My conversations with the young sky-man continued. Each day he sat a little closer, talked a little more. They were beaming light upwards and testing the reflections to see what this revealed about the new sky. He had a brother and two sisters in his village—city—on the Ring. He asked very little about me, but I sensed that this was because he did not want to seem nosy. As sky-folk went, he was less foolish than most. I liked him.
"Why do you call them dragons?" he asked one day as we sat together beneath the sky, where the clouds had begun their evening dance. It was full summer, so hot and humid even at sunset that it took hours to dry after my bath. I lay on the riverbank on a swatch of deerskin, wearing a long-sleeved tunic to protect against insects. He wore the same ugly white bag.
"Because they are," I replied.
"I didn't think dragons were part of your, er, cultural tradition," he said. "Your people have chosen to follow African and Native American ways, right?" He was as dark as I inside his baggy skin. It was clear we shared ancestors, yet he spoke as if we were different species.
Perhaps we were. There had been only two choices at the time of the great exodus: the Ring, where there could be cities and cars and all the conveniences of life as it once was, or Earth and nothing. Most chose the Ring, even though it meant traveling to the great belt of rocks beyond Mars, from which the Earth is merely a tiny pinpoint lost in a black, starry sky. For those who chose Earth, the lama manipa and the rebbe and the storytellers came forth and taught the people anew all the ways they had once scorned. And all the clans everywhere, no matter their chosen ways, swore the same oath: to live simply. Those who could not or would not were exiled to the Ring.
"Dragons are a human thing," I said. "People have dreamt of dragons in every corner of the Earth."
"What do you dream of, Nahautu?" he asked. He sat very near me, sharing the swatch of deerskin, and looked at me through his little face-window. His eyes were impossibly wistful. Even if he had grown up among my people, he could never have been a warrior. Perhaps because of that, I had begun to love him.
"Becoming a griot," I said. "Traveling the world sharing tales."
"Why don't you?"
"Who would look after my father? I have no husband or children to share the duty. I stand too tall and talk too loudly and have too little patience with foolishness. No man wants a wife so unwomanly."
"On the Ring," he said, very softly, "there are many women like you."
Somehow I was not at all surprised.
The leader of the sky-scientists came to my father a few days later. He hunkered down in the center of our house and drew a diagram in the floor-dust. They had determined the source of the sky's change: a simple chemical shift, triggered by a critical mass of oxygen in our atmosphere and a certain kind of light from the sun. Old foolishness lay at the root of it. Before the exodus, for many years, all the world blew poisons into the sky. Forests died. The world grew warmer. Since the exodus the forests had returned and the world begun to cool, but the old poisons were still there, dormant. Now they had awakened, combined in some strange new way, and changed the sky.
"We can neutralize the chemicals," the sky-man said. One of the women was with him, her face alight with the good news. "We fire a single missile into the air, with a wide dispersal pattern. The chain reaction would begin here and spread through the atmosphere. Earth would be her old self again by the next morning."
My father tried to be polite. "We like the sky the way it is," he said.
The woman's excitement faltered and faded. The man frowned. "Others might not."
"True," my father said, "but they must accept the sky the way it is. That is the one law we all obey, no matter what traditions we follow, and no matter that it means our lives are shorter and harder than yours. We no longer change the world to suit ourselves. When the world changes, we change with it."
"This red sky is nothing natural. The procedure would restore nature."
My father folded his arms, his eyes growing thunderous. There were times when I admired his obstinacy. His fury could be a truly awesome thing.
"Leave," he said. "Take your bubble off my fishing cottage and go back to the sky."
"If I have given offense—"
"You live in the sky on a strip of rock. The same air your ancestors breathed sickens you now. You offend me with your existence! Get out!" And he reached for a nearby drinking-gourd; he would have thrown it had I not grabbed his wrist.
The sky-people left quickly. I let my father go and he stomped about the room for some time, still raging. I sat back to wait for him to calm down. "And you will see nothing more of them, either," he said. I knew then that he was bothered by my evening chats with the young one.
I did not argue. His obstinacy was a thing to be admired except when it was not, and at such times reason and common sense were useless. Nor did I agree, however. He would notice this and be angry, for he was a warrior and warriors expect their every command to be obeyed. One day, perhaps, he would understand that he had raised a warrior in me as well. Did I not love him in spite of his disappointment with me? Had I not proven myself willing to die alone rather than surrender my spirit just to obtain a husband? And now I had resisted a fine suitor's advances out of loyalty to my people. I could not speak for wisdom, but did these things not signify strength?
I laid out dinner and swept the floor and laid out our pallets for sleep, then went down to the river for my evening bath. The fishing cottage sat forlorn and empty beside the water. The clear shell that the sky-folk had built around it was gone, and so were they.
I washed, and then watched the clouds swim against the waves of the sunset until dark. My only true friends, I thought, but I felt more alone than ever.
Perhaps the sky-people sent messages back to the Ring and conferred with others of their folk. Perhaps they simply talked amongst themselves and decided to do what they felt was right. I am told they solicited the opinion of several villages' elders, at least, though that was spurious. The elders had lived most of their lives under blue skies. Enough of them yearned for those days that the sky-folk found some agreement for their plan. They could be very smart when it suited them, and my people could be very stupid.
I was in the fields, harvesting ripe ears of corn, when the young one returned. I would have laughed had anyone told me a man could sneak onto our land wearing a big white bag, but perhaps it was a testament to his desire that he did so successfully.
"Nahautu, come with me," he said. I was glad to see him, though I knew my father would likely tear his white bag open when he caught us. We walked to the river and that was the moment when I intuited what would happen. The air felt heavy that day; I could see the shadows moving more than usual. High above, dragons touched tails and spun in a delicate lattice.
"I wanted you to see this," he said. Greatly daring, he took my hand. Was it weak of me that I allowed it? Was I a traitor? The men of my village were confused by me, but I was not so very different from other women. I wanted to be touched with tenderness. I wanted to be special in another's eyes. I wanted someone to talk to who would not think me strange; someone who would look at me and not think how do I control such a woman? That did not seem so very much to ask, to me. Nor to this strange young man from the sky.
He pointed toward the hills in the near distance, humps of trees outlined against the horizon. "There."