Finity's End

Old River was both friend and enemy, god and devil to the hisa, stronger than human courts or decrees or all the forces the Base could bring to bear. It might kill him, but he didn’t care. He knew he was stupid for ru

And he didn’t want to be there to hear it. Yes, they’d have the people out searching. But slower than they’d be out searching, under other circumstances. Their masks were missing cylinders. They’d have to fill out all that paperwork, do all those reports. It gave him a strange, light-headed satisfaction. Die? They wouldn’t. Be inconvenienced? A lot. He felt a light-headedness not from shortness of air, but from a single moment of victory he knew he’d pay for.

He’d worked all his life to get here, and in the end, it wasn’t lawyers that took him away, it was himself, because he’d blown it—and chosen to blow it—at least he’d chosen it. Stealing those cylinders and ru

Lightning flashed and thunder cracked right above his head, above the tops of the trees. His heart jumped and his knees wobbled with the adrenaline rush it gave him. A planet’s surface where electricity flew around like a loose power line, that was a dangerous thing: water coursed beside the path, not tame Old River any longer, but a rough-surfaced flood, Old River in one of his killing moods.

Old River he mad, the downers would say.

Old River he catch you foot, drag you down. Melody had warned him of the treachery of soft banks among the very first things she’d ever warned him when he came to the planet. Old River was the devil who always lurked to take the unwary, and Great Sun was the god—if downers had a religion. Which human experts argued about in stupid technicalities.

You couldn’t ask the downers that. They said if you asked you’d give them ideas and it might pervert the whole course of downer development, turning it toward something human.

So what were the domes, fools? Puffer-balls? Nature falling from the sky? They didn’t know about Old River. They recorded downer beliefs about Old River, they knew the words, but Old River wouldn’t cover for them, wouldn’t protect them, wouldn’t take care of them, father and devil both.

He’d told Bianca—he’d told Bianca—his thoughts were tumbling wild as the water near his foot—to say that they were late because he’d gone back to see about the saw. Wasn’t that what they’d agreed to say? That was what she’d have said, if they went to her. As they would. He’d thought through so many variations on the lie he’d confused himself.

But that was it, wasn’t it? She was supposed to say that, if they questioned her about being late. So he couldn’t use the saw excuse.

He could say, well, he wasn’t sure where he’d put the saw, and he remembered later putting it somewhere else and he wanted to find it—

The hell, after that interview with Nu

He could still make a case for himself, he could say he’d just been that shaken and wanted to keep his record clear in case he and Bianca had just missed finding it out here, but, damn, nobody was going to believe that, and he was never going to get reassigned down to the Base, never again. He’d blown all the trust, all the credit he had for common sense…

His foot went in. Cold water pressed the one-way fabric to his leg, and, sweat-osmosed, a trickle got through and into his boot before, one hand holding a branch, the other braced against the moss, he hauled himself out and up to squat on the bank.

Close. Soberingly close. Adrenaline had spiked. It fell, now, leaving tremors, leaving a side aching and lungs burning with effort.

He knew he’d be smarter to go back on his own, and say—just say he was spooked, and he’d been a fool, but he’d come back on his own, hadn’t he?

If he was Marshall Willett, he’d get a second chance, no problem. Mama and papa would buy it for him, pull strings, use up favor-points, and Marshall would get one more chance. But he was Fletcher Neihart, a spacer-brat, son of no one, and he’d used up all his second chances just surviving his mother’s inheritance.

Disaster. The kid had run. Spooked. Elene Quen had the report on her desk, a personal fax from Nu

Damon had been upset with what she’d done in getting the court order.

Not as upset as she’d expected about the fact of her trading her influence on Pell for Finity ’s support: that was a merchanter way of doing business and it regarded merchanter relations. It was diplomacy, in which diplomats used every card they had to use and did it in secrecy.

But about what she’d traded, about interference with the Children’s Court, he’d been unexpectedly upset—a distress about the boy’s case which she hadn’t predicted, and still, after all these years on station, didn’t understand. Damon was a lawyer, before anything, and believed in processes of law as important for their own sake, a viewpoint she flatly didn’t share in her heart of hearts—only took his advice, generally, when she crossed from port law, which she did understand, into station law, which she detested on principle. Perhaps that was the heart and soul of what was at issue.

The fact that Finity had a right to the boy? In Damon’s eyes, that might be disputable. In her eyes, that was absolute. That the station court had repeatedly held against that right? In her mind, that was an outrage. Not her outrage, because it wasn’t her ship— she ain’t my ship, she ain’t my fight was the rule on dockside—but now a deal had set her firmly on Finity ’s side in the matter.

Process for its own sake? Importance of the process? The law might be Damon’s life. But it was an ornament, a baroquerie of station life. In space it just might kill you.

Maybe, now, by the facts in this report, she’d just lost a kid, following the station’s damned processes . A letter from the boy’s independent lawyers, acting in his interest , had gotten to Nu

Hell if. Fletcher Neihart might have lived on a station, but he hadn’t been brought up by Nu

Now, enterprising lad, he’d stolen a bunch of cylinders, each one about eight hours of oxygen—if you didn’t push it. Three, or less, if you pushed it hard. And a scared, mad kid didn’t know moderation. The cylinders weren’t fresh ones, either. They added up the total use-hours from work records on the people he’d stolen them from and came up with three days if he was pushing it.

The kid was trying to wait till Finity had left port, was what he was doing: he was doing things that weren’t totally bright on an adult level but that made perfect sense to a kid. She’d brought up two of her own, she knew station-born sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from personal and recent experience, and right now the desire to shake the runaway till his teeth rattled mingled with the fear that spacer directness and stationer legality together might have pushed Francesca’s kid into deeper danger than his limited experience could comprehend.