Company Wars 01 – Downbelow Station

strode out into the weeds and under the trees while the trucks and the column

kept on. “Hisa!” he called aloud. “Hisa, it’s Emilio Konstantin! Do you see us?”

They came, a handful, shyly advancing into the lights. One came holding out his

hands, and he did. The Downer came to him and embraced him energetically. “Love

you,” the young male said. “You go walk, Konstantin-man?”

“Bounder? Is it Bounder?”

“I Bounder, Konstantin-man.” The shadowed face looked up at him, dim light from

now-stopped trucks glinting off a sharp-edged grin. “I run, run, run come back

again watch you. All we eyes to you, make you safe.”

“Love you, Bounder, love you.”

The hisa bobbed in pleasure, fairly danced with it. “You go walk?”

“We’re running away. There’s trouble in the Upabove, Bounder, men-with-guns.

Maybe they come Downbelow. We run away like the hisa, old, young, some of us not

strong, Bounder. We look for a safe place.”

Bounder turned to his companions, called something which ran up and down scales

and chattered from them back to the trees and into the branches above. And

Bounder’s strange, strong hand slipped about his as the hisa began to lead him

back to the road, where all the column had stopped, those rearmost crowding

forward to see.

“Mr. Konstantin,” one of the staff called from the passenger seat of a truck,

nervousness in his voice, “they all right coming in with us?”

“It’s all right,” he said. And to the others: “Be glad of them. The hisa are

back. The Downers know who’s welcome on Downbelow and who isn’t, don’t they?

They’ve been watching us all this time, waiting to see if we were all right. You

people,” he called out louder still to the unseen masses beyond, “They’ve come

back to us, you understand? The hisa know all the places we could run to, and

they’re willing to help us, you hear that?”

There was a murmuring of distress.

“No Downer ever hurt a man,” he shouted into the dark, over the patient rumble

of the engines. He closed his hand the more firmly on Bounder’s, walked down

among them, and Miliko slipped her hand within his elbow on the other side. The

trucks started up again, and they walked, at the same slow pace. Hisa began to

join the column, walking along in the weeds beside the road. Some humans shied

from them. Others tolerated the shy touch of an offered hand, even Q folk,

following the example of old staffers, who were less perturbed by it.

“They’re all right,” he heard one of his workers call out through the ranks.

“Let them go where they like.”

“Bounder,” he said, “we want a safe place… find all the humans from all the

camps, take them to many safe places.”

“You want safe, want help; come, come.”

The strong hand stayed within his, small, as if they were father and child; but

for all of youth and size it was the other way about… that humans went as the

children now, down a known human road to a known human place, but they were not

coming back, might never—he acknowledged it—might never come back.

“Come we place,” Bounder said. “You make we safe; we dream bad mans away and

they go; and you come now, we go dream. No hisa dream, no human dream;

together-dream. Come dream place.”

He did not understand the babble. There were places beyond which humans had

never gone among hisa. Dream-places… it was already a dream, this mingled flight

of humans and hisa, in the dark, in the overturning of all that had been

Downbelow.

They had saved the Downers; and in the long years of Union rule, when humans

came who cared nothing for the hisa… there would be humans among the hisa who

could warn them and protect them. There was that much left to do.

“They’ll come someday,” he said to Miliko, “and want to cut down the trees and

build their factories and dam the river and all the rest of it. That’s the way

of it, isn’t it? If we let them get away with it.” He swung Bounder’s hand,

looked down at the small intense face on the other side. “We go warn other