Finity's End

No. It had been no suicide attempt, regardless of the speculation in the station news. Fletcher simply had tried to lie low until schedule forced them to abandon him again, and hell if the Old Man was likely to give him up on that basis. It had come down to a test of patience, an incident now with an unwanted publicity that could harm Quen at the very least

He found it significant that the Old Man hadn’t even asked to see the nephew on whom they’d spent such effort. It was a fair guess it was because the Old Man’s temper was still not back from hyperbolic orbit.

That meant, in the Old Man’s official silence toward young Fletcher, the whole business of settling Fletcher in was definitively his problem.

His problem, his unit, his command, and his job to fix.

“So what do you think?” Bucklin stopped beside him to ask as he stood thinking on the Fletcher problem.

Bucklin had a temper where it came to junior misbehaviors; and he already knew Bucklin was a

The last kid. The very last until one of the women got Finity another youngest, and until stationside encounters began to fill the long-darkened kids’ loft: that also was part of the change in the Rules. Real liberties. Unguarded encounters. Finity ’s women were going off precautions, and some talked excitedly, even teary-eyed, about babies—the scariest and most irrevocable change in the Rules, the one that, at moments, argued that the Rules change was permanent.

But the need for children born was also absolute. The ship had to, at whatever risk, repopulate itself.

What do you think ? Bucklin asked. What he thought was tangled with yesterday and bitter losses.

“Just figuring,” JR said. “Ignore the face. The guy’s seventeen. Just keep telling yourself those are station-years. The Old Man said it. Out of all those years, he’s all the replacement we’ve got. So here we are.”

Chapter 7

Number A26. At least they believed in posting numbers inside the ship. Fletcher found the door of his quarters and elbowed the latch. It wasn’t locked. And it slid open on a closet of a room with two bunks, barely enough room between them for a person to stand up. A couple of lockers at the end. God, it was a closet . And two bunks? He had to share this hole? With one of them ?

He wasn’t happy. But it was a place, and until now he’d had none. He walked in and the door shut the moment he cleared it. He stood there, appalled and this time, yes, he tested it out, angry . He wanted to throw things. But there wasn’t a single item available except the duffle he’d brought, no character to the place, just—nothing. Cream and green walls, lockers that filled every wall-space above the mattresses and bed frames. Cream-colored blankets secured with safety belts. That promised security, didn’t it?

A check of the lighted panel at the end of the room, which looked to fold back, showed a toilet and a shower compartment, a mirror, a sink, a small cabinet. The place was depressingly claustrophobic. He checked the lockers out, found the first right-hand one full of somebody’s stuff—bad news, that was—and slammed it shut, tried the left-hand side and found it empty, presumably for the clothes he’d brought.

There was more storage under the bunk, latched drawers that pulled out. He unpacked his duffle and stowed his dock-side clothes, his underwear, his personal stuff, where he figured he had license to put them.

Most carefully, he unwrapped what he really wanted to put away safely, the most precious thing—the hisa stick he’d wrapped in layers of his clothes.

The stick that customs hadn’t found. That the authorities on Downbelow hadn’t confiscated. That everything so far had conspired to let him keep. It was hisa work. It was a hisa gift.

It was illegal to touch, let alone to have and to take off-planet. But hisa bestowed them on special occasions—deaths, births, arrivals. And partings.

He smoothed the cords that tied the dangling feathers. The wood—real wood—was valuable in itself. But far more so was the carving, the cord bindings, the native feathers—only a very, very few such items ever left Downbelow, and the government watched over those with jealous protection from exploitation of the species, their skills, their beliefs.

But this particular one was his. He’d told his rescuers how he’d gotten it, and where he’d gotten it, and wouldn’t turn it loose. The planetary studies researchers had grilled him for hours on it, and he’d thought they might try to take it—but they’d only asked to photograph it, and put it through decon, and gave it back after that, and let him take it with him. He’d expected customs would confiscate it and maybe arrest him for trying to smuggle it out, a hope he actually entertained, thinking that maybe a snafu like that would get him snagged in the gears of justice again and maybe keep him off the ship—but Quen’s intervention had meant he hadn’t even had to deal with customs.

So one obstacle after another had fallen down, maybe Quen’s doing all along, and by now he supposed it really was his. And it was all he’d managed to take away that meant anything to him.

It meant all the hard things. It meant lessons Melody had tried to teach him—and failed.

It meant parting from where he’d been. It meant a journey. It meant eyes watching the clouded heavens. It meant faith, and faithfulness.

Maybe a human who was born to space couldn’t have the faith hisa had in Great Sun. Maybe he couldn’t believe that Great Sun was anything but what they said in his education, a nuclear furnace. Maybe Great Sun wasn’t a god, maybe there was no god, or whatever hisa thought or expected when they looked to the sky. But Melody was so sure that Great Sun would take care of his children, that Great Sun would always come back, that the dark never lasted…

The dark never lasted.

For him it would. Forces he couldn’t control had shoved him out where the dark went on forever, where even Melody’s Great Sun couldn’t walk far enough or shine brightly enough. That was where he was now.

But this stick he touched had lived, once. These feathers had flown in the fierce winds, once. Old River had smoothed these stones. All these things, Great Sun had made. And they were real in his hand, and he could remember, when he felt them, what the cloud-wrapped world felt like. They were his parting-gift.

Hisa put such sticks on the graves of the dead, human and hisa. They put them near the Watcher-statues. And when the researchers asked, bluntly, why, the hisa didn’t have the words to say.

But he knew. He knew. It was when you went away. It reminded you. It was a memory. It was the River and Great Sun, it was weather and wind. It was all those things that he’d almost touched, that the clean-suit only let him imagine touching without a barrier. It was waking up to a sunrise, and watching the world wake up. It was sleeping in the dark with no electric lights and waiting for Great Sun to find his child again— knowing that Great Sun would come for him the way Melody had come in the darkest hour of his childhood, when he was hiding from all the crazed authorities.