Blown. Blown in two seconds. He made four tries, but he couldn’t come out of the drop into the game fast enough with these kids to avoid getting blasted.
“This is enough,” he said. But Jeremy jollied him out of quitting, said they’d play partners, and after that he lived for maybe the equivalent of a station hall block before he blew up.
He just wasn’t very good at it. Or the point was, they were very, very good and their reflexes were astonishingly fast. When he exited the game and took the visor off he was a little disoriented from the intensity of the play they’d forced him to. They were different when they took theirs off, hyped, nervous, so much so that when they went for soft drinks at the bar he didn’t know the Jeremy he was dealing with. Jeremy’s fingers twitched, his small body was like a wound spring, and he sat and sipped a soft drink with Vince, who was a little saner, while Jeremy and Linda went back into the game and had it out. A long game. You could elect to watch the game on the screen where they were sitting; and Vince, who said he was tired, did… while Jeremy and Linda were nearby, two people just sitting at a table opposite each other, twitching occasionally, fingers moving on the pads. But on the screen two fighters were stalking each other.
“They’re good,” he said to Vince, aware first of a twelve-, thirteen-year-old boy’s face, and second that Vince was, chronologically speaking, a year older than he was.
And third that Vince was himself too hyped for rational conversation, arms and shoulders twitching to the moves on the screen, jabbering strategy at Linda, who was, he’d found out, Vince’s fairly close cousin and year-mate.
He didn’t react the way these twelve- and thirteen-year-olds did—but he’d never seen any kid react the way these kids did, not the most dedicated gameheads who’d haunted the vid parlors on Pell. Something in him said dangerous , and something said alien . Something in his gut said he was going to be outmatched at anything but cards with these kids, and that there was something direly skewed about these seventeen- and eighteen-year-old twelve-year-olds.
Baby faces. Tiny bodies. High, pre-change voices. He could pick any of the three of these kids up in one hand; but their reactions in games were tigerish. He’d heard the word, and knew the association. Tigerish . Predatory, low brain function, and fast.
Vince and he watched and drank soft drinks and ate chips as Jeremy and Linda kept it up for another hour and a half before watch-end mandated their return to quarters—a return which, like a lot of other odd things, said to him that these weren’t ordinary twelve-year-olds, who voluntarily delayed a game to sew patches on clothes, who made their beds without a wrinkle, who didn’t duck out on rules—and kept a single Attack game going an hour and a half because nobody could score.
He walked the steeply curving ring beside Jeremy, who still couldn’t walk like a normal human being, who was still electric and jumping with an energy he hadn’t discharged. And when they got into quarters Jeremy wasn’t relaxed until he’d spent a long time in the shower.
“You all right?” he asked Jeremy when the kid came out, stark naked, to dress for bed.
“Yeah.” Jeremy gave a little laugh and pulled on a tee and briefs to sleep in. But there was something still a little breathless, a little strange about him.
Fletcher took his own shower and scrubbed as if he could scrub out the sight he’d just seen, and asking himself how he felt about room-sharing with a hype-head. That was what it reminded him of. He had seen people react that way. On drugs.
He didn’t remember his mother playing kid games with him. He remembered his mother drugged out, but languid, most of the time, Remembered her more than once sitting at the table in the apartment and staring into space she didn’t need a visor to see. But her arms would be hard like that, as if she were waiting for something, and her face would be—
He couldn’t remember her face anymore. Not clearly. He came closest he’d come in years to remembering it with the women, senior crew, who came and went around him today. They looked like her. All the people on this ship looked like her in some subtle way, until those recent faces washed over what his mother had looked like to him.
And he remembered the times, the scariest times, when she’d been as scarily hyped as Jeremy had been in the game. How, at the last, she’d prowl the apartment and bump into walls that weren’t there for her. She’d held him in her arms, the only times he could remember her holding him, and she’d say she saw the stars, she saw all the colors of space, and she’d ask him if he could see them, too.
He couldn’t. Aged five, he’d thought there was something wrong with him, and that he was stupid, because he hadn’t been able to see the stars the way she could. Thank God she hadn’t given him any of what she was taking. She’d never gone that far down.
He let the shower fans dry his skin and his hair. He came out of the bath, abandoning the Base-induced modesty that had had him, on prior days, dressing in the cramped bath space. Jeremy didn’t give him more than a glance, so he guessed it was nothing new in the intimacy of a crowded ship. Jeremy sat on his bunk letting the cards cascade between his hands, cards flying between his fingers and piling up again, sheer nervous energy.
Jeremy had already proved he was good at cards.
He lost three more hours. He won one back. And when he did win, Jeremy didn’t sulk about it like some twelve-year-olds he’d known, just said, well, he was improving, and dealt another hand.
He was still sure he could swat Jeremy and his cousins aside in a straight-on fight. But he wasn’t sure, now, that he could exit without damage. He hadn’t factored in the possibility that his roommate was outright crazy. He hadn’t figured that others might be, that it might go with the territory, just being out here, dealing with space. He’d known no spacers intimately but his mother and Quen. All his life, he’d heard people say spacers were different or strange , usually meaning it came in the blood and it accounted for his misbehaviors or his quirks.
Maybe there was something to it. He no longer denied there could be reasons besides upbringing that made spacers rowdy and made station police nervous when spacers intruded into residential areas. They bullied people. They went in groups and were loud and disorderly. They got drunk and knifed each other in bars and the police just contacted ships responsible, never arrested anybody unless they had the ship’s officers present… because there’d been riots when a station attempted to intervene in spacer troubles, and what a riot was like when you got one, two thousand, ten thousand Jeremys all hyped and mad, he didn’t ever want to see.
The final tally of favor-points was thirteen hours. He lost the last time and went to bed, with the prospect of another tomorrow exactly like this one.
He had no idea where the ship was by now. There were sounds he couldn’t identify, occasionally hydraulics, but they were flying along at what Jeremy and his physics course called inertial. He lay in his bunk thinking about that until he made himself queasy with the thought of running into something; and reminded himself they weren’t going through the ecliptic like insystemers, but nadir of the system, clear of the planets and stations, clear of the star, out there where only starships went.
On the next day he found his appetite for breakfast had increased. His stomach had gradually settled to the feeling the ship gave him. His sinuses had quit protesting the change in air pressure. At work, the frantic pace in the laundry detail that had kept them moving during the first days had abated, and that meant time on their hands. They talked. He didn’t. They all folded sheets and stacked them up and they talked about the vid game last night, which at least was common ground, but he wasn’t inspired to add any observations, past their rapid chatter.