Shipstar (7 page)

He had come out of it, stiff and dry and jerky. A bit foggy, he watched the Sil deal with their wounded and put out the widespread fires. He had just woken up and now, after a breakfast of odd foods and stale water, felt pretty well. The halos ebbed, faded. With Irma he stood watching the Sil work. Their lithe bodies slumped and sagged. They were naturally limber, dexterous creatures, but not now.

Irma said, “The skyfish came over this part while you and I were trying to help carry that heavy ammo the Sil use. Blasted everything.”

He nodded, dimly recalling the fevered hours of carrying heavy cargo on rolling flatcars. Their wooden frame carriers held long cylinders of shaped shells with elementary fuses on the underside. It paid to be careful with them. Hard, dumb, sweaty work it was, while they heard hollow hammer blows rain down like a distant drumming wrath of sky gods. The concussions rolled over them and he had learned pretty quickly not to look up or back too much, because the occasional orange-hot fragment or buzzing shrapnel came that way. Once he had seen a zigzag tree burst into flame after a sizzling meteor slammed into it. He had helped throw water on it, then dirt when they had to. The burning city took all the reservoir water, and then that ran out, too.

After they got it put out, the humans went back to hauling ammo. The Sil guns hammered hard, trying to take down the skyfish. The brown and green football blimps churned across the sky and aimed lasers, antennas, and some kind of fire weapon down on the city.

He distracted himself by thinking how the skyfish could work at all. Its elaborate fins could flare out, capturing wind like a sail, and driving the gasbag forward. He guessed the huge creature could trim on this by shifting mass inside itself, getting a torque about its center of mass to navigate. This can be somewhat like a ship sailing at angles to the wind, tacking with its big side fan-fins spread out. It had big eyes and blister pods, maybe evolved from some balloonlike species. A bioengineered creature used to slowly patrol the air above the Bowl.

He had watched the battle and recalled how this place had been only a short while before. The Sil had their pride, of course. Their first full awake time in this large Sil city, the five visiting humans had to be led around, shown the town. They saw ancient majestic buildings of stacked stone, gleaming shiny statues to great dead savants, beautiful swooping curves and ramps and towers, then spindly ceramic bridges over moist green gardens and sprawled homes. They exhausted their reserves of
ooh
s and
ahh
s. It was indeed a fine city of untold ancient origin.

Not now.

During the battle, at least five of the living skyfish had circled, covering each other against any Sil artillery. When the guns barked up at them, a shower of beams and missiles cascaded down, silencing the crews. The pain beam was terrifying. When it struck, Cliff could see the shocked fear come into the Sil faces. They turned and ran, some snatching at their skins as though they were on fire. At the sensory level, they were.

The pain gun was a microwave beam that excited Sil nerves with agonies that made them fall, writhe, scream. It deranged some, who howled and jerked and ran in chaotic bursts. Others had the sense to run steadily out of the beam, if they could. The effect was intense, immediate, and ended Sil resistance where the beams struck. The pain projectors were soundless, which made them even more horrifying. These were the standard Folk weapon to panic opponents, and they worked their silent terror well.

But humans did not feel it at all. Some difference in the neural wiring made them immune. So Cliff, Aybe, Terry, Howard, and Irma hauled ammo and tried to stay alive. The skyfish wallowed across the air above the Sil city and brought flame spouts to bear. Some forked down green rays that seared buildings and people alike. The enormous living sky creatures systematically burned along geometric paths, and whole blocks of homes and factories burst into yellow flame.

The Sil brought their archaic weaponry to bear and blew shredding blasts into the skyfish underbodies. Once Cliff heard an enormous hollow
whoosh
that thundered down like a bass note. He and Irma looked up and saw a skyfish belly explode. A huge yellow ball licked around the green skin and trailed up the sides.

“Hydrogen,” Irma said brightly. “
That’s
their buoyancy gas.”

Howard said, “Helium must not give them enough lift. Tricky.”

“Oh, come on, where would they get helium?”

Another skyfish was floundering now, spewing fluids from multiple wounds, losing altitude, veering erratically. The city below it boiled with flame. The great beast slid down the sky through realms of smoke. Its crash was like a green egg crumbling in slow motion as it burned.

The destruction lumbered on amid roars and bangs and the sour stench of flame. Not long after, a nearby explosion Cliff never saw caught him. He took hot fragments in his left side and arm and went down. Then it all got fuzzy, the licking flames filmed over by a gray screen of pain.

He recalled seeing the skyfish turn and begin their ascent. They rose quickly, buoyed by the spreading fires below. Someone said the huge blimps would mend and rearm at higher altitude and might come back … and then it all went vague and he fell away into troubled sleep.

So now, getting his eyes to see this place right again, it seemed odd to have the big world go rolling along without him. Sils labored nearby and gave the humans no notice whatever. There was a gray silence to their movements, but they kept on stolidly.

Just like it will keep on after you’re dead,
Cliff thought.
The wide busy world of muscle work, weather changing, window washing, future judging, fast joyous dancing, racing heart in great passion, nose picking, fun talking, and bug swatting—all that will go merrily yea merrily along. If these aliens were never aware of your presence, they won’t be overwhelmed by your absence. But the same is true of the people you know, too. The world picks up the pace and moves on. Eternally.

They were standing apart from the men—Terry, Aybe, Howard—at the city’s edge. The humans had all slept in a makeshift cave in the surrounding hills, to avoid the constant light. Here there were scraps of the lush greenery on the slopes amid the rocky landscape, with some odd trees and big-leafed plants rich in fruit. They were eating some of these, rather bland with lots of pale blue juice. Irma said, “Quert looks worn down.”

Cliff turned to see the slim alien approach, its usually light-footed stride slow and lame. Quert’s voice was grainy, flat. “Onto here I-we came to speak”—a jerky hand gesture—“and wish share help.”

Quert’s Anglish was still improving, and quite a few of the other Sil had managed to share the language upload and integrator AI. Cliff still found it striking that the Astronomer Folk had widely distributed—“among the hunters,” Quert had said—a software that taught Anglish with a few immersion sleeps. He had seen the squat little machine that “learn us” as Quert said, but had no idea how it really worked.

Irma said, “We can labor beside you.”

Quert’s large yellow eyes studied them all in turn. “Medical we are now at. The dead rot.”

“They be many,” Irma said. The Sil had the most trouble with the irregular forms of
to be,
so they tried to use simple forms.

“I sad be for our acts.”

“You could not know the Folk would exact such a price,” Terry said, coming up to the group.

“Many dead. Have not known before, fire on our city.”

“You have lost the city, too,” Terry said.

“No. Do not hurt for the city. We build again fast.” Quert paused for a moment, eyes distant, then said, “The city speaks what has happened to us. Everywhere on the Bowl, the wounds, they show.”

“Sure,” Irma said.

“When we have more to say, we rebuild, the city speaks again,” Quert said. Irma didn’t understand, then.

The Astronomer Folk had apparently hoped the varying species of this area would rally to the Folk cause, and use the Anglish to somehow ensnare Cliff and the others. For the Sil it had worked in reverse. The Sil had been festering under Folk rule for a long time, and had seized the opportunity of uniting with their small human band. Now they suffered for it repeatedly, as the Folk tried to find the humans.

How long will they bear up?
Cliff wondered.
We’ve caused them huge losses …

“How we help?” Aybe asked.

Quert stood silent as its large eyes elongated up and down, rhythmically. The yellow eyes closed and the eyelids vibrated, as if shaken from behind. These expressions had no human parallel. Cliff had thought before that this must mean surprise or puzzlement, but now the alien made a curious squatting motion, its sinewy arms knotted in front of it. With the large Sil pancake hands and thick fingers it shaped a twisting architecture in the air.

Then its eyes jerked open and it stood. Cliff was cautious in inferring emotions from facial signatures in the Sil, but this case at least seemed clear. The constricted face oozed sad resolve.

“Dead are many. Have time now little.”

Irma said softly, “You wish help with the dead?”

“We may share violence. Share our ends also.”

*   *   *

The finely tended Sil city was now a chaos of jagged building shells, of splintered statues to great Sils now shattered into lumpy gray shards, of cratered streets, of angular trees sheared off at their roots or burned to cinders, of vehicles sitting gnarled and toasted, and the only sounds those of stones falling from half-crumpled walls. No groans, anymore. A city of dead.

A grim procession clogged the few cleared routes. Sil shuffled along with blackened faces and torn skins, mournful angular faces with eyes that saw little before them. Some of them bore wounded; others bore their dead. None spoke. None needed to.

The stench came to Cliff as they strode down from the surrounding hills. It rose as they entered the ruined precincts. Terry made masks for them all that proved essential as they labored through the endless day.

There was a code for burying the dead, something to do with recycling their substance into the Bowl’s sealed ecology. Especially here, water seemed scarce and the bodies went into a kind of pit that had a flexible blue cover and drains at the bottom.

Cliff hated going into the buildings and avoided them. He came upon a big Sil body that had a family gathered around it. They were rolling it in a pale green sheet. They stepped back and looked at Cliff. They were short, thin, and probably could not easily carry the body. He nodded and squatted to pick up the stiff fragrant mass. He got it standing on the rigid legs, then tipped the body onto his shoulder. As he stood up, the pressure forced gas through the voice box and a ragged croak rattled out. It sent shivers down his back. For a long second he wondered if the alien was protesting. He made himself look into the contorted Sil face, gone rigid. A purple tongue stuck out between the small knobby Sil teeth. The eyes had burst and goo ran down the angular cheeks.

Cliff looked away, stopped breathing. He took short jolting steps and the family followed him silently, all the way to the pit. He was sweating when he edged the body gently into the opening flap. The family just stared at the green sheet as it slid in, murmured to each other, then turned and walked slowly away. No sayings over the body, no ceremony. There was something dignified in the utter lack of ritual.

None of the Sil had looked him in the eye. He wondered what that meant.

The first day was hardest. After that, a numb resignation set in. The bodies got loaded on wagons and taken to parks—the only large, open areas in the city not filled with rubble. Some places the Sil got funeral pyres going, burning the bodies to keep them from stinking and from spreading disease. “Dirt takes not all,” Quert said. Cliff supposed that meant the soil processors were overloaded by such massive numbers.

Many corpses were underground. The job became an elaborate Easter egg hunt, Irma remarked sourly. They would bust into a shelter where often Sil had taken refuge, sitting in orderly rows. The humans were just helpers beside the Sil who would gather up valuables from the Sil laps, where often the dead had held what they felt was most dear. The Sil did not attempt identification anymore. They just turned the valuables over to an escort team. Then Sil would come in with a tubular flamethrower and stand in the door and cremate those sitting rigid inside. Get the precious metals and jewelry out, Cliff supposed, and then burn everybody inside.
An alien Belsen,
he thought,
and in the end, our fault.

The first bodies the human team had carried out, they treated with care and respect, loading them onto stretchers provided to give some semblance of funeral dignity. But after the first day of working on the piles and acres of wrecked bodies, humans and Sil alike became more casual. Bodies got stacked and carried for convenience. After that, a rank callousness descended and they used racks to group the bodies, then drag them with electrical haulers like sleds of dead.

The Sil called this entire bleak spectacle, the elegant stonework buildings smashed and seared brown and hard black, something that sounded like
scleelachrhoft.
But they all spoke little. In answer to questions, Quert mostly had an eye-move that meant “yes” or a side-nod that meant “no.”

Then came the patient patrols through the gray stone rubble. Here a leg, there an arm. Just pickings at first, parts to bag, but then they hit a treasure vault of tragedy. A reeking hash of a hundred had assembled in a basement. Cliff stepped in and found the tiled floor was awash in a still-warm broth of rank water and viscera. When the burst water mains had erupted, Cliff deduced, some of them had tried to escape through a narrow exit in the back. Their bodies were packed in a tight passageway. The dead did not bear burns. From their stiff, bloated condition, he gathered they had died of the smoke or oxygen loss as the firestorm sucked it all away.

Their leader had made it halfway up a ramp, only to be buried halfway up to her neck in a plaster goo and stone chips. She looked delicately young, smooth of skin still, though it was swollen and had begun to pucker with brown and blue welts. He carried her out himself.