“Why? Why’s Fletcher the exception?”
“He was shot dead, a long time ago,” Jeremy said. “He was the one getting the hatch shut when the Company men were trying to board, and he did it and died on the deck inside. Or there wouldn’t be any of us. No Alliance. No Union.”
He knew about the incident. He’d learned it in school, but he didn’t know it was a Fletcher Neihart who’d been the one to get the door shut when they tried to trap Finity and arrest Captain James Robert. He knew about Finity’s End saying the Earth Company authorities weren’t going to board, and the captain and crew had sealed the ship and left the station and the authorities behind them, refusing them authority over the ship and refusing station law on a merchanter’s deck. It was where the first merchanter’s strike had started, when merchanters from one end of space to the other had made it clear that trade goods didn’t and wouldn’t move without merchant ships.
In a long chain of events, it was the incident that had started the whole Company War.
History. Near-modern history, which he detested. He’d passed the obligatory quiz on the details to get into the program. The Company War. Treaty of Pell, 2353, and that had left civilization where it was when he’d been born, with Union on one side and Alliance on the other and Earth not real happy with either of them. And him stranded and his mother dead. That kind of history.
So, Jeremy said, somebody he was named after had gotten a critical hatch shut in the original fracas between Company ships and Family ships, without which either the ship wouldn’t have gotten away or the cops who shot this long-dead Fletcher would have died in the decompression that would have resulted if he hadn’t shut that hatch.
Pell knew about that kind of event. And he’d known about the start of the Company War.
So the guy’s name had been Fletcher. He didn’t know why he should be proud of some spacer who was a hundred years dead—but, well, dammit, he’d lived all his seventeen years around the snobbery of the Velasquezes and the Willetts, the Dees and the Konstantins, who’d been important because of their names, and important mostly because of what dead people in their families had done, while he’d never before had a sense of connection to anything but an addict mother and a lawsuit.
Somebody died closing an airlock and did it with pieces of him shot away, knowing otherwise there’d be vacuum killing more than the people shooting at him—that was a levelheaded brave guy, in his way of thinking. While the Willetts—they’d donated a warehouse full of stuff to the war effort. Big deal. No one had been shooting at them.
And Fletcher Neihart meant that man, on this ship. Fletcher wasn’t just a name. It was a revision of who he was—for a moment.
He never had meant much. And that, he’d told himself when he’d been at a low point of his teenaged years, scared spitless of the program placement tests, that never meant much was the source of his strength: not giving much of a damn. Like a gyro—kick it off balance a second and it swung right back. That realization had kept him sane. Kept him aware of his own value, which was only to himself.
Maybe that was why Madelaine’s being here had upset him—why Madelaine had upset him and why even yet he was feeling shaky. He’d instinctively seen a danger when Madelaine had dangled the lure of his mother’s motives and his father’s name in front of him yesterday.
He’d been in danger a second ago when he’d thought about famous relatives.
He was in danger when he began to slip toward thinking… being Fletcher Neihart wasn’t that bad a thing.
Yes, and Jeremy wasn’t a bad kid, and they could get along, and maybe Jeremy could make this year of enforced servitude not so bad. But he’d thought he could rely on Bianca, too, and yesterday in the same conversation in which he’d learned he had a great-grandmother and the lawyers he hated really loved him, in the very same conversation Madelaine had proved Bianca had talked to authorities and betrayed everything he’d shared with her about Melody and Patch,
It was nothing to get that angry about. Bianca had behaved about average, for people he’d dealt with. Better than some. She hadn’t talked until she’d been cornered and until he’d already been caught and shipped off the planet,
So forget falling into the soft traps of potential relatives. Figure that Jeremy would keep some secrets and advise him out of trouble, but he shouldn’t get soppy over it or mistake it for anything special. Jeremy had his orders, and those orders came from authority just like Madelaine, if it wasn’t Madelaine herself. She wanted him to ask who his father was. He didn’t damn well care. Whoever it was hadn’t come to Pell. Hadn’t cared for him. Hadn’t cared for his mother.
Spacer mindset.
Safer just to disconnect from all of them, Jeremy too. He could be pleasant, but he didn’t have to commit and he didn’t have to trust any of them. And that meant he didn’t have to get mad, consequently, when they proved no better and no worse than anyone else. He’d learned that wisdom in his half a dozen family arrangements, half a dozen tries at being given the nicely prepared room, the nicely prepared brother, the family who thought they’d save him from his heritage and a mother who hadn’t been much.
In that awareness he walked in complete safety through the buzz of talk and the occasional hand snagging him to introduce him to this or that cousin… screw it, he thought: he wasn’t possibly going to remember anything beyond this evening. The names would sink in only over time and with the need to deal with one and another of them. If he really, truly needed to know Jack from Jamie B., he’d ask for an alphabetical list. In the meantime, everyone wore name tags.
He’d had a hard day, however, and what he did want to quiet his nerves and dim the day’s troubles wasn’t on the dessert tray. He strolled over to the bar, lifted a glass of wine, turned his shoulder before he had to deal with the bartenders and walked off with it, sipping a treat he hadn’t had at the Base but that he had had regularly in the latest family. The Wilsons had collected their subsidy from the station for taking care of him, he hadn’t caused them trouble (he’d been a model student who ate his meals out), he’d done his own laundry… fact had been, he’d boarded at the Wilsons’, and they were pleasant, decent folk who’d had him to formal dinners on holidays at home or in nice restaurants, and who hadn’t cared if he hit their liquor now and again as long as he cleaned up the bar and washed the glasses.
The wine tasted good. His nerves promised to unwind. He told himself to relax, smile, have a good time, get to know as many of the glut of relatives as seemed pleasant. Like Jeff. Jeff was all right. Even great-grandmother Madelaine was on an agenda of her own, nothing really to do with him as himself, except as the daughter-legacy Madelaine hoped he’d turn into. He would disappoint her, he was sure.
But if she refrained from exercising authority over him and just took him as he was, as she’d done when she’d failed to make a fuss over him here, he could refrain from resisting her. He could be pleasant. He’d been pleasant to a lot of people once he knew it was in his interest, as it seemed generally to be in his interest on this ship.
He’d like to find a few cousins who were somewhat above twelve years of age. He’d like to have someone to talk occasionally to whose passion wasn’t vid-games.
“God, you’re not supposed to have that,” Jeremy said, catching up to him.
“Had it on station.”
Jeremy was troubled by it. He saw that. But he had it now, and he wasn’t going to turn it in. He drank it in slow sips. He had no intention of gulping multiple glasses and making an ass of himself.