Hands tugged at the side of his mask. His head was pounding. Then someone had shoved what must be a whole new cylinder in, and air started getting to him.
“It’s all right, kid,” a woman’s voice said. “Just keep that mask on tight. We’ll get you back.”
The woman got him halfway up the slope. A man showed up and lifted, and he finally got his feet under him.
He walked, his legs hurting. He hung on one and the other of his rescuers for the hard parts, and drew larger and larger breaths, his head throbbing from the strain he’d put on his body.
They got him down to a trail, and then someone had a litter and they carried him. He lay on it feeling alternately that he was going to tumble off and that he was turning over backwards, while Great Sun was a sullen glow through gray clouds and the rain that sheeted his mask. It was hard going and his rescuers didn’t talk to him. Breathing was hard enough, and he figured they’d have nothing pleasant to say.
By evening they’d reached the Base trail and he realized muzzily he must have been asleep, because he didn’t remember all of the trip or the turn toward the Base.
Somebody waked him up now and again to see that he was breathing all right, and he had two cylinders, now, both functioning, so breathing was a great deal easier, better than he’d been able to rely on for the days he’d been out.
Satin didn’t want him. Melody didn’t want him…
The bottom dropped out of the universe. He was falling. Falling into the water. He fought it.
Second pitch. It was V-dump. He wasn’t on Old River’s banks. He wasn’t suffocating. He was on a ship, a million—million klicks from any world, even from any respectable star.
His ship was slowing down, way down, to match up with a target star. They were all right.
No enemies. They’d have heard if there’d been enemies.
Finity’s End was solidly back in the universe again, moving with the stars and their substance.
He opened his eyes. Lay there, fumbled open a nutri-pack and sucked it down, aware of Jeremy rummaging after one.
“You all right?” he asked Jeremy.
“Yeah, fine.”
He saw Jeremy had gotten his own packet open. The intercom gave an all-clear and told them their schedule. They had two hours to clean up, eat, and get back underway.
He lay there, thinking of the gray sky spinning slowly around above the treetops. Of rain on the mask. Of the irreproducible sound of thunder on the hills.
The room smelled like somebody’s old shoes. And two nutri-packs down, he found the energy to unbelt and sit up.
“Shower,” he said to the kid, as Jeremy stirred out of his bunk. “Or I get it.”
“You can have it if you want,” Jeremy said.
“No, priority to you.” His stomach hadn’t quite caught up. He had an ache in his shoulders. Another in his heart. “Three hours at this jump-point. We’ll both make it.”
“Yeah, we’re going to make it,” Jeremy said, and hauled his skinny body out of the bunk. “No stinking Mazianni at the point, we’re going to get to Esperance and the Old Man’s going to be happy and we’ll be fine.”
“Sounds good to me,” he said, and while Jeremy went to the shower, he got up, self-disgusted, out of a bed that wanted changing, in clothes that wanted washing. He dragged one change of clothes out of the drawer, wished he had a change of sheets. He got out one of the chemical wipes and wiped his face and hands. It smelled sharp, and clean.
He could remember the stale smell of the mask flinging his own breath back at him. He could remember the fever chill of the earth, and the uneven way his legs had worked on the way home.
And Satin’s stick in his hand. He’d refused to let go of it. He’d said, “Satin gave it to me,” when the rescuers questioned him, and that name had shaken them, as if he’d claimed to have seen God.
He was here. He was safe.
He’d clung to the stick during that rescue without the remotest notion what to do with it, or what he was supposed to do.
Satin, in that meeting, had seen further into his future than he could imagine. She’d been in space. She knew where she sent him.
But he hadn’t known.
He sat on the edge of his bunk, listening to the intercom tell them further details, where they were, how fast they were going, numbers in terms he didn’t remotely understand.
But he was safe. He’d come that close to dying, and he sat here hurtling along in chancy space and telling himself he was very, very lucky; and, yes, beyond a doubt in his mind, now, Satin had sent him here. Satin, who’d known the Old Man.
He wondered if Satin had had the faintest idea he was a Neihart, or why he was on her world, when she’d sent him into space. He’d never from his earliest youth believed that downers were as ignorant as researchers kept trying to say they were. But he’d never attributed mystical powers to them: he was a stationer, too hard-headed for that—most of the time.
But underestimate them? In his mind, the researchers often did.
And in his dream and in his memory Satin had known his name.
Satin had known all about him.
She’d not gotten that from the sky. Sun hadn’t whispered it to her. She’d talked to Melody and Patch.
And knowing everything hisa could remotely know about him, she’d sent him… not to the station. To his ship. Had she known Finity was in port? Had she known even that, Satin, sitting among the Watcher-stones, to which all information flowed, on quick downer feet?
Satin, who perhaps this moment was sitting, looking up at a clouded sky, and, in the manner of an old, old downer, dreaming her peace, her new heavens, into being.
She’d known. Yes, she’d known. As the Old Man of Finity’s End had known—things he’d never imagined as the condition of his universe.
“All right, cousins,” the intercom said. “You can eat what you stowed before jump or you can venture out for a stretch. Both mess halls will be in service in ten minutes, so it’s fruit bars and nutri-packs solo or it’s one of those hurry-up dinners which your bridge crew will be very grateful to receive. Remember, there is still no laundry.”
Jeremy came out of the shower smelling of soap and bringing a puff of steam with him. It was far better air now. The fans were making a difference.
Downbelow slipped away in the immediacy of clean water and warmth and soap. Fletcher stripped clothes and went, chased through his mind by images of woods and water, the memory of air that wouldn’t come, but the shower was safe and clean and Jeremy was his talisman against nightmares and loss.
“Sir?” JR found the Old Man’s cabin dimly lighted as he brought the tray in, heard the noise of the shower, in the separate full bath Finity’s senior crew enjoyed. He ordered the lights up, set the meal in the dining alcove, and took the moment to make the stripped bed with the sheets set by and waiting.
The Old Man did such things himself. The senior-juniors habitually ran errands, down to laundry, down to the med station, and back, for all the bridge crew, whose time was more valuable to the ship; but the senior crew usually did their own bed-making and food-getting if they were at all free to do so.
In the same way the Old Man rarely ordered a meal in his quarters. He was always fast on the recovery, always in his office before the galley could get that organized.
Not this time. Not with the stress of double-jumping in and short sleep throughout their stay at Voyager. He felt the strain himself, in aches and pains. Mineral depletion. Jeff had probably dumped supplement in the fruit juice, as much as wouldn’t hit the gut like a body blow.