When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  In the shadows there, an armored Kkhruhhuft was sprawled, weapons platform on the ground, helmet off. There was a combat patch on her head. Quick look at the helmet. No damage.

  Well. Waiting for pickup, in any case. I was tempted to take out the phone and talk to her, but with Alix at my side... The Kkhruhhuft moved and the elephant started, shying away. Elephants are smart. I couldn’t imagine what was going through this one’s head, seeing a carnivore that size.

  Alix was holding the bridge railing, staring hard toward the trees, away from where the Kkhruhhuft lay sprawled. Gripping the bridge railing, whispering something under her breath. Something angry.

  I looked. Five or six grimy naked men there, surrounding a naked woman, a woman splayed on the ground. Men holding her arms and legs. One lying on top of her, another holding her head between his legs. At least, I assumed it was a woman from the positioning. Too many men on her to tell for sure.

  Alix looked up at me, disturbed, eyes hot. “You can make them stop.” Not a question. No uncertainty at all.

  One of the Saanaae came trotting up, a male, stopping before us. “This is not a place for you,” he said, English accented and sharp, but fluent. “Go back to your own compound.”

  I said, “Not a local, I’m afraid.” I showed him my ID badge.

  The Saanaa nodded, a decidedly human gesture, probably learned in the time it had been here. If I knew the Masters and their minions, these Saanaae would have forgotten their native tongue, lost what small nonhuman culture they had in a generation or two. He said, “What can I do for you?”

  I gestured around. “What is this place?”

  Alix grabbed me by the forearm, pointing at the gaggle of men, and said, “Can’t you make them stop it?” I could see that the men were trading places now, and were pulling the woman’s legs so far apart it looked like they might be damaging her.

  The Saanaa looked. Shrugged. Also too human. “What for? You wouldn’t interfere with dogs would you?” Alix turned away, looking out over the river, one hand linked into my belt.

  The Saanaa said, “We raise horses here, sir. For export.”

  Horses for export. “Whose buying them?”

  Another shrug. “I wouldn’t know. Ask your Master.” The Kkhruhhuft moved again, rolling over on her side, grunting softly, grumbling to herself as if in pain. The elephant bucked, pulling hard on the chain, and trumpeted, starting up a panicky neighing among the horses in the nearby paddock, bringing Saanaae and humans on the run.

  We walked across the bridge, turning uphill toward the forest, the sun now at our backs, coming down from the zenith. I heard Alix whisper, “That poor woman...”

  I stopped her, turned her around, hands on her shoulders, looking into those earnest eyes. “There are worse things,” I said. “We’ve both seen them.”

  She nodded, biting her lip. “I know, Athy. I just wish...”

  “What would you have had me do?”

  A small shrug, downcast eyes. “I know there’s nothing anyone can do for them, for any of us. Not now, at any rate.”

  Not ever. She moved in under my arm, put her arms around my chest and held me close. She said, “Around Carrboro you don’t see it much. It’s almost like... it never happened. I hate going into the bustee...”

  I could do nothing but nod. Maybe tell her, Yes, I know how it is... But I doubt that I did.

  We walked on, up a long, open defile, between walls of cool green forest. After a while, that infectious happiness returned, infecting me as well, and we laughed and talked, ran up into the mountains, holding hands.

  Ten. The Sun Slid Down the Sky

  The forest around us as we walked, as the sun slowly slid down the western sky, was a sequence of a light-dappled glades, hardly natural-looking at all. There was a winding stream, full of cool, clear water, water bubbling around stones, over sand, stream full of little fish, silvery and black, some with iridescent racing stripes down their sides. Plenty of grass here under the trees, enough sunlight coming through to make it grow, grass grown up in some places to knee height, in other places cropped short. Deer? No way for me to know.

  We were walking down a narrow dirt path, well worn, as if it got considerable use, Alix walking ahead of me, carrying a thin, springy willow-wand with which to brush aside the occasional spiderweb, fat orb spiders trying to run, getting wrapped in their own webs as they fell.

  She really is beautiful. You know that. Buttocks flexing, hips rocking back and forth to the rhythm of her walking. Curly black hair bouncing slowly. Muscular back outlined under her shirt, hefting the pack easily and well...

  I found that I couldn’t look away after a while, her shape filling my vision completely, blotting out the exquisitely feral countryside around us.

  Toward evening, when the sun was an orange ball lighting us through a line of trees atop a distant ridge, we stopped for supper on someone’s old patio, clearing leaves and dirt from a cracked white plastic picnic table, putting down our packs, breaking out provisions.

  Whoever lived here must have been well to do. The foundation was big and complex, though the house was gone without a trace, and there was an L-shaped swimming pool not far away, filled now with mud and scrubby vegetation. There was a garden too, and red rosebushes run wild, growing like vines.

  I cleared out the old grill, fishing the grating out of the weeds, clearing the brick hearth, taking blackened bones out of a bed of granular, rain-flattened ashes. Closer look. Limb bones. A small carnivore’s mandible. Dog maybe.

  “Athy.” Alix’s voice was quiet, not quite a whisper. Upset.

  I looked, and she was crouching by some weeds, holding something round and white, a small human skull. Looking at the crown, fingering it gently, inspecting a small hole. Not a wound. An unclosed frenulum.

  When I came to stand over her, she put the baby’s skull down gently and picked up another one, much larger. Flat above the gaping nose-hole. There was a third skull on the ground, this one quite large, with a pronounced brow-ridge. And a square-sided hole in the temple, away from which ran a long, irregular crack, roughly following one of the major suture lines.

  Alix put down the woman’s skull and kneeled, silent.

  I leaned over her and brushed aside the tops of the weeds. More bones. Ribs. Pieces of arms and legs. A very small pelvis. A dog’s skull, from a much larger animal than the one that’d been in the fire. The top of this one’s head was dished in, the brain-pan collapsed.

  Alix was looking over at the hearth now, at the little pile of bones I’d put aside, the little dog’s jaw. “A family,” she whispered. “With a baby.” She put her hand on my calf, slowly rubbing up and down, fingers shaking gently. The expression on her face was neutral. Anger perhaps. Or pity.

  She said, “Killed them all. Killed their dog.” A long look at those blackened bones. “Ate their puppy.”

  I toed the baby’s skull, turning it over so I could see where the spine had broken away from the foramen magnum. Splintered. One quick twist. Didn’t feel a thing.

  Alix slowly covered the bones up, pushing the weeds back into place, smoothing them down. She looked up at me, and I could see that glint of hard anger in her eyes. “Civilized men,” she said.

  I nodded, turning away, going to start up our campfire and cook our supper. The baby, I suppose, would’ve tasted better than the puppy. But these had, after all, been civilized men. And they’d probably kept the woman alive for a little while.

  o0o

  After dinner, rather than make camp under the trees of the dead family’s patio, we gathered up our gear and moved on into the orange gloom of summer dusk, climbing a steep, wooded hillside that gradually metamorphosed into a mountain. It was full night by the time we emerged from the trees, up onto the rocky bald dome of its peak.

  Maybe, once upon a time, there’d been a stupendous view up here during the night, a wheel of stars over the glittering lights of humanity. People had been living here for ten thousand years, had filled
the forest with a twinkle of electric lights for better than two centuries.

  A brief snippet of childhood memory: flying high over these mountains in an airliner, electric jets whispering outside in the midnight dark, my little-boy’s face pressed to the plastic window while my parents drowsed in their seats. Overhead, a million brittle stars, below a million-million bright sparks, the lights in people’s backyards.

  Now, there was nothing below us, only a bottomless pit of night. Alix stood quietly, tucked under my arm, arm around my back, holding on gently. Finally, she said, “Even back home you don’t see the stars like this.”

  The dim fires of Carrboro, the pallid glow of the adjacent bustee, were enough to wash away some of their glory. Here, overhead, the Milky Way was a river of pale silver, pitted with black and gold, a narrow arc standing up off the western horizon, cutting away almost a third of the sky, from Sagittarius setting to Taurus rising. The Great Square of Pegasus stood more or less directly overhead.

  “I wish,” she said softly, “that we’d been able to go out there. When I was a little girl, I dreamed about moving to one of the colonies.”

  To Neogaea, second planet of Tau Ceti, settled a full generation before the Invasion, home to thousands already. To Mina il-Seyf around far Zeta Tucanae, so remote no colonists had come yet to join the explorers’ fleet.

  I’d never met anyone who’d been to one of them, before or since the Invasion. Or knew what happened when the Masters came. But I’d seen the worlds of Alpha Centauri, the abandoned wreckage of the old scientific stations.

  Later, lying naked on our blankets beside the small tent we’d brought, campfire crackling beside us, slowly burning down to a bed of dull red-orange coals, barely lighting the area around us. We were lying with our feet toward the north, lying still, looking upward, watching the stars turn.

  Alix had been quiet, soft and gentle, almost hesitant in her lovemaking, stopping and starting, letting go, holding on. It made me wonder if she really wanted to continue, but she went on, going through her set of routines almost mechanically, and so did I, the two of us sighing together, moving against one another, crying out at appropriate moments, whispering our pleasure back and forth.

  A sense of separateness though, of distance, quite unlike the separateness of an attentive burdar, who stays within herself no matter how completely she is at your disposal.

  This was a self-enfolding separateness, Alix caught up in her own thoughts, not excluding me really, merely... going away from time to time, coming back with a start, going away again. Distracted, somehow.

  She said, “Do you remember your childhood dreams, Athy?”

  Which dreams? Children dream a hundred thousand dreams, of worlds that can never be, of worlds that can, of lifetimes to come that neither they nor anyone else will ever experience. I said, “Some. Not many.”

  “You remember how we used to dream of a time when the Invaders would be overthrown? We used to talk about what it would be like when we grew up, when we kicked them off the Earth, got their starship technology for ourselves...”

  I remembered. Abstract ideas, children boasting to each other. Ourselves captaining those great starships, FTL drive a great boon to humanity once the Invaders were overthrown, the best thing that could have happened to any of us. That was, of course, before we’d learned to call them the Master Race.

  Alix rolled up onto my chest, hands on me, looking down into my eyes. All I could really see of her face other than shadows was the shine of her eyes’ moisture, glimmer shifting as they moved. She held herself steady, clasping my thigh between her knees, and I could feel her damp crotch against my hip.

  “It was,” I said, “a wonderful dream. We had fun playing.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I imagine it can still come true. Imagine us out there again in ships of our own, like in all the old movies, masters of the starways...”

  Curious choice of words. Alix imagining us in the Masters’ place, perhaps, ruling their worlds for them, Kkhruhhuft working for us, Boromilithi our slaves and no one else’s, Saanaae our police, going to all the worlds, making sure the poor, pathetic natives would bow down before us...

  She said, “Remember what we called ourselves?”

  I nodded. The Liberators. A band of heroes come to free humanity from damnation and slavery. Casting off the yoke of the oppressor... In those days, among the smoking ruins of Earth, while the Kkhruhhuft walked among us, we didn’t know how heavy that yoke would become.

  If this, we thought, is the best they can do, then someday...

  We didn’t know how much time the Masters had at their disposal. Hadn’t begun to suspect what had befallen us.

  She said, “I used to wonder sometimes about all the other worlds. Used to imagine myself landing at the seat of some alien civilization, being greeted as a savior...”

  I imagined Alix landing on Boromilith, standing before a crowd of quiet, attentive Boromilithi. You’re free! All of you! Quiet consternation. Yes, Mistress. Will that be all, Mistress? How may we serve you, Mistress?

  Probably, the Boromilithi would have adapted. They’d only been slaves for a few thousand years.

  Alix kissed me on the lips, gently, softly. “You seem very far away tonight.”

  I nuzzled against the side of her head, felt her hair in my face, smelling ever so slightly of woodsmoke and ashes. “Memories,” I said.

  She kissed me lightly on the forehead, rested her chin up there for a moment. “From when we were kids?”

  Wanting me, perhaps, to be filled with thoughts of her, awareness of her existence. “Some. Thinking about all those other worlds, too.”

  She shifted again, sliding to the ground beside me, rubbing her hand back and forth on my abdomen. “Maybe someday...”

  Maybe someday you’ll see them too? Maybe someday the Masters will be overthrown? Alix put her head on my chest, snuggling under my heavy arm, ran one hand down the blade of my hipbone, to the place where my thigh joined my trunk, fingers resting gently on the big tendon there.

  She said, “It’s an important dream. We should never let it go. I haven’t...”

  Fantasies. Like the dream where you have someone at your side, though you know you are all alone.

  I once visited a world, I told her, which had no name. Nothing more than a Master ID number. Earth has a Master ID number as well, but it still has a name. The Boromilithi remember who they are. So do the Saanaae, though they no longer have a world. The Kkhruhhuft. So many other species I’ve met, gotten to know, know well or no more than a chance acquaintanceship.

  We stopped by this world, I and my comrades, just briefly, moving between ships, an expeditionary force on its way from one hot spot to another. Our scheduled freighter was late, the orbital station not prepared to accommodate us, so the Master sent us down to the world below, let us bivouac until the time came to leave again. No more than a few days.

  It was a vast gray world, skies perpetually clouded over, gray skies over gray mountains. Gray cities, dank, lusterless forests. Plantations out on the wet plains of the nameless world. Row on row of natives bending to their labors, walking silently through the streets of their decayed cities.

  We heard these people had been slaves of the Master Race for more than sixty thousand years.

  You could walk among them, and it was as if you weren’t even there. Stop them, hold them on the ground, pull off their clothing, do whatever you wanted. They were fairly humanoid, though very different in the little details. Some of us even thought it was kind of fun.

  But you’d do whatever you wanted, and then let them go. They’d get up and walk away, trudging off to their appointed task.

  You could hurt them. They wouldn’t scream, though their jaws would set, their thin lips twist. Threaten to kill them, they wouldn’t cower. Really kill them, they would only die. Maybe they were always like that. I don’t think so.

  Alix was silent against my chest, hand still holding onto the inside of my thigh. Fina
lly, she said, “I guess it’s hard to imagine coming to them as a liberator.”

  I nodded, rubbing my hand slowly back and forth across her back, scratching the area between her shoulderblades, feeling out the ridge of her spine.

  She kissed me on the chest, snuggled closer still, whispered, “It can’t be like that everywhere. It can’t stay like that forever.”

  No?

  After a while, we slept.

  o0o

  We could hear them in the distance by midmorning, a distant echo, the sound of axes ringing on trees as we walked up into the mountain pass, every now and then the crackling thump of a trunk going down. When we got closer, there were other cracking sounds, a heavy thudding. A slight vibration in the ground.

  Alix looking at me, unnerved. Me shrugging. I could find out through my phone, but... Why bother, really? We’d find out when we got there. And it wouldn’t matter to us, no matter who was here cutting down this forest.

  The trees ended at the crest of the trough, just where we were following a line of old stone, all that was left of some long-tumbled wall. Bright sunshine burning down on raw ground. Barebacked men and women hard at work. Axing the trees, though big saws would have been more efficient. Scrambling out of the way as they swayed against the sky, began to fall...

  Every face haggard, every body shining with sweat, every man, every woman gaunt and muscular. Overseers with whips. Bloody stripes on a back here, a breast there. It was getting to be a familiar sight.

  Teams of bulky horses, too. Hauling away limbless trunks, straining to uproot stumps while men and women hacked at roots, cursing, crying, falling to their knees, getting up again quickly.

  The workers were filthy, smeared with red clay made gummy by their sweat.

  Watching the horses dig in and rear, watching them surge against their harnesses, I wondered if this was why they were trying to fool around with elephants down below. They’d come in pretty handy, if they could be induced to calm down.

  Alix whispering beside me.

  “What?”