And when he looked around his guide was gone.
“Wait!” he called out, disturbing the peace. But his hisa guide might have been one of ten, of twenty hisa of like stature. Three in his vicinity wore cords and bits of shell very like his guide’s ornament. Wide hisa eyes stared at him, of the few hisa who remained standing and of the most who sat each or in clusters at the front of a statue.
“Melody?” he called out. “Patch?” But there was such a stillness around about the place that his calling only provoked stares.
What was he supposed to do? His guide had failed to tell him.
Where did he go? Push the button and call the Base for help?
He wasn’t ready to do that. He wasn’t ready to give up the idea that Melody and Patch would come here at least for him to bid them good-bye; more than that, getting past the administrative tangle he knew he’d added to his troubles—his mind shied away from fantasies of hisa intervention, last-moment, miraculous help. It didn’t seem wrong, at least, to explore the place while he waited. Hisa weren’t ever much on boundaries, and, after the novelty of his shouting had died away, hisa were wandering about among the images at apparent random, seeming untroubled by his presence.
So he walked about unhindered and unadmonished, looking up at the statues, one after the other, seeing minute differences in them the nature of which he didn’t know. Looking up turned his face to the misting rain and spotted his mask with more water than the water-shedding surface could easily dispose of, water that dotted the gray sky with translucent shining worlds, that was what he daydreamed them to be: this was the center of the hisa universe, and he stood in that very center, by their leave.
He spread wide his arms and turned, making the statues move, and the clouds spin, so that the very universe spun as it should, and he was at the heart of the world. He did it until he was dizzy, and then realized hisa were staring at him, remarking this strange behavior.
He was embarrassed then and, being dizzy, found a statue at the knees of which no one sat; he sat down like the others, exhausted, and realized he was beyond light-headed. A breathing cylinder wanted changing. But not urgently so. He set his hands on his knees and sat cross-legged, back straight. He was shivering, and had a hollow in the middle of him where food and filtered water would be very welcome. Excitement alone had carried him this far. Now the body was getting tired and wobbly.
He breathed in and out in measured breaths until he at least silenced the throbbing in his head and the ache in his chest Still, still, still, he said to himself, pushing down his demand on the cylinders until he could judge their condition.
He’d been cold and hungry many a time in his foolish childhood. He remembered hiding from maintenance workers, back in his tunnel ventures. He’d gone without water. Kid that he had been, he’d gotten on to how to manage the cylinders with a finesse the workers didn’t use, and pretended ignorance through the instruction sessions when he’d come down to the world. He’d known oh, so much more. He’d read the manuals understanding exactly what the technical information meant, as he’d wager the novices didn’t.
He leaned his head back against the stone, face to the sky. And drew a slow breath.
In time he knew in fact he had to change one cylinder out, and did. He slept a while, secure in two good cylinders.
Once, in an interlude between fits of rain, a hisa came over to him and said, “You human hello,” and he said hello back.
“You sit Mana-tari-so.”
“I don’t understand,” he said,
“Mana-tari-so,” the hisa said, and pointed up, to the statue.
It wasn’t a word he’d learned, of the few hisa words he did know.
“He name,” the hisa said.
“He name Mana-tari-so?” The statues, then, had names, like people, or stood for people. He rested against the knees of Mana-tari-so.
“Do you know Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o?” He didn’t pronounce Melody’s and Patch’s names well. But he thought someone should know them.
“Here, there,” the hisa said, and patted the statue. “Old, old, he.” And wandered off in the way of a hisa who’d said what he’d wished to say.
He knew something, he suspected, just in those few words, that the scientists would want very much to know, but he could only ponder the meaning of it. Old? Going back how far? And did it stand for a specific maker? And if that was the case, how did a hisa merit the making of such a huge image, with only stone tools? It was not the effort of one hisa. It couldn’t be, to shape it and move it and make it stand here.
He sat there cold and hungry and thirsty while the gray clouds went grayer with storm. He sat there while lightning played overhead and thunder cracked. His suit had passed its one flash heat, and had nothing more to give him except to retain some of his body heat. But Mana-tari-so sheltered him from the wind, and ran with water…
The earth shook. Heaved…
Became the ship… and a giant fist slamming at him.
He lay there, half-smothered by his own increasing weight, thinking… with startled awareness where he was… We’re going to die. We’re out of jump. We’re going to die here…
Second slam.
“Fletcher!” he heard from Jeremy. “You all right, Fletcher?”
“Yeah,” he said, as his stomach threatened to heave. “Yeah.”
A third drop. A wild, nerve-jolting screech from Jeremy.
The damned kid took it like a vid ride. Enjoyed it. Fletcher caught a gulp of air.
Told himself he couldn’t take the shame of being sick. There was a way to take it the way Jeremy did. He tried to find it. Tried to hold onto it.
“Stay belted! Stay belted!” the intercom said. “We’re in, we’re solid, but stay belted. You juniors, this is serious.” The hell, Fletcher thought. The hell. “I don’t think we’ll use the shower yet,” Jeremy said. “Drink all those packets! Fast!”
The backup shift on this jump was second to first, Madison to James Robert, Helm 2 to Helm 1. Both shifts were on the bridge.
But JR, riding it out below, fretted and occupied his time shaving, flat in his bunk, and taking a risk on a lightning-fast wash before he dressed. The Clear-to-move was uncommonly late in coming, but the audio off the bridge was reaching him while he lay there, and the captain’s station echoed to a monitor setup he had on his handheld, a test of fine vision, but what he heard, fretting below, was a quarry fleeing the point, trying to elude their fast drop toward the dark mass of the failed star that was the point.
They’d gone low, toward the mass, because a bat out of hell was going to come in after them and above them, and Champlain must guess it.
He wanted to be on the bridge, but there wasn’t a useful thing he could do but watch, and he was watching here, as Bucklin would be watching, as Lyra would be watching, and all the rest of them who had handhelds in regular issue. They were held in silence, not disrupting the essential com flow, not even so far as chatter between stations.
He waited. Waited, with an eye on the clock.
Saw, utterly silent, the appearance of another dot on the system scheme, and the fan of probability in its initial plot, rapidly revising.
“There she rides!” Com was unwontedly exuberant. “Announcing the arrival of Union ship Boreale right over us and bound after Champlain for halt and question. Champlain is at a one-hour lag now, and projected as one and a half hours and proceeding. We do not believe that Champlain has made a second V-dump.”