chatter sympathetically, even those who could not understand human speech; after
them came others, hisa thieves, bearing the inflatable dome and the compressors
and the generators and their food and whatever else they could strip from the
trucks, whether or not they themselves could possibly understand the use of it,
like a brown horde of scavenger insects.
Night came on them, and much of it they walked, resting when they must,
stringing through the wood, but hisa guided them so that none might stray, and
snuggled close about them when they stopped so that the chill was not so bad.
And once there was a thunder in the heavens that had nothing to do with the
rain.
“Landing,” the word passed from one to the other. The hisa asked no questions.
Their keen ears might have picked it up long ago.
Porey was back. It would probably be Porey. For a little time they would probe
the stripped base and send angry messages up to Mazian. Would have to get scan
information, decide what they were going to do about it and get Mazian’s
decision on it… all time consumed to their good.
Rest and walk, rest and walk, and whenever they would falter, the gentle Downers
were there to touch, to urge, to cajole. It was cold when they stopped, and
damp, though the rain never fell; and they were glad of morning, the first
appearance of the light sifting through the trees, which the Downers greeted
with trills and chattering and renewed enthusiasm.
And suddenly they were running out of trees, and the daylight broke clearer and
clearer, on a hillside sloping down to a vast plain. The far distance spread
before them as they came over the crest of a small rise, and the hisa were going
farther, going from the trees, into that wide valley… that sanctuary, Emilio
realized in sudden disturbance, that area the hisa had always asked remain
theirs, free of men, a vast open range only theirs, forever.
“No,” Emilio protested, looking about for Bounder. He made a gesture of appeal
to him, who swung along with a cheerful step nearby. “No. Bounder, we mustn’t go
down into the open land. Mustn’t. Can’t, hear? The men-with-guns, they come in
ships; their eyes will see.”
“Old Ones say come,” Bounder declared, never breaking stride, as if that settled
it beyond argument. Already the descent began, all the hisa rolling like a brown
tide from the trees, bearing humans and human baggage with them, followed by
other humans and others, toward the beckoning sunlit pallor of the plain.
“Bounder!” Emilio stopped, with Miliko beside him. “The men-with-guns will find
us here. You understand me, Bounder?”
“I understand. See we all, hisa, humans. We see they too.”
“We can’t go down there. They’ll kill us, do you hear me?”
“They say come.”
The Old Ones. Bounder turned away from him and continued downslope, turned again
as he walked and beckoned him and Miliko.
He took a step and another, knowing it was mad, knowing that there was a hisa
way of doing things and a human. Hisa had never lifted hands against the
invaders of their world, had sat, had watched, and this was what they would do
now. Humans had asked hisa for their help and hisa offered them their way. “I’ll
talk to them,” he said to Miliko. “I’ll talk to their Old Ones, explain to them.
We can’t offend them, but they’ll listen—Bounder, Bounder, wait.”
But Bounder walked on, ahead of them. The hisa kept moving, flowing down that
vast grassy slope to the plain. At the center of it, where a stream seemed to
flow, was something like an upthrust fist of rock and a trampled circle, a
shadow, that he realized finally as a circle of living bodies gathered about
that object
“There must be every hisa on the river down there,” Miliko said. “It’s some sort
of meeting place. Some kind of shrine.”
“Mazian won’t respect it; Union isn’t likely to either.” He foresaw massacre,
disaster, hisa sitting helpless while attack came. It was the Downers, he
thought, the Downers themselves whose gentle ways had made Pell what it was.
Time was when humans back on Earth had been terrified at the report of alien