People of the Sky

by Clare Bell

  Ai, it is too strange to understand, even as a story! I will think no more of it now and will sleep beside my Wind Laughing.

  When Kesbe woke, the air outside smelled brilliant and fresh, with an early morning quality that told her she had slept through the previous night. With a stab of disappointment, she saw the boy and his aronan were gone from the tent. She felt creaky and grimy as she rose up on her knees, stretched and scolded herself for wasting time in sleep. Again she thought of the mysterious Indian village that must be waiting somewhere in the vastness of the Barranca. She wished she could go there, then reluctantly turned her mind to more practical things.

  By now, if her last message had been heard and interpreted by Canaback, rescue craft would be in the air over the Barranca. She should build a smoke beacon.

  Taking a ration bar from her flightbag and stashing it in a flightsuit pocket for breakfast on the run, she crawled out of the tarp shelter. She nearly blundered into a large tangled mass hanging from the underside of the plane’s wing. For a confused moment, she thought that an entire hydraulic assembly had come loose from its mounting.

  She blinked once. No, this was not a portion of the aircraft’s innards dangling from tubes and wires. Those were legs. The hanging shape was the aronan. Haewi was upside down again, but this time by choice. Its fly-feet stuck tenaciously to Gooney Berg’s underside. Its head was tucked under one back-folded wing. Kesbe noticed that it had chosen to sling itself near the engine cowling and within proboscis-reach of the forbidden prop. Who knew what mischief it had been up to during the night.

  Her delight at finding the creature still nearby was overwhelmed by a surge of possessive indignation at this treatment of her aircraft. With her knuckles on her hips, she addressed the sleeping bundle of legs and wings. “Hey, chosovi amigo. Get down off there.” Haewi only curled its head down to stare at her. Little question-ripples of metallic gold crossed its compound eyes.

  “Down!” Kesbe made the gesture emphatically, but the aronan continued to hang inverted. It lowered one leg at a time, cleaning each with its mouthparts. Kesbe had never been more innocently or more completely ignored. Gooney Berg, however, had its own solution to the problem. A glob of black oil dripped from the big radial engine onto the aronan. With an outraged flurry of wings, Haewi fled to the Indian youth, who was standing a short distance away.

  “Don’t’ say I didn’t warn you, chosovi!” Kesbe yelled after it. She flung a rag to the boy to use on the aronan. He took a fingerful of goo, smelled it and grimaced. Kesbe left him to the job of cleaning up his flier while she set about attacking her own problems.

  She stuck a small hatchet in her belt before going off to scout for wood. In the crevices at the back of the terrace, she found a few scraggly thorn-trees. She hacked branches off them and brought the wood back to the plane. Studying the wind, she eyed the ledge, estimating the best place to locate her smoke-beacon.

  She started slicing chunks from one of the plastic cargo pallets. This stuff would burn too, making an inky smoke-plume visible for miles. With some of the antiquated friction matches in her survival kit, she soon had a healthy signal fire wafting its message into the sky over the Barranca.

  She also had to deal with the non-functional communications equipment. With the spare components available for the lasercom, she thought she could repair it. When all her efforts in the cockpit failed to restore the system, she got the youth to boost her atop the C-47’s horizontal stabilizer where she demounted the transmitting laser. The housing was scarred by the impact of a stone, the lasing crystal shattered.

  When she retrieved her spare, she found to her dismay that careful packaging hadn’t saved it from the effects of the rough landing, either. It was neatly cracked in half. She wished that she had kept the old radio-frequency equipment, even though the transmitters radiated excess heat like blast furnaces. The useless lasercom went into the back corner of the cargo compartment. It was too sophisticated and delicate a technology for the rough and ready life of an ancient C-47. She should have known better.

  As a late morning haze spread across the canyon, Kesbe poked her fire dispiritedly. No sign of rescue craft.

  Well, the Barranca was a big place in which to search for a lost C-47. Even if Canaback Base received her last lasercom transmission they might not even have anything capable of landing in such rugged country.

  As the day drew to an end without any sign of rescue, Kesbe began to mull over her position. If Canaback hadn’t found her by now, they weren’t likely to. It was possible that they had given up and written her off as another casualty of the Barranca, perhaps a little crazier than most. All right, she argued to herself, the searchers had wreckage detectors, but Gooney was made of 29ST aluminum alloy. The stuff hadn’t been used in aircraft design for a hundred years! It was all exotics now: titanium, beryllium, niobium…

  She suspected that the delay would be much longer than she had anticipated.

  And then the wish that she kept pushing away came creeping back. This time she accepted it with relief.

  If Canaback doesn’t find me soon, I’ll go to the boy’s village, she said to herself. She almost hoped they wouldn’t.

  Chapter 4

  Day came once again, without signs of search craft. A bank of gunmetal clouds sat atop the canyon. The overcast lifted a little, allowing a wan sunrise to filter through. The youth and his flier were gone, probably to find breakfast. The signal fire was out.

  It seemed to Kesbe that her aircraft looked forlorn as she hiked her makeshift pack further up on her shoulders and strode away from the plane. A last inspection of the blown tire and battered wheel hub confirmed what she already knew, she couldn’t fix the wheel without jacking the plane up and for that she would need help.

  She had done the best she could for the old Douglas—used a few tie-down stakes to secure her against any malicious winds, taped up the broken cockpit window, set the control locks and latched the doors.

  It wasn’t as if she was abandoning the aircraft for good, she told herself. She’d return when she could, hopefully with the means to get the C-47 airborne once again. And if she didn’t return, there was a note stuck to the inside of the windshield just in case someone from Canaback did spot the downed aircraft. Along with an explanation of the circumstances leading to her forced landing, Kesbe had included a crude map with her probable route marked by a broken line. If she couldn’t persuade the boy to guide her to his village, she thought she would strike out toward the great Hellshatter River and follow it down, hoping that the hidden settlement lay somewhere atop its cliffs.

  She thought of trying to walk all the remaining way to Tony Mabena’s installation. No. That was too far. The boy’s village might be primitive, but it had one advantage, she could probably make it there.

  The plan looked feasible, based on the area sectional she had. But her map wasn’t a detailed topographic, just an aerial survey and not complete at that.

  She shifted her pack again. Her pilot’s jacket kept it from digging too deeply into her shoulders, but she wished she had done a better job making the packframe. Walking to the far end of the terrace and peering over, she saw another ledge about ten meters below. It opened up into a wider terrace, an esplanade that offered her an easy route along the canyon wall. If she could get down to it.

  A shadow flitted over her. The whisper of air against wings made her stare skyward to see the aronan Haewi Namij glide in beneath the overcast. The creature’s wings were held in a dihedral angle, its legs tightly folded, making the flier appear to be some strange ultralight aircraft. It slid down from the sky, stalling itself at the last instant with a quick fan of its tail.

  The youth was scrambling off before his mount had fully settled. He eyed Kesbe’s pack and makeshift climbing equipment, then glanced at Gooney Berg, sitting abandoned at the end of the terrace. Kesbe’s hopes lifted. If she could make him understand that she needed the help of his people to help raise the C-47 so she could repair the dama
ged wheel, that might overcome any reluctance.

  It might be a slim hope, but she knew that more than one of Gooney Berg’s contemporaries had been salvaged by the use of primitive manpower. One C-47 had been dragged out of a mudhole by lines of New Guinea natives hauling on vine ropes.

  “Pueblo,” she said to the boy, falling back on Spanish to describe the kind of community he probably lived in. The Hopi words finally came and she added, “Kisokoki. Your village. Wikima. Guide me there.” She knew she must be mangling the Indian grammar but it was so simple, he must understand. As she spoke, the old language came more easily. “I need help to make my creature fly again,” she said in Hopi.

  He mouthed the words to himself, looking puzzled, then his brow cleared. After hesitating for a moment, while several expressions crossed his face, he motioned for Kesbe to sight along his forearm toward the horizon. She squinted at a chalk-yellow mesa arising from the dusky blues and grays of the Barranca.

  “Wikima kisokoki” There lies my village, he was saying.

  She stared at him, wondering why it had been so easy. Was it that he had recognized her plight? Or had the fear of strangers been lost because these people were so isolated they had never experienced an intrusion from outside?

  The boy lifted his eyebrows at her, his arm still extended toward the horizon.

  She swallowed. The country looked rough. Well, best get started.

  She gestured down at the ledge beneath. The boy gave a sharp nod as if to say, yes, go that way. Making her rope fast about a granite spur near the cliff edge, she made a non-slipping knot about her waist, put on her flying gloves and retrieved her pack along with climbing pitons she had made from tie-down stakes. Approaching the brink on hands and knees, she backed over, gripping the rope and bracing herself against the cliff. Much to her relief, the face was steep but not sheer. Rather than having to lower herself by the rope, she could clamber down backwards using hand and footholds.

  Once she was almost to the ledge, she let herself slide the remaining distance, landing in a puff of dust and a clank of pitons against her canteen. The youth grinned down, undid her anchoring knot and flipped the line to her.

  This part of the ledge was sufficiently wide to walk along, but narrow enough to make her nervous. She looped her safety line over outcrops as she sidled along, hammering in a piton or two for security. At last the shelf widened into another terrace that wound along the canyon face for several kilometers. Coiling the rope over her shoulder, she hiked up her pack again and set off.

  Using a mark scratched on her compass bezel to indicate the direction of the boy’s village, she strode across scrub and gravel. Above, the clouds started to break, letting sunlight enrich the landscape. Bedded sandstone layers she passed turned from a uniform cardboard tan to an amazing range of shades, from burnt orange to the palest yellow. She crossed eroded slabs of pastel blue limestone, her boots dislodging fossil shells. She stooped, picked one up and scratched away the calcareous matrix in which it was embedded. It looked like a scallop with five arm-like projections. She tried to imagine what it might have looked like while living, gave up the attempt and walked on.

  Her spirits lifted. Perhaps this journey wasn’t going to be so hard. Hadn’t she read about some twentieth-century fellow who had hiked the length of Earth’s Grand Canyon? Yes, he had done it with caches and air-dropped supplies, but the fact he had done it at all gave her hope. As for air support, she might even arrange her own if the youth and his flier would stay around.

  Eventually the terrace petered out, melting back into the mother-rock of the canyon wall. Kesbe managed to scramble down to the next esplanade. She stopped for lunch and was breaking out rations when Haewi Namij came whirring onto the esplanade, bearing the boy.

  After lunch, he chose to accompany her, matching her stride while Haewi Namij scuttled along behind. She found that the youth was quite willing to walk with her on the level, but when she had to resort to the rope, he merely climbed aboard his flier, gliding in short hops from one terrace to the next.

  Soon she was hot, bruised, dusty and a little irritated with him. It wasn’t encouraging to have a companion who could climb aboard his own biological version of an elevator while you had to struggle up or down with a rope. Envy began to invade her frustration. To the young Indian on his flier, the Barranca held no challenges. To her, slogging along on foot, every bump in the landscape was a major obstacle.

  It would be so much easier if I could ride you as he does, chosovi, she thought at the aronan. The simple audacity of that idea startled her. She had already sensed the intimacy of the bond between boy and flier. It was something precious, something she did not wish to intrude upon. Yet, she argued to herself, she had her own needs, not the least of which was survival.

  She doubted whether Haewi could carry two passengers, but it could alternate, carrying one at a time in a series of leapfrog flights from one esplanade to the next. That would certainly reduce the time needed to reach the village. On the basis of size, she guessed that she weighed perhaps a third more than the youth and that the aronan could lift her. If he could teach her to ride the flier…Dare she ask?

  Kesbe knew at once that there was more than simple practicality behind the idea. There was a wish burning in her, kindled by the first sight of an aronan from Gooney Berg’s cockpit window. On this world, Pegasus had neither hooves nor feathers, but there was still the age-old magic.

  She held back, a little frightened by the strength of her feelings. It seemed unfair to Gooney Berg that she should have such a desire. But how could she betray something that was at bottom a chunk of cold dead metal, given life only by human fancy and imagination? Animating Gooney Berg was a game she played with herself. She had played it with many other aircraft, though none had ever come as close to making it so vividly real. She remembered the war-song of the C-47’s engines against the thunderstorm. Perhaps it was just a hallucination brought on by exhaustion, yet…

  She listened to Haewi Namij scuttling along behind her, glanced back at the sun shimmering on its wings. The aronan needed no anthropomorphic imagination to make it real. This was a living flier with the capacity to bear a rider into the skies. It was a biological aircraft that could feel the air lifting its wings; able to respond to atmospheric currents with a sensitivity and precision impossible in a mechanical system. And a companion who could willingly share the gift of flight with its chosen rider.

  For it would choose, Kesbe sensed. Such a creature could never be forced or driven. The act of flight would not, she sensed, be an act of mastery by one being over another but rather a collaboration between the two.

  She trudged along, wondering how to frame the question she longed to ask. She didn’t even have the words to begin.

  I walk the canyonlands with the woman-spirit. Many voices speak within me, telling me what I should and should not have done. Perhaps it was foolish to guide her down out of the storm. Maybe it is even more foolish to take her to my village.

  Everything I have been taught tells me to honor those of the spirit-world. To meet with a spirit is a great blessing, so say the wise-women of my people. I do not feel blessed, only confused. None of my teachings prepared me for a spirit like this!

  She sweats. She bleeds. Her belly rumbles and she makes wind.

  Is she some strangely crippled kachina, lost from the Road of Life? Is she somehow of my flesh and my people? If she is as she appears, how did she come to command that great roaring aronan she called “Gooni Bug”? Why did she leave her flier quiet and still on the clifftops? I would never leave my Wind Laughing, my Haewi Namij.

  My Wind Laughing…

  The woman-spirit looks at Haewi with eyes that hunger. Is her great flier dead that she should want my Wind Laughing? Haewi Namij is the most beautiful of the aronans in the village, but that is no reason for someone else to want my flier. All among the people know that when child and aronan-nymph are given to each other, it is a sacred thing. That another could even wish
to ride my aronan is so sudden and strange a thought that I could not believe it. None of us ever rides another’s flier.

  No, that is not true. When there is great need, it is done, but only after meditation and ceremony determines that the need is real. The woman-spirit thinks she has great need, but she has not meditated, nor made ceremony. It is that which tells me she is not of my people.

  I am angry. I walk and kick rocks. My life with Haewi will end too soon, yet this stranger would take what little there is left. I wish I could tell her this, but she does not understand the words…I wonder if she would care.

  A voice sings in my head. Haewi and I could leave her here. Let the canyon turn her to dust.

  No. It would be an easy thing, but also a shameful thing. I have offered friendship. It is too late. I have taken on responsibility for this stranger. To abandon her now is not the way of the Pai Yinaye.

  Whatever she is, kachina or woman, I must see her to a place of safety. If that means that she rides Wind Laughing, I will perform the ceremony in her stead and beg forgiveness from the aronan-spirits that this must be so.

  She does not know yet what she asks of me. Perhaps I do not either.

  Chapter 5

  The next day was brilliantly clear, giving Kesbe a dizzying view as she marched along the esplanades with the young Indian. For the first time she began to appreciate the tremendous scale of this great gash in Oneway’s flesh. Looking at the bands of strata in the cliffs around her, she wondered how many millions of years of history lay buried there. Earth’s Grand Canyon was a mile deep. From the Pre-Cambrian Vishnu formation to the younger rocks on the canyon’s rim, the Grand held the residue (with some gaps) of more than 200 million years. Another 100 million or so lay preserved in the strata of Bryce and Zion canyons, which continued the geological sequence of the Grand. One could pile all three of those canyons atop each other and still have only half the depth of the Barranca, she thought.