Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh Page A

brother, killed in service—reason enough to carry grudges if a man wanted to. Reared by his mother’s sister on Cyteen proper, a plantation of sorts… then a government school, deep-teaching for tech skills. Claimed no knowledge of higher politics, no resentments of the situation. The pages passed into actual transcript, uncondensed, disjointed ramblings… turned to excruciatingly personal things, the kind of intimate detail which surfaced in Adjustment, while a good deal of self was being laid bare, examined, sorted.   Fear of abandonment, that deepest; fear of being a burden on his relatives, of deserving to be abandoned: he had a tangled kind of guilt about the loss of his family, had a pervading fear of it happening again, in any involvement with anyone. Loved the aunt. Took care of me, the thread of it ran at one point. Held me sometimes. Held me … loved me. He had not wanted to leave her home. But Union had its demands; he was supported by the state, and they took him, when he came of age. After that, it was state-run deep-teach, taped education, military training and no passes home. He had had letters from the aunt for a while; the uncle had never written. He believed the aunt was dead now, because the letters had stopped some years ago.
    She would write, he believed. She loved me. But there were deeper fears that she had not; that she had really wanted the state money; and there was guilt, that he had not come home; that he had deserved this parting too. He had written to the uncle and gotten no answer. That had hurt him, though he and the uncle had never loved each other. Attitudes, beliefs… another wound, a broken friendship; an immature love affair, another case in which letters stopped coming, and that wound involved itself with the old ones. A later attachment, to a companion in service… uncomfortably broken off. He tended to commit himself to a desperate extent. Held me, he repeated, pathetic and secret loneliness. And more things.   He began to find it. Terror of the dark. A vague, recurring nightmare: a white place. Interrogation. Drugs. Russell’s had used drugs, against all Company policy, against all human rights—had wanted badly something Talley simply did not have. They had gotten him from Mariner zone—from Mariner—transferred to Russell’s at the height of the panic. They had wanted information at that threatened station; had used Adjustment techniques in interrogation. Damon rested his mouth against his hand, watched the fragmentary record roll past, sick at his stomach. He felt ashamed at the discovery, naive. He had not questioned Russell’s reports, had not investigated them himself; had had other things on his hands, and staff to take care of that matter; had not—he admitted it—wanted to deal with the case any more than he absolutely had to. Talley had never called him. Had conned him. Had held himself together, already unstrung from previous treatment, to con Pell into doing the only thing that might put an end to his mental hell. Talley had looked him straight in the eye and arranged his own suicide.
    The record rambled on… from interrogation under drugs to chaotic evacuation, with stationer mobs on one side and the military threatening him on the other.   And what it had been, what had happened during that long voyage, a prisoner on one of Mazian’s ships… Norway … and Mallory.
    He killed the screen, sat staring at the stack of papers, the unfinished condemnations. After a time he set himself to work again, his fingers numb as he signed the authorizations.
    Men and women had boarded at Russell’s Star, folk who, like Talley, might have been sane before it all started. What had gotten off those ships, what existed over in Q… had been made, of folk no different than themselves.   He simply pushed the destruct on lives like Talley’s, which were already gone.   On men like himself, he thought, who had gone over civilized limits, in a place where civilization