Chapter 1
A system traffic monitor screen showed a blip where none had existed in this solar system. The wavefront of presence which had begun far, far out above the star spoke a series of numbers to a computer in Pell Central and a name flashed to displays throughout the room.
The master display, hanging two meters wide above the rows of traffic control workstations, simultaneously flashed up the same name in glowing green.
Finity’s End had come back to Pell.
“Alert the stationmaster,” the master tech said, and the message flashed through Pell Station’s central paging system.
By that time the signal, coming in from the jump range buoy at the speed of light, was four hours old. The Pell Central computers generated a predicted course based on data changing by the split second, a path outlined in ordinary green. The first projection supposed an abrupt drop in velocity well out from Pell’s Star.
Suddenly the huge display changed, bloomed with colors from red to blue, based on the last three courses and velocities that ship had used coming into Pell on that vector… and projected into the sun.
It made a bright, broad display across the ordinarily routine, direct-path listings. It alarmed the newest technicians and sent hands reaching toward reset toggles. Merchanters didn’t dive that close, that fast, toward the sun.
That ship had. Once. Years ago. That fact was still in the computer record and no one had purged it from files.
But the War was in the past. The navigational buoy, in its lonely position above the star, noted all arrivals in the entry range, and the information it sent to Pell Station showed no other blips attending the ship. Finity’s End came alone, this time, and the master tech calmly informed the junior technicians that the pattern they saw was no malfunction, but no reason for alarm, either.
The buoy’s information, incoming in those few seconds, was now a little further advanced. It had already excluded some predictions, and the automated computer displays continued to change as the buoy tracked that presence toward the sun—four hours ago.
By now, in realtime and real space, the oldest of all working merchanters had either blown off excess V and set its general course for Pell, or something was direly wrong. Only the robot observer was in a position to have seen the ship’s entry, and second by second the brightly colored fan of possibility on the boards dimmed as more and more of that remote-observer data came in. The fan of projection shrank, and eventually excluded the sun.
The screen was far less colorful and the technicians were far less anxious ten minutes further on, when the stationmaster walked in to survey the situation.
By now a message would be on its way from the ship to the station, granted that the tamer projections on the displays were true.
The captain of the oldest merchanter ship still operating would be, predictably, saluting the Pell stationmaster who, with his help, had founded the Alliance. The powers that dominated a third of human presence in the universe were about to meet.
But stationmaster Elene Quen, also predictably, strode to a com-tech’s workstation and took up a microphone before any such lightspeed message could reach her.
“Finity’s End, this is Quen at Pell. Welcome in. What brings us the honor?”
As far as the eye could see, Old River ran.
As far as the eye could see, thickets stood gray-green and blooming with white flowers beneath a perpetually clouded heaven.
Just beyond those thickets, huge log frames lay in squares on the earth, waiting for the floods to come—and downers were at work intermittent with play.
Hisa was the name they called themselves. Brown-furred and naked but for the strings of ornament and fur about necks and waists, they splashed cheerfully through the dozen log-bounded paddies that were already flooded. In broad, generous casts, they strewed the heavy, sinking grain.
Humans had watched this activity year upon year upon year of human residency at Pell’s Star.
And Fletcher Neihart could only watch, in the downers’ world but not quite of it, limited by the breather-mask that limited every human on the world. He’d never been limited by such a mask in his youthful dreams of being here, a part of the human staff on Downbelow: Pell’s World, the same world that had swung below Pell Station’s observation window for all his life, tantalizing, clouded, and forbidden to visitors.
But this was real, not photographs and training tape that only simulated the world. Here the clouds were overhead, not underfoot.
Here, the hisa workers, free of masks and moving lightly, toiled the little remaining time their easy world required them to work. Once the frames were built and once the world spun giddily toward spring and renewal, the hisa and the fields alike waited only for the rains.
Plants whose cycles were likewise timed to the monsoon were budded and ready. In the forests that bordered the log-framed fields, swollen at the slight encouragement of yesterday’s showers, the sun-ripened puffers turned the air gold with pollen. You touched a puffer-ball and it went pop. On this day of warm weather and gusty breezes puffer-balls went pop for no apparent reason, and the pollen streamed out in skeins. Pollen rode the surface of the frame-bound ponds as a golden film. It made dim gold streamers on the face of Old River.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Two hisa, also truant from work, made a game of the puffers at woods’ edge, skipping down a high bank of puffer-plants and exploding the white, gray-mottled globes in rapid succession until their coats were gold.
Then they shook themselves and pollen flew in clouds.
“Gold, gold, gold for spring,” Melody crowed at Fletcher, and scampered up to the top of the bank above the river, as her co-truant Patch, whose human-name came of a white mark on his flank, chased after her. Melody dived down again. And up, in an explosion of puffer-balls. “Silly Fetcher! Come, come, come!”
Fetcher was what they called him. They wanted him to chase them. But the staff wasn’t supposed to run. Or climb. The safety of the breather-masks was too important.
“Gold for us!” Patch cried and, under his playful attack, pollen burst from the puffer-balls, pop, pop, pop-pop, in a chain of pixy dust explosions that caught the fading light.
Fletcher, watching this game up and down the little rise next a stand of old trees, exploded some of his own. That little hummock on which hisa played chase was a just-out-of-reach paradise for a teen-aged boy: things to break that only brought life and laughter—and created puffer-balls for next spring.
He was seventeen and he was, like the hisa, just slightly truant from the work of the Base.
But down here no one truly cared about a little break in the schedule, least of all the downers, who would all go walkabout when the springtime called, as it was beginning to do.
A last few days to seed the frames. A last few days for pranks and games. Then the monsoon rains would come, then the land would break out in blooms and mating, and no one could hold the hisa to something so foolish as work.
A teen-aged boy could understand a system like that. He’d worked so hard to be here, to be in the junior-staff program, and here was the payoff, a delirious moment that more than matched his dreams.
The hisa shrieked and ran and, abandoning rules, he chased, into the thicket along the river shore. They dived over the crest of another puffer-ball ridge. They laid ambushes on the fly and caught him in a puff of pollen.
And after they’d chased up and down, and broken enough speckled puffer globes to have the surface of the water, the rocks, and the very air among the tired old trees absolutely gold with pollen, they cast themselves down by the noisy edge of the water to watch the forever-clouded sky.