Cloud Dragon Skies
N.K. Jemisin
Long ago, our ancestors looked at the sky and saw gods. Their ancestors saw only stars. In the end, only the earth knew the truth.
They came at the end of harvest-season. I was in the field, picking hard little pods of okra with dirty fingers, when I heard my father's voice on the wind. I got to my feet and saw, above the bobbing leaves, strangers standing in front of our house. Four of them, all wearing baggy white garments which enclosed them from head to toe. I was not alarmed. Because the sky-people were weak against our diseases—the Earth is so much wilder than their land—they always wrapped themselves thus. Even so, we kept our guard up. Who knew what new diseases they might have developed, up in the sky and surrounded by strangeness? Infected blankets. Germs as spears and arrows. Accept no gifts from them, the griots had warned, but of course people are greedy.
I walked through the fields to stand at my father's side. He had no sons, my father, and no other daughters. His fields were productive, his sculptures and drawings prized by all, yet often he felt himself impoverished in the way that men do when they have too few copies of themselves underfoot. I saw the strangers look me over through the small windows which revealed their faces, and felt pleased to be assessed so seriously. I kept hold of my basket but stood tall, letting my posture speak for me. Harm him, trick him, and I shall know you are as evil as the stories say. Not for nothing was I still unmarried.
"My daughter, Nahautu," my father said to the strangers. He kept his voice neutral, and by this I knew he disliked them. "She too must agree to this."
The stranger who stood at the front of the group inclined his head. "My greetings, Nahautu," he said. He spoke our tongue with a thick accent, and tortured the pronunciation of my name. "I and my companions have come from the sky-land. Do you know of it?"
"The Humanicorp ring habitat beyond Mars," I replied. I kept my voice as neutral as my father's.
"Yes, exactly," the stranger replied, clearly surprised. "We are scientists—seekers of knowledge—come to study the changes in the sky. We have asked your father for his hospitality." He nodded toward the back field, where our fishing cottage sat near the shore of the river, among the twisting cypress-roots. "Your village elders told us you use that building only during autumn and winter; may we use it until then?"
I set down my basket and folded my arms. "Autumn is three months away," I said. "We are good hosts, but we cannot feed four extra mouths for so long and still eat ourselves."
"They bring provisions of their own," my father said. I heard the same kindly condescension from him as from the sky-man. "They will keep their space-machines out of sight. The cottage will be sealed in a bubble while they are inside—only a few hours each day. They will be ghosts, barely there and rarely seen. Do you agree?"
And what would we get in return? I wanted to ask, but I knew the answer to that. It was against our law to accept their goods, even in trade, and we had all we wanted of their knowledge. Even so, Father would gain status from hosting the strangers. The young warriors would think him brave for flirting with danger; the elders would call him wise for aiding relations with the skyfolk. He had a need to be admired, my father. My fault. I had been slow to give him grandchildren, who could look up to him in awe as I once had.
For him, I gave the strangers my nod.
They bowed, stiffly and with no true humility, but that was all right because I expected no better of them. All my life I had heard tales of the sky-people and how their ways had nearly destroyed the world. I looked each of them in the eye as they straightened and sent my silent message again. You are fools, I said with my shoulders and my legs and my tight strong fists, but I know how much harm fools can do. I will watch you closely.
Two of them were women. One squirmed under my gaze. The other smiled, plainly intending friendliness but seeming fatuous instead. Their leader narrowed his eyes at me, puzzled or irritated by my manner. The fourth was a younger man who also squirmed and looked away at first, but then his eyes drifted back. There was a familiar weight and texture to his gaze.
I picked up my basket and returned to the field, making sure to sway my hips as I walked.
I was a child when the sky changed. I can still remember days when it was endlessly blue, the clouds passive and gentle. The change occurred without warning: one morning we awoke and the sky was a pale, blushing rose. We began to see intention in the slow, ceaseless movements of the clouds. Instead of floating, they swam spirals in the sky. They gathered in knots, trailing wisps like feet and tails. We felt them watching us.
We adapted. We had never taken more than we needed from the land, and we always kept our animals far from water. Now we moistened wild cotton and stretched this across our smoke holes as filters. Sometimes the clouds would gather over fires that were out in the open. A tendril would stretch down, weaving like a snake's head, opening delicate mist jaws to nip the plume of smoke. Even the bravest warriors would quickly put such fires out.
"How do you like the sky?" asked the younger man of the sky-folk. He came out of the fishing cot to watch each evening as I bathed at the river. Usually he looked away, but every so often I felt his eyes on my breasts, my round hips, the forest of curls between my legs. It charmed him that I was "so natural, so unselfconscious," even though every woman is conscious of such things.
I sat on the riverbank, twisting my hair into rows along my scalp. It would dry overnight and then I could let it loose to dangle in spirals like a cloud-dragon's neck.
"I neither like it nor dislike it," I said. "It just is."
He sat near me, awkwardly perched on a fallen tree-branch. I wondered if he worried about snagging his soft white garment on a spar of wood. I wondered if he would wriggle his way out of it, like a snake, if that happened.
"We've determined that a chemical shift has occured in the planetary atmosphere at the tropopausal layer," he said. "We think the actual amount of change is very slight, on the order of parts per trillion."
So sweet, his words of courtship. It pleased me that he made no assumptions. We live simply, down here on this earth that his kind have forsaken, but we are not stupid.
"And what of the dragons?" I asked. "How different are they?"
"Dragons?"
I gestured up at the clouds. One wove a lazy braid above us, brilliant gold in the setting sun.
"Ah, the clouds. Clouds are clouds, aren't they? Just fog in the air instead of on the ground."
I leaned back on my elbows and looked at him. Did his people never stop studying the sky to simply watch it?
He watched the blackeyes of my nipples rise and fall and said, "Well, the Ring's distance sensors did detect some odd amino acids in the thermosphere. We're planning to send up sampling probes soon. If we find anything I'll let you know."
I visualized them sending up one of their little metal balls to take a bite out of a dragon. Stupid, stupid. His kind have never seen the forest for the trees, or the dragons for the vapor-particulates.
But then, I am the one who knew better and said nothing.
After the sky turned red, the sun still shone and the crops still grew. The sky-folk came down to check for changes in us, but there were none—none of the kind they cared about, anyhow. Our weavers chose new colors for traditional beadwork patterns. Our musicians made up new songs, though only some were laments for the lost blueness. The red skies were beautiful too. At sunset, streaks of yellow boiled across the red like rivers of lava. Bits of blue returned then, and violet, and green as bright as new leaves. The clouds lined up to dance along these colors, ribboning the sky until nightfall, when they gathered into knots or relaxed in wisps to rest. Rain came only at night now.