He undressed, settled into a truly luxurious bed, ordered the automated lights to dark, and shut his eyes.
Tomorrow, maybe.
Or maybe they’d work quietly, behind the scenes, and come down on that shop with some sort of warrant before they left. It was disappointing to kids, who believed in justice and instant results, two mutually exclusive things, as the Rules of the Universe usually operated, and he didn’t want them to lose their natural expectation of justice somehow working… but it wasn’t a reasonable hope in light of everything else that was going on.
Other Finity staff were tired, too. And if they’d hit the pillows the way he had, the deep dark was just too easy to fall into.
Dark and then the gray of hisa cloud.
The view along Old River’s shores didn’t change. But Old River changed by the instant.
So did he, standing on that bank and watching the wind in the leaves. He and Old River both changed. So did the wind. And leaves fell and leaves grew and trees lived and died. The view wasn’t the same. It just looked that way. And the young man who stood there, like the river that flowed past the banks, wasn’t the same. He just looked that way.
He wanted Satin to know he’d tried. He wanted to know whether Melody and Patch were having a baby… and just wondering that, he saw a darkness in the v of a fallen log and the hill above him, a dark place, a comfortable place, for downers.
He knew who lived there. It was a dream, he knew it was a dream, and he knew that its facts were suspect as the instantaneity of its scene-changes, but he was relatively sure what he saw, and who he knew was there.
In this dream it was months and months since he’d left. Half a year. And in the swift hurtling of worlds around stars and stars around the heart of the galaxy and galaxies through the universe… a certain time had passed, in the microcosm of that living world. He had fallen out of time, but Melody and Patch lived to a planet’s turning and the more and less of Old River’s flowing, and the lights and darks of the clouds above. For them, time moved faster, and a baby was growing, a new baby that wasn’t him.
The young man stood on the bank… in the curious way of the dream he thought of himself objectively, the visitor from the stars, timeless, skipping forward or backward.
He stood in one blink, this young man, in the shabby cheap apartment of his infancy, seeing the woman dead in the rumpled sheets, and aching because he’d known her so little.
He stood watching a gang of young boys swagger along Pell docks, and was both sorry for them and dismayed. They were such fools, and thought they knew the shape of the universe.
He stood in the deep tunnels of Pell, and watched downers move through that dark, muffled against the cold and carrying lights that made them look like isolate stars.
He stood beside the fields on Downbelow, and looked for Bianca among the workers, but couldn’t find her. The young man walked from place to place, and saw others he knew… stood in the corner of Nunn’s office, and watched the man work… visited the mess hall, and watched the young men and women come and go. But the one face eluded him.
He needed to find her. He didn’t know quite why, but it was urgent, and he apprehended some danger. He tried to think where to search next, and went from place to place, past people who didn’t care, and downers bent on games.
A storm was coming. But that wasn’t the danger. The danger was shapeless, and had an urgency he couldn’t identify.
“Fletcher!”
He jumped, leaden, and tangled in sheets and dark.
“Fletcher!”
It was Vince’s voice. It was Vince’s shadow at his bedside, scarcely visible against the faint glow of the ceiling.
He wasn’t on Downbelow. Bianca wasn’t lost. He was in the dark of a sleepover at the end of the space lanes and a kid he was watching had an emergency.
“Fletcher, Jeremy’s gone.”
Where would Jeremy go? He was still half asleep, and confused about where he was… he’d been jolted out of a vivid dream of loss and searching, and it wasn’t Bianca missing, it was Jeremy, and it was real.
Esperance. The Xanadu.
“System. Lights on.”
Light began, a soft flare of color in the ceiling.
“When?” he asked Vince.
“I don’t know. I just woke up and it’s a big bed and he wasn’t there.”
The light was brighter by the moment, washing down the walls like veils of pink and eye-tricking gold.
Fletcher rolled to the edge of the bed, trying to think, and thinking about Esperance, and game parlors and kids sneaking downstairs in the sleepover for hot chocolate and breakfast…
But it was Esperance. And there was more danger here than drunken Belizers.
“If he’s gone after breakfast I’ll skin him. Is Linda awake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wake her. Everybody get dressed. If he’s downstairs I’ll lock him in quarters when I catch him. God knows how he got past the watch.” Docks outside began to form itself in his mind’s eye. Jeremy’s discontent. Meetings among the captains. Jeremy going out to find an officer who could get something in motion…
… regarding the hisa stick. The shop, and the man who ran it.
It wasn’t just a kid skipping down to get breakfast or play vid games. Jeremy might have gone back to the ship, maybe to contact somebody through ops, to try to talk to an officer high enough to authorize something.
He put on clothes as fast as he could find them in the gathering light. He heard the kids in the next room, heard Linda invite Vince to get out so she could dress. She was hurrying.
Fletcher shoved on his boots. The room lights were up to half, now, in their aurora-like dawn, but the light from the common hall flared bright and white as Vince entered the bath.
Vince came out again. Instantly. “Fletcher, you got to come look!”
To the bathroom? He didn’t ask. He went.
In filmy white soap, written across the mirror:
For the honor of the ship.
Chapter 26
The Old Man was still drinking coffee, but the captains of Celestial and Rose were both in agreement about the agreement to cut Mazian’s suppliers out and more than a little high on enthusiasm and a new-found friendship. Other captains, more sober, were sitting at tables, arguing the fine details, no few of them clustered about the Old Man.
And the goings on of Boreale and Champlain were a major interest. Topics like black market and Mazian always pricked ears up, most of the ships represented in the group quite honestly willing to deal with any paying market, but not in favor of behavior that went across the unspoken codes of conduct. There was debate about Champlain’s conduct. There was distrust of Boreale’s rigging as a warship conducting trade; there was uneasy, probing converse between ships operating under Union registry and ships operating as Alliance traders, heads together at small tables in the bar. The private dining room had grown too crowded for anyone to sit except the Old Man and his constantly changing, high-rank table companions.
Deals were being cut. The dock safety office had made one visit to be sure the party was orderly: the establishment had exceeded occupancy limits, but nobody wanted to deal with currently good-humored ship’s officers.
Deals not only regarding the Alliance treaty. There were deals being done for route-timing, two and three ships agreeing what they’d carry and when, to assure better prices for their goods. There were a couple of younger officers casting looks at each other that said they might end up sleeping-over.
JR thought by now he’d talked to every individual in the room, and rehearsed his information and answered questions multiple times for each. He’d gone light on the wine. He’d eaten bar crackers that lay like lead in his stomach and taken to soft drinks as the only remedy for the crackers.