Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Seven

“So it came at you, did it? Arms going like windmills?”

Johnny laughed with boyish pleasure, and the others in the hut joined in. Stirling was vaguely aware of imperfections in the sound of his brother’s laugh—a kind of skidding clash of chords which suggested the voice box needed overhauling—but he was too busy eating to give it much thought. The soup tasted incredibly good, and not merely because he was hungry. It was made from at least six different vegetables, some which Stirling had never seen before, and had been simmered slowly, perhaps for days, into a thick, nearly homogenous slurry which he was unable to stop devouring. The F.T.A. had worked wonders down below, he thought, but this is food.

Stirling smiled compliantly between mouthfuls. “That’s right. Bright red, it was. Arms going like windmills. What was it?”

“I’m surprised at you, Vic. I thought you newspapermen had read everything and knew even more.” Johnny was enjoying himself. “Farmers have always used scarecrows, haven’t they?”

“A scarecrow! But …” A whole universe of angry darkness yawned momentarily beneath Stirling’s feet. “But we’re fifteen thousand feet above sea level. Birds don’t fly that high, do they? Three Miles?”

“Some of them do—geese, mainly. On a clear day you can see them going over here, so far up they look like specks of dust; and your insides feel empty with watching them. I’m told the Des attract geese. In the old days they used to come around here in thousands and foul up the transit area; so, the scarecrows were put in. There’re a few machines at this end of the raft too, but we keep them immobilized most of the time; otherwise we’d get nothing in the traps.”

Stirling noted the frequent use of the personal plural. His brother’s apparently complete identification with the group on the He could mean it would be difficult to persuade him to return; but that was something to worry about later. For the moment he was content just to rest, eat, and enjoy the curiously archaic pleasures of being with and talking to his own kin. The last was a very real enjoyment in spite of the fact that it must have ‘been, in part, induced by the bizarre circumstances of the meeting. Down below, Stirling had left the fam-apt at the first opportunity and had never thought about Johnny from one year to the next. Up here on the He, drifting above cloud-mountains, the family connection was important; and it felt strong even though Johnny had changed.

And Johnny was different. Looking at him in the dim light of an almost-exhausted glow-globe strung in the roof, Stirling saw that his brother had lost the odd mixture of timidity and truculence which had made him virtually unemployable since his teens. He was relaxed, confident, exuding a kind of exultant pleasure in being alive. The only thing which appeared not to have changed was Johnny’s pride in his physique. It was neither warm nor cold in the hut, and all the others were fully clad in assorted old clothes, but Johnny was stripped to the waist. The flat swathes of muscle across his shoulders and chest had an inhuman hardness, a crispness of definition which made them look like the body plates of an armored creature.

Behind him stood Stirling’s two captors, Dix and Paddy; and crouched around the hut in postures of uneasy watchfulness were four other men, none of whom had spoken a word. Stirling was reminded that his brother was known among them as “Jaycee”—a man who, from the stray references picked up during the long walk to the village, had come among them and immediately assumed command, apparently through sheer force. This was something Stirling found difficulty in assimilating. Johnny had always been bigger and stronger than most people; but the will to rule others was something new in his character.

“My brother will sleep here,” Johnny said abruptly. ‘Tell Melissa to bring him some bedding from the store and make it up.”

“Sure thing, Jaycee,” Dix pushed himself away from the wall and headed for the door. He was a rangy, brown man with prematurely silver hair and protruding lower jaw.

“It’s very late,” Paddy said quietly. “She’ll be asleep, and old Latham won’t like anybody going into their place at this time of night.” The glow-globe and revealed him as having a flattened nose and reproachful brown eyes, the face of a man who has seen everything and failed to benefit from the experience.

Dix lifted his shoulders in exasperation. “That old goat Latham! I hope he objects. I just hope he objects.” He grinned, showing only his lower teeth. “I wouldn’t mind if Melissa tried to throw me out, too.”

Stirling felt his animosity for the man return. “This man Latham, Johnny. He’s pretty old, is he?”

“Yeah. Melissa’s father is pretty old.”

“I thought so. I could see Dix was getting ready to bump him, so I guessed he must be an old man.” This is childish, Stirling thought, but the techniques you learn for picking fights at school are always the best simply because they are childish. “Either that, or Dix is planning to sneak up and club him from the back the way he did with me tonight.”

Dix, his eyes sick with hatred, stared at Stirling, but did not speak. Stirling guessed it must have been a bitter blow to him when his new capture had turned out to be Jaycee’s brother.

Johnny looked concerned. “Did he hurt you, Vic?”

“I didn’t hurt him, Jaycee,” Dix protested. “He was able to walk in here, wasn’t he? He was only out for a few seconds.”

“That part could be true,” Stirling said. “When I woke up he was still emptying my pockets.”

Dix, his mouth working silently, took an involuntary ‘half-step towards Stirling, but checked himself as Johnny stood up.

“I’ll talk to you later, Dix.” The slight distortions produced by the voice box made Johnny’s words menacingly flat. Dix spread his knobby-fingered hands. “How was I to know…?”

“Give my brother back what you took; then fetch Melissa. And don’t make any more trouble.”

“Sure thing, Jaycee.” Dix lifted Stirling’s pack from a corner, dropped it in his lap, and went out with a venomous glance over his shoulder. Stirling lifted the pack, set it by his side, and when he looked up found Johnny’s eyes on him.

“How did you find me, Vic?”

“Mostly luck, I guess. I noticed you took Dad Considine’s boots.”

“Well, I’ll be dammed,” Johnny said in wonderment. “You mean you can remember all that stuff we talked about when we were kids?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“I didn’t think you would. You seemed to grow up so fast and get out so fast. I’m surprised you can. remember it, that’s all.”

Stirling felt uncomfortable, guilty. “Listen, Johnny. I know I wasn’t much of a brother just at the time when you needed me … ”

“Who needed you?”

“I’ll put that another way… ”

“Save your breath, Victor. I’m all right, and I don’t need an amateur analyst.”

“I’m trying to get things straight between us.”

Johnny smiled. “Vic, how many people did you know down there who had single apartments like your own?” He used an old trick Stirling had almost forgotten: speaking through the voice box while his lips remained motionless in the smile. In their private convention, this meant triumph, the conversational equivalent of “checkmate.”

“What do you mean?” Stirling uneasily sifted the connotations of the question. “Let’s put it another way—how do you feel right now?”

“Pretty tired. Very tired.”

“But otherwise all right?”

“I guess so. Why?”

“Some people spend their first week up here lying on their bellies, hugging the dirt, afraid to move. Some of them die. That skull you found was probably all that’s left of somebody who got up the ladder and was too paralyzed by agoraphobia to get out of the scarecrow’s way. The sky leans heavily on some men, Vic.”

Stirling inventoried his own emotions. Johnny was wrong about him. He could feel those miles of thin, cold air underneath, and his nerves shrieked out against them. Yet he had walked twenty miles across Heaven on his first day. And there had been a skull buried in the soil only a few feet from the transit area.

There was a sound at the entrance to the hut, and a girl came in carrying an armful of lumpy pillows covered in plastic. Moving so quickly that Stirling had barely time to focus on her in the dim light, she threw the pillows onto the floor and stalked out. He got an impression of a black whiplash of a girl: lean, hard, impossibly thick hair exploding darkly away from her temples, eyes signaling anger. One of the men sitting near the door grabbed for her playfully as she went by; there was the sound of a slap; he settled back against the wall and ruefully nursed his cheek while the others laughed uproariously. Stirling Winked. He had not even seen the blow.

“That was Melissa,” Johnny spoke with a kind of proprietary pride. “What do you think of her, Vic?”

“Nice,” Stirling said cautiously.

“Nice, he says. That’s the future Mrs. Considine.”

“Does she know it yet?”

Johnny laughed. “That’s the sort of crack you were always best at, Vic. The big, soft man who carries a stiletto! Melissa knows about it, all right—she just enjoys acting mad like that. It’s a kind of ritual with girls like her. A prenuptial ritual.”

“What’s she doing up here anyway?”

“She lives here.”

“How did she get here?”

“That’s a long story.” Johnny glanced around henignly at the other men squatting against the walls; he did it strangely, like a savage king surveying his court. “Her father brought her up about fifteen years ago when she was just a kid. You’ll never guess what old Latham was before he came here.”

“Tell me,” Stirling said. Fifteen years, he thought, fifteen years of this.

“A judge,” Johnny announced. “Imagine a high court judge breaking out of the Compression! It’s fair enough, I suppose, but he set himself up as a judge up here too. A real little philosopher-king, he was.

“When I arrived he watched me for a couple of days out of those watery old eyes and told me he had assessed me. Assessed me! He said I was best suited for foraging. I was to cover a whole fifteen-mile strip by myself, breaking off an ear of corn or something every hundred paces so as not to cause a localized drop in the harvest—which would be noticed down in the station.” Johnny snorted—one of the few sounds he could make naturally, without the aid of the vocal prosthetic.

“You didn’t like the idea,” Stirling said mechanically.

“You bet I didn’t. People were always assessing me down below and coming out with the wrong answers. I told him I was going to sit in the village all day, and he was going to forage. I told him I was going to do all the assessing from now on.” Johnny savored the memory for a few seconds before he went on.

“Old man Latham kicked up hell. He called in his own little law-enforcement agency, a big dumb hulk called . ..” “Luciano,” one of the listeners supplied. “That’s it. Luciano. The only thing was, I did all the enforcing.” Johnny glanced down complacently at his broad, flat forearms. “You didn’t kill him?”

“Of course not. He’s foraging too now. Along with Judge Latham. I saw him a couple of days ago and”— Johnny winked broadly at the other men—”he’s walking almost normally again.”

There was a ripple of amusement which took in everybody except, Stirling noticed, the man called Paddy. He stared at his brother in disbelief. Two short months in the Stone-Age society of the Be had turned Johnny Considine into a stranger. Could this really be the kid brother he had protected all the way through junior school because his classmates had ribbed him so much about the voice box? Stirling’s eyes instinctively searched for and found the L-shaped scar on Johnny’s throat. It had been shortly after Johnny’s fourth birthday when he had fallen, while carrying a drinking glass, and a transparent spear had gouged its way through his vocal cords. He was wrong, Stirling realized, to think that Johnny had changed, but the new environment was developing latent aspects of his character which would be better kept in the background. This is my big-brother act again, Stirling thought, but family responsibilities must mean something. He remembered, with a stirring of guilt, that neither of them had yet mentioned their mother. Filled with a sudden sense of urgency, Stirling tried for something significant to say, but then became aware of the incongruity of the two of them sorting out their family problems before an audience of strangers.

“Johnny,” he said, “I’ve got things I want to discuss with you, in private.”

“This is private.”

“This is the He’s equivalent of Grand Central station.”

“Things are different up here. I don’t have any secrete from the other members of the Council.”

“Get rid of them, Johnny.”

Johnny’s eyes clouded with something like pain. “There are things you’ll have to learn, Vic, and I think it’s going to be hard on both of us. Come on—I’ll show you around.”

He got up and left the hut with a dismissive wave to the rest of the group. As Stirling, followed him out, he had to stoop to pass through the doorway with its curtain of the same black plastic used on the He for clothing. The night breezes were cool, but not nearly as cold as Stirling had expected at the altitude.

“Greenhouse effect,” Johnny explained as they walked. “There’s a shell field covering the whole productive area of the He. The intensity’s very low—a goose can fly right through it without even blinking—but it’s enough to increase the wavelength of solar radiations coming through, and the heat doesn’t get back out again. Keeps in most of the oxygen all this green stuff gives off, which is a good thing for us too.”

“So you didn’t need the big boots, after all.”

“No. I didn’t need the big boots.”

Stirling took a deep breath. “Johnny, this whole business is a charade. You can’t go on hiding up here, chief of a tribe of dropouts.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s too fantastic. Normal people don’t live like this. And think of your mother.”

“Oh, brother! Are you scraping the bottom of the barrel!”

“All right,” Stirling said. “That sounded corny, even to me. But what about her?”

“Mother knows I can look after myself and that I’m not the suicidal type. You know, Vic, that’s good, coming from you. You got out just as soon as you were able, and you never took time off to visit her even though you were only a few miles away.”

“I’m not proud of that, but mother doesn’t really need people much.”

“Precisely my point, big brother. So why bring her into it? This is purely between us. How about getting down to the real reason you came after me?”

“Which is … ?”

“Which is that you hated it down there as much as I did. You got your newspaper job and poured your salary into a single apartment because that was the only escape you could visualize. And when I got right out of the whole setup, really escaped from the whole stinking mess down there, it made you sick.

“You want to bring me back because you couldn’t have gone on living in the Compression knowing I was up here. It’s the post-1992 situation all over again on a smaller scale. When the Government set out to brainwash everybody into thinking they liked living like sardines, they ruled that nobody would be allowed to live on the lies because the Compression could only be made bearable if everybody was in it together. No favorites. No bending the law for the rich and the powerful, wasn’t that it, big brother? That’s why you came after me. Admit it.”

Stirling could feel depths which dwarfed the three-mile fall from Heaven opening up under his feet. “You couldn’t be further off the beam, Johnny. You’re my brother. …”

“Half-brother,” Johnny interrupted in a voice which sounded like an electrical discharge in the prosthetic. He turned to face Stirling. “My father was not your father.”

“It makes no difference to me.”

“Victor! While we’re at it, let’s dig down even deeper. Let’s say the one thing which has never been said before.” Stirling suddenly felt tired, defeated. “Let’s get some sleep and talk this over in the morning.”

“You and I,” Johnny said slowly and distinctly. “We never liked each other.”

Stirling was conscious of no pain, no torment, only a feeling of release as deep-seated tensions ebbed away. The psychic orgasm brought him a few moments of cool, blessed sanity. He stared past Johnny towards the night-black fields and the ancient gleams of the cooking fires. He saw them with new eyes. This was … freedom.

“My kid brother has grown up and passed me,” he said finally. “I’ll leave in the morning.”

“I’m sorry,” Johnny replied softly. “Nobody goes back down.”

“What?”

“It’s the only real law we have in Heaven. Do you think nobody ever tried the life, then changed his mind? This community depends on secrecy; and the only way we can be sure of getting it, is by never allowing anyone to go back.

“From now on, big brother, you’re permanently on the side of the angels.”