People of the Sky

From the flaps of the Tor first edition: "...Clare Bell has created the wonderfully strange and fascinating Oneway, where humans and Aronans, the graceful alien flyers their human partners need for survival in their village at the bottom of the deep Barranca "mother canyon" live in symbiotic harmony. It is two hundred years since Pueblo Indians followed the prophecy of the miraculous Blue Star Kachina that appeared during a ritual on ancient holy ground in the American Southwest. Funded by the tribe's endowment, a faction of the Pueblo tribe emigrated to the far star of the prophecy and found Oneway, a planet of plateaus and canyons like their native Southwest. Now, two hundred years later, the colony of the Pai Yinaye, "People of the Sky," as they call themselves, is only a legend to those who live in Oneway's high-tech enclaves. Kesbe Temiya, a restorer of antique aircraft, discovers the lost colony when her plane is forced down in a storm over the Barranca. Kesbe, herself the daughter of American Pueblo Indians, had been delivering a "Gooney Bird" - a World War II C-47 transport plane which had been stranded and preserved on the ice of a Greenland glacier - to its new owner at an airbase on Oneway. Rescued by a villager and his Aronan, she is taken to the isolated Pai village where the People, wary of outsiders, won't help her unless she accepts their traditions by undergoing the initiation rites, including bonding with her own Aronan. Nobody outside the tribe, not even a Pueblo like Kesbo, has ever undergone the intense ordeal of initiation. Before she is accepted, Kesbo's life will be transformed by the unique and alien experience that sets apart the Pai..."