Footsteps in the Sky (21 page)

Just before eruption, there was a moment of perfect clarity. He was fucking a woman he didn't know, didn't care for in the least. When he closed his eyes, it was Teng there. These thigh's did not grip the way Teng's did, the arms were not as rough. But the last time he and Teng had made love, she had actually looked at him … at him. This woman was looking at him, hissing, face contorted, but she didn't know who he was. She didn't care either.

Thus, when Alvar cried out, it was as much with despair as with ecstasy, and the throbbing pulses in the aftermath of his orgasm were much more like pain then pleasure. He disengaged and rolled away from the woman, disgusted, deeply depressed.

Teng was standing over him, framed by stars. For a moment he thought it might be some plague-inspired vision—but up until now he hadn't actually seen anything that wasn't there. Teng's face was as fixed as an ivory statue. Her bandaged arm hung loosely, but the other gripped a black pistol.

“So that's how it is, Alvar,” she said, towering over him like the goddess she was. Her words fell on him like hail. She stared at him a moment longer, and he thought—but it could be the plague—that her whole frame was trembling, like a string on a guitar. As if something terrible were trying to escape her will.

“Today is a good day to die, Alvar, remember?” Teng raised the gun and pointed it at Alvar.

Not like this. At least when I'm sober, so I can meet death with real fear instead of confusion!
Alvar struggled to speak, but his mouth was foam rubber.
I love you, Teng, I really do.
He closed his eyes.

“Let's go,” another voice cried. “Oh, shit.”

It was Jimmie, coming up behind Teng.

“Oh, shit. Sand I'm sorry, girl,” he said.

Sand was levered up on her palms. She gathered her self quickly, however, despite her tangled and disarrayed clothing, and launched herself clumsily at Jimmie.

Teng scarcely moved. Her hand seemed to merely brush at Sand. Jimmie was screaming hoarsely and incoherently, and then Sand was on the ground. Jimmie knelt beside her.

“You're right,” said Teng. “It's time to go. See you in Hell, Alvar.”

With that she turned and strode away without a backwards glance, and after a moment's hesitation, Jimmie followed.

Alvar groaned and sank back down to the quaking stone, praying for the plague to end.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Hoku watched Homikniwa sprint ahead, gun snapping first this way and then that. The speed and precision of the man was amazing. Hoku wondered where Homikniwa could have learned to move so, on a planet which had never known war. There was much that he did not know about the little man; Homikniwa had come to him long before Hoku became mother-father of the coastal communities. In those hard times, Homikniwa had been invaluable, both as a companion and as a bodyguard. When Abraham and his faction had made their move against him—fifteen years ago?—Homikniwa had been there. Alone, in the desert, it had been the two of them against six men. But those six were amateur killers, and Homikniwa was a professional. Five corpses and one frightened witness had marked the end of Hoku's struggle for succession. Only one of them had Hoku killed himself, and that had been a lucky shot. But after that Hoku knew he could kill, if need be. That one man was the only man Hoku had killed with his own hands, but when time came to arrange the death of Pela, Hoku had been able to do so without flinching. Killing was power, and Hoku understood the uses of power.

Still, he knew better than to kill too much, and to make it look accidental when he did. The Hopitu-Shinumu—whether progressive or traditional—were not used to violent death. It terrified them, and though he wanted people to be afraid of him, to respect him—he did not want them to hate him as an inhuman monster.

Red Jimmie had saved him a lot of deaths. With all of their computer defenses down and its defenders plagued into oblivion, he had thus far taken the pueblo without firing a shot. People would remember that about him. They would remember that he loved his people, even the stupid traditionals, and that he was only doing what was best for them.

Homikniwa motioned him on ahead. It was safe. Hoku, unarmed—the mother-father should not have to arm himself—moved on up into the pueblo proper.

The plague was a short-lived one: the virus itself was probably already dead in most of its human hosts, and the drug it produced would run its course in perhaps six or seven hours. That gave Hoku plenty of time to disarm the pueblo warriors, find the alien, and get down to the business of consolidating his power here. With Tuwanasavi under his control, the other pueblos would be of little difficulty; the great kivas and the rites they controlled were all here, and so were most of the clan headmen. He would allow them their traditional ways for many years—wean them slowly—but by the time he went to meet Mas—by the time he was dead, he would see them modernized, ready to face the Reed toe-to-toe. And whether he ever gained control of the alien ships or not, the Reed would at least believe he had, if he could find some way to deal with the warship in orbit.

Deep breaths, and one thing at a time. Flyers were settling everywhere, now, like bees on corn tassels. The sky was full of them.

The jail would be his first stop. Get Jimmie out, have him put the computer back to its tasks, but working for Hoku. And find the alien. Was it true, as Jimmie said, that it wore the shape of dead Pela? Or was it possible that the strain had become too much for the old traitor, that he saw his dead wife in everything? Hoku would find out, without need for middle-men. He could put his own hands to the task, and that appealed to him, after the defection of his satellites.

An hour later, Hoku had installed himself in the clan council building and was receiving reports from around the mesa. The reports were good, generally—there had still been no fighting to speak of, though one traditionals had shot himself in the foot with a Wasp. Yuyahoeva—the ostensible mother-father of Tuwanasavi—had been found and was recovering from the effects of the plague in isolation; Hoku wanted him pliable, and the drug would make him that. The woman Sand and more importantly the alien were both still unaccounted for, but Hoku did not imagine that they could have escaped the mesa while plagued. Hoku repeated this to himself over and over. How could one woman continue to stay out of his grasp?

Another disturbing problem was the absence of Red Jimmie. That meant that Hoku still did not have access to pueblo data or defensive capabilities. He must rely on information beamed to him from the coast or from space—and Hoku trusted nothing from space anymore. Still, he had a fairly tight net around the pueblo, in case this Sand did manage to summon the coherence to try and fly out again. Impatiently, he called the cube in front of him back to life, though he had silenced it only a moment before.

On his order, the cube projected a flat relief map on the wall. There was the mesa, the crooked seams of the land around it. His own flyers were ubiquitous, a swarm of red dots identified by a coded and always changing frequency. Yellow marked any pueblo flyers, and the screen showed them to be stationary, all of them. Sighing, Hoku leaned back and contemplated the shifting patterns of the red lights as they conducted search sweeps over the mesa and the rugged land near it. He had designed the pattern himself, and was slightly displeased to see that it varied a bit from his orders. Here, a flyer had deviated into another's search territory, there, one had spiraled too far across the broken cliff-side. Surely, no plagued woman could negotiate such terrain.

Then again, each man out there wanted to be the one to find Sand and the alien, to please Hoku, and so he could not blame them too much for such personal initiative. All in all, the search seemed efficient.

Where could she be? For the first time, it occurred to Hoku that the woman may not have been plagued at all; though natural immunity was out of the question, someone could have given her the same inoculation that he and his men had received.

Red Jimmie was, after all, her father. And Jimmie was missing too.

“Fuck!” Hoku softly allowed himself. Could Jimmie make a ship invisible? Almost certainly, at least in the sense that he could disable its frequency emitter.

“Give me an aerial projection from satellite data,” he said, making the request sound like a curse. The image flickered and changed.

“Moving flyers in red,” Hoku commanded. Immediately a number of red spots appeared on the map, located this time not by their own transmissions but by telescopes and radar two hundred kilometers above them.

Hoku studied the display intently. Was there anything … The image flickered out of existence. Hoku cursed, clenched his fists until the nails cut his skin.

“Still image,” he hissed. “Recording of that last transmission.”

The topography of the mesa reappeared. The red dots were unmoving points. Carefully, Hoku traced his search plan over, calling up a schematic of it to help him. Accounting for the many deviations, he tried to trace down every flyer. Then, in a flash of inspiration, he superimposed a still of the earlier display he had been examining, the one constructed from the identification frequencies. If there was a flyer not accounted for by that map which was present in the satellite image, he would have Jimmie. Unless Jimmie could make the craft invisible in reality, which Hoku chose not to believe possible. Or unless Jimmie had somehow slipped through the noose of Hoku's ships long ago, which also seemed unlikely. Any ships leaving the pueblo were to have been reported and then intercepted. If Jimmie was smart—and he was—he would have waited to get one of Hoku's own flyers, so he could slip out unnoticed.

To his disappointment, the number of ships in the two displays was identical. He called up a real-time map of the flyer transmissions.

Now there was one missing, he realized with growing excitement. The one whose search pattern had taken it so far off of the mesa proper. He quickly searched to assure himself that the pilot had not merely returned to his proper course, but such was not the case. A flyer was gone, headed out into the badlands south of the mesa.

What was Jimmie doing? Had he gone insane? It was possible. The strain of being an agent here in the pueblos must have been immense. And it had been Jimmie himself who had infected Pela with the deadly virus tailored for her and only her, though Jimmie himself hadn't known he was the carrier. But Jimmie could have figured that out easily enough. That and fear for his daughter might have pushed him over the edge.

“Get me Homikniwa,” he growled at the unseen presence of his computer link. “And get me Kewa.”

He might need the woman's advice. She seemed to understand the emotional, irrational side of human behavior better than he. Hoku reflected that most of his mistakes had been in assuming people acted as he did, rationally and with calculation. Surely Jimmie understood that his daughter was no longer in danger, now that the great secret was no longer a secret. Everyone on the Fifth World knew about the alien now, and Hoku stood to gain nothing by killing even as bothersome a pest as Sand. All Hoku wanted now was the woman in Pela's form. In fact, what he really wanted now was Sand's cooperation and Jimmie's too. If they holed up in a canyon somewhere and forced a violent confrontation, Hoku—and the Hopi people—might lose everything.

Hoku would trust this to no one else. When Homikniwa and the puzzled Kewa arrived, the three of them went immediately to the Bluehawk.

Halfway there, a voice in Hoku's ear buzzed for his attention, and he gaped as his carefully constructed theory collapsed.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Sand clawed her way along a rock face that heaved and trembled, that reached out claws to rend her, that seemed to babble. The shushing of her hands across smooth stone seemed to be a word she couldn't quite understand, but a crucial one nevertheless. Her heart was thumping out through her hands, which felt like stone themselves, and more than once she feared petrification.

She had to constantly remind herself what she was doing, that lowland warriors prowled the mesa. She should be trying to find a flyer—preferably a Dragonfly—and escape, find Tuchvala. Instead her mind just kept replaying, over and over, the crush of Alvar's body against her, the terrible need that had seized her, even though her disgust had been at least as great as her lust. The fragmented images and flashes of sensation that rushed about like ravens in her mind were more than confused, they were contradictory. Everything about the encounter had been wrong—there was nothing about Alvar she had desired, except that he had been there. When they had so frantically coupled, it hadn't been a man inside of her at all, but a woman. It had been Tuchvala moaning, grinding her into the stone. When her eyes flicked open to Alvar—a man she knew not at all—she had felt sick, and shut them tightly, though terrible colors swirled in the darkness. Now the flashes of him panting over her returned, the feel of his tongue in her mouth, and she retched, emptying what little was left of her earlier meal.

Hide! She scrambled on across the steep slope. There was a cave she knew of, if only she could reach it, stay there until this terrible thing left her brain. If it ever did. If she wasn't permanently brain damaged or even dying.

A sensation came which she only tentatively identified as a new sound, and when she looked for its source, she saw a lowland hovercraft topping the stone ridge. She froze, willing herself to become one of the yellow stone outcroppings, but in an instant the flyer had changed course. Sand darted down the slope, sliding and skidding on her butt. Her limbs refused to react properly, and she quickly lost her balance, tumbled painfully down the grade until she fetched against a projecting spur. Wildly flailing, she scrambled around it, unto the narrow ledge below. Beyond the ledge there was nothing, a sheer drop down to checkered fields streaked with the hazy trails of numerous hovercraft and cycles. Vertigo seized her, for the first time in her life, and though she was safely against the stone face, Sand felt as though she were actually teetering over the brink. The faint voice that always suggested that she jump into the void, plunge through that magical air between cliff and earth sounded like sudden, blaring music. She shivered and ran up the ledge.

Where was the hovercraft? She had lost sight of it.

The even stone broke off, suddenly, and she realized that she had gone in the wrong direction. Here was a spill channel, where rainwater traced a steep grove down the mesa. Perhaps forty feet below, she could see another shelf. Could she climb down that smooth channel? Not in this state. She turned to retrace her path, and there was the hovercraft, six meters away, waiting for her. She turned frantically back to the only route left her and was preparing to try it anyway, when her muscles wrapped her into a ball of pain.

The pain and her terrible confusion lifted at about the same time. She had some slight memory of a woman with a hypodermic and something warm that felt good against her flesh, soothed out the agony with a touch.

“That should bring them down. This will bond up with the receptors for the drug more efficiently than the drug itself.”

A woman's voice, one that Sand did not recognize. When she opened her eyes she didn't know the face either. Lowlander, though.

“Good.” Sand did recognize that deep, male voice. It was Hoku himself. Sand didn't know if she more flattered or terrified. Woozily she surveyed her surroundings. The shape of the cabin and the steady throb of its floor told her she was in some sort of flyer, probably one of those big hovercrafts they call Bluehawks. Alvar—her recent “lover”—sat strapped to a chair, eyes listless. I must look like that, she thought, but instead of feeling sympathy for him she wanted to vomit again. Her thoughts were becoming clearer, but in a way, that only made things worse. What had happened to them? She thought she could guess; some microbe engineered to produce psychoactive compounds. Not uncommon on Earth, she understood, but not common on the Fifth World. Such self-indulgent sensation was one of the things her ancestors fled when they left that world of lotus-eaters.

Who? Her father of course. Fresh anger cut at the clinging cobwebs left by the drug.

The fourth person in the cabin was Hoku. He stared at her with fixed eyes. The power he radiated was unmistakable, and another thrill of fear woke in her spine.

“You know what's going on, SandGreyGirl? Do you? Your father and some offworld woman have taken your friend.”

What did this man want? Father with Tuchvala? That made sense, somehow, though it shouldn't. If Jimmie worked for Hoku—and he surely did, releasing the virus and shutting down the computer so that Hoku could take the mesa—then why was he fleeing from Hoku?

“I don't know much of anything anymore,” Sand sighed, wearily.

“Do you know who he is?” Hoku asked, in a way he probably thought was gentle. He pointed to Alvar.

She shook her head. “He was with the woman, the kahopi. He said he was from Parrot Island, like my Father. He said. …”

Alvar was staring at her, his face contorted with the effort to understand what he was hearing.

“He said …” she went on, and suddenly remembered. Her lips thinned into an angry line.

“He's an offworlder too. They both came here with the Reed. And so did my father.”

There. The last thing Alvar had told them, just before the insanity really began. She watched Alvar; he sank into his chair with a look of utter despair.

“Yes,” he muttered, to Hoku's suddenly furious glance. Hoku stood, then, crossed the cabin in four quick steps, and slapped Alvar in the face. The offworlder's head rolled back with the blow, and the red impressions of Hoku's fingers remained on his cheek.

“And Jimmie?” He growled. “Jimmie too?”

“I was supposed to replace him. The Reed always has agents on its colony worlds.”

“This is
our
world,” Hoku snarled. “Ours.”

“He means his,” Sand blurted. “That's what he means.”

Hoku turned to her, and for an instant she thought he would strike her too, but instead, his face went blank of emotion.

“What do you know about me, little girl? Nothing. You know nothing. You have no idea what I have done and will do to keep this planet in Hopi hands.”

“Hoku.” It was the woman, who still sat near Sand.

“Hoku, there is nothing to gain by harassing these two. Sand must understand the situation clearly. Then she will see where her duty is, regardless of her feelings about us.”

“He caused my mother to die!” Sand snarled at the woman, who shrank away from her a bit. “He has nothing to say that I want to hear!”

The woman seemed to master her startlement. She reached up and dabbed at Sand's forehead with a damp cloth. It felt good, despite everything.

“Listen, Sand,” the woman said. My name is Kewalacheoma, from the old Snake clan. You and I, Hoku—we are all Fifth Worlders. These people that have the alien. …”

“Her name is Tuchvala.”

“Ah. … Okay. These people that have Tuchvala are taking her to a landing drum north up the coast. A drum from a Vilmir Foundation starship. A Reed ship. Once they get her there, there is nothing we can do for her. Do you understand that? How can you want that?”

Sand dropped her head down. “What does it matter? While we play these stupid games, Tuchvala's sisters are preparing our doom. We had a chance, before your idiotic invasion. She was going to talk to them, try to convince them. …”

“What's this? What do you mean?” Hoku had a hungry look now.

Sand's head felt clearer with each instant, her anger and outrage sharper.

“Those ships in space, the ones you so stupidly think you can use for your own gain. They're alive, Hoku. Tuchvala is one of them made flesh, the only one still sane. If the whim strikes them, or if they are threatened in any way, they will destroy us all and start this planet again, from scratch. Do you understand that? That while we chase each other all over the Fifth World, Masaw is preparing an end to it?”

Hoku regarded her in shocked silence.

“She told you this?” He finally asked.

“Who else? She came down here to save us if she could, and you have chased her, threatened her. …”

“Sand,” Hoku grated evenly. “I have been chasing you. Without your interference, we would have found your “Tuchvala” at her landing site, and she would have told us all this. I assume you used the ojo on her.”

“She was telling the truth.”

“I'll believe that when it's verified.”

Sand lunged against her restraints. “And you have no right to my mother's body! You are the sole reason for her death.”

“Her curiosity was the reason for her death. But I tell you frankly, Sand, her death was perhaps my biggest mistake, and I regret it bitterly.”

“Do you. Well how nice. You and I can be mates now, Hoku. When's the wedding?”

Hoku blew out a long, slow breath and turned to Kewa.

“What can I do, Kewa? She is unreasonable. I thought she might be of some help in convincing Jimmie to come back to us, but. …”

He was interrupted by Alvar's harsh laugh. “It's out of his hands now. They're with Teng now. Nothing can stop Teng and nothing can change her mind. She killed your Whipper, you know.”

“A Whipper?” Hoku frowned. “I didn't know about this.”

Sand watched the exchange. There was pride in Alvar's voice, and also certainty. And the woman had definitely killed Chavo, despite his Kachina training. She remembered the woman's eyes, diamond hard. She remembered her, too, towering over Sand and Alvar back on the mesa. That was who had Tuchvala.

“Killed a Whipper,” repeated Hoku.

“But she is wounded,” Sand told him. “Chavo cut her good before she killed him.”

Hoku was nodding, and Sand could almost see the calculation running behind his eyes.

“Can we catch them, Homikniwa?” he asked raising his voice. The answer came from overhead, through the comm system.

“Yes. They'll have to circle to avoid a storm, and the Bluehawk is faster. We'll catch them, I think.”

“Then what?” asked Sand. Assume you overcome this woman somehow. What do you think you will do with Tuchvala?”

Hoku regarded her clinically. “Do you really believe what you said? About the danger from the ships?”

“It is true,” Sand snapped. “As true as my mother's death.”

“And she needs only to talk to these ships to stop them?”

“She wasn't sure. She wasn't sure she could stop them at all.”

Hoku pursed his lips and nodded. He spoke once again to the unseen pilot.

“Homikniwa. Release my personal code. Launch the attack on the landing drum now.”