When Heaven Fell

by Barton, William

  “She seems like a lovely little girl.”

  A slow nod. “We’ve been... happy together. I wish you could’ve come home sooner. She knows who you are.”

  I remembered Alix standing by the lamp at the beginning of our last night together, eight years ago, holding wet fingers up to the light, examining the texture of her vaginal mucus. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  A shrug. “You were already long gone before I knew for sure.”

  “You could’ve sent me a message. My father could’ve called the Spahis for you.”

  “Your father and mother blamed me for what happened, once again.”

  “Lank would have done it for you.”

  A slow nod. “Yes. And he offered many times. Urged me to... let you know.”

  “Then why not?”

  “What good would that have done? What would you have done?”

  A long silence, while Alix ran her hand over the smooth, furry musculature of my chest, ran her hand down along my thigh, grappled among the nearly-shapeless hanging masses of my genitals. It was a question without a good answer. What would I have done? I said, “I would have come back to visit you and... see her. I could have sent you the wherewithal to live better than... this.” An aimless gesture at the dark room.

  “We’ve lived well enough. Lank saw to that.”

  “I’ll... thank him.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  A sharp memory of our parting moment, on the train station in Durham. Lank telling me that bit about compassion being his stock in trade. All right. But I’ll thank him anyway.

  She said, “Make love to me again, Athy. This old woman will want some new memories to replay, something to treasure on certain empty nights, when you’ve gone away again.” She took my hand and guided it back between her legs.

  o0o

  Morning sunlight warm on my face, that same smooth breeze cool on my exposed flank. Alix’s weight resting against me, a warm, damp mass heating my side, heartbeat a faintly noticeable flexing beneath her flesh. Arm around me, one knee up, weight of her leg resting on my thigh. Slow breathing, the breathing of sleep.

  I opened my eyes slowly, expecting to see the sky. Looked into Kaye’s eyes, not far away. She was sitting on the foot of the bed, below her mother’s rump, behind her legs, still dressed in her wrinkled linen nightie, looking at us.

  She leaned forward, resting her elbows on Alix’s bare hip, dropping her chin into a cupped palm. Twinkle in child’s eyes. Hint of a cherubic smile. “Well,” she said. “Good morning, sleepyhead. I thought you’d never wake up. I’m starving. But I waited for you...”

  Unfamiliar tautness in my chest. Waiting. Waiting for what? Maybe waiting for her to call me Daddy? Nonsense. Just something I once saw in an old video. Or maybe something from a children’s book I’d once read. All right. Hadn’t Kaye read those same books by now?

  Maybe not. Maybe she’d gone to a different sort of school. This was a mighty unconcerned child, finding her mother in a position like this. Unlikely that it hadn’t happened before. Eight years? Hundreds of times, at least.

  She reached across her sleeping mother and grabbed my hand, lifting it off Alix’s ribs. “Come on,” she said. “You can make us all oatmeal.”

  “Oatmeal. Um. There isn’t any milk.”

  She grinned. “Don’t be such a sissy.”

  I sat up then, slowly, carefully, watching Kaye watch me as I stretched. Saw her looking at all the heavy muscles and thick, ridged white scars. I looked down at Alix, face relaxed against her pillow, eyes closed, mouth open, breathing so slowly and evenly.

  Kaye said, “Come on. We’ll let her sleep until the oatmeal is ready.”

  A breakfast of milkless oatmeal then, loaded with brown sugar until in looked like a mass of half-molten cookie-dough, Alix stumbling into the kitchen just as we dished it out into three bowls, just as the tea-water began to boil, the kettle coughing unsteadily just before it whistled. Alix, wrapped in a faded, flowery, somewhat tattered-looking old housecoat, hair disheveled. Kaye grinning at her as she spooned out dollops of brown goo.

  Alix standing there, looking at us, daughter in nightgown, making outmeal with some hide-torn, underwear-clad old hulk.

  And later, Alix and I standing together in her shower, sun-warmed water from a rooftop cistern sluicing over us, wrapped in one another’s arms. Alix pulling my face down for yet another kiss. Me remembering how Kaye had badgered to join us in the shower. Innocence? Children are seldom innocent.

  Kaye watching from the doorway while Alix and I got dressed in her room. My uniform seemed inappropriate now, tight, stiff, constricting. Alix fingered the collar, looking at the two bright stars. “What did you have before? Three connected little diamonds?”

  “I was a jemadar-major, then. This is for a rissaldar.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Kaye said, “I do, Mommy. A jemadar-major commands a regiment of 1,024 troopers. A rissaldar commands a brigade of 16,384 troopers. He has sixteen jemadars-major under him.”

  o0o

  We walked, in the bright morning sunshine, Kaye skipping ahead of us through the woods, following the old trail down past Lincoln Park, muddy path marred with fresh footprints, many of them the barefoot marks of children, a bicycle track or two, through the collapsed ruins of a prefab housing development, crossing Bolin Creek on the trunk of a fallen tree, Kaye dancing lightly, where I walked solidly, where Alix teetered, alarm concealed in her eyes.

  The old clay quarry was empty when we walked by it, full of red, muddy water, a few white bones lying off to one side, where tall grass had begun to grow, still green with spring. I tried to remember what it’d been here before the Invasion, tried to remember walking up here when I was Kaye’s age. Nothing. Alix still just a skinny little girl I sometimes saw in the hallway at school, Master Race still nameless, Kkhruhhuft just fangy monsters in a history book, something that had happened when Grandpa was a little boy.

  Kaye fished a long bone from the weeds, a man’s thick femur by the look of it, started using it to golf round, tan cobbles into the water, rocks sometimes plunking into the mud, sometimes splashing down in the little pond, starting up patterns of intersecting ripples.

  The athletic field behind the high school was empty as well. Sunday, I suddenly realized. But the football field was freshly mowed and raked, laid out for soccer perhaps, or field hockey, the baseball diamond freshly chalked. Kaye threw her bone aside and found an old plastic pie plate from somewhere, tossed it at me Frisbee-style, caught it deftly when I threw it back. Stood below her, ready to break her fall, while she climbed a tree to retrieve it from a leafy bough where it’d inadvertently lodged, courtesy of one of my more careless throws.

  Once, when I glanced at Alix, leaning by herself against the rusty chain-link fence, I thought she looked angry.

  Walked them home at lunch time. Took Alix in my arms and kissed her. Told her I had a little business to conduct, that I’d be back in time for supper. Kaye watching us from the doorway, frowning. Alix looking at her daughter as I turned to go, obviously upset.

  Well. They had a history with each other. Things I’d never hear about.

  o0o

  One last time, fiery sunset in the sky as I walked down the muddy streets of the Chapel Hill bustee, headed back toward the remains of Carrboro. My father hadn’t come home again, the house dark and empty, Lank nowhere to be found, Church business keeping him busy. I considered taking my suitcase with me to Alix’s house, but decided against it, snapping the latches shut and leaving it on the bed in my old room, the room in which I’d never been a child.

  Scooped up an armload of autobooks, childhood classics, Tarzan and Mowgli and all the rest, took the package of precious sealed batteries, found a bag in which to carry them and left. Walked along, wondering what she’d think, seeing how some pre-Invasion program-artist visualized those old, dead worlds. Kreeg-ah. Grandmother plummeting down the stairs, wheelchair and all. Tenth
olm and Falconhurst. I still live.

  She’s the last part of the old dream. The dream in which you stayed and married Alix and lived happily ever after. Kaye the child we’d had after all. The child winnowed from all the uselessly spilled seed. Spilled into burdar after sterile burdar.

  Thought about Wu Chingda and those few stolen moments, the two of us huddled together in my cabin on a Master Race starship. They don’t sterilize soldiers. Part of the promise made to us. You serve your time, retire when you feel you must. Go home. Raise your family. Not many decide to do it.

  I could have decided when I came home before, my twenty-four years’ enlistment almost up. I could have signed for another six, maybe twelve then, but decided on the full twenty-four. By the time it was over, I’d have twelve service hashmarks on my sleeve, running all the way from wrist to elbow. Forty-eight years.

  How many times would I have made love to Alix in forty-eight years? Fifteen thousand times, maybe? A ridiculous number. What would it have been like, watching Kaye grow from a baby to the little girl she was now? What would it be like, seeing the little girl pass through adolescence to adulthood? Unimaginable.

  When I knocked, she greeted me at the door.

  o0o

  A last supper, a final night. Kaye shoved off to bed with difficulty, hanging back, looking at her mother with pleading eyes, Alix looking back with that same hint of anger. A look that said they’d been through whatever it was time and again. Faint memories of my own childhood, of Lank and Oddny battling it out, dragging their feet or rushing on ahead as the case may be, hoping to wear down adult intransigence. Sometimes it worked, more often not.

  Alix led me back to the living room, the same room where we’d first rejoined on my last visit, intent on recreating that atmosphere perhaps. She took off her clothes for me then and stood naked, skin very white in the dim moonlight, waiting. Rewarded when I stood and undressed as well.

  Last embraces have a painful quality to them, but it soon fades as the moments proceed. Hands on each other, then mouths. Lying down together on her old couch, sexual excitement waxing, because the animal within will have its way with you, no matter what else is going on.

  Once lying on the couch, facing each other, so very traditional, eyes glittering in the darkness, pretending to see. Again, kneeling up, facing the same direction, looking out into the moonlit street, Alix whispering while we made love. Whispering words I simply couldn’t hear. A third time lying on the floor, carpet scratchy on our skins, her back, my knees and elbows, very slowly, both of us tiring now.

  Then we lay together in the darkness.

  I said, “Alix, I have to leave tomorrow. You know that.”

  She sat up slowly, formless and dim in the shadows, head outlined against the moonlit window, looking down at me where I lay on the floor. “I know,” she said. “It’ll be all right.”

  Everything will be all right, as usual. Everything will get back to normal then. I with my burdars, she with her succession of... lovers, I guess. I said, “I’d like you to come with me, Alix. You and Kaye both.”

  Silence. Alix still sitting motionless, eyes invisible in the darkness. But I could feel them on me nonetheless.

  She said, “How? As your burdar?” Word spat out with bitterness. As what? I heard. As your whore?

  I said, “That’s really the only way it can be done. Active-duty Spahis are not allowed to marry. You know that.”

  More silence, then she said, “That’s what they say.” Pause. The sound of her breathing quite audible. Anger, perhaps, palpable. “And what about Kaye? Will she be your burdar too? Would you start screwing her when she gets old enough? Or merely rent her out to your friends?”

  Jesus. I got up, walked over to the cracked window pane and stood looking out into the moonlight. “Don’t be...” Um. No reason to call her names. I said, “There’re other sorts of burdar, you know. I’ve told you about Fyodor and Margie.”

  I could feel her standing behind me now, tension filling the room, displacing the last bits of dying passion. “Is that what you want? Me for a whore and Kaye for a servant? What will she do, Athy? Wash the dishes? Polish your boots maybe? God damn you.”

  Just for a moment, I wanted to turn around and slap her. Useless. Not the sort of person I’d ever been. But, just maybe, a hint of what I might have become, had I stayed home, had I married Alix and stayed to raise a family with her. Momentary glimpse, then, of a bitter and sullen old man, married to a woman full of hatred and contempt.

  By now my belly would be slack, my muscles soft, my hair full of gray. The alternate track to my dream of eternal bliss.

  I said, “Things are changing out there, Alix. The old ways are going fast. The Spahi organization feels that the pool of new recruits has about run dry. We’ve begun to establish schools to train young children, take them as young as seven and give them a head start, so they’ll be ready for us when the time comes. They’re called Spartaki.”

  Silence. Then a whisper. “And you think Kaye could qualify for such a school.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll be promoted to rissaldar-major soon. They’ll bend the rules for me, at least enough for that...”

  And, voice low, full of rage, she said, “Fuck you, Athol Morrison. I don’t need you. My daughter doesn’t need you. Go away now. Don’t ever come back.”

  I felt a startled pang, deep in my chest. Go away? Now? I turned around and said, “Alix...”

  “Get out, God damn you!”

  I found my clothes in the darkness, put them on, walked from the room and went out into the night, closing the door gently behind me, latch clicking home, blotting out the sound of her weeping.

  As I walked away, I looked back and saw Kaye’s little white face watching me out her bedroom window. I stopped for a moment, looking back. Waved. Saw her hand wave in return. Then I walked on.

  o0o

  Another bright and sunshiny day, North Carolina forests flush with late springtime, spring green turning to the rich, darker green of early summer, Lank bringing me back to the Durham train station one more time, dropping me off this time, not waiting around to see me go. It’d been a long, quiet ride over, Lank only asking, toward the end, when I’d be home again. Me telling him, truthfully, that I didn’t know.

  Home? No longer. This may have been the sun for which my eyes were made, but there were other suns I loved more dearly. A hundred million suns. Maybe the truth would have been, “never.”

  I stood on the platform with a few other travelers, listening to the rail hum softly, heralding a soon-to-arrive train. A small group of cloaked humans huddled together in one corner. A naked man in a collar, on a leash, leash held by a tall, slender, imperious-looking woman in a Sirkar uniform. A couple of Saanaae in body-sweaters and white shoulder-shawls, wearing the brooches of their interstellar police organization. Another young Saanaa, minding a basket full of squirming poppits. Something that looked like a dog with a gun slung around its neck on a leather strap, little arms with hands where its ears should have been. A pair of fat, green-eyed froggy-looking things, Masters’ sigils stenciled on their skin.

  Maybe I’d make it to the beach one last time before shipping out, see if I could find any Kkhruhhuft I knew at Cape Cod. Hell, maybe I could even stop by and see Sarah’s new home.

  “Athy.”

  A woman’s voice, pitched low.

  I didn’t want to turn around. Too many things in my heart. Too many doors already closed, me not wanting them opened again. I turned around anyway.

  An ugliness of pain. Even uglier hope.

  Alix was standing there, dressed in familiar jeans, a familiar leather jacket. Holding a small cloth valise in one hand, holding Kaye’s hand in the other. Face hard and flat, expressionless, controlled.

  In Kaye’s eyes there was only joy.

  I found I could hardly whisper. “So. You decided to come after all...”

  She took one step forward and handed me the valise. Dropped Kaye’s hand and turned, turned
and started walking away.

  “Alix?”

  She reached the top of the stairway and paused, one hand on the railing, not looking back.

  “Alix.”

  She clattered downward, booted feet rapid and sharp on the risers, going away, going out of sight. In a moment I heard the sound of a car rolling away over gravel. Lank’s old car, perhaps. Then I felt Kaye’s hand, small and warm in my own and looked down at her.

  She said, “Is that our train I hear coming?”

  Epilogue.

  There are planets that merit the name Paradise. Sêret-Anh, where we’d headquartered the Third Army of the Spahi Mercenaries, was one such. Blue on blue sky, infinitely deep overhead. Mountains and soft forests and waterfalls, deserts and seas, rainbows after storms, fluffy white snow falling over wintry lands, summer a delicate hand on your brow.

  I sat by the remains of the little picnic Margie’d wrought, my back on a sun-warmed stone surface, looking out across a little bowl of a valley, tumbled stones over which a stream fell in many small cascades, tinkling down to a clear, cold pool.

  Helga standing on a rock by the water, hair so blond it looked almost white, sunlight shining on her skin as she tossed back that thick mane of pale, wild hair. Eyes so blue you could make them out at any distance, whenever they were open. Arching her back, solid breasts rising, her voice a faraway murmur. Miriam sitting on the rock beside her, trailing her feet in the water, stirring the pool with her toes, skin so black she looked like a shadow. Matter and antimatter.

  Fyodor came down the hill, boots crunching on loose rock, skidding every now and again, and sat himself down on my boulder with a sigh. Sweat beading on his face, darkening his gray hair with a bit of dampness. He said, “They make a pretty picture.”

  “They do.” They made a prettier one in my bed, posing for me, both of them just twenty years old, new to burdarage and my service. Each willing to sit by quietly and watch while I used the other, or lend a hand, if need be.