“No!” from Nike.

“—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a year older than he is; but Fletcher’s seventeen years weren’t time-dilated. So do you want my orders, or are there other suggestions?”

“He’s the baby,” Connor said “I think we ought to do a Welcome-in.”

Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It wasn’t the idea he had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew privileges and he hadn’t been through the process and the understandings and the acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.

“He’s a little old for that,” JR said.

“We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy,” Sue said. “Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took it. So how’s this guy holier than any of us?”

“He’s upset, that’s one difference. He wasn’t born here. He’s not one of us…”

“That’s what a Welcome-in’s for , isn’t it?” Chad asked, with devastating reason.

But a bad idea. “Not yet. This isn’t somebody straight down from the kids’ loft. This isn’t a green kid.”

“Plenty green to me,” Chad said.

“He can’t do anything,” Lyra said. “He’s not trained to do anything. He’s a stationer. He’s a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he’s got to appreciate what he’s joining.”

JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group, one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of him in an emergency.

“So when do we do a Welcome-in?” Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad’s tone it was an issue the way Fletcher’s encounter with him over the wine glass was going to be an issue with Chad.

“Not yet,” JR said. “Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he’ll blow, and that’s no good”

“Everybody blows,” Connor said.

“Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy’s size,” Bucklin muttered, finally, a dose of common sense. “Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you.”

There were sulks. They hadn’t done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They hadn’t known whether Finity would survive her next run, and they’d Welcomed-in Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn’t seemed fair for any kid to die alone in the nursery, the ship’s last kid, in years when they hadn’t produced any other kids.

Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to station-time.

And very, very different.

“I say we go easy with him,” JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin’s clear statement of the facts had gained, “and we give him a little chance to figure us out. Then we’ll talk. ”

There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.

“Square up,” JR said. “Don’t sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a senior venue.”

Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.

“I say with JR,” said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, “we give him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn’t, we talk again at Mariner.”

“Just don’t take him on,” JR said. “If you’ve got a problem with him, refer it to me.”

He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher’s quarters this evening and try to talk it out with him. But he didn’t trust that three-quarters of a wine glass in three gulps had improved Fletcher’s logic. Or his temper. There were constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased slide.

He supposed he’d tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe hadn’t been the ideal pair-up.

But putting him with him or Bucklin would inspire jealousy: Put him with Chad? There were two tempers in a paper sack. Connor, the same. Ashley or Toby would go silent and there’d be offense there. He couldn’t think of anybody better than Jeremy, who could outright disarm the devil.

The Old Man and Paul both had warned him there weren’t fast fixes for personal messes once they went wrong. You didn’t just go running down to a case like Fletcher and tell him how to fix his life and expect cooperation, especially after a public scene such as they’d just had. Fletcher had to figure a certain amount out for himself, and meanwhile he and his crew had to figure out what a mind was like who’d been more than content to sink into a gravity well and never see the stars again. Stranger than the downers, in his own opinion. Downers at least had been born to endless cloud and murk.

Wood, a slim wand of it brought into space where wood was a rarity, feathers, where birds never flew… and spirals and dots and bands carved by hisa fingers—fingers no longer content to carve wood with stones, the scientist reminded them. Hisa of these times were quite glad to have sharp metal blades. Hisa accepted them in trade and called metal cold-cold. That had become the hisa word for it.

No matter how hard you tried to keep the Upabove out of Downbelow, humans didn’t give up their ties to the technology they depended on and hisa learned to depend on it, too. But humans found it difficult to go down to a world again.

Fletcher lay on his bunk, his head a little light from the wine. His fingers drew peace from the touch of the feathers, damaged by a Downbelow rain. The touch of wood evoked memories far happier than where he was.

He didn’t give up his resentments. He didn’t give up his dreams, either. And maybe the experts weren’t right that he’d done actual harm by going where he’d gone. Expert opinion had backed another theory, once, right up to the time before he was born. Then the idea had been to get the hisa into space, teach them technology, give them the benefits of the steel and plastics world above their clouded world. Hisa had been very clever with machines, quick to learn small jobs like checking valves, changing filters, reading dials.

Pell Station, short of personnel in its earliest days, and overwhelmed by events cascading about it, had begun with hisa at the heart of the operation, and they’d built the station around the presumption there’d always be hisa on Pell.

But human greed had tried to push things too fast on Downbelow. People had multiplied too fast. Had brought demands on the hisa for more, more, more of their grain, for organized work, for controlling Old River’s floods and doing things on schedule.

Hisa hadn’t taken to schedules and human demands. A hisa named Satin had led a hisa uprising—well, as uprisen as patient hisa ever got—back during the War.

Then a new set of experts had moved in, declared humans had done everything wrong and shut down a lot of operations the Base had used to have, restricted more severely the rotation of hisa up to the station, and dashed all expectations of hisa and humans working together.

Was it wrong that Melody and Patch had rescued a human child?

Was it wrong he’d grown up and found them again?

Was it wrong he’d dreamed of working with them—maybe a little closer than he should have gotten?

(But he knew them, and they knew him, his gut protested. He hadn’t hurt them. He’d never hurt them.)

His fingers traced designs no human understood. He knew what scientists surmised the designs were: day-night in the pattern of black dots, Great Sun in the circles, Old River in the long curves and branches.