People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  The dancer emerges into the plaza. His mask is brightly, almost savagely painted. Feathers sweep from top and back, cascading down in a brilliant mix of color, startling in the grayness of dawn and the dull brown of the pueblos. The kachina’s steps are slow and leaden, but as he approaches, his feet pick up tempo, forcing the drumbeat to follow him, instead of dancing to the drum. The people lean forward. The children hear their parents muttering above their beads, hear in-drawn breath. They try to remember. Have the kachinas ever danced like this?

  No. There is anger in his steps and in every shake of his feathers. His feet do not tread the earth, they strike it, they beat it. They force the drumbeat, distort the rhythm. Something is wrong. Never has the kachina’s dance been one of bitterness.

  Yet the older men sigh and look on with a glitter in their hawks’ eyes, as if they knew this would happen and are satisfied that it has. A few babies wail and are carried away by their mothers. The deer-hoof rattles on the kachina’s legs crack sharply, the bells no longer jingling but shrill. Something is terribly wrong, the children think, but do not know what. The older children think that they will leave the pueblo when they grow up.

  And then with an angry leap, the kachina kicks both booted feet against the earth and howls, the sound reverberating inside the wooden cylinder of his head. Tears start to the eyes of the children. The one kachina who came has gone mad. Men rush toward the dancer, but they come too late. One of the kachina’s hands claws his head, wrenches it sideways, tips it over and off. It falls, revealing the agonized features of a young man and a voice that cries out that the dance is a lie and he can no longer bear to perform it.

  Many children feel their parents’ hands come down over their eyes or feel themselves lifted and clasped against blanketed breasts to block out the sight, but like the men running to the dancer, it is too late. They have seen the kachina beheaded. They know now that the glorious mask is just a painted cylinder of wood, and underneath was only a man.

  Murmurs run through the crowd, first in the scratchy voices of old men, then taken up by everyone. The prophesy has come true. As foretold, a kachina has danced in the plaza and taken off his mask before uninitiated children. It is the end of things, the people say The ceremonies have withered, now they will die.

  Stunned, the villagers retreat into their pueblos and begin their daily work. Hands carve kachinas, make pots, weave plagues, prepare corn, but souls are frozen. The village’s grief is the sound of its children crying for the kachina.

  Her grandfather’s words faded and Kesbe found herself wiping moisture from her eyes. She too had cried for the kachina.

  “Why did the dancer do that?” she asked Bajeloga in English. “Did he want to hurt all those kids? Was he crazy?”

  “There is no answer to that, Little Bluebird. It was a time of great pain. Perhaps he felt it more than most. Or perhaps he believed in the prophesy and wanted it to come true.”

  Kesbe wrinkled her nose and scowled. “It was a bad prophesy.”

  Bajeloga laughed and ruffled her hair. “Do bluebirds judge priests and prophets? Do you fly so high already, chosovi? All things must come in their time. Beginnings, endings. That dance was an ending, but it was also a beginning. The kachina who tore off his mask was not the last kachina to dance in the plaza. There was one more. But this kachina did not dance for children.”

  Again he slipped into the Hopi tongue to tell the remainder of the tale.

  Several weeks went by after the Wuwuchim dance. Christmas passed, then the New Year. The villagers wrenched themselves out of their lethargy and went on with their lives. The kivas were carefully sealed, for they would not be used again. Young people went out and looked for housing outside the pueblos. Quietly, almost serenely, the village began preparations for its own dissolution.

  And then, one evening, a new kachina appeared, dancing in the twilight shadows across the square. He bore the image of a bright four-pointed blue star on a black case mask. Above the mask was a fan of feathers and below a ruff woven of Douglas fir branches. The kachina wore a red-brown kilt with a wide sash, wore black body paint except for yellow shoulders, forearms and calves, carried a yucca whip and rang a bell.

  He brought a new message to the village. Yes, Hopi ceremonialism on Earth was to end as the prophesy foretold. But it would find a new birth on another world. The cycle of migration through the First, Second, Third and Fourth worlds had not ended. A Fifth World lay ahead.

  Quit the Earth and leave it to be destroyed by those forces already at work. Find a new world where the ancient ways could be resurrected without interference. The capability was there. While the Hopi had languished on their mesatop home, technology had pushed outward, developing stardrives and finding new planets. All that remained was to find and claim a new home.

  The word spread from village to village along the mesas, passing not only among the Hopi, but to the other Pueblo tribes who had gathered under their banner, the Zuni, the peoples of Taos and the Rio Grande, the Havasupai and others. The hope it raised gave birth to a name, the faith that bore the name of the Blue Star Kachina. It was a fire, igniting both hope and dissension among Pueblos. Some were tied too tightly to the land and could not bear the thought of abandoning it, despoiled as it had become. Others thought the migration impossible and spoke in resigned voices about giving up all pretense of the old ways and blending in with the world outside.

  At last the tribes split, most deciding to go, a few deciding to stay. The Hopi sold out their part of the Black Mesa coal lease to the Navajo to finance their journey.

  “By then,” said Bajeloga, “coal wasn’t used as fuel any longer because it had become the source of the hydrocarbons used in manufacturing plastics and chemicals. The value of the Black Mesa lease inflated and even though our people didn’t get a fair price, the money was enough to assemble equipment and buy transport to the most distant world they could find.”

  “Do we know which one they chose?” Kesbe asked.

  “No, the records were lost,” the old man said. “Little Bluebird, it is getting late and your mother has made piki bread for supper.” They got up and walked back to Bajeloga’s old electric van.

  Kesbe rose from the well of exhausted sleep into half-awake dozing. Her childhood memories faded, became tangled with dreams in the twilight, and gave way to more recent events. She remembered the storm and the landing those were real, but the vision of a dark-skinned savior aboard a winged mount had to be an hallucination. So her mind decided and so she chose to slide back into dreamless sleep, but, to her annoyance, her consciousness persisted, irritated by a humming sound.

  At first she thought she had somehow left the engines running. No, the sound wasn’t quite the same. It didn’t come from the right direction either. The engines were aft of her seat. The low resonance filling the cockpit came from overhead. It was in the metal surfaces around her, making her fingernails vibrate when she groped for a panel. As she rubbed the sleep-grit from her eyes, her mind searched the catalogue of all Gooney’s familiar voices and failed to find this one among them. It reminded her of a sound of her childhood: the enraged buzz of a bumblebee trapped inside a tin can.

  A stripe of shadow across the plane’s instrument panel below the windshield commanded Kesbe’s attention. Her bleary eyes opened wider. Was the stick-like thing across the window just a broken branch?

  Still dazed by exhaustion, her gaze fastened on a leg whose foot rested on the upper curve of the aircraft’s nose. The structure reminded her of an insect’s limb enlarged by about a factor of five hundred. She felt revulsion flutter in her stomach. She didn’t like insects. It had a small sucker pad and two short, curved claws. Her eyes traveled along the tarsal segments of the extremity up to a sculpted tube of chitin, whose lower end bore a comb of spines. At the top was a hinged joint where the lower leg joined the upper. The whole appendage bore a halo of tiny hairs silvered with raindrops.

  The leg flexed suddenly, startling Kesbe. Paired claws
scrabbled on the windshield. The hum, which had been blanked from her awareness, returned in full force. Her mind finally made the connection between this insect-like limb and the memory of a flying creature carrying a small human rider.

  She sat up, wondering what had become of her rescuer. If this limb belonged to the person’s mount then why was he or she letting the animal crawl on her aircraft?

  Kesbe glanced nervously at the hole made by her boot in the right side cockpit window. Her instinctive dislike of insects had been compounded by a disturbing incident with a wasp when she was seven. It was one thing for her to marvel at the unknown creature from far away another to have the animal’s segmented limb within touching distance.

  It was also annoying not knowing what she was dealing with. Then she remembered that she’d seen some information on Oneway’s native flora and fauna at an exhibit at the space port.

  The physical and biological makeup of Oneway were not all that different from Earth. The planet’s plant life, in particular, was very similar to Terran species, but the animal life had taken a divergent course. Nothing here could properly be called a vertebrate, although a few fish-like swimmers had managed to wriggle to the top of their evolutionary tree. Instead it was the Arthropoda who multiplied and expanded. The predominant family, the Paradoptera, were an insect-like group that differed from Terran insects in that they had four walking limbs instead of six.

  With another quick glance at the creature’s limb segments through the windshield, she recalled the illustrations of Oneway’s paradopteran arthropods. She hoped to match her remembered impression of the creature in flight with its depiction in the space port exhibit.

  Like insects, Oneway’s paradopterans varied considerably in size and shape and filled most of the ecological niches on the planet. Some were highly accomplished fliers, others were entirely wingless. Some were ugly spiky little monsters, reminding her of hugely enlarged stag beetles. Others had a fairy-like delicacy that appealed to her despite their insectile character They reminded her of the stories her grandfather had told her about the dragonfly, who was sacred to the Hopi people since it always lived near water.

  She recalled a painting, a top view of a flying creature with wings extended, the same animal she had seen gliding below Gooney Berg.

  The caption had described the animal as an aronan, a paradopteran species characterised by the presence of four limbs, paired fore-and hindwings and a very un-insect-like head. The other pertinent facts were that it grew to considerable size, had a twenty-to thirty-year lifespan and was not known to be carnivorous.

  Perhaps it’s not known to be carnivorous, Kesbe thought sourly, because the last person who tried to find out got eaten.

  The display had been careful to say that not a lot was known about aronans and what was known might not be accurate. What she had seen and what was presumably dancing on her airplane, according to the exhibit, was Aronae pseudopegasi Barranca, known colloquially as the Barranca Canyon aronan.

  Well, that describes the creature, she thought. The text didn’t say anything about aronans having riders.

  When she glanced up again, the aronans limb had changed position. Now it reminded her of a grasshopper leg. Through the translucent cuticle of the thigh, she could see muscles banded in a herringbone pattern. Muscle fibers flickered as the leg twitched.

  Kesbe caught a glimpse of the veined underside of a wing through the windshield as the creature swung itself around on Gooney’s brow. A feathery antenna brushed the glass. She frowned. Whatever your intentions, friend, I don’t like anyone on my airplane without my permission.

  Emboldened, she squinted up through the plane’s windshield. If the aronan had a rider, she might catch a glimpse of the person perhaps a dangling foot.

  Her uncertainty turned to irritation. This was strange behavior from a would-be rescuer. Where was the creature’s rider?

  “Whatever you are, get the hell off my airplane,” she growled. She banged the cockpit roof for emphasis.

  The aronans response to her noise was a screech of claws on aluminum that set her teeth on edge. Gooney Berg rocked slightly as something slid off the plane’s roof to land with a thud on the right wing.

  Kesbe knelt in the co-pilot’s seat, watching it crawl along the slick metal of the wing like a cockroach on a tabletop. It resembled a strange hybrid of moth, dragonfly and grasshopper except for a neck and head like that of a Terran sea-horse.

  Her irritation became alarm when the creature straddled the right engine cowling and began nuzzling the three-bladed prop. Thumping and yelling from inside did nothing to deter it. She hauled the co-pilot’s dual control wheel over, banging the ailerons up and down. It made an unholy racket to her ears but didn’t seem to bother the creature, who extended a proboscis and probed the C-47’s upright propeller blade.

  Kesbe wondered uneasily if insects were deaf. They didn’t have ears, did they?

  “Hey, you extra-terrestrial mosquito! You’re gonna lose whatever you use for cojones if you don’t get away from that prop!”

  The creature took no notice. Evidently the upright prop blade was just the thing on which to scratch an itchy neck.

  The thought occurred to her that the creature’s spiny exoskeleton could possibly damage Gooney’s propeller. Even a nick could start a stress fracture. There weren’t too many three-bladed Hamilton props on Oneway. The few precious spares she had tucked in the cargo compartment were the sum total.

  “Damn! Why, out of all the possible fates dealt by the gods do I get stuck with a flat tire and an overgrown bug who’s carrying on a love affair with my engine?”

  She tried one more furious bang with the ailerons. The creature only lifted its wings briefly. Raising and lowering flaps didn’t seem to bother it either.

  She climbed around the control pedestal into the pilot’s seat, thinking she might use the starter to flip the prop without firing up the engines. She hoped that the lower cylinders in the right radial engine hadn’t filled with oil.

  She ran through engine startup. Throttle and props, fuel valves, overhead to snap on the electrical master switch, hydraulics on. Her fingers flew across the overhead controls, then paused on the engine starter. One glance right told her the creature was still abusing her prop. She gritted her teeth and pushed the switch.

  The starter ground. The prop flipped over. The aronan sailed off Gooney’s right wing and landed on the ground with an angry buzz. As the engine started the counterweights in the prop rattled like a handful of rocks in a can.

  What was that? Kesbe stared again. The blowing dust nearly obscured a small figure that darted from a cleft at the rear of the terrace. On two legs it ran, straight across to the aronan which still lay on its back, kicking its legs in the air.

  Outside, the small figure knelt beside the fallen creature, trying to lift it. Kesbe clutched the control wheel, pulling herself up out of her seat.

  The small figure was a boy. He had a white scarf bound around his arm—Kesbe’s. He was real, he had tried to help her and she had just about murdered his mount. She felt a blush of shame flood her face under the film of sweat. A part of her mind retaliated with anger. If you meant to help me, why didn’t you show your face instead of letting your aronan loose on my aircraft?

  As for the aronan’s companion, the poor kid looked terrified, and well he might be, faced with a monster like Gooney Berg, Kesbe thought. His black hair lashed his shoulders in the wind as he went on hands and knees, trying to get one shoulder under the struggling flier’s wing.

  He beat his fist in the dust and shook it at Gooney Berg. He ripped the white scarf from his arm, wadded it up and flung it away.

  Kesbe fell back in her seat, stunned by the ghastliness of her mistake. Tucking a dart-pistol into a thigh pocket of her flight suit just in case something nasty appeared, she shut down the engine and left her seat. One peek through the broken side window told her the boy was still fighting to right his flier. The aronan buzzed and gave feeble kic
ks like a swatted housefly. Kesbe wondered if it was injured. She stopped and grabbed the first-aid kit from behind the co-pilot’s seat.

  Patching up oversized arthropods had never been her forte, but whoever the boy was, she owed him what help she could give She shouldered into her flight jacket, went aft into the cargo compartment and undogged the rear door.

  Chapter 3

  “Haewi!”

  The boy’s cry came on the wind above the plaintive drone of the flier. The voice was an adolescent’s, cracking with grief and the nearness of manhood.

  Kesbe emerged from under the wing and saw him. He was dressed in a short shoulder-cape, leggings and breechclout, his chest bare. She knew he had seen her, for he crouched, ready to defend his mount. No weapons showed in his balled fists, but his coiled stance and the way anger writhed on his face held her at a distance.

  She let her knees bend, deliberately reducing her height in comparison to his. She showed the palms of her hands. He didn’t know the gesture, for he only ducked his head, eyeing her sullenly. Abruptly he turned his back on her and tried once again to turn the aronan over.

  The creature didn’t appear injured, but in its stunned frenzy, its wings were outspread on both sides, stranding it on its back. Kesbe had seen small moths and beetles temporarily stuck upside-down. Their design did not include rapid recovery from falls that left them flat on their backs. Left alone, the aronan would probably right itself, but its young master was too frightened to leave it.

  With a nervous glance at Kesbe, the boy pushed one wing back, but as soon as he let go to run around and close the other, it sprang out, knocking him over. He crawled to the aronan’s head, stroking one of the trembling antennae and moaning, “Haewi…”