Finity's End - a Union-Alliance Novel Read Free

far more chancily than here.
    Improve the downer agricultural methods? Import Earth crops, or bioengineer downer grain with higher yields?
Control
Old
River
? Hisa crops needed the floods. Humans farmed crops from old Earth only in the Upabove, in orbiting facilities, to protect the world ecosystem, and those were luxuries, and scarce. Crops native to Downbelow were the abundance that fed the tanks that fed the merchant ships.
    Processing could turn downer grain into bread and surplus could feed the fish tanks that supplied colonies from Pell to Cyteen. The agricultural plantations launched cargo up and received things sent down, sometimes by shuttle and not infrequently by the old, old method of the hard-shell parachute drop through Downbelow's seething and violent clouds.
    The port and the launch site were busy, human places Fletcher had been glad to leave in favor of this study outpost along
Old
River
. Here, in fields on the edge of deep, broad forest, things didn't move at any rapid pace and nothing fell from the sky. Here a hisa population not that great in the world met humans who monitored the effects of the vast operation to the south on hisa life, looking for any signs of stress and growing a little grain as hisa grew it, cataloging, observing—
    And each spring for reasons linked to love and burrows and babies, downers would forget their fields, follow their instincts and go walking—females walking far, far across the hills and through the woods and down the river, with desirous males tagging after.
    Fletcher hadn't been down here long enough to have seen the migrations. He'd come last year at harvest, and the monsoon was yet to come. He knew that there were tragedies in the spring: death along with rebirth. There were falls, and drownings… the old hands warned the young staffers of that fact: the oldest hisa went walking, too, and deaths in spring were epidemic—spirit tokens, those waist-cords and necklaces brought back by others to hang on sticks in the burying-place. Every spring was risky, with the rains coming down and River running high—and he worried about these two, Melody and Patch,
his
hisa, with increasing concern.
    You were supposed to be trained just to speak with downers on Pell Station.
    But he'd met Melody illicitly on the station—oh, years ago, when he was eight, a human runaway, a boy in desperate need of something magical to intervene—and Melody, squatting down to peer at him in his hiding-place, had said, "You sad?" in that strange, mask-muffled voice of hers.
    How did you give a surly answer to a magical creature?
    He'd been locked in his own shell, hating everything he saw, hiding in the girders of the dock, moving from one to another cold and dangerous place to evade station authorities who might be looking for a runaway.
    His foster-family—his
third
foster-family—had been scum that day. All adults were scum that day.
    But you couldn't quite say that about an odd and alien creature who crouched down near him in the cold, metal-tinged air and asked, "
Why
you sad?"
    Why was he sad? He'd not even identified what he felt until she put her finger on it. He'd thought he was mad. He was angry at most everything. But Melody had asked what the psychs had skirted around for years, just put her finger right on the center of things and made him wonder why he was sad.
    A mother that committed suicide? Foster-families that thought
he
was scum? He'd survived those. No, that wasn't it. He was sad because he hadn't anyone or anywhere or anything and nobody wanted him the way he was. Not even his mother had.
    He'd said, "My mother's dead," though it had happened three years ago. And Melody had patted his arm gently, as about that time Patch had shown up and squatted down, too.
    "Sad young human," Melody had explained to Patch. "Gone, gone he mama."
    It made him feel as if he was three years old. Or five. As he'd been when his mother had done the deed and left him for good and all. And he'd