The Deadly Sky

by Doris Piserchia

  I hit out with a small stick I carried, listened to the familiar pings and clangs. No, it was no animal I timidly assaulted but a giant structure calculated to mangle enemies like myself. Tonight it would be my turn to sit out on the peaks, stare at the ruptured sky and order it to remain whole and unaffected by this thing upon which I walked. Perhaps Grena would sit with me and make the spent time more worthwhile.

  My blood froze as my father appeared before me out of a white mist. This was the first time I had seen a person in my illusions. This man I regarded almost as if he had returned from the dead. It had been a long time since I had seen him and I had my fill of looking at him as I stood on the blue line without moving.

  Slowly I began to walk toward him. All at once he faded and I nearly called out to him. I also came to a swift halt. Sweat leaked into my eyes so that my inclination was to reach up and brush it aside with the back of my hand. I nearly did so but then I grew rigid in my tracks. The air was suddenly too hot. My feet were weak and wet. I had an unbearable desire to cough. A part of the stick in my hand was abruptly yanked away as something dropped on it.

  Without moving my head I stared down at what looked like a black sea that thrashed and hurled dark foam high into the air. I swayed, leaned toward a girder to my right, raised the piece of stick to prop against the steel. I had just righted myself when something dropped to take away the remainder of the stick.

  Bewildered, dry of mouth, I stared down to discover that the blue line was gone. Unwittingly I had come to its end and progressed some five feet farther. Now I needed to wait for it to appear on the new part of the girder. Not that it mattered.

  The space had already been crossed and I was still whole and in one piece.

  I wanted to go on but I couldn’t. Nearly blinded by sweat, I could see Sargoth’s featureless face before me, taunting, mocking, daring me to be something he had never been. Of course it was all in my imagination and unreal, but I genuinely desired to go on. Half my mind said it was time to go back; before the invisible enemy decided to shift reality inside the weapon, before they did away with the safety path and left me stranded with dropping blades and buzz saws all around me.

  I had no more than gotten through the tunnel when the invasion alarm sounded. Something had come from the crack in the sky, activating the sensitive antennae on the peaks.

  They were fireflies, two of them, strange little winged devils that flared blue, red and yellow. They could move like hawks and seemed to know when it was most advantageous to light up.

  Jolanne and Grena chased them astride a pair of jinga. They carried buckets of water and scoops with which they hoped to capture and extinguish the invaders.

  It wouldn’t have been too serious if the fireflies managed to get down to Emera, since vorite scarcely burned, but our barracks were more than vulnerable and all the aliens seemed to know it. Whether guided by some unseen energy or by their own perceptions, they made a great effort to evade their pursuers, who chased them down into the abyss and back up again.

  One of them succeeded in getting past Jolanne. Straight as an arrow it headed toward the nearest wooden building. As soon as it touched down on a corner of the roof, it flared a bright yellow and literally began eating the wood.

  While the drell went after it, Grena pursued hers down into the crevasse again. Standing on the edge, I watched her fly up and down the distant wall with her scoop held ready. The firefly was adept but nothing could outmaneuver the jinga who spent their lives dipping and soaring between these mountain peaks.

  Someone had been standing behind me and I turned my head as he moved closer. I looked into Hallistair’s glittering eyes and pale face.

  “If I go over so do you,” I said, reaching for him.

  His lip curled in contempt and he stepped out of reach. “You’re being normally idiotic.”

  I wondered if he had entertained thoughts of shoving me over the edge. If so, he would have had to make it look good since practically everybody in the, compound was outside by now.

  Someone held up a hose and aimed a spray of water at the roof of the burning building as Jolanne chased the firefly from one corner to another. Finally she was able to scoop the thing up, after which she deftly tossed it into her bucket. When she alighted on the ground we were all allowed a look at the booty. I thought it looked like the skeleton of a bat, small and shriveled, black and dull. It was difficult to believe that only a few minutes before it had been alive and fiery.

  Grena caught hers down in the abyss. She bronght it up to dump it out on the ground. I tried to reach her first to help her off the jinga but someone beat me to it. Hallistair was there to lift her and set her down. Over his shoulder she glanced back at me as she was led across the plateau to the buildings.

  That night Willa came to play cards with Spencer, Leece and myself.

  “Excuse the one hand,” she said. Throwing her hair out of her eyes, she leaned forward and rapped the table with the fingers of her glass hand. The other member was still bandaged. “Don’t let it get to you or get you down,” she said to all of us. “It’s what we’re up here for, isn’t it?”

  We remained silent.

  “You get my meaning,” she said. “If they had asked for my services ten years ago I’d have told them to buzz off. Had kids then. Still have them, but they’re grown now and don’t need me to tend them. Not that I don’t have anything to live for. I’ve got plenty.”

  “Married?” said Leece.

  Will threw back her head to get her hair out of her face. “Won’t he like me all made of glass? I’ll bet he will, for a fact.” Her tone grew matter-of-fact. “Life is so filled with choices. Did you ever wish you didn’t have to make any?”

  Leece wasn’t paying any attention to her. He was looking at me. “I was referring to the charts today. You’ve put fifteen feet on the blue line. I’ve put two inches to it while Spencer’s been good for three.”

  “I did a foot,” said Will. “Leave him alone. We all behave differently in there. Some are snails and others are like jackrabbits.”

  “What’s your secret?” Leece asked.

  “Have you been talking to Hallistair, by any chance?”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “Half-pint,” said Spencer.

  Leece kept staring at me. “Ah, yes, he’s the one the pretty girl likes. The one with light hair.”

  “Buzz off,” said Spencer. “Let’s play the game and get rid of our vinegar in the weapon.”

  For several days I’d had an overwhelming urge to see my father. As I finished out the hands with my miserable friends, I determined to go the very next morning. Perhaps that was why I slept so soundly, and in my bed in my room, not on a hall couch.

  Not bothering to have breakfast, I walked out onto the peaks to find a jinga. I could have chosen a better day for it since it was gray and wet. The rain came down in sheets, soaking me to the skin, making it difficult to watch the birds. If I were not careful I might grab hold of one only to slide or be hurled into the chasm, which, upon contemplation, might not be all that bad a way to go.

  My steed turned out to be a foul-tempered giant who seemed annoyed that I would take as an invitation to mount him the fact that he grounded within reach. His wings creating a deafening noise, he soared high before dive-bombing into the crevasse. Grimly I hung on and even punched him in the head before he decided to take me up to clear air and then all the way down the mountain. He didn’t seem sorry to have me disembark but flew over my head, screeching and trying to peck me. The last I saw of him he was winging his way toward the rainclouds over Timbrini.

  Seeing my father again was disturbing, not just because it had been too long since I had last seen him but because he had changed. He hadn’t gone to the office.

  “Not for several days,” he said to me over the luncheon table. “Not that I was worried about you. You’re at least old enough to watch after yourself.” He tried to give a humorous laugh but it turned out dry and stale.
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br />   Somehow the blue of his eyes seemed faded. The lines in his face looked more pronounced, deeper. When he raised his cup to his mouth his hand trembled. For the first time since I had known him he looked vulnerable.

  “You aren’t in any sort of trouble, are you?” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  “Because if you are, it won’t matter. I mean to say, whatever it is you can count on me. Regardless of how serious it is.”

  “Thank you. There’s no trouble.”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “You’ve never been away so long before.” Giving me an apologetic smile, he said, “Funny, isn’t it? I seem to have missed you. Now you’re planning a cross-country bike trip. With Willmett?”

  “Probably alone.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’ll be gone a long time.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Yes. You know, Sargoth never showed up. I can’t imagine where he’s gone to. I went to the drell office to complain, and do you know what they did?”

  “Gave you your money back.”

  “How did you know that? Yes, that unsavory individual, what’s his name? Said they hadn’t charged me in the first place, that I insisted. Whole bunch of nonsense. I’ve never given anybody that much money without kicking and groaning.”

  After he laid down for a nap I went downtown to see if it had changed or if I only imagined it had. To my surprise I found Falloway in his place of business. He seemed put out to see me and refused to give me so much as a nod when I walked in.

  “It isn’t my fault,” I said to him. “I’m only surprised you let Suttler recruit her.”

  “He’s promised me he won’t. I’m not certain I ought to trust him. I believe his being a drell for so long has destroyed some of his finer feelings.”

  “Maybe he suspects her of being an alien.”

  “That bilge again! She’s totally human! I should know. I’ve taken care of her since she was a baby. I couldn’t think more of her if she were my own flesh. I want you to stay away from her. You’re going to end up like Suttler and the other drells and I don’t want her hurt. She can’t love a man who’s made of glass.”

  I waited for him to calm down before broaching another subject.

  “Your profile?” he said. “Nothing out of the ordinary in it. Not even a definite plus for riding the birds. I said as much to Suttler years ago.”

  “What was his reply?”

  “I don’t remember. Something about a pig in a poke or a purse and a sow. Doesn’t sound flattering, eh? Now I hear you’re doing better in the weapon than anyone else up there. How do you account for it?”

  I couldn’t and said so. After I left him I returned home and sat with my father. Willmett called to complain about my always being gone these days. He was still trying to find a cheap attorney interested in suing the drell establishment for fraud. I told him to forget it, that he didn’t really want to be a drell anyway. He insisted that he did and finally hung up on me. It was all right with me. For some reason he didn’t seem amusing anymore. In fact very little in my past or present existence was even tolerable.

  I walked all through the house trying to recapture the peace I had once known, the fascination with nature that had been mine, the feeling of assurance that life would be long and interesting. In the basement I looked over all the odd and funny things I had invented over the years. On impulse I took my antenna that had created rain and tucked it in a new valise to take back to the mountain with me.

  In the evening I rode a train to the edge of civilization, walked across the prairie and caught the first jinga that came along.

  Spencer wasn’t in our room, which suited me fine since I was in no mood to be even mildly amiable. A glance in the bathroom mirror told me that I had gone long enough without shaving so I made my preparations. At the last minute I thought of the new bottle of lotion my father had given me so I went to the closet to get it. For quite a long time I had disdained using depilatories or even electric razors but preferred the straight, treacherous kind. Why I carried mine to the closet with me, I don’t know, but it saved my life.

  No sooner did I open the door and reach up to the shelf where the bottle rested than something dropped onto my back. A pair of tentacles whipped about my neck to cut off my breath. If I hadn’t had the razor I would have been rendered unconscious in a matter of a few seconds.

  Nor caring if I sliced my own flesh, I hacked with the razor and felt a tentacle loosen. Slashing away at the other side of my neck, I managed to knock the other one off before the creature fell to the floor.

  Never having seen the likes of it before, I still needed no one to tell me where it had come from. Only the crack in the sky could have presented this specimen to my dimension.

  I had expected some sort of head or body to be attached to the tentacles but there wasn’t one. There was only a single serpentine length with what resembled a hooded eye mid-way on it. It lay on the carpet bleeding a pink fluid, blinking up at me with its milky eye, waiting for me to dispatch it, which I did with no qualms. Then I went looking for Spencer. He did share the room with me and I expected him to be able to tell me who had been hanging about while I was gone.

  He was visiting Willa, who was upset because she was being scrapped.

  “No good reason,” she said to me in a low voice. “You’ve-done-your-duty stuff, can’t-ask-for-more. It’s okay if that’s the real reason but I feel as if they’re discriminating.” Her glass hand was restless on the chair while her glance kept slipping from me to the foggy window. I knew what distressed her. Thoughts of freedom and life clashed with the hopelessness that had been instilled in her over the past weeks.

  “Take their word for it and go,” I said.

  “While the drells remain up here talking about me behind my back. They’ll say I couldn’t hack it because I’m a woman.”

  Spencer hushed her with a touch. “You gave plenty and were ready to give more. Now they’re offering you something to take away. Don’t question it.” He looked around at me. “I, too. They’ve given me the boot.”

  “I can’t believe it!”

  “They haven’t done it right,” said Will. “They’ll have us going home thinking we weren’t good enough.”

  “No, you must be hacked to pieces first,” I said. “Your bodies mustn’t be whole or you’ve held something back. You two can go ahead and complain. As for me, I’ll crow every inch of the way down this black mountain.”

  Spencer didn’t look at me. “Your name isn’t on the list. They haven’t dismissed you.”

  Forgetting that I carried the body of an alien in a paper bag, I hurried out of the room and down the hall to the foyer where the duty roster was posted. The area was empty except for Hallistair, who stood looking at the names with a black expression.

  “Here,” I said, thrusting the bag into his hands. While he opened it, I studied the list and found that several people had been excused from weapon duty. Too many, in my opinion.

  Meanwhile Hallistair shrieked, dropped the bag and ran away. I was left to ponder upon Sargoth’s motives in scrapping most of the staff.

  “It’s just that we’re going to make more use of fewer resources,” Jolanne said to me after I managed to corner her at a table in the cafeteria. It seemed incongruous to me that she would need the same kind of nourishment as I, but such was the case. I couldn’t exactly see the chewed wads sliding down her gullet, though I tried, the same as I had once tried to watch the passage of food down Sargoth’s hatch.

  Jolanne didn’t appear to be embarrassed or annoyed that I was so attentive, but calmly forked her meal into her mouth and listened to me.

  “What you mean is that fewer recruits will be assaulting the weapon more frequently,” I said.

  “Yes, I believe that’s what I tried to say.”

  “Why?”

  “It has to be obvious. We’ve been wasting everything up here for far too long withou
t fighting a winning battle. It’s time we changed our tactics.”

  “Which will be?”

  “Sorry, you’ll get no more info from me. Go hunt up Mills, or Sargoth as you call him, and pump him for a while.”

  She agitated me sufficiently to make my finger tingle. “What about the creature that tried to kill me in my room?”

  “It would be better if you had managed not to lose it.”

  “I don’t think I lost it. I think someone stole it. I set it down on a bench for a minute and while my back was turned it disappeared.”

  “I can’t form an opinion about something you haven’t got.”

  I hadn’t had any appetite to begin with and now I couldn’t even pretend to eat. Laying down my fork I stared at her smooth face. Her eye stared at me like a winking emerald. “You know, don’t you? All of you know perfectly well that Hallistair is from the dark side. You know he has a personal vendetta against me. I know you know. What I don’t know is why you don’t care.”

  Chapter 10

  I was standing on the blue line wondering if I was going to slip off the girder and plunge into the black ocean below when a small hard object struck me in the back. Turning slowly and carefully, I saw Leece standing well behind me. He had a pea shooter with which he peppered me from head to foot with tiny missiles that stung like fire.

  I was so enraged that I forgot all about where I was. Giving a cry of anger, I began running along the line toward my persecutor who immediately fled. I chased him all the way through the crossover into the tunnel and the machine room.

  “What’s wrong?” said Sargoth, leaving his position by the monitor. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I was surprised that I didn’t see Leece. In fact there was no one else in the room besides myself and the drell.

  “Where is he?” I asked. “Where is Leece?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I stepped near to the glass man and stared into his green eye. Momentarily I was startled to realize that it was a shade below my own eyes. It seemed only yesterday that Sargoth had looked like a giant to me.