Thirty? Forty?
He felt a little dazed. Not just about her. He’d caught invitations from all over. He, Fletcher Neihart, who’d only in the last year gotten a real date. He didn’t know why the woman had looked at him, except here he didn’t have a rep as a trouble-maker working against him.
Maybe he had shiny-new written all over him. Maybe—
Maybe what that woman had seen was a man, not a boy. Maybe that was who he could be.
He phoned the kids to be absolutely sure they were in their rooms and assured them there was a Finity senior on watch. He had another shower after all that running up and down stairs, and flung himself down in bed, in soft pillows, with his hands under his head.
The ceiling shifted colors subtly, one of the room’s amenities—something just… just to be pretty. Something you had to pay for. And spacers lived like this. Rich ones did… unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
But that was a bauble. The warmth in the bar tonight, the acceptance with JR’s crowd, that they hadn’t been obliged to offer him—the pretty young women trying to attract his attention, that was the amazing thing in his days here. And tonight, the knowledge, dizzying as it was, that when things went chancy he wasn’t alone, he wasn’t counted a fool, and he had a shipful of people to turn up as welcome as Arnold and JR had done, to fend off trouble and know solidly what to do.
It was damned seductive, so seductive it put a lump in his throat despite the thin sounds of revelry that punctured the recent peace.
Did he still miss Downbelow? He conjured Old River in his mind, saw Patch laughing at him from the high bank, and yet…
Yet he couldn’t hear the sound, not Patch’s voice, not Melody’s. He could only see the sunlight and the drifting pollen skeins. He couldn’t remember the sounds.
And Melody and Patch by now believed he’d gone… Bianca had gone on with her studies, passed biochem, he did hope. What could she possibly know about where he was?
He’d written to the Wilsons. I’m fine. I’ve done a lot of laundry. Now they’ve put me in charge of the kids. Who are older than I am. You’ll find that funny. But my station years count, and they’re far smaller than I am. I’m back doing vid-games and losing… I know you’ll be amused…
To Bianca he’d begun to write I love you … and he’d stopped, in the sudden knowledge that what they’d begun had never had time to grow to that word. He’d agonized over it. He’d not even been able to claim a heartfelt I miss you … because he’d gotten so far away and so removed from anything she’d understand that he didn’t think about her except when he thought about Downbelow.
He’d written… instead. …I think about you, I wish you could see this place. It seems so close to Pell, now. Before, it seemed so far …
He’d written… in a crisis of honesty… I’ve kind of bounced around, people here, people there. I’ve never dealt with anybody I didn’t choose …
If he added to that tonight, he’d write .. . I don’t think any group of people since I was a kid ever looked me up and invited me in… but they did that, tonight. It felt …
But he wouldn’t write that to Bianca, no admission she wasn’t the one and only of his life… you weren’t supposed to tell a girl that. No admission he’d had a dozen offers tonight. No admission he’d felt excited…
No admission he’d been scared as hell walking up to that group in the bar, and sure they were going to pull one on him, but he’d gone anyway, because he wanted… wanted what they held out to him. He wanted inclusion. A circle closing around him. He’d never felt complete in all his life.
He disliked Chad and Sue and Connor with less energy than he’d felt before he’d spent a few days ashore. Now they were familiar faces in a sea of strangers. He’d ended up talking to the lot of them, who’d made nothing of any grudge he had. He’d just been in , and the double-cross and the pain and the bruises and everything else had added up simply to being asked to that table to break one of JR’s rules and to be regarded as one of them, not one of the kids.
That event was unexpectedly important to him, so important it buzzed him more than the wine, more than the woman trying to make connection with him, more than anything that had happened.
It’s a setup , he kept saying to himself. He’d believed things before. He’d even believed one of his foster-brothers making up to him, best friends, until it turned out to be a setup, and a fight he’d won.
And lost. Along with childish trust
He was dangerously close to believing, tonight, not the way he’d believed in Melody and Patch, nothing so dramatic…just a call to a table where he’d not been remarkable, just one of the set. He was theirs, because they had to find something to do with him. Making his life hell had been an option to them, but not the one they’d taken.
It was better than his relations with people at the Base, when he added it up. He’d come in there determined to succeed and George Willett, who’d planned to do just the minimum, had instantly hated him, so naturally the rest had to. He’d come aboard Finity mad and surly, and JR, give him credit, had been more level-headed than he had been, more generous than he had been…
He didn’t exactly call truce or accept his situation on Finity . But for the first sickening moment… he wasn’t sure if he knew how to get home again. The first actual place he’d visited, and he felt… separated… from all he had known, and connected to the likes of JR and Jeremy and a grandmother who gave him a handful of change on a first liberty.
He didn’t know what was the matter with him, or why a handful of change and a drink in a bar could suddenly be important to him… more important than two downers he’d come to love. It was as if he had Downbelow in one hand and Finity in the other and was weighing them, trying to figure out which weighed the heaviest when he couldn’t look at them or feel them at the same time.
It was as if the sounds had come rushing back to him and he could see Melody saying, in her strange, lilting voice, You go walk, Fetcher?
You grow up, Fetcher?
Find a human answer… Fletcher?
Maybe he had to take the walk. Maybe the answer was out there.
Or maybe it was in that unprecedented come and join us he’d, for the first time in a decade, gotten from other human beings.
“If Pell reaches agreement,” the Mariner stationmaster said, and James Robert declared, “Then bet on it. It’s surer than the market.”
Senior captains of a significant number of ships in port had happened to have business on Mariner’s fifth level Blue at the same time, and found their way to a meeting unhampered this time by Champlain’s attempts to get into the circuit of information. Champlain was outbound this morning, and good riddance, JR thought, if Champlain weren’t headed to their next port
But in the kind of dispensation Finity had long been able to win on credentials the Old Man swore they’d resigned, the Union merchanter Boreale changed its routing and prepared an early departure.
In the same direction.
“If the tariff lowers and the dock charges lower,” the senior captain of Belize said, “we’d sign.”