“The hell!” he said. Temper got past the tranquilizer, and he shut it down. She wasn’t going to needle him into reaction, or salve her conscience, either. “The Neiharts aren’t going to be happy with me. You know that.”
“It’s not a place to screw up, Fletcher. There’s no place to go.—You look at me! Don’t drop your eyes. You look straight at me and you hear this. You give it a good chance. You give it a good honest try and come back with no complaints from them and after a year, in the year it’s going to take them to get back here, you can walk into my office as a grown man and say you want to be transferred back. And I’ll intercede for you . Then. Not now.”
His heart beat faster and faster. He didn’t say anything for the moment. She waited. He threw out the next challenge: “I screwed up down there. Can you fix that ?”
“I can fix it up here enough to give you a post in the tunnels. You’d work with downers. You’d stand a chance of working your way back to Downbelow.”
It was too good. It was everything handed back to him. On a platter. Everything but the downers that mattered. Years. Human years. A long time for them. Maybe too long for Melody and Patch.
“But,” Quen said, as firmly, “if you come back with anything on your record, I’ll give Finity the chance to decide whether they want you, and if they don’t, we’ll see about an in-depth psych exam to see what you do need to straighten you out. Do you copy, Mr. Neihart? Is that plain enough?”
“Yes, ma’am.” All cards were bet. Straighten you out . That meant psych adjustment , not just psych tests. It wasn’t supposedly a big deal. Just an instilled fear of sabotage was what they gave you, just a real horror of messing up the station. But they’d find out, too, what he thought of the human species. And they’d straighten that kink out of him. They’d rip the heart out of him. Make him normal, so he could never, ever want to go back to Downbelow.
“It’s serious business, Mr. Neihart. It’s very serious, life-and-death business. Are you unstable? Did you try to kill yourself?”
“No, ma’am. Not really.”
“Logical decision, was it, to run off into the outback?”
“No. But I’d duck the ship. Miss the undock. Get sent to the psychs.”
“It’d lose you your license, all the same.”
“Yes, ma’am, but you were taking it away anyway. At least I wouldn’t go on the ship.”
She thought about that a moment. She thought about him , and held his life and sanity in the balance. The noise and clang and clank of the dockside machinery went on around them, inexorable clank of a loader at work.
“That bad, is it, what we’re doing to you?”
“I don’t want them. I never wanted them. Hell if they want me.”
“Wanting had nothing to do with it, Fletcher. By putting your mother off the ship, they gave you and your mother a chance to live.”
“Well, she died and none of them did damn well by me!”
“They were kind of busy saving this station. Earth. Humanity. In which, if I do say so, they saved you. And saving the downers, if that scores with you. If the Alliance had gone under, Mazian’s Fleet would have had Downbelow for a source of supply. They’d have employed very different management methods with the downers. Or did they cover that in your history courses?”
They had. And he was glad Mazian wasn’t at Downbelow, and that someone had kept the Fleet far away. But the fact that the Neiharts were heroes in that fight didn’t mean anything on a personal level. It didn’t bring his mother back. She’d never been crazy enough the courts didn’t dump her kid back with her. And she’d never been sane enough to sign the papers that would give him up for adoption—and for Pell citizenship. He didn’t forgive her for that.
“Look at me,” Quen said. He did, reluctantly, knowing that this was the other woman largely responsible for his life—every screwed-up placement, every good, every bad: Quen had personally intervened to keep him from the trouble he’d gotten into any number of times. The fairy godmother. The magic rescue for him, that had enabled him not to compete with the likes of Marshall Willett but to stay out of complete disaster.
And the primary reason, maybe, his mother hadn’t gotten psyched-over before she killed herself. He didn’t know what he felt about Quen. He never had understood.
“I’ll tell you something,” Quen said. “You’ve got the best chance of your life in front of you. But it’s not going to be easy. You’ve walked off from every family you’ve been put with. Aboard ship, you can’t walk off; and no matter what you think, you can’t stop being related to these people. These are the real thing , Fletcher. They’re every fault you see in the mirror and every good point you own. Give them a fair chance.”
“Screw them!”
“Fletcher, get it through your head, I envy you . You’ve got a family. And they want you. Don’t be an ass about it, and let’s get over there.”
Her ship was destroyed in the War. With everybody on it. And he thought about taking a cheap shot on that score, the way she’d come back at him, but she’d held out hope to him, damn her, and she was the only hope. She gathered up her aides and her security and the cops and they all walked over to the area of the dock where the board showed, in lights, Finity’s End . There was customs; she walked him past. It was that fast. The gate was in front of him, and he looked back, looked all around at Pell docks.
Looked back, in that vast scale, even imagining the Wilsons might show up. That was his last foster-family, the one he was still legally resident with. The one he even liked.
But the dockside was vacant of anybody but dockers and, he supposed, Finity crew. Even his lawyers and his psychs were no-shows. Just Quen. Just the cops. All the little figures, dwarfed by the giant scale of the docks, were strangers.
When he gave it a second thought he guessed he was hurt—hurt quite a bit, in fact, but the lack of well-wishers and good-byes didn’t entirely surprise him. Maybe Quen hadn’t told the Wilsons where he was. Or maybe the Wilsons had heard about him running away on Downbelow, and just decided he was too crazy, too lost, too damned-to-hell screwed up.
He didn’t know what he’d say to them if they did show up, anyway. Thanks ? Thanks for trying? In the slight giddiness of vast scale and the fading tranquilizer, he hated his lawyers, hated his families. Every one of them. Even the last.
“Good-bye,” Quen told him. “Good luck. See you.” She didn’t offer her hand. Didn’t give him a chance to refuse it. “You go on up, give your passport to the duty officer. Follow instructions. You’re out of our territory from the time you cross that line.—Matter of fact, this is the ship that won that particular point of law as a part of the constitution. That was what the whole War meant. Welcome to the future.”
Screw you and your War, was what he thought as hydraulics wheezed and gasped around the gate, and the huge gantry moved above him, like some threatening dragon making little of anything on human scale. He had nothing to back up any reply to Quen. He owned no dignity but silence and to do what she’d said, go ahead and go aboard. So he left her standing and, passport in hand, took that long, spooky walk, up that ramp and into a cold, lung-hurting tunnel far thinner than the station walls.
He was aware there was black space and hard vacuum out there, beyond that yellow ribbing. Walking down the tunnel looked like being swallowed by something, eaten up alive. And it was. The cops would still be waiting at the bottom of the ramp to be sure he went all the way down this gullet; but when he reached the lock and confronted a control panel, he wasn’t even sure what to do with the buttons. They said he was spacer-born. And this damned thing had not even the courtesy of labeling on the buttons.