“Sorry.”
Voice quite forlorn, in lost little girl tones: “I wish I could’ve gone with them.”
“No you don’t.”
Looking up at me again, back into my eyes. “Some of it was pretty nice, Athy.”
Some of it was. But you can’t go away and leave it like this. Can’t leave her here pining away for dreams that never were. Not fair. Not fair at all. I took out the phone and opened it up in front of her, said, “Do you know what this is, Alix?”
She shook her head, staring at the thing, obviously afraid.
I held the phone to my face, and said, “10x9760h, logging on. Level Five-high.”
The router responded, acknowledging my presence, then I logged out, folded up the phone and put it away.
She said, “You had that with you up in the mountains, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“Why?”
Good question. I said, “Alix, I’m a soldier of the Master Race. It means something to me.”
The expression on her face was something like a the grimace that presages tears, her eyes still on mine, shining hard in the lamplight. “It such a little world to you, isn’t it?”
“Maybe so.”
She stood then, facing the lamp, dismissing me, I thought. I stood, turning to go...
She walked slowly over to the lamp, standing before me in its light, but her eyes were remote now, turned inward. She slowly undid the robe’s cloth belt and let it fall open, letting me see she was naked underneath, breasts and belly sagging just a little bit.
Not looking at me. Not putting on a show for my benefit. Not anymore.
Standing by the lamp. Running her hand down over her belly, down into her pubic hair, spreading her vulva wide open, dipping two fingers into her vagina. Pulling them out and holding them up in the lamplight, examining the shining wet, spreading her fingers apart just a fraction of an inch, staring for a moment at a thin, glistening strand, gleaming like a bit of spider’s web, that spun out between her fingertips.
Whispered softly, something I couldn’t make out. Frozen in space and time now. Her face so very serious.
She wiped her fingers off on the terrycloth, turned to face me again, shrugged the robe off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. Put her hand on one breast, and said, “Make love to me one last time before you go, Athy.”
Like a hammer blow in the middle of my chest.
I wanted to ask her why, found I could not.
“All right,” I said. And we lay down together for the rest of the night.
o0o
Mid-morning, and the sunlight was slanting steeply down on the Durham monorail station, track already humming softly, a high distant keening that let us know there was a train moving in, not far up the line. Trees and vines down below, all around, moving under a steady, stiff breeze, gaps in the woodland opening and closing, ruins alternately hidden and revealed.
Alix’s silent eyes on me in the morning when we awakened. Completely expressionless. Not sorry to see me go. Evidently not glad. Sitting there naked on the bed watching me get dressed. Sitting almost as if she were already alone. Place between her legs visibly reddened by the night’s activity.
I had a momentary fantasy that she’d ask me to do it one more time before I went. Looked in her eyes.
No. Nothing.
I let myself out and walked away.
Walked home, remembering how the night had been, remembering Alix’s determined, almost mechanical passion. Not talking to me, just breathing, breathing hard, taking me into herself, lying on her back, legs spread as wide as they’d go, wrapped around my back, pulling me deep.
Three times, each more intense than the one before. Then she patted me on the back, smiling to herself not me, rolled away, mumbling something about sleep, left me to lie awake and wonder.
No one around when I went to my parents’ house, which had never been my home. Just Lank, sitting on the porch, waiting with his car. I went upstairs and packed my meager kit, came back downstairs again and we left, bouncing away across ruts of dry mud.
Now, standing at the train station, I watched the trees blow in the wind, wishing for another world, another life, another something. I turned to Lank. “Well...”
He looked up at me, unsmiling, hands hanging down, folded below the beltline of his cassock. Just looking at me. Maybe not even judgmental. He said, “I was glad you came home, Athy.”
I nodded. “It’s been nice, having a little brother again, Lank. I wish the others...”
He smiled, a very small, faded sort of smile, shook his head slowly. “They were glad to see you too. Really.”
I stared at him for a moment, glanced around the empty train platform, looked away. Really.
He said, “It’ll be all right.”
“I suppose so. But I would’ve thought...” Hell. What did you think? “I would’ve thought Dad might understand.” Being a Master-Race collaborator and all, you’d think so.
Lank put his hand on my shoulder, squeezed gently, took it away. “I’m sure he does, but... Well: You can go away now, Athy. The rest of us have to stay here forever. People aren’t going to forget what you did for a long time.”
No. I suppose not. “What about you?”
He smiled, wider this time, genuine warmth. “Hell, Athy. Compassion’s my stock in trade.”
Just doing our jobs, are we? It tasted like bitter bile in my throat.
The train came on down the track, hissed to a stop at the station, hung there waiting for me, filling the air with a soft vibration. I hugged my brother one last time. Then I got on the train and slid away into the bright morning sunshine.
o0o
By sunset, I was back in New York, back out to the cosmodrome, a hard wind blowing in off the sea as Shrêhht and I walked across the concrete pavement toward the lighter, small, low, scattered brownish clouds scudding over our heads, moving from southeast to northwest. A warm wind, scented by the ocean.
The lighter, dark, glassy hull reflecting orange sunshine, stood in the middle of a blackened starburst pattern of scorchmarks, rays pointing away in all directions, ramps down, cargo hatches open, frost clinging to fuel lines that hissed with the movement of fresh hydrogen slurry.
Ahead of us, a long line of coffled men and women moved, walking slowly, stepping in unison, chained at the neck like so many Boromilithi serfs. Not naked though, not being whipped, each carrying his or her own little bundle of rags and rubbish, some with small children handcuffed to their wrists, a few lugging babies.
Colonists, the overseer said. Coffled like that to keep them from getting lost. He’d laughed merrily. Just wait’ll we hit zero-gee! There’ll be puke and babyshit everywhere...
The overseer had a Boromilithi assistant, a quick, strutting, officious little thing with a clipboard under his arm and a stylus tucked behind his ear. I wonder if he liked seeing humans in chains? Seemed to like his job, at any rate.
Shrêhht and I stood aside, waiting for the cattle to board. There’d be someplace we could settle in at the last moment, after all the excitement was over. Just now, I could turn and look southward, to where the sea was gleaming on the horizon. White lines out there, gentle surf rolling up a grimy, abandoned beach, throwing up driftwood and age-old trash. Maybe someday the last of it will be cast ashore again and the sea will be clean.
I said, “Where’re you going from here?”
Shrêhht settled onto her haunches, perching on the ground like some gaunt, enormous, nesting bird, fiddling with her vocoder. “To take command of the Eighteenth Grand Phalanx on a world called Arwhôttenen, beyond Cygnus Arm.”
Where the stars begin to thin out at last.
A brief snippet of memory, standing in my combat armor on the surface of a cold, airless world, circling a star close to the galactic core, a star that orbited outside the plane of the galaxy. It was night and the sky was splendid, the core already risen by the time the sun set, emerging from glare-shadow like jewels
against velvet.
Then, later, when the last gauzy strand of spiral arm had set, the last sparkle of loose rim stars, I and my comrades could look out across the vacant deep. Faintly reddish globular clusters shining here and there, like fuzzy stars, dim, far away, so very few. The Magellanics like brilliant clouds. Other galaxies like little smudges, hardly visible at all.
Most of all, the overwhelming dark.
Shrêhht said, “It’ll be good to get back out there again. Get back to work.”
I nodded slowly. “I should never have come here.”
She said, “You had to do what you did, Athol Morrison. Don’t be sorry.”
Nothing.
She said, “It’s too bad your friends had to die. But the choice might have been between them and your whole world. All your people.”
Not even that. Marsh was dead the minute he decided to break his oath. Alix would be surprised when Davy came home again, chastised and punished, but alive. It hadn’t taken much to arrange that. Not much at all. Just an innocent, silly little dupe. Poor Davy.
But Sandy, Marsh’s sagoth lover, was already tortured to death, shrieking, telling everything she knew, as they cut away crucial tendons, as they pulled her uterus right on out through her vagina on the end of a big, toothy clamp.
Probably already cremated, ashes washed down some prison drain.
I was told they’d ferreted out several hundred Saanaae traitors, die-hard rebels who couldn’t quite put aside the memory of Yllir Waÿÿ. Tonight, in police barracks all across the world, little ceremonies would be held, sad Saanaae stripped of rank and uniform, then shot down by their closest friends.
And Shrêhht said, “It’s too bad they had to die, my friend. But if it had been my race, I would’ve done the same.” She stood again, looking with me down toward the sea. The sun was almost gone, setting behind all the ruins to our west, setting beyond the shiny new towers of ceramic and glass we still called New York. She played softly on the vocoder controls, her true voice a barely-audible bubbling growl, and the machine whispered, “Still, our oaths of allegiance are compelled, not owed.”
I turned and looked up at her, astonished, but her eyes were turned away now, fixed on the distant red hemisphere that was all we could see of the sun.
She said, “It may be that times will never change. Then again, maybe they will. Until that time comes... we can do no more than serve.”
The lighter’s warning siren hooted, summoning us aboard.
Fifteen. A Dry and Fiery Wind
Karsvaao’s air was like the air inside a kiln, dry and fiery, wind abrasive on my skin, sunlight reflecting off the stained white concrete of the landing apron, blinding me as I stood at the head of the lighter’s cargo ramp, shading my eyes.
Christ. Zero humidity, the inside of my nose drying away to aching parchment as I stood here. Thin, a little hard to get a deep breath. Air temperature possibly in excess of 340 Kelvins, waves of heat standing up off the landscape, world distorted, as though seen through water.
One long, hard moment in which my skin felt almost cold, then sweat started from every pore. Swell.
I started down the ramp to where a dark stick-figure was waiting, felt a light bounce in my step. A largish, diffuse sort of world, maybe ten percent larger than Earth, a bit less dense overall, surface gravity down around seventy percent. The sun, a slow-rotating F8, was a blue fleck in the sky, almost two AU away, standing now about twenty degrees above the horizon, throwing long shadows onto the ground.
Late afternoon, I hoped. That way it wouldn’t get any hotter than this. At least, not today...
Solange Corday, her skin tanned the color of bituminous coal, anthracite-shiny with sweat, clapped me on the shoulder, grinning. She held out a pair of opaque-looking sunglasses, matching the ones perched on her own snub nose, and said, “Welcome back.”
I dropped my kit, put them on, and looked out at a subdued and glareless landscape, my eyes still watering. “Fuck. Nice planet you got here...”
The spaceport was atop of some kind of plateau, I knew that much from my briefing tags, the horizon close, rimmed by trees of some sort, nothing visible beyond but pale, tawny-neutral sky.
Dust. Like on Mars. Yellow, rather than red.
Solange picked up my kit and said, “Come on. Car’s this way. I’ll fill you in while we walk...”
It was shady in the little strand of forest by the edge of the landing field, things only a little like trees, more like thick stalks of tall, dry grass swaying slowly in the breeze, rustling leaves that looked like muddy lace doilies. Cooler here, though not much, still nothing like moisture in the air, Solange telling me about the world, the base, the whole damn universe, what a nice bloke the regional tahsildar seemed to be, Lord Van Horne MacKaye apparently once Vice Air Marshall of the North European Aerospace Defense Unit. Wonder how many of his people survived the Invasion?
Great Britain, I understand, is still uninhabitable.
We came out of the woods abruptly, back into blinding sunlight that made me squint right through the glasses, onto the sullen-looking crushed rock pavement of a cliff’s-edge parking lot. Solange’s open-topped desert-khaki staff car, Spahi decal looking like it was ready to peel right off the door, was parked over by a rickety sort of wooden guardrail.
“Jesus.”
A better than average view. We seemed to be looking out over the whole world, down across an immense talus pile, eons of sandstone shards fallen from the sheer side of the mesa, over a brown world of bare, craggy hills, brown forests growing in the troughs between, buildings peeking out from between the trees, houses and whatnot made of the same dark sandstone, almost invisible.
There. To one side, a fortress-like compound, the Spahi base, with crenelated walls, our green and black flag fluttering from a tall staff. You could see right down inside, could see a batch of soldiers drilling in the sun.
I nodded that way. “New graduates?”
She laughed, hopping into the driver’s seat, wincing and leaning away from blistered brown upholstery. “Came in last month. Not a one over twenty, most of them still scarred-up from Alpha Cee.”
“This place must be a shock.”
Another laugh, pressing the car’s starter. I could feel an unsteady vibration in my buttocks. Equipment not in very good order. Have to see about that.
I could feel the ultraviolet glare off the Master’s castle right through the sunglasses, feel it prickling on my skin. It was standing up on another tall crag, beyond the fortress, dark black, as if in silhouette, reflecting brilliant pearls of light from an occasional odd angle.
“They have bees around here?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
Far away, remote, more or less beyond the horizon, protruding over it, I could see a range of angular, reddish mountains.
o0o
It took a while to get to the base, Solange chattering away about this and that as we followed a narrow ramp of a road down the side of the mesa, a road too narrow for two cars this size to pass each other most places. There were pull-offs every kilometer or so, but I hated to think about backing up.
Down on the ground it was hotter still, a brooding sort of heat, low spots blanketed by bits of dusty haze, by chaff-like stuff that seemed to be falling out of the trees, but there was life evident everywhere. Things like lizards. Things like bugs. All of them cast in shades of brown and tan, like little stone statuettes, like new-cast bronze. Once I caught a brief glimpse of something the size of a mouse that looked like it was made from molten gold.
Solange said, “Don’t let its looks fool you. This is a pretty nice world.” She looked over at me and grinned, grabbed the wheel a little harder as the car lurched and veered toward the side of the road, bouncing over some big, angular rock or another. “Protein compatibility. We can eat local stuff, and it tastes pretty good...”
We passed by a little bit of town, hovels squatting among the trees, and I got my first look at the n
atives, a gang of laborers digging some kind of dusty trench beside the road, supervised by one of their own kind, a tall, slim Karsvoë wearing a long white robe, his Master’s emblem worn in the middle of the breast, like a miniature shield.
Solange grinned again. “You see?”
The laborers were naked, and they were not bad-looking people, tall, thin, lizardy sorts, heads a bit bird-like, pale tan muzzles and big, shiny black eyes, with long, skinny arms and legs, short fat tails. These things look like little dinosaurs, I realized, like troödons. Stuff like tufted brown hair on their backs, or maybe very thin feathers. Like troödons cross-bred with anorexic chimpanzees.
They turned to look at us as we drove by, and I said, “Yeah. I guess I do.” Some of them had flabby appendages hanging between their legs. Others had what looked like puckered little cloacae.
She said, “I think it’s funny as hell. Wait’ll you hear some of the shit I have to tell you...”
o0o
The junior officers’ housing was on a steep, jagged, bare-rock hillside opposite the fortress, a cluster of flat-roofed, adobe and sandstone bungalows, built into recesses in the almost-cliffside, with ornate doors and narrow, dark windows. Native construction. Probably a good idea.
Solange dropped me off on a dusty roadside at the end of a short flagstone walkway, tossed me my kit, and said, “Pick you up in about three hours. We’ll do the tour.” Rumbled away in a cloud of dust, shouting something back that may not have been in English and probably wasn’t a hearty hi-ho Silver.
All right. This is supposed to be easy. Go in now and do whatever it is you’re going to do.
I turned, walked up the walk, and, somehow, the door was open in front of me, Fyodor, dressed up in white linen, face wrinkled around his smile, stiff hair the color of ripe wheat, was reaching out to take my bag, put his arm around my shoulders, usher me inside.
It was dark and cool, and I could smell something cooking. Pot roast. My mouth suddenly started to water.
“Welcome home, sir...” Fyodor’s slight Russian accent, which had been much heavier when he’d come into my service six years ago, was as nice a symbol of welcome as I could’ve imagined. And...
When Heaven Fell Page 25