That was Jeremy, three new programs offered before he’d disposed of the first one. Dessert… a heavy hit of carbohydrate… was somehow appealing, even if his mouth tasted like antiseptic.
He struggled up to a sitting position. His eye, the one with the stitch in the eyebrow, was swollen shut. His ribs felt massively abused. Jeremy set a tray in his lap, and the offering was a synth cheese sandwich.
Considering the condition of his mouth, the detested synth cheese wasn’t a bad choice. He ate the sandwich. He ate the fruit tart dessert while Jeremy jabbered on about the ship they were chasing having started a run, and how Finity ’s engines were more powerful than any little pirate spotter’s and how Jeremy thought they didn’t need the Union warship that was running beside them. If Champlain tried a duck and strike maneuver, they’d scatter Champlain over the jump-point
He wasn’t so sure. And his head was spinning. The sugar tasted good. The rest was just palatable. He supposed that he should be terrified of the possibility of the ship going into combat, but maybe it was the perspective of just having been there himself, on a smaller scale: he didn’t care. Jeremy took the tray and he lay down again and drifted out.
At some time the lights had dimmed. He slitted his eyes open on Jeremy moving about the room, trying not to make a racket, checking locker latches. He couldn’t keep awake. Whatever Charlie had shot into him just wasn’t going away, and he thought about Chad and Connor and Sue, and the scene at the laundry pickup. “We ever get our laundry turned in?” he asked, thinking that Chad was going to have to do it, whatever he liked or didn’t like, the work of the ship had to go on. And Jeremy answered:
“Yeah, I took it down.”
He drifted again. And waked with the intercom blaring warning.
“… ten minutes, cousins. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Get those packets organized. Our spook friend went jump an hour ago and we’re going early. Wake up and acknowledge, on your feet and get belted in. This is going to be a hard dump on the other side. You juniors belt in good and solid. Helm One says easy done but the captain says we’ll flatten pans in the galley. If you have any chancy latches, tape ’em shut .”
“Hot damn,” Jeremy said. “We’re on ’em.”
“On what?” Fletcher asked thickly. And then he remembered Champlain , JR’s talk about missiles, and the chance there might be shooting. Then the fear that hadn’t been acute at his last waking seemed much more immediate. He tried to sit up, looking for the packets, with the cabin swinging round on him. He was aware of Jeremy doing the call-in, reporting to the computer they were accounted for.
Jeremy came back to him and had the packets, and some tape. “Going to fix these so they don’t slide out of reach,” Jeremy said, and taped them to the edge of the cot, except one, which Jeremy stripped of its protective coating. “You want to take it yourself, or do you want me to shoot it?”
“A little early.”
“It’ll be all right. You take it. I got to see you do before I tuck in.”
“Yeah,” he said. Admittedly he was muzzy-headed. “Charlie gave me a hell of a dose.”
“One of those time-release things,” Jeremy said as Fletcher put the packet against his arm and let it kick. He didn’t even feel the sting, he was that numb.
“Double-dosed,” he said. “Is that all right?”
“Charlie knows,” Jeremy said, and found the ends of the safety belt for him as he lay back. Fletcher snapped the ends, tucked a pillow under his head, asking himself if he was going to wake up again, or if anything went wrong, whether he’d ever know anything again. Did you have to wake up to die? Or if you died in your sleep, did you ever know it had happened?
He couldn’t do anything about it. He’d taken the shot. And Jeremy still sat there. Watching him.
Just watching, for what seemed a long, long time.
What are you looking at ? Fletcher asked, but he couldn’t muster the coordination to talk, feeling the uncertainty of one more drug insinuating itself through his bloodstream. Jeremy set a hand on his shoulder, patted it but he couldn’t feel it. He was that numb.
“ Five minutes. Five minutes, cousins. Whatever you’re doing, get it set up, we’re about to make a run up .”
“I don’t want you to leave,” Jeremy said distressedly “I don’t want you ever to leave, Fletcher. I don’t want you to go back to Pell. Vince and Linda don’t want you to go.”
He was emotionally disarmed, tranked, dosed, numb as hell and spiraling down into a deep, deep maze of dark and shadows. He heard the distress in Jeremy’s voice, felt it in the pressure, no keener sensation, of Jeremy’s fingers squeezing his shoulder.
“Most of all I don’t want you to go,” Jeremy said. “Ever. You’re like I finally had a brother. And I don’t want you to go away, you hear me, Fletcher?”
He did hear. He was disturbed at Jeremy’s distress. And he began to be scared for Jeremy sitting there arguing with him long past what was safe.
“Get to bed,” he managed to mumble. After that the pressure of Jeremy’s hand went away, and he drifted, aware of Jeremy getting into his bunk.
Aware of the last intercom warning…
Gravity increased. The earth was soft and the sky was heavy with clouds…
“I don’t want you and Chad to fight,” a young voice said, and called him back to the ship, to the close restraint of the belts, the pressure hammering him into his bunk.
“I’d really miss you,” someone said. “I would.”
A long, long time his back pressed against the ground, and he watched the monsoon clouds scud across, layers and layers of cloud.
Then he walked, on an endless wooded slope… in an equally endless fight for air…
Going for jump , he heard someone say…
Chapter 19
The Watcher-statues towered above the plain, large-eyed hisa images like those little statues on the hill. But these were far larger, tricking the eye, changing the scale of the world as Fletcher walked down toward them. Living hisa moved among them, very small against the work that, when humans had seen it, revised all their opinions about the hisa’s lack of what humans called civilization.
He knew that part. Only a very few artifacts ever left Downbelow. Everybody was curious about the hisa, and if nothing prevented the plunder of hisa art, so he understood, hisa artifacts would be stripped off the world and the culture would collapse either for want of critical objects of reverence (or… whatever hisa did with such things); or it would collapse because of the influx of culturally disruptive trade goods and environmentally disruptive human presence.
Researchers didn’t ordinarily get to go out to the images. Only a handful had come here to photograph, and to deal with hisa.
And now, culmination of his dreams, he was here, approaching the most important site humans knew of on Downbelow. His youthful guide brought him closer and closer. He walked at the speed the scant air he drew through the mask would let him move, with the notion that before he got to those statues surely some authority, hisa or human, would stop him. It was too reckless, too wondrous a thing for a nobody like him to get to see this place close up.
And yet no one did stop him. As he walked down the long hillside, he saw strange streaks in the grass all around the cluster of dark stone images, and wondered what those patterns were until he noticed that his guide’s track was exactly such a line, and so were his steps, when he cast a mask-hampered look back. They were tracks of visitors, coming and going from every direction.
Hisa sat or walked among these images, some alone, some in groups, and they had made the tracks across the land, most from the woods just as he did, but some from the river, or the hills or the broad plain beyond. The rain that sifted down weighed down the grasses, but nothing obliterated the traces.