When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  I can see us both in the mirror, she leaning over the sink, hands on its rim, holding herself steady, looking into her own eyes perhaps, while bright Karsvoë sunlight poured through the curtains. Holding herself steady, standing on her toes, legs apart, while I did my final deed to her. Told her good-bye in my own special way.

  When it was over, she sat down on our waterless toilet, staring at the opposite wall, staring at nothing. Waited while I washed myself, motionless when I patted her on the head one last time, walked out of the room and let her do whatever she was going to do.

  And now, Hani would be on her way.

  They say the islands of Indonesia are still quite lovely, all those alien, Western-style cities smashed to rubble, overgrown by dark green forest, the forest itself filling back up with village of little huts, the old ornate temples restored to their original function. Bells and dancing and music and prayer.

  I never asked what she would do with all the money she’d earned, enough money to keep herself and her extended family alive and well, comfortable, envied by all who saw them, for generations to come.

  Would she take a husband now, someone who would be at her beck and call, someone living in the shadow of her wealth, existing to serve her? Nonsense. Only my own voice speaking in there. I could picture Hani doting, as she aged, on the children of her sisters and cousins. Their grandchildren. The grandchildren of her childhood friends...

  I held out my hand to her, and said, “These have been very good years for me, Hani. I’ll remember you.” It sounded rehearsed. Maybe a little silly.

  She stared at my hand for a few seconds, then looked up, squarely into my face, eyes unwavering on mine. And then she turned away, shouldered her little bag, walked up the lighter’s boarding ramp and was gone.

  So be it. I put my feelings away and walked slowly back to my staff car, stood looking out over desert Karsvaao for a long while. When the ground rumbled and shook I turned around, shading my eyes from the sun, and watched the lighter’s thick, silver shape rise gleaming in the late afternoon sun, climbing into a tan and dusty sky on its thin spike of pale violet fire. Dwindling, then gone, thunder fading to silence.

  I sat in the car for a while longer, hardly thinking, remembering a thousand nights of Hani, feeling them fade away to nothingness. Then I reached into my breast pocket and pulled out the pickup voucher. She’d arrived yesterday and was waiting for me in the burdars’ transit barracks.

  Sarah Morgan, it said on my little piece of paper. Seventeen years old. Well. I put the car in gear and drove on down.

  Eighteen. Magnificent Desolation

  Time passed, as time will, and I stood at the head of the lighter’s cargo-loading ramp, holding Sarah’s hand in mine, looking out over a broad expanse of alien beauty. Beauty that made me think of Aldrin’s words, standing on the old, gray Moon.

  “Magnificent desolation,” he’d called it.

  Seen from space, Kkhruhhuft had been like no other habitable planet I’d ever seen, with its clear, cloudless atmosphere, with its vast red polar tundras, highlands jagged with wind-eroded mountains, temperate zones brown with ancient dust, tiny seas strung along the equator, green with cyanobacterial scum, water gathering in all the little hollows between what should have been abyssal plains, great, gray continents left to be no more than high, lifeless plateaus.

  Compared to this, Karsvaao was Eden.

  I looked down at Sarah, Sarah quiet by my side. Drinking it all in, eyes wide, mouth slightly open. Astonished, perhaps, that such empty beauty could exist. Astonished, perhaps, that it had any right to exist.

  Dark crags in the distance, stark and angular against a cloudless, cobalt blue sky, Kkhruhhuft’s sun no more than a brilliant white spark in the vast emptiness overhead. Land between us and the mountains bare, abandoned, riven with old gullies, though where the rain could have come from, where it might have gone, no one could say. Soft, cool wind blowing out of what I knew to be the northeast, dry on our faces, carrying with it a faint tang of fireworks, of burning, of chemistry alien beyond knowing.

  Wind a faint, faraway moan, curling round the lighter’s landing jacks, around its steering vanes and angular engine hardware. And Sarah looking up at me now, eyes alight, afire with something very much like joy.

  “Each new world I see,” she said, “is such a surprise.”

  I nodded, knowing exactly what she meant. We started down the ramp, still holding hands, headed for the edge of the scorched, hard-packed dirt of the landing field, to where a score of unpainted gray Kkhruhhuft were loading a few bits of containerized cargo into a low-slung truck the size and shape of an antique skiploader, immense beings handling boxes and cartons the size of small houses.

  Shrêhht, they said, would be waiting to greet us at her ancestral home. Not far. Come with us, honored guest. Squatting low, almost eye-to-eye with me. Humble. Nervous, almost shy. These Kkhruhhuft were not soldiers.

  Sarah’s pleasure at her surroundings lasted for the whole of the long ride to a place called Hánáq, as the truck rolled through interminable expanses of dusty desert, as we followed a narrow track that wound up and down the passes of those stark black mountains, as we looked down from on high upon a tawny plain, studded with knobby hills, looked down on a silver ribbon of river that twisted between them to a distant green sea.

  It had been like this, in a way, since the moment I met her, surprising me, sometimes, as I expected her to grow quiet and meek, just the way all the others had. Expected her to become the very image of a burdar in my bed.

  Expectation can lead you astray.

  I’d found her waiting for me, seated in the lobby of the burdars’ transit barracks, one small bag settled by her feet, a mid-sized young woman with the light-chocolate complexion of many mixed-race North Americans who can claim West African descent, hair loosely curled, reddish-black, as if freshly hennaed, hanging almost to her shoulders, tousled in a way that made it look natural, though I knew that couldn’t be...

  She stood, recognizing me the moment I walked in, face uncertain, giving me my first look into those wide brown eyes, irises so pale that, in certain kinds of light, they looked almost yellow. Then she flashed me a bit of a tentative smile, and said, “You look a lot bigger than your picture.”

  I’d laughed, held my hands in the size and shape of a standard desk holo, and said, “Good thing, too.” Then she took my hand, and her fingers were warm and soft, her grip strong and sure.

  She’d asked me questions about Karsvaao and its people, frowned over a chain-gang of laborers grubbing in the dirt, exclaimed over the sky’s incredibly neutral coloration, and I began to wonder just where they’d found this one. Maybe just her age, everything in the universe new and interesting. You seldom see a new burdar younger than early twenties, and the luck of the draw guarantees you won’t get that many fresh out of their own version of Basic.

  Then we were at the crib, Fyodor smiling as he ushered us through the door, a little surprised when she took his hand, Janice, Mira and Margie staying in the background, though she kept looking over at them. They’d get to know her later, when she’d be moving into Hani’s so recently abandoned bedroom.

  I had her hand the little bag over to Fyodor, then took her into my room and closed the door, ready to do what I knew from trial and error was necessary with a new burdar, my hand lightly on her back as I showed her the way. My heart quickening, my step lightening with anticipation. An acceleration of hormones.

  They say one grows jaded over time.

  One does not.

  She stood still then for a long moment, looking at the freshly-changed, turned down sheets of my bed, a pattern of pretty pink and yellow flowers, terrestrial flowers, though I couldn’t remember their names, images of little black and gold bees flying among them, settling at the center of this blossom or that, and I could see a haze of doubt on her face.

  Is it the same self-doubt I experienced when the troop transport climbed away from Earth, carrying me away to wat
ch my friends die on Mars? Did I really want to come here? Too late now.

  I wondered too if she might be a virgin, given her age. Given that this was her first assignment and I her first soldier. I’d not been with a virgin since my first night with Alix, who was of course experiencing her own first virgin. This would be different. Maybe. Another little trickle of anticipation. A momentary awareness of my own inner idiocy.

  Then she murmured, softly, to herself, “‘...I lay me down with a will...’“ I wondered, for just a second, if she knew that was an epitaph. Most likely she did, for it’s on one of the world’s best-known graves.

  She turned and looked me in the eye, half smiling, half serious. Put her hands to her throat and pulled off a small, white silk scarf, let it fall to the floor like some heavy, diaphanous wisp of smoke. Began unbuttoning her white blouse, beginning at the collar.

  I remembered the guileless way Alix had stripped for me on the beach, at the North Carolina oceanside, on a distant summer day, already years gone by.

  Blouse unbuttoned and dropped. White linen skirt unzipped and dropped, sandals stepped out of, and Sarah stood before me, almost naked, breasts confined by a lightweight elastic brassier, hips barely concealed by a pair of simple cotton briefs. Waiting. Eyes on me.

  And, I suddenly realized, staking her claim. She would be here for a few years, four or six or eight, would be here, no doubt, when Janice and Mira decided they’d had enough and gone on home. Would stay until she decided her own wealth was sufficient. Then she would go as well.

  She waited, waited, made her decision to act. Slipped out of the little bra, breasts hardly bouncing, with the astonishing solidity of youth, nipples many shades darker than her skin, already crinkling around the edges, bunching up in the middle. Took off her underpants and tossed them aside. Reached out and took me by the hand.

  When we lay down together, even by the time we’d finished, I still didn’t know if she’d been a virgin or not, the absence of physical evidence hardly telling. A little clumsy perhaps, but then she did lay herself down with a will, which is all that really matters.

  o0o

  Hánáq lay in a bend of the river, a wide loop of slow muddy water that would one day, I thought, become an oxbow lake, silt up, slowly dry, become part of the loamy plain over which we were rolling now, fat, knobby truck tires raising a small cloud of dark dust that quickly settled on the low, dry brown vegetation covering the ground on either side of the road, leaves chattering in the wind, audible whenever the truck engine paused for a shifting of gears.

  Kkhruhhuft visible in the distance, a long line of squatty dinosaurs bending low, doing something among the plants. Here and there were other large animals. I had a momentary feeling of disquiet, expecting they’d at least look like Cretaceous herbivores, ceratopsians, maybe, or hadrosaurs. The nearest one looked like a big, brown baseball mitt with big yellow eyes, wide mouth down low, looking like the place through which you’d slip your hand, yellow tongue visible as it chewed up woody vegetation. A living baseball glove the size of an armored personnel carrier, maybe half-again the size of a Kkhruhhuft.

  Sarah was on her knees in the seat, face pressed to the window’s cloudy plexiglass, looking out at them, watching as the nearest one turned on its huge, stubby, footless legs, eyes rolling visibly, little x-shaped pupils following the movement of the truck along the road.

  Hánáq was not quite what you’d call a city or town, though large enough to be one. More like a Mayan temple complex in appearance, step-pyramids surmounted by small buildings, mostly the dun color of the native stone, but painted here and there, narrow stripes of scarlet and bright azure, gleaming little inlay patterns that had to be gold, sheets of what appeared to be burnished copper, pyramids separated by wide fieldstone plazas, fountains here and there that sprayed a thin mist of water, mist blowing away, dissipating in the wind, faint, blurry rainbows playing within. Planters full of scrubby brown and silver bushes, all of it looking quite dead.

  Small parties of Kkhruhhuft walking here and there, by two and threes and fours, standing aside for the truck, some body-painted, some not.

  Sarah said, “Look. Are those children?” Pointing out the window.

  There were a couple of Kkhruhhuft, herding a group of maybe a half-dozen things that looked like big brown ducks. Bald, scaly brown ducks. Ducks the size of horses. Heads bobbing back and forth as they waddled, looking around, mouths gaping. If we opened the windows, I was sure we’d hear them quack-quacking softly to each other.

  I glanced up toward the driver, who lay on a big pallet by the windscreen, taking up fully a third of the truck’s cockpit. Put my hand on Sarah’s arched back, and said, “Those are the men-folk, I guess.”

  She gave me an incredulous look, wide-eyed again. “Men?” Another look back at waddling duck-boys. A blink, a slight smile of amusement. “I might like to be a Kkhruhhuft, then.”

  Or, if you’d had the right genetics, a slightly less invasive upbringing, you might like to be a Spahi yourself. Easy for a man’s burdar to forget we’re half female, women the same as the men...

  I patted her on the backside, watched her wiggle on cue. She’d been good about that sort of thing, not resisting, not resenting, yet not acting as though anything were done merely as a duty. I wondered how long that would last.

  She said, “This place is really neat. I’m glad you brought me along.”

  Shrêhht’s compound was down by the river front, rambling buildings of stuccoed adobe surrounded by a low stone wall, gate wide open and unguarded, marked by two sigils I recognized, one for the Master Race sponsor of the Kkhruhhuft Expeditionary Forces, the other a compound of Shrêhht’s ID-cartouche and that of her family and gens.

  Shrêhht came out of the big bronze doors, stood by and waited while we debarked, while the driver unloaded our few trunks, watched critically while the driver backed his truck around and drove away.

  She keyed her vocoder, and it said, “I told her if she dented my gate again, I’d hold her under the river until she turned into a thrähhs.” No clue about that last word, something for which the vocoder’s simple AI didn’t care to do more than invent a symbolic transliteration. Her last whispered word had really sounded like a cat choking up a hairball.

  I became aware that Sarah was standing behind me now, almost up against my back. I half turned toward her, looking down. Her eyes were big, this time filled with something other than excitement. I smiled.

  She murmured, “Athy, that looks like something out of an old video...”

  I remembered Kong beating the shit out of that silly tyrannosaurus, which, in reality, would have made a meal out of that big, fat old gorilla. I said, “This is the friend I told you about. Her name is Shrêhht.”

  “Her breath smells like frying liver.”

  I looked up at Shrêhht, listened to the slight wheeze of her laughter. She said, “Let’s go in. I’ll introduce you to my family.”

  The building seemed larger inside than it had looked from without, its scale concealed by the scale of the Kkhruhhuft and their world. Inside was a great hall, sheer stone walls towering away to a shadowy ceiling of exposed wooden rafters, rough hewn from logs that must grow somewhere in this desert, walls covered with reed-thatch hangings, images plaited into them, hardly visible until you got close enough to see all the corded tan-on-tan patterns. Images of Kkhruhhuft. Soldiers. Battles. Killing. Armed and armored non-Kkhruhhuft. Mostly unrecognizable. Saanaae. And lots of humans.

  The big room was made to seem full by the presence of Kkhruhhuft, standing in little groups, each group marked by similar body-paint styles, or by none. Shrêhht taking us first to stand before a little altar, gleaming with the blue fire of a hundred little candles, surmounted by three statuettes, one high, two low.

  “Honored Mother...” the one on the daïs. “My sister-wives Atubôrrh and Vodrêhh...” Shrêhht glanced at Sarah, perhaps getting a little tired of her uneasiness, and said, “Vodrêhh is stationed on Earth just
now. She’s really taken a liking to the Gobi Plateau. We’ll have to go there next time we’re on Earth together.”

  I put my arm around Sarah, urged her forward, held against my chest, arms crossed around her. “I guess it’d look a little bit like this place. She’d like parts of Australia, too.” Sarah was still and calm, obviously no longer afraid. Maybe just caught in a little behavior loop, too self-conscious, too conscious of the odd newness of her situation, simply to stand and be herself.

  Shrêhht turned to the others, beckoning to a single long, rather lean Kkhruhhuft, marked with a very different sort of body paint from what I was used to seeing on soldiers, long stripes of alternating green and gold stark on the scales of her back, swirls of light orange on her breast. “The is my house-mate Zváiroq.”

  She whispered something in Kkhruhhuft, not wearing a vocoder, a stuttering phrase that sounded like a lion’s purr.

  “...and the household major-domo Nûmri-Äng.” This one was a little small as Kkhruhhuft went, standing on bent legs, lowering herself further, her only body paint an encapsulated version of Shrêhht’s family-gens device.

  And in the background, a dozen other adults, none of them painted, none of them introduced, Shrêhht leading us to a gaggle of brown-duck males, who stared at us big-eyed and murmured softly, like, “...borkborkbork...” little quirky noises all their own, a paintless nanny keeping them all together, Shrêhht running down a laundry list of meaningless names, “Rûq, Löhh, Slaaq, Mrëgh, Tuhhs, Vshât...” tapping each one in turn, eliciting a soft little “bork” in reply, running her hand gently along the back of the last one she’d named, “My favorite, I’m afraid. Quite spoiled.”

  Another unpainted nanny, herding a group of thin, lizard-like immature females, “Our children...” eight of them, looking up at us, eyes lit by intelligence and curiosity, murmuring soft words and phrases in a delicate, lisping version of Kkhruhhuft speech.