People of the Sky (31 page)

Now she breathed the aronan’s essence and it stank in her nostrils.
Everyone lied to me. Sahacat, Nyentiwakay and most of all you. You made me think I was loved. Is the caterpillar also seduced to the paralyzing sting of the wasp to lie helpless while the wasp lays its eggs? I won’t be your caterpillar, Bacqui Iba.

The rushing wings passed once overhead, faded and then returned. Kesbe tilted her face up in the darkness. She knew her betrayal and rage were rising with her answering scent. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks as she ran with the boy’s weight tearing at her arms. She cursed the part of her that even now could love Baqui Iba because she could never forget the one last flight. Part of her bled inside when she caught the note of bewilderment that quickly turned to anguish in the odor blowing to her from the flier.

She gritted her teeth, urged Chamol on, ignored Imiya’s groans and feeble struggles. They were almost to the trailhead when the flier swooped so low that she felt the strong wind of its passing. It alighted on the trail, turning to face her. The eyes caught starlight, their facets shining with a pale gleam. Its antennae were silvered feathers. Darkness hid the rest of its face so that the most insect-like features were all she saw.

It moved and she heard the dry clicking of one chitin surface against another. The odor it sent was heavy, musty, with the sharp sting of hurt.

“I was a fool then,” Kesbe snarled back both in words and scents. “I was a trusting, believing fool. Now I know the truth about you and your kind.”

“Then what about this boy? What do you smell in him, Baqui Iba? Is he happy with what he holds in his guts? Is that why he writhes in my arms?”

“I’d like to believe that,” Kesbe said bitterly. “Stand aside, Baqui Iba.”

She took a deep breath. “No. Go away.”

The aronan took one step toward her. Quickly she changed places with Chamol, taking the front. Baqui Iba sent again, but the terror and rage in her mind blocked the words from forming. Again the barrier was between them and this time Kesbe was grateful. She formed the surging emotions into an angry scent blast and loosed it toward the aronan. It retreated, its antennae curled tightly. There was a stinging like the odor of molten metal in her nose, a harsh actinic scent. Then the creature was gone and the path to
Gooney Berg
stood open.

On the mesa-top, Kesbe staggered toward the C-47’s outline against the stars, her arms aching from Imiya’s weight. She felt Chamol stumble against her, lose pace and nearly fall. The Pai woman’s breath rasped in her ears. The bulky form in the blanket gave a moan.

For one ludicrous, yet terrifying instant, Kesbe thought she had lost the cargo-door keys, but she found them in the depths of her coverall pocket. With a clunk and squeak, the door opened. Kesbe switched on the cabin lights. The two women hauled Imiya inside, laid him down on a pile of tarps. He clutched his swollen belly through the pile of blankets and moaned again,
louder. His voice had a raw edge of pain that sent Kesbe scuttling forward to find her pharmaceutical kit.

She got a syringe with painkiller. Before Chamol could say anything, she had the needle in the boy’s arm-vein and was pressing down on the plunger. She saw Chamol grimace in dismay.

“This sting takes away pain,” Kesbe said quickly, turning to dog the cargo door against any intruders. “Help me get him forward.”

She grabbed the youth under the arms while Chamol took Imiya’s feet. As they hauled him along the companionway past the bulkheads, the blanket slipped from his bloated stomach. Again, something moved inside, protesting the jouncing. She flipped the blanket back over him as revulsion stabbed her own belly. She did not want to see.

The painkiller seemed to help. His eyes grew dazed, his mouth slack. He was belted into the copilot’s seat with Chamol crouching behind. Kesbe slipped into the left side, busied herself with take-off preparations. She was grateful that her mind acted mechanically, pushing aside distractions.

Gyro. Mags. Starter. Her hand swept across the row of bat switches. A pump whined and banged as the hydraulics came to life. One motor ground, sputtered, faltered. She clenched her teeth, hoping that the electrical system still had enough juice and tried again. This time the big radial engine caught, snorting indignantly at having to perform without a battery cart. The other engine also grumbled, belching out a plume of oily smoke.

“This time, no return,” said Kesbe, looking over her shoulder at the Pai woman. Chamol nodded tightly.

With a blast from the offside prop, she pivoted
Gooney
around, countering the turn by use of the opposite engine. From her twelve-foot perch in the cockpit, she surveyed the mesa-top. It was barely lit from a sun still hidden below the horizon—too early for take-off on visual flight procedures, unless she knew the runway well enough. She decided that she did.

She bent down, threw the lever that locked the C-47’s tail-wheel, checked both her passengers once more. Chamol looked pale but determined. Imiya had fallen into a troubled sleep, the thing inside him evidently quiescent. Perhaps the painkiller had affected it. Hopefully once they were in the air, repeated doses would keep it that way until they reached Canaback.

She stood on the brakes as she pushed the throttles to full take-off and held the plane there, feeling its engines surging. As soon as she lifted her toes,
Gooney
began to track down the mesa, wheels bumping over hidden stones. As the plane gathered momentum and started to lift, Imiya stirred in his seat.

He uttered a mournful bubbling cry that made Kesbe jerk her head toward him in the same instant that she was reaching for the lever to raise the landing gear. He gasped hugely, straining up against the harness. His legs went rigid, his head arched back and his belly thrust upward like that of a woman in labor…

“No!” he cried, clawing at his stomach. “No, it must stay within. It is the only chance I have!”

“Chamol, do something!” Kesbe yelled, pushing forward on the yoke, for in those few seconds of inattention, the plane had begun to climb too steeply and was wallowing toward a stall.

The Pai woman spun back to get the medical kit. Imiya was rigid, legs starting to splay apart in the rudder-pedal well. Kesbe saw a glimpse of muscle contractions that banded and squeezed the mass of whatever was in his stomach. Fluid began to run from between his legs, darkening the seat and puddling on the floor.

“No,” he sobbed. “It must stay. Even though it hurts me, it must live…it must live…” He forced his hands between his legs as if he could stop his body from expelling the larval aronan Sahacat had forced him to bear.

“Chamol!” Kesbe screamed. She couldn’t fly the plane with something like this going on nearly on top of her. Her stomach was doing flip-flops from fright and revulsion and the only thing holding her together was the fierce need to concentrate on the aircraft.

She pointed the nose down. Enough mesa was left for her to land. Imiya bucked and writhed in his seat harness while Kesbe hung onto the wheel, trying not to imagine what might burst out of him and suppressing an irrational but powerful urge to climb out of her seat and flee into the cargo bay. Chamol ran in with a white face and the medical kit.

“Get him out of here!” Kesbe hissed, but her voice was drowned out by a breathy grunt from the youth as he drew up his knees. From the corner of her eye Kesbe saw a strong contraction draw down the upper part of his abdomen. She had all too close a view of what was happening. She saw a strange opening resembling a vulva directly behind his gentials. It bulged and swelled like a woman’s birthway when the baby is crowning, but this was no human infant. Something white and glistening slithered halfway out.

A grimace distorted Imiya’s flushed face. He heaved and cried aloud as he expelled the parasite. It flopped into the rudder pedal well in front of his seat.

Kesbe heard it flapping about wetly, the sound making her feel sick. She felt even worse an instant later when she realized her dual rudder controls had gone strangely stiff she couldn’t press left rudder. Something had caught beneath the copilot’s pedal on Imiya’s side, jamming the mechanical linkage. She had a good guess what it was. She tramped hard on the pedal, hearing an increased frenzy of trashing from the opposite well.

She glanced sideways to where Chamol was trying to lift the panting youth from his seat. “Forget him,” she said shakily in English, then switched to Pai. “Get that thing out of there,” she gestured frantically. “It’s stuck!”

Dammit, she needed full rudder control. A crosswind was blowing. Quickly she crabbed
Gooney Berg
with the ailerons, going into a sideways slip. That last piece of mesa was sliding away…

She lost altitude faster than she expected. There wasn’t time to flare for landing. She could only straighten the plane with ailerons and engine thrust before it flew itself onto the dirt, coming in fast and hot.

“Hang on,” she yelled above the roaring engines and the scream of air past the fuselage. It wasn’t in Pai, but Chamol understood well enough. She flung herself across Irniya, clinging to his harness straps.

Grit pelted Kesbe’s windshield while dust boiled up around the aircraft. The wings bounced and flexed alarmingly with the impact of the landing. Her attempts to brake resulted in a lot of squealing and not much else. When the brakes finally did take hold, the C-47 nearly went over on her nose.

The sickening downward rotation of the cockpit reversed itself just as Kesbe thought the props were about to scrape sandstone.
Goomy Berg
slammed back on her tailwheel, rocking and squeaking in indignant protest.

All Kesbe wanted to do was disintegrate into a limp sweat-soaked mass in her seat, but the soggy slapping and scraping sounds from the copilot’s rudder well had her out of her seat in an instant. She grabbed for the fire-extinguisher mounted against the forward bulkhead, intending to freeze the loathsome thing with a well-placed blast of cold carbon dioxide.

To her astonishment, Chamol met her with a face contorted with anger and struck the canister from her hand. It rolled away with a clank, under the seat where she couldn’t reach it. “Why must your answer to fear be to destroy?” the Indian woman spat. She turned from Kesbe, lifted her brother out of the copilot’s seat and began to drag him down the companionway.

Kesbe was beside her, trying to grab her shoulders in the narrow passage. “Chamol, where are you taking him?”

“You have done your task. Imiya is rid of the aronan inside him. I take him to my house to recover.”

“You take him off
Goomy Berg
and Sahacat will do god-knows-what to him,” Kesbe said grimly. “He needs treatment. He’s in shock.”

Chamol only thinned her lips, heaved the moaning Imiya over her shoulder and headed for the door. “I do not need your help any more, warrior-woman.”

Kesbe made a sudden decision. She lunged at Chamol, tearing the youth from her grip. Thrusting him onto a crate, she whirled, caught Chamois arm, twisting it behind the woman’s back, and forced her out the cargo bay door. She pulled the door home with a heavy clunk and dogged it, ignoring the Pai woman’s frantic pounding.

Next she grabbed Mabena’s radio from a locker behind the pilot’s compartment, retreated into the cargo bay and latched the forward door against the sounds and the increasingly obnoxious smell emanating from the cockpit. She put the radio to one side while she lifted Imiya off the crate and made him a bed on a pile of tarpaulins. She tucked an emergency blanket around him and elevated his feet to reduce shock. Despite the fluid still seeping from between his legs, and some bleeding, he looked better for having gotten rid of the parasite.

“You poor kid,” Kesbe muttered, ruffling the hair above the flushed, tear-streaked face. One hand grabbed her arm, held it, then loosened as the boy’s eyes closed. He sank into a troubled sleep.

She considered her next step. Did she have the fortitude to go back up to the cockpit, find the fire-extinguisher and dispose of the aborted horror? The very thought of being near it again gave her uncontrollable shudders. Even the possessive anger at being forced from her own flight deck could not overcome the revulsion she felt. It was asking too much and she was already drained.

The pounding from outside had stopped. Chamol had probably become disgusted and gone away, perhaps to fetch others of the Pai from Tuwayhoima.

Kesbe hesitated. There was nothing wrong with asking for help. Not in a situation like this. Her previous resolution not to reveal the existence of the Pai Yinaye to anyone outside would have to be sacrificed.

Wearily, she got up, retrieved the hand-cranked radio set and put it between her knees. She set it up the way Mabena had showed her, began to grind and hoped that someone would be listening. He had been serious when he gave it to her, hadn’t he? She would hate to find he only meant it as a bizarre joke.

She was beginning to think so, when, after several minutes of cranking and calling, she got only static. Then a voice came through. A woman’s. She was startled, then remembered that Mabena’s engineer was female.

She gave her name, her location in degrees latitude and longitude and the emergency nature of the call. The engineer told Kesbe she would take down the information. Meanwhile, Kesbe was to stay on the air. In a few minutes, she heard another voice, tinny and broken with static, but recognizable. Mabena’s African-Maori accent was a welcome one to her ears. She answered,

“Tony, you were right in warning me. Something devilish is going on here and I’m right in
the middle of it.” She gave him a short version of the events that had taken place during her stay in Tuwayhoima.

Glancing at Imiya, she felt a renewal of the repugnance that had gripped her when the parasite had come slithering out of his body. “I rescued a teen-aged boy who had an embryonic aronan inside him. Luckily we got it out,” she continued into the radio. “If I hadn’t realized exactly what was going on, Tony, I would have ended up the same way. The damn things seduce you, then lay an egg in you that hatches and grows…” She caught herself.