Downbelow Station

They did not find a capsule, only debris and wreckage.

iii

The hisa had been coming and going from the begi

There were domes for humans now, diggings made by Downer labor, and compressors thumped away with the pulse of life, rude, patched domes unlovely… but they gave shelter to the old and to the children, and to all the rest of them as brief summer yielded to fall, as skies clouded and the days full of sun and the nights of stars grew fewer.

Ships overflew them, shuttles on their runs going and coming; they were accustomed to this, and it no longer frightened them.

You must not gather even the woods, Miliko had explained to the Old Ones through interpreters. Their eyes see warm things, even through trees. Deep earth can hide hisa, oh, very deep. But they see even when Sun doesn’t shine.

Downer eyes had gotten very round at that. They had talked among themselves. Lukases, they had muttered. But they had seemed to understand.

She had talked day upon day to the Old Ones, talked until she was hoarse and she exhausted her interpreters, tried to make them understand what they faced, and when she would tire, alien hands would pat her arms and her face and round hisa eyes look at her with profound tenderness, all, sometimes, that they could do.

And humans… by night she came to them. There was Ito, and Ernst and others, who grew moodier and moodier — Ito because all the other officers had gone with Emilio; and Ernst, a small man, who had not been chosen; and one of the strongest men of all the camps, Ned Cox, who had not volunteered in the first place… and began to be ashamed. There was a kind of contagion that spread among them, shame perhaps, when they heard news from main base, that told of nothing but misery. About a hundred sat outside the domes, choosing the cold weather and the reliance on breathers as if by rejecting comfort they proved something to each other and to themselves. They had grown silent, and their eyes were, as the Downers said, bright and cold. Day and night… in this sanctuary, in the place of hisa images… they sat in front of the domes in which others lived, in which others were all too eager to take their turns — they could not all get in at once. They stayed because they must; any desertion would be noted from the sky. They had elected sanctuary, and there was nothing left to do but to sit and think of the others. Thinking. Measuring themselves.

Dreaming, the hisa called it. It was what hisa came to do.

Use sense, Miliko had told them in the first days, when they were most restless, talking wildly about action. We’re to wait.

Wait on what? Cox had asked, and that began to haunt her own dreams.

This night, hisa were coming down the slope who had been sent for… days before. This night she sat with the others and watched them come, hands in her lap, watched small, distant bodies moving in the starless dark of the plain, sat with a curious tautness in her gut, and a tightness in her throat. Hisa… to fill up the number of humans, so that those who sca

Go or lose the people she commanded. She could no longer hold them otherwise.

Are you afraid to be left? she had asked the humans who would remain, the quiet, retiring ones, the old, the children, those men and women unlike those who sat outside — families and people with loved ones and those who were, perhaps, saner. She felt guilt for them. She was supposed to protect them and she could not; could not really even lead that band outside — she simply ran ahead of their madness. Many of these who would remain were Q, refugees, who had seen too much of horror, and were too tired, and had never asked to be down here at all. She imagined they must be afraid. The hisa elders could be perversely strange, and while Pell folk were used to hisa, they were still alien to these people. No, one old woman had said. For the first time since Mariner I’m not afraid. We’re safe here. Not from the guns, maybe, but from being afraid. And other heads had nodded, and eyes stared at her with the patience of the hisa images.

Now hisa moved near them where they sat… a small group of hisa, who came first to her and to Ito, and they stood up, looked back on the others who waited.

“See you,” Miliko said, and heads nodded, in silence.

Several more were chosen, the hisa taking those they would, and slowly, in the dark, they walked that track across and up the slope, as others would come down, in small groups. One hundred twenty-three humans would go this night; and as many hisa come to join the camp in their place. She hoped that the hisa understood. They had seemed to, finally, eyes lighting with merriment at the joke on the humans who looked down to spy on them.

They went by the quickest route, passed other hisa on the way down, who called out cheerfully to them… and she walked at a human’s best pace, panting, dizzy, resolved not to rest, for a hisa would not rest; and so they had all agreed to do it. She staggered as they made the final climb into the forest margin helped by the young hisa females who hovered about them… She-walks-far was one, and Wind-in-trees another, and more whose names she could not quite fathom nor the hisa say. Quickfoot, she had named the one and Whisper the other, for they set great store by human names. She had tried the names they called themselves, to please them as they walked, but her tongue could not master them and her attempts sent the hisa into nose-wrinkling gales of laughter.

They rested until the sun came up, in the trees and the bracken, and under a rocky ledge. By daylight they set out again, she and Ito and Ernst and the hisa who guided them, as other hisa had led others of them into the forest now, elsewhere. The hisa moved as if there were no enemies in all the world, with prank-playing, and once an ambush which stopped their hearts… Quickfoot’s joke. Miliko frowned, and when the other humans did, the hisa caught the mood and grew quieter, seeming perplexed. Miliko caught Whisper by the hand and tried earnestly and once more to make sense to her, who knew less human speech than those hisa they were accustomed to deal with.

“Look.” At last she grew desperate, seized a stick and crouched down, ripped up living and dead bracken to make a clear spot. She jabbed the stick at the ground. “Konstantin-man camp.” She drew a line. “River.” It was not likely, knowledgeable men said, that any drawn symbol was going to penetrate hisa imagination; it was not in their approach to things, lines and marks bearing no relationship to the real object. “We make circle, so, we eyes watch human camp. See Konstantin. See Bounder.”

Whisper nodded, suddenly enthusiastic, a quick bob of her whole body on her haunches. She pointed back in the direction of the plain. “They… they… they,” she said, and snatched the stick, waved it at the sky with the nearest thing to menace she had ever seen in a hisa. “Bad they,” she said, and hurled the stick at the sky, bounced several times, clapped her hands and struck her breast with her palms. “I friend Bounder.”

Bounder’s mate. Miliko stared at the young female’s intense expression, suddenly understanding, and Whisper seized her hand, patted it. Quickfoot patted her shoulder. There was a quick sputtering of conversation among all the hisa, and they suddenly seemed to take a decision, separated by pairs and each seized a human by the hand.