He’d hated them lifelong. But right now he saw them as a chance: he was good at talking to them. He’d say he’d spooked because of being followed and that at first he’d really meant to get the saw before it went on his record. And then he could break down and say it wasn’t the idea, and he’d lied, and it was just immaturity. He had just turned seventeen. You got some license to be immature, didn’t you? They gave plenty to Marshall Willett. Or Jim Frantelli. Jim had a book full of reprimands on stupid things, and he didn’t have any . Not one. Wouldn’t that count for something? Somewhere?
Or if they got onto him and said he couldn’t come back to the program he could talk to the downers. He’d tell Melody and Patch if he wasn’t there after they came back from the walk, they should sit down and strike. They’d get all the downers behind him and they’d say no downer would work if they didn’t have Fletch—
He was kidding himself. It wasn’t going to happen. Melody and Patch couldn’t organize something like that even if he could make them understand. They’d try to help him, but they weren’t the kind of downer that ran things. He didn’t even know if he’d find them out here, or if the rains had started the spring and they’d have gone off somewhere he didn’t know, all unknowing that their Fetcher was in trouble.
He’d just needed—just needed to have some breathing room. A day or two before people started invoking courts and lawyers and sending him through it all again——
He’d worked hard. He’d be happy to work hard all his life, and earn the station-share the ship was suing the station about and never spend a credit except on food. He’d be good down here.
It just wasn’t damn all fair, and he hated their damn ship and he hated the family that had left his mother on the station.
Intellectually he knew they’d had no choice, sick as she was; but there was a childish part of him that was mad about that; and a much more rational part that hated them for their damned persistence , coming back again and again with their lawsuits, and the station for its stupid automated accounting systems that kept kicking the bill out again—when all they wanted was not to be billed for fourteen and a half million c and all the station wanted was a quittance so they could either put him on the books or get him off the books. It was two authorities playing games with each other, all technicalities, for a stupid ship that refused to pay his mother’s bills and a station that refused to admit he was born to a station-share and kept billing Finity for his existence here.
Stupid games. All these years that he’d been trying to get on the level and have a life of his own, for God’s sake, what did they want of him, except to go one more round of lawsuits and make points on each other. He hated—
Mud sent him skidding, down, down, down in the twilight, and River was below. He grabbed at things in fright, and got his hand on a branch, and held, having torn muscles and scared himself. He hung there and slowly began to get his feet under him, and crawled up the slope on his hands and knees, asking himself why it mattered, and wouldn’t it have been better after all if he’d just gone in and saved everybody the bother.
It took him a long time to get his feet under him. When he walked again it was with a knot of pain in his throat and a knot of fear around his heart, with no notion where he was going.
To see as much of the world as he could see, he decided, before he pushed the come-get-me button on the locator and admitted the dream was over. There wasn’t much point in wandering in the dark and using up cylinders. So he’d just sit down and stay warm and not lose his head.
He was shivering when he did find a place to sit. The suit had a flash lining, and you could pull a patch off and it would heat up. It would only do it once, and then that suit was done and a discard, but he was going to be at the halfway point of cylinders by tomorrow and he’d have to go back or he wouldn’t come back.
You wouldn’t die of Downbelow’s air right away. If you breathed it you got medical problems.
Maybe if he just lied and told them he had breathed the air they’d keep him on the station. They’d put him in the hospital, and they’d find out he hadn’t, and he’d be in a lot of trouble, but he wouldn’t be on the ship.
Or maybe he’d just really do it, just take the mask off and come back really sick and not have to think about the ship. He’d be a medical case, then, maybe for the rest of his life, just like his mother.
But he’d seen that. He didn’t want it.
He’d think about solutions tomorrow, he decided. He’d think when he had to think. He pulled the patch to heat the suit, and felt the warmth spread in the folds, first, then, gradually to the rest of his body.
Then there was nothing to do but sit there, while the rain roared in the trees and River roared in his banks nearby.
Nunn would have gotten in a lot of trouble, Fletcher imagined, for thinking he was going to walk tamely back to the dorm-dome. He was sort of sorry about that. Nunn never had done anything to him.
It was damned hard not to think what a mess he’d gotten himself in. He wished he had the strength to keep walking so he didn’t have to listen to his own mind work, and to his own common sense say how badly he’d screwed up.
If you had a cylinder go out while you were sleeping you just got slower and slower and maybe didn’t wake up. He should have checked out how far gone the cylinders were before it got dark. He wasn’t used to places that became dark with no light switch to flip. It was dark, now, and he couldn’t check them. That was what they said. If you get lost, don’t go to sleep. He could go by feel and change out to ones he knew were new; but if he ran around with a bunch of unwrapped cylinders in his pockets he could ruin a few, or he could get them wet in the rain and the damp.
Hell with it, he thought. He thought he had enough time left on the ones that were in.
The scare when he’d nearly fallen in Old River a while ago had begun, however, to drive something of his self-preservation out of him. It had been a sharp, keen danger, not the sickly kind of terror he hated so much worse—sitting in a lawyer’s office and listening to people disposing of his life. He’d nearly fallen in the river and he began slowly to realize now he wasn’t scared. Just toss the dice, and maybe he’d decide to come back and maybe he wouldn’t.
If he passed the safe limits of choice, then maybe he’d make it, and maybe he wouldn’t. In either case, he had more control over his life than the people who ran things would ever give him.
He was screwing them up good, was what he was doing. They’d be upset, and he wasn’t damned sorry.
Probably Bianca would be upset, too, but then, Bianca didn’t know his record. When people found that out they quit caring, and most of them got away from him so fast their tracks smoked.
Melody and Patch would be upset. Melody most of all. But Melody hoped for a new baby. Hoped he’d grown up and found a girl of his own kind only so she could have a baby and quit taking care of a messed-up human kid.
When he thought about that, he hurt inside. Aged seventeen, safe and secret in the dark, he hurt, for all the things that had ever gone wrong___
They were calling him again…
Wouldn’t let him be alone, and it was all he wanted…
…“Fletcher…”
“Fletcher,” someone said from outside, and he blinked, shaky, sick. Someone—his eyes were blurred—lifted his head up after several tries and succeeded after he began to cooperate with the effort to lift him. Someone put something to his lips and said, “Drink,” so he closed his lips on the straw and drank. It was what his body needed, a taste told him that.
The somebody was a younger cousin. Jeremy. The place was the ship.
The arm he was holding himself up with began to shake. The place smelled like sweat and old clothes. “Something wrong with the ship?” He found the strength to panic, and tried to sit up.
“No,” Jeremy said, and slipped his arm free and let him struggle with the belts that were holding him. “Keep drinking the juice. I’m senior by a month. I get the shower first.”