War World X Takeover

THE COMING OF THE DINNEH




By John Dalmas



2074 A.D., Earth


The army landed at Lukachukai on February 6, 2074. Also at fifteen or twenty other places on the Navajo Reservation. It was a Wednesday. Not that February or Wednesday mean anything now; the calendar is more complicated here. But I remember those things because I am an old man. I forget yesterday, but I remember well what happened long ago.

My wife and I lived at Mescalero, New Mexico, then, but sometimes we did consulting, mostly on Apache reservations. Strictly speaking, the Navajo are Apaches. Were Apaches. The Spaniards got the name Apache from the Zunis, who used it for all the Athapaskan speaking-tribes that raided them. The Spaniards called the biggest of those tribes “Apache de Navajo,” Apaches of the Fields, because they cultivated corn squash. The Spaniards never did conquer them.

If you know much about Indians, you might guess from my name, Carl Boulet, that I didn’t start out as Dinneh, as Apache or Navajo. I’m a Chippewa-Sioux mixed blood. My great grandmother told me that the French last name came from one of Louis Riel’s métis refugees from the Manitoba Insurrection in the 1860s.

But that’s not what you want to hear about. You want to know what it was like to come in exile to this world, and what it was like here in the old days. I will tell you the best I can. I did not talk English for many Earth-years till you came here. Once it was my best language; I had three university degrees, and talked it like you do, better than Chippewa. Better than Mescalero. Now it comes forth differently, even though my words are English. That’s because I have come to think differently, living as we do here.

The September before the army came to Lukachukai, my wife and I—her name was Marilyn—established a program in applied domestic ecology in several Navajo schools, on a trial basis. It is strange to remember things like that. I was a different person in those days. At the end of January, we went back to see how it was going. On February 6, she was at Window Rock while I’d driven up to Lukachukai the day before.

It was noon. I’d eaten lunch, and was in the gym shooting baskets with a couple of teachers. I have not remembered shooting baskets for a very long time. Then the principal hurried in. The army, he said, had just landed at Window Rock, and federal marshals had arrested the tribal government. Troops had landed at Tuba City and Dinnehotso, too; they’d probably landed at every town on the reservation that day.

Just then it was snowing hard at Lukachukai, which may have been why they hadn’t landed there yet. The men I’d been shooting baskets with didn’t even look at each other. They started for the door. Lemmi Yazd paused long enough to call back to me, “Maybe you better come too.”

I hesitated for maybe a second, then grabbed my parka where it hung in the teachers’ lounge and followed them outdoors. They scattered; I stayed with Lemmi and we trotted to his pickup; we got in, he lifted it on its air cushion, and we left the parking lot in a hurry.

“Where are we going?” I asked him.

“A place we’ve set up in the Chuskas,” he said. “One of the places.”

Instead of going northeast into the Chuska Mountains on the maintained road, he drove west a little way, then turned north on a small dirt road, not made by engineers but cleared through junipers and pinyons for their trucks. You couldn’t see very far through the snow, which was fine with us. The snowfall thinned and thickened but never stopped. As we got farther north, the land grew higher, and the pinyon and juniper began to be displaced by ponderosa pine. And there the snow wasn’t just today’s new fall. There was snow left from before.

I worried about Marilyn. It sounded as if, at Window Rock, there’d been no warning. I wondered if I was doing the right thing to go with Lemmi Yazzi. But if she was interned at Window Rock and I was interned fifty miles away at Lukachukai… I turned the radio on in the pickup and got the tribal station out of Window Rock. It was playing America the Beautiful. In English. That made it real to me; the government had taken over.

We’d been warned, kind of. The summer before, a rumor swept the reservations all over the United States, that the government was going to start taking over and selling Indian lands and relocating reservation Indians.

Ten years earlier, hardly anyone would have taken a rumor like that seriously. But in 2172, the Soviets had begun rounding up some of the Turkic and Mongol peoples in Asia and relocating them by force to a world called Haven. It was scary to read about.

The CoDominium Bureau of Relocation had been sending immigrants to Haven for years, and once, out of curiosity, I’d read up on the planet. Not in the newsfax, but in technical journals. Haven sounded like a bad place.

Some tribes, the Mesaderos and Navajos among others, had set up unofficial committees of resistance. Not that we thought it would really happen, but just in case. Hideouts were built or dug in, in hidden places in canyons and forests, and supplies were hidden in them. It was to one of those that Lemmi was driving us.

We were the first ones to reach it. It was two hogans topped with a foot of dirt and twenty inches of snow, on one side of a shallow draw, shaded by pines and firs. The hogans would be hard to see from the air, with the naked eyes. Maybe an instrument search would show them.

Until that day there’d only been a rumor, and the Navajo Reservation hadn’t seemed like the place where the government would start. The Navajos were the strongest and most populous tribe and most of their land was poor. The White Mountain and Mescalero reservations had much better land. And the Nez Perce; even the Pine Ridge. I suppose the government decided that if they took the strongest first, and relocated its people, the other tribes would lose heart and do what they were told. I used to wonder if that’s how it worked out.

Within forty minutes there were ten of us in the two hogans. Everyone but me had clothes stored there, and boots, and a rifle. I was lucky to have worn boots that morning instead of oxfords; the weather forecast had given me that. And two of the pickups had rifles racked in them, so there was one for me. I didn’t know who I would worry with an old .30 caliber Winchester hunting rifle. Two infantry riflemen had more firepower than the ten of us.

Of course, the idea wasn’t to get in fights anyway. It was to make little armed demonstrations, get on the television and in the newsfax, and get the American people on our side. That had been the strategy of the Indian rights movement for more than a century. But the government was paying less and less attention to the people.

It stopped snowing that night. Meanwhile the government had shut down all the tribal radio stations and Navajo language programs on other stations, and banned any mention of what was happening. We tuned in Gallup, Flagstaff, Farmington, and Holbrook, and they never mentioned that anything was going on.

The guys I was with talked it over. They decided to sit tight and take it a day at a time. If we didn’t hear anything tonight, maybe we’d send out pickups in the morning to visit the nearest groups. Maybe we could work something out.


No one asked my opinion; I wasn’t Navajo. I wasn’t any kind of Apache—any of the Dinneh, or Tindeh…the people in the Apache languages. I was originally from the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, where the country was soggy muskeg instead of timbered mountains or rough, stony desert. I’d married a Mescalero, learned the language, and done my Ph.D. research on them. Also I spoke pretty good Navajo. But I wasn’t really one of them. Not then. I even had enough European genes to give me hazel eyes. But if they had asked my opinion, I’d have gone along with what they thought best. I had nothing myself to suggest. I was no chief then. I was an educator.

As it turned out, the army came to us, at about 3:30 in the morning. I suppose their instruments picked up the heat from our stovepipes, even though we kept very small fires. They’d have taken us entirely by surprise, except that I had awakened and had to urinate, so I pulled on my boots and went out of the hogan. And heard the soft, rumbling hum of landing craft settling into a meadow in the woods—what the Spanish and Anglos in the southwest call a cienega—a hundred or so meters down slope. I went into both hogans and woke everyone up.

We fooled them; we fought. It seemed unreal then that we’d do that. It seemed unreal to the army, too; that’s why we did as well as we did. Some of us didn’t even take time to lace our boots, just wrapped the laces around our ankles. The others strapped on snowshoes and went down the draw toward the cienega. I didn’t have snowshoes; I just waded along the best I could in other people’s tracks.

The troops were in no hurry. They were still in the cienega. They’d unloaded from the two light landers, I guess a platoon of them, and were forming up to move on us.

None of us had a night scope, of course, but the soldiers weren’t wearing camouflage whites, and there was moonlight. With the snow cover, it was easy to see them. But it was too dark to use the sights on our rifles. We just aimed down the tops of our barrels and started to shoot from behind trees. We had time to shoot two or three rounds each before they started shooting back, but when they did, it was the most frightening thing in my life, before or since. It sounded like four hundred rifles instead of forty. I could hear bullets hitting tree trunks and rocks, and branches falling off the trees above and behind us. They fired for about half a minute, I guess.

Then they stopped, and started moving forward. Someone said later that they’d gotten orders through headphones in their helmets. They were to take us prisoner if they could and they thought they’d intimidated us; thought we were ready to quit, and I was. One or two of our people started shooting again though, so the soldiers did too, and then the rest of us did. I shot two or three times more before Lemmi yelled to cease fire and surrender. After a few seconds, the soldiers stopped shooting again, too. They came up and arrested all of us. A few started to beat us with their rifle butts, but their sergeants swore at them and made them quit. We’d shot a few of them—I heard we killed three and the rest were pretty mad. Five of us had been shot, and two were dead.

Another lander came down in the cienega, and they loaded us and took off. They didn’t stop at Lukachukai. They flew us straight to Window Rock, where they’d set up a fenced compound with army field shelters, just for guerrillas, and mostly still empty. The other Window Rock internees were kept in the community college and high school auditoriums, and the livestock-judging pavilion.

The field shelters we were in didn’t have any power cells in the heaters, so they seemed pretty cold, especially for sleeping. Especially when we lay on our cots in summer-weight sleeping bags, shivering and looking out through the transparent roofs, seeing stars through holes in the clouds.

Actually, most of us didn’t know what it was to sleep cold. Not then.

The army let us know about our families—Marilyn at the school—but they kept us segregated. We were guerrillas. I never thought of myself that way, but we were. They kept bringing more people to the guerrilla compound, some of them women. This went on for several days. The Navajo Reservation is bigger than some states—about the size of West Virginia—with a thousand canyons, a thousand ridges and mesas, and a lot of its people live out among them on isolated ranches.

The army didn’t know who or where the guerrillas were. So they waited for attacks, and killed or rounded up the attackers, and checked out little ranches for groups of men with weapons.

Quite a few White Mountain Apaches had driven up from the Fort Apache Reservation—seventy or eighty at least—and maybe forty or fifty from the San Carlos, connecting up with the Navajos they’d contacted earlier, through the committees. The police and the army didn’t try to keep them from coming. Maybe they wanted them to come and get rounded up; they probably thought that those who came would be the hardcore resistance on the other reservations, and they’d get them now instead of later. There were also twenty or thirty Jicarilla Apache, and nine who came all the way from Mescalero in a van, expecting to get arrested and jailed on the way. There was even a work van load from the tiny Yavapai Reservation, mixed-blood Apaches and Yavapais who spoke only English.

Those numbers are not exact. I’ve estimated from hearsay, and from how many ended up in the guerrilla compound. The nine Mescaleros are the only ones whose starting number I learned exactly. Four of the nine were killed or hospitalized, or maybe escaped to hide out somewhere; the other five were interned with us.

The compound got more and more crowded until, after eight days, more troops arrived. Not the U.S. Army this time, but CoDominium Marines. Russian-speaking. Someone said the army wasn’t happy about having to do that job and that the whole thing had gotten out. Soldiers had told their families on the phone, also the newsfax and television, and the government couldn’t pretend anymore that nothing was going on.

Then shuttles landed at the Window Rock airfield and they started loading us. I was lucky: I got a seat by one of the windows. After a few minutes we lifted, moving upward and outward till the rim of the Earth curved blue and white against black, and still outward till the curvature was strong. If I’d had a better view, I could have seen the Earth as a great beautiful ball. Finally, out beyond the outer Van Allen Belt, we docked with a converted freighter waiting to take us to Haven. I was feeling pretty bad; I thought I’d never see my wife again. But before they finished shuttling people up, they’d brought all the internees, Marilyn included, and we were together again.




2074, Luna


The Alexei Makarov was not a Bureau of Relocation ship. It was a tramp ore carrier on contract to Kennicott. They’d put in temporary facilities in the cargo holds, to take immigrants on the return trip. We slept in stacks of narrow bunks, used long common latrines, and ate standing up.

At the start there were 2,436 men and boys, and 1,179 women and girls, thirteen years old or older. There had been more than three hundred younger children with the internees, but someone in the government got them taken away before we shuttled up. The woman in charge of taking them said they’d be settled with people on Earth; that conditions on Haven were too extreme for young children. That didn’t help the children born aboard the Makarov. And it wouldn’t help those who would be born after we arrived on Haven. Or their mothers.

One of the first things Marilyn told me, when we got together, was that she’d started getting morning sickness when she was interned; we were going to be parents. She didn’t know what that meant. I did—I’d read about childbirth on Haven—but I didn’t tell her.


Meanwhile there were more than 3,600 of the Dinneh living in badly crowded conditions on the Makarov. I got the numbers from George Frank, the Navajo Tribal Chairman, who was the prisoner in charge of prisoners. He was the man responsible to the Marine Commandant for our organization and behavior. Bad colds broke out as soon as the Makarov left orbit. Practically everyone got one, and quite a few went into pneumonia. The Marine medics didn’t have facilities to handle transportees, so only those whose condition was recognized as critical got taken to the clinic. Eleven died. We thought that was pretty bad.

George organized the Navajos according to clan, and the rest of us by tribe. Although I was only adopted Mescalero, the Mescaleros made me their spokesman because I could speak Navajo pretty well. From the start, most of the Apaches could pretty much carry on a conversation with each other, including the Navajos, each speaking his own dialect. But Mescalero is less like the others, and at first the Mescaleros had trouble understanding and being understood. And no one felt like speaking English; we felt betrayed by the English language government.

More and more, the Navajos included us in. All of us were Dinneh, George said—we were all “the people.”

It was the Russian language that complicated things. Like all Americans, we’d taken Russian in school, and the Russian Marines and crew had all taken English, but not many on either side could understand what the other said very well. You had to talk very slowly and keep it simple. Marilyn was an exception. Her MA at the University of New Mexico had been in Native American Languages, but as an undergrad she’d had two years of Russian, on top of the three required years in grade school and a fourth year by choice in high school. So she was our spokesperson with the Russians, who liked her because she used their language so well.

Most of the Russians were all right. Whatever prejudices they had didn’t include one against American Indians. But there wasn’t anything they could do about too many people in too little space. It was always too hot in the hold. Water was rationed, and there weren’t any showers. We could only wash once a week. After a while the holds smelled pretty bad. The food was poor and monotonous, but it nourished us all right, and on two meals a day, fat people lost weight.

To help pass the time, we’d sit in groups and tell stories. People would tell the stories of books they read, or movies they’d seen, or places they’d been, or they’d make up stories. At first only a few people would tell stories, but pretty soon more and more told them. Also we slept a lot. George set it up so everyone had a chance to do aerobic exercises once a day, in small groups. Most people did them—it was something to do—and it proved to be a good thing. But it did make it hotter in the holds.

Marilyn got to know the Marines’ liaison officer, a woman lieutenant named Toloconnicov, who gave her a little book about Haven. It frightened Marilyn to read it. It didn’t sound as bad as the technical articles had, but I didn’t say anything. We’d find out when we got there. It might not be as bad as I expected.

Something more surprising came from her friendship with Lieutenant Toloconnicov. One day the lieutenant gave Marilyn an envelope and waited while she read what was inside: a formal invitation in English for both of us to have supper with the Marine commander, Major Shcherbatov. Marilyn told the lieutenant that we’d like to go, but we hadn’t had a shower or washed our clothes for nearly five months. The lieutenant wrote us a permission to use showers in the sickbay, and said there’d be clean clothes for us there.

It felt good to shower and put clean clothes on.

The major had been stationed in eastern Siberia for a couple of years, and gotten interested in the Chukchi people there. From that he’d gotten interested in American Indians, so he had lots of questions about the Navajo. When he learned that not all of us were Navajo, he had questions about the other Apache tribes, and the Chippewa and the Sioux. We had supper with him twice, and talked for about three hours each time.

Marilyn asked him questions about Haven, but he claimed he didn’t know much about it. I didn’t believe him. He picked up his wine glass when he said it, which kept him from having to look at her. It didn’t make me feel any better about what we’d find there.

It took the Makarov more than thirteen months to reach Haven. In that time we received four different series of shots, broad-spectrum vaccines to keep us safe from disease on Haven, as safe as possible. Also, Marilyn gave birth to a boy. We named him Marcel, after my grandfather.

The week before we entered the Byers System, George said he didn’t feel qualified to be chief on Haven, and proposed Tom Spotted Horse, a retired marine master sergeant in his forties. The council agreed, so Tom was our chief. He organized us into squads, platoons, companies and battalions, and made sure we all knew what we belonged to. We picked our own officers and sergeants. That was tradition, and Tom didn’t know most of the people.

A few days before we landed, Lieutenant Toloconnicov gave Marilyn a military topographic map of the district where we were supposed to land. Marilyn let me look at it before she took it to Tom. The latitude was subtropical; on a planet known for its cold climate, that was hopeful. The top half of the map showed the south part of a plateau that broke away into badlands. South of the badlands was a basin with the word desert on it. There were no towns or roads, but the plateau had a few thin broken lines with the words livestock driveway, and across it in large letters, the word KAZAKHS. The Kazakhs, I knew, were a people in Asia, and I remembered reading, years before, that a tribe of Kazakh traditionalists, herdsmen, had gotten the Soviet government to sponsor a Kazakh colony on Haven. This must be where it was.

An X had been marked on the plateau with a marker pen. The only reason I could think of for that was, we were supposed to be put down there. I went with Marilyn and told Tom what I’d made of the map; he listened, and then made me his technical aide.

The next day, forming up to load into the shuttles, most of us were feeling glad to be getting there at last. Even I was. At least I knew what we were in for. Instead of putting us down where the X was, they put us on a mesa isolated from the plateau by broken lands. Lieutenant Toloconnicov said the Major was responsible for that. He believed that if he lauded us at the X, the Kazakhs, who were armed, would attack us and make slaves out of the prisoners they took.

Then she marked on the map the mesa she thought we were on. I looked around. The ground cover looked a lot like bunch grass, shin high, with bearded purplish seed heads moving in a light breeze. Low shrubs were scattered around, mostly about knee high and stiff looking. It didn’t look too bad.

We were told to unload some cases from the shuttles. Some were labeled rations, some blankets, and some tents. One small heavy case was unmarked. Lieutenant Toloconnicov said the ship’s captain was going to keep the stuff, and not give it to us, but the Major was in charge of us, and didn’t let him. She told us this was all that the government had sent along for us here. She sounded apologetic when she said it.

When all the people and cases were on the ground, Toloconnicov gave Marilyn a package. She told her, “This is a personal gift to you and your husband from Major Shcherbatov. It is not to be opened till we have left. I think the lieutenant knew what it was, but we didn’t ask.

On the ground, Tom assigned some people to start opening the cases and counting what was in them. The rations were Marine field rations in individual packets, one meal per packet. The blankets were military, too. The tents weren’t modern, individual field tents, but old, obsolete heavy squad tents. To carry them, we’d have to cut them up, if we could find anything to cut them with.


When the shuttles lifted for the last time, we all stood and watched them get small and disappear. It felt very final. We felt abandoned, which was how we needed to feel. The CoDo Marines had given us every treatment they had to protect us from disease, but the Bureau of Relocation had left us to starve or freeze, or be enslaved.

Tom’s supply crew kept opening cases. The unlabeled case solved the problem of how to cut up the tents; it held 500 trench knives in sheaths. Only 500 knives for more than 3,000 people, but we were lucky to have them. Then, privately, Marilyn opened the major’s gift package.

It held a big, 10 millimeter revolver in a holster, also a cleaning kit, and two boxes of ammunition, 100 rounds in all. That and a little kit for starting fire by compression. She gave the pistol to me.

There we were, 3,600 people, with blankets that still had to be counted, some old tent fabric for shelter, food for a few days, some knives and one pistol. There was no store to go to.

It could have been much worse. It was summer. Also, the ship’s captain hadn’t been allowed to leave us with nothing at all. Before the shuttles had brought down the last of the people, Tom had sent out scouting parties to look for water and anything else useful. They didn’t find any.

And it was almost hot, warm enough to sweat. The things I’d read had emphasized how cold Haven was. But there was summer, a long one. And when the sun is up for more than forty hours at a time, heat can build. I thought it might be early afternoon. The sun was high, but not as high as it should be at noon in the subtropics.

I told Tom what I thought. He squinted at the sky, then looked at me. “Forty hours between sunup and sundown? There was something about that in the little book your wife showed me, but a lot of it was confusing. Do we get forty hours of night, too?”

I’d known people like Tom: Intelligent, but only what they saw around them was real. Information about space or other planets was just noise. “It’s not that simple, I told him. “This world is a moon. The planet it goes around, Cat’s Eye, is big and hot, hot enough to glow in the dark. When Cat’s Eye is up, we’ll get both heat and light from it. When it’s up but the sun’s down; we’ll have what’s called ‘dimday.’ It will get cooler during dimday, but not as cool as during truenight.”

It also seemed to me that the sun would move around irregularly in the sky, because Haven circles Cat’s Eye while they’re both going around the sun. But I didn’t tell him that.

He looked thoughtful, which was much better than if his eyes had glazed over. He was getting used to a new “here and now.”

“It’s complicated,” I added. “We’ll learn what we need to by experience.” He nodded. Then the last of his scouting parties came back and told him they hadn’t found any water. Nobody was surprised, up on a mesa like that.

“We’ll go down into a canyon, he said to me. “If there’s water to be found, that’s where it will be. After we’ve found water, where do you think we should go? Down into the desert basin, or up on the plateau?”

“The plateau,” I said. “We’re going to need a lot of food, soon, and the Kazakhs up there are herdsmen. We need to steal some livestock from them. But they’re armed, and they’re supposed to be fighters. It will be dangerous.”

His attention drew inward for a minute, then returned to me. “I’ll send a raiding party to the plateau. Do these Kazakhs live in large bands or small?”

A raiding party. The Navajos had known about things like that, two hundred and fifty years ago. Now—Now I wondered. “I don’t know,” I answered.

“We’ll have to go and find out,” he said.

He told his scouting parties to find a way down off the mesa into one of the canyons that flanked it. A way that the women could hike. The canyon needed to have good water and be one that men could climb out of, up onto the plateau. When the scouting parties had left, he went to see how the crews were doing cutting up tents to make shelter pieces. I went with him.

It seemed to me we were lucky to have Tom Spotted Horse as our chief. He sized up problems, made decisions and gave orders like a marine sergeant.

The sun moved as slowly through the sky as you might expect on a world with forty hours between sunup and sundown. Tom’s scouts had found two possible ways to leave the mesa. He selected one, then got the rations, blankets, shelter pieces and pieces of tent rope distributed among the people. They made packs out of them. Then he formed them up in their units and we started down the trail, with scouts leading the way. The sun seemed almost as high as when the shuttles had left, a little more than three hours earlier by my watch. There were eight rations for each person—that was all we had—and no one was to eat until Tom ordered a meal break.

It didn’t pay to think too much about things; you could go into despair. We had to make a decision and do it, and handle the complications as they came up. Or lie down and die. The Dinneh weren’t known for lying down and dying.

We didn’t have nice backpacks from Wilderness Suppliers. We rolled up our rations inside our two blankets each, wrapped them in a piece of tent cloth, tied it all together with a piece of tent rope, and slung it over a shoulder. Also there were a lot of people—almost all the women—who’d been interned wearing street shoes. Their feet were soon in trouble. Those who wore riding boots or engineer’s boots were just as bad off. A few tried to go barefoot, but they put their shoes back on pretty quickly. Marilyn was wearing stout, low-cut walking shoes, but gravel and sand got in them. We took turns carrying Marcel. I offered to carry her pack for her, but she wouldn’t let me. She said it would make her look bad to the Navajo women.

The canyon we worked our way down into was about seven hundred meters deep there, according to our map, and the way was steep, treacherous in places. It wasn’t like hiking the Bright Angel or Kaibab Trails down into the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Those were surveyed, improved, and maintained—almost manicured; I suppose they still are. This was rough, untracked and uncertain. Much of it required scrambling instead of hiking. And we had people, especially women, who’d never hiked in their lives. Some weighed more than a hundred kilos, even after thirteen months on the Makarov. For them, the trail was hell; for some it was impossible. Twice we got cliffed out and had to wait while the scouts hunted for a way to continue. Then we all had to backtrack a ways before we could go on again. Once a scout fell to his death. We also lost eight people who fell when rock slid away beneath their feet and they couldn’t stop sliding before they went over an edge.

All the scouts saw goatlike animals. One scout came face to face with something that looked much like a large mountain lion, with thick fur and a ruff—our first cliff lion. It backed away and disappeared when he yelled and threw a rock at it; it had never seen anything like him before.

The plants didn’t look so unearthly either. I know now how strange some of them really are, but the strangeness wasn’t conspicuous. It looked a lot like some canyon might in Arizona. There was a thing like grass with sharp leaves that cut when you touch them, and another with leaves that stung and burned like nettles, but quite a bit worse. Also there was something that gave people a rash; we needed to find out what it was, so we could avoid it.

The geology was different than I was used to. The rock strata seemed to be volcanic from the mesa top to the canyon bottom; there was nothing I recognized as sedimentary. Most of the strata were basalt; some were vesicular.


Even most of us who wore hiking boots had blisters by the time we reached the canyon bottom and buried our faces in the icy creek we found there. Lots of feet were raw, with bloody socks.

The hike down had taken us seven hours by my watch. I’m told some were still straggling in five hours later, and a few never made it, even with help.

Tom Spotted Horse was one of the first ones down. As others got to the bottom, he gave orders about sanitary practices, and had the people spread out along the creek. They could eat one ration each. During breaks along the trail, he’d had the platoon leaders find out who were the survival hobbyists—those who’d learned and practiced traditional survival skills. Now he sent them out to find material and make fire starters. Marilyn gave him the fire starter from Major Shcherbatov; it could serve to start fires till we had our own. She also gave him the little book about Haven.

Almost all of us took our shoes and boots off, and Tom had platoon leaders check on whose feet weren’t too bad. All I had were a couple of blood blisters on the ends of toes, and blisters on the tops of my little toes, from walking downhill. They weren’t very sore. Of the men with good feet, he assigned two hundred to be a raiding party. I’d shown him my pistol, so he made me one of them, assigned as an aide to Nelson Tsinajini, chief of the raiding party. Nelson and I already knew each other; we’d talked aboard the Makarov. He’d served in the infantry, making sergeant, and I’d done two years of ROTC at the University of Minnesota for the financial aid.

I didn’t like to leave Marilyn and Marcel, but I knew if anything happened to me, they’d be taken care of. There were lots more men than women among us.

Nelson’s orders were to go up the canyon, climb onto the plateau, find livestock and drive them down to the people. Even Haven’s day wouldn’t last forever, so we were to leave right away. No one knew whether it would be too dark to travel in the canyon after sundown.

No one knew if it was possible to herd sheep or cattle down from the plateau, either, assuming we were able to steal some. We didn’t even know for sure that a man could get up there from the canyon. But we didn’t have any choice. If we failed, the people would starve.

We started. The top of the plateau wasn’t much higher than the mesa top, but the hike was uphill. Judging from what I’d read, the partial pressure of oxygen on top was probably about the same as at 5,000 meters on Earth. That made breathing about as hard as on the Tibetan Plateau. We’d all been living at 1,800-2,500 meters on Earth. One 1,830 at Mescalero, I remember—but we’d just spent thirteen months on a ship with the oxygen pressure about like on Earth at sea level. So we spent a lot of time stopped, sucking air through our mouths and sweating. When we stopped for real breaks, Nelson would ask questions about Haven.

The afternoon sun didn’t get down into the canyon bottom, which ran pretty much north and south, so it wasn’t very hot, but the hard work made us sweat. I was glad we had a creek beside us most of the way, to drink from. I was also glad that the gravity on Haven is only 0.91 Earth normal.

Most of us were in our twenties or late teens—I was almost the oldest at thirty-four—but even so, some of them got pretty sick, probably what they call altitude sickness on Earth. On top of that, a Jicarilla named Juan Cruz, up in front a ways, was charged and badly bitten by something that looked like a short-jawed crocodile. It would have killed him right there, but two Navajos started hitting it with big rocks. A couple of the rocks they couldn’t have lifted ordinarily. Cruz’s right leg was almost torn off at the knee, and he lost a lot of blood before we got it stopped with a tourniquet. He looked more gray than brown. Nelson assigned three guys who’d been having altitude sickness to take him back to the people.

It seemed to me he’d never make it. I’d read about land gators—that’s what the first settlers had named them. They’re a kind of hibernating, warm-blooded version of the komodo dragon on Earth. Usually if one of them bites you, you get blood poisoning.

It was dusk in the canyon when Nelson and I climbed over the lip and onto the plateau. We were damp with sweat, but the air was already getting cold. The sun was setting when the last men reached the top—the last of the one hundred and eighty-two that made it that day. There were others strung out behind for maybe a couple of miles, too sick to go on. It was pretty flat on top, and the vegetation was a little different than on the mesa; there was less grass and quite a lot of a knee-high shrub. Here and there were patches of a bigger shrub, chest high and with lots of thorns.

We had no way to make fires and a raiding party in unknown territory shouldn’t have fire at night, anyway. So we paired up for sleeping, two guys huddled together, with two blankets and a tent cloth under us and the same on top. Nelson was my partner. Most of us had been picked up as guerillas and had gloves, winter caps and jackets in our bedrolls. We wore those too. I could have used some water, but the nearest we knew of was a mile and a half back down the canyon.

Nelson assigned sentry duty, two men on a shift, using watches that were either luminous or would light up. It gets dark fast at that latitude, especially where the air is so thin. It was already deep twilight when we lay down, and in spite of the hard lumpy ground, I was asleep in a few minutes.

The first time I woke up, it was with a leg cramp. I scrambled out of the covers and walked it off, careful not to step on anyone. It was dark and through the thin, clear air, the sky was beautiful. It was also cold and I was cold. When the cramp was gone, I walked out beyond where the men were sleeping, and urinated, then looked at my watch. I’d slept for two hours. That was the longest single, undisturbed piece of sleep I’d have that night.

The rest of the night I drifted in and out of dreams and half-dreams. Even asleep I was aware how cold it was, and while I didn’t get another cramp, my legs felt strange. They wanted to squirm. Also my thighs and buttocks were stiffening up from the hiking. It was impossible not to squirm and jerk, and Nelson was as bad as I was; maybe worse. Huddling together for warmth, we were closer than Siamese twins, which made the squirming and jerking even worse. Add to that being thirsty…. We weren’t used to being so cold and thirsty. It got worse as the hours passed, and I was awake more and asleep less.

Even so, dimday took me by surprise. I’d dozed, and slept through the rising of Cat’s Eye. It made a kind of dawn, and the gas giant loomed above the horizon, looking big! A lot bigger than the moon does on Earth. It was a thick crescent of reflected white, and in the cradle of the crescent, the rest of it glowed a dull, banded red, about as bright as the coals in a campfire. I could see a long way across the plateau top now, though not details; it was a lot lighter than full moonlight.

I nudged Nelson Tsinajini. “Nelson,” I said, “It’s morning.”

He grunted, uncurled a little, and half sat up to look around. “Some morning,” he said, and shivered. “When does the sun come up?”

I looked at my watch; it was about ten hours since we’d laid down to sleep. “In about thirty hours,” I told him. He swore in English; Nelson preferred English for swearing.

I could tell from the thickness and direction of Cat’s Eye’s crescent about where the sun was on the other side of Haven. It agreed with what my watch told me. “Is this as light as it’s going to get till then?” he asked.


“It should get lighter,” I told him. “Cat’s Eye should pass through most of the phases before sunup. It ought to be pretty light out when it’s full.”

“Well shit!” Nelson growled. He folded back the covers, and got up stiffly. “We might as well get started,” he muttered, and looked around. Then, changing to Navajo, he shouted, “Everybody up!”

It took a couple of minutes. When everyone was on their feet, Nelson made us all run in place to warm up.

It helped some. He took his knife and cut thorny stakes about a meter long from the pieces of shrub wood he could find and pushed them in the ground to mark where the trail was, out of the canyon. Then he had us roll our packs, keeping a ration out inside our shirts, and we started to hike again, away from the rim. He said we’d eat after we warmed up more. It seemed to me it must be near freezing and I suspected it wouldn’t warm up much, if at all, till sunup; it was more likely to get colder After walking for about ten minutes—I remember that; I still had the white man’s habit of looking at my watch—we came to a pool and Nelson called a halt so we could drink and eat.

He was quiet while we ate. When we were done, he called three squad leaders over. “I’m going to hold most of us here,” he told them, “and send your squads out to explore, to see if you can find where the livestock is.

“Frank, I’m sending Carl here with you.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Carl is Chippewa, adopted into the Mescalero, but he talks good Navajo. He’s reservation raised, in Minnesota. And he knows things about this world; he read a lot about it, back on Earth. He knows when the sun will come up. And he has a gun, a pistol, in case you run into trouble.”

Frank nodded. Frank Begay was the only man in the raiding party who was older than me. He’d been a medicine chief. Too bad I would never get to know him well.

“Take another ration each,” Nelson said, “but leave your bedrolls here. I want you back when it’s time to sleep again. At the latest.”

One squad went along near the rim toward the west, another to the east. Frank’s squad, eleven with myself, went straight inland. When Cat’s Eye is only a crescent, dimday isn’t a good time for long distance seeing, but if there were sheep around, we’d hear them farther than we could see them anyway. We’d hiked for nearly an hour and a half when we came to another pool. It looked shallow, but was about a hundred meters across and around it were lots of tracks that looked like sheep tracks. As we walked around looking, we found pony tracks, too, and tracks as big as cow tracks, but longer and narrower, like young moose. I told Frank about muskylope, and that some people on Haven had learned to ride them and use them as pack animals.

We looked at the trail where it left the pool. Frank Begay had worked sheep all his life, and he said it looked like a big band—about two thousand. They were going east. We didn’t see any dog tracks with them. Frank decided to split the squad. He’d take five men with him and follow the sheep. The rest of us would backtrack the sheep and find where they came from. We were to keep going till we either found the place, or for five hours, whichever came first. If we found it, we would learn as much as we could about it and then come back to the big pool. If both halves weren’t back in twelve hours, the half that was back could go to Nelson Tsinajini and report.

He put me in charge of the half squad I was with. He said we were all Dinneh now, that the government had made us all one. And that Tom and Nelson both had confidence in me. One young Navajo didn’t want to be under me, so Frank changed him to his half and gave me Cody George. Then we left.

I’d set my watch to zero on the stop watch mode and we backtracked the sheep trail for almost four hours when we saw up ahead what looked like a long wall or fence. By then it was lighter; Cat’s Eye was still a crescent, but it was getting thicker. So we got down on our hands and knees and crawled; the low shrubs would make us hard to see.

What we’d seen was a fence made by uprooting and piling the big thorn bushes. On the other side of it were shaggy cattle. I remembered reading that the Kazakh colonists were going to take yaks with them. Yaks from the Tibetan Plateau, that could stand severe cold and thin oxygen. We followed the fence in more or less the direction we’d been going before, west, and pretty soon we could hear someone yelling up ahead, not an alarm, but as if he was yelling at the cattle. Closer up, I could see what looked and sounded like a young boy. He had a grub hoe, and seemed to be chopping some kind of plant out of the pasture. There was a gap in the fence, with only one big thorn shrub in it to block it, and when a cow would get close to the gap, the boy would yell and chase her away.

It wasn’t just yelling; it was words. I was pretty sure it wasn’t Kazakh. Kazakh is a Turkic language. This one sounded Indo-European to me. It reminded me of what Lieutenant Toloconnicov had said about the Kazakhs using slaves, and something I’d read about Balt and Armenian indentured laborers being shipped to Haven. If he was a Balt or Armenian, he d probably learned Russian and English in school, so I could talk to him. He’d also probably not feel any loyalty to the Kazakhs.

I told my men to stay where they were and lie low, then moved to the gap in the fence and crawled through past the shrub that blocked it. Mostly the herd boy’s back was toward it, so I crawled to him on hands and knees, slowly, easily, making no quick movements. When I got closer, I could hear him talking to himself, as if he was angry. The hoe was a kind of grub hoe and looked too heavy to be a good weapon, unless he was really strong.

When I was about forty feet away and he still hadn’t seen me, I rose up and started for him in a crouch, still quietly, only rushing the last few feet. I don’t think he knew I was there till I was on him. Then I hit him from behind, throwing him down and landing on him.

He didn’t really struggle; I was surprised at how thin he was inside his cape.

“Don’t yell,” I told him, in slow, distinct English. “If you’re quiet, nothing will happen to you.”

He didn’t make a sound.

“Come to the fence with me,” I said. “I want you to answer questions about your masters.” Then I let go my hold on his head and got off him.

He half turned over so he could look at me. And stared. “Are you—American?” he asked.

“I’m an American Indian,” I told him, and watched his eyes get round. He must have seen old American movies back on Earth. “We don’t have slaves,” I added. “Those we admire, we adopt into the tribe as warriors.”

I’d seen some of those movies too. Sometimes they weren’t even all nonsense. He nodded, then picked up his hoe, and together we trotted to the fence, he kept looking back over his left shoulder as if for somebody coming. I looked too, and saw something I hadn’t noticed before. I should have. By the light of dimday, I saw low buildings humped in the distance. They looked like a large set of buildings.

Crouching by the fence, I asked him, “What were you watching for?”

“Amud,” he said. “It is his shift to keep watch on the herd. He just went to the—ranch, for tea. He’ll be back soon, and if I’m not chopping puke bush, he’ll beat me.”

“We’ll watch for him then,” I said, and began to ask about the ranch and the people there. His eyes were gray and looked too big for his thin face, but they flashed with anger, and once I got him started, he talked without urging. All I had to do was steer. His name was Janis, he said. Most of the Kazakhs had left two truedays earlier—maybe 120 hours as I figured it. They had taken the sheep to summer pastures. The lambs were now old enough to be out during the cold of truenight.


Sometimes there was no truenight between truedays; there was just day, then dimday, then day again. Sometimes there’d be a short truenight, with dimday before or after. But now and then there’d be a long truenight and even in summer it would freeze hard then, the waterholes would freeze over and wet places would freeze on top like concrete.

There were fifty or sixty Kazakhs with this ranch. Fifteen or sixteen of them were still here at their year-round headquarters. There were also eight indentured laborers—seven Latvians and a Russian—whose contracts the Kazakhs had bought from the Bureau of Relocation. Indentured laborers were the same as slaves. Three of the Latvians were women or girls, and two of them were pregnant by Kazakhs. Their babies would die because the air was so thin, Janis said, and maybe the mothers. The Kazakhs didn’t care enough about them to take them to Shangri-La for birthing. Besides, Kazakh women were supposed to arrive from Earth, later in the year, brides for the stockmen.

Of the Kazakhs still at the headquarters, three tended the cattle here in the pasture, one on a shift. Six tended the horse herd. The rest looked after the headquarters. Those not on duty would be sleeping or loafing.

And yes, they were always armed. They carried a short, curved sword and a pistol. Those out tending herds, like Amud, also carried a whip and a rifle.

That was as far as Janis had gotten when I saw someone riding out from the buildings. “He’s coming,” I said to Janis. Stay here. Pretend you’re napping. When he comes over to beat you, I’ll kill him. I have warriors with me. We’ll kill the rest of the Kazakh, take their cattle and horses, and free your people. You can come with us if you want.”

Then I crawled back past the gate bush and hid myself behind the hedge, to wait where I could see Janis through the gap. Two minutes earlier I’d felt confident. Now my guts felt tight and hot; it all seemed like a terrible mistake. Nelson had told us to scout; we were to learn, come back and report. What I was planning to do was kill fifteen or sixteen armed Kazakhs and steal their cattle and horses. With five men, a boy, and only one gun—three guns if we got Amud’s. Maybe I could still change my mind, sneak away and go to the main force.

But Amud would whip Janis, and Janis would probably tell; he would feel betrayed. And—Did the Kazakhs have radios? Could they call in the crews from their outstations? Or police from somewhere, or Marines?

The Kazakh rode up on his shaggy pony and uncoiled his whip to wake Janis. I shot him in the chest, and he fell off his horse like a sack. The pony was well trained; he hardly moved.

I waved to bring my five men to me and we crawled through the gap. The sight of his dead ex-master didn’t bother Janis; he looked excited. The Kazakh was armed, as Janis had said. I gave the boy the sword, gave the Kazakh’s military rifle to a Navajo named Arnold and the pistol to Cody George. Then I told all of them what I wanted them to do, and nobody argued. They all looked as if they thought I knew what I was doing. After I’d put on the Kazakh’s sheepskin cloak and cap, I got on the pony, helped Cody get on behind me, and told Janis to follow alongside. The others went back through the gap to do what I’d told them.

The ranch buildings were low and mostly oblong and their roofs were rounded. They were made of construction flex, but riding up to them, you couldn’t tell, because thick outer walls of sods had been built around them for insulation, and thick sod pads had been laid on the roofs. Their windows were small and there weren’t very many. Besides the finished buildings, there was almost a village of small round buildings nearby that weren’t finished yet, for when the Kazakh brides arrived. The flex walls were up and there were piles of turf waiting to be set.

Janis was skinny but tough and used to the thin air. He’d jogged alongside me and had had breath enough to talk and answer questions. There was no radio at the headquarters, he’d said. That was hard to believe of volunteer colonists and I still half expected to see an antenna on a roof, but all I saw was a windmill. The breeze had died and the windmill wasn’t moving. As we rode up, there was a smell I would come to know as the smell of dung fires. Somewhere a compressor was thudding; probably they had a power pump for water when there was no wind. I drove the pony with my left hand and kept my right inside my cloak, holding my revolver, in case anyone came out and saw that something was wrong.

As I rode in among the buildings, I could see a building with a lean-to on one side. A corner of the building was in the way, but I could hear a hammer clanging on iron; it had to be the smithy. The smith was Russian, Janis had told me, an indentured laborer whom the Kazakhs had given privileges. Janis didn’t like him, perhaps because he had privileges, or maybe because he was Russian.

Janis pointed at one of the largest building, next to the windmill. “That’s where the Kazakhs live,” he said. Then he pointed at another: “And that is the horse stable.” He started toward it, as I’d instructed him. His hand was inside his long cape, holding Amud’s short curved sword; his job was to kill the stable boss, a Kazakh with an arthritic hip, and get his gun and sword.

A Kazakh came out of an outbuilding and crossed to another, not fifty meters away. He never paid any attention to Cody and me; I suppose he was used to everything being all right. Janis saw him too, and pretended he was going to another long building, maybe a lambing shed. Cody and I got off the pony just outside the door of the Kazakh bunkhouse and I looped the reins around a hitching rail there. Then we walked in.

The door opened into a fairly wide, shallow room with pegs around the wall for cloaks and wet boots. It would keep cold air from rushing into the rest of the house when the door was open. Then we went through the inner door, my eyes sweeping around. It opened into the main part of the house, which was mostly one big room with sleeping robes around the sides, and at one end a kitchen not separated by a wall. There were men sleeping, and three men around a blanket in the middle of the floor, playing some game. We started shooting at once, first at the men gambling, then at others as they rolled to their feet from their beds. The two women working in the kitchen were screaming. There were six men there, and we shot them all, right away.

“Cody,” I said, “go outside and see if anyone’s coming.” I hoped no one had heard the shooting through the thick walls. While I reloaded my pistol, I walked over to the women, talking Russian at them the best I could. They’d already quieted. Both of them were naked—the Kazakhs kept them that way—and one looked about six months pregnant; I don’t think she was sixteen yet. I’d read the Koran; these Kazakh settlers weren’t very good Muslims.

“Where do they keep their rifles?” I asked.

Both women began talking at once, then the young one quieted. The older woman was pointing toward a corner of the building. In that room, she told me, also in Russian. One of the men we’d shot would have the key on his belt. Carrying a butcher knife, she went with me to look for the key. After we looked at a Kazakh, she would slash his throat, even if he looked dead. She was a little bit crazy.

We checked out the three by the blanket without finding the key. I took the holstered pistol from one of them and put it on my belt as a spare. Then I heard two shots outside, not loud at all through the sod walls, and I ran over and opened the outer door, just enough to see out. Cody was crawling out from under a big man in shirt sleeves, and there was a hammer lying on the ground. The blacksmith, I decided. Cody was having trouble getting free; it looked like one of his arms might be broken. Then a Kazakh came running around the corner of a building, and I shot at him and missed. He ducked back out of sight. Cody didn’t come to the bunkhouse like I thought he would. Instead he ran into the building across the way, which would let him find targets of his own. There was more shooting, I couldn’t see where.


From where I was, I could only see in one direction and it didn’t seem like a good idea to pop out. Besides, one of us needed to be here and hold the armory with its rifles. Back in the main room, I saw the older woman opening the armory door. The pregnant girl had put on a pair of pants from a dead Kazakh and was buckling on his pistol belt. I could see a ladder fastened to a wall, and a trapdoor above it in the roof. From the roof I’d be able to see around. But first I needed to see the armory and get a rifle. I couldn’t hit much with a pistol except up close; with a rifle I could reach out.

In the armory were rifle racks, one of them almost full. I took one, an obsolete military model and checked to see if the magazine was full. It was. I took two spare magazines from an open box, put them in a deep pocket in my Kazakh cloak, and went back out of the armory. The pregnant girl was standing by the inner door with a pistol in her hand, as if waiting for someone to come in from outside. I called to her to be careful, to kill only Kazakhs.

Then I went to the ladder and climbed it. The trapdoor opened below the roof ridge on the side away from most of the buildings. I could hear some shouting but no shooting, and crawled to the ridge on my belly. From there I could see across the buildings and into the horse pasture on the far side. One of the herdsmen on shift was just sitting on his horse about four hundred meters away about as far as I could make him out by dimday. He seemed to be looking in my direction. There should have been another one, but I couldn’t see him.

That’s when I heard three shots below, in the bunkhouse, two of them almost at the same time. I stayed where I was, hoping that the women would take care of things down there. There was more shooting from a building near the horse stable. A Kazakh ran out, around the corner of the door and waited, pistol in hand, as if he thought someone might follow him out. I raised my rifle and aimed as well as I could, given the distance and the light. Then I squeezed off a single round, and he fell. No one shot at me, and it occurred to me that if a Kazakh saw me, he might not be sure I wasn’t another Kazakh.

Another one came trotting toward the bunkhouse, half-bent over, also holding his pistol. There was another advantage for us: Except for herdsmen on shift, probably none of them had a rifle with him. I shot him down, too, and someone shot twice in my direction, someone I hadn’t seen. One bullet hit sod near my face and threw dirt on me, so I crawled back and rolled to my right a couple of meters, then moved back up just enough to over and see someone running from a shed and into cover behind another one.

It looked as if he was going to get around behind me. For just a second I thought about going back down through the trapdoor, but what good could I be there? I needed to be where I could find targets. So I stayed where I was. If someone did get around behind me, he wouldn’t be able to see me from close up because of the eaves, and maybe he couldn’t shoot well with a pistol.

One place I couldn’t see at all was the ground close in front of the bunkhouse. Then I heard more shooting from inside. Right after that a window broke, as if someone wanted to get in that way. I knew the windows were double paned, because there was a sash at the outer end of the window hole and another one at the inner end. They’d be hard to crawl through. Then there was a shot from somewhere across the way, and I heard a yell of pain from in front, by the window. It had to be Cody that shot him—Cody with what I had thought might be a broken arm.

Right after that there were three quick shots from behind me, pretty far away—rifle shots, I thought. I didn’t hear any bullets hit. From the corner of my eye I saw someone run from a building toward the Kazakh I’d shot near the stable. I didn’t think it was a Kazakh; it was someone without a cap, someone baldheaded. He bent as he reached the Kazakh, just long enough to pull off his pistol belt and pick up his gun, then he shouted something and ran inside. I decided he must be one of the Latvians.

What happened next might have been from someone seeing my breath puff in the chilly air. There was a short burst of rifle fire, and one or more bullets hit just in front of me. One went through the sod, hit the flex below and glanced back up through the sod again to knock off the Kazakh cap I was wearing. Then I heard feet trotting as if coming to the bunkhouse from in front, so I rolled over the top, and with someone shooting at me again, I slid down the other side feet first, to drop off the edge. It wasn’t a long drop, less than two meters. My feet hadn’t hit the ground yet when I saw the two Kazakhs, and when I landed, I emptied half a magazine in their direction. They both fell, and I ran to the outer door of the bunkhouse, hearing more shooting and the dull thud of slugs hitting sod-covered flex.

I was in the cloakroom, panting as if I’d run a hundred meters, before I remembered the women. I called to them in English. “It’s me! The American.” But I still didn’t try to go through the inner door. Instead I did some quick mental arithmetic. I’d killed a Kazakh in the cow pasture. Then Cody and I had shot six more inside. And I’d shot one near the stable and two just out front. And Cody’d shot at least one other. That made eleven, eleven of, say, sixteen. And there’d been other shooting. How many were left? Had the women killed any?

So I called out, “How many from outside did you women kill?” The answer came in Russian: “One.” So there shouldn’t be more than four Kazakhs left, it seemed to me. Just then there was more shooting outside, and I stood beside the door, listening for whatever would tell me anything. After awhile I heard someone, Janis, call out in English. “Indian!”

I answered without showing myself: “Yes?”

“I killed two, and I don’t know where there are any more. Some of my friends have guns now. What should we do next?”

“What about the herdsmen with the horses?”

“We just shot one of them. I don’t know about the other.”

That might have been the one who’d been shooting at me. “Get his rifle,” I called.

“We already did.”

Janis said he’d killed two and then they’d shot a horse herder, unless Janis had counted the herder as one of the two. There could hardly be more than two Kazakhs left to fight here—maybe none at all. I’d just told myself that when there was a shot from inside the bunkhouse, then screaming, and more shots. I went inside to see. It was the pregnant girl that was screaming, lying on the floor, while the other woman was swearing—it sounded like swearing—and emptying her pistol at a window in the other side of the bunkhouse.

I turned and ran out, around the corner of the bunkhouse, then around the back corner. Behind, crouched below a window but looking right at me, was a Kazakh. I don’t think he knew what was happening, even then; he probably thought it was all a slave uprising. If he’d shot right away, he could have killed me. Instead I killed him with another short burst.

I stood there panting and shaking for a minute, till my mind started to work again. Then I replaced the magazine in my rifle. Was there another Kazakh? Or had we shot them all?

I went back to a front corner of the bunkhouse and called out in Navajo: “Cody! Are you all right?”

He called back to me from somewhere. “All right except for one arm. It may be broken. The blacksmith hit me with a hammer.”

Another voice called in Navajo. It was Arnold, the man I gave the rifle to in the cow pasture. “Boulet! Where are the Kazakhs?”


“Most of them are dead,” I called back. “Shot, anyway.

“Maybe all of them. Have you seen any?”

“Just one. He’s dead now. He rode past me without seeing me. It was impossible to miss.”

“Janis!” I called in English. “I think we’ve got them all. Lets be careful not to shoot each other now. But keep an eye open, in case one of them is still running around.

Actually there were four still alive, all of them wounded and out of action. We dragged them into the bunkhouse to leave them there.

We had thirty-six horses and about eighty cattle. Yaks. I was only a fair horseman, but four of the five Navajos, all but one who grew up in Flagstaff, were pretty good and had herded livestock before. Four Latvians said they wanted to come with us. Another had been killed, and the pregnant girl had been shot in the chest. She’d gone into premature labor from the shock, and her breath came in and out of the bullet hole, making bloody bubbles that smelled bad. I was pretty sure she’d die soon and so was she. The older woman said she’d stay with her. I think she probably killed the wounded with her butcher knife, after we left. She really hated them.

None of the other four Latvians—one a pregnant woman—had ever ridden a horse. The Kazakh ponies were well trained, but thought that whoever was on their backs should know how to ride. Also, the Latvians didn’t know how to control them, so the ponies took advantage of them, giving them trouble. Finally Cody made them double up, two to a horse. They saddled the ponies up and also made less for us to keep track of. It would be up to the Latvians to stay with or follow us.

We all had guns now, a rifle and two pistols each. We also put a saddle or pack saddle on all the spare horses. Three of the Navajos knew how to load a pack saddle; they loaded the spare rifles and pistols, and all the ammunition boxes and swords, on pack horses. Also we filled the waterbags and canteens we found there. Then, with Navajos running the show, we headed east, driving the cattle ahead of us. The spare horses trailed behind, tied in a string.

We went slowly. We didn’t know how these cattle would act if we hurried them, and with Cody injured, and two of us not as skilled on horseback as we needed to be, there were only three men qualified to handle the herd. We’d traveled as fast earlier on foot.

There was time to think about the fight. How had we won at so little cost? The Kazakh’s had outnumbered us and had many more weapons. But they had suspected nothing. Even after we began attacking them, they didn’t know what was happening; probably they thought they faced only their slaves. It wasn’t warrior skills that won for us, or virtue, although their own evil treatment of their slaves had allowed us to attack them and win.

If we had fought them in other circumstances, it would have been different. The Kazakhs had a reputation as a tough people, and those who went with the herds almost born on horseback. I remembered reading about the Kazakhs who wanted to be colonists: they were traditional herdsmen from the dry steppes around Lake Balgash. Probably they’d grown up in the saddle. I also remembered my reading on biogeography: wolf packs still ranged there; the herdsmen had probably grown up with guns, too.

Reading about them, I’d felt affinity with them. They had wanted to continue their way of life in freedom. Now I knew them and didn’t like them anymore.

When we came to the big water hole where we’d separated from Frank Begay and his five men, Cat’s Eye was swollen, gibbous and dim-day seemed about as light as a stormy day in Minnesota. I had not ridden for almost two Earth-years before and my buttocks were sore from the saddle.

We’d had water to drink, from canteens, but we stopped to let the animals drink. One of my men rode eastward on the trail, the direction that Frank and the others had taken, to see if he could find any sign that they’d returned before us. Then he came back, shouting that at the edge of vision, in that direction, he’d seen dust raised by animals. Either a herd was being hurried, or some Kazakhs were coming fast on horseback.

I took charge again at once, and told the men to get the herd moving toward the canyon. “Get them started, I said, “and drive them at a run! Get the pack horses there too! Nelson may need the guns.”

The three skilled Navajos began at once; the rest of us helped as well as we could. Even the Latvians tried. They’d been keeping their seats better than at the beginning, but now, as we began to hurry, and to harry the cattle into a gallop, one of the Latvians fell off his horse, and the others seemed likely to. One of them, the baldheaded man, shouted in their own language, and they stopped their horses. All but one, the pregnant woman, got off with their weapons. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the other three lie down behind bushes. Their ponies stood by till one of the Latvians got up and charged at them, shouting. Then the ponies wheeled and started after the rest of us.

It seemed that the Latvians were going to sell their lives to kill some of their ex-masters. It wasn’t easy to ride away from them, but we had to get the herds, the cattle and horses, to Nelson Tsinajini, so he could drive them down the canyon to the people. We’d sell our lives afterward, if we had to.

As the herd began to gallop, they raised a cloud of dust. The Kazakhs would notice, and come after us. Probably they’d seen Frank and his men scouting their camp, and killed or caught them. None of Frank’s people had more than a knife. Maybe the Kazakhs had even made one of them tell.

I dropped back a little and to the east, out of our dust cloud, to see better. I could make out the dust cloud the Navajo had seen, maybe a kilometer away now, or a little more. The horses would run faster than cattle; the Kazakhs would gain on us if they wanted to. And as they saw our direction, they could cut the angle and save distance.

I hurried and caught up with the others. Cody, riding with his one good arm, was leading the horse string past the cattle, with one of the other men harrying them from behind, to get the extra guns to Nelson. Behind me I heard gunfire, and for a minute I didn’t know what it meant. They hadn’t come to the Latvians yet. Then I realized: the Kazakhs had had prisoners with them, some of Frank’s men, probably tied onto horses. And the prisoners were slowing them up, so they were dumping them off and shooting them.

How far had it been from the canyon break to the big pool? More than an hour and a half on foot through bunch grass and dwarf shrubs; seven or eight kilometers. Could we get there before we were caught? Surely the horses would, and the rifles, but would the cattle, and those who were driving them? I heard another flurry of shooting that quickly, increased. The Latvians! How many Kazakhs would they kill, the three of them? Would the Kazakhs stay long enough to kill them all, or were they exchanging shots in passing, hardly slowing? Did they know how important a few minutes were for us?

The other Latvian, the one who had tried to stay with us, fell off her horse. I saw her trying to get up as I passed; it looked as if she was injured. For a minute I thought of circling back and picking her up, but my horse would slow too much, carrying two, and I was needed. I felt guilty anyway. I slowed a little and looked back. She had turned, lying on her belly looking back down the trail. Her rifle was un-slung; she was ready for the Kazakhs. I speeded up again.

Soon the cattle began to slow. They were tiring. I told myself that I should have tried to rescue the Latvian woman after all, but by then she was a kilometer back. So I rode out to the side again, away from our dust, to see how close our pursuers had gotten. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared; their horses had been running longer than ours. But even so, they were more than a dust cloud now; they were objects. Soon, even by dimday, they would appear as men on horseback. I decided to stay to the side. If it seemed they would catch the herd, I would fall back and begin shooting at them from the flank. Perhaps I could lead some of them away.


But not yet. We still might reach Nelson Tsinajini before we were caught, and some of his men would have guns by then and be on horseback.

There were more shots, but they lasted only seconds. They’d come to the Latvian woman. Not long after that they began to shoot at us, just a short burst now and then. They could hardly be aimed, that far away in dimday, and there was little chance they’d hit one of us. It would be a waste of bullets to shoot back, and I’d have to stop. Or else shoot backwards, twisted in the saddle. I looked forward then, past the herd, and saw men coming on horseback. We were getting close; these had to be some of Nelson’s men coming to help us. We closed fast and in two minutes they were passing us, four of them, with more in sight ahead. Almost at once the four began to shoot at the Kazakhs, veering off to both sides. The Kazakhs would either have to stop, or split up, or run a gauntlet of rifle fire.

Then I felt my pony flinch, stumble a little, and begin to limp. I didn’t know if he’d been hit, stepped in a hole, or what. I reined him to a halt and jumped off. He stayed, obedient to his training, so I ran from him, throwing myself down behind some dwarf shrubs for cover.

The Kazakhs were coming up, maybe a dozen of them. Most would pass a hundred meters away, but one veered off toward my horse. He must have known I’d be somewhere near it. I shot at him almost face on, but his horse’s head must have gotten in the way. It went down, and its rider unloaded from it even as it fell, landing on his feet but unable to keep them. He tumbled, rolling, and then I couldn’t see him anymore. The others passed, paying no attention. I shot at the two hindmost, and one of them went down too, horse and rider crashing.

I started crawling to get farther away from my horse.

Three more of the people were coming. Of the four who’d already come, I could see none, only three horses standing, moving in little circles. The Kazakhs swerved toward those who were coming. There was a lot of shooting, and when it was over, those three of the people were gone too, shot off their horses. There were nine or ten Kazakhs left. It seemed as if they shot more accurately from a running horse than we did.

I had crawled some more. Now the Kazakhs looked as if they weren’t going to chase the people anymore. They gathered in a loose group two or three hundred meters away, as if talking to one another. Then they separated, and went to round up the horses they could see standing around. I started crawling on my belly again, till I came to a couple of thorn shrubs. There I put a fresh magazine in my rifle. If one of the Kazakhs came close, I’d get up and shoot him, then shoot as many more as I could.

I got pretty cold, lying there on the ground. After a little while, when nothing had happened, I got to my knees. I saw the Kazakhs trotting off with some spare horses behind them. My horse was gone, When they were too far to see, I got up and went to look for the one whose horse I’d shot, who’d landed on his feet. I couldn’t find him. I started walking toward where the people should be and the cattle herd.

They had left the small water hole and on horseback and foot were herding the cattle into the head of the small arroyo that grew to become the canyon. I was in time to help them. When all the cattle were in the arroyo, headed downward to where the rest of the people were, the armed men brought up the rear, in case some Kazakhs came. I was with them. Nelson saw me and we talked. He’d heard what had happened, heard enough of it to know I was responsible. He said I was truly one of the Dinneh, a spirit from the old times taken flesh again.

When we got to the main encampment, we kept going, taking the herd down to the desert basin below. The Dinneh followed. Eighty head of cattle were not enough to keep the people; we needed many more. Tom Spotted Horse was still the chief and he chose men to go back and get more livestock. Especially sheep—a big band of sheep that could be distributed to many people. I was one he chose. Half the horses and most of the rifles went with us.

The other horses were used to scout the desert while we were gone, and the people were told to explore, to taste every fruit, every seed, every root, every small animal. Quite a few people got sick and died. That was how we learned what was food and what was not. A few died the first time that truenight lasted forty hours, a night as cold as winter. Over the next few Haven days and nights, those who did not really want to live, died.

We brought almost fourteen hundred sheep down from the plateau. Pretty soon a force of Kazahs came to punish us and take back their livestock. They used the same canyon we had used, but we had left men behind with rifles, to watch from side canyons. When the Kazakhs passed by, they followed them, and when truenight came, they crept into the Kazakh camp from up-canyon. The Kazakhs had sentries out below but not above, so our warriors went in among them and killed some of them in their sleep with knives. Each time they killed one, they put his rifle in the stream.

By the time an alarm was raised, about a dozen of the Kazakhs were dead. The rest left, went back up to the plateau. By then they would have seen that we were many people and wouldn’t know we had only the rifles we’d taken from them. Afterward we took their rifles out of the stream and cleaned them the best we could. The ammunition we had, we hoarded in case the Kazakhs came back.

After that we traveled for quite a while, slowly, driving our herds. Till the weather started to get colder. We wanted to be far from the Kazakhs and perhaps find better land. Meanwhile we learned to make bows and arrows, and spear casters, and bolos, and learned how to use them. We learned to drive muskylope into box canyons, where they were trapped.

Quite a few of the women who gave birth that first year died, and most of the newborn, but that was only part of it. We got so worried about the women that Tom Spotted Horse said only the men should eat unknown things. But that was too late for Marilyn. She died of a poison root. Then Marcel was killed by a tamerlane, and for a time, I wished to die also. In the first long Haven winter, more than half of the Dinneh died from cold and hunger—mostly men. The women were given more food than the men were and each woman was allowed to take more than one husband.

Tom Spotted Horse said we would not butcher more than half our cattle, or more than half our sheep. For the rest of our needs, we had to use what the land had to offer. Some of the Dinneh wanted to have a different chief, but the council said that Tom was right. They said that any group that wanted to leave could leave, and take their share of the livestock with them, but if they left, they could never come back. So no one left.

That was a long time ago. Tom Spotted Horse was killed in a rock fall, and I was named “master sergeant,” which is what the Dinneh had come to call their chief. Me! A Chippewa-Sioux mixed blood, chief of the Dinneh! I have lived through fourteen winters on Haven, and I am old. There aren’t many left of those who came here on the Makarov. I think we get old faster here. I remember reading that there are minerals in the water on Haven that gradually poison you. For a time it seemed that the Dinneh might die out, so many died and so few infants lived. But some lived, and the yaks lived, and many of the sheep, which were also Tibetan.

The horses had almost as much trouble birthing as the women, and we learned to ride the muskylope. Now we number eight hundred and seventy-three, last count, which is up again, and our herds and flocks are large. We have found a lower valley where we take our women when their term is near, and mostly they live. Their mothers were ones who lived. The breed grows stronger.


The young people think this world is good. Except for the Kazakhs, years ago, you are the first outsider we’ve seen since the shuttles left us on the mesa. The CoDo Marines have never found us; I don’t think they ever looked; I don’t think they care. We may be here forever.