I laughed and he laughed, as if we had made an agreement. He wished knowledge. I wanted to paint Cagen’s story, so I said I would teach him.

  I watched Cagen for many days from the corner of my eye. After I knew him for a time, I took him to Shadow Cave to see the paintings my fathers and grandfathers had made.

  Shadow Cave is at the center of a wheel. My people walk the wheel every few years, moving from place to place for water and game. But the sacred cave is never more than a few days’ walk away. Although the entrance is taller than a man, and wide, we crawl when we enter the cave, a sign of respect. We are all children in the sight of the gods.

  Once in, light a torch to watch shadows leap to the spiked ceiling. My heart always smiles to see the smooth stones, the empty rock streambed, and most of all the walls covered with endless paintings, some made when men still had tails.

  “Ah, you have drawn the War,” Cagen said, pointing to my paintings of clouds and lights above a burnt horizon. His words gave me hope he might have a mind after all.

  I told him we did not call it “war,” that Great War which white men suffered when I was a boy, fifty seasons ago. We called it the time of silent thunder. Thunder you hear with your body, not your ears.

  “Not silent!” Cagen said. “Far from silent.”

  Cagen said that beings from another sun came to this world, with strange, strong machines that made the white man’s knowledge useless. The machines destroyed the great villages of the world, some even larger than Dar es Salaam!

  “And what stopped these creatures and machines?” I said as I inscribed the words Cagen spoke to me in my head and drew the story on the cave walls the way my father taught me. “Did the whites build their own great machine to fight for them?”

  “No one knows,” Cagen said, and shrugged his shoulders. “Lots of guesses, but no answers. Some say disease, some that they fought among themselves. We crawled out from under the rubble, and there were these big metal things everywhere. All dead. We pried them open, and studied the machines. We learned from them. The machines changed everything.”

  “Then they were gifts from the gods,” I said. Too often, humans do not give praise to the beings who watch over us.

  “That’s as good an answer as any,” he said.

  He told me that the world’s chiefs, who ruled the people with what he called governments, promised to protect their people from the machines and the sky men—if they were men—who built them. The governments traveled as far as the moon to build a great walled village with many guns. Such things are beyond my mind. I look up at the moon and see no village, so perhaps this is a lie.

  “But in return for this protection, we’ve lost our freedom,” Cagen said, gazing at the walls of Shadow Cave. His sigh was as heavy as an old man’s. “Everything is so peaceful here. Not like out there.”

  “Are there not sunsets in your land?”

  He laughed, but the sound was not happy. “Yes. But things are … different now. That’s what the history books say.” He paused. “When you can find a history book. My father was a history teacher.”

  “Ah. He held your people’s stories?”

  Cagen smiled. “Yes. But by the end of his life, men like him had a hard time finding work. Where I come from, too many believe it’s better to forget the past.”

  What would become of a people who forget their stories? Surely even white men have grandfathers and grandmothers who must be remembered.

  “I think you tease me,” I said to him. “You are a trickster, like Kaggen, your name.”

  “The Mantis,” he said. We had spoken of this before.

  I took the torch and moved him down to the other side of the cave, and found an image I knew he would like. It may have been painted by my grandfather’s grandfather. It was a half-circle of men driving a giraffe over a cliff. Behind them was Kaggen, the Mantis, mighty arms spread wide.

  “The Trickster.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The hunters tricked the giraffe into killing itself. They ate well.” I paused. “The men from the stars … were they hunters?”

  “We never found out why they killed us. Never.”

  He stared at the painting of the men, and the giraffe, and the trickster god, as if his heart was close to an understanding too great, or too heavy, for his head. Then we left the cave.

  Cagen and I spoke for many days, hours, and then moons. In times of drought, the hunters have less time to sit at an old man’s feet, so I enjoyed Cagen’s eager eyes, full of wondering. Cagen learned quickly, as if our grandmothers whispered in his ear. Tell him a thing but once, and he could recite it back to you even if you roused him from sleep in the middle of the night.

  Among the possessions he brought with him was the small listening machine he called a radio. He would play it at night, strange talk and strange music from far away. Our children would try to dance to the music, but they always laughed too hard to dance long.

  One afternoon, Cagen toyed with a scraggly red plant with white veins, growing at his feet. Like all things that lived in the earth during that time, the plant thirsted for water. “Is this bloodweed?” he asked.

  “Your eyes have grown wiser,” I said. “I did not know if you would see it. Tell me what you would do with this.”

  “Strip off the bark,” he said. “Boil it to make a paste.”

  “And?”

  “And … spread that on wounds to stop the blood.”

  “After the wounds have been washed. After.”

  We paused when we heard a whistling sound. Something glided through the sky. It looked like a wheel made of silver-blue metal. As it flew in front of a cloud, it turned white. Against the blue sky a moment later, it turned blue again. Faintly, I could see snake-like tendrils trailing behind it.

  Cagen flinched.

  “Why should you fear?” I said. “Rejoice. Now they are the white man’s machines.”

  “I’m not a white man,” he said.

  “You are white on the inside,” I said, sorry to insult him so. He did not answer the insult, so perhaps he had not heard.

  “They were left behind after the war,” Cagen said quietly. “They could make their own spare parts, and we used those parts to change our world. We started out using them. Now, I think, they’re using us.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, hoping to learn something new for my cave from this strange young man.

  He scratched his head. “Sometimes I think that our own government is turning into a bigger threat than the aliens ever were.”

  “Why don’t you go to your elders and tell them that they are wrong?”

  “I don’t even know who our leaders are anymore.”

  “Your villages are so large that you don’t know your grandmothers and fathers?”

  Cagen did not answer. He seemed terribly tired.

  “You go home soon,” I said to Cagen one night as we watched the moon. It was almost full. “I think you don’t want to go.”

  Cagen sighed. Then his eyes brightened. “Can we go to Modimo’s Hand before I leave?”

  Modimo is the Big God, the one who made all the others, who in turn made the mountains and clouds and animals and men. The place we call Modimo’s Hand is a clearing surrounded by four oblong stones jutting from the ground, two days’ walk south from where our people camped. It is sacred to all the People, and every two seasons all of the families scattered across the savannah meet there to trade and make marriages. It is a place of power.

  I had spoken to him of Modimo’s Hand, how my own father had there given me my secret name, how I had met my first wife there, Nela of the bright eyes, who gave me two sons and a daughter before the fever took her.

  Many times Cagen had asked me to take him. Always I had said “some other time.” We had no more time. I said yes.

  “We pack food for four days,” I said. “It will be good to have this last time together.”

  So we walked, out south across the grasslands. We would have seemed a strange sight, this black white man with his rifle, and an old man half his size, carrying the spear of his fathers. My bones groaned much of the time, as they often do now, but Cagen’s spirited walking carried my heart with him. We walked and talked, and at night, watched the stars.

  “You say they are flaming gas,” I said, poking at the fire. “My grandfather said they were the eyes of the dead and the unborn.”

  He chuckled. “I think I like your story better.”

  “Mine does not explain all things.”

  “Neither does mine.”

  Far up in the clouds, another of those odd metal machines moved silently across the sky.

  They flew. They walked. They changed color and shape like chameleon lizards. I wondered who the sky men had been, who came to destroy and kill those in the cities, and what bad thing had happened to them to make them worship death.

  When I could no longer quiet the ache in my bones with ginger bark, I chose a path that would save us a half day’s travel. We climbed over rocks unseen since my boyhood, long forgotten now. Here, the grass thinned, brown sand and rock pushed through the Earth’s skin.

  I squinted my eyes against a sudden flash of light.

  “What is it?” Cagen asked.

  Not ten steps away, behind a fever bush, the light sparked again, and then died away.

  “I do not know,” I said.

  The light was wrong. Too much brightness where an overhang should have left only shadow. From this odd angle I saw the glimmer again, more brightly.

  The rocks shimmered as they might in great heat. This, at a time of day when the sun was too young to be so boastful.

  “What in the hell … ?” Cagen said.

  I do not believe in Cagen’s Hell, and in other times I might have scolded him for speaking of devils so close to our sacred grounds.

  We moved rocks away, revealing metal, unblemished but dull with dirt. Limp metal snakes as long as two men, as thick as my body, coiled at its side.

  This was a sky machine. Cagen said that this one had come from above, not one built by white men from odd pieces. Begging my grandfather for protection I backed away, making the secret signs he taught me to banish demons. How long had it crouched here in the earth, so near our sacred grounds?

  When I backed away, the thing appeared to be gone, hiding itself among the rocks with nothing but the shimmering to show where it lay. Two steps to the right … and it became whole, sitting as if it had been planted there by the gods at the dawn of time. A man could have stood right next to it, and if the sun was not just so, and your eyes attuned just so, it would not be seen.

  I backed away. An evil smell hung in the air. Burnt, choking, sudden and strange. It caught in my throat and made me cough.

  “This is a bad thing,” I said.

  Fire seemed to dance on Cagen’s face. Instead of stepping away from the thing, he moved toward it like a man walking in sleep. Instead of preparing himself for struggle, his arms lay limp at his sides.

  “I’ve seen them in museums, but never been this close … ,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  He took another step toward this metal thing.

  The machine was tilted, like a silver tortoise shell lying half against a rock wall. Had it carried something alive, and somehow wounded? Had its own metal arms tunneled into the earth to hide from its enemies, or to find a place to die at peace? Cagen thrust himself against one of the largest rocks. He grunted, strained, and sweat burst out on his forehead. The rock groaned, then slid down the silvery metal and was still.

  The machine made a sound like angry bees. Then, a door as high as my shoulder slid up with speed I had never seen, as if the open space it revealed had always been. Inside, blackness stared back at us.

  “Hide yourself!” I said to Cagen, but he seemed not to hear me. “Is something still … alive?”

  “Fifty years?” he said. “No, it’s dead.” But his voice as not certain.

  We watched the open doorway for several minutes, and no sky creature moved inside the machine, nor any man. The smell from inside was an old smell, like dirt and dust and old dead flesh. The evil burnt smell had faded. The door seemed to invite us closer, like a sweet voice in our ears, although it was silent.

  “I’m going to look inside,” Cagen said.

  I meant to tell him he was being foolish, but I said nothing. Instead, my feet surprised me and trailed behind his on the rocky soil.

  Cagen’s arm clung to the thing’s doorway, perhaps so he could pull away if a sky-beast tried to yank him inside. I stooped beneath his raised arm to see what his eyes beheld, telling myself that even if the machine roasted me, or somehow stole my breath, it would make a worthy last sight to bring my grandfather.

  In the next breath, my courage was rewarded.

  There, on the floor just inside the doorway, lay something dead. It was not human or animal. Although it was curled like an infant, the creature had once been as tall as a man, or taller. The bones made me think of a wasp mated to a crocodile, and its bones were splintered just as mine would have been. It was good to know these creatures were mortal, not gods. Cagen grabbed my hand, squeezing my own tender bones hard. I knew why: we were men of two legs, born beneath the same sky, who had seen a creature from beyond the sun. It looked like a cousin of our world; a creature that might walk here, or could have walked here long ago, in the old days when gods and giant beasts ruled the earth. I will call this thing a sky lizard.

  As I stared at that thing in the ship, Cagen’s stories became real in my mind. Now I could see the horror of the flying machines, killing all people with fire. Compared with this sky lizard, even the oddest white man and I were brothers.

  “We must leave here,” I said.

  Cagen held his hand up in a gesture to silence me. This is a great insult to an elder, but I knew his intent.

  We waited in a long silence, and no army of demons swarmed from within the machine’s belly. Perhaps we would not be killed after all.

  Cagen knew the ways of white men who could salvage broken machines and learn to make them fly in the air. The lands I knew were behind me; and in front of me was Cagen’s world. One at a time, we bent and entered the door. It remained open behind us, but the walls themselves began to glow, enough pale red light to see everything within.

  Walking farther inside this machine was like entering an animal’s stomach, all dark red walls, cords and membranes. The floor of the machine held three nests of woven vine-like cables, each nest large enough for a small man.

  Cagen stared at the nests. I could hear his mind telling him to lie down. I saw it in his eyes.

  “Do not do it,” I begged him.

  He did not listen to me, and lowered himself into the vine net.

  The moment he touched them, the vines moved. Fifty years may have been enough to kill men from the stars, but the machine itself still lived. Cagen screamed and struggled, but the vines snatched him backward as a mother might an infant. Cagen’s arms were pinned. Metal snakes darted from the ceiling, burrowing into his flesh as he howled and bled. First his arms. Then his legs. His head. He writhed, screaming an English curse. Afraid, we always speak our first tongue.

  But the next language he spoke was not English. I had never heard it before. His words no longer sounded as if they came from a human throat.

  I grasped Cagen’s wrist, and the chair swallowed me too—but not in the way it swallowed Cagen, with tiny spears. The machine swallowed my mind. My thoughts were no longer my own. I felt as if I were drowning in someone else.

  All the world shattered into pieces. Great villages burning. The shadows of flying and walking machines plagued the land, as the metal tortoises slaughtered the fleeing. Rivers boiled with blood. Screams and running and endless death.

  Above, the pitiless stars.

  I screamed prayers, and quickly reached for my medicine pouch. I shook powdered frog skin on Cagen three times, begging the gods to help him. Still, his body convulsed, eyes bulged, hands clutched at the vines. He screamed again.

  And bucked.

  Then …

  The machine rocked. I lurched and caught myself … then realized that the tortoise-shell had heaved in time with Cagen’s motion, just a beat late.

  I understood: Cagen had made the machine move.

  I did not know how that could be so, but I had felt the humming beneath my feet from the instant Cagen was trapped in the chair. When he moved, the vibration grew stronger.

  The machine was feeding on him. The machine was a hunter, too, like its long-dead master. A dog will hunt with a man, will follow his orders. This thing obeyed like a dog … but it was no dog.

  I pulled at the cords binding Cagen. One came loose from the back of his head, and the others dislodged as well. I pulled him from the chair. He was babbling as I dragged him from the ship.

  The door closed behind us.

  I pulled him back only a few steps, but the machine was gone when I glanced behind me. A chameleon. Unless you were very lucky, or unlucky—or the machine wanted you to see it—you would pass by and not notice where it lay. The machine might have been there when I was a boy, but spared me.

  I pulled Cagen as far as I could, but the rocks made our journey difficult. He was gasping for breath, eyes wide and staring wildly. I understood: The machine might be chasing us, hiding in the wind.

  “Ohhh … ,” he finally groaned. “My head.” He cursed in English again.

  “What happened to you?” I said to Cagen.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and cursed in English again. He brought his knees to his chest and rocked, mumbling to himself. More curses? Prayers?

  The vines had entered his arms, but the wounds had already stopped bleeding, as if someone had held fire to them. Strange.