Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Finity’s End

Caroline J. Cherryh

Chapter 1

A system traffic monitor screen showed a blip where none had existed in this solar system. The wavefront of presence which had begun far, far out above the star spoke a series of numbers to a computer in Pell Central and a name flashed to displays throughout the room.

The master display, hanging two meters wide above the rows of traffic control workstations, simultaneously flashed up the same name in glowing green.

Finity’s End had come back to Pell.

“Alert the stationmaster,” the master tech said, and the message flashed through Pell Station’s central paging system.

By that time the signal, coming in from the jump range buoy at the speed of light, was four hours old. The Pell Central computers generated a predicted course based on data changing by the split second, a path outlined in ordinary green. The first projection supposed an abrupt drop in velocity well out from Pell’s Star.

Suddenly the huge display changed, bloomed with colors from red to blue, based on the last three courses and velocities that ship had used coming into Pell on that vector… and projected into the sun.

It made a bright, broad display across the ordinarily routine, direct-path listings. It alarmed the newest technicians and sent hands reaching toward reset toggles. Merchanters didn’t dive that close, that fast, toward the sun.

That ship had. Once. Years ago. That fact was still in the computer record and no one had purged it from files.

But the War was in the past. The navigational buoy, in its lonely position above the star, noted all arrivals in the entry range, and the information it sent to Pell Station showed no other blips attending the ship. Finity’s End came alone, this time, and the master tech calmly informed the junior technicians that the pattern they saw was no malfunction, but no reason for alarm, either.

The buoy’s information, incoming in those few seconds, was now a little further advanced. It had already excluded some predictions, and the automated computer displays continued to change as the buoy tracked that presence toward the sun—four hours ago.

By now, in realtime and real space, the oldest of all working merchanters had either blown off excess V and set its general course for Pell, or something was direly wrong. Only the robot observer was in a position to have seen the ship’s entry, and second by second the brightly colored fan of possibility on the boards dimmed as more and more of that remote-observer data came in. The fan of projection shrank, and eventually excluded the sun.

The screen was far less colorful and the technicians were far less anxious ten minutes further on, when the stationmaster walked in to survey the situation.

By now a message would be on its way from the ship to the station, granted that the tamer projections on the displays were true.

The captain of the oldest merchanter ship still operating would be, predictably, saluting the Pell stationmaster who, with his help, had founded the Alliance. The powers that dominated a third of human presence in the universe were about to meet.

But stationmaster Elene Quen, also predictably, strode to a com-tech’s workstation and took up a microphone before any such lightspeed message could reach her.

“ Finity’s End , this is Quen at Pell. Welcome in. What brings us the honor?”

As far as the eye could see, Old River ran.

As far as the eye could see, thickets stood gray-green and blooming with white flowers beneath a perpetually clouded heaven.

Just beyond those thickets, huge log frames lay in squares on the earth, waiting for the floods to come—and downers were at work intermittent with play.

Hisa was the name they called themselves. Brown-furred and naked but for the strings of ornament and fur about necks and waists, they splashed cheerfully through the dozen log-bounded paddies that were already flooded. In broad, generous casts, they strewed the heavy, sinking grain.

Humans had watched this activity year upon year upon year of human residency at Pell’s Star.

And Fletcher Neihart could only watch, in the downers’ world but not quite of it, limited by the breather-mask that limited every human on the world. He’d never been limited by such a mask in his youthful dreams of being here, a part of the human staff on Downbelow: Pell’s World, the same world that had swung below Pell Station’s observation window for all his life, tantalizing, clouded, and forbidden to visitors.

But this was real, not photographs and training tape that only simulated the world. Here the clouds were overhead, not underfoot.

Here, the hisa workers, free of masks and moving lightly, toiled the little remaining time their easy world required them to work. Once the frames were built and once the world spun giddily toward spring and renewal, the hisa and the fields alike waited only for the rains.

Plants whose cycles were likewise timed to the monsoon were budded and ready. In the forests that bordered the log-framed fields, swollen at the slight encouragement of yesterday’s showers, the sun-ripened puffers turned the air gold with pollen. You touched a puffer-ball and it went pop. On this day of warm weather and gusty breezes puffer-balls went pop for no apparent reason, and the pollen streamed out in skeins. Pollen rode the surface of the frame-bound ponds as a golden film. It made dim gold streamers on the face of Old River.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Two hisa, also truant from work, made a game of the puffers at woods’ edge, skipping down a high bank of puffer-plants and exploding the white, gray-mottled globes in rapid succession until their coats were gold.

Then they shook themselves and pollen flew in clouds.

“Gold, gold, gold for spring,” Melody crowed at Fletcher, and scampered up to the top of the bank above the river, as her co-truant Patch, whose human-name came of a white mark on his flank, chased after her. Melody dived down again. And up, in an explosion of puffer-balls. “Silly Fetcher! Come, come, come!”

Fetcher was what they called him. They wanted him to chase them. But the staff wasn’t supposed to run. Or climb. The safety of the breather-masks was too important.

“Gold for us!” Patch cried and, under his playful attack, pollen burst from the puffer-balls, pop, pop, pop-pop, in a chain of pixy dust explosions that caught the fading light.

Fletcher, watching this game up and down the little rise next a stand of old trees, exploded some of his own. That little hummock on which hisa played chase was a just-out-of-reach paradise for a teen-aged boy: things to break that only brought life and laughter—and created puffer-balls for next spring.

He was seventeen and he was, like the hisa, just slightly truant from the work of the Base.

But down here no one truly cared about a little break in the schedule, least of all the downers, who would all go walkabout when the springtime called, as it was beginning to do.

A last few days to seed the frames. A last few days for pranks and games. Then the monsoon rains would come, then the land would break out in blooms and mating, and no one could hold the hisa to something so foolish as work.

A teen-aged boy could understand a system like that. He’d worked so hard to be here, to be in the junior-staff program, and here was the payoff, a delirious moment that more than matched his dreams.

The hisa shrieked and ran and, abandoning rules, he chased, into the thicket along the river shore. They dived over the crest of another puffer-ball ridge. They laid ambushes on the fly and caught him in a puff of pollen.

And after they’d chased up and down, and broken enough speckled puffer globes to have the surface of the water, the rocks, and the very air among the tired old trees absolutely gold with pollen, they cast themselves down by the noisy edge of the water to watch the forever-clouded sky.

Fletcher sprawled beside them, flat on the bank. The breather-mask, its faceplate thickly dotted with pollen now, was the barrier between him and the world, and the need to draw air through the filtered cylinders of his mask left him giddy and short of breath.

Breathe, breathe, breathe as fast as possible at the rate the mask gave him oxygen. Downers when they worked Upabove, in the service passages of Pell, lived in those passages at the high CO2 level that downers found tolerable. When they exited those passages into the human corridors of the Upabove, they were the ones to go masked.

On Pell’s World, on Downbelow, the necessities were reversed, and humans were the strangers, unmasked inside their domes and masked out of doors.

On Downbelow, humans always remembered they were guests—worked their own huge fields and mills on the river plain south of here and tended their own vast orchards at the forest edge to grow grain and fruit in quantities great enough for trade with other starstations.

For more than they themselves needed, downers simply would not work. And what they thought of so much hard work and such huge warehouses, one had to wonder. It wasn’t the hisa way, to deal in food. They shared it. One wondered if they knew Pell Station didn’t eat all the grain Pell operations grew on Downbelow. There were wide gulfs of understanding between hisa and humans.

Risk yourself sometimes. Never risk a downer. Those were the first and last rules you learned. Kill yourself if you were a fool, and some staffers had done that: the air of Downbelow was more than high in CO2, it was heavy with biologicals that liked human lungs too well. If your breathing cylinders and your filters gave out, you could stay alive breathing the air of Downbelow—but you were in deep, deep trouble.

Kill yourself if you were a fool. Run your mask cylinders out if you were a total fool. But never harm a downer, never ask for downer possessions, never admire what a downer owned. They didn’t react as humans reacted. Bribes and gifts of food or trinkets won points with them.

So, happily, did humans who’d play games. After all the theorizing and the scientific studies, it came down to that: downers worked so they could live to play. So the staff, to gain influence and good will with downers, played games. Trainees brought up to the stringent, humorless discipline of the wartime Upabove learned different rules down here—at least the ones in direct contact with downers.

It made perfect, glorious sense to Fletcher.

Humans had learned, first of all lessons, not to be distressed when spring came full and downers went wandering, leaving their work to the mercy of the floods. The frames would hold the grain from scattering too far. The floods might lift and drift a frame or two, losing an entire paddy, but there was no need to worry. The hisa made enough such frames.

One year of legend the frames would all have gone downriver and the harvest would have failed entirely, but humans had held the land with dikes to save the hisa, as they thought. A wonderful idea, the downers thought when they came back from springtime wandering, and they were very glad and grateful that kind humans had saved their harvest, which they had been sure was lost.

But surely such disasters had happened before, and hisa had survived—by moving downriver to other bands, most likely. And all the human anguish over whether providing the dikes might change hisa ways had come to naught. A few free spirits now experimented with dikes, like old Greynose and her downriver brood, but the Greynose band worked fields where River ran far more chancily than here.

Improve the downer agricultural methods? Import Earth crops, or bioengineer downer grain with higher yields? Control Old River? Hisa crops needed the floods. Humans farmed crops from old Earth only in the Upabove, in orbiting facilities, to protect the world ecosystem, and those were luxuries, and scarce. Crops native to Downbelow were the abundance that fed the tanks that fed the merchant ships.

Processing could turn downer grain into bread and surplus could feed the fish tanks that supplied colonies from Pell to Cyteen. The agricultural plantations launched cargo up and received things sent down, sometimes by shuttle and not infrequently by the old, old method of the hard-shell parachute drop through Downbelow’s seething and violent clouds.

The port and the launch site were busy, human places Fletcher had been glad to leave in favor of this study outpost along Old River. Here, in fields on the edge of deep, broad forest, things didn’t move at any rapid pace and nothing fell from the sky. Here a hisa population not that great in the world met humans who monitored the effects of the vast operation to the south on hisa life, looking for any signs of stress and growing a little grain as hisa grew it, cataloging, observing—

And each spring for reasons linked to love and burrows and babies, downers would forget their fields, follow their instincts and go walking—females walking far, far across the hills and through the woods and down the river, with desirous males tagging after.

Fletcher hadn’t been down here long enough to have seen the migrations. He’d come last year at harvest, and the monsoon was yet to come. He knew that there were tragedies in the spring: death along with rebirth. There were falls, and drownings… the old hands warned the young staffers of that fact: the oldest hisa went walking, too, and deaths in spring were epidemic—spirit tokens, those waist-cords and necklaces brought back by others to hang on sticks in the burying-place. Every spring was risky, with the rains coming down and River running high—and he worried about these two, Melody and Patch, his hisa, with increasing concern.

You were supposed to be trained just to speak with downers on Pell Station.

But he’d met Melody illicitly on the station—oh, years ago, when he was eight, a human runaway, a boy in desperate need of something magical to intervene—and Melody, squatting down to peer at him in his hiding-place, had said, “You sad?” in that strange, mask-muffled voice of hers.

How did you give a surly answer to a magical creature?

He’d been locked in his own shell, hating everything he saw, hiding in the girders of the dock, moving from one to another cold and dangerous place to evade station authorities who might be looking for a runaway.

His foster-family—his third foster-family—had been scum that day. All adults were scum that day.

But you couldn’t quite say that about an odd and alien creature who crouched down near him in the cold, metal-tinged air and asked, “ Why you sad?”

Why was he sad? He’d not even identified what he felt until she put her finger on it. He’d thought he was mad. He was angry at most everything. But Melody had asked what the psychs had skirted around for years, just put her finger right on the center of things and made him wonder why he was sad.

A mother that committed suicide? Foster-families that thought he was scum? He’d survived those. No, that wasn’t it. He was sad because he hadn’t anyone or anywhere or anything and nobody wanted him the way he was. Not even his mother had.

He’d said, “My mother’s dead,” though it had happened three years ago. And Melody had patted his arm gently, as about that time Patch had shown up and squatted down, too.

“Sad young human,” Melody had explained to Patch. “Gone, gone he mama.”

It made him feel as if he was three years old. Or five. As he’d been when his mother had done the deed and left him for good and all. And he’d begun to feel embarrassed, and caught in a lie that was just going to get wider. “Long time ago,” he’d said, in a surly tone. “Long time you sad,” Melody had said, and put her finger on it again, in a way the psychs had never been able to.

And somehow then—maybe it had been Patch’s idea—they’d gotten him up on his feet and talked to him about things that just didn’t make any sense to him.

He knew he wasn’t supposed to talk to them. The fact he was breaking a rule made him inclined to go with them and get in real trouble, challenging the authorities to take him out of the foster-family he’d been trying to escape.

He’d walked about with them for an hour in the open, uncaught, unreprimanded, and he’d seen the amazing details about the station that downers knew. And then one of Melody’s mask cylinders had run out. They’d had to go to a locker within the service tunnels to get another, and he’d discovered a secret world, a world only licensed supervisors got to see—legally, among creatures only licensed supervisors got to deal with—legally.

He’d gone home to his foster-family and apologized, lying through his teeth about being very, very sorry. He’d stayed with that foster-family and followed their rules for another three whole years because their residence was near the access he knew to the maintenance tunnels. And the tunnels became his route to various places about the station, and his refuge from anger. He used masks that were for human maintenance workers, always in a locker by the access doors. He did no harm. For the first time he had a Place that was always his. For the first time in his life he had something to lose if he got caught. And for the first time in his life he’d reformed his bad-boy ways, gotten out of the crowd he was in and reformed so well the social workers thought his foster– family—his worst family of the lot—had worked a miracle.

He’d stayed reformed: he’d improved in school, which brought rewards of another kind. And even when, after the four-year rotation station workers were allowed. Melody and Patch had gone back down to their world, he hadn’t collapsed and relapsed into his juvenile life of crime.

No. He’d already confessed at least part of his story (not the part about actually going into the tunnels) to his guidance counselor and made a solemn career choice: working with the downers on Downbelow.

Tough standards, tough program, tough academic work. But he’d made the program. He’d gotten his chance.

And, not surprising, because former station workers lived and worked around the human establishments on Downbelow, he’d met Melody and Patch inside an hour after reaching the forest Base last fall. She was grayer. Patch wasn’t as big as he’d recalled. He’d grown that much in the nearly ten years since he’d seen them, and he’d not known how old his Downers had been.

It might be her last fertile season, and Patch her last mate. No other male pursued her that he knew of, and she would not, he understood, lead Patch all that long a chase when her spring was on her—but then Patch couldn’t walk so far these days, either.

He wanted them back safely. But he knew, now, soberly, that ultimately he’d lose them, too. So days were precious to him. And this day—this was the best day of his life, this game of puffer-balls and pollen.

A hard downer finger poked him hard below the ribs, and he curled in self-defense. Melody and Patch were in a prankish mood and, lying on his back on the bank, he jabbed Patch back, which sent Patch screaming for the nearest tree-limb. In the trees downers could climb like crazy, and a human in heavy boots and clean-suit was not going to catch Patch.

Patch flung leaves at him. “Wicked, wicked,” Melody cried, and flung a puffer-ball, which disintegrated on impact. Pollen was everywhere. Patch dropped, shrieking, from the tree.

Then it was pollen wars until the air was thick and gold again.

And until the restricted breathing had Fletcher leaning against a low-hanging limb gasping for air and sweating in the suit.

The light was dimmer now.

“Sun goes walk,” he said. One couldn’t say to downers that Great Sun set, or went down, or any such thing. The rules said so. Great Sun walked over the hills. These two downers knew Great Sun’s unguarded face, having been up in the Upabove themselves, but it didn’t change how they reverenced the star. He used the downer expression: “The clock-words say humans go inside.”

They looked, Melody and Patch did, at gray, cloud-veiled Sun above a shadowing River. They slid arms about each other as they set out walking up the trail toward the Base, being old mates, and comfortable and affectionate. Where the trail widened, Melody put an arm about Fletcher, too, and they walked with him back down the river path until, past three large paddy-frames, they came within sight of the domes where humans lived, in filtered, oxygen-supplied safety above the flood zone.

“You fine?” Patch asked. “You got bellyache?”

“No,” he said, and laughed. Downers didn’t brood on things. If you didn’t want a dozen questions, you laughed. They wouldn’t let him be sad, and wouldn’t leave him in distress.

They were absolutely adamant in that.

So he laughed, and poked Patch in the ribs, and Patch poked him and ducked around Melody.

Games.

“Late, late, late,” he said. And then the alarm on his watch beeped, as all across the fields quitting time announced itself on the ’link everyone wore.

“Oh, you make music, time go!”

Not that they grasped in the least what time really meant. On days when a lot of the staff was out in the fields, the downers would gather to watch close to quitting time, and exclaim in amazement at the hour every human in the fields simultaneously quit work and headed back to Base, carrying whatever they’d been using, gathering up whatever they’d brought with them. The downers understood there was a signal and that it came with music. It was not the beep itself, the Director said, it was the why that puzzled the downers. The old hands like Melody and Patch, who’d seen the station change shift, and who’d worked by the clock, could tell the younger downers that humans set great store by time and doing things together.

(“But Great Sun he come again,” was Melody’s protest against any such notion of pressing schedule. “Always he come”)

On Downbelow, in downer minds, there were always new chances, new tomorrows.

And one never had to do anything that pressing, that it couldn’t wait one more hour or one more day. You wanted to know when to go to your burrow? Look to Great Sun, and go before dark. Or after, if you were in a mood to risk the blindness of the nights.

One was never in too big a hurry. One could take the time to walk, oh, way off the direct track home, in this still-strange notion (to a station-born human) of being able to look across a wide open space to see what other people were doing on other routes. Upabove, it would have been corridors and walls.

Here, on this happiest of all days, he found his path intersecting Bianca Velasquez’s route on her way home. They were in the same biochem seminar. They mixed before discussion-session. She’d always hung around with Marshall Willett and the Dees. Who didn’t hang around with him.

She was going to snub him. He could pretend to drop something and let her go by while he rummaged in the gravel of the path. Like a fool. He could save himself the sour end to a good day.

But it ought to be easy to look at Bianca. It ought to be easy to talk to her. Hi, just a simple hi, and put the onus of politeness on her. Hi. Ready for the biochem quiz? What job are you on? He had it straight. Civilized amenities were very clear in his head until she almost looked at him and he almost looked at her and by an accident of converging trails they were walking together.

Not just any girl. The girl. Bianca Velasquez, who’d drawn his eye ever since he’d first seen her. Suddenly his brain was vacant. He couldn’t look at her when he couldn’t think and his body temperature was rising in what he knew was a glow-in-the-dark blush.

God, he was a fool. He must have inhaled puffer-pollen. He didn’t know why he’d chosen today to cross her path, just—there she’d been; and he’d done it

“Where were you?” she asked.

“Over there.” He waved his hand at River. That sounded stupid. And she’d noticed he was gone? God, if the supervisor had seen him…

“So where were you?”

“Oh, beyond the trees. Down by the River.”

“Doing what?”

“This downer I work with—Melody—she wanted to show me something.” I work with . As if he was a senior supervisor. That sounded like a fool. She’d rattled him just by existing. He was already in a tangle and he’d only just opened his mouth.

“You’re all over stuff.”

He brushed his clean-suit “Puffer-balls.” Thank God, he had his inspiration for something to say. “It was all over. And the sun and everything. It was real pretty. That’s why I went.”

“Where?”

Fast thinking. Panic. Decision. “I’ll show you.”

“Sure.”

Oh, God. She said yes. He didn’t expect her to say yes.

“When?” she asked

“Can you get away tomorrow?”

“How long?”

“No longer than I was today. About the same time. Right before sunset. When the light’s right.”

“I don’t know. We’re not supposed to be alone down there.”

She thought he was trouble. And he wasn’t. He had maybe one sentence to change her mind.

“Melody and Patch will be there. They used to work near my rez on the station, I’ve known them for years before I came down. We’ll be safe.” He blurted that out and then wished he hadn’t been quite so forthcoming. She was a nice, decent girl from a solid, rule-following family. He’d just told her something the supervisors might not know from his records, and if they got to asking too close questions of Melody and Patch, they in hisa honesty could accidentally say something to get him canned from the program.

“All right,” she said. “Sure. All right.”

He could hardly believe it. She was from Family with a capital F, and he was from a non-resident household with an f only for fouled-up. She wasn’t somebody who’d normally even talk to him on the Station. But she seemed to invite him to hold her hand, brushing close as they walked and when he did slip his hand around hers, her fingers were chaste and cold and listless, making him ask himself was this the way Stationer Family girls were, or had he just made a wrong, unwelcome move?

“Got to watch your hands when you go through decon,” he said. “I’m all over pollen.”

“Yeah,” she said, and gave a little squeeze of the fingers that made him suddenly lightheaded. He wasn’t mistaken. She did want to talk to him. He hadn’t imagined she was looking back at him in biochem.

He didn’t expect this. He really didn’t. “I thought you were, kind of, hanging with Marshall Willett.”

“Oh, Marshall. ” Her disgust dismissed the very name and being of Marshall Willett, one of the Willetts, who’d been in close orbit around her for three months, acting as if he owned the Base and the senior staff, besides.

He didn’t know what to say. He had a dream, and quite honestly that dream wasn’t remotely Bianca Velasquez. It was being in this world and on this world on days like today.

It was lasting to be a senior in the Program on Downbelow. Getting involved with someone like Bianca wasn’t a help: it was a hindrance he’d never sought.

But—here she was. Interested—at least in holding hands. And what did he do?

She was smart. She was far more serious-minded than Marshall Willett, whose reason for being down here he privately suspected was a family trying to make him do something for a career. Bianca was bright, she was pretty, she seemed to care about the work, and that—in addition to being able to stay down here amid the wonders of the planet for the rest of his life—that was just too much to ask of luck.

No. Back to level: permanent duty on the world was all he wanted, and he wouldn’t risk that by making a wrong move on Bianca and her powerful Family, not even if she was standing stark naked in the pollen-gold and the sun of that bank.

God, he liked that image. She’d be so pretty. She had dark hair and olive skin. She’d be all gold with the sun and the pollen coming down in streamers… well, repaint that picture with breather-masks and the clean-suits. They’d plod about in clumsy isolation while Melody and Patch scampered and threw puffer-balls at them. And how much trouble could you get into with a girl, when neither of you could take off the breather-masks and all you could touch was fingertips?

They walked along hand in hand toward the domes, which now were ghostly pale against the rapidly advancing twilight. The white yard lights were on. Other workers were coming home, too, walking much faster than they were.

Their paths split apart again where the path reached what they called the Quadrangle, and the dorm-domes were very strict, male in one direction, female in the other, if you were junior staff…

As if they didn’t have good sense until their twentieth birthday and then mature wisdom automatically happened; but in essence, he’d been glad to have the peace the no-females rules brought to the guys’ side, and tonight he was glad of it because he didn’t have to think of a dozen more clever things to say. He’d had maybe five minutes walking with her, avoiding making a total fool of himself. He had all night and tomorrow to get his thoughts together before he had to talk to her again.

Oh, my God , he had a date with Bianca Velasquez.

It was impossible. He’d never gone with a girl. And having a Family girl like Bianca actually make a date with him was… impossible. Bianca was so Family her feet didn’t touch the floor, so virginal and proper her knees locked when she slept at night. He was disposed on one side of the equation to think it was some kind of setup: he’d met numerous setups in his life, for no other reason than he was nobody.

But over the weeks he had seen that she was smarter than that crowd, and maybe bored with them, and, the thought came to him, maybe she was lonely, too. Marshall seemed to think the Sun and all the planets sort of naturally swung round him because he was a Willett; Bianca was the only human being on the Base—including the supervisors—who didn’t have to give a damn that Marshall was a Willett, because she was a Velasquez. Velasquezes didn’t have to give a damn about Willetts, Siddons, Somervilles, or Kielers, which was the big clique down here.

So what did she do? She held hands with him ?

He didn’t have a family at all. He was non-resident scum.

He also stood six feet, had learned self-defense on Pell’s rough-and-tumble White Dock, the bottom end of where he’d lived, at worst, with his fourth family, and he could beat shit out of Marshall Willett. So maybe that was her idea, her way of thumbing her nose at the lot of them. She’d been sort of a loner, too, in the center of a cloud of admirers.