When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  Maybe they don’t grow around here and can’t be got. Pineapples will grow down on the coastal plain...

  My mother remained taciturn, though Alix, uncomfortable, tried to draw her out. I felt, for the first time, a small trickle of anger at them all, slowly waxing. A moment when I wanted to stand up and shout at them.

  It would have been for nothing though. All their feelings about Alix just anger at a little girl who, they imagined, stole their little boy. Parents imagining their son a little boy, even while they knew he was masturbating to the image of a dancing whore? Parents are silly like that. And masturbation is a boy’s game, done with icons, not other people.

  With Alix, they must imagine me holding her in my arms, whispering secrets to her, going away from them. A betrayal of sorts, like a watchdog who licks the hand of a stranger.

  They sat silent, while Lank and Oddny talked of childhood things, of times gone by, while we sat together on their sofa, while they waited for the evening to end, for Alix to rise and bid them good-bye, and go home. Maybe they imagined her walking away in the darkness alone. Or maybe they assumed I’d leave with her.

  Not long before midnight, Alix yawned. I stood, and, as she rose beside me, I saw the relief in their eyes. But I bid them all good night and led Alix by the hand, up creaking, handmade stairs, closing the door on them all.

  o0o

  Standing in this imitation of my childhood room, the one she must surely remember well, standing in a pool of yellow-orange light, dark night outside, Alix stared for a long time at my boy’s icon, almost but not quite frowning. Finally, she reached out and touched its trigger point, and the woman began her dance, exposing herself.

  A giggle. “I remember his...”

  I put my arm around her shoulders, watching as the dancing girl spread her labia for us. “I almost didn’t. I’m afraid to ask them why it’s here and back in working order. Or why they were so... unhappy tonight.”

  Alix turned in my arms and put her hands on my chest, shadowed eyes serious, looking up at me. “Don’t you know?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s been a long time since you went away, Athy. People change. It’s a very sour sort of life you left behind.”

  I nodded. Sure, but every life’s like that. It’s why old people are so often very bitter and subdued. Or angry. Nothing is fair. Life goes badly, and then you die. Or it goes very well indeed, and then you die anyway. The spouse you were glad to have stays faithfully by your side for all those years, and you die knowing you missed it all, that you spent most of those years suffocating from boredom. Or they leave you, alone and bitter, for someone else. And you can’t forget that tang of what-might-have-been, no matter that their replacement was wealthier, healthier, happier, stronger, more devoted, whatever.

  She said, “After you went, somehow, your going became my fault.”

  I could imagine Alix left behind. Imagine my parents telling each other, If only we’d kept them apart... “I suppose there’s nothing anyone can do to stop people looking for someone to blame, some way to make excuses for what they’d otherwise perceive as their own failings...”

  “Was it their fault?” A steady, dark-eyed stare. “Or mine?”

  “Only mine. Because I wanted to go...”

  We sat down on the edge of the bed and I turned out the lamp, leaving us in semi-darkness, moonlight through the window, the dancing girl’s lambent glow. After a while, Alix said, “She really is very pretty. I used to wonder if you preferred her to me sometimes.”

  “That’s silly.”

  She turned to face me, features invisible in shadow, and said, “I guess. But women always wonder.”

  I leaned forward into the shadow and kissed her, murmured, “You were real.”

  She rubbed one hand slowly across the top of my thigh, running her fingers down the troughs between major muscle groups. “Am I real now?”

  My hand was on the inside of her leg now, fingers drifting across smooth skin, running up that big tendon at the top of the thigh, touching the seam of her underpants. Lightweight cotton cloth, a few strands of crisp hair escaped to the outside. “I guess you don’t mean this, do you.”

  Voice very quiet: “No.”

  I could feel the hump of her mons through the cloth, the cushion of compressed hair, the place where it divided, a tiny almost-bump that would be her clitoris. “I don’t know, Alix. What’s real is what I can touch.”

  A whisper: “That’s not saying a lot.”

  “No.” I ran my other hand up her dress, took hold of the waistband of her underpants and started sliding them down. She lifted up slightly so I could get them off over her rump, let me pull them down her legs and drop them onto the floor, a tiny scrap of invisible cloth.

  When I kneeled on the floor, one knee on her underpants, the other on cold wood, she put her hands around my head, fingers settled against the nape of my neck, while I kissed the inside of her thigh, worked my way up toward the warmth of her crotch. “You were real to me too, Athy.”

  I didn’t want to ask her what that meant, pressing my face into the damp place where her thigh joined her body. I turned to face into her then, running my tongue between labia, teasing out those folds of pleasure, and heard her sigh. She said, “Benny never wanted to do this.”

  And, unexpectedly, I remembered the first time I’d done it to her this way, her surprised reticence, then reluctant fingers stealing down the back of my neck, murmurs of, “Oh, Athy, don’t, you don’t have to...” fading away. I never asked, but it may have been her first orgasm with another person.

  And, in the middle of this one, she was whispering about what Benny’d never wanted to do.

  Later, we lay tangled together, damp skin on damp skin, looking out into the tangle of moonlit trees. I’d opened the window all the way, so the curtains lifted away from the frame, flapping slowly over us, warm breeze filling the room, soft on our skins.

  Alix huddled against me, head on my chest, and kept running her hand through my pubic hair, fingers trailing around on my rubbery, postcoital penis, feeling, I suppose, her own ichor and mine. It felt strange, not something any burdar’d ever done of her own accord. Not something I’d ever asked for, either, hardly worth the effort, and not in keeping with what I thought of as women’s character. Indelicate.

  It also seemed... I don’t know. Personal. Intimate?

  Me looking at my own face in the hazy darkness. God damn you. You’re twenty years out of practice understanding women’s feelings. And never really had a chance to learn. Right. Sitting in a PX bar with Solange, Johnny Rexroth, and a few other favorites. Drinking dark beer, thick ale, sharp, rich dropshot boilermakers. Laughing, making all sorts of nasty jokes, about sex and violence, burdars, natives, poppits, Masters, what have you. Friends. Comrades.

  Staggering back to the crib lot, stinking drunk, weaving down the road, arm around Solange’s back, her arm around my shoulders. Singing. I can’t even remember what. The two of us burping in each other’s faces as we stood reeling in the yard between our two cribs, Solange making some wisecrack about giving Tzadi’s damn face a good workout, poking each other hard just a few times, screaming with laughter.

  Fuzzed out humor, amusement, remembering that her burdar Tzadi was an Armenian, with a rather large nose.

  I went in and held Hani down on the living room floor, sat astride her chest and did what I did. She didn’t complain, keeping her eyes shut the whole time, then helping me off to bed, sponging my face and chest with a warm, damp cloth, smiling as she tucked me in.

  I’d seen Solange naked in the junior officers’ bath, tall, slender, almost hairless, but looking like every woman in the world despite her attenuated Nilotic form. Thinking of sex with her seemed a little bit liking thinking of sex with Johnny Rexroth, whose burdars were always male, all save his wonderful cook Cerise, who’d been with him for twelve years.

  Alix was handling my scrotum now, rolling my testicles gently against each other, feeling the pla
cement of that little bump and cord coming off the forward end of each spongy egg. And realized she was quite good at it, touch firm enough not to tickle, light enough not to hurt. Not something I remember from back then.

  Maybe Benny taught her how.

  The wind blew a little harder outside, pushing the curtains up higher, making the trees move against each other, a sound like the rush of the surf against the shore. Up in the sky the stars were clear and hard, barely twinkling. Not much like the stars you see from outer space, though, the stars seen from the nightside of an airless world.

  Alix said, “I always wanted to know what it was like out there. I often wish I’d passed muster with you... or that there was some other way.”

  Another moment of realization. These people don’t even know about the colonization project. They don’t know how the Masters’ empire works, because there’s no reason for anyone to tell them. I tried to picture Alix as a colonist woman, maybe settled on A-IV’s relatively placid antarctic continent. She was probably too old for the selection process now. Unless the Masters decided the colonists would need medtech too. “Didn’t you ever go out before...”

  She curled against me, running her palm back and forth across the ridges of my stomach. “We went to Mars for a while when I was six. Something to do with my mother’s job. I don’t remember much. Red desert. Pink sky. Staying inside the domes. Going outside in vacsuits. I liked the low gee, I guess, for a while, but mostly I wanted to come back home. I missed the real sky.”

  That moment, getting off the starship. The sky for which my eyes were made. “I missed it too.”

  “But you never came home. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” I could feel the way that made her restless. Women always want you to say how you feel, even burdars, though they can’t press you for an answer. Maybe the answers they get, the lack of them, is why so many women seem to believe men don’t feel...

  Soap opera bullshit. Fossil social concepts left over from twenty years and more ago, half-formed adolescent knowledge. I know how women feel. Half the soldiers of the Spahi legions are women.

  She said, “Well. I still would’ve liked to go. Maybe I wouldn’t have come home either...”

  What was she picturing? The two of us soldiering together out among the Fixèd Stars? Going into battle together, making love afterward? Maybe she pictured Davy and Marsh out there too, along with all our other childhood friends...

  We talked our way into the night, Alix telling me about her life, the way she’d lived, the dreams she’d had to let go, making me by turns jealous and sorry. There’d been a lot of men, men who’d helped her hone the sexual skills she was showing me now. The image was odd and unpleasant, in my imagination a whole army of them lined up at her feet, waiting in turn for a few moments between her splayed legs.

  I kept telling myself it was silly to have any feelings at all. These men were just her burdars...

  And I was sorry to think of her moving through that long, goalless life, moving from the day of my departure to some hypothetical death, living for this little job and that one, men passing in and out of her life, strangers become friends become strangers.

  We made love again, Alix sitting astride me now, looking down on me, palms flattening on my chest, kneading muscle like a cat preparing its bed. And lay together again, damp once more, and talked. She wanted to know about my life out among the stars, so I simply told her.

  She grew quiet. Listened. Held still against my side. Training. Death. Burdars. Natives.

  I told her about the Mountains Without Clouds, and her eyes shone in the night as she tried to visualize the place I was describing. I told her about the windrows of native dead, and watched her imagine sorrow.

  I told her about the day we landed on a world very much like Earth, and burned down all those cities of concrete and steel and glass. Tried to tell her about a moment when I’d stood in front of a massed group of unarmed humanoids, stood in my black ceramic armor, while they looked at me out of wide, soulful brown eyes. Adults certainly, though I couldn’t tell if they were male, female or something else. Small ones that had to be children. Some of them silent, some making soft noises that might be cries of despair.

  I’d checked the duty rosters, confirmed my order checklist, and sprayed them with my torch, watched them fall in the flames, curl and blacken and die. Local things that stood in for flowers would one day soon bloom in the field of ashes I left behind.

  Tried to tell her that, but failed. What she wanted was the beauty of other worlds, the glory of my soldier’s life. Something to hold against the drear and limit of the world she’d known since I went away. Some way to confirm what she’d always imagined: that, wherever I was, I was happy.

  I wondered if I felt ashamed, but couldn’t tell. What does shame feel like? I held her close, and we yawned together, smiled maybe, and slept as dawn spread its first faint indigo ribbons against the night.

  o0o

  We awoke at noon, sunlight streaming in steeply through the open window, went and showered together, though the others must long ago have been up and about. As we embraced under the streaming water, I could imagine my mother downstairs, listening. Angry? Tears in her eyes, perhaps? By the light of day, holding Alix, wet and soapy in my arms, I couldn’t imagine caring.

  It turned out everyone had gone but Lank, who sat with us while we drank mugs of hot, sugary coffee. Alix was unexpectedly shy in front of him, eyes downcast, almost blushing, which made her seem younger than she had only moments before. That other Alix, the shadowy span of her adolescent girlhood in my memory, had been a little like that.

  Lank didn’t seem to notice. When we’d finished the coffee, when we’d eaten a little bit of fruit, the remaining fat heel from an irregular, hardening loaf of raisin bread, he drove us to Durham, left us at the monorail platform as we’d arranged. During the trip over, back up 15-501’s broken pavement, Alix and I sat together in the back seat, leaning against each other, quiet.

  Lank never said anything as he drove, never looked back over his shoulder. Maybe he thought we were fooling around.

  o0o

  The East-West North American Central Monorail Trunk was built over the roadbed of I-40, which had originally been laid down in the last third of the twentieth century, during the fading years of the Post-World War II infrastructure boom. It had been renewed, built again with a hard plastic roadbed in the mid twenty-first, then overshadowed by the monorail line, around the turn of the century. Private cars were still using it though, on the day of the Invasion. It hadn’t been returned to operational status until not long before I left.

  Looking downward now, as the shadow of the train moved along the shadow of the track, flying from pylon to thin pylon, I could see the old roadbed was still in good shape, much better than the old-style faux stone of 85, or local routes like 15-501. This scaly red stuff just didn’t weather, would stay intact for a million years, now that no one was driving on it. Unless of course, scavengers decided to pull it up sometime.

  Maybe they would. There were all kinds of people visible down there, living alongside the track. Little bunches of ramshackle huts, tents and teepees, the occasional still-intact pre-Invasion house, smoke coming out of its chimney. One fine-looking place was surrounded by a high fence, topped by rusty barbed wire, two big black dogs standing in the yard. There was a fat black woman on her knees, tending a rosebush.

  I pointed it out to Alix as we went by. She watched the place recede, and said, “Hard to say whose that is. An Overseer Corps supervisor, maybe. Some of them live pretty well.”

  Overseer Corps. An odd turn of phrase. I hadn’t much thought about looking into Earth’s real social infrastructure. I wasn’t going to be here that long. Would the fat woman in the yard be the supervisor herself, or merely an employee?

  Sliding east out of Durham, we passed over a wilderness of terraced vines, heading down toward the flat country. This was where RTI University had been, but all I saw was one big bill
board, standing aslant on sagging legs: “Planetary Trade Zone 93.”

  Beyond that, where the housing tract community of Morrisville had been, we passed over a broad expanse of well-cleared land, several dozen square miles of agricultural fields, different sorts of crops separated by bands of forest, crops under some sound rotation scheme, all the little hills carefully contour plowed. Little houses here and there, no more than whitewashed shacks.

  No machinery visible. Nor animals. The fields were full of naked black workers, toiling in long lines under a hot summer sun. One field was under the plow, its sod being turned under to enrich the soil’s nitrogen content prior to a Fall sowing of some sort. I couldn’t quite remember how the planting and harvesting seasons worked around here. It just hadn’t been important before.

  And the plow, of course, was being pulled by a team of husky men.

  Dotted sparsely around the complex were armed Saanaae, white blankets thrown over their backs, big straw hats on their heads. Very silly looking. Most of them were flanked by dark brown humans, humans usually dressed in white shorts, some of them with white socks running up to their knees. Some of them had on white shirts, females maybe.

  Nothing down there that looked like a Caucasian. Maybe there were dark Hispanics, but it was impossible to tell at this distance. We were down off the Piedmont Plateau now, passing over land that could be classed as tropical. No sense in using white men down there. They’d only die on you.

  At Smithfield, far beyond where Raleigh had been, the East-West Central trunk intersected the North-South Eastern trunk, which ran down the fine red plastic roadbed of I-95. The train stopped here to exchange passengers with other trains, people transferring, most of them heading on down to Florida, where the beaches were still fine, or on up to New York and the center of the world. It would stand here for a half-hour, so Alix and I got out to stretch our legs on the platform.

  This is flat country here, hot and steamy, stretching on into the hazy blue distances south and east. Northward, you can see the beginnings of Virginia’s long, low hills, to the west the faint rim of the Piedmont Plateau, topped by a mist of fluffy white cloud.