Текст книги "Finity's End "

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

He was shocked, and tried to hide it. Madelaine had never unburdened that opinion to him. But he hadn’t been in the line of command the last time they’d visited Pell and Madelaine’s temper hadn’t been ruffled by a sordid trade to get her great-grandson back, either.

“I blame Elene,” Madelaine said. “I blame Elene that she left her own ship. I blame Elene that she didn’t take Francesca in tow and provide a little personal friendship. Granted Elene was busy and Elene was pregnant, too, but if she ever extended a hand of friendship to my granddaughter before she hit the bottom I have yet to hear it. If my Elizabeth had lived to get back to Pell, she’d have had words for Quen. I reserve what I say. I’m only the girl’s grandmother.”

Francesca’s mother, Elizabeth. Dead at Olympus. There were so many.

Madelaine nudged JR’s arm with her wine glass. “Take a little extra care of my great-grandson. Don’t waste him in the junior-juniors. I know he’s an ass, but he’s got possibilities. Personal favor.”

JR drew in a slow, deep breath. He’d gotten snagged, broadsided, and boarded. Aunt Madelaine was the ship’s chief lawyer.

“I’ll try,” he said

“All you can do,” Madelaine agreed.

“Any special advice?” he asked Madelaine.

“For dealing with him? Grow all-over fur. The boy’s had no human ties. Damned Pell courts.” Sip of wine. The bottom of the glass, a little straw-colored liquid remaining. “Get me another wine, there’s a love. James has come. I won’t tell him what Fletcher did. None of us will. It just isn’t important.”

James Robert had come in, perhaps thinking he’d find a grateful, happy new member in the Family. Madelaine went in that direction, damage control, protection of her great-grandson, leaving him to get a refill at the bar, and one for himself while he was at it.

James Robert and Madelaine were in heavy discussion when he brought the wine. He put the glass in Madelaine’s outheld hand, offered his other on the moment to the Old Man, who hadn’t gotten across the room before Madelaine’s interception, and the Old Man murmured an abstracted thanks and took it.

Talk among the seniors: a Union ship just sitting out there, having run recovery on a bottle of Scotch. Quen and some high-powered agreement in their own vital interest. Madelaine said it was tariffs, which pointed to a political agreement inside the Alliance. The secrecy smelled to high heaven of some kind of operation of Mallory’s, while, third question, they were very publicly taking up trade again, in a move that had to be gossiped wherever merchanters docked… and the Fletcher incident had to dominate the gossip on Pell and everywhere else.

He had surmised their return to trade might be intended as a demonstration of Alliance power, a demonstration of the safety they hoped they’d created in the shipping lanes… at a critical moment when support of the starstation councils for the continued pirate hunt was wavering.

And at a time when Union was handing out special privileges to merchanters who wanted to sign on to wealthy Union instead of the economically struggling Alliance. He didn’t want to focus his career on fighting Union activity: he’d trained all his life to fight Mazianni, and that was where his interest was, but he could see that Union’s actions, actions which Quen would find of interest, constituted a smart move. Getting enough merchanters voluntarily signed into Union would win for Union without a shot what the War hadn’t gained for them by all the ordnance expended. If merchanters started drifting over the Line and signing with Union in any significant numbers the universe could see humanity polarized again into two major camps. Then, depend on it, merchanters would see themselves first regulated to the hilt, then entirely replaced by Union’s own ships: a merchanter desperate enough to clutch at Union financial support wasn’t analyzing his future further than the next set of bills.

It was the very situation that had started the War, the move to take over the merchanters this time coming not from Earth’s side, but from Union’s side of the border. One would think Union might have learned from Earth’s experience with the merchanters. Not so. The merchanters had formed their own state, at Pell, and with a handful of stations balancing commitment between the Merchanter Alliance and Union, and now Union started pushing to get the merchanters. The starstations independence would go next, and then they’d reach for Earth. If Mazian didn’t step in.

Or if Mallory and Quen and the Old Man of Finity’s End didn’t draw a line and say: no further.

And was that the message that went with the bottle in a black, starry sea? A warning—from Mallory and from Finity , Stay our allies? Don’t provoke us with your recruitments and your ship-building? Yours is the glass house?

It was certain in their own minds that Mazian had a secret base, somewhere within 20 lights of Pell, and that was an immense volume of space to search for someone determined not to be found. The rest of human habitation was concentrated in a comparatively small sphere at the center, where Mazian could strike without warning—and escape to that remote base.

It required a network of informants to establish any kind of security. Union didn’t have that network. Mallory did. Mallory—who was once of the Fleet. And they were such a network, they, the merchanters… who wouldn’t talk to Union or Alliance stationside officials with anything like the freedom with which they talked to each other.

From Mazian’s view, however, finding the heart of human civilization wasn’t a question of searching a 40-light sphere. It was a concentrated area Mazian could easily strike, without warning and with a choice of targets that could send chills down any civilized backbone. If a junior could venture a guess of his own, it was worse than that: Mazian’s aim might be to establish multiple bases, scattered points from which to threaten the center—and Mazian’s overriding strategy might not be a crushing military strike but rather evading Mallory, waiting for Union to get overconfident, and then maneuvering the Alliance or Earth into so deep a diplomatic crisis with Union that the Alliance had no hope except to forgive Mazian and recall him to take over the government. Then Mazian could use those bases to hit Union. But merchanters would bleed in the process.

Against that backdrop, the captains of Finity’s End had held their meeting with Quen and gotten some agreement out of her that they had wanted. Meanwhile they were going back to trading, Union was still refusing to let Alliance merchanters into its internal routes without them signing up as Union-based, and the Old Man had wanted Quen to bribe him into supporting her in some scheme of her devising.

What in hell game were they playing?

He went back to the bar, picked up a glass of wine for himself. Bucklin and Chad intercepted him on their own inquiry, having been out of the loop.

“So was that all about Fletcher?” Bucklin asked

“Some of it. Madelaine being his grandmother.” Great-grandmother, but in a Family’s tangled exogamous web of greats, second and third cousins and nieces and nephews on lives extended by time dilation and rejuv, you compressed generations unless you were seriously trying to track what you were to each other. “She’s taking a personal interest. She wants this kid in very badly.”

Silence greeted that revelation.

“About the drink,” JR said. “Let it slide. He didn’t know the rules. I’ll think about where he fits. He’s not Jeremy’s size. The body’s as mature as we are. The education’s just way behind.”

“Yeah, well.” Bucklin sighed, and they took their drinks and walked over to the rest of the junior-seniors, who’d staked out a table for eight. They pulled more chairs over, until it was a dense, tight group, Lyra, Toby, Ashley, Sue and Connor, Nike, Wayne, and Chad: as many different looks as they had star-scattered fathers. Lyra, a year younger than Bucklin and third in command, was the family’s sole almost redhead, sporting an array of earrings and bracelets she couldn’t wear in ops. Lyra, and beside her, Toby, whose brown complexion and shoulder-trailing kinky locks made that pair of cousins about as far apart as the Family genes stretched.

Lyra and Toby had brought a dedicated bottle of wine from the bar. Bucklin and he also had wine. The rest had soft drinks and fruit juice, and that was the line Fletcher had crossed without permission: Fletcher had assumed, maybe because he’d done it on station, that he had a right.

“Fletcher,” JR said by way of explanation, “had a run-in with Vince, you’ll have noticed. He opted for his quarters. Presumably he got there. Jake checked.”

“So did you explain the rules?” Connor asked over his own soft drink. By custom, they didn’t follow formal courtesies in rec hall or in mess. Complaints were allowed; and he could have figured it would be Connor and Sue that spoke up for the rule book.

“Fletcher’s got a possible Extenuating.” He saw frowns settle not only on those two faces but all around. “He’s a junior-junior, but Madison said it. The body physiologically isn’t.”

“Body’s not mind,” Nike said, and swept an indignant hand from Wayne and Connor on her right to Chad, Sue, and Ashley on her left. “When do we get wide-open liberty on the docks? When do we sleepover where we like? Or take a wine off the bar in front of the seniors and everybody?”

“You know when.” He didn’t want this debate over the issue, and their challenge to him was the answer. No, maturity wasn’t identical from ship to station on the biological or the mental level, and there wasn’t a neat equivalency. The off-again on-again hormonal flux of time-dilated pubescent bodies that was the number one reason they didn’t get bar privileges was precisely the hormonally driven emotional flux that set their nerves in an uproar when they were crossed. His physical-sixteens and -fifteens were a pain in the ass; he was just emerging from that psychological cocktail himself, and while at physical and mental seventeen-to-eighteen and chronological and educational twenty-six he was just getting his own nerves to a calm, sensible state. Yes, he still flared off, a besetting sin of his. But the infinite wisdom of the Way Things Worked on a short-handed ship had made him senior-most junior, responsible for all the junior crew that was still in that stage.

Keep them busy picking nits, his predecessor in the role had warned him; never let them take on the real rules. Give them nits to worry at and they’ll obey the big ones. Then Paul had added, smugly: You did.

Nits, hell. His predecessor had commanded the juniors through the dustup at Bryant’s, when so many had died—among the juniors as well. That had been no waltz.

They gave him Fletcher on a damn milk run. It seemed, on the surface, a tame, and minor, duty, one that shouldn’t set his lately pubescent hormones skewing wildly through the whole gamut of adrenaline charge. He’d had his last personal snit, oh, exquisitely dissected and laid out for him by Paul, right down to temper as his personal failing.

Not this time.

“Give him some leeway,” he said to the others. “Just give him some leeway. He’s not the same as having grown up here. He’s not the same as anyone we’ve ever personally known.”

“I hear he gave you trouble,” Ashley said.

“Not lately.”

“Not in fifteen minutes,” Sue said. “He shoved that glass on you in front of everybody.”

“Fine. I gave it to Vince. Who set up the situation, if we have to talk about fault.” His temper was getting on edge. Sue had a knack for stirring it up. He hauled it back and put on the brakes. “I saw the drink and I was dealing with it. I didn’t need a snot-nosed junior-junior to tell me that was a wineglass. Vince interfered. It blew. That’s the end of it. We’ve got Fletcher, he’s physiological seventeen, he probably drank on station, and somewhere, somehow in the plain fact he doesn’t know a damn thing useful, we’ve got to fit him in at the bottom of the senior-juniors—”

“No!” from Nike.

“—or see him someday in charge of the junior-juniors, Vince is chronologically a year older than he is; but Fletcher’s seventeen years weren’t time-dilated. So do you want my orders, or are there other suggestions?”

“He’s the baby,” Connor said “I think we ought to do a Welcome-in.”

Loft-to-crew-quarters transition. Scare the new junior. It wasn’t the idea he had in mind though it was arguably a fair proposition: Fletcher wanted crew privileges and he hadn’t been through the process and the understandings and the acceptance of authority that all the rest of them had.

“He’s a little old for that,” JR said.

“We did a Welcome-in for Jeremy,” Sue said. “Jeremy was the last. Jeremy took it. So how’s this guy holier than any of us?”

“He’s upset, that’s one difference. He wasn’t born here. He’s not one of us…”

“That’s what a Welcome-in’s for , isn’t it?” Chad asked, with devastating reason.

But a bad idea. “Not yet. This isn’t somebody straight down from the kids’ loft. This isn’t a green kid.”

“Plenty green to me,” Chad said.

“He can’t do anything,” Lyra said. “He’s not trained to do anything. He’s a stationer. He’s a stationer with stationer attitudes. And he’s got to appreciate what he’s joining.”

JR cast a look aside, where the captains and Madelaine talked with Com 1 of first shift. And back again, to frowning faces. A kid coming up out of the nursery, yes, always got a Welcome-in when he or she officially hit the junior ranks. It was high jinks and it was a test. It was, among other things, a chance for senior-juniors to get their licks in and, outright, bring the new junior into line. But it also put the new junior in the center of a protective group, one that would see him safely through the hazards of dockside and take care of him in an emergency.

“So when do we do a Welcome-in?” Chad asked, and he knew right then by Chad’s tone it was an issue the way Fletcher’s encounter with him over the wine glass was going to be an issue with Chad.

“Not yet,” JR said. “Ultimately we have to bring him in. But push him and he’ll blow, and that’s no good”

“Everybody blows,” Connor said.

“Everybody is straight from nursery and not this guy’s size,” Bucklin muttered, finally, a dose of common sense. “Somebody could get hurt. Fletcher. Or you.”

There were sulks. They hadn’t done a Welcome-in on anybody since Jeremy, three shipboard years ago, a wild interlude in the middle of dangerous goings-on. They hadn’t known whether Finity would survive her next run, and they’d Welcomed-in Jeremy the brat a half-year early, because it hadn’t seemed fair for any kid to die alone in the nursery, the ship’s last kid, in years when they hadn’t produced any other kids.

Jeremy and Fletcher. The same crop, the same year. One theirs, one lost to station-time.

And very, very different.

“I say we go easy with him,” JR said in the breath of reason Bucklin’s clear statement of the facts had gained, “and we give him a little chance to figure us out. Then we’ll talk. ”

There was slumping, there was clear unhappiness with that ruling.

“Square up,” JR said. “Don’t sulk like a flock of juvvies. This is a senior venue.”

Heads came up, backs straightened marginally.

“I say with JR,” said Lyra, who was usually a fount of better judgment, “we give him a little time. If he comes around, fine. If he doesn’t, we talk again at Mariner.”

“Just don’t take him on,” JR said. “If you’ve got a problem with him, refer it to me.”

He thought maybe he should go down to Fletcher’s quarters this evening and try to talk it out with him. But he didn’t trust that three-quarters of a wine glass in three gulps had improved Fletcher’s logic. Or his temper. There were constructive talks, and there were things bound to go to hell on a greased slide.

He supposed he’d tried to fix things too fast. And putting him with Jeremy maybe hadn’t been the ideal pair-up.

But putting him with him or Bucklin would inspire jealousy: Put him with Chad? There were two tempers in a paper sack. Connor, the same. Ashley or Toby would go silent and there’d be offense there. He couldn’t think of anybody better than Jeremy, who could outright disarm the devil.

The Old Man and Paul both had warned him there weren’t fast fixes for personal messes once they went wrong. You didn’t just go running down to a case like Fletcher and tell him how to fix his life and expect cooperation, especially after a public scene such as they’d just had. Fletcher had to figure a certain amount out for himself, and meanwhile he and his crew had to figure out what a mind was like who’d been more than content to sink into a gravity well and never see the stars again. Stranger than the downers, in his own opinion. Downers at least had been born to endless cloud and murk.

Wood, a slim wand of it brought into space where wood was a rarity, feathers, where birds never flew… and spirals and dots and bands carved by hisa fingers—fingers no longer content to carve wood with stones, the scientist reminded them. Hisa of these times were quite glad to have sharp metal blades. Hisa accepted them in trade and called metal cold-cold. That had become the hisa word for it.

No matter how hard you tried to keep the Upabove out of Downbelow, humans didn’t give up their ties to the technology they depended on and hisa learned to depend on it, too. But humans found it difficult to go down to a world again.

Fletcher lay on his bunk, his head a little light from the wine. His fingers drew peace from the touch of the feathers, damaged by a Downbelow rain. The touch of wood evoked memories far happier than where he was.

He didn’t give up his resentments. He didn’t give up his dreams, either. And maybe the experts weren’t right that he’d done actual harm by going where he’d gone. Expert opinion had backed another theory, once, right up to the time before he was born. Then the idea had been to get the hisa into space, teach them technology, give them the benefits of the steel and plastics world above their clouded world. Hisa had been very clever with machines, quick to learn small jobs like checking valves, changing filters, reading dials.

Pell Station, short of personnel in its earliest days, and overwhelmed by events cascading about it, had begun with hisa at the heart of the operation, and they’d built the station around the presumption there’d always be hisa on Pell.

But human greed had tried to push things too fast on Downbelow. People had multiplied too fast. Had brought demands on the hisa for more, more, more of their grain, for organized work, for controlling Old River’s floods and doing things on schedule.

Hisa hadn’t taken to schedules and human demands. A hisa named Satin had led a hisa uprising—well, as uprisen as patient hisa ever got—back during the War.

Then a new set of experts had moved in, declared humans had done everything wrong and shut down a lot of operations the Base had used to have, restricted more severely the rotation of hisa up to the station, and dashed all expectations of hisa and humans working together.

Was it wrong that Melody and Patch had rescued a human child?

Was it wrong he’d grown up and found them again?

Was it wrong he’d dreamed of working with them—maybe a little closer than he should have gotten?

(But he knew them, and they knew him, his gut protested. He hadn’t hurt them. He’d never hurt them.)

His fingers traced designs no human understood. He knew what scientists surmised the designs were: day-night in the pattern of black dots, Great Sun in the circles, Old River in the long curves and branches.

But maybe the curling patterns meant vines and seeds. Maybe it was fields and maybe it was hisa paths the lines meant. You could see anything you believed in, in hisa carving, that was the thing. And if he ever could ask Melody and Patch to read the stick for him, as sure as he knew their minds, he’d bet they’d read him something completely different every time he asked

So who was smarter? Hisa, with their patterns that could mean anything the day felt like meaning? Or humans who, in their writing and their image-making, pinned a moment down with precision, like a specimen on a board?

Was one better, or smarter, and ought hisa not to work on the station as much as some of them, individuals with preferences like every human, wanted to work?

He didn’t think natural was better. He didn’t think hisa should die young from infections, or lose their babies in floods or to fevers, or die of broken legs. But the authorities ruled there were hisa you could contact, but hisa who didn’t work at the Base were completely off limits. And they went on dying of things station medicine could cure.

Experts said—better a few die like that than have another contact the way it had been when the Fleet military had invaded Downbelow. Humans never should have landed on Downbelow at all, was what one side said. Everything humans had ever done was harmful and wrong. They’d already robbed an intelligent species of their unique future and further contact could only do worse.

But wasn’t a human-hisa future unique in the patterns of a wide universe, too? Wasn’t it a surer chance for the hisa to survive, when worlds with life were so few? And wasn’t it as important in the vast cosmos that two species had gotten together and worked together?

Seemed sensible to him that he’d done no harm.

They’d given him a gift that meant—surely—they weren’t harmed.

But when he remembered that he was lying on a bunk in a ship speeding toward nowhere, and away from every meaning the stick had to anyone, a lump came up in his throat and his eyes stung.

Rotten stupid was what it was.

More experts. Quen, this time. Nunn.

Friends, he and Bianca. Running around together. Thinking of things together. For maybe fifteen whole, oblivious days, with disaster written all around them.

It shouldn’t surprise him when it all fell apart. Things always did. He wrapped the feathered cords around the stick and put it away in the back of the drawer.

Then he fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, chasing away the ache in his chest with the remembrance of sunglare through green leaves. Jeremy came in from the party, late, and he pretended to be asleep as Jeremy clattered about and took a late shower.

When Jeremy had dimmed the lights and gone to bed, he got up and stripped his clothes off to go to sleep.

“There’s a lot of the guys mad at you,” Jeremy said out of the dark.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have taken the drink,” Jeremy said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said coldly. “They set ’em out, yeah, I’ll drink one. Nobody had a sign up. Nobody told me stop.”

“Vince was an ass,” Jeremy said finally.

“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling better by that small vindication. “Generally. So how was it?”

“Oh, it was fine.” Jeremy settled, a stirring of sheet and a sighing of the mattress. A silence then, in the dark. “JR said everybody should lay off you and be polite.”

“That so.” He didn’t believe it. But he couldn’t see Jeremy’s face to test the truth of it.

They were going to jump at maindawn, He was worried about sleeping through it. Forgetting the drug. Going crazy,

They were going to Mariner from here. They’d actually be at another star.

“Are they going to warn us tomorrow morning?” he asked Jeremy.

“About the jump? Yeah, sure, I’ll guarantee you can’t sleep through it. They’ll be on the intercom. Fifteen minutes before. You got your drugs?”

“Yeah,” When he was out of his clothes, he had the drugs in the elastic side pocket, on the bed, the way Jeremy had advised him. Always with him, “They’re right here.” He was still wobbly about the experience. Going into it out of the dark, he supposed one shift or the other had to have it in the middle of their night, but it was a scary proposition,

“Anybody from the party have a hangover,” he said, “That’d be bad.”

“The Old Man wouldn’t show ’em any mercy,” Jeremy said. “How are you, drinking that wine? You won’t have a headache, will you?”

“Not usually.” Stupid, he said to himself. He’d forgotten about the jump when he drank it all. He hoped he wouldn’t.

He figured if he did he wouldn’t, as Jeremy said, get any pity for it.

He shut his eyes. He didn’t sleep, for a long, long time.

When the warning came it was loud, and scared him awake.

“ Fifteen minutes, ” it said. “ Rise and shine. We’re on our way. Pull your pre-jump checks, latch down, tuck down, belt in, all you late party-goers. No sympathy from fourth shift … you get the next jump and we get the rec hall … move, move, move …”

Chapter 12

The light came back. Melody would say Great Sun came walking back above the clouds. As soon as Fletcher could see trunks of trees in the dawn he took up walking, just following River; and River led him, oh, far, far up through the woods. Rain drizzled down, but still not a downer appeared. Downers on such a day would stay to their burrows, having more sense than to get wet and cold.

Or they’d gone wandering for love, walking as far as a female could, and farther than some of the males, those less able, those less strong. That was the test.

That was what he was looking for, he began to think. That was the test he’d set himself, the challenge, to overtake what he loved, lusted after, longed for with a remote and bewildered ache. He was a young male. He’d been confused. But now, beyond any psych’s pat answers, he had a clear idea what he hoped to find in this tangled woods, with its huge trees and its banks of puffer-globes glistening with the mist. Like the downers who walked until a last suitor followed, he was looking for someone who cared. Simple quest. Someone who cared.

He wasn’t going to find that someone, of course. And ultimately, being only human, he’d have to push that rescue button and let the ones who didn’t give a damn chase him down and bring him back, because the station paid them to do that. His thinking was muddled and he knew it was, but it was comfort to think the ache was common to all the world.

The sun grew brighter. The rain grew less.

He heard strange whistling calls, such as came constantly in the deep bush. No one was sure what made some of those sounds. Sometimes he’d heard downers imitate them.

There were clicks, and rising booms, and whistles.

A creature stared at him from the hillside. He’d heard of such big, gray diggers, but they came nowhere near the Base, being shyer than the downers and given to be harmless to humans if unmolested. It was a marvelous sight. It moved on all fours, unlike downers, and chewed a frond of herbage, staring at him with a blandly curious expression. It wasn’t afraid of him. He wasn’t quite afraid of it, but the advice from lectures was not to go close or get in their way, and he walked off the path and across to another clear spot to avoid it.

A shower of fronds came down on him, startling him and making him look up. A downer was in the tree near him.

And his heart soared.

“Hello,” he called it, hoping it might be a friend. He didn’t think he knew this downer, but he called out to it. “Good morning. Want Melody and Patch! Name Fetcher.” He ventured their hisa names, that he’d never used to another hisa. “Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o my friends I want find.”

“You come!” the downer said, decisively.

So it did understand, and that meant it was one who’d worked with humans and one that might help him. Maybe the downers had heard a human was missing; but he’d given a request, and rarely would a downer refuse. This one scrambled down the fat, white-and-brown tree trunk and skipped ahead of him through the fronds that laced over the trail.

So after all his fear he was rescued. Downers knew where he was. His imaginings, his wild constructions of hope, the constructions of fantasy and rescue he’d built in the dark to keep him going—his daydreams so seldom came true, and he’d begun to believe this one would come to the worst, the most calamitous end of all.

But now, instead, the last, the wildest and most fanciful hope, was taking shape around him: yes , Melody and Patch knew he was lost. They’d whistled it through the trees, or simply sent younger, quicker downers running to look for him. They hadn’t forgotten him. They still cared.

On and on the downer led him, until he was panting, short on oxygen and staggering as he went.

The way it led him wasn’t back the way he’d come. Or perhaps he’d gotten oriented wrong with River: he’d been following the water, and perhaps in the winding paths he could find on the high forested hills, away from observing the direction of River’s flow, he’d just turned around and started walking back again. He’d be disappointed if that proved so, if suddenly between the trees he found himself back at the Base, among the human-tended fields, nothing gained.

But the walking went on and on for hours, beyond anything he thought he could do. He changed out mask cylinders. By then he had no idea where he was. But the downer never quite lost him. He’d think he was hopelessly behind, and then the whistling would guide him, past the thumping of his own pulse in his ear. He’d fall, tripped in the awkward vision of the mask, and a shower of leaves would fall around him, like a benediction, a gentle urging to get up again.

I’m using up the cylinders, he wanted to say to the downer, who never came close enough long enough. He began to fear he was in danger after all, and that with the best will in the world the downer would kill him, only from the walking.

A long, long walk (another cylinder-change along, it was) he saw the giant trees of the forest began to grow fewer. Am I back after all? he asked himself. Was I that far lost? And am I only back at the Base?

He was exhausted and in pain, and struggling to breathe, trying not to give up a cylinder sooner than he’d wrung the last use out of it. He was ready, now, to be back in safety.

But a bright gold of treeless land showed between the trees.

It wasn’t the cleared hillsides around the Base. There was no white of domes or dark green of trees, and Old River was far from him. It might be the further fields, where humans grew grain in vast tracts, at Beta Site, near the shuttle landing.