He couldn’t go home. But he couldn’t exist here, where clearly someone, and probably more than one of the juniors, had not only expressed their opinion of him, but had done it in spite of JR’s opposition—not damaging him , because the petty spite in this family no more got to him than all the other collapsed arrangements had done. The illusions he’d had shattered were all short-term, a minimum amount invested—so he only felt a fool.
What that act had shattered in JR was another question. He saw that now, and wished he’d said something. But he hadn’t done the deed. He hadn’t chosen it. He couldn’t fix it. His being here had drawn something from JR’s crew that maybe nothing else would have ever caused.
Now it had surfaced. It was JR’s job to deal with it as best he could. And he’d let the door shut on a relationship it would only hurt JR now to pursue. If he chased after it—he saw the damage he could do in the crew. He was outside the circle. Again.
He began to clean up the room, replacing things in drawers and lockers, Jeremy’s as well as his own. And he saw that JR was right. Jeremy was in a hell of a situation. Jeremy had latched on to him in lieu of Vince and Linda, with whom Jeremy had avowed nothing in common but age; and now when he left, Jeremy would have to patch that relationship up as a bad second choice.
Worse still, Jeremy had set some significance on his being the absent age-mate, Jeremy’s lifelong what-if, after Jeremy had, like him, like so many of this crew, lost mother, father, cousins… all of the relationships a kid should have.
The last thing the kid needed was a public slap in the face like his moving out of the cabin they shared, in advance of the time he made a general farewell to the ship.
Jeremy was the keenest regret he had. In attaching to him, the kid had done what he himself had done early in his life. The kid had just invested too much in another human being. And human beings had flaws, and didn’t keep their promises, and all too often they ducked out and went off about their own business, for very personal reasons, disregarding what it did to somebody else.
That was what it was to grow up. He’d always suspected that was the universal truth. Now, being the adult, he did it to somebody else for reasons he couldn’t do anything about. And maybe understood a bit more about his mother, who’d done the chief and foremost of all duck-outs.
He went to the galley when he’d finished the clean-up.
“Did you find it?” was Jeremy’s very first question, and there was real pain in Jeremy’s eyes.
“No,” he said. “JR’s looking for it.”
“We didn’t do it,” Linda said, from a little farther away.
Vince came up beside her.
“We’d have done it,” Vince said, “but we wouldn’t have stolen anything.”
He’d never have thought he’d have seen honesty shining out of Vince. But he thought he did see it, in the kids whose time-stretched lives made them play like twelve-year-olds and look around at you in the next instant with eyes a decade older.
“I believe you,” he found himself saying, and thought then he’d completely surprised Vince.
But he saw those three faces looking to him—not at him, but to him—in a way he’d never planned to have happen to him or them. And he didn’t know what to do about it.
Bucklin was the first resort. Wayne was the second. Lyra the third. If one of those three would lie to him, JR thought, there was no hope of truth, and Bucklin said, first off:
“I can’t imagine it.”
Wayne simply shook his head and said, “Damn.” And then: “What in hell was he doing with a hisa artifact? Aren’t those things illegal?”
Lyra, when he found her in the corridor at B deck scrub, had the stinger. “Is it remotely possible Fletcher faked it?”
He supposed he hadn’t a devious enough mind even to have thought of that possibility.
Or something in Fletcher’s behavior had kept him from thinking so. He entertained the idea, turned it one way and another and looked at it from the underside. But he didn’t believe it.
He tracked down the junior-juniors, who were with Fletcher, working in the mess hall. “I want to talk to them,” he said to Fletcher, and took Jeremy to a far enough remove the waiting junior-juniors couldn’t see expressions, let alone overhear.
“What happened?” he asked Jeremy.
“We got back and it was just messed,” Jeremy said
He was tempted to ask Jeremy who he thought had done it. But a second thought informed him that the last thing he wanted to do was start an interactive witch hunt. “Any observations?”he asked
“No, sir,” Jeremy said.
“How’s Fletcher behaving?”
“He’s being real nice,” Jeremy said, and looked vastly upset. “You think maybe we should call back to Mariner, maybe, if somebody sold it?”
He had to weigh making that call, to inform Mariner police. He didn’t say so. He didn’t want to log it as a theft on station: it would taint Finity ’s name, no matter what spin he put on it: possession of a forbidden artifact, theft aboard the ship. It was excruciatingly embarrassing, at a time when Finity ’s good name had just secured agreements from other captains and from the station that were critical to peace, and at a time when—he was constantly conscious of it—the captains had life and death business under their hands.
At any given instant, the siren might sound and they might be in a scramble to stations regarding some maneuver by the ship in front of them.
Meanwhile all their just-completed agreements hung on Finity ’s unsullied reputation for fair, rigorously honest dealing. Taint Finity ’s good name with a sordid incident aboard and captains and station management back at Mariner had to ask themselves whether Finity was as reliable and selfless in her dealings as legend said of the ship. Finity had been meticulously honest. Other captains and the various stations had contributed to the military fund that kept Finity and Norway going without limit, repaired their damage, fueled them, armed them, trusted them—and he had to call station police and say there’d been a theft on a ship no one else could get aboard?
Silence about the matter was dishonest toward Fletcher. But telling the truth could damage the ship and the Alliance. There was no clean answer. And the matter was on his hands. He had to take the responsibility for it, not pass it upstairs to the senior captains; and that meant he had to answer to Fletcher for his silence, in his absolute conviction that, whatever else, if it had ever existed, it was aboard, because no member of this crew would have sold it ashore.
One last question, one out of Lyra’s question: “What did this artifact look like?”
“About this long.” Jeremy measured with his hands, as Fletcher had, exactly as Fletcher had. “Brown and white feathers, sort of greenish twisted cords… it’s carved all over.”
“You did see it?”
“He let me hold it. He let me touch it. They’re real feathers .”
“I’m sure they are.” Until Jeremy’s description he had no evidence but Fletcher’s word that such a stick actually existed, and he set markers in his mind, what was proved, what was assumed, and who had said it. The stick now went down as a fact, not just a report. “Did he say where he got it?”
“A hisa gave it to him. He said the cops got him through customs. He says the carvings mean something.”