“Fletcher,” JR said by way of explanation, “had a run-in with Vince, you’ll have noticed. He opted for his quarters. Presumably he got there. Jake checked.”
“So did you explain the rules?” Connor asked over his own soft drink. By custom, they didn’t follow formal courtesies in rec hall or in mess. Complaints were allowed; and he could have figured it would be Connor and Sue that spoke up for the rule book.
“Fletcher’s got a possible Extenuating.” He saw frowns settle not only on those two faces but all around. “He’s a junior-junior, but Madison said it. The body physiologically isn’t.”
“Body’s not mind,” Nike said, and swept an indignant hand from Wayne and Connor on her right to Chad, Sue, and Ashley on her left. “When do we get wide-open liberty on the docks? When do we sleepover where we like? Or take a wine off the bar in front of the seniors and everybody?”
“You know when.” He didn’t want this debate over the issue, and their challenge to him was the answer. No, maturity wasn’t identical from ship to station on the biological or the mental level, and there wasn’t a neat equivalency. The off-again on-again hormonal flux of time-dilated pubescent bodies that was the number one reason they didn’t get bar privileges was precisely the hormonally driven emotional flux that set their nerves in an uproar when they were crossed. His physical-sixteens and -fifteens were a pain in the ass; he was just emerging from that psychological cocktail himself, and while at physical and mental seventeen-to-eighteen and chronological and educational twenty-six he was just getting his own nerves to a calm, sensible state. Yes, he still flared off, a besetting sin of his. But the infinite wisdom of the Way Things Worked on a short-handed ship had made him senior-most junior, responsible for all the junior crew that was still in that stage.
Keep them busy picking nits, his predecessor in the role had warned him; never let them take on the real rules. Give them nits to worry at and they’ll obey the big ones. Then Paul had added, smugly: You did.
Nits, hell. His predecessor had commanded the juniors through the dustup at Bryant’s, when so many had died—among the juniors as well. That had been no waltz.
They gave him Fletcher on a damn milk run. It seemed, on the surface, a tame, and minor, duty, one that shouldn’t set his lately pubescent hormones skewing wildly through the whole gamut of adrenaline charge. He’d had his last personal snit, oh, exquisitely dissected and laid out for him by Paul, right down to temper as his personal failing.
Not this time.
“Give him some leeway,” he said to the others. “Just give him some leeway. He’s not the same as having grown up here. He’s not the same as anyone we’ve ever personally known.”
“I hear he gave you trouble,” Ashley said.
“Not lately.”
“Not in fifteen minutes,” Sue said. “He shoved that glass on you in front of everybody.”
“Fine. I gave it to Vince. Who set up the situation, if we have to talk about fault.” His temper was getting on edge. Sue had a knack for stirring it up. He hauled it back and put on the brakes. “I saw the drink and I was dealing with it. I didn’t need a snot-nosed junior-junior to tell me that was a wineglass. Vince interfered. It blew. That’s the end of it. We’ve got Fletcher, he’s physiological seventeen, he probably drank on station, and somewhere, somehow in the plain fact he doesn’t know a damn thing useful, we’ve got to fit him in at the bottom of the senior-juniors—”
“No!” from Nike.
“—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a year older than he is; but Fletcher’s seventeen years weren’t time-dilated. So do you want my orders, or are there other suggestions?”
“He’s the baby,” Connor said “I think we ought to do a Welcome-in.”
Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It wasn’t the idea he had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew privileges and he hadn’t been through the process and the understandings and the acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.
“He’s a little old for that,” JR said.
“We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy,” Sue said. “Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took it. So how’s this guy holier than any of us?”
“He’s upset, that’s one difference. He wasn’t born here. He’s not one of us…”
“That’s what a Welcome-in’s for, isn’t it?” Chad asked, with devastating reason.
But a bad idea. “Not yet. This isn’t somebody straight down from the kids’ loft. This isn’t a green kid.”
“Plenty green to me,” Chad said.
“He can’t do anything,” Lyra said. “He’s not trained to do anything. He’s a stationer. He’s a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he’s got to appreciate what he’s joining.”
JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group, one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of him in an emergency.
“So when do we do a Welcome-in?” Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad’s tone it was an issue the way Fletcher’s encounter with him over the wine glass was going to be an issue with Chad.
“Not yet,” JR said. “Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he’ll blow, and that’s no good”
“Everybody blows,” Connor said.
“Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy’s size,” Bucklin muttered, finally, a dose of common sense. “Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you.”
There were sulks. They hadn’t done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They hadn’t known whether Finity would survive her next run, and they’d Welcomed-in Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn’t seemed fair for any kid to die alone in the nursery, the ship’s last kid, in years when they hadn’t produced any other kids.
Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to station-time.
And very, very different.
“I say we go easy with him,” JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin’s clear statement of the facts had gained, “and we give him a little chance to figure us out. Then we’ll talk. ”
There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.
“Square up,” JR said. “Don’t sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a senior venue.”
Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.
“I say with JR,” said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, “we give him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn’t, we talk again at Mariner.”
“Just don’t take him on,” JR said. “If you’ve got a problem with him, refer it to me.”
He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher’s quarters this evening and try to talk it out with him. But he didn’t trust that three-quarters of a wine glass in three gulps had improved Fletcher’s logic. Or his temper. There were constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased slide.
He supposed he’d tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe hadn’t been the ideal pair-up.