Downbelow Station

“Well,” Miliko exclaimed, looking up from the spread of charts on their bed.

“Love you,” Satin said, and came with absolute confidence, embraced Miliko, hugged her cheek-to-cheek around the obstacle of the breather.

“You’re going away,” said Miliko.

“Go to you home,” she said. “See Be

Sometimes Downer talk made little sense; sometimes meanings shot through the babble with astonishing clarity. Emilio gazed on her with somewhat of guilt, that for as long as they had dealt with Downers, there was none of them who could manage more than a few of the chattering Downer words. Be

The hisa loved gifts. He thought of one, on the shelf by the bed, a shell he had found by the riverside. He got it and gave it to her and her dark eyes shone. She flung her arms about him.

“Love you,” she a

“Love you too, Satin,” he told her. And he put his arms about her shoulders, walked her out through the outer offices to the lock, set her through. Beyond the plastic she opened the outer door, took her mask off and gri

“I go work,” she told him. The shuttle was due. A human worker would not have been working on the day he was leaving assignment; but Satin headed away with a slam of the flimsy door and anxious enthusiasm, as if at this late date someone’s mind could be changed.

Or perhaps it was unfair to attach to her any human motives. Perhaps it was joy, or gratitude. Downers understood no wages; gifts, they said.

Be

He turned, walked back through the operations center, to his own quarters and Miliko. He took off his jacket, hung it on the peg, breather still about his neck, an ornament they all wore from the time clothing went on in the morning till it went off at night.

“Got the weather report from station,” Miliko said. “We’re going to catch it again in a day or so after the next one hits us. There’s a big storm brewing out to sea.”

He swore; so much for hopes of spring. She made a place for him among the charts on the bed and he sat down and looked at the damages she had red-penciled, flood areas station was able to show them, down the long chains of beads which were the camps they had established, along unpaved, hand-hacked roads.

“Oh, it’s going to get worse,” Miliko said, showing him the topographical chart. “Comp projects enough rain with this one to get us flood in the blue zones again. Right up to base two’s doorstep. But most of the roadbed should be above the floodline.”

Emilio scowled, expelled a soft breath. “We’ll hope.” The road was the important thing; the fields would flood for weeks more without harm except to their schedules. Local grains thrived on the water, depended on it in the initial stages of their natural cycles. The lattices kept young plants from going downriver. It was human machinery and human tempers which suffered most. “Downers have the right idea,” he said. “Give up during the winter rains, wander off when the trees bloom, make love, nest high and wait for the grain to ripen.”

Miliko gri

He sighed, unregarded, pulled over the slab of plastic which served him as a writing desk and started making out perso

They were dispersing old hands and trainees and Q assignees down the road to each of the new bases, trying to keep proportions which would not leave staff vulnerable to riot; trying to make the Q folk into workers, against their belief that they were being used; tried to work with morale — it was the willing ones they moved out, and the surliest main base had to keep, in that one huge dome, many times enlarged and patched onto until dome was a misnomer — it spread irregularly over the next hill, a constant difficulty to them. Human workers occupied the several domes next; choice ones, comfortable ones — they were always reluctant to be transferred out to more primitive conditions at the wells or the new camps, alone with the forest and the floods and Q and strange hisa.

Communication was always the problem. They were linked by com; but it was still lonely out there. Ideally they wanted aircraft links; but the one flimsy aircraft they had built some years back had crashed on the landing field two years ago… light aircraft and Downbelow’s storms did not agree. Hacking a landing site for shuttles… that was on the schedule, at least for base three, but the cutting of trees had to be worked out with the Downers, and that was touchy. With the tech level they managed onworld, crawlers were still the most efficient way of getting about, patient and slow as the pace of life on Downbelow had always been, chugging away through mud and flood to the wonderment and delight of Downers. Petrol and grains, wood and winter vegetables, dried fish, an experiment in domesticating the knee-high pitsu, which Downers hunted… (You bad, Downers had declared in the matter, make they warm in you camp and you eat, no good this thing. But Downers at base one had become herders, and they had all learned to eat domestic meat. Lukas had ordered it, and this was one Lukas project that had worked well.) Humans on Downbelow fared well enough equipped and fed themselves and station, even with the influx they had gotten. That was no small task. The manufacturies up on station and the manufactories here on Downbelow were working nonstop. Self-sufficiency, to duplicate every item they normally imported, to fill every quota not alone for themselves but for the overburdened station, and to stockpile what they could… it was all falling into their laps here on Downbelow, the excess population, the burden of station-bred people, their own and refugees, who had never set foot on a world. They could no longer depend on the trade which had once woven Viking and Mariner, Esperance and Pan-Paris and Russell’s and Voyager and others into a Great Circle of their own, supplying each others’ needs. None of the other stations could have gone it alone; none had the living world it took — a living world and hands to manage it. There were plans on the board now, the first crews moved, to go for the onworld mining they had long delayed, duplicating materials already available in Pell system at large… just in case things got worse than anyone wanted to think. They would get massive new programs underway this summer, when Downers were receptive to approach again; get it well moving in fall, when the Downers hit their working season, when cool winds made them think of winter again and they seemed never to rest, working for humans and working to carry soft mosses into their tu

Downbelow was due to change. Its human population had quadrupled. He mourned it; Miliko did. They had gridded off areas already… Miliko’s ever-present charts — places which no human should ever touch, the beautiful places, the sites they knew for holy and the places vital to the cycles of hisa and wild things alike.