But maybe the curling patterns meant vines and seeds. Maybe it was fields and maybe it was hisa paths the lines meant. You could see anything you believed in, in hisa carving, that was the thing. And if he ever could ask Melody and Patch to read the stick for him, as sure as he knew their minds, he’d bet they’d read him something completely different every time he asked

So who was smarter? Hisa, with their patterns that could mean anything the day felt like meaning? Or humans who, in their writing and their image-making, pinned a moment down with precision, like a specimen on a board?

Was one better, or smarter, and ought hisa not to work on the station as much as some of them, individuals with preferences like every human, wanted to work?

He didn’t think natural was better. He didn’t think hisa should die young from infections, or lose their babies in floods or to fevers, or die of broken legs. But the authorities ruled there were hisa you could contact, but hisa who didn’t work at the Base were completely off limits. And they went on dying of things station medicine could cure.

Experts said—better a few die like that than have another contact the way it had been when the Fleet military had invaded Downbelow. Humans never should have landed on Downbelow at all, was what one side said. Everything humans had ever done was harmful and wrong. They’d already robbed an intelligent species of their unique future and further contact could only do worse.

But wasn’t a human-hisa future unique in the patterns of a wide universe, too? Wasn’t it a surer chance for the hisa to survive, when worlds with life were so few? And wasn’t it as important in the vast cosmos that two species had gotten together and worked together?

Seemed sensible to him that he’d done no harm.

They’d given him a gift that meant—surely—they weren’t harmed.

But when he remembered that he was lying on a bunk in a ship speeding toward nowhere, and away from every meaning the stick had to anyone, a lump came up in his throat and his eyes stung.

Rotten stupid was what it was.

More experts. Quen, this time. Nunn.

Friends, he and Bianca. Running around together. Thinking of things together. For maybe fifteen whole, oblivious days, with disaster written all around them.

It shouldn’t surprise him when it all fell apart. Things always did. He wrapped the feathered cords around the stick and put it away in the back of the drawer.

Then he fell back on his bunk and stared at the ceiling, chasing away the ache in his chest with the remembrance of sunglare through green leaves. Jeremy came in from the party, late, and he pretended to be asleep as Jeremy clattered about and took a late shower.

When Jeremy had dimmed the lights and gone to bed, he got up and stripped his clothes off to go to sleep.

“There’s a lot of the guys mad at you,” Jeremy said out of the dark.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have taken the drink,” Jeremy said.

“I don’t want to hear about it,” he said coldly. “They set ’em out, yeah, I’ll drink one. Nobody had a sign up. Nobody told me stop.”

“Vince was an ass,” Jeremy said finally.

“Yeah,” he agreed, feeling better by that small vindication. “Generally. So how was it?”

“Oh, it was fine.” Jeremy settled, a stirring of sheet and a sighing of the mattress. A silence then, in the dark. “JR said everybody should lay off you and be polite.”

“That so.” He didn’t believe it. But he couldn’t see Jeremy’s face to test the truth of it.

They were going to jump at maindawn, He was worried about sleeping through it. Forgetting the drug. Going crazy,

They were going to Mariner from here. They’d actually be at another star.

“Are they going to warn us tomorrow morning?” he asked Jeremy.

“About the jump? Yeah, sure, I’ll guarantee you can’t sleep through it. They’ll be on the intercom. Fifteen minutes before. You got your drugs?”

“Yeah,” When he was out of his clothes, he had the drugs in the elastic side pocket, on the bed, the way Jeremy had advised him. Always with him, “They’re right here.” He was still wobbly about the experience. Going into it out of the dark, he supposed one shift or the other had to have it in the middle of their night, but it was a scary proposition,

“Anybody from the party have a hangover,” he said, “That’d be bad.”

“The Old Man wouldn’t show ’em any mercy,” Jeremy said. “How are you, drinking that wine? You won’t have a headache, will you?”

“Not usually.” Stupid, he said to himself. He’d forgotten about the jump when he drank it all. He hoped he wouldn’t.

He figured if he did he wouldn’t, as Jeremy said, get any pity for it.

He shut his eyes. He didn’t sleep, for a long, long time.

When the warning came it was loud, and scared him awake.

“ Fifteen minutes, ” it said. “ Rise and shine. We’re on our way. Pull your pre-jump checks, latch down, tuck down, belt in, all you late party-goers. No sympathy from fourth shift … you get the next jump and we get the rec hall … move, move, move …”

Chapter 12

The light came back. Melody would say Great Sun came walking back above the clouds. As soon as Fletcher could see trunks of trees in the dawn he took up walking, just following River; and River led him, oh, far, far up through the woods. Rain drizzled down, but still not a downer appeared. Downers on such a day would stay to their burrows, having more sense than to get wet and cold.

Or they’d gone wandering for love, walking as far as a female could, and farther than some of the males, those less able, those less strong. That was the test.

That was what he was looking for, he began to think. That was the test he’d set himself, the challenge, to overtake what he loved, lusted after, longed for with a remote and bewildered ache. He was a young male. He’d been confused. But now, beyond any psych’s pat answers, he had a clear idea what he hoped to find in this tangled woods, with its huge trees and its banks of puffer-globes glistening with the mist. Like the downers who walked until a last suitor followed, he was looking for someone who cared. Simple quest. Someone who cared.

He wasn’t going to find that someone, of course. And ultimately, being only human, he’d have to push that rescue button and let the ones who didn’t give a damn chase him down and bring him back, because the station paid them to do that. His thinking was muddled and he knew it was, but it was comfort to think the ache was common to all the world.

The sun grew brighter. The rain grew less.

He heard strange whistling calls, such as came constantly in the deep bush. No one was sure what made some of those sounds. Sometimes he’d heard downers imitate them.

There were clicks, and rising booms, and whistles.

A creature stared at him from the hillside. He’d heard of such big, gray diggers, but they came nowhere near the Base, being shyer than the downers and given to be harmless to humans if unmolested. It was a marvelous sight. It moved on all fours, unlike downers, and chewed a frond of herbage, staring at him with a blandly curious expression. It wasn’t afraid of him. He wasn’t quite afraid of it, but the advice from lectures was not to go close or get in their way, and he walked off the path and across to another clear spot to avoid it.

A shower of fronds came down on him, startling him and making him look up. A downer was in the tree near him.

And his heart soared.

“Hello,” he called it, hoping it might be a friend. He didn’t think he knew this downer, but he called out to it. “Good morning. Want Melody and Patch! Name Fetcher.” He ventured their hisa names, that he’d never used to another hisa. “Tara-wai-sa and Lanu-nan-o my friends I want find.”