The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

Marc shrugged. "Weh. As far as I can tell, though, what's happened is that a new language got dumped into my speech centers. I still… feel like me."

  "Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?" Blair murmured, and then held up a hand. "We'll have to go on the assumption that you are still you, old boy."

  "Weh."

  I wish I was certain, he thought behind the mask of his face. My head feels… too full. Like the contents got stirred around and reinserted.

  And cascades of new information seemed to fall into place every time he thought in the Cloud Mountain tongue. Not just information: When he used it he started to think like a native speaker. And that was very damned strange, when he tried to mentally translate terms like "life" or "death" or "time" or "cause."

  He noticed them staring at him with concern again. "Weh, it's a bit startling from the inside, too, eh?" he said. "Like having a whole new world dumped into your head."

  "I take it back," Blair said dryly.

  "What?"

  "Calling these people high-level hunter-gatherer," he said dryly.

  Cynthia chuckled. "I don't think they made the, umm, Cave Master, somehow," she said, waving around at the encampment. "All this looks a lot more like your first guess, Chris."

  Not far away, Teesa and her sister sat by one of the fires; a tall yellow-haired warrior shared it, working with quick tapping blows from an antler pick on a stone tool held across his lap in a fold of leather, tip-tip-tip-tock! Then he shook the fragments out of the leather and began to bind the spearhead into a shaft, studiously avoiding Marc's eye. When he became conscious of the Terran's eyes on him, he deliberately looked elsewhere, making a covert sign as he wrapped the tools and a block of obsidian in the hide and tucked it away in a haversack made from the whole skin of some badgerlike animal.

  The all-too-familiar click sounded behind Marc's eyes, and he knew the gesture the man had made was one against dangerous magic.

  Bon, he thought. My comrades are looking at me strange because I can speak Cloud Mountain, and they think I'm big bad mojo.

  The young girl came over to them with a sheet of bark. It held grilled antelope liver and breadnuts, and a twist of coarse salt in a leaf.

  "Oh, in for a lion, in for a lamb," Marc muttered to himself, and brushed the fingers of his right hand down from his brow to chin, then moved his hand sideways.

  "This traveling hunter thanks the she whose hearth gifts him with meat," he said in the girl's own tongue.

  She giggled. "So polite! My name is Zore. I'm not polite, not often."

  Marc grinned. "No, you are a forrick," he said.

  The word slipped out almost before he saw the mental image, something like a miniature baboon with a bright red bottom.

  "Well, I won't throw dung at you from a treetop," she said. "Anyway, my sister says she will speak with you tomorrow."

  Marc watched her skip back to her sister's fire. "Cute little babette," he said, handing around the food.

  They'd all kept their mess kits, since those folded around their canteens. Apart from that they had their knives, pistols, Blair's rifle and forty rounds of the powerful Magnum ammunition, and Cynthia's shotgun, unfortunately with nothing but the six rounds in the magazine. Marc still had his bow and quiver; from the burned and blasted gear they'd managed to rescue little besides the scorched metal parts of some tools, and a small steel box that Marc fervently hoped had come through undamaged.

  They ate the liver in Cloud Mountain style, with trimmed twigs as forks; the locals seemed to be a mannerly folk. The rich, strong-tasting organ meat went down well, after a long, strenuous day and nothing since breakfast. Their hosts had also added a pile of leaves the size of small towels, which was exactly what they used them for; the sap was thin and astringent and pleasantly scented.

  "I think I've figured out something," Cynthia said at last. "Look, everyone, that damn thing the girl—"

  "Teesa," Marc put in.

  "Teesa, right. The thing she used on Marc… well, there's only two explanations for it. First, it could be magic. Second, it could be really, really advanced technology."

  "There's a difference?" Blair asked.

  Cynthia punched him on the shoulder, only half in jest. "You bet. Because that isn't the only evidence of advanced technology around. And I don't believe in magic."

  "Isn't this sort of academic—," Marc began.

  The black woman cut him off with a chop of her hand. "No, it ain't. Think about it for a second. The other evidence is this damn planet."

  "You don't mean the aliens-did-it stuff, eh?" Marc said.

  Silently, Cynthia pointed to Teesa and back to Marc. "You got a better explanation? And that explains a lot—how Venus has a fossil record that ends two hundred million years ago, and how you've got dinosaurs and people together at the same time. This place isn't a naturally living planet at all; it's a terrarium. A zoo. An experimental station. Give you odds Mars is, too. And somewhere around here is… I don't know, a watching post, an automatic alarm system, whatever. It does things. Give you odds that's why the EastBloc didn't set up their base around here. Those problems they had with their probes…"

  Marc checked a surge of denial and skepticism; after what had happened to him, all certainties seemed shaken. Blair poked meditatively at the fire with a stick.

  "It would take a technology… not just more advanced than ours, but one based on entirely separate principles, to create an entire ecosphere. On the other hand, so would instant imprinting of a different language on a human brain."

  "Weft" Marc said. "But it would account for a lot. For the way we

  got here, for example. And why the Riga did. Sort of stretching coincidence for us both to end up in the same neighborhood by accident, eh?"

  Suddenly he felt his spirits lift. I'm not just lost and in danger of death, he thought. This is adventure, by God! We've got a chance at one of the great puzzles of all history! Sure, it's sad Tyler got killed, but this is a dangerous planet.

  He tried to drag himself back to practicality. "We've got to find out more," he said.

  "Yeah," the woman said, looking over at Teesa. "We do. 'Cause our little mission to rescue bro Binkis obviously isn't on anymore. Something else entirely got its hooks into him.

  "Oh, and one thing—be careful what you say around Teesa there."

  "Why?" Blair asked. "We didn't get the mysterious language lesson, old boy."

  "Weh," Marc said, with a grim smile. "But she got English the same way I got Cloud Mountain. Or the Real Tongue, to translate."

  Next dawning, Teesa watched in the bright early light as Marc used the…

  "Bow," her new language supplied. Unlike many of the words, it actually meant something, something she could understand rather than just making her head hurt. The bow was made up of laminations, and bent to throw the arrow, which was much like a little spear or a giant blowgun dart.

  The muscles stood out in his arms and shoulders in a sudden static wave. The string released, going snap! on the bracer, and the arrow hissed out, thunking into a tree forty yards distant.

  Teesa walked over. Marc nodded to her, friendly but wary—she couldn't blame him for that. Most of her folk would have been frankly terrified at such close contact with the Mysteries, but his people had arcane knowledge of their own.

  "Good shooting," she said.

  He'd picked four trees, each another fifty or so paces out. The farther ones were far beyond blowgun range, but the closest—

  She put the bone mouthpiece of the tube to her lips. Ffffth! The fire-hardened tip sank quivering in the creamy-colored bark. Just then a fluff-tail broke from cover behind a bush. Teesa's hand flashed down to the pouch at her belt, loaded, and ffffth! again. The little animal leaped, landed, kicked convulsively, and lay still. Marc grinned and bowed. They walked over to the tree; she picked up the fluff-tail on her way, hanging it from her belt.

  "Mother of Fluff-tails, thank you," she said as she did. "For hide and meat, we thank you and your
children."

  At the tree, Teesa's blowgun dart stood beside the man's arrow. Marc reached out to pull it free, and she laid a hand on his arm to stop him. Even without the Cave Master on her brow, there was a peculiar feeling to the contact, as if her fingers grew warm. He must have felt it, too, for he moved aside a little as she plucked the dart free herself, holding it by the steadying-bead at the blunt end.

  "This is a clean dart," she said, holding up the foot-long sliver. "See? The end is charred but not treated. We use for practice, and for small game. Now see this, but be careful!"

  She returned it to her pouch, and—carefully!—drew free one of the dipped rounds. That had a thick tarry liquid on its end.

  "The venom of the black swamp spider. Very dangerous and very hard to find, and how do you say…"

  She thought for a moment. What would "boil down" be in the Sky People tongue? Ah, yes.

  "Very hard and dangerous to concentrate. Very, you would say, expensive. But death to a man in a few heartbeats, and even to a large 'saur, in an hour or so if you hit a soft spot, around the eye or mouth, or the anus. We use in war, and to guard our homes."

  "Not for hunting?" he asked, taking the dart with sensible, gingerly caution and examining it.

  "No! The meat is deadly if not cooked very well, and even then too much may sicken you—make your hands tremble."

  "Ah. Nerve toxin, and a bad one," he said. Then in her language: "A lasting poison."

  "Yes." She looked speculatively at the bow. "Blowguns have short range, and will not pierce a shield or a leather cloak. Perhaps with those… why do you use it, if you have the death-from-afar?" She tapped his pistol.

  He replied, "The guns come from our home." He pointed upward to show that he meant the place-beyond-the-sky, not the village to the east. "The bullets come from there also. We can make a bow here, and the arrows."

  "Can I try?" she said.

  He handed her the bow. She looked at it carefully; the handle in the center was mahogany, the limbs shamboo strips with tharg-horn on the inside, sinew on the outside, and a beautiful double-curve shape. It had the look of something well made for a purpose, though there was none of the little touches—decorative carving, perhaps some inlay—that one of her people would have used for something so valuable. As he had done, she held the grip in her left hand and tried to pull back the string.

  "Like this," Marc said, standing behind her and setting her stance and hands in place. "Throw the left hand out, and draw back with your shoulders and stomach muscles."

  Ah, she thought, grasping what he meant with her body as well as her mind—she was accustomed to hard, skilled work from earliest childhood. Like this…

  With a long hooosh! of effort she managed to draw the string to the angle of her jaw; her right arm trembled a bit, and the twine bit into her fingers despite the work callus. She would need a bracer on her left arm and a shooting glove on her right fingers such as Marc had, but those looked easy to make. She let the bow relax and handed the weapon back to Marc.

  "Very nice," he said over her shoulder. "That is a heavy bow."

  She grinned to herself; the musky scent told her he found more than her strength and skill interesting. Of course, he could probably tell the same of her…

  Except that his language is strange—it has so few words for scents, she thought suddenly. And they are… vague. Why would that be?

  "Now let me try with an arrow!" she exclaimed.

  "Well, just once," he said. "You need a bow tailored to you, and some gear. Try that closest tree first."

  It was a big one, with white bark that shed in long, curling strips. She did again as he had shown her, conscious of the closeness of his body until she pushed that and everything else out of her mind with life long discipline.

  Snap. The string stung her forearm. There was a sweet surge through the bow, and the arrow flashed away—faster than a thrown spear, far bigger and heavier than a blowgun dart. And…

  "I hit!" she said, jumping up and down and waving the bow. "I hit!"

  Only just, though: The arrow stood through the edge of the tree, through the bark and just a bit of the wood. She could tell from his raised eyebrows that Marc found it surprising she should hit with her first try. They grinned at each other…

  A grunt, and a whistling of cloven air from behind her. A javelin arched over their heads and slammed into the tree with a heavy thunk of cloven wood. Taldi strutted past to pull it free, which needed a foot braced against the trunk and care taken not to snap the triangular stone head; he took the arrow, too, and handed it to Marc.

  "Here is your toy," he said, contemptuously at first, then with a little quiver of fear in his voice as the greatwolf stuck his head around Marc's thigh and bared teeth at Taldi.

  "Heel," Marc told the animal, and turned back to Taldi with mild amusement, which clearly made the Cloud Mountain warrior angrier than ever. Then Marc added, "Circle, boy!"

  Tahyo gave a deep sound: Ooooorh. Then he dashed off down the stretch of grassland and into the thicker brush beyond.

  "My thanks for fetching my toy," Marc said, taking it from Taldi's fingers and setting it back on the string.

  Just then, a striped wild pig broke cover. It was a small one, less than knee-high, and it dashed between two of the trees and beyond. Marc pivoted smoothly, drawing to the angle of his jaw and tracking the animal with the point.

  Snap.

  Teesa found herself holding her breath. The arrow soared out in a blurred arch, and…

  "You hit!" she cried, jumping up again.

  The animal went over with a squeal, kicking and thrashing. An instant later Tahyo appeared, throwing himself on the pig and seizing its throat in his already-powerful jaws. When it went still he sat back, licking his chops and looking hopefully at the man a hundred yards away.

  Taldi flushed, going dark red under his amber skin; the range was far beyond javelin throw.

  "It is a bad magic, to ensorcell a greatwolf," he snarled. "The Father of Greatwolves must be angry with you… and any that shelter you! They will be under his curse!"

  "Thank you, hunter," Teesa said hastily to Marc to put him under the protection of ritual. "We accept your gracious gift of meat."

  Taldi stalked off, which was bad manners—he should have helped them break the kill. Teesa and Marc dressed it out, washed their arms down in a nearby stream, and carried it back slung from a branch between them. Cries of welcome greeted them; quite a few had observed the shot from a distance, and fresh meat was always welcome, when you'd been living on trail-jerky for days.

  "Do you often use the, ah, the Diadem of the Eye to learn new languages?" Marc asked, as they recovered the other arrows and headed back to camp.

  "Never before," she said cheerfully, and laughed as he looked at her wide-eyed. "It is too dangerous, and we seldom meet outsiders."

  "Too dangerous?" he asked.

  "Yes. My mother died when I was very young, before I could learn all she knew, and even if she had taught me all her skills, the Diadem of the Eye is dangerous. To touch a mind with it is… full of perils. Sometimes both the wearer and the one touched may… how do you say?"

  The concepts that flooded into her mind were so strange; there was no way to really say be taken by the bad spirits. She sorted through them, and smiled as she found the words she needed.

  "Yes, go hopelessly mad?

  "Urk!" he replied.

  The gently rolling land grew steeper to the southwest; the ridges and hilltops were still in grass, but thick forest crept upward, foretelling the solid mantle of trees that covered the foothills and lower slopes of the great mountains on the horizon. The two-score of Cloud Mountain warriors walked in a rough line, with scouts ranging out to the front and behind and on either side. The others moved at a ranging, swinging walk, stopping every hour or so to rest for a few minutes and drink water. The air was warm and soft, enough so that their near-naked bodies gleamed with sweat as the hours of the long Venusian day wore on
.

  Marc put one foot ahead of the other and concentrated on his breathing; he was in hard, good shape and had the advantage of muscles and lungs that had evolved for heavier gravity and thinner air than this, but he still had to admire their stamina.

  "And the way they keep off the ridgelines and don't leave much track," he said quietly to the other Terrans as they got back to their feet after the latest rest period.

  "Yeah, they're the Last of the Cloud Mountaineers and every one of 'em's an Eagle Scout," Cynthia said, wiping the sweat off her face and directing a stream from the canvas water-bottle into her mouth. "You bet—Davy Crockett and Dan'l Boone would have loved 'em."

  Zore went by, her tame fluff-tail at her heels, chasing a butterfly with orange-black-blue wings nearly as broad across as her head. Tahyo started off after her, and then returned at a sharp command to heel. Marc had noticed that the locals were uneasy around the young greatwolf; they knew his kind, but only as dangerous predators and hunting rivals. A greatwolf who ran with human beings was big mojo and it made them uneasy.

  "Not too far off, from what Marc tells us," Blair said.

  "Yeah. And I'm not enthusiastic about getting involved in their quarrels," Cynthia replied quietly. "Even if they seem a lot nicer than the Neanderthals. It's against doctrine… and it's sort of skanky. I never had any desire to be the first Negro conquistador."

  Marc shrugged in agreement: Non-interference as far as humanly possible was official doctrine, and generally speaking, he supported it. Odd, I actually like Cynthia better now that I'm not in the running, so to speak, he thought. "Evidently the survivors from the Riga are at this place where Teesa's people used to live before the Neanderthals came… the Wergu, they call them."

  "What does that mean, exactly?" Cynthia asked.

  "Errr…"

  He concentrated; he was getting the trick of stepping back from knowing the language to knowing about it. When he'd managed to transpose the sounds to shapes in his mind's eye he went on:

  "Ah, beastmen. '-Gu' is the suffix; sort of 'men' in the sense of a generic term, as in 'Englishmen,' or 'people.' 'Wer,' beasts; 'gu,' men: beastmen. These guys are the Nesbergu. Cloud Mountain People. Or possibly the Misty Hills Folk, something like that. Humans in general—our type of human being—are firigu. True-men."