This time it wasn’t anything so ephemeral as one more human family that he’d lose. This time it was everything he’d ever worked for. It was Melody and Patch themselves.
Just Melody, just Patch. Just a couple of downers. Quasi-humans. Just the only living beings that had ever really loved him. And Bianca, who made him stupid and excited and set him tripping over his own tongue and still for some reason liked him. Bianca was the first ever of anybody who fit that category of ‘people’ the psychs were so set on him making relationships with, but when he thought about it, it wasn’t a seamless relationship, even so. Nothing was seamless when the courts made you hold a microscope to it and asked you if it was valid.
Bianca was what he’d say to the psychs when they got around to arguing about his motives for making trouble. He’d say, I’ve been working on developing relationships. That was one of their own phrases. They’d like that. You couldn’t use words like transference and displacement, because they knew you were psyching them when you did that, but relationships was a word that you could use. He’d say he was just working things out about relationships—
The dicing-up had in that sense already begun—as if he knew the track things had to take now and couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t bear for the court psychs to get their hands on him, so he ripped himself up and handed them the pieces in the order he controlled. But, hell, it still meant that nothing stayed whole. If they found out about Melody and Patch they’d dice that up, too, until, like his foster-families, there wasn’t any clean feeling left.
And he’d told Bianca. She knew. She’d talk. People always did, when the psychs wanted to know. They betrayed you to help you.
“You!” someone shouted, thin and far away. It was a male voice, and angry. Somebody had seen him. And he ran. He knew that he’d made a choice the moment he’d started running, and it felt like freedom, and he didn’t stop.
“Come back here!” the staffer shouted. Desperate.
So was he. He ran for the path by the river, where the trees and the rocks hid him and he kept running and running, while the breathing mask failed to keep up with the need for oxygen and started feeding him CO².
Red and gray warred in his vision. He slowed only because he had to. He walked, blind and gasping, because he knew someone was behind him who might not run as fast, but who’d be there, nonetheless.
The river roared beside him, swollen with the falling rain. When the man chasing him got the notion he couldn’t find him in the thicket and went back to report that there was a fool out running in the woods, they’d send out more people with more cylinders to look for him in a systematic way.
Old River’s rising might cut them off, cover his tracks, keep him safe.
Old River he strong, Melody would say, Old River he drink all, all down he catch.
Old River was both friend and enemy, god and devil to the hisa, stronger than human courts or decrees or all the forces the Base could bring to bear. It might kill him, but he didn’t care. He knew he was stupid for running, and right now, he didn’t care. Back there at the Base, in the next few minutes, the word would get around. Where’s Fletch? Where’s Fletch, the buzz would start. And then they’d all start saying it.
And he didn’t want to be there to hear it. Yes, they’d have the people out searching. But slower than they’d be out searching, under other circumstances. Their masks were missing cylinders. They’d have to fill out all that paperwork, do all those reports. It gave him a strange, light-headed satisfaction. Die? They wouldn’t. Be inconvenienced? A lot. He felt a light-headedness not from shortness of air, but from a single moment of victory he knew he’d pay for.
He’d worked all his life to get here, and in the end, it wasn’t lawyers that took him away, it was himself, because he’d blown it—and chosen to blow it—at least he’d chosen it. Stealing those cylinders and running, that wasn’t going to be a minor rules infraction. But it was a choice, damn them all. It was his choice. When things fell apart, he at least had that to say.
Lightning flashed and thunder cracked right above his head, above the tops of the trees. His heart jumped and his knees wobbled with the adrenaline rush it gave him. A planet’s surface where electricity flew around like a loose power line, that was a dangerous thing: water coursed beside the path, not tame Old River any longer, but a rough-surfaced flood, Old River in one of his killing moods.
Old River he mad, the downers would say.
Old River he catch you foot, drag you down. Melody had warned him of the treachery of soft banks among the very first things she’d ever warned him when he came to the planet. Old River was the devil who always lurked to take the unwary, and Great Sun was the god—if downers had a religion. Which human experts argued about in stupid technicalities.
You couldn’t ask the downers that. They said if you asked you’d give them ideas and it might pervert the whole course of downer development, turning it toward something human.
So what were the domes, fools? Puffer-balls? Nature falling from the sky? They didn’t know about Old River. They recorded downer beliefs about Old River, they knew the words, but Old River wouldn’t cover for them, wouldn’t protect them, wouldn’t take care of them, father and devil both.
He’d told Bianca—he’d told Bianca—his thoughts were tumbling wild as the water near his foot—to say that they were late because he’d gone back to see about the saw. Wasn’t that what they’d agreed to say? That was what she’d have said, if they went to her. As they would. He’d thought through so many variations on the lie he’d confused himself.
But that was it, wasn’t it? She was supposed to say that, if they questioned her about being late. So he couldn’t use the saw excuse.
He could say, well, he wasn’t sure where he’d put the saw, and he remembered later putting it somewhere else and he wanted to find it—
The hell, after that interview with Nunn? after being told to pack up?
He could still make a case for himself, he could say he’d just been that shaken and wanted to keep his record clear in case he and Bianca had just missed finding it out here, but, damn, nobody was going to believe that, and he was never going to get reassigned down to the Base, never again. He’d blown all the trust, all the credit he had for common sense…
His foot went in. Cold water pressed the one-way fabric to his leg, and, sweat-osmosed, a trickle got through and into his boot before, one hand holding a branch, the other braced against the moss, he hauled himself out and up to squat on the bank.
Close. Soberingly close. Adrenaline had spiked. It fell, now, leaving tremors, leaving a side aching and lungs burning with effort.
He knew he’d be smarter to go back on his own, and say—just say he was spooked, and he’d been a fool, but he’d come back on his own, hadn’t he?
If he was Marshall Willett, he’d get a second chance, no problem. Mama and papa would buy it for him, pull strings, use up favor-points, and Marshall would get one more chance. But he was Fletcher Neihart, a spacer-brat, son of no one, and he’d used up all his second chances just surviving his mother’s inheritance.
Disaster. The kid had run. Spooked. Elene Quen had the report on her desk, a personal fax from Nunn, down at the Base, and she sat staring at it, reading it for any wisdom she could get from it.
Damon had been upset with what she’d done in getting the court order.