They hesitated. Guards were supposed to escort them. There were no guards, he realized in that instant. He had just ordered all the security forces in main base offworld.
“Go on inside,” he said to the rest. “Get that dome normalized; I’ll talk to you about it later.” And while he had their attention: “Look around you. There’s all of a
Frightened eyes stared at him… no belief. They had come in on overcrowded, dying ships; had been in Q on-station; lived here, in mud and close quarters, moved about under guns. He let go his breath and his anger.
“Go on,” he said. “Break it up. Get about your business. Make room for those people.”
They moved, the boy and a couple of the young men toward Operations, the rest back into their dome. The flimsy doors closed in sequence this time, locking them through, group after group, until all were gone, and the deflated dome crest began to lose some of its wrinkles as the compressor thumped away.
There was a soft chattering, a bobbing of bodies. The Downers were still with him. He put out his hand and touched Bluetooth. The Downer touched his hand in turn, a calloused brush of flesh, bobbed several times in the residue of excitement. At his other side stood Satin, arms clenched about her, her dark eyes darker still, and wide.
All about him, Downers, with that same disturbed look. Human quarrel, violence, alien to them. Downers would strike in a moment’s anger, but only to sting. He had never seen them quarrel in groups, had never seen weapons… their knives were only tools and hunting implements. They killed only game. What did they think, he wondered; what did they imagine at such a sight, humans turning guns on each other?
“We go Upabove,” Satin said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “You still go. It was good, Satin, Bluetooth, all of you, it was good you came to tell me.”
There was a general bobbing, expressions of relief among all the hisa, as if they had not been sure. The thought occurred to him that he had ordered Hale and his men off on that same shuttle… that human spite might still make things uncomfortable.
“I’ll talk to the man in charge of the ship,” he told them. “You and Hale will be in different parts of the ship. No trouble for you. I promise.”
“Good-good-good,” Satin breathed, and hugged him. He stroked her shoulder, turned and received an embrace from Bluetooth as well, patted his rougher pelt. He left them and started toward the crest of the hill, on the track to the landing site, and stopped at the sight of several figures standing there.
Miliko. Two others. All had rifles. He felt a sudden surge of relief to think he had had someone at his back after all. He waved his hand that it was all right, hastened toward them. Miliko came quickest, and he hugged her. Miliko’s two companions caught up, two guards off the shuttle. “I’m sending some personnel up with you,” he said to them. “Discharged, and I’m filing charges. I don’t want them armed. I’m also sending up some Downers, and I don’t want the two groups near each other, not at any time.”
“Yes, sir.” The two guards were blank of comment, objected to nothing.
“You can go back,” he said. “Start moving the assignees this way; it’s all right”
They went about their orders. Miliko kept the rifle she had borrowed of someone, stood against his side, her arm tight about him, his about her.
“Hale’s lot,” he said. “I’m packing them all off.”
“That leaves us no guards.”
“Q wasn’t the trouble. I’m calling station about this one.” His stomach tightened, reaction beginning to settle on him. “I guess they saw you on the ridge. Maybe that changed their minds.”
“Station’s got a crisis alert. I thought sure it was Q. Shuttle called station central.”
“Better get to Operations then and cancel it” He drew her about; they walked down the slope in the direction of the dome. His knees were water.
“I wasn’t up there,” she said.
“Where?”
“On the ridge. By the time we arrived up there, there were just Downers and Q.”
He swore, marveling then that he had won that bluff. “We’re well rid of Bran Hale,” he said.
They reached the trough among the hills, walked the bridge over the water hoses and up again, across to Operations. Inside, the boy was submitting to the medic’s attention and a pair of techs was standing armed with pistols, keeping a nervous watch on the Q folk who had brought him in. Emilio motioned a negative to them. They cautiously put them away, looked unhappy with the whole situation.
Carefully neutral, Emilio thought. They would have gone with any winner of the quarrel out there, no help to him. He was not angry for it, only disappointed.
“You all right, sir?” Jim Ernst asked.
He nodded, stood watching, with Miliko beside him. “Call station,” he said after a moment. “Report it settled.”
ii
They nestled in together, in the dark space humans had found for them, in the great empty belly of the ship, a place which echoed fearfully with machinery. They had to use the breathers, first of what might be many discomforts. They tied themselves to the handholds, as humans had warned them they must, to be safe, and Satin hugged Bluetooth-Dahit-hos-me, hating the feel of the place and the cold and the discomfort of the breathers, and most of all fearing because they were told that they must tie themselves for safety. She had not thought of ships in terms of walls and roofs, which frightened her. Never had she imagined the flight of the ships as something so violent they might be dashed to death, but as something free as the soaring birds, grand and delirious. She shivered with her back against the cushions humans had given them, shivered and tried to cease, felt Bluetooth shiver too.
“We could go back,” he said, for this was not of his choosing.
She said nothing, clamped her jaw against the urge to cry that yes, they should, that they should call the humans and tell them that two very small, very unhappy Downers had changed their minds.
Then there was the sound of the engines. She knew what that was… had heard it often.
“We will see great Sun,” she said, now that it was irrevocable. “We will see Bennett’s home.”
Bluetooth held her tighter. “Bennett,” he repeated, a name which comforted them both. “Bennett Jacint.”
“We will see the spirit-images of the Upabove,” she said.
“We will see the Sun.” There was a great weight on them, a sense of moving, of being crushed at once. His grip hurt her; she held to him no less tightly. The thought came to her that they might be crushed unnoticed by the great power which humans endured; that perhaps humans had forgotten them here in the deep dark of the ship. But no, Downers came and went; hisa survived this great force, and flew, and saw all the wonders which inhabited the Upabove, walked where they might look down on the stars and looked into the face of great Sun, filled their eyes with good things.
This waited for them. It was now the spring, and the heat had begun in her and in him; and she had chosen the Journey she would make, longer than all journeys, and the high place higher than all high places, where she would spend her first spring.
The pressure eased; they still held to each other, still feeling motion. It was a very far flight, they had been warned so; they must not loose themselves until a man came and told them. The Konstantin had told them what to do and they would surely be safe. Satin felt so with a faith which increased as the force grew less and she knew that they had lived. They were on their way. They
She clutched the shell which Konstantin had given her, the gift which marked this Time for her, and about her was the red cloth which was her special treasure, the best thing, the honor that Bennett himself had given her a name. She felt the more secure for these things, and for Bluetooth, for whom she felt an increasing fondness, true affection, not the springtime heat of mating. He was not the biggest and far from the handsomest, but he was clever and clear-headed.
Not wholly. He dug in one of the pouches he carried, brought out a small bit of twig, on which the buds had burst… moved his breather to smell it, offered it to her. It brought with them the world, the riverside, and promises.
She felt a flood of heat which turned her sweating despite the chill. It was unnatural, being so close to him and not having the freedom of the land, places to run, the restlessness which would lead her further and further into the lonely lands where only the images stood. They were traveling, in a strange and different way, in a way that great Sun looked down upon all the same, and so she needed do nothing. She accepted Bluetooth’s attentions, nervously at first, and then with increasing easiness, for it was right The games they would have played on the face of the land, until he was the last male determined enough to follow where she led… were not needed. He was the one who had come farthest, and he was here, and it was very right
The motion of the ship changed; they held each other a moment in fear, but this men had warned them of, and they had heard that there was a time of great strangeness. They laughed, and joined, and ceased, giddy and delirious. They marveled at the bit of blossoming twig which floated by them in the air, which moved when they batted at it by turns. She reached carefully and plucked it from the air, and laughed again, letting it free.
“This is where Sun lives,” Bluetooth surmised. She thought that it must be so, imagined Sun drifting majestically through the light of his power, and themselves swimming in it, toward the Upabove, the metal home of humans, which held out arms for them. They joined, and joined again, in spasms of joy.
After long and long came another change, little stresses at the bindings, very gentle, and by and by they began to feel heavy again.
“We are coming down,” Satin thought aloud. But they stayed quiet, remembering what they had been told, that they must wait on a man to tell them it was safe.
And there was a series of jolts and terrible noises, so that their arms clenched about each other; but the ground was solid under them now. The speaker overhead rang with human voices giving instructions and none of them sounded frightened, rather as humans usually sounded, in a hurry and humorless. “I think we are all right,” Bluetooth said.
“We must stay still,” she reminded him.
“They will forget us.”
“They will not,” she said, but she had doubts herself, so dark the place was and so desolate, just a little light where they were, above them.
