Cowboys and Aliens

by Joan D. Vinge

  DOLARHYDE STOPPED, TURNED to look back at the outlaw named Hunt.

  “You the same Colonel Woodrow Dolarhyde who fought at Antietam?” Hunt asked.

  Dolarhyde hesitated, looking down at Hunt, feeling an unaccustomed mix of emotions rise up in him. Now was the time when his bitterness and shame had always burst out of him as fury—

  But he didn’t even know Hunt. Hunt was only another veteran, another victim of soldier’s heart who’d drifted west after the war, like too many others who’d lost everything that held any meaning for them in blood and smoke, in the endless years of killing or being killed.

  The man wasn’t a ghost, only a stranger, and curiosity was the only thing that showed on his face.

  “Yes, I am,” Dolarhyde said quietly, at last . . . realizing at last that after nearly thirteen years, there probably wasn’t anybody left who hated him as much as he still hated himself.

  Hunt nodded, his curiosity satisfied, and turned back to the fire as Dolarhyde walked on.

  Dolarhyde kept walking, alone with his thoughts, until he passed beyond the firelight at the edge of their camp to a spot where he could just see the Apache camp.

  He stood for a long moment watching the war dance being performed there, trying to see what Nat had described to him: a sacred ceremony where the dance filled the warriors with life in the face of death; that sent their prayers for blessings and protection to God-as-they-knew-Him; that heated their blood for the coming battle, giving them the will and courage it took to win. . . . The dance would probably go on all night, until it was time to ride out in the morning.

  Nat claimed that to the Apaches everything was sacred, everything was infused by the presence of Yusn, the Creator, and White-Painted Woman. To go into battle without performing the appropriate rituals and observing the proper traditions would be a disaster, and the result would be slaughter, without meaning or honor.

  Slaughter. That was how he’d always seen war—the results of a battle with any enemy, but especially the Apaches, savages who he’d always figured had no God at all. Their ceremonies had looked as primitive to him as their weapons . . . until they’d gotten hold of rifles, anyway.

  He remembered dignified army chaplains reading a prayer in front of lines of troops ready to go into battle, asking God’s blessing and protection for the men—a prayer that had no more moved God to mercy than the agony of the wounded and dying had, once the fighting started.

  The chaplain had always walked away again, without ever really seeing any of the very real men he’d just sent away to kill or be killed . . . especially not at the times when they’d needed to see him the most.

  After Antietam, Dolarhyde had ceased to listen to the chaplains, ceased believing in any law of man or God, in anything but himself.

  But if anything had proved to him that he controlled nothing in his own life, it had been seeing his only child snatched away by monsters. The alien demons had invaded his self-imposed exile from beyond the sky, to rob him of his illusions, along with Percy, leaving him stranded and empty . . . like that riverboat in the middle of the desert.

  Dolarhyde wondered about the aliens in the metal fortress: what kind of ideas they had about God, whether they saw humans, or Ella’s people, or any other—sentient beings, Ella called them—as nothing more than insects to crush, to eradicate.

  Seeing Ella walk out of that fire, glowing like an angel, was as close to seeing Heaven as he ever expected to get; and yet even her people had been exterminated by these demons, these monsters . . . these alien things. He had no words left to describe “sentient beings” that lived only to destroy other people’s lives, whose only god seemed to be gold.

  But only yesterday, he’d laughed at Ella, saying, “What’re they gonna do? Buy something?”

  He suddenly recalled his first glimpse of Jake Lonergan, in that prison wagon, chained to Percy . . . remembered that he’d ignored his own son, too blind with hatred for the man who’d stolen his gold . . . his gold . . . not his son.

  He’d been prepared to torture Lonergan until he gave up where he’d hidden it, and then kill him—simply for having the brass to challenge his non-existent control over the small piece of the world that he’d believed he owned.

  He considered the painful irony of the truth: how Jake couldn’t have told him anything if he’d wanted to; how the same aliens that’d kidnapped his son had taken the gold he’d cared so goddamn much more about away from Jake . . . and killed Jake’s woman in front of his eyes.

  Jake came up beside him, almost as if Dolarhyde had conjured him out of his own thoughts. For a moment they stood side by side, watching the Apache camp in the distance, each of them lost in memories. At last Dolarhyde said, “I knew you’d be back.”

  Jake cocked his head, looking at him in mild surprise, because there’d been nothing cynical inside the words, nothing accusing behind them . . . simply relief, and maybe even a little gratitude.

  Dolarhyde turned away then, walking back into camp, content at last with the place his thoughts had led him to; ready to face tomorrow.

  Jake stood a moment longer, watching Dolarhyde go. The edges of his mouth turned up as he said, to the air, “You’re welcome.” He left the place where they’d been standing too, because he wanted to find Ella, and Ella wasn’t there.

  EMMETT CROUCHED IN a pile of rocks, the dog lying down at his side, as he secretly watched the Apache war dance with wide-eyed fascination. He’d gone closer than anybody else had dared to get; thinking about the things he’d listened to Nat tell Mr. Dolarhyde about what the ceremony meant to the Apaches.

  He wondered how Nat knew so much about Apaches, even how to speak their language, when all Emmett had ever known about him was that he worked for Mr. Dolarhyde, and Grandpa hated Mr. Dolarhyde. Emmett had never even spoken to Nat before. He’d never seen real Apaches before, either. It had never occurred to him how much Nat looked like an Apache . . . like he belonged to two worlds, or none; the way Emmett found himself feeling more and more, since his own world had started to fall apart, along with his family. . . .

  But it was Nat who came up behind him, where he thought he’d hidden himself so well, and laid a hand lightly on his shoulder. Nat’s voice was firm as he said, “Hey, Emmett, you shouldn’t be here.” The war dance was only for Apache eyes . . . even Nat had not been watching it, he realized.

  Emmett looked up, half disappointed and half embarrassed. He couldn’t tell what the expression on Nat’s face was, as Nat glanced toward the Apaches. Emmett got up and shuffled away, the dog trotting behind him as he headed back into camp.

  NAT WAS ABOUT to follow him, but he hesitated for just a moment, watching the warriors dance while the women chanted and called: an outsider looking on at a world to which he had once belonged, but never would again.

  He lingered, watching, for a moment too long; just as he began to turn away, he realized that the nantan’s sharp eyes had spotted him standing there. Black Knife held his gaze for a long moment. Then, to Nat’s surprise, Black Knife gestured for him to enter the camp, to come and take a seat by the fire.

  Nat stood where he was for a long moment, overcome by emotions he had kept buried too deeply inside, for far too many years. . . . At last he started forward, crossing into the light of the Apache world, where a part of his soul had finally been granted acceptance again. Moving among his people, he sat down next to Black Knife.

  Black Knife nodded to him; Nat saw in the chief’s obsidian eyes both welcome and respect.

  “You are a good Apache,” Black Knife said. And with that, he rose to his feet and joined the dance, leaving Nat to share in a part of his past life that he’d never thought he would get the chance to reclaim.

  AFTER WANDERING THROUGH the whole camp, and searching most of its perimeter, Jake found Ella at last. She was standing alone in the darkness at the top of a hill, gazing at the stars as if she were searching for her true home; a place that lay somewhere out there, like Heaven . . . a place that no
longer existed.

  Jake thought of the ruined cabin: the only real home he’d ever had, that no longer existed . . . the home he had shared with Alice . . . who no longer existed . . .

  All he had ever wanted of Heaven . . . and he hadn’t even realized it.

  He tried not to think at all, as he stopped beside Ella and looked up at the stars. They were beautiful, out here in the desert. He must have lain awake at night and stared up at them for years, somehow he was sure of that, even though his memory of that time seemed to be gone for good.

  But it had never occurred to him before that the stars were beautiful . . . any more than he could ever have imagined that someone like Ella might drop out of the sky one day like a wounded angel, as beautiful as the whole sea of stars . . . as beautiful inside as she was outside, whatever her true form was.

  Even after all she’d been through—the loss and the hardships that had made her strong—life hadn’t turned her bitter and hard; it had only filled her with more compassion.

  She was like a guerrilla, a Juarista from another world, fighting in a battle she might never win . . . that might never end . . . but not just for revenge. Having lost her past, her world, everything but her life, she’d found a reason to go on living, in saving other worlds and their people . . . even his own people, who needed her help to save the world they all shared, however ungratefully.

  When he’d been told she was dead, he hadn’t known who or what she really was. Yet simply knowing her as a woman named Ella . . . when he’d believed she was gone, he’d felt like something inside him had died along with her; an emotion that had gone numb so long ago he hadn’t realized he’d ever possessed it.

  And then, seeing her walk out of the flames, reborn, shining like the Morning Star after a long dark night. Coming directly toward him. . . .

  He remembered suddenly why he’d been looking for her, tonight: that the two of them had unfinished business left from that final moment standing heart to heart on the shore of the desert lake.

  Ella looked down, away from the sky, and turned toward him as if she’d sensed his thoughts, or his emotions. “Just so you know,” she said softly, and looked away as she said it, “I’m not going to be here for very long.”

  “None of us are here for very long. . . .” He met her gaze as she looked up again, his own eyes fearless. He took off his hat, like a gentleman, and kissed her. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he murmured.

  Her hands rose, catching his bruised face with the gentlest of fingers, holding it still, as she went on looking at him. He saw on her face the same kind of wonder and amazement he’d seen when she realized he was trying to save her from the flyer.

  But this time her eyes said it was nothing but a kiss, only the briefest contact of his lips with hers, that she couldn’t believe. He didn’t understand that at all . . . even if his body had its own ideas, as his hands rose to take her into his arms.

  Her hands dropped to her sides then, and closed over his own, tender but insistent as she moved his hands away; she gave a slight shake of her head. She glanced down, her own face as confused as his was, now. But one of her hands clung to his a moment longer; telling him that her body had its own opinions too, even if she wasn’t ready to listen to them.

  He smiled a little as he took a step back, understanding that much, at least.

  As he began to turn away, Ella’s hand reached out suddenly and caught his. He stopped; she let go. She didn’t say anything, or even glance at him.

  But she didn’t have to. He stood quietly beside her, looking up at the Milky Way, the river of light connecting their separate worlds, their solitary lives, their destinies. Sensing her unspoken gratitude, all at once he became aware of his own, as he thought about lying sleepless, alone, staring up at the stars, at unreachable Heaven . . . tonight, of all nights, when tomorrow’s dawn might bring the end of the world.

  17

  The scent of sage was strong in the dawn wind as Dolarhyde’s motley troops assembled in two groups, side-by-side . . . together in their eagerness to go to war against a common enemy, but still uneasy with each other, not yet united in trust.

  Dolarhyde sat on his horse, with Ella on one side of him and Jake on the other. As he looked back at the waiting riders, he realized he’d never seen a less disciplined, less likely looking group of fighting men in his life. But then, he’d never faced an enemy like this one before. . . . Somehow it struck him as fitting.

  He looked past Ella at Black Knife, who waited at the head of his own band of warriors. Nat had explained to him that Black Knife’s position as a high chief was due partly to his skill as a di-yin of war—not just a good fighter, but a kind of medicine man whose special gift from the spirit world gave him the insight to lead his men to victory in battles. Battles against human enemies.

  The Apaches all wore a streak of war paint across their cheeks and the bridge of their nose, a Chiricahua pattern, although it was chalk-white instead of the usual red ochre. But then, not all the warriors were Chiricahuas: Maybe it was a new design, something that the survivors of different tribes had agreed on, a symbol of their united stand against the United States . . . or against the universe.

  Dolarhyde glanced past Ella at Black Knife—and found the nantan looking back at him. He still had no real idea of how to read the Apache leader’s face; but this time he got the odd feeling that Black Knife was thinking the same thing about him. He just hoped that today, Black Knife remembered who their real enemies were.

  He turned back to Jake, who nodded. He raised his arm, a signal for all the riders to move out.

  THE RIDE INTO hostile territory stirred an old familiar feeling in Jake . . . the feeling that he’d done the same thing far too many times before. This must have been what his old life had been like—riding out with the boys to waylay a stage, or rustle horses and cattle; something he figured the Apaches knew as much about as his gang did. It was almost reassuring.

  Just the thought of real cavalry, riding in perfect lines, bristling with weapons, stirred something a lot more unpleasant. He wasn’t sure if it was the way a troop of horse soldiers looked—like a stone wall topped with spikes—or more likely that they’d tried to nail his hide to their wall, one time too many.

  This felt right . . . a bunch of misfit, need-driven outcasts. The only thing any of them really had in common, red or white, was the determination, and the skill, to survive against enemies who wanted to see them dead.

  If they happened to save the whole goddamn world in the process, well . . . where would they be without it?

  And knowing that the holier-than-thou, Godfearing folk who’d spat on them all their lives would end up owing their own lives to outlaws, Apaches and a woman from some other planet—even if no one in New Mexico Territory ever learned the truth—it would still let him have the last laugh, if someday the good people of the Territories finally put a noose around his neck.

  THE RIDERS SLOWED as they reached the jagged crest of a final hill, and saw the aliens’ fortress-ship, still sitting like a tombstone on the mesa’s flat summit, now too close for comfort.

  But comfort wasn’t what they were here for. The two parallel groups of riders drew up together and sat staring at their target for a long moment as men muttered to one another in two different languages.

  Dolarhyde’s group and the Apaches glanced at each other a last time, acknowledging their mutual need, despite the fear of betrayal that lay just beneath the skin in every one of them.

  Then they rode on down the slope, crossing the wide plain of the valley floor, where the land was already showing a trace of fresh green after the first thunderstorm of summer, transforming the pale dirt between the clumps of scrub. Every form of life in the desert fought back against annihilation with an unyielding perversity that could have been the definition of Life itself, as well as of Death.

  When they reached the weather-eaten wall of the mesa on the far side, the riders stopped again at the foot of a talus slope b
elow a protruding stone outcrop. The rubble and detritus had laid down a precarious path to the rim, identifying the spot where the two halves of the group had finally agreed that they would split up.

  Leaving their horses at the base of the slope, Black Knife and his mountain fighters picked a trail up the steep scarp to higher ground, where they could surround the slot canyon that marked the aliens’ hidden ground-level entrance, and fire down on the enemy as they emerged from their sunken fortress.

  The two groups separated, with more than one uncertain backward glance, Dolarhyde led his men on around the foot of the outcrop, heading toward the only sufficient cover near the canyon’s entrance, a timeworn ridge of granite that ran parallel to the mesa’s foot, within sight of the arroyo Jake remembered. The outlaw cavalry would form up and reconnoiter from there, and they could keep watch for any aliens—or any surviving captives—as they came out.

  NOW IT WAS Jake’s turn to act. He dismounted, signaling to the hand-picked members of his gang that it was time to set the first part of their plan in motion. He led the five men across the open ground to the base of the cliff, all of them carrying haversacks slung over their shoulders as they scrambled up the eroded slope to the mesa’s rim.

  The protruding top of the alien ship threw a long, accusing shadow across their path as they pushed through the underbrush, moving cautiously over the flat ground of the mesa top until they reached the ship’s base.

  Jake paused for a moment, scanning the canyon rim across from them, until he caught a glimpse of Black Knife’s warriors moving into position, fading into the land itself as they chose firing positions.

  He was glad to see them there, even as they vanished into cover. He knew they saw him and his men too, reassuring them that Dolarhyde’s part of the operation was proceeding as planned.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the ridge where Ella, Dolarhyde and the rest were waiting their turn, waiting for a sign. . . . He saw a small spark of light, figured Dolarhyde was using that damned spyglass he was so fond of, watching everything that went on like a hawk.