“Descendants you mean, Liz.”
“Yeah, descendants.”
“It’s hard to believe Kathy and her crew came down here more than a century ago. I’m still taking care of her cat.”
“Sorry, Jack. I know you two were close.”
“That was two years ago … for me at least. What were you going to say about the locals?”
“Okay, this one comes from the anthropology section. They’ve been snooping as best they can from up here and they just don’t see how these people are able to survive at the rate of acquisition of resources they’ve been observing.”
“You think they’re up to something we haven’t noticed so far?”
“We know they are. Two days ago they began setting out what look like several small aircraft on the hilltop, south of the hamlet.”
“Aircraft?”
“Yeah. We know they can’t have real functional airplanes. They don’t have the materials or the technology to build engines. Anthropology are saying it might be some sort of cargo cult-type of behavior.”
“Huh?”
“It’s like a religion. They build an airport complete with fake planes in the belief that passing air travelers will land and bring them goods.”
“What passing travelers?”
“Yeah, I know. There aren’t any, so they couldn’t have figured that for themselves. But the buzz is that maybe the crew taught their kids to do this to attract our attention, which means…”
“They might have figured out we’re here.”
“Be careful, Jack. We want you to avoid contact until you’ve found out as much as possible at the crash site.”
“It’ll be okay. I bet no one comes to this side of the mountains much. It’s all desert. No resources here.”
“But the ship is there. Maybe they know that’s where we would head first.”
“I bet you this new activity has nothing to do with us. Keep watching those planes. I think you’ll find they fly just fine.”
“Jack?”
Julia wandered to the very edge of the village and looked down over the plain below. The first week of griffin season was nearly over and still no hunt had been launched. In the calm air streamers of smoke rose straight up from a few of the huts as early risers stoked up their stoves. The rain, which had fallen thinly all night from a dense, low overcast, formed small rivulets that ran over the valley side at her feet. More than a kayem below her, the terrain was shrouded in a heavy, ground-hugging fog. Only the greatest trees, more than one hundred ems tall, pushed their crowns through the mist, like verdant little islands in a milky lake. In the mist below, griffins crooned their haunting contact calls as they flew blind and unseen on their migration route. There would be no hunt today. Julia plodded back to the hunters’ lodge.
A few hunters were up and huddled in front of the communal stove, nursing mugs of steaming pepper root tea. A few were tinkering with bits of hunting tackle. Others swung, hung over and listless, in their hammocks. When hunters can’t hunt, they drink. For six nights the hooch had flowed as the frustrated hunters boasted, fought, and told unlikely tales of their exploits. Now both food and hooch were in short supply. The hunters were bored. A few looked up as Julia entered. She shook her head.
“Ten tenths at three hundred ems, rain, and a thick fog below.” She gave an apologetic shrug.
Julia looked forward to her first hunt, but feared it too. Each time the sky looked as though it might clear, she began to feel a flutter of apprehension begin in her belly. With bad weather apparently set in for the day, she relaxed a bit, sharing the languor of the older hunters. Most of the men and women of the Family shared a common set of features and coloring. Standouts were rare and regarded as somewhat precious. Julia wasn’t one of them. Children of similar ages could be hard to tell apart unless you knew them well. Members of the Family felt their individuality keenly, and adults wore distinctive facial brands and tattoos. Julia still wore the anonymous look of unaltered youth. She had already designed a face for her adult self, but wouldn’t be allowed to apply it until she participated in a successful hunt.
She looked to the corner of the lodge where Pak, her assigned hunting partner squatted. Pak, the harpooner, was a quiet, wiry little woman. She was old for a hunter, perhaps three times Julia’s own age. She had had no children, and was now almost certainly too old. Julia wondered how it would be to hunt with her. Old Jared, the teacher, said Pak was good, perhaps the best of her generation. That was exactly why Jared put Pak and Julia, an untried novice, together for her first season. Pak was knapping a flinty cobble, her mind and body intent on the task. Her left hand had only a thumb and forefinger. The rest had been lost to a half dead griffin in a moment of adolescent carelessness, long before Julia was born. Pak turned the flint around and around in her hands, looking for the minutest hint of a flaw, trying to visualize its internal fracture planes. Then she would take up the hammer stone and strike a precise blow. Most times all she got was a sharp “clack” and maybe a tiny splinter of stone. Then she would grunt quietly, as though in surprise at her failure, and turn the rock some more. Once in several attempts she knocked off a good flake, with a fine sharp edge. Then she picked it up without expression and tucked it into the little leather pouch hanging from her belt. Such flakes were Pak’s skinning tools. She seemed to sense Julia’s gaze, for she looked up from her work.
“Don’t fret little one.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Stick with me and you won’t stay a virgin for long.” She threw back her head and cackled. Julia felt her face redden. The ribald talk in the lodge often did that to her, and she hated it. Some of the other hunters chuckled quietly at Pak’s joke. Jared handed Julia a mug of tea and pushed her closer to the stove.
“Ah, Jack. Liz here. How did you make out in the ship? Over.”
“Well there are no bodies. All three of them made it out okay. The main turbine is trashed. There are some organic remains, like bones, inside it. It looks like the engine ingested some flying animal. The cabin has been gutted as far as usable equipment and supplies go. The main power panel is smashed, which explains why there was no Mayday. They activated the emergency beacon, as we already know, and left. That’s about all I can tell you.”
“No personal notes, messages, anything like that?”
“No. Did you know she was pregnant?”
“No. I didn’t know that, Jack. I’m sorry.”
“Long time ago, I guess… What’s going on at the village?”
“It’s hard to say. There’s a heavy overcast, and rain. Infrared and radar imaging shows that no large objects, like the supposed aircraft, have moved and the people are still concentrated within the dwellings for the most part.”
“I guess they are holed up waiting for a break in the weather.”
“I guess so.”
Julia thought back to the last season, when she learned to fly a skysail, but was still too inexperienced to hunt. Before her first flight, old Jared had lectured her for an entire exhausting week. They sat together in Jared’s hut day and night, drinking pepper tea and smoking shredded baccy roots to stay awake. Jared’s philosophy was that lessons learned while suffering would stay with the pupil forever. Julia had sat in the craft while a group of sturdy hunters offered it up to the wind and she felt it twitch and twist as she worked the controls. Ultimately however, there was no better test than to catapult the student into the air and let her fly or crash.
The wind was good. It blew steadily up the launching slope at a near perfect angle. Julia sat in the cockpit, her bowels churning. More than surviving the flight itself she hoped to hold her sphincter tight. If she died, Julia wanted to be remembered as a woman who had gone to her death without shitting herself. Jared and the hunters tied a couple of spare chutes and a large boulder into the front seat, to replace the weight of the absent
harpooner.
As he fastened the leather straps that held Julia fast to her seat, Jared jabbered into her ear. “Don’t let the nose get too high. Set the brakes half out on approach. Then you can go long or short. Hold off until she mushes onto the ground.” Julia recognized elements of the speech. It was the wisdom of Kathleen, given to all young pilots, in order that they might survive to be old pilots.
About eight old lags heaved the skysail onto the greased wooden launching deck and hooked on a cable. They all backed off except for Jared who held the craft level by one wingtip. Julia extended two fingers and waved them back and forth. At the edge of the cliff, thirty ems away, where the launch deck ended, a hunter pulled a rope and threw herself flat on the ground. The skysail began to scrape forward on its wooden skid, pulled by the net full of rocks descending from the cliff top. Julia worked stick and rudder furiously as she was hauled rapidly forward and hurled into space, directly into the wind. She flew out for a few seconds and then turned back, trying to cruise alongside the hill adjacent to the cliff, hoping to pick up some of the rising air that ran like a buoyant river along the slope. The air lifted her up and gave her hope. As she stayed aloft for a few seconds, a minute, a few minutes, she felt the gods at her back, buoying her up, willing her to succeed. Her goal was simple: gain enough height from the hill to get in a position to land without killing herself or destroying the skysail. Julia worked the skysail back and forth above the slope, making sweeping turns at each end and trying to strike an efficient balance between skidding and slipping through the air. Either one would cause her to lose height and earn her the scorn of the experienced hunting pilots. In the steady updraft, each beat took her higher, until the launch site receded and the hunters resembled small bustling insects.
As her confidence grew, it outstripped her ability to concentrate upon the task. Her turns became ragged as she was exhausted by the effort of controlling the craft. She began to consider getting on the ground a matter of urgency, lest her ability to fly dissolve before she accomplished the most important part of her flight. Julia popped the airbrakes and descended steeply toward the hilltop directly at the throng of watching pilots. At the last moment, fearing she might kill someone, she heeled the skysail over on a wingtip and cartwheeled through a mass of bushes, shedding strips of griffin wing membrane and pieces of airframe in her wake. Old Jared had a rule for this situation too: you break it, you fix it. That winter, Julia learned how to pare tree branches into wing ribs using a stone tipped adze.
“Liz, are you there?”
“Go ahead Jack.”
“I found graves.”
“Okay…”
“There are bodies buried under rock cairns, two of them, not far from the ship. I don’t know how I missed them before.”
“Who?”
“Bryan Carver and Yves Pelletier. Names and dates are inscribed on flat rocks. Carver died on the day of the crash, Pelletier a day later.”
“Oh God, Jack. Do you realize what that means?”
“I can’t think about anything else.”
The next morning dawned bright and clear, with a steady breeze. Before long, little puffs of cumulus cloud were spreading together into the long parallel streams Jared called “cloud streets.” A ragged group had assembled at the head of the launching deck from which they would depart. Julia squirmed to the front of the group the better to be a part of the event. The hunters were dressed in warm skins and mufflers of hand spun chute fabric, to keep out the chill winds aloft. The nervous chatter dried up and they stood waiting as Miles, Captain of the Family, shuffled up to bless the hunt and to read, as he always did, a passage from the Log of Kathleen.
Ancient and stooped as he was, he had a sense of occasion, and had dressed himself in the garb of the ancestors. Julia had seen the old man’s performance many times, but never before from the perspective of one who was to be part of the hunt. It was a comforting tradition. The costume Miles wore was quite unlike the skins of the hunters. His body garment was of an orange hue, like a flame. Most of his head was enclosed by a gleaming red gourd-like hat decorated with a motif of jagged blue-white lightning bolts. His eyes were covered by a curved sheet of a bright, smooth substance that reflected an image of the semicircle of standing hunters. His face covering resembled the black snout of some strange animal, with a flexible proboscis that hung down to his waist and swung as he walked. He carried the Log in a leather bag slung over his shoulder.
A couple of the hunters helped him lower his frail frame to the ground, where he sat cross-legged. With a snap he detached the snout thing first at one side and then at the other and laid it reverently before him. Then he pushed up the silvery face covering until it rested on top of his headdress. He regarded the hunters with piercing blue eyes, as though deciding whether they were worthy to hear the venerated text. The hunters sat silently, respectfully, as Miles drew the precious book from its bag and opened it with great care at the very last page.
“This is the wisdom of the first person on this world,” he said. “She was my grandfather’s great grandmother, and her name was Kathleen. I did not know her, but my grandfather did. She was the leader and only survivor of the people who fell upon the world from the deep ocean of the sky. She was not able to return to her home among the stars. Instead she founded our village and became the mother of every one of us. She was a pilot, as many of you are. But she flew farther, higher and faster than any of us. She flew between worlds.
“She possessed much knowledge within her head, and she resolved to write down all that she knew that might help us, her descendants, to survive. She crafted this Log and recorded her ancient skills, so that we might profit from them. Before she died, she taught her grandchildren to build the first skysails, from the boughs of the forest and the skins of animals. They used them at first to scout for game in the valley and later to hunt the griffins, as you will do today.” He pointed at the leather bound tome of rough parchment before him. “This is the Log of Kathleen the Pilot, my great great great grandmother.” He took a deep breath and then began to declaim the wisdom of Kathleen. Though the book was open in front of him, he did not read from it, rather he recited from memory the precious words of his ancestor.
Julia hardly listened. She was too excited and nervous about the upcoming hunt. She was a pilot, like Kathleen was. Not a space traveler, but a skin, bone and branch skysail pilot. Her mind raced ahead, full of pitch angles, glide ratios, turn rates and pursuit tactics. She felt for the pulse in her neck, aware that her wheels were spinning crazily. She took a few slow breaths and forced herself to listen to the end of Miles’ recitation, the last words Kathleen recorded in the Log.
“One day my people may come. Do not fear them. They are only people, like me and like you. Remember, this is your world. Until then, my children, happy hunting.”
“Jack here. Liz, I keep going over in my mind, what Kathy must have gone through. The choices she must have had to make.”
“I know, Jack. I’ve been thinking about it too. If she only had herself to worry about, she could have lived out her life alone and died alone. But the baby — obviously it was a boy, she couldn’t make that choice for him.”
“Actually she was having twins. A boy and a girl.”
“So that just complicates the question of who begat whom. It doesn’t change the fact that she’s the ancestor of them all.”
“So am I. Liz.”
“I know.”
“I guess she had good genes.”
“I guess you do too.”
From above the griffin was easy to see, as a dark silhouette against the background of scrubby bush and baked clay soil. In flight, the forelimbs with their deadly talons were held in front, to grasp and slash at prey, while the shorter, stouter walking limbs folded back, streamlining the creature. It soared in a dusty column of rising air, delicate wing membranes outstretched, climbin
g toward them. Julia leaned forward, slapped Pak on the shoulder and pointed. Pak turned and nodded, grinning. Through her goggles Julia could see that Pak’s eyes were bright with anticipation and, perhaps, a trace of amusement. Pak tapped the side of her head in a silent gesture that meant “I know.” Pak was testing her, she realized. She had already spotted the target and wanted to see how long it would be before Julia saw it too. Pak began to unsling her harpoon from the side of the cockpit.
Julia pushed the stick forward. They were momentarily weightless as they pitched into a steep dive toward the oblivious prey. She knew what she should do: build up speed as they swooped down below the target, and pull up hard into a steep climbing turn, to present Pak with a clear shot at the vulnerable belly. Judging distance when the target is below you is difficult though. Even seasoned pilots don’t always get it right. Julia was way off. She undershot the griffin as it turned in a left-handed spiral. Finally the creature noticed her and turned tighter into its circle, denying them a shot. Julia rolled to follow the turn. The griffin turned tighter. Way tighter. Banked hard over, the inexperienced Julia hauled full up elevator to tighten her own turn and discovered something she had never been taught. Most young pilots believe stalling is caused by a lack of speed.
Wrong.
Stalls are caused by excessive angle of attack.
Julia and Pak experienced a split second of bone jarring vibration as the turbulent airflow breaking away from the wing passed over the tail. And then it happened. The nose dropped with a sickening lurch. At the same time the skysail rolled violently to the inside of the turn and was caught in a sudden and vicious autorotation. The ground spun ahead of them, growing larger by the second, as Julia, instinctively, but quite wrongly, pulled the stick hard into her stomach with all the strength she could muster.
“Jack, you were right!”
“Huh?”
“The planes are going up. They’re flying them around in circles, gaining height.”
“Figures. Kathy used to be a sailplane pilot. What do you think they’re going to do?”
Tesseracts Fourteen: Strange Canadian Stories Page 26
