And sometimes such sticks seemed to come back again. Sometimes a downer took one from a gravesite and bestowed it on another hisa and sometimes they returned to the one that had given the gift. One researcher had asked why, and the downer in question had just said, “He go out, he come back,” and that was all science had ever learned.
He go out. He come back.
To a graveyard, with more strings and feathers added. Researchers took account of such things, in meticulous studies that noted whether the sticks were set in the earth straight, or slanted, or if the feathers were tied above or below certain marks…
All that would mean things in the minds of the researchers, perhaps. He didn’t trust anything they surmised—he, as someone who’d been given one—someone who’d carried one as a hisa had to carry such a gift. He’d had no place to store it, no place to carry it…
And had the researchers with their air-conditioned domes and their cabinets and their classifying systems never thought what it was to carry one, with no pockets, ridiculous thought? When you had one in your trust, you just carried it, was all, and it was with you, and at some point in the next day or so after, he supposed downers felt a need to complete the job of carrying it, taking it to a grave, or to Old River, or to stand on some hilltop, nearest the sky, just to get on with their lives, get a meal, take a drink, do something practical.
He never got to find a place to let it go, that was the thing.
Satin gave it to him, laid the burden of it on him, saying… go to space, Fletcher.
He’d brought it here and in that sense he’d carry it forever if he couldn’t find it. He’d carry the burden of it all his life, if the people he’d been sent to, his own people, made a joke of it—if the ones who should accept him thought so little of him and all he’d grown up to value.
He raked the hair back, head in his hands, had, he thought to himself, a clearer understanding of Satin’s gesture and of his banishment than any behaviorist ever could give him.
Take this memory and go, Fetcher.
Be done with old things. Be practical. Feed yourself. Sleep. Let Melody go.
But that wasn’t all of it, even yet. It was Satin’s gift. It came from the one hisa who’d gone to space, and back again. It wasn’t just from any hisa. It was from the authority all hisa knew and all humans recognized. It was Satin’s gift and Base administration hadn’t dared say otherwise.
Then some stinking lowlife stole it, because an unwanted cousin came in as an inconvenience, one who had had some other life than the ship.
He didn’t think now that JR would have done it or countenanced it, but protect the party responsible and try to patch it all up? That was JR’s job, to keep the bad things quiet and keep the crew working. He figured the Old Man might not even have heard yet—if it was up to JR to report.
But no—he recalled now, piecing the details of pre-jump together: Madelaine knew. And if Madelaine knew, he’d bet the Old Man did know.
He didn’t think that the senior captain would approve such goings-on. In that light, it was well possible that JR had had to explain the situation.
A weight came on the bunk edge beside him. Jeremy. With an earnest, troubled look, itself an unspoken plea. He’d been seeing Downbelow, in his mind.
“The hell of it all is,” he said to Jeremy, “the stick was like a trust. You know what I mean? And if I get it back, I don’t know what I’d do with it… something Satin would want; but I don’t know.—But it’s for me to choose when and where to do that. Somebody else doing it… just tucking it away somewhere…” He was talking to a twelve-year-old, who, even with his irreverence, believed in things dim-witted twelve-year-olds believed, in magic, and a responsive universe, things somebody older could still in his heart believe, but never dare say aloud. “You know what that means? That they carry that stick. And that they’ve taken on responsibility for something they probably wouldn’t choose to carry, but I’ll tell you something about that stick. It won’t turn them loose. That thing’s an obligation, that’s what it is. And this ship won’t ever be quit of it if it doesn’t give it back to me.” He saw Jeremy’s face perfectly serious, absolutely believing. “And—no,” he said to Jeremy, “I’m not going to look for it. It’s going to come back to me or this ship will change and change into what somebody aboard wants it to be. I’m not going to play games with Chad about it. He’d better hope he finds it and gets it to me before the captain steps in to settle it, and I kind of think that’s the instruction the captain’s given JR. You understand me? If the ship doesn’t find it—it’s going to be the ship’s burden, and the ship’s responsibility, and as long as I live I won’t trust Chad Neihart. Maybe no one else will, either.”
“What if it’s not his fault?” Distress rang in Jeremy’s voice. “What if he, like, meant to give it back and something went wrong?”
“I said it. It’s something you carry until you can lay it down. Downer superstition, maybe. But it’s true. I can tell you, either I’m going to forgive Chad and his hangers-on, or I’m not. And I’m going to trust this ship or I’m not. That’s the kind of choice it is. You can pass that word where you think it needs to be passed. Things people do don’t altogether and forever get patched up, Jeremy, just because they’re sorry later. If Chad destroyed it… that says something it’ll take years for me to forget.”
There was a long and brittle silence.
“He’s not a bad guy,” Jeremy said faintly.
“Can I trust him after this?” he asked. Yes, Jeremy believed in miracles, and balances. And maybe it was callous to trade on it, but, dammit, he believed such things himself, and maybe belief could motivate one other human being in the crew. “Can I ever trust him? That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Jeremy didn’t have an answer for him, even with a long, long wait. Just: “I’ll put the word around. This shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t, Fletcher. We’re not like that.”
“I want to think so,” Fletcher said. It was, at least in that ideal world of these few moments’ duration, the truth. Then, because the ensuing silence grew uncomfortable: “Are they going to open rec, do you think, or not?”
“I think we’re supposed to sit in quarters. At least until they give us a clear. I’ll lend you my tapes.”
Fletcher got up and walked the six steps the cabin allowed before he fetched up in front of the mirrored sink alcove. He saw Jeremy standing, too, watching him with a distressed look on his face.
“Cards,” he said to Jeremy, foreseeing otherwise Jeremy worrying at the matter and himself pacing twelve steps up and back, up and back, for a long, long number of hours. It was a situation Jeremy knew how to endure, this being pent in quarters. He imagined the rule in force at other chancy moments, on Finity ’s exits into lonely star systems, and the too-wise twelve-year-old with nothing and no one to confide in.
Don’t leave . He remembered Jeremy pleading with him, in a way that, maybe hearing it when he was tranked, the way it did with tape-drugs, had settled into his consciousness with peculiar force. He’d had borrowed brothers all his life. He’d never had a foster brother as desperate, as lonely as Jeremy. There’d never been a rivalry between them. Now—he began to see Jeremy adopting his trick of leaving the coveralls collar undone, his trick of how he did a hitch in the belt—
Even the cuff turn-up. The obsession, when they’d been on liberty, with finding a sweater, a brown sweater, like his. God, it was laughable.
And enough to grab his heart, when he looked at the kid’s face, the eyes that searched his for every hint of advice, and, having just evoked it and brought it into the open, how did he ignore it?