That group came in talking about a ship they’d met. A Union ship.
Aren’t we in Alliance territory? he wondered. Then he felt queasy, remembering in the process that if he did have a view of the space outside the ship, it wouldn’t be anything like the Pell solar system schematic he’d learned in school. No planets. No sun. Great Sun was far behind him.
They were at what they called a dark mass, a near-star and a couple of massive objects that still wouldn’t go to fusion if you lumped them all together.
The nature of the Tripoint mass was a fact to memorize, in school, a trade route on which Pell depended. Fact, too, that Tripoint had been a territory they’d fought over in the War. He’d grown up with the memorial plaques. On this site …
But here he was in the middle of it, and so was a Union ship, and the kid across from him, his not-kid roommate with the twelve-year-old body, and Vince and flat-chested Linda the same, they all chattered with awed speculations about what a Union carrier was doing, or why, as the rumor was, the captain had talked with it and fired a capsule at it.
“We might see action yet,” Jeremy said happily. Fletcher didn’t take it for cheering news. But, the techs said, nothing had developed. The Union ship had stayed put.
Another takehold warning came through. Finity had moved once, and then again, and now it fired the engines again. They spent an hour in the safety-nook of the galley playing vid games while the engineering people went to their quarters, off-shift and resting. There was no hint of trouble.
Then there was cooking to do for future meals, mixing and pouring into pans and layering of pasta and sauce while the end-shift meal cooked.
Pans from storage, thawed and heated, produced fruit pastry for dessert, with spice Fletcher had never tasted before. Jeff the cook said it came from Earth, and that gave him momentary pause. He was being corrupted, he thought. Fed luxuries. He thought how he couldn’t get that flavor on Pell, or couldn’t afford it; and he asked himself if he ever wanted to get to like it.
But he ate the dessert and a second helping, and told himself he might as well enjoy it in the meanwhile and be moral and righteous and resentful later. Shipboard had its advantages, and it was a moral decision to enjoy them while they were cheap and easy: the spice, the tastes, the novelty of things. He was mad, yes, he was resentful, and he was caught up in affairs he’d never wanted, but he didn’t, he told himself, need to make any moral points, just legal ones, and only when he got back to Pell. Anything he chose to enjoy for the time being—the fruit dessert, the absolutely best shower he’d ever had access to, a better mattress than he’d ever slept on, all of that—he could equally well choose to forego when the time came, nothing of his pride or his integrity surrendered.
And the taste, meanwhile, was wonderful.
Galley duty, he decided, beat laundry all hollow. Laundry was work. On this detail there was food. As much as you wanted. It was, besides, a duty with the freedom of Downbelow about it—a work-on-your-own situation, with amicable people to deal with as supervisors. He especially liked Jeff, the chief mainday cook, a big gray-haired man who’d evidently enjoyed a lot of his own desserts, and who bulked large in the little galley, but who moved with such precision in the cramped space you were safer with him than with any three juniors. Jeff liked you if you liked his food, that seemed the simple rule; and Jeff didn’t ask anything complicated of him—like assumptions of kinship.
Cleanup after the cooking wasn’t an entirely fun job, but it wasn’t bad, either. Word came to Jeff by intercom that the carrier had held its position and they were going to do a run up to V in an hour, so the galley had to be cleaned up, locked up, battened down, every door latched. Then, Jeff said, they could go to quarters early, at maindark, that hour when the lights dimmed to signify a twilight for mainday and dawn for alterday crew. Before, they’d had two hours for rec and rest, but tonight the captains had declared no rec time. It was early to bed, stuck in their bunks while the ship did whatever it did to get where they were going.
He was moderately uneasy when the engines fired. He and Jeremy lay in their bunks while the next, relatively short burn happened, a long, pressured wait. After that, during what was announced as a fifty-minute inertial glide, Jeremy played vid games, lying in his bunk, so hyped on his fantasy war it was hard to ignore him, in his twitches and his nervous limb-moving and occasional sound effects.
Jeremy might act as if he were on drugs, but Fletcher knew as a practical fact of living with the boy that that wasn’t the case. At times he was convinced that Jeremy sank into his games because he was scared of what the ship was doing, and he tried not to dwell on that thought. If Jeremy was scared, then he had no choice but assume a kid used to this knew what to be scared of. But at other times, as now, he wondered if that line blurred for Jeremy, as to what were games and what weren’t.
Join Mallory’s crew when he grew up, Jeremy had said. Trade wasn’t for Jeremy. No such tame business. Jeremy wanted to fight Mazian’s raiders.
History and life had shot along very fast in the seventeen station-side years Jeremy had been alive—and for all the twelve violent and brutal years Jeremy had actually been waking, Fletcher surmised, Jeremy had been right in the thick of it, in that situation the court on Pell had refused to let him enter.
Jeremy had a dead mother, too. This ship had death in abundance to drive Jeremy; as he guessed Vince and Linda were also driven—all of them stranger than kids of twelve and thirteen ever ought to be.
And not even a precocious twelve or a fecklessly ignorant seventeen. Jeremy, Vince, Linda all had the factual knowledge of those years. Jeremy indicated that, unlike the present situation, they usually had tape during the couple of weeks they did live during jump—briefing tapes making them aware of ship’s business, educational tapes teaching them body-skills and facts, informational tapes informing them of history going on at various ports, all those very vivid things that tape was, and all the vivid teaching that tape could evidently do even more efficiently on the jump drugs than it did on the other brands of trank that went with tape-study stationside. Tape could feel like reality, and if he added up the tape Jeremy must have had in all those months tranked-out lying in his bunk, he figured he could tack on a virtual college education and a couple or three waking years of life on Jeremy’s bodily twelve.
But while it was knowledge and technical understanding Jeremy had gained during those lost, lifeless weeks, life lived at the time-stretched rate of two weeks to every month of elapsed universal time while a ship was in jump, it still wasn’t real-life experience. It wasn’t any kind of emotional maturity, or physical development. They were mentally strange kids, all of the under-seventeens, sometimes striding over factual adult business so adeptly he could completely forget how big a gap his own natural growth set between them and him—and sometimes, again, as now, they acted just the age their bodies were. Humor consisted of elbow-knocking and practical jokes. Sex was to snigger at. War and death were vid games, even in kids who’d seen their own mothers and sibs die—that was the awful part. Jeremy had seen terrible, bloody things—and went right back to his games, obsessed with bloody images and grinning as he shot up imaginary enemies. Or real ones. Think what you’re doing, he wanted to yell at Jeremy, but by what little he’d been able to understand, Jeremy’s whole life was no different than those bloody games and Jeremy was fitting himself to survive. That was the most unnerving aspect of the in-bunk vid wars. Linda wanted to be an armscomper and target the ship’s big guns. About Vince, he had no idea.
Himself, during the ship’s maneuvering and slamming about, he shut his eyes and listened to the music Jeremy lent him. He asked himself did he want to risk his tape machine and his study tapes by using them during such goings-on, when if they came unsecured they could suffer damage.