All right, he said to himself for the tenth time in five minutes, all right, calm down. A year. A year and he’d be back to Pell and he’d survive it and if Quen reneged, he’d go to court. Do what they said, keep them happy until, back at Pell after that year, he ran for it and held Quen to her word.
Meanwhile the captain’s nephew had said go back down to the laundry and check out some clothes. He could do that, while his heart hammered from anger and his ears picked up a maddening hum somewhere just below his hearing and he wasn’t sure of the floor. He told himself he was going to walk around, telling himself he wasn’t going to be sick at his stomach, he wasn’t even going to think about the fact that the ship was moving. He walked out to the hall and down to A14, to the laundry.
He wasn’t the only one looking for clean clothes. He stood in a line of six, all of whom introduced themselves with too damn much cheerfulness, a Margot with a -t, a Ray, a Nick, a Pauline, a Johnny T., and a John Madison who, he declared, wasn’t related to the captain. Directly.
He didn’t intend to remember them. He wasn’t remotely interested. He was polite, just polite. He smiled, he shook hands. Their chatter informed him you could pick up more than laundry at the half-door counter. You could buy personal items on your account, if you had an account, which as far as he knew he didn’t. As he approached the counter he could see, beyond the kid handing out the clothes, a lot of shelves with folded clothing sorted somehow. He saw mesh sacks of laundry left off and folded stacks of clean clothes picked up, and this supposedly was going to be his post. Big excitement.
“Fletcher,” he told the kid at the desk.
“Wayne,” the kid said. He looked no more than sixteen. “Glad you made it. So you take over here after next burn.”
“Seems as if.” He mustered no false cheerfulness. The other kid on duty, Chad, went and got the size he requested “ Finity patch is on,” Chad said of the ship’s blues he got. “Personal name patch, Sam’ll get to it as he can. He makes ’em. He’ll get it done for you before we go up.”
Up meant leave normal space. He knew that. He knew it was regularly about five days a ship took between leaving dock and exiting the system. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”
A small plastic bag landed on top of the stack of folded blues, toiletries, and such. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” he said again, and carried his stack of slippery-bagged new clothes back the way he’d come, along a corridor that curved very visibly up.
That was it. He was assigned, checked in, uniformed, and set.
His gut was in a knot. He wanted to hit the first thing he came to. Nothing made sense. His stomach was sending him queasy signals that up and down were out of kilter, the horizon curves were steeper than he’d ever dealt with, and he was going to be a little crazy before he got off this ship, crazy enough he’d have memorized JR, James Robert, John, Johnny, Jake, Jim, and Jimmy, Jamie and all his damn relatives.
He opened the door to his room. This time there was a kid on the other bunk. A kid maybe twelve, dark-haired, dark-eyed, eyeing him with equal suspicion.
“Hi,” the kid said after a beat. “I’m Jeremy.”
“Yeah?” Defensively surly tone.
Defensively surly back. “I got lucky. We’re bunkmates.”
He must have frozen stock still a heartbeat. His heart speeded up. The rest of the room phased out.
“No, we’re not,” he said, and threw his new issue down on the other bunk.
“I live here,” was the indignant protest, in a pre-adolescent voice. “First.”
“No way in hell. This does it! This is the limit!”
“Well, I don’t want you here either!” the kid yelled back.
“Good,” he said. His voice inevitably went shaky if he didn’t let his temper blow and the struggle between trying to be fair with a hapless twelve-year-old and his desire to punch something had his upset gut in an uproar. It was the whole business, it was every lousy, stinking decision authorities had made about him all his life, and here it was, summed up, topped off and proposing he was rooming with a damned kid .
He dumped his new clothes on the bed. The door had closed. He went back and hit the door switch.
“They’re about to sound take-hold,” the kid’s voice pursued him as he left. “You can’t find anybody! You’ll break your neck!”
He didn’t damn care. He started down the hall, and heard someone shout at him and then footsteps coming.
“Don’t be stupid!” Jeremy said, and caught his sleeve. “They’re going to blow the warning. You haven’t got time to get anywhere else! Get back in quarters!”
The kid was in earnest. He had no doubt of that. He didn’t want to give up or give in, but the kid was worried, and maybe in danger, trying to stop him. He yielded to the tug on his arm and went back toward the room, wondering if he was being conned, or whether the kid knew what he was talking about. It was convincing enough.
And they no sooner were back in the room with the door shut than a warning sounded and Jeremy dived for his bunk.
“Belt in,” Jeremy said, and he followed Jeremy’s example, unclipped the safety belts and lay down, with the siren screaming warning at them all the while.
“Got time, there’s time,” Jeremy said, horizontal and fastening his belt. “ God , you don’t ever do that!”
He ignored the kid’s concerns and got the belt snugged down, telling himself if this turned out to be minor he was going to be madder than he was.
Then force started to build, not downward, but sideways, and the mattresses tilted sideways, so that he had a changing view of the inside bottom of the bunk beside him. His arms weighed three times normal, his whole body flattened and he could only see the bottom of Jeremy’s bunk, both rotated on the same axis, both swung perpendicular to the acceleration that just kept increasing.
He couldn’t fight it. He found himself shaking and was glad Jeremy couldn’t see it. He was scared. He could admit it now. He was up against something he couldn’t fight, caught up in a force that could break him if he ran out there in the hall and pitted himself against it. It went on, and on.
And on.
And on.
There wasn’t that much racket. Or vibration. Or anything. He shivered from fear and ran out of energy to shiver. He couldn’t see Jeremy. He didn’t know what Jeremy was doing. And finally he had to ask. “How long do we do this?”
“Three hours forty-six minutes.”
Shivering be damned. “You’re kidding!”
“That’s three hours fifteen to go,” Jeremy’s high voice said. “We like to clear Pell pretty quick. Lot of traffic. Aren’t you glad you didn’t go in the corridor?”
He couldn’t take being squashed in his bunk for three hours with nothing to do, nothing to view, nothing to think about but leaving Pell. Or the ship hitting something and everybody dying. “So what do you do when you’re stuck like this?”
“You can do tape. Or read. Or music. Want some music?”
“Yeah.”
Jeremy cut some on, from what source he wasn’t sure. It was loud, it was raucous, it was tolerable. At least he could sink his mind into it and lose himself in the driving rhythm. Inexorable. Like the ship. Like the whole situation.
It occurred to him finally to wonder where they were going. He’d never asked, and neither Quen nor his lawyers had told him. Just—from Quen—the news he’d be gone a year.
He asked when the music ran out. And the answer came from the unseen kid effectively double-bunked above his head:
“Tripoint to Mariner to Mariner-Voyager, Voyager, Voyager-Esperance, Esperance, and back again the way we came. There’s supposed to be real good stuff on Mariner. Fancier than Pell.”
Partly he felt sick at his stomach with the long, long recital of destinations. And he supposed he had to be glad their route was inside civilized space and not off to Earth or somewhere entirely off the map.
But he felt his heart race, and had to ask himself why he’d felt this little… lift of spirits when the kid said Mariner—which was supposed to be a sight to see. As if he was glad to be going to places he’d only heard about and had absolutely no interest in seeing.