The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  "Oh, just routine, today," Marc said. "Got to go—big dinner tonight!"

  "With that nice Ms. Whitlock?" Maria asked with a smile.

  Marc's own mouth quirked. "Among others."

  Venus, Gagarin Continent—Far West

  Teesa sat under the thatched overhang at the front of the Chief's House, sitting cross-legged on a rug of skins and examining the death-thing that had killed her Jondlar, nostrils twitching at the faint remaining scent, acrid and fiery. It carried like a minor key through the stronger smells of the village, wood smoke and cooking, sweat, dung, drying hides tacked to the log walls, and the warm, clean forest-smell from the mountains above.

  The death-thing had a wooden part at the rear, made to fit against the shoulder, and another where a hand would support the front, but the most of it was the strange, blue-silvery metal. It was heavy, like stone or bronze, but harder than either; cautious tests on the big knives of the same metal had shown that they could nick bronze, and the tube that spat death was harder still. Hard stone would grind the edges of the knives sharp, as with a bronze blade. It was more work, but warriors had nearly come to blows over the having of them.

  None had wanted to touch the death-thing, which might well be laden with misfortune.

  Jondlar's brother Taldi thought it was cursed, of course. But then, Taldi thought having a whitefeather shit on his head or letting his fire go out meant a curse.

  This is cursed, that is cursed, he's not happy unless he has a good curse on him, Teesa thought. Though perhaps all of us are under a curse.

  She sighed and let the death-thing rest across her lap as she looked up. The village was about its work. There were a dozen houses like hers scattered on either side down half a mile of pathway, differing only in that each held several families while in hers only she dwelt with her little sister, Zore. Each house had walls of oak logs chinked with mud and sticks on a base course of field-stone carefully fitted; the roofs were high-pitched and neatly thatched with greenish-gold reeds cut into decorative patterns. In this mild, comfortable summer weather, the reed curtains that covered windows had been rolled up and the shutters were open. Every house had a space in front where the roof was continued out past the walls, and where a hearth burned in a circle of stones. Each also had a post planted in the dirt, twice a tall man's height, carved to show which of the clans of the Cloud Mountain folk dwelt within.

  In a wider open spot was a bigger, round building, roofed but open-sided save for the supporting pillars. That was the Gathering House for ceremonies and meetings; a spring welled up in the middle of it, feeding a pond from which all could draw water, and a mossy stone-lined channel carried the overflow away. The whole was hidden in a circular depression of the hilly plateau. Above, to the south, reared the mountains. Every settlement of the Cloud Mountain People had to be hard to reach and hard to see these days.

  Most of the men and some young women were out hunting; children wandered about, playing or doing chores in the small gardens behind the houses, or among the free-ranging knee-high flightless purple-and-green housebirds and small pigs with black and yellow stripes on their bristly hides. Here and there an adult knapped obsidian or flint, or shaped wood and leather and shamboo into things useful or beautiful. One old man, his yellow hair turned silver, bent with exquisite care over a small pot filled with the poison sacks of black spiders, boiling them down into a tarry sludge in which the points of blowgun darts would be dipped. The empty traps and the bodies of the noxious palm-sized insects were piled nearby.

  Teesa bent her head back over the death-thing. Only after days of study had the various shapes and bits come clear to her eyes, so alien were they. She pulled back on the little lever on the right side, feeling a smooth, heavy resistance as if she were pulling up a bucket on a rope. Inside was an empty space, and the other end of the tube. The thing went click as well, and the little finger-sized lever inside the metal loop ahead of the grip made for a hand came forward.

  Zore leaned forward, nostrils flaring. There was an oily scent from the complex interior; it looked—

  "I am tired of thinking that this looks like nothing else in the world," Teesa said.

  Zore giggled. She was just fifteen sun-turnings, and squatted naked save for a string of beads around her neck and some body-paint, her shock of tousled white hair falling loose down her back.

  "But it does look like nothing else," she said, and craned nearer. "It looks like the insides of an animal," she went on. "If only the insides of an animal were made of this strange metal."

  Teesa opened her mouth to tell the young girl to be silent, then closed it again. That is quite clever! she thought instead. I have been spending too much time angry since the raid, and not enough using my wits. I should let Jondlar's spirit go, if I can. It is enough to avenge him.

  She forced his image out of her head—thinking about a ghost could summon it—and held the death-thing up to look down the tube from the rear. It held spiraling grooves cut into the hard metal.

  "This must be like the dart for a blowgun," she said, fingering one of the little things the beastman chief had had in a hide pouch.

  There were several hundred of them, small cylinders about the size of a finger and colored like copper. She brought one up to her nose and sniffed deeply; yes, there was a smell, something strangely like the lingering scent in the tube. A touch of the tongue confirmed that it was copper or bronze or something like; the sharp taste was unmistakable. Teesa held the little cylinder to her forehead and concentrated on her memories.

  "When the beastman used this death-thing, many of these little tubes were cast out of the side of it—here, where you can pull back on this lever and look down the tube. But"—sweat broke out on her forehead as she forced the details back—"they were shorter. Part of them was missing!"

  Zore turned one of the little tubes in her fingers. "The pointed part at this end, or the round-and-flat part?"

  "The pointed part was gone! That must be the dart-that-kills! And a magic breath to push it!"

  She leaned over and gave her sister a hug for an instant. Then she returned to the death-thing. "So the dart must go in here, with the pointed end first."

  Fumbling, she slid the cylinder into the opening and let the moving part run forward; it pinched her finger a little and she sucked at the minor hurt as she thought.

  "Then he held the wooden part against his shoulder, so, and—ah!"

  Peering down the tube, she saw there was a notch and a blade that came into alignment. "How clever! It is by this that you see where the dart will strike!"

  The way the rear sight could be adjusted up and down puzzled her for a few minutes, but the Cloud Mountain People were familiar with the concept of "aiming up" when trying for a long-distance shot with a blowpipe. At last she clicked the sight down flat for point-blank range and looked around.

  A pig was walking down the beaten earth of the street not far away, with only empty savannah and scattered trees beyond it. Teesa brought the blade into the notch and moved them until they rested just behind the pig's shoulder, then put her hand to the grip and pulled the little curved lever before it.

  Crack!

  Teesa toppled backward as the death-thing punched her shoulder with a sharp pain like a fist striking; the acrid smell was back, overpoweringly strong. Lying on her mat, she saw and heard as the pig sounded a single short note of agony and dropped, blood pouring from a hole in its side. Others ran squealing and squawking; children screamed; adults sprang up with weapons in their hands. Zore leaped up and yodeled delight, turning cartwheels as the crowd gathered and babbled questions.

  Slowly, for the first time in weeks, Teesa began to smile.

  Venus, Gagarin Continent—Jamestown

  "Save early, save often," Marc muttered to himself; the rich brown chicken-stock-frying onions smell from the kitchen was getting to him.

  And while Ametri is a pretty good cook, she ain't Cajun, her. Can't trust her to make a good roux. Got to do th
at myself.

  He tapped the button at the side of the keyboard. The computer whirred softly to itself; just for safety's sake, the same procedure saved a copy of his report on the wild tharg migrations to the base mainframe and its ROM disks. Venus could get some humongous thunderstorms and electronic storage had to be redundant. Then…

  "Oh, hell, it can't hurt," he muttered to himself. "It's just the public records. Or the semipublic."

  Wing Commander Christopher Blair, he typed. Selection history.

  The usual stuff: high marks at Eaton, Sandhurst, Olympic-level fencer, marksman… something sprang out at him.

  On the Beta list until departure minus twelve, when Commander Jason Brady killed in auto crash on Ml north of Milton Keynes.

  "No," Marc said, slapping his forehead with the palm of his hand. "You are not going down that route, P'tit Boug," he said to himself. "You know why you don't like him. People die in traffic accidents. Down that route lies madness and bad, bad things. This place, it's too small for any of us to go crazy."

  He flicked off the computer, rose, and stretched, looking around and smiling wryly. Jamestown wasn't all that short of housing; adobe brick was—

  Cheap as dirt, he told himself.

  And they could hire local builders for not much more. Anything that came from Earth was expensive and in short supply, of course, which made for some odd contrasts. The computer was connected to all the others in town with the latest in fiber-optic cable, but the water system was based on shamboo pipes and elm logs bored hollow and pegged together.

  The rugs on the tile floor of the big living room/office would have fetched plenty on Earth, and the furniture was handcrafted of tiger-striped woods; lustrous furs covered the benches built into the walls. The windows were of thin-scraped 'saur intestine, and translucent rather than clear; the available glass was better, but not much—the first Kartahownian shops were just getting the knack, and it was wavy and full of bubbles. The heating system was an arched kiva-style fireplace in one corner, where a low fire of split oak soaked warmth into the massive walls and radiated out again, keeping the raw chill of the winter day outside at bay. A special research effort back on Earth had been necessary to produce the everlasting fluorescent lights above. It was cheaper to make lightbulbs that cost thousands of dollars each to send to Venus, rather than send replacements for forty-five-cent ones that burned out. Even so, residents were "encouraged" to use alcohol-fueled lanterns as much as possible.

  The kitchen/dining area was behind a doorway closed with strings of wooden beads. It had the same mixture of luxury and primitivism: broad counters and an island of polished honey-colored wood whose grain swirled with scarlet streaks, but the stove was built of brick, its main luxury cast-bronze disks set in the top. He'd hired some kitchen help for today, a middle-aged woman named Ametri and her daughter. They were chopping vegetables as he came in, and looked mildly scandalized as he moved over to the oven—in Kartahown, cooking was woman's work; there weren't even male chefs. Both of them wore simple ankle-length gowns of what amounted to linen; Ametri had her hair up under a kerchief as befitted a widow, but her teenaged daughter wore her long black locks tied back with a headband and woven with scarlet ribbons.

  The stock for the gumbo was nearly ready—simmering away in an eight-quart clay pot, with ten pounds of browned chicken parts, necks and bones, the onions and garlic, parsley and celery, all scenting the air even more delightfully than the loaves of fresh bread beside the earth oven. The simmering had been going on for four hours; now he dropped in the sachet d'epices, and put the shrimp shells and heads on a small cutting board, ready to dump in.

  "You should hire my daughter Talti as housekeeper," Ametri said, as she sliced tomatoes. "Then you would not have to cook—she learns quickly your way of cooking, and already she is good at our way. She is a hard worker and clever to learn your customs, always clean and neat, and so pretty! It's not right for a sorkisun like you to live by yourself without a woman."

  "Sokisun" was Kartahownian for nobleman. Trying to convince Ametri that he wasn't one was as futile as trying to tell her General Clarke wasn't a king. Marc groaned inwardly; Talti was about seventeen in Earth-years, and built like something from the latest Beach Blanket movie, which was uncomfortably obvious under the thin almost-linen of her gown, and she was giving him a big white smile as her mother tried to…

  … well, not exactly pimp her. Being a housekeeper for someone well-off is a recognized sort of relationship in Kartahown, a way for a poor girl to earn a dowry.

  A couple of guys did have "housekeepers" like that, but it was officially frowned upon, a policy he agreed with… or at least the part of him above the neck did so. Dr. Feldman was eagerly awaiting conclusive evidence on whether the Terran and Venusian varieties of human were interfertile; if so, it would screw up the biology even worse. It hadn't taken nearly as long for someone to prove that Part A fit Part B.

  A sound came from the front yard: not quite a bark—greatwolves didn't—but at least a long ooroorrrff by Tahyo, followed by happy thumping noises as his tail beat against the wooden gate, and then more as someone thumped his ribs. Marc smiled; that more or less settled who it was. The pup's run was in the front yard, so he wouldn't destroy the potherbs and truck out back, and while he'd learned not to growl at people who came through the gate, there were only a few he fussed over.

  Then the bell over the door tinkled and the someone came in. "Damn that dog and his slobbering jaws of love!" Cynthia said. "I brought this dress from Earth!"

  "Hi, podna," Marc said mildly.

  "Podna my ass!"

  He heard her go into the bathroom and the water run. Ametri and Talti scowled as Cynthia came back to the kitchen, and ostentatiously turned back to their work.

  "Lord Jesus, but that smells good," Cynthia said, sounding a bit mollified.

  She was dressed in a simple, sleeveless brown dress and a pair of gold hoop earrings that did wonders against the long, slender ebony neck. This was a semiformal occasion after all, although she looked nearly as good in field overalls…

  Down, boy! he told himself, and returned her smile.

  "What's for dinner?" she went on, taking a piece of celery and nibbling on it.

  "Shrimp, chicken, and andouille gumbo, dirty rice… well, sort of rice… fresh wheat bread, and wop salad. Comar tarts for dessert."

  "Wheat bread? My, my," she said, raising one slim brow.

  The first experimental plots were just now yielding something beyond enough seed-grain, finally acclimatized to the shorter year here. She went on, "And it would take someone from New Orleans to make a salad into an ethnic slur."

  He flashed her a grin as he combined the lettuces, not-quite-olives, and tomatoes and dressing in a large bowl, then tossed and divided the result on eight plates.

  "I'm not from the Big Sleazy; I'm a bayou boy, me," he said. "And at least I haven't started calling you ma negresse, eh?"

  "And you'd better not!" she said, sounding as if she were only half-joking.

  He gave a mock whimper as he laid two anchovies and one boiled shrimp across each salad, then added a spear of boiled shamboo-sprout.

  "Plus the General is coming," he said mischievously.

  The celery stopped halfway to Cynthia's full lips. "Are you bullshitting me?"

  "I said a few section heads were coming," Marc put in reasonably. "One of them turned out to be the Commandant. Want to help get ready?"

  "As long as it doesn't involve ruining my only Earth-made dress," Cynthia said. "You didn't tell me the General was coming. Shee-it!"

  "Mais, would you mind putting out these and the salsa and chips and drinks? The next part here in the kitchen requires the skills of a joint chief and a choreographer."

  Marc whistled silently to himself as she worked. He could imagine them doing this for themselves, a family dinner… The whistle became audible as he beat the roux with a whisk and waited while it turned to the proper chocolate brown color for Cajun
Napalm. The nickname wasn't given idly, and you had to be careful not to get any on your bare skin. He added it to the stock; this part did require focus.

  Forty minutes later, he stepped back, dusted his hands together with satisfaction, and began to pull off the apron. The doorbell tingled again. His smile turned a little gelid when Chris Blair's face showed beyond the door, and they did the squeeze-the-hand thing. Doc Feldman and his wife, Maria, followed, then the General and his spouse, an elegant woman in her late thirties who ran Jamestown's information systems. General Clarke was in his early forties, lean, square-jawed, and energetic. Marc liked and admired him, without the element of awe that a lot of the older hands felt; most of them swore the man would have been president someday if he hadn't volunteered to lead the First Fleet's landing team.

  Possibly. But I don't think he made much of a sacrifice in taking this

  position. There's not much call for generals back home, except for the Army Corps of Engineers.

  After all, the United States hadn't fought a real war since Korea, and none looked likely anytime soon; nuclear war was mutual suicide, and neither the Americans and their Commonwealth allies nor the Russian-Chinese alliance wanted to risk it by clashing directly. For that matter, apart from some ongoing squabbles in Africa, nobody on Earth had fought a serious conflict since… when had that last one in the Middle East been?

  Nineteen sixty-seven, he remembered. Twenty years ago and change.

  The EastBloc and the U.S. had stepped in after that and imposed a settlement, and the place had gone back to being a sleepy backwater, only marginally more important than Africa itself. With two entire habitable—and inhabited—planets at stake, everyone who mattered was too focused on space anyway.

  Even the French and their pissant little European Union.

  According to the news, they were busting their asses at that base in Guiana and their little space station, but it would be years before they could do anything interplanetary, and by then they'd be a distant third fiddle.