Finity's End

“Good-bye,” Quen told him. “Good luck. See you.” She didn’t offer her hand. Didn’t give him a chance to refuse it. “You go on up, give your passport to the duty officer. Follow instructions. You’re out of our territory from the time you cross that line.—Matter of fact, this is the ship that won that particular point of law as a part of the constitution. That was what the whole War meant. Welcome to the future.”

Screw you and your War, was what he thought as hydraulics wheezed and gasped around the gate, and the huge gantry moved above him, like some threatening dragon making little of anything on human scale. He had nothing to back up any reply to Quen. He owned no dignity but silence and to do what she’d said, go ahead and go aboard. So he left her standing and, passport in hand, took that long, spooky walk, up that ramp and into a cold, lung-hurting tu

He was aware there was black space and hard vacuum out there, beyond that yellow ribbing. Walking down the tu

Hell if he was going to walk back down and ask the Stationmaster which one to push. Damn ships didn’t ever label anything. The station hadn’t labeled anything until the last few years they finally put the address signs up, because they’d been invaded once and didn’t want to give the enemy any help.

He hated the War, and here he was, sucked into a place like a step backward into a hostile time, right back into the gray, grim poverty of the War years. He resented it on that score, too.

And since nobody did him the courtesy of advising Finity he was here, he could stand here freezing in the bitter cold, or he could punch a button and hope the top one was it and not the disco

The airlock opened without his touching it.

So someone had told them he was here.

But no one was in the airlock to meet him.

He’d never seen a starship’s airlock up close, except in the vids, and it was unexpectedly large, a barren chamber with lockers and readouts he didn’t understand. He walked in and the door hissed shut. Heavily. He was in a spaceship. Swallowed alive.

Not a citizen of Pell. He never had been. They’d never let him have more than resident status and a travel visa. He knew all the ins and outs of that legality. Entitled to be educated but not to vote. Entitled to be drafted but not to hold a command. Entitled to be employed but not tenured.

Now after all his struggle to avoid it, he’d achieved a citizenship. He became aware he had a citizen’s passport in the hand that held the duffle strings, and this was where he was born to be.

But Quen hinted that, too, could change.

Lie. They all lied.

The i

A door to the right was open. He walked that far, his boots making a lot of metal racket, but a woman came out and met him. So did another woman, and a man.

“Fletcher, is it?” the woman said, and put out a hand.

So, hell, what did he do? He purposely misunderstood and handed her the passport

“Welcome aboard,” she said without a flicker, and pocketed it without looking at it. “Not much time. I’m Frieda N. This is Mary B. And Wes. There’s only one. There’s no other Fletcher, either. You’re just Fletcher.”

He’d never been anything else. Frieda N. held out her hand a second time, and he took it, finding himself lost in the information flow, wondering if she was related, how she was related and how any of these people were related to his mother. His mother had talked about her mother. He had a grandmother. He didn’t know whether she was still alive or not, but spacers lived long lives, and stationers aged faster. He supposed she might be here.

For the first time it came to him… there was something personal about these people who assumed they owned him. These people who’d owned his mother. And left her.

Others came into the hall. “This is your cousin June, Com 3. And Jake. Jake’s chief bioneer, lower deck Ops.”

June was an older woman, with a dry, firm handshake, and communications didn’t seem to add up to anybody he needed to deal with. Jake had a thin face, a sober face, and looked like a cop he knew: not u

Then another man came in, in the kind of waistlength, ribbed-cuff jacket spacers wore over their coveralls where they were working near the cold side of the docks. Silver-haired. A lot of stripes on the sleeve.

“Fletcher,” Jake said, “this is Madison, second captain.”

He’d already spotted authority, and took the hand when it was offered him, feeling overwhelmed, wobbly in the knees, wobbly in his mental state, knowing he was going to want to settle how to deal with these people, but all his scenarios of defiance had evaporated, in Quen’s little advisement, her outright bribe for good behavior.

Not smart at least to screw things up from the start. Start friendly, start sane, try , one more stupid time, to make the good impression with one more damned family—his own family.

“Welcome aboard.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and Finity ’s second captain held onto his hand, a cold-chilled, dry clasp. He felt trapped for good and certain. I don’t know you people, he wanted to shout. I don’t give a damn. And here he was doing the safe, the sensible thing, as somebody else arrived to take his hand. It was a cousin named Pete, a cargo officer, nobody, in his book. It was one more introduction, and he wanted just to escape to somewhere private and shut the door.

“Welcome in, Fletcher.” Pete was a dark-haired man with a trace of gray in a beard unusual on dockside—you only saw them on spacers; and it was worth a stare; he was aware he was staring, losing his focus, while strangers’ hands patted his shoulders, welcomed him in a chaos of names and emotions.

“Pete,” Jake said, “you want to show Fletcher to the safe room?”

“Yeah, sure,” Pete said, and indicated the duffle. “That’s all the baggage you brought? I’ll stow it for you.”

“Nossir,” he said, and held onto it. Desperately. “No.”

Pete relented. Jake said, “Get Warren to make him up a patch set soon as we leave dock.—What’s your height, son? Height and weight, Pell Standard. Six feet?”

“About. Eighty-five kilos.”

“Baggage weight?”

He knew what he’d come downworld with. What they let you bring. “Twenty-two.”

“Got it.” And with no more fuss and no more word about the duffle Pete took him out to the corridor and to another room at the next cross-corridor, no simple room, but a vast curved chamber, a VR theater, he thought, with railings where everybody stood. Old people, younger ones. A theater full of relatives, hundreds of them, all staring in sudden quiet in their conversations. “This is Fletcher,” Pete called out, and someone cheered. “He’s late, but he’s here!” Pete said. Others called out hellos and welcome aboard, and, grotesquely enough, applauded.