So, for all those tentative reasons, walking back to mess, he decided he liked his designated almost-brother, this round, among all the foster-brothers they’d tried to foist off on him. And if Vince leaned on Jeremy again tomorrow, he’d rattle Vince’s teeth with no real effort and damn the consequences.
They played cards in the rec hall after supper this first evening in Mariner system, and he won his time back from Jeremy plus six hours. Jeremy blew a hand. That was something. Or he was getting suddenly, measurably better.
“Want to play a round?” It was one of the senior-juniors coming up behind his shoulder as he collected the cards. He’d forgotten the name, but the convenient patch on the jumpsuit said, Chad .
Jeremy scrambled up from the chair when Chad asked, dead-serious and looking worried. The room was mixed company, seniors out of engineering watching a vid, a couple of other card games, the senior-juniors over in the corner shooting vid-games, and this guy, one of their group, wanted to play.
It wasn’t right, Jeremy’s behavior said it wasn’t right.
“Maybe you’d better play Jeremy,” Fletcher said, “He’s better.”
Chad settled into the chair anyway, determined to have his way. Chad looked maybe a little younger than JR, not much, big, for the body-age. Chad picked up the cards and dealt them. The stakes were already laid: get up and walk off from this guy, or pick up the cards. Jeremy’s distress advised him this was somebody to worry about. He picked up the cards, hoping he could score that way.
Chad won the hand, a lapse of his concentration, his own fault. The guy didn’t talk, didn’t ask anything, just played a hand and won it. They’d bet an hour.
“My hour,” Chad said. “You clean my room tomorrow, junior-junior.”
“I guess I do,” he said. He’d lost, fair and square. He didn’t like it, but he’d played the game. He’d satisfied Chad’s little power-play, didn’t want another hand, in any foolish notion he could win it back against a good, a very good card player. He got up and left, and Jeremy caught him up in the corridor, not saying anything.
He felt he’d been played for the fool, though he was grateful for Jeremy’s cues, and didn’t want to talk about the bloody details of the encounter. More than embarrassed, he was angry. Chad was one of JR’s hangers-on, crew, cronies, whatever that assortment amounted to, and JR hadn’t been there; but at the distance of the corridor, he saw the game beneath the game, and he knew winning against Chad wouldn’t have been a sign of peace.
“Did he cheat?” he asked Jeremy. He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t sure he’d have caught it, and he wanted to know that, bottom-level.
“No,” Jeremy said, “but he’s pretty good.”
It was better than his suspicion, but it didn’t much improve his mood “Why don’t you go on back?” he said. “There’s no point. I’m going to bed.”
“Me, too,” Jeremy said, for whatever reason, maybe that things weren’t entirely comfortable for a roommate of his in the rec hall right now. There’d been a pissing-match going on. My skull’s thicker than yours head-butting. And why Chad had chosen to come over to their table and pick on him was a question, but it wasn’t a pleasant question.
They got to the cabin, undressed.
“When we get to Mariner, you know,” Jeremy said, awkwardly enthusiastic, “there’s supposed to be this sort of aquarium place. It’s wild. Really worth seeing, what I hear. ”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we could kind of go, you know.”
He let his surly mood spill over on Jeremy and Jeremy was trying to make the best of it. Least of anybody on the ship was Jeremy responsible for Chad’s unprovoked attack on him.
He sat down on the bed; he thought about aquariums and Old River and how the fish had used to come up in the shallows, odd flat creatures with long noses. Melody had told him the name, but like no few hisa words, it was hisses and spits. They had an aquarium on Pell, too.
But it was an offer. It was something to do. Mostly he wanted to send his letters home. He didn’t want Chad or anybody else setting him up for something. And the coming liberty was a time when they might be out from under officers’ observation.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m kind of in a mood.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said.
“You know I didn’t want to be here. It’s not my fault.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “But you’re all right, you know. I wish you’d been here all along.”
He didn’t. Especially tonight. But he couldn’t say it to Jeremy’s earnest, offering face. There was the kid, the twelve-year-old man, the—whatever Jeremy was—who wanted to go with Mallory and fight against the Fleet, the kid who got so hyped on vid-games he shook and jerked with nerves, and who wanted to tour an aquarium on Mariner—probably, Fletcher thought, a whole lot more exotic to Jeremy than it was to him. Jeremy shared what he wanted to do. Shared a bit of himself.
Wished he’d had his company. That was saying something.
And because the moment was heavy and fraught with might-have-been’s, he ducked Jeremy’s earnest look and bent down instead and pulled open his under-bunk storage.
Where more than next morning’s socks resided. Where what was important to him resided.
In that moment of emotional confidences he took the chance, dug into the back of it and took out what Jeremy probably had never seen, something hands had made that weren’t human hands.
“What’s that?” Jeremy asked in astonishment, as he sat up and brought out the spirit stick. The cords unwound, feathers settling softly in the air, and the unfurling cords revealing the carvings in wood.
“Something someone gave me,” he said. He was defensive of it, and all it was to him. He thought to this moment he was a fool for unveiling it. But Jeremy’s reaction was more than he expected. It wasn’t puzzlement. It was awe, amazement, everything he looked for in someone who’d know what he was looking at and appreciate what he treasured.
“It’s hisa work,” Jeremy said. “Where’d you get it?”
“It was a gift to me. That’s where I lived. That’s what I did. That’s what I worked all my life to get into.” He handed it across the narrow gap and Jeremy took it carefully in his hands, stick, cords, feathers, and all.
Jeremy handled it ever so carefully, looked at the carvings, at the cords, fingered the wood, and then looked closely at a feather, stroking it with his fingers. “I figure about the cords, maybe, but how’d they make this ?”
He didn’t know what Jeremy was talking about for a moment, and then by Jeremy’s fingers on the center spine and the edges of the feather he realized. “It’s a feather ,” he said, hiding amusement, and Jeremy instantly made his hands gentler on the object.
“You mean like it came off a bird?”
“Not quite like the birds on Earth. They don’t fly much. They kind of glide. Some stay mostly on the ground. Downbelow birds.”
“I never saw a feather close up,” Jeremy said. “It’s soft.”
“Feathers from two kinds of birds. The wood comes from a little bush that grows on the riverbank. Cords are out of grasses. You soak it and put a stick in it and twist real hard while it’s wet and it makes cord. There’s a trick to sticking the next piece in just as you’re running out of the last one, so they make a kind of overlay in the twist. I’ve watched them do it. They don’t braid, that’s not something they invented. But they do this twist technique. If you do a lot of them, you’ve got rope.”
“Wild,” Jeremy said, and fingered the cord and, irresistibly, the feathers. “That’s really wild. I’ve seen vids of birds. I never saw a feather, like, by itself. Just from a distance. ”
“They fall off all the time. You’re not supposed to collect them. Hisa do. But humans can’t collect them.”
“A bird with its feathers falling off.” Jeremy thought that was funny.
So did he. “Not all at the same time. Like your hair falls out in the shower. A piece gets tired and falls out and a new one grows. It’s kind of related to hair. Biologically speaking.”