The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  The Sky People

  by S. M. Stirling

  TO JANET, FOREVER

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Melinda Snodgrass, Daniel Abraham, Sally Gwylan, Emily Mah, Yvonne Coats, Terry England, George R. R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Yvonne Coats, and Ian Tregellis of Critical Mass for help and advice.

  To Steve Brady for more help, on entomology this time.

  Thanks to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Leigh Brackett, Otis Adelbert Kline, Leinster, Heinlein, and all the other great pulpsters for gracing my childhood with John Carter, Northwest Smith, "Wrong Way" Carson of Venus, and all the heroes gifted with a better solar system than the one we turned out to inhabit. From the jungles of Venus and the Grand Canal of Marsopolis, I salute you!

  All mistakes, infelicities, and errors are of course my own.

  PROLOGUE

  Venus

  June 14, 1962

  The sun rose in the west.

  Deera of the Cloud Mountain People ran as she had through the short hours of darkness, without hope and without much fear. The mild, warm air of the midlands made the sweat on her face and flanks feel almost cool as it dried, and the tall grass beat against her thighs as her long legs scissored endlessly. The morning sun was still low, casting the seven runners' shadows before them and turning the clouds to the color of raw gold. They had trotted through the short, bright summer night and would run on into the long span of daylight, until the great yellow globe of Kru sank in the east… if they lived that long, which was unlikely.

  She would run until she could run no more. Then the Wergu would catch them, and they would fight, and they would die. If they were fortunate, they would die quickly; her warriors had orders to make sure of that for her. There had been some slight chance that they would reach the foothills before the beastmen caught up with them, being longer-limbed, but their foes had gained too quickly for that to seem likely. The Cloud Mountain party had been tired from a long journey when the ambush struck, and those who broke away had not had time to snatch up more than their weapons, nor had they been able to build enough of a lead to hide their trail. Now hunger gnawed at them as well as weariness, and they had had no time to do anything but scoop up water in their hands as they forded pools or creeks. The Wergu were fresh, with gourds of water at their belts and dried meat in their pouches to eat as they pursued.

  Then her mate, Jaran, broke the deep rhythm of his breath, sniffing deeply.

  "What is it, my love?" Deera said. "What do you scent?"

  Before he could answer, she smelled it herself, and spoke: "Fire!"

  The land before the dozen-strong war party was gently rolling, covered in long green grass starred with flowers crimson and white, with copses of trees along the occasional small streams. They passed small herds of tharg and churr, but luckily nothing bigger, and most animals-of-fur avoided men. Not longtooths or great-wolves or crescent-horns, but there weren't any of those in sight, either. Then they saw the thread of smoke rising skyward, and saw animals and fliers heading away. Men and beastmen used fire… or it might be wildfire from a lightning strike, deadly in grassland country if it spread.

  "We go there," Deera said, pointing; the sunlight broke off the bright bronze of her spearhead.

  She alone of their party carried metal weapons, the spear and the knife at her belt; their trading mission to the coastal cities hadn't reached its goal before the Wergu found them.

  "That is where the streak-of-light pointed," her mate said doubtfully. "A bad omen."

  "It is a new-thing. If we go on with no new-thing, the beastmen will crack our bones for marrow before the sun sets. If it is not a new-thing we can use, we cannot be killed any more surely."

  Their bare callused feet splashed through the creek, and they eeled through the brush and trees on either side. Fliers exploded from the boughs, eeeking indignantly, and a hawk pounced from the sky to harvest them, its wings as broad as a man's spread arms.

  Then the tribesmen stopped. A few moaned aloud in fear.

  Deera's eyes went wide in wonder. For a long moment the thing in the broad meadow ahead was so strange that her eyes slid away from its shape, unable to comprehend.

  Then there was a feeling like a click behind her brow, and she saw. It was twice the height of a tall man, and stood on three long, spidery legs amid a circle of burnt grass. The fire beneath was still working its way outward, slow and sullen in the wet growth of spring. The body above was a cone in shape, the bottom blackened and with a smaller cone protruding from it; even at two hundred yards she could feel the heat. Holes like little caves or the windows of a hut opened in the upper body, and movement there brought a gasp from her people. The scent of burning was rank, and she coughed a little at the smoke. Slowly, mastering the fear that made her skin glisten with fresh sweat—was she not the heir to the Cave Master, initiate of the Mystery?—she approached and prodded the skin of the… thing with the tip of her spear. There was a hollow clunk.

  "It is metal!" she said. "But not bronze or copper or tin or gold or silver!"

  Suddenly her mate pushed her between the shoulder blades. She looked around in surprise.

  "Go!" Jaran said with fierce hope in his eyes. "The Wergu will fear this thing of magic. We will fight them here. If we kill many, they will not pursue beyond it. Go! Run for the mountains!"

  Agony spiked through her despair as he grounded the butt of his spear and took his blowgun from the sling across his back, reaching for a dart from his belt.

  "I cannot leave you!"

  "You are our people's hope, and there is no time for talk. Go. Go now!"

  Weeping, Deera obeyed.

  Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, USSRJune 14,1962

  "Bozhemoi!" the technician whispered.

  The grainy image flickered on the video monitors. It was in color, for no expense had been spared. The smoke of landing had cleared, and the scientists behind him exclaimed sharply as the camera deployed and panned across a meadow scarred by fire. The audio pickups were functioning as well; there was a crackling of burning grass, the hiss of the wind, unintelligible cheeps and croaks.

  "That is grass," one of the biologists said, slurping at a glass of hot, sweet tea from the samovar in the corner. The scent of it was strong in the room, along with the scorched-insulation-and-metal smell of tube-driven electronics. "And I would swear some sort of field-poppy."

  "Parallel development under environmental influence," another, older academician said, as the recording reels whirred. "Perhaps Comrade Lysenko was right after all!"

  Both fell silent as something flicked by the video pickup. The technician kept his hands off the controls. The long feedback cycle to the probe's robot mothercraft orbiting around Venus and from there to the surface and back made it impossible to track moving objects. A beaked head filled the pickup, a beak with fangs, blurred by the close-up. A tongue flicked within as the whatever-it-was gnawed at the lens and then fluttered off. It had teeth and feathered wings with claws on the forward edge… Then sky showed again, white with only a tint of blue, and full of flying creatures too distant to identify. The technician looked at some trees for reference, and his eyes widened again as he realized how large some of the fliers must be.

  "Are the Yanki gettin
g any of this?" a KGB bigwig asked unhappily.

  "I'm afraid so, Comrade General," the chief academician said. "There's no way to narrowcast a beam over interplanetary distances. Just as we will intercept their Martian probe's broadcasts when it lands next month. That is why it was decided to rebroadcast internally as well."

  The security officer opened his mouth to respond, then closed it again. This time he whispered a curse: "Chto za chert?" Even the most ideologically vigilant could be forgiven a What the devil! at what they saw next as a half-dozen figures pushed through the brush and stood staring at the probe.

  They were men—human males, tall and fair. The one who approached and tentatively prodded at the lander with the point of her spear was a woman. Oh, it was no race that Earth had ever born; that combination of umber skin, white-blond hair, tilted, light eyes, snub nose, and full lips… perhaps somewhere in the Urals you might find a similar mix, but the overall impression was exotic. So was the garb: loincloths and halter of scaly leather, jewelry of raw gold nuggets and carved fangs. The head of the woman's spear looked like bronze; those of her five male companions were obsidian, pressure-flaked to an almost metallic finish. All were tall and rangy, moving with a loose economy of motion like hunting wolves.

  Utter silence fell. It lasted through the woman's flight, and the brief, savage battle with a larger band of newcomers that followed—brutish thickset figures who seemed almost a different species. When that was over one of the victors approached the camera, his squat, massive naked body painted in crude patterns and splashed with blood, some of it his own; more blood and brains dripped from the knobkerrie he carried in one hand.

  At last the face filled the pickup. It was covered in what was either hair or a sparse beard, the prognathous, thin-lipped mouth thrusting forward underneath a huge blobby nose, the forehead slanting back from brow ridges like a shelf of bone, the long skull ending in a bun at the rear. Feathers stood in a topknot of reddish-brown hair. Suddenly the brutish figure screamed, a long snarling wail that showed a gaping mouth full of square tombstone teeth. The ball-headed club swung and the video signal vanished in static; the microphones picked up crashing and rending sounds for an instant more.

  "A Neanderthal," one of the scientists said. "Nu ni huy sebe! What the fuck?"

  CHAPTER ONE

  Encyclopedia Britannica, 16th Edition University of Chicago Press, 1988

  VENUS: Parameters

  ORBIT: 0.723 AU

  ORBITAL PERIOD: 224.7 days

  ROTATION: 30hrs. 6mins. (retrograde)

  MASS: 0.815 x Earth

  AVERAGE DENSITY: 5.2 g/cc

  SURFACE GRAVITY: 0.91 x Earth

  DIAMETER: 7,520 miles (equatorial; 94.7% X Earth)

  SURFACE: land 20%, water 80%

  ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION:

  NITROGEN 76.2%

  OXYGEN 22.7%

  CARBON DIOXIDE 0.088%

  TRACE ELEMENTS: Argon, Neon, Helium, Krypton, Hydrogen

  atmospheric pressure: 17.7 psi average at sea level

  Venus differs from Earth, its sister planet, primarily in its slightly smaller size and slightly lower average density, as well as the lack of a moon or satellite, and its retrograde (clockwise) rotation. The composition of the atmosphere is closely similar to that of Earth, the main differences being the higher percentage of oxygen and the somewhat greater mass and density of the atmosphere as a whole.

  Average temperatures on Venus are roughly 10 degrees Celsius higher than those on Earth, due to greater solar energy input, moderated by the reflective properties of the high cloud layer; isotope analysis suggests that these temperatures are similar to those on Earth in the Upper Cretaceous period, at which time Earth, like Venus today, had no polar ice caps.

  Most of Venus' land area of approximately 40,000,000 sq. miles is concentrated in the Arctic supercontinent of Gagarin, roughly the size of Eurasia, and the Antarctic continent of Lobachevsky, approximately the size of Africa. Chains of islands constitute most of the remaining land surface, ranging in size from tiny atolls to nearly half a million square miles…

  Venus, Gagarin Continent—Jamestown Extraterritorial Zone 1988

  Unnnngg-OOOK!

  One of the ceratopsians in the spaceport draught team raised its beaked, bony head and bellowed, stunningly loud, as the team was led around to be hitched to the newly arrived rocket-plane. The supersonic crack of the upper stage's first pass over the dirt runways at high altitude had spooked them a little, but they were used to the size and heat of the orbiters by now.

  Some of the new arrivals from Earth filing carefully down the gangway from the rocket-plane's passenger door started at the cry. When one of the giant reptiles cut loose it sounded a little like the world's largest parrot; the beasts were massive six-ton quadrupeds with columnar legs, eight feet at the shoulder and higher at their hips, twenty-five feet long from snout to the tip of the thick tail, and they had lungs and vocal cords to match their size. The long purple tongue within the beak worked as the beast called, and it shook its shield—the massive bony plate that sheathed its head and flared out behind to cover the neck. The shield was a deep bluish-gray, the pebbled hide green-brown above, with a stripe of yellow along each flank marking off the finer cream-colored skin of the belly.

  Then it added the rank, musky scent of a massive dinosaurian dung-dump to the scorched ceramic odor of the orbital lander's heat-shield.

  Welcome to Venus, Marc Vitrac thought, as the score or so of new base personnel and the six spaceship crew gathered at the foot of the ladder. I'm glad it waited until the harness was hitched. That could have landed on my feet if it had happened while we were getting things fastened.

  He switched his heavy rifle so that it rested in the crook of his left arm—it was a scope-sighted bolt-action piece with a thumbhole stock and chambered for a heavy big-game round, 9x70 mm Magnum. Then he waved his right arm forward and called:

  "Take it away, Sally!"

  "Get going, you brainless lumps!" the slender ash-blond woman shouted from her seat in a saddle high on the shoulders of the left-hand beast.

  That was purely to relieve her feelings. Nobody really liked the dim-witted, bad-tempered dinosaurs, useful though they were. The joystick in her hand was the real control; she shoved it forward, and the unit relayed its signals to the receivers on each beast's forehead, hidden under hemispheres of tough plastic. That triggered current through the implants running down through skulls and into the motor ganglions and pleasure-pain centers of their tiny brains. The two ceratopsians leaned into their harness, and the yard-thick hauling cable of braided dinosaur hide came taut with a snap. After a moment's motionless straining, the rocket stage lurched into motion and trundled down the long strip of reddish dirt towards the hangars and cranes where it would be mated with the big dart-shaped booster and made ready for its next lift to orbit.

  It was a lot cheaper to ship electronic controller units from Earth than tractors and bulldozers, not to mention the non-existent infrastructure of fuel and spare parts. All you needed to collect ceratopsians was a heavy-duty trank gun; they'd eat anything that grew, including the trunks of oak trees, and they lived indefinitely unless something killed them.

  Marc wiped his face on the sleeve of his jacket as the rocketplane left, trailing dust, taking with it the radiant heat still throbbing out of its ceramic underbelly and a stink of burnt kerosene. The coastal air of Gagarin flowed in instead, the iodine scent of the sea half a mile northward, and smells of vegetation and animals not quite Earthly. The sun was a little bigger in the sky than it would be on the third rock from the sun, partly because they were closer to it, and partly from the light white haze that never really cleared from the blue arch above. Otherwise, apart from the weird fauna—and the size of the bugs—it might have been a spring day in California, temperature in the seventies and air fairly dry, yellow flowers studding a rolling plain of waist-high grass around them, just turning from rainy-season green to champagne color. Already so
me of the birds and fliers scared off by the rocket-plane's descent were winging back in. Something with iridescent blue-and-yellow feathers, a twelve-foot wingspan, and a beak full of teeth screeched at him as it passed, snapping at dragonflies six inches across.

  Okay.

  Most of the Carson's six-person crew were here as well, looking a little more relieved than usual: There had been some sort of problem with the main fission reactor this time, just after the final insertion burn. The Aerospace Force kept two nuclear-boost ships on the run between Venus and Earth, the Carson and the Susan Constant.

  The little clump of new fish in their blue Aerospace Force overalls stood at the base of the wheeled gangway, woozy even in Venus' ninety-percent gravity after three months of zero-G despite all that exercise en route could do. At least they were used to the denser air and higher oxygen, since the passenger ships adjusted their own gradually on the trip. Some of them were looking a little stunned; others were grinning ear to ear. He knew exactly what they were thinking, and his lips turned up as well—the thrill wasn't gone for him yet, not by a long shot:

  Yeah, I've finally made it! All the tests and psych tests and physical tests and trials and qualifications and all the millions who started out on the selections and I was the one who made itl

  One young black woman with civilian-specialist shoulder-flashes—she looked to be a couple of years short of Marc's twenty-five—bent down and gently touched the Venusian soil; when she straightened, a look of astonished delight was on her face. He met her eye and winked; on his first day he'd gone down flat and kissed the dirt.

  "Welcome to Venus in general and the Jamestown Extraterritorial Zone in particular, folks! I'm Lieutenant Marc Vitrac, US ASF, and one of the Ranger squad here, which means specimen-collector, liaison with the locals, and general dogsbody. We've got a howdah laid on. I know three months in zero-G makes you feel like a boiled noodle when you get back dirtside."

  A murmur of "no problem, feeling fine" and shaking of heads: You had to be nearly Olympic caliber physically as well as qualified in two or three degree-equivalents even to get onto the short list for Venus. All of them were probably proud of it, and they were all aggressive self-starters by definition. He shrugged mentally; he'd done exactly the same thing when he arrived, and had been puffing by the time he made it to the reception hall. The plain fact of the matter was that it took weeks to months of carefully phased acclimatizing before you got full function back. That was why they used the more expensive nuclear-rocket craft for shipping people between planets, instead of the cheap but slow solar-sail freighters. A big nuclear booster could get you here in a hundred and twenty days, give or take, depending on orbital positions—the robot freighters took three or four times that long, and nobody could stand a year and a half without gravity, not to mention the risk of solar flares en route.