Finity was in port. Here they went again. Seven years since the last lawsuit from that quarter.
None of them, he told himself, had ever meant a thing.
The lawyers’ letter said, after that opening tidbit: This is to apprise you… ran down to: refiling of the petition to the Superior Court of Pell; and, like a high-speed impact: The official reopening of your case …
He read it to the end. McIntire wanted him to be aware, that was alclass="underline" the legal wars were starting again. They’d want depositions. Maybe another psych exam. Dammit, he was one year short of past all this: one year short of his majority, and they could mandate another psych exam, see whether his best interests were being served… that was the way they always put it. His best interests.
Only this time—this time he wasn’t exactly within walking distance of his lawyer’s office.
“They want you to take the next shuttle up,” Nunn said. “Tomorrow.”
He folded it again as it had been and gave it back to the director in the pretense that the director hadn’t read it first.
And he tried to assume a nonchalance he didn’t feel, while his heart raced and his mind scattered. “That’s ridiculous. Respectfully, sir. That’s ridiculous. How much money are they going to spend on this?”
“They want you to take the flight.”
“For a week on station? Two, at max? This is stupid . They do it whenever they’re in port. Don’t they know that? This isn’t any walk down to the court.”
“Do you resent it? Do you think it’s unfair?”
Oh, that was a psych question. Nunn wasn’t real clever at it.
“I’m not real happy,” he said calmly. “They don’t say a thing about how long I’m going to stay up there.”
“Well, their idea, of course, is that you’ll board their ship, isn’t it?”
A cold day in hell was what he thought. Nunn’s calm voice made his skin crawl. “They sue every time they’re in port. They always lose. It’s just a waste of time and money. They’re worried because the station wants them to buy me a station-share. They don’t want to spend fourteen million. So everybody sues. That’s what this is about.”
There was a little silence, then, a troublesome silence. He hadn’t a notion why, just—Nunn looked at him, and for some reason he thought Nunn knew something Nunn wasn’t telling him.
The man wanted him on that shuttle, and they wanted to get him out of here, that was the first consideration. And if Bianca’s family on the station had heard about him and knew his history—God knew what strings they could pull. The trouble he’d thought he was in for being late back from the field was nothing against this trouble. And he didn’t dare let Nunn see how upset he was. If you were emotionally upset they sent you away from the downers. Fast.
A seventeen-year-old with no credentials in the program and a continuing prospect of emotional upset? They’d send him Upabove with no return ticket. And lawyers couldn’t help him. Not even the court could overrule the scientists in charge of downer welfare.
“I’d better go pack.” His voice almost wobbled. He turned a breath into a theatric sigh and cast Nunn the kind of exasperated, weary look he’d learned to give police, lawyers, judges, authority in general. He didn’t break into a sweat and he didn’t blow up. “So where’s the shuttle schedule?” He feared one was onworld. It was midweek. One should be. “What time does the shuttle go?”
“Tomorrow morning. You’d better pack all your stuff, all the same. Oh-seven hundred, weather permitting, the car will pick you up at the dorm.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. He wasn’t going to have days to get ready, then. And, pack all your stuff. Nunn thought he’d be staying Upabove, then.
He’d think of something. He’d surprise them.
He’d make them fly him back.
Make them. He hadn’t had a great deal of luck making anybody do anything. He’d gotten in here only because he’d been a straight, clean student since he’d reformed, and because he’d half-killed himself scoring high on the exams, but that was getting into the program. Now, in a lawsuit, they weren’t going to look at his future. They were going to look at his past, which was nothing but trouble. All his records were going to end up in court, public. They were going to ask how somebody with a juvenile record had gotten into the program in the first place. Everything he’d lived down was going to reappear. All his records. A drug-dosing mother. All his sessions with station cops. His psychs had vouched him clear of that; if only he could show a clean record in his work down here he might have a chance.
Instead he’d lost equipment and been late. He’d picked one hell of a time to slight the rules down here… with the lawsuit coming up again, and himself going under the psychological microscope again to try to prove, no, he couldn’t go to space, he wasn’t fit to go to space. He was too fragile to be deported.
How could he simultaneously prove he was rehabbed enough to be down here and not fit to go with his relatives and get shot at along with his mother’s ship?
And what did he say when they asked him what he’d been up to reporting late? I lost my head? I was infatuated with a girl? And drag Bianca’s name into it, and let her Family in on it?
He hated his relatives with a fury beyond reason. He hated all humanity at the moment.
He went out the doors, one after another, realizing, in a colder panic since the test that brought him here, that they—the they in station administration who lifelong had ordered him around—could now get him up to the station for their own convenience in their lawsuit, but they might not get around to bringing him back all that quickly, even if all things were equal and he hadn’t just gotten Bianca Velasquez into trouble—a shuttle ticket up, they’d pay for. Down, he couldn’t afford. That meant even if things went absolutely flawlessly, his lawyers were going to have to sue to make them send him back, which would take time, a lot of time.
They could ruin his life while they messed around and made up their minds. They were ruining his life, just filling out their damned forms and sending him up to the station again because the law said he had to be in court to say so.
Seven hundred hours. That was when the shuttle broke dock, flew, did whatever it did. He heard the shuttles go over in the early mornings when the staff was having breakfast. They’d roar overhead and people would stop talking for a few beats and then they’d go on with their conversations.
Where’s Fletch ? they’d say tomorrow morning.
Bianca would miss him for a couple of weeks. Maybe longer.
But what good would it do?
He’d never see Melody and Patch again, and they damned sure wouldn’t understand where he’d gone. The monsoon was coming. They could die in their long walk and he wouldn’t be here, he wouldn’t know.
Rain washed over him and lightning whitened the door of the men’s dorm as he opened it and shoved his way through into the entry. In a shattered blur of white he saw the usual pile of clean-suits for the cleaning crew to take, all the masks hanging, clustered on their pegs. His mask should join them. He should unsuit, go in, pack, as he was told.
But he didn’t want to unsuit. Not yet. Not yet for going inside and facing the questions he’d get from supervisors and the others in the program when he started packing up. Emotions would answer. And that was no good, not for him, not for his future. He wanted an hour, one hour, to walk in the rain—just to get himself together, not to have a fight with Marshall Willett on his record.