Love? She’d exuded just enough to rip the guts out of a kid. She loved somebody whose name Madelaine dangled before him? Had his kid?

Then why in hell had she lost herself in drug-hazed space? Post-birth depression? He wished it were that simple.

He went back to the mess hall and, finding there was nothing doing at the moment, had a soft drink. They were free. It was one benefit of a situation that felt, again, like the trap it was.

“So what’d Legal want?” Jeremy wanted to know,

“Just passport stuff,” he said. He didn’t talk about it. He didn’t want Jeremy for a confidant on this point. He didn’t at all want Vince and Linda, who were lurking for gossip. If Vince had opened his mouth right then, he’d have hit him.

He fought for calm. He tried to settle down and just go numb about the situation, telling himself that a year, like all other periods of time, would pass. He’d learned to wait in doctors’ offices, in psychiatrists’ offices, in court. “Don’t fidget,” the adult of the month would say, and he’d stay still. When he stayed still nobody noticed him. A year was long, but his fight to get to Downbelow had been longer. He did know how to win by waiting. Don’t feel anything. Don’t say much. Don’t engage anybody the way he’d engaged the lawyer. He’d made the one mistake up in Madeline’s office… made the kind of mistake that gave manipulative people and lawyers levers to use.

No. She’d already known him, before he ever walked in that door. He was her great-grandson , and she’d lost her daughter and her granddaughter and now she wanted a try at him, seeing his mother in him. That was something he’d never faced. She was his honest-to-God real great-grandmother, and his mother had lived on this ship.

She’d just died on Pell.

Chapter 11

The shift went to bed, an exhausted mainnight in which visions of rain-veiled river danced in Fletcher’s eyes; and playing cards cascaded like raindrops, inextricably woven images, in which somehow he owed days, not hours, and in which he chased Jeremy through tunnels first of earth and then of garishly lit steel and pipe, the latter of which looked miraculously like the tunnels on Pell.

Next morning it was back to the galley before maindawn, help Jeff set out the breakfast trays and get the carts up to B deck, but they were still cooking huge casseroles for next jump… things that could warm up in a hurry, a lot of red pepper involved. Taste was pretty dim after jump, so Jeff said, and by Fletcher’s estimation it was true; spicy things perked up the appetite. While they were doing that, they’d had no further alarms, no changes in velocity. Jeff said the ship’s long, even run under inertia would give them the chance to get some baking done. Cakes in the oven during a high-K run were doomed, so Jeff said.

So whenever they hit an onboard stretch where they could spread out and cook, they cooked for all they were worth: fancy pastries, casseroles, pies, trays of pasta and individual packets for those hours people came in scattered There were onions and fish from Pell, there was keis and synth ham, there was cabbage and couscous and what they called animal protein, which was a kitchen secret nobody should have to look at before it cooked. It came in pieces and mostly the cook-staff ground it. There was rice from Earth and yellow grain from Pell; there were sauces, there were gravies, there were fruit jellies that came from Downbelow and wine solids and spices and yeasts that came from Earth. There were keis sandwiches, fish sandwiches, and pro-paste sandwiches which Fletcher swore he’d never eat again in his life; there were pickles and syrups and stuffed pasta, string pasta, puff breads and flat-breads and meal and pro-paste pepper rolls with hot sauce, and there were sausage rollups, which were their lunch, and keis and ham rollups which were supper. The galley had rung with the battering of pans and trays, swum in pots of sauce that went steaming into forms of given sizes and had to be trundled on carts into the galley lift, where in coats you put the stuff in deep-freeze on the very outer level of the rim in what they called the skin. Out there among the structural elements of the passenger ring, cold was the natural, cheap environment, requiring only a rack for storage, no mechanism but a light; and you felt that cold burning right through your boot-soles when you walked the grids. Fletcher made one trip down with Jeff just to see what it was like, his closest approach to the uncompromising night outside the hull; he was glad to get back up into warmth and light of the ring.

All this day they worked on sandwiches, and of course, tastes of the current batch. Nobody on regular cook-staff ever seemed to eat a meal: they sampled; and the last job they put together, just before supper, was a giant pyramid of tasty little sandwiches and another of sweets. Which to Fletcher’s disappointment didn’t turn up on their menu. It went to B deck.

“We’ll get some,” Jeremy said as he watched the cart go. “Topside in the senior mess. There’s a get-together coming. Everybody’s there.”

“So?” he said. He wasn’t at all enthusiastic about meetings. He remembered board-call, and everybody together for that. It had been particularly uncomfortable. And he’d worked hard today. He thought he had a right to those desserts. “I’d rather read or something. Thanks.”

“You’re really supposed to go. It’s all of second and third shift, and a lot of first will come. That’s why they’ve been handing us fast food today. Eat light.”

“Is it a meeting, or what is it?”

“Not a meeting ,” Jeremy said as if he were a little slow. “Food. The fancy food. It’s a party . You know. People. Music. Party.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause that Union bunch is just sitting back there not bothering us, ’cause we’re in a big boring jump-point and we don’t have anything much to do. Why not ? When you’re downtimed and there’s no pirates going to bother you, you throw a party. Come on, Fletcher, you’ll enjoy it. Be loose. Jump before main-dawn, but tonight we shake things up, man. Be loose, be happy, it’s got to be somebody’s birthday! That’s what we say, it’s somebody’s birthday somewhere! Celebrate for George.”

“Who’s George?” There was such a thing as ship-speak: the in-jokes sometimes flew past him.

“King George V.”

He’d thought, with his fascination with old Earth history, there was no way a twelve-year-old from Finity was going to know King George of England. Or England, for that matter, in spite of Jeremy’s tape study. He was amazed. And enticed. “Why George?”

“Well, because he’s old and he’s dead, and nobody throws him parties anymore, so we do on Finity . When it’s nobody else’s birthday, it’s for old King George!”

He’d walked into that one. “Why not?” he said. “Seems logical.”

He still didn’t entirely want to go, but he considered the food they’d been working on all day; and he knew himself, that once he was committed to being alone, knowing full well there was a party going on elsewhere, he’d feel lonelier. I’d rather stay in my room and hate all of you might be the real answer, but it wasn’t, in Jeremy’s clear opinion, going to be the accepted answer.

Besides, Jeremy had, against all odds, made it sound like fun.

So they showered and put on clean, unfloured, unpeppered clothes without grease spots, and went up to B deck. Fletcher’s most dire apprehension in the affair was that he might have to suffer through some formal introduction of himself, standing up in front of people he didn’t want to be polite to. “They’re not going to introduce me again, are they?” he’d asked Jeremy. “I don’t want to be introduced.”