When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  She looked up at me, wide-eyed and serious again, the laughter and joy of our long, private walk put aside and forgotten. “We never hear about these things,” she said.

  No? Are the workers from the Chapel Hill bluehouse invisible? Maybe so.

  An altercation down in the cut, back a ways from the tree-fellers, where yet another gang was digging away at the dirt, breaking it with picks, leveling it with shovels, smashing large rocks with heavy, rusty-headed sledgehammers.

  Two heavyset women, women in uniform-like denim, holding the arms of a starved-looking yet muscular man, a third woman, slighter than the other two, long, lustrous blond hair tied back in a sun-brilliant ponytail, lashing him methodically with her whip. Even at this distance, I could see dots of blood like freckles on her face, dots splashed from the man’s raw back.

  And the whipped man? Nothing. Hanging in his captors’ arms, head hanging low, as if unconscious. His eyes were open though, staring into some other region of spacetime. Waiting it out. Going away to somewhere safe.

  Alix said, “They look like they’re enjoying themselves.” Flat. Bitter.

  I said, “Maybe they are. Who knows how life’s treated those women?”

  Alix looked at me, face expressionless, then turned back and watched them finish up. When they were done, they let the man fall to his knees and walked away, shouting at the other workers. The man stayed where he was for a minute or two, then slowly got to his feet, leaned and picked up a broken-bladed shovel, began trying to dig with the stub.

  There were Saanaae here too, standing in the shade under the trees at the raw edge of the forest, Saanaae dressed in hats and shawls and blankets, ID badges used like brooches at their necks. Saanaae already looking at us, hefting their rifles, one, then another beginning to trot over.

  I fished in my pocket for my own badge...

  Long, shuddery bellow from up above the cut, deep-pitched, vibrating in my chest, touching my intestines with a sparkle of induced fear. The Saanaae stopped, turning back, looking back toward the crest of the pass. A lone gray Kkhruhhuft stood up there, looking down at us, outlined against the sky, cradling a slim military weapon in her arms.

  Whips suddenly cracked in the silence, overseers shouting at their charges to shut their mouths and get to work. A muffled cry of pain. Neighing of horses. Rattle of heavy chains. Crackle of a stump being pulled, roots breaking, being cut.

  I motioned to Alix and we began walking up the hill, past silent Saanaae, to where the soldier waited. She was a big one, almost a meter longer than Shrêhht, I thought. Very weatherbeaten. One eye socket empty, showing red scar tissue and white bone. Big, dented-in region along the adjoining left temple, feathery tuft missing as well. One chela mandible gone from her left... hand. Tentacles twisted, as if they’d been burned. Big white burn scar on her left knee, scales gone, flesh smooth and glassy.

  I could feel Alix huddling in my shadow. And the Kkhruhhuft was whispering, a pulse of breathy laughter.

  A quick glance down along her spine, two cartouches painted in, one red, the other black. ID number for her Kkhruhhuft military organization, an indicator of high rank. Another ID for the human overseer corps and its local Master. Between them was a Kkhruhhuft ideograph I couldn’t read.

  She laughed again, fiddled with her vocoder box. “And you are?”

  I smiled, dug out my badge and held it up to her good eye. “Athol Morrison, jemadar-major Tenth Spahis.”

  Something like a slow nod, polite greeting, one soldier to another, a modification of the Kkhruhhuft military salute. “Midrohh, Daughter of Zemvrakhf. Retiree.”

  There was a commotion behind us, back down the hill, shouting voices, Alix clutching at my arm until I turned to look. One of the human overseers had a woman down on the ground, was beating her rapidly, really leaning his weight into the blows, grunting with each swing, using a thick, crooked piece of tree limb.

  Hard, ugly, meaty sounds were echoing off the forest.

  There was a Saanaa guard standing by, watching impassively, other human overseers ignoring the byplay. Slaves continuing to work.

  Midrohh said, “We’re building a road here, down into the Tennessee Valley.”

  I looked back at her. “Why?”

  She hissed softly, and keyed the vocoder. “Ask the local Master. Lovely country hereabouts.”

  Down the hill the beating was finished, the naked woman lying still on the ground, obviously unconscious, face marked with blood. The overseer walked away, shouting at the other slaves, waving his now-splintered stick at them.

  I nodded slowly. “It is a lovely place to retire. Why didn’t you go back home?” Back home to males and breeding and family.

  “This was my last posting.” She gestured at me with her ruined claw. “Too many combat honors. Not enough of me left to fight now.”

  It takes a lot to make a Kkhruhhuft say something like that. There must be more damage here than just what was visible. “And your family?”

  “They have all of me they need.”

  Meaning she’d bred for them, raised a generation or two of cubs, gone back out into the dark between the stars.

  Alix grabbed at me again, making me look back down the cut. Apparently, they’d dragged the jagged remains of a stump over the fallen woman. At some point, what was left of her must have died.

  And Midrohh said, “Besides. It’s easier to watch this here than... home.”

  I stood looking down at the mangled corpse, my arm around Alix’s shoulders, feeling her shiver, though the bright sun, approaching noonday, was hot on our backs. “I know what you mean.” I said.

  o0o

  Tawny sunset time, and Alix and I were camped beside a cold mountain lake, in a wide hollow among green hills, water smooth, mirroring the colors of the sky. The shadows were long here already, sunlight barely spilling over the hills, most of the light reflected down off dull orange clouds, hardly brighter than the bands of dark blue sky showing between them.

  Insect sounds. Some kind of dull, intermittent buzzing. Periodically, a thin, complex cry, a bird perhaps. The pale smoke from our little camp fire rose straight up until it disappeared.

  Alix poked at her hot meal, a camp-ration serving of veal scallopini, as if fascinated by its color, its smell and texture. “Where’d you find these? I’d’ve thought the last one would’ve been eaten long ago.”

  My own dinner was a fine vegetable lasagna, still thick and spicy, cheese wonderfully stringy, for all that it must have been at least thirty-five years old. “Lank had them. He’s got all kinds of stuff like this squirreled away...”

  You throw the little white packets in the campfire, or lay them atop the stove. When they turn clear, so you can see the bubbling contents, they’re done. Alix took a pull from her drink carton, sighed, and said, “I never thought I’d taste chocolate milk again.”

  Later, with the sky black overhead, spangled with the eternally lovely Empire of the Master Race, we swam in the lake’s cold water, splashing, chasing each other, grappling and groping. Came scampering up onto the shore, collapsed together on our blanket by the fire, droplets splashing like some incandescent liquid in the night.

  I sat cross-legged, feeding bits of wood into the fire, watching the yellow flames grow, Alix reclining beside me, wet hand on my back. Though the water had been cold, the night was yet warm, radiation from the fire toasting us on one side.

  Alix lay back, sprawled carelessly, open to me, a wonderland of light and shadow, dark eyes on my face, black hair fluffing back up into ringlets as it dried. She said, no, whispered really, “I remember the first time I saw you like this, sitting naked beside me in the firelight. Maybe we were still fourteen. I don’t remember. It seems so long ago...” Words choppy, far apart, pulled from the depths of memory, Alix falling into the abyss of the past.

  She said, “I think it was the night a whole bunch of us camped out in the woods up near the Eno. You. Me. Marsh. Davy. Those two sisters they used to hang around with...�
�

  Jenny and Marie something. Dos Santos? Can’t remember. Tall, thin girls, flat chested and bony, without the tissue to make a single breast between them. I can remember them playing basketball on the school’s outdoor court, thinking how really cool they looked, angular, all elbows. And so wonderfully coordinated.

  I remember Davy and Marsh arguing about them. About their hair. Davy liked it done up in cornrows, Marsh wanted it fluffy and free. I remember Alix laughing at them, saying, what with there being two damn girls and all, they could each have what they wanted.

  But Jenny and Marie insisted on wearing their hair in the same style, Like sisters, damn you! regardless of what anybody else wanted. What they chose was long thin braids ending in dark beadwork, which neither Davy nor Marsh liked. It clicked when they walked, which made it hard for the Liberators to pretend.

  It had been a brilliant, sunny summer day, like so many days back then, the six of us walking through the woods, following some long-forgotten trail beside Piney Mountain Creek, a tributary of the New Hope that flowed down from the woods off I-85.

  The guerrillas were hard at work that day, moving northward to the ambush site, talking in whispers about how many Kkhruhhuft we would kill, about how this time we’d finish the lot. We’d stay in character for a while, then the plot would fall apart, and we’d run laughing through the trees, chasing each other, stopping now and then to pick off a tick from one smooth, tan-to-brown hide or another, run onward.

  We were dressed for the climate that day, tight khaki shorts and dull green halter tops on the girls, though there was little enough to halt even on Alix then. Boys in a similar uniform of looser shorts and sleeveless mud-green tees. We all had fine running shoes on our feet, the best shoes money could buy, culled from the ruins of one store or another, from some fallen shopping mall.

  Image of us hiding on the embankment above the highway, looking down on more or less empty concrete. A couple of wrecked cars, a streamlined cargo truck lying on its side, canister caved in, a mass of shiny wrinkles.

  Hiding, looking out between leafy branches, watching for movement we knew wouldn’t come.

  Alix nudged me, whispering amusement.

  Davy and Jenny, who were more imaginative, more into the Liberators game, were side by side, peering out onto the road, muttering to each other about Kkhruhhuft devils...

  Dull, thick-bodied Marsh and dull sister Marie were crouched behind them, Marsh squatting, young muscle bulging solidly in his thighs, Marie on her hands and knees. And Marsh’s hand stealing across one slim buttock, finger running down the line of her shorts’ dorsal seam, feeling between her legs, pressing here, pressing there.

  Marie was motionless. No, not quite motionless. Moving just the least little bit, shifting her hips so Marsh’s hand would find a more interesting spot.

  Alix was suppressing a giggle, not wanting to let them know they were being watched, Marsh probably unable to imagine there was anything else in the world just now but his own fingers and Marie’s little crotch. Giggling inside herself, quivering, Alix was nuzzling against the side of my head. Getting ideas maybe, because we’d already been fooling around, a little bit here, a little bit there, for months now.

  Shadow.

  Moving over us.

  Whisper of wind from the sky.

  Marsh took his hand off Marie’s butt, twisted his neck, turning an astonished face to the sky, gaping. I put my arm around Alix’s shoulders, holding her close, and looked up, knowing just what I’d see.

  The Kkhruhhuft patrol boat was like an impossible iron blimp, like one of John Carter’s Barsoomian warships, floating in defiance of the wind, floating on wings of eighth ray, gun turrets pointing this way and that, waiting to shower lightning bolts down on the defiant few below.

  We kept forgetting it was real...

  Davy was sitting on his rump now, knees up, elbows on knees, holding his walking stick like some long, thin rifle. A magic rifle, with all the force anyone would ever need. He squinted down its length, sighting in. “Zap,” he said. “Zap.”

  Zap. I tried to remember that Kkhruhhuft ship burning as it fell, but the image was already faded, far stronger the memory of it as a ball of fire on the ground, Washington Monument crumbling to dust and sliding away into the flames.

  Overhead, the patrol boat flew on, following the line of 85/70/15-501 eastward past North Durham, beyond Raleigh, going who knew where.

  “Some day,” Davy said, “we’ll know what to do.”

  That was an article of faith for us. Some day our turn would come. We wouldn’t fail, hiding in basements, covering our heads and crying out in terror the way our parents had, when their moment came.

  Lying beside me now in the summer night, beads of water still clinging to her stomach, Alix ran her hands down the long blades of her hip bones, and said, “We believed so much in what was possible, then, didn’t we?”

  I nodded, not wanting to remember any more, only wanting to look at her, savor this moment. I would be wanting to remember her this way, remember how those beads of water shone in the firelight, like living diamonds, in time to come.

  I’d want to lie on my burdar, thrusting gently, folded away into myself, and remember Alix just as she was now.

  And Alix said, “Not everyone has forgotten, Athy.”

  A long moment of silence, fire crackling beside us, flickering flame making the shadows dance and shift, me staring at Alix’s mons, admiring the way the shadows danced around her pubic hair.

  She said, “Some people still believe anything’s possible.”

  She had her hand on my forearm, fingers running along corded ridges of muscle, following the outlines of the tendons on the inside of my wrist, cables that operated the lever action of my fingers.

  Still not registering. Just memories, that’s all. No special significance. I ran my hand up the inside of her thigh, fingers on smooth skin, feeling a slight laxness in the flesh, the way it would bunch up a little bit if I pressed harder.

  And, while I fooled with her crotch, running my fingers here and there, brushing aside hair, drawing out moisture, Alix began to talk, telling me about that time of dreams. Of how dreams were meant to be cherished, followed, held onto.

  I should have felt a hard moment of dread, but I was hypnotized by the hard reality of her instead, by the feeling of liquid silk on my fingertips, by the response of her, the way her body changed and shifted even as she spoke.

  Dreams, Athy. Reality. The great wide sky above us all. You’ve been there, you know what’s possible. You’ve come home again. We’ve been waiting for you.

  We?

  Too disjoint to follow. She tried to keep on talking even when I substituted my tongue for those fingertips, but, after a little while, it grew difficult for her to talk and breathe at the same time. Talking would wait.

  o0o

  I fed the fire again, putting in one of the large dry branches we’d found, feeding broken twigs in around it, listening to the wood crackle and spit, watching the flames spill upward around the fresh log. There was a boundary layer of steam forming between fire and fuel, curling upward, disappearing.

  A little bug came out of a hole in the wood, small, round, black, ran along between walls of flame, fell over the side and was gone.

  I sat cross-legged on the blanket, one hand on my own crotch, feeling the smooth, softened skin of my penis, like fine-grained velvet to my fingertips, and watched Alix sleep, face turned away from the fire, features almost hidden in shadow. She had one leg drawn up, knee outward, ankle tucked under the other leg, firelight shining off a damp patch on the inside of her thigh.

  Did Hani ever sleep like this? Did any of them? Probably. Though they were determined to wait for you, make sure you were through with them for the night, there were limits to human vitality. In the end, as you sat and watched, their eyes would droop away to slits, awareness fade, breathing grow deep and hollow and slow.

  Sudden stark memory of Hani curled up on a blanket,
knees tucked against her chest, head resting on one elbow, hair fanned out almost artfully. Breath occasionally catching as she slept, like a little hiccough, breathe, pause... breathe again. We were at our favorite beach on Boromilith, surfeited by sun and sea, the world’s ocean whispering softly, tide a flat, slow surge, very different from Earth, from any world that had a single large moon.

  Somewhere out in the darkness I remembered hearing Solange Corday, sighing softly to herself, murmuring, an occasional whispered question from her burdar, Is this all right? This? ... fine. Fine. More there. Yes, that...

  Both moons had been in the sky, barely picking out the thin line of the surf in wan gray light. I remember wondering if it would be interesting to watch them, watch her male burdar hard at work. I sat and watched Hani sleep, watched the slow movement of her breasts, in and out.

  Alix hadn’t waited for me, hadn’t even tried. Had rubbed her hand slowly up and down the back of my neck, down the upper part of my spine, held my head against her thigh while her own breathing quieted.

  I was expecting her to get in position, knees spread and drawn up, expecting her to wait while I thrust into her, wait ‘til I was finished as well. Instead, I heard her breathing grow slower and slower, deeper, more hollow, until finally she was asleep.

  If it’d been Hani, I might have pushed her into position, climbed into the saddle, gone through the motions. What difference does it make? The liquid is there. The animal heat.

  Cattle don’t care that they’re being made into steaks. All they know is their throats have been cut.

  But she seemed so beautiful, lying there like that. So... worthwhile.

  God damn it, you’re not in love with her. This isn’t the Alix you remember, it’s some middle-aged woman caught up in the web of her own fantasies. You’re in love with an old memory. A memory compounded of impossible dreams.

  So what is she in love with, then? You? Your memory?

  Just think about the things she’s been saying to you. Hardly coherent. But compounded of dreams. Of fantasy. Of... something.

  Roll her on her back now. Stick that thing in her. Forget about all this nonsense. You’ll be going home again soon. What difference does it make?