“Comp projects enough rain with this one to get us flood in the blue zones
again. Right up to base two’s doorstep. But most of the roadbed should be above
the floodline.”
Emilio scowled, expelled a soft breath. “We’ll hope.” The road was the important
thing; the fields would flood for weeks more without harm except to their
schedules. Local grains thrived on the water, depended on it in the initial
stages of their natural cycles. The lattices kept young plants from going
downriver. It was human machinery and human tempers which suffered most.
“Downers have the right idea,” he said. “Give up during the winter rains, wander
off when the trees bloom, make love, nest high and wait for the grain to ripen.”
Miliko grinned, still marking her charts.
He sighed, unregarded, pulled over the slab of plastic which served him as a
writing desk and started making out personnel assignments, rearranging
priorities with the equipment. Perhaps, he thought, perhaps if he pleaded with
the Downers, arranged some special gifts, they would hang on a little longer
before their seasonal desertion. He regretted losing Satin and Bluetooth; the
pair of them had been of enormous help, persuading their fellows in outright
argument when it came to something their Konstantin-man wanted very badly. But
that went both ways; Satin and Bluetooth wanted to go; They wanted something now
in his power to give, and it was their time to have their way, before their
spring came on them and they passed all self-control.
They were dispersing old hands and trainees and Q assignees down the road to
each of the new bases, trying to keep proportions which would not leave staff
vulnerable to riot; trying to make the Q folk into workers, against their belief
that they were being used; tried to work with morale—it was the willing ones
they moved out, and the surliest main base had to keep, in that one huge dome,
many times enlarged and patched onto until dome was a misnomer—it spread
irregularly over the next hill, a constant difficulty to them. Human workers
occupied the several domes next; choice ones, comfortable ones—they were always
reluctant to be transferred out to more primitive conditions at the wells or the
new camps, alone with the forest and the floods and Q and strange hisa.
Communication was always the problem. They were linked by com; but it was still
lonely out there. Ideally they wanted aircraft links; but the one flimsy
aircraft they had built some years back had crashed on the landing field two
years ago… light aircraft and Downbelow’s storms did not agree. Hacking a
landing site for shuttles… that was on the schedule, at least for base three,
but the cutting of trees had to be worked out with the Downers, and that was
touchy. With the tech level they managed onworld, crawlers were still the most
efficient way of getting about, patient and slow as the pace of life on
Downbelow had always been, chugging away through mud and flood to the wonderment
and delight of Downers. Petrol and grains, wood and winter vegetables, dried
fish, an experiment in domesticating the knee-high pitsu, which Downers hunted…
(You bad, Downers had declared in the matter, make they warm in you camp and you
eat, no good this thing. But Downers at base one had become herders, and they
had all learned to eat domestic meat. Lukas had ordered it, and this was one
Lukas project that had worked well.) Humans on Downbelow fared well enough
equipped and fed themselves and station, even with the influx they had gotten.
That was no small task. The manufacturies up on station and the manufactories
here on Downbelow were working nonstop. Self-sufficiency, to duplicate every
item they normally imported, to fill every quota not alone for themselves but
for the overburdened station, and to stockpile what they could… it was all
falling into their laps here on Downbelow, the excess population, the burden of
station-bred people, their own and refugees, who had never set foot on a world.
They could no longer depend on the trade which had once woven Viking and
Mariner, Esperance and Pan-Paris and Russell’s and Voyager and others into a