The lawyer. Wanting to know about laws. And asking into what wasn’t her business, except that the question also involved his attitude toward rules-following, his behavior in a ship full of critical procedures. He was tempted to lie, to make things far worse than they were.
But he didn’t want to find himself restricted from the freedom he did have, either.
“Did you have a reason for running off from the Base?” she pursued, and he tried to organize his thoughts to give her the answer she’d both believe and take for reassurance.
“Being pushed further than you can push me now,” he said. “Further than anyone can ever push me again. That’s all. You can only lose so much.”
“Were you thinking of suicide?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Did you care about the downers? The stationmaster said you’d been consorting rather closely with two of them.”
Bianca talked. The information hit him like a hammer blow.
And then, on a next and shaky breath, Of course Bianca talked. I was gone. She had a right to talk. It was nothing but expected—only the ruin of something else important. Another support of his life kicked out from under him.
She was scared. She was involved and I involved her. A Family girl with a Family on her back. Sure, she had to get straight with them. I had to be the one at fault. I was gone, she had to be practical about it.
He’d hoped for a little more fortitude from her. Just a little heroism. But she’d saved her own hide. Everyone did, when the chips came down.
“Despite your heritage,—you trained to work with the downers,” Madelaine asked sharply. “Why?”
“Because—” He almost said, Because I love them, but he wasn’t going to let that information loose. Because I never thought you’d get me away from Pell. Never give a psych or a lawyer a handle to hold to. Not a real one. “Because they’re different. Because I don’t like human beings much. How’s that?”
“Sad if true.”
“Downers don’t kidnap people.”
“And, as I know from brief experience, they don’t understand human relationships. It’s very much the contrary of what you’re supposed to be doing with them. But you were intent on your own reasons.”
“Reasons that they invited me to be with them. For years. I know the downers, I know the two I dealt with.”
“You know them better than the scientists and the researchers. You know them well enough to defy the rules and endanger a half a hundred rescuers”
“It was their choice to be out there chasing me.”
“Was it?” A shake of the lawyer’s head. “Fletcher, I think you’re better than that. Difficult. So was my granddaughter. It’s why you were born. She was in love, in a year when any child was a hostage to fate. She knew that. She ran a risk.”
In love.
It’s why you were born.
He had a merchanter for a mother and that meant he had no father. It was one of the facts of his life: he had no father. How dare she throw that out for bait? His mother knew who the father was and it wasn’t some chance encounter in a sleep-over?
He wouldn’t take that bait. Not if his life depended on it.
He stood up. “I’ve got work to do.”
Madelaine looked at him as if he were something on her agenda. No longer cool, no longer remote. “God, you’re like Francesca.”
That, too, was a gut blow. He didn’t know how hard until he’d walked out, through the office, past the cousin named Blue, and out into the fancy carpeted corridor.
Like Francesca. She looked at him with age-crinkled eyes and dismissed his best shot with God, you’re like Francesca…
He wasn’t like his mother. He wasn’t anybody’s copy. His mother hadn’t been like him.
She was in love…
He’d not known his mother when she was seventeen. She might have sat in that same chair. She might have used this same lift. Walked these same corridors…
Been in love…
He had a father somewhere. His great-grandmother knew who it was. She had all the names, and held them as bait to draw him out, to get pieces of him in her reach, more deft than any psych.
He was used to the station as his mother’s venue. That was where she’d lived, and Finity’s End was where she’d come from.
But this corridor, these places, all this was a place she’d walked in, too, like some hidden room of her life where she’d been as young as he was now and where people remembered her in the same awkward, mistake-making years he was trying his best to grow out of.
It shook him.
It totally revised his concept of where he was and what he’d come from and who that seventeen-year-old twelve-year-old he roomed with really might have been to him. Here he was wandering around blind, in her young years, meeting people who’d wanted him because they’d lost her and to whom the whole reality of the station was a locked room they couldn’t get into, either. And Jeremy was the bridge. Jeremy was the might-have-been, the one he’d always have been with. His mother would be dead, maybe, with Jeremy’s mother, with half the people on the ship… and things would be a lot the same, but different, vastly different, too.
He rode the lift back to A deck and walked back where he’d come from. His nerves weren’t up to a challenge of things-as-they-were or a confrontation with Madelaine Neihart. He just wanted to go back to the mess hall and to Jeremy, that was all—even to go back to Vince and Linda. He couldn’t feel the ship moving, but they were shooting unthinkably fast toward the nadir of the Tripoint mass-point, where another event he didn’t understand would happen and they’d more than accelerate: they’d plunge a second time out of the known universe into a state his mother had chosen to live in, that she’d ultimately chosen to die in.
He’d failed that unit in his physics class—how the universe didn’t like the state they’d be in, and spat them out reliably somewhere else. He agreed with the universe: he didn’t like the state they’d be in and he didn’t want to imagine it. He didn’t know whether he could understand it, but when he’d had to study it, he’d pleaded with his physics instructor he didn’t want to take that tape again, please God, he didn’t want to… and the psychs had gotten into it. Finally the school had exempted him and let him study it and just barely pass it realtime, with pencil and paper, because the psychs said there were special psychological reasons that the instructor and the school weren’t equipped to deal with. They’d offered to help him deal with it. And he’d said no. And somehow it hadn’t come up again.
No more exemption, now. No more psychs to step in and say let Fletcher alone: he can’t deal with it. The court had forgotten all about that fear when it gave him up and stripped him of his Pell ID. His bitter guess was that it had stopped mattering to most people the second somebody mentioned fourteen million credits. Quen had reached out and tapped some judge on the shoulder and said, Let them have him this time.
And ironically, completely unexpectedly, the only person in the whole affair who cared—personally, cared, as it turned out—might have been the lawyer, Madelaine. The crew at large, meanwhile, didn’t know what he’d grown into, but thought the courts were holding from them some poor stupid kid it was their right to have, a kid whose spacer heritage would leap to the fore and instantly make him love them.