People of the Sky (3 page)

An expression of surprise and wonder lit up the narrow brown face of the rider. One hand lifted in a brief wave. Feeling as though she were in a dream, Kesbe waved back. The boy, or perhaps it was a girl, shouted something that was lost in the wind, then gestured ahead. The meaning was clear. Follow.

Still unwilling to trust her sense of sight, Kesbe pulled her white aviator’s scarf from around her neck and held it out. The wind whipped it from her hand before she was ready to let it go. The flier darted away, then returned with the scarf fluttering in the hand of its rider. The little figure bound the scarf about its own arm, letting one end trail back like a banner.

The flier shot in front of
Gooney Berg
, driving ahead into the curtain of overcast. Kesbe held the plane in line behind it. She fought exhaustion with new strength born of hope. Somehow she had been given a guide through this alien wilderness of sky. It did not even occur to her whether or not to trust it her numbed mind could only accept and follow.

She throttled back to stay behind the creature. The altimeter unwound slowly as she followed her guide down into the unknown heart of the Barranca.

The aircraft descended through layers of overcast. Kesbe kept her eyes fixed on the flier and its rider, fearful she would lose her guide in the rags of cloud whipping across
Gooney
Berg’s windshield. As she banked steeply to follow them through a tight turn, the warning shudder of a high-speed stall reminded her she still had an airplane to pilot.

The small rider extended an arm, waving left. Beneath blowing tatters of cloud, Kesbe saw slate-blue cliffs. A momentary hole in the overcast showed a ledge that broke the rise of the canyon’s walls. The creature’s rider gestured again, making it unmistakably clear that she was to land here on this rain-slicked shelf of rock.

Kesbe eyed it doubtfully. The terrace looked about two hundred and fifty feet wide, barely twice the C-47’s wingspan. She couldn’t see how long it was. She wondered briefly if her guide on his nimble flier had any appreciation of how much runway this big ship needed.

Probably not
.

Kesbe shoved that thought from her mind. The terrace was her only chance even though the landing would be rougher than the worst pot-holed strip she’d ever set down on. She would certainly pop a tire and at worst would collapse the landing gear No The worst was that the plane would skid off the cliff edge in a mass of flaming metal…She choked off the too-vivid images that seized her.
One thing a pilot shouldn’t have is too much imagination.

The ledge was passing by under her port wingtip. If she chose to land, it would have to be now. She made her decision and began mentally reciting the litany of her pre-landing checklist.

Fuel selectors, left engine to left main tank, right to right main, fuel booster pumps on. Don’t forget to richen the mixture or the engines might cut out just when you need that extra power.

Her right hand playing the throttle and mixture levers, she reached across with her left to zero the directional gyro. She suppressed an impulse to look out the window for the flier. It and its rider had done their job. She was on approach for landing on something as close to an airstrip as the Barranca would offer.

Remember short-field technique
, she told herself.
Keep wide on the downwind leg of the approach.

With the bad visibility, Kesbe decided to bring the ship in on instruments. Carefully she began the procedure, trying not to let tension rush her.
Airspeed, one-twenty. Forty-five degree turn, easy right bank and roll-out. Forty-five seconds on this heading…watch that clock-, this has to be precise…then into a standard-rate turn for a full one-eighty.

As the plane completed its maneuver, she lowered full flaps to dump airspeed. Now the landing gear. The hydraulic lever and latch were located to the rear in the center aisle between pilot and co-pilot. Under usual conditions it was the co-pilot’s responsibility to operate the landing gear hydraulics. She had to do it with a quick lunge into the center aisle while maintaining control of the aircraft.
Slam the lever down and fumble for the locking latch with one hand while pressing the control wheel forward with the other.

The strength of one arm wasn’t enough to hold the plane in its downward glide. The nose lifted, began to buffet. A stall warning horn wailed.

The white chill of adrenaline shock went through Kesbe as she snatched her hand from the lever and shoved hard on the wheel. She didn’t know whether she’d managed to lock the landing gear down, she could only hope for the hydraulic gauge needle to rise as she forced
Gooney’s
nose down, picking up enough airspeed to avert the stall. With sweat trickling down her neck,
she knew she had made a near-fatal mistake in lowering full flaps before she got the gear down. A glance at the airspeed indicator showed the needle still trembling at a dangerously low level She steepened her descent.

With three fingers, she nudged the throttles forward, picking up enough power to keep the plane from mushing. Emerald lights shone from the instrument panel and she felt a braking effect as the C-47’s wheels descended into the slipstream.

Kesbe risked diverting her attention from the forward view to peek out the side window past the curve of the fuselage. She had a wheel. The left side gear was down. The right side she would have to take on faith, since she had no co-pilot to sing back confirmation.

Air whistled past her cockpit window as the engines rumbled behind her. Ahead, growing more distinct through swirling ground-fog, was her refuge, a pitifully narrow ledge of uneven rock. Wisps of cloud streamed outward, indicating a crosswind blowing off the terrace. She lowered one wing and pressed right rudder, crabbing
Gooney
inward.

Glancing down, she saw the cliff edge pass beneath her wheels. Now was the time to haul back on the yoke, lifting the nose but keeping power…wings level, round her out and let her sink gently before chopping power…

No! She was still too high. Kesbe rammed the throttles forward, but the plane was already falling. The surge of power couldn’t save
Gooney
from a thunderous crash on her landing gear. The plane bounced up again, nearly jerking Kesbe’s head from her shoulders. A wing dipped.
Gooney Berg
veered toward the rockface at the back of the ledge, ignoring Kesbe’s efforts to wrench the wheel in the opposite direction. She endured another skull-jarring smash. The screech of aluminum on bare stone accompanied an orange fountain of sparks spraying from the right wingtip as it ground against a cliff face.

Kesbe shoved her toes down on the brakes and heard a tire explode with a sharp report. In an instant, the careening aircraft had turned itself into a maniac merry-go-round. The spinning force threw her against the side panel.

Pinned by the effects of centrifugal acceleration, she could only make futile grabs for the swinging control wheel while dreading the sudden drop that meant a plunge over the cliff. She lashed up with one foot in an attempt to kick open the overhead escape hatch, but only succeeded in putting her boot through the side window.

The noise grew louder, the punishing force more relentless until…

It stopped.

Kesbe lay limply across the two seats in the creaking aircraft, watching eddies of fog and dust whirl past the windshield She wondered if she had somehow taken a shortcut through hell to heaven. She decided she hadn’t. Her boot was sticking awkwardly out the broken side window and the control pedestal edge poked painfully into the back of her spine. She could feel the plane still rocking beneath her. A droning sound and vibration penetrated her daze, making her aware that the engines were still alive even though her flailing hand had knocked the throttles to idle.

She pulled her boot from the window, picking pieces of glass from her flight suit. Slowly and stiffly she sat up, rubbing a swelling lump on the back of her head and blinking back the cluster of stars that invaded her vision.

“That, old girl,” she said to the still-thrumming plane, “was a classic ‘arrival.’”

The cockpit listed to the left but not badly. She had only blown the tire and not collapsed the wheel struts. After knocking the remaining glass from the left side window, she poked her head out, wondering how close she was to the edge of the cliff. She feared she would see nothing but air beneath the left wing and that the battered wheel hub would be teetering on the brink. Instead,
wet rock and gravel spread into the fog on all sides. She faced the sheer wall of rock that showed her she had come to rest at the rear of the terrace.

One glance backward at her tire-tracks told the story of her landing. The plane must have swapped ends several times on the rain-slick rock after it finished bouncing. A chalk-white gouge along the rockface shone with bits of embedded aluminum from
Gooney Berg’s
right wingtip. Kesbe was lucky she hadn’t lost the wing.

Shaky with relief, she slumped in her seat until the sputter of idling engines reminded her she still had a task to perform. Now that panic no longer spurred her mind, her thoughts went leaden. It seemed to take forever to go through engine shutdown.

When at last the old Pratt and Whitneys coughed to a halt and the props stilled, Kesbe lost the battle with exhaustion. Knowing dimly that she should clamber out and tie down the aircraft, she made a brief struggle to rise from her seat, but her legs would no longer obey. She gave up She was as safe as she could be at the moment, nestled at the rear of the ledge. It would take one hell of a wind to blow her off now. With that thought, she let her mind slip away.

She had been ten when Morning Bird Man took her from her home in the suburbs of Kayenta up to the deserted villages on First Mesa. There she had walked with him in amid the closed, empty pueblo houses and now, instead of dreaming, she re-lived that afternoon.

Conscious of the leggy awkwardness that had come upon her that summer, the child walked beside her grandfather in the deserted village, glancing up at him as they went. Bajeloga was becoming bone and sinew now, from his ropy neck to the stark and stubborn squareness of his face. He had lost the roundness and stolidity of stature that had once seemed to root him into the soil. His fleshlessness was not emaciation but rather the strength of spareness. His body seemed to have lightened, as if anticipating a move from earth into sky.

She had seen images of ancient Hopi clan leaders from the beginning of the twentieth century and was struck by the intensity burning in their eyes. She had read the names in the captions: Lololma, Tawakwatipia, Yukioma. The syllables rolled from her tongue, the massive cheek bones of their faces became fixed in her mind. Bajeloga, born several hundred years later, in 2184, sometimes frightened her by his resemblance to them.

She watched his keen eyes study the sky overhead, resting momentarily on a wisp of cloud. Almost unconsciously, his lips formed the words of blessing that the cloud was there and hope that the wisp might swell and bring rain. Each time he saw a cloud, his eyes would light with the ancient hope. Kesbe would watch him, not saying the truth that they both knew, that now it was climate control and cloud seeding that brought the rain, not prayers.

Yet with the growing heat and aridity of the Southwest, caused by a global temperature rise, Kesbe knew that weather control technology was slowly losing the gains made in previous decades. Perhaps there would come a time when people would again plead to spirits for rain.

Barefoot, Kesbe and Morning Bird Man walked along the uneven rim of First Mesa, looking west. There was not much space to pass between the rear walls of the pueblo houses and the tumbled edge that fell away into the desert. Some buildings had been reconstructed during a brief revival of interest in Pueblo culture, but others had withstood time, refusing to fall. Kesbe and her grandfather sat down on a rocky point that seemed to thrust outward like a spear from the clenched hand of the mesa. Bajeloga’s faded, tattered canvas shirt and pants blended into the pale sandstone his seamed face blended into the late afternoon shadows thrown across the rocks.

“Is it sad,
chosovi
, Little Bluebird?” He turned his deep-set eyes from the sky to her face and she felt as if those eyes could wring from her every drop of what she was as easily as they could
pierce the sky and seek out the clouds. Those eyes could be hard if they chose: there was that strength deep in their brown-clay depths. “ls it sad that the people are gone and the village is empty?”

The wind blew dust around the crumbling corners of the pueblos, making a mournful hooting and wailing, as if the adobe buildings could answer Bajeloga’s question. Kesbe let the wind fill the silence before she drew her brows together and said, “But they went to find something better.”

He settled down on his bony haunches with a long “Aaah,” that Kesbe heard as a mixture of pleasure at her perception, and an expression of pain.

“They travelled such a great distance and then…”

Kesbe leaned her head against her grandfather’s shoulder. The hardness of it gave her comfort. “Do you think all of those people died?”

“No one knows,
chosovi
. The survey teams searched the worlds in that part of space where the last message from the colony ship originated. They found nothing.” He shaded his eyes against the bleached sky and spoke in a voice that had the color and tone of the adobe pueblos that made up the deserted village. “It happened so long ago.” He tapped the chronometer on his wrist with a fingernail ridged and roughened by age. “I think by the white man’s time now. All Pueblos do, even if we don’t admit it. But there are still times when the past seems to live in the present for me, as it did for my ancestors. That is when I remember, as if the migration had happened yesterday.”

Kesbe gave a childish snort of derision. “Even with rejuv treatments, you can’t be that old. Stop teasing me.” Yet inside, she suddenly quailed, for she did not know how old he was. Bajeloga was not her grandfather by blood, he had adopted the withdrawn boy who later became her own father. So badly had the fabric of Pueblo life been torn that traditional barriers between tribes and against intertribal adoptions had broken down. Bajeloga himself was an example, his mother Hopi, his father Havasupai. To keep alive the dwindling remnants of his father’s tribal tradition, he used his Havasupai name of Morning Bird Man. Those of the Hopi and other Pueblos who still remained on the mesas respected his choice.

“I am not that old,” Bajeloga agreed. “My memories are words, told to me by my father and his father before him and his grandfather before that. But sometimes they grow to be more than words, as if I had lived then and seen the last kachina dances.”

“Tell me again what happened,” Kesbe asked.

“
Chosovi
, you know that from your school history. At first it was land pressures, Navajos, sheep. Later, the electronics industries moved in. If you look out there toward the southwest, you can still see a few of the slab-and-stand-style buildings made in the last part of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. In 2062, when the Blue Star migration began, the desert was covered with them right up to the mesas. The whites called it Silicon Flats.”