Downbelow Station tau-3

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  She closed her eyes finally, drew a deliberately peaceful breath. Graff stirred against her, settled again, a friendly presence in the dark.

  v

  Pell: sector blue one, number 0475; 2400 hrs. md.; 1200 hrs. a.

  “She sleep,” Lily said. Satin drew in a breath and settled her arms about her knees. They had pleased Sun-her-friend; the Dreamer had wept for joy to hear the news that Bluetooth had brought, the Konstantin-man and his friend safe… so, so awesome the sight of tears on that tranquil face. All the hisa’s hearts had hurt within them until they understood it was happiness… and a warmth had sat within the dark and lively eyes, that they had crowded close to see. Love you, the Dreamer had whispered, love you every one. And: Keep him safe.

  Then at last she smiled, and closed her eyes.

  “Sun-shining-through-clouds.” Satin nudged Bluetooth and he who had been zealously grooming himself — trying vainly to bring order to his coat, for respect of this place — looked toward her. “You go back, go and set your own eyes on this young Konstantin-man. Upabove hisa are one thing; but you are very quick, very clever Downbelow hunter. You watch him, come and go.”

  Bluetooth cast an uncertain look at Old One and at Lily.

  “Good,” Lily agreed. “Good, strong hands. Go.”

  He preened diffidently, a young male, but others gave him place; Satin regarded him with pride, that even the old strange ones saw worth in him. And truth: there was keen good sense in her friend. He touched the Old Ones and touched her, quietly excused himself toward the outside of the gathering.

  And the Dreamer slept, safe in their midst, although a second time humans had fought humans and the secure world of the Upabove had rocked like a leaf on the breast of river. Sun watched over her, and the stars still burned about them.

  Chapter Six

  Downbelow: 10/11/52; local day

  The trucks moved at a lumbering pace through the clear area, forlorn, collapsed domes, the empty pens, and above all the silence of the compressors, telling a tale of abandonment. Base one. First of the camps after main base. Lock doors banged loosely, unfastened, in a slight wind. The weary column straggled now, all looking at the desolation, and Emilio looked on it with a pang in his own heart, this thing that he had helped to build. No sign of anyone staying here. He wondered how far down the road they were, and how they fared. “Hisa watch here too?” he asked of Bluetooth, who, almost alone of hisa, still remained with the column, beside him and Miliko. “We eyes see,” Bluetooth answered, which told him less than he wanted.

  “Mr. Konstantin.” A man came up from the back, walked along with him, one of the Q workers. “Mr. Konstantin, we have to rest.”

  “Past the camp,” he promised. “We don’t stay in the open longer than we can help, all right? Past the camp.”

  The man stood still and let the column pass and his own group overtake him. Emilio gave Miliko’s shoulder a weary pat, increased his own pace to overtake the two crawlers ahead of the column; he passed one in the clearing, overtook the other as they reached the farther road, got the driver’s attention and signed him half a kilometer halt. He stopped then and let the column move until he was even with Miliko. He reckoned that some of the older workers and the children might be at the end of their strength. Even walking with the breathers was about the limit of exertion they could take over this number of hours. They kept stopping for rest and the requests grew more and more frequent.

  They began to straggle as it was, some of them stringing further and further behind. He drew Miliko aside, and watched the line pass. “Rest ahead,” he told each group as they passed. “Keep on till you get there.” In time the back of the column came in sight, a draggled string of walkers. The older ones, patient and doggedly determined, and a couple of staffers who walked last of all. “Anyone left?” he asked, and they shook their heads.

  And suddenly a staffer was coming down the winding road from the other end of the column, jogging, staggering into other walkers, as the line erupted with questions. Emilio broke into a run with Miliko in his wake, intercepting the man.

  “Com got through,” the runner gasped, and Emilio kept running, the slanted margins of the road, up the tree-curtained windings until he saw the trucks and people massed about them. He circled through the trees and worked his way through the crowd, which broke to let him, toward the lead truck, where Jim Ernst sat with the com and the generator. He scrambled up onto the bed, among the baggage and the bales and the older folk who had not walked, worked his way through to the place where Ernst sat, stood still as Ernst turned to him with one hand pressing the plug to his ear and a look in his eyes that promised nothing but pain.

  “Dead,” Ernst said. “Your father… riot on the station.”

  “My mother and brother?”

  “No word. No word on any other casualties. Military’s sending. Mazian’s Fleet. Wants contact with us. Do I answer?”

  Shaken, he drew in a breath, aware of silence in the nearest crowd, of people staring up at him, of a handful of old Q residents on the truck itself looking at him with eyes as solemn as the hisa images.

  Someone else scrambled up onto the truckbed and waded through, flung an arm about him. Miliko. He was grateful… shivered slightly with exhaustion and delayed shock. He had anticipated it. It was only confirmation.

  “No,” he said. “Don’t answer.” A murmur started in the crowd; he turned on it. “No word on any other casualties,” he shouted, drowning that in a hurry. “Ernst, tell them what you picked up.”

  Ernst stood up, told them. He hugged Miliko against him. Miliko’s parents and sister were up there, cousins, uncles and aunts. The Dees might survive or, equally, they might die unnoted by the dispatches: there was more hope for the Dees. They were not targets like the Konstantins.

  The Fleet had seized control, imposed martial law, Q — Ernst hesitated and doggedly continued, before all the uplifted faces below — Q had rioted and gotten across the line, with widespread destruction and loss of life, stationers and Q both.

  One of the old Q residents was crying. Perhaps, Emilio acknowledged painfully, perhaps they too had people for whom to worry.

  He looked down on row after row of solemn faces, his own staff, workers, Q, a scattering of hisa. No one moved now. No one said anything. There was only the wind in the leaves overhead and the rush of the river beyond the trees.

  “So they’re going to be here,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, “they’re going to be back here wanting us to grow crops for them and work the mills and the wells; and Company and Union are going to fight back and forth, but it’s not Pell anymore, not in their hands, when what we grow can be taken to fill their holds. When our own Fleet comes down here and works us under guns… what when Union comes after them? What when they want more work, and more, and there’s no more say any of us has in what happens to Downbelow? Go back if you like; work for Porey until Union gets here. But I’m going on.”

  “Where, sir?” That was the boy — he had forgotten the name — the one Hale had bullied the day of the mutiny. His mother was by him, in the circle of his arm. It was not defiance, but a plain question.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Wherever the hisa can show us that’s safe, if there is any such place. To live there. To dig in and live. Grow our crops for ourselves.”

  A murmur ran among them. Fear… was always at the back of things for those who did not know Downbelow, fear of the land, of places where man was a minority. Men who were unconcerned by hisa on-station grew afraid of them in the open land, where men were dependent and hisa were not. A lost breather, a failure… they died of such things on Downbelow. The cemetery back at main base had grown as the camp did.

  “No hisa,” he said again, “ever harmed a human. And that despite things we’ve done, despite that we’re the aliens here.” He climbed down from the truck, hit the yielding ruts of the road, lifted his hands for Miliko, knowing she at least was with him. She jumped down, and questione
d nothing. “We can set you up in the camp back there,” he said. “Do that much for you at least, those of you that want to take your chances with Porey. Get the compressors running for you.”

  “Mr. Konstantin.”

  He looked up. It was one of the oldest women, from the truckbed.

  “Mr. Konstantin, I’m too old to work like that back there. I don’t want to stay behind.”

  “Lot of us going on,” a male voice said.

  “Anyone going back?” one of the Q foremen asked. “We need to send one of the trucks back with anyone?”

  There was silence. Shaking of heads. Emilio stared at the lot of them, simply tired. “Bounder,” he said, looking to one of the hisa who waited by the forest edge. “Where is Bounder? I need him.”

  Bounder came, out from among the trees, on the slope of the hill. “You come,” Bounder shouted down, beckoning up toward the hill and the trees. “All come now.”

  “Bounder, we’re tired. And we need the things on the trucks. If we go that way we can’t take the trucks and some of us aren’t able to walk. Some are sick, Bounder.”

  “We carry sick, many, many hisa. We steal good things on trucks, teach we good, Konstantin-man. We steal for you. You come.”

  He looked back at the others, at dismayed and doubtful faces.

  Hisa surrounded them. More and more came out of the woods, even some with young, which humans rarely saw. It was trust, that such came out among them. All of the company sensed it, perhaps, for there was no protest. They helped the old and the unwell down from the trucks. Strong young hisa made slings of their hands for them; others heaved down the supplies and the equipment

  “And what when they get scan after us?” Miliko murmured unhappily. “We’ve got to get deep cover, fast.”

  “Takes sensitive scan to tell human from hisa. Maybe they won’t find it profitable to go after us… yet.”

  Bounder reached him, took his hand, wrinkled his nose at him in a hisa wink. “You come with.”

  They were not good for a long walk, however much the news had put the strength of fright into them. A little while climbing uphill and down through woods and bracken and they were all panting and some being carried who had started out walking. A little more and the hisa themselves began to slow the pace. And at length, when the number of humans they were having to carry grew more than they could manage, they called halt and themselves stretched out to sleep in the bracken.

  “Find cover,” Emilio urged Bounder. “Ships will see us, not good, Bounder.”

  “Sleep now,” Bounder said, curling up, and nothing would stir him or the others. Emilio sat staring at him helplessly, looked out over all the hillside while humans and hisa lay down where they had dropped their bundles, curled up in their blankets some of them, others of them too weary to spread them. He used his own for a pillow, lay down on Miliko’s, gathered her against him there under the sun that slanted down through the leaves. Bounder snuggled up to them and put an arm about him. He let himself go, slept, a weary, healthy sleep.

  And he waked with Bounder shaking him and Miliko squatting with her arms across her knees, with a light fog moistening the leaves, late, late day, and cloud, and threatening rainfall. “Emilio. I think you should wake up. I think it’s some very important hisa.”

  He rolled onto the other arm, gathered himself to his knees, squinting in the cold mist as other humans were waking all about him. They were Old Ones who had come from among the trees, hisa with white abundantly salting their fur, three of them. He rose and bowed to them, which seemed right, in their land and in their woods.

  Bounder bowed and bobbed and seemed more sober than he was wont. “No talk human talk, they,” Bounder said. “They say come with.”

  “We’re coming,” he said. “Miliko, rouse them out.”

  She went, with quiet words spoke to the few still sleeping, and the word ran through all the number down the hill, weary, damp humans gathering up their baggage and their persons. There were even more hisa arriving. The woods seemed alive with them, every trunk in the woods likely to conceal a flitting brown body.

  The Old Ones melted off through the woods. Bounder delayed until they were ready, and then started off, and Emilio took Miliko’s blanket roll on his own shoulder and followed after.

  At any hint of a human limping as they went, brushing through damp leaves and dripping branches, there were hisa to help, hisa to take them by the hand and chatter sympathetically, even those who could not understand human speech; after them came others, hisa thieves, bearing the inflatable dome and the compressors and the generators and their food and whatever else they could strip from the trucks, whether or not they themselves could possibly understand the use of it, like a brown horde of scavenger insects.

  Night came on them, and much of it they walked, resting when they must, stringing through the wood, but hisa guided them so that none might stray, and snuggled close about them when they stopped so that the chill was not so bad.

  And once there was a thunder in the heavens that had nothing to do with the rain.

  “Landing,” the word passed from one to the other. The hisa asked no questions. Their keen ears might have picked it up long ago.

  Porey was back. It would probably be Porey. For a little time they would probe the stripped base and send angry messages up to Mazian. Would have to get scan information, decide what they were going to do about it and get Mazian’s decision on it… all time consumed to their good.

  Rest and walk, rest and walk, and whenever they would falter, the gentle Downers were there to touch, to urge, to cajole. It was cold when they stopped, and damp, though the rain never fell; and they were glad of morning, the first appearance of the light sifting through the trees, which the Downers greeted with trills and chattering and renewed enthusiasm.

  And suddenly they were running out of trees, and the daylight broke clearer and clearer, on a hillside sloping down to a vast plain. The far distance spread before them as they came over the crest of a small rise, and the hisa were going farther, going from the trees, into that wide valley… that sanctuary, Emilio realized in sudden disturbance, that area the hisa had always asked remain theirs, free of men, a vast open range only theirs, forever.

  “No,” Emilio protested, looking about for Bounder. He made a gesture of appeal to him, who swung along with a cheerful step nearby. “No. Bounder, we mustn’t go down into the open land. Mustn’t. Can’t, hear? The men-with-guns, they come in ships; their eyes will see.”

  “Old Ones say come,” Bounder declared, never breaking stride, as if that settled it beyond argument. Already the descent began, all the hisa rolling like a brown tide from the trees, bearing humans and human baggage with them, followed by other humans and others, toward the beckoning sunlit pallor of the plain.

  “Bounder!” Emilio stopped, with Miliko beside him. “The men-with-guns will find us here. You understand me, Bounder?”

  “I understand. See we all, hisa, humans. We see they too.”

  “We can’t go down there. They’ll kill us, do you hear me?”

  “They say come.”

  The Old Ones. Bounder turned away from him and continued downslope, turned again as he walked and beckoned him and Miliko.

  He took a step and another, knowing it was mad, knowing that there was a hisa way of doing things and a human. Hisa had never lifted hands against the invaders of their world, had sat, had watched, and this was what they would do now. Humans had asked hisa for their help and hisa offered them their way. “I’ll talk to them,” he said to Miliko. “I’ll talk to their Old Ones, explain to them. We can’t offend them, but they’ll listen — Bounder, Bounder, wait.”

  But Bounder walked on, ahead of them. The hisa kept moving, flowing down that vast grassy slope to the plain. At the center of it, where a stream seemed to flow, was something like an upthrust fist of rock and a trampled circle, a shadow, that he realized finally as a circle of living bodies gathered about that object

  “Th
ere must be every hisa on the river down there,” Miliko said. “It’s some sort of meeting place. Some kind of shrine.”

  “Mazian won’t respect it; Union isn’t likely to either.” He foresaw massacre, disaster, hisa sitting helpless while attack came. It was the Downers, he thought, the Downers themselves whose gentle ways had made Pell what it was. Time was when humans back on Earth had been terrified at the report of alien life. There had been talk of disbanding colonies even then, for fear of other discoveries… but no terror on Downbelow, never here, where hisa walked empty-handed to meet humans, and infected men with trust.

  “We’ve got to persuade them to get out of here,” he said.

  “I’m with you,” Miliko said.

  “Help you?” a hisa asked, touching Miliko’s hand, for she was limping as she leaned on him. They both shook their heads and kept walking together, at the back of the flow now, for most of the others had gone ahead, caught up in the general madness, even the old, borne in the hands of the hisa.

  They rested in their long descent, while the sun passed zenith, walked and rested and walked more, while the sun slid down the sky and shone beyond the low rounded hills. A cylinder gave out in his mask, ruined by the moisture and the forest molds, ill augury for the others. He gasped against the obstruction, fumbled after another, held his breath while he did the exchange and slipped the mask back on. They walked, slowly now, on the plain.

  In the distance rose that indistinct fish-shaped mass, an irregular pillar, out of a sea of hisa bodies… and not alone hisa. Humans were there, who rose up from where they sat and walked out to meet them, as they came through. Ito of base two was there, with her staff and workers, and Jones of base one, with his, who offered hands to shake, who looked as bewildered as they were. “They said come here,” Ito said. “They said you would come.”