Cracking the Sky

by Brenda Cooper

  “I may not succeed.”

  Aline answered. “We might fail. But we need to do this to save the other humans, the ones who still have bodies. The AIs have been built to care for them, for you, but the dissonance is too great. They need to bond and pair and grow. They need the stars and the right to build metal bodies and the knowledge that they cannot be killed.”

  We did kill them. Not me, but the police of the dataspheres. Surely that wasn’t fair. I did not doubt for a moment that they would kill us if they had to. Kill me.

  But that was not why I would help. I took Aline’s virtual hand in mine, feeling the ridges of her knuckles. “We will do it,” I said.

  The dog came up and licked my hand.

  PART THREE

  Stories from Fremont’s Children

  The HEBRAS and the

  DEMONS and the DAMNED

  I’m going to ramble a bit. Let me; I’m no roamer speaking over a communal fire. I’m not sure I know which parts of the story you want. But this is part of how Fremont was saved and kind of an alien contact story, too.

  My name is Chaunce, and I am one of the few left on Fremont who remembers the home we left behind. Deerfly. Stupid name for a planet, if you ask me. But we didn’t leave Deerfly over its wreck of a name. Rather, it was too smart for us, everybody there becoming stronger, faster beings, almost becoming computers or robots with flesh, leaving us true humans behind, some of them wearing no more than a thin skin of flesh to fool the eye.

  Fremont was too smart for us, too. In the time I’m telling you about, we’d been here seventeen years. Instead of doing what a self-respecting colony does and grows, we kept losing people to tooth and claw and cliff.

  Real humans had grown up on colony planets like this, but Deerfly had gone tame generations ago.

  We needed help. Needed to find some accord with this place before it killed us. It gnawed at me that I’d done little for the colony except back-breaking work and staying alive. I’d left the leading to others, and Fremont needed more from me than that. Since I managed horse farms back on Deerfly, I looked to the animals.

  Now, there are a lot of animals on Fremont, but most wouldn’t work for what I needed.

  The cats had decided we were dinner the day we landed, and they were too big to be undecided in any way I could think of. A foot-long scar on my right calf throbbed in the cold of winter; a reminder.

  We had a few domestic dogs we’d brought shipboard and more we were planning to birth and raise up. We weren’t going to lack for best friends, for herding beasts to keep goats in bunches, or four-footed pranksters to steal the chickens. But dogs are smaller than humans, and smaller than most beings of tooth and claw here. I was glad of them, but on Fremont they needed protecting just like we did. They’d give us warning, but they’d die trying to save us from paw cats or yellow snakes. And given how we mostly loved them, humans sometimes died saving their dogs.

  Fremont has its own four-footed and single-tailed beasts with a canine look. They run in packs, and people call them demon dogs. But they should never, ever be confused for real dogs. These demons have no soul, and they exist to eat. Worse, I’ve seen them hunt, and I’m sure they are communicating with each other more than any of our native animals from Deerfly, or the ones our fathers brought from Earth. Demons don’t speak, but they work like a team with radios. We can’t even eat them; they make humans mildly sick.

  I had high hopes for the djuri: four-footed prey that run in packs, fleeing for their lives from the demon dogs. It turned out the djuri were too shy to help. Hard to find, always running and hiding and bleating. Not too bright, either, and not big enough to really help us. Humans can look down on them, or maybe look a big one straight in the eye. Well, all right. A few are even bigger than that. The bucks. But still, they’re not hefty creatures. Keep in mind that we can look a paw cat in the eye, too, and they outweigh us and have claws long as fingers and hard as knives. The truly good thing about djuri is they are incredibly good to eat.

  That’s pretty much the rundown on the bigger animals we’d seen here so far, except the hebras. They were our last hope for an answer. I took a while to realize this, even though I sat at the edge of the cliff by the promise of our town, looking down over the grass plains every day for two summers. The grass there is scary big, bigger than a man’s head by the end of summer. When it dries, it’s sharp like a million razors trying to flay the skin from anything as soft as a human. I still have scars on my fingers from it, and on my shoulders.

  As tall as the grass is, the hebras heads rise above it. They’ve got legs that come to a man’s head. Instead of straight backs like horses, their backs slope up to shoulders, and their necks measure the tiniest bit longer than their backs. Their coats are solid, striped, or are covered with great spots like the shadow pattern of leaves on the forest floor. Their colors are all variation of gold and green, brown and black, and sometimes the barest bit of red like a red-haired woman being touched by the sun.

  Make no mistake. Hebras are prey animals. Paw cats hunt them all summer, and demons get the weak and the slow and the young. But they are so much more. Remember how I told you about the demon dogs? Perhaps being prey on a planet full of thorns made them smarter than any of the horses I ever rode or trained or showed or loved.

  One day, far below me, the demon dogs hunted hebras. I’d given up digging out the smelter’s foundation for the day, my muscles screaming sore and my back feeling on fire. I stood at the edge of the cliff looking down, letting the cooling breeze of near-dusk tease sweat from my skin. The sun shone bright enough to wash everything dull and soft, with that little extra bit of gold that the late part of the day brings. The air smelled of seeds and harvest and of the fall which would soon touch us.

  Below me a herd of hebras grazed, rotating between watcher and eater, the distance making animals with heads towering above my own look small.

  A breeze kissed the tops of the grasses, bending them south in ripples. A few lines of grass moved the wrong way as a pack of seven demons surrounded twice as many hebras. I spotted the dogs’ path even before the wily old watch-hebra bugled fear and loathing.

  The hebras ran together, almost lockstep, all of them trying for a gap between two of the demons, heading sideways to me, their heads bobbing up and down with their ungainly rocking run.

  The dogs raced to make a line in front of the hebras, cutting them off. They began to bay, a high long-winded howl that instilled fear in me even though I stood so far above them the sound was faint and thin.

  The hebras turned, all together, a wave of long necks and thin tails.

  The dogs flowed behind them.

  The tallest hebra let out a short high-pitched squeal and the hebras twitched and broke into three lines, one-hundred-eighty degree turns, as if they practiced every day. Maybe they did. They had it down, stretching out long, taking turns teasing the dogs. The gap between grazer and hunter widened.

  A dog nipped at the last animal in one line, a brown blur flashing momentarily up above the high grass and then falling back down. The target hebra twisted, probably kicking even though I couldn’t see its legs for the grass, and then put on a burst of speed. It passed two other hebras, and a different animal became last, running right in front of the slavering dogs.

  I’d been in the grass the week before. It pulled and cloyed and knotted and tripped. But the hebras and the demons slid though it, streams of living beings, barking and baying and bugling.

  The air had cooled down a little, but I stood with goose-bumps rising on my forearms, transfixed, and afraid that if I moved I’d somehow change the outcome of the race down below.

  It was nearly too dark to see by the time the first of the dogs stopped, the grass swallowing the hunter as it became still. I lost the place it stood entirely in the space of two breaths.

  As the stars and two of our moons brightened in the black sky above me, I realized the hebras had won fairly easily. They were off grazing somewhere else, and th
e dogs would have a hungry night.

  If it had been fourteen unarmed humans against seven demons, I’d have bet on the dogs.

  Our roving scientists brought back a lot of djuri bones; jaws and the think back leg bones cracked open by teeth. But not many hebra bones. Some. They did die. But not very fast, or very easy.

  So I swore I’d figure out how to tame them. Not that we’d gotten within two hundred meters by then. The great beasts were shy of us, and fast.

  I couldn’t catch one myself. I was almost sixty already, and slowing. I took my story to the Town Council, which was led by Jove Alma at the time, a nervous man with a deep focus on making and keeping plans. He thought the tighter he gripped our choices in his and the Council’s fist, the more of us would live. Some believed him, some hated him, but everyone obeyed. The previous leader had been a risk taker, and cost almost all of us people we loved. That’s the long way ’round of saying that catching animals wasn’t in Jove’s plan, and the Council turned me down flat. There was a city being built and the chill of winter already clinging to every dawn.

  The winter was the second harshest we’d ever had, with snow in town instead of just in the hills and two sheet-ice storms. We lost ten more people. Two froze to death on a trip out into the woods to bring back samples of winter plants, leaving behind two orphans to add to our growing stockpile. The third one who went with them lost three fingers and part of her sanity. Cats ate two adults and a babe, fire claimed a family of four, and one of the men my age hanged himself in the middle of town. We had two less births than deaths that season.

  All that long cold I thought of the hebras. Sometimes I glimpsed them down below on the cold grass plains. Fire had flamed the grass flat and low and the hebras sometimes loped like shadows at the edge of the plain near the sea, clearly visible when frost turned the stubble white and hoary in the early dawn. But mostly they hid in the Lace Forest that surrounded us.

  Come spring, we stopped huddling together in the buildings we’d made for guild halls and finished up some of the houses. I built mine at the edge of town, as close to the cliff as the Town Council would let me. Mornings, as dawn split the sky open, I sat and watched the fading moons and the greening grass below. The hebras returned, sleeping on the plain, two watch beasts circling the sleepers restlessly, heads way up. I was pretty sure they traded off watches just like we did, and for the same reason. It made me feel kindred.

  One morning when the grass was knee-high to a human and the first splindly-legged baby hebras clung to their dams, Jove came and stood silently beside me, looking down at the plains. His gaze was unfocused, as if he saw the whole thing and the sea beyond, but not the hebras right below. “Three of the orphans got in trouble last night. Fought each other and one’s fetched up in the infirmary with a broken leg.”

  He’d hate that. Jove hated all disorder. I waited him out, curious what he’d say next.

  “Council met, and we figure you got room for two boys.”

  Shock gave way to liking the idea pretty fast. I’d never married, never had kids, just managed farms and hired help. But there was no help to hire here. My ancestors had farmed Deerfly by making babies, back in the days before there were too many bots and androids to count and people didn’t have any work to do that looked like farming except training exotics. So I didn’t stand and blink stupidly at Jove for long, but instead I just said, “Thank you.”

  He looked surprised at that, like he’d been expecting resistance, so it was his turn to pause for a beat too long and then say, “Thank you,” himself. He smiled before he walked away, the sun fully risen now, shoving his shadow behind him as he walked back to town.

  The boys were Derk and Sho. Derk was thin and wiry, and faster by far. Sho plodded, and had so much patience I couldn’t imagine what had made him part of the fight at all until one day I came across two other boys teasing him in high, mean voices for being stupid. They were wrong; I already knew that. But sometimes being the silent type means people make their own decisions about who you are.

  Sho and Derk had school and then work every day, but since they were only twelve, they had energy to spare in spite of the harsh schedules. It only took a few days before they stood beside me at the cliff’s edge, looking down at the herd.

  Sho started drawing hebras in the dirt with sticks and they both started naming them.

  As the days got longer, we gave up sleep to pick our way down the steep path between Artistos and the wide road on the plains where we’d trucked tools and technology from the shuttles at our makeshift spaceport.

  The boy with the broken leg, Niko, recovered enough to follow us down the path, and soon all three of them laughed together, their raised voices surely spreading all across the plain. Soon half the teens and a few of the old singles from town began to join us at the crack of dawn.

  Some of the watchers wanted to catch a hebra, some to stun one. Those weren’t the right answers. I knew it deep in my gut, found it hard to say why I knew so hard, so I just told them, “If we scare them off, they might never come back.” I never let them get close to the herds, just to watch them. The boys helped me—all three of them now living with me, and acting like herd dogs to the new people.

  The trail from town to plain lay nearly naked against the cliff, a thin ribbon of dirt with no place big enough for predators to hide. We could stand safely or sit on small rocks and talk. The hebras knew we were there, sometimes lifting their heads and pointing their broad, bearded faces at us. I wanted them to know we weren’t their enemy. We kept it up all summer, the crowd straining against my calls for patience. Sho stood beside me, facing them, telling them off with his eyes and his stance, and they listened. Derk and Niko stood quietly at the rear, watching everyone and all the hebras, eyes darting from one to one to one, keeping count and order.

  Some of the boys were fascinated with the hebra’s beards, maybe because they had the first hint of stubble on their own chins. They started drawing pictures of the girls in town with beards and longish necks, and giggling.

  The grass stretched its fairy-duster seed-pods toward the autumn sky, tall as me if I stood inside it. Demons started hunting more, sometimes running the hebras twice a day. The herd lost one old hebra and one very young one that twisted a leg. The pack lost one old dog and two pups. So in a way, the hebras were winning. Except of course that one hebra fed all the dogs and dead dogs didn’t feed the hebras anything.

  The cats stayed away. I suspect our scent and presence did that. They hunted us as quickly as hebra, but they liked us in small groups. There were about twenty humans on the path most mornings.

  Once a week or so Jove came and watched, always walking away before the bells rang for breakfast. I knew that he was thinking, but it did no good to push Jove, and thus no good to push the Town Council. But if the plains burned below us, we’d have to wait another year to capture even one hebra.

  One morning after Jove ghosted away from us, Sho asked, “Is he scared of catching one?”

  “Hard work to run a colony. He has to choose.”

  “He should see how much we and the hebras need each other.”

  I suspected the boy had the right of it, but it does no good to downtalk leaders. “Jove is a busy man.”

  “Can you ask him for some rope?”

  “What are you going to do with rope?”

  “Catch a hebra.”

  “Probably not. You think about how to do that, and we’ll try your idea if I can get rope. Rope is dear.” We had what we’d brought, and some we’d made. But none of our homemade rope was strong enough for this.

  “Please ask.”

  The persistence of boys. “If an opening comes up.”

  About noon that same day, Jove came by to watch us raise the roof on the smelter. The metal slabs had come all the way from Deerfly and been brought in pieces from Traveler in one of the little shuttles a year ago. Jove stood to the side as we used chain to hoist the metal, the chain travelling over a tall wooden post and b
eam structure we’d lashed together just for this job. Even with the leverage it took three men sweating to get the last and largest section up and held, while three more of us fastened it with nails also brought from the ship.

  At the end, Jove came and stood silently beside me. “Good job, Chaunce. Now we can make our own nails.”

  “That’s what we did all this work for? Nails?”

  “And hinges. And maybe bits for those animals down below.” He nodded at the roof. “One of your beasts might have pulled that easier.”

  It wasn’t a use I had thought of—I’d been thinking of riding them. I felt doubtful they’d be pullers. But if they were—we could make wagons and flatbeds and farm tools. The thought was good. “Can I have some rope?”

  “You might get hurt. Or die. The boys might die.”

  “We’ve gotta find accord with some of the wild things here. We can’t fear them all forever.” But then, he’d lost a wife to a pack of demons, found her in pieces three days after we landed. Years had passed, but some memories burn your soul.

  He toed the ground for a while.

  I could get enough Council to override him if I really tried. But he was a good leader, and I’d learned that if you undermine a good leader you can be rewarded with a worse one.

  He swallowed and looked off at some distant spot in the sky before he said, “Let’s go get it.”

  I had plenty of time to think, lurching home in the darkening night with three hundred feet of rope coiled over my right shoulder. I understood Jove’s issue: time breathed down on us. We were failing, dying by bits each year as we missed goals, became food for the local predators, fought amongst each other, and tried ever so hard to learn the dangers and opportunities here. We needed more stout, warm buildings, to retrieve the rest of our supplies from Traveler before the shuttles ran out of fuel, to build better perimeters, and to breed more children than Fremont took from us. Taking the three boys out on the plains represented a hefty risk of our future. Better to risk boys than girls, but still . . .