When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  Well, well. Fancy that. It was like a bitter taste in my mouth. I said, “I’ll be put to sleep.”

  Alix had the decency to look startled at my choice of words.

  o0o

  Their camp was in a lovely little valley, already descending into shadow as the sun sank behind the mountains. A long, narrow bowl, like some kind of giant soup tureen, sliver of silvery stream winding through the bottom, bowl lined with dry brown summer grass, a couple of crabapple trees poking up here and there, a few swathes of stalky brown bushes, things bearing clusters of dark red berries.

  Memory almost there. The berries had some kind of natural ephedra-like substance in them, had been used by the aborigines as an effective folk medicine, millennia before the Western pharmaceuticals industry had come up with ephedrine.

  Above the valley, visible over the trees, were the ruins of some old church. Not a regular church, though. The still-standing steeple was bulbous rather than straight-sided, seemed to bear the remnants of golden metal cladding. An old metal cross, now standing aslant. Catholic, maybe. There were a few of them scattered throughout these mountains. Up beyond the abandoned church there’d be an old road leading to some nearby town, most likely also abandoned and in decay.

  Alix linked her arm through mine and said, “Welcome to Dorvo Valley, Athy.” Smiling now.

  Dorvo Valley.

  God damn it.

  Dorvo Valley was a not-quite-paradisical wilderness that featured in a series of early Twenty-First century fantasy novels we’d all read and loved as kids. It had been the focus of the Episode of the Last 360th Dorvo Egg in Crimson Darkness, a story so enchantedly exciting that we played out its complex plot over and over again, like variations on a theme.

  I was always Älendar Vexh-nem, the once-and-future Vaihadet of the shrouded world known as Käraiha, Alix his girlfriend Zzaine Orrn. Davy played her brother Raitearyón, who’d been Älendar’s comrade in long captivity, while Marsh was always Vastav Eov, rebel Vaihisor of Red Island...

  Almost the first time I kissed Alix, we were Älendar and Zzaine, rather than ourselves. Perhaps that excused the moment. Excuses we didn’t need for long.

  I think I remember Davy being angry, saying it spoiled the game. Not Marsh though, who was after the girl who always played Zir-Las Staa. Funny. She was supposed to be Raitearyón’s girlfriend, rather than that of the somewhat sexless Eov...

  Down under the trees on the far side of the valley, next to an enormous red briar patch, they’d set up tents of dull brown cloth, tents almost blending into the forest. They had cookfires going, plumes of gray smoke rising into the sky, giving their presence away.

  Alix took me by the hand and pulled me along. “Come on, Athy. Dinner’s ready.”

  We went. And I remembered that, near the end of Crimson Darkness, Dorvo Valley had been destroyed by a thermonuclear device.

  o0o

  Dinner was served under the trees, at a set of old picnic tables they’d dragged in from somewhere else. The church maybe, or the backyard of some nearby, luxurious quasi-rural home. A dinner of roasted meat, slightly burnt corn on the cob. Sweet potatoes. Kool Aid from decades-old packages, indigo grape and brilliant green lime, sweetened with raw crystals of cane sugar, sugar with a much different taste than the fine white beet sugar the Spahi commissaries were getting from somewhere else.

  Dinner served with a surprise, Alix, Davy and Marsh pleased by my visible reaction.

  The two Saanaae sat naked on the ground at either end of our table, eating meals of corn and sweet potato, as well as some dark-gray meat of their own that smelled a bit like a freshly-mowed lawn. Beside them, folded neatly on the ground, were their white cloaks and straw hats and brooch placards with Master ID numbers.

  One male. One female, her ovipositor dangling between her forelegs like a stiff cardboard tube, shiny wet inside when the light caught it just right. Most people’s eyes shied away. Their ID badges said they were attached to a police unit near the remains of Asheville.

  The male, sitting beside me, looked at me, eating slowly, listening to the idle conversation, eating his meat in small chunks, each bit with a dab of candied yam spread on top. The female seemed to prefer the corn more than anything else, biting it off bit by bit from one end, cob and all, sprinkling it every now and again from a shaker of what looked like blue metallic glitter.

  The male said, “So, Spahi.”

  “Morrison.”

  He nodded slowly, not a human nod, but some upward head movement that was ever so slightly horse-like. “Morrison. I call myself Mace. It’s a translation of my, uh, real name.” His English was excellent, only the alien resonance of his deep chest and heavy head giving him away as a nonhuman. Maybe a little bit like you’d imagine a talking horse would sound.

  “The last Saanaa I met was still using her real name.”

  The female said, “Stoneshadow. And that Saanaa you met was still in denial. Time for us to forget.” English almost as good, but contaminated by a slight accent. More like a talking dog.

  Denial. It made me want to smile. “Forget what?”

  The male said, “Our home is gone. Time to realize that this is our home.” He gestured at the woods around us.

  So. That seemed reasonable. Also a lie. “What’re you doing here, then? If you want to forget, that is.”

  “I still have a Master.” Dead-pan. Uninflected.

  I glanced at the female. Nothing. Those green eyes just too unreadable. Hard to know what these... people were thinking. Harder than the Kkhruhhuft, who I knew much better.

  The male said, “Well, Jemadar-Major Morrison. I understand you were on Rouhaaz.”

  Not a question. I nodded.

  He said, “I was on Rouhaaz as well.”

  I could picture him with a rifle butt in the face, with someone’s bayonet fishing around in his pouch. Or imagine it that way, at any rate. “At Souhaezo Valley?” Trees smoking as they bled milky sap, refusing to catch fire. Burning centaur bodies. Yellow-green centaur blood.

  “I was captured at Taxxaewi Beach.”

  I shook my head. “Never there. Sorry.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, eyes motionless, reflecting red from the cookfire. “Doesn’t matter. This battle or that one. This world. That one. It’s not Saanaae. Not Kkhruhhuft. Not humans. Only Masters.”

  I said, “You and I are soldiers in the service of the Master Race.”

  Beside me, Alix stopped eating suddenly. Davy and Marsh, farther down the table, were both looking up, watching me.

  The Saanaa said, “Why are you here, then?”

  I glanced at Alix. “These are my friends.”

  He nodded slowly, another delicate head-toss. “Just so, Jemadar-Major.” He looked down the table at the female, whose badge indicated a somewhat higher rank. “And our friends as well.”

  o0o

  Late night. Darkness. The summer wind a steady rush of soft static, branches chattering gently, leaves whispering over one another, as flesh on flesh, sloping walls of our tent flapping gently in and out. Thud. Lines growing taut. Softer thud, walls relaxing, hanging down toward us.

  Alix and I grappling on the floor, lying atop our soft, spread-out blankets. Mouths pressed together, tongues groping for one another. Hands reaching this way and that, palpating genitals, tugging at buttocks, squeezing here, there, nowhere at all.

  Nerves alight with magic energy, surging from our hearts to our limbs and back again.

  I could feel the rough, rubbery texture of her erect nipple in my mouth, marveling at its singular tastelessness. Idle thoughts distracting me from a full appreciation of her hand gripping my penis, squeezing, pumping gently.

  Fingers inside her, traversing slick stickiness, gripped by the internal tension of a responding pubococcygeus muscle. Her cervical os was a tiny, hard bump at my fingertip, like a little cartilaginous volcano.

  End to end then, my fingers still massaging away at her clitoris, trying to mimic that agile circling rem
embered from long ago, as if from a dream, face down at the top of her thigh, mouth massaging one side of a fleshy mound, tongue reaching a little way inside, tasting something that might be called an odd, animal sweetness.

  Feeling her fingers pushing at the engorged space behind my scrotum, drifting back to my anus, drifting away again. Mouth on me, mostly soft and moist and warm, punctuated by the occasional brief scrape of teeth, here and there.

  Maybe we shouted when it was over.

  I could imagine Marsh and Sandy in the next tent, lying together in one other’s arms, smiling as they listened. Imagine Davy lying alone in his own tent. Thinking, perhaps, of his wife back in Carrboro. Or maybe just sleeping.

  o0o

  Later, I opened the tent flap, letting the wind and moonlight in. Fresh air blew over us, making the atmosphere inside the tent, air heated by our efforts, seem like some swampy miasma. Devils rising from us, like dim and foggy clouds.

  We pulled one of the drier blankets outside and spread it on the ground, sat naked together, arms around each other, looking up at a waning, three-quarters full Moon. For some reason, the maria looked like real seas tonight, the five major ones interlocking, like some vast Mediterranean in the sky. I could imagine ships sailing there, lateen-rigged in my dream, like Arab dhows, sailing on the winds of the Moon. Ancient cities, some half in ruins, gleaming under blue Earthlight in that shadowed quarter, others flaming brilliant white by the light of the Sun.

  Dusty plains beyond, ridden by alien horse barbarians. Remote mountain tribes, who would kill and eat the lowlanders. Island folk far out in the seas. Cannibal isles. Pirates. Wars and fiery battles fought with the most primitive of weapons. Greek fire from bubbling naphtha wells. Ballistae. Simple powder rockets...

  Alix kissed my shoulder, sliding her hand underneath my arm, squeezing a big, hanging muscle mass. “You’re still sweating,” she said.

  I held her close, running my fingers gently down her side, letting my hand rest on the soft flesh of her hip. I wondered briefly what she’d be like, slimmed down by Spahi exercise regimens, wondered what she would have been like, still young perhaps, if she’d come with me. Come with me and survived.

  And I still wanted to be up on that imaginary Moon. Thoughts of the real one. Human bases and buried cities lying silently in the dust, measureless caverns collapsed, blown open when the Kkhruhhuft came. When I was a kid, you could look up at the Moon and see lights twinkling on the dark part. Could peer through a child’s telescope and see regular lines scored out on the brilliant white plains.

  If you looked long enough, you’d see the white spark of a spacecraft climbing away toward orbit. If you were sharp eyed, you could pick out the glitter of a space habitat or two as it whirled between sunlight and shadow.

  Alix leaned around my chest, kissed me softly on one nipple, tickling me with her tongue. “Are you all right, Athy?” Hardly more than a whisper.

  I said, “Just caught up in all the old dreams.” She was leaning across me now, laying her head on my thigh, looking up at a face that must be lost in shadow. My hand slid off her hip, cupping one buttock now, feeling her warmth against the breezy night.

  The wind picked up, blowing hair down into my face, Alix reaching up and quickly brushing it away. When I got home I’d have to have it trimmed back. You don’t go into combat with long, loose hair that can fall down in your eyes.

  She said, “That’s why were all here, I suppose. Because we can’t forget those old dreams.”

  Soft, bitter heat moving through my chest. “Do you really think you know what you’re doing?”

  She kissed me on the thigh, rubbed her face gently back and forth. “For a long time I didn’t,” she said. “For a long time I thought Davy and Marsh were crazy. Just playing the old games, you know? I thought it was silly. Silly and dangerous...”

  “Then, why...”

  “Because I was lonely, Athy. Because it made me remember what life felt like, back when... when we were together.”

  Back when we were children. “You do understand it’s still no more than a dangerous game, don’t you?” I was stroking her hair now, fingers tangling in all the curls, feeling out the smooth, round shape of her head. It seemed very small under my hand, like a child’s skull, hardly matching the visual image I had of her, remembered from daylight.

  Her hand was on my abdomen now, rubbing back and forth just below my navel, where the skin was folded in on itself, like soft suede leather. “You’re so... thin,” she said. “Thin and hard.” Her fingers slid down and tangled in my still-damp pubic hair, rested there for a moment. “I guess I believed that until the Saanaae came.”

  The Saanaae. Mace and Stoneshadow. Others, without a doubt. Many others. Saanaae thousands, millions, resettled on Earth forever. I said, “You know why they’re here, don’t you? Here as police?”

  She had her hand on my penis now, fingers moving around on soft skin. She said, “We heard about the Rebellion, Athy. All those worlds in flame. People dying all across the stars.”

  Despite everything, despite a desire to suddenly get up and just run away, I could feel myself coming erect under her ministrations. Could feel a hard tautness developing deep inside, as if someone were twisting a turnbuckle, tension evolving of its own accord.

  She said, “I know you had a part in what happened. You and your Spahis. The Kkhruhhuft.”

  I said, “The Saanaae rebellion failed, Alix. It was put down in just a few weeks.”

  “What if the Spahis had joined them, Athy? What if the Kkhruhhuft...”

  “There are still Saanaae in the universe today because they’re useful to the Master Race. And because the rebellion was futile, because it failed so utterly.”

  “They say it almost succeeded, Athy.”

  They say. What would Alix and her friends be imagining? What did they know? Precious little. And they wouldn’t know that the Saanaae rebellion, setting a score of worlds ablaze, was so pitifully small a thing that it involved no more than a few legions of Spahis, a handful of Kkhruhhuft regiments.

  No one’s even told them of the million or so Saanaae military police who joined us in the suppression of their brethren, once the hard work of killing was done.

  I said, “Alix, the Saanaae built an interstellar organization for the task. They had the power to move about freely. Could do what they wanted, as trustees of the Master Race. What makes you think Earth alone can succeed where all the Saanaae in all of space failed?”

  Softly, she said, “Humanity has an interstellar component as well.”

  I wanted to laugh, wanted to push her away, stand up and laugh, but her hands down there kept me focused and motionless. So the Saanaae would tell them that they almost succeeded. And invoke all those absurd what-ifs. What if the Spahis. What if the Kkhruhhuft. What if all the Saanaae, scattered to so many worlds of the empire. What if.

  What if God came back from that eternal heavenly vacation, just to set us free?

  Hell, why not imagine the aphids rebelling? What not imagine the mindless poppits suddenly waking up one day and going, My God, what have we done?

  Why not imagine the Master Race will suddenly begin to care how we feel?

  Alix slid the rest of the way up my thigh, put my penis in her mouth, working at it with her lips and tongue, moving rhythmically, slowly, reacting to feedback from my body. I sat. Waited. Stared at the silvery Moon. Wished for another life. When my orgasm came I heard Alix choke softly. Choke softly and swallow.

  o0o

  Still later, I sat alone on the blanket watching our shiny old Moon descend across the western sky, waited patiently for it to fall bellow the low, rolling mountains of the horizon. Watched those same old stars wheel, thought those same old thoughts about Masters and worlds and friends and wars.

  Alix slept inside the tent, naked on the blankets there, more or less face down, half curled, feet projecting into the wan moonlight, buttocks globed up, ghostly, surrounding shadow. If I listened closely, I could
hear the slow, hollow, start-stop breathing of her sleep.

  I could hear animals in the night. Things scuttling in the underbrush. The occasional faint, musical cry of a hunting owl. Very far away the rhythmic clank of some night bird or another.

  Once, a murmur from some other tent. A woman’s voice, gasping, hollow. A nightmare? A breathing problem? I wanted to imagine her making love. Wanted to imagine that, if only for a few minutes, there was someone for whom the world had ceased to exist. Someone for whom there was only the moment.

  I could feel the flat, hard square of the command phone in the palm of my hand, where it’d lain quietly for an hour now, while I watched the Moon drift across the sky, the wheel of the stars making it’s path seem to curve.

  Go ahead. Call Shrêhht. Discuss the information laid down in your query queue. Talk about this new development. You know how it’ll be. The Sirkar will already know about Marsh, will be watching him, waiting for the right moment.

  Pray to that world-famous nonexistent God that it’s only Marsh. And, please God, don’t let the Sirkar be involved on an institutional level.

  Image of fire from the sky. The world burned clean and resettled by some other deserving race.I wonder. Will they make us come and kill our own?

  Probably.

  Will we do it?

  Of course.

  Image of my Alix’s burned corpse lying twisted in some gutter, like so much cooked red meat. I could see her lying there, flesh mummy-like, roasted tendons drawing her legs up, so I could see the seared and parted lips of her vulva, burned clean of hair. Singed like a chicken. Waiting. Inviting me. Come on, soldier-boy. Here’s a nice burdar for you.

  A deep rustling thud from some nearby shadow. The Saanaae were sleeping there, legs curled under, torsos upright, cocked just so, arms folded across their chests, heads down and nodding in sleep. I could barely make them out, the shape of one or the other moving, shifting on the ground.

  If they rebelled again, the Masters might decide they weren’t so useful after all. Why would they risk it?

  No answer.