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.
Not as upset as she’d expected about the fact of her trading her influence on Pell for Finity ’s support: that was a merchanter way of doing business and it regarded merchanter relations. It was diplomacy, in which diplomats used every card they had to use and did it in secrecy.
But about what she’d traded, about interference with the Children’s Court, he’d been unexpectedly upset—a distress about the boy’s case which she hadn’t predicted, and still, after all these years on station, didn’t understand. Damon was a lawyer, before anything, and believed in processes of law as important for their own sake, a viewpoint she flatly didn’t share in her heart of hearts—only took his advice, generally, when she crossed from port law, which she did understand, into station law, which she detested on principle. Perhaps that was the heart and soul of what was at issue.
The fact that Finity had a right to the boy? In Damon’s eyes, that might be disputable. In her eyes, that was absolute. That the station court had repeatedly held against that right? In her mind, that was an outrage. Not her outrage, because it wasn’t her ship— she ain’t my ship, she ain’t my fight was the rule on dockside—but now a deal had set her firmly on Finity ’s side in the matter.
Process for its own sake? Importance of the process? The law might be Damon’s life. But it was an ornament, a baroquerie of station life. In space it just might kill you.
Maybe, now, by the facts in this report, she’d just lost a kid, following the station’s damned processes . A letter from the boy’s independent lawyers, acting in his interest , had gotten to Nunn before her letter, and dammit, Nunn had handed that letter to the kid and then let that kid walk out the door, trusting he was dealing with a stationer mentality who’d tamely, because it was the orderly thing to do, walk over and pack his belongings and surrender to the law.
Hell if. Fletcher Neihart might have lived on a station, but he hadn’t been brought up by Nunn’s rules or Damon’s law, not for the first five years of his life. Not so long as Francesca Neihart had had her kid in hand. He might have been born on a station, stuck on a station, educated on a station, but one stationer family after the other had come back to the Children’s Court saying they couldn’t handle him.
Now, enterprising lad, he’d stolen a bunch of cylinders, each one about eight hours of oxygen—if you didn’t push it. Three, or less, if you pushed it hard. And a scared, mad kid didn’t know moderation. The cylinders weren’t fresh ones, either. They added up the total use-hours from work records on the people he’d stolen them from and came up with three days if he was pushing it.
The kid was trying to wait till Finity had left port, was what he was doing: he was doing things that weren’t totally bright on an adult level but that made perfect sense to a kid. She’d brought up two of her own, she knew station-born sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds from personal and recent experience, and right now the desire to shake the runaway till his teeth rattled mingled with the fear that spacer directness and stationer legality together might have pushed Francesca’s kid into deeper danger than his limited experience could comprehend.
The fact was, Fletcher Neihart was trying to stand off the whole Alliance court system and her authority simultaneously, and he was doing a pretty good job of it—because a starship couldn’t sit at dock extra days. Finity couldn’t wait. It had schedules, obligations, operations, God knew , critical operations, with desperate issues at stake. Fletcher was a Neihart. And he was holding off the lot of them. Like mother, like son, and like the legendary man whose name he carried.
And if Nunn had lost that kid, if thanks to people she’d put in charge of critical operations, station management didn’t deliver a live body to Finity before undock, she would be in a hell of a mess. The agreement she and James Robert had made for good and solid reasons of policy might stand, but the decades-long friendship she had with the politically essential Neiharts might not survive the event.
Hell of a thing for the kid—who right now was wandering a Downbelow woods on three days worth of cylinders, in a state of mind she could more accurately imagine than any court could. She knew what it was to be ripped loose from everything and set adrift in a world that was never going to make gut-level sense.
But she hadn’t done wrong in signing the order or anything else she’d arranged with the Neiharts of Finity’s End . She was right—ethically, morally, historically right. Leave things to Damon’s precious law, and the whole human race could go down the chute. They’d come near enough in the last phase of the War: nobody had thrown a planet-buster, but they’d lost a station. They’d nearly lost two. They could lose a planet the next time the human race went to war. In order to prevent that happening, she had no illusions. Her enemies claimed she wanted to destroy Union. That was so. But practically she knew she couldn’t do that. In plain diplomatic reality, the Merchanters’ Alliance had to keep the tight balance of power between themselves and Union, and they had to keep it balanced no matter how frightening and uncomfortable the attempts of Mazian to destabilize the Alliance and rebuild his power base, no matter the near-time choices in terms of her political future, even of her own determination to save the Quen name—let alone one kid’s personal wishes about his domicile.