He’d stayed reformed: he’d improved in school, which brought rewards of another kind. And even when, after the four-year rotation station workers were allowed. Melody and Patch had gone back down to their world, he hadn’t collapsed and relapsed into his juvenile life of crime.
No. He’d already confessed at least part of his story (not the part about actually going into the tunnels) to his guidance counselor and made a solemn career choice: working with the downers on Downbelow.
Tough standards, tough program, tough academic work. But he’d made the program. He’d gotten his chance.
And, not surprising, because former station workers lived and worked around the human establishments on Downbelow, he’d met Melody and Patch inside an hour after reaching the forest Base last fall. She was grayer. Patch wasn’t as big as he’d recalled. He’d grown that much in the nearly ten years since he’d seen them, and he’d not known how old his Downers had been.
It might be her last fertile season, and Patch her last mate. No other male pursued her that he knew of, and she would not, he understood, lead Patch all that long a chase when her spring was on her—but then Patch couldn’t walk so far these days, either.
He wanted them back safely. But he knew, now, soberly, that ultimately he’d lose them, too. So days were precious to him. And this day—this was the best day of his life, this game of puffer-balls and pollen.
A hard downer finger poked him hard below the ribs, and he curled in self-defense. Melody and Patch were in a prankish mood and, lying on his back on the bank, he jabbed Patch back, which sent Patch screaming for the nearest tree-limb. In the trees downers could climb like crazy, and a human in heavy boots and clean-suit was not going to catch Patch.
Patch flung leaves at him. “Wicked, wicked,” Melody cried, and flung a puffer-ball, which disintegrated on impact. Pollen was everywhere. Patch dropped, shrieking, from the tree.
Then it was pollen wars until the air was thick and gold again.
And until the restricted breathing had Fletcher leaning against a low-hanging limb gasping for air and sweating in the suit.
The light was dimmer now.
“Sun goes walk,” he said. One couldn’t say to downers that Great Sun set, or went down, or any such thing. The rules said so. Great Sun walked over the hills. These two downers knew Great Sun’s unguarded face, having been up in the Upabove themselves, but it didn’t change how they reverenced the star. He used the downer expression: “The clock-words say humans go inside.”
They looked, Melody and Patch did, at gray, cloud-veiled Sun above a shadowing River. They slid arms about each other as they set out walking up the trail toward the Base, being old mates, and comfortable and affectionate. Where the trail widened, Melody put an arm about Fletcher, too, and they walked with him back down the river path until, past three large paddy-frames, they came within sight of the domes where humans lived, in filtered, oxygen-supplied safety above the flood zone.
“You fine?” Patch asked. “You got bellyache?”
“No,” he said, and laughed. Downers didn’t brood on things. If you didn’t want a dozen questions, you laughed. They wouldn’t let him be sad, and wouldn’t leave him in distress.
They were absolutely adamant in that.
So he laughed, and poked Patch in the ribs, and Patch poked him and ducked around Melody.
Games.
“Late, late, late,” he said. And then the alarm on his watch beeped, as all across the fields quitting time announced itself on the ’link everyone wore.
“Oh, you make music, time go!”
Not that they grasped in the least what time really meant. On days when a lot of the staff was out in the fields, the downers would gather to watch close to quitting time, and exclaim in amazement at the hour every human in the fields simultaneously quit work and headed back to Base, carrying whatever they’d been using, gathering up whatever they’d brought with them. The downers understood there was a signal and that it came with music. It was not the beep itself, the Director said, it was the why that puzzled the downers. The old hands like Melody and Patch, who’d seen the station change shift, and who’d worked by the clock, could tell the younger downers that humans set great store by time and doing things together.
(“But Great Sun he come again,” was Melody’s protest against any such notion of pressing schedule. “Always he come”)
On Downbelow, in downer minds, there were always new chances, new tomorrows.
And one never had to do anything that pressing, that it couldn’t wait one more hour or one more day. You wanted to know when to go to your burrow? Look to Great Sun, and go before dark. Or after, if you were in a mood to risk the blindness of the nights.
One was never in too big a hurry. One could take the time to walk, oh, way off the direct track home, in this still-strange notion (to a station-born human) of being able to look across a wide open space to see what other people were doing on other routes. Upabove, it would have been corridors and walls.
Here, on this happiest of all days, he found his path intersecting Bianca Velasquez’s route on her way home. They were in the same biochem seminar. They mixed before discussion-session. She’d always hung around with Marshall Willett and the Dees. Who didn’t hang around with him.
She was going to snub him. He could pretend to drop something and let her go by while he rummaged in the gravel of the path. Like a fool. He could save himself the sour end to a good day.
But it ought to be easy to look at Bianca. It ought to be easy to talk to her. Hi, just a simple hi, and put the onus of politeness on her. Hi. Ready for the biochem quiz? What job are you on? He had it straight. Civilized amenities were very clear in his head until she almost looked at him and he almost looked at her and by an accident of converging trails they were walking together.
Not just any girl. The girl. Bianca Velasquez, who’d drawn his eye ever since he’d first seen her. Suddenly his brain was vacant. He couldn’t look at her when he couldn’t think and his body temperature was rising in what he knew was a glow-in-the-dark blush.
God, he was a fool. He must have inhaled puffer-pollen. He didn’t know why he’d chosen today to cross her path, just—there she’d been; and he’d done it
“Where were you?” she asked.
“Over there.” He waved his hand at River. That sounded stupid. And she’d noticed he was gone? God, if the supervisor had seen him…
“So where were you?”
“Oh, beyond the trees. Down by the River.”
“Doing what?”
“This downer I work with—Melody—she wanted to show me something.” I work with . As if he was a senior supervisor. That sounded like a fool. She’d rattled him just by existing. He was already in a tangle and he’d only just opened his mouth.
“You’re all over stuff.”
He brushed his clean-suit “Puffer-balls.” Thank God, he had his inspiration for something to say. “It was all over. And the sun and everything. It was real pretty. That’s why I went.”
“Where?”
Fast thinking. Panic. Decision. “I’ll show you.”
“Sure.”
Oh, God. She said yes. He didn’t expect her to say yes.
“When?” she asked
“Can you get away tomorrow?”
“How long?”
“No longer than I was today. About the same time. Right before sunset. When the light’s right.”
“I don’t know. We’re not supposed to be alone down there.”