He was exhausted and in pain, and struggling to breathe, trying not to give up a cylinder sooner than he’d wrung the last use out of it. He was ready, now, to be back in safety.
But a bright gold of treeless land showed between the trees.
It wasn’t the cleared hillsides around the Base. There was no white of domes or dark green of trees, and Old River was far from him. It might be the further fields, where humans grew grain in vast tracts, at Beta Site, near the shuttle landing.
But those wouldn’t be gold yet, just brown, turned earth.
It was the forest edge, for sure. And when he’d followed his guide to the last fringe of forest giants he saw below him a hill sweeping on for a great distance, down to a plain of last year’s golden grass. In the heart of a pollen-hazed distance, something like a set of figures stood, thick and strange, and impossible to be alive.
Scale played tricks with his eyes. Tiny figures moved among the greater ones, hisa, dwarfed by skyward-looking images.
He knew, then, what he saw—what he’d heard reported, at least, and seen only in photographs.
It was the Spirit-place, the great holy place. The stone figures that watched the sky, the great Watchers, of which their little ones on the hill were the merest hint.
Humans didn’t come here.
“Come-come,” the downer said, beckoning as humans beckoned “Come-come, you come, Melody child.”
He walked a golden hill, that tore beneath his feet. He was losing the vision. There was a feeling of falling… down and down.
Of arrival. He knew it now. The dream escaped his mind. Breaths came faster. There was no cylinder restraining his air. There was no clean-suit. There was no world…
He’d been in the best moment of his life. And wasn’t there. Would never be. Tears leaked between Fletcher’s shut lids, and he drew tainted breath, and knew why his mother had kept the dream, bought it on dockside. Knew why his mother had loved it more than she’d loved him.
There’d been no future in the dream. He’d not known it could turn darker.
That moment, that very moment he’d want to hold, that was the one the arrival ripped away from him, after all the pain.
There was just Jeremy scrabbling in his drawer, after clothes, there was just Jeremy saying, “Drink the stuff. You’ve got to have it.”
He’d have ignored Jeremy. But he couldn’t ignore his stomach. It wanted; and he reached numbly after the drink packets, the synth that pulled electrolytes back into balance after hyperspace had done its worst to a human body.
After the dream was done.
“You shower first or me?” Jeremy asked him.
“You.” He didn’t want to move. It wasn’t a favor Jeremy offered him. He wanted to keep his eyes shut and try to recover that sight, that moment, when he’d met all his hopes.
He could have them back. Could have had them forever. If something hadn’t pulled the ship in.
It was another month. What had pulled them in, if they weren’t doomed to die in empty space, had to be the star they’d been looking for.
They were at Mariner.
He gulped down his remaining drink packets, drowsed while Jeremy showered and his own stomach settled. They made two more touches at the interface that almost made him sick, and then he slept again. He came to with the intercom talking to them.
“ Jeremy, Vincent, Linda, Fletcher. ” It was the synthesized voice he’d heard last time. Jeremy had told him there was a set-up in the computer where a random-sort program juggled the electronic dice and put the scut-crews on whatever assignment their luck assigned them. It activated the intercom to call your team’s cabins and even left mail in your mailbox.
“ Laundry detail ,” it said.
“Damn!” Jeremy cried from inside the bath, and came out still damp and stark naked. “No fair!”
At least, Fletcher thought, he knew how to do that job.
“Stupid machine!” Jeremy shouted at the ceiling and kept swearing.
Fletcher rolled out of bed, his clothes at that particular stage of sticking to his body and dragging across dead skin that made him sure he didn’t want to linger in them. The effects of a month-long near dormancy weren’t pretty on the human body inside or out, he’d discovered. This time his gut wanted to protest, and he made the bathroom in some haste.
Officers’ meetings. Numbers that pertained to ship-sightings, stock reports, futures and commodities… the same kind of information they’d tracked for military purposes for nearly two decades, and from before JR had sat on staff; but the information was never sifted down to military intelligence: the availability of supply and the activity and origin of suspect ships—questions which JR’s brain kept following off-track of what his seniors were discussing.
Seniors reminisced instead about old port-calls, pre-War, early War. They talked about the early days of Mariner Station, when everything had been bare metal, and the details swirled around in a junior mind not quite sure whether this was needful information or just the pleasurable talk of old crew, recalling hard times which juniors nowadays didn’t remember.
When they’d put into Mariner before, in his recollection, they hadn’t traded. The Old Man had had meetings with Mariner authorities and military authorities, they’d had meetings with other captains and senior crew off other ships and taken in the kind of information ships wouldn’t ordinarily trade with each other, information on the market more freely shared than made sense… if they were rivals. They’d been no one’s rivals, then.
Now they were going in to compete and consequently they wanted prices for what they carried as high as possible.
Now secrecy mattered not because they didn’t want Mazian and the Fleet to know what they hauled and where they hauled it, but because they wanted to keep the price of goods, apparently scarce, as high as they could manage until they sold what they were carrying. Let somebody speculate that their load was all downer wine (it wasn’t) and the price of wine would plummet, taking their profit. Let them speculate that they carried Earth chocolate and coffee (they did) and the price of those goods would drop in three seconds on the electronic boards.
They were legally restrained from entering their goods on the market until they’d reached a certain distance from Mariner, and Helm had run them as close to that mark as they could at near-light before he’d dumped them down to the sedate crawl at which they approached Mariner Station.
At 0837h/m local their goods had gone up for sale on the Mariner Exchange, and they had a vast amount of printout from Mariner, which was just old enough (two hours light-speed) to make buys hazardous. The new guessing game was not what Finity carried but what Finity wanted or needed. The price of goods would react. Any ship dropping into Mariner system was going to affect prices when they began to make their buys and as traders reassessed goods ‘in the system’ and their effect on each other. And there was a ship, Boreale , already approaching dock.
Boreale was from Cyteen. That was interesting in the engineering and the political sense: it was one of those new Cyteen quasi-merchanters with a military, not a Family crew, coming from a port which specialized in biostuffs (rejuv, plant and animal products, pharmaceuticals) as well as advanced tech. Also a factor to consider on the question of that ship’s cargo and the futures market: farther ports deep in Union territory did produce metals and other items that could drive down the prices of goods inbound from say, Viking, heavily a manufacturing system.
It was, in short, a guessing game in which Mariner futures and commodities traders could suffer agonies of financial doubt, a game on which Finity ’s profit margin ticked up or down by little increments every time someone made a buy or sell decision and changed the amount of goods available.
The market also reacted in a major way to every ship docking, because the black box that every ship carried shot news and technical statistics to the station systems, news derived from all starstations in the reporting system. The black boxes wove the web that held civilization together. A single ship’s black box reported every piece of data from the last station that ship had docked at, and thus every piece of data previously brought to that last station from other ships of origins all over space. The information constituted pieces of a hologram reflecting the same picture at different moments in time, and the station’s computers somehow assembled it alclass="underline" births and deaths, elections, civil records, deeds, titles, rumors, popular songs, books in data-form for reproduction by local packagers, mail, production statistics, news, sports, weather where applicable, star behaviors, navigational data, in-space incidents, the total picture of everything going on anywhere humans existed so far as that particular ship had been in contact with it. A last-minute load went into a ship when it undocked and went out of a ship when it docked elsewhere, weighted by the computers as most accurate where the ship had just been and least accurate or least timely regarding starstations farthest from its last dock. The station computers heard it all, digested it all, overlaid one ship’s black-box report over another and came up with a universe-view that included the prices of goods at the farthest ports of the human universe… one that faded in detail considerably regarding information from Cyteen or its tributaries—or from inside Earth—but it was good enough to bet on, and pieces let a canny trader make canny wagers.