When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  He set the keg on its side, propped against the hammer. “And now...” He swept up the mugs, all five in one spider-fingered hand. It made a wonderful, deep gurgle as it filled the glasses, a dark, russet beer with a strong, bitter smell.

  I shook my head, almost laughing. “I remember when you exploded that damn beerball, Davy...”

  He slid the stein in front of me. “Takes a little practice, that’s all.”

  I sipped the beer, foam tickling on my upper lip, took a bigger swallow. Bitter on the tip of my tongue, sweeter farther back. At least as good as what the Boromilithi were making. Probably a lot better than what I’d get on Karsvaao.

  Davy said, “Jesus Christ, it’s good to see you, Athy! You look like fucking Superman.”

  Übermensch? Maybe not. Maybe just the centuries-old cartoon character, emblem of every boy’s secret dream. If I was Superman nobody’d pick on me anymore. Not even Mom and Dad.

  Marsh tipped his mug back, swallowing close to a half-liter in one go. Bumped the mug down, wiped his mouth on the back of one hand. Burped. “If you’d been like this way back when, we’d’uh won more damn games, Athy...” A bleary-eyed grin. Marsh the Sagoth well on his way to puking in the gutter.

  I had to laugh at that. Football. After the Invasion, with 3V gone, it turned into something we could live for. Davy a fine tight end, me at quarterback. Marsh usually playing halfback, sometimes one guard position or the other. We’d had some wonderful games.

  Image out of memory. Sprinting down field, battered football tucked under my left arm, right arm crooked forward so I could elbow assholes in the helmet, knock them down, wondering where the hell Marsh was. Davy still probably lying on his side, where the opposing guard had put him.

  OK. One play fucked up. No chance now to send the ball spiraling forty or fifty yards down field, to where Davy would be waiting, counting as he ran, spinning around at just the right moment...

  A sudden hush, and I was running alone, seemingly having outdistanced all the Durhamite pursuers, running under the goalposts, turning to face the field, ball held overhead, waiting for the touchdown cheer, the sight of my father grinning, giving me the high sign...

  Silence.

  All the players standing out on the field, looking up. No one looking at me from the stands. Everyone standing, looking up. Silence.

  And there was a low rumble from overhead.

  I looked up, shielding my eyes with my free hand, holding the ball against my side again. Overhead, the Kkhruhhuft patrol ship was a fat silver shape, like an old-fashioned dirigible, floating against the wind, studded with turrets. Turrets that could deliver the lightning of the gods. They say, we were told in those days, that they run on antigravity. Which, according to our physics, is impossible...

  A lot of impossible things in those days. And we didn’t know yet about the poppits and the Master Race. Just the almighty, deadly Kkhruhhuft.

  Back in the present, Marsh was going on and on about those old football days, reminiscing about one game after another as he slopped up beer. Problems Marsh? For such a happy-go-lucky boy? Happens to the best of us.

  Davy ignored him, looking at me, eyes far away. Finally, he put his hand on my forearm, squeezing the heavy bands of muscle, and said, “God, I’ve missed you, Ath! I wish the Hell I’d passed the tests. I always wanted to go with you...”

  I told him that would’ve been nice, fun, the two of us going off to the wars together. Told him that. But Davy Itakë would have died in training. Would just be a memory now of someone, a friend, long lost. And it was damned good to see him alive now.

  o0o

  Moments go by, turning in hours, the musicians finishing their break, getting back to work. They played a tune I didn’t know, something scratchy and incomprehensible, then went on to “Young Love,” a hit I remembered from 2159, from the spring before the Invasion. It’d been sung then by some skinny girl with bronze-colored hair, who’d done no better job than the short, fat old black woman singing it now.

  A shadow fell over our table, a human shape that dimmed the kerosene light, and Marsh suddenly fell silent. Davy sat back in his chair, looking over my shoulder. Waiting. And I knew. This is what you were expecting, isn’t it? Lank didn’t bring you here just to drink beer with the old boys. I turned around in my chair.

  She was still tall. Curly black hair lightly streaked with bits of silver-gray. Face squarer than I remembered, a few lines I couldn’t recall, at the outer corners of her eyes, bracketing her mouth. Neck still long and smooth, delicate tracery of veins and tendons visible under the skin. Suntanned. That was something she’d been in the long ago. Her waist was thicker than I remembered, dressed in blue denim and cheap-looking brown suede.

  Boots on her feet, reaching about a third of the way up each calf, jeans tucked in, pouched at the juncture of her thighs, showing they’d been tailored for a man.

  Like I was seeing her for the first time, in that smoking old ruin we’d still wanted to call Chapel Hill, after the first assault was over, the soldiers gone, the warships no more than chaotically spinning lights in the midnight sky, my parents trying to keep me indoors forever afterward, though the explosions were done, the ground no longer vibrating under the cracked concrete of our basement floor.

  Because I’d been indoors, under ground, for the last of it, the changes came as a shock to me, no matter how much I’d seen during our flight from Washington, D.C., back across Virginia to the home we’d tried to abandon. Our house was still standing, but hurt beyond recognition, the beautiful, white-pillared front façade burned black, delicate yellow vinyl siding puckered and blistered, the whole house looking like a toy car I’d thrown in the ornamental fire when my parents weren’t around, car twisting and melting into some fantastic shape, just before bursting into flame.

  I’d stood for a long while on the torn-up sod of our lawn, looking down the hill, across the street at the collapsed boards and brick and mangled steel frame of Mr. Grossman’s house, wondering if his three asshole sons had survived, wondering if I’d ever see them again, get into fights with them, shoot beebees at their dog. No sign of them, and no one ever bothered with the ruins.

  The sky seemed very high on that long ago morning, pale blue, streaked with a few remote white clouds, clouds drawn out, as if by a high wind. Something was twinkling up there, several somethings, right on the edge of my vision. Those wrecked starships, I knew, tumbling in orbit, out of control, crewed by the dead.

  Maybe, I’d thought, just a few of them are crewed by dead Kkhruhhuft. Maybe, as I walked around town, looking for my friends, if any of them were still around, I’d even find a few dead Kkhruhhuft soldiers, just lying abandoned here and there, like dead therapod carnivores...

  So I’d walked, going from street to street, house to house, looking for Marsh, for best friend Davy, for all the others, all my playmates. It’d been a long time since I’d been able to do anything besides play indoor games with Lank and Oddny.

  Marsh’s house was crushed almost to dust, no single piece anywhere larger than my hand. Davy’s was intact, even the window glass unbroken, but no one was home. When I’d tried the knob on the front door, it had been securely locked. I remember thinking, with some despair, Maybe they’ve just gone shopping...

  But the nearby Argomart where I knew they liked to shop was just wiped away, nothing left but the parking lot and a bare, strange-looking foundation slab. Both of them would turn up later, their parents having taken them to the old shelter under the downtown postoffice, the one that’d been built for World War III, but on that day, not long before my eleventh birthday, I was sure they were dead.

  I was sitting on a hefty piece of torn-apart masonry in the middle of town, some huge wad of broken bricks welded together by grainy-looking cement, a piece of what building I had no idea, wondering what I was going to do, trying to swallow past that unaccountably tight, sore place in the middle of my throat, when I heard her footsteps, soft, light, hesitant, walking up the stre
et, crunching delicately on bits of debris.

  A thin girl, about my own age, curly black hair, big, damp-looking brown eyes, pale, a forlorn look on her face. Standing there, looking at me, with a look that I knew, even then, said, All my friends are dead...

  Faint, shadowy smile on her face. Faint look of hope. And she said, “You’re name’s Athy, isn’t it? I remember you from school.”

  I nodded, remembering her from here and there, just one more person I hardly knew, someone who sat on the other side of the room. Alix, I’d thought. Alix something. She held out a slim, white-fingered hand, and said, “Alexandra Moreno.”

  When I took her hand, the fingers were unexpectedly warm, her grip strong and friendly. “Athol Morrison. Athy,” I told her.

  We sat together for a while, talking, remembering mutual friends from school, wondering where they all were... if they were anywhere at all. Then we walked down the long hill of Franklin Street, past all the rich people’s antique houses, past charred ruins, collapsed heaps of brick, a few twisted steel skeletons surrounded by cool, hard puddles of melted glass and plastic.

  We saw one dog sniffing around near the crushed remnants of a house where a boy we’d both known once lived, but it looked at us wild-eyed and ran away when we got closer. It was a fat reddish mutt with an upcurving tail. Half chow, I think, and half something else. Alix looked after him rather wistfully, making me wonder if maybe she had a lost dog somewhere, but I didn’t want to ask.

  Then, under the light of a wan noonday sun, we stood together, silent, holding hands, looking at what was left of University Metamall, where we were so used to meeting all our friends. Bits of wall. Long pieces of clear plastic sheeting from the roof. Scattered stuff, colorful, suggestive, merchandise from all the stores.

  And a man lying face down in a puddle of dirty water, body swollen, skin purple, clothes stiff and distended. No one that we’d ever known.

  From across the table, in the here and now, Lank laughed abruptly. “Say something, Athy!”

  I glanced at him, gave him a wry look, turned back to Alexandra Moreno, who, one day, long ago, I’d vowed to marry, held out my hand, and said, “Hello, Alix.”

  She said, “If I didn’t know who you were, I’d never guess.” She took my hand, grip still strong and friendly, fingers still warm, still smiling, but with something of a shadow crossing her face momentarily, then pulled up a chair and sat, turning it around backwards, sitting astride, arms resting across the back, a pose I’d never seen her in before.

  We sat and we talked in the dim yet harsh kerosene light of Davy’s bar, in some ways strangers, in other ways very old friends indeed. When I closed my eyes, she looked just the same as she had twenty years ago, young and fresh, and I could still feel the smooth skin of her waist under my hands.

  Smaller hands, as I recall them. Smoother hands.

  Shadows were etched on her face by the hard quality of the light, throwing her eyes into shallow wells of darkness, making them seem larger and more intent. Eyes on me. On my face, that little image of me centered in a curved reflection of the room.

  The others were falling into the background now, Davy and Lank receding, turning toward each other, carrying on some conversation of their own, memories of me, perhaps, and still vigilant. Aware. Marsh, draining another beer, sat silent, eyes a little dazed, nothing left of the day’s hawk-eyed sagoth policeman, looking at me sometimes, mostly seeming to listen to Davy and Lank.

  Maybe he remembered too. Maybe not. There’s no real forgetfulness in liquor, but it can help erase the here and now, which is often the point.

  Alix’s teeth were visible as she talked, almost but not quite white, glistening with moisture, mouth held in a half smile, as if in fond reverie...

  Chin resting on her hands, eyes tipped to look up at me, she said, “After you were gone, for a long time, I didn’t know what to do.” The smile broadened, grew a little more wistful. “I guess I felt more like a lost soul than I expected. I missed you.”

  I leaned toward her a little bit, shifting in my chair, trying to pick just the right words, failing. “We talked about that in the last days, didn’t we? I missed you too.”

  A lie? I don’t know. Maybe not. I thought about her some, in the pitifully short nights of my early training. Thought about having her in bed with me. Thought about making love, about our long walks in the woods, our long, too-serious talks together. It faded, too soon, under the deadly stress of Spahi training, as my newfound friends withered and died.

  Then, of course, there was Marni. Then a host of others. Not a lie, though. I never forgot her, after all.

  She said, “It wasn’t enough. All I did was rationalize. I didn’t want you to feel bad, Athy.”

  All I could do was nod. “I know. I appreciated it.”

  A look from her that might have been surprise, then she said, “Are you married?” A quick glance at my big hands, then her eyes were back on my face, fixed on my eyes.

  I shook my head. “We’re not allowed to marry.”

  The half smile faded. “Never?”

  I shrugged. “I’ll retire some day, if I survive my whole enlistment. If I want to. Old soldiers fading away and all that.” Like the havildar-emeritus at the spaceport, an older man, signed up for a shorter term. What would I be in another ten or twenty years?

  She wasn’t smiling at all any more, eyes evasive, away from my face. Looking at my hands again, seeming to measure them. Big, blunt fingers, rough-looking, a little red around the knuckles. Not a strangler’s hands. More the sort of hands with which you pull off limbs.

  Image of a spindly, chitinous being, small, not much more than twelve hundred centimeters tall, a little stick-man of a bug. Image of myself holding the little being helpless, taking away its needle-like sword, bending the metal in my hand, stilling the being’s agitated thrashing with the other. It tried to bite me then, so I pulled off its arms and walked away, listening to the soft hissing noises it made as it curled in the alleyway and bled some kind of dark gray blood.

  Alix said, “I was married. For a while.” Eyes back on my face then. Not afraid. Sorry perhaps.

  Softly, I said, “I’d hoped you would, Alix. We knew I was going to be gone forever. There wasn’t any waiting to be done.” I remembered the little sliver of pain I’d felt when I told her those things, on our last night together, so long ago, imagining some other boy, some other man, someone I knew surely, maybe even Davy or Marsh, holding her damp body just the way I was holding it, holding her in the night after making love.

  She said, “I waited for two years, Athy.” A brittle smile. “I guess I was hoping you’d flunk out of basic training and come home to me. I waited until we heard you’d finished with Mars and left for Alpha Centauri.”

  Alpha Centauri, of the deadly teal jungles, where my old friends lay buried. I reached out and put my hand on her forearm, squeezing gently. “You shouldn’t have, Alix. I wanted you to be happy.” But not so much that it made me want to stay...

  She nodded. “I finally married Benny Tekkomuz.”

  I remembered Benny from high school, a short, plump, overserious boy with short, bristly blond hair and washed-out blue eyes. Not interested in much beyond getting his schoolwork in on time, as if the old, pre-Invasion future still waited for us all.

  I wondered, Why him? Maybe, because he was so very different from me.

  She said, “I did my best, but it never really worked out. He stayed... focused on other things. All he wanted from me was to make love twice a day, as soon as we woke up and again right after supper...”

  A faint, surprising sliver of pain. I said, “I wanted to make love to you twice a day too, Alix. Maybe three or four.” It was as light-sounding as I could make it. Almost flippant. Defuse this.

  She said, “That was different. I loved you.”

  So.

  She said, “It lasted about five years. Then I couldn’t stand it any more and sent him away. He seemed almost glad to go.”

/>   “No children?”

  A look of not quite pain, a touch of bitterness. “No. I saw to that.”

  “Where’s Benny now?”

  “Someplace, I suppose. He’s a Sirkar official. Quite successful, I understand.”

  Benny, gone to his proper reward, with all the other hard working, nose-to-the-grindstone boys. “And you didn’t marry again.” That little sliver of interior pain, selfish pain, telling me I wanted her to say no...

  She shook her head, sat back a little and ran one hand through her hair, tossing the curls into disarray, a peculiarly abandoned gesture, and yet... Graceful. Attractive. Alluring...

  She said, “Life gets lonely. You do what you have to. But... no. No one I wanted to have stay.”

  A simple phrase that. And one that pulled at my insides. I tried to think of an endless supply of compliant burdars, of what they had at my beck and call. I wanted not to be selfish, to be glad, at least, that she’d found little bits and pieces of happiness without me, if not the dream we’d once shared.

  I was the one who’d left, after all.

  She reached forward and touched my forearm, squeezed gently. “Were you ever sorry you went away, Athy?”

  I looked into her eyes, and said, “Sometimes.” And those glistening eyes were upon me, watching, alert, aware. Not the eyes of a burdar, nor the eyes of a comrade soldier.

  o0o

  It grew late, and the bar’s clientele thinned out, people rising and yawning, stretching, staggering out through the swinging doors, out into a summer night. Marsh folded his arms on the tabletop and put his head down upon them, snoring gently. Lank and Davy continued to talk about old times, growing sleepy-eyed, but seeming to wait.

  Finally, Alix sat up straight, stretching her back taut, breasts pushing at the material of her blouse, eyes squeezed shut as she threw her head back. “Jesus, I’ll have a head in the morning...” She ruffled her hair again, and, looking at me, said, “I’d better be going.”