People of the Sky (32 page)

“Can you take off with
Gooney Berg
?” Mabena asked.

“I’ve got to check her out for damage. My last landing was pretty rough. Besides…” she faltered as she remembered the aborted parasite that still writhed on the floor of her cockpit. She just couldn’t face even looking at it.

“Contact Canaback,” she said. “Give them the information I gave you. Tell them that this is vitally important. The Pai must be freed from this infestation, evacuated if need be.”

“It’s that serious?” Mabena asked. “I had some gut feelings, but…”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Kesbe replied fervently, “And believe me, you don’t want to.”

“I’ll contact the base. Keep transmitting at half-hour intervals. We’ll monitor you and get back with Canaback’s response. Mabena out.”

Kesbe let the old disk-microphone slip from her hand. She wiped sweat from her brow with her coverall sleeve. It was getting hot in the plane. Chamol had gone, but other voices sounded outside the aircraft. She went to a port-window and peered out.

She expected to see an angry crowd of villagers surrounding the plane to demand that the boy be given up to them and that she be punished. Instead, what met her eyes was a row of priests costumed as kachina dancers. The black hair spilling from beneath the mask of the center dancer and the wristlet made of two-tailed scorpions told her that it was Sahacat.

Anger burned in her. She wanted to confront Sahacat with her crime—to fling the horror of the act in the woman’s face in hope that it would shame her. And perhaps drag from her the reason.

One glance at Imiya told her he slept the sleep of one who has been utterly drained. He would be safe here in
Gooney
Berg. She took the C-47’s keys from her pocket and threaded them on a cord around her neck.

She stepped down from the cargo bay, turning quickly to lock the hatch behind her. She slipped the keys inside her flight coverall. No one would be able to reach Imiya now. Even if the shaman did take the keys from her, Sahacat wouldn’t know how to use them, since the Pai had no concept of keylocks or latches.

Sahacat and the other priests were arrayed in ceremonial kilts, sashes, aronan feather-scales and kachina masks. A ceramic pot-drum hung from a cord around the shaman’s neck. She began to beat it. The sound was a counterpoint to the wail of the wind across the mesa.

Kesbe felt herself strangely divided as she faced the shaman and the line of priests. Part of her ridiculed the idea that they could mount any meaningful attack, but part of her remembered previous encounters with Sahacat.

The Pai dancers began to stamp to the drumbeat. The outsize kachina masks bobbed grotesquely. Ankle and hand rattles hissed. She found it surprisingly difficult to interrupt, for the Indian in her was reluctant to disturb the sanctity of the dance. Thinking of Imiya heightened her anger and gave her the resolution she needed.

“You think you are going to frighten me away? Take off those masks and show your faces!”

Her shout blew away in the wind. The dance continued.

“This isn’t a child’s game! Sahacat, you nearly killed that boy by implanting a parasite in him. I want to know why. I want you to answer. Are you afraid?”

The drum stopped. The line of dancers fell back, although they continued the stamp-shuffle. The central figure lifted the barrel-like structure of the mask from her head, shaking back her hair.

“You say I have done evil in making Imiya
lomuqualt
,” she said. “A thing is evil when seen through eyes touched with evil. Or made blind by ignorance and fear.”

“I don’t care what sort of fancy name you give to it—the whole thing is sickening. In my tribe, you’d be severely punished and I’m going to see that you are.”

“Words,” Sahacat said, scattering a handful of tiny feather-scales to the wind. “These are words. It is acts that have meaning. I dance. If you would seek answers, dance with me.” With a thump of her drum, the shaman joined once more with the line of stamping priests. She pivoted away from Kesbe and when she turned forward once more, her mask was again in place.

Her voice boomed hollowly from the interior of the mask. “Do you know me, warrior-
woman? I am Sasquasoha, the Blue Star Kachina.”

“You’re a psychotic,” Kesbe snarled, slipping into English in her rage. She found herself fighting the urge to move her feet in the same rhythm as the dancers. It wasn’t only the booming of the shaman’s drum, something in the air was intoxicating her, pulling at her…

She pulled a cloth from her pocket and covered her nose with it, damming the increased sensitivity to scent that contact with Baqui Iba had given her. With every move and turn Sahacat made, she cast out scent. It was a bitter odor with a charcoal undertone that caught Kesbe’s emotions and wrenched them toward despair.

Kesbe pinched her nose shut, but she still had to breathe and she could feel the scents penetrate through the inside of her cheeks, the back of her throat and the exquisitely smell-sensitive nodule that had developed in the roof of her mouth. Already Sahacat was playing on her as she would the black flute, but this time the music was that of odor.

She knew too that her own mind was betraying its vulnerability in the odors her body was releasing. She wasn’t experienced enough to put up a barrier. Sahacat would know everything she needed.

“Dance, warrior-woman,” came the voice from inside the mask, so strange that it made Kesbe’s hair prickle in spite of herself. Anger flooded her. All right. She would confront Sahacat in the battle of dance. She shouldered out of her coverall, it was too confining. One of the stamping priests threw something that landed at her feet. It was a white kilt with a woven sash.

Kesbe picked it up and hesitated. She had nothing to cover her top. Quickly she peeled out of her shirt, pants and underclothes, bound the kilt around her waist and faced Sahacat. Clenching her fists, she began a slow stamp-shuffle.

Again the voice resonated inside the kachina mask. “Dance with your fears, warrior-woman.”

As if scent were a cloak, Sahacat cast it and Kesbe felt its folds settle on her. It was a wild, challenging smell, bringing images of clouds and crashing thunder into her mind. It made her feel as if she were once more aloft in
Gooney Berg,
battling a high-altitude storm. The beat of the shaman’s drum was the roll of thunder. The stamp of Kesbe’s feet in her own rhythm became the drone of engines, roaring back defiance.

She danced as if she were the plane itself, feeling the rain pounding her metal skin, sucking fuel from her wing tanks to feed the powerful pulsation of her engines. She danced and she became the plane. The winds grew fiercer and still she flew. But the storm’s might seemed endless and her tanks began to drain. She felt the last liter of fuel run down the lines, then her engines sputtered in their last burst of thrust. Her propellers windmilling helplessly, she started a fateful glide down to the rocks that awaited her below…

She was no longer the plane. Her wings had been stripped from her. The glide became a fall. She lifted her head in despair to the sky that was receding from her, knowing in the next instant she would be shattered.

No, this was a dance and her feet were still moving to the drum, but most of her mind was locked in the terror of the fall. The moment slowed, seeming to pass in a series of freeze-frames that grew more extended. She would plummet forever, her mind seized by the frenzy of panic as the impact came ever-closer, yet never happened.

And the sky laughed and the canyon mocked her in Sahacat’s voice. She knew her dancing had begun to falter and she would soon crumple, but even if her body became still, her mind would still be imprisoned in the moment of the fall and would stay locked to it. She would crawl away beaten and crazed, letting the shaman triumph.

Kesbe gritted her teeth, flung her head back, felt the sweat that ran from her body and forced
her feet to stay in the stamping rhythm. The part of her that was still falling howled and spat, flinging droplets of saliva into the sky. One drop of fluid soared up, darkened and took on shape. Wings bloomed from it, legs extended, and all of a sudden it was no longer a blob of spit but the distant form of an aronan diving toward her.

Again there was the rush and sweep of wings, the abrupt jerk as the flier caught her and swooped away, clasping her securely between its forelegs. She laughed aloud, hearing her voice come echoing back from the canyon walls.
I’m not afraid, shaman. I have made an aronan with my own spit and it carries me beyond your reach!

Abruptly the sensation faded and she was back on the mesa, facing the line of masked kachinas. She glared into the narrow slots of eyes in the painted wood, knowing she had faced down her fears. The drum grew louder, the steps faster. Again the Blue Star Kachina stamped toward her, whirled and dipped, casting another net of scent over her.

It began as the spicy-fruity aroma of persimmons, painting a yellow-orange glow in her mind. It deepened to red, then fermented into purple. Everything around her seemed to grow soft and spongy, imbued with the tint of ripening plums. The shaman’s drum had the sound of a heartbeat or the beginning of the gentle movements of lovemaking.

At first Kesbe tried to resist the rhythm, but it intoxicated her, drawing her into the embrace of smell and sound. She let her body move with the drum in its now-languid beat. Waves of smell washed over her, arousing her. Inwardly, she smiled. If the shaman-woman was counting on her to be afraid of sex, Sahacat was badly mistaken.

The beat of sound and smell increased in pace. Kesbe danced easily, giving herself for she saw no danger lurking there. She felt as though she were moving in a bath of warm oil, whose waves, generated by her movement, lapped the inside of her thighs and seemed to surge up inside her. Even then she felt no alarm, for she knew that this was all illusion, however skillfully cast.
You have no power over me through my womanhood
, she thought at the shaman.
That is not one of my fears.

The waves grew stronger and more insistent, washing through her. Then they crested, broke and died away, but as they ebbed, she felt them leave something at her center. She thought, as she continued to dance, that the heat low in her belly was the lingering effect of the
kekelt
drug and that it would soon dissipate.

It didn’t, however, and she grew uncertain.
It is illusion
, she tried to persuade herself, but the illusion refused to let her listen, ft planted the idea inside her mind that Sahacat had the power to engender fertilization.

The smell in her nostrils grew darker, more fruity, with an undertone of musk. Panic began to grow in her as she sensed the shaman had sought and found the root of another fear.

She kept dancing, but she could not help feeling the warmth above her pubic bone start to burgeon, pushing outward. She contracted her belly muscles until they cramped, but the slow, inexorable swelling continued. She closed her eyes, put more force into her stamping. This was not happening. There was no way it could, but even as her mind repeatedly denied it, the scent strengthened in her nose and the feeling possessed her body.

The ties of her kilt felt tight. She stood it as long as she could, then loosened them with fingers that trembled as she felt the growing mound of her stomach. No, she cried, but the illusion was firmly anchored within her and the fear only made it stronger.

The panic turned to anger. It was her body, dammit. She searched for a way to fight back. If Sahacat could deal in sensory images, so could she. By concentrating hard, she imagined a wide leather strap bound across her abdomen, flattening the swelling and forcing it back into herself. It
seemed to stop, to regress and again she felt triumph as she danced.

She heaved a deep breath and in dismay, felt the leather binding stretch beneath the outward thrust of her belly. In her mind she remade the binder of a stronger material and still it gave. She recast it into a ceramo-metallic, but the push of life within her burst through. This was unreal, a distant part of her mind tried to tell her, knowing well that even the strongest swell of flesh could not break such materials, but in her fear the illusion held.

She gave up the ridiculous battle with her body. She grew heavier with each step she danced, her spirits sinking. Once she thought she would escape the fate nature meted out to women, to bear unwillingly, to be used, filled, reduced to a vessel on two legs whose spirit and accomplishments meant nothing. Keep ‘em barefoot and pregnant, the litany rang, and so had it been down through the years until technology provided effective contraception.

It was drilled into her in space pilot training that a slip-up could delay or damage a woman’s career and so she had opted for the fool-proof contraceptive implant. Those who depended on less effective means or willpower or luck often found themselves dealing with the inconvenience and disgrace of their fertility. And now by the shaman’s power she had been forced to take her place among them.

Her fear grew sharper and centered in her belly, which seemed to be expanding faster. How large would she grow? Would it end when she reached normal human limits? But no limits existed in this world of terror and shadow. She crushed her fears to her, trying to keep them from the shaman, yet she knew Sahacat had already seized them.

Weakened, weighted, she felt her steps slow. She sagged to her knees, doubled over. The mass of her gravid flesh pushed her thighs apart. Nightmare painted an image of woman-becoming-termite-queen, swollen to monstrous dimensions by the demands of fertility, made immobile by sheer bulk. She felt as though she herself would become a mere vestige of flesh attached to a malignantly ballooning womb.

And what did that womb hold? Not children, but
things
, such as the one that had spilled out of Imiya. Things that would suck and drain her, eat her out from the inside and leave nothing but a withered husk.

No, no, no…but she was trapped within that moment with all its sensations and she could not wrench free. She knew that in reality, she had fallen out of the dance and lay huddled in near-catatonic stupor in the dust at the shaman’s feet. She knew of that reality, tried to reach it, but was thrust back into the nightmare where her body ran wild, totally out of her control.

But that was not yet the worst. The worst was discovering that part of her was a conspirator with the shaman’s power. Part of her wanted the feeling of being filled, being ripe and burgeoning. Part of her loved the liquid warmth inside, a warmth that spread to her genitals, swelling her labia with a sexual engorgement and laying a joyous placidity over her mind so that she could live each moment with animal contentment.

And that part, when she found it, horrified and shamed her more than anything else. It was what made her vulnerable to a seduction that was more than sexual. She hated the insidiousness of it, how it played on her most deeply rooted desires, casting aside her fears. A false promise that was true to the most ancient parts of her brain and body, so true that she could not root it out.