We ambled slowly toward the ramp, people getting out of our way. A human overseer, not a Spahi but some civilian employee of one of the local Masters, made his line of coffled Boromilithi slaves stop in their tracks, bowed slightly as he waved us on toward the ramp.
As we walked up the ramp, I heard Shrêhht’s real voice growl softly, and the vocoder said, “This is A4x228k, logging off in transit.”
Right, let us not forget. I took out my phone and did the same, and the Boromilith planetary command net said, “3C286b, acknowledge and out.”
Inside, the lighter’s cargo-space seemed, as usual, dank and metallic-smelling, rather poorly ventilated, intended mainly for containerized cargo. The upper decks were reserved for loose cargo, now taken over by passengers, stiff plastic padding on the floor the only concession to organic comfort. The air was hazy-looking, and we stood in one corner, squinting under dim, glary lighting that supposedly mimicked the natural light of the Masters’ homeworld.
“Lot of cattle here today.” Beings streaming in all around us, already squabbling over the best positions. Clots of humans, strings of Boromilithi, a scattering of other species, even two more Kkhruhhuft on the far side of the compartment, backs grazing the upper bulkhead.
Shrêhht whispered, “Earth-bound ships are more like that than some others.” She gestured at a nearby coffle. “Boromilithi are going to be used as labor on the new human colony worlds.”
I’d heard that story, much more than rumor. The Masters were beginning to seed the uninhabited worlds around Earth, which was to be the centerpiece of what was, after all, a frontier sector. And humans, already good mercenaries, would make fine overseers as well. Boromilithi, on the other hand, made much better slaves.
Something to be proud of, relatively speaking? Maybe not. The Kkhruhhuft made better mercenaries, perhaps, than we’d ever be, having been at it for seventeen thousand years. I’d never heard of them being used as overseers anywhere.
A sudden metallic scraping blared through the air, like steel wool on exposed nerves, the ship’s AI calling out to the poppits, alerting them. Shrêhht suddenly kneeled beside me, dropping onto her belly, stretching full length on the plastic, tendrils fluttering around the clasp of her vocoder’s neck-strap, resting her massive chin on the floor padding.
Scrape. Scrape. Scrape. Three seconds warning, my dear little poppits.
All around us, people and things were scurrying to lie down. I put myself on my back, legs spread a bit, arms down by my sides, hands flat, palms up, a position I knew would be comfortable.
Ten gee. Like sleeping with a whale. Like having it roll over in its sleep.
There were no more warnings, just the sudden clank-thud of automatic doors slamming shut, knowing if you were caught in one you’d be cut in half or crushed flat, the air around us suddenly seeming much more oppressive, cut off from the outside. The solid, distant whine of servomotors putting the engine gimbals through their paces as the software flexed its muscles. The much louder throb of powerful turbines, the rush of hydrogen slurry pouring through the fuel lines.
Thud. Ship shuddering as fluorine injectors made hypergolic ignition, giving the afterburner ram a zero-velocity start. And then I was smothering under a metric ton of me.
Somewhere, a human baby screamed, shrill and flat, almost covering the sudden murmurs of protest, the panicky whispers of the Boromilithi, most of whom had never been up before. My inner ears spun as the ship rolled, tipping over onto its proper synergy track.
I could feel my hands open, fingers flattening, knuckles pressing into the floor.
Engine thunder came up through the companionways, walls rattling and shuddering as the ship climbed out of the troposphere, cargo canisters creaking against their tie-downs, trapped sophonts, helpless, moaning softly, someone crying nearby, whimpering like an injured dog. Shrêhht lay inert beside me, breathing heavily, chuffing like a damaged engine, head visible in one corner of my grayed-out vision, eyes rolling slowly in her head.
I imagine the strain on her ribs was immense. But a Kkhruhhuft would never complain, even if those ribs collapsed.
There was a hand-sized poppit on the floor between us, crushed flat to the deck, looking like a little blue starfish, mouth gaping open, eight tiny red eyes looking back at me.
The pressure let off a little and the noise level went down abruptly as we climbed through the tropopause, afterburner extinguishing itself in Boromilith’s rarefied stratosphere, inlets closing, lighter proceeding at a six-gee climb on toward orbit.
In a little while, even that would back off and there’d be a gentle almost-silence, nothing but the distant rumble of the cruise engine, pushing us up to the starship at an easy tenth-gee, keeping us under gravity so we’d stay on the floor. Thoughtful of them. It. Software with a heart.
o0o
Soon we were all on the ship, gear stowed in our “cabins,” safe and sound, if there is such a thing. Boarding is always a crazy experience, what with the lighter docking at the starship’s zero-gee hub, passengers and cargo bobbing all over the place, poppits flipping around in the air like so many flying spiders.
The ship’s name, it turned out, acknowledging our arrival log, was 7m64subCX, ship’s node housing a full-fledged Master, albeit a minor one.
My room was a tiny cubby, one of thousands made from bolted-together cargo containers, outfitted with the bare minimum necessary, up on the point-six gee level, more than halfway out to the hull. This was “paying passenger” country. Most of the sentients on board were cargo, would make the trip in the core-periphery cargo space, down around point-oh-five.
I try not to go down there. The smell, from motion-sickness vomitus, from transit-shock diarrhea, from whatever processes nonhumans have to make their own special contribution, can be astonishing.
I went on up to a hull-level platform, under poppit-normal one-point-one gee. The view out the “window” here was stupendous. I sat by myself at a little table near the guardrail of one of the balcony restaurants, looking out across the main concourse, floor below thronged with thousands of sentients, more species than I knew the names of, looking out the window beyond.
It looked like a vast, curving pane of optically perfect glass, a window on space a hundred meters high, perhaps twice as wide. Impossible, of course. The external hull of this ship, like all the starships I’d seen, was a featureless enclosure of mirror-bright metal, made from who-knows-what. Besides which, the ship was rotating to keep us under gee. The hull was under the concourse floor. The window should have been looking into the next compartment, whatever it was.
Outside, Boromilith was a bright crescent ten thousand kilometers away, filling about half the window, one of its moons, Laelathri from the color, a soft orangish tint, floating just beyond the hazy curve of the atmosphere, holding the same phase. There were stars visible too, dozens of them like faintly colored jewels in the hard black sky, mostly diamonds, here an opal, there a pale sapphire, which hardly seemed likely against all that glare.
At one horn of the crescent, the only one I could actually see, was the glitter of Boromilith’s tiny north polar icecap, the pole in summer just now. And there were pale green seas, dark swatches of jungle, tan and sandy deserts. The twinkle of city lights in the night...
I remember seeing the night side of Earth from space just once, back when I was a kid, going with my family on a vacation to the Moon, maybe six months before the invasion. It seemed like the continents were seas of continuous light. There was even light way out on the ocean. Now, most likely, it would all be dark.
I took a sip of my drink, something vaguely whisky-like, poured from a cheap-looking, labelless bottle, and looked away.
There was a stage show going on up here, something that had started after I sat down, a man and woman dancing together naked, touching each other, whirling away, touching again. The men and women gathered close to the stage seemed enraptured.
The couple on the stage were being very realistic about th
eir artistic little dance, the tall, handsome, muscular man with a very stiff-looking erection, one that hardly bounced at all as he pranced, the lithe, long-haired woman showing a delicate sheen of moisture on the inside of her thighs. You’d think they wouldn’t be able to do that, the man having blood pressure problems, the woman focused more on muscular effort than on the mechanics of arousal. Besides which, they’d probably done this act thousands of times, would be bored with each other, bored with the whole silly business. Drugs, perhaps?
And the people watching them, men and women both? Their eyes followed every movement closely, their mouths open, as if with expectation. Why would they want to watch these people dance and sweat, when they could turn to each other and have the very thing for themselves?
I know people who’ve carried whole pornography collections all the way from Earth, even Spahis, who have the compliant bodies of burdars at their beck and call. Pictures, presumably, have no feelings, though, if you look closely, it’s clear that the people within the pictures do.
A woman spreading her legs for the camera, smile a grimace on her face, stunned look in her eyes. A man holding his own penis, smirking for the faceless crowd beyond the lens. A distant look, thinking, maybe, about tonight’s dinner. Or maybe about the car he’s got to have repaired once again.
The couple on the stage grappled with each other, kissing, making the crowd surrounding them sigh with delight, then the woman spun, ever so gracefully, bending at the waist, presenting her buttocks to her male counterpart, presenting like an extinct female ape in some old film. The man turned, with equal grace, swinging his hips forward.
On the floor, some of the audience members crouched lower, getting down in front of the woman so they could look up between her legs and get a better view.
Nothing I hadn’t seen a thousand times before. I turned away and looked back out the window. We’d swung over toward the dayside now and Boromilith was a beautiful, glittering treasure spread out below, worth looking at endlessly and forever.
A voice, whispered, a vocoder, speaking: “Enjoying the show?”
I looked up again, and Shrêhht was crouching beside my table, holding a frosty mug in one claw. She poured a splash in her mouth, tipping her head back to swallow like a bird. There was a smell in the air, like a cross between kerosene and pizza.
I shrugged and gestured at the window. “This one, immensely. That one...” A nod at the stage, where the dancers had settled into a rather simplistic rhythm of coital pumping, hardly art at all. Some of the audience members were kneeling now, as if in prayer, one woman even putting her head right down on the stage in the shadow of the dancers. I said, “I don’t know why they bother.”
Shrêhht nodded, watching the dancers fuck stolidly away. “At home,” she said, “we have something a little bit like this. Huntresses get up on stage with some small prey animal or another, stalk and kill. Then eat. It’s all very titillating to some.”
“You?”
Another shrug. “I suppose not. When I was a youngster maybe.”
Kkhruhhuft breeding is very different from our own, though what we hear as gossip is not very detailed. The males, it seems, are nonsentient, property at best, animals at worst, kept by special shepherdesses, doled out at breeding time. They take none of them out to the stars and a Kkhruhhuft mercenary remains celibate, I think, for her entire duty cycle.
Maybe they go home periodically to breed. I don’t know. Shrêhht has never seemed interested in talking about it, nor any other Kkhruhhuft I’ve known.
She said, “Have you eaten? I think we can both get food here.”
I nodded, signaling to the waiter. Up on stage, the man and woman were sweating now, skins bright with moisture, the crowd before them all bunched together and silent. Waiting.
o0o
My first real view of Earth, from the ground, after more than twenty years’ absence, came like a physical blow. Seen from space, it was just one more habitable world, something only vaguely like the planet I’d watched drifting away on the void so long ago, hardly remembered, overlaid by so many other worlds, so many worlds just like this.
And now, standing at the foot of the lighter’s boarding ramp? I stood, flat-footed, staring, lungs perfused by familiar air, familiar no matter how tainted by unfamiliar smells. Beyond the flat black pavement of the landing stage, beyond the stained old gray granite buildings of the spaceport...
Something. The shattered towers of a ruined city. The bright towers of a new city. Little swatches of dark green, forest such as I’d not seen in so long. Beyond it all, a vaulting sky of delicate peach and tawny gold. Sunrise.
And the sun for which my eyes were made.
Shrêhht, bulking huge behind me, said, “It’s always something, coming home.” She managed to make the vocoder sound quiet, reflective, perhaps even respectful.
I could only nod. Then I took out my phone and said, “10x9760h, logging on as arrived.”
Modulated static, like the soft background static of Boromilith, and the same genderless voice said, “4Y1028h, net connect.”
Out there, somewhere, the world I left behind. The people. Family. Friends. People I would’ve known, but never met. Friends I would’ve had, if only I’d stayed here. Voids, like negative charges in a particle net. Nonexistent people. My children, perhaps. Children I would’ve had if I’d stayed here. Children with Alix? I could see her now in my memory, an amalgam compounded of the girl she really had been, the woman I’d thought she was then.
As stevedores came out to unload the ship, as the first coffles began staggering down the ramp, overseers snarling, angry human words interspersed with pidgin-Boromilithi, we walked over to the main building, a building patched here and there, granite smeared with cement, covering the big cracks I remembered from long ago.
We walked through the slanting light of a golden sun and, for just a moment, something very much like exhilaration stole through me. It’s always something, she’d said. Coming home.
Inside, the building was in some ways just as it had been when I’d first seen it, back in the late spring of 2154. But changed, nonetheless. The starry sky bonded to the stone ceiling was beginning to peel away here and there, the Milky Way showing thin rips, the bit with Orion hanging free, swaying slowly in the air currents, as if about to fall.
And the tile floor, a vitrimosaic showing the history of space travel, looked worn somehow. Old. You could barely make out Yuri Gagarin’s face. And the face of Wing Commander Derek McDonnough, who’d captained the Larrabee, who’d rammed the original Master’s scoutship with his own, looked like it had been excised with a chisel.
Would the Masters order that? No. I don’t think their... feelings if you can call them that, extend so far. Kkhruhhuft? Again, no. They’re proud of us. We almost beat them.
Vandals, maybe.
Dotted here and there around the periphery of the terminal’s main concourse, scattered through the human crowds, were various... others. A group of poppits, gathered neatly and motionlessly in one corner. A couple of things that looked like wolverines covered with crabgrass. A coffle of beat-up looking Boromilithi. Maybe on their way home. A thing like a big, leathery black medicine ball with a couple of dozen brilliant white eyes, eight or ten stalky arms and legs, squatting on a pile of luggage.
And, scattered around the periphery, dressed in white shawls and stiff straw hats, Masters’ ID badges at their throats, slim rifles held across scaly green chests... centaurs, I guess you’d call them, but not like anything out of human myth. Taller than a man, with long, fat forelegs, ending in heavy digging claws, back sloping down to short hind legs and a thick, stiff little tail. Upper bodies a little bit humanoid. Not much. Arms like a man, bigger, a little less gracile. Bullet heads, mouths with... teeth.
I’d seen a picture in an old textbook once, an animated holo of some ancient herbivore called a moschops. Teeth like that. Big, flat, spatulate buck teeth. Some of them had their shawls hanging open, so you could see t
he males’ cloacas and the females’ long, stiff ovipositors...
Saanaae. They’d only started bringing them in around the time I left, beginning to replace the Kkhruhhuft occupation forces, who were needed elsewhere. Saanaae make poor soldiers, but excellent police.
We walked across to a section of what had once been ticket counters beneath a sign that said SIRKAR PORT AUTHORITY. There were long lines here, snaking back toward the entrances. People. Things. Men and women behind the counters, querulous officials in some kind of reddish-brown uniform, badges of cheap and shiny metal, aluminum colored to look like silver and gold, pinned on here and there.
We walked to the front of the line, stood waiting.
One of the men there, sorting people’s forms, glanced at us, scowled, looked away, kept on working. I knocked on the counter, sharp, peremptory. “Now, sir.”
He looked up, looked at me, looked at the Kkhruhhuft. “Go to the back of the line.”
Behind me, I could hear Shrêhht stir.
Makes you wonder how people get their jobs. Maybe he hadn’t noticed that Shrêhht was three meters tall. Or that I was wearing a sidearm. Maybe he just had plenty of confidence in the Saanaae guardsmen all around us. Well. I’d dealt with self-important little officials before. No reason I shouldn’t treat this one the same way I’d treat a nonhuman.
I glanced at Shrêhht, motioning her to stay out of it, was turning to face the man, reaching out to take hold of his sleeve, reclaim his attention, when an older man, paunchy, with dark gray hair, saggy face with one big scar running diagonal across his forehead, walked quietly up. He put out his hand to touch my arm, and said, “Johnson. Move your line down to the next kiosk.”
The younger man looked at him, astonished. “What?!” Rising to his feet, mouth open, face starting to color.
“Do it, boy.” The old man wasn’t looking at him.
Johnson turned and stared at us, seemed to focus in for a second. “This isn’t right.”
“Do it anyway.”
“I’ll raise this at tonight’s meeting, Velasquez...” A threat, spoken with a sharp edge. Someone nearby, someone standing in line I think, muttered, “Bloody God-damned sagoths...”
When Heaven Fell Page 3