Downbelow Station

“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 ru

“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

“There 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.