Chapter 3

Burns' Station hove up against a cloud-rimmed sky, sun-stained wisps of fleece against black, bristling bills, and the station itself less farm than hill-fort, house and girdling walls and outstructures of stone set high on a promontory where the river bent. The facing height was dark with woods, but the trees were cleared back at a considerable distance on the occupied side, providing a measure of farmland and pasturage.

Dusk was settling thick by the time Celestine chugged in to the floating dock. Two blasts of the whistle brought a stir of life from the hill, gates opening, lantern-bearing men hastening down the face of the promontory on wooden steps.

There was no lack of hands to receive the cables: Jim hurled one coil from the bow and Merritt cast the second from the stern, hastened to help Jim run out the plank, while the engine fell away into silence and Amos joined them at the gangway.

Hands reached to steady them, friendly faces lantern-lit, all male and most bearded. Jim went first and shook hands and pounded shoulders; Merritt followed into the commotion, ignored for Amos, who came after. "Engineer," Amos said of him, and there was a cheer and no scarcity of hands held out in welcome.

"My equipment," Merritt protested as the lantern-bearers began to climb; but some men stayed and began to unload for them, and he let himself be guided up the wandering board steps, up and up to the station's open gates.

Another group waited inside them, in the dirt yard, where there was a blaze of torches, where slits of windows in the stone house showed yellow of firelight, and big square windows on the upper floors blazed friendlier welcome.

A great red-haired fellow came out from the rest to Amos and grasped his offered hand in friendly violence, then looked at Merritt, face frozen in a remnant of a smile.

"Frank," said Amos, "meet Sam Merritt. We got ourselves an Earthman engineer. —Sam, this here's Frank Burns. The Burns, head of station."

Burns grinned pleasantly and thrust his big hand toward Merritt. "So they heard us. But—" he asked suddenly, looking beyond them to the others, "wasn't there supposed to be more of you? You got no crew, no helpers?"

"I'm afraid not," said Merritt

"Wait a minute now," said a balding man to Burns' left. "Earth promised us at least two men and a work crew."

"I'm sorry," said Merritt. "I'm all you've got."

There was an angry murmuring from some present, that made Merritt suddenly doubt his welcome and his safety, but Burns set a heavy hand on his shoulder and looked at the man who had objected.

"Mr. Merritt," Burns said, "want you to meet Tom Porter. Tom's a neighbor of ours, come up to wait out what Celestine'd bring us. Tom Porter's holding's big as ours and right next, lots of families in Porter's Station, but they use our landing."

"Mr. Porter." Merritt accepted the offered hand.

"Glad to meet you," Porter said, belated grace. "Fact is, we're glad to get any help at all, but we'd hoped for more."

"I wish I had help too," Merritt said. "But I'm told you can supply manpower and some supplies; we've precious little of the latter."

"We'll manage," said Burns. "Hey, I don't know what we're standing out here in the wind for. Ken, Fred, you boys set what gear there is in the shed, and baggage in the main room, anywhere you like. —You timed it right Amos; Hannah's just got dinner on the table."

"Good," Amos grinned. "Been looking forward to a winter with Hannah's cooking. How's things here?"

"All right. Mostly all right." Frank Burns hailed them into the open doorway of the big main house, into light and warmth; and behind them the outer gates creaked shut and most of the crowd followed.

It was a grander house, in its stone and bare-beams style, than the governor's mansion in New Hope; and it was newer. The floors were split planking, massively solid; the walls were hung with necessities, rope and other such items; the furniture was hand-hewn and use-smoothed, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and savory food. Oil lamps and an enormous fireplace gave light, cast shadows back into retreating hallways and to a balconied upstairs. Women and children hastened this way and that setting the table; an ignored baby screamed indignation. Outside, cattle lowed and sheep bleated; and inside, human voices shouted over the confusion.

"We're hotel as well as farm," said Burns. "The last place on the river, the highest ground in flood: half a dozen farms round about do their meetings here and their trading at our dock, and come here when it floods. Same with Tom's place downriver. How long do you figure to stay over, Amos? Did I hear you say all winter?"

"Don't really know," Amos answered. "I'm supposed to stay by our friend here and provide him the use of a boat when needed…" He paused to grin at some elderly acquaintance and to shake hands and exchange words briefly. There were the center of all the gathering now, old and young clustered about them, the children dancing about and asking for some treat brought from downriver. It was impossible to talk at length. "Give it up," Burns said when Amos tried further. "Shed the coats and sit."

Merritt unzipped the jacket and surrendered it to a child who held out her hands for it, turned tableward and let himself be placed near the head of the long board, next Burns himself and Amos and Porter, and Jim on the other side. An older woman came up drying her hands on an apron and offered her own welcome. "Hannah Burns," she said of herself, the while a boy shouldered in at Merrill's other side to put down a cup of tea, and food was appearing in huge bowls and kettles, seized and passed one to the next with great care.

"A pleasure, Hannah Burns," Merritt said. "Sam Merritt. Thank you for making room for us."

Hannah Burns gave a short nod and something caught her quick eye: she shouted a name and instructions about serving and was off again. Merritt blinked, noting the unbroken line of male faces at table: neither women nor children. All at once there was the feeling of difference, his own manners, his machine-woven clothes and smooth-shaven face an alien distinction.

"How soon," asked Porter, leaning forward with a spoon in hand, "how soon you going to get started, Mr. Engineer?"

Merritt paused to let the girl making the rounds with the kettle of stew ladle some past his shoulder to his plate, thanked her with a nod and leaned forward again. "Well, as soon as I can. It'll take me some little time to look over the possible sites—"

"We did the looking," Porter shot back. "We don't have the time for you to take five years at this project, Mr. Merritt. We got families down there in the lower valley that are going to be washed out next spring, that are praying now the floods don't get worse before winter stops them. We need help now, quick. We got no time to wait."

Of a sudden the table chatter had fallen away. The bustle of women and children faded. The whole room was listening. Only the barking of a dog sounded outside.

"If what we build doesn't hold," said Merritt, "I don't need to tell you what will happen next spring. That would be a disaster, Mr. Porter."

"I think," said Burns from the head of the table, "the site we have in mind is a good one. It's just half a mile upriver from here, where the canyon narrows the river down. There's a good deal of rock there to be used, and the canyon splits the upper valley basin from the lower. We can't get men or supplies any farther into the Upriver, and building the dam downriver would wipe out the best farmland we've got."

"It sounds reasonable," said Merritt. "But I'll still have to see the place myself before I can start making any plans. I'm aiming at a spring deadline too, Mr. Porter. I saw enough of what you're talking about on the way up the river that I very much understand what you mean. But I don't want to waste our limited supplies or risk lives and property by jumping into this without study. I can promise you I'm going to be working steadily from now on, and by the time the water falls so that we can start working, I hope to have some plans drawn up. You can help now by finding a crew to work."

"Burns and I can raise a thousand in a month," said Porter. "Do you need more than that?"

It was a fifth the total population of Hestia. Merritt considered the two of them, one side and the other. "What we'll need depends on the time and the site and the amount of rock we'll have to move."

"You'll have all the help we can give," Burns assured him. "You understand, Mr. Merritt—we've seen a lot of land and no few of our friends and relatives lost to that river. It doesn't get easier to be patient, knowing we're within sight of an answer. I can't tell you how anxious we all are to see this project underway, but we understand the difficulty involved. We've tried it twice ourselves and lost."

"Well, I'll get out to that site of yours first thing tomorrow and see what I can learn."

Burns made a deprecating gesture. "No, no, Mr. Merritt. Take a day to catch your breath; I'm hurrying no guest out into the edge of Upriver. I've got some charts of our own may interest you, and lists of the supplies we've been storing toward this project for years."

"Frank," said Hannah Burns, coming to lean on the man's chair-back, "I'm sure those things can wait til late tomorrow. Let 'em eat in peace, for pity's sake. I'm sure they're tired." She lifted her eyes to Merritt, smiled tautly with a crinkling of sun-wrinkles. "Room's waiting on you. Good meal and steady land underfoot and you'll be wanting it. Trust it more than old river: good walls and lots of folk around you. You'll sleep here, no worry."

After cramped, sweltering nights and cold days on Celestine, the little room upstairs in Burns' house was luxury: quaint, with the same rough furniture and handmade rugs and a pillow-soft bed. Merritt tested it fully clothed, lay back in it with the billowing mattress rising about him and shut his eyes a moment, opened them again to watch yellow lamplight flickering on dusty beams. Adam Jones seemed incredible from such a perspective.

A wood stove gave heat, too much heat, and the room was close. Merritt rolled out of the yielding mattress and went to the shuttered window, unbarred and opened it, inhaling the clean, free wind out of the dark… leaned there, looking out. There was a view of a slanting, shingled roof, and after a little gap, the roof of a shed, and an irregular portion of the yard, then the stone wall and the forest. A torch gleamed, moved, vanished. The yard, the whole house was settling for the night. The noise downstairs had sunk away.

He turned away, opened the luggage that one of Burns' folk had set beside the door and began to unpack, considered the task of arranging his belongings for a moment and gave it up, hung out only what he meant to wear on the morrow, and set his shaving kit on the table.

Someone came up the hall—traffic came and went with the house arranging itself for the night; but the steps stopped and someone knocked.

"Come in," he said, half-turned, and found a young woman there, her arms full of towels. Her first glance was to him, the second to the open window, and she deposited the towels on the bed and went at once to the window, closed it and the shutters, fastening them with the bar.

"I'm sorry," she said. 'That's awfully dangerous, to sleep that way. We keep the windows shuttered at night and the doors bolted."

"Thank you," he said, taken aback.

"Meg Burns," she said, smiling suddenly. "Daughter."

He had seen her downstairs, but the lights had been poor. Standing next the lamp as she was, her red-brown hair acquired a brightness, her brown eyes a gentleness that stopped one for an extra glance. No competition for Adam Jones' light-of-love daughters, perhaps, but there was a healthiness about her that had its proper place in wind and sun, not a starship's sterile atmosphere.

"I brought the towels," she said. "There's a bath down the hall at the end and hot water on the stove there; you refill it for the next and don't dump the tub til has to be. And I'm sorry about the window, but the light draws all kinds of pests.—If you wake up for breakfast in the morning it's ready at daybreak. Just come downstairs. There's always enough. Or sleep over. That's no matter either."

"Thank you," he murmured a second time, and Meg Burns turned to go, smiled at him over her shoulder as he smiled at her, then was off down the hall outside with a patter of slippered feet.

He closed the door after, considered the closed window and put the towels on the table, looked again to the door.

Not the manners he had known, he decided, reckoning the way of things at table, the implications in the house of order of a different sort than he easily guessed: caution settled on him, a conviction that there were borders and barriers here.

He tried the bath, in line after one of the Burnses: the way was to learn who was next and knock on that door when finished. The bare-boards room was stiflingly hot and humid, and there was no plumbing but a drain in the floor and an admonition posted to empty only washwater down.

And in the morning, with a pain in his muscles from the too-soft mattress, he considered his outworlder clothes and his outworlder manners and still shaved, still dressed as he would have aboard the Adam Jones. He had his own ways, and purposed to keep them.

Daylight put a bright complexion on the fortress-station and on all the land about it. His belly full of a fine breakfast (he had been late, but Hannah Burns had saved eggs and sausage for him, a special case among her guests), Merritt climbed the grassy slope to the crest of the promontory over the river, his hands jammed in the pockets of his jacket, for there was a chill in the morning wind, more than he had known on the river.

The clouds were entirely gone, leaving a sky of brilliant blue, a pale morning sun too small for the sky, a landscape of unsuspected colors sprawling out in the first clear daylight he had seen on Hestia: oranges and yellows and bluegreens of autumn in this alien woods, with no rain to curtain them.

At the base of the promontory the river ran rough from the narrows, yellow-brown with silt. Celestine bobbed at her moorings at the dock that was sheltered by the bending of the river, toy boat on a river gone miniature. A sound of water came up the deep, a trick of the air currents.

Against the northern and eastern sky rose more mountains than he had yet seen, a bristling outline usually hidden by the rains: foothills of the Divide, source of floods and barrier that made the weather. It was the Upriver, at least part of it, its nearer approaches mantled in dark forest.

The wind grew bitter. Merritt turned his shoulder to it and pulled his hood up, glanced back at the station's rambling walls, at the fields and the meadow downslope. Two of the women sat with the sheep, while a black dog and a brown one trotted the limits of the flock.

It was a way to walk, a lee side out of the wind: Merritt made a slow and casual descent, and when he had come nearer the herders and the sheep, he recognized one of the two shepherdesses in coveralls for Meg Burns.

She saw him at a distance and waved a hand in tentative greeting. He ventured out across the dew-wet grass, walking carefully among the skittish sheep, causing work for the dogs, who worked them back together.

"Good morning," he said to the women, and both, seated on a bare space of rock, gave him polite nods of welcome. Meg stood up then, regarded him in her own way as warily as did the brown dog who came to sit at her side.

"Making up your mind where you're going to build?" she asked him.

"I've been looking at the charts and thinking on it." He gave a perfunctory smile at the half-grown girl who was Meg's companion, looked back to Meg. "Do you know the river beyond this point?”

"Not well," she said. "I don't go there. No one does."

"Have you lived here all your life?"

"I was born here," she said, and smiled in a way that made her ordinary face beautiful. "I'm afraid we're not travelers. I've never been anywhere at all."

"What, not even to New Hope?"

"No," she said, "not even to the next farm."

"Don't you sometimes worry about living right here on the edge of the human world?"

She laughed silently, as though the question surprised her. "Not really. Not often. Our place has always been safe, our walls keep us that way, and most of the things in the forest are afraid of the dogs. We're all right if we come away from the forest before dark and never take the big trees. We're agreeable to it and it doesn't bother us; that's how we live here. We fit in."

Things might change when the river changes, you know."

"I know. But that has to be, after all. Everything will change. But then maybe Hestia will be somewhere worthwhile. Maybe Earth will send us more help then." She looked out over her flock, whistled and pointed, and the dogs ran, headed off a stray from the edge. She turned then, looked back at him. "I've grown up here," she said. "And for most of my life we've been waiting for you. I'd almost given up."

To that, he did not precisely know what to say. It was, in all, a better argument than the governor had used.

"Do you think," he asked, "that you could show me the place your father thinks we ought to build? Is it too far?"

She looked a little doubtful, looked into his face as if she were estimating him. "All right," she agreed after a moment. "But you'd better go back to the house after a gun."