Downbelow Station (12 page)

“I’ve heard,” he said. “I’ve heard how it was here.”

“Konstantin-man good friend.” She lifted her face at his touch, looked fearlessly into the strange mask which made him very horrible to see. “Love good mans. Downers work hard, work hard, hard for Konstantin. Give you gifts. Go no more away.”

She meant it. They had learned how Lukases were. It was said in all the camp that they should do good for the Konstantins, who had always been the best humans, gift-bringers more than the hisa could give.
 
“What’s your name?” he asked, stroking her cheek. “What do we call you?” She grinned suddenly, warm in his kindness, stroked her own sleek hide, which was her vanity, wet as it was now. “Humans call me Satin,” she said, and laughed, for her true name was her own, a hisa thing, but Bennett had given her this, for her vanity, this and a bright bit of red cloth, which she had worn to rags and still treasured among her spirit-gifts.

“Will you walk back with me?” he asked, meaning to the human camp. “I’d like to talk with you.”

She was tempted, for this meant favor. And then she sadly thought of duty and pulled away, folded her arms, dejected at the loss of love. “I sit,” she said.
 
“With Bennett.”

“Make he spirit look at the sky,” she said, showing the spirit-stick, explaining a thing the hisa did not explain. “Look at he home.” “Come tomorrow,” he said. “I need to talk to the hisa.” She tilted back her head, looked at him in startlement. Few humans called them what they were. It was strange to hear it. “Bring others?” “All the high ones if they will come. We need hisa Up-above, good hands, good work. We need trade Downbelow, place for more men.” She extended her hand toward the hills and the open plain, which went on forever.

“There is place.”

“But the high ones would have to say.”

She laughed. “Say spirit-things. I-Satin give this to Konstantin-man. All ours.

I give, you take. All trade, much good things; all happy.” “Come tomorrow,” he said, and walked away, a tall strange figure in the slanting rain. Satin-Tam-utsa-pitan sat down on her heels with the rain beating upon her bowed back and pouring over her body, and regarded the grave, with the rain making pocked puddles above it.

She waited. Eventually others came, less accustomed to men. Dalut-hos-me was one such, who did not share her optimism of them; but even he had loved Bennett.

There were men and men. This much the hisa had learned

She leaned against Dalut-hos-me, Sun-shining-through-clouds, in the dark evening of their long watch, and by this gesture pleased him. He had begun laying gifts before her mat in this winter season, hoping for spring.
 
“They want hisa Upabove,” she said. “I want to see the Upabove. I want this.”

She had always wanted it, from the time that she had heard Bennett talk of it.

From this place came Konstantins (and Lukases, but she dismissed that thought).
 
She reckoned it as bright and full of gifts and good things as all the ships which came down from it, bringing them goods and good ideas. Bennett had told them of a great metal place holding out arms to the Sun, to drink his power, where ships vaster than they had ever imagined came and went like giants.
 
All things flowed to this place and from it; and Bennett had gone away now, making a Time in her life under the Sun. It was a manner of pilgrimage, this journey she desired to mark this Time, like going to the images of the plain, like the sleep-night in the shadow of the images.

They had given humans images for the Upabove too, to watch there. It was fit, to call it pilgrimage. And the Time regarded Bennett, who came from that journey.
 
“Why do you tell me?” Dalut-hos-me asked.

“My spring will be there, on Upabove.”

He nestled closer. She could feel his heat. His arm went about her. “I will go,” he said.

It was cruel, but the desire was on her for her first traveling; and his was on him, for her, would grow, as gray winter passed and they began to think toward spring, toward warm winds and the breaking of the clouds. And Bennett, cold in the ground, would have laughed his strange human laughter and bidden them be happy.

So always the hisa wandered, of springs, and the nesting.

iv

Pell: sector blue five: 5/28/52

It was frozen dinner again. Neither of them had gotten in till late, numb with the stresses of the day—more refugees, more chaos. Damon ate, looked up finally realizing his self-absorbed silence, found Elene sunk in one of her own… a habit, lately, between them. He was disturbed to think of that, and reached across the table to lay his hand on hers, which rested beside her plate. Her hand turned, curled up to weave with his. She looked as tired as he. She had been working too long hours—more than today. It was a remedy of sorts… not to think. She never spoke of Estelle. She did not speak much at all. Perhaps, he thought, she was so much at work there was little to say.
 
“I saw Talley today,” he said hoarsely, seeking to fill the silence, to distract her, however grim the topic. “He seemed… quiet. No pain. No pain at all.” Her hand tightened. “Then you did right by him after all, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think there is a way to know.”

“He asked.”

“He asked,” he echoed.

“You did all you could to be right. That’s all you can do.”

“I love you.”

She smiled. Her lips trembled until they could no longer hold the smile.

“Elene?”

She drew back her hand. “Do you think we’re going to hold Pell?”

“Are you afraid not?”

“I’m afraid you don’t believe it.”

“What kind of reasoning is that?”

“Things you won’t discuss with me.”

“Don’t give me riddles. I’m not good at them. I never was.”

“I want a child. I’m not on the treatment now. I think you still are.” Heat rose to his face. For half a heartbeat he thought of lying. “I am. I didn’t think it was time to discuss it. Not yet.”

She pressed her lips tightly together, distraught.

“I don’t know what you want,” he said. “I don’t know. If Elene Quen wants a baby, all right. Ask. It’s all right. Anything is. But I’d hoped it would be for reasons I’d know.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’ve done a lot of thinking. I’ve watched you. But you haven’t done any of it aloud. What do you want? What do I do? Get you pregnant and let you go? I’d help you if I knew how. What do I say?”

“I don’t want to fight. I don’t want a fight. I told you what I want.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “I don’t want to wait anymore.” Her brow furrowed. For the first time in days he had the feeling of contact with her eyes. Of Elene, as she was.
 
Of something gentle. “You care,” she said. “I see that.”

“Sometimes I know I don’t hear all you say.”

“On ship… it’s my business, having a child or not. Ship family is closer in some things and further apart in others. But you with your own family… I understand that. I respect it.”

“Your home too. It’s yours.”

She managed the faintest of smiles, an offering, perhaps. “So what do you say to it?”

Offices of station planning were giving out dire warnings, advice otherwise, pleadings otherwise. It was not only the establishment of Q. There was the war, getting nearer. All rules applied to Konstantins first.
 
He simply nodded. “So we’re through waiting.”

It was like a shadow lifting. Estelle’s ghost fled the place, the small apartment they had drawn in blue five, which was smaller, into which their furnishings did not fit, where everything was out of order. It was all at once home, the hall with the dishes stowed in the clothing lockers and the living room which was bedroom by night, with boxes lashed in the corner, Downer wickerwork, with what should have gone into the hall lockers.
 
They lay in the bed that was the daytime couch. And she talked, lying in his arms, for the first time in weeks talked, late into the night, a flow of memories she had never shared with him, in all their being together.
 
He tried to reckon what she had lost in Estelle: her ship; she still called it that. Brotherhood, kinship. Merchanter morals, the stationer proverb ran; but he could not see Elene among the others, like them, rowdy merchanters offship for a dockside binge and a sleepover with anyone willing. Could never believe that.
 
“Believe it,” she said, her breath stirring against his shoulder. “That’s the way we live. What do you want instead? Inbreeding? They were my cousins on that ship.”

“You were different,” he insisted. He remembered her as he had first seen her, in his office on a matter involving a cousin’s troubles… always quieter than the others. A conversation, a re-meeting; another; a second voyage… and Pell again.
 
She had never gone bar-haunting with her cousins, had not made the merchanter hangouts; had come to him, had spent those days on station with him. Failed to board again. Merchanters rarely married. Elene had.
 
“No,” she said. “You were different.”

“You’d take anyone’s baby?” The thought troubled him. Some things he had never asked Elene because he thought he knew. And Elene had never talked that way. He began, belatedly, to revise all he thought he knew; to be hurt, and to fight that. She was Elene; that quantity he still believed in, trusted.
 
“Where else could we get them?” she asked, making strange, clear sense. “We love them, do you think not? They belong to the whole ship. Only now there aren’t any.” She could talk of that suddenly. He felt the tension ebb, a sigh against him. “They’re all gone.”

“You called Elt Quen your father; Tia James your mother. Was it that way?” “He was. She knew.” And a moment later. “She left a station to go with him. Not many will.”

She had never asked him to. That thought had never clearly occurred to him. Ask a Konstantin to leave Pell… he asked himself if he would have, and felt a deep unease. I would have, he insisted. I might have. “It would be hard,” he admitted aloud. “It was hard for you.”

She nodded, a movement against his arm.

“Are you sorry, Elene?”

A small shake of her head.

“It’s late to talk about things like this,” he said. “I wish we had. I wish we’d known enough to talk to each other. So many things we didn’t know.” “It bother you?”

He hugged her against him, kissed her through a veil of hair, brushed it aside.
 
He thought for a moment of saying no, decided then to say nothing. “You’ve seen Pell. You realize I’ve never set foot on a ship bigger than a shuttle? Never been out from this station? Some things I don’t know how to look at, or even how to imagine the question. You understand me?”

“Some things I don’t know how to ask you either.”

“What would you ask for?”

“I just did.”

“I don’t know how to say yes or no. Elene, I don’t know if I could have left Pell. I love you, but I don’t know that I could have done that—after so short a time. And that bothers me. That bothers me, if it’s something in me that it never occurred to me… that I spent all my planning trying to think how to make you happy on Pell…” “Easier for me to stay a time… than for a Konstantin to uproot himself from Pell; pausing’s easy, we do it all the time. Only losing Estelle I never planned. Like what’s out there, you never planned. You’ve answered me.” “How did I answer you?”

“By what it is that bothers you.”

That puzzled him. We do it all the time. That frightened him. But she talked more, lying against him, about more than things… deep feelings; the way childhood was for a merchanter; the first time she had set foot on a station, aged twelve and frightened by rude stationers who assumed any merchanter was fair game. How a cousin had died on Mariner years back, knifed in a stationer quarrel, not even comprehending a stationer’s jealousy that had killed him.
 
And an incredible thing… that in the loss of her ship, Elene’s pride had suffered; pride … the idea set him back, so that for some time he lay staring at the dark ceiling, thinking about it.

The name was diminished… a possession like the ship. Someone had diminished it and too anonymously to give her an enemy to get it back from. For a moment he thought of Mallory, the hard arrogance of an elite breed, the aristocracy of privilege. Sealed worlds and a law unto itself, where no one had property, and everyone had it: the ship and all who belonged to it. Merchanters who would spit in a dockmaster’s eye made grumbling retreat when a Mallory or a Quen ordered it. She felt grief at losing Estelle. That had to be. But shame too… that she had not been there when it mattered. That Pell had set her in the dockside offices where she could use that reputation the Quens had; but now there was nothing at her back, nothing but the reputation she had not been there to pay for. A dead name. A dead ship. Maybe she detected pity from other merchanters.
 
That would be bitterest of all.

One thing she had asked of him. He had cheated her of it without discussing it.

Without seeing.

“The first child,” he murmured, turning his head on the pillow to look at her, “goes by Quen. You hear me, Elene? Pell has Konstantins enough. My father may sulk; but he’ll understand. My mother will. I think it’s important it be that way.”

She began to cry, as she had never cried in his presence, not without resisting it. She put her arms about him and stayed there, till morning.

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Viking station: 6/5/52

Viking hung in view, agleam in the light of an angry star. Mining, industry regarding metals and minerals… that was its support. Segust Ayres watched, from the vantage of the freighter’s bridge, the image on the screens.
 
And something was wrong. The bridge whispered with alarm passed from station to station, frowns on faces and troubled looks. Ayres glanced at his three companions. They had caught it too, stood uneasily, all of them trying to keep out of the way of procedures that had officers darting from this station to that to supervise.