Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

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 all: 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.

The black box system also continually affected the local station-use commodities market, as a shortage of, say, grain product on Fargone affected the price of grain product everywhere in known space. A tank blew out at Viking and a major Viking tank farm shut down a quarter of its production: the price of fish product, that bane of a small-budget spacer’s existence, actually ticked up 10/100ths of a credit everywhere in the universe, in spite of the fact that every station produced it and there was no food staple cheaper than that: somebody might actually have to freight fish product to Viking.

JR told himself this truly was a thrilling piece of news and that he should be pleased and proud that Finity was at last occupied with details like that rather than figuring how they could best spend the support credits they had to supply ships like Norway with staples and metal, out in the deep, secret dark of jump-points a ship laden the way they were loaded now couldn’t reach. They still would haul for Mallory—one run scheduled out when they were done with this loop, as he understood—but there were other ships appointed to do that, a few, at least, who regularly plied the supply dumps that Mallory used.

What was different from the last near-twenty years was that their schedule to meet Mallory at a rendezvous yet to be arranged didn’t call on them for their firepower.

And at Pell, they’d officially given up the military subsidy that fueled and maintained them without their trading. That was the big change, the one that shoved them away from the public support conduit and onto the stock exchange and the futures boards not with an informational interest in the content of the boards—but with a commercial one.

Safer, Madelaine had argued, to haul contract. That meant hauling goods for someone else who’d flat-fee them for haulage and collect all the profit, with a bonus if their careful handling and canny timing, or blind luck ran the profit above a pre-agreed amount, and liability up to their ears if something happened to the cargo. It was steady, it was relatively safe, it guaranteed they got paid as long as the goods got to port intact

But it didn’t pay on as large a scale as a clever trader could make both hauling and trading their own goods. They had the safer option; but Finity had never done contract haulage as a primary job, and maybe it was just the Old Man’s pride that he disdained it now. James Robert and Madison had been doing trading in ship-owned goods for a lot of years before the War, they’d watched the market survive the War and blossom into something both vital and different, and by what JR saw now, they just couldn’t resist it

The Old Man and Madison were, in fact, as happy as two kids with a dock pass, going over market reports. JR felt his brain numbed and his war-honed instincts sinking toward rust. All he’d learned in his life was at least remotely useful in what the two senior captains were doing, but not with the same application. He wasn’t even engaged in strategy thinking, like whether the ship near them might be reporting to Union command. They knew that Boreale would do exactly that—report to Union command—so there wasn’t even any doubt of it to entertain him.

Trade. Real trade. He still entertained the unvoiced notion that they were engaged in information-gathering and intrigue about which neither the Old Man nor Madison had told him. He went over the political and shipping news with a trained eye and gathered tidbits of speculation that—were no longer useful in the military sense, since they’d be outmoded by the time they got near someone who reported to Mallory.

That ship they’d met at Tripoint continued to haunt him, and after the staff meeting—knowing he’d lose points in the strange non-game they played, but not as many as if he asked on a current situation—he snagged Madison to ask with no hints about it whether that encounter had been scheduled.

“No,” was Madison’s answer. “They’re watching, is all.”

“Watching us.”

“Watching for anything the Alliance is doing. Seeing what our next step is. Being sure—odd as it might sound—that we aren’t negotiating with the Fleet for a cease-fire and a deal with Mazian independent of them. Earth’s made some provocative moves.”

Mark that for a blind spot he should ponder at leisure. It wasn’t enough to know the honest truth about one’s own intentions toward the enemy: an ally still had to plan its security in secret and without entirely trusting anyone. One’s allies could take a small piece of information, foresee double-crosses and act, ruinously, if not reassured.

And, true, Earth was building more ships, launching new explorations in directions opposite to the Alliance base at Pell.

That Earth might someday make peace with the Fleet and amnesty them into its service again… that was, in his book, a very sensible fear for Union or Pell to have; but that they themselves, Finity , and Norway , would someday make peace with the Fleet? Not likely. Not with Edger in the ascendant among Mazian’s advisors. Damn sure Mallory wouldn’t. Union didn’t remotely know Mallory or Edger if they ever thought that

But then… Union hadn’t had experienced military leaders when the War started. They’d learned tactics and strategy from the study tapes on which Union’s education so heavily relied. But most of all they’d learned it from the Fleet they were fighting, as the whole human race hammered out the tactics and strategy of war at more than lightspeeds and with relativistic effects and no realtime communications at all. He’d learned Fleet tactics by apprenticeship to the Old Man and strategy from Mallory. The Fleet had developed uncanny skills and still did things Union pilots couldn’t match. Union, on the other hand, sometimes did things that surprised you simply because it wasn’t what one ought to do… if one had read the ancient Art of War , or if one had understood the Fleet.

Union was always hard to predict. Sometimes its actions were just, by traditional approaches, wrong. Union was now their ally.

“Where do you suspect Mazian is right now?” he asked Madison. The estimation could change by the hour. Like the market, only with more devastating local consequences.

“I have absolutely no idea,” Madison said. “The way I don’t know where Mallory is, either.”

On the fine scale of the universe, that was not an unusual situation. “Do you think she knows where Mazian is?”

There was a longer silence than he’d expected, Madison thinking that one over, or thinking over whether it was needful baseline information, or a truth a senior-junior ought to figure out for himself. “I think Mallory knows contingency plans she’ll never divulge. I think she knows a hell of a lot she’ll never divulge. I think they’re her safety, even from us. Loose talk could reach Union. I don’t think their amnesty is worth a damn in her case.”

“You think they’d go after her?”

“They’d be fools right now if they did. And I don’t think they’re fools. I think they’d like to know a lot more about her operations than they know. I think they lose a lot of sleep wondering whether someday we’ll turn tables, make an understanding with Earth, and go after them. Earth trying to get a foothold back in space, establishing new starstations… in other directions… they view that with great suspicion.”

“Do you think Earth might become a problem?”

“We don’t think so currently. But after the War, when we couldn’t get a peace to stick… you aren’t old enough to remember. But we spacefarers had been homogenous so long we flatly had forgotten how to deal with divergent views, contrary interests, traders that we are. One thing old Earth is good at: diplomacy.”

“Good at it!” He couldn’t restrain himself. “Their diplomacy started the War!”

“Not on their territory,” Madison said with a nasty smile. “The War never got to them, did it? When we and Union chased Mazian’s tail back to Sol space and we lost him, it looked as if we were going to square off with the Union carrier… Earth mediated that little matter. We frankly didn’t know what hit us. First thing we knew, we agreed, the Union commander agreed, each of us separately with Earth; then we had to agree with each other or Earth would have flung us at each other and watched the show from a distance. Learn from that. It’s all those governments, all those cultures on one world. They’re canny about settling differences. And we’d forgotten the knack. Four, five thousand years of planetary squabbles have to teach you something useful, I suppose.” Madison folded up his input board and tucked the handheld into his operations jacket, preparing to leave. “I don’t know if we could have made peace without Earth.”

“Would we have made war without them, sir? In your opinion.

“Far less likely, too. We’d have been an adjunct of what’s now at Union. But James Robert would have spit in their eye, still, when they tried to nationalize the merchanters. We’d have fought them. We’d have had every merchanter in space on our side. As we did. And we’d still have gained sovereignty on our own decks. As we did. Think about it. It’s all we merchanters ever really gained from all the fighting we ever did. I just don’t think we’d have blown Mariner doing it.”

A Union spy had sabotaged a station—this station. Mariner. Pell had lost a dock during the War. Mariner had depressurized all around the ring, and tens of thousands of people who hadn’t made it to sealed shelter had died. It was the worst human disaster that had happened outside of Earth. Ever.

And, we merchanters . It was the first time he’d ever heard anyone on Finity use that particular we . Or talk about a balance sheet, a profit-and-loss in the War. It was a sobering notion, that the War wasn’t just the War, immutable, always there. There’d been a before. Was it possible there would be an after—and that they wouldn’t have gained a damned thing by all they’d done, all the blood they’d shed?

Was it true, that even if you shoved at history and fought and struggled with its course, the universe still did what it was going to do anyway?

Hell if.

He couldn’t accept that.

Madison went on his way to the bridge, needed there, and he went his.

He hadn’t found his way past Madison’s reticence to ask what no one had yet told him… the reason they’d split from Mallory, which he began to think held all the other answers. No better informed than before he’d snagged the second captain, JR picked up his own handheld and clipped it to a belt that did little else but hold it—a great deal like the pistol he’d once worn, back in the bad old days when fifteen-year-olds had gone armed everywhere on the ship.

They’d stopped doing that when they’d gotten through the business with Earth and when it was sure they’d moved Mazian’s raiders out of the shipping lanes. What the likes of Africa and Europe had done when they boarded a merchanter didn’t bear telling their younger crew, but he’d grown up with a pistol on his hip and instructions how to use it in corridors where you had to worry about a pressure blowout.

At fifteen he’d been instructed to blow out the corridor where he was himself if his only other prospect had been capture by the Fleet.

Helluva way to grow up, he supposed. It was the only life he’d known. And when they’d gotten past the worst of the mop-up, and when they could go through a jump-point without being on high alert—then the Old Man had called the guns in, and arranged that they’d be in lockers here and there about the ship, with no latch on the cabinets (nothing on Finity was locked), but not to be carried again. He’d felt scared when they’d taken the guns away. It had taken him this long to get over being scared.

And they hadn’t ever had to use them. Their in-ship stand-down from arms had lasted and the Old Man had been right.

Maybe this stand-down from arms would last, too, and maybe he needed to bear down harder on the study of Viking fish farms.

Laundry wasn’t anybody’s favorite assignment. After-jump meant a load of sweaty clothes. But it was better, Jeremy had said, than drawing the duty after liberty, because there was no limit to how many outfits somebody could get dirty on a two-week liberty, and there was a limit to how many clothes anybody totally tranked out could get dirty during jump. So they had the light end of things, and consequently they’d washed everything they had in the bins inside four hours. The better and worse of such assignments was a detail of spacer life Fletcher had never quite, somehow, imagined as potentially an item of curiosity and least of all his problem.

But he’d learned how to manage his personal property, on this particular detail. He’d learned, for instance, that by rules and regulations you left your last work clothes for cleaning in the laundry on your way out to liberty, like at Pell, and whoever got next laundry duty (it couldn’t be them, because the computer never doubled you on the same assignment) did all of it as they’d done, on the run out from dock.

So there were rhythms to the jobs they did. The laundry didn’t always operate at the mad pace it had the last time. It was a burst of activity in this particular period, and then last-minute special cleaning for officers’ uniforms.

He learned, for instance, that a crew member on Finity had an issue of clothing of which at least one dress and one work outfit stayed in the locker ready for board-call and undock schedules or a senior officer talked seriously to you about your wardrobe. A regular crew member took only flash stuff and civvies ashore on a liberty, and wasn’t allowed to wear work stuff on dock unless he was working, which junior-juniors didn’t have to do.

“So what if you wear work clothes?” he asked Jeremy as Jeremy worked beside him, having given him this piece of information. “Another talk with an officer?”

“Why don’t you try it?” Vince asked from behind his back.

That was at least the third snide and uninvited remark. Vince was still on him about the drink from the bar last main-dark, from what he could figure; somehow that really bothered Vince.

“After all,” Vince said, “you don’t have to follow the rules. Not you.”

“Cut it out,” Jeremy said

“Vince,” Linda said

“Well, he didn’t, did he?”

“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