“And I’m telling you we can’t do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man would have the proverbial cat. For another, he’s a stationer.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it, up and down the list?” Chad said. “He’s a stationer. He doesn’t give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of us—and nobody ever called him on it.”
“I called him on it. Immediately.”
“Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn’t stay for gatherings… say hello to him and you get stared at.”
“Did you hear the word order, Chad? I order you to let this drop.”
“Yessir, we hear, but—”
“We don’t think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be,” Toby said, all earnestness, “or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it was the Old Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was important to do the traditions. We’re going to have babies on this ship. are we not going to welcome them in when they come up, or what?”
“I’m saying—” He faced a handful of juniors who’d survived all the War could throw at them. Who’d kept the traditions intact. Who hadn’t given up the principles, the history, the honor of the ship. And who could tell them that the practices of a Welcome-in, centuries old, were stupid, silly, ridiculous?
The junior captain, the officer in charge of the juniors, wasn’t even supposed to be involved in this, and traditionally speaking, hadn’t been and hadn’t sought it. He’d gotten involved at all, point of fact, because he’d given an order first not to do it in this case, and then to wait, and now they’d come back to him to argue for now rather than later, because his order was in their way. It was crew business and not his business, by centuries-old habit. There was a tradition in jeopardy here just in their having to confront him.
And more serious to the welfare of the ship, their unity, their way of defining who was who, their way of including someone new in the traditions—all that was threatened. His position, like Bucklin’s, was defined by the lofty track toward the captaincy, but theirs was a network of relations with each other that would define all of their lifetime of working together. And he was looking down on it all from officer-height and saying, It’s not that important—at a time when the crew as a whole was facing the greatest and most profound change in its mission since it had become, de facto, Mallory’s backup.
They were feeling robbed. Robbed of their war, their victory, their outcome. He understood that. None of them liked what they saw as being sent away from a conflict that had cost them heavily. And he saw, staring into that lineup of faces, and taking in the fact that they were all male, that there was also the men-women issue. Lyra and Linda, female, made a small but separate society: their children, when they chose to get them, from whomever they chose to get them, were the hope of the ship, the hope, the future of Finity’s End. Young men, and it was specifically the young men of the crew who’d come to him… they were the tradition-keepers, the teachers: men had their importance to a merchanter Family not in getting children, but in being Family, in bringing up their sisters’ and their cousins’ children. They were the guardians of tradition; and they were, potentially, men on a ship with a damaged tradition, a shattered ship’s company, too damn many dead Finity brothers with too little memory on the part of the outside as to who’d died and what heroic sacrifices they’d made away trom the witness of stationers and worlds. There were all too many small, funny, or touching stories that had died with this uncle or that cousin, stories of the ship’s finest hours that never would find their way into Finity’s archive, or into the next generation.
The men of Finity’s End alone knew what they were. The ship hadn’t been able to leave Fletcher to the ordinary existence of a stationer, but they hadn’t brought him in, either. Only the men could do that.
They were right. And after giving a halfway yes, he’d delayed too long. He’d weakened. He’d already gotten himself on the gravity slope by agreeing it had to be done.
“I’m still saying wait,” he said, trying to recover what authority his wavering had undermined. Unpleasant lesson and one he was determined to remember. “I’m saying—just—whenever you do it, go easy. He’s not a kid or a senior. He’s had all those several years of waking transactions Jeremy hasn’t had, and for all I can figure, his mind did something during those years besides learn algebra, all right? He’s not a ship kid. Give him some credit for the age he looks—the way I did, dammit, over the damn drink. I think he’s due that.”
“He looks like you and me,” Bucklin was quick to remind him. “When he hits Mariner dockside, nobody but us is going to know how old he is. And we’re responsible for him. ”
“I say he’s gained a little more maturity than Jeremy. You’re right he’s got a body that mixes with adults, not kids. A body that’s mostly done with its growing. He’s Jeremy with a body at its fastest and his nerves a lot more under control. It’s got to make a difference. He’s been dealing with adults as an adult on station. Jeremy hasn’t.”
“You’re not supposed to know about what goes on,” Chad said, “officially speaking. You don’t know about it.”
“I’m saying use your common sense!”
“That’s fine,” Wayne said, “and we agree, sir, but you still don’t know about it. You’re not supposed to have been this far involved with it. Let us. That’s what this is about. He’s not one of us yet. He doesn’t know us. We don’t know him.”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly, “I still don’t know about it.”
They left. He stood there, wired for the sim, literally. And telling himself he shouldn’t interfere.
Then that the potential for someone getting hurt was high.
And that they’d probably do it sometime during evening rec. An ambush in one’s quarters was the usual. A gang showed up, hauled you off to a storage area and ran you through the same silliness everybody endured once, during which you agreed who was senior and who wasn’t.
If he interfered and the crew found out he had, he could create a major problem, in their sense of betrayal.
But a Finity youngster knew exactly what was happening to him. He knew he wasn’t being killed. He knew it was a joke.
He put in a call to legal, to Madelaine’s office, “Call Fletcher up there,” he said to Blue, who took the call. “I want to talk to him, I don’t want the whole ship to know.”
“Problem?” Blue asked
“Not yet,” he said.
The laundry was still quiet, so quiet it was down to cards, Jeremy teaching him the trick shuffle and Fletcher about to concede that small fingers had their advantage. Linda was watching—“Never got it myself,” Linda said—when Vince drifted in, and one of the seniors came with him.
“Thought you were going to clean my cabin,” Chad said.
“Yeah, well,” Fletcher said, and decided he wasn’t going to learn the shuffle in another round and he might as well do what he’d gotten himself into. He got up, gave Jeremy his cards back and Chad gave him the cabin number, A39, a fair distance around the rim.
“You do a good job,” Chad admonished him.
“Yeah,” he said, and left, telling himself he wasn’t playing cards with Chad again until there was revenge involved. He stopped by his own cabin and picked up cleaning cloths, in the case Chad’s place wasn’t supplied, and told himself Chad had probably trashed the place just to make his life difficult