How the times had changed!
“Yes, sir,” he said “Glad to know that.”
So he took his leave and the Old Man returned to his correspondence with Boreale .
So they were pulling out early, to inconvenience those making plans. It had the flavor of the old days, the gut-tightening apprehension of coming out of jump expecting trouble. And it was chancier, in some ways. With Mallory you always knew where you stood. The other side shot at you. You shot at them. That was simple.
Here, part of the merchanters who should be working on their side was working for the Mazianni and at the same time, representatives of their former enemy Union might be working for Mallory.
He supposed he’d better talk to the juniors about security. The juniors, especially the junior-juniors with Fletcher, were, on one level, sacrosanct: any dock crawler that messed with a ship’s junior crew was asking for cracked skulls, no recourse to station police, just hand-to-hand mayhem, in the oldest law there was among merchanters. Even station cops ignored the enforcement of simple justice.
But he didn’t want to deliver the Old Man any surprises. And Fletcher was worth a special thought. Attaching Jeremy to him with an invisible chain seemed to him the brightest thing he’d done at this port.
Chapter 16
Games, vids, more games, restaurants with a perpetual sugar high. It was everything a kid could dream of… and that was when Fletcher began to know he was, at stationbred seventeen, growing old. The body couldn’t take the sugar hits. The ears grew tired of the racketing games. The stomach grew tired of being pitched upside down after full meals. So did Vince’s, and the ship’s sometime lawyer lost his three frosty shakes in a game parlor restroom, and didn’t want to contemplate anything lime-colored afterward, but Vince was back on the rides faster than Fletcher would have bet.
It meant, when he took them back to the sleepover nightly, that they were down to the frazzled ends, exhausted and laying extravagant plans for return visits.
Linda had bought a tape on exotic fish.
And he’d gotten them back alive, through a very good meal at the restaurant, past the sleepover’s jammed vid parlor. He loaded them into the lift.
“Hello,” someone female said, and he fell into a double ambush of very good-looking women he’d never met, who had absolutely no hesitation about a hands-on introduction.
“On duty,” he said. He’d learned to say that. Jeremy and the juniors were laughing and hooting from the open elevator, and he ricocheted into a third ambush, this one male, in the same ship’s green, who brushed a hand past his arm a hair’s-breadth from offense and grinned at him.
“What’s your room number?”
“I’m on duty,” he said, and got past, not without touches on his person, not without blushing bright red. He felt it.
The lift left without him, the kids upward bound, and he dived for the stairs.
“Fletcher!” a Finity voice called out, and he caught himself with his hand on the bannister.
It was Wayne, with a grin on his face.
“What’s the trouble?”
“Not a thing,” Wayne said cheerfully, and brushed off the importunate incomers with a wave of his arm.
“The kids just went up.”
“They’ll survive,” Wayne said “Join us in the bar.”
“I’m not supposed to.”
“JR’s with us.” Wayne clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on in.”
He’d not had a better offer—on first thought.
On second, he was exceedingly wary it was a set-up.
Except that Wayne had been one of the solid, the reliable ones. He decided to go to the door of the bar and have a look and risk the joke, if there was one.
It was as advertised, the senior-juniors with a table staked out and a festive occasion underway. Wayne set a hand on his back and steered him toward the group. JR beckoned him closer.
He took it for an order, set his face and walked up to the table… where Lyra cleared back, Bucklin pulled up a chair, and JR signaled service. Chad was there, Nike, Wayne, Sue, Connor, Toby, Ashley… the whole batch of them.
“Our novice here just shed three offers,” Wayne announced. “They’re in tight orbit about this lad.”
“Not surprised,” Lyra said. “I would, if he weren’t off-limits.”
“You would, if you weren’t off-limits,” Connor gibed. “Come on, be honest.”
He wasn’t sure whether that was a joke at his expense or not, but the waiter showed up and asked him what he was drinking. He took a chance and ordered wine.
Talk went on around him, letting him fall out of the spotlight. He was content with that. They talked about the sights on the station. They talked about the progress of the loading, they talked about the rowdy arrival—it was a freighter named Belize , a small but reputable ship, no threat to anyone—and he had his glass of wine, which tasted good and hit a stomach long unaccustomed to it. Chad ordered another beer. There were second orders all around.
“I’d better get up to the kids,” he said, and got up and started to move off.
“Good job,” JR said soberly. “Fletcher. Good job. If you want to stay another round, stay.”
“Thanks,” he said, feeling a little desperate, a little trapped. More than a little buzzed by the wine. “But I’d better get up there.”
“Fletcher,” Lyra said “Welcome in.”
Maybe it was a test. Maybe he’d passed. He didn’t know. He offered money for his share of the tab, but JR waved it off and said it was on them.
“Yessir,” he said. “Thank you.” He escaped, then, not feeling in control of the encounter, not feeling sure of himself in his graceless duck out of the gathering and out of the bar.
But they’d invited him. His nerves were still buzzing with that and the alcohol, and if spacers from Belize tried to snag him he drifted through them in a haze, unnoticing. He rode the lift up to the level of his room, got out in a corridor peaceful and deserted except for a slightly worse for wear spacer from Belize , and entered his palace of a room, where he had every comfort he could ask for.
He’d written to Bianca. Things aren’t so bad as I’d thought …
This evening he undressed, showered, and flung himself down in a huge bed that, as Jeremy had said, you almost wanted safety belts for… and thought about Downbelow, not from pain this time, but from the comfort of a luxury he’d not imagined. Memories of Downbelow came to him now at odd moments as those of a distant place—so beautiful; but the hardship of life down there was considerable, and he remembered that, too—only to blink and find himself surrounded by the sybaritic luxury of an accommodation he’d never in the world thought he could afford. He had so many sights swimming in his head it was like the glass-walled water, the huge fish patrolling a man-made ocean. His worlds seemed like that, insulated from each other.
His hurts tonight were all in that other world. He’d felt good tonight. He’d been anxious the entire while, not quite believing it was innocent until he was out of that bar without a trick played on him, but his cousins had made the move to include him, and he discovered—
He discovered he was glad of it.
He shut his eyes, ordered the lights out…
A knock came at the door. A flash at the entry-requested light .
Cursing, he got up, grabbed a towel as the nearest clothing-substitute, and went to see who it was before he opened the door.
Jeremy.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked, and didn’t bother to turn the lights on, standing there with a bathtowel wrapped around him and every indication of somebody trying to sleep.
“Vince and Linda went downstairs. I told them not to. But you weren’t here. And they said they were going down to check…”