The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  Instead of arguing, he turned to the four spaceport laborers. "ImiTaWok's'wee, tob," he said in the tongue of Kartahown: Get it back to the building, guys.

  The locals grabbed the shamboo-framed wheeled staircase and began dragging it off after the rocket-plane. The newcomers spared a few startled glances at them: You had to look fairly closely to see that they weren't common garden-variety Caucasoid Earthlings. People around here tended to medium-tall height, olive coloring, and mostly brown or black hair, with a minority of blonds and a smaller one of redheads; only the sharply triangular faces and hooked noses were even a little out of the ordinary. The four workers were shaved and barbered Terran-style and dressed in ordinary-for-Jamestown pants and shirts of parachute cloth; they couldn't be told from Earthlings until they spoke. Put Marc Vitrac into an off-the-right-shoulder tunic, grow his hair long and tie it in a knot on the left side of his head, and give him a bronze sword, and he'd fit right in on this coast.

  "Yeah, those guys are from Kartahown," he said, pointing east along the coast. The Bronze Age city-state, which was Venus' highest civilization, was about forty miles thataway. "Some of them have picked up English, too, since they moved up this way looking for work."

  Including some escaped slaves we're sheltering from people who'd like to beat them to death with bronze-tipped scourges, but let's not get into that right now.

  "That's quick," said the oldest of the newcomers, in his midthirties and with a bird colonel's insignia. "We've only been here six years, and the base was pretty small for most of that period."

  "Well, we're even more exotic and interesting to them than they are to us, sir," Vitrac said. "And by local standards, we're wizards and richer than God. A steel knife or a couple of yards of parachute fabric is real money here."

  Plus we don't beat people to death with bronze-tipped scourges.

  "And if you'll all follow me…"

  He led them off, slowly, across the cropped grass near the landing strip; there were two in an X-shaped combination, each several thousand yards long. Another ceratopsian stood waiting patiently; in fact, it was blissed out by a trickle charge to the pleasure center, drooling slightly onto the grass. On its back rested a twenty-foot howdah made of laminated shamboo, with a shaped and padded underside and two broad leather girths running under the dinosaur's belly to hold it on. The seats were stepped like those in a movie theater to accommodate the slope of the animal's back from the high point over its hips. Marc stood by the short folding ladder at the right foreleg, once or twice discreetly helping a passenger with his free hand.

  More than one gave the bigger-than-elephantine beast a dubious look; its steady breathing was a machinelike whoosh… whoosh… and the heavy reptile stink was strong, like a neglected cage full of iguanas at a pet shop. The massive columnar legs were taller than a big man, too.

  When everyone was settled Marc folded up the ladder, put his foot on the ceratopsian's knee, grabbed the edge of the bony shield, and vaulted into the front seat to take up the controls. Once you got your muscle tone back, the combination of lower gravity and extra oxygen made you hell on wheels physically—and they'd all been distinctly above-average specimens to begin with.

  "Fasten your seat belts, please," he said.

  And keep your barf-bags handy. This thing sways like a sonofabitch.

  Unlike many, he didn't bother to say git or the equivalent, just pushed the control forward a notch and rotated the joystick. The beast gave a low coughing grunt and then a wince-inducing screech of complaint as it came out of a daze of quasi-reptilian ecstasy and turned in place before pacing forward; the weight of howdah and passengers wasn't really noticeable to something that weighed about as much as a big dump truck, and everyone clutched the grab-bars. The strings of silver bells around the edges of the howdah chimed in chorus at the first lurch, then settled down into a ting-ting-ting-ting beneath the heavy thud of footfalls as the animal paced along. It wasn't doing more than walk, but each stride covered a lot of ground.

  Marc did start a little as the black woman slid into the front seat beside him. He didn't think it was his own overwhelming attractiveness; he was a slim, wiry man of medium height for Jamestown—five-ten—built like a gymnast or track-and-field star, which he'd been, with a pleasant open face, olive skin, and dark green eyes. His black hair was cropped short. She just seemed exuberantly happy to be on Venus, and less returning-gravity-whipped by the voyage than most of the newcomers. And of course she was less constrained than someone in the Aerospace Force, although military formality was distinctly low-key here. For one thing, there was scarcely anyone below commissioned rank. A lieutenant was on the bottom of the heap.

  She touched the plank of the seat as if seeking reassurance in the rough, slightly splintery surface.

  "I like the bells," she said.

  "Me too," he replied. "It's mostly to warn people out of the way. These things aren't what you'd call maneuverable, even Iced."

  "Iced?"

  "Ah, Jamestown slang. Internal Control Device: I-C-D, and so-Iced."

  "You've been here awhile, right, Lieutenant?" she asked.

  "Weh," he agreed cheerfully in the dialect of his childhood.

  He was no more immune than most young men to attention from a good-looking woman, and on Venus you had the added pleasure of knowing she was in the top of the bell curve for brains and general ability, too. He went on:

  "More than a year now, Venus year, that is. Mostly in construction, maintenance, supply, but just recently we've had more time for real exploring and research—fascinating stuff. What we're learning is going to shake the Earth. And a lieutenant is small potatoes here, ah, Miss…"

  "Cynthia Whitlock, Lieutenant," she said, and held out a hand. "Sorry, I didn't catch your name—I was paying more attention to the surroundings than the spiel!"

  "Marc Vitrac. Ethnology and linguistics, power systems and lighter-than-air pilot."

  "Geology, minors in paleontology and information systems. And… imiKartahownai 'n dus-jas!" she asked.

  She had a pretty good accent for someone working from recordings rather than talking to native speakers. The hand that gripped his was firm and strong and dry, slender and long-fingered; shaking it meant he had to juggle the rifle he was holding in the crook of his other arm.

  "Yeah, I've picked up a fair amount of Kartahownian. It's damned useful here; a lot of people along the coast speak it, sort of a lingua franca. Some of them have acquired a bit of English over in the town, too. They've got some very smart people there—it doesn't pay to underestimate them."

  She tilted her head to one side. "Louisiana?" she said.

  "Evangeline, eh, she was my mawmaw,'" he said, exaggerating the Cajun lilt for a moment. "Bayou born and bred. Grand Isle."

  "Harlem born and bred," she replied, with only a trace of it in her General American.

  Then her brows went up slightly as he took a quick glance skyward and started to raise the rifle. "Nope," he said, lowering the weapon. "He's not going for us. Guess we look too much like a 'saur."

  When he'd relaxed, she went on, indicating the rifle with a glance, "That cannon is a bird-gun?"

  "Mais, for those things, weh, certainly," he said, turning a thumb upward.

  He was unsurprised she knew her way around firearms, even though she was a civilian. The selection program tended to pick intellectuals who were also outdoors types or vice versa. Then he raised his voice a little so the rest of the score of passengers could hear, and it took on a slight tour-guide tone. One that he realized was based on something he'd heard an uncle use when he conducted tours of the bayous in his swamp boat, throwing marshmallows to the quasi-tame gators for the tourists.

  "Y'all might want to take a gander skyward. First big Quetza of the season, and they're quite a sight."

  Most of the passengers did look up. He heard gasps. It was one thing to watch a video of a flying creature with a wingspan of eighty feet, but another to see one with your naked eye. Even b
ack in the Cretaceous, nothing that size could have flown on Earth, but the gravity was a bit lower here, and the air wasn't just thicker but also had more oxygen per unit to power flight muscles. This Quetza was coming in low, coasting down from the inland cliffs where they nested, banking to avoid the built-up area of Jamestown, and then sweeping back seaward.

  The thin long-headed body was bigger than a man's and roughly the same shape, but it was tiny between the vast leathery expanses of wing that caught the thermals; the eyes in its long, narrow-beaked head were huge and yellow and it turned one of them towards the wagon as it went by overhead. Then the wings half-folded, and the great beast came down on the other side of the runways like an arching thunderbolt of brown hide and white-and-scarlet body-fuzz and yellow jaws. Those were slender, like a great pickaxe beak, balanced by a bony crest behind, and full of jagged teeth.

  "Ah, shit, it's going for that herd of churr, probably after a bebette. Sorry, people—I'm going to have to take a shot. Fire in the hole!"

  It was the claws on the ends of the long legs that struck first, in a puff of dust. More dust fountained into the air as the giant wings flogged the air, and something struggled beneath them as the thirty-odd adults and younglings in the herd spattered like water on a waxed floor, bawling and shrieking in terror. The week-old churr colt was the size of a medium pig except for the longer legs, and it squealed like one. Churr were what the locals used instead of horses; Venus didn't have any equivalent of equines, as far as they knew. The shaggy, social omnivores were actually more like bears, and still more like horse-sized dogs with the digestive systems of hogs.

  The pterodactyl worked for height, looked down at the animal thrashing in its claws, and dropped him from two hundred feet. The squeal ran all the way down as the falling beast thrashed his legs, then cut off abruptly at the meaty thud of impact. The winged reptile turned in a circling gyre as it descended and then settled to the ground like a flying avalanche, mantling its wings over the dead animal as it fed. After an instant, the long head came up with a dripping chunk in its jaws. It bolted the food whole, and you could see the lump traveling down the throat.

  Marc brought the ceratopsian around and pressed the bliss-out button to freeze it in place before he came up with one knee on the bench, taking a hitch of the rifle sling around his left elbow to give a three-point rest and working the bolt to chamber one of the heavy rounds. Cynthia slid down and went flat to peer over the edge of the howdah, her thumbs on her ears and mouth open. The pterodactyl's huge eye with its star-shaped pupil leaped into view through the sight: about nine hundred yards. Now shift a little for the wind, stroke the trigger…

  CRACK!

  Recoil punched into his shoulder despite the rubber pad and the weapon's muzzle brake and the fourteen-pound mass of the heavy rifle. Through the scope he had a brief glimpse of the predator's brain splashing away from the hollow-point bullet. When he took the scope from his eye, the forty-foot wings were thrashing the soil in a last frenzy. As they stilled to twitching, the churr herd closed back in, standing in a circle for a moment before settling in to feed amid ripping and crunching sounds; the shaggy animals liked meat more than acorns or grass, though they'd eat anything in a pinch. They'd have it down to tatters and a skeleton by sundown, with the corpse beetles making sure not enough was left to smell by tomorrow.

  This planet had an active ecosystem.

  Marc worked the action and caught the empty shell as it ejected. That was one hundred and seventy-five dollars of the taxpayers' money in shipping costs, right there, and they had their own reloading shop now. The sharp, acrid chemical stink of nitro powder hung in the air for a moment, then drifted away into the flowers-hay-hot-dirt-and-ocean smells.

  "Jesus, Lieutenant!" the bird colonel said reverently.

  "Yeah, sir. You've got to watch out for the Quetzas, take a glance skyward every so often; the older ones like that can lift a grown man into the air with a high-speed snatch. They can't carry that much weight for long… but they don't have to. And you don't let kids go out without an armed escort! The First Fleet people shot a half-dozen daily around the town for a while and that seems to have taught them to avoid it. Lucky there aren't all that many of the really huge ones."

  "They can learn?" the colonel asked. "The reports say they're not very big-brained."

  "About like a smart bird, say a parrot or a bald eagle—some of the smaller dinosaurian land predators are like that, too. The herbivores like this one"—he kicked the ceratopsian's shield—"are dumb as geckos. The big Quetzas migrate to the southern hemisphere in the winter, right down to the Antarctic continent, so you only have to worry about them from this time of year to the start of the fall rains. It's a good thing there aren't more of the thunder-lizards this far north, or it'd be impossible to live outside a cave."

  The colonel nodded as Marc got their mount back into motion and headed into town. "What's that over there?" he said, pointing left and southward.

  Everyone looked. There was a fifty-acre field densely planted with a reedlike crop about twelve feet high waving in the light breeze, each stem as thick as a woman's wrist. The stems were deep, poplin green and the clusters of flowers on top were pink with white cores. They attracted clusters of palm-sized insects colored like monarch butterflies, orange, black, and yellow. There were millions of them, and they made a dense twirling blanket like a translucent Persian carpet over the blossoms. A strong scent half like cloves and half like cut grass came with the breeze, together with an occasional fluttering winged drift of the insects.

  "That's our shamboo crop—the local name for it has this goddamned click sound in the middle, so we don't use it. When its shoots are just showing aboveground, it tastes like asparagus crossed with candy. Harvest it when it's four feet tall, and you can crush this sweet juice out of it and make sugar or a pretty good rum, and the Topsies—"

  "Topsies?" the colonel asked.

  "Ceratopsians." He slapped the shield of their mount to show what he meant "They eat it like bonbons. That's what we use most of it for. At eight feet, it's too tough even for the big critters to like much, but you can get fiber out of it that makes dandy rope and burlap and canvas, and just recently we've made some paper from it. When it's mature, the seeds taste a lot like sesame and give good oil for cooking and soap, and the stems are like bamboo only a lot stronger and tougher; that's what the howdah is made of."

  He cleared his throat, sat, and got their mount going again. "Jamestown proper is, as you know, closer to the water."

  That was because the first cargoes and personnel had come down in one-way capsules that had landed on the shallow bay with its half-moon curve of blinding white beach; it had taken years to get the runway and orbital boosters ready for two-way traffic. The cargo pods brought by the automated solar-sail craft that shuttled between the planets and Earth orbit on their long, leisurely arcs still did splash down there, floating the last few thousand feet on parachutes whose cloth itself had a dozen uses here. There was a long wooden dock stretching out into the clear green water of the bay now; the low solar-only tides made things easier around a port.

  A native ship was tied up to the dock, a tubby fifty-footer with a mast and single square sail and twin steering oars. A Grand Banks-style schooner rested on the other side of the wharf. White sails showed farther out, where the water was purple-blue, with small whitecaps.

  Marc pointed out the other features of the settlement: the helium-cooled pebble-bed reactor and generator emitting a plume of steam beneath its mound of dirt, a miniature version of the mass-produced types that generated most electricity back home these days; the airship mooring tower, built of shamboo and local woods (both the flying craft were out right now); and the semi-experimental fields growing crops from Earth alongside the Venusian plants domesticated by Kartahown. The town proper was made up of low adobe buildings lining the three dirt streets. All were whitewashed and most had roofs that were curves of green synthetic, each made of half a cargo pod; a f
ew used reddish homemade tile or brown wooden shingles instead. Workshops and laboratories vied with warehouses and residences. The houses had acre-sized walled gardens, and there was a small park and a fair number of big trees that looked a lot like live oaks and had been standing here before the Terrans came.

  Hitching posts and watering troughs stood at intervals along the streets, and there were board sidewalks on the main drag, with a proud but lonely stretch of brick in front of the town-hall-cum-commandant's-office. Riders on churr-back and pedestrians and carts drawn by churr or tharg-oxen made room for the ceratopsian. There were a couple of engine-powered ground vehicles in town, but they were carefully mothballed for emergencies.

  Many of the people waved and called greetings, and Marc waved back. This was a small town. Only one hundred thirty-two Earthlings were here, not counting the score of newcomers. And counting the twenty or so who'd been born here, and the nine who'd died. Nobody here was old, and everyone was a top physical specimen, but there was a whole planet of unfamiliar perils around them. About twice as many Kartahownians and tribesfolk lived around the base, and there was a floating population of visitors from there and elsewhere, traders and pilgrims and the sheerly curious.