“You and JR have been talking. Right?”
Madelaine shook her head. “No. We haven’t. What about?”
“The truth—” He could hardly breathe. He kept his voice calm. “She kept sending me to welfare—and getting me back—until she finally went out on a trip and never came down. And left me tangled in the damn court system. Then they couldn’t put me anywhere permanent and let anybody get attached to me because you kept suing the station. Let me tell you. I made it through six foster-families, five of them before I was fifteen. I made it through school. I made it through the honors program and into graduate. I licensed to work on Downbelow in Planetary Science, which is what I want to do, and where you called me from, and where I left everything I care about. And you come along and jerk me up and out of that to do your damn laundry and scrub mess hall tables, because you could do that and I’m your property! Well, screw all of you! I’m trying to keep my head straight because I know we can’t turn this ship around, I haven’t got money to buy passage on any other ship, and I have to live out this year, but that’s all ! That’s all . Because when we get back to Pell I’m going to sue you to get off this ship.”
“It still won’t give you Pell citizenship.”
It failed to knock the wind out of him, as she clearly expected. He didn’t want to tell her about Quen’s promise to him. She’d be the lawyer fighting him. He’d already been stupid and said too much. His lawyers would certainly have told him so.
“I had a girl back there,” he said.
“Oh, is that it?”
“No! That’s not it. It’s not all it is.” Naturally they wanted to wrap all his problems up in that. But what he felt wouldn’t be understandable to people who didn’t know what there was on a planet. He’d had a grandmother. She’d died. A lot of people on this ship had died… along with Jeremy’s close relatives. And Madelaine— his grandmother… his great- grandmother—just stared at him, maybe amused, maybe hurt by the truth he’d told, maybe not giving a damn for anything but the ship’s fourteen million. Since his mother died he’d never had to deal with anybody who owned the same set of emotional entanglements to him that his mother had had, and then he’d been five. Slowly the emotional shock of meeting this woman reached through to him, the feeling of an emotional pain somewhere he wasn’t sure of, bone-deep and about to become acute, and tangled somewhere in his mother’s death.
“I was in Planetary Studies,” he said. “That doesn’t mean anything here. But it mattered to me. It mattered everything to me.”
“The stationmaster told us what you’d done. Both your extraordinary work to get into the program, and the ruinous thing you did at the end.” Madelaine’s face was sober. Her hands were steepled loosely before her, a tangle of fingers, an attitude that somehow echoed a habit of someone else—his mother—he wasn’t sure. “Fact is, in your tender love of the planet, you broke laws, you fractured rules designed to protect it and the downers from the well-meaning and the callous users. I’m interested in why you’d do such a thing.”
The lawyer. Wanting to know about laws. And asking into what wasn’t her business, except that the question also involved his attitude toward rules-following, his behavior in a ship full of critical procedures. He was tempted to lie, to make things far worse than they were.
But he didn’t want to find himself restricted from the freedom he did have, either.
“Did you have a reason for running off from the Base?” she pursued, and he tried to organize his thoughts to give her the answer she’d both believe and take for reassurance.
“Being pushed further than you can push me now,” he said. “Further than anyone can ever push me again. That’s all. You can only lose so much.”
“Were you thinking of suicide?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Did you care about the downers? The stationmaster said you’d been consorting rather closely with two of them.”
Bianca talked . The information hit him like a hammer blow.
And then, on a next and shaky breath, Of course Bianca talked. I was gone. She had a right to talk . It was nothing but expected—only the ruin of something else important. Another support of his life kicked out from under him.
She was scared. She was involved and I involved her. A Family girl with a Family on her back. Sure, she had to get straight with them. I had to be the one at fault. I was gone, she had to be practical about it.
He’d hoped for a little more fortitude from her. Just a little heroism. But she’d saved her own hide. Everyone did, when the chips came down.
“Despite your heritage,—you trained to work with the downers,” Madelaine asked sharply. “Why?”
“Because—” He almost said, Because I love them, but he wasn’t going to let that information loose. Because I never thought you’d get me away from Pell. Never give a psych or a lawyer a handle to hold to. Not a real one. “Because they’re different. Because I don’t like human beings much . How’s that?”
“Sad if true.”
“Downers don’t kidnap people.”
“And, as I know from brief experience, they don’t understand human relationships. It’s very much the contrary of what you’re supposed to be doing with them. But you were intent on your own reasons.”
“Reasons that they invited me to be with them. For years. I know the downers, I know the two I dealt with.”
“You know them better than the scientists and the researchers. You know them well enough to defy the rules and endanger a half a hundred rescuers”
“It was their choice to be out there chasing me.”
“Was it?” A shake of the lawyer’s head. “Fletcher, I think you’re better than that. Difficult. So was my granddaughter. It’s why you were born. She was in love, in a year when any child was a hostage to fate. She knew that. She ran a risk.”
In love.
It’s why you were born.
He had a merchanter for a mother and that meant he had no father. It was one of the facts of his life: he had no father. How dare she throw that out for bait? His mother knew who the father was and it wasn’t some chance encounter in a sleep-over?
He wouldn’t take that bait. Not if his life depended on it.
He stood up. “I’ve got work to do.”
Madelaine looked at him as if he were something on her agenda. No longer cool, no longer remote. “God, you’re like Francesca.”
That, too, was a gut blow. He didn’t know how hard until he’d walked out, through the office, past the cousin named Blue, and out into the fancy carpeted corridor.
Like Francesca . She looked at him with age-crinkled eyes and dismissed his best shot with God, you’re like Francesca …