When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  Lank wasn’t talking, just driving the car, looking ahead at the rutted lane. Long, straight, overgrown with grass. But I could see bits of paving material here an there, visible through the weeds. “This is old highway 15-501, isn’t it?”

  Lank glanced at me, smiled and nodded. “Can’t imagine what tore it up like this. Been this way for a long time, though.”

  The trees were taller here and I realized we were passing through the southern part of Korstian State Park, which had been uninhabited since the 1920s, had been farmland for a couple of centuries before that. No ruins in the woods either, but when we crossed a mud-plastered log bridge over New Hope Creek, I could see the smoke from a camp fire and, near the river’s bend, what looked like an Indian teepee made from colorful old blankets.

  The people around the campfire were dark skinned, but I couldn’t tell whether they were Indians or not. Before the invasion, the nearest Indian community was probably the Lumbee Museum, or maybe those last few Cherokee towns near Asheville.

  “Lank?”

  He looked up from his driving and I saw he was sweating now, from the afternoon heat, from the effort of controlling the car, from wearing his heavy robe.

  “Why the priesthood?”

  Long, serious look, measuring me. Can I trust you? Can I talk to you openly? Are you really my long-lost brother? Or just a man wearing the Masters’ uniform? He looked away for a moment, then back at me. “Well...” He reached up and fingered his clerical collar and smiled weakly. “Better this collar than that other one, eh? You made a better choice than you’ll ever know, Athy.”

  Just one more bit of memory surfacing, the memory that Lank had cried the day I went away. Overhead, the sky was beginning to color with sunset, turning russet and brown, sun bisecting by the horizon, its visible face striated with thin bands of cloud. The color reminded me of all the other red places I’d been on the long voyage outward into the sky.

  The changes, sudden, kaleidoscopic, were a shock to my system. Saying goodbye to mother, father, brother, sister, kissing Alix farewell, wishing she wouldn’t cry, knowing she would. Mustering among the cool green trees with all the other frightened young recruits. Staring, horrified, at the master-sergeant’s scarred and angular face, at the angry glint in her cold blue eyes.

  I remember wondering, briefly, timidly, if once, somewhere, there’d been a man who’d loved this hard, compassionless woman. Was this what Alix would’ve become if she’d passed the examinations? I didn’t know.

  We’d gone by train to an old airfield, where we’d boarded a battered and ancient cargo plane, an electric jet manufactured some time in the latter part of the twenty-first century, lifting above the cool, green forest, turning west over low, eroded mountains, passing over the crushed remains of cities, over a Mississippi swollen by floods, past a smoking, cratered desert...

  The California Megalopolis looked like a vast toy city flattened by some careless giant’s lawnrolling tool.

  Then we were in Australia, in a featureless world of red and tan. Sun blazing overhead as we toiled over lifeless sandstone landscape. Hardy young men and women reduced to crawling, begging to go home. Our numbers dwindled quickly, the master-sergeant and her comrades pitiless, without mercy.

  One of my newfound friends, a British recruit who died later, out among the stars, called her “La Belle Dame.” I was not yet literate enough to get the reference. The day came when we were no longer recruits, when we pinned on our troopers’ badges, proud and strong, when we shipped out for what they called “Advanced Training.”

  Airless Mars proved to be an easy place to die, I and my comrades in vacuum suits of an advanced and unfamiliar design, toiling under a small, harsh sun set in a dull pink sky that blackened toward zenith, toiling through an unforgiving red desert that was, now, truly lifeless. And our numbers dwindled more, dwindled as I began to have dreams, dreams that disturbed my precious sleep, sleep filled with fiery nightmares, sleep filled with dreams of longing, dreams colored in subtle shades of blue and green.

  One night I awoke, crying in my sleep, to find myself in the master-sergeant’s arms. Cradled. Like a child. Her hand smoothing the sweat from my brow. After a while I went back to sleep. I was alone in the morning, La Belle Dame as merciless as ever, and supposed it was all part of the dream.

  And the longing for greenery was answered in a way that turned my memories of home sour. If the Earth is green, Alpha Centauri A-IV is greener. Very much like the Earth, though, like the Earth with it’s volume turned all the way up, like the Earth with it’s bass controls at full-throated cry. Forests of teal and gold, full of creatures from some Cretaceous nightmare, where we finished our work of preparation. And our numbers dwindled further.

  When it was over, there were five left from our company’s original two dozen. The master-sergeant kissed us all, handed us our orders, and smiled. We went out to our newly-formed legions, to wars that made us forget how hard that deadly training had been. Hard? Deadly? We didn’t know the meaning of those words. Not yet.

  As the sky darkened overhead, shadows lengthening and merging around us, Lank drove his car up a gentle rise, the two small mountains flanking Bolin Creek, surmounted by two isolated buildings, outlined against the sky. Atop Mount Bolus, to the north, something that looked like a small, flat mosque, golden domes catching the last rays of the sun. Facing it, slightly higher, atop Chapel Hill itself, was outlined the familiar hard black architecture of the local Master’s compound. Everything else was hidden among the trees.

  I guess I expected us to go on up Franklin Street, which would’ve led right by the compound, but it seemed to be choked with saplings, a forest of thin spruce, the pavement long ago torn up and gone. Instead, Lank turned at what had once been the corner of Estes, onto a rutted and muddy lane that looked like it saw a great deal of use. There were people walking here now, people looking at us curiously. At me? Maybe. Once or twice, Lank waved to someone who waved back.

  In my day, no one had lived on this low, swampy ground. It was just where the sewer lines ran, Chapel Hillians preferring to live along the high, breezy ridge lines. “What’s down here?”

  Lank looked over at me, puzzled, then shrugged. “The Bustee, Ath. The Master put its bluehouse down here and this is where we’ve all come to live.”

  Bustee. That was the word Spahis used for any sort of native village. I said, “You live down here?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got a cell at the monastery.” He gestured vaguely, up toward the mosque-like thing on Mt. Bolus.

  Everyone else, though... “How many?”

  “About fifteen hundred.”

  When I was a boy, the population of Chapel Hill was nearer one-hundred thousand. The stars were coming out overhead now as the sky turned full black, and I could begin to smell the effluvia of human habitation, not so very different from the smells I associated with bustees across the galaxy.

  Four. A Black and Starry Sky

  Full darkness fallen, the sky black and starry overhead, blotted here and there by wisps of opaque cloud, we pulled through the unpaved streets of the bustee, tires bouncing over rutted lanes made of dried mud. After the autumn rains, this place must be pleasant indeed.

  Down by Bolin Creek, the houses were black humps rising up from the ground, mostly dark, flickery red-orange light shining through the occasional open window. They must still have screens. Midges down here. Mosquitoes. It got bad only a year or so after the Invasion, bugs making a quick comeback when centuries of suppression technology came to an abrupt end.

  There’d been trees down here, brushy vegetation covering the swampy land by the creek, a paved footpath on the other side, following the old sewer line. A place to walk your dog, a shortcut to the commercial complex at the foot of the hill. I remember playing in these woods as a child with my friends, getting tangled in sticky webs during Big Spider Season, picking off ticks that got on us by the dozens.

  We always played war, fighting as guerrillas aga
inst the Kkhruhhuft invaders we knew would one day come. Then they came and conquered, and there were no real guerrillas to be found. All of us beaten. But we played in those woods just the same, boys and girls dreaming of an adulthood in which there would be guerrillas. Us. The woods were gone now, replaced by ramshackle housing, and trees grew where all our rich, electrified homes had been.

  Lank drove the car up a steep hillside toward the looming facade of a house larger than the ones down in the little valley. A house with yellow light spilling from its windows. Over the jouncing creak of the car’s frame I could barely make out a distant, rhythmic thudding noise. Generator.

  Lank said, “This is where Mom and Dad decided to build the new house, Athy. We’re on the backside of the hill where the Vine Vet Center used to be, up on Franklin Street.”

  I remembered the long curve of the hill, walking down the sidewalk on sunny days, passing the animal hospital with its faint cacophony of barking, its fainter whiff of dogshit. Used to be a joke about the place. On the town map, the one you could download from the national database system, it was listed as Vine Veteran’s Hospital, some long-erased clerical software having misinterpreted the abbreviation “Vet.” We used to laugh, envisioning its emergency room. Talk about your dogs of war...

  Lank pulled up in front of the house and clicked off the car, dashboard lights fading all together. “Welcome home, Athy.”

  I sat and looked up at the building, shadowed and dark other than square windows where electric light spilled into the night. Not a familiar place at all. I stood, stepping down onto the gravel driveway, stretching. And wondering. I felt surprisingly uncomfortable, knowing my parents were in there somewhere waiting to greet me. What would I say to them after twenty years? What would they say to me?

  A shadow detached itself from the darkness at the front of the house, where I supposed the door might be, the shadow of a woman walking over to me, resolving into form and figure in the night. A tall, slender, bony-looking woman, straight red-brown hair combed plain around an angular face. She was almost as tall as me, coming close, looking up into my eyes, searching...

  I whispered, “Oddny?”

  She threw herself against me, arms going around the barrel of my chest, face pressing into the side of my neck. “Oh, God, Athol...” Almost unbelieving.

  I held onto my sister, arms around her, pulling her close, wondering who this woman really was. Not really knowing how to react. Not yet. Memories of her. The dry-eyed young woman who told me good-bye on that last sunny day, who took Alix by the hand and led her away when it was time for me to go. The smart girl, eighteen months my junior, who helped me remember all the things I’d forgotten when school started up again almost two years after the Invasion. My confidant as a teenager, laughing with me about the silly things boys and girls did, trying to be together, not knowing how. My childhood playmate.

  A sudden memory of us when we were much younger. I just past eight perhaps, she not quite seven. The two of us playing together under a sheet, bright sunlight lighting up the inside of our little tent with pure, glistening blue-white light. Fooling around, giggling, getting inside each other’s clothes, poking at this and that, snickering at our little inspections. I don’t think we even wondered what would happen if someone, Mom and Dad maybe, caught us at it. Probably they knew and laughed, remembering those same things from their own childhoods.

  Holding her against me now, feeling that woman’s body, conscious of her suddenly, suddenly uncomfortable again. And realizing she’d started to cry, hot moisture soaking into my collar. Again, “Oh, God, Athol...”

  Then the door opened, spilling more electric yellow light, tossing the shelter of darkness aside, and all the others came tumbling out, glad cries, calling my name. Welcome home, they said. Brother, son, friend, dearest Athol Morrison. And me, wondering, Who are these people?

  They led me inside, all talking at once, then silent, then all talking again, to a room flooded by bright electric lights, crystal-based lamps I remembered so well, from so long ago, to a room with a long, low walnut table, the table my great-grandmother had given my parents as a wedding present a half century ago. There was food arrayed on the table, familiar-smelling food, waiting to be eaten. Waiting, some small part of me realized, evoking a faint shiver of horror, for me.

  Maybe I should’ve come unannounced. Come to them as a night-wandering stranger. Hello, Mother. It’s your son Athol, come home at last...

  Silly things of childhood flooding me now. As if I’d never been away. Yet knew that I had. Packing the cold starship soldier away, into a very tiny corner indeed.

  My father looked much as he had those twenty long years ago. Tall, sturdy, handsome. But... Hair thinner, much grayed. Lines in his face that hadn’t been there. Fat around the middle that no one had when I was young, when the world was real.

  And my mother. Thin, gray, waxy-featured. Old. The two of them like grandparents from some old novel...

  A tiny voice inside: they aren’t even eighty yet. They shouldn’t even be middle aged in a world where men and women can live into their twelfth decade. And yet. Mother and Father looking old. Lank and Oddny looking middle aged...

  Right. You know. Perhaps they won’t say anything. Maybe they won’t even notice, because you’re so tall and strong, battle scars worn like badges of service, though the medics could wipe them away in an instant. Maybe they just won’t notice.

  That look in Father’s eye though. Doubt? Fear? His mouth opening, serious, about to speak...

  But my mother burst into tears and threw her arms around me, breaking the tension of the moment, sobbing, telling me how much she’d missed me, how much she feared, when I never wrote home. How she’d felt when the mothers of the other boys and girls who’d gone away with me told her... How she’d felt when young Tommy Watkins’s casket arrived home on the monorail, gunmetal-gray plastic, filled with remains so disfigured nobody could be sure who it was.

  I remembered him dying, the only home boy in my regiment, something between us that passed for friendship. Tommy was a happy lad, lucky and careless. Luck always runs out. Caution is something you can control, can manufacture anew every day.

  It took us a long while to get him out from under the granite cliff face he’d brought down on himself and three other troopers, after wiring the landmine incorrectly.

  I remember packing what was left of him into his coffin for shipment home, standing there, staring down at something that looked like a cross between a roadkill and a huge, gravel-invaded scab, splinters of bone, white teeth poking out here and there, through a torn, hairy hide. Goodbye, Tommy Watkins, I’d whispered to myself. You should’ve been more damned careful.

  You make friends among the troopers. You can’t help it. I learned to be closest with men and women who seemed likely to take care of themselves, to distance myself from the happy-go-lucky. You don’t want to get caught up in someone else’s fatal mistake.

  And so, here and now, they gathered round, and hugged me and kissed me, and cried over me, as we all sat down, and killed the fatted calf.

  Welcome home.

  But that shadowed look in my mother’s eye. Horror? Maybe it’s only the scars I told myself.

  o0o

  Then, later, they lay me down to sleep, leading me to my own little room, high in the back of the house, with a window that looked over the brow of the hill into the old city. It was black out there now, no lights, only stars and the shadows of trees. But they smiled at me, closed the door, and left me alone. I stood in the room like a hulking ghost, surrounded by artifacts long forgotten.

  Sports posters from Chapel Hill High School, from the days right before the Invasion, when it was the place I’d be going in just a few years now. A place where a big, strong, fast-growing boy like me could be feared and admired.

  On the wall at the foot of the bed was a life-size image of a movie star I’d used as a masturbation icon when I was fourteen, misty three-D technology making her breasts and
rounded hip stand out from the wall as you walked in front of her. I couldn’t remember her name, just that my parents had been angry when I traded my best hunting knife for this piece of trash. My father telling me I’d be sorry when the batteries ran out. How hard it would be, what with the Invasion and all, to get new ones.

  By the time they’d run out I’d already met Alix, whose real flesh looked better to me than the synthetic movie star, whose breasts and hips I could actually touch...

  My couch-like bed, already a little too short when I left. Probably now too fragile for the hundred kilo behemoth who’d come back to visit. I sat down and listened to the soft creak of suspensor springs. The old technology held its own. I sat, staring up at the nameless goddess of my childhood fantasies, remembering the minutes I’d spent with her, from time to time.

  Fresh, misty skin, almost looking damp. Just as it always had.

  I wonder where they found fresh batteries, to make her live again?

  I wonder why they thought I’d want her back?

  Opposite the bed, my small rack of books, spines out, titles waiting for me to read them. Arranged, the way I’d liked, not by author, but by the chronological order of my reading them. Childhood books, from Johanna Spyri and G.A. Henty and Calvin Soderblom, to adolescent books, early and late, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Martha ten Darien. The one or two truly adult books I’d just begun reading in late high school gathering dust down one end.

  I reached out and pulled one of the Burroughs volumes, one whose title caught my eye, looking at the cover. At the Earth’s Core. I gave the book a gentle squeeze and the bulging breasts of the almost-naked cave girl turned my way, delicate-boned Victorian face turning up toward me, eyes pleading. Another gentle squeeze and the story began. David Innes and Abner Perry. Mechanical mole. Pellucidar, Mahars and Sagoths. Dian the Beautiful and Hooja the Sly One. Ja the Mezop.