Finity's End

Tell him—the Old Man had begun, and found no words for what to tell Francesca’s heir, either.

So there was no information for him, just an urging to make the situation work… somehow… within the junior crew, where the Old Man didn’t, on long-standing principle, interfere. It was the future relationships of the members of that crew to each other that they were hammering out in their conduct of a set of duties and responsibilities all their own, the way Finity crew had done for more than a century. In a certain measure the Old Man couldn’t reach into that arrangement to settle and protect one special case without skewing every relationship, every reliance, every concept of personal honor and chain of command the junior crew maintained

Fletcher had to make a Fletcher-shaped place in the crew. There couldn’t be less. Or more. And it wasn’t the Old Man’s job to do it. He got that from the silence, when he knew that the Old Man had thought a very great deal about Fletcher before he came aboard.

“I’ll take care of him,” JR said, and received back only a sidelong look from the Old Man. When JR looked back in leaving, the Old Man was busy at his work again, clearly with no intention of asking or saying further in the matter.

Chapter 8

Morning mess hall was another collection of cousins, mostly seniors. Fifty people ate at a set time, on schedule—be hungry or skip it entirely, unless you had an excuse or a favor-point with the cook, so Jeremy said.

Fletcher ate at the same table with Jeremy and two other only moderately pubescent juniors, Vincent and Linda, both doubtless older in station years than they seemed, but mentally like the age they looked, they mostly jabbered about games or what they’d done on Pell docks, their speech larded with wild, decadent , and fancy , juvvie-buzz that seemed current among their small set. Mostly they ignored him, beyond the first exchange of names, turned shoulders to him without seeming to notice it in the heat of their conversational passion, and Jeremy’s eyes lit with the game-jabber, too.

Being ignored didn’t matter to Fletcher. He’d lain awake and tossed and turned in his bunk. Jeremy had lent him music tapes and those had gotten him through the dark hours.

But today he had to work with these kids who admittedly knew everything he didn’t; and he went with them when they’d had their breakfast—a decent breakfast, if he’d had the appetite, which he didn’t.

They all went, still jabbering about dinosaurs and hell levels, down to A14, and in the next few hours he learned all about laundry, how to sort, fold, stack, and keep a cheerful face right along with the two other juniors in the mess pool with him and Jeremy.

They’d drawn Laundry as their work for this five-day stint… but not every day. You didn’t get stuck on one kind of job as a junior. That was a relief to learn.

The junior-juniors, the ship’s youngest, the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds among whom he was unwillingly rated, drew such jobs relatively often. But so did the mid-level techs, from time to time. Juniors, so Jeremy said, rotated through Laundry to Minor Maintenance, to Scrub, to Galley, but there were jobs all over the ship that were rotating jobs, or part-time jobs, or jobs people did only on call.

Junior-juniors inevitably got the worst assignments, Fletcher keenly suspected. Laundry was everybody’s laundry; laundry for several hundred people who’d been out on liberty for two weeks was a lot of laundry, sonic and chemical cleaning for some tissue-fabrics, water-cleaning for the rough stuff, dry, fold, sort, and stack by rank.

It filled the time that otherwise would have required too much thinking, and it was a job where you did meet just about everybody, as people came to the counter for pickup of what they’d sent in at undock and to pick up small store items like soap refills for their showers, and sewing kits, and other odd notions.

Fletcher didn’t remember all the names by half—except Parton, who was blind, and who had one mechanical eye for ordinary things, Jeremy said, and the other one was a computer screen for cargo data or anything else Parton elected to receive. He didn’t think he’d forget Parton, who asked him to stand still a moment until his mechanical vision had registered a template of his face. He’d never met a blind person. But Jeremy said Parton’s left eye was sharp all the way into situations where the rest of them couldn’t see, and Parton didn’t always know whether there was light or not. His mechanical eye could spot you just the same.

Laundry pickup was a place to hear gossip—all the gossip in the ship, he supposed, if you kept your ears open. He picked up a certain amount of information on certain individuals even with no idea who he was hearing about, and he heard how various establishments on Pell didn’t meet the approval of the senior captain.

Vincent and Linda talked about various places you’d go in civvies , and restaurants you’d wear a patch to , meaning the ship’s patch, he guessed. Someone dropped by the counter and gave him his own, ten black circular ship’s patches, and small patches that said Finity’s End and Fletcher Neihart . It was, he supposed, belonging . He wasn’t sure how he felt about them.

Jeremy handed him a sewing kit from off the shelf of supplies. “You stitch ’em on,” Jeremy said. “The shiny-thread ones are for dress outfits, the plain-thread are for work gear. If they start looking tatty you get new ones or the watch officer has a fit. I’ll show you how, next watch.”

Labels got your laundry back to you, that was one use of them he saw. You also had a serial number. He was F48, right next to his name. He saw that in a roll of tags that was also in the packet the man had given him. Those were just for the laundry. It was a lot of sewing on tags.

Even in the underwear and the socks.

Labeled. Everything. Head to toe.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t like it. On Base he’d had to do his own laundry. Everybody did. You got your clothes back because you sensibly never dumped them in bins with everybody else’s. He’d never learned to sew anything in his life, but he figured he’d learn if he wanted his socks and underwear back.

Labeling right down to his socks as Finity crew, though, he’d have skipped that if he could. But counting they’d lose your underwear if you didn’t, it seemed a futile point on which to carry on a campaign of independence, or make what was a tolerable situation today harder than it was. Nobody had done anything unpleasant—or been too intrusively glad to see him. Vincent tried to engage him about where he’d been, holding up the ship and making them late on their schedule, but Jeremy told Vince to stop and let him alone and Vince, who came only up to mid-chest on him, took stock of him in a long look and shut up about it.

Jeremy wanted to talk about Downbelow when they got back to quarters after mess, and that was harder. They sat there stitching his labels into his socks, and Jeremy wanted to know what Downbelow looked like.

“Real pretty,” he said.

“There’s trees on Pell,” Jeremy said

“Yeah. The garden. The ones on Downbelow are prettier.” He jabbed his finger with the needle, painfully so. Sucked on it. He and Jeremy sat on their respective bunks, with a stack of his entire new wardrobe and all the clothes he’d brought with him plus a pile of the clothes he’d gotten dirty so far, and he wasn’t sorry to have the help doing it.

He daydreamed for an instant about puffer-ball gold and pollen skeining down Old River, beneath branches heavy with spring leaves. Rain on the water.