Spacer mindset.

Safer just to disconnect from all of them, Jeremy too. He could be pleasant, but he didn’t have to commit and he didn’t have to trust any of them. And that meant he didn’t have to get mad, consequently, when they proved no better and no worse than anyone else. He’d learned that wisdom in his half a dozen family arrangements, half a dozen tries at being given the nicely prepared room, the nicely prepared brother, the family who thought they’d save him from his heritage and a mother who hadn’t been much.

In that awareness he walked in complete safety through the buzz of talk and the occasional hand snagging him to introduce him to this or that cousin… screw it, he thought: he wasn’t possibly going to remember anything beyond this evening. The names would sink in only over time and with the need to deal with one and another of them. If he really, truly needed to know Jack from Jamie B., he’d ask for an alphabetical list. In the meantime, everyone wore name tags.

He’d had a hard day, however, and what he did want to quiet his nerves and dim the day’s troubles wasn’t on the dessert tray. He strolled over to the bar, lifted a glass of wine, turned his shoulder before he had to deal with the bartenders and walked off with it, sipping a treat he hadn’t had at the Base but that he had had regularly in the latest family. The Wilsons had collected their subsidy from the station for taking care of him, he hadn’t caused them trouble (he’d been a model student who ate his meals out), he’d done his own laundry… fact had been, he’d boarded at the Wilsons’, and they were pleasant, decent folk who’d had him to formal dinners on holidays at home or in nice restaurants, and who hadn’t cared if he hit their liquor now and again as long as he cleaned up the bar and washed the glasses.

The wine tasted good. His nerves promised to unwind. He told himself to relax, smile, have a good time, get to know as many of the glut of relatives as seemed pleasant. Like Jeff. Jeff was all right. Even great-grandmother Madelaine was on an agenda of her own, nothing really to do with him as himself, except as the daughter-legacy Madelaine hoped he’d turn into. He would disappoint her, he was sure.

But if she refrained from exercising authority over him and just took him as he was, as she’d done when she’d failed to make a fuss over him here, he could refrain from resisting her. He could be pleasant. He’d been pleasant to a lot of people once he knew it was in his interest, as it seemed generally to be in his interest on this ship.

He’d like to find a few cousins who were somewhat above twelve years of age. He’d like to have someone to talk occasionally to whose passion wasn’t vid-games.

“God, you’re not supposed to have that,” Jeremy said, catching up to him.

“Had it on station.”

Jeremy was troubled by it. He saw that. But he had it now, and he wasn’t going to turn it in. He drank it in slow sips. He had no intention of gulping multiple glasses and making an ass of himself.

“What’s this?” He knew that young, high, penetrating voice, too. Vince had showed up, with Linda. Inevitably with Linda. “You can’t drink that.”

Vince and his holier-than-thou, wiser-than-everyone attitudes for what Vince wouldn’t dare do when he was taller and older. He gestured with the three-quarters full glass, “Have drunk it. When you grow up, you can give it a try. Meanwhile, relax.”

“You’ll get on report,” Vince said. “I’ll bet you get on report.”

“Fine. Let them ship me back. I’ll cry tears.”

“I wish they would,” Vince said, one of his moments of sincerity, and about that time a larger presence came up on him.

JR.

“He’s drinking,” Vince said as if JR had no eyes. Fletcher looked straight at JR.

“Somebody give you that?” JR asked in front of Jeremy and Vince and Linda. He’d had enough family togetherness for the day. He drank three-quarters of a well-hoarded glass down in three swallows.

“Here,” he said, and handed the empty glass to JR. JR almost let it fall. And caught it on the fly, not without spilling a couple of last drops to the expensive carpet.

Fletcher walked off. He’d had enough party and celebration, and beyond that, he wasn’t in a frame of mind to stay around to be discussed or reprimanded in front of his roommate, a twelve-year-old jerk, or a couple of hundred of his worst enemies. It was easy to leave in the open-ended mess hall section. He just kept walking to the lift, out where the light was dimmer and the noise was a lot less.

JR held a glass he didn’t want to be holding. He handed it to Vince, restraining himself from immediate comment. He didn’t know what exchange had preceded Vince’s complaint to him. Clearly cousin Fletcher had just overloaded on something, be it wine or family.

He refused to get into he-saids with immediately involved junior-juniors and walked to the bar to learn the plain facts. “Nate. Did you give Fletcher wine?”

Nate was one of the senior crew, now, lately of the junior crew, and Nate looked distressed. “No. He just took it. I didn’t know what to do. Has he got leave?”

“Not officially, no. You did right. You didn’t make an incident. Vince and the junior-juniors called him on it, though, and he flared and left.”

“The guy wasn’t real straightforward about asking for permissions, what it seems to me. I think he knew it was off limits.”

“Yeah. You and I both noticed. If he does it again just let him. I’ll talk to Legal and we’ll find out whether there were agreements with him before he boarded, or what.”

“Trouble?” Bucklin turned up by him at the bar, Bucklin couldn’t have missed Fletcher’s leaving.

“Vince sounded off about the drink. Fletcher’s pissed.”

“Cousin Fletcher came aboard pissed. Counting he was hauled here by the cops and the stationmaster, I’m not personally surprised he and young Vince should go critical. ”

“It’s on our watch,” JR sighed. “We got him, he’s ours.”

“Maybe we could have airlock drill,” Bucklin’s tone was wistful, the suggestion outrageous.

“I’m afraid that won’t solve it.” He couldn’t quite joke about it, tempest in an infinitesimal teacup though it might be. “Captain-sir wants him. Madelaine wants him. I’m afraid we ultimately have to work him in.”

“Between you and me only, this has a bad feeling.” This time Bucklin wasn’t making a joke at all. “This guy doesn’t want to be here. I mean, it’s hard enough to work him in if we wanted him. We’re busy. We’ve got nothing but unskilled labor in him. We had a fine thing going before we got lucky in the court, and I appreciate we had a legal problem, but—where are we going to fit him in?”

Bucklin left his complaint hanging after that, and after a moment, in his silence on the issue, Bucklin walked away. Bucklin wasn’t of a rank to say what was floating in the air unsaid. We don’t want him didn’t half sum up the feeling among the senior-juniors. They had had an integrated team that was turning their last-born batch of juniors, ending with Jeremy, into a tight-knit unit that would put the senior-juniors in crew posts in another couple of years, with Jeremy and Vince and Linda their best backup for what was going to be, with adequate luck, a sudden crop of babies forthcoming from this run. The senior-juniors were a team tested literally under fire. However thin they were in numbers, he saw the makings of a damned fine command in what his seniors had left him and what he’d spent the last seven years putting together. Supposing now that women did become pregnant, and that the nursery did acquire a new batch of kids, he and Bucklin and Lyra had plans to set Jeremy and Vince and Linda in charge of the ones who’d come out of the nursery as junior-juniors at just about the time that trio hit physical maturity. It had all been going to work out neatly, and then they got cousin Fletcher, of a physical size to fit with senior-juniors, basic knowledge far beneath that of junior-juniors, and a surly attitude to boot. Add to that a late-to-board-call stunt unprecedented in the history of the ship, for which Fletcher had proved nothing but self-righteous and angry.