeremy handled those cards with dexterity a dockside dealer could envy.