“Vince,” Jeremy said
“I want to talk to you,” Vince said to Jeremy, and those two went out in the corridor and stayed gone awhile.
“Is Jeremy all right?” Fletcher asked Linda, and Linda didn’t look at him, quite. “Yeah. Fine,” Linda said.
He was worried. Vince and Linda both were a little senior to Jeremy and he had the idea they were both leaning on the kid. His agemate. Him.
He’d personally had enough of Vince’s notion of subtlety. Adrenaline was up, vibrating through him so he’d like to put Vince through the nearest wall if Vince crossed him one more time about the drink issue. But Vince was too small. At best he’d have to settle for bouncing Vince off the wall, which wasn’t satisfying at all, or holding him a few inches off the deck, which had possibilities. But either would likely get him confined to the ship for a long, boring couple of weeks and he found he was looking forward to liberty. He really was. He figured he’d write home. He’d promised Bianca he’d write. Yes, she’d caved in, she’d saved her neck, her career. He couldn’t blame her, now that he’d had time to think about it. He had a lot to tell her.
He’d write his foster-family, too. The Wilsons. Tell them he was all right. He owed them that. He’d heard that junior crew had an allowance and he’d asked Jeremy how much a letter cost: the answer was simply that letters didn’t mass at all, in a ship’s black box, and if you didn’t want physical copy to go, it was ten c per link for handling.
That was a little more than he’d hoped, but a lot less than he’d feared, and Mariner was a single-hop from Pell as you counted postage: jump-points, Jeremy said, didn’t count, only station hookups did; and for that ten c, they let you have a fair amount of storage per letter.
He’d see Mariner and he’d write Bianca about it like a diary. He was a little doubtful about the Wilsons, even shy about writing to them, in the thought maybe they didn’t want a letter from him after the trouble he’d caused at the end, but he’d eaten enough of their holiday dinners: he could afford the cash at least to tell them he was all right, even if none of them had come to see him off—for one thing because he didn’t depend on Quen to have even told them. She’d have known they were a legal convenience—she’d set it up. But she probably didn’t know, because he’d not mentioned it even to the psychs, that they were the one batch he’d really liked, and really called some kind of home.
He could write to Quen. One of those picture messages, the really neon, garish ones, the sort spacers bought, if he were going to send one to Quen. If it wouldn’t cut seriously into his spending money he’d be downright tempted just for the hell of it. But something nice and sentimental for the two really he was going to send, maybe the picture sort that you could print out in holo. He didn’t know whether Bianca or the Wilsons had ever gotten a message from outside Pell, and he figured they’d keep it and maybe like a picture they could repro and look at
Jeremy and Vince came back. He looked at Jeremy for bruises or signs of ruffling, but Jeremy didn’t look to have been disturbed, just a little hot around the edges and not looking at anybody.
He couldn’t ask Jeremy then and there what Vince had wanted, or whether Vince had given him a hard time. Things seemed peaceful. Vince and Jeremy settled to playing cards. Business was so slow there wasn’t an alterday crew into the laundry once they closed up shop for the shift: their instructions were to leave the laundry door open and the light on, however, and put a check-sheet and a pen in the holder for people that took soap and other things, so they could keep the reorder records straight and know who’d picked up their clothes.
Doesn’t anybody ever steal? he wondered, and then he asked himself, Steal shower soap? And decided it was silly. It was free. Their own job as guardians of the laundry was largely superfluous once the washing and folding was all done: they had to clean up, latch down, be sure cabinet doors were shut tight and otherwise safed. Mostly they played cards. He figured at a certain point it was just a place for them to be, out of the way and bothering no one essential to the ship. Or maybe, at this stage of things, heading in, maybe everyone aboard was taking a breather. Traffic in the corridor was the lowest and slowest it had been.
As it happened, they didn’t go straight to the mess hall this end of shift. Jeremy and he were supposed to check in with medical… again. It was a few minutes standing in line, but the staff didn’t do anything but prick your finger, weigh you, and ask you a few questions, like: How are you sleeping? How are you feeling? With him it was, Glad to see you, Fletcher. Had any problems? How are the lungs?
In case he’d inhaled something on Downbelow. But he could say, for the second time, he hadn’t. They stuck his finger, looked at his lungs, listened to him breathe…
“All fourteen million credits are safe,” he said to the Family medics, and the medic looked at him as if it was a bad joke. Probably it was pretty low and surly humor.
“Do I get a liberty?” he asked.
“See no reason not,” the medic in charge said
“Thanks.” He’d no desire to offend the medics, or get on somebody’s report to JR. Clean record was his ambition right now, just get through it. Stay out of run-ins with JR, who alone of the officers seemed to be in charge of his existence. Get back to Pell. He had to produce a calm pulse for the medics and he’d done that, forgetful of Vince: he thought of green leaves and sun through the clouds, and when they dismissed him, he supposed they called him healthy.
Jeremy didn’t get his lungs looked at. Jeremy just watched, cheerful again.
“So what was that with Vince?” He sprang the question on Jeremy as they walked toward the mess hall. And Jeremy’s good mood evaporated.
“Oh, Vince is Vince,” Jeremy said.
“If he gives you a hard time about me, you know,—let me know.”
Jeremy looked at him, a dark eye under a shelf of hair that was usually shading his eyes. “Yeah,” Jeremy said as if he hadn’t quite expected that. “Yeah, thanks.”
He’d felt obliged to offer. He guessed Jeremy hadn’t expected much out of him and he knew Jeremy hadn’t been completely happy to give up his (he now knew) single room to be the only junior-junior with a roommate. But Jeremy had been cheerful all the same, and stood up for him and tried to make the best of it, and that was fairly unusual in the string of people he’d lived with. In this kid, in this twelve-year-old body and combat-nerves mind, he had something ironically like the guys he’d used to hang out with when he was a little younger than Jeremy, guys well aside from what the sober adults in his life had wanted him to associate with. He’d been into a major bit of mischief until he’d wised up and gotten out of it
But, along with the mischief he hadn’t gotten into any longer, had gone the fellowship he hadn’t had in the competitive Honors program. He’d invested in no friendly companionship since he’d gotten involved so deeply in his goals, except, well, Bianca, which had started out with a rush of something electric. But no guys, no one to play a round of cards with or hang about rec with. He’d evaded females in the crew. He’d let himself fall back into an earlier time when girls were something the guys all viewed from a distance, when guys were mostly occupied with looking good, not yet obsessed with hoping their inadequacies didn’t show… he’d been through all of it, and he could look back with, oh, two whole years’ perspective on the really paranoid stage of his life.
And maybe—he decided—maybe dealing with small-sized Jeremy in that sense felt like a drop back into innocence and omnipotence.
Like revisiting his own brat-kid phase, when vid-games and running the tunnels had been his total obsession. Getting away with it. Telling your friends how wonderful you were. Yes, he grew tired of hearing blow-by-blow accounts of maze-monsters and flying devils while Jeremy was beating him at cards, and the words wild and dead-on and decadent were beginning to make his nerves twitch; but there was something genuine and real in Jeremy that made him put up with the rough edges and almost regret that he’d lose Jeremy when his year of slavery was up. A few years ago, bitter and sullen with changes in his living arrangements, he’d have declined to give a damn—or to invest in a quasi-brother he’d lose. But he’d grown up past that; he’d had his experience with the Wilsons, and finally the Program; and somewhere in the mix he’d learned there was something you gained from the people that chance and the courts flung you up against, never a big gain, but something.