People of the Sky (5 page)

Quit the Earth and leave it to be destroyed by those forces already at work. Find a new world where the ancient ways could be resurrected without interference. The capability was there. While the Hopi had languished on their mesatop home, technology had pushed outward, developing stardrives and finding new planets. All that remained was to find and claim a new home.

The word spread from village to village along the mesas, passing not only among the Hopi, but to the other Pueblo tribes who had gathered under their banner, the Zuni, the peoples of Taos and the Rio Grande, the Havasupai and others. The hope it raised gave birth to a name, the faith that bore the name of the Blue Star Kachina. It was a fire, igniting both hope and dissension among Pueblos. Some were tied too tightly to the land and could not bear the thought of abandoning it, despoiled as it had become. Others thought the migration impossible and spoke in
resigned voices about giving up all pretense of the old ways and blending in with the world outside.

At last the tribes split, most deciding to go, a few deciding to stay. The Hopi sold out their part of the Black Mesa coal lease to the Navajo to finance their journey.

“By then,” said Bajeloga, “coal wasn’t used as fuel any longer because it had become the source of the hydrocarbons used in manufacturing plastics and chemicals. The value of the Black Mesa lease inflated and even though our people didn’t get a fair price, the money was enough to assemble equipment and buy transport to the most distant world they could find.”

“Do we know which one they chose?” Kesbe asked.

“No, the records were lost,” the old man said. “Little Bluebird, it is getting late and your mother has made
piki
bread for supper.” They got up and walked back to Bajeloga’s old electric van.

Kesbe rose from the well of exhausted sleep into half-awake dozing. Her childhood memories faded, became tangled with dreams in the twilight, and gave way to more recent events. She remembered the storm and the landing those were real, but the vision of a dark-skinned savior aboard a winged mount had to be an hallucination. So her mind decided and so she chose to slide back into dreamless sleep, but, to her annoyance, her consciousness persisted, irritated by a humming sound.

At first she thought she had somehow left the engines running. No, the sound wasn’t quite the same. It didn’t come from the right direction either. The engines were aft of her seat. The low resonance filling the cockpit came from overhead. It was in the metal surfaces around her, making her fingernails vibrate when she groped for a panel. As she rubbed the sleep-grit from her eyes, her mind searched the catalogue of all
Gooney’s
familiar voices and failed to find this one among them. It reminded her of a sound of her childhood: the enraged buzz of a bumblebee trapped inside a tin can.

A stripe of shadow across the plane’s instrument panel below the windshield commanded Kesbe’s attention. Her bleary eyes opened wider. Was the stick-like thing across the window just a broken branch?

Still dazed by exhaustion, her gaze fastened on a leg whose foot rested on the upper curve of the aircraft’s nose. The structure reminded her of an insect’s limb enlarged by about a factor of five hundred. She felt revulsion flutter in her stomach. She didn’t like insects. It had a small sucker pad and two short, curved claws. Her eyes traveled along the tarsal segments of the extremity up to a sculpted tube of chitin, whose lower end bore a comb of spines. At the top was a hinged joint where the lower leg joined the upper. The whole appendage bore a halo of tiny hairs silvered with raindrops.

The leg flexed suddenly, startling Kesbe. Paired claws scrabbled on the windshield. The hum, which had been blanked from her awareness, returned in full force. Her mind finally made the connection between this insect-like limb and the memory of a flying creature carrying a small human rider.

She sat up, wondering what had become of her rescuer. If this limb belonged to the person’s mount then why was he or she letting the animal crawl on her aircraft?

Kesbe glanced nervously at the hole made by her boot in the right side cockpit window. Her instinctive dislike of insects had been compounded by a disturbing incident with a wasp when she was seven. It was one thing for her to marvel at the unknown creature from far away another to have the animal’s segmented limb within touching distance.

It was also annoying not knowing what she was dealing with. Then she remembered that she’d seen some information on Oneway’s native flora and fauna at an exhibit at the space port.

The physical and biological makeup of Oneway were not all that different from Earth. The planet’s plant life, in particular, was very similar to Terran species, but the animal life had taken a divergent course. Nothing here could properly be called a vertebrate, although a few fish-like swimmers had managed to wriggle to the top of their evolutionary tree. Instead it was the Arthropoda who multiplied and expanded. The predominant family, the Paradoptera, were an insect-like group that differed from Terran insects in that they had four walking limbs instead of six.

With another quick glance at the creature’s limb segments through the windshield, she recalled the illustrations of Oneway’s paradopteran arthropods. She hoped to match her remembered impression of the creature in flight with its depiction in the space port exhibit.

Like insects, Oneway’s paradopterans varied considerably in size and shape and filled most of the ecological niches on the planet. Some were highly accomplished fliers, others were entirely wingless. Some were ugly spiky little monsters, reminding her of hugely enlarged stag beetles. Others had a fairy-like delicacy that appealed to her despite their insectile character They reminded her of the stories her grandfather had told her about the dragonfly, who was sacred to the Hopi people since it always lived near water.

She recalled a painting, a top view of a flying creature with wings extended, the same animal she had seen gliding below
Gooney Berg.

The caption had described the animal as an
aronan
, a paradopteran species characterised by the presence of four limbs, paired fore-and hindwings and a very un-insect-like head. The other pertinent facts were that it grew to considerable size, had a twenty-to thirty-year lifespan and was not known to be carnivorous.

Perhaps it’s not known to be carnivorous
, Kesbe thought sourly,
because the last person who tried to find out got eaten.

The display had been careful to say that not a lot was known about aronans and what was known might not be accurate. What she had seen and what was presumably dancing on her airplane, according to the exhibit, was
Aronae pseudopegasi Barranca
, known colloquially as the Barranca Canyon aronan.

Well, that describes the creature
, she thought.
The text didn’t say anything about aronans having riders.

When she glanced up again, the aronans limb had changed position. Now it reminded her of a grasshopper leg. Through the translucent cuticle of the thigh, she could see muscles banded in a herringbone pattern. Muscle fibers flickered as the leg twitched.

Kesbe caught a glimpse of the veined underside of a wing through the windshield as the creature swung itself around on Gooney’s brow. A feathery antenna brushed the glass. She frowned.
Whatever your intentions, friend, I don’t like anyone on my airplane without my permission.

Emboldened, she squinted up through the plane’s windshield. If the aronan had a rider, she might catch a glimpse of the person perhaps a dangling foot.

Her uncertainty turned to irritation. This was strange behavior from a would-be rescuer. Where was the creature’s rider?

“Whatever you are, get the hell off my airplane,” she growled. She banged the cockpit roof for emphasis.

The aronans response to her noise was a screech of claws on aluminum that set her teeth on
edge.
Gooney Berg
rocked slightly as something slid off the plane’s roof to land with a thud on the right wing.

Kesbe knelt in the co-pilot’s seat, watching it crawl along the slick metal of the wing like a cockroach on a tabletop. It resembled a strange hybrid of moth, dragonfly and grasshopper except for a neck and head like that of a Terran sea-horse.

Her irritation became alarm when the creature straddled the right engine cowling and began nuzzling the three-bladed prop. Thumping and yelling from inside did nothing to deter it. She hauled the co-pilot’s dual control wheel over, banging the ailerons up and down. It made an unholy racket to her ears but didn’t seem to bother the creature, who extended a proboscis and probed the C-47’s upright propeller blade.

Kesbe wondered uneasily if insects were deaf. They didn’t have ears, did they?

“Hey, you extra-terrestrial mosquito! You’re gonna lose whatever you use for
cojones
if you don’t get away from that prop!”

The creature took no notice. Evidently the upright prop blade was just the thing on which to scratch an itchy neck.

The thought occurred to her that the creature’s spiny exoskeleton could possibly damage
Gooney’s
propeller. Even a nick could start a stress fracture. There weren’t too many three-bladed Hamilton props on Oneway. The few precious spares she had tucked in the cargo compartment were the sum total.

“Damn! Why, out of all the possible fates dealt by the gods do I get stuck with a flat tire and an overgrown bug who’s carrying on a love affair with my engine?”

She tried one more furious bang with the ailerons. The creature only lifted its wings briefly. Raising and lowering flaps didn’t seem to bother it either.

She climbed around the control pedestal into the pilot’s seat, thinking she might use the starter to flip the prop without firing up the engines. She hoped that the lower cylinders in the right radial engine hadn’t filled with oil.

She ran through engine startup.
Throttle and props, fuel valves, overhead to snap on the electrical master switch, hydraulics on
. Her fingers flew across the overhead controls, then paused on the engine starter. One glance right told her the creature was still abusing her prop. She gritted her teeth and pushed the switch.

The starter ground. The prop flipped over. The aronan sailed off
Gooney’s
right wing and landed on the ground with an angry buzz. As the engine started the counterweights in the prop rattled like a handful of rocks in a can.

What was that? Kesbe stared again. The blowing dust nearly obscured a small figure that darted from a cleft at the rear of the terrace. On two legs it ran, straight across to the aronan which still lay on its back, kicking its legs in the air.

Outside, the small figure knelt beside the fallen creature, trying to lift it. Kesbe clutched the control wheel, pulling herself up out of her seat.

The small figure was a boy. He had a white scarf bound around his arm—Kesbe’s. He was real, he had tried to help her and she had just about murdered his mount. She felt a blush of shame flood her face under the film of sweat. A part of her mind retaliated with anger.
If you meant to help me, why didn’t you show your face instead of letting your aronan loose on my aircraft?

As for the aronan’s companion, the poor kid looked terrified, and well he might be, faced with a monster like
Gooney Berg,
Kesbe thought. His black hair lashed his shoulders in the wind as he went on hands and knees, trying to get one shoulder under the struggling flier’s wing.

He beat his fist in the dust and shook it at
Gooney Berg
. He ripped the white scarf from his arm, wadded it up and flung it away.

Kesbe fell back in her seat, stunned by the ghastliness of her mistake. Tucking a dart-pistol into a thigh pocket of her flight suit just in case something nasty appeared, she shut down the engine and left her seat. One peek through the broken side window told her the boy was still fighting to right his flier. The aronan buzzed and gave feeble kicks like a swatted housefly. Kesbe wondered if it was injured. She stopped and grabbed the first-aid kit from behind the co-pilot’s seat.

Patching up oversized arthropods had never been her forte, but whoever the boy was, she owed him what help she could give She shouldered into her flight jacket, went aft into the cargo compartment and undogged the rear door.

“Haewi!”

The boy’s cry came on the wind above the plaintive drone of the flier. The voice was an adolescent’s, cracking with grief and the nearness of manhood.

Kesbe emerged from under the wing and saw him. He was dressed in a short shoulder-cape, leggings and breechclout, his chest bare. She knew he had seen her, for he crouched, ready to defend his mount. No weapons showed in his balled fists, but his coiled stance and the way anger writhed on his face held her at a distance.

She let her knees bend, deliberately reducing her height in comparison to his. She showed the palms of her hands. He didn’t know the gesture, for he only ducked his head, eyeing her sullenly. Abruptly he turned his back on her and tried once again to turn the aronan over.

The creature didn’t appear injured, but in its stunned frenzy, its wings were outspread on both sides, stranding it on its back. Kesbe had seen small moths and beetles temporarily stuck upside-down. Their design did not include rapid recovery from falls that left them flat on their backs. Left alone, the aronan would probably right itself, but its young master was too frightened to leave it.

With a nervous glance at Kesbe, the boy pushed one wing back, but as soon as he let go to run around and close the other, it sprang out, knocking him over. He crawled to the aronan’s head, stroking one of the trembling antennae and moaning, “Haewi…”

Compassion drew Kesbe to her feet and several steps closer before she realized what she was doing. The youth whirled, lunging at her. She scrambled back from the blur of limbs, flying black hair and white teeth. Then he was standing before her, his jaw jutting, his skinny ribcage heaving, muscles bunched in both sinewy arms.

His face contorted in a startling grimace. The nose wrinkled, the corners of the mouth drew back and the tongue lifted toward the bared upper teeth. She heard a fluid hissing and realized that it came from air the boy sucked over his tongue.

Kesbe retreated, suppressing an impulse to lash back at the sudden threat, reminding herself that this was only a youth. “I didn’t mean to hurt your aronan,” she protested even though she knew her words in English were nonsense to him. “I didn’t recognize it.”

“Haewi,” the youngster said angrily. He gestured at the struggling flier.

She raised both hands palms up in a lifting motion, indicating that she would help him right the aronan. “Haewi,” she repeated, not knowing what the sound meant. It did sound similar to some old Hopi words her grandfather had taught her. Again she made the palms-up lift and this time the youth seemed to understand her purpose. His face lost its snarl, though not its wary expression. She got up. He moved back. He let her take one pace toward the aronan, then two.

The youth stood aside. For an instant she wanted him there again as a barrier between her and the creature. No. She had offered to help. She wasn’t going to let her fear compound what damage she had already done.

The aronan lay on its back, its neck crooked up with its head between its front legs. For an instant it looked unpleasantly like a housefly that had been swatted by a giant.

As Kesbe approached, this impression faded. The aronan’s body was shorter and shaped differently from that of an insect. Its abdomen terminated, not in a wasp-like stinger or ovipositor, but in a fan of pinnate scales that reminded her of a hawk’s tailfeathers.

She stepped carefully around an outspread wing. It vibrated, filling the air with a low-pitched
hum that grew more resonant near the aronan’s thorax. She stooped, touching the long spar on the wing’s leading edge. It was ridged and slightly square in cross-section, its edge silken against her fingers. Muted hues swirled through the black veining on the wing’s translucent underside while iridescent feather-edged scales lay in the gravel at her feet.

Her senses were captivated by its alien beauty. None of the illustrations in the spaceport exhibit could do the creature justice. Yet these details reminded her of something else she had seen, though it was a poor pale echo of what lay before her now.

After disembarking from the shuttle at the spaceport, she’d had to wait for entry clearance. While the bureaucrats poked their computer keys and scratched their heads about the antique aircraft she was bringing in, she wandered around the lounge area and happened upon the exhibit. In addition to the illustrations, it also contained some cases with mounted speciments of Oneway’s wildlife. Her curiosity and sense of practicality overcame her distaste and she investigated them.

The exhibit was located, almost apologetically, in an out-of-the-way corner. It was obvious that whoever had done it would never get a job in the Galactic Smithsonian. Something about the desiccated specimens caught her eye, especially one delicately shrivelled creature perched unconvincingly on a tree limb. It looked like something an entomology student might have cooked up as a hoax. At the time, Kesbe was more than willing to guess that someone had.

It looked like a five-foot-long grasshopper until one noticed that the middle pair of legs was missing. In place of the usual grasshopper head, the creature had what appeared to be the enlarged dried up head of a Terran sea-horse, although the eyes were recognizably compound. The whole thing looked so spindly that a good-sized sneeze would destroy it. Bugs (or something), had eaten holes in the brittle brown chitin, adding to its generally pathetic appearance. She had wondered whether it looked this dilapidated when it was alive or whether it had been mutilated by a terrible taxidermy job.

Now, as she knelt beside the aronan, she knew that the display had failed miserably in its attempts to portray the living animal. Putting her first-aid kit to one side, she grasped the aronan’s wingspar and began to ease it back. She felt the powerful vibration from the animal’s flight muscles against her palms. Then, as she tightened her grip, the resonance went into her hands, the bones of her wrists, and up her arms to her shoulders. While she held the wing closed, she clenched her teeth to keep them from buzzing together.

The wing jerked. Kesbe teetered on her knees, put out one hand to save her balance. Her palm contacted the aronan’s thorax. Her first reaction was to snatch her hand back, but she didn’t. She had expected to touch the cold carapace of an insect. Instead her hand sank into a mat of stiff thick bristles. They were slightly warm, something she didn’t expect. This was not the radiant body heat of a mammal, nor did the creature’s strange fuzz have the moist oiled feel and smell of fur. Its texture was similar to dried grass and a heady sage-like aroma tickled her nose.

The youth ran around to the other side of the aronan and rolled the animal onto its closed wing. With a fierce grunt, he shoved it over. Its legs flailed near Kesbe’s face. She ducked.

And then the aronan was on its feet, scuttling back and forth, fluttering its wings. The boy was at its head in an instant, soothing it and stroking its antennae. When it calmed down, he bent and tapped one foreleg. Obediently, the creature lifted its limb, letting the boy handle and inspect each joint, flexing it gently. Kesbe didn’t blame him,
Gooney’s
prop blade had thrown the aronan a good distance.

She stood back, wondering if the youth had forgotten her. Perhaps he had, for he went over the aronan meticulously, examining legs, body and wings for signs of injury. The only damage
seemed to be a few scales lost from the wings. The boy retrieved several, making sad little clucks as he tried to replace each by working it in among its neighbors.

She stooped, picking up a small scale he had missed. It was a deep turquoise, with iridescent highlights of dark blue and emerald. In the middle, it felt solid, like a reptile scale, but the edges were finely feathered.

Dusty fingers plucked it from her hands. The boy scowled at her as he tucked the loose wing-scale carefully into a drawstring pocket in his shoulder-cape. He stood back, arms folded, head lowered. From beneath coarse bangs he peered at her in an odd indirect stare.

Though his face was sharper and his body lighter in build, there was still the sense of solidity about him that spoke of possible Pueblo ancestry. She felt her eyes grow wide, although she tried not to gape at him in surprise. Could it be that some remnants of the Blue Star colony had survived?

She remembered again what her grandfather had told her about the Blue Star migration and her own family’s refusal to join in.

The Temiyas and a few other families who chose to remain on Earth had been a minority within the Pueblo tribes. The majority, intoxicated with the fervor of the Blue Star faith and its promise of a new Fifth World uncontaminated by the presence of the disruptive European culture, had left Earth in 2062. They settled on another world, hoping to revive their ancient tribal life, but the colony disappeared. No survivors or descendants had been found.

If this boy was a survivor of the lost colony, what were his people like? How did they live? The questions flooded into her mind along with an intense desire to see the boy’s home village. Obviously the boy’s people had made changes to adapt, his winged mount was proof of that.

Kesbe wondered what the youth saw in her face. Was there that much of the Indian left in her? Only her grandfather had given her any real sense of her past and her people. Again she wished Morning Bird Man could be here now, sharing his wrinkled wisdom.
Bajeloga, you would know what to say to this boy.

As she studied him, he thrust his head forward, his nostrils widening, sniffing at her as if he were a young predator. His face distorted into the unsettling half-snarl that made her want to grimace back at him. Abruptly he withdrew. His expression shifted back to that of a wary human teenager.

“Baqui hanakomi?” The boy spoke in a hoarse tenor, his head cocked to one side.

Kesbe stared at him, her hope growing.

His word “hanakomi” sounded like the Hopi word “haqumi,” which meant “who are you?” It was a reasonable beginning to a conversation.

After a moment of unexpected silence she decided to take the initiative and used his greeting back to him. “Baqui hanakomi?” she asked.

A line formed between his straight brows. His lips pursed pugnaciously and his nostrils flared. “
Ba
hanakomi,” he said. All right, he was correcting her. “
Ba
hanakomi,” she replied.

“Apinu’i.” He clenched his fist emphatically against his chest. Kesbe was about to respond by pointing at him and repeating the sound. She averted her eyes slightly, knowing it was impolite to point or stare. “Apinu,” she said, thinking it was the boy’s name.

She gestured at the aronan. “Ba hanakomi?”

“Haewi Namij.” The beginnings of a smile twitched across his lips. He walked to his flier, tossing back a loosely bound horsetail of dusty black hair. “Haewi Namij, chosovi poko.”

With a surprise, she recognised “chosovi,” from her grandfather’s name for her. And
poko
she knew from Bajeloga’s stories. It meant an animal who would do things for you.

The aronan butted its master playfully as he stroked it. Little ripples of metallic gold played across the velvet of its compound eyes, giving life and expression to an otherwise opaque stare. Its head was very unlike that of an insect, having an elongated snout and a slightly dished-in face. It had an attractive elfin shape, with a small muzzle and mothlike proboscis coiled up in a delicate watch-spring beneath its chin.

Two straight horns sculpted from chitin guarded the hemispheres of its compound eyes. The eyes themselves were slightly recessed beneath a spiny ridge, giving the aronan less of a bug-eyed look than it might otherwise have had. Above the horns were a pair of plumed antennae that continually stroked the air as if searching for something in the breeze. Kesbe watched and forgot herself completely.

Until the boy looked toward her. He beckoned her to approach. She went forward with both eagerness and trepidation, halting when Haewi Namij turned its head to challenge her with a disconcerting stare from both compound eyes.

She stood in front of the aronan, extending her hand so that Haewi could smell it, the usual animal-human introduction. It was not the creature’s nose that touched her palm, for Haewi Namij had no nostrils at the end of its narrow muzzle. Instead its antennae fluttered along her hand, gathering her scent.

A grumble of thunder overhead broke Kesbe out of the little universe of fascination into which she had been drawn with the boy and his creature. Rain began to patter down on the gravel. The boy suddenly squinted, then waved his hand toward the shape of the forgotten C-47. “Ba hanakomi?” he asked.

Kesbe felt a grin relax the tautness of her face. To him the aircraft must seem as much a living creature as the aronan. “Baqui hanakomi,” she retorted, correcting his assumption just as he had corrected her grammar. She flung her arm out at the aircraft. “Gooney Berg. Come and meet her. She won’t bite.”

“Gooni Bug,” the boy repeated. He sent a suspicious glance toward the aircraft.

The sky suddenly let loose in a sheeting deluge. Kesbe decided that continuing the conversation was not worth being drenched. She retreated under
Gooney Berg’s
wing, waving at the boy to come after.

It took him some time to decide. Kesbe managed to get several tarps out of the plane and hang them from the underside of the wing to form a makeshift shelter. A few plastic cargo pallets arranged about one wheel strut made a raised floor against rivulets invading the dry ground under the plane. She knew she could be cozier inside the aircraft, but there was no way the boy or his aronan could be coaxed into such a confined area. She didn’t want to leave them or have them leave her. Again she felt a strong wish to go with the boy to his village, but she knew the chances were remote for a stranger such as she.

She sighed, then got out her survival kit: a portable heater, battery light, blankets, rations and thermos. She lit the light, started the heater and sat down on the tire, staring up into the wheel-well. A dollop of grunge plopped onto her shoulder, reminding her that the C-47’s engines had a habit of dripping oil. She moved her tent to one side of the wheel strut.