“You come!” the downer said, decisively.

So it did understand, and that meant it was one who’d worked with humans and one that might help him. Maybe the downers had heard a human was missing; but he’d given a request, and rarely would a downer refuse. This one scrambled down the fat, white-and-brown tree trunk and skipped ahead of him through the fronds that laced over the trail.

So after all his fear he was rescued. Downers knew where he was. His imaginings, his wild constructions of hope, the constructions of fantasy and rescue he’d built in the dark to keep him going—his daydreams so seldom came true, and he’d begun to believe this one would come to the worst, the most calamitous end of all.

But now, instead, the last, the wildest and most fanciful hope, was taking shape around him: yes , Melody and Patch knew he was lost. They’d whistled it through the trees, or simply sent younger, quicker downers running to look for him. They hadn’t forgotten him. They still cared.

On and on the downer led him, until he was panting, short on oxygen and staggering as he went.

The way it led him wasn’t back the way he’d come. Or perhaps he’d gotten oriented wrong with River: he’d been following the water, and perhaps in the winding paths he could find on the high forested hills, away from observing the direction of River’s flow, he’d just turned around and started walking back again. He’d be disappointed if that proved so, if suddenly between the trees he found himself back at the Base, among the human-tended fields, nothing gained.

But the walking went on and on for hours, beyond anything he thought he could do. He changed out mask cylinders. By then he had no idea where he was. But the downer never quite lost him. He’d think he was hopelessly behind, and then the whistling would guide him, past the thumping of his own pulse in his ear. He’d fall, tripped in the awkward vision of the mask, and a shower of leaves would fall around him, like a benediction, a gentle urging to get up again.

I’m using up the cylinders, he wanted to say to the downer, who never came close enough long enough. He began to fear he was in danger after all, and that with the best will in the world the downer would kill him, only from the walking.

A long, long walk (another cylinder-change along, it was) he saw the giant trees of the forest began to grow fewer. Am I back after all? he asked himself. Was I that far lost? And am I only back at the Base?

He was exhausted and in pain, and struggling to breathe, trying not to give up a cylinder sooner than he’d wrung the last use out of it. He was ready, now, to be back in safety.

But a bright gold of treeless land showed between the trees.

It wasn’t the cleared hillsides around the Base. There was no white of domes or dark green of trees, and Old River was far from him. It might be the further fields, where humans grew grain in vast tracts, at Beta Site, near the shuttle landing.

But those wouldn’t be gold yet, just brown, turned earth.

It was the forest edge, for sure. And when he’d followed his guide to the last fringe of forest giants he saw below him a hill sweeping on for a great distance, down to a plain of last year’s golden grass. In the heart of a pollen-hazed distance, something like a set of figures stood, thick and strange, and impossible to be alive.

Scale played tricks with his eyes. Tiny figures moved among the greater ones, hisa, dwarfed by skyward-looking images.

He knew, then, what he saw—what he’d heard reported, at least, and seen only in photographs.

It was the Spirit-place, the great holy place. The stone figures that watched the sky, the great Watchers, of which their little ones on the hill were the merest hint.

Humans didn’t come here.

“Come-come,” the downer said, beckoning as humans beckoned “Come-come, you come, Melody child.”

He walked a golden hill, that tore beneath his feet. He was losing the vision. There was a feeling of falling… down and down.

Of arrival. He knew it now. The dream escaped his mind. Breaths came faster. There was no cylinder restraining his air. There was no clean-suit. There was no world…

He’d been in the best moment of his life. And wasn’t there. Would never be. Tears leaked between Fletcher’s shut lids, and he drew tainted breath, and knew why his mother had kept the dream, bought it on dockside. Knew why his mother had loved it more than she’d loved him.

There’d been no future in the dream. He’d not known it could turn darker.

That moment, that very moment he’d want to hold, that was the one the arrival ripped away from him, after all the pain.

There was just Jeremy scrabbling in his drawer, after clothes, there was just Jeremy saying, “Drink the stuff. You’ve got to have it.”

He’d have ignored Jeremy. But he couldn’t ignore his stomach. It wanted; and he reached numbly after the drink packets, the synth that pulled electrolytes back into balance after hyperspace had done its worst to a human body.

After the dream was done.

“You shower first or me?” Jeremy asked him.

“You.” He didn’t want to move. It wasn’t a favor Jeremy offered him. He wanted to keep his eyes shut and try to recover that sight, that moment, when he’d met all his hopes.

He could have them back. Could have had them forever. If something hadn’t pulled the ship in.

It was another month. What had pulled them in, if they weren’t doomed to die in empty space, had to be the star they’d been looking for.

They were at Mariner.

He gulped down his remaining drink packets, drowsed while Jeremy showered and his own stomach settled. They made two more touches at the interface that almost made him sick, and then he slept again. He came to with the intercom talking to them.

“ Jeremy, Vincent, Linda, Fletcher. ” It was the synthesized voice he’d heard last time. Jeremy had told him there was a set-up in the computer where a random-sort program juggled the electronic dice and put the scut-crews on whatever assignment their luck assigned them. It activated the intercom to call your team’s cabins and even left mail in your mailbox.

“ Laundry detail ,” it said.

“Damn!” Jeremy cried from inside the bath, and came out still damp and stark naked. “No fair!”

At least, Fletcher thought, he knew how to do that job.

“Stupid machine!” Jeremy shouted at the ceiling and kept swearing.

Fletcher rolled out of bed, his clothes at that particular stage of sticking to his body and dragging across dead skin that made him sure he didn’t want to linger in them. The effects of a month-long near dormancy weren’t pretty on the human body inside or out, he’d discovered. This time his gut wanted to protest, and he made the bathroom in some haste.

Officers’ meetings. Numbers that pertained to ship-sightings, stock reports, futures and commodities… the same kind of information they’d tracked for military purposes for nearly two decades, and from before JR had sat on staff; but the information was never sifted down to military intelligence: the availability of supply and the activity and origin of suspect ships—questions which JR’s brain kept following off-track of what his seniors were discussing.

Seniors reminisced instead about old port-calls, pre-War, early War. They talked about the early days of Mariner Station, when everything had been bare metal, and the details swirled around in a junior mind not quite sure whether this was needful information or just the pleasurable talk of old crew, recalling hard times which juniors nowadays didn’t remember.

When they’d put into Mariner before, in his recollection, they hadn’t traded. The Old Man had had meetings with Mariner authorities and military authorities, they’d had meetings with other captains and senior crew off other ships and taken in the kind of information ships wouldn’t ordinarily trade with each other, information on the market more freely shared than made sense… if they were rivals. They’d been no one’s rivals, then.