Disorientation still struck occasionally, but those occasions were diminishmg. Yes, he was in space, which he’d dreaded, but he wasn’t in space: it was just a comfortable, spice smelling kitchen full of busy people.
When, late in the shift, he took a break, he sat down to a cup of real coffee at a mess hall table. He understood it was real coffee, for the first time in his life, and he drank it, rolling the taste around on his tongue and telling himself… well… it was richer than synth coffee. Different. Another thing he daren’t get too used to.
A ship, he was discovering, skimmed some real fancy items for its own use, and didn’t count the cost quite the way station shops would. On this ship, while they had it, Jeff said, they had it and they should enjoy it.
There were points to this ship business that, really, truly, weren’t half bad. A year was a long time to leave home but not an insurmountable time. There were worse things to have happened. A year to catch his balance, pass his eighteenth year, gain his majority…
Jeremy came up and leaned on the table. “Madelaine wants you.”
“Who’s that?” he asked across the coffee cup.
“Legal.”
His stomach dropped, no matter that there wasn’t anything Legal Affairs could possibly do to him now. He swallowed a hot mouthful of coffee and burned his throat so he winced.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Probably papers to clear up. She’s up on B deck. Want me to walk you there?”
He didn’t. It was adult crew and he didn’t want any witnesses to his troubles, particularly among the juniors. Particularly his roommate. All the old alarms were going off in his gut. “What’s the number up there?”
“I think it’s B8. Should be. If it isn’t, it’s not further than B10.”
“I can find it,” he said. He drank the rest of the coffee, but with a burned mouth it didn’t taste as good, and the pain of his throat lingered almost to the point of tears, spoiling what had been a good experience. He got up and went down the corridor to the lift he knew went to B deck.
It was a fast lift. Just straight up, no sideways about it, and up to a level where the Rules said he shouldn’t be except as ordered. It was a carpeted blue corridor: downstairs was tiled. It was ivory and blue and mauve wall panels.
Really the executive level, he said to himself. This part of the ship looked as rich as Finity was. So this was what you lived like when you got to be senior executive crew… and lawyers were certainly part of the essentials. Finity didn’t even need to hire theirs. It was one more damn cousin, and since lawyers had been part and parcel of his life up till now, he figured it was time to get to know this one.
This one—who’d stalked him for seventeen years and who he suddenly figured was to blame, seeing how long spacers lived, for every misery in his life.
Madelaine? Such an innocent name. Now he knew who he hated.
It was B9. He found Legal Affairs on a plaque outside, and walked into an office occupied by a young man in casuals one might see in a station office, not the workaday jump suit they wore down where the less profitable work of the ship got done.
“You’re not Madelaine,” he observed sourly.
“Fletcher.” The young man stood up, offered a hand, and he took it. “Glad to meet you. I’m Blue. That’s Henry B. But Blue serves, don’t ask why. Madelaine’s expecting you. ”
“Thanks,” he said, and the young man named Blue showed him into the executive office, facing a desk the like of which he’d never seen. Solid wood. Fancy electronics. A gray dragon of a woman with short-cropped hair and ice-blue eyes.
“Hello,” she said, and stood up, came around the desk, and offered a cool, limp hand, a kind of grip he detested.
She looked maybe sixty, old enough that he knew beyond a doubt she was one of the lawyers behind his problems and that apparent sixty probably represented a hundred. She was cheerful. He wasn’t.
“So what’s this about?” he asked. “Somebody forget to sign something?” He feigned delight. “You’ve changed your minds and you’re sending me home?”
Unflapped, she picked up a blue passport from off her desk and handed it to him. “This is yours. Keep it and don’t mislay it. I can reissue but I get surly about it.”
“Thanks.” He tucked it in his pocket and was ready to leave.
“Sit down.—So how are you getting along?”
She knew he wasn’t happy here and didn’t give a damn.
Good, he thought, and sat. That judgment helped pull his temper back to level and gave him command of his nerves. It was another lawyer. The long-term enemy, the enemy he’d never met, but always knew directed his life. She was cool as ice.
He could be uncommunicative, too. His lawyers had taught him: don’t fidget, look at the judge, don’t get angry. And he wasn’t. Not by half. “Am I having a good time?” he countered her as she sat down and faced him across her desk, her computer full of business that had to be more important to her than his welfare. “No. Will I have a good time? No. I’m not happy about this and I never will be. But here we are until we’re back again.”
“I know it’s a hard adjustment.”
“And you had to interfere in my life.” He hadn’t found anybody aboard he could specifically blame. He’d have expected something official from the senior captain, at least a face-to-face meeting, and hadn’t gotten it—as if they’d snatched him up, and now that they’d demonstrated they could, they had no further interest in him. He resented that on some lower level of his mind. He wouldn’t have unloaded the baggage in her office, he hadn’t intended to, but, damn it, she asked. She wanted him to sit down and unburden his soul to her, in lieu of the real authority on this ship—when she was the person, the one person directly responsible for ten and more years of lawsuits and grief in his life, not to mention present circumstances. He drew a deep breath and fired all he had. “My mother was a no-good drughead who ducked out on me, you wouldn’t leave me in peace, and here I am, just happy as you can imagine about it.”
“Your mother had no choice in being where she was. She did have a choice in refusing to give up your Finity citizenship.”
“She died! And excuse me, but what in hell did you think you were doing, ripping up every situation I ever worked out for myself?”
There was a fairly long silence. The face that stared at him was less friendly than the hisa watchers and just as still.
“I’m sorry you wanted the station, but you weren’t born to the station, Fletcher, and that’s a fact that neither of us controlled. This universe doesn’t let you just float free, you know. There’s a question of citizenship, your birthright to be in a particular place, and birth doesn’t make you a Pell citizen. You were always ours, financially, legally, nationally. Francesca wouldn’t let you be theirs. She wanted you here. They just wouldn’t let you leave.”
“The damn courts, you mean.” In the low opinion he held of Pell courts they could possibly find one small point of agreement. And she hadn’t flared back at him, had, lawyeresque, held her equilibrium. He even began to think she might not be so bad, the way nobody on the whole ship had really turned out to be an enemy. In giving him Jeremy, they’d left him nothing to fight. Nothing to object to. In sending him here, to this woman, they gave him, again, nobody he could fight with the anger he had built up. It was robbery, of a kind he only now identified, that he really didn’t want to hurt this woman. “The damned courts,” she said quietly, “yes, exactly so.”