She looked maybe sixty, old enough that he knew beyond a doubt she was one of the lawyers behind his problems and that apparent sixty probably represented a hundred. She was cheerful. He wasn’t.
“So what’s this about?” he asked. “Somebody forget to sign something?” He feigned delight. “You’ve changed your minds and you’re sending me home?”
Unflapped, she picked up a blue passport from off her desk and handed it to him. “This is yours. Keep it and don’t mislay it. I can reissue but I get surly about it.”
“Thanks.” He tucked it in his pocket and was ready to leave.
“Sit down.—So how are you getting along?”
She knew he wasn’t happy here and didn’t give a damn.
Good, he thought, and sat. That judgment helped pull his temper back to level and gave him command of his nerves. It was another lawyer. The long-term enemy, the enemy he’d never met, but always knew directed his life. She was cool as ice.
He could be uncommunicative, too. His lawyers had taught him: don’t fidget, look at the judge, don’t get angry. And he wasn’t. Not by half. “Am I having a good time?” he countered her as she sat down and faced him across her desk, her computer full of business that had to be more important to her than his welfare. “No. Will I have a good time? No. I’m not happy about this and I never will be. But here we are until we’re back again.”
“I know it’s a hard adjustment.”
“And you had to interfere in my life.” He hadn’t found anybody aboard he could specifically blame. He’d have expected something official from the senior captain, at least a face-to-face meeting, and hadn’t gotten it—as if they’d snatched him up, and now that they’d demonstrated they could, they had no further interest in him. He resented that on some lower level of his mind. He wouldn’t have unloaded the baggage in her office, he hadn’t intended to, but, damn it, she asked. She wanted him to sit down and unburden his soul to her, in lieu of the real authority on this ship—when she was the person, the one person directly responsible for ten and more years of lawsuits and grief in his life, not to mention present circumstances. He drew a deep breath and fired all he had. “My mother was a no-good drughead who ducked out on me, you wouldn’t leave me in peace, and here I am, just happy as you can imagine about it.”
“Your mother had no choice in being where she was. She did have a choice in refusing to give up your Finity citizenship.”
“She died! And excuse me, but what in hell did you think you were doing, ripping up every situation I ever worked out for myself?”
There was a fairly long silence. The face that stared at him was less friendly than the hisa watchers and just as still.
“I’m sorry you wanted the station, but you weren’t born to the station, Fletcher, and that’s a fact that neither of us controlled. This universe doesn’t let you just float free, you know. There’s a question of citizenship, your birthright to be in a particular place, and birth doesn’t make you a Pell citizen. You were always ours, financially, legally, nationally. Francesca wouldn’t let you be theirs. She wanted you here. They just wouldn’t let you leave.”
“The damn courts, you mean.” In the low opinion he held of Pell courts they could possibly find one small point of agreement. And she hadn’t flared back at him, had, lawyeresque, held her equilibrium. He even began to think she might not be so bad, the way nobody on the whole ship had really turned out to be an enemy. In giving him Jeremy, they’d left him nothing to fight. Nothing to object to. In sending him here, to this woman, they gave him, again, nobody he could fight with the anger he had built up. It was robbery, of a kind he only now identified, that he really didn’t want to hurt this woman.
“The damned courts,” she said quietly, “yes, exactly so.”
“Did you pay fourteen million?”
“You heard about that.”
“Damn—excuse me—right I heard.”
“They sued us to buy you a station-share and kept the case in limbo; meanwhile, their own Children’s Court wouldn’t release you to us so long as the War continued, or so long as we were working with Norway . And we don’t give up our own, young sir. Learn that first off. For good or for ill, this ship’s deck is sovereign territory and we don’t give up our own and pay a fourteen million credit charge on top of the outrage. If you want to know who put obstacles in your path, yes, the Pell courts, who saw no reason to credit this ship for the very fact there is a Pell judiciary and not an outpost of Union justice in its place. Your mother fought tooth and nail to maintain custody of you. We would have taken you at any pass through this system. Pell courts thought otherwise, but they gave you no rights within Pell’s law.”
It had been a good day going, before Madelaine the lawyer called him in to tell him what great favors they’d done him. Nothing to fight? She’d given him something. Fourteen million credits and his life at issue. Civilization was cancelled for the day. And he turned honest. “I don’t want to be here. Doesn’t that count ?”
“But the fact is, you had no right to be at Pell, either.”
“I had every right!”
“Not the important right. Not the legal right. And they wouldn’t give it to you unless we paid for it because your rights lie on this ship where, from your mother, you have citizenship and financial rights.”
“Well, that’s not my fault. I don’t owe this ship. And I damned sure don’t owe my mother. She never did anything but mess up my life.”
“She had little enough of her own. Your mother was my daughter’s child. Your grandmother died at Olympus. Unfortunately for both of us, it seems, I’m your great-grandmother. Your closest living relative.”
He’d fired off his mouth without knowing what he was firing at. He’d insulted his mother as he was in the habit of doing with strangers rather than having others do the sneering and the blaming and him do the defending. Lifelong habit, and he’d just done it to the wrong person. He’d wondered what it would be like to have a grandmother, or a godmother, back when he was reading nursery rhymes. Stationers had them. If he had one he wouldn’t ever be in foster homes. Would he?
His godmother, however, wasn’t a soft, plump woman with a wand and a pumpkinful of mice. It was a spacefaring lawyer with eyes that bored right through you. And not his god- mother, either. Not even his grandmother. His grandmother’s mother , two generations back.
“Francesca died when you were five,” Madelaine said “That’s too young really to have known her. Or to have formed a good judgment.”
He was prepared to back up a couple of squares and admit he’d been too quick. But her judgment of him drew a shake of his head. He couldn’t help it. “No. I was there. I remember .”
He remembered police, and his mother lying on the bed, not moving. He remembered realizing something was wrong with her. Her hand had been cold, terribly cold when he’d touched it. He’d known that wasn’t right. And he’d called the emergency squad. He remembered textures. Sensations. Everything, every tiniest detail, was branded in his consciousness.
“She was a good woman,” Madelaine said. “Good at what she did. She’d taken jump drugs all her life with no trouble. The simple fact was, she was pregnant, too late to abort, too early to deliver except to a birthlab, which she chose not to do; we knew what we were facing—it’s declassified now, so we can talk about it. But it wasn’t then, and going to a birthlab at her stage of pregnancy—we didn’t have the time for her to do that and recover. We just couldn’t wait for her, if she did it without us she’d still be stranded ashore, and she was in a hell of a mess. There was nothing for anyone but bad choices. We said we’d be back in a year. That didn’t happen. We missed our appointment with her, and she crashed. Just crashed, physiologically, psychologically. Depression sometimes follows a birth. She started self-medicating. The hyprazine, particularly the hyprazine, if you’ve taken it in jump, it gives you an illusion of being in space, and that’s what you take when you’re pregnant. That illusion was what she was after, Fletcher. Just so you know.”