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.”
“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?