She thought he was trouble. And he wasn’t. He had maybe one sentence to change her mind.
“Melody and Patch will be there. They used to work near my rez on the station, I’ve known them for years before I came down. We’ll be safe.” He blurted that out and then wished he hadn’t been quite so forthcoming. She was a nice, decent girl from a solid, rule-following family. He’d just told her something the supervisors might not know from his records, and if they got to asking too close questions of Melody and Patch, they in hisa honesty could accidentally say something to get him canned from the program.
“All right,” she said. “Sure. All right.”
He could hardly believe it. She was from Family with a capital F, and he was from a non-resident household with an f only for fouled-up. She wasn’t somebody who’d normally even talk to him on the Station. But she seemed to invite him to hold her hand, brushing close as they walked and when he did slip his hand around hers, her fingers were chaste and cold and listless, making him ask himself was this the way Stationer Family girls were, or had he just made a wrong, unwelcome move?
“Got to watch your hands when you go through decon,” he said. “I’m all over pollen.”
“Yeah,” she said, and gave a little squeeze of the fingers that made him suddenly lightheaded. He wasn’t mistaken. She did want to talk to him. He hadn’t imagined she was looking back at him in biochem.
He didn’t expect this. He really didn’t. “I thought you were, kind of, hanging with Marshall Willett.”
“Oh, Marshall. ” Her disgust dismissed the very name and being of Marshall Willett, one of the Willetts, who’d been in close orbit around her for three months, acting as if he owned the Base and the senior staff, besides.
He didn’t know what to say. He had a dream, and quite honestly that dream wasn’t remotely Bianca Velasquez. It was being in this world and on this world on days like today.
It was lasting to be a senior in the Program on Downbelow. Getting involved with someone like Bianca wasn’t a help: it was a hindrance he’d never sought.
But—here she was. Interested—at least in holding hands. And what did he do?
She was smart. She was far more serious-minded than Marshall Willett, whose reason for being down here he privately suspected was a family trying to make him do something for a career. Bianca was bright, she was pretty, she seemed to care about the work, and that—in addition to being able to stay down here amid the wonders of the planet for the rest of his life—that was just too much to ask of luck.
No. Back to leveclass="underline" permanent duty on the world was all he wanted, and he wouldn’t risk that by making a wrong move on Bianca and her powerful Family, not even if she was standing stark naked in the pollen-gold and the sun of that bank.
God, he liked that image. She’d be so pretty. She had dark hair and olive skin. She’d be all gold with the sun and the pollen coming down in streamers… well, repaint that picture with breather-masks and the clean-suits. They’d plod about in clumsy isolation while Melody and Patch scampered and threw puffer-balls at them. And how much trouble could you get into with a girl, when neither of you could take off the breather-masks and all you could touch was fingertips?
They walked along hand in hand toward the domes, which now were ghostly pale against the rapidly advancing twilight. The white yard lights were on. Other workers were coming home, too, walking much faster than they were.
Their paths split apart again where the path reached what they called the Quadrangle, and the dorm-domes were very strict, male in one direction, female in the other, if you were junior staff…
As if they didn’t have good sense until their twentieth birthday and then mature wisdom automatically happened; but in essence, he’d been glad to have the peace the no-females rules brought to the guys’ side, and tonight he was glad of it because he didn’t have to think of a dozen more clever things to say. He’d had maybe five minutes walking with her, avoiding making a total fool of himself. He had all night and tomorrow to get his thoughts together before he had to talk to her again.
Oh, my God , he had a date with Bianca Velasquez.
It was impossible. He’d never gone with a girl. And having a Family girl like Bianca actually make a date with him was… impossible. Bianca was so Family her feet didn’t touch the floor, so virginal and proper her knees locked when she slept at night. He was disposed on one side of the equation to think it was some kind of setup: he’d met numerous setups in his life, for no other reason than he was nobody.
But over the weeks he had seen that she was smarter than that crowd, and maybe bored with them, and, the thought came to him, maybe she was lonely, too. Marshall seemed to think the Sun and all the planets sort of naturally swung round him because he was a Willett; Bianca was the only human being on the Base—including the supervisors—who didn’t have to give a damn that Marshall was a Willett, because she was a Velasquez. Velasquezes didn’t have to give a damn about Willetts, Siddons, Somervilles, or Kielers, which was the big clique down here.
So what did she do? She held hands with him ?
He didn’t have a family at all. He was non-resident scum.
He also stood six feet, had learned self-defense on Pell’s rough-and-tumble White Dock, the bottom end of where he’d lived, at worst, with his fourth family, and he could beat shit out of Marshall Willett. So maybe that was her idea, her way of thumbing her nose at the lot of them. She’d been sort of a loner, too, in the center of a cloud of admirers.
And Marshall—Marshall would want one thing from her first off, which Fletcher had no intention of asking of her, not because he didn’t think of it, but because, bottom line, his motive, unlike Marshall’s, wasn’t to get himself kicked out of the program.
She acted shy. He squeezed her hand when they parted company. Senior staff members habitually sat watch at the doors. They counted everybody in for the night, for safety’s sake, to be sure nobody was left out with a broken leg or a dead breather-cylinder or something.
Nobody got a minute alone, if you were under twenty.
You were safe holding hands. If you couldn’t manage the no sex rule till your majority, the Director had told them plainly, there was no shortage of applicants, ten for every slot they filled
Tomorrow, Bianca Velasquez had promised him, and Fletcher Neihart walked on down the path to the men’s dorms, past the monitors and into decontamination with a preoccupation so thorough the monitor had to ask him twice to sign in.
Chapter 2
The restaurant was old enough to have gone from glamour to a look of hard use and back to glamour again. Now it was beyond trends. Now it was a Pell Station tradition: Pell’s finest restaurant, with its lighted floor, its display of the very real stars beyond the tables, features both of which were its hallmark, copied elsewhere but never the same.
The new touch was the holo display that set those stars loose among the tables, a piece of engineering Elene Quen had seen with the overhead lights on. The sight destroyed the illusion, but the magic was such when the dark came back that the senses were always dazzled, no matter what the reasoning mind knew of the technology behind the illusion.
The waiters settled their distinguished party at the best table, reserved from the hour Finity’s End had returned her call. It was herself, her husband Damon Konstantin, Captain James Robert Neihart and his brother captains, Madison, Francie, and Alan. At this hour, the meal was breakfast for Francie and Alan, supper for James Robert and Madison; and with all four of Finity’s captains away from the ship, business that had the ill grace to hit Finity’s deck this close after docking would fall into the hands of Finity’s more junior staff.