Were all of them waiting for lightning to kill someone? Was that the kind of game this was? Divine favor? Judgment from the clouds?
The rain came down in torrents for a while, then slacked off, as if nature had grown weary of its rage.
After a long, long while he could see the shadows of the tall Watchers by some source of light other than the lightnings.
He’d seen the sun go down. He’d been in the thick of the woods. He’d never in his life really seen the sun rise from an unobstructed horizon, not as it did now, just a gradual, soft light that at first he could scarcely detect. He could never point to a moment and say that this was dawn. Light just became, and grew, and defined the world around him.
He shifted sides: the leg nearest the ground had chilled to the point of pain, and he could protect one side at a time. He changed out a cylinder, carefully pocketing the spent wrapper.
He slept, then, perhaps simply from weakness. He truly slept, and waked in an unaccustomed warmth. He opened his eyes and realized Great Sun was brighter than he was accustomed to be, comforting the land.
He sat, absorbing the warmth, leaning on the knees of the statue, on Mana-tari-so. He said to himself then that he should just wait, and never push the button that would call for help at all. It wasn’t a scary place. He was with the hisa, and whatever this place was: it waited, it watched. It was all expectation, and in a light-headed way, at this moment, so was he.
But a hisa took his arm, and wanted him to rise and walk, where, he had no idea. A hisa never meant harm, at least. They were utterly without violence. And he went, curious, wobbling on his feet from hunger and light-headedness and cramped legs.
The hisa brought him to the base of the largest Watcher, and a little gray-furred hisa, older than any hisa he’d ever seen.
“You walk in forest,” the old hisa said—female, he thought. And he sank down to his knees on the mat of golden grass, before this old, old creature. “You name Fetcher.”
“Yes.” Something held him from blurting out a request for Melody and Patch. He’d been before judges—and this was one, something told him so, with a sense of hushed reverence that distant thunder could not disturb.
“Satin, I.”
Satin! A shiver went down his spine. Satin, the downer who’d led in the War. Satin, who’d been to space and come down again.
A very thin, elderly hand reached out to him, brushed dust from the mask faceplate, then touched his bare, muddy fingers.
“You boy come watch Great Sun.”
“Yes.”
“What he tell you?”
“I don’t know.” Was he supposed to know something? Was he supposed to be wiser? There was a time downers had made him better than he was. There was a time downers had given him far better sense than he had. But what should he know now? He didn’t think there’d be an easy answer for the ship above their heads and for the rules he’d broken.
“Not you place,” Satin said, and lifted her chin, looked Up then at the heavens with eyes tireless as the Watchers themselves. “There you place, Fetcher.”
“I’m Melody’s,” he said, fearful of disrespecting this most important of hisa; but Satin was wrong. He didn’t belong up there. That was all the trouble. “I belong to Patch and Melody. I don’t want to go back up there. Ever.”
A chill went down his back as those eyes sought his, with the mask between them. “You walk with Great Sun. I walk with Sun my time, bad time, lot shoot, lot die.”
The War. War wasn’t a word they were ever supposed to use with hisa.
“I know,” he said.
“You walk with Sun,” she said, and from the grass beside her took up a spirit stick, a carved stick as long as a human’s forearm, a carved stick done up with woven strands and feathers and stones. He’d seen them on gravesites, at boundaries, at important places hisa meant to mark. “Take,” she said, and offered it to him.
Humans weren’t supposed to touch such things. But she offered it, and he took it carefully in one hand. He saw intricate carvings, and the wear of age and the discoloration at one end that said it might have been set in dark earth once.
“You take,” she said.
He didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t own such a thing. Or maybe—maybe it was a grave marker. They were, sometimes. Maybe it was his dying she meant.
“Why?” he asked. “Do what with it?”
“Go you place. You sleep with Mana-tari-no, make he no rest. You dream Upabove. All you dream belong Upabove. You go there.”
He didn’t know what to say, or to do. He didn’t want this answer.
“I want to see Melody and Patch,” he said as clearly as he could, as forcefully as he dared object.
“Not you dream,” Satin said.
“I didn’t dream. I didn’t have a dream!” It was what hisa came here to do, that was what the researchers said. They dreamed and the wise old ones interpreted those dreams. They believed the old ones dreamed the world into reality. They were primitive beings.
He looked into those old, wise eyes and saw—pity?
He grew angry. Or wanted to. But Melody had told him the truth all those years ago. He wasn’t angry. He was sad.
“You find dream up there.” Satin gestured toward the sky. “Go walk you springtime. Melody and Patch go walk. Time you go, Melody child.”
It hurt. It hurt a great deal. But he knew the truth when, after a period of self-delusion, he got the straight word from somebody who could see it.
Go away. Go back. You’re hurting Melody.
It was true. He’d invited himself into Melody’s life and never left. And downers didn’t live as long as humans. It was a big piece of Melody’s life he’d taken with his need, his problem.
Downer females didn’t get pregnant until their last infant grew up.
Did Melody think that he was hers? In her heart of hearts, was that the reason, that she wanted to be rid of him and couldn’t—and couldn’t have her baby until he was out of her life?
He offered the stick back, with all it meant, every tie, every connection to the hisa. He did it in hurt, and in what his pride insisted was anger and what Melody had always insisted wasn’t.
But Satin refused the stick. “You take,” she said. “Belong you.”
He couldn’t speak for a moment. He didn’t know the exact moment in their talking together when the realization had happened, just that at a moment amid the pain he felt assured that he’d been—not cast out: the gift of the stick proved that. But sent out by them. Graduated. Dismissed, with his own business unfinished; his messages unspoken; his plans shifted to a totally different course.
And by what he knew now, he had to go.
It was a good thing he wore a mask. The bottom seal was getting slick. And there was a painful lump in his throat.
“Tell Melody and Patch I love them,” he said finally. “I hope they’re all right this spring.”
“Spring for them,” Satin said, saying it as plainly to his ears as any human could: it was too much for a hisa to bring up a human. Spring came. It carried hope for Melody. And a hisa wise in the ways of the Upabove explained what Melody and Patch were too kind, too gentle to say: Melody should forget her human child, quit her lifetime of waiting for him and get on with the years she had, she and Patch. Spring for them.
“I understand,” he said, and got up, weary and weak as he’d grown. He made the proper little bow hisa made to those they owed respect, and held the stick close as he walked away.