Finity's End

Tomorrow, Bianca Velasquez had promised him, and Fletcher Neihart walked on down the path to the men’s dorms, past the monitors and into decontamination with a preoccupation so thorough the monitor had to ask him twice to sign in.

Chapter 2

The restaurant was old enough to have gone from glamour to a look of hard use and back to glamour again. Now it was beyond trends. Now it was a Pell Station tradition: Pell’s finest restaurant, with its lighted floor, its display of the very real stars beyond the tables, features both of which were its hallmark, copied elsewhere but never the same.

The new touch was the holo display that set those stars loose among the tables, a piece of engineering Elene Quen had seen with the overhead lights on. The sight destroyed the illusion, but the magic was such when the dark came back that the senses were always dazzled, no matter what the reasoning mind knew of the technology behind the illusion.

The waiters settled their distinguished party at the best table, reserved from the hour Finity’s End had returned her call. It was herself, her husband Damon Konstantin, Captain James Robert Neihart and his brother captains, Madison, Francie, and Alan. At this hour, the meal was breakfast for Francie and Alan, supper for James Robert and Madison; and with all four of Finity’s captains away from the ship, business that had the ill grace to hit Finity’s deck this close after docking would fall into the hands of Finity’s more junior staff.

Cocktails arrived, glasses clinked, faces marked by years of war broke into honest smiles. Rejuv and time-dilation stretched out a life, but years on rejuv left marks, too, on all of them. Captain James Robert Neihart in particular, a hundred forty-nine years old as stations counted time, was fortyish in build, but he was gray-haired and papery-ski

Seeing how the years had worn even on spacers, who played fast and loose with time, and counted the years on ships’ clocks separate from station reckonings, Elene looked anxiously at her husband Damon, nearly two decades after the War, and for a fleeting, fearful second she accounted of the fact that they were none of them immortal. The years passed faster for her and for Damon than they did for any spacer.

And she’d been a spacer herself until she’d elected what should have been a one-year shore tour with a man she’d loved, a spacer’s vacation on this shore of a sea of stars, a deliberate dynastic tie with the Konstantins of Pell.

Fateful decision, that. Her ship, Estelle , hadn’t survived its next run: Estelle had become a casualty of the War years and the Quen name, once distinguished among merchanters, had all but died in that disaster. No ship, no Name was left of all she’d been. And so, so much had conspired to bind her here ashore. She’d fought her War in the corridors of Pell.

And had she aged to their eyes? Had Damon, in the seven years since Finity’s End had last seen this port?

Were the captains of Finity’s End all thinking, looking at her, How sad, this last of the Quens growing old on station-time?

Last of the Quens would be the spacer view. But thanks to Damon she wasn’t the last of her Name. She’d borne two children, hers, and Damon’s, for two equally old, equally threatened lines. The Neiharts of Finity’s End might not yet have acknowledged the fact, but she’d more than given the heir of the Konstantins a son, Angelo Konstantin, stationer, born and bred in his father’s heritage: more relevant to any spacer’s hopes, she had a daughter, Alicia Quen. The Quens had no ship, but they had a succession.

Cocktails, and small talk. Catching up on the business of seven years with a thin, colorless: how have you been, how’s trade, what’s ever became of…?

They ordered supper, extravagantly. They were spacers in from the deep, cold Beyond, on the start of a two-week dock-side liberty… the first truly wide-open liberty since before the War. And that in itself was news that set the dock abuzz.

“What’s changed?” Damon echoed a question from Madison. “A lot of new facilities, a lot of improvements all up and down the dock. There’s a number of new sleepovers, a couple of quality accommodations—”

“The garden,” Elene said.

“The garden,” Damon said. “You’ll want to see that.”

“Garden?” Francie asked. To a spacer, a garden produced greens: you grew them aboard your own ship if you had leisure and room. A garden was a lot of lights and timed water.

Pell’s didn’t grow just lettuce and radishes.

“Take it from me,” Elene said. “You’ll be amazed.” But she had a curious feeling when she said it— listen to me, she thought. Here she was, praising Pell’s advantages to spacers, and she tested the queasy feeling she had as she caught the words coming out of her mouth.

The mirror every morning showed her a stranger enmeshed in station business, and lately her eyes looked back at her, bewildered and pained at the change in her own face. Could she, going back all those years, still choose this exile and want this rapid passage of years?

Supper arrived with the help of several waiters. “Very good,” James Robert said after his initial sampling, and the company agreed it was indeed a seven-year meal.

Rumors necessarily attended Finity’s dealings on the docks, more than Madison’s odd statement they were on a true liberty. Rumors preceding this di

What was certain was that before she ever docked at Pell, Finity’s End had made a large draw on the Alliance Bank, a draw of 74. 8 million against both principal and interest on the sum it had left on account for safekeeping in the War. Listing her latest port of departure as Sol 1, Earth, she’d logged goods for sale and made a modest trade of luxury goods on the futures market even before docking, a procedure legal here at Pell.

The market had reacted. If Finity came in selling cargo, then Finity was buying. Speculators had surmised from the instant she showed on the boards that, if she bought, she’d buy staples like flour and dry sugar, cheap at Pell, or lower mass cargo like pharmaceuticals, either one a reasonable kind of cargo for a ship in Finity’s kind of operation. Mallory of Norway , Pell’s defense against the pirates, could always use such commodities. Finity served Norway as supply; such commodities rose in price. But since most direct shippers, even the most patriotic and forgiving, would rather see their shipments actually reach the destination they intended instead of being diverted to some lonely port out on the fringes of civilization, the bids for hired-haul goods and mail stayed stable.

Then, confounding all estimations, Finity’s futures buy had turned out to be goods for the luxury market, goods like downer wine.

Curious. The immediate speculation was that Finity meant simply to play the futures market during a couple of weeks at dock, create a little uncertainty, then dump those items on the market at the last moment, having made a one- to two-week runup in price on speculation—not legal everywhere, but legal on Pell. The market was jittery. Some political analysts, taking appearances as fact, said that if Finity was buying high-quality cargo on her own tab, the pirate-chasing business must be near an end, as some forecast it must be—and needed to be. The expenditure of public funds for continued operations was a burden on the economy.