Downbelow Station

The skies were clear for the morning, only a few fleecy puffs overhead and a line of them marshaling themselves across the northern horizon, beyond the river. It was a long view; it usually needed a day and a half for the horizon clouds to come down to Downbelow base, and they planned to take advantage of that break, patching the washout which had cut them off from base four and all the further camps down the chain. It was, they hoped, the last of the storms of winter. The buds on the trees were swelling to bursting, and the grain sprouts, crowded by flood against the crossed-beam lattices in the fields, would soon want thinning and transplanting to their permanent beds. Main base would be the first to dry out; and then the bases downriver. The river was some bit lower today, so the report came in from the mill.

Emilio saw the supply crawler off on its way down the muddy road downriver, and turned his back, walked the slow, well-trampled way toward higher ground and the domes sunk in the hills, domes which had gotten to be twice as numerous as before, not to mention those that had transferred down the road. Compressors thunked along out of rhythm, the unending pulse of humanity on Downbelow. Pumps labored, adding to the thumping, belching out the water which had seeped into the domes despite their best efforts to waterproof the floors, more pumps working down by the mill dikes and over by the fields. They would not cease until the logs in the fields stood clear.

Spring. Probably the air smelled delightful to a native. Humans had little impression of it, breathing in wet hisses and stops through the masks. Emilio found the sun pleasant on his back, enjoying that much of the day. Downers skipped about, carrying out their tasks with less address than exuberance, would rather make ten scurrying trips with a handful than one uncomfortable, laden passage to anywhere. They laughed, dropped what light loads they bore to play pranks on any excuse. He was frankly surprised that they were still at work with spring coming on so in earnest. The first clear night they had kept all the camp awake with their chatter, their happy pointing at the starry heavens and talking to the stars; the first clear dawn they had waved their arms to the rising sun and shouted and cheered for the coming light — but humans had gone about with a brighter mood that day too, with the first clear sign of winter’s ending. Now it was markedly warmer. The females had turned smugly alluring and the males had turned giddy; there was a good deal of what might be Downer singing from the thickets and the budding trees on the hills, trills and chatter and whistles soft and sultry.

It was not as giddy as it would get when the trees sprang into full bloom. There would come a time that the hisa would lose all interest in work, would set off on their wanderings, females first and solitary, and the males doggedly following, to places where humans did not intrude. A good number of the third-season females would spend the summer getting rounder and rounder — at least as round as the wiry hisa became — to give birth in winter, snugged away in hillside tunnels, little mites all limbs and ruddy baby fur, who would be scampering about on their own in the next spring, what little humans saw of them.

He passed the hisa games, walked up the crushed rock pathway to Operations, the dome highest on the hill. His ears picked up a crunching on the rocks behind him, and he looked back to find Satin limping along in his wake, arms out for balance, bare feet on sharp stones and her imp’s face screwed up in pain from the path designed for human boots. He grinned at the imitation of his strides. She stood and grinned at him, unusually splendid in soft pelts and beads and a red rag of synthetic cloth.

“Shuttle comes, Konstantin-man.”

It was so. There was a landing due on this clear day. He had promised her, despite good sense, despite axioms that world-synched pairs were unstable in the spring season, that she and her mate might work a term on-station. If there was a Downer who had staggered about under too-heavy loads, it was Satin. She had tried desperately to impress him… See, Konstantin-man, I work good.

“Packed to go,” he observed of her. She displayed the several small bags of no-knowing-what which she had hung about her person, patted them and grinned delightedly.

“I packed.” And then her face went sad, and she held out her open arms. “Come love you Konstantin-man, you and you friend.”

Wife. The hisa had never figured out husband and wife. “Come in,” he bade her, touched by such a gesture. Her eyes lit with pleasure. Downers were discouraged even from the vicinity of the Operations dome. It was very rare that one was invited inside. He walked down the wooden steps, wiped his boots on the matting, held the door for her and waited for her to adjust her own breather from about her neck before he opened the inner seal.

A few working humans looked up, stared, some frowning at the presence, went back to their jobs. A number of the techs had offices in the dome, divided off by low wicker screens; the area he shared with Miliko was farthest back, where the only solid wall in the great dome afforded him and Miliko private residential space, a ten-foot section with a woven mat floor, sleeping quarters and office at once. He opened that door beside the lockers and Satin followed him in, staring about her as if she could not absorb the half of what she saw. Not used to roofs, he thought, imagining how great a change it was going to be for a Downer suddenly shipped to station. No winds, no sun, only steel about, poor Satin.

“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 Bennett home.” She hesitated, folded hands diffidently behind her, bobbed a little, looking from one to the other of them. “Love Bennett-man. See he home. Fill up eyes he home. Make warm, warm we eyes.”

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. Bennett had been best at it.

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 announced.

“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 grinned at him, waved her hand.

“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.

Bennett Jacint had understood them. The Downers tended that grave. Laid shells there, perfect ones, skins, set up the strange knobby sculptures that meant something important to them.

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 grinned, still marking her charts.

He sighed, unregarded, pulled over the slab of plastic which served him as a writing desk and started making out personnel assignments, rearranging priorities with the equipment. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps if he pleaded with the Downers, arranged some special gifts, they would hang on a little longer before their seasonal desertion. He regretted losing Satin and Bluetooth; the pair of them had been of enormous help, persuading their fellows in outright argument when it came to something their Konstantin-man wanted very badly. But that went both ways; Satin and Bluetooth wanted to go; They wanted something now in his power to give, and it was their time to have their way, before their spring came on them and they passed all self-control.

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