Finity's End

The fact was, Fletcher Neihart was trying to stand off the whole Alliance court system and her authority simultaneously, and he was doing a pretty good job of it—because a starship couldn’t sit at dock extra days. Finity couldn’t wait. It had schedules, obligations, operations, God knew , critical operations, with desperate issues at stake. Fletcher was a Neihart. And he was holding off the lot of them. Like mother, like son, and like the legendary man whose name he carried.

And if Nu

Hell of a thing for the kid—who right now was wandering a Downbelow woods on three days worth of cylinders, in a state of mind she could more accurately imagine than any court could. She knew what it was to be ripped loose from everything and set adrift in a world that was never going to make gut-level sense.

But she hadn’t done wrong in signing the order or anything else she’d arranged with the Neiharts of Finity’s End . She was right—ethically, morally, historically right. Leave things to Damon’s precious law, and the whole human race could go down the chute. They’d come near enough in the last phase of the War: nobody had thrown a planet-buster, but they’d lost a station. They’d nearly lost two. They could lose a planet the next time the human race went to war. In order to prevent that happening, she had no illusions. Her enemies claimed she wanted to destroy Union. That was so. But practically she knew she couldn’t do that. In plain diplomatic reality, the Merchanters’ Alliance had to keep the tight balance of power between themselves and Union, and they had to keep it balanced no matter how frightening and uncomfortable the attempts of Mazian to destabilize the Alliance and rebuild his power base, no matter the near-time choices in terms of her political future, even of her own determination to save the Quen name—let alone one kid’s personal wishes about his domicile.

Fight the microbattles, the ones on paper, on conference tables, sometimes in public posturings—so they never, ever had to fight another hot war or—the alternative—lose what was human by acquiescing to Union’s high-speed expansionism.

Instant populations. Cultures pla

Time was what they had to gain. They’d faced, in Azov, in Emory, a faceless enemy. An alienated humanity Earth had alienated over centuries. An alienated humanity that didn’t operate by the same rules. The very history and process Damon venerated didn’t work out there in the Beyond.

The Fletcher Neiharts of the universe, along with her longtime problem child, were precious, every one of them. Her throwaway problem couldn’t live under Pell’s law… and now that she devoted half an hour’s sustained consideration to the boy as he’d grown to be, she knew why he’d been inconvenient all his life—that he couldn’t thrive in a sealed bubble of a never-changing, zero-growth world where every decision was for the status quo. He couldn’t live in it unless and until the system crushed him—and she had never let it do that. The mentalities to respond to the problems Cyteen posed the rest of humanity couldn’t come out of Pell. Neither, for what she could see, could that response come out of Earth, whose distance- and culture-blinded dealings had driven Cyteen to become the alien culture it was in the first place.

She had such a narrow, narrow window in which to give a civilization-saving shove at the clockwork of the system—in things gone catastrophically wrong between Earth and its colonies in the earliest days of Earth’s expansion outward. The timeliness that had brought her Finity’s End in its mission to reconcile merchanters and Union was the same timeliness that demanded the Alliance finally wake up to the economic challenge Union posed. It was the pendulum-swing of the Company Wars: they’d settled the last War, they’d banded together and shoved hard at the system to get it to react in one way; now the reactionary swing was coming back at them, the people with the simplistic solutions, and they had to stand fast and keep the pendulum from swinging into aggressive extremism on one hand and self-blinded isolationism on the other.

She hadn’t forever to hold power on Pell: a new election could depose her inside a month. People too young to have fought the War were rabble-rousing, stirring forces to oppose her tenure, special interests, all boiling to the top.

And they might topple her from the slightly irregular power she held if she’d just killed a kid. James Robert Neihart hadn’t forever to live in command of Finity’s End . He was pushing a century and a half, time-dilated and on rejuv. Mallory’s very existence was at risk every time she stalked the enemy, and she never ceased.

At least one set of hands on the helm of state were bound to change in twenty years. That was a given, and God help their successors. Madison, James Robert’s successor, was a capable man. He just wasn’t James Robert, and his word didn’t carry the Old Man’s cachet with other merchanters.

The whole delicate structure tottered. Time slowed. Finity’s End would have to wait on a teenaged boy to come to his senses… or lose him, to its public embarrassment, and her damnation, as things were ru

And damn him, damn the kid

They lost him, the word floated through the meetings of Finity perso

All the Old Man’s hopes, he thought. To start this voyage by finally losing Fletcher…

What you want to happen, the saying went… What you want to happen is your responsibility, too. He’d heard that dictum at notable points in his life, and he wasn’t sure how he felt right now.

Guilty, as if he’d gotten a reprieve, maybe. As if the entire next generation of Neiharts had escaped dealing with a problem it could ill afford.

I will not lie. I will not cheat. I will not steal. I will never dishonor my Name or my ship…

That pretty well covered anything a junior could get into. And as almost not a junior, and in charge of the rest of the younger crew, he was responsible, ultimately responsible for the others, not only for their physical safety, but for their mental focus. If there was a moral failure in his command, it was his moral failure. If there was something the ship had failed to do, that attached to the ship’s honor, the dishonor belonged to all of them, but in a major way, to him personally.

The ship as a whole had all along failed Fletcher. His mother individually and categorically had failed him.

And what was the woman’s sin? A body that had happened to carry another Neihart life, at a time when the ship hadn’t any choice but put her ashore, because to fail the call Finity’s End had at the time hadn’t been morally possible. Finity’s End had always been the ship to lead, the ship that would lead when others didn’t know how or where to lead; and she’d had both the firepower and the engines to secure merchanter rights on the day that firepower became important, when some ship had had to follow Norway to Earth.