The Sky People

by S. M. Stirling

  "Okay," Cynthia said with a slight wince. "Let's look."

  The interior of the hut was crowded, but not as disorderly or dirty as you might have expected from the Wergu settlement as a whole. Bags hung from the walls, and weird collections of bones and herbs and sticks; there was a heavy sharp smell, almost medicinal. Gourd bowls were heaped with unidentifiable substances, or colored pebbles; one brimmed with gold nuggets. A stone lamp with a crude wick burning in fat stood before a niche that held a small Wergu skull… a sacrifice? Sacred relic? Remembrance of a loved one? There was no way to tell.

  And one stone that jutted from the hut's wall, the Diadem of the Eye. Teesa darted towards it, then hesitated, her hand slowing as she reached towards it. Cynthia felt her own skin crawl in sympathy; it had been the center of the tribeswoman's life, the most holy relic of her people… and it had betrayed her. Now it stood for the dreadful violation of the self that Cynthia had shared.

  "I will do it," Jadviga snapped.

  "No!" Teesa said.

  She reached out and took it. They all held their breath, but it was nothing but an inert piece of metal as she dropped it in the pouch at her side.

  "Now to the Cave! Quickly!"

  Steed Noble paced down the narrow path, his head weaving in a ceratopid equivalent of nervousness, as the forest way wound downward towards the lake and river where the holy village of the Cloud Mountain People had been. Great trees crowded close on either side, types of oak and beech, others he couldn't identify, with odd spiky branches and long drooping leaves mottled in dark green and pale white, towering a hundred feet and more overhead in a tangled mass of branches.

  Lianas dipped from branch and trunk, and flowering vines climbed in a profusion of blue and purple and trembling sheets of gold. Insects buzzed through the olive-colored gloom beneath the great trees amid a languorous musty scent of blossom and decay, but only a few scampering monkeys could be seen, and a few three-foot-high feathered 'saurs scampered across their path in a scatter of dead leaves.

  "Me think it maybe too quiet," Marc said.

  Blair made a peculiarly English mmmph? sound, and then Marc saw how the branches above were stirring, more and faster than the slow wind could account for. Tahyo had been looking upward, flicking his ears; now he growled and then wulfed again and again, his call for alarm and danger.

  "Watch out!" Marc shouted, and "Beware!" in the Cloud Mountain tongue.

  He drew his pistol and shot, a long tongue of red flame in the dimness. The first of the Wergu dropping from the branches above folded in midair with an urrggg as the flat elastic snap of the 10 mm round sounded. He bounced off the 'saur's shield and fell under the steady pile-driver beat of the enormous hoof-toed feet. A thrown club struck the pistol out of Marc's hand a second later. The weapon fell under Steed Noble's left rear foot and was ground out of shape against a rock. Marc shook his hand for a second, cursing at the pain.

  More of the subhumans were dropping, their limbs outstretched like giant hairy spiders. One landed in the howdah and grabbed a Cloud Mountain tribesman by the front of his face and the rear of his skull and lifted the head off with a dreadful wet tearing-ripping-snapping sound, and blood fountained into the air for an instant. Then the others were on the subhuman, their flint-headed tomahawks rising and falling with thudding crunches as the hominid roared and tried to grapple. A second landed on the 'saur's tail and started to climb into the howdah. He had time for just one hooting scream as Tahyo rose and set his jaws on the beastman's face and squeezed.

  Another came down on the 'saur's nose, just above the horn, and began to scramble up towards Marc with inhuman agility, his knobkerrie in one hand. Blair's arm came past Marc's shoulder; the Cajun winced away in anticipation, and slitted his eyes against the muzzle-flash.

  Crack. Crack.

  Two deliberate shots, and the beastman toppled backward. More were falling all around them, and there was a confused scrambling scrimmage amid the boles of the trees, screams and bellows and shrieks of sudden pain, the whirling chaos of any sudden fight with no way to tell what was happening. Marc stabbed at the button that would halt the 'saur and reached for his machete, although his right hand was still a little numb.

  Mais, our guns, they don't seem to last, eh? I'll be down to a stone hatchet myself, pretty soon. The thought made him want to laugh, which would be a bad idea right then.

  "Stand fast!" Marc heard Taldi shout. "Stand fast, Cloud Mountain men! The beasts are few! Kill them. Kill!"

  After a dazed moment Marc realized that was true; only a couple of dozen had taken part in the ambush, probably the only ones left with the heart for it. Outnumbered scores to one, they quickly went down, but they took more than a few of their enemies with them, plucked apart or clubbed into splinters of bone and flesh. The tribesmen stood panting and glaring about them, blood running from hatchet blade and spear point and knife.

  "Forward!" Taldi said, and suited words to action, loping down the trail.

  Marc pushed the joystick forward again, and the rolling motion of the ceratopid increased as the muffled drumbeat of his feet beat faster. It seemed like only a few moments later when they burst through into bright sunlight: not open country, more in the nature of scrubby second growth, but without the overarching canopy. A dozen strides later and they passed an odd-looking falcon-faced totem pole, old and moss-grown and leaning out of plumb, with a rude stone altar before it. Then they were out on an open slope, and below them was a river and a lake and a village, and across the water a cliff pierced by the mouths of many caves.

  The Cloud Mountain men raised a long exultant cheer. Blair nodded towards the village. Scores of figures were scuttling out of the buildings, down the stream towards the lake and the forests and swamps there. Most of them seemed to be women carrying children, or youngsters on foot, with a guard of males.

  "The lost homeland of the Cloud Mountain People, currently occupied by the Wergu. It looks very much as if that ambush was a last stand and suicide mission to let the females and young escape."

  "Weh," Marc replied. "I think our Cloud Mountain friends are a bit prejudiced, them."

  "Understandable, but there you are. By all means, let us proceed with our organic tank, shall we?"

  Marc turned the joystick, and Steed Noble began a cautious descent of the rough trace. "To the village, or the caves?"

  The two men were tensely silent for a moment. Teesa and Cynthia—and Jadviga Binkis, for that matter—would be in either one or the other. A wrong guess might be the difference between rescuing a living person and finding a gutted corpse… if they were alive at all, which was impossible to tell.

  Can't think like that, you, Marc told himself. Not if you want to function—and you need one hundred percent right now.

  "Caves," he said. "Some of the Cloud Mountain Texians will be going into the village, and they'll find the women if they're there."

  They would indeed; they were trotting alongside Steed Noble and baying like wolves as the straggling line of stone huts came closer. A knot of Wergu fighters held the street, behind an improvised barrier, their shields up. The Cloud Mountain men put shafts to the strings of their new bows and loped towards them. The ones in the howdah complained as Marc turned the beast aside and towards the river.

  Taldi silenced them. "The holy one is there!" he barked. "Watch out—there may be more of them hidden among the rocks."

  "This is the holy place," one of the bowmen replied. "Is it not cursed for un-sanctified men to come here?"

  A shadow passed over Taldi's face; then he shrugged. "If it is cursed, let the curse rest on me!"

  "My eye," Marc murmured to himself. "He's determined, that one!"

  A score or so of Cloud Mountain fighters accompanying Steed Noble hesitated at the edge of the water; it was cold and fairly rough here. Marc waited while Taldi waded over, holding his bow over his head; the water came about to his waist, no more than thigh deep on the 'saur. Marc pushed the joystick forward, and the big bea
st took a first step in.

  Oooonnkk, he said plaintively. Then: Ooon! Ooon! Which probably meant cold, cold. He advanced tentatively, making sure of his footing each time; the water never reached more than halfway up his columnar legs, but he had to hold his great low-slung head up, and he complained again when his tail dipped into the rushing mountain stream.

  Marc was more concerned about what waited on the other side. The semicircle of cliffs was a thousand feet high, dark rock below, crimson sandstone above. The noon sun leached shadow and contrast from it, but the cave-mouths were still black eyes into nothing. A flight of pterosaurs took off from the higher reaches as they came close, medium-sized ones with twenty-foot wingspans and long fin-like crests at the back of their heads. Their shrill hissing cries echoed from the rocks; amid rock and water and crushed herbs, the ammonia scent of their rookery was strong.

  The Cloud Mountain men fell silent, the looming cliff weighing on their spirits. So did the carvings along the winding path that led upward through patches of rock and shrub, totem poles ancient and decayed, uncared-for since their grandfathers' day.

  "Which one is the Cave of the Mysteries, Taldi?" Marc called.

  "There," the tribesman said, pointing with his spear. "Along the well-worn path, between those piles of rocks." Then he dashed ahead a dozen feet. "Look! Look!"

  It was a long 'saur feather. Blair leaned down recklessly from the howdah. "It's one of the ones Cyn was wearing!" he said, suddenly grinning like a wolf. "We're on the right track!"

  "And this one is from Teesa's garb!" Taldi said.

  "If it was dropped today," Marc said.

  "Here," Taldi said. "More! Lying light on the grass. These were dropped of a purpose, as a sign."

  Marc slid to the ground and whistled. Tahyo came down from the howdah in a scrambling rush, panting up at him. He showed Tahyo the feather and watched the wet black nose wrinkle as the greatwolf took the scent.

  "Follow!" Marc said. "Follow, boy! Come on, boug!"

  Tahyo cast around, then put his nose to the ground, looked up, whined, and trotted away. The path he followed was a rising one, heading for the mouth of the largest cave.

  "That settles it," Marc said grimly.

  Blair extended a hand. Marc leaped, caught it by the wrist, braced a foot on the 'saur's knee, and leaped again, hauled upward by his own spring and the Englishman's strong arm. Tahyo paused and looked over his shoulder with a follow me! expression.

  "The very Cave of the Mysteries," Taldi whispered.

  "Where else?" Marc said, and pushed the joystick forward again.

  Teesa shuddered. The approach to the Cave of the Mysteries was bad enough, but now she felt… like something was touching each bone in her spine with a cold finger that slid inside her flesh to touch the cord there.

  "It is awake," she said. "I can feel it. And it seeks to know what passes."

  The three women looked over their shoulders, crouched against the boulder that had fallen from the cliff side long ago and half-buried itself in the dirt. Back on the other slope the Wergu were streaming out of the forest and down towards the village.

  "Our people must have the victory," she said. "Now we must protect them!"

  The three looked at one another, nodded, and walked forward. The last of her folk's spirit-poles lay on the ground nearby; she bent and touched it for an instant, taking comfort from the rough feel of the wood under her fingertips, and the connection with her blood. Then she looked up grimly at the ragged, irregular hole of the entrance. Generations of her people had shaped and polished it, but it still looked to her now like some misshapen mouth gaping to devour her once again, twenty paces across and as many high. Few memories remained of her first passage through there under the control of it, but those would make her wake sweating from evil dreams for the rest of her life.

  If I live, she thought mordantly, and smiled.

  "Let us go."

  The three of them approached, useless clubs clutched tightly in their hands for comfort. The shadow fell chill on them as they entered, the rock of the floor like a single slab beneath their feet. Ten yards farther in, something moved, moved with a creak and rattle of metal.

  It was Binkis, his features terribly calm. The rifle was slung over his back, and he dragged a thing on a wheeled dolly behind him, a thing like a blowgun dart… no, more like a bullet, she thought. That was a thing of Jadviga's clan of the Sky People, and so was the cart beneath it. Some inconsequential part of her mind dredged up an English word: "dolly."

  Binkis looked at them. "Units will return to the holding area," he said. "Contamination of the observational sphere has reached out-of-parameter levels. This locus is endangered. Readjustment is necessary to reestablish unimpeded interactions. Resistance is futile."

  Teesa heard Cynthia mutter something under her breath, something like, "Oh, lordy, now he's quoting from a New Frontier episode." Then Cynthia said more clearly, "That thing there… the biobomb… won't that contaminate your observational sphere anyway?"

  Binkis nodded in two motions, one up, one down. "That is unavoidable. The premature intrusion of source-globe sapients has already introduced it. In this region it will reestablish parameters for some time."

  "Franziskus!" Jadviga said earnestly. "They may not have planned to actually use it!"

  "Probability too low to calculate," the thing that spoke through her husband's face said. Then the man showed for a flicker: "You know them, darling! The Yanki have the ear of the only city on Venus. They will destroy it to isolate the Americans, and then blame them for the plague. Here far fewer will die."

  Teesa's hand moved. She took a deep breath, reached into the pouch, and brought out the Diadem. Then she dropped it around her brow and reached out with either hand, clamping them tight on the back of the other women's skulls, and pushed.

  The world vanished.

  "This is as far as he can go!" Marc said.

  Oooooonnnnkkk! Onnng! Onnng! Steed Noble chimed in.

  He waved his great head back and forth, setting a foot on the steep path up and pulling it back as rock shifted and clattered under the great disk of gristle and bone. It would take the full power of the Ice unit to make the beast venture farther onto steep, uncertain footing. All his instincts must be screaming at him. It was a matter of size. If you dropped a mouse off a mountain, it would land unharmed. A cat might be injured, or possibly killed. A man would certainly die. Something the size of a seven-ton ceratopid would splash, even from a fall that a man could survive.

  "Then let's get going," Blair said grimly.

  Marc pressed the stay-put button, and Steed Noble's head drooped until his beak touched the ground. A line of drool dropped to the ground, and the beast's yellow reptile eyes half-closed as he sighed in ecstasy. Until the switch was turned off or the batteries ran out, not even being dismembered would distract the 'saur much.

  They all slid to the surface. "Wait here," Marc said to the Cloud Mountain warriors.

  Most of them were glad enough to do so; Tahyo was, too, flattening himself to the rock and laying his ears back, rolling his eyes in a pleading expression. Taldi simply shook his head and followed the two Terrans, though his face turned a sickly shade under its natural amber and his lips were peeled back in a fixed rictus of determination.

  The rocks rattled under their moccasins as they took the last few yards, throwing up a little dust. The papery smell of it contrasted with the cold stone breath of the cave. Marc's mouth was dry and his heart thuttered under his breastbone, but he felt steady and alert for all that. Blair brought the heavy rifle down from across his back and worked the bolt, a long chick-chack! as he put the second-from-last bullet into the chamber. They paused for an instant to let their eyes adjust to the gloom, and then they saw the tableau of motionless figures. They scarcely seemed to breathe. The sudden outward flutter of hundreds of tiny hand-sized pterosaurs with long rudder-tipped tails was a jarring contrast; then silence settled back over their fading cheeps and twitt
ers.

  Teesa stood with her back to them, and her hands on the backs of the heads of Cynthia and Jadviga. The Diadem of the Eye was on Teesa's head, and even from the rear Marc could see how the jewel on her forehead was shedding a crawling pattern of green light. That glittered in Binkis' unmoving eyes.

  "Teesa!" Taldi shouted.

  None of the figures moved. Marc put out a hand to restrain the Cloud Mountain warrior, but he brushed past.

  "The wizard has enchanted you, but I will set you free!" he called, and dashed forward.

  His knife was in his hand as he drove for Binkis, but the Lithuanian still didn't move—or perhaps that which used him as a puppet of flesh didn't let him. Instead Taldi suddenly pitched forward onto the rock-slab floor of the cave. He gave one scream as every muscle in his body convulsed, and then there was a crackle of bone and he was limp, with blood running from nose and mouth, eyes and ears.

  "That's a weapon on the dolly," Marc said tightly.

  "Yes, old boy, it is," Blair replied. "And an EastBloc one. Cyrillic lettering. Offhand I'd say it was meant to be delivered by a medium-sized missile."

  "Weh, I think Teesa is trying something. And I don't think we should upset it."

  "But we must do something."

  Marc took a deep breath. "Whether or not it works—," he began. "—one has to finish," Blair finished.

  Marc took a step to the left of Cynthia. Blair moved to the right of Jadviga, raising the rifle. The universe vanished.

  Where am I? Marc thought.

  What it felt like was standing on an infinite gray plain under a gray sky. Looking down, he could see that the gray surface under his feet was somehow crawling—like a mass of tiny ants, or perhaps of even tinier machines, blinking on and off without color or light. The air felt… neutral, without scent or heat or cold. When he took a step, nothing changed, but he could sense an almost infinite motion, and suddenly he was standing next to the others.

  Cocain! he thought.