Company Wars 01 – Downbelow Station

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

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