functions alien to those of a starship. This was commerce and the maintenance of
a centuries-old orbit, cataloging of goods and manufacture, of internal and
onworld populations, native and human… a colony, busy with mundane life. She
surveyed it with a slow intake of breath, a sense of ownership. This was what
they had fought to keep alive.
Com central came through suddenly, an announcement from council. “… wish to
assure station residents,” said Angelo Konstantin, with council chambers in the
background, “that no evacuation of this station will take place. The Fleet is
here for our protection…”
Their world.
It only remained to put it in order.
Chapter Four
« ^ »
Downbelow: main base: 1600 hrs. station standard
Local Dawn*
*Seasonal variation in daylit hours and difference in rotational period from
station (Earth) standard results in daily progressing time difference: station
and world pass only rarely into relative synch.
Morning was near, a red line on the horizon. Emilio stood in the open, breath
paced evenly through the mask, wearing a heavy jacket against the perpetual
chill of nights at this latitude and elevation. The lines moved in the dark,
quietly, bowed figures hastening with loads like insects saving eggs from flood,
outward, out of all the storage domes.
The human workers still slept, those in Q and those of the residents’ domes.
Only a few staff helped in this. His eyes could spot them here and there about
the landscape of low domes and hills, tall shadows among the others.
A small, panting figure scurried up to him, gasped a naked breath. “Yes? Yes,
you send, Konstantin-man?”
“Bounder?”
“I Bounder.” The voice hissed around a grin. “Good runner, Konstantin-man.”
He touched a wiry, furred shoulder, felt a spidery arm twine with his. He took a
folder paper from his pocket, gave it into the hisa’s callused hand. “Run,
then,” he said. “Carry this to all human camps, let their eyes see, you
understand? And tell all the hisa. Tell them all, from the river to the plain;
tell them all send their runners, even to hisa who don’t come in human camps.
Tell them be careful of men, trust no strangers. Tell them what we do here.
Watch, watch, but don’t come near until a call they know. Do the hisa
understand?”
“Lukases come,” the hisa said. “Yes. Understand, Konstantin-man. I Bounder. I am
wind. No one catches.”
“Go,” he said. “Run, Bounder.”
Hard arms hugged him, with that frightening easy strength of the hisa. The
shadow left him into the dark, flitted, ran …
Word sped. It could not be recalled, not so easily.
He stood still, watched the other human figures on the hillside. He had given
his staff orders and refused to confide in them, wishing to spare them
responsibility. The storage domes were mostly empty now, all the supplies they
had contained taken deep into the bush. Word sped along the river, by ways which
had nothing to do with modern communications, nothing which listeners could
monitor, word which sped with a hisa’s speed and would not be stopped at any
order from the station or those who held it. Camp to camp, human and hisa,
wherever hisa were in touch one with the other.
A thought struck him… that perhaps never before Man had the hisa had reason to
talk to others of their kind in this way; that never to their knowledge was
there war, never unity among the scattered tribes, but somehow knowledge of Man
had gotten from one place to the other. And now humans sent a message through
that strange network. He imagined it passing on riverbanks and in the brush, by
chance meetings and by purpose, with whatever purpose moved the gentle,
bewildered hisa.
And over all the area of contact, hisa would steal, who had no concept of theft;
and leave their work, who had no concept of wages or of rebellion.
He felt cold, wrapped as he was in layers of clothing, well insulated against
the chill breeze. He could not, like Bounder, run away. Being Konstantin and
human, he stood waiting, while advancing dawn picked out the lines of burdened
workers, while humans from the other domes began to stir out of sleep to