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

low-hanging limb gasping for air and sweating in the suit.
    The light was dimmer now.
    "Sun goes walk," he said. One couldn't say to downers that Great Sun set, or went down, or any such thing. The rules said so. Great Sun walked over the hills. These two downers knew Great Sun's unguarded face, having been up in the Upabove themselves, but it didn't change how they reverenced the star. He used the downer expression: "The clock-words say humans go inside."
    They looked, Melody and Patch did, at gray, cloud-veiled Sun above a shadowing River. They slid arms about each other as they set out walking up the trail toward the Base, being old mates, and comfortable and affectionate. Where the trail widened, Melody put an arm about Fletcher, too, and they walked with him back down the river path until, past three large paddy-frames, they came within sight of the domes where humans lived, in filtered, oxygen-supplied safety above the flood zone.
    "You fine?" Patch asked. "You got bellyache?"
    "No," he said, and laughed. Downers didn't brood on things. If you didn't want a dozen questions, you laughed. They wouldn't let him be sad, and wouldn't leave him in distress.
    They were absolutely adamant in that.
    So he laughed, and poked Patch in the ribs, and Patch poked him and ducked around Melody.
    Games.
    "Late, late, late," he said. And then the alarm on his watch beeped, as all across the fields quitting time announced itself on the 'link everyone wore.
    "Oh, you make music, time go!"
    Not that they grasped in the least what time really meant. On days when a lot of the staff was out in the fields, the downers would gather to watch close to quitting time, and exclaim in amazement at the hour every human in the fields simultaneously quit work and headed back to Base, carrying whatever they'd been using, gathering up whatever they'd brought with them. The downers understood there was a signal and that it came with music. It was not the beep itself, the Director said, it was the
why
that puzzled the downers. The old hands like Melody and Patch, who'd seen the station change shift, and who'd worked by the clock, could tell the younger downers that humans set great store by time and doing things together.
    ("But Great Sun he come again," was Melody's protest against any such notion of pressing schedule. "Always he come")
    On Downbelow, in downer minds, there were always new chances, new tomorrows.
    And one never had to do anything
that
pressing, that it couldn't wait one more hour or one more day. You wanted to know when to go to your burrow? Look to Great Sun, and go before dark. Or after, if you were in a mood to risk the blindness of the nights.
    One was never in too big a hurry. One could take the time to walk, oh,
way
off the direct track home, in this still-strange notion (to a station-born human) of being able to look across a wide open space to see what other people were doing on other routes. Upabove, it would have been corridors and walls.
    Here, on this happiest of all days, he found his path intersecting Bianca Velasquez's route on
her
way home. They were in the same biochem seminar. They mixed before discussion-session. She'd always hung around with Marshall Willett and the Dees. Who didn't hang around with him.
    She was going to snub him. He could pretend to drop something and let her go by while he rummaged in the gravel of the path. Like a fool. He could save himself the sour end to a good day.
    But it ought to be easy to look at Bianca. It ought to be easy to talk to her. Hi, just a simple hi, and put the onus of politeness on her. Hi. Ready for the biochem quiz? What job are you on? He had it straight. Civilized amenities were very clear in his head until she almost looked at him and he almost looked at her and by an accident of converging trails they were walking together.
    Not just any girl.
The
girl. Bianca Velasquez, who'd drawn his eye ever since he'd first seen her. Suddenly his brain was vacant. He couldn't look at